Guest Post: In the Garden with Nathan, Part One

You may remember Nathan from his birthday last year. Well, Nathan and I were trying to find a time to skype so I could get a tour of his garden a few weeks ago. With the time difference, that proved significantly more difficult than you'd expect, so he started sending me emails with pictures attached, and I've been learning a ton about his garden. Nathan's passion for plants is pretty infectious. It's also rather impressive to me, since I once killed a cactus. ("About a month ago, I got a cactus, and a week later, it died. I got really depressed because I was like, damn, I am less nurturing than a desert." - Demetri Martin) Anyway, Nathan said I could share his garden with you, so get excited.


On to the post!


Exhibit 1: Salamanders! I find these cute little guys all around the property, usually under mounds of leaves. It always amazes me how this amphibian that likes cool/moist environs can survive through our scorching hot, dry summers.

Now another reason I love spending time in my garden:
Echevarias.
These plants are just so dang cute. I think they look like rose flowers laying on the ground. They are not particularly cold hardy, so I never saw these until moving to CA, but my garden stays just warm enough in the winter that I can grow these anywhere in the garden and  not worry about them dying from cold. Then beginning in Spring, they send up the most unique and colorful flower stalks. I love placing these near walkways and in pots around seating areas because I've found that people always stop to admire them.

The ones in the foreground are Echevaria elegans and the ones in the back are Echevaria imbricata.


Another thing that I really like about my garden are my bananas. This guy is an Ensete ventricosum 'maurelii.' They're not looking their best right now (this picture is from about a year ago) because they lose all their leaves when it frosts, so they are just coming out of dormancy. My bananas are a little more high maintenance than most of my other plants, but I totally think that they are worth it for the massive, tropical leaves. So hott! Maybe I'll buy a few more of these this year. They have far exceeded my expectations. I'm only sharing the photo of this guy because the rest of my 'banana grove' has not yet come out of dormancy so it just looks like a bunch of sticks in the ground. They have some of these guys at the Santa Barbara zoo near where the island fox is at.

This concludes part one of the Matson Garden tour. Stay tuned for bird's eggs, impregnated Melianthus, and Bromeliads - oh my!