I have written recently about my desire to add structure and mid-level height to the garden. We are on a very flat plot; there is not a lot of varied terrain here, not to mention that it’s not terribly large. The picture above is of the South Garden, which has two towering trees, neither of which we planted: A southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora), totally inappropriate for our climate, and a Catalpa bignonoides, which IS appropriate. The only thing I like about the Magnolia is that it shades the house in summer; however it also shades the house in winter, uses a TON of water, and has enormous leathery leaves that never break down and have to be removed from the garden. I love the Catalpa but my neighbors hate it, because it has these long seed pods (you can see last year’s desiccated pods above) that hold roughly a zillion seeds and they go everywhere and germinate everywhere. I love it because it has huge, orchid-like flower racemes in spring, gigantic heart-shaped leaves, and the seed pods when green are quite attractive, hanging like ornaments. Anyway, these trees provide plenty of canopy (sometimes too much, the pruners are coming in March to help me with that!) and high-level interest, and the Catalpa is very favored by birds and insects.

Then there is the shrub-level, which I’ve got covered, and the ground cover level, which is also good. Lots of low stuff. But not a lot in that mid-level.

I’m absolutely obsessed with English gardener Monty Don, who has written scads of books and is on Gardener’s World in the UK every Friday night. His garden, Longmeadow, is filled with stone walls and box/yew hedges which all add plenty of structure in winter when the garden is covered with snow. But he also coppices numerous trees like Hazel (a practice that has largely fallen out of favor here) to make these free-form, natural trellises for climbing flowers, fruits, and vegetables. He has a lot of them in the garden and I think they are quite charming. Unlike fruit trees, they are also free! So I decided that we should make several of these to add structure to our garden, and I can use them for climbing vines, peas, beans, or even pumpkins (which I think I will do this year, more to come on that).

Last weekend, Tom and I went to my parent’s house, about 10 minutes away. They live on a large hill which is basically native oak woodland, with CA live oaks and bay trees intermingling with toyon and buckeye. One of their oaks had a dead section, which Dad sawed off for me, and we took those branches as well as some toyon to add to our pile of branches from the trees in our yard. Today, it was just a matter of figuring out which ones looked good together, finding a solid place for them to rest, and tying them together. The twine loops are to aid plants in climbing, though I’ll also have to train them to the trellis.

We put three of them along the fence next to the street, to add vertical interest for those walking by, as well as hide portions of the garden to make it a little more mysterious. With the leftover shorter branches we made one more to put in the South Pollinator Garden for the red mallow to grow on.

This week I also added a Boysenberry and a Red Globe Grape to our climbing fruiting vines, so we look forward to harvesting that fruit late this summer.

It’s full-on spring here, we have had not a drop of rain in February, and soon it will be time to start tomatoes.