What's Blooming

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Blooming Calendar

Find out what's blooming at Filoli from January to December.

Garden Information

Learn about Filoli plants and gardening practices—ask the experts.

Autumn at
Filoli Festival

Join us October 1 for family activities and entertainment.

Plant Highlights This Week

Flowers are one of the most pronounced markers of the progression of time in a garden. Each week we scout the gardens for amazing blooms and feature our favorites here. Check back often to see what we have in store for your next visit to Filoli.

The Rose Garden is in full bloom.

Plant and Garden Highlights
The summer annuals are in full bloom!
Fruit trees are bending with the weight of ripening fruit.
Sunken Garden: Zinnia ‘Zowie Yellow Flame’, ‘Inca’, ‘Benary Gaint Orange’, Salvia ‘Victoria’, Limonium ‘Seeker Pastel Blue’ (Statice)
Chartres: Petunia ‘Supreme Opera Light Blue’ and ‘Supreme Opera White’. Impatiens ‘Accent White’ in the shady areas.
Sundial: Zinnia ‘Magellen Salmon’
The cutting gardens are busting out with lavender, sunflowers, and an incredible variety of summer blooming perennials.

New Plantings: There are no new plantings this week.

Projects: July is the month we prune most of our camellias, leptospermum, and other spring flowering shrubs. Summer pruning of espalier fruit trees takes place. Harvest peaches, plums, and early–ripening apples. Hedging of the holly, myrtle, English laurel and Grecian bay laurel.

Notes and Common Questions

Renovation of yews continues in the Walled Garden as we complete the three–year plan of renovating all the Irish yews in the Garden. The yews along the wedding place tiers will be renovated over the next two weeks. You will also notice the hard pruning on the holly hedge dividing the cutting gardens. The hedge was too wide and tall and will recover nicely over the next year.

What’s the blue stuff we sprinkle in the beds prior to planting?
The “blue stuff,” as it is so affectionately known by visitors and volunteers, is a slow release nitrogen fertilizer called Nitroform. It is a urea–based fertilizer and contains 38% nitrogen. It is designed to release nitrogen slowly over several months.

What happened to the Kashmir Cypress?
Unfortunately, the Kashmir Cypress has succumbed to the dastardly oak root fungus disease. Oak root fungus is the number one killer of plants in the Garden. The tree was pulled out and the roots inspected. Not only were the roots infected with the fungus, the root system was also poorly formed with many girdling roots. There are currently no plans to replant.

When do we replant for the summer display?
We try to leave the spring display in the ground until after the Flower Show and Mother’s Day weekend. By mid–May the gardeners are chomping at the bit to pull out the old and plant the new. The 3rd week in May is typically when we begin pulling beds and digging out the tulips. Planting continues into early June and the summer display will fill in and peak from late June through mid–September.

How many bulbs does Filoli plant every year?
A total of 82,000 bulbs were purchased for the Garden for the 2011 display season. The bulbs were planted in the Garden beds and potted up into 3,000 display pots last fall.
Tulips: 45,000 for garden beds and pots (17,500 in beds, 35,500 in pots, 53 varieties)
Daffodils: 22,000 for garden beds and pots (48 varieties)
Other bulbs: 26,000 hyacinth, muscari and others
The sunken garden alone accounts for 4,000 Tulip ‘Dordogne’

What do you do with all the tulip bulbs when they finish blooming?
When the tulips fade, the foliage is removed and the annual display continues through the spring. Once the spring display has faded, the beds are pulled and the tulip bulbs are dug up and dumped into the compost pile. We do not keep tulip bulbs in the ground for a couple of reasons. First, tulips in our climate do not come back consistently after the initial season. Tulips left in the ground will typically come up sporadically, with less vigor and have smaller flowers. Secondly, we change the color scheme of the spring display every year. If all the tulips were left in the ground every year, we would have a jumble of colors as the old tulips mix with the recently planted bulbs.

Do you replant the daffodil field every year?
The upper daffodil field is a combination of older daffodils that are naturalized and bulbs that are added every fall. We typically plant anywhere between 15,000 and 20,000 daffodil bulbs every year.

All the white and yellow daffodils you encounter in pots throughout the garden will be moved to the greenhouse after they are done blooming. The pots are allowed to dry out and the bulbs go into dormancy. In late summer, the bulbs are removed from the pots and sorted by variety into crates.

October is the month we plant the bulbs in the field. We make numerous 6” deep trenches the width of the field, place the bulbs in the trench, and backfill. We concentrate on the areas where the bulbs are getting sparse to ensure a solid swath of yellow and white daffodils for the spring display. Enjoy!

Why did we cut back many of the rhododendron in the woodland garden?
For years we have been battling a pesky insect called the greenhouse thrip. The insects feeding action causes evergreen leaves to turn silver. Greenhouse thrips love rhododendron leaves and have decimated many of our plants in the woodland garden. We have tried many control methods in the past with little success. Our new strategy is to renovate or remove the varieties that are susceptible to the insect. By removing much of the infested foliage and the susceptible plants, we will reduce the population of thrips to a tolerable level and the remaining rhodies will have a chance to thrive. We are also considering new organic products to control new infestations. Greenhouse thrips also infest the Myrtle hedge around the garden house lawn and you will notice we trimmed the hedge much harder than normal to remove the leaves harboring a large thrip population. The thrip population will be monitored throughout the year and the rhodies will be evaluated as they put out new growth. New varieties will be planted as needed to fill the voids left by the removal of susceptible plants.