from spring into summer

June 14, 2009 James 14 Comments

The spring orgy of flowers is winding down. Some spring bulbs flashed for just a few days and were gone. But it didn’t really matter because they were replaced by something else interesting.

Summer’s flowers seem to come at a more measured pace. But for me it’s a different sort of pleasure, letting me focus on more subtle things like plant forms, leaf colors and textures.

Here’s some of what’s still blooming from spring, along with the beginnings of plants that will accompany me through the summer months.

The flowers above, left to right, top to bottom:

1: Blanket flower (Gaillardia pulchella).
2: Lavender cotton (Santolina chamaecyparissus–I have to look up the spelling of this species every time).
3: Deerweed (Lotus scoparius) You might confuse this California native for one of the invasive brooms. It’ll drop most of its leaves to survive the summer drought, but the delicate wands of branches stay attractive–at least to my eyes.
4. St. Catherine’s lace (Eriogonum giganteum)–a buckwheat from the California Channel Islands and coastal regions. This is a young plant, but its umbels are already huge–the largest in this photo is two feet across.
5. Santa Cruz Island buckwheat (Eriogonum arborescens)–another California buckwheat.
6. This is a Crinum that came with the house. It might be C. powellii.
7. Verbena bonariensis–a flower that’s exactly the same color as the verbena in the final picture in this post, though their plant and flower forms are totally different.
8. Clarkia williamsonii.
9. Same as 6.
10. Brodiaea species, one that I lost my records for–maybe B. elegans (anybody know this one?).
11. Butterfly bush (Clerodendrum myricoides ‘Ugandense’)–In the same family as mints and sages, this has square stems and a delicate scent to the leaves and stems. It enjoys water but doesn’t get much of it and still looks presentable.
12. Verbena lilacina, a tough species from the Isla de Cedros, off the coast of Baja. At first glance it looks like the lavender lantana many people around here grow, but the leaves are totally different. Here it’s planted alongside some succulents with red and blue-gray leaves.

Thanks again to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers Bloom Day!

gardening, landscape design

wishing for water

June 13, 2009 James 4 Comments

Remember wishing wells? In the early 1970s, when I first started paying close attention to gardens, every few yards would have a wishing well as an accent of the landscaping: Big lawns, lots of flowers, the wishing well, maybe even a lawn jockey. You don’t see wishing wells (or lawn jockeys) around these parts very often anymore.

The other day I was up on the roof deck, enjoying the breeze. Looking in a direction I don’t usually pay much attention to, I noticed this feature in the back yard of one of my neighbors. It’s a little hard to make out, so I’ve enhanced it a little. Hmmm. Looks like a wishing well, maybe 1970s vintage…

Jump ahead 30 years, to the more drought-conscious 21st century. Many Californians are reducing or replacing their turf. One of the ways that’s used to give some focus or structure to these de-lawned yards is to construct a dry stream bed.

(I thought it was interesting that both these yard accents are all about water. The wishing well celebrates the stuff, almost as if it’s available in a magical, never-ending supply. The stream bed is more of our time, and acknowledges that water is a resource that isn’t always plentiful and can’t be taken for granted.)

Down the street, another of my neighbors has done their own take on a dry stream bed. It has lawn along some of its length, but succulents and drought-tolerant plants the rest of the way. And in the middle of the stream…seashells. And these little yellow rubber duckies…

art, gardening, my garden, photography

art from the garden

June 12, 2009 James 4 Comments

I started this blog because I was feeling that I was entering a bit of an imposed artistic hiatus. Kodak had stopped producing the specialized film I used for most of my photography, and I’d bought the last of the old stock of it that people had to sell on eBay.

I enjoy gardening at least as much as art-making. Also, the idea of a garden plays with the same kinds of ideas that I was interested in when I did my art, stuff like the edges between human culture and nature, and the environmental costs of human habitation. The idea of a garden blog seemed like it could keep me thinking about some ideas that interested me. And it might push the some of the same creative buttons that photography did.

(Left: James SOE NYUN. Calla Lily Dissection II, 1997. Pigment print, ca. 13 x 19 inches.)

Maybe the blog has functioned too well to keep me out of the studio. But I’ve been reprinting at some of the garden-based photography I did in the past and seeing how it might point in new directions.

Recently I was invited to show of my older work at a small gallery in Escondido, in northern San Diego County. The show is Eyesight is Insight / Art + Science, and is curated by Ruth West and Sarach Attwood. The show opened yesterday, and remains up through July 3 at the Escondido Arts Partnership Municipal Gallery. These are a couple of the works in the show, images from my Destructive Testing Series, a small group of works where I use plant materials from the garden in little science experiments.

(Left: James SOE NYUN. Fig Leaf Flammability Test 6b, 2000. Pigment print, ca. 19 x 15 3/4 inches.)

In addition to reprinting some fo the older work, I’ve actually been doing a little bit of work looking at gardening. I’ll share some of it here once I get to something I’m willing to show the world.

In the meantime, I’m happy to share some of this older work. Stop by the show if you’re in the headed for Escondido!

gardening, landscape design, my garden

reclaimed from concrete

June 9, 2009 James 7 Comments

Two posts ago I mentioned the Crack Garden, a winner in this year’s ASLA awards program that made me think in a new way about dealing with too much concrete. Ryan over at Dry Stone Garden has some different thoughts on the project that are worth a read.

And as long as we’re talking about reclaiming space from what used to be paved over, let me show you a few shots of my front porch. (Notice how fanatically I staged the space for these photos, including coiling the leaky old hose off in the corner. That’s a level of creativity you never see in the garden design mags.)

The area was all concrete until two, three years ago. This was from the years when a lot of concrete was poured with strips of wood to break the expanse of concrete into neat rectangles. Nice idea, but over the years the wood rots. The concrete shifts.

So I dug out all the decaying wood with a chisel. Next John and I spent a couple hours with a sledgehammer removing some of the big squares of concrete, and then I poured black-pigmented cement to grout between some of the slabs.

I probably didn’t do enough to prepare the ground. Why spend time doing that when there’s bare dirt where you can put plants? So in went some blue fescue in a grid pattern. (Fortunately a few of the plants died, breaking up what would be a cliche of little blue fescues all lined up neatly in their rows.) And then a plant of red shisu for contrast, two standing stones, three stepping stones, a potted euphorbia, gravel mulch and the coiled garden hose to complete the picture. (The shisu is an herb that dies back every year, but it reseeds like crazy, letting you decide where you want some dark red foliage this year.)

Okay, ASLA. I’m ready for my Honor Award.

gardening, my garden

the $128 dollar apricot

June 8, 2009 James 4 Comments

Many of you are familiar with William Alexander’s book, The $64 tomato. In its pages he installs thousands of square feet of new garden space and then does the unthinkable–adding up how much it all cost him, down to how much it cost him for that Brandywine tomato he was holding in his hand. (Sixty-four dollars per tomato, as you might guess from the book’s title.)

Pricey, for sure, but in the end he comes to a conclusion about gardening: “It’s not about what it actually costs to eat this piece of fruit. It’s really about lifestyle.”

One of my little lifestyle indulges is apricots. I love apricots. John loves apricots. But the apricot-shaped objects you get in the stores around here have nothing to do with what the fruit should taste like.

It seemed like a no-brainer: We could plant a tree of our own. We could pick the fruit when it was ripe, not when it was deemed at the proper stage for picking and transport by some industrial fruit-growing outfit hundreds of miles away.

The real no-brain part of this adventure kicked in after we actually put the tree in the ground. Coastal San Diego has winters that tend to be too mild for apricots to set fruit, even if you select the low-chill varieties. The tree always blooms, usually just a few cluster of flowers on random stems distributed around the tree. I see bees visiting the flowers. I’ve even tried my hand at pollinating them myself. But those flowers don’t usually turn into fruit. If we’d really been thinking we wouldn’t have bothered trying to grow one in the first place.

Last year was the best in the over fifteen years the tree has been in the ground, when the tree set almost twenty fruits. Out of those we probably got something like eight or nine before the critters got to them.

This year we’re down to one fruit, and it still hasn’t gotten to the point where we can pick it. It’s down to the final few days, and it’ll be a race against the critters.

Why do we pursue this perverse lifestyle, chasing the occasional apricot? In the years when we get fruit it’s always a revelation: The scent that prepares you for the first bite of fruit. The delicate balance of tartness and sweetness. The absolutely perfect sensation of all the things a good apricot should be.

But as I think about things like sustainability and what’s the best use of soil in a garden where cosmological space seems to be contracting, this indulgence is getting harder to justify. A new plum tree twenty feet away has already borne two fruits, and a fig nearby is suddenly covered with tiny figs. There are better choices out there than trying to make an apricot thrive where it wasn’t designed to grow.

At the top of the list for an apricot replacement next fall is the loquat. Delicious fruits. Low water needs. Ornamental evergreen tree, with a manageable final size. And the tree actually bears well in this climate.

(Image: Oldie, from the Wikimedia Commons, made available under GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2)

gardening, landscape design

avoid, or embrace the inevitable?

June 5, 2009 James 10 Comments

Today I want to talk about a couple things that seem inevitable: Garden plants will die; and, concrete hardscape will develop cracks.

Strategy 1: You could try avoidance, developing ways to get around those facts.

You may have heard of the recent garden at the Chelsea Garden Show designed by James May of Britain’s Top Gear automotive program. The plants (and insects) were all made of plastic modeling paste. It was totally artificial. A garden that will never experience death—but neither will it ever experience life. (And what would you call a “garden” like this? Landscape or hardscape?)

If you want to avoid cracks in concrete walkways or patio covers, you could avoid concrete altogether. For instance, you could employ alternate materials like decomposed granite or one of the attractive alternative paving systems highlighted over at Steve Snedeker’s Landscaping and Gardening Blog.

Or you could embrace what’s going to happen anyway.

Some plants look attractive after they’ve passed on for good or just for the season. To the left are some plants at Piet Oudolf’s Chicago Lurie Garden as they appeared this past February. Picking structurally interesting plants like those can keep things looking good, even in the presence of things in the garden that may be dying. This is a big and rich topic that I’ve touched on occasionally in my posts, and I’m sure to return to in the in the future in more detail.

And how do you embrace cracked concrete? I was over at Pruned, where this brilliant winner from the 2009 American Society of Landscape Architects Awards was highlighted. The project by CMG Landscape Architecture of San Francisco played up the natural tendency of concrete to crack, as well as the tendency of plants to colonize those cracks.

(Photo: Tom Fox)

The recipe:

Take one piece of cracked pavement.

Apply a jackhammer to widen the cracks. (Photo: Kevin Conger)

Amend the soil, and then place plants of your choosing in the enlarged cracks. (Photo: Tom Fox)

Total project cost, with homeowner labor: $500. The final results are surprising, and so is the final cost, particularly when you consider it’s a project involving professional landscape architects.

gardening

two surprises

June 3, 2009 James 6 Comments

Last week I was leaving the library and overheard three athletic young men outside having a discussion. One of them said one of the following sentences:

“Great game last night!”
“I’m tired of studying, lets get some brews.”
“Dude, I just love the way jasmine smells!

If you picked the last one, you would be correct. I guess I was a little surprised at what was the subject of conversation among three college jocks.

The library entrance is flanked by two planters full of jasmine that are situated high over the walkway. When the jasmine blooms, there’s no missing the aroma.

I took the stairs up to the level of the beds last week. There, I was surprised to find that one of the planters contains a little more than jasmine. To my eyes it looks like someone has staged a little guerrilla gardening operation: Poking through the monoculture of the flowering vines were little plants of yarrow, gaura, a pink-flowered mint relative (anyone know what this is from the photo?), and something else not in bloom that I can’t identity in its green, leafy state. The bed on the other side is just plain jasmine, as it’s been for the last 18 years. If this were officially sanctioned landscaping, they would have made the planting symmetrical and introduced these little plants on the other side.

It’s all a little chaotic. I think I like it.

gardening, landscape

nepotism and plants

June 2, 2009 James 4 Comments

I enjoy odd botanical science stories, and this was one of the stranger ones I’ve read in a while: Plants will look after clones of themselves but won’t lift a petal to assist an unrelated plant of the same species. That’s the controversial result of a study published in Ecology Letters and publicized in yesterday’s BBC Magazine.

Richard Karban of the University of California, Davis and Kaori Shiojiri of Kyoto University in Otsu, Japan studied the Great Basin sagebrush, Artemisia tridentata. They found that there’s a chance that a plant will alert another identical clone of a species when danger is near. But when two unrelated Great Basin sagebrushes are placed next to each other, the strangers won’t do anything to help each other out. (How the plants communicate wasn’t part of the study. Details…)

(Left: Artemisia tridentata. Britton, N.L., and A. Brown. 1913. An illustrated flora of the northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions. Vol. 3: 530.)

These findings sound a lot like another study I’d mentioned just a little a year ago, where seedlings from the same parents will coexist happily in a pot, while seedlings of the same species that come from different parents will try to out-compete each other. Similar processes might be going on in both of these studies.

All this is interesting when you think about horticultural plants versus wild populations. Many plants in horticulture and some in agriculture are grown from cuttings, or are grafted or budded or layered. Each resulting plant is a clone of another and will have identical, predictable characteristics. If you buy a Fuji apple tree, you’d like to be assured that you get a Fuji apple, not a random seedling.

According to findings in the new study, identical horticultural plants might actually have some temporary advantages. For instance one plant might help its neighbor brace for immediate hazards in their environment, maybe something like an insect attack. (Someone should try out how a pot full of cuttings behave compared to the same species grown from seed from unrelated parents.)

While gardeners might enjoy predictability, biologists would still say that this is a bad thing from a long term evolutionary standpoint. An ailment that could wipe out one plant could wipe out all the plants with identical genetic makeup. Nepotism among clones of the same plant might be useful for the plant’s immediate circle, but is likely to be a dangerous thing for the future of the species.

gardening, landscape

words are important

June 1, 2009 James 6 Comments

One night a week and a half ago, when much of the world was watching the final “American Idol” showdown between Adam Lambert and Kris Allen or viewing the finale of “Dancing with the Stars,” almost a hundred of us were at the local native plant society meeting to hear Kristie Orosco. Environmental Director for the San Pasqual Band of Kumeyaay Indians, ethnobotanist, and member of the Native American Environmental Protection Coalition, our speaker gave us a quick introduction to how some of the local Native Americans traditionally used plants in their environment as food.

She was one of those rare communicators, a person who with a very few words can take you into a different way of thinking and seeing the world. One thing she said, in particular, has stuck with me. Instead of stating that a plant blooms, she used the phrase that a plant “gives it flowers.” What a gorgeous way to phrase it: Instead of a plant being an inert blooming machine that you pick up for a few bucks at the nursery and toss when it turns ugly, it was a living entity that gives of itself by producing flowers.

How you say something is as important as what you say, and her words opened up a world to me where everything in nature is a gift. Although I’ve developed a cynical side to my personality, I’ve tried to counter it by keeping alive a part of me that continues to stay amazed at the things of the natural world and almost willfully naive about many of the ways of humankind. It’s that second side of me that’s certain that the earth would be a lot better off than it is if we all spoke and viewed the landscape the way Kristie Orosco did.

You often read that the plants you encounter in the wilds have traditional uses, but it’s not until you’ve had direct experience with the uses that the connection really clicks. To cement that connection, our speaker brought foods for all of us to try, enough to cover several large tables.

On the menu:

Shaawii, or acorn pudding (pink, looks like spam but it’s actually edible–and subtly tasty)

Pit-roasted agave root (something like a chewy, smoky vegan beef jerky–my favorite of the night)

Limeade with seeds of chia (Salvia columbariae)

“Medicine tea” (steeped dried flowers from Mexican elderberry, Sambucus mexicanus, very delicately flavored, used for a number of purposes, including breaking a fever)

Yucca root (starchy, but different from potatoes in flavor)

Yucca flowers, boiled (the blooms of Hesperoyucca whipplei, which is finishing up giving its flowers in many of our hillsides around town; very delicate flavor with a tiny nip of bitterness, brussels sprouts for people who don’t like brussels sprouts, or a new food for people who love artichoke hearts)

Yucca flowers, raw (as above, only crunchier, a little more bitter)

I’ve always admired plants of Hesperoyucca whipplei from a distance–The ends of its leaves end in sharp points that you have to show immense respect. Now that I’ve tasted its root and sampled its flowers and heard Kristie Orozco speak about the plant, my aesthetic appreciation of it has deepened into something else much richer.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]

Monthly Archives: June 2009