Category Archives: places

a neighborhood native garden

Saturday I had the opportunity to take a short hike with some of the local native plant society folks through Manzanita Canyon, one of the small neighborhood canyons in San Diego that break up the urban development on the mesa tops. One of the communities that surrounds it, Azalea Park, has been cleaning up the canyon and the neighborhood. One of their projects is been to transform a vacant canyon lot into a pocket park devoted to native plants.

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The sign announcing Parque Linda is almost as big as the little park itself, and is flanked by a sturdy plant of bladderpod (Isomeris arborea, aka Cleome arborea) a plant that’s floating to the top of my list of favorite natives.Visually, it’s a pleasant, low shrub, with yellow flowers several months of the year. The growth habit is open enough that you can see some of the interesting branch structure, so the plant isn’t just a yellow gumdrop.

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Judging from the number of insects visiting it, the plant also appears to be a big favorite of the local animal community.

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The garden was organized by adults, but many of the local children participated in its creation. I was particularly struck by the little clay signs that were used to identify many of the plants. The adults identified the plants they wanted to label, but the kids made the signs.

The park gathers together a number of plants that can survive on whatever rainfall comes their way. But being a garden and not a revegetation project, Parque Linda will require the ongoing support of the community to maintain it. The fact that the little garden exists at all–not to mention that people will be committing its upkeep–speaks to the fact that this is a neighborhood that cares about its well being, a place where people’s interests don’t stop at their property lines.

We need more places like it.

…and some not so garden-worthy

You could probably gather together six gardeners and get six different opinions of what would make a plant garden-worthy. But I suspect there might be somewhat more agreement on certain other plants that probably shouldn’t be included in a garden. Here are some encounters from Sunday’s trip to Tecolote Canyon that would fall easily into most people’s less-than-desirable category.

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I’ll have to admit to actually liking this plant to the right. During the winter it drops its leaves and is an attractive thicket of upright or sprawling branches. This time of year it starts new growth that has this warm red-brown coloration. It’ll flower soon, and then set some loose clusters of white berries. Pretty, yes, and native, and important to wildlife. But this is poison oak. Maybe not the best choice for small backyard gardens…

Most of the rest of my list below is comprised of exotic plants that have staked a claim for themselves at the expense of the native species. Different locations have their own list of invasives, so what you see below is tailored to Southern California. Some of these plants could be good choices for other locations. Others would be trouble almost anywhere you grow them.

[ At this point I’d like to dedicate the rest of this Friday the thirteenth post to Outofdoors, who last month devoted her Friday the thirteenth post to invasive plant species. ]

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I won’t go into too much detail about this troublesome trio. People have been working hard to get the word out on pampas grass, green fountain grass, and iceplant. The grasses, in particular, can be gorgeous things in gardens, waving in the breeze and lending their dramatic form to groups of softly mounding landscape shrubs. You can see why people want to grow them. But are they garden-worthy in Southern California?

All three of these quickly check out of people’s gardens and make for the wilds. I found both grasses and plenty of iceplant escaped into the canyon, here on this hillside and in other spots. So, as pretty as they can be–and I consider this drift of fountain grass in the second photo to be particularly poetic–these three would be better left in their native lands, or grown in climates where the weather might limit their spread.

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This is the first flower I saw this season on the local plants of onion weed (Asphodelus fistulosus). The first time I saw it I thought it was a wildflower and wanted some for my garden. In full bloom the stalks of white flowers are an impressive sight. But they do spread like crazy. Not a good choice for the garden.

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This combination of plants looks as impressive as any planting assembled by practitioners of the New Perennials garden movement. But once again, the plants aren’t really welcome additions to the canyon. In the foreground is teasel (Dipsacus sp.), a plant with excellent year-round architectural structure but having invasive tendencies that are considered “Moderate” by the California Invasive Plant Council (Cal-IPC). Here it’s set against a background of last season’s black mustard, a problem in these parts since it was introduced by the Spanish in the eighteenth century. The Cal-IPC only considers the mustard’s ranginess to be of “Moderate” concern, but also states: “Primarily a weed of disturbed sites, but can be locally a more significant problem in wildlands.” I’d say it’s a more significant pest locally.

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Fennel can be attractive in the herb garden, but like the rest of the invasives in this post, this is another plant that gets around. Its overall undesirable impacts are considered “High” by the Cal-IPC. If I see fennel offered in the local nurseries it’s usually the bronze colored strain. It’s less vigorous, but all forms are considered invasive. I do wish this were a better choice for gardens because it hosts swallowtail butterflies, but at least there’s plenty of swallowtail food out in the local canyons. The butterflies won’t starve. Okay, I’ll pass.

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Say “Old California” to anyone who’s lived in these parts for long, and this plant will probably come to mind. The Brazilian Peruvian pepper tree forms a gorgeous tree with long, delicate leaves that move any time there’s a breeze. But unfortunately the plants develop berries that the birds find irresistible. While the Cal-IPC considers their threat to California to be only “Limited,” there are plants that would be better choices.

The Australian peppermint willow (Agonis flexuosa), although not a native plant, is a good drought-tolerant substitute that looks a bit like the pepper tree but doesn’t share its invasive tendencies. If you must have a delicate weeping tree that says “Old California” but don’t mind a lilting Australian accent, this would be a better choice–and you can get varieties with either green or dramatic black foliage. Or you could give up altogether on the colonial look and go in for any of the truly native trees. It doesn’t get any more “old California” than that.

As I reread this post I’m struck that I’m probably not doing a particularly good job of discouraging people from growing these plants. I keep going back to the beautiful redeeming qualities of these invasives, and I guess that’s why they continue to be such a problem. The mind tells you they might be bad news, but sometimes it’s hard to say no.

With this last image I leave the plant kingdom and turn to another species that’s native to the local canyons. This one I think you’ll definitely agree you wouldn’t want around. I won’t assume that you like snakes any more than I do, so if you want to see the picture you’ll have to click HERE.

Still, who among you doesn’t think baby animals are just the cutest things? Now, everybody, say “awwwww”… This is a little baby southern Pacific rattler, probably no longer than my forearm and too young to rattle. I’m deathly afraid of snakes but managed to fend off the fear to snap the picture and watch the snake as it coiled itself defensively and make like a sidewinder, sliding backwards into the grasses.

I have to respect these animals since they do wonders to keep down the rodent population. And they’re every bit as native as the poison oak I showed earlier. But after having had one of these in the backyard facing off against my cat, I’ve definitely decided this is another species that’s not garden-worthy, at least in my enclosed little space.

I admit it, I’m a wimp. Nature isn’t always convenient is it? But throw out the rattlesnakes and pampas grass and black mustard and fennels and you’re still left tens of thousands of cool and friendly selections to invite into the garden.

some garden-worthy local plants

There’s usually a big disconnect between going to a nursery to look at plants and going out botanizing to an open space preserve like the one I live near. The plants in a nursery will likely be the usual garden store suspects, mixed in with new introductions from all over the globe. But what plants you see in the wilds, except for escapees from residential gardens, usually have nothing to do with what you see in the nurseries.

Gardens are of course artificial places. Although people may feel connected to nature while tending their personal landscapes, it’s too often a nature that exists only at their local plant nursery and nowhere in the wild lands around them. My own garden has these same tendencies, but I’ve been trying to counteract them with more native plantings.

Things have also been changing in at least some of the nurseries around town, and there’s a gradual flow of plants from our wild areas into people’s gardens. Most of the larger nurseries offer at least a small selection of natives, and the specialty native plant nurseries can always be counted on for a selection of plants that they feel garden-worthy.

Sunday was cool but sunny, a perfect day for a short walk through my neighborhood canyon preserve to see some of these plants in their wild state. And along the way I saw a couple that I think people wouldn’t mind living with.

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Tecolote Canyon–literally “Owl Canyon”–includes a city park of about 900 acres, most of it the slopes and bottoms of a coastal canyon that were too economically challenging to build on. Some of the park has been handed over to a golf course and some athletic fields, but a lot of it remains in something approaching its natural state.

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The trail cuts through several stands of our coastal live oaks, shown here with lots of neon green (non-native) grasses. These oaks would be gorgeous in private gardens. Imagining opening the back door and stepping out into this. But a fungus that was imported from Europe in a shipment of rhododendrons is now making these difficult to grow in all but the most driest garden spaces.

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During the winter rains a little stream runs through the park. It takes months for the water to dry up completely, so every now and then you’ll find little watering holes like this one.

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Lemonade berry appears frequently in native garden plantings and is easy to find at native nurseries. The plants have been blooming in the canyon for a couple months, and they’re still blooming. This species forms a large, tidy shrub that stays an attractive dark green color year round. Later in the year it’ll develop orange-to-salmon berries in the place of the flowers. Definitely garden-worthy.

Lemonade berry performs best near the coast where heavy frosts aren’t a concern, but it can come back if frozen.

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These aren’t flowers, but I think they’re pretty attractive. The toyon, also called Chrsitmas berry (Heteromeles arbutifolia) still had its berries out. This is another plant that makes an attractive large evergreen shrub in the home landscape. The leaves on this are just a little lighter green than those of the lemonade berry, and the plant more densely branched.

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Toyon is a fine native substitute for holly, bearing these berries during the time of year when holly would. (And speaking of “holly would,” did you know that Hollywood got its name from big stands of this that grew on the hillsides overlooking what’s now tinseltown?) This is also one of the easier plants to find commercially.

milkvetch-closeup

I’ve written recently about a new groundcover milkvetch that I was trying out. A different species with somewhat similar-looking flowers was approaching peak bloom in several spots in the canyon. There are over 1500 vetch species on earth and a half-dozen in the county, but I believe this one is Astragalus trichopodus.

The flowers are small and intricate and appear on a plant that can approach three feet tall. This milkvetch dies back to nothing during the summer drought, but I think it would look great when combined with selections that have more summer interest.

milkvetch-plant

The canyon hillsides are overrun with invasive mustard that is just now starting to put on its spring growth spurt. But this milkvetch gets going quicker, and actually seems to stand a chance against the black mustard menace, unlike other natives that mature later. Here you see it growing up through the trellis of dead mustard stems left over from last year.

tecolote-canyon-lupine

Not having spent much time in Texas, it took me a while to figure out that Texas bluebonnets were Texas species of what I’d been calling lupines all my life. Here’s a “California bluebonnet.” In this canyon they’re more of an occasional treat than a plant that colonizes big spreads of hillside. They’re ephemeral, but would be gorgeous in a garden.

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Fuchsia-flowered gooseberry is a shoulder-high shrub with a long blooming period from winter through much of spring. You can probably see from the picture that it is a little on the thorny side, something like you’d see on Victorian moss roses. But the flowers make this a striking plant in the right spot. The shiny green leaves will persist throughout the year if the plant is given an occasional summer sip of water. And did I mention “hummingbird-magnet?”

There were other native plants in bloom, including the perky scarlet monkey flower. But my trip was just a little early to catch the the peak flowering. I’ll post more as I take more trips.

And of course, in a park surrounded by human habitation, you’ll find a healthy sampling exotic species. I’ll post next on a few of my interesting but less garden-worthy encounters.

hanging garden

These are the last of my Chicago tourist architecture photos, all taken on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

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One of the two buildings we looked at in detail is the recently completed Tribune Student Center, which is located directly underneath the elevated rail that cuts through campus. Most architects would have considered the site a disaster and likely would have shied away from the project. Rem Koolhaas, architect of the Seattle Public Library and some other recent high-profile projects, took the location as a challenge and swooped in with a solution so amazing it makes your head spin.

Noise and vibration would be the worst part of living below the tracks. But what would happen if you made a big burrito of the train by wrapping the rail overhead in steel and concrete? And what if you put holes in the top of the tube to direct the noise up to the sky? Here’s a shot of the exterior showing the tube and one side of the student center.

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Inside, the center is a busy concentration of colliding lines and angles. And when a train passes overhead, you can still notice it. Only, it sounds more like a home heater turning on instead of a jet taking off.

One little piece of repose inside is what Koolhaas has dubbed the hanging garden. Part bridge, part green roof, this long rectangle planted with grasses brings light inside and introduces some nature into the dark world of industrial surfaces.

Green roofs are by definition on the roof, so you don’t usually get to engage them as directly as you do here. Dropping the roof down like this was almost as brilliant as wrapping the overhead railway in a tube. Unfortunately, this is the only part of the structure that uses anything resembling a green roof.

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Here you see the hanging garden hovering over the tables of the cafeteria. It’s a little hard making it out in the picture, but it’s also a little hard teasing apart all the angles when you’re there in real life. This isn’t an architecture that’s all about clarity and purity and minimalism.

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Although it isn’t remotely botanical, I enjoyed this other little detail. An entrance into the student center goes through this big portrait of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, modern master of clarity and purity and minimalism. To enter on this side, you approach the portrait, the automatic sensor notices your presence, Mies’s mouth opens to let you in, and then proceeds to shut tight behind you to swallow you whole. Yum yum. (I’m not sure Koolhaas thinks highly of Mies’s work…)

Here’s an overhead shot of the whole center, based on the aerial photo at Live Search Maps:

koolhaas

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Returning to things definitely botanical, here’s a little planting of birches next door to the Koolhaas building, at Helmut Jahn’s student housing structure. Whether it’s a modern planting like this or a cluster in a residential front yard, there seems to be something about birches that makes people want to plant several of them together. Why is that?

Would a single birch look totally wrong? Would it be asking a single tree to stand in for an entire forest? Is this one of our unquestioned social conventions, or would a single birch simply be too transparent to hold its own? I’ll have to pay more attention next time I run across more birches…

Renzo Piano's Rue de Meaux housing project

While you’re pondering this question, check out the landscaping done at Renzo Piano’s Rue de Meaux public housing project in Paris which uses many oodles of birches in its courtyards. This design doesn’t cluster the trees by twos and threes, but it sure does use a small forest of them. [ Image by lauraknosp via Flikr ]


treefall

The fallen eucalyptusI was heading back to my desk at work on Thursday and noticed a cluster of my coworkers looking out a window. There’s a little access road right outside. Usually it doesn’t have a full-grown eucalyptus tree fallen across it, but this day it did.

Trunk of fallen treeI don’t have my camera with me most of the time, but Declan had his. He was part of the volunteer crew who wrestled the tree to the curb, but he also managed take these shots.

[ View the entire set on Flikr ]

Not much later the building’s safety person had issued a warning:

Just a heads-up, literally: high winds are blowing down eucalyptus branches and trees around campus. About an hour ago, an entire tree broke off and fell across the access road… (Very fortunately, no people or vehicles were in its path.) Until the winds die down, please be sure to watch and listen for breaking branches and avoid walking through the eucalyptus groves.

The UCSD campus is home to over 200 thousand of these trees in plantings that date back a hundred years, back to a eucalyptus mania when eucalyptus were planted all over Southern California, including three million just a few miles up the coast in what’s now Rancho Santa Fe.

If you live in this part of the state you’ve probably heard the stories: that the trees are call widowmakers because they drop their branches if you look at them wrong, that they’re just giant non-native weeds that take up valuable space…bad things like that.

I wonder if the bad rap on the first count is entirely deserved. For sure, some eucalyptus are brittle, and there have been three times in the last year alone when I was within fifty feet or thirty seconds of being taken out by falling eucalyptus. But with almost a quarter million of them on campus and millions of them in town it’s inevitable that a few of them keel over or fall apart. Are they that much worse than oaks or other trees that people plant by the millions?

I did a quick and totally informal survey of some headlines, eucalyptus versus oaks. Maybe the eucs are totally bad news. May they’re not that much worse than other species. Whatever the case, they definitely can be gorgeous trees.

Shadows cast over towering eucalyptuses (Eucalypturs kills woman in Old Town San Diego, The San Diego Union-Tribune–January 8, 2003)

2 killed in ‘freak accident’ : Falling oak crushes pickup on County Line Rd. (Oak tree, The Post and Courier (Charleston, N.C.)–April 16, 2008)

Tree check asked after accident (Eucalyptus kills woman in parked pickup truck, Evening Tribune (San Diego, CA)–December 25, 1987)

Man killed by falling tree (Oak tree falls onto pickup truck, News Sentinel, (Knoxville, TN) December 28, 2008)

$160,000 awarded in Zoo death (Award given to family of girl killed by falling eucalyptus, The San Diego Union–August 2, 1986)

Girl killed by falling tree at Boy Scout camp (Oak tree, Associated Press, via MSNBC–August 10, 2005)

Half of the incidents above involved pickup trucks. Weird. Maybe that’s the deadly combination: pickup trucks and large trees. Like mobile homes and tornadoes…

balboa park's desert garden

January can be an amazing month for succulents and other desert plants. Many aloes and agaves explode into bloom, and plants with ephemeral foliage are green with leaves in ways you don’t often see them.

balboa-park-succulent-bloom-overviewSan Diego’s Balboa Park houses one of the prime local collection of cacti, succulents and other desert dwellers from around the world. The Desert Garden, the larger of its two succulent gardens, was established in 1976, but many of the plants are senior citizens much older than the age of the garden.

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Aloes star in its January landscape, with red and orange torches of flowers that double as hummingbird magnets.

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And shown here, lurking in the shadows, is one of the local hummingbirds, staking its territory.

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Among the big, mature specimens are several dragon trees, Dracaena draco. In this first photo, on the near trunk, you can see a reddish patch where the plant’s red sap has dried. When cut, these plants ooze a fluid that in some European legends was purported to be dragon’s blood, hence the plant’s name (draco = dragon).

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This is a public garden, and so it’s subject to funding glitches and battles over civic priorities. I’d consider the garden to be in great condition considering those limitations.

One thing I would have loved to have seen, though, would be more plant labels. I encountered so many interesting species, but very few of them had name tags. I have this thing about needing to know the name of a plant–Call me compulsive. But the lack of labels drove me crazy. I realize, however, that tags don’t come cheap. And in a wide-open public garden, labels can walk away with pieces of succulents in the hands of evil plant addicts.

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One of the plants that was labeled was this Natal Bottlebrush, Greyia sutherlandii. A bit scrappy-looking as a plant, but what great flowers!

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Also labeled was the Madagascar ocotillo, Alluaudia procera. I loved the spiral patterning of its spines.

Another problem with this being a public garden is that there are quite a few specimens where people’s temptations to carve their initials in the plant life got the better of them. This euphorbia was scarred many times over. But that wasn’t going to stop it from blooming.

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After visiting the garden I was surprised by how many shots I’d racked up in the camera. And for some reason, the majority of them were verticals. Is there something about succulents–particularly the upright-growing kinds that mimic the way a human stands–that scream out for photographing them in an upright orientation?

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Some yuccas, I think, with spent bloom stems.

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Boojum trees, Fouquieria columnaris, native to Baja California. This plant is in the same genus as the California desert’s spectacular ocotillo, which interestingly isn’t related to the Madascar ocotillo, above.

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Aloes and kalanchoes in bloom.

balboa-park-succulent-looking-towards-florida-canyonThe main garden is a flat, easy stroll over wide decomposed granite pathways. As part of a recent expansion, the garden now also includes this switchback down into Florida Canyon, also part of Balboa Park. The plants along the descent are still young, but should look spectacular in a decade or so.

Not everyone in the world loves cactus and succulents. They might point to the defensive spines many of the plants have, and they might say the sculptural shapes of the plants don’t look soft and cozy like leafy shrubs or fragrant roses. balboa-park-succulent-spiny-rosesNext to the Desert Garden is Balboa Park’s rose garden. During springtime, thirty seconds of walking would take you from the world of cactus and succulents to a garden manic with flowers and heavy with the aroma of roses. But on this bright January day, the adjacent roses were pruned down to naked stems and piercing thorns. It was the cactus and succulents that looked warm and welcoming.

The Desert Garden is located across Park Boulevard from the Natural History Museum on Balboa Park’s museum row. The garden has no walls, no entry fee, and is open 24/7, 365 days of the year.

If the 2.5 acres of the Desert Garden isn’t enough of a cactus and succulent fix, cross Park Boulevard and take a stroll over to the Balboa Park Club, maybe ten minutes on foot, and take in the parks original 1935 cactus garden, which, according to the park’s website, was established “under the direction of [San Diego gardening legend] Kate Sessions for the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition.” There you’ll find “some of the largest cactus and succulent specimens in the Park,” along with a nice collection of proteas.

some of my favorite photographs

My visit after Christmas to the Getty Center had as its main destination an exhibit of photographs by Carleton Watkins.

Watkins worked all over the West Coast, and was the first person to develop an important body of work on Yosemite. The show contained beautifully preserved examples of his photographs, including a few that rank up there among my all-time favorite photographs ever taken.

Carleton Watkins: El Capitan

Carleton Watkins: El Capitan, 1860s [ Library of Congress ]

More than one person has argued that Watkins is the first important artist to come out of California, regardless of medium, and I would not argue that point. There’s a poise and stillness to the work. The images seem to float in their own time and space that extends to infinity.

Even after an hour in a crowded series of galleries, the work left me with a sense of stillness that I still feel, over a week later. (The fact that I’m still on vacation also probably has something to do with it…)

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Carleton Watkins: First View of the Yosemite Valley from the Mariposa Trailca. 1866.

In the image to the left, El Capitan, the light-colored mass of granite to the distance in the left, balances elegantly with the bulk of the nearer hillside on the right. It’s an amazingly formal, modern image. I don’t know of any drawing, painting or other photograph from up to this time that looks anything like it.

(This is one of two versions of this image taken at the same time from the same vantage point. I prefer the other version of this image, which is in the Getty show. I wasn’t able to find anything on the web to borrow of either version, so this quick shot out of one of my books that at least gives you an idea of the image.)

Carleton Watkins: Cape Horn, Columbia River

Carleton Watkins: Cape Horn, Columbia River, 1867 [ National Gallery of Art ]

I had a conversation with Roy Flukinger, Curator of Photography & Film at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, about nineteenth century landscape photographs. He spoke of a “transubstantiation” of matter that occurs in many of them, where the long exposures and photographic techniques rendered water, air and land to be almost equivalent materials. In the image above, the water and sky and distant mountains merge into each other. The cliffs to the right seem to float over the water. At the same time, they seem to fit into the rocks to the left like a key fits into a lock, or the way the shape of Africa reaches across the Atlantic to nestle into the empty space of the Caribbean on a map.

Carlton Watkins: Cape Horn near Celilo, 1867

Carleton Watkins: Cape Horn near Celilo, 1867 [ Metropolitan Museum of Art ]

The quietness and sense of infinite space in this one is phenomenal. If your blood pressure doesn’t drop ten points after viewing this image, nothing will bring it down!

Dialogue Among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California runs until March 1.

shady deal

Few ideas are simpler: Plant a tree. Shade your house. Reduce your cooling expenses. Reduce global warming.

A current program that’s giving away shade trees for free is coming out of the California Center for Sustainable Energy. Customers of San Diego Gas & Electric in San Diego and Orange Counties can get their choice of twenty kinds of trees in fifteen gallon containers. Each household can claim as many as ten trees. Choices run from small, slow-growing crepe myrtles to big London plane trees to native live oaks.

Even if you’re out of the target audience for the program, their site has a link page to a pile of shade tree and urban forestry sites with lots of information. Their own site has a couple of basic principles for deciding where to put a shade tree and what kind to use:

  1. Plant only deciduous trees on the south side of the building to allow the sun to warm your home in the winter
  2. Concentrate planting on the west side, that’s where the energy savings are the greatest

A few years back there was a similar giveaway program, and houses in the neighborhood got flyered with offers for your choice of one of three tree species. For free. They’d even plant the tree for you.

Free cassia tree
Free cassia tree

The neighbor next door opted for one, a gold medallion tree, Cassia leptophylla. It’s in bloom right now and is pretty attractive. The plant is supposed to top out at thirty feet and spread twenty or thirty feet.

But now we come to the part of the post where we look the gift horse in the mouth.

My neighborhood is on the first rise of hills over the Pacific Ocean. Many of the houses here have views out over the ocean, Mission Bay, downtown San Diego and even down to the hills of Tijuana in Mexico and the craggy Coronado Islands off the coast of Tijuana and Rosarito. (There’s something really cool about standing on your roof deck and being able to see another country.) My view isn’t the most spectacular. Still, the glimpses of water and the land below give me a sense of place.

As for the cooling effects of the trees, the majority of the houses around here either don’t have air conditioning or–like our neighbor with the tree–have it but never use it. If things get warm, you open a window or door. Of course, a couple miles inland things are different, and a shade tree can save you lots in cooling.

So, to my neighbors, a plea: Go ahead and plant trees, but select the ones that are scaled for your house and the neighborhood.

Ugly house
Ugly house
But to this one particular neighbor I offer a special exemption. Please do plant a tree. Ivy. Shrubbery. Anything!

the long brown season

When you spend your time in San Diego’s well-watered burbs it’s easy to forget that you’re living in the middle of a desert. The last significant rainfall in town occurred in February, and the unirrigated natural lands around town have long ago begun their transformation into the long brown season.

My recent little excursion to Los Peñasquitos Canyon, a local open-space preserve between San Diego and Del Mar, gave me a chance to see what the natural world is doing in these parts.

Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve trail

Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve

Dried thistle

Not everything is brown, of course. Some plants are tapped into locations with residual moisture. Others have adapted to the climate and have the stamina to stay green year-round.

Here are a few of the plants still showing colors other than brown:

BuckwheatFlat-topped buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum) a native plant.

Rosa californiaWild rose (Rosa californica) a native.

Invasive fennelFennel (Foeniculum vulgare) an exotic, invasive species. This is the culinary plant from the Mediterranean that has escaped into the wilds.

Poison oakPoison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) a native–one of the few plants that turns blazing red in the fall. Even now, it’s showing some of that red color.

Flowering thistleThistle in bloom. I’m not sure if this is native or not, but it’s not the hyper-nasty Russian thistle (the dried flowers of which are shown in the large photo above). [Correction/edit August 1: This is actually a teasel, not a thistle. Like the escaped fennel above, this too is a renegade exotic species. Pretty, though…]

It’s a condition of our consumer culture and times to want what we don’t have. Living in San Diego, most of the plant materials that people expect to find in their home gardens fall outside of the category of what occurs naturally or is well-suited to the area.

It’s always instructive to visit the natural preserves to see plants–even the nasty invasives–that are supremely well-designed to live in this climate. Some of the plants in these parks would do extremely well in gardens. But it’s hard letting go of plants that many of us associate with places we’ve lived in and even people we’ve known.

My own yard has several areas that I consider my guilty pleasure zones. I have pieces of a bromeliad and a kahili ginger that I was given in the 1970s, as well as the green rose from that I dug up from the house where I grew up in the Los Angeles area. And I’m a natural born collector who has a hard time saying no to interesting plants. These plants all require some water and tending beyond what nature brings.

But they’re counterbalanced by garden areas planted with drought-tolerant species, local and introduced, that receive almost no water and attention over the summer. As time goes on, I’ll be expanding those areas. Don’t expect me any time soon, however, to plant poison oak, as pretty and hardy as the plant is. I have my limits as to how much true nature I want in my garden…

once an orchard

I wanted to find the quince tree again.

It probably had been close to ten years since I last hiked my nearby Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve. Still I clearly remembered coming upon an ancient but still fruiting quince in one of the tributary canyon bottoms. Unwatered for decades and tended only by the wildlife, it had seemed like a miracle of survival in San Diego’s desert climate.

Survivor quinceLast Saturday I scootered up to the preserve and started a slow stroll through the native willows and sycamores and oaks that line the dry creek in López Canyon. I only vaguely remembered the location, but less than half a mile in, right by the side of the trail, there it was, still very much alive, green and loaded with fruit.

Fruit on old quince tree

Nearby, in the shade of an old sycamore and crowded with some robust shrubs–including poison oak–I found a second tree with fruit on its branches.

Quince and poison oak

And then I started looking around in earnest. Off to the left stood a different kind of tree, either a different quince or maybe even a pear. It had a thick, creased trunk and the plant was clearly old. But the tree still drooped a little from the weight of the fruit.

Quince or pear treeQuince or pear fruit

Old apricot in Lopez CanyonNot far ahead stood another specimen. Though without fruit it was clearly another fruiting tree, probably an apricot, judging by its leaves, a month after the last of its offerings would have been ripe.

So that made for four trees that I could find without crawling through more poison oak or further through the snakey grass. I’m certain all the trees were many decades old, but exactly how old I couldn’t say for sure.

Local history places an orchard operator in this canyon as late as 1921, so some of the trees may date to then, though this area has been ranched and cultivated at least as early as the early 1800s, when this area was contained in the first of the Mexican land grants in Alta California, to as recently as 1962, when the land was acquired by the County.

Ruiz-Alvarado adobe, San DiegoNearby, under a protective shelter at the confluence of López Canyon and Los Peñasquitos Canyon, stand the remains of the Ruiz-Alvarado Adobe, one of the oldest structures in San Diego County.

Anything older than a hundred years around these parts is considered a relic. If you were to believe the most wishful of the sources the adobe would date all the way back to 1815, though more reliable sources place its construction at 1857. This small adobe, along with a later, grander one to the east, became part of a thriving concern dedicated to ranching.

Ruiz-Alvarado adobe, San DiegoMaybe it’s wishful and over-romanticizing on my own part–or maybe not–to imagine that the settlers who lived in this adobe planted the fruit trees in López Canyon. But the trees are as much of the human history of this area as are the few remaining adobe walls. Here we need all the history that we’ve got.