Category Archives: plant profiles

wild and out of control

All over town here in San Diego you see the black mustard plant, Brassica nigra, now approaching the end of its blooming period.

The undulating yellow mounds of it doing its thing are a spectacular sight, so much so that Napa Valley, up north in the wine country, has an annual Mustard Festival that’s just come to its conclusion. The festival host the expected Napa wine and food offerings, and also hosts contests in photography, art and cooking with mustard. In addition to how the plant looks, it has an interesting history, as told by Napa pioneer Calvin Chesterfield Griffith, quoted on the Mustard Festival’s site:

This is the story of our early California when it was only a wilderness, with great quantities of trees, beautiful plains, all kinds of wild animals and birds; many, many Indians, and no white men at all.

Father Serra had come from Spain to Mexico to spread the religion of Jesus Christ, and hearing about this beautiful, vast country to the north, decided to explore it. With a few faithful followers and Indian guides, he traveled north through what is now our glorious and loved California. As he traveled he scattered to the right, and to the left, the mustard seeds which he had brought with him from Spain.

The following year, as they returned south they followed ‘a ribbon of gold;’ and following that path again Father Serra established his ‘Rosary of Missions,’ beginning in San Diego and ending in Sonoma.

It’s an appealing, romantic story, but it also sidesteps the fact that the mustard has invaded much of the West, and can be found in most of the United States. As a robust winter annual, it can out-compete most native plants, particularly in disturbed locations, and form virtual monocultures that prevent other plants from getting a foothold. The pictures above were taken a few blocks from my house, in Tecolote Canyon. Because of abundant moisture earlier in the year, the plants were well over my head in spots, easily seven feet tall.

To the left is a picture of a part of the canyon where the mustard hasn’t taken over. It’s a good example of coastal sage scrub, rich in plantlife and alive with birds and insects. The white-flowering plant in the foreground is black sage, Salvia mellifera, blooming up a storm, with yellow deerweed (Lotus scoparius) behind it. So what would I prefer–a rich ecological mix of plants that host a range of animal life, or a showy burst of color that nourishes almost no animal life and is about to dry out to a wildfire magnet?

Alert on a new invasive: Cousin Jenny, a new Master Gardener in South Carolina, alerted me to a new invasive plant, cogongrass, a plant that’s being listed as a treat even worse than the suffocating kudzu. Here’s a link to a story in the Beaufort Gazzette. Like the black mustard, it’s an attractive plant, but it’s also serious bad news.

More on weeds and invasives: I’ve been leafing through Weeds of California and Other Western States, by Joseph M. DiTomaso and Evelyn A. Healy. It’s a sumptuous two-volume set, a coffee-table book of weeds if there ever was one, with 3000 images of the 750 evil species it lists. It also comes with a CD-ROM of the images in the book that can be used without royalties for educational purposes.

In addition to the 750 nasties, there’s a table in the back with potential future threats from plants that are just entering the ecosystem. The book leans towards the technical side, but there’s a handy glossary and index. It took me 20 minutes to figure out that the annoying grass coming up in spots around the yard was tall veldgrass. But with other species I was able to go right to the offender.

I found it striking that a huge number of the weeds–like the black mustard–were of European origin, likely brought over by settlers from there over the past centuries. Controls have since been erected that help reduce the entry into the country of plants that might prove invasive. However, with people, products and produce jetting all around the world these days, it’s inevitable that there will be waves of invading plants from regions other than Europe. The cogongrass that’s of concern in the South, for instance, comes from Asia.

As I wander around the yard inventorying the plants coming up in the crevices, it’s weirdly comforting to know that my yard is contributing to preserving the earth’s biological diversity–though unfortunately I’m not necessarily helping along the species that really need it the most!

no such thing as a boring plant

The Botany Photo of the Day page at the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden site is always worth a visit. They post a photo, along with a brief discussion that points to a pile of references that you could follow around and keep yourself happy, interested and unproductive for much of a morning. Why go outside and pull weeds?

Fritillaria affinis
Their plant for May Day, Fritillaria affinis, is a native of Western North America, and a plant occasionally offered in bulb catalogs. Fritillarias come from dry-summer regions and require similar conditions to survive in gardens. This is one of the easier species, hardy from zone 6-9.

Photo by Jackie Chambers [ source ]

jacaranda

Sunday I went down to San Diego’s annual Artwalk streetfair down by the cool waterfront in the Little Italy neighborhood.

This has been a seriously bipolar spring, alternating chilly periods with intensely hot ones. This weekend was one of the hot ones, and people were milling about slowly, checking out the stalls of art. But almost everyone seemed to be more interested in the stands offering cold drinks.

I talked to one of my photographer friends down there who had a double booth and has been pretty successful there in years past. “People are mostly looking this time,” she said.

I guess I was one of the lookers too, for the most part. After getting my fill of the art, the one sight that really caught my eye was this jacaranda tree in bloom over an orange backhoe near where I’d parked my scooter:

jacaranda in bloom over backhoe

I don’t see eye-to-eye with Jerry Sanders, the mayor of San Diego, but this is one thing we agree on. It’s his favorite tree, and one of mine. It’s Jacaranda mimosifolia, a South American native that’s well adapted to areas without much in the way of frost. The leaves are ferny and delicate and the plant’s pretty well behaved in the U.S. (It’s considered an invasive pest, however, in South Africa and Queensland, Australia.) In the spring it turns into this, an explosion of purple flowers that rain down on cars and sidewalks below. Messy as all get out but a pretty exultant mess! Yet another plant that’s too big for my yard…

smaller echiums

In addition to the spectacular Echium candicans, you can occasionally find some smaller examples of the the genus. Because of the economics of the plant nursery industry, where people tend to buy stuff that’s in bloom over just about anything else, and because these plants have a relatively short–though spectacular!–blooming (read “saleable”) period, you don’t often see plants of them available. But seeds are a little easier to come by.

The J.L. Hudson catalog a little while back had four echiums available, including candicans (which there is listed under its fastuosum synonym). Of the others, E. wildpretii is occasionally sold in other seed listings, sometimes as “Tower of Jewels.” The plant is a beautiful rosette of long gray leaves the first year, about eighteen inches across, then in the second (edit, June 3, 2010: or third) year the plant shoots straight up six to ten feet with a conical tower of dark rose to carmine-red flowers.

Echium wildpretii

Echium wildpretii, growing wild on the flanks of the Pico del Teide, a dormant volcano, on the island of Tenerife. Photo by Grombo, from Wikipedia. [ source ]


My yard, at 60-some by 120-some feet, is maybe a little larger than typical lots in town, but it’s still not huge. A plant that grows like the skyscrapers downtown–narrow but tall–makes a lot of sense for gardens like mine, so I bought a big packet of wildpretii seeds. Here are the baby pix of the fuzzy little guys, at something like four weeks old:
Echium wildpretii seedlings

A little more warm weather–if it ever comes back–and they’ll be ready for the garden, ready to grow for a year in preparation for an outrageous flowering next spring. You don’t think a couple dozen or more of these rockets going off at once would be too much, do you?

From the Hudson listings I also got some seeds of E. russicum, similar in color to wildpretii and also a biennial, but something that’s more on the scale of a typical garden border. Enormous and fabulous is cool, but something that plays well with others should be nice to have around.

pride of madeira

For the last three weeks Echium candicans (a.k.a. “Pride of Madeira”) has been blooming around town. Here’s a planting up at UCSD.

pride of madeira

For eleven months it’s a somewhat open, woody shrub with rosettes of long, narrow leaves, of a soft grayed green color. Then in spring it puts up these outrageous cones of blue, lavender or magenta. The shape of the cones can be a little rounded towards the tip or fairly pointed. The plant can grow three to five or more feet tall, and twice as wide.

Many other species in the genus Echium are biennials. They put out a rosette of leaves one year, and bloom themselves to death the following year, often in a wild display of flowers. But candicans tends to be much more long-lived. So far it hasn’t made itself a big presence in residential gardens, maybe because of its largish size. But people are starting to plant it more in their gardens. It looks nice much of the year, puts on an insane display for a month, is well adapted to Mediterranean climates down to zone 9 and doesn’t require much water. What’s not to like? Okay, okay, it’s not the smallest spectacular plant out there.

I keep looking at plants and the one or two blank spots in the yard. Maybe one of these days I’ll make room for it.

how to scare adults and small children

A box showed up last week. Inside was a plant I’d bid on on eBay, Darlingtonia californica, the cobra lily, a plant for the new bog garden. It was a nice little division, packed in sphagnum and still wet from the bog garden it had just left. I showed it to John.

“It’s enought to give me nightmares,” he said, shuddering a little.

Darlingtonia californica

I have this scare of snakes, a fear instilled in me by a nanny who took me to the Rangoon zoo and pointed out the the banded kraits. “See that one? It can kill you with one little bite. And that one,” she said, pointing out the Burmese python. Well, she didn’t need to say anything. Multi-feet long, and as fat as I was, there was no question I wouldn’t want to feel its loving embrace.

Some people want gardens that are pretty and make them feel good. But somehow I end up getting this plant that has more than a passing resemblance to my childhood fears. Maybe it’s about time I faced them head-on. And as scary as this plant is, I think it’s also fairly amazing-looking. And for the first time, I have this compulsion to give this plant a nickname, something like…Audrey

bad day for ferns

After three weeks of days in the 60s the last two have pushed into the 80s. It’s the kind of intensely sunny spring weather that makes people productive or delirious. Next door they’re playing basketball and downing beers, and here at home John and I have been getting a final coat of paint on some steel stairs to the roof deck that had started to fade and show some rust spots. For us, the beers and margaritas will flow later this afternoon, when we go over to Mason’s and Carlos’s for dinner.

What is a great day for humans hasn’t been so kind on the Australian tree fern, Cyathea cooperi that we put in the ground last fall. General planting guidelines for them say to give them semi-shade, except near the coast, where they can tolerate full sun. Three weeks ago we had a weekend like this one, suddenly sunny and hot after a long period of cool weather. The plant wasn’t used to the heat, and the last set of fronds suddenly browned.

Fortunately the fern was producing a more fronds at the time, and they since unfurled into a gorgeous new set. Hopefully that hot weather prepared the plant for more sun and heat, and that the new set of fronds doesn’t dry up like the last ones did. We should find out in a few days.

Still, in the end, I won’t worry too much. This is about as hot as it ever gets at the coastal edge of town. The plant is getting established, and it’s fully capable to produce more fronds just in time for the cool, overcast months ahead, months with conditions that the locals have dubbed “May gray” and “June gloom.” Now that the sun’s out, though, it’s time to work on my tan…

winner of an ugly contest

Last summer John and I were at the farmer’s market in Ocean Beach, a funky, alternative neighborhood of San Diego. We were looking over some of the offerings at a stall when someone behind me starts laughing and shouts out over my shoulder, “Look at those ugly-ass tomatoes!”

Obviously someone used to the perfectly shaped (and perfectly tasteless) grocery store tomatoes, he was pointing out a pile of Cherokee Purple tomatoes to his girlfriend. “They’re, like mutant. Who’d buy that?” To be sure, the tomatoes were flat, irregularly shaped and sized, partly green and partly reddish-purple. Nothing to win a spot on a pinup calendar of tomato varieties. But these tomatoes have their rabid followers, and I count myself one of them. They’re like the best tomato you’ve tasted, and sliced up they’re actually pretty attractive.

The above is a picture from the Seed Savers Exchange catalog [ source ]. These are prettier examples than you usually find of this variety.

One person even has a domain name, cherokeepurple.com attached to his blog entries about trying to grow this variety (without much success) in Arkansas. I might not be that rabid, but last year I decided to save some seeds from the best examples of Cherokee Purple from the farmer’s markets so that I could grow my own. This is an heirloom, open pollinated variety, so they should come true from seed.

I consulted Saving Seeds, an older book by Marc Rogers that’s still available via Amazon (and probably a few other sellers). If you own the book, give it up–You’re a plant geek. There, the basic instructions were to first clean the seeds as best as you could. Next you drop them into a jar full of water for a few days until the gummy pulp surrounding the seeds ferments and liberates the seeds. When that happens, the previously pulpy seeds–which floated–would sink to the bottom of the jar. Finally you drain and dry them and store them away. I followed the instructions, but I was worried that there was still some pulp attached to some of the seeds when I was done with the process so that not all of them sank.

The acid test came three weeks ago when I put some of the seeds into pots. Maybe not all the seeds were processed perfectly, but I’m now the proud parent of six pots of Cherokee Purple seedlings!

I have a few spots around the yard selected for them, places where I’ve never put tomatoes, so I’m hoping they’ll take to their new locations and thrive. I’ll probably give them a couple more weeks in their pots, and then it’s time to set them loose. I’ll post the baby pictures as they grow up…pictures so ugly only a parent and lover of Cherokee Purple could love.

giant staghorn fern

The graphic at the top of this blog is based on a picture of a giant staghorn fern that I’ve been growing for the last decade or so. This is the plant:staghorn
The board it’s mounted to is four feet across, so you can get a sense for how big it is. As far as these larger staghorns go, it’s a teenager. This could easily get 50% larger over time. But even at its current size, people stop and comment.

The plant came labelled Platycerium grande, but I’m now convinced it’s actually the species superbum. (Edit April 10, 2011: Bob in a comment below wondered about which species this was, and I went off and did more research about how to tell these two species apart. The plants appear really similar at first glance. The main diagnosis is whether there are one or two of the patches with spores on the fruiting fronds. P. grande has two patches, P. superbum has one. My plant has the single area where the fronds first branch, so I’m sticking with P. superbum. Apparently superbums are commonly mislabeled grande in the horticultural trade.) As with other staghorns this species produces two kinds of fronds. Sterile, basal ones grow downward and serve to attach the plant to the trees it grows upon in nature. The more decorative fertile fronds grow up and out into the wild forms that earn these plants their “staghorn” name. These latter fronds can divide themselves into upright structures that do not bear spores, and lower ones that do.

Some resources like Staghorn Ferns at a Glance call this a “difficult” species, though that hasn’t been my experience in Southern California, maybe because excessive rains aren’t a problem. For a fern the plant doesn’t seem to care for huge amounts of water. A shot of water once a week or so keeps it happy. It lives on the north-facing side of a fence, so it get only small amounts of direct sunlight. The garden has seen some light frost over the years, and the plant stays outdoors through it all.

view of staghorn from above
A view of the staghorn from the top

Probably the trickiest part of dealing with the plant is moving it around and “repotting” it. The original plant came attached to a board that was about a foot square. As the plant grew I screwed the original board to boards of rot-resistant cedar, secured from behind to pieces going 90 degrees from the main support boards. That first change of supports was to one two feet square. When the plant outgrew it I attached that second support to the current support. To reduce the bulk of the previous support I carefully removed the backing boards that held the planks on the front face together. The fern had attached itself to the boards in the meantime, so it held the boards in place until I attached them to the new support.

Some growers attach sphagnum moss onto the boards where the fern will expand, but the last time I skipped that step and the plant has been happy enough with that decision. As the fronds die and are replaced with new ones, the old fronds decompose slowly, providing an area where moisture and nutrients can gather.

protea pink ice

proteaplant.jpgShown here with its last flowers of a long season that started last fall is Protea x Pink Ice, a hybrid between the species P. compacta and P. susannae. Although one of the growing guides says this stops at 5-7 feet tall, it’s now pushing 10 or more, egged on by a cool and moist winter.

The shrub is well-behaved, and responds well to gentle pruning. But you grow it because of its flowers, and they’re pretty exotic:
proteapinkice.jpg

When I get all piney over not having a cold enough climate to properly grow lady’s slipper orchids or produce even a small apricot crop, seriously cool plants like this begin to make up for what I can’t do.