bye-bye birdie

July 12, 2009 James 4 Comments

Yesterday’s big garden task was to take out a big bird of paradise that we’d planted twenty years ago.

Left: The “before”…

…and the “after”…

The plant had some good things to recommend it: big splashy flowers (if you’re into that sort of thing), a robust plant that needs minimal maintenance, and a requirement for no additional watering beyond what it gets from rainfall here near the coast.

But one bad trait that you don’t often see discussed is that over time the roots can do damage to nearby hardscape. Ours had lifted the brick patio nearby by over an inch over just the past year.

John’s first inspiration was to use the hedge trimmers. The idea was that they’d make quick work of the bird, cutting through the lower stalks as if they were butter, and we’d be done in a couple minutes. They sort of worked, but had a hard time cutting through the fibrous stalks. It might take an hour, not two minutes.

Since it was such slow going I decided that doing things manually, with the trusty hand pruners, would work at least as well and not introduce the issue of losing a finger or two to the blades.

The local landfill has a program where they’ll accept greens waste without charge, chop it to bits, process it into mulch or compost, and sell it for next to nothing. But certain fibrous plant waste is exempted: things like palms, bananas, bamboo and a few other plants…including bird of paradise. So, anything on the list of forbiddens has to be dumped as regular urban waste.

I’m not up on dump fees around the country, but our little expedition cost $34, about the same as a trip to the zoo ($35 per adult) and a deal compared to a day at Sea World ($55-65). And with no food stands selling deep-fried munchies, it was probably a lot less fattening.

While at the dump, it was a chance to see some of the rare local riparian habitat whizz by the window at 35 mph…

…and some blooming buckwheats. It’s not quite a native plant garden, but the edges of the landfill shield some protected and uncommon species.

In fact, immediately to the east, is Miramar Mounds National Natural Landmark, a piece of land designated to be of special interest in a program administered by the National Park Service. The Landmark comes to life during the winter rains, with vernal pools suddenly dotting mesa tops. The federally endangered San Diego mesa mint breaks into bloom, and the ground around the pools comes alive with toads the size of your thumbnail and Pacific chorus frogs…or so I’ve heard. Although I’ve visited vernal pools before, I’ve never made it to Miramar Mounds proper. Bounded by freeways, the dump, and part of the adjacent military base, access is restricted. It’s definitely on my list of places in town I’d love to visit.

gardening, landscape design, my garden

background check

July 10, 2009 James 10 Comments

My last post has me thinking more about the backgrounds that plants grow against.

I was getting excited that the San Miguel Island buckwheats(Eriogonum grande var. rubescens) that I’d grown from seed were coming in to bloom. But standing back from them, I realized that the place where I’d transplanted them–a raised bed with a red brick retaining wall behind it–might not have been the best place for the plants.

The dusky pink flowers blend so well with the reddish colors of the brick that they practically vanish. And the busy gridded background of the brick and weeping mortar draws so much attention that anything in front of the wall just gets ignored.

What would it look like against a more neutral backbround? I wondered. And so I went to grab a piece of white matboard and positioned it behind the plants.

Wow. Big difference. It’s suddenly easier to make out the shapes of the umbels of flowers, and you can begin to appreciate the subtle color of the flowers.

Up close, the white background almost made the plant look like a botanical illustration.

The low contrast against the background didn’t prevent this bug from finding the buckwheat. Clearly, a bug’s eyes and brain don’t work the same way our human ones do.

Once these plants grow in more and achieve some more height they should stand a better chance of holding their own against the background of busy brickwork. But the plants will never “pop” against the wall in the same way they’d show against a simpler, more neutral background. So, in the “note to self” category, I’ll be paying more attention to contrasts between the plant and the hardscape around it.

art, gardening, photography

one way to photograph a tree

July 7, 2009 James 12 Comments

Photographing a tree can present some challenges. You can walk around it to select the best angle, or pick a time of day with the best lighting conditions, but you still have to deal with the fact that the tree stays rooted in its spot and that the background behind the tree may be an unsightly or incomprehensible mess.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #8, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

Last year I ran across the work of Korean photographer Myoung-Ho Lee, whose photos of trees present an elegant–and spectacularly not practical–solution to this problem of background. He just brings a plain background with him and stands it up behind the tree. If you figure that the trees in the photos are at least 25 feet tall, you get a sense of how huge the background sheet has to be.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #13, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

Some of the photos have just the tree isolated against the plain background. Others show the tree and background in the larger context of the landscape where the tree is growing.

The results are pretty amazing, and create photos that are rich with suggestion and ideas about photography.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #11, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

You might be driven to think about the fact that to photograph something in the wilds is to select it. Although this act of selecting the tree isn’t really digging the thing up from nature, it’s still bringing something from the wilds indoors onto a wall. That might make you think that photography–and much of art–is finding something interesting interesting in the world and bringing it into a gallery.

You also might think that looking at a photograph of something might tell you something about how the thing in the photo looks, but very little about its context or meaning.

And you might even think of Marcel Duchamp displaying a signed urinal in an exhibition, with the basic premise that if an artist calls something art, it’s art.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #12, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

None of those thoughts are “right answers,” and you will probably have other thoughts of your own. I think you’ll agree, however, that these are some of the more striking photographs of trees that have ever been taken.

gardening, my garden

my swamp creatures

July 2, 2009 James 11 Comments

Here are some of the pitcher plants growing in my guilty pleasure bog garden, a small concrete container in which I have more than a half dozen of these sarracenias and as many sundews. The guilty pleasure part of this comes in when you consider that most of California is now in its third year of drought, and when you realize that none of the plants in the bog garden likes to dry out. And preferably they’d like to have their toes, though not all their roots, in standing water.

The genus Sarracenia is native mostly to wet zones in the Eastern and Southern United States (with one species into Canada). The ones I’ve tried are proving to be pretty easy to grow as long as they get sunlight and good-quality water. (I’ve probably mentioned before how mine get reverse osmosis water from the local water cafe instead of the hyperchlorinated bong water that comes out of most Southern California spigots. So far, providing good water has been the most difficult part of growing these plants.)

These plants, left to right, top to bottom:

Sarracenia rubra
S. leucophylla ‘Tarnok’
S. x Dixie Lace
S. alata
S. minor

There’s also a closely related swamp thing that’s native to Northern California and Oregon. That plant, Darlingtonia californica, however, is as difficult to grow in most locations as it is stunning. If your can’t provide summer night temperatures below 55 degrees, don’t bother with it. You’ll kill it. I killed mine. Not all native plants makes sense to grow if they’re not native to your environment! (If you really must do what I did and not as I say, you could try constructing a special darlingtonia box like they do in Japan to lower temperatures around the plant.)

So what’s the water use? During the hottest months the little bog survives on three to four 5-gallon servings a month of water. That totals around 15-20 gallons for a space that’s about six or seven square feet, or about 2.1 to 3.3 gallons per square foot. I was a little shocked when I compared this number to what one source says it takes to maintain a typical lawn over the summer here in the coastal zone: 2.6-3.6 gallons per square foot.

Like, I can have a tiny little swamp garden for about the same amount of water it takes to support an equivalent spot of average lawn? And when you consider that most lawns are larger than six or seven square feet, I suddenly feel a little less guilty about my little guilty pleasure. And it made me look at lawns differently, that they’re just green swamps full of grass. I think I’d rather have my little bog garden.

(Full disclosure: We still do have a small patch of grass in the backyard which gets greened up for the big Fourth-of-July party and then neglected most of the rest of the year. It helps to have heavy afternoon shade like we do to minimize how much water a lawn requires. But when the guy who keeps it mowed and edged won’t do it any more (you know who you are), the lawn is history…)

[ Lost in the Landscape ]

Monthly Archives: July 2009

bye-bye birdie

background check

one way to photograph a tree

my swamp creatures

an artist loosed in a garden