interesting, challenging reading

July 29, 2010 James 2 Comments

This is a post for the reader who might enjoy an occasional book on gardening and landscape architecture that isn’t designed to sit on your coffee table or nightstand.

The British Library has recently unveiled EThOS, a portal to electronic theses and dissertations from the UK. If the thesis has been digitized, it’s available to you for download once you register. Registration is free, and so are most of the texts. If something isn’t available yet, you can request it to be digitized within thirty days so that you can download it. Once again, that process is usually free.

Only a small minority of theses and dissertations written these days is on gardening of course, but there’s some great work being done on the topic in British institutions, with the University of Sheffield leading the way.

Do a basic search on “Sheffield” and “landscape” and you’ll get titles like the following that are available without waiting thirty days:

Wu, Jiahua. Landscape morphology : a comparative study of landscape aesthetics.

Jorgensen, Anna. Living in the urban wild woods : a case study of the ecological woodland approach to landscape planning and design at Birchwood, Warrington New Town.

Alturki, Ashraf. Attitudes towards designed landscapes in two desert cities : Medina, Saudi Arabia and Tucson, Arizona.

Zhao, Jijun. Thirty years of landscape design in China (1949-1979): The era of Mao Zedong. (The abstract for this one outlines some fascinating ideas about designed landscape and ideology: “[L]andscape architects first emerging in early twentieth century China concerned themselves especially with the design of gardens and parks. This situation remained almost unchanged during the radical socialist revolution, which resulted in the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 that was led by Chairman Mao Zedong (1893-1976). During the Mao era (1949-1979), the impact of the Chinese communist ideology on landscape was far-ranging and ground breaking. Besides extensive development of public parks for socialist education as well as recreational purposes, cities were reshaped with large housing areas created for workers–the proletariats, and urban squares playing a crucial role in exhibiting political power, while the countryside was reshaped from a hierarchical landscape with an exploitative nature to an egalitarian one, where the broad masses were to benefit from improvements.”)

Alternately, try a search on “Sheffield” and “garden” and you’ll find titles like these, digitized and ready to download:

Gilberthorpe, Enid Constance. British botanical gardens in the 1980s : changes reflected by bibliographical and social survey.

Kellett, J.E. Public policy and the private garden : An analysis of the effect of government policy on private garden provision in England and Wales 1918-81. (Sheffield City Polytechnic)

…and then there are intriguing titles like these that still need to be digitized though you could be reading them in not much more time than it takes for a book to be delivered to your doorstep:

Qasim, Mohammad. The potential role of private gardens in developing greater environmental sustainability in cities.

Cannon, Andrew R. Wild birds in urban gardens : opportunity or constraint?

Be forewarned. From the skimming I did, these texts read like…well, college dissertations. Even among the authors who write really clearly you sense a certain amount of them playing academic buzzword bingo. After all, the authors have to tell their profs that they know the literature and can use their lingo. In addition, the photos accompanying the texts aren’t picture-book quality the way they appear online. But once you get beyond that, you cross over to a world rich in ideas.

[ Electronic Theses Online Service ]

gardening, my garden

exotic plant, exotic pest

July 26, 2010 James 12 Comments

Two Aloe barberae plants one affected by mites — The upper canopy of my two plants of *Aloe barberae* (aka *A. Bainesii*). The left one is the larger, typical form. The one on the right is the dwarf form from Mozambique. The one on the left is the one affect by aloe mite.

I’m heartbroken that one of the two big tree aloe in the front yard is under attack by aloe mites, the scourge of many aloe growers. The succulent expert at one of my local nurseries just shook his head when I asked for anything that would make the mites go away. Of course I ran to the web for advice. Discussions splattered all over the charts, from guardedly optimistic to “throw the thing in the trash.” I started to uncover several references to the syndrome that the aloe gall mites generate as “aloe cancer.”

The best discussion I encountered I’ve seen so far is at XericWorld forums, where the whole range of opinions gets expressed by a number of experts. The thread has lots of photos of infected plants and of the mites themselves. Growers expressed success with insecticides (even though mites aren’t insects). Others had zero results even with dedicated miticides. Most people recommend plant-surgery, and one person treated affected areas with bleach.

Developing aloe mite gall — A newly developing gall.

Aloe mite gall on Aloe barberae — One of the galls produced by the plant in reaction to being attacked by Aloe mites.

Sunbird Aloes, a commercial firm in South Africa, the land of aloes, recommends a completely different treatment: formaldehyde applied to the gall.

There’s also an informative page hosted by Michael J. Green hosted at the Gates Cactus & Succulent Society [ here ]. The author here points out that the gall is produced by the plant in reaction to a chemical produced by the mites, a compound similar to 2-4-d, one of the main ingredients in the infamous Vietnam War herbicide Agent Orange.

Aloe mite gall — Closeup of another of the galls on the trunk.

Most of the treatments are intended for spot treatments when only part of the plant is infested. But my poor plant has a major infestation all over its main trunk, and that’s been affecting the growths farther up. It’s been in gradual decline for several years, but it’s going downhill quickly. At first I thought it was gophers eating the roots, or the renters next door stopping watering of their lawn and the aloe roots that extend under it. But I’ve finally figured out the awful truth. Even the plant seems to realize its distress since it’s starting to shoot new growths from near the base of the trunk.

I step back and try to be philosophical and maybe even marvel in my grief that such tiny, nearly microsopic creatures can take down such a large plant. It’s all a part of the cycle of life that we celebrate with the seasons and the changes plants go through. Only with something tree-sized I was hoping for something that would outlive me, not a twenty-year relationship that would end in tragedy.

Possible early aloe mite damage — The end of one of the leaves being produced at the base of the plant. I'm not sure if this might be early signs of mite damage or a bad reaction to some of my draconian treatments.

If any of you have had luck with something let me know! In the meantime I’m trying a few treatments. As much as I try to avoid chemical nastiness in the garden, I’m desperate. I’m removing the galls and swabbing the infected area with a 50% bleach solution. I’ve applied the systemic insecticide imidacloprid at the roots, hoping that the insecticide won’t affect the beneficial bugs feeding on the plants nearby. Then I tried to spray just the affected plant–a big 12-16 footer–as best as I could with Bayer 3-in-1, which in addition to imidacloprid contains the miticide tau-fluvalinate. I don’t know that these treatments will do anything other than relieve me of guilt that I didn’t try what I could to save the plant.

Wish me luck.

gardening, my garden

are roses dead?

July 22, 2010 James 9 Comments

I’ve been meaning to mention a piece I read in the local paper a few months back. Dick Streeper, gung-ho local rose grower and one of the founders of the Inez Grant Parker Memorial Rose Garden in San Diego’s amazing Balboa Park, mentioned in his piece how “The world’s leading commercial association of rose producers, All-America Rose Selections, in business since 1939, has recently lost about two-thirds of its members. That has caused a substantial drop in rose sales and a drop in the numbers of good new varieties being introduced. Identifying and buying good, newly introduced roses is suddenly more difficult.”

I wonder, though, if the drop in rose sales actually led to the drop in AARS memberships and not the other way around. There was a point a couple decades back when the splashy hybrid teas and floribundas with their rose-show flower shapes started to get passed over as people seemed to move towards the nostalgic beauties of the David Austin roses, flowers that looked like old roses but had a lot of the modern rose qualities of more reliable repeat blooming and somewhat better disease resistance. Other breeders participated in this renaissance and old timey roses were all over.

It’d be interesting to sales reports for all these plants. I wonder if we, the fickle public, just got tired of them. Or at least we didn’t see anything new and shiny to take their place and stopped buying them in the same numbers. Roses can live for a long time, and really, how many roses do you need to buy in a lifetime? And for fickle gardeners, has there been anything new and exciting to cause us to uproot some of the plants we have?

I’ve mentioned before that I had over a hundred plants in the house where I grew up. My current living situation is down to just one rose. And that one got dug up from its spot in the garden and plopped in a pot this past autumn. It’s one of the plants I planted at my parent’s house in the 1970s and the only plant that I brought with me. I hope it survives the recent transplant. So far so good.

greenroseflower — Opening Flower on Green Rose

Even that plant is the green rose, a variety dating to the early 1800s and possibly the 1700s. And the last rose I bought was one of our local species Rosa minutifolia (a rose which did not survive an attempted transplant). So you can see I haven’t been doing much lately to support rose breeders…

gardening, my garden

agonizing over the right pot

July 19, 2010 James 5 Comments

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that people often hate to go shopping with me. Plants, clothes, paint colors, cheese…it can sometimes take me a long time to make up my mind. I admit that these aren’t life-or-death decisions I’m making. But as far as I’m concerned that’s no excuse not to pay attention to the process. Some things in life are still very important.

During last week’s plant shopping adventure I picked up three little aloes I wanted to pot up for the back patio. I was surprised by how quickly I was able to pick between all the cool offerings. Some collectors like one of everything that catches their eye. By contrast I guess I like to collect one thing in depth. Accordingly I picked an interesting genus of plant (Aloe) and then decided on three contrasting but complementary examples. I was a little bothered that two of the three were unknowns, but I don’t begin to consider myself an aloe collector. They looked cool and the price was reasonable. Decision made.

Then came time to select pots for the plants and for the location where they’d live. The local Home Depot had some functional designs but nothing that excited me. Then I was off to my favorite local nursery. Even when I set some basic rules for myself (“nothing matching,” “a simple design not detracting from the plant,” “earth tones or glazed blue for color”) I ended up with lots of workable options. Since the nursery has a good return policy I picked six to take home to see how they looked on the patio and with the plants.

None of the pots were really pricey, but in all cases they were priced higher than the plants. A lot of the profits in the nursery and landscaping biz aren’t the plants themselves, but all the stuff that goes with them.

So in the end I kept four of the pots and rejected the center and right of the largest pots in the first photo. The extra pot now houses a little division of Aloe maculata (a.k.a. A. saponaria) that I dug up from the front yard. It’s typically an aggressive colonizer–the Matilija poppy of aloes–spreading underground via long stolons. I’m not sure how it’ll do in a pot, so this is an experiment.

Here’s part of the finished edge of the patio. Clockwise from the top: Aloe andongensis, A. saponaria, unknown red aloe.

And here’s the last of the aloes, yet another unknown, nearby in its new pot.

In my teen years I did some informal study of Japanese bonsai and ikebana, the art of arranging branches, leaves and flowers. Proportion proportion proportion were big themes in both, and one of the standard formulas was that the container should be approximately one and a half times the height of the plant material. In all my pots the plants seem too small, but as we all know plants do that amazing thing: grow. Since some of these are unknown species I have no idea how much they’ll grow. But I hope they’ll come to look more at home in their new digs.

Okay, now it’s time to worry about the next big thing…

gardening, places

solana succulents

July 16, 2010 James 9 Comments

Indulge me, if you would, a quick return to last month’s San Diego County Fair. There, in the flower show going on in the botanical building, I ran across this one class they had for “most unusual foliage.” Flowers are great, but so are leaves. This little display included a few pretty special examples.

Here you see variegated milk thistle and a fuzzy kalanchoe leaf, thick and rigid like many layers of felt.

This was the winning leaf, from a succulent echevaria. Not the prettiest thing on earth, but it definitely fit the “most unusual” category.

While at the fair I ran across the display I ran across the display mounted by Solana Succulents. The place has been around for a while, but I’d never taken the short trip to north county to check it out. This past weekend I took John up for a quick visit.

Heading north, once you clear the thin atmosphere of Del Mar, you come upon a chain of fun, funky little beach towns on the way up the coast. A visit to Solana Beach and neighboring Encinitas will give you some comfort that the 1960s never went away very far, though they did get a little reinterpreted and gentrified.

Solana Succulents occupies the outdoor spaces of a little house that’s been converted into a shop. I liked its tight, funky feel. You’ll find little succulent gifts, bigger landscape specimens, as well as some wild curiosities that’ll probably keep a connoisseur happy. With so many pointy, sharp plants around, this is no place to take your toddler. But for two people who find succulents totally cool it was a great way to spend part of an afternoon.

Here’s a brief gallery of some of the hundreds of neat plants there. I tried to get the names, but a few plants weren’t labeled. And beyond that there were some unknowns mixed into the offerings.

Red aloe at Solana Succulents — A cool red aloe or gasteraloe hybrid.

Another red aloe at Solana Succulents — Another aloe or aloe hybrid with cool red summer coloring.

*Aloe andongensis*, a species with gentle spots and a distinct gold aura.

Aloe tomentosa flower spikes — The fuzzed flower buds of *Aloe tomentosa*. The plant is a pretty basic green aloe, but these woolly flowers make up for the ordinary plant.

*Espostoa lanata*: Was it Freud who said, 'Sometimes a succulent is just a succulent?'

Variegated Agave lophantha — One of the variegated forms of *Agave lophantha*, a nice little spiky bundle not much over a foot across at this point.

Boxed euphorbia at Solana SUcculents — A nice boxed euphorbia specimen.

Euphorbia polygona, one of many Old-World euphorbias that mimic New-World cactus.

Pilosocereus species not azureus — And a real New World cactus, one of the weirdly blue-colored species in the genus *Pilosocereus*. The owner needed to look up the exact species, but he said it wasn't the more common *azureus*.

I didn't get its name oops — I really flaked on the name of this one. Maybe one of the stapelia relatives? EDIT 7/16/2010: Thanks to Candy, who has identified this plant as *Euphorbia pugniformis f. cristata*.

Leaf detail of another plant I forgot to get the name of — There was this short little plant with a bulbous, succulent base. It had fewer than a half-dozen leaves. But what stunning leaves. I thought they had a great gold-dust effect to them. And then John suggested that I wipe the potting soil off the leaves. Okay, no more gold dust effect, but still a great plant. Not all succulents are squat, spiny, leafless little auditions for a horror movie. This plant is proof. But I think a lot of the other plants I've shown are further proof of that.

gardening, my garden

compost update

July 13, 2010 James 7 Comments

This is a quick update on the composter I picked up back in early May. Was eight weeks enough time during a cool spring to create a batch of usable compost? I wondered.

Yes and no seems to be the answer. When to empty a compost pile or bin is always a balancing act. The most ephemeral scraps have long passed the point where they’re most beneficial. At the same time, the woodier clippings are only partially on their way to being ideal compost. You can screen the compost and use what will go through a half-inch screen. Or you can take the lazy way out and dump out most of what you have and pick out the egregiously big chunks for further breaking down.

I opted for the lazy/impatient method. A couple weeks ago the pile had started to cool down, and I didn’t want to keep feeding the pile more scraps, only to have to wait additional weeks to empty it. In total I netted about twenty gallons of gorgeously earthy-smelling black gold. I’m not sure how much I fed the composter, though I know I came close to filling up the 80-gallon contraption at least twice, only to have the clippings compact as they broke down.

I emptied the buckets around various veggie plantings around the yard. At this point the compost will serve as mulch, with some of the nutrition leaching into soil as the beds get watered. When it’s time for the late summer changeover of crops the mulch will get worked into the soil and serve more as an amendment. By that time I hope some of the bigger, crunchier bits of yard waste will have broken down even further.

If you want fine compost to mix into planting mix or to start seeds, you’ll want it broken down further than this, or you’d break out a screen to take out the bigger chunks. But for how I used the compost, this approach seems like it’ll work just fine.

Once I emptied the composter it was time to start the next batch, mixing some of the leftover scraps from the last batch with the new materials. I kinduv liked this photo with it perky colors and many layers. (I think it’s worth clicking on to expand.) Still I’m not the first one to turn a camera on a compost pile: I linked back in December of 2007 to Very Rich Hours of a Compost Pile, a photo project by John Pfahl. It’s worth a look.

Facing an empty bin I suddenly felt the urge to do some tidying around the garden if it meant that I’d be generating yard wast that I could feed the composter. Stop number one: one of the towers of Echium wildprettii that had collapsed spectacularly over a walkway and against the side of the house as it reached the end of its blooming. I’d lived a couple of weeks with the plant in this condition, stepping over it as I went back to my studio. But it was time. To avoid being inundated with hundreds of baby echiums, however, I only clipped the lower part of the plant for my bin. The top, with its myriad seeds is now in the greens recycle bin, on its way to the city recycling facility. The city facility caught fire in the 1990s from the high heat in their compost pile, so I have no doubt their facility will be able to break down seeds like this.

Overall, this has been a composter: it generates no unpleasant odors, and being a tumbling model it’s even fun to turn the drum a few revolutions to keep the clippings mixed. The last few days have actually been warmer, so I’m hoping the next batch will cook even quicker than the first.

gardening, my garden

colder than alaska

July 7, 2010 James 13 Comments

It’s been a cool summer so far, following on the heels of a sunny but cool spring. I’ve been watching the temperatures in the paper for Fairbanks, Alaska, and most days the official San Diego report has been cooler. In fact it’s been cooler than almost anywhere in the US except for maybe Anchorage in Alaska. Brr.

At my July 4th party I was talking to someone there with ties to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and his thoughts were that this is typical for an El Niño year. The phenomenon that the locals call “May gray” would be slow to get started (as was the case this year), and the dreaded subsequent phenomenon the we call “June gloom” would drag on longer than usual. All that seems to be happening.

The garden natives don’t seem to be worrying about the temperature as much as I’ve been. In fact the late-spring bloomers seem to be having a field day, extending their bloom, looking nice at a time of year when they don’t always. Black sage is often done by this time, but there are a few lingering flowering stems.

For stunning flowers, though, the black sage has passed the baton to Cleveland sage. Here’s the common and gorgeous cultivar ‘Winnifred Gilman.’

…and here’s Winnifred in closeup…

One of local live-forevers, Dudleya edulis, has had one of the more amazing years that I can remember. Here’s an 18-20 year old plant from above, all covered with flowers. In this photo it’s sprawling six feet across from one edge to the other.

The same dudleya, viewed from ground level as it cascades over a short little retaining wall.

The San Miguel Island buckwheat that I grew from seed two years ago, Eriogonum grande var. rubescens, is finally hitting its stride, finally looking the photos I’ve seen in books. Maybe the cooler weather will keep it looking nice longer.

Among the many non-natives that call my garden their home, this is Clerodendrum ugandense, finally perking up after looking like a twig until late in May. I think it’s been a somewhat slow start for this plant this year, but it always waits until the weather warms to look like a plant you want to keep in the garden.

The common ornamental sage, Salvia ‘Hot Lips,’ is grown for its red and white bicolored blooms. I’ve heard that it blooms mostly with white flowers when weather turns cold. In the left photo these are the only two red and white flowers I could find on three plants. The rest of the flowers are white. In the depths of winter, however, this plant is often completely bicolored, so I’m not sure if there’s any truth to this color change rumor.

Some of the plants that I worry about the most are my American pitcher plants, these Sarracenia from the South, where the daily low temperatures these days are often running ten degrees above the San Diego daytime highs. Fortunately these plants seem to respond more to daylength than to temperature, and the plants look pretty good. Still, they might be taller by now where they originate.

Cool as the days may be, one thing told me for sure that I do not live remotely near Alaska. Monday night was the grand opening of the first giant bloom of this climbing cactus, probably Hylocereus undatus. Even if it’s probably been slow getting started this year, it’s probably the best proof that I’m overreacting. Hardy to not much below freezing, one hit of arctic cold and you’ll freeze this plant’s tuchas off.

At eight to ten inches across, the only shy thing about this plant is that it only opens as darkness approaches. People in cold climes covet being able to grow plants like this–or in fact many of our more tender California natives.

That’s definite proof, Dorothy. We don’t live in Alaska. It just might feel that way these cool summer days.

gardening, my garden

almost red white and blue natives

July 5, 2010 James 9 Comments

We had some people over to view the local fireworks yesterday. To mark the occasion I threw together some of the blooming natives from the garden for a pastel rendition of the red, white and blue theme of the day.

White was the easy color. Several white buckwheats were blooming, and I picked some stems of the flat-top buckwheat, Eriogonum fasciculatum. Its broad, open umbels also look a bit like fireworks.

For red, the dark rose colors of San Miguel Island buckwheat (Eriogonum grande var. rubsescens) provided a reasonable stand-in. If I had some Delphinium cardinale in the garden, it would have really provided a bright scarlet kick. Maybe next year…

For blue, the pickings got pretty slim. The blue-violet whorls of Cleveland sage (Salvia clevelandii ‘Winnifred Gilman’) were the closest I could come up with. As with the white buckwheat, the structure of the stems seemed a bit like fireworks, with whorls of little tubular flowers exploding out from the stem.

The result was a lot less subtle than floral fireworks, but I liked how it marked the occasion and celebrated a Southern California sense of place.

Many of the people who showed up knew I was a plant nut, so two of the hostess gifts were colorful florist bouquets. One of them marked the occasion by including red, white and blue flowers. But even florists with all their international resources sometimes have problems with the color blue. This florist’s solution? Why not dye white flowers blue? The results don’t look much like anything in my California garden so the gift flowers and the local posies weren’t intermixed, and the different bouquets have their own places around the house.

I hope you all had a great fourth!

gardening, landscape design, places

fairly cool plants

July 3, 2010 James 7 Comments

On my recent trip to the San Diego County Fair the horticultural displays seemed to divide into two big categories: exhibits that featured cool designs (usually entered by a landscape design firm or individual) and those that feature some pretty cool plants (mostly in exhibits assembled by specialty nurseries).

I’ve talked enough about the cool designs. Here are some fairly cool plants. Some have been around for centuries, others are fairly new to our gardens. Hopefully the new introductions are fairly tame, otherwise you might be seeing here the new exotic weed pests that’ll be keeping us busy for the next hundred years.