Monthly Archives: December 2010

gardening, my garden

2010 highlight: la niña loca

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If there’s a story of the year for the garden, one of the competitors would definitely be the December rains. The prognosticators were promising us a La Niña winter, cool and very dry. Instead we got one of the rainiest Decembers on record.

I’ve been playing with video lately, and here are some snapshots of the garden as it looked on December 22, partway through some of the torrents.

I was a wimp. All the shots are through windows, so you can only see part of the garden. But I think you get the idea.

The video quality is definitely lo-def, as the capture was done with an old point-and-shoot that had some lo-res video capabilities. But like I said, I think you get the idea…


And for you concerned capitalists out there who might have been worried about the status of one of our local shopping palaces after I posted some photos of part of it underwater, here are some befores and afters of the Fashion Valley Shopping Center. The befores are from the same day as the garden photos above. The afters are from December 29.

Before

After

Before
After


Before...
After


Not everything was back to normal. Parts of the garage are still under a few inches of water and cordoned off.

And there’s a limited amount of damage where the water undermined the road under the elevated trolley tracks.

But overall things looked pretty good, and shoppers were back to returning their ugly sweaters for something more desirable.

The forecast is for more rain the night of New Year’s Day. Will La Niña Loca continue on into the next year?

landscape, places

a freeway runs through it

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I tried to go Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve on Monday to burn off some of the holiday calories but the gates were shut tight. I’d forgotten that they close the place down after heavy rains to protect the trails. In the minute I was there two other cars pulled up with the same idea. I guess there wore more calories than usual going around this holiday season…

I ended up closer to home, at Marion Bear Memorial Park in San Clemente Canyon. San Diego has made an attempt to preserve and develop interconnected open spaces so that wildlife can move around. Some of the set-aside places can have the feeling more of a corridor than a destination, and this park, positioned along four lanes of busy highway traffic, suffers from corridor syndrome. I can get a little arrogant over what kind of open space experience you can have in a park bordered for its entire length by freeway traffic, but once you get practiced at shutting out the constant automotive noise it was definitely much much better than nothing.

Being an urban park you encounter some bizarre botanical warning signs. Trees have hanging limbs? Better watch out!

Hazardous limbs? Like on this sycamore?

The iceplant marching down the hillside beyond looks lots more dangerous to me.

Signs that parts of the park were underwater from the recent rains were everywhere. This cone was still partially submerged.

The perennial stream had retreated into its main channel…

…but grasses and other plants far from the stream bed were bent over from east to west from the force of the water that was covering them a few days ago.

In addition to the natural narrative of plants responding to the force of running water, you could see examples of many of the other narratives that late December exposes:

Late-season, falling, coloring leaves…

A hanging sycamore leaf...
Yellowing leaves of arroyo willow

Closeup of arroyo willow's golden late-season leaves.

Bare branches, plants dying back for the winter…


Plants gone to seed, starting the new generation…

One of our plants called Golden Bush, Isocoma menziesii..
Golden bush seed head closeup...

Rosa californica seed hips...

Plants responding to the rains with new growth…

Showy (and spiny) gooseberry, Ribes speciosum...
Mexican elderberry...

Uh oh...poison oak, and lots of it...

New generations starting up…

Tiny oak seedling with fungus on fallen log...

Two new live oak saplings

And for me, one of the most interesting narratives is that here in this urban environment, you can still encounter so many of December’s natural processes and the rhythms of the seasons.


gardening, my garden, plant profiles

thank you rob!

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Before the holidays got in full swing I got some pitcher plant seed and seedlings from Rob of The Pitcher Plant Project. Rob is super-enthusiastic about the genus Sarracenia and his blog bounces along with his energy. Check it out!

Rob’s a couple years ahead of me in making his own custom hybrids and has some really cool plants coming along. Here are some shots of the seedlings he sent me.


These first all come from the cross of Sarracenia Bug Bat x Diane Whittaker. This cross combines the seriously snakey-looking hood of S. minor with the frilly hood and wild patterning of S. leucophylla. The plants are young, but you can begin to see what promise they have. You can also see some of the variation that’s possible in a complex hybrid.

Two views of a seedling from the complex cross of Sarracenia ((purpurea ssp. pupurea x jonesii) x (leucophylla x rubra ssp. gulfensis)). All four parents of this hybrid share a rare recessive genetic mutation that prevents the leaves from producing red pigments, leaving this hybrid green green green from chlorophyll. One of Rob’s special interests is in these so-called “anthocyanin-free” (“AF”) plants, and I think they’re pretty amazing too. It really focuses your attention on the architecture of the pitchers.

Even if you’re only moderately technically-oriented you can make a lot of sense out of what’s going on with these AF plants in a paper by Phil Sheridan and Richard Mills, first published in Plant Science and now available online at Meadowview Biological Research Station: [ Presence of proanthocyanidins in mutant green Sarracenia indicate blockage in late anthocyanin biosynthesis between leucocyanidin and pseudobase ]. According to the paper the mutation that makes these plants green is one that affects the final stage in the metabolic pathway that creates red anthocyanin pigments.

And the plants kept going… Here are some first-year seedlings of the cross of Sarracenia Godzuki x ((flava x oreophila) x flava var. rugelli)…

And finally a big pile of seed from some really interesting crosses:

  • S. oreophila “Veined” x Adrian Slack
  • S. (oreophila x Royal Ruby) x Adrian Slack
  • S. leucophylla x Adrian Slack
  • S. (leucophylla x oreophila) x Brooks Hybrid
  • S. (leucophylla x oreophila) x (Ladies in Waiting x Judith Hindle)
  • S. Bug Scoop x Brooks Hybrid
  • S. alata, Texas x flava var. maxima

They’re now in individual bags of damp sphagnum moss in the lower veggie crisper of the fridge. A couple more weeks of the cold treatment and then they’ll be ready to pot up.

If I manage to keep all the plants and even half of the new seedlings I germinate alive I’ll be up to my ankles in hungry young carnivores. To some people this might sound like a 1950s B horror movie, but as far as I’m concerned life doesn’t get much better than that!

Thanks, Rob!

gardening, my garden

more december colors

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Red and green seem to be the predominant colors these days. Instead, how about a shot of hot magenta-pink against green? Of all my pitcher plants this season Sarracenia Daina’s Delight is probably looking the best of any of them.

Vivid colors aren’t the rule this late in the season, with brown being the increasingly prevalent shade. With fewer things like color to distract you it’s a good time of year to concentrate on the amazing shapes these pitchers assume. In their brown state it’s easier to see the little hairs on the leaves that direct the insects down into digestive juices.


For you color addicts there’s still a bit of color left. This species is Sarracenia rubra var. wherryi (a.k.a. S. alabamensis var. wherryi.)

And for you color addicts who like a more traditional red and green combo, could you do any better than this? It’s a cross nicknamed ‘W.C.’ by Jerry Addington after Karen Oudean’s Willow Creek Nursery, in honor of Karen bestowing on him this clone of the hybrid of S. (psittacina x rubra) x leucophylla.

Hmmm…how about a cross between Daina’s Delight and W.C. for gorgeous late season color and awesome patterning? If they both bloom next spring I just might have to make that cross and find out…

landscape, places

après le déluge

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Six days of wet weather were coming to an end this morning when John and I left the garden with its pockets of standing water and did a little grocery shopping. We weren’t far from the San Diego River, and we’d heard it was running high. With the storms clearing and being more curious than cautious today we headed over for a look.

The estuary where the channelized river flows into the Pacific flowed with more water than I’ve seen in it. The ducks took to it like…ducks to water.

Heading east, Friar’s Road was down to one passable lane.

We stopped at a couple spots. The first was the YMCA, where the parking lot was being claimed by the river. Stairs led into water where ordinarily they deposit you onto dry land.

Most dramatic was this schoolbus. I’m sure it was empty at the time the water rose, but it’s a pretty awesome indicator of what nature was doing.

Stop #2 was Fashion Valley Shopping Center. People look at its siting–on the banks of the San Diego River–and sometimes wonder whether placing it there was such a good idea. Today, right about the time these pictures were taking, the river was cresting at the highest level it’s reached since 1980–the highest water level in a generation. The parking garages were partially submerged. Underground parking became underwater parking.

Access into the mall shuts down from one direction whenever the river runs high. Today there was only one way in and out of the mall.

All the sights until now were pretty amazing, but being good consumers we were almost more shocked at this sight: two open parking spaces. On December 22. In the middle of the day, during prime shopping hours.

And just as shocking was this: Inside the mall. Where’d all the shoppers go? Let me remind you it’s still December 22…

Well, that was pretty much the end of our expedition. Our holiday shopping was pretty much complete except for the kinds of things that don’t grow in shopping centers. So it was back home, where the standing water in the garden was starting to drain. Will we remember this freakish week once the sun comes out and all the relatives descend?

gardening, my garden

white solstice

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The year's first carpenteria, which opened on December 17th, shown here with an appreciative local critter on the stamens.

Winter Solstice is a celebration for optimists. Six months of ever-diminishing sunlight leads up to this, the day with the longest, darkest night. If you weren’t an optimist or schooled in the rational ways of the world you might expect the days to diminish into perpetual darkness–No wonder the Mayan Long Count Calendar ends on this day in 2012. A pessimist could see this day as the beginning of the end of time.

But I know things are about to change. The duration of the sunlight I find so precious is about to start to increase. The plants that are beginning to sprout will take advantage of the extra light and grow faster and run headlong into California’s manic late-winter, early-spring season of flowering and regeneration. Call me an optimist. It may be tough now, but to appropriate the words of Dan Savage in his campaign to fight bullying of LGBT young persons, It gets better!

Here’s a brief white-themed gallery in case you’re dreaming of a white solstice. We have no snow to offer you, but instead how about some bright white flowers, some white leaves to get you into the mood?

Have a warm and safe holiday, everyone, whether the white stuff around you is snow, foliage or blooms. It’s all about to get better, soon.

The local chaparral currant, Ribes indecorum, a plant new to the garden within the last year, coming into bloom for the first time.
Detail of the chaparral currant flowers.
December paperwhite narcissus
Early-season blooms of black sage, Salvia mellifera. The overall color is really more pale violet than white.
Flowers on a volunteer statice plant, Limonium perezii. The bracts give the flowering structures a lavender look, but you can see that the flowers are actually white inside the bracts. The closest neighbor's plant of this is a few hundred feet down the street. I had no idea the seeds could travel so far. Enjoy it now. This weed is outta there once the holidays are over.
Details of the leaves of San Miguel Island buckwheat, Eriogonum grande, green on top, white beneath...

The white-ish Dudleya brittonii with December precipitation, rain, not snow...

Who could forget our great local white sage, Salvia apiana?

...and one of our great local dudleyas, D. pulverulenta, one of the whitest of the dudleyas, and it loves life in my garden. Joy oh joy!

gardening

not your parents’ ornaments

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So there I was, taking my early morning route to my office, admiring the red, bronze, green and yellow leaves of liquidambars in December…

…when I came upon an unusual sight. Instead of the dangling seedpods that you see on these trees this time of year, as on this branch…

…I ran across several trees with different sorts of ornaments suspended from the almost-bare branches.

Here’s a closeup view. The ornaments? Cell phones!

By now you’re probably asking, they look festive enough, but why cell phones?

Well, these trees were part of the landscaping around the Jacobs School of Engineering on the UCSD campus, named after benefactors Joan and Irwin Jacobs, of Qualcomm fame. (That’s Qualcomm as in one of the main players in the design and manufacture of cell phones…)

I guess cell phone ornaments probably won’t be catching on in households unless they’re the households of billionaire telecomm execs, but it gave me a laugh. And isn’t it great to see trees other than conifers all dolled up for the holidays?

gardening, my garden

no floral porn this month

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It’s awesome sparse for flowers in the garden right now. But hey, it’s December!

this is the hinge between seasons. Things are budding up, others are finishing up. A few long-blooming plants plants make up the glue holding all the changes together. And a very few plants are taking advantage of the late fall to do their flower thing.

Overall here are lots of closeups, with not many plants covered all over with flowers. Click the images for a full view.

Some of the usual subjects not shown this month:
Baileya multiradiata
Dudleya caespitosa
Salvia Hot Lips
Red and orange reed-stem Epidendrum orchids
Camellia Cleopatra
Salvia discolor
Clerodendrum myricoides ‘Ugandense’

Thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. There’s lots of snow on the ground around the country and internationally. So once again I should stop whining and enjoy what I have to look at!


gardening, my garden

why a greenhouse?

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I find that I’m asking myself whether I need the greenhouse anymore. Left over from an obsession with warm-growing orchids a couple decades ago, it sits in the middle of some prime real estate in the every-shrinking back yard.

Its current incarnation is more shed than greenhouse, with bags of potting mix and pots taking up most of the space. Still I continue to use it for some propagating. Because of the famous greenhouse effect temperatures inside during the daytime can climb ten to twenty degrees higher than outdoors–and that’s with heavy shadecloth on the western exposure. Even at night it stays a little warmer than the outdoors. Before sunrise during a cold snap a week and a half ago I looked at the thermometer inside: 42 degrees. Pretty cold, but it was but four to five degrees higher than a nearby thermometer outside.

The new patch of lettuce outside. Where's the lettuce?
Here's a little recycled sixpack that I seeded with lettuce five days earlier. Unlike the bare patch outside, the seeds are germinating.

The extra warmth can help seeds germinate a few days earlier than outdoors. And once the plants are up they can grow quite a bit faster. The warm spa temperatures inside the greenhouse, combined with some protection from marauding nature, can give you a leg up on the season.

I showed this photo of germinating bladderpods a couple of weeks ago. These plants are less than two weeks old.
And these are the same bladderpods last night, showing lots of luxuriant growth. I'll be repotting these soon and getting them ready for planting in the garden.

If you’re occasionally impatient like me it’s nice to see bigger plants sooner.

And this last photo shows another advantage of the extra warmth. These are yearling seedlings of the North American pitcher plant, Sarracenia. All three pots were started in the greenhouse a year ago, but the one in the middle spent most of the summer outside in strong sunlight. These plants are supposed to like the intense light, but you can see that they were more partial to temperatures that reminded them of the South than intense sun. For plants that ordinarily take five years to mature, it’s looking like the extra warmth can take a year or two off of the usual time. It’s cool to have a greenhouse to save a few weeks but having it help shave one or two years is pretty persuasive.

So as I talk myself through all this it’s looking like I’ll still want to have some sort of greenhouse, even in Southern California. But it might not be this really inefficient and poorly located greenhouse. And did I mention that the current building has termites?

The replacement might be separate little structures. Maybe they could be enclosed carts and have wheels so that they could be repositioned to take advantage of the best sun angles. And if they’re on wheels they could be stuck in a corner of the yard if they’re not being used for propagation. And something like a cart wouldn’t waste space on aisles to walk down.

Well, there are lots of possibilities, and I’ll be thinking about what to do. I’m one of those people who likes to stare at a problem for a long time, but maybe in a few months you’ll be reading about the next big garden construction project.

gardening

the “gardening as hobby” menace

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Do you feel insulted, does it really really bother you if someone calls what you do out in the garden a “hobby?” Do you have a deep sense that what you’re doing is way more important than things that you yourself would call a hobby?

Then, if you haven’t visited there already, run over to last Friday’s post by James Golden at View from Federal Twist. Then follow that up with Helen’s post over at The Patient Gardener’s Weblog. Be sure to read through the comments, and you’ll probably feel compelled to comment yourself. (Of course I commented, and if it weren’t so late I’d go on here for paragraphs with my strong reactions to being trivialized as a gardener.)

Answer key to my initial two questions: As far as I’m concerned “Effing yes” in both cases.