Monthly Archives: June 2011

art, gardening, my garden, places

piece o’ history

8 Comments

Here’s the latest addition to the garden, a small chunk of the House of Hospitality in Balboa Park, a small chunk of San Diego architectural history.

In the late 1990s the city rehabilitated the building, one of many historic structures built as temporary exhibition spaces for the 1915 Panama-PacificCalifornia Exposition. The exhibit halls weren’t really intended to be a landmarks to pass into time immemorial. But the city has grown attached to these examples of Churrigueresque architecture, and the buildings are actively preserved.

(“Churrigueresque” refers to the Spanish/Catalan architect José Benito de Churriguera, who developed a fairly elaborate Rococo style of ornament that was picked up in Colonial Mexico. Bertram Goodhue and Carleton M. Winslow, the architects who worked on the Exposition, studied the style in Mexico and brought it a few miles north of the border. The over-the-top plaster details made for dramatic and escapist exposition buildings, but the details are high maintenance and can begin to fail over the years. It got to the point that the ornamentation was falling off the buildings and threatening to ka-bonk passers-by.)

“Preservation” of the building went through several phases, and eventually employed the wrecking ball. The old House of Hospitality was demolished and a new one erected in its place. To make sure that the new building closely resembled the original the old ornamentation was removed from the buildings and casts made. The new ornamentation is now made of glass-fiber-reinforced-concrete instead of the original horsehair-reinforced plaster.

Rather than landfilling the old architectural ornamentation, the interesting chunks were sold off to benefit the preservation efforts. And it was on a frantic Saturday morning in 1997 where we were able to fight off some of the most aggressive shoppers I’ve ever encountered to pick up this piece of local history. I’m pretty sure that my chunk of history comes from the tower in the photo above, from around the arches.

The fragment was really cool, but it sat in various corners of the house and my studio as we decided what to do with it. Last month we finally decided to liberate the piece back to the outdoors. Here’s its probably final resting place, attached to a long blank stretch of fence above the fishpond.

I don’t typically go in for lots of garden art or pieces of fake Roman artifacts sprinkled around a garden. But I was happy with how this relatively small chunk of Balboa Park serves as a cool focal point for a part of the garden presided over by a long, plain fence.

In demolishing the original building and dispersing its surfaces the city has managed an odd sort of preservation. Zoos and botanical gardens sometimes have the sad burden of keeping alive species that no longer exist in the wild. And my back yard holds a piece of a building that exists only in a facsimile of the original.

gardening, my garden

you paid money for that?

8 Comments

At the plant sale attached to the recent succulent show a couple of the society members looked at one of the plants I had in my hands and made all sorts of approving noises. “Great plant!” or “Wow, you scored!”

That was not the reaction when I got the plants home.

While John didn’t quite come out and say something like, “You paid good money for that?,” it was there in implication in what little he said.

I suppose it’s the curious gardener’s curse, getting all excited over some of the odder botanical life forms that didn’t get sprinkled on with the magic unicorn glitter that makes a plant conventionally pretty. Add to that the more general gardener’s curse of being able to see the future in recognizing the promise in a packet of black seeds indistinguishable from dust or a bag of brown bulbs looking no more promising than a heap of shallots.

Here’s one of the little plants, Ipomea platensis, a species in the same genus as morning glories. This is the young plant.

Some day it’ll grow up into something looking like this plant in the main succulent show. Very cool, but we’re missing the magic unicorn glitter.

This is a cool plant with a Latin name that would draw snickers from a junior high school science class, Fockea edulis.

Some day I hope mine grows up into something looking like these larger plants in the main show…

Here’s a more mature specimen of Dioscorea elaphantipes, another of the little plants I got. I think the form of the caudex on this one looks pretty amazing. So far these are three caudex-forming (caudiciform) species, but the inflated plant parts all look quite different from each other. The foliage, too, looks totally different one plant to the next.

Oper­culi­carya decaryi also has a cool inflated stem…

…and tiny, dark, delicate leaves.

And then there was this one, Tyle­codon striatus, a plant that even I think is kinduv ugly. Lots of brown stem and not much else. They have competitions to find the ugliest dogs. Do they have ugly plant contests? This species stands a pretty good chance of winning. And I paid good money for it!

Not all was lumpy and bulbous at the plant sale, and there actually was a lot of unicorn glitter spread over many of the plants.

Echevaria Afterglow and Sedum adolphii 'Oranges'
Golden sedum
Dudleya brittonii
Flower on Adenium obesum, a relative of the tropical plumeria. Like most of the plants I purchased this species will form a dramatic caudex, but people seem to buy it at least as much for the flowers.

I liked the forest of plant labels at this vendor's booth. One of them bears the really unhelpful plant name of succulent...

There were succulent-friendly pots, too. Just look at all that drainage.


And of all the pots I came so close to going home with this one by Don Hunt Ceramics. Isn’t the glaze terrific? You wouldn’t care if the plant inside was as ugly as one of my new ones!

Considering what I purchased–and especially what I did not buy–this might just be the last time I’m allowed to go shopping unattended.

gardening, my garden

cooking for vermin

12 Comments

It’s been a bad year for pocket gophers. I’ve been cleaning up the garden for our annual big July 4th party, dealing with gopher damage and generally getting everything pretty-like. One large spot in the front–just about the first zone of the garden visitors will encounter–is totally bare and calls out for some new plants to fill in the space. But the last thing I wanted to do is to install something new that would turn into expensive gopher chow.

I decided that I would try to place some new plants in the dead zone, but wanted to see if I couldn’t try something to deter the gophers. Gopher bait pellets are popular, but I can’t say that they’ve worked for me. How can you tell if something is working when the creature you’re after lives 99.9% of the time underground and their damage seems to come in random spurts? And I worry about the cat discovering a poisoned gopher. Gopher-killing traps are popular, and it’s the one method that seems to have the best chance at success. Still I’m not sure I’m ready to go there.

I’ve tried castor bean-based repellant. I’ve tried blood meal. Both things that are supposed to keep the creatures at bay, but I don’t know that they’ve worked for me for longer than a few days. And the idea of spreading blood meal fertilizer around native plants at the start of what’s summer dormancy for many of them didn’t seem like too bright an idea. (Let me force feed you some bratwurst while you’re trying to get to sleep…) One thing I haven’t tried is chili powder.

I admit that this is just an experiment, maybe one that’s doomed to fail. The only things I have going on my side are the facts that, 1) there’s at least one commercial product out there that combines blood meal with chili powder, and 2) you sometimes see references on gopher control using chili, usually in combination with something like garlic. Since I don’t want to do blood meal, the chili powder alone might do something.

And if chili powder might work, why not use the most industrial-strength stuff you can your hands on? It’s not pepper spray, but the local Indian grocer sells 880 grams of extra-hot ground pepper for less than five dollars–less than half the price for the blood-meal/chili mixture I’ve seen. I cook with the stuff, but a half teaspoon will make a large batch of food sizzle and scare away most of my Ohio relatives. It might work for gophers, too.

So, into the planting holes I mixed up a recipe of soil mixed with generous amounts of the chili powder, about 1 quarter cup per hole. Next, into the holes go the three new San Miguel Island buckwheats. They’re not the most exotic of the California native plants, but I was pretty happy to find several well grown examples in a local generalist nursery. If you see a business doing something good, why not support them?

Finally the plants got a healthy top-dressing of the chili powder. What I didn’t use on the new plants I spread around a few other plants that seem to be favorite gopher menu items. This is how it looks before watering it in, pretty glaringly orange-red. It looks closer to normal after you soak it in a bit.

One Big Caution: Although chili powder is a natural product, it’s still a nasty irritant. Wear gloves. A respirator and goggles might be a good addition on a windier day. I’m not saying this for dramatic effect. Wind blew some in my eyes and I suffered the expected effect–no surprise. But I also rubbed my gloves on the side of my face, only to have my face burn like a second degree sunburn for half an hour.

Will all this fail and collapse into a pile of chili powder induced flames? Dunno, but it’ll be an interesting experiment.

rambles

i was hacked

11 Comments

You might think of gardens and even garden blogs as little zones of quiet in the hubbub of life beyond. But try as you might the outside world always seems to find you. Some of the dark forces in the world found this blog and tried to mount a quiet takeover in the form of the WordPress Pharma Hack.

Diana of Elephant’s Eye was the first to notice when several weeks ago some of the search results for this blog were being hijacked with an offer to buy pharmaceuticals online without a prescription. My blog? Pimping Viagra and Tramadol? How rude. The situation continued to get worse as more results showed signs of the hack, and reached a point in Google Analytics where the word “pharmacy” was indexed twice as frequently as the word “plant.” I had no idea what was happening.

Eventually I tracked down the offending hack. Better yet there were several sites showing ways to make the beast go away. Fortunately this wasn’t the sort of hack where all the data vanishes, and at no point were any readers harmed by visiting these pages. But removing the problem required a lot of time checking out individual files and database entries in the secret inner sanctum files behind the scenes.

If you blog at WordPress.com or Blogspot you’re probably safe from ever encountering this. Both services have tech staff way more on the ball than I’m able to be.

If you host your own instance of WordPress, as I do, then you need to be on the lookout for it. The Pearsonified blog offers some useful ways to deal with the attack, as do several other resources. Just search for “WordPress pharma hack.”

At this point I think I’ve got it beat. Results on Google still show a few offending search results, but overall things are looking better as the robots spider through the content. So recovery from this hack is like recovering from a bad bout of the flu.

Some handy things to avoid getting hacked, or to quickly find out about a hack with it if you are:

  • Blog at one of the main blog platforms unless you have a need or desire to exert more control over your blog content, display or delivery.
  • Google yourself frequently, and Google your blog content. It’s not just for vanity anymore.
  • Keep your WordPress version current. Updating will take less time and hassle than righting the wrongs of a hacker.
  • Check your blog stats often. A big dropoff in traffic might signal a big problem with the blog.
  • If you see another blogger’s content being hijacked, point it out to them. The symptoms of this attack are invisible if you’re just viewing pages or writing content. It’s only when you use a search engine that you notice this particular hack.

So…hopefully that’s the end of this headache. Relieved of the need to figure out the prescription for the problem, I actually accomplished some gardening today–and blogging too. Life is much better now.

Stay safe!

gardening

succulence

9 Comments
Rebutia muscula
Copiapoa hypogaea var. barquitensis

One of the halls in San Diego’s Balboa Park almost always seems to have a plant show dedicated to one group of plant or another. This past weekend it was the turn for cactus and succulents, courtesy the San Diego Cactus and Succulent Society.

This show featured an expected sampling of cactus, but a surprisingly low number of plants with colorful, splashy foliage like you’d find on some sedums or echevarias. Maybe some of them don’t transport so easily, and many others get too big to take to a show. Or maybe there’s a certain snobbery against easy-to-like plants that are probably a little overexposed in garden centers and home stores around town.

I'm not sure how to react to this entry, a carved up specimen of the common San Diego County coastal prickly pear, Opuntia littoralis. Most botanical gardens will have vandalized cactus and succulents, with initials carved into plants that will carry the scars for the rest of their lives. And here's another act of creative vandalism. It's fun, but I'm a little too uptight to enjoy it without feeling some guilt or dis-ease. But in the end it’s probably a better deal for the plant than to chop up the leaf for a big serving of nopales.

Notocactus leninghausii
Mammillaria carmenae
Sulcorebutia rauschii

Rebutia fulviseta--sorry for the awful focus on this one...

Euphorbia poissonii
Euphorbia unispina
And yet another euphorbia, this one E. misera, native right here in coastal San Diego County.
Oops...I didn't get the name of this wonderful wonder. Sorry. Maybe one of you knows? EDIT JUNE 12: Hoover suggested that this might be Cal­ibanus hookeri, and it looks like that is indeed the plant. Thanks, Hoover!
This decades-old specimen is Adenia glauca.

Whatever the reason for the dearth of “pretty plants,” weird was in, and I found myself gravitating to the side of the exhibition hall with plants that took up the idea of succulent growth habits and ran with it in ways you don’t see in cactus or rosette-forming succulents. Pretty many of them are not, but there’s a major cool factor with these.

Out of these I really grooved on the caudiciform species, plants that develop grossly enlarged stem bases, stems or roots to store water for the plant to use during the dry months of the year.

It was easy to snap up a big pile of photos at the show with my cellphone camera, but the quality of almost all of them was been pretty pathetic. Low indoor light = Slow exposures = Blurry photos. And controlling focus is really really touchy to nearly impossible.

I’m not about to give up my real cameras, but gosh these little devices are handy, like the convenient Hostess Twinkies of the photographic world. Amazing how much we’re willing to give up for the sake of convenience. Still, every now and then the photographic Hostess Twinkie goddess smiled on me and gave me sharp images that were focuses almost where I’d have focused with my camera.

Anyway, you might have guessed that where there’s a plant show, there’s usually a plant sale. But that’ll be the topic of a future post…

art, landscape, places

all shook up

6 Comments

Visitors to this part of the UCSD campus won’t forget that California is Earthquake country. Set at the edge of a walkway next to the landscaping are these pillars that have undergone simulated tremors on a jumbo shake table that can deliver a massive series of movements emulating the Big One.

Another hint that this is California lies in the fact that these are pillars modeled on those that keep our freeways high in the air. The structures lab here has worked with transportation agencies to try to develop safer structural components for bridges and overpasses.

During severe shaking the tremendously strong yet fragile concrete disintegrates, leaving the supporting steel which has flexibility but comparatively little strength to keep structures aloft. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near a freeway with compromised supports like this.

The solution the structural engineers came up with is to wrap the columns in a material that bandages the concrete and keeps it from pulverizing into gravel. It almost seems too obvious a thing to do, but it looks like it really works when you compare these two pillars to the first ones I showed.

So, here in the middle of clipped hedges and mounds of orange lion’s tail, you have these six pillars, standing around like decaying Grecian columns or remnants of a garden folly in an Eighteenth-Century English garden.

Temple of Harmony SE Facade

This image is of the Temple of Harmony, a folly on the grounds of Halswell House, Goathurst, Somerset, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons. (Image by Stronach, released to the public domain. Thank you Stronach!) Even though it’s far from this land with the shakes the Temple apparently has some trouble standing up. The Wikipedia description states that “it now has the addition of a tie bar, a long retaining bolt that runs through the structure from one side to the other, helping to keep it together.”

Maybe the Halswell Park Trust could take a clue from the clever Californians and wrap the Temple in fiberglass, though, yeah, it might look a little more like the work of Christo than that of Thomas Prowse, its original architect…