All posts by James

landscape, plant profiles

wild and out of control

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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!

gardening, plant profiles

no such thing as a boring plant

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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 ]

art, plant profiles

jacaranda

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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…

gardening, landscape design, quotes

the dark side of lawns

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I was thumbing through The American Lawn, edited by Georges Teyssot, a collection of thoughts on the phenomenon of American lawns by eight contributors. It’s a wide ranging collection of essays looking at the place of lawns in American culture since colonial days. One of the pieces, “The Electric Lawn” by Mark Wigley, has a couple of quotes that interested me in my current disenchantment with all things turf-related.

On lawns and power relationships:

While renderings for clients may show the lawn, and manuals of drawing technique may describe the ways in which it can be represented, the drawings with which architects communicate to themselves and other architects leave the lawn out. It is assumed that wherever there is nothing specified in the drawing there is grass. The lawn is treated like the paper on which the projects are drawn, a tabula rasa without any inherent interest, a background that merely clears the way for the main event. Yet the lawn is always precisely controlled, whether by the architect or landscape designer. Lawns are all about control. The green frame is far from neutral or innocent. What is left out of the picture often rules the picture.

And a look at 50s green-lawned utopia gone bad:

The deadly lawnmower is the star of the dark side of suburban life. Take Stephen King, the high priest of suburban gothic. In his 1985 film Maximum Overdrive, a passing alien spaceship causes all the machines on the planet to turn against their operators–insulting, taunting, torturing, and then killing. A young boy rides his bicycle down the middle of a generic suburban street. Lawns pass by on either side. The only sign of trouble is that the automatic sprinklers uncannily respond to his presence…A blood-stained lawnmower lurks behind a tree, idling, waiting. When the boy finally stops, it roars to life and chases him down the street…

Well, I didn’t see that movie, and Leonard Maltin rates it a bomb: “Stupid and boring.” Maybe a couple of interesting takes on suburbia, but nothing for the Netflix queue…

gardening, my garden

turf battle

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When we moved into the house twenty years ago one of the first things we did was to take out the front lawn. Southern California is a desert, and it seemed like the environmentally sensitive thing to do. And besides, there are piles of interesting drought-tolerant plants, and replacing the lawn let us sample some of the neat plants from Southern California and around the globe that don’t require constant watering. Although it doesn’t look its absolute best with no added water, most of the front yard has endured most of the middle of summer with no rain or watering. The back yard, however, has been a different story.

Turf Battle Location

For the longest time the lawn area was something like thirty feet square after you subtracted space devoted to walkways, a greenhouse, a deck, a shade bed, and a big zone for vegetables. The lawn, scrappy-looking much of the year and nothing I had any interest in maintaining, was John’s indulgence that I lived with grudgingly, knowing that his Snapper lawnmower from his yard maintenance business days thirty years ago wouldn’t last forever. Even after we pushed into the back yard with a room addition a couple years ago, reducing the lawn to less than half its original size, John was still attached to the green wasteland, still insisting it was worth his trouble to maintain.

Then, three weeks ago, it finally happened. The engine on the Snapper died, and John decided he didn’t want to replace it. An ad on Craigslist and a day or two and the mower found a new home, some guy with a lawn business who has other Snappers and wanted this one for parts.

I took the mower’s death as a sign from Gaia that it was time for the lawn to go. John took it as a sign that he needed a new machine. So the compromise was a battery-powered mower that didn’t have nearly the same pollution profile as the old Snapper. Better would have been a corded model, something that would use the power directly and not waste it charging batteries. Better yet would have been a nice push model that uses nothing other than human umph. But I at least feel better that we’re cutting down on greenhouse gases. And at least the lawn is a low-water Saint Augustine, so it’s not gobbling up the water other turf options would require.

Shopping for the mower then started to push another of my buttons: boycotting items manufactured in China. Every model we looked at was made there. I have nothing against the Chinese people, but its government supports repression in Tibet and Burma (aka Myanmar) so that I try to avoid buying stuff made there whenever possible. (The Chinese Embassy knows I’m doing this, if they read their letters.) I lost that one too. Dang, it’s hard doing anything else sometimes. Sarah Bongiorni has a book, A Year Without “Made in China,” in which she recounts her attempts for her family to go a year without purchasing anything made in China. She had so much trouble she could write a book about it.

Some talking points and data on the pollution from lawnmowers:

Lawn mowers and other machines with engines under 25 horsepower now account for 7 percent of California’s smog-forming emissions from mobile sources, the equivalent of more than 3 million cars, according to the California Air Resources Board.–San Diego Union

Low-horsepower machines account for at least 10 percent of the nation’s smog-forming pollution, which has been linked to respiratory and heart disease, according to the EPA. A single lawnmower emits as much pollution in an hour as 50 cars driving 20 miles.–Washington Post

As an example, mowing grass with a gasoline powered lawnmower causes as much pollution as operating a car for 13 hours.–Senator Dianne Feinstein citing the EPA study

And…the good folks at Environment Canada have a nice online calculator that lets you see a close approximation of how much your mower pollutes.

art, photography

calla lily displacement

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Here’s a recently reworked piece, Calla Lily Displacement, from the Destructive Testing photo series I started ten years ago:

Calla Lily Displacement

Believe it or not this work sprang from a discomfort I had with the documentary photo tradition, where the photographer is often considered an invisible presence, and where photography is a neutral and even benign tool with which to view of the world.

Destructive Testing is a group of still life images documenting various gently destructive acts against botanical material. In these actions, I was interested in questioning that neutrality by pointing out the presence of the photographer. At the same time I wanted the image to still be a beautiful one, something that balanced the destructiveness with qualities we expect from images we want to have around us.

(And yes, I wanted to do a calla lily picture that wasn’t like the tens of thousands of them that have already been done…)

gardening, quotes, rambles

those arrogant humans…

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Are gardeners more humble people? Do we know things a lot of others don’t or believe in things others choose not to believe? Here are a couple thoughts for Earth Day, the first one a soft feather bed of a quote, the second one a bed of nails.

Human beings–any one of us, and our species as a whole–are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.–Bill McKibben in an interview with Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 13.

If wildlife species are to become extinct, that will be regrettable. But any literate person knows that extinction is the way of evolution, and is in the fundamental flow of life. However, man is different. If man is not immortal, then there is no purpose or meaning in his existence. Which in turn would mean no purpose or meaning in the universe. The human immortality imperative is absolute and radical. That is why wildlife conservation has never been permitted to move to the questions of ultimate value. There is no place for an ultimate nonhuman value in our western metaphysics, because of necessity, the human interest is the cosmic interest. That is what it is all about. Wildlife is an “externality.” — John. A. Livingston in The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, in The John A. Livingston Reader (2007: 101).

gardening

altruistic plants?

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It’s disappointing to put together a pot of several seemingly matched plants–even of the same species, only to have most of the plants dwarfed and out-competed by one of their pot-mates. Sometimes you want to throw your hands up and quote Rodney King, “I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? …I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out!”

A study published last year by McMaster University biologist Susan Dudley sheds some light on the phenomenon. She found that sibling plants of the same species coexist nicely when grown in the same pot, being generally considerate of each other as they produced their root systems. But in contrast, plants of the same species that were “strangers” to each other produced highly competitive root systems that didn’t show the same level of cooperation.

sea rocket

“Though they lack cognition and memory, the study shows plants are capable of complex social behaviours such as altruism towards relatives,” says Dudley in the McMaster Daily News. “Like humans, the most interesting behaviours occur beneath the surface.”

According to the report, the study was done with one species, “sea rocket (Cakile edentula), a member of the mustard family native to beaches throughout North America, including the Great Lakes,” so its effects might be different with other species.

But the next time you assemble a container planting it might be interesting to see if cuttings of one plant or seedlings from the same clones develop a more cooperative living arrangement than wildly different clones taken from the entire vegetable diaspora of the same species.

Image from:USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / Britton, N.L., and A. Brown. 1913. An illustrated flora of the northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions. Vol. 2: 196.

my garden, plant profiles

smaller echiums

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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.

plant profiles

pride of madeira

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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.