gardening

stefano mancuso, standing up for plants

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Plants are way smarter than humans give them credit for being…

Here’s a cool, thoughtful video from the very cool TED program that I was first pointed out to me courtesy of a link sent out by International Carnivorous Plant Society. (Yes, there are a couple shots of a Venus flytrap.)

You can select subtitling into any of ten languages in case you’d like to catch every word Stefano Mancuso, one of the founders of plant neurobiology, has to say. Part of his message: Genesis got it all wrong, but then so did Aristotle.

(An aside: I’ve written at least once about pronouncing scientific Latin names. Listen to how Mancuso pronounces the Latin name of California’s own giant sequoia, Sequoiadendron giganteum at the 3:51 mark. If there’s any country that can lay claim to even begin to pronounce Latin correctly it’s gotta be Italy, and the way the name comes out sounding has almost nothing to do with how I’m used to hearing it. Of course the word “Sequoia” originates on this side of the pond, so this is a puzzle with no real answer–the most interesting kind!)


gardening, my garden

unusual october

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October usually throws some ridiculously warm and dry weather at us. This was the month that in 2003 and 2007 saw monster wildfires racing through the county, including the largest fire to hit California in recorded history (in 2003).

We’ve a few of those warmer days, but what’s been surprising has the the cool, wet foretaste of winter. Here’s a little example: This is my parking pass for work, where I usually go in to the office Mondays through Thursdays. Each big dark X corresponds to a day when it was too wet to ride my scooter in to work. Add to that another morning when I got a bad weather report and arrived pretty drenched.

Over the last two weeks it seems like half the mornings looked a little like this, with mist–or outright rain–turning the pavement wet.

Finally, the line of repurposed cat litter buckets that had looked so forlorn all summer at the drip edges of the roof were beginning to fill with water. In fact my two rain big barrels are now full, ready to have their contents shared back into the garden.

In response to the cooling trend plants are leafing out; seedlings are germinating. Readers not in mediterranean climates might think they’re reading a garden blog from the southern hemisphere. But no, this is California, which shares this wet-winter/dry-summer climate with less than 5% of the earth’s surface. To make up for being so special we’re treated with almost 20% of all the world’s plant species. More than a fair trade for long summer months with close to no water.

I was out in the front yard over the weekend, tidying up growth that had hit its expiration date. Mixed in with branches that had truly died were plenty belonging to drought-deciduous plants that were coming back to life. On the left is our local chaparral currant, Ribes indecorum, turning from brown twigs to leafy twigs. On the right is Verbena lilacina, a plant that can stay looking fairly green over the summer if you give it more water than I do.

Everywhere I stepped I had to avoid mashing tiny little buckwheat seedlings, or these guys, itty bitty little chia plants (Salvia columbariae). Early this summer when I took out the dead plants of this annual I made a point of shaking the seed heads over the dirt. Still I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough germination to repeat the amazing show of last spring. Looks like I didn’t need to be so concerned.

In the back yard seedlings of baby blue eyes were pushing their way through the mulch. The mulch really does help keep down the weeds, but this species fortunately doesn’t seem overly daunted by my attempt to save myself a few dozen hours of weeding. Various creatures do find these seedlings extra-tasty–including the cat, which seems to think these are almost as good as catnip. Once they’re larger the cat doesn’t seem to pay them any attention. I’m hoping for a nice half dozen or so survivors.

And there were even more seedlings. These are a few days away from showing their first true leaves, but I’m hoping that they’re the beginnings of clarkias that surrounded this patch of bare dirt. If not clarkias, they’re likely seedlings of this really noxious weed that shared the space with the clarkias. We’ll soon find out…

Yes, it’s been an unusual October. But I’ll take plants leafing out and seedlings pushing their way out of the ground any day over another round of brushfires!

gardening, my garden

my new natives

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Saturday was my local California Native Plant Society’s annual plant sale.

Eight hours on my feet, volunteering, had me pretty exhausted, but not too exhausted to shop! Still, I thought Saturday’s haul showed remarkable focus and restraint–except for one plant.

I’ve threatened to start a collection of dudleyas, that cool mostly-California genus of rosette-forming succulents. I have several species in the garden already, and I’ve always been struck by the subtle variations between the different kinds. I think that you can make out some of the differences pretty easily in the big group photo above, though a couple are immature plants and will look a little more like their relatives when grown up.

So here are the new additions:

Dudleya abramsii, Abrams’ dudleya.

Orcutt’s dudleya, D. attenuata ssp. orcuttii.

Britton’s dudleya, D. brittonii, a Baja species, probably one of the biggest, splashiest of this genus.

Candle holder live-forever, D. candelabrum, another of the larger, more charismatic species. This hails from the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara.

Bright green dudleya, D. virens ssp. hassei (also called D. hassei). The “bright green” in this Catalina Island species appears to be a misnomer since my plant looks really white or blue-green, as do the photos up on CalPhotos.

Sticky dudleya, D. viscida, a plant only found in the low southern end of the state.

Looking at the first photo you’ll probably notice a plant that looks nothing like a dudleya. That plant is thick-leaved yerba santa, Eriodichtyon crassifolium. With a reputation for spreading when it’s happy, this isn’t a plant for every garden. There’s a spot behind the back fence on the slope garden where there’s a tangle of iceplant and ivy. If any plant stands a chance against those two nemeses it might be this one. I’ve loved its lavender flowers in the spring and the strikingly modern upright growth habit. It’ll give me more excuses to tend this little wasteland of a garden space, my little secret garden with big, scary datura flowers and the even scarier iceplant and ivy.

gardening, my garden

october color

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Here’s a quick roundup of what’s blooming in the October garden. It might look like a lot, but this is probably 90% of everything that has anything looking remotely like a flower on it, and a lot of these are tiny tiny flowers on big big plants that are grown primarily for their foliage and structure. It makes you a little more appreciative of the plants that make this hard time of year their floral niche.

Just starting up their bloom are the first of the paperwhite narcissus, Camellia sasanqua ‘Cleopatra,’ Stapelia gettleffii and Protea Pink Ice.

Salvia clevelandii ‘Winnifred Gilman’ is showing a second burst of energy, blooming not quite as intensely as in the spring, but with more vigor than over the summer.

All the rest of the plants have been blooming for a few months now, and a few of those fall into the almost-everblooming category–plants forever thinking about S. E. X. Click any of the little thumbnails below for a closer look, or hover over the thumbnail for the plant name. (And my apologies for a few repeats of some of the same images above–My gallery software only has an all-or-nothing option for posting these.)

Thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting this monthly roundup (even though it’s actually been a few months since I posted…). Check out this month’s other [ Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day posts ]


gardening

seed bomb controversies

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Someone has declared tomorrow, October 9, 2010 as International Tulip Guerrilla Gardening Day. [ Here’s the Facebook event. ] I won’t be discussing tulips, but this post does have a few things to say about guerrilla gardening.

The local native plant listserv lit up a few weeks ago over a story in the local paper about seed bombs that ran on August 30.

If you’re not up on seed bombs here’s a little background: The idea of rolling up seeds and clay to make little balls that could be lobbed into an area to sow the seeds probably goes back centuries. But the technique was revitalized in Japan by Masanobu Fukuoka during the last century as part of a low-disturbance style of planting. Instead of tilling the ground, these lumps of seed and clay could be spread out on the earth’s surface, reducing ground disturbance and the resulting need to weed so intensely. Up to that point the little round seed delivery devices were known as seed balls, earth balls or even clay dumplings.

With the rise of the militant guerrilla gardening movement, the little seed ball became one of the weapons of choice against what was perceived as urban blight. An untended vacant lot could be showered with with these little projectiles, and a few good rains could see the seeds sprouting and taking over what might have been invasive weeds. In the testosterone-soaked guerrilla garden movement the friendly seed ball quickly became rebranded a “seed bomb.”

Now we return to current times and the article I started out mentioning: The original cut of the article touted how these particular seed bombs contained native species, including–cue the scary music–sweet alyssum! While the definitely-not-native sweet alyssum isn’t one of the top two or three most invasive plants, it’s undisputedly a problem and has no business in a seed ball that could get hurled into an wild area by a well-meaning guerrilla gardener. In my own garden, a sowing of the stuff twenty years ago has led to a situation of seedlings still popping up every time it rains.

The article generated all sorts of comments, and several people wrote directly to the maker of these particular seed bombs mentioned in the paper, Jim Mumford of GreenScaped Buildings. One thing led to another and it was revealed that the newspaper got hold of a bad list of ingredients, and that sweet alyssum had never been a part of the mix. The newspaper ran a sidebar correction to the story. (The species used to me looks like the California native wildflower mix offered by S&S Seeds.)

Still by that point the damage had been done, and the creator of these particular balls felt like he needed to show up last month at the lion’s den of the the native plant society meeting to do some damage control. He brought us all a big bag of free seed balls. He ran down the real list of species that were really in the mix. He reiterated that sweet alyssum had never been part of the mix.

When it was all over, several in the audience were saying they had no trouble with the species used to make the seed balls. The plants were all from California and weren’t considered invasive. But this was a tough crowd to please and there were still a few lingering concerns.

Within the state there are distinct forms of many of the plants in the mix, and each region’s flora has a particular balance of local plants. If you bring in a non-local strain of a “native” plant you might do something to mess up that balance. Really the only way to make a safe seed bomb that you might lob into a wild area would be to use seed from local plants. Seed bombs are fun, but keep them confined to urban gardens away from wildlands and don’t go tossing the balls into your neighborhood canyon thinking you’re doing the earth a favor.

The story of the San Diego seed bombs has a relatively happy ending. But over the last couple of months I’ve run across a seller who offers “West Coast seed bombs” on Etsy and through a number of boutiques. The vendor lists the ingredients as “Cornflower, Siberian Wallflower, Garland Chrysanthemum, Shasta Daisy, Farewell-to-Spring, Plains Coreopsis, Sulphur Cosmos, Wild Cosmos, African Daisy, Sweet William, California Poppy, Blanket Flower, Baby’s Breath, Tidy Tips, Mountain Phlox, Blue Flax, Sweet Alyssum, Annual Lupine, Lemon Mint, Red Poppy, Rocky Mountain Penstemon, Desert Bluebell, Mexican Hat, Gloriosa Daisy, None-so-Pretty, Prairie Coneflower, and Black-eyed Susan.” Not only does this mix include sweet alyssum, it contains garland chrysanthemum, one of our local scourges. Some parts of the country also have problems with the baby’s breath.

The issue of invasives aside, it makes me wonder about people’s definitions of what constitutes a wildflower. Siberian wallflower on the West Coast? African daisy?

I got in touch with the makers of these seed bombs, and they were quite responsive, saying “we are continually developing this product. Your feedback will help inform our product going forward and is much appreciated. We will gladly include information about the danger of invasive species in our product from here forward.” And they asked for suggestions for plants that would be better citizens in a West Coast wildflower mix. Off the top of my head I referred them to the list accompanying the article, and added just a few ideas of California natives not on the list: baby blue eyes, fivespot, coast sunflower, desert marigold. What others would you recommend?

If the makers of these seed balls drastically change their mix we could have another relatively happy ending. Most of us probably have non-native plants in our gardens. If what happens in the garden stays in the garden, then it’s not quite a doom and gloom scenario. But we definitely have a problem if people start throwing seed bombs into the wilds.

In this case, accompanying the seed balls with a note about the potential threat of invasive plants could do as much good as reformulating the mix.

gardening

hydrate!

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Summer heat finally arrived–in September. Two hours north, Los Angeles hit 113 degrees on Monday, a degree hotter than Death Valley. At least one San Diego County town hit 109 on Monday, though down here near the coast it didn’t get much more than the low 90s. Still, really hot by what we’re used to.

Now that it’s turned hot I feel like as punishment I need to write on the chalkboard two hundred times:

I will not complain about it being a cold summer.
I will not complain about it being a cold summer.
I will not complain about it being a cold summer.
I will not complain about it being a cold summer.
I will not complain about it being a cold summer.
I will not complain about it being a cold summer.
I will not complain about it being a cold summer.
I will not complain about it being a cold summer.
I will not complain about it being a cold summer…

It was so hot that the contents of the snack bottle of vitamin Cs (aka chocolate chips) were turning into chocolate goo. John’s emergency response to stick them in the fridge averted disaster.

Over the weekend, knowing it was going to be a stretch of hot weather ahead, I tried to give a serious soak to the plants most susceptible to drying out. Anything in a pot got a good drink–a lesson I learned in August when we had two surprise days of hot summer summer weather. In August this Ceanothus lleucodermis that I’d carefully propagated from seed didn’t survive the hot spell to be planted this fall.

In addition to the potted plants, a small group that was new in August got an extra watering out of the weekly cycle. And the remaining zones of water-intensive plants and bogs got the extra soak.

Some plants didn’t seem to be bothered by the heat or dryness. This native bladderpod (Isomeris arborea) has been one of the most reliable garden plants, expanding and blooming like crazy in a spot where it has shaded roots. Another bladderpod in a more exposed location subsists on a similar amount of water, though it’s just one third the size of this plant.

The non-native Solanum pyracanthum is another plant that gets by with close to zero added water in a semi-sheltered spot near the first bladderpod. It has a much longer bloom season than my native nightshades, and it has the added bonus of a row of decorative orange spikes that decorate the center of each leaf.

A potted Stapelia gigantea also seemed to enjoy the hot weather. You can tell by the burned stems that this plant probably doesn’t get enough moisture. Still, it survives and blooms.

In my last post I mentioned a different stapelia species that stinks like carrion and is pollinated by flies. This S. gigantea has the same charming trait. The fifty pound potfull of stinky plant lives outside the window to my studio workstation. Like most people in the neighborhood we don’t bother with air conditioning, so working in my studio has been an…interesting olfactory experience. At least the stink is only really bad when you get close to the flower.

With heat often comes fire. Two recent evenings had extra-fiery sunsets. What looks like colorful sun-lit clouds in this photo is actually smoke from a 500-plus acre fire in Mexico that made it over the border. Fortunately the fire got extinguished and didn’t develop into another of the monster conflagrations we’ve experienced twice in the last seven years.

The rest of the West Coast seems to be sharing this same heatwave. The worst seems over, but there are probably more warm days ahead. So stay cool as possible–and remember to hydrate.

gardening, my garden

roadkill flower

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When I got home Monday it was almost dark, one of the sure signs that summer is over. Out in the garden a pot of Stapelia gettleffii was showing off its first flower of the season. It was dark enough that I had to use the camera flash.

I’ve only had this South African plant for a few months and this was its first bloom for me. Elaborately striped and fuzzy with hairs that look like fur, I’m trying to decide whether the flower is “pretty” or not. It’s definitely in the weird and wonderful category, though. The flies like it too, mainly because it’s gently fragrant like something that’s been run over on the interstate.

I’ve grown another of these carrion flowers, Stapelia gigantea, for a few years now. That plant has flowers that last for just a day, and I was expecting the same thing with this species. But when I went out earlier today that first flower was still open, drawing a small crowd of adoring flies. (They got camera-shy for this shot.)

This is a frost-tender plant, so it’d work only if you brought it indoors for the winter in regions colder than zone 10. I’m not sure I’d want this as a houseplant when it’s flowering, but it fortunately blooms before it gets so cold outside that you’d have to bring it inside.

Pretty or not, it’s definitely a conversation-starter.

art, gardening, landscape design, places

a palm garden takes shape

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I’m sure I’m not the first to have noticed the irony: The main approach to Los Angeles County Museum of Art takes you through the BP Grand Entrance. The back way in takes you through the La Brea Tar Pits.

When I took the photos on the last day of July crude oil was still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, and the irony was heavy like the odor of tar coming from the fenced-off pits where archaeologists were working behind the museum on extracting critters and plants that got caught in the ancestral goo.

Here, junior’s ball has somehow made it over the fence around one of the pits. You could maybe rescue it with a stick…or you could wade through the tar and hope that you don’t get caught, only to be discovered by archaeologists a few millennia down the road.

We arrived at the museum an hour before it opened, via the back entrance, so we had a chance to spend some time with Robert Irwin’s Palm Garden Installation. I posted [ before ] on the earlier stages of the garden, and it’s still not complete. But by now you can really make out many more of the elements of what the final garden will look like.

There are many palm species used in the garden. A number of them are planted in a lawn, inside planter boxes that mimic the wooden planter boxes the trees were grown in. But unlike the wooden temporary planters, these permanent homes are made out of thick steel plate–the “it” material of the moment for well-financed modern gardens.

A closer look at the planter box…

In a back corner you could see a collection of palms in pots, and in this photo you can get a better idea of the kind of planter box the steel ones are meant to suggest.

Another look at some of the palms in transition… In this installation some of the plants are rotated out according tot he season. I’m not sure whether these are headed in or out.

LACMA was about to open a new facility, the Resnick Pavillion designed by Renzo Piano. As the building nears completion more elements of the Palm Garden Installation are being planted. In addition to palms it includes several of the non-palm species. These are some spectacularly variegated agaves plants of a furcraea, possibly Furcraea foetida ‘Mediopicta’–Thanks for the correction, Loree!

The way the plants have been shaped, with the lowest leaves removed, made them look like variegated New Zealand flax (phormiums) until you got close to them. It’s not a bad look. It’ll be interesting to see if these agaves furcraeas are kept pruned this way or whether they’ll be allowed to grow into the rosettes that agave furcraea growers are used to seeing. This is in no way a naturalistic garden, so my guess is that the agaves plants will be kept this shape. Besides, how do you mow around them without running over the leaves?

Detail: Furcraea foetida, I think

Another detail of the variegated furcraeas

Another of the non-palm species: this cycad developing this really cool cone. It’s probably something like three to four feet long.

A bench and real palms outside the Resnick pavilion…

The single most dramatic gesture is the placement of this palm with a thickly bulbous trunk that’s been planted in a tight opening that leads two stories down into a parking garage. The effect is like staring down into a North Dakota Minuteman missile silo. It’s more than a tad unsettling, and asserts that garden-making can be about more than designing pleasant, unchallenging spaces.

Say “Los Angeles” to someone and ask them what comes to mind. Palm trees would probably be one of the first things the person might bring up, even though the city’s official tree is the coral tree is and the official flower the bird of paradise. “Cars” would probably be another. Here palms and cars come together, with a short arcade of the trees lining the driveway down into the parking garage.

I’m not anything remotely resembling a palm expert, so I can’t tell you what species this is. But I can show you that it has amazingly sculptural trunks.

Looking up into the fronds gives you the sensation closest what you get from many of the artworks Robert Irwin did before he designed gardens. The fronds filter the light in interesting ways, and two or more layers make things darker than just a single layer. If you stand in the driveway and look straight up the negative space of the sky reads like a bright zigzag between the delicate layers of palm.

If you’d like to compare the effect of the palm fronds to an earlier Irwin piece, here’s a corner of his Running Violet V Forms, a piece that I walk around and under at least twice a week. In this 1980s piece panels of violet-colored mesh turn light or dark, depending on the number of layers, and the mesh turns opaque or transparent depending on how the light is striking it. The mesh interacts with views of the eucalyptus grove where it’s placed. I’ve loved this piece ever since the day it went up. You can read my love story with this piece [ here ].

Artists often complain that big museums don’t pay enough attention to local artists in their scramble to show off big-name artists from the other coast or another country. This summer day LACMA had several galleries devoted to the the photographs of Cathy Opie, and work of other local artists could be found the walls of several of the galleries. But I didn’t identify any plant species used in this garden that came from within a thousand-mile radius.

Word is that Robert Irwin is designing yet another garden, this one for a new federal courthouse here in San Diego. Wouldn’t it be great if he could use some of our California species in the project? What about some of our delicately transparent plants like deer weed or broom baccharis? Or what about some of the many plants that undergo stunning transformations as the seasons change? To see an important new, high profile garden comprised of local natives would be such an amazing opportunity.

gardening

california native plant week

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Darlingtonia californica growing at California Carnivores.

You may have heard already, but if not I wanted to relay some great news about the passing this week of ACT 173, a bill that would declare the third week of April California Native Plant Week. The legislature has been deadlocked over the state budget and I was worrying this bill would get stalled along with everything else. But such was not the case–Yay!

Our state flower: California poppy, Escholzia californica, shown in its coastal form.

If you’re into reading documents containing lots of “whereas-es” you can view the full resolution [ here ].

April is high bloom season for a lot of the natives, so it should be a great time of year to spread the word about California natives.

gardening, my garden

our big food swap

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Some folks in my office organized an event where we’d bring in our excess fruits and veggies and do a big exchange for some of the other things people brought to share.

My main time of having excess food in my garden is around March, when the grapefruit tree goes crazy. Now in the late throes of summer, the garden basically had herbs to share–I didn’t think the figs would make it intact in a tight backpack as I scootered to work. So here’s my little pile of offerings: rosemary, parsley, lemongrass and rose geranium. People weren’t convinced that rose geranium was edible, so I also brought a couple recipes. [ Here’s one of them. ]

I didn’t feel so bad that my figs didn’t make it in. Someone had three trees of green figs, all of them ripening at the same time.

We have another gardening artist in the building. He had some potted tomatoes and sweet peppers to share. I helped myself to one of the peppers, Doux Long d’Antibes, a long sweet pepper from up the coast from Cannes.

And here’s this glorious collection of hot peppers. I love my hot peppers, but being fairly coastal I have a hard time growing them. This gardener lives inland a few miles, so the little bit of extra warmth helped her get this great crop. So of course my haul included a few of these as well.

This was the first time that this food swap was tried at the office, and I’d definitely call it a success. You reach a point where even neighbors and family don’t want to see you headed their direction with a bag of fruit.

I’m hoping we can do this again, maybe in the late winter, when I’ll have kale and chard to spare, along with a tree full of amazing grapefruit…

an artist loosed in a garden