california-friendly phlomis

August 29, 2009 James 9 Comments

It’s not quite planting season, but for the last few trips to the local nursery I’d been eying a plant I hadn’t noticed before, Phlomis monocephala, a sister species to the more common Jerusalem sage, P. fruticosa.

This strongly drought-tolerant species from Turkey has leaves that are highly textured like those of several native California sages. What sets it apart from the California sages is what it does in the summer, when the leaves turn this strong yellow-green color. In the spring to early summer it will have a modest display of yellow flowers, but this a plant that you use for its cool foliage, providing a point of interest when a lot of the natives have shut down.

My front yard is a mixed Mediterranean-climate planting with a number of California natives, and I thought this plant would complement them nicely. It so happens that there are some plants that peaked five years ago and would better replaced. Three phlomis would fit in their spot perfectly.

It so happened that the nursery had exactly three plants. Plant shopping can be a competitive sport. If you see something, that might be the last chance you’ll have at it. So you can probably guess that I’m now the owner of three little Phlomis monocephala plants. I won’t do any serious garden reworking for another month or so, but I should be able to keep the plants happy and watered for that long.

The plant will top out at about four by four feet, is considered hardy to zone 9, and requires excellent drainage.

While at the nursery I noticed this other California-friendly phlomis, P. lanata. This species grows lower, to maybe two feet tall by three to four wide. The size and shape of the plant actually would have been a better choice for the spot I have, but this isn’t one of the phlomis species that develops the gorgeous yellow summer coloration.

What it does have, though, are these really cool, fuzzy grayish leaves and stems. How can you resist touching it? Like the much larger Jerusalem sage, it’ll put on a good show of bright yellow flowers.

One thing I do at nurseries is to move plants into little combinations to see how they’d look together. The first time the staff sees me doing it it might raise some eyebrows, but the staff at Walter Anderson Nursery is used to me by now. (As you might expect someone who works in a library, I make sure to put everything back in its proper place.)

Here’s a play in scale and texture, a little ensemble of yellowish-green to pale green colored leaves that I liked: the Phlomis monocephala that I bought, in combination with what would be the low-growing form of coyote ~~bush~~ brush (Baccharis pilularis pilularis ‘Pigeon Point’) and the really delicate Australian woolly bush (Adenanthos sericeus).

Often, when you do an exercise like this, the plants will have wildly different cultural requirements or would be grossly incompatible size-wise. But in this case all three could coexist together in a nice planting, with maybe only the woolly bush needing just a bit more summer watering. The woolly bush would grow up into a large shrub, the phlomis into a dense medium-sized one, and the coyote ~~bush~~ brush would sprawl attractively around the base of the other two.

gardening, landscape design, places

on the road: cornerstone sonoma (more)

August 24, 2009 James 15 Comments

These are the last of the photos I took at the gardens at CornerStone Sonoma. Looking through this second batch it seems that the gardens below rely heavily on hardscape details and less on plants. None of them are gardens without plants, but the green stuff definitely plays second fiddle to the more engineered parts of the gardens.

Yoji Sasaki’s The Garden of Visceral Serenity features this terrific walkway: a central, solid strip that alternates with horizontal stripes of varying widths.

Topher Delaney has this striking installation made up of a very short menu of elements: a blue-and-dark-gray striped wall, birches, three balls made of rope, white shade cloth surrounding the space, a bordering hedge and white crushed stone beneath your feet.

The color palette is reduced down to white, gray, black, green and the insistent blue of the backdrop and–today, anyway–the sky.

Most people plant birches because the trees have striking white trunks. But with the ground and walls being white, the birch trunks almost disappear, leaving a sense of green sheltering foliage floating overhead.

At mid-morning, the shadows of the trees draw striking forms underfoot, and shadows of the plantings next door make soft patterns on the white shade screen.

I liked this detail at Walter Hood’s Eucalyptus Memory garden. Garden designers often use single chairs or long benches to suggest a point of repose in the landscape. Here, Hood has used two chairs next to each other in the foreground and three in the distance, next to a pond, instead of the more expected bench. I wonder, is the fact that you have a chair to yourself meant to reinforce your sense of interior contemplation, even when there’s someone sitting next to you?

The rest of Hood’s installation consists of very few materials. Most dominant are two tall mesh panels that frame a view to a distant pond. One side is empty, the other contains eucalyptus branches and leaves. After a few moments of looking at the garden, what hits you next–and hits you hard–is the smell of the drying eucalyptus in the one panel. This is a garden for more senses than just sight.

Another sense, that of sound, is reinforced in David McCrory’s and Roger Raiche’s Rise garden. A steel tube runs through it, the kind that you see used for drainage under a road. As you walk through it you feel a sense of shelter, and the sounds of the surrounding world change as they echo gently through the chamber.

Pamela Burton designed the last of the spaces that I wanted to share. Her Earth Walk burrows into the land, and requires that you descend into the garden to fully experience it.

The earthen color of the hay bales and the adobe mud walls reminded me of the desert.
Once you pass a big, solid of Mexican feather grass and approach the bottom, you’re surprised with a long rectangular pond with waterlilies and fish. It felt like an oasis.

By the time you drop the eight feet or so into the bottom of this installation you can’t see any of the gardens around it. What you experience is reduced down to the walls, the grasses, the sky above, and the water below.

My final reactions to visiting Cornerstone were similar to going to a little museum and seeing a collection of single works by a number of artists. There’s a little bit of tension, a bit of competition going on between the pieces. Some landscape architecture can work well this way, where the designer makes a statement and you can appreciate what’s being said. You then move on to the next piece and try to figure out what’s going on with it. But if you want a landscape architecture that’s deeply rooted in the surroundings and its history, you might leave here wanting more than many of the works deliver.

In the end, one thing Cornerstone did very well for me that a lot of other landscape architecture doesn’t comes from the intimate scale of most of its gardens. These are gardens the size of many residential lots. These are spaces that tell you that interesting landscape design doesn’t have to be scaled to massive public works or some gonzo pallazzo.

For more looks at Cornerstone Sonoma, check out Alice Joyce’s postings on her blog, Bay Area Tendrils Garden Travel.

gardening, landscape design

on the road: cornerstone sonoma

August 22, 2009 James 5 Comments

The big garden destination for the Sonoma County weekend ended up being CornerStone Sonoma. Imagine a giant garden show with totally unrelated demonstration gardens lined up next to each other in their own stalls like some big horticultural petting zoo. But instead of nice-but-not-so-interesting gardens assembled by local landscapers, you have some really striking spaces put together by some of the bigger names in the landscape architecture field.

Finding the place isn’t hard–Jenny was along for the outing and had brought her GPS. We followed the nice, polite directions of the GPS unit until we got close. The CornerStone literature says to look for the white picket fence as a sign that you’ve arrived. This is CornerStone’s take on a white picket fence, and it’s good preparation for what you’ll find there.

Like many destinations in Sonoma, Cornerstone combines wine tasting opportunities (4 vineyards), with chances to get a bite to eat, and places to shop for gifts or things for your garden. How are you set for some rustic architectural details to set into your landscaping?

Maybe your koi pond needs some mermaids? (John wanted one of these very badly.)

The facility has some pleasant lawn spaces with flowerbeds of cooling purples and blues and whites that were being set up for some social event.

But what sets this place apart are the main gardens in the back. And of all of them it’s hard not to love this one by Oehme & van Sweden, the Garden of Contrasts.

Big, sturdy agaves contrast with soft grasses that move in the wind.

As the seasons change, plants move in and out of prominence in this planting. Here are the last California poppies of the season planted in the grasses.

This one might be a little harder to love–or at least it was for me, Ken Smith’s Daisy Border. From the astroturf to the plastic tubes to the plastic flowers, there’s nothing alive in this “planting.” But I suppose it’s naturalistic in the sense that some of the daisies in this border look pretty good, while others seem the worse for wear because of what the elements (and probably small visitors) have done to them. Who ever has a border where every single plant is meticulously well-groomed?

John Greenlee created a soft, rolling planting that consists entirely of grasses, his Mediterranean Meadow. People do all-grass plantings all the time–call it “lawn.” But it’s a brave thing to do a garden with all sorts of contrasting grasses. Here a low river of fescue runs through the plantings.

Taller, stiffer grasses (edit: or are these restios?) line the “banks” of the river.

I wish this scene photographed better than it did. The foreground features soft seed heads of a short grass, with a more architectural species planted on the top of the low mound.

This and so many of the other gardens were bubbling over with all sorts of ideas you could repurpose in another garden setting. I’ll share more scenes from CornerStone in the next post.

gardening, landscape design, places

on the road: wine country gardens

August 15, 2009 James 3 Comments

The daylight was ending as we crossed the bridge into the wine country north of San Francisco.

Things were developing that gorgeous warm tint that you only see for a few minutes of the day. People had set aside the next day to visit some wineries, and this gorgeous evening was the best preparation you could ask for.

We stopped at three wineries, and you pick up pretty quickly that the vineyards are interested in promoting a lifestyle as part of the process of sending you home with a few bottles of wine. To set the mood, each location we visited played its own riff on the basic formula that wineries follow: a tasting bar, personable servers, a gift shop, and–most interesting for me–some sort of garden setting around the facility.

Stop #1 was the largest, most industrial place that we were to visit that day, Rodney Strong Vineyards. You could stroll around an elevated perch and take a look at the oak casks and the stainless tanks holding their next bottlings.

Set in the middle of your basic picturesque Sonoma County vineyards, their take seemed to be fairly minimalist, that the grapes around the winery were garden enough. But they did have some attractive planter boxes lining the steps ascending to the tasting room.

Being high summer, their plantings featured brilliant zinnias, marigolds and calibrachoa in what I’d call a real-world planting, selections that anyone could find at their local garden center, nothing too fussy or scary or exotic.

The message they wanted to convey through their setting: We want to make your visit pleasurable, but we’re primarily about the wine. Our wines might be a better value because we don’t splurge on the unnecessary theatrics.

Across the parking lot was destination #2, J Vineyards. The approach to the front door passes casual-looking plantings of grasses, sedges and flax.

In Designing with Plants by Piet Oudolff and Noel Kingsbury, the authors caution against mixing plantings of different grasses. But here the technique of mixing different plants with strong linear forms succeeds beautifully. (Definitely a case in point that design guidelines are meant to be broken.)

To get in the tasting room you cross a little bridge over a pond teeming with water plants. The hardscape is cut through with strong linear elements, but the plants seem to defy the geometry, with clumps of one kind of plant cascading from one level to the next, not accentuating the structure like boxwoods planting along a driveway. Winetasting–with optional finger foods–can happen indoors, or on the patio overlooking the garden.

The message they wanted to convey through their setting: We’re not the least expensive winery out there, but what’s wrong with an occasional splurge every now and then?.

Oversized pots with spiky plants were a common feature. This blue potted succulent was set next to a rough woven vine fence in downtown Healdsburg, where we stopped for lunch. I’m sure their gardener pruned the pointy lower leaves off the plant to avoid injury to the masses passing through, but I personally hate to see gorgeous symmetrical plants disfigured this way.

Our last winery stop, Mazzocco Vineyards, also featured a spiky plant–a flax–planted in a big pot–this one a model with beautifully dripping glaze.

The smallest of the three stops that day, the winery featured low-growing drought-tolerant plants and some annuals set in a small theater set that evoked a casual resort set in the middle of oaked foothills. A berm along the adjacent roadway created a sense of shelter and avoided the road noises that would have spoiled the mood.

The setting was simple and casual, nothing so spectacular that you had to stop to look at it, but a pleasant place to relax and spend part of an afternoon.

The message they wanted to convey through their setting: We’re all about rustic elegance. Our wines are direct and connected to the land. (Their offerings happened to offer a large number of vineyard-designated bottlings of zinfandel, many with its own strong character.)

My favorites that day?
Wines: Mazzocco. (I didn’t sample at the first stop.)
Gardens: J.

But they’d all be worth a visit. (And my thanks to our designated driver that day!)

gardening, places

on the road: luther burbank’s farm

August 14, 2009 James 4 Comments

History is a fragile thing, something that I was reminded of on my recent visit to Sonoma County.

Pioneering plantsman Luther Burbank moved to this area in the mid-1880s, making his home in Santa Rosa, and establishing a plant breeding and trial location nearby on Gold Ridge, in present-day Sebastapol. Over his career, which included over 40 years of work at this location, he developed and introduced hundreds of varieties of food crops and ornamental plants–including the still-popular Shasta daisy, and was pretty much the Thomas Edison of the plant world.

You can visit his main residence in Santa Rosa, but it was the Gold Ridge Experiment Farm where the work of coming up with the new varieties took place. Our host in Sebastapol basically said that there wasn’t much to see of the farm anymore. But I was curious to stand in the middle of horticultural and agricultural history, so John and Jenny and I took a short trip to the site.

A small brown sign in downtown Sebastapol points to the farm, .7 miles away, and a second small brown sign down the road points left towards the location. The first thing that you see when you turn left, instead of some pastoral trial farm scene overflowing with historical flowers, is the bigger sign announcing the Burbank Heights & Orchards, an anonymous cluster of gray clapboard-sided apartment houses. A bit of trailblazing over the winding lane through the apartments eventually leads to a little yellow cottage in a clearing, along with a matching out-building and a greenhouse that must be as small as the bathrooms in the surrounding apartments.

If it weren’t for the greenhouse it’d be hard to know that this was the destination. But this was it. What’s left of major botanical history. (You can see the apartments in the background.)

The cottage dates to 1906, when the San Francisco earthquake scrapped the original structure. There’s an adjacent little cottage garden, with some examples of Shasta daisies and other plants with ties to Burbank and this location.

The hybrid penstemons here are modern varieties, but there’s an interesting unknown tall nightshade with purple flowers that was found growing on the site in 1980. Aside from the Shasta daisies, the plants of major historical interest here aren’t the horticultural pretties as much as the trees and shrubs nearby: Walnuts, berries, plums, cherries, hawthorns, roses, among many.

Some of the plants aren’t Burbank hybrids at all, but are stock that was used in his vegetable husbandry. Burbank’s work was all about improving on nature, not appreciating nature as it exists, so what nature you see in the form of the original species–including the Catalina Cherries native to California–were collected here for their potential value to what could be made with them.

In an article, “Luther Burbank : A Victim of Hero Worship,” Walter L. Howard writes that “[t]he science of breeding grew and advanced rapidly during the first two decades of the new century, and though it may not be generally recognized, the movement is traceable to Burbank as a potent activator. Professor H. J. Webber, a pioneer plant-breeder and geneticist and a contemporary of Burbank, has declared that through the influence of Burbank the science of plant breeding was advanced by at least twenty years and for this accomplishment alone, he deserved a sizable monument to his memory.” (Quoted at the Gold Ridge website.)

Today, Luther Burbank isn’t completely forgotten. There’s the little remaining farmstead, and the Burbank home in Santa Rosa. Burbank’s Shasta daisy is the official flower of Sebastapol. And there’s even a stretch of Highway 12 between Santa Rosa and Sebastapol that’s designated the Luther Burbank Memorial Highway. But Sonoma County, a region that’s living large as one of the hotspots of California wine country, seems a little distracted by other things than to pay large amounts of attention to a figure whose career saw the rise but not the fall of Prohibition in the United States.

So, should you plan a trip to God Ridge Experiment Farm? As a destination unto itself, probably not, unless you live nearby. But if you’re here for a visit to the Sonoma and Napa Valley wineries, sure, take the little side trip. It might be a little sad, but you’ll be glad you went.

gardening, places

on the road: visiting california carnivores

August 11, 2009 James 6 Comments

On our recent trip we had only one nursery on the list of must-visit locations: California Carnivores in Sebastapol.

Specializing in carnivorous plants from around the world, proprietor Peter D’Amato has assembled a collection of species and hybrids that run the gamut from venus flytraps and American pitcher plants to really cool sundews and bladderworts.

One of the first plants that you encounter is this massed group of the hybrid, Sarracenia x Dana’s Delight. It’s a fairly common plant, but gather together several dozen pots of it in a massed display and there’s nothing common about it. The pitchers color up to a most amazing purplish red when grown in strong sunlight.

Here’s another pitcher plant that had some gorgeous coloration. I forgot to note the name–sorry–but I think it might be a form or hybrid of S. flava.

If there’s a pitcher plant that I covet it’s this one, the California and Oregon cobra lily, Darlingtonia californica. I’ve killed one already, and won’t attempt another until I’m more confident that I can offer it what it needs to survive.

To grow so many different kinds of plants requires a lot of space. Here’s a shot of the propagation ponds.

I left the premises with three plants, a couple more than I really have room for in my bog. I posted yesterday about the amazing fly-catching capabilities of the sundew I bought (Drosera filiformis ssp. filiformis ‘Florida giant’). Another plant was a division of an albino hybrid, Super Green Giant.

The third purchase was this beautifully colored version of the yellow pitcher, Sarracenia flava. Here it is from the front…

…and here it is from behind.

…and for contrast, here’s a form of this species with minimal coloration, ‘Maxima.’ I love its yellow-green coloration.

The basic element of a pitcher plant is a highly developed leaf structure that contains a reservoir of fluid that insects fall into. The bug eventually drowns, and the the digested insect turns into food for the plant.

The more I look at pitcher plants, the more I appreciate the differences between them. It’s like musical variations on a theme, where you start with something simple and recognizable, and then go off into all sorts of amazing directions.

Jenny was out to this coast for a family visit, and was along for this plant trip. Her purchases were two: a small but very pretty and cute bladderwort, Utricularia livida, and a distinctive little venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula.

The husband’s reaction when we got back to the hotel went something like, “You bought a venus flytrap? To take all the way back to South Carolina? Where venus flytraps come from?” But Jenny is a a curious plant person herself, and the flytrap she picked was a nicely grown specimen that had striking red coloration unlike the typical versions of the species. Like pitcher plants, flytraps can have their own sets of cool variations on the basic theme.

gardening

on the road: every car should have one

August 10, 2009 James 6 Comments

I’m just back from a few days with family in Sebastapol, up in the Russian River and Sonoma Valley wine country north of San Francisco. I’ll post on the garden destinations I managed to drag people to while we were up there, but I’ll start backwards with one of the events on the way home yesterday.

On the return trip the car was plagued for a few minutes by this fly that kept buzzing around the inside of the car, evading all our attempts to shoo it out the windows. In the back seat we had three plants that were my souvenirs from a visit to California Carnivores, a carnivorous plant specialty nursery that was just five minutes form the hotel where we stayed. (I’ll post more on the nursery visit later.)

One of the plants was this sundew, Drosera filiformis ssp. filiformis ‘Florida Giant.’ Well, I think you know where this story is headed…

When we got home John noticed that a fly had been trapped by the sundew, most likely the one that had been annoying us at the beginning of the trip. That explains why we hadn’t noticed the insect after the first few minutes of the return trip.

After this experience I’d like to suggest that every automotive manufacturer should make a drosera standard equipment on all their models, especially for this buggy time of the year…

my garden, plant profiles

covering ground: carmel aster

August 6, 2009 James 7 Comments

When you see a plant listed as a “groundcover” you can expect practically anything, from something that will cling low to the earth and spread like spilled paint, to what’s really a sprawling shrubby thing that will form a loose mound of branches that’s several feet tall at the center. Closer to the first category is this plant that began blooming for me during the final days of July.

The plant goes by a number of common names, among them, Carmel aster, California aster, beach aster, and branching beach aster. And the number of Latin names attached to the plant doesn’t to much to simplify identifying it: Lessingia filanginifolia v. californica, Lessingia californica, Corethrogyne leucophylla, Corethrogyne filanginifolia. The last name, Corethrogyne filanginifolia, seems to be the one that’s going to stick for a while, so that’s the one I’ll be trying to train myself to use.

Plant this where you’d like a white-leaved low groundcover. It blooms from midsummer into the fall with small, pale lavender flowers with perky yellow centers. The plant will go several months without supplemental watering, but will look better with an occasional sip of water (about once per month during the summer here near the coast).

As a groundcover the foliage on Carmel aster can be a little on the sparse side, especially when grown lean and dry, as you see here. But I use the bare spots as a place to sow some late winter-flowering wildflower seeds. Plants of California poppies look great peeking through the low mat of white leaves, for instance. By this time of year, however, weeds aren’t a problem, so the occasional bare patches aren’t a weed magnet like they might be during the winter.

Last fall I planted three different groundcovers to trial. This is the one that I’ll be keeping and planting more of.

gardening, my garden

rain, almost

August 4, 2009 James 5 Comments

We’re located far enough south that the monsoonal influence that brings August rains to the desert southwest can sometimes make itself felt. But we’re far enough north that the effect is mostly somewhat more humid days but very little or nothing at all in the way of actual precipitation.

Yesterday afternoon I was on the computer, playing a game of Tetris, that time-sink that raised itself in my consciousness again now that media outlets were celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. For a few seconds there was this noise outside. Rain?

By the time I paused the game and made it outside most of it had evaporated, but I did manage to see a few drops left on some steps. It was enough to make it into the weather report as “a trace” of rain, but nothing to add to the 0.0 inches rainfall total since the start of the July rain season or 3.1 inches since the start of the year.

A trace isn’t enough moisture to mean much to the plants, but the weather pattern made for nice clouds for the sun to colorize this morning…

…and a nice moonrise last night. (Sunset a few minutes later was great, but I don’t take my camera everywhere I go.)

We’ve been thinking about getting ready for a few days away to see some family in the Sonoma Valley. A little rain would have helped with the preparations by reducing the areas I’d be hand-watering in preparation for being away. There’ll be someone taking care of the house, but it would be a little much to assemble detailed watering instructions or to ask them to climb a short but steep bank of loose dirt with a watering can to attend to some plants that are still getting established.

At a time like this I realize that this is a gardener’s garden that requires selective attention to different plants. Most of the plants are grouped by water needs, and two sprinkler heads and a small drip system take care of the thirstiest plants. But the occasional new plant mixed in with established plantings requires individualized attention–mostly in the form of extra water, usually delivered by hand. So I’ll be working through a short list of watering chores to finish before leaving:

soak the potted plants
soak the new plants scattered around the garden
give the veggies a good drink
visit the water store for 5 gallons of water for the bog plants
water seedlings and cuttings in the greenhouse

And there’s one final important thing to remember: Put cat food out where the cat sitter–but not the ants–can find it…

gardening, my garden

many parts are edible

August 1, 2009 James 7 Comments

Tomato plants are poisonous, right? Actually, not at all, according to a New York Times article that a coworker sent me on Thursday.

I’d bought into the common wisdom that tomato plants, along with potato plants and many other members of the nightshade family, contained poisons that rendered them inedible. The article stated, however, that the alkaloid in tomato plants, tomatine, has no history of poisoning humans or livestock, and that there was at least a brief record of the leaves being used in cooking, most notably in a tomato sauce served at the landmark Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. Furthering the argument that tomatine is “probably not a killer,” Harold McGee, the article’s author, mentioned that the alkaloid is present in significant amounts in green tomatoes. There’s definitely a long history of eating those, often in fried form, often in the South.

I consider myself to be both a curious eater and a curious gardener, so I had to put this knowledge to the test. At the same time, I thought I’d also try my first preparation of “cossack asparagus,” the shoots of the aquatic cattail that I have growing in the pond.

First, I cut some tomato leaves off one of the plants. Next I trimmed some of the cattail shoots that had escaped into the pond from their pot. I removed the toughest outer leaves from the cattail shoots and rinsed them.

I chopped the cattail stems and the tomato leaves, and added them to a stir-fry of ginger and Japanese shishito peppers from the garden. If I were a little more adventurous, I’d have left off soy sauce so that I could have tasted the ingredients better. But I chickened out. In went a drizzle of soy.

The conclusion? I served a little side portion to John without telling him what the ingredients were.

“At first I thought they [the cattails] were green onions,” he said. “But they didn’t taste like them. And then I thought they lemongrass. But I was able to chew them.”

Such gushing enthusiasm! But after he made the reserved comments above, he agreed that the ingredients were indeed edible, and that we could have them again. And yes, I lived to write about eating both of these new ingredients.

Next time I’ll try simpler preparations so that I can better enjoy the individual flavors. Maybe a pesto sauce with raw tomato leaves. (I found that the cooking removed most of their flavor.) Or maybe I’ll try preparing a side dish of cattail stems steamed like asparagus.

One of my gardening resolutions for the year was to explore the lesser-known edible qualities of my garden plants. I’m glad that I did.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]