live, from california…

March 27, 2009 James 5 Comments

A plant’s name can often help give you a sense of place as to where the plant originated. I’ve been noticing recently that a lot of plants in the garden have species names that are either “californica” or “californicus.” I guess you can’t get much more California than that.

First is our ever-popular state flower, the California poppy, Escholzia californica. Most of you are familiar with this form, the bright orange one that comes in California wildflower mixes. I planted some seed a decade ago, and these come back every year, some where they did the previous year, some a few feet away. But for me they’re not the wandering world traveler that they are for some people. (They’ve naturalized in parts of Chile and are on the pest (but not invasive) species list for Tennessee.)

This year I’m also growing from seed the form of the species that you actually find in this part of the state, Escholzia californica maritima. The flowers are about a third of the size of the orange version, and are gold shading to a yellow-orange. My pampered plants are taking their time flowering, so these are images of plants in the winds, on the bluffs overlooking the ocean south of Del Mar. Once these start blooming, I’ll probably cut back the orange ones so the two strains don’t hybridize.

And here’s the classic orange poppy in the garden growing in the middle of a prostrate form of California sagebrush, Artemisia californica ‘Canyon Gray.’ While most of the forms of sagebrush are, well, brushy and upright, this selection from the Channel Islands off the coast of Ventura grows near the ground and sprawls a bit. The plant can get a little leggy in the middle, so a well-placed volunteer poppy seedling can be the best way to conceal that fact.

I wrote last year about this wild ranunculus, Ranunculus californicus, or California buttercup. It disappears not long after flowering, but it’s a nice presence during early spring.

The coast sunflower, Encelia californica, continues the yellow-to-orange theme. My plants were planted only recently and aren’t blooming yet. This is a stand of it at Torrey Pines Preserve this past Monday, doing just fine with natural rainfall. (It won’t be quite so ornamental once the moisture gives out, however.)

The last one I’ll share today has got to be one of the more spectacular Californians, the bush anenome, Carpenteria californica. The flowers began to open just this week. This species hails from the Sierra foothills where it can become quite the large shrub. My plant has tripled in size in one year, though it’s still not more than three feet tall. It can triple in size again, and then I’m getting the pruning shears. Pretty flowers, though, no?

gardening, plant profiles

do i dare plant this?

March 24, 2009 James 11 Comments

Do any of you know how this plant would do in a garden setting? It’s thick-leaved yerba santa (Eriodictyon crassifolium) one of our local native species in the phacelia family.

I’ve seen it around in the wild areas of town for a while, and I’ve always liked its odd, stemmy growth habit, with a tuft of serrated gray-green leaves on the ends of straight, floppy or contorted branches. Here’s how it looks in one setting at Torrey Pines State Preserve. You can see all the ways the branches grow, including this big circular loop-de-loop.

Right now yerba santas all around town are in full bloom, bearing these delicate lavender-colored tubular blooms at the ends of their stems. I’m in love.

In most locations I’ve seen the plant growing four to six feet tall, and mounding six to eight feet in width. What I’ve heard some of the native plant people say about how it grows in the wilds–that it spreads widely via underground runners to develop big colonies–is the part that scares me. I think I’d like the effect of its cool stems growing up and through some low groundcovers, but I don’t want it to be the total monster, either.

It’s a plant that makes a statement, but I don’t want the statement to be that I was gullible enough to plant a totally rank plant into the garden!

gardening, landscape design

dramatic wall colors and plants

March 23, 2009 James 4 Comments

I still haven’t gotten around to doing something about the color of the my little detached studio behind the house. Colors of residential neighborhoods and garden walls usually tend towards pretty neutral shades. Here are a couple combinations of walls with plants that I thought were pretty dramatic while still being flattering to the landscaping. They could be interesting choices for garden walls or even–if you’re truly brave–walls of your house.

This first one is the freeway side of the Tustin Marketplace in Orange County, as see from Interstate 5 on my way up to LA last week. The fairly dark burnt red-to-salmon wall coloration mixes dramatically with the green bougainvillea foliage and reddish magenta flowers in the foreground. And the silver trunks and bright green foliage of the trees in the background stand out dramatically against the wall.

The second is another retail situation, the plantings by the parking lot at the Mission Valley Mall here in town. The violet wall, as the preceding reddish one, once again plays against the silver trunks of the trees and the bright green leaves.

The first combination to me feels warming and energetic without being too hyper, with the red being a color that isn’t so far removed from the Mediterranean themed housing that continues to be popular in Southern California. The second is definitely cooler, more restrained–and maybe a little more urban and adventurous.

We’ll see how brave I am when I finally have time to address residing the studio and rebuilding the attached patio cover. But I’m definitely feeling like doing something other than white or beige this time…

art, landscape

grab a compass…or a cow

March 20, 2009 James 6 Comments

Maybe you saw the news story last August: Using images from Google Earth, Dr. Sabine Begall and her colleagues found that cows generally align themselves north-to-south, using the earth’s magnetic field as a guide. [ image source ]

And you may have heard the followup story this week: Cows grazing around power lines faced in random directions because the electromagnetic fields generated by the power lines disrupted the cows’ internal sensors.

I was curious. If cows can have their internal systems messed with by power lines, what about plants? I did a quick web trawl and found all sorts of evidence that electromagnetic fields could in fact effect plant growth, though bioelectromagnetics is a field that hasn’t seen a huge amount of research.

One study “showed significantly greater wet root weight and significantly smaller stem diameter and dry seed weight at the end of the experiment in exposed plants compared to control plants.”

And I ran across an email response by Shireef Darwish, a grad student at the Department of Plant Science at McGill University, to the question “do magnetic fields have an effect on plant growth?” The explanation is worth reading, and includes an extensive bibliography that points to further effects of electromagnetism on plants.

Outofdoors recently did a great post that reminded us that it would make so much more sense to generate power with solar cells at the point of use in the city than to deploy solar arrays in the desert, destroying big swaths of fragile desert.

In addition to eating up the desert, I’d add that remote generation would require the power companies to deliver the power to distant cities, most likely over high tension lines. All of you can probably speak from personal experience that the power line roads that the electric companies gouge through the landscape beneath the lines do plenty to disfigure the landscape and to provide fertile open space that might encourage invasive species. Not a pretty sight. And then there’s the issue of the electromagnetic fields.

It’s been known for a while that a fluorescent tube placed underneath high-tension lines would glow just from the fields. (The effect is observable underneath the lines that carry the hugest amount of current, not necessarily the lower-capacity transmission lines.) There are at least two art projects that take advantage of this phenomenon, both to power the bulbs and to get us thinking about what it might mean for us to have these power lines in our midst.

Fluorescent tubes below power lines Larry and Debby Kline. Encryption (The Electric Fields of California, Site # 4) Sears Point Farming Company
Tubbs Island, Sonoma, CA [ source ]

I met Larry and Debby Kline here in San Diego during 2003 when they had an opening of their artwork at a gallery across the street from a gallery where I was showing my own work. They were part of the way through this project where they made sculptures of fluorescent tubes beneath some of the high-capacity power lines that run through California. One project used 30 bulbs, another 60. (A tip from the Klines: The bulbs light up best when they’re standing on end.) After assembling the sculptures, they made striking photographs of them.

And then, in 2004, British artist Richard Box used 1301 bulbs in this installation.

Richard Box installation of fluorescent tubes beneath power lines [ source ]

I don’t want to get all hysterical over the potential effects of these electromagnetic fields, but they obviously have some effects on animals and plants. While the power lines may be no more dangerous to your health than your cell phone or microwave oven, I can’t help but think that this is yet another poorly-designed and unnecessary science experiment that we humans have dropped into the landscape. There’s no doubt, though, that at least the power line roads have their impacts.

gardening, my garden

the rain might not belong to you

March 19, 2009 James 10 Comments

At first I thought it was a good idea. I never imagined that in some communities it would be prohibited.

During some of the recent rains I put some little buckets to catch rainwater that had drained off the roof. In this part of the state you can hardly ever have too much water, and good-quality water is extra-valuable.

One of my water-use indulgences is an experimental little bog garden with carnivorous plants. Tap water here has four times the dissolved solids usually recommended for these swamp-dwellers, so in warmer weather they get five gallons a week of reverse osmosis water from the local water store. Collecting fresh rainwater seemed like a much more sustainable alternative.

Left: Drosera Marston Dragon.
Right: Drosera capensis, red form, with deerfly snack.

Yesterday’s LA Times had an article on residents in some of the dryland Four Corners states who were finding out that collecting rainwater was actually illegal in their communities. Because of a complex patchwork of water rights agreements, many homeowners actually don’t own the rainwater that falls on their houses.

Here’s a quick snippet from the article:

“If you try to collect rainwater, well, that water really belongs to someone else,” said Doug Kemper, executive director of the Colorado Water Congress… Frank Jaeger of the Parker Water and Sanitation District, on the arid foothills south of Denver, sees water harvesting as an insidious attempt to take water from entities that have paid dearly for the resource. “Every drop of water that comes down keeps the ground wet and helps the flow of the river,” Jaeger said. He scoffs at arguments that harvesters like Holstrom only take a few drops from rivers. “Everything always starts with one little bite at a time.”

I have a healthy respect for the rule of reasonable laws, but these seemed way beyond the pale. Like, are they worried these people are going to bottle the rainwater and sell it to us in Southern California?

Here within view of the Pacific Ocean, any water not retained in the ground would just wash down the storm drains and slide out into the bay. I doubt we have the same sorts of rules. But for many folks in Utah or Colorado who are trying to grow their own veggies, doing what they can to reduce become more self-sustaining and reduce their footprint on the earth, things aren’t so easy.

What do you think? Should the rainwater belong to all of us?

gardening, places

loud music and sage

March 17, 2009 James 2 Comments

I drove all the way up to Los Angeles for an organ recital last night. I knew I was in for trouble when the usher handed me a program and offered me a pair of earplugs. But more on that later.

John hates the idea of me to taking my scooter to LA, so I grudgingly drove the gas-devouring Jeep. But to turn the situation to an advantage I stopped by the Tree of Life Nursery in San Juan Capistrano. It’s a few miles east of I-5, but ten ten minutes of driving off the interstate beats an hour and a half each direction from San Diego.

I’d been planning on doing something with the unclaimed zone between my house and the neighbor behind me, and I wanted some native plants to fill in the zone. This would be a good chance to pick up some plants without the ridiculous commute.

The plantings around the nursery featured some vibrant spring flowers, including this stand of California poppies and vivid violet phacelia.

And this traffic cone mallow was pretty spectacular as well (probably desert mallow, Sphaeralcea ambigua).

While there I picked up some plants for my project, including some more plants of white sage (Salvia apiana) and a clone of purple sage (Salvia leucophylla ‘Amethyst Bluff’). I’ll post more on that project later in the week.

Negotiating LA rush hour traffic can be an ordeal, and doing it with a dozen plants in the back of the car wasn’t anything I was looking forward too, especially if I had to jam on the brakes. But traffic was fairly light and I got to my destination with plenty of time for a relaxing dinner before the concert.

And now, on to the concert: When the lights dimmed, a man got up to introduce the performer for the evening. Charlemagne Palestine was one of the figures active in the avant-garde music scene, first in New York around 1970, and slightly later in Los Angeles. The man introducing him apologized that during earlier rehearsals they’d blown three fuses on the organ, and that they might need to interrupt the concert to replace more fuses.

The concert location, the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, claims to have the world’s largest indoor church organ, a monster with well over 20,000 pipes. What would the sound be if you got several thousand of them going at the same time? The audience got to find out about an hour into the piece.

What had started out as a wispy cloud of delicate sustained notes had gradually gown in intensity as organ stops got added. When the composer/performer finally did a face-plant into the keyboard around the 60 minute mark and remained there unmoving for a good ten minutes, the hall shook with a throbbing earthquake of sound that with zero doubt was the loudest, most intense, most jarring ten minutes of anything I’ve ever heard in my life. (There’s a recording of Schling-Blägen, the piece Charlemagne Palestine performed in concert, but that in no way gives prepares you for the physical assault that the you’ll experience live.)

When the piece ended, I was still shaking. I wasn’t sure I could drive home very reliably, and I was glad I wasn’t on the scooter.

As I opened the car door, the smell of sage escaped from plants behind the back seat. It’s said that sage tea is good for calming the nerves, and the same could probably be said for the aroma from the plants. With all my nerves still firing on overload, it was probably the perfect remedy for what I’d just experienced. When I got home two hours later, I lay down, and went right to sleep.

PS: I’ve only talked about the loudness of the piece, but in the final analysis there was a lot of beauty and delicacy in it as well. I loved it. Music can take you many places. This piece took me somewhere I’ve never been.

gardening, places

a neighborhood native garden

March 16, 2009 James 4 Comments

Saturday I had the opportunity to take a short hike with some of the local native plant society folks through Manzanita Canyon, one of the small neighborhood canyons in San Diego that break up the urban development on the mesa tops. One of the communities that surrounds it, Azalea Park, has been cleaning up the canyon and the neighborhood. One of their projects is been to transform a vacant canyon lot into a pocket park devoted to native plants.

The sign announcing Parque Linda is almost as big as the little park itself, and is flanked by a sturdy plant of bladderpod (Isomeris arborea, aka Cleome arborea) a plant that’s floating to the top of my list of favorite natives.Visually, it’s a pleasant, low shrub, with yellow flowers several months of the year. The growth habit is open enough that you can see some of the interesting branch structure, so the plant isn’t just a yellow gumdrop.

Judging from the number of insects visiting it, the plant also appears to be a big favorite of the local animal community.

The garden was organized by adults, but many of the local children participated in its creation. I was particularly struck by the little clay signs that were used to identify many of the plants. The adults identified the plants they wanted to label, but the kids made the signs.

The park gathers together a number of plants that can survive on whatever rainfall comes their way. But being a garden and not a revegetation project, Parque Linda will require the ongoing support of the community to maintain it. The fact that the little garden exists at all–not to mention that people will be committing its upkeep–speaks to the fact that this is a neighborhood that cares about its well being, a place where people’s interests don’t stop at their property lines.

We need more places like it.

art, gardening, plant profiles

gbbd: pretty purple

March 15, 2009 James 12 Comments

For this Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day I’ve picked some predominantly purple spring-flowering plants that are starting to do their thing in my garden. All but one of these are California (or Baja California) natives, and all would be seriously water-wise choices for the garden. Some would even make it through an entire summer without water, though they’d look just a little better with a sip once or twice a month.

Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum): What a great name for a great plant. This iris relative is happy coexisting in a moderately-watered garden with other plants, though they can stand drought. Here they are living alongside some chard and heliotrope.

Blue dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) are common here near the coast and are one of our reliable signs that it’s spring. They self-sow and spread around the garden, but not obnoxiously.

Black sage (Salvia mellifera) is one of the local canyon plants that’s earned a place in the garden. In life the flowers are a slightly stronger pale mauve color than here in the photo. It’s just beginning to come into flower and should be a little more intense in a couple weeks. Though not one of the “look at me” sages, it’s still quietly beautiful.

Verbena lilacina originates in Baja. The plant shown here is just getting started. It should flower much of the year and require very little summer water.

This one’s maybe closer to blue than purple, the South African bulb Morea tripetala. I stuck it in a really dry spot, and it’s now probably just blooming on the reserves in the bulb. We’ll see how well it does after a season of tough love in the garden.

And with the last photo we come back to California with the justifiably ever-popular Penstemon Margarita BOP (sometimes sold as Penstemon heterophyllus ‘Margarita BOP’). The flowers are a wild mix of blue and magenta pink, giving the overall impression of purple. The open tubular flowers have something of the look of a foxglove which would require a certain amount of water, but this penstemon actually does just fine with almost no added water.

Thanks to May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. Check out the page with glimpses into what’s blooming all around the world.

gardening, my garden

backyard archaeology

March 14, 2009 James 5 Comments

Digging holes for plants always seems to be a big opportunity to find things left by former owners or dropped by visitors to the house.

My most recent haul included this little yellow marble, nails, toys from the kids next door and money. Unfortunately the money almost always takes the form of pennies or nickels—The hundred dollar bills must degrade rapidly in the soil.

When we moved into the house twenty years ago the neighbor’s ivy had overrun the back two thousand square feet of the garden. We found all sorts of stuff lurking in it including an intact barbecue. And then there was this: 65 feet of a brick retaining wall. We had no idea it was there underneath all that ivy.

And here’s an artifact from my recent walk to my local canyon, the fossil remains of an extinct species of shopping cart, probably courtesy of the unseen homeless who must live nearby.

I’m sure backyard archaeology has turned up stranger things. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve dug up in the garden?

gardening, landscape, landscape design, places, plant profiles

…and some not so garden-worthy

March 13, 2009 James 4 Comments

You could probably gather together six gardeners and get six different opinions of what would make a plant garden-worthy. But I suspect there might be somewhat more agreement on certain other plants that probably shouldn’t be included in a garden. Here are some encounters from Sunday’s trip to Tecolote Canyon that would fall easily into most people’s less-than-desirable category.

I’ll have to admit to actually liking this plant to the right. During the winter it drops its leaves and is an attractive thicket of upright or sprawling branches. This time of year it starts new growth that has this warm red-brown coloration. It’ll flower soon, and then set some loose clusters of white berries. Pretty, yes, and native, and important to wildlife. But this is poison oak. Maybe not the best choice for small backyard gardens…

Most of the rest of my list below is comprised of exotic plants that have staked a claim for themselves at the expense of the native species. Different locations have their own list of invasives, so what you see below is tailored to Southern California. Some of these plants could be good choices for other locations. Others would be trouble almost anywhere you grow them.

[ At this point I’d like to dedicate the rest of this Friday the thirteenth post to Outofdoors, who last month devoted her Friday the thirteenth post to invasive plant species. ]

I won’t go into too much detail about this troublesome trio. People have been working hard to get the word out on pampas grass, green fountain grass, and iceplant. The grasses, in particular, can be gorgeous things in gardens, waving in the breeze and lending their dramatic form to groups of softly mounding landscape shrubs. You can see why people want to grow them. But are they garden-worthy in Southern California?

All three of these quickly check out of people’s gardens and make for the wilds. I found both grasses and plenty of iceplant escaped into the canyon, here on this hillside and in other spots. So, as pretty as they can be–and I consider this drift of fountain grass in the second photo to be particularly poetic–these three would be better left in their native lands, or grown in climates where the weather might limit their spread.

This is the first flower I saw this season on the local plants of onion weed (Asphodelus fistulosus). The first time I saw it I thought it was a wildflower and wanted some for my garden. In full bloom the stalks of white flowers are an impressive sight. But they do spread like crazy. Not a good choice for the garden.

This combination of plants looks as impressive as any planting assembled by practitioners of the New Perennials garden movement. But once again, the plants aren’t really welcome additions to the canyon. In the foreground is teasel (Dipsacus sp.), a plant with excellent year-round architectural structure but having invasive tendencies that are considered “Moderate” by the California Invasive Plant Council (Cal-IPC). Here it’s set against a background of last season’s black mustard, a problem in these parts since it was introduced by the Spanish in the eighteenth century. The Cal-IPC only considers the mustard’s ranginess to be of “Moderate” concern, but also states: “Primarily a weed of disturbed sites, but can be locally a more significant problem in wildlands.” I’d say it’s a more significant pest locally.

Fennel can be attractive in the herb garden, but like the rest of the invasives in this post, this is another plant that gets around. Its overall undesirable impacts are considered “High” by the Cal-IPC. If I see fennel offered in the local nurseries it’s usually the bronze colored strain. It’s less vigorous, but all forms are considered invasive. I do wish this were a better choice for gardens because it hosts swallowtail butterflies, but at least there’s plenty of swallowtail food out in the local canyons. The butterflies won’t starve. Okay, I’ll pass.

Say “Old California” to anyone who’s lived in these parts for long, and this plant will probably come to mind. The ~~Brazilian~~ Peruvian pepper tree forms a gorgeous tree with long, delicate leaves that move any time there’s a breeze. But unfortunately the plants develop berries that the birds find irresistible. While the Cal-IPC considers their threat to California to be only “Limited,” there are plants that would be better choices.

The Australian peppermint willow (Agonis flexuosa), although not a native plant, is a good drought-tolerant substitute that looks a bit like the pepper tree but doesn’t share its invasive tendencies. If you must have a delicate weeping tree that says “Old California” but don’t mind a lilting Australian accent, this would be a better choice–and you can get varieties with either green or dramatic black foliage. Or you could give up altogether on the colonial look and go in for any of the truly native trees. It doesn’t get any more “old California” than that.

As I reread this post I’m struck that I’m probably not doing a particularly good job of discouraging people from growing these plants. I keep going back to the beautiful redeeming qualities of these invasives, and I guess that’s why they continue to be such a problem. The mind tells you they might be bad news, but sometimes it’s hard to say no.

With this last image I leave the plant kingdom and turn to another species that’s native to the local canyons. This one I think you’ll definitely agree you wouldn’t want around. I won’t assume that you like snakes any more than I do, so if you want to see the picture you’ll have to click HERE.

Still, who among you doesn’t think baby animals are just the cutest things? Now, everybody, say “awwwww”… This is a little baby southern Pacific rattler, probably no longer than my forearm and too young to rattle. I’m deathly afraid of snakes but managed to fend off the fear to snap the picture and watch the snake as it coiled itself defensively and make like a sidewinder, sliding backwards into the grasses.

I have to respect these animals since they do wonders to keep down the rodent population. And they’re every bit as native as the poison oak I showed earlier. But after having had one of these in the backyard facing off against my cat, I’ve definitely decided this is another species that’s not garden-worthy, at least in my enclosed little space.

I admit it, I’m a wimp. Nature isn’t always convenient is it? But throw out the rattlesnakes and pampas grass and black mustard and fennels and you’re still left tens of thousands of cool and friendly selections to invite into the garden.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]