Category Archives: gardening

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…

gardening, my garden

summer at last

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Summer finally arrived last week. A humid mass of high pressure from Mexico hopped the border fence and gave us some hot days and tropical-looking morning clouds that lit up brilliantly as the sun rose.

After almost four months with a total natural rainfall of .05 inches much of the garden has been heading into its defensive dormancy. But a few plants seem to be reveling in the arrival of some real summer heat. Top of the list is this California fuchsia, the ‘Route 66’ cultivar, which opened its flowers to coincide with the hot weather. Some Epilobium species and clones have fairly small, gray-colored leaves, but this is one of those where the leaves a smidge larger and greener, a bright contrast to the screaming orange flowers.

Desert marigold, Baileya multiradiata, has been blooming away with the help of a little additional water, but not much.

In the bed that gets some irrigation the gingers are the current stars of the show. Coinciding with the California fuchsia was this kahili ginger, Hedychium gardnerianum, a plant that I’ve been growing since my early teens, a hand-me-down plant from one of my mother’s gardening friends. Sitting in the back yard after sunset is a treat with this insanely fragrant ginger nearby.

Of course summer isn’t all about the flowers. The fig tree is hitting its peak fruit production this week. It’s the variety ‘Brown Turkey,’ which is supposed to do well with less heat than what most other varieties require. This has been one its best years ever for me. I’m trying to figure out what went right this year, and I’m thinking the success has something to do with water. This past winter and spring actually delivered a slightly-over normal rainfall that was spaced evenly throughout several months. Also, last year I applied some water-conserving woodchip mulch over the bed that contains the fig. And John’ has made a point of watering the zone around the fig every other week or so. I hope to be able to repeat the success next year, which according to the prognosticators could be a drier than average La Niña year.

The garden herbs are doing well. A sixpack of parsley several months back is turning out to be way more than two people who use parsley once or twice a week. At least it’s a pleasantly textured plant for the front of a border.

A sixpack of basil, however, hasn’t seemed to produce nearly enough. Maybe the basil will pick up with the warmer weather.

Surprisingly the tropical lemongrass plants (both the East- and West-Indian versions) haven’t been sulking and are overproducing just like the parsley.

Adding to the pile of edibles, our neighbor Olinda stopped by with her grandson. It was all she could do to carry this giant watermelon. John was impressed with its size and suggested I weigh it: 30.8 pounds.

It’s one of the with-seed varieties that stores these days don’t seem to stock much anymore. Stunning rind, don’t you think? One of the many things we’re losing in part because of big agra.

I was hoping to save the watermelon for a day or two, until we had room in the fridge, but I was a little clumsy photographing its cool rind in detail. Now I know what a melon dropped 3 feet off a table onto a brick patio does. It stays in one piece, but you have to deal with it right away.

High summer also means the best cantaloupes of the season. This is Scooter helping us out by finishing a couple of half-melons we had for breakfast. The melon came from the local hybrid grocery-farmer’s market.

And so our summer begins: a little too much melon and a garden peaking with fruit and herbs. Life is good.

art, gardening

scrub your air

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This was fun: I opened up the Museum of Modern Art gift catalog yesterday and saw this on page 2, the Andrea Air Purifier. Instead of filters or electric charges, Matthieu Lehanneur’s machine from 2007 uses a live plant.

Once again I get the feeling that gardeners are way ahead of the curve. Plants to clean the air? Who’d have thought such a thing was possible?

And then there’s the matter of the price tag $199, plant not included. Yikes. But the manufacturer makes some claims about how the gizmo is lots more efficient than traditional purifiers or even plants:

Based on experiments performed by RTP Labs, Andrea improves the efficiency of formaldehyde removal from the air relative to plants alone by 360%. Relative to HEPA and carbon filters, comparison between the RTP Labs data and literature data show an improvement in formaldehyde filtration efficiency of 4400%. These data confirm that while plants alone in an interior setting are more efficient than HEPA and carbon filters at removing toxic gases from the air, they are significantly less efficient than Andrea. Even more important, the rate of gas removal by Andrea is, according to the RTP Labs data, over 1000% faster than for plants alone.

Much of the technological magic appears to be due a fan that circulates air around the plant and then into the room–something that you could probably rig up in the privacy of your own home. (Be prepared to water your plant more often.) As a fun piece of conceptual art that was part of MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind show, the price wouldn’t be that outrageous. But as a functional appliance I’d probably opt for a few little green machines, growing and photosynthesizing and blooming through the winter doldrum months…

gardening, landscape, places

bloom day: natives at home and in the wild

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This is why I enjoy growing native plants: On a quick hike through my nearby Tecolote Canyon Natural Park there were a few plants blooming away, hardly aware it’s midsummer and three months since the last real rain. And when I came home some of the same species were blooming just as exuberantly in my garden. That’s a great sense of connection with the wild, and I get a sense that parts of my garden are participating in the continuity of nature.

The common California flat-top buckwheat, Eriogonum fasciculatum:

In the wilds (actually a reveg parking strip) with seaside daisy (Encelia Californica)
At home, one the easment slope garden, doing battle with the neighbor’s sacred iceplant

 

Bladderpod, Isomeris arborea, with its bee-magnet yellow flowers.

Trail-side
At home, in a mixed planting of natives and exotics

 

The totally awesome sacred datura, Datura wrightii.

In the wilds, the form with a pale lavender edging
Also in the wilds, the all-white form
…at home, also on the slope garden

 

Amaryllis belladonna (“naked ladies”) is native to South Africa, but there were two little clusters in the canyon. They don’t really colonize the canyons and generally aren’t considered invasive. They were a surprise and I wonder if someone planted them here. And at home I also happened to have the first of them blooming in the garden.

One of the ‘wild’ amaryllis
…another of the ‘wild’ amaryllis
…and the amaryllis back home, in the garden

 

In the canyon there were a few other things going at it:

Blue elderberry blooms and fruit (Sambucus nigra ssp. cerulea, formerly Sambucus mexicana)
Oenothera elata, a primrose that blooms on tall spires
Laurel sumac, Malosma laurina
Coyote melon (Cucurbita palmata). It’s generally considered inedible. I tried one once. I agree.
Nestled in the dead stems of the invasive fennel is this other non-native. It looks like some sort of garden nicotiana
Your basic Rosa californica flower…
…and pods
The very cool fiber optic grass, Isolepsis cernua

 

And at home were some California plants that either weren’t blooming in the canyon or aren’t native to this area:

Nuttall’s milkvetch, Astragalus nuttalii, with its noisy rattle-like pods
California sealavender (Limonium californicum) the only statice native to California — EDIT November 20, 2014: Although this plant was sold to me as this California native, it is in reality the INVASIVE L. ramosissimum ssp. provinciale. Yikes! Even the native plant specialists can make a mistake, looks like.
Cleveland sage at the end of its summer blooming, with the gorgeous grass, purple three awn (Aristida purpurea)
San Diego sunflower (Bahiopsis laciniata), not looking great, but considering it’s battling iceplant on the slope garden and hasn’t been rained on or watered in over three months, it’s not doing that badly
The desert mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) could probably stand being cut back a bit, but it still has a small few blooms on its almost leafless stems. I’m really coming to enjoy the light green, slightly yellow color of the plant, a great contrast against silver or dark green foliage

 

If the naked lady amaryllis weren’t pornographic enough, here are some of the non-natives blooming in the garden right now. It’s August, and the flower count isn’t what it was three months ago.

Salvia Hot Lips and a big pink bougainvillea
Closer view of Salvia Hot Lips. As the weather warms, this one of three plants is showing more red with the white in the flowers. The other two plants are still mostly white
A really fragrant ginger, Hedychium coccineum ‘Tara’
Society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) is a common xeriscape plant, but it’s so adaptable that it’ll grow with its roots standing in water, as you see here in the pond. It has as much of an aroma as the ginger, but I wouldn’t exactly call it fragrant…
Butterfly bush, Clerodendrum myricoides. The flowers are nice, but people don’t talk enough about how pleasant the plant smells when you touch it
…and underneath the butterfly bush, this tidy little lead wort or dwarf plumbago (Ceratostigma plumbaginoides). It does fine in dappled sunlight with very little added water
A cactus and some succulents draping over a wall. Blooming is Crassula falcata, in the same big family as all the California Dudleya species
…and a closeup of the Crassula flowers, showing the red petals and little gold shocks of the stamens. This one’s worth looking at up close

 

These last plants definitely aren’t California natives, but they’re native to somewhere. If I lived in those places, I’d probably want them in my garden.

Check out the other gardeners around the world participating in this month’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. Thanks as always to Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting this event.

gardening, my garden

my haul

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In the spirit of the “haul video,” the art form in which a fashion-conscious usually young consumer describes his or her latest finds from the last shopping trip to the mall–a video in which the word “cute” has to appear at least fourteen times–let me show off my latest finds on my recent excursion to the Theodore Payne Foundation. (You didn’t think I’d go there and only pick up a couple plants for Aunt Barbara, did you?)

This first photo, a dark-flowered selection of desert willow, Chilopsis linearis, is a plant I did not buy. But if I manage to kill of one of my existing large shrub-sized plants in a spot that receives some summer water, this plant will be near the top of my list.

I also didn’t picky up any of the cool selection of pots.

But I did buy a few plants, including:

Verbena lilacina ‘Paseo Rancho,’ a light pink selection of the usually lavender Cedros Island verbena. You might call its color a little on the pale and insipid side, but it’s different from the other clones in my garden. Insipid but different, and maybe just a little cute. Reason enough to have it.

Cliff lettuce, or Dudleya caespitosa. Cute, huh? Ever the collector, I think it might be fun to explore some of the dozens of Dudleya species that grow in California.

Coast buckwheat, Eriogonum latifolium. I don’t really know this plant–which is sometimes reason enough to try to get to know it better. It’s been described as being similar to San Miguel Island buckwheat (E. grande). To me it looks like the leaves are a little more deluxe, thicker, fuzzier.

This plant, along with the preceding two selections, isn’t native to my immediate area. But being coastal or island plants, I’m hoping they’ll like what I have to offer them. The rest of my haul, however, consists of species that grow in my county, some of them not far from me.

San Diego ragweed, San Diego ambrosia–whatever you want to call Ambrosia pumila. The leaves are really delicately cut, like some artemisias, and I think this diminutive plant really does qualify as “cute.” This is a species that’s listed on the CNPS list of rare plants and proposed for the Federal Endangered Species list. It’s weird to travel 140 miles to get a mile that grows nearby, but that’s the responsible thing to do. Our local CNPS plant sales also have offered this plant. Yanking these up out of the ground where they grow nearby would be grossly tacky and totally illegal.

San Diego willowy monardella, Monardella linoides ssp. viminea, is another local plant that’s listed by both the state and federal agencies as endangered. It’ll have delicate whorls of lavender flowers when it blooms. But like most (or maybe all?) monardellas it has intensely fragrant leaves that I can enjoy right now.

And finally, one of my favorite of the softly delicate grasses, Aristida purpurea, purple three awn. It’s slightly more coarse than the popular Mexican feather grass that’s non-native and starting to look like it’s invasive. But it moves just as amazingly in the wind, and has a delicate purple tinge part of the year, something feather grass doesn’t offer.

August isn’t high season for planting, but with this cool summer-that-never-was I figured I could get away with it. And really, here, not that far from the coast, the main issue with many plants is water.

I hate to show newly installed plants before they have a chance to fill in, but here’s the finished bed where all of the plants except for the monardas went into. These Californians should be better choices for this exposed, dry spot than some of the exotics that I had in there before. Not shown in this photo is a very happy Cleveland sage and some ecstatic purple three awn plants that I grew from seed.

I haven’t counted all the “cutes” in my writeup. I know I’ve failed miserably, partly because I really dislike the word unless I’m discussing my extremely cute cat. I will try to do better if I decide to commit my shopping trips to video.

gardening, my garden, places

but what would aunt barbara like?

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A little over a week ago we went up for a long weekend to visit Aunt Barbara in LA’s San Fernando Valley. The Theodore Payne Foundation, one of the Southland’s major sources of California native plants was only half a dozen freeway exits away. I’ve mail-ordered seeds from them but I’d never been to the nursery. Midsummer isn’t high planting season. Visiting to buys plants might not be the best idea. Still, alright, you know where this is headed…

Barbara was busy with a friend, but John and I took the trip to Sunland, the community situated near where the Valley reaches toward the Los Angeles River and meets the San Gabriel Mountains. Urban sprawl quickly gives way to large, dusty lots. Manicured landscaping starts to fade away as the look and smell of the foothills blows in from the east. What a great location for a native plant nursery.

The perky Baja fairy duster, looking a lot like many Australian plants Southern Californians are used to seeing
The Matilija poppies were past their peak, but there were still a few around

Late July isn’t high season for native flowers. The last of the season’s Matilija poppy flowers (Romneya) appeared here and there on the nursery grounds and Baja fairy duster (Calliandra californica) provided some blooms next to the parking lot. (Interestingly, according to the Tree of Life Nursery, Theodore Payne–the person, not the foundation–was responsible for discovering and introducing the ‘White Cloud’ cultivar of Romneya that is so often grown.)

Something else that was blooming: Dendromecon harfordii

Also in bloom: Salvia pachyphylla with its gorgeous pink bracts against the violet flowers

A little trail leads to the little rise of land overlooking the nursery. The sign points to “Wildflower Hill.”

This time of year it’s pretty much California Flat-Top Buckwheat Hill, which isn’t at all a bad thing. It’s a subtle and gorgeous plant. But if you came expecting Butchart Gardens, well you’d be disappointed. Of course, if a taste of wild California is what you’re after, this is your place.

Of the three retail native plant nurseries I’ve been to over the last several years, this one is probably the wildest and the least “garden”-like. There are pockets with benches and picnic tables, but the main narrative here is that you’ve stepped over the edge into wilderness. Shut your eyes and you hear birds everywhere. Look away from the buildings and you could easily feel that you’re farther than four blocks from the suburbs. (By contrast, San Juan Capistrano’s Tree of Life Nursery feels the most nurtured, tended and garden-like. The Escondido branch of Las Pilitas Nursery falls somewhere in between.)

We were staying with Aunt Barbara, and I wanted to go back with a couple plants that might fit comfortably into her garden, both in the way it looks and the way she waters it. To give you a taste, here’s a shot of her front walkway.

…and here’s another shot at the Payne Foundation grounds, of the beautiful spires of spent sage against the browning landscape. This kind of scene gives me a real sense of nature’s subtle cycles, but I had a feeling Aunt Barbara wouldn’t go for it. What plants would reconcile the deep divide?

The short list of the nursery’s many selections included seaside daisy (various cultivars of Erigeron glaucus), bush snapdragon (Galvezia speciosa), California aster (Aster chilensis) and maybe even one of the California fuchsias. Barbara mentioned loving the flowers of Matilija poppy, but that’s a plant purchase I think a person needs to make for themselves, after they’ve seen how vigorous it can be and how un-cottage gardeney it starts to look this time of year.

The winners?

The only flower on the Venegasia carpesioides that I picked out for Barbara. I wished that it had a few more.

Canyon sunflower (Venegasia carpesioides) and the ever-popular Penstemon Margerita B.O.P. I planted them before we left, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they A) survive, and B) show Barbara that there are some natives that would fit easily into her California cottage garden. What other plants would the rest of you suggest for all the Aunt Barbara’s out there? What plants would you pick that could mix fairly easily with existing garden borders and bloom much of the year?

And some of the flowers on the Penstemon Margarita B.O.P.

art, gardening, landscape design, places

getty garden, light and shadow

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I try to stop by Robert Irwin’s Central Garden at the Getty Center whenever I’m nearby. This early august day was bright but cool, a perfect day for a stroll through the garden to see what new things I’d find.

If you’ve never been to the garden, it divides into two large parts: a central bowl holding a maze of two colors of clipped azaleas and its surrounding plantings, and, above it, a straight watercourse that is shaded all along its length by London plane trees, a cousin of the American sycamore.

This trip I was concentrating on how the idea of light and shadow, dark and light played out in the overall design and plantings.

To experience the upper watercourse, you follow a path that zigzags back and forth. It takes you in and out of the shade and shelter of the trees, letting you experience the bright Los Angeles sunlight and how it contrasts with the dappled light the trees provide in the spring, summer and fall.

The watercourse near the top of the Central Garden

The watercourse, the sheltered core of this top garden, changes from a noisy stream with large stones in its path at the top, to a waterway that glides quietly over a textured streambed down below.

The effect of the dappled sunlight is repeated in the plantings. Dark, almost black-leaved, plants alternate with light-colored ones. In this photo it’s almost hard to distinguish the alternating light and shadow of the trees above from the dappled plantings below. It’s a little confusing, a tad disorienting. And if you’re fascinated with the effects of light and shadow as I am, you might find it a quietly thrilling experience.

Even this little detail, a planting of succulents, plays with contrasts, light and dark. It’s a little corner that would look great in a home garden, and here it further helps to reinforce the vibrations of light and dark in the upper garden.

When I first saw the garden I thought the plantings were a little chaotic. All this light and dark, all this continual contrasting of colors and plant shapes seemed restless. Small doses would look great as perky little container plantings, but it seemed way too much of a good thing. It seemed like a little English cottage garden doped up on steroids.

But I’ve been changing my mind. All this craziness reinforces the intense vibration of contrasts that you experience walking the zigzag path.

Once you make your way out of the upper portion of the garden you’re set free into the relative calm of the lower bowl. There’s no more zigzagging in and out of the shade, there’s no more quick shifting from light to dark. Still, the sunken design of the lower garden ensures that one of the sides will experience shade during most of the day. And the plantings down here, still alternating dark and light, tell you that you’re still in the same garden.


Yes, each trip here I see something new. But I also realize that making this kind of garden happen is such an extreme commitment of resources and labor.

I haven’t quite figured out a way to photograph the capital outlay it takes to keep this garden looking great. But I’d like to end this post with a tribute to the heroes, those dedicated gardeners who make this place a garden worth visiting several times a year.

Thanks, guys!

art, gardening

tulip mania paintings

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Here’s a really interesting painting that I encountered Sunday while I was visiting the Getty Museum. It’s “The Tulip Folly,” by the 19th century French academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was having a big show in one of the galleries. (The painting was on loan from Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum.)

The scene takes place during the 1630s tulip mania and shows a soldier guarding a potted tulip, while other troops stomp out fields of flowering bulbs. The piece was painted in 1882 during a time of economic distress around the Paris Bourse Crash, a time even more economically unsettled than our own. Gérôme was painting tulips and the tulip folly alright, but he was also commenting on his own day, which saw a great stock market crash three and a half centuries after the collapse of tulip values.

While looking for images of this painting I ran across a couple other interesting depictions of the tulip mania. Both were painted by Dutch artists closer to the actual tulip market crash, and both paintings reside in Haarlem’s Frans Hals Museum.

Hendrik Gerritsz Pot painted an allegory of Flora’s Wagon of Fools around 1640. This painting shows a cartload of tulip-deranged wackos leading the common workers into the sea. Substitute Wall Street bankers for the tulip-snorting loonies and I think it has special resonance for us today.

Jean Brueghel the Younger’s Satire of the Tulip Frenzy is even unkinder towards the participants in the frenzy. They appear in the painting as monkeys. Smack!

As unflattering as the speculators appear, in some ways the previous image of Flora’s wagon comes off as being a stronger indictment of the damage done to a general population by a moneyed elite. Still, Brueghel’s monkeys are pretty wild and I like his work better as a painting.

Sometimes I feel a little silly chasing after an unusual plant that I absolutely must have. (If you hear of a land run on San Diego ragweed, I might have something to do with it…) Maybe these images, combined with the experience of our current economic times, will slap a little bit of sanity into me.

art, gardening

art from potatoes

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is currently featuring a series of installations and exhibitions looking at notions of food, culture and art. The program, EatLACMA, is co-curated by the collective that goes by the name of Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young) along with LACMA curator Michele Urton.

Åsa Sonjasdotter has contributed The Way Potatoes Go, a vaguely California-shaped planter containing soil, potato plants, plant labels and straw mulch. In the piece she explores the 10,000 years of history and culture associated with potatoes, one of the plants with the longest and richest narratives.

From the artist’s statement: “The varieties exist as a result of coincidences, accidents, planning, violence, and careful custody over thousands of years. Through tracing their different backgrounds a history of human desire appears.” Go to [ http://eatlacma.org/gardens/ ] and click on The Way Potatoes Go on the map for details on the varieties.

If you can’t check out the piece in person here are a few random details of it:


You can also click [ here ] for further information on how the artist got interested in this, one of the most primal of foods.

Over the summer this garden of historical potatoes will be viewed by tens of thousands of people. Although many gardeners will already be familiar with some of the rich history of potatoes, this installation will bring that knowledge and appreciation to a wider audience. And the artist’s story is a compelling read.