Category Archives: gardening

dilemma: that ugly garden wall

September 14, 2009 James 11 Comments

One of the bits of ugliness that we uncovered as part of our current household projects is this wall in the garden that we’re trying to figure out what to do with. When we look out the dining room, kitchen and bedroom windows this is what we see, and it has the potential for being a cool accent wall for the garden in front of it.

You shake your head in disbelief at how some things get constructed backwards and this was one of them. Apparently there was a low retaining wall with a fence on it to begin with. Then the previous owner wanted a nice concrete bench and outdoor fireplace on the other side. Instead of taking down the wall, they just cast the concrete bench around the wood. And then they stapled chicken wire to the fence and used it as scaffolding for the fireplace.

Wood being wood rots away after a few decades. After we moved into the house we basically replaced some of the problem spots and called it good enough, but twenty years later there was no salvaging it. Time to fix it and fix it right. But you know me: Whatever we do has to look really cool. What to do?

Leaving it alone is one option. It does have a certain warehouse chic look to it, although nothing else in the house has anything else to do with that look.

This wall detail in the Topher Delaney garden that I’ve written about recently serves as one inspiration. I wouldn’t recreate it literally, but it shows how something bold and dynamic can animate the garden space. It would be easy enough to chip off the mortar and detach the chicken wire from my wall and tile something geometric and bold.

I do wonder, though if it might dominate the space a bit too much. And how well would something so bold would wear after a few decades? Would a simple background divider, a foil for plants, be a better option?

It’ll be several months before I’ll be able to take on this part of the project, so I’ll have some time to come up with a plan. What would you do with a problem wall like this?

gardening, my garden

providing shelter

September 10, 2009 James 3 Comments

It’s one of the saddest things to see: A house undergoes a remodel or even minor revision like a new paintjob, and in the course of of the project the landscaping gets run over by equipment or trampled by workers oblivious to established plants that may be as old as the house.

We’ve just started a project of our own on a little detached studio room behind the house. It began innocently enough with thoughts about replacing the patio cover that was starting its slow descent to the ground. (No piece of wood is safe in the land of termites.) Maybe two or three weekends of hard work to replace it. Yah, right.

As long as we were removing the patio that was attached to the room, we thought it would be a good time to redo the siding that has some spots that are failing. And as long as the walls were open, we really should insulate. And as long as we had things partly dissembled it made sense to replace the old single glazed windows and doors with better insulating ones. (The local power company provides rebates towards insulation, and one of the federal stimulus packages features 30% rebates on super-insulated replacement windows.) Now that the walls are starting to be opened, it’s clear that some of them are so gone that we’re having to re-frame them completely. So the little two weekend project has grown to two months or more. If it doesn’t rain.

Right: Just some of the spots we’re having to reframe.

With a fairly long-term project like this, we didn’t want to damage the plants in the middle of it. John’s assortment of epiphyllum cactus plants in pots needed shelter, and less portable plants planted in the raised shade bed around the pond wouldn’t be able to take much sun. The waterlilies in the pond would do okay with full sun, but the extra sun causes algae to grow and we didn’t want to have to battle pond scum as another house project.

So the weekend we took down the sheltering patio cover, up went these little portable cabanas and beach umbrellas. It looks like we’re having a big garden party, but it’s going to be a lot less relaxing the next couple of months.

This is my main workstation where I do my blogging, layered over by protective sheeting and open to the great outdoors. I suspect my blogging is going to take a big hit for a while as all my waking hours start to be consumed with the project.

And all this is happening during the prime planting season in Southern California. I have seeds to sow and plants to plant. I’m stressed. But with my university job being one of those impacted by state furloughs, I’ll be having lots of time to work on the project. I suppose that’s seeing the silver lining to the dark cloud that’s about to send lightning bolts in my general direction…

gardening, my garden

thinking about water

September 5, 2009 James 7 Comments

It’s easy to obsess about something you don’t have enough of, and water in California is one of those things.

On my recent trip to Northern California it was hard not to notice the dozens of signs stuck along the side of the interstate like so many Fox News soundbites-on-a-stick. I can’t tell you all the details about our water-use wars, but it has something to do with ongoing drought, overpopulation and a mandate to return water to natural watercourses in attempt to keep some small fish from vanishing from the face of the earth forever. As cheap, plentiful water is shut off or diverted to the big cities with more political clout, it’s easy to see that some farmers aren’t happy.

Back home, we’ve been reminded that water doesn’t just magically fall from the sky in plentiful amounts. The cast-iron water lines that supply the neighborhood have been failing, and the old lines are being replaced with new, bright baby-blue water mains. All summer long the street out front has been a construction pit as they installed temporary supply lines, cut through pavement to remove the old problem pipe, installed the new lines and prepared to hook up the houses to the never-ending font of the life-giving fluid. They’ve said that the street will be a no-parking zone for the next six weeks. Feels like it’s been forever already.

Of course that water supply isn’t without limits. The city has been on a mandatory water-reduction program since June, and I was happy to see that city water use dropped 20% that month. But as the novelty of saving water wore off, July’s numbers fell to 12%.

I’ve been trying to do my part. Overall I feel pretty good about it, but I’ve found myself falling off the wagon a bit myself. My new offense is this little number, a reverse-osmosis purification system to improve the water quality I can offer a new little collection of carnivorous plants (more on that in a future post). A reality with almost all R/O systems is that producing one gallon of good water generates several gallons of waste. I knew that going into it, but the reality of it is pretty stunning.

But instead of following the installation instructions, which outline in detail how you send all the wastewater down the drain through the special pipe fittings the manufacturer thoughtfully supplies with the unit, I modified the installation to aim the waste stream into a water bottle. The rejected water ends up being a little saltier and grosser that what comes from the tap, but it’s still cleaner than the graywater we’re recycling from our showers and is perfectly good for watering the plants that aren’t among the chosen few.

Now that I’ve lived with this setup for a couple of weeks I’m finding that lugging around five gallon water bottles can be a bit of a chore. Maybe I’ll rig a way to divert the waste directly to the garden. But that’s a project that will have to wait. Fall planting season is coming up, as well as a pile of house projects. And then there’s that new collection of plants to play with…

gardening, my garden

not in the doldrums

September 1, 2009 James 7 Comments

It’s the end of summer and most areas of the garden seem to be in some sleepy botanical torpor, exhausted from the heat. Not much is blooming. Brown is everywhere.

And then by contrast there’s this little over-performing corner, formed in large part by chunks of succulents that John has collected over the years…

Cascading over a back wall are the shocking red flowers of this crassula (I think it’s Crassula perfoliata var. minor, a.k.a. Crassula falcata). Its companions in this photo are a couple of other succulents, one of the goth-black aeoniums (Aeonium arboreum ‘Zwartkop’) and what’s likely Graptopetalum paraguayense. The three are pretty easy to find and like nice combined.

After the winter rains the foliage on all of these plants plumps up and looks pretty spectacular. But as summer settles in the aeonium and and graptopetalum drop their larger leaves in favor of a tight cluster of leaves packed at the growing end of the stalks. The bigger the leaf the greater the water loss. The crassula will retain its leaves, however, although they’ll look a little shriveled in the drought. The fact that the leaves are folded in half probably helps to shade the leaf, reduce transpiration and reduce moisture loss.

The flowering of the crassula varies by year. The photo above is from this season, actually not one of the better years. To the left is a shot from last August. This year’s not quite as flashy, but in the slow heat of August and September, I’ll take it.

gardening, my garden, plant profiles

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.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]

Category Archives: gardening

dilemma: that ugly garden wall

providing shelter

thinking about water

not in the doldrums

california-friendly phlomis

on the road: cornerstone sonoma (more)

on the road: cornerstone sonoma

on the road: wine country gardens

on the road: luther burbank’s farm

on the road: visiting california carnivores

an artist loosed in a garden