Category Archives: gardening

friday garden roundup

July 17, 2009 James 5 Comments

After finishing my coffee and reading some of the newspaper this morning I took a quick survey around the yard.

Honey bush (Melianthus major) is a South African species that I’ve had for a couple years now. Although it responds to watering with a lot of spunky growth, it’s also good with minimal additional watering. I have two sprinkler heads in the garden, and this plant gets by on the overspray from one of the heads after it’s made the sages and tangerine tree happy.

The maroon flowers unfurl from the branch tips in spring and dry to these brown spikes. I’ve left them on the plant to help me decide if I like the way they look or not. The bed they’re in in has a lot of mounding plants, so the spikes give some vertical interest.

The leaves are heavily serrated and are the main reason for growing the plant. Here they are, with shadows, and backlit by the morning sun. They look a little fierce, but they’re actually soft, like rubber. They do have a bit of an unpleasant odor if you brush by them. Combine that fact with the plant’s eventual size–six to twelve feet–and you’ll see that it has “dramatic background plant” written all over it.

The melianthus grows next to a bromeliad that truly is nasty and spiny. (I’ve mentioned this plant before…) Pretty though, even when it’s not flowering. And it takes next to no water when grown in mostly shade.

Next to the honey bush and bromeliad, in a planting that spans two or three continents, is a young manzanita, Actostaphylos Dr. Hurd, shown here in a detail highlighting its exfoliating bark. Although one of the faster growing manzanitas–it’s grown eight inches since February–this still isn’t a plant for the impatient. Currently it’s exactly one meter tall, and will hopefully hit its design height of ten feet before I’m back diapers. Eventually it’ll make it to fifteen feet or more.

In the front of the same bed, next to a sprinkler head, are some basil cuttings that I’ve posted on before. Six weeks after planting out, the largest plant is maybe eight by eight inches and is big enough for me to consider taking an occasional snip for the dinner table. In a month I should be ready to make batches of pesto.

The final photo isn’t my garden, but looking across the street, where they’re installing plastic turf. The neighbors are responding to our new water restrictions by mixing synthetic grass with palm trees. The look will be something like the wet Hawaiian paradise they had before.

But I do worry that synthetic grass, even if it looks something like the real thing, does nothing to address people’s fundamental expectations of what a garden should look like in a fiercely dry climate. And in my most uncharitable moments I think that installing plastic grass is like treating heroin addiction with methadone. And to this gardener, installing something as dead as plastic grass lands with a thud as loud as the one created by the infamous 1978 remodel of a Sunset Boulevard mansion by a Saudi sheik that featured planters full of plastic flowers.

But hey, they’re doing what makes sense to them, and they will be reducing their water use.

gardening, my garden

july bloom day

July 14, 2009 James 16 Comments

For this month’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day I have some closeup photos of some of what’s blooming in the garden. I’ve done a couple posts on using backgrounds behind plants (Background check / One way to photogrpah a tree). Inspired, all but one of these shots uses a white sheet of matboard placed behind the plants. Each color of background presents a different end result. Using white accentuates dark flowers and stems, and some of these photos are a busy network of dark lines against the light background.

There are some newcomers just coming into bloom, but many plants have been in bloom for several months. When life gives you more of the same flowers…well, I was thinking I’d try to photograph them a little differently.

I suspect the neighbors think I’m odd enough taking pictures of everything in the garden, and I thought it’d be extra-distressing if I were to be walking around the garden with a big white board as well as the camera. As a result all of these are from the quiet privacy of the back yard, with the exception of the one plant without a white background.

Purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea.

Lion’s tail, Leonotis leonorus; Desert mallow, Sphaeralcea
ambigua.

Peruvian daffodil, Hymenocallis festalis; Freeway daisy, Osteospermum sp.

Verbena bonariensis; Juncus patens (with fallen leaf caught in the plant).

Some salvias:

Salvia nemerosa ‘Snow Hills’; Ivy-leaved sage (Salvia cacaliaefolia).

On the left is Andean sage (Salvia discolor with its almost black flowers set in light green calyces; on the right is Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips.’

Some California buckwheats:

Flat-topped buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum)

San Miguel Island buckwheat (Eriogonum grande var. rubescens)

St. Catherine’s lace (Eriogonum giganteum)

Butterfly bush (Clero- dendrum ugan- dense); seed pod of whitetop pitcher plant (Sarracenia leucophylla).

Pink and white double bougainvillea (unknown variety); Agastache aurantiaca ‘Apricot Sprite.’

Pink double bougainvillea (another unknown variety); toloache (Datura wrightii).

Thanks again the Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. It’s a terrific way to build community among garden bloggers wanting to share the flowers in their gardens. Check out this month’s offerings!

gardening, my garden

bye-bye birdie

July 12, 2009 James 4 Comments

Yesterday’s big garden task was to take out a big bird of paradise that we’d planted twenty years ago.

Left: The “before”…

…and the “after”…

The plant had some good things to recommend it: big splashy flowers (if you’re into that sort of thing), a robust plant that needs minimal maintenance, and a requirement for no additional watering beyond what it gets from rainfall here near the coast.

But one bad trait that you don’t often see discussed is that over time the roots can do damage to nearby hardscape. Ours had lifted the brick patio nearby by over an inch over just the past year.

John’s first inspiration was to use the hedge trimmers. The idea was that they’d make quick work of the bird, cutting through the lower stalks as if they were butter, and we’d be done in a couple minutes. They sort of worked, but had a hard time cutting through the fibrous stalks. It might take an hour, not two minutes.

Since it was such slow going I decided that doing things manually, with the trusty hand pruners, would work at least as well and not introduce the issue of losing a finger or two to the blades.

The local landfill has a program where they’ll accept greens waste without charge, chop it to bits, process it into mulch or compost, and sell it for next to nothing. But certain fibrous plant waste is exempted: things like palms, bananas, bamboo and a few other plants…including bird of paradise. So, anything on the list of forbiddens has to be dumped as regular urban waste.

I’m not up on dump fees around the country, but our little expedition cost $34, about the same as a trip to the zoo ($35 per adult) and a deal compared to a day at Sea World ($55-65). And with no food stands selling deep-fried munchies, it was probably a lot less fattening.

While at the dump, it was a chance to see some of the rare local riparian habitat whizz by the window at 35 mph…

…and some blooming buckwheats. It’s not quite a native plant garden, but the edges of the landfill shield some protected and uncommon species.

In fact, immediately to the east, is Miramar Mounds National Natural Landmark, a piece of land designated to be of special interest in a program administered by the National Park Service. The Landmark comes to life during the winter rains, with vernal pools suddenly dotting mesa tops. The federally endangered San Diego mesa mint breaks into bloom, and the ground around the pools comes alive with toads the size of your thumbnail and Pacific chorus frogs…or so I’ve heard. Although I’ve visited vernal pools before, I’ve never made it to Miramar Mounds proper. Bounded by freeways, the dump, and part of the adjacent military base, access is restricted. It’s definitely on my list of places in town I’d love to visit.

gardening, landscape design, my garden

background check

July 10, 2009 James 10 Comments

My last post has me thinking more about the backgrounds that plants grow against.

I was getting excited that the San Miguel Island buckwheats(Eriogonum grande var. rubescens) that I’d grown from seed were coming in to bloom. But standing back from them, I realized that the place where I’d transplanted them–a raised bed with a red brick retaining wall behind it–might not have been the best place for the plants.

The dusky pink flowers blend so well with the reddish colors of the brick that they practically vanish. And the busy gridded background of the brick and weeping mortar draws so much attention that anything in front of the wall just gets ignored.

What would it look like against a more neutral backbround? I wondered. And so I went to grab a piece of white matboard and positioned it behind the plants.

Wow. Big difference. It’s suddenly easier to make out the shapes of the umbels of flowers, and you can begin to appreciate the subtle color of the flowers.

Up close, the white background almost made the plant look like a botanical illustration.

The low contrast against the background didn’t prevent this bug from finding the buckwheat. Clearly, a bug’s eyes and brain don’t work the same way our human ones do.

Once these plants grow in more and achieve some more height they should stand a better chance of holding their own against the background of busy brickwork. But the plants will never “pop” against the wall in the same way they’d show against a simpler, more neutral background. So, in the “note to self” category, I’ll be paying more attention to contrasts between the plant and the hardscape around it.

art, gardening, photography

one way to photograph a tree

July 7, 2009 James 12 Comments

Photographing a tree can present some challenges. You can walk around it to select the best angle, or pick a time of day with the best lighting conditions, but you still have to deal with the fact that the tree stays rooted in its spot and that the background behind the tree may be an unsightly or incomprehensible mess.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #8, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

Last year I ran across the work of Korean photographer Myoung-Ho Lee, whose photos of trees present an elegant–and spectacularly not practical–solution to this problem of background. He just brings a plain background with him and stands it up behind the tree. If you figure that the trees in the photos are at least 25 feet tall, you get a sense of how huge the background sheet has to be.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #13, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

Some of the photos have just the tree isolated against the plain background. Others show the tree and background in the larger context of the landscape where the tree is growing.

The results are pretty amazing, and create photos that are rich with suggestion and ideas about photography.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #11, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

You might be driven to think about the fact that to photograph something in the wilds is to select it. Although this act of selecting the tree isn’t really digging the thing up from nature, it’s still bringing something from the wilds indoors onto a wall. That might make you think that photography–and much of art–is finding something interesting interesting in the world and bringing it into a gallery.

You also might think that looking at a photograph of something might tell you something about how the thing in the photo looks, but very little about its context or meaning.

And you might even think of Marcel Duchamp displaying a signed urinal in an exhibition, with the basic premise that if an artist calls something art, it’s art.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #12, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

None of those thoughts are “right answers,” and you will probably have other thoughts of your own. I think you’ll agree, however, that these are some of the more striking photographs of trees that have ever been taken.

gardening, my garden

my swamp creatures

July 2, 2009 James 11 Comments

Here are some of the pitcher plants growing in my guilty pleasure bog garden, a small concrete container in which I have more than a half dozen of these sarracenias and as many sundews. The guilty pleasure part of this comes in when you consider that most of California is now in its third year of drought, and when you realize that none of the plants in the bog garden likes to dry out. And preferably they’d like to have their toes, though not all their roots, in standing water.

The genus Sarracenia is native mostly to wet zones in the Eastern and Southern United States (with one species into Canada). The ones I’ve tried are proving to be pretty easy to grow as long as they get sunlight and good-quality water. (I’ve probably mentioned before how mine get reverse osmosis water from the local water cafe instead of the hyperchlorinated bong water that comes out of most Southern California spigots. So far, providing good water has been the most difficult part of growing these plants.)

These plants, left to right, top to bottom:

Sarracenia rubra
S. leucophylla ‘Tarnok’
S. x Dixie Lace
S. alata
S. minor

There’s also a closely related swamp thing that’s native to Northern California and Oregon. That plant, Darlingtonia californica, however, is as difficult to grow in most locations as it is stunning. If your can’t provide summer night temperatures below 55 degrees, don’t bother with it. You’ll kill it. I killed mine. Not all native plants makes sense to grow if they’re not native to your environment! (If you really must do what I did and not as I say, you could try constructing a special darlingtonia box like they do in Japan to lower temperatures around the plant.)

So what’s the water use? During the hottest months the little bog survives on three to four 5-gallon servings a month of water. That totals around 15-20 gallons for a space that’s about six or seven square feet, or about 2.1 to 3.3 gallons per square foot. I was a little shocked when I compared this number to what one source says it takes to maintain a typical lawn over the summer here in the coastal zone: 2.6-3.6 gallons per square foot.

Like, I can have a tiny little swamp garden for about the same amount of water it takes to support an equivalent spot of average lawn? And when you consider that most lawns are larger than six or seven square feet, I suddenly feel a little less guilty about my little guilty pleasure. And it made me look at lawns differently, that they’re just green swamps full of grass. I think I’d rather have my little bog garden.

(Full disclosure: We still do have a small patch of grass in the backyard which gets greened up for the big Fourth-of-July party and then neglected most of the rest of the year. It helps to have heavy afternoon shade like we do to minimize how much water a lawn requires. But when the guy who keeps it mowed and edged won’t do it any more (you know who you are), the lawn is history…)

gardening

it came from the florist

June 30, 2009 James 4 Comments

Not long ago one of John’s friends, a florist, stopped by the house for a visit. She brought with her a single long-stemmed red rose in a tall vase. When I came home there was the flower, huge, red, perfect and scentless, sitting on the counter.

As you might guess from my title, there’s a good chance I might have an uncomfortable relationship with flowers from a florist. If you go to someone’s house and want to give them something special, do you stop by the grocery and pick up a pound of tomatoes as a host or hostess gift? Of course not. You’d pick some from your garden and share something special, something seasonal, something that gives of yourself and your garden. For me a store tomato has always shared something with a florist’s rose. What you hold in your hands might be cosmetically stunning, but it leaves me with a question…what is this thing, anyway? Is it botanical? Or maybe some industrial product?

It just so happened that a couple nights before I’d finished reading Amy Stewart’s 2007 book, Flower Confidential. If you don’t know her as an author of books, you might know her as the woman behind the blog, Dirt. And if you don’t know the book, it’s basically a look inside the cut-flower industry and reveals it to be just that: an industry. The three big sections of the book, “Breeding,” “Growing” and “Selling” may well explode any warm and fuzzies you might have about the florist trade, and show it to be possibly worse for the environment, workers and public health than the part of big agribusiness dedicated to food crops.

Here are just a few snippets:

[U]nlike imported fruits and vegetables, flowers are not tested for illegal pesticide residue. After all, they’re not going to be eaten. That creates a situation in which growers have an incentive to use the maximum amount of pesticides to eliminate the possibility of a single gnat turning up in a box.

The complaints about labor and environmental problems have been part of the flower industry’s legacy for as long as it has been in Latin America. Although the situation has been thoroughly reported by investigative journalists, it doesn’t appear to have changed American’s buying habits. Every year, a greater share of flowers sold in the United States come from Latin America. Over the last decade, sales of domestically grown roses have dropped from almost 500 million to just under 100 million. Meanwhile, imports of cut roses have increased to over 1.3 billion stems a year.

At the grocery store, I can buy organic wine, fair-trade chocolate, and hormone-free milk from a local creamery. But the flowers in buckets by the cash register are unlabeled, unmarked, entirely undifferentiated. There’s no basis on which to compare and choose, except for price… The anonymity of cut flowers has made it impossible for customers to demand anything different.

There’s a lot more to the book than rants against the trade, and it’s a worthwhile read if you’d like to know more about what you find at the store.

Several days after the perfect florist’s rose finally passed on to the next plane in the way that florist’s roses do–without opening up, without showing the stamens and pistils that are a flower’s very reason for existing–Linda showed up at the house with a bouquet of roses from her garden. Even before I saw them I knew there were roses in her hands. There was a breeze coming in the front door, and there was scent of roses coloring the air.

Over the next days the roses proceeded to do what roses do. They opened. They continued to release their scents. And in a couple more days they’ll start to drop their petals and fade. They participate in a natural process in a way that their more primped runner-up in a beauty pageant relative does not, and I appreciate them for that.

gardening

parasitized hornworm

June 29, 2009 James 7 Comments

Summer…tomatoes…hornworms… It seems like you can’t have one without the others.

Jenny, friend of the blog, over on the other coast, sent me this photo from her garden, a tobacco hornworm that has been parasitized by a wasp.

Here’s an almost perky description of what’s happening, courtesy the Clemson University Department of Entomology, Soils & Plant Sciences page. You can practically hear the entomologists spinning their LPs with bubbly 1950s pizzicato string music in the background:

The adult wasp inserts its eggs beneath the skin of the hornworm larva. The eggs hatch and the young braconids feed on the viscera of the hornworm until they pupate… This parasite is an important factor in control of hornworms and is most beneficial (my italics).

I do get protective of my tomatoes, especially early in the season. But learning the details of biological controls sometimes gives me the creeps.

Any empathy for the evil hornworm out there? No? Oh well. I thought I’d try…

gardening, my garden

pleasures of hand-watering

June 27, 2009 James 9 Comments

It’s not a proper graywater system, but we’ve gotten used to showering with a bucket below us, both to catch the water before it gets warm enough to use and to catch whatever water splashes into the bucket. We still lose usable water down the drain, but we’re putting what we save to good use in the garden.

With only a small part of the yard on automatic watering, I’ve always done a lot of watering by hand. Now I’ve been doing it a lot more using reclaimed water.

Most of it’s been spot-watering. Not everything in the garden needs the same amount of water, so why not water only the things that need water? This is a tiny buckwheat seedling I’ve been encouraging to get established.

It’s a great way to get to know your plants better. At the same time you learn a lot about the soil they’re growing in, with some areas of the yard accepting a lot of water, while others just pool up and drain slowly.

Another water-conserving thing I’ve been doing is to let the facial fuzz go a few more days than I used to–Good thing facial hair is in these days. More fuzz = less water needed to take it off. (Don’t let the color of the hair get you off-subject. Remember that I’m talking about graywater, not gray hair…)

But back to graywater: One concern I have with using water from the shower is what happens when bath products get dumped in the garden. I’m working on finding out more, but in the meantime I’m only watering the ornamentals with the graywater. A local blog Linda turned me on to, Angel with Dirty Finger Nails, did an introduction to the subject. The post made some recommendations for laundry detergents and linked to a list of a few things to avoid.

Sure, watering by hand is more labor-intensive than turning on the sprinklers. But I think I’ve mentioned it before that I count myself among the gardeners who enjoy gardening, not just gardens. Watering by hand is one of those great pleasures that only gardeners like us will understand.

gardening, landscape design

how the neighbors are coping

June 26, 2009 James 8 Comments

Water restrictions went into effect here in San Diego on June 1. So far there’s a short list of thou-shalt-nots, and the water district has primarily targeted landscape irrigation, the low-hanging fruit, with directives like: no watering between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., watering only on specified days based on your address, sprinkler-watering limited to no more than 10 minutes, three times a week.

Walking around my neighborhood I can see a lot of people who’ve responded to the call. Some are just beginning to make changes, while others made changes years ago.

I was down a couple streets from my house when I saw this front yard makeover. Simple. Just a few big plants chosen for their countours. This is a house where the modern lines of the house echo the style of the plantings. The sago palm requires some water, but the other plants would do well going dry.

Walking around I saw a number of houses where more drought-tolerant plantings were making their way into the landscape. Each house seemed to have their own take on what a drought-tolerant front yard could look like.

Some relied on hardscape to replace a lawn…

…some went in for lots of mulch instead of a lawn, but not many plants…

…some for mulch with some plants, drought-tolerant or not…

…many of the yards that were reimagined as dry landscapes many years ago seemed to rely on gravel and some plants…

…several used gravel with just a few plants to image a desert theme…

…this one mixed gravel, junipers, and edible landscaping–a fig–right out front…

…many used what I’d consider a contemporary look, employing widely-spaced drought tolerant combining natives or exotics set in mulch or DG…

…here’s another of the style where a few plants are set in the middle of space they’ll never grow into. It’s definitely a look, as well as landscaping that embraces the fact that things don’t need to be densely planted to look good…

…many yards feature some more water-intensive plants mixed in with ones that require a lot of water, a kind of planting that a drip irrigation system can make possible. These people used some roses along with plants that’ll look good with less water.

Looking around you sense that this is a neighborhood in transition. Some people are just letting their lawns go brown. Some may be planning on redoing their plantings. Others are probably just waiting out the water restrictions to go back to their old ways.

Some houses are still attached to their old ways that feature conspicuous water consumption. Maybe at some point its was a status thing, showing everyone that you could spend resources on something that can’t be used. But these days it’s hard not to feel a little hot under the collar when these are resources that are being taken from the rest of us.

Still, before I get overly tough on the neighbors, I want to give people the benefit of the doubt for a while. These are tough economic times. Redoing your landscaping can be an expensive proposition. And there are people for whom dealing with a sprinkler timer would be like asking them to pilot the Space Shuttle. (My father could never figure out his timer.) And there’s a chance that people haven’t heard about the new restrictions.

But there’s one water-user that I’ll call out on the carpet. This is our local shopping center, which presumably is maintained by people who know what they’re doing. But watering the sidewalk and the asphalt…

…and then letting all the water run off into the storm drains, well, that does get my goat. But it’s not like I’m only grousing on a blog they’ll probably never read. They’ve heard from me already, and I hope they’ll get in step with the neighborhood they serve.

But overall I’m pleased. People are getting the message and they’re doing something about it. I think they get a sense that we’re all in this together, and we’ll find ways to deal with this water crisis. Not living in a neighborhood ruled by a homeowner’s association, you can see that we’re all finding different solutions.

Some choices will be better than others from the standpoint of water use, habitat, urban runoff or reducing the heat island effect. Still, it’s encouraging to see people people waking up from this fantasy of a lush, green, subtropical California of endless water resources.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]

Category Archives: gardening

friday garden roundup

july bloom day

bye-bye birdie

background check

one way to photograph a tree

my swamp creatures

it came from the florist

parasitized hornworm

pleasures of hand-watering

how the neighbors are coping

an artist loosed in a garden