Category Archives: gardening

gardening, my garden, plant profiles

an easy outdoor orchid

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Orchids can be finicky creatures, especially when you try to grow species that aren’t adapted to your growing conditions. If you’re lucky enough to live in an area with infrequent freezing temperatures (the warm end of zone 9B or in zone 10 or higher), many of the reed-stemmed epidendrums can be as easy to grow as anything in the garden and can be as inexpensive as most other plants. But these also make easy houseplants if you have a nice south-facing window.

epidendrumtwocolorsIf they bear more than a passing resemblance to the flashy florist cattleya orchids it’s no coincidence–They’re closely related members of the Cattleya alliance of orchids.

The parent species for these plants originate in Central America, where they can sometimes be seen growing rampantly. Epidendrum radicans and E. ibaguense are tough and prolific, and will tolerate temperatures down to the high 20s.

To get the species themselves, you’ll have to go to an orchid nursery, but their hybrids can be had in many good garden centers or nurseries. Colors come in everything from the parent species’  orange and red, to pink, salmon, rose, purple, lavender and white. The plants bloom almost the year round and will grow two to five feet tall, depending on light and watering. They all make great starter orchids or good plants to use for landscaping.

Light

Epidendrums are happiest in bright light, from dappled shade to several hours of full sun. They will survive in full sun, but the plants will be short, and the leaves may scorch on the hottest days. They’ll also grow in heavy shade, but the plants will grow tall, and you won’t see any flowers.

epidendrumplantThis is an example of plant that has been grown in fairly deep shade. The plant grows big, loose and floppy, and it only flowers on the stems that receive some direct sun.

Water

Low to moderate garden water is a good starting point for these epidendrums. They will tolerate quite moist conditions, and they can be surprisingly drought tolerant. But they look best somewhere in between.

Soil

You can grown these in special orchid mixes if you like, but mine have been happy stuck into average-to-sandy garden dirt. Plants grown in orchid mixes will require more watering. Any loose potting mix would work well for plants in pots.

Propagation

epidendrumkeikiFlowering stems, when they reach the end of their flowering life, usually produce new plants near their tips. Orchid growers call these keikis, Hawaiian for “babies.” These little plants will send out long white roots before long. Cut the rooted keikis off when the roots are two to four inches long and stick them where you’d like another plant, being careful not to break the brittle roots. The plants will often start blooming within a year. Additionally, epidendrums can be dug up and divided every few years.

If you get deeper into epidendrum species, you’ll also find species with brown, green and almost-blue flowers, some of them bicolors, some of them with outrageous spotting. If you have the collector gene in your DNA, you’ll find 1500 species to choose from. These specialty epidendrums don’t necessarily have the same lust for life and tolerance for cool temperatures as the common reedstems do, so be sure to do some research before sticking them in a garden bed with your perennials.

gardening, my garden

greener gardening practices

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I think that these days all of us are trying to go green in many aspects of our lives as we try to reduce our demands on the world’s resources. Gardening has the shiny green patina of communing with nature and being kind to plants and animals that make up this green earth. But so many modern gardening practices consume big piles of the resources that we depend on, and others contributes significantly to environmental pollution.

Since it’s early in the year, the time that we many of us make resolutions, I’ve outline some areas that I’ll be trying to work on in my own garden. I’ve gathered them together below and categorized them into the three big Rs of going green: reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Reduce

  1. Fewer annuals: The semi-twisted logic of planting annuals, nurturing them for six months, and then yanking them out when they’re all bloomed out to replace them with other seasonal annuals to enjoy for maybe just a few more months is starting to bother me. It’s a certain amount of work on my part, and the energy that must go into the production of bedding plants adds to what guilt I feel. I doubt I’ll give up on annuals entirely. But I’ll try to rely on them less, mostly as temporary fillers until something with year-round interest can take over. Alternately, a lot of annuals reseed, so that you can plant them one year, and they’ll return reliably in future years. Allysum, zinnias, melampodium, celosia, poppies and many ornamental grasses are just a few of the plants that reseed reliably.
  2. I’ll think twice before I pull out a plant. Is a plant really ill or dying? Or am I just bored with it?
  3. When I do decide that a plant has to go, I’ll work on using more plants that are better adapted to my environment. Living in San Diego, this means using more Mediterranean-adapted plants and plants native to the area. This will reduce needs for supplemental water, plant food and insect control.
  4. It’s more work, but I’m starting more plants from seed these days. Shipping a packet of seeds across the country takes way less energy than shipping the bed-full of plants that many packets will give you. Direct-sowing the seeds into the ground can save on transportation costs for potting mix and pots. Another bonus is that you can treat yourself to plenty more varieties than would be available at the local nursery.
  5. In addition to buying more seeds to grow, I’m saving more seeds from the plants I already have. For species and open-pollenated heirloom plants, the seed should come true to the original. For hybrid plants, the seedlings can be an adventure, some of them coming looking like their parents, others coming out to be interesting mongrel mixes.
  6. Grow more edible plants. There’s the push to buy locally grown produce, fruits and veggies that have been grown within a hundred miles of your house. Why not grow food yourself and drop the transportation costs to zero? I’ve got various herbs overwintering in the garden, and seeds for various plants are now in the ground or already germinating: kale, beets, amaranth, miner’s lettuce, plus whatever plants of romaine and New Zealand spinach will come back from seed. Several of these have terrific ornamental value, so they’ll get to live with the more decorative plantings.
  7. I want to learn more about how to prepare the edible plants I already have. For instance, the cattails growing in the pond in the back yard are often listed as being one of the staples of the native American population in centuries past. Some of the local succulent population of the genus Dudleya also were used for food, and in fact one of the species is called edulis. (With a name like edulis, it’s gotta be good!) Maybe those and other plants in the garden could be relied on for occasional interesting meals. Even if some of them might be a little too weird for regular consumption, eating, like gardening, ought to be an adventure.

Reuse

  1. It’s not perfect horticultural hygiene, but I try to reuse pots whenever possible. Unfortunately I usually end up with more gallon pots than I’ll ever be able to use a second or third time. Many nurseries will take them to reuse. And then I found that our almost-local native plant outfit, Las Pilitas Nursery, will also donate 10 cents to the California Native Plant Society for each pot that is returned for them to reuse. (That would explain the Lowes and Home Depot pots that I’ve seen at the nursery!)
  2. For those situations when I decide a plant isn’t right for one spot, I’ll try to see if there’s another location in the garden where it would work better. Or may I know someone who’d be dying to do some plant rescue…
  3. When I buy seeds, I sometimes end up with more than I need. I’ll share them with interested folks, and it could be an way to get more native or drought-tolerant plants into people’s gardens.

Recycle

  1. Stores often have last week’s bulbs on sale for not much money. If they’re bulbs adapted to the climate, this is a great way to save some of these plants from the dumpsters. And if you’re into dumpster-diving or cruising the back alleys of garden centers, you might pick these up for free. Most of the narcissus in my yard came through these mark-downs.
  2. I’ll have to admit that I’m a failed composter. I just don’t have the magic combination of time, space and discipline (in all honesty it’s mostly the discipline where I’m lacking). But the city fortunately has a greens recycling program for those of us who don’t have this down. Kitchen scraps are already making it into the bins, and I’ll try to be be even more fanatical with anything green in the garden that would compost.
  3. If you’re not doing it already, recycle lawn lawn clippings into mulch. Last summer I convinced John to put the onto the veggie garden instead of dumping them in the city greens recycling. This way they’re still getting recycled, only they don’t have to be trucked to the landfill to be turned into mulch.
  4. Even if you can’t find someone to reuse your plastic pots, there are some emerging uses for them that might become available to more parts of the country. I’ll keep my eyes open in case there are interesting local recycling opportunities, like the one where pots would be melted down for “landscape timbers.” (The link goes to an great program in Missouri.)
  5. Broken clay pots make great covers for drain holes in pots around the garden. They allow the water to drain out, but also reduce the amount of potting soil that you lose.

Like many new year’s resolutions, I know I won’t stick to them fanatically. One of the things that draws me to the plant world is the sheer variety in all the cool plants that I can invite into my garden. I’m a collector at heart, so saying no to a new and interesting specimen is one of the hardest things for me to do. I know that that’s going to be one of the hardest goals to stick to. Hopefully, putting it out in a public space like this post will provide me a little gentle pressure and reminder of what I intended to do.

gardening, landscape design, my garden

recycling concrete

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One of the easiest ways to reuse broken concrete is to stack up the pieces to make a low garden wall.

recycledconcretewalloverview

My house came with an expanse of dangerously uneven, cracked concrete that needed to be removed. One option would have been to haul it off to the landfill. But turning the scraps into this little wall for a raised vegetable garden ended up being a greener solution.

The hardest part was breaking up the concrete into manageable pieces. (We used a sledgehammer). And lifting the twenty to sixty pound chunks into place made for some hard work. But it was basically an “easy” job in that it wasn’t particularly technical and didn’t demand too many brain cells.

If your soil is especially unstable, the concrete could be set on top of a foundation. But for almost all soils, and for a low wall like this one–about twenty inches tall–don’t bother. Try to stagger the joints between pieces from row to row to make the wall more stable. Work to nest the pieces together as tightly as possible to minimize soil loss out the sides if you’ll be using the wall for a raised bed.

If you would like a softer look, you could also plant little succulents or compact rock-garden plants into the crevices. Creeping sedums, alyssum, low varieties of thyme or trailing strawberries would be good, easy choices for a wall that has a sunny exposure. You could also plant low-growing bulbs or annuals in front of the wall.

recycledconcretewalldetail

The result is definitely on the rustic end of the spectrum, more “cottage” than glam or glitzy. But you’ll feel better about not filling up the landfill. And in the end the project could be easier than loading the chunks into a truck to haul them away.

gardening, my garden

my new year's plant

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If there’s a plant that says New Year’s Day to me, it’s the common jade plant, Crassula ovata. The reason why is a little embarrassing, and I’m trusting you not to tell anyone else.

Growing up, my family would spend the morning of New Year’s Day gathered around the television setting, watching the Rose Parade. Overtaken by misguided jags of inspiration, I’d make my own little parade floats out of little cardboard boxes and whatever flowers were available.

jadeflowers

My family lived in the same valley as Pasadena, though inland a few miles. The two locations essentially shared the same climate profile, something around Zone 9B. Don’t believe the propaganda about the Pasadena area having gargantuan fields of roses blooming everywhere in January. Yes, you’ll find roses, but not in the same number as other flowers.

Instead, at my parents’, the plant that was dependably covered with flowers on New Year’s was the jade plant. They had a couple plants in the back yard that were about as tall as I was, and they supplied more than enough little starry white flowers to completely cover my artistic creations.

jadeplant

Now, all grown up, I have a jade in the front yard. This year, with the bizarrely warm fall we had, the plant was confused and started blooming in November. Here’s how it looked yesterday. Not totally covered in flowers, but with plenty of flowers to go around–unless someone needs to build a major float.

So, with that photo, let me wish you a happy New Year’s! May 2009 bring you piles of flowers and interesting plants and good times with people who care deeply for you!

gardening

defying gravity

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I was thinking about doing a flat wall art-piece incorporating living plants, and what should I run across but this on Landscape + Urbanism, a creation that was featured in Metropolitan Home.

Panel planting
Panel planting

It’s a panel of living succulents that were establish in a normal, flat orientation. Then everything was rotated 90 degrees and mounted on the wall.

So is this realization a good idea? It looks cool, for sure. But the plant choices make me think that this effect might not last for long.

Aeonium arboreum ‘Zwartkopf‘, Kalanchoe fedtschenkoi and Echeveria ‘Afterglow’ are the named plants. But all of those–like most plants–will grow up, away from gravity just like they’d grow in the garden, and away from the panel in search of light. This tailored wall piece, over the course of a year or so, could turn shaggy and scrappy, like a florist’s bouquet once the flowers start to wither.

I like the basic idea, but I think other plants would probably stay looking nice for longer, particularly plants that were adapted to growing in a horizontal orientation: Creeping fig (Ficus pumila) in its various color forms, various colors of clinging ivy (Hedera sp.), Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) or many vines that attach themselves to walls using aerial roots. Yes, I know, all these are potentially over-exuberant to invasive plants. But constrained to a panel separate from a wall, and with a shallow, constrained root system, I’d reason that you’d stand a chance of keeping these plants well behaved.

And you wouldn’t have to re-plant the wall panel over and over again.

art, gardening

molds–the good kind

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In 1999 I went to an exhibition examining some artists’ response to natural processes. Out of all the pieces the work of Daniel Ladd stayed stuck in my mind all these years. On display were gourds that he had grown into molds shaped like human bodies. With surfaces as smooth as polished stone the process only gave itself away when you noticed the gourd stems.

Dan Ladd. Moulded gourd [ source ]

To do the pieces in the show, Ladd formed molds out of plaster using reproductions of classical sculptures. The mold was then placed in the garden and a young Lagenaria gourd placed inside. As the gourd was allowed to mature inside, it took on the shape of the mold. After frost, the mold was removed, revealing the artwork.

Ladd also uses other shapes as mold forms, but the ones I find most affecting are these torsos. When I started assembling this post I found his website which had maybe a dozen different examples of his gourd sculptures. When I looked again he’d taken them down. So you’ll have to imagine what they looked like based on this specimen that someone had preserved away from his site.

In addition to the gourd art, Ladd also works with elaborately manipulated living plants to form growing sculptures. The whole topiary-like idea of reshaping nature is there in these works, but the results are pretty different. His site, even though it’s currently a work in progress, has some examples.

In researching this post I ran into a whole pile of other things in this general area of vegetable torture, including another artist employing a similar technique.

Mary Catherine Newcomb. Molded eggplant from Product of Eden [ source ]

Mary Catherine Newcomb is a Canadian sculptor who also molds vegetables into human shapes. She then can add non-vegetable details, as you see to the left, in a project currently at the Rodman Hall Art Centre at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.

On the vine, the sculptures are fun, though they don’t have the presence of Ladd’s work. When she takes her veggies and preserves them in glass bottles, however, they turn into something weird and unsettling, like embryos preserved in formaldehyde. Icky icky icky. I want one.

The art of molding gourds isn’t an invention by Ladd. In fact it goes back centuries in China, with its current master practitioner being Zhang Cairi. I have a dim recollection of having heard that vegetables were also molded in southern Europe–things like eggplant and tomatoes. That’s an area for me to do a little more research in. I’ll post anything I find out here. And if you know anything about, please let me know.

A few other gourd and molded vegetable resources:

VegiForms, a commercially available series of molds that lets you turn your fruit into cute sculptures.

Gourd art of other sorts. These are basically “just” decorated gourds.

Jim Story on shaping gourds, via the American Gourd Society.

Jim Widess demonstrates making molded portrait gourds.

Book: The Immortal Molded Gourds of Mr Zhang Cairi by Betty Finch and Guojun Zhang.

gardening, places

shady deal

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Few ideas are simpler: Plant a tree. Shade your house. Reduce your cooling expenses. Reduce global warming.

A current program that’s giving away shade trees for free is coming out of the California Center for Sustainable Energy. Customers of San Diego Gas & Electric in San Diego and Orange Counties can get their choice of twenty kinds of trees in fifteen gallon containers. Each household can claim as many as ten trees. Choices run from small, slow-growing crepe myrtles to big London plane trees to native live oaks.

Even if you’re out of the target audience for the program, their site has a link page to a pile of shade tree and urban forestry sites with lots of information. Their own site has a couple of basic principles for deciding where to put a shade tree and what kind to use:

  1. Plant only deciduous trees on the south side of the building to allow the sun to warm your home in the winter
  2. Concentrate planting on the west side, that’s where the energy savings are the greatest

A few years back there was a similar giveaway program, and houses in the neighborhood got flyered with offers for your choice of one of three tree species. For free. They’d even plant the tree for you.

Free cassia tree
Free cassia tree

The neighbor next door opted for one, a gold medallion tree, Cassia leptophylla. It’s in bloom right now and is pretty attractive. The plant is supposed to top out at thirty feet and spread twenty or thirty feet.

But now we come to the part of the post where we look the gift horse in the mouth.

My neighborhood is on the first rise of hills over the Pacific Ocean. Many of the houses here have views out over the ocean, Mission Bay, downtown San Diego and even down to the hills of Tijuana in Mexico and the craggy Coronado Islands off the coast of Tijuana and Rosarito. (There’s something really cool about standing on your roof deck and being able to see another country.) My view isn’t the most spectacular. Still, the glimpses of water and the land below give me a sense of place.

As for the cooling effects of the trees, the majority of the houses around here either don’t have air conditioning or–like our neighbor with the tree–have it but never use it. If things get warm, you open a window or door. Of course, a couple miles inland things are different, and a shade tree can save you lots in cooling.

So, to my neighbors, a plea: Go ahead and plant trees, but select the ones that are scaled for your house and the neighborhood.

Ugly house
Ugly house
But to this one particular neighbor I offer a special exemption. Please do plant a tree. Ivy. Shrubbery. Anything!

gardening, quotes, rambles

matters of taste

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Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay for Extreme Horticulture,* a book by photographer John Pfahl who was the subject of one of this blog’s first posts. I bumped into the essay again as I was skimming through an anthology I’d read last year, Solnit’s Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. Here’s a fragment that I found really interesting, part of her essay, “The Botanical Circus.”

There is a whole language of class in the garden–when they returned to the garden, flowers were redeemed with the tasteful monochromatic schemes of the likes of Gertrude Jekyll; and, as gardening essayist Michael Pollan points out, there is a whole class war of the roses, in which old roses–more fragrant, more softly shaped, less abundant in their bloom, more limited in the palette–are the exiled aristocracy. Good taste is about renunciation: you must have enough to restrain in order to value restraint, enough abundance to prize austerity. After all, it was only after aniline dyes made bright clothing universally available that the privileged stopped dressing like peacocks; spareness is often the public face of excess…Moderation, the Greek philosopher said, is pleasant to the wise, but it’s not necessarily fun. Eleanor Perényi writes in her book Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden,

Looking at my dahlias one summer day, a friend whose taste runs to the small and impeccable said sadly, “You do like big conspicuous flowers, don’t you?” She meant vulgar, and I am used to that. It hasn’t escaped me that mine is the only WASP garden in town to contain dahlias, and not the discreet little singles either. Some are as blowsy as half-dressed Renoir girls; others are like spiky sea-creatures, water lilies, or the spirals in a crystal paperweight; and they do shoot up to prodigious heights. But to me they are sumptuous, not vulgar.

I’ve gone on in some posts about the necessity to rein in color choices to achieve some sort of harmony. But then I’ve written about wonderfully vulgar, er…sumptuous, plants like toloache and Echium wildprettii. I really do like a certain amount of order, but at the same I do appreciate these flaming agents of chaos. I may achieve pockets of “good taste” in the yard, but these are tempered by the bawdy and outrageous.

So what’s your garden like? Carefully coordinated and muted like a wardrobe from J. Crew or Land’s End? Or sassy and outrageous like Martha Stewart in hot pants and five-inch cha-cha heels?

A note on my links to books: The book links in all of my posts (with only one exception that I can think of) take you to abebooks.com, a site made up of hundreds of booksellers around the world, a good many of them the little brick and mortar operations that are dying out too quickly as giants like Amazon take over publishing.

gardening

a basil bouquet

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Basil bouquet
Basil bouquet
Basil is one of those herbs that doesn’t do well stuck in the refrigerator. Whenever I buy a bunch I get out a little vase, fill it with water, and help myself to however much of the bouquet I need for a meal. (It helps to pull off the lower leaves so that only stems sit in the water.)

Basil rooting in water
Basil rooting in water
Kept in a bright spot in the kitchen, the bouquet will begin to sprout roots. That’ll help keep the basil fresher. And if you have any left after a couple weeks, you can set the rooted cuttings out in the garden. Instant basil plants. Just add water.