Category Archives: gardening

the long brown season

July 29, 2008 James 4 Comments

When you spend your time in San Diego’s well-watered burbs it’s easy to forget that you’re living in the middle of a desert. The last significant rainfall in town occurred in February, and the unirrigated natural lands around town have long ago begun their transformation into the long brown season.

My recent little excursion to Los Peñasquitos Canyon, a local open-space preserve between San Diego and Del Mar, gave me a chance to see what the natural world is doing in these parts.

Not everything is brown, of course. Some plants are tapped into locations with residual moisture. Others have adapted to the climate and have the stamina to stay green year-round.

Here are a few of the plants still showing colors other than brown:

Flat-topped buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum) a native plant.

Wild rose (Rosa californica) a native.

Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) an exotic, invasive species. This is the culinary plant from the Mediterranean that has escaped into the wilds.

Poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) a native–one of the few plants that turns blazing red in the fall. Even now, it’s showing some of that red color.

Thistle in bloom. I’m not sure if this is native or not, but it’s not the hyper-nasty Russian thistle (the dried flowers of which are shown in the large photo above). [Correction/edit August 1: This is actually a teasel, not a thistle. Like the escaped fennel above, this too is a renegade exotic species. Pretty, though…]

It’s a condition of our consumer culture and times to want what we don’t have. Living in San Diego, most of the plant materials that people expect to find in their home gardens fall outside of the category of what occurs naturally or is well-suited to the area.

It’s always instructive to visit the natural preserves to see plants–even the nasty invasives–that are supremely well-designed to live in this climate. Some of the plants in these parks would do extremely well in gardens. But it’s hard letting go of plants that many of us associate with places we’ve lived in and even people we’ve known.

My own yard has several areas that I consider my guilty pleasure zones. I have pieces of a bromeliad and a kahili ginger that I was given in the 1970s, as well as the green rose from that I dug up from the house where I grew up in the Los Angeles area. And I’m a natural born collector who has a hard time saying no to interesting plants. These plants all require some water and tending beyond what nature brings.

But they’re counterbalanced by garden areas planted with drought-tolerant species, local and introduced, that receive almost no water and attention over the summer. As time goes on, I’ll be expanding those areas. Don’t expect me any time soon, however, to plant poison oak, as pretty and hardy as the plant is. I have my limits as to how much true nature I want in my garden…

gardening, landscape design

a man named pearl

July 28, 2008 James 3 Comments

Opening last Friday in theaters in Los Angeles (and just a few other places) was A Man Named Pearl. The Pearl of the film is South Carolina master topiarist Pearl Fryar. The documentary doesn’t open here in San Diego until August 22 but the film is on my list. How often is it that you have a film about a gardener? (Let’s see…there was Peter Sellers in Being There…and then…any others? Would The Constant Gardener or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil really qualify beyond having gardens and gardeners in their titles?)

The film’s site has show dates and a trailer that gives you the best overview of his work. That trailer forms the opening part of the first of the clips below, and afterwards it goes into a forum featuring Fryar talking about his work in front of an audience. The second clip is a more extended talk and includes a demonstration with him firing up his electric hedge clippers…

gardening, landscape design

a vacant house

July 26, 2008 James 1 Comment

There’s a house across that street that is looking like it’s turning into a victim of the current mortgage fiasco. The owner bought at the top of the home valuations and probably expected prices to keep growing.

When no one had seen the main owner for weeks we were starting to think that things weren’t quite right over there. A month ago a mortgage broker’s sign appeared in front of the house, then someone with the city came by to shut off the water. Seeing all this happening confirmed our worst fears.

Since life here in the desert can’t exist without supplemental water, the last time a house sat vacant on our street one of the neighbors kept it watered while another mowed the lawn. With that situation fresh in John’s memory, he cornered the neighbor across the street and struck a deal. Between the two of them they’d tend the house until a new owner could move in, doing what they can to keep up the neighborhood.

At some point the water got restored to the house, and so the yard was getting water. But no one was taking care of the mowing.

Enter John and the neighbor. Now, whenever one of them has a mower out, the parking strip along the sidewalk gets a quick haircut.

Unfortunately, the yard inside the gates is going feral, but at least we can’t see it so easily. This was difficult-to-maintain landscaping put in by non-gardeners and only tended by hired help. Once the gardeners left, entropy started to claim the inner yard. (John’s and the neighbor’s commitment to keeping up the neighborhood for free go only so far. And by now you may gather my general shrill attitude towards maintaining expansive lawns in the desert…)

The last word is that the house has been sold. Who bought it, when they’ll move it, who they are–all that’s still the grand mystery that these transactions so often are. These deals can fall through any time.

After you live in a neighborhood for a while you get to experience good neighbors and neighbors from the other side of hell. The last ones in this house were some of the good ones–personable, friendly, interesting and tolerant, and we’re sad to see them go. As we head in for another round in this game of new neighbor roulette, we’re keeping our fingers crossed for reasonable ones again.

gardening, plant profiles

toloache

July 23, 2008 James 2 Comments

In the local canyons, this time of year brings about the spectacular flowers of the sacred datura, Datura wrightii. The low, mounding bushes grow two to three feet tall and easily twice as wide, and are covered from dusk to mid-morning with immense white trumpets, easily eight inches across, often flushed with pale lavender.

Photo by Dlarsen, via Wikimedia Commons [ source ]

This is one of several species of the genus that has been called toloache in Mexico. It’s in the nightshade family, and like other members of the genus Datura, the plant is as toxic as it is spectacular.

Even though it’s highly poisonous, some Native Americans used the plant as part of a ceremony marking the passage of a child to an adult. From the Wikipedia: “Among the Chumash, when a boy was 8 years old, his mother gave him a preparation of momoy to drink. This was supposed to be a spiritual challenge to the boy to help him develop the spiritual wellbeing that is required to become a man. Not all of the boys survived [my emphasis].”

On my recent pre-dusk hike through our local Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve all the buds on the numerous toloache plants were tightly furled when I arrived.

But by the time I left, less a half hour before sunset, the flowers buds were loosening. Had I stayed an hour longer I would have been able to view the fresh flowers in the last glow of daylight like an intoxicating evil welcoming the night.

Here you can get a sense for how large these flowers will be.

Despite its bad press this is one of our local plants that I’ve been eying to add to the garden. The only thing the cat shows any interest in are plants that look like grasses or catnip, and there are parts of the yard no small child could get to. Besides, I’ve already got a number of toxic plants in the garden–oleanders, tomatoes and other nightshade cousins.

In addition to having amazing flowers, this datura requires no added water during the long dry summer. Nothing this spectacular can make that claim.

Speaking of poisonous plants, last week’s New York Times had an article on the Duchess of Northumberland. She’s in the process of building a modern annex to grounds that were designed by Capability Brown, the landmark British landscape designer from the eighteenth century. Traditionalists are not happy. “They said I am to gardens what Imelda Marcos is to shoes,” the Duchess is quoted. In her project one of the features is the Poison Garden, which the article describes as “a spooky fenced-off area with about 100 varieties of toxic plants, as well as cannabis and opium poppies.”

I bet this duchess’s garden parties will be pretty interesting affairs…

gardening, my garden

trimming leaves

July 22, 2008 James Leave a comment

Here’s a little plant-tidying tip that I picked up years ago. If you have sword-shaped leaves that have died on their ends, instead of chopping off the ends blunt and square, trim them into a pointed shape using very sharp pruning shears or scissors. This gives you a more natural shape to what’s left.

If someone looks really closely they won’t be fooled by your handiwork, but it’ll draw less attention than if you’d just lopped off the brown tips.

Before:
Leaf with dead tips before pruning

After:
Leaf after trimming

art, gardening, photography

chemistry, physics, biology

July 18, 2008 James 4 Comments

Here’s a cool artwork by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey that was featured at the recent Wimbledon tennis-thing. It’s made of three panels of grass.

Wimble grass art

The sections were grown in a darkened space under artificial lights that projected through photographic negatives. The brighter the exposure, the richer the green color.

It’s the reverse principle at work as leaving a hose or board on your lawn for a week: When you pick up the hose or board you can see how the grass grew pale where it was deprived of sunlight.

So what would you call this art process? It’s basically using light to effect a transformation of some kind of material, and that’s pretty much the definition of photography.

Photography’s first revolution was the ability to use chemical processes to fix an image made by light–think of the photographer disappearing into a darkroom with some unpromising plates or film and coming back with a magical image. Then the physics of turning light sensors into electrical impulses made chemistry-free imaging possible, leading to things like television cameras and your cellphone camera.

And now comes this process where the recording device is biological. Of course, relying on something living and growing, the result is anything but permanent, but that’s also one of the nice things about the pieces. Nothing lasts forever.

The grass artwork reminds me of Dennis Oppenheim’s brilliant 1970 photographic performance, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, where he leaves a book on his chest as the exposed parts of him sunburn on the beach. The first picture shows him at the beginning, with the book. In the second, hours later with the book removed, a sunburn describes the area where the book protected him.

Dennis Oppenheim. Reading Position for Second Degree Sunburn. Chromogenic prints with applied text.

It’s just as much a “biological photograph” as the Wimbledon piece. While the grass piece stuns most in its execution, the Oppenheim piece, coming out of conceptual art, buzzes with ideas and humor.

Next time you come back from the beach with untanned patches where your swimsuit shaded your body, why not consider yourself a walking photograph?

[ Thanks to Landscape+Urbanism, where I first saw the Wimbledon grass pieces, and to Creative Review, where I’ve linked. ]

gardening, landscape design, rambles

i've been tagged!

July 15, 2008 James 4 Comments

Thanks to Mary Ann at Urban Garden Journal, this blog has been tagged. Actually, it’s the second time I’ve been tagged. (Thanks, In the Garden!) But I was swamped at the time and didn’t get a chance to respond. Also, I was even newer to blogging than I am now, and wasn’t familiar with the game of blog tag. In my occasionally over-cynical mind I mistook it to be some sort of suspect blogger’s pyramid scheme. But in the meantime I’ve realized it’s actually a fun game and a terrific way to get to know more about your fellow bloggers.

The rules as passed down to me from the two taggers are simple, though the two sets of rules vary a bit. If I’ve tagged you, you can pick whichever version you like, or make up something along these lines:

Once you have been tagged, in your blog you must list six (or ten) weird things, random facts, or habits about yourself.
In that same post, tag five (or six) other bloggers, by linking to their blogs and writing a little about why you’re tagging that blog.
Once you’ve done the above, you should leave a note on the blog of the person who tagged you. (That would be me.)
The person that is tagged can’t tag back the person who just tagged them.

So…some randomness about me:

“Mulch” is one of my favorite words–not to garden with it, necessarily, just the sound of of the word.
My shoe size is 11.
When other children were wanting to be firemen or police officers I was thinking that I wanted to be a college professor. I didn’t grow out of it until I was three years into a graduate program in music.
Though I enjoy novels, I read mostly non-fiction books.
The Four Corners region of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah is probably my favorite place on earth.
I love good chocolate.
In my teen years I appeared as an extra in Paul Bartel’s film, Death Race 2000.
I appreciate order, but I seem to attract chaos at least as much.
I have a big yellow ocean kayak in the side yard that I haven’t taken out on the water in at least four years.
I don’t consider myself particularly interested in popular culture–I wouldn’t know a Britney Spears if one jumped up from the sidewalk and bit me on the butt–but I do enjoy Bravo TV’s Project Runway and Top Chef reality shows, as well as the Daily Show.

And now for the bloggers I’m tagging:

Garden History Girl: Excellent insights into gardens today, informed by gardens past, as well as notes on cultural influences that can influence garden-making.

The Midnight Garden: A blogger on Cape Cod enjoying his garden and its seasons–as well as his morning cups of coffee.

Garden Wise Guy: Always informative, usually funny, sometimes even a little snide–and coming from me that’s a compliment! You might not want your garden to appear on his blog…sometimes like a 10 worst-dressed list…

Landscape + Urbanism: A great roundup of things in the outdoor urbanism realm. Lots of fun ideas to steal and down-size for your own garden.

Pacha Mona: What’s it like to live and garden and cook with interesting ingredients in Costa Rica? This blog captures the textures and flavors of a place that’s on my “visit someday” list.

Garden Porn: With a name like that what’s not to like? A fun read and some great spaces to boot.

There are more–lots more–that I enjoy and would have loved to have tagged. But I need to keep some in store for the next time I’m tagged. And if I haven’t tagged you but you’d like to play, please do! I’ll add you to my list here.

gardening, quotes, rambles

garden color

July 12, 2008 James 1 Comment

Color of course needs to be an important consideration in planning the garden. You may be familiar with Gertrude Jekyll’s important book devoted just to the subject, Colour Scheme in the Flower Garden. If you don’t know it—or if you your copy is falling apart—you can read it for free online via Google Books. Her selections of plants won’t apply to many locations since she lived in England, but her thought processes about choosing colors and staging processions of colors throughout the year colors are instructive and worth the read.

You can find plenty of other garden books online through Google books. If they’re out of copyright you can see the entire text. Even if they’re still under copyright control, you can skim through many others–usually enough to let you decide if you want to buy the book, and often enough to answer a specific question that might be your only reason for wanting to look at the book.

When Google started their massive project to digitize items in many of the world’s major libraries they raised more than a few eyebrows. What were they up to? What were they doing scanning all these books and potentially releasing for free the hard work of the world’s authors?

I’ve just finished The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr. It’s definitely a work of journalism and not poetry, but a paragraph on page 223 made my jaw drop and just by itself made reading the book worthwhile:

George Dyson, a historian of technology…was invited to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, in October 2005 to give a speech… After his talk, Dyson found himself chatting with a Google engineer about the company’s controversial plant to scan the contents of the world’s libraries into its database. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” the engineer told him. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI [Artificial Intelligence].”

Creepy. But at least in the end, when Google’s computers take over the world, they’ll at least be able to put together a color-coordinated English cottage garden.

gardening, quotes, rambles

more thoughts about gardens

July 11, 2008 James 2 Comments

I quoted recently from Robert Pogue Harrison’s recent Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Here are a couple more passages that I liked.

…[I]n the final analysis we must always remember that nature has its own order and that human gardens do not, as one hears so often, bring order to nature; rather, they give order to our relation to nature.

…[T]here is in the Versailles gardens an aesthetic drive to tame, and even humiliate, nature into submission…

While we long ago ceased to credit doctrines regarding the divine right of kings, and while few among us believe we are living in an age of enlightenment, we still have not sufficiently dismantled the doctrine of humanity’s divine right, which in many ways still reigns supreme in contemporary Western societies, in practice if not in theory. For all its perverse beauty and wondrous transfiguration of pride, Versailles will not be of much help to us when it comes to finding a less presumptuous relationship to nature than the one bestowed upon us by that era.

In the interest of full self-disclosure I’ve never visited the massive formal gardens of Louis XIV at Versailles, but I think I’d feel awestruck and spiritually injured at the same time. The author captures my squeamishness perfectly.

everything, gardening, quotes, rambles

humility 101

July 7, 2008 James 3 Comments

Most of [Czech author Karel] Čapek’s commentators consider The Gardener’s Year a minor work, but as Verlyn Klinkenborg remarks in the introduction to the Modern Library English edition of 2002, “most students of Čapek believe gardening is a subset of life, whereas gardeners, including Čapek, understand that life is a subset of gardening.”
–Robert Pogue Harrison

My first meaningful exposure to the work of Čapek came through Leoš Janáček’s amazing 1925 opera, The Makropulos Affair, which is based on Čapek’s play of the same name. I suppose you could call it a science fiction opera: a young woman becomes the laboratory rat of her alchemist father, who is tasked by Emporer Rudolf II to devise a formula that will extend his life by three centuries. When given the potion, the daughter at first drops into a coma. However, when she wakes up, she truly has been transformed into being able to live another 300 years. In living through those extra years she becomes increasingly detached from her original humanity as she is forced to leave one mortal husband after another and loved ones fade around her. At the end of the opera, even though she is in possession of her father’s formula for the elixir that would allow her to keep extending her life, she refuses to concoct the drink and chooses humanity–and death.

It’s a powerful tale with echoes all the way back to the Odyssey, where Odysseus declines eternal life in favor of his known, mortal one, back in Ithaca with the family and friends he knows and loves. Also, Čapek, ever rooted in the earth and distrustful of the quick, shallow pleasures of “progress,” uses the play to express his dis-ease with where unthinking application of the technologies that were exploding around him would lead the human race.

I bring all this up because I’ve been reading Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. One of the chapters is devoted to Čapek and his work, The Gardener’s Year. The quote at the beginning of this post comes from that chapter, as does this second by Čapek himself, in an extended quote:

I tell you, to tame a couple of rods of soil is a great victory… And if you have no appreciation for this strange beauty, let fate bestow upon you a couple of rods of clay–clay like lead, squelching and primeval clay out of which coldness oozes; which yields under the spade like chewing-gum, which bakes in the sun and gets sour in the shade; ill-tempered, unmalleable, greasy, and sticky like plasters of Paris, slippery like a snake, and dry like a brick, impermeable like tin, and heavy like lead. And now smash it with a pick-axe, cut it with a spade, break it with a hammer, turn it over and labour, cursing aloud and lamenting.

Then you will understand the animosity and callousness of dead and sterile matter which ever did defend itself, and still does, against becoming a soil of life; and you will realize what a terrible fight life must have undergone, inch by inch, to root in the soil of the earth, whether that life be called vegetation or man.

All this may sound a little dense and difficult going, but others of Harrison’s quotes from Čapek’s work show it to be incredibly funny at the same time. I have plenty of books lined up that I need to read, but this one is moving to the front of the queue.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]