Category Archives: gardening

gardens as social spaces

May 18, 2008 James Leave a comment

A little while back I wrote about the Critical Mass photography awards. One of the “Top 50” photographers, Lucas Forest Foglia, had a series based on a community garden and the people who interact there.

Left: Lukas Forest Foglia: Savuth Watering [ source ]

The Great American Garden shares undertones with the Great American anything: competition, excess and individualism. Just look at all the battles for the greenest lawn that the Scott’s fertilizer people perpetuate in their ads that are about to start saturating the airwaves.

But community gardens allow something else to happen. They’re shared spaces and meeting places where people of differing backgrounds and cultures interact.

Foglia’s photos look at the varied people who work plots of land in a community garden in Providence, Rhode Island, and they celebrate the intersections that develop there. It’s a nice body of work and definitely worth a look.

Lessons

Left: Lukas Forest Foglia: Lessons, 2005 [ source ]

gardening, plant profiles

no such thing as a boring plant

May 2, 2008 James Leave a comment

The Botany Photo of the Day page at the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden site is always worth a visit. They post a photo, along with a brief discussion that points to a pile of references that you could follow around and keep yourself happy, interested and unproductive for much of a morning. Why go outside and pull weeds?

Their plant for May Day, Fritillaria affinis, is a native of Western North America, and a plant occasionally offered in bulb catalogs. Fritillarias come from dry-summer regions and require similar conditions to survive in gardens. This is one of the easier species, hardy from zone 6-9.

Photo by Jackie Chambers [ source ]

gardening, landscape design, quotes

the dark side of lawns

April 28, 2008 James Leave a comment

I was thumbing through The American Lawn, edited by Georges Teyssot, a collection of thoughts on the phenomenon of American lawns by eight contributors. It’s a wide ranging collection of essays looking at the place of lawns in American culture since colonial days. One of the pieces, “The Electric Lawn” by Mark Wigley, has a couple of quotes that interested me in my current disenchantment with all things turf-related.

On lawns and power relationships:

While renderings for clients may show the lawn, and manuals of drawing technique may describe the ways in which it can be represented, the drawings with which architects communicate to themselves and other architects leave the lawn out. It is assumed that wherever there is nothing specified in the drawing there is grass. The lawn is treated like the paper on which the projects are drawn, a tabula rasa without any inherent interest, a background that merely clears the way for the main event. Yet the lawn is always precisely controlled, whether by the architect or landscape designer. Lawns are all about control. The green frame is far from neutral or innocent. What is left out of the picture often rules the picture.

And a look at 50s green-lawned utopia gone bad:

The deadly lawnmower is the star of the dark side of suburban life. Take Stephen King, the high priest of suburban gothic. In his 1985 film Maximum Overdrive, a passing alien spaceship causes all the machines on the planet to turn against their operators–insulting, taunting, torturing, and then killing. A young boy rides his bicycle down the middle of a generic suburban street. Lawns pass by on either side. The only sign of trouble is that the automatic sprinklers uncannily respond to his presence…A blood-stained lawnmower lurks behind a tree, idling, waiting. When the boy finally stops, it roars to life and chases him down the street…

Well, I didn’t see that movie, and Leonard Maltin rates it a bomb: “Stupid and boring.” Maybe a couple of interesting takes on suburbia, but nothing for the Netflix queue…

gardening, my garden

turf battle

April 27, 2008 James Leave a comment

When we moved into the house twenty years ago one of the first things we did was to take out the front lawn. Southern California is a desert, and it seemed like the environmentally sensitive thing to do. And besides, there are piles of interesting drought-tolerant plants, and replacing the lawn let us sample some of the neat plants from Southern California and around the globe that don’t require constant watering. Although it doesn’t look its absolute best with no added water, most of the front yard has endured most of the middle of summer with no rain or watering. The back yard, however, has been a different story.

For the longest time the lawn area was something like thirty feet square after you subtracted space devoted to walkways, a greenhouse, a deck, a shade bed, and a big zone for vegetables. The lawn, scrappy-looking much of the year and nothing I had any interest in maintaining, was John’s indulgence that I lived with grudgingly, knowing that his Snapper lawnmower from his yard maintenance business days thirty years ago wouldn’t last forever. Even after we pushed into the back yard with a room addition a couple years ago, reducing the lawn to less than half its original size, John was still attached to the green wasteland, still insisting it was worth his trouble to maintain.

Then, three weeks ago, it finally happened. The engine on the Snapper died, and John decided he didn’t want to replace it. An ad on Craigslist and a day or two and the mower found a new home, some guy with a lawn business who has other Snappers and wanted this one for parts.

I took the mower’s death as a sign from Gaia that it was time for the lawn to go. John took it as a sign that he needed a new machine. So the compromise was a battery-powered mower that didn’t have nearly the same pollution profile as the old Snapper. Better would have been a corded model, something that would use the power directly and not waste it charging batteries. Better yet would have been a nice push model that uses nothing other than human umph. But I at least feel better that we’re cutting down on greenhouse gases. And at least the lawn is a low-water Saint Augustine, so it’s not gobbling up the water other turf options would require.

Shopping for the mower then started to push another of my buttons: boycotting items manufactured in China. Every model we looked at was made there. I have nothing against the Chinese people, but its government supports repression in Tibet and Burma (aka Myanmar) so that I try to avoid buying stuff made there whenever possible. (The Chinese Embassy knows I’m doing this, if they read their letters.) I lost that one too. Dang, it’s hard doing anything else sometimes. Sarah Bongiorni has a book, A Year Without “Made in China,” in which she recounts her attempts for her family to go a year without purchasing anything made in China. She had so much trouble she could write a book about it.

Some talking points and data on the pollution from lawnmowers:

Lawn mowers and other machines with engines under 25 horsepower now account for 7 percent of California’s smog-forming emissions from mobile sources, the equivalent of more than 3 million cars, according to the California Air Resources Board.–San Diego Union

Low-horsepower machines account for at least 10 percent of the nation’s smog-forming pollution, which has been linked to respiratory and heart disease, according to the EPA. A single lawnmower emits as much pollution in an hour as 50 cars driving 20 miles.–Washington Post

As an example, mowing grass with a gasoline powered lawnmower causes as much pollution as operating a car for 13 hours.–Senator Dianne Feinstein citing the EPA study

And…the good folks at Environment Canada have a nice online calculator that lets you see a close approximation of how much your mower pollutes.

gardening, quotes, rambles

those arrogant humans…

April 22, 2008 James 1 Comment

Are gardeners more humble people? Do we know things a lot of others don’t or believe in things others choose not to believe? Here are a couple thoughts for Earth Day, the first one a soft feather bed of a quote, the second one a bed of nails.

Human beings–any one of us, and our species as a whole–are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.–Bill McKibben in an interview with Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 13.

If wildlife species are to become extinct, that will be regrettable. But any literate person knows that extinction is the way of evolution, and is in the fundamental flow of life. However, man is different. If man is not immortal, then there is no purpose or meaning in his existence. Which in turn would mean no purpose or meaning in the universe. The human immortality imperative is absolute and radical. That is why wildlife conservation has never been permitted to move to the questions of ultimate value. There is no place for an ultimate nonhuman value in our western metaphysics, because of necessity, the human interest is the cosmic interest. That is what it is all about. Wildlife is an “externality.” — John. A. Livingston in The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, in The John A. Livingston Reader (2007: 101).

gardening

altruistic plants?

April 21, 2008 James 2 Comments

It’s disappointing to put together a pot of several seemingly matched plants–even of the same species, only to have most of the plants dwarfed and out-competed by one of their pot-mates. Sometimes you want to throw your hands up and quote Rodney King, “I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? …I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out!”

A study published last year by McMaster University biologist Susan Dudley sheds some light on the phenomenon. She found that sibling plants of the same species coexist nicely when grown in the same pot, being generally considerate of each other as they produced their root systems. But in contrast, plants of the same species that were “strangers” to each other produced highly competitive root systems that didn’t show the same level of cooperation.

“Though they lack cognition and memory, the study shows plants are capable of complex social behaviours such as altruism towards relatives,” says Dudley in the McMaster Daily News. “Like humans, the most interesting behaviours occur beneath the surface.”

According to the report, the study was done with one species, “sea rocket (Cakile edentula), a member of the mustard family native to beaches throughout North America, including the Great Lakes,” so its effects might be different with other species.

But the next time you assemble a container planting it might be interesting to see if cuttings of one plant or seedlings from the same clones develop a more cooperative living arrangement than wildly different clones taken from the entire vegetable diaspora of the same species.

Image from:USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / Britton, N.L., and A. Brown. 1913. An illustrated flora of the northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions. Vol. 2: 196.

gardening

online plant databases compared: PlantFiles vs. Hortiplex

April 11, 2008 James Leave a comment

Imagine opening your mailbox and getting one of those seed catalogs with no pictures and names you’ve never heard of before–something like the J.L. Hudson, Seedsman listings, for instance, which just hit my house a couple days ago. With a little work you can find out at least something about almost any plant you’re interested in on the web. Often the results from a general search engine query are a mess to sort through, and I wanted to see if I could find out information on general plants by testing out specific databases that would have predictable interfaces and results.

I’ll look at more general resources like Wikipedia and the USDA’s Plants Database in the future, but for this little study I narrowed the databases to those available at two of the big garden sites, the PlantFiles at Dave’s Garden and Hortiplex at GardenWeb. Both Dave’s Garden and GardenWeb offer memberships that give you various privileges, though Dave’s Garden charges for their premium services. Both sites let you look for information in addition to just plants, but to simplify this study I’ve limited my scope to searching the plant databases.

As of last Friday, the press kit for PlantFiles had this background:

The PlantFiles is the world’s largest collaboratively-developed database of plants, created by real gardeners from around the world. It is targeted toward serious gardeners and professionals, but is easy enough for anyone to use. Currently 162,130 plants are featured along with images and notes; more are added each day. Submissions are subject to peer-review, with errors corrected by a team of editors. PlantFiles is the fastest-growing feature of DG, and is responsible for attracting more than half of all new subscribers.

On the same day the Hortiplex page said it contains “101,133 records, 78,477 links, 50,744 taxa, 50,389 cultivars, 14,409 images/image links, and 1,651 vendor links.”

Side-by-side comparison: On one day (April 4, 2008) I looked up a collection of plants in both databases, one database immediately after the other. I selected general plant names, names of specific varieties, and nicknames for plants. My sample was pretty small–16 queries in all–but I think the results give a good sense for what the databases offer. The results of what I found are listed in the table below.

Entering queries: The search interfaces behave a little differently. PlantFiles automatically turns queries of more than word into keywords booleaned together with an “or” operator. If you don’t want that to happen, you can do an exact text search by placing the words together within quote marks. That’s similar to how Google and probably most other search engines operate, so if you’ve mastered that, you can search PlantFiles in the same way. All the multi-word searches in the table below for PlantFiles were entered in quotes except where noted.

Hortiplex behaves differently. It automatically assumes right-hand truncation, so that a search for something like “kale” (which I used below) will pull up various kale plants, but it also will retrieve Hemerocallis ‘Kaleidomania’ because “kale” is how the word “Kaleidomania” begins. I couldn’t find a way to defeat that “feature,” either by using quotes alone, adding a space to the end of “kale,” or by adding a space and wrapping the whole thing between quotes. Maybe there’s a way but I couldn’t find it, and I couldn’t find any documentation on how to search. This feature isn’t a problem all the time, but I’ve noted some of the gross results below.

	Dave’s Garden PlantFiles	GardenWeb Hortiplex
Petunia	244 hits With separate hits for the generic P. hybrida plus additional hits for specific cultivars and other plants that have “petunia” in their name. Many hits with photos.	43 hits 1 hit for genus; garden petunia varieties clustered together under P. hybrida; other hits for various species–various petunias and plants that have “petunia” in their name. 11 hits with images or links to images.
Double Delight rose	0 hits using this exact string; 1 hit using string “rose double delight”; 14 hits using shortened string “double delight”; 8092 hits when no quotes used around search string. The single hit for this exact cultivar had 44 images.	1 hit With image.
Sarracenia	152 hits Includes species, forms of species, and many hybrids. Many hits with 1 or more photos.	56 hits Includes species, forms of species, and cultivars; 20 listings with photos.
Sarracenia purpurea	5 hits Found the species, one form, one subspecies, and two varieties. Four of five hits with 1 or more photos apiece.	5 hits Resulted in the type species plus four varieties, including two cultivars. Two hits with images and/or links to images.
Hinoki cypress	3 hits Each with 1 or more images.	2 hits 1 for species and 1 for cultivar. 1 hit with 3 photos.
Dianella	10 hits Includes 6 species plus 4 varieties or cultivars. 9 with 1 or more pictures.	7 hits 1 for genus, 6 species. 1 with image.
Salvia divinorum	1 hit With 3 images.	1 hit With 1 image.
black-eyed susan	50 hits Includes hits for several species, but the majority are for cultivars of Rudbeckia hirta. 34 hits with 1 or more pictures apiece.	10 hits 2 for genera, 8 for species. 7 hits with pictures.
kale	93 hits All examples of kale, flowering kale, or other appropriate hits. 23 hits with images.	18 hits Included 3 groups of kale species, 5 kale species, 10 other hits that had text string “kale” though weren’t the vegetable. 6 hits with images or links to images, only 1 of these for the vegetable.
tomato Mr Stripey	1 hit With 3 photos.	0 hits Also tried “Tomato Mister Stripey” but still no hits.
alpine strawberry	9 hits All hits for cultivars of 1 species. 6 hits with 1 or more photos.	1 hit
mizuna	6 hits Hits for 2 species, 3 varieties, 5 cultivars. 2 hits with 1 or more photos.	1 hit
muscat grape	0 hits / 1 hit for “grape muscat” / 262 hits for “muscat grape” entered without quotes, with desired entry in the #2 position.	0 hits for “muscat grape” or “grape muscat”
lettuce Nevada	1 hit	0 hits / only hit for general “lettuce” search.
lemongrass	0 hits as 1 word / 3 hits for “lemon grass,” including 2 hits with several photos.	1 hit / 1 additional hit for “lemon grass,” the latter with image.

What did I think? As you can see PlantFiles at Dave’s Garden pulled up the most results most of the time. If you’re looking for a specific cultivated variety, it’s the most likely to have what you’re looking for. I did notice that Hortiplex does have a pretty decent sampling of rose varieties, though it didn’t find the variety of lettuce I was interested in. Still, there are sure to be times you don’t want to sort through 244 different petunia entries for general information. The lack of plant name authority control at both sites, at least for common names, can cause spotty, incomplete results of the sort you can see in the “lemongrass” example above, where “lemondgrass” and “lemon grass” were considered different things. Some sort of fuzzy “did you mean instead?” searching and retrieval would be nice, but these are sites without the resources of Google.

The displays in PlantFiles were fairly random, and those big sets of results sometimes took a long time to make sense of. Multi-word searches seemed to generally cluster at the top the results of your query in some sort of relevance order. Hortiplex offers a much more rational display of the results, listing the best matches at the top, and organizing things by genus, then species, then variety. Families, genera, species (including subspecies and varieties), grexes/groups, and cultivars are all displayed in different colors, so it’s easy to tell them apart.

Both sites offer ways for users to enter new plants, though Hortiplex’s method seemed less elegant. There’s a basic review of proposals for new plants before they go up on both sites. Both sites offer some basic scientific classification information that seemed pretty reliable, however there isn’t much of it–mainly information like family, genus, and species. Beyond the information on classification, PlantFiles offers some basic generic cultural information along the lines of plant size, hardiness, soil needs and propagation methods. Unfortunately many of the supposed hits on Hortiplex are just links out to other sites, and I found that some of the links don’t go anywhere.

Once a plant is in the database, both sites offer ways for users to contribute information and photos. To see the images or comments required scrolling down in PlantFiles or clicking on a link in Hortiplex. I preferred the scrolling method, though PlantFiles requires an additional click when there are more than seven images. Both sites have knowledgeable users, so you’re likely to find good information about at least some of the plants.

In the aesthetics department, I’d say that both sites are…functional. You go to the sites for the information, not for ideas on how to make you web page look hip.

At some point in the future I’ll take a look at some broad encyclopedias and at more specialized databases. I know that there’s a rich compost heap of information out there!

Just for fun, you can try out your own search comparisons using the little search forms below, courtesy of some basic HTML code that’s offered at each site.

gardening, landscape design

"away from the soft pornography of the flower"

April 9, 2008 James 2 Comments

The quote in the title is from a statement by Charles Waldheim about the work of landscape designer Piet Oudolf in a January 31 article in the New York Times, “A landscape in winter, dying heroically.” (I ran across this in a post to Alexander Trevi’s interesting Pruned blog.)

Photos by Herman Wouters for the New York Times article.

One of Oudolf’s interests is in constructing landscapes that acknowledge the cycles of nature, the browning and the dying, along with the greening and regrowth.

“You look at this, and it goes deeper than what you see,” Oudolf is quoted. “It reminds you of something in the genes—nature, or the longing for nature.”

“You accept death. You don’t take the plants out, because they still look good. And brown is also a color.”

These are gardens about deeper things. They’re as beautiful as all those merely skin-deep gardens, but they’re so much more nourishing. I wrote earlier referring to a comment about Monet’s gardens being designed to expose natural processes. Oudolf’s gardens do the same thing, and I’d love to be able spend some time lost in his landscapes…

Piet Oudolf’s website.

gardening, my garden

april plant combinations

April 8, 2008 James Leave a comment

The garden is always changing. As plants mature and others come into bloom, I’m always seeing combinations of plants and interesting relationships between them. Here are a couple plant combinations in the yard that I’m particularly happy with.

This is Homeria collina, a South African bulb, with an unidentified rosette-forming succulent–quite likely a graptopetalum, possibly G. ‘Point Dexter’s’ or G. paraguayense–blooming in the foreground and cascading over a retaining wall. It’s right on the sidewalk in front of the house, and it’s extra-nice that you see the combination at eye-level.

I like how the purple-gray tones in the succulent complement the color of the block wall, and how its orangey tones work well with the homeria.

In the back yard there’s a different group of things converging, a bromeliad going out of bloom, some red Russian kale that’s just about ready to pick, plain white landscaping pansies that are nearing the end of their lifespans, and a Penstemon with its first flowers of the season. (The kale was much more purple just two weeks ago, before the weather started to warm up.)

In a couple of weeks these combinations will be gone, and there’ll be new ones that I’ve never seen before. All these joys of gardening!

gardening, my garden, plant profiles

winner of an ugly contest

April 7, 2008 James 2 Comments

Last summer John and I were at the farmer’s market in Ocean Beach, a funky, alternative neighborhood of San Diego. We were looking over some of the offerings at a stall when someone behind me starts laughing and shouts out over my shoulder, “Look at those ugly-ass tomatoes!”

Obviously someone used to the perfectly shaped (and perfectly tasteless) grocery store tomatoes, he was pointing out a pile of Cherokee Purple tomatoes to his girlfriend. “They’re, like mutant. Who’d buy that?” To be sure, the tomatoes were flat, irregularly shaped and sized, partly green and partly reddish-purple. Nothing to win a spot on a pinup calendar of tomato varieties. But these tomatoes have their rabid followers, and I count myself one of them. They’re like the best tomato you’ve tasted, and sliced up they’re actually pretty attractive.

The above is a picture from the Seed Savers Exchange catalog [ source ]. These are prettier examples than you usually find of this variety.

One person even has a domain name, cherokeepurple.com attached to his blog entries about trying to grow this variety (without much success) in Arkansas. I might not be that rabid, but last year I decided to save some seeds from the best examples of Cherokee Purple from the farmer’s markets so that I could grow my own. This is an heirloom, open pollinated variety, so they should come true from seed.

I consulted Saving Seeds, an older book by Marc Rogers that’s still available via Amazon (and probably a few other sellers). If you own the book, give it up–You’re a plant geek. There, the basic instructions were to first clean the seeds as best as you could. Next you drop them into a jar full of water for a few days until the gummy pulp surrounding the seeds ferments and liberates the seeds. When that happens, the previously pulpy seeds–which floated–would sink to the bottom of the jar. Finally you drain and dry them and store them away. I followed the instructions, but I was worried that there was still some pulp attached to some of the seeds when I was done with the process so that not all of them sank.

The acid test came three weeks ago when I put some of the seeds into pots. Maybe not all the seeds were processed perfectly, but I’m now the proud parent of six pots of Cherokee Purple seedlings!

I have a few spots around the yard selected for them, places where I’ve never put tomatoes, so I’m hoping they’ll take to their new locations and thrive. I’ll probably give them a couple more weeks in their pots, and then it’s time to set them loose. I’ll post the baby pictures as they grow up…pictures so ugly only a parent and lover of Cherokee Purple could love.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]