So there I was, taking my early morning route to my office, admiring the red, bronze, green and yellow leaves of liquidambars in December…
…when I came upon an unusual sight. Instead of the dangling seedpods that you see on these trees this time of year, as on this branch…
…I ran across several trees with different sorts of ornaments suspended from the almost-bare branches.
Here’s a closeup view. The ornaments? Cell phones!
By now you’re probably asking, they look festive enough, but why cell phones?
Well, these trees were part of the landscaping around the Jacobs School of Engineering on the UCSD campus, named after benefactors Joan and Irwin Jacobs, of Qualcomm fame. (That’s Qualcomm as in one of the main players in the design and manufacture of cell phones…)
I guess cell phone ornaments probably won’t be catching on in households unless they’re the households of billionaire telecomm execs, but it gave me a laugh. And isn’t it great to see trees other than conifers all dolled up for the holidays?
It’s awesome sparse for flowers in the garden right now. But hey, it’s December!
this is the hinge between seasons. Things are budding up, others are finishing up. A few long-blooming plants plants make up the glue holding all the changes together. And a very few plants are taking advantage of the late fall to do their flower thing.
Overall here are lots of closeups, with not many plants covered all over with flowers. Click the images for a full view.
Some of the usual subjects not shown this month: Baileya multiradiata
Dudleya caespitosa
Salvia Hot Lips
Red and orange reed-stem Epidendrum orchids Camellia Cleopatra
Salvia discolor
Clerodendrum myricoides ‘Ugandense’
Thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. There’s lots of snow on the ground around the country and internationally. So once again I should stop whining and enjoy what I have to look at!
I find that I’m asking myself whether I need the greenhouse anymore. Left over from an obsession with warm-growing orchids a couple decades ago, it sits in the middle of some prime real estate in the every-shrinking back yard.
Its current incarnation is more shed than greenhouse, with bags of potting mix and pots taking up most of the space. Still I continue to use it for some propagating. Because of the famous greenhouse effect temperatures inside during the daytime can climb ten to twenty degrees higher than outdoors–and that’s with heavy shadecloth on the western exposure. Even at night it stays a little warmer than the outdoors. Before sunrise during a cold snap a week and a half ago I looked at the thermometer inside: 42 degrees. Pretty cold, but it was but four to five degrees higher than a nearby thermometer outside.
The new patch of lettuce outside. Where's the lettuce?Here's a little recycled sixpack that I seeded with lettuce five days earlier. Unlike the bare patch outside, the seeds are germinating.
The extra warmth can help seeds germinate a few days earlier than outdoors. And once the plants are up they can grow quite a bit faster. The warm spa temperatures inside the greenhouse, combined with some protection from marauding nature, can give you a leg up on the season.
I showed this photo of germinating bladderpods a couple of weeks ago. These plants are less than two weeks old.And these are the same bladderpods last night, showing lots of luxuriant growth. I'll be repotting these soon and getting them ready for planting in the garden.
If you’re occasionally impatient like me it’s nice to see bigger plants sooner.
And this last photo shows another advantage of the extra warmth. These are yearling seedlings of the North American pitcher plant, Sarracenia. All three pots were started in the greenhouse a year ago, but the one in the middle spent most of the summer outside in strong sunlight. These plants are supposed to like the intense light, but you can see that they were more partial to temperatures that reminded them of the South than intense sun. For plants that ordinarily take five years to mature, it’s looking like the extra warmth can take a year or two off of the usual time. It’s cool to have a greenhouse to save a few weeks but having it help shave one or two years is pretty persuasive.
So as I talk myself through all this it’s looking like I’ll still want to have some sort of greenhouse, even in Southern California. But it might not be this really inefficient and poorly located greenhouse. And did I mention that the current building has termites?
The replacement might be separate little structures. Maybe they could be enclosed carts and have wheels so that they could be repositioned to take advantage of the best sun angles. And if they’re on wheels they could be stuck in a corner of the yard if they’re not being used for propagation. And something like a cart wouldn’t waste space on aisles to walk down.
Well, there are lots of possibilities, and I’ll be thinking about what to do. I’m one of those people who likes to stare at a problem for a long time, but maybe in a few months you’ll be reading about the next big garden construction project.
Do you feel insulted, does it really really bother you if someone calls what you do out in the garden a “hobby?” Do you have a deep sense that what you’re doing is way more important than things that you yourself would call a hobby?
Then, if you haven’t visited there already, run over to last Friday’s post by James Golden at View from Federal Twist. Then follow that up with Helen’s post over at The Patient Gardener’s Weblog. Be sure to read through the comments, and you’ll probably feel compelled to comment yourself. (Of course I commented, and if it weren’t so late I’d go on here for paragraphs with my strong reactions to being trivialized as a gardener.)
Answer key to my initial two questions: As far as I’m concerned “Effing yes” in both cases.
Here’s just part of the second load of dark gold this season.
I know composting is warm and fuzzy and poetic, all about returning the earth’s bounty back to the soil. But take a look at the mechanics of composting, will you?
You prune your garden and throw the scraps in the composter. Or you find plants that have died and chop up their remains into the dark bin. Next you wait a few months for the stuff to break down and then you feed it back to the plants in the garden. Some of the plants might be seedlings of deceased plants in the compost. It’s like you’re feeding a plant the reprocessed remains of its parents or–worse yet–itself.
In human terms you’d call this something close to cannibalism, not far from what happens in the 1973 science fiction thriller Soylent Green. It had been a few years since I’d seen the film so I had to refresh my memory of its plot: Charlton Heston plays a prickly detective named Thorn. (Thorn, as in “thorn in your side” or Thorn as in something botanical–my conspiracy theory is coming full circle…)
Leonhard Kern. Menschenfresserin (Female Cannibal), ca. 1650. Ivory, Schwäbisch Hall, Württembergisches Landesmuseum Stuttgart. Public domain photo by Andreas Praefcke, 2006, from the Wikimedia Commons.
In the course of investigating a murder, Thorn happens upon the realization that the rations many of the residents of 2022 New York City were eating–Soylent Green–were reprocessed from humans, hence the famous penultimate line from the film, “Soylent Green is people!”
We’re all civilized folk, however, so cannibalism isn’t something that we generally take part in. (And for me it’d be doubly difficult because I’d have to give up being a vegetarian…)
Still, all unseemliness aside, I’m getting hooked on vegetable cannibalism–composting–and I’m feeling good about it.
Kitchen scraps, most of the garden clippings, all these things end up in the big black bin. The first batch of Soylent Black took about six weeks in high summer. The next batch got close to ready but then I fed the composter lots of new scraps, pushing back the time it would be ready to use by a couple months.
And then in October, with what passes down here as heavy autumn rains, a large branch that constituted about a quarter of the grapefruit tree snapped. It seemed like a waste to toss the unripe fruit, so into the composter it went. Four or five weeks later it looked like this, with most of the whole fruits looking almost like the day they were admitted to the composter.
So to the list of foodstuffs like avocado pits and corn ears–things that don’t break down readily–I’ve added whole citrus. By contrast the fruits that were broken open were beginning to compost, so I fished out all the whole uncomposted grapefruits, split them open with a shoved, and then added them to the next pile of things to start composting.
One of my mother’s Ohio-isms was the phrase that someone’s eyes were bigger than their stomach. In our case it was that our pile of compostables from an intense weekend of clearing our overgrown plants was bigger that the space we had in the barrel.
But no problem, really. We chopped these up into two big yard trash cans that will sit around for a couple weeks, maybe a little more in this cold weather, until the volume of what’s in the composter now miraculously shrinks. (If you’ve composted you know exactly what I mean, with the compostables seeming to turn into water and vapor, leaving almost nothing behind.)
You may be looking at this and saying that it’s a lot of work, and it can be. But like so many other things in the garden, it’s amazingly gratifying work, both for the gardeners and the lucky plants that get a share of the soylent black.
Here’s a short roundup of some of the leaf colors going on in the garden. This is Southern California so it was tough coming up with the stereotypical sizzling reds and yellow and oranges of a lot of autumn gardens in colder climates. But I think we’ve got some pretty cool colors, including the color that might cause the most envy from the northern latitudes: green!
Unfortunately this is what the preceding plant looks like when you back away from the few remaining colored leaves. Most of the autumn color is from the pile o' bricks in the background.I've mentioned my fondness for the look of poison oak before. This is a relative from California and much of the rest of the country, Rhus aromatica, a.k.a. R. trilobata, the Gro-Low clone. It's not poisonous, but not so amazingly colored as its evil cousin either.Yellowing apricot leaves...Euphorbia tirucalli, the Sticks on Fire clone, showing the orange and red colors that start to develop as the temperature plummets into the high 30s. I've grown--and battled to remove--the typical green version which gets pretty huge and out of control. This clone doesn't get nearly so huge, but I don't trust that fact enough to let it out of a pot.This photo of a little plum is more interesting than pretty. These are the December leaves of one of those multi-variety grafted trees. Each of the varieties is coloring up in its own way.Another Euphorbia, E. cotinifolia. This one's a bit of a cheat. The leaves are this color all year until they drop for the winter.A close look at the chalk dudleya, D. pulverulenta. Some of the white stuff covering the leaves has been rubbed off in the foreground leaves.On the left, the mediterranean Phlomis monocephala, in its stressed gold-green summer coloration. Soon the plant will turn greener with more rains. To the right, Central-California Coast native Astragalus nuttallii with leaves edging towards blue and gray.And all over the garden are seedlings showing lots of that green color I talked about. Here's a young plant of the local stinging lupine, Lupinus hirsutissimus. It doesn't really sting, but the little haris can definitely poke you. Handling a dried plant after it's died down in the spring without gloves is not one of the more pleasant things I've done.
Happy fall, everyone. I hope you all enjoy whatever colors the season brings you.
While my last post was dedicated to an easy seed propagation project, this one details a couple that were a little more labor-intensive. Still not hard, just a little bit more work to pull off.
Sarracenia Night Sky, a hybrid of S. leucophylla and S. rubra gulfensis.
I’ve posted about my pitcher plants a few times before–Sarracenia species from the American South and some hybrids–and this is the first year I’ve tried sowing my own seed. All eight species (or nine, or ten or eleven, depending on the expert you listen to) are inter-fertile, and hybrids between all of them are possible and have been made at one time or another. The hybrids, too, are generally fertile, and you can go crazy with the genetic possibilities.
Sarracenia Dainas Delight, a complex hybrid of S. xWillissii and S. leucophylla.
For creative sorts you can arrange garden plants in interesting ways, but with this genus you could also design the very plants that you grow. If you live in the heart of pitcher plant country, this might be a problem. Bees could carry pollen from your hybrid plants to nearby native species and create some new unnatural hybrids. But the genus never crossed to this side of the Mississippi River so Californians can play Doctor Frankenstein all they want without worrying about messing with the native population beyond our castle walls.
Mature seed pod of Sarracenia flava.
So…I began in the spring making some hybrids, and the pods began to ripen in August, with the last pods just finishing up ripening right about now.
Closeup of the previous Sarracenia flava seedpod. This one contained almost 500 seeds. You can see them practically jumping out of the pod.
The seeds require a cool, damp period in order to germinate. I emptied the pods and put the seed in a plastic bag with a few strands of moist chopped sphagnum moss, one bag for each cross. And into the fridge they went for four weeks.
After this period of cold stratification I sowed the seed on the surface of chopped sphagnum moss which I’d layered on the top of post filled 50/50 with a sand/peat mixture.
Next, I put the pots into a clear plastic box, poured in half an inch of standing rainwater, closed the lid, and put them near a window that faces south-southeast. If everything goes well–and it looks like it did–the seedlings begin to emerge in two to four weeks. Warmish weather is best, though you don’t have to be too fanatical. This batch experienced the recent 90- to 100-degree days as well as many cooler days in the 60s. As long as the seed think it’s spring, they’ll begin to germinate.
That’s pretty much it. Some people place the seedlings under constant bright lights and 70-plus degree temperatures for up to three years to speed them up to maturity. I’m hoping that bright daylight in a warmish interior spot will give them enough of a boost that I don’t have to resort to the equivalent of putting the plants on steroids.
Yearling sarracenia seedlings of the cross S. (Melanorhoda, Triffid Park x rosea luteola).
And here you see the reason why people might try to accelerate growth. These are year-old seedlings from a cross by Brooks Garcia that I sowed a year ago, thinking I’d practice on someone else’s cross before attempting my own. I grew these in my unheated greenhouse which has fairly low, less-than-ideal lighting conditions. They did get some bottom heat during the coldest months of the year.
Drosophyllum lusitanicum, a couple months old.
The other carnivorous plants I’m propagating this fall are of this Mediterranean-region species, Drosophyllum lusitanicum. While virtually all carnivorous plants are creatures of swamps and bogs, this one is unique in that it comes from fairly dry areas with be limited summer rainfall. Unlike the preceding sarracenia bog plants, this species could actually thrive in California’s wet-winter, dry-summer climate without too much additional life support.
Its common name is “Dewy Pine” because the leaves have little tentacles tipped with sticky bug-catching fluid that looks like dew. But Barry Rice mentions a much cooler moniker: Its Portuguese name translates into “Slobbering Pine.”
This plant and the preceding Sarracenia do catch insects. It’s a contradiction I’m trying to come to terms with. I plant a lot of California native plants, which provide nectar and other food for all sorts of winged and crawling creatures. And then I have these little monsters that actively trap and consume them. Call me a man of contradictions. In the end I hope I’m doing lots more good than bad.
I only know of one seller who ships Drosophyllum so you pretty much have to grow your own from seed if you want one. (I got my seed from the seed bank of the International Carnivorous Plant Society.) The little black seeds have a hard coat that slows down germination. If you have some 220-grit sandpaper around that’s not a problem. Just lightly–and I mean lightly–rub the seed between two sheets of the sandpaper until a patch of the black seed coat is worn away to reveal the white layer underneath. Then pop them on top of the same mixture you’d use for germinating Sarracenia and keep the mix moist with good-quality water. Germination for me was about two to six weeks, no cold stratification necessary.
There you have it. With both of these kinds of plants it was a little more work than my last post growing bladderods from seed. But really, it isn’t that hard if you’re patient.
Fall: Prime time to sow many seeds in California’s mediterranean climate. Self-sown generations of clarkia, poppies, baby blue eyes, buckwheats and lupines are showing up all around the garden.
But this year has pulled me in lots of directions and I haven’t put a lot of effort into sowing seeds. Also, part of this lack of motivation is an attempt to accept the reality that the garden is pretty full as it stands, and I try resist the delusion that a plant growing from a tiny seed won’t take up as much space as a nearly mature one from the nursery. Consequently the only active seed-sowing I’ve taken part in has been limited to two very different kinds of plants: the California-native bladderpod and some carnivorous plants.
The bladderpod was mainly an experiment. The pods that give Isomeris arborea its common name are full of seeds the size of dried peas. How easy would they be from seed?
Very easy, as it turns out. I opened up a couple pods and buried the seeds about a quarter to half inch in these pots just two weeks ago. Here they are, showing almost 100% germination and phenomenal seedling vigor.
The more upright of my two young bladderpod plants
Now that I see they’re really easy from seed I can check out the other thing thing I was curious about. I have two bladderpods in the garden. One is slow-growing but is assuming a nice upright posture. The other is an exuberant floppy mess of green-gray leaves and yellow flowers. Both forms have their use in the garden, but I was really hoping for more upright growth patterns when I put them in the garden.
My seedlings come from the more upright plant, so we’ll see whether they follow mom’s growth habits when placed in various locations around the yard. Is the difference in growth habit nature or nurture? Might I have a consistently strain of upright-growing bladderpods on my hands?
In the native plant community growing specific strains or cultivars is often looked down upon as reducing natural variation and dumbing down the gene pool. But in the garden it’s useful to know what kind of plant you’re getting. A gardener might be disappointed to end up with a low mound instead of an open upright shrub. The customer might never buy another native plant again and instead fill their yard with hydrangeas. They’d spend thousands of gallons watering their hydrangeas, there’d be no more water for people and plants, and civilization as we know it would collapse.
Anyway, so far this has been really easy. Next post I’ll look at my more high energy-input efforts to grow some carnivorous plants from seed.
Can you call a patch of dirt of about eight square feet a garden? I’m starting to consider my recent planting of succulent a miniature little dudleya patch. But a garden?
I’ve already shown off the new species I picked up at my recent native plant society’s sale. Recently I finally got around to giving them their place in the larger garden. The location is more shade than I’d like–maybe four to six hours’ sun with afternoon shade. Situated on the edge of a somewhat irrigated area devoted to fruit trees it might be more moisture than the plants really want. Most of what I’ve read about dudleyas suggests using an inorganic mulch like pebbles instead of the bark that you see here. Still, there’s an older clump of Dudleya edulis that you can see in the near-back of these photos. The clump has done well so far, so there’s hope for the new arrivals.
There are eight Dudleya species in this area of the garden, but they get to share space with a couple other other succulents, a blackish-purple aeonium and the blue chalk fingers plant (Selecio mandraliscae) that is getting to be pretty popular down here as a groundcover. The finger-shaped leaves play nice with the fingers of several of the dudleyas most easily seen in the upper left picture: edulis, viscida, and attenuata.
In the center of the space is this ornate column made out of cast concrete. The previous owners of the house must have gotten a good price on architectural molds because there’s this little column, and another, much larger, outdoor feature that looks like part of a Doric column. Either the owners were of…um, eclectic?…taste or they were postmodern two decades before Charles Moore designed the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans. The features are made of concrete, however, so it’s a little hard to do much more than try to live with them. Maybe one day I’ll bring the diamond-bladed saw to deal with this feature. Still, living with other people’s choices can sometimes push you towards a solution you never would have come up with yourself.
So, what to do with this column in the Dudleya Garden? One obvious thing would be to place on top of it a mirrored reflecting ball, sort of a garden gazing ball that was popularized in Victorian times. I want to be a little more subversive, though. How would a bowling ball hold up to the elements? I wonder. But for now I’m auditioning a couple of rocks, an irregular chuck of green stone that John picked up somewhere, and a rounded river rock of the sort that you dig up in gardens in my neighborhood, remnants from the days when this land lay many hundred miles to the south in what’s now Mexico, days when the land was lower and drained the big river that formed the area’s Copper Canyons.
In a rock wall about fifteen feet away I had space for a single plant. This will best represent how many dudleyas are found in nature: on steep ground, often growing out of what looks like no soil at all. This is Dudleya virens ssp. hassei, a species found only on Santa Catalina Island. While some dudleya species will form a single, perfect rosette, this single growth should before too long develop into an ever-widening clump of starry foliage.
This little planting in the rocks should soon look a little like something you’d find in nature. But the other patch of dudleyas with maybe a mirrored disco ball? Well, that’s definitely going to be a human-created garden.
Our weekend Netflix viewing was The Savages, a 2007 film starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman who play a sister and brother who are called in to care for their ailing father. The siblings leave New York City and Buffalo in the fall to pick up their father in Sun City, Arizona.
I laughed at some of the establishing shots of the landscaping in Sun City. I had to share.
Long rows of these soccer ball trees are shown all over Sun City.
Houses with these ball shaped trees...Big palm trees, but the planting budget didn't allow everyone to get one of their own...This hedge really got me laughing. What emerges from behind the hedges two seconds after this shot is even funnier...
As far as the film, I liked it. As expected, the siblings have issues between them, including some sibling rivalry that’s simmered for four decades. But all in all they’re adults trying hard to do the right thing for their father: nothing too Hollywood and cloyingly uplifting, but nothing that’s a real downer, either.
Of course such mature behavior would never fly in many families I’m familiar with. Overall it left me with the feeling that’s best summed up by a bumpersticker John has that hasn’t made it onto a vehicle yet: My Family is More Dysfunctional than Yours.
