Category Archives: landscape

words are important

June 1, 2009 James 6 Comments

One night a week and a half ago, when much of the world was watching the final “American Idol” showdown between Adam Lambert and Kris Allen or viewing the finale of “Dancing with the Stars,” almost a hundred of us were at the local native plant society meeting to hear Kristie Orosco. Environmental Director for the San Pasqual Band of Kumeyaay Indians, ethnobotanist, and member of the Native American Environmental Protection Coalition, our speaker gave us a quick introduction to how some of the local Native Americans traditionally used plants in their environment as food.

She was one of those rare communicators, a person who with a very few words can take you into a different way of thinking and seeing the world. One thing she said, in particular, has stuck with me. Instead of stating that a plant blooms, she used the phrase that a plant “gives it flowers.” What a gorgeous way to phrase it: Instead of a plant being an inert blooming machine that you pick up for a few bucks at the nursery and toss when it turns ugly, it was a living entity that gives of itself by producing flowers.

How you say something is as important as what you say, and her words opened up a world to me where everything in nature is a gift. Although I’ve developed a cynical side to my personality, I’ve tried to counter it by keeping alive a part of me that continues to stay amazed at the things of the natural world and almost willfully naive about many of the ways of humankind. It’s that second side of me that’s certain that the earth would be a lot better off than it is if we all spoke and viewed the landscape the way Kristie Orosco did.

You often read that the plants you encounter in the wilds have traditional uses, but it’s not until you’ve had direct experience with the uses that the connection really clicks. To cement that connection, our speaker brought foods for all of us to try, enough to cover several large tables.

On the menu:

Shaawii, or acorn pudding (pink, looks like spam but it’s actually edible–and subtly tasty)

Pit-roasted agave root (something like a chewy, smoky vegan beef jerky–my favorite of the night)

Limeade with seeds of chia (Salvia columbariae)

“Medicine tea” (steeped dried flowers from Mexican elderberry, Sambucus mexicanus, very delicately flavored, used for a number of purposes, including breaking a fever)

Yucca root (starchy, but different from potatoes in flavor)

Yucca flowers, boiled (the blooms of Hesperoyucca whipplei, which is finishing up giving its flowers in many of our hillsides around town; very delicate flavor with a tiny nip of bitterness, brussels sprouts for people who don’t like brussels sprouts, or a new food for people who love artichoke hearts)

Yucca flowers, raw (as above, only crunchier, a little more bitter)

I’ve always admired plants of Hesperoyucca whipplei from a distance–The ends of its leaves end in sharp points that you have to show immense respect. Now that I’ve tasted its root and sampled its flowers and heard Kristie Orozco speak about the plant, my aesthetic appreciation of it has deepened into something else much richer.

landscape

written with clouds

May 26, 2009 James 3 Comments

On Sunday we were working outside on a project and happened to look up at the sky. A plane had been skywriting, spreading some advertising copy in the sky to the north–some sort of ad for Geico insurance, I think. After that text was done, up popped this message:

Here’s the same picture turned upside down if you’re not one of those people who read books inverted:

“Be fire safe?”

Here in San Diego we often don’t obsess about fire until after the end of summer, when the land around us has gone without water for six months and the hot desert winds blow from the east. The end of October is classic fire season for us, the time of year when the firestorms of 2003 and 2007 ravaged this part of the state. But last month’s Santa Barbara fire and this little bit of public-service skywriting got me thinking about the place of fire in the local ecosystem.

Cover of Richard Halsey's book

Three meetings ago, the local chapter of the California Native Plant Society hosted wildfire ecologist Richard Halsey. Director of the California Chaparral Institute, Halsey has been working to try educate the public about new understandings about fire. In addition to the institute, he’s been a strong voice in the media, and has authored the book, Fire, Chaparral and Survival in Southern California. (Town Mouse & Country Mouse did a nice post on Fire this month, which included some good quotes from Halsey.)

Anyone who thinks that plant society meetings are slow, drawn out affairs wasn’t at the meeting I attended. Halsey and one of the other biologists invited to speak went mano a mano over some of the ideas that represented a break from what is still being taught in schools.

I’m no biologist, but at least some of Halsey’s points made sense to me. Here’s a short list of some of what he had to say:

The notion that “chaparral needs to burn” is a crock of bat guano. Although the ecosystem is adapted to coming back after a blaze, it doesn’t need fire to thrive.
When areas burn more frequently than the plants living there are adapted to, however, many original plant species die out and invasives begin to move in. Type conversion of chaparral into a weedy grassland of exotic species can begin.
Extensive fire breaks gouged into a natural area are a magnet for weed species that can take over the ecosystem. (See the previous bullet point.) Of all of these points, the other biologist made the strongest argument against this position of Halsey’s, citing a study where areas with abandoned fire breaks revert almost completely to their previous species after a certain number of years.
A new study looking at ocean sediments in the Channel Islands shows that large fires have occurred in Southern California, but were separated by far greater numbers of years than we’re seeing today. Virtually all the fires we’re seeing today have been caused by humans.
A legend of the local Kumeyaay people mentions a particularly devastating fire several hundred years before the arrival of the Spanish in California and Mexico. After the fire, the Kumeyaay had to live in the desert for an entire generation before the land west of the mountains was habitable again.

As recently as 2003-2004, when I was working a photography series on the 2003 Cedar Fire, I put together an artist’s statement for that body of work that included the sentence, “The land needed to burn, to regenerate.” Halsey has convinced me that it’s time for me to rethink that position.

James SOE NYUN. Hill with Wildflowers, Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004. Chromogenic print, 15 x 18 3/4 in.

gardening, landscape

how dry am i?

May 21, 2009 James 10 Comments

This post may be mainly for the math nerds among you, but I think it could be interesting to any gardeners living in drought-prone parts of the world.

In my last post I mentioned that I’d used instructions in Olivier Filippi’s The Dry Gardening Handbook to figure out the drought stress index, or hydric deficit, for where I live in San Diego.

USDA zones are useful for dealing with minimum temperatures. For gardeners in the western U.S., Sunset zones provide more finesse, combining temperature with other climate conditions. The the drought stress numbers, however, are useful if you want to concentrate on understanding how many months a plant might be subjected to severe drying conditions due to lack of rainfall.

Filippi writes in his book that “everyone’s drought is different,” so be sure to consider factors other than this single number, things like total rainfall, humidity, the sun exposure a plant might get or the amount of wind your site experiences. The technique presented in The Dry Gardening Handbook derives from work of plant geographer Henri Gaussen.

Figuring out hydric deficit is pretty straightforward but will take a few minutes of your time. Either use a spreadsheet program like Excel or a sheet of paper. First, go to a site like World Climate where you can find your area’s monthly total rainfall and monthly average temperatures. On the spreadsheet or paper set up a column with the months of the year, January to December. Next fill in a column with the monthly average rainfall in millimeters, and another column with the average monthly temperature in degrees Celsius.

Now you have two options: Follow the instructions in the book, which isn’t that hard but requires making a graph with three different axes. Or use my simplified technique, which requires some calculations but no graphing. I’ll send you to the book for the somewhat more precise method, but here’s my easier method: In a fourth column, divide the rainfall number by the temperature and multiply by 2. That’s where the math comes in to play.

Here’s my result for San Diego:

Month	Rainfall (mm)	Temperature (Celsius)	2 x (Rainfall/Temperature)
Jan	55.6	14.1	7.890
Feb	41.3	14.7	5.62
Mar	49.9	15.3	6.52
Apr	19.8	16.6	2.39
May	4.8	17.8	0.54
Jun	1.9	19.3	0.2
Jul	0.5	21.6	0.05
Aug	2.1	22.5	0.19
Sep	4.7	21.8	0.43
Oct	8.6	19.8	0.87
Nov	29.5	16.6	3.56
Dec	35.4	14.1	3.62

Count up the numbers in the fourth column that are less than 1, and that’s your approximate hydric deficit number. The higher the hydric deficit number, the more severe your drying conditions. For the San Diego Airport, the number is 6. (If you have a month where the average temperature is below freezing, for my oversimplified method just throw out that month and consider that there’s minimal hydric deficit.)

Now what do you with the number? For one thing, you can use it to compare you growing conditions with the drought resistance code for a plant in Filippi’s book. For example, the matilija (“tree”) poppy (Romneya coulteri) has a drought tolerance rating of 6–perfect for an unwatered garden in San Diego. By contrast, Ceanothus ‘Ray Hartman’ has a code of 4, and Hidcote Blue lavender (Lavandula angustifolia ‘Hidcote Blue’) has a code of 3. These other plants would probably survive without supplemental water, but to look their best the ceanothus might benefit from a couple months of occasional supplemental watering, and the lander maybe three. You can also use the number to compare the drying forces where you live other regions around you, or apply the number to better understand your climate in relation to that of a plant’s origin.

For fun, I added four other sites in San Diego County. You can see how the county offers a huge number of growing conditions, from dry coastal conditions, mountain meadows, backcountry chaparral, and full-on desert.

City	Hydric deficit
San Diego Airport	6
La Mesa	5-6
Cuyamaca	1
Campo	3
Borrego Springs	7

And then a few other cities in California. You can see a general moistening the farther north you go, and a general drying as you head east towards the deserts.

City	Hydric deficit
Los Angeles	6
San Bernardino	4-5
Victorville	6
Santa Barbara	5
Monterrey	4
San Jose	4-5
Santa Cruz	3
San Francisco	4
Richmond	4
Sacramento	4-5
Fresno	5
Yosemite National Park	2
Eureka	1 2
Redding	2

I’d never played with mapping in Google Maps, but thought this might be a fun first little project. I took the numbers above and applied them to a map. The results are pretty impressive for something that’s not hard to do. So far the blips are in California only, but I might work on the map some more to include other locations. Take a look…

View Hydric Deficit Map in a larger map

landscape, plant profiles

the chrysanthemum problem

May 13, 2009 James 6 Comments

All around town, both roadside and trailside, the garland chrysanthemums have been blooming.

The perky spawn of plants that have been grown for centuries in China and Japan for their tasty young green leaves, Chrysanthemum coronarium has come to be a big nuisance in many disturbed areas of Southern California.

But rather than getting all negative and cursing the plant, let me try a different tack to try to encourage everyone to rip it out by its pretty little roots:

Did you know that 100 grams of boiled garland chrysanthemum provides 51% of your recommended daily requirements of vitamin A, 40% of vitamin C, 21% of iron, and has only 20 calories? (That’s according to healthalicious.com.)

OregonLive.com offers some kitchen ideas for garland chrysanthemum: “Lightly saute the leaves and stems or whole 4- to 6-inch seedlings with sesame seeds, garlic, ginger and soy sauce… Eat raw in salad, add to soups containing fresh ginger, or dunk in fritter batter and deep-fry.”

(Be sure your greens come from a site other than a roadside that might have been sprayed with herbicides by the city. And be sure you’re eating garland chrysanthemum instead of the somewhat similar bush sunflower (encelia) or San Diego sunflower (viguiera).)

There are of course other reasons to pull up this plant. The Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve site puts it succinctly: “[C]hrysanthemum forms fields that overtake native plants such as California buckwheat and sagebrush–both these plants provide food and shelter for native birds, insects and other animals.”

So in the end garland chrysanthemum is the perfect weed. Whether you respond to thoughts of a healthy snack or to appeals of doing what you can to make the world a better place, you can get out your weeding tools and go to town.

A final thought: Wouldn’t it be great for green-conscious restaurants to offer tasty and hip entrees on their menu that contain locally-harvested garland chrysanthemum greens that otherwise would have been damaging the ecosystem? Or maybe we could stock stalls at farmer’s markets with piles of the stuff? Why not turn this over-abundant invasive plant into a resource that could be cropped, improving the local landscape at the same time?

Eat up, everyone!

This post is dedicated to Outofdoors, who first thought up the idea of dedicating the 13th of the month to posts on invasive species.

landscape, places

santa ysabel open space preserve

April 30, 2009 James 5 Comments

A trip to the town of Santa Ysabel in the spring is for me like stepping into a time machine in a couple of different ways. In the first most obvious sense, this little town in the foothills of San Diego County appears to be pickled in some earlier though indefinite time period. A couple buildings have painted facades straight out of 1930s Walker Evans photographs, while others look like straightforward roadside commercial architecture rescued from the 1960s.

Time travel also comes to my mind when I look at the surrounding countryside. Plants that stopped blooming a month ago in my neighborhood canyons are just coming online up here at 3000 feet. Some of this feels like February back home.

Still, even though it contains many familiar plants, this is a very different ecosystem. There are dozens of plants I’d never see back down closer to sea level, and that’s what brought me to Santa Ysabel last weekend.

The town serves as gateway to the Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve, 5025 acres of foothills and active ranch lands set near the headwaters of the San Diego River.

Botanist Jerilyn Hirshberg led the intense day of botanizing which began with the handing out of sheets of paper listing 203 plants that we stood a good chance of seeing that day.

Be prepared. If you go an an outing looking at all the plant species in an area, expect to spend a certain amount of time huddled together and bent over as you look at some of the smallest of the small plants. People typically call them “belly flowers.” But Jeri used a word that I’d never heard before (and I think was one she’d made up): “dinkophytes”–with “dinko” as in “dinky plants.”

A biologist on the trip complained several times, “That’s not a real word!” But I loved it so much that I hereby grant it official word status and encourage all of you to begin using it.

In the end we didn’t see all 203 plants on the list, but the group found some bonuses that weren’t on it. Here are just a few of them, a couple of which have made it into the garden world.

Johnny jump up, or California golden violet (Viola pedunculata). Perky name, perky plant.

Grape soda lupine (Lupinus excubitus ssp. austromontanus). Yes, it does have a distinct—but delicate—concord grape fragrance, though it’s almost insulting to call the scent ”grape soda.” (Would you describe a flower by saying that it smells like artificially rose-scented air freshener?) The shrub is a pleasant mound of silvery leaves, but the towering spikes make it truly gorgeous this time of year.

California milkweed (Asclepias californica). The clusters of vivid wine blooms are striking. What makes this milkweed really remarkable is that it’s covered with so many soft hairs that it’s hard not to touch it. Kay, the trip organizer, thought it was like handling a cloud. Good description.

This plant hosts the local population of the monarch butterfly. Before you go off and plant this milkweed in hopes of attracting them to your garden, however, it’s worth reading some advice from the Las Pilitas Nursery site: “The alkaloids associated with this milkweed and other milkweeds give the butterflies that feed on it protection. Alkaloids from the wrong milkweed (South American, Mexican, etc.) can expose the butterflies to predation. If the monarch or other butterfly has not evolved with the milkweed they may have limited tolerance for the particular alkaloid of the plant species. The California flyway runs from Baja to Canada, it does not include Mexico proper nor Central America. If you live in Chicago [which is part of the pathway of the monarchs that migrate to mainland Mexico] you can plant Mexican species (Asclepias mexicana) or Asclepias tuberosa, don’t plant our species.”

Scarlet bugler (Penstemon centranthifolius).

One of the botanical highlights centered on this little plant, the hill star (Lithophragma heterophylla), closely related to our very prolific woodland star. Though fairly common to the north, this stand of hill stars formed the only currently known population in San Diego County.

The idea of a county is entirely a human construct, but still I thought that was a pretty cool way to end the trip, seeing the only location of a plant in my local human construct.

To end this post, here are just a few more pictures of the hillsides of the preserve, studded with at least five different species and natural hybrids of oaks…

gardening, landscape

gbbd: the garden and beyond

April 15, 2009 James 5 Comments

It’s spring, all right. The garden continues to bloom away manically, but the outdoor places around town have been no slouch, either, when it comes to flowers.

This Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day, hosted by May Dreams Gardens, features a gallery of some blooms from the garden mixed in with blooms from Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego.

In the top photo from Mission Trails you can see that the yellow-flowered deerweed, Lotus scoparius, has colonized many of the sunny areas that burned four and a half years ago. As the landscape recovers, other plants will come in and stake their claims. The second image from near the top of Fortuna Peak shows that other areas are also recovering from the fires, though slower than farther downslope.

You can hover over each image below for its name, or click it to see a larger photo. While you can probably tell what’s a wild plant and what’s in the garden, there’s an answer key at the end if you’re into quizzing yourself. (A few of thee are tricky in that they’re local native plants that have been incorporated into the garden.)

Answers:
Wild, garden, garden;
garden, wild, wild;
wild, garden wild;
garden, garden, garden;
garden, wild, garden;
wild, garden, wild;
wild, wild, wild.

landscape

trying to do the right thing

April 6, 2009 James 7 Comments

People often try to do the right thing, but along the way things somethings can go astray.

Saturday I was hiking one of our local urban canyons, San Clemente Canyon, with some other plant people. Like the rest of our local canyons, the plants you find there are a mix of native and introduced species. It’s not pristine, by any means, particularly when you consider that there’s a freeway a couple hundred feet behind where this photo was taken. But many of the really big plants are original to the canyon. You can get a good impression of what it was like two centuries ago, and hopefully that’ll motivate people to preserve what’s left.

During that walk everyone paused at a big clearing in the trees. It was a broad area that had been cleared of the invasive species and replanted with California plants. The project was financed by the city authority that maintains the sewer lines that run through the park. The maintenance roads eat into the native habitat, and for ever acre of road, the agency did an offset of five acres where they tried to mitigate the damage done by the bulldozed access routes. It’s a pretty reasonable way to deal with something a big city needs to operate–sewers–and at the same time improve the integrity of the semi-wild spaces.

After oohing and awing at the improvements, several of us noticed the poppies. California poppies, yes they were, but big, tall orange ones and not the petite yellow-to-gold ones that you typically find in the local environment.

A trip yesterday to Tecolote Canyon, another of the local urban canyons, revealed exactly the same thing in a restoration in progress there.

Technically, under current botanical systems, both versions of the poppy are considered the same species. But a quick look at them yells you that they’re as distinct from one another as cousins in a family, and they have genetics that evolved to making them appropriate for their different environments.

Take a look at their leaves, to start. The one on the left, below, is from the classic “California poppy” that people know (Escholzia californica). The one on the right is from the version found around here (at once classified as Escholzia californica maritima). The one on the left has less leaf surface, and to me looks like it’s evolved to deal with more drought.

Growing the two versions side-by side in the garden also reveals another difference. The regular California poppy develops powdery mildew this cool and humid time of year, whereas the local version seems to be close to unaffected.

So when you combine the plant size, flower size, flower color and the plants’ resistance to powdery mildew, you can see that the plants are quite different, and that the coastal version is probably better suited for living here. (In gardens the typical orange form is pretty rugged and no slouch, but its disease issues give it a disadvantage to being as spectacular as it might be in a drier region like the Antelpe Valley, the location of the California Poppy Preserve.)

Recon Native Plants, a San Diego wholesale native plant nursery that specializes in habitat restoration, takes extra pride in knowing exactly where their plants come from. Their site advertizes:

For example, an Artemisia californica from the Sierra Nevada and an Artemisia californica from coastal San Diego County are the same species, however they have evolved and adapted with different genetics for different environments. With the source identified, RECON Native Plants can tell our clients within 5 miles, the origin of each plant and the client can select the location most appropriate to their project.

It’s a good illustration of the difference between planting a garden and going the extra distance to effect a successful habitat restoration project. Many gardeners would prefer the splashier Antelope Valley version of the state flower, but that’s not the form that makes most sense for our local flora. Somewhere along the planning, implementation or sourcing of these two habitat restoration projects, something went a little astray. It’s a small detail, but it’s one that many people consider important as we try to keep our open spaces as wild as we can.

EDIT, April 7: Check out another post on two different poppy forms over at DryStoneGarden.

landscape, photography

the view from the top

April 3, 2009 James 2 Comments

It’s spring, and the wildflowers wait for no one. I’ve been forsaking gardening and home projects and blogging (gasp!) a bit to check out some of the local open spaces. Here’s a panorama of part of the view from the top of Fortuna Mountian, at 1,243 feet the second highest “peak” in the San Diego city limits. (Click the image to enlarge.)

This peak burned on October 26, 2003 during the county’s big Cedar Fire. Revisiting the area is a great lesson to see how things recover from a major fire, either by resprouting from the roots or reestablishing themselves by seed. There are still plenty of dead branches poking up towards the sky, but there’s also a huge amount of green. And these big, gorgeous rocks didn’t hold on to their scorch marks for long. (Don’t you just love rocks in a landscape, either in the wilds or in a garden?)

Many of the plants and flowers aren’t ones you’ll find even in native plant gardens, but several have passed the “garden-worthy” test. In the second frame from the left above, you’ll see a bloom spike of the stinging lupine, Lupinus hirsutissimus, sort of an awful name for a beautiful plant.

While I haven’t seen plants of this annual species offered for sale, several online sources do list seeds, including S&S Seeds, and Seedhunt.

Also on the summit were two other plants that are used fairly frequently in native gardens: laurel sumac (Malosma laurina) and mission manzanita (Xylococcus bicolor), both of them eventually forming large, interesting shrubs.

I’ll be sharing more bits and pieces of the trips as I get them more organized.

art, landscape

grab a compass…or a cow

March 20, 2009 James 6 Comments

Maybe you saw the news story last August: Using images from Google Earth, Dr. Sabine Begall and her colleagues found that cows generally align themselves north-to-south, using the earth’s magnetic field as a guide. [ image source ]

And you may have heard the followup story this week: Cows grazing around power lines faced in random directions because the electromagnetic fields generated by the power lines disrupted the cows’ internal sensors.

I was curious. If cows can have their internal systems messed with by power lines, what about plants? I did a quick web trawl and found all sorts of evidence that electromagnetic fields could in fact effect plant growth, though bioelectromagnetics is a field that hasn’t seen a huge amount of research.

One study “showed significantly greater wet root weight and significantly smaller stem diameter and dry seed weight at the end of the experiment in exposed plants compared to control plants.”

And I ran across an email response by Shireef Darwish, a grad student at the Department of Plant Science at McGill University, to the question “do magnetic fields have an effect on plant growth?” The explanation is worth reading, and includes an extensive bibliography that points to further effects of electromagnetism on plants.

Outofdoors recently did a great post that reminded us that it would make so much more sense to generate power with solar cells at the point of use in the city than to deploy solar arrays in the desert, destroying big swaths of fragile desert.

In addition to eating up the desert, I’d add that remote generation would require the power companies to deliver the power to distant cities, most likely over high tension lines. All of you can probably speak from personal experience that the power line roads that the electric companies gouge through the landscape beneath the lines do plenty to disfigure the landscape and to provide fertile open space that might encourage invasive species. Not a pretty sight. And then there’s the issue of the electromagnetic fields.

It’s been known for a while that a fluorescent tube placed underneath high-tension lines would glow just from the fields. (The effect is observable underneath the lines that carry the hugest amount of current, not necessarily the lower-capacity transmission lines.) There are at least two art projects that take advantage of this phenomenon, both to power the bulbs and to get us thinking about what it might mean for us to have these power lines in our midst.

Fluorescent tubes below power lines Larry and Debby Kline. Encryption (The Electric Fields of California, Site # 4) Sears Point Farming Company
Tubbs Island, Sonoma, CA [ source ]

I met Larry and Debby Kline here in San Diego during 2003 when they had an opening of their artwork at a gallery across the street from a gallery where I was showing my own work. They were part of the way through this project where they made sculptures of fluorescent tubes beneath some of the high-capacity power lines that run through California. One project used 30 bulbs, another 60. (A tip from the Klines: The bulbs light up best when they’re standing on end.) After assembling the sculptures, they made striking photographs of them.

And then, in 2004, British artist Richard Box used 1301 bulbs in this installation.

Richard Box installation of fluorescent tubes beneath power lines [ source ]

I don’t want to get all hysterical over the potential effects of these electromagnetic fields, but they obviously have some effects on animals and plants. While the power lines may be no more dangerous to your health than your cell phone or microwave oven, I can’t help but think that this is yet another poorly-designed and unnecessary science experiment that we humans have dropped into the landscape. There’s no doubt, though, that at least the power line roads have their impacts.

gardening, landscape, landscape design, places, plant profiles

…and some not so garden-worthy

March 13, 2009 James 4 Comments

You could probably gather together six gardeners and get six different opinions of what would make a plant garden-worthy. But I suspect there might be somewhat more agreement on certain other plants that probably shouldn’t be included in a garden. Here are some encounters from Sunday’s trip to Tecolote Canyon that would fall easily into most people’s less-than-desirable category.

I’ll have to admit to actually liking this plant to the right. During the winter it drops its leaves and is an attractive thicket of upright or sprawling branches. This time of year it starts new growth that has this warm red-brown coloration. It’ll flower soon, and then set some loose clusters of white berries. Pretty, yes, and native, and important to wildlife. But this is poison oak. Maybe not the best choice for small backyard gardens…

Most of the rest of my list below is comprised of exotic plants that have staked a claim for themselves at the expense of the native species. Different locations have their own list of invasives, so what you see below is tailored to Southern California. Some of these plants could be good choices for other locations. Others would be trouble almost anywhere you grow them.

[ At this point I’d like to dedicate the rest of this Friday the thirteenth post to Outofdoors, who last month devoted her Friday the thirteenth post to invasive plant species. ]

I won’t go into too much detail about this troublesome trio. People have been working hard to get the word out on pampas grass, green fountain grass, and iceplant. The grasses, in particular, can be gorgeous things in gardens, waving in the breeze and lending their dramatic form to groups of softly mounding landscape shrubs. You can see why people want to grow them. But are they garden-worthy in Southern California?

All three of these quickly check out of people’s gardens and make for the wilds. I found both grasses and plenty of iceplant escaped into the canyon, here on this hillside and in other spots. So, as pretty as they can be–and I consider this drift of fountain grass in the second photo to be particularly poetic–these three would be better left in their native lands, or grown in climates where the weather might limit their spread.

This is the first flower I saw this season on the local plants of onion weed (Asphodelus fistulosus). The first time I saw it I thought it was a wildflower and wanted some for my garden. In full bloom the stalks of white flowers are an impressive sight. But they do spread like crazy. Not a good choice for the garden.

This combination of plants looks as impressive as any planting assembled by practitioners of the New Perennials garden movement. But once again, the plants aren’t really welcome additions to the canyon. In the foreground is teasel (Dipsacus sp.), a plant with excellent year-round architectural structure but having invasive tendencies that are considered “Moderate” by the California Invasive Plant Council (Cal-IPC). Here it’s set against a background of last season’s black mustard, a problem in these parts since it was introduced by the Spanish in the eighteenth century. The Cal-IPC only considers the mustard’s ranginess to be of “Moderate” concern, but also states: “Primarily a weed of disturbed sites, but can be locally a more significant problem in wildlands.” I’d say it’s a more significant pest locally.

Fennel can be attractive in the herb garden, but like the rest of the invasives in this post, this is another plant that gets around. Its overall undesirable impacts are considered “High” by the Cal-IPC. If I see fennel offered in the local nurseries it’s usually the bronze colored strain. It’s less vigorous, but all forms are considered invasive. I do wish this were a better choice for gardens because it hosts swallowtail butterflies, but at least there’s plenty of swallowtail food out in the local canyons. The butterflies won’t starve. Okay, I’ll pass.

Say “Old California” to anyone who’s lived in these parts for long, and this plant will probably come to mind. The ~~Brazilian~~ Peruvian pepper tree forms a gorgeous tree with long, delicate leaves that move any time there’s a breeze. But unfortunately the plants develop berries that the birds find irresistible. While the Cal-IPC considers their threat to California to be only “Limited,” there are plants that would be better choices.

The Australian peppermint willow (Agonis flexuosa), although not a native plant, is a good drought-tolerant substitute that looks a bit like the pepper tree but doesn’t share its invasive tendencies. If you must have a delicate weeping tree that says “Old California” but don’t mind a lilting Australian accent, this would be a better choice–and you can get varieties with either green or dramatic black foliage. Or you could give up altogether on the colonial look and go in for any of the truly native trees. It doesn’t get any more “old California” than that.

As I reread this post I’m struck that I’m probably not doing a particularly good job of discouraging people from growing these plants. I keep going back to the beautiful redeeming qualities of these invasives, and I guess that’s why they continue to be such a problem. The mind tells you they might be bad news, but sometimes it’s hard to say no.

With this last image I leave the plant kingdom and turn to another species that’s native to the local canyons. This one I think you’ll definitely agree you wouldn’t want around. I won’t assume that you like snakes any more than I do, so if you want to see the picture you’ll have to click HERE.

Still, who among you doesn’t think baby animals are just the cutest things? Now, everybody, say “awwwww”… This is a little baby southern Pacific rattler, probably no longer than my forearm and too young to rattle. I’m deathly afraid of snakes but managed to fend off the fear to snap the picture and watch the snake as it coiled itself defensively and make like a sidewinder, sliding backwards into the grasses.

I have to respect these animals since they do wonders to keep down the rodent population. And they’re every bit as native as the poison oak I showed earlier. But after having had one of these in the backyard facing off against my cat, I’ve definitely decided this is another species that’s not garden-worthy, at least in my enclosed little space.

I admit it, I’m a wimp. Nature isn’t always convenient is it? But throw out the rattlesnakes and pampas grass and black mustard and fennels and you’re still left tens of thousands of cool and friendly selections to invite into the garden.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]