Category Archives: my garden

california-friendly phlomis

August 29, 2009 James 9 Comments

It’s not quite planting season, but for the last few trips to the local nursery I’d been eying a plant I hadn’t noticed before, Phlomis monocephala, a sister species to the more common Jerusalem sage, P. fruticosa.

This strongly drought-tolerant species from Turkey has leaves that are highly textured like those of several native California sages. What sets it apart from the California sages is what it does in the summer, when the leaves turn this strong yellow-green color. In the spring to early summer it will have a modest display of yellow flowers, but this a plant that you use for its cool foliage, providing a point of interest when a lot of the natives have shut down.

My front yard is a mixed Mediterranean-climate planting with a number of California natives, and I thought this plant would complement them nicely. It so happens that there are some plants that peaked five years ago and would better replaced. Three phlomis would fit in their spot perfectly.

It so happened that the nursery had exactly three plants. Plant shopping can be a competitive sport. If you see something, that might be the last chance you’ll have at it. So you can probably guess that I’m now the owner of three little Phlomis monocephala plants. I won’t do any serious garden reworking for another month or so, but I should be able to keep the plants happy and watered for that long.

The plant will top out at about four by four feet, is considered hardy to zone 9, and requires excellent drainage.

While at the nursery I noticed this other California-friendly phlomis, P. lanata. This species grows lower, to maybe two feet tall by three to four wide. The size and shape of the plant actually would have been a better choice for the spot I have, but this isn’t one of the phlomis species that develops the gorgeous yellow summer coloration.

What it does have, though, are these really cool, fuzzy grayish leaves and stems. How can you resist touching it? Like the much larger Jerusalem sage, it’ll put on a good show of bright yellow flowers.

One thing I do at nurseries is to move plants into little combinations to see how they’d look together. The first time the staff sees me doing it it might raise some eyebrows, but the staff at Walter Anderson Nursery is used to me by now. (As you might expect someone who works in a library, I make sure to put everything back in its proper place.)

Here’s a play in scale and texture, a little ensemble of yellowish-green to pale green colored leaves that I liked: the Phlomis monocephala that I bought, in combination with what would be the low-growing form of coyote ~~bush~~ brush (Baccharis pilularis pilularis ‘Pigeon Point’) and the really delicate Australian woolly bush (Adenanthos sericeus).

Often, when you do an exercise like this, the plants will have wildly different cultural requirements or would be grossly incompatible size-wise. But in this case all three could coexist together in a nice planting, with maybe only the woolly bush needing just a bit more summer watering. The woolly bush would grow up into a large shrub, the phlomis into a dense medium-sized one, and the coyote ~~bush~~ brush would sprawl attractively around the base of the other two.

my garden, plant profiles

covering ground: carmel aster

August 6, 2009 James 7 Comments

When you see a plant listed as a “groundcover” you can expect practically anything, from something that will cling low to the earth and spread like spilled paint, to what’s really a sprawling shrubby thing that will form a loose mound of branches that’s several feet tall at the center. Closer to the first category is this plant that began blooming for me during the final days of July.

The plant goes by a number of common names, among them, Carmel aster, California aster, beach aster, and branching beach aster. And the number of Latin names attached to the plant doesn’t to much to simplify identifying it: Lessingia filanginifolia v. californica, Lessingia californica, Corethrogyne leucophylla, Corethrogyne filanginifolia. The last name, Corethrogyne filanginifolia, seems to be the one that’s going to stick for a while, so that’s the one I’ll be trying to train myself to use.

Plant this where you’d like a white-leaved low groundcover. It blooms from midsummer into the fall with small, pale lavender flowers with perky yellow centers. The plant will go several months without supplemental watering, but will look better with an occasional sip of water (about once per month during the summer here near the coast).

As a groundcover the foliage on Carmel aster can be a little on the sparse side, especially when grown lean and dry, as you see here. But I use the bare spots as a place to sow some late winter-flowering wildflower seeds. Plants of California poppies look great peeking through the low mat of white leaves, for instance. By this time of year, however, weeds aren’t a problem, so the occasional bare patches aren’t a weed magnet like they might be during the winter.

Last fall I planted three different groundcovers to trial. This is the one that I’ll be keeping and planting more of.

gardening, my garden

rain, almost

August 4, 2009 James 5 Comments

We’re located far enough south that the monsoonal influence that brings August rains to the desert southwest can sometimes make itself felt. But we’re far enough north that the effect is mostly somewhat more humid days but very little or nothing at all in the way of actual precipitation.

Yesterday afternoon I was on the computer, playing a game of Tetris, that time-sink that raised itself in my consciousness again now that media outlets were celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary. For a few seconds there was this noise outside. Rain?

By the time I paused the game and made it outside most of it had evaporated, but I did manage to see a few drops left on some steps. It was enough to make it into the weather report as “a trace” of rain, but nothing to add to the 0.0 inches rainfall total since the start of the July rain season or 3.1 inches since the start of the year.

A trace isn’t enough moisture to mean much to the plants, but the weather pattern made for nice clouds for the sun to colorize this morning…

…and a nice moonrise last night. (Sunset a few minutes later was great, but I don’t take my camera everywhere I go.)

We’ve been thinking about getting ready for a few days away to see some family in the Sonoma Valley. A little rain would have helped with the preparations by reducing the areas I’d be hand-watering in preparation for being away. There’ll be someone taking care of the house, but it would be a little much to assemble detailed watering instructions or to ask them to climb a short but steep bank of loose dirt with a watering can to attend to some plants that are still getting established.

At a time like this I realize that this is a gardener’s garden that requires selective attention to different plants. Most of the plants are grouped by water needs, and two sprinkler heads and a small drip system take care of the thirstiest plants. But the occasional new plant mixed in with established plantings requires individualized attention–mostly in the form of extra water, usually delivered by hand. So I’ll be working through a short list of watering chores to finish before leaving:

soak the potted plants
soak the new plants scattered around the garden
give the veggies a good drink
visit the water store for 5 gallons of water for the bog plants
water seedlings and cuttings in the greenhouse

And there’s one final important thing to remember: Put cat food out where the cat sitter–but not the ants–can find it…

gardening, my garden

many parts are edible

August 1, 2009 James 7 Comments

Tomato plants are poisonous, right? Actually, not at all, according to a New York Times article that a coworker sent me on Thursday.

I’d bought into the common wisdom that tomato plants, along with potato plants and many other members of the nightshade family, contained poisons that rendered them inedible. The article stated, however, that the alkaloid in tomato plants, tomatine, has no history of poisoning humans or livestock, and that there was at least a brief record of the leaves being used in cooking, most notably in a tomato sauce served at the landmark Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. Furthering the argument that tomatine is “probably not a killer,” Harold McGee, the article’s author, mentioned that the alkaloid is present in significant amounts in green tomatoes. There’s definitely a long history of eating those, often in fried form, often in the South.

I consider myself to be both a curious eater and a curious gardener, so I had to put this knowledge to the test. At the same time, I thought I’d also try my first preparation of “cossack asparagus,” the shoots of the aquatic cattail that I have growing in the pond.

First, I cut some tomato leaves off one of the plants. Next I trimmed some of the cattail shoots that had escaped into the pond from their pot. I removed the toughest outer leaves from the cattail shoots and rinsed them.

I chopped the cattail stems and the tomato leaves, and added them to a stir-fry of ginger and Japanese shishito peppers from the garden. If I were a little more adventurous, I’d have left off soy sauce so that I could have tasted the ingredients better. But I chickened out. In went a drizzle of soy.

The conclusion? I served a little side portion to John without telling him what the ingredients were.

“At first I thought they [the cattails] were green onions,” he said. “But they didn’t taste like them. And then I thought they lemongrass. But I was able to chew them.”

Such gushing enthusiasm! But after he made the reserved comments above, he agreed that the ingredients were indeed edible, and that we could have them again. And yes, I lived to write about eating both of these new ingredients.

Next time I’ll try simpler preparations so that I can better enjoy the individual flavors. Maybe a pesto sauce with raw tomato leaves. (I found that the cooking removed most of their flavor.) Or maybe I’ll try preparing a side dish of cattail stems steamed like asparagus.

One of my gardening resolutions for the year was to explore the lesser-known edible qualities of my garden plants. I’m glad that I did.

gardening, my garden

the most recent water bill

July 29, 2009 James 5 Comments

We’ve taken a lot of measures to try to conserve water. Each water bill we receive gives us a chance to look at how well we’re doing. Compared to last year, this last bill showed a 40.1% drop for the two-month period of mid-May to mid-July.

To get to this point we’ve installed drip irrigation for most of the remaining thirsty plants, reduced the number of times a week the outdoor sprinkler runs, recycled water from the shower, mulched many garden spaces, and replaced some water-intensive plants with low-water or no-water selections. It’s helped that this has been a fairly cool spring and early summer.

Still, 112 gallons a day average total for a household of two people–one of us working 40 hours a week, the other mainly working out of the house–still seems a little on the high side. That’s enough water to flush a 1.6 gallon low-flow toilet 70 times per day. But compared to an American per capita average of something around 60-70 gallons for just indoor usage, I guess that’s not too awful for both indoor and outdoor use.

Hmmm, I wonder if we can get the usage down to less than 100 total gallons a day for the two of us. It might be a little tricky over the summer. But it should be totally doable once the weather cools.

gardening, landscape design, my garden

a hanging screen

July 27, 2009 James 9 Comments

Here’s a hanging screen in the garden, a project from a decade or more ago that I still like. It helps separate two levels of the garden: a lower level that has black bamboo planted in a corner, and an upper one where there’s a long tiled bench and outdoor fireplace.

The screen hangs in an opening that’s five feet high and six wide, and features opaque white polycarbonate in the frame that allows the shadows of the bamboo to provide interesting shadows on long, sunny afternoons.

The style of the screen is a little more overtly Japanese than where I’m in my life stylistically right now, and comes from a time when I was exploring Asian influenced craftsman designs as I was trying to improve my woodworking skills. (There’s a whole bedroom in the house that features similar woodwork.)

The materials are redwood for the frame and polycarbonate for the “windows.” The whole assembly was made with no tools more specialized than a hand-held circular saw and router. Everything is held together with screws, pegs, caulk and an unspeakable amount of waterproof glue.

gardening, my garden

in the pond

July 21, 2009 James 6 Comments

When we purchased the house it came with a nice, deep pond that was perfect for waterlilies. It also came with an upper pond with a waterfall into the lily pond, and two other small ponds. Two decades later, one of the small ponds has now been converted into a planter, and another into my bog garden. Remaining are the two largest ponds, the lily pond and the upper pond, which we reduced in size by half.

We’ve had waterlilies blooming since the end of April. I have no idea what variety this one is–It came with the pond that came with the house. But it’s a tough and reliable plant.

The ponds are mostly John’s territory, but I’ve sneaked a couple California native species into them. The first is a cattail (Typha sp.), one of my favorite water plants.

If you’ve ever grown these, you realize quickly that there’s a certain amount of maintenance that goes with them, mainly in dealing with their spreading rhizomes. If the plant is potted, it’ll soon escape and will require frequent trimming when growing actively. Here are a couple of shoots that have escaped into the fertile pond scum. In the past the shoots got tossed, but I just read in an excerpt from Steve Brill and Evelyn Brin’s Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not-So-Wild) Places how they’re totally edible and are nicknamed “Cossack’s asparagus.” The next trimmings will be going into the skillet.

A new native to the pond is California bulrush (Scirpus californicus), a replacement for a giant papyrus that finally succumbed after two decades. Although the new scirpus is called a rush, it’s actually a sedge. Two months ago it was a one-gallon plant. Now it’s easily twice the size.

Its little flowers aren’t spectacular, but a mass of these little bloom clusters could be a nice effect once it gets a little larger.

The closest canyon is about an eighth of a mile away, but various critters find their way to the water. Raccoons, opossums and tracks from a cat larger than a house cat, smaller than a cougar have been sighted over the years. During the first years a couple of visits from a great blue heron finally discouraged John from trying to raise koi in the lower pond after they ended turning in expensive birdfeed.

These days the main visitors are sparrows, which blend so well with pond scum and the surrounding rocks that they’re hard to see…

…and these days we’re seeing a lot of these lesser goldfinches.

Now that our daytime temperatures have finally been climbing into what you’d expect during the summer, I think I might be frolicking in the water if I were one of these birds.

gardening, my garden

two reasons to mulch

July 20, 2009 James 5 Comments

One of the weekend garden projects was to put down some mulch around a couple of the fruit trees. I’d resisted doing it earlier because I’d been using the bare ground at the edge of the little orchard as a place to sow various annual wildflower seeds–clarkia, baby blue eyes, poppies, fun things like that. Mulch would have prevented the seed from germinating.

A little garden of annual wildflowers sounds really cool, but it’s a lot of work to keep going. Bare ground during the wet winter and spring weather is an open invitation for all the dormant weed seeds to set up house, and keeping the bed weeded was a several-day-a-week chore.

Add to that that we’re re trying to do more to conserve water. Mulching around the trees to conserve water was making too much sense to not do. Come winter I’ll be glad for the reduced weeding.

The raised bed with the fruit trees still contains some ornamentals near the edges, and I mulched up to near the edges of most of them. This is the local Dudleya edulis, combined with blue chalk fingers, Senecio mandraliscae, from South Africa.

Some of the other plants in the bed were so low-growing that mulching would have covered them entirely. I left a couple little patches of the native Dichondra occidentalis with mulch only at the edges. Hopefully the plant will be able to grow up through the mulch a bit.

This little San Miguel Island buckwheat seedling was large enough to not bury, but a couple seedlings nearby were specks in the dirt that would have never seen the light of day.

For these tiniest seedlings, I left the ground bare. In addition I erected a couple little goalposts to mark the location so I wouldn’t stomped on when I walk through or pull them out thinking they’re a weed. It’s a technique I use whenever I plant some seeds in the open ground. The little upright twigs usually stay around long enough for the seeds to germinate and get to a safe size.

I’ll miss the little meadow in the spring months, but not the weeding. And I feel better that the fig and plum will be able to get by with a little less water. Come fall, if I decide I’d still like some annuals to liven up a garden spot with the bare branches of the trees overhead, there really wouldn’t be anything stopping me from clearing little patches of dirt through the mulch, sowing some wildflowers, and erecting little goalposts to protect the plants from marauding gardeners.

Hmm. I’m not sure why it took me so long to do this…

gardening, my garden

friday garden roundup

July 17, 2009 James 5 Comments

After finishing my coffee and reading some of the newspaper this morning I took a quick survey around the yard.

Honey bush (Melianthus major) is a South African species that I’ve had for a couple years now. Although it responds to watering with a lot of spunky growth, it’s also good with minimal additional watering. I have two sprinkler heads in the garden, and this plant gets by on the overspray from one of the heads after it’s made the sages and tangerine tree happy.

The maroon flowers unfurl from the branch tips in spring and dry to these brown spikes. I’ve left them on the plant to help me decide if I like the way they look or not. The bed they’re in in has a lot of mounding plants, so the spikes give some vertical interest.

The leaves are heavily serrated and are the main reason for growing the plant. Here they are, with shadows, and backlit by the morning sun. They look a little fierce, but they’re actually soft, like rubber. They do have a bit of an unpleasant odor if you brush by them. Combine that fact with the plant’s eventual size–six to twelve feet–and you’ll see that it has “dramatic background plant” written all over it.

The melianthus grows next to a bromeliad that truly is nasty and spiny. (I’ve mentioned this plant before…) Pretty though, even when it’s not flowering. And it takes next to no water when grown in mostly shade.

Next to the honey bush and bromeliad, in a planting that spans two or three continents, is a young manzanita, Actostaphylos Dr. Hurd, shown here in a detail highlighting its exfoliating bark. Although one of the faster growing manzanitas–it’s grown eight inches since February–this still isn’t a plant for the impatient. Currently it’s exactly one meter tall, and will hopefully hit its design height of ten feet before I’m back diapers. Eventually it’ll make it to fifteen feet or more.

In the front of the same bed, next to a sprinkler head, are some basil cuttings that I’ve posted on before. Six weeks after planting out, the largest plant is maybe eight by eight inches and is big enough for me to consider taking an occasional snip for the dinner table. In a month I should be ready to make batches of pesto.

The final photo isn’t my garden, but looking across the street, where they’re installing plastic turf. The neighbors are responding to our new water restrictions by mixing synthetic grass with palm trees. The look will be something like the wet Hawaiian paradise they had before.

But I do worry that synthetic grass, even if it looks something like the real thing, does nothing to address people’s fundamental expectations of what a garden should look like in a fiercely dry climate. And in my most uncharitable moments I think that installing plastic grass is like treating heroin addiction with methadone. And to this gardener, installing something as dead as plastic grass lands with a thud as loud as the one created by the infamous 1978 remodel of a Sunset Boulevard mansion by a Saudi sheik that featured planters full of plastic flowers.

But hey, they’re doing what makes sense to them, and they will be reducing their water use.

gardening, my garden

july bloom day

July 14, 2009 James 16 Comments

For this month’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day I have some closeup photos of some of what’s blooming in the garden. I’ve done a couple posts on using backgrounds behind plants (Background check / One way to photogrpah a tree). Inspired, all but one of these shots uses a white sheet of matboard placed behind the plants. Each color of background presents a different end result. Using white accentuates dark flowers and stems, and some of these photos are a busy network of dark lines against the light background.

There are some newcomers just coming into bloom, but many plants have been in bloom for several months. When life gives you more of the same flowers…well, I was thinking I’d try to photograph them a little differently.

I suspect the neighbors think I’m odd enough taking pictures of everything in the garden, and I thought it’d be extra-distressing if I were to be walking around the garden with a big white board as well as the camera. As a result all of these are from the quiet privacy of the back yard, with the exception of the one plant without a white background.

Purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea.

Lion’s tail, Leonotis leonorus; Desert mallow, Sphaeralcea
ambigua.

Peruvian daffodil, Hymenocallis festalis; Freeway daisy, Osteospermum sp.

Verbena bonariensis; Juncus patens (with fallen leaf caught in the plant).

Some salvias:

Salvia nemerosa ‘Snow Hills’; Ivy-leaved sage (Salvia cacaliaefolia).

On the left is Andean sage (Salvia discolor with its almost black flowers set in light green calyces; on the right is Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips.’

Some California buckwheats:

Flat-topped buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum)

San Miguel Island buckwheat (Eriogonum grande var. rubescens)

St. Catherine’s lace (Eriogonum giganteum)

Butterfly bush (Clero- dendrum ugan- dense); seed pod of whitetop pitcher plant (Sarracenia leucophylla).

Pink and white double bougainvillea (unknown variety); Agastache aurantiaca ‘Apricot Sprite.’

Pink double bougainvillea (another unknown variety); toloache (Datura wrightii).

Thanks again the Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. It’s a terrific way to build community among garden bloggers wanting to share the flowers in their gardens. Check out this month’s offerings!

[ Lost in the Landscape ]

Category Archives: my garden

california-friendly phlomis

covering ground: carmel aster

rain, almost

many parts are edible

the most recent water bill

a hanging screen

in the pond

two reasons to mulch

friday garden roundup

july bloom day

an artist loosed in a garden