The front garden, like the rest of my lot, mixes California natives with exotics from all over. Our local bladderpod in the foreground, yellow and perky and virtually ever-blooming, with a big clump of aloe that owns January.
Folks in colder climates may be drooling a bit, but there’s a price for year-round gardens: Year-round weeds! Since this is Bloomday, let me start off with a few weeds in bloom, doing their best to generate even more weeds. There are times when I think that it might be nice to live where you can forget about weeding for three months or more…
Weedy nightshade, right before I pulled it upWeedy chammomile relative, Pineapple WeedPure yellow evil, from the big family that gives us sunflowersWeedy grass
California native Corethrogyne (Lessingia) filaginifolia duking it out with weedy alyssum
But through the magic of photography, an artistic medium well suited to telling lies and half-truths, here are some blooms for the month. I could tell you there are no weeds around these blooming plants, but then I’d be lying. Big time.
From California, and the California floristic province:
Hummingbird sage, Salvia spathaceaA prostrate form of the local black sage, Salvia mellifera, picking up its floweringOur local very fragrant nightshade, Solanum parishiiWinnifred Gilman sage, with a few scant flowers, not quite buying into the fact that spring is coming.Tree Coreopsis or Giant Coreopsis, Coreopsis gigantea, still a ways to go before achieving tree statusSan Diego Sunflower, Bahiopsis (Viguiera) lacinata, battling iceplant on the slopeOne of almost a dozen monkeyflower seedlings. It is definitely partly Mimulus aurantiacus, but other species could be involved.Verbena lilacinaA lone Coast Sunflower, Encelia californica, with way too many weeds back on the neglected slope gardenSanta Cruz Island Buckwheat, Eriogonum arborescensOur local chaparral currant, Ribes indecorum, pleasant, not spectacularArctostaphylos manzanita Dr. HurdAstragalus nuttallii, from the California Central Coast
Okay, everyone, say awwwwww. Carpenteria california
From beyond California:
Your basic prostrate rosemaryThe last of the bicolor narcissus. I didn't get the camera out while it was looking nice.A kalanchoe species or Edit January 17 Cotyledon orbiculata--see first comment from Elephant's EyeYour basic jade plantCrassula multicava, a low groundcover with vaporous little jade-plant-like flowers floating above itArctotis Big MagentaAnother Arctotis hybridYour basic prostrate rosemaryPeople generally grow aeoniums for their foliage......but they also have a month or so when their flowers can upstage the plant.And humans aren't the only species that appreciates the flowers. Look closely and you'll see quite a few ants going to town...
Two forms of Oxalis purpurea, purple- and green-leaved. It's pretty, but best contained in warmer climates where it can spread.Sleepy Oxalis purpurea flower, slowly unfurling as the morning advances, feeling blurry until until the sun hits it.
Green rose in bud...
Green rose unfurled...looking a little less green.
Checking out the garden, photographing flowers, you get to see what’s going on in the garden. I’ve mentioned the weeds already. Now, let’s add gopher holes into the mix shall we?
While I’ve pretty much given up trying to control the gophers, I can at least pick away at the weeding. Okay, enough blogging for now. Time to pull some weeds. But maybe I’ll check out a few more Garden Bloggers Bloom Day posts first…
If there’s a story of the year for the garden, one of the competitors would definitely be the December rains. The prognosticators were promising us a La Niña winter, cool and very dry. Instead we got one of the rainiest Decembers on record.
I’ve been playing with video lately, and here are some snapshots of the garden as it looked on December 22, partway through some of the torrents.
I was a wimp. All the shots are through windows, so you can only see part of the garden. But I think you get the idea.
The video quality is definitely lo-def, as the capture was done with an old point-and-shoot that had some lo-res video capabilities. But like I said, I think you get the idea…
And for you concerned capitalists out there who might have been worried about the status of one of our local shopping palaces after I posted some photos of part of it underwater, here are some befores and afters of the Fashion Valley Shopping Center. The befores are from the same day as the garden photos above. The afters are from December 29.
Before
After
BeforeAfter
Before...After
Not everything was back to normal. Parts of the garage are still under a few inches of water and cordoned off.
And there’s a limited amount of damage where the water undermined the road under the elevated trolley tracks.
But overall things looked pretty good, and shoppers were back to returning their ugly sweaters for something more desirable.
The forecast is for more rain the night of New Year’s Day. Will La Niña Loca continue on into the next year?
Before the holidays got in full swing I got some pitcher plant seed and seedlings from Rob of The Pitcher Plant Project. Rob is super-enthusiastic about the genus Sarracenia and his blog bounces along with his energy. Check it out!
Rob’s a couple years ahead of me in making his own custom hybrids and has some really cool plants coming along. Here are some shots of the seedlings he sent me.
These first all come from the cross of Sarracenia Bug Bat x Diane Whittaker. This cross combines the seriously snakey-looking hood of S. minor with the frilly hood and wild patterning ofS. leucophylla. The plants are young, but you can begin to see what promise they have. You can also see some of the variation that’s possible in a complex hybrid.
Two views of a seedling from the complex cross of Sarracenia ((purpurea ssp. pupurea x jonesii) x (leucophylla x rubra ssp. gulfensis)). All four parents of this hybrid share a rare recessive genetic mutation that prevents the leaves from producing red pigments, leaving this hybrid green green green from chlorophyll. One of Rob’s special interests is in these so-called “anthocyanin-free” (“AF”) plants, and I think they’re pretty amazing too. It really focuses your attention on the architecture of the pitchers.
Even if you’re only moderately technically-oriented you can make a lot of sense out of what’s going on with these AF plants in a paper by Phil Sheridan and Richard Mills, first published in Plant Science and now available online at Meadowview Biological Research Station: [ Presence of proanthocyanidins in mutant green Sarracenia indicate blockage in late anthocyanin biosynthesis between leucocyanidin and pseudobase ]. According to the paper the mutation that makes these plants green is one that affects the final stage in the metabolic pathway that creates red anthocyanin pigments.
And the plants kept going… Here are some first-year seedlings of the cross of Sarracenia Godzuki x ((flava x oreophila) x flava var. rugelli)…
And finally a big pile of seed from some really interesting crosses:
S. oreophila “Veined” x Adrian Slack
S. (oreophila x Royal Ruby) x Adrian Slack
S. leucophylla x Adrian Slack
S. (leucophylla x oreophila) x Brooks Hybrid
S. (leucophylla x oreophila) x (Ladies in Waiting x Judith Hindle)
S. Bug Scoop x Brooks Hybrid
S. alata, Texas x flava var. maxima
They’re now in individual bags of damp sphagnum moss in the lower veggie crisper of the fridge. A couple more weeks of the cold treatment and then they’ll be ready to pot up.
If I manage to keep all the plants and even half of the new seedlings I germinate alive I’ll be up to my ankles in hungry young carnivores. To some people this might sound like a 1950s B horror movie, but as far as I’m concerned life doesn’t get much better than that!
Red and green seem to be the predominant colors these days. Instead, how about a shot of hot magenta-pink against green? Of all my pitcher plants this season Sarracenia Daina’s Delight is probably looking the best of any of them.
Vivid colors aren’t the rule this late in the season, with brown being the increasingly prevalent shade. With fewer things like color to distract you it’s a good time of year to concentrate on the amazing shapes these pitchers assume. In their brown state it’s easier to see the little hairs on the leaves that direct the insects down into digestive juices.
For you color addicts there’s still a bit of color left. This species is Sarracenia rubra var. wherryi (a.k.a. S. alabamensis var. wherryi.)
And for you color addicts who like a more traditional red and green combo, could you do any better than this? It’s a cross nicknamed ‘W.C.’ by Jerry Addington after Karen Oudean’s Willow Creek Nursery, in honor of Karen bestowing on him this clone of the hybrid of S. (psittacina x rubra) x leucophylla.
Hmmm…how about a cross between Daina’s Delight and W.C. for gorgeous late season color and awesome patterning? If they both bloom next spring I just might have to make that cross and find out…
The year's first carpenteria, which opened on December 17th, shown here with an appreciative local critter on the stamens.
Winter Solstice is a celebration for optimists. Six months of ever-diminishing sunlight leads up to this, the day with the longest, darkest night. If you weren’t an optimist or schooled in the rational ways of the world you might expect the days to diminish into perpetual darkness–No wonder the Mayan Long Count Calendar ends on this day in 2012. A pessimist could see this day as the beginning of the end of time.
But I know things are about to change. The duration of the sunlight I find so precious is about to start to increase. The plants that are beginning to sprout will take advantage of the extra light and grow faster and run headlong into California’s manic late-winter, early-spring season of flowering and regeneration. Call me an optimist. It may be tough now, but to appropriate the words of Dan Savage in his campaign to fight bullying of LGBT young persons, It gets better!
Here’s a brief white-themed gallery in case you’re dreaming of a white solstice. We have no snow to offer you, but instead how about some bright white flowers, some white leaves to get you into the mood?
Have a warm and safe holiday, everyone, whether the white stuff around you is snow, foliage or blooms. It’s all about to get better, soon.
The local chaparral currant, Ribes indecorum, a plant new to the garden within the last year, coming into bloom for the first time.Detail of the chaparral currant flowers.December paperwhite narcissusEarly-season blooms of black sage, Salvia mellifera. The overall color is really more pale violet than white.Flowers on a volunteer statice plant, Limonium perezii. The bracts give the flowering structures a lavender look, but you can see that the flowers are actually white inside the bracts. The closest neighbor's plant of this is a few hundred feet down the street. I had no idea the seeds could travel so far. Enjoy it now. This weed is outta there once the holidays are over.Details of the leaves of San Miguel Island buckwheat, Eriogonum grande, green on top, white beneath...
The white-ish Dudleya brittonii with December precipitation, rain, not snow...
Who could forget our great local white sage, Salvia apiana?
...and one of our great local dudleyas, D. pulverulenta, one of the whitest of the dudleyas, and it loves life in my garden. Joy oh joy!
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.
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.
