Category Archives: my garden

gardening, my garden

from seed, the easy version

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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.

gardening, my garden

my new dudleya patch

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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.

gardening, my garden

unusual october

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October usually throws some ridiculously warm and dry weather at us. This was the month that in 2003 and 2007 saw monster wildfires racing through the county, including the largest fire to hit California in recorded history (in 2003).

We’ve a few of those warmer days, but what’s been surprising has the the cool, wet foretaste of winter. Here’s a little example: This is my parking pass for work, where I usually go in to the office Mondays through Thursdays. Each big dark X corresponds to a day when it was too wet to ride my scooter in to work. Add to that another morning when I got a bad weather report and arrived pretty drenched.

Over the last two weeks it seems like half the mornings looked a little like this, with mist–or outright rain–turning the pavement wet.

Finally, the line of repurposed cat litter buckets that had looked so forlorn all summer at the drip edges of the roof were beginning to fill with water. In fact my two rain big barrels are now full, ready to have their contents shared back into the garden.

In response to the cooling trend plants are leafing out; seedlings are germinating. Readers not in mediterranean climates might think they’re reading a garden blog from the southern hemisphere. But no, this is California, which shares this wet-winter/dry-summer climate with less than 5% of the earth’s surface. To make up for being so special we’re treated with almost 20% of all the world’s plant species. More than a fair trade for long summer months with close to no water.

I was out in the front yard over the weekend, tidying up growth that had hit its expiration date. Mixed in with branches that had truly died were plenty belonging to drought-deciduous plants that were coming back to life. On the left is our local chaparral currant, Ribes indecorum, turning from brown twigs to leafy twigs. On the right is Verbena lilacina, a plant that can stay looking fairly green over the summer if you give it more water than I do.

Everywhere I stepped I had to avoid mashing tiny little buckwheat seedlings, or these guys, itty bitty little chia plants (Salvia columbariae). Early this summer when I took out the dead plants of this annual I made a point of shaking the seed heads over the dirt. Still I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough germination to repeat the amazing show of last spring. Looks like I didn’t need to be so concerned.

In the back yard seedlings of baby blue eyes were pushing their way through the mulch. The mulch really does help keep down the weeds, but this species fortunately doesn’t seem overly daunted by my attempt to save myself a few dozen hours of weeding. Various creatures do find these seedlings extra-tasty–including the cat, which seems to think these are almost as good as catnip. Once they’re larger the cat doesn’t seem to pay them any attention. I’m hoping for a nice half dozen or so survivors.

And there were even more seedlings. These are a few days away from showing their first true leaves, but I’m hoping that they’re the beginnings of clarkias that surrounded this patch of bare dirt. If not clarkias, they’re likely seedlings of this really noxious weed that shared the space with the clarkias. We’ll soon find out…

Yes, it’s been an unusual October. But I’ll take plants leafing out and seedlings pushing their way out of the ground any day over another round of brushfires!

gardening, my garden

my new natives

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Saturday was my local California Native Plant Society’s annual plant sale.

Eight hours on my feet, volunteering, had me pretty exhausted, but not too exhausted to shop! Still, I thought Saturday’s haul showed remarkable focus and restraint–except for one plant.

I’ve threatened to start a collection of dudleyas, that cool mostly-California genus of rosette-forming succulents. I have several species in the garden already, and I’ve always been struck by the subtle variations between the different kinds. I think that you can make out some of the differences pretty easily in the big group photo above, though a couple are immature plants and will look a little more like their relatives when grown up.

So here are the new additions:

Dudleya abramsii, Abrams’ dudleya.

Orcutt’s dudleya, D. attenuata ssp. orcuttii.

Britton’s dudleya, D. brittonii, a Baja species, probably one of the biggest, splashiest of this genus.

Candle holder live-forever, D. candelabrum, another of the larger, more charismatic species. This hails from the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara.

Bright green dudleya, D. virens ssp. hassei (also called D. hassei). The “bright green” in this Catalina Island species appears to be a misnomer since my plant looks really white or blue-green, as do the photos up on CalPhotos.

Sticky dudleya, D. viscida, a plant only found in the low southern end of the state.

Looking at the first photo you’ll probably notice a plant that looks nothing like a dudleya. That plant is thick-leaved yerba santa, Eriodichtyon crassifolium. With a reputation for spreading when it’s happy, this isn’t a plant for every garden. There’s a spot behind the back fence on the slope garden where there’s a tangle of iceplant and ivy. If any plant stands a chance against those two nemeses it might be this one. I’ve loved its lavender flowers in the spring and the strikingly modern upright growth habit. It’ll give me more excuses to tend this little wasteland of a garden space, my little secret garden with big, scary datura flowers and the even scarier iceplant and ivy.

gardening, my garden

october color

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Here’s a quick roundup of what’s blooming in the October garden. It might look like a lot, but this is probably 90% of everything that has anything looking remotely like a flower on it, and a lot of these are tiny tiny flowers on big big plants that are grown primarily for their foliage and structure. It makes you a little more appreciative of the plants that make this hard time of year their floral niche.

Just starting up their bloom are the first of the paperwhite narcissus, Camellia sasanqua ‘Cleopatra,’ Stapelia gettleffii and Protea Pink Ice.

Salvia clevelandii ‘Winnifred Gilman’ is showing a second burst of energy, blooming not quite as intensely as in the spring, but with more vigor than over the summer.

All the rest of the plants have been blooming for a few months now, and a few of those fall into the almost-everblooming category–plants forever thinking about S. E. X. Click any of the little thumbnails below for a closer look, or hover over the thumbnail for the plant name. (And my apologies for a few repeats of some of the same images above–My gallery software only has an all-or-nothing option for posting these.)

Thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting this monthly roundup (even though it’s actually been a few months since I posted…). Check out this month’s other [ Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day posts ]


gardening, my garden

roadkill flower

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When I got home Monday it was almost dark, one of the sure signs that summer is over. Out in the garden a pot of Stapelia gettleffii was showing off its first flower of the season. It was dark enough that I had to use the camera flash.

I’ve only had this South African plant for a few months and this was its first bloom for me. Elaborately striped and fuzzy with hairs that look like fur, I’m trying to decide whether the flower is “pretty” or not. It’s definitely in the weird and wonderful category, though. The flies like it too, mainly because it’s gently fragrant like something that’s been run over on the interstate.

I’ve grown another of these carrion flowers, Stapelia gigantea, for a few years now. That plant has flowers that last for just a day, and I was expecting the same thing with this species. But when I went out earlier today that first flower was still open, drawing a small crowd of adoring flies. (They got camera-shy for this shot.)

This is a frost-tender plant, so it’d work only if you brought it indoors for the winter in regions colder than zone 10. I’m not sure I’d want this as a houseplant when it’s flowering, but it fortunately blooms before it gets so cold outside that you’d have to bring it inside.

Pretty or not, it’s definitely a conversation-starter.

gardening, my garden

our big food swap

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Some folks in my office organized an event where we’d bring in our excess fruits and veggies and do a big exchange for some of the other things people brought to share.

My main time of having excess food in my garden is around March, when the grapefruit tree goes crazy. Now in the late throes of summer, the garden basically had herbs to share–I didn’t think the figs would make it intact in a tight backpack as I scootered to work. So here’s my little pile of offerings: rosemary, parsley, lemongrass and rose geranium. People weren’t convinced that rose geranium was edible, so I also brought a couple recipes. [ Here’s one of them. ]

I didn’t feel so bad that my figs didn’t make it in. Someone had three trees of green figs, all of them ripening at the same time.

We have another gardening artist in the building. He had some potted tomatoes and sweet peppers to share. I helped myself to one of the peppers, Doux Long d’Antibes, a long sweet pepper from up the coast from Cannes.

And here’s this glorious collection of hot peppers. I love my hot peppers, but being fairly coastal I have a hard time growing them. This gardener lives inland a few miles, so the little bit of extra warmth helped her get this great crop. So of course my haul included a few of these as well.

This was the first time that this food swap was tried at the office, and I’d definitely call it a success. You reach a point where even neighbors and family don’t want to see you headed their direction with a bag of fruit.

I’m hoping we can do this again, maybe in the late winter, when I’ll have kale and chard to spare, along with a tree full of amazing grapefruit…

gardening, my garden

summer at last

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Summer finally arrived last week. A humid mass of high pressure from Mexico hopped the border fence and gave us some hot days and tropical-looking morning clouds that lit up brilliantly as the sun rose.

After almost four months with a total natural rainfall of .05 inches much of the garden has been heading into its defensive dormancy. But a few plants seem to be reveling in the arrival of some real summer heat. Top of the list is this California fuchsia, the ‘Route 66’ cultivar, which opened its flowers to coincide with the hot weather. Some Epilobium species and clones have fairly small, gray-colored leaves, but this is one of those where the leaves a smidge larger and greener, a bright contrast to the screaming orange flowers.

Desert marigold, Baileya multiradiata, has been blooming away with the help of a little additional water, but not much.

In the bed that gets some irrigation the gingers are the current stars of the show. Coinciding with the California fuchsia was this kahili ginger, Hedychium gardnerianum, a plant that I’ve been growing since my early teens, a hand-me-down plant from one of my mother’s gardening friends. Sitting in the back yard after sunset is a treat with this insanely fragrant ginger nearby.

Of course summer isn’t all about the flowers. The fig tree is hitting its peak fruit production this week. It’s the variety ‘Brown Turkey,’ which is supposed to do well with less heat than what most other varieties require. This has been one its best years ever for me. I’m trying to figure out what went right this year, and I’m thinking the success has something to do with water. This past winter and spring actually delivered a slightly-over normal rainfall that was spaced evenly throughout several months. Also, last year I applied some water-conserving woodchip mulch over the bed that contains the fig. And John’ has made a point of watering the zone around the fig every other week or so. I hope to be able to repeat the success next year, which according to the prognosticators could be a drier than average La Niña year.

The garden herbs are doing well. A sixpack of parsley several months back is turning out to be way more than two people who use parsley once or twice a week. At least it’s a pleasantly textured plant for the front of a border.

A sixpack of basil, however, hasn’t seemed to produce nearly enough. Maybe the basil will pick up with the warmer weather.

Surprisingly the tropical lemongrass plants (both the East- and West-Indian versions) haven’t been sulking and are overproducing just like the parsley.

Adding to the pile of edibles, our neighbor Olinda stopped by with her grandson. It was all she could do to carry this giant watermelon. John was impressed with its size and suggested I weigh it: 30.8 pounds.

It’s one of the with-seed varieties that stores these days don’t seem to stock much anymore. Stunning rind, don’t you think? One of the many things we’re losing in part because of big agra.

I was hoping to save the watermelon for a day or two, until we had room in the fridge, but I was a little clumsy photographing its cool rind in detail. Now I know what a melon dropped 3 feet off a table onto a brick patio does. It stays in one piece, but you have to deal with it right away.

High summer also means the best cantaloupes of the season. This is Scooter helping us out by finishing a couple of half-melons we had for breakfast. The melon came from the local hybrid grocery-farmer’s market.

And so our summer begins: a little too much melon and a garden peaking with fruit and herbs. Life is good.

gardening, my garden

my haul

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In the spirit of the “haul video,” the art form in which a fashion-conscious usually young consumer describes his or her latest finds from the last shopping trip to the mall–a video in which the word “cute” has to appear at least fourteen times–let me show off my latest finds on my recent excursion to the Theodore Payne Foundation. (You didn’t think I’d go there and only pick up a couple plants for Aunt Barbara, did you?)

This first photo, a dark-flowered selection of desert willow, Chilopsis linearis, is a plant I did not buy. But if I manage to kill of one of my existing large shrub-sized plants in a spot that receives some summer water, this plant will be near the top of my list.

I also didn’t picky up any of the cool selection of pots.

But I did buy a few plants, including:

Verbena lilacina ‘Paseo Rancho,’ a light pink selection of the usually lavender Cedros Island verbena. You might call its color a little on the pale and insipid side, but it’s different from the other clones in my garden. Insipid but different, and maybe just a little cute. Reason enough to have it.

Cliff lettuce, or Dudleya caespitosa. Cute, huh? Ever the collector, I think it might be fun to explore some of the dozens of Dudleya species that grow in California.

Coast buckwheat, Eriogonum latifolium. I don’t really know this plant–which is sometimes reason enough to try to get to know it better. It’s been described as being similar to San Miguel Island buckwheat (E. grande). To me it looks like the leaves are a little more deluxe, thicker, fuzzier.

This plant, along with the preceding two selections, isn’t native to my immediate area. But being coastal or island plants, I’m hoping they’ll like what I have to offer them. The rest of my haul, however, consists of species that grow in my county, some of them not far from me.

San Diego ragweed, San Diego ambrosia–whatever you want to call Ambrosia pumila. The leaves are really delicately cut, like some artemisias, and I think this diminutive plant really does qualify as “cute.” This is a species that’s listed on the CNPS list of rare plants and proposed for the Federal Endangered Species list. It’s weird to travel 140 miles to get a mile that grows nearby, but that’s the responsible thing to do. Our local CNPS plant sales also have offered this plant. Yanking these up out of the ground where they grow nearby would be grossly tacky and totally illegal.

San Diego willowy monardella, Monardella linoides ssp. viminea, is another local plant that’s listed by both the state and federal agencies as endangered. It’ll have delicate whorls of lavender flowers when it blooms. But like most (or maybe all?) monardellas it has intensely fragrant leaves that I can enjoy right now.

And finally, one of my favorite of the softly delicate grasses, Aristida purpurea, purple three awn. It’s slightly more coarse than the popular Mexican feather grass that’s non-native and starting to look like it’s invasive. But it moves just as amazingly in the wind, and has a delicate purple tinge part of the year, something feather grass doesn’t offer.

August isn’t high season for planting, but with this cool summer-that-never-was I figured I could get away with it. And really, here, not that far from the coast, the main issue with many plants is water.

I hate to show newly installed plants before they have a chance to fill in, but here’s the finished bed where all of the plants except for the monardas went into. These Californians should be better choices for this exposed, dry spot than some of the exotics that I had in there before. Not shown in this photo is a very happy Cleveland sage and some ecstatic purple three awn plants that I grew from seed.

I haven’t counted all the “cutes” in my writeup. I know I’ve failed miserably, partly because I really dislike the word unless I’m discussing my extremely cute cat. I will try to do better if I decide to commit my shopping trips to video.

gardening, my garden, places

but what would aunt barbara like?

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A little over a week ago we went up for a long weekend to visit Aunt Barbara in LA’s San Fernando Valley. The Theodore Payne Foundation, one of the Southland’s major sources of California native plants was only half a dozen freeway exits away. I’ve mail-ordered seeds from them but I’d never been to the nursery. Midsummer isn’t high planting season. Visiting to buys plants might not be the best idea. Still, alright, you know where this is headed…

Barbara was busy with a friend, but John and I took the trip to Sunland, the community situated near where the Valley reaches toward the Los Angeles River and meets the San Gabriel Mountains. Urban sprawl quickly gives way to large, dusty lots. Manicured landscaping starts to fade away as the look and smell of the foothills blows in from the east. What a great location for a native plant nursery.

The perky Baja fairy duster, looking a lot like many Australian plants Southern Californians are used to seeing
The Matilija poppies were past their peak, but there were still a few around

Late July isn’t high season for native flowers. The last of the season’s Matilija poppy flowers (Romneya) appeared here and there on the nursery grounds and Baja fairy duster (Calliandra californica) provided some blooms next to the parking lot. (Interestingly, according to the Tree of Life Nursery, Theodore Payne–the person, not the foundation–was responsible for discovering and introducing the ‘White Cloud’ cultivar of Romneya that is so often grown.)

Something else that was blooming: Dendromecon harfordii

Also in bloom: Salvia pachyphylla with its gorgeous pink bracts against the violet flowers

A little trail leads to the little rise of land overlooking the nursery. The sign points to “Wildflower Hill.”

This time of year it’s pretty much California Flat-Top Buckwheat Hill, which isn’t at all a bad thing. It’s a subtle and gorgeous plant. But if you came expecting Butchart Gardens, well you’d be disappointed. Of course, if a taste of wild California is what you’re after, this is your place.

Of the three retail native plant nurseries I’ve been to over the last several years, this one is probably the wildest and the least “garden”-like. There are pockets with benches and picnic tables, but the main narrative here is that you’ve stepped over the edge into wilderness. Shut your eyes and you hear birds everywhere. Look away from the buildings and you could easily feel that you’re farther than four blocks from the suburbs. (By contrast, San Juan Capistrano’s Tree of Life Nursery feels the most nurtured, tended and garden-like. The Escondido branch of Las Pilitas Nursery falls somewhere in between.)

We were staying with Aunt Barbara, and I wanted to go back with a couple plants that might fit comfortably into her garden, both in the way it looks and the way she waters it. To give you a taste, here’s a shot of her front walkway.

…and here’s another shot at the Payne Foundation grounds, of the beautiful spires of spent sage against the browning landscape. This kind of scene gives me a real sense of nature’s subtle cycles, but I had a feeling Aunt Barbara wouldn’t go for it. What plants would reconcile the deep divide?

The short list of the nursery’s many selections included seaside daisy (various cultivars of Erigeron glaucus), bush snapdragon (Galvezia speciosa), California aster (Aster chilensis) and maybe even one of the California fuchsias. Barbara mentioned loving the flowers of Matilija poppy, but that’s a plant purchase I think a person needs to make for themselves, after they’ve seen how vigorous it can be and how un-cottage gardeney it starts to look this time of year.

The winners?

The only flower on the Venegasia carpesioides that I picked out for Barbara. I wished that it had a few more.

Canyon sunflower (Venegasia carpesioides) and the ever-popular Penstemon Margerita B.O.P. I planted them before we left, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they A) survive, and B) show Barbara that there are some natives that would fit easily into her California cottage garden. What other plants would the rest of you suggest for all the Aunt Barbara’s out there? What plants would you pick that could mix fairly easily with existing garden borders and bloom much of the year?

And some of the flowers on the Penstemon Margarita B.O.P.