Category Archives: my garden

gardening, my garden, photography, plant profiles

echiums!

9 Comments

This must be the year for my prima donna plants to finally decide to bloom. First it was the first bloom for me of the Agave attenuata over the winter. Now it’s this echium’s turn.

This is Echium wildpretii, which has gone from five feet tall two weeks ago to over seven and a half feet.

It’s also known by various common names, including tower of jewels, red bugloss, and–in Spanish–tajinaste. “Tajinaste”: what a gorgeous sounding name, way more musical than bugloss or “tower of jewels,” which sounds a little square to me, like a plant name from a 1927 seed catalog. Tajinaste is endemic to one Atlantic island, Tenirife, off the northern African coast.

This echium species is described as a biennial. Many plants described that way will put up leaves the first year and then bloom the second year from seed, after which the plants produce huge amounts of seed and then die.

Although it’s been known to flower in the second year, this plant’s usual interpretation of the term takes “biennual” literally as “two years,” keeping you waiting that long from sowing to flowering. And there’s one plant in the front yard that looks like it’s going to be taking an additional year. Biennial? I think not.

Still, worth the wait, don’t you think?

The plant grows in spirals. Here you can see the spiraling new flowers.

The central rosette of leaves just a few months before sending up the central bloom stalk.

During the two years you wait for it to bloom, you get to look at an attractive mound of lance-shaped coarse gray leaves, usually eighteen inches to twice that across during its second growing season. When nature withholds flowers you can always look at and photograph leaves. So here’s some of my little crop of Echium wildpretii plant photos.

Echium wildpretii leaves in soft focus

Some of the leaves develop these neat hook ends.

As you can see it’s an attractive plant even when out of bloom. It has low water requirements and looks clean until its final, spectacular exit. After a few months it turns from a big dramatic plant into a big dramatic dead plant with tendencies to topple even before its deep tap root decays.

Its reputation is that it’ll send seeds everywhere at that point, so this might not be the best plant if you live near the edge of a dry natural area. A related echium, pride of Madeira, (E. candicans) has established itself as a pest in some coastal areas of Southern California. I’ll get to see how bad it really is after these plants finally give out later this summer. I’ll worry about that later, but for now I’ll sit back and enjoy the plant.

gardening, my garden

some local yellow daisies

7 Comments

As the big spring bloom winds down I’ve been struck by how many of the native plants have yellow flowers. It clearly offers the plants an evolutionary advantage since bees love yellow and bees are some of the major pollinators. This is a little roundup of the three yellow daisy-flowered shrubs and sub-shrubs that I grow.

Coast sunflower as you find it...at the coast.

Encelia californica hails from the more coastal edges of Southern and Central California, hence its common name of “coast sunflower.” A dark central button anchors golden yellow rays that shoot out in an informal circle. It’s a popular choice for both gardens flowering roadside wildflower mixes.

The green, green leaves of this encelia.

With so many other natives bearing grayish leaves, the bright green leaves of this plant really stand out. I’ve seen it used locally, where an occasional drink during the summer can help keep it green and flowering through the summer. In my garden the plants have a mostly unirrigated spot behind a fence, so they exercise their natural tendency to defoliate and stop blooming when the weather warms.

Giant coreopsis, Coreopsis gigantea, earns its name more from the tall plant size rather than the size of its flowers. The weird plant will eventually form what looks like a trunk from three to six feet tall that sprout finely-cut leaves. This takes a few years–My two year old seedlings are in the two to two and a half foot tall range. Blooms are perky yellow daisies about three inches across. I planted a little grove of these in a back corner of the garden, but the grove has dwindled to just a few plants thanks to a gopher that found the little tree trunks too delicious to pass up. Grrrr. Times like this I hate hate the full circle of nature.

This last one’s San Diego County sunflower. The current botanical name is Bahiopsis laciniata though I and everyone else I know around here learned its name as Viguiera lacinata. Its flowers come in at about an inch and a half across, so it’s smaller than the previous two. But a blooming bush of it makes a low, neat mound in the garden or in the local wilds. Of these three, the flowers have the most “refined” look to them–if you consider French marigolds and yellow cosmos to be refined plants. Because of it being a local plant it’s a fairly common denizen of local native plant gardens. Also, a lot of coastal-zone roadside restoration projects around here seem to have this plant in the mix.

Although I’ve call all of these “daisies,” each has its own special character and use in the garden. The encelia is a great pick for its long bloom when watered. The coreopsis is a perky mass of flowers when it’s in bloom, but few California natives stand up to it in weirdness during its leafless state in the summer and fall. The San Diego County sunflower is a nice tidy mound with so many flowers you might confuse it for an an annual. But it’s best to plant some decoy plants around it for the dry parts of year when it dies back.

Give them a try. The bees will thank you.

my garden, photography

unfurling datura

11 Comments

Only about five minutes elapsed between the first and second of these photos of the unfurling buds of sacred datura, Datura wrightii. I had no idea how quickly these things opened in the fading evening light as they get ready for their nighttime pollinators. Stand too close to these massive opening buds and you could almost get hurt!

There are times I’m sorry you can’t convey hover the internet how something smells. This is one of them. These massive eight to nine inch flowers can pump out so much scent every moth in the neighborhood comes for a visit. I usually think humans and insects don’t have an awful lot in common. But we definitely share an attraction to this flower’s amazing scent.

That’ll be the next photo project: setting up the tripod again in the dark, waiting for the moths, as I get intoxicated on the scent of the flowers…

gardening, my garden

leaves more amazing than flowers

13 Comments
Sarracenia Leah Wilkerson pitcher and flower

Today I feature some striking pitcher plant leaves to mark the occasion of April’s Foliage Follow-Up, the blog meme begun by Pam of Digging.

The story goes that the early settlers mistook the carnivorous trumpet-shaped leaves for flowers. And how could you blame them? These tall tubes formed from modified leaves feature interesting shapes and colors in the green-yellow-white-pink-red range, often with the colors forming striking patterns. They’re easily as interesting as most flowers.

Botanist Donald E. Schnell writes in Carnivorous Plants of the United States and Canada, “there seems to be nothing subtle about pitcher plants. Their general appearance begs attention, and when we encounter them we are almost startled. But once we look for awhile, then wander among them, we can begin to peel apart layers of subtlety and see many little secrets that collective fit these plants so neatly into their bog habitat–and we still do not know all their secrets.”

Schnell has divided the carnivorous pitcher leaf into 5 different zones, each with a different morphology. The scary insect-eating and -digesting carnivory takes place down in zones 3 and 4, the lower parts of the pitcher. But these photos concentrate on the backs of the top lid of these pitchers, the entire lid being what Schnell calls zone 1.

The top of the pitcher of Sarracenia Leah Wilkerson
Sarracenia Mardi Gras
Sarracenia leucophylla, red, Franklin County, Florida
Sarracenia leucophylla 'Tarnok'
Sarracenia mitchelliana. Within a few weeks the pitcher will be entirely maroon.
Sarracenia (flava x mitchelliana). Plants with brownish leaves are often a hard sell, but I think this plant makes a good case that they can look rich and wonderful, not like dead leaves.
Sarracenia Judith Hindle
Sarracenia W.C.
Sarracenia Red Sumatra. This early in the season it looks more like Pink Sumatra, but the color will darken before long.

Even though my sarracenia plants get to live in a cushy USDA Zone 10 garden (not to be confused with the zones of a sarrecenia pitcher), their internal clocks seem more tuned in to seasonal cycles of daylength or relative temperatures than to absolute temperatures. Most of the species and hybrids have been suspicious of San Diego’s warm climate and keep their flowers and foliage developing in the rhizomes all winter. Only now are most beginning to bloom and send out leaves, though maybe a little bit earlier than in the American Southeast, where these plants originate.

As the season progresses, these leaves will often develop different colorations. The veins in some will grow more pronounced, some pitchers will go all-red, others will show a golden underglow. The brief burst of spring flowers in these plants is great, but the foliage makes for months of really cool leaf-viewing.

For all sorts of other foliage happenings in the garden world, check out the links in this month’s Foliage Follow-Up post at Digging. Thanks for hosting, Pam!


gardening, my garden

blue and orange (gbbd)

19 Comments

The color combination of blue and orange reminds me of noisy kiddie toys, of hard molded plastic waiting room chairs, of harshly lit 1970s fast-food restaurants trying unsuccessfully to look modern and friendly, or of jerseys for some high school football team. With two colors screaming at each other from opposite sides of a color wheel, it’s not a combination that brings me a lot of joy or peace.

But spring is here, and part of the far back yard has been blooming away. Its main colors are–you guessed it–blue and orange, mainly hot orange California poppies and sky blue flowers of nemophilia, baby blue eyes.

As much as I generally don’t love these colors together, it’s hard for me not to like this little zone of perky chaos.

Even the blue flowers against the brick hardscape reinforces the blue and orange (or blue and orange-red) colors.

But in a garden you hardly every have two strong flower colors alone. The varieties of leaf green serve as peacemakers, separating the warring colors and injecting their own shades into the garden color palette. Other secondary leaf or flower colors help the enrich the palette and keep the peace.

From some angles a softer blue-gray provides a background to the hot orange flowers. Here the foliage is the now-common chalk fingers, Senecio mandraliscae. It’s still a blue and orange theme, but the blue is less emphatic and the orange is permitted to dominate.

Little pockets of cool-colored plants provide areas of visual rest. Here’s baby blue eyes and chalk fingers with a dark purple-black aeonium. Pretend I cut back the dying narcissus foliage…

Some viewpoints let the cool colors predominate, with just a few punctuation marks of poppy orange. New into this photo are whitish-violet flowered black sage (Salvia mellifera), magenta freeway daisy (Osteospermum), with a softer orange-red desert mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) in the upper left corner.

I’ll have to rethink what the combination of blue and orange means to me, at least in the garden. These flowers may be gone in a couple of months. Maybe this a combination that I should embrace and associate with “spring.”

Spring is bringing lots of other colors combinations and other flowers to gardens around the world. Check them out at May Dreams Gardens, where Carol is hosting yet another Garden Boggers Bloom Day. Thank you, Carol!

gardening, my garden

plant it once, have it forever

10 Comments

There’s a prominent Northern California nursery* that advertises on its website that a variety will self-sow and naturalize. Or in its peppy, enthusiastic way: “Reseeds!” One of the plants so listed has a followup note: “Due to agricultural restrictions, we cannot ship this plant to Arkansas, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas.”

Read between the lines: This plant, under the right conditions, might just run wild, out of control, and take over your garden or an ecosystem! (Not all plant restrictions are based on their invasive potential, however. For instance, some might be controlled because of known pests or diseases the species may harbor.)

Over the years I’ve added interesting plants to the garden, only to have them sow and propagate themselves all over the garden. For most of these, I don’t worry huge amounts that they’ll escape to the nearby wilds because they’re wimps when not pampered in a garden, but with regular watering they’re aggressive thugs. Pretty thugs, to be sure. But still thugs.

Here are a few of my mistakes. Some are merely annoying. Others require multiple hours of labor every year to keep under control. Colder areas might not have the same problems with these that I do, but I’m sure you have your own monsters. (My apologies in advance to the fine nation of Mexico. I just noticed that four of my selections have “Mexican” in their common names…)

Mexican petunia (Ruellia brittoniana). Pretty, tough. Also pretty tough to eradicate in my garden once it got a foothold. I should have paid attention when the guy at the plant sale warned me that it might spread. According to Floridata, “Mexican petunia is listed as a Category I invasive species by the Florida Exotic Pest Plant Council. This means that it is ‘altering native plant communities by displacing native species, changing community structures or ecological functions, or hybridizing with natives.’ This warning applies to all parts of the state of Florida (and other areas with similar mild climates). Where hardy, the Mexican petunia excels at invading wetlands.” It also can be a nuisance in a dry garden like mine where it spreads underground and via exploding seed pods.

Mexican fan palm (Washingtonia robusta). Maybe it’s a uniquely California thing: You go out to the garden to pull weeds, and along with the crabgrass and spurge, you end up pulling up little palm trees. Folks in colder climes might be thrilled to have some of these, but here they’re a nuisance. Our Mexican fan came with the house, and it took us a few years to finally remove it. All that time we were yanking baby palms all over the front yard, and the seedbank remained viable for several years afterward.

Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima). I’ve dinged this plant several times before. I won’t add anything more here other than to note that I’ve probably pulled up a hundred seedlings this season. At least this is down from the orgy of seedlings that I had when there was a harem of adult plants in the garden that apparently had nothing on their mind except sex and reproduction.

Mexican evening primrose (Oenothera species, I think it was O. speciosa). I was on vacation at the Grand Canyon in 1991. Innocently I bought a packet of seeds of these that were sold as a “wildflower.” I was thrilled when they came up the first year and I had a gregarious patch of delicate bright pink flowers where there’d been a patch of dirt previously. Little did I know they’d resow and spread by underground runners and continue to annoy me to this day. Wild flower, indeed.

Sweet alyssum (Lobularia maritima). Don’t let the “sweet” in its common name fool you. I continue to weed alyssum seedlings popping up around the garden from a single packet of mixed colors I planted in the late 1980s.

Fortnight lily (Dietes iridioides). A few clumps of these came with the house. The tough, hard seeds lay dormant in the ground for years and plague you with unwanted seedlings long after you’ve removed their source.

Calla lily (Zantedeschia aethiopica). I’ll have to admit that I have a soft spot for these plants and don’t pull them out the same way I pull out other unwelcome plants. My parent’s house came with a fifty-foot foundation planting of them on the north side of their house. The way the plant can spread, however, now makes me think the previous owners might have started with just a half dozen plants. Feral callas are plants of concern in some California wetlands. A couple well-watered garden spots seem to generate calla lilies out of thin air.

Epazote (Dysphania ambrosioides). I won’t quite call planting this Mexican herb a mistake, since I use occasionally in cooking. It does spread about the garden a bit, however, and pops up in unexpected places. There are reports [ including this one ] that it’s colonized parts of New York’s Central Park–though that’s not my doing. I popped over to Wikipedia and learned this pretty interesting detail I’d never heard before: “Epazote essential oil contains ascaridole…; in pure form, it is an explosive sensitive to shock.” Botanical TNT–Wild!

To my mistakes, I’ll add some native California annuals and perennials that have been really successful in reproducing themselves in my garden. Currently, my plants are wandering around an area where they’re desired and haven’t escaped far. I won’t call them mistakes at this point, but I can see that they could become unwelcome in some situations.

California poppies (Escholzia californica). What? Our sacred state flower?! Well, there are some unwelcome escaped colonies in Chile and Australia. And the seeds regularly find their way into cracks in the pavement.

Baby blue eyes (Nemophila menziesii). Not really what I’d call a thug, though these seem to be pretty successful at reproducing themselves. It’s easy to pull out the occasional unwanted plants, but who’d want to?

Clarkia (Clarkia spp.). I haven’t grown many clarkia species, but the one that seems to wander around the most for me is C. rubicunda ssp. blasdalei.

*There’s a good chance you’ll have guessed the identity of this well-known nursery if you’ve spent any time at its website. I don’t mean to diss them at all. You can get potentially rambunctious plants from virtually all nurseries, including those dedicated to native plants.

gardening, my garden

mowing is like vacuuming…

7 Comments

I don’t have many opportunities to mow the lawn. I’ve basically told John that the day he can’t keep up with the grass will be the day I break into the Monsanto factory and abscond with all the Roundup they have and then apply it to the lawn. There’s lots of other ways I’d rather use the space.

The day has come. John had some work done on a foot and will be hobbling around for a couple months. The grass, however, well-watered from the January and February rains, didn’t stop growing, and it was time to have the conversation.

Well, in the end, I’m embarrassed to say that I caved, reasoning that he should be back to pushing the mower around in a few weeks, and now isn’t the best season to think of planting something that will require water to keep it going through the dry summer and fall ahead. Besides, John really likes his little patch of lawn, and he lets me have my way with most of the rest of the garden.

So I popped some allergy tablets and pulled out the electric mower and headed for the patch of grass. Back and forth I went over the browning green surface. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s weirdly meditative, like vacuuming, I decided, only with a device that can chop off your toes.

My diverse lawn

As I took down the seed heads it was a chance to look at this what we call a lawn. It’s never been a fanatically maintained piece of green, and features little colonies of Saint Augustine, Bermuda, rye, clover and whatever other species the wind has delivered. The biological diversity of this patch would do the Amazon proud and drive any single-species lawn fanatic to distraction.

The cat, last fall, shaking off the thatch from the lawn. This is inside the house, of course.

By mid-summer it’ll go mostly brown as we cut back on watering to continue with our water conservation. At that point, facing four to six months of brown, four to six months of thatch being tracked into the house every time you walk across the garden, that’ll be when we might continue our discussion with whether we might want to do something else with this patch of prime garden real estate.

Whatever we decide, you can rest assured that we will not be installing the plastic turf that’s getting to be a popular garden surface around town. In fact, I like that stuff so little I’ve started my very first Facebook group, Plastic Turf Must Die!!!!!! As far as I’m concerned fardens are about life and growing things, and this stuff is as dead and cheesy as anything out there. If you’re any sort of joiner and hate the stuff yourself, join the group!

gardening, my garden

culturally insensitive plant names?

33 Comments

On one of my trips out hiking one of the group went running over to a plant in hysterical full bloom, Pedicularis densiflora, something she referred to as “Indian warrior.” It’s a stunning little plant that’s at least somewhat related to the plants in the genus Castilleja that are sometimes called “Indian paintbrush.”

I can’t say that I’ve had a conversation with anyone about this pedicularis. But in this age of heightened cultural sensitivities and school mascots being changed to less potentially offensive characters I’ve been trying to use the more generic name of “paintbrush” when discussing the castillejas. Most people still know what I’m referring to.

A quick look at Calflora turned up dozens of other California natives that have “Indian” in the name, including Palmer’s Indian mallow (Abutilon palmeri), Indian manzanita (Arctostaphylos mewukka), Indian milkweed (Asclepias eriocarpa), Indian strawberry (Duchesnea indica) and Indian headdress (Tracyina rostrata). I’m not Native American but I wonder if these common names might not be the best to use.

Tradescantia albiflora. Some people call it inch plant--probably a better name for it.

Trying to come up with other plant names that have left me a little queasy I thought immediately about the common houseplant, wandering jew, Tradescantia albiflora. The former owners of my house planted some in a bed, and I’m still trying to eradicate it, twenty years later. I keep telling myself that “wandering Jew” is just a plant name and I’m not being anti-semitic when I take the weeding fork to it.

Algerian ivy is another incredibly noxious plant pest, but I know that it’s named after the country where it originates and not the people who live there. In this case I don’t feeling like I’m committing genocide when I yank it out by the yard. Same goes for all the thousands of other plants named after their country of origin, both in their common and scientific latin names.

Dried leaves of Citrus hystrix

Looking on the web I came up with a couple other plant names that folks might find offensive. Golden Gate Gardener had a note about Keffir lime, Citrus hystrix, and Keffir lily, Clivia miniata. In Arabic, according to one of the commenters on the post, “keffir” refers to a non-believer, something similar to the way “heathen” is used in English. Possibly objectionable. But when the word traveled to South Africa it became a seriously troubling epithet for the non-white population. Ick. I buy the leaves of this lime in Asian groceries for when I make curry or pasta, and I’ll make a point of calling it something else. Thai lime, maybe. As for Clivia miniata, the latin name comes to the rescue. Even my mother–not prone to show off with scientific names–called it clivia.

Plant names are important. They can tell you plenty about the sociology of those who did the naming, and they can shape how you perceive the plant. I’ll try to pay more attention to names when I use them, and I’ll try to reject the ones that really shouldn’t have a place in modern, accepting, pluralistic society.

gardening, my garden

bog chronicles

6 Comments

Several ponds and a waterfall came with the house when we moved in a couple decades ago. They looked cool and the waterfall continues to provide a nice gurgling noise that helps mask the usual din of a residential neighborhood. Unfortunately, as the years passed, the ponds began to fail or show their shortcomings.

One of them was so tiny it was good for breeding mosquitos and not much else. It got turned into a planter pretty quickly.

The mid-sized pond turned out to be a critter magnet. Rummaging possums and raccoons ate all the fish and regularly upturned any water plants. Two years back it became my first bog garden, and is today filled with carnivorous sundews and pitcher plants. I was concerned about how much water a bog garden would require, but last year I figured it out that it required only about as much water as an equivalent patch of grass.

Maybe five years ago it became apparent that we had a growing leak on the largest pair of ponds and linking waterfall. The concrete that made up the ponds was fine, but plant roots were prying up the decorative rocks that had been mortared on top to make the ponds look like a volcanic grotto. I divided the upper pond in two, leaving the front half to cascade the water into the lower pond. The back half became yet another planter. Nothing seemed to do well there, though, so I decided to try turning it into another bog for my growing pitcher plant collection.

I started by removing several hundred pounds of dirt. Taking away the dirt exposed the reason why nothing seemed to thrive in the bed. The surround plants had sent their roots into the planter and sucked up whatever irrigation I provided to the plants I wanted to thrive there. I did a brutal pruning on all the adventuring roots, but figured that they’d be back when offered moist soil to wander into.

To keep roots out of the bog I decided to containerized the bog plants in plastic storage tubs from Target. I could water the plants in the tubs and leave the surrounding soil dry, reducing the attraction for marauding roots. I used two sixteen by twenty-two inch containers that were a foot deep plus a smaller one on the end.

The super-secret ingredients that went into my bog mix: sand and peatmoss. You need to be sure the peatmoss doesn't have added fertilizer, which could make the bog plants fail.

I packed dirt around the tubs to stabilize them, then filled them up with a 60/40 blend of sphagnum peat moss and washed plaster sand, the sort of acid, low-nutrition soil that most carnivores prefer to grow in. Finally, after several hours of hard labor of the sort the sort that I think my doctor is about to tell me I can’t do anymore, I got to install the plants.

The bog, ready for plants.
One of the Sarracenia alata rhizomes that went into the bog.

I selected several species of taller-growing pitcher plants to form the main planting, Sarracenia flava, S. alata and S. oreophila. From my research I figured out that these often grow naturally farther from water sources or in areas where the bogs dry out for part of the year. As far as pitcher plants go, these all should prove to be fairly drought tolerant. Still “drought tolerant” is a relative term, and they’ll need to be kept at least damp year-round.

Ta-da! The finished bog.

To finish off the planting, and to partially assuage my guilt at not using native plants, I surrounded one of the tubs with divisions of one of my native rushes, Juncus patens, a riparian plant that doesn’t seem to resent drying out. Another bonus of this species is that it looks good throughout the year, something that can’t be said for these pitcher plants, which counter their several months of looking severely cool and amazing with several months of looking dying and pathetic.

I’ll post progress photos as the young new bog plants begin to fill and and show their potential. I’m hoping this won’t turn into another failed pond.

gardening, my garden

high spring (gbbd)

22 Comments

This is it. High spring in San Diego. There are probably more things blooming now in the garden than there will be at any other time of year.

I start with the current state of the agave that I’ve been showing for the last few months. It’s bloomed its way from the base of the flower stalk to very near the very end. The plant will soon die and you won’t see any more photos of it. Fortunately the plant has several other growths to keep it going into the future.

The spike has arced up and come back to the ground, where its final blooms are resting.

I’ve provided a few captions, but there are too many flowers to comment on in detail. For the rest of the photos, hover your mouse to view the names or click to enlarge.

Leaves of the unknown Gasteria.

An unknown gasteria. The flowers are nice, but I grow it mainly for the foliage.


The weird double blooms of this pitcher plant, Sarracenia leucophyll 'Tarnok,' shown with the first pitchers of the season.
The bloom of another carnivorous pitcher plant.
Geum and blue-eyed grass.
Salvia lyrata 'Purple Volcano.' It's rather weedy according to Robin Middleton, but it does have its nice garden moments.

The not-quite black flowers of Salvia discolor.

Flowers on the grapefruit. They smell great. And they bode well for a good crop next year.


Thank you thank you thank you to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. Stuff is beginning to bloom everywhere. [ Check it out all the blooming gardens! ]