Yesterday I went out to Crestridge Ecological Preserve, about a half hour’s drive from coastal San Diego. There will be lots of photos from the trip, but here’s a little panorama to get started, featuring the common sticky monkeyflower, Mimusus aurantiacus.
Around here you can easily find clones of it that are soft apricot-yellow, or ones that are orange, or scarlet. I’d read somewhere that pretty much all the forms west of Interstate 15 were scarlet, and all of those east of it were apricot. It was supposed to have something to do with coastal plants supposedly being pollinated by hummingbirds, while those inland were visited by bees. (EDIT, May 9: Another source I just looked at mentioned that the primary pollinator of the pale form was the hawk moth, which makes sense for an adaptation towards larger, paler flowers.)
Well, what do you make of this? The top composite shows the plants, below are the details of the flowers on the plants. (You’ll definitely have to click to enlarge this photo to make sense of this wide panorama.) On this north slope were five plants that showed the complete range from apricot to scarlet, and the plants were arranged sequentially as if they lines in a spectrum. Crestridge is a couple dozen miles east of I-15, so I think these plants blow the I-15 hypothesis out of the water.
I’d guess the real answer will implicate plant-sex and require a more nuanced understanding of how these different color forms establish themselves in different areas.
Two weeks ago I joined the local CNPS chapter for a trip out to Anza Borrego Desert State Park with botanical wizard, Larry Hendrickson. Our destination was Plum Canyon, one of the rocky canyons that drains the eastern face of San Diego County’s Laguna Mountains. Spring wildflowers were close to their peak, and Larry knew ’em all, including a sighting of an Arizona plant that hadn’t yet been described in California.
This first plant is the species that gives the canyon its name. Well, you’d guess it’s some sort of plum, but the common name of Prunus fremontii is actually “desert apricot.” Plum, apricot…close enough.
I went a little crazy with the camera, and below are some of that craziness. (I think I got all the IDs correct on these, but if I missed a few, let me know!)
Desert sun is your first impression, but plants were everywhere, blooming and not.
Subtly colored, powerfully scented: Desert lavender, Hyptis emoryi. This common plant is in the mint family–It helps explain its intense aroma whenever you touch the plant.
Near the desert lavender, Trixis californica.
Subtle dark blue-violet flowers of Indigo bush Parry Dalea, Psorothamnus Marina parryi. (Thanks to jimrob and Larry Hendrickson for the correction here!)
A very cool spurge, Chamaesyce polycarpa.
One of the things you notice is that the plants often grow in the company of other plants, separated by expanses of sharp shards of decomposed mountainside. It’s not a look that people generally cultivate in their gardens but it makes sense here. Larger plants help provide shelter to seedlings. I’d also guess that more seeds end up caught up in the low branches of shrubs than they do in the bare earth with rain beating down on them. The effect is a bit of an enthusiastic jumble of plants.
Desert lavender with brittlebush, Encelia farinosa var farinosaPhacelia distans with Chuparosa, Justicia californicaChuparosa, phacelia, with Fremont's desert pincussion, Chaenactis fremontiiEven the cactuses get romantic. Here's a young Engelmann's Hedgehog Cactus, Echinocereus engelmannii with California barrel cactus, Ferocactus cylindraceus
This combination of big and tiny yellow flowers I decided was totally garden-worthy: Encelia farinosa with the desert subspecies of deerweed, Lotus scoparius var. brevialatus. Nearer the coast the coast sunflower and deerweed makes a similar combination.
Speaking of garden-worthy plant combinations, I thought this composition of pale and silver-leaved plants and stems was a delicate mix of contrasting scale and textures.
Springtime in the desert means belly flowers galore…
Camissonia pallidaPurple mat, Nama demissum, with Wallace's wooly daisy, Eriophyllum wallaceiAnd in the category of belly flowers falls the locally rare plant I mentioned earlier. This tiny little thing is Arizona pussypaws, Calyptridium parryi var arizonicum. So far this is the only known California population.
An itty bitty legume. I have Lotus stragosus in my notes, and I'm pretty sure that this is that.
A mile up the canyon, as you gain a ltitle altitude, the California junipers start up.
Many were going crazy with the juniper berries.
And a couple junipers had this bug. I’m really bad with my insects, so I’m just calling this a juniper bug. I’m sure it’s got a real name… Edit (March 28): Thanks to Katie for this bug ID: This critter definitely looks like a western leaf-footed bug.
On the way home, climbing out of the desert, two differently-colored species of ceanothus provided spots of color along the sharp curves of Banner Grade. The lavender one was our fairly widespread C. tomentosus. But what was the white one? My carload of plant people just couldn’t stand not knowing. We had to stop and do a quick ID.
The slightly cupped leaves helped us identify this plant as Ceanothus greggi ssp. var. perplexans. Although known as “desert ceanothus” the plant didn’t get prolific until we started climbing near the 3,000 foot level.
This final photo is the plant in the landscape. How could we not stop for a closer look?
A couple weekends ago Agave deserti was looking well-watered from the winter rains. This swirling mass of plants appeared to have nominated one of the cluster to go forth and flower.
Flowering is a big deal for these plants. The stalk will rise up something like ten feet from the plants central growth point. When they start out the stalks take on this gorgeous pink and green coloration, which contrasts against the nearly white rosettes of the main plants.
I couldn’t help myself from getting a little abstract and arty with this extreme cropping of this closeup. It’s really such a neat phenomenon that you can appreciate all sorts of ways.
Once it blooms the main growth point dies. Critters relish the seed, so these don’t always get a chance to reproduce that way. Fortunately they have the fallback of throwing one or more pups from the base of the plant. Once a plant has bloomed and pupped a few times you can get a striking grouping of genetically identical plants called a genet. The first photo of this post is a nice example.
The plants were all over the slopes of Plum Canyon at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. But occasionally you’d see the agaves setting up household in unlikely places, like this rock cleft. It makes for a nice photo though I’m not so sure about what it bodes for a lifetime anchored in this one spot. The plants didn’t appear any too concerned, however.
I leave you with a closeup of a single plant of a larger genet. Wikipedia says that a single individual out of a genet is called a ramet. I learn something new every day.
Although many agaves grow in perfect, implacable rosettes, so that you can almost see a mathematical purity in their patterns, the desert agave seems to celebrate a looser, wilder approach to life. You can almost envision a vortex of desert wind blowing just looking at these leaves.
All in all a gorgeous species!
I’ll have more desert plant photos as I work through the files on my camera…
When word hit that the tsunami generated by the huge Sendai Earthquake would be hitting San Diego by 9:00 a.m. yesterday morning we took notice. When the size of what we were likely to experience was predicted to be only in the two to three foot range, it motivated John and me to do a bit of disaster tourism by heading for the water.
I suppose our motivation was a bit like a child’s playing with plastic dinosaurs–small, safe versions of big scary things. We could experience something far-away and fearsome with minimal risk. It could put us in touch with things of this world that evoke fear and awe. Where we went, to the base of the Crystal Pier in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of town, we encountered one or two dozen people doing exactly the same thing.
Over the course of an hour the water rose and withdrew twice. It happened fairly quickly, but the effects were pretty subtle, so subtle that I might be overreacting and calling the normal tidal changes tsunamis. I’m fairly certain it was more than normal tidal motion, however, partly because the changes coincided almost exactly with the time the forecasters predicted the surge would hit.
Down at the water’s edge I was strafed by this sand grader more than once. This is a highly groomed beach.
Reminders that seaweed and other unpleasant things grow in the water aren’t welcome here. The tourists don’t like to step on the stuff. The locals don’t like the smell. So out comes this machine, like some sort of giant beach zamboni, keeping the sand free from nature.
It reminded me that my knowledge of local green things pretty much stops at the water line, even though there’s a rich and strange world not far from where I stood. The common seaweed is properly an algae, not a plant, but there are several marine grasses that call the ocean home.
I think this is one of the surfgrasses, Phyllospadix spp. The leaves are strong and stringy to stand up to the constant motion of the water.
But beyond that, I just have a general notion of what’s out there. The sea remains a dangerous mystery.
Hmmm…maybe the local native plant society needs to host a native plant swim instead of a hike…
After having lived without a cellphone for the last two centuries I finally took the leap. Not only did I get a cellphone, I got a smart phone. The iPhones have been all the rage for a while, but I ended up selecting an HTC MyTouch serviced by T-Mobile.
As someone who’s a bit of a Luddite and who’s loudly protested cellphones and cellphone culture, I’m almost ashamed to admit owning the device. Still, something about the combination of a device that is part-phone, part-camera, part-wireless router, part-web browser, part-music player, part-camcorder, part-GPS unit, part-nanny, part-godknowswhatelse seemed compelling.
The view looking north, up past Scripps Pier
Last week a good friend came to visit for a few days. A tourist trip up to the top of Mount Soledad, the high point of coastal San Diego, seemed like a good idea. Thursday was a break between winter storms, which meant that the visibility could be pretty stunning.
Yes indeed. The views were terrific. Also, a lot of native plants surrounding the little pad of green grass and parking at the top of the mountain were breaking out into bloom.
Did someone say “photo-op?”
Scarlet monkey flower, Mimulus aurantiacus, but judging from the focus the camera was more rapt with the view of La Jolla below.Deerweed, Lotus scoparius, also frustratingly out of focus, no matter how hard I tried to get the camera to focus on the flower instead of the background foliage.
Since I didn’t have my real camera this seemed like a good test for the camera feature on the new handheld device. (Really, can you call it a phone anymore?)
Here’s a short stack of snapshots I took up there. And yes, I consider them snapshots, only snapshots.
I’m used to cameras with lots of controls. For controls, this model has a moderate zoom option and the ability to turn the flash on or off or on automatic. That’s it for options. So, it does make for a simple-to-use camera, but it’s simple to the point of being simplistic. Coast sunflower, Encelia californica, showing both focus and exposure issues.
The flowers of lemonadeberry, Rhus integrifolia. Unlike my other attempts at closeups, this shot came out clear and crisp--but still blown out in the highlights.
Achieving good focus or getting an exposure that doesn’t overexpose something in the frame can be a challenge. These are limitations for lots of point and shoot cameras, so I don’t know that it’s any worse than some of them. Lens flare when you shoot into the sun can be a problem, but that happens with even the best of cameras.
The phone designers probably realized that the camera would be liable to shake as you took a snapshot. To compensate they applied a fairly extreme level of in-camera sharpening. For some images it’s barely noticeable, in others it’s so obvious it hurts.
So as not to seem like I’m a total Mr. Negative, there were a few things I did like. The wide 9:16 aspect ratio of the image–similar to the current generation of televisions–is kinduv cool and cinematic. The 2:3 aspect ratio of old-school 35mm cameras is harder to work with and often feels unnatural.
A view with encelia and lemonadeberry in the foreground, as well as the ever-present coyotoebrush, baccharis.That view again, this time with some chamise, Adenostoma fasciculatum, in the foreground. I still have trouble deciding whether I'm in coastal sage scrub habitat or maritime chaparral. The presence of chamise tells you that you're in chaparral.A view to the south. You could easily see a couple dozen miles into Mexico that day.
Colors looked pretty true to life.
And in the end there’s the much better chance that you’ll have the cellphone camera handy when you’ve left the dedicated camera at home. You may never miss another photo op again.
So…has life changed with a cellphone? I can’t say that it has that much. It was handy to have when I was trying to navigate Philadelphia a couple weeks ago. It’s handy to keep in touch with people when you’re away from the landline. And I guess I feel just a little bit more hip. Like, now, when people talk about angry birds, I realize chances are that they’re most likely talking about the app and not what happens when you disturb a nest.
I drafted this post on a plane back to San Diego after having spent most of week in Philadelphia for a conference. This particular conference has the perverse habit of holding almost all of its meetings in February, almost always in places where winters are less benign than California’s.
Philadelphia sunrise. This was about 3:30 a.m. San Diego time.
Last week I walked on snow, slipped on ice, and encountered sidewalks heaped with piles of dark, bleak urban snow. But I also saw still waterways encrusted with transparent ice, architecturally leafless winter trees, and stands of sturdy grasses asserting themselves through snow-covered embankments.
I didn’t die. I returned with all of my fingers and toes intact. But as beautiful as things were I felt out of place. Visiting other people’s winter was like visiting other people’s houses. You don’t know the rules. What can you touch? Where should you sit? When do you open the windows and doors on warm days?
Over time you can learn the rules and begin to feel comfortable in the strange house, but a week isn’t enough. It all still seemed exotic when I left.
These are a few shots from my exotic adventure, most of them taken the day after the conference concluded, most of them on a trip out to the Barnes Collection in the Philadelphia suburb of Merion.
The Barnes is best known for its important post-impressionist and early modern artworks, all of which are “permanently”* displayed in a gallery in the exact locations where its founder Albert C. Barnes placed them during his lifetime. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many Cezannes and Renoirs stacked up on gallery walls in one location. It was thrilling and uncomfortably tight at the same time.
Outside the Barnes, in the arboretum
In addition to being one of the more important collections of post-impressionist and early modern art, The Barnes is also a small garden estate that calls the grounds an arboretum. This is a landscape of big trees and larger lawns. If you’ve read some of my other posts bashing lawns you’d probably never think you’d read me something nice about them, but here’s one thing: A lawn covered with snow gives you a sense of space similar to a lawn with no snow in the spring. It’s a flatness, whether the flatness is white or green, and the flatness serves as a uniform foil for the plants placed in it. You can still read the space and get a sense of how it would be during other times of year. Additionally I’d guess that it’d be easier to focus on the seasonal cycles when some things stay the same.
One of the plants with a label: Franklinia alatamaha. It originated in Georgia, but the little trees are now considered extinct in the wild there.A little bonsai parked outside the greenhouse at the BarnesThe greenhouse was closed on Sunday, but you could peer inside and window-shop for a climate even warmer than California's.An outdoor arrangement at the Barnes of evergreens and grasses
All you cold winter-dwellers will know these plants better than I do. The only IDs I have are from the plant labels placed generously around the grounds. But I was deterred by the blanketing snow to go exploring off the cleared paths. It’s back to that other people’s house thing. Was it okay to go traipsing all over the place, maybe stomping on some precious low plants I didn’t see under my boots? There wasn’t anyone to ask on my way out, so I tried to be the good houseguest and wandered off only a couple times–nothing equivalent to peeking in closets or checking for dust on the frames of the host’s Picassos.
One of the Barnes' neighbors who clearly feels the collection should remain in its current location.The new home of the Barnes Collection under construction in downton Philadelphia
A note about my asterisked “permanently” above: Many of the paintings were removed for conservation in preparation for the entire collection about to be moved whole to a new building on Philadelphia’s museum row, a prime block of land with plenty of room for a small museum, but not enough for even a small arboretum. The major soap opera and powerplay behind the relocation are the subject of the recent documentary The Art of the Steal. Plants don’t have the same dramatic value as wars over eight-figure artworks, so not surprisingly there’s no discussion of the arboretum in the documentary. Also not surprisingly I didn’t see any copies of the film available for purchase in the official Barnes Foundation giftshop.
Along with lots of other gardeners I’ve gone all sad and nostalgic on how gardens seldom outlive the gardeners. The drama of this collection’s relocation tells you that a will with very specific instructions is no guarantee that things will be left as you envisioned. Art collections, lifetime gardens—nothing is forever is it?
Thanks to She Who Would Not Want To Be Named for sending me a link to a really interesting story in yesterday’s New York Times: Plants have been engineered through the dark arts of gene splicing to detect TNT at a level of sensitivity one hundred times greater than bomb-sniffing dogs.
In the presence of TNT vapors the leaves of the engineered Arabidopsis and tobacco plants blushed from green to white as chlorophyll drained out of the leaves. The process took several hours, so just imagine how slowly an airport check-in would move. Still, I think I’d rather be scanned by a plant than a radiation-emitting strip-search machine.
The research was published Wednesday in PLoS ONE under the catchy title “Programmable Ligand Detection System in Plants through a Synthetic Signal Transduction Pathway.” (Somebody please help scientists come up with titles that make sense to the rest of us.) The title in the Times is maybe even worse, in an insulting way, “Plants that Earn Their Keep.” Do plants have to justify their existence? Why does a plant have to “do something useful” in order to earn a place on this earth? Grrrrrr. Arrogant humans!
Anyway, airline travel has been at the front of my mind recently as I brace for a trip in a few days to Philadelphia. Monday I was brave enough to add the weather report to my desktop. Yikes! I’m not sure that I even recognize the weather icon for last Wednesday. It’s definitely one that’s never appeared on any San Diego forecast I’ve been around for!
In the general Philly area both Longwood Gardens and the Morris Arboretum have conservatories. Unfortunately I’m not likely to have much time to do sightseeing, but it’ll be interesting enough to see what some people call winter. But if there’s anything on the “must see” list, let me know.
Let me finish my ramble by returning briefly to the unpleasant topic of airline terrorism to say a couple words about these photos that were in the news a year ago that many of you recognize.
These are shots of the alleged “underwear-bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, probably taken during while he was attending school in London. I looked quickly at the main subject–really, what can a photograph tell you about a person? Maybe that a seemingly normal-looking person can attempt to do some awful things? Maybe that this person was not so isolated as not feel the peer-pressure to buy a hat with a Nike swoosh?
What I focused on next–and some of you gardeners out there have already guessed it–is the amazing backdrop of colorful foliage. What are those plants?, I asked myself. Then my brain wandered off into other areas: Did the suspect enjoy plants enough to think that this would be a scenic location for a portrait (on at least two occasions, looking at his change in clothing)? Or maybe the photographer dragged the resentful and unwilling subject out into the cold, into these spots with the colorful backgrounds?
I don’t know. The only possible answer I can pull out of all this is that the backdrop is the kind of foliage that people in areas of the world colder than mine get to experience.
Other than that I’m left with questions, only questions…
It’s time for my annual tribute to the winter sycamore trees. The week of rain leading up to Christmas has left most of the trees bare, their leaves on the ground.
So, when life mainly gives you fallen leaves, that’s mainly what I’ve taken photos of this year. I won’t call this great art but I do like the square shot of the bare branches…maybe a little Jackson Pollack or Harry Callahan…
The question I’ve been asking myself a lot this season: Is it just my imagination, or do the leaves more often than not land butter-side-down, with their top sides usually against the dirt? Maybe the way they’re weighted? Or are they unstable if they land on their stems so that the wind blows them over?
I tried to go Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve on Monday to burn off some of the holiday calories but the gates were shut tight. I’d forgotten that they close the place down after heavy rains to protect the trails. In the minute I was there two other cars pulled up with the same idea. I guess there wore more calories than usual going around this holiday season…
I ended up closer to home, at Marion Bear Memorial Park in San Clemente Canyon. San Diego has made an attempt to preserve and develop interconnected open spaces so that wildlife can move around. Some of the set-aside places can have the feeling more of a corridor than a destination, and this park, positioned along four lanes of busy highway traffic, suffers from corridor syndrome. I can get a little arrogant over what kind of open space experience you can have in a park bordered for its entire length by freeway traffic, but once you get practiced at shutting out the constant automotive noise it was definitely much much better than nothing.
Being an urban park you encounter some bizarre botanical warning signs. Trees have hanging limbs? Better watch out!
Hazardous limbs? Like on this sycamore?
The iceplant marching down the hillside beyond looks lots more dangerous to me.
Signs that parts of the park were underwater from the recent rains were everywhere. This cone was still partially submerged.
The perennial stream had retreated into its main channel…
…but grasses and other plants far from the stream bed were bent over from east to west from the force of the water that was covering them a few days ago.
In addition to the natural narrative of plants responding to the force of running water, you could see examples of many of the other narratives that late December exposes:
Late-season, falling, coloring leaves…
A hanging sycamore leaf...Yellowing leaves of arroyo willow
Closeup of arroyo willow's golden late-season leaves.
Bare branches, plants dying back for the winter…
Plants gone to seed, starting the new generation…
One of our plants called Golden Bush, Isocoma menziesii..Golden bush seed head closeup...
And for me, one of the most interesting narratives is that here in this urban environment, you can still encounter so many of December’s natural processes and the rhythms of the seasons.
Six days of wet weather were coming to an end this morning when John and I left the garden with its pockets of standing water and did a little grocery shopping. We weren’t far from the San Diego River, and we’d heard it was running high. With the storms clearing and being more curious than cautious today we headed over for a look.
The estuary where the channelized river flows into the Pacific flowed with more water than I’ve seen in it. The ducks took to it like…ducks to water.
Heading east, Friar’s Road was down to one passable lane.
We stopped at a couple spots. The first was the YMCA, where the parking lot was being claimed by the river. Stairs led into water where ordinarily they deposit you onto dry land.
Most dramatic was this schoolbus. I’m sure it was empty at the time the water rose, but it’s a pretty awesome indicator of what nature was doing.
Stop #2 was Fashion Valley Shopping Center. People look at its siting–on the banks of the San Diego River–and sometimes wonder whether placing it there was such a good idea. Today, right about the time these pictures were taking, the river was cresting at the highest level it’s reached since 1980–the highest water level in a generation. The parking garages were partially submerged. Underground parking became underwater parking.
Access into the mall shuts down from one direction whenever the river runs high. Today there was only one way in and out of the mall.
All the sights until now were pretty amazing, but being good consumers we were almost more shocked at this sight: two open parking spaces. On December 22. In the middle of the day, during prime shopping hours.
And just as shocking was this: Inside the mall. Where’d all the shoppers go? Let me remind you it’s still December 22…
Well, that was pretty much the end of our expedition. Our holiday shopping was pretty much complete except for the kinds of things that don’t grow in shopping centers. So it was back home, where the standing water in the garden was starting to drain. Will we remember this freakish week once the sun comes out and all the relatives descend?
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