Category Archives: places

gardening, places

more waterlily photos to share

1 Comment

Here in Southern California summer slips into the doldrums as the weather heats up and the land dries out. If only we had shallow lakes everywhere we might have acres of waterlilies blooming their heads off. Things might look a little bit like this…


Jenny was at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania recently and sent me these photos of their water gardens. (Thanks, Jenny!) She was struck by their flowers, but was really drawn to the foliage. It’s easy to love the variegated ones, but the crinkled edges on the other varieties are awfully cool too. These are all waterlilies but for one, the plant without blooms. I’ll try to get the name of the from her, but if any of the rest of you know what it is, just drop a note.

Of course, having a body of water in a warm climate is no guarantee that water plants will thrive. Last year, up in Los Angeles, the Echo Park Lotus Festival took place. But after celebrating the blooming of the water lotuses every year since 1972, there were no lotus blooms to show. Earlier this month they went ahead and held the annual celebration, but this time it was re-branded the Echo Park Community Festival. No lotuses. Sad.

gardening, places

two saturdays

5 Comments

A couple hours of community service: Sounds a little like a sentence handed down by a judge, but it was actually how I spent some of last Saturday. I’ve posted earlier about the native plant garden at Old Town State Historic Park. That trip I was walking the paths and enjoying garden.

palm-seedlings

But this time I was a volunteer helping maintain this interesting young garden. Much of the time I was squatted down in the dirt pulling up little palm trees. If you live in another part of the world you might think that pulling up palm trees is a bizarre thing to do. But palm seedlings are a very real weed around here, especially when there are still actively fruiting palms nearby, and when there’s still an active seedbank left from one of the palms that was removed to make way for the garden.

palm-date

palm-mexican-fan

mallow-flower

In just one month since my last visit, the number of flowers had diminished as we head into our long brown season when many plants approach dormancy. There were some splashy clarkia flowers remaining, as well as this mallow from the Channel Islands.

There were other weeds to pull at, and the day ended with a quick pruning demonstration and a demonstration on one way to maintain deer grass (Muhlenbergia rigens). With this big, dramatic grass you can let the stems go brown–which is an easy-maintenance approach to this plant. Or you can reach down on each of the old flowering stems, feel for a joint a couple inches above the base of the plant, and pull. muhlenbergia-rigensIf you find the node, the stem yanks out without much resistance. It’s not a chore you can do easily while wearing thick gloves, and without gloves you’ve likely to shred your hands. Fortunately this a grass that looks stately and architectural whether or not you pull the dried stems. We left most of the plants as they were.

After just two hours of tidying the garden looked even better and ready for the dry months ahead.

Jump ahead one week…

plant-sale-wet-pavement

Even though June is typically one of our dry months, today was cool and drizzly as John and I headed for the Master Gardener’s plant sale at Balboa Park.

plant-sale-fig

We parked near the park’s jumbo Moreton Bay fig (Ficus macrophylla). It’s an amazing plant, but like many figs, it’s not a good choice if you’re concerned about keeping your home’s foundation intact. I was appreciative of having the park, a great publicly-funded shared space, where you can go to enjoy spectacular plants that don’t make sense to plant in most home spaces.

plant-sale-lined-up

Rain or shine, the people make a trail to this plant sale. This is half an hour before the sale, with all these brave souls standing in the heavy mist waiting to get first crack at this year’s offerings.

plant-sale-shoppers

…and this is during the first few minutes of the sale.

Some highlights this year were bromeliads from Balboa Park’s propagation program–big plants for the price of a Happy Meal–and an entire table of different salvias. As thrilled as I am with the genus salvia, I resisted the temptations. No space in the garden is no space in the garden.

plant-sale-johns-plant

But John didn’t show the same restraint. He likes his succulents. And the more unlabeled the succulent is the better. I swear he does this to drive me crazy, knowing how much I like my plant names. (The succulent expert on site looked at it and said that it’s some sort of crassula relative, which is what I’d have called it. Okay, we have a family name, and now only 1400 species to go through… Any help out there?)

Although we didn’t end up dropping a lot of change on this sale, many people with more space in the gardens found interesting plants to populate their spaces. And the proceeds from the sale go to a good cause.

So these two Saturdays showed a couple way you can help the botanical organizations around town. You can donate your labor. Or you can do what comes naturally for most Americans: Go shopping!

art, gardening, my garden, places

first tomatoes and artichokes

2 Comments

first-cherokee-purple-tomatoes-of-the-season

greenhouse-tomato-plant

It’s hardly May, and I have my first tomatoes of the season already, this gorgeous pair on a seedling of the heirloom Cherokee Purple.

Okay, I cheated a little. These are actually hothouse tomatoes. Some seed I planted in the greenhouse last spring didn’t germinate until last fall. Transplanting the plants outdoors in November would have meant certain death for the little tomatoes, but I didn’t have the heart to pull them out. One of them set down roots through the drainage holes of the pot and just kept growing. Although the greenhouse is too shady and unheated, the plant survived. And now I have these first two tomatoes, with more on the way.

I’ve never used the greenhouse for anything as practical as growing veggies, so this will be an interesting experiment.

first-artichokes

The first artichokes of the season are also on some plants that were almost accidents. For years we had a clump of an especially good selection growing in the veggie garden. But a room addition on the house put the garden in shade, and the plants went into decline. I dug them out and was going to toss them, until I decided to try a couple stems in the back of a new raised bed. The combination of more light, more moisture, and fresh compost-rich soil worked their magic, and the plants are now looking as good as they ever have.

I like to think that I earned some bonus points for showing some mercy and not tossing the tomato and artichoke plants into the greens recycling. But in the case of the artichoke, at least, it’s another life lesson in trying to find the right location for an underperforming plant.

Are there any plants that you’ve had similar experiences with? Any “rescue plants” that ended up rewarding you as much as others you’d planned for?

gardening, places

interpreting history through plants

6 Comments

mccoy-house-with-grasses

The native plant garden at San Diego’s Old Town State Historic Park occupies a gentle rise in the land on the north end of the park. The garden sits on the grounds of the Silvas-McCoy house, a modern reconstruction by the park service based on foundations excavated in 1995.

The house replicates an 1869 structure by Irish immigrant James McCoy. Previous to McCoy’s arrival the site was previously in the hands of Maria Eugenia Silvas, and the grounds also contain the foundations of two adobe structures that predate the McCoy house.

The park service, charged with interpreting the history of San Diego’s founding, decided between rebuilding the McCoy house or recreating the earlier adobes. Would they opt to tell the story of early Spanish settlement? Or that of later settlers? Or instead could they do something to interpret the area’s original inhabitants, the Kumeyaay, whose village of Koss’ai occupied the site, and whose tenure went back thousands of years? Choices like that are never without controversy, and you could make good arguments on all sides of the debate.

This was during a flurry of historic reconstruction in Old Town which turned this corner of the park into a construction zone. During the project I spotted one of the more amusing informational signs I’ve encountered, one that proclaimed a nearby patch of earth to be the “Future site of San Diego’s first city jail.” (Do you ever regret not having a camera along?)

mccoy-house

The native plant garden, like the Silvas-McCoy house, also participates in the park’s mission to provide historic context. The selection of plants reinforces the story the garden tells.

In the days of Silvas and McCoy the San Diego River flowed in front of this site. The plants that would have been found here would have been primarily riparian species. To tell that story, you’ll see stands of mugwort, sycamore, mulefat, coast live oak and willow featured on the grounds.

In the past, the river would sometimes empty into Mission Bay to the north, or into San Diego Bay to the south. The geographical indecisiveness of a meandering river works fine for the natural world, but poorly for a culture tied to private ownership of property. The current San Diego River has been forced into an engineered channel a quarter mile to the north and is no longer able to decide on its own where it would like to go. So, in addition to telling a story about the location of the river 150 years ago, the garden–a riparian plant community stranded hundreds of feet from the river that would have originally sustained it–to me speaks to notions of ownership of space and ideas about the control of nature. It’s not just another pretty garden.

monkey-flower

Of course, when you say “garden,” people do want to see pretty flowers. Above is chaparral mallow (Malacothamnus fasciculatus), and here’s the perky red monkey (Mimulus aurantiacus)…

poppies-and-sage

…and the ever-popular California state flower (Escholzia californica) in its most recognizable color form, with wands of white sage (Salvia apaiana) in front.

native-bouquet

And here’s a bouquet of some of what was blooming.

The garden in its current state goes back only a little more than a year, when a group of local California Native Plant Society volunteers weeded the site and planted many of the plants. The garden hosted an open house on Saturday, and visitors got a chance to tour the site and get insights from ethnobotanist Richard Bugbee about traditional Kumeyaay uses of many of the plants in the garden.

For example did you know that young flowering stems of white sage were peeled and eaten raw? This is one of the most assertively aromatic of sages, but peeling the stems purportedly takes away the oil-producing glands and gives the stems a flavor something like celery. (Maybe “tastes like celery” is the botanical equivalent of the catch-all “tastes like chicken,” but I intend to find out the next time my plants need a haircut…) Future plans for the garden include signage on traditional Kumayaay uses of the plants growing there.

group-photo

That’s ethnobotanist Richard Bugbee, second from the right in this photo, along with landscape architect Kay Stewart, far right, who was heavily involved in designing the garden. Next to Richard is Peter St. Clair who, along with the original donor to the native garden project, had the vision and persistence to have the garden in the first place. Peter also organizes the volunteer work crews that help maintain and shape the garden.

At not much over a year old, this is still a young garden. There are still areas to be cleared and plantings to be finalized, but the garden has good bones and occupies a fascinating location. It’s definitely a place to watch as it matures, and they’re always on the lookout for volunteers to help the process along. Sign me up!

gardening, places

santa barbara botanic garden has burned

3 Comments

Here’s an update on conditions, taken from the complete press release by the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden:

Fire officials accompanied Botanic Garden President Dr. Edward Schneider through the Garden, allowing him to assess the buildings and grounds. “The good news is that the Meadow, Discovery Garden, Teahouse, Desert and most of the Redwood Exhibits are untouched,” said Dr. Schneider. “Unfortunately, the historic Campbell Bridge, the beloved Pritchett Path, the popular Redwood Tree Ring Exhibit, Oak Woodland and Porter Path Exhibits were either destroyed or heavily damaged.” Further damage was also sustained in the riparian corridor canyon as the fire spread from Tunnel Road down to Mission Creek.

…Yesterday, the Garden confirmed loss of structures on its grounds. The 1908 Gane House, the proposed centerpiece of the Botanic Garden’s building project, the Vital Mission Plan, was destroyed. The Botanic Garden had hoped to rehabilitate the large Craftsman-style home and to seek historic landmark status for it. Also lost in the fire was a deck overlooking Mission Canyon Creek, a lathe house, and the Director’s residence and garage.

Original post:

I’ve been distressed to read over the last couple days that at least part of Santa Barbara Botanic Gardens has burned in the Jesusita Fire that’s tearing through the community. Has anyone heard anything more detailed?

This morning’s Los Angeles Times described how the garden’s Gane House has burned:

In Mission Canyon, the century-old Gane House at the 78-acre Santa Barbara Botanic Garden was engulfed in flames, leaving little more than three brick chimneys standing.

“We’re very heartbroken,” said Nancy Johnson, the garden’s vice president of marketing and government relations. “We were hoping to restore it to its grandeur.”

Lost inside were all the gardening tools, horticultural materials, the metal shop that made tags to identify plants, the overstock of books published by the garden, and the office contents and computers of the head gardener and facilities maintenance man, Johnson said. Biofuel gardening truck parked outside also appear to have been destroyed.

And yesterday’s Silicon Valley Mercury News ran a news wire story that mentioned:

[Carol] Ostroff said she evacuated Tuesday and stayed with friends nearby until they too had to evacuate on Wednesday.

“The wind kicked up, and we watched this firestorm on the hill,” Ostroff said.

Ostroff, who along with her husband acts as caretaker for the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, sells tinctures and herbal wreaths from her home garden at the local farmer’s market.

“My garden is my life,” she said. “If I lose my garden I’m out of a job. My husband’s out of a job too.”

The SBBG has been an important force in Southern California native plant horticulture, having introduced many interesting additions that are a part of many gardens. My garden alone has Salvia leucophylla ‘Amethyst Bluff,’ Galvezia juncea ‘Gran Canon,’ and Artemisia californica ‘Canyon Gray.’ I hate to see such a resource turned to ashes.

landscape, places

santa ysabel open space preserve

5 Comments

A trip to the town of Santa Ysabel in the spring is for me like stepping into a time machine in a couple of different ways. In the first most obvious sense, this little town in the foothills of San Diego County appears to be pickled in some earlier though indefinite time period. A couple buildings have painted facades straight out of 1930s Walker Evans photographs, while others look like straightforward roadside commercial architecture rescued from the 1960s.

Time travel also comes to my mind when I look at the surrounding countryside. Plants that stopped blooming a month ago in my neighborhood canyons are just coming online up here at 3000 feet. Some of this feels like February back home.

Still, even though it contains many familiar plants, this is a very different ecosystem. There are dozens of plants I’d never see back down closer to sea level, and that’s what brought me to Santa Ysabel last weekend.

santa-ysabel-preserve-sign

The town serves as gateway to the Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve, 5025 acres of foothills and active ranch lands set near the headwaters of the San Diego River.

Botanist Jerilyn Hirshberg led the intense day of botanizing which began with the handing out of sheets of paper listing 203 plants that we stood a good chance of seeing that day.

botanizing

Be prepared. If you go an an outing looking at all the plant species in an area, expect to spend a certain amount of time huddled together and bent over as you look at some of the smallest of the small plants. People typically call them “belly flowers.” But Jeri used a word that I’d never heard before (and I think was one she’d made up): “dinkophytes”–with “dinko” as in “dinky plants.”

A biologist on the trip complained several times, “That’s not a real word!” But I loved it so much that I hereby grant it official word status and encourage all of you to begin using it.

In the end we didn’t see all 203 plants on the list, but the group found some bonuses that weren’t on it. Here are just a few of them, a couple of which have made it into the garden world.

viola-pedunculata

Johnny jump up, or California golden violet (Viola pedunculata). Perky name, perky plant.

lupinus-excubitus-austromontanus

Grape soda lupine (Lupinus excubitus ssp. austromontanus). Yes, it does have a distinct—but delicate—concord grape fragrance, though it’s almost insulting to call the scent ”grape soda.” (Would you describe a flower by saying that it smells like artificially rose-scented air freshener?) The shrub is a pleasant mound of silvery leaves, but the towering spikes make it truly gorgeous this time of year.

asclepias-californica

California milkweed (Asclepias californica). The clusters of vivid wine blooms are striking. What makes this milkweed really remarkable is that it’s covered with so many soft hairs that it’s hard not to touch it. Kay, the trip organizer, thought it was like handling a cloud. Good description.

This plant hosts the local population of the monarch butterfly. Before you go off and plant this milkweed in hopes of attracting them to your garden, however, it’s worth reading some advice from the Las Pilitas Nursery site: “The alkaloids associated with this milkweed and other milkweeds give the butterflies that feed on it protection. Alkaloids from the wrong milkweed (South American, Mexican, etc.) can expose the butterflies to predation. If the monarch or other butterfly has not evolved with the milkweed they may have limited tolerance for the particular alkaloid of the plant species. The California flyway runs from Baja to Canada, it does not include Mexico proper nor Central America. If you live in Chicago [which is part of the pathway of the monarchs that migrate to mainland Mexico] you can plant Mexican species (Asclepias mexicana) or Asclepias tuberosa, don’t plant our species.”

scarlet-bugler

Scarlet bugler (Penstemon centranthifolius).

lithophragma-heterophyllum-grouping

lithophragma-heterophyllum-closup

One of the botanical highlights centered on this little plant, the hill star (Lithophragma heterophylla), closely related to our very prolific woodland star. Though fairly common to the north, this stand of hill stars formed the only currently known population in San Diego County.

The idea of a county is entirely a human construct, but still I thought that was a pretty cool way to end the trip, seeing the only location of a plant in my local human construct.

To end this post, here are just a few more pictures of the hillsides of the preserve, studded with at least five different species and natural hybrids of oaks…

oak-hillside-at-santa-ysabel-osp

oak-at-santa-ysabel-preserve

santa-ysabel-preserve-hillside-with-oaks

engelmann-oak-at-santa-ysabel-preserve

santa-ysabel-preserve-near-entrance-looking-north-east

gardening, landscape design, places

landscaping without plants

15 Comments

salk-looking-west

From my desk at work it’s less than a fifteen minute stroll to this viewpoint, which has got to be one of the most famous places to stand in all of modern architecture.

The view is of the central plaza of the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, which architect Louis Kahn designed for his client, polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk. The plaza features this simple water feature that pulls your eye towards the water, 400 feet below, and to the horizon and the sky. The materials of the plaza are reduced down to water, travertine marble and the angled concrete walls of the research buildings.

No plants. When Kahn was working on the design he’d had a conversation with Mexican architect Luis Barragán. Kenneth Frampton recounts Barragán’s seminal response in Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture:

“I would not put a tree or blade of grass in this space. This should be a plaza of stone, not a garden.” I [Kahn] looked at Dr. Salk and he at me and we both felt this was deeply right. Feeling our approval, he added joyously, “If you make this a plaza, you will gain a facade–a facade to the sky.”

As much as I love plants, I have to agree that this was the right decision. There’s an unphotographably joyous experience of pure space that settles into your mind as you stand or sit to contemplate the view.

salk-looking-north

If you can pull your eyes off the horizon–not an easy thing to do–you start to notice, however, that plants do figure in the plaza’s final realization. Immediately to the east are some steps, and planting beds on either side of the steps. As with a lot of modern planting design, the planters feature one kind of plant and one kind only. Considering the planting design was executed many years ago, probably in the late 1960s or early 1970s, long before the current focus on edible landscaping, it’s surprising that the plant of choice was orange trees, at least four dozen of them. (Maybe it has something to do with the environmental ethic that was developing while the Salk was being designed, an ethic that we’re finally rediscovering today.)

Below is a 360-degree panorama from the top of the steps. Just imagine walking west towards the horizon, at dusk, on a calm evening, as the orange trees begin to flower and scent the air.

salk-panorama-horizontal

gardening, places

botanical side trip

3 Comments

While I was visiting San Diego’s Earth Day celebrations on Sunday, I took a quick detour into Balboa Park’s Botanical Building. It dates back to the 1914-15 Panama Pacific Exposition, and lays claim to being one of the largest lath structures in the world.

balboa-park-botanical-building-outside-overview

botanical-building-looking-up-into-the-mist

It was an odd feeling to leave the sun-drenched celebration of sustainable living outside and shift gears into the shaded, misted, and heavily watered Botanical Building. Humid and tropical, the interior reminded me of the over-watered vision of paradise that many people still think of when they think of California. Palms, cycads, begonias, orchids and other tropicals and subtropicals lazed in the shade or reached for the light dozens of feet overhead.

I usually go to public gardens and keep an eye out for things I’d like to have in my own garden. Gardens are amazingly democratic that way. If you look hard enough, you can often find some of the rarest plants, especially now with the web available to help source them.

In these days of looming water rationing, however, I felt a little queasy that the Botanical Building was showcasing all sorts of water-intensive plants San Diegans are trying not to fixate on so much these days. Our average temperatures enable the growth of these plants, our regular rainfall does not.

As I was thinking about that queasiness, I realized that many of the Balboa Park buildings nearby are museums that are full of unique objects or things that would be so far beyond my means to buy. The resources of these museums are focused on giving the public access to things and ideas they might not ordinarily encounter. I decided to try to think of the Botanical Building that way, as a sort of botanical museum. Although I could probably find many of its plants if I searched hard enough–and a few of them are actually totally common–I decided to try to look at and appreciate the plants as if they were museum objects I didn’t need to own.

And as my indignation started to lift, I started to be appreciative. Wasn’t it great that people in the city have a place where they can go visit some interesting plants but not have to worry about watering and caring for them? And the Botanical Building is free! If people decide to create little pockets of paradise at home, they don’t need to do their whole gardens this way. A little shaded corner could give you a lot of the same sense of coolness and shelter that the Botanical Building does.

In addition to the big lath house, Balboa Park offers a number of other plantings, including two succulent gardens. So it’s not like the park spends all its resources pimping an outdated vision of Southern California. And there’s value in seeing an old-school planting of this sort to help appreciate how local ideas about gardening have shifted.

So…back to my visit. Lots of things were in flower, but I ended up focusing on plants with variegated leaves that were used throughout the building. No forest would have so many variegated plants in so small a space, but this “garden museum” did a nice job in showcasing some of the botanical world’s interesting foliage patterns. Take a look…

(As usual you click on the images to enlarge them, especially if the signs in the thumbnails are too small to read…)

carex-morrowii-leaves

carex-morrowii-sign

ficus-aspera-leaves

ficus-aspera-sign

iresine-lindenii-leaves

iresine-lindenii-sign

impatiens-niamnimensis-variegata-leaves

impatiens-niamnimensis-variegata-sign

cordyline-leaves

cordyline-sign

begonia-fabulous-tom-leaves

begonia-fabulous-tom-sign

cyclamen-leaves

Cyclamen

iresine-herbstii-leaves

Iresine herbstii

farfugium-japonicum-aureo-maculata-leaves

farfugium-japonicum-aureo-maculata

alternanthera-party-time-leaves

alternanthera-party-time


places

earth day fair

Leave a comment

Yesterday was the big city Earth Day fair here in town at Balboa Park. Buoyed by temperatures in the 80s, tens of thousands of people came out to celebrate.

freeway-backup

Getting to the park required some form of travel, which for many people meant participating in a three mile traffic jam to exit at the park. (Just a little bit of irony in people in getting into their internal combustion powered vehicles to celebrate the earth, don’t you think?)

With the main core of Balboa Park dedicated to pedestrians and the fair, parking a car there was pretty impossible. The organizers had arranged for remote parking and shuttles, which seemed to be working well.

scooter-parking

I rode my scooter, which made parking in the unused space between cars easy. I give myself a few brownie points for driving something that’s pretty fuel-efficient, though in reality a carload of people in a Hummer would have used about the same amount of gas to get there. I’m trying to get greener, really. (All of you reading this, hold me to it–Guilt works. So does an appeal to my sense of the greater good.)

bicycle-valet-parking

In the end, though, even on a hot day, the way to get there was on two feet–or two wheels. Cars were barred from entering the core of the park, and there was free valet parking for bicycles. Yeeha!

earth-day-crowd

electric-car

stuff-to-buy_solar-cells

earth-day-information-booths_tijuana-river-estuary

Once you got there you had your choice of 400-plus booths. Native plant society? Check. Landscape contractors specializing in low-water landscapes? Several. Information on greener residential construction practices (including solar energy)? Or on most of the public natural parklands around the county? Or on converting your car to a purely electric vehicle? Absolutely.

electric-rolls

Left: A 1930s (1932?) Rolls Royce that has been turned into a purely electric vehicle.

glamorous-trash

On such a warm day I felt really sorry for the person in this garbage can costume that was meant to draw attention to city waste issues. But he or she was incredibly perky all the time I watched. Better than the wilted guy in the banana suit nearby.

recycled-paper

One of the kid-friendly booths was this hands-on demonstration of paper-making using recycled paper. I watched a girl of probably no more than five staring at the little sheet of paper that she’d just made, like it was the most magical object in the world.

stuff-to-buy_rain-barrelsstuff-to-buy_sandalsstuff-to-buy_cactus-and-succulentselectric-bikes

And of course there were booths to buy earthly stuff: water storage systems (a little pricey at over $6 per gallon of capacity), electric bicycles, cool succulents, sandals, teeshirts, kettle corn… Okay, some of the offerings were more opportunistic than they were green, but hey, it’s a festival. The home-made lemonade stand caught my interest, but even by not long after noon, they were sold out. Waaah.

Events like this are interesting to see what’s being pushed as the latest greatest thing, and some of the green construction technologies were pretty big. Fifteen years ago an event like this would have been filled with people demonstrating their double-paned window systems. Yesterday I might have seen one outfit offering a specialized version of insulated glazing. That goes to show how what may have seemed cool and exotic a decade ago can become commonplace–and even part of regulations. It gives me hope that we’re seeing a lot of people working on some of our big problems. And what’s considered a boutique industry this year might be common as dirt in a decade. Solar-electric kettle-corn storage systems, anyone?

Crowds or not, I always enjoy going to Balboa Park. Here are just a few random sights. I’ll post tomorrow on what was going on in the botanical building, seemingly oblivious to the Earth Day happenings.

tea-trees

Always a crowd-pleaser, the wild trunks of the Australian tea tree (Leptospermum laevigatum) were drawing photographers every few minutes. I’ve loved this plant ever since I saw it in the 1970s at the Los Angeles County Arboretum. I might have room for one if I nuke everything else in the back yard…

bush-poppy

The park is devoting itself more to California native plants. Here’s a new planting of bush poppy (Dendromecon, probably harfordii) with a groundcover ceonothus.

lawn-bowling

In my cloistered life a tightly cropped patch of lawn is a pretty exotic sight. And then add lawn bowlers on top of that. Wow. Not things I see every day. The park is always great for keeping my eyes open…

gardening, places

loud music and sage

2 Comments

I drove all the way up to Los Angeles for an organ recital last night. I knew I was in for trouble when the usher handed me a program and offered me a pair of earplugs. But more on that later.

John hates the idea of me to taking my scooter to LA, so I grudgingly drove the gas-devouring Jeep. But to turn the situation to an advantage I stopped by the Tree of Life Nursery in San Juan Capistrano. It’s a few miles east of I-5, but ten ten minutes of driving off the interstate beats an hour and a half each direction from San Diego.

I’d been planning on doing something with the unclaimed zone between my house and the neighbor behind me, and I wanted some native plants to fill in the zone. This would be a good chance to pick up some plants without the ridiculous commute.

at-the-tree-of-life-nursery_0001The plantings around the nursery featured some vibrant spring flowers, including this stand of California poppies and vivid violet phacelia.

at-the-tree-of-life-nursery_0002at-the-tree-of-life-nursery_0003

And this traffic cone mallow was pretty spectacular as well (probably desert mallow, Sphaeralcea ambigua).

While there I picked up some plants for my project, including some more plants of white sage (Salvia apiana) and a clone of purple sage (Salvia leucophylla ‘Amethyst Bluff’). I’ll post more on that project later in the week.

Negotiating LA rush hour traffic can be an ordeal, and doing it with a dozen plants in the back of the car wasn’t anything I was looking forward too, especially if I had to jam on the brakes. But traffic was fairly light and I got to my destination with plenty of time for a relaxing dinner before the concert.

And now, on to the concert: When the lights dimmed, a man got up to introduce the performer for the evening. Charlemagne Palestine was one of the figures active in the avant-garde music scene, first in New York around 1970, and slightly later in Los Angeles. The man introducing him apologized that during earlier rehearsals they’d blown three fuses on the organ, and that they might need to interrupt the concert to replace more fuses.

The concert location, the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, claims to have the world’s largest indoor church organ, a monster with well over 20,000 pipes. What would the sound be if you got several thousand of them going at the same time? The audience got to find out about an hour into the piece.

What had started out as a wispy cloud of delicate sustained notes had gradually gown in intensity as organ stops got added. When the composer/performer finally did a face-plant into the keyboard around the 60 minute mark and remained there unmoving for a good ten minutes, the hall shook with a throbbing earthquake of sound that with zero doubt was the loudest, most intense, most jarring ten minutes of anything I’ve ever heard in my life. (There’s a recording of Schling-Blägen, the piece Charlemagne Palestine performed in concert, but that in no way gives prepares you for the physical assault that the you’ll experience live.)

When the piece ended, I was still shaking. I wasn’t sure I could drive home very reliably, and I was glad I wasn’t on the scooter.

As I opened the car door, the smell of sage escaped from plants behind the back seat. It’s said that sage tea is good for calming the nerves, and the same could probably be said for the aroma from the plants. With all my nerves still firing on overload, it was probably the perfect remedy for what I’d just experienced. When I got home two hours later, I lay down, and went right to sleep.

PS: I’ve only talked about the loudness of the piece, but in the final analysis there was a lot of beauty and delicacy in it as well. I loved it. Music can take you many places. This piece took me somewhere I’ve never been.