Tag Archives: December

gardening, my garden

2010 highlight: la niña loca

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If there’s a story of the year for the garden, one of the competitors would definitely be the December rains. The prognosticators were promising us a La Niña winter, cool and very dry. Instead we got one of the rainiest Decembers on record.

I’ve been playing with video lately, and here are some snapshots of the garden as it looked on December 22, partway through some of the torrents.

I was a wimp. All the shots are through windows, so you can only see part of the garden. But I think you get the idea.

The video quality is definitely lo-def, as the capture was done with an old point-and-shoot that had some lo-res video capabilities. But like I said, I think you get the idea…


And for you concerned capitalists out there who might have been worried about the status of one of our local shopping palaces after I posted some photos of part of it underwater, here are some befores and afters of the Fashion Valley Shopping Center. The befores are from the same day as the garden photos above. The afters are from December 29.

Before

After

Before
After


Before...
After


Not everything was back to normal. Parts of the garage are still under a few inches of water and cordoned off.

And there’s a limited amount of damage where the water undermined the road under the elevated trolley tracks.

But overall things looked pretty good, and shoppers were back to returning their ugly sweaters for something more desirable.

The forecast is for more rain the night of New Year’s Day. Will La Niña Loca continue on into the next year?

landscape, places

a freeway runs through it

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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...

Rosa californica seed hips...

Plants responding to the rains with new growth…

Showy (and spiny) gooseberry, Ribes speciosum...
Mexican elderberry...

Uh oh...poison oak, and lots of it...

New generations starting up…

Tiny oak seedling with fungus on fallen log...

Two new live oak saplings

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.


landscape, places

après le déluge

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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?