Tag Archives: drought-tolerant landscaping

a new groundcover

March 2, 2009 James 8 Comments

Here’s a look at a new groundcover I’m trying out. The plant, Nuttall’s milkvetch (Astragalus nuttallii) is native to coastal Central California, and seems to be adapting easily to my coastal San Diego location–maybe a little too well!

Las Pilitas Nursery, who seems to be the only firm propagating the species, estimates its height to be 3-18 inches and 18 to 36 inches wide. The plant went into the ground October 12, and has topped out at a foot or so high–so far so good. But its spread, now at over six feet, has easily hit more than double the estimated maximum plant size. And that’s with no supplemental watering after the first couple of months in the ground. We’ll see if it slows down as the weather warms and the ground dries out.

The milkvetch bore some of these small, ivory-white flowers on it in October, and it’s never been without them in the intervening six months. Now that the weather is warming, the plant is getting even more interested in flowering.

As much as I enjoy its flowers, my favorite thing about this milkvetch is its delicate foliage. It’s fern-like, and so far has maintained its clean, green-to-grayish green coloration. I have the plant at front edge of the retaining wall next to the front sidewalk, so it’s easy to get face to face with the flowers and leaves. A front of the bed location would also let people enjoy this delicately textured plant.

So, if you’d like a distinctive, delicate, low, mounding groundcover for a dry spot in a zone 9 or 10 landscape, this might be just the ticket, even if the plant might get a little wide and need to be cut back.

PS: I should also mention that one of this milkvetch’s common names is “locoweed,” and the plant is supposedly poisonous. I have no idea whether it’s in the category of nightshade or no more dangerous than tomato plants. Since I have no small children around or pets that get into anything other than catnip, I’ve never let an interesting plant’s supposed toxicity stop me from growing it. But you might consider that before planting a couple acres of it.

gardening, photography, places, plant profiles

balboa park's desert garden

January 11, 2009 James 4 Comments

January can be an amazing month for succulents and other desert plants. Many aloes and agaves explode into bloom, and plants with ephemeral foliage are green with leaves in ways you don’t often see them.

San Diego’s Balboa Park houses one of the prime local collection of cacti, succulents and other desert dwellers from around the world. The Desert Garden, the larger of its two succulent gardens, was established in 1976, but many of the plants are senior citizens much older than the age of the garden.

Aloes star in its January landscape, with red and orange torches of flowers that double as hummingbird magnets.

And shown here, lurking in the shadows, is one of the local hummingbirds, staking its territory.

Among the big, mature specimens are several dragon trees, Dracaena draco. In this first photo, on the near trunk, you can see a reddish patch where the plant’s red sap has dried. When cut, these plants ooze a fluid that in some European legends was purported to be dragon’s blood, hence the plant’s name (draco = dragon).

This is a public garden, and so it’s subject to funding glitches and battles over civic priorities. I’d consider the garden to be in great condition considering those limitations.

One thing I would have loved to have seen, though, would be more plant labels. I encountered so many interesting species, but very few of them had name tags. I have this thing about needing to know the name of a plant–Call me compulsive. But the lack of labels drove me crazy. I realize, however, that tags don’t come cheap. And in a wide-open public garden, labels can walk away with pieces of succulents in the hands of evil plant addicts.

One of the plants that was labeled was this Natal Bottlebrush, Greyia sutherlandii. A bit scrappy-looking as a plant, but what great flowers!

Also labeled was the Madagascar ocotillo, Alluaudia procera. I loved the spiral patterning of its spines.

Another problem with this being a public garden is that there are quite a few specimens where people’s temptations to carve their initials in the plant life got the better of them. This euphorbia was scarred many times over. But that wasn’t going to stop it from blooming.

After visiting the garden I was surprised by how many shots I’d racked up in the camera. And for some reason, the majority of them were verticals. Is there something about succulents–particularly the upright-growing kinds that mimic the way a human stands–that scream out for photographing them in an upright orientation?

Some yuccas, I think, with spent bloom stems.

Boojum trees, Fouquieria columnaris, native to Baja California. This plant is in the same genus as the California desert’s spectacular ocotillo, which interestingly isn’t related to the Madascar ocotillo, above.

Aloes and kalanchoes in bloom.

The main garden is a flat, easy stroll over wide decomposed granite pathways. As part of a recent expansion, the garden now also includes this switchback down into Florida Canyon, also part of Balboa Park. The plants along the descent are still young, but should look spectacular in a decade or so.

Not everyone in the world loves cactus and succulents. They might point to the defensive spines many of the plants have, and they might say the sculptural shapes of the plants don’t look soft and cozy like leafy shrubs or fragrant roses. Next to the Desert Garden is Balboa Park’s rose garden. During springtime, thirty seconds of walking would take you from the world of cactus and succulents to a garden manic with flowers and heavy with the aroma of roses. But on this bright January day, the adjacent roses were pruned down to naked stems and piercing thorns. It was the cactus and succulents that looked warm and welcoming.

The Desert Garden is located across Park Boulevard from the Natural History Museum on Balboa Park’s museum row. The garden has no walls, no entry fee, and is open 24/7, 365 days of the year.

If the 2.5 acres of the Desert Garden isn’t enough of a cactus and succulent fix, cross Park Boulevard and take a stroll over to the Balboa Park Club, maybe ten minutes on foot, and take in the parks original 1935 cactus garden, which, according to the park’s website, was established “under the direction of [San Diego gardening legend] Kate Sessions for the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition.” There you’ll find “some of the largest cactus and succulent specimens in the Park,” along with a nice collection of proteas.

gardening, places

the long brown season

July 29, 2008 James 4 Comments

When you spend your time in San Diego’s well-watered burbs it’s easy to forget that you’re living in the middle of a desert. The last significant rainfall in town occurred in February, and the unirrigated natural lands around town have long ago begun their transformation into the long brown season.

My recent little excursion to Los Peñasquitos Canyon, a local open-space preserve between San Diego and Del Mar, gave me a chance to see what the natural world is doing in these parts.

Not everything is brown, of course. Some plants are tapped into locations with residual moisture. Others have adapted to the climate and have the stamina to stay green year-round.

Here are a few of the plants still showing colors other than brown:

Flat-topped buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum) a native plant.

Wild rose (Rosa californica) a native.

Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) an exotic, invasive species. This is the culinary plant from the Mediterranean that has escaped into the wilds.

Poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) a native–one of the few plants that turns blazing red in the fall. Even now, it’s showing some of that red color.

Thistle in bloom. I’m not sure if this is native or not, but it’s not the hyper-nasty Russian thistle (the dried flowers of which are shown in the large photo above). [Correction/edit August 1: This is actually a teasel, not a thistle. Like the escaped fennel above, this too is a renegade exotic species. Pretty, though…]

It’s a condition of our consumer culture and times to want what we don’t have. Living in San Diego, most of the plant materials that people expect to find in their home gardens fall outside of the category of what occurs naturally or is well-suited to the area.

It’s always instructive to visit the natural preserves to see plants–even the nasty invasives–that are supremely well-designed to live in this climate. Some of the plants in these parks would do extremely well in gardens. But it’s hard letting go of plants that many of us associate with places we’ve lived in and even people we’ve known.

My own yard has several areas that I consider my guilty pleasure zones. I have pieces of a bromeliad and a kahili ginger that I was given in the 1970s, as well as the green rose from that I dug up from the house where I grew up in the Los Angeles area. And I’m a natural born collector who has a hard time saying no to interesting plants. These plants all require some water and tending beyond what nature brings.

But they’re counterbalanced by garden areas planted with drought-tolerant species, local and introduced, that receive almost no water and attention over the summer. As time goes on, I’ll be expanding those areas. Don’t expect me any time soon, however, to plant poison oak, as pretty and hardy as the plant is. I have my limits as to how much true nature I want in my garden…

gardening, plant profiles

toloache

July 23, 2008 James 2 Comments

In the local canyons, this time of year brings about the spectacular flowers of the sacred datura, Datura wrightii. The low, mounding bushes grow two to three feet tall and easily twice as wide, and are covered from dusk to mid-morning with immense white trumpets, easily eight inches across, often flushed with pale lavender.

Photo by Dlarsen, via Wikimedia Commons [ source ]

This is one of several species of the genus that has been called toloache in Mexico. It’s in the nightshade family, and like other members of the genus Datura, the plant is as toxic as it is spectacular.

Even though it’s highly poisonous, some Native Americans used the plant as part of a ceremony marking the passage of a child to an adult. From the Wikipedia: “Among the Chumash, when a boy was 8 years old, his mother gave him a preparation of momoy to drink. This was supposed to be a spiritual challenge to the boy to help him develop the spiritual wellbeing that is required to become a man. Not all of the boys survived [my emphasis].”

On my recent pre-dusk hike through our local Los Peñasquitos Canyon Preserve all the buds on the numerous toloache plants were tightly furled when I arrived.

But by the time I left, less a half hour before sunset, the flowers buds were loosening. Had I stayed an hour longer I would have been able to view the fresh flowers in the last glow of daylight like an intoxicating evil welcoming the night.

Here you can get a sense for how large these flowers will be.

Despite its bad press this is one of our local plants that I’ve been eying to add to the garden. The only thing the cat shows any interest in are plants that look like grasses or catnip, and there are parts of the yard no small child could get to. Besides, I’ve already got a number of toxic plants in the garden–oleanders, tomatoes and other nightshade cousins.

In addition to having amazing flowers, this datura requires no added water during the long dry summer. Nothing this spectacular can make that claim.

Speaking of poisonous plants, last week’s New York Times had an article on the Duchess of Northumberland. She’s in the process of building a modern annex to grounds that were designed by Capability Brown, the landmark British landscape designer from the eighteenth century. Traditionalists are not happy. “They said I am to gardens what Imelda Marcos is to shoes,” the Duchess is quoted. In her project one of the features is the Poison Garden, which the article describes as “a spooky fenced-off area with about 100 varieties of toxic plants, as well as cannabis and opium poppies.”

I bet this duchess’s garden parties will be pretty interesting affairs…

my garden, plant profiles

space alien in san diego?

June 14, 2008 James Leave a comment

The evidence!

Okay, okay, I’ll admit it. Despite a certain resemblance to the classic “Martian popping thing” available at Archie McPhee’s, it’s actually the final two leaves on a Pachypodium geayi, a succulent and spiny first-cousin to the better known plumeria that is such a fragrant staple in Hawaiian leis.

Kept moist, and during the cooler and wetter parts of the year, the plant is a spiny column ringed with a rosette of long gray-green leaves. Drop the watering, and the plant goes into defensive mode, dropping its leaves and making like a cactus. Where we have it, in the back of the back yard, it gets to dry out along with the rest of the drought-tolerant plants, so we get to see its “cactus” behavior most of the summer and into fall. When the water starts up, the leaves come back and it’s happy again.

This species can produce pendant cream-colored flowers with reflexed petals. They’re not the most spectacular bloomers in the Pachypodium genus–P. lamerei could be confused for a plumeria if it weren’t for the spines on the plant.

This plant is about ten years in the ground and is coming up on four feet tall. Mature plants will get triple or quadruple the height of this teenager. More water would help it along, I’m sure, but in my yard it gets what it gets.

So far no pests have bothered it. Would you?

plant profiles

pride of madeira

April 18, 2008 James 7 Comments

For the last three weeks Echium candicans (a.k.a. “Pride of Madeira”) has been blooming around town. Here’s a planting up at UCSD.

For eleven months it’s a somewhat open, woody shrub with rosettes of long, narrow leaves, of a soft grayed green color. Then in spring it puts up these outrageous cones of blue, lavender or magenta. The shape of the cones can be a little rounded towards the tip or fairly pointed. The plant can grow three to five or more feet tall, and twice as wide.

Many other species in the genus Echium are biennials. They put out a rosette of leaves one year, and bloom themselves to death the following year, often in a wild display of flowers. But candicans tends to be much more long-lived. So far it hasn’t made itself a big presence in residential gardens, maybe because of its largish size. But people are starting to plant it more in their gardens. It looks nice much of the year, puts on an insane display for a month, is well adapted to Mediterranean climates down to zone 9 and doesn’t require much water. What’s not to like? Okay, okay, it’s not the smallest spectacular plant out there.

I keep looking at plants and the one or two blank spots in the yard. Maybe one of these days I’ll make room for it.

gardening, my garden, plant profiles, rambles

in bloom: this big aloe

January 14, 2008 James 1 Comment

Sorry. I don’t know the species, but it’s for sure an aloe, possibly Aloe arborescens. It’s pretty common in Southern California but spectacular nevertheless, especially in bloom:

This is the plant in the front yard. It’s now mounding something like 6 feet tall and maybe 8 wide, and covered with these tall spires of coral-orange-red flowers. You can easily forget that there are other things blooming.

Like other aloes, it originates in Southern Africa, if not South Africa proper. It left a Mediterranean climate similar to California’s, and thrives on the warm, dry summers and cool, moister winters. Some summers it endures more than a month with no supplemental water, and it’d survive just fine if it didn’t get half of how much it gets. But like many things it responds to a little coaxing, and with a little water looks a little less feral.

There’s a definite hierarchy among some ecologically-concerned though a little purist gardeners. Fake English country gardens that in the desert that is California require lots of water and are filled with overfed disposable plants blooming themselves to death are near the dregs of the dregs at the bottom of the list. Drought-tolerant landscaping rises lots higher. And in the highest regard are the drought-tolerant gardens that rely solely on native plants. So this aloe is a middle-of-the-road choice in social consciousness. If it were human it’d probably drive a Subaru and vote for fairly progressive causes, though it might be caught throwing recyclables out with the landfill trash or listening to Howard Stern.

It’s interesting that a plant can have been in cultivation here for a century or more and still be considered an exotic species. Human ancestors that might have brought the plant with them would now be long-gone, though their progeny could be considered native to wherever they were born. Biology, though, has a much longer memory, and with good reason.

Some of these species brought over from other places could take over the biota, just like the human exotics have pretty much displaced the native populations that were here before them. Those of us who aren’t Native Americans are the human kudzus, the human tamarisks, the human tumbleweeds–opportunistic colonizers of a benign new prospect. Some of these other garden plants could well go on to be the scourge of the continent. But in the end the plants and the immigrants all share the basic will to survive–survive first and ask moral questions later if at all.

Fortunately, this aloes seems content in its place as it gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger, shading its competitors and smothering smaller plants around it.

Uh oh.

Sure is pretty though, eh?

[ Lost in the Landscape ]