Tag Archives: native plants

gardening, my garden

more than last month

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After posting on Nasher Sculpture Center’s Sculpture garden–very much a rarefied 1%er’s kind of garden–it’s really comforting to return to the garden I call home. It’s April 15 in this 99%er’s garden, and time for this months Garden Blogger’s Bloom Day meme, hosted of Carol at May Dreams Gardens.

Every time I do one of these posts I worry that I’m showing you the same things. But since I stare at these plants for hours on end I hope you don’t mind the repeat appearances of some of the things that are still blooming. But in addition to the forever bloomers there are a lot of new things starting up this month.

Here’s an overview of the irrigated raised bed. There’s a native coyote bush in the back that I raised from seed, and it seems fine with this somewhat moist location. In front of it are some blooming exotics: a potted Euphorbia lambii with its chartreuse flowers, an Arctotis hybrid “Big Magenta” in the lower left, Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips’ to the right and a honey bush (Melianthus major) in the background, right, with its dark red bracts.

Euphorbia lambii detail.

There’s a lot from California (or very nearby) in bloom:

Verbena lilacina (from nearby in Mexico)

Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum) livening up the edges of the veggie plantings.

Some of the last flowers on the black sage, Salvia mellifera.

Takes 1-3 of Salvia clevelandii ‘Winnifred Gilman.”

A red monkeyflower seedling from a cultivar that died a couple of years ago.

The local stinging lupine, Lupinus hirsutissimus.

The local coastal sea daisy, previously called a coreopsis, I’m trying to get used to its new name, Leptosyne maritima.

Another ex-coreopsis, Leptosyne gigantea.

The local bladderpod, Isomeris arborea, with one of its bladder-like seedpods to the right.

Island alum root doesn’t so incredibly well for me. I suspect that I’m not watering it enough to make it bloom like mad like I’ve seen it do locally.

A fremontia that we have in East County, Fremontodendron mexicanum. It’s a plant that’s been imprisoned in a gallon pot from a plant sale last fall, waiting until I figure out where to put a really big plant.

The giant island buckwheat (Eriogonum giganteum) in bud. Last year the gophers got to it. I thought it was doomed. Looks like it’s pulling through.

San Miguel Island buckwheat (Eriogonum arborescens).

A succulent dudleya that you find out in the eastern parts of the county, Dudleya saxosa ssp. aloides.

Carpenteria california, in bloom since December.

The California poppies started up last month. They’re close to peaking.

This plant, a spreading form of chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum) known as ‘Nicholas.”

And from other places we have:

Verbena bonariensis.

An unknown red aloe or aloe hybrid.

Three takes on santolina, S. chamaecyparissus, more in bloom than last month.

The rose geranium in the herb garden is a total monster. Pretty in lavender-pink, though. And it’s pretty easy to pull up.

Yah, yah, yah, this protea all over again…

You’re witness to the final moments of this Mexican evening primrose. It’s a noxious weed in the garden, and I pulled it up five seconds after I put down the camera.

Nile, oblivious to all my weeding and survey work in the garden.

Another weedy plant, Homeria collina. Not nearly as bad as the previous one, so it usually gets to live and reproduce in my garden unless it comes up in a seriously bad spot.

Fortnight iris, Dietes iridioides. Another pretty but really weedy plant. It’s still coming up from seed left by plants a decade ago. This is a flower on the one plant that gets to live.

A couple of takes on blooming graptopetalums.

Silver jade, Crassula argentea, just coming into bloom.

But of the exotics, the most splashy right now are the American pitcher plants, the sarracenia. These carnivorous plants have leaves modified into the bug-catching tubes that are often mistaken for flowers. But you’ll see the floppy mop-top flowers that these guys produce.

S. alata and flowers.

A natural hybrid, S. ‘Leah Wilkerson,” flowers and new pitcher.

A hybrid of S. flava by S. oreophila. The pitchers are just opening, and will turn a much more intense combination of red and yellow.

Happy Bloomday, every’all. For more gardens check out Carol’s April 2012 Bloomday post [ right here ].

gardening, my garden

the garden back home

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We interrupt this brief series of looks at Dallas for a quick glance around my garden back home in San Diego. Actually I’ve been home from Texas for a while now, but I wanted to make a little better sense of the two hundred or so photos on my various devices before I posted the final selections. Until then, and until I can apply order the rest of the universe, here’s a light smattering of what’s going on.

March and April can be eyebrow-deep in flowers. But the winter rains that give a big boost to the plants haven’t arrived this year. Take these tiny chia plants (Salvia columbariae) as examples. This is some of this year’s seed-grown crop, nothing taller than two or three inches. The previous years they were closer to two to three feet tall–and stunning. Little water, big difference.

Out front, where many of the natives live, maybe 95% of the irrigation is natural rainfall. The plants would look better with supplemental water, so I sometimes wonder if I’m doing a bad PR job about natives if the garden sometimes looks a little straggly. I’m not sure whether it’s tough love on my part or just having gotten used to not needing to water. In the end the plants do seem to to pull along, and maybe that’s the more important message about the natives: They don’t always look great (how many of us do?) but they can survive without taxing the local water resources.

For the most part the following are plants, California natives and from farther afield, that came into bloom recently. A lot of the old dependables are still blooming away, oblivious to the season…

Win­nifred Gilman salvia

Verbena lilacina

An unknown lavender that self-sowed

Another view of the stinging lupine, backlit to show the little prickly hairs

Stinging Lupine: This plant is fairly well armed with tiny, unpleasant little hairs. But it's a local native that's totally dependable for a month of color.

Solanum pyracanthum: The species name of this nightshade translates into "fire thorn," pretty appropriately named. As the leaf dries the thorns are the last to lose their color.

The common gray santolina, new flowers against the dried remainders of last year's flowers. In my book, the soothing brown dried heads of flowers look lots cooler against the silver foliage than the egg-yolk yellow of the fresh blooms.

Salvia chamaedryoides

Salvia Bee's Bliss: a plant that a lot of folks rave about. It can be slow to get established, but once it gets going it's pretty tough and a great source of flowers for 2-3 months.

Phlomis monocephala

A mystery oxalis species--I lost its name. The leaves are ordinarily dark green, but the plant is dying back for the year, and the dying foliage is this subtle mottled effect.

Melianthus major, Honey Bush

Hummingbird sage, Salvia spathacea

Homeria collina

The silver-with-red leaved silver jabe plant, Crassula arborescens

Grapefruit flowers: kids, this is where grapefruits come from.

Geum Red Wings

Gaura lindheimeri

Sarracenia flava var. maxima, the first of the pitcher plants to have bloomed this year.

Euphorbia lambii

Eriogonum arborescens

Dichelostemma capitatum, Blue Dicks. Beautiful in the garden in huge groups, they're also really delicious for the gophers.

Desert mallow, Sphaer­al­cea ambigua

Daffodil--I think it's Ice Follies. Not many daffodil hybrids come back reliably in Southern California, but this is one of the classics.

Another look at Crassula multicava

Another crassula, C. multicava, with billowing heads of tiny flowers in winter and spring (and maybe longer if you water them more than I do).

Coreopsis maritima, our local native coreopsis, that's undergone a name change to Leptosyne maritima.

The first California poppy of the season

Blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium bellum


Thanks again to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting this great way for garden bloggers to find each other. It’s also a fine way to see what’s in bloom around the world. Check out all the gardens [ here ].

gardening, my garden

january bloomday

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Happy January Bloom Day, folks!

Lots of pictures this month.

Okay I cheated, with some multiples of the same plant mixed in. But a big dose of perky orange in the dead of winter seemed morally acceptable.

I guess it’s a typical Southern California January, with some ever-bloomers mixed in with the winter-flowering plants or last of the fall plants. You can hover over an image above to get the name, but here’s a quick rundown on the January backbone plants.

Some plants that say “California” but are from other places:

Aloe arborescens

A. andongensis

A. bainesii

Kalanchoe tubiflora

Jade plant, Crassula ovata

Salvia divinorum

S. Hot Lips

Protea ‘Pink Ice’

Lavender

Arctotis

Oxalis purpurea

…and the really noxious

Oxalis pes-caprae

California natives:

Coreopsis maritima

C. gigantea

Ribes indecorum

Gutierrezia californica

Carpenteria californica

Mimulus aurantiacus

Isomeris arborea

Sphaeralcea ambigua

Galvezia speciosa

Verbena lilacina

Salvia mellifera

Salvia ‘Bee’s Bliss’

Salvia spathacea

There are also a few other things in bloom that didn’t make it into the mix, things like ‘Dr. Hurd’ manzanita, but you get the idea…

Thanks as always to Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. Check out the January post to see what the rest of the world looks like in the middle of January [ here ]

gardening

cnps plant sale tomorrow, october 15!

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If you’re near San Diego, be sure to stop by Balboa Park for the big annual native plant sale of the local chapter of the California Native Plant Society. Hours are 11-3 for the regular folks, but you can shop at 10 if you’re a member.

[ Plant list ]

And a special bonus: You can have your very own CNPS teeshirt imprinted with my Dudleya pulverulenta image:

Quantities of plants–and teeshirts–are limited. Come early for the best selection.

art, landscape, places

staycation 2011

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College Prowler, the website that provides crowdsource ratings of colleges and universities by important factors like campus dining, academics, and the guys who go there, recently also ranks the schools for “weather.” (Really, we’d call that “climate,” wouldn’t we?) Of the five schools rated as A+, three are here in San Diego.

Keeping that in mind, when I was recently trying to decide where I might want to go on a short little summer vacation, San Diego won out. Really, when Newark recently hit 108, D.C., D.C. struck 105 and Dallas roasted at 100 or more for three weeks solid, it was hard to think about going anywhere else, especially now in the hot breath of summer.

Monarch butterfly on ginger

So home it was. Long weekends in the garden…monarrch butterflies…

The long weekends were an excuse to get to the beach and get my feet wet. Pathetic that I haven’t done this in over two years.


The extra days were also an excuse to go for a short visit to Torrey Pines State Preserve, where lots was still in bloom even though it’s high summer and there’s been no significant rain for several months:


The new cat, hiding in the cables behind the electronics...

And we adopted a new cat. She’s closer to feral than being a lap cat, but we’re hoping that she’ll at least not feel the need to hide behind the furniture while humans are around.

James SOE NYUN. Yellowstone Lake Hotel, Yellowstone National Park, 2008. Digital pigment print, 16x19.75 inches.

And last, I had the chance to participate in some art stuff. I’m in the current 20th Juried Exhibition at the La Jolla Athenaeum. I was really surprised and honored that I was awarded first prize by the local big art name jurrors, Kathryn Kanjo of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and Joseph Bellows of the photo gallery that bears his name. Woohoo!

This is one of three images in the show, works from the Yellowstone region that channel photographers from the nineteenth century. If you’re on vacation here in town, stop by. The show is up through September 3.

Enjoy what’s left of the summer!

art, landscape, places, plant profiles

petals and parasites

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The garden is turning decidedly brown as the temperatures warm and the dry summer gets underway–Sounds like a perfect time to revisit high spring in the local foothills. Or maybe that’s just a ruse to get an excuse to show some photos I didn’t get to posting yet. Pick whatever motivation sounds good to you…

When I visited Crestridge Ecological Preserve last May the rock roses (Helianthemum scoparium) were announcing themselves assertively. The little low plants were at their peak and vibrated with dozens to hundreds of brilliant yellow five-petaled flowers on each plant.

And anywhere that you saw rock roses you’d see hundreds of rock rose petals beneath the plants. I was trying to decide what I liked better, the flowering plants, or the red earth beneath them, dusted gold with fallen petals.

Rock rose. Cool plant.

“Cool plant” might not be your first reaction to the dodder (Cuscuta californica) that was everywhere. Lacking chlorophyll, its only way of surviving is to latch on to a host plant and suck on its vital plant juices, depleting the host while growing extravagantly all over it.

Hillside with chaparral mallow, chamise, pearly everlastings, deerweed and...dodder (the gold, twiny stuff)

Someone on the trip pointed out that DNA work has established this as a member of the Convolvulaceae, the same family that includes Calystegia, the genus of native morning glories, as well as Convolvulus, the genus that contains the common garden morning glories. The new draft Jepson manual follows this classification.

Dodder doing its thing, with chamies, golden yarrow and Lakeside ceanothis in the background. Ooh, pretty...

If you’ve planted the garden morning glories, only to recoil in horror at how they coil over absolutely everything in their path, you’ll recognize the growth pattern that dodder adopts. Like morning glories, it twines like crazy. And, it’s parasitic! Extra bonus!! Dodder is an annual, so that even though it feeds off its host, it does so for only part of the year, mainly during the growing season when the host stands the best hope of keeping up with the dodder’s demands.

All that ickiness aside I happen to love how the stuff looks, twiny and golden, working its way through the landscape. Visually, it does what nothing else in the landscape does. I’m not the only person struck by its forms. There’s a fairly abstract, very modernist photo of dodder in Laguna Beach that was taken by Edward Weston way back in 1937. [ Check out the image at the Center for Creative Photography, in Tucson. ]

So, as far as I’m concerned: Dodder. Cool plant.

About the time I took this trip I happened to open up the Sunday comics to see the week’s Bizarro single-panel. I won’t stomp all over copyright and lift the image for here, but you can view it on Dan Piraro’s blog [ here ]. But let me try to describe it:

Night. Suburbia. Exterior of a house with a lawn and low, mounding foundation plantings. A sidewalk leads away from the front door. Tight shot of a couple who are leaving the house.

The woman, smiling, says to the man, “What terrific hosts.”

Behind them, in the doorway of their home, stands the host couple. Light spills out from indoors and onto the stoop. The man wears a pair of round black glasses, “Harry Potter glasses” you might say, though you sense that he was wearing them long before Harry Potter existed. He waves a weak farewell.

Next to him the hosting woman stands, her hands clasped. She does not look happy. She speaks.

“What incredible parasites.”

Who’d ever think that the host/parasite relationship would ever be material for the funny pages? Talk about timing, talk about coincidence, the trip to Crestridge, the dodder, the Sunday comic…

gardening, plant profiles

mutant primrose

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I’m almost ready to blame this freaky mutant on fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor disaster.

On my way to the office, several times a week, I walk past a cultivated patch of Hooker’s evening primrose, Oenothera elata. A few days ago I noticed this mutant crested growth on the central growing point on one of the plants. I’ve noticed this crested growth pattern in the garden a few times, most recently on a euphorbia. But this is the first time I’ve noticed it on a primrose–or any other local native plant for that matter.

In a case of crested growth, the growing tip on a stem, the apical meristem, changes from a single growth point to a growth all along a broad line of cells. As the cells along the line grow, the plant forms a fan-shaped growth instead of a slender stem.

In this second photo you can see a normal stem to the right for comparison: slender normal stem, big fat mutant stem.

And here you can see the crested stem from the side and how it widens as it rises.

Pretty weird, huh?

landscape, places, plant profiles

monkeyflower spectrum

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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.

landscape, plant profiles

survey season

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This spring I’ve helped out with a couple plant surveys organized by the local CNPS chapter. There are plenty of plants in the county and relatively few people to survey them, so the chapter picks a plant or group of plants for which there’s a compelling need to inventory them. The theme this year was dune plants. I don’t know this group of plants very well, so it’s been a great learning experience.

Surveys in two locations netted five or six rare List 1B species. (See the CNPS definition of the various listings [ here ].) I was there for four to five of them.

At the first location it was hard to miss the rare form of Juncus acutus, towering over my head. Shown here, it’s surrounded by the common but wonderfully perky yellow beach evening primrose (Camissonia cheiranthifolia) and the exotic sea rocket, Cakile maritima.

(A closeup of the dune evening primrose.)

Also nearby, also yellow, common, and perky: telegraph weed, Heteroteca grandiflora.

But enough of these common plants. We came here looking for rare ones!

Here’s one that was pretty hard to miss: Nuttall’s lotus, Lotus nuttallianus. I hope you like yellow. The bright flowers turn orange-red after they’ve been pollinated, encouraging the pollinators to visit the still-not-deflowered yellow blooms.

This snowy plover and least tern preserve was one of the plants’ favored areas. The word “preserve” promised more than was evident here. It was a patch of sand like any other part of the beach, but with just one piece of white string around it. Any dog or small child or group of teens with a cooler could have stepped inside, squashing the plants, scrambling the eggs and nestlings.

We saw several hundred of these, Brand’s phacelia, Phacelia stellaris. Around the edges of this patch you can see the one of invasive species of Erodium.

Another look at the phacelia… Most were about this size, practically belly flowers. But occasionally–as in the semi-shade beneath a picnic bench–you’d find individuals almost a foot tall.

And the last of the rare plants we surveyed the first day, coast wooly-heads, Nemacaulis denudata var. denudata. There were thousands at the first site. They weren’t flowering yet, but the plants were unmistakable with their long accordion-pleated white leaves. In bloom, they’ll have wiry stems floating little creamy balls of bloom over the leaves.

Here’s a final shot, a closeup of the flowering heads of the Juncus acutus. ssp. leopoldii.

It’s a stunning plant out on the sand. And of all of these, the common form of Juncus acutus is something you’ll see offered in various native plant catalogs. If you need a big, architectural, spiky sedge that likes a certain amount of moisture, this might be just your plant.

art, gardening, landscape

california native plant week, the cartoon

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Here’s a little cartoon I whipped up this morning on Xtranormal, the site that lets you create and distribute your own animations without needing to really know what you’re doing. (When it comes to CGI, that pretty much describes me…)

It’s pretty much California Native Plant Week meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets Hello Kitty. And it’s a test of how well voice synthesis can deal with some common (and less common) scientific names.

Pixar, my number is (619) 555-0213.