Tag Archives: native plants

gardening

seed bomb controversies

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Someone has declared tomorrow, October 9, 2010 as International Tulip Guerrilla Gardening Day. [ Here’s the Facebook event. ] I won’t be discussing tulips, but this post does have a few things to say about guerrilla gardening.

The local native plant listserv lit up a few weeks ago over a story in the local paper about seed bombs that ran on August 30.

If you’re not up on seed bombs here’s a little background: The idea of rolling up seeds and clay to make little balls that could be lobbed into an area to sow the seeds probably goes back centuries. But the technique was revitalized in Japan by Masanobu Fukuoka during the last century as part of a low-disturbance style of planting. Instead of tilling the ground, these lumps of seed and clay could be spread out on the earth’s surface, reducing ground disturbance and the resulting need to weed so intensely. Up to that point the little round seed delivery devices were known as seed balls, earth balls or even clay dumplings.

With the rise of the militant guerrilla gardening movement, the little seed ball became one of the weapons of choice against what was perceived as urban blight. An untended vacant lot could be showered with with these little projectiles, and a few good rains could see the seeds sprouting and taking over what might have been invasive weeds. In the testosterone-soaked guerrilla garden movement the friendly seed ball quickly became rebranded a “seed bomb.”

Now we return to current times and the article I started out mentioning: The original cut of the article touted how these particular seed bombs contained native species, including–cue the scary music–sweet alyssum! While the definitely-not-native sweet alyssum isn’t one of the top two or three most invasive plants, it’s undisputedly a problem and has no business in a seed ball that could get hurled into an wild area by a well-meaning guerrilla gardener. In my own garden, a sowing of the stuff twenty years ago has led to a situation of seedlings still popping up every time it rains.

The article generated all sorts of comments, and several people wrote directly to the maker of these particular seed bombs mentioned in the paper, Jim Mumford of GreenScaped Buildings. One thing led to another and it was revealed that the newspaper got hold of a bad list of ingredients, and that sweet alyssum had never been a part of the mix. The newspaper ran a sidebar correction to the story. (The species used to me looks like the California native wildflower mix offered by S&S Seeds.)

Still by that point the damage had been done, and the creator of these particular balls felt like he needed to show up last month at the lion’s den of the the native plant society meeting to do some damage control. He brought us all a big bag of free seed balls. He ran down the real list of species that were really in the mix. He reiterated that sweet alyssum had never been part of the mix.

When it was all over, several in the audience were saying they had no trouble with the species used to make the seed balls. The plants were all from California and weren’t considered invasive. But this was a tough crowd to please and there were still a few lingering concerns.

Within the state there are distinct forms of many of the plants in the mix, and each region’s flora has a particular balance of local plants. If you bring in a non-local strain of a “native” plant you might do something to mess up that balance. Really the only way to make a safe seed bomb that you might lob into a wild area would be to use seed from local plants. Seed bombs are fun, but keep them confined to urban gardens away from wildlands and don’t go tossing the balls into your neighborhood canyon thinking you’re doing the earth a favor.

The story of the San Diego seed bombs has a relatively happy ending. But over the last couple of months I’ve run across a seller who offers “West Coast seed bombs” on Etsy and through a number of boutiques. The vendor lists the ingredients as “Cornflower, Siberian Wallflower, Garland Chrysanthemum, Shasta Daisy, Farewell-to-Spring, Plains Coreopsis, Sulphur Cosmos, Wild Cosmos, African Daisy, Sweet William, California Poppy, Blanket Flower, Baby’s Breath, Tidy Tips, Mountain Phlox, Blue Flax, Sweet Alyssum, Annual Lupine, Lemon Mint, Red Poppy, Rocky Mountain Penstemon, Desert Bluebell, Mexican Hat, Gloriosa Daisy, None-so-Pretty, Prairie Coneflower, and Black-eyed Susan.” Not only does this mix include sweet alyssum, it contains garland chrysanthemum, one of our local scourges. Some parts of the country also have problems with the baby’s breath.

The issue of invasives aside, it makes me wonder about people’s definitions of what constitutes a wildflower. Siberian wallflower on the West Coast? African daisy?

I got in touch with the makers of these seed bombs, and they were quite responsive, saying “we are continually developing this product. Your feedback will help inform our product going forward and is much appreciated. We will gladly include information about the danger of invasive species in our product from here forward.” And they asked for suggestions for plants that would be better citizens in a West Coast wildflower mix. Off the top of my head I referred them to the list accompanying the article, and added just a few ideas of California natives not on the list: baby blue eyes, fivespot, coast sunflower, desert marigold. What others would you recommend?

If the makers of these seed balls drastically change their mix we could have another relatively happy ending. Most of us probably have non-native plants in our gardens. If what happens in the garden stays in the garden, then it’s not quite a doom and gloom scenario. But we definitely have a problem if people start throwing seed bombs into the wilds.

In this case, accompanying the seed balls with a note about the potential threat of invasive plants could do as much good as reformulating the mix.

gardening

california native plant week

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Darlingtonia californica growing at California Carnivores.

You may have heard already, but if not I wanted to relay some great news about the passing this week of ACT 173, a bill that would declare the third week of April California Native Plant Week. The legislature has been deadlocked over the state budget and I was worrying this bill would get stalled along with everything else. But such was not the case–Yay!

Our state flower: California poppy, Escholzia californica, shown in its coastal form.

If you’re into reading documents containing lots of “whereas-es” you can view the full resolution [ here ].

April is high bloom season for a lot of the natives, so it should be a great time of year to spread the word about California natives.

gardening, my garden

summer at last

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Summer finally arrived last week. A humid mass of high pressure from Mexico hopped the border fence and gave us some hot days and tropical-looking morning clouds that lit up brilliantly as the sun rose.

After almost four months with a total natural rainfall of .05 inches much of the garden has been heading into its defensive dormancy. But a few plants seem to be reveling in the arrival of some real summer heat. Top of the list is this California fuchsia, the ‘Route 66’ cultivar, which opened its flowers to coincide with the hot weather. Some Epilobium species and clones have fairly small, gray-colored leaves, but this is one of those where the leaves a smidge larger and greener, a bright contrast to the screaming orange flowers.

Desert marigold, Baileya multiradiata, has been blooming away with the help of a little additional water, but not much.

In the bed that gets some irrigation the gingers are the current stars of the show. Coinciding with the California fuchsia was this kahili ginger, Hedychium gardnerianum, a plant that I’ve been growing since my early teens, a hand-me-down plant from one of my mother’s gardening friends. Sitting in the back yard after sunset is a treat with this insanely fragrant ginger nearby.

Of course summer isn’t all about the flowers. The fig tree is hitting its peak fruit production this week. It’s the variety ‘Brown Turkey,’ which is supposed to do well with less heat than what most other varieties require. This has been one its best years ever for me. I’m trying to figure out what went right this year, and I’m thinking the success has something to do with water. This past winter and spring actually delivered a slightly-over normal rainfall that was spaced evenly throughout several months. Also, last year I applied some water-conserving woodchip mulch over the bed that contains the fig. And John’ has made a point of watering the zone around the fig every other week or so. I hope to be able to repeat the success next year, which according to the prognosticators could be a drier than average La Niña year.

The garden herbs are doing well. A sixpack of parsley several months back is turning out to be way more than two people who use parsley once or twice a week. At least it’s a pleasantly textured plant for the front of a border.

A sixpack of basil, however, hasn’t seemed to produce nearly enough. Maybe the basil will pick up with the warmer weather.

Surprisingly the tropical lemongrass plants (both the East- and West-Indian versions) haven’t been sulking and are overproducing just like the parsley.

Adding to the pile of edibles, our neighbor Olinda stopped by with her grandson. It was all she could do to carry this giant watermelon. John was impressed with its size and suggested I weigh it: 30.8 pounds.

It’s one of the with-seed varieties that stores these days don’t seem to stock much anymore. Stunning rind, don’t you think? One of the many things we’re losing in part because of big agra.

I was hoping to save the watermelon for a day or two, until we had room in the fridge, but I was a little clumsy photographing its cool rind in detail. Now I know what a melon dropped 3 feet off a table onto a brick patio does. It stays in one piece, but you have to deal with it right away.

High summer also means the best cantaloupes of the season. This is Scooter helping us out by finishing a couple of half-melons we had for breakfast. The melon came from the local hybrid grocery-farmer’s market.

And so our summer begins: a little too much melon and a garden peaking with fruit and herbs. Life is good.

gardening, landscape, places

bloom day: natives at home and in the wild

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This is why I enjoy growing native plants: On a quick hike through my nearby Tecolote Canyon Natural Park there were a few plants blooming away, hardly aware it’s midsummer and three months since the last real rain. And when I came home some of the same species were blooming just as exuberantly in my garden. That’s a great sense of connection with the wild, and I get a sense that parts of my garden are participating in the continuity of nature.

The common California flat-top buckwheat, Eriogonum fasciculatum:

In the wilds (actually a reveg parking strip) with seaside daisy (Encelia Californica)
At home, one the easment slope garden, doing battle with the neighbor’s sacred iceplant

 

Bladderpod, Isomeris arborea, with its bee-magnet yellow flowers.

Trail-side
At home, in a mixed planting of natives and exotics

 

The totally awesome sacred datura, Datura wrightii.

In the wilds, the form with a pale lavender edging
Also in the wilds, the all-white form
…at home, also on the slope garden

 

Amaryllis belladonna (“naked ladies”) is native to South Africa, but there were two little clusters in the canyon. They don’t really colonize the canyons and generally aren’t considered invasive. They were a surprise and I wonder if someone planted them here. And at home I also happened to have the first of them blooming in the garden.

One of the ‘wild’ amaryllis
…another of the ‘wild’ amaryllis
…and the amaryllis back home, in the garden

 

In the canyon there were a few other things going at it:

Blue elderberry blooms and fruit (Sambucus nigra ssp. cerulea, formerly Sambucus mexicana)
Oenothera elata, a primrose that blooms on tall spires
Laurel sumac, Malosma laurina
Coyote melon (Cucurbita palmata). It’s generally considered inedible. I tried one once. I agree.
Nestled in the dead stems of the invasive fennel is this other non-native. It looks like some sort of garden nicotiana
Your basic Rosa californica flower…
…and pods
The very cool fiber optic grass, Isolepsis cernua

 

And at home were some California plants that either weren’t blooming in the canyon or aren’t native to this area:

Nuttall’s milkvetch, Astragalus nuttalii, with its noisy rattle-like pods
California sealavender (Limonium californicum) the only statice native to California — EDIT November 20, 2014: Although this plant was sold to me as this California native, it is in reality the INVASIVE L. ramosissimum ssp. provinciale. Yikes! Even the native plant specialists can make a mistake, looks like.
Cleveland sage at the end of its summer blooming, with the gorgeous grass, purple three awn (Aristida purpurea)
San Diego sunflower (Bahiopsis laciniata), not looking great, but considering it’s battling iceplant on the slope garden and hasn’t been rained on or watered in over three months, it’s not doing that badly
The desert mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) could probably stand being cut back a bit, but it still has a small few blooms on its almost leafless stems. I’m really coming to enjoy the light green, slightly yellow color of the plant, a great contrast against silver or dark green foliage

 

If the naked lady amaryllis weren’t pornographic enough, here are some of the non-natives blooming in the garden right now. It’s August, and the flower count isn’t what it was three months ago.

Salvia Hot Lips and a big pink bougainvillea
Closer view of Salvia Hot Lips. As the weather warms, this one of three plants is showing more red with the white in the flowers. The other two plants are still mostly white
A really fragrant ginger, Hedychium coccineum ‘Tara’
Society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) is a common xeriscape plant, but it’s so adaptable that it’ll grow with its roots standing in water, as you see here in the pond. It has as much of an aroma as the ginger, but I wouldn’t exactly call it fragrant…
Butterfly bush, Clerodendrum myricoides. The flowers are nice, but people don’t talk enough about how pleasant the plant smells when you touch it
…and underneath the butterfly bush, this tidy little lead wort or dwarf plumbago (Ceratostigma plumbaginoides). It does fine in dappled sunlight with very little added water
A cactus and some succulents draping over a wall. Blooming is Crassula falcata, in the same big family as all the California Dudleya species
…and a closeup of the Crassula flowers, showing the red petals and little gold shocks of the stamens. This one’s worth looking at up close

 

These last plants definitely aren’t California natives, but they’re native to somewhere. If I lived in those places, I’d probably want them in my garden.

Check out the other gardeners around the world participating in this month’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. Thanks as always to Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting this event.

gardening, my garden

my haul

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In the spirit of the “haul video,” the art form in which a fashion-conscious usually young consumer describes his or her latest finds from the last shopping trip to the mall–a video in which the word “cute” has to appear at least fourteen times–let me show off my latest finds on my recent excursion to the Theodore Payne Foundation. (You didn’t think I’d go there and only pick up a couple plants for Aunt Barbara, did you?)

This first photo, a dark-flowered selection of desert willow, Chilopsis linearis, is a plant I did not buy. But if I manage to kill of one of my existing large shrub-sized plants in a spot that receives some summer water, this plant will be near the top of my list.

I also didn’t picky up any of the cool selection of pots.

But I did buy a few plants, including:

Verbena lilacina ‘Paseo Rancho,’ a light pink selection of the usually lavender Cedros Island verbena. You might call its color a little on the pale and insipid side, but it’s different from the other clones in my garden. Insipid but different, and maybe just a little cute. Reason enough to have it.

Cliff lettuce, or Dudleya caespitosa. Cute, huh? Ever the collector, I think it might be fun to explore some of the dozens of Dudleya species that grow in California.

Coast buckwheat, Eriogonum latifolium. I don’t really know this plant–which is sometimes reason enough to try to get to know it better. It’s been described as being similar to San Miguel Island buckwheat (E. grande). To me it looks like the leaves are a little more deluxe, thicker, fuzzier.

This plant, along with the preceding two selections, isn’t native to my immediate area. But being coastal or island plants, I’m hoping they’ll like what I have to offer them. The rest of my haul, however, consists of species that grow in my county, some of them not far from me.

San Diego ragweed, San Diego ambrosia–whatever you want to call Ambrosia pumila. The leaves are really delicately cut, like some artemisias, and I think this diminutive plant really does qualify as “cute.” This is a species that’s listed on the CNPS list of rare plants and proposed for the Federal Endangered Species list. It’s weird to travel 140 miles to get a mile that grows nearby, but that’s the responsible thing to do. Our local CNPS plant sales also have offered this plant. Yanking these up out of the ground where they grow nearby would be grossly tacky and totally illegal.

San Diego willowy monardella, Monardella linoides ssp. viminea, is another local plant that’s listed by both the state and federal agencies as endangered. It’ll have delicate whorls of lavender flowers when it blooms. But like most (or maybe all?) monardellas it has intensely fragrant leaves that I can enjoy right now.

And finally, one of my favorite of the softly delicate grasses, Aristida purpurea, purple three awn. It’s slightly more coarse than the popular Mexican feather grass that’s non-native and starting to look like it’s invasive. But it moves just as amazingly in the wind, and has a delicate purple tinge part of the year, something feather grass doesn’t offer.

August isn’t high season for planting, but with this cool summer-that-never-was I figured I could get away with it. And really, here, not that far from the coast, the main issue with many plants is water.

I hate to show newly installed plants before they have a chance to fill in, but here’s the finished bed where all of the plants except for the monardas went into. These Californians should be better choices for this exposed, dry spot than some of the exotics that I had in there before. Not shown in this photo is a very happy Cleveland sage and some ecstatic purple three awn plants that I grew from seed.

I haven’t counted all the “cutes” in my writeup. I know I’ve failed miserably, partly because I really dislike the word unless I’m discussing my extremely cute cat. I will try to do better if I decide to commit my shopping trips to video.

gardening, my garden, places

but what would aunt barbara like?

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A little over a week ago we went up for a long weekend to visit Aunt Barbara in LA’s San Fernando Valley. The Theodore Payne Foundation, one of the Southland’s major sources of California native plants was only half a dozen freeway exits away. I’ve mail-ordered seeds from them but I’d never been to the nursery. Midsummer isn’t high planting season. Visiting to buys plants might not be the best idea. Still, alright, you know where this is headed…

Barbara was busy with a friend, but John and I took the trip to Sunland, the community situated near where the Valley reaches toward the Los Angeles River and meets the San Gabriel Mountains. Urban sprawl quickly gives way to large, dusty lots. Manicured landscaping starts to fade away as the look and smell of the foothills blows in from the east. What a great location for a native plant nursery.

The perky Baja fairy duster, looking a lot like many Australian plants Southern Californians are used to seeing
The Matilija poppies were past their peak, but there were still a few around

Late July isn’t high season for native flowers. The last of the season’s Matilija poppy flowers (Romneya) appeared here and there on the nursery grounds and Baja fairy duster (Calliandra californica) provided some blooms next to the parking lot. (Interestingly, according to the Tree of Life Nursery, Theodore Payne–the person, not the foundation–was responsible for discovering and introducing the ‘White Cloud’ cultivar of Romneya that is so often grown.)

Something else that was blooming: Dendromecon harfordii

Also in bloom: Salvia pachyphylla with its gorgeous pink bracts against the violet flowers

A little trail leads to the little rise of land overlooking the nursery. The sign points to “Wildflower Hill.”

This time of year it’s pretty much California Flat-Top Buckwheat Hill, which isn’t at all a bad thing. It’s a subtle and gorgeous plant. But if you came expecting Butchart Gardens, well you’d be disappointed. Of course, if a taste of wild California is what you’re after, this is your place.

Of the three retail native plant nurseries I’ve been to over the last several years, this one is probably the wildest and the least “garden”-like. There are pockets with benches and picnic tables, but the main narrative here is that you’ve stepped over the edge into wilderness. Shut your eyes and you hear birds everywhere. Look away from the buildings and you could easily feel that you’re farther than four blocks from the suburbs. (By contrast, San Juan Capistrano’s Tree of Life Nursery feels the most nurtured, tended and garden-like. The Escondido branch of Las Pilitas Nursery falls somewhere in between.)

We were staying with Aunt Barbara, and I wanted to go back with a couple plants that might fit comfortably into her garden, both in the way it looks and the way she waters it. To give you a taste, here’s a shot of her front walkway.

…and here’s another shot at the Payne Foundation grounds, of the beautiful spires of spent sage against the browning landscape. This kind of scene gives me a real sense of nature’s subtle cycles, but I had a feeling Aunt Barbara wouldn’t go for it. What plants would reconcile the deep divide?

The short list of the nursery’s many selections included seaside daisy (various cultivars of Erigeron glaucus), bush snapdragon (Galvezia speciosa), California aster (Aster chilensis) and maybe even one of the California fuchsias. Barbara mentioned loving the flowers of Matilija poppy, but that’s a plant purchase I think a person needs to make for themselves, after they’ve seen how vigorous it can be and how un-cottage gardeney it starts to look this time of year.

The winners?

The only flower on the Venegasia carpesioides that I picked out for Barbara. I wished that it had a few more.

Canyon sunflower (Venegasia carpesioides) and the ever-popular Penstemon Margerita B.O.P. I planted them before we left, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they A) survive, and B) show Barbara that there are some natives that would fit easily into her California cottage garden. What other plants would the rest of you suggest for all the Aunt Barbara’s out there? What plants would you pick that could mix fairly easily with existing garden borders and bloom much of the year?

And some of the flowers on the Penstemon Margarita B.O.P.

gardening, my garden

almost red white and blue natives

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We had some people over to view the local fireworks yesterday. To mark the occasion I threw together some of the blooming natives from the garden for a pastel rendition of the red, white and blue theme of the day.

White was the easy color. Several white buckwheats were blooming, and I picked some stems of the flat-top buckwheat, Eriogonum fasciculatum. Its broad, open umbels also look a bit like fireworks.

For red, the dark rose colors of San Miguel Island buckwheat (Eriogonum grande var. rubsescens) provided a reasonable stand-in. If I had some Delphinium cardinale in the garden, it would have really provided a bright scarlet kick. Maybe next year…

For blue, the pickings got pretty slim. The blue-violet whorls of Cleveland sage (Salvia clevelandii ‘Winnifred Gilman’) were the closest I could come up with. As with the white buckwheat, the structure of the stems seemed a bit like fireworks, with whorls of little tubular flowers exploding out from the stem.

The result was a lot less subtle than floral fireworks, but I liked how it marked the occasion and celebrated a Southern California sense of place.

Many of the people who showed up knew I was a plant nut, so two of the hostess gifts were colorful florist bouquets. One of them marked the occasion by including red, white and blue flowers. But even florists with all their international resources sometimes have problems with the color blue. This florist’s solution? Why not dye white flowers blue? The results don’t look much like anything in my California garden so the gift flowers and the local posies weren’t intermixed, and the different bouquets have their own places around the house.

I hope you all had a great fourth!

gardening, places

at the county fair

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Are gardeners terrorists? You’d think so looking at the sign posted outside the San Diego County Fair.

This gardener took advantage of the “Furlough Friday” deal for state employees (free admission!) and checked out the offerings of the fair for the first time in half a decade. I guess the rationale of free admission was to get more people in the gate to partake of the rides and stunt food–you know, the bizarre offerings that often involve impaling something on a stick, sticking it in batter, and then deep-frying it. I searched all over for the worst of the worst stunt food but the best (worst?) I could find was a stand offering “fried Twinkie lattes”–really nothing more weird than a vanilla latte–and this trailer selling chocolate covered bacon. Neither dish really seemed to be deep fried, so I guess they’re getting with the health-conscious kick…

My main destination was the outdoor garden displays, where the main point of each display seemed to be either attracting new customers to the landscape firms there or–in the case of the non-profit institutions and garden clubs–education. The fair’s never been about landscape design as a high art, but there’s always interesting stuff there.

If there was theme to the displays this year, “edibles” seemed to be the word, keeping up the health-conscious theme of the not-deep-fried chocolate-covered bacon. This display by the San Diego Botanic Garden in Cooperation with the San Diego Water Authority won the prize for the best edible landscape. The display also won an award for the exhibit that arranged plants in a way that demonstrated “good taste.”

It featured food crops and ornamentals of all sorts as long as they fit into the purple-pink-green-silver palette, and demonstrated that a garden with veggies could be as pulled together as any other garden. In its combination of cool-weather crops (such as purple cabbage) with warm-weather ones (like basil and squash) it was also a reminder that this is a garden show than a real-world garden.

San Diego Botanic Garden display: A fence row planted with ornamentals, kale and squash.

Here are a few more photos of displays that played with the edibles theme:

Artichokes and olive trees in a space designed by Lane McClelland and Laurie Roberts.

Ornamentals and veggies hanging in burlap, also in the McClelland-Roberts garden.

Grow what you love--the entrance to the same McClelland-Roberts garden, featuring corn, chard, chives and other edibles.
Wendy Slijk's display showed off this hanging pot with squash.


Home Depot's entry featured a little grape vineyard.

A scarecrow guarding veggie beds in a display by the San Diego Horticultural Society.

In addition to edibles, drinkables got to play a role, as in this display of Agave tequilana by the Palomar Cactus and Succulent Society. This might not be one of the great landscape agaves, but how can you fault a plant that is the source of tequila?

Erigeron glaucus cv. Bountiful at the Tree of Life Nursery display.

I kept my eye out for uses of native plants, but there were almost none. Part of that is probably because the majority of the charismatic flowering natives do their thing at the end of winter or during spring. The one main exception was a small display by native plant specialist Tree of Life Nursery.

Brittons chalk dudleya and red monkeyflower in the Tree of Life Nursery's display.

Inside, in the adjacent exhibits building, there was a flower show going on, with roses and dahlias and gladiolus and lots of cubbies with flower arrangements. And that’s where I saw a few more natives, where they had a category for cut native flowers. So there was more monkeyflower here, along with one of the bush poppies (Dendromecon) and some matilija poppies.

Really, who doesn’t love these matilijas? The last photo is of one of them. Next post I’ll share some other sightings.


gardening, my garden, places

good book, cool trivia

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I love a good book that surprises you.

When I was talking to a botanist a couple months ago and she recommended Oscar F. Clarke’s Flora of the Santa Ana River and Environs : with references to world botany, I was expecting the book to be a nicely assembled writeup of a watershed a couple of hours to the north. book coverAs such it’d be a good writeup of species I’m using to seeing in my area seen through the filter of someone working in the Los Angeles/Orange/Riverside County region of Southern California.

The volume, which the back cover says “represents a culmination of a lifetime of natural history study,” lives up to my expectation of being a useful guide for studying the plants of the area. But in addition it ends up being full of all sorts of interesting little details that breath life into what might otherwise be an inert textbook. It’s a rich book, not a dense one.

(Edit, July 13, 2010: In addition to Clarke, the book has three co-authors who should be named: Danielle Svehla, Greg Ballmer and Arlee Montalvo. Thanks to all of you for such a great book.)

For example, take some of the details in the writeup on our state flower, the California poppy. Last year I decided that I’d replace my plantings of the typical garden-orange strain with the lower-growing yellow strain that you find locally. The first season’s plants germinated and grew well. This year I was fully expecting the plants to return in profusion, coming up both from last season’s roots and the seeds that the plants dropped. Instead, most of this year’s crop were the big orange garden strain. What went wrong?

Clarke’s description of the species concludes with a sentence that helped answer my question: “Local native populations produce seeds that remain dormant until exposed to winter/spring conditions in combination with smoke or other unknown factors, while populations from central California and commercial cultivars produce non-dormant seeds.” While it didn’t explain what I need to do to get these plants to naturalize, it at least explained that I was battling against some unknown biological forces. I felt better in my failure.

The illustrations in many manuals can be pretty poor, but that’s not the case here. All throughout the book brims with illustrations. Here are some of them from the poppy description. You’ll find closeups of diagnostic plant features, usually with the graphic of a penny for size comparison’s sake. And often you’ll see shots of entire plants. Each writeup also has a little rectangle with a graphic of a human standing next to the plant being described. The idea is that the box will tell you a lot of details at a glances–stuff like size, growth habit, structure of the flower, number of petals, the position of the ovary, and whether the plant is an annual or lives longer. After having stared at the graphics for a couple weeks I still find it a tad confusing, but if you’re good at decoding images instead of reading about the details, this might be just the thing for you. Another minor grouse is that typeface is almost too small for aging eyes like mine. Of course a bigger type would probably result in a larger, less field-friendly manual. But those are minor quibbles.

Back to some plant trivia: About California sea lavender, Limonium californicum, shown here getting ready to bloom, Clarke observes that “The only native California member of this genus, [it] occurs primarily along the immediate coast. It is salt-tolerant (halophytic) and excretes salt on its broad, leathery leaves.” This detail is important to me as I decide which plants to target with the leftover water I’ve gathered from showering. Instead of tossing the soapy, shampoo-spiked water, I’ve been trying to figure which plants wouldn’t mind standing in the second-hand liquids. This species seemed happy enough with the water last year, and the writeup gives me extra confidence that I’m probably not doing it any harm.

(Edit, November 20, 2014: It was pointed out to me that the plant I purchased and depicted here as L. californicum is in reality the INVASIVE L. ramosissimum ssp. provinciale. Apparently even the reputable native nurseries get things wrong every now and then. I will be replacing this plant with something more responsible.)

Life in the Santa Ana River Basin these days is as much about invasive plants as it is native species. Accordingly the book has a number of exotics mixed into the 900 species it describes.

Telling grasses apart can be one of the more difficult things to do in the field. The detailed descriptions and photos help ease that chore. Here are the illustrations for panic veldgrass, Ehrharta erecta, a really bothersome weed in many gardens, mine included.

The weed descriptions, like those for the other plants, have little trivia bits woven through them. About panic veldtgrass you learn that “Livestock find it highly palatable, especially chickens and rabbits.” That sentence might not mean a lot to you, but it explained something I’ve been noticing.

Scooter, the cat, always shows a lot of interest when I’m in the garden, and is most helpful when I’m in the middle of pulling up weeds. And of all the weeds, this is the one that the cat really goes crazy over, often nudging, clawing, fighting you to get to munch on a few blades of the stuff.

Ah, yes, it all suddenly makes sense now: “livestock,” “highly palatable.” Eureka! So to Clarke’s list of chickens and rabbits we can add another species: cats.

So yes, this is a book with lots of information about plants of the Santa Ana region. But it ended up telling me as much about what’s going on in my garden. Very cool.

landscape, places, plant profiles

21,015 tiny little plants

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I now have a new appreciation for the work of field botanists.

A couple weekends ago I had a chance to work on a rare plant survey on the slopes of Viejas Mountain in eastern San Diego County. I enjoy seeing plants out in their wild habitat and the description of the task sounded downright idyllic: You go out to trailless edges of the county, enjoy the scenery, and all the while look for rare plants.

San Diego thornmint (Photo: Janet Franklin)

The plant of special interest for this trip was San Diego thornmint, Acanthomintha ilicifolia, a plant found only in a smattering of places in California and bits of northern Baja. And the plant is even more selective than that. It only grows on clay lenses–gently or moderately sloped areas of clay soil that has washed down from nearby areas. The surrounding chaparral plants for the most part don’t care for these soil conditions, so they create openings for this rare annual to colonize.

The project was to get a population count of thornmint from areas where they’d been sighted more than a decade earlier. Comparing today’s numbers against the earlier censuses would give you an idea of how well the plant is doing in the wilds.

Me, looking for thornmint, enjoying the scenery around my feet. (Photo: Janet Franklin)

Our assignment was population 51, a cluster of adjacent stands on the western edge of Cleveland National Forest, just outside the city of Alpine. (Looking back on the suburban sprawl I thought it looked a little like the photos of Area 51 taken from Freedom Ridge.)

Most of the spread had burned in one of the recent major wildfires to go through the county and was in the state of growing back—pretty successfully, since travel got to be tough some of the day. Whenever the chaparral parted and the soil conditions looked right, you scoured the ground for thornmints, which at this point in their lifecycle were mostly 1-4 inches tall, with most of them not yet in bloom.

No thornimint at this one sub-location, but lots of Palmer's grappling hook, Harpagonella palmeri, one of the species that's commonly associated with thornmint. (Photo: Janet Franklin)

One of the three sub-populations we looked at was completely gone. Nada. Zero plants. Maybe the fire wiped them out. Maybe we weren’t observant enough, though we fine-tooth combed the hillside.

Success--thornmints! (Photo: Janet Franklin)

But the other two populations gave us an exercise in counting plants. Lots and lots of plants. Tiny, tiny little plants.

By the middle of the afternoon we had a count, 21,015 plants. It was six hours of open slopes with no shade spent in deep concentration looking for the little plants, counting all the while.

I’ll confess: We did a little estimating when the populations got really large, and so we didn’t actually physically count all 21,015 plants. But 21,015 seemed like a solid estimate.

While it’s good to know that there are more than a handful of plants left in the wild, it’s also a little unnerving to see that they have such a limited distribution, and more disturbing that one of the three populations from earlier seemed to have vanished.

Locally common, but in the grand scheme of things, awfully rare, especially with human encroachment from Area 51 next door.

Hesperoyucca whippleii, one of the stunning garden subjects shown here in the wilds, with thronmint nearby. (Photo: Janet Franklin)

San Diego thornmint probably won’t turn into one of the great garden plants for California native gardens. But along the way we saw plenty of species closely related to those used in home native landscapes: laurel sumac (Malosma laurina), ceanothus (tomentosus and foliosus), stinging lupine (Lupinus hirsutisimmus), manzanita (one of the Arctostaphylos glandulosa subspecies)…

Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum) growing on a clay lens. (Photo: Janet Franklin)

…and one of my favorite flowering natives: blue-eyed grass, growing and blooming among the tiny little thornmints.

Usually my camera is the first thing I pack for one of these outings, but somehow I forgot it at home this time. My thanks to team-leader Janet for the use of her images from the trip!