Tag Archives: native plants

a visit to recon native plants

November 27, 2009 James 3 Comments

Weekend before last my native plant society organized a little propagation workshop that was hosted by Recon Native Plants. One of the sessions focused on growing plants from seed, another on propagating from cuttings. I’ve done a bit of both, though my success with seeds definitely outshines any luck with growing anything from cuttings. My main take-away for the cuttings session was to try to take the cuttings early in the morning, when the plants are least dried out. I’ll be giving that a try and sharing whatever successes or failures that that leads to.

My favorite part of the morning was a chance to tour the nursery and see a large wholesale operation dedicated to propagating California and Southwestern natives. In my little backyard-garden world I’m used to seeing a few plants in pots sitting around, waiting to be planted. To visit such a big facility is to see the world in a different way. Here’s an artfully arranged mountain of gallon pots filled with soil mix being planted with little artemesias. I’ll never complain again about having to pot up a half dozen transplants. Continue reading a visit to recon native plants →

gardening, my garden

pining for the fjords

November 17, 2009 James 4 Comments

Dead plants? Or are these just resting, pining for the fjords?

I suffer from that mix of laziness, lack of time and unrealistic expectations that will let me leave a dead plant in the ground longer than it probably should stay in a home garden that is trying to look presentable to the neighbors. Sometimes I’ll even water a dead plant, knowing I’m wasting my water, but secretly hoping that there might just be the least chance the plant isn’t really gone.

A few new plants in the garden don’t survive the initial transplant. I still find myself underestimating the water needs of a new plant. Just because it’s “drought-tolerant” doesn’t mean it will take to its new dry home in the garden without enough water to get a proper root system established outside the confines of the little nursery containers. The plants above, two of the five deerweeds I planted this year, probably didn’t make it for that reason. It probably didn’t help that the smaller of the two plants was set into a bed where nearby plants had established a root system already and would likely steal away any water I gave the new plant. This picture shows some of the competing roots.

Other plants just seem to…die. Here’s an ex-monkey flower to the left. Maybe it was lack of water in its second year. Maybe it didn’t like its spot. And the plant to the right is my Guatamalan blue, the ivy-leaved sage, Salvia cacaliaefolia. No mystery with this one. It was getting way too big, and I pruned it ridiculously hard in late July or August. Killed it. There was a bit of green left as recently as a month ago, and this plant being a sage probably would have rooted if I’d stuck one of the green bits in some cutting mix. But I dozed. Dead plant.

But every now and then something like this happens. I’d planted this bladderpod (Isomeris arborea) in the late winter and kept it watered. It seemed to be hanging on okay but wasn’t a fast grower. Then a colony of some insects I’d never seen before descended overnight and seemed to be reproducing a new generation. In the process they stripped most of its leaves. The plant quickly dropped what few leaves were left and I wrote it off as dead. In a weird way I thought of its demise as a success story: The native plant provided food and shelter for one of the less usual visitors to the garden. Only in the course of things I thought the plant had perished. Bummer.

But here it is three months later, leafed out, waiting for the rains to come. With success stories like this I’m reluctant to give up on the plants in the other photos, but I think their time has come.

gardening, landscape, my garden

looking like spring again

November 3, 2009 James 4 Comments

I was confused the other day. Walking by the young plum tree, I noticed this. Flowers? In November? Apparently the plum was confused too.

After the long summer doldrums a lot in the garden is finally showing signs of waking up from its long nap. Some plants are showing new growth, others are blooming–even blooming when you don’t expect them to.

These paperwhite narcissus are a reliable indicator of the cooling days and nights ahead.

Protea ‘Pink Ice’ coexists with the most xeric plants in the garden and stays a resilient green all year. Beginning in the fall this big shrub begins its flowers. This will go on all winter and into the spring.

Salvia clevelandii‘s main flowering happens in the spring. But given the right conditions–a little supplemental water doesn’t seem to hurt–it can throw a few more flowers in the fall.

Ditto for Salvia spathacea. Sometimes a lot is made of the repeat-flowering abilities of some of the natives. With these two, the spring flowerings are always way more stunning, and you’ll never confuse spring for fall. But as reminders of the late winter and spring flowers ahead, they’re terrific.

Another seasonally confused plant is this groundcover ceanothus. I’m only slowly now coming around to this genus. Groundcover versions like you see in the Burger King parking lot (think C. griseus ‘Yankee Point’) were all I saw for decades, but I’ve been trying to pay more attention to what other ceanothus have to offer. This one, unfortunately, is one of the Burger King-type varieties: low, flat, green all year on a low-to-moderate amount of water. It’s so inert and emphatically green it reminds me of plastic. I may never come to love this type, but fortunately there are other plants in the genus that do very different things.

My campus is incorporating more natives into the landscaping, and all these photos of natives, from the salvias, down, come from an afternoon walk yesterday afternoon. Here a young plant of one of the dendromecons (either D. rigida or D. harfordii) provides an airy cloud of yellow.

…and nearby one of the heucheras celebrates its spot in half-sun with occasional irrigation.

A few flowers, for sure. But it’s not really spring. We’ll need the rains to begin for that to happen.

gardening, my garden

in with the new

October 20, 2009 James 6 Comments

Sunday was a day of cleaning up the garden to make room for a few new plants. The preferred order of doing things probably would have been to clean up the space and then go shopping, but the big fall plant sale of the San Diego chapter of the California Native Plant Society takes place on one day only, and the Saturday before was the day.

I arrived at the sale with a short shopping list that was arranged alphabetically. The first plants I saw were the two last gallons they had of the first plant on my list, prostrate chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum ‘Nicolas’). I grabbed the gallons and started down my list. I wasn’t looking forward to doing the rest of my shopping weighed down by twenty pounds of native shrubbery, but there’s nothing like a little physical discomfort to keep you on budget.

The chamise that you usually find in the chaparral is a striking, large shrub with dramatic branch structure. This selection, a form from San Nicolas Island, matures to an open, graceful groundcover, several feet across. When it’s young, like here, it’s easy to mistake it for trailing rosemary.

Chamise has a reputation for being a poor choice for fire-prone locations. Even die hard native plant people who live in wild areas will often actively remove what any plants they find near their home. A conversation I had with one of the experienced local CNPS chapter members made me wonder if its reputation is ill-deserved. His contention was that the plant burns no more intensely that many other natives, and that he’d witnessed a burn line where half of a chamise had burned, while the other half of the plant looked green and healthy. He held that it was yet another case of local fire departments waging war on perfectly good native plants. My plants were going next to a concrete sidewalk along the street, so fire safety wasn’t on my mind. Even if flammable, a low groundcover poses fewer hazards than a big burning bush.

As I continued shopping I ran into one of my coworkers who with the help of his wife was hefting a two-inch pot of the rare San Diego bur-ragweed, Ambrosia chenopodiifolia. The plant can make an attractive little lump, and I was tempted briefly by its rare status. But this species, along with other ragweeds, is considered a severe allergen at PollenLibrary.com, and I have a hard enough time surviving the spring without severe allergens immediately outside.

By the time I checked out I had ten plants, about thirty to forty pounds worth, including a gallon plant of Garrya elliptica and some itty bitty pots of deerweed (Lotus scoparius), yerba buena (Satureja douglasii) and California aster (Corethrogyne filaginifolia, aka Lessingia filanginiflora). And it was at this point I ran into fellow local blogger George from Groksurf’s San Diego. He had a slope, and was thinking about some manzanitas for a slope, some for groundcover, others for larger, contrasting shapes. It had been years since I’d seen him last, so it was a nice chance to touch base and talk plants and water use in the landscape. But I felt bad when I had to excuse myself and get what was feeling like 300 pounds of plants to the car and get back home to finish Saturday’s house projects.

The rest of Saturday would be lots of unpleasant house projects. But I knew that much of Sunday I’d finally be able to get back into the garden. It had been too long.

gardening, my garden

seeds for the fall planting season

October 12, 2009 James 5 Comments

The current house project reached a milestone, with us getting reaching the waterproof house wrap stage, ready for the siding. What this really means is that it’s no longer a race against the start of the fall rains to get this far. I can slow down a bit and get back to some things in the garden.

The cool, shortening work days signal that the fall planting season is approaching. As in the past I have new plants I’d like to try growing from seed. Consulting the really handy Seed Propagation of Native California Plants by Dara E. Emery, I see that the author recommends planting annuals by the end of October, and sowing lupines by October 15. So it’s really time to get myself in gear.

I’ve already received my order from Theodore Payne Foundation, mostly annuals, most of them plants that I looked at during the winter and spring blooming season and decided to try. I saw this plant combination at the Tree of Life Nursery on my last visit. I liked how the plants looked together, and added two of the three plants to my order: the gorgeous deep purple Parry’s phacelia, Phacelia parryi, and the perky yellow desert marigold, Baileya multiradiata. Another plant I scoped out on my spring treks was the stinging lupine, Lupinus hirsutissimus, and the Payne Foundation catalog had it. The pink, purple and yellow flowers of the three species should play well together. It won’t be anything too subtle, but what do you want out of springtime flowers?

Another interesting catalog, one that I’m looking at is Ginny Hunt’s Seedhunt. She’s got over forty sages from around the world, a dozen unusual restios from South Africa, and a nice representation of California natives. The latter include an attractive cream variant on the normally orange rancher’s fiddleneck, Amsinckia vernicosa var. furcata ‘Griswold Hills,’ along with some of the neat tarweeds, hemizonia, seven different clarkias, the less common Salvia carduacea, as well as the stinging lupine and Parry’s phacelia that I’ve already got.

Where many catalogs offer species and hybrid populations where the population’s traits have been fixed through several generations of selfing and sibling crosses, Seedhunt’s listing includes seed mixes of what appear to be open-pollinated agastaches and dahlias. If you have a sense of adventure mixes like this are a brave way to go. Because the exact pollen parents aren’t known, the plants that you get will show a certain amount of variation. The downside is that the plant size, exact flower color and maybe their size and shape your plants might not fit neatly with their neighbors in a manicured border. The fun part about this is that you’ll get a plant that’s not exactly like someone else’s. If you like adventure, this might be just the thing.

So this next week I hope to get at least some these seeds in pots or in the ground. It’ll be a great break from all the house projects. And Saturday the San Diego chapter of the California Native Plant Society is having their big plant sale of the year at Balboa Park. I’m not sure I’ll have time to plant a couple dozen new plants, but I’ll plan on checking things out and seeing what calls my name. There’s always time to look at plants.

my garden, plant profiles

covering ground: carmel aster

August 6, 2009 James 7 Comments

When you see a plant listed as a “groundcover” you can expect practically anything, from something that will cling low to the earth and spread like spilled paint, to what’s really a sprawling shrubby thing that will form a loose mound of branches that’s several feet tall at the center. Closer to the first category is this plant that began blooming for me during the final days of July.

The plant goes by a number of common names, among them, Carmel aster, California aster, beach aster, and branching beach aster. And the number of Latin names attached to the plant doesn’t to much to simplify identifying it: Lessingia filanginifolia v. californica, Lessingia californica, Corethrogyne leucophylla, Corethrogyne filanginifolia. The last name, Corethrogyne filanginifolia, seems to be the one that’s going to stick for a while, so that’s the one I’ll be trying to train myself to use.

Plant this where you’d like a white-leaved low groundcover. It blooms from midsummer into the fall with small, pale lavender flowers with perky yellow centers. The plant will go several months without supplemental watering, but will look better with an occasional sip of water (about once per month during the summer here near the coast).

As a groundcover the foliage on Carmel aster can be a little on the sparse side, especially when grown lean and dry, as you see here. But I use the bare spots as a place to sow some late winter-flowering wildflower seeds. Plants of California poppies look great peeking through the low mat of white leaves, for instance. By this time of year, however, weeds aren’t a problem, so the occasional bare patches aren’t a weed magnet like they might be during the winter.

Last fall I planted three different groundcovers to trial. This is the one that I’ll be keeping and planting more of.

gardening, landscape design, my garden

background check

July 10, 2009 James 10 Comments

My last post has me thinking more about the backgrounds that plants grow against.

I was getting excited that the San Miguel Island buckwheats(Eriogonum grande var. rubescens) that I’d grown from seed were coming in to bloom. But standing back from them, I realized that the place where I’d transplanted them–a raised bed with a red brick retaining wall behind it–might not have been the best place for the plants.

The dusky pink flowers blend so well with the reddish colors of the brick that they practically vanish. And the busy gridded background of the brick and weeping mortar draws so much attention that anything in front of the wall just gets ignored.

What would it look like against a more neutral backbround? I wondered. And so I went to grab a piece of white matboard and positioned it behind the plants.

Wow. Big difference. It’s suddenly easier to make out the shapes of the umbels of flowers, and you can begin to appreciate the subtle color of the flowers.

Up close, the white background almost made the plant look like a botanical illustration.

The low contrast against the background didn’t prevent this bug from finding the buckwheat. Clearly, a bug’s eyes and brain don’t work the same way our human ones do.

Once these plants grow in more and achieve some more height they should stand a better chance of holding their own against the background of busy brickwork. But the plants will never “pop” against the wall in the same way they’d show against a simpler, more neutral background. So, in the “note to self” category, I’ll be paying more attention to contrasts between the plant and the hardscape around it.

gardening, plant profiles

our answer to prairie smoke

June 17, 2009 James 5 Comments

A plant that was a big hit with many of the bloggers who made it to Chicago for the recent Garden Bloggers Spring Fling was prairie smoke, Geum trifolium. I didn’t make it to Chicago, and I’ve never seen prairie smoke in person. But it looked like I’d have been as struck with it as all the bloggers who witnessed its terrific puffball seedheads in real life.

Photo to the right: Gary A. Monroe, US Forest Service [ source ]

The seedhead to the left, however similar it might appear, is not prairie smoke. Instead, it’s Apache plume, Fallugia paradoxa, the Southwest’s alternative to the Midwest’s puffball.

Flowers and seedpods are great ways to tell which plants are related. Just looking at the seeds you could probably guess that the two plants are related, with both of them belonging to the rose family. You can see the rose resemblance even more in the flowers in the following photo.

I photographed these ten days ago in the parking lot of Las Pilitas Nursery, where they were near their peak. If I had more space I might have brought some of these home with me…

The shrubs grow about four feet tall and a little wider, with whitish stems and narrow rosemary-like leaves. The Jepson Horticultural database states that Fallugia paradoxa “grows especially well in zones 14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23 and also in zones 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, and 24.” No plant is perfect, unfortunately. The Native Plant Database of the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center gives you a heads-up: “It is good for erosion control because of drought-tolerance and aggressive seeding. It can, however, become too aggressive in optimum conditions.”

All those cool seeds must go somewhere.

gardening, landscape

words are important

June 1, 2009 James 6 Comments

One night a week and a half ago, when much of the world was watching the final “American Idol” showdown between Adam Lambert and Kris Allen or viewing the finale of “Dancing with the Stars,” almost a hundred of us were at the local native plant society meeting to hear Kristie Orosco. Environmental Director for the San Pasqual Band of Kumeyaay Indians, ethnobotanist, and member of the Native American Environmental Protection Coalition, our speaker gave us a quick introduction to how some of the local Native Americans traditionally used plants in their environment as food.

She was one of those rare communicators, a person who with a very few words can take you into a different way of thinking and seeing the world. One thing she said, in particular, has stuck with me. Instead of stating that a plant blooms, she used the phrase that a plant “gives it flowers.” What a gorgeous way to phrase it: Instead of a plant being an inert blooming machine that you pick up for a few bucks at the nursery and toss when it turns ugly, it was a living entity that gives of itself by producing flowers.

How you say something is as important as what you say, and her words opened up a world to me where everything in nature is a gift. Although I’ve developed a cynical side to my personality, I’ve tried to counter it by keeping alive a part of me that continues to stay amazed at the things of the natural world and almost willfully naive about many of the ways of humankind. It’s that second side of me that’s certain that the earth would be a lot better off than it is if we all spoke and viewed the landscape the way Kristie Orosco did.

You often read that the plants you encounter in the wilds have traditional uses, but it’s not until you’ve had direct experience with the uses that the connection really clicks. To cement that connection, our speaker brought foods for all of us to try, enough to cover several large tables.

On the menu:

Shaawii, or acorn pudding (pink, looks like spam but it’s actually edible–and subtly tasty)

Pit-roasted agave root (something like a chewy, smoky vegan beef jerky–my favorite of the night)

Limeade with seeds of chia (Salvia columbariae)

“Medicine tea” (steeped dried flowers from Mexican elderberry, Sambucus mexicanus, very delicately flavored, used for a number of purposes, including breaking a fever)

Yucca root (starchy, but different from potatoes in flavor)

Yucca flowers, boiled (the blooms of Hesperoyucca whipplei, which is finishing up giving its flowers in many of our hillsides around town; very delicate flavor with a tiny nip of bitterness, brussels sprouts for people who don’t like brussels sprouts, or a new food for people who love artichoke hearts)

Yucca flowers, raw (as above, only crunchier, a little more bitter)

I’ve always admired plants of Hesperoyucca whipplei from a distance–The ends of its leaves end in sharp points that you have to show immense respect. Now that I’ve tasted its root and sampled its flowers and heard Kristie Orozco speak about the plant, my aesthetic appreciation of it has deepened into something else much richer.

gardening, my garden

morning drizzle

May 31, 2009 James 6 Comments

This morning the runners in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon are taking to the streets down the hill from me. It’s overcast and cool enough, for sure. But somehow I’m not feeling motivated to run 26 miles…

The locals have a name for these two months when the morning cloud cover blots out the sun: May gray and June gloom. It makes for a slow easing into summer, good running weather, and prolongs the season when you can hope to put plants in the ground and not have to worry too much about keeping them watered.

Yesterday was extra-cool, and the thick marine layer of clouds made for a heavy drizzle most of the day. For me the sight of raindrops on plants is rare enough that I grabbed the camera.

Are photos of raindrops and dewdrops on plants and flowers cliches? Dunno. Even if they are, I think there’s something so satisfying about them that people need to keep taking them.

Below are all the photos I took in smaller gallery format. Going left to right: images 1-4, flowers of sacred datura, Datura wrightii; 5-6, leaves on tower of jewels, Echium wildpretii; 7, spiderweb on California fuchsia, Epilobium canum ‘Catalina’; 8, flowers of deerweed, Lotus scoparius.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]

Tag Archives: native plants

a visit to recon native plants

pining for the fjords

looking like spring again

in with the new

seeds for the fall planting season

covering ground: carmel aster

background check

our answer to prairie smoke

words are important

morning drizzle

an artist loosed in a garden