Tag Archives: native plants

some bloom day blooms from seed

May 15, 2009 James 6 Comments

Today’s Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day post features five plants I’ve raised from seed. I’d consider most of these in the “pretty easy” to “really easy” categories, both to germinate and to grow.

Three of these came up from seed that I sowed directly in the ground last October. I basically made little furrows a quarter to half an inch deep, sprinkled in some seed, and watered them in. I provided some supplemental watering the give them a head start, and then let the occasional rains take care of getting the plants established. Now that the rains are probably over for the year, I give them occasional sprinklings to keep them greener and flowering longer.

This first flower is Clarkia williamsonii, which is an annual native to inland Central California and Orange County. The Seedhunt listing described the flowers as being “gaudy.” A flower that’s gaudy? Sold!

The next images are of another clarkia, Clarkia rubicunda ssp. blasdalei, native to coastal Central California and El Dorado County. The first is a freshly opened flower, the second a flower that’s on it’s second day.

Until this morning I’d never noticed with these that the fresh flowers have the stamens all bundled up, and that they don’t extend until the flower is older, after the anthers bearing the pollen are starting to dry up. You can see the stamens as the white four-pronged appendage in the center of the second flower. It’s a clever way to prevent self-pollination and keep the gene pool diverse.

Another easy annual is baby blue eyes, Nemezia menziesii. What you see here is pretty scrappy and well could be the last flower of the season. Although this is an easy plant, I’ve decided that it’s better suited to a garden spot that might get more than bi-weekly supplemental water.

I’ve been showing lots of California poppies this spring. This will probably be the last of the garden pictures of the common orange form. The flowers this time of year are starting to get smaller as the plant’s water supplies dwindle. Also, here near the coast, the plants start to mildew heavily, leaving them crippled. (You can see some of that as the whitish background foliage.)

Better suited to coastal areas is this yellow coastal form of the species, Escholzia californica maritima. The strain I’ve got starts to flower later in the year than the typical orange form, but the plants show much better resistance to powdery mildew and will continue flowering later into the year.

Unlike the first three plants I showed, the poppies are perennial, so the same plants will continue to come back one year to the next. But one nice thing with all these species is that they’ll come back from seed as well.

Check out all the other Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day photos by checking out the listing at May Dreams Gardens.

gardening, places

interpreting history through plants

May 11, 2009 James 6 Comments

The native plant garden at San Diego’s Old Town State Historic Park occupies a gentle rise in the land on the north end of the park. The garden sits on the grounds of the Silvas-McCoy house, a modern reconstruction by the park service based on foundations excavated in 1995.

The house replicates an 1869 structure by Irish immigrant James McCoy. Previous to McCoy’s arrival the site was previously in the hands of Maria Eugenia Silvas, and the grounds also contain the foundations of two adobe structures that predate the McCoy house.

The park service, charged with interpreting the history of San Diego’s founding, decided between rebuilding the McCoy house or recreating the earlier adobes. Would they opt to tell the story of early Spanish settlement? Or that of later settlers? Or instead could they do something to interpret the area’s original inhabitants, the Kumeyaay, whose village of Koss’ai occupied the site, and whose tenure went back thousands of years? Choices like that are never without controversy, and you could make good arguments on all sides of the debate.

This was during a flurry of historic reconstruction in Old Town which turned this corner of the park into a construction zone. During the project I spotted one of the more amusing informational signs I’ve encountered, one that proclaimed a nearby patch of earth to be the “Future site of San Diego’s first city jail.” (Do you ever regret not having a camera along?)

The native plant garden, like the Silvas-McCoy house, also participates in the park’s mission to provide historic context. The selection of plants reinforces the story the garden tells.

In the days of Silvas and McCoy the San Diego River flowed in front of this site. The plants that would have been found here would have been primarily riparian species. To tell that story, you’ll see stands of mugwort, sycamore, mulefat, coast live oak and willow featured on the grounds.

In the past, the river would sometimes empty into Mission Bay to the north, or into San Diego Bay to the south. The geographical indecisiveness of a meandering river works fine for the natural world, but poorly for a culture tied to private ownership of property. The current San Diego River has been forced into an engineered channel a quarter mile to the north and is no longer able to decide on its own where it would like to go. So, in addition to telling a story about the location of the river 150 years ago, the garden–a riparian plant community stranded hundreds of feet from the river that would have originally sustained it–to me speaks to notions of ownership of space and ideas about the control of nature. It’s not just another pretty garden.

Of course, when you say “garden,” people do want to see pretty flowers. Above is chaparral mallow (Malacothamnus fasciculatus), and here’s the perky red monkey (Mimulus aurantiacus)…

…and the ever-popular California state flower (Escholzia californica) in its most recognizable color form, with wands of white sage (Salvia apaiana) in front.

And here’s a bouquet of some of what was blooming.

The garden in its current state goes back only a little more than a year, when a group of local California Native Plant Society volunteers weeded the site and planted many of the plants. The garden hosted an open house on Saturday, and visitors got a chance to tour the site and get insights from ethnobotanist Richard Bugbee about traditional Kumeyaay uses of many of the plants in the garden.

For example did you know that young flowering stems of white sage were peeled and eaten raw? This is one of the most assertively aromatic of sages, but peeling the stems purportedly takes away the oil-producing glands and gives the stems a flavor something like celery. (Maybe “tastes like celery” is the botanical equivalent of the catch-all “tastes like chicken,” but I intend to find out the next time my plants need a haircut…) Future plans for the garden include signage on traditional Kumayaay uses of the plants growing there.

That’s ethnobotanist Richard Bugbee, second from the right in this photo, along with landscape architect Kay Stewart, far right, who was heavily involved in designing the garden. Next to Richard is Peter St. Clair who, along with the original donor to the native garden project, had the vision and persistence to have the garden in the first place. Peter also organizes the volunteer work crews that help maintain and shape the garden.

At not much over a year old, this is still a young garden. There are still areas to be cleared and plantings to be finalized, but the garden has good bones and occupies a fascinating location. It’s definitely a place to watch as it matures, and they’re always on the lookout for volunteers to help the process along. Sign me up!

gardening

some garden ceanothus

May 4, 2009 James 10 Comments

On my last nursery trip I noticed a new horticultural ceanothus selection that I hadn’t encountered before. Ceanothus Tuxedo is striking because of its brown-black foliage, a leaf color I’ve never seen before on a ceanothus. In this photo you can see its large, dark foliage contrasted against the bright medium green of a more typical ceanothus.

Tuxedo arose as a mutation on a branch of Ceanothus Autumnal Blue, a hybrid of C. thyrsiflorus and C. ×delilianus (which is itself a hybrid of a hardy deciduous species with a more tender evergreen one). Autumnal Blue isn’t a plant that’s a typical constituent of California native gardens, instead being an old British hybrid that was bred for its hardiness. Also unlike its purely California brethren, it blooms in summer or fall, not in the spring.

The new Tuxedo selection is reputedly drought-tolerant. Looking at its ancestry, however, it’s clear it will require some supplemental summer water in dry climates. There’s no question that it appreciates good drainage. Mature height is listed as at least six feet high and across.

Next to Tuxedo in the nursery were a couple variegated ceanothus. C. thyrsiflorus ‘El Dorado’ features small light green/dark green leaves on a large shrub. In summer the leaves will show more contrast, with the light green turning more of a yellow color.

If you want yellow-and-green leaves in a more spreading ceanothus, there’s C. griseus horizontalis ‘Diamond Heights.’ (Sorry for the fuzzy photo…) You could think of it as a variegated version of a well known groundcover ceanothus like ‘Yankee Point.’

Both of the above could be considered low-water (not no-water) plants for a garden.

California native plant purists might think twice before planting any of these selections. They scream that they’re garden plants and not visitors from the wilds. But these ceanothus do give you more options if you’d still like your plants to have a bit of laid back California attitude to them.

The last ceanothus I want to share is a wild plant, taken about ten days ago just outside the Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve in the San Diego County foothills. Chaparral whitethorn (C. leucodermis) has got to be one of the most unique of the genus, combining fluffy, vaporous blue-tinged white flowers with a plant that has bark as white as an aspen. It’s an amazing effect.

But unfortunately the plant appears to be singularly difficult to grow in anything but the perfect garden spot. Taking up the slack is a garden-friendly hybrid, L.T. Blue (L.T. equals leucodermis x thyrsiflorus), which preserves the white bark color and blue (if not misty blue) flowers of leucodermis in combination with the much more garden-tolerant C. thyrsiflorus. Las Pilitas carries it, and this last photo is from their site.

gardening, my garden

milkvetch update

May 2, 2009 James 4 Comments

I wrote earlier about a little patch of Nuttall’s milkvetch (Astragalus nuttallii), a new California native groundcover I’m trying out. Last time, I was pretty enthusiastic. Now, after eight weeks with less than a quarter inch of natural rainfall, I’m a little less excited.

At this point, at the end of April/beginning of May, the plant continues to be interesting up close: a mix of reddening stems, small green-gray leaves and dramatic red-tinged cream-colored pods.

When the seeds have ripened inside the pods, they rattle in a really interesting way. You can see why many Astragalus are called “rattlepod”:

But the down-side about this plant, I’m finding out, is how it looks from a distance. The red stems, whitish pods and green leaves all give the impression of a brown, dying plant. Just squint while looking at the next image and you can begin to see that it’s not the most kempt looking selection for one of the first things you encounter.

This introduction might work well in an informal area, mixed in with big plants that will take up the slack when this one takes a vacation. A spot that gets occasional garden water also might keep this plant looking nicer, longer. But since I planted it at eye-level, right at the front sidewalk in a spot that gets no supplemental water all summer, I’ve decided it’s probably not the right plant for this spot.

So…I’ve cut it back pretty heavily, and it may be out of this spot if it doesn’t look a lot better quickly. That’s the fate of a lot of California natives: They look great during the cool, wet growing season, but look less wonderful during when it dries out and get hotter, which unfortunately also happens to be the season when people want to be outdoors, enjoying their gardens.

Don’t let that discourage you from planting natives, however. Some of the buckwheats I’ve planted next to the milkvetch are still green all over and are about to begin their long season of flowers and dramatic dried seed heads. And there are many other options for plants that look good throughout the year. It’s just a matter of finding the right plant for the right spot in the garden.

landscape, places

santa ysabel open space preserve

April 30, 2009 James 5 Comments

A trip to the town of Santa Ysabel in the spring is for me like stepping into a time machine in a couple of different ways. In the first most obvious sense, this little town in the foothills of San Diego County appears to be pickled in some earlier though indefinite time period. A couple buildings have painted facades straight out of 1930s Walker Evans photographs, while others look like straightforward roadside commercial architecture rescued from the 1960s.

Time travel also comes to my mind when I look at the surrounding countryside. Plants that stopped blooming a month ago in my neighborhood canyons are just coming online up here at 3000 feet. Some of this feels like February back home.

Still, even though it contains many familiar plants, this is a very different ecosystem. There are dozens of plants I’d never see back down closer to sea level, and that’s what brought me to Santa Ysabel last weekend.

The town serves as gateway to the Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve, 5025 acres of foothills and active ranch lands set near the headwaters of the San Diego River.

Botanist Jerilyn Hirshberg led the intense day of botanizing which began with the handing out of sheets of paper listing 203 plants that we stood a good chance of seeing that day.

Be prepared. If you go an an outing looking at all the plant species in an area, expect to spend a certain amount of time huddled together and bent over as you look at some of the smallest of the small plants. People typically call them “belly flowers.” But Jeri used a word that I’d never heard before (and I think was one she’d made up): “dinkophytes”–with “dinko” as in “dinky plants.”

A biologist on the trip complained several times, “That’s not a real word!” But I loved it so much that I hereby grant it official word status and encourage all of you to begin using it.

In the end we didn’t see all 203 plants on the list, but the group found some bonuses that weren’t on it. Here are just a few of them, a couple of which have made it into the garden world.

Johnny jump up, or California golden violet (Viola pedunculata). Perky name, perky plant.

Grape soda lupine (Lupinus excubitus ssp. austromontanus). Yes, it does have a distinct—but delicate—concord grape fragrance, though it’s almost insulting to call the scent ”grape soda.” (Would you describe a flower by saying that it smells like artificially rose-scented air freshener?) The shrub is a pleasant mound of silvery leaves, but the towering spikes make it truly gorgeous this time of year.

California milkweed (Asclepias californica). The clusters of vivid wine blooms are striking. What makes this milkweed really remarkable is that it’s covered with so many soft hairs that it’s hard not to touch it. Kay, the trip organizer, thought it was like handling a cloud. Good description.

This plant hosts the local population of the monarch butterfly. Before you go off and plant this milkweed in hopes of attracting them to your garden, however, it’s worth reading some advice from the Las Pilitas Nursery site: “The alkaloids associated with this milkweed and other milkweeds give the butterflies that feed on it protection. Alkaloids from the wrong milkweed (South American, Mexican, etc.) can expose the butterflies to predation. If the monarch or other butterfly has not evolved with the milkweed they may have limited tolerance for the particular alkaloid of the plant species. The California flyway runs from Baja to Canada, it does not include Mexico proper nor Central America. If you live in Chicago [which is part of the pathway of the monarchs that migrate to mainland Mexico] you can plant Mexican species (Asclepias mexicana) or Asclepias tuberosa, don’t plant our species.”

Scarlet bugler (Penstemon centranthifolius).

One of the botanical highlights centered on this little plant, the hill star (Lithophragma heterophylla), closely related to our very prolific woodland star. Though fairly common to the north, this stand of hill stars formed the only currently known population in San Diego County.

The idea of a county is entirely a human construct, but still I thought that was a pretty cool way to end the trip, seeing the only location of a plant in my local human construct.

To end this post, here are just a few more pictures of the hillsides of the preserve, studded with at least five different species and natural hybrids of oaks…

gardening, photography

picture this photo contest

April 22, 2009 James 9 Comments

Gardening Gone Wild is hosting a photo contest for the best image of native plants in a garden setting. Wander down to the links in the comments on their post to see all the excellent ways people use natives in their gardens.

It’s hard for me sit something like this out, so below are my three entries, photos taken in my garden over the last couple of months. (As usual, click to see the larger images.)

I’ve already shared the first two on these pages, so forgive me for reprising them. These are of clumps of blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum) in a totally assorted planting, mixing the natives with veggies (Red Winter red Russian kale, beets, red- and orange-stemmed chard) ornamentals (heliotrope, geum and sages) and an herb (catmint). The planting requires an average amount of watering to keep everybody happy, but it shows how food plants and natives can easily coexist with more gardenesque selections.

(“Gardenesque”–how I love that word. No, I didn’t make it up. I have Noel Kingsbury (with Piet Oudolf) to thank for using it in Designing with Plants. He blogs, too!)

The first is a closeup of the native, the second shows the same bed three weeks later, after the geum started to flower.

The third photo pictures a foundation planting featuring one of the California native rushes, Juncus patens. I have this thing for spikey, architectural plants, and this one fulfills my needs nicely. Most rushes are creatures of wet zones. However, J. patens is one of the most drought-tolerant. These plants are located in the drip line for water off the roof, and they can make it through the summer with minimal added irrigation.

gardening, my garden, plant profiles

western dichondra

April 10, 2009 James 4 Comments

My parents knew a good deal when they saw one. The house they purchased in the Southern California ‘burbs had the required number of bedrooms, fruit trees in the back, a lawn for the kids to play on, and was located half-way between their jobs. The front yards in the neighborhood were well maintained but not splashy.

Some of the houses on the other side of the nearby main boulevard, however, had immaculate high-maintenance gardens–and probably had gardeners to go with them. One of the groundcover choices that some of those houses sported was a dark green dichondra lawn, smooth and uniform as the felt on a pool table. These were lawns that didn’t tolerate much foot traffic, required lots of weeding, heavy summer water and were meant mainly for show. Compared to our lumpy, spiky lawn, these dichondra tableaux seemed like the stuff that dreams are made of. (We never would have considered that dichondra is considered a weed in many parts of the country.)

Jump ahead lots and lots of years to my current house. Every now and then in one of the raised beds I’d see a plant volunteer underneath some shrubs or around some bulbs. It sure looked like dichondra, but for a long time I thought I wasn’t IDing the plant correctly.

As it turns out the plant really is a dichondra, and it’s actually one of the uncommon native plants found in coastal sage scrub, chaparral and oak woodland habitats. The local species, Dichondra occidentalis, is distinct from the classic lawn plant–one of the subtle distinguishing characteristics being the silver or brown hairs on the stems. But it’s still a dichondra, and I thought its was pretty cool that one of the plants that I’d fetishized growing up somehow managed to find me as an adult.

The dichondra has self-sowed itself into a couple spots around the house. It now forms a welcome groundcover in this raised planter, where a few months ago the narcissus were breaking through the soil…

…and this is today, with white Chinese ground orchids, Bletilla striata alba, blooming away in their bed of soft dichondra.

If you don’t want to wait for the plant to show up on its own, several California native plant suppliers offer Dichondra occidentalis, though it’s definitely one of the less popular items. The plant seems best for me in part-shade. It can take the summer off if you don’t water it, but bi-weekly sprinklings have kept it around year-round for me, though in summer it’s a little sparse. But as much as I hate to admit it, I also have a hard time looking glamorous all the time, so I’m willing to give this plant a break…

gardening, my garden

live, from california…

March 27, 2009 James 5 Comments

A plant’s name can often help give you a sense of place as to where the plant originated. I’ve been noticing recently that a lot of plants in the garden have species names that are either “californica” or “californicus.” I guess you can’t get much more California than that.

First is our ever-popular state flower, the California poppy, Escholzia californica. Most of you are familiar with this form, the bright orange one that comes in California wildflower mixes. I planted some seed a decade ago, and these come back every year, some where they did the previous year, some a few feet away. But for me they’re not the wandering world traveler that they are for some people. (They’ve naturalized in parts of Chile and are on the pest (but not invasive) species list for Tennessee.)

This year I’m also growing from seed the form of the species that you actually find in this part of the state, Escholzia californica maritima. The flowers are about a third of the size of the orange version, and are gold shading to a yellow-orange. My pampered plants are taking their time flowering, so these are images of plants in the winds, on the bluffs overlooking the ocean south of Del Mar. Once these start blooming, I’ll probably cut back the orange ones so the two strains don’t hybridize.

And here’s the classic orange poppy in the garden growing in the middle of a prostrate form of California sagebrush, Artemisia californica ‘Canyon Gray.’ While most of the forms of sagebrush are, well, brushy and upright, this selection from the Channel Islands off the coast of Ventura grows near the ground and sprawls a bit. The plant can get a little leggy in the middle, so a well-placed volunteer poppy seedling can be the best way to conceal that fact.

I wrote last year about this wild ranunculus, Ranunculus californicus, or California buttercup. It disappears not long after flowering, but it’s a nice presence during early spring.

The coast sunflower, Encelia californica, continues the yellow-to-orange theme. My plants were planted only recently and aren’t blooming yet. This is a stand of it at Torrey Pines Preserve this past Monday, doing just fine with natural rainfall. (It won’t be quite so ornamental once the moisture gives out, however.)

The last one I’ll share today has got to be one of the more spectacular Californians, the bush anenome, Carpenteria californica. The flowers began to open just this week. This species hails from the Sierra foothills where it can become quite the large shrub. My plant has tripled in size in one year, though it’s still not more than three feet tall. It can triple in size again, and then I’m getting the pruning shears. Pretty flowers, though, no?

gardening, plant profiles

do i dare plant this?

March 24, 2009 James 11 Comments

Do any of you know how this plant would do in a garden setting? It’s thick-leaved yerba santa (Eriodictyon crassifolium) one of our local native species in the phacelia family.

I’ve seen it around in the wild areas of town for a while, and I’ve always liked its odd, stemmy growth habit, with a tuft of serrated gray-green leaves on the ends of straight, floppy or contorted branches. Here’s how it looks in one setting at Torrey Pines State Preserve. You can see all the ways the branches grow, including this big circular loop-de-loop.

Right now yerba santas all around town are in full bloom, bearing these delicate lavender-colored tubular blooms at the ends of their stems. I’m in love.

In most locations I’ve seen the plant growing four to six feet tall, and mounding six to eight feet in width. What I’ve heard some of the native plant people say about how it grows in the wilds–that it spreads widely via underground runners to develop big colonies–is the part that scares me. I think I’d like the effect of its cool stems growing up and through some low groundcovers, but I don’t want it to be the total monster, either.

It’s a plant that makes a statement, but I don’t want the statement to be that I was gullible enough to plant a totally rank plant into the garden!

gardening, places

a neighborhood native garden

March 16, 2009 James 4 Comments

Saturday I had the opportunity to take a short hike with some of the local native plant society folks through Manzanita Canyon, one of the small neighborhood canyons in San Diego that break up the urban development on the mesa tops. One of the communities that surrounds it, Azalea Park, has been cleaning up the canyon and the neighborhood. One of their projects is been to transform a vacant canyon lot into a pocket park devoted to native plants.

The sign announcing Parque Linda is almost as big as the little park itself, and is flanked by a sturdy plant of bladderpod (Isomeris arborea, aka Cleome arborea) a plant that’s floating to the top of my list of favorite natives.Visually, it’s a pleasant, low shrub, with yellow flowers several months of the year. The growth habit is open enough that you can see some of the interesting branch structure, so the plant isn’t just a yellow gumdrop.

Judging from the number of insects visiting it, the plant also appears to be a big favorite of the local animal community.

The garden was organized by adults, but many of the local children participated in its creation. I was particularly struck by the little clay signs that were used to identify many of the plants. The adults identified the plants they wanted to label, but the kids made the signs.

The park gathers together a number of plants that can survive on whatever rainfall comes their way. But being a garden and not a revegetation project, Parque Linda will require the ongoing support of the community to maintain it. The fact that the little garden exists at all–not to mention that people will be committing its upkeep–speaks to the fact that this is a neighborhood that cares about its well being, a place where people’s interests don’t stop at their property lines.

We need more places like it.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]