[ Lost in the Landscape ]

garden gates

Last fall I was at the local metal sup­ply shop where they were hav­ing a spe­cial on sheets of stamped stain­less steel. About that time I was think­ing of rebuild­ing the gates to the back yard. The stain­less sheets were 4x4 feet, nar­rower than the open­ing that need to be gated. But after a lit­tle work with pen­cil and paper I came up with these two designs.

What you see are the back sides, the sides that have a lit­tle more detail­ing, and the sides that I like the most. On the sec­ond gate I spaced and cut the cen­ter sup­port too short so that I had to fill in with another piece of wood. I wound up lik­ing the repaired ver­sion than the orig­i­nal draw­ing. With con­struc­tion and with pho­tog­ra­phy, I like to plan a bit ahead of time. But acci­dents will hap­pen, and they often make the out­come a lot more interesting.

Basic mate­ri­als: ribbed stain­less steel, ipe hard­wood trim, painted pressure-treated wood structure.

April 14 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: gates • ipe • projects • stainless steel | No Comments »

how to scare adults and small children

A box showed up last week. Inside was a plant I’d bid on on eBay, Dar­ling­to­nia cal­i­for­nica, the cobra lily, a plant for the new bog gar­den. It was a nice lit­tle divi­sion, packed in sphag­num and still wet from the bog gar­den it had just left. I showed it to John.

“It’s enought to give me night­mares,” he said, shud­der­ing a little.

I have this scare of snakes, a fear instilled in me by a nanny who took me to the Ran­goon zoo and pointed out the the banded kraits. “See that one? It can kill you with one lit­tle bite. And that one,” she said, point­ing out the Burmese python. Well, she didn’t need to say any­thing. Multi-feet long, and as fat as I was, there was no ques­tion I wouldn’t want to feel its lov­ing embrace.

Some peo­ple want gar­dens that are pretty and make them feel good. But some­how I end up get­ting this plant that has more than a pass­ing resem­blance to my child­hood fears. Maybe it’s about time I faced them head-on. And as scary as this plant is, I think it’s also fairly amazing-looking. And for the first time, I have this com­pul­sion to give this plant a nick­name, some­thing like…Audrey…

April 13 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: bog garden • cobra lily • Darlingtonia californica • snakes | 3 Comments »

shameless self-promotion

If you’re in San Diego, I invite you to attend The Photographer’s Eye: A Way of See­ing, one of the cur­rent shows at the Museum of Pho­to­graphic Arts. It’s got one of my works from my Going series as part of it. The show closes April 20.

James SOE NYUN: Steer­ing wheel, Mon­u­ment Val­ley (from the Going series).

Also, a few posts back I men­tioned that I’d put up the link to the Top 50 Pho­tog­ra­phers at Portland’s Crit­i­cal Mass, where one of my port­fo­lios is fea­tured. The link is now active. Take a look!

April 13 2008 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: exhibitions • James SOE NYUN | No Comments »

bad day for ferns

After three weeks of days in the 60s the last two have pushed into the 80s. It’s the kind of intensely sunny spring weather that makes peo­ple pro­duc­tive or deliri­ous. Next door they’re play­ing bas­ket­ball and down­ing beers, and here at home John and I have been get­ting a final coat of paint on some steel stairs to the roof deck that had started to fade and show some rust spots. For us, the beers and mar­gar­i­tas will flow later this after­noon, when we go over to Mason’s and Carlos’s for dinner.

What is a great day for humans hasn’t been so kind on the Aus­tralian tree fern, Cyathea cooperi that we put in the ground last fall. Gen­eral plant­ing guide­lines for them say to give them semi-shade, except near the coast, where they can tol­er­ate full sun. Three weeks ago we had a week­end like this one, sud­denly sunny and hot after a long period of cool weather. The plant wasn’t used to the heat, and the last set of fronds sud­denly browned.

For­tu­nately the fern was pro­duc­ing a more fronds at the time, and they since unfurled into a gor­geous new set. Hope­fully that hot weather pre­pared the plant for more sun and heat, and that the new set of fronds doesn’t dry up like the last ones did. We should find out in a few days.

Still, in the end, I won’t worry too much. This is about as hot as it ever gets at the coastal edge of town. The plant is get­ting estab­lished, and it’s fully capa­ble to pro­duce more fronds just in time for the cool, over­cast months ahead, months with con­di­tions that the locals have dubbed “May gray” and “June gloom.” Now that the sun’s out, though, it’s time to work on my tan…

April 12 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles • rambles | Tags: Australian tree ferns • ferns • hot weather | No Comments »

online plant databases compared: PlantFiles vs. Hortiplex

Imag­ine open­ing your mail­box and get­ting one of those seed cat­a­logs with no pic­tures and names you’ve never heard of before–something like the J.L. Hud­son, Seeds­man list­ings, for instance, which just hit my house a cou­ple days ago. With a lit­tle work you can find out at least some­thing about almost any plant you’re inter­ested in on the web. Often the results from a gen­eral search engine query are a mess to sort through, and I wanted to see if I could find out infor­ma­tion on gen­eral plants by test­ing out spe­cific data­bases that would have pre­dictable inter­faces and results.

I’ll look at more gen­eral resources like Wikipedia and the USDA’s Plants Data­base in the future, but for this lit­tle study I nar­rowed the data­bases to those avail­able at two of the big gar­den sites, the Plant­Files at Dave’s Gar­den and Hor­ti­plex at Gar­den­Web. Both Dave’s Gar­den and Gar­den­Web offer mem­ber­ships that give you var­i­ous priv­i­leges, though Dave’s Gar­den charges for their pre­mium ser­vices. Both sites let you look for infor­ma­tion in addi­tion to just plants, but to sim­plify this study I’ve lim­ited my scope to search­ing the plant databases.

As of last Fri­day, the press kit for Plant­Files had this background:

The Plant­Files is the world’s largest collaboratively-developed data­base of plants, cre­ated by real gar­den­ers from around the world. It is tar­geted toward seri­ous gar­den­ers and pro­fes­sion­als, but is easy enough for any­one to use. Cur­rently 162,130 plants are fea­tured along with images and notes; more are added each day. Sub­mis­sions are sub­ject to peer-review, with errors cor­rected by a team of edi­tors. Plant­Files is the fastest-growing fea­ture of DG, and is respon­si­ble for attract­ing more than half of all new subscribers.

On the same day the Hor­ti­plex page said it con­tains “101,133 records, 78,477 links, 50,744 taxa, 50,389 cul­ti­vars, 14,409 images/image links, and 1,651 ven­dor links.”

Side-by-side com­par­i­son: On one day (April 4, 2008) I looked up a col­lec­tion of plants in both data­bases, one data­base imme­di­ately after the other. I selected gen­eral plant names, names of spe­cific vari­eties, and nick­names for plants. My sam­ple was pretty small–16 queries in all–but I think the results give a good sense for what the data­bases offer. The results of what I found are listed in the table below.

Enter­ing queries: The search inter­faces behave a lit­tle dif­fer­ently. Plant­Files auto­mat­i­cally turns queries of more than word into key­words booleaned together with an “or” oper­a­tor. If you don’t want that to hap­pen, you can do an exact text search by plac­ing the words together within quote marks. That’s sim­i­lar to how Google and prob­a­bly most other search engines oper­ate, so if you’ve mas­tered that, you can search Plant­Files in the same way. All the multi-word searches in the table below for Plant­Files were entered in quotes except where noted.

Hor­ti­plex behaves dif­fer­ently. It auto­mat­i­cally assumes right-hand trun­ca­tion, so that a search for some­thing like “kale” (which I used below) will pull up var­i­ous kale plants, but it also will retrieve Heme­ro­cal­lis ‘Kalei­do­ma­nia’ because “kale” is how the word “Kalei­do­ma­nia” begins. I couldn’t find a way to defeat that “fea­ture,” either by using quotes alone, adding a space to the end of “kale,” or by adding a space and wrap­ping the whole thing between quotes. Maybe there’s a way but I couldn’t find it, and I couldn’t find any doc­u­men­ta­tion on how to search. This fea­ture isn’t a prob­lem all the time, but I’ve noted some of the gross results below.

What did I think? As you can see Plant­Files at Dave’s Gar­den pulled up the most results most of the time. If you’re look­ing for a spe­cific cul­ti­vated vari­ety, it’s the most likely to have what you’re look­ing for. I did notice that Hor­ti­plex does have a pretty decent sam­pling of rose vari­eties, though it didn’t find the vari­ety of let­tuce I was inter­ested in. Still, there are sure to be times you don’t want to sort through 244 dif­fer­ent petu­nia entries for gen­eral infor­ma­tion. The lack of plant name author­ity con­trol at both sites, at least for com­mon names, can cause spotty, incom­plete results of the sort you can see in the “lemon­grass” exam­ple above, where “lemond­grass” and “lemon grass” were con­sid­ered dif­fer­ent things. Some sort of fuzzy “did you mean instead?” search­ing and retrieval would be nice, but these are sites with­out the resources of Google.

The dis­plays in Plant­Files were fairly ran­dom, and those big sets of results some­times took a long time to make sense of. Multi-word searches seemed to gen­er­ally clus­ter at the top the results of your query in some sort of rel­e­vance order. Hor­ti­plex offers a much more ratio­nal dis­play of the results, list­ing the best matches at the top, and orga­niz­ing things by genus, then species, then vari­ety. Fam­i­lies, gen­era, species (includ­ing sub­species and vari­eties), grexes/groups, and cul­ti­vars are all dis­played in dif­fer­ent col­ors, so it’s easy to tell them apart.

Both sites offer ways for users to enter new plants, though Hortiplex’s method seemed less ele­gant. There’s a basic review of pro­pos­als for new plants before they go up on both sites. Both sites offer some basic sci­en­tific clas­si­fi­ca­tion infor­ma­tion that seemed pretty reli­able, how­ever there isn’t much of it–mainly infor­ma­tion like fam­ily, genus, and species. Beyond the infor­ma­tion on clas­si­fi­ca­tion, Plant­Files offers some basic generic cul­tural infor­ma­tion along the lines of plant size, har­di­ness, soil needs and prop­a­ga­tion meth­ods. Unfor­tu­nately many of the sup­posed hits on Hor­ti­plex are just links out to other sites, and I found that some of the links don’t go anywhere.

Once a plant is in the data­base, both sites offer ways for users to con­tribute infor­ma­tion and pho­tos. To see the images or com­ments required scrolling down in Plant­Files or click­ing on a link in Hor­ti­plex. I pre­ferred the scrolling method, though Plant­Files requires an addi­tional click when there are more than seven images. Both sites have knowl­edge­able users, so you’re likely to find good infor­ma­tion about at least some of the plants.

In the aes­thet­ics depart­ment, I’d say that both sites are…functional. You go to the sites for the infor­ma­tion, not for ideas on how to make you web page look hip.

At some point in the future I’ll take a look at some broad ency­clo­pe­dias and at more spe­cial­ized data­bases. I know that there’s a rich com­post heap of infor­ma­tion out there!

Just for fun, you can try out your own search com­par­isons using the lit­tle search forms below, cour­tesy of some basic HTML code that’s offered at each site.

April 11 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: comparisons • Dave's Garden • GardenWeb • Hortiplex • plant databases • PlantFiles | No Comments »

“away from the soft pornography of the flower”">“away from the soft pornography of the flower”

The quote in the title is from a state­ment by Charles Wald­heim about the work of land­scape designer Piet Oudolf in a Jan­u­ary 31 arti­cle in the New York Times, “A land­scape in win­ter, dying hero­ically.” (I ran across this in a post to Alexan­der Trevi’s inter­est­ing Pruned blog.)

Pho­tos by Her­man Wouters for the New York Times article.

One of Oudolf’s inter­ests is in con­struct­ing land­scapes that acknowl­edge the cycles of nature, the brown­ing and the dying, along with the green­ing and regrowth.

“You look at this, and it goes deeper than what you see,” Oudolf is quoted. “It reminds you of some­thing in the genes—nature, or the long­ing for nature.”

“You accept death. You don’t take the plants out, because they still look good. And brown is also a color.”

These are gar­dens about deeper things. They’re as beau­ti­ful as all those merely skin-deep gar­dens, but they’re so much more nour­ish­ing. I wrote ear­lier refer­ring to a com­ment about Monet’s gar­dens being designed to expose nat­ural processes. Oudolf’s gar­dens do the same thing, and I’d love to be able spend some time lost in his landscapes…

Piet Oudolf’s website.

April 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: natural cycles • Piet Oudolf | 1 Comment »

april plant combinations

The gar­den is always chang­ing. As plants mature and oth­ers come into bloom, I’m always see­ing com­bi­na­tions of plants and inter­est­ing rela­tion­ships between them. Here are a cou­ple plant com­bi­na­tions in the yard that I’m par­tic­u­larly happy with.

This is Home­ria col­lina, a South African bulb, with an uniden­ti­fied rosette-forming succulent–quite likely a grap­topetalum, pos­si­bly G. ‘Point Dexter’s’ or G. paraguayense–bloom­ing in the fore­ground and cas­cad­ing over a retain­ing wall. It’s right on the side­walk in front of the house, and it’s extra-nice that you see the com­bi­na­tion at eye-level.

I like how the purple-gray tones in the suc­cu­lent com­ple­ment the color of the block wall, and how its orangey tones work well with the homeria.

In the back yard there’s a dif­fer­ent group of things con­verg­ing, a bromeliad going out of bloom, some red Russ­ian kale that’s just about ready to pick, plain white land­scap­ing pan­sies that are near­ing the end of their lifes­pans, and a Pen­ste­mon with its first flow­ers of the sea­son. (The kale was much more pur­ple just two weeks ago, before the weather started to warm up.)

In a cou­ple of weeks these com­bi­na­tions will be gone, and there’ll be new ones that I’ve never seen before. All these joys of gardening!

April 08 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: color combinations • in bloom • plant combinations | No Comments »

winner of an ugly contest

Last sum­mer John and I were at the farmer’s mar­ket in Ocean Beach, a funky, alter­na­tive neigh­bor­hood of San Diego. We were look­ing over some of the offer­ings at a stall when some­one behind me starts laugh­ing and shouts out over my shoul­der, “Look at those ugly-ass tomatoes!”

Obvi­ously some­one used to the per­fectly shaped (and per­fectly taste­less) gro­cery store toma­toes, he was point­ing out a pile of Chero­kee Pur­ple toma­toes to his girl­friend. “They’re, like mutant. Who’d buy that?” To be sure, the toma­toes were flat, irreg­u­larly shaped and sized, partly green and partly reddish-purple. Noth­ing to win a spot on a pinup cal­en­dar of tomato vari­eties. But these toma­toes have their rabid fol­low­ers, and I count myself one of them. They’re like the best tomato you’ve tasted, and sliced up they’re actu­ally pretty attractive.

The above is a pic­ture from the Seed Savers Exchange cat­a­log [ source ]. These are pret­tier exam­ples than you usu­ally find of this variety.

One per­son even has a domain name, cherokeepurple.com attached to his blog entries about try­ing to grow this vari­ety (with­out much suc­cess) in Arkansas. I might not be that rabid, but last year I decided to save some seeds from the best exam­ples of Chero­kee Pur­ple from the farmer’s mar­kets so that I could grow my own. This is an heir­loom, open pol­li­nated vari­ety, so they should come true from seed.

I con­sulted Sav­ing Seeds, an older book by Marc Rogers that’s still avail­able via Ama­zon (and prob­a­bly a few other sell­ers). If you own the book, give it up–You’re a plant geek. There, the basic instruc­tions were to first clean the seeds as best as you could. Next you drop them into a jar full of water for a few days until the gummy pulp sur­round­ing the seeds fer­ments and lib­er­ates the seeds. When that hap­pens, the pre­vi­ously pulpy seeds–which floated–would sink to the bot­tom of the jar. Finally you drain and dry them and store them away. I fol­lowed the instruc­tions, but I was wor­ried that there was still some pulp attached to some of the seeds when I was done with the process so that not all of them sank.

The acid test came three weeks ago when I put some of the seeds into pots. Maybe not all the seeds were processed per­fectly, but I’m now the proud par­ent of six pots of Chero­kee Pur­ple seedlings!

I have a few spots around the yard selected for them, places where I’ve never put toma­toes, so I’m hop­ing they’ll take to their new loca­tions and thrive. I’ll prob­a­bly give them a cou­ple more weeks in their pots, and then it’s time to set them loose. I’ll post the baby pic­tures as they grow up…pictures so ugly only a par­ent and lover of Chero­kee Pur­ple could love.

April 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Cherokee Purple tomato • heirloom tomatoes • saving seeds • seedlings • tomato seeds | 2 Comments »

a mountain of plastic pots

I had a moun­tain of unwanted plas­tic pots, mostly in the 3–5 inch size, left­overs from when I was grow­ing more than just a few orchids around the house. The pots were used, a lit­tle old, but basi­cally func­tional. I couldn’t part with them–who knows when I’d need them? After a cou­ple years of goad­ing from John, a cou­ple hun­dred of them went to the land­fill last fall.

Then I heard about the Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Gar­den hav­ing a great idea. They’ve started up a pro­gram to recy­cle those unwanted left­over plas­tic pots into some­thing useful.

Gar­den pots and trays have been recy­cled into land­scape tim­bers, use­ful for build­ing retain­ing walls and land­scape bor­ders. Each tim­ber mea­sures 7-inches X 9-inches by 8.5 feet long, weighs 280 pounds, and lasts for up to 50 years.

Well, yeah, Mis­souri would be a lit­tle far to go next time I have a pile of pots I need to part with. But I’ll be a lit­tle more dili­gent in look­ing around for more sus­tain­able solu­tions than dump­ing them!

April 06 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: plastic • pots • recycling | No Comments »

color resources

Here’s the side view of my stu­dio. The col­ors are pretty atro­cious and I wanted to try out some dif­fer­ent options.

Colourlovers lets you play with col­ors in lots of ways, and I started there. I used their tool to extract some of the gen­eral col­ors of the stu­dio from the pic­ture above. I can’t change the brick eas­ily, so the orange-red color is pretty much a given. I want to use fore­ground plant­i­ngs that are mainly green, though I’ve already planted a Loropetalum chi­nense var. rubrum ‘Plum Delight’ which has vivid pur­ple foliage much of the year. I made a “before” swatch com­bi­na­tion incor­po­rat­ing the green and pur­ple foliage with an orange that gen­er­ally rep­re­sents the brick. I also used the gray and army green col­ors from the stu­dio for the first swatch. Those are the col­ors I want to play with mod­i­fy­ing.

My cur­rent main idea is to do some­thing a lit­tle more dar­ing with the basic color, prob­a­bly some in the intense blue to blue-violet range. I think the plant col­ors would look pretty amaz­ing against it. About the time I redo the sid­ing on the stu­dio the patio will also get redone, most likely with char­coal gray/black uprights to mir­ror some char­coal sup­ports I have going on in the front of the house. I’ll stare at the new swatch below to see if it really would be as cool as I think it might be. And if I don’t like that one, maybe some­thing like the sec­ond alter­nate, some­thing using rusted steel to cover the eaves and a dark, warm gray on the build­ing… And if I don’t like those options, chang­ing swatch col­ors is lots more work­able than repaint­ing every­thing.

While you’re at the site you can also take your swatches and turn them into plaids or stripes or a whole bunch of other pat­terns. A few months back I was spend­ing waaaaay too much time play­ing at Colourlovers!

A sim­i­lar resource, one that’s devoted just to swatches, is Adobe’s Kuler. It’s not as social a place as Colourlovers, but the inter­face is beau­ti­fully designed. Also, you’ll prob­a­bly find more pro­fes­sional palette options that peo­ple have con­tributed. Enjoy!

April 05 2008 | Categories: landscape design | Tags: color • colourlovers • kuler | No Comments »