[ Lost in the Landscape ]

shopping for a manzanita

I had a wish list with me on my last pril­grim­age up to Las Pil­i­tas Nurs­ery, a spe­cial­ist in Cal­i­for­nia native plants located about a fifty-minute drive north of my house. One of the plants on the list was pointleaf man­zanita, a.k.a. Mex­i­can man­zanita, Arc­tostaphy­los pun­gens.

Pointleaf man­zanita plant [ source ]

There are dozens of dif­fer­ent man­zan­i­tas. Some creep along the ground. Oth­ers approach being tree-sized. The Las Pil­i­tas selec­tion of this species has the char­ac­ter­is­tic nice red man­zanita bark, a grace­ful upright growth habit, ter­rific drought tol­er­ance, plus a mature size that was per­fect for the places I wanted to put it: about six feet tall and four wide.

When I got to the nurs­ery I found one plant remain­ing, in a five gal­lon pot. Valerie at the nurs­ery and a gen­tle­man were look­ing it over, and he clearly was inter­ested. They noticed me. There was talk of arm-wrestling.

In the end I guess I looked intim­i­dat­ing and the gen­tle­man walked away. The prize was mine. So I came home with a nice large starter plant for where I wanted one for the front yard. I’d wanted sev­eral more, how­ever, to put along the back fence. While I could have ordered some plants, I thought it might be inter­est­ing to try grow­ing some from seed.

The most excel­lent Theodore Payne Foun­da­tion in the Los Ange­les area offered seeds for this man­zanita, along with the über-weird and won­der­ful Core­op­sis gigan­tea and a hand­ful of other plants that proved irre­sistable at from-seed prices.

The ship­ment arrived last week, almost no time after I’d sent in the order. (It’s pretty old-school–You actu­ally have to fill out a paper form and mail it in…)

When I opened up the enve­lope, how­ever, I knew things weren’t going to be easy. H2SO4? Isn’t that sul­fu­ric acid?

September 30 2008 | Categories: gardening • plant profiles | Tags: Arctostaphylos pungens • Las Pilitas Nursery • Mexican manzanita • pointleaf manzanita • seeds • sulfuric acid | 2 Comments »

as if by magic

I was in the front yard this morn­ing, water­ing in some new native plants that I’d planted a cou­ple week­ends ago. It was a few min­utes of qual­ity time, me with the plants, crouched down, the hose on a slow trickle, the water pud­dling slowly into the lit­tle basins I’d built around each plant.

It also ended being some inter­est­ing qual­ity time with the neigh­bors. Olinda from next door pulled up in her car from hav­ing dropped her grand­son off at school. Usu­ally she waves and goes up her steps, but this time she came over to where I was watering.

Seems like some­thing weird had hap­pened overnight. When she got into her car this morn­ing her grand­son had smelled some­thing. Olinda looked down into the car’s ash­tray and saw a cig­a­rette butt. “And we don’t smoke,” she emphasized.

Yes, she’d left the car unlocked overnight, and one of the win­dows had been rolled down. But she thought it was extra-strange. The whole fam­ily hears things in and around the house all the time, she reported. “I think our house is huanted.” And a grand­son had seen a bruja, a witch, inside the house not long ago.

I am such a skep­tic with all things para­nor­mal. But Olinda’s com­ments got me thinking.

Astra­galus nut­tal­lii, pho­tographed by Beat­rice F. Howitt [ source ]

Last week­end I’d put into the ground a gal­lon plant of rattle-weed or Nuttall’s milkvetch (Astra­galus nut­tal­lii), a low lit­tle ground­cover with del­i­cate, blue-gray foliage, cream col­ored flow­ers and some out­ra­geously over­scaled seed pods. It’s a plant native to the coastal coun­ties from Los Ange­les to north of San Fran­cisco, and not one you often see see in gardens.

Within two days of my plant­ing it, John came to me with a puz­zled expres­sion. “You planted a new plant by the front walk­way the other day, didn’t you?”

“It’s gone.”

I went out to look, but it was after dark. I felt around with my hands a bit but couldn’t feel any­thing where the plant had been. Check­ing back dur­ing day­light all I saw was dirt. No nubs, no hole where the plant had been dug out. Noth­ing. The only signs of strug­gle were a few oxalis bulbs strewn on the sur­face, bulbs that I’d unearthed and then replanted in the course of plant­ing the milkvetch.

Of course a crit­ter of some sort was prob­a­bly respon­si­ble for the dis­ap­pear­ance. But it was odd that one of the plants I’d been water­ing this morn­ing was another milkvetch plant that I’d set into the ground a week before the one that had van­ished. Sited less than twenty feet away, it looked happy and com­pletely untouched.

So is the neigh­bor­hood haunted by a witch with a taste for milkvetch plants and cig­a­rettes? Or just voles or pos­sums? Or maybe a phan­tom gar­dener who’s raid­ing the street for inter­est­ing lit­tle plants? Now that last one would be really scary…

September 26 2008 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: Astragalus nuttallii • Nuttall's milkvetch • supernatural • witches | 2 Comments »

another use for blogging software

Last fall I began a list­ing of plants that were new to the gar­den. I used it to track things like a plant’s com­mon and sci­en­tific names, what size of plant I put in the ground, where I planted it, when I planted it, along with mis­cel­la­neous notes. At first I used Microsoft Excel to main­tain my spread­sheet of plants, and it worked great in a lot of ways.

The main prob­lem devel­oped because I divide my time at home between two dif­fer­ent com­put­ers, one in the main house, and the other back in my stu­dio. Because I share the machine in the front house with John, he’d often be on it when I wanted to make an entry for a new plant. I had sep­a­rate copies of my plant list on the front machine and the one in my stu­dio, and soon the two lists started to wan­der out of sync. Had I remem­bered to mail myself a copy of the updated file to update my other com­puter? Or had I remem­bered to enter the newest addi­tion to both spread­sheets? Things got messy fast.

One improve­ment would have been to share a file between my two machines on the home net­work. But because I don’t have the most reli­able wire­less avail­able I’m not always logged into the net­work on both machines. So shar­ing a file wouldn’t work all the time.

Then it occurred to me: Why not use the capa­bil­i­ties of this blog to main­tain my plant list? I use Word­Press soft­ware on my site to power this blog. A lot of peo­ple are using Word­Press soft­ware (not to be con­fused with blogs mounted at WordPress.com) to run their web­sites instead of using it to power a blog, and using the capa­bil­i­ties of the blog to main­tain a list seemed no more weird. The net result is that now I can log into my blog from any­where on earth and update my plant list.

At first I kept the list pri­vate, but now any­one can click the “plant list” tab below my header and take peek at my gar­den. Soon (and when I have some time) I’ll add images to the list­ing, and I’ll also have the abil­ity to link eas­ily to any post­ing that I might make about a plant. And at some point I’ll be adding the older gar­den plants to the list.

What have I given up with this arrange­ment? One thing I really liked about the old Excel spread­sheet was that I could sort infor­ma­tion in columns eas­ily, by sci­en­tific name, by loca­tion, by date planted–whatever I wanted to look at.

Word­Press allows you to cus­tomize the basic out-of-the-box pro­gram with a long and grow­ing menu of plu­g­ins. But there isn’t any plu­gin I’ve found yet that allows you to sort data in columns or rows sim­ply by click­ing on the header. (There used to be a plu­gin that did just that, but it wasn’t com­pat­i­ble with newer ver­sions of Word­Press.) If any­one knows of a plu­gin that does this, please let me know–It’d make my record-keeping a lot easier!

Of course, anyone’s wel­come to write me notes about the list. Are there plants you want to know more about? Or are there plants you want warn me about before they take over the gar­den? Or you could do a quick psy­cho­log­i­cal analy­sis of me by look­ing at what I choose to put in the ground. Like, what kind of per­son would plant a camel­lia and Cal­i­for­nia native plants? Is he a men­ace to society?

September 25 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: plant databases • record-keeping | No Comments »

inspired by nature: how plants grow

This is the last in this lit­tle series of posts on how nature has shaped what we do artis­ti­cally, con­tin­u­ing on the post on the book, Inspired by Nature: Plants: The Building/Botany Con­nec­tion.

The ear­lier post talked about the overt nat­ural pat­terns that archi­tects have incor­po­rated into their works. The authors of this book also talk in more con­cep­tual terms about how the way plants grow could also help us under­stand how build­ings are designed.

One of the plant growth pat­terns is that of the epi­phyte, a plant that grows on the branches of another plant. In this way the sec­ond plant can gain access to higher lev­els of light high in a for­est. Just think of the many trop­i­cal orchids and bromeli­ads that use this strat­egy, liv­ing high in the tree­tops, enjoy­ing the brighter light and pro­tec­tion that a tree­top loca­tion affords.

Find­ing a par­al­lel in the archi­tec­tural realm the authors pro­pose this project by the Dutch firm, Kor­te­knie Stuhlmacher Archi­tecten. The Las Pal­mas Par­a­site sits on top of another struc­ture in Rot­ter­dam, The Nether­lands. By using the struc­ture below, this lit­tle green addi­tion takes advan­tage of the views and sun­light avail­able dozens of feet up with­out the need to build a tall foun­da­tional under­struc­ture to get it up so high in the rooftops. Although called a “par­a­site” even by the archi­tects, the project sits fairly benignly on its host, enjoy­ing the loca­tion, but not drink­ing up its pre­cious plant juices. To prove this point, the lit­tle struc­ture was dis­man­tled a few years after it was planted here on the rooftop, prob­a­bly with min­i­mal effect on the ware­houses below. [ source ]

A true par­a­site has a more marked effect on the health of its plant host. Plants like mistle­toe and dod­der use another plant for sup­port, as do epi­phytes, but they also tap into the host’s reserves and draw nutri­tion directly from it, some­times con­tribut­ing to the death of the host.

Archi­tec­tural equiv­a­lents of this are prob­a­bly a lot more com­mon­place than that of the epiphyte–You prob­a­bly have a neigh­bor with a room addi­tion or remodel that seems to suck the life juices out of the orig­i­nal build­ing. This book pro­pose a cou­ple exam­ples of archi­tec­tural par­a­sites, one of them being this Fire and Police Sta­tion in Berlin by Sauer­bruch Hut­ton Archi­tects. Here the bright red-and-green glass struc­ture hangs onto the frame of the orig­i­nal tra­di­tional brick struc­ture. I’m not sure it’s suck­ing the host’s juices dry, but it cer­tainly is mak­ing itself felt more assertively than with the epi­phyte above.

And the last exam­ple I wanted to share was one employ­ing the plant char­ac­ter­is­tic of the for­est canopy. The trees of trop­i­cal forests grow up and up, often cre­at­ing a thin con­cen­tra­tion of green­ery high above the for­est floor, with tall naked tree trunks sup­port­ing the high-altitude garden.

An archi­tec­tural equiv­a­lent is the Sharp Cen­tre for Design in Toronto, built by Alsop Archi­tects. This oth­er­worldly build­ing hov­ers high above the build­ings below, like high tree­tops hov­er­ing high above the shade-loving plants of the under­storey far below. [ source ]

Wild, eh?

None of these projects “fit it” in any tra­di­tional sense. The new build­ings don’t rely on mim­ic­k­ing how the exist­ing archi­tec­ture looks. But to me these build­ings have the same sense of happy coex­is­tence that well-paired plants in the gar­den have. You can appre­ci­ate the indi­vid­u­als, but together they make some­thing new and interesting.

September 24 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • places | Tags: architecture • inspired by nature | 2 Comments »

inspired by nature: patterns (coda)

After read­ing yesterday’s post on nat­ural motifs in archi­tec­ture, Linda shared this photo that she’d taken recently on her recent trip to Europe. One of her stops was Barcelona’s famous Parc Güell, designed by Antoni Gaudí, where she found this haunt­ing detail of palm fronds dec­o­rat­ing a fence.

Ever since I saw a lyri­cal doc­u­men­tary on Gaudí in the 1980s (I’m pretty sure it was Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Anto­nio Gaudí) vis­it­ing the park has been on my list of things to do…someday.

Archi­tec­ture and the botan­i­cal world of course have a spe­cial rela­tion­ship. Early shel­ters were con­structed of branches, twigs, thatch, fronds, logs, and other plant prod­ucts that would pro­vide shel­ter from the ele­ments. It some­how seems fit­ting that mem­o­ries of those early days of human civ­i­liza­tion live on in how we dec­o­rate our built envi­ron­ment, long after many of our build­ing mate­ri­als now come about through indus­trial processes and not through nat­ural ones: Even as we seek shel­ter from the nat­ural world, we con­tinue to need to cel­e­brate it.

Yes, humans seem to find ever darker things to do to each other and the rest of the planet. But quiet cel­e­bra­tions like this of what’s truly impor­tant con­tinue to give me guarded hope for the species.

September 23 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • landscape design • places | Tags: Antoni Gaudí • Barceloa • fences • hardscape • inspired by nature | 1 Comment »

inspired by nature: patterns

I picked up a book the other day, Inspired by Nature: Plants : The Building/Botany Con­nec­tion, a trans­la­tion of a Span­ish archi­tec­ture book by Ale­jan­dro Bahamón, Patri­cia Pérez and Alex Campello.

It looks at the rela­tion­ship of plants and archi­tec­ture in inter­est­ing ways, from the conceptual–relating how build­ings are designed in ways that mimic plants, to the more overt–seeing how rec­og­niz­able plant forms are incor­po­rated into struc­tures. Here are some great projects fea­tured in the book:

Erick van Egeraat Asso­ci­ated Archi­tects. Dutch Embassy, War­saw, Poland. Photo by C. Richters [ source ]

Embassies these days have to employ pro­tec­tive mea­sures. The stem-and-leaf fenc­ing on this one is ter­rific, work­ing as a part of the over­all com­po­si­tion as well as serv­ing a defen­sive purpose.

Klein Dytham Archi­tec­ture. Leaf Chapel, Kobuchizawa, Japan. [ source ]

The vine-inspired open­ings on this wed­ding chapel light up at night in an amaz­ing way. And dur­ing the day the sun­light fil­ters into the inte­rior. The pat­tern­ing reminds me of the kind of designs you find on fab­rics and every­day objects. It’s cool to see it blown up onto architecture.

René González. Cis­neros Fontanals Art Foun­da­tion, Miami, Florida. [ source ]

Ceramic tiles give a strong feel­ing of stalks of bam­boo on the walls of this build­ing, but they’re abstracted in inter­est­ing ways. You almost might not real­ize that they’re bam­boo in ori­gin if it weren’t for the stands of golden bam­boo planted nearby.

All­mann Sat­tler Wapp­ner Architek­ten. Süd­west­met­all Offices, Reut­lin­gen, Ger­many. [ source ]

Leaf designs cut from metal sheets com­bine the reg­u­lar geom­e­try of a grid with free-form nat­ural shapes that defy being ratio­nal­ized into neat squares. The pave­ment under­foot also par­tic­i­pates in this inter­ac­tion of nature and human thought.

All these projects seem a lit­tle beyond my capa­bil­i­ties to pull off at my lit­tle house. But then that project with he bam­boo tiles might be just the coolest solu­tion for the new bath­room shower…

September 22 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: Allmann Sattler Wappner Architekten • architecture • botanical designs • Erick van Egeraat Associated Architects • inspired by nature • Klein Dytham Architecture • René González | 2 Comments »

inspired by nature: colors

I wrote ear­lier about how the euca­lyp­tus trees in my area had started to shed their bark and men­tioned how there were some inter­est­ing col­ors com­bi­na­tions that were hap­pen­ing as part of the process. The trees have con­tin­ued shed­ding bark all sum­mer and now into fall.

Not long ago I was talk­ing to Linda about col­ors, and she’d men­tioned being struck by some of the same col­ors her­self, and how some­day she thought it might be inter­est­ing to make a quilt using some of those unex­pected jux­ta­po­si­tions of color.

For fun, I’ve taken some pho­tos and made color palettes based on them using the tools at colourlovers.com. Most of the com­bos come from col­ors on the bark, but the last one below derives from the col­ors of new leaves against the berry-red shades of the new stems.

These are all on the lit­eral side. You could take any of these pic­tures and get a lot wilder–especially into the plum-grape-purple territory.

The titles for the palettes–“widomaker”–comes from the dark nick­name gum trees have in Aus­tralia because of their casual habit of drop­ping branches onto unsus­pect­ing folk below. It’s not hyper­bole. Twice, just this past year, I’ve come within less than fifty feet of hav­ing big branches dropped on my head.

Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers

September 21 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • plant profiles | Tags: color combinations • eucalyptus • exfoliating bark • inspired by nature | No Comments »

a curry garden

Just a few miles from my house was a gar­gan­tuan Asian gro­cery that was always on my list of places to take peo­ple from out of town who hailed from more shel­tered places. Vien Dong had cases with live bull­frogs, fish of sorts you’re not likely to find at Safe­way, dozens of kinds of dried mush­rooms and fun­gus, plus fruits and veg­gies that ranged from the com­mon to the jaw-droppingly weird. In addi­tion to being a mem­o­rable tourist des­ti­na­tion it was my source of ingre­di­ents for when­ever I wanted to cook a fairly authen­tic Asian meal.

Thai food in par­tic­u­lar is one of my pas­sions, and eat­ing it at one of the good local Thai restau­rants is often a sub­lime expe­ri­ence. Cook­ing Thai dishes, how­ever, can some­times lead to frus­tra­tion. Rich, sub­tle and com­plex, the cui­sine fre­quently demands ingre­di­ents that aren’t always read­ily avail­able at the local gro­cery. And Vien Dong was just far enough away that it wasn’t convenient.

When I vis­ited Vien Dong two week­ends ago I was sad­dened to see that the place was clos­ing. All the aisles were close to bare and the few remain­ing veggies–though marked half-off–looked like the pro­duce that would have been sent to the dump­ster in bet­ter days. There are other Asian gro­cers within five miles of home, but noth­ing as ency­clo­pe­dicly weird and won­der­ful as Vien Dong was. Retail expe­ri­ences can some­times frus­trate me to near tears, but this time I almost wept from the tragedy of the situation.

This year, even before I even imag­ined the pos­si­bil­ity of the demise of Vien Dong, I thought I’d try grow­ing some spe­cial ingre­di­ents in the gar­den for when I was moti­vated to try one of the sim­pler Asian recipes. Hot pep­pers, lemon­grass and Thai basil all fig­ure promi­nently in some of my favorite cur­ries, and those three are the three sta­ples I decided to grow. Over­all I’d con­sider this year’s attempt to be mostly successful.

The lemon­grass plants were def­i­nitely a suc­cess. I planted both the East Indian and West Indian species, Cym­bo­pogon flex­u­o­sus and C. cit­ra­tus, to com­pare the two main options. The more com­monly grown is the West Indian species, and with thick, lemon-vegetable scented stems you can see why it’s more pop­u­lar. The East Indian has an iden­ti­cal fla­vor, but the stems are thin­ner, and it takes a lit­tle more work to come up with a usable quan­tity of the inner stems used for cooking.

My plants get a half day of full sun, weekly deep water­ings, and monthly (or so) feed­ings of fish emul­sion. Both plants are grow­ing well–almost three feet tall and slightly wider–though for me the East Indian plant seems to be a lit­tle more robust. With so much lemon­grass around, I’m start­ing to sneak it into non-Asian meals. Try it with any food that would be friendly towards cit­rus aromas.

The Thai basil was also a suc­cess. I started some plants from seed in the spring and set them out in the new raised bed along­side some orna­men­tals. As the orna­men­tals grew they started to shade the basil. Still, some full sun mixed with dap­pled sun later in the day man­ages to keep the plants happy. Add aver­age to some­what more than aver­age amounts of water and you end up with more basil than you’ll use.

If you’ve never grown it, you’ll find that the flow­ers have an attrac­tive, gen­tle pur­ple tinge unlike the plain white flow­ers of reg­u­lar basil. Bees love the flow­ers, and you’ll love the dis­tinct fla­vor of the leaves–assertive as reg­u­lar basil, but with a def­i­nite spiciness.

The least suc­cess­ful part of the curry exper­i­ment was with the hot peppers.

The chili most often called for in Thai recipes is often referred to as a “bird pep­per,” a tiny and intensely hot fire­bomb of a fruit. When I went shop­ping for pep­pers (I hadn’t had the fore­sight to actu­ally grow plants from seed this exper­i­ment) the pep­per selec­tion was pretty lim­ited. So I ended up try­ing out a new hybrid ser­rano chili called Ser­rano del Sol. The label listed it as tast­ing like a ser­rano, but bear­ing ear­lier, and hav­ing fruit dou­ble the size. It also listed the fruit as being 5,000 to 6,000 Scov­ille units–warm, but only jalapeño-warm, not as hot as a typ­i­cal ser­rano (10,000 to 23,000 Scov­ille units) or a Thai pep­per (50,000 to 100,000 units). By con­trast, the self-defense pep­per spray has 2,000,000 to 5,300,000 Scov­ille units of intensity.

The fla­vor of the fruits does say “ser­rano” rather than “jalapeño,” which is good since I’m one of the many folks who prefers the for­mer over the lat­ter. But the fla­vor still doesn’t really say “Thai,” and the lack of heat inten­sity has required adding gen­er­ous amounts of dried hot pep­per to what­ever I cook.

For cook­ing real Thai, hold out for real Thai pep­pers. (Most good seed sources list the vari­ety.) But Ser­rano del Sol could be a good vari­ety for any­one who likes the ser­rano fla­vor but would pre­fer some­thing less hot.

The plant has done well in mostly-sunny con­di­tions with aver­age water. It hasn’t been as vig­or­ous or pro­duc­tive as I’d hoped, but truth be told it wasn’t planted until later in the sea­son, long after the lemon­grass and Thai basil. (This was dur­ing the time when the recent sal­mo­nella scare was being tied to Mex­i­can chili pep­pers rather than toma­toes. Not want­ing to be caught with­out one of the world’s most essen­tial ingre­di­ents, I rushed out and grabbed a way to grow my own.)

So, yes, I’ve been cook­ing more Asian-influence meals now that I have the ingre­di­ents a few steps away from the cut­ting board. But get­ting the per­fect bal­ance of salty-sour-sweet fla­vors con­tin­ues to elude me. At least now I have lots of raw mate­r­ial close at hand to exper­i­ment with.

Next year (a note to myself): shop for thai pep­per seeds and start them early in the spring, along with Thai basil; plant more lemon­grass if the cold kills the cur­rent plants; and maybe exper­i­ment with plant­ing grocery-store tubers of fresh galan­gal and fresh tumeric, since those are other essen­tials that aren’t always avail­able, even in the Asian groceries.

September 19 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • places • plant profiles | Tags: East Indian lemongrass • hot peppers • lemongrass • Scoville scale • Serrano del Sol pepper • Thai basil • Thai cooking • West Indian lemongrass | No Comments »

what elephants eat

Polit­i­cally I’m fairly far afield from the Repub­li­can party, but I’m think­ing that one of my plants must be a card-carrying mem­ber. Por­tu­lacaria afra marked the open­ing of the Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion a cou­ple weeks ago by qui­etly com­ing into bloom.

So what’s the con­nec­tion between the Repub­li­cans and this plant? Ele­phants.

In its native habi­tat this plant can be good for­age for ele­phants. (And I’m sure you know that the ele­phant is the sym­bol of the Repub­li­can Party.) Accord­ing to a treat­ment on this species by Robert J. Baran, 80% of the diet of ele­phants in South Africa’s Addo National Park con­sists of this plant. Hence one of its com­mon names, “ele­phant bush.”

Out­doors in San Diego the plant is ridicu­lously easy to grow. Full sun, occa­sional sum­mer water (ca. every 2–4 weeks) and well-drained soil are all it asks. If you want more of the plant, break off a chunk and set it some dirt. Instant new plant.

Its flow­er­ings are rare here, how­ever, and it’s easy to miss the lit­tle pink puffs of smoke that hover over the plant for a cou­ple weeks.

The plant in the pic­ture is maybe ten years in the ground in this spot, and is about four feet tall. Some reports say it’ll get three times this size, but you can eas­ily break off any chunks that offend you. So far so good in this loca­tion. And in pots it’s much more con­strained. (The ugly fence in the back­ground and its trans­for­ma­tion into some­thing much more fab­u­lous will be the sub­ject of an upcom­ing post…)

The plant report­edly also does well indoors in colder cli­mates. Its easy-growing nature has caused a lot of peo­ple to call it as a vari­ant of the clas­sic beginner’s jade plant (Cras­sula ovata). But aside from the cur­sory sim­i­lar­i­ties the plants are in com­pletely dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies. If you’ve been lucky enough to live where it’s warm enough to see them both bloom you’ll def­i­nitely believe that their rela­tion­ship is pretty far apart.

Mealy­bugs haven’t been an issue with this plant for me out­doors, but they seem to be an occa­sional prob­lem when it’s grown indoors in bright sun. Shade-grown, over-watered suc­cu­lents seem to attract the crit­ters. Try a brighter spot, and cut down on the water­ing if the lit­tle beast­ies are a problem.

Over­all, this is a happy plant that eas­ily crosses party lines. But you might want to keep it out of sight when the ele­phants come to loll about in your koi pond.

September 17 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: elephant bush • in bloom • jade plant • Portulacaria afra • spekboom • succulents | 1 Comment »

pointillist garden color

It dri­ves John crazy, but I love it when plants begin to grow into each other. When I’m ready to sit back and enjoy the moment, you can hear the open­ing and clos­ing of prun­ing shears in his hands.

Here’s a plant­ing that reached this crit­i­cal stage a cou­ple months ago, a clus­ter­ing of pink gaura (Gaura lind­heimeri), blue ivy-leaved sage (Salvia cacali­ae­fo­lia) and the wacky mixed red and/or white blooms of Salvia micro­phylla ‘Hot Lips.’ The plants have flow­ers of approx­i­mately the same size, and from just a few feet away you stop to see the indi­vid­ual flow­ers and begin to see the plant­ing as a gen­tle vibra­tion of col­ors that move from pink to red to white to blue. (The red­dish foliage of the gaura also adds to the effect.)

It makes me think a lit­tle bit of the sim­i­lar color effects in the paint­ings of Georges Seu­rat. His best-known paint­ing, La Grande Jette, inspired Stephen Sond­heim to com­pose his musi­cal, Sun­day in the Park with George.

Georges Seu­rat. A Sun­day on La Grande Jette-1884, 1884–1886. Oil on can­vas, 207.5 x 308 cm. The Art Insti­tute of Chicago. [ source ]

On the can­vas, pointil­list lit­tle dots of color give a vibra­tory shim­mer to the sur­face of the paint­ing. Instead of mix­ing the col­ors on his palette, he lets your eye do it.

Big chunks of gar­den color laid out next to each other can be a great effect. But I also like the shim­mer of lit­tle dots of color. Seu­rat had an inter­est­ing thing going on with his later work–Why not appro­pri­ate it for the garden ?

September 16 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • my garden | Tags: color combinations • gaura • Gaura lindheimeri • Georges Seurat • ivy-leaved sage • pointillism • Poistimpresionism • sages • Salvia cacaliaefolia • Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips' | 1 Comment »