Archive for September, 2008
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…)
Envelope with acid-soaking instructions
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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.
Palm fronds in bronze 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 »
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 »
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.
The widowmaker
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.
Exposed eucalyptus trunk
Color by COLOURlovers
Shedding eucalyptus bark
Color by COLOURlovers
New eucalyptus leaves
Color by COLOURlovers
September 21 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape • plant profiles | Tags: color combinations • eucalyptus • exfoliating bark • inspired by nature | No Comments »
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.
East and West Indian lemongrass plants
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.
Thai basil leaves and blooms
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.
Serrano del Sol peppers
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 »
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.
Flowers of Portulacaria afra
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.
Portulacaria plant
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 »
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.
Pointillist garden colors
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 ]
Seurat Grande Jette detail
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 »
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