[ Lost in the Landscape ]

halloween frights

Happy Halloween to all of you!

Growing up, Halloween was always my favorite of the holidays. These were the years before everyone cloistered their children into parties surrounded by armed guards, and after the years when the celibrants really meant “trick or treat” when they said it—as in “give me some candy, otherwise I’ll throw eggs on your cars.” Ah. Kindler, gentler times…

I have three little selections to share with you today, ranked from mildy scary to dizzyingly horrifying.

Number one: Scary.

(The image to the left from the Orchids in Our Tropics web store [ source ])

In my orchid-growing days I was fascinated by plants in the Pleurothallis alliance of neotropics orchids, although I was never brave enough to try growing any of them. Of the thirty or so genera in the alliance, one genus had a spectacular name so appropriate for today: Dracula!

And if that’s not wild enough, Carl Luer in 1978 described what is perhaps the most outlandish of the species in the genus. And what do you suppose this mad scientist picked for the species name? Vampira! (A mad scientist with a sense of humor—I like that!) Besides having a terrific name, Dracula vampira is one awesome plant, something this photo attests to. Most of the pleurothallids are small little wonders, but the flowers on this one are eight inches top to bottom.

Scary, but intriguingly beautiful at the same time.

Number two: Scarier.
I know that I’ve shared this one bit of scariness with you before, but it continues to scare me every time I see it.

Every neighborhood probably has one of these, a house with a yard that looks like it’s auditioning for a part in a post-holocaust movie. Like, did the radiation from the bomb blast take out all the plants? To their credit, the homeowners do get points for creating a yard that takes no water whatsoever—a bonus in our current drought. But there are so many better ways to save water and enhance the world you live in. Greg suggested that someone seedbomb this house in a bit of guerrilla gardening, but how do you seedbomb concrete?

I’m not a big fan of the new generation of fake turf that’s going around these days. Although it’s light years beyond Astroturf, it still looks like plastic from less than fifteen feet away, and it does nothing to battle the urban heating phenomenon. At least it would begin to dress up this yard. And currently the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is offering rebates of thirty cents per square foot of lawn that you replace with the plastic stuff. (At a cost of $12 a square foot for the fake turf, the rebate doesn’t go terribly far…)

The water agencies are also offering rebates on water-efficient sprinkler heads, starting at $4.00 per head, which would pay for most of the unit, as well as rebates on weather-based sprinkler timers. Check out the information on the rebate programs. One grouse I have with them is that there’s nothing that would give you a credit for replacing lawn with low-water-use plants that would also help keep the city cool by reducing the amount of reflected solar energy that is converted to urban overheating.

Number three: Scariest.

I was in the back yard looking for the cat the other evening, rounding her up for the evening indoors. She was being extra-coy that night, and I had to go for the flashlight. Returning to the garden, the flashlight beam highlighted this atrocity less than two feet from my face: the dreaded tomato tobacco hornworm! (Edit: Thanks to Jenny for correcting my identification of this little terror.)

Eek! I felt like Janet Leigh in the shower scene from Psycho, only I was better dressed at the moment.

This is a horror than any gardener can empathize with, I’m sure, particularly when the tomato tobacco hornworm is chomping on the last precious tomato plant of the season. As much as I try to be kind to nature, I marched inside to get the Felco shears and did battle with the beast.

(This photo is actually of another worm I discovered the next day. All summer long there were no hornworms. And then suddenly, bam!, there were several, chomping away on what may be the last tomato in the neighborhood.)

So…you decide. Was the tomato tobacco hornworm the scariest thing? Or was it the vile, murderous gardener who would commit unspeakable acts with a pair of shears?

October 31 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: Dracula vampira • Halloween • orchids • tomato hornworm • tomatoes • water rebates • water use | 3 Comments »

community outreach

A weekend ago the local branch library was celebrating its 50th anniversary. To mark the occasion they threw a little party, complete with live music, snacks, things for kids and adults to do, and a few tables of community groups answering questions and giving out information.

The North Clairemont Branch Library today. (Yes, this is how they spell “Claremont” in these here parts—It’s the spawn of England’s Claremont with the first name of one of the developer’s family members, Claire Burgener.)

The North Clairemont Branch Library at its opening, in 1958. I’ve always like the simple, modern lines of the library, and the clerestory windows admit gentle, diffused light for reading. The building has hardly changed, but the neighborhood around it certainly has.

One of the tables had a representative from the Tecolote Canyon Nature Center that’s located nearby. They had posterboard displays of some of the local wildlife, a listing of some invasive plant species of concern, a small live snake and a little stuffed fox.

The kids were of course most taken with the critters, and I’ll have to admit I was taken with the fox myself. Twenty years of living near the canyon and this was the first fox I’d seen. Unfortunately this brown fox wasn’t exactly moving very quickly in its taxidermied state.

At least I hope some of the adults took the plant information seriously. I’ll have to admit, however, that the vegetable rogue’s gallery on the sign hadn’t been updated much in recent years. The “most wanted” plant on the list seemed to be Argentine pampas grass, a position it’s held for most of the years I’ve looked at these lists. It’s still a problem, but we have a number of other escapees roaming the hillsides.

Inside, for almost no money you could pick up Life and Saturday Evening Post issues from the 1950s, 50-year-old publications to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the library. (What proper library event would be complete without a book sale?) As you might expect, there were lots of Cold War-related articles. And then this stack that caught my eye, including an issue with the article, “So you want to hunt uranium.”

If the table outside didn’t get the attention of the parents, a rack of literature inside might have. Almost all of the top row was dedicated to invasive plants, water conservation or drought-tolerant landscaping. Things don’t get much more Southern California than that.

October 30 2008 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Clairemont Branch Library • libraries • Tecolote Canyon • Tecolote Canyon Nature Center | No Comments »

double bougainvilleas

One of the pleasures of a Southern California garden—if you have the space—is the ability to grow bougainvilleas. From my deck I can see that the neighbors to the north and east have some, as do the neighbors two doors down to the south. It’s one of the plants that defines a Southern California garden. They’re common as dirt, but a lot more charismatic.

My garden has two varieties that we put in over ten years ago. I unfortunately don’t know their names—This is before I started my database of plant names, and their original labels are long gone. But they’re a complementary pair of double-flowered varieties, a magenta-pink variety, and a white variety that is flushed the same pink tone at the edge of its bracts.

This is how the two plants look growing together. Bare wall, or frothy mass of pink flowers on a plant that requires almost no water and the occasional pruning? It was an easy decision for us.

One of the down-sides of these plants is what happens with the bracts once the plant has finished flowering. On the single-flowered varieties, they can drop off and make a thick pile of mulch—or mess to clean up, depending on where the plant is. One neighbor has their plant next to their swimming pool, a placement decision that creates a certain amount of extra maintenance.

On the double-flowered versions, the dead bracts tend to hang on to the plant and look a little less than glamorous. Here’s a progression from new, to less-than-new, to faded bracts on my plant. You can cut them off, if the brown bothers you. But the plant is putting out new flowers most of the year, so there’s plenty of distraction away from the brown.

We Southern Californians may be lacking the fiery transformation of our trees as fall sets in, but we’re certainly not without our garden color.

October 27 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bougainvilleas • drought-tolerant landscaping | 1 Comment »

under citrus quarantine

The last couple times I’ve gone plant-shopping to one of my favorite nurseries I’ve noticed a big line of yellow police tape stretched in front of the citrus plants. A sign nearby states that the plants are under quarantine and can’t be purchased. (Good thing I planted my tangerine last year…)

The quarantine that has impacted the nursery is one that has been imposed on much of the county. According to the press release from the California Department of Food and Agriculture (ominously dated September 11) “the quarantine area includes 1,181 square-miles and extends from the international border with Mexico up the coast to Highway 78, east to Ramona, and south along local roads and highways to the international border at Tecate, Mexico.” (The release has a link to a pdf of a map of the bounderies, but the link was dead as of Saturday afternoon.) That’s basically all of the city plus a whole pile of ‘burbs.

My garden tangerine is new as of last fall so I’ve been paying a certain amount of attention to it. I also have a grapefruit, but it’s generally self-sustaining and doesn’t require much attention. But after returning from the nursery Saturday I happened to look at the plant and saw some insect damage of a sort I’d never noticed before.

That sent me all over the web, looking to see if this was the sort of damage that would be done by the little beast that has caused all this commotion, the Asian citrus psyllid. There were lots of mugshots of this fairly ugly bug, plus descriptions of the plant-wilting disease that it can spread. Neither seemed to be what I had going on in the back yard, however.

It turns out the trouble in my little Tahiti was caused instead by the citrus leafminer, an insect first detected in the general area in 2000. Some bugs can be considered basically benign, and this one is one of those. This is from its rap sheet from the Kern County Cooperative Extension Service a couple years ago.

For most, citrus leafminer will likely be nothing more than a nuisance, since research from Florida has not linked this pest to any reductions in yield or quality of fruit. However, it is unlikely that there are many farmers who get pleasure seeing the beautiful leaves in their orchards become all twisted and knurled. The real problems with citrus leafminer are while the trees are in the nursery and during their first one to three years of development after planting. During this time citrus leafminer, which loves to feed inside new flush leaves, can cause sufficient distortion and damage to caused stunting of the plants.

More of a nuisance for mature plants, it sounds like. And the damage was on only a fairly small portion of the plant’s new leaves. That allowed me to appreciate the fact that the wandering insect patterns inside the leaf have a cool, loopy, geometrical grace to them. I can live with a little twisting and knurling now that I know it doesn’t seem to bother the plant too much…

October 26 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Asian citrus psyllid • citrus • citrus leafminer • grapefruits • plant quarantines • tangerines | 3 Comments »

another summer of love

Garden’s aren’t neutral, apolitical spaces. Along with the subtle autumn changes in foliage the neighborhood has been growing Obama and the occasional McCain yard signs, as well as signs for where the homeowners stand on the various state propositions.

Here’s a view from the front sidewalk of one of my signs. I couldn’t get a proper yard sign locally, but I found a small window sign in pdf format to print from the web. Yeah, it’s tiny. So small I put another one in my car window, about two feet away, eye-level, from the sidewalk. No missing that one.

The summer just concluded has been a remarkable one here in California. When the California Supreme Court ruled last spring that prohibitions against gay marriage were against the principles of the state constitution, it opened up the floodgates for a lot of us who’ve been in long-term relationships to finally be able to enter into the legal relationship that mirrored how we live our lives every day.

I wrote a while ago of John and my getting married, back in June. And so many of our friends have decided to tie the knot. Although John and I are usually homebodies our social calendar up to September had us attending more weddings than we’ve attended in a decade, let alone one summer. We attended weddings and receptions in people’s backyards, in some of our local parks and in parts of town with sweeping views of I wasn’t in the state in the summer of 1967, the original Summer of Love, but this was one all over again.

There are political and social forces afoot here in the state and beyond that want to withdraw those newly-granted civil rights, however. Proposition 8 on California’s November ballot would place discriminatory language in the state constitution of the sort that’s been pushed into many other state constitutions over the last decade. In our difficult times, first post-9/11 and now in the middle of our current economic meltdown, it’s easy for people to turn on each other and pick on the easiest targets. But I think we can do better than that.

California is poised to be the first state in the country to reject that trend. The polls are still pointing to the proposition going down to defeat, and even our Republican Governor is opposed to it. But we’re in no position to take things for granted. The margin is slim, and getting smaller as the election nears. And who’s not to say that there won’t be a “Bradley-effect,” with voters trying to sound more open-minded or tolerant to a pollster even if it won’t reflect what they’ll actually do in the voting booth?

So, this November, be sure to vote: Vote for me and John, who’ve been together over 25 years, or John and Robert who’ve been together over 21, or for Liz and Ellen, or Mason and Carlos, or Paul and Alan or the dozens of people we know plus the thousands of other couples in the state who’ve committed to each other. Is it time for divisive politics as usual or for real change? This is our chance to lead the way.

October 25 2008 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: civil rights • Proposition 8 • seasons • summer | 1 Comment »

water-conserving gardens

Every year the water districts in San Diego county sponsor a contest to recognize gardens that use low amounts of water. The California-Friendly Landscape Contest has winners for each water district, and then overall winners in three major categories: best do-it-yourself, best professionally designed, and best native plantings.

Here are a few images of the prize winners this season. I think they show that you can have a lively yard without using swimming pools-full of water to keep things green. Some of the winners feature cactus and succulents, but you can see below that you don’t have to do the desert-thing to use less water.

Best California-native. Winner: Gidlund. Our native flora has plenty of choices that should be used more frequently. Flowering selections in this garden feature sages (salvias), asters (erigeron), and monkey flowers (mimus or diplacus, depending on which authority you side with).

Best in City of San Diego. Winner: Johnson. Succulents with contrasting leaf colors and forms star in this garden. This image features agaves, euphorbias and senecios among the assortment.

Best do-it-yourself. Winners: Mendell, Kirk (sorry, they only listed the last names…). This entry was another of the succulent-intensive ones, but this shows a portion of the garden with mounds of low plants with contrasting foliage, as well as plants in the distance in bloom. Most of us like flowers, don’t we?

Best professionally-designed. Winner: Whitney. A number of broad-leaved plants with beautifully contrasting foliage feature in this landscape. I think the contrasts are absolutely gorgeous!

Many of the photos show landscapes that aren’t 100% mature, but you can get a sense of what the gardens will look like in a few years. Also, as in many landscaping contests, the hardscape seems to get a lot of the attention. I’m of two minds on that issue. For a landscaper, a large portion of the profit resides in the hardscape details, with markup on a gazebo being way more than on a few shrubs. So some of the landscapes seem to push the human features rather than natural ones. But in the case of a well-placed garden path: what better way to imagine yourself in the new landscape than by “walking” through the space with your eyes, following a gentle meander through your beautiful new garden?

Check out all the winners. The deadline to enter next year’s competition is April 6, 2009, so that gives us all a few months to do a little replanting. In the end, any garden that helps save water can be declared a winner.

October 24 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • hardscape • native plants • succulents • water use | No Comments »

what a good idea!

My neighbors catty-corner across the street have been in the throes of a gonzo whole-house remodel. The project is finally nearing its conclusion, with some of the landscaping and hardscape elements finally being installed.

Right by the front door is this detail that I thought was drop-dead brilliant: The tall papyrus rises from behind the half-wall, and your attention focuses on the feathery tops of the plants. But then there’s this cutout in the wall, far below the tops of the plants, so that looking through you notice the geometry of the stems that have been isolated from the rest of the plant. It was like a Cezanne still life or an early cubist painting where multiple views of the same object coexist in the same plane: the exuberant tops of the papyrus, and the geometrical upright lines formed by the stems, two separate but interacting views of the same subject.

I really like what the neighbors have done with their house, but this was the one thing I liked most of all. When I talked to Jackie and told him how incredibly impressed I was with the detail he looked a little puzzled. Turns out the papyrus was just put there for the time being, and that the hole in the wall was going to turn into some sort of low water feature that would only be visible from the back side of the wall. My conceptual take on what he was planning was just an accident of circumstances, and that the finished project would be quite different.

Well, then!

I guess that means I can steal the idea, refine it and call it my own for the next project I do. Why not construct a solid wall with cutouts that show you interesting architectural details of the plants on the other side? So many plants have both amazing branch structure and striking foliage. Why not highlight each feature by separating the views?

And if you beat me to using this idea, be sure to put me in the credit line. As you can see the idea was mine, all mine…

October 23 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: hardscape • papyrus • walls | 2 Comments »

ooh, scary!

In keeping with my dark purple and black themes of some recent posts (like this one), here are a couple pictures Jenny shared with me of some of her plants. This first one is a bromeliad with incredibly striped, almost reptilian leaves. The pumpkin pot is a fun touch for the our current season.

I’m glad it’s a plant, because if I encountered an animal that looked like this I might start walking the opposite direction. Real fast.

This one, Begonia Black Fang, is a little cuddlier, even literally fuzzy. Dark-colored plants can get lost in the landscaping if you’re not careful, but combined with other interesting plants, like here, they can be great up-close specimens.

Thanks for sharing your pictures, Jenny!

October 22 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Begonia Black Fang • begonias • black • bromeliads • Jenny • pots | 1 Comment »

more about lawns

Thanks to Linda who saved for me a New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert, “Turf War.” It’s from the…um…July 21 issue. (Okay, it sometimes take me a little time to finally get around to things…)

It’s a worthy read that takes a historical look at some of the writings discussing the topic of the American lawn, beginning with Andrew Jackson Downing’s 1841 Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Being a review of the lawn literature, it’s ripe with pithy quotes by the author and many others that show changes in American thought towards this carpet of mown grass. Read the article for all the quotes in context, but here’s a handful that I especially liked:

Among the dozen or so main grasses that make up the American lawn, almost none are native to America. Kentucky bluegrass comes from Europe and northern Asia, Bermuda grass from Africa, and Zoysia grass from East Asia.

Mowing turfgrass quite literally cuts off the option of sexual reproduction…In his anti-lawn essay “Why mow?,” Michael Pollan puts it this way: “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.”

“A fine carpet of green grass stamps the inhabitants as good neighbors, as desirable citizens,” Abraham Levitt wrote. (By covenant, the original Levittowners agreed to mow their lawns once a week between April 15th and November 15th.)

[In a discussion on the us pesticides and herbicides on lawns:] In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.”

Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles—an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should new have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day.

For a developer…putting in turfgrass is by far the easiest way to landscape; what is sometimes called “contractor’s mix” grass seed is specifically formulated to provide a fast-growing—though not necessarily long-lasting—green. (Lowe’s, which sells fifteen pounds of contractor’s-mix seed for $23.52, advertises it as an “economy mixture that provides quick grass cover.”) The lawn may be wasteful and destructive, it may even be dangerous, but it is, in its way, convenient.

October 21 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • quotes | Tags: lawns • pesticides • water use | 2 Comments »

flower trials and tribulations

I ran across William Miller’s Annual Flower Research page of Cornell’s Department of Horticulture the other day. It’s one of those sites where you can spend a fair amount of time but still feel good about yourself in that you’re learning fun stuff while you’re there.

I don’t have a lot of space in my garden for annuals and I want that space to count. Seed catalogs usually sell you on a plant’s good qualities but, quite frankly, when was the last time you saw one of them talk about a plant’s minuses? Annual Flower Research trials several dozen of the newest introductions and rates them on plant uniformity, flowering, foliage and landscape value. These ratings are based on how well the plants perform over the summer in Ithaca, New York, so the results won’t be applicable to all regions in all seasons. Still there’s lots that is generalizable to many situations.

What I like most are the photos which, beginning with their 2005 trials, are taken at two-week intervals throughout the growing season. Do you want to get a sense of how your bed will look like as it progresses throughout the year? Do you want to see how well the plants grow? Do you want to see whether the plants stay in bloom throughout the summer? The pictures can help you answer those questions.

One specific question that the sequential pictures answered for me is how plants of red millet develop their color over the season, a question that’s especially interesting because I’d just plants out of the ‘Red Majesty’ strain. Unfortunately their trial of this strain was in 2004, before the bi-weekly photos started up, but their 2005 trials included the ‘Jester’ strain, developed from a seedling of ‘Red Majesty.’ That would probably give me a good approximation of how the color of the mother strain would develop. [ The source of these images ]

June 30

July 12

August 1

August 18

September 3

So…I could expect mostly green foliage with red-purple flower stalks. Then about a month later everything would turn dark purple. Cool site, eh?

The one thing that I’d love to see added would be details of the flowers. It’s nice to see how the plants would do in the landscape, but I usually buy plants based on how deeply in love I fall with the individual flowers. Add that feature and I’d be spending even more time at this site.

October 20 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Annual Flower Research • annuals • flower trials • Pennisetum glaucum 'Purple Majesty' • purple millet | 1 Comment »