[ 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 »