[ Lost in the Landscape ]

after the fires

After San Diego County’s fires of 2003 moved into new areas, I was one of those tacky dis­as­ter tourists who went into some of the recently reopened areas. It’s inter­est­ing what moti­vates peo­ple to do things of the sort. An acquain­tance with doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­pher aspi­ra­tions scours the world for dis­as­ter, and has gone to wit­ness famine in Africa and Asia, and was in Banda Ache in 2005 not long after the pre­vi­ous December’s tsunami. What can you wit­ness in times like that?

I wasn’t look­ing for human suf­fer­ing. Also, I had no inter­est in the mawk­ish Hallmark-card exploita­tion of some weird sort of notion of human dig­nity that emerges in des­per­ate times. I was pri­mar­ily inter­ested in the fires as one whop­ping dose of real­ity of the power of nature, just as I have this fas­ci­na­tion of vol­ca­noes and earth­quakes, not for the ter­rors they can unleash on us humans, but more for a much-needed dose of human humil­ity. I think that we humans are blis­ter­ingly arro­gant as a species and need to be rat­tled into con­scious­ness about our place in the universe.

You can make some of these dis­cov­er­ies while gar­den­ing, observ­ing the world and uncov­er­ing your place in it. But I guess I’m dense enough that it takes some­thing cat­a­clysmic to give me the rest of the story. Dunno…maybe it’s the same kind of need that dri­ves peo­ple to moun­tain climb­ing or NASCAR…

So there I went, out into the burn areas, mostly to the back­coun­try, but also around my neigh­bor­hood. Look­ing back at the pho­tos I took I think that I was look­ing to find some sort of order or beauty out of the mess. Was it look­ing for some sort of reas­sur­ance? Or maybe some­thing approach­ing accep­tance? Mak­ing peace with the real­i­ties of the world?

La Jolla Panorama with Smoke I, Day 3, 2003.

Here’s the left half of a dip­tych taken on the third day of the fires from the top of Mount Soledad, a view­point that on other days gives you a view of the ocean, down­town San Diego and the moun­tains to the east. This was day three of the fires, with the flames now prob­a­bly no closer than ten miles away. But that day most of what you saw was the air, thick with smoke and the color of burnt caramel.

“Tim Loves Julia” Rock, near El Cap­i­tan Reser­voir, Day 3, 2003.

Taken the same day as the pre­vi­ous image, this was out just a cou­ple miles from where the Cedar Fire began. With the winds blow­ing east-to-west, the air was sur­pris­ingly clear imme­di­ately over­head but the smell of ash was every­where. This boul­der with the graf­fiti was prob­a­bly about as close as I got to look­ing at that human dig­nity thing. I won­der if Tim and Julia are still together. Or was this just some drunken mid­night out­ing with a six­pack and a can of spraypaint?

My first tourist pic­tures turned into a small pho­to­graphic series, The Fire Works. Over the course of sev­eral months I vis­ited many areas that had burned and looked for the signs of change, restora­tion or recovery.

Mis­sion Trails Park II, 3 Months Later, 2004.

After three months and a few rains things were still black­ened, but the green was start­ing to come back.

Mis­sion Trails Park VI, 3 Months Later, 2004.

Taken the same after­noon as the pre­vi­ous image, the signs of recov­ery are a lit­tle more sub­tle in this pic­ture. Imme­di­ately after the fire the rocks were black. Now they’re washed white. In a large print of this image you can see lit­tle seedlings return­ing to the park.

Rock and Branches, Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004.

The Cuya­maca Moun­tains expe­ri­enced some of the most intense burn­ing. But add some time, sun­light and water and you end up with one of the more spec­tac­u­lar spring wild­flower blooms I’d seen in a few years.

Hill with Wild­flow­ers, Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004.

…And this is one of the last images I took in the series, the fol­low­ing May. With the major­ity of the pines in the Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park wiped out, restora­tion was far from com­plete. It may take longer than my life­time, and things will never be exactly as they were. But nature is doing what it does and doing it beautifully.

This project was a real eye-opener for me. You can read about the trans­for­ma­tions that occur after a fire and appre­ci­ate the facts. Still, there’s noth­ing like get­ting out into the areas that were affected to give me a much deeper appre­ci­a­tion of the changes.

After 2007’s fires, how­ever, after watch­ing too many days of dis­as­ter cov­er­age on tele­vi­sion, I had no incli­na­tion what­so­ever to repeat my post-fire sur­veys of 2003 and 2004. I stayed in the house, turned on the HEPA air fil­ter I’d bought after the ear­lier fires, and tried my best not to let the hor­rific news cov­er­age get to me. Some­times you feel that a human being has seen enough.

Speak­ing of things that humans prob­a­bly shouldn’t have to ever live through, let me plug a book by one of my recent cowork­ers, Paul Har­ris, who’s recently pub­lished Diary From The Dome: Reflec­tions on Fear and Priv­i­lege Dur­ing Kat­rina.

Paul went as tourist to New Orleans, look­ing to spend a laid-back week tak­ing in what the South­ern city had to offer. Instead he ended up in the mid­dle of Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, evac­u­ated to the Super­dome along with thou­sands of the city’s res­i­dents who couldn’t find a way out of town. You’ve heard or read of some of what hap­pened there, but Paul gives an espe­cially har­row­ing account of the the expe­ri­ence. He saw and lived through things none of the press reported, includ­ing how being a white tourist gave you priv­i­leges that none of the major­ity black res­i­dents were offered. This book will open your eyes.

October 19 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • places | Tags: Cedar Fire • fire • fire ecology • Hurricane Katrina • Paul Harris | 1 Comment »

fire season

I’ve been think­ing a lot about fire lately. I blogged a few days ago about start­ing an infor­mal exper­i­ment to look at ways to start seeds that require fire to ger­mi­nate. And lately we’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing the sort of dan­ger­ous fire con­di­tions that you only see in the autumn here in South­ern California.

When the dry Santa Ana winds scour west­ward from the desert an hour to the east, they can bring to Octo­ber some of the warmest days of the year. At the same time, as these dry, gale-force winds blow west­ward through the moun­tain passes, they breed dan­ger­ous con­di­tions for major wildfires.

Mon­day night, as I was leav­ing the office, some­one stopped me on the way out. “Have you heard about the fires?” he asked. The Los Ange­les area had been see­ing fires over the last cou­ple of days and now Camp Pendle­ton, forty miles to the north, was burn­ing. Peo­ple were being evac­u­ated from their homes.

Oh no. Here we go again, I thought. For­tu­nately, sev­eral days later, those fires all seem to be doused or at least on the way to con­tain­ment. But the fire weather is still with us.

It was almost a year ago when John and I were up on the roof deck, hav­ing an early din­ner, enjoy­ing a freak­ishly warm Octo­ber after­noon. Look­ing directly west the hori­zon was clear, but to both the north and south there were dark streaks of smoke. Dri­ven by the same desert winds that had made that after­noon so remark­ably warm, the smoke rose high into the atmos­phere from sources far­ther inland and streaked out over the ocean. Things were burn­ing, and it was look­ing bad.

Above: An enhanced NASA image of the San Diego County fires that first after­noon, Octo­ber 22, 2007 [ source ]

One of John’s cowork­ers lost his home that first night of the fire. Over the next sev­eral days, hun­dreds of thou­sands of oth­ers were tem­porar­ily home­less when they were ordered to leave their homes in the largest evac­u­a­tion in Cal­i­for­nia his­tory. In the final tally, a quar­ter of the county’s land had burned and at least peo­ple seven had lost their lives, includ­ing sev­eral migrant work­ers who were trav­el­ing on foot, north to their jobs. (Ear­lier this year pro­ducer Laura Cas­taneda put out a doc­u­men­tary, The Devil’s Breath, on some of their sto­ries. When the his­tory of the migrant work­ers is writ­ten, it’ll be full of the sort of heroic fig­ures and try­ing cir­cum­stances that pop­u­late the Amer­i­can nar­ra­tive of the set­tle­ment of the “wild west.” )

Last year’s fires had fol­lowed a set of even more destruc­tive ones in 2003. Those came closer to my house than last year’s flames–within maybe three miles–and that first morn­ing saw a hot rain of ash and even embers.

The pho­to­jour­nal­ists were rush­ing to the fire lines, try­ing to get a shot of the dev­as­ta­tion. But it was the vision of the sun veiled in smoke drew out my cam­era that first morn­ing. There’s a color to the light that comes with fire, a per­va­sive and almost sticky yellow-brown that reminds you of sun­set col­ors even in the mid­dle of the day, but the brown­ing effect is so pro­found that every­thing looks wrong. If I didn’t tell you that the images were of smoke you might con­sider the images beau­ti­fully atmos­pheric. I guess they are, but there’s that scary coun­ter­bal­anc­ing of some­thing being out of con­trol and dangerous.

(That vibra­tion of beauty and ter­ror goes straight back to eighteenth-century aes­thet­ics, and to early writ­ings of peo­ple like Joseph Addi­son, who remarked that “The Alps fill the mind with an agree­able kind of hor­ror.” This is rich ground that been mined by a num­ber of artists for the last quarter-millennium. In the pho­tog­ra­phy world, John Pfahl and Richard Mis­rach are just a cou­ple of those who have pro­duced sig­nif­i­cant bod­ies of work draw­ing on this con­flicted Roman­tic notion of the sub­lime. And as long as peo­ple have this notion of awe and pow­er­less­ness, there will be cen­turies more of art draw­ing from it.)

[ next, after the fires… ]

October 18 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • rambles | Tags: 2003 • Cedar Fire • fire • Santa Ana winds | 3 Comments »

garden-deficit disorder

It’s get­ting to be that sea­son. My morn­ings are now see­ing me at work around sun­rise and home at a time when it’s almost dark by when I’ve fin­ished prepar­ing and eat­ing din­ner. And for the next two months it’s only going to be get­ting worse as we head towards the dark­en­ing maw of win­ter. At least I only do these long days four times a week. Still, I’m get­ting a seri­ous case of with­drawal from the garden.

This is the time of year when I really start to feel envi­ous about John’s posi­tion, work­ing out of the house. In between doing what he does on the phone and com­puter he gets a chance to keep up with the hap­pen­ings on the street. The neigh­bors across the street just had a new baby, John reported, and he’s really cute. John also reported that the mother of one of our neigh­bors just died, and the neigh­bor two houses down is now in a nurs­ing home, com­pletely inco­her­ent, after being ambu­lanced away from the house not much more than a week ago.

Look­ing at the implaca­ble facades of the houses on the street, it’s hard to tell that any­thing is hap­pen­ing. But being home, around the neigh­bors, John is able to keep up with dramas.

John is also able to keep up with things hap­pen­ing in the gar­den. A story from the past week was of look­ing out the win­dow to see the cat din­ing on the ten­der new leaves of the mil­let seedlings that I’d set in the ground not many days before.

“You didn’t stop her?” I protested.

“It was soooo cute,” he said.

Well, this was the cat over last week­end. How can you dis­ci­pline basic instinc­tual behav­ior in such a sweet cat? Okay, okay, I calmed down a bit.

But I was still wor­ried about the mil­let plants.

Left: Orna­men­tal mil­let, Pen­nise­tum glau­cum ‘Pur­ple Majesty’ [ source ]

Orna­men­tal red mil­let hit the gar­den world in a big way with the intro­duc­tion of the Pur­ple Majesty F1 strain in 2003. This slen­der four– to five-footer was awarded the All-America Selec­tions Gold Medal, which basi­cally assured that the plant would end up in gar­den cen­ters and seed cat­a­logs all over. That strain spawned oth­ers, includ­ing the shorter ‘Jester,’ which I’ve been start­ing to see a lot of–even at the Home Depot gar­den center.

Even though pur­ple mil­let is now so déclassé, now that it’s hit Home Depot, I decided I wanted to try it. A seed order a few weeks back brought me a hefty packet of the orig­i­nal Pur­ple Majesty. Some of the seeds went into pots and they sprouted in less than a week. And then the lit­tle fel­las were ready for the gar­den, when they were adjust­ing and start­ing to increase in size. And then the lawn­mower cat attacked.

Well, I’m glad to say, I could hardly see any cat dam­age to the seedlings–a chewed blade here and there, but noth­ing major. Here’s a lit­tle clump of them as they stand today. The largest is push­ing eight inches tall, and the red col­oration is start­ing to develop now that they’re bask­ing in full sun half of the day. It might be too late in the year for them to develop the dra­matic seed heads, but I’ll have some nice pur­ple, ver­ti­cal plants in the gar­den in no time. Since these are hardy to zone 8, they’ll make it through win­ter just fine and be bloom­ing away before you know it.

Any­way, now that I’ve have a cou­ple hours in the gar­den this morn­ing I’m feel­ing reju­ve­nated, espe­cially now that I know that the plants I’ve been slav­ing over lately have come through unscathed. And of course it’s been nice to have some gar­den time to spend with the cat. To pro­tect the mil­let, I’ve been point­ing out to her the lit­tle grass seedlings that are real weeds. So far the feline lawn­mower seems con­tent with the other options.

October 17 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles • rambles | Tags: cats • October • Pennisetum glaucum 'Purple Majesty' • purple • purple millet • the neighborhood | 2 Comments »

the little black book

I guess I’m a lit­tle old-fashioned because, yes, I occa­sion­ally still buy books. Even with all the infor­ma­tion you can find on the web, there’s some­thing sat­is­fy­ing in hold­ing a book in the hand. It’s the dif­fer­ence between look­ing at a cal­en­dar of flow­ers and actu­ally hold­ing one in your hand, feel­ing the soft­ness of the petals and tak­ing in the fragrance.

Last week’s mail brought me a copy of a book I posted on recently, Karen Platt’s Black Magic & Pur­ple Pas­sion: Dark Foliage and Flow­ers for the Gar­den. This is a slen­der lit­tle vol­ume that has its heart a long list­ing of plants that have black or dark pur­ple attrib­utes: flow­ers, foliage, or stems. Most of the plant descrip­tions come with brief infor­ma­tion on cul­ti­va­tion and propagation.

There are dozens of pho­tos of indi­vid­ual plants, but because of the eco­nom­ics of pub­lish­ing they’re all clus­tered on the glossy pages in the cen­ter of the book. It would of course have been more use­ful to have the images next to the descriptions.

Ear­lier I posted a cou­ple plants in my gar­den that I’d con­sider black or dark pur­ple, and this book listed one of them, black bamboo.

The book addi­tion­ally men­tions a cou­ple oth­ers that are already in my gar­den. Aeo­nium arboreum, shown here in semi-shade against the green leaves of an aloe, is a suc­cu­lent that has found a home in many South­ern Cal­i­for­nia gar­dens. I’d def­i­nitely con­sider it to have leaves that are very close to black. It’s incred­i­bly easy to grow as long as it doesn’t freeze.

Another of the plants listed in the book, Pen­este­mon dig­i­talis ‘Husker Red,” is one that I’d con­sider more to be more of a green plant that’s got gen­tle red-purple tints to the leaves. My plant lives in a semi-shaded loca­tion, how­ever, and given more sun it might develop darker foliage. Also, what one per­son would con­sider dark pur­ple, another might call a totally dif­fer­ent color. Time to get out the Pan­tone color charts!

Once you start think­ing about all the color you see in the plants around you, you could eas­ily add to the author’s list of dark plants. Here’s the ‘Pur­ple Vol­cano’ clone of a US East-Coast sage, Salvia lyrata. The flow­ers are insignif­i­cant, but the foliage is this gor­geous dark pur­ple. I have it planted here with yellow-and-red gail­lar­dia, though I think I’d have done bet­ter pair­ing it with pinks or blues. Well, it is trans­plant­ing sea­son, and it’s amaz­ing what a per­son can do with a shovel in five min­utes’ time…

Three plant­ing dia­grams in the book give some ideas about how these black flow­ers and plants could be used. One pairs the dark plants with gold col­ors, and a sec­ond uses silver-colored plants for a foil. The third shows an “island” plant­ing, where a walk­way sur­rounds a bed of dark plants. I’m sure that the plant­ing schemes would give you strik­ing results.

Unfor­tu­nately the book doesn’t have any real-world pho­tos of these plant­ing sug­ges­tions or of any of the dark plants in a real gar­den set­ting, and that’s prob­a­bly the books weak­est link. Per­son­ally, I can begin to imag­ine how a small hand­ful of plants might look together, but I really have to see pho­tos of the more com­pli­cated plant­i­ngs for them to make any sense to me.

Some­how all this color-theming seems like a par­tic­u­larly British thing–just think of Gertrude Jekyll’s influ­en­tial White Gar­den, planted in 1948 at Siss­inghurst. (And of course, Jekyll is well known for her dis­cus­sions of gar­den color.)

Even if you don’t want to cross over to the dark side, this books has many good ideas for plants that you could use to pro­vide pock­ets of dark inter­est through­out your own gar­den. What bet­ter way to appre­ci­ate the bril­liant flow­ers most of us have in our gar­dens than by hav­ing some sub­tle, dark plants to set them off?

October 14 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: black • color combinations • Karen Platt • purple | No Comments »

where’s waldo?

There used to be a large, mature tan­ger­ine tree in the yard across street. When the mid­win­ter peak sea­son came around, all the neigh­bors could help them­selves to amaz­ingly good tan­ger­ines. (What they say about home-grown toma­toes being way bet­ter than store-bought can be said of tan­ger­ines as well.)

There was a minor neigh­bor­hood tragedy when a new neigh­bor moved in across the street. Think­ing that the tan­ger­ine was a big lemon tree, one of them pointed the tree out to her gar­dener. “Take that thing out,” she instructed.

When the neigh­bors, one by one, told her how much they had loved the tan­ger­ine tree the new owner got increas­ingly despon­dent. Turns out she really loved tan­ger­ines and never would have had the tree taken out if she knew what it was.

To avoid future tragedies of this sort at least two of us on the street put in our own tan­ger­ine trees last year. Mine flow­ered nicely for sev­eral weeks this past spring, and the flow­ers turned to lit­tle baby tan­ger­ines. It was look­ing like the tree’s first crop would net a cou­ple dozen nice fruits this season.

Then some heat waves hit, time dur­ing which I hadn’t given the plant enough sup­ple­men­tal water­ing. The tree sulked and dropped all but three or four fruits. I’d been count­ing my tan­ger­ines before they’d been ripened and picked. More sad days.

Then, this past month, the tree started bloom­ing again. I can’t say that I’ve ever noticed a dou­ble bloom­ing period on cit­rus, but my life expe­ri­ence with cit­rus has been with one tree of the fairly reli­able Oro Blanco grape­fruit. (The grape­fruit has bloomed once annu­ally and fruited heav­ily in alter­nat­ing years.)

I made a point of water­ing the tree heav­ily while it was bloom­ing, and the plant is now cov­ered with more green fruit than it had last spring. Count­ing them is like a “where’s Waldo” exer­cise, with more lit­tle fruits seem­ingly appear­ing out of plain sight. This branch has at least seven on it.

It’s pre­ma­ture to start count­ing ripe tan­ger­ines at this point, but at least now it’s start­ing to look like a rea­son­able first crop for a young plant. This vari­ety, the Frost Owari clone of Sat­suma tan­ger­ines, bears heav­ily in Decem­ber. (Sat­sumas are also referred to as “man­darins.”) Expect baby pic­tures as they start to turn color…

October 13 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Frost Owari tangerine • mandarins • neighbors • tangerines | 2 Comments »

back fence/black fence

I don’t know about you, but cer­tain kinds of basic house­hold main­te­nance can seem about as unin­ter­est­ing as watch­ing beige paint dry. To keep me moti­vated, I some­times offer myself lit­tle rewards. Why not make the repairs I need to make, but at the same time why not mod­ify the orig­i­nal plan a lit­tle bit to keep things interesting?

There was a back fence that we installed almost twenty years ago. At the time we were a lit­tle lazy, and the thought of some plain exte­rior ply­wood nailed to some sup­ports sounded like an accept­able solu­tion for an out of sight, out of mind piece of the yard. Some of the fence hadn’t fared well over the years, how­ever, and for some of the recent week­ends we’ve worked on repairs.

So we knocked out the worst of the pan­els and replaced them with new pressure-treated ply­wood. And instead of plain, unfin­ished pan­els, I thought it was time to make it look like some­thing other than a fence that might have thrown together by a cou­ple of twenty-somethings with a still-developing sense of how the world should look.

I con­sider the house and yard as a bit of a liv­ing lab­o­ra­tory. Why not paint the pan­els a color that no one in their right mind would paint them? Say, some­thing like…black. And why not dress up the plain pan­els with some bands of steel that will rust to a color that’ll match some of the steel details that are start­ing to appear around the yard?

In these pho­tos the steel has only begun to rust. By mid­win­ter it should be nicely browned all over.

I think the greens and browns of the plants show up nicely against the new back­ground instead of retreat­ing into it. And even if it’s not exactly the color you would have painted it, the fence at least doesn’t look like it’s about to fall down…

October 11 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden • rambles | Tags: fences • hardscape • maintenance • plywood | 2 Comments »

a rehearsal

Ear­lier I shared a closeup photo of a san­tolina that had flow­ered but where I hadn’t cut off the spent blooms. The stems had devel­oped a gen­tly lyri­cal brown coun­ter­point to the blue-gray foliage.

Here’s what the plant looks like now as you turn off the side­walk towards the house. (The plant in the back­ground is the com­mon red foun­tain grass, Pen­nise­tum x avena ‘Rubrum’.)

I’m treat­ing this as a bit of a rehearsal for what the gar­den might look like in future years. I’ve set three plants of two dif­fer­ent buck­wheats in the ground, and I have at least six pots of another buck­wheat that I’m rais­ing from seed. These are plants that have umbels of tiny flow­ers for two or more months of the year. And then the whole flow­er­ing assem­bly turns brown to black.

The first thing a typ­i­cal gar­dener would be tempted to do is to chop the stem back. But these dried stems hover del­i­cately over the plants and have a quiet beauty of their own. Once you change your expec­ta­tions of how to main­tain a plant–i.e., chop­ping off any dead flowers–and let the plants do their thing, they can be amaz­ing in new and dif­fer­ent ways. (Of course, many plants look much bet­ter by dead­head­ing the spent blooms. It’s the rare gar­den plant that ages so grace­fully as these san­toli­nas or buckwheats.)

Here’s a shot from the past week­end of Eri­o­gonum gigan­teum, St. Catherine’s lace, past its bloom period at Quail Botan­i­cal Gar­dens. This large buck­wheat is native to the Chan­nel Islands off the coast of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, as well as some of the adja­cent coast. It looks a lit­tle like Queen Anne’s lace for a while in the spring, and then the stems dry to a warm rust or dark brown that I didn’t cap­ture very well in this photo of a plant in the shade.

It’s a look that’s more infor­mal than many gar­dens in the neigh­bor­hood, a look the coex­ists eas­ily with dried grasses and casual shrubs, but not with roses or man­i­cured bor­ders of annuals.

I’m prepar­ing myself for the look with some of these untrimmed plants, and I’m already anx­ious for how the buck­wheats will look next sum­mer. And maybe by next sum­mer the neigh­bors will be ready for the look, too. The untrimmed san­tolina is just the rehearsal.

October 08 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: brown • buckwheats • Eriogonum • Eriogonum giganteum | No Comments »

appreciating black

The Inter­net is a hum­bling con­trap­tion. Any time you think you’ve got a new and excit­ing idea you can trawl the web for a few min­utes and find that someone’s had the same idea long before you.

Case in point: With Hal­loween approach­ing, I was think­ing about the color black and how that’s prob­a­bly the last color you’ll hear a gar­dener talk­ing about using in the gar­den. And then I run across this book online, Black Magic & Pur­ple Pas­sion: Dark Foliage and Flow­ers for the Gar­den, by Karen Platt. Dang. She got there first, and in the year 2000. I haven’t had a chance to look at the book yet, but it sounds like it could be a good resource for plants that fea­ture the dark­est, rich­est depths of color.

I shouldn’t have been sur­prised. For well over a decade now, vio­las and pan­sies have been avail­able in dark black-purple col­ors. And from long before that, there’s been a near-black maroon hol­ly­hock that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s days at Mon­ti­cello. And that’s just the tip of the black iceberg.

Look­ing around my gar­den I can come up with a cou­ple more inter­est­ing exam­ples of plants and flow­ers that come in black or some­thing pretty darn close to it, dontcha know (as Sarah Palin might say…).

Andean sage, Salvia dis­color, has these lit­tle dark, dark flow­ers that read as black more than the pro­found pur­ple that they are. In my gar­den the plant gets about three feet tall and like most sages sprawls a bit. It’s best used where you can appre­ci­ate the dark flow­ers up close. The rest of the plant is close to white in color–pale green on the tops of the leaves, white below–so this is a plant with lots of inter­est­ing contrast.

And then there’s black bam­boo, Phyl­lostachys nigra, the stems of which ripen in their sec­ond year to this beau­ti­ful black color.

Although listed as grow­ing twenty to thirty feet, the plant in my gar­den has stayed closer to ten or twelve feet tall. Give it water if you want it big, or only an occa­sional offer­ing, like I do, to keep it smaller.

Being a clump­ing bam­boo it’s pretty well behaved when it comes to spread­ing. Here it’s con­tained on two sides by walls, and to keep it in bounds John dug a shal­low trench join­ing the two walls, dumped in some left­over dry cement mix, and watered it in. The plant crosses the con­crete line only occa­sion­ally, and when it does it’s easy to snip the way­ward rhizomes.

The hard­est job with this plant is thin­ning out the stems that have died back. Every other year I devote half an hour or so and dis­ap­pear inside the plant with a pair of hand pruners–not a job for the claus­tro­pho­bic. The job is best done after spring nest­ing sea­son, after some of the local birds use the dense foliage to raise their young.

Want more ideas for black plants? Take a look at King Seeds, a seed resource in New Zealand where they have flow­ers arranged by color, includ­ing black! (There they list pop­pies, dianthus, nas­tur­tiums and nemophila ‘Penny Black’ among their dark-flowered offerings.)

Hal­loween isn’t far away, of course. But these are great plants that deserve a place in gar­dens year round.

October 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Andean sage • black • black bamboo • color • dark flowers • Phyllostachys nigra • Salvia discolor | 3 Comments »

bamboozled

Yes­ter­day after­noon I had to run an errand up to coastal north­ern San Diego County. The des­ti­na­tion was two, three miles from Quail Botan­i­cal Gar­dens, in Encini­tas. Even with a pre­dic­tion for pos­si­ble rain­show­ers, it seemed like a worth­while stop, par­tic­u­larly since I hadn’t been there for three or four years.

Left: The entrance to Quail. Am I too much of a con­spir­acy the­o­rist in think­ing that the yel­low flow­ers and foliage were planted to coor­di­nate with the big yel­low arrow point­ing to the entry?

The first thing that hit me was the admis­sion charge, which for John and me totaled twenty bucks. If they hadn’t been host­ing a spe­cial event this week­end, there would have been an addi­tional charge to park.

When I first started going there the gar­den was oper­ated by San Diego County, and there either was no admis­sion charge, or it was neg­li­gi­ble. When the County hit finan­cial hard times in the 1990s, one of the first things they decided to cut was pub­lic sup­port for Quail. I’m a firm believer in pub­lic sup­port of open space and gar­dens like Quail, and to have to pay this kind of sur­charge is scan­dalous. To me it’s not an issue of my being cheap. Instead it’s a moral issue verg­ing on democ­racy, the col­lec­tive good, an notions of right and wrong.

The gar­dens are located in the county’s upscale coastal region, just a stone’s throw from the La Costa Resort and Spa, so the idea of pay­ing ten bucks to look at plants might not seem like any sort of hard­ship to much of the com­mu­nity. But think of all the peo­ple that can’t afford to take advan­tage of the grounds. But that’s our county for you. At least, to their credit, the grounds orderly and the plants are well-maintained.

Any­way, back to the visit: We parked and took in the grounds. One of the high­lights there is an impres­sive assort­ment of bam­boos. Their pam­phlet calls it “the nation’s largest col­lec­tion of bam­boo, from giant tim­ber bam­boo to exotic smaller bam­boos for your home gar­den.” It was enough to make me want to take out the remain­ing lawn and replace it with a stand of run­ning bam­boos. John was less enthu­si­as­tic about the idea.

It wasn’t hard to be impressed by the giant trop­i­cal bam­boo, Den­dro­cal­mus gigan­teus.

Some of the “smaller” bam­boos were pretty strik­ing as well. These are two shots of the striped blow­pipe bam­boo, Bam­busa dolichoclada ‘Stripe.’ The plants are still tall but how tall I can’t say. It’s like being down­town some­where: When you’re at the foot of a build­ing it’s some­times hard to tell if its a few sto­ries tall or one of the major skyscrapers.

Another of the bam­boos with var­ie­gated yellow-and-green stalks is this painted bam­boo, Bam­busa vul­garis ‘Vit­tata’, shown here with the var­ie­gated leaves of an uniden­ti­fied smaller-growing bam­boo. (A plant with­out a label? What kind of botan­i­cal gar­den is this?)

Not all of the bam­boos with var­ie­gated yel­low and green stalks are huge. Here’s a rel­a­tively man­age­able Alphonse Karr bam­boo, Bam­busa mul­ti­plex ‘Alphonse Karr.’

This Ben­gal bam­boo (Bam­busa tulda ‘Stri­ata’) also exhib­ited a bit of strip­ing, only in green and white. Only a few of the stalks had strip­ing, so it’s not as pro­nounced as on the pre­vi­ous selections.

One of the pro­grams Quail has is to incor­po­rate pieces of art within the gar­dens. Here’s part of an instal­la­tion of “Steeples,” eight col­or­ful ceramic totems by Christie Benis­ton. It’s set in the midst of a shady grove of a run­ning bam­boo species that I couldn’t find a label for.

This is the plant­ing that made me want to replace the cur­rent remain­ing patch of lawn. (Bam­boos are giant grasses, so con­cep­tu­ally I sup­pose you could call a bam­boo grove a giant lawn–and one you don’t have to mow!) Imag­ine open­ing the din­ing room door and hav­ing a grove of these pup­pies out­side. It prob­a­bly would cut down on the sun­bathing oppor­tu­ni­ties, but this would be an amaz­ing planting.

October 05 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • places • plant profiles | Tags: bamboo • botanical gardens • government funding • parks • Quail Botanical Gardens | 3 Comments »

critter problems

The last of the toma­toes were start­ing to looked snacked on. And then there was this bla­tantly half-eaten apple lean­ing over the fence from the neighbor’s.

The fruits and veg­gies in my yard can go weeks with no com­pe­ti­tion from the local fauna. And then all of a sud­den things start to go miss­ing: that apri­cot that I’ve been eying for weeks, or the tomato that’s just start­ing to show color.

If there are lots of spoils to go around it’s not a big deal. But if we’re talk­ing about that last tomato of the sea­son, or the fall’s first leaves of kale, then I get very concerned.

The cur­rent crit­ter prob­lem: pos­sums (or “opos­sums,” take your pick on what you want to call them). These lit­tle beasts keep vam­pire hours, appear­ing after sun­set, and dis­ap­pear­ing before the full moon sets. They have no prob­lem get­ting high into trees or climb­ing over tall fences.

One recent night I was in the yard as the neigh­bors were talk­ing. Then they got all quiet, like they were inter­rupted by some­thing astonishing.

“Oh good. It’s going over to their yard,” some­one said. And by “their,” they were of course mean­ing “my.” And I’m sure they had just expe­ri­enced a pos­sum sighting.

I have yet to see one this year, though I’ve seen the dam­age. [Cue the space-alien music…] They’re out there. Some­where. Watch­ing. Wait­ing. Ready to invade.

Maybe that’s why I just put on my stack of books to read Peter Coates’s Amer­i­can Per­cep­tions of Immi­grant and Inva­sive Species : Strangers on the Land, a book from 2006. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but there are dis­cus­sions of invad­ing ani­mals like Eng­lish spar­rows and Euro­pean star­lings, and intro­duced plants like euca­lyp­tus and Japan­ese cherry trees. And these out­siders are related to Amer­i­can notions sur­round­ing immi­gra­tion, xeno­pho­bic ten­den­cies, and the Amer­i­can con­cern over attacks from outer space.

Perus­ing the index I’ve just noticed that there’s no men­tion of my imme­di­ate prob­lem, the Vir­ginia pos­sum, an ani­mal that was intro­duced to the West dur­ing the 1930s, per­haps as a poten­tial food source dur­ing the Depres­sion. Too bad.

I’m con­vinced that this lit­tle mar­su­pial that’s laughed at in an unend­ing sup­ply of jokes about slow-moving roadkill-victims is actu­ally a crea­ture of some secret higher intel­li­gence with immense pow­ers. It clearly has it fig­ured out how to con­trol my mind. How else can you explain my work­ing long hours, plant­ing and tend­ing my gar­den, just to keep the local pos­sum pop­u­la­tion sup­plied with a deli­cious bounty of fresh produce?

Be very afraid.

October 04 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: garden pests • invasive species • opossums • Peter Coates • possums | 1 Comment »