[ Lost in the Landscape ]

the new spring

Autumn: It’s the new spring.

At least that’s seem­ingly the case for those of us in Mediter­ranean cli­mates. With our dry sum­mers and moist win­ters, the plants best adapted to our cli­mate come close to tak­ing the sum­mer sum­mer off, and then use the onset of cooler, wet­ter weather to start think­ing about get­ting grow­ing again. Some of the shrubs in the local canyons drop some or all of their leaves in response to drought stress, and most of the wild­land annu­als dis­ap­pear not long after the last rains. Our long brown sea­son of sum­mer could almost be con­fused with the depths of win­ter in other areas.

Left: Core­op­sis gigan­tea in its defen­sive, leaf­less sum­mer mode.

Read­ing the recent blogs from those other cli­mates, I’m notic­ing that peo­ple are start­ing to with­draw from their gar­dens, hol­ing up with some favorite plants trans­planted into pots to over­win­ter indoors. These gar­den­ers are think­ing about sit­ting down with plant cat­a­logs and look­ing ahead to the hol­i­days, and then to warmer days and the reemer­gence of their gardens.

Here in San Diego, how­ever, I started off Sep­tem­ber by trans­plant­ing plants around the gar­den, read­just­ing plant spac­ing and color relationships.

Left: Some of the gar­den before and after autumn thin­ning and transplanting.

I planted dozens of lit­tle pots of seeds of plants that I want to grow this fall and next year: giant core­op­sis, datura, buck­wheats from the Chan­nel Islands, mal­lows from the desert, mil­let for the birds and some South African restios for a spot in the gar­den where the orig­i­nal plants haven’t aged grace­fully. It’s a frenzy of activ­ity of the sort that peo­ple in other cli­mates would asso­ciate with late win­ter and early spring.

All sum­mer, the patches of earth that get almost no sup­ple­men­tal water stay brown and vir­tu­ally weed-free. Once the rains return, the weeds begin to claim the uni­verse and the weed­ing chores begin again.

For­tu­nately, a layer of mulch makes a world of dif­fer­ence in keep­ing down weed seedlings. Unfor­tu­nately, areas where you want to sow wild­flower seed can’t be mulched at all if you want the lit­tle seeds to ger­mi­nate on their own. To keep down my work­load, this year I’m iso­lat­ing the wild­flower patches to just a cou­ple spots, around a cou­ple lit­tle trees that will drop their leaves for the win­ter. We’ll see how well that works out…

A few spots in my gar­den don’t have to abide by strictly Mediter­ranean water require­ments. There’s a small herb and veg­etable gar­den that gets mod­er­ate doses of water year-round. A new raised bed har­bors some trop­i­cals that get to stay moist, as well as some other selec­tions that need a lit­tle help with the water. This is the part of the gar­den that gets to expe­ri­ence sum­mer along with the rest of the world. So the task of weed­ing never com­pletely comes to an end, although it’s greatly local­ized to these spots that get watered one to three times a week.

All in all, this 2% of the Earth’s land mass that expe­ri­ences this Mediter­ranean cli­mate (the region around the Mediter­ranean Sea, west­ern South Africa, parts of the Chilean coast, west­ern Aus­tralia, and much of Cal­i­for­nia) has its own sea­sonal cycles that don’t sync up eas­ily with the rest of the world. Gar­den­ers in other areas might not under­stand us. For­give us if we have this glaze of antic­i­pa­tion coat­ing our moods these days. Even as we worry about weeds and increased gar­den chores, fall is here, and it’s the emer­gence of a whole new sea­son in the garden.

November 16 2008 03:24 pm | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: fall • Mediterranean climate • seasons • spring • transplanting • weeding • weeds

6 Responses to “the new spring”

1. Lona on 16 Nov 2008 at 5:57 pm #

   We in the North­ern cold cli­mate areas are jeal­ous about now.When we are hat­ing to say good­bye to our beau­ti­ful gar­dens and flow­ers your is just start­ing again.I think we do not real­ize that your hot dry gar­dens go into an almost dor­mant time.

2. Midwest Mom on 17 Nov 2008 at 6:49 am #

   It is amaz­ing to me to see your core­op­sis leaf­less in the sum­mer. Here in Illi­nois, sum­mer is char­ac­ter­ized by pro­fuse bloom­ing; it is our most col­or­ful season.

   I am inter­ested in your small-plot gar­den­ing meth­ods. I have lim­ited space and am explor­ing ways to plant more effi­ciently — both for orna­men­tals and pro­duce gardening.

   I will cer­tainly be back to learn more. Thanks for the good work.

   Best, MM

3. lostlandscape on 17 Nov 2008 at 7:49 pm #

   Lona and MM,
   Wel­come to San Diego! Of course not every­thing here was brown all summer–just add water and you can believe that you’re shar­ing a cli­mate with most of the rest of the world. And our cool win­ter grow­ing sea­son is now sud­denly on pause as we get hot winds stir­ring up fires every­where. But every place has the good with the bad, don’t they?

4. Jenny on 19 Nov 2008 at 3:47 pm #

   It was 75F here on Sat­ur­day and then ZAP!, 25F last night. Not much bloom­ing here any more.

   Although, on the bright side, we don’t have to mow for 6 months.

5. lostlandscape on 19 Nov 2008 at 10:14 pm #

   Eek! 25 degrees in San Diego would do away with all life forms as we know them!

   Now Jenny, don’t you go gloat­ing over the fact that at least you don’t have to mow. I don’t mow either! John does that–as long as he wants to have his lit­tle patch of grass, he’ll have to main­tain it!

6. tina on 20 Nov 2008 at 6:14 am #

   Hello there and good morn­ing! All the gar­den pic­tures caught my eye and it is for sure we here in Ten­nessee are get­ting ready to put our gar­dens to bed. You get to start on where you live in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia? How cool is that. I have never ever been to Cal­i­for­nia, though my son lived in San Diego for two years. He said it is warm for sure. Good luck with all your seeds. You have a lovely blog.

   I REALLY love the ‘for­est’ of rebar. It does look like bam­boo and at first that was what I thought it was.

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