I’ve been thinking a lot about weeds lately. Now that the weather is changing, the little cool season green interlopers are starting to show themselves with a vengeance. And as I mentioned earlier, I’m reading American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species : Strangers on the Land by Peter Coates.
The epigram that starts off chapter 3 is an amazing quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince:
There were on the planet where the little prince lived–as on all planets–good and bad plants…If it is only a sprout of radish or the sprig of a rose-bush, one would let it grow wherever it might wish. But when it is a bad plant, one must destroy it as soon as possible, the very first instant that one recognizes it. Now there were terrible seeds on the planet that was the home of the little prince; and these were the seeds of the baobab. The soil of that planet was infested with them. A baobab is something you will never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabas are too many, they split it in pieces.
I’m not sure if Saint-Exupéry ever met a real live baobab plant, the world’s largest succulent, shown to the left in a photo by Quinn Norton (used under the Creative Commons 1.0 Attribution General License) [ source ].
And I’m not sure if the author was just using the word “baobab” just because it sounds cool and deliciously evil. But his description of a plant from hell sure describes a lot of the weeds that I feel compelled to keep up with.
After all, I wouldn’t want the world to split into pieces just because I was too lazy to weed my garden!
Here are a few mostly unrelated things I’ve been storing up.
Shopping for Pumpkins
McLean, Virginia photo by Joel Sternfeld
First off, I wanted to share this fun(?) photo that’s only a few days late for Canadian Thanksgiving or a couple weeks early for the US holiday. (Be sure to click it to enlarge it to get the full effect.) The image is “McLean, Virginia (1978)” by photographer Joel Sternfeld. It’s his best-known photo and the cover to one of the editions of his book, American Prospects.
A big part of photography can be being in the right place at the right time. But then you have to know when to snap the shutter. Sternfeld nailed this one!
Ornamental Grasses
Grasses have been used as lawn materials for centuries, but the last couple decades have seen an explosion in the use of ornamental grasses that you don’t attack with lawnmowers. The Canadian firm, Bluestem Nursery, has assembled one of the better brief guides to dozens of commonly-used ornamental grasses. When does a grass bloom? How much water does it need? How large does it get? Just take a look at the great summary. Click on the plant name for photos and a more detailed description. It doesn’t have every plant you’ll run into in a seed catalog, but it has plenty of the hardier species.
Penstemons from Seed
A few weeks ago I was planning to sow seeds of a couple species of penstemon. Some of the species in the genus require a cold snap to germinate, others require light, while some respond to a fairly elaborate string of temperature changes. And some just spring to life after you sprinkle them in some soil and water them in. I had no idea what kind of treatment my species required until I went trawling the web. That was when I ran across Jim Swayne’s penstemon seed germination methodology pages.
There you’ll find several hundred penstemon species listed, along with brief germination notes on how you make the little seeds come to life. (For example, one of the more elaborate routines, for P. hartwegii, goes something like: “Sow fresh seed @ 70ºF (21ºC), sow stored seed under thin cover 8 wks @ 40ºF (4ºC), move to 50ºF (10ºC) under light; if no germ. in 4 wks, move to 60ºF (16ºC).” Fortunately my two species were closer to the “just add water” category.)
An Election Video You Haven’t Seen
Leaving the garden, I wanted share this clip in recognition of the elections just concluded. It may be the last election footage you’ll need to watch this season: a promo for Please Vote for Me, a Danish documentary from 2007 on an election for Class Monitor for a third grade class in Wuhan, China. It’s a little Sesame Street in parts, but it’s got its Lord of the Flies moments as well.
Linda lives in inland San Diego, although nowhere near the extreme eastern frontiers of the county. Still, during the October 2007 wildfires, she was evacuated for several days when the flames came close to her home.
Recently a booklet showed up at her house. Entitled Will You be Prepared for the Next Wildfire?, it listed the steps you can follow to make your home more fire-resistant. Interestingly more than half of the pamphlet was dedicated to landscaping.
One of the main ideas the publication lays out is to develop “defensible space” around your house. The photo below shows the basic concept better than any words could [ source ].
The other landscaping tips deal with selecting the best plants to have near your house. Two pages of fire-resistant trees, shrubs, groundcovers, vines and perennials round out the recommendations.
Being the plant expert that I am (yeah right…) I did notice a couple of little proofreading glitches with the pamphlet. There’s a photo of something labeled “coyote bush,” but the plant is something altogether different. Also, there’s a typo in the plant lists that calls something a “bush gerimander” instead of a “bush germander.” (It seems to be a typo somehow befitting a booklet produced by a political entity: a plant that’s the linguistic hybrid of a germander and a political district drawn by gerrymander!) But those are minor quibbles.
It’s the time of year to look back on summer to see which of the new plants were good additions to the garden. Once of my favorites of the year is Euphorbia hypericifolia ‘Diamond Frost’ (usually sold simply as Euphorbia Diamond Frost).
Euphorbia Diamond Frost plant at end of season
Introduced around 2004, the plant is getting to be very commonly available, even hitting my local Home Depots this season. The individual flowers are tiny and nothing to write Martha about, but the plant is covered with them all season, making it look like a cloud of white vapor.
It’s listed as a filler plant, but I think it’s best used as a single accent plant near where you’d walk by it and appreciate the white mist of flowers. Also, since the individual flowers are so tiny, I like it combined with other plants that have smaller flowers or have a more delicate plant texture. Here you see it paired with the small-scale but spiky Dianella revoluta ‘Baby Bliss,’ pink Gaura lindheimeri, and the red-and-white Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips.’
Closeup of Euphorbia Diamond Frost’s flowers
Overall height with a year’s growth: 18 inches.
Overall width: 24 inches.
Use: front border, in pots.
Exposure: sun to part shade.
Water needs: dry to average to regular.
The plant is listed as an annual except in zone 10, with a minimum recommended temperature of 40 degrees. My plant went in the ground last November and made it through a typical San Diego coastal winter of occasional light frosts but no serious freezing. The plant sat sulking and leafless through the worst of it, but come warmer weather it put out leaves and began to flower. Once the nights reliably topped 50 degrees, the plant began to flower its head off.
Here’s a little helping of some of what was blooming in the garden today.
I wanted to have a little more fun with the pictures than showing you a slideshow of the garden. Only the first one, Camellia sasanqua ‘Cleopatra’ with an attendant ant, is a basic straightforward shot. The rest are cropped and then collaged together. See if you can guess what everything is.
There’s an answer key at the end.
Camellia sasanqua
Monday florals 2
Monday florals 1
Monday Florals 3
Monday Florals 4
The answers (top to bottom, left to right):
Camellia sasanqua ‘Cleopatra’
Paperwhite narcissus
Alyssum Plectranthus verticillatus (Creeping Charlie) flowers
Epidendrum hybrid, red Solanum pyracanthum
Thai basil blooms
Strawberry blossom Melampodium Derby (volunteer from last season)
Epidendrum hybrid, orange Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips’ Cestrum elegans Gaillardia pulchella (Blanket flower) Salvia nemorosa ‘Snow Hills’ Rotheca myricoides ‘Ugandense’ (Butterfly bush)
Heliotrope
Zinnia volunteer from 2007 season, finally showing itself Salvia cacaliaefolia (Ivy-leaved sage) with caterpillar Strelitzia reginae (Bird of paradise) from below Salvia sagittata (Arrow-leaved sage) Oxalis purpurea
As my recent cold began to fade I began to put away the garden picture books and reach for a book that I knew would require a little more focus and reflection. I’m not that far into it yet, but Peter Coates’s American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land is proving to be a surprisingly lively read for a book that seems aimed at an academic audience.
With interesting histories of “invading” plants and animals set against historical debates over human immigration, it’s a volume that could be interesting for many thoughtful gardeners and birders. Here are just a couple passages that touch on some of the issues in the book:
“Without question the most deplorable event in the history of American ornithology,” declared William Dawson in 1903, “was the introduction of the English Sparrow.” This may sound absurd to those acquainted with the passenger pigeon’s fate. Yet Dawson insisted that the notorious extinctions of the pigeon and the great auk … were mere “trifles” compared to the frightful repercussions for various small native birds of the “invasion of that wretched foreigner.” A dramatic remark of this sort from a century ago serves as a welcome corrective to the unreflective tone of current literature on bioinvasion, which frequently intimates that today’s level of concern in unmatched.
Those who speak of ecological nativism … give the impression that antipathy toward exotic species and the simultaneous championing of native biota have been particularly robust in the United States. This view usually emerges by default: commentators simply neglect to reflect on other national experiences. [Mark] Sagoff, [in “What’s Wrong with Exotic Species?”] though, directly compares American intolerance with a more relaxed European “cosmopolitanism” that “tolerates porous borders” for immigrant flora and fauna. He sees this as a reflection of different New and Old World conceptions of nature. Whereas Americans are dedicated to the “idea of pristine nature,” as enshrined in the related concepts of wilderness and indigenous species (native plants and animals, by implication, being biotic citizens of a terrestrial Eden), these notions, he claims, lack cultural, spiritual, and historical meaning for Europeans, who prefer their nature to be a blend of the nonhuman and the cultural. The alien organisms Europeans worry about and are keen to exclude from their countryside and farms, he explains, are genetically modified crops (mostly born in the United States).
I swear that I’m not trying to look like Annie Liebovitz or some wacked paparazzo, but I often drag a camera along when I go looking for plants at nurseries.
I used to take a pad of paper and a pen, but this method has started to prove a lot more useful. I can quickly “jot down” the names of plants by taking a picture of the signs that most nurseries thoughtfully provide.
Those signs often have interesting cultural information as well. And if I’m taken with a plant I’ve never seen before, it’s easy to commit it to pixels and bring the photo back home to think about whether the plant could possibly have a place in an already overcrowded garden.
And should Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie stroll through, I can discretely snap their picture for the next installment of Access Hollywood. I’m sure the world wants to know what plants they want to have in their garden.
Unless you’re reading this blog using a bicycle-powered generator in the desert outback somewhere east of Perth you’ve heard of the revolutionary change in the leadership of the United States. It’s the culmination of tireless work for equality and civil rights by generations of good people. In Tuesday’s California elections, in addition to voting for Barack Obama in a landslide, voters also overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2, a worthy initiative that mandates more humane cage conditions for chickens and other farm animals.
I should be happy, and I am genuinely happy–about those and many other things that happened election day.
This gardener is pissed
But politics is a messy beast, and this gardener is having a bout of bad attitude. It started on Monday with the first signs of a bad cold and then worsened as some of the political fallout from Tuesday’s elections became clearer. So often, along with the good and revolutionary, you get delivered the vile and reactionary. In the same California elections I referred to the populace narrowly approved Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment rescinding the rights of gay and lesbian citizens from marrying each other, thereby upholding the traditional values of having gays and lesbians marry people of the opposite gender.
In effect, in their actions, the voters of California decided to grant additional civil rights to poultry, while at the same time rescinding rights for the state’s gay and lesbian population.
So, are we to conclude that, in a state where it takes 55% of the vote to raise property taxes, all it takes is a slim majority of the population to take rights away from thousands of its fellow citizens? Have the California voters said that my commitment in marriage last June to John is now null and void? Not so fast!
The lawsuits have begun, and one of the arguments is that very issue of the size of the vote necessary to revise a basic right that’s in the constitution versus merely amending it. Legal challenges often get a bad rap in this country, but if it had been left exclusively to the popular vote we’d still have things like segregation and industrial runoff igniting the rivers of the Northeast.
My current cold will pass, along with my current bad attitude. No matter the immediate outcomes of the challenges to Proposition 8, so too will pass this country’s romance with intolerance. No matter what transpires, John and I will continue to consider ourselves married.
It’ll take a while for the culture to change, but the signs are everywhere. Although people over 30 voted for California’s Proposition 8, the population 30 and under soundly rejected it by a margin of two to one.
Another sign: Let me quote the final sentence of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, in which he sets the bar for the changes that would need to take place. Notice the list, the agenda King sets.
…And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
And let me compare that the agenda Barack Obama set in his speech Tuesday night at Chicago’s Grant Park. His list, his agenda, his America resides in the third paragraph from the very beginning.
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen, by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different, that their voices could be that difference.
It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states.
We are, and always will be, the United States of America.
At no time in his campaign did Obama defend gay marriage. That would have been political suicide. But it’s telling that we are no longer invisible as we were in King’s day. This is a different vision of America that will come to be as the next generation finally gets its say.
The plant catalog of the Tree of Life Nursery is impressive. Selections hail mainly from the state of California, but they carry a few selections from the Southwest United States. Refreshingly they also augment their selection with plants from Baja California.
(The biological zones of Southern California spread south of the imaginary line of the international border, so the inclusion of plants from Baja makes perfect sense. The division of Alta California from Baja California is a purely human and arbitrary one. There’s no river, no range of mountains to divide the two countries, only an arbitrary line on a map and stretches of border fencing that range from wispy strands of barbed wire to welded pieces of steel left over from Operation Desert Storm.)
The Tree of Life catalog even lists poison oak! (“Deciduous shrub, vining, shiny leaves, skin irritant, valuable for wildlife, revegetation.”) When I visited on Saturday I didn’t see any out on the sales tables, though I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d have offered to don their hazmat suits and bring me up a couple from the propagation areas… They did have a good sampling of much of the rest of the catalog, and I had the time to carefully look over each of their offerings.
The nursery is surrounded by plantings that include a few of their offerings. Grown-up specimens are often completely different from the one-gallon babies, so it’s a great opportunity to see how some plants will mature.
Beware of Rattlesnakes sign
To give everything an authentic early-California feel they apparently have even thought to pepper their grounds with period-appropriate reptiles. Unfortunately I didn’t see any.
The new discovery of the weekend was a delicate but stunning stand of late-autumn golden grasses of the purple three-awn (Aristida purpurea). Swaying gently in the afternoon breeze and backlit with the day’s sun, they looked like a slightly larger, less floppy native take on the Mexican feather grass that’s getting to be a beautiful cliche in our gardens and quite potentially a new pest in our local canyons. Unfortunately I was so taken with the grasses that I neglected to take their portrait.
It was tough to say no to so many interesting plants, but I was there on a mission: I needed something extremely low and spreading for next to some stepping stones that I’d installed last weekend. The location gets close to zero additional water throughout the year, so the plants had to be happy with that kind of deprivation.
Artemisia californica
Trips to nurseries without a plan in hand can sometimes lead to a bad case of assortment-itis, with a trunk-load of wildly dissimilar plants with clashing cultural needs. I ended up with three selections which, though different species, have similar cultural needs. Also I thought their strongly contrasting plant forms and colors would look well together: a prostrate form of the gray-green foliaged coastal California sagebrush (Artemisia californica ‘Canyon Gray’), a low selection of California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum ‘Dana Point’), and the almost white-foliaged Carmel aster (Lessingia filaginifolia v. californica).
Dana Point buckwheat
Carmel aster
And, um, yes. I did get a couple other plants. But not too many…
The most radical thing you can do is stay home. –Gary Snyder, quoted by Rebecca Solnit in the current Orion
With all my apologies to Gary Snyder, Saturday included a quick trip up to Tree of Life Nursery in Southern Orange County, one of the main specialists in California native plants. I found it something between tragic and funny that I traveled an hour and a half to look at plants that lived four houses away. But then there were all those unusual plants that I’d never see in a lifetime of hiking around California.
Camp Pendleton
Vehicle tracks at Camp Pendleton
The trip from my house in San Diego traverses the coastal I-5 corridor, which in these parts is characterized by suburban sprawl with intermittent splices of something resembling nature. The first big splices are the lagoons: Los Peñasquitos, San Elijo, Batiquitos. And then, after Oceanside, you hit the open hillsides of Camp Pendleton that go on for miles. A freeway runs through it, so it’s anything but pristine. Also, many days you see helicopters by the highway and amphibious craft just off the coast, staging some sort of military takeover of California. Saturday was relatively quiet, however, with just the constant grind of the traffic at your back as you looked out to sea. Still, the scraped foreground didn’t help develop any sense of communing with the earth.
Soon the twin seaside domes of the San Onofre nuke plant lay down the signal that civilization is about to take over again. A few more miles of homes and businesses takes you to Ortega Highway, where a turn to the east gets you off the interstate.
You’re almost to the nursery, but not quite. Two final miles of roads through homes in San Juan Capistrano remind you that there’s an election just a few days away, and the tenor of the dozens of signs reinforces whatever stereotypes you might hold of Orange County being a conservative wonderland. (Of course, progressive Laguna Beach–which is to Orange County what Austin is to Texas–is only a few hillsides away.)
The Ortega Highway, heading to Tree of Life Nursery
Finally, for the final five miles to the nursery, the road opens up through the open shade of an oak woodland habitat. The morning is quiet and there are only a few cars and motorcycles on this tour route that eventually leads to Lake Elsinore.
Tree of Life Nursery sign
But long before you get to the lake, you find the nursery.
Tree of Life Nursery from Parking Lot
Even the first view of the place from the parking lot is promising.
Casa La Paz at Tree of Life Nursery
The main sales area centers around Casa La Paz, a scenic adobe set among the oaks. It’s easy to imagine yourself in early Alta California before the arrival of petunias and the non-Spanish White Man. This is a place that’s perfected the theater of shopping for native plants.
Inside the Casa, you’ll find a thoughtful selection of books on native and Mediterranean-climate gardens, as well as books on the local flora. In the fall, and once again in the spring, they offer free classes on replacing your lawn with California natives. But it’s the plants that bring most people here.
I’m not sure if Saint-Exupéry ever met a real live baobab plant, the world’s largest succulent, shown to the left in a photo by Quinn Norton (used under the Creative Commons 1.0 Attribution General License) [ source ].
