[ Lost in the Landscape ]

really good bad topiary

Big Green Bird

Here’s a basic weep­ing fig, Ficus ben­jam­ina, that’s been con­verted into a bird. I espe­cially like the tail feath­ers (a lit­tle hard to see in this pic­ture). I neglected to get its GPS coor­di­nates, but it’s on Fan­ual Avenue in Pacific Beach, just around the cor­ner from Trader Joe’s…

December 13 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Ficus benjamina • topiary • weeping fig | 1 Comment »

garden in moonlight

Last night the moon was nearly full and the gar­den glowed brightly in its light. The images below are all long expo­sures, from sev­eral to thirty sec­onds, so a tri­pod was essential.

Moon, con­trail, clouds

Moon, con­trail, clouds…

Yucca in moonlight

Yucca in moon­light: The flow­ers are white, but light from the nearby street­light made them appear orange.

Moon­lit Water Lilies

Water lilies reflect­ing the moon, over black water, with bent papyrus stems in the fore­ground… This is my favorite pic­ture from last night.

Moon­lit papyrus

Papyrus and falling water…

The cat, exploring…

The cat, explor­ing on the roof…

Neigh­bor­hood view

A view towards the water from the deck…

Gar­den at night

…and finally, a shot of the gar­den. In long expo­sures like this one, the gar­den almost looks as if it’s being lit by the sun. But the odd, the­atri­cal col­ors from the lights in the houses give it a color cast that makes you look twice. Day or night?

Long dig­i­tal expo­sures always have a degree of noise, the grainy pris­matic fuzz that pol­lutes the darker parts of the images. (It’s par­tic­u­larly obnox­ious in the cat image above.) Pro­grams like Noise Ninja can do won­ders with reduc­ing the noise and mak­ing the images look more nat­ural. But I think they’re fine for shar­ing on the web.

December 12 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography | Tags: cats • moon • night photography • Scooter • time exposures | 8 Comments »

chicago in may–garden bloggers unite!

In case any of you missed the post­ing back in Sep­tem­ber, over at Mr McGregor’s Daugh­ter, be sure to mark your cal­en­dars for the 2009 Spring Fling of gar­den blog­gers in Chicago. The dates are set for May 29–31, a per­fect time to visit the Lurie Gar­den (after hang­ing with the other blog­gers, of course).

Unfor­tu­nately, my only 2009 Chicago trip will be in Feb­ru­ary. But for those of you who can make it this should be a great way to finally meet some of your fel­low gar­den blog­gers. From all the reports the 2008 Spring Fling in Austin was amaz­ing, and this should be at least as great. Be sure to blog about it big time (and I know all of you will)–Make those of us who can’t be there leaf-green with envy!

December 12 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: blogging • Chicago • Spring Fling | 1 Comment »

chicago in…february?

Work will be tak­ing me to Chicago in mid-February. My first reac­tion to the con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers’ choice of loca­tion and time was some­thing approach­ing dis­be­lief. Chicago in Feb­ru­ary? I don’t have that many lay­ers of cloth­ing in my closet!

Mind you, you’re lis­ten­ing to a wimp from San Diego. I’ve been get­ting dis­tressed that the nights are start­ing to drop below 50 degrees. I feel like I need to count my fin­gers and toes every time I come back indoors to be sure they haven’t frozen off.

My first trip to Chicago as an adult was just over a decade ago, and I quickly fell in love with all the cul­tural ben­e­fits of the place. Its muse­ums, archi­tec­ture and restau­rants are noth­ing short of amaz­ing. Those are all pretty much indoor things, how­ever. What’s a wimpy sub­trop­i­cal gar­dener and out­doors per­son to do?

On the top of my list of things to see in Chicago is the Lurie Gar­den, designed by Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd, Piet Oudolf and Robert Israel. Aside from the Bat­tery in New York, I believe it’s Oudolf’s only pub­lic work in the U.S.

Left: The Lurie Gar­den in June. (Photo by Tor­sodog via the Wiki­me­dia Com­mons [ source ])

But the gar­den in Feb­ru­ary? Even though Oudolf tries to incor­po­rate nat­ural cycles into his designs, cre­at­ing spaces that honor and cel­e­brate the nat­ural changes in the world, I sus­pect that Feb­ru­ary will be a harsh test.

Still, even if it’s an amaz­ing place in Feb­ru­ary, I’ll know that I’ll have missed one of the main points of the gar­den. This is a garden-as-process. It’s not about look­ing gor­geous for a few weeks of the year. Instead it’s ded­i­cated to the changes that hap­pen as the sea­sons progress. (From the pho­tos I’ve seen, it also hap­pens to look great most of the year…)

It’ll be like step­ping into a con­cert hall to hear a few quiet min­utes of a piece of music that lasts much longer. Even if those few min­utes are amaz­ing, that music is a liv­ing thing that has a life longer that what you’ve expe­ri­enced. You leave the hall sens­ing that you’ve missed some amaz­ing moments.

I sus­pect that’ll be how I feel after I leave Chicago.

December 11 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • places | Tags: Chicago • Piet Oudolf • travel | 2 Comments »

monster potato

What would you say if you ran across a 7 pound, 13 ounce potato in your gar­den? Pretty impressed? That’s the cur­rent offi­cial Guin­ness Book record holder as the world’s heav­i­est potato.

But the cur­rent BBC News Mag­a­zine site has a story on a farmer’s find in his field that blows away the cur­rent record holder. This spec­i­men report­edly weighs in at 24.9 pounds (11.3 kilos), and was pro­duced with “no fer­til­izer or other chem­i­cals,” accord­ing to the story. [ image source ]

From my cal­cu­la­tions, this potato, if mashed and served at a hol­i­day meal, would feed any­where from 50 to 125 eaters, depend­ing on how many of them are still doing the Atkins Diet. I’m afraid that, even with my extended fam­ily, I’d have a lot of leftovers…

December 09 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: potatoes • vegetables | 2 Comments »

dear santa: books!

Okay, Santa, in case you’re read­ing this: You know that I love books. And with the pub­lish­ing indus­try being so bat­tered by new media like, gulp, blog­ging (mea culpa), what bet­ter way to sup­port the art form of cool, inter­est­ing books?

Gar­den pic­ture books are always appre­ci­ated, as are books that are a lit­tle more thought­ful about gar­den­ing and nature and cul­ture. New books from the local book­store are great, but used ones from a local book­store or a site like abebooks.com work just as well. In fact, that’s where you can find some great out of print books you’ll never encounter any­where else. And what bet­ter way to par­tic­i­pate in recycling?

Here are some titles that would make me extra-happy, and I’d guess that many like-minded gar­den­ers out there would find them inter­est­ing as well. Some are from the past year, some from fur­ther back.

• Niwaki: Prun­ing, Train­ing and Shap­ing Japan­ese Gar­den Trees by Jake Hob­son
  Books with func­tional instruc­tions for how to prune are use­ful, but this book gives you ideas on how to move from the func­tional to the sen­si­tive, grace­ful and artis­tic. This is prun­ing with nature instead of against it. I don’t have a Japan­ese gar­den, but I can always learn lessons from its traditions.

Although I love the works of the Dutch gar­den designer Piet Oudolf, one of the gods of the “new peren­ni­als” gar­den­ing move­ment, I real­ized that I didn’t have any of his books. The titles that look the most interesting:

• Design­ing with Plants
• Gar­den­ing with Grasses
• Dream Plants for the Nat­ural Garden

And some selec­tions that are more from the art side of things:

• Los Ange­les Trees : Paint­ings, Draw­ings, Film­stills by Lucas Reiner
  I haven’t had a chance to flip through this book, but the recent LA Times writeup looked entic­ing. “The trees exude patience and humor, cast­ing sneaky, leafy shad­ows across the graf­fiti and cacoph­o­nous sig­nage of L.A… [Reiner] began to draw and paint indi­vid­ual trees, most of them not Cal­i­for­nia natives. He saw their strange shapes as ‘the result of their inter­ac­tion with the needs of civilization.’”

If price is no object, there’s always the clas­sic (and now ridicu­lously pricey):

• A Few Palm Trees by Ed Ruscha
  The title pretty much says it. Ruscha’s book has black and white pho­tos of var­i­ous palm trees in the Hol­ly­wood area, along with the street addresses where he found them. The pho­tos aren’t par­tic­u­larly “good” in any tra­di­tional artis­tic sense. It’s just a stu­pid lit­tle artist’s book with pic­tures of a few palm trees–pretty much the antithe­sis of the pre­ced­ing effort, just a cool lit­tle slacker of a book. It’s weirdly compelling.

And keep­ing with the one-plant theme:

• Saguaros pho­tographs by Mark Klett, text by Gre­gory McNamee
  Mark Klett is one of my favorite pho­tog­ra­phers work­ing today. Few peo­ple cap­ture the edges of civ­i­liza­tion and nature bet­ter than he. In this book Klett col­lects together images of saguaros he’s take over the years. No two plants of any species are exactly the same, and with saguaros it’s even more true. These are plants with char­ac­ter, pho­tographed with soul.

And then I might add some gen­eral items, not strictly book– or gardening-related, but prod­ucts that are made of things from the earth:

• Arti­sanal cheeses, any­thing from stinky to refined!
• Craft beers, ales espe­cially, the hop­pier the better

And you thought I was hard to shop for!

December 09 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • photography | Tags: books • presents | 1 Comment »

we’re fine

I had a cou­ple ques­tions, includ­ing one from Greg, on whether we were near the unfor­tu­nate fighter jet crash in town. For­tu­nately the answer is pretty much no, but just a few miles away still seems plenty close.

But for the house­hold that was home in the house when the acci­dent occurred…what can you say? The news has been say­ing that with a high school of 1,800 stu­dents nearby, the acci­dent could have been way worse. But a tragedy is a tragedy, whether it affects one per­son or mul­ti­tudes. My thoughts go out to every­one who was affected.

Thanks for your con­cern. Stay safe, everyone.

December 08 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: accidents | No Comments »

dear santa: odd plants!

Cousin Jenny shared some of the plants on her wish list. I thought I’d share them here myself in case some of you might be look­ing for some inter­est­ing plant gifts for gar­den­ers that aren’t typ­i­cal gar­den cen­ter offer­ings. These aren’t gen­er­ally what you’d call “pretty” flow­ers, but boy are they fascinating.

Stapelia gigan­tea with my hand for scale

Ear­lier I’d posted on my Stapelia gigan­tea, and she men­tioned that she wouldn’t mind hav­ing one herself.

She also sent a list of some of the other larger-flowered species in the genus that she was inter­ested in, includ­ing S. gran­di­flora, shown here in an image by Quadell from the Wiki­me­dia Com­mons [ source ]. And should any of my san­tas be read­ing this, I wouldn’t mind hav­ing some of them myself. Species in this genus make inter­est­ing house­plants or grow well out­doors with dry-average water con­di­tions in places that don’t freeze. Beware of the flow­ers, how­ever, because they smell like roadkill–but in a good way!

White Bat Flower

And then there was this white bat flower (Tacca inte­gri­fo­lia) that she pho­tographed at the UNC Botan­i­cal Gar­dens last year. This species is prob­a­bly con­sid­ered to be the most choice of the genus, but there are sev­eral other equally stange, whiskered tacca species. Although I haven’t ever grown them, it appears that tac­cas are shade plants that don’t ever ever like to freeze or dry out. Once again, they might be good house­plant selec­tions, although not plants that would be easy to bring into bloom. Find­ing them, even with all the resources of the Inter­net, is a major challenge.

Much eas­ier to find of the plants on her list is the but­ter­fly amaryl­lis, Hip­peas­trum papilio. It’s also easy to grow and flower. Now, Jenny, why ever would you want a plant that’s easy to grow? Where’s the chal­lenge? At least the flow­ers look more exotic than the single-colored win­dowsill amaryl­lises. [ image source ]

To Jenny’s list I’d like to add one of my own wants. I have a long-term inter­est in orchids that goes back to my early teen years. One of the plants that I’ve never been able to secure in twenty years of look­ing is an exam­ple from the Genus Ophrys. The plants of this genus have intrigu­ing flow­ers that look like female wasps. In the spring, the male wasps flit about, look­ing for a lit­tle insect-lovin’. When they find the will­ing ophrys flow­ers they go to town, appar­ently sat­is­fy­ing them­selves while pol­li­nat­ing the flower. Charles Dar­win was also fas­ci­nated by the genus, and looked at them in detail in his The Var­i­ous Con­trivances by which Orchids are Fer­til­ized by Insects. (The entire book is avail­able online for free via Google Books.)

Here’s a YouTube video of one of these insects in action. Warn­ing: This is extremely graphic. Chil­dren should be shel­tered from view­ing this clip unless you want to have a long dis­cus­sion about the birds and the bees and cross-dressing plant species. Like most pornog­ra­phy, the clip does go on a lit­tle too long.

Ophrys species gen­er­ally come from Mediter­ranean regions of Europe, so I’m think­ing many of them would do well out­doors where I am in San Diego. But where to find them? About twenty years ago I was cor­re­spond­ing with a biol­ogy grad stu­dent in France. He sent me some seeds, but I was never able to ger­mi­nate them. (Have you ever tried to grow orchids from seed?!)

Even now that Santa has the Inter­net avail­able to him or her, ophrys tubers are just about impos­si­ble to get on this side of the Atlantic unless you deal with import per­mits and all that paper­work. I just might have to con­tent myself with the YouTube insect porn.

Ooh baby.

December 08 2008 | Categories: gardening • plant profiles | Tags: Ophrys • orchids • Tacca | 2 Comments »

domesticated

Amy Stein’s new book of pho­tographs, Domes­ti­cated, sits some­where between the mun­dane and poetic, the beau­ti­ful and the jarring.

Left: Amy Stein. Howl [ source ]

A coy­ote howls at the moon in a snow-covered park­ing lot. A young girl in a bathing suits stands on a swim­ming pool div­ing board to con­front a black bear star­ing at her over the fence. A hunter stands in his back yard as he aims his rifle at a wild turkey pass­ing just a few feet away.

The lit­tle fleet­ing vignettes of life in a small Penn­syl­va­nia town illu­mi­nate life at the bound­aries where the back yard ends and some­thing you might call the nat­ural world begins. Some­times the close prox­im­ity of nature makes things amaz­ingly con­ve­nient (the hunter and the turkey). Other times it comes too close for com­fort (the girl and the bear).

Left: Amy Stein. Back­yard [ source ]

These slices of life at first amaze you with that “Wasn’t it amaz­ing that she was able to be right there at the right time to take that pho­to­graph” reac­tion. But the photographer’s work­ing method tricks you a bit. She col­lected news­pa­per pieces and oral sto­ries of life in and around Mata­moras, a town bor­der­ing state for­est in the north­east part of the state. Next she pro­ceeded to recre­ate the events in the sto­ries using town res­i­dents and what­ever props necessary–including taxi­der­mied animals.

Stein calls her images nat­ural his­tory dio­ra­mas, and that’s exactly how they func­tion. But with these scenes tak­ing place inside the edges of a pho­to­graph, they seem to have a higher sense of real­ity to them than the dust-covered tableaux you’d find at your local museum. Picasso said famously that art is a lie that tells the truth. Even though you know that these images are staged, they speak to a deeper knowl­edge that we know is true.

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing, worth­while work.

Check out Amy Stein’s web­site, port­fo­lio of the other Domes­ti­cated images, or get the book.

December 07 2008 | Categories: art • photography • places | Tags: Amy Stein • domesticated • humans and nature • natural world | 1 Comment »

friday blooms–banned in several states, sorta

Salvia divi­no­rum flowering

Today’s flower pho­tos are of the first blooms of the sea­son on Salvia divi­no­rum, a plant that seemed like an appro­pri­ate choice to high­light for the 75th anniver­sary of Repeal Day, the end of Pro­hi­bi­tion in the United States.

This is a plant with a cou­ple of bad rep­u­ta­tion points against it.

Robin Mid­dle­ton, one of Britain’s big gurus on the genus Salvia, gave up on the plant: “Native to a remote part of Mex­ico, this is one of the most dif­fi­cult salvias to get into flower…I have dis­carded this salvia, as mine never flowered.”

And Betsy Cleb­sch, one of the Bay Area’s high priest­esses of the genus and author of The New Book of Salvias: Salvias for Every Gar­den, writes: “On sev­eral occa­sions I have grown the plant in a green­house but have never suc­ceeded in get­ting my plants to flower.”

My plants are new to the gar­den so my expe­ri­ence with the plant is pretty lim­ited. But it appears that given the right con­di­tions, even in the hands of a non-expert like me, that first rap of never flow­er­ing appears to be undeserved.

The sec­ond rap against this salvia comes from the fact that its tra­di­tional med­i­c­i­nal uses and role in shaman­is­tic div­ina­tion don’t square with some notions of of what peo­ple should be doing with the plants in the nat­ural world. Sev­eral states have recent laws on the books against pro­cess­ing the plant or pack­ag­ing it for human con­sump­tion. For­tu­nately there seem to be exemp­tions for peo­ple using it for orna­men­tal, hor­ti­cul­tural pur­poses. Sev­eral coun­tries, includ­ing Aus­tralia, Den­mak and Italy exert some sort of con­trol over the plant. (Bet­ter con­sult your lawyer or Wikipedia before plant­ing it and giv­ing it away to all your friends…)

What are its effects, and what’s all the fuss? you might ask. But I’m the wrong per­son to ask since my drugs of choice tend towards caf­feine, choco­late and occa­sional hits of refined sugar. (Sam’s cof­fee cart at work offers a mocha-chip scone that hits all three addic­tion points!) And for altered states of con­scious­ness I pre­fer to look at art, lis­ten to music or read a book. But by gen­eral accounts this plant has no record of addic­tion and is prob­a­bly less dan­ger­ous than alco­hol and tobacco.

Closeup of Salvia divi­no­rum flowers

Why grow it? It looks cool! (Check out the white fuzz on the indi­vid­ual flow­ers!) It has a fas­ci­nat­ing eth­nob­otan­i­cal back­ground. And the fact that some peo­ple want to ban it is alone a good rea­son as far as I’m con­cerned. Plants are inter­est­ing all on their own, but when a plant rep­re­sents a micro­cosm of issues cir­cu­lat­ing through cul­ture it gets to be really fas­ci­nat­ing. (Vocab­u­larly word of the day: synec­doche.)

Devel­op­ing flow­ers stem on Salvia divinorum

The image to the right shows a new bloom spike with the devel­op­ing vio­let calyxes.

If they come after this plant, what’s next? All those lovely opium pop­pies in your gardens?

What opium pop­pies? They’re just “Ori­en­tal pop­pies,” you might say. But they’re no less opium pop­pies than what’s grown in the Afghan high­lands as part of the drug trade. What do you think the “som­niferum” in their sci­en­tific name (Papaver som­niferum) alludes to? Next time you buy a plant from some­where you’re tech­ni­cally con­tribut­ing to traf­fick­ing in a Sched­ule II con­trolled sub­stance. (Check out Michael Pollan’s 1997 Harper’s Mag­a­zine arti­cle, “Opium made easy.”)

And then there are all those highly poi­so­nous plants like fox­glove, or species that could eas­ily be mod­i­fied for bioter­ror­ism uses like cas­tor bean. Can peo­ple be trusted to have those plants in their gardens?

It’s a slip­pery slope. A slip­pery slope, I tell you. In the mean­time proudly grow your pop­pies and fox­gloves and salvias. Keep your gar­dens free!

Let me go back to the cul­ti­va­tion ques­tion that I started with. Betsy Cleb­sch in the 2003 edi­tion of her book reported that, “I have found it impos­si­ble to find any­thing writ­ten about it in gar­den­ing or hor­ti­cul­tural mag­a­zines or books; my infor­ma­tion comes from botan­i­cal and eth­no­batan­i­cal descrip­tions and from con­ver­sa­tions with those who have grown the plant.” The web now has a cer­tain amount of infor­ma­tion on how to grow the plant, and below are my notes.

What I’m doing: One of the two husky rooted cut­tings from two-inch pots went into a gal­lon con­tainer with cheap pot­ting soil into a shady, humid and unheated green­house and was kept con­stantly moist. The other went into the ground (sandy soil with­out many amend­ments) in a shady spot in a raised bed next to the gar­den pond and was watered when­ever I remem­bered to do it.

The pot­ted green­house plant grew fairly upright, but has that pale, gaunt look of some peo­ple who live in dark apart­ments. The plant in the ground hasn’t grown as tall, but looks more robust, putting out more in the way of basal growths. The flow­er­ing plant shown here is the one from the green­house, but the one out­doors is putting out a bloom stalk and seems to be a cou­ple weeks behind the first one in bloom­ing. The plants are dif­fer­ent culti­gens, so the dif­fer­ence in their behav­ior prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with that. But both seem to respond to bright but min­i­mal direct sun­light and average-moist con­di­tions at the roots.

Happy grow­ing!

December 05 2008 | Categories: gardening • plant profiles | Tags: controlled substances • drugs • ethnobotany • opium poppies • Salvia divinorum | 5 Comments »