Only a couple areas of the garden are on automatic watering with dedicated sprinklers. The rest of the garden has to depend on rainfull and the gardener dragging a hose over to whatever needs to be watered. I’m sure that reduces how much I water because I’m very conscious of how long I’m standing there with the hose and how moist the soil appears to be getting.
It’s been warm for the last couple of weeks, and a month since the last rains, so I’ve been doing a certain amount of watering. But I’ve also been making little line drawings with the hose…
And how many of you have this same sprinkler head? I try no to anthromorphize things too much, bust this sprinkler always seems to be staring back at me quizzically.
Am I the only one with problems with how to pronounce the Latin names for plants?
Last fall I was at a nursery and noticed a gorgeous stand of grasses in their demonstration garden. What was it, I asked?
“JFjfaljsldjflajsdljf purpurea,” the woman said.
I stared at her for a couple seconds. I’m sure my jaw was dropped and I looked pretty stupid. I worked backwards from the part I recognized, “purpurea,” and finally understood that she’d just told me that the plants were Aristida purpurea, purple three-awn.
To her credit she hadn’t actually said “JFjfaljsldjflajsdljf” for the genus name. Instead it was a very flat, American-style pronunciation that came out something like “Uh-RIS-tuh-duh.” I’d seen the name on paper a lot before that moment, but I’d never heard someone pronounce it. All along I was holding a very different sound in my head, something more like “Ah-ree-STEE-dah.”
In my undergraduate years studying music I was required to sing in the chorus. Two of the pieces we sang, Bach’s B-minor mass and Mozart’s Vesperae Solennes del Confessore, were in Latin. With Ancient Latin being a thoroughly dead language, Singer’s Latin–basically Latin sung as if it were Italian–was what I’d learned.
With the air tense with misunderstanding and purple three-awn blowing in the wind behind me, American Botanical Latin so rudely came face to face against my Singer’s Latin. Who was right?
I’d probably guess both of us and no one. Botanical Latin over the years has been studded with plant names honoring people and places whose names contain letters and sounds you’d never encounter old-school Latin. (Oerstedella schweinfurthiana, anyone?) And who’s to say pronouncing Latin as if it were Italian makes sense? Scholars now say that modern Shakespearean English is pretty far removed from the original Elizabethan pronunciations. It stands to reason that modern Italian is much further separated than that from its Latin source.
So, really, when you come down to it, we all talk with accents. And sometimes, to make ourselves better understood, we have to adapt to the ways the people around us say things.
Left: The plant that started all this, Aristida purpurea, photographed by Stan Shebs, from the Wikimedia Commons, used under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.5 license [ source ].
The morning was warm so I went up onto the deck to soak up a little of the January sunshine. While I was up there I noticed the wind shaking the leaves of one of the potted plants growing up there.
This is Euphorbia cotinifolia, a shrub in the same genus as the exalted poinsettia and the lowly and weedy spurges. Species like the quaking aspen tree (Populus tremuloides) get all the glory for having foliage that quivers in the wind, but I thought the maroon leaves on this plant were doing a pretty good job of it.
This turns out to have been my first YouTube video upload. John’s little digital Instamatic has a movie mode that lets you capture moving snapshots. The quality isn’t what the perfectionist in me would like for it to be, but like other snapshots I think you get the idea what’s being photographed…
Ferns are some of my favorite plants. Their delicate leaves and strong architectural forms keep me looking at them. The little ginkgo-shaped leaves and black stems of the maidenhair fern have to be right up there among my favorite kinds of fern.
But with all the delicate-looking ferns to choose from, what’s got to be another of my favorite is the bird’s nest fern (Asplenium sp.). Here are some closeups of the sides of the undivided spears of a specimen at San Diego’s Balboa Park.
If you read it on the internet it must be true, right? I’ve had some questions about a recent post that relayed some information on farmers in Iraq being prohibited from saving seeds. After doing more detailed research it looks like some of the exact facts need to be scrutinized a little more critically. But your conclusions on the situation may not change much.
All the bluster revolves around Order 81, a directive on plant variety protection that Paul Bremer, the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority administrator, pushed pushed into effect (at the behest of Monsanto, according to a 2008 interview with F. William Engdahl). The press release from Focus on the Global South and GRAIN that got the firestorm of opinion going declares that, “while historically the Iraqi constitution prohibited private ownership of biological resources, the new US-imposed patent law introduces a system of monopoly rights over seeds.” If you look at the current version of the release you’ll see that it’s all marked up with corrections and clarifications, with a piece of emphatic clarification at the beginning of the release:
The law does not prohibit Iraqi farmers from using or saving “traditional” seeds. It prohibits them from reusing seeds of “new” plant varieties registered under the law. In practical terms, this means they cannot save those seeds for re-use either.
So is Focus on the Global South and GRAIN thinking the law is benign and just? Their press release may be contrite about the confusion they might have caused, but in the current rewritten version still goes on to decry the order as a slap in the face against food sovereignty at the same time it drives big agribusiness into the traditional ways of traditional peoples.
It’s all fascinating reading that gives more nuance and background to the conclusions that people were coming to. In the end it’s not only a case about people’s ways of life being destroyed, nor is it a simple case of protecting intellectual property. Here are a few samples of what’s out there:
I really would like to see a contemporary analysis of the situation. Was all this bluster? Or has the situation played out as many feared? Based on stories of the social and environmental costs of reliance on Monsanto crops has created in some parts of India, for instance, I suspect things can’t be going well in Iraq.
Last July I did a post on the documentaryA Man Named Pearl, and at point asked a question about what films there were about gardening. Leslie made the recommendation of Greenfingers, a Y2K British production starring Clive Owen and Helen Mirrin. Based loosely on a true story, it told of incarcerated gardeners in England that had a rehabilitation program involving gardening. In real life the prisoners eventually went on to design award winning garden exhibits at the Hampton Court and Chelsea Flower Shows.
My Netflix queue is pretty long, but by last week I’d worked through a few dozen films and the red envelope containing Greenfingers arrived in the mail. I won’t give away the end any more than I have–It’s based only loosely on the facts I’ve mentioned above. But if you haven’t seen it already it’s definitely a worthy movie rental–Warm, funny and romantic, it’s a great film for these long winter nights.
Now if only the film didn’t use so many plastic plants, including a red hibiscus that features prominently in the plot. We’re gardeners, people! We can tell!
January can be an amazing month for succulents and other desert plants. Many aloes and agaves explode into bloom, and plants with ephemeral foliage are green with leaves in ways you don’t often see them.
San Diego’s Balboa Park houses one of the prime local collection of cacti, succulents and other desert dwellers from around the world. The Desert Garden, the larger of its two succulent gardens, was established in 1976, but many of the plants are senior citizens much older than the age of the garden.
Aloes star in its January landscape, with red and orange torches of flowers that double as hummingbird magnets.
And shown here, lurking in the shadows, is one of the local hummingbirds, staking its territory.
Among the big, mature specimens are several dragon trees, Dracaena draco. In this first photo, on the near trunk, you can see a reddish patch where the plant’s red sap has dried. When cut, these plants ooze a fluid that in some European legends was purported to be dragon’s blood, hence the plant’s name (draco = dragon).
This is a public garden, and so it’s subject to funding glitches and battles over civic priorities. I’d consider the garden to be in great condition considering those limitations.
One thing I would have loved to have seen, though, would be more plant labels. I encountered so many interesting species, but very few of them had name tags. I have this thing about needing to know the name of a plant–Call me compulsive. But the lack of labels drove me crazy. I realize, however, that tags don’t come cheap. And in a wide-open public garden, labels can walk away with pieces of succulents in the hands of evil plant addicts.
One of the plants that was labeled was this Natal Bottlebrush, Greyia sutherlandii. A bit scrappy-looking as a plant, but what great flowers!
Also labeled was the Madagascar ocotillo, Alluaudia procera. I loved the spiral patterning of its spines.
Another problem with this being a public garden is that there are quite a few specimens where people’s temptations to carve their initials in the plant life got the better of them. This euphorbia was scarred many times over. But that wasn’t going to stop it from blooming.
After visiting the garden I was surprised by how many shots I’d racked up in the camera. And for some reason, the majority of them were verticals. Is there something about succulents–particularly the upright-growing kinds that mimic the way a human stands–that scream out for photographing them in an upright orientation?
Some yuccas, I think, with spent bloom stems.
Boojum trees, Fouquieria columnaris, native to Baja California. This plant is in the same genus as the California desert’s spectacular ocotillo, which interestingly isn’t related to the Madascar ocotillo, above.
Aloes and kalanchoes in bloom.
The main garden is a flat, easy stroll over wide decomposed granite pathways. As part of a recent expansion, the garden now also includes this switchback down into Florida Canyon, also part of Balboa Park. The plants along the descent are still young, but should look spectacular in a decade or so.
Not everyone in the world loves cactus and succulents. They might point to the defensive spines many of the plants have, and they might say the sculptural shapes of the plants don’t look soft and cozy like leafy shrubs or fragrant roses. Next to the Desert Garden is Balboa Park’s rose garden. During springtime, thirty seconds of walking would take you from the world of cactus and succulents to a garden manic with flowers and heavy with the aroma of roses. But on this bright January day, the adjacent roses were pruned down to naked stems and piercing thorns. It was the cactus and succulents that looked warm and welcoming.
The Desert Garden is located across Park Boulevard from the Natural History Museum on Balboa Park’s museum row. The garden has no walls, no entry fee, and is open 24/7, 365 days of the year.
If the 2.5 acres of the Desert Garden isn’t enough of a cactus and succulent fix, cross Park Boulevard and take a stroll over to the Balboa Park Club, maybe ten minutes on foot, and take in the parks original 1935 cactus garden, which, according to the park’s website, was established “under the direction of [San Diego gardening legend] Kate Sessions for the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition.” There you’ll find “some of the largest cactus and succulent specimens in the Park,” along with a nice collection of proteas.
Here’s a bit of political unpleasantness I read about in a seed description in the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog listing for the Iraqi tomato variety, Rouge D’Irak:
Saving seeds was made illegal under the “Colonial Powers” of the United States. Under the new law, Iraqi farmers must only plant seeds from “protected varieties” from international corporations.
First Hiliburton, then Blackwater, and now monster agribusiness taking advantage of the war. I wish I was surprised.
The Baker Creek online catalog actually lists five different plants of Iraqi origin, in case you’d like to help preserve varieties that Iraqi farmers now can’t legally grow from their own seeds: four tomatoes, Tatar of Mongolistan, Rouge D’Irak, Al-Kuffa, and Nineveh; along with a melon, Baghdad Long. Aren’t you heirloom tomato specialists looking for new varieties to try? How about these plants with an amazing contemporary history?
Orchids can be finicky creatures, especially when you try to grow species that aren’t adapted to your growing conditions. If you’re lucky enough to live in an area with infrequent freezing temperatures (the warm end of zone 9B or in zone 10 or higher), many of the reed-stemmed epidendrums can be as easy to grow as anything in the garden and can be as inexpensive as most other plants. But these also make easy houseplants if you have a nice south-facing window.
If they bear more than a passing resemblance to the flashy florist cattleya orchids it’s no coincidence–They’re closely related members of the Cattleya alliance of orchids.
The parent species for these plants originate in Central America, where they can sometimes be seen growing rampantly. Epidendrum radicans and E. ibaguense are tough and prolific, and will tolerate temperatures down to the high 20s.
To get the species themselves, you’ll have to go to an orchid nursery, but their hybrids can be had in many good garden centers or nurseries. Colors come in everything from the parent species’ orange and red, to pink, salmon, rose, purple, lavender and white. The plants bloom almost the year round and will grow two to five feet tall, depending on light and watering. They all make great starter orchids or good plants to use for landscaping.
Light
Epidendrums are happiest in bright light, from dappled shade to several hours of full sun. They will survive in full sun, but the plants will be short, and the leaves may scorch on the hottest days. They’ll also grow in heavy shade, but the plants will grow tall, and you won’t see any flowers.
This is an example of plant that has been grown in fairly deep shade. The plant grows big, loose and floppy, and it only flowers on the stems that receive some direct sun.
Water
Low to moderate garden water is a good starting point for these epidendrums. They will tolerate quite moist conditions, and they can be surprisingly drought tolerant. But they look best somewhere in between.
Soil
You can grown these in special orchid mixes if you like, but mine have been happy stuck into average-to-sandy garden dirt. Plants grown in orchid mixes will require more watering. Any loose potting mix would work well for plants in pots.
Propagation
Flowering stems, when they reach the end of their flowering life, usually produce new plants near their tips. Orchid growers call these keikis, Hawaiian for “babies.” These little plants will send out long white roots before long. Cut the rooted keikis off when the roots are two to four inches long and stick them where you’d like another plant, being careful not to break the brittle roots. The plants will often start blooming within a year. Additionally, epidendrums can be dug up and divided every few years.
If you get deeper into epidendrum species, you’ll also find species with brown, green and almost-blue flowers, some of them bicolors, some of them with outrageous spotting. If you have the collector gene in your DNA, you’ll find 1500 species to choose from. These specialty epidendrums don’t necessarily have the same lust for life and tolerance for cool temperatures as the common reedstems do, so be sure to do some research before sticking them in a garden bed with your perennials.
I think that these days all of us are trying to go green in many aspects of our lives as we try to reduce our demands on the world’s resources. Gardening has the shiny green patina of communing with nature and being kind to plants and animals that make up this green earth. But so many modern gardening practices consume big piles of the resources that we depend on, and others contributes significantly to environmental pollution.
Since it’s early in the year, the time that we many of us make resolutions, I’ve outline some areas that I’ll be trying to work on in my own garden. I’ve gathered them together below and categorized them into the three big Rs of going green: reduce, reuse, and recycle.
Reduce
Fewer annuals: The semi-twisted logic of planting annuals, nurturing them for six months, and then yanking them out when they’re all bloomed out to replace them with other seasonal annuals to enjoy for maybe just a few more months is starting to bother me. It’s a certain amount of work on my part, and the energy that must go into the production of bedding plants adds to what guilt I feel. I doubt I’ll give up on annuals entirely. But I’ll try to rely on them less, mostly as temporary fillers until something with year-round interest can take over. Alternately, a lot of annuals reseed, so that you can plant them one year, and they’ll return reliably in future years. Allysum, zinnias, melampodium, celosia, poppies and many ornamental grasses are just a few of the plants that reseed reliably.
I’ll think twice before I pull out a plant. Is a plant really ill or dying? Or am I just bored with it?
When I do decide that a plant has to go, I’ll work on using more plants that are better adapted to my environment. Living in San Diego, this means using more Mediterranean-adapted plants and plants native to the area. This will reduce needs for supplemental water, plant food and insect control.
It’s more work, but I’m starting more plants from seed these days. Shipping a packet of seeds across the country takes way less energy than shipping the bed-full of plants that many packets will give you. Direct-sowing the seeds into the ground can save on transportation costs for potting mix and pots. Another bonus is that you can treat yourself to plenty more varieties than would be available at the local nursery.
In addition to buying more seeds to grow, I’m saving more seeds from the plants I already have. For species and open-pollenated heirloom plants, the seed should come true to the original. For hybrid plants, the seedlings can be an adventure, some of them coming looking like their parents, others coming out to be interesting mongrel mixes.
Grow more edible plants. There’s the push to buy locally grown produce, fruits and veggies that have been grown within a hundred miles of your house. Why not grow food yourself and drop the transportation costs to zero? I’ve got various herbs overwintering in the garden, and seeds for various plants are now in the ground or already germinating: kale, beets, amaranth, miner’s lettuce, plus whatever plants of romaine and New Zealand spinach will come back from seed. Several of these have terrific ornamental value, so they’ll get to live with the more decorative plantings.
I want to learn more about how to prepare the edible plants I already have. For instance, the cattails growing in the pond in the back yard are often listed as being one of the staples of the native American population in centuries past. Some of the local succulent population of the genus Dudleya also were used for food, and in fact one of the species is called edulis. (With a name like edulis, it’s gotta be good!) Maybe those and other plants in the garden could be relied on for occasional interesting meals. Even if some of them might be a little too weird for regular consumption, eating, like gardening, ought to be an adventure.
Reuse
It’s not perfect horticultural hygiene, but I try to reuse pots whenever possible. Unfortunately I usually end up with more gallon pots than I’ll ever be able to use a second or third time. Many nurseries will take them to reuse. And then I found that our almost-local native plant outfit, Las Pilitas Nursery, will also donate 10 cents to the California Native Plant Society for each pot that is returned for them to reuse. (That would explain the Lowes and Home Depot pots that I’ve seen at the nursery!)
For those situations when I decide a plant isn’t right for one spot, I’ll try to see if there’s another location in the garden where it would work better. Or may I know someone who’d be dying to do some plant rescue…
When I buy seeds, I sometimes end up with more than I need. I’ll share them with interested folks, and it could be an way to get more native or drought-tolerant plants into people’s gardens.
Recycle
Stores often have last week’s bulbs on sale for not much money. If they’re bulbs adapted to the climate, this is a great way to save some of these plants from the dumpsters. And if you’re into dumpster-diving or cruising the back alleys of garden centers, you might pick these up for free. Most of the narcissus in my yard came through these mark-downs.
I’ll have to admit that I’m a failed composter. I just don’t have the magic combination of time, space and discipline (in all honesty it’s mostly the discipline where I’m lacking). But the city fortunately has a greens recycling program for those of us who don’t have this down. Kitchen scraps are already making it into the bins, and I’ll try to be be even more fanatical with anything green in the garden that would compost.
If you’re not doing it already, recycle lawn lawn clippings into mulch. Last summer I convinced John to put the onto the veggie garden instead of dumping them in the city greens recycling. This way they’re still getting recycled, only they don’t have to be trucked to the landfill to be turned into mulch.
Even if you can’t find someone to reuse your plastic pots, there are some emerging uses for them that might become available to more parts of the country. I’ll keep my eyes open in case there are interesting local recycling opportunities, like the one where pots would be melted down for “landscape timbers.” (The link goes to an great program in Missouri.)
Broken clay pots make great covers for drain holes in pots around the garden. They allow the water to drain out, but also reduce the amount of potting soil that you lose.
Like many new year’s resolutions, I know I won’t stick to them fanatically. One of the things that draws me to the plant world is the sheer variety in all the cool plants that I can invite into my garden. I’m a collector at heart, so saying no to a new and interesting specimen is one of the hardest things for me to do. I know that that’s going to be one of the hardest goals to stick to. Hopefully, putting it out in a public space like this post will provide me a little gentle pressure and reminder of what I intended to do.
It’s been warm for the last couple of weeks, and a month since the last rains, so I’ve been doing a certain amount of watering. But I’ve also been making little line drawings with the hose…
And how many of you have this same sprinkler head? I try no to anthromorphize things too much, bust this sprinkler always seems to be staring back at me quizzically.
