[ Lost in the Landscape ]

live, from california…

A plant’s name can often help give you a sense of place as to where the plant orig­i­nated. I’ve been notic­ing recently that a lot of plants in the gar­den have species names that are either “cal­i­for­nica” or “cal­i­for­ni­cus.” I guess you can’t get much more Cal­i­for­nia than that.

First is our ever-popular state flower, the Cal­i­for­nia poppy, Escholzia cal­i­for­nica. Most of you are famil­iar with this form, the bright orange one that comes in Cal­i­for­nia wild­flower mixes. I planted some seed a decade ago, and these come back every year, some where they did the pre­vi­ous year, some a few feet away. But for me they’re not the wan­der­ing world trav­eler that they are for some peo­ple. (They’ve nat­u­ral­ized in parts of Chile and are on the pest (but not inva­sive) species list for Ten­nessee.)

This year I’m also grow­ing from seed the form of the species that you actu­ally find in this part of the state, Escholzia cal­i­for­nica mar­itima. The flow­ers are about a third of the size of the orange ver­sion, and are gold shad­ing to a yellow-orange. My pam­pered plants are tak­ing their time flow­er­ing, so these are images of plants in the winds, on the bluffs over­look­ing the ocean south of Del Mar. Once these start bloom­ing, I’ll prob­a­bly cut back the orange ones so the two strains don’t hybridize.

And here’s the clas­sic orange poppy in the gar­den grow­ing in the mid­dle of a pros­trate form of Cal­i­for­nia sage­brush, Artemisia cal­i­for­nica ‘Canyon Gray.’ While most of the forms of sage­brush are, well, brushy and upright, this selec­tion from the Chan­nel Islands off the coast of Ven­tura grows near the ground and sprawls a bit. The plant can get a lit­tle leggy in the mid­dle, so a well-placed vol­un­teer poppy seedling can be the best way to con­ceal that fact.

I wrote last year about this wild ranun­cu­lus, Ranun­cu­lus cal­i­for­ni­cus, or Cal­i­for­nia but­ter­cup. It dis­ap­pears not long after flow­er­ing, but it’s a nice pres­ence dur­ing early spring.

The coast sun­flower, Encelia cal­i­for­nica, con­tin­ues the yellow-to-orange theme. My plants were planted only recently and aren’t bloom­ing yet. This is a stand of it at Tor­rey Pines Pre­serve this past Mon­day, doing just fine with nat­ural rain­fall. (It won’t be quite so orna­men­tal once the mois­ture gives out, however.)

The last one I’ll share today has got to be one of the more spec­tac­u­lar Cal­i­for­ni­ans, the bush anenome, Car­pen­te­ria cal­i­for­nica. The flow­ers began to open just this week. This species hails from the Sierra foothills where it can become quite the large shrub. My plant has tripled in size in one year, though it’s still not more than three feet tall. It can triple in size again, and then I’m get­ting the prun­ing shears. Pretty flow­ers, though, no?

March 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Artemisia californica 'Canyon Gray' • bush anemone • California • California poppy • Carpenteria californica • coast sunflower • Encelia californica • Escholzia californica • Escholzia californica maritima • native plants • Ranunculus californicus • sagebrush | 5 Comments »

do i dare plant this?

Do any of you know how this plant would do in a gar­den set­ting? It’s thick-leaved yerba santa (Eri­o­d­ic­tyon cras­si­folium) one of our local native species in the phacelia family.

I’ve seen it around in the wild areas of town for a while, and I’ve always liked its odd, stemmy growth habit, with a tuft of ser­rated gray-green leaves on the ends of straight, floppy or con­torted branches. Here’s how it looks in one set­ting at Tor­rey Pines State Pre­serve. You can see all the ways the branches grow, includ­ing this big cir­cu­larl loop-de-loop.

Right now yerba san­tas all around town are in full bloom, bear­ing these del­i­cate lavender-colored tubu­lar blooms at the ends of their stems. I’m in love.

In most loca­tions I’ve seen the plant grow­ing four to six feet tall, and mound­ing six to eight feet in width. What I’ve heard some of the native plant peo­ple say about how it grows in the wilds–that it spreads widely via under­ground run­ners to develop big colonies–is the part that scares me. I think I’d like the effect of its cool stems grow­ing up and through some low ground­cov­ers, but I don’t want it to be the total mon­ster, either.

It’s a plant that makes a state­ment, but I don’t want the state­ment to be that I was gullible enough to plant a totally rank plant into the garden!

March 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • plant profiles | Tags: Eriodictyon crassifolium • native plants • yerba santa | 7 Comments »

dramatic wall colors and plants

I still haven’t got­ten around to doing some­thing about the color of the my lit­tle detached stu­dio behind the house. Col­ors of res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hoods and gar­den walls usu­ally tend towards pretty neu­tral shades. Here are a cou­ple com­bi­na­tions of walls with plants that I thought were pretty dra­matic while still being flat­ter­ing to the land­scap­ing. They could be inter­est­ing choices for gar­den walls or even–if you’re truly brave–walls of your house.

This first one is the free­way side of the Tustin Mar­ket­place in Orange County, as see from Inter­state 5 on my way up to LA last week. The fairly dark burnt red-to-salmon wall col­oration mixes dra­mat­i­cally with the green bougainvil­lea foliage and red­dish magenta flow­ers in the fore­ground. And the sil­ver trunks and bright green foliage of the trees in the back­ground stand out dra­mat­i­cally against the wall.

The sec­ond is another retail sit­u­a­tion, the plant­i­ngs by the park­ing lot at the Mis­sion Val­ley Mall here in town. The vio­let wall, as the pre­ced­ing red­dish one, once again plays against the sil­ver trunks of the trees and the bright green leaves.

The first com­bi­na­tion to me feels warm­ing and ener­getic with­out being too hyper, with the red being a color that isn’t so far removed from the Mediter­ranean themed hous­ing that con­tin­ues to be pop­u­lar in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. The sec­ond is def­i­nitely cooler, more restrained–and maybe a lit­tle more urban and adventurous.

We’ll see how brave I am when I finally have time to address resid­ing the stu­dio and rebuild­ing the attached patio cover. But I’m def­i­nitely feel­ing like doing some­thing other than white or beige this time…

March 23 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: color • color combinations • hardscape • walls | 4 Comments »

grab a compass…or a cow

Maybe you saw the news story last August: Using images from Google Earth, Dr. Sabine Begall and her col­leagues found that cows gen­er­ally align them­selves north-to-south, using the earth’s mag­netic field as a guide. [ image source ]

And you may have heard the fol­lowup story this week: Cows graz­ing around power lines faced in ran­dom direc­tions because the elec­tro­mag­netic fields gen­er­ated by the power lines dis­rupted the cows’ inter­nal sensors.

I was curi­ous. If cows can have their inter­nal sys­tems messed with by power lines, what about plants? I did a quick web trawl and found all sorts of evi­dence that elec­tro­mag­netic fields could in fact effect plant growth, though bio­elec­tro­mag­net­ics is a field that hasn’t seen a huge amount of research.

One study “showed sig­nif­i­cantly greater wet root weight and sig­nif­i­cantly smaller stem diam­e­ter and dry seed weight at the end of the exper­i­ment in exposed plants com­pared to con­trol plants.”

And I ran across an email response by Shireef Dar­wish, a grad stu­dent at the Depart­ment of Plant Sci­ence at McGill Uni­ver­sity, to the ques­tion “do mag­netic fields have an effect on plant growth?” The expla­na­tion is worth read­ing, and includes an exten­sive bib­li­og­ra­phy that points to fur­ther effects of elec­tro­mag­net­ism on plants.

Out­of­doors recently did a great post that reminded us that it would make so much more sense to gen­er­ate power with solar cells at the point of use in the city than to deploy solar arrays in the desert, destroy­ing big swaths of frag­ile desert.

In addi­tion to eat­ing up the desert, I’d add that remote gen­er­a­tion would require the power com­pa­nies to deliver the power to dis­tant cities, most likely over high ten­sion lines. All of you can prob­a­bly speak from per­sonal expe­ri­ence that the power line roads that the elec­tric com­pa­nies gouge through the land­scape beneath the lines do plenty to dis­fig­ure the land­scape and to pro­vide fer­tile open space that might encour­age inva­sive species. Not a pretty sight. And then there’s the issue of the elec­tro­mag­netic fields.

It’s been known for a while that a flu­o­res­cent tube placed under­neath high-tension lines would glow just from the fields. (The effect is observ­able under­neath the lines that carry the hugest amount of cur­rent, not nec­es­sar­ily the lower-capacity trans­mis­sion lines.) There are at least two art projects that take advan­tage of this phe­nom­e­non, both to power the bulbs and to get us think­ing about what it might mean for us to have these power lines in our midst.

Larry and Debby Kline. Encryp­tion (The Elec­tric Fields of Cal­i­for­nia, Site # 4) Sears Point Farm­ing Com­pany
Tubbs Island, Sonoma, CA [ source ]

I met Larry and Debby Kline here in San Diego dur­ing 2003 when they had an open­ing of their art­work at a gallery across the street from a gallery where I was show­ing my own work. They were part of the way through this project where they made sculp­tures of flu­o­res­cent tubes beneath some of the high-capacity power lines that run through Cal­i­for­nia. One project used 30 bulbs, another 60. (A tip from the Klines: The bulbs light up best when they’re stand­ing on end.) After assem­bling the sculp­tures, they made strik­ing pho­tographs of them.

And then, in 2004, British artist Richard Box used 1301 bulbs in this installation.

[ source ]

I don’t want to get all hys­ter­i­cal over the poten­tial effects of these elec­tro­mag­netic fields, but they obvi­ously have some effects on ani­mals and plants. While the power lines may be no more dan­ger­ous to your health than your cell phone or microwave oven, I can’t help but think that this is yet another poorly-designed and unnec­es­sary sci­ence exper­i­ment that we humans have dropped into the land­scape. There’s no doubt, though, that at least the power line roads have their impacts.

March 20 2009 | Categories: art • landscape | Tags: cows • electromagnetic fields • power lines • science | 6 Comments »

the rain might not belong to you

At first I thought it was a good idea. I never imag­ined that in some com­mu­ni­ties it would be prohibited.

Dur­ing some of the recent rains I put some lit­tle buck­ets to catch rain­wa­ter that had drained off the roof. In this part of the state you can hardly ever have too much water, and good-quality water is extra-valuable.

One of my water-use indul­gences is an exper­i­men­tal lit­tle bog gar­den with car­niv­o­rous plants. Tap water here has four times the dis­solved solids usu­ally rec­om­mended for these swamp-dwellers, so in warmer weather they get five gal­lons a week of reverse osmo­sis water from the local water store. Col­lect­ing fresh rain­wa­ter seemed like a much more sus­tain­able alternative.

Left: Drosera Marston Dragon.
Right: Drosera capen­sis, red form, with deer­fly snack.

Yesterday’s LA Times had an arti­cle on res­i­dents in some of the dry­land Four Cor­ners states who were find­ing out that col­lect­ing rain­wa­ter was actu­ally ille­gal in their com­mu­ni­ties. Because of a com­plex patch­work of water rights agree­ments, many home­own­ers actu­ally don’t own the rain­wa­ter that falls on their houses.

Here’s a quick snip­pet from the article:

“If you try to col­lect rain­wa­ter, well, that water really belongs to some­one else,” said Doug Kem­per, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Col­orado Water Con­gress… Frank Jaeger of the Parker Water and San­i­ta­tion Dis­trict, on the arid foothills south of Den­ver, sees water har­vest­ing as an insid­i­ous attempt to take water from enti­ties that have paid dearly for the resource. “Every drop of water that comes down keeps the ground wet and helps the flow of the river,” Jaeger said. He scoffs at argu­ments that har­vesters like Hol­strom only take a few drops from rivers. “Every­thing always starts with one lit­tle bite at a time.”

I have a healthy respect for the rule of rea­son­able laws, but these seemed way beyond the pale. Like, are they wor­ried these peo­ple are going to bot­tle the rain­wa­ter and sell it to us in South­ern California?

Here within view of the Pacific Ocean, any water not retained in the ground would just wash down the storm drains and slide out into the bay. I doubt we have the same sorts of rules. But for many folks in Utah or Col­orado who are try­ing to grow their own veg­gies, doing what they can to reduce become more self-sustaining and reduce their foot­print on the earth, things aren’t so easy.

What do you think? Should the rain­wa­ter belong to all of us?

March 19 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: politics • water • water conservation | 10 Comments »

loud music and sage

I drove all the way up to Los Ange­les for an organ recital last night. I knew I was in for trou­ble when the usher handed me a pro­gram and offered me a pair of earplugs. But more on that later.

John hates the idea of me to tak­ing my scooter to LA, so I grudg­ingly drove the gas-devouring Jeep. But to turn the sit­u­a­tion to an advan­tage I stopped by the Tree of Life Nurs­ery in San Juan Capis­trano. It’s a few miles east of I-5, but ten ten min­utes of dri­ving off the inter­state beats an hour and a half each direc­tion from San Diego.

I’d been plan­ning on doing some­thing with the unclaimed zone between my house and the neigh­bor behind me, and I wanted some native plants to fill in the zone. This would be a good chance to pick up some plants with­out the ridicu­lous commute.

The plant­i­ngs around the nurs­ery fea­tured some vibrant spring flow­ers, includ­ing this stand of Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies and vivid vio­let phacelia.

And this traf­fic cone mal­low was pretty spec­tac­u­lar as well (prob­a­bly desert mal­low, Sphaer­al­cea ambigua).

While there I picked up some plants for my project, includ­ing some more plants of white sage (Salvia api­ana) and a clone of pur­ple sage (Salvia leu­co­phylla ‘Amethyst Bluff’). I’ll post more on that project later in the week.

Nego­ti­at­ing LA rush hour traf­fic can be an ordeal, and doing it with a dozen plants in the back of the car wasn’t any­thing I was look­ing for­ward too, espe­cially if I had to jam on the brakes. But traf­fic was fairly light and I got to my des­ti­na­tion with plenty of time for a relax­ing din­ner before the concert.

And now, on to the con­cert: When the lights dimmed, a man got up to intro­duce the per­former for the evening. Charle­magne Pales­tine was one of the fig­ures active in the avant-garde music scene, first in New York around 1970, and slightly later in Los Ange­les. The man intro­duc­ing him apol­o­gized that dur­ing ear­lier rehearsals they’d blown three fuses on the organ, and that they might need to inter­rupt the con­cert to replace more fuses.

The con­cert loca­tion, the First Con­gre­ga­tional Church of Los Ange­les, claims to have the world’s largest indoor church organ, a mon­ster with well over 20,000 pipes. What would the sound be if you got sev­eral thou­sand of them going at the same time? The audi­ence got to find out about an hour into the piece.

What had started out as a wispy cloud of del­i­cate sus­tained notes had grad­u­ally gown in inten­sity as organ stops got added. When the composer/performer finally did a face-plant into the key­board around the 60 minute mark and remained there unmov­ing for a good ten min­utes, the hall shook with a throb­bing earth­quake of sound that with zero doubt was the loud­est, most intense, most jar­ring ten min­utes of any­thing I’ve ever heard in my life. (There’s a record­ing of Schling-Blägen, the piece Charle­magne Pales­tine per­formed in con­cert, but that in no way gives pre­pares you for the phys­i­cal assault that the you’ll expe­ri­ence live.)

When the piece ended, I was still shak­ing. I wasn’t sure I could drive home very reli­ably, and I was glad I wasn’t on the scooter.

As I opened the car door, the smell of sage escaped from plants behind the back seat. It’s said that sage tea is good for calm­ing the nerves, and the same could prob­a­bly be said for the aroma from the plants. With all my nerves still fir­ing on over­load, it was prob­a­bly the per­fect rem­edy for what I’d just expe­ri­enced. When I got home two hours later, I lay down, and went right to sleep.

PS: I’ve only talked about the loud­ness of the piece, but in the final analy­sis there was a lot of beauty and del­i­cacy in it as well. I loved it. Music can take you many places. This piece took me some­where I’ve never been.

March 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Charlemagne Palestine • music • sages • Tree of Life Nursery | 2 Comments »

a neighborhood native garden

Sat­ur­day I had the oppor­tu­nity to take a short hike with some of the local native plant soci­ety folks through Man­zanita Canyon, one of the small neigh­bor­hood canyons in San Diego that break up the urban devel­op­ment on the mesa tops. One of the com­mu­ni­ties that sur­rounds it, Aza­lea Park, has been clean­ing up the canyon and the neigh­bor­hood. One of their projects is been to trans­form a vacant canyon lot into a pocket park devoted to native plants.

The sign announc­ing Par­que Linda is almost as big as the lit­tle park itself, and is flanked by a sturdy plant of blad­der­pod (Iso­meris arborea, aka Cleome arborea) a plant that’s float­ing to the top of my list of favorite natives.Visually, it’s a pleas­ant, low shrub, with yel­low flow­ers sev­eral months of the year. The growth habit is open enough that you can see some of the inter­est­ing branch struc­ture, so the plant isn’t just a yel­low gum­drop.

Judg­ing from the num­ber of insects vis­it­ing it, the plant also appears to be a big favorite of the local ani­mal community.

The gar­den was orga­nized by adults, but many of the local chil­dren par­tic­i­pated in its cre­ation. I was par­tic­u­larly struck by the lit­tle clay signs that were used to iden­tify many of the plants. The adults iden­ti­fied the plants they wanted to label, but the kids made the signs.

The park gath­ers together a num­ber of plants that can sur­vive on what­ever rain­fall comes their way. But being a gar­den and not a reveg­e­ta­tion project, Par­que Linda will require the ongo­ing sup­port of the com­mu­nity to main­tain it. The fact that the lit­tle gar­den exists at all–not to men­tion that peo­ple will be com­mit­ting its upkeep–speaks to the fact that this is a neigh­bor­hood that cares about its well being, a place where people’s inter­ests don’t stop at their prop­erty lines.

We need more places like it.

March 16 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Azalea Park • community gardens • Manzanita Canyon • native plants | 4 Comments »

gbbd: pretty purple

For this Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day I’ve picked some pre­dom­i­nantly pur­ple spring-flowering plants that are start­ing to do their thing in my gar­den. All but one of these are Cal­i­for­nia (or Baja Cal­i­for­nia) natives, and all would be seri­ously water-wise choices for the gar­den. Some would even make it through an entire sum­mer with­out water, though they’d look just a lit­tle bet­ter with a sip once or twice a month.

Blue-eyed grass (Sisy­rinchium bel­lum): What a great name for a great plant. This iris rel­a­tive is happy coex­ist­ing in a moderately-watered gar­den with other plants, though they can stand drought. Here they are liv­ing along­side some chard and heliotrope.

Blue dicks (Dich­e­lostemma cap­i­ta­tum) are com­mon here near the coast and are one of our reli­able signs that it’s spring. They self-sow and spread around the gar­den, but not obnoxiously.

Black sage (Salvia mel­lif­era) is one of the local canyon plants that’s earned a place in the gar­den. In life the flow­ers are a slightly stronger pale mauve color than here in the photo. It’s just begin­ning to come into flower and should be a lit­tle more intense in a cou­ple weeks. Though not one of the “look at me” sages, it’s still qui­etly beautiful.

Ver­bena lilacina orig­i­nates in Baja. The plant shown here is just get­ting started. It should flower much of the year and require very lit­tle sum­mer water.

This one’s maybe closer to blue than pur­ple, the South African bulb Morea tripetala. I stuck it in a really dry spot, and it’s now prob­a­bly just bloom­ing on the reserves in the bulb. We’ll see how well it does after a sea­son of tough love in the garden.

And with the last photo we come back to Cal­i­for­nia with the jus­ti­fi­ably ever-popular Pen­ste­mon Mar­garita BOP (some­times sold as Pen­ste­mon het­ero­phyl­lus ‘Mar­garita BOP’). The flow­ers are a wild mix of blue and magenta pink, giv­ing the over­all impres­sion of pur­ple. The open tubu­lar flow­ers have some­thing of the look of a fox­glove which would require a cer­tain amount of water, but this pen­ste­mon actu­ally does just fine with almost no added water.

Thanks to May Dreams Gar­dens for host­ing Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day. Check out the page with glimpses into what’s bloom­ing all around the world.

March 15 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • plant profiles | Tags: black sage • blue dicks • blue-eyed grass • color • Dichelostemma capitatum • drought-tolerant landscaping • gbbd • native plants • Penstemon heterophyllus • Penstemon Margarita BOP • purple • Salvia mellifera • Sisyrinchium bellum • Verbena lilacina | 12 Comments »

backyard archaeology

Dig­ging holes for plants always seems to be a big oppor­tu­nity to find things left by for­mer own­ers or dropped by vis­i­tors to the house.

My most recent haul included this lit­tle yel­low mar­ble, nails, toys from the kids next door and money. Unfor­tu­nately the money almost always takes the form of pen­nies or nickels—The hun­dred dol­lar bills must degrade rapidly in the soil.

When we moved into the house twenty years ago the neighbor’s ivy had over­run the back two thou­sand square feet of the gar­den. We found all sorts of stuff lurk­ing in it includ­ing an intact bar­be­cue. And then there was this: 65 feet of a brick retain­ing wall. We had no idea it was there under­neath all that ivy.

And here’s an arti­fact from my recent walk to my local canyon, the fos­sil remains of an extinct species of shop­ping cart, prob­a­bly cour­tesy of the unseen home­less who must live nearby.

I’m sure back­yard archae­ol­ogy has turned up stranger things. What’s the weird­est thing you’ve dug up in the garden?

March 14 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: archaeology • lost and found | 5 Comments »

…and some not so garden-worthy

You could prob­a­bly gather together six gar­den­ers and get six dif­fer­ent opin­ions of what would make a plant garden-worthy. But I sus­pect there might be some­what more agree­ment on cer­tain other plants that prob­a­bly shouldn’t be included in a gar­den. Here are some encoun­ters from Sunday’s trip to Tecolote Canyon that would fall eas­ily into most people’s less-than-desirable category.

I’ll have to admit to actu­ally lik­ing this plant to the right. Dur­ing the win­ter it drops its leaves and is an attrac­tive thicket of upright or sprawl­ing branches. This time of year it starts new growth that has this warm red-brown col­oration. It’ll flower soon, and then set some loose clus­ters of white berries. Pretty, yes, and native, and impor­tant to wildlife. But this is poi­son oak. Maybe not the best choice for small back­yard gardens…

Most of the rest of my list below is com­prised of exotic plants that have staked a claim for them­selves at the expense of the native species. Dif­fer­ent loca­tions have their own list of inva­sives, so what you see below is tai­lored to South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Some of these plants could be good choices for other loca­tions. Oth­ers would be trou­ble almost any­where you grow them.

[ At this point I’d like to ded­i­cate the rest of this Fri­day the thir­teenth post to Out­of­doors, who last month devoted her Fri­day the thir­teenth post to inva­sive plant species. ]

I won’t go into too much detail about this trou­ble­some trio. Peo­ple have been work­ing hard to get the word out on pam­pas grass, green foun­tain grass, and ice­plant. The grasses, in par­tic­u­lar, can be gor­geous things in gar­dens, wav­ing in the breeze and lend­ing their dra­matic form to groups of softly mound­ing land­scape shrubs. You can see why peo­ple want to grow them. But are they garden-worthy in South­ern California?

All three of these quickly check out of people’s gar­dens and make for the wilds. I found both grasses and plenty of ice­plant escaped into the canyon, here on this hill­side and in other spots. So, as pretty as they can be–and I con­sider this drift of foun­tain grass in the sec­ond photo to be par­tic­u­larly poetic–these three would be bet­ter left in their native lands, or grown in cli­mates where the weather might limit their spread.

This is the first flower I saw this sea­son on the local plants of onion weed (Aspho­delus fis­tu­lo­sus). The first time I saw it I thought it was a wild­flower and wanted some for my gar­den. In full bloom the stalks of white flow­ers are an impres­sive sight. But they do spread like crazy. Not a good choice for the garden.

This com­bi­na­tion of plants looks as impres­sive as any plant­ing assem­bled by prac­ti­tion­ers of the New Peren­ni­als gar­den move­ment. But once again, the plants aren’t really wel­come addi­tions to the canyon. In the fore­ground is teasel (Dip­sacus sp.), a plant with excel­lent year-round archi­tec­tural struc­ture but hav­ing inva­sive ten­den­cies that are con­sid­ered “Mod­er­ate” by the Cal­i­for­nia Inva­sive Plant Coun­cil (Cal-IPC). Here it’s set against a back­ground of last season’s black mus­tard, a prob­lem in these parts since it was intro­duced by the Span­ish in the eigh­teenth cen­tury. The Cal-IPC only con­sid­ers the mustard’s rangi­ness to be of “Mod­er­ate” con­cern, but also states: “Pri­mar­ily a weed of dis­turbed sites, but can be locally a more sig­nif­i­cant prob­lem in wild­lands.” I’d say it’s a more sig­nif­i­cant pest locally.

Fen­nel can be attrac­tive in the herb gar­den, but like the rest of the inva­sives in this post, this is another plant that gets around. Its over­all unde­sir­able impacts are con­sid­ered “High” by the Cal-IPC. If I see fen­nel offered in the local nurs­eries it’s usu­ally the bronze col­ored strain. It’s less vig­or­ous, but all forms are con­sid­ered inva­sive. I do wish this were a bet­ter choice for gar­dens because it hosts swal­low­tail but­ter­flies, but at least there’s plenty of swal­low­tail food out in the local canyons. The but­ter­flies won’t starve. Okay, I’ll pass.

Say “Old Cal­i­for­nia” to any­one who’s lived in these parts for long, and this plant will prob­a­bly come to mind. The Brazil­ian Peru­vian pep­per tree forms a gor­geous tree with long, del­i­cate leaves that move any time there’s a breeze. But unfor­tu­nately the plants develop berries that the birds find irre­sistible. While the Cal-IPC con­sid­ers their threat to Cal­i­for­nia to be only “Lim­ited,” there are plants that would be bet­ter choices.

The Aus­tralian pep­per­mint wil­low (Ago­nis flex­u­osa), although not a native plant, is a good drought-tolerant sub­sti­tute that looks a bit like the pep­per tree but doesn’t share its inva­sive ten­den­cies. If you must have a del­i­cate weep­ing tree that says “Old Cal­i­for­nia” but don’t mind a lilt­ing Aus­tralian accent, this would be a bet­ter choice–and you can get vari­eties with either green or dra­matic black foliage. Or you could give up alto­gether on the colo­nial look and go in for any of the truly native trees. It doesn’t get any more “old Cal­i­for­nia” than that.

As I reread this post I’m struck that I’m prob­a­bly not doing a par­tic­u­larly good job of dis­cour­ag­ing peo­ple from grow­ing these plants. I keep going back to the beau­ti­ful redeem­ing qual­i­ties of these inva­sives, and I guess that’s why they con­tinue to be such a prob­lem. The mind tells you they might be bad news, but some­times it’s hard to say no.

With this last image I leave the plant king­dom and turn to another species that’s native to the local canyons. This one I think you’ll def­i­nitely agree you wouldn’t want around. I won’t assume that you like snakes any more than I do, so if you want to see the pic­ture you’ll have to click HERE.

Still, who among you doesn’t think baby ani­mals are just the cutest things? Now, every­body, say “awwwww”… This is a lit­tle baby south­ern Pacific rat­tler, prob­a­bly no longer than my fore­arm and too young to rat­tle. I’m deathly afraid of snakes but man­aged to fend off the fear to snap the pic­ture and watch the snake as it coiled itself defen­sively and make like a sidewinder, slid­ing back­wards into the grasses.

I have to respect these ani­mals since they do won­ders to keep down the rodent pop­u­la­tion. And they’re every bit as native as the poi­son oak I showed ear­lier. But after hav­ing had one of these in the back­yard fac­ing off against my cat, I’ve def­i­nitely decided this is another species that’s not garden-worthy, at least in my enclosed lit­tle space.

I admit it, I’m a wimp. Nature isn’t always con­ve­nient is it? But throw out the rat­tlesnakes and pam­pas grass and black mus­tard and fen­nels and you’re still left tens of thou­sands of cool and friendly selec­tions to invite into the garden.

March 13 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • places • plant profiles | Tags: Agonis flexuosa • Asphodelus fistulosus • black mustard • Brassica nigra • Dipsacus fullonum • fennel • invasive plants • onion weed • pampas grass • pepper trees • peppermint willow • snakes • teasel | 4 Comments »