[ Lost in the Landscape ]

santa ysabel open space preserve

A trip to the town of Santa Ysabel in the spring is for me like step­ping into a time machine in a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent ways. In the first most obvi­ous sense, this lit­tle town in the foothills of San Diego County appears to be pick­led in some ear­lier though indef­i­nite time period. A cou­ple build­ings have painted facades straight out of 1930s Walker Evans pho­tographs, while oth­ers look like straight­for­ward road­side com­mer­cial archi­tec­ture res­cued from the 1960s.

Time travel also comes to my mind when I look at the sur­round­ing coun­try­side. Plants that stopped bloom­ing a month ago in my neigh­bor­hood canyons are just com­ing online up here at 3000 feet. Some of this feels like Feb­ru­ary back home.

Still, even though it con­tains many famil­iar plants, this is a very dif­fer­ent ecosys­tem. There are dozens of plants I’d never see back down closer to sea level, and that’s what brought me to Santa Ysabel last weekend.

The town serves as gate­way to the Santa Ysabel Open Space Pre­serve, 5025 acres of foothills and active ranch lands set near the head­wa­ters of the San Diego River.

Botanist Jer­i­lyn Hir­sh­berg led the intense day of botaniz­ing which began with the hand­ing out of sheets of paper list­ing 203 plants that we stood a good chance of see­ing that day.

Be pre­pared. If you go an an out­ing look­ing at all the plant species in an area, expect to spend a cer­tain amount of time hud­dled together and bent over as you look at some of the small­est of the small plants. Peo­ple typ­i­cally call them “belly flow­ers.” But Jeri used a word that I’d never heard before (and I think was one she’d made up): “dinkophytes”–with “dinko” as in “dinky plants.”

A biol­o­gist on the trip com­plained sev­eral times, “That’s not a real word!” But I loved it so much that I hereby grant it offi­cial word sta­tus and encour­age all of you to begin using it.

In the end we didn’t see all 203 plants on the list, but the group found some bonuses that weren’t on it. Here are just a few of them, a cou­ple of which have made it into the gar­den world.

Johnny jump up, or Cal­i­for­nia golden vio­let (Viola pedun­cu­lata). Perky name, perky plant.

Grape soda lupine (Lupi­nus excu­bi­tus ssp. aus­tromon­tanus). Yes, it does have a distinct—but delicate—concord grape fra­grance, though it’s almost insult­ing to call the scent ”grape soda.” (Would you describe a flower by say­ing that it smells like arti­fi­cially rose-scented air fresh­ener?) The shrub is a pleas­ant mound of sil­very leaves, but the tow­er­ing spikes make it truly gor­geous this time of year.

Cal­i­for­nia milk­weed (Ascle­pias cal­i­for­nica). The clus­ters of vivid wine blooms are strik­ing. What makes this milk­weed really remark­able is that it’s cov­ered with so many soft hairs that it’s hard not to touch it. Kay, the trip orga­nizer, thought it was like han­dling a cloud. Good description.

This plant hosts the local pop­u­la­tion of the monarch but­ter­fly. Before you go off and plant this milk­weed in hopes of attract­ing them to your gar­den, how­ever, it’s worth read­ing some advice from the Las Pil­i­tas Nurs­ery site: “The alka­loids asso­ci­ated with this milk­weed and other milk­weeds give the but­ter­flies that feed on it pro­tec­tion. Alka­loids from the wrong milk­weed (South Amer­i­can, Mex­i­can, etc.) can expose the but­ter­flies to pre­da­tion. If the monarch or other but­ter­fly has not evolved with the milk­weed they may have lim­ited tol­er­ance for the par­tic­u­lar alka­loid of the plant species. The Cal­i­for­nia fly­way runs from Baja to Canada, it does not include Mex­ico proper nor Cen­tral Amer­ica. If you live in Chicago [which is part of the path­way of the mon­archs that migrate to main­land Mex­ico] you can plant Mex­i­can species (Ascle­pias mex­i­cana) or Ascle­pias tuberosa, don’t plant our species.”

Scar­let bugler (Pen­ste­mon cen­tran­thi­folius).

One of the botan­i­cal high­lights cen­tered on this lit­tle plant, the hill star (Lithophragma het­ero­phylla), closely related to our very pro­lific wood­land star. Though fairly com­mon to the north, this stand of hill stars formed the only cur­rently known pop­u­la­tion in San Diego County.

The idea of a county is entirely a human con­struct, but still I thought that was a pretty cool way to end the trip, see­ing the only loca­tion of a plant in my local human construct.

To end this post, here are just a few more pic­tures of the hill­sides of the pre­serve, stud­ded with at least five dif­fer­ent species and nat­ural hybrids of oaks…

April 30 2009 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: Asclepias californica • butterflies • California milkweed • grape soda lupine • hill star • johnny jump up • Lithophragma heterophylla • Lupinus excubitus ssp. austromontanus • San Diego County • Santa Ysabel • Santa Ysabel Open Space Preserve • scarlet bugler • Viola pedunculata | 5 Comments »

camera oops

Have you ever made a mis­take while using a cam­era and ended up lik­ing the “bad” photo best?

I had bor­rowed John’s dig­i­tal point and shoot and had aimed the thing at one of the local native plants, a bloom­ing bush poppy, Den­drome­con rigida. The cam­era took for­ever to focus, and I thought it’d done its thing. But the flash went off as I was mov­ing to put the cam­era back in my pocket.

The result­ing photo com­bines a blurred ren­di­tion of the plant and mulch with just a lit­tle bit of sub­ject mat­ter frozen in place by the flash. It’s noth­ing you’d use to iden­tify the plant, but I like it as a photo…

April 26 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: bush poppy • Dendromecon rigida • photographic mistakes | 7 Comments »

landscaping without plants

From my desk at work it’s less than a fif­teen minute stroll to this view­point, which has got to be one of the most famous places to stand in all of mod­ern architecture.

The view is of the cen­tral plaza of the Salk Insti­tute of Bio­log­i­cal Stud­ies, which archi­tect Louis Kahn designed for his client, polio vac­cine pio­neer Jonas Salk. The plaza fea­tures this sim­ple water fea­ture that pulls your eye towards the water, 400 feet below, and to the hori­zon and the sky. The mate­ri­als of the plaza are reduced down to water, traver­tine mar­ble and the angled con­crete walls of the research buildings.

No plants. When Kahn was work­ing on the design he’d had a con­ver­sa­tion with Mex­i­can archi­tect Luis Bar­ragán. Ken­neth Framp­ton recounts Barragán’s sem­i­nal response in Stud­ies in Tec­tonic Cul­ture: The Poet­ics of Con­struc­tion in Nine­teenth and Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury Archi­tec­ture:

“I would not put a tree or blade of grass in this space. This should be a plaza of stone, not a gar­den.” I [Kahn] looked at Dr. Salk and he at me and we both felt this was deeply right. Feel­ing our approval, he added joy­ously, “If you make this a plaza, you will gain a facade–a facade to the sky.”

As much as I love plants, I have to agree that this was the right deci­sion. There’s an unpho­tograph­ably joy­ous expe­ri­ence of pure space that set­tles into your mind as you stand or sit to con­tem­plate the view.

If you can pull your eyes off the horizon–not an easy thing to do–you start to notice, how­ever, that plants do fig­ure in the plaza’s final real­iza­tion. Imme­di­ately to the east are some steps, and plant­ing beds on either side of the steps. As with a lot of mod­ern plant­ing design, the planters fea­ture one kind of plant and one kind only. Con­sid­er­ing the plant­ing design was exe­cuted many years ago, prob­a­bly in the late 1960s or early 1970s, long before the cur­rent focus on edi­ble land­scap­ing, it’s sur­pris­ing that the plant of choice was orange trees, at least four dozen of them. (Maybe it has some­thing to do with the envi­ron­men­tal ethic that was devel­op­ing while the Salk was being designed, an ethic that we’re finally redis­cov­er­ing today.)

Below is a 360-degree panorama from the top of the steps. Just imag­ine walk­ing west towards the hori­zon, at dusk, on a calm evening, as the orange trees begin to flower and scent the air.

April 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: architecture • edible landscaping • Lis Barragan • Louis Kahn • Salk Institute | 15 Comments »

first epipyllums of the season

There are gar­dens zones that I con­sider to be mainly my spaces, and there are oth­ers that I con­sider John’s. The pond/shaded patio area is largely his gar­den play­ground, and he has a num­ber of pot­ted plants, includ­ing sev­eral dif­fer­ent kinds of epi­phyl­lums, the orchid cactus.

For a cou­ple months now, we’ve been watch­ing buds develop on one of the epis. The plants aren’t labeled, and there are enough of them that you for­get which one is which. As we watched the lit­tle buds we had no idea what color the flow­ers would be. Judg­ing by the sepals on the outside–red, maybe?

Oops. It’s actu­ally a pure white inner flower when it opens. Here you can see the white petals are ringed with red-tinged, yellowish/greenish sepals.

When a plant gets sev­eral on them at a time, it would be a traffic-stopper if we had traf­fic in the back yard… For a cac­tus, epipyl­lums are on the wimpy side. Like, you have to squirt water at them every now and then. And they don’t cope well with freez­ing tem­per­a­tures. And they like mostly-shaded con­di­tions. Other than that, they’re pretty easy–and spec­tac­u­lar start­ing about now..

April 23 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: cactus • epiphyllums • orchid cactus | 6 Comments »

picture this photo contest

Gar­den­ing Gone Wild is host­ing a photo con­test for the best image of native plants in a gar­den set­ting. Wan­der down to the links in the com­ments on their post to see all the excel­lent ways peo­ple use natives in their gardens.

It’s hard for me sit some­thing like this out, so below are my three entries, pho­tos taken in my gar­den over the last cou­ple of months. (As usual, click to see the larger images.)

I’ve already shared the first two on these pages, so for­give me for repris­ing them. These are of clumps of blue-eyed grass (Sisy­rinchium bel­lum) in a totally assorted plant­ing, mix­ing the natives with veg­gies (Red Win­ter red Russ­ian kale, beets, red– and orange-stemmed chard) orna­men­tals (heliotrope, geum and sages) and an herb (cat­mint). The plant­ing requires an aver­age amount of water­ing to keep every­body happy, but it shows how food plants and natives can eas­ily coex­ist with more gar­de­nesque selections.

(“Gardenesque”–how I love that word. No, I didn’t make it up. I have Noel Kings­bury (with Piet Oudolf) to thank for using it in Design­ing with Plants. He blogs, too!)

The first is a closeup of the native, the sec­ond shows the same bed three weeks later, after the geum started to flower.

The third photo pic­tures a foun­da­tion plant­ing fea­tur­ing one of the Cal­i­for­nia native rushes, Jun­cus patens. I have this thing for spikey, archi­tec­tural plants, and this one ful­fills my needs nicely. Most rushes are crea­tures of wet zones. How­ever, J. patens is one of the most drought-tolerant. These plants are located in the drip line for water off the roof, and they can make it through the sum­mer with min­i­mal added irrigation.

April 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: blue-eyed grass • Juncus patens • native plants • Sisyrinchium bellum | 8 Comments »

sphinx moths

Along with the flow­ers, spring brings its share of insects. I could do with­out the ants that are now begin­ning to explore the inte­rior of the house, but the sphinx moths that started to appear in huge num­bers last week are about as cool as any bug out there.

This is the white-lined sphinx moth, Hyles lin­eata. Although its main range is the Amer­i­can West and north­ern Mex­ico, the species can be found all over the US. (Check out the writeup at the ter­rific But­teryflies and Moths of North Amer­ica site for more information.)

There are dozens of other sphinx moths, includ­ing the adults of the noto­ri­ous tomato and tobacco horn­worms, famil­iar to almost any­one who’s tried to grow a tomato plant. The cater­pil­lars of the white-lined sphin­xes, how­ever, don’t seem to have the rep­u­ta­tion for going on the same sort of sus­tained ram­pages against our veg­etable gardens.

The way these large, mus­cu­lar insects maneu­ver and hover over flow­ers as they feed reminds you of hum­ming­birds, and in fact they’re also called “hum­ming­bird moths.” As with hum­ming­birds, they enjoy nectar-rich flow­ers, such as this Hot Lips sage. You can see these moths feed­ing dur­ing the day­light, but the pop­u­la­tions really come out after the sun sets, form­ing qui­etly buzzing clouds at dusk or before the sun rises.

In no way do I con­sider myself an insect pho­tog­ra­pher. I quickly found out how frus­trat­ing it can be to pho­to­graph fast-moving moths with a cam­era that refuses to focus in the dark. These are the only two pho­tos I kept out of a cou­ple dozen tries.

This sec­ond image is no stun­ner, but you can begin to make out the amaz­ing long tongue that the moth uses to lap up the tasty nectar.

If you’re into insect pho­tos done as well as any­one out there can do them, you should take a look at the work of Bob Parks. He was work­ing at San Diego’s Museum of Nat­ural His­tory when I first met him ten or so years ago. I don’t know of any­one as pas­sion­ate and devoted to bugs and pho­tos of bugs. That pas­sion shows in his tech­ni­cally out­stand­ing and patiently ren­dered pic­tures. There’s a nice bio­graph­i­cal writeup of him at the SDNHM site.

April 22 2009 | Categories: plant profiles • rambles | Tags: Bob Parks • desirable insects • Hyles lineata • insects • sphinx moths | 10 Comments »

botanical side trip

While I was vis­it­ing San Diego’s Earth Day cel­e­bra­tions on Sun­day, I took a quick detour into Bal­boa Park’s Botan­i­cal Build­ing. It dates back to the 1914–15 Panama Pacific Expo­si­tion, and lays claim to being one of the largest lath struc­tures in the world.

It was an odd feel­ing to leave the sun-drenched cel­e­bra­tion of sus­tain­able liv­ing out­side and shift gears into the shaded, misted, and heav­ily watered Botan­i­cal Build­ing. Humid and trop­i­cal, the inte­rior reminded me of the over-watered vision of par­adise that many peo­ple still think of when they think of Cal­i­for­nia. Palms, cycads, bego­nias, orchids and other trop­i­cals and sub­trop­i­cals lazed in the shade or reached for the light dozens of feet overhead.

I usu­ally go to pub­lic gar­dens and keep an eye out for things I’d like to have in my own gar­den. Gar­dens are amaz­ingly demo­c­ra­tic that way. If you look hard enough, you can often find some of the rarest plants, espe­cially now with the web avail­able to help source them.

In these days of loom­ing water rationing, how­ever, I felt a lit­tle queasy that the Botan­i­cal Build­ing was show­cas­ing all sorts of water-intensive plants San Die­gans are try­ing not to fix­ate on so much these days. Our aver­age tem­per­a­tures enable the growth of these plants, our reg­u­lar rain­fall does not.

As I was think­ing about that queasi­ness, I real­ized that many of the Bal­boa Park build­ings nearby are muse­ums that are full of unique objects or things that would be so far beyond my means to buy. The resources of these muse­ums are focused on giv­ing the pub­lic access to things and ideas they might not ordi­nar­ily encounter. I decided to try to think of the Botan­i­cal Build­ing that way, as a sort of botan­i­cal museum. Although I could prob­a­bly find many of its plants if I searched hard enough–and a few of them are actu­ally totally common–I decided to try to look at and appre­ci­ate the plants as if they were museum objects I didn’t need to own.

And as my indig­na­tion started to lift, I started to be appre­cia­tive. Wasn’t it great that peo­ple in the city have a place where they can go visit some inter­est­ing plants but not have to worry about water­ing and car­ing for them? And the Botan­i­cal Build­ing is free! If peo­ple decide to cre­ate lit­tle pock­ets of par­adise at home, they don’t need to do their whole gar­dens this way. A lit­tle shaded cor­ner could give you a lot of the same sense of cool­ness and shel­ter that the Botan­i­cal Build­ing does.

In addi­tion to the big lath house, Bal­boa Park offers a num­ber of other plant­i­ngs, includ­ing two suc­cu­lent gar­dens. So it’s not like the park spends all its resources pimp­ing an out­dated vision of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. And there’s value in see­ing an old-school plant­ing of this sort to help appre­ci­ate how local ideas about gar­den­ing have shifted.

So…back to my visit. Lots of things were in flower, but I ended up focus­ing on plants with var­ie­gated leaves that were used through­out the build­ing. No for­est would have so many var­ie­gated plants in so small a space, but this “gar­den museum” did a nice job in show­cas­ing some of the botan­i­cal world’s inter­est­ing foliage pat­terns. Take a look…

(As usual you click on the images to enlarge them, espe­cially if the signs in the thumb­nails are too small to read…)

Cycla­men

Ire­sine herbstii

April 21 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Balboa Park • Balboa Park Botanical Building • foliage • variegated leaves • water use | 3 Comments »

earth day fair

Yes­ter­day was the big city Earth Day fair here in town at Bal­boa Park. Buoyed by tem­per­a­tures in the 80s, tens of thou­sands of peo­ple came out to celebrate.

Get­ting to the park required some form of travel, which for many peo­ple meant par­tic­i­pat­ing in a three mile traf­fic jam to exit at the park. (Just a lit­tle bit of irony in peo­ple in get­ting into their inter­nal com­bus­tion pow­ered vehi­cles to cel­e­brate the earth, don’t you think?)

With the main core of Bal­boa Park ded­i­cated to pedes­tri­ans and the fair, park­ing a car there was pretty impos­si­ble. The orga­niz­ers had arranged for remote park­ing and shut­tles, which seemed to be work­ing well.

I rode my scooter, which made park­ing in the unused space between cars easy. I give myself a few brownie points for dri­ving some­thing that’s pretty fuel-efficient, though in real­ity a car­load of peo­ple in a Hum­mer would have used about the same amount of gas to get there. I’m try­ing to get greener, really. (All of you read­ing this, hold me to it–Guilt works. So does an appeal to my sense of the greater good.)

In the end, though, even on a hot day, the way to get there was on two feet–or two wheels. Cars were barred from enter­ing the core of the park, and there was free valet park­ing for bicy­cles. Yeeha!

Once you got there you had your choice of 400-plus booths. Native plant soci­ety? Check. Land­scape con­trac­tors spe­cial­iz­ing in low-water land­scapes? Sev­eral. Infor­ma­tion on greener res­i­den­tial con­struc­tion prac­tices (includ­ing solar energy)? Or on most of the pub­lic nat­ural park­lands around the county? Or on con­vert­ing your car to a purely elec­tric vehi­cle? Absolutely.

Left: A 1930s (1932?) Rolls Royce that has been turned into a purely elec­tric vehicle.

On such a warm day I felt really sorry for the per­son in this garbage can cos­tume that was meant to draw atten­tion to city waste issues. But he or she was incred­i­bly perky all the time I watched. Bet­ter than the wilted guy in the banana suit nearby.

One of the kid-friendly booths was this hands-on demon­stra­tion of paper-making using recy­cled paper. I watched a girl of prob­a­bly no more than five star­ing at the lit­tle sheet of paper that she’d just made, like it was the most mag­i­cal object in the world.

And of course there were booths to buy earthly stuff: water stor­age sys­tems (a lit­tle pricey at over $6 per gal­lon of capac­ity), elec­tric bicy­cles, cool suc­cu­lents, san­dals, teeshirts, ket­tle corn… Okay, some of the offer­ings were more oppor­tunis­tic than they were green, but hey, it’s a fes­ti­val. The home-made lemon­ade stand caught my inter­est, but even by not long after noon, they were sold out. Waaah.

Events like this are inter­est­ing to see what’s being pushed as the lat­est great­est thing, and some of the green con­struc­tion tech­nolo­gies were pretty big. Fif­teen years ago an event like this would have been filled with peo­ple demon­strat­ing their double-paned win­dow sys­tems. Yes­ter­day I might have seen one out­fit offer­ing a spe­cial­ized ver­sion of insu­lated glaz­ing. That goes to show how what may have seemed cool and exotic a decade ago can become commonplace–and even part of reg­u­la­tions. It gives me hope that we’re see­ing a lot of peo­ple work­ing on some of our big prob­lems. And what’s con­sid­ered a bou­tique indus­try this year might be com­mon as dirt in a decade. Solar-electric kettle-corn stor­age sys­tems, anyone?

Crowds or not, I always enjoy going to Bal­boa Park. Here are just a few ran­dom sights. I’ll post tomor­row on what was going on in the botan­i­cal build­ing, seem­ingly obliv­i­ous to the Earth Day happenings.

Always a crowd-pleaser, the wild trunks of the Aus­tralian tea tree (Lep­tosper­mum lae­vi­ga­tum) were draw­ing pho­tog­ra­phers every few min­utes. I’ve loved this plant ever since I saw it in the 1970s at the Los Ange­les County Arbore­tum. I might have room for one if I nuke every­thing else in the back yard…

The park is devot­ing itself more to Cal­i­for­nia native plants. Here’s a new plant­ing of bush poppy (Den­drome­con, prob­a­bly har­fordii) with a ground­cover ceonothus.

In my clois­tered life a tightly cropped patch of lawn is a pretty exotic sight. And then add lawn bowlers on top of that. Wow. Not things I see every day. The park is always great for keep­ing my eyes open…

April 20 2009 | Categories: places | Tags: Balboa Park • Earth Day | No Comments »

from shower to flower

Earth Day is com­ing up on Wednes­day. What environment-friendly changes will you be try­ing to make?

Last year we installed a tan­k­less water heater, a move that has saved us at least 30% on our gas bill. But it still takes a while for the heated water to make it to the bath­room. In the past, we let the cold water in the pipes go down the drain until the water got to a proper shower tem­per­a­ture. But now the water is going into a bucket that we’ll use to water the gar­den. (A prettier–or at least cleaner–bucket not for­merly used for pulling weeds and mix­ing pot­ting soil is next on the agenda…)

The next log­i­cal step for water con­ser­va­tion would be to install a gray water sys­tem to reuse wash­wa­ter. Reg­u­la­tions in Cal­i­for­nia have been com­plex enough so that only 41 house­holds have done it legally in San Diego County, and only 200 state-wide. State sen­a­tor Alan Lowen­thal from Long Beach has intro­duced a new bill, SB 1258, that would man­date a review of exist­ing codes to make it eas­ier to design and install legal gray water sys­tems, a piece of leg­is­la­tion that is being called the “shower to flower” bill.

It’s a good start, and one worth supporting.

Related read­ing:
San Diego Union Tribue: New water­ing source is sur­fac­ing (March 23, 2009 arti­cle)
Los Ange­les Times: A solu­tion to California’s water short­age goes down the drain (April 19, 2009 opin­ion piece)
The text of SB 1258, marked up with com­ments and sug­ges­tions for fur­ther improve­ments by Oasis Design.

April 19 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Earth Day • gray water • recycling • water conservation | 7 Comments »

dressed to weed

Sunny and warm: a per­fect morn­ing for cats and gar­den­ers. The cat had her chores, mainly to stare at inter­est­ing things in the gar­den, and I had mine.

Task #1 was to dead­head the arc­to­tis (African daisy) that has been bloom­ing for sev­eral months. This is the “before” on one plant…

…and the “after” on another. Arc­to­tis goes on bloom­ing regard­less of whether it’s been dead­headed or not. But the plants looked like they were wind­ing down for the year, and I was hop­ing to extend their sea­son a bit.

The plants are attrac­tive, but I thought the bucket of trim­mings was pretty cool, too.

Chore #2 was to weed one of the patches of bromeli­ads that we’d let loose in the back of a raised bed. The plant has rigid spines like teeth on a sharp saw blade, which makes weed­ing tricky, and forces you to ask your­self, “Do I really want to do this?”

John started on the task and ended up with bloody fore­arms. Not happy. He went for the pitch­fork, think­ing we could lift the clumps, weed under them, and then set the clumps back. These are plants with almost no roots, and that would have worked fine.

But I pro­posed another idea. I have these long cor­dura motor­cy­cle gauntlets that I use when I ride my scooter when it’s cold out. They pro­tect your hands, but also your fore­arms. Would those work for the gar­den, too?

I suited up, first a thick long-sleeved sweat­shirt, and then the gauntlets. Okay, it’s not par­tic­u­larly haute cou­ture, and it’s not a look I’d want to inflict on the world. But it worked.

Why all this effort? Well, the flow­ers are pretty stun­ning right now in an unre­strained, trop­i­cal way. And the plants are sur­pris­ing drought-tolerant.

Weed­ing around them seems to be the main chal­lenge. But now we’ve got an easy solution…

April 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bromeliads • cats • deadheading • weeding | 6 Comments »