[ Lost in the Landscape ]

gbbd: the garden and beyond

It’s spring, all right. The gar­den con­tin­ues to bloom away man­i­cally, but the out­door places around town have been no slouch, either, when it comes to flowers.

This Gar­den Blogger’s Bloom Day, hosted by May Dreams Gar­dens, fea­tures a gallery of some blooms from the gar­den mixed in with blooms from Mis­sion Trails Regional Park in San Diego.

In the top photo from Mis­sion Trails you can see that the yellow-flowered deer­weed, Lotus sco­par­ius, has col­o­nized many of the sunny areas that burned four and a half years ago. As the land­scape recov­ers, other plants will come in and stake their claims. The sec­ond image from near the top of For­tuna Peak shows that other areas are also recov­er­ing from the fires, though slower than far­ther downslope.

You can hover over each image below for its name, or click it to see a larger photo. While you can prob­a­bly tell what’s a wild plant and what’s in the gar­den, there’s an answer key at the end if you’re into quizzing your­self. (A few of thee are tricky in that they’re local native plants that have been incor­po­rated into the gar­den.)

Answers:
Wild, gar­den, gar­den;
gar­den, wild, wild;
wild, gar­den wild;
gar­den, gar­den, gar­den;
gar­den, wild, gar­den;
wild, gar­den, wild;
wild, wild, wild.

April 15 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape | Tags: Add new tag • fire • fire ecology • flowers • gbbd • in bloom • Mission Trails Regional Park | 5 Comments »

feed your guests before you eat them

Yes­ter­day saw some of my pitcher plants open­ing up their spring­time blooms. These are car­niv­o­rous plants that pri­mar­ily dine on insects that slide into leaves which have evolved into ele­gant long tubes that con­tain a diges­tive juice at the bot­tom. (See the young Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla ‘Tarnok’ pitch­ers in the pic­ture to the left.)

Almost all the species have evolved so that they flower, offer­ing nec­tar to their guests, before they develop their mature pitchers–effectively help­ing assure their repro­duc­tion by not din­ing on their pol­li­na­tors. These soft yel­low flow­ers appear on Sar­race­nia alata, the pale or yel­low trumpet.

Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla ‘Giant’ looks like it’s only a cou­ple days behind in its flow­er­ing sched­ule. This bud is about to open to a dark red lit­tle mop of petals.

In the “eat-or-be-eaten” world of car­niv­o­rous plants, it’s inter­est­ing to see that it’s not the plants that always have the upper hand in their rela­tion­ship with insects. Here the top of an emerg­ing pitcher has been munched on by some insect.

This was my first pitcher plant, pur­chased in the flower aisle of the local Trader Joe’s store. (It must have been a spe­cial pur­chase because I’ve never seen them there again…) Like many plants sold for dec­o­ra­tion, it came with no label. I want to know the name of every­thing, so this both­ers me to no end. (It could be the com­mon dec­o­ra­tive hybrid Sar­race­nia Judith Hin­dle, or it might not…)

I’m still fairly new to pitcher plants, so I can’t offer much advice on grow­ing them other than to keep them wet, and to use good-quality water. These are about as far from drought-tolerant plants as you’ll ever encounter. And to that I might add that when given an option to select between pot­ting them in half-peat/half-sand or half-peat/half-perlite, choose the sand mix­ture, at least if you’re doing a lit­tle bog plant­ing. Oth­er­wise the per­lite just floats to the top, look­ing like lit­tle sty­ro­foam peanuts that have floated to the sur­face of a pol­luted lake. Not pretty. If I were ever to re-do the bog, that would be the first thing I’d do differently.

April 13 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: carnivorous plants • Sarracenia alata • Sarracenia leucophylla | 1 Comment »

gonzo topiary

I posted a cou­ple months ago about the pres­ence here in town of an extreme top­i­ary gar­den. At that point I hadn’t had a chance to visit it, but last week I finally made it.

The house respon­si­ble for the gar­den perches high above the street. The owner could have cho­sen to plant ground­cover on the long slope, or to ter­race it and gar­den the dif­fer­ent lev­els. Instead they opted to pop­u­late the slope with sev­eral dozen crazy lit­tle top­i­aries. Some of them are geo­met­ric, but most are fan­ci­ful lit­tle fig­ures. Bun­nies, sea mon­sters, Texas gun­slingers, you name it.

The plants mak­ing up all the fig­ures appeared to be cape hon­ey­suckle, Teco­maria capen­sis, a plant that isn’t one of the clas­sic top­i­ary selec­tions. But it accepts shap­ing really well, and seems to be a good choice for top­i­ary if you don’t mind a lit­tle bumpi­ness here and there. The plant can have spec­tac­u­lar tubu­lar orange flow­ers, though don’t expect to see many if you’re sculpt­ing a giant bunny out of it.

A spec­ta­cle like this doesn’t just hap­pen, so it was no sur­prise that I found a gar­dener main­tain­ing it. I was hop­ing to see some­one shap­ing the top­i­aries. But instead he was using an elec­tric hedge trim­mer to keep the plants off the stairs that led up (and up and up) to the house. But I guess that’s gar­den­ing for you. There’s a cer­tain amount of the really grat­i­fy­ing work of putting in new plants or admir­ing the flow­ers, but there’s a lot of basic main­te­nance that goes into it as well…

Speak­ing of things top­i­ary, I finally had a chance to see A Man Named Pearl, the 2006 doc­u­men­tary on Pearl Fryar’s amaz­ing top­i­ary gar­den in Bish­opville, South Car­olina. The basic story is inspir­ing: a sharecropper’s son moves into a white neigh­bor­hood where his pres­ence isn’t appre­ci­ated at first; over time he makes a gar­den that is awarded “Yard of the Month”; and then he goes on to shape a col­lec­tion of some of the most orig­i­nal top­i­aries ever clipped. Some of you have seen the doc­u­men­tary already–particularly now that HGTV has broad­cast it. But if you haven’t, it’s def­i­nitely worth a look.

April 12 2009 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: A Man Named Pearl • cape honeysuckle • Pearl Fryar • Tecomaria capensis • topiary • videos | 7 Comments »

western dichondra

My par­ents knew a good deal when they saw one. The house they pur­chased in the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia ‘burbs had the required num­ber of bed­rooms, fruit trees in the back, a lawn for the kids to play on, and was located half-way between their jobs. The front yards in the neigh­bor­hood were well main­tained but not splashy.

Some of the houses on the other side of the nearby main boule­vard, how­ever, had immac­u­late high-maintenance gardens–and prob­a­bly had gar­den­ers to go with them. One of the ground­cover choices that some of those houses sported was a dark green dichon­dra lawn, smooth and uni­form as the felt on a pool table. These were lawns that didn’t tol­er­ate much foot traf­fic, required lots of weed­ing, heavy sum­mer water and were meant mainly for show. Com­pared to our lumpy, spiky lawn, these dichon­dra tableaux seemed like the stuff that dreams are made of. (We never would have con­sid­ered that dichon­dra is con­sid­ered a weed in many parts of the country.)

Jump ahead lots and lots of years to my cur­rent house. Every now and then in one of the raised beds I’d see a plant vol­un­teer under­neath some shrubs or around some bulbs. It sure looked like dichon­dra, but for a long time I thought I wasn’t IDing the plant correctly.

As it turns out the plant really is a dichon­dra, and it’s actu­ally one of the uncom­mon native plants found in coastal sage scrub, chap­ar­ral and oak wood­land habi­tats. The local species, Dichon­dra occi­den­talis, is dis­tinct from the clas­sic lawn plant–one of the sub­tle dis­tin­guish­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics being the sil­ver or brown hairs on the stems. But it’s still a dichon­dra, and I thought its was pretty cool that one of the plants that I’d fetishized grow­ing up some­how man­aged to find me as an adult.

The dichon­dra has self-sowed itself into a cou­ple spots around the house. It now forms a wel­come ground­cover in this raised planter, where a few months ago the nar­cis­sus were break­ing through the soil…

…and this is today, with white Chi­nese ground orchids, Bletilla stri­ata alba, bloom­ing away in their bed of soft dichondra.

If you don’t want to wait for the plant to show up on its own, sev­eral Cal­i­for­nia native plant sup­pli­ers offer Dichon­dra occi­den­talis, though it’s def­i­nitely one of the less pop­u­lar items. The plant seems best for me in part-shade. It can take the sum­mer off if you don’t water it, but bi-weekly sprin­klings have kept it around year-round for me, though in sum­mer it’s a lit­tle sparse. But as much as I hate to admit it, I also have a hard time look­ing glam­orous all the time, so I’m will­ing to give this plant a break…

April 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Bletilla striata alba • Chinese ground orchid • Dichondra occidentalis • groundcovers • lawns • native plants • western dichondra | 4 Comments »

trying to do the right thing

Peo­ple often try to do the right thing, but along the way things some­things can go astray.

Sat­ur­day I was hik­ing one of our local urban canyons, San Clemente Canyon, with some other plant peo­ple. Like the rest of our local canyons, the plants you find there are a mix of native and intro­duced species. It’s not pris­tine, by any means, par­tic­u­larly when you con­sider that there’s a free­way a cou­ple hun­dred feet behind where this photo was taken. But many of the really big plants are orig­i­nal to the canyon. You can get a good impres­sion of what it was like two cen­turies ago, and hope­fully that’ll moti­vate peo­ple to pre­serve what’s left.

Dur­ing that walk every­one paused at a big clear­ing in the trees. It was a broad area that had been cleared of the inva­sive species and replanted with Cal­i­for­nia plants. The project was financed by the city author­ity that main­tains the sewer lines that run through the park. The main­te­nance roads eat into the native habi­tat, and for ever acre of road, the agency did an off­set of five acres where they tried to mit­i­gate the dam­age done by the bull­dozed access routes. It’s a pretty rea­son­able way to deal with some­thing a big city needs to operate–sewers–and at the same time improve the integrity of the semi-wild spaces.

After oohing and awing at the improve­ments, sev­eral of us noticed the pop­pies. Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies, yes they were, but big, tall orange ones and not the petite yellow-to-gold ones that you typ­i­cally find in the local environment.

A trip yes­ter­day to Tecolote Canyon, another of the local urban canyons, revealed exactly the same thing in a restora­tion in progress there.

Tech­ni­cally, under cur­rent botan­i­cal sys­tems, both ver­sions of the poppy are con­sid­ered the same species. But a quick look at them yells you that they’re as dis­tinct from one another as cousins in a fam­ily, and they have genet­ics that evolved to mak­ing them appro­pri­ate for their dif­fer­ent environments.

Take a look at their leaves, to start. The one on the left, below, is from the clas­sic “Cal­i­for­nia poppy” that peo­ple know (Escholzia cal­i­for­nica). The one on the right is from the ver­sion found around here (at once clas­si­fied as Escholzia cal­i­for­nica mar­itima). The one on the left has less leaf sur­face, and to me looks like it’s evolved to deal with more drought.

Grow­ing the two ver­sions side-by side in the gar­den also reveals another dif­fer­ence. The reg­u­lar Cal­i­for­nia poppy devel­ops pow­dery mildew this cool and humid time of year, whereas the local ver­sion seems to be close to unaffected.

So when you com­bine the plant size, flower size, flower color and the plants’ resis­tance to pow­dery mildew, you can see that the plants are quite dif­fer­ent, and that the coastal ver­sion is prob­a­bly bet­ter suited for liv­ing here. (In gar­dens the typ­i­cal orange form is pretty rugged and no slouch, but its dis­ease issues give it a dis­ad­van­tage to being as spec­tac­u­lar as it might be in a drier region like the Antelpe Val­ley, the loca­tion of the Cal­i­for­nia Poppy Pre­serve.)

Recon Native Plants, a San Diego whole­sale native plant nurs­ery that spe­cial­izes in habi­tat restora­tion, takes extra pride in know­ing exactly where their plants come from. Their site advertizes:

For exam­ple, an Artemisia cal­i­for­nica from the Sierra Nevada and an Artemisia cal­i­for­nica from coastal San Diego County are the same species, how­ever they have evolved and adapted with dif­fer­ent genet­ics for dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ments. With the source iden­ti­fied, RECON Native Plants can tell our clients within 5 miles, the ori­gin of each plant and the client can select the loca­tion most appro­pri­ate to their project.

It’s a good illus­tra­tion of the dif­fer­ence between plant­ing a gar­den and going the extra dis­tance to effect a suc­cess­ful habi­tat restora­tion project. Many gar­den­ers would pre­fer the splashier Ante­lope Val­ley ver­sion of the state flower, but that’s not the form that makes most sense for our local flora. Some­where along the plan­ning, imple­men­ta­tion or sourc­ing of these two habi­tat restora­tion projects, some­thing went a lit­tle astray. It’s a small detail, but it’s one that many peo­ple con­sider impor­tant as we try to keep our open spaces as wild as we can.

EDIT, April 7: Check out another post on two dif­fer­ent poppy forms over at Dry­S­tone­Gar­den.

April 06 2009 | Categories: landscape | Tags: California poppy • Escholzia californica • Escholzia californica maritima • habitat restoration • humans and nature • mitigation projects • poppies | 7 Comments »

autopiary–in pink!

Ear­lier I’d shared my neighbor’s car-shaped hedge with you. A cou­ple weeks ago John men­tioned that the hedge was in bloom.

I hadn’t paid much atten­tion to what the clipped plant was. But now that it’s bloom­ing, it’s clear that the plant is Raphi­olepis indica, the Indian hawthorn that’s turn­ing every third yard in this part of town either pink or white with its flow­ers. There’s def­i­nitely some­thing to be said for grow­ing plants that nobody else grows, but there’s also some­thing cool about hav­ing your plants par­tic­i­pate in a city-wide explo­sion of color.

Well, there may be a few mil­lion of these plants bloom­ing in town, but no one has one that’s shaped quite like my neighbor’s…

April 05 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: hedges • Indian hawthorn • Raphiolepis indica • topiary | 5 Comments »

controlled chaos

I often have trou­ble mix­ing orna­men­tals and veg­eta­bles together in a gar­den bed that’s sup­posed to be “for com­pany,” a bed that’s meant to be attrac­tive as well as con­tain­ing tasty-looking plants that you’d like to take to the din­ner table.

Some parts of the gar­den where I’ve snuck veg­gies in with the other plants look a lit­tle chaotic, but here’s a patch that I really like the looks of. Ear­lier I showed part of this cor­ner that the bed­room win­dow over­looks. But new things are start­ing to bloom, and the col­ors are start­ing to really click for me.

When I was putting this bed together, I set myself the main rule of “noth­ing yel­low.” In decid­ing what veg­gies to place there, I just stuck to that orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple. (Okay, can you tell that I work in libraries and orga­nize infor­ma­tion dur­ing the week?)

This bed fea­tures sev­eral edi­bles: red-stemmed chard, orange-stemmed chard, Red Win­ter red Russ­ian kale, red beets, plus cat­mint for tea (and for the cat). The orna­men­tals include scar­let geum, pur­ple heliotrope, vio­let blue-eyed grass, the salmon-colored bulb Home­ria col­lina, two blue sages (Salvia sagit­tata and Salvia cacali­ae­fo­lia) plus a few other things not in bloom.

For sure, there’s a lot of red and blue and pur­ple going on here. But sev­eral vari­a­tions on green in the back­ground green do won­ders to pull together what might oth­er­wise be chaos.

I’m going to hate cut­ting any of these veg­gies for dinner…

April 04 2009 | Categories: my garden | Tags: blue • color • color combinations • flower beds • purple • red • vegetable gardening • vegetables • violet | 9 Comments »

the view from the top

It’s spring, and the wild­flow­ers wait for no one. I’ve been for­sak­ing gar­den­ing and home projects and blog­ging (gasp!) a bit to check out some of the local open spaces. Here’s a panorama of part of the view from the top of For­tuna Mount­ian, at 1,243 feet the sec­ond high­est “peak” in the San Diego city lim­its. (Click the image to enlarge.)

This peak burned on Octo­ber 26, 2003 dur­ing the county’s big Cedar Fire. Revis­it­ing the area is a great les­son to see how things recover from a major fire, either by resprout­ing from the roots or reestab­lish­ing them­selves by seed. There are still plenty of dead branches pok­ing up towards the sky, but there’s also a huge amount of green. And these big, gor­geous rocks didn’t hold on to their scorch marks for long. (Don’t you just love rocks in a land­scape, either in the wilds or in a garden?)

Many of the plants and flow­ers aren’t ones you’ll find even in native plant gar­dens, but sev­eral have passed the “garden-worthy” test. In the sec­ond frame from the left above, you’ll see a bloom spike of the sting­ing lupine, Lupi­nus hir­sutis­simus, sort of an awful name for a beau­ti­ful plant.

While I haven’t seen plants of this annual species offered for sale, sev­eral online sources do list seeds, includ­ing S&S Seeds, and Seed­hunt.

Also on the sum­mit were two other plants that are used fairly fre­quently in native gar­dens: lau­rel sumac (Mal­osma lau­rina) and mis­sion man­zanita (Xylo­coc­cus bicolor), both of them even­tu­ally form­ing large, inter­est­ing shrubs.

I’ll be shar­ing more bits and pieces of the trips as I get them more organized.

April 03 2009 | Categories: landscape • photography | Tags: Fortuna Mountain • Mission Trails Regional Park • San Diego | 2 Comments »

our front porch project

We began this project to redo our front porch sur­round last year. It’s not totally fin­ished, but it’s at a point I thought I’d share it with you.

The house orig­i­nally came with an enclo­sure around the lit­tle front porch/patio area that made it feel like you were behind bars, doing time for a crime you didn’t com­mit. We took a saw to the orig­i­nal porch cover and pro­vided some breath­ing space in it, but it always felt like an uncom­fort­able retro­fit. As the ter­mites dealt a ter­mi­nal blow to the first enclo­sure, I devel­oped this com­pletely reworked design, sort of a decon­structed patio cover, with open­ings through the front screen­ing panel, as well as an open, incom­plete canopy overhead.

This shows the shel­ter from the front of the house. The big win­dow cut into the screen lets you see out into the neigh­bor­hood, while not mak­ing you feel caged.

Another front view, approach­ing from the side of the house…

And a last shot from the roof, show­ing the par­tial cov­er­ing over­head. Many of days are over­cast, and we really would pre­fer sun over shade most days. This reduced cover shel­ters the big main win­dow and front door, but lets more light in than an edge-to-edge cover.

The new wood needs to sea­son just a lit­tle bit before the final fin­ish­ing, and the old wood will need to be scrubbed to clean it a bit. But once the fin­ish is on, it should really look great. I’m pleased!

Main mate­ri­als: pressure-treated lum­ber for the sup­port struc­ture (painted black, to fade into the back­ground); ipe hard­wood lum­ber for the slats; exposed stain­less steel screws for fas­ten­ing the slats. The ipe hard­wood is poten­tially the least green com­po­nent of this project. Although my local lum­ber sup­plier is assur­ing its users that their ipe “is har­vested from pro­fes­sion­ally man­aged sus­tain­able forests,” some of my research is now say­ing that the claim just may be a crock of green­wash­ing. Ugh.

Choos­ing sus­tain­able mate­ri­als for an out­door project is chal­leng­ing. There are inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions you can wade into, includ­ing an intro­duc­tory Sus­tain­able Deck­ing Solu­tions post that’s worth a look. If you must use ipe, a sup­plier like Altru­Woods can sup­ply FSC cer­ti­fied lum­ber for a project, and might have been the bet­ter choice for get­ting mate­ri­als for this project.

What­ever you do, reduc­ing the amount of mate­ri­als you use is a begin­ning. The post above rec­om­mends that “[o]ne green build­ing idea with a lot of merit is treat­ing wood as a lux­ury. Trees help the planet the most when they’re alive and glob­ally, the acreage per for­est is dwin­dling rapidly. Using wood as a com­mon struc­tural and out­door fin­ish mate­r­ial is not a long-term sus­tain­able prac­tice.” Good advice.

How do you all approach try­ing to be greener in your out­door projects? I sup­pose one excel­lent alter­na­tive to a patio cover would have been to plant a tree. It’s a con­cept our grand­par­ents would have signed on to…

April 01 2009 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: green building practices • hardscape • patio covers • sustainability | 6 Comments »