[ Lost in the Landscape ]

morning drizzle

This morn­ing the run­ners in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon are tak­ing to the streets down the hill from me. It’s over­cast and cool enough, for sure. But some­how I’m not feel­ing moti­vated to run 26 miles…

The locals have a name for these two months when the morn­ing cloud cover blots out the sun: May gray and June gloom. It makes for a slow eas­ing into sum­mer, good run­ning weather, and pro­longs the sea­son when you can hope to put plants in the ground and not have to worry too much about keep­ing them watered.

Yes­ter­day was extra-cool, and the thick marine layer of clouds made for a heavy driz­zle most of the day. For me the sight of rain­drops on plants is rare enough that I grabbed the camera.

Are pho­tos of rain­drops and dew­drops on plants and flow­ers cliches? Dunno. Even if they are, I think there’s some­thing so sat­is­fy­ing about them that peo­ple need to keep tak­ing them.

Below are all the pho­tos I took in smaller gallery for­mat. Going left to right: images 1–4, flow­ers of sacred datura, Datura wrightii; 5–6, leaves on tower of jew­els, Echium wild­pretii; 7, spi­der­web on Cal­i­for­nia fuch­sia, Epi­lo­bium canum ‘Catalina’; 8, flow­ers of deer­weed, Lotus sco­par­ius.

May 31 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Datura wrightii • Echium wildpretii • Epilobium Catalina • native plants • rain | 6 Comments »

screening with wood, screening with plants

I showed the almost-complete ver­sion of this front porch screen ear­lier, but that was before we applied the final stain to the wood. Here it is in the really final version.

As long as we were stain­ing wood, we got up to the deck and attacked the rail­ings with the same stain. It had been more than a year since we’d done it last and things had faded. You can see the before and after pretty clearly in these pic­tures. (This project used an oil-based stain for hard­woods. They make a water-based stain that claims to last seven years, but it ended up flak­ing off this oily ipe hard­wood on the small project we tested it on. Total dis­as­ter. Save it for softwoods.)

How do all of you react to exte­rior wood that’s aged to a sil­ver color? This project is still on the new side for us and we wanted to keep it look­ing as it did when we first fin­ished it. Stain­ing all the tops and bot­toms and sides of the wood is a lot of work, though. As we get less able or moti­vated to keep up with details around the house, I’m sure we’ll let things assume more of a Gray Gar­dens look.

But back to the front screen… After the project was com­plete there was a gap between where the screen ends and the dri­ve­way. While I’m not one to put up cas­tle walls and a moat between us and the busy street, a lit­tle more pri­vacy seemed like a good idea.

Before, we had a cou­ple low laven­ders in front of the screen: Nice enough and they sur­vived with vir­tu­ally no sum­mer water­ing. But they weren’t much of a pri­vacy screen. Yank. Out they went.

In their place is this new Cean­othus ‘Tuxedo.’ I’d done a post on some gar­den cean­othus not long ago, and I couldn’t stop think­ing about the near-black foliage of this vari­ety. With the laven­ders gone, there was a per­fect place for it.

Okay, stare at the pic­ture of the lit­tle gal­lon plant and ask the obvi­ous ques­tion: “Wasn’t the idea to install a plant that would screen the view from the street?”

Cean­othus tend to be rapid grow­ers. This selec­tion is new to the trade this spring, so I’m not sure exactly how rapid it’ll be. Still, I expect that it’ll approach its tar­get size of six feet by six feet before too long. I’ll post more pic­tures as it fills in.

May 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: ceanothus • Ceanothus Tuxedo • hardscape • screening • wood stains | 13 Comments »

basil season

I love my drought-tolerant herbs, but I couldn’t imag­ine sum­mer with­out one that likes a lit­tle more water to do well: basil.

Last year, I shared that when I buy a bunch at the gro­cery I usu­ally cut off the ends of the stems and place them in some water on the counter. Basil hates being refrig­er­ated, and this often keeps the bunch fresh for as long as you remem­ber to refresh the water.

It’s a nice coun­ter­top bou­quet. But often the stems will begin to root in the water. After a cou­ple weeks or so, once the stems are approach­ing an inch long, you can trans­plant the lit­tle plants into the garden.

Give them a lit­tle shade the first few days to ease the tran­si­tion out into the real world. If the cut­tings are trans­planted when the nights are 55 to 60 degrees or warmer, they’ll take off and give you enough basil so you won’t have to buy any more basil for the rest of the season.

You prob­a­bly won’t know the exact vari­ety of your basil, and you won’t have access to all the vari­eties you might find in an herb specialist’s cat­a­log. (The Thyme Gar­den, for instance, lists 29 dif­fer­ent basils.) But for all-around tomato-friendly sum­mer cook­ing, the basil you’ll find in the stores works great.

Last night we had din­ner at a local Viet­namese restau­rant that served us an inter­est­ing kind of mint as part of the meal. We didn’t eat all of it and I pock­eted what was left, think­ing that what works for basil is sure to work for mint. Since mint has such an abil­ity to take over your gar­den and your life, how­ever, the new plants will have to adjust to life in pots.

May 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: basil • herbs | 5 Comments »

written with clouds

On Sun­day we were work­ing out­side on a project and hap­pened to look up at the sky. A plane had been sky­writ­ing, spread­ing some adver­tis­ing copy in the sky to the north–some sort of ad for Geico insur­ance, I think. After that text was done, up popped this message:

Here’s the same pic­ture turned upside down if you’re not one of those peo­ple who read books inverted:

“Be fire safe?”

Here in San Diego we often don’t obsess about fire until after the end of sum­mer, when the land around us has gone with­out water for six months and the hot desert winds blow from the east. The end of Octo­ber is clas­sic fire sea­son for us, the time of year when the firestorms of 2003 and 2007 rav­aged this part of the state. But last month’s Santa Bar­bara fire and this lit­tle bit of public-service sky­writ­ing got me think­ing about the place of fire in the local ecosystem.

Three meet­ings ago, the local chap­ter of the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety hosted wild­fire ecol­o­gist Richard Halsey. Direc­tor of the Cal­i­for­nia Chap­ar­ral Insti­tute, Halsey has been work­ing to try edu­cate the pub­lic about new under­stand­ings about fire. In addi­tion to the insti­tute, he’s been a strong voice in the media, and has authored the book, Fire, Chap­ar­ral and Sur­vival in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. (Town Mouse & Coun­try Mouse did a nice post on Fire this month, which included some good quotes from Halsey.)

Any­one who thinks that plant soci­ety meet­ings are slow, drawn out affairs wasn’t at the meet­ing I attended. Halsey and one of the other biol­o­gists invited to speak went mano a mano over some of the ideas that rep­re­sented a break from what is still being taught in schools.

I’m no biol­o­gist, but at least some of Halsey’s points made sense to me. Here’s a short list of some of what he had to say:

• The notion that “chap­ar­ral needs to burn” is a crock of bat guano. Although the ecosys­tem is adapted to com­ing back after a blaze, it doesn’t need fire to thrive.
• When areas burn more fre­quently than the plants liv­ing there are adapted to, how­ever, many orig­i­nal plant species die out and inva­sives begin to move in. Type con­ver­sion of chap­ar­ral into a weedy grass­land of exotic species can begin.
• Exten­sive fire breaks gouged into a nat­ural area are a mag­net for weed species that can take over the ecosys­tem. (See the pre­vi­ous bul­let point.) Of all of these points, the other biol­o­gist made the strongest argu­ment against this posi­tion of Halsey’s, cit­ing a study where areas with aban­doned fire breaks revert almost com­pletely to their pre­vi­ous species after a cer­tain num­ber of years.
• A new study look­ing at ocean sed­i­ments in the Chan­nel Islands shows that large fires have occurred in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, but were sep­a­rated by far greater num­bers of years than we’re see­ing today. Vir­tu­ally all the fires we’re see­ing today have been caused by humans.
• A leg­end of the local Kumeyaay peo­ple men­tions a par­tic­u­larly dev­as­tat­ing fire sev­eral hun­dred years before the arrival of the Span­ish in Cal­i­for­nia and Mex­ico. After the fire, the Kumeyaay had to live in the desert for an entire gen­er­a­tion before the land west of the moun­tains was hab­it­able again.

As recently as 2003–2004, when I was work­ing a pho­tog­ra­phy series on the 2003 Cedar Fire, I put together an artist’s state­ment for that body of work that included the sen­tence, “The land needed to burn, to regen­er­ate.” Halsey has con­vinced me that it’s time for me to rethink that position.

James SOE NYUN. Hill with Wild­flow­ers, Cuya­maca Ran­cho State Park, 6 Months Later, 2004. Chro­mogenic print, 15 x 18 3/4 in.

May 26 2009 | Categories: landscape | Tags: fire • fire ecology | 3 Comments »

herbs for a dry garden

Is there any­thing bet­ter than fresh herbs from the garden?

For years I had herbs in my fairly dry veg­gie gar­den. Some of the herbs herbs thrived. Oth­ers sulked. Some died.

For­tu­nately, if you’re try­ing to cut down on water­ing, you still have a huge num­ber of herbs to choose from. For instance, many of the plants that you think of imme­di­ately when you hear the word “herb” orig­i­nate in the Mediter­ranean, and many of them pre­fer less mois­ture than other gar­den plants.

Below, I’ve listed some com­mon herbs that have done well for me dry spots, along with oth­ers that I’ve seen doing well in quite dry con­di­tions. There are lots of other selec­tions, but this list can get you going with more than a summer’s worth of recipes.

• Rose­mary (Ros­mar­i­nus offic­i­nalis): You can pick from forms that sprawl, form a shrub, or grow straight up in spires.
• Sage (Salvia offi­cianalis): Euro­pean Gar­den sage comes in lots of ver­sions in leaf color (green, golden, tri-color or pur­ple) and fla­vor (“sage” fla­vor, pineap­ple, or grape).
• Oregano (Ori­g­anum vul­gare)
• Mar­jo­ram (Ori­g­anum majo­rana)
• Thyme (Thymus spp.): Some thymes, includ­ing many of those sold for orna­men­tal ground­cover use (such as T. ser­pi­phyl­lum) are only slightly scented or not at all. The culi­nary bush forms gen­er­ally have more scent and fla­vor, and they come in a wide range, includ­ing lemon and lime. They also tend to be more tol­er­ant of dry conditions.
• Laven­der (Lavan­dula spp.): There are sev­eral laven­der species, as well as plenty of hybrids and vari­eties. All are at least some­what drought tol­er­ant. Some extremely so.
• Scented gera­ni­ums (Pelargo­nium spp.): Take your pick of rose, apple, cin­na­mon, nut­meg, pineap­ple, lemon, lime, apri­cot and others.
• Worm­wood (Artemisia spp.)
• Mex­i­can oregano (Lip­pia grave­olens)
• Fen­nel (Foenicu­lum vul­gare): Beau­ti­ful and tasty plants, but they’re con­sid­ered inva­sive in many loca­tions (includ­ing the entire Cal­i­for­nia floris­tic province). Research before you plant! There’s an attrac­tive bronze ver­sion that’s reputed to be less inva­sive. Still, I wouln’t plant it if reg­u­lar fen­nel is a prob­lem in your area.
• Nas­tur­tium (Tropae­olum majus): With edi­ble, pep­pery leaves and flow­ers, some peo­ple con­sider this an herb. As with fen­nel, above, it can be inva­sive. Don’t plant it if it could escape. (Many of the moister hill­sides here in San Diego are cov­ered with the stuff.)
• Lemon grass, both West-Indian (Cym­bo­pogon cit­ra­tus) and East-Indian (C. flex­u­o­sus): Sources tell you these plants like water, but I’ve found that they don’t mind going dry occa­sion­ally, espe­cially if they’re given some shade.

Good eats!

May 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • herbs • rose geranium • rosemary • sage • sweet marjoram | 5 Comments »

the bamboo-inspired quilt is done!

I’ve posted occa­sion­ally on the progress of the quilt that Linda was stitch­ing to com­mem­o­rate John’s and my wed­ding last sum­mer. Last week the fin­ished quilt made it into my eager hands and I had to share.

The design was inspired by an art quilt by Liz Axford that I’d encoun­tered online, one of her Bam­boo Boo­gie Woo­gie series. And it hap­pened to be one that Linda had actu­ally seen in person.

If you stare at it long enough you can make out the lit­tle bam­boo stems with their joints. It’s nature abstracted, but the nat­ural rhythms still play out in the final quilt.

The back of the quilt fea­tures two inter­twin­ing bam­boo stems made out of fab­ric from two shirts that we liked so much that we’d worn them until they were thread­bare. Isn’t that the most roman­tic detail?

Thanks so much, Linda–We love the quilt and we’ll trea­sure all your love and effort that went into mak­ing it. The quilt will be hang­ing on the wall before the week­end is over!

May 23 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: isn't that the most thoughtful thing? • quilts • weddings | 7 Comments »

how dry am i?

This post may be mainly for the math nerds among you, but I think it could be inter­est­ing to any gar­den­ers liv­ing in drought-prone parts of the world.

In my last post I men­tioned that I’d used instruc­tions in Olivier Filippi’s The Dry Gar­den­ing Hand­book to fig­ure out the drought stress index, or hydric deficit, for where I live in San Diego.

USDA zones are useful for dealing with minimum temperatures. For gardeners in the western U.S., Sunset zones provide more finesse, combining temperature with other climate conditions. The the drought stress numbers, however, are useful if you want to concentrate on understanding how many months a plant might be subjected to severe drying conditions due to lack of rainfall.

Filippi writes in his book that "everyone's drought is different," so be sure to consider factors other than this single number, things like total rainfall, humidity, the sun exposure a plant might get or the amount of wind your site experiences. The technique presented in The Dry Gardening Handbook derives from work of plant geographer Henri Gaussen.

Figuring out hydric deficit is pretty straightforward but will take a few minutes of your time. Either use a spreadsheet program like Excel or a sheet of paper. First, go to a site like World Climate where you can find your area's monthly total rainfall and monthly average temperatures. On the spreadsheet or paper set up a column with the months of the year, January to December. Next fill in a column with the monthly average rainfall in millimeters, and another column with the average monthly temperature in degrees Celsius.

Now you have two options: Fol­low the instruc­tions in the book, which isn’t that hard but requires mak­ing a graph with three dif­fer­ent axes. Or use my sim­pli­fied tech­nique, which requires some cal­cu­la­tions but no graph­ing. I’ll send you to the book for the some­what more pre­cise method, but here’s my eas­ier method: In a fourth col­umn, divide the rain­fall num­ber by the tem­per­a­ture and mul­ti­ply by 2. That’s where the math comes in to play.

Here’s my result for San Diego:

Count up the num­bers in the fourth col­umn that are less than 1, and that’s your approx­i­mate hydric deficit num­ber. The higher the hydric deficit num­ber, the more severe your dry­ing con­di­tions. For the San Diego Air­port, the num­ber is 6. (If you have a month where the aver­age tem­per­a­ture is below freez­ing, for my over­sim­pli­fied method just throw out that month and con­sider that there’s min­i­mal hydric deficit.)

Now what do you with the num­ber? For one thing, you can use it to com­pare you grow­ing con­di­tions with the drought resis­tance code for a plant in Filippi’s book. For exam­ple, the matil­ija (“tree”) poppy (Rom­neya coul­teri) has a drought tol­er­ance rat­ing of 6–perfect for an unwa­tered gar­den in San Diego. By con­trast, Cean­othus ‘Ray Hart­man’ has a code of 4, and Hid­cote Blue laven­der (Lavan­dula angus­ti­fo­lia ‘Hid­cote Blue’) has a code of 3. These other plants would prob­a­bly sur­vive with­out sup­ple­men­tal water, but to look their best the cean­othus might ben­e­fit from a cou­ple months of occa­sional sup­ple­men­tal water­ing, and the lan­der maybe three. You can also use the num­ber to com­pare the dry­ing forces where you live other regions around you, or apply the num­ber to bet­ter under­stand your cli­mate in rela­tion to that of a plant’s origin.

For fun, I added four other sites in San Diego County. You can see how the county offers a huge num­ber of grow­ing con­di­tions, from dry coastal con­di­tions, moun­tain mead­ows, back­coun­try chap­ar­ral, and full-on desert.

And then a few other cities in Cal­i­for­nia. You can see a gen­eral moist­en­ing the far­ther north you go, and a gen­eral dry­ing as you head east towards the deserts.

I’d never played with map­ping in Google Maps, but thought this might be a fun first lit­tle project. I took the num­bers above and applied them to a map. The results are pretty impres­sive for some­thing that’s not hard to do. So far the blips are in Cal­i­for­nia only, but I might work on the map some more to include other loca­tions. Take a look…

View Hydric Deficit Map in a larger map

May 21 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape | Tags: California • drought • drought stress • Dry Gardening Handbook • Henri Gaussen • hydric deficit • Olivier Filippi | 10 Comments »

the dry gardening handbook

Olivier and Clara Fil­ippi have been gar­den­ing in the south of France for well over a quar­ter cen­tury. Theirs is a mediter­ranean cli­mate, and their nurs­ery, Pépinière Fil­ippi, located near Mont­pel­lier, spe­cial­izes in plants adapted to the dry-summer/wet-winter cycles that you find in only five large regions on earth: the Mediter­ranean zone, proper; South Africa; the south­west cor­ner of Aus­tralia; Chile; and much of California.

When I picked up Olivier Filippi’s recent The Dry Gar­den­ing Hand­book: Plants and Prac­tices for a Chang­ing Cli­mate, I was expect­ing it to be a dif­fer­ent sort of book than it is, maybe some­thing about gen­eral drought-tolerant plants, or a vol­ume ded­i­cated to help­ing your gar­den adapt to using less water. What this is, how­ever, is a straight book on mediter­ranean gar­den­ing and plants suited to mediter­ranean climates–something that prob­a­bly shouldn’t come as a sur­prise since that’s the focus of the author’s nursery.

There’s a brief intro­duc­tion to what con­sti­tutes a mediter­ranean cli­mate, fol­lowed by notes on the strate­gies plants use to sur­vive and thrive in it. Good advice on plan­ning, plant­ing, estab­lish­ing and water­ing a new mediter­ranean gar­den comes next. Then Fil­ippi gives us the heart of the book, a list­ing of over 400 mediterranean-adapted species, con­tain­ing com­mon and sci­en­tific names, approx­i­mate mature plant sizes, and notes on cul­ti­va­tion and prop­a­ga­tion. (If you can begin to read French, you can check out the online cat­a­log at the author’s nurs­ery, which closely mir­rors the list of plants rec­om­mended in the book. There you’ll also find some of the advice that’s offered in the book, although with­out the nice pho­tos in the book.)

Olivier Fil­ippi gar­dens in France, and the plant list def­i­nitely Euro­cen­tric: lots of dif­fer­ent laven­ders, cis­tus, phlomis, for exam­ple, with rel­a­tively few plants from other the other great mediter­ranean regions. In fact, many of the non-Mediterranean mediterranean-friendly plants listed are drought tol­er­ant selec­tions from sev­eral non-mediterranean cli­mates. For gar­den­ers in dry cli­mates that don’t undergo mediter­ranean cycles, these sug­ges­tions might be some of the best options to try. But those plants might not the be great­est of dis­cov­er­ies: Pho­tinia, heav­enly bam­boo (Nan­d­ina domes­tica), red-hot poker (Kniphofia sar­men­tosa) and Amer­i­can gaura (Gaura lind­heimeri), for instance, are prob­a­bly already com­mon offer­ings in many Amer­i­can nurseries.

One of the book’s most out­stand­ing fea­tures is the use of a “drought resis­tance code” that assigns a num­ber from one to six to each of the species in its plant list. Based on work by plant geo­g­ra­pher Henri Gaussen, the num­ber quan­ti­fies the num­ber of months of the year a plant can be expected to sur­vive under drought stress. The book also con­tains instruc­tions on how to cal­cu­late the cli­matic pro­file of where you live. (I fig­ured out that my coastal San Diego loca­tion exerts a 3.5 to 4 drought stress fac­tor. (Edit May 20: I oopsed on my fig­ur­ing for coastal San Diego. My revised num­ber is a much dryer drought stress fac­tor of 6.)) All that’s a really use­ful way to under­stand drought.

When you see plants sold in nurs­eries and cat­a­logs as drought-tolerant, the descrip­tion can be mean­ing­less. A vari­ety that would go fine for two weeks with­out water could turn into sea­soned kin­dling if sub­jected to six or seven months of con­tin­ued dry­ing. Real­iz­ing that a “drought-tolerant” chamomile plant has a drought resis­tance code of 2 would begin to tell you that it wouldn’t thrive in the same con­di­tions that would suit California’s more “drought-proof” Rom­neya coul­teri, which has a drought resis­tance code of 6. Hav­ing that infor­ma­tion could help you plan com­pan­ion plant­i­ngs, as well as help you avoid plants alto­gether that would only lead to expen­sive mistakes.

Com­ing at plant­i­ngs from a mediter­ranean focus leads the author to say some choice things about lawns:

You don’t have to be a vision­ary to see that the tra­di­tional lawn is an absur­dity in mediter­ranean cli­mates. If you nur­ture a deeply rooted feel­ing that you can’t be happy with­out a vast, lush lawn, then per­haps you ought to con­sider going to live in Corn­wall… Peo­ple often imag­ine that they need a huge expanse of lawn, but all too often the only per­son who walks over a tra­di­tional lawn in its entirety is the unfor­tu­nate indi­vid­ual who has to mow it every Sunday.

The author’s solu­tion? Land­scap­ing that pays atten­tion to where you live. For those of you in mediter­ranean cli­mates, this book can help you develop a deeper under­stand­ing of what’s unique about your envi­ron­ment. It can help you come up with good plant choices com­pat­i­ble with what your loca­tion offers. Along the way, it could help you save water, reduce pes­ti­cide use and maybe even free up some of those Sun­days you spend mow­ing the lawn.

May 16 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: books • drought-tolerant landscaping • Mediterranean climate • Olivier Filippi | 7 Comments »

some bloom day blooms from seed

Today’s Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day post fea­tures five plants I’ve raised from seed. I’d con­sider most of these in the “pretty easy” to “really easy” cat­e­gories, both to ger­mi­nate and to grow.

Three of these came up from seed that I sowed directly in the ground last Octo­ber. I basi­cally made lit­tle fur­rows a quar­ter to half an inch deep, sprin­kled in some seed, and watered them in. I pro­vided some sup­ple­men­tal water­ing the give them a head start, and then let the occa­sional rains take care of get­ting the plants estab­lished. Now that the rains are prob­a­bly over for the year, I give them occa­sional sprin­klings to keep them greener and flow­er­ing longer.

This first flower is Clarkia williamsonii, which is an annual native to inland Cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia and Orange County. The Seed­hunt list­ing described the flow­ers as being “gaudy.” A flower that’s gaudy? Sold!

The next images are of another clarkia, Clarkia rubi­cunda ssp. blas­dalei, native to coastal Cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia and El Dorado County. The first is a freshly opened flower, the sec­ond a flower that’s on it’s sec­ond day.

Until this morn­ing I’d never noticed with these that the fresh flow­ers have the sta­mens all bun­dled up, and that they don’t extend until the flower is older, after the anthers bear­ing the pollen are start­ing to dry up. You can see the sta­mens as the white four-pronged appendage in the cen­ter of the sec­ond flower. It’s a clever way to pre­vent self-pollination and keep the gene pool diverse.

Another easy annual is baby blue eyes, Nemezia men­ziesii. What you see here is pretty scrappy and well could be the last flower of the sea­son. Although this is an easy plant, I’ve decided that it’s bet­ter suited to a gar­den spot that might get more than bi-weekly sup­ple­men­tal water.

I’ve been show­ing lots of Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies this spring. This will prob­a­bly be the last of the gar­den pic­tures of the com­mon orange form. The flow­ers this time of year are start­ing to get smaller as the plant’s water sup­plies dwin­dle. Also, here near the coast, the plants start to mildew heav­ily, leav­ing them crip­pled. (You can see some of that as the whitish back­ground foliage.)

Bet­ter suited to coastal areas is this yel­low coastal form of the species, Escholzia cal­i­for­nica mar­itima. The strain I’ve got starts to flower later in the year than the typ­i­cal orange form, but the plants show much bet­ter resis­tance to pow­dery mildew and will con­tinue flow­er­ing later into the year.

Unlike the first three plants I showed, the pop­pies are peren­nial, so the same plants will con­tinue to come back one year to the next. But one nice thing with all these species is that they’ll come back from seed as well.

Check out all the other Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day pho­tos by check­ing out the list­ing at May Dreams Gar­dens.

May 15 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Clarkia rubicunda ssp blasdalei • Clarkia williamsonii • clarkias • Escholzia californica • Escholzia californica maritima • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • native plants • poppies • reseeding • seed-grown plants | 6 Comments »

the chrysanthemum problem

All around town, both road­side and trail­side, the gar­land chrysan­the­mums have been blooming.

The perky spawn of plants that have been grown for cen­turies in China and Japan for their tasty young green leaves, Chrysan­the­mum coro­nar­ium has come to be a big nui­sance in many dis­turbed areas of South­ern California.

But rather than get­ting all neg­a­tive and curs­ing the plant, let me try a dif­fer­ent tack to try to encour­age every­one to rip it out by its pretty lit­tle roots:

Did you know that 100 grams of boiled gar­land chrysan­the­mum pro­vides 51% of your rec­om­mended daily require­ments of vit­a­min A, 40% of vit­a­min C, 21% of iron, and has only 20 calo­ries? (That’s accord­ing to healthalicious.com.)

OregonLive.com offers some kitchen ideas for gar­land chrysan­the­mum: “Lightly saute the leaves and stems or whole 4– to 6-inch seedlings with sesame seeds, gar­lic, gin­ger and soy sauce… Eat raw in salad, add to soups con­tain­ing fresh gin­ger, or dunk in frit­ter bat­ter and deep-fry.”

(Be sure your greens come from a site other than a road­side that might have been sprayed with her­bi­cides by the city. And be sure you’re eat­ing gar­land chrysan­the­mum instead of the some­what sim­i­lar bush sun­flower (encelia) or San Diego sun­flower (viguiera).)

There are of course other rea­sons to pull up this plant. The Tijuana River National Estu­ar­ine Research Reserve site puts it suc­cinctly: “[C]hrysanthemum forms fields that over­take native plants such as Cal­i­for­nia buck­wheat and sagebrush–both these plants pro­vide food and shel­ter for native birds, insects and other animals.”

So in the end gar­land chrysan­the­mum is the per­fect weed. Whether you respond to thoughts of a healthy snack or to appeals of doing what you can to make the world a bet­ter place, you can get out your weed­ing tools and go to town.

A final thought: Wouldn’t it be great for green-conscious restau­rants to offer tasty and hip entrees on their menu that con­tain locally-harvested gar­land chrysan­the­mum greens that oth­er­wise would have been dam­ag­ing the ecosys­tem? Or maybe we could stock stalls at farmer’s mar­kets with piles of the stuff? Why not turn this over-abundant inva­sive plant into a resource that could be cropped, improv­ing the local land­scape at the same time?

Eat up, everyone!

This post is ded­i­cated to Out­of­doors, who first thought up the idea of ded­i­cat­ing the 13th of the month to posts on inva­sive species.

May 13 2009 | Categories: landscape • plant profiles | Tags: Chrysanthemum coronarium • garland chrysanthemum • invasive plants • weeds | 6 Comments »