[ Lost in the Landscape ]

the most recent water bill

We’ve taken a lot of mea­sures to try to con­serve water. Each water bill we receive gives us a chance to look at how well we’re doing. Com­pared to last year, this last bill showed a 40.1% drop for the two-month period of mid-May to mid-July.

To get to this point we’ve installed drip irri­ga­tion for most of the remain­ing thirsty plants, reduced the num­ber of times a week the out­door sprin­kler runs, recy­cled water from the shower, mulched many gar­den spaces, and replaced some water-intensive plants with low-water or no-water selec­tions. It’s helped that this has been a fairly cool spring and early summer.

Still, 112 gal­lons a day aver­age total for a house­hold of two people–one of us work­ing 40 hours a week, the other mainly work­ing out of the house–still seems a lit­tle on the high side. That’s enough water to flush a 1.6 gal­lon low-flow toi­let 70 times per day. But com­pared to an Amer­i­can per capita aver­age of some­thing around 60–70 gal­lons for just indoor usage, I guess that’s not too awful for both indoor and out­door use.

Hmmm, I won­der if we can get the usage down to less than 100 total gal­lons a day for the two of us. It might be a lit­tle tricky over the sum­mer. But it should be totally doable once the weather cools.

July 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: water conservation • water use | 5 Comments »

a hanging screen

Here’s a hang­ing screen in the gar­den, a project from a decade or more ago that I still like. It helps sep­a­rate two lev­els of the gar­den: a lower level that has black bam­boo planted in a cor­ner, and an upper one where there’s a long tiled bench and out­door fireplace.

The screen hangs in an open­ing that’s five feet high and six wide, and fea­tures opaque white poly­car­bon­ate in the frame that allows the shad­ows of the bam­boo to pro­vide inter­est­ing shad­ows on long, sunny afternoons.

The style of the screen is a lit­tle more overtly Japan­ese than where I’m in my life styl­is­ti­cally right now, and comes from a time when I was explor­ing Asian influ­enced crafts­man designs as I was try­ing to improve my wood­work­ing skills. (There’s a whole bed­room in the house that fea­tures sim­i­lar woodwork.)

The mate­ri­als are red­wood for the frame and poly­car­bon­ate for the “win­dows.” The whole assem­bly was made with no tools more spe­cial­ized than a hand-held cir­cu­lar saw and router. Every­thing is held together with screws, pegs, caulk and an unspeak­able amount of water­proof glue.

July 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: hardscape • screening | 9 Comments »

gardens from lands with little water

My thanks to James Golden of View from Fed­eral Twist for bring­ing to my atten­tion a book that he thought would speak to this Californian’s attempts to gar­den in a land with lit­tle water. Pene­lope Hobhouse’s The Gar­dens of Per­sia traces the devel­op­ment of gar­dens in the rainfall-challenged area, begin­ning with the the ear­li­est known gar­den for which we have an archae­o­log­i­cal record, Cyrus the Great’s gar­dens at Pasar­gadae, which date to the 6th cen­tury, BCE.

That ear­li­est gar­den fea­tured a rec­tan­gu­lar space divided sym­met­ri­cally into smaller rec­tan­gles by two water courses that inter­sected at a 90 degree angle. It’s a basic for­mula that would develop through the cen­turies into the Islamic, Mughal and Moor­ish gar­dens which, in turn, went on to influ­ence garden-making in Europe and beyond.

Cyrus’s gar­den used water in a way that treated it as a pre­cious resource in a desert land but also showed off the fact that water was avail­able to the owner of the gar­den, rein­forc­ing the pres­tige and power of the ruler. Sub­se­quent gar­dens in Per­sia con­tin­ued to strike this bal­ance. They used water in care­ful, strate­gic ways, treat­ing it as the rare resource it was, often in nar­row chan­nels where evap­o­ra­tion would have been minized under the desert sun. At the same time they high­lighted the power of the owner of the gar­den, and per­haps helped to con­flate water’s life-giving pow­ers with legit­i­macy of the ruler.

Here in San Diego, you can see an inter­pre­ta­tion of a Persian-influenced Moor­ish gar­den in Bal­boa Park’s Alcazar Gar­den. Pur­port­edly “pat­terned after the gar­dens of Alcazar Cas­tle in Seville, Spain,” the gar­den is a 1935 design by local archi­tect Richard Requa, built for the 1935–36 Cal­i­for­nia Pacific Inter­na­tional Exposition.

View Larger Map

Although I’ve never been to the Alcázar in Seville, a quick trip to the satel­lite overview of the orig­i­nal Alcázar gar­dens on Google Maps reveals the Cal­i­for­nia gar­den to be a fairly loose inter­pre­ta­tion of what you’ll find in Spain. But it retains strong over­tones of tra­di­tional Per­sian gar­dens in its strong sym­me­try and thrifty use of water. (Gar­den sight­see­ing via Google Maps works really well for overviews of large gar­dens with strong struc­ture. Take a look at Ver­sailles or Isola Bella.)

In the Bal­boa Park gar­den each of the inter­sec­tions of the main cen­tral axis and two per­pen­dic­u­lar axes is cel­e­brated by a small tiled foun­tain, six to eight feet across. Nei­ther foun­tain throws water more than a few inches away from the fountainhead.

With San Diego’s cur­rent water restric­tions, home­own­ers can’t have any sort of foun­tain that shoots water into the air. So even foun­tains that are as mea­sured in their use of water as these are wouldn’t be per­mit­ted. But evap­o­ra­tion and water waste on this style of foun­tain is so dif­fer­ent from what you’d have with civic foun­tains that are more like unplugged fire hydrants. (Think of the foun­tains in Las Vegas at Bel­la­gio.) These lit­tle Moor­ish foun­tains cel­e­brate water, they don’t waste it.

The gar­den fea­tures bor­ders of clipped box­wood that out­line the rec­tan­gles of the gar­den beds. Sea­sonal plant­i­ngs rotate in an out of these bor­dered areas. Laven­der, cos­mos, and Shasta daisies were fill­ing in the cen­tral rec­tan­gles on this July after­noon, with rud­beckia, pen­ste­mon, ire­sene, can­nas, sun­flow­ers and other warm-weather plants on the margins.

Are these plant­i­ngs his­tor­i­cally accu­rate? With the excep­tion of the laven­der, not at all. But chances are that if the Per­sian rulers were around today, they would used what­ever mate­ri­als were avail­able to them, espe­cially if they were plants that spoke to power and con­quest over dis­tant lands. Plants from all over the globe and mod­ern hybrids would only serve to rein­force the viewer’s sense of the ruler’s power.

Pene­lope Hob­house makes a sim­i­lar obser­va­tion about choice of plant mate­ri­als in the Persian-influenced gar­dens at the Gen­er­al­ife in Grenada: “Archae­ol­o­gists dis­cov­ered that the gar­den must orig­i­nally have been planted with low-growing flow­ers requir­ing lit­tle soil, although there were some deeper pits obvi­ously made for shrubs, such as myr­tle, and orange trees which had been described as grow­ing there in the 16th cen­tury. After the exca­va­tions the soil was returned to the Ace­quia Court, and today mod­ern annu­als with no his­tor­i­cal authen­tic­ity give a col­or­ful display.”

If you were want­ing to make a historically-correct Per­sian gar­den Hobhouse’s text list many other options through­out, includ­ing var­i­ous roses, tulips, and sev­eral trees includ­ing white poplar, plane trees, plums, apri­cots, and apples.

Another resource for his­tor­i­cal plants would be Ali Akbar Husain’s Scent in the Islamic Gar­den: A Study of Dec­cani Urdu Lit­er­ary Sources, a study that I knew noth­ing about until I hap­pened to see it sit­ting on the shelf next to the Hob­house book in the library. This fairly aca­d­e­mic but quite read­able book con­cen­trates on Mhu­gal gar­dens and pro­vides a long appen­dix of specif­i­cally fra­grant plants men­tioned in gar­den texts. Although the focus is on texts from India, plants of of Euro­pean ori­gin make up a big part of the list.

Many of the selec­tions don’t come as any sur­prise: sev­eral rose species, nar­cis­sus, vio­lets, laven­der, jas­mine, mint, crinum, cro­cus, lilies, iris. But a cou­ple would be sur­pris­ing selec­tions for gar­dens today: one of the stink­ing corpse flower species (Amor­phophal­lus caman­u­la­tus) and cannabis (yes, that cannabis).

July 26 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: fountains • historical authenticity • Moorish gardens • Penelope Hobhouse • Persian gardens • water features • water use | 9 Comments »

more waterlily photos to share

Here in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia sum­mer slips into the dol­drums as the weather heats up and the land dries out. If only we had shal­low lakes every­where we might have acres of waterlilies bloom­ing their heads off. Things might look a lit­tle bit like this…

Jenny was at Long­wood Gar­dens in Penn­syl­va­nia recently and sent me these pho­tos of their water gar­dens. (Thanks, Jenny!) She was struck by their flow­ers, but was really drawn to the foliage. It’s easy to love the var­ie­gated ones, but the crin­kled edges on the other vari­eties are awfully cool too. These are all waterlilies but for one, the plant with­out blooms. I’ll try to get the name of the from her, but if any of the rest of you know what it is, just drop a note.

Of course, hav­ing a body of water in a warm cli­mate is no guar­an­tee that water plants will thrive. Last year, up in Los Ange­les, the Echo Park Lotus Fes­ti­val took place. But after cel­e­brat­ing the bloom­ing of the water lotuses every year since 1972, there were no lotus blooms to show. Ear­lier this month they went ahead and held the annual cel­e­bra­tion, but this time it was re-branded the Echo Park Com­mu­nity Fes­ti­val. No lotuses. Sad.

July 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: aquatic plants • Echo Park Community Festival • Echo Park Lotus Festival • Longwood Gardens • waterlilies | 1 Comment »

in the pond

When we pur­chased the house it came with a nice, deep pond that was per­fect for waterlilies. It also came with an upper pond with a water­fall into the lily pond, and two other small ponds. Two decades later, one of the small ponds has now been con­verted into a planter, and another into my bog gar­den. Remain­ing are the two largest ponds, the lily pond and the upper pond, which we reduced in size by half.

We’ve had waterlilies bloom­ing since the end of April. I have no idea what vari­ety this one is–It came with the pond that came with the house. But it’s a tough and reli­able plant.

The ponds are mostly John’s ter­ri­tory, but I’ve sneaked a cou­ple Cal­i­for­nia native species into them. The first is a cat­tail (Typha sp.), one of my favorite water plants.

If you’ve ever grown these, you real­ize quickly that there’s a cer­tain amount of main­te­nance that goes with them, mainly in deal­ing with their spread­ing rhi­zomes. If the plant is pot­ted, it’ll soon escape and will require fre­quent trim­ming when grow­ing actively. Here are a cou­ple of shoots that have escaped into the fer­tile pond scum. In the past the shoots got tossed, but I just read in an excerpt from Steve Brill and Eve­lyn Brin’s Iden­ti­fy­ing and Har­vest­ing Edi­ble and Med­i­c­i­nal Plants in Wild (and Not-So-Wild) Places how they’re totally edi­ble and are nick­named “Cossack’s aspara­gus.” The next trim­mings will be going into the skillet.

A new native to the pond is Cal­i­for­nia bul­rush (Scir­pus cal­i­for­ni­cus), a replace­ment for a giant papyrus that finally suc­cumbed after two decades. Although the new scir­pus is called a rush, it’s actu­ally a sedge. Two months ago it was a one-gallon plant. Now it’s eas­ily twice the size.

Its lit­tle flow­ers aren’t spec­tac­u­lar, but a mass of these lit­tle bloom clus­ters could be a nice effect once it gets a lit­tle larger.

The clos­est canyon is about an eighth of a mile away, but var­i­ous crit­ters find their way to the water. Rac­coons, opos­sums and tracks from a cat larger than a house cat, smaller than a cougar have been sighted over the years. Dur­ing the first years a cou­ple of vis­its from a great blue heron finally dis­cour­aged John from try­ing to raise koi in the lower pond after they ended turn­ing in expen­sive birdfeed.

These days the main vis­i­tors are spar­rows, which blend so well with pond scum and the sur­round­ing rocks that they’re hard to see…

…and these days we’re see­ing a lot of these lesser goldfinches.

Now that our day­time tem­per­a­tures have finally been climb­ing into what you’d expect dur­ing the sum­mer, I think I might be frol­ick­ing in the water if I were one of these birds.

July 21 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: birds • California bulrush • cattails • Scirpus californicus • Typha • water gardening • waterlilies | 6 Comments »

two reasons to mulch

One of the week­end gar­den projects was to put down some mulch around a cou­ple of the fruit trees. I’d resisted doing it ear­lier because I’d been using the bare ground at the edge of the lit­tle orchard as a place to sow var­i­ous annual wild­flower seeds–clarkia, baby blue eyes, pop­pies, fun things like that. Mulch would have pre­vented the seed from germinating.

A lit­tle gar­den of annual wild­flow­ers sounds really cool, but it’s a lot of work to keep going. Bare ground dur­ing the wet win­ter and spring weather is an open invi­ta­tion for all the dor­mant weed seeds to set up house, and keep­ing the bed weeded was a several-day-a-week chore.

Add to that that we’re re try­ing to do more to con­serve water. Mulching around the trees to con­serve water was mak­ing too much sense to not do. Come win­ter I’ll be glad for the reduced weeding.

The raised bed with the fruit trees still con­tains some orna­men­tals near the edges, and I mulched up to near the edges of most of them. This is the local Dud­leya edulis, com­bined with blue chalk fin­gers, Senecio man­dralis­cae, from South Africa.

Some of the other plants in the bed were so low-growing that mulching would have cov­ered them entirely. I left a cou­ple lit­tle patches of the native Dichon­dra occi­den­talis with mulch only at the edges. Hope­fully the plant will be able to grow up through the mulch a bit.

This lit­tle San Miguel Island buck­wheat seedling was large enough to not bury, but a cou­ple seedlings nearby were specks in the dirt that would have never seen the light of day.

For these tini­est seedlings, I left the ground bare. In addi­tion I erected a cou­ple lit­tle goal­posts to mark the loca­tion so I wouldn’t stomped on when I walk through or pull them out think­ing they’re a weed. It’s a tech­nique I use when­ever I plant some seeds in the open ground. The lit­tle upright twigs usu­ally stay around long enough for the seeds to ger­mi­nate and get to a safe size.

I’ll miss the lit­tle meadow in the spring months, but not the weed­ing. And I feel bet­ter that the fig and plum will be able to get by with a lit­tle less water. Come fall, if I decide I’d still like some annu­als to liven up a gar­den spot with the bare branches of the trees over­head, there really wouldn’t be any­thing stop­ping me from clear­ing lit­tle patches of dirt through the mulch, sow­ing some wild­flow­ers, and erect­ing lit­tle goal­posts to pro­tect the plants from maraud­ing gardeners.

Hmm. I’m not sure why it took me so long to do this…

July 20 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: mulch • seedlings • water conservation | 5 Comments »

lettuce make art

A woman in my office brought in a cou­ple flats of let­tuces that her father had grown. Every few months the father’s gar­den gets to that exu­ber­ant point where there’s no way you can begin to eat every­thing it pro­duces. What bet­ter thing to do with it than share?

I brought home a cou­ple heads that are mak­ing their way into sal­ads. Peo­ple rave about the dif­fer­ence between home-grown and store-bought toma­toes, but let­tuce can show sim­i­lar dif­fer­ences. The thick outer stems in the sal­ads had a del­i­cate crunch with­out the bit­ter­ness that you often encounter.

Talk­ing to my coworker she was say­ing how her father was get­ting dis­tressed with the new water­ing restric­tions. Appar­ently he was used to water­ing his veg­eta­bles every day. She was try­ing to assure him that cut­ting back to every other day prob­a­bly wouldn’t make much dif­fer­ence, even in midsummer.

In addi­tion to salad I made this abstrac­tion using another closeup of the let­tuce as a source. This employs the much-overused Find Edges fil­ter in Pho­to­shop, in com­bi­na­tion with a cou­ple of other con­trols. I tried to keep just a hint of the let­tuce to credit the bio­log­i­cal source of the image. It’s a desk­top doo­dle at this point, and I’m not sure I’ll do any­thing with it.

So, is this what they call play­ing with your food?

July 19 2009 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: lettuce • photoshop | 1 Comment »

friday garden roundup

After fin­ish­ing my cof­fee and read­ing some of the news­pa­per this morn­ing I took a quick sur­vey around the yard.

Honey bush (Melianthus major) is a South African species that I’ve had for a cou­ple years now. Although it responds to water­ing with a lot of spunky growth, it’s also good with min­i­mal addi­tional water­ing. I have two sprin­kler heads in the gar­den, and this plant gets by on the over­spray from one of the heads after it’s made the sages and tan­ger­ine tree happy.

The maroon flow­ers unfurl from the branch tips in spring and dry to these brown spikes. I’ve left them on the plant to help me decide if I like the way they look or not. The bed they’re in in has a lot of mound­ing plants, so the spikes give some ver­ti­cal interest.

The leaves are heav­ily ser­rated and are the main rea­son for grow­ing the plant. Here they are, with shad­ows, and back­lit by the morn­ing sun. They look a lit­tle fierce, but they’re actu­ally soft, like rub­ber. They do have a bit of an unpleas­ant odor if you brush by them. Com­bine that fact with the plant’s even­tual size–six to twelve feet–and you’ll see that it has “dra­matic back­ground plant” writ­ten all over it.

The melianthus grows next to a bromeliad that truly is nasty and spiny. (I’ve men­tioned this plant before…) Pretty though, even when it’s not flow­er­ing. And it takes next to no water when grown in mostly shade.

Next to the honey bush and bromeliad, in a plant­ing that spans two or three con­ti­nents, is a young man­zanita, Actostaphy­los Dr. Hurd, shown here in a detail high­light­ing its exfo­li­at­ing bark. Although one of the faster grow­ing manzanitas–it’s grown eight inches since February–this still isn’t a plant for the impa­tient. Cur­rently it’s exactly one meter tall, and will hope­fully hit its design height of ten feet before I’m back dia­pers. Even­tu­ally it’ll make it to fif­teen feet or more.

In the front of the same bed, next to a sprin­kler head, are some basil cut­tings that I’ve posted on before. Six weeks after plant­ing out, the largest plant is maybe eight by eight inches and is big enough for me to con­sider tak­ing an occa­sional snip for the din­ner table. In a month I should be ready to make batches of pesto.

The final photo isn’t my gar­den, but look­ing across the street, where they’re installing plas­tic turf. The neigh­bors are respond­ing to our new water restric­tions by mix­ing syn­thetic grass with palm trees. The look will be some­thing like the wet Hawai­ian par­adise they had before.

But I do worry that syn­thetic grass, even if it looks some­thing like the real thing, does noth­ing to address people’s fun­da­men­tal expec­ta­tions of what a gar­den should look like in a fiercely dry cli­mate. And in my most unchar­i­ta­ble moments I think that installing plas­tic grass is like treat­ing heroin addic­tion with methadone. And to this gar­dener, installing some­thing as dead as plas­tic grass lands with a thud as loud as the one cre­ated by the infa­mous 1978 remodel of a Sun­set Boule­vard man­sion by a Saudi sheik that fea­tured planters full of plas­tic flowers.

But hey, they’re doing what makes sense to them, and they will be reduc­ing their water use.

July 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Arctostaphylos x Dr. Hurd • basil • bromeliads • drought-tolerant landscaping • Melianthus major | 5 Comments »

july bloom day

For this month’s Gar­den Blog­gers Bloom Day I have some closeup pho­tos of some of what’s bloom­ing in the gar­den. I’ve done a cou­ple posts on using back­grounds behind plants (Back­ground check / One way to pho­togr­pah a tree). Inspired, all but one of these shots uses a white sheet of mat­board placed behind the plants. Each color of back­ground presents a dif­fer­ent end result. Using white accen­tu­ates dark flow­ers and stems, and some of these pho­tos are a busy net­work of dark lines against the light background.

There are some new­com­ers just com­ing into bloom, but many plants have been in bloom for sev­eral months. When life gives you more of the same flowers…well, I was think­ing I’d try to pho­to­graph them a lit­tle differently.

I sus­pect the neigh­bors think I’m odd enough tak­ing pic­tures of every­thing in the gar­den, and I thought it’d be extra-distressing if I were to be walk­ing around the gar­den with a big white board as well as the cam­era. As a result all of these are from the quiet pri­vacy of the back yard, with the excep­tion of the one plant with­out a white background.

Pur­ple cone­flower, Echi­nacea pur­purea.

Lion’s tail, Leono­tis leonorus; Desert mal­low, Sphaer­al­cea
ambigua.

Peru­vian daf­fodil, Hymeno­cal­lis fes­talis; Free­way daisy, Osteosper­mum sp.

Ver­bena bonar­ien­sis; Jun­cus patens (with fallen leaf caught in the plant).

Some salvias:

Salvia nemerosa ‘Snow Hills’; Ivy-leaved sage (Salvia cacali­ae­fo­lia).

On the left is Andean sage (Salvia dis­color with its almost black flow­ers set in light green calyces; on the right is Salvia micro­phylla ‘Hot Lips.’

Some Cal­i­for­nia buckwheats:

Flat-topped buck­wheat (Eri­o­gonum fas­ci­c­u­la­tum)

San Miguel Island buck­wheat (Eri­o­gonum grande var. rubescens)

St. Catherine’s lace (Eri­o­gonum gigan­teum)

But­ter­fly bush (Clero– den­drum ugan– dense); seed pod of white­top pitcher plant (Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla).

Pink and white dou­ble bougainvil­lea (unknown vari­ety); Agas­tache auran­ti­aca ‘Apri­cot Sprite.’

Pink dou­ble bougainvil­lea (another unknown vari­ety); toloache (Datura wrightii).

Thanks again the Carol of May Dreams Gar­dens for host­ing Gar­den Blog­gers Bloom Day. It’s a ter­rific way to build com­mu­nity among gar­den blog­gers want­ing to share the flow­ers in their gar­dens. Check out this month’s offerings!

July 14 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: buckwheats • Eriogonum • flowers • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • sages • salvias | 16 Comments »

some missing words

The cur­rent issue of Orion, one of my favorite mag­a­zines, fea­tures “World With­out Vio­lets,” a scary lit­tle essay by Robert Michael Pyle.

A mother in Britain dis­cov­ered that the edi­tors of the cur­rent Oxford Junior Dic­tio­nary, in their zeal to bring this lit­tle dic­tio­nary for chil­dren up to date, had removed a long list of words deal­ing with nature in order to make room for words like “broad­band,” “bungee jump­ing” and “chat room.”

Pyle writes about the uni­verse the edi­tors of the Dic­tio­nary have cre­ated for the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren who would use it:

It is a world with­out vio­lets. Spring comes unan­nounced by catkins and pro­ceeds with­out ben­e­fit of cro­cuses, cowslips, or tulips. Sum­mer brings no laven­der, mel­ons, or nec­tarines, and autumn is absent of acorns, almonds, and hazel­nuts. Win­ter must be endured with­out the holly and the ivy, the wren or the mistletoe.

So, sud­denly bungee jumping–how retro-80s is that concept?–is more impor­tant than tulips, broad­band more nec­es­sary for chil­dren to know about than mel­ons, and chat rooms more of our real world than holly.

If some­one decides that we don’t need a word for some­thing, does that some­thing cease to exist? Not really. But what kind of mind­set decides that chil­dren don’t need to know about their nat­ural world any­more? I was disturbed.

July 13 2009 | Categories: landscape • quotes | Tags: children • natural world • Oxford Junior Dictionary • words | 5 Comments »