[ Lost in the Landscape ]

bye-bye birdie

Yesterday’s big gar­den task was to take out a big bird of par­adise that we’d planted twenty years ago.

Left: The “before”…

…and the “after”…

The plant had some good things to rec­om­mend it: big splashy flow­ers (if you’re into that sort of thing), a robust plant that needs min­i­mal main­te­nance, and a require­ment for no addi­tional water­ing beyond what it gets from rain­fall here near the coast.

But one bad trait that you don’t often see dis­cussed is that over time the roots can do dam­age to nearby hard­scape. Ours had lifted the brick patio nearby by over an inch over just the past year.

John’s first inspi­ra­tion was to use the hedge trim­mers. The idea was that they’d make quick work of the bird, cut­ting through the lower stalks as if they were but­ter, and we’d be done in a cou­ple min­utes. They sort of worked, but had a hard time cut­ting through the fibrous stalks. It might take an hour, not two minutes.

Since it was such slow going I decided that doing things man­u­ally, with the trusty hand pruners, would work at least as well and not intro­duce the issue of los­ing a fin­ger or two to the blades.

The local land­fill has a pro­gram where they’ll accept greens waste with­out charge, chop it to bits, process it into mulch or com­post, and sell it for next to noth­ing. But cer­tain fibrous plant waste is exempted: things like palms, bananas, bam­boo and a few other plants…including bird of par­adise. So, any­thing on the list of for­bid­dens has to be dumped as reg­u­lar urban waste.

I’m not up on dump fees around the coun­try, but our lit­tle expe­di­tion cost $34, about the same as a trip to the zoo ($35 per adult) and a deal com­pared to a day at Sea World ($55–65). And with no food stands sell­ing deep-fried munchies, it was prob­a­bly a lot less fattening.

While at the dump, it was a chance to see some of the rare local ripar­ian habi­tat whizz by the win­dow at 35 mph…

…and some bloom­ing buck­wheats. It’s not quite a native plant gar­den, but the edges of the land­fill shield some pro­tected and uncom­mon species.

In fact, imme­di­ately to the east, is Mira­mar Mounds National Nat­ural Land­mark, a piece of land des­ig­nated to be of spe­cial inter­est in a pro­gram admin­is­tered by the National Park Ser­vice. The Land­mark comes to life dur­ing the win­ter rains, with ver­nal pools sud­denly dot­ting mesa tops. The fed­er­ally endan­gered San Diego mesa mint breaks into bloom, and the ground around the pools comes alive with toads the size of your thumb­nail and Pacific cho­rus frogs…or so I’ve heard. Although I’ve vis­ited ver­nal pools before, I’ve never made it to Mira­mar Mounds proper. Bounded by free­ways, the dump, and part of the adja­cent mil­i­tary base, access is restricted. It’s def­i­nitely on my list of places in town I’d love to visit.

July 12 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bird of paradise • Miramar Landfill • Miramar Mounds National Landmark | 4 Comments »

background check

My last post has me think­ing more about the back­grounds that plants grow against.

I was get­ting excited that the San Miguel Island buck­wheats(Eri­o­gonum grande var. rubescens) that I’d grown from seed were com­ing in to bloom. But stand­ing back from them, I real­ized that the place where I’d trans­planted them–a raised bed with a red brick retain­ing wall behind it–might not have been the best place for the plants.

The dusky pink flow­ers blend so well with the red­dish col­ors of the brick that they prac­ti­cally van­ish. And the busy grid­ded back­ground of the brick and weep­ing mor­tar draws so much atten­tion that any­thing in front of the wall just gets ignored.

What would it look like against a more neu­tral back­bround? I won­dered. And so I went to grab a piece of white mat­board and posi­tioned it behind the plants.

Wow. Big dif­fer­ence. It’s sud­denly eas­ier to make out the shapes of the umbels of flow­ers, and you can begin to appre­ci­ate the sub­tle color of the flowers.

Up close, the white back­ground almost made the plant look like a botan­i­cal illustration.

The low con­trast against the back­ground didn’t pre­vent this bug from find­ing the buck­wheat. Clearly, a bug’s eyes and brain don’t work the same way our human ones do.

Once these plants grow in more and achieve some more height they should stand a bet­ter chance of hold­ing their own against the back­ground of busy brick­work. But the plants will never “pop” against the wall in the same way they’d show against a sim­pler, more neu­tral back­ground. So, in the “note to self” cat­e­gory, I’ll be pay­ing more atten­tion to con­trasts between the plant and the hard­scape around it.

July 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: contrast • Eriogonomu grande var. rubescens • garden walls • hardscape • native plants • San Miguel Island buckwheat | 10 Comments »

one way to photograph a tree

Pho­tograph­ing a tree can present some chal­lenges. You can walk around it to select the best angle, or pick a time of day with the best light­ing con­di­tions, but you still have to deal with the fact that the tree stays rooted in its spot and that the back­ground behind the tree may be an unsightly or incom­pre­hen­si­ble mess.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #8, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

Last year I ran across the work of Korean pho­tog­ra­pher Myoung-Ho Lee, whose pho­tos of trees present an elegant–and spec­tac­u­larly not prac­ti­cal–solu­tion to this prob­lem of back­ground. He just brings a plain back­ground with him and stands it up behind the tree. If you fig­ure that the trees in the pho­tos are at least 25 feet tall, you get a sense of how huge the back­ground sheet has to be.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #13, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

Some of the pho­tos have just the tree iso­lated against the plain back­ground. Oth­ers show the tree and back­ground in the larger con­text of the land­scape where the tree is growing.

The results are pretty amaz­ing, and cre­ate pho­tos that are rich with sug­ges­tion and ideas about photography.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #11, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

You might be dri­ven to think about the fact that to pho­to­graph some­thing in the wilds is to select it. Although this act of select­ing the tree isn’t really dig­ging the thing up from nature, it’s still bring­ing some­thing from the wilds indoors onto a wall. That might make you think that photography–and much of art–is find­ing some­thing inter­est­ing inter­est­ing in the world and bring­ing it into a gallery.

You also might think that look­ing at a pho­to­graph of some­thing might tell you some­thing about how the thing in the photo looks, but very lit­tle about its con­text or meaning.

And you might even think of Mar­cel Duchamp dis­play­ing a signed uri­nal in an exhi­bi­tion, with the basic premise that if an artist calls some­thing art, it’s art.

Myoung-Ho Lee. Tree #12, archival InkJet print. [ source ]

None of those thoughts are “right answers,” and you will prob­a­bly have other thoughts of your own. I think you’ll agree, how­ever, that these are some of the more strik­ing pho­tographs of trees that have ever been taken.

July 07 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • photography | Tags: Myoung-Ho Lee • trees | 12 Comments »

my swamp creatures

Here are some of the pitcher plants grow­ing in my guilty plea­sure bog gar­den, a small con­crete con­tainer in which I have more than a half dozen of these sar­race­nias and as many sun­dews. The guilty plea­sure part of this comes in when you con­sider that most of Cal­i­for­nia is now in its third year of drought, and when you real­ize that none of the plants in the bog gar­den likes to dry out. And prefer­ably they’d like to have their toes, though not all their roots, in stand­ing water.

The genus Sar­race­nia is native mostly to wet zones in the East­ern and South­ern United States (with one species into Canada). The ones I’ve tried are prov­ing to be pretty easy to grow as long as they get sun­light and good-quality water. (I’ve prob­a­bly men­tioned before how mine get reverse osmo­sis water from the local water cafe instead of the hyper­chlo­ri­nated bong water that comes out of most South­ern Cal­i­for­nia spig­ots. So far, pro­vid­ing good water has been the most dif­fi­cult part of grow­ing these plants.)

These plants, left to right, top to bottom:

1. Sar­race­nia rubra
2. S. leu­co­phylla ‘Tarnok’
3. S. x Dixie Lace
4. S. alata
5. S. minor

There’s also a closely related swamp thing that’s native to North­ern Cal­i­for­nia and Ore­gon. That plant, Dar­ling­to­nia cal­i­for­nica, how­ever, is as dif­fi­cult to grow in most loca­tions as it is stun­ning. If your can’t pro­vide sum­mer night tem­per­a­tures below 55 degrees, don’t bother with it. You’ll kill it. I killed mine. Not all native plants makes sense to grow if they’re not native to your envi­ron­ment! (If you really must do what I did and not as I say, you could try con­struct­ing a spe­cial dar­ling­to­nia box like they do in Japan to lower tem­per­a­tures around the plant.)

So what’s the water use? Dur­ing the hottest months the lit­tle bog sur­vives on three to four 5-gallon serv­ings a month of water. That totals around 15–20 gal­lons for a space that’s about six or seven square feet, or about 2.1 to 3.3 gal­lons per square foot. I was a lit­tle shocked when I com­pared this num­ber to what one source says it takes to main­tain a typ­i­cal lawn over the sum­mer here in the coastal zone: 2.6–3.6 gal­lons per square foot.

Like, I can have a tiny lit­tle swamp gar­den for about the same amount of water it takes to sup­port an equiv­a­lent spot of aver­age lawn? And when you con­sider that most lawns are larger than six or seven square feet, I sud­denly feel a lit­tle less guilty about my lit­tle guilty plea­sure. And it made me look at lawns dif­fer­ently, that they’re just green swamps full of grass. I think I’d rather have my lit­tle bog garden.

(Full dis­clo­sure: We still do have a small patch of grass in the back­yard which gets greened up for the big Fourth-of-July party and then neglected most of the rest of the year. It helps to have heavy after­noon shade like we do to min­i­mize how much water a lawn requires. But when the guy who keeps it mowed and edged won’t do it any more (you know who you are), the lawn is history…)

July 02 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bog plants • Darlingtonia californica • lawns • sarracenia • water use | 11 Comments »