[ Lost in the Landscape ]

california-friendly phlomis

It’s not quite plant­ing sea­son, but for the last few trips to the local nurs­ery I’d been eying a plant I hadn’t noticed before, Phlomis mono­cephala, a sis­ter species to the more com­mon Jerusalem sage, P. fru­ti­cosa.

This strongly drought-tolerant species from Turkey has leaves that are highly tex­tured like those of sev­eral native Cal­i­for­nia sages. What sets it apart from the Cal­i­for­nia sages is what it does in the sum­mer, when the leaves turn this strong yellow-green color. In the spring to early sum­mer it will have a mod­est dis­play of yel­low flow­ers, but this a plant that you use for its cool foliage, pro­vid­ing a point of inter­est when a lot of the natives have shut down.

My front yard is a mixed Mediterranean-climate plant­ing with a num­ber of Cal­i­for­nia natives, and I thought this plant would com­ple­ment them nicely. It so hap­pens that there are some plants that peaked five years ago and would bet­ter replaced. Three phlomis would fit in their spot perfectly.

It so hap­pened that the nurs­ery had exactly three plants. Plant shop­ping can be a com­pet­i­tive sport. If you see some­thing, that might be the last chance you’ll have at it. So you can prob­a­bly guess that I’m now the owner of three lit­tle Phlomis mono­cephala plants. I won’t do any seri­ous gar­den rework­ing for another month or so, but I should be able to keep the plants happy and watered for that long.

The plant will top out at about four by four feet, is con­sid­ered hardy to zone 9, and requires excel­lent drainage.

While at the nurs­ery I noticed this other California-friendly phlomis, P. lanata. This species grows lower, to maybe two feet tall by three to four wide. The size and shape of the plant actu­ally would have been a bet­ter choice for the spot I have, but this isn’t one of the phlomis species that devel­ops the gor­geous yel­low sum­mer coloration.

What it does have, though, are these really cool, fuzzy gray­ish leaves and stems. How can you resist touch­ing it? Like the much larger Jerusalem sage, it’ll put on a good show of bright yel­low flowers.

One thing I do at nurs­eries is to move plants into lit­tle com­bi­na­tions to see how they’d look together. The first time the staff sees me doing it it might raise some eye­brows, but the staff at Wal­ter Ander­son Nurs­ery is used to me by now. (As you might expect some­one who works in a library, I make sure to put every­thing back in its proper place.)

Here’s a play in scale and tex­ture, a lit­tle ensem­ble of yellowish-green to pale green col­ored leaves that I liked: the Phlomis mono­cephala that I bought, in com­bi­na­tion with what would be the low-growing form of coy­ote bush brush (Bac­cha­ris pilu­laris pilu­laris ‘Pigeon Point’) and the really del­i­cate Aus­tralian woolly bush (Adenan­thos sericeus).

Often, when you do an exer­cise like this, the plants will have wildly dif­fer­ent cul­tural require­ments or would be grossly incom­pat­i­ble size-wise. But in this case all three could coex­ist together in a nice plant­ing, with maybe only the woolly bush need­ing just a bit more sum­mer water­ing. The woolly bush would grow up into a large shrub, the phlomis into a dense medium-sized one, and the coy­ote bush brush would sprawl attrac­tively around the base of the other two.

August 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Adenanthos sericeus • Baccharis pilularis pilularis Pigeon Point • coyote bush • Jerusalem sage • Phlomis lanata • Phlomis monocephala • plant com • plant combinations • wooly bush | 9 Comments »

on the road: cornerstone sonoma (more)

These are the last of the pho­tos I took at the gar­dens at Cor­ner­Stone Sonoma. Look­ing through this sec­ond batch it seems that the gar­dens below rely heav­ily on hard­scape details and less on plants. None of them are gar­dens with­out plants, but the green stuff def­i­nitely plays sec­ond fid­dle to the more engi­neered parts of the gardens.

Yoji Sasaki’s The Gar­den of Vis­ceral Seren­ity fea­tures this ter­rific walk­way: a cen­tral, solid strip that alter­nates with hor­i­zon­tal stripes of vary­ing widths.

Topher Delaney has this strik­ing instal­la­tion made up of a very short menu of ele­ments: a blue-and-dark-gray striped wall, birches, three balls made of rope, white shade cloth sur­round­ing the space, a bor­der­ing hedge and white crushed stone beneath your feet.

The color palette is reduced down to white, gray, black, green and the insis­tent blue of the back­drop and–today, anyway–the sky.

Most peo­ple plant birches because the trees have strik­ing white trunks. But with the ground and walls being white, the birch trunks almost dis­ap­pear, leav­ing a sense of green shel­ter­ing foliage float­ing overhead.

At mid-morning, the shad­ows of the trees draw strik­ing forms under­foot, and shad­ows of the plant­i­ngs next door make soft pat­terns on the white shade screen.

I liked this detail at Wal­ter Hood’s Euca­lyp­tus Mem­ory gar­den. Gar­den design­ers often use sin­gle chairs or long benches to sug­gest a point of repose in the land­scape. Here, Hood has used two chairs next to each other in the fore­ground and three in the dis­tance, next to a pond, instead of the more expected bench. I won­der, is the fact that you have a chair to your­self meant to rein­force your sense of inte­rior con­tem­pla­tion, even when there’s some­one sit­ting next to you?

The rest of Hood’s instal­la­tion con­sists of very few mate­ri­als. Most dom­i­nant are two tall mesh pan­els that frame a view to a dis­tant pond. One side is empty, the other con­tains euca­lyp­tus branches and leaves. After a few moments of look­ing at the gar­den, what hits you next–and hits you hard–is the smell of the dry­ing euca­lyp­tus in the one panel. This is a gar­den for more senses than just sight.

Another sense, that of sound, is rein­forced in David McCrory’s and Roger Raiche’s Rise gar­den. A steel tube runs through it, the kind that you see used for drainage under a road. As you walk through it you feel a sense of shel­ter, and the sounds of the sur­round­ing world change as they echo gen­tly through the chamber.

Pamela Bur­ton designed the last of the spaces that I wanted to share. Her Earth Walk bur­rows into the land, and requires that you descend into the gar­den to fully expe­ri­ence it.

The earthen color of the hay bales and the adobe mud walls reminded me of the desert.
Once you pass a big, solid of Mex­i­can feather grass and approach the bot­tom, you’re sur­prised with a long rec­tan­gu­lar pond with waterlilies and fish. It felt like an oasis.

By the time you drop the eight feet or so into the bot­tom of this instal­la­tion you can’t see any of the gar­dens around it. What you expe­ri­ence is reduced down to the walls, the grasses, the sky above, and the water below.

My final reac­tions to vis­it­ing Cor­ner­stone were sim­i­lar to going to a lit­tle museum and see­ing a col­lec­tion of sin­gle works by a num­ber of artists. There’s a lit­tle bit of ten­sion, a bit of com­pe­ti­tion going on between the pieces. Some land­scape archi­tec­ture can work well this way, where the designer makes a state­ment and you can appre­ci­ate what’s being said. You then move on to the next piece and try to fig­ure out what’s going on with it. But if you want a land­scape archi­tec­ture that’s deeply rooted in the sur­round­ings and its his­tory, you might leave here want­ing more than many of the works deliver.

In the end, one thing Cor­ner­stone did very well for me that a lot of other land­scape archi­tec­ture doesn’t comes from the inti­mate scale of most of its gar­dens. These are gar­dens the size of many res­i­den­tial lots. These are spaces that tell you that inter­est­ing land­scape design doesn’t have to be scaled to mas­sive pub­lic works or some gonzo pallazzo.

For more looks at Cor­ner­stone Sonoma, check out Alice Joyce’s post­ings on her blog, Bay Area Ten­drils Gar­den Travel.

August 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: CornerStone Sonoma • McCrory-Raiche • Pamela Burton • Topher Delaney • Walter Hood | 15 Comments »

on the road: cornerstone sonoma

The big gar­den des­ti­na­tion for the Sonoma County week­end ended up being Cor­ner­Stone Sonoma. Imag­ine a giant gar­den show with totally unre­lated demon­stra­tion gar­dens lined up next to each other in their own stalls like some big hor­ti­cul­tural pet­ting zoo. But instead of nice-but-not-so-interesting gar­dens assem­bled by local land­scap­ers, you have some really strik­ing spaces put together by some of the big­ger names in the land­scape archi­tec­ture field.

Find­ing the place isn’t hard–Jenny was along for the out­ing and had brought her GPS. We fol­lowed the nice, polite direc­tions of the GPS unit until we got close. The Cor­ner­Stone lit­er­a­ture says to look for the white picket fence as a sign that you’ve arrived. This is CornerStone’s take on a white picket fence, and it’s good prepa­ra­tion for what you’ll find there.

Like many des­ti­na­tions in Sonoma, Cor­ner­stone com­bines wine tast­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties (4 vine­yards), with chances to get a bite to eat, and places to shop for gifts or things for your gar­den. How are you set for some rus­tic archi­tec­tural details to set into your landscaping?

Maybe your koi pond needs some mer­maids? (John wanted one of these very badly.)

The facil­ity has some pleas­ant lawn spaces with flowerbeds of cool­ing pur­ples and blues and whites that were being set up for some social event.

But what sets this place apart are the main gar­dens in the back. And of all of them it’s hard not to love this one by Oehme & van Swe­den, the Gar­den of Contrasts.

Big, sturdy agaves con­trast with soft grasses that move in the wind.

As the sea­sons change, plants move in and out of promi­nence in this plant­ing. Here are the last Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies of the sea­son planted in the grasses.

This one might be a lit­tle harder to love–or at least it was for me, Ken Smith’s Daisy Bor­der. From the astro­turf to the plas­tic tubes to the plas­tic flow­ers, there’s noth­ing alive in this “plant­ing.” But I sup­pose it’s nat­u­ral­is­tic in the sense that some of the daisies in this bor­der look pretty good, while oth­ers seem the worse for wear because of what the ele­ments (and prob­a­bly small vis­i­tors) have done to them. Who ever has a bor­der where every sin­gle plant is metic­u­lously well-groomed?

John Green­lee cre­ated a soft, rolling plant­ing that con­sists entirely of grasses, his Mediter­ranean Meadow. Peo­ple do all-grass plant­i­ngs all the time–call it “lawn.” But it’s a brave thing to do a gar­den with all sorts of con­trast­ing grasses. Here a low river of fes­cue runs through the plantings.

Taller, stiffer grasses (edit: or are these restios?) line the “banks” of the river.

I wish this scene pho­tographed bet­ter than it did. The fore­ground fea­tures soft seed heads of a short grass, with a more archi­tec­tural species planted on the top of the low mound.

This and so many of the other gar­dens were bub­bling over with all sorts of ideas you could repur­pose in another gar­den set­ting. I’ll share more scenes from Cor­ner­Stone in the next post.

August 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: agaves • CornerStone Sonoma • fake plants • John Greenlee • Oehme & van Sweden • ornamental grasses • plastic | 5 Comments »

on the road: wine country gardens

The day­light was end­ing as we crossed the bridge into the wine coun­try north of San Francisco.

Things were devel­op­ing that gor­geous warm tint that you only see for a few min­utes of the day. Peo­ple had set aside the next day to visit some winer­ies, and this gor­geous evening was the best prepa­ra­tion you could ask for.

We stopped at three winer­ies, and you pick up pretty quickly that the vine­yards are inter­ested in pro­mot­ing a lifestyle as part of the process of send­ing you home with a few bot­tles of wine. To set the mood, each loca­tion we vis­ited played its own riff on the basic for­mula that winer­ies fol­low: a tast­ing bar, per­son­able servers, a gift shop, and–most inter­est­ing for me–some sort of gar­den set­ting around the facility.

Stop #1 was the largest, most indus­trial place that we were to visit that day, Rod­ney Strong Vine­yards. You could stroll around an ele­vated perch and take a look at the oak casks and the stain­less tanks hold­ing their next bottlings.

Set in the mid­dle of your basic pic­turesque Sonoma County vine­yards, their take seemed to be fairly min­i­mal­ist, that the grapes around the win­ery were gar­den enough. But they did have some attrac­tive planter boxes lin­ing the steps ascend­ing to the tast­ing room.

Being high sum­mer, their plant­i­ngs fea­tured bril­liant zin­nias, marigolds and cal­i­bra­choa in what I’d call a real-world plant­ing, selec­tions that any­one could find at their local gar­den cen­ter, noth­ing too fussy or scary or exotic.

The mes­sage they wanted to con­vey through their set­ting: We want to make your visit plea­sur­able, but we’re pri­mar­ily about the wine. Our wines might be a bet­ter value because we don’t splurge on the unnec­es­sary the­atrics.

Across the park­ing lot was des­ti­na­tion #2, J Vine­yards. The approach to the front door passes casual-looking plant­i­ngs of grasses, sedges and flax.

In Design­ing with Plants by Piet Oudolff and Noel Kings­bury, the authors cau­tion against mix­ing plant­i­ngs of dif­fer­ent grasses. But here the tech­nique of mix­ing dif­fer­ent plants with strong lin­ear forms suc­ceeds beau­ti­fully. (Def­i­nitely a case in point that design guide­lines are meant to be broken.)

To get in the tast­ing room you cross a lit­tle bridge over a pond teem­ing with water plants. The hard­scape is cut through with strong lin­ear ele­ments, but the plants seem to defy the geom­e­try, with clumps of one kind of plant cas­cad­ing from one level to the next, not accen­tu­at­ing the struc­ture like box­woods plant­ing along a dri­ve­way. Winetasting–with optional fin­ger foods–can hap­pen indoors, or on the patio over­look­ing the garden.

The mes­sage they wanted to con­vey through their set­ting: We’re not the least expen­sive win­ery out there, but what’s wrong with an occa­sional splurge every now and then?.

Over­sized pots with spiky plants were a com­mon fea­ture. This blue pot­ted suc­cu­lent was set next to a rough woven vine fence in down­town Healds­burg, where we stopped for lunch. I’m sure their gar­dener pruned the pointy lower leaves off the plant to avoid injury to the masses pass­ing through, but I per­son­ally hate to see gor­geous sym­met­ri­cal plants dis­fig­ured this way.

Our last win­ery stop, Maz­zocco Vine­yards, also fea­tured a spiky plant–a flax–planted in a big pot–this one a model with beau­ti­fully drip­ping glaze.

The small­est of the three stops that day, the win­ery fea­tured low-growing drought-tolerant plants and some annu­als set in a small the­ater set that evoked a casual resort set in the mid­dle of oaked foothills. A berm along the adja­cent road­way cre­ated a sense of shel­ter and avoided the road noises that would have spoiled the mood.

The set­ting was sim­ple and casual, noth­ing so spec­tac­u­lar that you had to stop to look at it, but a pleas­ant place to relax and spend part of an afternoon.

The mes­sage they wanted to con­vey through their set­ting: We’re all about rus­tic ele­gance. Our wines are direct and con­nected to the land. (Their offer­ings hap­pened to offer a large num­ber of vineyard-designated bot­tlings of zin­fan­del, many with its own strong character.)

My favorites that day?
Wines: Maz­zocco. (I didn’t sam­ple at the first stop.)
Gar­dens: J.

But they’d all be worth a visit. (And my thanks to our des­ig­nated dri­ver that day!)

August 15 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: Sonoma County • vineyards • winetasting | 3 Comments »

on the road: luther burbank’s farm

His­tory is a frag­ile thing, some­thing that I was reminded of on my recent visit to Sonoma County.

Pio­neer­ing plants­man Luther Bur­bank moved to this area in the mid-1880s, mak­ing his home in Santa Rosa, and estab­lish­ing a plant breed­ing and trial loca­tion nearby on Gold Ridge, in present-day Sebastapol. Over his career, which included over 40 years of work at this loca­tion, he devel­oped and intro­duced hun­dreds of vari­eties of food crops and orna­men­tal plants–including the still-popular Shasta daisy, and was pretty much the Thomas Edi­son of the plant world.

You can visit his main res­i­dence in Santa Rosa, but it was the Gold Ridge Exper­i­ment Farm where the work of com­ing up with the new vari­eties took place. Our host in Sebastapol basi­cally said that there wasn’t much to see of the farm any­more. But I was curi­ous to stand in the mid­dle of hor­ti­cul­tural and agri­cul­tural his­tory, so John and Jenny and I took a short trip to the site.

A small brown sign in down­town Sebastapol points to the farm, .7 miles away, and a sec­ond small brown sign down the road points left towards the loca­tion. The first thing that you see when you turn left, instead of some pas­toral trial farm scene over­flow­ing with his­tor­i­cal flow­ers, is the big­ger sign announc­ing the Bur­bank Heights & Orchards, an anony­mous clus­ter of gray clapboard-sided apart­ment houses. A bit of trail­blaz­ing over the wind­ing lane through the apart­ments even­tu­ally leads to a lit­tle yel­low cot­tage in a clear­ing, along with a match­ing out-building and a green­house that must be as small as the bath­rooms in the sur­round­ing apartments.

If it weren’t for the green­house it’d be hard to know that this was the des­ti­na­tion. But this was it. What’s left of major botan­i­cal his­tory. (You can see the apart­ments in the background.)

The cot­tage dates to 1906, when the San Fran­cisco earth­quake scrapped the orig­i­nal struc­ture. There’s an adja­cent lit­tle cot­tage gar­den, with some exam­ples of Shasta daisies and other plants with ties to Bur­bank and this location.

The hybrid pen­ste­mons here are mod­ern vari­eties, but there’s an inter­est­ing unknown tall night­shade with pur­ple flow­ers that was found grow­ing on the site in 1980. Aside from the Shasta daisies, the plants of major his­tor­i­cal inter­est here aren’t the hor­ti­cul­tural pret­ties as much as the trees and shrubs nearby: Wal­nuts, berries, plums, cher­ries, hawthorns, roses, among many.

Some of the plants aren’t Bur­bank hybrids at all, but are stock that was used in his veg­etable hus­bandry. Burbank’s work was all about improv­ing on nature, not appre­ci­at­ing nature as it exists, so what nature you see in the form of the orig­i­nal species–including the Catalina Cher­ries native to California–were col­lected here for their poten­tial value to what could be made with them.

In an arti­cle, “Luther Bur­bank : A Vic­tim of Hero Wor­ship,” Wal­ter L. Howard writes that “[t]he sci­ence of breed­ing grew and advanced rapidly dur­ing the first two decades of the new cen­tury, and though it may not be gen­er­ally rec­og­nized, the move­ment is trace­able to Bur­bank as a potent acti­va­tor. Pro­fes­sor H. J. Web­ber, a pio­neer plant-breeder and geneti­cist and a con­tem­po­rary of Bur­bank, has declared that through the influ­ence of Bur­bank the sci­ence of plant breed­ing was advanced by at least twenty years and for this accom­plish­ment alone, he deserved a siz­able mon­u­ment to his mem­ory.” (Quoted at the Gold Ridge website.)

Today, Luther Bur­bank isn’t com­pletely for­got­ten. There’s the lit­tle remain­ing farm­stead, and the Bur­bank home in Santa Rosa. Burbank’s Shasta daisy is the offi­cial flower of Sebastapol. And there’s even a stretch of High­way 12 between Santa Rosa and Sebastapol that’s des­ig­nated the Luther Bur­bank Memo­r­ial High­way. But Sonoma County, a region that’s liv­ing large as one of the hotspots of Cal­i­for­nia wine coun­try, seems a lit­tle dis­tracted by other things than to pay large amounts of atten­tion to a fig­ure whose career saw the rise but not the fall of Pro­hi­bi­tion in the United States.

So, should you plan a trip to God Ridge Exper­i­ment Farm? As a des­ti­na­tion unto itself, prob­a­bly not, unless you live nearby. But if you’re here for a visit to the Sonoma and Napa Val­ley winer­ies, sure, take the lit­tle side trip. It might be a lit­tle sad, but you’ll be glad you went.

August 14 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: history • Luther Burbank • Sebastapol • Shasta daisies • Sonoma County | 4 Comments »

on the road: visiting california carnivores

On our recent trip we had only one nurs­ery on the list of must-visit loca­tions: Cal­i­for­nia Car­ni­vores in Sebastapol.

Spe­cial­iz­ing in car­niv­o­rous plants from around the world, pro­pri­etor Peter D’Amato has assem­bled a col­lec­tion of species and hybrids that run the gamut from venus fly­traps and Amer­i­can pitcher plants to really cool sun­dews and bladderworts.

One of the first plants that you encounter is this massed group of the hybrid, Sar­race­nia x Dana’s Delight. It’s a fairly com­mon plant, but gather together sev­eral dozen pots of it in a massed dis­play and there’s noth­ing com­mon about it. The pitch­ers color up to a most amaz­ing pur­plish red when grown in strong sunlight.

Here’s another pitcher plant that had some gor­geous col­oration. I for­got to note the name–sorry–but I think it might be a form or hybrid of S. flava.

If there’s a pitcher plant that I covet it’s this one, the Cal­i­for­nia and Ore­gon cobra lily, Dar­ling­to­nia cal­i­for­nica. I’ve killed one already, and won’t attempt another until I’m more con­fi­dent that I can offer it what it needs to survive.

To grow so many dif­fer­ent kinds of plants requires a lot of space. Here’s a shot of the prop­a­ga­tion ponds.

I left the premises with three plants, a cou­ple more than I really have room for in my bog. I posted yes­ter­day about the amaz­ing fly-catching capa­bil­i­ties of the sun­dew I bought (Drosera fil­i­formis ssp. fil­i­formis ‘Florida giant’). Another plant was a divi­sion of an albino hybrid, Super Green Giant.

The third pur­chase was this beau­ti­fully col­ored ver­sion of the yel­low pitcher, Sar­race­nia flava. Here it is from the front…

…and here it is from behind.

…and for con­trast, here’s a form of this species with min­i­mal col­oration, ‘Max­ima.’ I love its yellow-green coloration.

The basic ele­ment of a pitcher plant is a highly devel­oped leaf struc­ture that con­tains a reser­voir of fluid that insects fall into. The bug even­tu­ally drowns, and the the digested insect turns into food for the plant.

The more I look at pitcher plants, the more I appre­ci­ate the dif­fer­ences between them. It’s like musi­cal vari­a­tions on a theme, where you start with some­thing sim­ple and rec­og­niz­able, and then go off into all sorts of amaz­ing directions.

Jenny was out to this coast for a fam­ily visit, and was along for this plant trip. Her pur­chases were two: a small but very pretty and cute blad­der­wort, Utric­u­laria livida, and a dis­tinc­tive lit­tle venus fly­trap, Dion­aea mus­cip­ula.

The husband’s reac­tion when we got back to the hotel went some­thing like, “You bought a venus fly­trap? To take all the way back to South Car­olina? Where venus fly­traps come from?” But Jenny is a a curi­ous plant per­son her­self, and the fly­trap she picked was a nicely grown spec­i­men that had strik­ing red col­oration unlike the typ­i­cal ver­sions of the species. Like pitcher plants, fly­traps can have their own sets of cool vari­a­tions on the basic theme.

August 11 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: California Carnivores • carnivorous plants • nurseries | 6 Comments »

on the road: every car should have one

I’m just back from a few days with fam­ily in Sebastapol, up in the Russ­ian River and Sonoma Val­ley wine coun­try north of San Fran­cisco. I’ll post on the gar­den des­ti­na­tions I man­aged to drag peo­ple to while we were up there, but I’ll start back­wards with one of the events on the way home yesterday.

On the return trip the car was plagued for a few min­utes by this fly that kept buzzing around the inside of the car, evad­ing all our attempts to shoo it out the win­dows. In the back seat we had three plants that were my sou­venirs from a visit to Cal­i­for­nia Car­ni­vores, a car­niv­o­rous plant spe­cialty nurs­ery that was just five min­utes form the hotel where we stayed. (I’ll post more on the nurs­ery visit later.)

One of the plants was this sun­dew, Drosera fil­i­formis ssp. fil­i­formis ‘Florida Giant.’ Well, I think you know where this story is headed…

When we got home John noticed that a fly had been trapped by the sun­dew, most likely the one that had been annoy­ing us at the begin­ning of the trip. That explains why we hadn’t noticed the insect after the first few min­utes of the return trip.

After this expe­ri­ence I’d like to sug­gest that every auto­mo­tive man­u­fac­turer should make a drosera stan­dard equip­ment on all their mod­els, espe­cially for this buggy time of the year…

August 10 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: carnivorous plants • Drosera filiformis • sundews | 6 Comments »

covering ground: carmel aster

When you see a plant listed as a “ground­cover” you can expect prac­ti­cally any­thing, from some­thing that will cling low to the earth and spread like spilled paint, to what’s really a sprawl­ing shrubby thing that will form a loose mound of branches that’s sev­eral feet tall at the cen­ter. Closer to the first cat­e­gory is this plant that began bloom­ing for me dur­ing the final days of July.

The plant goes by a num­ber of com­mon names, among them, Carmel aster, Cal­i­for­nia aster, beach aster, and branch­ing beach aster. And the num­ber of Latin names attached to the plant doesn’t to much to sim­plify iden­ti­fy­ing it: Lessin­gia filangini­fo­lia v. cal­i­for­nica, Lessin­gia cal­i­for­nica, Corethrog­yne leu­co­phylla, Corethrog­yne filangini­fo­lia. The last name, Corethrog­yne filangini­fo­lia, seems to be the one that’s going to stick for a while, so that’s the one I’ll be try­ing to train myself to use.

Plant this where you’d like a white-leaved low ground­cover. It blooms from mid­sum­mer into the fall with small, pale laven­der flow­ers with perky yel­low cen­ters. The plant will go sev­eral months with­out sup­ple­men­tal water­ing, but will look bet­ter with an occa­sional sip of water (about once per month dur­ing the sum­mer here near the coast).

As a ground­cover the foliage on Carmel aster can be a lit­tle on the sparse side, espe­cially when grown lean and dry, as you see here. But I use the bare spots as a place to sow some late winter-flowering wild­flower seeds. Plants of Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies look great peek­ing through the low mat of white leaves, for instance. By this time of year, how­ever, weeds aren’t a prob­lem, so the occa­sional bare patches aren’t a weed mag­net like they might be dur­ing the winter.

Last fall I planted three dif­fer­ent ground­cov­ers to trial. This is the one that I’ll be keep­ing and plant­ing more of.

August 06 2009 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: beach aster • Carmel aster • Corethrogyne filanginifolia • Corethrogyne leucophylla • Lessingia filaginifolia v. californica • native plants | 7 Comments »

rain, almost

We’re located far enough south that the mon­soonal influ­ence that brings August rains to the desert south­west can some­times make itself felt. But we’re far enough north that the effect is mostly some­what more humid days but very lit­tle or noth­ing at all in the way of actual precipitation.

Yes­ter­day after­noon I was on the com­puter, play­ing a game of Tetris, that time-sink that raised itself in my con­scious­ness again now that media out­lets were cel­e­brat­ing its twenty-fifth anniver­sary. For a few sec­onds there was this noise out­side. Rain?

By the time I paused the game and made it out­side most of it had evap­o­rated, but I did man­age to see a few drops left on some steps. It was enough to make it into the weather report as “a trace” of rain, but noth­ing to add to the 0.0 inches rain­fall total since the start of the July rain sea­son or 3.1 inches since the start of the year.

A trace isn’t enough mois­ture to mean much to the plants, but the weather pat­tern made for nice clouds for the sun to col­orize this morning…

…and a nice moon­rise last night. (Sun­set a few min­utes later was great, but I don’t take my cam­era every­where I go.)

We’ve been think­ing about get­ting ready for a few days away to see some fam­ily in the Sonoma Val­ley. A lit­tle rain would have helped with the prepa­ra­tions by reduc­ing the areas I’d be hand-watering in prepa­ra­tion for being away. There’ll be some­one tak­ing care of the house, but it would be a lit­tle much to assem­ble detailed water­ing instruc­tions or to ask them to climb a short but steep bank of loose dirt with a water­ing can to attend to some plants that are still get­ting established.

At a time like this I real­ize that this is a gardener’s gar­den that requires selec­tive atten­tion to dif­fer­ent plants. Most of the plants are grouped by water needs, and two sprin­kler heads and a small drip sys­tem take care of the thirsti­est plants. But the occa­sional new plant mixed in with estab­lished plant­i­ngs requires indi­vid­u­al­ized attention–mostly in the form of extra water, usu­ally deliv­ered by hand. So I’ll be work­ing through a short list of water­ing chores to fin­ish before leaving:

• soak the pot­ted plants
• soak the new plants scat­tered around the garden
• give the veg­gies a good drink
• visit the water store for 5 gal­lons of water for the bog plants
• water seedlings and cut­tings in the greenhouse

And there’s one final impor­tant thing to remem­ber: Put cat food out where the cat sitter–but not the ants–can find it…

August 04 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: rain • watering | 5 Comments »

many parts are edible

Tomato plants are poi­so­nous, right? Actu­ally, not at all, accord­ing to a New York Times arti­cle that a coworker sent me on Thursday.

I’d bought into the com­mon wis­dom that tomato plants, along with potato plants and many other mem­bers of the night­shade fam­ily, con­tained poi­sons that ren­dered them ined­i­ble. The arti­cle stated, how­ever, that the alka­loid in tomato plants, toma­tine, has no his­tory of poi­son­ing humans or live­stock, and that there was at least a brief record of the leaves being used in cook­ing, most notably in a tomato sauce served at the land­mark Berke­ley restau­rant, Chez Panisse. Fur­ther­ing the argu­ment that toma­tine is “prob­a­bly not a killer,” Harold McGee, the article’s author, men­tioned that the alka­loid is present in sig­nif­i­cant amounts in green toma­toes. There’s def­i­nitely a long his­tory of eat­ing those, often in fried form, often in the South.

I con­sider myself to be both a curi­ous eater and a curi­ous gar­dener, so I had to put this knowl­edge to the test. At the same time, I thought I’d also try my first prepa­ra­tion of “cos­sack aspara­gus,” the shoots of the aquatic cat­tail that I have grow­ing in the pond.

First, I cut some tomato leaves off one of the plants. Next I trimmed some of the cat­tail shoots that had escaped into the pond from their pot. I removed the tough­est outer leaves from the cat­tail shoots and rinsed them.

I chopped the cat­tail stems and the tomato leaves, and added them to a stir-fry of gin­ger and Japan­ese shishito pep­pers from the gar­den. If I were a lit­tle more adven­tur­ous, I’d have left off soy sauce so that I could have tasted the ingre­di­ents bet­ter. But I chick­ened out. In went a driz­zle of soy.

The con­clu­sion? I served a lit­tle side por­tion to John with­out telling him what the ingre­di­ents were.

“At first I thought they [the cat­tails] were green onions,” he said. “But they didn’t taste like them. And then I thought they lemon­grass. But I was able to chew them.”

Such gush­ing enthu­si­asm! But after he made the reserved com­ments above, he agreed that the ingre­di­ents were indeed edi­ble, and that we could have them again. And yes, I lived to write about eat­ing both of these new ingredients.

Next time I’ll try sim­pler prepa­ra­tions so that I can bet­ter enjoy the indi­vid­ual fla­vors. Maybe a pesto sauce with raw tomato leaves. (I found that the cook­ing removed most of their fla­vor.) Or maybe I’ll try prepar­ing a side dish of cat­tail stems steamed like asparagus.

One of my gar­den­ing res­o­lu­tions for the year was to explore the lesser-known edi­ble qual­i­ties of my gar­den plants. I’m glad that I did.

August 01 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: cattails • tomatoes | 7 Comments »