[ Lost in the Landscape ]

halloween hostess bouquet

What do you take to the Hal­loween party when you know the hosts will have every­thing taken care of?

Here’s my solu­tion for tonight: a bou­quet of car­niv­o­rous plant pitch­ers from the back­yard bog gar­den. Shown here are two Sar­rece­nia leu­co­phyllas, S. alata, and the hybrid S. Judith Hindle.

It was either those or a bloom of the stink­ing corpse flower, which unfor­tu­nately is between flow­ers. Besides, it’s prob­a­bly bet­ter eti­quette, even on Hal­loween, to show up with a bou­quet of pretty but slightly creepy pitch­ers than a mam­moth blos­som that smells like carrion…

October 31 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Halloween • pitcher plants • sarracenia | 6 Comments »

fun with hybrids

There are over a quar­ter mil­lion plant species known to biol­ogy. Of those more than 5,000 can be found in Cal­i­for­nia, and 1,500 in San Diego County alone. With so many amaz­ing plant species out there I still find myself being inter­est­ing in hybrids between the pure species.

My last post was on Sar­race­nia, the North Amer­i­can pitcher plants. The genus appears to be fairly new to the world in evo­lu­tion­ary terms, and all the species in the genus will hybridize eas­ily with any of the oth­ers. And all these hybrids will con­tinue to inter­breed with the par­ent species or other hybrids. When you find a bog with two or more species in it, chances are good that you’ll find inter­me­di­ate plants with traits of all the species present in that location.

This dri­ves biol­o­gists crazy. Find­ing a plant that’s a pure species can be a major headache when the plants are out there, frol­ick­ing in the mud. But evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy acknowl­edges that hybrids can intro­duce new genes into a plant’s gene pool so that they might be bet­ter equipped to with­stand some stres­sors that a pure species might not.

In addi­tion to pos­si­ble evo­lu­tion­ary advan­tages, a hybrid plant found in nature can be a really cool-looking mon­grel. And human-created hybrids that have been selected for spe­cific traits over gen­er­a­tions can begin to take a species or genus in direc­tions nature would never have imagined.

Here on the left is the Sar­race­nia hybrid Judith Hin­dle. I first encoun­tered mass tissue-cultured num­bers of it in the flower aisle at Trader Joe’s a cou­ple years ago. It’s a pretty great-looking plant by itself, but imag­ine a whole store dis­play of it. This human cre­ated selec­tion derives from three species, and its pedi­gree can be notated: ((Sar­race­nia pur­purea x S. flava) x S. leu­co­phylla) x ((S. pur­purea x S. flava) x S. leu­co­phylla).

Doing the math, you an see that it’s one-fourth S. pur­purea, this species. (My photo here isn’t the exact par­ent, just one gen­eral exam­ple of what this vari­able species can look like. Sev­eral tax­on­o­mists have decided that this plant I’ve shown you, S. pur­purea var. burkii, is actu­ally a new species, S. rosea, but it looks quite sim­i­lar and you can get the gen­eral idea…)

Another quar­ter of the ances­try comes from S. flava. (You might rec­og­nize this same photo from my last post. Once again this is just a rough esti­ma­tion of what the par­ent looked like. It’s actual great-grandparents were S. flava var. rugelli, a plant with pure green pitch­ers with a red patch in the throat.)

And the final two quar­ters of its ances­try comes from the gor­geous S. leu­co­phylla, the white-topped pitcher plant. I find myself com­par­ing the hybrid with the par­ents, try­ing to see the char­ac­ter­is­tics that came through in the final hybrid. Clearly S. leu­co­phylla has the most influ­ence in this cross.

Here’s another com­mon sar­race­nia, S. Dixie Lace. Larry Mel­lichamp, its breeder, isn’t 100% cer­tain of its parent­age, but he esti­mates it to be: (S. leu­co­phylla x S. rubra) x (S. psittacina x S. pur­purea). It shares two par­ents with Judith Hin­dle above, but intro­duces two new species into the mix.

The pres­ence of this ances­tor, S. rubra, is sub­tle, and is prob­a­bly most man­i­fested in the some­what upright-growing pitch­ers and the robust growth habit. (Once again, the plant I’ve shown is only a close approx­i­ma­tion of the S. rubra var. wher­ryi that was used for the actual cross. And yet again, this lat­ter species has been clas­si­fied as a sep­a­rate species by some taxonomists.)

The final ances­tor is S. psittacina, a plant that’s prac­ti­cally impos­si­ble to hide the pres­ence of in any hybrid. The lean­ing growth habit and pat­tern­ing of the pitch­ers takes sev­eral gen­er­a­tions to fade into the background.

Hybrids can hap­pen any­where. In the irri­gated part of my gar­den I have a few sage species from Europe and the Amer­i­cas. These are the leaves of Salvia sagit­tata, the arrow-leaved sage, a plant from Ecuador.

Next to it I noticed a young plant which at first I thought was a seedling of the of its neigh­bor. It has the same light green col­oration and coarse leaf tex­ture as does S. sagit­tata. When I started look­ing closer at the leaves, how­ever, some­thing seemed a lit­tle off. Instead of the dis­tinct arrow shape, the leaves are closer to oval. Seedlings some­times take a while to develop their mature char­ac­ter­is­tics, but I started think­ing that it might be a hybrid of S. sagit­tata with one of the other sages nearby.

Three feet away is S. nemorosa. It also has coarse-textured leaves, but they’re smaller, darker green and rounder (prob­a­bly “lin­ear” to “oblong” with a “cor­date” leaf base, accord­ing to the leaf mor­phol­ogy charts).

And about six feet away are sev­eral plants of the pop­u­lar ‘Hot Lips’ cul­ti­var of S. micro­phylla, a species from Texas into Mex­ico. Its leaves are smooth, much smaller, darker green and also more rounded. (I guess I’d call it an “ovate” leaf form with an “obtuse” leaf tip.)

Who do you think might be the father? I’m lean­ing towards S. nemorosa.

The seedling sage found a clear­ing in the mid­dle of a lit­tle walk­way to ger­mi­nate. I’ll let the seedling bloom to see if it’s interesting–or if it’s even a hybrid at all. See­ing the flow­ers should help me bet­ter guess what its par­ents might be. If it’s worth keep­ing I’ll trans­plant it out of harm’s way. If it’s not, I’ll treat it as any other unwanted gar­den col­o­nizer. What­ever the case, it’ll be an inter­est­ing lit­tle experiment.

Topic for a future post: What’s bad about hybrids?

October 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: hybrids • sages • Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips' • Salvia nemorosa • Salvia sagittata • sarracenia • Sarracenia flava • Sarracenia leucophylla • Sarracenia psittacina • Sarracenia purpurea • Sarracenia rubra | 4 Comments »

sarracenia: an appreciation

So many inter­est­ing plants, so lit­tle time and space to grow them. My cur­rent plant obses­sion is the Amer­i­can pitcher plant genus, Sar­race­nia. I’m not alone in my obses­sion. Brooks Gar­cia even has a firm ded­i­cated to the genus which bears the name Sar­race­nia Obsessed. It’s hard to explain what causes a per­sonal obses­sion but let me try.

The plants of this genus of eight to eleven species all have evolved mod­i­fied leaves that form tubes that attract and cap­ture prey. A fly or an ant and goes for the nec­tar that the plant offers at the tip of the pitcher, and every few of the unfor­tu­nates slips on the slip­pery sur­face and is directed down far­ther into the tube by downward-pointing hairs on the inside of the leaf. Many of the species have a tube filled with diges­tive enzymes that await any crea­ture that makes it to the bot­tom of the tube. The insect even­tu­ally drowns, and is digested by the plant. Dinner.

Evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy has devised a num­ber of unpleas­ant ways its crea­tures can meet their ends. Being lured into a nectar-bated trap, then directed by needle-sharp hairs towards a nasty fluid that will start to eat you while you’re still a lit­tle bit alive sounds like one of the more grue­some exits to make. (I’ll never com­plain about another gru­el­ing din­ner party again…)

There are peo­ple who grow these plants where all this car­niv­o­rous unpleas­ant­ness is the main attrac­tion. A lot of these enthu­si­asts are men. Are car­niv­o­rous plants a guy-thing? All this eat-or-be-eaten machismo, Rambo non­sense, I won­der? But I guess I’m a lit­tle defec­tive as a guy—I love to cook and I watch Project Run­way for godsakes—and what really attracts me to these is how seri­ously gor­geous and inter­est­ing these plants are.

Take the case of the yel­low pitcher plant, Sar­race­nia flava. This species fea­tures an extended upright tube (back to that guy thing again, sorry) that’s capped by an attrac­tive lid that hov­ers over the open­ing. These plants live in bogs in lands of many rains, so the lid helps keep rain­wa­ter from dilut­ing the nasty fluid inside the tube. The basic struc­ture car­ries from one form of the species to the other, but sub­tle vari­a­tions in shape and extreme ones in col­oration could keep a col­lec­tor occu­pied for decades.

In my lit­tle col­lec­tion I have sev­eral of the col­ored vari­a­tions that have been described. The pitch­ers look best in the spring and are a lit­tle ragged this time of year. But you can get a basic idea of some of the dif­fer­ences between plants of this species.

Sar­race­nia flava var. max­ima sits at one end of the spec­trum, color-wise. The leaves are all a clean green­ish yel­low color—leaf color—with the only pig­ment being lit­tle patches of red­dish col­oration at the grow­ing point of the rhizome.

S. flava var. flava takes the basic pitcher back­ground color of var. max­ima and adds some strip­ing to the leaves. This is a ver­sion of this vari­ety with an extra-wide maw.

S. flava var. cuprea is also called the “cop­per top” vari­ety. The back of the lid can have a light bronze to dark choco­late col­oration. Some­times the color stays for the life of the pitcher, some­times it fades to green. In pro­longed full-sun con­di­tions this plant can have a won­der­ful dark choco­late top, plus some of the heavy vein­ing you’d find in some of the more heav­ily col­ored varieties.

Beyond these, there’s a var. rugelli, which has all-green col­oration accented with a maroon bloth in the throat, var. rubri­corpa, the “red tube” which has a red body topped with a veined hood, and var. atrop­ur­purea, which has such a heavy suf­fu­sion of red that the entire tube looks that color.

And that’s only one species. There are seven to ten oth­ers, depend­ing on the tax­on­o­mist you’re talk­ing to, with each of the oth­ers pre­sent­ing their own inter­est­ing vari­a­tions on the bug-eating pitcher theme. And all of these species can inter­breed, lead­ing to huge num­bers of hybrids. Check out all the Sar­race­nia pho­tos of species and hybrids at The Car­niv­o­rous Plant Photo Finder. You may end up spend­ing hours at this one site alone and never find a way out of this obsession.

October 25 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: carnivorous plants • pitcher plants • sarracenia • Sarracenia flava | 5 Comments »

in with the new

Sun­day was a day of clean­ing up the gar­den to make room for a few new plants. The pre­ferred order of doing things prob­a­bly would have been to clean up the space and then go shop­ping, but the big fall plant sale of the San Diego chap­ter of the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety takes place on one day only, and the Sat­ur­day before was the day.

I arrived at the sale with a short shop­ping list that was arranged alpha­bet­i­cally. The first plants I saw were the two last gal­lons they had of the first plant on my list, pros­trate chamise (Adenos­toma fas­ci­c­u­la­tum ‘Nico­las’). I grabbed the gal­lons and started down my list. I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to doing the rest of my shop­ping weighed down by twenty pounds of native shrub­bery, but there’s noth­ing like a lit­tle phys­i­cal dis­com­fort to keep you on budget.

The chamise that you usu­ally find in the chap­ar­ral is a strik­ing, large shrub with dra­matic branch struc­ture. This selec­tion, a form from San Nico­las Island, matures to an open, grace­ful ground­cover, sev­eral feet across. When it’s young, like here, it’s easy to mis­take it for trail­ing rosemary.

Chamise has a rep­u­ta­tion for being a poor choice for fire-prone loca­tions. Even die hard native plant peo­ple who live in wild areas will often actively remove what any plants they find near their home. A con­ver­sa­tion I had with one of the expe­ri­enced local CNPS chap­ter mem­bers made me won­der if its rep­u­ta­tion is ill-deserved. His con­tention was that the plant burns no more intensely that many other natives, and that he’d wit­nessed a burn line where half of a chamise had burned, while the other half of the plant looked green and healthy. He held that it was yet another case of local fire depart­ments wag­ing war on per­fectly good native plants. My plants were going next to a con­crete side­walk along the street, so fire safety wasn’t on my mind. Even if flam­ma­ble, a low ground­cover poses fewer haz­ards than a big burn­ing bush.

As I con­tin­ued shop­ping I ran into one of my cowork­ers who with the help of his wife was heft­ing a two-inch pot of the rare San Diego bur-ragweed, Ambrosia chenopodi­ifo­lia. The plant can make an attrac­tive lit­tle lump, and I was tempted briefly by its rare sta­tus. But this species, along with other rag­weeds, is con­sid­ered a severe aller­gen at PollenLibrary.com, and I have a hard enough time sur­viv­ing the spring with­out severe aller­gens imme­di­ately outside.

By the time I checked out I had ten plants, about thirty to forty pounds worth, includ­ing a gal­lon plant of Gar­rya ellip­tica and some itty bitty pots of deer­weed (Lotus sco­par­ius), yerba buena (Sat­ureja dou­glasii) and Cal­i­for­nia aster (Corethrog­yne filagini­fo­lia, aka Lessin­gia filangini­flora). And it was at this point I ran into fel­low local blog­ger George from Groksurf’s San Diego. He had a slope, and was think­ing about some man­zan­i­tas for a slope, some for ground­cover, oth­ers for larger, con­trast­ing shapes. It had been years since I’d seen him last, so it was a nice chance to touch base and talk plants and water use in the land­scape. But I felt bad when I had to excuse myself and get what was feel­ing like 300 pounds of plants to the car and get back home to fin­ish Saturday’s house projects.

The rest of Sat­ur­day would be lots of unpleas­ant house projects. But I knew that much of Sun­day I’d finally be able to get back into the gar­den. It had been too long.

October 20 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Adenostoma fasciculatum 'Nicolas' • chamise • native plants | 6 Comments »

still no rain

I find weather and cli­mate to be amaz­ingly fas­ci­nat­ing things. The media must not believe that the rest of the pub­lic thinks the same way, judg­ing by how they always seem to need to sex up the topic.

“Flood­ing! Mud­slides!” was how Weath­er­bug pack­aged the recent early win­ter storm head­ing for California.

Think­ing that dry lit­tle San Diego stood a chance of get­ting some real rain out of the storm, I put out a cou­ple trays of pot­ted car­niv­o­rous plants in hopes of giv­ing them a taste of real water from the sky. And along the eaves of the house I placed some buck­ets to catch rain­wa­ter that I could use later.

Unfor­tu­nately I was duped by all the buildup. Imag­ine my dis­ap­point­ment when I came home last night and found the buck­ets as empty as a bin of free hundred-dollar bills and as dry as the Bap­tist potlucks of my early teen years. We are talk­ing dry.

Often by the end of Sep­tem­ber we have the first of the autumn rains. But not this year.

Still, the days are cool­ing. The skies are home to more and more clouds that look like they could deliver some pre­cip­i­ta­tion. The rains didn’t come this week, but they’ll come.

October 15 2009 | Categories: my garden | Tags: collecting rainwater • rain • weather | 4 Comments »

seeds for the fall planting season

The cur­rent house project reached a mile­stone, with us get­ting reach­ing the water­proof house wrap stage, ready for the sid­ing. What this really means is that it’s no longer a race against the start of the fall rains to get this far. I can slow down a bit and get back to some things in the garden.

The cool, short­en­ing work days sig­nal that the fall plant­ing sea­son is approach­ing. As in the past I have new plants I’d like to try grow­ing from seed. Con­sult­ing the really handy Seed Prop­a­ga­tion of Native Cal­i­for­nia Plants by Dara E. Emery, I see that the author rec­om­mends plant­ing annu­als by the end of Octo­ber, and sow­ing lupines by Octo­ber 15. So it’s really time to get myself in gear.

I’ve already received my order from Theodore Payne Foun­da­tion, mostly annu­als, most of them plants that I looked at dur­ing the win­ter and spring bloom­ing sea­son and decided to try. I saw this plant com­bi­na­tion at the Tree of Life Nurs­ery on my last visit. I liked how the plants looked together, and added two of the three plants to my order: the gor­geous deep pur­ple Parry’s phacelia, Phacelia par­ryi, and the perky yel­low desert marigold, Bai­leya mul­ti­ra­di­ata. Another plant I scoped out on my spring treks was the sting­ing lupine, Lupi­nus hir­sutis­simus, and the Payne Foun­da­tion cat­a­log had it. The pink, pur­ple and yel­low flow­ers of the three species should play well together. It won’t be any­thing too sub­tle, but what do you want out of spring­time flowers?

Another inter­est­ing cat­a­log, one that I’m look­ing at is Ginny Hunt’s Seed­hunt. She’s got over forty sages from around the world, a dozen unusual restios from South Africa, and a nice rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Cal­i­for­nia natives. The lat­ter include an attrac­tive cream vari­ant on the nor­mally orange rancher’s fid­dle­neck, Amsinckia ver­ni­cosa var. fur­cata ‘Gris­wold Hills,’ along with some of the neat tar­weeds, hem­i­zo­nia, seven dif­fer­ent clarkias, the less com­mon Salvia car­d­u­acea, as well as the sting­ing lupine and Parry’s phacelia that I’ve already got.

Where many cat­a­logs offer species and hybrid pop­u­la­tions where the population’s traits have been fixed through sev­eral gen­er­a­tions of self­ing and sib­ling crosses, Seedhunt’s list­ing includes seed mixes of what appear to be open-pollinated agas­taches and dahlias. If you have a sense of adven­ture mixes like this are a brave way to go. Because the exact pollen par­ents aren’t known, the plants that you get will show a cer­tain amount of vari­a­tion. The down­side is that the plant size, exact flower color and maybe their size and shape your plants might not fit neatly with their neigh­bors in a man­i­cured bor­der. The fun part about this is that you’ll get a plant that’s not exactly like some­one else’s. If you like adven­ture, this might be just the thing.

So this next week I hope to get at least some these seeds in pots or in the ground. It’ll be a great break from all the house projects. And Sat­ur­day the San Diego chap­ter of the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety is hav­ing their big plant sale of the year at Bal­boa Park. I’m not sure I’ll have time to plant a cou­ple dozen new plants, but I’ll plan on check­ing things out and see­ing what calls my name. There’s always time to look at plants.

October 12 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: native plants • seeds | 5 Comments »

one wall to go

The house projects con­tinue. We’ve worked around my lit­tle stu­dio build­ing and are now on the final stretch, 22 feet of wall that backs a raised planter. There’s only one win­dow to worry about on this wall, but all the plants are mak­ing it a del­i­cate demo­li­tion operation.

Some of the green­ery is look­ing a lit­tle trod­den on. This is a row of island coral bells, Heuchera max­ima, that hasn’t escaped the occa­sional stomp­ing on by a ran­dom foot. But for the most part these should look okay in a cou­ple months after the rains perk them up.

I pruned this plant out of the way. It’s my only rose, the green rose that I’ve been grow­ing since my early teens. Sep­tem­ber and Octo­ber aren’t prime rose prun­ing sea­sons, but I’m hop­ing the plant doesn’t mind too much.

This plant, a Bon­bero hot pep­per, so far has escaped being stepped on or hav­ing pieces of old sid­ing dropped on it. It’s near­ing the end of its short period of pro­duc­tiv­ity, so I won’t stay up nights wor­ry­ing about it. Still, now that the hot pep­pers are col­or­ing up red against the leaves, I’d miss hav­ing it in the garden.

We’re still unde­cided about what color to paint the sid­ing once we get it up. I was think­ing dark and dra­matic, and only some­what kid­ding sug­gested to John that we “paint it black.” When we got down to the final layer of old tarpa­per it was a chance to pre­view what a dark color would look like behind the plants.

Here’s the black of the tarpa­per with the new white Tyvek house wrap for con­trast. The white looks awfully harsh against the plants in the fore­ground. White is a good to accen­tu­ate some sinewy branches or the archi­tec­tural con­tours of a dra­matic plant. But the con­trast between the white and the plants is really extreme, and we prob­a­bly won’t be going with light col­ors. The dark col­ors recede nicely behind the plants, a fea­ture that might be nice in this nar­row gar­den space. The leaf col­ors con­trast against it gen­tly, but I worry that the plants might get a lit­tle lost.

One of the really pop­u­lar tinted stucco col­ors being used in the neigh­bor­hood right now is a dull dark green color, which to me seems like the worst color pos­si­ble for set­ting off green plants. Silver-leaved medit­ter­anean and native plants can stand a chance of con­trast­ing against it, but it’s pretty deadly for leaf-green plants. So we def­i­nitely won’t be doing dark green.

But a dark urban gray? I even thought of a dark red, but the house came with what seems like ten acres of brick­work, so I think that’d be too much as well.

We still have a week or two before we com­mit to a color. What would be hip, sooth­ing and flat­ter­ing for plants all at the same time? I’m one of those peo­ple who could spend hours look­ing at paint swatches, but that’s eas­ier to do than the hard con­struc­tion work that I need to get out of the way before get­ting to paint colors.

That said, I’m still a big believer in the power of color, and it could be more impor­tant deci­sion in the long run than where we decide to move a wall out­let. Deci­sions, decisions…

October 06 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: color combinations • colors • wall colors | 7 Comments »