[ Lost in the Landscape ]

baccharis season

This has been one of the most spec­tac­u­lar years I can remem­ber for coy­ote bush brush, Bac­cha­ris pilu­laris.

With many plants still dor­mant from a long sea­son with no rain, the perky green bac­cha­ris with their over the top heads of white seeds stand out. They look espe­cially amaz­ing with the sun behind them, light­ing up the masses of seed.

Here’s a closeup of a stem swarm­ing with seeds…

…look­ing closer…

…and closer still. You can see here that the seeds are attached to the white para­chutes that give the plants their white color this time of year in the wilds. These pho­tos were taken in Tecolote Canyon, a few blocks from my house, this past Fri­day, one day before our first mea­sur­able rain­fall in 164 days knocked many of these seeds off the plants.

Coy­ote bush brush is some­times used in native gar­dens, occa­sion­ally in this upright form, but more often in its pros­trate Cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia coastal form. The selec­tions ‘Pigeon Point’ and ‘Twin Peaks’ are fairly pop­u­lar. But if you grow the these selec­tions you’ll find that only male plants are used hor­ti­cul­tur­ally, mean­ing you’ll miss out on this dis­play of seed heads that can begin in late sum­mer and last until the winds and rains dis­perse them.

For con­trast, this is a boy coy­ote bush brush, sturdy and green with no sup­ple­men­tal water here near the coast. The buck­wheats and sage and sage­brush have all retreated to their dor­mant gray late sum­mer col­oration all around him.

And a closeup of his dried flow­ers. Noth­ing nearly so spec­tac­u­lar as his sis­ters this time of year. But he’s got one advan­tage in that he’s not fill­ing the air with para­chutes of seed blow­ing every­where like his messy sisters.

Male or female, coy­ote bush brush plays host to more inter­est­ing ben­e­fi­cial local bugs than you’ll see on almost any other plant. I’ll be start­ing some of these from seed this year in hopes of get­ting one of these spec­tac­u­larly messy female plants. Down-wind four houses from me is the canyon, so seed dis­per­sal shouldn’t be a problem.

For fur­ther read­ing: In Praise of Bac­cha­ris pilu­laris, at Town Mouse and Coun­try Mouse.

November 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • plant profiles | Tags: Baccharis pilularis consanguinea • coyote bush • seeds • Tecolote Canyon | 10 Comments »

when plants collide

Fif­teen years I’ve been wait­ing for this plant to bloom. Fif­teen years. And now that it’s bloom­ing it throws its big bloom stalk into a tan­gle of two tree aloes grow­ing together in what’s now a big three-plant smashup.

The flow­er­ing plant is Agave atten­u­ata, the fox­tail agave. Native to higher ele­va­tions in Mex­ico, it’s sup­pos­edly fairly rare where it orig­i­nates. But in zone 10 and 9b-plus South­ern Cal­i­for­nia gar­dens it’s fairly com­mon, with sev­eral gar­dens in every block of my neigh­bor­hood hav­ing one or more plants.

Many agaves, includ­ing the local native Shaw’s agave, Agave shawii, come armed with attrac­tive but sharp spines. But A. atten­u­ata is as soft and friendly a suc­cu­lent as you’ll ever meet, and that’s one of its big appeals for home gar­dens. Another bonus is that it requires no sup­ple­men­tal water­ing in gar­dens near the coast.

Almost all of the agave species will bloom once and then die (mono­carpy). For­tu­nately one plant of this species will have many rosettes, with only the bloom­ing rosette dying back, leav­ing the rest to bloom in future seasons.

At this point the stalk is taller than I am and is start­ing to grow down­ward in a thick arc.

The indi­vid­ual blooms are still closed up for busi­ness. Soon, though, the indi­vid­ual green­ish white flow­ers will open up a few at a time, begin­ning at the base of the inflo­res­cence and then slowly mov­ing towards the end.
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Here’s a plant at a neighbor’s house in full bloom last win­ter so that you can see what the agave does when it isn’t busy run­ning into other plants. Very grace­ful, don’t you think?

I wish the flow­er­ing stem hadn’t col­lided with the aloes. The stalk is assertive and solid so that there’s no stak­ing it or coax­ing it out of harm’s way. Oh well. I can sit back and enjoy the flow­er­ing, even if the flow­ers aren’t in the place where I’d like them.

Any­thing that you have to wait fif­teen years for it to bloom isn’t going to be the most con­ve­nient of species.

November 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Agave attenuata • agaves • succulents | 10 Comments »

a visit to recon native plants

Week­end before last my native plant soci­ety orga­nized a lit­tle prop­a­ga­tion work­shop that was hosted by Recon Native Plants. One of the ses­sions focused on grow­ing plants from seed, another on prop­a­gat­ing from cut­tings. I’ve done a bit of both, though my suc­cess with seeds def­i­nitely out­shines any luck with grow­ing any­thing from cut­tings. My main take-away for the cut­tings ses­sion was to try to take the cut­tings early in the morn­ing, when the plants are least dried out. I’ll be giv­ing that a try and shar­ing what­ever suc­cesses or fail­ures that that leads to.

My favorite part of the morn­ing was a chance to tour the nurs­ery and see a large whole­sale oper­a­tion ded­i­cated to prop­a­gat­ing Cal­i­for­nia and South­west­ern natives. In my lit­tle backyard-garden world I’m used to see­ing a few plants in pots sit­ting around, wait­ing to be planted. To visit such a big facil­ity is to see the world in a dif­fer­ent way. Here’s an art­fully arranged moun­tain of gal­lon pots filled with soil mix being planted with lit­tle arteme­sias. I’ll never com­plain again about hav­ing to pot up a half dozen trans­plants. con­tinue reading »

November 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • places | Tags: habitat restoration • native plants • Recon Native Plants • Salva spathacea | 3 Comments »

out with the old

This will be the year that I finally win the bat­tle against Mex­i­can feath­er­grass, the blog­ger said opti­misti­cally. I doubt that I’ll be see­ing the end of this beau­ti­ful but wildly over­pro­lific grass any time soon, but I’ve com­pleted pulling all the par­ent plants in the gar­den. With the source of seeds removed, the hun­dreds of unwanted seedlings that I have to pull up every year should diminish.

So how bad was the feath­er­grass prob­lem? Here’s a shot under­neath a black sage in the back yard, no closer than seventy-five feet from the near­est adult feath­er­grass plant capa­ble of set­ting seed. The seed just blew down­wind and set up house­hold in the shel­tered ger­mi­nat­ing con­di­tions in the shade of the sage. Other areas of the gar­den will look like this when the rains begin again and all the banked seed begins to ger­mi­nate. I hate to think that these might get to the local urban canyon, four houses away.

My rela­tion­ship with Mex­i­can feath­er­grass (Nas­sella tenuis­sima or Stipa tenuis­sima) started off in the early 1990s. Like most peo­ple who’ve planted it, I saw it at the nurs­ery with its stalks weav­ing del­i­cately in its beguil­ing come-hither way and fell in love. I bought two.

At first things between us went well. The grasses spread a bit, but the thought of free plants were a real bonus. I even gave plants away.

Though pro­lific, the plant isn’t cur­rently listed as an inva­sive species on the mas­ter Cal-IPA inven­tory, but appears on a 2007 list of nom­i­nated species. It’s clear from some of the com­ments on a Fresh Dirt post­ing that it’s a grow­ing prob­lem in some areas, my neigh­bor­hood included.

Yes, the stuff is gor­geous. But too high main­te­nance and poten­tially prob­lem­atic in my area. It’s time for us to part ways.

So how will I get my fix for del­i­cate, feath­ery grasses? This year has been my first time grow­ing the native Aris­tida pur­purea, pur­ple three-awn, a species that’s found locally. The plant is shorter than the com­mon feath­er­grass, which might be a bonus, depend­ing on your gar­den sit­u­a­tion. And unlike the nas­sella it has a decid­edly pur­ple color to it while it’s growing–very nice. I’ll post pho­tos once my plants get a lit­tle big­ger. I have no idea if it’ll be the same issue of the plant vol­un­teer­ing all over the gar­den, though I doubt it. Even if it escapes to the wilds, it’ll be in the com­pany of oth­ers of its species. Not a prob­lem.

November 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: invasive plants • Mexican feather grass • Mexican feathergrass • Nassella tenuissima • Stipa tenuissima • weeds | 8 Comments »

pining for the fjords

Dead plants? Or are these just rest­ing, pin­ing for the fjords?

I suf­fer from that mix of lazi­ness, lack of time and unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions that will let me leave a dead plant in the ground longer than it prob­a­bly should stay in a home gar­den that is try­ing to look pre­sentable to the neigh­bors. Some­times I’ll even water a dead plant, know­ing I’m wast­ing my water, but secretly hop­ing that there might just be the least chance the plant isn’t really gone.

A few new plants in the gar­den don’t sur­vive the ini­tial trans­plant. I still find myself under­es­ti­mat­ing the water needs of a new plant. Just because it’s “drought-tolerant” doesn’t mean it will take to its new dry home in the gar­den with­out enough water to get a proper root sys­tem estab­lished out­side the con­fines of the lit­tle nurs­ery con­tain­ers. The plants above, two of the five deer­weeds I planted this year, prob­a­bly didn’t make it for that rea­son. It prob­a­bly didn’t help that the smaller of the two plants was set into a bed where nearby plants had estab­lished a root sys­tem already and would likely steal away any water I gave the new plant. This pic­ture shows some of the com­pet­ing roots.

Other plants just seem to…die. Here’s an ex-monkey flower to the left. Maybe it was lack of water in its sec­ond year. Maybe it didn’t like its spot. And the plant to the right is my Guata­malan blue, the ivy-leaved sage, Salvia cacali­ae­fo­lia. No mys­tery with this one. It was get­ting way too big, and I pruned it ridicu­lously hard in late July or August. Killed it. There was a bit of green left as recently as a month ago, and this plant being a sage prob­a­bly would have rooted if I’d stuck one of the green bits in some cut­ting mix. But I dozed. Dead plant.

But every now and then some­thing like this hap­pens. I’d planted this blad­der­pod (Iso­meris arborea) in the late win­ter and kept it watered. It seemed to be hang­ing on okay but wasn’t a fast grower. Then a colony of some insects I’d never seen before descended overnight and seemed to be repro­duc­ing a new gen­er­a­tion. In the process they stripped most of its leaves. The plant quickly dropped what few leaves were left and I wrote it off as dead. In a weird way I thought of its demise as a suc­cess story: The native plant pro­vided food and shel­ter for one of the less usual vis­i­tors to the gar­den. Only in the course of things I thought the plant had per­ished. Bummer.

But here it is three months later, leafed out, wait­ing for the rains to come. With suc­cess sto­ries like this I’m reluc­tant to give up on the plants in the other pho­tos, but I think their time has come.

November 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: dead plants • Lotus scoparius • native plants • pruning • watering | 4 Comments »

november garden bloggers bloom day

Salvia micro­phylla ‘Hot Lips’ would be in every month’s bloom day post­ing because it never has stopped bloom­ing for me since it went into the ground two years ago. The plants are get­ting huge and tak­ing more than their share of the gar­den, and I’ll have to admit that they’re on my list of flow­ers that I’m almost tired of see­ing. But because of these plants, the hum­ming­birds are a con­stant pres­ence in the back yard. I’d hate to do any­thing rash like remove their favorite year-round source of nectar.

A while back I had to find out what it was about these plants that was so appeal­ing. I took one of the flow­ers and popped it into my mouth. A tiny hit of fla­vor, faint but sweet, reg­is­tered on my tongue. Pretty tasty if you’re a bird addicted to nec­tar. But I won­dered if I was pimp­ing my neigh­bor­hood birds with sugar water in the way a busy sub­ur­ban par­ent might keep their kids sup­plied with gal­lons of soda.

Some other plants that are in the “I’m almost sick and tire of see­ing them all the time” cat­e­gory: Salvia nemerosa ‘Snow Hills,’ Gail­lar­dia pul­chella, and Euphor­bia ‘Dia­mond Frost.’ They’re all in the gallery of flow­ers below.

The sea­son also brings some new blooms to the fall gar­den: Oxalis bowiei, Pro­tea Pink Ice, Camel­lia sasan­qua ‘Cleopa­tra,’ lemon­grass, and the plant for­merly known as Lessin­gia filangini­fo­lia var. cal­i­for­nica (now rela­beled as Corethrog­yne filagini­fo­lia var. cal­i­for­nica). And then there are the spo­radic bloomers. You can’t set your cal­en­dar by them, but they’re nice to have around. Hover over any image below for their name.

Happy Bloom Day, and thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gar­dens for host­ing this monthly online gar­den party.

November 14 2009 | Categories: my garden | Tags: flowers • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day | 14 Comments »

defensive boots

It’s a dan­ger­ous time out there for Cal­i­for­nia gar­den blog­gers. One of them just had a run-in of a thumb and a chipper-shredder, though for­tu­nately with an out­come way short of what you’d see towards the end of Fargo. (If you don’t know Fargo, here’s the snow­globe that came with the deluxe collector’s let­ter­boxed edi­tion VHS tape which mir­rors the tone of the film per­fectly. It memo­ri­al­izes the infa­mous chipper-shredder scene where Trooper Marge Gun­der­son comes upon the crim­i­nal try­ing to dis­pose of his lat­est vic­tim. When shaken, the snow in the globe is tainted with lit­tle red flakes. Magical…)

Another blog­ger broke her arm, tak­ing her away from post­ing for a while.

Not to be left out, a lit­tle over a month ago, while work­ing on my house repair project, I ended up step­ping into a pile of scrap wood that hap­pened to have a big spikey nail that was point­ing straight up out of one of the boards. My work shoes–some bat­tered old Skecher ten­nies that were hip in the late 1990s–were no match for the nail and…you know the rest. I’m per­fectly fine now, but two days of painkillers and the week of crutches were no fun.

I really should have bet­ter shoes for work­ing out­side, I thought after the lit­tle acci­dent. And this week­end I finally got around to replac­ing my unsafe and ugly tennies.

So here they are: some indus­trial Tim­ber­land work­boots with steel toes and puncture-resistant soles. They weigh as much as a small sack of pota­toes but are sur­pris­ingly comfortable.

So was this overkill for work­ing out­side and around the gar­den? They should be great for forc­ing a shovel into the patches of the gar­den where the earth is seri­ously hard­pan clay. But they’re def­i­nitely noth­ing to wear when try­ing to weave gin­gerly through a bed of new seedlings. I haven’t had a chance to plant any­thing over the last cou­ple of days, and I haven’t had a need to finesse my way around tiny lit­tle plants. But I think I’ll like them and that I’ll actu­ally wear them gardening.

What­ever the ver­dict, one mem­ber of the house­hold is already happy. Here’s Scooter, who doesn’t give a hoot about my new boots. But every new pair of shoes that enters the house means that there’ll be a shoe­box accom­pa­ny­ing them. The cat approves.

November 10 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: cats • Fargo (film) • films • injuries • Scooter • workboots | 9 Comments »

looking like spring again

I was con­fused the other day. Walk­ing by the young plum tree, I noticed this. Flow­ers? In Novem­ber? Appar­ently the plum was con­fused too.

After the long sum­mer dol­drums a lot in the gar­den is finally show­ing signs of wak­ing up from its long nap. Some plants are show­ing new growth, oth­ers are blooming–even bloom­ing when you don’t expect them to.

These paper­white nar­cis­sus are a reli­able indi­ca­tor of the cool­ing days and nights ahead.

Pro­tea ‘Pink Ice’ coex­ists with the most xeric plants in the gar­den and stays a resilient green all year. Begin­ning in the fall this big shrub begins its flow­ers. This will go on all win­ter and into the spring.

Salvia cleve­landii’s main flow­er­ing hap­pens in the spring. But given the right conditions–a lit­tle sup­ple­men­tal water doesn’t seem to hurt–it can throw a few more flow­ers in the fall.

Ditto for Salvia spathacea. Some­times a lot is made of the repeat-flowering abil­i­ties of some of the natives. With these two, the spring flow­er­ings are always way more stun­ning, and you’ll never con­fuse spring for fall. But as reminders of the late win­ter and spring flow­ers ahead, they’re terrific.

Another sea­son­ally con­fused plant is this ground­cover cean­othus. I’m only slowly now com­ing around to this genus. Ground­cover ver­sions like you see in the Burger King park­ing lot (think C. griseus ‘Yan­kee Point’) were all I saw for decades, but I’ve been try­ing to pay more atten­tion to what other cean­othus have to offer. This one, unfor­tu­nately, is one of the Burger King-type vari­eties: low, flat, green all year on a low-to-moderate amount of water. It’s so inert and emphat­i­cally green it reminds me of plas­tic. I may never come to love this type, but for­tu­nately there are other plants in the genus that do very dif­fer­ent things.

My cam­pus is incor­po­rat­ing more natives into the land­scap­ing, and all these pho­tos of natives, from the salvias, down, come from an after­noon walk yes­ter­day after­noon. Here a young plant of one of the den­drome­cons (either D. rigida or D. har­fordii) pro­vides an airy cloud of yellow.

…and nearby one of the heucheras cel­e­brates its spot in half-sun with occa­sional irrigation.

A few flow­ers, for sure. But it’s not really spring. We’ll need the rains to begin for that to happen.

November 03 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • my garden | Tags: native plants • seasons • spring | 4 Comments »

“satisfactory germination”">“satisfactory germination”

Last spring’s trip to the Santa Ysabel Pre­serve intro­duced me to chap­ar­ral whitethorn in full bloom. This plant, Cean­othus leu­co­der­mis, has a rep­u­ta­tion for being a touchy gar­den sub­ject. But see­ing its pale blue flow­ers set off against a plant with glow­ing white bark made me want to see if I might be able to grow it where I live, two thou­sand feet lower in ele­va­tion and much nearer the coast.

I was intrigued when the Theodore Payne seed list­ing offered it. One seed packet might give me sev­eral plants to try for not too much expense. Maybe one of the plants would end up in the spot in the gar­den that would make it happy.

The first chal­lenge you face when a packet of seeds arrive is to get them to ger­mi­nate. I was afraid that a plant that’s hard to grow might also be dif­fi­cult to ger­mi­nate, so I went to Dara Emory’s handy resource, Seed Prop­a­ga­tion of Cal­i­for­nia Native Plants for assis­tance. There she rec­om­mends two spe­cial treat­ments for the seed: boil­ing water treat­ment, fol­lowed by 1–3 months of strat­i­fi­ca­tion. But there was a sen­tence that made the process sound eas­ier than that: “Hot water only may give sat­is­fac­tory germination.”

The tin­kerer in me took that as an oppor­tu­nity to con­duct another lit­tle gar­den exper­i­ment. I divided the seeds into three lots. Most went right back into the packet they came it–It was way too many seeds for me to con­tem­plate deal­ing with, even if the ger­mi­na­tion rate was spotty.

I poured a small quan­tity of rapidly boil­ing water on the other two seed batches. Dous­ing with boil­ing water ordi­nar­ily would kill many liv­ing things. The first time you do it with seeds, it’s an act that you carry out trust­ing those who went before you, even as the act itself seems coun­ter­in­tu­itive and reckless.

The cean­othus seeds made strange crack­ling noises when the hot water hit. They have incred­i­bly hard seed cov­er­ings, so the crack­ling was the sound of the seed coats being breached. I let the water cool, and then placed most of the exper­i­men­tal sub­jects in moist peat moss, and wrapped them up in a ziploc bag for some hiber­na­tion in the veg­gie crisper drawer of the fridge. I saved out nine seeds which escaped the refrig­er­a­tor treat­ment. Those went straight into seedling mix in pots that I kept watered on the floor of my unheated green­house, which is pretty close to being placed in a a bright spot outdoors.

That was August 1, and within 3 weeks I was begin­ning to see sprout­ing seeds. Con­sid­er­ing that I could prob­a­bly make space for three or so plants, this def­i­nitely con­sti­tuted “sat­is­fac­tory germination.”

I guess I was so happy with the seeds that didn’t receive cold treat­ment that I for­got about the seeds in the fridge. When I finally checked on them a month ago prac­ti­cally every seed had sprouted and was show­ing long green seed leaves reach­ing for a sun that didn’t exist in the refrigerator.

Now with all these seedlings I’m feel­ing like I’m run­ning a botan­i­cal puppy mill. What will I do with all these plants? Of course, I doubt all of them will sur­vive. (What cul­ture was it where chil­dren were only named after they had reached their first birth­day?) But there will be a few more plants than I’ll need.

Well, I sup­pose I could donate the spares to next year’s native plant society’s sale–but that’s not until Octo­ber of 2010. And I could see if any of the mem­bers might be inter­ested in swap­ping for some of their own spare plants hat I’d be inter­ested in…

November 02 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Ceanothus leucodermis • germination • seeds | 6 Comments »