[ Lost in the Landscape ]

mowing is like vacuuming…

I don’t have many oppor­tu­ni­ties to mow the lawn. I’ve basi­cally told John that the day he can’t keep up with the grass will be the day I break into the Mon­santo fac­tory and abscond with all the Roundup they have and then apply it to the lawn. There’s lots of other ways I’d rather use the space.

The day has come. John had some work done on a foot and will be hob­bling around for a cou­ple months. The grass, how­ever, well-watered from the Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary rains, didn’t stop grow­ing, and it was time to have the con­ver­sa­tion.

Well, in the end, I’m embar­rassed to say that I caved, rea­son­ing that he should be back to push­ing the mower around in a few weeks, and now isn’t the best sea­son to think of plant­ing some­thing that will require water to keep it going through the dry sum­mer and fall ahead. Besides, John really likes his lit­tle patch of lawn, and he lets me have my way with most of the rest of the garden.

So I popped some allergy tablets and pulled out the elec­tric mower and headed for the patch of grass. Back and forth I went over the brown­ing green sur­face. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s weirdly med­i­ta­tive, like vac­u­um­ing, I decided, only with a device that can chop off your toes.

My diverse lawn

As I took down the seed heads it was a chance to look at this what we call a lawn. It’s never been a fanat­i­cally main­tained piece of green, and fea­tures lit­tle colonies of Saint Augus­tine, Bermuda, rye, clover and what­ever other species the wind has deliv­ered. The bio­log­i­cal diver­sity of this patch would do the Ama­zon proud and drive any single-species lawn fanatic to distraction.

The cat, last fall, shak­ing off the thatch from the lawn. This is inside the house, of course.

By mid-summer it’ll go mostly brown as we cut back on water­ing to con­tinue with our water con­ser­va­tion. At that point, fac­ing four to six months of brown, four to six months of thatch being tracked into the house every time you walk across the gar­den, that’ll be when we might con­tinue our dis­cus­sion with whether we might want to do some­thing else with this patch of prime gar­den real estate.

What­ever we decide, you can rest assured that we will not be installing the plas­tic turf that’s get­ting to be a pop­u­lar gar­den sur­face around town. In fact, I like that stuff so lit­tle I’ve started my very first Face­book group, Plas­tic Turf Must Die!!!!!! As far as I’m con­cerned far­dens are about life and grow­ing things, and this stuff is as dead and cheesy as any­thing out there. If you’re any sort of joiner and hate the stuff your­self, join the group!

March 31 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: grass • lawns • mowing | 7 Comments »

the desert blooms

Week­end before last I took a trip out to the Tierra Blanca Moun­tains on the south­west­ern edge of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park on a trip orga­nized by the San Diego Chap­ter of the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Society.

Bigelow’s mon­key flower, Mimu­lus bigelovii var. bigelovii

Twin­ing desert snap­dragon, Neogaer­rhinum filipes

This was a trip that offered lots of up-close flower view­ing. After sev­eral months with good rain­fall many of us were hop­ing for car­pets of bloom­ing desert flow­ers spread­ing out in every direc­tion. But the rains didn’t begin until the end of fall. The flo­ral dis­play was good, with flow­ers easy to find in all direc­tions, but it wasn’t the gonzo hundred-year bloom that we’d hoped for. Botanist Larry Hen­drick­son, who led the out­ing, started out think­ing this was close to an aver­age year. But we found the lit­tle yel­low twin­ing desert snap­dragon in sev­eral loca­tions, and its sight­ing made him revise his eval­u­a­tion of the year to better-than average.

Parish’s poppy, Eschscholzia parishii. As with the Cal­i­for­nia poppy, this lit­tle poppy comes in orange as well as yellow.

Fish­hook cac­tus, Mam­mi­laria dioica, grow­ing in a crack in the quartz rock

Desert poin­set­tia, Euphor­bia eriantha

Greene’s ground cherry, Physalis cras­si­fo­lia

Fero­cac­tus cylin­draceus flower closeup

Fero­cac­tus cylin­draceus and Phacelia dis­tans

Twigs with wild heliotrope

The splashiest flower was wild heliotrope, Phacelia dis­tans. If you saw a car­pet of pur­ple, it was most likely this plant.

Desert land­scape with wild heliotrope

Ocotillo with heliotrope and chuparosa

Closeup of the del­i­cate leaves of the ele­phant tree

Last post I men­tioned my dis­com­fort with cer­tain plant names, includ­ing those that begin with the epi­thet “Indian.” Dunno. Maybe I’m being too sensitive.

Well, one of the canyons we explored was named “Indian Canyon.” Chang­ing plant names and geo­log­i­cal for­ma­tions seems to take about as much time. This canyon is one of the more north­ern exten­sions of the ele­phant tree or torote (Burs­era micro­phylla).

A fern in the desert, always a sur­prise. I think this is Cheilan­thes par­ryi.

The flow­ers were mainly small species. Look­ing up the hill­side the impres­sion is mainly of white rock relieved by tall wands of ocotillos.

What’s the best way to bring relief to a day in the desert? Maybe water?

We ended up in a stream that sup­ported a chain of lit­tle palm oases of the Cal­i­for­nia fan palm (Wash­ing­to­nia fil­if­era). These trees had been burned in the past. This was maybe an acci­dent, but in the past the Native Amer­i­cans were known to burn the fronds to get eas­ier access to the dates. Appar­ently it doesn’t seri­ously dam­age the plant.

Nearby these palms escaped the fire and flaunted long skirts of dried fronds. Liv­ing in sub­ur­bia peo­ple prune the dead fronds off what­ever palm species they grow, and you almost never see this gor­geous effect of decades of fronds sheath­ing the trunk. Maybe they’re afraid that it’ll be habi­tat for crea­tures they’d rather not have. Still, it’s a great effect, don’t you think?

March 23 2010 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: Anza-Borrego Desert State Park • desert plants • native plants | 14 Comments »

culturally insensitive plant names?

On one of my trips out hik­ing one of the group went run­ning over to a plant in hys­ter­i­cal full bloom, Pedic­u­laris den­si­flora, some­thing she referred to as “Indian war­rior.” It’s a stun­ning lit­tle plant that’s at least some­what related to the plants in the genus Castilleja that are some­times called “Indian paintbrush.”

I can’t say that I’ve had a con­ver­sa­tion with any­one about this pedic­u­laris. But in this age of height­ened cul­tural sen­si­tiv­i­ties and school mas­cots being changed to less poten­tially offen­sive char­ac­ters I’ve been try­ing to use the more generic name of “paint­brush” when dis­cussing the castille­jas. Most peo­ple still know what I’m refer­ring to.

A quick look at Calflora turned up dozens of other Cal­i­for­nia natives that have “Indian” in the name, includ­ing Palmer’s Indian mal­low (Abu­tilon palmeri), Indian man­zanita (Arc­tostaphy­los mewukka), Indian milk­weed (Ascle­pias eri­o­carpa), Indian straw­berry (Duch­es­nea indica) and Indian head­dress (Tra­cy­ina ros­trata). I’m not Native Amer­i­can but I won­der if these com­mon names might not be the best to use.

Trades­cantia alb­i­flora. Some peo­ple call it inch plant–probably a bet­ter name for it.

Try­ing to come up with other plant names that have left me a lit­tle queasy I thought imme­di­ately about the com­mon house­plant, wan­der­ing jew, Trades­cantia alb­i­flora. The for­mer own­ers of my house planted some in a bed, and I’m still try­ing to erad­i­cate it, twenty years later. I keep telling myself that “wan­der­ing Jew” is just a plant name and I’m not being anti-semitic when I take the weed­ing fork to it.

Alger­ian ivy is another incred­i­bly nox­ious plant pest, but I know that it’s named after the coun­try where it orig­i­nates and not the peo­ple who live there. In this case I don’t feel­ing like I’m com­mit­ting geno­cide when I yank it out by the yard. Same goes for all the thou­sands of other plants named after their coun­try of ori­gin, both in their com­mon and sci­en­tific latin names.

Dried leaves of Cit­rus hystrix

Look­ing on the web I came up with a cou­ple other plant names that folks might find offen­sive. Golden Gate Gar­dener had a note about Kef­fir lime, Cit­rus hys­trix, and Kef­fir lily, Clivia mini­ata. In Ara­bic, accord­ing to one of the com­menters on the post, “kef­fir” refers to a non-believer, some­thing sim­i­lar to the way “hea­then” is used in Eng­lish. Pos­si­bly objec­tion­able. But when the word trav­eled to South Africa it became a seri­ously trou­bling epi­thet for the non-white pop­u­la­tion. Ick. I buy the leaves of this lime in Asian gro­ceries for when I make curry or pasta, and I’ll make a point of call­ing it some­thing else. Thai lime, maybe. As for Clivia mini­ata, the latin name comes to the res­cue. Even my mother–not prone to show off with sci­en­tific names–called it clivia.

Plant names are impor­tant. They can tell you plenty about the soci­ol­ogy of those who did the nam­ing, and they can shape how you per­ceive the plant. I’ll try to pay more atten­tion to names when I use them, and I’ll try to reject the ones that really shouldn’t have a place in mod­ern, accept­ing, plu­ral­is­tic society.

March 20 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | | 18 Comments »

bog chronicles

Sev­eral ponds and a water­fall came with the house when we moved in a cou­ple decades ago. They looked cool and the water­fall con­tin­ues to pro­vide a nice gur­gling noise that helps mask the usual din of a res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hood. Unfor­tu­nately, as the years passed, the ponds began to fail or show their shortcomings.

One of them was so tiny it was good for breed­ing mos­qui­tos and not much else. It got turned into a planter pretty quickly.

The mid-sized pond turned out to be a crit­ter mag­net. Rum­mag­ing pos­sums and rac­coons ate all the fish and reg­u­larly upturned any water plants. Two years back it became my first bog gar­den, and is today filled with car­niv­o­rous sun­dews and pitcher plants. I was con­cerned about how much water a bog gar­den would require, but last year I fig­ured it out that it required only about as much water as an equiv­a­lent patch of grass.

Maybe five years ago it became appar­ent that we had a grow­ing leak on the largest pair of ponds and link­ing water­fall. The con­crete that made up the ponds was fine, but plant roots were pry­ing up the dec­o­ra­tive rocks that had been mortared on top to make the ponds look like a vol­canic grotto. I divided the upper pond in two, leav­ing the front half to cas­cade the water into the lower pond. The back half became yet another planter. Noth­ing seemed to do well there, though, so I decided to try turn­ing it into another bog for my grow­ing pitcher plant collection.

I started by remov­ing sev­eral hun­dred pounds of dirt. Tak­ing away the dirt exposed the rea­son why noth­ing seemed to thrive in the bed. The sur­round plants had sent their roots into the planter and sucked up what­ever irri­ga­tion I pro­vided to the plants I wanted to thrive there. I did a bru­tal prun­ing on all the adven­tur­ing roots, but fig­ured that they’d be back when offered moist soil to wan­der into.

To keep roots out of the bog I decided to con­tainer­ized the bog plants in plas­tic stor­age tubs from Tar­get. I could water the plants in the tubs and leave the sur­round­ing soil dry, reduc­ing the attrac­tion for maraud­ing roots. I used two six­teen by twenty-two inch con­tain­ers that were a foot deep plus a smaller one on the end.

The super-secret ingre­di­ents that went into my bog mix: sand and peat­moss. You need to be sure the peat­moss doesn’t have added fer­til­izer, which could make the bog plants fail.

I packed dirt around the tubs to sta­bi­lize them, then filled them up with a 60/40 blend of sphag­num peat moss and washed plas­ter sand, the sort of acid, low-nutrition soil that most car­ni­vores pre­fer to grow in. Finally, after sev­eral hours of hard labor of the sort the sort that I think my doc­tor is about to tell me I can’t do any­more, I got to install the plants.

The bog, ready for plants.

One of the Sar­race­nia alata rhi­zomes that went into the bog.

I selected sev­eral species of taller-growing pitcher plants to form the main plant­ing, Sar­race­nia flava, S. alata and S. oreophila. From my research I fig­ured out that these often grow nat­u­rally far­ther from water sources or in areas where the bogs dry out for part of the year. As far as pitcher plants go, these all should prove to be fairly drought tol­er­ant. Still “drought tol­er­ant” is a rel­a­tive term, and they’ll need to be kept at least damp year-round.

Ta-da! The fin­ished bog.

To fin­ish off the plant­ing, and to par­tially assuage my guilt at not using native plants, I sur­rounded one of the tubs with divi­sions of one of my native rushes, Jun­cus patens, a ripar­ian plant that doesn’t seem to resent dry­ing out. Another bonus of this species is that it looks good through­out the year, some­thing that can’t be said for these pitcher plants, which counter their sev­eral months of look­ing severely cool and amaz­ing with sev­eral months of look­ing dying and pathetic.

I’ll post progress pho­tos as the young new bog plants begin to fill and and show their poten­tial. I’m hop­ing this won’t turn into another failed pond.

March 17 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bog garden • bog plants • Juncus patens • sarracenia | 6 Comments »

high spring (gbbd)

This is it. High spring in San Diego. There are prob­a­bly more things bloom­ing now in the gar­den than there will be at any other time of year.

I start with the cur­rent state of the agave that I’ve been show­ing for the last few months. It’s bloomed its way from the base of the flower stalk to very near the very end. The plant will soon die and you won’t see any more pho­tos of it. For­tu­nately the plant has sev­eral other growths to keep it going into the future.

The spike has arced up and come back to the ground, where its final blooms are resting.

I’ve pro­vided a few cap­tions, but there are too many flow­ers to com­ment on in detail. For the rest of the pho­tos, hover your mouse to view the names or click to enlarge.

Leaves of the unknown Gas­te­ria.

An unknown gas­te­ria. The flow­ers are nice, but I grow it mainly for the foliage.

The weird dou­ble blooms of this pitcher plant, Sar­race­nia leu­co­phyll ‘Tarnok,’ shown with the first pitch­ers of the season.

The bloom of another car­niv­o­rous pitcher plant.

Geum and blue-eyed grass.

Salvia lyrata ‘Pur­ple Vol­cano.’ It’s rather weedy accord­ing to Robin Mid­dle­ton, but it does have its nice gar­den moments.

The not-quite black flow­ers of Salvia discolor.

Flow­ers on the grape­fruit. They smell great. And they bode well for a good crop next year.

Thank you thank you thank you to Carol at May Dreams Gar­dens for host­ing Gar­den Blog­gers Bloom Day. Stuff is begin­ning to bloom every­where. [ Check it out all the bloom­ing gar­dens! ]

March 14 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: flowers • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • spring | 22 Comments »

no storms this weekend

Finally. A week­end with good weather and no major out­side com­mit­ments. The local paper recently noted that of eight week­ends, six had been wet and stormy. Out­door leisure busi­nesses were hurt­ing, the paper noted. I’d guess plantsellers would be in the same sit­u­a­tion, though I really think gar­den­ing is much too impor­tant a thing to even begin to call “leisure.”

One of the com­mit­ments that ate into the free time was a fam­ily birth­day that we cel­e­brated at a rental condo down on Mis­sion Beach (San Diego Beach House). That was the day of the mega-earthquake in Chile and the inter­na­tional tsunami alerts. A pretty bizarre day for a party.

Life­guards a few miles up the coast noted some abnor­mal tidal action that they thought had some­thing to do with the tsunami, but we were enough in cel­e­bra­tion mode that we didn’t notice it.

Some­where dur­ing the after­noon some­one was alert enough to spot a boat in dis­tress. Here it is through binoculars.

That was another stormy, dra­matic week­end, how­ever, and the boat’s prob­lems had more to do with the bru­tal on-shore winds and big waves.

Leav­ing the beach I pho­tographed this sign. I’d noticed it before and almost thought that it was a joke. That day I wasn’t so sure anymore.

The time at the beach with the was dra­matic as all get out, and we sure need the rain. But where there’s rain, there’s weeds.

So this week­end I’ll be spend­ing a lot of the week­end out­side, in the sun, pulling weeds. Absolutely, there are worse things to have to do, but with so many wet week­ends the weeds have got­ten so far ahead of me I hardly know where to start.

Much of the weed­ing will be like this: one tiny lit­tle keeper plant mixed in with dozens of inter­lop­ers. There’s a desert marigold seedling (Bai­leya mul­ti­ra­di­ata) mixed in this mess. Some­where.

I’ll enjoy my time in the sun, but leisure? I think not.

March 13 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: rain • weeding • weeds | 7 Comments »

a local ceanothus

Cean­othus sea­son is here in force. One of the local stars is a species with the unfor­tu­nate com­mon name of “warty-stem cean­othus.” Nei­ther is its Latin name of Cean­othus ver­ru­co­sus espe­cially glam­orous. But hope­fully you can see how cool a plant it is in these photos.

If my week­day desk had a win­dow I’d look out on a the head of a lit­tle canyon that’s a mix­ture of intro­duced euca­lyp­tus and a par­tially restored snip­pet of coastal sage scrub habi­tat. A cou­ple hun­dred yards away in the re-wilded area are sev­eral of these cean­othus that have been glow­ing white for the last month with their clouds of flowers.

Last Novem­ber these cean­othus were stemmy but gracefully-branched shrubs. Adapted to sur­vival for many months with­out water its leaves are tiny and sparse. Still you could eas­ily walk past them.

If you stopped to look at the plant, you’d eas­ily see these inter­est­ing “warts” that give the plant its name. The warts are actu­ally leaf-bases (stip­ules) that remain on the branches long after the leaves are gone.

By Jan­u­ary the for­merly sparse look­ing plants were respond­ing to the rains with swelling flower buds.

And a month later the plants were going at it big time…

Cal­i­for­nia could be the evo­lu­tion­ary epi­cen­ter of the genus cean­othus. Of the approx­i­mately 52 cean­othus species in the US, 46 are found here. Of those 46 about 38 occur only here.

That’s a lot of com­pe­ti­tion for pre­cious space and water in a nurs­ery, but sev­eral native Cal­i­for­nia spe­cial­ists in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia offer this plant. You can see that this could be a choice addi­tion to a dry gar­den where you want an airy, grace­ful shrub that’s 7–8 feet tall and about 10 feet across. As I strug­gle with cean­othus from out­side my imme­di­ate area, I keep think­ing I should use more selec­tions that are bet­ter suited to what I have to offer them.

I love this plant, warts and all. But peo­ple in the end seem to buy the name and the image as much as they buy the plant. Just rebrand the plant with a friend­lier (but more trite) hor­ti­cul­tural name like “Cloud Blos­som Lilac” and just stand back as every­one snaps it up.

March 07 2010 | Categories: plant profiles | Tags: Ceanothus verrucosus • native plants | 7 Comments »

the prodigal ceanothus

The ori­gin of Cean­othus ‘Tuxedo’ reads a bit like a hor­ti­cul­tural soap opera: A Cal­i­for­nia native species, Cean­othus thyr­si­florus, crosses the Atlantic for Europe, where it meets up with another cean­othus, this one from the East Coast of the US, Cean­othus amer­i­canus, or New Jer­sey tea. Loose on for­eign soil the two get roman­ti­cally involved, with Cean­othus ‘Autum­nal Blue’ being one of the chil­dren. One of the plants of Autum­nal Blue moves to Ire­land, where its tol­er­ance for moister gar­den con­di­tions and good cold tol­er­ance makes it quite popular.

(Edit, March 4, 2010: A quick trawl through David Fross and Dieter Wilken’s ter­rific resource, Cean­othus, reminded me that the story is even more twisted than this. The par­ents of ‘Autum­nal Blue’ include the two species men­tioned above, but also the Mex­i­can and Guatemalan species, C. caeruleus. The plot thickens…)

There, in Ire­land, grow­ing on the grounds of Fitzger­ald Nurs­eries, one of the branches sud­denly throws a muta­tion, where the nor­mally green leaves are instead a dra­matic dark color, some­thing between dark choco­late, inky black and maybe just a lit­tle grape thrown in. Pat FitzGer­ald notices the strik­ingly dif­fer­ent branch, and begins a prop­a­ga­tion pro­gram in earnest. His nurs­ery lists sev­eral other near-black plants, includ­ing the dra­matic Phormium cookianum ‘Black Adder.’ Even­tu­ally the plant crosses back to the other side of the Atlantic, for Cal­i­for­nia, where it was released in lim­ited dis­tri­b­u­tion last year.

The almost-black leaves of Cean­othus ‘Tuxedo.’

That’s when I met this totally unique look­ing cean­othus and decided I wanted it for my gar­den. I brought a lit­tle gal­lon plant and located it where I wanted a dra­matic six-foot shrub, expect­ing that it would be a quick-growing screen plant. Almost a year later, though, the lit­tle plant remains a lit­tle plant, and hasn’t really grown. Even though I watered it all last year as you would most new plants in the gar­den, my guess is that I failed to give it enough water through the 146 con­sec­u­tive days with­out mea­sur­able pre­cip­i­ta­tion that San Diego expe­ri­enced, the third-driest rain­less time in our record books.

To the plant’s credit, it didn’t die. And now the rains have sat­u­rated the soil, it’s show­ing some inter­est in putting out some new growth. But I felt like I needed some guid­ance in doing a bet­ter job grow­ing this plant. Who bet­ter to ask than the per­son who prob­a­bly has the most expe­ri­ence with this plant? Why not con­tact Pat FitzGer­ald, its originator?

Thank­fully, Pat was gen­er­ous with his time in respond­ing to my ques­tions. Here are some excerpts from the advice he sent my way.

Regard­ing dry con­di­tions yes I would expect slow growth. Have you prunded your plant. I noticed from the pic­ture on your blog it had very long un-pruned branches. Like a lot of shrubs in dry con­di­tions I think thought needs to be put into help­ing the plants in the first year get depth of root pen­e­tra­tion so that dur­ing dry spells its tak­ing mois­ture from a depth. I sus­pect if you can give mois­ture to Tuxedo dur­ing the first year of estab­lish­ment to help it along and prune next spring you will see dense growth establish…

I high­light mois­ture reten­tion as a lot of peo­ple harp on about using water and drought but often for­get you can con­di­tion your soil to retain more of that valu­able mois­ture. There are so many recy­cled com­posts to be pur­chased or that the house­holder can make now that you can work into the soil to make pock­ets 3 X 3 feet around newly planted shrubs or even mulch to give them that start in life. The cure to drought and slow growth in dry areas is more often what you do before you plant than after as I am sure you well know but it needs repeat­ing and repeat­ing to the public…

Tuxedo will behave dif­fer­ently depend­ing on soil den­sity so in heavy soil I have seen plants exhibit­ing a shorter more com­pact nature to their growth. If planted in shade and espe­cially in a lighter soil Tuxedo will cer­tainly stretch as it seems to much pre­fer full sun for sake of both colour and flow­er­ing. In our more moist cli­mate I think the plant can get to 8 feet as can many many shrubs here in our tem­per­ate climate…

I think the one com­ment I would have is that sim­ply Tuxedo is for me more than a Cean­othus with deep dark foliage. Tuxedo is an ever­green foliage plant and once estab­lished in the gar­den hardy to minus 12 cel­cius in our expe­ri­ence but pos­si­bly minus 15 cel­cius. This is an achieve­ment for me as I can­not rec­om­mend hardly any ever­green with such dark foliage with such win­ter hardiness.

Tuxedo is also a good plant for train­ing on a trel­lis or wall in our cli­mate at least. There is no doubt in my mind that Tuxedo will ben­e­fit from occa­sional prun­ing but no more than once per year.

I just hope in time Tuxedo con­tributes some way pos­i­tively to Cal­i­forn­ian gar­dens. While only part native its still is a nice feel­ing as a plant breeder to have a plant go back to its home­land and be accepted into people’s gardens.

After review­ing Pat’s advice I’ve decided to not only give the plant more water and mulch around them for added water reten­tion through the crit­i­cal first year or two after a plant is freed into the soil. If I use an organic mulch it will break down over time and enrich the soil.

A com­mon thread you read with many Cal­i­for­nia native plants is that they detest rich soil. In fact Greg Rubin of California’s Own Native Land­scape Design spoke to the local native plant soci­ety of plant­ing large num­bers of short-lived col­or­ful plants between the large struc­tural species so that the tem­po­rary plants could “burn up” the excess nutri­ents in the soil, par­tic­u­larly in a sit­u­a­tion where the soil was for­merly a heavily-fertilized lawn. But ‘Tuxedo,’ with par­ents from moister parts of Cal­i­for­nia and the East Coast, sounds like it would ben­e­fit from being treated differently.

Cean­othus ‘Tuxedo’ with chalk dud­leya in the foreground.

For me, grow­ing Cean­othus ‘Tuxedo’ will be a lit­tle more work and water than grow­ing many other cean­othus would be. But I think it should be worth it. In fact, I saw more of them in the nurs­ery again and picked up a sec­ond gal­lon plant. Here you see it planted as a back­ground for the sil­very foliage and even­tual orange flow­ers of chalk-leaf dud­leya, Dud­leya pul­veru­lenta, and Cal­i­for­nia fuch­sia, Zauschne­ria cal­i­for­nica ‘Route 66.’

Cean­othus ‘Tuxedo’ with Cal­i­for­nia fuch­sia in the fore­ground, which will bring orange flow­ers to the end of summer.

Wish me and the plants luck. Not every plant is per­fectly adapted to your grow­ing con­di­tions, but a lit­tle effort can help make them thrive. And the rea­sons that make ‘Tuxedo’ a lit­tle trick­ier in the dri­est parts of Cal­i­for­nia might make it a good can­di­date for moister parts of the state, or other parts of the coun­try where cean­othus might be mar­ginal. This year the plant is in wide cir­cu­la­tion and should be widely available.

Cean­othus in New York or Lit­tle Rock? This might be the one.

March 04 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: black • Ceanothus Tuxedo | 18 Comments »