[ Lost in the Landscape ]

some local yellow daisies

As the big spring bloom winds down I’ve been struck by how many of the native plants have yel­low flow­ers. It clearly offers the plants an evo­lu­tion­ary advan­tage since bees love yel­low and bees are some of the major pol­li­na­tors. This is a lit­tle roundup of the three yel­low daisy-flowered shrubs and sub-shrubs that I grow.

Coast sun­flower as you find it…at the coast.

Encelia cal­i­for­nica hails from the more coastal edges of South­ern and Cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia, hence its com­mon name of “coast sun­flower.” A dark cen­tral but­ton anchors golden yel­low rays that shoot out in an infor­mal cir­cle. It’s a pop­u­lar choice for both gar­dens flow­er­ing road­side wild­flower mixes.

The green, green leaves of this encelia.

With so many other natives bear­ing gray­ish leaves, the bright green leaves of this plant really stand out. I’ve seen it used locally, where an occa­sional drink dur­ing the sum­mer can help keep it green and flow­er­ing through the sum­mer. In my gar­den the plants have a mostly unir­ri­gated spot behind a fence, so they exer­cise their nat­ural ten­dency to defo­li­ate and stop bloom­ing when the weather warms.

Giant core­op­sis, Core­op­sis gigan­tea, earns its name more from the tall plant size rather than the size of its flow­ers. The weird plant will even­tu­ally form what looks like a trunk from three to six feet tall that sprout finely-cut leaves. This takes a few years–My two year old seedlings are in the two to two and a half foot tall range. Blooms are perky yel­low daisies about three inches across. I planted a lit­tle grove of these in a back cor­ner of the gar­den, but the grove has dwin­dled to just a few plants thanks to a gopher that found the lit­tle tree trunks too deli­cious to pass up. Grrrr. Times like this I hate hate the full cir­cle of nature.

This last one’s San Diego County sun­flower. The cur­rent botan­i­cal name is Bahiop­sis lacini­ata though I and every­one else I know around here learned its name as Vigu­iera lacinata. Its flow­ers come in at about an inch and a half across, so it’s smaller than the pre­vi­ous two. But a bloom­ing bush of it makes a low, neat mound in the gar­den or in the local wilds. Of these three, the flow­ers have the most “refined” look to them–if you con­sider French marigolds and yel­low cos­mos to be refined plants. Because of it being a local plant it’s a fairly com­mon denizen of local native plant gar­dens. Also, a lot of coastal-zone road­side restora­tion projects around here seem to have this plant in the mix.

Although I’ve call all of these “daisies,” each has its own spe­cial char­ac­ter and use in the gar­den. The encelia is a great pick for its long bloom when watered. The core­op­sis is a perky mass of flow­ers when it’s in bloom, but few Cal­i­for­nia natives stand up to it in weird­ness dur­ing its leaf­less state in the sum­mer and fall. The San Diego County sun­flower is a nice tidy mound with so many flow­ers you might con­fuse it for an an annual. But it’s best to plant some decoy plants around it for the dry parts of year when it dies back.

Give them a try. The bees will thank you.

May 26 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Bahiopsis laciniata • Coreopsis gigantea • Encelia californica • Viguiera lacinata • yellow | 7 Comments »

yet another (fun) total waste of time

Ser­vices that will print a cus­tom fab­ric for you have been around for a lit­tle while. Now there’s Short­omatic, a firm that will take a design or photo that you upload and turn it into a pair of boardshorts–just in time for sum­mer. Even if you don’t spring the $99 for the shorts, you can noo­dle around on their site and see what your pho­tos might look like turned into cloth­ing. I played a bit with some mostly gar­den photos:

The orig­i­nal photo, some var­ie­gated Agave amer­i­cana at the Hunt­ing­ton Library’s desert garden…

…And the photo imag­ined as a pair of shorts using the Short­omatic design tool. These have a bit of a lederhosen/bondage vibe. I’m not sure I could pull off this look at the beach.

Here’s a photo from last sum­mer of a sphinx moth hov­er­ing at night over some sage flowers.

…And the same photo turned into a pair of shorts.

A photo of the West Side of Los Ange­les, taken from out­side the gar­dens at the J. Paul Getty Museum on a cool, clear Jan­u­ary afternoon.

Board shorts with the sky­line used for a bor­der at the base of the leg openings.

This is another suc­cu­lent photo, using the “find edges” fil­ter in Pho­to­shop, a huge cliche if there ever was one. And then I took the photo and tilted it towards the red end of the spectrum.

And here’s what it looks like turned into shorts.

Oh good, another black hole where you can throw your spare time…

May 24 2010 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: fabric design • fabrics • Shortmatic • shorts | 10 Comments »

colleen goes national

Colleen Miko, owner of the Pacific Northwest’s Colleen’s, a Land­scape Design Com­pany, has one of her gar­den designs fea­tured in the cur­rent issue of Organic Gar­den­ing Mag­a­zine. In the inter­est of full dis­clo­sure I’m glad to say that Colleen also hap­pens to be my cousin through a cou­ple of for­tu­nate mar­riage links in the fam­ily. She’s received well-deserved regional notice for her land­scape work, but this is her first national print expo­sure. (Edit, May 19: Any­one with access to cable might have seen her on TV ear­lier, when she was the final­ist in HGTV’s Landscaper’s Chal­lenge program.)

Rah Colleen!

Here’s a peek at one of the spaces in her design. I like how the gen­tly sym­met­ri­cal plant­i­ngs helps focus atten­tion on the water fea­ture. In other gar­dens, foun­tains and other focal points some­times feel too small for the spaces they’re allot­ted. But Colleen’s strat­egy here gives greater visual weight to the bur­bling water and the area around it. The whiff of sym­me­try also brings visual calm that com­ple­ments the calm­ing sound of water. I’d love to spend some time in this space on a warm after­noon with a glass of North­west riesling.

Pick up the June/July issue and see more of her work!

And be sure to pop over to Colleen’s web­site, where you’ll find other exam­ples of her designs, as well as instruc­tions on how to build this fun bird­house with a green roof.

May 18 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: birdhouses • Colleen Miko • Colleen's • green roofs • water features | 3 Comments »

my favorite garden gadget

There are peo­ple who go gaga over gad­gets, and then there are skep­ti­cal folks like me. If I buy gad­get it really has to promise to do some­thing I need it to do. (Case in point: I still don’t own an i-anything. No iPhone, no iPad, not even–gasp!–an iPod.)

But the gad­gets in the gar­den that I really enjoy hav­ing are my two maximum-minimum ther­mome­ters. Imag­ine a device that tells you how hot and cold it got any­where in your gar­den over what­ever time period you like.

I have one in the green­house, where it tells me how hot the tem­per­a­ture got inside while I was at work. This is infor­ma­tion you won’t get from a weather report.

You could also use a pair of them to iden­tify micro­cli­mates around your yard and to answer spe­cific ques­tions like, Is the lower part of a slope more liable to get frost than the top? Or, how much tem­per­a­ture dif­fer­ence is there between the beds on the north and south sides of the house?

The ver­sions I have are totally ana­log devices where the mer­cury in the ther­mome­ter pushes up a lit­tle piece of metal inside the glass col­umn on both the warm and cold sides. To reset the thing you pull the metal pieces down from the out­side using a mag­net. Prim­i­tive, but effec­tive, as befit­ting a device that was invented in 1782 by James Six.

Yes, I did say that the ther­mome­ters are filled with mer­cury. Mine are over twenty years old. Reg­u­la­tions in many places today would stip­u­late that the fluid be some­thing more envi­ron­men­tally respon­si­ble, but the devices would func­tion the same way. You can also get these in dig­i­tal ver­sions, as well as those that have a dial instead of fluid-filled glass cham­bers. (I gen­er­ally find dial ther­mome­ters to be less accu­rate in gen­eral, however.)

There you have it. My favorite bor­ing lit­tle device. You can’t use them to surf the web or make gelato. But then what use does a plant have with Hulu or Facebook?

May 16 2010 | Categories: gardening | Tags: maximum-minimum thermometers • six's thermometer • temperature • thermometers | 7 Comments »

21,015 tiny little plants

I now have a new appre­ci­a­tion for the work of field botanists.

A cou­ple week­ends ago I had a chance to work on a rare plant sur­vey on the slopes of Vie­jas Moun­tain in east­ern San Diego County. I enjoy see­ing plants out in their wild habi­tat and the descrip­tion of the task sounded down­right idyl­lic: You go out to trail­less edges of the county, enjoy the scenery, and all the while look for rare plants.

San Diego thorn­mint (Photo: Janet Franklin)

The plant of spe­cial inter­est for this trip was San Diego thorn­mint, Acan­thomintha ili­ci­fo­lia, a plant found only in a smat­ter­ing of places in Cal­i­for­nia and bits of north­ern Baja. And the plant is even more selec­tive than that. It only grows on clay lenses–gently or mod­er­ately sloped areas of clay soil that has washed down from nearby areas. The sur­round­ing chap­ar­ral plants for the most part don’t care for these soil con­di­tions, so they cre­ate open­ings for this rare annual to colonize.

The project was to get a pop­u­la­tion count of thorn­mint from areas where they’d been sighted more than a decade ear­lier. Com­par­ing today’s num­bers against the ear­lier cen­suses would give you an idea of how well the plant is doing in the wilds.

Me, look­ing for thorn­mint, enjoy­ing the scenery around my feet. (Photo: Janet Franklin)

Our assign­ment was pop­u­la­tion 51, a clus­ter of adja­cent stands on the west­ern edge of Cleve­land National For­est, just out­side the city of Alpine. (Look­ing back on the sub­ur­ban sprawl I thought it looked a lit­tle like the pho­tos of Area 51 taken from Free­dom Ridge.)

Most of the spread had burned in one of the recent major wild­fires to go through the county and was in the state of grow­ing back—pretty suc­cess­fully, since travel got to be tough some of the day. When­ever the chap­ar­ral parted and the soil con­di­tions looked right, you scoured the ground for thorn­mints, which at this point in their life­cy­cle were mostly 1–4 inches tall, with most of them not yet in bloom.

No thorn­imint at this one sub-location, but lots of Palmer’s grap­pling hook, Harpagonella palmeri, one of the species that’s com­monly asso­ci­ated with thorn­mint. (Photo: Janet Franklin)

One of the three sub-populations we looked at was com­pletely gone. Nada. Zero plants. Maybe the fire wiped them out. Maybe we weren’t obser­vant enough, though we fine-tooth combed the hillside.

Success–thornmints! (Photo: Janet Franklin)

But the other two pop­u­la­tions gave us an exer­cise in count­ing plants. Lots and lots of plants. Tiny, tiny lit­tle plants.

By the mid­dle of the after­noon we had a count, 21,015 plants. It was six hours of open slopes with no shade spent in deep con­cen­tra­tion look­ing for the lit­tle plants, count­ing all the while.

I’ll con­fess: We did a lit­tle esti­mat­ing when the pop­u­la­tions got really large, and so we didn’t actu­ally phys­i­cally count all 21,015 plants. But 21,015 seemed like a solid estimate.

While it’s good to know that there are more than a hand­ful of plants left in the wild, it’s also a lit­tle unnerv­ing to see that they have such a lim­ited dis­tri­b­u­tion, and more dis­turb­ing that one of the three pop­u­la­tions from ear­lier seemed to have vanished.

Locally com­mon, but in the grand scheme of things, awfully rare, espe­cially with human encroach­ment from Area 51 next door.

Hes­per­oyucca whip­pleii, one of the stun­ning gar­den sub­jects shown here in the wilds, with thron­mint nearby. (Photo: Janet Franklin)

San Diego thorn­mint prob­a­bly won’t turn into one of the great gar­den plants for Cal­i­for­nia native gar­dens. But along the way we saw plenty of species closely related to those used in home native land­scapes: lau­rel sumac (Mal­osma lau­rina), cean­othus (tomen­to­sus and folio­sus), sting­ing lupine (Lupi­nus hir­sutisim­mus), man­zanita (one of the Arc­tostaphy­los glan­du­losa subspecies)…

Blue-eyed grass (Sisy­rinchium bel­lum) grow­ing on a clay lens. (Photo: Janet Franklin)

…and one of my favorite flow­er­ing natives: blue-eyed grass, grow­ing and bloom­ing among the tiny lit­tle thornmints.

Usu­ally my cam­era is the first thing I pack for one of these out­ings, but some­how I for­got it at home this time. My thanks to team-leader Janet for the use of her images from the trip!

May 14 2010 | Categories: landscape • places • plant profiles | Tags: Acanthomintha ilicifolia • native plants • plant surveys • rare plants • San Diego thornmint | 4 Comments »

my new composter

I often get the impres­sion that to get your ticket punched as a real, seri­ous gar­dener you have to take up com­post­ing. Still, I gave up on pol­ish­ing my halo a dozen years ago. The old-fashioned com­post pile I had took way more main­te­nance than I was inter­ested in…all the has­sles, espe­cially keep­ing the beast stirred and watered.

Since those days tum­bling com­posters have really come into their own as an alter­na­tive to the piles that just sit there like Uncle Ervin on his Barca-Lounger in front of the TV. The promise of a com­post device that sim­pli­fies keep­ing the mix stirred and aer­ated sounded almost too god to be true, but I’ve been tempted to give them a twirl.

The oppor­tu­nity came up as I headed to the back aisles at Costco to pick up some cheese and bread. On my way to the back of the store a big tum­bling com­poster tried to reel me in with its dark trac­tor beam.

The thing with this store is that you usu­ally have your choice of the one item they offer for sale, which in this case was the 80-gallon Life­time model 60021 tum­bling com­poster. (Costco offers sev­eral other mod­els online.) Even with a price tag less than $100 I resisted at first. But I went home and did a lit­tle research online. Judg­ing by the cus­tomer reviews peo­ple gen­er­ally seemed to like this model, with the main com­plaint being being about an inter­nal aer­at­ing tube that kept get­ting bent because it was made out of PVC. It seemed like a valid but rel­a­tively minor con­cern, so I decided to give the com­poster a try.

The com­poster in its box, as it looks when you bring it home.

When you buy this model, you’re really buy­ing a com­poster kit, not an assem­bled com­poster. I doc­u­mented the time I started, before I opened the box, before I assem­bled the nec­es­sary tools (which ended up requiring–among other things–an elec­tric drill and socket wrenches), before I read the instruc­tions that rec­om­mended that it would take two adults to assem­ble it. John is still hob­bling around on crutches right now, so I decided to go it alone.

The time when I com­pleted assem­bling it.

The time right before I began to open the box.

From the doc­u­mented end time you can see that it took me about an hour and fifty min­utes to put it together. That includes time spent tak­ing a few pieces apart after I’d installed them incor­rectly, as well as a few min­utes when John came out to super­vise my work and ogle the new toy. I’m gen­er­ally pretty handy with mechan­i­cal things, if a lit­tle impa­tient to read all the way through instruc­tions. I also did okay heft­ing the big 65 pound box the kit came in, and had the added ben­e­fit of a power screw­driver. Adjust your expec­ta­tions for assem­bly time and effort accordingly.

The inau­gural kitchen scraps.

The assem­bled composter.

Things fit together eas­ily and made for a sturdy, double-walled, insu­lat­ing com­post­ing cham­ber. Appar­ently the com­pany read the cus­tomer com­plaints about the PVC aer­at­ing tube, because by the time they made my ver­sion of the model, the flimsy inter­nal part had been replaced with a rigid piece of per­fo­rated metal pipe.

I couldn’t resist doing a lit­tle trim­ming of plants around the gar­den. On even its first day, the com­poster is well on its way to being filled. The cut­tings and kitchen scraps will cook down over time, mak­ing room for more waste.

The com­poster now lives out­side the kitchen, along­side the trash­cans and recy­cle bar­rels. It shouldn’t be hard to keep the com­post bar­rel fed and tum­bled. Once the bar­rel is filled it’ll need a few weeks for the com­post to cook to per­fec­tion, a time when you shouldn’t be feed­ing it more clip­pings and scraps. To do things right, hav­ing a sec­ond bar­rel at the ready for those times would be the way to go. Within a few weeks I should have a bet­ter idea whether this model of com­poster lives up to my expec­ta­tions and war­rants my buy­ing a sec­ond one.

So, will I become a real, seri­ous, com­post­ing gar­dener? I’d say it’s off to a good start.

May 05 2010 | Categories: gardening | Tags: compost bins • composting • recycling • rotary composters | 13 Comments »

well endowed landscaping

Here’s a lit­tle week­end quiz: Any guesses as to where I took this picture?

Does this sec­ond photo help?

Clue #1: It’s in Los Angeles.

Clue #2: It’s a uni­ver­sity campus.

Clue #3: The school col­ors are echoed in the flower col­ors of the landscaping.

If you’re not into uni­ver­si­ties and their col­ors the answer is USC, the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, where the plant­ing color scheme fea­tures the cam­pus col­ors of car­di­nal and gold. If you were to ask me for my opin­ion I’d offer that they’re prob­a­bly fine col­ors for foot­ball uni­forms but a lit­tle stri­dent for most gar­den sit­u­a­tions if they were the only col­ors you used. But the entire cam­pus was vibrat­ing with new plant­i­ngs of red salvias and yellow-orange marigolds, with a few left­over win­ter plant­i­ngs of pan­sies in sim­i­lar colors.

I men­tioned the plant­i­ngs to one of the cam­pus reg­u­lars I was up there to meet with. Appar­ently USC has an endow­ment (by what was prob­a­bly an enthu­si­as­tic alum­nus) to sup­ply bed­ding plants in the school colors.

From the themed sea­sonal color, to the lawns, to the hedges, to the fanat­i­cally clipped creep­ing fig around the Romanesque win­dows, to the trees planted in reg­i­mented rows, it’s so not my phi­los­o­phy of gardening.

Trees (and cam­pus build­ings) pro­vid­ing cool­ing shade

A flow­er­ing canopy, dozens of feet overhead

But for an urban cam­pus set where the warm sea­son is just that, the tall trees pro­vide wel­come shade and the many benches set in the plant­i­ngs make for oppor­tu­ni­ties to sit and hold con­ver­sa­tions. And the style of the land­scape seems to come straight out of a tra­di­tion of how a cam­pus should look: neat, orderly, with a sense that many things of worth come from Europe.

My par­ents met on this cam­pus way back when. Look­ing at the com­fort­able but for­mal plant­i­ngs, I think I that can under­stand them a lit­tle bet­ter, the atti­tudes where they came from. Lift­ing my gaze to take in the tall sycamores, the mature mag­no­lias, I know that many of these trees were here when my par­ents attended the campus.

But as far as the team-themed bed­ding plants–Were they here then? I’m not so sure. I’ll have to ask my father about them, though it’s not the sort of detail he’s likely to remember.

A few plant­i­ngs flaunted col­ors other than the offi­cial school ones. The trees and lawns fea­tured green, of course, and here and there you’d find a non-conforming clus­ter of plants. I end with a cou­ple final shots of those.

Another rene­gade plant­ing that didn’t get the car­di­nal and gold memo…

Acan­thus mol­lis, not a sign of car­di­nal or gold

May 02 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: color combinations • University of Southern California | 11 Comments »