Archive for June, 2010

more from the county fair

Let me share my favorite gar­den design from this year’s San Diego County Fair. If I tell you that I grew up on Sun­set Mag­a­zine and that I fre­quented the Sun­set demon­stra­tion gar­dens at the Los Ange­les County Arbore­tum in the 1970s, you can see why a gar­den like this pushes my but­tons. This space my North County’s Akana Design really embraces the Sun­set aes­thetic of com­bin­ing mod­ern design with liv­able out­door spaces. (Ignore the ugly black shade cloth back­ground that’s been draped over the plas­tic white lat­tice that the fair pro­vided for their displays.)

I’ve been known to grouse about out­door spaces where the gar­den has been sac­ri­ficed at the expense of adding yet another room to a McMan­sion, but the plants in this design seemed to be inte­grated into the results and not so much an after­thought. This space fea­tures a com­pact eat­ing space on gold-colored decom­posed gran­ite, with a whiter stone mulch used for most of the grow­ing areas. Two sim­ple wooden walls pro­vide some pro­tec­tion, at the same time they define the space and pro­vide a back­drop for plantings.

A sin­gle lounge chair sits off to one side at the end of a DG walk­way. A stone in front serves as an ottoman. When the chair is stored indoors for the win­ter, the ottoman stone could serve as an accent at the end of the lit­tle path. The seat is sur­rounded by fra­grant rose­mary and cleve­land sage, as well as plants that pro­vide visual inter­est and variety.

This detail shows some of the plants used to pro­vide tex­tural inter­est: loman­dra, phormium, aeo­nium, tea tree (I think), and–uh oh–Mexican feather grass. Well I had to find some­thing about the plant­i­ngs to cri­tique. Might I sug­gest using the native Aris­tida pur­purea instead? Sorry to quib­ble too much. Over­all I thought it was a really suc­cess­ful presentation.

Among the other dis­plays, Pond-Ology fea­tured a lit­tle yoga deck in the mid­dle of a trop­i­cal par­adise. It pushed my Sun­set but­tons a bit too.

I’m not into mak­ing a zoo of cap­tive angels in my back yard, but I thought this menagerie by Blue Pacific Land­scape Design was well done. I espe­cially like how the color of the blue pots echoes through the plant­i­ngs around them. The cas­cad­ing pink gera­ni­ums pro­vide nice con­trast. Pots full of blue flow­ers would have been way too matchy-matchy.

At this gar­den show, as at many oth­ers these days, one of the big themes is green walls. Anan­das­capes incor­po­rated this wall into a pretty mod­ern display.

Take four green walls and attach them side to side and you have a green obelisk. The Good Earth Plant Co. and Green­scape Build­ing pro­vided this 3D ver­sion of the flat green wall.

You could walk around it and look in detail at the var­i­ous suc­cu­lents that made the plant­ing possible.

Liv­ing in a near-desert I’m still not con­vinced that green walls make a whole pile of sense. Why not plant an easy-care vine instead? But you’ve got admit they’re spec­tac­u­lar, and “spec­tac­u­lar” works well at a noisy county fair with lots of distractions.

In my next and final post from the fair I’ll show you some of the things that inter­ested me most: Plants!

June 30 2010 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: • • • | 12 Comments »

at the county fair

Are gar­den­ers ter­ror­ists? You’d think so look­ing at the sign posted out­side the San Diego County Fair.

This gar­dener took advan­tage of the “Fur­lough Fri­day” deal for state employ­ees (free admis­sion!) and checked out the offer­ings of the fair for the first time in half a decade. I guess the ratio­nale of free admis­sion was to get more peo­ple in the gate to par­take of the rides and stunt food–you know, the bizarre offer­ings that often involve impal­ing some­thing on a stick, stick­ing it in bat­ter, and then deep-frying it. I searched all over for the worst of the worst stunt food but the best (worst?) I could find was a stand offer­ing “fried Twinkie lattes”–really noth­ing more weird than a vanilla latte–and this trailer sell­ing choco­late cov­ered bacon. Nei­ther dish really seemed to be deep fried, so I guess they’re get­ting with the health-conscious kick…

My main des­ti­na­tion was the out­door gar­den dis­plays, where the main point of each dis­play seemed to be either attract­ing new cus­tomers to the land­scape firms there or–in the case of the non-profit insti­tu­tions and gar­den clubs–education. The fair’s never been about land­scape design as a high art, but there’s always inter­est­ing stuff there.

If there was theme to the dis­plays this year, “edi­bles” seemed to be the word, keep­ing up the health-conscious theme of the not-deep-fried chocolate-covered bacon. This dis­play by the San Diego Botanic Gar­den in Coop­er­a­tion with the San Diego Water Author­ity won the prize for the best edi­ble land­scape. The dis­play also won an award for the exhibit that arranged plants in a way that demon­strated “good taste.”

It fea­tured food crops and orna­men­tals of all sorts as long as they fit into the purple-pink-green-silver palette, and demon­strated that a gar­den with veg­gies could be as pulled together as any other gar­den. In its com­bi­na­tion of cool-weather crops (such as pur­ple cab­bage) with warm-weather ones (like basil and squash) it was also a reminder that this is a gar­den show than a real-world garden.

San Diego Botanic Gar­den dis­play: A fence row planted with orna­men­tals, kale and squash.


Here are a few more pho­tos of dis­plays that played with the edi­bles theme:

Arti­chokes and olive trees in a space designed by Lane McClel­land and Lau­rie Roberts.

Orna­men­tals and veg­gies hang­ing in burlap, also in the McClelland-Roberts garden.


Grow what you love–the entrance to the same McClelland-Roberts gar­den, fea­tur­ing corn, chard, chives and other edibles.

Wendy Slijk’s dis­play showed off this hang­ing pot with squash.


Home Depot’s entry fea­tured a lit­tle grape vineyard.

A scare­crow guard­ing veg­gie beds in a dis­play by the San Diego Hor­ti­cul­tural Society.

In addi­tion to edi­bles, drink­ables got to play a role, as in this dis­play of Agave tequi­lana by the Palo­mar Cac­tus and Suc­cu­lent Soci­ety. This might not be one of the great land­scape agaves, but how can you fault a plant that is the source of tequila?


Erigeron glau­cus cv. Boun­ti­ful at the Tree of Life Nurs­ery display.

I kept my eye out for uses of native plants, but there were almost none. Part of that is prob­a­bly because the major­ity of the charis­matic flow­er­ing natives do their thing at the end of win­ter or dur­ing spring. The one main excep­tion was a small dis­play by native plant spe­cial­ist Tree of Life Nursery.

Brit­tons chalk dud­leya and red mon­keyflower in the Tree of Life Nursery’s display.


Inside, in the adja­cent exhibits build­ing, there was a flower show going on, with roses and dahlias and glad­i­o­lus and lots of cub­bies with flower arrange­ments. And that’s where I saw a few more natives, where they had a cat­e­gory for cut native flow­ers. So there was more mon­keyflower here, along with one of the bush pop­pies (Den­drome­con) and some matil­ija poppies.

Really, who doesn’t love these matil­i­jas? The last photo is of one of them. Next post I’ll share some other sightings.


June 28 2010 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: • • | 8 Comments »

good book, cool trivia

I love a good book that sur­prises you.

When I was talk­ing to a botanist a cou­ple months ago and she rec­om­mended Oscar F. Clarke’s Flora of the Santa Ana River and Envi­rons : with ref­er­ences to world botany, I was expect­ing the book to be a nicely assem­bled writeup of a water­shed a cou­ple of hours to the north. book coverAs such it’d be a good writeup of species I’m using to see­ing in my area seen through the fil­ter of some­one work­ing in the Los Angeles/Orange/Riverside County region of South­ern California.

The vol­ume, which the back cover says “rep­re­sents a cul­mi­na­tion of a life­time of nat­ural his­tory study,” lives up to my expec­ta­tion of being a use­ful guide for study­ing the plants of the area. But in addi­tion it ends up being full of all sorts of inter­est­ing lit­tle details that breath life into what might oth­er­wise be an inert text­book. It’s a rich book, not a dense one.

(Edit, July 13, 2010: In addi­tion to Clarke, the book has three co-authors who should be named: Danielle Svehla, Greg Ballmer and Arlee Mon­talvo. Thanks to all of you for such a great book.)

For exam­ple, take some of the details in the writeup on our state flower, the Cal­i­for­nia poppy. Last year I decided that I’d replace my plant­i­ngs of the typ­i­cal garden-orange strain with the lower-growing yel­low strain that you find locally. The first season’s plants ger­mi­nated and grew well. This year I was fully expect­ing the plants to return in pro­fu­sion, com­ing up both from last season’s roots and the seeds that the plants dropped. Instead, most of this year’s crop were the big orange gar­den strain. What went wrong?

Clarke’s descrip­tion of the species con­cludes with a sen­tence that helped answer my ques­tion: “Local native pop­u­la­tions pro­duce seeds that remain dor­mant until exposed to winter/spring con­di­tions in com­bi­na­tion with smoke or other unknown fac­tors, while pop­u­la­tions from cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia and com­mer­cial cul­ti­vars pro­duce non-dormant seeds.” While it didn’t explain what I need to do to get these plants to nat­u­ral­ize, it at least explained that I was bat­tling against some unknown bio­log­i­cal forces. I felt bet­ter in my failure.

The illus­tra­tions in many man­u­als can be pretty poor, but that’s not the case here. All through­out the book brims with illus­tra­tions. Here are some of them from the poppy descrip­tion. You’ll find close­ups of diag­nos­tic plant fea­tures, usu­ally with the graphic of a penny for size comparison’s sake. And often you’ll see shots of entire plants. Each writeup also has a lit­tle rec­tan­gle with a graphic of a human stand­ing next to the plant being described. The idea is that the box will tell you a lot of details at a glances–stuff like size, growth habit, struc­ture of the flower, num­ber of petals, the posi­tion of the ovary, and whether the plant is an annual or lives longer. After hav­ing stared at the graph­ics for a cou­ple weeks I still find it a tad con­fus­ing, but if you’re good at decod­ing images instead of read­ing about the details, this might be just the thing for you. Another minor grouse is that type­face is almost too small for aging eyes like mine. Of course a big­ger type would prob­a­bly result in a larger, less field-friendly man­ual. But those are minor quibbles.

Back to some plant trivia: About Cal­i­for­nia sea laven­der, Limo­nium cal­i­for­nicum, shown here get­ting ready to bloom, Clarke observes that “The only native Cal­i­for­nia mem­ber of this genus, [it] occurs pri­mar­ily along the imme­di­ate coast. It is salt-tolerant (halo­phytic) and excretes salt on its broad, leath­ery leaves.” This detail is impor­tant to me as I decide which plants to tar­get with the left­over water I’ve gath­ered from show­er­ing. Instead of toss­ing the soapy, shampoo-spiked water, I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure which plants wouldn’t mind stand­ing in the second-hand liq­uids. This species seemed happy enough with the water last year, and the writeup gives me extra con­fi­dence that I’m prob­a­bly not doing it any harm.

Life in the Santa Ana River Basin these days is as much about inva­sive plants as it is native species. Accord­ingly the book has a num­ber of exotics mixed into the 900 species it describes.

Telling grasses apart can be one of the more dif­fi­cult things to do in the field. The detailed descrip­tions and pho­tos help ease that chore. Here are the illus­tra­tions for panic veld­grass, Ehrharta erecta, a really both­er­some weed in many gar­dens, mine included.

The weed descrip­tions, like those for the other plants, have lit­tle trivia bits woven through them. About panic veldt­grass you learn that “Live­stock find it highly palat­able, espe­cially chick­ens and rab­bits.” That sen­tence might not mean a lot to you, but it explained some­thing I’ve been noticing.

Scooter, the cat, always shows a lot of inter­est when I’m in the gar­den, and is most help­ful when I’m in the mid­dle of pulling up weeds. And of all the weeds, this is the one that the cat really goes crazy over, often nudg­ing, claw­ing, fight­ing you to get to munch on a few blades of the stuff.

Ah, yes, it all sud­denly makes sense now: “live­stock,” “highly palat­able.” Eureka! So to Clarke’s list of chick­ens and rab­bits we can add another species: cats.

So yes, this is a book with lots of infor­ma­tion about plants of the Santa Ana region. But it ended up telling me as much about what’s going on in my gar­den. Very cool.

June 22 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • places | Tags: • • • • • • • • • • | 5 Comments »

a new weed

This past win­ter I was notic­ing a weed pop­ping up all around the yard that I hadn’t noticed before. I was men­tion­ing it to John, and added, “I’m not sure what it is, though think it could be some sort of euphorbia.”

Then in the gen­tly tact­ful way spouses have of cor­rect­ing you and point­ing out your blind spots he qui­etly cleared his throat and pointed to one of the four young pot­ted plants we have around the gar­den of Euphor­bia lam­bii, one of my dry garden-adapted plants from the Canary Islands. “Maybe it’s that?”

Uh, like duh. What else would it be?

Last year was the first that these plants bloomed, and this spring they bloomed with a vengeance. Dur­ing sunny weather over the last few weeks I’ve heard lit­tle pop­ping noises from the direc­tion of the plants, and have come to the con­clu­sion that the sounds were that of seed pods explod­ing and jet­ti­son­ing the dust-like seed every­where.

I may come to regret the day I intro­duced these to the gar­den, which accord­ing to my records is March 9, 2008.

Speak­ing of weedy plants, here’s another sur­prise seedling from the gar­den, a lit­tle baby red foun­tain grass, one of three seedlings I noticed this year. In recent years the related green foun­tain grass, Pen­nise­tum setaceum has become a nox­ious (though stun­ningly beau­ti­ful) weed and has landed high on vir­tu­ally every thou-shalt-not-plant list issued for Cal­i­for­nia. But many peo­ple gave a by to this related red plant. It was often pushed as being ster­ile and inca­pable of repro­duc­ing by seed, a piece of mis­in­for­ma­tion even I relayed in this blog. (I’ve cor­rected that ear­lier oops in case any­one reads that ear­lier post.) As you can see here it can repro­duce by seed, though this form doesn’t spawn the same way reg­u­lar foun­tain grass does. Nor is it imme­di­ately the same mon­ster pest that feather grass (Nas­sella tenuis­sima) can be.

Pok­ing around the web I found an updated plant descrip­tion at San Mar­cos Grow­ers that includes some inter­est­ing back­ground on this plant:

Recent work in prepa­ra­tion for the grass sec­tions of the Flora of North Amer­ica, which will include nat­u­ral­ized and cul­ti­vated grasses, indi­cates that the name cho­sen for this plant will be Pen­nise­tum advena or per­haps P. x advena. Dr. Joseph K. Wipff, pre­vi­ously with Texas A&M and now a tur­f­grass breeder, wrote the sec­tion on Pen­nise­tum and has indi­cated that Red Foun­tain Grass is most likely a cross between P. setaceum and P. macrostachys (AKA ‘Bur­gundy Giant’). As a hybrid the name would most appro­pri­ately be Pen­nise­tum x advena ‘Rubrum’. The latin word advena means “newly arrived” or “stranger.”

So is it safe to plant this form of foun­tain grass? Here’s my think­ing: Hybrids between species are often ster­ile. (Think of mules, the off­spring of a horse and a don­key.) But every now and then some­thing hap­pens that allows the hybrid to repro­duce. Some­times the seedlings will be just as nearly ster­ile as the imme­di­ate par­ent, but other times a muta­tion could ren­der the seedling entirely fer­tile. In that lat­ter sce­nario the nearly-sterile foun­tain grass could turn into some­thing with the ugly inva­sive poten­tial of its Pen­nise­tum setaceum ancestor.

In other words, today I would be cau­tious and not plant it. Unfor­tu­nately, almost twenty years ago, we designed the front yard around a big mound of the stuff. The plants look stun­ning and move gra­ciously in response to the breezes. Their size is per­fect for the spot, and their red color is unmatched among other grasses. Every now and then I look at other options, like those rec­om­mended in the Don’t Plant a Pest brochure put out by the Cal­i­for­nia Inva­sive Plant Coun­cil. But these lists often fall short in the alter­na­tives they offer and end up read­ing like, “Cheese­cake is bad for you. Would you like to eat this deli­cious raw rutabaga instead?” So…I’m still look­ing for the per­fect replace­ment plant–hopefully some sort of native, but in the mean­time I’m pulling the occa­sional seedlings.

June 20 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • | 10 Comments »

bog plants, three ways

Arleen of Camissiona’s Cor­ner asked about how I made the lit­tle bogs where I’ve got var­i­ous swamp and other moisture-loving plants. Here’s a quick run­down of the three dif­fer­ent meth­ods I use to keep these plants happy.

The most straight­for­ward is the clas­sic water-tray method. You basi­cally take your pot­ted plants and stand them in a tray of water. It keeps the pot moist-to-wet as long as you have water in the tray. I like to let the tray dry out for a day or two so mos­qui­toes don’t start breed­ing in the water.

My method num­ber two is to grow plants with­out pots in undrained tubs. Here I’ve buried the tubs in dirt at the level of the tub to dis­tract from the ugly con­tainer. Since I’m pri­mar­ily grow­ing sar­race­nia, Amer­i­can pitcher plants which detest rich soil, the mix I’ve used here is a low-nutrition com­bi­na­tion of one part clean sand to one part peatmoss.

Here you see the plants from the side. The ugly tub prac­ti­cally disappears.

This tech­nique has the dis­ad­van­tage in that the bot­tom of the tub can develop anaer­o­bic con­di­tions as the water sits. I’ve heard of some grow­ers installing water­ing tubes that deliver new water to the bot­tom of the planter. This lets fresh, oxy­genated water occupy the place of the old, stale stuff. Other grow­ers don’t bother with it. This is my first year with this sys­tem, so I can’t com­ment on how well it does.

The third method I use is sim­i­lar to the last in that it uses a basi­cally imper­vi­ous con­tainer this time with some drainage. In this case, I con­verted a shal­low con­crete fish­pond that was the con­stant tar­get of neigh­bor­hood crit­ters. I drilled sev­eral drainage holes in the bot­tom and attached lit­tle plas­tic “snorkels,” short lengths of tub­ing that fit into the drainage open­ings and extend up to near the top of the soil line. In the­ory this keeps the bog from turn­ing into a sub­merged swamp in the wettest weather, though so far we’ve never received that much rain at once in the three sea­sons I’ve had this bog. The fit around the lit­tle snorkels isn’t per­fect, so over time all water will leak out the bot­tom any­way, keep­ing this setup from going anaer­o­bic like the method above.

I’d guess that you could accom­plish the same result by drilling a few tiny holes in the bot­tom of the tubs like I’ve used in the sec­ond setup. Or you could use a com­meri­cially avail­able plas­tic pond insert. I didn’t do that in my sec­ond method because that was yet another failed pond. In this case plant roots invaded the pond and caused it to leak. I didn’t want to encour­age the roots again by sup­ply­ing them with more water.

I’ve never tried grow­ing ver­nal pool plants in these bog setups, but I think method one and three might be good ways to make it hap­pen. Unlike these bogs you’d want to let the ver­nal pools go dry dur­ing the sum­mer and fall. Choice of soil mix would be another dif­fer­ence to con­sider. Ver­nal pools around here form in the thick clay that caps our mesas around town, so the plants would prob­a­bly want more nutri­tion that clas­sic bog plants would pre­fer. Water­ing with some­thing other than Southern-California water out of the tap would prob­a­bly be a good idea too unless you’d want the pools to turn into alkali swamps. If you have expe­ri­ence with con­struct­ing a syn­thetic ver­nal pool, I’d love to hear from you to see if my guesses are close to the mark!

June 14 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | | 9 Comments »

getting real

Echium wildpretii growing wild in Tenerife

Grow this plant and your gar­den will look exactly like this! (Yah, right… )

[ Right: Image of Echium wild­pretii by Mat­a­parda. This file is licensed under the Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. ]

I’ve got to be real­is­tic, I keep telling myself. The plant may be cool, but the whole effect prob­a­bly won’t be much like how the plants grow in the wild or how they’re shown on some dra­mat­i­cally illus­trated gar­den website.

It’s like buy­ing clothes out of a cat­a­log that are being mod­eled some­one impec­ca­bly styled and impos­si­bly toned. But because of the reces­sion most of us have had to let our per­sonal styl­ists go, and when you go to try on the clothes the look ends up being a sad disappointment.

For my last post, on my bloom­ing echi­ums, I was hav­ing a hard time com­ing up with an attrac­tive photo that showed the entire plant. The plants are grow­ing in a tight cor­ner of the gar­den that has a wood­pile, a rusty shed and a big dis­or­derly stack of stuff wait­ing to be dis­sem­bled and taken to the metal recy­cling facil­ity at the landfill–not stuff I wanted to pub­lish out there for all the world to see.

From one van­tage point the stu­dio walls act as a fairly neu­tral back­drop, but to take this photo my back was against the neighbor’s wall and I couldn’t get the dis­tance I wanted.

The angles that showed off the plants bet­ter also showed off all the junk. Gag.

Okay, back to get­ting real. My gar­den will never look like the high vol­canic slopes of Tener­ife. It’ll never look like the east­ern slope of the Sierra Nevada, or approx­i­mate the wide vis­tas of our desert two hours to the east of here. Some of my plants may come from those places, but cul­ti­vat­ing them won’t hide the fact that I live in a sub­urb with neigh­bors all around.

I guess I look at the gar­den as a scrap­book or photo album. A plant might have asso­ci­a­tions with some­where I’ve been or would like to visit. Maybe I grew up with another of the plants. Yet another may be intrigu­ingly cool even though I have no idea where it comes from. In arrang­ing the plants, in mak­ing the gar­den, I can come up with some­thing where my mem­o­ries can mix with the shapes, col­ors and tex­tures of the plants and pro­duce some­thing I like and hope­fully will look okay to others.

Bloom­ing now in one of my lit­tle bog gar­dens is a stream orchid, Epi­pactis gigan­tea, a plant with a huge pile of asso­ci­a­tions for me. (You can sort of make it out to the left in this photo.) Those mem­o­ries go some­thing like this: I was tak­ing some of the rough Jeep roads in Saline Val­ley, a gen­er­ally unvis­ited expanse of white sand imme­di­ately north­west of Death Val­ley. I’d camped one night on the west side of the val­ley at the mouth of a lit­tle canyon lead­ing up into the Inyo Moun­tains. All night long I kept hear­ing angered chal­lenges from the wild bur­ros that called this area their home. The next morn­ing I headed towards the canyon, keep­ing a wary eye on the bur­ros that were never far away. Soon I started to hear water. I guess I’d unknow­ingly plopped myself on top of a trail lead­ing to a water source for the burros–That would explain the angry noises all night.

Soon the canyon folded in around me, and I went from the glar­ing white hot­ness of the exposed val­ley floor to a cool, shel­tered out­door room. Water driz­zled down a gran­ite face in front of me. Ferns grew every­where. And scar­let columbines. And dozens of this plant, the stream orchid, in peak bloom. Imag­ine that. Orchids in the desert. It was one of those peak out­door moments that I’ll remem­ber forever.

Well, the lit­tle bog gar­den looks and feels noth­ing like that May morn­ing in Saline Val­ley, but see­ing this lit­tle orchid will remind me of that encounter every time I see it.

June 06 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography | Tags: • • • • • | 13 Comments »

echiums!

This must be the year for my prima donna plants to finally decide to bloom. First it was the first bloom for me of the Agave atten­u­ata over the win­ter. Now it’s this echium’s turn.

This is Echium wild­pretii, which has gone from five feet tall two weeks ago to over seven and a half feet.

It’s also known by var­i­ous com­mon names, includ­ing tower of jew­els, red bugloss, and–in Span­ish–taji­naste. “Taji­naste”: what a gor­geous sound­ing name, way more musi­cal than bugloss or “tower of jew­els,” which sounds a lit­tle square to me, like a plant name from a 1927 seed cat­a­log. Taji­naste is endemic to one Atlantic island, Tenir­ife, off the north­ern African coast.

This echium species is described as a bien­nial. Many plants described that way will put up leaves the first year and then bloom the sec­ond year from seed, after which the plants pro­duce huge amounts of seed and then die.

Although it’s been known to flower in the sec­ond year, this plant’s usual inter­pre­ta­tion of the term takes “bien­nual” lit­er­ally as “two years,” keep­ing you wait­ing that long from sow­ing to flow­er­ing. And there’s one plant in the front yard that looks like it’s going to be tak­ing an addi­tional year. Bien­nial? I think not.

Still, worth the wait, don’t you think?

The plant grows in spi­rals. Here you can see the spi­ral­ing new flowers.

The cen­tral rosette of leaves just a few months before send­ing up the cen­tral bloom stalk.

Dur­ing the two years you wait for it to bloom, you get to look at an attrac­tive mound of lance-shaped coarse gray leaves, usu­ally eigh­teen inches to twice that across dur­ing its sec­ond grow­ing sea­son. When nature with­holds flow­ers you can always look at and pho­to­graph leaves. So here’s some of my lit­tle crop of Echium wild­pretii plant photos.

Echium wild­pretii leaves in soft focus

Some of the leaves develop these neat hook ends.


As you can see it’s an attrac­tive plant even when out of bloom. It has low water require­ments and looks clean until its final, spec­tac­u­lar exit. After a few months it turns from a big dra­matic plant into a big dra­matic dead plant with ten­den­cies to top­ple even before its deep tap root decays.

Its rep­u­ta­tion is that it’ll send seeds every­where at that point, so this might not be the best plant if you live near the edge of a dry nat­ural area. A related echium, pride of Madeira, (E. can­di­cans) has estab­lished itself as a pest in some coastal areas of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. I’ll get to see how bad it really is after these plants finally give out later this sum­mer. I’ll worry about that later, but for now I’ll sit back and enjoy the plant.

June 03 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography • plant profiles | Tags: • • • | 9 Comments »