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 06:30 am | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography | Tags: • • • • •

13 Responses to “getting real”

  1. Pam/Digging on 06 Jun 2010 at 10:43 am #

    I think you are right that we grow cer­tain plants—even when we largely favor natives for var­i­ous good reasons—because they remind us of some­one or some­place we love. And that makes the gar­den a more inter­est­ing and more per­sonal place. Every­thing doesn’t have to fit in per­fectly for it to be “right.”

  2. Elephant's Eye on 06 Jun 2010 at 11:44 am #

    A gar­den is a liv­ing scrap­book filled with mem­o­ries — what a won­der­ful description.

  3. Arleen Webster/Camissonia's Corner on 06 Jun 2010 at 2:06 pm #

    You’re absolutely right, James. Who wouldn’t want to bring into their gar­den a reminder of some­thing they stum­bled across while tra­vers­ing the wilds that would recre­ate great mem­o­ries of a once-in-a-lifetime expe­ri­ence. Although not lit­er­ally, of course, unless you hap­pen to have a col­lect­ing per­mit. I’ve stub­bornly tried to grow sev­eral montane/alpine plants that I’ve encoun­tered in the East­ern Sier­ras in my own gar­den, but with zero suc­cess (Newberry’s Pen­ste­mon, Alpine Gen­tian, West­ern Monks­hood, and West­ern Blue Flag). I should have known bet­ter, but stub­bornly per­sisted cuz I just HAD to bring the East­ern Sier­ras down into the foothills of the Santa Ana Moun­tains. Need­less to say, Mother Nature wins every time.

    I’m very inter­ested in how you put together your bog gar­den (maybe you’ve posted about it before?). I’ve had this idea in my head for awhile now about mak­ing my own mini ver­sion of a ver­nal pool. Would prob­a­bly be sim­i­lar to bog gar­den con­struc­tion (with a liner to pre­vent drainage), and then let it fill up with the win­ter rains and dry out with the sum­mer heat. But per­haps it’s eas­ier said than done.

  4. Ruth on 07 Jun 2010 at 6:54 am #

    James, What a stun­ning plant! I like your bog gar­den; I have a small one. And my Venus Fly­trap is bloom­ing! :)

  5. Brad on 07 Jun 2010 at 5:44 pm #

    Great story. I just saw a stream orchid for the first time in a friend’s gar­den. Not the most impres­sive flower, but orchids always have some­thing bizarrely fas­ci­nat­ing about them. There are many plants I like because of my first impres­sion of them. Noth­ing wrong with that.

  6. lostlandscape on 07 Jun 2010 at 7:47 pm #

    Pam, as impressed as I am by stun­ningly designed gar­dens I really appre­ci­ate gar­dens that read a bit like an auto­bi­og­ra­phy and give you a sense that some­body inter­est­ing lives there.

    EE, thank you! I really love a space that lives in time, in mem­o­ries, as much as it does in the present.

    Arleen, I can’t blame you for try­ing to grow these beau­ties. Unless a curi­ous per­son like you tries, how will the rest of us know if one of them might actu­ally have a broad tol­er­ance for con­di­tions and actu­ally thrive in unex­pected places? My own cur­rent project is Cean­othus leu­co­der­mis, which really shouldn’t like it here near the coast, but I have two small plants still alive. Thanks for ask­ing about the bog gar­dens. I’ve been mean­ing to do a post on them, and I hope to soon.

    Ruth, con­grats on your fly­trap flow­ers. I’ve read that they’re not the eas­i­est car­ni­vores to grow and I’ve been too timid to try them yet. Obvi­ously you’re doing some­thing right!

    Brad, I was thrilled when I spot­ted my first wild orchid in my county a cou­ple decades ago. The flow­ers were about the size of grains of rice and about as spec­tac­u­lar, but I was thrilled with any orchid sight­ing at all here in the dry non-tropics.

  7. ricki - sprig to twig on 09 Jun 2010 at 5:22 pm #

    I am often sur­prised to see back­ground noise in my photos…somehow my brain and eye­balls do their own edit­ing and I see the scene as I wish it to be. Those flower stalks are so mag­nif­i­cent that your “junk” fades from sight, and I’ll bet I wouldn’t have noticed it had you not men­tioned it.

  8. Wendy on 12 Jun 2010 at 8:01 pm #

    Wow, it must be a pretty cool sight to see those things in the wild like that! Definit­ley looks like it’d have the poten­tial to be inva­sive though.

  9. Country Mouse on 13 Jun 2010 at 9:20 pm #

    That must have been a moment indeed.

  10. Christine on 16 Jun 2010 at 8:17 am #

    What a cap­ti­vat­ing story! We live for moments like that, don’t we? Took a day trip from 168 to basi­cally the mid­dle of the val­ley (when the low grow­ing cacti turned into Joshua trees we went a lit­tle far­ther and then turned back) and the magic of that expe­ri­ence still sticks.

  11. lostlandscape on 16 Jun 2010 at 8:09 pm #

    Ricki, some­times with my pho­tos I worry that I’m like the guy who listed a shiny teapot on eBay and took the photo while he was naked. By show­ing the gar­den and not pay­ing enough atten­tion to the back­grounds I worry that I’m expos­ing things I shouldn’t be!

    Wendy, I’d love to visit Tener­ife in early sum­mer to see these plants in their nat­ural habi­tat. I think I’d remem­ber that sight for decades.

    CM, it’s almost 20 years later and the mem­ory still feels fresh.

    Chris­tine, your story has that great ele­ment of sur­prise built in to the expe­ri­ence, going from one habi­tat into another so stun­ningly dif­fer­ent. Even if you know what’s ahead the tran­si­tions can still be rev­e­la­tions, don’t you think?

  12. sprig to twig » Blog Archive » eremurus on 28 Jun 2010 at 6:27 pm #

    […] over at Lost in the Land­scape, did a post recently bemoan­ing the dif­fi­culty of stag­ing shots of big, bold, dra­matic plants. Oh, man, can I […]

  13. joco on 28 Jun 2010 at 9:57 pm #

    Hiya James,
    How’s about a wash­ing line and a large sheet?
    You may even go so far as to paint a basic seascape on it. Take your stu­dio out-of-doors.

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