[ Lost in the Landscape ]

from seed, the labor-intensive version

While my last post was ded­i­cated to an easy seed prop­a­ga­tion project, this one details a cou­ple that were a lit­tle more labor-intensive. Still not hard, just a lit­tle bit more work to pull off.

Sar­race­nia Night Sky, a hybrid of S. leu­co­phylla and S. rubra gulfen­sis.

I’ve posted about my pitcher plants a few times before–Sar­race­nia species from the Amer­i­can South and some hybrids–and this is the first year I’ve tried sow­ing my own seed. All eight species (or nine, or ten or eleven, depend­ing on the expert you lis­ten to) are inter-fertile, and hybrids between all of them are pos­si­ble and have been made at one time or another. The hybrids, too, are gen­er­ally fer­tile, and you can go crazy with the genetic possibilities.

Sar­race­nia Dainas Delight, a com­plex hybrid of S. xWillis­sii and S. leu­co­phylla.

For cre­ative sorts you can arrange gar­den plants in inter­est­ing ways, but with this genus you could also design the very plants that you grow. If you live in the heart of pitcher plant coun­try, this might be a prob­lem. Bees could carry pollen from your hybrid plants to nearby native species and cre­ate some new unnat­ural hybrids. But the genus never crossed to this side of the Mis­sis­sippi River so Cal­i­for­ni­ans can play Doc­tor Franken­stein all they want with­out wor­ry­ing about mess­ing with the native pop­u­la­tion beyond our cas­tle walls.

Mature seed pod of Sar­race­nia flava.

So…I began in the spring mak­ing some hybrids, and the pods began to ripen in August, with the last pods just fin­ish­ing up ripen­ing right about now.

Closeup of the pre­vi­ous Sar­race­nia flava seed­pod. This one con­tained almost 500 seeds. You can see them prac­ti­cally jump­ing out of the pod.

The seeds require a cool, damp period in order to ger­mi­nate. I emp­tied the pods and put the seed in a plas­tic bag with a few strands of moist chopped sphag­num moss, one bag for each cross. And into the fridge they went for four weeks.

After this period of cold strat­i­fi­ca­tion I sowed the seed on the sur­face of chopped sphag­num moss which I’d lay­ered on the top of post filled 50/50 with a sand/peat mixture.

Next, I put the pots into a clear plas­tic box, poured in half an inch of stand­ing rain­wa­ter, closed the lid, and put them near a win­dow that faces south-southeast. If every­thing goes well–and it looks like it did–the seedlings begin to emerge in two to four weeks. Warmish weather is best, though you don’t have to be too fanat­i­cal. This batch expe­ri­enced the recent 90– to 100-degree days as well as many cooler days in the 60s. As long as the seed think it’s spring, they’ll begin to germinate.

That’s pretty much it. Some peo­ple place the seedlings under con­stant bright lights and 70-plus degree tem­per­a­tures for up to three years to speed them up to matu­rity. I’m hop­ing that bright day­light in a warmish inte­rior spot will give them enough of a boost that I don’t have to resort to the equiv­a­lent of putting the plants on steroids.

Year­ling sar­race­nia seedlings of the cross S. (Melanorhoda, Trif­fid Park x rosea lute­ola).

And here you see the rea­son why peo­ple might try to accel­er­ate growth. These are year-old seedlings from a cross by Brooks Gar­cia that I sowed a year ago, think­ing I’d prac­tice on some­one else’s cross before attempt­ing my own. I grew these in my unheated green­house which has fairly low, less-than-ideal light­ing con­di­tions. They did get some bot­tom heat dur­ing the cold­est months of the year.

Dros­o­phyl­lum lusi­tan­icum, a cou­ple months old.

The other car­niv­o­rous plants I’m prop­a­gat­ing this fall are of this Mediterranean-region species, Dros­o­phyl­lum lusi­tan­icum. While vir­tu­ally all car­niv­o­rous plants are crea­tures of swamps and bogs, this one is unique in that it comes from fairly dry areas with be lim­ited sum­mer rain­fall. Unlike the pre­ced­ing sar­race­nia bog plants, this species could actu­ally thrive in California’s wet-winter, dry-summer cli­mate with­out too much addi­tional life support.

Its com­mon name is “Dewy Pine” because the leaves have lit­tle ten­ta­cles tipped with sticky bug-catching fluid that looks like dew. But Barry Rice men­tions a much cooler moniker: Its Por­tuguese name trans­lates into “Slob­ber­ing Pine.”

This plant and the pre­ced­ing Sar­race­nia do catch insects. It’s a con­tra­dic­tion I’m try­ing to come to terms with. I plant a lot of Cal­i­for­nia native plants, which pro­vide nec­tar and other food for all sorts of winged and crawl­ing crea­tures. And then I have these lit­tle mon­sters that actively trap and con­sume them. Call me a man of con­tra­dic­tions. In the end I hope I’m doing lots more good than bad.

I only know of one seller who ships Dros­o­phyl­lum so you pretty much have to grow your own from seed if you want one. (I got my seed from the seed bank of the Inter­na­tional Car­niv­o­rous Plant Soci­ety.) The lit­tle black seeds have a hard coat that slows down ger­mi­na­tion. If you have some 220-grit sand­pa­per around that’s not a prob­lem. Just lightly–and I mean lightly–rub the seed between two sheets of the sand­pa­per until a patch of the black seed coat is worn away to reveal the white layer under­neath. Then pop them on top of the same mix­ture you’d use for ger­mi­nat­ing Sar­race­nia and keep the mix moist with good-quality water. Ger­mi­na­tion for me was about two to six weeks, no cold strat­i­fi­ca­tion necessary.

There you have it. With both of these kinds of plants it was a lit­tle more work than my last post grow­ing blad­derods from seed. But really, it isn’t that hard if you’re patient.

November 23 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: carnivorous plants • Drosophyllum lusitanicum • hybrids • sarracenia • seedlings • seeds • stratification | 14 Comments »

from seed, the easy version

Fall: Prime time to sow many seeds in California’s mediter­ranean cli­mate. Self-sown gen­er­a­tions of clarkia, pop­pies, baby blue eyes, buck­wheats and lupines are show­ing up all around the garden.

But this year has pulled me in lots of direc­tions and I haven’t put a lot of effort into sow­ing seeds. Also, part of this lack of moti­va­tion is an attempt to accept the real­ity that the gar­den is pretty full as it stands, and I try resist the delu­sion that a plant grow­ing from a tiny seed won’t take up as much space as a nearly mature one from the nurs­ery. Con­se­quently the only active seed-sowing I’ve taken part in has been lim­ited to two very dif­fer­ent kinds of plants: the California-native blad­der­pod and some car­niv­o­rous plants.

The blad­der­pod was mainly an exper­i­ment. The pods that give Iso­meris arborea its com­mon name are full of seeds the size of dried peas. How easy would they be from seed?

Very easy, as it turns out. I opened up a cou­ple pods and buried the seeds about a quar­ter to half inch in these pots just two weeks ago. Here they are, show­ing almost 100% ger­mi­na­tion and phe­nom­e­nal seedling vigor.

The more upright of my two young blad­der­pod plants

Now that I see they’re really easy from seed I can check out the other thing thing I was curi­ous about. I have two blad­der­pods in the gar­den. One is slow-growing but is assum­ing a nice upright pos­ture. The other is an exu­ber­ant floppy mess of green-gray leaves and yel­low flow­ers. Both forms have their use in the gar­den, but I was really hop­ing for more upright growth pat­terns when I put them in the garden.

My seedlings come from the more upright plant, so we’ll see whether they fol­low mom’s growth habits when placed in var­i­ous loca­tions around the yard. Is the dif­fer­ence in growth habit nature or nur­ture? Might I have a con­sis­tently strain of upright-growing blad­der­pods on my hands?

In the native plant com­mu­nity grow­ing spe­cific strains or cul­ti­vars is often looked down upon as reduc­ing nat­ural vari­a­tion and dumb­ing down the gene pool. But in the gar­den it’s use­ful to know what kind of plant you’re get­ting. A gar­dener might be dis­ap­pointed to end up with a low mound instead of an open upright shrub. The cus­tomer might never buy another native plant again and instead fill their yard with hydrangeas. They’d spend thou­sands of gal­lons water­ing their hydrangeas, there’d be no more water for peo­ple and plants, and civ­i­liza­tion as we know it would collapse.

Any­way, so far this has been really easy. Next post I’ll look at my more high energy-input efforts to grow some car­niv­o­rous plants from seed.

November 21 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bladderpod • cultivars • Isomeris arborea • native plants • seedlings • seeds • sowing seeds | 8 Comments »

my new dudleya patch

Can you call a patch of dirt of about eight square feet a gar­den? I’m start­ing to con­sider my recent plant­ing of suc­cu­lent a minia­ture lit­tle dud­leya patch. But a garden?

I’ve already shown off the new species I picked up at my recent native plant society’s sale. Recently I finally got around to giv­ing them their place in the larger gar­den. The loca­tion is more shade than I’d like–maybe four to six hours’ sun with after­noon shade. Sit­u­ated on the edge of a some­what irri­gated area devoted to fruit trees it might be more mois­ture than the plants really want. Most of what I’ve read about dud­leyas sug­gests using an inor­ganic mulch like peb­bles instead of the bark that you see here. Still, there’s an older clump of Dud­leya edulis that you can see in the near-back of these pho­tos. The clump has done well so far, so there’s hope for the new arrivals.

There are eight Dud­leya species in this area of the gar­den, but they get to share space with a cou­ple other other suc­cu­lents, a blackish-purple aeo­nium and the blue chalk fin­gers plant (Sele­cio man­dralis­cae) that is get­ting to be pretty pop­u­lar down here as a ground­cover. The finger-shaped leaves play nice with the fin­gers of sev­eral of the dud­leyas most eas­ily seen in the upper left pic­ture: edulis, vis­cida, and atten­u­ata.

In the cen­ter of the space is this ornate col­umn made out of cast con­crete. The pre­vi­ous own­ers of the house must have got­ten a good price on archi­tec­tural molds because there’s this lit­tle col­umn, and another, much larger, out­door fea­ture that looks like part of a Doric col­umn. Either the own­ers were of…um, eclectic?…taste or they were post­mod­ern two decades before Charles Moore designed the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans. The fea­tures are made of con­crete, how­ever, so it’s a lit­tle hard to do much more than try to live with them. Maybe one day I’ll bring the diamond-bladed saw to deal with this fea­ture. Still, liv­ing with other people’s choices can some­times push you towards a solu­tion you never would have come up with yourself.

So, what to do with this col­umn in the Dud­leya Gar­den? One obvi­ous thing would be to place on top of it a mir­rored reflect­ing ball, sort of a gar­den gaz­ing ball that was pop­u­lar­ized in Vic­to­rian times. I want to be a lit­tle more sub­ver­sive, though. How would a bowl­ing ball hold up to the ele­ments? I won­der. But for now I’m audi­tion­ing a cou­ple of rocks, an irreg­u­lar chuck of green stone that John picked up some­where, and a rounded river rock of the sort that you dig up in gar­dens in my neigh­bor­hood, rem­nants from the days when this land lay many hun­dred miles to the south in what’s now Mex­ico, days when the land was lower and drained the big river that formed the area’s Cop­per Canyons.

In a rock wall about fif­teen feet away I had space for a sin­gle plant. This will best rep­re­sent how many dud­leyas are found in nature: on steep ground, often grow­ing out of what looks like no soil at all. This is Dud­leya virens ssp. has­sei, a species found only on Santa Catalina Island. While some dud­leya species will form a sin­gle, per­fect rosette, this sin­gle growth should before too long develop into an ever-widening clump of starry foliage.

This lit­tle plant­ing in the rocks should soon look a lit­tle like some­thing you’d find in nature. But the other patch of dud­leyas with maybe a mir­rored disco ball? Well, that’s def­i­nitely going to be a human-created garden.

November 18 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: dudleya • Dudleya Garden • garden art • gazing balls | 11 Comments »

amusing landscape

Our week­end Net­flix view­ing was The Sav­ages, a 2007 film star­ring Laura Lin­ney and Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man who play a sis­ter and brother who are called in to care for their ail­ing father. The sib­lings leave New York City and Buf­falo in the fall to pick up their father in Sun City, Arizona.

I laughed at some of the estab­lish­ing shots of the land­scap­ing in Sun City. I had to share.

Long rows of these soc­cer ball trees are shown all over Sun City.

Houses with these ball shaped trees…

Big palm trees, but the plant­ing bud­get didn’t allow every­one to get one of their own…

This hedge really got me laugh­ing. What emerges from behind the hedges two sec­onds after this shot is even funnier…

As far as the film, I liked it. As expected, the sib­lings have issues between them, includ­ing some sib­ling rivalry that’s sim­mered for four decades. But all in all they’re adults try­ing hard to do the right thing for their father: noth­ing too Hol­ly­wood and cloy­ingly uplift­ing, but noth­ing that’s a real downer, either.

Of course such mature behav­ior would never fly in many fam­i­lies I’m famil­iar with. Over­all it left me with the feel­ing that’s best summed up by a bumper­sticker John has that hasn’t made it onto a vehi­cle yet: My Fam­ily is More Dys­func­tional than Yours.

November 15 2010 | Categories: art • gardening • landscape design | Tags: films • The Savages | 7 Comments »

a decade of neglect

When my par­ents retired they moved out of their house of almost twenty-five years in the Los Ange­les area. Not want­ing to pick favorites between their two chil­dren they decided on a mod­est house in a new devel­op­ment in Ocean­side, halfway between my sis­ter and me.

Like many new homes the land­scap­ing that came with the place was bare-bones: lawn, with a sin­gle podocar­pus sapling next to the front curb. The blank slate excited my mother, who was look­ing for­ward to putting her stamp on a new piece of prop­erty. I helped her plan the yard, con­struct the raised beds, move dirt and do some of the plant­ing. In the end, though, almost all the plant selec­tions were hers: ole­an­ders, pit­tospo­rum, gera­ni­ums, roses, aza­leas, aga­pan­thus, bird of par­adise, Japan­ese maple, cit­rus, stone fruit trees, plus selec­tions from the other plants that were being pro­moted twenty years ago.

When my mother died in the late 90s it left my father with a yard that wasn’t exactly what you’d call low-maintenance. And Ocean­side wasn’t a quick drive up for me so that I could help tend it. Sev­eral years later he moved out, leav­ing the gardener’s gar­den in the hands of renters, many of whom never watered or tended it.

One cor­ner of the back yard, with some sur­vivor plants and oth­ers that hadn’t fared so well.

Last sum­mer I had a chance to stop by the house for what will prob­a­bly be my last visit. Many plants were still alive, thanks in part to what had been a mod­er­ately moist win­ter and spring, with more thanks prob­a­bly going to the neigh­bors who watered their lawns and unknow­ingly kept the ground moist for thirsty roots from next door to sneak under the side fence.

A detail of the pre­ced­ing pho­tos, show­ing a bright green native Bac­cha­rus, coy­ote brush, that had col­o­nized the bed. It looks much hap­pier than most of the non-natives.

Laven­der, crape myr­tle and cit­rus are still hang­ing on. The lawn is long gone, however.

The side yard, with over­grown hon­ey­suckle and pittosporum.

A rose and weeds in the front yard, prob­a­bly sur­viv­ing from over­spray from the neighbor’s sprinklers.

I’d always thought Japan­ese maples were water hogs. This one didn’t seem to mind the abuse, though I sus­pect its roots wan­dered far next door look­ing for water. To the left behind it is aspara­gus fern, a plant that will sur­vive long after the next zom­bie apocalypse.

Shef­fle­ria, the fairly inde­struc­table house­plant, turns into a fairly inde­struc­table sub­trop­i­cal screen out­doors when planted next to the neighbor’s well watered lawn. The adja­cent aza­leas weren’t so resource­ful and were pretty crispy-brown.

My mother liked her gera­ni­ums. This sur­vivor was just about the only thing bloom­ing that day.

A steep and weedy slope drops to the back prop­erty line. A nar­row ripar­ian cor­ri­dor behind the house was thick with untrimmed wil­lows, doing a ter­rific job of screen­ing out con­dos and a Home Depot that have gone up beyond the fence.

The house is in the hands of new own­ers now. They’ll prob­a­bly look at the ragged plant­i­ngs and decide to start fresh, remov­ing most of the scrappy plants and mak­ing the yard their own.

If I hadn’t seen the yard in its cur­rent state I might have felt pro­tec­tive or ter­ri­to­r­ial. But this visit allowed me to let go. This was once a com­fort­able and beau­ti­fully main­tained gar­den that gave my par­ents joy. I have those mem­o­ries, but I real­ize that’s not what the gar­den is anymore.

I now feel at peace with what­ever the new own­ers will want to do with the yard. I wish them well.

November 06 2010 | Categories: gardening | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • what remains | 10 Comments »