Two weeks ago I joined the local CNPS chapter for a trip out to Anza Borrego Desert State Park with botanical wizard, Larry Hendrickson. Our destination was Plum Canyon, one of the rocky canyons that drains the eastern face of San Diego County’s Laguna Mountains. Spring wildflowers were close to their peak, and Larry knew ‘em all, including a sighting of an Arizona plant that hadn’t yet been described in California.
This first plant is the species that gives the canyon its name. Well, you’d guess it’s some sort of plum, but the common name of Prunus fremontii is actually “desert apricot.” Plum, apricot…close enough.
I went a little crazy with the camera, and below are some of that craziness. (I think I got all the IDs correct on these, but if I missed a few, let me know!)
Desert sun is your first impression, but plants were everywhere, blooming and not.
Subtly colored, powerfully scented: Desert lavender, Hyptis emoryi. This common plant is in the mint family–It helps explain its intense aroma whenever you touch the plant.
Near the desert lavender, Trixis californica.
Subtle dark blue-violet flowers of Indigo bush Parry Dalea, Psorothamnus Marina parryi. (Thanks to jimrob and Larry Hendrickson for the correction here!)
A very cool spurge, Chamaesyce polycarpa.
One of the things you notice is that the plants often grow in the company of other plants, separated by expanses of sharp shards of decomposed mountainside. It’s not a look that people generally cultivate in their gardens but it makes sense here. Larger plants help provide shelter to seedlings. I’d also guess that more seeds end up caught up in the low branches of shrubs than they do in the bare earth with rain beating down on them. The effect is a bit of an enthusiastic jumble of plants.
Desert lavender with brittlebush, Encelia farinosa var farinosa
Phacelia distans with Chuparosa, Justicia californica
Chuparosa, phacelia, with Fremont’s desert pincussion, Chaenactis fremontii
Even the cactuses get romantic. Here’s a young Engelmann’s Hedgehog Cactus, Echinocereus engelmannii with California barrel cactus, Ferocactus cylindraceus
This combination of big and tiny yellow flowers I decided was totally garden-worthy: Encelia farinosa with the desert subspecies of deerweed, Lotus scoparius var. brevialatus. Nearer the coast the coast sunflower and deerweed makes a similar combination.
Speaking of garden-worthy plant combinations, I thought this composition of pale and silver-leaved plants and stems was a delicate mix of contrasting scale and textures.
Springtime in the desert means belly flowers galore…
Camissonia pallida
Purple mat, Nama demissum, with Wallace’s wooly daisy, Eriophyllum wallacei
And in the category of belly flowers falls the locally rare plant I mentioned earlier. This tiny little thing is Arizona pussypaws, Calyptridium parryi var arizonicum. So far this is the only known California population.
An itty bitty legume. I have Lotus stragosus in my notes, and I’m pretty sure that this is that.
A mile up the canyon, as you gain a ltitle altitude, the California junipers start up.
Many were going crazy with the juniper berries.
And a couple junipers had this bug. I’m really bad with my insects, so I’m just calling this a juniper bug. I’m sure it’s got a real name… Edit (March 28): Thanks to Katie for this bug ID: This critter definitely looks like a western leaf-footed bug.
On the way home, climbing out of the desert, two differently-colored species of ceanothus provided spots of color along the sharp curves of Banner Grade. The lavender one was our fairly widespread C. tomentosus. But what was the white one? My carload of plant people just couldn’t stand not knowing. We had to stop and do a quick ID.
The slightly cupped leaves helped us identify this plant as Ceanothus greggi ssp. var. perplexans. Although known as “desert ceanothus” the plant didn’t get prolific until we started climbing near the 3,000 foot level.
This final photo is the plant in the landscape. How could we not stop for a closer look?
A couple weekends ago Agave deserti was looking well-watered from the winter rains. This swirling mass of plants appeared to have nominated one of the cluster to go forth and flower.
Flowering is a big deal for these plants. The stalk will rise up something like ten feet from the plants central growth point. When they start out the stalks take on this gorgeous pink and green coloration, which contrasts against the nearly white rosettes of the main plants.
I couldn’t help myself from getting a little abstract and arty with this extreme cropping of this closeup. It’s really such a neat phenomenon that you can appreciate all sorts of ways.
Once it blooms the main growth point dies. Critters relish the seed, so these don’t always get a chance to reproduce that way. Fortunately they have the fallback of throwing one or more pups from the base of the plant. Once a plant has bloomed and pupped a few times you can get a striking grouping of genetically identical plants called a genet. The first photo of this post is a nice example.
The plants were all over the slopes of Plum Canyon at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. But occasionally you’d see the agaves setting up household in unlikely places, like this rock cleft. It makes for a nice photo though I’m not so sure about what it bodes for a lifetime anchored in this one spot. The plants didn’t appear any too concerned, however.
I leave you with a closeup of a single plant of a larger genet. Wikipedia says that a single individual out of a genet is called a ramet. I learn something new every day.
Although many agaves grow in perfect, implacable rosettes, so that you can almost see a mathematical purity in their patterns, the desert agave seems to celebrate a looser, wilder approach to life. You can almost envision a vortex of desert wind blowing just looking at these leaves.
All in all a gorgeous species!
I’ll have more desert plant photos as I work through the files on my camera…
After two rounds of judging it’s now official. My image of a chalk dudleya (Dudleya pulverulenta) is the winner in a contest looking for an image to use to promote the upcoming California Native Plant Week, which this year is April 17 to 23. The competition was held by the San Diego Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, and the winning image will be used locally in publicity and on t-shirts and who knows what else.
Woohoo! I’m jazzed!
To the right is the winning image, Chalk Dudley, Budding Out.
Down below I detail the steps I took to turn a snapshot into this final photo. continue reading »
George Schlatter, creator of the late 60s/early 70s classic TV show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In, recently said this about entertainer Tiny Tim of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” fame: “One time we filled his dressing room with flowers and he came out crying because he said we had killed the flowers!”–Quoted in the Los Angeles Times
Well, I didn’t cry, but by the end of the world premiere performance of Mark Applebaum’s Concerto for Florist and Orchestra many flowers had given their lives in the name of art. I wrote a quick post last week about this odd little bit of music theater that was going to be played by the La Jolla Symphony with florist soloist James DelPrince. Saturday night I went to the concert.
Some of the buckes of flowers before the soloist and orchestra took to the stage
Over the course of three movements the solo florist arranged flowers manically while the orchestra plunged into a score that had some really strikingly beautiful passages as well as some butt-kicking moments. In one of the movements the strings slid around in quietly dissonant clouds of sound while tuned gongs sounded above the clouds. In another the orchestra bounced along on tricky rhythms, egged on by the percussion. And at the end the ensemble pretty much fizzled out in an orchestrated dissolution of the music. All this time the florist attacked buckets of raw floral material and stabbed the stems into bricks of green florist foam.
The set piece that was constructed during the second movement
While all this was happening I kept withing the florist would disappear so that I could just concentrate on the music. I’m sure there were others who’d have preferred the orchestra take their dissonant chords home and let the florist arrange away in peace. Whatever. In the end it wasn’t much more than a stunt. Still, the stunt pretty much filled the hall, and the piece got more applause than you’d have experience downtown at the more staid symphony.
Part of the floral creation that was made during the third movement grand finale
Before the concert the composer had a chance to speak, and said something like how he was bored of a lot of regular music and that he’d “rather fail in an interesting way than succeed at doing something normal.” So yes, I think he managed to fail interestingly.
As far as the floral creations, they were nice enough, but I think I’ve seen much more compelling avant-garde arranging done. Just think of the amazing Japanese ikebana creations that you can see every now and then. The arrangements reminded me of the monster showpiece “cakes” that you see assembled on the reality TV subgenre devoted to cake decorating and cake decorating competitions. They’re always impressive because of the sheer size and fragility, but so often the ideas behind the cakes just seem trite. Sorry. I sound like such a snot sometimes.
At the conclusion of the Concerto for Florist and Orchestra everyone with a cellphone camera had to make their way up on stage to snap some shots of the finished arrangement
So, are there any reality TV shows devoted to florists? Florists working with stressed people trying to prepare for a wedding? Or dealing with grieving families after a loved one has passed on? Or working with the hapless bachelor trying to impress the new love interest with a pile of so many dead roses Tiny Tim would be bawling? If Bravo or Lifetime suddenly comes up with one, remember you saw the idea here first.
Sunday I went for a little plant walk out to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. It’s been a good year for desert flowers, but it’s not one of those spectacular seasons when the ground pulsates purple with sand verbena or gold with brittlebush. Some of the ocotillo were in bloom, and the desert agaves like this one (Agave deserti) were sending up their pink and green stalks.
Lots else was in bloom. But as I review the photos from the trips I’m finding that I’m staring at a pile of images of plants I don’t know the names of. I’ll share more of the pictures than this first one once I get them a little better organized and the plants matched up with my list of names.
Since it’s Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day I’ll share with you some plants from my garden that I do know the names of. Some of these are old friends that have been blooming for a while, and I’ve been sharing over past Bloom Days. But a lot of these are just coming into bloom for the first time this year.
I thought the blooms on this carpenteria were finished a month ago, but the plant has surprised me with a robust bloom spurt, bigger than the first one.
Unlike the carpenteria, this old friend, the tree coreopsis, won’t be blooming again for another nine or ten months.
Many of these plants survive in the garden with minimal added water. The climate in this area is dry in a coastal-influenced sort of way. I might water once or twice a month in the summer, but the frequent morning overcast and occasional fog helps keep the plants hydrated. Additionally the plants in the garden have enjoyed a slighter higher than average rainfall so thoughts of the dry summer ahead aren’t in the minds of these plants. Spring is here.
This Salvia Bee’s Bliss has been in the ground for over two years, but only now is it starting to take off.
Black sage, Salvia mellifera.
The local annual chia, Salvia carduaceae, with the exotic Phlomis monocephala in the background. The chia is one of the coastal plants that also can get to be pretty common in parts of the desert.
Here’s another combination of plants, the lavender pink of the stinging lupine with the strident gold of the crassula relative behind it. The contrast is pretty strident to my taste, but hey, spring isn’t all about subtle plays of one color against another…
Last month I showed this orange mimulus seedling. That time I got it in focus.
From the same parents that lived in this bed comes this other monkeyflower, this one velvety red with almost black detailing.
And here’s another velvety red mimulus seedling. You might confuse it for the previous one, but the flowers are subtly different.
Nuttall’s milkvetch, looking full and flowery, close to its seasonal peak.
Verbena lilacina looks better for me with a little more added water than some of the plants around it. But it survives even when I forget.
The pale Verbena lilacina ‘Paseo Rancho’ was just starting to bloom last month. It’s starting to wake up for the spring.
Some parts of the garden get treated to more frequent watering.
This California buttercup, Ranunculus california, comes up reliably every year in an area of the garden where lawn meets unwatered gravel.
Blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium bellum, appreciates a moister spot as well.
Geum Red Wings, a pretty, informal plant.
Hummingbird sage, Salvia spathacea, is a California plant from moister places than my garden. Even in semi-shade it looks best with water two or three times a month.
And these last two of these go about as far from desert plants as you can get without getting aquatic plants. Both of these grow in my bog gardens, with their feet in standing water most of the year.
Sarracenia flava var. maxima is one one of the first plants in the bog to put out flowers. The common description of the scent is ‘cat piss,’ but I think that’s a little too harsh a description. The flowers are nice, but most people grow these for the pitcher-shaped leaves.
A couple more sarracenias, a different S. flava in the back, and a hybrid of S. flava and S. alata up front.
Head over to Carol’s blog, May Dreams Gardens, to check out all the other bloggers celebrating Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day!
When word hit that the tsunami generated by the huge Sendai Earthquake would be hitting San Diego by 9:00 a.m. yesterday morning we took notice. When the size of what we were likely to experience was predicted to be only in the two to three foot range, it motivated John and me to do a bit of disaster tourism by heading for the water.
I suppose our motivation was a bit like a child’s playing with plastic dinosaurs–small, safe versions of big scary things. We could experience something far-away and fearsome with minimal risk. It could put us in touch with things of this world that evoke fear and awe. Where we went, to the base of the Crystal Pier in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of town, we encountered one or two dozen people doing exactly the same thing.
Over the course of an hour the water rose and withdrew twice. It happened fairly quickly, but the effects were pretty subtle, so subtle that I might be overreacting and calling the normal tidal changes tsunamis. I’m fairly certain it was more than normal tidal motion, however, partly because the changes coincided almost exactly with the time the forecasters predicted the surge would hit.
Down at the water’s edge I was strafed by this sand grader more than once. This is a highly groomed beach.
Reminders that seaweed and other unpleasant things grow in the water aren’t welcome here. The tourists don’t like to step on the stuff. The locals don’t like the smell. So out comes this machine, like some sort of giant beach zamboni, keeping the sand free from nature.
It reminded me that my knowledge of local green things pretty much stops at the water line, even though there’s a rich and strange world not far from where I stood. The common seaweed is properly an algae, not a plant, but there are several marine grasses that call the ocean home.
I think this is one of the surfgrasses, Phyllospadix spp. The leaves are strong and stringy to stand up to the constant motion of the water.
But beyond that, I just have a general notion of what’s out there. The sea remains a dangerous mystery.
Hmmm…maybe the local native plant society needs to host a native plant swim instead of a hike…
Here’s a fun one: My local community/university orchestra will be premiering a new piece this weekend. Stanford University composer Mark Applebaum has composed a work for orchestra with a special, unusual soloist: a florist.
The Concerto for Florist and Orchestra riffs on the traditional notion of a concerto, where one or more virtuoso solists duke it out musically with an accompanying ensemble. In the new work, the orchestra will play and the florist will…presumably array flowers and leaves virtuostically all over the stage. Some musical concerto soloists have reputations for being high-strung individuals, and to my mind the new piece also riffs on the idea of florists sometimes having a reputation for being just as high-strung.
The work’s soloist will be James DelPrince, Associate Professor of Plant and Soil Sciences with a specialization in Floral Design and Interior Plantscaping Design at Mississippi State University. On his campus biography page DelPrince writes, “The aesthetics of horticulture involve recognition of the intrinsic beauty of plants and flowers along with the practiced skill of floral design and interior plant placement. I enjoy and value the opportunity to bring understanding and appreciation of floral and plant design to people.” And this weekend’s performance–the second time DelPrince has worked floral magic with Mark Applebaum’s music to accompany him–seems like a great way to bring some of that appreciation to a different sort of audience than people looking for something to decorate their wedding.
If you want more traditional fare, the all-concerto concert opens with Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, with Hannah Cho, winner of the orchestra’s 2009 Youth Artist Competition. Closing the evening will be another “conceptual concerto,” Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, a concerto with no soloists at all other than members of the orchestra, all of whom will have to work pretty hard to play the score.
One of my music profs from many years ago, Robert Erickson, was famous for shutting his eyes when listening to performances. He wasn’t bored; he just didn’t want the visuals to get in the way of truly hearing the music. You won’t want to shut your eyese for Saturday’s and Sunday’s performances.
Fill in the blank:
California coffeeberries are __________
versatile in the landscape
important members of the ecosystem
boring as dirt
Coffeeberries, Frangula californica (aka Rhamnus californica) are common plants in California native plant gardens. The plants stay green and leafy all year and provide a welcome evergreen background for other species that go through more extravagant bloom-and-bust cycles. They’re tough plants, and you can find clones that tolerate higher water parts of the garden as well as areas that subsist on natural rainfall.
The species produces berries that progress from red to purple to black over the course of the summer. Any plant that produces berries is likely to be an important food source for wildlife. Earlier in the season, in flower, it keeps pollinators happy.
An unknown cultivar of coffeeberry–in bloom! Look at those amazing flowers! (Don’t go wetting yourself in excitement, now…)
But until recently, I’d viewed them as fairly uninteresting plants, and I’d have answered “3” to the fill-in-the-blank above. I had none in the garden.
That changed a couple years ago with the introduction to the garden of several plants of two different clones. In the wilds the typical form can get pretty large–fifteen feet tall in the shade, and more, and even wider. But garden selections let you have smaller coffeeberries that won’t need constant pruning to keep them at a reasonable size.
A closeup of the leaves on ‘Eve Case’
I picked a couple plants of the classic ‘Eve Case’ cultivar, which has reported garden sizes of four to ten feet, depending on water and sun exposure. It’s a fairly informal plant, with fairly coarse leaves spaced fairly far apart on its stems. “Woodsy” would be an apt description for it.
By contrast, the leaves of ‘Tranquil Margarita’
I also tried the cultivar ‘Tranquil Margarita,” which is offered by Las Pilitas Nursery. The nursery’s website gushes about this one: “It is the most beautiful coffeeberry I’ve ever seen. (At first I didn’t realize it was a coffeeberry!) Leaves are clean, shiny and rich looking. The whole plant looks like it belongs next to an English Tudor in London.”
A still-young plant of ‘Tranquil Margarita,’ looking a little more mannered than ‘Eve Case’
Hyperbole? I think not. In describing plants for a California garden, saying a plant could look great in a Tudor garden could almost be seen as an insult. But I really really like this plant. So far it’s been a good, clean grower, nice and upright. For me it’s been faster than ‘Eve Case,’ but a gopher attack on the roots my Eve’s doesn’t render this a scientifically meticulous comparison.
There are at a few other cultivars that are out in the marketplace. Most common is ‘Mound San Bruno’–or ‘Mount San Bruno’–which grows fairly low and wide, with a pretty dense habit and typical fairly coarse leaves. ‘Seaview,’ a parent of ‘Eve Case,’ is an older variety that is reported to be a good, taller groundcover. (I haven’t observed any of this cultivar. There’s also a version of it called ‘Seaview Improved.’) ‘Leatherleaf’ has thicker, darker leaves than the typical form. ‘Little Sur’ gets mentioned occasionally, but I don’t see it listed on lists I’ve consulted. It’s probably one of the smallest versions.
There are probably other varieties and cultivars out there. If you have space you can always grow the unadulterated, unselected form of the species and earn bonus points for supporting genetic diversity.
So there you have it, the humble coffeeberry. I don’t think anyone would call it the sexiest thing with leaves, but as I get older I’m more and more attracted to plants that are sturdy and subtle over flashy and disposable horticultural one night stands. Treat the plant with respect and it’ll be there for you for many mornings to come.
Sunday we went up to LA for a family birthday. While we were up there we stopped by Los Angeles Modern Auctions, which was having a preview for an upcoming sale that includes some really cool items by Ettore Sottsass, one of my favorite 20th Century designers. Paintings, sculpture, furniture, general stuff: you can see it for years in books and magazines but the experience of coming face to face with it can be pretty different.
Once of the not-by-Sottsass lots in the sale is this immense garden path designed by California ceramic artist Stan Bitters, a student of Peter Voulkos. Like Voulkos his work is inspired by the material of clay itself–And how can you get more earthy, more primal than clay? Ceramics, gardening, it all can come from the same place.
The path can be assembled in several configurations, and in this configuration coils more than forty feet long. The piece comes from the later 1960s, at a time when Bitters was working with a ceramics manufacturer that basically gave him 20 tons of clay to see what he could make out of it.
When someone gives you 20 tons of clay you make big things, and this is just one of many examples of the really really big artworks he started to create. Most of his works of that era grew out of collaborations with architects–Big work works really well outdoors.
His work is all over public spaces up in the Fresno area. In recent years he’s been doing public and private commissions in the Los Angeles and Palm Springs areas.
The garden path looked a tad cramped and out of place on display in a warehouse full of polished modern and postmodern furniture and art, but just imagine this snaking its way through a landscape. Very cool.
This was a path he made for his own home and garden, and it has a gentle casualness, a welcome lack of striving, that you can see in the private pieces artists make for themselves and friends. You can make out the casual, earthy surface details and glaze in this detail.
So if your garden needs a casual but still pretty stunning focal point here’s your chance. You’ll probably need to rent a very large truck to bring it home.
