Archive for June, 2011

piece o’ history

Here’s the lat­est addi­tion to the gar­den, a small chunk of the House of Hos­pi­tal­ity in Bal­boa Park, a small chunk of San Diego archi­tec­tural history.

In the late 1990s the city reha­bil­i­tated the build­ing, one of many his­toric struc­tures built as tem­po­rary exhi­bi­tion spaces for the 1915 Panama–PacificCal­i­for­nia Expo­si­tion. The exhibit halls weren’t really intended to be a land­marks to pass into time immemo­r­ial. But the city has grown attached to these exam­ples of Chur­rigueresque archi­tec­ture, and the build­ings are actively preserved.

(“Chur­rigueresque” refers to the Spanish/Catalan archi­tect José Ben­ito de Chur­riguera, who devel­oped a fairly elab­o­rate Rococo style of orna­ment that was picked up in Colo­nial Mex­ico. Bertram Good­hue and Car­leton M. Winslow, the archi­tects who worked on the Expo­si­tion, stud­ied the style in Mex­ico and brought it a few miles north of the bor­der. The over-the-top plas­ter details made for dra­matic and escapist expo­si­tion build­ings, but the details are high main­te­nance and can begin to fail over the years. It got to the point that the orna­men­ta­tion was falling off the build­ings and threat­en­ing to ka-bonk passers-by.)

“Preser­va­tion” of the build­ing went through sev­eral phases, and even­tu­ally employed the wreck­ing ball. The old House of Hos­pi­tal­ity was demol­ished and a new one erected in its place. To make sure that the new build­ing closely resem­bled the orig­i­nal the old orna­men­ta­tion was removed from the build­ings and casts made. The new orna­men­ta­tion is now made of glass-fiber-reinforced-concrete instead of the orig­i­nal horsehair-reinforced plaster.

Rather than land­fill­ing the old archi­tec­tural orna­men­ta­tion, the inter­est­ing chunks were sold off to ben­e­fit the preser­va­tion efforts. And it was on a fran­tic Sat­ur­day morn­ing in 1997 where we were able to fight off some of the most aggres­sive shop­pers I’ve ever encoun­tered to pick up this piece of local his­tory. I’m pretty sure that my chunk of his­tory comes from the tower in the photo above, from around the arches.

The frag­ment was really cool, but it sat in var­i­ous cor­ners of the house and my stu­dio as we decided what to do with it. Last month we finally decided to lib­er­ate the piece back to the out­doors. Here’s its prob­a­bly final rest­ing place, attached to a long blank stretch of fence above the fishpond.

I don’t typ­i­cally go in for lots of gar­den art or pieces of fake Roman arti­facts sprin­kled around a gar­den. But I was happy with how this rel­a­tively small chunk of Bal­boa Park serves as a cool focal point for a part of the gar­den presided over by a long, plain fence.

In demol­ish­ing the orig­i­nal build­ing and dis­pers­ing its sur­faces the city has man­aged an odd sort of preser­va­tion. Zoos and botan­i­cal gar­dens some­times have the sad bur­den of keep­ing alive species that no longer exist in the wild. And my back yard holds a piece of a build­ing that exists only in a fac­sim­ile of the original.

June 27 2011 | Categories: art • gardening • my garden • places | Tags: • • • • • | 8 Comments »

you paid money for that?

At the plant sale attached to the recent suc­cu­lent show a cou­ple of the soci­ety mem­bers looked at one of the plants I had in my hands and made all sorts of approv­ing noises. “Great plant!” or “Wow, you scored!”

That was not the reac­tion when I got the plants home.

While John didn’t quite come out and say some­thing like, “You paid good money for that?,” it was there in impli­ca­tion in what lit­tle he said.

I sup­pose it’s the curi­ous gardener’s curse, get­ting all excited over some of the odder botan­i­cal life forms that didn’t get sprin­kled on with the magic uni­corn glit­ter that makes a plant con­ven­tion­ally pretty. Add to that the more gen­eral gardener’s curse of being able to see the future in rec­og­niz­ing the promise in a packet of black seeds indis­tin­guish­able from dust or a bag of brown bulbs look­ing no more promis­ing than a heap of shallots.

Here’s one of the lit­tle plants, Ipomea platen­sis, a species in the same genus as morn­ing glo­ries. This is the young plant.

Some day it’ll grow up into some­thing look­ing like this plant in the main suc­cu­lent show. Very cool, but we’re miss­ing the magic uni­corn glitter.

This is a cool plant with a Latin name that would draw snick­ers from a junior high school sci­ence class, Fockea edulis.

Some day I hope mine grows up into some­thing look­ing like these larger plants in the main show…

Here’s a more mature spec­i­men of Dioscorea elaphan­tipes, another of the lit­tle plants I got. I think the form of the caudex on this one looks pretty amaz­ing. So far these are three caudex-forming (cau­di­ci­form) species, but the inflated plant parts all look quite dif­fer­ent from each other. The foliage, too, looks totally dif­fer­ent one plant to the next.

Oper­culi­carya decaryi also has a cool inflated stem…

…and tiny, dark, del­i­cate leaves.

And then there was this one, Tyle­codon stria­tus, a plant that even I think is kin­duv ugly. Lots of brown stem and not much else. They have com­pe­ti­tions to find the ugli­est dogs. Do they have ugly plant con­tests? This species stands a pretty good chance of win­ning. And I paid good money for it!

Not all was lumpy and bul­bous at the plant sale, and there actu­ally was a lot of uni­corn glit­ter spread over many of the plants.

Echevaria After­glow and Sedum adol­phii ‘Oranges’

Golden sedum

Dud­leya brittonii

Flower on Ade­nium obe­sum, a rel­a­tive of the trop­i­cal plume­ria. Like most of the plants I pur­chased this species will form a dra­matic caudex, but peo­ple seem to buy it at least as much for the flowers.

I liked the for­est of plant labels at this vendor’s booth. One of them bears the really unhelp­ful plant name of suc­cu­lent…


There were succulent-friendly pots, too. Just look at all that drainage.


And of all the pots I came so close to going home with this one by Don Hunt Ceram­ics. Isn’t the glaze ter­rific? You wouldn’t care if the plant inside was as ugly as one of my new ones!

Con­sid­er­ing what I purchased–and espe­cially what I did not buy–this might just be the last time I’m allowed to go shop­ping unattended.

June 25 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • • | 8 Comments »

cooking for vermin

It’s been a bad year for pocket gophers. I’ve been clean­ing up the gar­den for our annual big July 4th party, deal­ing with gopher dam­age and gen­er­ally get­ting every­thing pretty-like. One large spot in the front–just about the first zone of the gar­den vis­i­tors will encounter–is totally bare and calls out for some new plants to fill in the space. But the last thing I wanted to do is to install some­thing new that would turn into expen­sive gopher chow.

I decided that I would try to place some new plants in the dead zone, but wanted to see if I couldn’t try some­thing to deter the gophers. Gopher bait pel­lets are pop­u­lar, but I can’t say that they’ve worked for me. How can you tell if some­thing is work­ing when the crea­ture you’re after lives 99.9% of the time under­ground and their dam­age seems to come in ran­dom spurts? And I worry about the cat dis­cov­er­ing a poi­soned gopher. Gopher-killing traps are pop­u­lar, and it’s the one method that seems to have the best chance at suc­cess. Still I’m not sure I’m ready to go there.

I’ve tried cas­tor bean-based repel­lant. I’ve tried blood meal. Both things that are sup­posed to keep the crea­tures at bay, but I don’t know that they’ve worked for me for longer than a few days. And the idea of spread­ing blood meal fer­til­izer around native plants at the start of what’s sum­mer dor­mancy for many of them didn’t seem like too bright an idea. (Let me force feed you some bratwurst while you’re try­ing to get to sleep…) One thing I haven’t tried is chili powder.

I admit that this is just an exper­i­ment, maybe one that’s doomed to fail. The only things I have going on my side are the facts that, 1) there’s at least one com­mer­cial prod­uct out there that com­bines blood meal with chili pow­der, and 2) you some­times see ref­er­ences on gopher con­trol using chili, usu­ally in com­bi­na­tion with some­thing like gar­lic. Since I don’t want to do blood meal, the chili pow­der alone might do some­thing.

And if chili pow­der might work, why not use the most industrial-strength stuff you can your hands on? It’s not pep­per spray, but the local Indian gro­cer sells 880 grams of extra-hot ground pep­per for less than five dollars–less than half the price for the blood-meal/chili mix­ture I’ve seen. I cook with the stuff, but a half tea­spoon will make a large batch of food siz­zle and scare away most of my Ohio rel­a­tives. It might work for gophers, too.

So, into the plant­ing holes I mixed up a recipe of soil mixed with gen­er­ous amounts of the chili pow­der, about 1 quar­ter cup per hole. Next, into the holes go the three new San Miguel Island buck­wheats. They’re not the most exotic of the Cal­i­for­nia native plants, but I was pretty happy to find sev­eral well grown exam­ples in a local gen­er­al­ist nurs­ery. If you see a busi­ness doing some­thing good, why not sup­port them?

Finally the plants got a healthy top-dressing of the chili pow­der. What I didn’t use on the new plants I spread around a few other plants that seem to be favorite gopher menu items. This is how it looks before water­ing it in, pretty glar­ingly orange-red. It looks closer to nor­mal after you soak it in a bit.

One Big Cau­tion: Although chili pow­der is a nat­ural prod­uct, it’s still a nasty irri­tant. Wear gloves. A res­pi­ra­tor and gog­gles might be a good addi­tion on a windier day. I’m not say­ing this for dra­matic effect. Wind blew some in my eyes and I suf­fered the expected effect–no sur­prise. But I also rubbed my gloves on the side of my face, only to have my face burn like a sec­ond degree sun­burn for half an hour.

Will all this fail and col­lapse into a pile of chili pow­der induced flames? Dunno, but it’ll be an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment.

June 21 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • | 12 Comments »

i was hacked

You might think of gar­dens and even gar­den blogs as lit­tle zones of quiet in the hub­bub of life beyond. But try as you might the out­side world always seems to find you. Some of the dark forces in the world found this blog and tried to mount a quiet takeover in the form of the Word­Press Pharma Hack.

Diana of Elephant’s Eye was the first to notice when sev­eral weeks ago some of the search results for this blog were being hijacked with an offer to buy phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals online with­out a pre­scrip­tion. My blog? Pimp­ing Via­gra and Tra­madol? How rude. The sit­u­a­tion con­tin­ued to get worse as more results showed signs of the hack, and reached a point in Google Ana­lyt­ics where the word “phar­macy” was indexed twice as fre­quently as the word “plant.” I had no idea what was happening.

Even­tu­ally I tracked down the offend­ing hack. Bet­ter yet there were sev­eral sites show­ing ways to make the beast go away. For­tu­nately this wasn’t the sort of hack where all the data van­ishes, and at no point were any read­ers harmed by vis­it­ing these pages. But remov­ing the prob­lem required a lot of time check­ing out indi­vid­ual files and data­base entries in the secret inner sanc­tum files behind the scenes.

If you blog at WordPress.com or Blogspot you’re prob­a­bly safe from ever encoun­ter­ing this. Both ser­vices have tech staff way more on the ball than I’m able to be.

If you host your own instance of Word­Press, as I do, then you need to be on the look­out for it. The Pear­son­i­fied blog offers some use­ful ways to deal with the attack, as do sev­eral other resources. Just search for “Word­Press pharma hack.”

At this point I think I’ve got it beat. Results on Google still show a few offend­ing search results, but over­all things are look­ing bet­ter as the robots spi­der through the con­tent. So recov­ery from this hack is like recov­er­ing from a bad bout of the flu.

Some handy things to avoid get­ting hacked, or to quickly find out about a hack with it if you are:

  • Blog at one of the main blog plat­forms unless you have a need or desire to exert more con­trol over your blog con­tent, dis­play or delivery.
  • Google your­self fre­quently, and Google your blog con­tent. It’s not just for van­ity anymore.
  • Keep your Word­Press ver­sion cur­rent. Updat­ing will take less time and has­sle than right­ing the wrongs of a hacker.
  • Check your blog stats often. A big dropoff in traf­fic might sig­nal a big prob­lem with the blog.
  • If you see another blogger’s con­tent being hijacked, point it out to them. The symp­toms of this attack are invis­i­ble if you’re just view­ing pages or writ­ing con­tent. It’s only when you use a search engine that you notice this par­tic­u­lar hack.

So…hopefully that’s the end of this headache. Relieved of the need to fig­ure out the pre­scrip­tion for the prob­lem, I actu­ally accom­plished some gar­den­ing today–and blog­ging too. Life is much bet­ter now.

Stay safe!

June 19 2011 | Categories: rambles | Tags: • • | 11 Comments »

test post

Please ignore. This is a test to see if I’ve been able to restore this site to its pre-hacked state.

June 14 2011 | Categories: rambles | | No Comments »

succulence

Rebu­tia muscula

Copi­apoa hypogaea var. barquitensis

One of the halls in San Diego’s Bal­boa Park almost always seems to have a plant show ded­i­cated to one group of plant or another. This past week­end it was the turn for cac­tus and suc­cu­lents, cour­tesy the San Diego Cac­tus and Suc­cu­lent Society.

This show fea­tured an expected sam­pling of cac­tus, but a sur­pris­ingly low num­ber of plants with col­or­ful, splashy foliage like you’d find on some sedums or echevarias. Maybe some of them don’t trans­port so eas­ily, and many oth­ers get too big to take to a show. Or maybe there’s a cer­tain snob­bery against easy-to-like plants that are prob­a­bly a lit­tle over­ex­posed in gar­den cen­ters and home stores around town.

I’m not sure how to react to this entry, a carved up spec­i­men of the com­mon San Diego County coastal prickly pear, Opun­tia lit­toralis. Most botan­i­cal gar­dens will have van­dal­ized cac­tus and suc­cu­lents, with ini­tials carved into plants that will carry the scars for the rest of their lives. And here’s another act of cre­ative van­dal­ism. It’s fun, but I’m a lit­tle too uptight to enjoy it with­out feel­ing some guilt or dis-ease. But in the end it’s prob­a­bly a bet­ter deal for the plant than to chop up the leaf for a big serv­ing of nopales.

Noto­cac­tus leninghausii

Mam­mil­laria carmenae

Sul­core­bu­tia rauschii

Rebu­tia fulviseta–sorry for the awful focus on this one…


Euphor­bia poissonii

Euphor­bia unispina

And yet another euphor­bia, this one E. mis­era, native right here in coastal San Diego County.

Oops…I didn’t get the name of this won­der­ful won­der. Sorry. Maybe one of you knows? EDIT JUNE 12: Hoover sug­gested that this might be Cal­ibanus hook­eri, and it looks like that is indeed the plant. Thanks, Hoover!

This decades-old spec­i­men is Ade­nia glauca.

What­ever the rea­son for the dearth of “pretty plants,” weird was in, and I found myself grav­i­tat­ing to the side of the exhi­bi­tion hall with plants that took up the idea of suc­cu­lent growth habits and ran with it in ways you don’t see in cac­tus or rosette-forming suc­cu­lents. Pretty many of them are not, but there’s a major cool fac­tor with these.

Out of these I really grooved on the cau­di­ci­form species, plants that develop grossly enlarged stem bases, stems or roots to store water for the plant to use dur­ing the dry months of the year.

It was easy to snap up a big pile of pho­tos at the show with my cell­phone cam­era, but the qual­ity of almost all of them was been pretty pathetic. Low indoor light = Slow expo­sures = Blurry pho­tos. And con­trol­ling focus is really really touchy to nearly impossible.

I’m not about to give up my real cam­eras, but gosh these lit­tle devices are handy, like the con­ve­nient Host­ess Twinkies of the pho­to­graphic world. Amaz­ing how much we’re will­ing to give up for the sake of con­ve­nience. Still, every now and then the pho­to­graphic Host­ess Twinkie god­dess smiled on me and gave me sharp images that were focuses almost where I’d have focused with my camera.

Any­way, you might have guessed that where there’s a plant show, there’s usu­ally a plant sale. But that’ll be the topic of a future post…

June 07 2011 | Categories: gardening | Tags: • • • | 9 Comments »

all shook up

Vis­i­tors to this part of the UCSD cam­pus won’t for­get that Cal­i­for­nia is Earth­quake coun­try. Set at the edge of a walk­way next to the land­scap­ing are these pil­lars that have under­gone sim­u­lated tremors on a jumbo shake table that can deliver a mas­sive series of move­ments emu­lat­ing the Big One.

Another hint that this is Cal­i­for­nia lies in the fact that these are pil­lars mod­eled on those that keep our free­ways high in the air. The struc­tures lab here has worked with trans­porta­tion agen­cies to try to develop safer struc­tural com­po­nents for bridges and overpasses.

Dur­ing severe shak­ing the tremen­dously strong yet frag­ile con­crete dis­in­te­grates, leav­ing the sup­port­ing steel which has flex­i­bil­ity but com­par­a­tively lit­tle strength to keep struc­tures aloft. I wouldn’t want to be any­where near a free­way with com­pro­mised sup­ports like this.

The solu­tion the struc­tural engi­neers came up with is to wrap the columns in a mate­r­ial that ban­dages the con­crete and keeps it from pul­ver­iz­ing into gravel. It almost seems too obvi­ous a thing to do, but it looks like it really works when you com­pare these two pil­lars to the first ones I showed.

So, here in the mid­dle of clipped hedges and mounds of orange lion’s tail, you have these six pil­lars, stand­ing around like decay­ing Gre­cian columns or rem­nants of a gar­den folly in an Eighteenth-Century Eng­lish garden.

Temple of Harmony SE Facade

This image is of the Tem­ple of Har­mony, a folly on the grounds of Hal­swell House, Goathurst, Som­er­set, cour­tesy of the Wiki­me­dia Com­mons. (Image by Stronach, released to the pub­lic domain. Thank you Stronach!) Even though it’s far from this land with the shakes the Tem­ple appar­ently has some trou­ble stand­ing up. The Wikipedia descrip­tion states that “it now has the addi­tion of a tie bar, a long retain­ing bolt that runs through the struc­ture from one side to the other, help­ing to keep it together.”

Maybe the Hal­swell Park Trust could take a clue from the clever Cal­i­for­ni­ans and wrap the Tem­ple in fiber­glass, though, yeah, it might look a lit­tle more like the work of Christo than that of Thomas Prowse, its orig­i­nal architect…


June 02 2011 | Categories: art • landscape • places | Tags: • • • • • | 6 Comments »