[ Lost in the Landscape ]

what’s eating you

No gar­den project seems to ever be com­plete, but we did put the fin­ish on the bog bench we’ve spent a lot of time work­ing on.

We used this stuff, Superdeck. It took already good-looking wood and turned it into some­thing almost like a nice fin­ish on fur­ni­ture. Over the last few years we’ve tried var­i­ous ways to fin­ish ipe used out­doors and this stuff seems to give it the most durable and attrac­tive fin­ish. They haven’t paid me a cent to say this. I like the stuff.

Twenty feet from the bog bench Stapelia get­tl­ef­fii has opened its first flow­ers of the sea­son. I’ve men­tioned before how this plant is one of an infor­mal group of carrion-scented plants that are pol­li­nated by flies.

Back at the bog bench this Sar­race­nia alata, vein­less form, is hav­ing a hard time hid­ing the fact that it’s had a lot of bugs–most of them flies–as meals this sea­son. Just look at how the pitch­ers sud­denly turn dark as you go down the tube. Dead bugs inside. Lots of them.

Midsummer’s edi­ble high­light is the ripen­ing of the figs, and this one is about thirty, forty feet from the bog bench..

One of the annoy­ing neme­ses of fig grow­ers is this shiny lit­tle guy below, the fig bee­tle. It has the unpleas­ant habit of break­ing the fig’s skin and then feed­ing off the suc­cu­lence inside. I can’t say that I blame them, but I want the figs all to myself.

For some rea­son they seem cap­ti­vated with this one plant in the bog, the “green” form of Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla, a form that lacks the abil­ity to make the red­dish antho­cyanin pig­ments. I’ve noticed that the pitch­ers of this plant have a dis­tinct damask-rose aroma. Maybe the scent reminds the bee­tles of the flo­ral notes of figs?

What­ever the case, at least one of the bee­tles got a lit­tle too inter­ested in this pitcher and fell in. It was grue­some to watch as it tried to fight its way back out of the pitcher, strug­gling so hard it kicked a big hole in the side of this tube. It took at least three days to die.

There’s a cer­tain streak in many car­niv­o­rous plant afi­ciona­dos that seems to delight in the bug killing aspect of these plants. I’m not one of them. My father spent much of his life as a Bud­dhist, and I’m sure some of its tenets of non-violence against the uni­verse rubbed off on me. I found it unset­tling to walk by the pitcher and watch this hap­pen­ing. A slow death by star­va­tion and dehy­dra­tion, head-down into a pile of dead bugs–not the way I want to leave this earth.

So I put on my rosy gog­gles of denial and look at the plants in the bog. This is one of the more spec­tac­u­lar ones right now, named ‘W.C.,’ it’s a polyg­a­mous hybrid involv­ing S. leu­co­phylla, S. rubra and S. psittacina.

Still, I’m reminded of the obliv­i­ous pet-owner’s line: “He’s a cute puppy isn’t he? Why, no, it doesn’t bite.”

Yah right. Pretty, evil things…

July 31 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: benches • bog garden • carnivorous plants • fig beetles • figs • hardscape • sarracenia • Stapelia gettleffii • Superdek | 8 Comments »

keeping your dead tree healthy

There’s this dead tree out­side my week­day office. A crew has been work­ing on it for the last two weeks.

It’s one of three very dead trees that make up an 1986 instal­la­tion by Terry Allen. Set in an area of the UCSD cam­pus that’s seen many of the cam­pus’ sig­na­ture euca­lyp­tus cut down to make way for build­ings, they’re in part sup­posed to embody trees that were lost to the chain­saw of progress. The writeup at the Stu­art Col­lec­tion web­site has lots of things to say about the project, includ­ing: “Although they osten­si­bly rep­re­sent dis­place­ment or loss, these trees offer a kind of com­pen­sa­tion: one emits a series of recorded songs and the other a lively sequence of poems and sto­ries cre­ated and arranged specif­i­cally for this project.”

This tree–the dead-looking gray one towards the left of this frame–plays recorded spo­ken things.

Yes. Two of the artist’s trees make noise. Loud, annoy­ing noise. So in effect this artists has taken a tree–something that to me rep­re­sents the pos­si­bil­ity of the quiet that you find in a grove–and replaces it with devices with speak­ers in them that pol­lute the thin grove with poetry and loud music. By ban­ish­ing what’s left of the quiet it’s the aural equiv­a­lent of clearcut­ting what’s left of the trees. You call that compensation?

I do not love this work.

This one plays music. Some­one had brought in a plas­tic chair so they could sit and lis­ten to the giant lead-plated iPod.

The trees in the project started out their lives in the adja­cent groves but were removed. They were then dis­sem­bled and soaked in wood preser­v­a­tive. Once thor­oughly embalmed, the trees were reassem­bled and sheets of lead nailed all over their outer sur­faces. Over the course of 25 years the one mute tree–the one with the scis­sor lift next to it in the first phot above–developed the sort of white and yel­low oxi­da­tion that lead can acquire over time. Oxi­dized lead makes up the artist’s pig­ment lead yel­low, and sul­fides of lead can turn the lead white.

The trunk of the spoken-word tree

I guess the nat­ural processes went against the artist’s inten­tions of hav­ing a dark ghost of a tree the color of raw lead. The two work­ers have been pound­ing and clean­ing and maybe even replac­ing some of the lead plat­ing. The tree is start­ing to look really dead again.

My final thoughts? I don’t think this artist really gets nature. Nat­ural processes are being denied. And now, you can’t hear the for­est for the trees.

July 24 2011 | Categories: art • landscape • places | Tags: natural cycles • Stuart Collection • Terry Allen • trees • UCSD | 15 Comments »

petals and parasites

The gar­den is turn­ing decid­edly brown as the tem­per­a­tures warm and the dry sum­mer gets underway–Sounds like a per­fect time to revisit high spring in the local foothills. Or maybe that’s just a ruse to get an excuse to show some pho­tos I didn’t get to post­ing yet. Pick what­ever moti­va­tion sounds good to you…

When I vis­ited Cre­stridge Eco­log­i­cal Pre­serve last May the rock roses (Helianthe­mum sco­par­ium) were announc­ing them­selves assertively. The lit­tle low plants were at their peak and vibrated with dozens to hun­dreds of bril­liant yel­low five-petaled flow­ers on each plant.

And any­where that you saw rock roses you’d see hun­dreds of rock rose petals beneath the plants. I was try­ing to decide what I liked bet­ter, the flow­er­ing plants, or the red earth beneath them, dusted gold with fallen petals.

Rock rose. Cool plant.

“Cool plant” might not be your first reac­tion to the dod­der (Cus­cuta cal­i­for­nica) that was every­where. Lack­ing chloro­phyll, its only way of sur­viv­ing is to latch on to a host plant and suck on its vital plant juices, deplet­ing the host while grow­ing extrav­a­gantly all over it.

Hill­side with chap­ar­ral mal­low, chamise, pearly ever­last­ings, deer­weed and…dodder (the gold, twiny stuff)

Some­one on the trip pointed out that DNA work has estab­lished this as a mem­ber of the Con­volvu­laceae, the same fam­ily that includes Calyste­gia, the genus of native morn­ing glo­ries, as well as Con­volvu­lus, the genus that con­tains the com­mon gar­den morn­ing glo­ries. The new draft Jep­son man­ual fol­lows this classification.

Dod­der doing its thing, with chamies, golden yarrow and Lake­side cean­othis in the back­ground. Ooh, pretty…

If you’ve planted the gar­den morn­ing glo­ries, only to recoil in hor­ror at how they coil over absolutely every­thing in their path, you’ll rec­og­nize the growth pat­tern that dod­der adopts. Like morn­ing glo­ries, it twines like crazy. And, it’s par­a­sitic! Extra bonus!! Dod­der is an annual, so that even though it feeds off its host, it does so for only part of the year, mainly dur­ing the grow­ing sea­son when the host stands the best hope of keep­ing up with the dodder’s demands.

All that ick­i­ness aside I hap­pen to love how the stuff looks, twiny and golden, work­ing its way through the land­scape. Visu­ally, it does what noth­ing else in the land­scape does. I’m not the only per­son struck by its forms. There’s a fairly abstract, very mod­ernist photo of dod­der in Laguna Beach that was taken by Edward Weston way back in 1937. [ Check out the image at the Cen­ter for Cre­ative Pho­tog­ra­phy, in Tuc­son. ]

So, as far as I’m con­cerned: Dod­der. Cool plant.

About the time I took this trip I hap­pened to open up the Sun­day comics to see the week’s Bizarro single-panel. I won’t stomp all over copy­right and lift the image for here, but you can view it on Dan Piraro’s blog [ here ]. But let me try to describe it:

Night. Sub­ur­bia. Exte­rior of a house with a lawn and low, mound­ing foun­da­tion plant­i­ngs. A side­walk leads away from the front door. Tight shot of a cou­ple who are leav­ing the house.

The woman, smil­ing, says to the man, “What ter­rific hosts.”

Behind them, in the door­way of their home, stands the host cou­ple. Light spills out from indoors and onto the stoop. The man wears a pair of round black glasses, “Harry Pot­ter glasses” you might say, though you sense that he was wear­ing them long before Harry Pot­ter existed. He waves a weak farewell.

Next to him the host­ing woman stands, her hands clasped. She does not look happy. She speaks.

“What incred­i­ble parasites.”

Who’d ever think that the host/parasite rela­tion­ship would ever be mate­r­ial for the funny pages? Talk about tim­ing, talk about coin­ci­dence, the trip to Cre­stridge, the dod­der, the Sun­day comic…

July 21 2011 | Categories: art • landscape • places • plant profiles | Tags: Bizarro • comics • Crestridge Ecological Preserve • Cuscuta californica • dodder • Helianthemum scoparium • native plants • Peak rockrose • rockrose | 5 Comments »

random updates

San Miguel Island buck­wheat, Eri­o­gonum grande var. rubescens, pos­si­bly pro­tected by a cloak of extra-hot chili powder

Update #1: The gopher chron­i­cles (Orig­i­nal post: Cook­ing for Ver­min)

It’s been three weeks since I tried to ward off gophers by using extra-hot chili pow­der. Peo­ple want to know if it works.

The con­clu­sion: There’s no sign of obvi­ous dam­age from pocket gophers in the treated area. The plants are grow­ing and bloom­ing nor­mally. That might sound like suc­cess, but there hasn’t been any gopher dam­age any­where else in the gar­den, either. So it’s incon­clu­sive at this point. But I’ll post as the sea­son goes on. I really really want this to work.

Update #2: Life post-hacking (Orig­i­nal post: I was hacked)

After I real­ized that my blog was hacked I cleaned out what looked like the prob­lem code. But two days later the Word­Press Pharma Hack was back. I did more dras­tic cleanup after that, and it looks like that took care of the problem.

The tide turns…

Even after cleanup, because it takes days to weeks for Google to catch up and rein­dex every­thing on a site, searches for my blog showed many titles for my posts as promis­ing ways to buy var­i­ous drugs with­out pre­scrip­tion. Even as recently as Wednes­day, last week, the num­ber one blog key­word was “Pre­scrip­tion.” For a gar­den blog it’s pathetic to have that word ahead of the next four on the list: “gar­den,” “plants,” “blog” or “land­scape.” But the tide turned on Thurs­day, and the good words con­tinue to rise as the hacker words sink.

Update #3: Aloe, good-bye (Orig­i­nal post: Exotic plant, exotic pest)

It’s been almost a year since I men­tioned that my spec­i­men Aloe bar­berae (aka A. baine­sii) was in seri­ous decline. Aloe mites had attacked the plant and I was blam­ing its fate on them. The plant con­tin­ued to decline to the point that it had just a few grow­ing tips that kept get­ting smaller and smaller. Some­thing was very wrong and we cut the plant back to a stump one to two months later, leav­ing three small pups that were spring­ing from the low­est two feet of the plant.

The dying trunk of the dying aloe, with the three pups look­ing increas­ingly worse. Time to pull the pups off to root them, it looks like…

Since then even those lit­tle pups have failed to thrive. Signs of mites have been few, so I’m begin­ning to think that some other cause is respon­si­ble for the prob­lems. Hypoth­e­sis #1 at the moment: pocket gophers eat­ing the roots. My main rea­son for think­ing this is that there’s another A. bar­berae just a few feet away that looks robust, with none of the signs of ill­ness the big plant was show­ing. I’ll keep my hope up for that plant.

A rooted cut­ting of the orig­i­nal big aloe

In the mean­time, aloes being aloes, I fig­ured that all the lit­tle branch tips I cut off might root eas­ily. I treated all the chunks with miti­cide, stuck them in pot­ting mix and kept them just-moist. All three took.

Quite frankly I’m not sure there’s room in the front for two giant aloes I had there in the first place–placing the two orig­i­nal plants so close was a mis­take. So I gave two of the rooted plants to peo­ple in my office who were eager to grow this ter­rific plant. I still have one rooted plant, along with a half dozen more unrooted branch tips sit­ting on my green­house floor that are still green, almost a year later. I might end up with an impres­sive aloe in a pot if I can’t find a place for it. And if I root the remain­ing branch tips I could have a half-dozen more giveaways.

The orig­i­nal plant looks doomed, but pieces of the orig­i­nal clone live on. In the life and death world of gar­dens that’s almost a happy ending.

Update #4: Crest-fallen (Orig­i­nal post: Mutant Prim­rose)

In case you’re won­derng what hap­pened to the mutant Hooker’s evening prim­rose from a May 12 post­ing, it looks like the weight of the extra tis­sue on the crested grow­ing tip was more than the stem could keep aloft. Within a week of the orig­i­nal photo, the stem flopped to the ground, where it has stayed, still alive, but not thriving…

Now (early July)…

How the plant looked in early May…

Update #5: A dif­fer­ent out­come for a crested growth (Orig­i­nal post: Defor­mity or Bio­log­i­cal Won­der?)

My last progress report is on this mutant crested growth of a Euphor­bia lam­bii. Since I posted on it in June of 2009, the plant seems to have incor­po­rated the crest into its con­tin­ued growth pat­terns, unlike on what was going on with the prim­rose above. Still, you can tell that the growth pat­tern isn’t quite what nor­mal plants go through. Still inter­est­ing, two years later…

The crest as of July of this year…

The crest in June, 2009

A dif­fer­ent view of the plant as it looks today. The spindly-looking-ness of the plant is my fault (for­get­ting to water it enough) and not some­thing the crested growth is respon­si­ble for.

July 15 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Aloe bainesii • Aloe barberae • aloe mite • blogging • crested plants • Eriogonum grande var rubescens • Euphorbia lambii • Oenothera elata • pocket gophers • Wordpress Pharma Hack | 8 Comments »

after the party

If your def­i­n­i­tion of a good party is one that gets the police called on it, my July 4th party was a fail­ure. But by other stan­dards I think it went pretty well. (The new gar­den bench was really appre­ci­ated and well-used.)

As you try to play host, the party can pass by so fast you don’t have time to really take it in. And before you know every­one has left and you’re left with what peo­ple didn’t eat or drink, plus all the things peo­ple bring along, edi­ble and not.

Inven­to­ry­ing the drinks it almost looks like we have more cans and bot­tles than we started with. I guess peo­ple were scared to try this year’s weird/unusual bev­er­age offer­ing, Malta India, a sweet non-alcoholic drink from Puerto Rico. We ended up with eight out of eight bot­tles uncon­sumed. And there were gifts of a lot of six­packs of things we didn’t start out with.

There was a gift of this patri­otic chrysanthemum…

…and then this…

I’ve known San Diego artist Tom Driscoll for a while, and he brought along one of his recent pieces.

Tom Driscoll: Array 2, in a pre­lim­i­nary mockup before its exhi­bi­tion at the Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art, San Diego. Gyp­sum cement and pow­dered pigment.

For sev­eral years now he’s been mak­ing casts in found molds–the pack­ag­ing for var­i­ous con­sumer prod­ucts that we usu­ally throw away–using gyp­sum cement and pow­dered pig­ment. Talk about recylcing.

Here’s a prepara­tory instal­la­tion in his stu­dio of a big piece, Array 2, that was fea­tured in the Here Not There: San Diego Art Now exhi­bi­tion last year at the Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art, San Diego.

Tom Driscoll. Array 2, detail of instal­la­tion at the Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art, San Diego. Photo: Elena Jacinto.

Here’s an alter­nate view, look­ing upwards, that lets you appre­ci­ate the phys­i­cal­ity of the components.

If the only thing keep­ing you from bring­ing this piece home is that it might not match your sofa, you could reuphol­ster your liv­ing room suite in this fab­ric, Alexan­der Girard’s 1954 Qua­tre­foil design, shown here in the “pink” col­or­way… (Image from eamesfabric.com.)

The piece that Tom brought to the party is a cast of pack­ag­ing for a com­puter mouse. Although you look at the object and say “com­puter mouse,” the pack­ag­ing was a sim­pli­fied ver­sion of the orig­i­nal object. The result­ing piece is more like a sketch of the orig­i­nal object, not a faith­ful repro­duc­tion. It looks great, but if you’re lucky you can com­plete the expe­ri­ence of the piece by hold­ing it in your hand: cool, smooth, mus­cu­lar and heavy, it looks and feels like an art­work crafted out of an exu­ber­antly col­ored piece of stone. If Jean Arp or Con­stan­tin Brân­cusi sculpted com­puter mice they might look and feel some­thing like this. This is one seri­ously sen­sual object! And–yikes!–I actu­ally have a red sofa it would match.

Thanks, Tom, and thanks to every­one else who con­tributed to mak­ing this a great day!

July 11 2011 | Categories: art | Tags: hostess gifts • Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego • sculpture • Tom Driscoll | 3 Comments »

the big project

It’s done at last, the project from Hades.

The ugly back­side of the out­door fire­place, a week into the demolition

What started out as this ugly out­door fire­place with attached bench…

The fin­ished bench, from the end.

…has now mor­phed effort­lessly (yah right) into this new gar­den fea­ture: part bench, part deck, part raised bog/planter. It’s about four by six­teen feet in size.

For the last two years my bog plants were hog­ging up the sunny spot in the mid­dle of the patio. Totally in the way. The new bench needed to have a raised bog/planter detail, return­ing some of the hard­scape to garden.

With a gen­eral plan in place we got going.

 

Some scenes from the project:

This act of cre­ation began with an act of destruc­tion. The decrepit and not earthquake-safe chim­ney came down a brick at a time over sev­eral week­ends. We saved 350 bricks that came off in pretty good con­di­tion and hand-chiseled the mor­tar off of most of them. Inside the fire­place was the rea­son the whole thing hadn’t col­lapsed already: 200 pounds of rein­forc­ing steel. At cur­rent metal recy­cling rates we got almost 30 dol­lars for the scrap metal.

The rus­tic Japan­ese tiles that I loved 15 years ago and still appre­ci­ate now

I had some moments of nos­tal­gia and renewed appre­ci­a­tion for the lit­tle Japan­ese tiles that I picked out fif­teen years ago to try to orna­ment what at the time was already a mar­gin­ally attrac­tive gar­den fea­ture. The didn’t come off the fire­place eas­ily, and the shards and even the good bits were dis­patched to the dump. As much as we tried to recy­cle, this project is not going to get a Plat­inum LEED rat­ing.

The super-story bricks removed, we were left with a long con­crete bench. I like plain con­crete as a mate­r­ial, but this bench had been formed around a wood fence that had rot­ted away a decade ago. We shimmed over the ugli­ness and cov­ered it all with wood.

A shimmed cor­ner with sup­port for the deck­ing about to be installed

The whole bench with shims in place

The bench with black paint to keep the white from show­ing through between the slats

Before adding sup­pot bat­tens for the planter we checked to see how it would look with them out­side. Ugh. Way too rus­tic, too Coun­try Home, too NASCAR. The bat­tens are now hid­den inside.

With the fire­place gone, it opens up the patio to the rest of the back yard.I liked how the zones were dis­tinct before, but the bench still serves as a gen­tle sep­a­ra­tor between gar­den zones.

The bench was poured with this Greco-Roman col­umn for sup­port. Were they pin­ing for some lost ances­tors? Or were they post­mod­ern ten years before the move­ment caught on with archi­tects? What­ever the case, we decided to paint it black to de-emphasize it. No way were we going to take on tak­ing it out!

The planter nearly com­plete, ready for the pond liner

Pond liner being put into place. This is to pro­tect the wood and allow the bog plants to sit in water. This could also be repur­posed in the future as a raised pond, or–after punch­ing some drain holes–a nor­mal planter box.

…and here it is with the bog plants in place.

A final “after” picture:

We’re going to relax some before start­ing the next gar­den project, maybe in these two old but­ter­fly chairs John got second-hand 30 years ago, with our feet up on the new bench…

July 09 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: benches • bog garden • bog plants • decks • diy • hardscape • pitcher plants • projects • sarracenia | 10 Comments »

squashed (almost-wordless wednesday)

These showed up in my office last week. Look to the left, tucked into the corner.

It’s a pair of fairly senior zuc­chini that some­one has dolled up.

I swear I’m not behind this–The slugs ate all my squash seedlings this year. But it looks like some­one else has a gar­den with way more zuc­chini than they could pos­si­bly use…

July 06 2011 | Categories: gardening | Tags: craft projects from hell • zucchini | 3 Comments »

outdoor rooms versus the garden

I’m start­ing to worry about the Jamie Durie’s of the world. I, as a gar­dener, am get­ting con­cerned that the kind of land­scap­ing he represents—outdoor spaces that are becom­ing increas­ingly indis­tin­guish­able from tightly dec­o­rated indoor spaces—seems to be tak­ing over.

Take a look at what peo­ple are doing on home makeover shows, includ­ing Durie’s own The Out­door Room on HGTV. Look at the increas­ing bulk of out­door fur­ni­ture in cat­a­logs. Or just go shop­ping for a patio set, which is what we did recently.

Some of the smaller-scale out­door fur­ni­ture we saw…

…and more of the smaller-scale furniture…

The mis­matched plas­tic sets we’ve from as long as fif­teen years ago that been liv­ing with were look­ing long in the tooth. We wanted a sim­ple table and chairs for the roof deck, and maybe some­thing for the back patio. Yes, we found tables and chairs in the stores…

Some of the bigger-scaled seat­ing, as uncom­fort­able as it is large.

Yet more. At least this set was comfortable.

…But there’s been a huge explo­sion in huge-scaled resort-themed seat­ing, much of it wrapped in syn­thetic wicker. They tell you to “think big” when select­ing fur­ni­ture scaled to the larger out­doors, but so much of this would be all out of pro­por­tion to the aver­age gar­den. In all this McMansion-scaled fur­ni­ture I kept see­ing Jamie Durie, and I wondered:

A. Who has space for all this huge fur­ni­ture? and,

B. What hap­pens to the space devoted to gar­dens when the inside starts to sprawl outdoors?

A 2010 inter­view in the LA Times didn’t raise my com­fort level. When asked about the basic focus of his recently launched TV series Durie replied, “The rea­son I cre­ated this show was to cast a wider net and reach the non-gardener. I want to encour­age peo­ple inter­ested in travel, archi­tec­ture, design, food or even fash­ion — and the show really encom­passes all that. It’s really just laced with gar­dens, which is the icing on the cake.” How do you rec­on­cile this state­ment with the tag line for his web­site, jamiedurie.com: “Con­nect­ing peo­ple with plants”?

These out­door rooms are spaces where pot­ted plants are largely inter­change­able with throw pil­lows. Planted sur­faces and gar­den beds give way to hard­scape. The domin­ion of humans, shel­tered indoor spaces, make their move to trans­form the out­doors into places where nature gets increas­ingly mar­gin­al­ized. Humans dom­i­na­tion marches ahead.

Con­trast these with gar­den rooms of the past, which seeme more about the plants, often fea­tur­ing walls made out of plants and liv­ing green things under­foot. Our generation’s out­door rooms seem to be all about the humans. For a pur­port­edly green-conscious era all this seems backwards.

Is any­one else both­ered by this? Or is it just me?

July 03 2011 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: chairs • Jamie Durie • outdoor furniture • outdoor rooms • rants • tables | 18 Comments »