Octo­ber can be the cru­elest month. The first cou­ple of days saw a return visit from Satan’s HVAC guy. Freak­ing hot. And same goes for Wednes­day of this week. Octo­ber was the month of the big wild­fires in 2003 and 2007.

This Octo­ber also brought the first mea­sur­able rain since May, when the month saw 0.02 inches of rain. Accord­ing to San Diego weather enthu­si­ast John S. Stokes III, “[t]his is the 19th time in the last 163 years June, July, August and Sep­tem­ber have been zero/trace.” But after a dry sum­mer we got some rain, and change is in the air.

One of the Cal­i­for­nia native plants that weath­ers the dry spell best is the cof­fee­berry, Fran­gula cal­i­for­nia or more com­monly known and sold by its old name of Rham­nus cal­i­for­nica. With only occa­sional sup­ple­men­tal water the plants stay look­ing green. Give them a lit­tle more water and they can look absolutely lush.

You can buy dif­fer­ent clones of cof­fee­berry, and they do do slightly dif­fer­ent things. The most “nor­mal” look­ing plant, from a non-native hor­ti­cul­tural stand­point might be the clone Tran­quil Margerita that’s sold by Las Pil­i­tas. If you read any British gar­den writ­ing you’ll encounter the word “gar­de­nesque,” and this clone could be used to define the word. Neat, dense and well-behaved, with long, some­what glossy leaves, it would fit seam­lessly into cot­tage gar­den landscape.

Eve Case is a clone that goes back to its intro­duc­tion in 1975 by the Saratoga Hor­ti­cul­tural Research Foun­da­tion, a group that was founded in 1952 through the vision of hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ist Ray Hart­man to give Cal­i­for­ni­ans more climate-appropriate choices for their gar­dens. Com­pared to Mar­garita, Eve is a wild woman. This clone’s leaves are coarser, a lit­tle reflexed, and come fewer to the stem than with Tran­quil Mar­garita. If Mar­garita was gar­de­nesque, Eve might be called “woodsy.” Here’s one of my plants of it–probably not the best exam­ples of what this clone can look like. But it’s a real-life exam­ple of what gophers can do in a gar­den to retard the growth of plants, with this plant going into the ground after the pre­vi­ous one.

Mound San Bruno is some­where between the pre­vi­ous two clones. The leaves tend to be a lit­tle smaller, and not so recurved like in Eve Case. My plant of it is a really bad exam­ple. I put in the ground and assumed that the lit­tle drip emit­ter would keep it happy. But some evil critter–gophers again–buried the emit­ter so that the plant got next to no water for sev­eral months. If the plant had a chance to get estab­lished it would have weather the dry spell just fine, but this plant didn’t fare so well. But as soon as I fixed the emit­ter it came back, and should look ter­rific after it gets a moist win­ter to get it established.

Peo­ple grow cof­fee­ber­ries for the reli­able green foliage. But they also grow this plant for its berries. True to its name the berries mature to a dark shade like dark-roast espresso beans. I men­tioned change ear­lier, and this seems to be the month when you see the berries mak­ing their tran­si­tion in a big way.

Some plants have a mul­ti­color mix of fruits at this point in the season.

For me Eve Case is just start­ing the tran­si­tion, show­ing col­or­ful spots on the orig­i­nal green berries.

Next in the cof­fee­berry spec­trum are warm oranges…

…quickly fol­lowed by pink-inspired reds.

The final color stage is this name­sake cof­fee bean color. The birds are sure to show up once they find out cof­fee­berry is served…