Archive for the 'landscape' Category
This is why I enjoy growing native plants: On a quick hike through my nearby Tecolote Canyon Natural Park there were a few plants blooming away, hardly aware it’s midsummer and three months since the last real rain. And when I came home some of the same species were blooming just as exuberantly in my garden. That’s a great sense of connection with the wild, and I get a sense that parts of my garden are participating in the continuity of nature.
The common California flat-top buckwheat, Eriogonum fasciculatum:
In the wilds (actually a reveg parking strip) with seaside daisy (Encelia Californica)
At home, one the easment slope garden, doing battle with the neighbor’s sacred iceplant
Bladderpod, Isomeris arborea, with its bee-magnet yellow flowers.
Trail-side
At home, in a mixed planting of natives and exotics
The totally awesome sacred datura, Datura wrightii.
In the wilds, the form with a pale lavender edging
Also in the wilds, the all-white form
…at home, also on the slope garden
Amaryllis belladonna (“naked ladies”) is native to South Africa, but there were two little clusters in the canyon. They don’t really colonize the canyons and generally aren’t considered invasive. They were a surprise and I wonder if someone planted them here. And at home I also happened to have the first of them blooming in the garden.
One of the ‘wild’ amaryllis
…another of the ‘wild’ amaryllis
…and the amaryllis back home, in the garden
In the canyon there were a few other things going at it:
Blue elderberry blooms and fruit (Sambucus nigra ssp. cerulea, formerly Sambucus mexicana)
Oenothera elata, a primrose that blooms on tall spires
Laurel sumac, Malosma laurinia
Coyote melon (Cucurbita palmata). It’s generally considered inedible. I tried one once. I agree.
Nestled in the dead stems of the invasive fennel is this other non-native. It looks like some sort of garden nicotiana
Your basic Rosa californica flower…
…and pods
The very cool fiber optic grass, Isolepsis cernua
And at home were some California plants that either weren’t blooming in the canyon or aren’t native to this area:
Nuttall’s milkvetch, Astragalus nuttalii, with its noisy rattle-like pods
California sealavender (Limonium californicum) the only statice native to California
Cleveland sage at the end of its summer blooming, with the gorgeous grass, purple three awn (Aristida purpurea)
San Diego sunflower (Bahiopsis laciniata), not looking great, but considering it’s battling iceplant on the slope garden and hasn’t been rained on or watered in over three months, it’s not doing that badly
The desert mallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua) could probably stand being cut back a bit, but it still has a small few blooms on its almost leafless stems. I’m really coming to enjoy the light green, slightly yellow color of the plant, a great contrast against silver or dark green foliage
If the naked lady amaryllis weren’t pornographic enough, here are some of the non-natives blooming in the garden right now. It’s August, and the flower count isn’t what it was three months ago.
Salvia Hot Lips and a big pink bougainvillea
Closer view of Salvia Hot Lips. As the weather warms, this one of three plants is showing more red with the white in the flowers. The other two plants are still mostly white
A really fragrant ginger, Hedychium coccineum ‘Tara’
Society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) is a common xeriscape plant, but it’s so adaptable that it’ll grow with its roots standing in water, as you see here in the pond. It has as much of an aroma as the ginger, but I wouldn’t exactly call it fragrant…
Butterfly bush, Clerodendrum myricoides. The flowers are nice, but people don’t talk enough about how pleasant the plant smells when you touch it
…and underneath the butterfly bush, this tidy little lead wort or dwarf plumbago (Ceratostigma plumbaginoides). It does fine in dappled sunlight with very little added water
A cactus and some succulents draping over a wall. Blooming is Crassula falcata, in the same big family as all the California Dudleya species
…and a closeup of the Crassula flowers, showing the red petals and little gold shocks of the stamens. This one’s worth looking at up close
These last plants definitely aren’t California natives, but they’re native to somewhere. If I lived in those places, I’d probably want them in my garden.
Check out the other gardeners around the world participating in this month’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. Thanks as always to Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting this event.
August 14 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape • places | Tags: Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • hiking • native plants | 16 Comments »
I now have a new appreciation for the work of field botanists.
A couple weekends ago I had a chance to work on a rare plant survey on the slopes of Viejas Mountain in eastern San Diego County. I enjoy seeing plants out in their wild habitat and the description of the task sounded downright idyllic: You go out to trailless edges of the county, enjoy the scenery, and all the while look for rare plants.
San Diego thornmint (Photo: Janet Franklin)
The plant of special interest for this trip was San Diego thornmint, Acanthomintha ilicifolia, a plant found only in a smattering of places in California and bits of northern Baja. And the plant is even more selective than that. It only grows on clay lenses—gently or moderately sloped areas of clay soil that has washed down from nearby areas. The surrounding chaparral plants for the most part don’t care for these soil conditions, so they create openings for this rare annual to colonize.
The project was to get a population count of thornmint from areas where they’d been sighted more than a decade earlier. Comparing today’s numbers against the earlier censuses would give you an idea of how well the plant is doing in the wilds.
Me, looking for thornmint, enjoying the scenery around my feet. (Photo: Janet Franklin)
Our assignment was population 51, a cluster of adjacent stands on the western edge of Cleveland National Forest, just outside the city of Alpine. (Looking back on the suburban sprawl I thought it looked a little like the photos of Area 51 taken from Freedom Ridge.)
Most of the spread had burned in one of the recent major wildfires to go through the county and was in the state of growing back—pretty successfully, since travel got to be tough some of the day. Whenever the chaparral parted and the soil conditions looked right, you scoured the ground for thornmints, which at this point in their lifecycle were mostly 1-4 inches tall, with most of them not yet in bloom.
No thornimint at this one sub-location, but lots of Palmer’s grappling hook, Harpagonella palmeri, one of the species that’s commonly associated with thornmint. (Photo: Janet Franklin)
One of the three sub-populations we looked at was completely gone. Nada. Zero plants. Maybe the fire wiped them out. Maybe we weren’t observant enough, though we fine-tooth combed the hillside.
Success—thornmints! (Photo: Janet Franklin)
But the other two populations gave us an exercise in counting plants. Lots and lots of plants. Tiny, tiny little plants.
By the middle of the afternoon we had a count, 21,015 plants. It was six hours of open slopes with no shade spent in deep concentration looking for the little plants, counting all the while.
I’ll confess: We did a little estimating when the populations got really large, and so we didn’t actually physically count all 21,015 plants. But 21,015 seemed like a solid estimate.
While it’s good to know that there are more than a handful of plants left in the wild, it’s also a little unnerving to see that they have such a limited distribution, and more disturbing that one of the three populations from earlier seemed to have vanished.
Locally common, but in the grand scheme of things, awfully rare, especially with human encroachment from Area 51 next door.
Hesperoyucca whippleii, one of the stunning garden subjects shown here in the wilds, with thronmint nearby. (Photo: Janet Franklin)
San Diego thornmint probably won’t turn into one of the great garden plants for California native gardens. But along the way we saw plenty of species closely related to those used in home native landscapes: laurel sumac (Malosma laurina), ceanothus (tomentosus and foliosus), stinging lupine (Lupinus hirsutisimmus), manzanita (one of the Arctostaphylos glandulosa subspecies)…
Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum) growing on a clay lens. (Photo: Janet Franklin)
…and one of my favorite flowering natives: blue-eyed grass, growing and blooming among the tiny little thornmints.
Usually my camera is the first thing I pack for one of these outings, but somehow I forgot it at home this time. My thanks to team-leader Janet for the use of her images from the trip!
May 14 2010 | Categories: landscape • places • plant profiles | Tags: Acanthomintha ilicifolia • native plants • plant surveys • rare plants • San Diego thornmint | 4 Comments »
Last week I participated in a trip to Miramar Mounds National Natural Landmark that I helped organize for a group of us from the local native plant society. Only a few visitors get to visit every year, so we were lucky to have the opportunity. JoEllen Kassebaum, Botanist for Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, interpreted for us.
Detail: Pogogyne abramsii
Several endangered species call the Landmark home. The best-known is probably San Diego mesa mint, Pogogyne abramsii, a plant with extremely limited distribution.
San Diego button celery Ernygium aristulatum var. parishii (the green plants)
San Diego button celery is another endangered plant found on the Landmark. Both these species live only in vernal pools. The issue isn’t so much that the plants are wimps. Give them a little depression filled with water for a few weeks and they thrive. They’re endangered because the gently rolling terrain that favors the creation of vernal pools is also easy land to develop. (Sad to say, my house probably sits on land where vernal pools were found sixty years ago.)
Downingia with annual hairgrass, Deschampsia danthonioides
The superstar of the pools last week, however, was the toothed calicoflower, Downingia cuspidata. The way it grows only in the pools creates a really cool effect when it blooms. The land around the pools is whatever color the chaparral is, but the pools become this solid mass of soft lavender.
Lots and lots of Downingia cuspidata in bloom
Downingia, up close and personal
Sorry for sharing so many of the downingia photos, but the displays were way too amazing not to!
And there were other things blooming away. Here’s a small sampling.
Owl’s clover, Castilleja densiflora, growing more at the edges of the pools and not so much in them
A Brodiaea (filifolia?) growing on the pool edges, along with one of the goldfield species
Bladderpod, Isomeris arborea, growing high on the mima mounds separating the pools
Bounded by freeways on two sides, a city landfill on another, and runways of the Marine airbase to the north, it’s an unpromising location for 400-plus acres of rare vernal pool habitat. The Landmark, dedicated in 1972, remains a part of MCAS Miramar. The land isn’t technically a preserve—national security interests could cause the land to be withdrawn back into military use. But the same reasons that make this an unlikely location for a nature destination—the freeways, the dump—also make it a compromised location for military activities. We can keep our fingers crossed that it remains dedicated to preserving these rare resources.
April 25 2010 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: Downingia cuspidata • Eryngium aristulatum var. parishii • native plants • Pogogyne abramsii • San Diego button celery • San Diego mesa mint • vernal pools | 10 Comments »
Weekend before last I took a trip out to the Tierra Blanca Mountains on the southwestern edge of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park on a trip organized by the San Diego Chapter of the California Native Plant Society.
Bigelow’s monkey flower, Mimulus bigelovii var. bigelovii
Twining desert snapdragon, Neogaerrhinum filipes
This was a trip that offered lots of up-close flower viewing. After several months with good rainfall many of us were hoping for carpets of blooming desert flowers spreading out in every direction. But the rains didn’t begin until the end of fall. The floral display was good, with flowers easy to find in all directions, but it wasn’t the gonzo hundred-year bloom that we’d hoped for. Botanist Larry Hendrickson, who led the outing, started out thinking this was close to an average year. But we found the little yellow twining desert snapdragon in several locations, and its sighting made him revise his evaluation of the year to better-than average.
Parish’s poppy, Eschscholzia parishii. As with the California poppy, this little poppy comes in orange as well as yellow.
Fishhook cactus, Mammilaria dioica, growing in a crack in the quartz rock
Desert poinsettia, Euphorbia eriantha
Greene’s ground cherry, Physalis crassifolia
Ferocactus cylindraceus flower closeup
Ferocactus cylindraceus and Phacelia distans
Twigs with wild heliotrope
The splashiest flower was wild heliotrope, Phacelia distans. If you saw a carpet of purple, it was most likely this plant.
Desert landscape with wild heliotrope
Ocotillo with heliotrope and chuparosa
Closeup of the delicate leaves of the elephant tree
Last post I mentioned my discomfort with certain plant names, including those that begin with the epithet “Indian.” Dunno. Maybe I’m being too sensitive.
Well, one of the canyons we explored was named “Indian Canyon.” Changing plant names and geological formations seems to take about as much time. This canyon is one of the more northern extensions of the elephant tree or torote (Bursera microphylla).
A fern in the desert, always a surprise. I think this is Cheilanthes parryi.
The flowers were mainly small species. Looking up the hillside the impression is mainly of white rock relieved by tall wands of ocotillos.
What’s the best way to bring relief to a day in the desert? Maybe water?
We ended up in a stream that supported a chain of little palm oases of the California fan palm (Washingtonia filifera). These trees had been burned in the past. This was maybe an accident, but in the past the Native Americans were known to burn the fronds to get easier access to the dates. Apparently it doesn’t seriously damage the plant.
Nearby these palms escaped the fire and flaunted long skirts of dried fronds. Living in suburbia people prune the dead fronds off whatever palm species they grow, and you almost never see this gorgeous effect of decades of fronds sheathing the trunk. Maybe they’re afraid that it’ll be habitat for creatures they’d rather not have. Still, it’s a great effect, don’t you think?
March 23 2010 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: Anza-Borrego Desert State Park • desert plants • native plants | 14 Comments »
The rain last weekend cleared out long enough for us to install the shade panel we’d constructed.
The fence you see faces north by northwest. Anything growing in the bed is in total shade for several months. About this time of year, though, the sun swings north, and things start to get sun exposure in the later parts of the day. We removed the termite-munched patio cover that shaded the delicate plants last fall—it had to go—but suddenly time was of the essence in restoring shade.
This is where a few shade denizens live in the bed…
…along with John’s collection of orchid cactus, Epiphyllum, that he’s amassed over the years. We also have a small assortment of hanging tillandsias and some tropicals, including a few surviving orchids from my rabid orchid-growing days two decades ago.
This weekend has turned rainy again, filling many of the holes in the shade screen with water. It’s slowed down moving the plants to their new home, but I won’t complain about the water we’re getting.
We’re already two inches ahead of the entire rainfall for last season (July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009). And last month’s rain accumulation alone, 5.4 inches, came close to the 5.5 total for all of 2009. Still we have a couple inches to go before we can even claim an average rainfall year.
This season’s rain is filling up vernal pools after several years of disappointments. Friday I stopped by some pools with a biologist to scope out a potential field trip for the local native plant society. Vernal pools are among the most threatened habitats locally. The occur on our mesa tops, areas that prove irresistible to developers because they’re flat and require less soil preparation than canyon bottoms or slopes.
Young plants were everywhere, including those of San Diego mesa mint (Pogogyne abramsii), a plant on several endangered species lists. If the rains keep up, it looks like it’s going to be a great year for them.
February 28 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape • my garden | Tags: endangered species • hardscape • San Diego mesa mint • shade • vernal pools | 4 Comments »
Ever wonder what your garden would look like if the human caretakers just vanished?
Maybe I’ve been inspired by all the disaster flicks like 2012 or the History Channel’s Life After People series. But envisioning gardens after gardeners is an interesting intellectual exercise that might help us answer that pesky question: What is a garden?
Would all the invasive species take over? Would the native plants reclaim their turf? For how long would you still be able to tell that a garden existed in a spot in the first place?
I looked at parts of my back yard and tried to imagine what would happen.
Within the first month, in Southern California’s dry climate, most of the potted plants would perish for lack of water. Some of the succulents might hang on longer, but without an extensive root system in the ground, they’d be doomed.
This little frog would be staring at a bog garden where all the bog plants have died back, once again for lack of water.
Within two or three months the fishponds would be dry: no waterlilies, no cattails, no sedges, no water for the local birds.
This pathetic patch of grass would go through boom and bust cycles, turning green with the rains, dying back to brown other times of year. Seeds of other plants better adapted to the conditions would eventually take hold. Maybe some plants from the local canyon. Maybe some hardy exotic or invasive species.
Behind the back fence of the house is this slope dominated by rampant iceplant. The the neighbor behind me and I haven’t been able agree on what to do with the space. I’ve planted a small collection of native plants to help stabilize the slope. These are species that with only once exception can be found within a five mile radius of the house, and include plants like this nightshade, Solanum parishii…
…and Del Mar Manzanita, Arctostaphylos glandulosa ssp. crassifolia, an extremely rare plant that’s on the Federal endangered species list. The neighbor, however, loves their iceplant and can’t imagine of a slope without this gawdawful invasive species clamoring all over it. The local chapter of the California Native Plant Society has prepared a great pamphlet on getting rid of iceplant that you can view [ here ]. It goes into some great reasons to get rid of the stuff:
Planted on hillsides of thousands of homes in San Diego, it has since crawled off the original site and into neighboring Open Space parks, endangering unique plants by smothering them. Iceplant provides little habitat value compared to the plant community that it is replacing. Compared to the native shrubs, iceplant has very shallow roots that do not hold soil well; close inspection often reveals gullies underneath the twisted mat of vines. After rain, Iceplant engorges with water, substantially increasing its weight. As a result, iceplant can cause the deterioration of steep hillsides by encouraging slumping – potentially endangering the house above.
For people in suburbia, “habitat value” might mean plants that harbor scary wild animals and bugs, so that’s not always the most compelling reason to go native. The fact that iceplant might endanger their property values could be more persuasive.
So, returning to my main topic, the iceplant would probably overrun most of the native plants in a very few years and form a deep pile. Once we neglected the slope for a few years and found that the mat of iceplant was starting to push the back fence over. Within ten years the fence would begin to fail and the iceplant would begin its descent into the lower garden.
These plants along the back fence would stand a chance of surviving without water. The yucca, palm, protea would be tall enough to survive an onslaught of marauding iceplant from behind. They’re plants that don’t require much maintenance, and this wall of foliage would probably look unchanged for a number of years. But the lower aloes and other succulents would likely be smothered by the iceplant.
This apricot against the back fence never looks great without summer watering, but it survives. It’s tall enough that it would probably survive the iceplant invasion. Some of the adjacent native plants do great with the natural conditions. They might not cope so well with the marauding iceplant.
The neighbor on the side has Algerian ivy that requires constant clipping to keep it next door. Within two years it would begin to establish itself in the back yard. Taller plants that might survive the iceplant invasion might have ivy crawling up and smothering them.
This raised bed near the house is where veggies and irrigated plants live. Most of the exotic plants wouldn’t make it without water. The Dr. Hurd manzanita, the bougainvillea vine and maybe the Garrya elliptica would probably hang in there, however, maybe for decades, maybe for much longer.
Fifty to seventy-five years out the house would start to fail. Plants might begin to move in. The surrounding garden space would be overgrown with the hardiest drought-adapted species. I almost never plant in rows, but the mixed origins of the species—South Africa, South America, Europe, as well as from all over California, not just local species—would clue an investigator into the fact that a garden existed on the site. The relationships between the plants would be dictated by nature, not a gardener preserving order between plants with mismatched levels of vigor.
Chances are excellent that one hundred years out, maybe two hundred or more, the most persistent invasive species would still be here. Iceplant and ivy, plus fennel and black mustard that have invaded the local canyons, would feature in the neighborhood landscape. But while many invasives bask in the newly disturbed earth of a garden or the re-engineered grades around roads, they don’t always do so well long-term. Biologists have suggested that many native plants would return to a place where they’re not being pulled out or constantly mowed. My yard might be colonized by the local Mexican elderberry, or toyon, or lemonade berry, or prickly pear. And maybe some of the plants I’ve already introduced to the yard will persist and reproduce. The restoration of nature might spread from my house and from the wild edges of nature just a few houses away.
Even after nature returns, the occasional hardy exotic plant surviving amidst the natives, along with some of the neighborhood’s plantings of trees and shrubs in rows will make it obvious: There used to be gardens here.
February 02 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • iceplant • invasive plants • native plants | 26 Comments »
On my last little outing to my city’s largest open-space park, before the recent rains, while I wasn’t busy looking at sycamores, I was heading up the trail to Fortuna Peak, one of the highest point in the city limits. At 1291 feet in elevation and with good trails all the way, it’s no serious mountain climb, but the view from the top gives you views from the ocean to the west to the first ranges of real mountains to the east.
Many of the local wild parks have signs warning you about the dangerous fauna in the area—mostly rattlesnakes. Here the sign cautions hikers about the mountain lions that live here on the park’s more than 5000 acres and in the adjacent open space.
I’m used to being the top predator almost wherever I go. Even confronting a sign like this, I still manage to don that cloak of invincibility stitched through years of never confronting anything that might challenge that sense. I’m also a pretty statistics-driven person. I might think about how you’re many times more likely to meet your end by lightening strike on a golf course than hiking through land like this. Many more people die from smoking than they do through mountain lion attack.
For me, knowing that there are mountain lions in the vicinity adds to the adventure. Somehow this park feels more authentic, more alive, more complete because of it.
It brings to mind the only solo backpacking trip I’ve taken through Utah’s Cedar Mesa backcountry. Five minutes after entering the wilderness area I encountered the only human I was to see for the rest of the trip as he was leaving. Ten minutes into the trip I was crossing a stream bed still moist from an afternoon thunderstorm. As I stepped into the sand I noticed one immense, perfect paw print next to my boot. A mountain lion had passed this way in the last few hours. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling a quick stab of fear at that moment. Welcome to the wild.
Maybe that’s a bit too much macho posturing on my part. If I were attacked by one of these cats, the first thing the authorities would do is to go after it. People would demand it. My recklessness would lead to the destruction of one of these elusive creatures. But I’m not a mountain lion’s favorite food, and these signs always seem like a park authority trying to limit their liability. Really, what are the odds of suffering any harm?
The wilds today didn’t offer anything so dramatic as mountain lions. A few other hikers were out, some of them totally fit and practically running, others looking like they were there because of a New Year’s resolution. Almost nothing was in bloom, but white-flowering currant (Ribes indecorum) provided bright accent marks along the trail to the top.
Once on top the view expands all around you. Look north and you see open chaparral and the runways of Miramar Air Station several miles away. Military installations may take up a certain amount of a city’s land, but they often manage to preserve open space in ways that suburban sprawl doesn’t.
Turn a little east and there you begin to see the ranks of foothills leading up to the Cuyamaca and Laguna ranges that divide the county, coastal region on one side, desert on the other. Yerba santa and black sage provide the foreground.
After I returned home from the hike I finally opened up the latest issue of Orion Magazine. One of the pieces, “Spectral Light” by Amy Irvine, describes a city family that has moved into a area in the Southwest as they come to grips with living in an area that is wilder than they ever imagined. Definitely got me thinking. It’s worth picking up the January/February 2010 issue to read it, or you can listen to the author read her piece or download the podcast [ here ].
January 25 2010 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: Mission Trails Regional Park • mountain lions • Orion Magazine • wilderness | 5 Comments »
I first photographed these two trees over a decade ago, when I was working on a little photo project on local sycamores. I liked the way the two branches seemed to form a continuous arc when viewed from the right angle. Today, one of the trees is ailing and has lost some branches. Still, this little branch detail remains. The vegetation around the trees has changed over the years, as you might expect, and now you’ll have to stand in the middle of a big coyote bush to view the effect. At least it wasn’t a cactus.
When I started my photo series a lot of things attracted me to the Western sycamore, Platanus racemosa: their interesting branch structure, their over-scaled and dramatic leaves, their amazing exfoliating bark. And of the handful of native tree species within a few miles of my house, the sycamore may be the most spectacular this time of year. On my last trip to to San Diego’s Mission Trails Regional Park, I paid closest attention to what these trees were doing at the beginning of winter.
These are deciduous trees, along with the cottonwoods and willows, and they’ll attempt autumn or early winter color. Often the leaves are as much brown as they are yellow.
With a backdrop of gray sagebrush and black sage you’d never mistake this for a New England autumn postcard.
Things were nearing the end of leaf-fall. Most of the leaves lay underfoot.
Some of the leaves that weren’t underfoot were underwater.
With most of the leaves now off the trees, the light-colored bark stands out. Here a tree shows off its silhouette against a dark green evergreen live oak.
Looking closely at the bare trees lets you concentrate on their peeling bark. Who needs inkblots when you can do your own Rorschach test on patterns of sycamore bark? It’s great now, but will get more interesting as the year progresses.
Yellow, brown, gray and green are the main colors this time of year in the canyon bottoms where sycamores concentrate. Here’s a final shot of the last yellow-brown sycamore leaves of the season.
Nearby, cottonwoods contribute to the color scheme…
…as do the arroyo willows.
It won’t be long before the raucously colored flowers start up. But it’s a quietly beautiful time of year before they do.
January 18 2010 | Categories: landscape • plant profiles | Tags: Platanus racemos • seasons • sycamores • those autumn leaves • winter | 10 Comments »
Another quick stop over the holidays took the form of a visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Installed at the new main entrance is this battalion of 202 antique streetlights, Urban Light, by artist Chris Burden. Streetlights like these of course were positioned at curbs in straight lines, spaced regularly. Clustering them together like this accentuates that fact, and to me makes the whole installation seem maybe just a little bit militaristic.
Arranged behind the Burden piece are some palm trees, the first plantings of what will be a large installation of palms by Robert Irwin. Irwin is the design force behind the Central Garden at the J. Paul Getty Museum, but here the trees will read less like a separate garden than plantings integrated into the art and architecture.
Their trunks echo the posts of the streetlights, as does the fact that they’re planted in a regular pattern. Also, as with the streetlights, they’re a collection of different kinds. A press release states: “Along with the palms, Irwin’s other medium is Southern California’s light, and the species of palms have been specially chosen to gather and reflect the interplay of light and shadow native to L.A.” [ source ] I love Robert Irwin’s work [ here’s a sample ], and I’ll be checking back on this installation as time goes on.
The whole vertical shaft thing becomes a theme around the Museum’s latest building, the newish Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which has red exterior accents, including plenty of red columns.
The landscaping in this part of the museum is interesting in that it uses palms or flat plantings. Virtually no shrubs. It’s a pretty urban planting that in part seems designed to give the homeless no place to camp.
Most horizontal surfaces, using decomposed granite or this Turfstone product, are designed as walkable extensions of the concrete paving. Where does the landscape end and the urban fabric begin?
Here’s an interesting gardening aside: The Museums are located on the same big city block as the famed La Brea Tar Pits, where the ground oozes black, gummy tar, a substance that has preserved bones of sabertooth tigers and woolly mammoths from the last ice age that got too close to the stuff. Just imagine trying to garden where digging a hole to plant a shrub might put you in contact with the deadly sludge! I have yet to pick up a garden book that even begins to discuss what to do with this kind of soil problem. While the park containing the tar pits has a few gooey shoe-grabbing spots, these plantings seemed free of the muck.
My main reason for visiting LACMA was to take in a photo exhibit that reassembles many of the works that were seen in the seminal 1975 “New Topographics” exhibition of landscape photography. These works in the show signaled a break from the more romantic takes on what landscape photos ought to look like and engaged a land where the human presence reigned supreme.
One of my favorite photographers in the show, Robert Adams, often combines the romantic sublime with a cooler take on what the world really looks like. To the left is “Mobile Homes, Jefferson County, Colorado” from 1973 [ source ], a great example of what his eye sees. You get the sense in his work that the human landscape often fails to live up to the stunning geography where it’s sited.
Seeing his work again prompted me to reread some of his Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values. (From this photo you can see that he takes “traditional values” pretty broadly.) Here’s a quick snippet gardeners and landscape designers might like to think about.
Not surprisingly, many photographers have loved gardens, those places that Leonard Woolf once described as “the last refuge of disillusion.” Gardens are in fact strikingly like landscape pictures, sanctuaries not from but of truth.
—from the essay, “Truth and Landscape” in Beauty in Photography
In parting, let me move from beauty in photography to beauty in art. Here’s a closeup of Urban Light, backlit by the afternoon sun:
(For another example of Burden’s work, check out the installation of 50,000 nickel coins and 50,000 matchsticks that the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art exhibited: The Reason for the Neutron Bomb.)
January 12 2010 | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography • places • quotes | Tags: architecture • architecture and landscaping • art and landscaping • Broad Contemporary Art Museum • Chris Burden • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • palm trees • robert adams • Robert Irwin | 7 Comments »
The holiday break begins with a quick trip to visit an old friend who’s vacationing in Palm Springs. I seem to bring warm weather with me: the days are in the upper 70s and the air is desert-dry. The local weather report whines about only “partially sunny” conditions, though the only clouds I see are thin white veils high in the atmosphere. Good hiking weather, I think. My friend is just a little equivocal but he finally caves. “OK, but nothing too strenuous.”
The North Lykken Trail is picked for its easy proximity to where we’re staying and its promise of nice aerial views of the Palm Springs and the rest of the Coachella Valley. The online writeup calls it “moderately strenuous,” as does Philip Ferranti’s 140 Great Hikes in and Near Palm Springs. It seems doable and fun, so off we go.
Blooming chuparosa (Justicia californica, this first image) is everywhere. And where there’s chuparosa, there are hummingbirds and buzzing clouds of bees feeding on its nectar.
Plants of brittlebush (Encelia farinosa) are everywhere too, but most are just leafing out from their long dry summertime coma. Soon they’ll be covered in bright yellow daisies. This plant usually calls dryer areas home but can be found all the way to the coast, and it’s used a lot in landscaping projects.
Here’s a barrel cactus (Ferocactus cylindraceus) with an awesome view of the city.
Maybe we’re distracted by the view or I’m too focused on the plantlife, but by about now we’re scrambling over piles of rocks, in and out of drainages, looking for the trail. If we were deep somewhere in the wilds without a map we might be getting concerned. But how can you say you’re lost when there’s a big city grid down below as a reference point? Okay, we’re not really lost, but some of this is on the strenuous side of “moderately strenous.” But not for too much longer. We find some other hikers off in the distance and get back on the trail.
With the trail securely underfoot it’s easier to take in the great rock formations and enjoy more of the views.
It’s a bit away from peak bloom but there are a few other things to see. This is one of the desert plants I’ve always found pretty interesting, whether it’s in bloom or not. Desert trumpet or pipeweed (Eriogonum inflatum) is an unmistakable buckwheat that usually has flowering stems with a fat trumpeting protuberance below the nodes of its bloom spikes. Often it’s a lot more pronounced than in these two photos.
Sometimes, though, you find a plant that produces stems that are wiry and delicate, with none of the bulging that you see here. Some botanist had some fun naming that one: Eriogonum inflatum var. deflatum.
Looking at views and plants is hard work, so we take a number of brief breaks, this one in Chino Canyon. (That’s me to the right, the slavedriver ready to move on to the next ridge.)
This is a hike that makes you hyper-aware of the edges where the desert ends and irrigated human habitation begins. Even though the plants used in this home’s landscaping may say “desert” to you, you can see that the real desert here isn’t one that stays palm-tree-green year-round.
Even a collection of dryland plants can require water to keep looking good when they’re planted closer together than you’d find them in nature. Also, some of these plants—particularly the palms—would be only found in more riparian desert habitats, not here where the homeowner wanted them. Check out the drip-irrigation octopus in the lower right corner.
But I suppose it’s hard to resist the temptation to landscape with the plant that’s in your city’s name. Now we’ll just have to work on the “springs” part to make sure all the palms have enough water to survive this challenging piece of desert.
So by now you’ve probably guessed that at least one of us survives the hike. We both do, actually, but are a little sore the next morning. That’s where the artificial springs—the burbling hot tub, in this case, in the semi-shade of the palm trees—comes in handy.
And then my liberal guilt kicks in. As a tourist am I perpetuating a double standard, expecting water and shade be provided me, when I might expect the people living here to make do with less? Okay, if I had to choose, I really could do without the hot tub. But the hike was great.
December 21 2009 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: desert plants • desert towns • hiking • native plants • Palm Springs | 8 Comments »
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