My main time of having excess food in my garden is around March, when the grapefruit tree goes crazy. Now in the late throes of summer, the garden basically had herbs to share—I didn’t think the figs would make it intact in a tight backpack as I scootered to work. So here’s my little pile of offerings: rosemary, parsley, lemongrass and rose geranium. People weren’t convinced that rose geranium was edible, so I also brought a couple recipes. [ Here’s one of them. ]

I didn’t feel so bad that my figs didn’t make it in. Someone had three trees of green figs, all of them ripening at the same time.

We have another gardening artist in the building. He had some potted tomatoes and sweet peppers to share. I helped myself to one of the peppers, Doux Long d’Antibes, a long sweet pepper from up the coast from Cannes.

And here’s this glorious collection of hot peppers. I love my hot peppers, but being fairly coastal I have a hard time growing them. This gardener lives inland a few miles, so the little bit of extra warmth helped her get this great crop. So of course my haul included a few of these as well.

This was the first time that this food swap was tried at the office, and I’d definitely call it a success. You reach a point where even neighbors and family don’t want to see you headed their direction with a bag of fruit.

I’m hoping we can do this again, maybe in the late winter, when I’ll have kale and chard to spare, along with a tree full of amazing grapefruit…

After almost four months with a total natural rainfall of .05 inches much of the garden has been heading into its defensive dormancy. But a few plants seem to be reveling in the arrival of some real summer heat. Top of the list is this California fuchsia, the ‘Route 66’ cultivar, which opened its flowers to coincide with the hot weather. Some Epilobium species and clones have fairly small, gray-colored leaves, but this is one of those where the leaves a smidge larger and greener, a bright contrast to the screaming orange flowers.

Desert marigold, Baileya multiradiata, has been blooming away with the help of a little additional water, but not much.

In the bed that gets some irrigation the gingers are the current stars of the show. Coinciding with the California fuchsia was this kahili ginger, Hedychium gardnerianum, a plant that I’ve been growing since my early teens, a hand-me-down plant from one of my mother’s gardening friends. Sitting in the back yard after sunset is a treat with this insanely fragrant ginger nearby.

Of course summer isn’t all about the flowers. The fig tree is hitting its peak fruit production this week. It’s the variety ‘Brown Turkey,’ which is supposed to do well with less heat than what most other varieties require. This has been one its best years ever for me. I’m trying to figure out what went right this year, and I’m thinking the success has something to do with water. This past winter and spring actually delivered a slightly-over normal rainfall that was spaced evenly throughout several months. Also, last year I applied some water-conserving woodchip mulch over the bed that contains the fig. And John’ has made a point of watering the zone around the fig every other week or so. I hope to be able to repeat the success next year, which according to the prognosticators could be a drier than average La Niña year.

The garden herbs are doing well. A sixpack of parsley several months back is turning out to be way more than two people who use parsley once or twice a week. At least it’s a pleasantly textured plant for the front of a border.

A sixpack of basil, however, hasn’t seemed to produce nearly enough. Maybe the basil will pick up with the warmer weather.

Surprisingly the tropical lemongrass plants (both the East- and West-Indian versions) haven’t been sulking and are overproducing just like the parsley.

Adding to the pile of edibles, our neighbor Olinda stopped by with her grandson. It was all she could do to carry this giant watermelon. John was impressed with its size and suggested I weigh it: 30.8 pounds.

It’s one of the with-seed varieties that stores these days don’t seem to stock much anymore. Stunning rind, don’t you think? One of the many things we’re losing in part because of big agra.

I was hoping to save the watermelon for a day or two, until we had room in the fridge, but I was a little clumsy photographing its cool rind in detail. Now I know what a melon dropped 3 feet off a table onto a brick patio does. It stays in one piece, but you have to deal with it right away.

High summer also means the best cantaloupes of the season. This is Scooter helping us out by finishing a couple of half-melons we had for breakfast. The melon came from the local hybrid grocery-farmer’s market.

And so our summer begins: a little too much melon and a garden peaking with fruit and herbs. Life is good.

In the spirit of the “haul video,” the art form in which a fashion-conscious usually young consumer describes his or her latest finds from the last shopping trip to the mall—a video in which the word “cute” has to appear at least fourteen times—let me show off my latest finds on my recent excursion to the Theodore Payne Foundation. (You didn’t think I’d go there and only pick up a couple plants for Aunt Barbara, did you?)

This first photo, a dark-flowered selection of desert willow, Chilopsis linearis, is a plant I did not buy. But if I manage to kill of one of my existing large shrub-sized plants in a spot that receives some summer water, this plant will be near the top of my list.

I also didn’t picky up any of the cool selection of pots.

But I did buy a few plants, including:

Verbena lilacina ‘Paseo Rancho,’ a light pink selection of the usually lavender Cedros Island verbena. You might call its color a little on the pale and insipid side, but it’s different from the other clones in my garden. Insipid but different, and maybe just a little cute. Reason enough to have it.

Cliff lettuce, or Dudleya caespitosa. Cute, huh? Ever the collector, I think it might be fun to explore some of the dozens of Dudleya species that grow in California.

Coast buckwheat, Eriogonum latifolium. I don’t really know this plant—which is sometimes reason enough to try to get to know it better. It’s been described as being similar to San Miguel Island buckwheat (E. grande). To me it looks like the leaves are a little more deluxe, thicker, fuzzier.

This plant, along with the preceding two selections, isn’t native to my immediate area. But being coastal or island plants, I’m hoping they’ll like what I have to offer them. The rest of my haul, however, consists of species that grow in my county, some of them not far from me.

San Diego ragweed, San Diego ambrosia—whatever you want to call Ambrosia pumila. The leaves are really delicately cut, like some artemisias, and I think this diminutive plant really does qualify as “cute.” This is a species that’s listed on the CNPS list of rare plants and proposed for the Federal Endangered Species list. It’s weird to travel 140 miles to get a mile that grows nearby, but that’s the responsible thing to do. Our local CNPS plant sales also have offered this plant. Yanking these up out of the ground where they grow nearby would be grossly tacky and totally illegal.

San Diego willowy monardella, Monardella linoides ssp. viminea, is another local plant that’s listed by both the state and federal agencies as endangered. It’ll have delicate whorls of lavender flowers when it blooms. But like most (or maybe all?) monardellas it has intensely fragrant leaves that I can enjoy right now.

And finally, one of my favorite of the softly delicate grasses, Aristida purpurea, purple three awn. It’s slightly more coarse than the popular Mexican feather grass that’s non-native and starting to look like it’s invasive. But it moves just as amazingly in the wind, and has a delicate purple tinge part of the year, something feather grass doesn’t offer.

August isn’t high season for planting, but with this cool summer-that-never-was I figured I could get away with it. And really, here, not that far from the coast, the main issue with many plants is water.

I hate to show newly installed plants before they have a chance to fill in, but here’s the finished bed where all of the plants except for the monardas went into. These Californians should be better choices for this exposed, dry spot than some of the exotics that I had in there before. Not shown in this photo is a very happy Cleveland sage and some ecstatic purple three awn plants that I grew from seed.

I haven’t counted all the “cutes” in my writeup. I know I’ve failed miserably, partly because I really dislike the word unless I’m discussing my extremely cute cat. I will try to do better if I decide to commit my shopping trips to video.

Barbara was busy with a friend, but John and I took the trip to Sunland, the community situated near where the Valley reaches toward the Los Angeles River and meets the San Gabriel Mountains. Urban sprawl quickly gives way to large, dusty lots. Manicured landscaping starts to fade away as the look and smell of the foothills blows in from the east. What a great location for a native plant nursery.

The perky Baja fairy duster, looking a lot like many Australian plants Southern Californians are used to seeing

The Matilija poppies were past their peak, but there were still a few around

Late July isn’t high season for native flowers. The last of the season’s Matilija poppy flowers (Romneya) appeared here and there on the nursery grounds and Baja fairy duster (Calliandra californica) provided some blooms next to the parking lot. (Interestingly, according to the Tree of Life Nursery, Theodore Payne—the person, not the foundation—was responsible for discovering and introducing the ‘White Cloud’ cultivar of Romneya that is so often grown.)

Something else that was blooming: Dendromecon harfordii

Also in bloom: Salvia pachyphylla with its gorgeous pink bracts against the violet flowers

A little trail leads to the little rise of land overlooking the nursery. The sign points to “Wildflower Hill.”

This time of year it’s pretty much California Flat-Top Buckwheat Hill, which isn’t at all a bad thing. It’s a subtle and gorgeous plant. But if you came expecting Butchart Gardens, well you’d be disappointed. Of course, if a taste of wild California is what you’re after, this is your place.

Of the three retail native plant nurseries I’ve been to over the last several years, this one is probably the wildest and the least “garden”-like. There are pockets with benches and picnic tables, but the main narrative here is that you’ve stepped over the edge into wilderness. Shut your eyes and you hear birds everywhere. Look away from the buildings and you could easily feel that you’re farther than four blocks from the suburbs. (By contrast, San Juan Capistrano’s Tree of Life Nursery feels the most nurtured, tended and garden-like. The Escondido branch of Las Pilitas Nursery falls somewhere in between.)

We were staying with Aunt Barbara, and I wanted to go back with a couple plants that might fit comfortably into her garden, both in the way it looks and the way she waters it. To give you a taste, here’s a shot of her front walkway.

…and here’s another shot at the Payne Foundation grounds, of the beautiful spires of spent sage against the browning landscape. This kind of scene gives me a real sense of nature’s subtle cycles, but I had a feeling Aunt Barbara wouldn’t go for it. What plants would reconcile the deep divide?

The short list of the nursery’s many selections included seaside daisy (various cultivars of Erigeron glaucus), bush snapdragon (Galvezia speciosa), California aster (Aster chilensis) and maybe even one of the California fuchsias. Barbara mentioned loving the flowers of Matilija poppy, but that’s a plant purchase I think a person needs to make for themselves, after they’ve seen how vigorous it can be and how un-cottage gardeney it starts to look this time of year.

The winners?

The only flower on the Venegasia carpesioides that I picked out for Barbara. I wished that it had a few more.

Canyon sunflower (Venegasia carpesioides) and the ever-popular Penstemon Margerita B.O.P. I planted them before we left, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they A) survive, and B) show Barbara that there are some natives that would fit easily into her California cottage garden. What other plants would the rest of you suggest for all the Aunt Barbara’s out there? What plants would you pick that could mix fairly easily with existing garden borders and bloom much of the year?

And some of the flowers on the Penstemon Margarita B.O.P.

The upper canopy of my two plants of Aloe barberae (aka A. Bainesii). The left one is the larger, typical form. The one on the right is the dwarf form from Mozambique. The one on the left is the one affect by aloe mite.

I’m heartbroken that one of the two big tree aloe in the front yard is under attack by aloe mites, the scourge of many aloe growers. The succulent expert at one of my local nurseries just shook his head when I asked for anything that would make the mites go away. Of course I ran to the web for advice. Discussions splattered all over the charts, from guardedly optimistic to “throw the thing in the trash.” I started to uncover several references to the syndrome that the aloe gall mites generate as “aloe cancer.”

The best discussion I encountered I’ve seen so far is at XericWorld forums, where the whole range of opinions gets expressed by a number of experts. The thread has lots of photos of infected plants and of the mites themselves. Growers expressed success with insecticides (even though mites aren’t insects). Others had zero results even with dedicated miticides. Most people recommend plant-surgery, and one person treated affected areas with bleach.

A newly developing gall.

One of the galls produced by the plant in reaction to being attacked by Aloe mites.

Sunbird Aloes, a commercial firm in South Africa, the land of aloes, recommends a completely different treatment: formaldehyde applied to the gall.

There’s also an informative page hosted by Michael J. Green hosted at the Gates Cactus & Succulent Society [ here ]. The author here points out that the gall is produced by the plant in reaction to a chemical produced by the mites, a compound similar to 2-4-d, one of the main ingredients in the infamous Vietnam War herbicide Agent Orange.

Closeup of another of the galls on the trunk.

Most of the treatments are intended for spot treatments when only part of the plant is infested. But my poor plant has a major infestation all over its main trunk, and that’s been affecting the growths farther up. It’s been in gradual decline for several years, but it’s going downhill quickly. At first I thought it was gophers eating the roots, or the renters next door stopping watering of their lawn and the aloe roots that extend under it. But I’ve finally figured out the awful truth. Even the plant seems to realize its distress since it’s starting to shoot new growths from near the base of the trunk.

I step back and try to be philosophical and maybe even marvel in my grief that such tiny, nearly microsopic creatures can take down such a large plant. It’s all a part of the cycle of life that we celebrate with the seasons and the changes plants go through. Only with something tree-sized I was hoping for something that would outlive me, not a twenty-year relationship that would end in tragedy.

The end of one of the leaves being produced at the base of the plant. I’m not sure if this might be early signs of mite damage or a bad reaction to some of my draconian treatments.

If any of you have had luck with something let me know! In the meantime I’m trying a few treatments. As much as I try to avoid chemical nastiness in the garden, I’m desperate. I’m removing the galls and swabbing the infected area with a 50% bleach solution. I’ve applied the systemic insecticide imidacloprid at the roots, hoping that the insecticide won’t affect the beneficial bugs feeding on the plants nearby. Then I tried to spray just the affected plant—a big 12-16 footer—as best as I could with Bayer 3-in-1, which in addition to imidacloprid contains the miticide tau-fluvalinate. I don’t know that these treatments will do anything other than relieve me of guilt that I didn’t try what I could to save the plant.

Wish me luck.

I wonder, though, if the drop in rose sales actually led to the drop in AARS memberships and not the other way around. There was a point a couple decades back when the splashy hybrid teas and floribundas with their rose-show flower shapes started to get passed over as people seemed to move towards the nostalgic beauties of the David Austin roses, flowers that looked like old roses but had a lot of the modern rose qualities of more reliable repeat blooming and somewhat better disease resistance. Other breeders participated in this renaissance and old timey roses were all over.

It’d be interesting to sales reports for all these plants. I wonder if we, the fickle public, just got tired of them. Or at least we didn’t see anything new and shiny to take their place and stopped buying them in the same numbers. Roses can live for a long time, and really, how many roses do you need to buy in a lifetime? And for fickle gardeners, has there been anything new and exciting to cause us to uproot some of the plants we have?

I’ve mentioned before that I had over a hundred plants in the house where I grew up. My current living situation is down to just one rose. And that one got dug up from its spot in the garden and plopped in a pot this past autumn. It’s one of the plants I planted at my parent’s house in the 1970s and the only plant that I brought with me. I hope it survives the recent transplant. So far so good.

Opening Flower on Green Rose

Even that plant is the green rose, a variety dating to the early 1800s and possibly the 1700s. And the last rose I bought was one of our local species Rosa minutifolia (a rose which did not survive an attempted transplant). So you can see I haven’t been doing much lately to support rose breeders…

During last week’s plant shopping adventure I picked up three little aloes I wanted to pot up for the back patio. I was surprised by how quickly I was able to pick between all the cool offerings. Some collectors like one of everything that catches their eye. By contrast I guess I like to collect one thing in depth. Accordingly I picked an interesting genus of plant (Aloe) and then decided on three contrasting but complementary examples. I was a little bothered that two of the three were unknowns, but I don’t begin to consider myself an aloe collector. They looked cool and the price was reasonable. Decision made.

Then came time to select pots for the plants and for the location where they’d live. The local Home Depot had some functional designs but nothing that excited me. Then I was off to my favorite local nursery. Even when I set some basic rules for myself (“nothing matching,” “a simple design not detracting from the plant,” “earth tones or glazed blue for color”) I ended up with lots of workable options. Since the nursery has a good return policy I picked six to take home to see how they looked on the patio and with the plants.

None of the pots were really pricey, but in all cases they were priced higher than the plants. A lot of the profits in the nursery and landscaping biz aren’t the plants themselves, but all the stuff that goes with them.

So in the end I kept four of the pots and rejected the center and right of the largest pots in the first photo. The extra pot now houses a little division of Aloe maculata (a.k.a. A. saponaria) that I dug up from the front yard. It’s typically an aggressive colonizer—the Matilija poppy of aloes—spreading underground via long stolons. I’m not sure how it’ll do in a pot, so this is an experiment.

Here’s part of the finished edge of the patio. Clockwise from the top: Aloe andongensis, A. saponaria, unknown red aloe.

And here’s the last of the aloes, yet another unknown, nearby in its new pot.

In my teen years I did some informal study of Japanese bonsai and ikebana, the art of arranging branches, leaves and flowers. Proportion proportion proportion were big themes in both, and one of the standard formulas was that the container should be approximately one and a half times the height of the plant material. In all my pots the plants seem too small, but as we all know plants do that amazing thing: grow. Since some of these are unknown species I have no idea how much they’ll grow. But I hope they’ll come to look more at home in their new digs.

Okay, now it’s time to worry about the next big thing…

Yes and no seems to be the answer. When to empty a compost pile or bin is always a balancing act. The most ephemeral scraps have long passed the point where they’re most beneficial. At the same time, the woodier clippings are only partially on their way to being ideal compost. You can screen the compost and use what will go through a half-inch screen. Or you can take the lazy way out and dump out most of what you have and pick out the egregiously big chunks for further breaking down.

I opted for the lazy/impatient method. A couple weeks ago the pile had started to cool down, and I didn’t want to keep feeding the pile more scraps, only to have to wait additional weeks to empty it. In total I netted about twenty gallons of gorgeously earthy-smelling black gold. I’m not sure how much I fed the composter, though I know I came close to filling up the 80-gallon contraption at least twice, only to have the clippings compact as they broke down.

I emptied the buckets around various veggie plantings around the yard. At this point the compost will serve as mulch, with some of the nutrition leaching into soil as the beds get watered. When it’s time for the late summer changeover of crops the mulch will get worked into the soil and serve more as an amendment. By that time I hope some of the bigger, crunchier bits of yard waste will have broken down even further.

If you want fine compost to mix into planting mix or to start seeds, you’ll want it broken down further than this, or you’d break out a screen to take out the bigger chunks. But for how I used the compost, this approach seems like it’ll work just fine.

Once I emptied the composter it was time to start the next batch, mixing some of the leftover scraps from the last batch with the new materials. I kinduv liked this photo with it perky colors and many layers. (I think it’s worth clicking on to expand.) Still I’m not the first one to turn a camera on a compost pile: I linked back in December of 2007 to Very Rich Hours of a Compost Pile, a photo project by John Pfahl. It’s worth a look.

Facing an empty bin I suddenly felt the urge to do some tidying around the garden if it meant that I’d be generating yard wast that I could feed the composter. Stop number one: one of the towers of Echium wildprettii that had collapsed spectacularly over a walkway and against the side of the house as it reached the end of its blooming. I’d lived a couple of weeks with the plant in this condition, stepping over it as I went back to my studio. But it was time. To avoid being inundated with hundreds of baby echiums, however, I only clipped the lower part of the plant for my bin. The top, with its myriad seeds is now in the greens recycle bin, on its way to the city recycling facility. The city facility caught fire in the 1990s from the high heat in their compost pile, so I have no doubt their facility will be able to break down seeds like this.

Overall, this has been a composter: it generates no unpleasant odors, and being a tumbling model it’s even fun to turn the drum a few revolutions to keep the clippings mixed. The last few days have actually been warmer, so I’m hoping the next batch will cook even quicker than the first.

At my July 4th party I was talking to someone there with ties to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and his thoughts were that this is typical for an El Niño year. The phenomenon that the locals call “May gray” would be slow to get started (as was the case this year), and the dreaded subsequent phenomenon the we call “June gloom” would drag on longer than usual. All that seems to be happening.

The garden natives don’t seem to be worrying about the temperature as much as I’ve been. In fact the late-spring bloomers seem to be having a field day, extending their bloom, looking nice at a time of year when they don’t always. Black sage is often done by this time, but there are a few lingering flowering stems.

For stunning flowers, though, the black sage has passed the baton to Cleveland sage. Here’s the common and gorgeous cultivar ‘Winnifred Gilman.’

…and here’s Winnifred in closeup…

One of local live-forevers, Dudleya edulis, has had one of the more amazing years that I can remember. Here’s an 18-20 year old plant from above, all covered with flowers. In this photo it’s sprawling six feet across from one edge to the other.

The same dudleya, viewed from ground level as it cascades over a short little retaining wall.

The San Miguel Island buckwheat that I grew from seed two years ago, Eriogonum grande var. rubescens, is finally hitting its stride, finally looking the photos I’ve seen in books. Maybe the cooler weather will keep it looking nice longer.

Among the many non-natives that call my garden their home, this is Clerodendrum ugandense, finally perking up after looking like a twig until late in May. I think it’s been a somewhat slow start for this plant this year, but it always waits until the weather warms to look like a plant you want to keep in the garden.

The common ornamental sage, Salvia ‘Hot Lips,’ is grown for its red and white bicolored blooms. I’ve heard that it blooms mostly with white flowers when weather turns cold. In the left photo these are the only two red and white flowers I could find on three plants. The rest of the flowers are white. In the depths of winter, however, this plant is often completely bicolored, so I’m not sure if there’s any truth to this color change rumor.

Some of the plants that I worry about the most are my American pitcher plants, these Sarracenia from the South, where the daily low temperatures these days are often running ten degrees above the San Diego daytime highs. Fortunately these plants seem to respond more to daylength than to temperature, and the plants look pretty good. Still, they might be taller by now where they originate.

Cool as the days may be, one thing told me for sure that I do not live remotely near Alaska. Monday night was the grand opening of the first giant bloom of this climbing cactus, probably Hylocereus undatus. Even if it’s probably been slow getting started this year, it’s probably the best proof that I’m overreacting. Hardy to not much below freezing, one hit of arctic cold and you’ll freeze this plant’s tuchas off.

At eight to ten inches across, the only shy thing about this plant is that it only opens as darkness approaches. People in cold climes covet being able to grow plants like this—or in fact many of our more tender California natives.

That’s definite proof, Dorothy. We don’t live in Alaska. It just might feel that way these cool summer days.

We had some people over to view the local fireworks yesterday. To mark the occasion I threw together some of the blooming natives from the garden for a pastel rendition of the red, white and blue theme of the day.

White was the easy color. Several white buckwheats were blooming, and I picked some stems of the flat-top buckwheat, Eriogonum fasciculatum. Its broad, open umbels also look a bit like fireworks.

For red, the dark rose colors of San Miguel Island buckwheat (Eriogonum grande var. rubsescens) provided a reasonable stand-in. If I had some Delphinium cardinale in the garden, it would have really provided a bright scarlet kick. Maybe next year…

For blue, the pickings got pretty slim. The blue-violet whorls of Cleveland sage (Salvia clevelandii ‘Winnifred Gilman’) were the closest I could come up with. As with the white buckwheat, the structure of the stems seemed a bit like fireworks, with whorls of little tubular flowers exploding out from the stem.

The result was a lot less subtle than floral fireworks, but I liked how it marked the occasion and celebrated a Southern California sense of place.

Many of the people who showed up knew I was a plant nut, so two of the hostess gifts were colorful florist bouquets. One of them marked the occasion by including red, white and blue flowers. But even florists with all their international resources sometimes have problems with the color blue. This florist’s solution? Why not dye white flowers blue? The results don’t look much like anything in my California garden so the gift flowers and the local posies weren’t intermixed, and the different bouquets have their own places around the house.

I hope you all had a great fourth!