Here’s the latest addition to the garden, a small chunk of the House of Hospitality in Balboa Park, a small chunk of San Diego architectural history.
In the late 1990s the city rehabilitated the building, one of many historic structures built as temporary exhibition spaces for the 1915 Panama–PacificCalifornia Exposition. The exhibit halls weren’t really intended to be a landmarks to pass into time immemorial. But the city has grown attached to these examples of Churrigueresque architecture, and the buildings are actively preserved.
(“Churrigueresque” refers to the Spanish/Catalan architect José Benito de Churriguera, who developed a fairly elaborate Rococo style of ornament that was picked up in Colonial Mexico. Bertram Goodhue and Carleton M. Winslow, the architects who worked on the Exposition, studied the style in Mexico and brought it a few miles north of the border. The over-the-top plaster details made for dramatic and escapist exposition buildings, but the details are high maintenance and can begin to fail over the years. It got to the point that the ornamentation was falling off the buildings and threatening to ka-bonk passers-by.)
“Preservation” of the building went through several phases, and eventually employed the wrecking ball. The old House of Hospitality was demolished and a new one erected in its place. To make sure that the new building closely resembled the original the old ornamentation was removed from the buildings and casts made. The new ornamentation is now made of glass-fiber-reinforced-concrete instead of the original horsehair-reinforced plaster.
Rather than landfilling the old architectural ornamentation, the interesting chunks were sold off to benefit the preservation efforts. And it was on a frantic Saturday morning in 1997 where we were able to fight off some of the most aggressive shoppers I’ve ever encountered to pick up this piece of local history. I’m pretty sure that my chunk of history comes from the tower in the photo above, from around the arches.
The fragment was really cool, but it sat in various corners of the house and my studio as we decided what to do with it. Last month we finally decided to liberate the piece back to the outdoors. Here’s its probably final resting place, attached to a long blank stretch of fence above the fishpond.
I don’t typically go in for lots of garden art or pieces of fake Roman artifacts sprinkled around a garden. But I was happy with how this relatively small chunk of Balboa Park serves as a cool focal point for a part of the garden presided over by a long, plain fence.
In demolishing the original building and dispersing its surfaces the city has managed an odd sort of preservation. Zoos and botanical gardens sometimes have the sad burden of keeping alive species that no longer exist in the wild. And my back yard holds a piece of a building that exists only in a facsimile of the original.
At the plant sale attached to the recent succulent show a couple of the society members looked at one of the plants I had in my hands and made all sorts of approving noises. “Great plant!” or “Wow, you scored!”
That was not the reaction when I got the plants home.
While John didn’t quite come out and say something like, “You paid good money for that?,” it was there in implication in what little he said.
I suppose it’s the curious gardener’s curse, getting all excited over some of the odder botanical life forms that didn’t get sprinkled on with the magic unicorn glitter that makes a plant conventionally pretty. Add to that the more general gardener’s curse of being able to see the future in recognizing the promise in a packet of black seeds indistinguishable from dust or a bag of brown bulbs looking no more promising than a heap of shallots.
Here’s one of the little plants, Ipomea platensis, a species in the same genus as morning glories. This is the young plant.
Some day it’ll grow up into something looking like this plant in the main succulent show. Very cool, but we’re missing the magic unicorn glitter.
This is a cool plant with a Latin name that would draw snickers from a junior high school science class, Fockea edulis.
Some day I hope mine grows up into something looking like these larger plants in the main show…
Here’s a more mature specimen of Dioscorea elaphantipes, another of the little plants I got. I think the form of the caudex on this one looks pretty amazing. So far these are three caudex-forming (caudiciform) species, but the inflated plant parts all look quite different from each other. The foliage, too, looks totally different one plant to the next.
Operculicarya decaryi also has a cool inflated stem…
…and tiny, dark, delicate leaves.
And then there was this one, Tylecodon striatus, a plant that even I think is kinduv ugly. Lots of brown stem and not much else. They have competitions to find the ugliest dogs. Do they have ugly plant contests? This species stands a pretty good chance of winning. And I paid good money for it!
Not all was lumpy and bulbous at the plant sale, and there actually was a lot of unicorn glitter spread over many of the plants.
Echevaria Afterglow and Sedum adolphii ‘Oranges’
Golden sedum
Dudleya brittonii
Flower on Adenium obesum, a relative of the tropical plumeria. Like most of the plants I purchased this species will form a dramatic caudex, but people seem to buy it at least as much for the flowers.
I liked the forest of plant labels at this vendor’s booth. One of them bears the really unhelpful plant name of succulent…
There were succulent-friendly pots, too. Just look at all that drainage.
And of all the pots I came so close to going home with this one by Don Hunt Ceramics. Isn’t the glaze terrific? You wouldn’t care if the plant inside was as ugly as one of my new ones!
Considering what I purchased–and especially what I did not buy–this might just be the last time I’m allowed to go shopping unattended.
It’s been a bad year for pocket gophers. I’ve been cleaning up the garden for our annual big July 4th party, dealing with gopher damage and generally getting everything pretty-like. One large spot in the front–just about the first zone of the garden visitors will encounter–is totally bare and calls out for some new plants to fill in the space. But the last thing I wanted to do is to install something new that would turn into expensive gopher chow.
I decided that I would try to place some new plants in the dead zone, but wanted to see if I couldn’t try something to deter the gophers. Gopher bait pellets are popular, but I can’t say that they’ve worked for me. How can you tell if something is working when the creature you’re after lives 99.9% of the time underground and their damage seems to come in random spurts? And I worry about the cat discovering a poisoned gopher. Gopher-killing traps are popular, and it’s the one method that seems to have the best chance at success. Still I’m not sure I’m ready to go there.
I’ve tried castor bean-based repellant. I’ve tried blood meal. Both things that are supposed to keep the creatures at bay, but I don’t know that they’ve worked for me for longer than a few days. And the idea of spreading blood meal fertilizer around native plants at the start of what’s summer dormancy for many of them didn’t seem like too bright an idea. (Let me force feed you some bratwurst while you’re trying to get to sleep…) One thing I haven’t tried is chili powder.
I admit that this is just an experiment, maybe one that’s doomed to fail. The only things I have going on my side are the facts that, 1) there’s at least one commercial product out there that combines blood meal with chili powder, and 2) you sometimes see references on gopher control using chili, usually in combination with something like garlic. Since I don’t want to do blood meal, the chili powder alone might do something.
And if chili powder might work, why not use the most industrial-strength stuff you can your hands on? It’s not pepper spray, but the local Indian grocer sells 880 grams of extra-hot ground pepper for less than five dollars–less than half the price for the blood-meal/chili mixture I’ve seen. I cook with the stuff, but a half teaspoon will make a large batch of food sizzle and scare away most of my Ohio relatives. It might work for gophers, too.
So, into the planting holes I mixed up a recipe of soil mixed with generous amounts of the chili powder, about 1 quarter cup per hole. Next, into the holes go the three new San Miguel Island buckwheats. They’re not the most exotic of the California native plants, but I was pretty happy to find several well grown examples in a local generalist nursery. If you see a business doing something good, why not support them?
Finally the plants got a healthy top-dressing of the chili powder. What I didn’t use on the new plants I spread around a few other plants that seem to be favorite gopher menu items. This is how it looks before watering it in, pretty glaringly orange-red. It looks closer to normal after you soak it in a bit.
One Big Caution: Although chili powder is a natural product, it’s still a nasty irritant. Wear gloves. A respirator and goggles might be a good addition on a windier day. I’m not saying this for dramatic effect. Wind blew some in my eyes and I suffered the expected effect–no surprise. But I also rubbed my gloves on the side of my face, only to have my face burn like a second degree sunburn for half an hour.
Will all this fail and collapse into a pile of chili powder induced flames? Dunno, but it’ll be an interesting experiment.
I’ve been MIA from reading my favorite garden blogs, and I’ve been AWOL from posting. You know the story…life happens.
At least the first distractions was garden-related.
I posted this photo months ago. It’s of the backside of an outdoor fireplace after we removed a rotted wooden fence that the previous owners poured concrete around to form a garden bench. The world has only a certain amount of abject ugliness and a big pile of it sat in the back yard. So…what to do with it?
We thought about cladding it in something, maybe some cement panel pieces leftover from a previous house project. Or maybe grow a vine. Ryan suggested stuccoing the ugly mound.
We ended up with one of the more radical solutions: Make the whole mess go away.
Well, actually, it’s been several weeks of chiseling out the old bricks, one at a time, trying to save them for some something. But hopefully not another house project using brick. I’m coming to hate the stuff. This house 25 years ago came with brick walkways, brick walls, brick patios, brick everything. Enough already! There may be a Craigslist ad in our future.
And after the brick there were a few hundred little tiles that had to be chipped off the bench. I can blame the ugly mortar mess on the back of the fireplace on the previous owner, but the tile was my own bit of youthful excess, trying to prettify a seriously imperfect slab of concrete. Paint is easy to undo. Tile is not.
So that’s been distraction #1.
Distraction #2 hasn’t got much to do with the garden. Recently I got it in mind that I wanted to learn a new piece of music, the piano part for John Adams’ wild Road Movies, for violin and piano. Here’s a YouTube video of a nice performance of the last movement, particularly of the swinging piano part. (Ignore the screaming child near the conclusion.)
The garden project should be done before too too too long–more to follow for sure. But this music is going to take a while longer. It almost makes you pine for living in a climate where the garden shuts down for six months, leaving you with little to do but indoor stuff…like baking and art and music.
(Actually it’s been here since Monday, but life has intruded on my marking the occasion appropriately… I’ll have a few more posts on the topic, stretching out the official week to a few extra days. We really should have a native plant month, if not year! Why’d we settle for just seven days?)
There are lots of ways to celebrate. Visit your favorite nursery that handles native plants. Take a hike and do a little casual botanizing. Or go on a garden tour featuring nice home plantings of California’s great assortment of native plants, many of them found nowhere else.
Today I’m celebrating with a quick tour around the garden to show some of the cool plants California has to offer.
And let me begin with the most worn out California cliché plant, our state flower, the California poppy, Escholzia californica. There are reasons things become clichés, including the fact that something can be so incredibly satisfying that you want to use it to excess. Poppies have reseeded all over the back yard, and I’m okay with that.
How can you pull up something this Perky?
Monkeyflowers are other commonly-used natives. Here’s an orange seedling from a hybrid involving Mimulus aurantiacus.
… and here’s a rich maroon version out of the same batch of monkeyflower seedlings.
Also very popular is this one, Carpenteria californica. The shrub stays green most of the year and it can flower for several months in the late winter and spring, good reasons why people like this plant and use it frequently.
There are lots of good reasons to plant natives. You can pick plants that satisfy human desires for attractive plants. Or you can choose plants that participate in the larger natural picture by providing nectar for the native bees, shelter for the local birds, or food for the neighborhood’s desirable insects. And you can also grow some of the the rare plants and help preserve them during times when plant habitat continues to be paved over.
My coast sunflower plants are covered with flowers right now, and all of the blooms are a little ragged. Old school gardeners might douse the plant to kill off the bugs eating the petals. But I’m reveling in the fact that I’m helping some of the local critters find something to subsist on. This particular flower was playing host to a very corpulent and very yellow spider that blended in with the bloom color.
The giant blooms of this Datura wrightii offer amazing sights and an intense hit of fragrance for the humans, but you’ll often also see the local critters taking advantage of its nectar.
Way less spectacular are these subtle spires of Island alum root or coral bells, Hechera maxima. I like the flowers. I like the leaves.
This little slice of woodland lives in the little gap between my greenhouse and studio, and combines the coral bells with the similarly-leaved blood currant, Ribes sanguineum var. glutinosum (not currently in bloom, or not “currant–ly” in bloom if you go in for bad puns, but of course I’d never do that to you…).
“Woodsy” isn’t the only look you can achieve with California’s plants. My entrance patio features the minty groundcover yerba buena, Satureja douglasii, with the nicely-sized and versatile gray rush, Juncus patens. This space is a little “modern,” a little “Japanese.”
And if you go in for a garden style that’s mostly “cottage,” California offers you hundreds of easy-going options that would look better in your space than their more uptight distant relatives that hang out in typical garden centers.
I leave you with a little gallery of other casual plants that are easy to live with and would fit into lots of gardens. Enjoy!
Cleveland sage, Salvia clevelandii.
Black sage, Salvia mellifera.
Clarkia rubicunda ssp. blasdalei.
Parish’s nightshade, Solanum parishii.
Blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium bellum.
San Diego sunflower, Bahiopsis lacinata, fighting the good fight against the neighbor’s iceplant.
Island bush snapdragon, Galvezia speciosa
The succulent chalk dudleya, Dudleya pulverulenta. Striking in flower and the rest of the year as well.
One of my personal favs, deerweed, Lotus scoparius. It can be a tad touchy if you water it too much, but it’s worth the bother.
Yellow, white, blue, lavender, pink…The front garden is crazy strident right now and I like it. The floral chaos is concentrated along the sidewalk in front of the house, where the plants present themselves at eye-level for anyone walking by.
If you were to check passports on the plants you’d find a number of California origin mixed in with others from Mediterranean climates. Here’s the gloriously sprawley Nuttall’s milkvetch, Astragalus nuttallii, from the California Central Coast, with a South African arctotis hybrid.
The deep violet chia, Salvia columbarae, hails from around here. The bright yellow Jerusalem sage, Phlomis monocephala, from Turkey. The chia is annual but reseeds itself efficiently. After the plant dies back, its seed heads stay attractive for several months. The phlomis starts to drop its leaves in summer’s drought but never goes entire bare. As it does that, the leaves turn more and yellowish– grayish-green in color.
To help control the floral chaos, I’ve planted incorporated a lot of each of these two plants, along with several of the milkvetch above.
The locally common bulb, blue dicks, Dichelostemma capitatum, with the salmon colored South African bulb, Homeria collina behind it.
A yellow crassula picks up on the yellow theme as you walk by.
A couple years ago I broadcast some seed of Southern California’s Phacelia parryi but never saw any make it to maturity. Just a week ago I noticed this, one of the last flowers on a small plant that has come up from that old broadcast. I probably would have missed it if it weren’t up at eye-level.
I tried shooting a walk-by encounter of the front garden using my cellphone’s camcorder feature. Unfortunately the result looks like it was shot with a, well, cellphone, and I’m too embarrassed to share it. Too bad. Gardens are best explored in time and space and not in still photos. Videos could give you a sense of exploration still photos can’t. Well, I love a project, and getting a decent walk-by sequence will be another item on my ever-growing punchlist.
I’m sure you’ve read those earnest but wacked letters sent to advice columns, letters where the writer wants to share a piece of housekeeping ingenuity that you look at and find yourself gobsmacked by the total uselessness of the advice being offered. These letters might begin something like, “Dear Heloise, you know, I never throw out corn tassels anymore because I realized that I could use them to make wigs for my pet iguana…” (I might be making this one up. Maybe not. It doesn’t really matter.)
Both John and I had read in one of the papers a while back that you could use boiling water to control weeds. Inspired one day after making a pot of pasta, remembering what he’d read, John drained the pasta water out onto some weeds that were growing in the cracks out on the patio. Not long afterwards the weeds croaked. Somehow it all seemed to make sense.
So…at the risk of sounding too much like like Heloise…I pass on this piece of gardening advice.
You’ll have to think this method through a little before applying it to many situations in the garden. This works if you want to kill everything, like in the middle of hardscape, but probably isn’t a good idea if there might be roots of a desirable plant nearby. Also, it really does take a lot of boiling water to polish off some stubborn plants. It’s not a particularly effective or method. If you salt your pasta water to the point of seawater you might not want to introduce all the salts near fragile plants. And the hot water might even stimulate some dormant seeds into growth, since the method is almost exactly the “hot water method” that’s referred to in manuals on seed propagation.
Still, if you find yourself with a big pot of boiling water that you’d otherwise dump down the drain and have a patio full of weeds nearby, this might be just the thing to do.
While out weeding I’ve been noticing that some of the plants growing up in the cracks aren’t the standard nasty beasties that have been plaguing me over the years. These are in fact some California natives, seedlings of parents I’ve planted in the garden in places where I wanted them. The seedlings are trying to start up a new generation in places where I really don’t want them, but I’m having a hard time pulling them out.
This one’s Clarkia rubicunda ssp. blasdalei. I think I’ll let it flower before removing the plant. It’s an annual, besides, so I should be able to indulge it for a month longer, to let it fulfill its biological destiny.
San Miguel Island buckwheat, Eriogonum grande var. rubescens, one of several I’ve noticed recently. I like the plant, but I’m afraid its choice of location sucks. I think I’ll be able to pull it out soon.
California sagebrush, Artemisia californica. I really hate to pull up anything with a species name of “californica,” but once again its choice of location totally sucks. So far–for over a year now–it’s avoided getting doused with pasta water or getting yanked out of the ground. But a plant in the wrong place is a plant in the wrong place.
I have to admit it. This plant, in this spot, is a weed.
In the last post I mentioned that I was making hybrids with some of my pitcher plants. The process is a little klunky, and it typically takes a minimum of three years for plants to approach maturity. So why bother?
Here’s why I bother. Below are siblings from a single cross made by Rob of The Sarracenia Project blog, some plants of which he sent me a few months ago. It’s one cross, but just look at all the subtle–or not so subtle–variations from one plant to another. Traits from one parent combine with traits from the other. Sometimes one parent dominates, sometimes you see a perfect fusion of the two. Although the plants aren’t yet mature, they’re starting to show the characteristics they’ll carry on to adult-hood.
The parents are Sarracenia Bug Bat–photos of which you can view [ here ] at the really swell Carnivorous Plant Photo Finder site–and S. Diane Whittaker, viewable [ here ]. This is a complex cross, but the species that push their presence forward most are the extravagant S. leucophylla [ photos here ] and the stern and slightly sinister S. minor [ photos here ].
I don’t know about you, but I like to just stare at the plants and observe how the family traits express themselves. Additionally, most hybrids look different as the seasons change. Right now the final three are my favorites, but I’m looking forward to how these plant will develop though the summer and fall. Thanks for the hours of fun, Rob!
Last year a visitor to the garden was asking about the little bags that were on some of the flowers. It looked like it was time to explain the birds and the bees to the curious visitor.
That was Year One of my making some hybrids using Sarracenia, one of the two North American carnivorous pitcher plant genera. Most of the plants live outdoors and get visited by various insects. The little bags were condoms against larger insects getting to the flower and delivering pollen from a different flower than I’d intended to be used in a hybrid. In the South, where most of these plants originate, the flowers are pollinated by a large bee that isn’t found here in Southern California. But I looked at the layer of protection as insurance against some other insect getting to the flower and doing its own experiments with plant breeding. I wanted these flowers all to myself.
When I was shopping at the fabric store I was a little distressed to find that the mesh fabric I was interested in was labeled “petticoat liner.” I thought I was a fairly open-minded and liberated male, but I felt a little shy going up to the counter with a bolt of the stuff, sort of like the first time you go up to the pharmacy counter with a box of condoms.
The clerk sensed my discomfort and supportively asked what I was going to do with the fabric. I explained. “Interesting idea,” she said. “I use big pieces of it to cover up my fruit trees to keep the birds out.” Oh good. A fellow gardener. This person understands. I left the store feeling much less stressed.
These bags aren’t the most virtuosic sewing projects you’ll encounter, just a long rectangle of fabric that’s been hand sewn up the sides to make a long tube. I use paperclips to hold the sheaths in place, but with a little more effort you can sew in some ribbon or string to make something resembling gift pouches that you can open and close easily.
It’s good to make at least a couple different sizes to accommodate the different bloom sizes found in this genus. This season I ran out of larger bags and ended using an actual gift bag left over from the holidays. Its white-gold color stands out pretty emphatically in the garden. If you were starting from scratch, a darker color would recede into the garden more gracefully.
These bags don’t provide protection against smaller pollinators. After doing a little more research it appears that the gold standard for material for hybridizing bags seems to be reemay, the breathable spun polyester that’s used for floating row covers in the garden. Scientific papers frequently cite Reemay bags being used in controlled pollination situations. That stuff is bright white and really stands out in the garden. Fortunately these bags only need to be on Sarracenia flowers for two to three weeks, so you won’t be defacing your garden permanently. Still, while your plants are wearing them, you might have to do a little more explaining to people visiting your plant collection…
After two rounds of judging it’s now official. My image of a chalk dudleya (Dudleya pulverulenta) is the winner in a contest looking for an image to use to promote the upcoming California Native Plant Week, which this year is April 17 to 23. The competition was held by the San Diego Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, and the winning image will be used locally in publicity and on t-shirts and who knows what else.
Woohoo! I’m jazzed!
To the right is the winning image, Chalk Dudley, Budding Out.
Down below I detail the steps I took to turn a snapshot into this final photo. continue reading »
But the city has grown attached to these examples of Churrigueresque architecture, and the buildings are actively preserved.
Here’s its probably final resting place, attached to a long blank stretch of fence above the fishpond.
