I’m sure I’m not the first to have noticed the irony: The main approach to Los Angeles County Museum of Art takes you through the BP Grand Entrance. The back way in takes you through the La Brea Tar Pits.

When I took the photos on the last day of July crude oil was still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, and the irony was heavy like the odor of tar coming from the fenced-off pits where archaeologists were working behind the museum on extracting critters and plants that got caught in the ancestral goo.

Here, junior’s ball has somehow made it over the fence around one of the pits. You could maybe rescue it with a stick…or you could wade through the tar and hope that you don’t get caught, only to be discovered by archaeologists a few millennia down the road.

We arrived at the museum an hour before it opened, via the back entrance, so we had a chance to spend some time with Robert Irwin’s Palm Garden Installation. I posted [ before ] on the earlier stages of the garden, and it’s still not complete. But by now you can really make out many more of the elements of what the final garden will look like.

There are many palm species used in the garden. A number of them are planted in a lawn, inside planter boxes that mimic the wooden planter boxes the trees were grown in. But unlike the wooden temporary planters, these permanent homes are made out of thick steel plate—the “it” material of the moment for well-financed modern gardens.

A closer look at the planter box…

In a back corner you could see a collection of palms in pots, and in this photo you can get a better idea of the kind of planter box the steel ones are meant to suggest.

Another look at some of the palms in transition… In this installation some of the plants are rotated out according tot he season. I’m not sure whether these are headed in or out.

LACMA was about to open a new facility, the Resnick Pavillion designed by Renzo Piano. As the building nears completion more elements of the Palm Garden Installation are being planted. In addition to palms it includes several of the non-palm species. These are some spectacularly variegated agaves plants of a furcraea, possibly Furcraea foetida ‘Mediopicta’—Thanks for the correction, Loree!

The way the plants have been shaped, with the lowest leaves removed, made them look like variegated New Zealand flax (phormiums) until you got close to the plants. It’s not a bad look. It’ll be interesting to see if these agaves furcraeas are kept pruned this way or whether they’ll be allowed to grow into the rosettes that agave furcraea growers are used to seeing. This is in no way a naturalistic garden, so my guess is that the agaves plants will be kept this shape. Besides, how do you mow around them without running over the leaves?

Detail: Furcraea foetida, I think

Another detail of the variegated furcraeas

Another of the non-palm species: this cycad developing this really cool cone. It’s probably something like three to four feet long.

A bench and real palms outside the Resnick pavilion…

The single most dramatic gesture is the placement of this palm with a thickly bulbous trunk that’s been planted in a tight opening that leads two stories down into a parking garage. The effect is like staring down into a North Dakota Minuteman missile silo. It’s more than a tad unsettling, and asserts that garden-making can be about more than designing pleasant, unchallenging spaces.

Say “Los Angeles” to someone and ask them what comes to mind. Palm trees would probably be one of the first things the person might bring up, even though the city’s official tree is the coral tree is and the official flower the bird of paradise. “Cars” would probably be another. Here palms and cars come together, with a short arcade of the trees lining the driveway down into the parking garage.

I’m not anything remotely resembling a palm expert, so I can’t tell you what species this is. But I show you that it has amazingly sculptural trunks.

Looking up into the fronds gives you the sensation closest what you get from many of the artworks Robert Irwin did before he designed gardens. The fronds filter the light in interesting ways, and two or more layers make things darker than just a single layer. If you stand in the driveway and look straight up the negative space of the sky reads like a bright zigzag between the delicate layers of palm.

If you’d like to compare the effect of the palm fronds to an earlier Irwin piece, here’s a corner of his Running Violet V Forms, a piece that I walk around and under at least twice a week. In this 1980s piece panels of violet-colored mesh turn light or dark, depending on the number of layers, and the mesh turns opaque or transparent depending on how the light is striking it. The mesh interacts with views of the eucalyptus grove where it’s placed. I’ve loved this piece ever since the day it went up. You can read my love story with this piece [ here ].

Artists often complain that big museums don’t pay enough attention to local artists in their scramble to show off big-name artists from the other coast or another country. This summer day LACMA had several galleries devoted to the the photographs of Cathy Opie, and work of other local artists could be found the walls of several of the galleries. But I didn’t identify any plant species used in this garden that came from within a thousand-mile radius.

Word is that Robert Irwin is designing yet another garden, this one for a new federal courthouse here in San Diego. Wouldn’t it be great if he could use some of our California species in the project? What about some of our delicately transparent plants like deer weed or broom baccharis? Or what about some of the many plants that undergo stunning transformations as the seasons change? To see an important new, high profile garden comprised of local natives would be such an amazing opportunity.

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.

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.

If you’ve never been to the garden, it divides into two large parts: a central bowl holding a maze of two colors of clipped azaleas and its surrounding plantings, and, above it, a straight watercourse that is shaded all along its length by London plane trees, a cousin of the American sycamore.

This trip I was concentrating on how the idea of light and shadow, dark and light played out in the overall design and plantings.

To experience the upper watercourse, you follow a path that zigzags back and forth. It takes you in and out of the shade and shelter of the trees, letting you experience the bright Los Angeles sunlight and how it contrasts with the dappled light the trees provide in the spring, summer and fall.

The watercourse near the top of the Central Garden

The watercourse, the sheltered core of this top garden, changes from a noisy stream with large stones in its path at the top, to a waterway that glides quietly over a textured streambed down below.

The effect of the dappled sunlight is repeated in the plantings. Dark, almost black-leaved, plants alternate with light-colored ones. In this photo it’s almost hard to distinguish the alternating light and shadow of the trees above from the dappled plantings below. It’s a little confusing, a tad disorienting. And if you’re fascinated with the effects of light and shadow as I am, you might find it a quietly thrilling experience.

Even this little detail, a planting of succulents, plays with contrasts, light and dark. It’s a little corner that would look great in a home garden, and here it further helps to reinforce the vibrations of light and dark in the upper garden.

When I first saw the garden I thought the plantings were a little chaotic. All this light and dark, all this continual contrasting of colors and plant shapes seemed restless. Small doses would look great as perky little container plantings, but it seemed way too much of a good thing. It seemed like a little English cottage garden doped up on steroids.

But I’ve been changing my mind. All this craziness reinforces the intense vibration of contrasts that you experience walking the zigzag path.

Once you make your way out of the upper portion of the garden you’re set free into the relative calm of the lower bowl. There’s no more zigzagging in and out of the shade, there’s no more quick shifting from light to dark. Still, the sunken design of the lower garden ensures that one of the sides will experience shade during most of the day. And the plantings down here, still alternating dark and light, tell you that you’re still in the same garden.

Yes, each trip here I see something new. But I also realize that making this kind of garden happen is such an extreme commitment of resources and labor.

I haven’t quite figured out a way to photograph the capital outlay it takes to keep this garden looking great. But I’d like to end this post with a tribute to the heroes, those dedicated gardeners who make this place a garden worth visiting several times a year.

Thanks, guys!

Indulge me, if you would, a quick return to last month’s San Diego County Fair. There, in the flower show going on in the botanical building, I ran across this one class they had for “most unusual foliage.” Flowers are great, but so are leaves. This little display included a few pretty special examples.

Here you see variegated milk thistle and a fuzzy kalanchoe leaf, thick and rigid like many layers of felt.

This was the winning leaf, from a succulent echevaria. Not the prettiest thing on earth, but it definitely fit the “most unusual” category.

While at the fair I ran across the display I ran across the display mounted by Solana Succulents. The place has been around for a while, but I’d never taken the short trip to north county to check it out. This past weekend I took John up for a quick visit.

Heading north, once you clear the thin atmosphere of Del Mar, you come upon a chain of fun, funky little beach towns on the way up the coast. A visit to Solana Beach and neighboring Encinitas will give you some comfort that the 1960s never went away very far, though they did get a little reinterpreted and gentrified.

Solana Succulents occupies the outdoor spaces of a little house that’s been converted into a shop. I liked its tight, funky feel. You’ll find little succulent gifts, bigger landscape specimens, as well as some wild curiosities that’ll probably keep a connoisseur happy. With so many pointy, sharp plants around, this is no place to take your toddler. But for two people who find succulents totally cool it was a great way to spend part of an afternoon.

Here’s a brief gallery of some of the hundreds of neat plants there. I tried to get the names, but a few plants weren’t labeled. And beyond that there were some unknowns mixed into the offerings.

A cool red aloe or gasteraloe hybrid.

Another aloe or aloe hybrid with cool red summer coloring.

Aloe andongensis, a species with gentle spots and a distinct gold aura.

The fuzzed flower buds of Aloe tomentosa. The plant is a pretty basic green aloe, but these woolly flowers make up for the ordinary plant.

Espostoa lanata: Was it Freud who said, ‘Sometimes a succulent is just a succulent?’

One of the variegated forms of Agave lophantha, a nice little spiky bundle not much over a foot across at this point.

A nice boxed euphorbia specimen.

Euphorbia polygona, one of many Old-World euphorbias that mimic New-World cactus.

And a real New World cactus, one of the weirdly blue-colored species in the genus Pilosocereus. The owner needed to look up the exact species, but he said it wasn’t the more common azureus.

I really flaked on the name of this one. Maybe one of the stapelia relatives? EDIT 7/16/2010: Thanks to Candy, who has identified this plant as Euphorbia pugniformis f. cristata.

There was this short little plant with a bulbous, succulent base. It had fewer than a half-dozen leaves. But what stunning leaves. I thought they had a great gold-dust effect to them. And then John suggested that I wipe the potting soil off the leaves. Okay, no more gold dust effect, but still a great plant. Not all succulents are squat, spiny, leafless little auditions for a horror movie. This plant is proof. But I think a lot of the other plants I’ve shown are further proof of that.

I’ve talked enough about the cool designs. Here are some fairly cool plants. Some have been around for centuries, others are fairly new to our gardens. Hopefully the new introductions are fairly tame, otherwise you might be seeing here the new exotic weed pests that’ll be keeping us busy for the next hundred years.

Ptilotus exaltatus 'Platinum Wallaby,' a plant that has been showing up in nurseries this past year.

Oh look: Another noteworthy plant, another ptilotus, Down Under.

Christmas in July? The Ecke poinsettia ranch folks who supply a huge percentage of the world’s poinsettias were showing off this new white variety, Polar Bear. My county used to be poinsettia central for the world, but cheaper production costs have driven a lot of that to Central America.

Chartreuse, green, white and near-black: Lobularia Snow Princes, two kinds of ipomoea, with Coleus ColorBlaze Alligator Tears.

Geranium crispum, variegated form. This is one of many foliage plants that have flowers that don’t seem to add much to the foliage.

Gosh, yet another noteworthy plant with a ‘Noteworthy Plant’ sign next to it. (Kinduv reminds me of those turnoffs labeled ‘scenic viewpoint’ on highways through spectacular landscapes, as if you needed the sign to tell you you were looking at something scenic or—in this case—noteworthy.) This was labeled a ‘Pine Needle Fern,’ but not with its species name. My quick web trawl didn’t turn up much with that name, only a fact that it’s considered one of the more primaeval kinds of fern. Very cool, whatever it is.

Rice flower, Ozothamnus diosmifolius, a plant drought-tolerant selection that, like the ptilotus plants, comes from Australia. You’d think they’d have run out of their notable plant signs by now.

Mention the word succulent and people have visions of a fairly desert-ey landscape. Here’s a display by Cordova Gardens that instead comes off as a really lush flower arrangement.

Deuterocohnia brevifolia, a fairly amazing succulent. (Edit: this is actually a bromeliad!)

Mammilaria parkinsoniana, a fairly amazing cactus.

A nice mixed planting of cactus and succulents at the Solana Succulents display.

A gorgeous purple prickly pear Opuntia Santa Rita, part of the Solana Succulents exhibit.

Agave victoria-reginae, a normally prim little bundle of green and white botanical joy. Check out bloom stalk in the next photo, however…

OMG, when that thing blooms, stand back! This little two-foot plant has probably produced a twelve-foot inflorescence. How do you design with this plant? Is it a foreground plant? Or something for the background? Not a bad quandary to be in.

Let me share my favorite garden design from this year’s San Diego County Fair. If I tell you that I grew up on Sunset Magazine and that I frequented the Sunset demonstration gardens at the Los Angeles County Arboretum in the 1970s, you can see why a garden like this pushes my buttons. This space my North County’s Akana Design really embraces the Sunset aesthetic of combining modern design with livable outdoor spaces. (Ignore the ugly black shade cloth background that’s been draped over the plastic white lattice that the fair provided for their displays.)

I’ve been known to grouse about outdoor spaces where the garden has been sacrificed at the expense of adding yet another room to a McMansion, but the plants in this design seemed to be integrated into the results and not so much an afterthought. This space features a compact eating space on gold-colored decomposed granite, with a whiter stone mulch used for most of the growing areas. Two simple wooden walls provide some protection, at the same time they define the space and provide a backdrop for plantings.

A single lounge chair sits off to one side at the end of a DG walkway. A stone in front serves as an ottoman. When the chair is stored indoors for the winter, the ottoman stone could serve as an accent at the end of the little path. The seat is surrounded by fragrant rosemary and cleveland sage, as well as plants that provide visual interest and variety.

This detail shows some of the plants used to provide textural interest: lomandra, phormium, aeonium, tea tree (I think), and—uh oh—Mexican feather grass. Well I had to find something about the plantings to critique. Might I suggest using the native Aristida purpurea instead? Sorry to quibble too much. Overall I thought it was a really successful presentation.

Among the other displays, Pond-Ology featured a little yoga deck in the middle of a tropical paradise. It pushed my Sunset buttons a bit too.

I’m not into making a zoo of captive angels in my back yard, but I thought this menagerie by Blue Pacific Landscape Design was well done. I especially like how the color of the blue pots echoes through the plantings around them. The cascading pink geraniums provide nice contrast. Pots full of blue flowers would have been way too matchy-matchy.

At this garden show, as at many others these days, one of the big themes is green walls. Anandascapes incorporated this wall into a pretty modern display.

Take four green walls and attach them side to side and you have a green obelisk. The Good Earth Plant Co. and Greenscape Building provided this 3D version of the flat green wall.

You could walk around it and look in detail at the various succulents that made the planting possible.

Living in a near-desert I’m still not convinced that green walls make a whole pile of sense. Why not plant an easy-care vine instead? But you’ve got admit they’re spectacular, and “spectacular” works well at a noisy county fair with lots of distractions.

In my next and final post from the fair I’ll show you some of the things that interested me most: Plants!

Are gardeners terrorists? You’d think so looking at the sign posted outside the San Diego County Fair.

This gardener took advantage of the “Furlough Friday” deal for state employees (free admission!) and checked out the offerings of the fair for the first time in half a decade. I guess the rationale of free admission was to get more people in the gate to partake of the rides and stunt food—you know, the bizarre offerings that often involve impaling something on a stick, sticking it in batter, and then deep-frying it. I searched all over for the worst of the worst stunt food but the best (worst?) I could find was a stand offering “fried Twinkie lattes”—really nothing more weird than a vanilla latte—and this trailer selling chocolate covered bacon. Neither dish really seemed to be deep fried, so I guess they’re getting with the health-conscious kick…

My main destination was the outdoor garden displays, where the main point of each display seemed to be either attracting new customers to the landscape firms there or—in the case of the non-profit institutions and garden clubs—education. The fair’s never been about landscape design as a high art, but there’s always interesting stuff there.

If there was theme to the displays this year, “edibles” seemed to be the word, keeping up the health-conscious theme of the not-deep-fried chocolate-covered bacon. This display by the San Diego Botanic Garden in Cooperation with the San Diego Water Authority won the prize for the best edible landscape. The display also won an award for the exhibit that arranged plants in a way that demonstrated “good taste.”

It featured food crops and ornamentals of all sorts as long as they fit into the purple-pink-green-silver palette, and demonstrated that a garden with veggies could be as pulled together as any other garden. In its combination of cool-weather crops (such as purple cabbage) with warm-weather ones (like basil and squash) it was also a reminder that this is a garden show than a real-world garden.

San Diego Botanic Garden display: A fence row planted with ornamentals, kale and squash.

Here are a few more photos of displays that played with the edibles theme:

Artichokes and olive trees in a space designed by Lane McClelland and Laurie Roberts.

Ornamentals and veggies hanging in burlap, also in the McClelland-Roberts garden.

Grow what you love—the entrance to the same McClelland-Roberts garden, featuring corn, chard, chives and other edibles.

Wendy Slijk’s display showed off this hanging pot with squash.

Home Depot’s entry featured a little grape vineyard.

A scarecrow guarding veggie beds in a display by the San Diego Horticultural Society.

In addition to edibles, drinkables got to play a role, as in this display of Agave tequilana by the Palomar Cactus and Succulent Society. This might not be one of the great landscape agaves, but how can you fault a plant that is the source of tequila?

Erigeron glaucus cv. Bountiful at the Tree of Life Nursery display.

I kept my eye out for uses of native plants, but there were almost none. Part of that is probably because the majority of the charismatic flowering natives do their thing at the end of winter or during spring. The one main exception was a small display by native plant specialist Tree of Life Nursery.

Brittons chalk dudleya and red monkeyflower in the Tree of Life Nursery’s display.

Inside, in the adjacent exhibits building, there was a flower show going on, with roses and dahlias and gladiolus and lots of cubbies with flower arrangements. And that’s where I saw a few more natives, where they had a category for cut native flowers. So there was more monkeyflower here, along with one of the bush poppies (Dendromecon) and some matilija poppies.

Really, who doesn’t love these matilijas? The last photo is of one of them. Next post I’ll share some other sightings.

When I was talking to a botanist a couple months ago and she recommended Oscar F. Clarke’s Flora of the Santa Ana River and Environs : with references to world botany, I was expecting the book to be a nicely assembled writeup of a watershed a couple of hours to the north. As such it’d be a good writeup of species I’m using to seeing in my area seen through the filter of someone working in the Los Angeles/Orange/Riverside County region of Southern California.

The volume, which the back cover says “represents a culmination of a lifetime of natural history study,” lives up to my expectation of being a useful guide for studying the plants of the area. But in addition it ends up being full of all sorts of interesting little details that breath life into what might otherwise be an inert textbook. It’s a rich book, not a dense one.

(Edit, July 13, 2010: In addition to Clarke, the book has three co-authors who should be named: Danielle Svehla, Greg Ballmer and Arlee Montalvo. Thanks to all of you for such a great book.)

For example, take some of the details in the writeup on our state flower, the California poppy. Last year I decided that I’d replace my plantings of the typical garden-orange strain with the lower-growing yellow strain that you find locally. The first season’s plants germinated and grew well. This year I was fully expecting the plants to return in profusion, coming up both from last season’s roots and the seeds that the plants dropped. Instead, most of this year’s crop were the big orange garden strain. What went wrong?

Clarke’s description of the species concludes with a sentence that helped answer my question: “Local native populations produce seeds that remain dormant until exposed to winter/spring conditions in combination with smoke or other unknown factors, while populations from central California and commercial cultivars produce non-dormant seeds.” While it didn’t explain what I need to do to get these plants to naturalize, it at least explained that I was battling against some unknown biological forces. I felt better in my failure.

The illustrations in many manuals can be pretty poor, but that’s not the case here. All throughout the book brims with illustrations. Here are some of them from the poppy description. You’ll find closeups of diagnostic plant features, usually with the graphic of a penny for size comparison’s sake. And often you’ll see shots of entire plants. Each writeup also has a little rectangle with a graphic of a human standing next to the plant being described. The idea is that the box will tell you a lot of details at a glances—stuff like size, growth habit, structure of the flower, number of petals, the position of the ovary, and whether the plant is an annual or lives longer. After having stared at the graphics for a couple weeks I still find it a tad confusing, but if you’re good at decoding images instead of reading about the details, this might be just the thing for you. Another minor grouse is that typeface is almost too small for aging eyes like mine. Of course a bigger type would probably result in a larger, less field-friendly manual. But those are minor quibbles.

Back to some plant trivia: About California sea lavender, Limonium californicum, shown here getting ready to bloom, Clarke observes that “The only native California member of this genus, [it] occurs primarily along the immediate coast. It is salt-tolerant (halophytic) and excretes salt on its broad, leathery leaves.” This detail is important to me as I decide which plants to target with the leftover water I’ve gathered from showering. Instead of tossing the soapy, shampoo-spiked water, I’ve been trying to figure which plants wouldn’t mind standing in the second-hand liquids. This species seemed happy enough with the water last year, and the writeup gives me extra confidence that I’m probably not doing it any harm.

Life in the Santa Ana River Basin these days is as much about invasive plants as it is native species. Accordingly the book has a number of exotics mixed into the 900 species it describes.

Telling grasses apart can be one of the more difficult things to do in the field. The detailed descriptions and photos help ease that chore. Here are the illustrations for panic veldgrass, Ehrharta erecta, a really bothersome weed in many gardens, mine included.

The weed descriptions, like those for the other plants, have little trivia bits woven through them. About panic veldtgrass you learn that “Livestock find it highly palatable, especially chickens and rabbits.” That sentence might not mean a lot to you, but it explained something I’ve been noticing.

Scooter, the cat, always shows a lot of interest when I’m in the garden, and is most helpful when I’m in the middle of pulling up weeds. And of all the weeds, this is the one that the cat really goes crazy over, often nudging, clawing, fighting you to get to munch on a few blades of the stuff.

Ah, yes, it all suddenly makes sense now: “livestock,” “highly palatable.” Eureka! So to Clarke’s list of chickens and rabbits we can add another species: cats.

So yes, this is a book with lots of information about plants of the Santa Ana region. But it ended up telling me as much about what’s going on in my garden. Very cool.

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!