Happy January Bloom Day, folks!

Lots of pictures this month.

Okay I cheated, with some multiples of the same plant mixed in. But a big dose of perky orange in the dead of winter seemed morally acceptable.

I guess it’s a typical Southern California January, with some ever-bloomers mixed in with the winter-flowering plants or last of the fall plants. You can hover over an image above to get the name, but here’s a quick rundown on the January backbone plants.

Some plants that say “California” but are from other places:

Aloe arborescens

S. Hot Lips

Protea ‘Pink Ice’

Lavender

Arctotis

Oxalis purpurea

…and the really noxious

Oxalis pes-caprae

California natives:

Coreopsis maritima

Salvia ‘Bee’s Bliss’

Salvia spathacea

There are also a few other things in bloom that didn’t make it into the mix, things like ‘Dr. Hurd’ manzanita, but you get the idea…

Thanks as always to Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. Check out the January post to see what the rest of the world looks like in the middle of January [ here ]

A couple folks asked about whether that tshirt with my dudleya photo would be available via mail order. The answer is YES, but our local native plant society isn’t set up up for any fancy online transactions and things will have to managed the old-fashioned way, by check. If you’re interested drop me a line at james999@999soenyun.com (removing every instance of “999” in the address) and I’ll put you in touch with the person handling the transactions.

The cost shipped to your door is $18, US sales only. All proceeds go to a worthy cause, the San Diego chapter of the California Native Plant Society. Last I heard the extra larges were close to all gone, but small, medium and large were still in fairly good supply.

The morning of the hoist: The exterior has just been complete, the clapboarding nailed, the chimney set.

The worksite around the Fallen Star. Yes, those are trees with autumn-colored leaves.

The house and the big hydraulic crane that will launch it.

One of the film crews settles into place

The worksite with the extended crane

The audience

The house 80+ feet in the air, being lowered onto its finale perch

And we have contact…

A closer view of the landed house

And here’s a Youtube video of the big hoist from the Jacobs School of Engineering, the school that is housed in the structure that the house landed on:

And another from a different viewpoint, more dramatic than the first. The first two minutes are the best:

And for you total junkies, yet another vantage point. Once again the first part is the most dramatic.

The piece a couple mornings later, after the removal of the cranes…

There’s still more work to do before the grand unveiling, a TV and fireplace to install inside, a garden to plant outside. But this was definitely a big milestone. I’ll post more once I get up on the roof and have some closeup views.

In this photo Lt. John Pike of the police force of the University of California, Davis demonstrates the proper way to apply pesticides and fungicides in your garden. The lieutenant’s top tips:

• Wear gloves! The stuff is gross. Keep it off your hands.
• Wear long pants and long-sleeved shirts. You don’t want the nasty stuff on you!
• Pick a day with little or no wind. You want to control exactly where the poison goes.
• Apply from the distance recommended by the manufacturer. The product label should tell you. Too close, you waste material. Too far, you risk ineffective coverage and your treatment won’t have the desired effect.
• Wear eye protection. I know, I know. I don’t have the visor down in the photo. Silly me. Don’t do as I do, just do as I say!

The riot-gear helmet is entirely optional, but a respirator–or at least a mask–is a really good idea. Happy spraying!

For other parodies of last Friday’s UC Davis pepper spray incident check out:
[ tumblr ]
[ Huffington Post ]
[ The New York Times ]

And why stop there? Invite Lt. Pike over to tomorrow’s Thanksgiving pictures! Entice him into your vacation pictures with your ex! And what better way to improve those musty family pictures with the siblings you’re not sure you’re really related to?

Probably the most remarkable thing blooming is this, a variegated mutation of Salvia divinorum.

I noticed the variegation a few months ago and will try to propagate the part of the plant with speckled leaves. A sport partially lacking chlorophyll would be at an evolutionary disadvantage out in the wilds, but gardeners–We’re weird–we’ll propagate these runts just because they’re pretty-like.

This is probably the most dramatic of the alligatored leaves. Even though many leaves are variegated, you can see that it hasn’t stopped those parts of the plant from flowering.

Enough of the leaves, this being Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. (Thanks as usual to Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting this monthly meme on every fifteenth of the month.) Let’s take a look at the flowers.

The blooms are fuzzy up-close, like some other salvias, including the Mexican bush sage, Salvia leucantha, a dependable low-water plant that’s common in Southern California and beyond. This blossom looks very friendly in a lisping, come-hither, snaggletoothed sort of way.

Unfortunately if you’re a gardener under the age of 18 in California you can’t purchase this plant. In some other states owning a plant can buy you three years in prison. I’m sorry but all this sounds ridiculous. People sometimes complain about a government being a “nanny-state,” but many of the states where you hear that claim being made loudest are ones that are likely to ban this plant. Hey, look at the cool flowers! Look at the the cool leaves! This is obviously a plant with ornamental value, just like Gramma Olive’s opium poppies.

Flowers are scarce all around, but if you look deep enough into many plants you’ll see a few hardy holdouts still in bloom. And with winter on the way, there are a precocious winter bloomers starting to do their thing. This one’s germander sage, Salvia chamaedryoides. As far as I know, this plant the rest of those featured here are perfectly legal to grow everywhere.

Another salvia, the common but cool “Hot Lips”

Oxalis purpurea, white form

Paperwhite narcissus

Galvezia speciosa ‘Firecracker’

Galvezia juncea, a species from near-by in Mexico, a member of the snapdragon family.

And here’s another local with a name change pending. Was: Isomeris arborea; Now is: Peritoma arborea. Gack.

A rare local native, something I’ve known as Coreopsis maritima. But in the new Jepson manual all the California species we knew as coreopsis have been moved to the genus Leptosyne. Leptosyne maritima–that one’s going take a while getting used to. (Sorry for the ragged half-flower. That is all that survived the weekend rains.)

Sphaeralcea ambigua, the first blooms in a while

An orange epidendrum. I think you saw this last month

Gutierrezia californica–a wispy plant with almost no leaves and a delicate cloud of yellow flowers

San Miguel Island buckwheat, Eriogonum grande var. rubescens, definitely not peaking…

Euphorbia Diamond Frost–This hit just a few years ago and everyone was talking about it. Now…almost nothing. Interesting. Gardeners aren’t fickle, are they?

Desperate, flower-starved times call for desparate measures, in this case the macro lens for these tiny creeping thyme flowers…

Gaura lindheimeri

Camellia Cleopatra, yes it was in bloom in October for that month’s Bloom Day

And, finally, a few shots of everyone’s favorite this time of year, Protea Pink Ice. Happy Bloomday!

The house being built on the ground, with its eventual perch being readied high on the roof of the building behind it.

Here a few random construction photos that show the development of part of Do Ho Suh’s Fallen Star installation that I posted on a few weeks ago [ here ]. I’m sure there are practical reasons for building the little house on the ground before hoisting it seven stories into the air to its perch on the side. But having it take shape at eye level has been interesting and exciting, and it’s a great way to involve future viewers of the artwork in the piece as it evolves from yards of concrete and stacks of steel beams.

As I view the piece come into being I can’t help but imagine being the construction firm approached to construct this little one-room building: “We want you to build us a house. Only much of it’s going to cantilevered over the edge of a tall building. And the house itself has to be built with a strong rake to the foundation, making the whole house slant at a serious angle…” A project like this doesn’t come along every day, and I’m sure somebody had some serious fun getting to work on it.

The steel fram takes shape. Here you can see there’s lots more engineering in this project than most houses that nest on the ground.

Framing for windows being installed…

Sheathing going on…

The sheathed house, crooked on the horizon, at sunrise…

After the building wrap…

Foggy morning with the wrapped house, still crooked on the horizon…

Sheathing going up on the roof…

Shingles now in place…

At this point the project has progressed to where stuff is happening on the inside, but it’s a mystery to outside viewers. The next big milestone will be when the exterior sheathing with its bouncy blue color shows up. Stay tuned.

Aerial rendering of the project location showing the rooftop with the crooked house and garden.

I touched base with the Stuart Collection folks about the “garden” around the house. Yes, it’s going to be live plants. The intent is to make the garden look a bit like the house, as if house and garden are little slice of Provincetown that have flown and and been wedged into the California fabric.

There are probably thousands of Southern California houses with clapboard siding and gardens with hydrangeas and roses that would be good models for what the artist is trying to achieve. As much as these gardens require lots of added water and attention to get them to thrive, the real stunt will be to try to pull off the effect when the house and garden will be elevated seven stories into the air. The collection is working with a landscape architect to come up with a mix of plants that will represent the botanical displacement but also be plants that will survive life on the edge, exposed to the elements.

It shouldn’t be that much longer before this house gets lifted into place. I suspect they’ll be using cranes and not a giant flock of balloons, even though several of you have commented on how much the plans for the house make it out to be a dead-ringer for the flying house in Up. More pictures to follow…

This santolina sums up the state of the garden pretty well. Peak flowering was in the past or hasn’t started up yet, but I’m enjoying where it’s at right now. This particular plant bloomed four months ago, but I liked the dead flower heads so much that I’ve left them on the plant.

California fuchsia, Epilobium ‘Route 66′ peaked about 6 weeks ago.

We actually had some significant rain–0.4 inches–last week. It was appreciated, but it also knocked off some of the plant’s flowers.

But it still looks pretty good. Here it is giving a little shade and color contrast to a chalk dudleya.

Bladderpod (Isomeris arborea) is a reliable bloomer for the times of year when most of the other natives have stopped blooming. It’s never covered with flowers, but there always seem to be a few on each of the ends on its branches.

Not peak monkeyflower season, either. This is all that’s blooming right now. One flower.

Corethrogyne filaginifolia is another reliable plant for this difficult time of year.

And you can always count on the grasses. This is purple three-awn, Aristida purpurea.

Among the non-natives this stapelia (S. gigantea) pretty much owns the garden with its big floppy flowers that smell of dead meat. Charming, disgusting and weird. I don’t apologize for it anymore.

You know things are slow when you show pictures of rosemary blooming. I’ll apologize for that, however.

But there’s a ltitle bit more…

Oxalis bowiei

Don’t put too much stock in plant names. White flowers, species name of Oxalis purpurea…

Salvia Hot Lips

Clerodendrum myricoides, butterfly bush

A pink Gaura lindheimeri that either volunteered or came up in a spot where I forgot planting it. That happens sometimes…

The ever-blooming orange epidendrum, an orchid that’s definitely not a prima donna assoluta

Camellia Cleopatra, one of the garden’s clear signals: fall is here

And there are a few other things:
Yellow waterlilies
A red aloe I’m forgetting the name of…
Red epidendrum
Gaillardia pulchella
A big magenta bougainvillea
A somewhat pampered orchid: Vanda roeblingiana

Hopefully autumn is bringing great things to all your gardens. Ongoing thanks to Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. Take a look at who’s got what blooming all around the world: [ link ]

[ Plant list ]

And a special bonus: You can have your very own CNPS teeshirt imprinted with my Dudleya pulverulenta image:

Quantities of plants–and teeshirts–are limited. Come early for the best selection.

We’re just back from the beach, where we tried to catch some of the glowing red tide that people were so excited about last night. Unfortunately we’d missed it at it peak, but I got a few general shots of how it looked.

These were all from La Jolla Shores, where the glow of streetlights and ambient glow from houses all around didn’t help see the subtle effects. There actually is a tiny little blue shimmer in this one, in the wave breaking towards the left of the frame.

And then there was this one with no glowing waves at all, but I liked the neat effects of a lens left open for 30 seconds…

…another one with a subtle glow…

…and a final one.

Check out the photo from last night in a local news story [ here ]. What we saw tonight was cool, but I’m sorry I couldn’t make it out to the water last night.

This particular garden, a long, rectangular space with a central water feature 162 feet long and 4 across, holds the distinction of being “…the oldest ornamental garden in the Western World, with the additional value of never having ceased to be a garden during the last seven centuries” (Casares-Porcel et al. in Delgado et al., 2007).

I enjoy creative research of this sort, and I thought I’d share some of the cool things that I’ve been finding out.

Today, the garden looks like this:

Peter Lorber. Gartenanlage Generalife, Alhambra, Granada, Spanien eigene Aufnahme, Erstellungsdatum 22.Juni 2006. Photo via Wikimedia.

But like any garden that’s been a while it’s undergone some major changes. The plants, for sure, have gone through a few generations and some major changes. For example, the big splashy bougainvillea that you see behind the column capital on the right side would in no way have been part of the original garden. The Patio was started in the later thirteen century. Bougainvilleas weren’t described until the 1700s, and didn’t make it to Europe until later. And the big splashy fountains are generally bogus to the original as well, having been added in the 1940s or early 1950s by architect Francisco Prieto Moreno. (EDIT: Sep 19: While the fountains are not original, their appearance pre-dates Prieto-Moreno’s work on the garden. I’m still researching when they appeared.)

But the one really mind-blowing discovery that came about in this garden was the result of some excavations done in the wake of a catastrophic fire that consume one of the adjacent structures. Archaeologist Bermudez and his team dug and dug and didn’t encounter the original soil line until they got 70 cm. beneath the level of the original pavement. And his and others’ research began to paint a picture of a garden with planting beds sunken deep between the walkways and water features.

Part of me–the gardener side–says “so what.” Maybe they just dug out the old icky soil and added a new layer on top. But excavations in Seville at the gardens of the Alcázar have found garden beds with stucco decorations on their sides. Others had fresco paintings. So that pretty much convinces me that they weren’t going to all that bother just to bury their ornamental garden bed decorations under a pile of garden soil, and it reveals that these were part of a garden tradition where they had lowered planting beds at least some of the time.

Below is a photo off Flickr of one of those gardens at the Alcázar, the Patio de las Doncellas, the Courtyard of the Maidens, that’s been restored to its original low soil surface. In gardens today you’re used to seeing raised beds, or garden paths near the level of the surrounding plantings. But this? Wow. (There were probably fewer personal injury attorneys around in medieval Spain, so I doubt the ropes at the edges of the garden bed reflect the original way these beds would have been experienced.)

Christophe Porteneuve. [Patio de las Doncellas, Alcázar, Seville]. Photo via Flickr.

And the last piece of information related to all this was a little graph that I put together trying to see how my local climate stacks up to Granada’s, rainfall-wise. On his most recent visit to lecture at my local California Native Plant Society, Bart O’Brien, author and Director of Special Projects for the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, pointed out how California’s mediterranean climate is the most extreme of all the five main mediterranean climates in its extremes of wet and dry.

The following compares Granada, located at over 2000 feet of elevation against sea-level San Diego, so this isn’t the fairest of comparisons. And Granada’s annual rain fall is something over 14 inches, versus San Diego’s average of slightly over 10 inches. But you can get a general sense of how extended the California summer dry can get.

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