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gbbd: the garden and beyond

mission-trails-lotus-scoparius-with-dichelostemma-capitatum

mission-trails-fortuna-peak-boulders

It’s spring, all right. The gar­den con­tin­ues to bloom away man­i­cally, but the out­door places around town have been no slouch, either, when it comes to flowers.

This Gar­den Blogger’s Bloom Day, hosted by May Dreams Gar­dens, fea­tures a gallery of some blooms from the gar­den mixed in with blooms from Mis­sion Trails Regional Park in San Diego.

In the top photo from Mis­sion Trails you can see that the yellow-flowered deer­weed, Lotus sco­par­ius, has col­o­nized many of the sunny areas that burned four and a half years ago. As the land­scape recov­ers, other plants will come in and stake their claims. The sec­ond image from near the top of For­tuna Peak shows that other areas are also recov­er­ing from the fires, though slower than far­ther downslope.

You can hover over each image below for its name, or click it to see a larger photo. While you can prob­a­bly tell what’s a wild plant and what’s in the gar­den, there’s an answer key at the end if you’re into quizzing your­self. (A few of thee are tricky in that they’re local native plants that have been incor­po­rated into the gar­den.)

Answers:
Wild, gar­den, gar­den;
gar­den, wild, wild;
wild, gar­den wild;
gar­den, gar­den, gar­den;
gar­den, wild, gar­den;
wild, gar­den, wild;
wild, wild, wild.

green immigrants

Here are a few more selec­tions that you might find inter­est­ing from Amer­i­can Per­cep­tions of Immi­grant and Inva­sive Species: Strangers on the Land, by Peter Coates, pub­lished in 2006.

Before Colum­bus brought seeds and cut­tings along on his sec­ond voy­age to the West Indies, North Amer­ica was home to less than 1 per­cent of the world’s total com­ple­ment of cere­als, starches, fruits, and vegetables.

Today, the only crops of sig­nif­i­cant com­mer­cial value native to the ter­ri­tory that became the United States are cran­berry, blue­berry, pecan nut, sugar maple, sun­flower, and tobacco–a fact that offers elo­quent tes­ti­mony to the great ser­vice that has been duly ren­dered by a sting of public-spirited Americans…

No Amer­i­can pub­lic ser­vant since [Thomas] Jef­fer­son deserves more credit for trans­form­ing the for­eign into the com­mon than David G. Fairchild. In his capac­ity as agri­cul­tural explorer in charge at the Sec­tion for For­eign Seed and Plant Intro­duc­tion from 1898 until 1928, Fairchild brought the navel orange to Florida and Cal­i­for­nia from Brazil and over­saw the intro­duc­tion of Italy’s seed­less grape and China’s dry land pis­ta­chio. His most notable con­tri­bu­tions, how­ever, were in the intro­duc­tion of the Chi­nese soy­bean and…the tree that became an essen­tial prop of Wash­ing­ton, D.C.‘s mon­u­men­tal land­scape, adorn­ing the Tidal Basin: the Japan­ese flow­er­ing cherry tree.

Fairchild’s encoun­ters with the infa­mous vine that “ate the South”…left him some­what chas­tened. He first came across kudzu about 1900 while tour­ing Japan, where this wild, semi­woody peren­nial was fed to live­stock. In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy he recalled a visit to a “kudzu enthu­si­ast” in Chip­ley, Florida, who was renowned for singing its praises as a for­age crop in the early 1900s, despite his neigh­bors’ dis­trust. “When­ever I think of that night’s talk with the kudzu pio­neer,” recalled Fairchild, “I have a spe­cial feel­ing of pride in what might be called our Amer­i­can will­ing­ness to try some­thing new, whether it be a new for­age crop, a new food, or any one of a thou­sand new, machine-made gad­gets.” Fairchild, who con­fessed that “per­haps I have an undue pas­sion for the new,” retained his faith in kudzu for quite some time, despite its pro­cliv­ity to spread at will. By the late 1930s, how­ever he was express­ing his grow­ing reser­va­tions in print. The seeds he brought back from Japan and planted on his prop­erty in Florida “‘took’ with a vengeance, smoth­er­ing every­thing they got onto, and pretty soon we became alarmed. Feel­ing that the kudzu was too much for us, we began to cut it out.”

Fairchild finally returned home, so to speak, in 1946, when invited to make his selec­tion for the “My Favorite Tree” guest col­umn in the jour­nal of the Amer­i­can Forestry Asso­ci­a­tion (the nation’s old­est con­ser­va­tion orga­ni­za­tion, founded in 1875). After men­tion­ing a string of exotic also-rans, but dis­card­ing them as unsat­is­fac­tory, he recalled that he had seen his first grove of Cal­i­for­nia coastal red­woods (Sequoia sem­per­virens) fairly late in life, at a time when he was still besot­ted with exotic Asi­atic promise: “A feel­ing of utter paral­y­sis over­took me and the pas­sion for plant­ing trees, my puny lit­tle trees, any­where, became distasteful.”

The sto­ries in the book are great, and the social com­men­tary is com­pelling. Unfor­tu­nately, every now and then a botan­i­cal clinker drops into the book’s pages, such as the one that fol­lows the quote on red­woods imme­di­ately above, where the author waxes, “Though the red­wood is only really found in Cal­i­for­nia (there is a tiny patch in the most south­west­erly cor­ner of Ore­gon), it is arguably more Amer­i­can than any other tree in the United States inso­far as it has no rel­a­tives, near or dis­tant, in any other coun­try.” Like, um, what about the Chi­nese dawn red­wood (Metase­quoia glyp­tostroboides)?

Okay, this isn’t a book you read for the botany, but it’s a wor­thy and thought­ful work on plants and the human con­di­tion, per­fect for late win­ter read­ing as you con­tem­plate the impend­ing bloom­ing of your cherry trees.

Although it’s pri­mar­ily about bio­log­i­cal immi­grants to North Amer­ica, Peter Coates points occa­sion­ally out that the immigrant-carrying boats sailed both directions:

The native oaks of Britain and the United States were greatly admired by J.C. Loudon, a lead­ing British hor­ti­cul­tur­ist of the mid-nineteenth cen­tury. He pro­nounced them “the most beau­ti­ful of trees.” Yet exotic trees had already become a manda­tory ingre­di­ent of the “polite” British land­scape enclosed within pri­vate estates. Loudon him­self was one of the trend­set­ters who insisted that, notwith­stand­ing the oak’s charms, “no res­i­dence in the mod­ern style can have a claim to be con­sid­ered as laid out in good taste, in which all the trees and shrubs employed are not either for­eign ones, or improved vari­eties of indige­nous ones.

The most sought-after of these arbo­real exotics were hardy North Amer­i­cans. Britons were ruth­lessly con­de­scend­ing toward Amer­i­can artis­tic achieve­ments at this time. “In the four quar­ters of the globe,” Syd­ney Smith famously inquired [in 1820], “who reads an Amer­i­can book?” or goes to an Amer­i­can play” or looks at an Amer­i­can pic­ture or statue?” Yet no one asked “who plants an Amer­i­can tree?”

and the winner is…

Burned, boiled, scraped with a rasp, doused in acid, or left alone? What’s the best way to ger­mi­nate man­zanita seeds?

The first manzanita seedlings

The first man­zanita seedlings

I’d begun a lit­tle kitchen exper­i­ment over two months ago to see which tech­nique would give the best ger­mi­na­tion for the Mex­i­can (or pointleaf) man­zanita, Actostaphy­los pun­gens. As of a cou­ple days ago, the win­ner is: scraped with a rasp.

Here are the first two tiny seedlings that breached their seed coats and made it up to day­light. I’d filed down through into the hard seed coat on the seeds of this batch, let­ting mois­ture reach the embryo inside, and to make it eas­ier for the new plant to emerge. (In gardener-speak the process is called “scarification.”)

I’ll post more results as the other seedlings emerge. If they ever emerge. This is not one of those instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion, buy-it-at-the-home-store-and-stick-it-in-the-ground experiments…

sage as a cut flower

In the past I’ve occa­sion­ally cut flow­ers from the gar­den, only to have them wilt imme­di­ately and dis­in­te­grate into a pile of organic mat­ter on top of a table I wanted to look nice for com­pany. Last week­end I was trim­ming back the ivy-leaved sage, Salvia cacali­ae­fo­lia. At first the stems went into the greens recy­cling can. But they looked too pretty there and I won­dered how well they’d do as cut flow­ers. So into the house they came, mak­ing a big, infor­mal bouquet/science exper­i­ment for the din­ing table.

Cut flowers of ive-leaved sageThe ver­dict? The flow­ers looked great through day three, with only the occa­sional flower falling off the stem. Then after that the ends of the stems where the flow­ers live started to droop. By day five, although the leaves still looked per­fectly pre­sentable, the flower ends were totally wilted, blooms had dropped off the stems, and there was a dry, black, gran­u­lar some­thing or another (pollen? seeds?) lit­ter­ing the table sur­face. Time for the greens recy­cle bin.

That was no worse than the lifes­pan of many of the more clas­sic cut flow­ers, so I’ll be treat­ing myself to vase-fulls of ivy-leaved sage the next time I cut it back.