[ Lost in the Landscape ]

the huntington desert garden

The late-December light was fad­ing when I headed to the wild and won­der­ful plants that make up the Huntington’s Desert Gar­den. The gar­den dates back many decades and fea­tures some immense spec­i­mens the likes of which you’ll almost never see. But what I love most about the gar­den is that it incor­po­rates these great plants into land­scapes that both honor the plants and use them in strik­ing combinations.

Many aloes were bloom­ing with their dra­matic spikes of hot, bright col­ors. The the­atri­cal light­ing helped to make some of the scenes even more dramatic.

(Be sure to click onthe third image to enlarge it. In its unearthly weird­ness, it’s got to be one of my favorite gar­den pho­tos I’ve ever taken.)

One zone of the gar­den focuses on plants you’d find in Cal­i­for­nia. Here a cre­osote bush serves as a screen for a radi­ant gray-white agave.

And this scene employs the coastal and Chan­nel Island buck­wheat, Saint Catherine’s lace (Eri­o­gonum gigan­teum)–a plant that tech­ni­cally doesn’t come from a desert–with other dry­land plants. The gray-green foliage on all of them helps to unify this diverse planting.

The Hunt­ing­ton is in a warm sub­trop­i­cal area just east of Los Ange­les. That doesn’t mean that it’s warm enough for all of these plants. Patio heaters of the kind that you see out­doors at restau­rants keep plants warm at night in one area of the gar­den. (These are the frigid depths of Decem­ber, after all.)

Now, as much as I was try­ing to focus on the over­all land­scape, I have to share a few pho­tos of indi­vid­ual species that caught my eye.

Look­ing up at a very large Yucca fil­if­era from Mexico…

(There’s an extremely sim­i­lar shot of the exact same plant on the Germanatrix’s post on her visit to this same gar­den at the end of Novem­ber. Check it out: here.)

Two tall palms with immense tree aloes, Aloe bar­berae. At the Hunt­ing­ton the species is iden­ti­fied as A. baine­sii, but the tax­on­o­mists have had a change of heart. I have two of these in my lit­tle front yard, the tallest of them still under twenty feet but still impres­sive at that size. The writeup on this plant says it can hit fifty feet or more. The Hunt­ing­ton spec­i­mens are just about there, I’d guess.

A dynamic and lyri­cal tan­gle of leaves on sev­eral plants of the var­ie­gated form of Agave amer­i­cana… (Homage to some­body… later Willem de Koon­ing? Franz Kline?) Agaves with their per­fect rosettes seem to appeal to the part of our brains that appre­ci­ate sym­me­try and order. This plant­ing sub­verted the expected into a beau­ti­ful mess.

A tall, dense stand of Cleis­to­cac­tus straus­sii…

As we left the Hunt­ing­ton the light that had made the Desert Gar­den extra-interesting was col­or­ing up the flanks of Mount Wil­son and the the rest of the San Gabriels.

Not far away from the Hunt­ing­ton is Pasadena, the site of the annual New Year’s Rose Parade, which should be get­ting under way not long after this post hits the web. (Okay, it’s sort of a lame way to try to segue this post to the topic of New Year’s Day, but–hey!–I had to give it a try.)

Happy New Year’s to all of you, and best wishes for a healthy and pros­per­ous year filled with amaz­ing botan­i­cal highlights.

January 01 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: agaves • aloes • cacti • desert plants • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • plant combinations • succulents | 11 Comments »

when plants collide

Fif­teen years I’ve been wait­ing for this plant to bloom. Fif­teen years. And now that it’s bloom­ing it throws its big bloom stalk into a tan­gle of two tree aloes grow­ing together in what’s now a big three-plant smashup.

The flow­er­ing plant is Agave atten­u­ata, the fox­tail agave. Native to higher ele­va­tions in Mex­ico, it’s sup­pos­edly fairly rare where it orig­i­nates. But in zone 10 and 9b-plus South­ern Cal­i­for­nia gar­dens it’s fairly com­mon, with sev­eral gar­dens in every block of my neigh­bor­hood hav­ing one or more plants.

Many agaves, includ­ing the local native Shaw’s agave, Agave shawii, come armed with attrac­tive but sharp spines. But A. atten­u­ata is as soft and friendly a suc­cu­lent as you’ll ever meet, and that’s one of its big appeals for home gar­dens. Another bonus is that it requires no sup­ple­men­tal water­ing in gar­dens near the coast.

Almost all of the agave species will bloom once and then die (mono­carpy). For­tu­nately one plant of this species will have many rosettes, with only the bloom­ing rosette dying back, leav­ing the rest to bloom in future seasons.

At this point the stalk is taller than I am and is start­ing to grow down­ward in a thick arc.

The indi­vid­ual blooms are still closed up for busi­ness. Soon, though, the indi­vid­ual green­ish white flow­ers will open up a few at a time, begin­ning at the base of the inflo­res­cence and then slowly mov­ing towards the end.
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Here’s a plant at a neighbor’s house in full bloom last win­ter so that you can see what the agave does when it isn’t busy run­ning into other plants. Very grace­ful, don’t you think?

I wish the flow­er­ing stem hadn’t col­lided with the aloes. The stalk is assertive and solid so that there’s no stak­ing it or coax­ing it out of harm’s way. Oh well. I can sit back and enjoy the flow­er­ing, even if the flow­ers aren’t in the place where I’d like them.

Any­thing that you have to wait fif­teen years for it to bloom isn’t going to be the most con­ve­nient of species.

November 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Agave attenuata • agaves • succulents | 10 Comments »

on the road: cornerstone sonoma

The big gar­den des­ti­na­tion for the Sonoma County week­end ended up being Cor­ner­Stone Sonoma. Imag­ine a giant gar­den show with totally unre­lated demon­stra­tion gar­dens lined up next to each other in their own stalls like some big hor­ti­cul­tural pet­ting zoo. But instead of nice-but-not-so-interesting gar­dens assem­bled by local land­scap­ers, you have some really strik­ing spaces put together by some of the big­ger names in the land­scape archi­tec­ture field.

Find­ing the place isn’t hard–Jenny was along for the out­ing and had brought her GPS. We fol­lowed the nice, polite direc­tions of the GPS unit until we got close. The Cor­ner­Stone lit­er­a­ture says to look for the white picket fence as a sign that you’ve arrived. This is CornerStone’s take on a white picket fence, and it’s good prepa­ra­tion for what you’ll find there.

Like many des­ti­na­tions in Sonoma, Cor­ner­stone com­bines wine tast­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties (4 vine­yards), with chances to get a bite to eat, and places to shop for gifts or things for your gar­den. How are you set for some rus­tic archi­tec­tural details to set into your landscaping?

Maybe your koi pond needs some mer­maids? (John wanted one of these very badly.)

The facil­ity has some pleas­ant lawn spaces with flowerbeds of cool­ing pur­ples and blues and whites that were being set up for some social event.

But what sets this place apart are the main gar­dens in the back. And of all of them it’s hard not to love this one by Oehme & van Swe­den, the Gar­den of Contrasts.

Big, sturdy agaves con­trast with soft grasses that move in the wind.

As the sea­sons change, plants move in and out of promi­nence in this plant­ing. Here are the last Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies of the sea­son planted in the grasses.

This one might be a lit­tle harder to love–or at least it was for me, Ken Smith’s Daisy Bor­der. From the astro­turf to the plas­tic tubes to the plas­tic flow­ers, there’s noth­ing alive in this “plant­ing.” But I sup­pose it’s nat­u­ral­is­tic in the sense that some of the daisies in this bor­der look pretty good, while oth­ers seem the worse for wear because of what the ele­ments (and prob­a­bly small vis­i­tors) have done to them. Who ever has a bor­der where every sin­gle plant is metic­u­lously well-groomed?

John Green­lee cre­ated a soft, rolling plant­ing that con­sists entirely of grasses, his Mediter­ranean Meadow. Peo­ple do all-grass plant­i­ngs all the time–call it “lawn.” But it’s a brave thing to do a gar­den with all sorts of con­trast­ing grasses. Here a low river of fes­cue runs through the plantings.

Taller, stiffer grasses (edit: or are these restios?) line the “banks” of the river.

I wish this scene pho­tographed bet­ter than it did. The fore­ground fea­tures soft seed heads of a short grass, with a more archi­tec­tural species planted on the top of the low mound.

This and so many of the other gar­dens were bub­bling over with all sorts of ideas you could repur­pose in another gar­den set­ting. I’ll share more scenes from Cor­ner­Stone in the next post.

August 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: agaves • CornerStone Sonoma • fake plants • John Greenlee • Oehme & van Sweden • ornamental grasses • plastic | 5 Comments »