[ Lost in the Landscape ]

the prodigal ceanothus

The ori­gin of Cean­othus ‘Tuxedo’ reads a bit like a hor­ti­cul­tural soap opera: A Cal­i­for­nia native species, Cean­othus thyr­si­florus, crosses the Atlantic for Europe, where it meets up with another cean­othus, this one from the East Coast of the US, Cean­othus amer­i­canus, or New Jer­sey tea. Loose on for­eign soil the two get roman­ti­cally involved, with Cean­othus ‘Autum­nal Blue’ being one of the chil­dren. One of the plants of Autum­nal Blue moves to Ire­land, where its tol­er­ance for moister gar­den con­di­tions and good cold tol­er­ance makes it quite popular.

(Edit, March 4, 2010: A quick trawl through David Fross and Dieter Wilken’s ter­rific resource, Cean­othus, reminded me that the story is even more twisted than this. The par­ents of ‘Autum­nal Blue’ include the two species men­tioned above, but also the Mex­i­can and Guatemalan species, C. caeruleus. The plot thickens…)

There, in Ire­land, grow­ing on the grounds of Fitzger­ald Nurs­eries, one of the branches sud­denly throws a muta­tion, where the nor­mally green leaves are instead a dra­matic dark color, some­thing between dark choco­late, inky black and maybe just a lit­tle grape thrown in. Pat FitzGer­ald notices the strik­ingly dif­fer­ent branch, and begins a prop­a­ga­tion pro­gram in earnest. His nurs­ery lists sev­eral other near-black plants, includ­ing the dra­matic Phormium cookianum ‘Black Adder.’ Even­tu­ally the plant crosses back to the other side of the Atlantic, for Cal­i­for­nia, where it was released in lim­ited dis­tri­b­u­tion last year.

That’s when I met this totally unique look­ing cean­othus and decided I wanted it for my gar­den. I brought a lit­tle gal­lon plant and located it where I wanted a dra­matic six-foot shrub, expect­ing that it would be a quick-growing screen plant. Almost a year later, though, the lit­tle plant remains a lit­tle plant, and hasn’t really grown. Even though I watered it all last year as you would most new plants in the gar­den, my guess is that I failed to give it enough water through the 146 con­sec­u­tive days with­out mea­sur­able pre­cip­i­ta­tion that San Diego expe­ri­enced, the third-driest rain­less time in our record books.

To the plant’s credit, it didn’t die. And now the rains have sat­u­rated the soil, it’s show­ing some inter­est in putting out some new growth. But I felt like I needed some guid­ance in doing a bet­ter job grow­ing this plant. Who bet­ter to ask than the per­son who prob­a­bly has the most expe­ri­ence with this plant? Why not con­tact Pat FitzGer­ald, its originator?

Thank­fully, Pat was gen­er­ous with his time in respond­ing to my ques­tions. Here are some excerpts from the advice he sent my way.

Regard­ing dry con­di­tions yes I would expect slow growth. Have you prunded your plant. I noticed from the pic­ture on your blog it had very long un-pruned branches. Like a lot of shrubs in dry con­di­tions I think thought needs to be put into help­ing the plants in the first year get depth of root pen­e­tra­tion so that dur­ing dry spells its tak­ing mois­ture from a depth. I sus­pect if you can give mois­ture to Tuxedo dur­ing the first year of estab­lish­ment to help it along and prune next spring you will see dense growth establish…

I high­light mois­ture reten­tion as a lot of peo­ple harp on about using water and drought but often for­get you can con­di­tion your soil to retain more of that valu­able mois­ture. There are so many recy­cled com­posts to be pur­chased or that the house­holder can make now that you can work into the soil to make pock­ets 3 X 3 feet around newly planted shrubs or even mulch to give them that start in life. The cure to drought and slow growth in dry areas is more often what you do before you plant than after as I am sure you well know but it needs repeat­ing and repeat­ing to the public…

Tuxedo will behave dif­fer­ently depend­ing on soil den­sity so in heavy soil I have seen plants exhibit­ing a shorter more com­pact nature to their growth. If planted in shade and espe­cially in a lighter soil Tuxedo will cer­tainly stretch as it seems to much pre­fer full sun for sake of both colour and flow­er­ing. In our more moist cli­mate I think the plant can get to 8 feet as can many many shrubs here in our tem­per­ate climate…

I think the one com­ment I would have is that sim­ply Tuxedo is for me more than a Cean­othus with deep dark foliage. Tuxedo is an ever­green foliage plant and once estab­lished in the gar­den hardy to minus 12 cel­cius in our expe­ri­ence but pos­si­bly minus 15 cel­cius. This is an achieve­ment for me as I can­not rec­om­mend hardly any ever­green with such dark foliage with such win­ter hardiness.

Tuxedo is also a good plant for train­ing on a trel­lis or wall in our cli­mate at least. There is no doubt in my mind that Tuxedo will ben­e­fit from occa­sional prun­ing but no more than once per year.

I just hope in time Tuxedo con­tributes some way pos­i­tively to Cal­i­forn­ian gar­dens. While only part native its still is a nice feel­ing as a plant breeder to have a plant go back to its home­land and be accepted into people’s gardens.

After review­ing Pat’s advice I’ve decided to not only give the plant more water and mulch around them for added water reten­tion through the crit­i­cal first year or two after a plant is freed into the soil. If I use an organic mulch it will break down over time and enrich the soil.

A com­mon thread you read with many Cal­i­for­nia native plants is that they detest rich soil. In fact Greg Rubin of California’s Own Native Land­scape Design spoke to the local native plant soci­ety of plant­ing large num­bers of short-lived col­or­ful plants between the large struc­tural species so that the tem­po­rary plants could “burn up” the excess nutri­ents in the soil, par­tic­u­larly in a sit­u­a­tion where the soil was for­merly a heavily-fertilized lawn. But ‘Tuxedo,’ with par­ents from moister parts of Cal­i­for­nia and the East Coast, sounds like it would ben­e­fit from being treated differently.

For me, grow­ing Cean­othus ‘Tuxedo’ will be a lit­tle more work and water than grow­ing many other cean­othus would be. But I think it should be worth it. In fact, I saw more of them in the nurs­ery again and picked up a sec­ond gal­lon plant. Here you see it planted as a back­ground for the sil­very foliage and even­tual orange flow­ers of chalk-leaf dud­leya, Dud­leya pul­veru­lenta, and Cal­i­for­nia fuch­sia, Zauschne­ria cal­i­for­nica ‘Route 66.’

Wish me and the plants luck. Not every plant is per­fectly adapted to your grow­ing con­di­tions, but a lit­tle effort can help make them thrive. And the rea­sons that make ‘Tuxedo’ a lit­tle trick­ier in the dri­est parts of Cal­i­for­nia might make it a good can­di­date for moister parts of the state, or other parts of the coun­try where cean­othus might be mar­ginal. This year the plant is in wide cir­cu­la­tion and should be widely available.

Cean­othus in New York or Lit­tle Rock? This might be the one.

March 04 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: black • Ceanothus Tuxedo | 18 Comments »

ooh, scary!

In keep­ing with my dark pur­ple and black themes of some recent posts (like this one), here are a cou­ple pic­tures Jenny shared with me of some of her plants. This first one is a bromeliad with incred­i­bly striped, almost rep­til­ian leaves. The pump­kin pot is a fun touch for the our cur­rent season.

I’m glad it’s a plant, because if I encoun­tered an ani­mal that looked like this I might start walk­ing the oppo­site direc­tion. Real fast.

This one, Bego­nia Black Fang, is a lit­tle cud­dlier, even lit­er­ally fuzzy. Dark-colored plants can get lost in the land­scap­ing if you’re not care­ful, but com­bined with other inter­est­ing plants, like here, they can be great up-close specimens.

Thanks for shar­ing your pic­tures, Jenny!

October 22 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Begonia Black Fang • begonias • black • bromeliads • Jenny • pots | 1 Comment »

the little black book

I guess I’m a lit­tle old-fashioned because, yes, I occa­sion­ally still buy books. Even with all the infor­ma­tion you can find on the web, there’s some­thing sat­is­fy­ing in hold­ing a book in the hand. It’s the dif­fer­ence between look­ing at a cal­en­dar of flow­ers and actu­ally hold­ing one in your hand, feel­ing the soft­ness of the petals and tak­ing in the fragrance.

Last week’s mail brought me a copy of a book I posted on recently, Karen Platt’s Black Magic & Pur­ple Pas­sion: Dark Foliage and Flow­ers for the Gar­den. This is a slen­der lit­tle vol­ume that has its heart a long list­ing of plants that have black or dark pur­ple attrib­utes: flow­ers, foliage, or stems. Most of the plant descrip­tions come with brief infor­ma­tion on cul­ti­va­tion and propagation.

There are dozens of pho­tos of indi­vid­ual plants, but because of the eco­nom­ics of pub­lish­ing they’re all clus­tered on the glossy pages in the cen­ter of the book. It would of course have been more use­ful to have the images next to the descriptions.

Ear­lier I posted a cou­ple plants in my gar­den that I’d con­sider black or dark pur­ple, and this book listed one of them, black bamboo.

The book addi­tion­ally men­tions a cou­ple oth­ers that are already in my gar­den. Aeo­nium arboreum, shown here in semi-shade against the green leaves of an aloe, is a suc­cu­lent that has found a home in many South­ern Cal­i­for­nia gar­dens. I’d def­i­nitely con­sider it to have leaves that are very close to black. It’s incred­i­bly easy to grow as long as it doesn’t freeze.

Another of the plants listed in the book, Pen­este­mon dig­i­talis ‘Husker Red,” is one that I’d con­sider more to be more of a green plant that’s got gen­tle red-purple tints to the leaves. My plant lives in a semi-shaded loca­tion, how­ever, and given more sun it might develop darker foliage. Also, what one per­son would con­sider dark pur­ple, another might call a totally dif­fer­ent color. Time to get out the Pan­tone color charts!

Once you start think­ing about all the color you see in the plants around you, you could eas­ily add to the author’s list of dark plants. Here’s the ‘Pur­ple Vol­cano’ clone of a US East-Coast sage, Salvia lyrata. The flow­ers are insignif­i­cant, but the foliage is this gor­geous dark pur­ple. I have it planted here with yellow-and-red gail­lar­dia, though I think I’d have done bet­ter pair­ing it with pinks or blues. Well, it is trans­plant­ing sea­son, and it’s amaz­ing what a per­son can do with a shovel in five min­utes’ time…

Three plant­ing dia­grams in the book give some ideas about how these black flow­ers and plants could be used. One pairs the dark plants with gold col­ors, and a sec­ond uses silver-colored plants for a foil. The third shows an “island” plant­ing, where a walk­way sur­rounds a bed of dark plants. I’m sure that the plant­ing schemes would give you strik­ing results.

Unfor­tu­nately the book doesn’t have any real-world pho­tos of these plant­ing sug­ges­tions or of any of the dark plants in a real gar­den set­ting, and that’s prob­a­bly the books weak­est link. Per­son­ally, I can begin to imag­ine how a small hand­ful of plants might look together, but I really have to see pho­tos of the more com­pli­cated plant­i­ngs for them to make any sense to me.

Some­how all this color-theming seems like a par­tic­u­larly British thing–just think of Gertrude Jekyll’s influ­en­tial White Gar­den, planted in 1948 at Siss­inghurst. (And of course, Jekyll is well known for her dis­cus­sions of gar­den color.)

Even if you don’t want to cross over to the dark side, this books has many good ideas for plants that you could use to pro­vide pock­ets of dark inter­est through­out your own gar­den. What bet­ter way to appre­ci­ate the bril­liant flow­ers most of us have in our gar­dens than by hav­ing some sub­tle, dark plants to set them off?

October 14 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: black • color combinations • Karen Platt • purple | No Comments »

appreciating black

The Inter­net is a hum­bling con­trap­tion. Any time you think you’ve got a new and excit­ing idea you can trawl the web for a few min­utes and find that someone’s had the same idea long before you.

Case in point: With Hal­loween approach­ing, I was think­ing about the color black and how that’s prob­a­bly the last color you’ll hear a gar­dener talk­ing about using in the gar­den. And then I run across this book online, Black Magic & Pur­ple Pas­sion: Dark Foliage and Flow­ers for the Gar­den, by Karen Platt. Dang. She got there first, and in the year 2000. I haven’t had a chance to look at the book yet, but it sounds like it could be a good resource for plants that fea­ture the dark­est, rich­est depths of color.

I shouldn’t have been sur­prised. For well over a decade now, vio­las and pan­sies have been avail­able in dark black-purple col­ors. And from long before that, there’s been a near-black maroon hol­ly­hock that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s days at Mon­ti­cello. And that’s just the tip of the black iceberg.

Look­ing around my gar­den I can come up with a cou­ple more inter­est­ing exam­ples of plants and flow­ers that come in black or some­thing pretty darn close to it, dontcha know (as Sarah Palin might say…).

Andean sage, Salvia dis­color, has these lit­tle dark, dark flow­ers that read as black more than the pro­found pur­ple that they are. In my gar­den the plant gets about three feet tall and like most sages sprawls a bit. It’s best used where you can appre­ci­ate the dark flow­ers up close. The rest of the plant is close to white in color–pale green on the tops of the leaves, white below–so this is a plant with lots of inter­est­ing contrast.

And then there’s black bam­boo, Phyl­lostachys nigra, the stems of which ripen in their sec­ond year to this beau­ti­ful black color.

Although listed as grow­ing twenty to thirty feet, the plant in my gar­den has stayed closer to ten or twelve feet tall. Give it water if you want it big, or only an occa­sional offer­ing, like I do, to keep it smaller.

Being a clump­ing bam­boo it’s pretty well behaved when it comes to spread­ing. Here it’s con­tained on two sides by walls, and to keep it in bounds John dug a shal­low trench join­ing the two walls, dumped in some left­over dry cement mix, and watered it in. The plant crosses the con­crete line only occa­sion­ally, and when it does it’s easy to snip the way­ward rhizomes.

The hard­est job with this plant is thin­ning out the stems that have died back. Every other year I devote half an hour or so and dis­ap­pear inside the plant with a pair of hand pruners–not a job for the claus­tro­pho­bic. The job is best done after spring nest­ing sea­son, after some of the local birds use the dense foliage to raise their young.

Want more ideas for black plants? Take a look at King Seeds, a seed resource in New Zealand where they have flow­ers arranged by color, includ­ing black! (There they list pop­pies, dianthus, nas­tur­tiums and nemophila ‘Penny Black’ among their dark-flowered offerings.)

Hal­loween isn’t far away, of course. But these are great plants that deserve a place in gar­dens year round.

October 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Andean sage • black • black bamboo • color • dark flowers • Phyllostachys nigra • Salvia discolor | 3 Comments »