[ Lost in the Landscape ]

gbbd: pretty purple

For this Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day I’ve picked some pre­dom­i­nantly pur­ple spring-flowering plants that are start­ing to do their thing in my gar­den. All but one of these are Cal­i­for­nia (or Baja Cal­i­for­nia) natives, and all would be seri­ously water-wise choices for the gar­den. Some would even make it through an entire sum­mer with­out water, though they’d look just a lit­tle bet­ter with a sip once or twice a month.

Blue-eyed grass (Sisy­rinchium bel­lum): What a great name for a great plant. This iris rel­a­tive is happy coex­ist­ing in a moderately-watered gar­den with other plants, though they can stand drought. Here they are liv­ing along­side some chard and heliotrope.

Blue dicks (Dich­e­lostemma cap­i­ta­tum) are com­mon here near the coast and are one of our reli­able signs that it’s spring. They self-sow and spread around the gar­den, but not obnoxiously.

Black sage (Salvia mel­lif­era) is one of the local canyon plants that’s earned a place in the gar­den. In life the flow­ers are a slightly stronger pale mauve color than here in the photo. It’s just begin­ning to come into flower and should be a lit­tle more intense in a cou­ple weeks. Though not one of the “look at me” sages, it’s still qui­etly beautiful.

Ver­bena lilacina orig­i­nates in Baja. The plant shown here is just get­ting started. It should flower much of the year and require very lit­tle sum­mer water.

This one’s maybe closer to blue than pur­ple, the South African bulb Morea tripetala. I stuck it in a really dry spot, and it’s now prob­a­bly just bloom­ing on the reserves in the bulb. We’ll see how well it does after a sea­son of tough love in the garden.

And with the last photo we come back to Cal­i­for­nia with the jus­ti­fi­ably ever-popular Pen­ste­mon Mar­garita BOP (some­times sold as Pen­ste­mon het­ero­phyl­lus ‘Mar­garita BOP’). The flow­ers are a wild mix of blue and magenta pink, giv­ing the over­all impres­sion of pur­ple. The open tubu­lar flow­ers have some­thing of the look of a fox­glove which would require a cer­tain amount of water, but this pen­ste­mon actu­ally does just fine with almost no added water.

Thanks to May Dreams Gar­dens for host­ing Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day. Check out the page with glimpses into what’s bloom­ing all around the world.

March 15 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • plant profiles | Tags: black sage • blue dicks • blue-eyed grass • color • Dichelostemma capitatum • drought-tolerant landscaping • gbbd • native plants • Penstemon heterophyllus • Penstemon Margarita BOP • purple • Salvia mellifera • Sisyrinchium bellum • Verbena lilacina | 12 Comments »

into the wild

A cou­ple posts ago I men­tioned dich­e­lostemma bloom­ing in the gar­den and I was think­ing that they were prob­a­bly also bloom­ing wild in the nat­ural spaces around me. I took a lunchtime walk through one of the semi-wild areas on the north part of the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego. The area has been set aside as a nat­ural pre­serve, although “nat­ural” in this case is actu­ally a canyon of native plants mixed in with some ear­lier 20th cen­tury plant­i­ngs of euca­lyp­tus. Fake as it may be as a gen­uine South­ern Cal­i­for­nia chap­ar­ral ecosys­tem, the edges where the grove meets the scrub starts to take on more native flavors.

There had been heavy rains this past Jan­u­ary, fol­lowed by occa­sional wet peri­ods, so the ground was still moist in spots. The weather was now turn­ing warm, sunny and spring-like. Grasses were grow­ing exu­ber­antly. It wasn’t long before I started to notice occa­sional flow­ers in the under­story. Although the spaces under the euca­lyp­tus prove hos­tile to most flow­er­ing plants other than the occa­sional also-imported black mus­tard, the blue dicks were pretty con­tent to be there, a sin­gle plant here, big rafts of them there.


A flow­er­ing head of Dich­e­lostemma cap­i­ta­tum, mixed in with the grasses and euca­lyp­tus


A larger stand of them, with their lit­tle flower heads raised up two feet or more in the dap­pled shade

I was tuned in to what I was see­ing, but in the back of my mind I was aware that back in my gar­den the same species of plants was also bloom­ing. Back home the blue dicks are part of a long con­tin­uum of “spring­time” flow­ers that begin with the first nar­cis­sus in Octo­ber and con­tinue into a num­ber of plants that have yet to bloom. But in the wild areas of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia this is it. Spring is short and–in a wet year like this one–intense, orgias­tic. As the weather warms the rains will stop. The grasses will die out and the flow­ers will fade out. Soon the long brown sea­son will begin. But in the fic­tion­al­ized nat­ural world of my gar­den, spring will be here for sev­eral more months. I’ll enjoy it for sure. But some­how it seems a lit­tle wrong.

March 14 2008 | Categories: landscape • my garden • places • rambles | Tags: blue dicks • Dichelostemma capitatum • eucalyptus • spring • UCSD | 2 Comments »