[ Lost in the Landscape ]

what’s eating you

No gar­den project seems to ever be com­plete, but we did put the fin­ish on the bog bench we’ve spent a lot of time work­ing on.

We used this stuff, Superdeck. It took already good-looking wood and turned it into some­thing almost like a nice fin­ish on fur­ni­ture. Over the last few years we’ve tried var­i­ous ways to fin­ish ipe used out­doors and this stuff seems to give it the most durable and attrac­tive fin­ish. They haven’t paid me a cent to say this. I like the stuff.

Twenty feet from the bog bench Stapelia get­tl­ef­fii has opened its first flow­ers of the sea­son. I’ve men­tioned before how this plant is one of an infor­mal group of carrion-scented plants that are pol­li­nated by flies.

Back at the bog bench this Sar­race­nia alata, vein­less form, is hav­ing a hard time hid­ing the fact that it’s had a lot of bugs–most of them flies–as meals this sea­son. Just look at how the pitch­ers sud­denly turn dark as you go down the tube. Dead bugs inside. Lots of them.

Midsummer’s edi­ble high­light is the ripen­ing of the figs, and this one is about thirty, forty feet from the bog bench..

One of the annoy­ing neme­ses of fig grow­ers is this shiny lit­tle guy below, the fig bee­tle. It has the unpleas­ant habit of break­ing the fig’s skin and then feed­ing off the suc­cu­lence inside. I can’t say that I blame them, but I want the figs all to myself.

For some rea­son they seem cap­ti­vated with this one plant in the bog, the “green” form of Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla, a form that lacks the abil­ity to make the red­dish antho­cyanin pig­ments. I’ve noticed that the pitch­ers of this plant have a dis­tinct damask-rose aroma. Maybe the scent reminds the bee­tles of the flo­ral notes of figs?

What­ever the case, at least one of the bee­tles got a lit­tle too inter­ested in this pitcher and fell in. It was grue­some to watch as it tried to fight its way back out of the pitcher, strug­gling so hard it kicked a big hole in the side of this tube. It took at least three days to die.

There’s a cer­tain streak in many car­niv­o­rous plant afi­ciona­dos that seems to delight in the bug killing aspect of these plants. I’m not one of them. My father spent much of his life as a Bud­dhist, and I’m sure some of its tenets of non-violence against the uni­verse rubbed off on me. I found it unset­tling to walk by the pitcher and watch this hap­pen­ing. A slow death by star­va­tion and dehy­dra­tion, head-down into a pile of dead bugs–not the way I want to leave this earth.

So I put on my rosy gog­gles of denial and look at the plants in the bog. This is one of the more spec­tac­u­lar ones right now, named ‘W.C.,’ it’s a polyg­a­mous hybrid involv­ing S. leu­co­phylla, S. rubra and S. psittacina.

Still, I’m reminded of the obliv­i­ous pet-owner’s line: “He’s a cute puppy isn’t he? Why, no, it doesn’t bite.”

Yah right. Pretty, evil things…

July 31 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: benches • bog garden • carnivorous plants • fig beetles • figs • hardscape • sarracenia • Stapelia gettleffii • Superdek | 8 Comments »

the big project

It’s done at last, the project from Hades.

The ugly back­side of the out­door fire­place, a week into the demolition

What started out as this ugly out­door fire­place with attached bench…

The fin­ished bench, from the end.

…has now mor­phed effort­lessly (yah right) into this new gar­den fea­ture: part bench, part deck, part raised bog/planter. It’s about four by six­teen feet in size.

For the last two years my bog plants were hog­ging up the sunny spot in the mid­dle of the patio. Totally in the way. The new bench needed to have a raised bog/planter detail, return­ing some of the hard­scape to garden.

With a gen­eral plan in place we got going.

 

Some scenes from the project:

This act of cre­ation began with an act of destruc­tion. The decrepit and not earthquake-safe chim­ney came down a brick at a time over sev­eral week­ends. We saved 350 bricks that came off in pretty good con­di­tion and hand-chiseled the mor­tar off of most of them. Inside the fire­place was the rea­son the whole thing hadn’t col­lapsed already: 200 pounds of rein­forc­ing steel. At cur­rent metal recy­cling rates we got almost 30 dol­lars for the scrap metal.

The rus­tic Japan­ese tiles that I loved 15 years ago and still appre­ci­ate now

I had some moments of nos­tal­gia and renewed appre­ci­a­tion for the lit­tle Japan­ese tiles that I picked out fif­teen years ago to try to orna­ment what at the time was already a mar­gin­ally attrac­tive gar­den fea­ture. The didn’t come off the fire­place eas­ily, and the shards and even the good bits were dis­patched to the dump. As much as we tried to recy­cle, this project is not going to get a Plat­inum LEED rat­ing.

The super-story bricks removed, we were left with a long con­crete bench. I like plain con­crete as a mate­r­ial, but this bench had been formed around a wood fence that had rot­ted away a decade ago. We shimmed over the ugli­ness and cov­ered it all with wood.

A shimmed cor­ner with sup­port for the deck­ing about to be installed

The whole bench with shims in place

The bench with black paint to keep the white from show­ing through between the slats

Before adding sup­pot bat­tens for the planter we checked to see how it would look with them out­side. Ugh. Way too rus­tic, too Coun­try Home, too NASCAR. The bat­tens are now hid­den inside.

With the fire­place gone, it opens up the patio to the rest of the back yard.I liked how the zones were dis­tinct before, but the bench still serves as a gen­tle sep­a­ra­tor between gar­den zones.

The bench was poured with this Greco-Roman col­umn for sup­port. Were they pin­ing for some lost ances­tors? Or were they post­mod­ern ten years before the move­ment caught on with archi­tects? What­ever the case, we decided to paint it black to de-emphasize it. No way were we going to take on tak­ing it out!

The planter nearly com­plete, ready for the pond liner

Pond liner being put into place. This is to pro­tect the wood and allow the bog plants to sit in water. This could also be repur­posed in the future as a raised pond, or–after punch­ing some drain holes–a nor­mal planter box.

…and here it is with the bog plants in place.

A final “after” picture:

We’re going to relax some before start­ing the next gar­den project, maybe in these two old but­ter­fly chairs John got second-hand 30 years ago, with our feet up on the new bench…

July 09 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: benches • bog garden • bog plants • decks • diy • hardscape • pitcher plants • projects • sarracenia | 10 Comments »

bog chronicles

Sev­eral ponds and a water­fall came with the house when we moved in a cou­ple decades ago. They looked cool and the water­fall con­tin­ues to pro­vide a nice gur­gling noise that helps mask the usual din of a res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hood. Unfor­tu­nately, as the years passed, the ponds began to fail or show their shortcomings.

One of them was so tiny it was good for breed­ing mos­qui­tos and not much else. It got turned into a planter pretty quickly.

The mid-sized pond turned out to be a crit­ter mag­net. Rum­mag­ing pos­sums and rac­coons ate all the fish and reg­u­larly upturned any water plants. Two years back it became my first bog gar­den, and is today filled with car­niv­o­rous sun­dews and pitcher plants. I was con­cerned about how much water a bog gar­den would require, but last year I fig­ured it out that it required only about as much water as an equiv­a­lent patch of grass.

Maybe five years ago it became appar­ent that we had a grow­ing leak on the largest pair of ponds and link­ing water­fall. The con­crete that made up the ponds was fine, but plant roots were pry­ing up the dec­o­ra­tive rocks that had been mortared on top to make the ponds look like a vol­canic grotto. I divided the upper pond in two, leav­ing the front half to cas­cade the water into the lower pond. The back half became yet another planter. Noth­ing seemed to do well there, though, so I decided to try turn­ing it into another bog for my grow­ing pitcher plant collection.

I started by remov­ing sev­eral hun­dred pounds of dirt. Tak­ing away the dirt exposed the rea­son why noth­ing seemed to thrive in the bed. The sur­round plants had sent their roots into the planter and sucked up what­ever irri­ga­tion I pro­vided to the plants I wanted to thrive there. I did a bru­tal prun­ing on all the adven­tur­ing roots, but fig­ured that they’d be back when offered moist soil to wan­der into.

To keep roots out of the bog I decided to con­tainer­ized the bog plants in plas­tic stor­age tubs from Tar­get. I could water the plants in the tubs and leave the sur­round­ing soil dry, reduc­ing the attrac­tion for maraud­ing roots. I used two six­teen by twenty-two inch con­tain­ers that were a foot deep plus a smaller one on the end.

The super-secret ingre­di­ents that went into my bog mix: sand and peat­moss. You need to be sure the peat­moss doesn’t have added fer­til­izer, which could make the bog plants fail.

I packed dirt around the tubs to sta­bi­lize them, then filled them up with a 60/40 blend of sphag­num peat moss and washed plas­ter sand, the sort of acid, low-nutrition soil that most car­ni­vores pre­fer to grow in. Finally, after sev­eral hours of hard labor of the sort the sort that I think my doc­tor is about to tell me I can’t do any­more, I got to install the plants.

The bog, ready for plants.

One of the Sar­race­nia alata rhi­zomes that went into the bog.

I selected sev­eral species of taller-growing pitcher plants to form the main plant­ing, Sar­race­nia flava, S. alata and S. oreophila. From my research I fig­ured out that these often grow nat­u­rally far­ther from water sources or in areas where the bogs dry out for part of the year. As far as pitcher plants go, these all should prove to be fairly drought tol­er­ant. Still “drought tol­er­ant” is a rel­a­tive term, and they’ll need to be kept at least damp year-round.

Ta-da! The fin­ished bog.

To fin­ish off the plant­ing, and to par­tially assuage my guilt at not using native plants, I sur­rounded one of the tubs with divi­sions of one of my native rushes, Jun­cus patens, a ripar­ian plant that doesn’t seem to resent dry­ing out. Another bonus of this species is that it looks good through­out the year, some­thing that can’t be said for these pitcher plants, which counter their sev­eral months of look­ing severely cool and amaz­ing with sev­eral months of look­ing dying and pathetic.

I’ll post progress pho­tos as the young new bog plants begin to fill and and show their poten­tial. I’m hop­ing this won’t turn into another failed pond.

March 17 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bog garden • bog plants • Juncus patens • sarracenia | 6 Comments »

my carnivores in december

As win­ter approaches many of the plants in the bog gar­den are start­ing to retreat into dor­mancy. Sun­day I filled part of a bucket with the trim­mings from the bog and two trays of pot­ted car­niv­o­rous plants.

I have mostly Amer­i­can pitcher plants, sar­race­nia, and I’ve been start­ing to learn the rhythms of the dif­fer­ent species and hybrids. Many put out their main flush of growth in the spring and look pro­gres­sively scrap­pier and scrap­pier as spring turns into sum­mer, and sum­mer into fall. Many of these are now tidied up in the bot­tom of this bucket.

Oth­ers sync up with hur­ri­cane sea­son, pre­sent­ing their most spec­tac­u­lar pitch­ers in late sum­mer and fall when heavy rains can be expected in the Amer­i­can South­east. The white-topped pitcher, Sar­race­nia leu­co­phylla, is the most charis­matic of these. At least two clones have been tissue-cultured and are com­monly avail­able, ‘Tarnok’ (to the left) and ‘Titan’ (to the right). In spring, a mature Tarnok will pro­duce big red dou­ble pom­poms of ster­ile flow­ers that will per­sist long into the year. The flow­ers being ster­ile, this could be con­sid­ered a culti­gen, a plant inca­pable of repro­duc­ing itself except by seduc­ing mem­bers of the human species to keep it alive via divi­sion or cloning. ‘Titan’ is sup­posed to have the unusual abil­ity to pro­duce pitch­ers over three feet tall, though in my too-dry, less than ideal con­di­tions, it’s not as good a grower and clumper as Tarnok.

‘Judith Hin­dle’ is another tissue-cultured, com­monly avail­able plant. I called this Sar­race­nia Trader Joe’s for a year because that’s where I bought this no-label plant. But I’ve decided it’s Judith Hin­dle because there was a whole big dis­play of plants that looked just like this one, and I’m fairly cer­tain that it’s the only hybrid that’s been tissue-cultured that looks and behaves like this. Like its leu­co­phylla grand­par­ent, it gives up its best pitch­ers in the fall.

Another plant that’s still got a few nice pitch­ers this late in the year is this red-lidded ver­sions of the species S. alata.

And this hybrid, ‘Super Green Giant,’ seems to be doing well late in the sea­son, though I’ve only had it since August and can’t vouch for what it’ll look like the rest of the year. Also, it’s lived a cod­dled life in a pot stand­ing in water, not one loosed in the out­door bog with these other plants.

Not every­thing is pitcher plants. This is the very easy-to-grow (some would say “weedy”) Drosera capen­sis, red form, a sun­dew from wet spots in South Africa. If you let it flower it will set seed. And if it sets seed, it can spread through­out your col­lec­tion. I’m try­ing to fig­ure out which of the bog plants can get by with less than boggy con­di­tions. So far this is one of them.

In addi­tion to the bog gar­den, I have two tubs of water with other plants. A very few are still look­ing pre­sentable this late in the year. Three hybrids in this tub com­bine to make a lively red-and-green dis­play: ‘Mardi Gras,’ ‘W.C.’ and a pri­mary hybrid, x mitchel­liana, made by Jerry Adding­ton of Court­ing Frogs Nurs­ery and retailed by Karen Oudean of Oudean’s Wil­low Creek Nurs­ery. All of these hybrids are one half or at least one quar­ter leu­co­phylla, so they retain some of its abil­i­ties to look nice in the fall. They also involve other species that tend to have a stronger year-round pres­ence instead of retreat­ing to a rhi­zome for the winter.

These trays of plants have moved from the unheated green­house, hope­fully to trig­ger the dor­mancy that most of these plants needs to thrive. Another hope is that they’ll get a taste of rain and not yet another drench­ing of reverse-osmosis water. After many weeks with noth­ing, they finally got treated to our first big storm of the sea­son. When I came home last night the trays had almost three inches of water in them. Real water. Free water from the sky. At last!

December 08 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bog garden • bog plants • carnivorous plants • Drosera capensis Red Form • rain • sarracenia • Sarracenia alata • Sarracenia Judith Hindle • Sarracenia leucophylla | 5 Comments »

souvenirs

I’m back from my trip, and I’ll post some of the trip pic­tures here soon.

Two weeks away dur­ing prime grow­ing sea­son can guar­an­tee that you’ll come back to sur­prises. I knew toma­toes grew quickly, but, dang, what was I think­ing when I put that one inde­ter­mi­nate mon­ster in the flower bed? I don’t usu­ally prune my tomato plants, but that’s what I was doing within fif­teen min­utes of pulling up in the dri­ve­way. A few baby toma­toes of the first crop went with the stems that went into the greens recy­cle bin, but there will be more where those came from.

The nicest sur­prise to come back to was prob­a­bly the open­ing of the first pitcher on the Sar­race­nia alata in the new bog gar­den. I’d been watch­ing the new leaves mak­ing their way up from the rhi­zomes for the last cou­ple of months, and this first pitcher was per­fect: ele­gant, stream­lined, and gen­tly striped.

I usu­ally don’t buy piles of sou­venirs on my trips. This time I came home with three. One was a lit­tle soap in the shape of a cute griz­zly bear. (The soap smelled like cheap cologne.) Another was a wild huckleberry-filled choco­late bar for John. (Even though he likes choco­late as much as I do, he agreed that the sou­venir bar tasted like bad Hershey’s with a lit­tle bit of berry jam spread on it. At least the wrap­per was festive.)

And the last sou­venir I brought home was for the car­niv­o­rous plants in the bog gar­den. Com­mon wis­dom is that car­ni­vores like pure water, with total dis­solved solids less than 50 parts per mil­lion. The local San Diego water bot­toms out at around 180ppm tds and goes up from there, so it’s not ideal–and actu­ally lethal over the long term–for car­ni­vores. At the Nor­ris Camp­ground in Yel­low­stone on my way out I emp­tied my 5-gallon emer­gency water con­tainer which I’d filled with dis­gust­ing San Diego tap water at the start of the trip. Then I went to the spigot and filled it with five fresh gal­lons of pure moun­tain snowmelt.

Not long after I got home I took the moun­tain water to the bog plants and opened the spigot on the jug and let it drib­ble into the assorted pitcher plants and sun­dews. After sniff­ing the dis­gust­ing sou­venir soap and sam­pling the unfor­tu­nate choco­late, I know the bog plants got the best sou­venir of all from my trip. Noth­ing is too good for some of my cur­rent favorite plants…

A happy Cape sun­dew (Drosera capen­sis, broad leaf form) in the bog garden.

June 06 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: bog garden • pitcher plants • Sarracenia alata • souvenirs | 3 Comments »

how to scare adults and small children

A box showed up last week. Inside was a plant I’d bid on on eBay, Dar­ling­to­nia cal­i­for­nica, the cobra lily, a plant for the new bog gar­den. It was a nice lit­tle divi­sion, packed in sphag­num and still wet from the bog gar­den it had just left. I showed it to John.

“It’s enought to give me night­mares,” he said, shud­der­ing a little.

I have this scare of snakes, a fear instilled in me by a nanny who took me to the Ran­goon zoo and pointed out the the banded kraits. “See that one? It can kill you with one lit­tle bite. And that one,” she said, point­ing out the Burmese python. Well, she didn’t need to say any­thing. Multi-feet long, and as fat as I was, there was no ques­tion I wouldn’t want to feel its lov­ing embrace.

Some peo­ple want gar­dens that are pretty and make them feel good. But some­how I end up get­ting this plant that has more than a pass­ing resem­blance to my child­hood fears. Maybe it’s about time I faced them head-on. And as scary as this plant is, I think it’s also fairly amazing-looking. And for the first time, I have this com­pul­sion to give this plant a nick­name, some­thing like…Audrey…

April 13 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: bog garden • cobra lily • Darlingtonia californica • snakes | 3 Comments »