[ Lost in the Landscape ]

good book, cool trivia

I love a good book that sur­prises you.

When I was talk­ing to a botanist a cou­ple months ago and she rec­om­mended Oscar F. Clarke’s Flora of the Santa Ana River and Envi­rons : with ref­er­ences to world botany, I was expect­ing the book to be a nicely assem­bled writeup of a water­shed a cou­ple of hours to the north. As such it’d be a good writeup of species I’m using to see­ing in my area seen through the fil­ter of some­one work­ing in the Los Angeles/Orange/Riverside County region of South­ern California.

The vol­ume, which the back cover says “rep­re­sents a cul­mi­na­tion of a life­time of nat­ural his­tory study,” lives up to my expec­ta­tion of being a use­ful guide for study­ing the plants of the area. But in addi­tion it ends up being full of all sorts of inter­est­ing lit­tle details that breath life into what might oth­er­wise be an inert text­book. It’s a rich book, not a dense one.

(Edit, July 13, 2010: In addi­tion to Clarke, the book has three co-authors who should be named: Danielle Svehla, Greg Ballmer and Arlee Mon­talvo. Thanks to all of you for such a great book.)

For exam­ple, take some of the details in the writeup on our state flower, the Cal­i­for­nia poppy. Last year I decided that I’d replace my plant­i­ngs of the typ­i­cal garden-orange strain with the lower-growing yel­low strain that you find locally. The first season’s plants ger­mi­nated and grew well. This year I was fully expect­ing the plants to return in pro­fu­sion, com­ing up both from last season’s roots and the seeds that the plants dropped. Instead, most of this year’s crop were the big orange gar­den strain. What went wrong?

Clarke’s descrip­tion of the species con­cludes with a sen­tence that helped answer my ques­tion: “Local native pop­u­la­tions pro­duce seeds that remain dor­mant until exposed to winter/spring con­di­tions in com­bi­na­tion with smoke or other unknown fac­tors, while pop­u­la­tions from cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia and com­mer­cial cul­ti­vars pro­duce non-dormant seeds.” While it didn’t explain what I need to do to get these plants to nat­u­ral­ize, it at least explained that I was bat­tling against some unknown bio­log­i­cal forces. I felt bet­ter in my failure.

The illus­tra­tions in many man­u­als can be pretty poor, but that’s not the case here. All through­out the book brims with illus­tra­tions. Here are some of them from the poppy descrip­tion. You’ll find close­ups of diag­nos­tic plant fea­tures, usu­ally with the graphic of a penny for size comparison’s sake. And often you’ll see shots of entire plants. Each writeup also has a lit­tle rec­tan­gle with a graphic of a human stand­ing next to the plant being described. The idea is that the box will tell you a lot of details at a glances–stuff like size, growth habit, struc­ture of the flower, num­ber of petals, the posi­tion of the ovary, and whether the plant is an annual or lives longer. After hav­ing stared at the graph­ics for a cou­ple weeks I still find it a tad con­fus­ing, but if you’re good at decod­ing images instead of read­ing about the details, this might be just the thing for you. Another minor grouse is that type­face is almost too small for aging eyes like mine. Of course a big­ger type would prob­a­bly result in a larger, less field-friendly man­ual. But those are minor quibbles.

Back to some plant trivia: About Cal­i­for­nia sea laven­der, Limo­nium cal­i­for­nicum, shown here get­ting ready to bloom, Clarke observes that “The only native Cal­i­for­nia mem­ber of this genus, [it] occurs pri­mar­ily along the imme­di­ate coast. It is salt-tolerant (halo­phytic) and excretes salt on its broad, leath­ery leaves.” This detail is impor­tant to me as I decide which plants to tar­get with the left­over water I’ve gath­ered from show­er­ing. Instead of toss­ing the soapy, shampoo-spiked water, I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure which plants wouldn’t mind stand­ing in the second-hand liq­uids. This species seemed happy enough with the water last year, and the writeup gives me extra con­fi­dence that I’m prob­a­bly not doing it any harm.

Life in the Santa Ana River Basin these days is as much about inva­sive plants as it is native species. Accord­ingly the book has a num­ber of exotics mixed into the 900 species it describes.

Telling grasses apart can be one of the more dif­fi­cult things to do in the field. The detailed descrip­tions and pho­tos help ease that chore. Here are the illus­tra­tions for panic veld­grass, Ehrharta erecta, a really both­er­some weed in many gar­dens, mine included.

The weed descrip­tions, like those for the other plants, have lit­tle trivia bits woven through them. About panic veldt­grass you learn that “Live­stock find it highly palat­able, espe­cially chick­ens and rab­bits.” That sen­tence might not mean a lot to you, but it explained some­thing I’ve been noticing.

Scooter, the cat, always shows a lot of inter­est when I’m in the gar­den, and is most help­ful when I’m in the mid­dle of pulling up weeds. And of all the weeds, this is the one that the cat really goes crazy over, often nudg­ing, claw­ing, fight­ing you to get to munch on a few blades of the stuff.

Ah, yes, it all sud­denly makes sense now: “live­stock,” “highly palat­able.” Eureka! So to Clarke’s list of chick­ens and rab­bits we can add another species: cats.

So yes, this is a book with lots of infor­ma­tion about plants of the Santa Ana region. But it ended up telling me as much about what’s going on in my gar­den. Very cool.

June 22 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • places | Tags: California poppy • California sea lavender • cats • Ehrharta erecta • Escholzia californica • Escholzia californica maritima • Limonium californicum • native plants • Oscar F. Clarke • panic veldtgrass • Santa Ana River Basin | 5 Comments »

no rain, no rainbows

I looked west this morn­ing while I was hav­ing break­fast and saw the first rain­bow I’ve seen in months, maybe years. Although it was cool out­side I had to go up to the deck to check it out. The rain­bow was just a short piece of an arc ris­ing from the ocean, but in this land of lit­tle rain you take what you get.

The rain­bow was just about the last offi­cial act of a set of four con­sec­u­tive storms that deliv­ered over six days almost as much mois­ture as we received all of last year. And by “storms” I do mean real storms with rain, hail, thun­der, light­ning and tree-toppling winds. But for most of us in town things went as well as could be expected.

At work euca­lyp­tus trees cracked and fell, build­ings leaked, flows of water and mud threat­ened to invade sev­eral build­ings. Walk­ing out­side entailed wad­ing through pud­dles or jump­ing from one high spot to another.

At home power flick­ered on and off a few times. The back yard laked up briefly, but noth­ing that looked like it was going to come in the house.

Hail came down a cou­ple times, but noth­ing was hurt. These pel­lets were about the size of peas.

Rain was heavy. These lit­tle buck­ets to catch roof runoff were full within the first 24 hours.

A pot­ted Kalan­choe pro­lif­era on the roof deck–seen here on the right–blew over. While the base must weigh 75 pounds when soak­ing wet, the plant is tall and proved no match for the blasts of wind that came through. This photo was shot after the plant was righted, so you can see it wasn’t both­ered by spend­ing some time sideways.

A sur­vey this morn­ing showed the trays of bog plants full of water, flood­ing the pots. These swamp dwellers are adapted to a lit­tle flood­ing, and in some areas peo­ple over­win­ter the rhi­zomes under­wa­ter so they don’t rot.

In fact, the par­rot pitcher plant from the Florida-Georgia area, Sar­race­nia psittacina, can be found com­pletely sub­merged over the win­ter. Its traps are unique in that they’re adapted to catch­ing swim­ming as well as crawl­ing crea­tures, so it’ll find some­thing to eat, whether under­wa­ter or above.

The cul­vert in city ease­ment behind the house filled with water. It makes me want to estab­lish a lit­tle ver­nal pool in the muck at the bot­tom. I won­der if it would work in this loca­tion. Some of the most endan­gered plants in my area can be found around ver­nal pools and nowhere else.

The cool­ing weather and moister weather greens up the plants that have been dor­mant through the dry sea­son. In the back Core­op­sis gigan­tea leaves begin to sprout on what had been lit­tle brown trunks. But in the fore­ground you see all the weeds that accom­pany the sea­son. These are mostly seedlings of a few mizuna plants, a Japan­ese mus­tard green, that I let go to seed a decade ago.

…and when life gives you young, weedy, ten­der mizuna sprouts, why not pick mizuna greens? These will be in tonight’s salad.

So you can see we came through pretty well. The main casu­alty was Scooter, the cat, who’s used to occa­sional times out­side to sun her­self. I think the “Can I go out­side, please?” expres­sion is pretty clear on her face here.

She did get to go out this morn­ing, at last, and so did I. While I appre­ci­ate the rain, a lit­tle respite between storms doesn’t hurt, both for cats and humans alike. It also gives the water­logged ground to dry out a bit or to let the water seep down farther.

If the weather fore­casts are right, we’ll be get­ting another storm on Tues­day, but it won’t be any­thing like the almost con­tin­u­ous rain we just had. After 3 years of bad drought, we’ll take what­ever rain falls, even if we don’t get any more rain­bows with it.

January 23 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: cats • drought • rain • weather | 5 Comments »

defensive boots

It’s a dan­ger­ous time out there for Cal­i­for­nia gar­den blog­gers. One of them just had a run-in of a thumb and a chipper-shredder, though for­tu­nately with an out­come way short of what you’d see towards the end of Fargo. (If you don’t know Fargo, here’s the snow­globe that came with the deluxe collector’s let­ter­boxed edi­tion VHS tape which mir­rors the tone of the film per­fectly. It memo­ri­al­izes the infa­mous chipper-shredder scene where Trooper Marge Gun­der­son comes upon the crim­i­nal try­ing to dis­pose of his lat­est vic­tim. When shaken, the snow in the globe is tainted with lit­tle red flakes. Magical…)

Another blog­ger broke her arm, tak­ing her away from post­ing for a while.

Not to be left out, a lit­tle over a month ago, while work­ing on my house repair project, I ended up step­ping into a pile of scrap wood that hap­pened to have a big spikey nail that was point­ing straight up out of one of the boards. My work shoes–some bat­tered old Skecher ten­nies that were hip in the late 1990s–were no match for the nail and…you know the rest. I’m per­fectly fine now, but two days of painkillers and the week of crutches were no fun.

I really should have bet­ter shoes for work­ing out­side, I thought after the lit­tle acci­dent. And this week­end I finally got around to replac­ing my unsafe and ugly tennies.

So here they are: some indus­trial Tim­ber­land work­boots with steel toes and puncture-resistant soles. They weigh as much as a small sack of pota­toes but are sur­pris­ingly comfortable.

So was this overkill for work­ing out­side and around the gar­den? They should be great for forc­ing a shovel into the patches of the gar­den where the earth is seri­ously hard­pan clay. But they’re def­i­nitely noth­ing to wear when try­ing to weave gin­gerly through a bed of new seedlings. I haven’t had a chance to plant any­thing over the last cou­ple of days, and I haven’t had a need to finesse my way around tiny lit­tle plants. But I think I’ll like them and that I’ll actu­ally wear them gardening.

What­ever the ver­dict, one mem­ber of the house­hold is already happy. Here’s Scooter, who doesn’t give a hoot about my new boots. But every new pair of shoes that enters the house means that there’ll be a shoe­box accom­pa­ny­ing them. The cat approves.

November 10 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: cats • Fargo (film) • films • injuries • Scooter • workboots | 9 Comments »

dressed to weed

Sunny and warm: a per­fect morn­ing for cats and gar­den­ers. The cat had her chores, mainly to stare at inter­est­ing things in the gar­den, and I had mine.

Task #1 was to dead­head the arc­to­tis (African daisy) that has been bloom­ing for sev­eral months. This is the “before” on one plant…

…and the “after” on another. Arc­to­tis goes on bloom­ing regard­less of whether it’s been dead­headed or not. But the plants looked like they were wind­ing down for the year, and I was hop­ing to extend their sea­son a bit.

The plants are attrac­tive, but I thought the bucket of trim­mings was pretty cool, too.

Chore #2 was to weed one of the patches of bromeli­ads that we’d let loose in the back of a raised bed. The plant has rigid spines like teeth on a sharp saw blade, which makes weed­ing tricky, and forces you to ask your­self, “Do I really want to do this?”

John started on the task and ended up with bloody fore­arms. Not happy. He went for the pitch­fork, think­ing we could lift the clumps, weed under them, and then set the clumps back. These are plants with almost no roots, and that would have worked fine.

But I pro­posed another idea. I have these long cor­dura motor­cy­cle gauntlets that I use when I ride my scooter when it’s cold out. They pro­tect your hands, but also your fore­arms. Would those work for the gar­den, too?

I suited up, first a thick long-sleeved sweat­shirt, and then the gauntlets. Okay, it’s not par­tic­u­larly haute cou­ture, and it’s not a look I’d want to inflict on the world. But it worked.

Why all this effort? Well, the flow­ers are pretty stun­ning right now in an unre­strained, trop­i­cal way. And the plants are sur­pris­ing drought-tolerant.

Weed­ing around them seems to be the main chal­lenge. But now we’ve got an easy solution…

April 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bromeliads • cats • deadheading • weeding | 6 Comments »

garden in moonlight

Last night the moon was nearly full and the gar­den glowed brightly in its light. The images below are all long expo­sures, from sev­eral to thirty sec­onds, so a tri­pod was essential.

Moon, con­trail, clouds…

Yucca in moon­light: The flow­ers are white, but light from the nearby street­light made them appear orange.

Water lilies reflect­ing the moon, over black water, with bent papyrus stems in the fore­ground… This is my favorite pic­ture from last night.

Papyrus and falling water…

The cat, explor­ing on the roof…

A view towards the water from the deck…

…and finally, a shot of the gar­den. In long expo­sures like this one, the gar­den almost looks as if it’s being lit by the sun. But the odd, the­atri­cal col­ors from the lights in the houses give it a color cast that makes you look twice. Day or night?

Long dig­i­tal expo­sures always have a degree of noise, the grainy pris­matic fuzz that pol­lutes the darker parts of the images. (It’s par­tic­u­larly obnox­ious in the cat image above.) Pro­grams like Noise Ninja can do won­ders with reduc­ing the noise and mak­ing the images look more nat­ural. But I think they’re fine for shar­ing on the web.

December 12 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography | Tags: cats • moon • night photography • Scooter • time exposures | 8 Comments »

garden-deficit disorder

It’s get­ting to be that sea­son. My morn­ings are now see­ing me at work around sun­rise and home at a time when it’s almost dark by when I’ve fin­ished prepar­ing and eat­ing din­ner. And for the next two months it’s only going to be get­ting worse as we head towards the dark­en­ing maw of win­ter. At least I only do these long days four times a week. Still, I’m get­ting a seri­ous case of with­drawal from the garden.

This is the time of year when I really start to feel envi­ous about John’s posi­tion, work­ing out of the house. In between doing what he does on the phone and com­puter he gets a chance to keep up with the hap­pen­ings on the street. The neigh­bors across the street just had a new baby, John reported, and he’s really cute. John also reported that the mother of one of our neigh­bors just died, and the neigh­bor two houses down is now in a nurs­ing home, com­pletely inco­her­ent, after being ambu­lanced away from the house not much more than a week ago.

Look­ing at the implaca­ble facades of the houses on the street, it’s hard to tell that any­thing is hap­pen­ing. But being home, around the neigh­bors, John is able to keep up with dramas.

John is also able to keep up with things hap­pen­ing in the gar­den. A story from the past week was of look­ing out the win­dow to see the cat din­ing on the ten­der new leaves of the mil­let seedlings that I’d set in the ground not many days before.

“You didn’t stop her?” I protested.

“It was soooo cute,” he said.

Well, this was the cat over last week­end. How can you dis­ci­pline basic instinc­tual behav­ior in such a sweet cat? Okay, okay, I calmed down a bit.

But I was still wor­ried about the mil­let plants.

Left: Orna­men­tal mil­let, Pen­nise­tum glau­cum ‘Pur­ple Majesty’ [ source ]

Orna­men­tal red mil­let hit the gar­den world in a big way with the intro­duc­tion of the Pur­ple Majesty F1 strain in 2003. This slen­der four– to five-footer was awarded the All-America Selec­tions Gold Medal, which basi­cally assured that the plant would end up in gar­den cen­ters and seed cat­a­logs all over. That strain spawned oth­ers, includ­ing the shorter ‘Jester,’ which I’ve been start­ing to see a lot of–even at the Home Depot gar­den center.

Even though pur­ple mil­let is now so déclassé, now that it’s hit Home Depot, I decided I wanted to try it. A seed order a few weeks back brought me a hefty packet of the orig­i­nal Pur­ple Majesty. Some of the seeds went into pots and they sprouted in less than a week. And then the lit­tle fel­las were ready for the gar­den, when they were adjust­ing and start­ing to increase in size. And then the lawn­mower cat attacked.

Well, I’m glad to say, I could hardly see any cat dam­age to the seedlings–a chewed blade here and there, but noth­ing major. Here’s a lit­tle clump of them as they stand today. The largest is push­ing eight inches tall, and the red col­oration is start­ing to develop now that they’re bask­ing in full sun half of the day. It might be too late in the year for them to develop the dra­matic seed heads, but I’ll have some nice pur­ple, ver­ti­cal plants in the gar­den in no time. Since these are hardy to zone 8, they’ll make it through win­ter just fine and be bloom­ing away before you know it.

Any­way, now that I’ve have a cou­ple hours in the gar­den this morn­ing I’m feel­ing reju­ve­nated, espe­cially now that I know that the plants I’ve been slav­ing over lately have come through unscathed. And of course it’s been nice to have some gar­den time to spend with the cat. To pro­tect the mil­let, I’ve been point­ing out to her the lit­tle grass seedlings that are real weeds. So far the feline lawn­mower seems con­tent with the other options.

October 17 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles • rambles | Tags: cats • October • Pennisetum glaucum 'Purple Majesty' • purple • purple millet • the neighborhood | 2 Comments »

plush lush

I have a num­ber of plants in the gar­den that reseed one year to the next, things like alyssum, vio­las, Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies, some orna­men­tal grasses, as well as the let­tuces that I’ve writ­ten about. Another of these hardy reseed­ers is catnip.

A mem­ber of the mint fam­ily, it can get ram­bunc­tious in moister cli­mates where it spreads eas­ily by seed. For­tu­nately, unlike many other plants in the mint fam­ily, for me it doesn’t spread by under­ground run­ners. Each year I can count on two to a half-dozen new seedlings each year in seem­ingly ran­dom loca­tions through­out the yard. Any­thing that comes up where it’s not wel­come is an easy tug to remove.

This year I’ve iden­ti­fied two cat­nip plants in the gar­den so far. Both were start­ing to gain stature until Scooter got into one of them last week­end. For­tu­nately they have that mint gene that helps them bounce back after a thor­ough chew­ing. Now I’m won­der­ing whether cat­nip needs to be a fed­er­ally con­trolled sub­stance…

 

July 10 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: catnip • cats | 2 Comments »

garden cat and abu ghraib in 3-d!

I’ve writ­ten about our cat Scooter. A while back I’d bought myself a Sput­nik cam­era, and old Russ­ian roll-film cam­era that takes two pic­tures simul­ta­ne­ously, each of them of the same thing, but with sep­a­rate lenses spaced about the same dis­tance as a pair of eyes. With a spe­cial stereo viewer or by mak­ing what’s called an anaglyph you can recon­struct the scene giv­ing you a 3-d effect. When I took the cam­era out­side on the first day I had it Scooter fol­lowed me out.

Above and below are a cou­ple anaglyphs made from images shot dur­ing that ses­sion. If you have a pair of red/cyan 3-d glasses you can see the image in stereo. (A red/greed pair will work as well, though not as well. Clear glasses that use polar­ized light won’t work for teas­ing apart the sep­a­rate images in the anaglyph.) I con­structed the anaglyphs in a way that would still make sense to view­ers with­out the 3-d glasses, in a way that fea­tures the star of each picture…

As much fun as I had out­side with the cat I hadn’t bought the cam­era to take more won­der­ful cat pic­tures. George Bush’s Iraq War was chug­ging along full steam and the noto­ri­ous pic­tures from Abu Ghraib had recently sur­faced. The world was pissed after see­ing them and so was I. Pol­i­tics seeps into my art in var­i­ous ways, most of them sub­tle, but I started a small seri­ous of pieces address­ing the Iraq war. Below is one of those works, a 3-d pho­tomon­tage com­bin­ing staged ele­ments along with one of the most infa­mous war images of recent times. It’s a com­plex response, com­bin­ing what might look like humor with a seething rage I still har­bor towards a war launched by a man who’s now been respon­si­ble for more Amer­i­can deaths than the num­ber of those who died in the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks in New York. And that’s only a frac­tion of those who’ve been killed.

James SOE NYUN: Le Can-Can Abu Ghraib.

Tech­ni­cal Details: The orig­i­nal Abu Ghraib image was gen­tly dis­sected and reassem­bled into two slightly dif­fer­ent images that were then com­pos­ited to give a sub­tle 3-d image. The fore­ground and stage were mock­ups that I staged and pho­tographed twice with con­ven­tional cam­eras, mov­ing the tri­pod to the side about four inches between expo­sures. The “danc­ing” fig­ures were pho­tographed using the stereo Sput­nik cam­era. Two sep­a­rate com­pos­ite images were com­pleted using Pho­to­shop, one reflect­ing what the left eye might see, the other what the right eye would see. The left image was then pasted into the red chan­nels of the final image and the right image pasted into the green and blue chan­nels. The final work is printed fairly large, at a scale approach­ing nar­ra­tive his­tory paintings.

Google “pho­to­shop” and “anaglyph” for a pile of resources on how to make your own anaglyphs.

March 29 2008 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: 3-d photography • Abu Ghraib • cats • photomontage • Sputnik camera • stereo photography | 2 Comments »

cats, bulbs, corms and tubers

Here’s a pic­ture of our cat Scooter, squinting:

Lovely, eh? She’s def­i­nitely great com­pany in the house or when we’re out­side gar­den­ing. But being a cat, she’ll be around one minute and off doing some­thing else the next, only to reap­pear when you least expect it. Some­thing like bulbs in the garden.

You plant the bulbs in the ground, add some water, and prac­ti­cally for­get about them. Then when they’re ready, they emerge and bloom for a few days or a few weeks. Then they’re not there any­more, long before you get tired of them.

Most of the paper­white nar­cis­sus in the gar­den have already bloomed. In San Diego they mark the start of the long bulb sea­son, with its long suc­ces­sions of nar­cis­sus, cycla­men, freesia, dich­e­lostemma, blom­me­ria, oxalis, ornithogalum, ixia, ranun­cu­lus, home­ria, calla, amaryl­lis, glad­i­o­lus, plus what­ever else that you’d for­got­ten that you’d put into the ground. I never get tired of see­ing them when they come decide to come around around. Some­thing like the favorite cat…

November 30 2007 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: bulbs • cats • corms • tubers | 1 Comment »