[ 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 »

screening with wood, screening with plants

I showed the almost-complete ver­sion of this front porch screen ear­lier, but that was before we applied the final stain to the wood. Here it is in the really final version.

As long as we were stain­ing wood, we got up to the deck and attacked the rail­ings with the same stain. It had been more than a year since we’d done it last and things had faded. You can see the before and after pretty clearly in these pic­tures. (This project used an oil-based stain for hard­woods. They make a water-based stain that claims to last seven years, but it ended up flak­ing off this oily ipe hard­wood on the small project we tested it on. Total dis­as­ter. Save it for softwoods.)

How do all of you react to exte­rior wood that’s aged to a sil­ver color? This project is still on the new side for us and we wanted to keep it look­ing as it did when we first fin­ished it. Stain­ing all the tops and bot­toms and sides of the wood is a lot of work, though. As we get less able or moti­vated to keep up with details around the house, I’m sure we’ll let things assume more of a Gray Gar­dens look.

But back to the front screen… After the project was com­plete there was a gap between where the screen ends and the dri­ve­way. While I’m not one to put up cas­tle walls and a moat between us and the busy street, a lit­tle more pri­vacy seemed like a good idea.

Before, we had a cou­ple low laven­ders in front of the screen: Nice enough and they sur­vived with vir­tu­ally no sum­mer water­ing. But they weren’t much of a pri­vacy screen. Yank. Out they went.

In their place is this new Cean­othus ‘Tuxedo.’ I’d done a post on some gar­den cean­othus not long ago, and I couldn’t stop think­ing about the near-black foliage of this vari­ety. With the laven­ders gone, there was a per­fect place for it.

Okay, stare at the pic­ture of the lit­tle gal­lon plant and ask the obvi­ous ques­tion: “Wasn’t the idea to install a plant that would screen the view from the street?”

Cean­othus tend to be rapid grow­ers. This selec­tion is new to the trade this spring, so I’m not sure exactly how rapid it’ll be. Still, I expect that it’ll approach its tar­get size of six feet by six feet before too long. I’ll post more pic­tures as it fills in.

May 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: ceanothus • Ceanothus Tuxedo • hardscape • screening • wood stains | 13 Comments »