in with the new

Sun­day was a day of clean­ing up the gar­den to make room for a few new plants. The pre­ferred order of doing things prob­a­bly would have been to clean up the space and then go shop­ping, but the big fall plant sale of the San Diego chap­ter of the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety takes place on one day only, and the Sat­ur­day before was the day.

Adenostoma fasciculatum Nicolas

I arrived at the sale with a short shop­ping list that was arranged alpha­bet­i­cally. The first plants I saw were the two last gal­lons they had of the first plant on my list, pros­trate chamise (Adenos­toma fas­ci­c­u­la­tum ‘Nico­las’). I grabbed the gal­lons and started down my list. I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to doing the rest of my shop­ping weighed down by twenty pounds of native shrub­bery, but there’s noth­ing like a lit­tle phys­i­cal dis­com­fort to keep you on budget.

The chamise that you usu­ally find in the chap­ar­ral is a strik­ing, large shrub with dra­matic branch struc­ture. This selec­tion, a form from San Nico­las Island, matures to an open, grace­ful ground­cover, sev­eral feet across. When it’s young, like here, it’s easy to mis­take it for trail­ing rosemary.

Chamise has a rep­u­ta­tion for being a poor choice for fire-prone loca­tions. Even die hard native plant peo­ple who live in wild areas will often actively remove what any plants they find near their home. A con­ver­sa­tion I had with one of the expe­ri­enced local CNPS chap­ter mem­bers made me won­der if its rep­u­ta­tion is ill-deserved. His con­tention was that the plant burns no more intensely that many other natives, and that he’d wit­nessed a burn line where half of a chamise had burned, while the other half of the plant looked green and healthy. He held that it was yet another case of local fire depart­ments wag­ing war on per­fectly good native plants. My plants were going next to a con­crete side­walk along the street, so fire safety wasn’t on my mind. Even if flam­ma­ble, a low ground­cover poses fewer haz­ards than a big burn­ing bush.

As I con­tin­ued shop­ping I ran into one of my cowork­ers who with the help of his wife was heft­ing a two-inch pot of the rare San Diego bur-ragweed, Ambrosia chenopodi­ifo­lia. The plant can make an attrac­tive lit­tle lump, and I was tempted briefly by its rare sta­tus. But this species, along with other rag­weeds, is con­sid­ered a severe aller­gen at PollenLibrary.com, and I have a hard enough time sur­viv­ing the spring with­out severe aller­gens imme­di­ately outside.

New plants in flat

By the time I checked out I had ten plants, about thirty to forty pounds worth, includ­ing a gal­lon plant of Gar­rya ellip­tica and some itty bitty pots of deer­weed (Lotus sco­par­ius), yerba buena (Sat­ureja dou­glasii) and Cal­i­for­nia aster (Corethrog­yne filagini­fo­lia, aka Lessin­gia filangini­flora). And it was at this point I ran into fel­low local blog­ger George from Groksurf’s San Diego. He had a slope, and was think­ing about some man­zan­i­tas for a slope, some for ground­cover, oth­ers for larger, con­trast­ing shapes. It had been years since I’d seen him last, so it was a nice chance to touch base and talk plants and water use in the land­scape. But I felt bad when I had to excuse myself and get what was feel­ing like 300 pounds of plants to the car and get back home to fin­ish Saturday’s house projects.

The rest of Sat­ur­day would be lots of unpleas­ant house projects. But I knew that much of Sun­day I’d finally be able to get back into the gar­den. It had been too long.

October 20 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • | 6 Comments »