[ Lost in the Landscape ]

monkeyflower spectrum

Yes­ter­day I went out to Cre­stridge Eco­log­i­cal Pre­serve, about a half hour’s drive from coastal San Diego. There will be lots of pho­tos from the trip, but here’s a lit­tle panorama to get started, fea­tur­ing the com­mon sticky mon­keyflower, Mimusus auran­ti­a­cus.

Around here you can eas­ily find clones of it that are soft apricot-yellow, or ones that are orange, or scar­let. I’d read some­where that pretty much all the forms west of Inter­state 15 were scar­let, and all of those east of it were apri­cot. It was sup­posed to have some­thing to do with coastal plants sup­pos­edly being pol­li­nated by hum­ming­birds, while those inland were vis­ited by bees. (EDIT, May 9: Another source I just looked at men­tioned that the pri­mary pol­li­na­tor of the pale form was the hawk moth, which makes sense for an adap­ta­tion towards larger, paler flowers.)

Well, what do you make of this? The top com­pos­ite shows the plants, below are the details of the flow­ers on the plants. (You’ll def­i­nitely have to click to enlarge this photo to make sense of this wide panorama.) On this north slope were five plants that showed the com­plete range from apri­cot to scar­let, and the plants were arranged sequen­tially as if they lines in a spec­trum. Cre­stridge is a cou­ple dozen miles east of I-15, so I think these plants blow the I-15 hypoth­e­sis out of the water.

I’d guess the real answer will impli­cate plant-sex and require a more nuanced under­stand­ing of how these dif­fer­ent color forms estab­lish them­selves in dif­fer­ent areas.

May 09 2011 | Categories: landscape • places • plant profiles | Tags: color • Crestridge Ecological Preserve • Mimulus aurantiacus • monkeyflowers • native plants | 7 Comments »

more december colors

Red and green seem to be the pre­dom­i­nant col­ors these days. Instead, how about a shot of hot magenta-pink against green? Of all my pitcher plants this sea­son Sar­race­nia Daina’s Delight is prob­a­bly look­ing the best of any of them.

Vivid col­ors aren’t the rule this late in the sea­son, with brown being the increas­ingly preva­lent shade. With fewer things like color to dis­tract you it’s a good time of year to con­cen­trate on the amaz­ing shapes these pitch­ers assume. In their brown state it’s eas­ier to see the lit­tle hairs on the leaves that direct the insects down into diges­tive juices.

For you color addicts there’s still a bit of color left. This species is Sar­race­nia rubra var. wher­ryi (a.k.a. S. alaba­men­sis var. wher­ryi.)

And for you color addicts who like a more tra­di­tional red and green combo, could you do any bet­ter than this? It’s a cross nick­named ‘W.C.’ by Jerry Adding­ton after Karen Oudean’s Wil­low Creek Nurs­ery, in honor of Karen bestow­ing on him this clone of the hybrid of S. (psittacina x rubra) x leu­co­phylla.

Hmmm…how about a cross between Daina’s Delight and W.C. for gor­geous late sea­son color and awe­some pat­tern­ing? If they both bloom next spring I just might have to make that cross and find out…

December 23 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: color • color combinations • fall • sarracenia • Sarracenia Daina's Delgiht • Sarracenia W.C. • seasons | 6 Comments »

white solstice

Win­ter Sol­stice is a cel­e­bra­tion for opti­mists. Six months of ever-diminishing sun­light leads up to this, the day with the longest, dark­est night. If you weren’t an opti­mist or schooled in the ratio­nal ways of the world you might expect the days to dimin­ish into per­pet­ual darkness–No won­der the Mayan Long Count Cal­en­dar ends on this day in 2012. A pes­simist could see this day as the begin­ning of the end of time.

But I know things are about to change. The dura­tion of the sun­light I find so pre­cious is about to start to increase. The plants that are begin­ning to sprout will take advan­tage of the extra light and grow faster and run head­long into California’s manic late-winter, early-spring sea­son of flow­er­ing and regen­er­a­tion. Call me an opti­mist. It may be tough now, but to appro­pri­ate the words of Dan Sav­age in his cam­paign to fight bul­ly­ing of LGBT young per­sons, It gets bet­ter!

Here’s a brief white-themed gallery in case you’re dream­ing of a white sol­stice. We have no snow to offer you, but instead how about some bright white flow­ers, some white leaves to get you into the mood?

Have a warm and safe hol­i­day, every­one, whether the white stuff around you is snow, foliage or blooms. It’s all about to get bet­ter, soon.

December 21 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: color • flowers • leaves • native plants • white • white sage | 10 Comments »

controlled chaos

I often have trou­ble mix­ing orna­men­tals and veg­eta­bles together in a gar­den bed that’s sup­posed to be “for com­pany,” a bed that’s meant to be attrac­tive as well as con­tain­ing tasty-looking plants that you’d like to take to the din­ner table.

Some parts of the gar­den where I’ve snuck veg­gies in with the other plants look a lit­tle chaotic, but here’s a patch that I really like the looks of. Ear­lier I showed part of this cor­ner that the bed­room win­dow over­looks. But new things are start­ing to bloom, and the col­ors are start­ing to really click for me.

When I was putting this bed together, I set myself the main rule of “noth­ing yel­low.” In decid­ing what veg­gies to place there, I just stuck to that orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple. (Okay, can you tell that I work in libraries and orga­nize infor­ma­tion dur­ing the week?)

This bed fea­tures sev­eral edi­bles: red-stemmed chard, orange-stemmed chard, Red Win­ter red Russ­ian kale, red beets, plus cat­mint for tea (and for the cat). The orna­men­tals include scar­let geum, pur­ple heliotrope, vio­let blue-eyed grass, the salmon-colored bulb Home­ria col­lina, two blue sages (Salvia sagit­tata and Salvia cacali­ae­fo­lia) plus a few other things not in bloom.

For sure, there’s a lot of red and blue and pur­ple going on here. But sev­eral vari­a­tions on green in the back­ground green do won­ders to pull together what might oth­er­wise be chaos.

I’m going to hate cut­ting any of these veg­gies for dinner…

April 04 2009 | Categories: my garden | Tags: blue • color • color combinations • flower beds • purple • red • vegetable gardening • vegetables • violet | 9 Comments »

dramatic wall colors and plants

I still haven’t got­ten around to doing some­thing about the color of the my lit­tle detached stu­dio behind the house. Col­ors of res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hoods and gar­den walls usu­ally tend towards pretty neu­tral shades. Here are a cou­ple com­bi­na­tions of walls with plants that I thought were pretty dra­matic while still being flat­ter­ing to the land­scap­ing. They could be inter­est­ing choices for gar­den walls or even–if you’re truly brave–walls of your house.

This first one is the free­way side of the Tustin Mar­ket­place in Orange County, as see from Inter­state 5 on my way up to LA last week. The fairly dark burnt red-to-salmon wall col­oration mixes dra­mat­i­cally with the green bougainvil­lea foliage and red­dish magenta flow­ers in the fore­ground. And the sil­ver trunks and bright green foliage of the trees in the back­ground stand out dra­mat­i­cally against the wall.

The sec­ond is another retail sit­u­a­tion, the plant­i­ngs by the park­ing lot at the Mis­sion Val­ley Mall here in town. The vio­let wall, as the pre­ced­ing red­dish one, once again plays against the sil­ver trunks of the trees and the bright green leaves.

The first com­bi­na­tion to me feels warm­ing and ener­getic with­out being too hyper, with the red being a color that isn’t so far removed from the Mediter­ranean themed hous­ing that con­tin­ues to be pop­u­lar in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. The sec­ond is def­i­nitely cooler, more restrained–and maybe a lit­tle more urban and adventurous.

We’ll see how brave I am when I finally have time to address resid­ing the stu­dio and rebuild­ing the attached patio cover. But I’m def­i­nitely feel­ing like doing some­thing other than white or beige this time…

March 23 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: color • color combinations • hardscape • walls | 4 Comments »

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 »

appreciating black

The Inter­net is a hum­bling con­trap­tion. Any time you think you’ve got a new and excit­ing idea you can trawl the web for a few min­utes and find that someone’s had the same idea long before you.

Case in point: With Hal­loween approach­ing, I was think­ing about the color black and how that’s prob­a­bly the last color you’ll hear a gar­dener talk­ing about using in the gar­den. And then I run across this book online, Black Magic & Pur­ple Pas­sion: Dark Foliage and Flow­ers for the Gar­den, by Karen Platt. Dang. She got there first, and in the year 2000. I haven’t had a chance to look at the book yet, but it sounds like it could be a good resource for plants that fea­ture the dark­est, rich­est depths of color.

I shouldn’t have been sur­prised. For well over a decade now, vio­las and pan­sies have been avail­able in dark black-purple col­ors. And from long before that, there’s been a near-black maroon hol­ly­hock that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s days at Mon­ti­cello. And that’s just the tip of the black iceberg.

Look­ing around my gar­den I can come up with a cou­ple more inter­est­ing exam­ples of plants and flow­ers that come in black or some­thing pretty darn close to it, dontcha know (as Sarah Palin might say…).

Andean sage, Salvia dis­color, has these lit­tle dark, dark flow­ers that read as black more than the pro­found pur­ple that they are. In my gar­den the plant gets about three feet tall and like most sages sprawls a bit. It’s best used where you can appre­ci­ate the dark flow­ers up close. The rest of the plant is close to white in color–pale green on the tops of the leaves, white below–so this is a plant with lots of inter­est­ing contrast.

And then there’s black bam­boo, Phyl­lostachys nigra, the stems of which ripen in their sec­ond year to this beau­ti­ful black color.

Although listed as grow­ing twenty to thirty feet, the plant in my gar­den has stayed closer to ten or twelve feet tall. Give it water if you want it big, or only an occa­sional offer­ing, like I do, to keep it smaller.

Being a clump­ing bam­boo it’s pretty well behaved when it comes to spread­ing. Here it’s con­tained on two sides by walls, and to keep it in bounds John dug a shal­low trench join­ing the two walls, dumped in some left­over dry cement mix, and watered it in. The plant crosses the con­crete line only occa­sion­ally, and when it does it’s easy to snip the way­ward rhizomes.

The hard­est job with this plant is thin­ning out the stems that have died back. Every other year I devote half an hour or so and dis­ap­pear inside the plant with a pair of hand pruners–not a job for the claus­tro­pho­bic. The job is best done after spring nest­ing sea­son, after some of the local birds use the dense foliage to raise their young.

Want more ideas for black plants? Take a look at King Seeds, a seed resource in New Zealand where they have flow­ers arranged by color, includ­ing black! (There they list pop­pies, dianthus, nas­tur­tiums and nemophila ‘Penny Black’ among their dark-flowered offerings.)

Hal­loween isn’t far away, of course. But these are great plants that deserve a place in gar­dens year round.

October 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Andean sage • black • black bamboo • color • dark flowers • Phyllostachys nigra • Salvia discolor | 3 Comments »

nothing yellow

Last fall’s big plant­ing effort was a big raised bed of peren­ni­als, shrubs, bulbs, a tree fern and a tan­ger­ine tree, most of which went into the ground over the course of two months. While I don’t strive for total order in every­thing in my life, I was wor­ried that assem­bling a bed of so many dif­fer­ent kinds of plants all at once might quickly lead to total chaos, some­thing on the order of those “color bowls” that they sell at nurs­eries and home stores.

(Okay, yes, some color bowls are well done and actu­ally quite nice, but the worst are tossed-together plant com­bi­na­tions that pro­vide work for the color-blind and are the gar­den equiv­a­lent of mak­ing your­self a cafe­te­ria plate of spaghetti, frozen yogurt, fried chicken, and creamed corn, all mixed together and doused with ketchup and caramel sauce.)

To help tame the poten­tial dis­or­der I set myself one basic orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple: Noth­ing yel­low (and only small doses of orange).

I have noth­ing against the color yel­low, and in fact I have yel­low all over the gar­den. But I wanted to cre­ate a quiet zone with sooth­ing col­ors that would har­mo­nize with each other. Also, one of my least favorite gar­den color com­bi­na­tions is the mix of yel­low flow­ers with gray foliage. Ban­ish­ing yel­low would let me fea­ture plants with inter­est­ing gray foliage. Still, even after ditch­ing yel­low and most oranges, it still leaves reds and pur­ples and whites and pinks and blues–and of course the all-important green!

But once a year, for a cou­ple weeks, the color scheme will fall apart as a clus­ter of kahili gin­ger break into bloom with spec­tac­u­lar and amaz­ingly fra­grant spikes of yel­low flow­ers. There’ll be noth­ing else yel­low in that part of the gar­den, and your eye will go right to the lewdly sen­su­ous rule­break­ers. Once that quick phi­lan­der off the color wheel passes, though, the gar­den will return to its for­mer order. Only now it’ll be enriched by heady mem­o­ries of its brief indis­cre­tion. (Hmmm, sounds like a few plot lines I’ve encountered…)

Speak­ing of orga­niz­ing some­thing around the absence of cer­tain col­ors–and things with plot lines, John and I were watch­ing some of the bonus fea­tures on the DVD of The Hours. In one of them the cos­tume and pro­duc­tion design­ers were talk­ing about how they arrived at a rule to help pull together the look of the film: Noth­ing red, and noth­ing blue. Partly as a result of that orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple the film sus­tains its earth-bound mood­i­ness as the plot hops decades and moves back and forth from Eng­land to New York to California.

So…whether you’re plan­ning a gar­den or shoot­ing a movie, remem­ber: Pay atten­tion to the power of color!

July 13 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: color • color combinations | 2 Comments »

garden color

Color of course needs to be an impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion in plan­ning the gar­den. You may be famil­iar with Gertrude Jekyll’s impor­tant book devoted just to the sub­ject, Colour Scheme in the Flower Gar­den. If you don’t know it—or if you your copy is falling apart—you can read it for free online via Google Books. Her selec­tions of plants won’t apply to many loca­tions since she lived in Eng­land, but her thought processes about choos­ing col­ors and stag­ing pro­ces­sions of col­ors through­out the year col­ors are instruc­tive and worth the read.

You can find plenty of other gar­den books online through Google books. If they’re out of copy­right you can see the entire text. Even if they’re still under copy­right con­trol, you can skim through many others–usually enough to let you decide if you want to buy the book, and often enough to answer a spe­cific ques­tion that might be your only rea­son for want­ing to look at the book.

When Google started their mas­sive project to dig­i­tize items in many of the world’s major libraries they raised more than a few eye­brows. What were they up to? What were they doing scan­ning all these books and poten­tially releas­ing for free the hard work of the world’s authors?

I’ve just fin­ished The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edi­son to Google by Nicholas Carr. It’s def­i­nitely a work of jour­nal­ism and not poetry, but a para­graph on page 223 made my jaw drop and just by itself made read­ing the book worthwhile:

George Dyson, a his­to­rian of technology…was invited to Google’s head­quar­ters in Moun­tain View, Cal­i­for­nia, in Octo­ber 2005 to give a speech… After his talk, Dyson found him­self chat­ting with a Google engi­neer about the company’s con­tro­ver­sial plant to scan the con­tents of the world’s libraries into its data­base. “We are not scan­ning all those books to be read by peo­ple,” the engi­neer told him. “We are scan­ning them to be read by an AI [Arti­fi­cial Intelligence].”

Creepy. But at least in the end, when Google’s com­put­ers take over the world, they’ll at least be able to put together a color-coordinated Eng­lish cot­tage garden.

July 12 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: artificial intelligence • color • Gertrude Jekyll • Google Books • Nicholas Carr | 1 Comment »

color resources

Here’s the side view of my stu­dio. The col­ors are pretty atro­cious and I wanted to try out some dif­fer­ent options.

Colourlovers lets you play with col­ors in lots of ways, and I started there. I used their tool to extract some of the gen­eral col­ors of the stu­dio from the pic­ture above. I can’t change the brick eas­ily, so the orange-red color is pretty much a given. I want to use fore­ground plant­i­ngs that are mainly green, though I’ve already planted a Loropetalum chi­nense var. rubrum ‘Plum Delight’ which has vivid pur­ple foliage much of the year. I made a “before” swatch com­bi­na­tion incor­po­rat­ing the green and pur­ple foliage with an orange that gen­er­ally rep­re­sents the brick. I also used the gray and army green col­ors from the stu­dio for the first swatch. Those are the col­ors I want to play with mod­i­fy­ing.

My cur­rent main idea is to do some­thing a lit­tle more dar­ing with the basic color, prob­a­bly some in the intense blue to blue-violet range. I think the plant col­ors would look pretty amaz­ing against it. About the time I redo the sid­ing on the stu­dio the patio will also get redone, most likely with char­coal gray/black uprights to mir­ror some char­coal sup­ports I have going on in the front of the house. I’ll stare at the new swatch below to see if it really would be as cool as I think it might be. And if I don’t like that one, maybe some­thing like the sec­ond alter­nate, some­thing using rusted steel to cover the eaves and a dark, warm gray on the build­ing… And if I don’t like those options, chang­ing swatch col­ors is lots more work­able than repaint­ing every­thing.

While you’re at the site you can also take your swatches and turn them into plaids or stripes or a whole bunch of other pat­terns. A few months back I was spend­ing waaaaay too much time play­ing at Colourlovers!

A sim­i­lar resource, one that’s devoted just to swatches, is Adobe’s Kuler. It’s not as social a place as Colourlovers, but the inter­face is beau­ti­fully designed. Also, you’ll prob­a­bly find more pro­fes­sional palette options that peo­ple have con­tributed. Enjoy!

April 05 2008 | Categories: landscape design | Tags: color • colourlovers • kuler | No Comments »