This has been one of the most spectacular years I can remember for coyote bush brush, Baccharis pilularis.
With many plants still dormant from a long season with no rain, the perky green baccharis with their over the top heads of white seeds stand out. They look especially amazing with the sun behind them, lighting up the masses of seed.
Here’s a closeup of a stem swarming with seeds…
…looking closer…
…and closer still. You can see here that the seeds are attached to the white parachutes that give the plants their white color this time of year in the wilds. These photos were taken in Tecolote Canyon, a few blocks from my house, this past Friday, one day before our first measurable rainfall in 164 days knocked many of these seeds off the plants.
Coyote bush brush is sometimes used in native gardens, occasionally in this upright form, but more often in its prostrate Central California coastal form. The selections ‘Pigeon Point’ and ‘Twin Peaks’ are fairly popular. But if you grow the these selections you’ll find that only male plants are used horticulturally, meaning you’ll miss out on this display of seed heads that can begin in late summer and last until the winds and rains disperse them.
For contrast, this is a boy coyote bush brush, sturdy and green with no supplemental water here near the coast. The buckwheats and sage and sagebrush have all retreated to their dormant gray late summer coloration all around him.
And a closeup of his dried flowers. Nothing nearly so spectacular as his sisters this time of year. But he’s got one advantage in that he’s not filling the air with parachutes of seed blowing everywhere like his messy sisters.
Male or female, coyote bush brush plays host to more interesting beneficial local bugs than you’ll see on almost any other plant. I’ll be starting some of these from seed this year in hopes of getting one of these spectacularly messy female plants. Down-wind four houses from me is the canyon, so seed dispersal shouldn’t be a problem.
For further reading: In Praise of Baccharis pilularis, at Town Mouse and Country Mouse.
November 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • plant profiles | Tags: Baccharis pilularis consanguinea • coyote bush • seeds • Tecolote Canyon | 10 Comments »
It’s not quite planting season, but for the last few trips to the local nursery I’d been eying a plant I hadn’t noticed before, Phlomis monocephala, a sister species to the more common Jerusalem sage, P. fruticosa.
This strongly drought-tolerant species from Turkey has leaves that are highly textured like those of several native California sages. What sets it apart from the California sages is what it does in the summer, when the leaves turn this strong yellow-green color. In the spring to early summer it will have a modest display of yellow flowers, but this a plant that you use for its cool foliage, providing a point of interest when a lot of the natives have shut down.
My front yard is a mixed Mediterranean-climate planting with a number of California natives, and I thought this plant would complement them nicely. It so happens that there are some plants that peaked five years ago and would better replaced. Three phlomis would fit in their spot perfectly.
It so happened that the nursery had exactly three plants. Plant shopping can be a competitive sport. If you see something, that might be the last chance you’ll have at it. So you can probably guess that I’m now the owner of three little Phlomis monocephala plants. I won’t do any serious garden reworking for another month or so, but I should be able to keep the plants happy and watered for that long.
The plant will top out at about four by four feet, is considered hardy to zone 9, and requires excellent drainage.
While at the nursery I noticed this other California-friendly phlomis, P. lanata. This species grows lower, to maybe two feet tall by three to four wide. The size and shape of the plant actually would have been a better choice for the spot I have, but this isn’t one of the phlomis species that develops the gorgeous yellow summer coloration.
What it does have, though, are these really cool, fuzzy grayish leaves and stems. How can you resist touching it? Like the much larger Jerusalem sage, it’ll put on a good show of bright yellow flowers.
One thing I do at nurseries is to move plants into little combinations to see how they’d look together. The first time the staff sees me doing it it might raise some eyebrows, but the staff at Walter Anderson Nursery is used to me by now. (As you might expect someone who works in a library, I make sure to put everything back in its proper place.)
Here’s a play in scale and texture, a little ensemble of yellowish-green to pale green colored leaves that I liked: the Phlomis monocephala that I bought, in combination with what would be the low-growing form of coyote bush brush (Baccharis pilularis pilularis ‘Pigeon Point’) and the really delicate Australian woolly bush (Adenanthos sericeus).
Often, when you do an exercise like this, the plants will have wildly different cultural requirements or would be grossly incompatible size-wise. But in this case all three could coexist together in a nice planting, with maybe only the woolly bush needing just a bit more summer watering. The woolly bush would grow up into a large shrub, the phlomis into a dense medium-sized one, and the coyote bush brush would sprawl attractively around the base of the other two.
August 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Adenanthos sericeus • Baccharis pilularis pilularis Pigeon Point • coyote bush • Jerusalem sage • Phlomis lanata • Phlomis monocephala • plant com • plant combinations • wooly bush | 9 Comments »
