[ Lost in the Landscape ]

a decade of neglect

When my par­ents retired they moved out of their house of almost twenty-five years in the Los Ange­les area. Not want­ing to pick favorites between their two chil­dren they decided on a mod­est house in a new devel­op­ment in Ocean­side, halfway between my sis­ter and me.

Like many new homes the land­scap­ing that came with the place was bare-bones: lawn, with a sin­gle podocar­pus sapling next to the front curb. The blank slate excited my mother, who was look­ing for­ward to putting her stamp on a new piece of prop­erty. I helped her plan the yard, con­struct the raised beds, move dirt and do some of the plant­ing. In the end, though, almost all the plant selec­tions were hers: ole­an­ders, pit­tospo­rum, gera­ni­ums, roses, aza­leas, aga­pan­thus, bird of par­adise, Japan­ese maple, cit­rus, stone fruit trees, plus selec­tions from the other plants that were being pro­moted twenty years ago.

When my mother died in the late 90s it left my father with a yard that wasn’t exactly what you’d call low-maintenance. And Ocean­side wasn’t a quick drive up for me so that I could help tend it. Sev­eral years later he moved out, leav­ing the gardener’s gar­den in the hands of renters, many of whom never watered or tended it.

One cor­ner of the back yard, with some sur­vivor plants and oth­ers that hadn’t fared so well.

Last sum­mer I had a chance to stop by the house for what will prob­a­bly be my last visit. Many plants were still alive, thanks in part to what had been a mod­er­ately moist win­ter and spring, with more thanks prob­a­bly going to the neigh­bors who watered their lawns and unknow­ingly kept the ground moist for thirsty roots from next door to sneak under the side fence.

A detail of the pre­ced­ing pho­tos, show­ing a bright green native Bac­cha­rus, coy­ote brush, that had col­o­nized the bed. It looks much hap­pier than most of the non-natives.

Laven­der, crape myr­tle and cit­rus are still hang­ing on. The lawn is long gone, however.

The side yard, with over­grown hon­ey­suckle and pittosporum.

A rose and weeds in the front yard, prob­a­bly sur­viv­ing from over­spray from the neighbor’s sprinklers.

I’d always thought Japan­ese maples were water hogs. This one didn’t seem to mind the abuse, though I sus­pect its roots wan­dered far next door look­ing for water. To the left behind it is aspara­gus fern, a plant that will sur­vive long after the next zom­bie apocalypse.

Shef­fle­ria, the fairly inde­struc­table house­plant, turns into a fairly inde­struc­table sub­trop­i­cal screen out­doors when planted next to the neighbor’s well watered lawn. The adja­cent aza­leas weren’t so resource­ful and were pretty crispy-brown.

My mother liked her gera­ni­ums. This sur­vivor was just about the only thing bloom­ing that day.

A steep and weedy slope drops to the back prop­erty line. A nar­row ripar­ian cor­ri­dor behind the house was thick with untrimmed wil­lows, doing a ter­rific job of screen­ing out con­dos and a Home Depot that have gone up beyond the fence.

The house is in the hands of new own­ers now. They’ll prob­a­bly look at the ragged plant­i­ngs and decide to start fresh, remov­ing most of the scrappy plants and mak­ing the yard their own.

If I hadn’t seen the yard in its cur­rent state I might have felt pro­tec­tive or ter­ri­to­r­ial. But this visit allowed me to let go. This was once a com­fort­able and beau­ti­fully main­tained gar­den that gave my par­ents joy. I have those mem­o­ries, but I real­ize that’s not what the gar­den is anymore.

I now feel at peace with what­ever the new own­ers will want to do with the yard. I wish them well.

November 06 2010 | Categories: gardening | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • what remains | 10 Comments »

landscaping horror: where diy meets wtf

One of my friends recently turned me on to Regretsy, a blog that gath­ers together some of the more unfor­tu­nate objects that earnest DIY­ers have made and posted for sale at the Etsy craft site.

I really like Regretsy’s tag line, “where DIY meets WTF,” and I’ve bor­rowed it for the sub­ti­tle of this quick post on a new gar­den space that went up in my neigh­bor­hood, a bit of land­scap­ing hor­ri­ble­ness that seemed per­fect for Halloween.

I thank John for notic­ing it first and point­ing it out to me, know­ing how well I’d appre­ci­ate it. “It’s on the right as you head down the hill. You can’t miss it.”

Ah, what a won­der: plas­tic grass-colored indoor-outdoor car­pet­ing, one of my per­sonal favs…placed nat­u­ral­is­ti­cally between the side­walk and the side fence…

But it gets bet­ter! Ever six feet or so, next to the fence, the designer has planted big red silk roses. I’m sure they were meant to coor­di­nate with the red curb.

A gar­den made out of dead things emu­lat­ing live ones. Zom­bies. Plas­tic roses. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

One of the dan­gers of hav­ing lovely flow­ers next to a pub­lic walk­way is that some­one might want to pick them.

One of the roses planted in this plas­tic lawn. Note the price tag still attached.

Could this be the lat­est avant-garde gar­den designed by Martha Schwartz, who’s incor­po­rated plas­tic plants into her designs, as in her [ Splice Gar­den, at Cambridge’s White­head Insti­tute ]?

No, sadly, prob­a­bly not. But I will force myself to say some­thing nice about it: At least it doesn’t require water­ing, except maybe to hose off the dust.

October 31 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: astroturf • drought-tolerant landscaping • Martha Schwartz • plastic • plastic turf • water conservation | 15 Comments »

our gardens after we’re gone

Ever won­der what your gar­den would look like if the human care­tak­ers just vanished?

Maybe I’ve been inspired by all the dis­as­ter flicks like 2012 or the His­tory Channel’s Life After Peo­ple series. But envi­sion­ing gar­dens after gar­den­ers is an inter­est­ing intel­lec­tual exer­cise that might help us answer that pesky ques­tion: What is a garden?

Would all the inva­sive species take over? Would the native plants reclaim their turf? For how long would you still be able to tell that a gar­den existed in a spot in the first place?

I looked at parts of my back yard and tried to imag­ine what would happen.

Within the first month, in South­ern California’s dry cli­mate, most of the pot­ted plants would per­ish for lack of water. Some of the suc­cu­lents might hang on longer, but with­out an exten­sive root sys­tem in the ground, they’d be doomed.

This lit­tle frog would be star­ing at a bog gar­den where all the bog plants have died back, once again for lack of water.

Within two or three months the fish­ponds would be dry: no waterlilies, no cat­tails, no sedges, no water for the local birds.

This pathetic patch of grass would go through boom and bust cycles, turn­ing green with the rains, dying back to brown other times of year. Seeds of other plants bet­ter adapted to the con­di­tions would even­tu­ally take hold. Maybe some plants from the local canyon. Maybe some hardy exotic or inva­sive species.

Behind the back fence of the house is this slope dom­i­nated by ram­pant ice­plant. The the neigh­bor behind me and I haven’t been able agree on what to do with the space. I’ve planted a small col­lec­tion of native plants to help sta­bi­lize the slope. These are species that with only once excep­tion can be found within a five mile radius of the house, and include plants like this night­shade, Solanum parishii…

…and Del Mar Man­zanita, Arc­tostaphy­los glan­du­losa ssp. cras­si­fo­lia, an extremely rare plant that’s on the Fed­eral endan­gered species list. The neigh­bor, how­ever, loves their ice­plant and can’t imag­ine of a slope with­out this gaw­daw­ful inva­sive species clam­or­ing all over it. The local chap­ter of the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety has pre­pared a great pam­phlet on get­ting rid of ice­plant that you can view [ here ]. It goes into some great rea­sons to get rid of the stuff:

Planted on hill­sides of thou­sands of homes in San Diego, it has since crawled off the orig­i­nal site and into neigh­bor­ing Open Space parks, endan­ger­ing unique plants by smoth­er­ing them. Ice­plant pro­vides lit­tle habi­tat value com­pared to the plant com­mu­nity that it is replac­ing. Com­pared to the native shrubs, ice­plant has very shal­low roots that do not hold soil well; close inspec­tion often reveals gul­lies under­neath the twisted mat of vines. After rain, Ice­plant engorges with water, sub­stan­tially increas­ing its weight. As a result, ice­plant can cause the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of steep hill­sides by encour­ag­ing slump­ing – poten­tially endan­ger­ing the house above.

For peo­ple in sub­ur­bia, “habi­tat value” might mean plants that har­bor scary wild ani­mals and bugs, so that’s not always the most com­pelling rea­son to go native. The fact that ice­plant might endan­ger their prop­erty val­ues could be more persuasive.

So, return­ing to my main topic, the ice­plant would prob­a­bly over­run most of the native plants in a very few years and form a deep pile. Once we neglected the slope for a few years and found that the mat of ice­plant was start­ing to push the back fence over. Within ten years the fence would begin to fail and the ice­plant would begin its descent into the lower garden.

These plants along the back fence would stand a chance of sur­viv­ing with­out water. The yucca, palm, pro­tea would be tall enough to sur­vive an onslaught of maraud­ing ice­plant from behind. They’re plants that don’t require much main­te­nance, and this wall of foliage would prob­a­bly look unchanged for a num­ber of years. But the lower aloes and other suc­cu­lents would likely be smoth­ered by the iceplant.

This apri­cot against the back fence never looks great with­out sum­mer water­ing, but it sur­vives. It’s tall enough that it would prob­a­bly sur­vive the ice­plant inva­sion. Some of the adja­cent native plants do great with the nat­ural con­di­tions. They might not cope so well with the maraud­ing iceplant.

The neigh­bor on the side has Alger­ian ivy that requires con­stant clip­ping to keep it next door. Within two years it would begin to estab­lish itself in the back yard. Taller plants that might sur­vive the ice­plant inva­sion might have ivy crawl­ing up and smoth­er­ing them.

This raised bed near the house is where veg­gies and irri­gated plants live. Most of the exotic plants wouldn’t make it with­out water. The Dr. Hurd man­zanita, the bougainvil­lea vine and maybe the Gar­rya ellip­tica would prob­a­bly hang in there, how­ever, maybe for decades, maybe for much longer.

Fifty to seventy-five years out the house would start to fail. Plants might begin to move in. The sur­round­ing gar­den space would be over­grown with the hardi­est drought-adapted species. I almost never plant in rows, but the mixed ori­gins of the species–South Africa, South Amer­ica, Europe, as well as from all over Cal­i­for­nia, not just local species–would clue an inves­ti­ga­tor into the fact that a gar­den existed on the site. The rela­tion­ships between the plants would be dic­tated by nature, not a gar­dener pre­serv­ing order between plants with mis­matched lev­els of vigor.

Chances are excel­lent that one hun­dred years out, maybe two hun­dred or more, the most per­sis­tent inva­sive species would still be here. Ice­plant and ivy, plus fen­nel and black mus­tard that have invaded the local canyons, would fea­ture in the neigh­bor­hood land­scape. But while many inva­sives bask in the newly dis­turbed earth of a gar­den or the re-engineered grades around roads, they don’t always do so well long-term. Biol­o­gists have sug­gested that many native plants would return to a place where they’re not being pulled out or con­stantly mowed. My yard might be col­o­nized by the local Mex­i­can elder­berry, or toyon, or lemon­ade berry, or prickly pear. And maybe some of the plants I’ve already intro­duced to the yard will per­sist and repro­duce. The restora­tion of nature might spread from my house and from the wild edges of nature just a few houses away.

Even after nature returns, the occa­sional hardy exotic plant sur­viv­ing amidst the natives, along with some of the neighborhood’s plant­i­ngs of trees and shrubs in rows will make it obvi­ous: There used to be gar­dens here.

February 02 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • iceplant • invasive plants • native plants | 26 Comments »

not in the doldrums

It’s the end of sum­mer and most areas of the gar­den seem to be in some sleepy botan­i­cal tor­por, exhausted from the heat. Not much is bloom­ing. Brown is everywhere.

And then by con­trast there’s this lit­tle over-performing cor­ner, formed in large part by chunks of suc­cu­lents that John has col­lected over the years…

Cas­cad­ing over a back wall are the shock­ing red flow­ers of this cras­sula (I think it’s Cras­sula per­fo­li­ata var. minor, a.k.a. Cras­sula fal­cata). Its com­pan­ions in this photo are a cou­ple of other suc­cu­lents, one of the goth-black aeo­ni­ums (Aeo­nium arboreum ‘Zwartkop’) and what’s likely Grap­topetalum paraguayense. The three are pretty easy to find and like nice combined.

After the win­ter rains the foliage on all of these plants plumps up and looks pretty spec­tac­u­lar. But as sum­mer set­tles in the aeo­nium and and grap­topetalum drop their larger leaves in favor of a tight clus­ter of leaves packed at the grow­ing end of the stalks. The big­ger the leaf the greater the water loss. The cras­sula will retain its leaves, how­ever, although they’ll look a lit­tle shriv­eled in the drought. The fact that the leaves are folded in half prob­a­bly helps to shade the leaf, reduce tran­spi­ra­tion and reduce mois­ture loss.

The flow­er­ing of the cras­sula varies by year. The photo above is from this sea­son, actu­ally not one of the bet­ter years. To the left is a shot from last August. This year’s not quite as flashy, but in the slow heat of August and Sep­tem­ber, I’ll take it.

September 01 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Aeonium arboreum • Crassula perfoliata var. mino • drought-tolerant landscaping • Graptopetalum paraguayense • succulents | 7 Comments »

friday garden roundup

After fin­ish­ing my cof­fee and read­ing some of the news­pa­per this morn­ing I took a quick sur­vey around the yard.

Honey bush (Melianthus major) is a South African species that I’ve had for a cou­ple years now. Although it responds to water­ing with a lot of spunky growth, it’s also good with min­i­mal addi­tional water­ing. I have two sprin­kler heads in the gar­den, and this plant gets by on the over­spray from one of the heads after it’s made the sages and tan­ger­ine tree happy.

The maroon flow­ers unfurl from the branch tips in spring and dry to these brown spikes. I’ve left them on the plant to help me decide if I like the way they look or not. The bed they’re in in has a lot of mound­ing plants, so the spikes give some ver­ti­cal interest.

The leaves are heav­ily ser­rated and are the main rea­son for grow­ing the plant. Here they are, with shad­ows, and back­lit by the morn­ing sun. They look a lit­tle fierce, but they’re actu­ally soft, like rub­ber. They do have a bit of an unpleas­ant odor if you brush by them. Com­bine that fact with the plant’s even­tual size–six to twelve feet–and you’ll see that it has “dra­matic back­ground plant” writ­ten all over it.

The melianthus grows next to a bromeliad that truly is nasty and spiny. (I’ve men­tioned this plant before…) Pretty though, even when it’s not flow­er­ing. And it takes next to no water when grown in mostly shade.

Next to the honey bush and bromeliad, in a plant­ing that spans two or three con­ti­nents, is a young man­zanita, Actostaphy­los Dr. Hurd, shown here in a detail high­light­ing its exfo­li­at­ing bark. Although one of the faster grow­ing manzanitas–it’s grown eight inches since February–this still isn’t a plant for the impa­tient. Cur­rently it’s exactly one meter tall, and will hope­fully hit its design height of ten feet before I’m back dia­pers. Even­tu­ally it’ll make it to fif­teen feet or more.

In the front of the same bed, next to a sprin­kler head, are some basil cut­tings that I’ve posted on before. Six weeks after plant­ing out, the largest plant is maybe eight by eight inches and is big enough for me to con­sider tak­ing an occa­sional snip for the din­ner table. In a month I should be ready to make batches of pesto.

The final photo isn’t my gar­den, but look­ing across the street, where they’re installing plas­tic turf. The neigh­bors are respond­ing to our new water restric­tions by mix­ing syn­thetic grass with palm trees. The look will be some­thing like the wet Hawai­ian par­adise they had before.

But I do worry that syn­thetic grass, even if it looks some­thing like the real thing, does noth­ing to address people’s fun­da­men­tal expec­ta­tions of what a gar­den should look like in a fiercely dry cli­mate. And in my most unchar­i­ta­ble moments I think that installing plas­tic grass is like treat­ing heroin addic­tion with methadone. And to this gar­dener, installing some­thing as dead as plas­tic grass lands with a thud as loud as the one cre­ated by the infa­mous 1978 remodel of a Sun­set Boule­vard man­sion by a Saudi sheik that fea­tured planters full of plas­tic flowers.

But hey, they’re doing what makes sense to them, and they will be reduc­ing their water use.

July 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Arctostaphylos x Dr. Hurd • basil • bromeliads • drought-tolerant landscaping • Melianthus major | 5 Comments »

how the neighbors are coping

Water restric­tions went into effect here in San Diego on June 1. So far there’s a short list of thou-shalt-nots, and the water dis­trict has pri­mar­ily tar­geted land­scape irri­ga­tion, the low-hanging fruit, with direc­tives like: no water­ing between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., water­ing only on spec­i­fied days based on your address, sprinkler-watering lim­ited to no more than 10 min­utes, three times a week.

Walk­ing around my neigh­bor­hood I can see a lot of peo­ple who’ve responded to the call. Some are just begin­ning to make changes, while oth­ers made changes years ago.

I was down a cou­ple streets from my house when I saw this front yard makeover. Sim­ple. Just a few big plants cho­sen for their coun­tours. This is a house where the mod­ern lines of the house echo the style of the plant­i­ngs. The sago palm requires some water, but the other plants would do well going dry.

Walk­ing around I saw a num­ber of houses where more drought-tolerant plant­i­ngs were mak­ing their way into the land­scape. Each house seemed to have their own take on what a drought-tolerant front yard could look like.

Some relied on hard­scape to replace a lawn…

…some went in for lots of mulch instead of a lawn, but not many plants…

…some for mulch with some plants, drought-tolerant or not…

…many of the yards that were reimag­ined as dry land­scapes many years ago seemed to rely on gravel and some plants…

…sev­eral used gravel with just a few plants to image a desert theme…

…this one mixed gravel, junipers, and edi­ble landscaping–a fig–right out front…

…many used what I’d con­sider a con­tem­po­rary look, employ­ing widely-spaced drought tol­er­ant com­bin­ing natives or exotics set in mulch or DG…

…here’s another of the style where a few plants are set in the mid­dle of space they’ll never grow into. It’s def­i­nitely a look, as well as land­scap­ing that embraces the fact that things don’t need to be densely planted to look good…

…many yards fea­ture some more water-intensive plants mixed in with ones that require a lot of water, a kind of plant­ing that a drip irri­ga­tion sys­tem can make pos­si­ble. These peo­ple used some roses along with plants that’ll look good with less water.

Look­ing around you sense that this is a neigh­bor­hood in tran­si­tion. Some peo­ple are just let­ting their lawns go brown. Some may be plan­ning on redo­ing their plant­i­ngs. Oth­ers are prob­a­bly just wait­ing out the water restric­tions to go back to their old ways.

Some houses are still attached to their old ways that fea­ture con­spic­u­ous water con­sump­tion. Maybe at some point its was a sta­tus thing, show­ing every­one that you could spend resources on some­thing that can’t be used. But these days it’s hard not to feel a lit­tle hot under the col­lar when these are resources that are being taken from the rest of us.

Still, before I get overly tough on the neigh­bors, I want to give peo­ple the ben­e­fit of the doubt for a while. These are tough eco­nomic times. Redo­ing your land­scap­ing can be an expen­sive propo­si­tion. And there are peo­ple for whom deal­ing with a sprin­kler timer would be like ask­ing them to pilot the Space Shut­tle. (My father could never fig­ure out his timer.) And there’s a chance that peo­ple haven’t heard about the new restrictions.

But there’s one water-user that I’ll call out on the car­pet. This is our local shop­ping cen­ter, which pre­sum­ably is main­tained by peo­ple who know what they’re doing. But water­ing the side­walk and the asphalt…

…and then let­ting all the water run off into the storm drains, well, that does get my goat. But it’s not like I’m only grous­ing on a blog they’ll prob­a­bly never read. They’ve heard from me already, and I hope they’ll get in step with the neigh­bor­hood they serve.

But over­all I’m pleased. Peo­ple are get­ting the mes­sage and they’re doing some­thing about it. I think they get a sense that we’re all in this together, and we’ll find ways to deal with this water cri­sis. Not liv­ing in a neigh­bor­hood ruled by a homeowner’s asso­ci­a­tion, you can see that we’re all find­ing dif­fer­ent solutions.

Some choices will be bet­ter than oth­ers from the stand­point of water use, habi­tat, urban runoff or reduc­ing the heat island effect. Still, it’s encour­ag­ing to see peo­ple peo­ple wak­ing up from this fan­tasy of a lush, green, sub­trop­i­cal Cal­i­for­nia of end­less water resources.

June 26 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: drought • drought-tolerant landscaping • water conservation | 8 Comments »

herbs for a dry garden

Is there any­thing bet­ter than fresh herbs from the garden?

For years I had herbs in my fairly dry veg­gie gar­den. Some of the herbs herbs thrived. Oth­ers sulked. Some died.

For­tu­nately, if you’re try­ing to cut down on water­ing, you still have a huge num­ber of herbs to choose from. For instance, many of the plants that you think of imme­di­ately when you hear the word “herb” orig­i­nate in the Mediter­ranean, and many of them pre­fer less mois­ture than other gar­den plants.

Below, I’ve listed some com­mon herbs that have done well for me dry spots, along with oth­ers that I’ve seen doing well in quite dry con­di­tions. There are lots of other selec­tions, but this list can get you going with more than a summer’s worth of recipes.

• Rose­mary (Ros­mar­i­nus offic­i­nalis): You can pick from forms that sprawl, form a shrub, or grow straight up in spires.
• Sage (Salvia offi­cianalis): Euro­pean Gar­den sage comes in lots of ver­sions in leaf color (green, golden, tri-color or pur­ple) and fla­vor (“sage” fla­vor, pineap­ple, or grape).
• Oregano (Ori­g­anum vul­gare)
• Mar­jo­ram (Ori­g­anum majo­rana)
• Thyme (Thymus spp.): Some thymes, includ­ing many of those sold for orna­men­tal ground­cover use (such as T. ser­pi­phyl­lum) are only slightly scented or not at all. The culi­nary bush forms gen­er­ally have more scent and fla­vor, and they come in a wide range, includ­ing lemon and lime. They also tend to be more tol­er­ant of dry conditions.
• Laven­der (Lavan­dula spp.): There are sev­eral laven­der species, as well as plenty of hybrids and vari­eties. All are at least some­what drought tol­er­ant. Some extremely so.
• Scented gera­ni­ums (Pelargo­nium spp.): Take your pick of rose, apple, cin­na­mon, nut­meg, pineap­ple, lemon, lime, apri­cot and others.
• Worm­wood (Artemisia spp.)
• Mex­i­can oregano (Lip­pia grave­olens)
• Fen­nel (Foenicu­lum vul­gare): Beau­ti­ful and tasty plants, but they’re con­sid­ered inva­sive in many loca­tions (includ­ing the entire Cal­i­for­nia floris­tic province). Research before you plant! There’s an attrac­tive bronze ver­sion that’s reputed to be less inva­sive. Still, I wouln’t plant it if reg­u­lar fen­nel is a prob­lem in your area.
• Nas­tur­tium (Tropae­olum majus): With edi­ble, pep­pery leaves and flow­ers, some peo­ple con­sider this an herb. As with fen­nel, above, it can be inva­sive. Don’t plant it if it could escape. (Many of the moister hill­sides here in San Diego are cov­ered with the stuff.)
• Lemon grass, both West-Indian (Cym­bo­pogon cit­ra­tus) and East-Indian (C. flex­u­o­sus): Sources tell you these plants like water, but I’ve found that they don’t mind going dry occa­sion­ally, espe­cially if they’re given some shade.

Good eats!

May 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • herbs • rose geranium • rosemary • sage • sweet marjoram | 5 Comments »

the dry gardening handbook

Olivier and Clara Fil­ippi have been gar­den­ing in the south of France for well over a quar­ter cen­tury. Theirs is a mediter­ranean cli­mate, and their nurs­ery, Pépinière Fil­ippi, located near Mont­pel­lier, spe­cial­izes in plants adapted to the dry-summer/wet-winter cycles that you find in only five large regions on earth: the Mediter­ranean zone, proper; South Africa; the south­west cor­ner of Aus­tralia; Chile; and much of California.

When I picked up Olivier Filippi’s recent The Dry Gar­den­ing Hand­book: Plants and Prac­tices for a Chang­ing Cli­mate, I was expect­ing it to be a dif­fer­ent sort of book than it is, maybe some­thing about gen­eral drought-tolerant plants, or a vol­ume ded­i­cated to help­ing your gar­den adapt to using less water. What this is, how­ever, is a straight book on mediter­ranean gar­den­ing and plants suited to mediter­ranean climates–something that prob­a­bly shouldn’t come as a sur­prise since that’s the focus of the author’s nursery.

There’s a brief intro­duc­tion to what con­sti­tutes a mediter­ranean cli­mate, fol­lowed by notes on the strate­gies plants use to sur­vive and thrive in it. Good advice on plan­ning, plant­ing, estab­lish­ing and water­ing a new mediter­ranean gar­den comes next. Then Fil­ippi gives us the heart of the book, a list­ing of over 400 mediterranean-adapted species, con­tain­ing com­mon and sci­en­tific names, approx­i­mate mature plant sizes, and notes on cul­ti­va­tion and prop­a­ga­tion. (If you can begin to read French, you can check out the online cat­a­log at the author’s nurs­ery, which closely mir­rors the list of plants rec­om­mended in the book. There you’ll also find some of the advice that’s offered in the book, although with­out the nice pho­tos in the book.)

Olivier Fil­ippi gar­dens in France, and the plant list def­i­nitely Euro­cen­tric: lots of dif­fer­ent laven­ders, cis­tus, phlomis, for exam­ple, with rel­a­tively few plants from other the other great mediter­ranean regions. In fact, many of the non-Mediterranean mediterranean-friendly plants listed are drought tol­er­ant selec­tions from sev­eral non-mediterranean cli­mates. For gar­den­ers in dry cli­mates that don’t undergo mediter­ranean cycles, these sug­ges­tions might be some of the best options to try. But those plants might not the be great­est of dis­cov­er­ies: Pho­tinia, heav­enly bam­boo (Nan­d­ina domes­tica), red-hot poker (Kniphofia sar­men­tosa) and Amer­i­can gaura (Gaura lind­heimeri), for instance, are prob­a­bly already com­mon offer­ings in many Amer­i­can nurseries.

One of the book’s most out­stand­ing fea­tures is the use of a “drought resis­tance code” that assigns a num­ber from one to six to each of the species in its plant list. Based on work by plant geo­g­ra­pher Henri Gaussen, the num­ber quan­ti­fies the num­ber of months of the year a plant can be expected to sur­vive under drought stress. The book also con­tains instruc­tions on how to cal­cu­late the cli­matic pro­file of where you live. (I fig­ured out that my coastal San Diego loca­tion exerts a 3.5 to 4 drought stress fac­tor. (Edit May 20: I oopsed on my fig­ur­ing for coastal San Diego. My revised num­ber is a much dryer drought stress fac­tor of 6.)) All that’s a really use­ful way to under­stand drought.

When you see plants sold in nurs­eries and cat­a­logs as drought-tolerant, the descrip­tion can be mean­ing­less. A vari­ety that would go fine for two weeks with­out water could turn into sea­soned kin­dling if sub­jected to six or seven months of con­tin­ued dry­ing. Real­iz­ing that a “drought-tolerant” chamomile plant has a drought resis­tance code of 2 would begin to tell you that it wouldn’t thrive in the same con­di­tions that would suit California’s more “drought-proof” Rom­neya coul­teri, which has a drought resis­tance code of 6. Hav­ing that infor­ma­tion could help you plan com­pan­ion plant­i­ngs, as well as help you avoid plants alto­gether that would only lead to expen­sive mistakes.

Com­ing at plant­i­ngs from a mediter­ranean focus leads the author to say some choice things about lawns:

You don’t have to be a vision­ary to see that the tra­di­tional lawn is an absur­dity in mediter­ranean cli­mates. If you nur­ture a deeply rooted feel­ing that you can’t be happy with­out a vast, lush lawn, then per­haps you ought to con­sider going to live in Corn­wall… Peo­ple often imag­ine that they need a huge expanse of lawn, but all too often the only per­son who walks over a tra­di­tional lawn in its entirety is the unfor­tu­nate indi­vid­ual who has to mow it every Sunday.

The author’s solu­tion? Land­scap­ing that pays atten­tion to where you live. For those of you in mediter­ranean cli­mates, this book can help you develop a deeper under­stand­ing of what’s unique about your envi­ron­ment. It can help you come up with good plant choices com­pat­i­ble with what your loca­tion offers. Along the way, it could help you save water, reduce pes­ti­cide use and maybe even free up some of those Sun­days you spend mow­ing the lawn.

May 16 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: books • drought-tolerant landscaping • Mediterranean climate • Olivier Filippi | 7 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 »

a new groundcover

Here’s a look at a new ground­cover I’m try­ing out. The plant, Nuttall’s milkvetch (Astra­galus nut­tal­lii) is native to coastal Cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia, and seems to be adapt­ing eas­ily to my coastal San Diego loca­tion–maybe a lit­tle too well!

Las Pil­i­tas Nurs­ery, who seems to be the only firm prop­a­gat­ing the species, esti­mates its height to be 3–18 inches and 18 to 36 inches wide. The plant went into the ground Octo­ber 12, and has topped out at a foot or so high–so far so good. But its spread, now at over six feet, has eas­ily hit more than dou­ble the esti­mated max­i­mum plant size. And that’s with no sup­ple­men­tal water­ing after the first cou­ple of months in the ground. We’ll see if it slows down as the weather warms and the ground dries out.

The milkvetch bore some of these small, ivory-white flow­ers on it in Octo­ber, and it’s never been with­out them in the inter­ven­ing six months. Now that the weather is warm­ing, the plant is get­ting even more inter­ested in flowering.

As much as I enjoy its flow­ers, my favorite thing about this milkvetch is its del­i­cate foliage. It’s fern-like, and so far has main­tained its clean, green-to-grayish green col­oration. I have the plant at front edge of the retain­ing wall next to the front side­walk, so it’s easy to get face to face with the flow­ers and leaves. A front of the bed loca­tion would also let peo­ple enjoy this del­i­cately tex­tured plant.

So, if you’d like a dis­tinc­tive, del­i­cate, low, mound­ing ground­cover for a dry spot in a zone 9 or 10 land­scape, this might be just the ticket, even if the plant might get a lit­tle wide and need to be cut back.

PS: I should also men­tion that one of this milkvetch’s com­mon names is “locoweed,” and the plant is sup­pos­edly poi­so­nous. I have no idea whether it’s in the cat­e­gory of night­shade or no more dan­ger­ous than tomato plants. Since I have no small chil­dren around or pets that get into any­thing other than cat­nip, I’ve never let an inter­est­ing plant’s sup­posed tox­i­c­ity stop me from grow­ing it. But you might con­sider that before plant­ing a cou­ple acres of it.

March 02 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Astragalus nuttallii • drought-tolerant landscaping • groundcovers • native plants • Nuttall's milkvetch | 8 Comments »