[ Lost in the Landscape ]

balboa park’s desert garden

Jan­u­ary can be an amaz­ing month for suc­cu­lents and other desert plants. Many aloes and agaves explode into bloom, and plants with ephemeral foliage are green with leaves in ways you don’t often see them.

San Diego’s Bal­boa Park houses one of the prime local col­lec­tion of cacti, suc­cu­lents and other desert dwellers from around the world. The Desert Gar­den, the larger of its two suc­cu­lent gar­dens, was estab­lished in 1976, but many of the plants are senior cit­i­zens much older than the age of the garden.

Aloes star in its Jan­u­ary land­scape, with red and orange torches of flow­ers that dou­ble as hum­ming­bird magnets.

And shown here, lurk­ing in the shad­ows, is one of the local hum­ming­birds, stak­ing its territory.

Among the big, mature spec­i­mens are sev­eral dragon trees, Dra­caena draco. In this first photo, on the near trunk, you can see a red­dish patch where the plant’s red sap has dried. When cut, these plants ooze a fluid that in some Euro­pean leg­ends was pur­ported to be dragon’s blood, hence the plant’s name (draco = dragon).

This is a pub­lic gar­den, and so it’s sub­ject to fund­ing glitches and bat­tles over civic pri­or­i­ties. I’d con­sider the gar­den to be in great con­di­tion con­sid­er­ing those limitations.

One thing I would have loved to have seen, though, would be more plant labels. I encoun­tered so many inter­est­ing species, but very few of them had name tags. I have this thing about need­ing to know the name of a plant–Call me com­pul­sive. But the lack of labels drove me crazy. I real­ize, how­ever, that tags don’t come cheap. And in a wide-open pub­lic gar­den, labels can walk away with pieces of suc­cu­lents in the hands of evil plant addicts.

One of the plants that was labeled was this Natal Bot­tle­brush, Greyia suther­landii. A bit scrappy-looking as a plant, but what great flowers!

Also labeled was the Mada­gas­car ocotillo, Allu­au­dia pro­cera. I loved the spi­ral pat­tern­ing of its spines.

Another prob­lem with this being a pub­lic gar­den is that there are quite a few spec­i­mens where people’s temp­ta­tions to carve their ini­tials in the plant life got the bet­ter of them. This euphor­bia was scarred many times over. But that wasn’t going to stop it from blooming.

After vis­it­ing the gar­den I was sur­prised by how many shots I’d racked up in the cam­era. And for some rea­son, the major­ity of them were ver­ti­cals. Is there some­thing about succulents–particularly the upright-growing kinds that mimic the way a human stands–that scream out for pho­tograph­ing them in an upright orientation?

Some yuc­cas, I think, with spent bloom stems.

Boo­jum trees, Fouquieria colum­naris, native to Baja Cal­i­for­nia. This plant is in the same genus as the Cal­i­for­nia desert’s spec­tac­u­lar ocotillo, which inter­est­ingly isn’t related to the Madas­car ocotillo, above.

Aloes and kalan­choes in bloom.

The main gar­den is a flat, easy stroll over wide decom­posed gran­ite path­ways. As part of a recent expan­sion, the gar­den now also includes this switch­back down into Florida Canyon, also part of Bal­boa Park. The plants along the descent are still young, but should look spec­tac­u­lar in a decade or so.

Not every­one in the world loves cac­tus and suc­cu­lents. They might point to the defen­sive spines many of the plants have, and they might say the sculp­tural shapes of the plants don’t look soft and cozy like leafy shrubs or fra­grant roses. Next to the Desert Gar­den is Bal­boa Park’s rose gar­den. Dur­ing spring­time, thirty sec­onds of walk­ing would take you from the world of cac­tus and suc­cu­lents to a gar­den manic with flow­ers and heavy with the aroma of roses. But on this bright Jan­u­ary day, the adja­cent roses were pruned down to naked stems and pierc­ing thorns. It was the cac­tus and suc­cu­lents that looked warm and welcoming.

The Desert Gar­den is located across Park Boule­vard from the Nat­ural His­tory Museum on Bal­boa Park’s museum row. The gar­den has no walls, no entry fee, and is open 24/7, 365 days of the year.

If the 2.5 acres of the Desert Gar­den isn’t enough of a cac­tus and suc­cu­lent fix, cross Park Boule­vard and take a stroll over to the Bal­boa Park Club, maybe ten min­utes on foot, and take in the parks orig­i­nal 1935 cac­tus gar­den, which, accord­ing to the park’s web­site, was estab­lished “under the direc­tion of [San Diego gar­den­ing leg­end] Kate Ses­sions for the 1935 Cal­i­for­nia Pacific Inter­na­tional Expo­si­tion.” There you’ll find “some of the largest cac­tus and suc­cu­lent spec­i­mens in the Park,” along with a nice col­lec­tion of proteas.

January 11 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography • places • plant profiles | Tags: Balboa Park • Balboa Park Desert Garden • cacti • desert plants • drought-tolerant landscaping • in bloom • succulents | 3 Comments »

a retail landscape

Here’s a post in com­mem­o­ra­tion of today, Black Fri­day, the day after Thanks­giv­ing when the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son gets going in earnest.

When one of South­ern California’s first Ikea stores opened at the Tustin Mar­ket­place in Orange County twen­ty­ish years ago I was excited. I’d been over­sat­u­rated with the cheap, ugly depart­ment store mer­chan­dise that was avail­able in my bud­get range at the time, and the sim­ple and ratio­nal Ikea designs wafted in like a breath of Nordic oxygen.

The build­ings of the Tustin Mar­ket­place were dif­fer­ent from any­thing I’d seen at the time. They were huge and painted in intense col­ors of the earth. Although the archi­tec­ture shared some of the color sen­si­bil­i­ties of post­mod­ern archi­tec­ture of the 1980s, it was noth­ing like what was being done in sub­ur­bia at the time. The cen­tral land­scap­ing was also dis­tinc­tive: geo­met­ric, spiky, sculp­tural. Once again, this wasn’t straight out of the rule­book for how you do land­scap­ing for a sub­ur­ban shop­ping center.

I had seen designs by the Mex­i­can archi­tect Ricardo Legor­reta in archi­tec­ture mag­a­zines, and the com­plex in Orange County reminded me a lot of his work. Lit­tle did I know until fairly recently that he actu­ally was respon­si­ble for design­ing the com­plex. On my last trip up to Los Ange­les I made a point of stop­ping by the stores on the way home. Unfor­tu­nately, the Tustin Mar­ket­place hadn’t aged gracefully.

The Ikea was long gone. One of the main roads into the com­plex dead-ended at a stark earth-red wall, eas­ily forty or fifty feet tall, that bore the ghostly remains of where a Linens ‘n’ Things store sign had been removed. I’ve never vis­ited the pyra­mids of either Egypt or Cen­tral Amer­ica, but this is how I imag­ine it would feel: over­pow­er­ing, des­o­late, scaled to some over­in­flated sense of human self-importance.

It was late on a Sun­day morn­ing and most of the remain­ing stores were just open­ing up. It’s the time of day when you’re con­fronted with the acres of blank, blank, blank asphalt that make up so many of this country’s retail land­scapes. This is land that lies bar­ren and unused for fifty weeks out of the year and only springs into use for those few and intense days of hol­i­day shopping.

But not every­thing was over­whelm­ing bleak­ness. The park­ing area next to the food court sported this dense grove of palm trees. The space made me think of the agri­cul­tural groves where dates are grown Indio, south of Palm Springs, in their sense of grace­ful geom­e­try over­head and shel­ter from the ele­ments. Pretty good for a retail park­ing lot, I thought.

A few of the geo­met­ri­cal land­scap­ing details remained from the orig­i­nal design. In the first of these, the orig­i­nal slop­ing lawn had been replaced by one of the arti­fi­cial lawn replace­ment prod­ucts out there. It looks real enough when you’re zoom­ing by in a car, but even with its hype of look­ing bet­ter than Astro­turf, it’s noth­ing I’d want to have to stare at from the win­dows of the house.

And here, in the part­ing shot of the shop­ping cen­ter, a row of white mono­liths marks the tran­si­tion from the park­ing lot to the pub­lic street beyond.

So, is the Tustin Mar­ket­place a great exam­ple of archi­tec­ture or land­scape design? I’d argue no. Even though it’s right on Inter­state 5, I wouldn’t go out of your way to visit it any­more unless you need a snack or bath­room break from the free­way. But the com­plex was dif­fer­ent in its day, and I give it points for that. Addi­tion­ally, the land­scap­ing didn’t require much water to sus­tain it.

Inter­est­ingly, Ricardo Legoretta was behind the late 1980s redesign of Per­sh­ing Square in Los Ange­les, one of the city’s his­toric open spaces and a past gath­er­ing point for a diverse mix of the pop­u­la­tion. Sev­eral years ago I attended a con­fer­ence at the Bilt­more Hotel, which is located on the square. Even at that time Legorreta’s huge slabs of con­crete that had been painted pur­ple looked hos­tile and dated. Per­sh­ing Square was another of the architect’s pub­lic spaces that hadn’t aged grace­fully. There’s now talk of replac­ing the design with some­thing else.

November 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • places | Tags: architecture • Black Friday • drought-tolerant landscaping • retail • Ricardo Legorreta • shopping • suburbia • Tustin Marketplace | 3 Comments »

reclamation

The house behind us has a back fence that is about fif­teen feet behind our rear fence. Between the two is a no-man’s-land of unmain­tained ice­plant, ivy and what­ever else has escaped from the adja­cent gar­dens. In some neigh­bor­hoods this might be the loca­tion for a back alley. But with lot of the back house ris­ing six feet over ours, the land is too sloped to accom­mo­date much more than a nar­row con­crete cul­vert to drain the slope behind us and keep the infre­quent rains from inun­dat­ing all of us below.

We have a gate that leads into this space of ambigu­ous own­er­ship, but I’d never spent much time back there until a recent project to repair the fence.

I looked with con­tempt at the thick mat of ice­plant. Botan­i­cal shag car­pet­ing, I thought. Every ignored space in town is cov­ered with it. It does next to noth­ing to pro­vide habi­tat for the local fauna. Although it’s often planted to sta­bi­lize a slope, its weight can actu­ally pull the slope down more than hold it in place. Yes, it’s very drought-tolerant, and it’s ser­vice­able in some sit­u­a­tions. But the plant for me usu­ally rep­re­sents a colos­sal fail­ure of the imag­i­na­tion. We can do bet­ter than this.

I just hap­pened to have two pots of seedlings of the native sacred datura, a.k.a. toloache, a.k.a. Datura wrightii. The plant eas­ily grows six or more feet across, and I real­is­ti­cally had no space for it in the gar­den around the house. The light­bulb over my head came on.

It’s amaz­ing what ten min­utes with a trowel, a water­ing can and two pots of plants can accom­plish. In this sec­ond photo, lower right, is one of the datura seedlings that I inserted into the thatch under the iceplant.

I must admit that after plant­ing them I for­got to water them for almost a week of dry weather well into the eight­ies. Expect­ing to see car­nage, I was sur­prised to instead see the plants look­ing at least as happy as they were in their seed pots. I gave them another drink of water, but that may be all they’ll require from here on out. Start­ing next spring, I’m hop­ing to bee able to see their amaz­ing morning-glory flow­ers from my deck, unfurl­ing at dusk to greet the night.

From my last walk in the local wilds I came home with a nap­kin folded around the seeds of another plant I pre­vi­ously didn’t have room for. I’m thrilled. I’ve got a whole new plot to garden.

November 25 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Datura wrightii • drought-tolerant landscaping • guerrilla gardening • native plants • toloache | 2 Comments »

double bougainvilleas

One of the plea­sures of a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia garden–if you have the space–is the abil­ity to grow bougainvil­leas. From my deck I can see that the neigh­bors to the north and east have some, as do the neigh­bors two doors down to the south. It’s one of the plants that defines a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia gar­den. They’re com­mon as dirt, but a lot more charismatic.

My gar­den has two vari­eties that we put in over ten years ago. I unfor­tu­nately don’t know their names–This is before I started my data­base of plant names, and their orig­i­nal labels are long gone. But they’re a com­ple­men­tary pair of double-flowered vari­eties, a magenta-pink vari­ety, and a white vari­ety that is flushed the same pink tone at the edge of its bracts.

This is how the two plants look grow­ing together. Bare wall, or frothy mass of pink flow­ers on a plant that requires almost no water and the occa­sional prun­ing? It was an easy deci­sion for us.

One of the down-sides of these plants is what hap­pens with the bracts once the plant has fin­ished flow­er­ing. On the single-flowered vari­eties, they can drop off and make a thick pile of mulch–or mess to clean up, depend­ing on where the plant is. One neigh­bor has their plant next to their swim­ming pool, a place­ment deci­sion that cre­ates a cer­tain amount of extra maintenance.

On the double-flowered ver­sions, the dead bracts tend to hang on to the plant and look a lit­tle less than glam­orous. Here’s a pro­gres­sion from new, to less-than-new, to faded bracts on my plant. You can cut them off, if the brown both­ers you. But the plant is putting out new flow­ers most of the year, so there’s plenty of dis­trac­tion away from the brown.

We South­ern Cal­i­for­ni­ans may be lack­ing the fiery trans­for­ma­tion of our trees as fall sets in, but we’re cer­tainly not with­out our gar­den color.

October 27 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bougainvilleas • drought-tolerant landscaping | 1 Comment »

water-conserving gardens

Every year the water dis­tricts in San Diego county spon­sor a con­test to rec­og­nize gar­dens that use low amounts of water. The California-Friendly Land­scape Con­test has win­ners for each water dis­trict, and then over­all win­ners in three major cat­e­gories: best do-it-yourself, best pro­fes­sion­ally designed, and best native plantings.

Here are a few images of the prize win­ners this sea­son. I think they show that you can have a lively yard with­out using swim­ming pools-full of water to keep things green. Some of the win­ners fea­ture cac­tus and suc­cu­lents, but you can see below that you don’t have to do the desert-thing to use less water.

Best California-native. Win­ner: Gid­lund. Our native flora has plenty of choices that should be used more fre­quently. Flow­er­ing selec­tions in this gar­den fea­ture sages (salvias), asters (erigeron), and mon­key flow­ers (mimus or dipla­cus, depend­ing on which author­ity you side with).

Best in City of San Diego. Win­ner: John­son. Suc­cu­lents with con­trast­ing leaf col­ors and forms star in this gar­den. This image fea­tures agaves, euphor­bias and senecios among the assortment.

Best do-it-yourself. Win­ners: Mendell, Kirk (sorry, they only listed the last names…). This entry was another of the succulent-intensive ones, but this shows a por­tion of the gar­den with mounds of low plants with con­trast­ing foliage, as well as plants in the dis­tance in bloom. Most of us like flow­ers, don’t we?

Best professionally-designed. Win­ner: Whit­ney. A num­ber of broad-leaved plants with beau­ti­fully con­trast­ing foliage fea­ture in this land­scape. I think the con­trasts are absolutely gorgeous!

Many of the pho­tos show land­scapes that aren’t 100% mature, but you can get a sense of what the gar­dens will look like in a few years. Also, as in many land­scap­ing con­tests, the hard­scape seems to get a lot of the atten­tion. I’m of two minds on that issue. For a land­scaper, a large por­tion of the profit resides in the hard­scape details, with markup on a gazebo being way more than on a few shrubs. So some of the land­scapes seem to push the human fea­tures rather than nat­ural ones. But in the case of a well-placed gar­den path: what bet­ter way to imag­ine your­self in the new land­scape than by “walk­ing” through the space with your eyes, fol­low­ing a gen­tle mean­der through your beau­ti­ful new garden?

Check out all the win­ners. The dead­line to enter next year’s com­pe­ti­tion is April 6, 2009, so that gives us all a few months to do a lit­tle replant­ing. In the end, any gar­den that helps save water can be declared a winner.

October 24 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • hardscape • native plants • succulents • water use | No Comments »

roadside flora

We’ve just returned from a cou­ple of days in L.A. The drive up and back isn’t one of the great scenic routes on earth, and for the most part it’s not par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing botanically.

The plant­i­ngs of trees along I-5 and the 405 over 150 miles mostly draw from tried and true Cal­i­for­nia plant sta­ples like palms and euca­lyp­tus, with stands of Ital­ian cypress and occa­sional pines con­cen­trated in the more res­i­den­tial areas. They’re attrac­tive enough and gen­er­ally drought-tolerant choices, but the rhythm of palm, palm, euca­lyp­tus, palm, cypress, palm, euca­lyp­tus, palm gets a lit­tle rep­e­ti­tious over the course of two and a half hours (if traf­fic is moving).

A new kind of tree has been appear­ing over the last half dozen years, how­ever. With the recent growth of cell phones, there’s been an explo­sion in how many cell tow­ers you see–More bars in more places trans­lates into more cell tow­ers in more places. The providers have occa­sion­ally tried to hide the tow­ers by try­ing to make them pass as trees–usually with pretty com­i­cal results.

To keep myself amused on the trip I shot a few pho­tos of road­side trees. See if you can spot the cell tow­ers in the grid below. (Answers are at the end of this post, but I don’t think you’ll need the answer key.)

Give up? The cell tow­ers are the far right in the top row (fake palm), the first in the third row (fake…er…what is that sup­posed to be? a red­wood? road­side in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia?) and far right in the third row (plain vanilla cell tower). At least the cell tower trees are drought-tolerant.

August 25 2008 | Categories: landscape design • places | Tags: cell phones • cell towers • drought-tolerant landscaping • Interstate 405 • Interstate 5 • Los Angeles • Orange County • roadside plantings • trees | 1 Comment »

brown is in

Maybe I was inspired by the gar­den designs of Piet Oudolf. Maybe I was inspired by my recent trip to see things turn­ing brown in Los Peñas­qui­tos Pre­serve. Or maybe I’m just a lit­tle busy and/or slacker-ey in the dol­drums of summer.

What­ever the rea­son, I’ve decided to let the flow­er­ing heads on a lot of plants do their nat­ural thing and turn brown, to see what they look like. These are all exper­i­ments that I might develop into some­thing a lit­tle more fin­ished look­ing at some point. And all this is tak­ing place in the front yard, where appear­ance is every­thing. What will the neigh­bors say? Hope­fully they have a sim­i­lar sense of adventure.

The plant on the top of this pic­ture is a spi­raea I bought fif­teen years ago. This is before I started my plant data­base, and the label is long gone. I’m still work­ing on research­ing the species. Even the Cal­i­for­nia native Spi­raea dou­glas­sii likes a lit­tle bit of water, but this one in the front yard gets very lit­tle in the sum­mer. It’s even sur­vived six weeks or more with no irri­ga­tion. It doesn’t look the pret­ti­est that way, but it survives.

Here it is con­trasted against the almost-white foliage of com­mon dusty miller, Senecio bicolor subsp. cineraria, a plant usu­ally sold as an annual. But it’s hung on for well over five years in this tough spot. Looks pretty good most of the year, too.

Another plant with light-colored foliage is San­tolina chamae­cy­paris­sus, also called laven­der cot­ton, ground cypress, and a few other things. I like the swoop-ey rhythm of the dried flower heads and stalks. This is one of those plants I really hate in bloom. The yel­low against the gray foliage for two weeks in early sum­mer is unfor­tu­nate. And the flow­ers smell creepy, too–something between bad med­i­cine and paint remover. At least the plant stays a nice mound of gray­ish foliage most of the year.

And the last plant in this lit­tle gallery is some basic laven­der, con­trasted against the brown-red foliage and seed heads of red feather grass, Pen­nise­tum setaceum ‘Rubrum’. Some peo­ple dead-head their laven­der, both to lengthen bloom-time and to keep the plants tidier. I like the pointil­list bits of laven­der with the gray-green foliage and the brown of the dead flow­er­ing heads.

I’m not pos­i­tive that dead­head­ing the spent flow­ers off the laven­der does much to keep the plant bloom­ing: It looks good win­ter through about now, and then starts to slow down as my water­ing slows down. The san­tolina blooms once a year, dead­headed or not. And the spiraea…well, the thing that would perk it up the most would be some more water and not vig­i­lant remov­ing of its spent blooms. Poor plant. It had the sad for­tune of end­ing up in my yard as its adop­tive home. San Diego isn’t surf and fun and sun­shine all the time…

August 20 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: deadheading • drought-tolerant landscaping • dusty miller • lavender • Pennisetum setaceum 'Rubrum' • Santolina chamaecyparissus • Senecio bicolor • spiraea | 2 Comments »

the long brown season

When you spend your time in San Diego’s well-watered burbs it’s easy to for­get that you’re liv­ing in the mid­dle of a desert. The last sig­nif­i­cant rain­fall in town occurred in Feb­ru­ary, and the unir­ri­gated nat­ural lands around town have long ago begun their trans­for­ma­tion into the long brown season.

My recent lit­tle excur­sion to Los Peñas­qui­tos Canyon, a local open-space pre­serve between San Diego and Del Mar, gave me a chance to see what the nat­ural world is doing in these parts.

Not every­thing is brown, of course. Some plants are tapped into loca­tions with resid­ual mois­ture. Oth­ers have adapted to the cli­mate and have the sta­mina to stay green year-round.

Here are a few of the plants still show­ing col­ors other than brown:

Flat-topped buck­wheat (Eri­o­gonum fas­ci­c­u­la­tum) a native plant.

Wild rose (Rosa cal­i­for­nica) a native.

Fen­nel (Foenicu­lum vul­gare) an exotic, inva­sive species. This is the culi­nary plant from the Mediter­ranean that has escaped into the wilds.

Poi­son oak (Tox­i­co­den­dron diver­silobum) a native–one of the few plants that turns blaz­ing red in the fall. Even now, it’s show­ing some of that red color.

This­tle in bloom. I’m not sure if this is native or not, but it’s not the hyper-nasty Russ­ian this­tle (the dried flow­ers of which are shown in the large photo above). [Correction/edit August 1: This is actu­ally a teasel, not a this­tle. Like the escaped fen­nel above, this too is a rene­gade exotic species. Pretty, though…]

It’s a con­di­tion of our con­sumer cul­ture and times to want what we don’t have. Liv­ing in San Diego, most of the plant mate­ri­als that peo­ple expect to find in their home gar­dens fall out­side of the cat­e­gory of what occurs nat­u­rally or is well-suited to the area.

It’s always instruc­tive to visit the nat­ural pre­serves to see plants–even the nasty invasives–that are supremely well-designed to live in this cli­mate. Some of the plants in these parks would do extremely well in gar­dens. But it’s hard let­ting go of plants that many of us asso­ciate with places we’ve lived in and even peo­ple we’ve known.

My own yard has sev­eral areas that I con­sider my guilty plea­sure zones. I have pieces of a bromeliad and a kahili gin­ger that I was given in the 1970s, as well as the green rose from that I dug up from the house where I grew up in the Los Ange­les area. And I’m a nat­ural born col­lec­tor who has a hard time say­ing no to inter­est­ing plants. These plants all require some water and tend­ing beyond what nature brings.

But they’re coun­ter­bal­anced by gar­den areas planted with drought-tolerant species, local and intro­duced, that receive almost no water and atten­tion over the sum­mer. As time goes on, I’ll be expand­ing those areas. Don’t expect me any time soon, how­ever, to plant poi­son oak, as pretty and hardy as the plant is. I have my lim­its as to how much true nature I want in my garden…

July 29 2008 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • invasive plants • Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve • native plants • seasons • summer | 4 Comments »

toloache

In the local canyons, this time of year brings about the spec­tac­u­lar flow­ers of the sacred datura, Datura wrightii. The low, mound­ing bushes grow two to three feet tall and eas­ily twice as wide, and are cov­ered from dusk to mid-morning with immense white trum­pets, eas­ily eight inches across, often flushed with pale lavender.

Photo by Dlarsen, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons [ source ]

This is one of sev­eral species of the genus that has been called toloache in Mex­ico. It’s in the night­shade fam­ily, and like other mem­bers of the genus Datura, the plant is as toxic as it is spectacular.

Even though it’s highly poi­so­nous, some Native Amer­i­cans used the plant as part of a cer­e­mony mark­ing the pas­sage of a child to an adult. From the Wikipedia: “Among the Chu­mash, when a boy was 8 years old, his mother gave him a prepa­ra­tion of momoy to drink. This was sup­posed to be a spir­i­tual chal­lenge to the boy to help him develop the spir­i­tual well­be­ing that is required to become a man. Not all of the boys sur­vived [my emphasis].”

On my recent pre-dusk hike through our local Los Peñas­qui­tos Canyon Pre­serve all the buds on the numer­ous toloache plants were tightly furled when I arrived.

But by the time I left, less a half hour before sun­set, the flow­ers buds were loos­en­ing. Had I stayed an hour longer I would have been able to view the fresh flow­ers in the last glow of day­light like an intox­i­cat­ing evil wel­com­ing the night.

Here you can get a sense for how large these flow­ers will be.

Despite its bad press this is one of our local plants that I’ve been eying to add to the gar­den. The only thing the cat shows any inter­est in are plants that look like grasses or cat­nip, and there are parts of the yard no small child could get to. Besides, I’ve already got a num­ber of toxic plants in the garden–oleanders, toma­toes and other night­shade cousins.

In addi­tion to hav­ing amaz­ing flow­ers, this datura requires no added water dur­ing the long dry sum­mer. Noth­ing this spec­tac­u­lar can make that claim.

Speak­ing of poi­so­nous plants, last week’s New York Times had an arti­cle on the Duchess of Northum­ber­land. She’s in the process of build­ing a mod­ern annex to grounds that were designed by Capa­bil­ity Brown, the land­mark British land­scape designer from the eigh­teenth cen­tury. Tra­di­tion­al­ists are not happy. “They said I am to gar­dens what Imelda Mar­cos is to shoes,” the Duchess is quoted. In her project one of the fea­tures is the Poi­son Gar­den, which the arti­cle describes as “a spooky fenced-off area with about 100 vari­eties of toxic plants, as well as cannabis and opium poppies.”

I bet this duchess’s gar­den par­ties will be pretty inter­est­ing affairs…

July 23 2008 | Categories: gardening • plant profiles | Tags: Datura wrightii • drought-tolerant landscaping • ethnobotany • in bloom • native plants • poisonous plants • sacred datura • toloache | 2 Comments »

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The evi­dence!

Okay, okay, I’ll admit it. Despite a cer­tain resem­blance to the clas­sic “Mar­t­ian pop­ping thing” avail­able at Archie McPhee’s, it’s actu­ally the final two leaves on a Pachy­podium geayi, a suc­cu­lent and spiny first-cousin to the bet­ter known plume­ria that is such a fra­grant sta­ple in Hawai­ian leis.

Kept moist, and dur­ing the cooler and wet­ter parts of the year, the plant is a spiny col­umn ringed with a rosette of long gray-green leaves. Drop the water­ing, and the plant goes into defen­sive mode, drop­ping its leaves and mak­ing like a cac­tus. Where we have it, in the back of the back yard, it gets to dry out along with the rest of the drought-tolerant plants, so we get to see its “cac­tus” behav­ior most of the sum­mer and into fall. When the water starts up, the leaves come back and it’s happy again.

This species can pro­duce pen­dant cream-colored flow­ers with reflexed petals. They’re not the most spec­tac­u­lar bloomers in the Pachy­podium genus–P. lamerei could be con­fused for a plume­ria if it weren’t for the spines on the plant.

This plant is about ten years in the ground and is com­ing up on four feet tall. Mature plants will get triple or quadru­ple the height of this teenager. More water would help it along, I’m sure, but in my yard it gets what it gets.

So far no pests have both­ered it. Would you?

June 14 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • Pachypodium geayi • succulents | No Comments »