[ Lost in the Landscape ]

no rain, no rainbows

I looked west this morn­ing while I was hav­ing break­fast and saw the first rain­bow I’ve seen in months, maybe years. Although it was cool out­side I had to go up to the deck to check it out. The rain­bow was just a short piece of an arc ris­ing from the ocean, but in this land of lit­tle rain you take what you get.

The rain­bow was just about the last offi­cial act of a set of four con­sec­u­tive storms that deliv­ered over six days almost as much mois­ture as we received all of last year. And by “storms” I do mean real storms with rain, hail, thun­der, light­ning and tree-toppling winds. But for most of us in town things went as well as could be expected.

At work euca­lyp­tus trees cracked and fell, build­ings leaked, flows of water and mud threat­ened to invade sev­eral build­ings. Walk­ing out­side entailed wad­ing through pud­dles or jump­ing from one high spot to another.

At home power flick­ered on and off a few times. The back yard laked up briefly, but noth­ing that looked like it was going to come in the house.

Hail came down a cou­ple times, but noth­ing was hurt. These pel­lets were about the size of peas.

Rain was heavy. These lit­tle buck­ets to catch roof runoff were full within the first 24 hours.

A pot­ted Kalan­choe pro­lif­era on the roof deck–seen here on the right–blew over. While the base must weigh 75 pounds when soak­ing wet, the plant is tall and proved no match for the blasts of wind that came through. This photo was shot after the plant was righted, so you can see it wasn’t both­ered by spend­ing some time sideways.

A sur­vey this morn­ing showed the trays of bog plants full of water, flood­ing the pots. These swamp dwellers are adapted to a lit­tle flood­ing, and in some areas peo­ple over­win­ter the rhi­zomes under­wa­ter so they don’t rot.

In fact, the par­rot pitcher plant from the Florida-Georgia area, Sar­race­nia psittacina, can be found com­pletely sub­merged over the win­ter. Its traps are unique in that they’re adapted to catch­ing swim­ming as well as crawl­ing crea­tures, so it’ll find some­thing to eat, whether under­wa­ter or above.

The cul­vert in city ease­ment behind the house filled with water. It makes me want to estab­lish a lit­tle ver­nal pool in the muck at the bot­tom. I won­der if it would work in this loca­tion. Some of the most endan­gered plants in my area can be found around ver­nal pools and nowhere else.

The cool­ing weather and moister weather greens up the plants that have been dor­mant through the dry sea­son. In the back Core­op­sis gigan­tea leaves begin to sprout on what had been lit­tle brown trunks. But in the fore­ground you see all the weeds that accom­pany the sea­son. These are mostly seedlings of a few mizuna plants, a Japan­ese mus­tard green, that I let go to seed a decade ago.

…and when life gives you young, weedy, ten­der mizuna sprouts, why not pick mizuna greens? These will be in tonight’s salad.

So you can see we came through pretty well. The main casu­alty was Scooter, the cat, who’s used to occa­sional times out­side to sun her­self. I think the “Can I go out­side, please?” expres­sion is pretty clear on her face here.

She did get to go out this morn­ing, at last, and so did I. While I appre­ci­ate the rain, a lit­tle respite between storms doesn’t hurt, both for cats and humans alike. It also gives the water­logged ground to dry out a bit or to let the water seep down farther.

If the weather fore­casts are right, we’ll be get­ting another storm on Tues­day, but it won’t be any­thing like the almost con­tin­u­ous rain we just had. After 3 years of bad drought, we’ll take what­ever rain falls, even if we don’t get any more rain­bows with it.

January 23 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: cats • drought • rain • weather | 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 »

wishing for water

Remem­ber wish­ing wells? In the early 1970s, when I first started pay­ing close atten­tion to gar­dens, every few yards would have a wish­ing well as an accent of the land­scap­ing: Big lawns, lots of flow­ers, the wish­ing well, maybe even a lawn jockey. You don’t see wish­ing wells (or lawn jock­eys) around these parts very often anymore.

The other day I was up on the roof deck, enjoy­ing the breeze. Look­ing in a direc­tion I don’t usu­ally pay much atten­tion to, I noticed this fea­ture in the back yard of one of my neigh­bors. It’s a lit­tle hard to make out, so I’ve enhanced it a lit­tle. Hmmm. Looks like a wish­ing well, maybe 1970s vintage…

Jump ahead 30 years, to the more drought-conscious 21st cen­tury. Many Cal­i­for­ni­ans are reduc­ing or replac­ing their turf. One of the ways that’s used to give some focus or struc­ture to these de-lawned yards is to con­struct a dry stream bed.

(I thought it was inter­est­ing that both these yard accents are all about water. The wish­ing well cel­e­brates the stuff, almost as if it’s avail­able in a mag­i­cal, never-ending sup­ply. The stream bed is more of our time, and acknowl­edges that water is a resource that isn’t always plen­ti­ful and can’t be taken for granted.)

Down the street, another of my neigh­bors has done their own take on a dry stream bed. It has lawn along some of its length, but suc­cu­lents and drought-tolerant plants the rest of the way. And in the mid­dle of the stream…seashells. And these lit­tle yel­low rub­ber duckies…

June 13 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: drought • dry stream beds • water • wishing wells | 4 Comments »

how dry am i?

This post may be mainly for the math nerds among you, but I think it could be inter­est­ing to any gar­den­ers liv­ing in drought-prone parts of the world.

In my last post I men­tioned that I’d used instruc­tions in Olivier Filippi’s The Dry Gar­den­ing Hand­book to fig­ure out the drought stress index, or hydric deficit, for where I live in San Diego.

USDA zones are useful for dealing with minimum temperatures. For gardeners in the western U.S., Sunset zones provide more finesse, combining temperature with other climate conditions. The the drought stress numbers, however, are useful if you want to concentrate on understanding how many months a plant might be subjected to severe drying conditions due to lack of rainfall.

Filippi writes in his book that "everyone's drought is different," so be sure to consider factors other than this single number, things like total rainfall, humidity, the sun exposure a plant might get or the amount of wind your site experiences. The technique presented in The Dry Gardening Handbook derives from work of plant geographer Henri Gaussen.

Figuring out hydric deficit is pretty straightforward but will take a few minutes of your time. Either use a spreadsheet program like Excel or a sheet of paper. First, go to a site like World Climate where you can find your area's monthly total rainfall and monthly average temperatures. On the spreadsheet or paper set up a column with the months of the year, January to December. Next fill in a column with the monthly average rainfall in millimeters, and another column with the average monthly temperature in degrees Celsius.

Now you have two options: Fol­low the instruc­tions in the book, which isn’t that hard but requires mak­ing a graph with three dif­fer­ent axes. Or use my sim­pli­fied tech­nique, which requires some cal­cu­la­tions but no graph­ing. I’ll send you to the book for the some­what more pre­cise method, but here’s my eas­ier method: In a fourth col­umn, divide the rain­fall num­ber by the tem­per­a­ture and mul­ti­ply by 2. That’s where the math comes in to play.

Here’s my result for San Diego:

Month	Rain­fall (mm)	Tem­per­a­ture (Celsius)	2 x (Rainfall/Temperature)
Jan	55.6	14.1	7.890
Feb	41.3	14.7	5.62
Mar	49.9	15.3	6.52
Apr	19.8	16.6	2.39
May	4.8	17.8	0.54
Jun	1.9	19.3	0.2
Jul	0.5	21.6	0.05
Aug	2.1	22.5	0.19
Sep	4.7	21.8	0.43
Oct	8.6	19.8	0.87
Nov	29.5	16.6	3.56
Dec	35.4	14.1	3.62

Count up the num­bers in the fourth col­umn that are less than 1, and that’s your approx­i­mate hydric deficit num­ber. The higher the hydric deficit num­ber, the more severe your dry­ing con­di­tions. For the San Diego Air­port, the num­ber is 6. (If you have a month where the aver­age tem­per­a­ture is below freez­ing, for my over­sim­pli­fied method just throw out that month and con­sider that there’s min­i­mal hydric deficit.)

Now what do you with the num­ber? For one thing, you can use it to com­pare you grow­ing con­di­tions with the drought resis­tance code for a plant in Filippi’s book. For exam­ple, the matil­ija (“tree”) poppy (Rom­neya coul­teri) has a drought tol­er­ance rat­ing of 6–perfect for an unwa­tered gar­den in San Diego. By con­trast, Cean­othus ‘Ray Hart­man’ has a code of 4, and Hid­cote Blue laven­der (Lavan­dula angus­ti­fo­lia ‘Hid­cote Blue’) has a code of 3. These other plants would prob­a­bly sur­vive with­out sup­ple­men­tal water, but to look their best the cean­othus might ben­e­fit from a cou­ple months of occa­sional sup­ple­men­tal water­ing, and the lan­der maybe three. You can also use the num­ber to com­pare the dry­ing forces where you live other regions around you, or apply the num­ber to bet­ter under­stand your cli­mate in rela­tion to that of a plant’s origin.

For fun, I added four other sites in San Diego County. You can see how the county offers a huge num­ber of grow­ing con­di­tions, from dry coastal con­di­tions, moun­tain mead­ows, back­coun­try chap­ar­ral, and full-on desert.

City	Hydric deficit
San Diego Airport	6
La Mesa	5–6
Cuya­maca	1
Campo	3
Bor­rego Springs	7

And then a few other cities in Cal­i­for­nia. You can see a gen­eral moist­en­ing the far­ther north you go, and a gen­eral dry­ing as you head east towards the deserts.

City	Hydric deficit
Los Ange­les	6
San Bernardino	4–5
Vic­torville	6
Santa Bar­bara	5
Mon­ter­rey	4
San Jose	4–5
Santa Cruz	3
San Fran­cisco	4
Rich­mond	4
Sacra­mento	4–5
Fresno	5
Yosemite National Park	2
Eureka	1 2
Red­ding	2

I’d never played with map­ping in Google Maps, but thought this might be a fun first lit­tle project. I took the num­bers above and applied them to a map. The results are pretty impres­sive for some­thing that’s not hard to do. So far the blips are in Cal­i­for­nia only, but I might work on the map some more to include other loca­tions. Take a look…

View Hydric Deficit Map in a larger map

May 21 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape | Tags: California • drought • drought stress • Dry Gardening Handbook • Henri Gaussen • hydric deficit • Olivier Filippi | 10 Comments »

“drought emergency”">“drought emergency”

Our Gov­er­nor has declared a drought emer­gency for Cal­i­for­nia. The state rain­fall and snow­pack has been lower than aver­age for most of the recent years, and reser­voir reserves are dwin­dling. My county has been slightly over aver­age in its rain­fall this sea­son but most of our water comes from the Sierra snows and the Col­orado River. So this cri­sis is very real for us down here as well.

At this point we’re on call for a vol­un­tary water reduc­tion, but if the rains fail us peo­ple will be required to reduce their water use 20%, and then–if things get worse–by 40% or more. Since land­scapes con­sumes the major­ity of the water, our county water author­ity has started an adver­tis­ing cam­paign to deliver these water-overuse door­knob hang­ers with the Sun­day paper. It’s also avail­able online: here.

There are check­boxes for “Your sprin­klers are water­ing the pave­ment,” “Your sprin­klers were on dur­ing the rain,” “You have a bro­ken sprin­kler, and/or your irri­ga­tion sys­tem is leak­ing,” “Your sprin­klers are on every day” and “Your sprin­klers are on dur­ing the day.” My local shop­ping cen­ter is a huge offender in the first cat­e­gory and will be get­ting a hang tag from me.

But this pro­gram is mostly about sprin­klers and water­ing habits and doesn’t really address the under­ly­ing causes. There really need to be big boxes say­ing, “Your huge expanse of grass and water-thirsty plants are attrac­tive, but I’d like to show you how you can have a terrific-looking yard that requires almost no addi­tional water,” or “This extremely well-watered golf course has no place in the desert that is San Diego County.”

The very green golf course in the local canyon bot­tom would get a vio­la­tion tag if that were the case. At least, to their credit, they let the dri­ving range go brown with the end of the rains. Maybe in Cal­i­for­nia golf could morph into a sea­sonal win­ter sport, like ski­ing? Maybe I’m delusional?

March 01 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: drought • water conservation • water use | 5 Comments »