Eriogonum | [ Lost in the Landscape ]

For this month’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day I have some closeup photos of some of what’s blooming in the garden. I’ve done a couple posts on using backgrounds behind plants (Background check / One way to photogrpah a tree). Inspired, all but one of these shots uses a white sheet of matboard placed behind the plants. Each color of background presents a different end result. Using white accentuates dark flowers and stems, and some of these photos are a busy network of dark lines against the light background.

There are some newcomers just coming into bloom, but many plants have been in bloom for several months. When life gives you more of the same flowers…well, I was thinking I’d try to photograph them a little differently.

I suspect the neighbors think I’m odd enough taking pictures of everything in the garden, and I thought it’d be extra-distressing if I were to be walking around the garden with a big white board as well as the camera. As a result all of these are from the quiet privacy of the back yard, with the exception of the one plant without a white background.

Purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea.

Lion’s tail, Leonotis leonorus; Desert mallow, Sphaeralcea
ambigua.

Peruvian daffodil, Hymenocallis festalis; Freeway daisy, Osteospermum sp.

Verbena bonariensis; Juncus patens (with fallen leaf caught in the plant).

Some salvias:

Salvia nemerosa ‘Snow Hills’; Ivy-leaved sage (Salvia cacaliaefolia).

On the left is Andean sage (Salvia discolor with its almost black flowers set in light green calyces; on the right is Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips.’

Some California buckwheats:

Flat-topped buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum)

San Miguel Island buckwheat (Eriogonum grande var. rubescens)

St. Catherine’s lace (Eriogonum giganteum)

Butterfly bush (Clero– dendrum ugan– dense); seed pod of whitetop pitcher plant (Sarracenia leucophylla).

Pink and white double bougainvillea (unknown variety); Agastache aurantiaca ‘Apricot Sprite.’

Pink double bougainvillea (another unknown variety); toloache (Datura wrightii).

Thanks again the Carol of May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. It’s a terrific way to build community among garden bloggers wanting to share the flowers in their gardens. Check out this month’s offerings!

Earlier I shared a closeup photo of a santolina that had flowered but where I hadn’t cut off the spent blooms. The stems had developed a gently lyrical brown counterpoint to the blue-gray foliage.

Fountain grass and santolina along walkway

Fountain grass and along walkway

Here’s what the plant looks like now as you turn off the sidewalk towards the house. (The plant in the background is the common red fountain grass, Pennisetum x avena ‘Rubrum’.)

I’m treating this as a bit of a rehearsal for what the garden might look like in future years. I’ve set three plants of two different buckwheats in the ground, and I have at least six pots of another buckwheat that I’m raising from seed. These are plants that have umbels of tiny flowers for two or more months of the year. And then the whole flowering assembly turns brown to black.

The first thing a typical gardener would be tempted to do is to chop the stem back. But these dried stems hover delicately over the plants and have a quiet beauty of their own. Once you change your expectations of how to maintain a plant–i.e., chopping off any dead flowers–and let the plants do their thing, they can be amazing in new and different ways. (Of course, many plants look much better by deadheading the spent blooms. It’s the rare garden plant that ages so gracefully as these santolinas or buckwheats.)

St. Catherine’s lace at Quail Botanical Gardens

Here’s a shot from the past weekend of Eriogonum giganteum, St. Catherine’s lace, past its bloom period at Quail Botanical Gardens. This large buckwheat is native to the Channel Islands off the coast of Southern California, as well as some of the adjacent coast. It looks a little like Queen Anne’s lace for a while in the spring, and then the stems dry to a warm rust or dark brown that I didn’t capture very well in this photo of a plant in the shade.

It’s a look that’s more informal than many gardens in the neighborhood, a look the coexists easily with dried grasses and casual shrubs, but not with roses or manicured borders of annuals.

I’m preparing myself for the look with some of these untrimmed plants, and I’m already anxious for how the buckwheats will look next summer. And maybe by next summer the neighbors will be ready for the look, too. The untrimmed santolina is just the rehearsal.

[ Lost in the Landscape ]

Tag Archives: Eriogonum

july bloom day

a rehearsal