[ Lost in the Landscape ]

good book, cool trivia

I love a good book that sur­prises you.

When I was talk­ing to a botanist a cou­ple months ago and she rec­om­mended Oscar F. Clarke’s Flora of the Santa Ana River and Envi­rons : with ref­er­ences to world botany, I was expect­ing the book to be a nicely assem­bled writeup of a water­shed a cou­ple of hours to the north. As such it’d be a good writeup of species I’m using to see­ing in my area seen through the fil­ter of some­one work­ing in the Los Angeles/Orange/Riverside County region of South­ern California.

The vol­ume, which the back cover says “rep­re­sents a cul­mi­na­tion of a life­time of nat­ural his­tory study,” lives up to my expec­ta­tion of being a use­ful guide for study­ing the plants of the area. But in addi­tion it ends up being full of all sorts of inter­est­ing lit­tle details that breath life into what might oth­er­wise be an inert text­book. It’s a rich book, not a dense one.

(Edit, July 13, 2010: In addi­tion to Clarke, the book has three co-authors who should be named: Danielle Svehla, Greg Ballmer and Arlee Mon­talvo. Thanks to all of you for such a great book.)

For exam­ple, take some of the details in the writeup on our state flower, the Cal­i­for­nia poppy. Last year I decided that I’d replace my plant­i­ngs of the typ­i­cal garden-orange strain with the lower-growing yel­low strain that you find locally. The first season’s plants ger­mi­nated and grew well. This year I was fully expect­ing the plants to return in pro­fu­sion, com­ing up both from last season’s roots and the seeds that the plants dropped. Instead, most of this year’s crop were the big orange gar­den strain. What went wrong?

Clarke’s descrip­tion of the species con­cludes with a sen­tence that helped answer my ques­tion: “Local native pop­u­la­tions pro­duce seeds that remain dor­mant until exposed to winter/spring con­di­tions in com­bi­na­tion with smoke or other unknown fac­tors, while pop­u­la­tions from cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia and com­mer­cial cul­ti­vars pro­duce non-dormant seeds.” While it didn’t explain what I need to do to get these plants to nat­u­ral­ize, it at least explained that I was bat­tling against some unknown bio­log­i­cal forces. I felt bet­ter in my failure.

The illus­tra­tions in many man­u­als can be pretty poor, but that’s not the case here. All through­out the book brims with illus­tra­tions. Here are some of them from the poppy descrip­tion. You’ll find close­ups of diag­nos­tic plant fea­tures, usu­ally with the graphic of a penny for size comparison’s sake. And often you’ll see shots of entire plants. Each writeup also has a lit­tle rec­tan­gle with a graphic of a human stand­ing next to the plant being described. The idea is that the box will tell you a lot of details at a glances–stuff like size, growth habit, struc­ture of the flower, num­ber of petals, the posi­tion of the ovary, and whether the plant is an annual or lives longer. After hav­ing stared at the graph­ics for a cou­ple weeks I still find it a tad con­fus­ing, but if you’re good at decod­ing images instead of read­ing about the details, this might be just the thing for you. Another minor grouse is that type­face is almost too small for aging eyes like mine. Of course a big­ger type would prob­a­bly result in a larger, less field-friendly man­ual. But those are minor quibbles.

Back to some plant trivia: About Cal­i­for­nia sea laven­der, Limo­nium cal­i­for­nicum, shown here get­ting ready to bloom, Clarke observes that “The only native Cal­i­for­nia mem­ber of this genus, [it] occurs pri­mar­ily along the imme­di­ate coast. It is salt-tolerant (halo­phytic) and excretes salt on its broad, leath­ery leaves.” This detail is impor­tant to me as I decide which plants to tar­get with the left­over water I’ve gath­ered from show­er­ing. Instead of toss­ing the soapy, shampoo-spiked water, I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure which plants wouldn’t mind stand­ing in the second-hand liq­uids. This species seemed happy enough with the water last year, and the writeup gives me extra con­fi­dence that I’m prob­a­bly not doing it any harm.

Life in the Santa Ana River Basin these days is as much about inva­sive plants as it is native species. Accord­ingly the book has a num­ber of exotics mixed into the 900 species it describes.

Telling grasses apart can be one of the more dif­fi­cult things to do in the field. The detailed descrip­tions and pho­tos help ease that chore. Here are the illus­tra­tions for panic veld­grass, Ehrharta erecta, a really both­er­some weed in many gar­dens, mine included.

The weed descrip­tions, like those for the other plants, have lit­tle trivia bits woven through them. About panic veldt­grass you learn that “Live­stock find it highly palat­able, espe­cially chick­ens and rab­bits.” That sen­tence might not mean a lot to you, but it explained some­thing I’ve been noticing.

Scooter, the cat, always shows a lot of inter­est when I’m in the gar­den, and is most help­ful when I’m in the mid­dle of pulling up weeds. And of all the weeds, this is the one that the cat really goes crazy over, often nudg­ing, claw­ing, fight­ing you to get to munch on a few blades of the stuff.

Ah, yes, it all sud­denly makes sense now: “live­stock,” “highly palat­able.” Eureka! So to Clarke’s list of chick­ens and rab­bits we can add another species: cats.

So yes, this is a book with lots of infor­ma­tion about plants of the Santa Ana region. But it ended up telling me as much about what’s going on in my gar­den. Very cool.

June 22 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • places | Tags: California poppy • California sea lavender • cats • Ehrharta erecta • Escholzia californica • Escholzia californica maritima • Limonium californicum • native plants • Oscar F. Clarke • panic veldtgrass • Santa Ana River Basin | 5 Comments »

some bloom day blooms from seed

Today’s Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day post fea­tures five plants I’ve raised from seed. I’d con­sider most of these in the “pretty easy” to “really easy” cat­e­gories, both to ger­mi­nate and to grow.

Three of these came up from seed that I sowed directly in the ground last Octo­ber. I basi­cally made lit­tle fur­rows a quar­ter to half an inch deep, sprin­kled in some seed, and watered them in. I pro­vided some sup­ple­men­tal water­ing the give them a head start, and then let the occa­sional rains take care of get­ting the plants estab­lished. Now that the rains are prob­a­bly over for the year, I give them occa­sional sprin­klings to keep them greener and flow­er­ing longer.

This first flower is Clarkia williamsonii, which is an annual native to inland Cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia and Orange County. The Seed­hunt list­ing described the flow­ers as being “gaudy.” A flower that’s gaudy? Sold!

The next images are of another clarkia, Clarkia rubi­cunda ssp. blas­dalei, native to coastal Cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia and El Dorado County. The first is a freshly opened flower, the sec­ond a flower that’s on it’s sec­ond day.

Until this morn­ing I’d never noticed with these that the fresh flow­ers have the sta­mens all bun­dled up, and that they don’t extend until the flower is older, after the anthers bear­ing the pollen are start­ing to dry up. You can see the sta­mens as the white four-pronged appendage in the cen­ter of the sec­ond flower. It’s a clever way to pre­vent self-pollination and keep the gene pool diverse.

Another easy annual is baby blue eyes, Nemezia men­ziesii. What you see here is pretty scrappy and well could be the last flower of the sea­son. Although this is an easy plant, I’ve decided that it’s bet­ter suited to a gar­den spot that might get more than bi-weekly sup­ple­men­tal water.

I’ve been show­ing lots of Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies this spring. This will prob­a­bly be the last of the gar­den pic­tures of the com­mon orange form. The flow­ers this time of year are start­ing to get smaller as the plant’s water sup­plies dwin­dle. Also, here near the coast, the plants start to mildew heav­ily, leav­ing them crip­pled. (You can see some of that as the whitish back­ground foliage.)

Bet­ter suited to coastal areas is this yel­low coastal form of the species, Escholzia cal­i­for­nica mar­itima. The strain I’ve got starts to flower later in the year than the typ­i­cal orange form, but the plants show much bet­ter resis­tance to pow­dery mildew and will con­tinue flow­er­ing later into the year.

Unlike the first three plants I showed, the pop­pies are peren­nial, so the same plants will con­tinue to come back one year to the next. But one nice thing with all these species is that they’ll come back from seed as well.

Check out all the other Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day pho­tos by check­ing out the list­ing at May Dreams Gar­dens.

May 15 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Clarkia rubicunda ssp blasdalei • Clarkia williamsonii • clarkias • Escholzia californica • Escholzia californica maritima • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • native plants • poppies • reseeding • seed-grown plants | 6 Comments »

trying to do the right thing

Peo­ple often try to do the right thing, but along the way things some­things can go astray.

Sat­ur­day I was hik­ing one of our local urban canyons, San Clemente Canyon, with some other plant peo­ple. Like the rest of our local canyons, the plants you find there are a mix of native and intro­duced species. It’s not pris­tine, by any means, par­tic­u­larly when you con­sider that there’s a free­way a cou­ple hun­dred feet behind where this photo was taken. But many of the really big plants are orig­i­nal to the canyon. You can get a good impres­sion of what it was like two cen­turies ago, and hope­fully that’ll moti­vate peo­ple to pre­serve what’s left.

Dur­ing that walk every­one paused at a big clear­ing in the trees. It was a broad area that had been cleared of the inva­sive species and replanted with Cal­i­for­nia plants. The project was financed by the city author­ity that main­tains the sewer lines that run through the park. The main­te­nance roads eat into the native habi­tat, and for ever acre of road, the agency did an off­set of five acres where they tried to mit­i­gate the dam­age done by the bull­dozed access routes. It’s a pretty rea­son­able way to deal with some­thing a big city needs to operate–sewers–and at the same time improve the integrity of the semi-wild spaces.

After oohing and awing at the improve­ments, sev­eral of us noticed the pop­pies. Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies, yes they were, but big, tall orange ones and not the petite yellow-to-gold ones that you typ­i­cally find in the local environment.

A trip yes­ter­day to Tecolote Canyon, another of the local urban canyons, revealed exactly the same thing in a restora­tion in progress there.

Tech­ni­cally, under cur­rent botan­i­cal sys­tems, both ver­sions of the poppy are con­sid­ered the same species. But a quick look at them yells you that they’re as dis­tinct from one another as cousins in a fam­ily, and they have genet­ics that evolved to mak­ing them appro­pri­ate for their dif­fer­ent environments.

Take a look at their leaves, to start. The one on the left, below, is from the clas­sic “Cal­i­for­nia poppy” that peo­ple know (Escholzia cal­i­for­nica). The one on the right is from the ver­sion found around here (at once clas­si­fied as Escholzia cal­i­for­nica mar­itima). The one on the left has less leaf sur­face, and to me looks like it’s evolved to deal with more drought.

Grow­ing the two ver­sions side-by side in the gar­den also reveals another dif­fer­ence. The reg­u­lar Cal­i­for­nia poppy devel­ops pow­dery mildew this cool and humid time of year, whereas the local ver­sion seems to be close to unaffected.

So when you com­bine the plant size, flower size, flower color and the plants’ resis­tance to pow­dery mildew, you can see that the plants are quite dif­fer­ent, and that the coastal ver­sion is prob­a­bly bet­ter suited for liv­ing here. (In gar­dens the typ­i­cal orange form is pretty rugged and no slouch, but its dis­ease issues give it a dis­ad­van­tage to being as spec­tac­u­lar as it might be in a drier region like the Antelpe Val­ley, the loca­tion of the Cal­i­for­nia Poppy Pre­serve.)

Recon Native Plants, a San Diego whole­sale native plant nurs­ery that spe­cial­izes in habi­tat restora­tion, takes extra pride in know­ing exactly where their plants come from. Their site advertizes:

For exam­ple, an Artemisia cal­i­for­nica from the Sierra Nevada and an Artemisia cal­i­for­nica from coastal San Diego County are the same species, how­ever they have evolved and adapted with dif­fer­ent genet­ics for dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ments. With the source iden­ti­fied, RECON Native Plants can tell our clients within 5 miles, the ori­gin of each plant and the client can select the loca­tion most appro­pri­ate to their project.

It’s a good illus­tra­tion of the dif­fer­ence between plant­ing a gar­den and going the extra dis­tance to effect a suc­cess­ful habi­tat restora­tion project. Many gar­den­ers would pre­fer the splashier Ante­lope Val­ley ver­sion of the state flower, but that’s not the form that makes most sense for our local flora. Some­where along the plan­ning, imple­men­ta­tion or sourc­ing of these two habi­tat restora­tion projects, some­thing went a lit­tle astray. It’s a small detail, but it’s one that many peo­ple con­sider impor­tant as we try to keep our open spaces as wild as we can.

EDIT, April 7: Check out another post on two dif­fer­ent poppy forms over at Dry­S­tone­Gar­den.

April 06 2009 | Categories: landscape | Tags: California poppy • Escholzia californica • Escholzia californica maritima • habitat restoration • humans and nature • mitigation projects • poppies | 7 Comments »

live, from california…

A plant’s name can often help give you a sense of place as to where the plant orig­i­nated. I’ve been notic­ing recently that a lot of plants in the gar­den have species names that are either “cal­i­for­nica” or “cal­i­for­ni­cus.” I guess you can’t get much more Cal­i­for­nia than that.

First is our ever-popular state flower, the Cal­i­for­nia poppy, Escholzia cal­i­for­nica. Most of you are famil­iar with this form, the bright orange one that comes in Cal­i­for­nia wild­flower mixes. I planted some seed a decade ago, and these come back every year, some where they did the pre­vi­ous year, some a few feet away. But for me they’re not the wan­der­ing world trav­eler that they are for some peo­ple. (They’ve nat­u­ral­ized in parts of Chile and are on the pest (but not inva­sive) species list for Ten­nessee.)

This year I’m also grow­ing from seed the form of the species that you actu­ally find in this part of the state, Escholzia cal­i­for­nica mar­itima. The flow­ers are about a third of the size of the orange ver­sion, and are gold shad­ing to a yellow-orange. My pam­pered plants are tak­ing their time flow­er­ing, so these are images of plants in the winds, on the bluffs over­look­ing the ocean south of Del Mar. Once these start bloom­ing, I’ll prob­a­bly cut back the orange ones so the two strains don’t hybridize.

And here’s the clas­sic orange poppy in the gar­den grow­ing in the mid­dle of a pros­trate form of Cal­i­for­nia sage­brush, Artemisia cal­i­for­nica ‘Canyon Gray.’ While most of the forms of sage­brush are, well, brushy and upright, this selec­tion from the Chan­nel Islands off the coast of Ven­tura grows near the ground and sprawls a bit. The plant can get a lit­tle leggy in the mid­dle, so a well-placed vol­un­teer poppy seedling can be the best way to con­ceal that fact.

I wrote last year about this wild ranun­cu­lus, Ranun­cu­lus cal­i­for­ni­cus, or Cal­i­for­nia but­ter­cup. It dis­ap­pears not long after flow­er­ing, but it’s a nice pres­ence dur­ing early spring.

The coast sun­flower, Encelia cal­i­for­nica, con­tin­ues the yellow-to-orange theme. My plants were planted only recently and aren’t bloom­ing yet. This is a stand of it at Tor­rey Pines Pre­serve this past Mon­day, doing just fine with nat­ural rain­fall. (It won’t be quite so orna­men­tal once the mois­ture gives out, however.)

The last one I’ll share today has got to be one of the more spec­tac­u­lar Cal­i­for­ni­ans, the bush anenome, Car­pen­te­ria cal­i­for­nica. The flow­ers began to open just this week. This species hails from the Sierra foothills where it can become quite the large shrub. My plant has tripled in size in one year, though it’s still not more than three feet tall. It can triple in size again, and then I’m get­ting the prun­ing shears. Pretty flow­ers, though, no?

March 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Artemisia californica 'Canyon Gray' • bush anemone • California • California poppy • Carpenteria californica • coast sunflower • Encelia californica • Escholzia californica • Escholzia californica maritima • native plants • Ranunculus californicus • sagebrush | 5 Comments »