[ Lost in the Landscape ]

words are important

One night a week and a half ago, when much of the world was watch­ing the final “Amer­i­can Idol” show­down between Adam Lam­bert and Kris Allen or view­ing the finale of “Danc­ing with the Stars,” almost a hun­dred of us were at the local native plant soci­ety meet­ing to hear Kristie Orosco. Envi­ron­men­tal Direc­tor for the San Pasqual Band of Kumeyaay Indi­ans, eth­nob­otanist, and mem­ber of the Native Amer­i­can Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Coali­tion, our speaker gave us a quick intro­duc­tion to how some of the local Native Amer­i­cans tra­di­tion­ally used plants in their envi­ron­ment as food.

She was one of those rare com­mu­ni­ca­tors, a per­son who with a very few words can take you into a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing and see­ing the world. One thing she said, in par­tic­u­lar, has stuck with me. Instead of stat­ing that a plant blooms, she used the phrase that a plant “gives it flow­ers.” What a gor­geous way to phrase it: Instead of a plant being an inert bloom­ing machine that you pick up for a few bucks at the nurs­ery and toss when it turns ugly, it was a liv­ing entity that gives of itself by pro­duc­ing flowers.

How you say some­thing is as impor­tant as what you say, and her words opened up a world to me where every­thing in nature is a gift. Although I’ve devel­oped a cyn­i­cal side to my per­son­al­ity, I’ve tried to counter it by keep­ing alive a part of me that con­tin­ues to stay amazed at the things of the nat­ural world and almost will­fully naive about many of the ways of humankind. It’s that sec­ond side of me that’s cer­tain that the earth would be a lot bet­ter off than it is if we all spoke and viewed the land­scape the way Kristie Orosco did.

You often read that the plants you encounter in the wilds have tra­di­tional uses, but it’s not until you’ve had direct expe­ri­ence with the uses that the con­nec­tion really clicks. To cement that con­nec­tion, our speaker brought foods for all of us to try, enough to cover sev­eral large tables.

On the menu:

• Shaawii, or acorn pud­ding (pink, looks like spam but it’s actu­ally edible–and sub­tly tasty)
• Pit-roasted agave root (some­thing like a chewy, smoky vegan beef jerky–my favorite of the night)
• Limeade with seeds of chia (Salvia colum­bariae)
• “Med­i­cine tea” (steeped dried flow­ers from Mex­i­can elder­berry, Sam­bu­cus mex­i­canus, very del­i­cately fla­vored, used for a num­ber of pur­poses, includ­ing break­ing a fever)
• Yucca root (starchy, but dif­fer­ent from pota­toes in flavor)
• Yucca flow­ers, boiled (the blooms of Hes­per­oyucca whip­plei, which is fin­ish­ing up giv­ing its flow­ers in many of our hill­sides around town; very del­i­cate fla­vor with a tiny nip of bit­ter­ness, brus­sels sprouts for peo­ple who don’t like brus­sels sprouts, or a new food for peo­ple who love arti­choke hearts)
• Yucca flow­ers, raw (as above, only crunchier, a lit­tle more bitter)

I’ve always admired plants of Hes­per­oyucca whip­plei from a distance–The ends of its leaves end in sharp points that you have to show immense respect. Now that I’ve tasted its root and sam­pled its flow­ers and heard Kristie Orozco speak about the plant, my aes­thetic appre­ci­a­tion of it has deep­ened into some­thing else much richer.

June 01 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape | Tags: ethnobotany • Kristie Orosco • native plants • vegetables | 5 Comments »

interpreting history through plants

The native plant gar­den at San Diego’s Old Town State His­toric Park occu­pies a gen­tle rise in the land on the north end of the park. The gar­den sits on the grounds of the Silvas-McCoy house, a mod­ern recon­struc­tion by the park ser­vice based on foun­da­tions exca­vated in 1995.

The house repli­cates an 1869 struc­ture by Irish immi­grant James McCoy. Pre­vi­ous to McCoy’s arrival the site was pre­vi­ously in the hands of Maria Euge­nia Sil­vas, and the grounds also con­tain the foun­da­tions of two adobe struc­tures that pre­date the McCoy house.

The park ser­vice, charged with inter­pret­ing the his­tory of San Diego’s found­ing, decided between rebuild­ing the McCoy house or recre­at­ing the ear­lier adobes. Would they opt to tell the story of early Span­ish set­tle­ment? Or that of later set­tlers? Or instead could they do some­thing to inter­pret the area’s orig­i­nal inhab­i­tants, the Kumeyaay, whose vil­lage of Koss’ai occu­pied the site, and whose tenure went back thou­sands of years? Choices like that are never with­out con­tro­versy, and you could make good argu­ments on all sides of the debate.

This was dur­ing a flurry of his­toric recon­struc­tion in Old Town which turned this cor­ner of the park into a con­struc­tion zone. Dur­ing the project I spot­ted one of the more amus­ing infor­ma­tional signs I’ve encoun­tered, one that pro­claimed a nearby patch of earth to be the “Future site of San Diego’s first city jail.” (Do you ever regret not hav­ing a cam­era along?)

The native plant gar­den, like the Silvas-McCoy house, also par­tic­i­pates in the park’s mis­sion to pro­vide his­toric con­text. The selec­tion of plants rein­forces the story the gar­den tells.

In the days of Sil­vas and McCoy the San Diego River flowed in front of this site. The plants that would have been found here would have been pri­mar­ily ripar­ian species. To tell that story, you’ll see stands of mug­wort, sycamore, mule­fat, coast live oak and wil­low fea­tured on the grounds.

In the past, the river would some­times empty into Mis­sion Bay to the north, or into San Diego Bay to the south. The geo­graph­i­cal inde­ci­sive­ness of a mean­der­ing river works fine for the nat­ural world, but poorly for a cul­ture tied to pri­vate own­er­ship of prop­erty. The cur­rent San Diego River has been forced into an engi­neered chan­nel a quar­ter mile to the north and is no longer able to decide on its own where it would like to go. So, in addi­tion to telling a story about the loca­tion of the river 150 years ago, the garden–a ripar­ian plant com­mu­nity stranded hun­dreds of feet from the river that would have orig­i­nally sus­tained it–to me speaks to notions of own­er­ship of space and ideas about the con­trol of nature. It’s not just another pretty garden.

Of course, when you say “gar­den,” peo­ple do want to see pretty flow­ers. Above is chap­ar­ral mal­low (Mala­cotham­nus fas­ci­c­u­la­tus), and here’s the perky red mon­key (Mimu­lus auran­ti­a­cus)…

…and the ever-popular Cal­i­for­nia state flower (Escholzia cal­i­for­nica) in its most rec­og­niz­able color form, with wands of white sage (Salvia apa­iana) in front.

And here’s a bou­quet of some of what was blooming.

The gar­den in its cur­rent state goes back only a lit­tle more than a year, when a group of local Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety vol­un­teers weeded the site and planted many of the plants. The gar­den hosted an open house on Sat­ur­day, and vis­i­tors got a chance to tour the site and get insights from eth­nob­otanist Richard Bug­bee about tra­di­tional Kumeyaay uses of many of the plants in the garden.

For exam­ple did you know that young flow­er­ing stems of white sage were peeled and eaten raw? This is one of the most assertively aro­matic of sages, but peel­ing the stems pur­port­edly takes away the oil-producing glands and gives the stems a fla­vor some­thing like cel­ery. (Maybe “tastes like cel­ery” is the botan­i­cal equiv­a­lent of the catch-all “tastes like chicken,” but I intend to find out the next time my plants need a hair­cut…) Future plans for the gar­den include sig­nage on tra­di­tional Kumayaay uses of the plants grow­ing there.

That’s eth­nob­otanist Richard Bug­bee, sec­ond from the right in this photo, along with land­scape archi­tect Kay Stew­art, far right, who was heav­ily involved in design­ing the gar­den. Next to Richard is Peter St. Clair who, along with the orig­i­nal donor to the native gar­den project, had the vision and per­sis­tence to have the gar­den in the first place. Peter also orga­nizes the vol­un­teer work crews that help main­tain and shape the garden.

At not much over a year old, this is still a young gar­den. There are still areas to be cleared and plant­i­ngs to be final­ized, but the gar­den has good bones and occu­pies a fas­ci­nat­ing loca­tion. It’s def­i­nitely a place to watch as it matures, and they’re always on the look­out for vol­un­teers to help the process along. Sign me up!

May 11 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: ethnobotany • native plants • Old Town Historic Park • San Diego | 6 Comments »

mostly words

My win­ter pile of plant and seed cat­a­logs con­tains one that doesn’t fit the usual model. Instead of page after page of gor­geous soft-core porno­graphic pho­tos and draw­ings of plants in brawny full leaf and buxom full bloom, the J.L. Hud­son Seeds­man cat­a­log takes the form of a tight 95 pages of black-on-white text and only twenty-five small line draw­ings for illustrations.

This is a cat­a­log all about words. It could well change your expec­ta­tions of what a seed cat­a­log should be. It’s listed as an “eth­nob­otan­i­cal cat­a­log of seeds,” and you can sit down with it and read it like a novel. Most of the seeds descrip­tions come with a sen­tence or two of cul­tural trivia about the plant, mostly about how one of the world’s soci­eties uses that plant. I’ve been find­ing that this is the cat­a­log that I’ve been spend­ing the most time with this year.

In addi­tion to the inter­est­ing cat­a­log copy, you start to notice that the text itself is gor­geous in the way it sits on the page. I was try­ing to place the spe­cial qual­ity it has when I finally noticed on the last page an inter­est­ing state­ment: “This pub­li­ca­tion was type­set entirely with­out the use of computers.”

No com­put­ers? In 2009? So retro it’s avant-garde, like albums released on vinyl. But worry not. They also have an online pres­ence.

This is def­i­nitely a cat­a­log with atti­tude. It’s also a cat­a­log with a pur­pose, a pur­pose that’s well doc­u­mented in a state­ment on their web­site, a pur­pose that’s in line with their self-description as a “pub­lic access seed bank.” You can also start to under­stand the pur­pose when you look at the titles of the brief selec­tion of books offered in the back of the catalog.

One of the works, Inva­sion Biol­ogy: Cri­tique of a Pseu­do­science, has a writeup that includes the state­ment, “We have all heard the breath­less tales of the dan­gers of ‘inva­sive alien species,’ but what does sci­ence say about them? …In all cases… intro­duced species have increased bio­log­i­cal diversity.”

Another title, Eco­fas­cism: Lessons from the Ger­man Expe­ri­ence, gets a long writeup that includes the impas­sioned lines, “Most U.S. envi­ron­men­tal­ists are com­pletely opposed to the aims of fas­cism, but reac­tionary forces have begun to bend eco­log­i­cal themes towards these very ends. Only through knowl­edge may we pre­vent this per­ver­sion of environmentalism.”

Once you under­stand where the cat­a­log is com­ing from, you’ll start to under­stand the almost will­ful atti­tude that would drive them to offer seed of black mus­tard, one of the plants that has taken over much of the local ecosys­tem and has few friends among the plant peo­ple I know. And one of the recent online cat­a­log sup­ple­ments had seed for Arundo donax, a plant that has taken over some impor­tant local ripar­ian habi­tats. Why don’t you just dump plu­to­nium in your gar­den? Hmmmm…Does that make me an ecofascist?

You don’t have to agree with every­thing you see in the cat­a­log, and you don’t have to buy any­thing out of it. But this is one pub­li­ca­tion that’s a must read if you’d like to get your­self think­ing instead of all hot and both­ered over the usual pretty pictures!

January 24 2009 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: biodiversity • ethnobotany • J.L. Hudson Seedsman • plant catalogs • seed banks • seed catalogs • seeds | 7 Comments »

friday blooms–banned in several states, sorta

Salvia divi­no­rum flowering

Today’s flower pho­tos are of the first blooms of the sea­son on Salvia divi­no­rum, a plant that seemed like an appro­pri­ate choice to high­light for the 75th anniver­sary of Repeal Day, the end of Pro­hi­bi­tion in the United States.

This is a plant with a cou­ple of bad rep­u­ta­tion points against it.

Robin Mid­dle­ton, one of Britain’s big gurus on the genus Salvia, gave up on the plant: “Native to a remote part of Mex­ico, this is one of the most dif­fi­cult salvias to get into flower…I have dis­carded this salvia, as mine never flowered.”

And Betsy Cleb­sch, one of the Bay Area’s high priest­esses of the genus and author of The New Book of Salvias: Salvias for Every Gar­den, writes: “On sev­eral occa­sions I have grown the plant in a green­house but have never suc­ceeded in get­ting my plants to flower.”

My plants are new to the gar­den so my expe­ri­ence with the plant is pretty lim­ited. But it appears that given the right con­di­tions, even in the hands of a non-expert like me, that first rap of never flow­er­ing appears to be undeserved.

The sec­ond rap against this salvia comes from the fact that its tra­di­tional med­i­c­i­nal uses and role in shaman­is­tic div­ina­tion don’t square with some notions of of what peo­ple should be doing with the plants in the nat­ural world. Sev­eral states have recent laws on the books against pro­cess­ing the plant or pack­ag­ing it for human con­sump­tion. For­tu­nately there seem to be exemp­tions for peo­ple using it for orna­men­tal, hor­ti­cul­tural pur­poses. Sev­eral coun­tries, includ­ing Aus­tralia, Den­mak and Italy exert some sort of con­trol over the plant. (Bet­ter con­sult your lawyer or Wikipedia before plant­ing it and giv­ing it away to all your friends…)

What are its effects, and what’s all the fuss? you might ask. But I’m the wrong per­son to ask since my drugs of choice tend towards caf­feine, choco­late and occa­sional hits of refined sugar. (Sam’s cof­fee cart at work offers a mocha-chip scone that hits all three addic­tion points!) And for altered states of con­scious­ness I pre­fer to look at art, lis­ten to music or read a book. But by gen­eral accounts this plant has no record of addic­tion and is prob­a­bly less dan­ger­ous than alco­hol and tobacco.

Closeup of Salvia divi­no­rum flowers

Why grow it? It looks cool! (Check out the white fuzz on the indi­vid­ual flow­ers!) It has a fas­ci­nat­ing eth­nob­otan­i­cal back­ground. And the fact that some peo­ple want to ban it is alone a good rea­son as far as I’m con­cerned. Plants are inter­est­ing all on their own, but when a plant rep­re­sents a micro­cosm of issues cir­cu­lat­ing through cul­ture it gets to be really fas­ci­nat­ing. (Vocab­u­larly word of the day: synec­doche.)

Devel­op­ing flow­ers stem on Salvia divinorum

The image to the right shows a new bloom spike with the devel­op­ing vio­let calyxes.

If they come after this plant, what’s next? All those lovely opium pop­pies in your gardens?

What opium pop­pies? They’re just “Ori­en­tal pop­pies,” you might say. But they’re no less opium pop­pies than what’s grown in the Afghan high­lands as part of the drug trade. What do you think the “som­niferum” in their sci­en­tific name (Papaver som­niferum) alludes to? Next time you buy a plant from some­where you’re tech­ni­cally con­tribut­ing to traf­fick­ing in a Sched­ule II con­trolled sub­stance. (Check out Michael Pollan’s 1997 Harper’s Mag­a­zine arti­cle, “Opium made easy.”)

And then there are all those highly poi­so­nous plants like fox­glove, or species that could eas­ily be mod­i­fied for bioter­ror­ism uses like cas­tor bean. Can peo­ple be trusted to have those plants in their gardens?

It’s a slip­pery slope. A slip­pery slope, I tell you. In the mean­time proudly grow your pop­pies and fox­gloves and salvias. Keep your gar­dens free!

Let me go back to the cul­ti­va­tion ques­tion that I started with. Betsy Cleb­sch in the 2003 edi­tion of her book reported that, “I have found it impos­si­ble to find any­thing writ­ten about it in gar­den­ing or hor­ti­cul­tural mag­a­zines or books; my infor­ma­tion comes from botan­i­cal and eth­no­batan­i­cal descrip­tions and from con­ver­sa­tions with those who have grown the plant.” The web now has a cer­tain amount of infor­ma­tion on how to grow the plant, and below are my notes.

What I’m doing: One of the two husky rooted cut­tings from two-inch pots went into a gal­lon con­tainer with cheap pot­ting soil into a shady, humid and unheated green­house and was kept con­stantly moist. The other went into the ground (sandy soil with­out many amend­ments) in a shady spot in a raised bed next to the gar­den pond and was watered when­ever I remem­bered to do it.

The pot­ted green­house plant grew fairly upright, but has that pale, gaunt look of some peo­ple who live in dark apart­ments. The plant in the ground hasn’t grown as tall, but looks more robust, putting out more in the way of basal growths. The flow­er­ing plant shown here is the one from the green­house, but the one out­doors is putting out a bloom stalk and seems to be a cou­ple weeks behind the first one in bloom­ing. The plants are dif­fer­ent culti­gens, so the dif­fer­ence in their behav­ior prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with that. But both seem to respond to bright but min­i­mal direct sun­light and average-moist con­di­tions at the roots.

Happy grow­ing!

December 05 2008 | Categories: gardening • plant profiles | Tags: controlled substances • drugs • ethnobotany • opium poppies • Salvia divinorum | 5 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 »

my newest sage

The num­ber of exam­ples that I have in the gar­den of the sage genus, Salvia, is grow­ing. The lat­est addi­tion is a tiny lit­tle plant of white sage, Salvia api­ana, that I put into a hole in the front yard where a few other plants have failed. The plant is native to this area and doesn’t require addi­tional water so I’m con­fi­dent that it should have no prob­lem with with the dry soil and the hot sun expo­sure. Time will tell whether it can com­pete with the roots of nearby estab­lished plantings.

Local exam­ples of the white sage show it to be fairly low, mound­ing plant of strongly-scented green­ish white leaves. Robin Middleton’s amaz­ing salvia site says that “peo­ple find the fra­grance of the foliage unpleasant…I don’t par­tic­u­larly like it,” and the descrip­tion at Las Pil­i­tas Nurs­ery calls the per­fume a mix­ture of “sage, pine nee­dles, burn­ing rub­ber, skunk.” To my nose, that mix­ture of sage and pine nee­dles and burn­ing rub­ber and skunk smells like the local chap­ar­ral and long hikes on a sunny after­noon, so I actu­ally enjoy it. In the late spring the low plant puts up infor­mal head-high spires of white flow­ers, some­times with a laven­der tint, but for me the plant is most valu­able for its attrac­tive foliage.

Photo from the Wiki­me­dia Com­mons, con­tributed by Eugene van der Pijll [ source ]

In addi­tion to hav­ing a num­ber of uses for the local Native Amer­i­cans as a food, fla­vor­ing and med­i­cine, the white sage was con­sid­ered sacred, fig­ured in sweat lodge cer­e­monies and was used remove evil spirits.

After the con­clu­sion of 1996 Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion in San Diego one of the more cre­ative post-convention protests involved an action to exor­cise the evil that some thought the con­ven­tion brought to town. In an act of purifi­ca­tion, in an cer­e­mony that involved drum­ming and chant­ing, pro­test­ers burned sticks of white sage to cleanse the Con­ven­tion Cen­ter site of the resid­ual evil.

July 09 2008 | Categories: landscape • landscape design • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: ethnobotany • Salvia apiana • white sage | 1 Comment »