[ Lost in the Landscape ]

random updates

Update #1: The gopher chron­i­cles (Orig­i­nal post: Cook­ing for Ver­min)

It’s been three weeks since I tried to ward off gophers by using extra-hot chili pow­der. Peo­ple want to know if it works.

The con­clu­sion: There’s no sign of obvi­ous dam­age from pocket gophers in the treated area. The plants are grow­ing and bloom­ing nor­mally. That might sound like suc­cess, but there hasn’t been any gopher dam­age any­where else in the gar­den, either. So it’s incon­clu­sive at this point. But I’ll post as the sea­son goes on. I really really want this to work.

Update #2: Life post-hacking (Orig­i­nal post: I was hacked)

After I real­ized that my blog was hacked I cleaned out what looked like the prob­lem code. But two days later the Word­Press Pharma Hack was back. I did more dras­tic cleanup after that, and it looks like that took care of the problem.

Even after cleanup, because it takes days to weeks for Google to catch up and rein­dex every­thing on a site, searches for my blog showed many titles for my posts as promis­ing ways to buy var­i­ous drugs with­out pre­scrip­tion. Even as recently as Wednes­day, last week, the num­ber one blog key­word was “Pre­scrip­tion.” For a gar­den blog it’s pathetic to have that word ahead of the next four on the list: “gar­den,” “plants,” “blog” or “land­scape.” But the tide turned on Thurs­day, and the good words con­tinue to rise as the hacker words sink.

Update #3: Aloe, good-bye (Orig­i­nal post: Exotic plant, exotic pest)

It’s been almost a year since I men­tioned that my spec­i­men Aloe bar­berae (aka A. baine­sii) was in seri­ous decline. Aloe mites had attacked the plant and I was blam­ing its fate on them. The plant con­tin­ued to decline to the point that it had just a few grow­ing tips that kept get­ting smaller and smaller. Some­thing was very wrong and we cut the plant back to a stump one to two months later, leav­ing three small pups that were spring­ing from the low­est two feet of the plant.

Since then even those lit­tle pups have failed to thrive. Signs of mites have been few, so I’m begin­ning to think that some other cause is respon­si­ble for the prob­lems. Hypoth­e­sis #1 at the moment: pocket gophers eat­ing the roots. My main rea­son for think­ing this is that there’s another A. bar­berae just a few feet away that looks robust, with none of the signs of ill­ness the big plant was show­ing. I’ll keep my hope up for that plant.

In the mean­time, aloes being aloes, I fig­ured that all the lit­tle branch tips I cut off might root eas­ily. I treated all the chunks with miti­cide, stuck them in pot­ting mix and kept them just-moist. All three took.

Quite frankly I’m not sure there’s room in the front for two giant aloes I had there in the first place–placing the two orig­i­nal plants so close was a mis­take. So I gave two of the rooted plants to peo­ple in my office who were eager to grow this ter­rific plant. I still have one rooted plant, along with a half dozen more unrooted branch tips sit­ting on my green­house floor that are still green, almost a year later. I might end up with an impres­sive aloe in a pot if I can’t find a place for it. And if I root the remain­ing branch tips I could have a half-dozen more giveaways.

The orig­i­nal plant looks doomed, but pieces of the orig­i­nal clone live on. In the life and death world of gar­dens that’s almost a happy ending.

Update #4: Crest-fallen (Orig­i­nal post: Mutant Prim­rose)

In case you’re won­derng what hap­pened to the mutant Hooker’s evening prim­rose from a May 12 post­ing, it looks like the weight of the extra tis­sue on the crested grow­ing tip was more than the stem could keep aloft. Within a week of the orig­i­nal photo, the stem flopped to the ground, where it has stayed, still alive, but not thriving…

Update #5: A dif­fer­ent out­come for a crested growth (Orig­i­nal post: Defor­mity or Bio­log­i­cal Won­der?)

My last progress report is on this mutant crested growth of a Euphor­bia lam­bii. Since I posted on it in June of 2009, the plant seems to have incor­po­rated the crest into its con­tin­ued growth pat­terns, unlike on what was going on with the prim­rose above. Still, you can tell that the growth pat­tern isn’t quite what nor­mal plants go through. Still inter­est­ing, two years later…

July 15 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Aloe bainesii • Aloe barberae • aloe mite • blogging • crested plants • Eriogonum grande var rubescens • Euphorbia lambii • Oenothera elata • pocket gophers • Wordpress Pharma Hack | 8 Comments »

a new weed

This past win­ter I was notic­ing a weed pop­ping up all around the yard that I hadn’t noticed before. I was men­tion­ing it to John, and added, “I’m not sure what it is, though think it could be some sort of euphorbia.”

Then in the gen­tly tact­ful way spouses have of cor­rect­ing you and point­ing out your blind spots he qui­etly cleared his throat and pointed to one of the four young pot­ted plants we have around the gar­den of Euphor­bia lam­bii, one of my dry garden-adapted plants from the Canary Islands. “Maybe it’s that?”

Uh, like duh. What else would it be?

Last year was the first that these plants bloomed, and this spring they bloomed with a vengeance. Dur­ing sunny weather over the last few weeks I’ve heard lit­tle pop­ping noises from the direc­tion of the plants, and have come to the con­clu­sion that the sounds were that of seed pods explod­ing and jet­ti­son­ing the dust-like seed every­where.

I may come to regret the day I intro­duced these to the gar­den, which accord­ing to my records is March 9, 2008.

Speak­ing of weedy plants, here’s another sur­prise seedling from the gar­den, a lit­tle baby red foun­tain grass, one of three seedlings I noticed this year. In recent years the related green foun­tain grass, Pen­nise­tum setaceum has become a nox­ious (though stun­ningly beau­ti­ful) weed and has landed high on vir­tu­ally every thou-shalt-not-plant list issued for Cal­i­for­nia. But many peo­ple gave a by to this related red plant. It was often pushed as being ster­ile and inca­pable of repro­duc­ing by seed, a piece of mis­in­for­ma­tion even I relayed in this blog. (I’ve cor­rected that ear­lier oops in case any­one reads that ear­lier post.) As you can see here it can repro­duce by seed, though this form doesn’t spawn the same way reg­u­lar foun­tain grass does. Nor is it imme­di­ately the same mon­ster pest that feather grass (Nas­sella tenuis­sima) can be.

Pok­ing around the web I found an updated plant descrip­tion at San Mar­cos Grow­ers that includes some inter­est­ing back­ground on this plant:

Recent work in prepa­ra­tion for the grass sec­tions of the Flora of North Amer­ica, which will include nat­u­ral­ized and cul­ti­vated grasses, indi­cates that the name cho­sen for this plant will be Pen­nise­tum advena or per­haps P. x advena. Dr. Joseph K. Wipff, pre­vi­ously with Texas A&M and now a tur­f­grass breeder, wrote the sec­tion on Pen­nise­tum and has indi­cated that Red Foun­tain Grass is most likely a cross between P. setaceum and P. macrostachys (AKA ‘Bur­gundy Giant’). As a hybrid the name would most appro­pri­ately be Pen­nise­tum x advena ‘Rubrum’. The latin word advena means “newly arrived” or “stranger.”

So is it safe to plant this form of foun­tain grass? Here’s my think­ing: Hybrids between species are often ster­ile. (Think of mules, the off­spring of a horse and a don­key.) But every now and then some­thing hap­pens that allows the hybrid to repro­duce. Some­times the seedlings will be just as nearly ster­ile as the imme­di­ate par­ent, but other times a muta­tion could ren­der the seedling entirely fer­tile. In that lat­ter sce­nario the nearly-sterile foun­tain grass could turn into some­thing with the ugly inva­sive poten­tial of its Pen­nise­tum setaceum ancestor.

In other words, today I would be cau­tious and not plant it. Unfor­tu­nately, almost twenty years ago, we designed the front yard around a big mound of the stuff. The plants look stun­ning and move gra­ciously in response to the breezes. Their size is per­fect for the spot, and their red color is unmatched among other grasses. Every now and then I look at other options, like those rec­om­mended in the Don’t Plant a Pest brochure put out by the Cal­i­for­nia Inva­sive Plant Coun­cil. But these lists often fall short in the alter­na­tives they offer and end up read­ing like, “Cheese­cake is bad for you. Would you like to eat this deli­cious raw rutabaga instead?” So…I’m still look­ing for the per­fect replace­ment plant–hopefully some sort of native, but in the mean­time I’m pulling the occa­sional seedlings.

June 20 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Euphorbia lambii • Fountain grass • invasive plants • Pennisetum setaceum 'Rubrum' • weeds | 10 Comments »

deformity or biological wonder?

There are some things I just don’t get. Waf­fles topped with fried chicken and syrup, for one thing. Crested suc­cu­lents, another.

A trip to a cac­tus show or nurs­ery site for suc­cu­lents will likely turn up a sec­tion devoted to plants with crested (or “cristate”) and mon­strose growths. Gen­er­ally I find that the shapes of plants are inter­est­ing enough, and I usu­ally don’t go gaga over some genetic oddball.

But the odd­ball crest­ing behav­ior found its way to the gar­den any­way. This is a young Euphor­bia lam­bii in the back yard, one of four I have grow­ing in pots.

Here’s a closeup…

And here’s a view from the top…

The typ­i­cal habit for this plant is to pro­duce branches that are dis­trib­uted around its grow­ing tip, some­thing that you can see in this nor­mal lam­bii nearby. With the crested muta­tion, the api­cal meris­tem, the point where new growth emerges, has changed from a point to a line. So instead of a cylin­dri­cal stem with branches all around, you get a stem that grows flat, like a cobra’s hood, with new growths dis­trib­uted along that line.

From what research I’ve done it isn’t appar­ent what causes this par­tic­u­lar muta­tion. The genus Euphor­bia, how­ever, is one of those where you could encounter it fairly com­monly. (If there’s any­thing in the plant’s envi­ron­ment that caused it, I won­der if might be drought stress. Of the four plants, this one received the least amount of water. A cou­ple times it came close to defo­li­at­ing. All the oth­ers are grow­ing normally.)

I’ll admit that the crested growth inter­est­ing. Maybe I’ll learn to love it. But I’m not there yet…

June 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: crested succulents • cristation • Euphorbia lambii • mutations | 3 Comments »

steel cube planters, part 1

This is the result of one of my week­end projects:

It’s one of four steel cubes that I assem­bled to put in the new raised bed. The sides of the bed are made of sheet steel that’s already weath­ered to a rich, warm, rusty patina, so I wanted some pots to put in it that were of the same material.

John vetoed my first avant-garde con­cep­tual ideas for arrange­ments, arrange­ments that worked with com­pet­ing sys­tems of geo­met­ri­cal hier­ar­chies, one of them based in part on some of the ideas behind Bernard Tschumi’s post­mod­ernist and highly con­cep­tual Parc de la Vil­lette in Paris. But below is one that I finally came up with that makes us both happy. It has some of the geo­met­ri­cal ten­sions that I wanted to work with. At the same time, the arrange­ment of the ele­ments is a lit­tle chaotic and whimsical–to the point that none of them sit flat on the ground–a qual­ity that appealed to John.

Each pot is planted with the iden­ti­cal plant mate­r­ial. Euphor­bia lam­bii is placed in the cen­ter, point­ing as per­fectly upright and away from the earth’s core as I could man­age with­out get­ting out the level, an effect that I’m hop­ing will point out how crookedly each planter is placed. Creep­ing thyme will even­tu­ally pro­tect the top of the slanted top plane of pot­ting mix.

This is an overview of two of the other con­tain­ers in the gar­den space, here in the mid­dle– and back­ground, with part of the new step­ping stone pathway:

If you have basic of weld­ing chops and a sup­plier that will pre-cut pieces fairly accu­rately, you can make them your­self in an after­noon. You could also make sim­i­lar con­tain­ers by screw­ing the steel plate to lit­tle pieces of angle iron. Part 2 of this post pro­vides some basic instruc­tions for the welded ver­sion shown here.

March 24 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: Bernard Tschumi • Euphorbia lambii • Parc de la Villette • planters | 5 Comments »