Southern California gets fall foliage colors too. If there’s a single tree that we can point to it would have to be the southern sweetgum, Liquidambar styraciflua. You see planted all over, so much that you might call it a cliche—But how can you can something so satisfying a cliche? To me it’s one of the comfort foods of plants, especially now that the weather has turned cool and thoughts turn towards winter.
Liquidambar Leaves
My own associations with the plant go back years. My mother planted a tree of the clone ‘Burgundy’ in front of the Los Angeles-area house where I spent many of my childhood years. The tree produced red to purple leaves in the fall, depending on the weather conditions, and proved to be a favorite backdrop for a number of family Thanksgiving pictures. When my parents retired to Oceanside, my mother started a sapling in from of the new home.
The plant is planted so much you might almost think it’s a native. But instead it hails from the American South—some compensation for their alligators and mosquitoes. In some locations it has escaped into the wilds, but seems to be much less of a problem than many other plants.
Liquidambars at UCSD
This is a planting at the UCSD campus, photographed this week between rainstorms. The plants began coloring up a month or more ago. Unlike aspens or maples or other plants with amazing autumn foliage, some liquidambar clones can hold on to their leaves through much of the winter. In fact, there was a year where big stands of it still had dark purple foliage hanging on the branches, even as the new growth was emerging in the spring.
What a weird year that was, a sign that sometimes we seem to escape having a genuine winter. But we do get autum. And liquidambars are the proof.
December 19 2008 | Categories: gardening • plant profiles | Tags: fall • Liquidambar styraciflua • seasons • sweetgum • UCSD | 3 Comments »
Autumn: It’s the new spring.
At least that’s seemingly the case for those of us in Mediterranean climates. With our dry summers and moist winters, the plants best adapted to our climate come close to taking the summer summer off, and then use the onset of cooler, wetter weather to start thinking about getting growing again. Some of the shrubs in the local canyons drop some or all of their leaves in response to drought stress, and most of the wildland annuals disappear not long after the last rains. Our long brown season of summer could almost be confused with the depths of winter in other areas.
Leafless Coreopsis gigantea
Left: Coreopsis gigantea in its defensive, leafless summer mode.
Reading the recent blogs from those other climates, I’m noticing that people are starting to withdraw from their gardens, holing up with some favorite plants transplanted into pots to overwinter indoors. These gardeners are thinking about sitting down with plant catalogs and looking ahead to the holidays, and then to warmer days and the reemergence of their gardens.
Garden before transplanting and thinning
[caption id=”attachment_2032” align=”alignleft” width=”300” caption=”Garden after autumn thinning and transplanting”]
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Here in San Diego, however, I started off September by transplanting plants around the garden, readjusting plant spacing and color relationships.
Left: Some of the garden before and after autumn thinning and transplanting.
Autumn seedlings
I planted dozens of little pots of seeds of plants that I want to grow this fall and next year: giant coreopsis, datura, buckwheats from the Channel Islands, mallows from the desert, millet for the birds and some South African restios for a spot in the garden where the original plants haven’t aged gracefully. It’s a frenzy of activity of the sort that people in other climates would associate with late winter and early spring.
Autumn weeds
All summer, the patches of earth that get almost no supplemental water stay brown and virtually weed-free. Once the rains return, the weeds begin to claim the universe and the weeding chores begin again.
Fortunately, a layer of mulch makes a world of difference in keeping down weed seedlings. Unfortunately, areas where you want to sow wildflower seed can’t be mulched at all if you want the little seeds to germinate on their own. To keep down my workload, this year I’m isolating the wildflower patches to just a couple spots, around a couple little trees that will drop their leaves for the winter. We’ll see how well that works out…
A few spots in my garden don’t have to abide by strictly Mediterranean water requirements. There’s a small herb and vegetable garden that gets moderate doses of water year-round. A new raised bed harbors some tropicals that get to stay moist, as well as some other selections that need a little help with the water. This is the part of the garden that gets to experience summer along with the rest of the world. So the task of weeding never completely comes to an end, although it’s greatly localized to these spots that get watered one to three times a week.
All in all, this 2% of the Earth’s land mass that experiences this Mediterranean climate (the region around the Mediterranean Sea, western South Africa, parts of the Chilean coast, western Australia, and much of California) has its own seasonal cycles that don’t sync up easily with the rest of the world. Gardeners in other areas might not understand us. Forgive us if we have this glaze of anticipation coating our moods these days. Even as we worry about weeds and increased garden chores, fall is here, and it’s the emergence of a whole new season in the garden.
November 16 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: fall • Mediterranean climate • seasons • spring • transplanting • weeding • weeds | 6 Comments »
