the view from the top

It’s spring, and the wild­flow­ers wait for no one. I’ve been for­sak­ing gar­den­ing and home projects and blog­ging (gasp!) a bit to check out some of the local open spaces. Here’s a panorama of part of the view from the top of For­tuna Mount­ian, at 1,243 feet the sec­ond high­est “peak” in the San Diego city lim­its. (Click the image to enlarge.)

fortuna-mountain-peak-panorama

This peak burned on Octo­ber 26, 2003 dur­ing the county’s big Cedar Fire. Revis­it­ing the area is a great les­son to see how things recover from a major fire, either by resprout­ing from the roots or reestab­lish­ing them­selves by seed. There are still plenty of dead branches pok­ing up towards the sky, but there’s also a huge amount of green. And these big, gor­geous rocks didn’t hold on to their scorch marks for long. (Don’t you just love rocks in a land­scape, either in the wilds or in a garden?)

stinging-lupine-closeup

Many of the plants and flow­ers aren’t ones you’ll find even in native plant gar­dens, but sev­eral have passed the “garden-worthy” test. In the sec­ond frame from the left above, you’ll see a bloom spike of the sting­ing lupine, Lupi­nus hir­sutis­simus, sort of an awful name for a beau­ti­ful plant.

While I haven’t seen plants of this annual species offered for sale, sev­eral online sources do list seeds, includ­ing S&S Seeds, and Seed­hunt.

Also on the sum­mit were two other plants that are used fairly fre­quently in native gar­dens: lau­rel sumac (Mal­osma lau­rina) and mis­sion man­zanita (Xylo­coc­cus bicolor), both of them even­tu­ally form­ing large, inter­est­ing shrubs.

I’ll be shar­ing more bits and pieces of the trips as I get them more organized.

April 03 2009 | Categories: landscape • photography | Tags: • • | 2 Comments »