[ Lost in the Landscape ]

a visit to recon native plants

Week­end before last my native plant soci­ety orga­nized a lit­tle prop­a­ga­tion work­shop that was hosted by Recon Native Plants. One of the ses­sions focused on grow­ing plants from seed, another on prop­a­gat­ing from cut­tings. I’ve done a bit of both, though my suc­cess with seeds def­i­nitely out­shines any luck with grow­ing any­thing from cut­tings. My main take-away for the cut­tings ses­sion was to try to take the cut­tings early in the morn­ing, when the plants are least dried out. I’ll be giv­ing that a try and shar­ing what­ever suc­cesses or fail­ures that that leads to.

My favorite part of the morn­ing was a chance to tour the nurs­ery and see a large whole­sale oper­a­tion ded­i­cated to prop­a­gat­ing Cal­i­for­nia and South­west­ern natives. In my lit­tle backyard-garden world I’m used to see­ing a few plants in pots sit­ting around, wait­ing to be planted. To visit such a big facil­ity is to see the world in a dif­fer­ent way. Here’s an art­fully arranged moun­tain of gal­lon pots filled with soil mix being planted with lit­tle arteme­sias. I’ll never com­plain again about hav­ing to pot up a half dozen trans­plants. con­tinue reading »

November 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • places | Tags: habitat restoration • native plants • Recon Native Plants • Salva spathacea | 3 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 »