[ Lost in the Landscape ]

that’s sooooo 1970s

A house down the street has had a contractor’s truck parked out­side of it for a while now. The owner said she’s remod­el­ing the kitchen and bath. Not any time too soon, accord­ing to John, who dur­ing our last time in the house noticed that those rooms oozed the stuff that 1975 was made of: fab­u­lous 70s mod­ern appli­ances, wood­grained formica, beige tile floors. There’s noth­ing wrong with any of these mate­ri­als, but the rooms looked like they were sealed in a time cap­sule, an easy thing to hap­pen to rooms that are so expen­sive to remodel.

Some gar­dens around town seem to have the same aura about them. You sense that the gar­den was planted all at once–probably by a pickup truck landscaper–from what was avail­able and fash­ion­able and con­sid­ered reli­able at the time. Decades later the plant­i­ngs will look untouched–the same plants in the same places (often planted too close together or too near a house). Things might be pruned a lit­tle, or there might be a mature row of some­thing with a miss­ing plant. But oth­er­wise untouched.

I tend to think of gar­dens as evo­lu­tion­ary projects, espe­cially when they’re in the hands of curi­ous gar­den­ers. It’s always a bit of a shock to see one of these botan­i­cal time cap­sules. Com­mer­cial plant­i­ngs seem to be the worst offend­ers. Here, to the right, is a lovely pair­ing of melaleu­cas with ice­plant at the local EZ-Lube that seems pick­led in about 1983.

So which plants shout that they’re from a cer­tain decade? I tried to sort that out based on what you see in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. (Other cli­mates will have their own char­ac­ter­is­tic plants.)

This is just a quick and impres­sion­is­tic draft that’s based on when plants were cheaply avail­able and most pop­u­lar, not nec­es­sar­ily when they were intro­duced. Many of them are still com­monly avail­able today and are hardy, worth­while choices for the gar­den. Oth­ers have turned out to be inva­sive dis­as­ters that have prompted nurs­eries to stop car­ry­ing them.

I’m sure I’ve mis­placed a few plants by a decade or two. You must have addi­tions of your own!

1960s

• Hol­ly­wood Twisted Juniper (Junipe­rus chi­nen­sis ‘Toru­losa’). “Hol­ly­wood” and “twisted” some­how seen to go together nicely… My mother cov­eted them, and I still think they’re pretty wild and crazy plants. Of course in the 1960s and 1970s, the junipers were a lot smaller than this.
• Ital­ian Cypress (Cupres­sus sem­per­virens). The house my par­ents pur­chased in 1968 had two lit­tle plants of these flank­ing a win­dow. When we moved out of that house they weren’t so little…
• Arborvi­tae (Thuja sp.)
• Japan­ese Pit­tospo­rum, Japan­ese Mock Orange (Pit­tospo­rum tobira)
• Japan­ese Gray-bark Elm, Japan­ese Zelkova (Zelkova ser­rata). These go back years, but there were lots of street plant­i­ngs in 1950s and 1960s suburbs.

And speak­ing of zelko­vas, my neigh­bor­hood had hun­dreds of them as street plant­i­ngs. Even­tu­ally they began lift­ing the side­walks, and then grew up into the power lines. One by one the own­ers took out the trees. Then, the city took out the power lines and put them under­ground, about the same time they repaired the side­walks. We have a few of the trees left.

1970s

• Ole­an­der (Ner­ium ole­an­der), shown here in a free­way plant­ing down the hill from me. They’re hardly ever planted any­more. Although drought-tolerant, they can get bad scale infes­ta­tions. The nail in the cof­fin for this plant, though, was the fact that they’re poi­so­nous if ingested or burned.
• Natal Plum (Carissa macro­carpa)
• Ice­plant (var­i­ous species), some are con­sid­ered inva­sive in South­ern California
• Var­ie­gated Japan­ese Euony­mus (Euony­mus japon­i­cus ‘Aureo-marginatus’)
• Melaleuca, Paper­bark Tree (Melaleuca quin­quen­ervia), now on the fed­eral inva­sive plant list and the scourge of many states

Here’s a tran­si­tional 1960s-1970s plant­ing at the bank down the street. More twisted junipers, paired here with natal plum.

1980s

• Foun­tain Grass, Green Foun­tain Grass (Pen­nise­tum setaceum), the Cal­i­for­nia Inva­sive Plants Coun­cil lists these as “Invasive–Do Not Plant–Invasive” (hmmm, they might be inva­sive…) on their web­site.

  Photo by Car­olyn Mar­tus from the Cal-IPC site [ source ]

• Red Foun­tain Grass, Pur­ple Foun­tain Grass (Pen­nise­tum setaceum ‘Rubrum’)–I still have three in the front yard and love them. Unlike the above, they’re ster­ile and don’t sow them­selves every­where. [ Edit June 11, 2010: The red foun­tain grasses are def­i­nitely not ster­ile, though they still are far less inva­sive than the green ver­sions of the species. It’s best not to plant these any­where where thye might escape. ]
• Aga­pan­thus
• Euge­nia, Aus­tralian Brush Cherry (Syzy­gium pan­ic­u­la­tum). These make tidy, fine-leaved clipped hedges. But when the euge­nia psyl­lid hit in 1988 plant­i­ngs every­where started to look awful. They dis­ap­peared from the trade.
• Indian Hawthorn (Rhaphi­olepis indica)
• New Zealand Flax (Phormium sp. and hybrids)

1990s

• Mex­i­can Feather Grass (Stipa or Nas­sella tenuis­sima), now quickly mov­ing onto many people’s lists of obnox­ious if not inva­sive plants. I started with two and now have half a dozen. I’d have thou­sands if I didn’t pull out a cou­ple dozen seedlings every week! This is the park­ing strip of a neigh­bor a few blocks away who prob­a­bly put in one or two plants herself.
• Laven­ders (Laven­dula sp.)–I still have one of these.
• Blue Fes­cue (Fes­tuca ovina glauca)–and sev­eral of these…
• Kan­ga­roo Paw (Anigozan­thus sp.)

2000s

• ???????

  What plants will the future decide define the Bush decade? What sturdy plants are the nurs­eries offer­ing that will run their course as peo­ple get tired of them or the plant’s inva­sive poten­tial are revealed? For one, I’m see­ing a lot of Cordy­line aus­tralis. I like these a lot, but they sud­denly seem to be planted every­where, many in loca­tions where they look good as two-foot ado­les­cents but will quickly out­grow their spots. And there are cheap queen palms (Sya­grus roman­zof­fi­ana) going into the ground everywhere.

  I’m sure there are dozens more.

February 19 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: heirloom plants • invasive plants • popular plants | 15 Comments »

once an orchard

I wanted to find the quince tree again.

It prob­a­bly had been close to ten years since I last hiked my nearby Los Peñas­qui­tos Canyon Pre­serve. Still I clearly remem­bered com­ing upon an ancient but still fruit­ing quince in one of the trib­u­tary canyon bot­toms. Unwa­tered for decades and tended only by the wildlife, it had seemed like a mir­a­cle of sur­vival in San Diego’s desert climate.

Last Sat­ur­day I scootered up to the pre­serve and started a slow stroll through the native wil­lows and sycamores and oaks that line the dry creek in López Canyon. I only vaguely remem­bered the loca­tion, but less than half a mile in, right by the side of the trail, there it was, still very much alive, green and loaded with fruit.

Nearby, in the shade of an old sycamore and crowded with some robust shrubs–including poi­son oak–I found a sec­ond tree with fruit on its branches.

And then I started look­ing around in earnest. Off to the left stood a dif­fer­ent kind of tree, either a dif­fer­ent quince or maybe even a pear. It had a thick, creased trunk and the plant was clearly old. But the tree still drooped a lit­tle from the weight of the fruit.

Not far ahead stood another spec­i­men. Though with­out fruit it was clearly another fruit­ing tree, prob­a­bly an apri­cot, judg­ing by its leaves, a month after the last of its offer­ings would have been ripe.

So that made for four trees that I could find with­out crawl­ing through more poi­son oak or fur­ther through the snakey grass. I’m cer­tain all the trees were many decades old, but exactly how old I couldn’t say for sure.

Local his­tory places an orchard oper­a­tor in this canyon as late as 1921, so some of the trees may date to then, though this area has been ranched and cul­ti­vated at least as early as the early 1800s, when this area was con­tained in the first of the Mex­i­can land grants in Alta Cal­i­for­nia, to as recently as 1962, when the land was acquired by the County.

Nearby, under a pro­tec­tive shel­ter at the con­flu­ence of López Canyon and Los Peñas­qui­tos Canyon, stand the remains of the Ruiz-Alvarado Adobe, one of the old­est struc­tures in San Diego County.

Any­thing older than a hun­dred years around these parts is con­sid­ered a relic. If you were to believe the most wish­ful of the sources the adobe would date all the way back to 1815, though more reli­able sources place its con­struc­tion at 1857. This small adobe, along with a later, grander one to the east, became part of a thriv­ing con­cern ded­i­cated to ranching.

Maybe it’s wish­ful and over-romanticizing on my own part–or maybe not–to imag­ine that the set­tlers who lived in this adobe planted the fruit trees in López Canyon. But the trees are as much of the human his­tory of this area as are the few remain­ing adobe walls. Here we need all the his­tory that we’ve got.

July 25 2008 | Categories: places | Tags: apricots • fruits • heirloom plants • history • Lopez Canyon • Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve • pears • quince • San Diego | 2 Comments »

long shelf life for seeds

When I’d heard years ago that a lotus seed from China had ger­mi­nated after lay­ing low for 1300 years I was pretty amazed. That was from seed col­lected in 1982 when Shen and Miller at UCLA sprouted a num­ber of seeds that were radio­car­bon dated to be any­where from 95 to 1288 years old, plus or minus a few years.

But when I heard the news mak­ing the rounds now that a two-millennium-old date palm seed from Masada had sprouted, I was def­i­nitely impressed.

Stud­ies of the lotus plants grown from the old seeds showed that all were abnor­mal, a fact that the sci­en­tists attrib­uted to radiation-induced muta­tions that occurred as a result of naturally-occurring radi­a­tion in the soil where they were found. The date palm–which has been dubbed the “Methusalah tree”– how­ever, has been grow­ing spunkily since it was sprouted in 2005, and is now five feet tall. If that palm doesn’t take the cake in the more-heirloom-than-thou plant con­test, I don’t know what would!

June 15 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: heirloom plants • lotus • palm trees | 3 Comments »