[ Lost in the Landscape ]

bog chronicles

Sev­eral ponds and a water­fall came with the house when we moved in a cou­ple decades ago. They looked cool and the water­fall con­tin­ues to pro­vide a nice gur­gling noise that helps mask the usual din of a res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hood. Unfor­tu­nately, as the years passed, the ponds began to fail or show their shortcomings.

One of them was so tiny it was good for breed­ing mos­qui­tos and not much else. It got turned into a planter pretty quickly.

The mid-sized pond turned out to be a crit­ter mag­net. Rum­mag­ing pos­sums and rac­coons ate all the fish and reg­u­larly upturned any water plants. Two years back it became my first bog gar­den, and is today filled with car­niv­o­rous sun­dews and pitcher plants. I was con­cerned about how much water a bog gar­den would require, but last year I fig­ured it out that it required only about as much water as an equiv­a­lent patch of grass.

Maybe five years ago it became appar­ent that we had a grow­ing leak on the largest pair of ponds and link­ing water­fall. The con­crete that made up the ponds was fine, but plant roots were pry­ing up the dec­o­ra­tive rocks that had been mortared on top to make the ponds look like a vol­canic grotto. I divided the upper pond in two, leav­ing the front half to cas­cade the water into the lower pond. The back half became yet another planter. Noth­ing seemed to do well there, though, so I decided to try turn­ing it into another bog for my grow­ing pitcher plant collection.

I started by remov­ing sev­eral hun­dred pounds of dirt. Tak­ing away the dirt exposed the rea­son why noth­ing seemed to thrive in the bed. The sur­round plants had sent their roots into the planter and sucked up what­ever irri­ga­tion I pro­vided to the plants I wanted to thrive there. I did a bru­tal prun­ing on all the adven­tur­ing roots, but fig­ured that they’d be back when offered moist soil to wan­der into.

To keep roots out of the bog I decided to con­tainer­ized the bog plants in plas­tic stor­age tubs from Tar­get. I could water the plants in the tubs and leave the sur­round­ing soil dry, reduc­ing the attrac­tion for maraud­ing roots. I used two six­teen by twenty-two inch con­tain­ers that were a foot deep plus a smaller one on the end.

I packed dirt around the tubs to sta­bi­lize them, then filled them up with a 60/40 blend of sphag­num peat moss and washed plas­ter sand, the sort of acid, low-nutrition soil that most car­ni­vores pre­fer to grow in. Finally, after sev­eral hours of hard labor of the sort the sort that I think my doc­tor is about to tell me I can’t do any­more, I got to install the plants.

I selected sev­eral species of taller-growing pitcher plants to form the main plant­ing, Sar­race­nia flava, S. alata and S. oreophila. From my research I fig­ured out that these often grow nat­u­rally far­ther from water sources or in areas where the bogs dry out for part of the year. As far as pitcher plants go, these all should prove to be fairly drought tol­er­ant. Still “drought tol­er­ant” is a rel­a­tive term, and they’ll need to be kept at least damp year-round.

To fin­ish off the plant­ing, and to par­tially assuage my guilt at not using native plants, I sur­rounded one of the tubs with divi­sions of one of my native rushes, Jun­cus patens, a ripar­ian plant that doesn’t seem to resent dry­ing out. Another bonus of this species is that it looks good through­out the year, some­thing that can’t be said for these pitcher plants, which counter their sev­eral months of look­ing severely cool and amaz­ing with sev­eral months of look­ing dying and pathetic.

I’ll post progress pho­tos as the young new bog plants begin to fill and and show their poten­tial. I’m hop­ing this won’t turn into another failed pond.

March 17 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bog garden • bog plants • Juncus patens • sarracenia | 6 Comments »

picture this photo contest

Gar­den­ing Gone Wild is host­ing a photo con­test for the best image of native plants in a gar­den set­ting. Wan­der down to the links in the com­ments on their post to see all the excel­lent ways peo­ple use natives in their gardens.

It’s hard for me sit some­thing like this out, so below are my three entries, pho­tos taken in my gar­den over the last cou­ple of months. (As usual, click to see the larger images.)

I’ve already shared the first two on these pages, so for­give me for repris­ing them. These are of clumps of blue-eyed grass (Sisy­rinchium bel­lum) in a totally assorted plant­ing, mix­ing the natives with veg­gies (Red Win­ter red Russ­ian kale, beets, red– and orange-stemmed chard) orna­men­tals (heliotrope, geum and sages) and an herb (cat­mint). The plant­ing requires an aver­age amount of water­ing to keep every­body happy, but it shows how food plants and natives can eas­ily coex­ist with more gar­de­nesque selections.

(“Gardenesque”–how I love that word. No, I didn’t make it up. I have Noel Kings­bury (with Piet Oudolf) to thank for using it in Design­ing with Plants. He blogs, too!)

The first is a closeup of the native, the sec­ond shows the same bed three weeks later, after the geum started to flower.

The third photo pic­tures a foun­da­tion plant­ing fea­tur­ing one of the Cal­i­for­nia native rushes, Jun­cus patens. I have this thing for spikey, archi­tec­tural plants, and this one ful­fills my needs nicely. Most rushes are crea­tures of wet zones. How­ever, J. patens is one of the most drought-tolerant. These plants are located in the drip line for water off the roof, and they can make it through the sum­mer with min­i­mal added irrigation.

April 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: blue-eyed grass • Juncus patens • native plants • Sisyrinchium bellum | 8 Comments »