winter sycamores

It’s time for my annual trib­ute to the win­ter sycamore trees. The week of rain lead­ing up to Christ­mas has left most of the trees bare, their leaves on the ground.


So, when life mainly gives you fallen leaves, that’s mainly what I’ve taken pho­tos of this year. I won’t call this great art but I do like the square shot of the bare branches…maybe a lit­tle Jack­son Pol­lack or Harry Calla­han…

The ques­tion I’ve been ask­ing myself a lot this sea­son: Is it just my imag­i­na­tion, or do the leaves more often than not land butter-side-down, with their top sides usu­ally against the dirt? Maybe the way they’re weighted? Or are they unsta­ble if they land on their stems so that the wind blows them over?


January 10 2011 | Categories: places • plant profiles | Tags: • • • • | 5 Comments »

white solstice

The year’s first car­pen­te­ria, which opened on Decem­ber 17th, shown here with an appre­cia­tive local crit­ter on the stamens.

Win­ter Sol­stice is a cel­e­bra­tion for opti­mists. Six months of ever-diminishing sun­light leads up to this, the day with the longest, dark­est night. If you weren’t an opti­mist or schooled in the ratio­nal ways of the world you might expect the days to dimin­ish into per­pet­ual darkness–No won­der the Mayan Long Count Cal­en­dar ends on this day in 2012. A pes­simist could see this day as the begin­ning of the end of time.

But I know things are about to change. The dura­tion of the sun­light I find so pre­cious is about to start to increase. The plants that are begin­ning to sprout will take advan­tage of the extra light and grow faster and run head­long into California’s manic late-winter, early-spring sea­son of flow­er­ing and regen­er­a­tion. Call me an opti­mist. It may be tough now, but to appro­pri­ate the words of Dan Sav­age in his cam­paign to fight bul­ly­ing of LGBT young per­sons, It gets bet­ter!

Here’s a brief white-themed gallery in case you’re dream­ing of a white sol­stice. We have no snow to offer you, but instead how about some bright white flow­ers, some white leaves to get you into the mood?

Have a warm and safe hol­i­day, every­one, whether the white stuff around you is snow, foliage or blooms. It’s all about to get bet­ter, soon.

The local chap­ar­ral cur­rant, Ribes indeco­rum, a plant new to the gar­den within the last year, com­ing into bloom for the first time.

Detail of the chap­ar­ral cur­rant flowers.

Decem­ber paper­white narcissus

Early-season blooms of black sage, Salvia mel­lif­era. The over­all color is really more pale vio­let than white.

Flow­ers on a vol­un­teer sta­t­ice plant, Limo­nium perezii. The bracts give the flow­er­ing struc­tures a laven­der look, but you can see that the flow­ers are actu­ally white inside the bracts. The clos­est neighbor’s plant of this is a few hun­dred feet down the street. I had no idea the seeds could travel so far. Enjoy it now. This weed is outta there once the hol­i­days are over.

Details of the leaves of San Miguel Island buck­wheat, Eri­o­gonum grande, green on top, white beneath…

The white-ish Dud­leya brit­tonii with Decem­ber pre­cip­i­ta­tion, rain, not snow…


Who could for­get our great local white sage, Salvia api­ana?

…and one of our great local dud­leyas, D. pul­veru­lenta, one of the whitest of the dud­leyas, and it loves life in my gar­den. Joy oh joy!


December 21 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • • | 10 Comments »

those autumn leaves, so-cal edition

Here’s a short roundup of some of the leaf col­ors going on in the gar­den. This is South­ern Cal­i­for­nia so it was tough com­ing up with the stereo­typ­i­cal siz­zling reds and yel­low and oranges of a lot of autumn gar­dens in colder cli­mates. But I think we’ve got some pretty cool col­ors, includ­ing the color that might cause the most envy from the north­ern lat­i­tudes: green!

Unfor­tu­nately this is what the pre­ced­ing plant looks like when you back away from the few remain­ing col­ored leaves. Most of the autumn color is from the pile o’ bricks in the background.

I’ve men­tioned my fond­ness for the look of poi­son oak before. This is a rel­a­tive from Cal­i­for­nia and much of the rest of the coun­try, Rhus aro­mat­ica, a.k.a. R. trilo­bata, the Gro-Low clone. It’s not poi­so­nous, but not so amaz­ingly col­ored as its evil cousin either.

Yel­low­ing apri­cot leaves…

Euphor­bia tiru­calli, the Sticks on Fire clone, show­ing the orange and red col­ors that start to develop as the tem­per­a­ture plum­mets into the high 30s. I’ve grown–and bat­tled to remove–the typ­i­cal green ver­sion which gets pretty huge and out of con­trol. This clone doesn’t get nearly so huge, but I don’t trust that fact enough to let it out of a pot.

This photo of a lit­tle plum is more inter­est­ing than pretty. These are the Decem­ber leaves of one of those multi-variety grafted trees. Each of the vari­eties is col­or­ing up in its own way.

Another Euphor­bia, E. cotini­fo­lia. This one’s a bit of a cheat. The leaves are this color all year until they drop for the winter.

A close look at the chalk dud­leya, D. pul­veru­lenta. Some of the white stuff cov­er­ing the leaves has been rubbed off in the fore­ground leaves.

On the left, the mediter­ranean Phlomis mono­cephala, in its stressed gold-green sum­mer col­oration. Soon the plant will turn greener with more rains. To the right, Central-California Coast native Astra­galus nut­tal­lii with leaves edg­ing towards blue and gray.

And all over the gar­den are seedlings show­ing lots of that green color I talked about. Here’s a young plant of the local sting­ing lupine, Lupi­nus hir­sutis­simus. It doesn’t really sting, but the lit­tle haris can def­i­nitely poke you. Han­dling a dried plant after it’s died down in the spring with­out gloves is not one of the more pleas­ant things I’ve done.



Happy fall, every­one. I hope you all enjoy what­ever col­ors the sea­son brings you.

December 04 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • | 9 Comments »

from leaf to mulch

For my first attempt at par­tic­i­pat­ing in Pam at Digging’s Foliage Follow-up Day I looked under the grape­fruit tree for inspi­ra­tion. As the leaves fall from the tree they go from green to brown to gray before they finally become part of the com­post that enriches the top of the soil. That last stage pro­duces some gor­geous arti­facts, where what’s left is mostly the thicker veins of the leaf. Even as the leaf tis­sue between the veins becomes com­post or is con­sumed by the lit­tle crit­ters liv­ing in the mulch, the struc­ture of the leaf still remains.

Here’s a series of pho­tos of those last rec­og­niz­able traces of formerly-living leaves. Most of the below take advan­tage of the fact that the shadow can seem much more sub­stan­tial as the thing itself. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the last­ing power of a leaf that is about to become com­post? Some­thing about the cycle of life?

February 16 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • | 18 Comments »