[ Lost in the Landscape ]

the long brown season

When you spend your time in San Diego’s well-watered burbs it’s easy to for­get that you’re liv­ing in the mid­dle of a desert. The last sig­nif­i­cant rain­fall in town occurred in Feb­ru­ary, and the unir­ri­gated nat­ural lands around town have long ago begun their trans­for­ma­tion into the long brown season.

My recent lit­tle excur­sion to Los Peñas­qui­tos Canyon, a local open-space pre­serve between San Diego and Del Mar, gave me a chance to see what the nat­ural world is doing in these parts.

Not every­thing is brown, of course. Some plants are tapped into loca­tions with resid­ual mois­ture. Oth­ers have adapted to the cli­mate and have the sta­mina to stay green year-round.

Here are a few of the plants still show­ing col­ors other than brown:

Flat-topped buck­wheat (Eri­o­gonum fas­ci­c­u­la­tum) a native plant.

Wild rose (Rosa cal­i­for­nica) a native.

Fen­nel (Foenicu­lum vul­gare) an exotic, inva­sive species. This is the culi­nary plant from the Mediter­ranean that has escaped into the wilds.

Poi­son oak (Tox­i­co­den­dron diver­silobum) a native–one of the few plants that turns blaz­ing red in the fall. Even now, it’s show­ing some of that red color.

This­tle in bloom. I’m not sure if this is native or not, but it’s not the hyper-nasty Russ­ian this­tle (the dried flow­ers of which are shown in the large photo above). [Correction/edit August 1: This is actu­ally a teasel, not a this­tle. Like the escaped fen­nel above, this too is a rene­gade exotic species. Pretty, though…]

It’s a con­di­tion of our con­sumer cul­ture and times to want what we don’t have. Liv­ing in San Diego, most of the plant mate­ri­als that peo­ple expect to find in their home gar­dens fall out­side of the cat­e­gory of what occurs nat­u­rally or is well-suited to the area.

It’s always instruc­tive to visit the nat­ural pre­serves to see plants–even the nasty invasives–that are supremely well-designed to live in this cli­mate. Some of the plants in these parks would do extremely well in gar­dens. But it’s hard let­ting go of plants that many of us asso­ciate with places we’ve lived in and even peo­ple we’ve known.

My own yard has sev­eral areas that I con­sider my guilty plea­sure zones. I have pieces of a bromeliad and a kahili gin­ger that I was given in the 1970s, as well as the green rose from that I dug up from the house where I grew up in the Los Ange­les area. And I’m a nat­ural born col­lec­tor who has a hard time say­ing no to inter­est­ing plants. These plants all require some water and tend­ing beyond what nature brings.

But they’re coun­ter­bal­anced by gar­den areas planted with drought-tolerant species, local and intro­duced, that receive almost no water and atten­tion over the sum­mer. As time goes on, I’ll be expand­ing those areas. Don’t expect me any time soon, how­ever, to plant poi­son oak, as pretty and hardy as the plant is. I have my lim­its as to how much true nature I want in my garden…

July 29 2008 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • invasive plants • Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve • native plants • seasons • summer | 4 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 »