[ Lost in the Landscape ]

more mediterranean than thou

Gosh, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? The main dis­trac­tions keep­ing me away from post­ing have been a cou­ple of classes I’ve been tak­ing to fill in some art his­tory holes I hadn’t both­ered with before. For one of them I’ve been doing a lit­tle research on Granada’s Patio de la Ace­quia, the “Court­yard of the Aque­duct,” one of the gar­dens at the Gen­er­al­ife, the gar­den fortress across the canyon from its more famous neigh­bor, the Alhambra.

This par­tic­u­lar gar­den, a long, rec­tan­gu­lar space with a cen­tral water fea­ture 162 feet long and 4 across, holds the dis­tinc­tion of being “…the old­est orna­men­tal gar­den in the West­ern World, with the addi­tional value of never hav­ing ceased to be a gar­den dur­ing the last seven cen­turies” (Casares-Porcel et al. in Del­gado et al., 2007).

I enjoy cre­ative research of this sort, and I thought I’d share some of the cool things that I’ve been find­ing out.

Today, the gar­den looks like this:

Peter Lor­ber. Gar­te­nan­lage Gen­er­al­ife, Alham­bra, Granada, Spanien eigene Auf­nahme, Erstel­lungs­da­tum 22.Juni 2006. Photo via Wiki­me­dia.

But like any gar­den that’s been a while it’s under­gone some major changes. The plants, for sure, have gone through a few gen­er­a­tions and some major changes. For exam­ple, the big splashy bougainvil­lea that you see behind the col­umn cap­i­tal on the right side would in no way have been part of the orig­i­nal gar­den. The Patio was started in the later thir­teen cen­tury. Bougainvil­leas weren’t described until the 1700s, and didn’t make it to Europe until later. And the big splashy foun­tains are gen­er­ally bogus to the orig­i­nal as well, hav­ing been added in the 1940s or early 1950s by archi­tect Fran­cisco Pri­eto Moreno. (EDIT: Sep 19: While the foun­tains are not orig­i­nal, their appear­ance pre-dates Prieto-Moreno’s work on the gar­den. I’m still research­ing when they appeared.)

But the one really mind-blowing dis­cov­ery that came about in this gar­den was the result of some exca­va­tions done in the wake of a cat­a­strophic fire that con­sume one of the adja­cent struc­tures. Archae­ol­o­gist Bermudez and his team dug and dug and didn’t encounter the orig­i­nal soil line until they got 70 cm. beneath the level of the orig­i­nal pave­ment. And his and oth­ers’ research began to paint a pic­ture of a gar­den with plant­ing beds sunken deep between the walk­ways and water features.

Part of me–the gar­dener side–says “so what.” Maybe they just dug out the old icky soil and added a new layer on top. But exca­va­tions in Seville at the gar­dens of the Alcázar have found gar­den beds with stucco dec­o­ra­tions on their sides. Oth­ers had fresco paint­ings. So that pretty much con­vinces me that they weren’t going to all that bother just to bury their orna­men­tal gar­den bed dec­o­ra­tions under a pile of gar­den soil, and it reveals that these were part of a gar­den tra­di­tion where they had low­ered plant­ing beds at least some of the time.

Below is a photo off Flickr of one of those gar­dens at the Alcázar, the Patio de las Don­cel­las, the Court­yard of the Maid­ens, that’s been restored to its orig­i­nal low soil sur­face. In gar­dens today you’re used to see­ing raised beds, or gar­den paths near the level of the sur­round­ing plant­i­ngs. But this? Wow. (There were prob­a­bly fewer per­sonal injury attor­neys around in medieval Spain, so I doubt the ropes at the edges of the gar­den bed reflect the orig­i­nal way these beds would have been experienced.)

Christophe Porteneuve. [Patio de las Don­cel­las, Alcázar, Seville]. Photo via Flickr.

And the last piece of infor­ma­tion related to all this was a lit­tle graph that I put together try­ing to see how my local cli­mate stacks up to Granada’s, rainfall-wise. On his most recent visit to lec­ture at my local Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety, Bart O’Brien, author and Direc­tor of Spe­cial Projects for the Ran­cho Santa Ana Botanic Gar­den, pointed out how California’s mediter­ranean cli­mate is the most extreme of all the five main mediter­ranean cli­mates in its extremes of wet and dry.

The fol­low­ing com­pares Granada, located at over 2000 feet of ele­va­tion against sea-level San Diego, so this isn’t the fairest of com­par­isons. And Granada’s annual rain fall is some­thing over 14 inches, ver­sus San Diego’s aver­age of slightly over 10 inches. But you can get a gen­eral sense of how extended the Cal­i­for­nia sum­mer dry can get.

Spe­cial rights on this post, to com­ply with the Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license of the first image:

More Mediter­ranean than thou by James SOE NYUN is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.soenyun.com.
Per­mis­sions beyond the scope of this license may be avail­able at http://soenyun.com/mailform.html.

September 18 2011 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: archaeology • Generalife • Granada • Mediterranean climate • Patio de la Acequia • Spain | 11 Comments »

unusual october

Octo­ber usu­ally throws some ridicu­lously warm and dry weather at us. This was the month that in 2003 and 2007 saw mon­ster wild­fires rac­ing through the county, includ­ing the largest fire to hit Cal­i­for­nia in recorded his­tory (in 2003).

We’ve a few of those warmer days, but what’s been sur­pris­ing has the the cool, wet fore­taste of win­ter. Here’s a lit­tle exam­ple: This is my park­ing pass for work, where I usu­ally go in to the office Mon­days through Thurs­days. Each big dark X cor­re­sponds to a day when it was too wet to ride my scooter in to work. Add to that another morn­ing when I got a bad weather report and arrived pretty drenched.

Over the last two weeks it seems like half the morn­ings looked a lit­tle like this, with mist–or out­right rain–turning the pave­ment wet.

Finally, the line of repur­posed cat lit­ter buck­ets that had looked so for­lorn all sum­mer at the drip edges of the roof were begin­ning to fill with water. In fact my two rain big bar­rels are now full, ready to have their con­tents shared back into the garden.

In response to the cool­ing trend plants are leaf­ing out; seedlings are ger­mi­nat­ing. Read­ers not in mediter­ranean cli­mates might think they’re read­ing a gar­den blog from the south­ern hemi­sphere. But no, this is Cal­i­for­nia, which shares this wet-winter/dry-summer cli­mate with less than 5% of the earth’s sur­face. To make up for being so spe­cial we’re treated with almost 20% of all the world’s plant species. More than a fair trade for long sum­mer months with close to no water.

I was out in the front yard over the week­end, tidy­ing up growth that had hit its expi­ra­tion date. Mixed in with branches that had truly died were plenty belong­ing to drought-deciduous plants that were com­ing back to life. On the left is our local chap­ar­ral cur­rant, Ribes indeco­rum, turn­ing from brown twigs to leafy twigs. On the right is Ver­bena lilacina, a plant that can stay look­ing fairly green over the sum­mer if you give it more water than I do.

Every­where I stepped I had to avoid mash­ing tiny lit­tle buck­wheat seedlings, or these guys, itty bitty lit­tle chia plants (Salvia colum­bariae). Early this sum­mer when I took out the dead plants of this annual I made a point of shak­ing the seed heads over the dirt. Still I was wor­ried that I wouldn’t have enough ger­mi­na­tion to repeat the amaz­ing show of last spring. Looks like I didn’t need to be so concerned.

In the back yard seedlings of baby blue eyes were push­ing their way through the mulch. The mulch really does help keep down the weeds, but this species for­tu­nately doesn’t seem overly daunted by my attempt to save myself a few dozen hours of weed­ing. Var­i­ous crea­tures do find these seedlings extra-tasty–including the cat, which seems to think these are almost as good as cat­nip. Once they’re larger the cat doesn’t seem to pay them any atten­tion. I’m hop­ing for a nice half dozen or so survivors.

And there were even more seedlings. These are a few days away from show­ing their first true leaves, but I’m hop­ing that they’re the begin­nings of clarkias that sur­rounded this patch of bare dirt. If not clarkias, they’re likely seedlings of this really nox­ious weed that shared the space with the clarkias. We’ll soon find out…

Yes, it’s been an unusual Octo­ber. But I’ll take plants leaf­ing out and seedlings push­ing their way out of the ground any day over another round of brushfires!

October 26 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: fall • Mediterranean climate • October • rain • seedlings | 5 Comments »

the dry gardening handbook

Olivier and Clara Fil­ippi have been gar­den­ing in the south of France for well over a quar­ter cen­tury. Theirs is a mediter­ranean cli­mate, and their nurs­ery, Pépinière Fil­ippi, located near Mont­pel­lier, spe­cial­izes in plants adapted to the dry-summer/wet-winter cycles that you find in only five large regions on earth: the Mediter­ranean zone, proper; South Africa; the south­west cor­ner of Aus­tralia; Chile; and much of California.

When I picked up Olivier Filippi’s recent The Dry Gar­den­ing Hand­book: Plants and Prac­tices for a Chang­ing Cli­mate, I was expect­ing it to be a dif­fer­ent sort of book than it is, maybe some­thing about gen­eral drought-tolerant plants, or a vol­ume ded­i­cated to help­ing your gar­den adapt to using less water. What this is, how­ever, is a straight book on mediter­ranean gar­den­ing and plants suited to mediter­ranean climates–something that prob­a­bly shouldn’t come as a sur­prise since that’s the focus of the author’s nursery.

There’s a brief intro­duc­tion to what con­sti­tutes a mediter­ranean cli­mate, fol­lowed by notes on the strate­gies plants use to sur­vive and thrive in it. Good advice on plan­ning, plant­ing, estab­lish­ing and water­ing a new mediter­ranean gar­den comes next. Then Fil­ippi gives us the heart of the book, a list­ing of over 400 mediterranean-adapted species, con­tain­ing com­mon and sci­en­tific names, approx­i­mate mature plant sizes, and notes on cul­ti­va­tion and prop­a­ga­tion. (If you can begin to read French, you can check out the online cat­a­log at the author’s nurs­ery, which closely mir­rors the list of plants rec­om­mended in the book. There you’ll also find some of the advice that’s offered in the book, although with­out the nice pho­tos in the book.)

Olivier Fil­ippi gar­dens in France, and the plant list def­i­nitely Euro­cen­tric: lots of dif­fer­ent laven­ders, cis­tus, phlomis, for exam­ple, with rel­a­tively few plants from other the other great mediter­ranean regions. In fact, many of the non-Mediterranean mediterranean-friendly plants listed are drought tol­er­ant selec­tions from sev­eral non-mediterranean cli­mates. For gar­den­ers in dry cli­mates that don’t undergo mediter­ranean cycles, these sug­ges­tions might be some of the best options to try. But those plants might not the be great­est of dis­cov­er­ies: Pho­tinia, heav­enly bam­boo (Nan­d­ina domes­tica), red-hot poker (Kniphofia sar­men­tosa) and Amer­i­can gaura (Gaura lind­heimeri), for instance, are prob­a­bly already com­mon offer­ings in many Amer­i­can nurseries.

One of the book’s most out­stand­ing fea­tures is the use of a “drought resis­tance code” that assigns a num­ber from one to six to each of the species in its plant list. Based on work by plant geo­g­ra­pher Henri Gaussen, the num­ber quan­ti­fies the num­ber of months of the year a plant can be expected to sur­vive under drought stress. The book also con­tains instruc­tions on how to cal­cu­late the cli­matic pro­file of where you live. (I fig­ured out that my coastal San Diego loca­tion exerts a 3.5 to 4 drought stress fac­tor. (Edit May 20: I oopsed on my fig­ur­ing for coastal San Diego. My revised num­ber is a much dryer drought stress fac­tor of 6.)) All that’s a really use­ful way to under­stand drought.

When you see plants sold in nurs­eries and cat­a­logs as drought-tolerant, the descrip­tion can be mean­ing­less. A vari­ety that would go fine for two weeks with­out water could turn into sea­soned kin­dling if sub­jected to six or seven months of con­tin­ued dry­ing. Real­iz­ing that a “drought-tolerant” chamomile plant has a drought resis­tance code of 2 would begin to tell you that it wouldn’t thrive in the same con­di­tions that would suit California’s more “drought-proof” Rom­neya coul­teri, which has a drought resis­tance code of 6. Hav­ing that infor­ma­tion could help you plan com­pan­ion plant­i­ngs, as well as help you avoid plants alto­gether that would only lead to expen­sive mistakes.

Com­ing at plant­i­ngs from a mediter­ranean focus leads the author to say some choice things about lawns:

You don’t have to be a vision­ary to see that the tra­di­tional lawn is an absur­dity in mediter­ranean cli­mates. If you nur­ture a deeply rooted feel­ing that you can’t be happy with­out a vast, lush lawn, then per­haps you ought to con­sider going to live in Corn­wall… Peo­ple often imag­ine that they need a huge expanse of lawn, but all too often the only per­son who walks over a tra­di­tional lawn in its entirety is the unfor­tu­nate indi­vid­ual who has to mow it every Sunday.

The author’s solu­tion? Land­scap­ing that pays atten­tion to where you live. For those of you in mediter­ranean cli­mates, this book can help you develop a deeper under­stand­ing of what’s unique about your envi­ron­ment. It can help you come up with good plant choices com­pat­i­ble with what your loca­tion offers. Along the way, it could help you save water, reduce pes­ti­cide use and maybe even free up some of those Sun­days you spend mow­ing the lawn.

May 16 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: books • drought-tolerant landscaping • Mediterranean climate • Olivier Filippi | 7 Comments »

the new spring

Autumn: It’s the new spring.

At least that’s seem­ingly the case for those of us in Mediter­ranean cli­mates. With our dry sum­mers and moist win­ters, the plants best adapted to our cli­mate come close to tak­ing the sum­mer sum­mer off, and then use the onset of cooler, wet­ter weather to start think­ing about get­ting grow­ing again. Some of the shrubs in the local canyons drop some or all of their leaves in response to drought stress, and most of the wild­land annu­als dis­ap­pear not long after the last rains. Our long brown sea­son of sum­mer could almost be con­fused with the depths of win­ter in other areas.

Left: Core­op­sis gigan­tea in its defen­sive, leaf­less sum­mer mode.

Read­ing the recent blogs from those other cli­mates, I’m notic­ing that peo­ple are start­ing to with­draw from their gar­dens, hol­ing up with some favorite plants trans­planted into pots to over­win­ter indoors. These gar­den­ers are think­ing about sit­ting down with plant cat­a­logs and look­ing ahead to the hol­i­days, and then to warmer days and the reemer­gence of their gardens.

Here in San Diego, how­ever, I started off Sep­tem­ber by trans­plant­ing plants around the gar­den, read­just­ing plant spac­ing and color relationships.

Left: Some of the gar­den before and after autumn thin­ning and transplanting.

I planted dozens of lit­tle pots of seeds of plants that I want to grow this fall and next year: giant core­op­sis, datura, buck­wheats from the Chan­nel Islands, mal­lows from the desert, mil­let for the birds and some South African restios for a spot in the gar­den where the orig­i­nal plants haven’t aged grace­fully. It’s a frenzy of activ­ity of the sort that peo­ple in other cli­mates would asso­ciate with late win­ter and early spring.

All sum­mer, the patches of earth that get almost no sup­ple­men­tal water stay brown and vir­tu­ally weed-free. Once the rains return, the weeds begin to claim the uni­verse and the weed­ing chores begin again.

For­tu­nately, a layer of mulch makes a world of dif­fer­ence in keep­ing down weed seedlings. Unfor­tu­nately, areas where you want to sow wild­flower seed can’t be mulched at all if you want the lit­tle seeds to ger­mi­nate on their own. To keep down my work­load, this year I’m iso­lat­ing the wild­flower patches to just a cou­ple spots, around a cou­ple lit­tle trees that will drop their leaves for the win­ter. We’ll see how well that works out…

A few spots in my gar­den don’t have to abide by strictly Mediter­ranean water require­ments. There’s a small herb and veg­etable gar­den that gets mod­er­ate doses of water year-round. A new raised bed har­bors some trop­i­cals that get to stay moist, as well as some other selec­tions that need a lit­tle help with the water. This is the part of the gar­den that gets to expe­ri­ence sum­mer along with the rest of the world. So the task of weed­ing never com­pletely comes to an end, although it’s greatly local­ized to these spots that get watered one to three times a week.

All in all, this 2% of the Earth’s land mass that expe­ri­ences this Mediter­ranean cli­mate (the region around the Mediter­ranean Sea, west­ern South Africa, parts of the Chilean coast, west­ern Aus­tralia, and much of Cal­i­for­nia) has its own sea­sonal cycles that don’t sync up eas­ily with the rest of the world. Gar­den­ers in other areas might not under­stand us. For­give us if we have this glaze of antic­i­pa­tion coat­ing our moods these days. Even as we worry about weeds and increased gar­den chores, fall is here, and it’s the emer­gence of a whole new sea­son in the garden.

November 16 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: fall • Mediterranean climate • seasons • spring • transplanting • weeding • weeds | 6 Comments »