walk on by

Yel­low, white, blue, laven­der, pink…The front gar­den is crazy stri­dent right now and I like it. The flo­ral chaos is con­cen­trated along the side­walk in front of the house, where the plants present them­selves at eye-level for any­one walk­ing by.

If you were to check pass­ports on the plants you’d find a num­ber of Cal­i­for­nia ori­gin mixed in with oth­ers from Mediter­ranean cli­mates. Here’s the glo­ri­ously spraw­ley Nuttall’s milkvetch, Astra­galus nut­tal­lii, from the Cal­i­for­nia Cen­tral Coast, with a South African arc­to­tis hybrid.

The deep vio­let chia, Salvia colum­barae, hails from around here. The bright yel­low Jerusalem sage, Phlomis mono­cephala, from Turkey. The chia is annual but reseeds itself effi­ciently. After the plant dies back, its seed heads stay attrac­tive for sev­eral months. The phlomis starts to drop its leaves in summer’s drought but never goes entire bare. As it does that, the leaves turn more and yel­low­ish– grayish-green in color.

To help con­trol the flo­ral chaos, I’ve planted incor­po­rated a lot of each of these two plants, along with sev­eral of the milkvetch above.

The locally com­mon bulb, blue dicks, Dich­e­lostemma cap­i­ta­tum, with the salmon col­ored South African bulb, Home­ria col­lina behind it.

A yel­low cras­sula picks up on the yel­low theme as you walk by.

A cou­ple years ago I broad­cast some seed of South­ern California’s Phacelia par­ryi but never saw any make it to matu­rity. Just a week ago I noticed this, one of the last flow­ers on a small plant that has come up from that old broad­cast. I prob­a­bly would have missed it if it weren’t up at eye-level.

I tried shoot­ing a walk-by encounter of the front gar­den using my cellphone’s cam­corder fea­ture. Unfor­tu­nately the result looks like it was shot with a, well, cell­phone, and I’m too embar­rassed to share it. Too bad. Gar­dens are best explored in time and space and not in still pho­tos. Videos could give you a sense of explo­ration still pho­tos can’t. Well, I love a project, and get­ting a decent walk-by sequence will be another item on my ever-growing punchlist.

April 21 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • • | 12 Comments »

echiums!

This must be the year for my prima donna plants to finally decide to bloom. First it was the first bloom for me of the Agave atten­u­ata over the win­ter. Now it’s this echium’s turn.

This is Echium wild­pretii, which has gone from five feet tall two weeks ago to over seven and a half feet.

It’s also known by var­i­ous com­mon names, includ­ing tower of jew­els, red bugloss, and–in Span­ish–taji­naste. “Taji­naste”: what a gor­geous sound­ing name, way more musi­cal than bugloss or “tower of jew­els,” which sounds a lit­tle square to me, like a plant name from a 1927 seed cat­a­log. Taji­naste is endemic to one Atlantic island, Tenir­ife, off the north­ern African coast.

This echium species is described as a bien­nial. Many plants described that way will put up leaves the first year and then bloom the sec­ond year from seed, after which the plants pro­duce huge amounts of seed and then die.

Although it’s been known to flower in the sec­ond year, this plant’s usual inter­pre­ta­tion of the term takes “bien­nual” lit­er­ally as “two years,” keep­ing you wait­ing that long from sow­ing to flow­er­ing. And there’s one plant in the front yard that looks like it’s going to be tak­ing an addi­tional year. Bien­nial? I think not.

Still, worth the wait, don’t you think?

The plant grows in spi­rals. Here you can see the spi­ral­ing new flowers.

The cen­tral rosette of leaves just a few months before send­ing up the cen­tral bloom stalk.

Dur­ing the two years you wait for it to bloom, you get to look at an attrac­tive mound of lance-shaped coarse gray leaves, usu­ally eigh­teen inches to twice that across dur­ing its sec­ond grow­ing sea­son. When nature with­holds flow­ers you can always look at and pho­to­graph leaves. So here’s some of my lit­tle crop of Echium wild­pretii plant photos.

Echium wild­pretii leaves in soft focus

Some of the leaves develop these neat hook ends.


As you can see it’s an attrac­tive plant even when out of bloom. It has low water require­ments and looks clean until its final, spec­tac­u­lar exit. After a few months it turns from a big dra­matic plant into a big dra­matic dead plant with ten­den­cies to top­ple even before its deep tap root decays.

Its rep­u­ta­tion is that it’ll send seeds every­where at that point, so this might not be the best plant if you live near the edge of a dry nat­ural area. A related echium, pride of Madeira, (E. can­di­cans) has estab­lished itself as a pest in some coastal areas of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. I’ll get to see how bad it really is after these plants finally give out later this sum­mer. I’ll worry about that later, but for now I’ll sit back and enjoy the plant.

June 03 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography • plant profiles | Tags: • • • | 9 Comments »

bloom day–in 3d!

Get out your 3D glasses! Part of this Gar­den Blog­gers Bloom Day post­ing comes to you in glo­ri­ous 3D, inspired by the news that 3D tele­vi­sion was the big news at the recent Las Vegas Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show, and by past, cur­rent and future 3D movies (Avatar, The Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon, Alice in Wonderland).

This is one of my clones of Arc­to­tis acaulis, which is just com­ing into bloom.

To view the 3D effect you’ll need a pair of glasses or a viewer that has a red lens over the left eye and a cyan (green works too) lens over the right. This image, what’s called an anaglyph, is pretty low-tech, more Black Lagoon than Avatar, but it works. I won’t detail all the steps for mak­ing it, but there are lots of expla­na­tions out on the web for how to do it in Pho­to­shop. [ Here’s one. ] You can also use a good photo edi­tor like Pho­to­shop Ele­ments that will let you adjust the indi­vid­ual color chan­nels of the image.

You don’t need a proper 3D cam­era to pho­to­graph slow-moving sub­jects like flow­ers, but you’ll need two sep­a­rate images, one for the left eye, and another for the right. Just take two images of the same sub­ject, mov­ing slightly left-to-right before you click the sec­ond image. If you have a cam­era with man­ual con­trols, you’ll get the best results if you focus and set the expo­sure manually.

This is the image pair I started with for the anaglyph above. You might even be able to view this raw pair in 3D. Some peo­ple are able to prac­tice what’s called “free-viewing,” where the left eye focuses on the left image and the right eye on the right-hand one. You’ll even­tu­ally see three images, and the cen­tral one will sud­denly pop into 3D.

This last pair shows the next-to-last step big step, before you layer the cyan image over the red one to cre­ate the final 3D image.

The rest of this post returns to stodgy old 2D. Sorry.

Win­ter is the big bloom sea­son for many of the native plants, as well as for many plants adapted to South­ern California’s mediter­ranean cli­mate. Here are many of the plants flow­er­ing right now.

Here’s the agave I fea­tured promi­nently in last month’s post­ing. It’s near­ing its half-way point on the spike.

First blooms of the sea­son on Ver­bena lilacina.

First blooms of the sea­son on Nuttall’s milkvetch, Astra­galus nut­tal­lii.

The very first, brave bloom on another Arc­to­tis acaulis clone, ‘Big Magenta.’

First flow­er­ing on another plant, likely Cras­sula mul­ti­cava. The bed where this plant is will soon be cov­ered with a dense mist of flow­ers for sev­eral months.

Another flow­er­ing cras­sula, Cras­sula ovata, your basic jade plant.

Black sage, Salvia mel­lif­era, com­ing into bloom.

Santa Cruz Island buck­wheat, Eri­o­gonum arborescens, still blooming–the Ener­gizer Bunny of buckwheats.

…some weird bromeliad. I have a likely name some­where, but not stored in my brain’s RAM right now…

I was tak­ing some pic­tures of this desert mal­low, Sphaer­al­cea ambigua, but was more cap­ti­vated by the inter­est­ing dam­age pat­terns cre­ated by a leaf-mining insect.

And last but not least: What I’m cer­tain will be the last paper­white nar­cis­sus of the sea­son. I keep think­ing that, but another clump pushes up through the earth and starts to flower. I’m not complaining.

As usual, my thanks Carol of May Dreams Gar­dens for host­ing Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day! Check out what’s in bloom in other gar­dens around the world [ here ].

If you haven’t had enough of the 3D pho­tos, check out a much ear­lier 3D gar­den blog post [ here ].

Now enough of this 2D indoors non­sense. Open the door, and go out­side and enjoy your gar­den in the grand glo­ri­ous 3D it comes in naturally.

January 15 2010 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: • • • • | 14 Comments »