[ Lost in the Landscape ]

visiting crestridge

For today’s Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day I’m doing some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. My gar­den looks a lot like it has in recent posts, so I thought I’d take you along on a tour last week­end of Cre­stridge Eco­log­i­cal Pre­serve, in San Diego County, a lit­tle over half an hour from the coast. The flow­ers were out in force.

One of the inter­est­ing nar­ra­tives of this place is how a land­scape responds to being burned. This pre­serve and many of the homes around it burned intensely in the big 2003 Cedar Fire. A lot of the homes nearby with their new tile roofs and crisp, new stucco look like they’ve been rebuilt out of the ashes.

Same goes for the plants. The Engel­mann oaks that help define the char­ac­ter of the pre­serve burned. But many are bounc­ing back. Really, if it weren’t for the burned snags it’d be hard to guess that this area was cin­ders seven and a half years ago.

The Pre­serve fea­tures a small vis­i­tor kiosk designed by James T. Hubbell, the county’s best known pro­po­nent of organic archi­tec­ture. Wood post-and-beam con­struc­tion with straw-bale infill makes up the walls of the one-room space. Floors are a mix of flag­stone and tile mosaics. Very groovy.

Around the kiosk is a native plant gar­den funded by a grant by the local CNPS chap­ter. Unlike the land­scape around it, this gar­den receives some irri­ga­tion to keep it look­ing more garden-like. But today the gar­den extended seam­less into the sur­round­ing landscape.

The flo­ral high­light of the trip is the the preserve’s stand of the rare Lake­side cean­othus, Cean­othus cya­neus. It’s vivid, dark color and big flo­ral heads make it what must be one of the most spec­tac­u­lar of the cean­othus species. It’s not par­tic­u­larly gar­den tol­er­ant, but given per­fect drainage and no water once estab­lished, it might hang around for a few years and stop traf­fic pass­ing by your garden.

On this trip we saw this lilac, as well as late-blooming exam­ples of the much more com­mon but less spec­tac­u­lar Ramona lilac, Cean­othus tomen­to­sus, and some inter­grades that look like they’re the love chil­dren of these two species.

Below is a lit­tle gallery of the visit. Hover on any image for a label of the plant. Click to see the entire image.

Check out what’s hap­pen­ing in gar­dens around the world in the other Gar­den Blog­gers Bloom Day posts hosted by Carol, of May Dreams Gar­dens. As always, thanks, Carol!

May 15 2011 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: Cedar Fire • Crestridge Ecological Preserve • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • James Hubbell • native plant gardens • Recon Native Plants • recovery after fire • red flowers | 13 Comments »

two saturdays

A cou­ple hours of com­mu­nity ser­vice: Sounds a lit­tle like a sen­tence handed down by a judge, but it was actu­ally how I spent some of last Sat­ur­day. I’ve posted ear­lier about the native plant gar­den at Old Town State His­toric Park. That trip I was walk­ing the paths and enjoy­ing garden.

But this time I was a vol­un­teer help­ing main­tain this inter­est­ing young gar­den. Much of the time I was squat­ted down in the dirt pulling up lit­tle palm trees. If you live in another part of the world you might think that pulling up palm trees is a bizarre thing to do. But palm seedlings are a very real weed around here, espe­cially when there are still actively fruit­ing palms nearby, and when there’s still an active seed­bank left from one of the palms that was removed to make way for the garden.

In just one month since my last visit, the num­ber of flow­ers had dimin­ished as we head into our long brown sea­son when many plants approach dor­mancy. There were some splashy clarkia flow­ers remain­ing, as well as this mal­low from the Chan­nel Islands.

There were other weeds to pull at, and the day ended with a quick prun­ing demon­stra­tion and a demon­stra­tion on one way to main­tain deer grass (Muh­len­ber­gia rigens). With this big, dra­matic grass you can let the stems go brown–which is an easy-maintenance approach to this plant. Or you can reach down on each of the old flow­er­ing stems, feel for a joint a cou­ple inches above the base of the plant, and pull. If you find the node, the stem yanks out with­out much resis­tance. It’s not a chore you can do eas­ily while wear­ing thick gloves, and with­out gloves you’ve likely to shred your hands. For­tu­nately this a grass that looks stately and archi­tec­tural whether or not you pull the dried stems. We left most of the plants as they were.

After just two hours of tidy­ing the gar­den looked even bet­ter and ready for the dry months ahead.

Jump ahead one week…

Even though June is typ­i­cally one of our dry months, today was cool and driz­zly as John and I headed for the Mas­ter Gardener’s plant sale at Bal­boa Park.

We parked near the park’s jumbo More­ton Bay fig (Ficus macro­phylla). It’s an amaz­ing plant, but like many figs, it’s not a good choice if you’re con­cerned about keep­ing your home’s foun­da­tion intact. I was appre­cia­tive of hav­ing the park, a great publicly-funded shared space, where you can go to enjoy spec­tac­u­lar plants that don’t make sense to plant in most home spaces.

Rain or shine, the peo­ple make a trail to this plant sale. This is half an hour before the sale, with all these brave souls stand­ing in the heavy mist wait­ing to get first crack at this year’s offerings.

…and this is dur­ing the first few min­utes of the sale.

Some high­lights this year were bromeli­ads from Bal­boa Park’s prop­a­ga­tion program–big plants for the price of a Happy Meal–and an entire table of dif­fer­ent salvias. As thrilled as I am with the genus salvia, I resisted the temp­ta­tions. No space in the gar­den is no space in the garden.

But John didn’t show the same restraint. He likes his suc­cu­lents. And the more unla­beled the suc­cu­lent is the bet­ter. I swear he does this to drive me crazy, know­ing how much I like my plant names. (The suc­cu­lent expert on site looked at it and said that it’s some sort of cras­sula rel­a­tive, which is what I’d have called it. Okay, we have a fam­ily name, and now only 1400 species to go through… Any help out there?)

Although we didn’t end up drop­ping a lot of change on this sale, many peo­ple with more space in the gar­dens found inter­est­ing plants to pop­u­late their spaces. And the pro­ceeds from the sale go to a good cause.

So these two Sat­ur­days showed a cou­ple way you can help the botan­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions around town. You can donate your labor. Or you can do what comes nat­u­rally for most Amer­i­cans: Go shopping!

June 20 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Muhlenbergia rigens • native plant gardens • Old Town Historic Park • plant sales • volunteering • weeding • weeds | 5 Comments »