Ceanothus season is here in force. One of the local stars is a species with the unfortunate common name of “warty-stem ceanothus.” Neither is its Latin name of Ceanothus verrucosus especially glamorous. But hopefully you can see how cool a plant it is in these photos.
If my weekday desk had a window I’d look out on a the head of a little canyon that’s a mixture of introduced eucalyptus and a partially restored snippet of coastal sage scrub habitat. A couple hundred yards away in the re-wilded area are several of these ceanothus that have been glowing white for the last month with their clouds of flowers.
Last November these ceanothus were stemmy but gracefully-branched shrubs. Adapted to survival for many months without water its leaves are tiny and sparse. Still you could easily walk past them.
If you stopped to look at the plant, you’d easily see these interesting “warts” that give the plant its name. The warts are actually leaf-bases (stipules) that remain on the branches long after the leaves are gone.
By January the formerly sparse looking plants were responding to the rains with swelling flower buds.
And a month later the plants were going at it big time…
California could be the evolutionary epicenter of the genus ceanothus. Of the approximately 52 ceanothus species in the US, 46 are found here. Of those 46 about 38 occur only here.
That’s a lot of competition for precious space and water in a nursery, but several native California specialists in southern California offer this plant. You can see that this could be a choice addition to a dry garden where you want an airy, graceful shrub that’s 7-8 feet tall and about 10 feet across. As I struggle with ceanothus from outside my immediate area, I keep thinking I should use more selections that are better suited to what I have to offer them.
I love this plant, warts and all. But people in the end seem to buy the name and the image as much as they buy the plant. Just rebrand the plant with a friendlier (but more trite) horticultural name like “Cloud Blossom Lilac” and just stand back as everyone snaps it up.
I was looking at my blooming Agave attenuata and noticed something for the first time. The flowers on its spike have been opening asymmetrically, with the south-facing buds opening a few days earlier than the ones on the shaded side. I guess it’s the agave equivalent of moss growing on the shaded north side of a tree trunk. As I looked at all the agaves in the neighborhood, I was noticing the same thing: All the south-facing buds open first. It makes sense, I guess, with the sun-warmed buds developing sooner than the ones growing in the shade. There must be a botanical term for this—I’ll see if I can’t look it up sometime.
Something else I noticed the other week was that two of the little rosettes growing underneath the growth producing the big spike are also blooming. They’re nice, but the blooms get pretty lost in the foliage.
And compared to the big main spike, which must be something like twelve or more feet from base to tip, you can see how it’d be easy to overlook the little pups…
In the photo above you can make out this big red aloe in the background, Aloe arborescens. The clump began as a one-gallon plant in the early nineties. Now it’s probably six feet tall and twelve across.
February in Southern California is a busy month for flowering plants. Here’s a selection of what else is blooming in the garden.
This raised planter of Oxalis purpurea is the first part of the garden that visitors encounter as they head up the front steps. Dozens of white flowers and a lone pink one in the front. Oops.
Verbena lilacina, greened up from the rains, beginning to hit its stride.
One of several plants of Nuttall’s milkvetch, Astragalus nuttallii, that I raised from seed last summer.
Snapdragon-relative Galvezia speciosa ‘Firecracker,’ never a prolific bloomer for me, though mine’s a young plant.
The pink-flowered, purple-leaved form of Oxalis purpurea.
Carpenteria californica, a California plant that reminds me a lot of sasanqua camellias in its simple contrast of stamens against broad petals.
First flowers on Phlomis monocephala.
February flowers on a yellow crassula that I’ve forgotten the name of…
The final blooms of the season on another crassula, your basic jade plant, Crassula ovata…
The fragrant Solanum parishii, a widespread California native, doing battle on the slope garden against iceplant, Algerian ivy and Bermuda buttercup.
Freeway daisies (Osteospermun) below, with black sage (Salvia mellifera, prostrate form) above.
Keeping up the daisy theme, Arctotis acaulis hybrid…
Another actotis, ‘Big Magneta’…
…and a final photo, a final arctotis, shown against a piece of garden art made from glass, steel, and concrete.
As always, my thanks to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. Even with snow on the ground many places up north, there’s still plenty in bloom today in warmer, more southern locations, and on windowsills and greenhouses around the world. Check them out [ here ].
Ever wonder what your garden would look like if the human caretakers just vanished?
Maybe I’ve been inspired by all the disaster flicks like 2012 or the History Channel’s Life After People series. But envisioning gardens after gardeners is an interesting intellectual exercise that might help us answer that pesky question: What is a garden?
Would all the invasive species take over? Would the native plants reclaim their turf? For how long would you still be able to tell that a garden existed in a spot in the first place?
I looked at parts of my back yard and tried to imagine what would happen.
Within the first month, in Southern California’s dry climate, most of the potted plants would perish for lack of water. Some of the succulents might hang on longer, but without an extensive root system in the ground, they’d be doomed.
This little frog would be staring at a bog garden where all the bog plants have died back, once again for lack of water.
Within two or three months the fishponds would be dry: no waterlilies, no cattails, no sedges, no water for the local birds.
This pathetic patch of grass would go through boom and bust cycles, turning green with the rains, dying back to brown other times of year. Seeds of other plants better adapted to the conditions would eventually take hold. Maybe some plants from the local canyon. Maybe some hardy exotic or invasive species.
Behind the back fence of the house is this slope dominated by rampant iceplant. The the neighbor behind me and I haven’t been able agree on what to do with the space. I’ve planted a small collection of native plants to help stabilize the slope. These are species that with only once exception can be found within a five mile radius of the house, and include plants like this nightshade, Solanum parishii…
…and Del Mar Manzanita, Arctostaphylos glandulosa ssp. crassifolia, an extremely rare plant that’s on the Federal endangered species list. The neighbor, however, loves their iceplant and can’t imagine of a slope without this gawdawful invasive species clamoring all over it. The local chapter of the California Native Plant Society has prepared a great pamphlet on getting rid of iceplant that you can view [ here ]. It goes into some great reasons to get rid of the stuff:
Planted on hillsides of thousands of homes in San Diego, it has since crawled off the original site and into neighboring Open Space parks, endangering unique plants by smothering them. Iceplant provides little habitat value compared to the plant community that it is replacing. Compared to the native shrubs, iceplant has very shallow roots that do not hold soil well; close inspection often reveals gullies underneath the twisted mat of vines. After rain, Iceplant engorges with water, substantially increasing its weight. As a result, iceplant can cause the deterioration of steep hillsides by encouraging slumping – potentially endangering the house above.
For people in suburbia, “habitat value” might mean plants that harbor scary wild animals and bugs, so that’s not always the most compelling reason to go native. The fact that iceplant might endanger their property values could be more persuasive.
So, returning to my main topic, the iceplant would probably overrun most of the native plants in a very few years and form a deep pile. Once we neglected the slope for a few years and found that the mat of iceplant was starting to push the back fence over. Within ten years the fence would begin to fail and the iceplant would begin its descent into the lower garden.
These plants along the back fence would stand a chance of surviving without water. The yucca, palm, protea would be tall enough to survive an onslaught of marauding iceplant from behind. They’re plants that don’t require much maintenance, and this wall of foliage would probably look unchanged for a number of years. But the lower aloes and other succulents would likely be smothered by the iceplant.
This apricot against the back fence never looks great without summer watering, but it survives. It’s tall enough that it would probably survive the iceplant invasion. Some of the adjacent native plants do great with the natural conditions. They might not cope so well with the marauding iceplant.
The neighbor on the side has Algerian ivy that requires constant clipping to keep it next door. Within two years it would begin to establish itself in the back yard. Taller plants that might survive the iceplant invasion might have ivy crawling up and smothering them.
This raised bed near the house is where veggies and irrigated plants live. Most of the exotic plants wouldn’t make it without water. The Dr. Hurd manzanita, the bougainvillea vine and maybe the Garrya elliptica would probably hang in there, however, maybe for decades, maybe for much longer.
Fifty to seventy-five years out the house would start to fail. Plants might begin to move in. The surrounding garden space would be overgrown with the hardiest drought-adapted species. I almost never plant in rows, but the mixed origins of the species—South Africa, South America, Europe, as well as from all over California, not just local species—would clue an investigator into the fact that a garden existed on the site. The relationships between the plants would be dictated by nature, not a gardener preserving order between plants with mismatched levels of vigor.
Chances are excellent that one hundred years out, maybe two hundred or more, the most persistent invasive species would still be here. Iceplant and ivy, plus fennel and black mustard that have invaded the local canyons, would feature in the neighborhood landscape. But while many invasives bask in the newly disturbed earth of a garden or the re-engineered grades around roads, they don’t always do so well long-term. Biologists have suggested that many native plants would return to a place where they’re not being pulled out or constantly mowed. My yard might be colonized by the local Mexican elderberry, or toyon, or lemonade berry, or prickly pear. And maybe some of the plants I’ve already introduced to the yard will persist and reproduce. The restoration of nature might spread from my house and from the wild edges of nature just a few houses away.
Even after nature returns, the occasional hardy exotic plant surviving amidst the natives, along with some of the neighborhood’s plantings of trees and shrubs in rows will make it obvious: There used to be gardens here.
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.
I grew this fiercely thorny rose, Rosa minutifolia, for over a decade. With wild-rose-pink flowers barely two inches across, its petals were crinkled and delicate, but the blooms were never particularly stunning when compared to the buxom, botoxed blooms of typical garden roses. The leaves were tiny to the point of almost being non-existent, and I’ve already mentioned the incredible number of thorns that made this just about the prickliest thing I’ve ever dealt with. (The only similarly thorny roses I can think of are a few heirloom moss roses like Alfred de Dalmas that I grew in my early teen rose-growing years.) So spiny is it that one of its early collectors proposed an alternate name for it: Rosa horrida. (Check out the fascinating tale of its discovery by Barbara Ertter here.)
In the end, I think I grew it partly because of its weirdly cool thorniness and its interesting story, but also because of its artificial, political rarity. In the United States, this rose is found only as a small island population along the Mexican border on Otay Mesa, here in San Diego County. This extreme rarity has placed it on California’s endangered species list. Skip south into Mexico a few dozen miles, however, and the plant begins to become a fairly common member of the chaparral plant community, forming great mounded thickets three to four feet high and many feet across. The notion that the plant is particularly rare is an artifact of national boundaries. Erase the US-Mexico border, and Rosa minutifolia becomes a mainstay of part of the pan-Californian ecosystem.
I find that to be a weird little mental game: Is the plant rare or not? What odd things do political boundaries do to how we understand the natural world that those boundaries are drawn over? Does that mean that it’s crazy to call this an endangered plant?
To that last question, I’ll answer that we really should consider it a plant to protect. We need to preserve what’s left of the diversity that remains in the world. If the plant goes extinct in California, it’s gone from California. Never mind that it has cousins south of the border.
And these days the purely conceptual notion of a national border is turning into a physical reality, as the ginormous border fence project turns the United States into a freakish zoo exhibit behind bars as this video produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology shows. (I also did a brief post related to all this recently, on the destruction of Smuggler’s Gulch.) When the only know U.S. population of this plant is further isolated from its southern kin, it becomes all the more desperate to preserve what little we have left.
When we were preparing the back yard for a small room addition we needed to move a few plants out of the way. My Rosa minutifolia was one of them. Used to near-desert conditions, the plant shoots down roots far into the ground, maybe even 20 feet deep. I guess I didn’t get enough of the roots, not to mention the fact that the transplant took place in the high heat of summer. The plant declined and then died over the course of a couple months.
I see the plant here and there. A native plant sale might have a few plants. The Tree of Life Nursery stocks it. Botanical gardens sometimes have a little thicket of it (or a massive thicket of it as is the case at Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden where “five rooted cuttings planted…in 1954 had become ‘one large tangled mass’ nearly 30 feet across by 1982” [ source ]). All these photos are from the Huntington’s Desert Garden, where the rose grows alongside cactus and other things that make its spininess look right at home.
I get nostalgic whenever I see it. My little plant, which was set in awful, dense, dry soil in a much too shady spot, never grew or flowered much. Nipping at the dead branches kept it from forming a Rosa horrida thicket. But I continued to coddle it for whatever reasons any of us coddle interesting, under-performing plants. And one of these days I wouldn’t be surprised if I plant another little thicket of it.
The holiday break begins with a quick trip to visit an old friend who’s vacationing in Palm Springs. I seem to bring warm weather with me: the days are in the upper 70s and the air is desert-dry. The local weather report whines about only “partially sunny” conditions, though the only clouds I see are thin white veils high in the atmosphere. Good hiking weather, I think. My friend is just a little equivocal but he finally caves. “OK, but nothing too strenuous.”
The North Lykken Trail is picked for its easy proximity to where we’re staying and its promise of nice aerial views of the Palm Springs and the rest of the Coachella Valley. The online writeup calls it “moderately strenuous,” as does Philip Ferranti’s 140 Great Hikes in and Near Palm Springs. It seems doable and fun, so off we go.
Blooming chuparosa (Justicia californica, this first image) is everywhere. And where there’s chuparosa, there are hummingbirds and buzzing clouds of bees feeding on its nectar.
Plants of brittlebush (Encelia farinosa) are everywhere too, but most are just leafing out from their long dry summertime coma. Soon they’ll be covered in bright yellow daisies. This plant usually calls dryer areas home but can be found all the way to the coast, and it’s used a lot in landscaping projects.
Here’s a barrel cactus (Ferocactus cylindraceus) with an awesome view of the city.
Maybe we’re distracted by the view or I’m too focused on the plantlife, but by about now we’re scrambling over piles of rocks, in and out of drainages, looking for the trail. If we were deep somewhere in the wilds without a map we might be getting concerned. But how can you say you’re lost when there’s a big city grid down below as a reference point? Okay, we’re not really lost, but some of this is on the strenuous side of “moderately strenous.” But not for too much longer. We find some other hikers off in the distance and get back on the trail.
With the trail securely underfoot it’s easier to take in the great rock formations and enjoy more of the views.
It’s a bit away from peak bloom but there are a few other things to see. This is one of the desert plants I’ve always found pretty interesting, whether it’s in bloom or not. Desert trumpet or pipeweed (Eriogonum inflatum) is an unmistakable buckwheat that usually has flowering stems with a fat trumpeting protuberance below the nodes of its bloom spikes. Often it’s a lot more pronounced than in these two photos.
Sometimes, though, you find a plant that produces stems that are wiry and delicate, with none of the bulging that you see here. Some botanist had some fun naming that one: Eriogonum inflatum var. deflatum.
Looking at views and plants is hard work, so we take a number of brief breaks, this one in Chino Canyon. (That’s me to the right, the slavedriver ready to move on to the next ridge.)
This is a hike that makes you hyper-aware of the edges where the desert ends and irrigated human habitation begins. Even though the plants used in this home’s landscaping may say “desert” to you, you can see that the real desert here isn’t one that stays palm-tree-green year-round.
Even a collection of dryland plants can require water to keep looking good when they’re planted closer together than you’d find them in nature. Also, some of these plants—particularly the palms—would be only found in more riparian desert habitats, not here where the homeowner wanted them. Check out the drip-irrigation octopus in the lower right corner.
But I suppose it’s hard to resist the temptation to landscape with the plant that’s in your city’s name. Now we’ll just have to work on the “springs” part to make sure all the palms have enough water to survive this challenging piece of desert.
So by now you’ve probably guessed that at least one of us survives the hike. We both do, actually, but are a little sore the next morning. That’s where the artificial springs—the burbling hot tub, in this case, in the semi-shade of the palm trees—comes in handy.
And then my liberal guilt kicks in. As a tourist am I perpetuating a double standard, expecting water and shade be provided me, when I might expect the people living here to make do with less? Okay, if I had to choose, I really could do without the hot tub. But the hike was great.
Weekend before last my native plant society organized a little propagation workshop that was hosted by Recon Native Plants. One of the sessions focused on growing plants from seed, another on propagating from cuttings. I’ve done a bit of both, though my success with seeds definitely outshines any luck with growing anything from cuttings. My main take-away for the cuttings session was to try to take the cuttings early in the morning, when the plants are least dried out. I’ll be giving that a try and sharing whatever successes or failures that that leads to.
My favorite part of the morning was a chance to tour the nursery and see a large wholesale operation dedicated to propagating California and Southwestern natives. In my little backyard-garden world I’m used to seeing a few plants in pots sitting around, waiting to be planted. To visit such a big facility is to see the world in a different way. Here’s an artfully arranged mountain of gallon pots filled with soil mix being planted with little artemesias. I’ll never complain again about having to pot up a half dozen transplants. continue reading »
I suffer from that mix of laziness, lack of time and unrealistic expectations that will let me leave a dead plant in the ground longer than it probably should stay in a home garden that is trying to look presentable to the neighbors. Sometimes I’ll even water a dead plant, knowing I’m wasting my water, but secretly hoping that there might just be the least chance the plant isn’t really gone.
A few new plants in the garden don’t survive the initial transplant. I still find myself underestimating the water needs of a new plant. Just because it’s “drought-tolerant” doesn’t mean it will take to its new dry home in the garden without enough water to get a proper root system established outside the confines of the little nursery containers. The plants above, two of the five deerweeds I planted this year, probably didn’t make it for that reason. It probably didn’t help that the smaller of the two plants was set into a bed where nearby plants had established a root system already and would likely steal away any water I gave the new plant. This picture shows some of the competing roots.
Other plants just seem to…die. Here’s an ex-monkey flower to the left. Maybe it was lack of water in its second year. Maybe it didn’t like its spot. And the plant to the right is my Guatamalan blue, the ivy-leaved sage, Salvia cacaliaefolia. No mystery with this one. It was getting way too big, and I pruned it ridiculously hard in late July or August. Killed it. There was a bit of green left as recently as a month ago, and this plant being a sage probably would have rooted if I’d stuck one of the green bits in some cutting mix. But I dozed. Dead plant.
But every now and then something like this happens. I’d planted this bladderpod (Isomeris arborea) in the late winter and kept it watered. It seemed to be hanging on okay but wasn’t a fast grower. Then a colony of some insects I’d never seen before descended overnight and seemed to be reproducing a new generation. In the process they stripped most of its leaves. The plant quickly dropped what few leaves were left and I wrote it off as dead. In a weird way I thought of its demise as a success story: The native plant provided food and shelter for one of the less usual visitors to the garden. Only in the course of things I thought the plant had perished. Bummer.
But here it is three months later, leafed out, waiting for the rains to come. With success stories like this I’m reluctant to give up on the plants in the other photos, but I think their time has come.
I was confused the other day. Walking by the young plum tree, I noticed this. Flowers? In November? Apparently the plum was confused too.
After the long summer doldrums a lot in the garden is finally showing signs of waking up from its long nap. Some plants are showing new growth, others are blooming—even blooming when you don’t expect them to.
These paperwhite narcissus are a reliable indicator of the cooling days and nights ahead.
Protea ‘Pink Ice’ coexists with the most xeric plants in the garden and stays a resilient green all year. Beginning in the fall this big shrub begins its flowers. This will go on all winter and into the spring.
Salvia clevelandii’s main flowering happens in the spring. But given the right conditions—a little supplemental water doesn’t seem to hurt—it can throw a few more flowers in the fall.
Ditto for Salvia spathacea. Sometimes a lot is made of the repeat-flowering abilities of some of the natives. With these two, the spring flowerings are always way more stunning, and you’ll never confuse spring for fall. But as reminders of the late winter and spring flowers ahead, they’re terrific.
Another seasonally confused plant is this groundcover ceanothus. I’m only slowly now coming around to this genus. Groundcover versions like you see in the Burger King parking lot (think C. griseus ‘Yankee Point’) were all I saw for decades, but I’ve been trying to pay more attention to what other ceanothus have to offer. This one, unfortunately, is one of the Burger King-type varieties: low, flat, green all year on a low-to-moderate amount of water. It’s so inert and emphatically green it reminds me of plastic. I may never come to love this type, but fortunately there are other plants in the genus that do very different things.
My campus is incorporating more natives into the landscaping, and all these photos of natives, from the salvias, down, come from an afternoon walk yesterday afternoon. Here a young plant of one of the dendromecons (either D. rigida or D. harfordii) provides an airy cloud of yellow.
…and nearby one of the heucheras celebrates its spot in half-sun with occasional irrigation.
A few flowers, for sure. But it’s not really spring. We’ll need the rains to begin for that to happen.
Sunday was a day of cleaning up the garden to make room for a few new plants. The preferred order of doing things probably would have been to clean up the space and then go shopping, but the big fall plant sale of the San Diego chapter of the California Native Plant Society takes place on one day only, and the Saturday before was the day.
I arrived at the sale with a short shopping list that was arranged alphabetically. The first plants I saw were the two last gallons they had of the first plant on my list, prostrate chamise (Adenostoma fasciculatum ‘Nicolas’). I grabbed the gallons and started down my list. I wasn’t looking forward to doing the rest of my shopping weighed down by twenty pounds of native shrubbery, but there’s nothing like a little physical discomfort to keep you on budget.
The chamise that you usually find in the chaparral is a striking, large shrub with dramatic branch structure. This selection, a form from San Nicolas Island, matures to an open, graceful groundcover, several feet across. When it’s young, like here, it’s easy to mistake it for trailing rosemary.
Chamise has a reputation for being a poor choice for fire-prone locations. Even die hard native plant people who live in wild areas will often actively remove what any plants they find near their home. A conversation I had with one of the experienced local CNPS chapter members made me wonder if its reputation is ill-deserved. His contention was that the plant burns no more intensely that many other natives, and that he’d witnessed a burn line where half of a chamise had burned, while the other half of the plant looked green and healthy. He held that it was yet another case of local fire departments waging war on perfectly good native plants. My plants were going next to a concrete sidewalk along the street, so fire safety wasn’t on my mind. Even if flammable, a low groundcover poses fewer hazards than a big burning bush.
As I continued shopping I ran into one of my coworkers who with the help of his wife was hefting a two-inch pot of the rare San Diego bur-ragweed, Ambrosia chenopodiifolia. The plant can make an attractive little lump, and I was tempted briefly by its rare status. But this species, along with other ragweeds, is considered a severe allergen at PollenLibrary.com, and I have a hard enough time surviving the spring without severe allergens immediately outside.
By the time I checked out I had ten plants, about thirty to forty pounds worth, including a gallon plant of Garrya elliptica and some itty bitty pots of deerweed (Lotus scoparius), yerba buena (Satureja douglasii) and California aster (Corethrogyne filaginifolia, aka Lessingia filanginiflora). And it was at this point I ran into fellow local blogger George from Groksurf’s San Diego. He had a slope, and was thinking about some manzanitas for a slope, some for groundcover, others for larger, contrasting shapes. It had been years since I’d seen him last, so it was a nice chance to touch base and talk plants and water use in the landscape. But I felt bad when I had to excuse myself and get what was feeling like 300 pounds of plants to the car and get back home to finish Saturday’s house projects.
The rest of Saturday would be lots of unpleasant house projects. But I knew that much of Sunday I’d finally be able to get back into the garden. It had been too long.
