I’m almost ready to blame this freaky mutant on fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi reactor disaster.
On my way to the office, several times a week, I walk past a cultivated patch of Hooker’s evening primrose, Oenothera elata. A few days ago I noticed this mutant crested growth on the central growing point on one of the plants. I’ve noticed this crested growth pattern in the garden a few times, most recently on a euphorbia. But this is the first time I’ve noticed it on a primrose–or any other local native plant for that matter.
In a case of crested growth, the growing tip on a stem, the apical meristem, changes from a single growth point to a growth all along a broad line of cells. As the cells along the line grow, the plant forms a fan-shaped growth instead of a slender stem.
In this second photo you can see a normal stem to the right for comparison: slender normal stem, big fat mutant stem.
And here you can see the crested stem from the side and how it widens as it rises.
Yesterday I went out to Crestridge Ecological Preserve, about a half hour’s drive from coastal San Diego. There will be lots of photos from the trip, but here’s a little panorama to get started, featuring the common sticky monkeyflower, Mimusus aurantiacus.
Around here you can easily find clones of it that are soft apricot-yellow, or ones that are orange, or scarlet. I’d read somewhere that pretty much all the forms west of Interstate 15 were scarlet, and all of those east of it were apricot. It was supposed to have something to do with coastal plants supposedly being pollinated by hummingbirds, while those inland were visited by bees. (EDIT, May 9: Another source I just looked at mentioned that the primary pollinator of the pale form was the hawk moth, which makes sense for an adaptation towards larger, paler flowers.)
Well, what do you make of this? The top composite shows the plants, below are the details of the flowers on the plants. (You’ll definitely have to click to enlarge this photo to make sense of this wide panorama.) On this north slope were five plants that showed the complete range from apricot to scarlet, and the plants were arranged sequentially as if they lines in a spectrum. Crestridge is a couple dozen miles east of I-15, so I think these plants blow the I-15 hypothesis out of the water.
I’d guess the real answer will implicate plant-sex and require a more nuanced understanding of how these different color forms establish themselves in different areas.
This spring I’ve helped out with a couple plant surveys organized by the local CNPS chapter. There are plenty of plants in the county and relatively few people to survey them, so the chapter picks a plant or group of plants for which there’s a compelling need to inventory them. The theme this year was dune plants. I don’t know this group of plants very well, so it’s been a great learning experience.
Surveys in two locations netted five or six rare List 1B species. (See the CNPS definition of the various listings [ here ].) I was there for four to five of them.
At the first location it was hard to miss the rare form of Juncus acutus, towering over my head. Shown here, it’s surrounded by the common but wonderfully perky yellow beach evening primrose (Camissonia cheiranthifolia) and the exotic sea rocket, Cakile maritima.
(A closeup of the dune evening primrose.)
Also nearby, also yellow, common, and perky: telegraph weed, Heteroteca grandiflora.
But enough of these common plants. We came here looking for rare ones!
Here’s one that was pretty hard to miss: Nuttall’s lotus, Lotus nuttallianus. I hope you like yellow. The bright flowers turn orange-red after they’ve been pollinated, encouraging the pollinators to visit the still-not-deflowered yellow blooms.
This snowy plover and least tern preserve was one of the plants’ favored areas. The word “preserve” promised more than was evident here. It was a patch of sand like any other part of the beach, but with just one piece of white string around it. Any dog or small child or group of teens with a cooler could have stepped inside, squashing the plants, scrambling the eggs and nestlings.
We saw several hundred of these, Brand’s phacelia, Phacelia stellaris. Around the edges of this patch you can see the one of invasive species of Erodium.
Another look at the phacelia… Most were about this size, practically belly flowers. But occasionally–as in the semi-shade beneath a picnic bench–you’d find individuals almost a foot tall.
And the last of the rare plants we surveyed the first day, coast wooly-heads, Nemacaulis denudata var. denudata. There were thousands at the first site. They weren’t flowering yet, but the plants were unmistakable with their long accordion-pleated white leaves. In bloom, they’ll have wiry stems floating little creamy balls of bloom over the leaves.
Here’s a final shot, a closeup of the flowering heads of the Juncus acutus. ssp. leopoldii.
It’s a stunning plant out on the sand. And of all of these, the common form of Juncus acutus is something you’ll see offered in various native plant catalogs. If you need a big, architectural, spiky sedge that likes a certain amount of moisture, this might be just your plant.
Here’s a little cartoon I whipped up this morning on Xtranormal, the site that lets you create and distribute your own animations without needing to really know what you’re doing. (When it comes to CGI, that pretty much describes me…)
It’s pretty much California Native Plant Week meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets Hello Kitty. And it’s a test of how well voice synthesis can deal with some common (and less common) scientific names.
(Actually it’s been here since Monday, but life has intruded on my marking the occasion appropriately… I’ll have a few more posts on the topic, stretching out the official week to a few extra days. We really should have a native plant month, if not year! Why’d we settle for just seven days?)
There are lots of ways to celebrate. Visit your favorite nursery that handles native plants. Take a hike and do a little casual botanizing. Or go on a garden tour featuring nice home plantings of California’s great assortment of native plants, many of them found nowhere else.
Today I’m celebrating with a quick tour around the garden to show some of the cool plants California has to offer.
And let me begin with the most worn out California cliché plant, our state flower, the California poppy, Escholzia californica. There are reasons things become clichés, including the fact that something can be so incredibly satisfying that you want to use it to excess. Poppies have reseeded all over the back yard, and I’m okay with that.
How can you pull up something this Perky?
Monkeyflowers are other commonly-used natives. Here’s an orange seedling from a hybrid involving Mimulus aurantiacus.
… and here’s a rich maroon version out of the same batch of monkeyflower seedlings.
Also very popular is this one, Carpenteria californica. The shrub stays green most of the year and it can flower for several months in the late winter and spring, good reasons why people like this plant and use it frequently.
There are lots of good reasons to plant natives. You can pick plants that satisfy human desires for attractive plants. Or you can choose plants that participate in the larger natural picture by providing nectar for the native bees, shelter for the local birds, or food for the neighborhood’s desirable insects. And you can also grow some of the the rare plants and help preserve them during times when plant habitat continues to be paved over.
My coast sunflower plants are covered with flowers right now, and all of the blooms are a little ragged. Old school gardeners might douse the plant to kill off the bugs eating the petals. But I’m reveling in the fact that I’m helping some of the local critters find something to subsist on. This particular flower was playing host to a very corpulent and very yellow spider that blended in with the bloom color.
The giant blooms of this Datura wrightii offer amazing sights and an intense hit of fragrance for the humans, but you’ll often also see the local critters taking advantage of its nectar.
Way less spectacular are these subtle spires of Island alum root or coral bells, Hechera maxima. I like the flowers. I like the leaves.
This little slice of woodland lives in the little gap between my greenhouse and studio, and combines the coral bells with the similarly-leaved blood currant, Ribes sanguineum var. glutinosum (not currently in bloom, or not “currant–ly” in bloom if you go in for bad puns, but of course I’d never do that to you…).
“Woodsy” isn’t the only look you can achieve with California’s plants. My entrance patio features the minty groundcover yerba buena, Satureja douglasii, with the nicely-sized and versatile gray rush, Juncus patens. This space is a little “modern,” a little “Japanese.”
And if you go in for a garden style that’s mostly “cottage,” California offers you hundreds of easy-going options that would look better in your space than their more uptight distant relatives that hang out in typical garden centers.
I leave you with a little gallery of other casual plants that are easy to live with and would fit into lots of gardens. Enjoy!
Cleveland sage, Salvia clevelandii.
Black sage, Salvia mellifera.
Clarkia rubicunda ssp. blasdalei.
Parish’s nightshade, Solanum parishii.
Blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium bellum.
San Diego sunflower, Bahiopsis lacinata, fighting the good fight against the neighbor’s iceplant.
Island bush snapdragon, Galvezia speciosa
The succulent chalk dudleya, Dudleya pulverulenta. Striking in flower and the rest of the year as well.
One of my personal favs, deerweed, Lotus scoparius. It can be a tad touchy if you water it too much, but it’s worth the bother.
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.
I’m sure you’ve read those earnest but wacked letters sent to advice columns, letters where the writer wants to share a piece of housekeeping ingenuity that you look at and find yourself gobsmacked by the total uselessness of the advice being offered. These letters might begin something like, “Dear Heloise, you know, I never throw out corn tassels anymore because I realized that I could use them to make wigs for my pet iguana…” (I might be making this one up. Maybe not. It doesn’t really matter.)
Both John and I had read in one of the papers a while back that you could use boiling water to control weeds. Inspired one day after making a pot of pasta, remembering what he’d read, John drained the pasta water out onto some weeds that were growing in the cracks out on the patio. Not long afterwards the weeds croaked. Somehow it all seemed to make sense.
So…at the risk of sounding too much like like Heloise…I pass on this piece of gardening advice.
You’ll have to think this method through a little before applying it to many situations in the garden. This works if you want to kill everything, like in the middle of hardscape, but probably isn’t a good idea if there might be roots of a desirable plant nearby. Also, it really does take a lot of boiling water to polish off some stubborn plants. It’s not a particularly effective or method. If you salt your pasta water to the point of seawater you might not want to introduce all the salts near fragile plants. And the hot water might even stimulate some dormant seeds into growth, since the method is almost exactly the “hot water method” that’s referred to in manuals on seed propagation.
Still, if you find yourself with a big pot of boiling water that you’d otherwise dump down the drain and have a patio full of weeds nearby, this might be just the thing to do.
While out weeding I’ve been noticing that some of the plants growing up in the cracks aren’t the standard nasty beasties that have been plaguing me over the years. These are in fact some California natives, seedlings of parents I’ve planted in the garden in places where I wanted them. The seedlings are trying to start up a new generation in places where I really don’t want them, but I’m having a hard time pulling them out.
This one’s Clarkia rubicunda ssp. blasdalei. I think I’ll let it flower before removing the plant. It’s an annual, besides, so I should be able to indulge it for a month longer, to let it fulfill its biological destiny.
San Miguel Island buckwheat, Eriogonum grande var. rubescens, one of several I’ve noticed recently. I like the plant, but I’m afraid its choice of location sucks. I think I’ll be able to pull it out soon.
California sagebrush, Artemisia californica. I really hate to pull up anything with a species name of “californica,” but once again its choice of location totally sucks. So far–for over a year now–it’s avoided getting doused with pasta water or getting yanked out of the ground. But a plant in the wrong place is a plant in the wrong place.
I have to admit it. This plant, in this spot, is a weed.
Two weeks ago I joined the local CNPS chapter for a trip out to Anza Borrego Desert State Park with botanical wizard, Larry Hendrickson. Our destination was Plum Canyon, one of the rocky canyons that drains the eastern face of San Diego County’s Laguna Mountains. Spring wildflowers were close to their peak, and Larry knew ‘em all, including a sighting of an Arizona plant that hadn’t yet been described in California.
This first plant is the species that gives the canyon its name. Well, you’d guess it’s some sort of plum, but the common name of Prunus fremontii is actually “desert apricot.” Plum, apricot…close enough.
I went a little crazy with the camera, and below are some of that craziness. (I think I got all the IDs correct on these, but if I missed a few, let me know!)
Desert sun is your first impression, but plants were everywhere, blooming and not.
Subtly colored, powerfully scented: Desert lavender, Hyptis emoryi. This common plant is in the mint family–It helps explain its intense aroma whenever you touch the plant.
Near the desert lavender, Trixis californica.
Subtle dark blue-violet flowers of Indigo bush Parry Dalea, Psorothamnus Marina parryi. (Thanks to jimrob and Larry Hendrickson for the correction here!)
A very cool spurge, Chamaesyce polycarpa.
One of the things you notice is that the plants often grow in the company of other plants, separated by expanses of sharp shards of decomposed mountainside. It’s not a look that people generally cultivate in their gardens but it makes sense here. Larger plants help provide shelter to seedlings. I’d also guess that more seeds end up caught up in the low branches of shrubs than they do in the bare earth with rain beating down on them. The effect is a bit of an enthusiastic jumble of plants.
Desert lavender with brittlebush, Encelia farinosa var farinosa
Phacelia distans with Chuparosa, Justicia californica
Chuparosa, phacelia, with Fremont’s desert pincussion, Chaenactis fremontii
Even the cactuses get romantic. Here’s a young Engelmann’s Hedgehog Cactus, Echinocereus engelmannii with California barrel cactus, Ferocactus cylindraceus
This combination of big and tiny yellow flowers I decided was totally garden-worthy: Encelia farinosa with the desert subspecies of deerweed, Lotus scoparius var. brevialatus. Nearer the coast the coast sunflower and deerweed makes a similar combination.
Speaking of garden-worthy plant combinations, I thought this composition of pale and silver-leaved plants and stems was a delicate mix of contrasting scale and textures.
Springtime in the desert means belly flowers galore…
Camissonia pallida
Purple mat, Nama demissum, with Wallace’s wooly daisy, Eriophyllum wallacei
And in the category of belly flowers falls the locally rare plant I mentioned earlier. This tiny little thing is Arizona pussypaws, Calyptridium parryi var arizonicum. So far this is the only known California population.
An itty bitty legume. I have Lotus stragosus in my notes, and I’m pretty sure that this is that.
A mile up the canyon, as you gain a ltitle altitude, the California junipers start up.
Many were going crazy with the juniper berries.
And a couple junipers had this bug. I’m really bad with my insects, so I’m just calling this a juniper bug. I’m sure it’s got a real name… Edit (March 28): Thanks to Katie for this bug ID: This critter definitely looks like a western leaf-footed bug.
On the way home, climbing out of the desert, two differently-colored species of ceanothus provided spots of color along the sharp curves of Banner Grade. The lavender one was our fairly widespread C. tomentosus. But what was the white one? My carload of plant people just couldn’t stand not knowing. We had to stop and do a quick ID.
The slightly cupped leaves helped us identify this plant as Ceanothus greggi ssp. var. perplexans. Although known as “desert ceanothus” the plant didn’t get prolific until we started climbing near the 3,000 foot level.
This final photo is the plant in the landscape. How could we not stop for a closer look?
A couple weekends ago Agave deserti was looking well-watered from the winter rains. This swirling mass of plants appeared to have nominated one of the cluster to go forth and flower.
Flowering is a big deal for these plants. The stalk will rise up something like ten feet from the plants central growth point. When they start out the stalks take on this gorgeous pink and green coloration, which contrasts against the nearly white rosettes of the main plants.
I couldn’t help myself from getting a little abstract and arty with this extreme cropping of this closeup. It’s really such a neat phenomenon that you can appreciate all sorts of ways.
Once it blooms the main growth point dies. Critters relish the seed, so these don’t always get a chance to reproduce that way. Fortunately they have the fallback of throwing one or more pups from the base of the plant. Once a plant has bloomed and pupped a few times you can get a striking grouping of genetically identical plants called a genet. The first photo of this post is a nice example.
The plants were all over the slopes of Plum Canyon at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. But occasionally you’d see the agaves setting up household in unlikely places, like this rock cleft. It makes for a nice photo though I’m not so sure about what it bodes for a lifetime anchored in this one spot. The plants didn’t appear any too concerned, however.
I leave you with a closeup of a single plant of a larger genet. Wikipedia says that a single individual out of a genet is called a ramet. I learn something new every day.
Although many agaves grow in perfect, implacable rosettes, so that you can almost see a mathematical purity in their patterns, the desert agave seems to celebrate a looser, wilder approach to life. You can almost envision a vortex of desert wind blowing just looking at these leaves.
All in all a gorgeous species!
I’ll have more desert plant photos as I work through the files on my camera…
Sunday I went for a little plant walk out to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. It’s been a good year for desert flowers, but it’s not one of those spectacular seasons when the ground pulsates purple with sand verbena or gold with brittlebush. Some of the ocotillo were in bloom, and the desert agaves like this one (Agave deserti) were sending up their pink and green stalks.
Lots else was in bloom. But as I review the photos from the trips I’m finding that I’m staring at a pile of images of plants I don’t know the names of. I’ll share more of the pictures than this first one once I get them a little better organized and the plants matched up with my list of names.
Since it’s Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day I’ll share with you some plants from my garden that I do know the names of. Some of these are old friends that have been blooming for a while, and I’ve been sharing over past Bloom Days. But a lot of these are just coming into bloom for the first time this year.
I thought the blooms on this carpenteria were finished a month ago, but the plant has surprised me with a robust bloom spurt, bigger than the first one.
Unlike the carpenteria, this old friend, the tree coreopsis, won’t be blooming again for another nine or ten months.
Many of these plants survive in the garden with minimal added water. The climate in this area is dry in a coastal-influenced sort of way. I might water once or twice a month in the summer, but the frequent morning overcast and occasional fog helps keep the plants hydrated. Additionally the plants in the garden have enjoyed a slighter higher than average rainfall so thoughts of the dry summer ahead aren’t in the minds of these plants. Spring is here.
This Salvia Bee’s Bliss has been in the ground for over two years, but only now is it starting to take off.
Black sage, Salvia mellifera.
The local annual chia, Salvia carduaceae, with the exotic Phlomis monocephala in the background. The chia is one of the coastal plants that also can get to be pretty common in parts of the desert.
Here’s another combination of plants, the lavender pink of the stinging lupine with the strident gold of the crassula relative behind it. The contrast is pretty strident to my taste, but hey, spring isn’t all about subtle plays of one color against another…
Last month I showed this orange mimulus seedling. That time I got it in focus.
From the same parents that lived in this bed comes this other monkeyflower, this one velvety red with almost black detailing.
And here’s another velvety red mimulus seedling. You might confuse it for the previous one, but the flowers are subtly different.
Nuttall’s milkvetch, looking full and flowery, close to its seasonal peak.
Verbena lilacina looks better for me with a little more added water than some of the plants around it. But it survives even when I forget.
The pale Verbena lilacina ‘Paseo Rancho’ was just starting to bloom last month. It’s starting to wake up for the spring.
Some parts of the garden get treated to more frequent watering.
This California buttercup, Ranunculus california, comes up reliably every year in an area of the garden where lawn meets unwatered gravel.
Blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium bellum, appreciates a moister spot as well.
Geum Red Wings, a pretty, informal plant.
Hummingbird sage, Salvia spathacea, is a California plant from moister places than my garden. Even in semi-shade it looks best with water two or three times a month.
And these last two of these go about as far from desert plants as you can get without getting aquatic plants. Both of these grow in my bog gardens, with their feet in standing water most of the year.
Sarracenia flava var. maxima is one one of the first plants in the bog to put out flowers. The common description of the scent is ‘cat piss,’ but I think that’s a little too harsh a description. The flowers are nice, but most people grow these for the pitcher-shaped leaves.
A couple more sarracenias, a different S. flava in the back, and a hybrid of S. flava and S. alata up front.
Head over to Carol’s blog, May Dreams Gardens, to check out all the other bloggers celebrating Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day!
