[ Lost in the Landscape ]

a little road trip

The most rad­i­cal thing you can do is stay home.
–Gary Sny­der, quoted by Rebecca Sol­nit in the cur­rent Orion

With all my apolo­gies to Gary Sny­der, Sat­ur­day included a quick trip up to Tree of Life Nurs­ery in South­ern Orange County, one of the main spe­cial­ists in Cal­i­for­nia native plants. I found it some­thing between tragic and funny that I trav­eled an hour and a half to look at plants that lived four houses away. But then there were all those unusual plants that I’d never see in a life­time of hik­ing around California.

The trip from my house in San Diego tra­verses the coastal I-5 cor­ri­dor, which in these parts is char­ac­ter­ized by sub­ur­ban sprawl with inter­mit­tent splices of some­thing resem­bling nature. The first big splices are the lagoons: Los Peñas­qui­tos, San Elijo, Batiq­ui­tos. And then, after Ocean­side, you hit the open hill­sides of Camp Pendle­ton that go on for miles. A free­way runs through it, so it’s any­thing but pris­tine. Also, many days you see heli­copters by the high­way and amphibi­ous craft just off the coast, stag­ing some sort of mil­i­tary takeover of Cal­i­for­nia. Sat­ur­day was rel­a­tively quiet, how­ever, with just the con­stant grind of the traf­fic at your back as you looked out to sea. Still, the scraped fore­ground didn’t help develop any sense of com­muning with the earth.

Soon the twin sea­side domes of the San Onofre nuke plant lay down the sig­nal that civ­i­liza­tion is about to take over again. A few more miles of homes and busi­nesses takes you to Ortega High­way, where a turn to the east gets you off the interstate.

You’re almost to the nurs­ery, but not quite. Two final miles of roads through homes in San Juan Capis­trano remind you that there’s an elec­tion just a few days away, and the tenor of the dozens of signs rein­forces what­ever stereo­types you might hold of Orange County being a con­ser­v­a­tive won­der­land. (Of course, pro­gres­sive Laguna Beach–which is to Orange County what Austin is to Texas–is only a few hill­sides away.)

Finally, for the final five miles to the nurs­ery, the road opens up through the open shade of an oak wood­land habi­tat. The morn­ing is quiet and there are only a few cars and motor­cy­cles on this tour route that even­tu­ally leads to Lake Elsinore.

But long before you get to the lake, you find the nursery.

Even the first view of the place from the park­ing lot is promising.

The main sales area cen­ters around Casa La Paz, a scenic adobe set among the oaks. It’s easy to imag­ine your­self in early Alta Cal­i­for­nia before the arrival of petu­nias and the non-Spanish White Man. This is a place that’s per­fected the the­ater of shop­ping for native plants.

Inside the Casa, you’ll find a thought­ful selec­tion of books on native and Mediterranean-climate gar­dens, as well as books on the local flora. In the fall, and once again in the spring, they offer free classes on replac­ing your lawn with Cal­i­for­nia natives. But it’s the plants that bring most peo­ple here.

Tomor­row: more on the nurs­ery trip.

November 03 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • places | Tags: Camp Pendleton • native plants • Orange County • politics • Tree of Life Nursery | No Comments »

roadside flora

We’ve just returned from a cou­ple of days in L.A. The drive up and back isn’t one of the great scenic routes on earth, and for the most part it’s not par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing botanically.

The plant­i­ngs of trees along I-5 and the 405 over 150 miles mostly draw from tried and true Cal­i­for­nia plant sta­ples like palms and euca­lyp­tus, with stands of Ital­ian cypress and occa­sional pines con­cen­trated in the more res­i­den­tial areas. They’re attrac­tive enough and gen­er­ally drought-tolerant choices, but the rhythm of palm, palm, euca­lyp­tus, palm, cypress, palm, euca­lyp­tus, palm gets a lit­tle rep­e­ti­tious over the course of two and a half hours (if traf­fic is moving).

A new kind of tree has been appear­ing over the last half dozen years, how­ever. With the recent growth of cell phones, there’s been an explo­sion in how many cell tow­ers you see–More bars in more places trans­lates into more cell tow­ers in more places. The providers have occa­sion­ally tried to hide the tow­ers by try­ing to make them pass as trees–usually with pretty com­i­cal results.

To keep myself amused on the trip I shot a few pho­tos of road­side trees. See if you can spot the cell tow­ers in the grid below. (Answers are at the end of this post, but I don’t think you’ll need the answer key.)

Give up? The cell tow­ers are the far right in the top row (fake palm), the first in the third row (fake…er…what is that sup­posed to be? a red­wood? road­side in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia?) and far right in the third row (plain vanilla cell tower). At least the cell tower trees are drought-tolerant.

August 25 2008 | Categories: landscape design • places | Tags: cell phones • cell towers • drought-tolerant landscaping • Interstate 405 • Interstate 5 • Los Angeles • Orange County • roadside plantings • trees | 1 Comment »