[ Lost in the Landscape ]

california-friendly phlomis

It’s not quite plant­ing sea­son, but for the last few trips to the local nurs­ery I’d been eying a plant I hadn’t noticed before, Phlomis mono­cephala, a sis­ter species to the more com­mon Jerusalem sage, P. fru­ti­cosa.

This strongly drought-tolerant species from Turkey has leaves that are highly tex­tured like those of sev­eral native Cal­i­for­nia sages. What sets it apart from the Cal­i­for­nia sages is what it does in the sum­mer, when the leaves turn this strong yellow-green color. In the spring to early sum­mer it will have a mod­est dis­play of yel­low flow­ers, but this a plant that you use for its cool foliage, pro­vid­ing a point of inter­est when a lot of the natives have shut down.

My front yard is a mixed Mediterranean-climate plant­ing with a num­ber of Cal­i­for­nia natives, and I thought this plant would com­ple­ment them nicely. It so hap­pens that there are some plants that peaked five years ago and would bet­ter replaced. Three phlomis would fit in their spot perfectly.

It so hap­pened that the nurs­ery had exactly three plants. Plant shop­ping can be a com­pet­i­tive sport. If you see some­thing, that might be the last chance you’ll have at it. So you can prob­a­bly guess that I’m now the owner of three lit­tle Phlomis mono­cephala plants. I won’t do any seri­ous gar­den rework­ing for another month or so, but I should be able to keep the plants happy and watered for that long.

The plant will top out at about four by four feet, is con­sid­ered hardy to zone 9, and requires excel­lent drainage.

While at the nurs­ery I noticed this other California-friendly phlomis, P. lanata. This species grows lower, to maybe two feet tall by three to four wide. The size and shape of the plant actu­ally would have been a bet­ter choice for the spot I have, but this isn’t one of the phlomis species that devel­ops the gor­geous yel­low sum­mer coloration.

What it does have, though, are these really cool, fuzzy gray­ish leaves and stems. How can you resist touch­ing it? Like the much larger Jerusalem sage, it’ll put on a good show of bright yel­low flowers.

One thing I do at nurs­eries is to move plants into lit­tle com­bi­na­tions to see how they’d look together. The first time the staff sees me doing it it might raise some eye­brows, but the staff at Wal­ter Ander­son Nurs­ery is used to me by now. (As you might expect some­one who works in a library, I make sure to put every­thing back in its proper place.)

Here’s a play in scale and tex­ture, a lit­tle ensem­ble of yellowish-green to pale green col­ored leaves that I liked: the Phlomis mono­cephala that I bought, in com­bi­na­tion with what would be the low-growing form of coy­ote bush brush (Bac­cha­ris pilu­laris pilu­laris ‘Pigeon Point’) and the really del­i­cate Aus­tralian woolly bush (Adenan­thos sericeus).

Often, when you do an exer­cise like this, the plants will have wildly dif­fer­ent cul­tural require­ments or would be grossly incom­pat­i­ble size-wise. But in this case all three could coex­ist together in a nice plant­ing, with maybe only the woolly bush need­ing just a bit more sum­mer water­ing. The woolly bush would grow up into a large shrub, the phlomis into a dense medium-sized one, and the coy­ote bush brush would sprawl attrac­tively around the base of the other two.

August 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Adenanthos sericeus • Baccharis pilularis pilularis Pigeon Point • coyote bush • Jerusalem sage • Phlomis lanata • Phlomis monocephala • plant com • plant combinations • wooly bush | 9 Comments »