[ Lost in the Landscape ]

the huntington desert garden

The late-December light was fad­ing when I headed to the wild and won­der­ful plants that make up the Huntington’s Desert Gar­den. The gar­den dates back many decades and fea­tures some immense spec­i­mens the likes of which you’ll almost never see. But what I love most about the gar­den is that it incor­po­rates these great plants into land­scapes that both honor the plants and use them in strik­ing combinations.

Many aloes were bloom­ing with their dra­matic spikes of hot, bright col­ors. The the­atri­cal light­ing helped to make some of the scenes even more dramatic.

(Be sure to click onthe third image to enlarge it. In its unearthly weird­ness, it’s got to be one of my favorite gar­den pho­tos I’ve ever taken.)

One zone of the gar­den focuses on plants you’d find in Cal­i­for­nia. Here a cre­osote bush serves as a screen for a radi­ant gray-white agave.

And this scene employs the coastal and Chan­nel Island buck­wheat, Saint Catherine’s lace (Eri­o­gonum gigan­teum)–a plant that tech­ni­cally doesn’t come from a desert–with other dry­land plants. The gray-green foliage on all of them helps to unify this diverse planting.

The Hunt­ing­ton is in a warm sub­trop­i­cal area just east of Los Ange­les. That doesn’t mean that it’s warm enough for all of these plants. Patio heaters of the kind that you see out­doors at restau­rants keep plants warm at night in one area of the gar­den. (These are the frigid depths of Decem­ber, after all.)

Now, as much as I was try­ing to focus on the over­all land­scape, I have to share a few pho­tos of indi­vid­ual species that caught my eye.

Look­ing up at a very large Yucca fil­if­era from Mexico…

(There’s an extremely sim­i­lar shot of the exact same plant on the Germanatrix’s post on her visit to this same gar­den at the end of Novem­ber. Check it out: here.)

Two tall palms with immense tree aloes, Aloe bar­berae. At the Hunt­ing­ton the species is iden­ti­fied as A. baine­sii, but the tax­on­o­mists have had a change of heart. I have two of these in my lit­tle front yard, the tallest of them still under twenty feet but still impres­sive at that size. The writeup on this plant says it can hit fifty feet or more. The Hunt­ing­ton spec­i­mens are just about there, I’d guess.

A dynamic and lyri­cal tan­gle of leaves on sev­eral plants of the var­ie­gated form of Agave amer­i­cana… (Homage to some­body… later Willem de Koon­ing? Franz Kline?) Agaves with their per­fect rosettes seem to appeal to the part of our brains that appre­ci­ate sym­me­try and order. This plant­ing sub­verted the expected into a beau­ti­ful mess.

A tall, dense stand of Cleis­to­cac­tus straus­sii…

As we left the Hunt­ing­ton the light that had made the Desert Gar­den extra-interesting was col­or­ing up the flanks of Mount Wil­son and the the rest of the San Gabriels.

Not far away from the Hunt­ing­ton is Pasadena, the site of the annual New Year’s Rose Parade, which should be get­ting under way not long after this post hits the web. (Okay, it’s sort of a lame way to try to segue this post to the topic of New Year’s Day, but–hey!–I had to give it a try.)

Happy New Year’s to all of you, and best wishes for a healthy and pros­per­ous year filled with amaz­ing botan­i­cal highlights.

January 01 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: agaves • aloes • cacti • desert plants • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • plant combinations • succulents | 11 Comments »

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 »

getty center garden in winter

John and I spent the hol­i­days at his aunt’s house in the Los Ange­les neigh­bor­hood of North­ridge. Christ­mas at her house is a fam­ily affair, but with fam­ily dis­persed around the coun­try, it’s not always as rau­cous as it some­times has been. This year we were thrilled to have a big con­tin­gent of imme­di­ate fam­ily, includ­ing Jenny and her mad sci­en­tist hus­band from South Car­olina. Past read­ers of this blog might rec­og­nize Jenny’s name as a some­times con­trib­u­tor of pho­tos and com­ments. It was great see­ing you, Jenny! (And Joe too!)

Fri­day, on our return home, John and I stopped by the Getty Cen­ter for an exhi­bi­tion of the pho­tographs of Car­leton Watkins (more on that show in a future post). To visit the Getty with­out tak­ing in its gar­dens would be unthink­able, and we spent more time out­doors than we did in the galleries.

It had rained the pre­vi­ous two days, clear­ing out the garbage in the air. The views from the hill­top were spec­tac­u­lar. Here you can see the sky­lines of Cen­tury City in the fore­ground against down­town in the distance.

This is the view to the south­west, across Santa Mon­ica Bay. The dis­tant land mass (straight ahead and to the right) is Catalina Island, forty-plus miles away.

The visit last Fri­day was the first time we’d vis­ited the gar­dens of the Getty Cen­ter dur­ing the win­ter. The Robert-Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den adver­tises itself as “always chang­ing, never twice the same,” so this would be a good chance to see it dur­ing a time that was less porno­graphic with flow­er­ing plants.

Still, there were flow­ers. This is the core plant­ing of clipped aza­leas in the cen­tral water fea­ture. In fact this was the first time I’d been there when the lit­tle mazes were show­ing any flow­ers. In addi­tion to the blooms, the foliage of one of the two aza­lea vari­eties dark­ens and red­dens in the cooler win­ter weather, mak­ing the plant­ing appear to be com­prised of inter­lock­ing rings of dif­fer­ent plants.

If you click on the image to enlarge it, you’ll see that the plants could stand a lit­tle bit of clip­ping. The aza­leas are lit­tle float­ing islands in the water, so keep­ing them trimmed involves a lit­tle more than strolling over them with hedge clippers.

John’s aunt vol­un­teers at the museum, and once she’d asked one of the groundskeep­ers how they trim the plants. At first he mimed get­ting in a boat and row­ing to the aza­leas. Then, after paus­ing for effect, he grinned and said that the water was really shal­low, and that they actu­ally just donned some waders to do their work.

Aside from the aza­leas, there were just a few other things in bloom: bougainvil­leas, brug­man­sias, roses, eryn­giums (sea-hollies) and some win­ter bloomers. Most of the inter­est came in the form of foliage and stems.

Here are some details from the plant­i­ngs that empha­size color, form and tex­ture, most of it best appre­ci­ated at close dis­tances. Some of the color com­bi­na­tions rant toward the mono­chro­matic. Here gray suc­cu­lents con­trast with the black leaves of Ophio­pogon planis­ca­pus.

This one fea­tured yel­low and green.

The foliage here tends more towards the bronze end of things.

In this com­po­si­tion, the silver-leaved Dichon­dra argen­tea is being slowly out-competed by the red oxalis (prob­a­bly a red-leaved form of O. pupurea). Once the weather warms, the oxalis will die back, let­ting the dichon­dra regain its dominance.

Some of the color com­bi­na­tions were more varied.

Some plant­i­ngs ran towards the chaotic. Like, don’t you think the blue aster-ey bits in this plant­ing (lower right) are a lit­tle too over the top? I think the light gray leaves would have added a nice con­trast to this com­bi­na­tion. But the flow­ers… Gild the lily, why don’t you?

But, hey, it’s all taste isn’t it?

In a nod to the sea­son, sev­eral spec­i­mens of browned late-season grasses moved dra­mat­i­cally in the strong mid­day winds. Before you go get­ting any ideas that this was a plant­ing in the height­ened nat­u­ral­is­tic style of the New Peren­ni­als gar­den design­ers like Piet Oudolf, the grasses were sin­gle plants of con­trast­ing species, placed in pots placed along the walkway.

In this last photo, in con­trast to the pre­ced­ing pic­tures of win­ter grasses, two plants with some­what grass-like forms belie the fact that it’s win­ter. To the left is the restio, Chon­doropetalum ele­phan­ti­num, and the right is var­ie­gated soci­ety gar­lic, Tul­baghia vio­lacea.

Some gar­den design­ers would like you to be able to know exactly what sea­son it is by look­ing at the plants in the gar­den. Fol­low­ing this phi­los­o­phy you should be able to set your cal­en­dar by look­ing at the gar­den. But what gives away the fact that it’s win­ter in this photo are the two vis­i­tors, bun­dled up against the cold. Looks like win­ter to me!

December 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: J. Paul Getty Museum • Los Angeles • plant combinations • Robert Irwin • seasons • winter | 6 Comments »

garden visits

While we were in L.A. we stopped by the houses of John’s cousin and aunt. Here are a few shots of some of their nice plantings.

First, pool­side at Cousin Chris and Susie’s house, was this nice South Seas look­ing com­bi­na­tion of leafy giant bird of par­adise (Stre­litzia nico­lai) with the jewel-tone foliage of Ire­sine herb­stii. The lat­ter plant has a few com­mon names like “beef­steak plant,” “blood­leaf” and–most unfor­tu­nate of all–“chicken giz­zard.” Gross. Who thought up that name?

One of Susie’s sis­ters is a land­scaper who was a final­ist on Home and Gar­den Television’s Landscaper’s Chal­lenge, and it was handy to have her sis­terly advice. But Susie made the plant selec­tions herself.

Then it was off to Aunt Barbara’s. One of her friends had hired a ser­vice that cleared and amended a bed, installed irri­ga­tion and then planted a warm-weather and then a cool-weather assort­ment of plants.

Bar­bara liked the idea of hav­ing lots of flow­ers with­out hav­ing to break her back putting them in, so she had the ser­vice do her own yard. Here are a cou­ple shots of the sum­mer mix, fea­tur­ing zin­nias, salvias, del­phini­ums, celosias, marigolds, por­tu­la­cas, lisianthus, plus some sun-tolerant vari­eties of coleus nearby.

But prepar­ing the beds and plant­ing the plants and installing a water­ing sys­tem isn’t all that’s required to keep these plants look­ing nice. When­ever she has a chance, Bar­bara takes a walk out to her plants and pulls off the spent flow­ers. By her care­ful dead­head­ing, the plant­i­ngs stay look­ing fresh many months after they’re set in the ground.

I’m sure she spends as much time tend­ing the plants as it took to put them in. Still, she’s a gar­dener and enjoys her out­door time. Some peo­ple might call it work, but I don’t think any of us would.

September 10 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: Aunt Barbara's garden • Chris and Susie's garden • deadheading • plant combinations | 5 Comments »

some plant ideas to borrow

Last weekend’s Los Ange­les trip included a short stop by the Getty Museum in Brentwood.

I’d posted ear­lier about their exhibit fea­tur­ing botan­i­cal illus­tra­tions by Maria Sibylla Mer­ian that con­tin­ues through the end of August. It was a com­pact, intense show with art­work by Mer­ian and her con­tem­po­raries, along with exam­ples of some of the ear­li­est illus­trated botan­i­cal books.


Unfor­tu­nately it was one of those thou-shalt-not-photograph exhi­bi­tions, so I had to be con­tent with snap­ping these two for-sale prints in the kiosk out­side the gal­leries. Mer­ian was inter­ested in plants, but even more so in the crit­ters that live in them. Here you see var­i­ous creepy crawlies cavort­ing with the plant life.

When vis­it­ing a place like the Getty it’s easy to get over­whelmed with the sheer unap­proach­able­ness of every­thing you see–the Acropolis-like site, the billion-plus dol­lar con­struc­tion bud­get, the irre­place­able art­works. But look­ing around the grounds there are all sorts of cool details that would be at home in a back yard plant­ing or patio project.

Here are some of the plant­i­ngs that I thought were cool. Some were in the Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den, oth­ers were around the museum grounds that were designed by the land­scape archi­tec­tural firm of Olin Part­ner­ship. (The best piece I’ve run across on the Web about the less famous gar­den plant­i­ngs was in, of all places, The Aus­tralian Human­i­ties Review.)

Many of the shady plant­i­ngs under­neath the plant­ing of Lon­don plane trees use light-colored foliage to make the plants pop in the shade. It’s a tech­nique that you read about a lot–but it works won­ders. Here’s a nice com­bi­na­tion of light-color suc­cu­lents.


Again in the shade, here are some plants with green-and-white var­ie­gated foliage, includ­ing a New Zealand flax.


And the last of these shade pic­tures, a plant­ing fea­tur­ing a chartreuse-leaved oxalis species. John thought it looked a lit­tle ane­mic, but I thought it was pretty cool.


Out of the shade, a plant­ing of con­trast­ing foliage col­ors can be a great accent. Here the plant­ing avoids green alto­gether, and com­bines plants pre­dom­i­nat­ing with red and yel­low tones, includ­ing the “Sticks of Fire” clone of the evil pen­cil tree.


In a gar­den with a large num­ber of dif­fer­ent plants it helps to have zones with less con­trast. Here a long, curv­ing row of pink crape myr­tles were bloom­ing over an extended bed of var­ie­gated soci­ety gar­lic bloom­ing with their lavender-pink flow­ers.


Mass plant­i­ngs don’t have to go into rows or grids. Here’s my favorite plant­ing on the entire prop­erty, a seem­ingly ran­dom arrange­ment of golden bar­rel cac­tus. The arrange­ment is infor­mal, but it’s as much a prod­uct of human inter­ven­tion as some­thing that’s overtly geo­met­ri­cal. The Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den draws most of the vis­i­tors, but this area is the most spec­tac­u­lar to my eyes.


If you have a billion-dollar view most peo­ple decide to chop down all the plants between you and the view. Here, the almost-transparent, unob­tru­sive, but still dra­matic spent flower stalks of these var­ie­gated cen­tury plants (Agave amer­i­cana ‘Mar­ginata’) actu­ally helps com­plete the view, giv­ing focus to what would be a run-of-the-mill spec­tac­u­lar view of the West Side of L.A. The actual flow­ers on these sculp­tural inflo­res­cences died months ago, and the stalks are actu­ally black and not green. But they’re cool as all get out–So why not leave them be?


Plant­i­ngs soften a lot of the hard geo­met­ri­cal edges. Here some pros­trate rose­mary cas­cades over the hard edge of the traver­tine wall.


And here, the baby’s tears grow­ing between the rough traver­tine squares soft­ens the tran­si­tion from human hard-edged geom­e­try to the softer forms of the vin­ing Boston ivy.

Next post I’ll share some of my favorite details from the hard­scape around the Getty.

August 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: foliage plants • J. Paul Getty Museum • plant combinations • shade • shade plants | No Comments »

two plants talking

Here’s a pic­ture from the week­end of a cou­ple of plants inter­act­ing aes­thet­i­cally, a dark rose clone of naked lady, Amaryl­lis bel­ladonna, with Mex­i­can feath­er­grass, Nas­sella tenuis­sima (bet­ter known as Stipa tenuis­sima). I par­tic­u­larly liked the lines on the petals of the lilies echo­ing the wispy lines described by the stems of grass…

August 21 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Amaryllis belladonna • Mexican feather grass • Mexican feathergrass • naked ladies • Nassella tenuissima • plant combinations • Stipa tenuissima | No Comments »

cinco de mayo plant combinations

In cel­e­bra­tion of Cinco de Mayo, here’s a patch of the gar­den fea­tur­ing the red, white and green col­ors that dom­i­nate the Mex­i­can flag.

The plants:

Celosia ‘New Look’ (intense red, on the left)
Salvia micro­phylla ‘Hot Lips’ (red-and-white bicolor on the right)
Salvia nemerosa ‘Snow Hills’ (white flow­er­ing plant in the background)

May 05 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: celosia • plant combinations • red flowers • salvias • white flowers | No Comments »

april plant combinations

The gar­den is always chang­ing. As plants mature and oth­ers come into bloom, I’m always see­ing com­bi­na­tions of plants and inter­est­ing rela­tion­ships between them. Here are a cou­ple plant com­bi­na­tions in the yard that I’m par­tic­u­larly happy with.

This is Home­ria col­lina, a South African bulb, with an uniden­ti­fied rosette-forming succulent–quite likely a grap­topetalum, pos­si­bly G. ‘Point Dexter’s’ or G. paraguayense–bloom­ing in the fore­ground and cas­cad­ing over a retain­ing wall. It’s right on the side­walk in front of the house, and it’s extra-nice that you see the com­bi­na­tion at eye-level.

I like how the purple-gray tones in the suc­cu­lent com­ple­ment the color of the block wall, and how its orangey tones work well with the homeria.

In the back yard there’s a dif­fer­ent group of things con­verg­ing, a bromeliad going out of bloom, some red Russ­ian kale that’s just about ready to pick, plain white land­scap­ing pan­sies that are near­ing the end of their lifes­pans, and a Pen­ste­mon with its first flow­ers of the sea­son. (The kale was much more pur­ple just two weeks ago, before the weather started to warm up.)

In a cou­ple of weeks these com­bi­na­tions will be gone, and there’ll be new ones that I’ve never seen before. All these joys of gardening!

April 08 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: color combinations • in bloom • plant combinations | No Comments »