[ Lost in the Landscape ]

dr. frankenstein’s plum tree

While John and I were out look­ing for a small orna­men­tal tree at our favorite local place to shop for plants, Wal­ter Ander­son Nurs­ery, we passed by some bins of bare root fruit trees. We weren’t in the mar­ket for a fruit tree, and we really don’t have the per­fect place to put one.

But John eyed the bins wist­fully. “I’ve always wanted a plum tree.”

Our past expe­ri­ence with a stone fruit was a vari­ety of apri­cot that was sup­posed to do okay with­out much chill­ing here in coastal San Diego. It’s been almost a dozen years, and that’s prob­a­bly how many fruit we’ve har­vested off the tree. Some of the fruits were eaten by crit­ters before we got to them, but for the most part the issue is that there just haven’t been many fruit to begin with. It just doesn’t get cold enough here for suc­cess with apricots.

I had that dis­cus­sion with Kurt at the nurs­ery, and he assured us that all the plums they car­ried were selected to do well in this area. I wasn’t totally con­vinced, but with John and Kurt work­ing their influ­ence, I gave in. We now have a plum tree. Or is it five plum trees?

We walked away with one of those Franken­stein multi-grafted plants, with a branch of five dif­fer­ent vari­eties. The the­ory is that they’re selected to pro­vide a long sea­son of fruits. But the real­ity of multi-grafts is that the vigor of the dif­fer­ent vari­eties is never the same as that of the oth­ers, and one or two vari­eties often take over unless you con­tinue to prune the plant care­fully. In fact, one of the vari­eties is listed as being par­tic­u­larly vig­or­ous. Uh oh.

John like the idea of the long sea­son. I liked the idea that out of the five vari­eties we might actu­ally find one that does well here–and actu­ally taste good. If a vari­ety doesn’t bear after its trial period, off the island it goes. Here’s what we ended up with:

• Santa Rosa: 300–400 hours chill requirement(below 45 degrees) . This vari­ety is the one that ends up planted every­where in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, and it seems to set fruit pretty reli­ably. The fla­vor isn’t any­thing to get excited over, though. It’s in the “why bother” cat­e­gory for me, and I’ll be really dis­ap­pointed if it’s the only one that does anything.
• Bur­gundy: 300–400 hours chill requirement
• Golden Nec­tar: 400–500 hours chill requirement
• Beauty: 250 hours
• Meth­ley: 250 hours

Now, less than two weeks in the ground, some of the branches are bloom­ing already. Encour­ag­ing. But I sus­pect the tree was at least some­what pre-chilled at the orig­i­nat­ing nursery.

Inter­est­ingly, the branch with the most green foliage and no flow­ers at all is the sup­pos­edly low-chill Meth­ley. And the other low chill vari­ety, Beauty, has next to no flowers.

I’ll report back on how this all goes. How I love a good experiment!

February 07 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: fruits • grafted trees • multi-grafted plants • plums | No Comments »

naked ladies and tarts

Plum tart

Early last week, while I was work­ing, John had a chance to go up to North­ridge and visit his aunt for a few days. As part of the long week­end he was able to go to the aunt’s sister’s house and raid her plum tree. “You couldn’t tell I touched it,” John said, refer­ring to the num­ber of fruits the tree still had on it. He came home with maybe five or six pounds of them.

When you have a small crop of any­thing you savor every sin­gle fruit. But with this many I could splurge, and break­fast Sun­day included a plum tart. Pho­tograph­ing some­thing purple-black against a white back­ground turned out to be a lit­tle too much con­trast to make the pic­ture look that appe­tiz­ing. But hot out of the oven it wasn’t bad. (I must admit, though, that John might be get­ting tired of this blog­ging thing, with me going, “Wait a minute. We need a pic­ture before we eat it…” I can just see the next tell-all book to hit it big: I mar­ried a blog­ger…)

Lycoris squamingera on bare stem

Out­side, things were bloom­ing. The first of the month brought this big burst of Lycoris squamigera Amaryl­lis bel­ladonna, which along with a pas­sel of other com­mon names is called naked ladies. The plant grows actively in the fall through spring, putting out long strap-shaped leaves, but no flow­ers. The flow­ers come now, in mid­sum­mer, after the plant has gone dor­mant and dropped all its leaves. The lone flower stem comes up from the bare earth, com­pletely unadorned by leaves–hence the com­mon name. Another of its com­mon names is “sur­prise lily,” which also makes a lot of sense–Imagine see­ing this after writ­ing the plant off as a goner. Edit: “Sur­prise lily” refers more to lycoris, which I’ve decided this plant isn’t after all, after a cou­ple discussions.

Because it grows in the win­ter, when it’s wet, and is basi­cally dor­mant in the long rain­less sum­mer, it gets by with min­i­mal sup­ple­men­tal water­ing, mak­ing it a per­fect bulb for Mediter­ranean cli­mates like South­ern California.

Other species in the genus Lycoris are some­times called naked ladies as well, but the plant around here that is most com­monly referred to by that name is the rounder, taller, more buxom Amaryl­lis bel­ladonna.

The rental house next door which often gets zero yard care has a patch by their front door. I couldn’t fig­ure out what I was doing wrong with mine. Why were mine shorter? And why did mine bloom for a some­what shorter (but more intense) period? Then I put the pieces together…totally dif­fer­ent species. I sup­pose there’s some­thing of that grass always being greener thing going on here.

Now that I’ve fig­ured it out I like mine just fine. In fact I think these, my kids, are much more won­der­ful than any­one else’s… See the species cor­rec­tion above. I’ve decided this is Amaryl­lis bel­ladonna after all!

Lycoris squamingera closeup

August 05 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: food • in bloom • Lycoris squamingera • naked ladies • plums | 2 Comments »