[ Lost in the Landscape ]

you paid money for that?

At the plant sale attached to the recent suc­cu­lent show a cou­ple of the soci­ety mem­bers looked at one of the plants I had in my hands and made all sorts of approv­ing noises. “Great plant!” or “Wow, you scored!”

That was not the reac­tion when I got the plants home.

While John didn’t quite come out and say some­thing like, “You paid good money for that?,” it was there in impli­ca­tion in what lit­tle he said.

I sup­pose it’s the curi­ous gardener’s curse, get­ting all excited over some of the odder botan­i­cal life forms that didn’t get sprin­kled on with the magic uni­corn glit­ter that makes a plant con­ven­tion­ally pretty. Add to that the more gen­eral gardener’s curse of being able to see the future in rec­og­niz­ing the promise in a packet of black seeds indis­tin­guish­able from dust or a bag of brown bulbs look­ing no more promis­ing than a heap of shallots.

Here’s one of the lit­tle plants, Ipomea platen­sis, a species in the same genus as morn­ing glo­ries. This is the young plant.

Some day it’ll grow up into some­thing look­ing like this plant in the main suc­cu­lent show. Very cool, but we’re miss­ing the magic uni­corn glitter.

This is a cool plant with a Latin name that would draw snick­ers from a junior high school sci­ence class, Fockea edulis.

Some day I hope mine grows up into some­thing look­ing like these larger plants in the main show…

Here’s a more mature spec­i­men of Dioscorea elaphan­tipes, another of the lit­tle plants I got. I think the form of the caudex on this one looks pretty amaz­ing. So far these are three caudex-forming (cau­di­ci­form) species, but the inflated plant parts all look quite dif­fer­ent from each other. The foliage, too, looks totally dif­fer­ent one plant to the next.

Oper­culi­carya decaryi also has a cool inflated stem…

…and tiny, dark, del­i­cate leaves.

And then there was this one, Tyle­codon stria­tus, a plant that even I think is kin­duv ugly. Lots of brown stem and not much else. They have com­pe­ti­tions to find the ugli­est dogs. Do they have ugly plant con­tests? This species stands a pretty good chance of win­ning. And I paid good money for it!

Not all was lumpy and bul­bous at the plant sale, and there actu­ally was a lot of uni­corn glit­ter spread over many of the plants.

There were succulent-friendly pots, too. Just look at all that drainage.

And of all the pots I came so close to going home with this one by Don Hunt Ceram­ics. Isn’t the glaze ter­rific? You wouldn’t care if the plant inside was as ugly as one of my new ones!

Con­sid­er­ing what I purchased–and espe­cially what I did not buy–this might just be the last time I’m allowed to go shop­ping unattended.

June 25 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: magic unicorn glitter • pots • shopping • succulent shows • succulents • ugliness | 8 Comments »

agonizing over the right pot

I’m a lit­tle embar­rassed to admit that peo­ple often hate to go shop­ping with me. Plants, clothes, paint col­ors, cheese…it can some­times take me a long time to make up my mind. I admit that these aren’t life-or-death deci­sions I’m mak­ing. But as far as I’m con­cerned that’s no excuse not to pay atten­tion to the process. Some things in life are still very impor­tant.

Dur­ing last week’s plant shop­ping adven­ture I picked up three lit­tle aloes I wanted to pot up for the back patio. I was sur­prised by how quickly I was able to pick between all the cool offer­ings. Some col­lec­tors like one of every­thing that catches their eye. By con­trast I guess I like to col­lect one thing in depth. Accord­ingly I picked an inter­est­ing genus of plant (Aloe) and then decided on three con­trast­ing but com­ple­men­tary exam­ples. I was a lit­tle both­ered that two of the three were unknowns, but I don’t begin to con­sider myself an aloe col­lec­tor. They looked cool and the price was rea­son­able. Deci­sion made.

Then came time to select pots for the plants and for the loca­tion where they’d live. The local Home Depot had some func­tional designs but noth­ing that excited me. Then I was off to my favorite local nurs­ery. Even when I set some basic rules for myself (“noth­ing match­ing,” “a sim­ple design not detract­ing from the plant,” “earth tones or glazed blue for color”) I ended up with lots of work­able options. Since the nurs­ery has a good return pol­icy I picked six to take home to see how they looked on the patio and with the plants.

None of the pots were really pricey, but in all cases they were priced higher than the plants. A lot of the prof­its in the nurs­ery and land­scap­ing biz aren’t the plants them­selves, but all the stuff that goes with them.

So in the end I kept four of the pots and rejected the cen­ter and right of the largest pots in the first photo. The extra pot now houses a lit­tle divi­sion of Aloe mac­u­lata (a.k.a. A. saponaria) that I dug up from the front yard. It’s typ­i­cally an aggres­sive colonizer–the Matil­ija poppy of aloes–spreading under­ground via long stolons. I’m not sure how it’ll do in a pot, so this is an experiment.

Here’s part of the fin­ished edge of the patio. Clock­wise from the top: Aloe andon­gen­sis, A. saponaria, unknown red aloe.

And here’s the last of the aloes, yet another unknown, nearby in its new pot.

In my teen years I did some infor­mal study of Japan­ese bon­sai and ike­bana, the art of arrang­ing branches, leaves and flow­ers. Pro­por­tion pro­por­tion pro­por­tion were big themes in both, and one of the stan­dard for­mu­las was that the con­tainer should be approx­i­mately one and a half times the height of the plant mate­r­ial. In all my pots the plants seem too small, but as we all know plants do that amaz­ing thing: grow. Since some of these are unknown species I have no idea how much they’ll grow. But I hope they’ll come to look more at home in their new digs.

Okay, now it’s time to worry about the next big thing…

July 19 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: aloes • pots • potted plants • shopping | 5 Comments »

vinyl resting place

I real­ize that I’m dat­ing myself when I reveal this, a long shelf of vinyl LPs, one of sev­eral in the house. I never lis­ten to them, but I don’t know what to do with them. There’s a lot of com­mon trash in the collection–Does the world need to pre­serve the bil­lionth press­ing of an indif­fer­ent ren­di­tion of the Pachel­bel Canon? Then there’s music so bad that you can’t bear to part with it. Case in point: The Lib­er­ace Christ­mas album, in which Lee recites “The Night Before Christ­mas.” So badly done it’s a camp classic.

A few hol­i­days ago I decided on a few truly trash­able discs and recy­cled them into flow­er­pots. It’s one of those craft projects that you can find lots of instruc­tions for out on the web. While vis­it­ing John’s aunt last month I saw one of the exam­ples of my hand­i­work, with a small pot­ted poin­set­tia set inside the craft project from hell.

Here’s one of the pro­to­types here at home, hold­ing a pot­ted plant. The hole in the disc for the spin­dle makes a great lit­tle drainage open­ing. This is more of a tray than pot, but I finally worked out a way to make some­thing that had a nice pot shape to it.

I ended up using two ceramic pots as forms, a small 4-incher and a larger one, around 6 inches. I’d place the disc and smaller pot on a cookie sheet in the oven, with the hole of the disc cen­tered on the hole of the pot. The tem­per­a­ture was set at a low but vinyl-melting tem­per­a­ture, some­thing in the high 200s if I remem­ber cor­rectly. When the disc reached the melt­ing point and began to just sag, I pulled every­thing out of the oven, placed the larger pot on top of the disc, and these pressed down gen­tly. The disc would assume a nice pot shape and form some attrac­tive crin­kles in the space between the two pots. Just let the disc cool a minute and you’re ready for the next one. The fumes from melt­ing vinyl can be pretty intense, unpleas­ant, and prob­a­bly not good for you, so this isn’t a project I’d tackle in an unven­ti­lated house dur­ing the dead of win­ter. Also, remem­ber that plas­tic is flam­ma­ble! Be careful.

Last month John gifted me this USB turntable for trans­fer­ring vinyl into sound files that I might actu­ally lis­ten to. Now all I need to do in my copi­ous spare time is sort through sev­eral hun­dred discs and decide which few I want to keep, which ones I want to con­vert and recy­cle, and those that can be turned into flow­er­pots right away.

So…

• Orig­i­nal Sargeant Pep­per first release: keep…
• Lib­er­ace Christ­mas album: con­vert but keep (was there any ques­tion on that?)…
• Alter­na­tive TV (a British avant-garde rock duo’s album that I bought after read­ing a glow­ing review): flow­er­pot…
• Pierre Boulez con­duct­ing Debussy’s La Mer: con­vert and recy­cle…
• Any­thing Barry Manilow: flow­er­pot (what was I thinking?)…

A sim­i­lar tech­nique can be used on 45s as well as 12-inchers. Here’s a lit­tle Rolling Stones candy dish, for example…

January 30 2010 | Categories: gardening | Tags: craft projects from hell • LPs • pots • recycling | 7 Comments »

ooh, scary!

In keep­ing with my dark pur­ple and black themes of some recent posts (like this one), here are a cou­ple pic­tures Jenny shared with me of some of her plants. This first one is a bromeliad with incred­i­bly striped, almost rep­til­ian leaves. The pump­kin pot is a fun touch for the our cur­rent season.

I’m glad it’s a plant, because if I encoun­tered an ani­mal that looked like this I might start walk­ing the oppo­site direc­tion. Real fast.

This one, Bego­nia Black Fang, is a lit­tle cud­dlier, even lit­er­ally fuzzy. Dark-colored plants can get lost in the land­scap­ing if you’re not care­ful, but com­bined with other inter­est­ing plants, like here, they can be great up-close specimens.

Thanks for shar­ing your pic­tures, Jenny!

October 22 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Begonia Black Fang • begonias • black • bromeliads • Jenny • pots | 1 Comment »

terrazzo planters

Gar­den pots and planters can be made out of almost any­thing that can stand up to sun and mois­ture. Clay, both glazed and unglazed, has been the main mate­r­ial of choice for nat­ural mate­ri­als, and it can assume all kinds of shapes, sizes and col­ors. Plas­tic wins out in the area of man-made mate­ri­als, com­bin­ing lighter weight, extremely mold-ability and options for all sorts of col­ors, usu­ally com­bined with lower cost.

The three big pots I picked for the new plants on the roof deck are made out of a less unusual mate­r­ial: ter­razzo, a con­crete that’s been ground down so that you can see the pol­ished aggre­gate mixed in with the cement matrix. Being made from con­crete, they’re heavy–more so than low-glazed ceramic. But I really like their sur­faces and the mod­ern pro­files of this line from Viet­nam. Here’s a closeup of their sur­face, con­trasted here against the leaves of Euphor­bia cotini­fo­lia:

Con­crete planters are used com­monly in com­mer­cial sit­u­a­tions because of their extreme stur­di­ness, but this ter­razzo fin­ish­ing tech­nique looks to be fairly uncom­mon. (A web search found lots of out­lets in Aus­tralia, but not the U.S.) But for­tu­nately they’re avail­able here in San Diego at Wal­ter Ander­son Nurs­ery. They’re not super-cheap–maybe dou­ble the cost of similarly-size ceramic pots at home stores, but they’re not ridicu­lous, either.

August 13 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: planters • pots • terrazzo | 3 Comments »

a mountain of plastic pots

I had a moun­tain of unwanted plas­tic pots, mostly in the 3–5 inch size, left­overs from when I was grow­ing more than just a few orchids around the house. The pots were used, a lit­tle old, but basi­cally func­tional. I couldn’t part with them–who knows when I’d need them? After a cou­ple years of goad­ing from John, a cou­ple hun­dred of them went to the land­fill last fall.

Then I heard about the Mis­souri Botan­i­cal Gar­den hav­ing a great idea. They’ve started up a pro­gram to recy­cle those unwanted left­over plas­tic pots into some­thing useful.

Gar­den pots and trays have been recy­cled into land­scape tim­bers, use­ful for build­ing retain­ing walls and land­scape bor­ders. Each tim­ber mea­sures 7-inches X 9-inches by 8.5 feet long, weighs 280 pounds, and lasts for up to 50 years.

Well, yeah, Mis­souri would be a lit­tle far to go next time I have a pile of pots I need to part with. But I’ll be a lit­tle more dili­gent in look­ing around for more sus­tain­able solu­tions than dump­ing them!

April 06 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: plastic • pots • recycling | No Comments »