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 »
Missed Sunset
Daylight goes quickly this time of year. Last night I grabbed the camera, thinking I’d catch sunset from the roof deck. But thirty seconds later the sun vanished into this sticky cloudbank settled on the water. So, if by “sunset” you mean watching the sun do a slow swan dive into the drink, I missed it.
My weekend reading has been Annie Proulx’s amazing novel, The Shipping News. The book vibrates with a sense of place (Newfoundland) and has descriptions more vivid than the things themselves. Early in it she describes a sunset as “a flock of birds on fire.” My sunset was nothing like that, but still worth the haul up to the deck.
Summer
While I was up there I snapped this shot of the progress of the trio of new plants that I put up there in August, Euphorbia cotinifolia, Kalanchoe prolifera, and Lomandra longifolia. The euphorbia has survived the occasional watering lapses and is coloring up this gorgeous wine red color.
Closeup of the kalanchoe
The kalanchoe is beginning to put up its bloom spikes for the winter and is showing an intensification of the red color on the margins of its leaves.
And the lomandra looks like it did in August, only bigger.
I was hoping for a container planting that had seasonal interest—something other than living versions of plastic plants that looked the same year-round. So far I’m pleased.
Galvezia juncea
Last month I decided those three plants needed some company, and so they now have a new resident nearby. This is Galvezia juncea ‘Gran Cañon’, Baja bush snapdragon. It’s green and architectural right now. But soon it should small scarlet tubular flowers to coax some hummingbirds up to the deck. With a big selection of nectar-rich salvias down below, however, the hummers might be a hard crowd to motivate.
No sounds of birds up on the deck, only the sound of the sunset…
December 01 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Euphorbia cotinifloia • Galvezia juncea • Kalanchoe prolifera • Loma • potted plants • roof deck • sunset | 3 Comments »
The roof garden now has three plants I’ve never grown before. I tried to pick plants that were tough sun-lovers that required almost no attention and not much water. While I don’t like to write about plants I don’t have any experience with, I thought this might be an opportunity to take you along for the ride as I try these out.
Lomandra longifolia ‘Breeze’
The first new plant is
Lomandra longifolia ‘Breeze,’ a dwarf mat rush. I’ve always liked spiky grass- or flax-like plants, and this stopped me with its dramatic long, narrow leaves. It’s listed as maturing to about 30 inches high and wide, though will likely be a tad smaller in a container. The plant is being marketed as a good plant for traffic medians. I’m hoping that will mean that it will require little care—though that may just be a marketing ploy to sell more plants. Another part of the sales pitch is that it should be extremely drought-tolerant once established. Looking around the web I found a listing for it that went on to say that potted versions of the plant will require regular water. Well, it ain’t gonna get lots of water up there on the roof, so we’ll see how well it’ll do. At least its new container is four times the size of the nursery pot and should dry out a lot slower.
Kalanchoe prolifera
New plant number two is
Kalanchoe prolifera, a succulent from Madagascar. It’s definitely an architectural plant that to me it looks a little like an overscaled, cartoon version of a bamboo, with its thick trunks and chunky leaves. The picture here shows the light green freckles on the trunk of the plant, making it a good plant to enjoy up close after you’ve oohed and ahed over its silhouette. Size could be a problem, with some listings saying that it can get to ten feet when it flowers in the winter. But then it dies back and starts all over again. Another experiment for sure.
I picked the final plant, Euphorbia cotinifolia, partly because I wanted something with interesting red foliage. Then when I saw the genus name I was thinking “slam dunk.” Great leafy foliage and extreme drought tolerance because euphorbias as among the camels of the plant world, right? Well, not so fast, because it turns out this is one of the euphorbias that actually likes fairly regularly water. Groan. It was a big plant and I wasn’t looking forward to taking it back to the nursery, let alone having to spend another half day trying to find something I liked only half as much.
Euphorbia cotinifolia closeup
Then, researching it some more, I read that it’s actually extremely drought tolerant after all, but that it will drop its leaves in response to drought. Okay, it’s worth a try, I thought. Experiment number three. Placed in the largest of the large containers it’d stand a chance of staying watered enough to hold on to its leaves during the warm part of the year. (It’s naturally deciduous during cold weather.)
So I’ve ended up with three very different looking plants. The lomandra should stay green and grassy year-round. The kalanchoe will shoot up to some impressive height, flower during the winter, and then die back to start all over. And the euphorbia should be a warm, reddish-purple presence much of the year, only to shed its leaves when the kalanchoe is getting ready to show off. It should make for an interesting, ever-changing show.
August 11 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Euphorbia cotinifloia • Kalanchoe prolifera • Lomandra longifolia • potted plants | 2 Comments »
Our roof deck has felt like a barren wasteland ever since it was built. There’s a set of plastic garden furniture up there, but we’ve stared at the space and wondered why it continues to feel so inhospitable.
For the last two years, being a gardener, planting something up there in pots has been my first thought towards a solution. The space gets full sun all day, however, and even though we’d thought ahead to install a hose bib up there, the last thing we want to do is to lock ourselves into a responsibility of trying to remember to trudge up there X times a week to keep things watered.
There are automatic watering systems out there that might have helped with the problem. Orbit, for instance, makes a line of inexpensive battery-powered devices that hook up to a hose or bib. Our experience in the past with one of these units soured us on that thought, though. We found that the thing required a lot of attention to get flow and timings just right, and it resulted in an octopus’s worth of little hoses going everywhere.
Also, I’ve decided that there are two kinds of people out in the world. The gadget people are the ones who have to have the latest cool gizmo or supposed labor-saving device. They’re the first to have an iPhone and the last to pull a weed with their bare hands when there might a special device in the garage.
The simplifiers—and I usually count myself in their numbers—have little use for gadets, which we typically refer to as “toys.” We can sometimes seem obstructionist to the march of progress, and we often have to have the worth of something proved to us before we adopt it. At that point we’ll call a gadget a “necessary tool.” (A Luddite would be a highly developed subspecies of simplifier.)
So, last weekend, this simplifier decided to finally take on the roof deck. To make long-term life easier for me, the roof solution had to include the following practical considerations:
- Tough, sun-loving, drought-tolerant plants
- Large pots (to hold moisture longer)
- Mulch (to reduce evaporation of moisture)
- A grouping of pots so that the plants could shade each other
To that list, I needed to add that the chosen plants would have to be able to visually hold their own in a large space. And of course, the end result had to be fabulous, at least to my eyes. So shopping I went.
After spending so much time outdoors, visiting every nursery and home store in a ten mile radius, I came home with the worst sunburn so far this year. I also had three pots, three plants, and several bags of potting soil. Getting the largest pot—which must have weighed a hundred pounds—up the spiral staircase was quite a feat, but here’s the result.
Roof plantings
In the next couple of posts I’ll talk about the plants—which are all new to my garden—and then the pots, which I thought were cool finds.
August 10 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: potted plants • watering | 1 Comment »
It’s disappointing to put together a pot of several seemingly matched plants—even of the same species, only to have most of the plants dwarfed and out-competed by one of their pot-mates. Sometimes you want to throw your hands up and quote Rodney King, “I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? …I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out!”
A study published last year by McMaster University biologist Susan Dudley sheds some light on the phenomenon. She found that sibling plants of the same species coexist nicely when grown in the same pot, being generally considerate of each other as they produced their root systems. But in contrast, plants of the same species that were “strangers” to each other produced highly competitive root systems that didn’t show the same level of cooperation.
“Though they lack cognition and memory, the study shows plants are capable of complex social behaviours such as altruism towards relatives,” says Dudley in the McMaster Daily News. “Like humans, the most interesting behaviours occur beneath the surface.”
According to the report, the study was done with one species, “sea rocket (Cakile edentula), a member of the mustard family native to beaches throughout North America, including the Great Lakes,” so its effects might be different with other species.
But the next time you assemble a container planting it might be interesting to see if cuttings of one plant or seedlings from the same clones develop a more cooperative living arrangement than wildly different clones taken from the entire vegetable diaspora of the same species.
Image from:USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / Britton, N.L., and A. Brown. 1913. An illustrated flora of the northern United States, Canada and the British Possessions. Vol. 2: 196.
April 21 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Cakile edentula • plant competition • potted plants • sea rocket • Susan Dudley | 2 Comments »
Someone John knew had a big Australian tree fern in a pot in his front entry. The plant got too big and we adopted it. At some point we repotted it into a fairly huge pot, something like two feet across. The fern seemed happy enough and kept growing. That was three or four years ago, and by October the fern was about to grow into the eight foot tall patio cover.
When we completed the new raised bed having a giant tree fern in the middle of it wasn’t in the plan. But looking at the fern, setting it free into the ground seemed like the right thing to do.
Moving the 200 pounder through the soft new dirt wasn’t easy. Neither was digging a hole deep enough to accommodate it. (Thanks, John!) But the beast is in the ground, and from all appearances, pretty happy with its new spot in the garden. In fact, it celebrated by unfurling new frond after new frond, more than doubling the number it had while in a pot. Seeing that, it seemed like the fern had been in suspended animation all the while it was in the pot, and now it was finally tasting life. Nature in a pot may be convenient for the humans, but nature might not be so thrilled…
The new home for the fern…
Some new fronds…
December 02 2007 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Australian tree ferns • potted plants | No Comments »
