[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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 »

too late for 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.

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.

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.

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 »

three new plants

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.

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.

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.

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 »

wasteland no more

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.

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 »

altruistic plants?

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 »

free at last

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 »