[ Lost in the Landscape ]

pining for the fjords

Dead plants? Or are these just rest­ing, pin­ing for the fjords?

I suf­fer from that mix of lazi­ness, lack of time and unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions that will let me leave a dead plant in the ground longer than it prob­a­bly should stay in a home gar­den that is try­ing to look pre­sentable to the neigh­bors. Some­times I’ll even water a dead plant, know­ing I’m wast­ing my water, but secretly hop­ing that there might just be the least chance the plant isn’t really gone.

A few new plants in the gar­den don’t sur­vive the ini­tial trans­plant. I still find myself under­es­ti­mat­ing the water needs of a new plant. Just because it’s “drought-tolerant” doesn’t mean it will take to its new dry home in the gar­den with­out enough water to get a proper root sys­tem estab­lished out­side the con­fines of the lit­tle nurs­ery con­tain­ers. The plants above, two of the five deer­weeds I planted this year, prob­a­bly didn’t make it for that rea­son. It prob­a­bly didn’t help that the smaller of the two plants was set into a bed where nearby plants had estab­lished a root sys­tem already and would likely steal away any water I gave the new plant. This pic­ture shows some of the com­pet­ing roots.

Other plants just seem to…die. Here’s an ex-monkey flower to the left. Maybe it was lack of water in its sec­ond year. Maybe it didn’t like its spot. And the plant to the right is my Guata­malan blue, the ivy-leaved sage, Salvia cacali­ae­fo­lia. No mys­tery with this one. It was get­ting way too big, and I pruned it ridicu­lously hard in late July or August. Killed it. There was a bit of green left as recently as a month ago, and this plant being a sage prob­a­bly would have rooted if I’d stuck one of the green bits in some cut­ting mix. But I dozed. Dead plant.

But every now and then some­thing like this hap­pens. I’d planted this blad­der­pod (Iso­meris arborea) in the late win­ter and kept it watered. It seemed to be hang­ing on okay but wasn’t a fast grower. Then a colony of some insects I’d never seen before descended overnight and seemed to be repro­duc­ing a new gen­er­a­tion. In the process they stripped most of its leaves. The plant quickly dropped what few leaves were left and I wrote it off as dead. In a weird way I thought of its demise as a suc­cess story: The native plant pro­vided food and shel­ter for one of the less usual vis­i­tors to the gar­den. Only in the course of things I thought the plant had per­ished. Bummer.

But here it is three months later, leafed out, wait­ing for the rains to come. With suc­cess sto­ries like this I’m reluc­tant to give up on the plants in the other pho­tos, but I think their time has come.

November 17 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: dead plants • Lotus scoparius • native plants • pruning • watering | 4 Comments »

trimming leaves

Here’s a lit­tle plant-tidying tip that I picked up years ago. If you have sword-shaped leaves that have died on their ends, instead of chop­ping off the ends blunt and square, trim them into a pointed shape using very sharp prun­ing shears or scis­sors. This gives you a more nat­ural shape to what’s left.

If some­one looks really closely they won’t be fooled by your hand­i­work, but it’ll draw less atten­tion than if you’d just lopped off the brown tips.

Before:

After:

July 22 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: pruning | No Comments »

the snake path

I just wrote about Robert Irwin’s ter­rific art­work in the UCSD Stu­art col­lec­tion. The col­lec­tion has another piece that I like, Alexis Smith’s Snake Path, from 1992.

From the collection’s page on the artist:

Smith’s work for the Stu­art Col­lec­tion alludes to the com­plex rela­tion­ship between nature and cul­ture or, in the con­text of the uni­ver­sity, between knowl­edge and the land­scape. Her Snake Path con­sists of a wind­ing 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide foot­path tiled in the form of a ser­pent whose head ends at the ter­race of the Cen­tral Library. The tail wraps around an exist­ing con­crete path­way as a snake would wrap itself around a tree limb. Along the way, the serpent’s slightly rounded body passes a mon­u­men­tal gran­ite book carved with a quote from Milton’s Par­adise Lost. The snake then cir­cles around a small trop­i­cal gar­den rep­re­sent­ing Eden. These pointed allu­sions to the bib­li­cal con­flict between inno­cence and knowl­edge mark an apt sym­bolic path to the university’s main repos­i­tory of books. The con­cept of find­ing sanc­tu­ary within one­self — out­side the ide­al­is­tic and pro­tected con­fines of the uni­ver­sity — speaks directly to the stu­dent on the verge of enter­ing the “real world.”

Here’s their offi­cial overview pic­ture of the work:



And here are some snap­shots from a walk there last week, first a closeup of the hexag­o­nal slate tiles that make up the snake’s “scales”:



…and here are a cou­ple shots of Eden, maybe not exactly “trop­i­cal,” as described, but a lush plant­ing that con­trasts to the sur­round­ing native veg­e­ta­tion:






The plants in “Eden” are plants that have bib­li­cal ref­er­ences or those that some­how look like they’d belong in an eden. In the two pic­tures above you can see how the Ital­ian cypresses have been pruned in a way that to me recalls some of the plants in the back­ground of Leonardo’s 1470s Annun­ci­a­tion, now at the Uffizi Gallery in Flo­rence:



So…you can study gar­den books on how to prune a plant–or you can study a paint­ing by Leonardo da Vinci!

March 20 2008 | Categories: art • places | Tags: Alexis Smith • Cupressus sempervirens • eden • Italian cypress • Leonardo • pruning | 3 Comments »