[ Lost in the Landscape ]

live, from california…

A plant’s name can often help give you a sense of place as to where the plant orig­i­nated. I’ve been notic­ing recently that a lot of plants in the gar­den have species names that are either “cal­i­for­nica” or “cal­i­for­ni­cus.” I guess you can’t get much more Cal­i­for­nia than that.

First is our ever-popular state flower, the Cal­i­for­nia poppy, Escholzia cal­i­for­nica. Most of you are famil­iar with this form, the bright orange one that comes in Cal­i­for­nia wild­flower mixes. I planted some seed a decade ago, and these come back every year, some where they did the pre­vi­ous year, some a few feet away. But for me they’re not the wan­der­ing world trav­eler that they are for some peo­ple. (They’ve nat­u­ral­ized in parts of Chile and are on the pest (but not inva­sive) species list for Ten­nessee.)

This year I’m also grow­ing from seed the form of the species that you actu­ally find in this part of the state, Escholzia cal­i­for­nica mar­itima. The flow­ers are about a third of the size of the orange ver­sion, and are gold shad­ing to a yellow-orange. My pam­pered plants are tak­ing their time flow­er­ing, so these are images of plants in the winds, on the bluffs over­look­ing the ocean south of Del Mar. Once these start bloom­ing, I’ll prob­a­bly cut back the orange ones so the two strains don’t hybridize.

And here’s the clas­sic orange poppy in the gar­den grow­ing in the mid­dle of a pros­trate form of Cal­i­for­nia sage­brush, Artemisia cal­i­for­nica ‘Canyon Gray.’ While most of the forms of sage­brush are, well, brushy and upright, this selec­tion from the Chan­nel Islands off the coast of Ven­tura grows near the ground and sprawls a bit. The plant can get a lit­tle leggy in the mid­dle, so a well-placed vol­un­teer poppy seedling can be the best way to con­ceal that fact.

I wrote last year about this wild ranun­cu­lus, Ranun­cu­lus cal­i­for­ni­cus, or Cal­i­for­nia but­ter­cup. It dis­ap­pears not long after flow­er­ing, but it’s a nice pres­ence dur­ing early spring.

The coast sun­flower, Encelia cal­i­for­nica, con­tin­ues the yellow-to-orange theme. My plants were planted only recently and aren’t bloom­ing yet. This is a stand of it at Tor­rey Pines Pre­serve this past Mon­day, doing just fine with nat­ural rain­fall. (It won’t be quite so orna­men­tal once the mois­ture gives out, however.)

The last one I’ll share today has got to be one of the more spec­tac­u­lar Cal­i­for­ni­ans, the bush anenome, Car­pen­te­ria cal­i­for­nica. The flow­ers began to open just this week. This species hails from the Sierra foothills where it can become quite the large shrub. My plant has tripled in size in one year, though it’s still not more than three feet tall. It can triple in size again, and then I’m get­ting the prun­ing shears. Pretty flow­ers, though, no?

March 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Artemisia californica 'Canyon Gray' • bush anemone • California • California poppy • Carpenteria californica • coast sunflower • Encelia californica • Escholzia californica • Escholzia californica maritima • native plants • Ranunculus californicus • sagebrush | 5 Comments »

return of the native

I’ve been watch­ing the seedlings, and now they’re just begin­ning to bloom: Ranun­cu­lus cal­i­for­ni­cus, a.k.a. “Cal­i­for­nia buttercup.”

I bought a plant at a native plant sale maybe ten years ago. The species gows 18–24 inches tall, is drought-tolerant, and stays pretty showy for a cou­ple months in the early spring with bright heads of these sim­ple yel­low flow­ers car­ried above the del­i­cate and shiny foliage. It self-sowed read­ily with­out becom­ing weedy, so that one plant became a nice hand­ful. That nice hand­ful, how­ever, got run over by a lit­tle back­hoe a cou­ple years ago when we did a lit­tle addi­tion to the back of the house. Where there used to be gar­den there was just tram­pled dirt. Now the first ranun­cu­lus are back, maybe not exactly where I’d want them, but close enough.

With too many of these native Cal­i­for­nia plants, they show up at native plant nurs­eries, but when you go out to the wilds you hardly ever run across them. But one of the last times I was hik­ing around the local San Clemente Canyon pre­serve, maybe 3 miles away, I looked down and there it was: Ranun­cu­lus cal­i­for­nica, as happy on the hill­side as it was back home in the garden.

March 18 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: native plants • Ranunculus californicus • reseeding | 1 Comment »