visiting crestridge

For today’s Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day I’m doing some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. My gar­den looks a lot like it has in recent posts, so I thought I’d take you along on a tour last week­end of Cre­stridge Eco­log­i­cal Pre­serve, in San Diego County, a lit­tle over half an hour from the coast. The flow­ers were out in force.

One of the inter­est­ing nar­ra­tives of this place is how a land­scape responds to being burned. This pre­serve and many of the homes around it burned intensely in the big 2003 Cedar Fire. A lot of the homes nearby with their new tile roofs and crisp, new stucco look like they’ve been rebuilt out of the ashes.

Same goes for the plants. The Engel­mann oaks that help define the char­ac­ter of the pre­serve burned. But many are bounc­ing back. Really, if it weren’t for the burned snags it’d be hard to guess that this area was cin­ders seven and a half years ago.

The Pre­serve fea­tures a small vis­i­tor kiosk designed by James T. Hubbell, the county’s best known pro­po­nent of organic archi­tec­ture. Wood post-and-beam con­struc­tion with straw-bale infill makes up the walls of the one-room space. Floors are a mix of flag­stone and tile mosaics. Very groovy.

Around the kiosk is a native plant gar­den funded by a grant by the local CNPS chap­ter. Unlike the land­scape around it, this gar­den receives some irri­ga­tion to keep it look­ing more garden-like. But today the gar­den extended seam­less into the sur­round­ing landscape.

The flo­ral high­light of the trip is the the preserve’s stand of the rare Lake­side cean­othus, Cean­othus cya­neus. It’s vivid, dark color and big flo­ral heads make it what must be one of the most spec­tac­u­lar of the cean­othus species. It’s not par­tic­u­larly gar­den tol­er­ant, but given per­fect drainage and no water once estab­lished, it might hang around for a few years and stop traf­fic pass­ing by your garden.

On this trip we saw this lilac, as well as late-blooming exam­ples of the much more com­mon but less spec­tac­u­lar Ramona lilac, Cean­othus tomen­to­sus, and some inter­grades that look like they’re the love chil­dren of these two species.

Below is a lit­tle gallery of the visit. Hover on any image for a label of the plant. Click to see the entire image.


Check out what’s hap­pen­ing in gar­dens around the world in the other Gar­den Blog­gers Bloom Day posts hosted by Carol, of May Dreams Gar­dens. As always, thanks, Carol!

May 15 2011 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: • • • • • • • • | 13 Comments »

a visit to recon native plants

Week­end before last my native plant soci­ety orga­nized a lit­tle prop­a­ga­tion work­shop that was hosted by Recon Native Plants. One of the ses­sions focused on grow­ing plants from seed, another on prop­a­gat­ing from cut­tings. I’ve done a bit of both, though my suc­cess with seeds def­i­nitely out­shines any luck with grow­ing any­thing from cut­tings. My main take-away for the cut­tings ses­sion was to try to take the cut­tings early in the morn­ing, when the plants are least dried out. I’ll be giv­ing that a try and shar­ing what­ever suc­cesses or fail­ures that that leads to.

My favorite part of the morn­ing was a chance to tour the nurs­ery and see a large whole­sale oper­a­tion ded­i­cated to prop­a­gat­ing Cal­i­for­nia and South­west­ern natives. Recon Mountain of PotsIn my lit­tle backyard-garden world I’m used to see­ing a few plants in pots sit­ting around, wait­ing to be planted. To visit such a big facil­ity is to see the world in a dif­fer­ent way. Here’s an art­fully arranged moun­tain of gal­lon pots filled with soil mix being planted with lit­tle arteme­sias. I’ll never com­plain again about hav­ing to pot up a half dozen trans­plants. con­tinue reading »

November 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • places | Tags: • • • | 3 Comments »