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!

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. In 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.

The world of commercial native plants covers a wide swath from feeding the needs and sometimes-fickle wants of home horticulturalists to supplying material for careful habitat restoration projects. Recon wholesales plants to landscapers, and I occasionally see their plants around town at various specialty nurseries. But a big portion of their production goes to habitat restoration projects.

The best of these projects use plants with genetic material from as near to the area that is being restored as possible, or to at least use examples of plants from a similar ecological niche. (A California buckwheat from the coastal area might not compete so effectively as and example fo the same species from a desert area, for instance.) Growing plants from location-sourced seeds is one of Recon’s specialties. Here’s an example: big sacks of seed heads of one of the plants that are called golden bush, Isocoma menziesii, from the Tijuana River Valley, waiting to be processed and sown.

Located in extreme southwestern San Diego County, about a mile from the Mexican border, Recon well may be the southwestern-most nursery in the continental United States. The grounds are an old converted dairy and have a cool industrial vibe to them, nothing like the warm and fuzzy country-cottage look and feel a lot of retail nurseries cultivate. Some of the troughs and tanks that were used to feed and water the cows take on a new life as giant planters.

I didn’t get the ID on what’s growing in this in this tank, some kind of sedge maybe?

But another tank was full of hummingbird sage, Salvia spathacea.

And there was a trough full of saltgrass, Distichilis spicata.

Unless a customer needs plants grown in a light-weight potting mix, Recon uses a proprietary blend that uses good old dirt as its base. If you find a plant from Recon in a nursery and lift it you’ll be surprised by how heavy the soil weighs, like the earth’s gravitational force is yanking twice as hard on a pot of natives. The soil they use comes from about six to eleven inches down in the ground. Higher up, the soil has more weed seeds; lower down, it has fewer of the beneficial soil microorganisms. Plants grown this way can stand a better chance of survival when they’re planted.

I took a bunch of random photos there. This is one of their propagation houses.

Here’s an area where they’re germinating hundreds and hundreds of California buckwheat.

And here’s a shade house where plants are hardened off with 30% shade before being exposed to full sun.

To end this post I don’t have any splashy photos of plants covered with flowers screaming “buy me” like you’d find at the local chain nursery, but Recon’s not that kind of place. But if you see a California landscape that’s been returned to a credible semblance of its former self after having been overrun by exotics or mauled by human development, there’s a chance that some of the plants had their origin right here.