[ Lost in the Landscape ]

some garden-worthy local plants

There’s usu­ally a big dis­con­nect between going to a nurs­ery to look at plants and going out botaniz­ing to an open space pre­serve like the one I live near. The plants in a nurs­ery will likely be the usual gar­den store sus­pects, mixed in with new intro­duc­tions from all over the globe. But what plants you see in the wilds, except for escapees from res­i­den­tial gar­dens, usu­ally have noth­ing to do with what you see in the nurseries.

Gar­dens are of course arti­fi­cial places. Although peo­ple may feel con­nected to nature while tend­ing their per­sonal land­scapes, it’s too often a nature that exists only at their local plant nurs­ery and nowhere in the wild lands around them. My own gar­den has these same ten­den­cies, but I’ve been try­ing to coun­ter­act them with more native plantings.

Things have also been chang­ing in at least some of the nurs­eries around town, and there’s a grad­ual flow of plants from our wild areas into people’s gar­dens. Most of the larger nurs­eries offer at least a small selec­tion of natives, and the spe­cialty native plant nurs­eries can always be counted on for a selec­tion of plants that they feel garden-worthy.

Sun­day was cool but sunny, a per­fect day for a short walk through my neigh­bor­hood canyon pre­serve to see some of these plants in their wild state. And along the way I saw a cou­ple that I think peo­ple wouldn’t mind liv­ing with.

Tecolote Canyon–literally “Owl Canyon”–includes a city park of about 900 acres, most of it the slopes and bot­toms of a coastal canyon that were too eco­nom­i­cally chal­leng­ing to build on. Some of the park has been handed over to a golf course and some ath­letic fields, but a lot of it remains in some­thing approach­ing its nat­ural state.

The trail cuts through sev­eral stands of our coastal live oaks, shown here with lots of neon green (non-native) grasses. These oaks would be gor­geous in pri­vate gar­dens. Imag­in­ing open­ing the back door and step­ping out into this. But a fun­gus that was imported from Europe in a ship­ment of rhodo­den­drons is now mak­ing these dif­fi­cult to grow in all but the most dri­est gar­den spaces.

Dur­ing the win­ter rains a lit­tle stream runs through the park. It takes months for the water to dry up com­pletely, so every now and then you’ll find lit­tle water­ing holes like this one.

Lemon­ade berry appears fre­quently in native gar­den plant­i­ngs and is easy to find at native nurs­eries. The plants have been bloom­ing in the canyon for a cou­ple months, and they’re still bloom­ing. This species forms a large, tidy shrub that stays an attrac­tive dark green color year round. Later in the year it’ll develop orange-to-salmon berries in the place of the flow­ers. Def­i­nitely garden-worthy.

Lemon­ade berry per­forms best near the coast where heavy frosts aren’t a con­cern, but it can come back if frozen.

These aren’t flow­ers, but I think they’re pretty attrac­tive. The toyon, also called Chrsit­mas berry (Het­erome­les arbu­ti­fo­lia) still had its berries out. This is another plant that makes an attrac­tive large ever­green shrub in the home land­scape. The leaves on this are just a lit­tle lighter green than those of the lemon­ade berry, and the plant more densely branched.

Toyon is a fine native sub­sti­tute for holly, bear­ing these berries dur­ing the time of year when holly would. (And speak­ing of “holly would,” did you know that Hol­ly­wood got its name from big stands of this that grew on the hill­sides over­look­ing what’s now tin­sel­town?) This is also one of the eas­ier plants to find commercially.

I’ve writ­ten recently about a new ground­cover milkvetch that I was try­ing out. A dif­fer­ent species with some­what similar-looking flow­ers was approach­ing peak bloom in sev­eral spots in the canyon. There are over 1500 vetch species on earth and a half-dozen in the county, but I believe this one is Astra­galus tri­chopo­dus.

The flow­ers are small and intri­cate and appear on a plant that can approach three feet tall. This milkvetch dies back to noth­ing dur­ing the sum­mer drought, but I think it would look great when com­bined with selec­tions that have more sum­mer interest.

The canyon hill­sides are over­run with inva­sive mus­tard that is just now start­ing to put on its spring growth spurt. But this milkvetch gets going quicker, and actu­ally seems to stand a chance against the black mus­tard men­ace, unlike other natives that mature later. Here you see it grow­ing up through the trel­lis of dead mus­tard stems left over from last year.

Not hav­ing spent much time in Texas, it took me a while to fig­ure out that Texas blue­bon­nets were Texas species of what I’d been call­ing lupines all my life. Here’s a “Cal­i­for­nia blue­bon­net.” In this canyon they’re more of an occa­sional treat than a plant that col­o­nizes big spreads of hill­side. They’re ephemeral, but would be gor­geous in a garden.

Fuchsia-flowered goose­berry is a shoulder-high shrub with a long bloom­ing period from win­ter through much of spring. You can prob­a­bly see from the pic­ture that it is a lit­tle on the thorny side, some­thing like you’d see on Vic­to­rian moss roses. But the flow­ers make this a strik­ing plant in the right spot. The shiny green leaves will per­sist through­out the year if the plant is given an occa­sional sum­mer sip of water. And did I men­tion “hummingbird-magnet?”

There were other native plants in bloom, includ­ing the perky scar­let mon­key flower. But my trip was just a lit­tle early to catch the the peak flow­er­ing. I’ll post more as I take more trips.

And of course, in a park sur­rounded by human habi­ta­tion, you’ll find a healthy sam­pling exotic species. I’ll post next on a few of my inter­est­ing but less garden-worthy encounters.

March 11 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • places • plant profiles | Tags: Astragalus trichopodus • Fuchsia-flowered gooseberry • Heteromeles arbutifolia • lemonade berry • lupines • milkvetch • native plants • Rhus integrifolia • Ribes speciosum • Tecolote Canyon • toyon | 5 Comments »