[ Lost in the Landscape ]

nepotism and plants

I enjoy odd botan­i­cal sci­ence sto­ries, and this was one of the stranger ones I’ve read in a while: Plants will look after clones of them­selves but won’t lift a petal to assist an unre­lated plant of the same species. That’s the con­tro­ver­sial result of a study pub­lished in Ecol­ogy Let­ters and pub­li­cized in yesterday’s BBC Mag­a­zine.

Richard Kar­ban of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Davis and Kaori Shio­jiri of Kyoto Uni­ver­sity in Otsu, Japan stud­ied the Great Basin sage­brush, Artemisia tri­den­tata. They found that there’s a chance that a plant will alert another iden­ti­cal clone of a species when dan­ger is near. But when two unre­lated Great Basin sage­brushes are placed next to each other, the strangers won’t do any­thing to help each other out. (How the plants com­mu­ni­cate wasn’t part of the study. Details…)

(Left: Artemisia tri­den­tata. Brit­ton, N.L., and A. Brown. 1913. An illus­trated flora of the north­ern United States, Canada and the British Pos­ses­sions. Vol. 3: 530.)

These find­ings sound a lot like another study I’d men­tioned just a lit­tle a year ago, where seedlings from the same par­ents will coex­ist hap­pily in a pot, while seedlings of the same species that come from dif­fer­ent par­ents will try to out-compete each other. Sim­i­lar processes might be going on in both of these studies.

All this is inter­est­ing when you think about hor­ti­cul­tural plants ver­sus wild pop­u­la­tions. Many plants in hor­ti­cul­ture and some in agri­cul­ture are grown from cut­tings, or are grafted or bud­ded or lay­ered. Each result­ing plant is a clone of another and will have iden­ti­cal, pre­dictable char­ac­ter­is­tics. If you buy a Fuji apple tree, you’d like to be assured that you get a Fuji apple, not a ran­dom seedling.

Accord­ing to find­ings in the new study, iden­ti­cal hor­ti­cul­tural plants might actu­ally have some tem­po­rary advan­tages. For instance one plant might help its neigh­bor brace for imme­di­ate haz­ards in their envi­ron­ment, maybe some­thing like an insect attack. (Some­one should try out how a pot full of cut­tings behave com­pared to the same species grown from seed from unre­lated parents.)

While gar­den­ers might enjoy pre­dictabil­ity, biol­o­gists would still say that this is a bad thing from a long term evo­lu­tion­ary stand­point. An ail­ment that could wipe out one plant could wipe out all the plants with iden­ti­cal genetic makeup. Nepo­tism among clones of the same plant might be use­ful for the plant’s imme­di­ate cir­cle, but is likely to be a dan­ger­ous thing for the future of the species.

June 02 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape | Tags: Artemisia tridentata • companion planting • sagebrush • science | 4 Comments »

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 »

at the tree of life nursery

The plant cat­a­log of the Tree of Life Nurs­ery is impres­sive. Selec­tions hail mainly from the state of Cal­i­for­nia, but they carry a few selec­tions from the South­west United States. Refresh­ingly they also aug­ment their selec­tion with plants from Baja California.

(The bio­log­i­cal zones of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia spread south of the imag­i­nary line of the inter­na­tional bor­der, so the inclu­sion of plants from Baja makes per­fect sense. The divi­sion of Alta Cal­i­for­nia from Baja Cal­i­for­nia is a purely human and arbi­trary one. There’s no river, no range of moun­tains to divide the two coun­tries, only an arbi­trary line on a map and stretches of bor­der fenc­ing that range from wispy strands of barbed wire to welded pieces of steel left over from Oper­a­tion Desert Storm.)

The Tree of Life cat­a­log even lists poi­son oak! (“Decid­u­ous shrub, vin­ing, shiny leaves, skin irri­tant, valu­able for wildlife, reveg­e­ta­tion.”) When I vis­ited on Sat­ur­day I didn’t see any out on the sales tables, though I wouldn’t have been sur­prised if they’d have offered to don their haz­mat suits and bring me up a cou­ple from the prop­a­ga­tion areas… They did have a good sam­pling of much of the rest of the cat­a­log, and I had the time to care­fully look over each of their offerings.

The nurs­ery is sur­rounded by plant­i­ngs that include a few of their offer­ings. Grown-up spec­i­mens are often com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the one-gallon babies, so it’s a great oppor­tu­nity to see how some plants will mature.

To give every­thing an authen­tic early-California feel they appar­ently have even thought to pep­per their grounds with period-appropriate rep­tiles. Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t see any.

The new dis­cov­ery of the week­end was a del­i­cate but stun­ning stand of late-autumn golden grasses of the pur­ple three-awn (Aris­tida pur­purea). Sway­ing gen­tly in the after­noon breeze and back­lit with the day’s sun, they looked like a slightly larger, less floppy native take on the Mex­i­can feather grass that’s get­ting to be a beau­ti­ful cliche in our gar­dens and quite poten­tially a new pest in our local canyons. Unfor­tu­nately I was so taken with the grasses that I neglected to take their portrait.

It was tough to say no to so many inter­est­ing plants, but I was there on a mis­sion: I needed some­thing extremely low and spread­ing for next to some step­ping stones that I’d installed last week­end. The loca­tion gets close to zero addi­tional water through­out the year, so the plants had to be happy with that kind of deprivation.

Trips to nurs­eries with­out a plan in hand can some­times lead to a bad case of assortment-itis, with a trunk-load of wildly dis­sim­i­lar plants with clash­ing cul­tural needs. I ended up with three selec­tions which, though dif­fer­ent species, have sim­i­lar cul­tural needs. Also I thought their strongly con­trast­ing plant forms and col­ors would look well together: a pros­trate form of the gray-green foliaged coastal Cal­i­for­nia sage­brush (Artemisia cal­i­for­nica ‘Canyon Gray’), a low selec­tion of Cal­i­for­nia buck­wheat (Eri­o­gonum fas­ci­c­u­la­tum ‘Dana Point’), and the almost white-foliaged Carmel aster (Lessin­gia filagini­fo­lia v. cal­i­for­nica).

And, um, yes. I did get a cou­ple other plants. But not too many…

November 04 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • places | Tags: Artemisia californica • Artemisia californica 'Canyon Gray' • California coastal sagebrush • Carmel aster • Dana Point buckwheat • Eriogonum fasciculatum • Eriogonum Fasciculatum 'Dana Point' • Lessingia filaginifolia v. californica • native plants • sagebrush • shopping • Tree of Life Nursery | 1 Comment »