I first photographed these two trees over a decade ago, when I was working on a little photo project on local sycamores. I liked the way the two branches seemed to form a continuous arc when viewed from the right angle. Today, one of the trees is ailing and has lost some branches. Still, this little branch detail remains. The vegetation around the trees has changed over the years, as you might expect, and now you’ll have to stand in the middle of a big coyote bush to view the effect. At least it wasn’t a cactus.
When I started my photo series a lot of things attracted me to the Western sycamore, Platanus racemosa: their interesting branch structure, their over-scaled and dramatic leaves, their amazing exfoliating bark. And of the handful of native tree species within a few miles of my house, the sycamore may be the most spectacular this time of year. On my last trip to to San Diego’s Mission Trails Regional Park, I paid closest attention to what these trees were doing at the beginning of winter.
These are deciduous trees, along with the cottonwoods and willows, and they’ll attempt autumn or early winter color. Often the leaves are as much brown as they are yellow.
With a backdrop of gray sagebrush and black sage you’d never mistake this for a New England autumn postcard.
Things were nearing the end of leaf-fall. Most of the leaves lay underfoot.
Some of the leaves that weren’t underfoot were underwater.
With most of the leaves now off the trees, the light-colored bark stands out. Here a tree shows off its silhouette against a dark green evergreen live oak.
Looking closely at the bare trees lets you concentrate on their peeling bark. Who needs inkblots when you can do your own Rorschach test on patterns of sycamore bark? It’s great now, but will get more interesting as the year progresses.
Yellow, brown, gray and green are the main colors this time of year in the canyon bottoms where sycamores concentrate. Here’s a final shot of the last yellow-brown sycamore leaves of the season.
Nearby, cottonwoods contribute to the color scheme…
…as do the arroyo willows.
It won’t be long before the raucously colored flowers start up. But it’s a quietly beautiful time of year before they do.
I was confused the other day. Walking by the young plum tree, I noticed this. Flowers? In November? Apparently the plum was confused too.
After the long summer doldrums a lot in the garden is finally showing signs of waking up from its long nap. Some plants are showing new growth, others are blooming—even blooming when you don’t expect them to.
These paperwhite narcissus are a reliable indicator of the cooling days and nights ahead.
Protea ‘Pink Ice’ coexists with the most xeric plants in the garden and stays a resilient green all year. Beginning in the fall this big shrub begins its flowers. This will go on all winter and into the spring.
Salvia clevelandii’s main flowering happens in the spring. But given the right conditions—a little supplemental water doesn’t seem to hurt—it can throw a few more flowers in the fall.
Ditto for Salvia spathacea. Sometimes a lot is made of the repeat-flowering abilities of some of the natives. With these two, the spring flowerings are always way more stunning, and you’ll never confuse spring for fall. But as reminders of the late winter and spring flowers ahead, they’re terrific.
Another seasonally confused plant is this groundcover ceanothus. I’m only slowly now coming around to this genus. Groundcover versions like you see in the Burger King parking lot (think C. griseus ‘Yankee Point’) were all I saw for decades, but I’ve been trying to pay more attention to what other ceanothus have to offer. This one, unfortunately, is one of the Burger King-type varieties: low, flat, green all year on a low-to-moderate amount of water. It’s so inert and emphatically green it reminds me of plastic. I may never come to love this type, but fortunately there are other plants in the genus that do very different things.
My campus is incorporating more natives into the landscaping, and all these photos of natives, from the salvias, down, come from an afternoon walk yesterday afternoon. Here a young plant of one of the dendromecons (either D. rigida or D. harfordii) provides an airy cloud of yellow.
…and nearby one of the heucheras celebrates its spot in half-sun with occasional irrigation.
A few flowers, for sure. But it’s not really spring. We’ll need the rains to begin for that to happen.
It’s winter here in Chicago alright. There wasn’t much snow on the ground when I arrived, but a quick look at the leafless trees and a quick duck outside didn’t leave any confusion that it’s any season other than winter. I’ve been pretty busy attending a conference, but I did manage to take a little architectural tour the other day with some of the other conferees.
Here’s a nice house in the Hyde Park neighborhood as seen from the bus. Notice the wintry-looking bare trees. Brrrr, cold, said the California blogger.
Though nice, the house isn’t a major architectural landmark. However, as of last month, it became an important historical one: This is the non-White House residence of Barack Obama. Actually, it’s the side of the house. The road on the front side has been sealed off by the Secret Service.
That in part sums up the experience of visiting here in the winter. There’s a lot of stuff that would be really interesting—if only it were open. Or you see stuff that’s maybe not looking its best.
Still, there are at least a couple bloggable things I’ve run across that I’ll be posting after I return home. If only this were May, when the gardens are looking more extravagant and the garden bloggers will be convening for their Spring Fling…
This is one of the reasons why people live in a Mediterranean climate like San Diego, suffering the frequent 70-plus degree daytime temperatures. Here’s the view out the front room window onto this huge, mounding pile of blooming aloe. I think it’s A. arborescens, one of the more common species that you see all over town. (There’s a little epidendrum orchid blooming just outside the window, but who’s going to pay it any attention with the aloe going off in the background?)
A closer look at the flowers…
…and a closer look at the leaves of the aloe (serrated edges, much softer than they appear) and the agave (straight edges).
For some people, it’s not winter without seeing snow. For me, it’s not winter until I’ve seen the aloe. Okay. I’m ready for spring now.
John and I spent the holidays at his aunt’s house in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Northridge. Christmas at her house is a family affair, but with family dispersed around the country, it’s not always as raucous as it sometimes has been. This year we were thrilled to have a big contingent of immediate family, including Jenny and her mad scientist husband from South Carolina. Past readers of this blog might recognize Jenny’s name as a sometimes contributor of photos and comments. It was great seeing you, Jenny! (And Joe too!)
Friday, on our return home, John and I stopped by the Getty Center for an exhibition of the photographs of Carleton Watkins (more on that show in a future post). To visit the Getty without taking in its gardens would be unthinkable, and we spent more time outdoors than we did in the galleries.
It had rained the previous two days, clearing out the garbage in the air. The views from the hilltop were spectacular. Here you can see the skylines of Century City in the foreground against downtown in the distance.
This is the view to the southwest, across Santa Monica Bay. The distant land mass (straight ahead and to the right) is Catalina Island, forty-plus miles away.
The visit last Friday was the first time we’d visited the gardens of the Getty Center during the winter. The Robert-Irwin-designed Central Garden advertises itself as “always changing, never twice the same,” so this would be a good chance to see it during a time that was less pornographic with flowering plants.
Still, there were flowers. This is the core planting of clipped azaleas in the central water feature. In fact this was the first time I’d been there when the little mazes were showing any flowers. In addition to the blooms, the foliage of one of the two azalea varieties darkens and reddens in the cooler winter weather, making the planting appear to be comprised of interlocking rings of different plants.
If you click on the image to enlarge it, you’ll see that the plants could stand a little bit of clipping. The azaleas are little floating islands in the water, so keeping them trimmed involves a little more than strolling over them with hedge clippers.
John’s aunt volunteers at the museum, and once she’d asked one of the groundskeepers how they trim the plants. At first he mimed getting in a boat and rowing to the azaleas. Then, after pausing for effect, he grinned and said that the water was really shallow, and that they actually just donned some waders to do their work.
Aside from the azaleas, there were just a few other things in bloom: bougainvilleas, brugmansias, roses, eryngiums (sea-hollies) and some winter bloomers. Most of the interest came in the form of foliage and stems.
Here are some details from the plantings that emphasize color, form and texture, most of it best appreciated at close distances. Some of the color combinations rant toward the monochromatic. Here gray succulents contrast with the black leaves of Ophiopogon planiscapus.
This one featured yellow and green.
The foliage here tends more towards the bronze end of things.
In this composition, the silver-leaved Dichondra argentea is being slowly out-competed by the red oxalis (probably a red-leaved form of O. pupurea). Once the weather warms, the oxalis will die back, letting the dichondra regain its dominance.
Some of the color combinations were more varied.
Some plantings ran towards the chaotic. Like, don’t you think the blue aster-ey bits in this planting (lower right) are a little too over the top? I think the light gray leaves would have added a nice contrast to this combination. But the flowers… Gild the lily, why don’t you?
But, hey, it’s all taste isn’t it?
In a nod to the season, several specimens of browned late-season grasses moved dramatically in the strong midday winds. Before you go getting any ideas that this was a planting in the heightened naturalistic style of the New Perennials garden designers like Piet Oudolf, the grasses were single plants of contrasting species, placed in pots placed along the walkway.
In this last photo, in contrast to the preceding pictures of winter grasses, two plants with somewhat grass-like forms belie the fact that it’s winter. To the left is the restio, Chondoropetalum elephantinum, and the right is variegated society garlic, Tulbaghia violacea.
Some garden designers would like you to be able to know exactly what season it is by looking at the plants in the garden. Following this philosophy you should be able to set your calendar by looking at the garden. But what gives away the fact that it’s winter in this photo are the two visitors, bundled up against the cold. Looks like winter to me!
And you know what that means…only four years to go until 12-21-12, the Mayan End of World, as baktun 13 comes to its close!
Apparently the Mayans didn’t have Hallmark stores where they could buy themselves new calendars…maybe something light and fluffy with kittens or puppies or blooming daffodils on it…
At least the Mayans were in tune enough with their environment to end their calendar on the shortest day of the year. For those of using this Gregorian calendar: Where’d we ever get this December 31 end-of-the-year nonsense? What does December 31 have to do with the natural world? The Gregorian calendar is a boondoggle invented by several centuries of committee meetings if there ever was one!
Suggested soundtrack: R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Or, for a viewing suggestion: Wim Wenders’ epic film, Until the End of the World (which happens to use the R.E.M. song).
Southern California gets fall foliage colors too. If there’s a single tree that we can point to it would have to be the southern sweetgum, Liquidambar styraciflua. You see planted all over, so much that you might call it a cliche—But how can you can something so satisfying a cliche? To me it’s one of the comfort foods of plants, especially now that the weather has turned cool and thoughts turn towards winter.
Liquidambar Leaves
My own associations with the plant go back years. My mother planted a tree of the clone ‘Burgundy’ in front of the Los Angeles-area house where I spent many of my childhood years. The tree produced red to purple leaves in the fall, depending on the weather conditions, and proved to be a favorite backdrop for a number of family Thanksgiving pictures. When my parents retired to Oceanside, my mother started a sapling in from of the new home.
The plant is planted so much you might almost think it’s a native. But instead it hails from the American South—some compensation for their alligators and mosquitoes. In some locations it has escaped into the wilds, but seems to be much less of a problem than many other plants.
Liquidambars at UCSD
This is a planting at the UCSD campus, photographed this week between rainstorms. The plants began coloring up a month or more ago. Unlike aspens or maples or other plants with amazing autumn foliage, some liquidambar clones can hold on to their leaves through much of the winter. In fact, there was a year where big stands of it still had dark purple foliage hanging on the branches, even as the new growth was emerging in the spring.
What a weird year that was, a sign that sometimes we seem to escape having a genuine winter. But we do get autum. And liquidambars are the proof.
At least that’s seemingly the case for those of us in Mediterranean climates. With our dry summers and moist winters, the plants best adapted to our climate come close to taking the summer summer off, and then use the onset of cooler, wetter weather to start thinking about getting growing again. Some of the shrubs in the local canyons drop some or all of their leaves in response to drought stress, and most of the wildland annuals disappear not long after the last rains. Our long brown season of summer could almost be confused with the depths of winter in other areas.
Leafless Coreopsis gigantea
Left: Coreopsis gigantea in its defensive, leafless summer mode.
Reading the recent blogs from those other climates, I’m noticing that people are starting to withdraw from their gardens, holing up with some favorite plants transplanted into pots to overwinter indoors. These gardeners are thinking about sitting down with plant catalogs and looking ahead to the holidays, and then to warmer days and the reemergence of their gardens.
Garden before transplanting and thinning
[caption id=”attachment_2032” align=”alignleft” width=”300” caption=”Garden after autumn thinning and transplanting”][/caption]
Here in San Diego, however, I started off September by transplanting plants around the garden, readjusting plant spacing and color relationships.
Left: Some of the garden before and after autumn thinning and transplanting.
Autumn seedlings
I planted dozens of little pots of seeds of plants that I want to grow this fall and next year: giant coreopsis, datura, buckwheats from the Channel Islands, mallows from the desert, millet for the birds and some South African restios for a spot in the garden where the original plants haven’t aged gracefully. It’s a frenzy of activity of the sort that people in other climates would associate with late winter and early spring.
Autumn weeds
All summer, the patches of earth that get almost no supplemental water stay brown and virtually weed-free. Once the rains return, the weeds begin to claim the universe and the weeding chores begin again.
Fortunately, a layer of mulch makes a world of difference in keeping down weed seedlings. Unfortunately, areas where you want to sow wildflower seed can’t be mulched at all if you want the little seeds to germinate on their own. To keep down my workload, this year I’m isolating the wildflower patches to just a couple spots, around a couple little trees that will drop their leaves for the winter. We’ll see how well that works out…
A few spots in my garden don’t have to abide by strictly Mediterranean water requirements. There’s a small herb and vegetable garden that gets moderate doses of water year-round. A new raised bed harbors some tropicals that get to stay moist, as well as some other selections that need a little help with the water. This is the part of the garden that gets to experience summer along with the rest of the world. So the task of weeding never completely comes to an end, although it’s greatly localized to these spots that get watered one to three times a week.
All in all, this 2% of the Earth’s land mass that experiences this Mediterranean climate (the region around the Mediterranean Sea, western South Africa, parts of the Chilean coast, western Australia, and much of California) has its own seasonal cycles that don’t sync up easily with the rest of the world. Gardeners in other areas might not understand us. Forgive us if we have this glaze of anticipation coating our moods these days. Even as we worry about weeds and increased garden chores, fall is here, and it’s the emergence of a whole new season in the garden.
Garden’s aren’t neutral, apolitical spaces. Along with the subtle autumn changes in foliage the neighborhood has been growing Obama and the occasional McCain yard signs, as well as signs for where the homeowners stand on the various state propositions.
My No On 8 Sign
Here’s a view from the front sidewalk of one of my signs. I couldn’t get a proper yard sign locally, but I found a small window sign in pdf format to print from the web. Yeah, it’s tiny. So small I put another one in my car window, about two feet away, eye-level, from the sidewalk. No missing that one.
The summer just concluded has been a remarkable one here in California. When the California Supreme Court ruled last spring that prohibitions against gay marriage were against the principles of the state constitution, it opened up the floodgates for a lot of us who’ve been in long-term relationships to finally be able to enter into the legal relationship that mirrored how we live our lives every day.
I wrote a while ago of John and my getting married, back in June. And so many of our friends have decided to tie the knot. Although John and I are usually homebodies our social calendar up to September had us attending more weddings than we’ve attended in a decade, let alone one summer. We attended weddings and receptions in people’s backyards, in some of our local parks and in parts of town with sweeping views of I wasn’t in the state in the summer of 1967, the original Summer of Love, but this was one all over again.
No On Proposition 8
There are political and social forces afoot here in the state and beyond that want to withdraw those newly-granted civil rights, however. Proposition 8 on California’s November ballot would place discriminatory language in the state constitution of the sort that’s been pushed into many other state constitutions over the last decade. In our difficult times, first post-9/11 and now in the middle of our current economic meltdown, it’s easy for people to turn on each other and pick on the easiest targets. But I think we can do better than that.
California is poised to be the first state in the country to reject that trend. The polls are still pointing to the proposition going down to defeat, and even our Republican Governor is opposed to it. But we’re in no position to take things for granted. The margin is slim, and getting smaller as the election nears. And who’s not to say that there won’t be a “Bradley-effect,” with voters trying to sound more open-minded or tolerant to a pollster even if it won’t reflect what they’ll actually do in the voting booth?
So, this November, be sure to vote: Vote for me and John, who’ve been together over 25 years, or John and Robert who’ve been together over 21, or for Liz and Ellen, or Mason and Carlos, or Paul and Alan or the dozens of people we know plus the thousands of other couples in the state who’ve committed to each other. Is it time for divisive politics as usual or for real change? This is our chance to lead the way.
When you spend your time in San Diego’s well-watered burbs it’s easy to forget that you’re living in the middle of a desert. The last significant rainfall in town occurred in February, and the unirrigated natural lands around town have long ago begun their transformation into the long brown season.
My recent little excursion to Los Peñasquitos Canyon, a local open-space preserve between San Diego and Del Mar, gave me a chance to see what the natural world is doing in these parts.
Not everything is brown, of course. Some plants are tapped into locations with residual moisture. Others have adapted to the climate and have the stamina to stay green year-round.
Here are a few of the plants still showing colors other than brown:
Flat-topped buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum) a native plant.
Wild rose (Rosa californica) a native.
Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) an exotic, invasive species. This is the culinary plant from the Mediterranean that has escaped into the wilds.
Poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum) a native—one of the few plants that turns blazing red in the fall. Even now, it’s showing some of that red color.
Thistle in bloom. I’m not sure if this is native or not, but it’s not the hyper-nasty Russian thistle (the dried flowers of which are shown in the large photo above). [Correction/edit August 1: This is actually a teasel, not a thistle. Like the escaped fennel above, this too is a renegade exotic species. Pretty, though…]
It’s a condition of our consumer culture and times to want what we don’t have. Living in San Diego, most of the plant materials that people expect to find in their home gardens fall outside of the category of what occurs naturally or is well-suited to the area.
It’s always instructive to visit the natural preserves to see plants—even the nasty invasives—that are supremely well-designed to live in this climate. Some of the plants in these parks would do extremely well in gardens. But it’s hard letting go of plants that many of us associate with places we’ve lived in and even people we’ve known.
My own yard has several areas that I consider my guilty pleasure zones. I have pieces of a bromeliad and a kahili ginger that I was given in the 1970s, as well as the green rose from that I dug up from the house where I grew up in the Los Angeles area. And I’m a natural born collector who has a hard time saying no to interesting plants. These plants all require some water and tending beyond what nature brings.
But they’re counterbalanced by garden areas planted with drought-tolerant species, local and introduced, that receive almost no water and attention over the summer. As time goes on, I’ll be expanding those areas. Don’t expect me any time soon, however, to plant poison oak, as pretty and hardy as the plant is. I have my limits as to how much true nature I want in my garden…
