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.
December 19 2008 | Categories: gardening • plant profiles | Tags: fall • Liquidambar styraciflua • seasons • sweetgum • UCSD | 3 Comments »
Autumn: It’s the new spring.
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
Garden after autumn thinning and transplanting
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.
November 16 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: fall • Mediterranean climate • seasons • spring • transplanting • weeding • weeds | 6 Comments »
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.
October 25 2008 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: civil rights • Proposition 8 • seasons • summer | 1 Comment »
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…
July 29 2008 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • invasive plants • Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve • native plants • seasons • summer | 4 Comments »
Ah summer, the season when the meadow blooms and the stag farts! Here are some sprightly words celebrating the season we’ve just begun. They’re the lyrics to a bouncy little ditty circa the year 1260 that most students going through music history courses will have have run across. If your Middle English is about as bad as mine, I’ve provided a translation.
Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu;
Ne swik þu nauer nu.
Pes:
Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.
Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu! |
Summer has come in,
Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
The seed grows and the meadow blooms
And the wood springs anew,
Sing, Cuckoo!
The ewe bleats after the lamb
The cow lows after the calf.
The bullock stirs, the stag farts,
Merrily sing, Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing, cuckoo;
Don’t you ever stop now,
Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.
Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now! |
You can sing it all by yourself, but it’s designed to be four-part round that you sing over a two-part ground. If you’re tired of “Row, row, row your boat” as the only round to sing at summer camp this might be just the ticket. Below is the music (click it to enlarge). And if you want to sing along, click here for an mp3 file [ source ].
Sumer is icumen in, transcribed from the ca. 1260 manuscript by Blahedo, used under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.5 license [ source ].
Warning: Once you listen to it a few times–and maybe even sing along–it gets to be one of those “It’s a Small World” earworm tunes that you’ll have a hard time getting rid of.
Find out more.
And if anyone’s reading this in the Southern hemisphere, here’s Ezra Pound’s winter parody. (I guess he wasn’t particularly fond of winter.)
June 29 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: music • seasons • sumer is icumen in • summer | No Comments »
The Japanese language has many poetic names for the seasons. One phrase that I’ve found particularly beautiful is take no aki, or “bamboo autumn.” It refers to the period in middle– to late-spring when leaves of some bamboos turn yellow and fall from the plants. In addition to the gorgeous built-in poetic analogy, I like how the phrase grounds a specific portion of the season by invoking a natural process that presumably would have been understood by a good portion of the population.
When I take my lunch break during the week and head to the gym, I follow a path that takes me by a small cluster of eucalyptus trees planted in a patch of lawn. Several of the trees have beautifully smooth trunks which are covered with a delicately mottled silvery bark. Once a year, usually late in spring or early in summer, the bark exfoliates, dropping off in small chunks that reveal the surprise: a bumpy, pale ocher layer of new bark underneath.
Another of the trees drops larger, thin, brittle sheets of red-brown bark, revealing a deliciously pale icy green below.
Many eucalyptus species have bark that exfoliates, as do many other trees, such as the sycamores that congregate in the moister areas of the local canyon bottoms. So…why shouldn’t we have a name for when that happens? Why shouldn’t we come up with ways to reattach language to natural processes and the world around us? Why not refer to this awkward transitional spring-summer period we’re in as “eucalyptus autumn?“
(Okay, okay, if you must quibble, not all of the 740-plus eucalyptus species shed their bark. And those that do, don’t do it at exactly the same time. But I vote for anything that grounds us more securely in the cycles of the world. And language, being such a fundamental component of our existence, seems like a great tool to use to accomplish the goal.)
June 26 2008 | Categories: plant profiles • rambles | Tags: bamboo autumn • exfoliating bark • seasons | 2 Comments »
I’m still visiting Newport R.I. where it seems like things are on hold. The lawns are mostly brown, the trees largely bare. Some evergreens seem like they’re waiting, like they’ve been waiting. A few rhododendrons or azaleas probably could be spectacular, but they’re not going to fulfill that promise anytime soon. It’s winter.
On the plane here I was reading the introduction to a scholarly edition of the Sukateiki, the Japanese eleventh-century gardening treatise that’s possibly the oldest book on gardening in existence in any language. In a chapter on geomancy, the authors discuss how the five geomantic elements–wood, fire, earth, metal, water–correspond to the seasons. Metal is autumn, water is winter, wood is spring, fire is summer, and earth the season that follows, doyo (pretend that there’s a macron–a long line–over the concluding “o”). So…five elements, five seasons? That got me thinking.
I spent some of my childhood in Burma, a tropical country with weather and seasons governed by the monsoons off the Indian Ocean. (An aside: To see what you can do to stay informed on the awful political mess there, as well as what you can do to help, click here.) There we had a cold dry season, then a hot dry season, followed by the rainy season. Three seasons. When my mother would talk about life in Ohio, with its four seasons, with its seasons of cold and snow, it all seemed awfully exotic and incomprehensible.
Now, living in Southern California, it’s impossible not to run into someone nostalgic for what they call four real seasons. Except for the occasional deciduous tree things stay pretty green. Things bloom in January. So some complain that it’s really just one very long season. Of course, anyone who’s lived there a while can feel the changes: You really shouldn’t plant lettuce in July, just as you’d probably not want to leave your doors and windows open most days in January. Every place has its cycles, only some are more subtle than others. Or do some people never go out of their houses?
And here in Newport, with the bare trees, the brown lawns, and–just overnight–a covering of fresh snow, there’s no doubt. It’s winter.
February 22 2008 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: Newport R.I. • seasons • Sukateiki • winter | No Comments »
« Prev
