[ Lost in the Landscape ]

after the rain delay

The rain last week­end cleared out long enough for us to install the shade panel we’d constructed.

The fence you see faces north by north­west. Any­thing grow­ing in the bed is in total shade for sev­eral months. About this time of year, though, the sun swings north, and things start to get sun expo­sure in the later parts of the day. We removed the termite-munched patio cover that shaded the del­i­cate plants last fall–it had to go–but sud­denly time was of the essence in restor­ing shade.

This is where a few shade denizens live in the bed…

…along with John’s col­lec­tion of orchid cac­tus, Epi­phyl­lum, that he’s amassed over the years. We also have a small assort­ment of hang­ing tilland­sias and some trop­i­cals, includ­ing a few sur­viv­ing orchids from my rabid orchid-growing days two decades ago.

This week­end has turned rainy again, fill­ing many of the holes in the shade screen with water. It’s slowed down mov­ing the plants to their new home, but I won’t com­plain about the water we’re getting.

We’re already two inches ahead of the entire rain­fall for last sea­son (July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009). And last month’s rain accu­mu­la­tion alone, 5.4 inches, came close to the 5.5 total for all of 2009. Still we have a cou­ple inches to go before we can even claim an aver­age rain­fall year.

This season’s rain is fill­ing up ver­nal pools after sev­eral years of dis­ap­point­ments. Fri­day I stopped by some pools with a biol­o­gist to scope out a poten­tial field trip for the local native plant soci­ety. Ver­nal pools are among the most threat­ened habi­tats locally. The occur on our mesa tops, areas that prove irre­sistible to devel­op­ers because they’re flat and require less soil prepa­ra­tion than canyon bot­toms or slopes.

Young plants were every­where, includ­ing those of San Diego mesa mint (Pogog­yne abram­sii), a plant on sev­eral endan­gered species lists. If the rains keep up, it looks like it’s going to be a great year for them.

February 28 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape • my garden | Tags: endangered species • hardscape • San Diego mesa mint • shade • vernal pools | 4 Comments »

rain delay

It’s almost never too rainy to gar­den, and of course it’s never too wet to blog. But some out­door projects have had to be put on hold temporarily.

Yes­ter­day, when it was still dry, we started to con­struct a shade panel to begin to replace a patio cover we tore down last fall. Many of the plants on the patio are shade plants, and we still have some shade plants hang­ing in the shade of the green­house. As the weather warms and the sun begins to burn hot­ter in the sky many of the plants are start­ing to need some cover.

We got this far on the panel project yes­ter­day. It’s a ten-by-four foot frame of alu­minum, with an inset of per­fo­rated alu­minum mesh. The diag­o­nal cross pieces are for both struc­tural sup­port and what I hope will be a level of coolness.

And then it began to rain: Light mist now and then yes­ter­day, and occa­sional rain­squalls this morn­ing. Not safe weather for oper­at­ing elec­tric devices out­side, but noth­ing to stop me from pulling some weeds and then stop­ping by my favorite local nurs­ery, Wal­ter Ander­sen Nurs­ery. There was a bald spot out front and I needed a plant to fill it. One plant.

But the nurs­ery was ooz­ing green life force that proved irre­sistible and I came home with three instead: white flow­er­ing cur­rant (Ribes indeco­rum), Route 66 Cal­i­for­nia fuch­sia (Zauschne­ria cal­i­for­nia ‘Route 66′) a sec­ond plant of Cean­othus ‘Tuxedo’ to go with one I pur­chased last year. I’ve resolved to plant at least fifty per-cent Cal­i­for­nia native plants, and I think I suc­ceeded. The first two qual­ify, and the last gets par­tial credit. (I have a post in the works describ­ing why.)

Of course for me rainy days turn into oppor­tu­ni­ties to col­lect more rain­wa­ter for the prima donna bog plants that detest the water that comes from the tap. At this point I prob­a­bly have sev­eral months’ sup­ply in buck­ets and bar­rels. And the ground will hold its mois­ture and require min­i­mal water­ing for sev­eral weeks. I wouldn’t want to force our county’s golf courses go with­out water, would I? (Well, yes, actu­ally, I would. Yet another blog post…)

February 20 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: collecting rainwater • rain • shade | 8 Comments »

providing shelter

It’s one of the sad­dest things to see: A house under­goes a remodel or even minor revi­sion like a new paintjob, and in the course of of the project the land­scap­ing gets run over by equip­ment or tram­pled by work­ers obliv­i­ous to estab­lished plants that may be as old as the house.

We’ve just started a project of our own on a lit­tle detached stu­dio room behind the house. It began inno­cently enough with thoughts about replac­ing the patio cover that was start­ing its slow descent to the ground. (No piece of wood is safe in the land of ter­mites.) Maybe two or three week­ends of hard work to replace it. Yah, right.

As long as we were remov­ing the patio that was attached to the room, we thought it would be a good time to redo the sid­ing that has some spots that are fail­ing. And as long as the walls were open, we really should insu­late. And as long as we had things partly dis­sem­bled it made sense to replace the old sin­gle glazed win­dows and doors with bet­ter insu­lat­ing ones. (The local power com­pany pro­vides rebates towards insu­la­tion, and one of the fed­eral stim­u­lus pack­ages fea­tures 30% rebates on super-insulated replace­ment win­dows.) Now that the walls are start­ing to be opened, it’s clear that some of them are so gone that we’re hav­ing to re-frame them com­pletely. So the lit­tle two week­end project has grown to two months or more. If it doesn’t rain.

Right: Just some of the spots we’re hav­ing to reframe.

With a fairly long-term project like this, we didn’t want to dam­age the plants in the mid­dle of it. John’s assort­ment of epi­phyl­lum cac­tus plants in pots needed shel­ter, and less portable plants planted in the raised shade bed around the pond wouldn’t be able to take much sun. The waterlilies in the pond would do okay with full sun, but the extra sun causes algae to grow and we didn’t want to have to bat­tle pond scum as another house project.

So the week­end we took down the shel­ter­ing patio cover, up went these lit­tle portable cabanas and beach umbrel­las. It looks like we’re hav­ing a big gar­den party, but it’s going to be a lot less relax­ing the next cou­ple of months.

This is my main work­sta­tion where I do my blog­ging, lay­ered over by pro­tec­tive sheet­ing and open to the great out­doors. I sus­pect my blog­ging is going to take a big hit for a while as all my wak­ing hours start to be con­sumed with the project.

And all this is hap­pen­ing dur­ing the prime plant­ing sea­son in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. I have seeds to sow and plants to plant. I’m stressed. But with my uni­ver­sity job being one of those impacted by state fur­loughs, I’ll be hav­ing lots of time to work on the project. I sup­pose that’s see­ing the sil­ver lin­ing to the dark cloud that’s about to send light­ning bolts in my gen­eral direction…

September 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: hardscape • remodeling • shade • shade plants | 3 Comments »

some plant ideas to borrow

Last weekend’s Los Ange­les trip included a short stop by the Getty Museum in Brentwood.

I’d posted ear­lier about their exhibit fea­tur­ing botan­i­cal illus­tra­tions by Maria Sibylla Mer­ian that con­tin­ues through the end of August. It was a com­pact, intense show with art­work by Mer­ian and her con­tem­po­raries, along with exam­ples of some of the ear­li­est illus­trated botan­i­cal books.


Unfor­tu­nately it was one of those thou-shalt-not-photograph exhi­bi­tions, so I had to be con­tent with snap­ping these two for-sale prints in the kiosk out­side the gal­leries. Mer­ian was inter­ested in plants, but even more so in the crit­ters that live in them. Here you see var­i­ous creepy crawlies cavort­ing with the plant life.

When vis­it­ing a place like the Getty it’s easy to get over­whelmed with the sheer unap­proach­able­ness of every­thing you see–the Acropolis-like site, the billion-plus dol­lar con­struc­tion bud­get, the irre­place­able art­works. But look­ing around the grounds there are all sorts of cool details that would be at home in a back yard plant­ing or patio project.

Here are some of the plant­i­ngs that I thought were cool. Some were in the Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den, oth­ers were around the museum grounds that were designed by the land­scape archi­tec­tural firm of Olin Part­ner­ship. (The best piece I’ve run across on the Web about the less famous gar­den plant­i­ngs was in, of all places, The Aus­tralian Human­i­ties Review.)

Many of the shady plant­i­ngs under­neath the plant­ing of Lon­don plane trees use light-colored foliage to make the plants pop in the shade. It’s a tech­nique that you read about a lot–but it works won­ders. Here’s a nice com­bi­na­tion of light-color suc­cu­lents.


Again in the shade, here are some plants with green-and-white var­ie­gated foliage, includ­ing a New Zealand flax.


And the last of these shade pic­tures, a plant­ing fea­tur­ing a chartreuse-leaved oxalis species. John thought it looked a lit­tle ane­mic, but I thought it was pretty cool.


Out of the shade, a plant­ing of con­trast­ing foliage col­ors can be a great accent. Here the plant­ing avoids green alto­gether, and com­bines plants pre­dom­i­nat­ing with red and yel­low tones, includ­ing the “Sticks of Fire” clone of the evil pen­cil tree.


In a gar­den with a large num­ber of dif­fer­ent plants it helps to have zones with less con­trast. Here a long, curv­ing row of pink crape myr­tles were bloom­ing over an extended bed of var­ie­gated soci­ety gar­lic bloom­ing with their lavender-pink flow­ers.


Mass plant­i­ngs don’t have to go into rows or grids. Here’s my favorite plant­ing on the entire prop­erty, a seem­ingly ran­dom arrange­ment of golden bar­rel cac­tus. The arrange­ment is infor­mal, but it’s as much a prod­uct of human inter­ven­tion as some­thing that’s overtly geo­met­ri­cal. The Robert Irwin-designed Cen­tral Gar­den draws most of the vis­i­tors, but this area is the most spec­tac­u­lar to my eyes.


If you have a billion-dollar view most peo­ple decide to chop down all the plants between you and the view. Here, the almost-transparent, unob­tru­sive, but still dra­matic spent flower stalks of these var­ie­gated cen­tury plants (Agave amer­i­cana ‘Mar­ginata’) actu­ally helps com­plete the view, giv­ing focus to what would be a run-of-the-mill spec­tac­u­lar view of the West Side of L.A. The actual flow­ers on these sculp­tural inflo­res­cences died months ago, and the stalks are actu­ally black and not green. But they’re cool as all get out–So why not leave them be?


Plant­i­ngs soften a lot of the hard geo­met­ri­cal edges. Here some pros­trate rose­mary cas­cades over the hard edge of the traver­tine wall.


And here, the baby’s tears grow­ing between the rough traver­tine squares soft­ens the tran­si­tion from human hard-edged geom­e­try to the softer forms of the vin­ing Boston ivy.

Next post I’ll share some of my favorite details from the hard­scape around the Getty.

August 28 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: foliage plants • J. Paul Getty Museum • plant combinations • shade • shade plants | No Comments »

a cool idea for garden shade

Maybe a year ago I was read­ing about a park­ing lot in town, at the local Kyocera cor­po­rate head­quar­ters, where they’d installed what they were call­ing “Solar Trees.” (They actu­ally trade­marked the name, but really aren’t all trees solar?) The Kyocera species of trees were steel poles that sup­ported big canopies made up of solar pan­els. They pro­vided shade to the cars below, and at the same time they gen­er­ated power. By the corporation’s esti­mate, one 30 by 40 foot solar tree would reduce as much green­house gases as a small grove of real trees.

Instal­la­tions like this are start­ing to appear in var­i­ous places, includ­ing a cou­ple of park­ing struc­tures at UCSD where they’re installing rooftop arrays over this summer.

I’ve thought about doing more with active solar devices, but where to put the pan­els was always an issue since the house has some pretty wacked roof angles, most of which don’t face south. Some sort of solar struc­ture in the gar­den might be an inter­est­ing solu­tion, maybe some­thing com­bin­ing a patio cover func­tion with power generation.

The Kyocera trees seem to be slanted more to cor­po­rate envi­ron­ments, and besides I find them more than a lit­tle mono­lithic and over­whelm­ing. Would you want these in your gar­den? But some­thing along these lines could be prac­ti­cal, good for the envi­ron­ment and attrac­tive. Sounds like a job for an artist or designer instead of an engineer…

That these trees sprouted here in town left me won­der­ing if there was any sort of link between them and Jim Bell, a local self-proclaimed “envi­ron­men­tal designer” who, among other things, has run for mayor (unsuc­cess­fully) twice, and once for City Coun­cil (also unsuc­cess­fully). I met him at a book sign­ing circa 2003, and he was hot on the idea of cov­er­ing all the roofs and park­ing lots with solar pan­els. His web site has an inter­est­ing statistic:

In the San Diego/Tijuana region, where I live, 20 per­cent cov­er­age of our build­ings and park­ing lots with solar pho­to­voltaic (PV) cells, cou­pled with effi­ciency improve­ments, would gen­er­ate enough elec­tric­ity to replace all forms of energy (elec­tric­ity, nat­ural gas, gaso­line, and diesel) cur­rently used in the region.

That idea was prob­a­bly not his orig­i­nally, either. But it speaks to a move­ment that’s in the air. Maybe the move­ment could begin right at home, in our back yards…

July 05 2008 | Categories: landscape design • rambles | Tags: patio covers • shade • solar energy • solar panels | No Comments »