[ Lost in the Landscape ]

souvenirs

I’m back from my trip, and I’ll post some of the trip pic­tures here soon.

Two weeks away dur­ing prime grow­ing sea­son can guar­an­tee that you’ll come back to sur­prises. I knew toma­toes grew quickly, but, dang, what was I think­ing when I put that one inde­ter­mi­nate mon­ster in the flower bed? I don’t usu­ally prune my tomato plants, but that’s what I was doing within fif­teen min­utes of pulling up in the dri­ve­way. A few baby toma­toes of the first crop went with the stems that went into the greens recy­cle bin, but there will be more where those came from.

The nicest sur­prise to come back to was prob­a­bly the open­ing of the first pitcher on the Sar­race­nia alata in the new bog gar­den. I’d been watch­ing the new leaves mak­ing their way up from the rhi­zomes for the last cou­ple of months, and this first pitcher was per­fect: ele­gant, stream­lined, and gen­tly striped.

I usu­ally don’t buy piles of sou­venirs on my trips. This time I came home with three. One was a lit­tle soap in the shape of a cute griz­zly bear. (The soap smelled like cheap cologne.) Another was a wild huckleberry-filled choco­late bar for John. (Even though he likes choco­late as much as I do, he agreed that the sou­venir bar tasted like bad Hershey’s with a lit­tle bit of berry jam spread on it. At least the wrap­per was festive.)

And the last sou­venir I brought home was for the car­niv­o­rous plants in the bog gar­den. Com­mon wis­dom is that car­ni­vores like pure water, with total dis­solved solids less than 50 parts per mil­lion. The local San Diego water bot­toms out at around 180ppm tds and goes up from there, so it’s not ideal–and actu­ally lethal over the long term–for car­ni­vores. At the Nor­ris Camp­ground in Yel­low­stone on my way out I emp­tied my 5-gallon emer­gency water con­tainer which I’d filled with dis­gust­ing San Diego tap water at the start of the trip. Then I went to the spigot and filled it with five fresh gal­lons of pure moun­tain snowmelt.

Not long after I got home I took the moun­tain water to the bog plants and opened the spigot on the jug and let it drib­ble into the assorted pitcher plants and sun­dews. After sniff­ing the dis­gust­ing sou­venir soap and sam­pling the unfor­tu­nate choco­late, I know the bog plants got the best sou­venir of all from my trip. Noth­ing is too good for some of my cur­rent favorite plants…

A happy Cape sun­dew (Drosera capen­sis, broad leaf form) in the bog garden.

June 06 2008 | Categories: landscape design • my garden | Tags: bog garden • pitcher plants • Sarracenia alata • souvenirs | 3 Comments »