[ Lost in the Landscape ]

blue and orange (gbbd)

The color com­bi­na­tion of blue and orange reminds me of noisy kid­die toys, of hard molded plas­tic wait­ing room chairs, of harshly lit 1970s fast-food restau­rants try­ing unsuc­cess­fully to look mod­ern and friendly, or of jer­seys for some high school foot­ball team. With two col­ors scream­ing at each other from oppo­site sides of a color wheel, it’s not a com­bi­na­tion that brings me a lot of joy or peace.

But spring is here, and part of the far back yard has been bloom­ing away. Its main col­ors are–you guessed it–blue and orange, mainly hot orange Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies and sky blue flow­ers of nemophilia, baby blue eyes.

As much as I gen­er­ally don’t love these col­ors together, it’s hard for me not to like this lit­tle zone of perky chaos.

Even the blue flow­ers against the brick hard­scape rein­forces the blue and orange (or blue and orange-red) colors.

But in a gar­den you hardly every have two strong flower col­ors alone. The vari­eties of leaf green serve as peace­mak­ers, sep­a­rat­ing the war­ring col­ors and inject­ing their own shades into the gar­den color palette. Other sec­ondary leaf or flower col­ors help the enrich the palette and keep the peace.

From some angles a softer blue-gray pro­vides a back­ground to the hot orange flow­ers. Here the foliage is the now-common chalk fin­gers, Senecio man­dralis­cae. It’s still a blue and orange theme, but the blue is less emphatic and the orange is per­mit­ted to dominate.

Lit­tle pock­ets of cool-colored plants pro­vide areas of visual rest. Here’s baby blue eyes and chalk fin­gers with a dark purple-black aeo­nium. Pre­tend I cut back the dying nar­cis­sus foliage…

Some view­points let the cool col­ors pre­dom­i­nate, with just a few punc­tu­a­tion marks of poppy orange. New into this photo are whitish-violet flow­ered black sage (Salvia mel­lif­era), magenta free­way daisy (Osteosper­mum), with a softer orange-red desert mal­low (Sphaer­al­cea ambigua) in the upper left corner.

I’ll have to rethink what the com­bi­na­tion of blue and orange means to me, at least in the gar­den. These flow­ers may be gone in a cou­ple of months. Maybe this a com­bi­na­tion that I should embrace and asso­ciate with “spring.”

Spring is bring­ing lots of other col­ors com­bi­na­tions and other flow­ers to gar­dens around the world. Check them out at May Dreams Gar­dens, where Carol is host­ing yet another Gar­den Bog­gers Bloom Day. Thank you, Carol!

April 14 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: baby blue eyes • blue • blue flowers • California poppy • color combinations • Escholzia californica • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • Nemophilia menziesii • orange • orange flowers • seasons • spring | 19 Comments »

high spring (gbbd)

This is it. High spring in San Diego. There are prob­a­bly more things bloom­ing now in the gar­den than there will be at any other time of year.

I start with the cur­rent state of the agave that I’ve been show­ing for the last few months. It’s bloomed its way from the base of the flower stalk to very near the very end. The plant will soon die and you won’t see any more pho­tos of it. For­tu­nately the plant has sev­eral other growths to keep it going into the future.

I’ve pro­vided a few cap­tions, but there are too many flow­ers to com­ment on in detail. For the rest of the pho­tos, hover your mouse to view the names or click to enlarge.

Thank you thank you thank you to Carol at May Dreams Gar­dens for host­ing Gar­den Blog­gers Bloom Day. Stuff is begin­ning to bloom every­where. [ Check it out all the bloom­ing gar­dens! ]

March 14 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: flowers • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • spring | 22 Comments »

looking like spring again

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.

November 03 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • my garden | Tags: native plants • seasons • spring | 4 Comments »

from spring into summer

The spring orgy of flow­ers is wind­ing down. Some spring bulbs flashed for just a few days and were gone. But it didn’t really mat­ter because they were replaced by some­thing else interesting.

Summer’s flow­ers seem to come at a more mea­sured pace. But for me it’s a dif­fer­ent sort of plea­sure, let­ting me focus on more sub­tle things like plant forms, leaf col­ors and textures.

Here’s some of what’s still bloom­ing from spring, along with the begin­nings of plants that will accom­pany me through the sum­mer months.

The flow­ers above, left to right, top to bottom:

1: Blan­ket flower (Gail­lar­dia pul­chella).
2: Laven­der cot­ton (San­tolina chamae­cy­paris­sus–I have to look up the spelling of this species every time).
3: Deer­weed (Lotus sco­par­ius) You might con­fuse this Cal­i­for­nia native for one of the inva­sive brooms. It’ll drop most of its leaves to sur­vive the sum­mer drought, but the del­i­cate wands of branches stay attractive–at least to my eyes.
4. St. Catherine’s lace (Eri­o­gonum gigan­teum)–a buck­wheat from the Cal­i­for­nia Chan­nel Islands and coastal regions. This is a young plant, but its umbels are already huge–the largest in this photo is two feet across.
5. Santa Cruz Island buck­wheat (Eri­o­gonum arborescens)–another Cal­i­for­nia buck­wheat.
6. This is a Crinum that came with the house. It might be C. pow­ellii.
7. Ver­bena bonariensis–a flower that’s exactly the same color as the ver­bena in the final pic­ture in this post, though their plant and flower forms are totally dif­fer­ent.
8. Clarkia williamsonii.
9. Same as 6.
10. Bro­di­aea species, one that I lost my records for–maybe B. ele­gans (any­body know this one?).
11. But­ter­fly bush (Clero­den­drum myri­coides ‘Ugandense’)–In the same fam­ily as mints and sages, this has square stems and a del­i­cate scent to the leaves and stems. It enjoys water but doesn’t get much of it and still looks pre­sentable.
12. Ver­bena lilacina, a tough species from the Isla de Cedros, off the coast of Baja. At first glance it looks like the laven­der lan­tana many peo­ple around here grow, but the leaves are totally dif­fer­ent. Here it’s planted along­side some suc­cu­lents with red and blue-gray leaves.

Thanks again to Carol at May Dreams Gar­dens for host­ing Gar­den Blog­gers Bloom Day!

June 14 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: flowers • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • spring • summer | 14 Comments »

the new spring

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 »

jacaranda

Sun­day I went down to San Diego’s annual Art­walk street­fair down by the cool water­front in the Lit­tle Italy neighborhood.

This has been a seri­ously bipo­lar spring, alter­nat­ing chilly peri­ods with intensely hot ones. This week­end was one of the hot ones, and peo­ple were milling about slowly, check­ing out the stalls of art. But almost every­one seemed to be more inter­ested in the stands offer­ing cold drinks.

I talked to one of my pho­tog­ra­pher friends down there who had a dou­ble booth and has been pretty suc­cess­ful there in years past. “Peo­ple are mostly look­ing this time,” she said.

I guess I was one of the look­ers too, for the most part. After get­ting my fill of the art, the one sight that really caught my eye was this jacaranda tree in bloom over an orange back­hoe near where I’d parked my scooter:

I don’t see eye-to-eye with Jerry Sanders, the mayor of San Diego, but this is one thing we agree on. It’s his favorite tree, and one of mine. It’s Jacaranda mimosi­fo­lia, a South Amer­i­can native that’s well adapted to areas with­out much in the way of frost. The leaves are ferny and del­i­cate and the plant’s pretty well behaved in the U.S. (It’s con­sid­ered an inva­sive pest, how­ever, in South Africa and Queens­land, Aus­tralia.) In the spring it turns into this, an explo­sion of pur­ple flow­ers that rain down on cars and side­walks below. Messy as all get out but a pretty exul­tant mess! Yet another plant that’s too big for my yard…

April 29 2008 | Categories: art • plant profiles | Tags: Artwalk • in bloom • Jacaranda mimosifolia • spring | No Comments »

into the wild

A cou­ple posts ago I men­tioned dich­e­lostemma bloom­ing in the gar­den and I was think­ing that they were prob­a­bly also bloom­ing wild in the nat­ural spaces around me. I took a lunchtime walk through one of the semi-wild areas on the north part of the cam­pus of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, San Diego. The area has been set aside as a nat­ural pre­serve, although “nat­ural” in this case is actu­ally a canyon of native plants mixed in with some ear­lier 20th cen­tury plant­i­ngs of euca­lyp­tus. Fake as it may be as a gen­uine South­ern Cal­i­for­nia chap­ar­ral ecosys­tem, the edges where the grove meets the scrub starts to take on more native flavors.

There had been heavy rains this past Jan­u­ary, fol­lowed by occa­sional wet peri­ods, so the ground was still moist in spots. The weather was now turn­ing warm, sunny and spring-like. Grasses were grow­ing exu­ber­antly. It wasn’t long before I started to notice occa­sional flow­ers in the under­story. Although the spaces under the euca­lyp­tus prove hos­tile to most flow­er­ing plants other than the occa­sional also-imported black mus­tard, the blue dicks were pretty con­tent to be there, a sin­gle plant here, big rafts of them there.


A flow­er­ing head of Dich­e­lostemma cap­i­ta­tum, mixed in with the grasses and euca­lyp­tus


A larger stand of them, with their lit­tle flower heads raised up two feet or more in the dap­pled shade

I was tuned in to what I was see­ing, but in the back of my mind I was aware that back in my gar­den the same species of plants was also bloom­ing. Back home the blue dicks are part of a long con­tin­uum of “spring­time” flow­ers that begin with the first nar­cis­sus in Octo­ber and con­tinue into a num­ber of plants that have yet to bloom. But in the wild areas of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia this is it. Spring is short and–in a wet year like this one–intense, orgias­tic. As the weather warms the rains will stop. The grasses will die out and the flow­ers will fade out. Soon the long brown sea­son will begin. But in the fic­tion­al­ized nat­ural world of my gar­den, spring will be here for sev­eral more months. I’ll enjoy it for sure. But some­how it seems a lit­tle wrong.

March 14 2008 | Categories: landscape • my garden • places • rambles | Tags: blue dicks • Dichelostemma capitatum • eucalyptus • spring • UCSD | 2 Comments »