The late-December light was fading when I headed to the wild and wonderful plants that make up the Huntington’s Desert Garden. The garden dates back many decades and features some immense specimens the likes of which you’ll almost never see. But what I love most about the garden is that it incorporates these great plants into landscapes that both honor the plants and use them in striking combinations.
Many aloes were blooming with their dramatic spikes of hot, bright colors. The theatrical lighting helped to make some of the scenes even more dramatic.
(Be sure to click onthe third image to enlarge it. In its unearthly weirdness, it’s got to be one of my favorite garden photos I’ve ever taken.)
One zone of the garden focuses on plants you’d find in California. Here a creosote bush serves as a screen for a radiant gray-white agave.
And this scene employs the coastal and Channel Island buckwheat, Saint Catherine’s lace (Eriogonum giganteum)—a plant that technically doesn’t come from a desert—with other dryland plants. The gray-green foliage on all of them helps to unify this diverse planting.
The Huntington is in a warm subtropical area just east of Los Angeles. That doesn’t mean that it’s warm enough for all of these plants. Patio heaters of the kind that you see outdoors at restaurants keep plants warm at night in one area of the garden. (These are the frigid depths of December, after all.)
Now, as much as I was trying to focus on the overall landscape, I have to share a few photos of individual species that caught my eye.
Looking up at a very large Yucca filifera from Mexico…
(There’s an extremely similar shot of the exact same plant on the Germanatrix’s post on her visit to this same garden at the end of November. Check it out: here.)
Two tall palms with immense tree aloes, Aloe barberae. At the Huntington the species is identified as A. bainesii, but the taxonomists have had a change of heart. I have two of these in my little front yard, the tallest of them still under twenty feet but still impressive at that size. The writeup on this plant says it can hit fifty feet or more. The Huntington specimens are just about there, I’d guess.
A dynamic and lyrical tangle of leaves on several plants of the variegated form of Agave americana… (Homage to somebody… later Willem de Kooning? Franz Kline?) Agaves with their perfect rosettes seem to appeal to the part of our brains that appreciate symmetry and order. This planting subverted the expected into a beautiful mess.
A tall, dense stand of Cleistocactus straussii…
As we left the Huntington the light that had made the Desert Garden extra-interesting was coloring up the flanks of Mount Wilson and the the rest of the San Gabriels.
Not far away from the Huntington is Pasadena, the site of the annual New Year’s Rose Parade, which should be getting under way not long after this post hits the web. (Okay, it’s sort of a lame way to try to segue this post to the topic of New Year’s Day, but—hey!—I had to give it a try.)
Happy New Year’s to all of you, and best wishes for a healthy and prosperous year filled with amazing botanical highlights.
January 01 2010 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: agaves • aloes • cacti • desert plants • Huntington Library Art Collections and Botanical Gardens • plant combinations • succulents | 11 Comments »
We interrupt our series on the gardens at the Huntington Library with this quick update on the progress of the bloom spike of my Agave attenuata.
At this point there flowers have opened on about three feet of the spike. The lowest ones are beginning to wither.
So far the blooms are proving to be extremely popular with the honeybees. (Notice the bee on the flower and ignore the bright red car in the background. Thank you.)
In this last image you can even see the pollen that the bee has attached to its back legs for transport back to the hive.
Thanks for your patience. With the next post we return to the gardens at the Huntington…
Previous posts on this plant:
One agave, eight ways (December Bloom Day)
When plants collide
December 31 2009 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Agave attenuata • bees • succulents | 6 Comments »
Fifteen years I’ve been waiting for this plant to bloom. Fifteen years. And now that it’s blooming it throws its big bloom stalk into a tangle of two tree aloes growing together in what’s now a big three-plant smashup.
The flowering plant is Agave attenuata, the foxtail agave. Native to higher elevations in Mexico, it’s supposedly fairly rare where it originates. But in zone 10 and 9b-plus Southern California gardens it’s fairly common, with several gardens in every block of my neighborhood having one or more plants.
Many agaves, including the local native Shaw’s agave, Agave shawii, come armed with attractive but sharp spines. But A. attenuata is as soft and friendly a succulent as you’ll ever meet, and that’s one of its big appeals for home gardens. Another bonus is that it requires no supplemental watering in gardens near the coast.
Almost all of the agave species will bloom once and then die (monocarpy). Fortunately one plant of this species will have many rosettes, with only the blooming rosette dying back, leaving the rest to bloom in future seasons.
At this point the stalk is taller than I am and is starting to grow downward in a thick arc.
The individual blooms are still closed up for business. Soon, though, the individual greenish white flowers will open up a few at a time, beginning at the base of the inflorescence and then slowly moving towards the end.
\
Here’s a plant at a neighbor’s house in full bloom last winter so that you can see what the agave does when it isn’t busy running into other plants. Very graceful, don’t you think?
I wish the flowering stem hadn’t collided with the aloes. The stalk is assertive and solid so that there’s no staking it or coaxing it out of harm’s way. Oh well. I can sit back and enjoy the flowering, even if the flowers aren’t in the place where I’d like them.
Anything that you have to wait fifteen years for it to bloom isn’t going to be the most convenient of species.
November 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Agave attenuata • agaves • succulents | 10 Comments »
Susan from Blue Planet Garden Blog dropped me a note about a new initiative she was involved in. Lawn Reform, a collaboration of nine bloggers from around the US, is trying to reshape how we all think about lawns and their roles in gardens.
If you’re not already out there crying, “Kill your lawn” (or at least something like “Reduce the size of your lawn”) the site lists six good reasons to think again about the green monster outside your house, “Polluted Waterways,” “Pesticide-Treated Lawns that are Toxic to Humans and Pets,” “Guzzling of Water, a Resource in Short Supply,” “Single-Species Monocultures that Provide Nothing for Wildlife,” “Frequent Mowing, with Air Pollution” and “Overtreated and Overwatered Lawns that Waste $$ and Keep Asking for More.”
To that list I’d add a more philosophical reason to rethink a green expanse, the idea that a lawn represents some weird macho domination of all things natural, that nature isn’t acceptable to live with until it’s been chopped to smithereens and reshaped into something that’s a pale imitation of itself. Start with this mindset and it’s not a a big leap to Silent Spring, global warming or The Bomb.
To promo Lawn Reform, Susan is hosting an “I used to have a lawn but now I have…” contest, where you’re encouraged to submit photos and stories related to transforming lawn into something else. The winners, drawn at random, will receive a copy of John Greenlee’s new book, The American Meadow Garden: Creating a Natural Alternative to the Traditional Lawn.
I’ll share a couple of life-after-lawn photos of my own. The newest expanse, which might be described as “I used to have a lawn but now I have dead grass,” is a fairly unattractive alternative to lawn, a patch of unwatered grass that’s in part a response to our current water rationing. This is probably nothing that’s going to make anyone do something else with their lawn, but it’s ugly enough that we’ll have to do something about it.
The second shot is an overview of my front yard, taken during the unflattering light of midday in the heat of September, something like 18 years after the we took out the front lawn. At the time we, along with much of Southern California, were into a lot of South African species, so there are a couple different forms of a stately tree aloe, Aloe barberae (a.k.a. A. bainseii) to the right, along with a big mound of Aloe arborescens. To the left is a big clump of the maligned red fountain grass from farther up in the African continent; it’s a plant that people tell you not to plant because of its invasive tendencies, although this version hasn’t self-sown in two decades. (Other versions of fountain grass, however, can take over an ecosystem in no time.)
We’ve tried various California natives over the years in this space. The most successful has been the row of coyote bush cascading over the front wall, Baccharis pilularis ‘Pigeon Point.’ It’s a plant that’s been said to have a ten year useful life. For us it’s doubled that number of years, though it’ll probably get renewed this planting season. Another corner of the ex-lawn, not shown here, features some buckwheats and plants from the Channel Islands. They’re filling in nicely as they provide more of a California flavor to the yard and soften a yard that used to be a lot more about succulents.
Before we undertook this big lawn replacement we asked a question about what we really used the front lawn for. Mostly we walked through it on the way to the front door. Why not put big mounding accent plants where we’d never walk? And in the place of where we used to have one species of grass that required lots of water and pampering we now have several dozen species of plants, almost all of which will make it through the summer with next to no additional watering. Greater diversity, check; less water use, check. The project also succeeds in all the other ways Lawn Reform suggests a lawn replacement would succeed.
But that’s just one success story. There are probably as many different ways to replace a lawn as there are gardeners. What would you do?
September 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: Lawn Reform • lawns • succulents | 11 Comments »
It’s the end of summer and most areas of the garden seem to be in some sleepy botanical torpor, exhausted from the heat. Not much is blooming. Brown is everywhere.
And then by contrast there’s this little over-performing corner, formed in large part by chunks of succulents that John has collected over the years…
Cascading over a back wall are the shocking red flowers of this crassula (I think it’s Crassula perfoliata var. minor, a.k.a. Crassula falcata). Its companions in this photo are a couple of other succulents, one of the goth-black aeoniums (Aeonium arboreum ‘Zwartkop’) and what’s likely Graptopetalum paraguayense. The three are pretty easy to find and like nice combined.
After the winter rains the foliage on all of these plants plumps up and looks pretty spectacular. But as summer settles in the aeonium and and graptopetalum drop their larger leaves in favor of a tight cluster of leaves packed at the growing end of the stalks. The bigger the leaf the greater the water loss. The crassula will retain its leaves, however, although they’ll look a little shriveled in the drought. The fact that the leaves are folded in half probably helps to shade the leaf, reduce transpiration and reduce moisture loss.
The flowering of the crassula varies by year. The photo above is from this season, actually not one of the better years. To the left is a shot from last August. This year’s not quite as flashy, but in the slow heat of August and September, I’ll take it.
September 01 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Aeonium arboreum • Crassula perfoliata var. mino • drought-tolerant landscaping • Graptopetalum paraguayense • succulents | 7 Comments »
The storm was passing, and the afternoon light was perfect. The succulents blooming in the front yard never looked better. I had to get the camera for this one!
In bloom are Aloe arborescens (orange-red) and a crassula species or relative (yellow). To the right, not in bloom but still dramatic, are two clones of a tree aloe (Aloe barberae). The low filler plant to the right is the California native coyote bush (Baccharis pilularis pilularis ‘Pigeon Point’). I don’t normally love the neighbor’s big pointy juniper in the background, but I think it completes this picture nicely.
February 08 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Aloe arborescens • Aloe barberae • aloes • crassula • in bloom • succulents | 6 Comments »
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.
January 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Aloe arborescens • aloes • seasons • succulents • winter | 3 Comments »
January can be an amazing month for succulents and other desert plants. Many aloes and agaves explode into bloom, and plants with ephemeral foliage are green with leaves in ways you don’t often see them.
San Diego’s Balboa Park houses one of the prime local collection of cacti, succulents and other desert dwellers from around the world. The Desert Garden, the larger of its two succulent gardens, was established in 1976, but many of the plants are senior citizens much older than the age of the garden.
Aloes star in its January landscape, with red and orange torches of flowers that double as hummingbird magnets.
And shown here, lurking in the shadows, is one of the local hummingbirds, staking its territory.
Among the big, mature specimens are several dragon trees, Dracaena draco. In this first photo, on the near trunk, you can see a reddish patch where the plant’s red sap has dried. When cut, these plants ooze a fluid that in some European legends was purported to be dragon’s blood, hence the plant’s name (draco = dragon).
This is a public garden, and so it’s subject to funding glitches and battles over civic priorities. I’d consider the garden to be in great condition considering those limitations.
One thing I would have loved to have seen, though, would be more plant labels. I encountered so many interesting species, but very few of them had name tags. I have this thing about needing to know the name of a plant—Call me compulsive. But the lack of labels drove me crazy. I realize, however, that tags don’t come cheap. And in a wide-open public garden, labels can walk away with pieces of succulents in the hands of evil plant addicts.
One of the plants that was labeled was this Natal Bottlebrush, Greyia sutherlandii. A bit scrappy-looking as a plant, but what great flowers!
Also labeled was the Madagascar ocotillo, Alluaudia procera. I loved the spiral patterning of its spines.
Another problem with this being a public garden is that there are quite a few specimens where people’s temptations to carve their initials in the plant life got the better of them. This euphorbia was scarred many times over. But that wasn’t going to stop it from blooming.
After visiting the garden I was surprised by how many shots I’d racked up in the camera. And for some reason, the majority of them were verticals. Is there something about succulents—particularly the upright-growing kinds that mimic the way a human stands—that scream out for photographing them in an upright orientation?
Some yuccas, I think, with spent bloom stems.
Boojum trees, Fouquieria columnaris, native to Baja California. This plant is in the same genus as the California desert’s spectacular ocotillo, which interestingly isn’t related to the Madascar ocotillo, above.
Aloes and kalanchoes in bloom.
The main garden is a flat, easy stroll over wide decomposed granite pathways. As part of a recent expansion, the garden now also includes this switchback down into Florida Canyon, also part of Balboa Park. The plants along the descent are still young, but should look spectacular in a decade or so.
Not everyone in the world loves cactus and succulents. They might point to the defensive spines many of the plants have, and they might say the sculptural shapes of the plants don’t look soft and cozy like leafy shrubs or fragrant roses. 
Next to the Desert Garden is Balboa Park’s rose garden. During springtime, thirty seconds of walking would take you from the world of cactus and succulents to a garden manic with flowers and heavy with the aroma of roses. But on this bright January day, the adjacent roses were pruned down to naked stems and piercing thorns. It was the cactus and succulents that looked warm and welcoming.
The Desert Garden is located across Park Boulevard from the Natural History Museum on Balboa Park’s museum row. The garden has no walls, no entry fee, and is open 24/7, 365 days of the year.
If the 2.5 acres of the Desert Garden isn’t enough of a cactus and succulent fix, cross Park Boulevard and take a stroll over to the Balboa Park Club, maybe ten minutes on foot, and take in the parks original 1935 cactus garden, which, according to the park’s website, was established “under the direction of [San Diego gardening legend] Kate Sessions for the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition.” There you’ll find “some of the largest cactus and succulent specimens in the Park,” along with a nice collection of proteas.
January 11 2009 | Categories: gardening • photography • places • plant profiles | Tags: Balboa Park • Balboa Park Desert Garden • cacti • desert plants • drought-tolerant landscaping • in bloom • succulents | 3 Comments »
Every year the water districts in San Diego county sponsor a contest to recognize gardens that use low amounts of water. The California-Friendly Landscape Contest has winners for each water district, and then overall winners in three major categories: best do-it-yourself, best professionally designed, and best native plantings.
Here are a few images of the prize winners this season. I think they show that you can have a lively yard without using swimming pools-full of water to keep things green. Some of the winners feature cactus and succulents, but you can see below that you don’t have to do the desert-thing to use less water.
Best California-native. Winner: Gidlund. Our native flora has plenty of choices that should be used more frequently. Flowering selections in this garden feature sages (salvias), asters (erigeron), and monkey flowers (mimus or diplacus, depending on which authority you side with).
Best in City of San Diego. Winner: Johnson. Succulents with contrasting leaf colors and forms star in this garden. This image features agaves, euphorbias and senecios among the assortment.
Best do-it-yourself. Winners: Mendell, Kirk (sorry, they only listed the last names…). This entry was another of the succulent-intensive ones, but this shows a portion of the garden with mounds of low plants with contrasting foliage, as well as plants in the distance in bloom. Most of us like flowers, don’t we?
Best professionally-designed. Winner: Whitney. A number of broad-leaved plants with beautifully contrasting foliage feature in this landscape. I think the contrasts are absolutely gorgeous!
Many of the photos show landscapes that aren’t 100% mature, but you can get a sense of what the gardens will look like in a few years. Also, as in many landscaping contests, the hardscape seems to get a lot of the attention. I’m of two minds on that issue. For a landscaper, a large portion of the profit resides in the hardscape details, with markup on a gazebo being way more than on a few shrubs. So some of the landscapes seem to push the human features rather than natural ones. But in the case of a well-placed garden path: what better way to imagine yourself in the new landscape than by “walking” through the space with your eyes, following a gentle meander through your beautiful new garden?
Check out all the winners. The deadline to enter next year’s competition is April 6, 2009, so that gives us all a few months to do a little replanting. In the end, any garden that helps save water can be declared a winner.
October 24 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: drought-tolerant landscaping • hardscape • native plants • succulents • water use | No Comments »
Politically I’m fairly far afield from the Republican party, but I’m thinking that one of my plants must be a card-carrying member. Portulacaria afra marked the opening of the Republican National Convention a couple weeks ago by quietly coming into bloom.
Flowers of Portulacaria afra
So what’s the connection between the Republicans and this plant?
Elephants.
In its native habitat this plant can be good forage for elephants. (And I’m sure you know that the elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party.) According to a treatment on this species by Robert J. Baran, 80% of the diet of elephants in South Africa’s Addo National Park consists of this plant. Hence one of its common names, “elephant bush.”
Outdoors in San Diego the plant is ridiculously easy to grow. Full sun, occasional summer water (ca. every 2-4 weeks) and well-drained soil are all it asks. If you want more of the plant, break off a chunk and set it some dirt. Instant new plant.
Its flowerings are rare here, however, and it’s easy to miss the little pink puffs of smoke that hover over the plant for a couple weeks.
Portulacaria plant
The plant in the picture is maybe ten years in the ground in this spot, and is about four feet tall. Some reports say it’ll get three times this size, but you can easily break off any chunks that offend you. So far so good in this location. And in pots it’s much more constrained. (The ugly fence in the background and its transformation into something much more fabulous will be the subject of an upcoming post…)
The plant reportedly also does well indoors in colder climates. Its easy-growing nature has caused a lot of people to call it as a variant of the classic beginner’s jade plant (Crassula ovata). But aside from the cursory similarities the plants are in completely different families. If you’ve been lucky enough to live where it’s warm enough to see them both bloom you’ll definitely believe that their relationship is pretty far apart.
Mealybugs haven’t been an issue with this plant for me outdoors, but they seem to be an occasional problem when it’s grown indoors in bright sun. Shade-grown, over-watered succulents seem to attract the critters. Try a brighter spot, and cut down on the watering if the little beasties are a problem.
Overall, this is a happy plant that easily crosses party lines. But you might want to keep it out of sight when the elephants come to loll about in your koi pond.
September 17 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: elephant bush • in bloom • jade plant • Portulacaria afra • spekboom • succulents | 1 Comment »
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