[ Lost in the Landscape ]

baccharis season

This has been one of the most spec­tac­u­lar years I can remem­ber for coy­ote bush brush, Bac­cha­ris pilu­laris.

With many plants still dor­mant from a long sea­son with no rain, the perky green bac­cha­ris with their over the top heads of white seeds stand out. They look espe­cially amaz­ing with the sun behind them, light­ing up the masses of seed.

Here’s a closeup of a stem swarm­ing with seeds…

…look­ing closer…

…and closer still. You can see here that the seeds are attached to the white para­chutes that give the plants their white color this time of year in the wilds. These pho­tos were taken in Tecolote Canyon, a few blocks from my house, this past Fri­day, one day before our first mea­sur­able rain­fall in 164 days knocked many of these seeds off the plants.

Coy­ote bush brush is some­times used in native gar­dens, occa­sion­ally in this upright form, but more often in its pros­trate Cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia coastal form. The selec­tions ‘Pigeon Point’ and ‘Twin Peaks’ are fairly pop­u­lar. But if you grow the these selec­tions you’ll find that only male plants are used hor­ti­cul­tur­ally, mean­ing you’ll miss out on this dis­play of seed heads that can begin in late sum­mer and last until the winds and rains dis­perse them.

For con­trast, this is a boy coy­ote bush brush, sturdy and green with no sup­ple­men­tal water here near the coast. The buck­wheats and sage and sage­brush have all retreated to their dor­mant gray late sum­mer col­oration all around him.

And a closeup of his dried flow­ers. Noth­ing nearly so spec­tac­u­lar as his sis­ters this time of year. But he’s got one advan­tage in that he’s not fill­ing the air with para­chutes of seed blow­ing every­where like his messy sisters.

Male or female, coy­ote bush brush plays host to more inter­est­ing ben­e­fi­cial local bugs than you’ll see on almost any other plant. I’ll be start­ing some of these from seed this year in hopes of get­ting one of these spec­tac­u­larly messy female plants. Down-wind four houses from me is the canyon, so seed dis­per­sal shouldn’t be a problem.

For fur­ther read­ing: In Praise of Bac­cha­ris pilu­laris, at Town Mouse and Coun­try Mouse.

November 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • plant profiles | Tags: Baccharis pilularis consanguinea • coyote bush • seeds • Tecolote Canyon | 10 Comments »

some garden-worthy local plants

There’s usu­ally a big dis­con­nect between going to a nurs­ery to look at plants and going out botaniz­ing to an open space pre­serve like the one I live near. The plants in a nurs­ery will likely be the usual gar­den store sus­pects, mixed in with new intro­duc­tions from all over the globe. But what plants you see in the wilds, except for escapees from res­i­den­tial gar­dens, usu­ally have noth­ing to do with what you see in the nurseries.

Gar­dens are of course arti­fi­cial places. Although peo­ple may feel con­nected to nature while tend­ing their per­sonal land­scapes, it’s too often a nature that exists only at their local plant nurs­ery and nowhere in the wild lands around them. My own gar­den has these same ten­den­cies, but I’ve been try­ing to coun­ter­act them with more native plantings.

Things have also been chang­ing in at least some of the nurs­eries around town, and there’s a grad­ual flow of plants from our wild areas into people’s gar­dens. Most of the larger nurs­eries offer at least a small selec­tion of natives, and the spe­cialty native plant nurs­eries can always be counted on for a selec­tion of plants that they feel garden-worthy.

Sun­day was cool but sunny, a per­fect day for a short walk through my neigh­bor­hood canyon pre­serve to see some of these plants in their wild state. And along the way I saw a cou­ple that I think peo­ple wouldn’t mind liv­ing with.

Tecolote Canyon–literally “Owl Canyon”–includes a city park of about 900 acres, most of it the slopes and bot­toms of a coastal canyon that were too eco­nom­i­cally chal­leng­ing to build on. Some of the park has been handed over to a golf course and some ath­letic fields, but a lot of it remains in some­thing approach­ing its nat­ural state.

The trail cuts through sev­eral stands of our coastal live oaks, shown here with lots of neon green (non-native) grasses. These oaks would be gor­geous in pri­vate gar­dens. Imag­in­ing open­ing the back door and step­ping out into this. But a fun­gus that was imported from Europe in a ship­ment of rhodo­den­drons is now mak­ing these dif­fi­cult to grow in all but the most dri­est gar­den spaces.

Dur­ing the win­ter rains a lit­tle stream runs through the park. It takes months for the water to dry up com­pletely, so every now and then you’ll find lit­tle water­ing holes like this one.

Lemon­ade berry appears fre­quently in native gar­den plant­i­ngs and is easy to find at native nurs­eries. The plants have been bloom­ing in the canyon for a cou­ple months, and they’re still bloom­ing. This species forms a large, tidy shrub that stays an attrac­tive dark green color year round. Later in the year it’ll develop orange-to-salmon berries in the place of the flow­ers. Def­i­nitely garden-worthy.

Lemon­ade berry per­forms best near the coast where heavy frosts aren’t a con­cern, but it can come back if frozen.

These aren’t flow­ers, but I think they’re pretty attrac­tive. The toyon, also called Chrsit­mas berry (Het­erome­les arbu­ti­fo­lia) still had its berries out. This is another plant that makes an attrac­tive large ever­green shrub in the home land­scape. The leaves on this are just a lit­tle lighter green than those of the lemon­ade berry, and the plant more densely branched.

Toyon is a fine native sub­sti­tute for holly, bear­ing these berries dur­ing the time of year when holly would. (And speak­ing of “holly would,” did you know that Hol­ly­wood got its name from big stands of this that grew on the hill­sides over­look­ing what’s now tin­sel­town?) This is also one of the eas­ier plants to find commercially.

I’ve writ­ten recently about a new ground­cover milkvetch that I was try­ing out. A dif­fer­ent species with some­what similar-looking flow­ers was approach­ing peak bloom in sev­eral spots in the canyon. There are over 1500 vetch species on earth and a half-dozen in the county, but I believe this one is Astra­galus tri­chopo­dus.

The flow­ers are small and intri­cate and appear on a plant that can approach three feet tall. This milkvetch dies back to noth­ing dur­ing the sum­mer drought, but I think it would look great when com­bined with selec­tions that have more sum­mer interest.

The canyon hill­sides are over­run with inva­sive mus­tard that is just now start­ing to put on its spring growth spurt. But this milkvetch gets going quicker, and actu­ally seems to stand a chance against the black mus­tard men­ace, unlike other natives that mature later. Here you see it grow­ing up through the trel­lis of dead mus­tard stems left over from last year.

Not hav­ing spent much time in Texas, it took me a while to fig­ure out that Texas blue­bon­nets were Texas species of what I’d been call­ing lupines all my life. Here’s a “Cal­i­for­nia blue­bon­net.” In this canyon they’re more of an occa­sional treat than a plant that col­o­nizes big spreads of hill­side. They’re ephemeral, but would be gor­geous in a garden.

Fuchsia-flowered goose­berry is a shoulder-high shrub with a long bloom­ing period from win­ter through much of spring. You can prob­a­bly see from the pic­ture that it is a lit­tle on the thorny side, some­thing like you’d see on Vic­to­rian moss roses. But the flow­ers make this a strik­ing plant in the right spot. The shiny green leaves will per­sist through­out the year if the plant is given an occa­sional sum­mer sip of water. And did I men­tion “hummingbird-magnet?”

There were other native plants in bloom, includ­ing the perky scar­let mon­key flower. But my trip was just a lit­tle early to catch the the peak flow­er­ing. I’ll post more as I take more trips.

And of course, in a park sur­rounded by human habi­ta­tion, you’ll find a healthy sam­pling exotic species. I’ll post next on a few of my inter­est­ing but less garden-worthy encounters.

March 11 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • places • plant profiles | Tags: Astragalus trichopodus • Fuchsia-flowered gooseberry • Heteromeles arbutifolia • lemonade berry • lupines • milkvetch • native plants • Rhus integrifolia • Ribes speciosum • Tecolote Canyon • toyon | 5 Comments »

community outreach

A week­end ago the local branch library was cel­e­brat­ing its 50th anniver­sary. To mark the occa­sion they threw a lit­tle party, com­plete with live music, snacks, things for kids and adults to do, and a few tables of com­mu­nity groups answer­ing ques­tions and giv­ing out information.

The North Claire­mont Branch Library today. (Yes, this is how they spell “Clare­mont” in these here parts–It’s the spawn of England’s Clare­mont with the first name of one of the developer’s fam­ily mem­bers, Claire Burgener.)

The North Claire­mont Branch Library at its open­ing, in 1958. I’ve always like the sim­ple, mod­ern lines of the library, and the clerestory win­dows admit gen­tle, dif­fused light for read­ing. The build­ing has hardly changed, but the neigh­bor­hood around it cer­tainly has.

One of the tables had a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Tecolote Canyon Nature Cen­ter that’s located nearby. They had poster­board dis­plays of some of the local wildlife, a list­ing of some inva­sive plant species of con­cern, a small live snake and a lit­tle stuffed fox.

The kids were of course most taken with the crit­ters, and I’ll have to admit I was taken with the fox myself. Twenty years of liv­ing near the canyon and this was the first fox I’d seen. Unfor­tu­nately this brown fox wasn’t exactly mov­ing very quickly in its taxi­der­mied state.

At least I hope some of the adults took the plant infor­ma­tion seri­ously. I’ll have to admit, how­ever, that the veg­etable rogue’s gallery on the sign hadn’t been updated much in recent years. The “most wanted” plant on the list seemed to be Argen­tine pam­pas grass, a posi­tion it’s held for most of the years I’ve looked at these lists. It’s still a prob­lem, but we have a num­ber of other escapees roam­ing the hillsides.

Inside, for almost no money you could pick up Life and Sat­ur­day Evening Post issues from the 1950s, 50-year-old pub­li­ca­tions to mark the fifti­eth anniver­sary of the library. (What proper library event would be com­plete with­out a book sale?) As you might expect, there were lots of Cold War-related arti­cles. And then this stack that caught my eye, includ­ing an issue with the arti­cle, “So you want to hunt uranium.”

If the table out­side didn’t get the atten­tion of the par­ents, a rack of lit­er­a­ture inside might have. Almost all of the top row was ded­i­cated to inva­sive plants, water con­ser­va­tion or drought-tolerant land­scap­ing. Things don’t get much more South­ern Cal­i­for­nia than that.

October 30 2008 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Clairemont Branch Library • libraries • Tecolote Canyon • Tecolote Canyon Nature Center | No Comments »