[ Lost in the Landscape ]

from the desert to the coast

Sun­day I went for a lit­tle plant walk out to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. It’s been a good year for desert flow­ers, but it’s not one of those spec­tac­u­lar sea­sons when the ground pul­sates pur­ple with sand ver­bena or gold with brit­tle­bush. Some of the ocotillo were in bloom, and the desert agaves like this one (Agave deserti) were send­ing up their pink and green stalks.

Lots else was in bloom. But as I review the pho­tos from the trips I’m find­ing that I’m star­ing at a pile of images of plants I don’t know the names of. I’ll share more of the pic­tures than this first one once I get them a lit­tle bet­ter orga­nized and the plants matched up with my list of names.

Since it’s Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day I’ll share with you some plants from my gar­den that I do know the names of. Some of these are old friends that have been bloom­ing for a while, and I’ve been shar­ing over past Bloom Days. But a lot of these are just com­ing into bloom for the first time this year.

I thought the blooms on this car­pen­te­ria were fin­ished a month ago, but the plant has sur­prised me with a robust bloom spurt, big­ger than the first one.

Unlike the car­pen­te­ria, this old friend, the tree core­op­sis, won’t be bloom­ing again for another nine or ten months.

Many of these plants sur­vive in the gar­den with min­i­mal added water. The cli­mate in this area is dry in a coastal-influenced sort of way. I might water once or twice a month in the sum­mer, but the fre­quent morn­ing over­cast and occa­sional fog helps keep the plants hydrated. Addi­tion­ally the plants in the gar­den have enjoyed a slighter higher than aver­age rain­fall so thoughts of the dry sum­mer ahead aren’t in the minds of these plants. Spring is here.

This Salvia Bee’s Bliss has been in the ground for over two years, but only now is it start­ing to take off.

Black sage, Salvia mellifera.

The local annual chia, Salvia car­d­u­aceae, with the exotic Phlomis mono­cephala in the back­ground. The chia is one of the coastal plants that also can get to be pretty com­mon in parts of the desert.

Here’s another com­bi­na­tion of plants, the laven­der pink of the sting­ing lupine with the stri­dent gold of the cras­sula rel­a­tive behind it. The con­trast is pretty stri­dent to my taste, but hey, spring isn’t all about sub­tle plays of one color against another…

Last month I showed this orange mimu­lus seedling. That time I got it in focus.

From the same par­ents that lived in this bed comes this other mon­keyflower, this one vel­vety red with almost black detailing.

And here’s another vel­vety red mimu­lus seedling. You might con­fuse it for the pre­vi­ous one, but the flow­ers are sub­tly different.

Nuttall’s milkvetch, look­ing full and flow­ery, close to its sea­sonal peak.

Ver­bena lilacina looks bet­ter for me with a lit­tle more added water than some of the plants around it. But it sur­vives even when I forget.

The pale Ver­bena lilacina ‘Paseo Ran­cho’ was just start­ing to bloom last month. It’s start­ing to wake up for the spring.

Some parts of the gar­den get treated to more fre­quent watering.

This Cal­i­for­nia but­ter­cup, Ranun­cu­lus cal­i­for­nia, comes up reli­ably every year in an area of the gar­den where lawn meets unwa­tered gravel.

Blue-eyed grass, Sisy­rinchium bel­lum, appre­ci­ates a moister spot as well.

Geum Red Wings, a pretty, infor­mal plant.

Hum­ming­bird sage, Salvia spathacea, is a Cal­i­for­nia plant from moister places than my gar­den. Even in semi-shade it looks best with water two or three times a month.

And these last two of these go about as far from desert plants as you can get with­out get­ting aquatic plants. Both of these grow in my bog gar­dens, with their feet in stand­ing water most of the year.

Sar­race­nia flava var. max­ima is one one of the first plants in the bog to put out flow­ers. The com­mon descrip­tion of the scent is ‘cat piss,’ but I think that’s a lit­tle too harsh a descrip­tion. The flow­ers are nice, but most peo­ple grow these for the pitcher-shaped leaves.

A cou­ple more sar­race­nias, a dif­fer­ent S. flava in the back, and a hybrid of S. flava and S. alata up front.

Head over to Carol’s blog, May Dreams Gar­dens, to check out all the other blog­gers cel­e­brat­ing Gar­den Blog­gers’ Bloom Day!

March 14 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: desert plants • flowers • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • native plants • water use | 22 Comments »

but they said to cut down on watering…

I read this in the week­end paper and had to share: It looks like the pop­u­la­tion of San Diego County is doing so well in cut­ting down our water use that the water dis­tricts that sup­ply us are sud­denly feel­ing the finan­cial pinch. Here’s a snip­pet from the San Diego Union-Tribune arti­cle:

“We don’t need to keep telling (cus­tomers) to do a bet­ter job,” said Bill Rucker, gen­eral man­ager for the Val­lecitos Water Dis­trict in San Marcos.

His agency’s sales fell 20 per­cent in the April-to-July period com­pared with the same period in 2008. To make up for the down­turn, the dis­trict will leave some posi­tions vacant and roll back con­ser­va­tion education.

Dur­ing a meet­ing of the region’s top water man­agers in late August, “every­one was con­cerned about the lost rev­enues,” said Den­nis Lamb of the Val­lecitos district.

He said the decision-makers expressed sup­port for allow­ing res­i­dents to con­tinue water­ing their lawns and other land­scap­ing a max­i­mum of three days a week dur­ing the win­ter and spring, even though cur­rent reg­u­la­tions call for irri­ga­tion only once a week from Novem­ber through May.

After read­ing reac­tions from the author­i­ties I’m left won­der­ing: Should it really be the water dis­tricts that are at the pub­lic fore­front of water con­ser­va­tion? On one hand they’re telling us to do the right thing. But at the same time it’s in their finan­cial inter­est if we don’t. Con­flict of inter­est, anyone?

September 15 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: water conservation • water use | 8 Comments »

thinking about water

It’s easy to obsess about some­thing you don’t have enough of, and water in Cal­i­for­nia is one of those things.

On my recent trip to North­ern Cal­i­for­nia it was hard not to notice the dozens of signs stuck along the side of the inter­state like so many Fox News soundbites-on-a-stick. I can’t tell you all the details about our water-use wars, but it has some­thing to do with ongo­ing drought, over­pop­u­la­tion and a man­date to return water to nat­ural water­courses in attempt to keep some small fish from van­ish­ing from the face of the earth for­ever. As cheap, plen­ti­ful water is shut off or diverted to the big cities with more polit­i­cal clout, it’s easy to see that some farm­ers aren’t happy.

Back home, we’ve been reminded that water doesn’t just mag­i­cally fall from the sky in plen­ti­ful amounts. The cast-iron water lines that sup­ply the neigh­bor­hood have been fail­ing, and the old lines are being replaced with new, bright baby-blue water mains. All sum­mer long the street out front has been a con­struc­tion pit as they installed tem­po­rary sup­ply lines, cut through pave­ment to remove the old prob­lem pipe, installed the new lines and pre­pared to hook up the houses to the never-ending font of the life-giving fluid. They’ve said that the street will be a no-parking zone for the next six weeks. Feels like it’s been for­ever already.

Of course that water sup­ply isn’t with­out lim­its. The city has been on a manda­tory water-reduction pro­gram since June, and I was happy to see that city water use dropped 20% that month. But as the nov­elty of sav­ing water wore off, July’s num­bers fell to 12%.

I’ve been try­ing to do my part. Over­all I feel pretty good about it, but I’ve found myself falling off the wagon a bit myself. My new offense is this lit­tle num­ber, a reverse-osmosis purifi­ca­tion sys­tem to improve the water qual­ity I can offer a new lit­tle col­lec­tion of car­niv­o­rous plants (more on that in a future post). A real­ity with almost all R/O sys­tems is that pro­duc­ing one gal­lon of good water gen­er­ates sev­eral gal­lons of waste. I knew that going into it, but the real­ity of it is pretty stunning.

But instead of fol­low­ing the instal­la­tion instruc­tions, which out­line in detail how you send all the waste­water down the drain through the spe­cial pipe fit­tings the man­u­fac­turer thought­fully sup­plies with the unit, I mod­i­fied the instal­la­tion to aim the waste stream into a water bot­tle. The rejected water ends up being a lit­tle saltier and grosser that what comes from the tap, but it’s still cleaner than the gray­wa­ter we’re recy­cling from our show­ers and is per­fectly good for water­ing the plants that aren’t among the cho­sen few.

Now that I’ve lived with this setup for a cou­ple of weeks I’m find­ing that lug­ging around five gal­lon water bot­tles can be a bit of a chore. Maybe I’ll rig a way to divert the waste directly to the gar­den. But that’s a project that will have to wait. Fall plant­ing sea­son is com­ing up, as well as a pile of house projects. And then there’s that new col­lec­tion of plants to play with…

September 05 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: reverse osmosis • water purifiers • water use | 6 Comments »

the most recent water bill

We’ve taken a lot of mea­sures to try to con­serve water. Each water bill we receive gives us a chance to look at how well we’re doing. Com­pared to last year, this last bill showed a 40.1% drop for the two-month period of mid-May to mid-July.

To get to this point we’ve installed drip irri­ga­tion for most of the remain­ing thirsty plants, reduced the num­ber of times a week the out­door sprin­kler runs, recy­cled water from the shower, mulched many gar­den spaces, and replaced some water-intensive plants with low-water or no-water selec­tions. It’s helped that this has been a fairly cool spring and early summer.

Still, 112 gal­lons a day aver­age total for a house­hold of two people–one of us work­ing 40 hours a week, the other mainly work­ing out of the house–still seems a lit­tle on the high side. That’s enough water to flush a 1.6 gal­lon low-flow toi­let 70 times per day. But com­pared to an Amer­i­can per capita aver­age of some­thing around 60–70 gal­lons for just indoor usage, I guess that’s not too awful for both indoor and out­door use.

Hmmm, I won­der if we can get the usage down to less than 100 total gal­lons a day for the two of us. It might be a lit­tle tricky over the sum­mer. But it should be totally doable once the weather cools.

July 29 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: water conservation • water use | 5 Comments »

gardens from lands with little water

My thanks to James Golden of View from Fed­eral Twist for bring­ing to my atten­tion a book that he thought would speak to this Californian’s attempts to gar­den in a land with lit­tle water. Pene­lope Hobhouse’s The Gar­dens of Per­sia traces the devel­op­ment of gar­dens in the rainfall-challenged area, begin­ning with the the ear­li­est known gar­den for which we have an archae­o­log­i­cal record, Cyrus the Great’s gar­dens at Pasar­gadae, which date to the 6th cen­tury, BCE.

That ear­li­est gar­den fea­tured a rec­tan­gu­lar space divided sym­met­ri­cally into smaller rec­tan­gles by two water courses that inter­sected at a 90 degree angle. It’s a basic for­mula that would develop through the cen­turies into the Islamic, Mughal and Moor­ish gar­dens which, in turn, went on to influ­ence garden-making in Europe and beyond.

Cyrus’s gar­den used water in a way that treated it as a pre­cious resource in a desert land but also showed off the fact that water was avail­able to the owner of the gar­den, rein­forc­ing the pres­tige and power of the ruler. Sub­se­quent gar­dens in Per­sia con­tin­ued to strike this bal­ance. They used water in care­ful, strate­gic ways, treat­ing it as the rare resource it was, often in nar­row chan­nels where evap­o­ra­tion would have been minized under the desert sun. At the same time they high­lighted the power of the owner of the gar­den, and per­haps helped to con­flate water’s life-giving pow­ers with legit­i­macy of the ruler.

Here in San Diego, you can see an inter­pre­ta­tion of a Persian-influenced Moor­ish gar­den in Bal­boa Park’s Alcazar Gar­den. Pur­port­edly “pat­terned after the gar­dens of Alcazar Cas­tle in Seville, Spain,” the gar­den is a 1935 design by local archi­tect Richard Requa, built for the 1935–36 Cal­i­for­nia Pacific Inter­na­tional Exposition.

View Larger Map

Although I’ve never been to the Alcázar in Seville, a quick trip to the satel­lite overview of the orig­i­nal Alcázar gar­dens on Google Maps reveals the Cal­i­for­nia gar­den to be a fairly loose inter­pre­ta­tion of what you’ll find in Spain. But it retains strong over­tones of tra­di­tional Per­sian gar­dens in its strong sym­me­try and thrifty use of water. (Gar­den sight­see­ing via Google Maps works really well for overviews of large gar­dens with strong struc­ture. Take a look at Ver­sailles or Isola Bella.)

In the Bal­boa Park gar­den each of the inter­sec­tions of the main cen­tral axis and two per­pen­dic­u­lar axes is cel­e­brated by a small tiled foun­tain, six to eight feet across. Nei­ther foun­tain throws water more than a few inches away from the fountainhead.

With San Diego’s cur­rent water restric­tions, home­own­ers can’t have any sort of foun­tain that shoots water into the air. So even foun­tains that are as mea­sured in their use of water as these are wouldn’t be per­mit­ted. But evap­o­ra­tion and water waste on this style of foun­tain is so dif­fer­ent from what you’d have with civic foun­tains that are more like unplugged fire hydrants. (Think of the foun­tains in Las Vegas at Bel­la­gio.) These lit­tle Moor­ish foun­tains cel­e­brate water, they don’t waste it.

The gar­den fea­tures bor­ders of clipped box­wood that out­line the rec­tan­gles of the gar­den beds. Sea­sonal plant­i­ngs rotate in an out of these bor­dered areas. Laven­der, cos­mos, and Shasta daisies were fill­ing in the cen­tral rec­tan­gles on this July after­noon, with rud­beckia, pen­ste­mon, ire­sene, can­nas, sun­flow­ers and other warm-weather plants on the margins.

Are these plant­i­ngs his­tor­i­cally accu­rate? With the excep­tion of the laven­der, not at all. But chances are that if the Per­sian rulers were around today, they would used what­ever mate­ri­als were avail­able to them, espe­cially if they were plants that spoke to power and con­quest over dis­tant lands. Plants from all over the globe and mod­ern hybrids would only serve to rein­force the viewer’s sense of the ruler’s power.

Pene­lope Hob­house makes a sim­i­lar obser­va­tion about choice of plant mate­ri­als in the Persian-influenced gar­dens at the Gen­er­al­ife in Grenada: “Archae­ol­o­gists dis­cov­ered that the gar­den must orig­i­nally have been planted with low-growing flow­ers requir­ing lit­tle soil, although there were some deeper pits obvi­ously made for shrubs, such as myr­tle, and orange trees which had been described as grow­ing there in the 16th cen­tury. After the exca­va­tions the soil was returned to the Ace­quia Court, and today mod­ern annu­als with no his­tor­i­cal authen­tic­ity give a col­or­ful display.”

If you were want­ing to make a historically-correct Per­sian gar­den Hobhouse’s text list many other options through­out, includ­ing var­i­ous roses, tulips, and sev­eral trees includ­ing white poplar, plane trees, plums, apri­cots, and apples.

Another resource for his­tor­i­cal plants would be Ali Akbar Husain’s Scent in the Islamic Gar­den: A Study of Dec­cani Urdu Lit­er­ary Sources, a study that I knew noth­ing about until I hap­pened to see it sit­ting on the shelf next to the Hob­house book in the library. This fairly aca­d­e­mic but quite read­able book con­cen­trates on Mhu­gal gar­dens and pro­vides a long appen­dix of specif­i­cally fra­grant plants men­tioned in gar­den texts. Although the focus is on texts from India, plants of of Euro­pean ori­gin make up a big part of the list.

Many of the selec­tions don’t come as any sur­prise: sev­eral rose species, nar­cis­sus, vio­lets, laven­der, jas­mine, mint, crinum, cro­cus, lilies, iris. But a cou­ple would be sur­pris­ing selec­tions for gar­dens today: one of the stink­ing corpse flower species (Amor­phophal­lus caman­u­la­tus) and cannabis (yes, that cannabis).

July 26 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • places | Tags: fountains • historical authenticity • Moorish gardens • Penelope Hobhouse • Persian gardens • water features • water use | 9 Comments »

my swamp creatures

Here are some of the pitcher plants grow­ing in my guilty plea­sure bog gar­den, a small con­crete con­tainer in which I have more than a half dozen of these sar­race­nias and as many sun­dews. The guilty plea­sure part of this comes in when you con­sider that most of Cal­i­for­nia is now in its third year of drought, and when you real­ize that none of the plants in the bog gar­den likes to dry out. And prefer­ably they’d like to have their toes, though not all their roots, in stand­ing water.

The genus Sar­race­nia is native mostly to wet zones in the East­ern and South­ern United States (with one species into Canada). The ones I’ve tried are prov­ing to be pretty easy to grow as long as they get sun­light and good-quality water. (I’ve prob­a­bly men­tioned before how mine get reverse osmo­sis water from the local water cafe instead of the hyper­chlo­ri­nated bong water that comes out of most South­ern Cal­i­for­nia spig­ots. So far, pro­vid­ing good water has been the most dif­fi­cult part of grow­ing these plants.)

These plants, left to right, top to bottom:

1. Sar­race­nia rubra
2. S. leu­co­phylla ‘Tarnok’
3. S. x Dixie Lace
4. S. alata
5. S. minor

There’s also a closely related swamp thing that’s native to North­ern Cal­i­for­nia and Ore­gon. That plant, Dar­ling­to­nia cal­i­for­nica, how­ever, is as dif­fi­cult to grow in most loca­tions as it is stun­ning. If your can’t pro­vide sum­mer night tem­per­a­tures below 55 degrees, don’t bother with it. You’ll kill it. I killed mine. Not all native plants makes sense to grow if they’re not native to your envi­ron­ment! (If you really must do what I did and not as I say, you could try con­struct­ing a spe­cial dar­ling­to­nia box like they do in Japan to lower tem­per­a­tures around the plant.)

So what’s the water use? Dur­ing the hottest months the lit­tle bog sur­vives on three to four 5-gallon serv­ings a month of water. That totals around 15–20 gal­lons for a space that’s about six or seven square feet, or about 2.1 to 3.3 gal­lons per square foot. I was a lit­tle shocked when I com­pared this num­ber to what one source says it takes to main­tain a typ­i­cal lawn over the sum­mer here in the coastal zone: 2.6–3.6 gal­lons per square foot.

Like, I can have a tiny lit­tle swamp gar­den for about the same amount of water it takes to sup­port an equiv­a­lent spot of aver­age lawn? And when you con­sider that most lawns are larger than six or seven square feet, I sud­denly feel a lit­tle less guilty about my lit­tle guilty plea­sure. And it made me look at lawns dif­fer­ently, that they’re just green swamps full of grass. I think I’d rather have my lit­tle bog garden.

(Full dis­clo­sure: We still do have a small patch of grass in the back­yard which gets greened up for the big Fourth-of-July party and then neglected most of the rest of the year. It helps to have heavy after­noon shade like we do to min­i­mize how much water a lawn requires. But when the guy who keeps it mowed and edged won’t do it any more (you know who you are), the lawn is history…)

July 02 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bog plants • Darlingtonia californica • lawns • sarracenia • water use | 11 Comments »

botanical side trip

While I was vis­it­ing San Diego’s Earth Day cel­e­bra­tions on Sun­day, I took a quick detour into Bal­boa Park’s Botan­i­cal Build­ing. It dates back to the 1914–15 Panama Pacific Expo­si­tion, and lays claim to being one of the largest lath struc­tures in the world.

It was an odd feel­ing to leave the sun-drenched cel­e­bra­tion of sus­tain­able liv­ing out­side and shift gears into the shaded, misted, and heav­ily watered Botan­i­cal Build­ing. Humid and trop­i­cal, the inte­rior reminded me of the over-watered vision of par­adise that many peo­ple still think of when they think of Cal­i­for­nia. Palms, cycads, bego­nias, orchids and other trop­i­cals and sub­trop­i­cals lazed in the shade or reached for the light dozens of feet overhead.

I usu­ally go to pub­lic gar­dens and keep an eye out for things I’d like to have in my own gar­den. Gar­dens are amaz­ingly demo­c­ra­tic that way. If you look hard enough, you can often find some of the rarest plants, espe­cially now with the web avail­able to help source them.

In these days of loom­ing water rationing, how­ever, I felt a lit­tle queasy that the Botan­i­cal Build­ing was show­cas­ing all sorts of water-intensive plants San Die­gans are try­ing not to fix­ate on so much these days. Our aver­age tem­per­a­tures enable the growth of these plants, our reg­u­lar rain­fall does not.

As I was think­ing about that queasi­ness, I real­ized that many of the Bal­boa Park build­ings nearby are muse­ums that are full of unique objects or things that would be so far beyond my means to buy. The resources of these muse­ums are focused on giv­ing the pub­lic access to things and ideas they might not ordi­nar­ily encounter. I decided to try to think of the Botan­i­cal Build­ing that way, as a sort of botan­i­cal museum. Although I could prob­a­bly find many of its plants if I searched hard enough–and a few of them are actu­ally totally common–I decided to try to look at and appre­ci­ate the plants as if they were museum objects I didn’t need to own.

And as my indig­na­tion started to lift, I started to be appre­cia­tive. Wasn’t it great that peo­ple in the city have a place where they can go visit some inter­est­ing plants but not have to worry about water­ing and car­ing for them? And the Botan­i­cal Build­ing is free! If peo­ple decide to cre­ate lit­tle pock­ets of par­adise at home, they don’t need to do their whole gar­dens this way. A lit­tle shaded cor­ner could give you a lot of the same sense of cool­ness and shel­ter that the Botan­i­cal Build­ing does.

In addi­tion to the big lath house, Bal­boa Park offers a num­ber of other plant­i­ngs, includ­ing two suc­cu­lent gar­dens. So it’s not like the park spends all its resources pimp­ing an out­dated vision of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. And there’s value in see­ing an old-school plant­ing of this sort to help appre­ci­ate how local ideas about gar­den­ing have shifted.

So…back to my visit. Lots of things were in flower, but I ended up focus­ing on plants with var­ie­gated leaves that were used through­out the build­ing. No for­est would have so many var­ie­gated plants in so small a space, but this “gar­den museum” did a nice job in show­cas­ing some of the botan­i­cal world’s inter­est­ing foliage pat­terns. Take a look…

(As usual you click on the images to enlarge them, espe­cially if the signs in the thumb­nails are too small to read…)

Cycla­men

Ire­sine herbstii

April 21 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Balboa Park • Balboa Park Botanical Building • foliage • variegated leaves • water use | 3 Comments »

“drought emergency”">“drought emergency”

Our Gov­er­nor has declared a drought emer­gency for Cal­i­for­nia. The state rain­fall and snow­pack has been lower than aver­age for most of the recent years, and reser­voir reserves are dwin­dling. My county has been slightly over aver­age in its rain­fall this sea­son but most of our water comes from the Sierra snows and the Col­orado River. So this cri­sis is very real for us down here as well.

At this point we’re on call for a vol­un­tary water reduc­tion, but if the rains fail us peo­ple will be required to reduce their water use 20%, and then–if things get worse–by 40% or more. Since land­scapes con­sumes the major­ity of the water, our county water author­ity has started an adver­tis­ing cam­paign to deliver these water-overuse door­knob hang­ers with the Sun­day paper. It’s also avail­able online: here.

There are check­boxes for “Your sprin­klers are water­ing the pave­ment,” “Your sprin­klers were on dur­ing the rain,” “You have a bro­ken sprin­kler, and/or your irri­ga­tion sys­tem is leak­ing,” “Your sprin­klers are on every day” and “Your sprin­klers are on dur­ing the day.” My local shop­ping cen­ter is a huge offender in the first cat­e­gory and will be get­ting a hang tag from me.

But this pro­gram is mostly about sprin­klers and water­ing habits and doesn’t really address the under­ly­ing causes. There really need to be big boxes say­ing, “Your huge expanse of grass and water-thirsty plants are attrac­tive, but I’d like to show you how you can have a terrific-looking yard that requires almost no addi­tional water,” or “This extremely well-watered golf course has no place in the desert that is San Diego County.”

The very green golf course in the local canyon bot­tom would get a vio­la­tion tag if that were the case. At least, to their credit, they let the dri­ving range go brown with the end of the rains. Maybe in Cal­i­for­nia golf could morph into a sea­sonal win­ter sport, like ski­ing? Maybe I’m delusional?

March 01 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: drought • water conservation • water use | 5 Comments »

drip irrigation not a water conserving thing?

“Poli­cies aimed at reduc­ing water appli­ca­tions can actu­ally increase water deple­tions… Con­ser­va­tion pro­grams that tar­get reduced water diver­sions or appli­ca­tions pro­vide no guar­an­tee of sav­ing water.”

These con­tro­ver­sial state­ments are part of the abstract of an arti­cle by Frank A. Warda and Manuel Pulido-Velazquez that was recently pub­lished in the cur­rent Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences of the United States of Amer­ica. The study mainly looks at agri­cul­tural water use in the Rio Grande Val­ley, but some of its ideas and find­ings have rel­e­vance for our lit­tle back­yard farm­steads. This is an open-access arti­cle, so you don’t have to have some mag­i­cal lev­els of access to be able to read it online for free.

November 29 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: water conservation • water use | No Comments »

halloween frights

Happy Hal­loween to all of you!

Grow­ing up, Hal­loween was always my favorite of the hol­i­days. These were the years before every­one clois­tered their chil­dren into par­ties sur­rounded by armed guards, and after the years when the celi­brants really meant “trick or treat” when they said it–as in “give me some candy, oth­er­wise I’ll throw eggs on your cars.” Ah. Kindler, gen­tler times…

I have three lit­tle selec­tions to share with you today, ranked from mildy scary to dizzy­ingly horrifying.

Num­ber one: Scary.

(The image to the left from the Orchids in Our Trop­ics web store [ source ])

In my orchid-growing days I was fas­ci­nated by plants in the Pleu­rothal­lis alliance of neotrop­ics orchids, although I was never brave enough to try grow­ing any of them. Of the thirty or so gen­era in the alliance, one genus had a spec­tac­u­lar name so appro­pri­ate for today: Drac­ula!

And if that’s not wild enough, Carl Luer in 1978 described what is per­haps the most out­landish of the species in the genus. And what do you sup­pose this mad sci­en­tist picked for the species name? Vam­pira! (A mad sci­en­tist with a sense of humor–I like that!) Besides hav­ing a ter­rific name, Drac­ula vam­pira is one awe­some plant, some­thing this photo attests to. Most of the pleu­rothal­lids are small lit­tle won­ders, but the flow­ers on this one are eight inches top to bottom.

Scary, but intrigu­ingly beau­ti­ful at the same time.

Num­ber two: Scarier.
I know that I’ve shared this one bit of scari­ness with you before, but it con­tin­ues to scare me every time I see it.

Ugly house

Every neigh­bor­hood prob­a­bly has one of these, a house with a yard that looks like it’s audi­tion­ing for a part in a post-holocaust movie. Like, did the radi­a­tion from the bomb blast take out all the plants? To their credit, the home­own­ers do get points for cre­at­ing a yard that takes no water whatsoever–a bonus in our cur­rent drought. But there are so many bet­ter ways to save water and enhance the world you live in. Greg sug­gested that some­one seed­bomb this house in a bit of guer­rilla gar­den­ing, but how do you seed­bomb concrete?

I’m not a big fan of the new gen­er­a­tion of fake turf that’s going around these days. Although it’s light years beyond Astro­turf, it still looks like plas­tic from less than fif­teen feet away, and it does noth­ing to bat­tle the urban heat­ing phe­nom­e­non. At least it would begin to dress up this yard. And cur­rently the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Water Dis­trict of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia is offer­ing rebates of thirty cents per square foot of lawn that you replace with the plas­tic stuff. (At a cost of $12 a square foot for the fake turf, the rebate doesn’t go ter­ri­bly far…)

The water agen­cies are also offer­ing rebates on water-efficient sprin­kler heads, start­ing at $4.00 per head, which would pay for most of the unit, as well as rebates on weather-based sprin­kler timers. Check out the infor­ma­tion on the rebate pro­grams. One grouse I have with them is that there’s noth­ing that would give you a credit for replac­ing lawn with low-water-use plants that would also help keep the city cool by reduc­ing the amount of reflected solar energy that is con­verted to urban overheating.

Num­ber three: Scari­est.

I was in the back yard look­ing for the cat the other evening, round­ing her up for the evening indoors. She was being extra-coy that night, and I had to go for the flash­light. Return­ing to the gar­den, the flash­light beam high­lighted this atroc­ity less than two feet from my face: the dreaded tomato tobacco horn­worm! (Edit: Thanks to Jenny for cor­rect­ing my iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of this lit­tle terror.)

Tomato Horn­worm

Eek! I felt like Janet Leigh in the shower scene from Psy­cho, only I was bet­ter dressed at the moment.

This is a hor­ror than any gar­dener can empathize with, I’m sure, par­tic­u­larly when the tomato tobacco horn­worm is chomp­ing on the last pre­cious tomato plant of the sea­son. As much as I try to be kind to nature, I marched inside to get the Felco shears and did bat­tle with the beast.

(This photo is actu­ally of another worm I dis­cov­ered the next day. All sum­mer long there were no horn­worms. And then sud­denly, bam!, there were sev­eral, chomp­ing away on what may be the last tomato in the neighborhood.)

So…you decide. Was the tomato tobacco horn­worm the scari­est thing? Or was it the vile, mur­der­ous gar­dener who would com­mit unspeak­able acts with a pair of shears?

October 31 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: Dracula vampira • Halloween • orchids • tomato hornworm • tomatoes • water rebates • water use | 3 Comments »