[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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.

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.)

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 »

water-conserving gardens

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 »

more about lawns

Thanks to Linda who saved for me a New Yorker arti­cle by Eliz­a­beth Kol­bert, “Turf War.” It’s from the…um…July 21 issue. (Okay, it some­times take me a lit­tle time to finally get around to things…)

It’s a wor­thy read that takes a his­tor­i­cal look at some of the writ­ings dis­cussing the topic of the Amer­i­can lawn, begin­ning with Andrew Jack­son Downing’s 1841 Trea­tise on the The­ory and Prac­tice of Land­scape Gar­den­ing. Being a review of the lawn lit­er­a­ture, it’s ripe with pithy quotes by the author and many oth­ers that show changes in Amer­i­can thought towards this car­pet of mown grass. Read the arti­cle for all the quotes in con­text, but here’s a hand­ful that I espe­cially liked:

Among the dozen or so main grasses that make up the Amer­i­can lawn, almost none are native to Amer­ica. Ken­tucky blue­grass comes from Europe and north­ern Asia, Bermuda grass from Africa, and Zoysia grass from East Asia.

Mow­ing tur­f­grass quite lit­er­ally cuts off the option of sex­ual reproduction…In his anti-lawn essay “Why mow?,” Michael Pol­lan puts it this way: “Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No won­der Amer­i­cans like them so much.”

“A fine car­pet of green grass stamps the inhab­i­tants as good neigh­bors, as desir­able cit­i­zens,” Abra­ham Levitt wrote. (By covenant, the orig­i­nal Levit­town­ers agreed to mow their lawns once a week between April 15th and Novem­ber 15th.)

[In a dis­cus­sion on the us pes­ti­cides and her­bi­cides on lawns:] In “Amer­i­can Green” (2006), Ted Stein­berg, a pro­fes­sor of his­tory at Case West­ern Reserve Uni­ver­sity, com­pares the lawn to “a nation­wide chem­i­cal exper­i­ment with home­own­ers as the guinea pigs.”

Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satel­lite data col­lected by the Depart­ment of Defense, deter­mined that, includ­ing golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thou­sand square miles–an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study con­cluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was grow­ing in places where tur­f­grass should new have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the coun­try well irri­gated, the author of the study cal­cu­lated, it would take an aston­ish­ing two hun­dred gal­lons of water per per­son, per day.

For a developer…putting in tur­f­grass is by far the eas­i­est way to land­scape; what is some­times called “contractor’s mix” grass seed is specif­i­cally for­mu­lated to pro­vide a fast-growing–though not nec­es­sar­ily long-lasting–green. (Lowe’s, which sells fif­teen pounds of contractor’s-mix seed for $23.52, adver­tises it as an “econ­omy mix­ture that pro­vides quick grass cover.”) The lawn may be waste­ful and destruc­tive, it may even be dan­ger­ous, but it is, in its way, convenient.

October 21 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • quotes | Tags: lawns • pesticides • water use | 2 Comments »