[ Lost in the Landscape ]

almost useless weeding advice

I’m sure you’ve read those earnest but wacked let­ters sent to advice columns, let­ters where the writer wants to share a piece of house­keep­ing inge­nu­ity that you look at and find your­self gob­s­macked by the total use­less­ness of the advice being offered. These let­ters might begin some­thing like, “Dear Heloise, you know, I never throw out corn tas­sels any­more because I real­ized that I could use them to make wigs for my pet iguana…” (I might be mak­ing this one up. Maybe not. It doesn’t really matter.)

Both John and I had read in one of the papers a while back that you could use boil­ing water to con­trol weeds. Inspired one day after mak­ing a pot of pasta, remem­ber­ing what he’d read, John drained the pasta water out onto some weeds that were grow­ing in the cracks out on the patio. Not long after­wards the weeds croaked. Some­how it all seemed to make sense.

So…at the risk of sound­ing too much like like Heloise…I pass on this piece of gar­den­ing advice.

You’ll have to think this method through a lit­tle before apply­ing it to many sit­u­a­tions in the gar­den. This works if you want to kill every­thing, like in the mid­dle of hard­scape, but prob­a­bly isn’t a good idea if there might be roots of a desir­able plant nearby. Also, it really does take a lot of boil­ing water to pol­ish off some stub­born plants. It’s not a par­tic­u­larly effec­tive or method. If you salt your pasta water to the point of sea­wa­ter you might not want to intro­duce all the salts near frag­ile plants. And the hot water might even stim­u­late some dor­mant seeds into growth, since the method is almost exactly the “hot water method” that’s referred to in man­u­als on seed propagation.

Still, if you find your­self with a big pot of boil­ing water that you’d oth­er­wise dump down the drain and have a patio full of weeds nearby, this might be just the thing to do.

While out weed­ing I’ve been notic­ing that some of the plants grow­ing up in the cracks aren’t the stan­dard nasty beast­ies that have been plagu­ing me over the years. These are in fact some Cal­i­for­nia natives, seedlings of par­ents I’ve planted in the gar­den in places where I wanted them. The seedlings are try­ing to start up a new gen­er­a­tion in places where I really don’t want them, but I’m hav­ing a hard time pulling them out.

This one’s Clarkia rubi­cunda ssp. blas­dalei. I think I’ll let it flower before remov­ing the plant. It’s an annual, besides, so I should be able to indulge it for a month longer, to let it ful­fill its bio­log­i­cal destiny.

San Miguel Island buck­wheat, Eri­o­gonum grande var. rubescens, one of sev­eral I’ve noticed recently. I like the plant, but I’m afraid its choice of loca­tion sucks. I think I’ll be able to pull it out soon.

Cal­i­for­nia sage­brush, Artemisia cal­i­for­nica. I really hate to pull up any­thing with a species name of “cal­i­for­nica,” but once again its choice of loca­tion totally sucks. So far–for over a year now–it’s avoided get­ting doused with pasta water or get­ting yanked out of the ground. But a plant in the wrong place is a plant in the wrong place.

I have to admit it. This plant, in this spot, is a weed.

April 11 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: native plants • weeding • weeds | 16 Comments »

january bloomday

Here goes… Jan­u­ary bloom­day, hosted by Carol of May Dreams Gar­dens.

The front gar­den, like the rest of my lot, mixes Cal­i­for­nia natives with exotics from all over. Our local blad­der­pod in the fore­ground, yel­low and perky and vir­tu­ally ever-blooming, with a big clump of aloe that owns January.

Folks in colder cli­mates may be drool­ing a bit, but there’s a price for year-round gar­dens: Year-round weeds! Since this is Bloom­day, let me start off with a few weeds in bloom, doing their best to gen­er­ate even more weeds. There are times when I think that it might be nice to live where you can for­get about weed­ing for three months or more…

But through the magic of pho­tog­ra­phy, an artis­tic medium well suited to telling lies and half-truths, here are some blooms for the month. I could tell you there are no weeds around these bloom­ing plants, but then I’d be lying. Big time.

From Cal­i­for­nia, and the Cal­i­for­nia floris­tic province:

From beyond California:

Check­ing out the gar­den, pho­tograph­ing flow­ers, you get to see what’s going on in the gar­den. I’ve men­tioned the weeds already. Now, let’s add gopher holes into the mix shall we?

While I’ve pretty much given up try­ing to con­trol the gophers, I can at least pick away at the weed­ing. Okay, enough blog­ging for now. Time to pull some weeds. But maybe I’ll check out a few more Gar­den Blog­gers Bloom Day posts first…

January 15 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: flowers • Garden Bloggers Bloom Day • gbbd • weeds | 25 Comments »

a new weed

This past win­ter I was notic­ing a weed pop­ping up all around the yard that I hadn’t noticed before. I was men­tion­ing it to John, and added, “I’m not sure what it is, though think it could be some sort of euphorbia.”

Then in the gen­tly tact­ful way spouses have of cor­rect­ing you and point­ing out your blind spots he qui­etly cleared his throat and pointed to one of the four young pot­ted plants we have around the gar­den of Euphor­bia lam­bii, one of my dry garden-adapted plants from the Canary Islands. “Maybe it’s that?”

Uh, like duh. What else would it be?

Last year was the first that these plants bloomed, and this spring they bloomed with a vengeance. Dur­ing sunny weather over the last few weeks I’ve heard lit­tle pop­ping noises from the direc­tion of the plants, and have come to the con­clu­sion that the sounds were that of seed pods explod­ing and jet­ti­son­ing the dust-like seed every­where.

I may come to regret the day I intro­duced these to the gar­den, which accord­ing to my records is March 9, 2008.

Speak­ing of weedy plants, here’s another sur­prise seedling from the gar­den, a lit­tle baby red foun­tain grass, one of three seedlings I noticed this year. In recent years the related green foun­tain grass, Pen­nise­tum setaceum has become a nox­ious (though stun­ningly beau­ti­ful) weed and has landed high on vir­tu­ally every thou-shalt-not-plant list issued for Cal­i­for­nia. But many peo­ple gave a by to this related red plant. It was often pushed as being ster­ile and inca­pable of repro­duc­ing by seed, a piece of mis­in­for­ma­tion even I relayed in this blog. (I’ve cor­rected that ear­lier oops in case any­one reads that ear­lier post.) As you can see here it can repro­duce by seed, though this form doesn’t spawn the same way reg­u­lar foun­tain grass does. Nor is it imme­di­ately the same mon­ster pest that feather grass (Nas­sella tenuis­sima) can be.

Pok­ing around the web I found an updated plant descrip­tion at San Mar­cos Grow­ers that includes some inter­est­ing back­ground on this plant:

Recent work in prepa­ra­tion for the grass sec­tions of the Flora of North Amer­ica, which will include nat­u­ral­ized and cul­ti­vated grasses, indi­cates that the name cho­sen for this plant will be Pen­nise­tum advena or per­haps P. x advena. Dr. Joseph K. Wipff, pre­vi­ously with Texas A&M and now a tur­f­grass breeder, wrote the sec­tion on Pen­nise­tum and has indi­cated that Red Foun­tain Grass is most likely a cross between P. setaceum and P. macrostachys (AKA ‘Bur­gundy Giant’). As a hybrid the name would most appro­pri­ately be Pen­nise­tum x advena ‘Rubrum’. The latin word advena means “newly arrived” or “stranger.”

So is it safe to plant this form of foun­tain grass? Here’s my think­ing: Hybrids between species are often ster­ile. (Think of mules, the off­spring of a horse and a don­key.) But every now and then some­thing hap­pens that allows the hybrid to repro­duce. Some­times the seedlings will be just as nearly ster­ile as the imme­di­ate par­ent, but other times a muta­tion could ren­der the seedling entirely fer­tile. In that lat­ter sce­nario the nearly-sterile foun­tain grass could turn into some­thing with the ugly inva­sive poten­tial of its Pen­nise­tum setaceum ancestor.

In other words, today I would be cau­tious and not plant it. Unfor­tu­nately, almost twenty years ago, we designed the front yard around a big mound of the stuff. The plants look stun­ning and move gra­ciously in response to the breezes. Their size is per­fect for the spot, and their red color is unmatched among other grasses. Every now and then I look at other options, like those rec­om­mended in the Don’t Plant a Pest brochure put out by the Cal­i­for­nia Inva­sive Plant Coun­cil. But these lists often fall short in the alter­na­tives they offer and end up read­ing like, “Cheese­cake is bad for you. Would you like to eat this deli­cious raw rutabaga instead?” So…I’m still look­ing for the per­fect replace­ment plant–hopefully some sort of native, but in the mean­time I’m pulling the occa­sional seedlings.

June 20 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Euphorbia lambii • Fountain grass • invasive plants • Pennisetum setaceum 'Rubrum' • weeds | 10 Comments »

plant it once, have it forever

There’s a promi­nent North­ern Cal­i­for­nia nurs­ery* that adver­tises on its web­site that a vari­ety will self-sow and nat­u­ral­ize. Or in its peppy, enthu­si­as­tic way: “Reseeds!” One of the plants so listed has a fol­lowup note: “Due to agri­cul­tural restric­tions, we can­not ship this plant to Arkansas, New Jer­sey, New York, Okla­homa, South Car­olina, and Texas.”

Read between the lines: This plant, under the right con­di­tions, might just run wild, out of con­trol, and take over your gar­den or an ecosys­tem! (Not all plant restric­tions are based on their inva­sive poten­tial, how­ever. For instance, some might be con­trolled because of known pests or dis­eases the species may harbor.)

Over the years I’ve added inter­est­ing plants to the gar­den, only to have them sow and prop­a­gate them­selves all over the gar­den. For most of these, I don’t worry huge amounts that they’ll escape to the nearby wilds because they’re wimps when not pam­pered in a gar­den, but with reg­u­lar water­ing they’re aggres­sive thugs. Pretty thugs, to be sure. But still thugs.

Here are a few of my mis­takes. Some are merely annoy­ing. Oth­ers require mul­ti­ple hours of labor every year to keep under con­trol. Colder areas might not have the same prob­lems with these that I do, but I’m sure you have your own mon­sters. (My apolo­gies in advance to the fine nation of Mex­ico. I just noticed that four of my selec­tions have “Mex­i­can” in their com­mon names…)

Mex­i­can petu­nia (Ruel­lia brit­to­ni­ana). Pretty, tough. Also pretty tough to erad­i­cate in my gar­den once it got a foothold. I should have paid atten­tion when the guy at the plant sale warned me that it might spread. Accord­ing to Flori­data, “Mex­i­can petu­nia is listed as a Cat­e­gory I inva­sive species by the Florida Exotic Pest Plant Coun­cil. This means that it is ‘alter­ing native plant com­mu­ni­ties by dis­plac­ing native species, chang­ing com­mu­nity struc­tures or eco­log­i­cal func­tions, or hybridiz­ing with natives.’ This warn­ing applies to all parts of the state of Florida (and other areas with sim­i­lar mild cli­mates). Where hardy, the Mex­i­can petu­nia excels at invad­ing wet­lands.” It also can be a nui­sance in a dry gar­den like mine where it spreads under­ground and via explod­ing seed pods.

Mex­i­can fan palm (Wash­ing­to­nia robusta). Maybe it’s a uniquely Cal­i­for­nia thing: You go out to the gar­den to pull weeds, and along with the crab­grass and spurge, you end up pulling up lit­tle palm trees. Folks in colder climes might be thrilled to have some of these, but here they’re a nui­sance. Our Mex­i­can fan came with the house, and it took us a few years to finally remove it. All that time we were yank­ing baby palms all over the front yard, and the seed­bank remained viable for sev­eral years afterward.

Mex­i­can feather grass (Nas­sella tenuis­sima). I’ve dinged this plant sev­eral times before. I won’t add any­thing more here other than to note that I’ve prob­a­bly pulled up a hun­dred seedlings this sea­son. At least this is down from the orgy of seedlings that I had when there was a harem of adult plants in the gar­den that appar­ently had noth­ing on their mind except sex and reproduction.

Mex­i­can evening prim­rose (Oenothera species, I think it was O. spe­ciosa). I was on vaca­tion at the Grand Canyon in 1991. Inno­cently I bought a packet of seeds of these that were sold as a “wild­flower.” I was thrilled when they came up the first year and I had a gre­gar­i­ous patch of del­i­cate bright pink flow­ers where there’d been a patch of dirt pre­vi­ously. Lit­tle did I know they’d resow and spread by under­ground run­ners and con­tinue to annoy me to this day. Wild flower, indeed.

Sweet alyssum (Lob­u­laria mar­itima). Don’t let the “sweet” in its com­mon name fool you. I con­tinue to weed alyssum seedlings pop­ping up around the gar­den from a sin­gle packet of mixed col­ors I planted in the late 1980s.

Fort­night lily (Dietes irid­ioides). A few clumps of these came with the house. The tough, hard seeds lay dor­mant in the ground for years and plague you with unwanted seedlings long after you’ve removed their source.

Calla lily (Zant­edeschia aethiopica). I’ll have to admit that I have a soft spot for these plants and don’t pull them out the same way I pull out other unwel­come plants. My parent’s house came with a fifty-foot foun­da­tion plant­ing of them on the north side of their house. The way the plant can spread, how­ever, now makes me think the pre­vi­ous own­ers might have started with just a half dozen plants. Feral callas are plants of con­cern in some Cal­i­for­nia wet­lands. A cou­ple well-watered gar­den spots seem to gen­er­ate calla lilies out of thin air.

Epa­zote (Dys­pha­nia ambro­sioides). I won’t quite call plant­ing this Mex­i­can herb a mis­take, since I use occa­sion­ally in cook­ing. It does spread about the gar­den a bit, how­ever, and pops up in unex­pected places. There are reports [ includ­ing this one ] that it’s col­o­nized parts of New York’s Cen­tral Park–though that’s not my doing. I popped over to Wikipedia and learned this pretty inter­est­ing detail I’d never heard before: “Epa­zote essen­tial oil con­tains ascari­dole…; in pure form, it is an explo­sive sen­si­tive to shock.” Botan­i­cal TNT–Wild!

To my mis­takes, I’ll add some native Cal­i­for­nia annu­als and peren­ni­als that have been really suc­cess­ful in repro­duc­ing them­selves in my gar­den. Cur­rently, my plants are wan­der­ing around an area where they’re desired and haven’t escaped far. I won’t call them mis­takes at this point, but I can see that they could become unwel­come in some situations.

Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies (Escholzia cal­i­for­nica). What? Our sacred state flower?! Well, there are some unwel­come escaped colonies in Chile and Aus­tralia. And the seeds reg­u­larly find their way into cracks in the pavement.

Baby blue eyes (Nemophila men­ziesii). Not really what I’d call a thug, though these seem to be pretty suc­cess­ful at repro­duc­ing them­selves. It’s easy to pull out the occa­sional unwanted plants, but who’d want to?

Clarkia (Clarkia spp.). I haven’t grown many clarkia species, but the one that seems to wan­der around the most for me is C. rubi­cunda ssp. blas­dalei.

*There’s a good chance you’ll have guessed the iden­tity of this well-known nurs­ery if you’ve spent any time at its web­site. I don’t mean to diss them at all. You can get poten­tially ram­bunc­tious plants from vir­tu­ally all nurs­eries, includ­ing those ded­i­cated to native plants.

April 03 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: invasive plants • seed-grown plants • weeds | 10 Comments »

no storms this weekend

Finally. A week­end with good weather and no major out­side com­mit­ments. The local paper recently noted that of eight week­ends, six had been wet and stormy. Out­door leisure busi­nesses were hurt­ing, the paper noted. I’d guess plantsellers would be in the same sit­u­a­tion, though I really think gar­den­ing is much too impor­tant a thing to even begin to call “leisure.”

One of the com­mit­ments that ate into the free time was a fam­ily birth­day that we cel­e­brated at a rental condo down on Mis­sion Beach (San Diego Beach House). That was the day of the mega-earthquake in Chile and the inter­na­tional tsunami alerts. A pretty bizarre day for a party.

Life­guards a few miles up the coast noted some abnor­mal tidal action that they thought had some­thing to do with the tsunami, but we were enough in cel­e­bra­tion mode that we didn’t notice it.

Some­where dur­ing the after­noon some­one was alert enough to spot a boat in dis­tress. Here it is through binoculars.

That was another stormy, dra­matic week­end, how­ever, and the boat’s prob­lems had more to do with the bru­tal on-shore winds and big waves.

Leav­ing the beach I pho­tographed this sign. I’d noticed it before and almost thought that it was a joke. That day I wasn’t so sure anymore.

The time at the beach with the was dra­matic as all get out, and we sure need the rain. But where there’s rain, there’s weeds.

So this week­end I’ll be spend­ing a lot of the week­end out­side, in the sun, pulling weeds. Absolutely, there are worse things to have to do, but with so many wet week­ends the weeds have got­ten so far ahead of me I hardly know where to start.

Much of the weed­ing will be like this: one tiny lit­tle keeper plant mixed in with dozens of inter­lop­ers. There’s a desert marigold seedling (Bai­leya mul­ti­ra­di­ata) mixed in this mess. Some­where.

I’ll enjoy my time in the sun, but leisure? I think not.

March 13 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: rain • weeding • weeds | 7 Comments »

out with the old

This will be the year that I finally win the bat­tle against Mex­i­can feath­er­grass, the blog­ger said opti­misti­cally. I doubt that I’ll be see­ing the end of this beau­ti­ful but wildly over­pro­lific grass any time soon, but I’ve com­pleted pulling all the par­ent plants in the gar­den. With the source of seeds removed, the hun­dreds of unwanted seedlings that I have to pull up every year should diminish.

So how bad was the feath­er­grass prob­lem? Here’s a shot under­neath a black sage in the back yard, no closer than seventy-five feet from the near­est adult feath­er­grass plant capa­ble of set­ting seed. The seed just blew down­wind and set up house­hold in the shel­tered ger­mi­nat­ing con­di­tions in the shade of the sage. Other areas of the gar­den will look like this when the rains begin again and all the banked seed begins to ger­mi­nate. I hate to think that these might get to the local urban canyon, four houses away.

My rela­tion­ship with Mex­i­can feath­er­grass (Nas­sella tenuis­sima or Stipa tenuis­sima) started off in the early 1990s. Like most peo­ple who’ve planted it, I saw it at the nurs­ery with its stalks weav­ing del­i­cately in its beguil­ing come-hither way and fell in love. I bought two.

At first things between us went well. The grasses spread a bit, but the thought of free plants were a real bonus. I even gave plants away.

Though pro­lific, the plant isn’t cur­rently listed as an inva­sive species on the mas­ter Cal-IPA inven­tory, but appears on a 2007 list of nom­i­nated species. It’s clear from some of the com­ments on a Fresh Dirt post­ing that it’s a grow­ing prob­lem in some areas, my neigh­bor­hood included.

Yes, the stuff is gor­geous. But too high main­te­nance and poten­tially prob­lem­atic in my area. It’s time for us to part ways.

So how will I get my fix for del­i­cate, feath­ery grasses? This year has been my first time grow­ing the native Aris­tida pur­purea, pur­ple three-awn, a species that’s found locally. The plant is shorter than the com­mon feath­er­grass, which might be a bonus, depend­ing on your gar­den sit­u­a­tion. And unlike the nas­sella it has a decid­edly pur­ple color to it while it’s growing–very nice. I’ll post pho­tos once my plants get a lit­tle big­ger. I have no idea if it’ll be the same issue of the plant vol­un­teer­ing all over the gar­den, though I doubt it. Even if it escapes to the wilds, it’ll be in the com­pany of oth­ers of its species. Not a prob­lem.

November 22 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: invasive plants • Mexican feather grass • Mexican feathergrass • Nassella tenuissima • Stipa tenuissima • weeds | 8 Comments »

two saturdays

A cou­ple hours of com­mu­nity ser­vice: Sounds a lit­tle like a sen­tence handed down by a judge, but it was actu­ally how I spent some of last Sat­ur­day. I’ve posted ear­lier about the native plant gar­den at Old Town State His­toric Park. That trip I was walk­ing the paths and enjoy­ing garden.

But this time I was a vol­un­teer help­ing main­tain this inter­est­ing young gar­den. Much of the time I was squat­ted down in the dirt pulling up lit­tle palm trees. If you live in another part of the world you might think that pulling up palm trees is a bizarre thing to do. But palm seedlings are a very real weed around here, espe­cially when there are still actively fruit­ing palms nearby, and when there’s still an active seed­bank left from one of the palms that was removed to make way for the garden.

In just one month since my last visit, the num­ber of flow­ers had dimin­ished as we head into our long brown sea­son when many plants approach dor­mancy. There were some splashy clarkia flow­ers remain­ing, as well as this mal­low from the Chan­nel Islands.

There were other weeds to pull at, and the day ended with a quick prun­ing demon­stra­tion and a demon­stra­tion on one way to main­tain deer grass (Muh­len­ber­gia rigens). With this big, dra­matic grass you can let the stems go brown–which is an easy-maintenance approach to this plant. Or you can reach down on each of the old flow­er­ing stems, feel for a joint a cou­ple inches above the base of the plant, and pull. If you find the node, the stem yanks out with­out much resis­tance. It’s not a chore you can do eas­ily while wear­ing thick gloves, and with­out gloves you’ve likely to shred your hands. For­tu­nately this a grass that looks stately and archi­tec­tural whether or not you pull the dried stems. We left most of the plants as they were.

After just two hours of tidy­ing the gar­den looked even bet­ter and ready for the dry months ahead.

Jump ahead one week…

Even though June is typ­i­cally one of our dry months, today was cool and driz­zly as John and I headed for the Mas­ter Gardener’s plant sale at Bal­boa Park.

We parked near the park’s jumbo More­ton Bay fig (Ficus macro­phylla). It’s an amaz­ing plant, but like many figs, it’s not a good choice if you’re con­cerned about keep­ing your home’s foun­da­tion intact. I was appre­cia­tive of hav­ing the park, a great publicly-funded shared space, where you can go to enjoy spec­tac­u­lar plants that don’t make sense to plant in most home spaces.

Rain or shine, the peo­ple make a trail to this plant sale. This is half an hour before the sale, with all these brave souls stand­ing in the heavy mist wait­ing to get first crack at this year’s offerings.

…and this is dur­ing the first few min­utes of the sale.

Some high­lights this year were bromeli­ads from Bal­boa Park’s prop­a­ga­tion program–big plants for the price of a Happy Meal–and an entire table of dif­fer­ent salvias. As thrilled as I am with the genus salvia, I resisted the temp­ta­tions. No space in the gar­den is no space in the garden.

But John didn’t show the same restraint. He likes his suc­cu­lents. And the more unla­beled the suc­cu­lent is the bet­ter. I swear he does this to drive me crazy, know­ing how much I like my plant names. (The suc­cu­lent expert on site looked at it and said that it’s some sort of cras­sula rel­a­tive, which is what I’d have called it. Okay, we have a fam­ily name, and now only 1400 species to go through… Any help out there?)

Although we didn’t end up drop­ping a lot of change on this sale, many peo­ple with more space in the gar­dens found inter­est­ing plants to pop­u­late their spaces. And the pro­ceeds from the sale go to a good cause.

So these two Sat­ur­days showed a cou­ple way you can help the botan­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions around town. You can donate your labor. Or you can do what comes nat­u­rally for most Amer­i­cans: Go shopping!

June 20 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: Muhlenbergia rigens • native plant gardens • Old Town Historic Park • plant sales • volunteering • weeding • weeds | 5 Comments »

the chrysanthemum problem

All around town, both road­side and trail­side, the gar­land chrysan­the­mums have been blooming.

The perky spawn of plants that have been grown for cen­turies in China and Japan for their tasty young green leaves, Chrysan­the­mum coro­nar­ium has come to be a big nui­sance in many dis­turbed areas of South­ern California.

But rather than get­ting all neg­a­tive and curs­ing the plant, let me try a dif­fer­ent tack to try to encour­age every­one to rip it out by its pretty lit­tle roots:

Did you know that 100 grams of boiled gar­land chrysan­the­mum pro­vides 51% of your rec­om­mended daily require­ments of vit­a­min A, 40% of vit­a­min C, 21% of iron, and has only 20 calo­ries? (That’s accord­ing to healthalicious.com.)

OregonLive.com offers some kitchen ideas for gar­land chrysan­the­mum: “Lightly saute the leaves and stems or whole 4– to 6-inch seedlings with sesame seeds, gar­lic, gin­ger and soy sauce… Eat raw in salad, add to soups con­tain­ing fresh gin­ger, or dunk in frit­ter bat­ter and deep-fry.”

(Be sure your greens come from a site other than a road­side that might have been sprayed with her­bi­cides by the city. And be sure you’re eat­ing gar­land chrysan­the­mum instead of the some­what sim­i­lar bush sun­flower (encelia) or San Diego sun­flower (viguiera).)

There are of course other rea­sons to pull up this plant. The Tijuana River National Estu­ar­ine Research Reserve site puts it suc­cinctly: “[C]hrysanthemum forms fields that over­take native plants such as Cal­i­for­nia buck­wheat and sagebrush–both these plants pro­vide food and shel­ter for native birds, insects and other animals.”

So in the end gar­land chrysan­the­mum is the per­fect weed. Whether you respond to thoughts of a healthy snack or to appeals of doing what you can to make the world a bet­ter place, you can get out your weed­ing tools and go to town.

A final thought: Wouldn’t it be great for green-conscious restau­rants to offer tasty and hip entrees on their menu that con­tain locally-harvested gar­land chrysan­the­mum greens that oth­er­wise would have been dam­ag­ing the ecosys­tem? Or maybe we could stock stalls at farmer’s mar­kets with piles of the stuff? Why not turn this over-abundant inva­sive plant into a resource that could be cropped, improv­ing the local land­scape at the same time?

Eat up, everyone!

This post is ded­i­cated to Out­of­doors, who first thought up the idea of ded­i­cat­ing the 13th of the month to posts on inva­sive species.

May 13 2009 | Categories: landscape • plant profiles | Tags: Chrysanthemum coronarium • garland chrysanthemum • invasive plants • weeds | 6 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 »

the evil baobab

I’ve been think­ing a lot about weeds lately. Now that the weather is chang­ing, the lit­tle cool sea­son green inter­lop­ers are start­ing to show them­selves with a vengeance. And as I men­tioned ear­lier, I’m read­ing Amer­i­can Per­cep­tions of Immi­grant and Inva­sive Species : Strangers on the Land by Peter Coates.

The epi­gram that starts off chap­ter 3 is an amaz­ing quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Lit­tle Prince:

There were on the planet where the lit­tle prince lived–as on all planets–good and bad plants…If it is only a sprout of radish or the sprig of a rose-bush, one would let it grow wher­ever it might wish. But when it is a bad plant, one must destroy it as soon as pos­si­ble, the very first instant that one rec­og­nizes it. Now there were ter­ri­ble seeds on the planet that was the home of the lit­tle prince; and these were the seeds of the baobab. The soil of that planet was infested with them. A baobab is some­thing you will never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baob­a­bas are too many, they split it in pieces.

I’m not sure if Saint-Exupéry ever met a real live baobab plant, the world’s largest suc­cu­lent, shown to the left in a photo by Quinn Nor­ton (used under the Cre­ative Com­mons 1.0 Attri­bu­tion Gen­eral License) [ source ].

And I’m not sure if the author was just using the word “baobab” just because it sounds cool and deli­ciously evil. But his descrip­tion of a plant from hell sure describes a lot of the weeds that I feel com­pelled to keep up with.

After all, I wouldn’t want the world to split into pieces just because I was too lazy to weed my garden!

November 15 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry • baobabs • Peter Coates • The Little Prince • weeds | 2 Comments »