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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 | 5 Comments »
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.
Leafless Coreopsis gigantea
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.
Garden before transplanting and thinning
[caption id=”attachment_2032” align=”alignleft” width=”300” caption=”Garden after autumn thinning and transplanting”]
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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.
Autumn seedlings
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.
Autumn weeds
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 »
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 »
Although this is not a political blog, it’s a space that acknowledges that you can’t escape the world, even nested within the walled confines of your privategarden spaces. An event that crept into my mental garden is the 20th anniversary of the 8.8.88 popular uprising in Burma (a country whose military rulers have decided should be called Myanmar). I thought I’d mark the occasion with pictures from a trip I took there with my father in 1998, shortly after the tenth anniversary of the attempted revolution.
But first, a quick recap in case you’re not familiar with the events: On August 8, 1988 student protesters led a popular uprising against the ruling military junta, leading in the course of several weeks to the downfall of General Ne Win. For the first time since 1962, when the general seized power, the country sensed that democracy might be possible once again. But the military panicked and installed martial law, leading to a crackdown that very likely resulted in far more casualties than China’s notorious and better known Tiananmen Square incident which would take place less than a year later.
The incident in China was immortalized in that famous photograph of the lone protester facing off with a tank. Fragile flesh meets hardened steel; youthful idealism confronts bureaucratic power. How can anyone forget that picture?
But with a government more secretive and repressive than even China’s, there were no similarly indelible images to make it out of the Burma, and the events of 8.8.88 live primarily through stories handed down from those who were there. In retelling the story I hope to keep its memory alive. [Read more on Burmese democracy efforts.]
Fast-forward ten years to October 1998, the end of the monsoon season, and two months after a small band of students had staged a protest in front of Sule Pagoda in downtown Rangoon. The students were no match and the government won this time.
Things were “stable” when we arrived, though an Orwellian smog hung in the air everywhere we went. Soldiers with rifles guarded key locations in Rangoon. Checkpoints with armed guards slowed down travel outside of the capital. (The US State Department still had a travel advisory in place.)
Orwellian sign
Our plan was to touch base with family in the Rangoon area for a week, travel for two weeks around what parts of the country the military allowed anyone to visit, and then return for a final week to Rangoon. That last week was time I’d set aside to “do photography” beyond my tourist snapshots. The malaria I contracted in up-state Burma gave me a week of fevered delirium to end my trip instead, so all these photos were snapped during the first part of the trip. Out of a few hundred slides, I’ve scanned a few of botanical interest, a few of my father’s home village, some zoo pictures, plus a few that show some of the textures of how people live under one the most repressive regimes in the world.
The flat tire
To get to my father’s village we drove to the city where the good dirt road ended and the bad dirt road began. There we rented a Jeep to take us as far we could get on road surfaces that were still part-liquid, part-goo from the monsoons that were just concluding. In Burma’s poor economy, even the relatively prosperous who could afford a vehicle couldn’t necessarily afford tires or the bribes necessary to get you in the good graces of the officials who would have access to foreign-made tires in the first place. After we couldn’t go any farther in the Jeep, we hired a bullock cart to take us the last couple of miles to the village.
Village catch basin
One of my father’s friends who also emigrated to the United States from this village sent money back to his relatives. Some of the funds helped the family get by. Some went to build a small pagoda outside the village. And some went to building this catch basin that helps provide the villagers with water through the eight months of the year that see almost no rainfall. This is generally how projects get financed. The government does virtually nothing unless the rulers can derive some kind of benefit from the transaction.
Blooming cotton
A flowering cotton plant in the village. Although I wear a lot of cotton, I’d never thought much about where it came from until I saw this plant. Looking at the flowers you can tell right away that it’s a mallow, first cousin to hollyhocks, okra and hibiscus.
Lily/Weed
Farmers in the village cotton fields, like farmers and gardeners everywhere else, have problems with weeds. Here’s one of their undesirables, an Asiatic lily. (If all my weeds could be so attractive I wouldn’t have any need for “good” plants!)
Bicycle mechanic's shop
The village bicycle mechanic’s “garage.” The mechanic, like many adults that you encountered, automatically went into this stiff, at-attention pose whenever you’d point a camera at him, maybe something to do with cameras loaded with slow film… My father has the same posing issues, even with a camcorder. (You can imagine how compelling videos of him just standing there are.)
A village party
The last night we were in the village we hired a band and threw a party. Most of the village showed up. Two of the musicians are shown with split-bamboo percussion clappers called
wallecotes (however you spell it…).
Village school
After we left the village we passed through another, more prosperous settlement. Here’s a class at their school.
Agitated elephant, Rangoon Zoo
An agitated elephant at the Rangoon zoo. I am
not a fan of zoos, and a visit to an old-school zoo like this one shows some of the reasons. The legs of the elephants stay chained to the posts all day long. Even at the thoroughly modern San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park, the elephants were kept chained to their stalls at night until the practice was discontinued in the 1990s in response to a well-publicized and particularly egregious case of neglect.
Caged Rangoon Zoo monkey
Caged monkey at the Rangoon zoo.
Caged leopard, Rangoon Zoo
This leopard and a neighboring lion got to spend their days pacing twelve-foot-square cages of steel and concrete.
Roadside staghorn and orchid
A couple of roadside epiphytic plants: a staghorn fern on the left and on the right an orchid in the vanda/phalaensopsis (Sarcanthinae) subtribe. Between cities, you can park your car and often see exotic plantlife like this.
Here are a couple good sites if you’d like to do a little more reading on the country. The second in particular has some actions that you can do to help bring democracy back to Burma, everything from switching off the Olympics to donating your many billions.
Irrawady.com
US Campaign for Burma
August 08 2008 | Categories: landscape • places • rambles | Tags: 8888 • agriculture • Burma • China • dictatorships • vacations • weeds | No Comments »
There were a number of spring flowers doing their thing at Yellowstone a couple weeks ago. I saw a patch of bright yellow and took this photo:
Yes, dandelions. They were all over. I talked to a ranger nearby who said that the park has a big problem with invasive species. He wasn’t a botanical expert, he said, but he thought there was a true wild dandelion, as well as the garden version. Unfortunately, this to me looks like the garden version. They were all over the park, as well as all over Idaho on the way there.
June 12 2008 | Categories: landscape • places | Tags: dandelions • invasive species • weeds • Yellowstone National Park | No Comments »
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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.
