white solstice

The year’s first car­pen­te­ria, which opened on Decem­ber 17th, shown here with an appre­cia­tive local crit­ter on the stamens.

Win­ter Sol­stice is a cel­e­bra­tion for opti­mists. Six months of ever-diminishing sun­light leads up to this, the day with the longest, dark­est night. If you weren’t an opti­mist or schooled in the ratio­nal ways of the world you might expect the days to dimin­ish into per­pet­ual darkness–No won­der the Mayan Long Count Cal­en­dar ends on this day in 2012. A pes­simist could see this day as the begin­ning of the end of time.

But I know things are about to change. The dura­tion of the sun­light I find so pre­cious is about to start to increase. The plants that are begin­ning to sprout will take advan­tage of the extra light and grow faster and run head­long into California’s manic late-winter, early-spring sea­son of flow­er­ing and regen­er­a­tion. Call me an opti­mist. It may be tough now, but to appro­pri­ate the words of Dan Sav­age in his cam­paign to fight bul­ly­ing of LGBT young per­sons, It gets bet­ter!

Here’s a brief white-themed gallery in case you’re dream­ing of a white sol­stice. We have no snow to offer you, but instead how about some bright white flow­ers, some white leaves to get you into the mood?

Have a warm and safe hol­i­day, every­one, whether the white stuff around you is snow, foliage or blooms. It’s all about to get bet­ter, soon.

The local chap­ar­ral cur­rant, Ribes indeco­rum, a plant new to the gar­den within the last year, com­ing into bloom for the first time.

Detail of the chap­ar­ral cur­rant flowers.

Decem­ber paper­white narcissus

Early-season blooms of black sage, Salvia mel­lif­era. The over­all color is really more pale vio­let than white.

Flow­ers on a vol­un­teer sta­t­ice plant, Limo­nium perezii. The bracts give the flow­er­ing struc­tures a laven­der look, but you can see that the flow­ers are actu­ally white inside the bracts. The clos­est neighbor’s plant of this is a few hun­dred feet down the street. I had no idea the seeds could travel so far. Enjoy it now. This weed is outta there once the hol­i­days are over.

Details of the leaves of San Miguel Island buck­wheat, Eri­o­gonum grande, green on top, white beneath…

The white-ish Dud­leya brit­tonii with Decem­ber pre­cip­i­ta­tion, rain, not snow…


Who could for­get our great local white sage, Salvia api­ana?

…and one of our great local dud­leyas, D. pul­veru­lenta, one of the whitest of the dud­leyas, and it loves life in my gar­den. Joy oh joy!


December 21 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • • | 10 Comments »

my newest sage

The num­ber of exam­ples that I have in the gar­den of the sage genus, Salvia, is grow­ing. The lat­est addi­tion is a tiny lit­tle plant of white sage, Salvia api­ana, that I put into a hole in the front yard where a few other plants have failed. The plant is native to this area and doesn’t require addi­tional water so I’m con­fi­dent that it should have no prob­lem with with the dry soil and the hot sun expo­sure. Time will tell whether it can com­pete with the roots of nearby estab­lished plantings.

Local exam­ples of the white sage show it to be fairly low, mound­ing plant of strongly-scented green­ish white leaves. Robin Middleton’s amaz­ing salvia site says that “peo­ple find the fra­grance of the foliage unpleasant…I don’t par­tic­u­larly like it,” and the descrip­tion at Las Pil­i­tas Nurs­ery calls the per­fume a mix­ture of “sage, pine nee­dles, burn­ing rub­ber, skunk.” To my nose, that mix­ture of sage and pine nee­dles and burn­ing rub­ber and skunk smells like the local chap­ar­ral and long hikes on a sunny after­noon, so I actu­ally enjoy it. In the late spring the low plant puts up infor­mal head-high spires of white flow­ers, some­times with a laven­der tint, but for me the plant is most valu­able for its attrac­tive foliage.

Photo from the Wiki­me­dia Com­mons, con­tributed by Eugene van der Pijll [ source ]

In addi­tion to hav­ing a num­ber of uses for the local Native Amer­i­cans as a food, fla­vor­ing and med­i­cine, the white sage was con­sid­ered sacred, fig­ured in sweat lodge cer­e­monies and was used remove evil spirits.

After the con­clu­sion of 1996 Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion in San Diego one of the more cre­ative post-convention protests involved an action to exor­cise the evil that some thought the con­ven­tion brought to town. In an act of purifi­ca­tion, in an cer­e­mony that involved drum­ming and chant­ing, pro­test­ers burned sticks of white sage to cleanse the Con­ven­tion Cen­ter site of the resid­ual evil.

July 09 2008 | Categories: landscape • landscape design • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: • • | 1 Comment »