I don’t have many opportunities to mow the lawn. I’ve basically told John that the day he can’t keep up with the grass will be the day I break into the Monsanto factory and abscond with all the Roundup they have and then apply it to the lawn. There’s lots of other ways I’d rather use the space.
The day has come. John had some work done on a foot and will be hobbling around for a couple months. The grass, however, well-watered from the January and February rains, didn’t stop growing, and it was time to have the conversation.
Well, in the end, I’m embarrassed to say that I caved, reasoning that he should be back to pushing the mower around in a few weeks, and now isn’t the best season to think of planting something that will require water to keep it going through the dry summer and fall ahead. Besides, John really likes his little patch of lawn, and he lets me have my way with most of the rest of the garden.
So I popped some allergy tablets and pulled out the electric mower and headed for the patch of grass. Back and forth I went over the browning green surface. Back and forth, back and forth. It’s weirdly meditative, like vacuuming, I decided, only with a device that can chop off your toes.
My diverse lawn
As I took down the seed heads it was a chance to look at this what we call a lawn. It’s never been a fanatically maintained piece of green, and features little colonies of Saint Augustine, Bermuda, rye, clover and whatever other species the wind has delivered. The biological diversity of this patch would do the Amazon proud and drive any single-species lawn fanatic to distraction.
The cat, last fall, shaking off the thatch from the lawn. This is inside the house, of course.
By mid-summer it’ll go mostly brown as we cut back on watering to continue with our water conservation. At that point, facing four to six months of brown, four to six months of thatch being tracked into the house every time you walk across the garden, that’ll be when we might continue our discussion with whether we might want to do something else with this patch of prime garden real estate.
Whatever we decide, you can rest assured that we will not be installing the plastic turf that’s getting to be a popular garden surface around town. In fact, I like that stuff so little I’ve started my very first Facebook group, Plastic Turf Must Die!!!!!! As far as I’m concerned fardens are about life and growing things, and this stuff is as dead and cheesy as anything out there. If you’re any sort of joiner and hate the stuff yourself, join the group!
Weekend before last I took a trip out to the Tierra Blanca Mountains on the southwestern edge of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park on a trip organized by the San Diego Chapter of the California Native Plant Society.
This was a trip that offered lots of up-close flower viewing. After several months with good rainfall many of us were hoping for carpets of blooming desert flowers spreading out in every direction. But the rains didn’t begin until the end of fall. The floral display was good, with flowers easy to find in all directions, but it wasn’t the gonzo hundred-year bloom that we’d hoped for. Botanist Larry Hendrickson, who led the outing, started out thinking this was close to an average year. But we found the little yellow twining desert snapdragon in several locations, and its sighting made him revise his evaluation of the year to better-than average.
Parish's poppy, Eschscholzia parishii. As with the California poppy, this little poppy comes in orange as well as yellow.Fishhook cactus, Mammilaria dioica, growing in a crack in the quartz rockDesert poinsettia, Euphorbia eriantha
Greene's ground cherry, Physalis crassifolia
Ferocactus cylindraceus flower closeup
Ferocactus cylindraceus and Phacelia distans
Twigs with wild heliotrope
The splashiest flower was wild heliotrope, Phacelia distans. If you saw a carpet of purple, it was most likely this plant.
Desert landscape with wild heliotrope
Ocotillo with heliotrope and chuparosa
Closeup of the delicate leaves of the elephant tree
Last post I mentioned my discomfort with certain plant names, including those that begin with the epithet “Indian.” Dunno. Maybe I’m being too sensitive.
Well, one of the canyons we explored was named “Indian Canyon.” Changing plant names and geological formations seems to take about as much time. This canyon is one of the more northern extensions of the elephant tree or torote (Bursera microphylla).
A fern in the desert, always a surprise. I think this is Cheilanthes parryi.
The flowers were mainly small species. Looking up the hillside the impression is mainly of white rock relieved by tall wands of ocotillos.
What’s the best way to bring relief to a day in the desert? Maybe water?
We ended up in a stream that supported a chain of little palm oases of the California fan palm (Washingtonia filifera). These trees had been burned in the past. This was maybe an accident, but in the past the Native Americans were known to burn the fronds to get easier access to the dates. Apparently it doesn’t seriously damage the plant.
Nearby these palms escaped the fire and flaunted long skirts of dried fronds. Living in suburbia people prune the dead fronds off whatever palm species they grow, and you almost never see this gorgeous effect of decades of fronds sheathing the trunk. Maybe they’re afraid that it’ll be habitat for creatures they’d rather not have. Still, it’s a great effect, don’t you think?
On one of my trips out hiking one of the group went running over to a plant in hysterical full bloom, Pedicularis densiflora, something she referred to as “Indian warrior.” It’s a stunning little plant that’s at least somewhat related to the plants in the genus Castilleja that are sometimes called “Indian paintbrush.”
I can’t say that I’ve had a conversation with anyone about this pedicularis. But in this age of heightened cultural sensitivities and school mascots being changed to less potentially offensive characters I’ve been trying to use the more generic name of “paintbrush” when discussing the castillejas. Most people still know what I’m referring to.
A quick look at Calflora turned up dozens of other California natives that have “Indian” in the name, including Palmer’s Indian mallow (Abutilon palmeri), Indian manzanita (Arctostaphylos mewukka), Indian milkweed (Asclepias eriocarpa), Indian strawberry (Duchesnea indica) and Indian headdress (Tracyina rostrata). I’m not Native American but I wonder if these common names might not be the best to use.
Tradescantia albiflora. Some people call it inch plant--probably a better name for it.
Trying to come up with other plant names that have left me a little queasy I thought immediately about the common houseplant, wandering jew, Tradescantia albiflora. The former owners of my house planted some in a bed, and I’m still trying to eradicate it, twenty years later. I keep telling myself that “wandering Jew” is just a plant name and I’m not being anti-semitic when I take the weeding fork to it.
Algerian ivy is another incredibly noxious plant pest, but I know that it’s named after the country where it originates and not the people who live there. In this case I don’t feeling like I’m committing genocide when I yank it out by the yard. Same goes for all the thousands of other plants named after their country of origin, both in their common and scientific latin names.
Dried leaves of Citrus hystrix
Looking on the web I came up with a couple other plant names that folks might find offensive. Golden Gate Gardener had a note about Keffir lime, Citrus hystrix, and Keffir lily, Clivia miniata. In Arabic, according to one of the commenters on the post, “keffir” refers to a non-believer, something similar to the way “heathen” is used in English. Possibly objectionable. But when the word traveled to South Africa it became a seriously troubling epithet for the non-white population. Ick. I buy the leaves of this lime in Asian groceries for when I make curry or pasta, and I’ll make a point of calling it something else. Thai lime, maybe. As for Clivia miniata, the latin name comes to the rescue. Even my mother–not prone to show off with scientific names–called it clivia.
Plant names are important. They can tell you plenty about the sociology of those who did the naming, and they can shape how you perceive the plant. I’ll try to pay more attention to names when I use them, and I’ll try to reject the ones that really shouldn’t have a place in modern, accepting, pluralistic society.
Several ponds and a waterfall came with the house when we moved in a couple decades ago. They looked cool and the waterfall continues to provide a nice gurgling noise that helps mask the usual din of a residential neighborhood. Unfortunately, as the years passed, the ponds began to fail or show their shortcomings.
One of them was so tiny it was good for breeding mosquitos and not much else. It got turned into a planter pretty quickly.
The mid-sized pond turned out to be a critter magnet. Rummaging possums and raccoons ate all the fish and regularly upturned any water plants. Two years back it became my first bog garden, and is today filled with carnivorous sundews and pitcher plants. I was concerned about how much water a bog garden would require, but last year I figured it out that it required only about as much water as an equivalent patch of grass.
Maybe five years ago it became apparent that we had a growing leak on the largest pair of ponds and linking waterfall. The concrete that made up the ponds was fine, but plant roots were prying up the decorative rocks that had been mortared on top to make the ponds look like a volcanic grotto. I divided the upper pond in two, leaving the front half to cascade the water into the lower pond. The back half became yet another planter. Nothing seemed to do well there, though, so I decided to try turning it into another bog for my growing pitcher plant collection.
I started by removing several hundred pounds of dirt. Taking away the dirt exposed the reason why nothing seemed to thrive in the bed. The surround plants had sent their roots into the planter and sucked up whatever irrigation I provided to the plants I wanted to thrive there. I did a brutal pruning on all the adventuring roots, but figured that they’d be back when offered moist soil to wander into.
To keep roots out of the bog I decided to containerized the bog plants in plastic storage tubs from Target. I could water the plants in the tubs and leave the surrounding soil dry, reducing the attraction for marauding roots. I used two sixteen by twenty-two inch containers that were a foot deep plus a smaller one on the end.
The super-secret ingredients that went into my bog mix: sand and peatmoss. You need to be sure the peatmoss doesn't have added fertilizer, which could make the bog plants fail.
I packed dirt around the tubs to stabilize them, then filled them up with a 60/40 blend of sphagnum peat moss and washed plaster sand, the sort of acid, low-nutrition soil that most carnivores prefer to grow in. Finally, after several hours of hard labor of the sort the sort that I think my doctor is about to tell me I can’t do anymore, I got to install the plants.
The bog, ready for plants.One of the Sarracenia alata rhizomes that went into the bog.
I selected several species of taller-growing pitcher plants to form the main planting, Sarracenia flava, S. alata and S. oreophila. From my research I figured out that these often grow naturally farther from water sources or in areas where the bogs dry out for part of the year. As far as pitcher plants go, these all should prove to be fairly drought tolerant. Still “drought tolerant” is a relative term, and they’ll need to be kept at least damp year-round.
Ta-da! The finished bog.
To finish off the planting, and to partially assuage my guilt at not using native plants, I surrounded one of the tubs with divisions of one of my native rushes, Juncus patens, a riparian plant that doesn’t seem to resent drying out. Another bonus of this species is that it looks good throughout the year, something that can’t be said for these pitcher plants, which counter their several months of looking severely cool and amazing with several months of looking dying and pathetic.
I’ll post progress photos as the young new bog plants begin to fill and and show their potential. I’m hoping this won’t turn into another failed pond.
This is it. High spring in San Diego. There are probably more things blooming now in the garden than there will be at any other time of year.
I start with the current state of the agave that I’ve been showing for the last few months. It’s bloomed its way from the base of the flower stalk to very near the very end. The plant will soon die and you won’t see any more photos of it. Fortunately the plant has several other growths to keep it going into the future.
The spike has arced up and come back to the ground, where its final blooms are resting.
I’ve provided a few captions, but there are too many flowers to comment on in detail. For the rest of the photos, hover your mouse to view the names or click to enlarge.
Leaves of the unknown Gasteria.
An unknown gasteria. The flowers are nice, but I grow it mainly for the foliage.
The weird double blooms of this pitcher plant, Sarracenia leucophyll 'Tarnok,' shown with the first pitchers of the season.The bloom of another carnivorous pitcher plant.Geum and blue-eyed grass.Salvia lyrata 'Purple Volcano.' It's rather weedy according to Robin Middleton, but it does have its nice garden moments.
The not-quite black flowers of Salvia discolor.
Flowers on the grapefruit. They smell great. And they bode well for a good crop next year.
Thank you thank you thank you to Carol at May Dreams Gardens for hosting Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. Stuff is beginning to bloom everywhere. [ Check it out all the blooming gardens! ]
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.
Ceanothus season is here in force. One of the local stars is a species with the unfortunate common name of “warty-stem ceanothus.” Neither is its Latin name of Ceanothus verrucosus especially glamorous. But hopefully you can see how cool a plant it is in these photos.
If my weekday desk had a window I’d look out on a the head of a little canyon that’s a mixture of introduced eucalyptus and a partially restored snippet of coastal sage scrub habitat. A couple hundred yards away in the re-wilded area are several of these ceanothus that have been glowing white for the last month with their clouds of flowers.
Last November these ceanothus were stemmy but gracefully-branched shrubs. Adapted to survival for many months without water its leaves are tiny and sparse. Still you could easily walk past them.
If you stopped to look at the plant, you’d easily see these interesting “warts” that give the plant its name. The warts are actually leaf-bases (stipules) that remain on the branches long after the leaves are gone.
By January the formerly sparse looking plants were responding to the rains with swelling flower buds.
And a month later the plants were going at it big time…
California could be the evolutionary epicenter of the genus ceanothus. Of the approximately 52 ceanothus species in the US, 46 are found here. Of those 46 about 38 occur only here.
That’s a lot of competition for precious space and water in a nursery, but several native California specialists in southern California offer this plant. You can see that this could be a choice addition to a dry garden where you want an airy, graceful shrub that’s 7-8 feet tall and about 10 feet across. As I struggle with ceanothus from outside my immediate area, I keep thinking I should use more selections that are better suited to what I have to offer them.
I love this plant, warts and all. But people in the end seem to buy the name and the image as much as they buy the plant. Just rebrand the plant with a friendlier (but more trite) horticultural name like “Cloud Blossom Lilac” and just stand back as everyone snaps it up.
The origin of Ceanothus ‘Tuxedo’ reads a bit like a horticultural soap opera: A California native species, Ceanothus thyrsiflorus, crosses the Atlantic for Europe, where it meets up with another ceanothus, this one from the East Coast of the US, Ceanothus americanus, or New Jersey tea. Loose on foreign soil the two get romantically involved, with Ceanothus ‘Autumnal Blue’ being one of the children. One of the plants of Autumnal Blue moves to Ireland, where its tolerance for moister garden conditions and good cold tolerance makes it quite popular.
(Edit, March 4, 2010: A quick trawl through David Fross and Dieter Wilken’s terrific resource, Ceanothus, reminded me that the story is even more twisted than this. The parents of ‘Autumnal Blue’ include the two species mentioned above, but also the Mexican and Guatemalan species, C. caeruleus. The plot thickens…)
There, in Ireland, growing on the grounds of Fitzgerald Nurseries, one of the branches suddenly throws a mutation, where the normally green leaves are instead a dramatic dark color, something between dark chocolate, inky black and maybe just a little grape thrown in. Pat FitzGerald notices the strikingly different branch, and begins a propagation program in earnest. His nursery lists several other near-black plants, including the dramatic Phormium cookianum ‘Black Adder.’ Eventually the plant crosses back to the other side of the Atlantic, for California, where it was released in limited distribution last year.
The almost-black leaves of Ceanothus 'Tuxedo.'
That’s when I met this totally unique looking ceanothus and decided I wanted it for my garden. I brought a little gallon plant and located it where I wanted a dramatic six-foot shrub, expecting that it would be a quick-growing screen plant. Almost a year later, though, the little plant remains a little plant, and hasn’t really grown. Even though I watered it all last year as you would most new plants in the garden, my guess is that I failed to give it enough water through the 146 consecutive days without measurable precipitation that San Diego experienced, the third-driest rainless time in our record books.
To the plant’s credit, it didn’t die. And now the rains have saturated the soil, it’s showing some interest in putting out some new growth. But I felt like I needed some guidance in doing a better job growing this plant. Who better to ask than the person who probably has the most experience with this plant? Why not contact Pat FitzGerald, its originator?
Thankfully, Pat was generous with his time in responding to my questions. Here are some excerpts from the advice he sent my way.
Regarding dry conditions yes I would expect slow growth. Have you prunded your plant. I noticed from the picture on your blog it had very long un-pruned branches. Like a lot of shrubs in dry conditions I think thought needs to be put into helping the plants in the first year get depth of root penetration so that during dry spells its taking moisture from a depth. I suspect if you can give moisture to Tuxedo during the first year of establishment to help it along and prune next spring you will see dense growth establish…
I highlight moisture retention as a lot of people harp on about using water and drought but often forget you can condition your soil to retain more of that valuable moisture. There are so many recycled composts to be purchased or that the householder can make now that you can work into the soil to make pockets 3 X 3 feet around newly planted shrubs or even mulch to give them that start in life. The cure to drought and slow growth in dry areas is more often what you do before you plant than after as I am sure you well know but it needs repeating and repeating to the public…
Tuxedo will behave differently depending on soil density so in heavy soil I have seen plants exhibiting a shorter more compact nature to their growth. If planted in shade and especially in a lighter soil Tuxedo will certainly stretch as it seems to much prefer full sun for sake of both colour and flowering. In our more moist climate I think the plant can get to 8 feet as can many many shrubs here in our temperate climate…
I think the one comment I would have is that simply Tuxedo is for me more than a Ceanothus with deep dark foliage. Tuxedo is an evergreen foliage plant and once established in the garden hardy to minus 12 celcius in our experience but possibly minus 15 celcius. This is an achievement for me as I cannot recommend hardly any evergreen with such dark foliage with such winter hardiness.
Tuxedo is also a good plant for training on a trellis or wall in our climate at least. There is no doubt in my mind that Tuxedo will benefit from occasional pruning but no more than once per year.
I just hope in time Tuxedo contributes some way positively to Californian gardens. While only part native its still is a nice feeling as a plant breeder to have a plant go back to its homeland and be accepted into people’s gardens.
After reviewing Pat’s advice I’ve decided to not only give the plant more water and mulch around them for added water retention through the critical first year or two after a plant is freed into the soil. If I use an organic mulch it will break down over time and enrich the soil.
A common thread you read with many California native plants is that they detest rich soil. In fact Greg Rubin of California’s Own Native Landscape Design spoke to the local native plant society of planting large numbers of short-lived colorful plants between the large structural species so that the temporary plants could “burn up” the excess nutrients in the soil, particularly in a situation where the soil was formerly a heavily-fertilized lawn. But ‘Tuxedo,’ with parents from moister parts of California and the East Coast, sounds like it would benefit from being treated differently.
Ceanothus 'Tuxedo' with chalk dudleya in the foreground.
For me, growing Ceanothus ‘Tuxedo’ will be a little more work and water than growing many other ceanothus would be. But I think it should be worth it. In fact, I saw more of them in the nursery again and picked up a second gallon plant. Here you see it planted as a background for the silvery foliage and eventual orange flowers of chalk-leaf dudleya, Dudleya pulverulenta, and California fuchsia, Zauschneria californica ‘Route 66.’
Ceanothus 'Tuxedo' with California fuchsia in the foreground, which will bring orange flowers to the end of summer.
Wish me and the plants luck. Not every plant is perfectly adapted to your growing conditions, but a little effort can help make them thrive. And the reasons that make ‘Tuxedo’ a little trickier in the driest parts of California might make it a good candidate for moister parts of the state, or other parts of the country where ceanothus might be marginal. This year the plant is in wide circulation and should be widely available.
Ceanothus in New York or Little Rock? This might be the one.
