Hey Natives

The Mighty Moleman

2011-06-04T20:35:00.000-07:00

As I've often said, I'm not going to go to war with any critter in my yard. I've been super lucky, too, in never having an critter go to war against my plants. Have to admit the moles have been a little pesky in the last few weeks, though.

I blame the rain. According to the paper this morning, this weekend will shatter previous month-of-June rain records. (And boy do I wish I'd held off on putting the patio furniture and lights out at the end of May. But every Californian just knows it doesn't rain in June, so I thought I was safe.)

The reason I blame the rain for the reign of the Moleman is that I usually do have some springtime mole activity, but it tends to stop when the rains stop. March through mid-May or so, I find mounds of soil heaved up here and there. No biggy, I just tamp it back down. But I believe that once the soil gets dry and hard, the moles kind of give up on trying to dig through it. This year, we keep getting new little rainstorms and the soil continues to be soft and pliable. And ply it they do. It's like land mines went off out there. I hope no plants end up harmed, but I have had to unbury some. Some several times. Also, I keep finding my drip line buried, and it is not the kind that is supposed to be buried.

I use the drip system only a few times per summer but I sure hope it still works if (just kidding, when) the time finally comes that I feel I need to give the plants a little refreshment.

The Garden Has Its Own Schedule

2011-05-24T22:11:00.000-07:00

I haven't been in the native gardening game--or even the plain old gardening game--for too many years yet, so I'm still getting accustomed to what blooms when. And the plants seem to mix it up and keep me guessing, too. This year I've noticed some substantial deviations from the blooming schedule of previous years.

Usually the Clarkias are just revving their flower engines at the beginning of May, even late April, but this year I didn't see any Clarkia blooms till the latter half of May. Usually by Bay to Breakers weekend, which is always the third Sunday in May, they are past their prime and I could start to collect seed from them, if I weren't too busy with guests and Breakers-related activities. But this year, with only a week left in May, there are many buds still to open.

Also, curiously, the Clarkia unguiculata, which in past years has towered in great, dense pink forests, up to 6 feet tall (!) is much shorter this year. And, sadly, the Clarkia amoena, a stunningly showy flower that nobody ever believes is native, seems to be absent in the yard this season.

I don't seem to have any Phacelia tanacetifolia, either. Usually that lovely wildflower would be gone to seed by now, in a big cluster where it used to pop up, but this year I had only two Phacelia volunteers, and they got eaten by deer. (Probably not a smart move on the deer's part, as that species of Phacelia has irritating little hairs all over it.)

I kind of miss my no-shows in the wildflower department, and may get a couple new packs of seed next year to start a new population. I don't know why the annuals were suppressed this year; I think it may be because we had very early October rain, and then long dry spells in November and December, and some may have germinated then croaked.

There is still a lot of Clarkia unguiculata coming into bloom, though, and soon I'll be cutting it and bringing it inside. It looks lovely alongside my woolly blue curls (Trichostema lanatum), but usually it towers over the Trichostema--this year is opposite.

Normally by this year my sulfur buckwheat (Eriogonum umbellatum) is turning dry and rust-colored by this time, as it's one of the earliest spring bloomers, but this year it was late as well, and therefore, delightfully, still going strong. Here it is next to its relative Eriogonum crocatum, a later bloomer (the front plant with the blue-gray leaves). Looks like this year I'll get simultaneous bloom on these two buckwheats, which is kind of a treat.

A super late bloomer this year is the lovely blue bulb, Triteleia laxa (Ithuriel's Spear). It normally makes an aquamarine-colored splash throughout the yard in April and early May, but as of this writing, there is barely enough blooming to eke out a photograph.

Another of the normally earliest precursors of spring is my cheery Grindelia hirsutula. Normally its sunny yellow flowers lighten up the dreary weeks of late February, early March, but this year they've just now gotten into full swing. What would cause such a drastic variation in schedule, I don't really know. I did fear that those plants were dead last summer, though, they went so utterly dormant and crusty. I was amazed and pleased when I saw green leaves returning at their bases, but it took quite some time. I don't know if they'd have made it if it hadn't been such a lovely, long, way-above-normal rain year.

I quite like that the garden takes on a life of its own and calls its own shots. Sometimes the shots are a little sad, as when previous volunteers decline to return, but in general, sitting back and watching what happens is the greatest joy in gardening.

April Flowers

2011-04-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

Lots of pretty things going on in the yard. I got sucked into the Weed Vortex for a while this morning--you pull one, then another and another and pretty soon a couple hours are gone. I also looked around and wished I'd planned some things differently. Also wish I'd photographed my irises while they were in their glory, as I see sadly now that they're well past prime. But overall, lots of miraculousness going on! Here are some photos.

A Sense of Place Continued. Remembering Stegner.

2011-04-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

In a Facebook-driven world where it is customary to list one’s favorite music/movies/books for everyone to see and not care about, I usually prefer to refrain. And yet I will say that my favorite author is Wallace Stegner. Today marks the anniversary of his passing in 1993, and I thought I would share some of the reasons I think he was and is so relevant to us, native plant advocates and gardeners.

Stegner is, or should be, as famous for his beautiful prose as for his unofficial status as the Voice of the American West, but it was that precision in dealing with the concept of Westernness that first drew me to his work when I was in college. I had a very boring job at the Spokane Public Library, pasting magnetic security ribbons into the bindings of books, so I turned to books-on-cassette (this was a long time ago) to entertain me through shifts. I checked out an audio-book version of a collection of Stegner essays and was stopped dead in my magnetic-pasting tracks listening to his descriptions of a childhood on the windswept plains of Montana, the place where my childhood occurred as well. “I seem to have been born with an overweening sense of place,” wrote Stegner, “an almost pathological sensitivity to the colors, smells, light, and land and life forms of the segments of earth on which I’ve lived.” I had never figured out how to express it myself, but I understood exactly what he was talking about. In his writing on Montana—not the mountain part, but the pancake part—Stegner remarks that while others have called it desolate, “I look for desolation and can find none.” That is the place I remember, too.

Shortly after my discovery of the essays, a political science professor suggested I read the 1967 novel All the Little Live Things, for its themes reflecting the American political and emotional landscape: traditional versus progressive, development versus protection; even irrigation version non-irrigation. And, though I didn’t pick up on it when I read it 20 years ago, conventional gardening versus native gardening. In recent years I’ve had a vague memory that the novel’s focus was on a woman who believed in accepting nature rather than working to remake it; I didn’t remember the details, but suspected that if I picked up the novel again, I would see myself in it more than I did half my life ago. Indeed, the first time I read it I found it lovely and compelling, but I ignored the references to Bay Area plants, animals and scenery, and did not fully appreciate the gardening discussions between the characters, the nature-conquering Joe, and the nature-allowing Marion. Now I read it and positively thrill to find Marion saying things like “I should think you’d have a nice natural garden where things are in balance and you don’t have to kill anything. Is it fair to plant a lot of plants that were never intended to grow here and then blame the gophers for liking them?”

The gopher-killing Joe retorts, “Wait till one eats up your begonias.”

“I haven’t got any begonias.”

“You will have.”

“Nope.”

To read Stegner and to observe the outdoors world are two intertwined experiences. The same things go on inside the book as outside the window: coyote brush seedlings volunteer in the yard, buckeyes sprout their delicate spring leaves, a mockingbird perches overhead and fills the air with announcements, then swoops away flashing its under-wing white feathers. A character looks out upon the hills and remarks, “Isn’t it lovely how violet the deciduous oaks look when everything is green around them?” Yes.

But Stegner was only partly optimistic about the West. One of the truest observations in All the Little Live Things comes when the narrator remarks, “We are a weed species.” Stegner warned for decades in his nonfiction about the damage that overpopulation would inflict on a water-limited region. “The West, vast and magnificent, greatly various but with the abiding unity of too little water except in its extreme northwest corner, has proved …fragile and unforgiving,” he writes in the introduction to his collection of essays, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. He continues, “In the dry West, using water means using it up. What we put to municipal and industrial use is not coming back into the streams to be available for irrigation. Or if it does come back, it comes back poisoned.”

Reading these too-true statements now, I can’t help thinking of the other night as I was running in my neighborhood and noticed, horrified, a yard completely covered in Algerian ivy and multiple sprinkler heads spewing geysers of fresh water on it. That sight evokes some very big whys: Why would you irrigate so soon after our monumental rain storms? Why would you irrigate ivy, ever? The simple answer is in the same Stegner piece: “Aridity has been a difficult fact of life for Americans to accept.”

But we will have to accept it. Ivy-irrigation does not inspire hope, but there is hope in the sense of place that Stegner believed in. Stegner has written that history’s normal mode of creating a “placed person,” is to have generations of family know and tend the same land, but this is seldom a reality in a civilization as young as the American West. We are all migrants, or recent descendents thereof. My own parents were not born in the same town as I was—my mother wasn’t even born on the same continent. But there is another path to a sense of place. It is through that “almost pathological sensitivity to the colors, smells, light, and land and life forms of the segments of earth” where we live. Sense of place means paying attention to the things that belong—the native plants and animals.

When I moved to the Bay Area 16 years ago it was but one in a string of moves, from Great Falls to Spokane, with stops in Seattle and Portland. I didn’t put down roots in any of those places, and didn’t know if I would here either. I thought it was beautiful and enjoyable in many ways, but even after more than a decade I felt on some level still a visitor. And then I read an article about gardening with native plants, and was intrigued enough to start doing some research. Soon I was immersed in natives, and acutely aware of them around me on my hikes where previously I had scarcely distinguished poison oak from live oak. I knew their names, I knew their characteristics, and I knew they belonged. And by connecting with the plants that belonged, suddenly I belonged, too. I became a placed person. I am rooted.

This, above all, is why I advocate gardening with native plants. A placed and rooted people will not use up a place’s scarcest resource—in our case, water. And a placed and rooted people know the joy and comfort of being at home where they are. Wallace Stegner put this more simply and perfectly than I can. “If you don’t know where you are,” he said, “you don’t know who you are.”

Baby Blues Still Babies

2011-04-02T20:54:00.000-07:00

We seem to have given spring a miss and gone straight into summer. With today in the mid-70s and the last several days in the 80s, maybe now my few, fragile little Nemophila menziesii (Baby Blue Eyes) seedlings will put on a growth spurt. I hope so--because it is very late for them to be as tiny as they are.

The guilty party looking for chow in potted plants

I haven't had great luck with these babies, except for one fantastic patio specimen two years ago. I think they should change the common name of this plant from Baby Blue Eyes to Sparrow Chow. Even my lovely specimen two years ago was initially eaten to a nub by white-crowned and gold-crowned sparrows--I know it was them, because I caught them in the act several times! Once, for a split second I started to open the door to shoo away the sparrows, but then I thought "Whoa, the garden is for the birds. Birds are not pests." But they do have a palate for Nemophila for some reason. For human greens too--I haven't been able to grow salad greens such as lettuce and spinach for our own table, because the sparrows chow right through it. I'm not an energetic enough gardener to mess with netting and all that--I always just figure what grows grows, and what doesn't can get replaced by what does.

The great Nemophila of '09 miraculously rebounded and it must have gained the sparrows' respect, because they then allowed it mature. But it was in full, spectacular bloom in mid-March. Last year I had just a couple pitiful little baby blues--just enough to luckily reseed a bit this year. And this year's seedlings are still teeny tiny, with March now history.

Here's the plant in March '09:

And here are its grandchildren today:

The sparrows haven't zeroed in on these pitiful little things--probably because they are too small to bother. I have been looking at these tiny seedlings for months now, with no change. So, I hope they get going and become real plants--maybe by month's end I can have a decent blue-eyed show that will coincide with the Clarkia concinna (Pink Ribbons) that reseeded quite nicely from last year. Will get plenty of photographic evidence if I do!

Hair-owing Garden Tales

2011-03-27T15:46:00.000-07:00

I don't consider my yard a battlefield. I'm not one of these Chevy-Chase-in-Caddyshack types locked in an ever-escalating war with moles--or with gophers, or rabbits or snails or slugs, or even deer. (I was at war with ivy once, but peace has reigned now for several seasons.) Many local gardeners I know do seem to consider deer a mortal enemy, but I've always had a pretty peaceable--even affectionate--attitude toward our hooved brothers and sisters. And I confess I like to only half-jokingly say that it's my good deer karma that protects my plants from being devoured, despite the fact that the yard--nestled, as it is, in a valley surrounded by open hills--is basically a kind of on-ramp to a major Cervine Superhighway.

This spring, however, I'm afraid the deer have indeed been snipping off the flowering stalks of my Heucheras and Potentillas. (Heuchera maxima and Potentilla glandulosa.) Granted, it's not a huge deal--the deer so far seem to be just clipping off the flower stalks, and leaving the bulk of the plants pretty well untouched. But still...it's springtime, and I was looking forward to the annual spring flower display. Now I'm imagining some cheery deer kitchen with a vase full of flowers on the table and the man deer reading the paper while the lady deer makes a cup of tea...

Here's the picked-over Heuchera. Leaves good, flower stalks clipped.

And the Potentilla, below. This is a highly local plant, grown from seed found in a park just a mile from the house, and it flourishes in the yard--but I'd still like it to get to have more than one teeny tiny flower!

The good news with the Heuchs is that they produce flower stalks for quite a long time, so if the deer decide they are tired of the tasty buds, then I could get a good show of flowers yet. I was thinking of maybe trying a little gentle dissuasion on the deer. I've heard that placing human hair on a plant can be a good, if slightly icky-looking, deer deterrent. I can collect a pretty good supply of said material every time I shower, plus, the hair might serve a dual purpose in the garden.

Philanthropic feline.

My mum, who has always been a good friend to birds, places the hair from her brush out on tree branches in the spring, because she read that birds like to use hair to make their nests. Many people, myself included, are surprised to learn that birds have next to no sense of smell, so they don't notice if potential nesting material originated on a creature they consider dangerous. To this end, I have enlisted my cat, Celeste, to make daily coat donations to the bird community. After brushing her, I take out the wad of fur and stick it on a branch. It seems to disappear quickly enough, and I hope at least some of it finds its way into cozy bird nests and not into the neighbors' swimming pool filters. (I would solicit donations from both cats, but Neo won't allow brushing--apparently he has some sort of embargo on bird-related aid, though he is gentlemanly enough to help Celeste with her coat.)

Perfect starter home for young couple with clutch.

My best-case scenario is if a sweet little feathered couple accepts the hair and fur offerings and takes up residence in the little house pictured here, which is right outside my home office. I can think of no better distraction from taxes and bill-paying than watching a couple of wrens or chickadees build a deluxe, fur-lined home for their family.

All Hail Tough Natives

2011-03-19T11:03:00.000-07:00

Some great, unusual (for the Bay Area) weather last night. I don't know if hail is harmful to most people's plants, but the natives sure take it in stride. It was fun to have some lightning and thunder and white stuff on the ground. (The cats thought differently.)

(The photos make it look like I went to town with the perlite, but it's hail.)

I don't do much, or anything, in the way of babying any of my plants, including seedlings and cuttings, because I sort of figure if they require codling then I don't have the time and energy for them, so everything is quite exposed. These Clarkia concinna seedlings seem to have forgotten all about the pelting.

I don't have any plants that minded being briefly put on ice, either. The actual air temp was well above freezing, but even when it does freeze around here--down to 22 degrees one time--none of plants have ever minded. I don't really understand why my natives are so tough, as many originate right along the coastline, where it doesn't freeze, and yet they take whatever my slightly inland weather throws at them.

More on Mystery Lupine

2011-03-09T20:09:00.000-08:00

A comment from Lisa and Robb on my last, long-ago post has prompted me to get off my keister and post an update. I've been allowing myself to fall back on the excuse of being distracted and busy. I haven't actually spent a lot of time in the yard this winter, but it is carrying on quite well without me--which is exactly what I wanted it to do. I do check in with the plants, but I've done very little serious work. Spent a day each of planting and weeding in January. It gives me unspeakable joy--and I'm not really exaggerating there--to see the plants take on a life of their own, spreading a little or a lot, and growing in expected and unexpected ways.

So, in sum, a pretty hands-off winter for this gardener, but by way of update on the strange lupine from my pre-Christmas post: it isn't presently blooming, but I'd say it's healthier than ever. As I'd mentioned, I can't think of what it would be other than Lupinus succulentus, because that was introduced in the yard in the form of a wildflower seed packet years ago. I'm not one to whip out a Jepson Manual (I don't even have one) and key out plants, but the lupine fits the general description of L. succulentus, except for its persistence through the seasons, so I think it is simply The Annual that Wouldn't Die.

Also, it now has a lovely large family! Here's a seedling that volunteered in a cell pack of assorted cuttings.

And here's one that volunteered in a patio pot.

I think it'll look nice in a pot, too. In addition, when I had to cut the big mama plant back from the footpath, I took about 10 cuttings of it, a couple of which keeled, three of which are still unrooted, and five of which struck roots and have already been planted out. I put the cuttings in cell packs, and I don't think it's customary to plant out into the yard straight from cell packs, but I've always heard that lupines don't like having their roots messed with, so I opted to skip the intermediate step of potting up to a 4". Here's one of the unrooted cell pack cuttings still at home after his siblings have headed off to college.

The cuttings that rooted took about two months. Which is another weird thing about the lupine being an annual, because I don't think of cuttings as a thing you do with annuals. Do gardeners out there reproduce annual species via cuttings? Maybe it only works if they are weird, immortal annuals like this one...

I do think the plant is lovely. Here it is in my little former-lawn area where it volunteered--it's that bushy thing behind the grasses.

The comment on my previous post mentioned lupines being tricky to grow, and except in the case of this one, I agree. My L. arboreus on the patio keeled (too hot), and my L. albifrons on the hill keeled (reason unknown).

And last year I did try one other, Lupinus latifolius ssp. parishii, but all four specimens got eaten--by snails, I think. I desperately wanted that plant, because it is a shade-tolerant lupine. L. latifolius, which is local to the area but sparse, is apparently not found in the nursery trade, so I went with the subspecies. (If any local nurserypersons are reading, please propagate some L. latifolius!)

Lisa and Robb, I'm pretty confident my giant lupine and its family will bloom again, so if you want, I can collect some seeds; when they're ready I could let you know and you could send an address to send them. Free, of course!

In closing, here's a picture of the boss-man supervising me as I took the photos today. By the look on his face, I don't think he's impressed with my work.

Lupinus mysterious

2010-12-22T22:12:00.000-08:00

I was just outside visiting my lovely, thriving, mildly blooming Lupine in the back yard. Which is a little weird because I'm pretty sure it's a spring-blooming annual species, and today is, uh, the second day of winter. The plant volunteered some time last year and was quite large by spring--I was delighted when it stayed green and lush and kept producing flowers right through summer. But it's still going strong, unfazed by short days, rain and a few freezes. I believe it to be Lupinus succulentus, because as far as I can remember, that's the only kind of Lupine I've ever introduced to the yard except for a Lupinus albifrons that didn't live long enough to bloom, and a Lupinus arboreus I had in a wine barrel for a while until it cooked--but it had yellow flowers, and the big lovely lupine in my yard now has the familiar purple. I've had Lupinus succulentus show up from time to time, due to its inclusion in a wild flower seed mix I sowed a few years ago, when I was first starting native gardening, so I think the current Lupine is one of the grandchildren. I just don't know why it's still living--thriving, no less--at this stage of the year. But I'm not complaining! I'm quite curious to see how long it persists.

Aster's Last Stand

2010-11-22T19:48:00.000-08:00

Recently my sweetie went outside to get some rosemary for his kitchen endeavors, and he came back in trailing some feathery substance that proceeded to alight on the floor everywhere he walked.

He'd brushed against my huge 'Purple Haze' Aster chilensis, which is admittedly encroaching on the footpath, and the feathery substance was seeds. In terms of house cleaning enthusiasm, mine doesn't even register, so I found the seed intrusion to be quite a pain-in-the-aster, so to speak, and it nudged me to reach the decision to take the plant out. I'm not a big remover of plants that I've selected, because I have a sentimental streak 20 miles wide, but I've been ambivalent about this one all summer, due to the unexpected way it grew. About this time last year it was getting a bit ragged looking, and I thought if I cut it way down it would grow back nice and fresh, but the cut-down part actually never did grow back. Instead, a ring of aster grew up around the perimeter of the old clump. Aster spreads by rhizomes (vigorously) so it just moved outward and came up to surround the old part. It made for kind of an odd feature--a kind of aster vortex that swallowed up the cat a few times.

So what the heck, time to move on. Another motivation to oust it is that way back in the early summer, I was possessed by a moment of summer fever and purchased a very non-native dwarf lime tree. I normally don't buy non-natives, but if it's something tasty that can go in my tummy, I sometimes make an exception, and I have a little pot of mint as well, so Mojito fairies must have been dancing in my head.

But then I realized I didn't really have a very sunny spot for the lime, so it stayed in its 5 gallon nursery pot all season. Now I guess it will move in where the aster moves out. It should be a good spot, because it's next to my outrageously heavy St. Francis birdbath that I manage to heave over daily in the summer in order to maintain a reputable towhee and finch spa, and that daily water-dump should suit that pesky non-native fruit. Now I just hope the little tree doesn't freeze during the winter. It's always something was these fussy not-hardy-Californians!

I'll have to think of some pretty, lower-growing natives to underplant the lime with. Also, I don't mean to paint the aster in a bad light. It was a lovely plant when it was blooming:

When I get out ol' Spod (Swinging Pick of Doom) and chop out all those rhizomes, I'll transplant them up on the still rather bare Hill of Doom, a sunny and out-of-hose-reach little slope I haven't really done much with yet. If I have blooming asters up there next spring, it'll be awesome--I'll report back if I do!

Rain, Rain Come and Stay, Go Away Another Day

2010-11-08T20:13:00.000-08:00

This morning my news feed (i.e. newspaper over sleepy cup of coffee) had an article on whether our girl La Niῆa will bring wetter or drier conditions to the Bay Area. Conclusion: no one knows! Which is a bit encouraging to me, actually, because I was under the impression that it meant drier for sure. But apparently we're right sort of on the cutoff between the wet and dry regions. The article says the last time we had La Niῆa was 2007-08. Oh icky, that's the year I scattered my first packet of wildflower seeds during a rain storm on the first weekend of March--and that was the last rain we ever got that year.

I'm crossing my fingers for another wet year--two in a row would be astounding, akin to say, winning the World Series or something--and that's what it seems to be shaping up as. My last post may be moot, because the weather gods may just keep all my seedlings alive. I adore this time of year so much. Yesterday I went running and it started pouring; as I was slogging up a hill with a stream of water running alongside the curb, my portable music thingy selected the "Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In Medley." (Yep, I have that in my music library and I'm not embarrassed, either!) As I was seeing that stream of rainwater while hearing the earnest strains of "let the sunshine in" it struck me as perfect rather than ironic. That rainwater was the sunniest, happiest thing I could think of. I've long loved my old buddy Helios, but this is the time of year for cup of hot chocolate in hand, cat on lap, and raindrops on roof. My post-ivy reconstruction is now two years in, and the plants are pretty well established, so I'm not too worried about their survival, but boy did they love last year. Also, I have some gaps and areas in need of a redo, so I will be planting newcomers in the next few weeks, and it would be awwwwwesome for them to just get good and established. Then I'll quit worrying and shut up about the weather already!

Nature or Nurture?

2010-11-05T19:03:00.000-07:00

Now that we've had some lovely early season rain, the next generation of annuals has sprouted, and I again have to ask myself whether to intervene with the hose if we hit a rainless stretch, or do I let nature take its course? Colorful annuals make a big impact in my yard in the spring, accounting for probably like 80% of its showiness factor, but annuals are a little tricky in that once the tender shoots appear, they need the ground to stay wet long enough to get good long roots down, and our pesky weather often just isn't on that same page with them. Both of the last two years we've had nice, refreshing October rain, followed by a devilishly dry November and not much improvement in December. Both times I opted to set out sprinklers a few times, because it saddened me to see the boisterous (and admittedly massive) seedling swaths turned back into dust.

Nevin Smith, in his marvelous book, "Native Treasures," addresses this annual conundrum in the aptly-named chapter "The Trouble with Annuals". He writes that while annual seeds need moisture to germinate, some "have additional mechanisms for preventing disastrous false starts. Often a certain minimum period of continuous moisture is necessary to activate them. Seeds of many species also require a certain number of cool or even frosty nights." (p. 255.) These are amazing adaptations, but I don't believe they are claimed by the particular annuals that inhabit my yard. It hasn't gotten terribly cool in my neighborhood, and the green carpets of seedlings appeared after the very first measurable rainfall.

Smith adds, "It is not uncommon for vast numbers of young seedlings to wither and die in an extended midwinter drought. Such is the nature of life in California."

Hence my dilemma. Nature can be merciless, but a garden affords the opportunity to inject a little nurture. Yet, I'm not the type of gardener who thinks gardening has much to do with control. When I first set out to plant an all-native garden, I looked at it as sort of a botanical nation-building endeavor. I did violently overthrow the ivy regime, and I installed quite a number of handpicked key players in the new native community, but the goal is for the plants to eventually have self-governance. I'll maintain a peacekeeping presence to deal with the threat of weed invasions and ivy insurgents, and I'll do some necessary housekeeping, but in terms of what thrives and what dies, what self-propagates and what fades away, I like for that to be out of my hands. I've wound the clock, now it's time to let it tick.

So all this argues for keeping the hose neatly coiled up by the faucet and letting the seedlings' fate run its course. I know I will find that hard, once I see them starting to keel. But actually, if they wither, it may be for the best; the last two years I've really had too many annuals--massive stands that choked out still-small perennials. Also, this year, the cheeky annuals are trespassing in places where they're not supposed to be, such as in my gravel-and-stone path. I guess the lesson there is to buy high-quality landscape fabric, not the cheapo permeable plastic so-called weed barrier at the home-improvement superstore. One might look at these seedlings and suspect them of being weeds, but I've seen these cotyledon rascals before, and I know them to be none other than G. capitatum, AKA globe gilia.

If this first flush of seedlings dies, perhaps later in the year a more manageably-sized crop with take its place. It could well be that nature is a better gardener than I.

Universe to Me: Life is Good

2010-09-29T16:22:00.000-07:00

I keep a list on the front page of this blog of every bird species I've spotted in (not near) my yard, since I consider it one of the truest joys in life to be favored with the company of avian friends. I haven't had the opportunity to update the list in a while, but I'm logging on to do so now. I am jobless at present, and while in some ways the freedom to find a new way of making a living is exciting, some days I can't help feeling a little weighed down by the fear of having to trade in the house for a cardboard box under the freeway. (The cats love cardboard boxes, so at least there's that.) Well, today was one of those days and I was feeling pretty gloomy. I dragged myself out to the porch to see what bills and bad news the mail would bring. As I opened the door I heard a rustling in the azalea. Wondering what kind of snake it would be this time (the hot weather seems to bring the serpentine friends down from the hills in greater numbers), imagine my surprise when instead I saw the very bird I've most pined to host. I've long had a soft spot 10 miles wide for the California quail, and I've always said, only a little jokingly, that my life would be complete if they ever visited the yard.

My life is indeed complete and the abundance of the universe knows no bounds. The quail hen dashed out from under the azalea and gamboled under the half-leafless chaparral currant (Ribes malvaceum) for several minutes while I stood frozen on the porch. Then I snuck back inside and grabbed the camera. Dang, no card! Found the card (whew), shoved it in the camera, ran to the window, and she was still there, under the Ribes, blending expertly with the tan, dried-out hummingbird sage. (People say hummingbird sage looks great all year if you water it weekly, but I just can't bring myself to use the water--the sage will come back with the rain in due time.)

I took the best pictures I was able given the limitations of the window, and I was too scared to risk opening the door again, lest the betassled beauty fly away. I was just about to dash to the upstairs window to see if I could see any more (I was concerned not seeing her husband, since they seem to always be seen in pairs if not groups), when Mrs. Quail decided to take flight. As she did I saw at least three others lift off from the corner area of the yard.

I know some people are lucky enough to have regular quail visits, but while I do see and hear them in the surrounding hills, our house doesn't quite back up right to the hills, and the street has always seemed a bit of an asphalt Rubicon that I feared the sweet quail would never cross. But now they have.

Once they were gone and I finished mopping up my tears of gratitude, I went out to the shed and got a millet-heavy birdseed mix to spread generously around the whole yard. A humble invitation for the loveliest of creatures to return. I hope they do. Oh, I hope they do. I have Ceanothus, Baccharis, wild roses and Atriplex (common name: quail bush!), all shrubs quail are said to favor. So please make yourselves at home, my good, good friends.

P.S. Not to slam the snakes. I'm lucky to have reptilian visitors too. I'm going to add a list of reptile sightings in the yard. It'll be shorter than the bird list, but aint it great living in the suburbs?

Coloring Summer Part 2

2010-09-27T19:28:00.000-07:00

Here are some more of the plants that bloomed for me in August and September. It is my theory that using groupings of these plants, and those in part 1 of this post, could obliterate the vicious rumor that California gardens have no color in summer. When fall planting time rolls around in a few weeks, I plan to increase the yard's inventory of these plants, and can't wait see how things look next August and September.

Solidago californica:

Madia elegans:

Heterotheca sessiliflora (admittedly, more spent blooms than fresh, but the fresh blooms do persistently keep appearing--they're out there even today, late September and 100 degrees):

Not a terrific picture here, I apologize, but I should mention Grindelia stricta var. platyphylla, which is a great-performing plant. Now, I had written a post a year or so ago about what a nemesis on the premises Grindelia turned out to be in my yard, but it is my belief that the monstrous, yard-taking-over plant was actually mislabeled at the nursery; luckily, I had already gotten a couple properly-labeled specimens from another nursery. I couldn't really go out there and say "Will the real G. stricta var. platyphylla please stand up," because the real plant stays quite low, whereas it was the impostor Grindelia that stood up and towered over everything. It's all gone now, but the real player remains, well-behaved and pleasingly late-flowering.

A little aside on Grindelia: another very lovely and well-behaved species is G. hirsutula, which is one of the first things to bloom for me in the spring. Right now, the two I have are looking more than a little dormant, so I am worried that they may be actually, er, dead...time will tell. I hope they revive because they are an early-spring highlight. But I digress. Back to the late summer blooms:

Our old friend Eschscholzia californica. I don't know how or why, but it does come back for a fall encore, whether it gets any water or not:

Linanthus grandiflora. This guy, too, is an annual, but I'll be danged if it doesn't bloom all summer. I definitely need more of it next year.

These next two don't count as summer blooms, exactly, because the blooms have dried completely, but I leave them on and still think they are cool-looking.

Eriogonum umbullatum:

Gnaphalium californicum:

And finally, I seem to have failed to get photographic documentation of this, but the Sisyrinchiums, both bellum (blue-eyed) and californicum (yellow-eyed), actually bloomed nicely in a couple places right through summer. It was, however, dependent on water--in both instances, they were near birdbaths that I empty and refill regularly. Still, goes to show that they can be all-summer bloomers if coaxed. Probably true of quite a few plants that otherwise take a nap for the latter half of summer.

Coloring summer

2010-09-07T22:54:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been off line for a while. I was working on quite a lengthy post, which I was just deciding to divide into two parts, detailing the many plants that have flowered in the yard over this last month. But I'm afraid I made a silly and catastrophic error and deleted the whole thing. Yes. I can't quite see reconstructing it all, so I'm just going to re-paste in the pictures, along with names, which I am not going to spell-check, so this'll be a little test for me. Sorry about the lack of descriptive text. The gist of my post was going to be that, contrary to popular myth, a lot of California natives do bloom late in the summer, and if one were to mass these plants together (which I have not done as yet), then one could have quite a colorful, myth-busting yard. Please let me know if you would like more info on any of the plants; I can certainly provide it, but not just at the moment, and I don't want to delay posting another day longer. Ahh, blogging.

Epilobium canum

Monardella macrantha 'Marian Sampson'

Satureja mimuloides

Achillea millefolium (really a spring bloomer but late in my yard for some reason)

Salvia 'Pozo Blue' hybrid

Aster chilensis (its name has changed but I haven't learned the new one yet)

Eriogonum fasciculatum

Eriogonum nudum

Eriogonum grande rubescens (very recent photo)

Eriogonum grande rubescens (a month ago)

Eriogonum grande rubescens planted with Monardella villosa

I guess I will do this in two posts. There are plenty more. The next post will feature the more yellow and white end of the summer bloom spectrum.

Blooming Disappointment

2010-08-11T22:46:00.000-07:00

In my last post I featured a flowering plant that I'm really pleased with this summer, Madia elegans (it's still blooming without signs of stopping), and now I'll mention a plant that seems to have given blooming a miss this year. Eriophyllum lanatum. Great plant, and I see it all over Mt. Diablo. I don't know why it's not into blooming in the yard this year...maybe it gets a bit too much shade, though I think it gets a good five or six hours of sun, so....

I bought just one in March 2009 and was told by the nurseryman to baby it a little over its first year, and then it would spread far and wide but stay low. Check, check and check, and last year, though it was still small, it was covered in lovely yellow daisy flowers. I decided to make cuttings (it's one of the easiest plants to root that I've every tried) so now I have several of them, but not one bloomed. Pity, because I was counting on ol' E. lanatum to provide some good-sized areas of bright summer color. It still makes a serviceable ground cover, and indeed, even a neighbor who isn't really into natives inquired about it, saying he liked the texture. So oh well. Maybe it'll bloom next year.

Here it is in the foreground, last summer--it looks similar now but at least twice the size:

And here's one of the cuttings:

And here are last year's flowers. Sigh.

Summer Flower Superstar

2010-07-21T22:30:00.000-07:00

Since there were some comments in my last post about the inevitable summer senescence of the native garden, I wanted to highlight a summer flowerer that I'm newly delighted with. Madia elegans. I'd read that it was a good for summer flowering, so bought three in 4" pots last fall. Then off to Yosemite I went for a little birthday treat, and when I came back I discovered I'd misjudged how much water the little pots would need while I was gone. Two of the three were toast, but I planted the survivor, and though it looked pretty sad, it hung on through the winter. Then I totally forgot about it! Its foliage was pretty inconspicuous as the annuals started growing around it. Then right about when the last of the Clarkias were finishing up and I was feeling a bit sad to see the color go, I spotted a bud on a very tall stalk in among the Clarkias. It actually took me a minute to remember, Oh yeeaaah, that's that Madia that's supposed to bring summer color. Within a few days it was. That was a few weeks ago, and it's still going strong. In the mid-day, the sun hits it full-on, and the flowers completely close up. Then when the evening shade moves over the plant, back out the sunny flowers come. On a sunny but not-too-hot day, the petals sort of semi-curl and look like they're getting ready to keel, but then they freshen right up again in the evening.

The plant is quite delightful, about 4.5 feet tall, narrow and sturdy. It is is common throughout most of the state, and couldn't be easier once you get it in the ground. I hadn't watered at all this year till I just ran the drip for a little while this weekend, and I think this plant would be fine whether I had done that or not. I plan to get several more this fall (and not kill them) and intersperse them here and there.

The Clarkia Clearcut

2010-07-19T21:45:00.000-07:00

This weekend I finally cleared out the crusty remains of annual wildflowers that make the yard so showy in the spring, occasionally causing people on their daily constitutionals to stop and point and say nice things. (Full credit goes to the flowers themselves--it's not like I can take credit for letting a few annuals go to seed.) But that breathtaking season is long over, and I worry that people who aren't familiar with the concepts of California native gardening might think the yard is just a case of another homeowner who plants a spring garden, has enormous success for a little while, only to slack off and let it fail miserably. I actually have been that person in the past. These days though, it's a case of the plants doing exactly what they are supposed to do.

This is the second summer of the post-Ivy War era, and the second time I have, let's face it, let the annuals run amok. It does make for a spectacular spring, but they end up choking other things. I refer to the corner yard as the Clarkia Forest in the spring though it is dotted with other flowers. But during the Clarkias' heyday, I spotted a poor Allium unifolium, which had gamely reproduced itself over its first year, but it was weak and pathetic, due to smothering by annuals. I also found a Monardella villosa, which is a great plant to have, what with its compact size and relatively late flowering schedule, but it too was nearly dead because of shading by annuals. So this coming fall, I really must steal myself to cull the volunteers. I've never had the heart to before, but sparing too many annual seedlings equals sacrificing other plants. I had planned to simply spare myself the onslaught of fall seedlings by cutting down the stalks before most of the seeds dispersed--but time gets away from a person. The seed capsules were definitely in full dispersal mode.

Here's a pictorial progression of the Clarkia Forest.

While I am loathe to show my dorky self here, this picture surreptitiously taken by my Sweetie, does show a sort of carpet of small Clarkias in front of me, just in front of my handful of weeks. This is in mid-March.

Note the taller plant on the leftmost part of the above photo, which is white sage. Below is the same spot in the yard photographed a bit over two months later. The white sage is again on the left of the photo, but all you can see of it is its white-flowered stalks; as you can see, the wildflowers grew right up too.

This is the stage where passersby stop and ask the names of various flowers.

And then this weekend, well overdue for a tidying-up. Fortunately I have very mellow, tolerant neighbors.

And finally, a shot after the clearing. I spread a little bark, which I normally don't, because I always read that one mustn't ever let the crowns of natives be covered, and I fear the bark will slump downslope and encroach on said crowns, but I couldn't resist, because it creates a more cared-for look. It also covers up the drip irrigation tubing, which became alarmingly visible after the dead-plant removal. I'm pretty happy with the "after" look--it seems reasonably classic California.

There is some color yet to come. There is a lot of Solidago californica (goldenrod) in there, only one stalk of which is starting to bud.

I do have a bit of trouble with this plant being leggy and floppy, unfortunately. But also, various buckwheats are blooming strong, and the pearly everlasting (Gnaphalium californicum) will keep its dry whitish flowers on for a long time. The fuchsias (Epilobium) will be in full bloom later--not highlighted in this photo shoot, but I have a couple tucked here and there, old standbys that they are. Aster will bloom later too. So, the color continues in some measure, but even if it didn't, I'm fine with just letting the yard rest. Summer is about relaxing, after all.

Four Seasons in One Hike

2010-07-12T21:35:00.000-07:00

When I lived in San Francisco I used to love going running with the Crowded House song "Four Seasons in One Day" on my iPod (which of course hadn't been invented yet and was really a crude little device we called a "walkman"), because no matter where in the city I chose to run, I would seem to travel through at least four seasons. It struck me hiking near my current East Bay home this weekend that the situation was similar, even though the temperature and relative humidity stayed pretty constant. Looking around though, I could indeed see samples of each of the four seasons, at least as we identify them in California.

The weather has been unseasonably cool this summer, even cool enough that my non-heat-loving Sweetie has been agreeing to hike with me--so I'm going to cheat a little and call this the hike's representative of winter. Also, cresting a large hill, a westward vista revealed a blanket of fog stretching itself along the coast toward Mount Tam and I knew all too well what it felt like for the people under it. There is a famous saying, often (but I've heard erroneously) attributed to Mark Twain: "The worst winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." So I count that fog sighting as winter and summer both.

Then right underfoot I came across one, then another, impressive and stunning patch of Clarkias. I think it must be Clarkia affinis. The first is in semi-woodland, mixed with monkey flower, and the second is on completely exposed and sun-baked grassland. Its bloom time seems similar to Clarkia amoena, or Farewell to Spring, so it's natural to find it here in early summer. But as you can see by some of the photographed yet-to-unfurl buds, it's stretching its bloom time well, well into summer. I find it such a marvel that it manages to bring itself into existence among the nearly impenetrable mat of weedy grasses--all now crispy and dry as straw, another unmistakable emblem of the California summer.

I love the way the Clarkia petals catch the sunlight, like little chalices, and look so frail and dainty, even as one glance around the parched surroundings proves that they are in fact tough as nails.

For comparison, here is Clarkia amoena in my yard a couple months ago. I think the garden conditions might cause it to be a bit exuberant, and also the nurseries might tinker around with the gene pool a bit. Honestly? I like the rugged, no-frills little Clarkia in nature better.

Another cheerful and willing bloomer on the dry and sun-drenched path is my old friend Grindelia stricta. Last summer I grew this guy in my yard, but wrote that I had to evict it because it just got too crazy. I had gumplants upwards of six feet in height; here in its natural home (a mere 2 miles away) it stays about knee-high, It's a cheery treat near the top of this hike's biggest climb, and it manages to bloom in spring and then way into summer. When I run this trail in the hot months, it's like a reward for making it to the top.

Next spring-summer spanning plant is Gnaphalium californicum. I am newly a huge fan. I have it in my yard for the first time this spring and have adored how it looks like little white lights among everything else. Up in the hills it grows in great patches and is at its most glistening and impressive now. In a few weeks, it will dry out but will remain quite lovely for a long time--hence its common moniker, Pearly Everlasting. On this hike, I see it in both stages.

Fresh spring look:

Mid-summer look:

Another spring flowerer I see soldiering on everywhere I look is good old monkey flower, Mimulus aurantiacus. In somewhat shaded areas on my hike, this plant looks as fresh as it must have in April. In my yard, it's pretty well gone into dormancy. I don't really know why all these plants I'm mentioning last longer in their natural homes than they do in my yard. Not like anyone's watering them out on the trail.

The fourth season, which I haven't got to yet, fall, is quite visible on much of the monkey flower, however. I find it so stunning to see the leaves turning scarlet, even as the yellow flowers are still fresh and bright.

What a lovely fall palette. And not too early, for us Californians. I find it pretty typical of the poison oak to be donning its scarlet wardrobe right about this time.

Another dazzlingly red denizen of this particular woodland is the spiny Ribes--it's not the speciosa that so many people put in their yards; I think it may be Ribes californicum or menziesii. At any rate, it's getting dressed for fall. The monkey flower, poison oak and Ribes know what some of us don't want to admit yet: fall is right around the corner.

Hike location: http://www.ebparks.org/parks/sobrante_ridge

Managing the Snake Menace

2010-07-05T15:25:00.000-07:00

I mentioned a few months ago that I've been letting my little feline friend of friends come out in the garden with me, but that I was a little worried it would give him a chance to have a reptilian encounter of the venomous variety. I wrote that post in March and my little snake-in-the-grass meadow region has gone from being a dense green patch, to a globe-gilia-packed thicket, to the cut-back, semi-dormant little plot that it is now. Here's the progression, taken from roughly the same spot, in mid-March, mid-May and this morning:

As you can see, there's plenty of visible ground in between the grass bunches now. And yet I'm more nervous than ever about the possibility of witnessing a Cat v. Rattler Smackdown in my back yard, mainly because it is high snake season, so I sent an email to Gary Bogue, the local newspaper's fantastic and heroic animal-advocate columnist. Here is my letter with Gary's reply, followed by two great reader responses (the responses are a little way into each column):

http://www.contracostatimes.com/columns/ci_15411514?nclick_check=1

http://www.contracostatimes.com/columns/ci_15421085

http://www.contracostatimes.com/columns/ci_15429195

It looks like the majority opinion is that there isn't a huge risk but there is some, so the best bet is to keep the fuzzy would-be explorer indoors. But people who give that advice haven't heard the howls of a cat that has been given a taste of the outdoors and then had it taken away, so I'm still going out with him daily. He's not exploring the whole world but he's allowed to investigate most of the yard on his leash while I'm nearby. Meanwhile, I'm working with little Miss Skittish Kitty to try to get her to let me put the leash on her so that she can go out and spare me her howls.

Back to the grass patch. This year it was unbelievably dense with Globe Gilia (Gilia capitatum). I haven't quite reached the point that I refer to any native wildflower as a weed, but man that flower does seed itself around! Next year I'm going to try to keep it at bay a bit, and try to mix in more Silene laciniata, Linanthus grandiflorus and Linum lewisii instead. Here are those flowers, in that order, taken from elsewhere in the yard today:

I think they'd do a good job of dressing up the meadow patch, because they take up very little space, but add sweet little spots of color--red, white and blue, no less. And they flower well into the summer. The Silene seems to flower all summer, and I had a volunteer Linanthus in the ground last year that punched out flowers till August. This is my first year with the native flax (Linum lewisii), but it's still flowering where I have it in pots. (I do have one in the meadow, but it seems to be done blooming, probably because I haven't bothered to splash it with occasional water.)

The two grasses in the meadow are Festuca rubra 'Pt. Molate' and Koelaria macrantha, or June Grass. The latter will stay bunchy, but the fescue will spread, presumably into a lawn alternative if desired. I haven't decided yet whether that is desired. I may pull it up as it spreads, in order to preserve some open space and keep the snake menace in check better. It's also nice to leave some open ground space for the birds to scuffle around on.

If anyone has any experience with meadow gardening in snakeville--and especially if anyone has any knowledge about how cats relate to snakes--I'd love to hear from you! I recognize that one of the goals of native gardening is to help wildlife, and I accept that some of that wildlife happens to have poison in its fangs, it's just that I want the fangs kept well away from my little gardening buddy's paws!

Enjoying the dog days

2010-06-27T16:21:00.000-07:00

Well, as we get older, time seems to move faster, and sure enough it doesn't seem half a year since I was lamenting the early daily disappearance of the sun (and hence early end to the yard-work-day in California's peak gardening season). Yet here we are in the dog days, and from yesterday until mid-week we'll enjoy the latest sunsets we're gonna get. The sun sets at about the same time for a span of evenings (according to this site, from June 25 to July 1) just as it sets at the same frustratingly early time for a span in the winter. Yet around the time of the equinoxes, the sunset times change rapidly--by as much as a minute per evening. My brother says this is because the sun and earth have a sinusoidal relationship and at the solstices we're sitting at the top or bottom of the wave, whereas at the equinoxes we're climbing up or down. This blows my mind a bit too much, and all I really know is that long summer days rule. The irony for California native gardeners is supposed to be that it's during the short winter days when there is a lot of work to do (like planting, redesigning, propagating, weeding) and in the long days, the garden is supposed to be kicking back in semi dormancy, and the weeds are theoretically gone and not returning, due to lack of moisture. But somehow I still feel pressure to get out there and get things done.

One task screaming to be done is the cutting down of the annual wildflower stalks, which are now pretty crusty and sad looking. I'm sure my neighbors are eager for me to do this, but I want to let a few seed capsules finish ripening and dehisce, so that I can have more wildflowers next year. But not as many. I still plan to do a post where I discuss designing with annuals, and the main thing I'm learning is that while they look fantastic when they're not thinned, they take a toll on the garden's permanent residents--smaller perennials and bulbs--by shading them out. Here is a mess of annual and perennial action from a couple months ago:

The other work I can't get on top of is babysitting and eventual potting up of plants grown from seeds or cuttings during the winter. And finally, there's watering, watering and watering of containers on the patio. I don't feel good about it because conserving water is one of the reasons for gardening with natives. But those in containers seem to be thirsty every dang time I turn around. My plan is to install drip, at least in the containers that are grouped together along the fence, and this will cut down on their dependency on me, and I hope will sort of cut the overall water use as well as keeping the conditions consistently moderately moist, rather than subjecting the poor plants to a crazy moisture pendulum that continually swings from saturated to parched.

So once I get the crusty annuals down, the baby plants potted up and the entire patio on drip, then I will get some Mojito mix and start enjoying the long dog days. Which I hope won't be over by then. And for those curious about why we say dog days, I was too. Seemed to remember hearing it had something to do with our buddy Sirius, the dog star, but didn't know what, since we don't see him this time of year. Turns out "dog days" refers to the days when our brightest star Sirius rises at the same time as the Sun, and apparently, the ancient types reckoned it was this convergence of two bright celestial objects that caused the summer heat. (Not quite, but I'm impressed those guys could figure out any of that cosmic stuff at all.) All I know is that in summertime, the livin' is supposed to be easy, so I better get out there and get those chores out of the way.

What's this butterfly doing?

2010-06-24T23:19:00.000-07:00

And what kind is it? I'm hoping some of you knowledgeable folks out there can tell me, because regrettably I don't know much about butterflies yet. The thing is this one was hanging out on my Aster chilensis but not moving, even when lightly prodded (by a gentle kitty paw). Was it dying? Sleeping? Laying eggs maybe? I'd be incredibly supportive of any butterflies and moths who want to raise families in my plants--especially the Aster, because it's not like a few caterpillars are going to make a dent in my supply of that, no matter how hungry hungry they are. (Aster chilensis spreads by rhizomes, and quite enthusiastically.)

I had to thank my little quadrupedal gardening buddy for pointing this insect out to me.

I had to sort of keep my eye on him to make sure he didn't attempt to harass or eat our winged guest, and he was actually quite cooperative. Also, he asked me to ask you to not hate him because he's beautiful:

Thanks for any info on the butterfly! I hope I'm doing something right for it to have been there.

Spring by Hallmark

2010-06-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

I'll do a post in the near future about how my yard was taken over by wildflowers. I never have been good at saying no to a wildflower volunteer. But for now, a picture show highlighting the showiest players, the Clarkias. These are Clarkia amoena (Farewell to Spring) and Clarkia unguiculata (Elegant Clarkia). They got their start in my yard two years ago when I decided to buy a measly two of each from Annies Annuals, and I planted them in a tiny area where I had cleared just enough ivy to fit in a few 4-inch annuals. They didn't even do well, because 2008 turned out to be our driest spring on record. But they managed to fulfill their life cycle as Nature intended, and dropped enough seeds that the following year, when the ivy was all clear, I had a veritable Clarkia Forest. Then the forest begat another forest this year. They are a little over the top for a native garden--I think they are hybrids designed by the nursery to appear hopped up on steroids--so last year I felt like that was sort of cheating, and I actually tried to cut most of them down before they went to seed so as to keep their reproduction at bay and have a more "realistic" yard this year. I didn't succeed. And I'm glad too, because, well. Take a look. They strike me as worthy of a greeting card you'd send to your granny. So for all the grannies out there:

Name this weed please

2010-05-31T09:42:00.000-07:00

Ages since I've posted here and I feel bad, but May is always a busy month for me and I can't seem to get a word typed in edgewise. I'm really grateful for you readers who stop by here when I post, and I'll try to keep up better now! I have a lot of spring flower-riot type photos, since it is that quite magical time of year, but for the moment, here's a quick, if embarrassing, ID I need help with! You weed-identifiers, please help me out. This crazy thing started growing about a year ago and it had a monocotish appearance at first--just a few blades--so I thought it might be one of the bulbs I'd planted months earlier, just behind schedule for whatever reason. It stayed in a holding pattern for months and months and finally started growing tall this spring. It finally developed more slender leaves and stalks almost 5 feet high, and when it developed buds they looked awfully weed-like, so I was disappointed. I'd planted an Ascelepias speciosa roughly in that spot early in the garden's life, but it seemed to die (for some reason I have had no luck whatsoever with Asclepias) and even though the leaves weren't like that plant's, I sort of wondered if it were maybe some other Asclepias, mislabeled from the nursery. At some point when I wasn't looking one of the buds not only flowered but moved right on to become a huge crazy seedhead. That had to come down before spreading over the entire neighborhood. Anyone know what it is? Most weeds come in dozens or hundreds or thousands, but this is the only one of its kind out there that I know of.

Thanks for any info! Pictures of happier, non-impostor plants to follow soon!

The Sacred and the Profane

2010-04-26T20:13:00.000-07:00

Okay. Confession time. *Ahem*.

I have a privet tree in my yard. Legustrum japonica. No one hates invasive exotics more than I do, but...it's complicated. I didn't know trees or plants at all when we moved into the house, but I quickly recognized this tree as the Bane of My Life. In summer, the tiny whitish flower petals cover everything in the yard, clog the gutters with fine debris, and make birdbath water-changing a pretty much constant task. Year-round the tree covers the doorstep in leaf-drop, and in winter, there are: The Berries. (Queue Psycho music.)

I'll get to the berries in a bit. You're wondering why I don't cut down this tree. Well, now that I know more about plants and understand the harm done by invasives, the tugging on my conscience is even more compelling than my sweep-weariness, but for one thing, this is not the only privet in town. I know most of the privets on the street are volunteer weeds, some of them possibly the prodigy of my tree, and I sometimes feel like more yards have them than don't. So removal of mine wouldn't change the overall local Privet Menace much. But yes, that's a cop-out, and I don't truly want to be part of the problem. But the birds! This is the bird tree of all time. I go outside in spring and there is a din of birdsong--a solid wall of sound--and most of it is located in the privet. I look up in the scaffolding (the only view of this tree that I think is kind of pretty) and see woodpeckers and nuthatches bouncing from branch to branch as well as sapsuckers, juncos, towhees, kinglets, finches, sparrows and others. And in winter armies upon armies of robins and waxwings. I go back and forth over the idea of getting rid of this tree. If I did, there are still the other trees--mostly birches, also far preceding our ownership of the home--and I see birds in them too. But not close to as many.

Plus, this is a mature tree and a huge feature on the landscape. Removal would result in my shade garden becoming not a shade garden, and us getting to know the neighbors a lot better. Any replacement would be years away from having the same sort of presence.

Now the berries. They come out in the fall, coloring the whole tree blue-black, and they start raining on everything in December or so. They stain my clothing, and, embarrassingly, the clothing of unsuspecting guests and passersby. They make the birdbath into purple soup every hour or so. Then the robins and waxwings arrive. I think of the New Year as Waxwing Season, and welcoming these gorgeous flocks is an inspiring way of welcoming the coming year.

I'm on the lookout for the Waxer Army over Christmas, and then one morning I look out the kitchen window and see that the privet has become a Waxwing Tree, branches drooping with great clusters of birds. Then something spooks the flock and the tree seems to explode as the cloud of birds moves on to some neighbor's privet. The waxers eat other things--good things like Toyons, as well as Pyracanthus and Juniper--but the knowledgeable lady at my favorite retail store, Wild Birds Unlimited, tells me that their favorite is Legustrum, "hand's down."

In addition to the waxers are lots and lots of robins, feasting on the same berries. All this also makes me refer to the early part of the year as year Purple Poo season. All the yard's pavement, front and back, and all stones, birdbaths, pots, cars--everything--is covered in purple poo from berry-glutted robins and waxwings. When I pour out the grape-colored birdbath water, a dark blue stain remains on the bowl.

Around mid February, Purple Poo season ends and I say farewell to the waxers (the robins stick around but not in as shocking of numbers). I miss them, but then again I don't. Well, I do. But that messy season is icky. And then spring arrives and where there was once only horrible purple poo there is now...seedlings! Any time I go outside, even just to get the paper, I start pulling a few privet seedlings and get sucked into a vortex. I can lose hours to this task. There is no end to the seedlings. Spring is the worst, but there's never a non-seedling time.

So, such a virulent, vicious non-native invasive standing tall above my yard of native shrubs and perennials, making a mess and creating chores. It's messed up, I know. I feel like I can never put my house on the local native garden tour with this nemesis on the premises. I suppose I'd have to plead guilty to aiding and abetting it--along with an army of masked bandits.

On gardening buddies, meadows and snakes

2010-03-30T19:42:00.000-07:00

For the last week or so I’ve had a new garden buddy. Seems my almost-middle-aged cat has got himself a bad case of spring fever, so I’ve been letting him come out with me and help trim the grasses—and call my planting choices into question. I’m in the cat-guardian camp that believes the danger of being flattened by a car or carried off by a coyote is too great for free-range kitties, so I keep mine inside, but Neo has always tortured my conscience with his howls to go out. In the past we’d try the leash thing and he’d spend the whole time trying to Houdini out of the harness, but he seems to be mellowing with age. I love having him around and I envision a time where he can chew on Festuca rubra and Koeleria macrantha to his tummy’s content while I do some weeding or sit in the sun and read a book.

All this is very good, except that it's got me regretting my back yard planting design choices. A spring-flower-filled meadow that would fade to tan as the summer wore on seemed too pretty to resist, despite my own objections that it might create a rattlesnake hazard. (They don’t invent expressions like “snake in the grass” for nothing, you know!) We live in a fairly rattlesnake-heavy area, and every spring and summer we see a handful in the yard. They like to relax under cool plant cover on hot summer days. The ivy was total snakeville, so I knew better than to create a similar situation.

And yet here and I am with a dense meadow patch. The idea was to replace our small lawn with drought-tolerant grasses that would be extravagantly colored by the blooms of Sisyrinchium bellum, Linum lewisii, Linanthus grandiflorus and Silene laciniata, as well as bulbs like Allium and Triteleia. This is coming along pretty well, though the Silene seemed to disappear. But what I have most of this year is Gilia capitata. My meadow is only a year old and wouldn’t be very dense yet, except for that impenetrable forest of Gilia.

This grass-and-Gilia patch that I’m seeing as a little dangerous is, naturally, the cat's favorite spot. He retreats to it every time something spooks him and I’ve dubbed it Homegrass, in reference to Hometree in Avatar.

So now I have to decide: 1) pull out the Gilia so that there is enough visible soil to spot snakies, or 2) prohibit cat use in that area till after blooming, then cut it all down with a weed-whacker. I have a feeling the cat in question is going to exercise his veto power on option 2. So far I’ve just been giving the area a visual inspection by parting the Gilia forest, but because many rattlers this time of year are babies and therefore small and rattle-less, I suspect they could go undetected. (By they way, I’m not against the snakes in principle—it was their home before it was mine—I just don’t want them biting my little friend of friends.)

Next year I will resolve to not let the Gilias run amok, and I’m kind of thinking of making Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) the backbone of the meadow. I have it elsewhere and so far, it doesn’t have stalks at all, but is just a nice, low turf-like cover. Maybe when it gets its stalks it’ll cause the same situation, but I’m wondering if it would be less dense, and therefore easier to peer into.

I do enjoy Yarrow, though find it needs a bit more water than I’d planned on giving. Yarrow is sort of a mascot in my yard though, because I have this memory of my mom buying some and my sister laughing at the purchase because “you can just find it growing in the wild.” Yes—and that pretty much encapsulates my whole garden ethos now.

Well, rainy week, so no need to decide right away what do with the meadow. My new garden buddy doesn’t ask to go out if it’s as much as drizzling. It’s probably worth modifying my meadow for him. He's better company than my old gardening buddy:

Directive?

2010-03-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

Happy springing forward, everyone! I live for that transition to where I can get home in daylight and check in with my plants any evening of the week. March is a magical time.

And now that we’re done reeling from that other March ritual, the Oscars (just kidding, I don’t get too invested, I mostly like to see the gowns, like everyone else), I thought it a good excuse to set out some thoughts on a movie that got some, but not enough, recognition last year. And don’t worry, it relates to native gardening, some. This year, Pixar’s Up became only the second animated movie ever to be nominated for a Best Picture award. How much this is attributable to the fact that there are now 10 nominees rather than five is a matter of speculation, but either way, I couldn’t help wishing the distinction had gone to last year’s magnificent Wall-E. Of course Wall-E got good reviews, and the Best Animated Feature statue (as though Pixar would ever not win that), but when Up was released last summer, it felt to me like Wall-E was forgotten and tossed out like so much Buy N Large refuse. I was pleased that at least The New York Times’ A.O. Scott named Wall-E the best picture of the decade. It is a film worth remembering. It’s not that I begrudge Up its many merits, its sweet story of enduring love and its eye-thrilling colorscape, but Wall-E is a deeply beautiful film, and a profound film. It is a film about what it is to be alive and a film that makes you want to change your life.

This is an essay that’s been rattling around in my cranium for a while and I’m posting it on a native plant blog. Well, in Wall-E, the human race is saved by a plant. The plant’s specific nativity is not the point. (We don’t actually know what kind of plant it is, but my money is on Algerian Ivy, given its stubborn persistence in all conditions, including the vacuum of space.) From the perspective of the people in the movie, the plant’s nativity is Earth, and so is theirs. Light-years from their home planet, the people have devolved into infantile and helpless creatures caught in a 700-year string of tedious, artificially-lit days that yield no joy or sorrow, no experience or sensation discernibly human. The people are lost to the earth and themselves.

There are many reasons gardeners cite for going native—save water, help wildlife, grow plants likely to thrive—and I agree with all of these, but, together they add up to maybe 1% of why I choose natives. I moved to the Bay Area in late 1994, so I have called it home for over a decade and a half. I always admired pretty gardens and pretty plants. But once I started learning about the plants that grow here naturally, only then did I begin to see this place, to be at home in it. Recognizing and knowing the plants as my neighbors and my hosts is what made me, as the late and very great Wallace Stegner would say, “a placed person.” Displaced for seven centuries, the people in Wall-E are re-placed because of the truth contained in a single plant. It’s easy enough, too, to see the ship as a metaphor for our modern lifestyle—plugged into machines and trapped in sterile indoor worlds.

A criticism that is often made of Wall-E is that it is powerful in its wordless first half but falls into action-cartoon stereotype in its second half, but I don’t buy this. The second half is the story, the hero’s journey if you want to go all Joseph Campbell on it. There are of course other themes at work, such as the film’s representation of love as light—think of the bulb that blazes into light at Eve’s touch and later doesn’t shatter when Wall-E compacts it, or the string of lights Wall-E uses to anchor Eve to himself—but fundamentally it’s a human-redemption story.

Wall-E finds the human ship midway through the film, obscured in a nebula, a not-unobvious metaphor for the mental and spiritual state of its inhabitants. The literally ungrounded passengers of The Axiom have so long forgotten their identity as embodied creatures that they can’t chew food, to say nothing of standing up and experiencing the simple pleasure of walking. They are admonished to “Remain stationary. A service bot will assist you momentarily.” Their entertainment amounts to sitting still next to a pool, or playing sports by controlling robot surrogates with a remote control. Even their wardrobe of identical jumpsuits is chosen by machines.

The idea of Earth, a tiny sample of which is brought to the gleaming ship by Wall-E, in the form of caked-on dirt and grime on his body, is so unfamiliar it literally sets off alarm bells, and sends an obsessive-compulsive little cleaning-bot on a mission to catch the offending visitor and eradicate the “foreign contaminant.”

Wall-E and his foreign contaminant, and his living plant, bring an element of chaos to the flawlessly streamlined ship. This starts to knock people off their machine-feed, turning their jumpsuits from cold and bloodless blue to vital, sanguine red, and causing the people to discover tools they’ve never known they had. Like eyes. “I didn’t know we had a pool!” “So many stars!” And hands. When two passengers inadvertently touch hands while pointing at Wall-E through a viewing bay window, we see that they are experiencing another’s touch for the first time; cut to the next scene, they’re splashing in the pool, likely the first playful human act in centuries.

Wall-E’s journey affects more than the passengers: fans of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest may see a bit of Randall McMurphy in Wall-E as he sets the defective bots free and inspires them to mimic his joie de vivre. But the most important impact is on the ship’s captain. As Wall-E had been programmed with the “directive” of compacting trash, and Eve the directive of scanning for signs of life, the captain’s directive, as the humans’ leader, is to take them back to where they all belong. When he proclaims “I don’t want to survive, I want to live,” we know he will do this, but it is the remnants of the home planet aboard his ship that impel him to start making the right queries. “Computer, define earth.” “Define sea.” (And unforgettably, “Define hoe-down.”) I defy any viewer to stave off goose bumps, and possible ocular waterworks, watching the scene where the captain whispers, “Computer, define dancing,” and the camera cuts to Wall-E and Eve in a glitter-tailed choreography outside the ship.

When I was a kid I loved 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dave Bowman’s journey into pure consciousness seemed exciting then, but these days I’m more concerned with the world of substance. Whenever I watch (yet another space adventure) The Empire Strikes Back, I’m always annoyed in the part where Yoda pinches Luke’s arm and scolds, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!” Luminous beings we may or may not be, but I can never help wondering just what this little green punk has against crude matter. I happen to like it. Yoda is supposed to represent the enlightened master, but I don’t think he’s as sharp as real-life monk and author Thich Nhat Hanh, who said, “The true miracle is not walking on water or walking in air, but simply walking on this earth.”

Near the end of Wall-E, the Axiom’s passengers tumble out of the ship’s chute onto bare earth, reborn, and they stand up and walk, feet on ground, crude matter on crude matter. I emerged from the theater euphoric and speechless, crying and laughing. I wanted to wrap my arms around the trunks of trees and sink my hands into the dirt. We need make no hyperspace journey across the galaxy. Our miracle is right here.

Turquoise and Lime

2010-02-24T17:49:00.000-08:00

Anyone else out there been enjoying the turquoise and lime graphics coming from the Vancouver winter games? I saw someone on TV criticizing the Olympic graphic art as wimpy and not sports-like, but I’ve long adored that color scheme. I find myself focusing more on how well the figure skaters’ costumes coordinate with the backdrop than on whether they land their quads or triple double doubles or whatever the heck they are.

Turquoise-lime seems to have been in fashion the last several years, since you see it everywhere, and it’s a combination that I find at once soothing and stunning. I first fell hard for it years ago while idly leafing through a book on interior design in India. I turned to a page featuring a kitchen with one full-on turquoise wall adjacent to a full-on lime wall, and on the table a simple vase of shocking pink bougainvillea. When I saw that picture I pulled one of these:

I think it was at that moment that I decided I must one day own a home, so that I could recreate that picture. When I finally did get the chance, I took the paint a few shades darker and substituted Clarkias for the bougainvillea. Here are my supermodels posing in front of each color. (The Clarkia vase is only in spring--and only out for about a minute before it has to be removed from the curious supermodels' reach).

Nature has its own version of the turquoise-lime scheme in California—it employs similar hues but a bit less intensity—and as with the picture in the Indian book, when I see it I want to recreate it at home.

While contrasting deep greens with light blue/grays is a classic California look, and one I’m sure professional designers sign off on enthusiastically, because it contrasts not only hue (color), but also value (light/dark), but I’d like to make a case for mixing the medium tones—using lighter, more yellowy greens with the blue/gray standards. Throw in a few really dark greens for grounding and you’ve got a scheme so pretty you barely need flowers.

Nature wields the blue-green scheme masterfully on the chaparral-covered hillsides of Mt. Diablo. I’ve hiked there sometimes and felt like I would keel over the side of a sandstone outcropping, so dizzying was the beauty of the vistas. It’s especially effective on misty days when everything is damp and washed, and the sky is a neutral white backdrop. Mt. Diablo’s chaparral pallet consists largely of two Arctostaphylos species. Arctostaphylos auriculata, or Mt. Diablo Manzanita, has a lovely, muted blue tone, like seafoam—or like crest toothpaste, or office scrubs. But Crest or scrubs or no, it’s a lovely color, let’s face it. Arctostaphylos manzanita ssp. laevigata is more of a bright, limey green, and it is also a plant on the not-small list of plants found on Diablo and almost nowhere else. (Don’t ever let anyone tell you Mt. Diablo is not a special place.) I find a hillside covered in these two manzanitas pretty much unmatched in the pastoral beauty department. I wish I had a photo that did it true justice, but I seem to forget my camera on the most photogenic days. I hope you can get the idea somewhat.

Mt. Diablo also works the blue brush with the majestic Pinus sabiniana, or Grey Pine. I love this pine with its enormous cones and long wispy needles, a foothill species that also comes down to our elevation to mingle with the chaparral and scrub, providing a blue counterpoint to the bright greens of coyote brush.

I’m also blown away by my favorite color scheme on my drive to work each morning. On a vivid, rain-washed morning like today, it’s all I can do to not drive off the road when I see the silver-blue bush lupines scattered among the limey grasses and mosses. Also this time of year, native roadside willows are putting on chartreuse spring leaves, and when I see a baby slate-blue Eucalyptus in among them, my lizard brain has moment of pure reflexive joy before my cerebral cortex steps in and says Whoa whoa whoa, those Eucalypts don't belong. For that matter, most of the brilliant green grasses don't either, but the colors still astonish.

In the garden, there are many ways to go green-blue. The list of bluish California natives is long, since blue/gray leaves are an adaptation to manage little water and lots of sun. To mention a few, Artemisia pycnocephala and A. californica, Lessingia filaginifolia (actually now called Corethrogyne filaginifolia), Penstemon palmerii, Epilobiums, Salvia leucophylla and apiana and many cultivars, Leymus condensatus (Canyon Prince especially), Datura wrightii, Eriophyllum confertiflorum or nevinii, many (most) Eriogonum, Lupinus albifrons, Atriplex, Dendromecon, Lepechinia ,and many Arctostaphylos.

And for the the lime green component, some choices might be: Trichostema lanatum, Mirabilis californica, Heucheras, Salvia spathacea, various Mimulus, Galvezia speciosa, and just about any native grass or sedge. And many Arctostaphylos. For a blue and green groundcover, trusty yarrows could fit both bills, as the species and many cultivars are lovely bright green, but the cultivar ‘Calistoga’ is marvelously silvery. And some plants go either way, depending on conditions, or even change with the seasons. For example, when I see Artemisia douglasii or Lepechinia in other people’s yards or in the wild, they’re usually distinctly gray, but in my yard, where they get quite a bit of shade, they are pure, fresh-looking green.

In the garden section pictured below, my idea is to mix the bright green of the Trichostema (Woolly Bluecurls) with blue-gray Artemisia pychnocephala in front and Canyon Prince Wild Rye (Leymus) behind. The Datura is pretty dark, but also bluish.

If a color scheme is stunning on a roadside or stunning on Mt. Diablo (or stunning around the Olympic skating rink), then bring it into the yard. Human eyes have more color-sensing cones than almost any other mammal, so why not swoon over these lovely variations and schemes every single day? Last night I went to dinner with some coworkers to an astonishingly great vegan restaurant and talk inevitably led to comparisons of other vegan restaurants. The consensus around the table came down hard against a place that makes their wait staff ask each customer, “What are you grateful for today?” I can appreciate that it would be hard to pull such a thing off without seeming sanctimonious or corny. But actually? When you think about it? I’m grateful as hell for Lupinus albifrons atop lime green moss, and for green and blue manzanitas lining hiking trails, and for the cone-heavy human eyes that allow me to see them.

January Showers Bring February Flowers

2010-02-09T20:21:00.000-08:00

Spring comes early for us lucky Californians (to think some people have to wait till May!) so I thought I’d take a moment to document my yard’s first outward signs of it. Blooms, that is! Below are the first of what I consider spring blooms. While I have a potted Arctostaphylos uva-ursi with lovely blooms, and a Ribes malvaceum that’s been decked out for over a month, I consider those winter bloomers, so don’t count them as harbingers of spring. However, I have heard numerous reports of some of the species below blooming in other people’s gardens weeks ago. I’m finding that part of the thrill (and I mean thrill) of redoing a yard in natives is learning what its own particular seasonal schedules will be.

So, my eager greeters of spring:

Salvia spathacea. Only one flower stalk so far, and I’m glad to see it, because this plant is among the first natives I ever bought and planted, some over two years ago, but they haven’t bloomed for me yet. (Experienced gardeners out there, please tell me, is this one of those plants that has to live for a few years before blooming?) I would love to see multitudes of flower stalks rising out of the Salvia patch one day. Right now I guess even saying "patch" is pushing it--more of a smattering--but some people have "warned" me of this sage's "invasiveness." At this point, I wish. This is one of those plants that other people were reporting in bloom weeks ago, so I hope mine are just a little tardy.

Second: Salvia mellifera, or Mel, as I call mine. Weighing in with three blooming stalks, and way more than three times the overall volume it was a year ago, Mel is so far one of the most successful citizens in the New Yard Order. Bought this lovely critter as a gallon at a botanic garden, labeled as just S. mellifera, but it’s looking to be actually a prostrate form. And that’s okay, the low sprawling version fits the spot just fine, with blades of Nassella and Aristida poking out of it. I hope it develops a lot more than three blooms in the weeks to come. Didn't bloom too much in its first spring, last year.

Next up, Ceanothus ‘Concha.' Just one itty bitty blossom, somewhat lost in the branches, but I’m counting it. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I worship unabashedly at the altar of Ceanothus and welcome the arrival of the purple-drenched season. Concha (or Conch Concherello, as I call it—sorry, gotta remember 70s TV for that one) is located next to a ‘Skylark’ Ceanothus, which blooms late, like into June, so in theory there will be a long stretch of Ceanothusyness each year. I worry a little about Conch ‘n’ Jon, er, Skylark, though, because their site is a bit shadier than my wishful-thinking memory had bet on.

That’s it for me bloom-wise so far. Oop, also some Lewisia cotyledon, which I forgot to photograph, but they seem to bloom on a whim whenever they feel like it, so not sure they count as signs of spring. Also some blooms on the wild strawberries, didn’t even think to photograph them—overlooked my lowly little friends, even though I really value them for their low groundcover usefulness.

Budding up next looks to be Ribes viburnifolium. It was blooming nicely by late February last year. I think it is a somewhat underrated plant, being really tough in dry conditions, yet able to grow and bloom in near full shade, and though others may describe the flowers as somewhat nondescript, I find them delightful. Here’s a pic from last year.

Finally, though my potted Arctostaphylos uva-ursi is covered in its sweet little pink bells, my ‘St. Helena’ and ‘Louis Edmunds’ Arctos are barely threatening to bloom. Some Arctostaphylos in the area are already dropping petals, so it causes me to worry a little that mine aren’t happy, but as I said, every site puts its own subtle spin on the seasons, so I’ll keep watching.

Buck Everlasting

2010-01-30T14:48:00.000-08:00

Our native buckwheats are reliable and appreciated for their ability to add floral color to semi-dormant, late summer California native gardens, and their endurance as cut flowers is well-known too. I didn’t appreciate either until experiencing it.

My native yard is still pretty young, and still developing, but one of the earliest things I planted was a couple Eriogonum fasciculatum. True to their reputation, they did punch out flowers through late summer and fall, but for some reason mine were very leggy and floppy and the flowers sort of cowered near the ground among other plants. Then around mid November I decided it was time for some fall cleaning and took a clipper to the garden. Even though the floppy little buckwheat blossoms were welcome little puffs of color, I decided to cut them back, hoping the plants would make a denser, less leggy comeback. But as I was taking my armload of green waste to the bin, I couldn’t bear to dump those sweet little pale pink powder puffs, so I gathered them up and put them in a little vase on the kitchen windowsill. (I would like to display garden cuttings more conspicuously, such as in the center of the kitchen table or a coffee table, but those places are too noticeable to the two cats’ Chomping Fangs of Doom.)

Well, seemingly a second later, November is December and I succumb to the yearly compulsion to replace anything in a vase with little pine boughs, so out go the powder puffs. But they were still too sweet to put in the bin, so I just set them in a little bucket (dry) by the door. When January came around and the pine boughs got booted, I looked in the bucket to find the Eriogonum powder puffs essentially unchanged. A little rusty, I guess, but still perfectly acceptable as a subtle winter vase occupant. So back in they are and showing no signs of changing.

I’m really looking forward to the expansion of my buckwheat population this year. I’ve added quite a few Eriogonum grande rubescens, and the ones that were in last year are now happily raising little seedling families. I’ve also added several Eriogonum nudum, which I’m hoping will reach for the sky a little and add height variation. I also added Eriogonum cinereum and parvifolium, which I haven’t seen in action yet. For sunny spring color I have some Eriogonum crocatum and umbellatum, which I adored last year. Hope they perform as admirably this year. The umbellatum has rust-burgundy leaves at the moment. It’s a delight when it flowers, because the blossoms start with an orange-red center that gradually turns lemon yellow.

Overall I find buckwheats to be one of the handiest, easiest options for long-term color, both outdoors and in. Would love to hear what buckwheats others grow and recommend.

Rainy Ruminations

2010-01-26T18:52:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of rain collecting—though I’m not sure what to call it. Roof rainwater runoff catchment is a bit of a mouthful; rain harvesting reminds me too much of the moisture farmers back on Tatooine. (People reading this blog get Star Wars refs, right?) Whatever it’s called, I’ve opted to set the idea aside, at least for this year. There seems to be a spectrum of roof water collecting, with a huge property retrofit on one end, and a few strung-together barrels on the other. If we could go back in time and rebuild our houses with rain catching systems, and use the collected water for some indoor uses as well as irrigation, I’m sure we could more than put a dent in California’s water problems. Unfortunately, no time machines, and it seems to be up to each of us to weigh the costs and benefits and figure out what we can reasonably do .

I’m not in the market for any major remodeling jobs in the foreseeable future, so was looking more in terms of easy DIY. Say a string of barrels here, a big cube-shaped tank there. I ran into a few minor disincentives, one being that I just hate to take a hacksaw to parts of the house; if I screw up the sawing off of the downspout, then I’d have to replace it and repaint it. Hassle. I don’t want to actually create house problems when they seem to do a pretty good job of creating themselves.

Most barrels that go under downspouts seem to be in the 55 to 100 gallon range, and in a moderate rainstorm that would fill up in just, to borrow a quote form Mr. Chekov in the new Star Trek movie, “Meenuts sir! Meenuts!” Which would mean I’d need to have a chain of connected barrels. In which case they would fill up in, well, a few more minutes. But that’s okay, because they come with overflow valves that you can direct away from your house. But, you have to have room for this chain o’ barrels—and admittedly, at the northwest corner of the house, I do. I could comfortably have three 100 gallon barrels, maybe four depending on how much I was willing to be bugged by a semi-obstruction when opening the gate. I have some other downspouts that could potentially go into barrels, with some creativity, but it depends whether it’s worth a lot of work and money, when the main payoff, I’ve determined, is mostly just feeling good.

A salesperson at a local irrigation supply retailer was telling me that rain water catchment systems make the most sense in places like California, where we go half the year without rain, but I disagree with that. What makes sense in place like California is huge catchment tanks built into the house that are used for irrigation and some indoor uses. These systems are much more common in some (more enlightened and forward-thinking) parts of the world, like Australia. My aunt recently moved into a new house in Queensland and it came readymade with a sleek 3000 liter (almost 800 gallon) tank that collects and filters roof water for use outdoors and in (see photo). My mom (mum) grew up in a house with a rain collecting tank underneath, and that was in the 30s and 40s. We Californians have some catching up to do.

In terms of the little barrel daisy-chains that a DIYer can do, I think that actually makes more sense in the type of climates where it rains some all year—fill the barrels, use the barrels, refill the barrels, reuse the barrels…Granted, that actually is us in winter sometimes. But as far as getting through a six-month rainless stretch, seems to me the most feasible thing is just planting appropriate plants that expect to be dry half the year.

Dry winter spells probably shouldn’t be the problem I make them out to be either. I don’t seem to have the knack for growing winter veggies, so no winter water need there, and once all my natives are established (I so look forward to that time) I don’t think they’ll be too fazed by less-than-soaked winters. It’s mostly the bulbs and wildflower seedlings that I’ll probably always ring my hands over. If they get started but then dry out, I’m afraid they’ll die. So yes, using rain barrels at those times instead of the tap would be nice, but mostly because I find I just love the feeling of pouring rainwater on the ground. It’s like I’m heroically stepping in for Mother Nature or Rain Miser or the Jet Stream, or whoever it is that controls winter weather, on an as-needed basis, and instead of substituting with crappy chlorinated tap water, I’m using the real thing.

I got really into it when our miracle October rain filled up my wheelbarrow and some Rubbermaid bins I’d carelessly left sitting out. And at this point, that remains the extent of my rain catching system. They’re not under downspouts, but they are overflowing. I know it will give me joy to dip a bucket in there and offer it to plants when they start drying out.

In reality, though? I won’t be giving them any water they wouldn’t have got anyway. I’ll just be staggering its delivery, because all the water that falls on our property goes into the yard. The water that falls where the wheelbarrow and bins are flows to a drain, which empties into soil. (It used to flow through a PVC pipe that was hidden in the ivy, out onto the sidewalk, but when I chopped out the ivy I also sawed off the pipe—I wasn’t too scared of hacksaws to do that.) All the roof downspouts empty into drains that lead somewhere in the yard—I didn’t make it that way, it’s just the way it was. Maybe a builder would say it’s wrong. I was talking to a guy from the city building department about a downspout that was draining too close to the foundation, and he recommended piping it not to the sidewalk, but: to the street! So apparently a rain-collecting slot in the collective conscious isn’t quite in place just yet.

But the main deterrent, even for small systems, is cost, due to it will essentially never pay for itself in literal, monetary terms. I found retail barrels to average more than $100 for 100-gallon barrels, and 300-gallon tanks are upwards of $1000. (!) A cool $800 can get you a sleek, low-profile 130-gallon tank. I wondered how long it would take for the water bill savings to compensate, so even though bills make my eyes glaze over pretty bad, and I usually don’t do any actual math on them, this month I calculated the per-gallon cost on my water bill. About .65 cents per gallon. So saving money is not the incentive, which bums me out, because if it were, people would do it. Granted, there are cheaper barrels out there, typically blue food-grade barrels, but a yard has several functions, one of which is looking nice, and the blue barrels, well, they’re not garden art. Being good to the planet and the local community is an incentive, but a properly selected native garden doesn’t impact on those terribly. So the entire incentive for me to spring for a little barrel system would really be the feeling of satisfaction when dipping into the rain supply. For fun, basically. And I may yet do it another year. For this year, I’m keeping the wheelbarrow and Rubbermaid bins out in the rain. If I win the lottery, I promise to have a colossal tank installed under the house.

R.I.P. Ceanothus

2010-01-15T14:03:00.001-08:00

I'm sad writing this post because I'm saying goodbye to a Ceanothus I was rather fond of. I haven't had a lot of plant casualties and this one came as a surprise and a blow. Unfortunately I can't say exactly what species this poor guy was because I put him in way before I ever discovered native gardening. I've only been into native gardening as a concept for about two years, and as a practice for less, but I should have discovered it much earlier, because I've been in love with Ceanothus since the first time I laid eyes on it, during my first spring in San Francisco, 1995. I noticed a thicket of it blooming while I was running in Buena Vista Park and I asked everyone I knew what it was until I found someone who could tell me, and I've worshiped at the altar of California Lilac ever since.

So when we first moved into our house in the suburbs in 2002, I planted several along the slope above the driveway. I didn't know what kind because I was still too much of a rube to understand that there are different kinds; I just went to a nursery and bought a bunch of plants in gallons that said "Ceanothus" on them. They all got devoured by deer the very first night they were in the ground. I cried. What can I say, I was new to the suburbs, I was new to deer. But eventually, one of the plants miraculously recovered and grew back. The deer nipped it back for a while, but eventually seemed to leave it alone and it flourished. I couldn't have been more pleased with it because it ended up being a low growing kind that cascaded over the retaining wall beautifully.

Then we built a shed in front of it. I viewed this decision as utterly tragic, because I knew it would completely block off the sun from my one heroic Ceanothus survivor, but we really needed the storage space, because my sweetie happens to have a hobby that takes up the entire garage. So I braced myself for losing my old Ceanothus buddy then, but again it proved determined and miraculous, and simply grew toward the sun. Its crown was still certainly in full shade, but it ended up sending branches to the edge of the shed and then, again, cascaded them beautifully down the retaining wall. I was amazed and delighted, and the retaining wall really did benefit from those lush, shiny leaves.

But then a while ago, I'm gonna say it was six or eight weeks ago, I was planting some bulbs and grasses in the area and I noticed the Ceanothus' crown appeared to be a little buried from soil that was slipping down the hill. I figured that wasn't healthy, so sort of dug around the crown to uncover it. As far as I could tell, I wasn't causing any major disturbance to the plant, and I assumed I was helping it. Well, I guess I wasn't, because a few weeks later, I noticed it ailing terribly. I had noticed some whitish stuff in the soil when I was digging around the crown, so maybe some sort of fungus or mildew had already taken hold. Or maybe I did manage to traumatize the poor plant--whatever it was, I feeling guilty. When I saw the branches ailing I cut them back, hoping to allow the plant to focus its energy and rebound, but I'm afraid it kept going downhill. It's toast now and time to remove it, which will give me a heavy heart. It survived two known major assualts--being eaten and being denied sun--and then it died for essentially no known reason. Dang it! Gardening is hard!

Farewell, sweet Ceanothus. And I'm sorry I didn't even bother to take this cruddy looking old bucket out of the shot the last time I photographed you. *Sigh*

Waiting for Wildflowers

2010-01-08T14:47:00.000-08:00

At some point over the holidays I managed to throw a whole bunch of wildflower seeds around the yard, and I hope to have some pretty pictures to show by springtime. Sowing over the holidays seems a little late, given that volunteers have been growing since the first rain October 12 and are looking pretty strong now, but I kept waiting because I wasn’t confident enough through December that the weather would be wet enough, and I didn’t want to have to haul out the hose just to keep seedlings alive. Of course there are no guarantees that we won’t have any severe dry spells for the rest of the winter, but since January through March are typically the wettest months, I thought/hoped it would be safe to sow seeds near around New Year. Two years ago, my first year of gardening with a partially ivy-free yard, I put seeds out on March 2, and it didn’t rain again at all that spring. Nevertheless, I kept the seedlings alive via watering, and even though I didn’t get a stunning flower show, I got enough that they self-sowed prolifically, and I’ll probably have some volunteers in that region every year from now on. And now that the whole front and side yard is ivy-free, and the back yard is lawn-free, I have a lot more space to introduce wildflowers. I like to use them because they are so audaciously showy, and largely responsible for making California’s spring as spectacular as it is. Another fun thing about growing lots of wildflowers is being able to bring them in as cut flowers--last spring my kitchen windowsill was a delight for about a month. (A kitchen table centerpiece bouquet would have been preferable, but too cat-accessible!)

I also put a lot of seeds in patio pots that are either now empty (having had their residents transferred to ground) or sparse (permanent resident not yet filled in), but I’m a bit skeptical whether I’ll get any germination in the pots, because the pots seem to have suddenly sprouted a sturdy crop of sparrows, juncos and towhees. How those guys spot the miniscule dirt-colored seeds in the soil is a mystery to me, but clearly they do. For that matter, the birds carpet the ground daily, but I’m hoping I scattered enough flower seeds that some will survive the pecking beaks of doom. (By the way, I don’t really associate the birds with doom—I love the birds and consider the yard theirs as much as mine, so if they decide I’m not having wildflowers this year, I accept that.)

And now a bit of info about and pictures of my wildflower experience of the last couple years. I started two years ago with two purchased seed mixes, one for shade and one for sun. The shade one consisted of Collinsia heterophylla (chinese houses), Clarkia unguiculata (elegant clarkia), Clarkia amoena (farewell-to-spring), Nemophila menziesii (baby blue eyes) and Nemophila maculata (five-spot). Only the first two succeeded and in low numbers—I guess my shade is a little excessive. The sunny mix contained Clarkia unguiculata, Gilia capitata (bluehead gilia), Layia platyglossa (tidy-tips), Escholzia californica (California poppy), Lupinus succulentus (arroyo lupine), and Phacelia tanacetifolia (tansy-leaf phacelia). All of these did okay the first rainless, hand-irrigated spring, and came back in much, much, much greater numbers the next year. Turns out Clarkia unguiculata, which indeed does okay in shade, does a million times better in full sun. I suspect the same is true for the Nemophilas.

Last fall, I had a dense carpet of volunteer seedlings, but only where the Ivy War had not been raging. This year, they’ve volunteered more extensively and prolifically, especially the poppies. And the Clarkias. Well, and the Gilias. I’m finally starting to understand why some gardeners complain about these flowers being “invasive.” However, I don’t really look at them that way, because weeding is an inevitability, and right now in my yard I have way, way more wildflower seedlings than weed seedlings. So pretty much it’s just the difference between culling wildflowers or pulling weeds, and I’d rather be culling wildflowers that are out-competing weeds than just pulling pesky weeds.

Last year's volunteer crop:

I augmented the side yard last year with a smattering of nursery-grown Clarkias, Nemophila, Layia, Phacelia viscida (sticky phacelia) and P. campanularia (desert bluebell). I also placed a few nursery-grown Clarkia concinna (red ribbons) in a planter box in heavy shade, and they lit it up beautifully. I also had a few nursery-grown Clarkia amoena hybrids, but I tried to not let them go to seed, because they actually struck me as a little too over-the-top and not really native-looking.

But except for those hybrids, last spring I let everything go to seed, leaving some to self-sow, and collecting some to scatter in the back yard and in pots. This year I’m buying no nursery-grown annuals, and waiting to see what comes from my scatter-shot sowing.

I’m also introducing a few more species this year from purchased seed packets: Lupinus bicolor (miniature lupine) and L. nanus (sky lupine), and Gilia tricolor (bird’s eye gilia). Of all the wildflowers I’ve grown so far, Lupines have volunteered the least vigorously and are the most susceptible to being eaten by something—snail possibly, but I’m not too good at pest i.d. For this reason, I tossed out a ton of the new lupine seeds, hoping even a small percentage succeeds. I probably would have increased their chances by boiling them, or at least roughing them up with sand, but I didn’t.

Design-wise, you have to want a pretty wild-looking garden to sow annuals like this. My style runs toward the naturalistic, so all I really do is try to cull tall things that show up near perimeters, and short things that come up away from perimeters.

I’ll report on this again in spring when I can say what worked well and what didn’t!

More Work Time

2009-12-07T16:40:00.000-08:00

Though I am mostly at home with California-style seasons, the one thing I do find a bit tricky is the fact that the time of year when the yard requires most work (i.e. planting time) happens to coincide with the shortest days. I typically experience something close to agony when the sun sets on weekends, especially Sundays, because inevitably I’m nowhere near finished whatever I’m doing. I’ve maimed innocent plants by stomping around well past the time where I could actually see them. This weekend was different only in that I could thankfully note that it won’t get any worse.

I mention this because there seems to be a semi-common misconception that this happy milestone falls on or around December 21. But don’t delay celebrating: the evenings are getting longer already! The solstice is the shortest day, but the earliest sunset is before, about two weeks at our latitude, and the latest sunset about two weeks after. I was raised with a pack of science-minded siblings and never allowed to harbor misconceptions regarding celestial goings-on—not that I necessarily absorbed the mechanisms, in this case no doubt some perturbation in the planet’s rotation and/or orbit—and we always marked December 7 as the dusk-sodden day after which evenings would brighten. That was in Montana, and way down here in the Bay Area, it would be a day or two different. I couldn’t seem to find to-the-second data online, but it doesn’t get earlier/grimmer than this weekend. From here on out, our yard work time increases! Unless you’re the type who’s out there at the crack of dawn—I am, um, not.

That said, I don’t think there’s a whole lot left to do! Every plant that was ready for the ground is in it, bulbs are in, a few drainage issues are managed to the extent that they will be this year...The only thing I ran out of time for this weekend was seeds. Pity, because there is a string of lovely rainstorms in the 15-day forecast, and I hope, hope, hope there won’t be any major rain stoppages for the rest of the season. That would mean that once the seeds go in, I can in theory do things other than yard work on weekends. Not that there’s anything I’d rather be doing, but there are other things in need of doing. (I wonder if I can remember how to clean the house—where do I keep the vacuum? Do I have one?) I find it alarming that the yard does take so much time, but this is only fall #2 since the Ivy War. I couldn’t do everything the first year (in addition to the Ivy War, there was also Operation Lawn Begone and two neglected slopes in need of reclaiming), but this year should pretty much get me to where, going forward, I’ll just be doing maintenance and refinements. Some time soon I will sprinkle seeds of annuals in strategic locations, including patio pots (things like baby blue eyes and tidy tips are amazing in pots—I had better pictures, but they were lost in a computer melt-down), but I had also wanted to sow flats of all kinds of perennial seeds I collected last year. I don’t know, though. If I sow them, I will have to babysit them, pot them up…Possibly that is not the kind of thing gardeners with day jobs should attempt, regardless of sunset time. Unless gardening is their day job. I wish. Well, I’ll see. When I get out my little box o’ seeds to scatter the annuals, the lure of the other seed packets may be too much to resist.

Remembering the Ivy War

2009-12-01T13:01:00.000-08:00

One-year anniversary of the end to major ivy fighting marked by ceremony, controversy

The sun rose bright and warm but the mood was somber as the yard’s native plants, nonnative trees and human resident gathered to mark the first anniversary of VS Day (Victory in the South), the last day of major fighting in the Ivy War. Veterans and residents recalled the gruesome battle of the Sunday After Thanksgiving, 2008, which raged from morning well into the night. Attendees recalled that resistance forces had been advancing along the southern front, battling entrenched ivy roots for weeks, and the four-day weekend associated with Thanksgiving had been set as a the target for victory.

The final battle was especially brutal, due to the refusal of General Spod (Swinging Pick of Doom) to budge on the end-of-weekend deadline. At the time, the general famously pointed out that war strategists had originally set November 1 as the deadline, and that this had already been missed by weeks, thus wasting several good rainfalls that would have benefitted new native plants, had they been able to move in on ivy-vacated ground. “We missed November 1, but we’re sure a hell not going to be out here in the trenches come December 1,” Spod told embedded reporters at the time. “To any critics out there, I would just say that if you spent one day out here on the ivy battlefield, you’d understand why we don’t plan to come out here again next weekend. The war ends here. Today.” As that Sunday battle raged, troops kept a nervous eye on the sun, undeterred in its westward movement toward its 4:51 setting, one of earliest of the year. Once the sun disappeared, the troops made the controversial decision to set up a work light, arousing neighbors’ concern for the human resident’s mental state.

Critics of the way the final battle unfolded have pointed out that substantial risks were taken with the wellbeing of both the large juniper trees, who suffered repeated pick blows to their root systems, and of the human resident, who suffered wrist and elbow tendonitis and lower back pain. At the anniversary ceremony, the human resident gave the following account of the battle: “My wrists and elbows were killing, man. My back was so sore I couldn’t stand up straight from noon on. I only got two bathroom breaks and no lunch!” But Spod could not launch attacks without the human resident’s aid and insisted on not backing down. “After the sun went down, I expected to be able to go back to the fort,” said the human resident. “But no, next thing I know the *%$# work light is out of the shed and set up on the sidewalk. The cord was draped over the fence and everyone was afraid Spod was going to slice it and get me electrocuted. It was *%#$ hectic, man. Plus the light was really directional, so everywhere you looked there were shadows, and it was *%$# impossible to tell the *%$# juniper roots from the *%$# ivy roots. I didn’t think anyone was gonna get out of there alive.”

The juniper trees, also attending the memorial, added, “We lost probably a dozen or more good roots, just because there was ivy wrapped around them. The ivy tried to hide that way and we were the collateral damage. A certified arborist had been called in at some point during the war and advised General Spod not to sever any of our roots that were over 2 inches in diameter, but some got cut alright—maybe not severed, but cut up pretty good.”

Embeds witnessing the southern front battlefields did at the time report heavy juniper root damage, filing grisly accounts of the shocking red root interiors exposed and mixing with the ivy’s tan roots in a tangle of rhizomatous carnage that littered the yard and sidewalk.

The battle finally ended that Sunday at 10pm, and the front was declared liberated. Troops were too fatigued and demoralized to raise a “mission accomplished” banner and unceremoniously returned to their forts. The human resident recalled the battle aftermath: “I was so tired, I thought I might puke, but I didn’t. I probably wouldn’t have made it if it weren’t for the other human resident, my sweetie, greeting my return with a massive plate of pasta and a DVD of Robot Chicken Star Wars sketches. Man, that *%$# saved me, man.”

President A. Manzanita addressed the crowd at the memorial, urging assembled plants to reflect on their freedom to spread and grow roots, free of ivy repression, and to give thanks for their cushy garden conditions. “Let us remember the resistance fighters who cleared the yard, and look to a future where all the yard’s plants—newly established natives and surviving exotics alike—join roots and thrive and in harmony under the banner of equality.” Manzanita added, “The ivy war was fought so that we native plants may enjoy luxuries that wild plants don’t. In our great yard, Yarrow and Salvia bloom into fall, and Needlegrasses stay green all summer.”

Later, in answer to charges that peacekeeping troop levels are at a season high, Corner Yard Chief of Staff Trichostema lanatum replied, “While it’s true that peacekeeping missions uproot ivy insurgencies every week, we must remember that not a single perennial or shrub has been lost to ivy attacks. Though we mourned a handful of annual wildflower casualties last spring, let’s remember that we lost more annuals to the one Gopher Incident than to all ivy explosions combined.” Lanatum also acknowledged that several Allium and Triteleia families had been rousted by anti-ivy forces, but added that all were successfully relocated, being dormant at the time.

Protests briefly interrupted VS Day ceremonies, with angry plants charging that the Grindelia stricta community had been unfairly exiled. President Manzanita replied that the Grindelias’ ouster was in the best interest of the yard’s security. “Let’s face it, the Grindelia were attempting a coup. We basically had a ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ situation on our hands. The Grindelia was the next ivy.”

Many children of the Grindelia, who now number in the hundreds, called the charge a gross exaggeration and vowed to keep drawing attention to their cause. A nearby Saliva, who refused to give her hybrid name, seemed to sympathize. “Hey, I had my limbs cut way back by the hand clipper unit, and for what—because me and the Grindelias were hanging out over the sidewalk? I’m lucky to still be here.”

Still, most of the ceremony attendees, many accompanied by seedlings, projected a solemn, yet joyous attitude one year after the ivy liberation. A non-native Azalea, a long-time denizen of the yard, remarked on the post-ivy standard of living. “I’m doing better than ever,” she said. “I don’t know why. Maybe I get more water without ivy roots sucking it up. Or maybe it’s just an attitude thing—anyway, I now bloom from the beginning of November right into May, and I never used to do that.”

Local bird populations seemed to concur. Said an American Robin, “I never used to stop in this yard. With so little space to forage on, it just wasn’t worth it. Now there are worms and bugs to go around.” A nearby Lesser Goldfinch agreed. “Now that there’s no ivy, the ladder can be set up under just about any tree and it seems like there’s a bird feeder everywhere you look. Not to mention fresh Yarrow, Buckwheat and other seeds. It’s like a whole buffet. Me and my buddies practically live here.”

The day’s memorial ended with a Christmas-light vigil, intended to commemorate both VS Day and the anniversary this week of the Christmas Light Uprising that started the war.

Bulb Time

2009-11-24T20:11:00.000-08:00

I’m no longer so optimistic about the prospects of a wet winter, but nevertheless, the weekend-after-Thanksgiving plan is to get a heap more bulbs in the ground. I probably go a little crazy on bulbs. How can you not? Last year I put in 250, distributed around the yard. I got them in fairly late—Christmastime—owing to delays associated with the protracted Ivy War. And bulbs were last in the planting queue, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about inadvertently digging them up while planting other things. Despite their somewhat late planting, they did not disappoint—March brought pretty pink powder puffs of Allium unifolium, and by April the whole yard was dotted with the ultramarine of Triteleia laxa (Ithuriel’s Spear), with a dash of variously-colored, swoon-inducing Calochortus (superbus and venustus) sprinkled in. For reasons I don’t understand, and someone with more botanical knowledge can maybe fill me in, the Calochortus produced several blooms per bulb, whereas the Allium and Triteleia produced one inflorescence per bulb. This year though, I’m hoping for a real treat, because I know these bulbs have been busy multiplying. I occasionally accidentally dig them up while pursuing ivy insurgents, and have been thrilled to find three to six bulbs, depending on conditions, wherever I’d planted one. This in just one year!

And this season I’m adding red and yellow to the bulb mix. The guidelines I follow on designing with color are as follows: more is more, and colors can’t clash. (I especially adhere to these rules in the context of gardens, but come to think of it, I pretty much apply them in most contexts—like Fiesta dishes for example, but don’t even get me started.) The red will be coming from one Dichelostemma ida-maia, and the yellow from Triteleia ixioides. I don’t have a planting plan, per se, just gonna go out with a box of bulbs in one hand and a trowel in the other and start planting. If spring brings yellow, pink and red side by side, that’s more than fine with me. For more info on these beauties, see the descriptions I wrote for Garden Natives here.

I am a bit worried about the rain situation; the four inches my rain gauge collected in October, which I’d then celebrated as a wondrous miracle, are a distant memory now, but it did induce last year's bulbs to start growing—not to mention starting a veritable carpet of wildflower seedlings. Someone knowledgeable told me not to worry, that the bulbs could sort of “push pause” and then resume growing when rain returns, but I haven’t quite been confident enough with that advice to refrain from watering. Therefore, I’ve been setting a sprinkler throughout the yard—I hate to, but I’m just too scared of letting the bulbs croak. As it is, I’m nervous I haven’t sprinkled enough. It’s a lot of dang hassle moving the hose around the yard at intervals—it takes like a day. As for the annual seedlings, a few patches in harder-to-haul-the-hose-to areas did bite the dust, but it’s not too tragic, because I have tons of collected seed squirreled away in envelopes, so I’ll simply throw out a second wave of annuals later when the rain seems more reliable.

In the event that the El Nino predictions are off and the rains never get very reliable…well, I’ll keep watering. People make fun of me because I’m dragging a hose around after touting my drought tolerant native garden, but come on people, I didn’t mean this time of year! I was puzzling over this subject with a dude at my work, who is a harsh critic of my decision to water, and we were saying, Well what happens during dry years in nature? My conclusion was, Nature doesn’t care if she loses a bunch of bulbs or anything else once in a while, because she has all the time in the world. But the gardener is attached to the plants she lovingly placed (not to mention purchased), ergo the gardener hauls out the hose during dry spells. I hope to not need to much longer.

Sun Sun, Go Away

2009-11-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

Dang, so much for my super-soaker winter prediction! Just kidding, I know there’s still plenty of time—as pointed out by the weather blog I’m anxiously following these days. Plus we are still way, way over normal rainfall to date, which is a great and magical thing. It’s just that I was hoping the ground wouldn’t have a chance to dry back out, because as part of my Yard 2.0 plan, I am still putting in a lot of new plants. (Last year’s Yard 1.0 left plenty of room for both additions and do-overs.) I wanted to get all plants in as early as possible so they could spend lots of time establishing and therefore need very, very little water next summer, and I have about half in now, but looks like I will need to babysit them until the rains come back to stay. I have a great drip system that was installed by the eminently knowledgeable Garden Natives during the summer, so that will be a boon, but some of the new plants are out of its reach. Also, after the October rain, the entire yard became a carpet of wildflower seedlings, and even though I will need to cull a huge number (*sniff!*), I can’t bear to let the rest keel over from thirst, which means I’ll probably set out the old fashioned sprinkler a few times. I know sprinklers use an outrageous amount of water, which makes me really wish I had planned and installed a rain water catchment system. I had abandoned the idea on the grounds that it was too much hassle and money, but now I realize if I’d done it, I’d have hundreds of gallons of free water just waiting to go out on those new plants. Also, I accidentally left my wheelbarrow and a Rubbermaid bin out in the October storm, and it felt so eco-friendly pouring it on my plants, I got sort of hooked. Plus, as every gardener knows, rain water is infinitely more beneficial than tap water. I’m told by a Very Smart Dude I know (my brother), that this is because rain picks up nitrogen from the atmosphere. So I’ll be shopping rain barrels soon, and will post whatever I come up with here.

Bring It

2009-10-19T22:14:00.000-07:00

This afternoon’s rainstorm made me even more inclined to go out on a limb and believe in the prospect of a nice, soaking El Nino year. I keep reminding myself that we had early rain last year (Halloween), only to be followed by a disappointing November and December, a disastrously crispy January, and sub-normal annual totals. But this year, how can one not feel we’re in for a drenching? I’ve been keeping my eyes out for actual data to post here pertaining to the likelihood of a strong El Nino, but I’ve come across little. This guy, whose blog I’m going to start following, thinks we’ll have a wetter than average winter, but doesn’t make any terribly bold proclamations. (The wettest weather will be from late December to early March—well, yeah.) He breaks the west into southwest and northwest, and I didn’t know which the Bay Area is, so I dropped him a line—we’re southwest. The latest press release from NOAA makes a lot of predictions, the most undramatic and conservative of which is for California. Other than these, I’ve read a few stories saying we’ll definitely have a weak El Nino, and maybe will or maybe won’t have a moderate one. Then I came across this story reporting that a lot of data doesn’t exist, due to damaged or lost weather buoys—subscription required, but the gist is, data-gathering buoys have been damaged and/or stolen, so current long-range forecasts are spotty).

So all bets are off! But I’m betting on a soaker anyway, and getting my new plants in the ground early. People seem to dismiss the freakish rain we had in September by saying it was the remnants of a hurricane off Baja, and the brilliant deluge last week (about 4 inches by my rain gauge) is explained as the remainder of some typhoon off Japan. But citing the origins of those rains doesn’t explain them, it just begs the question—we don’t usually have rainy remnants of hurricanes and typhoons in fall, so why are we now?

For the short term, I'm starting to take dry short-range forecasts with a dose of optimistic skepticism—today the forecast was “showers.” I was out on an errand for work when the showers hit; umbrella-less and desperate, I took refuge on a passing bus, not caring where it was going. It happened to cross Market at Powell, so I bailed off and ran as fast as I could down the stairs to the Muni/Bart station, but the stairs had become a waterfall, with a pond at the bottom that was ankle-deep. I couldn’t help being reminded of the 1997-98 El Nino. At that time in my life, I despised rain, our apartment in the lower Haight ‘hood not affording a lot of gardening opportunities to help me appreciate its necessity. We clocked about three times normal that year and I thought of that year as a year to endure; now I would love to endure another. Even on the rare sunny days, the city’s supersaturated parks seeped constant streams onto the sidewalks and down the streets. It was as though all the open spaces were Glenn Beck, unable to stop weeping, and seemingly for no reason. One clear, warm day I went running and stepped in dog poo, so I simply detoured over to Buena Vista Park and held my shoe under the powerful, cleansing faucet that was its northeast stairs. That’s the kind of year I’m hoping for now, partly because the state just needs it, and partly because it will establish the hell out of my plants—the 12 flats I’m putting in this fall, and everything I planted last year. That “once established” caveat you always see on plant descriptions following the words “drought tolerant” is going to be taken care of in short order.

I keep also toying with the idea of collecting roof runoff. I saw some barrels at Home Despot that looked pretty simple to hook up, and for a while I was determined to ask for them for my birthday; but when the time came I’d sort of rethought it, because it seemed so complicated—the barrels would fill quite quickly, and then where would I store the water? If I could get a bunch of storage barrels, how could I transfer the water into them if they weren’t downhill from the collection sites—and how would I apply the water to plants if they in turn weren’t downhill from the storage barrels? I’m sure these questions have answers, it just seemed too tiring and potentially expensive to figure them out. But when a coworker asked me if I had my rain barrels out last week and I admitted I’d sort of abandoned the idea, he seemed so crestfallen it caused me to start thinking about it again. I had rationalized that my downspouts all empty into the soil anyway, rather than into some street drainage pipe, but my astute coworker pointed out that the ground can only hold so much—witness the weeping parks of ’97-98. And USDA Soil Survey tells me the water on my plot has only 80 inches to sink in before hitting impermeable rock, after which I think it joins the great rushing river in a pipe under the street and out to the bay. So there is then something to this rain collection idea. If anyone knows how to do it and can recommend a source for supplies, please post here!!

Bathing Beauties

2009-10-09T20:28:00.000-07:00

It wasn't my intention to start a blog and never post updates, but owing to a combination of being busy at work, a little work travel, a little fun travel, classes, and getting ready for fall planting, blogging time is minimal. (Oh, and throw in my sloth-like energy level.) I knew this would happen, yet still hope to keep up more at some point. For now I'm just going to throw some pictures of birds on here--and replace the "What's Blooming" list with my Yardbirds List (no, Jimmy Page isn't on it), which I hope I will be able to update with more bird sightings in the future. I'm only going into Year 2 of full-on native gardening, so I have high hopes that the number of bird friends visiting in the yard will only go up.

My sweetie gave me an amazing Birdcam that can be hung or mounted on a tripod, and set to take a photo when it senses motion. Last week we put it in the most active bird zone, the back patio birdbath. One of the most tragic things about having to work is that I miss the Morning Bath Parade five out of seven days, but at least this way I can get a photographic recap!

The next round of pics should include some sparrows, who arrived this week. I've granted them clemency, even though last year they devoured my Stylomecon heterophylla (wind poppy), as well as the Nemophila menziesii (baby blue eyes) I had in patio pots. (The Nemophila came roaring back, the Stylomecon did not.) I notice they still like to nibble on the leaves of many plants I currently have out there, but I rejoice at the sparrows' return and their confirmation that fall is really here. Fall was in the light and on the buckeye branches well before it was in the air, but now the weather is finally cool, the sparrows are back in town, the nice people at Accuweather promise a night of irrigation from the sky on Monday, and I have a dozen flats of plants ready to go and 25 species of bird friends. Life is good.

Exotic is not a compliment.

2009-10-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

There's no shortage of stories in the news to write letters to editors about, and I almost never bother, but we all have our buttons, I guess. Mine are word misusage and invasive plants. I wrote this letter to the Contra Costa Times ages ago and pretty much forgot about it, but then I spotted it while I was at the airport eating a gross overpriced tofu curry and flipping through the Sunday paper.

Can also be seen here. http://www.contracostatimes.com/letters/ci_13414116

Monster and Mystery Gumplants

2009-09-10T14:39:00.000-07:00

Recently I am informed that the corner quadrant of my post-ivy yard looks, let’s see, what’s the word? Oh yes, “terrible.” Which is not what I envisioned last fall as I was swinging the pick ax and dreaming. My general idea for the corner was to anchor it with a Manzanita, place some medium-sized plants like sages in a somewhat naturalistic arrangement around it, and then line the border along the sidewalk with ground-hugging flowers that would drape gracefully over the moss-rock edging. I assigned the low-elevation task to Grindelia stricta var. platyphylla, a cute little gumplant that according to my reading would be tailor-made for the role, giving the sidewalk a gold lining with its cheery blossoms all summer. I also wanted to line the railroad-tie stairs in draping plants (mostly to cover my artfully installed visible rebar!) and I thought I’d try the gumplant along with a number of other plants there.

So I bought a half dozen of the gumplants in 4” pots in January, from a nursery whose description said, and I quote: “Stems are prostrate, forming a 6-8 inch tall plant that grows to 2 feet wide.” They ended up sitting in the driveway for a good couple of months, owing to my sloth-like pace installing the stones and railroad ties, but I finally got them in the ground some time in March, and wasn’t too worried because I know gumplants are tough cookies and would probably settle in quickly. Boy did they. By mid April, I was concerned they were getting unwieldy. By mid May, I was sure they were, and by June they were by far the dominant feature in the landscape. I started to forget what plants might be hiding behind them, save for the occasional glimpse through the odd opening in the Gumplant Thicket of Doom. I think the “6-8 inches tall and 2 feet wide” description was accurate for about one hour some afternoon in early April. The plants are now 3 to 5 feet tall and wide, with an ungovernable urge to sprawl across the sidewalk. My patient neighbors have not complained, even though my yard is located on a major evening constitutional thoroughfare, and strolling couples have had to walk single file to pass my Monster Gummies all summer. I attempted to reign them in by tying them to stakes, and that mostly made them look freakish and distorted, like zombies recoiling from a spritz of holy water. I should have just chopped them back, but the wily gumplants blackmailed me by dangling their flowering stems out over the sidewalk, so that if I cut them back, the corner border would be bloomless. Sucker for blooms that I am, I capitulated and resorted to tying, but it just looks stupid and I find myself increasingly looking forward to dispatching them with Spod (Swinging Pick of Doom) as though they were ivy.

I’m not suggesting gumplants are evil like ivy, it’s just that these were apparently mislabeled. I do have a couple real Grindelia stricta var. platyphylla that I got from Garden Natives, and they have behaved like they are supposed to—somewhat spreading and very low. The identity of the monsters, I’m afraid, is unknown to me. In certain situations they’d be great, like if you had a vast space and needed unbelievably quick cover that required zero care and also provided sunny flowers. They have a bit of an unpleasant odor, though—sort of an eau de forgot-to-take-the-laundry-out-of-the-washing-machine-for-three-days—so would be better suited well away from the evening constitutional superhighway that is my sidewalk.

Still, I figure even a ragged thicket with some yellow flowers is better than bare ground, so I’ll leave the Monster Gummies till (re)planting time. I’ve noticed Grindelias are pretty enthusiastic about reseeding, so I anticipate pulling a whole lot of Children of the Monster Gummies over the winter. They could easily be utilized like annuals, but I don’t think this year’s look is a look I want recreated.

However, there is also some Mystery Gummy species that has behaved quite differently, and which I won’t be taking out at all, as long as it keeps looking so fabulous. I am embarrassed to say I don’t know its identity either. I think I had some seeds of straight Grindelia stricta that I tossed about randomly (note to self, start keeping records), so it may be that, but I see that plant on hikes, and it tends to be, oh, a quarter the size. Granted, many of the plants in the corner quadrant have gone Michael Jordan on me, for some reason I’ve yet to understand, and these Mystery Gummies are over six feet high. No, for real. I can stand next to them and they tower above me. They have only a few stems each, so they’re marvelously willowy and haven’t intruded on neighboring plants at all; they’re like Grindelia trees that add a nice vertical element to the space. I adore their silhouettes against the sky as I stand on the sidewalk looking up at them, and I plan to keep them as long as they keep doing what they’re doing.

So to sum, Mystery Grindelias in, Monster Grindelias out. Once the monsters are out, I may go to a nursery and ask the real Grindelia stricta var. platyphylla to stand up, and I’ll get several, in order to fulfill my original gold-lined vision. In addition, I think I’ll mix in another sunny yellow low-grower that I’m very pleased with so far, Eriophyllum lanatum. I bought just one last year, but it’s proved very easy to propagate by cuttings, so I now have several. I quite like its daisy flowers--the center is the same sunny yellow as the rays, which I find very charming, like little suns in a kid’s drawing. It crossed my mind to also try edging with some more of the plants that have worked well lining the stairs, such as Heterotheca sessiliflora and Erigeron glaucus ‘Wayne Roderick’, but I think the heat blast from the sidewalk may prohibit their traveling too low in the yard. I also just recently realized that there are cultivars of Epilobium that are supposed to stay low, and they should be able to take the heat, so I may throw them into the border mix for a perky red-and-gold ensemble.

Please post any suggestions you might have!

The Ivy War

2009-09-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

How a Brutal 40-Year Ivy Reign Was Ended

By Jess “Ken Burns” Kolman

Accounts of the precise beginning of the Ivy War differ, but most historians point to the Christmas Light Uprising of 2006. Rumors of a resistance movement had been circulating since the turnover of the yard’s human ownership in 2002, but until late 2006, the brutal Algerian Ivy regime, installed in 1966, had maintained an unchallenged stranglehold on the entire front, corner and south side sectors of the yard. Any object daring to stand in the ivy’s way, such as the house or trees, would be summarily smothered and consumed. However, in December 2006, the ivy’s ruthless repression of the human resident’s attempt to erect a ladder to put up Christmas lights sparked an anti-ivy uprising that gave the resistance courage. During the melee, several ivy strands were severed to make way for the ladder, and this may have made the ivy appear vulnerable. Emboldened, the resistance commenced a barrage of strategic attacks beginning in early 2007, focusing on the northern highlands region of the yard.

The resistance organized three major battalions. The 81st Airborne Hand-Clipper Unit launched repeated raids on the leafy portions of the ivy, with the goal of gaining access to deeper concentrations of woody material. Here the 2nd Infantry Lopper Unit moved in with full scale assaults on thick stems. Finally, the all-important Heavy Armored Pick Division, headed by a $10 pick ax recruited from Big Lots, attempted to root out the underground elements.

By the beginning of 2008, the northern highlands were believed to be mostly clear of ivy, and native settlements of woodland strawberry, snowberry, Ribes sanguineum, irises and heucheras moved in. These settlements were tenacious in the face of insurgent ivy attacks, but some succumbed to drought and insect rebellions; the heuchera settlements came under heavy fire from hostile deer forces taking advantage of the ivy’s absence, and eventually had to pull out and retreat to the back yard demilitarized zone.

In the summer of 2008, the resistance began full scale attacks on the corner quadrant. The clipper and lopper generals were seriously wounded and replaced, and as the underground fighting intensified, a battle-weary Big Lots Pick was honorably discharged, paving the way for the recruitment of General Spod (the name reputedly stood for Swinging Pick of Doom), whose wider, sharper ax blade was seen by some as a means to a swifter victory. Gen. Spod laid out a bold, some would say unrealistic, plan for Full Ivy Removal, or FIR, by November. This would allow for massive native plant migration, coinciding with the beginning of the crucial rainy season. As Operation FIR gained steam over several fronts, allied homes throughout the neighborhood sent medivac teams of green waste bins to clear the battlefields. With as many as seven jam-packed bins going out every two weeks, excess ivy carnage was still accumulating with alarming speed in the driveway region.

In October 2008, the battle front progressed to the south side territories, where the ivy forces proved increasingly ruthless. Ivy that had benefitted from decades of favorable southern conditions lashed out with stems 4 inches or more in diameter, rendering the lopper unit powerless and requiring the creation of the Japanese Chop Saw Task Force. The chop saw was effective, but agonizingly slow. Meanwhile, underground, Gen. Spod’s forces were pushed to the brink by repeated encounters with solid ivy trunks, 8 inches wide, and often only a few feet apart. The ivy also made heavy use of terror tactics, detonating dozens of improvised explosive devices, apparently contributed by generations of littering human jackasses. Glass bottles would explode when struck by Spod, and ancient, unopened aluminum cans would issue geysers of Tab Cola or Schlitz Beer upon contact. The resistance also had to contend with the possibility of collateral damage when the ivy mingled with roots of friendly trees or took hostages, such as lizards, gopher snakes, and potentially dangerous rattlesnakes. And finally, the resistance encountered a challenge that would test its will perhaps more than any other--a huge biological weapons cache concealed in the ivy, slowing the resistance to a crawl by forcing it to manage the risk of a plague outbreak while decommissioning massive quantities of lethal rat poo.

In the end, VS Day (Victory in the South), came three days after Thanksgiving 2008, after an 11 hour battle that raged well into the night. Some saw Spod’s refusal to back down and fight another day as counterproductive, with fatigue and impaired visibility causing unacceptable amounts of ivy roots to be left in place. But Spod apologists point out that by this time, legions of native plant settlers had amassed in camps crowding the driveway region, and were desperate to leave their pot-bound conditions and begin setting down roots in rain-dampened soil.

Over the course of the 2008-09 rainy season, these pioneering natives established several nation-states. Now, in addition to the Woodland Commonwealth, begun in the northern highlands the previous year, two broad new communities were in place. The United Biomes of Chaparral and Scrub was chartered in the corner territory, electing A. manzanita, a cultivar related to the famous Dr. Hurd, as its president. On the south side territory, the Democratic Republic of Grasslands was established, with a bicameral congress of Nassella and Aristida presiding over a constituency of perennials and small shrubs.

The final front, the UBB (Under Bottlebrush) precinct, was allowed to remain under ivy control until the spring of ‘09, owing to the tactical challenges of fighting under the prickly canopy. In the relative détente that followed VS Day, the ivy might have regrouped and fought back in this region, if not for the politically explosive remarks of one of the human resident’s friends. Publicly praising the ivy’s “lush, glossy green leaves”, this person reignited anti-ivy sentiment and Spod’s forces marched under the bottlebrush the following weekend.

Armistice was finally declared in April of 2009, and the green bin armies returned to their distant homes, but a gruesome insurgency rages on. It is now widely agreed that the resistance underestimated the ivy’s resolve, and was not aware of its ability to survive for years underground, in the complete absence of photosynthesis, via the admittedly ingenious tactic of storing energy in rhizomes. The fledgling native nations are continually reminded that any bit of ivy left on the battlefield, even a finger-sized shred of root, can at any time resurrect and produce shoots and leaves. Ivy insurgents have been known to explode through the crowns of peaceful native plants, stirring fears that it may once again control the yard at large. This fear may have paved the way, politically, for the highly controversial decision to use chemical agents when it was discovered that ivy insurgents had camps inside and under a concrete wall, impervious to Spod. A stockpile of Roundup was deployed and though there was evidence of its efficacy, the contract with this supplier was suddenly terminated in light of intel indicating that Monsanto may be evil. An alternative supply of Ortho Brush-B-Gone has therefore been secured and is presently being deployed on all concrete wall-based insurgents.

Over the course of the war, many antiquities were recovered, including children's toys, dog collars, cat collars, golf balls, basketballs and every intermediate ball, and, curiously, aluminum root barriers and a large supply of landscape-ready river rocks. These latter items indicate to historians that the ivy may not have initially been intended to wield control over the entire yard, but was rather a tragic example of absolute power and unchecked rhizomatous invasiveness run amok.

Despite the tenacity of the ivy enemy, the various native communities are bravely thriving. Infrastructure has been restored and improved, with a full irrigation system added in July. However, the almost daily attacks by ivy insurgents has cast doubt on any initial timetables for troop draw-down, and experts acknowledge privately that the peacekeeping forces on all the former ivy fronts may in fact be needed for a hundred years.