DryStoneGarden

California Poppy, Eschscholzia californica

Hurray, hurray, hur-ray! Anita, partner and non-typing contributor to this blog, passed her final licensing exam today, making her a certified landscape architect of the state of California.  I’m not sure what practical effect her certification will have — rumors that she’ll lose all plant knowledge now that she’s an LA have so far proven untrue — but it’s been eight years, including three years of grad school, since she had the vision, and now it’s official. It would be hard to overestimate the satisfaction for her and the respect from me who witnessed the process.

Trudy the Corpse Flower

You can catch flies with honey, but you can catch even more with the stench of carrion. I went to see Trudy the corpse flower blooming at the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley. Corpse flowers (Amorphophallus titanum) earn that lovely goth name by exuding the stench of rotting meat to attract flies to act as pollinators, and they’re not shy about it. The smell is potent, Trudy filed the UC glass house with the smell of roadkill goat, and it’s effective, too; there were ten or twenty flies buzzing around it while I was there, and apparently there’s a bigger swarm in the morning when the smell is strongest. And it’s all a con job on the flies; they lay their eggs thinking there will be food for their offspring, but the children hatch and starve without a genuine carcass to feed on.

The flower is six feet tall and impressive even without the stench. Corpse flowers are from Malaysia and they take seven or more years to bloom, waiting until the plant’s corm weighs thirty pounds or more. The bloom, which is actually a collection of little flowers, has a claim as the biggest inflorescence in the world, and the spadix (the big spike sticking up in the middle) generates heat, up to twenty degrees warmer than the ambient temperature. Someone at the garden has a sensor set up to test if the plant gives off a biomagnetic field the way humans and animals do.

This particular corpse flower, Trudy, first bloomed in 2005 at age twelve, and then waited four years to bloom again, making this her second time blooming, though the garden has others which bloomed while Trudy was resting. The bloom will only last a couple of days before it gets pollinated and collapses. The garden’s website has tons of photos and regular updates. For years, we’ve been getting emails every time one of them blooms, but this was the first time I went by to check it out, and, I gotta say, it was pretty cool. There are seedlings for sale if you want to pay thirty dollars for an indoor plant that requires constant watering and feeding and smells like carrion when it blooms. Photos of nice-smelling flowers are below. (more…)

Purple Needle Grass, Nassella pulchra

And the hills turn brown in the summer time. — Kate Wolf “Here in California”

I was on a plane for the official solstice yesterday, so I’m a little late, this should probably be titled ‘first day of summer’. Purple needle grass (Nassella pulchra), the California native which looks dead (no, no, it’s just dormant) in the summer but actually lives a hundred years or more, seems like a good image for the California summer, which I sometimes refer to as straw season. (Quick quiz: Are the hills brown or golden in the summer time? I think the correct answer will depend on where you are from.) I was back east, in New Hampshire, for my first time and I was a bit shocked at how green everything was. The foliage seemed reckless. I would get briefly excited every time it started raining, and had to keep reminding myself that the rain wasn’t falling on my gardens.

Purple needle grass is perhaps the ultimate straw season plant and the official state grass of California, a fact that seems less impressive when you find out it has only been the state grass since 2004. (Who knew that designation of an official state grass would be a legacy of the Schwarzenegger years?) More impressive is that purple needle grass is the most widespread grass in the state, that the roots go 6-15 feet deep, and that it beat out over three hundred other grasses to get the title. Happy solstice, happy summer, happy straw season.

ryan 6/22

Leopard lily, Lilium pardalinum ssp. pardalinum

Our Leopard Lily Lilium pardalinum ssp. pardalinum (also listed as Panther Lily and sometimes Tiger Lily, why not Ocelot Lily or Jaguar Lily?) popped yesterday, just in time for Garden Bloggers Bloom Day (click thru for links to tons of gardenblogs showing what they have blooming). This is its second year for us, and it multiplied in the pot, but it’s looking like it might only do this one flower so we need to cherish it. It might be the coolest flower we grow.

We’re still learning about the native lilies. They seem relatively easy, but the hardest part is getting them. They’re only available from the commercial growers for a couple of weeks each year while they are in bloom. The Leopard lily showed up on the availability lists this year for about a week, but it sold out before we were ready to do an order, to be replaced by the “Corralitos Hybrids,” which will also sell out almost immediately. I have about two dozen lilies that I’m growing myself, but they are sloooow, two years to make a plantable 4″.

Leopard Lily and Corralitos Hybrid Lily

I didn’t know the Corralitos Hybrids but they are a cross between Lilium pitkinense and Lilium kelloggii, both of which are native to Northern California. (Pitkinense is sometimes listed as a subspecies of pardalinum. Pacific Bulb Society has photos of all of these lilies.) We snagged a half dozen, but they’re getting installed tomorrow and only spent four days in our yard. I took a photo of the two lilies side by side, the leopard lily is on the left, the Corralitos Hybrid on the right. We normally prefer to install plants when they aren’t blooming, but it’ll be pretty nice to show up at the job site with some of these. In retrospect, we should have ordered more and kept a few for ourselves. Ah, well.

Nigella, Heuchera, Larkspur, Calendula, Allium

A floral arrangement from last weekend shows several of the other plants blooming in our yard right now: Love in a mist (Nigella), Calendula, Heuchera “Torch, Larkspur, and the last of our Allium unifolium for the year. Check at May Dreams Gardens for lots of other plants in bloom and thank you Carol for hosting.

ryan 6/15

California fescue, Festuca californica, in February

To illustrate how to maintain grasses for Anita’s class, we took photos of the process with one of our California fescues (Festuca Californica). The first photo is in late February with the grass full of fresh growth from the rains. California fescue is a cool season grower, so its growing season starts in the fall and ends in the spring after it blooms.   (more…)

Photo from Pogo Park Photovoice

“Beautiful community garden that Iron Triangle has.  I’d really like to see more gardens, more flora, in the city of Richmond.” Click over to Pogo Park Photovoice to hear the speaker’s voice.

I was going to post some more content from Anita’s class about grasses, but an article in this week’s East Bay Express caught my attention with the mention of a photovoice project in the Iron Triangle of Richmond. (The Iron Triangle was originally defined as the area between three old railroad lines, but now refers more generally to the area between highways 80 and 580. Urban problems affect the area much more heavily than they do other parts of Richmond such as Richmond Annex where I live.) I complained recently about how there is sometimes a disconnect between designers and the communities they design for. Photovoice, where members of a community are given cameras to make their own document about their community, is a method to try to overcome that disconnect. It’s not so different from what garden designers do whenever they try to design for a new client, but photovoice projects are usually with communities that don’t often get their voices heard and don’t always get to participate in the design process for their own communities. I don’t know much about the Iron Triangle, even though I live in Richmond, so it was good to see the photos and hear the voices of the people who took them. I’ll be interested to see how the park turns out.