DryStoneGarden

meadowfoam and stream orchid

meadow foam and maianthemum

Tomorrow is the Bringing Back the Natives Tour. The Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden and the Fleming garden, both on the tour, are two of the states oldest and best gardens for California natives, and right about now is the time when they look their best.

The Fleming garden is the absolute must-see garden of the tour. It goes way beyond what is typical of a residential or native garden, and I think it’s especially interesting to also see the botanic garden on the same day. The two gardens are somewhat linked, besides the fact that they are both in the Berkeley hills; I don’t know exact details of the histories of either garden, but I do know that Jenny Fleming was involved with the botanic garden, and her garden is sort of like she made a condensed, concentrated form of the botanic garden at her own home. Luke Hass, who does the maintenance for the Fleming garden, has a couple of articles about the garden on his website. RootedinCalifornia has some recent photos and the tour’s website has others. It’s an amazing garden that has to be seen in person to be appreciated.

Both gardens are over fifty years old, which makes them unique places to see native plants used in Bay Area gardens. Often times on native tours it can be boring to see a lot of the same plants at every garden, but in this case it’s interesting to see similar plants used in both settings. The naturalized plantings of meadow foam, Limnanthes douglasii, are a good example. In the Fleming garden it’s intermingled with stream orchid, Epipactis gigantea, while the Tilden garden has the yellow form, Pt. Reyes meadow foam, Limnanthes douglasii var. sulphurea, with Maianthemum. The meadow foam is an annual, but it’s growing in a way that only happens in a mature garden.

Below, I put more photos of meadow foam below: the Pt. Reyes form naturalized among some aspens at the botanic garden, the regular form naturalized in our vegi garden without anything interplanted, two flowers of the regular form popping up through a snowberry, Symphoricarpos albus, in our garden, and the regular form with the stream orchid again. It grows naturally in vernal pools, so all the plants it’s combined with can take wet spring conditions. It’s not the prettiest plant after it finishes blooming, while you wait for the seeds to form, and it’s kind of weedy looking even while you wait for the flowers, but for now it’s looking really nice. (more…)

Indian paintbrush

Indian paintbrush is one of my favorite native wildflowers to see hiking, and one of the more unusual plants in any of our gardens. It is a hemiparasite, meaning it takes nourishment from a host plant but also photosynthesizes for itself. To grow it, you have to germinate the seed and then put it in a pot with another plant and wait for them to join root systems; when I read about the process, it sounded like a huge pain in the neck. Now that it’s established, though, it’s really carefree, growing with an Artemisia californica in some of the heaviest clay soil we’ve ever planted in. The two plants have similar foliage, so you don’t notice the paintbrush for much of the year, but then the blooms pop out from under the shrub and carry on for a long time before fading back and going dormant for the winter.

We got the plant at the Watershed Nursery, the only nursery I’ve ever seen selling it, and, in our experience, the best source for natives in the area. East Bay Nursery and Berkeley Hort and Annie’s Annuals are all good for natives, too, but they mostly sell cultivars and their plants come from all over the state, not really “native” in the purest sense. The Watershed Nursery, on the other hand, sells Bay Area natives, grown here in the Bay Area from seed collected here in the Bay Area. If you want to plant the same plants that you see when you’re out hiking, it’s the nursery to go to.

The paintbrush came in a gallon pot with the artemisia, but the Watershed Nursery grows most of their stock in restoration tubes. Restoration tubes, if you’ve never used them before, have some advantages over the typical gallon pots you find in the typical retail nurseries. Compared with a gallon-sized pot, it takes less time for the plant to fill the narrow tubes with roots, so the plant will cost less while still getting its roots just as deep in the ground, and the plants haven’t spent as much time in potting soil, so they are quicker to adapt to whatever soil you plant them in. The tubes have vertical ribs to keep the roots from girdling, and they are open at the bottom so the roots air-prune instead of circling the bottom or heading back up to the top. You don’t have to spend as much time undoing a root ball, so you can plant a lot more quickly, and you don’t do as much damage to the roots, so the plants establish themselves almost immediately. The plants look small when you first plant them, but they often seem to explode out of the ground. I’ve recently been passing by several yards where we planted a lot of Watershed Nursery plants, and they’ve all been looking big and healthy and happy. They have a sale every year during the upcoming Bringing Back the Natives Tour.

The Kew seed slideshow has a cool photo of an Indian paintbrush seed.

Eschscholzia californica maritima & Escholzia californica

I like this accidental side by side comparison of the coastal form of the California poppy, Eschscholzia californica maritima or Eschscholzia californica var. californica, and the regular California poppy, Eschscholzia californica. I put in the regular one two years ago and the coastal form last year. Both plants are perennial in our garden, so now we have both. I suppose growing together they could hybridize, but we deadhead pretty regularly and there are many blocks of houses and concrete between us and any “wild” land.

The regular poppy might be the better plant for most gardens–bigger and faster with larger blooms and that unique burnt-orange color–and it’s definitely more common in gardens, but the coastal one has its merits, too, and seems to be getting more popular. I say “regular” and “coastal,” but I’m pretty sure the coastal form is actually the native one for Richmond Annex where I live. In fact, the owner of Larner Seeds, where I got my seed, has a post on her blog that suggests that the prevalence of the more annual form around the Bay Area hills and throughout the state is the work of past generations of Boy Scouts, Sierra Clubbers, and other human seed dispersers, and that there used to be a lot more regional variance across the state. And apparently people are still doing it, James at Lost in the Landscape cites a recent re-gen project in the San Diego area that used the generic poppy instead of the locally native form.

The flowers of the coastal form have an interesting two-tone color, an orange interior fading to a bright lemony yellow on the outer parts of the petals, and they seem to vary a bit in size and coloring; the biggest coastal flowers are often as big as the smaller flowers on the annual form. In the wild I’ve mostly seen the coastal form looking like a woolly little blue-gray thing growing in dry mineral soil, but in the garden they get about a foot tall, and they’ve been quite willing to cover themselves in blooms during the spring and then keep producing sporadic blooms throughout the summer. Their small size works best for our small garden, so we’re thinking of pulling the regular ones this year, and going down to just the single form, the coastal one.

Eschscholzia californica maritima, coastal Cal poppy

ninebark with california poppies

As part of the DryStoneGarden/BuenoLuna 2009 quality-of-life initiative, which I think exists, we are trying to do a lot of cut flowers this year. We spend a lot of time in gardens, so it should be easy enough to do if we stay motivated. Cut flowers are a good way to see flower and plant combinations, so we’re planning to post some of them on the blog. The idea is to be interesting and random, rather than Martha Stewart. Bear with us as we figure out how to photograph them.

The foliage in this one is ninebark, Physocarpus capitatus, with california poppies. Some people seem to think cal poppies aren’t a good cut flower (for instance, they aren’t on the Annie’s Annuals list), but we use them a lot. I like the new, tightly furled ones best. We sear them in hot water (which some people say you only do for Papaver poppies and not Eschscholzia, but has never hurt anything when we’ve done it and doesn’t take much effort) and then they slowly open over the course of a few days, and then it’s usually time to discard them and find something new. Ninebarks are great for the foliage; they always have a lot of crossing branches to cut. The only reason to not use them in arrangements is that they are so easy to use as cuttings and get a whole new plant. There’s a photo of just the ninebark alone below.

–Update 4/24–One of the ninebark branches rooted while it was in the vase and already has roots to the bottom of a 4″, so I guess it’s not an either/or between using them for arrangements or as cuttings.

physocarpus capitatus, ninebark