DryStoneGarden

Aspens with California Poppy

Aspens in the Bay Area? Somewhat in keeping with snow on Mt. Diablo, not really the popular image of our area, but there they are. According to Sunset, P. tremuloides ‘generally performs poorly or grows slowly in lowlands; usually short lived in warmer climates.” The ones at the Tilden botanic garden seem to be doing well, though it’s true they aren’t large and did probably grow slowly. They were definitely one of the most beautiful things in the garden when I stopped off on my way home the other day. We get asked about aspens sometimes and have always advised people to plant birches instead, but clearly aspens can work, so maybe we need to modify that advice. The bot garden is in a cool micro-climate (small valley surrounded by hills) and there was ice on the lawn and on a few of the plants, so that might be helping these aspens. Next year I need to remember to stop off and see their fall color. This has been a good year for fall color in the Bay Area, so they were probably beautiful.

Redtwig Dogwoods with Aspens

Sunset also says aspens make a ‘good background tree for native shrubs and wildflowers.’ Indeed. I like how the redtwig dogwood and the aspens are both somewhat see-through, and how the colors are so strongly contrasting even as the upright forms are so similar. We’ve planted redtwigs against a light-colored wall a few times, and last week we planted a yellowtwig dogwood against a brick chimney. The line of aspens is just as architectural and works just as well for a backdrop.

Redtwig Dogwoods and Aspens

Specimen Manzanita with Manzanita Backdrop

One of my reasons for stopping at Tilden was to look at native plants in the winter and see what was blooming in December (Answer: not much, a few late blooms amongst the deadheads on some buckwheat and erigeron species, two raggedy grindelias still blooming, a few stray off-season blooms, and about one fifth or one quarter of the manzanita species.). We talk to a lot of people who think natives only look good for about half of the year and sometimes I find myself believing that a bit, too, so it was good to walk around and see which plantings looked good and which ones would look ratty to that percentage of the population out there who are skeptical of natives. A lot of the garden and a lot of the plants were looking really beautiful, even though it was a gray day right after a cold storm. The rainforest section was looking great (though it was too dark under the canopy to take photos) but I don’t think there’s much debate about how great the woodland natives can look. Probably the biggest problem for northern California natives is just that many people don’t think of them as California natives, instead mentally classifying them as Washington/Oregon natives.

California Fuchsia Planting

I think that when many people say they don’t like natives, they have a mental image of California fuchsia in winter, and when other people say they love natives, they have an image of Cal fuchsia in summer. This is a successful planting to my eyes, but this look seems like an example of what makes some people hostile to natives, a wild-looking plant in a rather wild-looking planting. It also seems to reflect the established popular image of a ‘native planting,’ even though natives can be used in so many other ways and to create so many different looks. I’ll try to return and take a photo from this same spot when the Cal fuchsias are blooming, because they are really pretty in bloom.

Coastal Bluff Planting

The buckwheats, another species not known to shine in the winter, looked good in some plantings and not so good in others. The Coastal Bluff section has a strong design, so the prominent buckwheat in the planting also looked fine and the planting would still look fine even if the buckwheat were replaced with a dying-back Cal fuchsia.

Cold Frame at Tilden

Hello Dudleya

The desert section had some cold-frames out in the southern California desert sections. There’s no question about Agave shawii looking good in the winter. They’re really a Baja native that had a few populations on our side of the border, but those populations have been displaced and now might only exist as revegetation plantings. San Marcos Growers says they’re growing it, so it might start showing up in nurseries more often. Apparently, it’s really slow from seed.

Agave shawii

Agave shawii

Ninebark Thicket

The ninebark thicket (Physocarpus capitatus) reminds me of a crustacean, either a limpet or maybe a barnacle. I doubt this is going to inspire many people to plant ninebarks or shear them into a limpet shape, but it’s actually being used pretty well here, an effective way to make a certain type of habitat plant look intentional and not too wild. And I bet the birds love it. It looks better than the Salvia leucophylla, which is generally considered more garden worthy but was looking just as deciduous and thickety as the ninebark. In fairness, the S. leucophylla is planted in a tough spot, up against a bridge on a steep slope leading down into a creek.

Salvia leucophylla, Purple Sage

Sugarbush, Rhus ovata

I just planted Rhus ovata (Sugarbush, an evergreen sumac) for the first time, three of them at my parents’ house. The Watershed Nursery has had a supply recently, one of the first times I’ve seen them available. ( — edit — my bad, I realized that I planted the other evergreen sumac, Rhus integrifolia.) Hopefully the ones I planted will look as good as they do here. I like the flower buds as much as I like their little white flowers. This one here looks ready to do a huge bloom in February or March, that time of year when even the native skeptics agree that California natives look beautiful.

Sugarbush, Rhus ovata

Update — And here is a March photo of that ninebark thicket in leaf. Still not the most ornamental plant in the garden, but not too bad.

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…)

Paeonia californica, California peony

The California peony is blooming at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden in Berkeley. I’d never seen one blooming before. To quote Las Pilitas, “You need perfect drainage, a very green thumb, and luck with this one.”

Paeonia californica, California peony

Deborah Small’s Ethnobotany Blog has a beautiful photo of one growing wild.

— Addendum —

California Peony going dormant

A photo of the peony going dormant in early July.

Allium unifolium

We’ve been starting to add California native bulbs to our home garden and our landscape plantings, and so far, Allium unifolium is one of our favorites. A lot of the native alliums require perfect drainage and a summer dry period and would be difficult to source even if you thought you could get the growing conditions right. A. unifolium, though, is easy to find and grow; we read that it’s supposedly the most clay tolerant of the alliums, and so far that’s been the case. Also, because it’s considered garden worthy (the Dutch like it) and not just for native purists, you can actually find it in sufficient quantities to make an impact in a large garden, where it will spread somewhat aggressively if it’s happy. It’s beginning to bloom in several of our gardens now.

Allium unifolium in our garden

We were recently at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden for their native plant sale, and I took pictures of the alliums that were blooming. The bed’s aesthetic (three foot high bed of stone holding 4-12 inch high plants) is more for collectors than for casual visitors, but it has some interesting stuff, of which Allium crispum sounds like the best bet to try in a garden. The Pacific Bulb Society has a good info page for North American alliums. Far West Bulb Farm also has photos and info and might be a source for some of them. I put photos of four alliums and the raised bed below. (more…)

Sing! by Mariposa Gardening and Design

We went to the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show (San Mateo Flower and Garden Show?) yesterday. This freestanding dry stone wall, by Mariposa Gardening and Design and John Shaw-Rimmington of the Dry Stone Walling Association of Canada, was the coolest feature in the show in my rather stone-oriented opinion. There’s something very cool about walking under a dry-stacked stone arch. They said about thirty people gathered around to watch them remove the form from underneath the arch during setup, and I saw a ton of people pose for for photos underneath it during the show.

Cool Living by Fiddleleaf Fine Gardening and Design

I also really liked the living wall by Fiddleleaf Fine Gardening and Design. The other green walls looked to me like they were grown horizontally and then put vertical for the garden show, but you could tell the Fiddleleaf wall was grown vertically from the way the plants oriented themselves. The construction details made me confident that it would actually be sustainable in the effort and resources to maintain it, and that it could evolve over time instead of being static. Green walls certainly seem to be the newest latest greatest; there were three of them in the garden show this year and it’s obviously an intriguing interesting idea, so I want to do some research into them. A lot of them seem to trade on the same novelty that makes Home Depot customers want to try growing a tomato plant hanging upside down in a bag, but I thought the Fiddleleaf living wall was the real deal, a beautiful sustainable feature for a small urban space.

Sky's the Limit by Rebecca Cole

“Look at this!” a woman beside me exclaimed when she saw the green walls in Sky’s the Limit, by Rebecca Cole, and I thought that captured the effect of seeing the tidy geometric mats of living wallpaper. Tons of novelty value, plants growing in a different way than you normally see. It’s impressive how well the shape in the painting matched the shape on the curtains, which matched the custom cushions, which matched the custom tiles. The garden swept most of the awards in the show, and it is the exemplar of a certain type of garden, the all-at-once garden, everything designed simultaneously so that everything matches, a perfect garden for the client who wants to write a check and then never change a thing.

The Return of Paradiso by Quite Contrary Garden Design

Similarly or in contrast to that garden, I’m not sure which, Quite Contrary Garden Design used found materials to make a cohesive whole. The materials all matched, but with the more casual roughness of flagstone, rather than tile. You could see that the designer collected the items, rather than designed them. I didn’t get to try out the wooden lounger, but I really liked how it looked.

There are photos already up on many of the designers’ websites, found through the garden show’s list of garden creators. BayAreaTendrils has photos, and I’m sure there’ll be more on other Bay Area blogger sites.

The show goes on for one more day, and the word at the show was that this won’t be the last year after all, that there’s a contract for five more years. Duane Kelly, the apparently-soon-to-be-former owner, has an interview at NestInStyle, talking about how the show needs to attract a new generation of visitors. It’ll be interesting to see what the new owners do to try to accomplish that.

ryan 3/21

hacienda de oro restaurant

We visited the Puerto Vallarta Botanical Garden. The garden was founded in 2004, and we were curious to see such a new botanical garden. One of the challenges of landscaping is making the planting interesting while you wait for the plants to grow, so it was interesting to see what they did with a new botanical garden. Their stated mission is to promote sustainability, protect native rainforest species and to develop the largest collection of Mexican orchids in the world. They already have a good section of native bush and an interesting shade house and conservatory, but for now, while they develop their orchid collection and wait for their revegetation plantings to fill in, the best parts of the garden are the swimming hole and the Hacienda de Oro restaurant.
I don’t mean that in a negative way; the swimming hole and the restaurant are great, and it was the most pleasant meal we ate in Mexico. The tortillas and vanilla ice cream are made there on site, our table was up on a balcony with a great view and a fresh breeze, and the service was endearingly slow and over-solicitous. We found a lot of details throughout the garden to interest us; photos are below.
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