DryStoneGarden

Mission olive

“All I know is that I don’t know.” Operation Ivy

Now that the terms stress deciduous and drought deciduous are somewhat established, I want to coin another phrase: deer deciduous. A lot of the deer-resistant plants get browsed for the first couple of years, periodically losing some or all of their foliage. Sometimes they grow out of it, sometimes they don’t. The plants don’t die, many are able to keep growing and get their foliage out of reach or they develop harder less-palatable leaves as they age and require less water, but it seems like a big percentage of the plants on deer-resistant lists will lose some foliage during their first few seasons. Deer deciduous.

This olive would be an example. I really didn’t think it would go so completely deciduous, poor thing. Though, now that I check, I do find a few sites on the web saying that the deer will eat them. Sunset has them on the deer-resistant list, but that list is probably the least reliable thing in the whole book. We ended up bringing the olive back to our place for the summer because of a change in construction plans at its new home, and it’s now carefully putting out new leaves. It’ll recover completely, and when we replant it we’ll spray it with Liquid Fence, which is somewhat effective, or we’ll cage it until it’s taller than the deer. It’s an olive; they’re survivors. I’m surprised that it got eaten, but probably I should just be surprised that I am surprised.

I like the Las Pilitas rating system and list of ratings for deer, though his list is for a different part of the state and our deer population disagrees with him on certain points. We’ve never had heavy browsing from anything that he rates a 9 or a 10, though, so that’s been reliable. The list only includes California natives, but some comparisons can be made for non-natives. Toxic is best along with grassy or spiky, scented foliage is next, tiny hard leaves are pretty good, followed by larger hard leaves sometimes being good, sticky or very fuzzy might work, and after that you better have your fingers crossed.

Update: As Daffodil Planter and the author herself, Carolyn Singer, pointed out, the two volumes of Deer In My Garden are a good print resource for gardening with deer.

ryan 3/31

Wikimedia has voting for their Picture of the Year 2008 contest through the 26th. For some reason, I really like the close-ups of insects. Photographer: Alvesgaspar.

ryan 2/22

Lupinus albifrons

Isn’t it pretty?

It’s a lot easier to do butterfly habitat as a home gardener than as a landscaper. Nectar hosts are no problem, we plant tons, but larval hosts are hard to put in a client’s garden. I know we need larval host plants and caterpillars in order to have butterflies, but it’s tough to welcome them into the garden when they behave like this. I really like this lupine (Lupinus albifrons, silver bush lupine), but it gets completely defoliated by caterpillars every year. It comes back quickly after we cut it back, but I’m afraid to put it into a client’s garden and have it end up looking like this. Otherwise, it’s a great plant, super-fast and drought tolerant with nice foliage and form and great blooms, but the client would need to be seriously committed to habitat or out of town four months of the year. We used to have a Lupinus arboreus (yellow bush lupine), also a great looking plant, but it never recovered after the caterpillars ate it.

I haven’t managed to ID the caterpillar, yet–orange back, black sides, and tiny white dots–but I know it isn’t any of the cool native butterflies. I’m pretty sure it’s a moth; all the caterpillars I find turn out to be moths. Our lupine is the host for the rare and endangered mission blue butterfly, but rare and endangered means I’m unlikely to find it in our garden. A photo of the caterpillar and a plea for a good caterpillar ID website below:

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