DryStoneGarden

Iochroma coccinea

The blooms are a little thin for bloom day this November, but I haven’t done bloom day in a couple of months and I like to keep track of what’s blooming in the garden this late in the year. A few of the ever-bloomers like Alyssum and Blessed Calendula are going, plus several red flowers which don’t match each other all that well. The Iochrmoa coccinea has climbed up through the Spicebush and has put out several clusters of flowers. The spicebush itself has a few flowers and some buds, and the Fuchsia ‘Gartenmeister Bonstedt’ has foliage and flowers leaning against the spicebush too. The Iochroma doesn’t match the more pinky red of the spicebush and the fuchsia, but it is keeping its flowers carefully sequestered.

Spicebush

Gartenmeister Bonstedt Fuchsia

One of our California fuchsias is blooming too, in another part of the garden. We have two different seed-grown varieties of California fuchsia, and this one with grayer foliage is the better one. It has been in full bloom for more than a month; the other one, with similar soil, exposure, and watering regime put out only a few flowers and mostly just tends to look like a tumbleweed.

Caliornia fuchsia

And we’ve let some of the Rocoto Peppers mature to a red color. They’re too hot for us when they get this red, but I like the look of them for this time of year; they remind me of Christmas lights.

Rocoto Pepper

Several other plants are in token bloom. The Indigofera still has flowers but is winding down its bloom season, some poppies are flowering, the young Arctostaphylos ‘John Dourley,’ the geraniums in the veggie garden, a couple of Sisyrinchiums, and there are a few Meadowfoam flowers doing a very light fall bloom. That’s about it, just enough to keep the hummingbird happy. My thanks, as always, to Carol at MayDreamsGardens for hosting Bloom Day. Click through for links to over a hundred bloggers showing off their blooms.

Last December I admired the aspens at Tilden, here and here, after they’d dropped their leaves. I told myself I should stop and check out their fall color this year, and I did actually follow through, stopping in several times to walk the garden while the aspens were coloring. They were nice, not quite like I saw in the mountains on my way back from Bishop but I give them extra points for doing it near the coast. In general, this doesn’t seem to have been one of our best years for color. I think the early storms knocked off a lot of the leaves as soon as they changed.

September

The aspens were definitely nice, though, and are of course great after they drop their leaves. I’m a fan of local natives, but it’s also great to see mountain species down here in the Bay Area. I’m lucky that my commute takes me past Tilden so regularly.

This Week

The aspens have been bare for a while now. Willows and spicebush are two of the main species coloring and dropping leaves there. In my own garden, the spicebush still has most of its leaves and even a couple of flowers and buds. I’m only five miles away, but in a less frosty microclimate.

Wildcat Creek

There’s one vine maple turned red. All the other fall color is yellow.

Vine Maple, Acer cirnatum

And along with fall color, November means that manzanita season is approaching. A few had token blooms, but this one was starting up its full bloom.

Parry Manzanita Starting Up

Townmouse recently mentioned the 2010 Fall Color Project that Dave at the Home Garden is hosting. He’s collecting and posting links to blogs around the country that are showing off their fall color. Click through to the kickoff post or to his front page to start with the most recent collection.

Trachycarpus fortunei on the left, Brahea edulis on the right

Our client at the cracked pot garden recently went through her garden ID’ing all of the plants, a task which was harder than you might think because it was originally planted by a horticulturalist with a love for variety. There are six kinds of lavender, for instance, and both Julia Phelps and Dark Star Ceanothus, two of the most similar forms of Ceanothus. The plant list for the garden is about as long as the list for my entire planting career, or at least it feels that way. Anyways, in the process, we were trying to ID the palms in the garden, a new horticultural task for me. I’ve never planted a palm and don’t know them well, though I’m starting to appreciate them; they might be my favorite element in this particular garden. They look great with the mix of foliage, and in particular with a couple of California natives, the mounding forms of Fremontodendron and Ceanothus.

Brahea edulis

I really like the combination of the Brahea edulis with the low, mounding form of Fremontodendron, F. californicum decumbens. Both plants have a prehistoric look to them.

Blue Mediterranean Fan Palm, Chamaerops humilis cerifera

Another nice native with non-native combo, the Blue Mediterranean Fan Palm against the the dark green foliage of ceanothus behind it.

Trachycarpus wagnerianus?

According to the original plant list, one of the Trachcyarpus specimens is T. wagnerianus, the (relatively) dwarf species of windmill palm. I think this is the one. It’s smaller in size than the others and it’s sited where I would expect to find the dwarf planted, but I don’t know enough about palms to be sure.

I also don’t know what this one in a container is, something dwarf and slow. It looks good against the Chondropetalum behind it. Quite a few other plants were figured. Among others, we ID’ed the aster-family shrub I showed in April. It’s a Shrub Aster, Felicia fruticosa, a good plant to know. It’s quite the show-stopper when it blooms.

Soon after Smith Rock, we spent some time at one of my other favorite rock places, the Buttermilks. The Buttermilks is an area of massive boulders right at the base of the eastern slope of the Sierras, near Bishop. Astonishingly big boulders with great views of the mountains.

Grandma and Grandpa Peabody

The Grandma and Grandpa Peabody boulders are the biggest ones I’ve ever seen just sitting completely exposed on top of the earth. They remind me of the way sloppy landscapers sometimes place rocks by just dumping them out of the truck. Generally speaking, it’s bad form if people can see the underside of a boulder, but when the boulder is a fifty foot tall chunk of granite, there’s something nice about seeing it placed so casually. Nature’s good at getting away with unnatural-looking effects.

Grandma and Grandpa Peabody again

There’s almost always a group of climbers on the underside of the Peabodies.

The Ironman Boulder on the Right

The Ironman Boulder, with the low traverse across its face, is another one that always has climbers on it. Photos from the Buttermilks and two other nearby climbing areas below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »

Crater Lake

On the way back from Smith we stopped at Crater Lake National Park and hiked to the top of one of the little peaks on the crater. We also checked out the Crater Lake Lodge, which turned out to have an interesting history. It opened in 1915, and from the sound of things was always the source of complaints. It was at the end of dirt road a long ways from any town, and the site was much more extreme than Oregon contractors were used to in those days, so some corners were cut on the construction and it was never completely finished. Running the lodge was always a hassle; water, electricity, laundry, and staffing were difficult, and the structure itself was never sound. The stone walls were hollow and built on an ash base without a foundation, causing the floors and walls of the building to buckle and warp as the building settled.

In the late eighties the building was declared unsafe and the park service decided to tear it own to build a new lodge. But then the public objected. The park service reminded everyone that they had been complaining about the lodge since its opening and that no one had ever been happy with the building, but everyone replied back that they didn’t care, they wanted to save it. So the park service spent 4 years completely rebuilding it, taking it down to the ground and rebuilding it with a basement and a proper foundation, and rebar, wall ties, and a concrete core inside the stone walls. They numbered and stored all of the stones and then put each one back in the same place.

I can’t speak to the finances of it, but the renovated building is hugely popular. It was all full in late September, and they recommend making reservations a year in advance. I didn’t take my camera with me when Anita and I hiked to the top of the peak behind the lodge, but we both agreed that the lodge improved the view, creating a nice focal point on the circular rim around the lake.

They had information about the history of the lodge and a nice cross-section of the new walls.

Last month on our way to a wedding in Oregon we spent several days climbing at Smith Rock. Pretty fantastic place. We’d been there once before, about five years ago. Great climbing and scenery, but even beyond that, the place is really well designed for climbers. The campground is great, with the tent area on the rim of the canyon away from the parking/cooking/bathroom area. The bathrooms are clean and there are hot showers, the approach trails are nice and well-maintained, and there’s huckleberry ice cream within walking distance of the campground. But just saying all that doesn’t really get the point across; you need to have seen other climbing areas where the climbers are treated like encroaching dirtbags (which they often are) to appreciate how nice Smith is. It’s the only climbing area that made me write fan mail to the area’s administrators, and in fact one of the other climbers was saying that he did the same thing and that the park system gets email from appreciative climbers almost every day.

The bulk of the climbing is on welded volcanic tuff, i.e. hot ash from an eruption 30 million years ago. When the welded ash cooled, it pulled apart forming the vertical cracks and columns with steep faces, perfect for climbing. A quirk of the place is that the rock is solid near the bottom but gets loose and crumbly when you climb more than one or two hundred feet up on the climbs that top out.

The most famous formation at Smith is the Monkey Face, a detached column with the look of a nefarious voodoo doll. In the photo, there’s a climber standing in the monkey’s nostril, faintly visible if you click on it.

I’m impressed to see proper retaining walls at the base of some of the climbs, made from the lava rock found on the rim of the canyon, a rock that gets sold under the trade name Black Lichen in the Bay Area. It’s the type of rock in the header photo of this blog, actually, which reminds me that I’ve always meant to switch it out for a photo with our native moss rock. Black lichen is darker and blockier than moss rock, not quite as attractive, and it’s from Oregon rather than California, so I suppose I’d better get myself a suitable moss rock photo ASAP.

We must have woken up early in the morning when I took this photo, as this area gets crowded. It’s definitely a little strange when the whole terraced cliff is full of climbers, not exactly like they are storming an Anasazi cliff dwelling, but maybe as if they are all training to storm one.

Smith Rock State Park also has an area of columnar basalt upriver from the main rock groups. The basalt is not as tall or regular as the cliff I posted about at Devil’s Postpile National Monument, but you’re allowed to climb the columns at Smith, unlike at Devil’s Postpile. I was surprised by how much columnar basalt I saw in Oregon; at one point during our trip I scrambled down the bank of the Deschutes River and realized I was scrambling over a whole slope of the high-dollar basalt that is sold for water features in the Bay Area. It made me feel better about the ones I’ve installed, to see them so widespread.

The basalt at Smith formed much more recently than the main formations at Smith. It’s pretty remarkable for such contrasting rock and climbing to be in walking distance from the main area.