DryStoneGarden

Clematis ligusticifolia, Virgins Bower

Now that we are just past the official start of spring, I thought I’d post the state of our deciduous plants. Nothing especially revelatory here, but it might be interesting/helpful to me in the future to have an approximate calendar date for leaf-out on some of these plants.

California natives:

Clematis ligusticifolia is leafed out;
Calycanthus occidentalis is just now leafing out;
Dicentra formosa and Dicentra “Bachanal” leafed out at the start of the month;
the Redtwig Dogwood is leafed out;
the Ninebark leafed out in early February and already has flower buds;
the native lilies came up several weeks ago, the other bulbs have been up for a long time;
the native asters are leafed out;
the Ribes “White Icicle” in the shade is leafed out and still holding some blooms;
the non-cultivar Ribes sanguineum is mid-bloom with leaves just starting to appear;
the two Amelanchier alnifolia in containers are budding;
Philadelphus microphyllus is budding;
the Snowberry leafed out two weeks ago;
Mimulus cardinalis is leafed out;
the Stream Orchid is just poking up

Non-natives:

the fig tree is leafing out;
the walnut just started to leaf out;
the Chinese pistaches are budding;
the Japanese maples in containers are leafed out;
the Astilbes just sent up some foliage;
the Chaste tree is just budding;
the young Eastern Redbuds have a few flowers;
the Indigofera just started to leaf out

Dicentra formosa and Tellima grandiflora

Dicentra formosa was the plant that I was happiest to see this year. It’s in a container that was devastated by skunks last year and I thought it was gone, but it popped out from under the Tellima several weeks ago and now has a few blooms up.

Dicentra formosa and Tellima grandiflora

Wow

To my complete astonishment, the highlight of my day yesterday was the Lowes parking lot in Concord. It has the biggest, bloomingest, most successful wildflower meadow I’ve ever seen. I have some cynical thoughts about it — it was probably done to appease environmentalists or the planning commission, it was probably amended with all the damaged bags of Miracle Grow, Monsanto probably supplied the seed mix — but it was impressive nevertheless. Not something I expected to see at a big box store.

Tidy Tips, Layia platyglossa

Tidy Tips predominated in the bio-swale, Chinese Houses on the berms.

I had never been to Lowes before and it turned out to be even more like Home Depot than I expected, but my hat’s off to whoever is responsible for that meadow. It’s pretty incredible.

Tidy Tips, Baby Blue Eyes, Alyssum, and African Daisy

The Tepee in April

Somehow I’ve managed to post nearly a year and a half without mentioning that our yard has a tepee during the dry season. I photographed it several times last year, but I think I needed some time between it and the post about our outdoor shower. I don’t want to sound too feral.
I may not have posted about it here, but the tepee hasn’t escaped the eyes of our government. This week we received census forms addressed to two different residences, one to our house and the other addressed to our tepee. It’s pretty funny to receive official government mail addressed to a tepee, but it’s also rather Big Brotherish, as the tepee hasn’t been up since October. Though maybe that’s just the speed our government works at; a census worker walked the neighborhood last summer, and now we see the fruits of that labor. Maybe we should reply as occupants of the tepee.

Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand

We learned about the unique charms of a tepee while traveling in New Zealand (tepees are surprisingly popular in the northern, sun-belt part of the South Island) where we stayed for several weeks in a tepee overlooking the Marlborough Sounds. It was an ecotourism place called Vanishing Point, and we helped build another tepee that was seventeen feet tall and wide enough to sleep eight people. The place was only accessible by boat, and there were other logistical challenges as well, but it was a beautiful place with a panoramic view of the Sounds. Vanishing Point doesn’t have a website anymore, so I think it has indeed vanished.

A Really Big Tepee Under Construction

Our tepee is much more modest and homemade. Anita sewed two canvas tarps together according to the pattern we saw in New Zealand, and we cut some of our bamboo for the poles. We put carpets and a futon and a little stone table with a candle lantern, and we call it the summer house. When we have house guests we run electricity out to it. One or two people were skeptical beforehand, but everyone leaves singing its praises. There’s something very very nice about a tepee, the cathedral version of a tent.

The Tepee in May

The Hot Springs

I bet no one thought DryStoneGarden would post about pedicures.

But I did get a pedicure of sorts at the hot springs in the Sierra de la Laguna national park near Santiago, a town about 50 miles north of San Jose del Cabo. The hot springs is very low-key, just a circle of rocks in a stream coming out of the hills. Hot water comes up through the sand and seeps out of the cliff in a couple of places, right before an abandoned concrete dam. The pool is not especially hot, though I would still rate it as a hot springs rather than just a warm springs, especially after we dug down into the sand to make the water warmer. But the unique part was that after we’d been in the water a little while, twenty or thirty small fish about 4-6 inches long gathered round and started nibbling at our feet.

It was a bit unnerving at first. Not so much the feeling — which is delicate and sandpapery, a little like being licked by a cat or I suppose a swarm of cats — but rather the thought that these fish were feeding off our bodies. But we got used to it. We joked that it was probably a fancy skin treatment in Asia, but of course it turns out that it is. And it definitely works; afterwards our skin was silky smooth. As a test, we let them feed on one of my knees but not the other, and we could indeed see a noticeable difference afterwards. It wasn’t a huge difference — nobody stared or pointed at my knees when I walked around in shorts — but one knee was distinctly shiny and smooth while the other was rough. I recommend it.

Sierra de la Laguna Granite

Veins

We explored up the gorge a ways; fun boulder-hopping. There was a double band of dark rock running along the creek for something like kilometer before the creek turned. Really beautiful. I hadn’t expected to see such striking granite in southern Baja. I was struck by the similarity between the roots of the wild figs and the veins in the rock. We basically went to the park because we happened to be passing by, but, out of all of Baja, the park is probably the place that we most want to go back to.

Wild Fig

More Veins

The Gorge,

Elephant Tree at Dusk

Here are some more plant photos I took in Baja in the desert around San Ignacio and Cerro Colorado, along the coast near Bahia Concepcion, and further south near Cabo Pulmo. My first go at taking photos in low desert, pretty fun, as my favorite things in the plant world are multitrunked trees with interesting form and bark, and Baja is pretty much an entire landscape of beautiful multitrunked specimens with interesting form and bark. Elephant trees were my favorites, but there were other stunning ones: Palo Verdes, Palo Blancos, Cardon Cactus, Organ Pipe Cactus, Adam’s Tree known in Spanish as Palo Adan (Fouquieria diguetii, the southern form of Ocotillo) and Limberbush (Jatropha cuneata), which I’d never heard of but really liked. So many good ones. I suppose some of them are technically standards or semi-standards, but practically all of the plants down there grow with the interesting form I associate with multitrunk trees.

Limberbush, Jatropha cuneata

Cardon

The Cardones come in graceful or stubby forms.

Cardon Multitrunk

Organ Pipe Cactus

Elephant Tree

Burseras

We saw hillsides that had an amazing specimen every twenty or thirty feet.

Bursera microphylla, Elephant Tree aka Torote

Torote means ‘twisted.’

Elephant Tree Trunk

Graveside Fouquieria diguetii, Palo Adan

Zero Leaves, One Bloom Cluster

Lots of Leaves, No Flowers

In the drier sections most of the Fouquierias were leafless, with maybe a few token blooms to keep the hummingbirds and visiting gardenbloggers happy; down south a lot of them were in full leaf with fewer flowers. Does anyone know why they’re called Palo Adan or Adam’s tree?

Fouquieria diguetii at Playa Requeson

I remember something incredibly spiny was keeping me from backing up any more for this photo.

Palo verde, aka Desert Willow

I’m partial to the name palo verde, but desert willow, another of its common names, seems appropriate too. Leafless they looked a lot like Japanese maples, but in full leaf they were indeed willowy.

Green Sticks

Roadside Palo Verde

As far as I’m concerned, they’re pretty even when they grow along the highway with trash scattered around.

Mesquite Tree

We started calling the Mesquites ‘Palo Gris’, because their trunks are gray but their green twigs and foliage resembles a Palo Verde. They’re actually a pretty sweet little tree, I think, just not as showy as the Palo Verdes and Palo Blancos. I read somewhere that some miners in Baja once found a root 50 meters deep.

Palo Blanco

Palo Blanco is a perfect common name, but if Palo Verde gets desert willow for a second common name, I think Palo Blanco should also get a second name and be called desert birch. They did seem biggest and happiest at the bottoms of washes and arroyos where they could find some extra water.

Palo Blanco

Palo Blanco

Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó

Loreto has the most historic of the missions The mission, inscribed with the cool title of “Cabeza y Madre de todas las Misiones de la Alta y Baja California,” was the original headquarters for the Jesuit settlement of the Californias, and the starting point of the Camino Real, aka the California Mission Trail. Pretty much all of the early expeditions to the Californias passed through there.

Map from: California from the Conquistadores to the Legends of Laguna

The mission was founded in 1697 and the stone building was built in 1740, but it has been modified, damaged, repaired, and renovated various times.

18th Century Drawing of the Mission, public domain

Mission Loreto in 1957

source

Mission Loreto 2010

There’s an eclectic mix of stone on the mission. The front facade is quarried limestone, but I counted five different kinds of stone on the entire building, plus some bricks added during some repair jobs. The mix of bricks and stone is something I’ve seen on the mainland of Mexico, and, for large buildings, the effect is much nicer than I would have expected.

Basalt, Limestone, and Brick

More photos of the mission are below.

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