DryStoneGarden

Bristlecone Pine

While I was out on the east side, I visited the Schulman Grove of Bristlecone Pines in the White Mountains. Bristlecone Pines are the famous “oldest trees in the world,” and, checking them out in person, I found they have a suitably amazing presence. They grow on a very dry, barren mountainside, sometimes with other plants — mountain mahogany, sage (Salvia and Artemisia), penstemon, thistle, paintbrush, lupine — but with the oldest ones growing in pure stands of gnarled, low-growing, ancient trees. There is a four mile loop trail that passes through the grove that has the Methuselah Tree, the oldest tree on earth at almost 5,000 years old, though it’s not disclosed which one is the actual Methusaleh, the forest service keeps its identity secret and doesn’t let anyone publish any photos of it. (There was an older one, Prometheus, but it was cut down by a scientist, and a NOVA program about the bristlecones claims that someone has found another one older than Methusaleh; the NOVA link has some cool interactive photos.) They are concerned that people would walk close to it and cause erosion, risking it health as erosion is apparently what eventually finishes these trees. They survive lightning strikes, pests, drought, etc., but in 5,000 years on the side of a dry, sandy mountainside, they’re going to see some serious erosion. Living 5,000 years, they’re not even on tree time, they’re starting to be on geologic time.

The most striking feature is how much dead wood they have. One 4,000 year old tree has a four foot diameter trunk with only a ten inch wide strip of living wood. And even after the wood dies, it doesn’t rot. Scientists have found wood that is 9,000 years old; they used the tree rings on these trees to calibrate the process of carbon dating, they are literally the standard by which we determine how old things are. Which makes sense, as there is something almost archaeological about the grove. Serious patience and endurance; these trees abide.

Bristlecone Pine

Bristlecone Forest

There’s a nice photo from the Schulman grove in photographer Rachel Sussman’s project the oldest living things in the world. She also has photos of redwoods, alerces, a 400,000 year old bacteria, an “underground forest,” and clonal trees like aspens where the genetic material is 80,000 years old. Bristlecone and redwood photos are always cool, but I think the best photos in the series are of the plants I’ve never heard of, the ones that are not visually impressive but have been unobtrusively living for thousands of years. (Hat tip: Studio G)

Another photo of a bristlecone and a few other old trees is at the blog for friendsoftrees.org.

— Somewhat off topic, but I feel like bookmarking the link, a slideshow of the world’s most famous trees includes a bristlecone.

Mountain Phlox, Linanthus grandiflora

It’s seeding time for California wildflowers. It’s mid-October and the recent rains have germinated the reseeders, both wanted and unwanted. We always start some in potting soil this time of year, so that we can direct seed the wildflowers we want and then use the potting soil starts to fill in any gaps where the direct seeding failed. One of the ones we’re starting this year, after a couple of years break, is Mountain Phlox, Linanthus grandiflorus. We started it in a couple of gardens three years ago and hadn’t really thought about it since then, but this year we noticed that it naturalized pretty well in those gardens and that it keeps blooming until quite late in the year; it can bloom until as late as September in a garden where it gets some supplemental water. Also, we saw a thick patch of it in the Botanic Garden at Tilden this past July, looking good when most of the other native annuals were done, and it made us want to plant some more of it.

Mountain Phlox, Linanthus grandiflorus, at Tilden

We also started California Wind Poppy (Stylomecon heterophylla), which we grew for the first time this past year, Blue Flax (Linum lewisii) which isn’t an annual but functions a bit like one, and Clarkia bottae. The rest of the wildflowers will just be whatever reseeds.

Striped Agave and Ceanothus

What do porcupines say after they kiss?

Ouch.

This is largest, spiniest plant I’ve ever transplanted. It had been planted too close to a path and had reached a point where walking in the garden required a delicate, sideways, dodging step to get around it. There was talk about consigning it to the green bin of life, and less serious talk about homegrown tequila or mezcal, but it had been the most striking element in this garden for years and it was much much cooler than anything else that could have been brought in to replace it. You can’t really come up with a better focal point than a large agave. So I agreed to try moving it.

It was kind of fun, actually; certainly more interesting than anything else I’ve ever transplanted. I wrapped it in burlap and wore two pairs of gloves, but the thorns pretty much laughed at that (local seller of succulents Cactus Jungle Nursery recommend using pieces of carpet when you move a cactus and if anyone asks you to move one of these agaves, “just tell them no”), though I actually got most of my pokes while I was cleaning out the pups growing all around it. 

The real challenge was the weight of the thing. I don’t know what it weighed, but it was much more than a hundred pounds; boulders seem easy to move in comparison. I couldn’t lift it, the only way I could move it was to grab the top of it and kind of leverage it around while my client’s landscape architect friend rather tentatively pried at it with a rock bar. He didn’t seem to find the process as charming as I did.

Fortunately, we were only moving it three feet, to the center of the planting bed; I don’t think I could have moved it much further.  We moved it in early October, which I think is a little late — you want it to heal and put out new roots before the cold and wet of the rainy season — but the plant didn’t seem to mind and it’s still looking healthy now, a year later. And if it grows a few feet wider and blocks the path again? Well…

Albizia cycleiferous

It’s tough to be a tree in Golden Gate Park. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival was this past weekend. Ridiculously crowded and a lot of fun, as usual. Personal favorites were Doc Watson, Galactic, and an over the top version of ‘This Land is Your Land’ by Tom Morello and Steve Earle.

Metasequoia schwinnii

Tenaya Peak

I have a feeling it might be self-indulgent to post about rock climbing for a largely non-climbing audience — it has a distinct ‘Look at me, I’m on top of the rock!’ quality — but there is clearly some connection between my interests in stonework and rock climbing, so I’ll go for it. In any case, what Anita and I do is often not so much rock climbing as it is vertical hiking, long climbs that are not particularly difficult but very scenic. We recently managed to sneak in a trip to Tuolumne Meadows and the Tenaya Lake area to do some absolutely beautiful vertical hikes before the fall planting season swallows us up for a while (55 lbs. of bulbs coming, among other things). It doesn’t get much more scenic than the area around Tenaya Lake.

Tenaya Summit

Tenaya Peak was probably the highlight. The view from the top includes Half Dome and all of the peaks of the Tuolumne area, and the climbing is low-angle and easy. The approach morphs into the climb and eventually you think, ‘Maybe I should put on my Spiderman rock shoes,’ and then a while later you think, ‘Maybe we should rope up,’ and then later you realize, ‘ Wow, I’m on the top, what a view.’ Rubberneckers in the parking lot and other non-climbers never believe me, but all that’s needed is a pair of sticky-rubber shoes with someone to manage the rope and anyone could do this climb. It’s truly beautiful.

Tenaya Lake

Foxtail Pine on Tenaya Peak

There’s always a surprising number of plants growing on the rock. We got to to hang out with one of the poster children for global warming, the pika. Pika’s can’t deal with heat and for the most part retreated up onto alpine peaks a long time ago. Now that the climate is warming even more, they are stranded on those peaks, unable to migrate north to cooler locations.

Pika!

Stately Pleasure Dome at Tenaya Lake

We climbed a few of the other domes in the area. The Stately Pleasure Dome is appropriately, if a bit grandiosely, named. Great White Book, up the white dihedral near the center of the main face, is one of the most enjoyable climbs I’ve ever done. Pywiack Dome is another dome we climbed, an almost unbroken slab. It’s all some of the most perfect granite I’ve ever seen.

Pywiack Dome

Can you spot the climbers?

Looking around on wikimedia, I found some photos that zoom in on climbers on the dome. You can click to enlarge.

Can you spot the climbers?

Climbers on Pywiack Dome

That’s not us, but we did rappel from those same anchors.

Glacial Erratics at Lake Tenaya, by Edward Muybridge c. 1870

I also found this copy of an old stereoscope from the 1870’s. That man clearly wishes he had my sticky-rubber shoes to climb that boulder with.

Look at me, I'm on top of the rock!

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Yosemite National Park, especially the Tuolumne Meadows and Tenaya area, is my favorite place in the Sierras. Pam at Digging is of the same mind, with a post calling Yosemite the most beautiful place on earth. She’s writing about national parks this week and compiling a list of posts from other bloggers. Check here to see the ongoing collection.

Sagebrush Country

Most of my time on the eastside, I was camped on the edge of the sagebrush sea that stretches from the Sierras across the Great Basin to Utah. It was a good opportunity to get to know that plant community. I’ve seen it and driven through it and even planted the namesake plant, Big Sage aka Great Basin Sage (Artemisia tridentata), in several gardens including my own, but I hadn’t really camped or hiked or spent an extended amount of time in it. It’s an interesting plantscape. Flat for the most part, with almost no trees, and the soil is loose and sandy and not for any plant that needs to be well fed or water-fat. The sun is strong, even though the actual temperatures stayed moderate because of the altitude, and there was almost always wind, especially in the evenings because I was at the base of a mountain. There were monsoon rains a lot of the time I was out there, storm clouds building during the afternoon and then briefly dropping rain somewhere on the landscape, frequently with a double or triple rainbow somewhere. Rains were still T-shirt weather, and the high desert smelled amazing afterwards. Sagebrush is one of those smells that evokes an entire landscape.

Snowberry, Bitterbrush, Sagebrush

Most of what you see of the sagebrush in the photo is actually its bloom stalks. Sagebrush is wind-pollinated, so it doesn’t need a big, showy flower and it doesn’t care about attracting pollinators. The foliage is beautiful enough to make up for the lack of flowers, though. We made a tea with it one night and seasoned potatoes with it on another, and it smells nice in campfires or as smudge sticks. I usually think of silver foliage as an accent or contrast for green foliage, but silver is the dominant color in sage country and it is the greens that act as compliments.

Blazing Star, Mentzelia

A few other plants — Blazing Star, Prickly Poppy, and Sulfur Buckwheat — provided the showy flowers. The spiny, weedy foliage of the blazing stars and prickly poppies would probably keep them out of most gardens, but their flowers are fantastic.

Blazing Star, Mentzelia

Prickly Poppy, Argemone

Prickly Poppy, Argemone

Sulfur Buckwheat, Eriogonum umbellatum

Sage at Convict Lake

“The Sagebrush Sea (scientifically known as “sagebrush steppe”) covers approximately 110 million acres of the American West, making it one of the most extensive landscapes in North America. The heart of the Sagebrush Sea is shaped by the Columbia River Basin, the Great Basin, the Wyoming Basin and the Colorado Plateau.” More info, including details about conservation efforts and some cool maps, can be found at SagebrushSea.org.

Sagebrush Sea, from SagebrushSea.org