Brent, my colleague down south, plants street trees. He has been doing so for decades. Some of the older trees are quite mature now. Brent telephones me to tell me whenever the first trees on opposite sides of a street meet in the middle. It is like a graduation for that particular colony of trees. The various species mature at different rates, so they ‘meet’ over their particular street on their own distinct schedule. Brent watches them all, and attends all of their ‘graduations’. Anyway, that is what the first picture reminded me of.
1. Redwoods meeting friends over a road is not uncommon here. For compact street trees that got planted at the same time on opposite sides of an urban street, it is an indication of maturity.
2. Shasta daisies are not exactly friends. They are just two of many separate flowers on the same mature plant. They are composite flowers, so each one contains many tiny but distinct flowers.
3. Lily of the Nile, while piled with many friends, waiting to get groomed and moved to another garden, looks like Sigmund the Sea Monster should stay away from the Pacific Coast Highway.
4. Deodar cedar seedlings that grew where they could not live in an industrial yard were relocated to be with friends in a landscape a few years ago. Some, although not all, are now doing well.
5. Beau, the 1967 C10, has a friend also, named Bo, and he is a 1967 C20. Beau helped me bring so much of my old plant material from the Santa Clara Valley. Bo does not get around so much.
6. Rhody is man’s best friend. Like all of his colleagues, he is very committed to his career, which is, of course, his commitment to his colleagues. In this picture, he happily awaits their arrival.
This is the link for Six on Saturday, for anyone else who would like to participate:
https://thepropagatorblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/six-on-saturday-a-participant-guide/
Mutants are the source of many of our favorite cultivars of otherwise simpler specie. Many cultivars of plants with compact, pendulous or fastigiate (strictly vertical) growth, or variegated, bronzed, golden or otherwise abnormally colored foliage, were derived from ‘sports’, which are mutant stems that appear on otherwise normal plants. Thornless blackberries were sports of thorny cultivars. Fruitless mulberry is a sport of white mulberry. There is no shortage of mutants.
You would think that those who maintain the County Parks would be prepared for anything. They nearly are. They know how to deal with gophers, moles, voles, weeds, flooding, all sorts of unpleasant weather, and of course, spontaneous limb failure of massive trees. They apparently did not plan for this one.
