Posted on by tonytomeo · 9 Comments

New Canes Replace Old Canes

50916thumbHeavenly bamboo, or simply ‘nandina’, is one of those many plants that almost never performs like it should. The intricately lacy foliage is so appealing while plants are young, and changes color with the seasons. The red berries can be comparable to those of holly. Unfortunately, healthy plants grow, and then ultimately get shorn into globs of disfigured leaves and stems.

The same abuse afflicts Oregon grape (mahonia), mock orange (philadelphus), forsythia, lilac, abelia and all sorts of shrubby plants that really should be pruned with more discretion. Their deteriorating older stems should be pruned to the ground as new stems grow up from the roots to replace them. It is actually not as complicated as it seems.

This pruning process, known as ‘alternating canes’, prunes the plants from below. It is a standard pruning technique for maximizing production of blackberries, raspberries and elderberries. It is similar to grooming old stalks from bamboo and giant reed, even if it does not prevent them from spreading laterally.

The deteriorating older stems, or ‘canes’, are easy to distinguish from newer growth. Old canes of Heavenly bamboo and Oregon grape become heavy on top, and flop away from the rest of the foliage. Old canes of mock orange and lilac get gnarled and less prolific with bloom. Aging abelia and forsythia canes become thickets of crowded twigs.

The newer stems are likely a bit lower, but are not so overgrown. Since the foliage is not so crowded, it is displayed on the stems better. Their blooms or berries are more abundant. By the time new growth becomes old growth, there will be more newer growth right below it. In fact, the regular removal of aging canes stimulates growth of new canes.

This is the time to prune Heavenly bamboo and Oregon grape, just because the oldest foliage is as bad as it will get after the warmth of summer. Mock orange, forsythia and lilac should get pruned while dormant through winter, but are commonly pruned just after they finish bloom early in spring. Abelia should probably wait until spring because new growth can look sad through winter.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 8 Comments

Horridculture – Think Outside The Box

P80912Straight out of college, I worked briefly for a wholesale nursery that grew landscape stock, which included boxed trees. We also recycled a few trees, particularly from the abandoned homes in the neighborhood around the nursery. (The neighborhood, including the nursery, were in the easement of the Norman Mineta Freeway, which in the process of being constructed at the time.) I had believed that the boxed and recycled trees were for ‘instant’ landscapes, the sort that were for clients who did not want to wait for things to grow. It made sense, particularly in our region where so few stay in the same home long enough for trees to mature.

Many trees were good candidates for growing in boxes. Some were naturally small trees. Others had fibrous root systems that did not mind the confinement. Japanese maple, crape myrtle, purple leaf plum, flowering cherry, flowering crabapple, magnolia and various specie of podocarpus all grew well for us, and probably adapted well to their new landscape homes.

Other trees were not such good candidates. We also grew a few specie of oak, pine and eucalyptus that did not want their roots to be confined to boxes. They wanted to disperse their roots as soon as they could. They had no problem doing so while young. However, mature boxed trees needed so many years to recover from their confinement that by the time they recovered, if they ever recovered at all, small trees that were planted at the same time had grown larger. Yet, people paid tens of thousands of dollars for some of the larger boxed trees.

Some clients did not care if the trees died. Some just wanted them to live long enough for their home to sell. Those who purchased the homes often did not care either. Many purchasers just demolished such homes and landscapes to build new monster homes on the sites. Many landscapers only needed such trees to live long enough for their client’s cheque to clear.

For example, the same ‘landscape company’ that was involved with the ‘Shady’ incident ( https://tonytomeo.com/2018/03/18/shady/ ) installed several boxed Italian stone pines nearby, on General Stillwell Drive, also in Marina. The client presented us with a picture of a very mature Italian Stone pine, and instructed us to install the exact same ‘native’ pines. I tried to explain that ‘Italian’ meant that they were not native. I tried to explain that they would take at least half a century to look like the old tree in the picture. I tried to explain that after only twenty years, the trunks of the trees could be wider than the two foot wide parkstrips that they were to be installed into. The client was an idiot; a demeaning and spoiled rotten idiot. We should have walked off the job (after giving him a good spanking and sending him to his room) when he insisted that we “do it”.

We did not walk off the job of course. There was too much money involved. However, I was conveniently not invited to subsequent meeting, and did not return to the site until after the trees had been installed and were developing some very serious problems.

The biggest trees that were available in 36” boxes were procured. No grower wanted to be liable for larger pines. Because of the innately shrubby structure of the species, the trees were not very tall at all, but were quite plump. They were a special cultivar of Italian stone pine that is native to the central coast of California. (?!)

You can imagine what needed to be done to get each 36” wide root system into a 24” wide parkstrip. Yes, the ‘landscapers’ sliced about half a foot off of opposite sides of the already distressed and unhappily confined root systems of each tree. Because the fluffy canopies obstructed the sidewalks and extended out over the curbs, each tree was severely disfigured by clearance pruning that removed about a third of the branch structure and foliage. In the end, only about two thirds of each of the trees that cost $500 each remained, and the client was furious that they were not as big as that half century old tree in the picture that he found online.

Each tree was outfitted with a pair of root barriers, one for the curb and one for the sidewalk, not to prevent the roots from elevating the pavement, but because the ‘landscaper company’ could earn a bit more money by adding them to the bill. If the trees were to survive, their big trunks would push the curb and sidewalk laterally before the roots elevated them vertically.

That was in about 2008, about ten years ago. Miraculously, several of the trees survived! I found their pictures online. (These two pictures look the same, but are actually in two different locations.) The trees have not yet damaged the curbs or sidewalks, but only because they are not much bigger than they were ten years ago.P80912+

Posted on by tonytomeo · 4 Comments

Lion’s Tail

80919It does not get much more orange than this. Lion’s tail, Leonotis leonurus, tends to start with a relatively light duty bloom phase in the middle of spring, and then continue blooming in increasingly prolific phases until it finally culminates with the most spectacular bloom phase of the year about now, late in summer or early in autumn. The bloom is about as bright orange as California poppy!

Deadheading and pruning between bloom phases is not as simple as it might seem. Cutting back too aggressively postpones the next bloom phase. Bloomed stems should instead be cut back just below the deteriorating blooms. This unfortunately allows maturing plants to get somewhat overgrown and in need of more severe pruning over winter, before their first bloom phase of spring.

By now, well blooming plants may be as tall as six feet. As they mature, plants tend to get a bit wider than tall. The narrow evergreen leaves are about three inches long. Bloom is typical of related salvias, with dense tufts of tubular flowers neatly arranged in tiers on upright stems. Lion’s tail just happens to bloom with distinctively wide floral tufts. Cultivars with yellow or white flowers are rare.

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Indian Summer Is The Norm

70920thumbThe popular definition of ‘Indian summer’ suggests that it is unseasonably warm and dry weather in spring or autumn, and that it typically happens after frost. Well, that definition just does not work here. It makes about as much sense as our so-called drought, which is actually the normal weather for our chaparral climate. Weather that repeats annually is neither unseasonable nor abnormal.

There are certainly years with more or less rain, and years with warmer or cooler weather in late summer and early autumn. Weather is naturally variable. It does not work like the thermostats in our homes, or the automated irrigation systems in our gardens. It is impossible to predict precisely how this summer will end, but it will likely have some characteristics of a normal Indian summer.

The one characteristic of the popular definition of Indian summer that will be notably absent is frost. That will not happen until after autumn. Locally, Indian summer can either be what seems to be a continuation of summer weather, or a resumption of warm summery weather after a bit of cooler weather. The main difference from earlier warm weather is that the nights are significantly cooler.

That is more important than it sounds. We do not notice the cooler nights as much as the plants that are outside all night do. While the days are as warm as they had been, some deciduous plants will begin to defoliate. Eventually, those that get colorful in autumn will begin to do so. Roses can be fertilized one last time, but even as they continue to bloom, they should not be fertilized again.

Indian summer prolongs the summer growing season significantly, but also has the potential to interfere with the winter growing season. Warm days keep warm season vegetables and flowering annuals performing so nicely that we do not want to remove them to relinquish their space for the cool season plants that will be needing it soon! In other climates, frost ends the summer season for us, and necessitates the transition to cool season crops. Indian summer can be too much of a good thing.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 2 Comments

Blue Marguerite

60907Most blue flowers are blushed with purple to some degree. Except for lily of the Nile, true blue flowers are quite uncommon. Even with their yellow centers, the tiny daisy flowers of blue marguerite, Felicia amelloides, seem to be too blue to be real. They are almost expected to fade to lavender. Bloom may not be as full as it was a month ago, but continues as long as the weather is warm.

Mature plants are usually less than a foot and a half tall, and not much wider, with a symmetrically rounded form. The branches are rather fragile, and can be broken by something as trivial as a clumsy cat. They really are not strong enough for bouncy dogs or children. Yet, their tiny oval leaves are just raspy enough to deter deer. Unfortunately, blue marguerite plants live only a few years.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 23 Comments

Trout and Cabbage

61012No; this is not a recipe. It is two brief stories about my first fishing trip and the first vegetables I ever grew.
My first fishing trip was at Silver Lake, past my grandparents summer house in Pioneer. I was just a little tyke. I think I had just a small cane with a hook on a string tied to it. I doubt that I was expected to catch anything with it. I sat on a bare granite shore with my Uncle Bill behind me to keep me from falling in, and my hook on a string in the water.
‘Fishy’ took the hook almost immediately. He was a slippery and shiny trout who startled everyone around with his eagerness to grab onto the hook in order to come home with us. I pulled him up so that my Uncle Bill could take him off of the hook. However, to my surprise, my Uncle Bill explained that Fishy had to go back into the lake because he was too small! I was baffled. I told my Uncle Bill that Fishy could not bee too small because he was bigger than any other fish in my grandfather’s aquarium!
Of course, Uncle Bill then explained that the objective of fishing was not to relocate fish from the uncomfortably cold lake to the cozy warm aquarium. As he continued to explain what the real objective of fishing was, it became very obvious that the lake was the best option for Fishy! Uncle Bill put Fishy back in the water, where he happily swam away. I am pleased to say that I never saw Fishy again.
Shortly afterward, my grandmother gave me a six-pack of cabbage seedlings that I planted in a neat row below my mother’s kitchen window. I was so pleased with them. I watered them and talked to them and sometimes just petted their waxy leaves. They grew quite large, and started to crowd each other.
Then, one day while I was out playing with my pine cones and favorite dirt on the patio, my mother came out with a paring knife and walked by without saying anything. To my HORROR, she returned with a severed cabbage! I totally freaked out! Of course, my mother explained to me that the objective of growing the cabbages was to eat them, and that they were the same vegetable that I liked so much in a cooked form. That was not much consolation. If I had known that, I would have planted them up at Silver Lake so that they could live happily ever after with Fishy.
Well, I did not eat any cabbage with supper that evening. By the time the second cabbage was murdered, I was able to eat it. I did not want it to die in vain; and it really was quite good. So were the third, fourth and fifth cabbage.
The last cabbage was the runt of the litter, so my mother allowed me to care for it all through winter. When it got muddy from splattering rain water falling from the eave, I washed it with soap, which is how I learned that plants do not like soap. As the weather warmed in spring, it bolted. The outer leaves got rather crispy, and a floral stalk stretched upward from the center. It bloomed with small yellow flowers and even made little seed capsules. I do not know if it ever made viable seed, because I did not collect any. By the time it deteriorated and died, I knew that it had lived a full life, so was not too sad about it. The funeral was brief before it was interred behind the apricot tree.
In the end, I ate neither the first fish I ever caught, nor the first vegetable I ever grew.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 12 Comments

Propagation Is No Big Mystery

Layer_(PSF)All plants propagate. Otherwise, they would go extinct. They all have the potential to propagate by seed or spores. However, some are more efficient at vegetative propagation from stems or roots. Of the later, a few propagate by seed so rarely that it is a wonder that they can evolve, since vegetatively propagated plants are clones, or genetically identical copies, of the original plants.

A single coastal redwood can live for thousands of years. Before such a tree dies, it clones itself by producing adventitious stems from its aging root system. These stems mature into new trees that can live for thousands of years more, only to repeat the process indefinitely. There is no opportunity to generate and share any slight genetic variations that are necessary to natural selection.

Well, this is probably more information than any of us need for our home gardens. It is only relevant to demonstrate than many plants are happy to propagate themselves vegetatively, or are at least conducive to simple vegetative propagation techniques. This is why most nursery plants are grown from cuttings, which are merely pieces of stem stuck into media and forced to grow roots.

For those of us who are not in the nursery industry, there is a more practical way to propagate a few copies of certain favorite plants. Sprawling groundcovers and vines like iceplant, knotweed, jasmine and ivy know all about it. So do many low growing succulents. Their lower stems develop roots where they lay on the ground, and grow into new plants. The process is known as ‘layering’.

Some low shrubby plants that might not layer naturally might be coerced to do so simply by getting a few of their lowest stems buried just below the surface of the soil, with a few inches of the tips sticking up. It helps to scratch off a patch of bark about a third of the way around the buried section of stem, and apply rooting hormone. Sturdy stems can be held down with rocks if necessary.

For most plants, layered stems can be buried about now, left through winter, and should be ready to be separated from the parent plants by next summer, just after any new growth matures. New plants will of course need to be watered generously until they develop enough roots to be self sufficient. Most plants with pliable stems that reach the soil can be layered. Junipers, euonymus, euryops, marguerites, boxwoods and carpet roses are some of the more popular candidates.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 2 Comments

Schedule Adjustment

P80624Something that I neglected to consider about the first year anniversary of this blog is that what was new is now old. The articles from my weekly gardening column that were new when posted last year are now a year old. That necessitates an adjustment to scheduling.
Recent articles get posted on Mondays and Tuesdays. Each article gets split into two separate posts. The first part on Monday is the main article, which is about a specified horticultural topic. The second part on Tuesday is about the featured species. Older articles from the same time a year earlier get posted in the same manner on Thursdays and Fridays. That format worked well until now. Articles that were new in the beginning of September of last year are scheduled to be recycled now, for the beginning of September this year.
Obviously, there is no point in posting the same articles twice. ‘Flowers Might Be Getting Scarce’ and ‘Fernleaf Yarrow’ were already recycled earlier, before I noticed that they were two of the first articles posted a year ago. The simple solution would be to back up a year, to recycle articles from 2016 instead of from 2017. However, those articles were already recycled on Thursdays and Fridays. Therefore, the schedule will be backed up even farther, to recycle articles from the same time in 2015. I am trying to keep this simple. Of course, no one should notice. The articles are appropriate to the season regardless of what year they were written in.
What might get noticed is that a few extra articles will be added to the mix. This will only continue between about now and the beginning of November, which was when I started recycling articles last year. Because the blog started in the beginning of September, and I started recycling year-old articles in the beginning of November, there are articles from September and October (between about September 1 and November 1) of 2016 that have not yet been recycled. I want to use them up just to that none get left out.
This is probably way more explanation than anyone needs, particularly since it is mostly in regard to something that should not get noticed; but it will explain the few extra articles between now and November. If I get a bit of time later today, I might add the first of the superfluous articles tonight.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 33 Comments

Six on Saturday: Again – Not My Garden

 

There are just too many cool things blooming in my colleague’s garden to not get some more pictures. Some may seem to be redundant to others that were shared earlier, as well as to some that have not been shared yet. The unknown salvia and lion’s tail are finishing their bloom, as it the know what time of year it is. The weather may not seem like that of late summer, but they know otherwise. I got these pictures while I could. African iris and African daisy are oblivious. They bloom whenever they want to, and African iris can even bloom a little bit through winter if it chooses to. Autumn sage, as the name implies blooms best about now. Of these six, only the four O’clock will deteriorate in autumn and die back through winter. The salvias will get pruned back anyway.

1. Four O’clock, Mirabilis jalapa, are the same as those featured last Saturday in Six on Saturday, and in the following brief article about the individual plants that bloom with flowers of different colors. This one looks like a blob of mustard with a bit of ketchup that squirted out of a hamburger as someone bit into it. The rich red flower in the background that looks more like plain ketchup is on the same stem.P80908

2. Autumn sage, Salvia gregii, is a different cultivar of the same species featured yesterday. The picture that was posted yesterday was from a specimen in the landscape at the library in town. This picture is that of a cultivar of smaller stature but with bigger flowers. The zonal geraniums of questionable (pink, salmon, peach or whatever) color that were featured last week can be seen in the background.P80908+

3. Black and blue salvia, Salvia guarantica, looks just like this. . . or this looks just like black and blue salvia. I really do not know what it is. It sure is an exquisite blue though. The base of the plant is rather scrawny, almost as if it intends to grow only as an annual. It will get cut back like other salvias, but not as aggressively. If it regenerates from the base like it should, the old growth can be cut back later.P80908++

4. Yellow African iris, Morea bicolor, is sort of cliché. However, this is the only one anywhere around. Seriously, with all the many acres of landscape that my colleague maintains out there, this is the only one. The more common white African iris, Dietes iridioides, is lacking completely. (‘Dietes‘ and ‘Morea‘ are synonyms, but ‘Dietes‘ is uses more for the ‘iridiodes, and ‘Morea‘ is used more for the ‘bicolor‘.)P80908+++

5. African daisy, Osteospermum ecklonsis, looks something like gazania. There are plenty pictures of gazania as well, but I will use them for the next two weeks. This species of African daisy is shrubbier and more colorful than the sprawling types that were popular as ground cover back in the 1980s. It blooms more profusely, and with more vivid colors. I probably should have gotten pictures of the other colors too.P80908++++

6. Lion’s tail, Leonotis leonurus, will be featured in my weekly gardening column this week, which shows up here on Tuesday. I am no fan of orange, but I can not dislike this bloom. The color is as flashy as that of California poppy. I will never understand why this perennial is not more popular than it it. It has been available longer than some of the less impressive salvias, but salvias are trendy. They are related of course.P80908+++++

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/

Posted on by tonytomeo · 12 Comments

Autumn Sage

50909Perhaps in the wild, it blooms in autumn. Where it gets watered in home gardens, even if watered only occasionally, autumn sage, Salvia greggii, blooms all through summer as well. If pruned back severely over winter, it starts to bloom even sooner in spring. The tiny flowers are red, rose, pink, peach, very pale yellow, lavender or white. Some poplar cultivars have bi-colored flowers.

Compact autumn sage that does not get much more than a foot tall is uncommon. Larger cultivars get four feet tall and broad, with more open growth. Most get about three feet high and a bit wider. Without severe winter pruning, stems can eventually get twiggy, with sparse foliage on the exterior. The tiny aromatic leaves are less than an inch long, and visually resemble oregano.

Even though it is not native to California, autumn sage is popular for native landscaping because it does not need much water. Just like native sages, it attracts butterflies and hummingbirds.