Posted on by tonytomeo · 10 Comments

San Francisco Iris II – the Expected Sequel

P80512KIt is not as if the previous article about it was inadequate. https://tonytomeo.wordpress.com/2018/05/05/san-francisco-iris/ I really did not want to get into the habit of writing so many sequels. However, something happened to necessitate this update.

I found what seems to be a REAL San Francisco Iris, right here in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Except for being somewhat etiolated from the shade of the surrounding redwoods, it looks very similar to the San Francisco iris I picked on the Montara Peaks when I was in high school! This one happens to be a bit lighter blue than most, but is certainly well within the color range of the flowers that I remember. Most were probably a bit darker blue, but many were lighter, and some were very pale blue.

It is impossible to know if it was planted in this spot that had been landscaped in the distant past, or merely grew wild. It is right down the road from the more colorful cultivars that I got pictures of earlier. It only recently bloomed on rather grassy foliage that was easy to miss.

I know it does not look like much, but I prefer it to the fancier garden cultivars of the same specie, Iris douglasiana. (It is not the ‘San Francisco’ cultivar of bearded iris.) It is what I am familiar with, and exemplifies the species. Besides Montara, I remember it from San Bruno Mountain, Angel Island and Alcatraz. I might have seen it in the Oakland Hills and on Point Reyes too, but I am not certain if they really were the same.

The bearded iris from my great grandmother’s garden will always be my favorite. https://tonytomeo.wordpress.com/2017/09/10/roots/ However, these San Francisco iris and I have too much history together to ignore.P80512K+

Posted on by tonytomeo · 10 Comments

San Francisco iris

P80505KThere really is a bearded iris that happens to be named ‘San Francisco’. It is related to ‘Los Angeles’, but not ‘San Jose’. (I really want to find a copy of ‘San Jose’ for my own garden!) Both ‘San Francisco’ and ‘Los Angeles’ are white with a slight blue highlight, and an even slighter reddish edge that is easy to miss. I can not remember which one of the two is whiter than the other, but the whiter one may lack the reddish edge altogether.

The San Francisco iris I remember is something completely different. It is a native west coast iris, Iris douglasiana (or douglasii or any other variation of ‘douglas‘ that any particular botanist happen to prefer) that happens to be endemic to the coastal region of San Mateo County south of San Francisco, and was probably endemic to San Francisco County as well. It would be difficult to identify the entire range, because San Francisco iris is merely a variety, rather than a species. The species has a much larger range. Some might say that the same species in Sonoma or Monterey Counties is also San Francisco iris, just because it happens to bloom with a similar color range.

Well, then there is the issue of the color range. Most varieties of other specie are a particular color. Those that have a range of color at least exhibit a distinct color range that is somehow special and different from everything else. The San Francisco iris does not. It is always blue, but might be any shade or hue between very pale blue and rather dark new denim blue. Not only is that a broad range of color, but it is not very distinctive from the same species hundreds of miles away.

So why do we know it as ‘San Francisco iris’? I really do not know. Perhaps it is just something for us to brag about.

Over the years, west coast iris has been bred to bloom with larger flowers with more of a color range. I am sorry that I did not get more pictures while they were blooming. Besides the more common shades and hues of simple blue, they can bloom in various shades and hues of purple, violet, yellow, gold and white. They are still as undemanding as their ancestors are, and once established, do not need much attention at all.P80505K+

Posted on by tonytomeo · 19 Comments

Pine

P80429Redwood Glen was the ‘camp’ that we all went to in the sixth grade. It was probably our equivalent of what is now known as ‘nature camp’. For most of us, our experience at Redwood Glen was the longest time we had ever been away from our homes and families. We arrived on Monday morning, and returned home on Friday afternoon. It was something that we looked forward to with great anticipation for the few years prior.

While there, we studied nature in a variety of ways. We found animal tracks and made plaster casts of them. We went hiking through a variety of ecosystems, and went on a night hike. We searched for fossils; and I found and still have the most complete fossil of half of a fish. We studied ecology and native flora and fauna. We identified redwoods, Douglas firs, ponderosa pines, bays, live oaks, bigleaf maples and box elders. We collected a few edible herbaceous plants and made our own salads with them. The three leaves that I collected to distinguish leaves with pinnate, palmate and parallel veins was a project in one of our botanical workshops. I described it yesterday at: https://tonytomeo.wordpress.com/2018/04/28/pinnate-leaves/

For my class, that was back in November of 1978. In 1995, when I went to grow rhododendrons nearby, I became a neighbor to Redwood Glen. I always knew where it was, but never had any excuse to stop by; until now. Some of my colleagues who manage the facilities and landscapes at a nearby conference center toured the site. I was right there with them.

Some of the buildings were new since 1978. Some had been renovated. The big dining room had not changed. What was most excellent about touring the facility was finding the same old cabin I stayed in back in 1978. I think that it was simply designated as Cabin 4 back then, but is now known as ‘PINE’.

Except for a modern roof and windows, Pine looks just like it did when I was there three decades ago. The middle front door was for the counselors who stayed in their own tiny room between the two wings to the left and right. I stayed in the wing on the right. My bunk was the lower of the two just inside the front door to the right. I so wanted to see the interior of Pine, but the door was locked.

I rarely want to see places that I remember so fondly. I prefer to remember them as they were rather than find that they had been renovated disgracefully, or demolished and replaced with something new. I sort of expected to find something new here. What an excellent surprise!P80429+

Posted on by tonytomeo · 14 Comments

Pink Flowering Currant

80404We tend to think of currants as being from Europe, Russia or Eastern North America. The pink flowering currant, Ribes sanguineum glutinosum, is actually endemic to canyons and riparian sites of the coastal ranges of California. Because it is an understory species that lives in the partial shade of large trees, it is quite tolerant of shade, and even prefers a bit of shade rather than full sun.

Mature specimens might reach first floor eaves, and get as wide as six feet. Aging stems of maturing plants should be pruned out to promote growth of new stems. New plants should probably be staked loosely until they disperse stabilizing roots. Although tolerant of drought, pink flowering currant is happier with occasional watering, and will actually tolerate poor drainage through winter.

Pendulous trusses of tiny pink flowers bloom like small wisteria flowers late in winter or early in spring. They are mostly done by now. Small and sparse currants get eaten by birds almost before they get seen. The deciduous foliage turns only soft yellow before falling in autumn. The handsome and slightly aromatic palmate leaves look and smell almost like those of a scented geranium.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 39 Comments

Look What The River Washed In!

P80224KWhat is it?!?

Is it alive?

Was it alive?

Is it moving?

Should we roll it back into the river?

Can we eat it? Someone actually asked that.

It really is as big and ugly as it looks. That is a size 11 boot next to it to demonstrate how big it is. We can not eat it. There is no need to put it back into the river. It is not moving. It was alive, and still is. It is the distended tuberous root of a wild cucumber, of the genus Marah, which is also known as ‘manroot’ because of how big it can get. That stub protruding from the top (toward the top of the picture) is the remnant of a stem. A few thin roots protrude from the lower half, with thicker root stubs at the bottom.

This picture was taken last winter after the San Lorenzo River flooded and then receded. There has not been enough rain this year to wash more than leaves and a few pinecones downriver.

If this tuberous root had not been unearthed and scoured clean by floodwater, it would have been actively growing through winter. The surprisingly thin and wiry vines appear in autumn and climb with tendrils over shrubbery and small trees. The palmately lobed leaves are rather fragile, and tear easily. Loose clusters of small pale white flowers are followed by weirdly spiny round fruit that ripens from light green to greenish yellow. Each fruit is about the size of a golf ball, and contains a few big seeds. As the weather gets warm in summer, the vines die completely to the ground, leaving the drying fruit dangling from whatever the vines grew onto earlier.

Why can’t the river bring us something useful?

Posted on by tonytomeo · 6 Comments

Little League

P80217+K1There are so many big trees in the Santa Cruz Mountains that keep most of us looking up. It is easy to miss much of the understory plants that grow on the forest floor.

While getting the pictures for the ‘Six on Saturday’ article posted earlier, I happened to notice these few small pale flowers that contrasted more with their own dark green foliage than they would have if they were more brightly colored. Perhaps that is a technique to get the attention of pollinators. It certainly got my attention.P80217+K2.JPGThe flowers were not completely white. They were very pale hues of pink. The wood sorrel in the last picture was slightly more pinkish than the unidentified cruciferous (of the family Cruciferae) flowers of the first two pictures. Pale flowers, particularly those that seem to be adorned with barely perceptible patterns, are typically those that use infrared and ultraviolet color to attract pollinators that can see such color. If that was their intention, they would not look so bland to the pollinators whom they prefer to attract.

Much of the surrounding dark green foliage is exotic (non-native) English ivy. It climbs some of the redwood trees and makes quite a mess of the forest. Native specie are too docile to compete with it. The two species in these pictures might have been more common years ago, before the English ivy invaded.

Neither of these specie are the sort that I would plant in my own garden. I do not even know what the first species is. The wood sorrel looks too much like related oxalis. Although several specie of oxalis are popular in home gardens, I still think of them as invasive weeds. Yet, in their natural environment, they are too happy and pretty to not be appealing.P80217+K3

Posted on by tonytomeo · 12 Comments

Brent is still an Idiot!

 

That is irrelevant here though. These are pictures of one of my ‘gardens’ in Brookdale, for comparison to pictures from the Jungalow. The pictures are no better than those of the Jungalow. ( https://tonytomeo.wordpress.com/2018/01/28/brent-is-an-idiot/ ) There is nothing to show anyway. It is just a forested vacant lot on Melwin Avenue. I have no pictures of the lower vacant lot on Logan Avenue where I grow my fig trees, berries, quince tree, rhubarb and a few other odds and ends. There is no landscape there either. It is just a vacant lot where I grow a few odd plants that I do not want to plant in riskier situations, where they might be in the way of other development or gardening. The fig trees can not produce good fruit in such cool shade, but will likely make plenty of cuttings for new trees elsewhere. Perhaps someday, I will have better pictures of a home garden, or at least pictures from the farm, rather than pictures from here or gardens of clients. What the pictures show quite well is the differences between Brent’s Jungalow and my unlandscaped ‘garden’.

IMG_20141004_153159

This is Melwin Avenue to the south and uphill. The ‘garden’ is out of view to the right.

IMG_20141004_153215

This is Melwin Avenue to the north and downhill. The ‘garden’ is out of view to the left. One of the big redwoods in the middle in the distance is on the corner of Logan Avenue, which is the corner of the other ‘garden’ The fuzzy tan person to the lower left is Bill.

IMG_20141004_153228

These tall coastal redwoods above are why the ‘garden’ is too dark to do much with.

IMG_20141004_153243

This is looking west and uphill into the ‘garden’ the circle of redwoods is bigger than it looks. Some of the larger trunks are about five feet wide. There is enough timber in them to build a house.

IMG_20141004_153304

The redwoods on the left are next door. The single redwood on the right is just inside the ‘garden’. Not much sunlight gets through.

IMG_20141004_153323

These redwoods are across the street to the east. They too are bigger than they look here.

Besides showing how different my garden is from the Jungalow, these pictures should demonstrate why I do not show pictures of my own garden. There just is not much to show. My clients’ gardens are much more interesting.

Brent is still an idiot.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 10 Comments

Fire! . . . Again

P71018“It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” That old margarine commercial was lame back in the 1970s, but the quote is so true. Inadvertent interference with the natural process of wildfires has unfortunately increased the combustibility of the flora of forests and wildlands throughout California. No one really meant to interfere with the process. It is just what happens when we need to protect our homes and properties from fire.

The longer the vegetation is deprived of fire, the more overgrown and combustible it becomes. If deprived of fire long enough, many plants start to succumb to insect infestation and disease, and they become more combustible as they deteriorate and die. To make matters worse, so many of the exotic (non-native) plants that have been introduced into California are just as combustible, and some are even more combustible than native flora!

Combustibility is certainly no accident on their part. It is part of their ecology. Very few woody plants that are native to California even try to survive fire. The two specie of redwoods protect themselves with thick noncombustible bark so that they can recover from fire, even if much of the foliage gets burned away. Desert fan palms also recover after fire, after fueling it with their very combustible old fronds in order to incinerate competing specie. They are experts on this sort of ecology!

Most plants specie are neither so determine to survive fire, nor so creative in exploiting it as the desert fan palm is. They just live and die with it, only to regenerate and start the process all over again. Many release their seed as they burn. Some pines protect their seed within thick cones that open to disperse seed afterward. Seed of some specie need to be scarified by heat to germinate only after fire. Everyone want to be the first to exploit new real estate freshly cleared by fire, and they are always working on techniques to give them an advantage.

The problem with these processes is that they are not compatible with our lifestyles. As several big wildfires continue to burn throughout Southern California, another fire started early this morning just east of the Sepulveda Pass of the San Diego Freeway in Bel Air.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 15 Comments

Felton Covered Bridge

04Now that I have been watching a few other blogs for three months, I notice that some people write some very interesting or at least entertaining articles about topic that are not directly related to the main topic of their respective blogs. Most are just like old fashioned slide shows (remember those?) with cool pictures from around the neighborhood, travels, home projects, or whatever might be interesting. I have not done this yet; but I happen to have a bit of free time at the moment, so thought that I would post these three pictures of the historic Felton Covered Bridge. Although I am technically from Los Gatos, my home is in the Santa Cruz Mountains between Los Gatos and Felton. I also have history in Felton, since my grandparents and my Pa used to live here.

In an attempt to keep this post relevant to horticulture, I should mention that the trees to the right of the Felton Covered Bridge are a colony of the common box elders that suddenly died this past year. ( https://tonytomeo.wordpress.com/2017/10/04/what-is-killing-the-box-elders/ )We still do not know what killed them so suddenly. Perhaps later I can post pictures of this same area when it was flooded. I just do not have that file here right now.05This is the southwestern of the four sidelight windows on the Felton Covered Bridge. If crossing from the end in the upper picture, it would be on the left side toward the far end. It is the best window in the house. Rhody to the lower right might be mistaken for a rodent ( https://tonytomeo.wordpress.com/2017/10/14/rhody/ ). My parents have a picture from about 1970 of my older sister (from War of the Worlds – https://tonytomeo.wordpress.com/2017/10/03/war-of-the-worlds/ ), my younger brother and and I looking out of this window. My brother and I were just tykes at the time, and were to short to see out of the window, so we were standing on the lower rail. Our sister was pointing at something in the distance.06This is the view from that same window. That wet thing below is the San Lorenzo River. The black spots in that wet thing below are ducks. Once the rain starts, the San Lorenzo River really looks more like river than a creek. This last spring, in the San Lorenzo River right below the Bridge, we scattered the ashes of a good friend, Steven Ralls, with whom I went to Oklahoma (to the right in the illustration – https://tonytomeo.wordpress.com/2017/11/19/oklahoma/ ). Most of the vegetation out there is native. The trees straight ahead are common cottonwoods. However, the tree to the left is a weeping willow. No one knows how it got there.

Hey, this was fun. Maybe I will post more pictures on those memes later. I don’t know what a meme is, but I suppose I could figure it out.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 8 Comments

Franklin Canyon Park

P71126Because I sometimes go to Brent’s jobs sites while in the Los Angeles area, people sometimes ask me if I see many famous actors. Well, I try to stay out of everyone’s way, so rarely see anyone at the sites. If I see anyone famous about town, I would not know it. I do not watch enough television or movies to recognize many of them.

However, I did recognize this famous actor from my childhood as the renowned Wile E. Coyote of Looney Tunes. He was just out for a stroll in Franklin Canyon Park in the Santa Monica Mountains above Beverly Hills. It happens to be one of my favorite places in the Los Angeles Area, and has an interesting history.

Even those who have never been to Franklin Canyon Park might have seen it on television and in movies. Franklin Canyon Reservoir was Myers Lake on which Opie Taylor was skipping stones on the Andy Griffith Show. It was also a pond near the Ponderosa on Bonanza, and near where Daniel Boone lived, and on various far away planets on Star Trek. Even the Creature from the Black Lagoon lived there!

There are a few exotic plants that were planted there over the years, and a few that have naturalized. The familiar deodar cedars are of course exotic. So are the few coastal redwoods from farther up the coast. Yet, most of the flora of Franklin Canyon Park is native, and shows what the Santa Monica Mountains were like before the surrounding area became so developed. Large sycamores and cottonwoods live in the riparian area at the bottom of the Canyon. The upper slopes and ridges are much more open, with smaller trees and all sorts of scrub. There were a few toyons, which are also known as ‘California holly’ scattered about. I can not help but wonder if there were more of them decades ago when Hollywood(land) was named after them. I know that there is now more vegetation than there was when fires burned the area more frequently, and some plants are less competitive than others. It is fascinating nonetheless. Sometimes, it can be difficult to imagine that there was ever anything natural in Los Angeles. I am sorry that I have no better pictures.