The most popular hardwood in California is essentially unavailable in nurseries. California black oak, Quercus kelloggii, provides between a quarter and a third of the hardwood timber harvested in California. One would not know it by its sporadic appearance within mixed forests of the Coastal Ranges. It is much more common in the Sierra Nevada, which might be why no one grows it.
Mature trees can top out at thirty feet with broad canopies if well exposed, or might be more than seventy feet tall and relatively slender if they must compete with other trees. The biggest trees are more than a hundred feet tall. The sculptural trunks are usually less then four feet wide. Trunks of old trees are commonly rotten inside. Gray and smooth young bark gets rough and dark with age.
The distinctively lobed deciduous leaves of California black oak are not much more than four inches long. They can get nearly twice as long on the most vigorous growth, or where shaded. The dark green foliage will slowly turn brown or yellow through autumn, and then defoliate through winter. It can turn a brighter yellow or orange, but then defoliates faster, if the weather gets cool fast.
Now that they have been so popular for so long, the deficiencies of flowering pear, Pyrus calleryana, (which is also known as Callery pear), are becoming increasingly evident. The dense branch structure and compact form that are so appealing while trees are young compromise structural integrity as trees mature. Symmetrical trees can be severely disfigured if limbs get broken by wind.
‘A Tree Grows In Brooklyn’ documents the resiliency and invasiveness of the common but typically undesirable tree of Heaven, Ailanthus altissima. Once a single female tree get established, the extremely prolific seeds get everywhere, including cracks in concrete. The resulting seedlings conquer wherever they are not dug out. If cut down, they just resprout from the roots.
The first half of the name sound appealing enough. The second half, not so much. Do the seeds grow into snails? Do they just look like snails? Not many have seen them. Tiny pale white flowers that are supposed to bloom in spring, as well as small black berries that develop after bloom, are rare. Laurel-leaf snailseed, Cocculus laurifolius, is grown just for its glossy evergreen foliage.
They sure took their time getting this far along. The bluish green succulent foliage of showy stonecrop, Hylotelephium spectabile, (formerly Sedum spectabile) first appeared at ground level in early spring, and has been growing into rounded mounds so slowly that it now stands less than three feet high and wide. Smaller types are half as big. Blooms are only now beginning to turn color.
With indiscriminate pruning, glossy abelia, Abelia X grandiflora, will never develop its natural form, with elegantly long and thin stems that arch gracefully outward. Sadly, almost all get shorn into tight shrubbery or hedges that rarely bloom. If only old stems get selectively pruned out as they get replaced by fresh new stems, mature shrubs can get eight feet tall and twelve feet wide.
It 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!
Most 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.
Something 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.
Perhaps 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.
Tony Tomeo 