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Six on Saturday: BIG News II!

Yes, this is a sequel to the BIG News of my previous Six on Saturday, which could qualify as a sequel to other Six on Saturday posts that were in regard to the original topic of the Gladiolus papilio. Well, at least there are fewer sequels about this topic than there are in regard to Rocky. No, not ‘that’ Rocky; although he has too many sequels also. Rocky is a raccoon. Actually, he or she is not a specific raccoon, but is any raccoon who necessitates relocation, and is unlikely the same more than once. Rocky likely return from relocation, but avoid areas in which they were trapped.

1. Rocky VI, or VII, or maybe VIII or more. I can not count them all. Heck, I do not know when we started counting. They might have been quite fashionable nearly a century ago.

2. African daisy may not seem special, but to me, they seem to be atypically colorful. The color range was limited to white and eerie shades of purple while we were still in school.

3. Phlox arrived in one of the more colorful landscapes just a few years ago, and politely proliferated. No one knows how it got here. It is perfectly white, and alluringly fragrant.

4. Bulbine caulescens, which lacks a common name, may seem to be no more interesting than African daisy, but is very special to me, because of who procured it a few years ago.

5. Gladiolus papilio from Tangly Cottage Gardening is, of course, the BIG news for these Six on Saturday. I noticed well budded floral spikes a week ago. They are now blooming!

6. Only a single new floral spike was observed last week. I should have investigated more thoroughly. There are actually several! A few are in full bloom like this. They are so rad!

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/

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Posted on by tonytomeo · 4 Comments

Perennial Pea

Perennial pea has potential to naturalize.

Although rarely planted intentionally in home gardens, perennial pea, Lathyrus latifolius, is somewhat common near rural roadside ditches and in riparian situations. It naturalizes to a minor degree, generally where the soil retains a bit of moisture after the rain finishes. It can eventually become somewhat overwhelming in unrefined but irrigated landscapes.

Bloom is typically rich purplish pink during late spring or early summer. A few specimens might bloom white or pale pink. Seed for varieties that bloom in any of these three colors, as well as red, is available online. Flowers resemble those of annual sweet pea, but are more abundant, and lack fragrance. Their delicate foliage might be slightly bluish green.

Vines might be lean through their first season from seed, but can get six feet long. By the middle of summer, they begin to die back to their plump perennial roots. They last longer with watering. Without watering, they may finish before July. Vines that grow from mature roots as winter ends after the first season should be bigger, fuller and perhaps voracious.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 8 Comments

Wildflowers Are Flowers Gone Wild

Periwinkle is pretty for a weed.

Wildflowers have been quite a fad. Relative to most fads, they are not so impractical. For some situations, they are a good excuse to waste less effort and resources on unrefined parts of the garden. Of course, they all require some degree of effort and resources. Most are neither as wild nor as natural as their marketing suggests them to be. Few are native. 

Wildflowers that lived here centuries ago, prior to the introduction of exotic species, were relatively unimpressive. Although some bloomed spectacularly, they did so within a brief season. Winter is too cool for pollinators that wildflowers intend to attract. Summer is too dry for bloom to last long. Most bloom was limited to the transition from winter into spring. 

The same native wildflowers bloom even less now than they did centuries ago because of competition with exotic species. Most exotic species that compete with wildflowers are feral forage crops that lack colorful bloom. They grow so vigorously that they obscure the natives. Mitigation of such undesirable vegetation ruins wildflowers that mature within it.

Most of the best wildflowers here now are as exotic as feral forage crops. Those that are native might be more reliant on unnatural cultivation. California poppy, evening primrose, and native annual lupines might prolong bloom with a bit of extra water through summer, but need weeding. With the same watering, (non-native) cosmos stands up to the weeds. 

Unfortunately, vegetation management is more important than wildflowers outside of the refined garden. Overgrown weeds are combustible and can be dangerous to pets. Weed whacking too often involves wildflowers before they get their chance to bloom, as well as foliage of spring bulbs after bloom. (It sometimes damages bark of trees and shrubs too.)

Some low and dense perennial wildflowers are more reliable than annual sorts because they exclude annual weeds. Saint John’s wort and periwinkle are invasive exotic plants, but work well as ground covers. Mowing or shearing them late in winter slows their competing weeds, and also enhances their foliar density before competing weeds regenerate.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 10 Comments

Columbine

Colorado has an elegant state flower.

Colorado must really like blue. Not only is the state tree the Colorado blue spruce, but the state flower is the Colorado blue columbine, Aquilegia caerulea. However, the flowers are not always blue, and in fact, are often white or various shades of pink or soft yellow, or a combination of two colors. The many other specie and hybrids of columbine add even more shades and combinations of richer shades of blue, red, yellow, orange and purple. The distinctively lacy foliage is somewhat bluish. A few varieties have chartreuse foliage.

Although potentially perennial, most columbine do not reliable regenerate after winter dormancy, so are instead grown as spring and summer annuals. Flowers are not as abundant as those of other annuals, but are interesting close up, and very attractive to hummingbirds. Mature plants stand about a foot tall, so work nicely in pots surrounded by lower and more colorful annuals like lobelia and alyssum. Columbine prefers partial shade and rich soil. Plants in full sun tend to be more compact and seem to be a bit faded. Incidentally, some parts of the plants are toxic.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 12 Comments

Weeds?

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Although I can not be certain, I believe that this is prickly lettuce.

Pretty weeds do not get my attention like they do for others. They look too much like weeds to me. If I want to appreciate them, I must do so with intention. Sometimes, I do actually try. I did happen to notice these two weeds. However, now that I got their pictures, I have no use for either of them. Neither is readily useful for the gardening column. I will just share them here.

The yellow flower pictured above is most likely prickly lettuce. I really do not know. I know it as yellow chicory; but chicory does not bloom yellow. Some people think of it as dandelion, since the flowers are similar. These flowers stand much higher though, with only minimal foliage below. For the picture, I plucked this flower and stuck it in the ground to keep it still in the breeze.

The white flower pictured below is common bindweed. When I was a kid, I knew it as morning glory. In this close up picture, it looks like a fancier garden variety of morning glory, although the flower is much smaller. Real morning glory happens to look good in white, like this one does. If it is fragrant, I have never noticed. It tends to creep along the ground more than it climbs.

It sometimes seems silly to me that others so easily notice how pretty weeds such as these are, especially while there are so many more flowers that are prettier. Then, I realize what others must think of what I consider to be pretty. For example, the pollarded blue gum with aromatic blue foliage that I enjoy so much, is the same species that gives all eucalypti a bad reputation.

Besides, these flowers were the prettiest in the otherwise bare meadow where I found them.

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Bindweed looks like miniature morning glory.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 12 Comments

Between A Rock And A Hard Place

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Where does this delightful columbine think it is?!

Columbine does not do well here. I do no know why. It does well enough in Colorado to be the Official State Flower there. Yet, the mildest of climates is Colorado are harsher than the climate here. It does not get too terribly warm in summer here. Humidity is minimal, but not as minimal as in much of Colorado. Nor does it exceed that of other regions where columbine does well.

We have certainly tried to grow columbine. It just does not work. Some of it succumbs to powdery mildew. Some succumbs to rust. The last batch just succumbed. Because it was expected, I did not bother to investigate. I got the impression that it was taken out by both powdery mildew and rust. Flowers that bloomed so delightfully when planted went to seed on their way out.

That should have been the end of it. I would not mind if someone tries again to grow columbine for next spring, even if it last for only a short while. I just do not expect to see it ever perform well here. None was planted this year. Even if someone had considered it, there was no need to add any prior to furlough, while cool season annuals for winter continued to bloom so happily.

What I certainly did not consider was the few seed that the last batch of columbine tossed almost a year ago. Apparently, at least one of those seed fell from the ledge where its parent plants lived briefly in now absent planter boxes, and into the edge of a small landscape below. It grew into an exemplary specimen of columbine, which is happily blooming as if it were in Colorado!

It is surrounded by a concrete retaining wall, a perpendicular granite wall and a big granite boulder!

 

Posted on by tonytomeo · 15 Comments

Tradition

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Lunaria annua is known more for coin shaped seed pods than bloom.

Money plant, Lunaria annua, which some may know as ‘honesty’, is honestly not a wildflower here. It is neither native nor naturalized. Yet, it seems to grow wild on roadsides, in drainage ditches, and around the perimeters of some of the landscapes. It certainly produces enough seed to naturalize. It just would not have done so in this climate without a bit of intervention.

Many years ago, someone who maintained the landscapes here started sowing seed for money plant. I do not know if he was the first to sow the seed, or if he collected it from plants that someone else grew. He collected seed annually to disperse randomly by simply tossing it out wherever he though it might happily grow into more money plant.

Since money plant wants a bit more water than it gets from annual rainfall here, it was happiest where it is most often seen now, in roadside drainage ditches and on the perimeters of irrigated landscapes. It somehow competes effectively with other seemingly more aggressive vegetation. In the more favorable situations, it self sows, but can not perpetuate indefinitely.

The horticulturist who dispersed the seed for so many years retired a few years ago. Consequently, there has been a bit less money plant annually since then. It certainly tries to naturalize, but was rather scarce last year.

We could not allow it to go extinct just yet. We collected some of the seed from the plants that bloomed last year. I dispersed a few where I thought they would be happy without being obtrusive in the landscapes. I gave most of the seed to a neighbor who happens to enjoy tossing random seed into random (but hopefully suitable) spots where wildflowers would be nice.

It is such a delightful tradition that is worth continuing.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 9 Comments

Poppy And Periwinkle

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Even though I know they are slightly purplish, periwinkle look blue to me.

Clearing space for a new small vegetable garden is more work than it will be worth. It took more than a day to remove the thicket of bramble from a triangular area that is only about forty feet from front to back, and not much more than twenty feet wide. After so many years of getting trash dumped on top of them, the brambles were unusually prolific with gnarly root burls.

There is still significant work to do. I still need to condition the soil and groom the adjacent junipers before sowing seed for the warm season vegetables for this summer. Now that I can see that the junipers that were formerly concealed by brambles are worthy of salvage and grooming, I will need to clear a bit more garden space across the road, and cut back a few trees above.

When finished and producing, the garden will not produce enough. The four hundred or so square feet in the main part of the garden should supply enough for two people; but realistically, it would more likely produce enough for me alone, with a bit extra to can for when it is not producing much. There are about a dozen on our crew. They all have families. I need a quarter acre!

The math of it all is frustrating. So is all the work to get it started. It all seems so futile. I know we will appreciate the little bit that we get. I will still get plenty from the weeds that grow wild around the baseball field, so will not take much from the garden.

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As simple as they are, poppies are still my favorite native wildflower.

For now, I try to visualize what the small vegetable garden will look like in production this summer, even if all that I see blooming are the poppies and periwinkle on the outskirts.

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My illustrations are more technical than artistic. It looks like someone else took this one. Ignore the pickup in the background.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 6 Comments

Field Of . . . ?

P91228KThis . . . was a ball field. It might eventually be one again. The old backstop at the upper left corner of the picture is almost completely obscured under a thicket of blackberry brambles and a fallen boxelder. It would need to be replaced. So would the decommissioned irrigation system, all the bases, the basepath, the turf . . . and everything else that goes into a functional ball field.

The turf had naturalized and overwhelmed the basepath long before last year. I collected wild mustard, radish and turnip greens from around the perimeter last spring and summer. By the time they were finishing, the blackberries were ready. I got stinging nettle from the bank of Zayante Creek in the background of this picture. Dock is already regenerating off to the far right.

There are naturalized wildflowers here too. I got pictures of perennial pea, purpletop vervain, Saint John’s wort, four o’clock, calla, narcissus, teasel, common thistle and California poppy, all within the perimeter of this ball field. Native trees include Douglas fir, California bay, California buckeye, bigleaf maple, white alder, cottonwood, coast live oak, canyon live oak and redwood.

The ball field looks like the moon now only because a construction company used it as a parking lot for trucks and machinery. We dumped excess soil removed from landscapes on the infield, where it was evenly dispersed by the machinery before it left. A low mound of road debris remains just past the foul line in the background. Firewood gets stocked out of view to the far left.

Restoring this meadow to a ball field would be like starting from scratch. The only salvageable asset is the flat space. Even though turf would be the most substantial feature of a finished ball field, a restoration project will involve more engineering and construction than horticulture.

Posted on by tonytomeo · 21 Comments

The Bad Seed Redemption

P91103The seed is not really bad. At least I do not think that it is. It is merely misunderstood. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is simply unidentified. I really do not know what it is. I do not say that very often, especially about seed that I bother to collect to sow elsewhere. I believe that it is of American bellflower, Campanula americana. If not, it is very closely related.

It appeared in part of one of the landscapes at work. Because it looked like some sort of campanula, we left it to see what it would do. It got quite tall, but never started to look like something we did not want to take a chance on. We were rewarded for taking the risk when it bloomed with these elegant spikes of small sky blue flowers. That was a little more than a year or so ago.

No one bothered to deadhead it immediately after bloom. It was only a few plants on the back edge of rather relaxed landscape, so was easy to ignore. By the time the dried floral stalks were noticed and removed, the seed had already been tossed. Consequently, there were many more of them through this last season, both in the same area, and in adjacent parts of the landscape.

In fact, there were too many to ignore when their floral spikes had finished blooming. I deadheaded them myself so that I could collect the dried floral carcasses in a small bucket. Some seed had already been tossed for next year. Nonetheless, there is enough dust-like seed in the bottom of the bucket to share with other landscapes. I intend to sow it just prior to winter storms.

So, this unidentified seed should be an asset to the landscapes.