Toast with your Pauce? Or a Naked Lady?

Pauce
Today was the hottest day of the year so far: it was nearly 100F (38C), making this the perfect time to heat the kitchen up. I like to sweat and turn bright red and gasp for air over a huge pot of boiling water when it is too hot to be outside. I had about 20 kilograms (45 lbs) of ripe tomatoes which I turned into 3 big jars of what I call "pauce". "Pauce" is skinned and seeded tomato cooked to the halfway point between sauce and paste. A jar makes a great dinner for two in the winter. We add onion, garlic, peppers and herbs to make a quick sauce that has the warm sweet glow of summer. When you are shivering in in mid winter you forget how sweaty summer was, remembering only the sweetness of all those tomatoes.



After cooking and canning the pauce, of course I went out in the heat and picked more tomatoes.




Toast

Same rose, the Bourbon 'Souvenir de la Malmaison', but different plants. One plant's flowers all toasted in this heat. The other's did not. Same amount of sun and water. The difference? One plant was put in 10 years ago; the other, two years ago. A good root system helps preserve the flowers in extreme heat. At least that is my best guess. I wish plants could talk and explain why they do what they do. What if the plant with the toasted flowers confessed, chuckling, that it hated me so it let all the flowers fry out of sheer spite? What if they ooohed and aaahed when you watered them, or burped after an application of fertilizer? Gardening would be more fun than it already is. Of course, if they screamed in pain when you dug them out...yikes, ok, never mind.



Now about those Naked Ladies
August is Naked Lady time in Southern California, when Amaryllis belladonna, common name Naked Lady, sends pearlescent pink flowers up to bloom in the heat. I don't like to use the common names of plants, but around the neighborhood if you say "Amaryllis belladonna" people go "Huh?" while if you say "Naked Lady" they know what you are talking about.





This South African native bulb is at home in California. Green juicy tongues of foliage appear around October, as the winter rains begin, browning and dying off by June. The delicate pink flowers shoot up from the leafless bulbs in August, set seed, brown, shrivel, and the cycle repeats. A completely no-care plant, unless you like to neaten up the area by removing the dead foliage in June. No water required, especially nice in the heat of August.

The August Torrent

Here, August is rainless. The torrents are comprised only of tomatoes. In this garden I can plant them in March or in May, but they never start producing until August. I speculate it's due to soil temperatures, which are at their warmest in August.





These made a sweet lucious sauce, even though they are not sauce tomatoes.


Here's the former upside-down hanging tomato. Though it has grown and is producing fruit and new flowers, it's still readjusting to living green side up again. Maybe the delay in growth and fruiting is not such a bad thing--it will extend the harvest.



The green beans were finished up by mid-July. I waited a month before planting a second crop because we needed a break from eating green beans for dinner every single night.



This year I planted the pie pumpkins for Thanksgiving on the first day of August. This is late, but last year the June-planted pumpkins were ripe in September, far too early for Thanksgiving. Plus I forgot. So we'll see how they do planted later. There is still plenty of hot weather ahead.



The other harvest of this August has been compost.




Not only have plants struggled due to the drought, but compost suffers as well since plant clippings and kitchen scraps become too crispy dry to decompose readily. Though I add leftover coffee and the water used to wash the kitchen floor along with plant material, I can't keep the pile moist. So the piles sits and wait for rain, a torrent of sweet rain, just as the plants do.

Neighborhood Natives

One special feature of our little neighborhood is the survival of native plants. Because the area is hilly, when the land was originally cleared to plant citrus trees, there were areas of slope too steep to be farmed, too steep to be cleared.

Thus some natives survived, despite two generations of farming in the area. When the land began sprouting houses instead of lemon and orange trees, the same rule applied: too steep to build on, too steep to bother clearing. Relatively large lots also made a difference--there was room to leave some strips of land untouched.

So, let's survey what has survived. Toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia), is also known as Coyote Berry, because coyotes eat the berries when they can't catch their preferred food, which is house cat. Toyon is a large shrub that eventually becomes a graceful small tree. It takes pruning and irrigation well, survives on rainfall alone, and is useful as a screen. Here's a Toyon screen in the neighborhood:



Here are the delicate white flowers:


And here, the newly developing berries. The berries turn red in early winter, which is the source of their other common name, Christmas Berry.



As an airy small understory tree, here's one gamely surviving the torrents of crap rained down upon it by the non-native Eucalyptus:


Another common neighborhood shrub is the Sugar Bush, Rhus ovata. It also tolerates irrigation and pruning very well. The local park has a volunteer that managed to sprout and grow large; one side has been pruned into a cube by the groundskeepers to keep the sidewalk passable, but the other side grows untouched:



In a bare unirrigated spot, on a rocky slope, it does just as well:


Another Rhus, but a vastly less desirable one, is Poison Oak, Rhus diversiloba. I've see this in only one spot, a county-owned strip behind my neighbor's house:
Beware.

Perhaps the native shrub most like common cultivated ones is Prunus ilicifolia. It also makes a good screen, a beautiful hedge or small tree, takes irrigation, clipping or pruning without a problem, yet does well unwatered. With its glossy, deep green foliage it looks like a Camellia out of bloom:



A few miles from here one can find wild growing Yucca whipplei, and I've planted one in our garden, but not one other have I seen on our walks. Opuntia littoralis, Coastal Prickly Pear, has been the only native succulent I've spotted. Here's an Opuntia by the hiking trail:


And one on a neighbor's rocky slope:


It's loaded with unripened fruit:


California Buckwheat, probably Eriogonum fasciculatum foliolosum, grows around the corner on yet another dry rocky slope. The flowers are white in spring and turn rust color as they dry out. I thought at first it was an exotic, a weed from Europe or Iowa, but no, it's quite native.



I finish with that most famous and most beloved of California native plants, the Coast Live Oak, Quecus agrifolia. There are just a few here and there, managing to sprout and grow in odd places. They were probably all cut down when the lemon orchards began to go in around 1920, or well before that for use as firewood. Here's one in the curve of the road, a couple of houses from here, stubbornly battling a Eucalyptus for light and space. I'm cheering on the Oak:



And an acorn, a hope for the future. I am thinking to collect and plant them here and there, in likely, uncultivated spots.



If I had known better, I should have planted our lot with Oaks and left the Toyon and Rhus ovata to seed in as an understory. I really should have. I should have left the Rhus integrifolia down in back, where Rosa 'Golden Celebration' now dominates. By now the Oaks would be sizable and the water bill negligible. It took me a few years and a lot of dog-walking to even notice the native plants here and there, to realize they were survivors of the original inhabitants, that they are their own kind of beautiful, and are far more appropriate to this land than just about everything I've planted in our garden.

But if I had "known better", there would have been no roses--no sweet, fat, perfumed, sensuous, luscious roses. I am reminded of the wise sinner's prayer: "Oh God, make me good--but not yet!" In other words, where roses are concerned, I'm planning to sin a while longer.

A Holy Trinity

A holy trinity of plants: Ligustrum japonicum, commonly called Japanese Privet, as mundane as daily routine. Rosa 'Iceberg', common as grass. And an Olive tree, never mundane, transcending commonality as a symbol, a food source, a intimate companion and enabler of human civilization.

Putting them together creates a whole greater than the sum. The deep green of the Ligustrum, the Olive's gray green, and the apple green of 'Iceberg', all jeweled by the Ligustrum's black berries, the Olive's black fruits, and pure white roses. Ligustrum, heavy, clipped, inert, is serious and dour, while the airy Olive and rose toss their limbs in the sensuous pleasure of a breeze.

Is it bland, this trinity? Or soothing, stable--a rock-solid triumvirate, each individual providing something the other two do not possess, without denying the other's virtues.

"Highly Variable"

Some botanical descriptions include the term "highly variable": our beloved native oak, Quercus agrifolia, is one such plant so described. The foliage can vary so dramatically, and inter species hybrids are so common, making exact identifications is difficult or impossible.

Consider, however, another plant that can be "highly variable":









"Now wait!" you say. "I see four different plants--a Sedum, a Euphorbia, and two Echeverias, probably E. 'After Glow' and possibly an E. imbricata hybrid."

Nope. According to the plant tags, all these plants are exactly the same. Genus "Succulent", Species: "Assorted".

I've been buying a lot of succulents lately. I've always liked them, but it wasn't time to own them again, until now. The first plant I ever grew, when my age was still in single digits, was a Graptopetalum paraguayense pup I was able to root, a gift from the elderly widow across the street, who had some enthusiasm for gardening. She had a cloud of snowy white hair, a canary named Tweety, and a desert tortoise named Speedy (and, okay, maybe not a lot of imagination where names for pets were concerned). She and her husband had driven out to the desert one day in the 1930's and picked up a desert tortoise and brought him home and he was their pet for forty years. Back then you could do that--drive out to nowhere in the California desert and dig up plants and catch tortoises and bring them all home to plant in the garden or make a pet of. And elderly widows had white hair, not blond. Back then.

I did not know the plant as "Graptopetalum paraguayense". It was simply "my plant". I had only the one, so a name was unnecessary. I'm unsure what happened to it, but I had it for years. I know I didn't kill it. It probably ended up planted in the ground, and when we moved it got left behind. I still have another plant that elderly widow gave my mother, a Sedum that is not quite S. dasyphyllum. I haven't been able to identify it. It is a frosty blue variant of S. dasyphyllum, and I've never found it for sale.

Between those two plants and today are decades of a non-succulent way of life. I wish that the nurserymen of Southern California would tag their Sedums, Echeverias, Sediverias, Graptopetalums, Graptoverias, Euphorbias, and such with the correct name, but I deduce they know I would buy them anyway, so why bother?

Succulents are again in my life, mostly all highly, even wildly variable Succulent assorteds. In future decades perhaps I will have only one plant again. I've bought a lot of Succulent assorteds, but not yet a Graptopetalum paraguayense. I'm holding off. Maybe that will be my first plant and also my last. Symmetrical, rather than highly variable. And the only name needed will be just "my plant".

A Zealous Friend to Roses

Zelus renardii, the Leaf Hopper Assassin Bug, is an aggressive predator and therefore a stalwart friend to roses. However, it is slightly less friendly to Rosarians, because it can inflict a painful sting if accidentally handled.

So leave her where she is, and know she's there to eat the bad guys, not to gnaw through a perfect fat golden flower bud.



It's difficult for me to write anything when I'm in a funk, and I've obviously been in a long dark slide the past month. I was struggling with a sick koi who I couldn't save, and concerned that other koi would be next. Pond treatments, antibiotics, an appearance of Fish Lice, getting a microscope for examinations and learning to use it, learning to anesthetize a fish for treatment, a setback in the biological filters meaning I was constantly checking water quality and making adjustments.

My pets--I'm responsible for them. I bought them and brought them here and so I owe them my care. I apologize for my failure. And an apology to you, Reader. Sorry I've been away. I must apologize also to my roses, who have also been neglected during all this. Zealous I must be as well. The Assassin Bug can't do it all herself.