Some Of The Locals, Red In Tooth And Claw

This girl stops by on the way to the neighbor's bird feeder, where she picks off a Mourning Dove for her daily dinner. The neighbor keeps putting out seeds, the Mourning Doves keep flying in, and the Cooper's Hawk keeps dining. I love her polka-dotted pants.


This girl sticks strictly to dog biscuits. Her bunny-chasing days are behind her. No, she's not blue about her bunny-chasing memories. She just doesn't want a bath.


She's an earwig-eating machine. Go to it, honey!


Beautiful, eats mosquitos, and the color of a desert sunrise. What's not to love?



If you are a koi keeper, Feathered Evil. Flying Death. What you have nightmares about. If the koi is too big to swallow, they stab them to death anyway, just for practice. Get thee behind me, Satan!


She eats her boyfriends. And anything else she can get. But not koi.

Sorry about the photo quality, but this girl is quite shy. Her favorite food is house cat, and she's probably responsible for eating the neighbor's Siamese, the other neighbor's Burmese, another neighbor's Tabby, another neighbor's miniature Dachshund, and not enough rabbits. We wish every local rabbit upon her, but the cats are apparently far easier to catch.




Of course there is no pure angel or pure evil (except the Heron) in our little natural world. The koi will eat dragonflies if they can snatch them, the Coyotes are the victims (mostly) of humankind, house cats will kill as many song birds as the hawks; the hawks will grab lizards if they can. So it's not a matter of good or evil (except the Heron). Everyone is just trying to make a living how ever they can. It's humankind who assigns "good" and "evil".

But it is humankind who gardens. We should take full credit for that.

The Incredible Shrinking Hand

Same hand, same pond, same koi...

September 15, 2006:


September 14, 2009:


OK, I admit it's the koi growing, not the hand shrinking. See how fast koi can grow? The koi was 4" (10 cm) in the first picture, and about 24" (60 cm) in the second, which is not all that large. Tomorrow it is three years to the day that we bought our first koi. It's been an adventure, heart wrenching at times, but educational always.

As a side note, if you squint a bit, you can see (especially in the first photo) my deadheading finger, the finger against which I snap off old flowers. It's pretty battered. That's stain in the skin, not dirt. All in a good cause, for a beautiful garden.

Happy Anniversary!

Companion Plants

Sometimes fussy, sometimes impervious to neglect,
but often achingly slow growing.
It may be an expensive and rare specimen,
mailed away for,

or you, drunk, pulled it out of

a dumpster

on the way home at three
in the morning,
or perhaps a long ago housemate, otherwise utterly forgotten, left
that plant,
a can of soup, one dirty sock and
no rent check,
or an elderly lady gave it to you when you were small,
wishing you a lifetime of growing.

Or it was your grandmother's.

You live with it for years,
for decades.
It accompanies you.

When you move, it comes along.
When the hurricane swirls in,
when the wild fire rages close with embers dancing,
you grab the dog,
the kids,
important documents,
that plant
and flee.

It's there on the window sill,
gathering dust while you are on your honeymoon.
There in the kitchen when you bring the new baby home from the hospital.
On the hall table,
surrounded by cards of condolence
when your father dies.
You shoo'ed your new kitten away from it,
and seventeen years later,
it sits atop the box containing the ashes of an old cat.

When you finally throw out your spouse,

and your old life,
the plant is still there, green.
Its lacy foliage doesn't complement a Croton's waxiness.
The amber of its stems don't
exist to contrast with Canna flowers.
Its life is not to be companion to other plants.
Its life is companioning you. Its life.

Somehow through all that living you water it,
repot it,
give it fresh soil mix and every once in a while,
a little fertilizer.
It may be in the same pot forever,
or it may get more substantial accommodations over time,
if you do. Or even if you
don't.

It may win a prize at a show.

It is not like your prom pictures,
your Teddy Bear, a souvenir from Hawaii, or
your mother's wedding dress.

It is not a
thing.

It is alive,
something you kept alive. Green.
You have breathed in the oxygen that
it breathed out.

It has absorbed carbon dioxide

you exhaled.

Though your dreams may have died,
it is there and alive,

a promise kept,
so imperceptibly growing
you didn't notice,
until one day the fog of the swift slow slog of living cleared
and you realized it,

grander, stronger, insistent.

(Two extraordinary plants photographed at the Inter City Cactus and Succulent Show held August 14, 2009 at the Los Angeles County Arboretum)

The Gully Behind The House

The gully behind the house was originally filled with Eucalyptus globulus, a mix of seedlings and survivors of the 1967 wildfire that burned this area--the original large trees were burnt, but some of them survived to sprout new trunks. Burnt and dead stumps also remained as a legacy of that fire. Long before our house was built, the trees had been planted as a windbreak for the citrus orchards which blanketed this area in the first half of the Twentieth century. The rich orchard land eventually sprouted houses in place of lemons and limes.

The first picture shows the small wall we built to create a flat area for a vegetable garden. The project was unsuccessful because although we'd had half of the trees removed, the remainder cast dense shade. Not to mention the constant rain of their leaves and twigs, molasses-thick sap, and the long thick strips of bark, like dried-stiff animal pelts, that they shower upon the world.

We were not happy. When the Santa Ana winds blew, they slammed the trees against the house. Full of flammable gummy oils, the Eucalypts were also a serious fire hazard. We were also worried about the flammable nature of those wooden stairs, which we called "the boat dock".



So, bye-bye Blue Gums!


Bye-bye, boat dock!


Hello terraces and a big wide staircase! We recycled the blocks of the failed vegetable garden wall as the treds of the stairway. I added roses, Phormium, a Mexican lime tree, and a place to sit and enjoy it:


The plants have filled in, and the little lime tree is producing flavorful small fruits. I squeeze one into a glass of ice water and sit under the pergola and listen to the birds in the neighbor's Eucalyptus trees.

September is Urginea maritima Month!

And you thought September was about going back to school, or, in the Southern Hemisphere, the start of that season that no gardener much cares about: Spring.

But in this piece of Eden, where it is the end of summer and we begin to look forward to fire season--though maybe "look forward to" is not the right way to put it--anyway, the start of September is show-off time for the Giant White Squill, Urginea maritima.



A bulb possessing the size and heft of a ladies ten-pin bowling ball, but with a stem instead of finger holes, it produces a cluster of green foliage from November to May in the Northern Hemisphere. It is native to Greece. The thick leaves, longer than wide, have a charming twist or wave to them, as if a doting mother had given them an affectionate grooming before patting them on the bottom and sending them on their way.

In late May the leaves die off:


 In late August or early September, the bulb shoots up a 5-6 foot (1.5-1.8 meter) flower spike. Here's mine, 6 feet tall this year:



There are hundreds of small flowers on each spike. They bloom from the bottom of the spike up. Sometimes the spike will twist or curl as the wave of opening flowers proceed upwards. Mine did not twist this year.



These big spikes are a popular accent for those enormous fresh flower arrangements you used to see in the lobbies of luxury hotels. Now that no one can afford luxury hotels any more, who knows what they are using in their arrangements now.




Mine is on a dry slope with some Yucca flaccida and my beloved Agave medio-picta alba:


The Squill will send out roots 4 or 5 feet in all directions, making it ideal for a dry slope--it is roots that hold a slope together. Eventually the bulb will split in two, and there will be two flower spikes instead of one. It takes a while--mine has been in the ground for at least 5 years, and it hasn't split yet.

All this is well and good: a post all about rare-ish bulb. But the real story, perhaps, is the reason this bulb is in my garden, and quite a few other gardens in this area, and in so many luxury hotel lobbies. It's here because some plant nut in inland Southern California decided back in the 1950's that this was a really cool plant. Plant nuts: you know them. They are the kind of people who think of their Agave medio-picta alba as "beloved".

Anyway, that particular Urginea-loving plant nut, perhaps masquerading as an enterprising businessman to disguise his plant nuttiness, planted some Giant White Squills, then planted some more, and developed a business supplying the flowers to the florist trade, and either he or his successor has continued to do so to the present day. The local garden center of note buys a bunch of bulbs from him every year and sells them, which is where mine came from.

But the moral of the story is that when you see a plant for sale, it is probably because one plant nut somewhere loved it. A lot. Then either they, or their more business-savvy relative, friend, or acquaintance, thought to try to sell it to other plant nuts. I know many gardeners often prefer plants to people (often with good reason) but though we may find plants to be more loyal companisons, still we plant nuts are linked to humanity, if in improbable ways, by improbable plants.