Rose Abuse

While the Amaryllis belladonna began to bloom this week, succulent pink flesh emerging from baked soil...


...I tried to repent of rose abuse.  Mid summer and feeling guilty, I decided to move a rose.  I had a rose in a terrible place where it just managed to survive.   For years.  I moved it to a slightly less terrible space, where a salvia and 'Crepuscule' decided to engulf it.  Again, it just managed to survive.  For years.  The other day it reached out and scratched my ankle when I went up the slope to check the oranges.  Grow me properly or kill me is the small soft song I heard.  So I moved it yet again, to finally give it a place worthy of its virtues.  Poor thing...serious rose abuse on my part.  Why grow them if you don't grow them well?  Grow it properly or kill it.

I dug Poor Thing up, whereupon it split into two, two twigs with a few dried roots each.  One half into a pot in full shade.  A week later it looks good, freshly leafed out again, still willing, still trying, still fighting:

  
The other half dropped its leaf (yeah, leaf in the singular) and looked dead.  I kept watering.   Then this yesterday...


We love what we think of as our garden ornament:  our plants--we want just the right combination of color and texture to make our heart sing and our ego swell, we want rare, we want unusual, we want exotic, we want glamour, we want perfomance.  We want fragrance, we want perfect foliage.  We want an exact size.  A symmetrical shape.  A cute name. 

What they want is their little life.  We want what we want while they silently battle bitter death as best they can.

Those small green leaves:  I am rightly humbled.  Good spots for you both.  You've earned it.  You've taught me. 

Friday. Just Friday

Echeveria flowers:

Echeveria flowers:

Echeveria:


Senecio rowleyanus:

Senecio rowleyanus:

 Aloe:


Hoover who wants me to forget about those darn plants and pet him now:


Just a typical Friday.

Solandra maxima

I don't see anyone growing Solandra maxima--I don't grow it myself, though I might if I had ever seen one for sale, which I haven't.  It is far out of fashion, but perhaps it should not be.  Plants go in and  out of fashion just as do outdoor pizza ovens, koi ponds, trash compactors, and  blue fiberglass pool slides.  Once upon a time a lot of gardeners were growing Solandra maxima, I imagine, just as once upon a time nearly everyone in Southern California had a Hollywood Juniper (Juniperus chinensis 'Torulosa') or two in their yard,  which is how they  ended up named  for Hollywood, a moderate, well-behaved evergreen tree next to the kidney-shaped pool with the sun-bleached blue fiberglass pool slide.  Hollywood Juniper are growing rare here, and the kidney-shaped pool is vanishing too.

Solandra maxima pruned as a shrub


Solandra maxima?  The only place I've ever seen  them is at the local Trader Joe's strip mall, where they are grown as shrubs against pillars aside the parking spaces.   And they grow well and thrive, stuffed  between concrete and  stucco on one side, asphalt and car fumes on the other.  This is a tough subtropical vine, but the stems get thick and strong, and our examples have been pruned into shrubs as a stairway of rigid vertical stems.  Cut back, they bloom, and  rebloom.  The flowers are as big as your open hand and account for the common name, "Cup Of Gold Vine".



I expect to see the same utterly mundane commercial plantings everywhere, namely Rhaphiolepis indica and generic yellow day lilys.  Indeed, this strip mall has them as well.  The Rhaphiolepis indica are there in their drab ubiquity, while the day lilys, thoroughly trampled by foot traffic, are in deep decline.  The thriving Solandra maxima are a rare and an uncommon delight.  People were giving me odd  looks as I snapped pictures.   What's so interesting about a bush?

A Magnificent Mature Italian Cypress, Cupressus semperviriens

The Italian Cypress at the corner of Almond and Center in Orange, California was planted in the 1890s, making it nearly 120 years old, older than about 99% of  all the buildings in Orange County.  It is 90 feet tall, and may be the largest Italian Cypress in California.



Recently I went and had a look at this beautiful old giant.  I saw that it has finally popped the sidewalk a bit, maybe an inch or two, and the concrete curb on the other side of the trunk, away from the sidewalk, is raised up about two inches by the roots.  One small section of the sidewalk has been very recently replaced, but most of the sidewalk and curb look to be at least 50-60 years old, and is most probably older.  Based on this, I would say the root system is pretty well behaved, at least for the first century.



What surprised and amazed me was the shape of the lowest branches, which begin at about eight or ten feet above the ground.  From one  angle, the branches are perhaps  18" wide.  From another angle, they are only about 4" wide!   The shape of the branch is flat and wide, like lumber!  I didn't know they did that. 







Most Italian Cypress I see are used  as tall, narrow hedges:


While they form a very effective narrow screen, their beauty is utterly lost.  A single magnificent specimen shows their true potential.    Ain't it wonderful? 



Update August 2011
I am absolutely sickened to report that this magnificent being has been cut down.  



Damn shame.   

Tomatoes 2010

Lazy, lazy tomato growing this year. I should be ashamed. I planted them and let them flop. Certainly not the best way to maximize yield: fruit is lost to earwigs and rot. Not many, but I hate losing any at all.



The lizard population is taking great care of the earwigs, and the Towhees are cleaning out any Tomato Hornworms, for which they have my gratitude.



Despite a cooler-than-average June and July, the tomatoes are arriving at the time they always do, though I also planted them later than normal, in May instead of April. Tomatoes have their own timetable, no matter what I do.

It's really satisfying to grow your own food, though I don't get the thrill and sense of pride from it that many people get. I've heard and read about the extreme effort some gardeners put into their tomatoes.

This spring, we attended a seminar given by a acknowledged tomato growing expert. He lost me when he started insisting that putting two aspirin (non coated!) under the root ball when planting was the correct method--not one aspirin and not three. Exactly two. One and three are bad. Gardeners who use one or three are morally reprehensible. I forget why.

The expert went on to say that watering every ten days when first planted and the temperature is below 80F (26C), or every eight days when first planted and temperatures are between 80 and 84, and a partridge in a pear tree, then moving to seven days, then five days, then increasing to seven days again as the fruit reddens, though ten days is even better, except it's temperature dependent, and afternoon wilting gets involved. Morning wilting is bad, but afternoon wilting is acceptable, even virtuous.



I think I might have let the plants flop this year in reaction to that expert's seminar. And then there was his stricture on pinching out all suckers, because they don't produce fruit. Good grief! When they are all flopped out all over, how do you even find suckers? And what are "suckers", anyway? They are not the same as rose suckers, which emerge from the ground, and are either new plants or rootstock, depending on whether or not the rose is grafted. In contrast, tomato "suckers" are new branches that emerge from the base of foliage on the main stem.



I'm lazy, I let the plants flop, I took the aspirin myself instead of dosing my plants, suckers went un-pinched and free to ruin my life, the automatic irrigation system runs whether they wilt or not, on the same schedule no matter what the temperature, and we still get a bunch of beautiful tomatoes every year, all delicious. I know I'm doing something wrong, I just don't know what it is.

For making sauce I use one of these processors to remove the skins, cores, and seeds. The hotter the growing conditions, the thinner the skins are. Because it doesn't get super hot here, the skins can be slightly tough, so we like to get rid of them.



These machines work great if you want a really smooth sauce. They are fast and easy to use. Just a couple of tricks I've learned using our machine: The first trick is to always cut the tomato in half before running it through the machine, even if the tomato is small. If you don't, they can squirt and splash. (If you don't care about tomato splashes on your ceiling, leave them whole.)

The second trick is to run the stuff through the machine twice instead of once. The second round produces a good amount of pulp, nearly 50% of the first round. You are losing some good flavorsome stuff if you only run it once. I've tried running it through three times, but the third time you get hardly nothing. So twice is good...oh dear, I'm starting to sound like that expert and his non-coated aspirin!

No, I'm not rearranging the same tomatoes all over the kitchen counters. These are more of them:


Instead of throwing all the leftover glop in the trash, I compost it, but rather than end up with one hundred billion tomato seedlings sprouting in the compost or where the compost ends up, I first microwave the glop to kill the seeds before dumping it in the compost.

I conclude by admitting if that expert was talking about Peonies, or Hostas, and if he swore that x number of aspirin, or Advil, or imported French chèvre in the planting hole would enable me to grow Peonies or Hostas in Southern California, I would do it. Because I adore Peonies and Hostas and they don't grow here. I adore Peonies and Hostas. Tomatoes I just eat.

The Most Unkindest Cut

This was the most unkindest cut of all;
For when the noble Caesar saw him stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms,
Quite vanquish'd him: then burst his mighty
heart. . . .
Julius Caesar, Act III Scene II



Mostly I have zero sympathy for Ficus benjamina. They have nasty root systems and are the enemy of all rose growers, as well as pavement, which they buckle, and pipes, which they invade.  Yes, they have a great beauty;  look at these limbs, like the arms of Atlas, holding up a green world:


However, Ficus benjamina are simply inappropriate for street planting.  More problems are created  than solved.  Still...look at this poor thing:



Did no one pause to think that the easiest way to keep trees out of power lines is to to plant trees with a mature height less than that of the power lines?

The electric company also had it in for this Chinese Elm, Ulmus parvifolia.



I know trees and voltage need to be separated, but here the power lines are on the other side of the street, so there's really no excuse for this:


I realize they are encouraging height to keep branches out of the way of trucks and pedestrians and so forth, but after all that, eventually the ficus roots will buckle the sidewalk and they'll pull them out at great expense. That, plus they look ridiculous.  The fake trees that disguise cell towers have a more natural appearance. 

It's not like the city doesn't know how to prune a tree correctly. These Magnolias around the corner are adequately if not artfully headed back and laced out:



Seeing this undamaged, unmolested, unstunted, un-poodled, unmodified Dracena draco nearby granted me a sense of relief. At least it is not chainsawed into a cube.



Sorry for the rant, but these mutilated trees illustrate our alienation from our planet and from species with whom we share this world. We don't know them, we don't understand them, we don't respect them. Is this not an "Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms"?