CornerStone Visit, Part Deux

The van Sweden group mix of Stipa tenuissima with monstrous Agaves is ravishing.  If I didn't know about the wildly invasive quality of S. tenuissima, I'd start planting it today around my Agaves.  Wow.  The blond color of the grass in late summer is even more stunning. Surely it is more impressive now then when it was first installed:  the Agaves have had time to grow so grand, the Stipa spreading all the while. 





In other areas, I thought shade cloth walls were more effective when decorated by natural shadows than when printed.

Printed shade cloth:


Shadows from surrounding plants:


Good old invaluable Ligustrum japonicum:


Vegetables mixed with ornamentals, or a greater effort at making vegetable patches more attractive--call it "Edible Deco"--seems to be an idea with significant popularity this year. This section of CornerStone seems to have anticipated that trend by several years.





Corn makes a fine, if ephemeral hedge:


A new take on "canned tomatoes":



More of our CornerStone visit in a future blog post. 

A CornerStone Visit, Of Course

Of course we needed to visit CornerStone while we were in the area.  It's been written about and the wave of interest has ebbed by now.   It's an outdoor exhibition by twenty or so different landscape architects.  Each LA got a small piece of ground to design as they wished.  Some are wonderful, some not. 

Perhaps I can see what's held up best and what has not.  The pink plastic windmills set on racks of green plastic pipe look yucky.  A New Yorker appears to have done that (surprise!).  The area with a big block of pink-painted concrete in an area intended to look like a miniature golf course for in-the-know intellectuals looks like hell, too.   The blue plastic balls wrapped around the dead tree are fading, though they look better than the pink windmills.  I think the dead tree would probably be more beautiful without them at this point.  Conclusion:  tacky materials don't age well.  I'm glad my camera battery died before I had to take pictures of the windmills and the pink concrete blob.

One project has a wishing wall where messages can be left, and visitors can also write a wish on a piece of mylar tape and tie it to a spiral of metal.  Many of the messages left at the wishing-wall were lighthearted.  They joyfully celebrated the day and the place.  Other wishes were desperately heartfelt and poignant.

Steel walls surround wishes written on silver mylar, left to flutter and sparkle in breeze and sun:


 









That left a lump in my throat.  Beats blue plastic balls, in my opinion.  A garden place can magically open your heart, and this one certainly did.



More CornerStone in future posts. 

Under A Tree Where Nothing Will Grow

Where mushrooms belong, under a tree.



It's often quite difficult to grow anything under an established tree.  A double-whammy of root system and shade.  These stone mushrooms decorate the area without disturbing the tree or frustrating the gardener.  Simplicity.

Yield vs. Flavor

Beneath the glory of Quercus lobata, the Valley Oak that tells you the state of the water table beneath...


...are the armies of immaculately trimmed vines:




With olives as companions...


...along with bits of truly California Kooky architecture that you must take seriously (or do you?) because it cost millions and millions and was done out of love...


...though the beauty of the simple and sensitive plantings around the kooky architecture outdoes the foreign stone by miles...




...and it is the dignity of the work that I really love.  The precision and care of the vines shows a craftsmanship that I adore and revere, no matter that it is probably mundane, or unnoticed by most visitors.  The endless washing of the floors, the crush, the care of the steel vats and pumps, the little on-site testing labs with forgotten coffee cups among the pipettes and beakers, the sturdy humble grape bins, the dazzlingly complex French and German machines that are part of the work that manages to go on here despite the flurry of drinkers, who are like constant tiny fruit flies hovering everywhere, non-threatening but annoying...

Bins for the grapes, which hold 1,000 lbs each:
 

A bladder grape press:


The "jacks" of the grapes, their stems now separated from the berries:


We were told about Yield vs. Flavor.  Table grapes from California's Central Valley have a yield of ten to twelve tons per acre.  Wine grapes in Napa are intended to have a yield of three or three-and-a-half tons per acre.  More yield is one reason--though not the only reason--that flavor and intensity is reduced.  And the soil in Napa is poor compared to the richness of the Central Valley, and the vines are watered less here, and not stuffed with NPK to within an inch of their lives. 

The glimpses of the source of all the intense work:  the career-changer vintners and would-be vintners who went from high-paying medicine or management to low-paying winery marketing or into the iffy, risky business of growing, and the deceptively clad in thrift-store-clothes, immensely skilled Mexican laborers, who work like serene fiends cleaning and pumping and pruning and cleaning some more and moving and driving fork lifts through spaces with millimeters to spare. 

The expense of the land and the process (those German machines!  Literal miles of stainless steel pipes!), and the knowledgeable locals, who when a particular winery is mentioned, where so much effort and money and desire and love were raw displayed, say "Yes, utterly ordinary wine, don't you think?"   It all means pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure.  More than the grapes are endlessly pressed here.  There is an underlying and painful tension.  Yet it is so beautiful.


 

Vitus vinifera

Not normally considered an aggressively invasive plant, various strains of non-native Vitus vinifera have taken over nearly all of this northern California valley, with help from another highly invasive species, Homo sapiens.



While the native Quercus agrifolia, Toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia), Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), and Madrone (Arbutus menziesii) are still found on the steeply sloping walls of the valley, and though a few of the magnificent Quercus lobata manage to survive on the valley floor, most all areas are taken up by Vitus.

Madrone (Arbutus menziesii):


Oak against a misty curtain wall of Sequoia:
 





Not that I'm complaining, you understand.  While human history is written by the winners, it can be noted that invasive species are identified from the point of view of the losers. 

Road Trip!

Off to Napa for a few days.   Through LA...





And past the Quercus lobata in Gorman Pass...


And through the Central Valley, now awash in fruit trees...


To a place familiar yet alien, a part of California with much more water.


The last photo was all I could get of the place.  It was getting dark as we arrived, and it was raining, and I was tired.  

We passed a 10 K race with thousands of runners near Van Nuys, and a CHP slowdown of the entire I-5 northbound interstate highway in Bakersfield to save a small black dog wearing a little red harness that was running on the road (well worth the wait:  they appeared to be saving him, Yay CHP!!!), and a stop at a fast-food place where I had the only healthy thing on the menu, which was a fresh fruit cup, and to my surprise, the fruit was actually ripe), and while I was being surprised by the freshness of the fruit, a bus full of Mariachi musicians stopped at the fast food place, with a small daughter of one of them yawning in her pajamas, and we got a little lost and ended up driving through Wasco, the Rose Capital Of California, and it was pouring rain in the East Bay where the wind farm is near Tracy, and I was sore afraid of an unfamiliar freeway of puddles and potholes, but we got past it. 

But no pictures of any of that--which is a road trip.  The best things don't wait to be photographed.

Indoor Plants

Indoor plants:  I tend to kill them.  I'm outside so much taking care of the outdoor plants that the indoor ones are completely neglected.  Those that have survived do so because they spend the warmer months outdoors, where I pay attention to them.

Most long-lived is this bathroom Phalenopsis, which the home builder gave us as a housewarming present when we moved in some eleven years ago.  It went eight years without blooming.  I finally added just a few pellets of Osmocote and started watering with distilled water, and it has subsequently bloomed twice.



The Pothos (Epipremnum aureum) have also worked.  They'll survive and bounce back from three or four months of no water and a good layer of dust build-up (spending the winter indoors, in other words).  They grew their way down to the floor and were working their way towards the door when I gave them a  trim.  The cuttings root easily.  My goal is to have two identical sets that I can rotate in and out of the house, so I've always got a pair that are reasonably healthy.

One of the E. aureums, happy after a summer outdoors getting water:


I visited a "tacky real estate photos" blog some time back where one of the entries highlighted a resident Pothos that had just about taken over the house--the owner had trained it to encircle the entry and then the plant climbed up the stair railing to encircle the landing upstairs as well.  Another section slipped into the dining room and encircled that, too.  It was weirdly creepy enough to motivate me to immediately give mine that aforementioned trim.  

The Sanseveria trifasciata spends the summer outdoors on the patio, and comes in for the winter.  Since it is nearly indestructable, it's survived so far.   It has not grown much, but survival is all I ask.



Then there is the Ravenea rivularis, Majesty palm, which I got a couple of weeks ago.  It's still alive--so far.  Supposedly fast growing to 10 feet (3 m) it then slows down, and is far fussier than Kentia palm, Howea forsteriana.  I think it would be ever so cool to have a ten foot palm in the house.  It's a matter of actually taking care of the thing indoors and getting it to grow indoors that's the challenge.  Ample water and generous fertilizer is the general consensus.  And a trip outside as often as possible to get the dust and any pests sprayed off.  Can I do it?   Well, the outdoors part, sure.

Majesty palm, hopefully upwardly mobile:


Everything else has died, the many African violets, the Peace Lily, the other Peace Lily, an array of doomed Aglaonemas.  The Rabbit Tracks, Maranta leuconeura kerchoviana,  ended up outside, where it has grown and survived for five or six years now, content if not ecstatic, in a sheltered spot in the ground.

I wonder if I could kill an indoor Clivia miniata, a common houseplant in colder regions, and here a plant which is nearly indestructible outdoors, given a shady spot and complete neglect.  Maybe not, but why try?  So much better to be outside in fresh air with a bunch of fish staring at me.

My lack of success with indoor plants points out one of my major reasons for gardening:  just to be outside under the sky.