Don't Lean Against That Tree

I’ve been thinking about what to write about. I tried writing about what I want to think about, but that doesn’t really get me anywhere, since I have to think in order to write (I know it doesn’t always look like that to my readers). At the same time, I’ve been working on building my photo collection so I can put together nice presentations for my clients, showing them what the plants I want to use look like, and to enhance my lectures.

In a parallel universe, a few blocks away…I recently installed a feature in this blog and my web site that allows me to see who’s reading this tome, how long they stay around, how many pages they click on and (here’s the fun part) where they’re reading from. It’s a free service from Google Analytics and I highly recommended it to any bloggers reading this. I just added the feature a few days ago and have noticed readers from all sorts of exotic places like Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, England, Finland, France, Thailand and Lompoc.

Back to the photos…Today it occurred to me that since I live only a few blocks from Santa Barbara’s botanic masterpiece, Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden, I’d walk over there with my trusty Nikon CoolPix S10 and shoot Alice once a month to capture what’s looking good at various times of the year. Hence, I build my photo collection!



[Brief historical aside] If you’re not familiar with ‘Alice’, it is without a doubt the jewel in the crown of the Santa Barbara park system. Named for it’s benefactor, Alice Keck Park (yes, her last name was Park, so it could have been called Alice Keck Park Park, but cooler heads prevailed), it was the site of the El Mirasol estate of the Herter family in the early 1900s, then became the El Mirasol (sunflower, en español) Hotel.



There was actually a proposal from a local real estate developer (who shall remain nameless, for now) to erect two 9-story condo towers on the site in about 1969!

“Alas,” thought I, entering the garden in late afternoon. “November is not exactly the time of year for great floral displays and sumptuous photography.” But off I went to give it a try. As I was lining up a shot of a soft shell-pink Canna Lily, I thought about those folks in Germany and the Finland and what November probably looks like in their gardens. So I checked. Berlin – High 48 F / low 33 F. Helsinki – high 35 F / low 27 F. I’ve also got some regular readers in the northern US where evening temps are dipping into the low 30s and upper 20s.

“Hmmmm…How, under the guise of horticultural education, could I rub it in that here in our Mediterranean climate, where most of us are just now thinking about donning a sweater in the evening or switching from flip-flops to shoes with socks, we have a lot for which to be thankful. I know – I’ll put my Alice photos on the blog! ”

So here are a few bits of eye candy to get the ball rolling. I’ll try this for a few months and see what comes of it. Leave a message if you want more articles like this one.

The first thing that caught my eye arriving at the park from the intersection of Arrellaga and Santa Barbara Streets were the shimmering pink blossoms of the Floss Silk Tree (Chorisia speciosa).


These are truly exotic looking trees originating from Brazil and Argentina, and are related to the African Baobab, though the trunks aren’t as distinctively “bloated.” Most stunning right now are the five-petaled pink flowers with tiny brown-on-ivory leopard spots.



There’s also a white flowering variety at Alice. But perhaps the most distinctive trait is the massively thorny trunk that some (but not all) of the trees develop. I can’t imagine even a rhinoceros with poison oak rubbing up to one of these bad boys.



Later in the year I’ll catch a photo of the floss-like fuzz that bursts from the seed pods, giving the plant it’s common name.

Just a hop and skip from these spiky beauties is a display of giant tree dahlias (Dahlia imperialis) that I await every fall. There are dahlias and then there THESE dahlias. This perennial appears to be on steroids, growing from little stubs that were cut back to the ground the previous year, into 12-foot high 3” diameter stems that rival some timber bamboos.



And in the fall, beautiful sparsely distributed lavender flowers with yellow centers appear.



It’s a marvel what nature can program a plant to do. Kids go nuts keeping track of the growth. If nurturing a 400 lb. pumpkin is out of the question, this is one plant that will get everyone’s attention.

Got time for one more? Good…Here’s a little oddity. Many folks, regardless of whether you live in the land of winter sandals or snow shoes, know the Aloe plant. The most familiar of these South African succulents is Aloe vera, used to treat burns and other skin inflammations. But have you seen an Aloe that can scamper up palm tree?



Climbing Aloe (Aloe ciliaris) has orange flowers almost year round, stems about the diameter of a pencil and short white cilia (barbs) that protrude from leaves and stems to trap neighboring upright branches and bark, allowing it to lean against trunks and continue to mound up on itself. Unlike vines that actually spiral around branches, climbing Aloe holds on more like Velcro. It’s growing up a Date Palm near the pond if you want to check it out.

I’m about Aliced out, but look for more articles this month. I have quite a few more pictures and a few woe-filled stories to unload. Comments would be greatly welcome, especially from those of you whimpering inside your igloos.

Green Thumb Sunday Blogroll

Green Thumb Sunday

Gardens and Fire

Smoke from the Sedgewick Fire at Sunrise

The Zaca fire had Santa Barbara packed and ready to move. The environmental, health and financial impacts will reverberate for a very long time. Yet how fortunate were we to have favorable weather and tireless efforts from local and faraway firefighters?

Seeing what’s going on in the Southland this week, we can hardly complain. As of this writing, there are over 500 structures destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people displaced and lives turned on their heads. On NPR this morning was the story of a single dad with 8-year old twin girls (one of them asthmatic) who were awoken in the middle of the night and told to get out. Left behind where pets (three goldfish named Larry, Moe and Curly, plus a cat), cell phone, credit cards - you get the point. The apartment complex burned to the ground – how do you console your daughters and start over? I can’t even begin to imagine.

So this morning, I drove to Santa Barbara’s Firescape Demonstration Garden at Mission Ridge and Stanwood Drive (right across from the fire station near the Sheffield Reservoir). Earlier this year Owen Dell (the other Garden Wise Guy) and I redesigned this invaluable resource co-managed by the City of Santa Barbara Fire Department and the Water Conservation program.
SB's Finest

The purpose of the Firescape Garden is to educate homeowners in fire prone areas about the best way to create defensible space around their homes. For more information about how to create a more firesafe landscape, read the City of Santa Barbara guidelines for landscaping.

The demonstration garden was given a complete face-lift after almost 25 years of service. Lots of plant material was removed, attractive plants were arranged as they would be used in a home garden, and the principles of protecting your home from wildfire were implemented.

The purpose of this blog post isn’t to explain those principles in detail, but to encourage readers to take proactive steps to give fire fighters a fighting chance to protect you and your neighbors. It’s actually quite simple – manage the potential fuel around your home and break the “fuel ladder.”

Bulbine and boulders

If you live in an area that would even remotely be vulnerable to wildfire (remember – the Paint fire crossed Highway 101 and jumped into Hope Ranch before the weather miraculously turned the fire back on itself) promise yourself that you’ll visit the Firescape Garden, read the material posted on the kiosks, have someone from the fire department visit your home for an assessment, and be prepared to make some changes to your landscape.

The following photos show the garden today, just a few months after its June 2007 installation. It might not make the cover of Sunset Magazine just yet, but it’s heading that way. There are many styles of plants (not just succulents and rocks) for many situations. No excuse; you can do this. What would you rather do – sift through the ashes or make a few compromises in your garden?

Sorry for the lack of pithy humor that is my trademark. This is deadly serious stuff.

Entrance to Firescape Garden

Info kiosk - here's how it works

Could you live with this?

Santa Barbara Beauty In The Eyes of This Beholder

O.K. - I recently cleansed my system by ranting about the ugly stuff, the butt-ugly stuff and the fugly stuff that pervades this otherwise beautiful city. It's way too easy to find good examples of really bad stuff, then rip a few hundred words on the keyboard. Now I'm not saying I feel any guilt about it, but I've challenged myself to find something nice to say, because there truly are some stunning plantings, buildings and garden artifacts to be grateful for.

So on the heels of the real Santa Barbara Beautiful Awards bestowed last week at the Lobero Theater, here is my version of what floats my boat. I laid out some simple ground rules: grab my trusty little Nikon CoolPics camera, leave for work on foot a few minutes early, and find those special places and things that just seem to get my endorphins pumping. Oddly, many of the same images that caught my eye have been featured at the Edhat website over the years. Guess that great artists think alike.

The Fountain at Micheltorena and State:

How fortunate are we to have such a prominent piece of private property preserved for the public? I don't know the history of this space, but the generosity of its original owner is, for me, like having our own Andrew Carnegie bestowing his philanthropy on the city. But in this case it's a glorious fountain, a graceful canopy of Coral Trees and the immaculate grounds below.

A few steps down the State Street and just being kissed by golden morning rays is one of my favorite facades.

There's something about the simplicity of the pattern on the diamond-shaped medallions that thrills me. It's the same restraint I often unsuccessfully seek in designing a garden - the willingness to totally commit to one simple idea and to state it boldly.

My favorite Agave sets down roots at the local mortuary parking lot--State and Sola.

Not quite sure who the designer was, but I know that local landscape contractor Debbie Shaw was involved in the installation a few years back. The plant combinations work very nicely, but the ultimate pairing is Agave vilmoriniana (Octopus Agave) and Sencecio mandraliscae (Blue Chalk Fingers). They kind of make me wonder if Georgia O'Keefe was also doing genetic engineering on desert succulents.

Three great finds in just a few blocks - then is was slim pickins until I hit the area around the main post office. But I knew where my next quarry lay. Down a lesser known alley (Presidio Avenue) is Jake's Fountain. At least that's what Lin (my spousal support unit) and I dubbed it years ago. Long story, but I had a structural engineering professor who loved all things pachydermian.

Nestled under spreading Tipu trees and flanked by stately Queen palms, the original grace of this fountain is now marred by some pretty fugly netting designed to keep hungry herons and egrets from chomping down the fish that swim in the main pool (not visible in this shot). This is like covering the Mona Lisa with razor wire to prevent it from being stolen, but blocking the beauty of the art. For my money, I'd adopt out the fish and restore the fountain to its unfettered glory.

Last on this list is a well-known architectural gem - the Meridian Studios, designed by none other than George Washington Smith and Carleton Winslow. This complex of offices and artist studio were added to the historic Lugo adobe in the mid-twenties.

The scale of the buildings and the distinctive coloration is a well-known landmark downtown. There's nothing like it that I've seen in my travels, and is just one of those places you bring out-of-town guests to show them how much cooler SB is than wherever they came from. I'll never pass up a chance to walk down this block of De la Guerra St. to take a quick peek at the narrow courtyard, worn bricks and brilliant wrought iron work.

Nuff for now...just wanted to show that I can be counted on to see not only the incredible absurdity of what some people do in the name of design, but also show proper respect for those special places that make Santa Barbara such a unique place to live.

Dawn of the Carnivorous Babies of Lotusland!

One of the most sustainable things that can happen to your garden sounds a little like a zombie movie. I’m talking about little babies eating grown-ups. As they say in Hollywood, here’s the story treatment. Santa Barbara being so close to Hollywood, I’ll give it my best shot.

Just before dawn, as an waning moon sets over the gnarled and twisted trees, a barely visible white oval, perched on a slender filament, slowly splits open, revealing the hideous baby within. (Pretty spooky so far, eh?). Barely newborn and craving its first meal, this grotesque creature prowls for a living prey. (O.K., now I’M getting creeped out.) The sun breaks the horizon and the creature’s neighbor begins to stir. Suddenly aware that a terrible fate is about to befall it, the neighbor, disoriented, attempts to escape, but it’s too late. It becomes baby’s first meal and the taste of living flesh is forever imprinted in its young mind. Sorry. Not flesh; make that “chitinous exoskeleton.”

Gotcha! You were picturing something like the Gerber baby, but with a hideous misshapen mouth. Nope. Just our friend the lacewing larva, out for a quick snack, biting through the luscious, crunchy surface of a destructive mealybug.

I’ve known for a long time that beneficial insects beat out toxic pesticide sprays any day. That’s why it’s usually rare to hear anyone complain about ladybugs in their gardens. But my visit to Lotusland yesterday helped fill in the blanks. Owen Dell and I were taping a new segment for our TV show, Garden Wise Guys, at Ganna Walska’s Lotusland insectary and butterfly garden. Lotusland has been pesticide-free for years, and their insectary gardens are strategically placed to offer good habitat for good guys.

Virginia Hayes joined us on camera on very short notice and shared some very cool information with us. Virginia is not only Lotusland’s curator, but also writes a delightful weekly column for the Santa Barbara’s weekly Independent chock full of great garden info.

We stumbled through a few hours of taping and will probably end up with about 5 minutes of information and madness. No, not fair--I stumbled, Owen nailed it, and Virginia was as smooth as silk. But what I learned in those few hours should be shared with all of you.

Here’s a quick preview of what you’ll learn when this segment airs in mid-fall. We hope to add one more good reason for you to abandon the use of toxic chemicals in your landscape and adopt a more sustainable model for your maintenance.

First, beneficial insects come in all shapes and sizes, but what most have in common is that they are first attracted to your garden by a source of food (generally nectar-bearing flowers), then take up residence to lay eggs. When the babies hatch out, they’re the ones that eat the larva and adult pests in your garden. If you get this part right, you have an endless supply of garden helpers.

Next, the more diverse your offerings, the more diverse will be the range of beneficial insects. The tiny good guys generally seek out small flat flowers that have their sweet nectar within easy reach (native Buckwheat, parsley, carrots), whereas the dudes and dudettes with long “drinking straw” feeding tubes can slurp nectar out of deeper tubular flowers, like the plants in the mint family (sage, lavender, Lamb’s ear).

To be sure they will set up housekeeping and hang around to feast, be sure there’s some dense cover. Planting a few of the big ornamental grasses works well and they look great year round.

I continually extol the virtues of mulch as a way to keep down weeds and conserve soil moisture, but it’s got an equally important role. The insects that inhabit your decomposing mulch can also act as a food source during certain parts of an insect’s life cycle. So keep that mulch layer nice and thick and you’ll get even more benefit!

For more information about Lotusland's Best Management Practicices, click over to their site.

With all the big Hollywood film industry folks that live around here, maybe this blog will get me my first horror flick screenwriting job. Hey, I guy can hope!

Nominations for Santa Barbara Not-So-Beautiful Awards

It’s about time for Santa Barbara Beautiful to issue their awards for all the great commercial building, residential, and landscape projects that continue to make our hometown such a fabulous place to live. SBB is all about shining a well-deserved spotlight on the property owners, designers, contractors and maintenance personnel who make the extra effort. We owe SBB a debt of gratitude for continually raising the bar and for providing funding to worthy beautification projects.

Out of necessity, or maybe kindness, they do not have an evil twin organization to rant about the aesthetic blight perpetrated upon the community by folks who plant and tend some of the landscapes we are daily subjected to. These are the tortured trees, chaotic colors, and hacked hedges that make me want to fly over with a napalm drop and put us out of our collective misery.

Here are my two main beefs…

1) People (out of ignorance, not malice) put plants in places they have no business being planted. If a plant is genetically imprinted to grow twenty feet high and twenty feet across, don’t put it in a 6” deep window box. That casts the die and assures unnecessary butchery for the live of the plant. Worse, some folks consider the pruning of a plant to be an artistic endeavor on par with avant garde sculpture.

2) Just ‘cause you own a smelly, obnoxious, gas-powered, pollution-belching hedge trimmer doesn’t mean you have to use it on every plant in the garden. And if you do whip it out, how about creating a somewhat natural form out of the plants you assault?

So permit me to offer the 1st Annual Santa Barbara Not-So-Beautiful Awards for Absurd Horticulture. I’m seeking your nominations. Here are the guidelines and a few pictorial examples to get you started. Leave your nominations as comments at the end of this post…

Category: Best Use of Inappropriate Technology To Perform Needless Work

This award will go to the Plant Janitor who has apparently never visited a real garden or ventured into the natural environment. Note the avoidance of the term “gardener” as this lofty title is reserved for those who recognize that plants are living things, that each has its own particular growth habits and cultural needs, and that, when properly selected and placed, can exist quite well with no reshaping from anyone, thank you very much.

Example...


Category: Most Absurd Location To Plant A Bougainvillea

Most Bougies fall into the category of aggressive, thorny, don’t-mess-with-me brambles that will take over a football field if left alone. Their allure, however, is their delightful color, imparted by bracts (not actually flowers) that range from purest white to copper, red, purple, and pink. It’s that beautiful color that makes folks plant them anywhere, regardless of the torturous abuse needed to subdue them in the ridiculous spaces we force them to occupy. It’s NOT a freakin’ petunia folks! Furthermore, when you slice them and dice them, you’re cutting off the tips that produce the color. Smooth move! So lemme know where the most absurd examples reside.

Example...


Category: Abused Plant Most Likely To Be Featured In A Dr. Seuss Illustration

How far can a plant janitor stray from the inherent form of a plant before we lose all connection with Mother Nature? How misguided and unobservant does one need to be to create the Twilight-Zone tableaus we find dotting the landscapes of Santa Barbara. When does it make more sense to throw some plastic coat hangers in a furnace, pull them out and shove them in the ground? You know they're out there—now go find them.

Example...


I think that’s enough to get you started. If you think of other categories, send them along and maybe we’ll try another round. In the meantime, while you’re looking for candidates, keep your eyes on the road—wouldn’t want to lose a REAL gardener.

Santa Barbara County Hort Society Tour

Plants! Where would we be without them? We’d be hungry, breathing toxic gases, sporting various sun-related skin conditions, and thoroughly perplexed with our irrational urge to visit the garden center on beautiful weekends.

I’m in a minor panic at the moment, sitting here at the keyboard putting together my thoughts before taking an enthusiastic group from the Santa Barbara County Horticultural Society (founded in 1869—who said we don’t have our stuff together?) through the Thayer’s garden. No offense to my other clients, but that’s still my fave rave of all the places I’ve done over the decades.

Who joins the Hort Society? Not to generalize too much, but it’s folks who just plain love plants—weird ones (the plants, not the people, although…) rare ones, drop-dead-gorgeous ones, odd ones, fat ones, skinny ones, plants that climb on rocks. Knowing from my own temperament, sometimes the possession of the plant overwhelms the necessity of fitting it into the overall design. “I just HAVE TO HAVE IT! I can always move it later” is the primal brain response from somewhere deep in the cortex.

I know I’ll be asked to “address” the folks before we turn them loose in the garden. So what gem can I impart that if they retain nothing else, will make this visit worthwhile? It’s my handy dandy system for taming potential chaos.

A couple of years ago I was asked to create design guidelines for the main meadow area at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. Honored? Stunned? Humbled? You bet. More on that another day.

The key idea was to tame the potential chaos of this grand palette by viewing the entire area as four or five major groupings of plants, each held together with a harmonizing theme.

Huh? Here’s an over simplification, but what if there were 100 varieties of plants to display. Do we combine them alphabetically by genus and species? Not likely. How about by the zip codes of the area in which they commonly occur? All the plants from downtown Santa Barbara’s 93101 would be in one group, the plants that naturally occur on the Mesa in another grouping…nah.

O.K. Back to the four or five major swaths, one with predominantly yellow and golden flowers, another made up of plants with a spiky form, another with gray and silver foliage. From a distance, there would be a sense of order due to the common visual characteristics, but if we move closer into the meadow, we’d see subtle and not so subtle contrasts between the various plants in each grouping.

Within each major block can be associations of plants of different species, but they’d all fit within the common theme. This allows a large variety of plants to be combined while simplifying the overall scale of the bed.

So what about trying this in your own garden, but scaled down to fit the spaces? I think the best example of this approach is the combination in the “Big Sur” garden at the Thayers (pictured above). Aeonium and Echevaria planted in blocks. Each has the same form and structure—flat succulent leaves held in a rosette. But the yellow-green of the slightly more robust Aeonium paired with the gray-green smaller Echevaria create a mass that from a distance, appears to be a single entity. But move in closer and there’s a subtle mix that provides another layer of complexity.

Too similar? I understand your concern, so we sparked things up by backing up that mass with Myer’s Asparagus, the common link in this grouping being the yellow-green foliage that complements the Aeonium, but with a radically different form—in this case, something like Rastafarian dreadlocks heading skyward.

Nuff for now. I can go on and on about how I visualize and compose with plants, but my hope is to give my readers a starting point for taming the one-of-each plantings I see in so many gardens owned by plant fanatics. Round up all the plants you’re thinking of using and see if you can categorize them by some common characteristics. Within those groupings, play with varying degrees of harmony and contrast.

Lemme know if this helps.