Almost Foiled By A Cyclops

All I wanted to do was project some PowerPoint slides of planting combinations on the screen and teach my eager students to become brilliant designers. I had spent an hour picking out images that range from simple "harmony / contrast" studies to more complex garden ideas.

But instead, I was lured into a bloody battle between man and machine. Chaos erupted as I tried to get the goddamn computer to "see" the shiny cyclopean creature clinging to the ceiling, motionless, but whirring with delight. Step one, turn on computer; step two, turn on projector - zip, nothin', just 'HITACHI' in block letters on the screen. "Crap!" I muttered, barely audible to the class.

Okay, we'll just reverse the order of ops: Shut down projector, shut down computer. Step one: turn on projector; step two....... "DAMN! Come on, this is the high point of tonight's class!"

One knowledgeable student offers, "Press the F3 key!"

"No," offers another, "it's F7."

"No," thinks me, it's FU. One classmate suggests we all just gather around the 14" monitor that's connected to the computer at the lectern. So's I plugs in me trusty thumb-drive and the projector springs to life.

"What did you do?" everyone asked. Damned if I know. Here are a few of the images I showed them with a sprinkle of commentary. I'm feeling like a teacher today.

Green and Green
The pic at the top of this blog is a tight shot of dark green mondo grass (Ophiopogon japonicus) sharing the frame with golden moneywort (Lyssimachia nummularia 'Aurea'). Harmony? They're both green, one a dark conifer kinda green, the other a glowing disc of chartreuse. Very different leaf forms create the contrast. Nice marriage.

Pushing the Yellow

I love the contrast of forms--the chunky, sculptural agave with its gold slash along the edge and the vining extensions of licorice plant (Helichrysum petiolare 'Morning Light') reaching through. The gold marries the two decidedly different forms

Magic Wands

I pointed out to my students that the big event here is the rhythmic forms of blue lavandin (Lavandula 'Provence') and island alumroot (Heuchera maxima - CA native) rising above the foliage. Each has a small delicate flower, but their color and petal shapes set up a nice dynamic. The creamy alumroot seems so right with the soft lavender flowers.

One more?

Shocking, Simply Shocking!

This one got lots of oohs and aahs. I like killer combos that challenge the students. I had a few volunteers take over the lecture, point out which where contrasting characteristics and where there were harmonious connections. They did pretty well. The dark leaf shrub is Smoke Bush (Cotinus coggygria) and the delicate yellow-green critter is golden tansy (Tanicitum vulgare - not sure of the variety).

The class ended well. No shots were fired, I didn't need to be escorted from the class and everyone thought they'd learned something.

If you're in the Santa Barbara area and want a one-day intensive planting design class, join me at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden on Saturday, April 4. More info at they're website and click on Classes.

Gardening Under the Influence

Here's a link my bi-weekly article at Edhat.com. Though slightly Santa Barbara-centric, it might give you some ideas on how to expand your summer adult-beverage chops while getting your garden tuned up.

Enjoy, and remember - you can be cited for gardening with a blood-alcohol level that exceeds 0.8.

10 Reasons Why I'm Not Going to Do a Top 10 List

Now that I'm writing regularly for three media outlets (Edhat.com, Coastal Woman, and Santa Barbara Homeowner), I have to come up with a lot of ideas for stories. Each has a very different readership and I need to use, as they say in the writing world, a different "voice" for each. So it would be easy to fall back on the tried and true top 10 lists: Billy's Favorite Plants; My 10 Favorite Garden Tools; 10 Ways to Get a Rabid Badger Out of Your Britches, etc. But here are 10 reasons I refuse to take that course...

1. If I tried to list 10 favorite plants, my brain would explode. There are too many and it would give the plants I left off a case of low self-esteem (yes, I'm anthropomorphizing).
2. I'm not fond of the number ten. I've always thought that if humans had four fingers on one hand and three on the other, we wouldn't be celebrating 100 year anniversaries, septi-sesqui-octo-centennials or any of that other base-10 crap. It's just a fluke of the universe that 10 is so damn important to us. I refuse to bestow any great significance on the number 10!
3. TEN are the initials of The Erotic Network, and this is a family show.
4. "Ten is the second discrete biprime (2.5) and the second member of the (2.q) discrete biprime family." Someone actually wrote this at Wikipedia. That's strange enough, but the amazing thing is it also means something to someone else. I wouldn't know where to begin deciphering that sentence. I still count on my fingers. I'm so embarrassed, I want nothing to do with that 'T' number. I'm not worthy.
5. I went to Home Depot yesterday trying to stimulate my story-writing lobe and could not find 10 plants I would willing use in a landscape design. I'm fed up with same frigging impatiens, petunias and lollipopped Marguerites I sold when I worked in nurseries in the 70s.
6. That's all I can think of...see, I told you I couldn't do it.

Mars Soil Capable of Sustaining Plant Live...however,

I was walking Biff the Wonder Spaniel, leash in one hand, LA Times in the other. Yes, I'm that nimble. On page A14 (Friday, June 27, 2008) was an article about "flabbergasted" scientists who were analyzing the potential of Martian soil. But what the story didn't delve into was the implications for professional garden coaches. No surprise there!

The Phoenix lander at the Martian pole has just analyzed a sugar-cube sized soil sample and the business implications for my landscape architectural consulting services are somewhat mixed. With a surprisingly alkaline pH ranging between 8 and 9, the variety of ornamental plants that can be grown will be similar to what I'm already used to here in SoCal. Lots of Mediterranean plants fall in that range and that's what I'm all about. The article only discussed edibles, indicating that asparagus and green beans would be fine, but strawberries would be hard pressed to thrive. I can extrapolate from this information that my plant palette potential will be most comfortable.

Phoenix also detected magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride "all of which are useful in organic processes." However (and this is where my business model starts to fray a wee bit) there are no organic compounds. No carbon-based nothing. After doing a little number crunching and factoring the rising cost of gas, I can't imagine how I'd ship enough compost and manure to remedy this essential missing piece.

One more glitch: I usually charge 50% of my consulting rate as travel time for out-of-town clients. With flight times ranging from 6 to 9 months (not to mention the billable hours sucked up while trying to find parking at the airport), I'm wondering if there will be enough Martians of means to make this worthwhile.

I think I'll do some more market studies before I upload my ad to Craigslist.

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?

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!

Dinosaurs Get Thirsty Too

Most paleontologists agree that those feathered creatures that flit around our gardens and occasionally compromise visibility through our windshields are descendents of ancient dinosaurs. So I’ll just take it on faith that they’re correct.

With the exception of some neighborhood crows that wake me up, I’m pretty chill with boids in the ‘hood. I’m not a binocular-toting birder, but from a purely functional garden point of view, they’re a bonus. They eat insects--the big raptors will even dispense gophers and other pests. Hurray, I say!

I’m all about having our landscapes appeal to as many senses as possible, so let’s add their color, movement, and songs. So what’s not to like?

My favorite landscape design is lovingly tended by a couple of avid birders. The small garden is a veritable airport terminal for guests who fly in from who knows where. A custom iron “tree” of feeders is dead center off the patio. All forms of hummingbird feeders hang from fences.

But my favorite feature is the custom fountain crafted from an old Maytag washer. The white enameled exterior was crafted into giant flat stair-stepped leaves where water trickles from one to the next. Birds of all sorts alight on the edges of the leaves, take a gulp, splash around in the lower pool, towel off, dust on some talcum powder and off they go. And you can see it from inside the house as well.

The point is (I know, the suspense was killing you) these guys need some help this summer. Santa Barbara had super-low rainfall, so there are fewer natural fresh watering holes. Please do your part. If there’s somewhere in your garden you can provide fresh water (not algae-ridden primordial soup) that would be great. And you don’t have to be in a drought-stricken area to look out for our buddies either. It’s just a good thing to do.

One more thang. Plant diverse gardens with lots of local native plants ‘coz them little dinos gotta eat too!

More info? Check with your local Audobon folks.

Surrendering Plants To The Enemy

Ethical Dilemma: Is it acceptable to leave healthy, beautiful plants in the hands of the devil when you move?

Santa Barbara—where the median price of a house left $1,000,000 behind years ago. Where 18 years ago, we rented a duplex formerly occupied by my mentor, Bob Cunningham, the first landscape architect who hired me (that’s another story). It wasn’t exactly a botanic garden—some fun stuff tucked into a mass of papyrus under the windows; a parking strip choked with Bermuda grass; high Eugenia hedges and a stunnning 150 year old Coast Live Oak that took out the carport in a wind storm (car was on the street—thanks Lin!)

But I digress (‘cause that’s what I do). Starting with a 10 s.f. demolition foray into the land of Bermuda grass, requested by my son Ben, we gradually began landscaping this rental with inexpensive and found plants until it looked almost exactly like what I tell my students and clients not to do. One of this, one of that—entertaining my fancy to experiment with whatever caught my eye (see Saturday Morning Syndrome blog). However, I DID create planting schemes using color, texture, foliage contrast and all that stuff that’s essential.

The 5’ strip along the driveway is now festooned with a stunning Princess Flower (Tibouchina heteromalla--see photo above), a prehistoric looking Honey Bush (Melianthus major) and Canna Lilies (don’t plant them under the eaves near your bedroom window if you don’t have rain gutters – they make FABULOUS percussion instruments when the water pours off the roof).

So we’ll be moving about two houses away in a few weeks, to a beautiful more modern place, but there is even LESS room to garden. Perhaps that’s a good thing—I’m now an ‘X’-shaped candle burning at all four ends so how can I care for a garden? Family, day job, trying to launch a new web-based business with the other Garden Wise Guy (Owen), my band, TV show, teaching (hey, that’s more than an X-shaped candle – have to invent a new letter with more pointy things). Who’s got time?

Here’s the dilemma—the owner here has a mow, hoe, and blow gardener who just seems to think every plant desires a hedge-induced box shape to look it’s best. If I leave everything to the Marquis de Sade it will be like selling my kids into slavery. Perhaps a “dig it” party for my horticultural friends, where everyone adopts these worthy chlorophyll machines and finds them a new home?

But THAT takes an organizational effort and I gotta move. The worst part is that since I’m only moving two houses away, I’ll have to see all those sad plants every time I walk by, asking “Daddy, why did you leave me here with that bad man?”

Gotta think about this.

Where do roses fit in?

I’ve been invited to speak at the Santa Barbara Rose Society on June 14 and had to think about how my approach to sustainable landscape design connects to folk who are ga-ga over roses. I’ve never been an enthusiast but can understand the passion. But on the face of it, roses aren’t the first thing that pops into my head when I think about plants that can more or less go it alone.

So I think my approach will be to expound on the mystical art of landscape design in general, and explain how it’s in everyone’s best interest to adopt the principles of sustainability. Sustainability isn't just about giving stuff up. There’s a place for exotic plants like roses, as long as you put them where they have the greatest chance of thriving with the least input of harmful stuff.

I’ll let you know how this one turns out. Maybe there’ll be a few converts out there ready to catch religion!