I found this interesting take on the seasons in the 2/11/10 New York Review of Books, from Christian Carryl’s review of Robert Walser’s The Assistant. Carryl quotes this excerpt from the book:
“And the world, was it changing? No. A wintry image could superimpose itself upon the world of summer, winter would give way to spring, but the face of the earth remained the same. It put on masks and took them off again, it wrinkled and cleared its huge, beautiful brow, it smiled or looked angry, but remained always the same. It was a great lover of make-up, it painted its face now more brightly, now in paler hues, now it was glowing, now pallid, never quite what it had been before, constantly it was changing a little, and yet remained always vividly and restlessly the same.”
Mr. Walser, a Swiss writer unfamiliar to me before reading the review, spent the last 20 years of his life in a mental institution. Always comforted by long walks, one day he simply slipped out unnoticed into a snowstorm.
Another view of Western Hills, gunnera unfurling pondside, “vividly and restlessly the same.”
The paths of the garden at Western Hills, which I visited a couple weeks back, were crowded with the mauve blossoms of self-seeding honesty, the biennial Lunaria annua. Because it was ubiquitous, I took no photos but of course now sorely wished I had. MB Maher took this photo, which still doesn’t begin to convey the crush of mauve-flowering honesty round the bend of nearly every path.
I wished I had taken a photo of the carpets of lunaria because the color of the flower is so definitively mauve. And mauve, I just learned, was the first chemically created color. (No, I never took high school chemistry but was shunted into the girls-only ghetto of the clerical courses. And this was in the 1970s!)
At a time when the British Empire was being seriously inconvenienced by malaria, a boy of 18, William Henry Perkin, stumbled into this seminal link between chemistry and industry in 1856, when his experiment to discover a synthetic quinine went awry but inadvertently resulted in the first permanent chemical dye. Following Queen Victoria’s lead, the Victorians draped themselves in mauve.
Despite its historical significance, it would surprise me if anyone actively sought out this color to include in their gardens. For one thing, as colors go, it’s a bit of a non-starter. Does anyone really desire the color or just tolerate it for the sake of the useful plant on which it blooms? ( e.g. Erysimum ‘Bowle’s Mauve’)
But mauve also seems to carry the whiff of Victorian drawing rooms, aspidistras in copper pots on the entryway table alongside calling cards of visitors for tea later in the afternoon. In other words, mauve has been accused of being old-fashioned. But for next year, I’m thinking how well mauve sets off all the yellows and tender white flowers of spring. And there are dark-leaved and variegated varieties of lunaria worth searching seed catalogues for too. These are the kind of easy (some might say weedy but not me), billowy plants that give a garden body. A rather elusive concept, but the shorthand would be that which separates a garden from a landscape installation.
I found this April 5 photo, year unknown but within the last few years, of some lunaria blooming in my garden, to the right in the photo. This supposedly easy naturalizer for shade hasn’t found conditions here to its liking….yet.
Fine. California Poppy Day. But there’s a lot more Far Side of the World in the name Eschscholtzia.
No, Paul Bettany hasn’t played the role of Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz, at least that I’m aware of. That’s Bettany portraying the physician and naturalist Dr. Stephen Maturin from the movie Master and Commander, positions Eschscholtz held on his two voyages. The stories are glancingly similar: science, adventure, and strong friendships sailing aboard a tall ship to The Far Side of the World, before radar, satellites, or GPS, when there was still world left to be explored.
Because April 6 is California Poppy Day, I spent a few minutes searching for the great deeds of the naturalist Eschscholtz (an interminable length of time in the era post-Internet, but imagine how time passed on those sailing voyages!) but there was little to be found. I was certain he bore a close resemblance to Bettany’s sexy naturalist in Master and Commander. As it turns out, not really, but still handsome in his own way. He was only 37 when he died but had traveled the world by sail twice, 1815 to 1818 and 1823 to 1826. We’re talking circumnavigation.
Eschscholtz sailed on Otto von Kotzebue’s scientific expedition to California and the greater Pacific in 1815 to 1818 aboard the Russian ship Rurik with a crew of 27 men, one of whom was his friend Adelbert von Chamisso, the German botanist. It was Chamisso, who was also a poet, who named our state flower after his friend. So the mouthful of mostly consonants that is the state flower of California has this awkward name because of a friend’s affection. All is forgiven.
Eschscholtzia californica, our golden poppy.
Unlike the friendship of Dr. Stephen Maturin, scientist, and Jack Aubrey, commander, detailed in the movie from Patrick O’Brian’s novel, the friendship of Eschscholtz and Chamisso differed in that they were both scientists. Eschscholtz did name a lupine after his friend, Lupinus chamissonis.
“”…It is during the months of spring that this queen of California flowers holds her especial court….It is a true poppy, a member of the same drowsy family with the immemorial flower of sleep and the Shirleys of our garden. Our Spanish people have several names for it, as ‘torosa’ and ‘toronja’….and the name it shares with other poppies, ‘dormidera,’ the sleepy one, because of its habit of closing its petals at the approach of evening, as though dropping off to sleep…”
– Charles Francis Saunders, With the Flowers and Trees of California, 1914″
Apparently, this poppy beat out another member of the poppy family, Romneya coulteri, or the Matilija Poppy, for the title of state flower. Romneya got zero votes. Personally, I’d have been hard-pressed to choose between the two.
I’m reprising a 2/23/10 photo of a local wildflower meadow because I have no California poppies to show from my garden. I planted two ‘Apricot Chiffon’ varieties of eschscholtzia, one of which died soon after planting and the other of which produced far more leaves than flowers, no doubt a consequence of soil too rich for these wildflowers.
I hope all this history hasn’t caused anyone to become dormidera (the sleepy one).
“Captain, your ship is salvage!” Possibly the most chilling words any ship’s captain will ever hear. Maritime law dating back to Byzantine times allows a ship and its cargo to be claimed by anyone, acting voluntarily (not in an official capacity), who rescues a disabled ship from serious peril from which the vessel or property could not have been rescued without such assistance. The laws of salvage will be dusted off and scrutinized to clarify the horrific event now unfolding in the aftermath of a Chinese coal freighter running off course over 40 miles and slamming full speed into Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
Must be why I have salvage on my mind today. Well, that disaster and the recent San Francisco Flower & Garden show, where salvage was a big star.
The Garden Route Company’s prize-winning garden “Re-Generation The World Without Us” has provided a possible solution to my currently trellis-less grape vine:
The grape vine needs trellising to reach the top of the pergola. When the trellis is in place, I can’t see the garden beyond the grape vine. Some years I like this sense of enclosure, but this year I want to try something new. I’m thinking lengths of chain hung from the pergola might be the answer. The grape vines clamber up the chains but won’t obscure the view of the garden beyond. The vine is leafing out and won’t wait for a trellis much longer. I’m excited to find out if the rusted chain and grape leaf have anything interesting to say to each other.
The use of salvage at the SF garden show was tied to themes of repurposing, recyling, and as a reminder that although it is our dreams that give raw materials shape and purpose, cut stone and forged steel will outlive us and become infused with new dreams. It is this latter use of salvage that brings such pathos to a garden. The bilge pump of a ship scuttled long ago now cradles a votive candle:
San Francisco has an excellent salvage yard, Building REsources, which we paid a visit the week of the show. They tumble glass and old pottery on site, so buying in bulk from them if you can haul it away is ideal.
I didn’t bring home any tumbled glass this trip. What really floats my boat are the discarded cuts of marble and stone that make wonderful table tops.
The shape, color, and texture of salvage will draw your eye, but the layers of history and half-remembered story will feed your garden’s soul and set it dreaming.
Joseph the cat in his current favorite spot, the grasslands, his personal Serengeti just outside the kitchen door. Comfort creature that he is, he prefers his grasslands have nice dry pavers to sit or lie on, or on which to occasionally just pose for me. (An old friend was a master of the malaprop, and when intending to say “creature comforts” he instead transposed the words and uttered “comfort creatures”; we immediately recognized the usefulness and merit of this phrase.)
One of my favorite spots now is anywhere I can see the Chinese Fringe Tree, Chionanthus retusus, almost in full bloom. What a pair of comfort creatures Joseph and I make every spring.
If you saw 8-foot tall daisies planted to the very edges of the geometric template that usually holds a suburban front yard lawn, in an upscale community in San Francisco, wouldn’t you assume the owners of the house were a friendly sort, happy to answer knocks on the door inquiring about their forest of unidentified daisies? If so, like me, you’d be wrong. Gardeners see the world through chlorophyll-tinted glasses and can often make such erroneous assumptions.
These towering daisies with small, tough, leathery leaves were seen in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco on March 24, 2010. The leaves were very stiff, almost succulent-like.
Across the street from the daisy forest house, a friendly gentleman tending an apple tree wanted to show me the tibouchina he just planted, and we chatted for a few moments. He said his friend, the owner of the daisy house, would love to hear from us, to go ahead and knock, which we did. It was difficult to politely excuse myself from this garrulous fellow, which seemed a positive indicator for a friendly reception at the daisy house. But it probably just wasn’t a good time for them. No ID was given, but they wouldn’t mind if we took some photos.
After this brief exchange held from a narrow crack in the doorway, the daisy house did send out a young male to the gate where the driveway meets the house, to watch us photograph the daisies, which I hadn’t noticed until the back of my neck started burning from the glare. I tried chatting him up, too, asking if he knew what kind of daisies they had allowed to fill with such ebullient profusion the entire front yard. “Nope,” was the one-word response. Not very chatty today, I guess. Perhaps they’re just fatigued by endless inquiries over the daisies. Attempting the horticultural equivalent of The Sartorialist was not as easy as I thought. Of course, any time there’s a door involved, the dynamics are much different. Out in the city versus at home in your sanctuary plays into it as well.
But at the end of the street was this lovely planting, with cobalt blue Lithodora diffusa and yucca in the foreground, leucadendron and ceanothus in the back. Only in San Francisco would lithodora look as happy as lobelia, or maybe lithodora just can’t take the alkalinity of SoCal soils. A successful Hortorialist entry. (That just sounds wrong.)
We headed back to our rooms at the Elements Hotel in the Mission district of San Francisco, really a hostel, no frills, but clean and a great (cheap) base of operations, then walked to Regalito for a wonderful meal (Tamales de Puerco for me). Just some tips for travelers to next year’s garden show.
(Edited 4/3/10 to thank Kelly/Floradora for kindly providing the identification of Senecio glastifolius to the UGC.)
On the Agave Walk this cerise Chilean showoff opens its first flower of spring. Zone 8-10.
The calandrinia sprawls onto the Agave Walk and is cut back by half to allow foot traffic. Even with this heavy-handed treatment it flowers prolifically all summer long. Greeny-blue succulent leaves, a tough plant for full sun, best with minimal supplemental irrigation to contain the tendency to sprawl. Its vigor matches that of Senecio mandraliscae, in that they both will overrun detailed succulent plantings. These types of aggressive sprawlers are perfect to edge pathways, where you can cut as much or as little back as you like, depending on if you’re in an expansive mood and welcoming visitors all summer or must keep your head down and work through the season, in which case you let the sprawlers loose to take over the pathways. I’m kidding, of course (sort of.)
I love the way most gardeners are instinctive cartographers of their little worlds, giving imposing-sounding names like the “Agave Walk” to a stretch of walkway no bigger than 10 feet long, 4 feet wide, named for the potted agaves that have been congregating here, mostly so I can watch the interplay of solidity and movement the agaves take part in with the perennials and grasses planted just behind the pots.
Just behind the agave walk in the main border, the castor bean ‘New Zealand Red’* is starting to elbow its way out of the pack. Ricinus has naturalized in Southern California in waste areas, so I’m keeping a careful eye on this one all summer. What broke down my resistance was this variety, the best red I’ve seen so far.
The story of Western Hills can’t be fully told by an outsider, of course, so this will in no way be an attempt at a complete history. The former nursery and now endangered 3-acre garden have woven through Northern Californian garden history and the careers and fortunes of San Francisco Bay Area designers for the last 50 years.
Indeed, at its peak, obsessive gardeners from all over the world traveled here. I merely made biannual pilgrimages from Southern California beginning in the early 1980’s, armed with notebooks and plant lists, never drumming up the nerve to speak to its owners, Lester Hawkins and Marshall Olbrich, who I’d often see on the pathways absorbed in giving tours to the impassioned gardeners that found their way to this remote garden in the hills of Occidental, California, seemingly as far west as is possible to venture without falling into the ocean. Bodega Bay, immortalized in Hitchcock’s The Birds, is just a few miles to the west.
When the pursuit of plants was still an adventure and not a mouse click, when one smuggled plants in suitcases from Europe because there was no U.S. source — a time hard to imagine, before Heronswood, Plant Delights, before the Internet — in this barren horticultural landscape the rare plants nursery at Western Hills became the beacon that guided me to a fecund world brimming over with a stunning riches of plant wealth, a world I returned to again and again for over 20 years.
Like all lost worlds, it’s nearly impossible to imagine a time when, for example, now-common plants like diascias, euphorbias and penstemons were rarities unavailable in U.S. commerce, only written of in English garden books. These were plants eminently suitable for my zone 10 garden but frustratingly out of reach.
It was this kind of plant, perfectly adapted for use in my garden in the Mediterranean climate of Los Angeles, that I brought home by the dozens from Western Hills Nursery in the trunk of the car, spilling over into the back seat, occasionally tied to the roof of the car, or on the floor between our feet.
What I was mostly oblivious to, however, largely because I had no place for them in my small garden, were the woody shrubs and trees that were being carefully selected and placed in the garden at Western Hills, inspired by the natural planting styles espoused by such horticulturalists as the 19th Century’s William Robinson.
The garden at Western Hills (USDA Zone 8, Sunset Zone 14/15/) slowly evolved over the decades of my visits, and as I walked its paths so many years ago, scouring the understories of its trees and shrubs for the next perennial or subshrub to shoehorn into my garden, I often neglected to bring my gaze upward. It seemed only just last week, wandering its abandoned paths in stunned amazement, did I truly apprehend the full scope of their horticultural ambitions.
Like all good plantsmen, Hawkins and Olbrich were steeped in the garden writers and makers of the past, absorbed their principles, then added their own unique adaptations, tempered by their own character, time, and place.
Ahead of its time, the garden today now has a sleepy, magical quality. You will not find intricate hardscape or elaborately paved sitting areas, just simple tracks through an astonishing array of plants, from spring bulbs of the tiniest stature, up through shrubs of infinite variety of leaf, flower and berry, and now the mature canopy of rare trees, many of which have required the assistance of an arborist to identify.
This timeless garden is literally poised at the edge of oblivion, of being wiped from horticultural memory.
If there is such a thing as perfect horticultural pitch, Hawkins and Olbrich were blessed with it. The complex perennial plantings they loved to engineer have not entirely survived the neglect, as is naturally the case with detailed perennial plantings, which need constant thinning and rejuvenation, but what remains has a purity of purpose, creating broad, rich carpets of tough and adaptive plants like phormium, astelia, phlomis, furcraea, eryngiums, echium, gunnera, linaria, hellebores, geraniums, lychnis, pulmonarias, symphytums, myosotis, lamium, ferns of all kinds, dicentra, euphorbias. It is an outdoor master horticultural class, espousing and vivifying the axiom “right plant, right place.”
In the face of such horticultural zeal, three acres was woefully inadequate, and the mature garden now needs careful editing and pruning to keep sight lines clear and growing conditions ideal.
After the deaths of Hawkins and Olbrich, the nursery and garden were bequeathed to and run by nursery associate Maggie Wych in 1991 and then sold in 2006. The new owners Robert Stansel and Joseph Gatta, had ambitious plans to maintain and preserve the garden and reopen the nursery, but due to the recession have had to make the painful decision to allow the property to lapse into foreclosure.
In its present mature state, the garden would seem to represent a maintenance challenge far beyond the abilities of a single owner, and a consortium is contemplated as a solution. The Garden Conservancy is compiling a photographic record of the garden and hoping to ensure its “long-term preservation.” MB Maher and I were at Western Hills in the early, slightly rainy morning of March 26, 2010, to add to the photographic record.
The Garden Conservancy has put together a rich history of Western Hills on its website, with links to newspaper articles and also the horticultural essays written by Lester Hawkins for Pacific Horticulture. Like those they admired and whose writings they absorbed, including Messrs. Robinson, E. A. Bowles, and Graham Stuart Thomas, we can add the names of Lester Hawkins and Marshall Olbrich to the pantheon of horticulturists still relevant to us today. Their legacy is not in doubt. If only their beloved and astounding garden can be preserved as well.
Warm thanks to Robert Stansel (who identified this camellia as ‘Dark Knight’).
Postscript to the nursery’s future under new owners here.
Among the minor reasons I took up blogging was to simply make an effort to retain plant names again. I’ve got shelves of old garden notebooks, in which I kept copious notes of plants desired, plants purchased, when they were planted in the garden, lists of seeds, when they were sown, nurseries, gardens to visit, etc., a habit I no longer keep that seems as far away and unattainable now as legible handwriting. I console myself with the theory that it’s the Internet’s fault, that since there’s so much information immediately available my plant sleuthing skills and memory are withering away, and that this is what’s responsible for the demise of my record keeping. But I do worry that I’m subconsciously viewing plants now as interchangeable shapes and colors, spiky or round, shade or sun. I much prefer being on a first-name basis with them.
There was a time I could stand before any plant in my garden and know its name by genus, species, and variety, but so often now when I stand before a plant there’s just a blankness. Here’s a case in point. This little abutilon has so much to recommend it. True, the flowers are small and do not possess the dramatic shape and coloring of some of the megapotamicum varieties, but the overall proportions of the plant — leaf, flower, and size — work so well together. It is not excessively scandent, with branches splaying out and dragging along the ground like so many abutilons end up behaving, but has a compact, bushy shape.
I was sure its name had something to do with avocados, like ‘Guacamole,’ but apparently not, so it shall remain nameless. If I should lose it, I’ll be unable to replace it. And when I give cuttings to friends, there will be that awkward moment, like not knowing someone’s last name when you introduce them: You’ll love this plant! It’s Abutilon _______________. The hybridizer’s handiwork will also regrettably go unacknowledged.
In my defense is the simple fact that this is an extraordinary time to be a gardener, with easy access to many great specialty and general plant nurseries. In an attempt to break the bad nameless habit, I’m trying out a “Recent Plant Purchases” page on the blog to keep a running list of new plant acquisitions. This makes me very, very happy.
Driving up from Los Angeles, about seven hours, Highway 5 through the Central Valley. On the CD player, Vampire Weekend, interspersed with a couple old novels on audio, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and, yes, Moby Dick. Call me excited, Ishmael.
The West Coast’s main garden shows, the San Francisco and Seattle Northwest Garden Show, gave us a bit of a cliffhanger last year when the current owner called it quits. A buyer finally stepped in, so the relief to garden show junkies was palpable when both shows got the green light for spring 2010. The SF show moved venue out of SF to San Mateo. I went up with photographer MB Maher, whose vastly superior photos are still unprocessed, so this is a sprinkling from my camera. (Edited 3/27/10. SeeDirt Du Jour’spost with a slideshow of MB Maher’s photos.) Because previous garden shows always seem to take place in unlit caves, we had picked up some rental lights at Adolph Gasser’s photo equipment shop in SF, but the lights proved to be unnecessary (for a professional anyway), and this year’s venue, though out of the way, was reasonably well-lit.
If there was a theme for the show, it’d be Resistance is Futile. That would be resistance to succulents, which abounded at the show, as exemplified in the giant Borg cube of succulents suspended in a moat by Organic Mechanics in their visual double entendre entitled “The Living Room.” A detail of the cube’s gothic doorway and dining tableau within.
From the “Salvaged Creole Jazz Courtyard,” a detail of the fountain, very Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil:
From the same garden, succulents suspended in rebar in a treble and bass motif fence:
In “Re-Generation ‘The World Without Us,'” I was told the armadillo does double duty as a BBQ when you roll back his armored plate.
Detail from the same garden, which was a post-apocalyptic-lite vision vastly different from, say, Mad Max or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Spare and lean, rust and stone, I understand this was the grand prize winner:
Detail of steps:
At the other end of the spectrum from spare and lean was the cast concrete wonderland by Keeyla Meadows, “The Habitat Dance with a Red Snake.” At first glance, I assumed it was an homage to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, but the program describes it as inspired by the endangered San Francisco Garter Snake. Whatever its inspiration, children will be delighted.
Typical for garden shows, most of the display gardens seemed intended to demonstrate the contractor’s facility with hardscape for outdoor sitting and eating areas, as in this very traditional treatment:
Those designers daring to exercise restraint, such as Huettl Landscape Architects, stood out amongst the over-the-top displays. “Via Aqua”:
I didn’t make it to the vendor booths, since we were there for the preview and the booths weren’t open yet. I would guess the general gardening public will be pleased with the show, the garden cognoscenti possibly less so, but it’s a solid effort by the new owners. Let’s hope the show continues on next year and attracts more of the talented Bay Area garden designers.
Lastly, a nice touch at the show was fairly diligent plant labeling.
