Hope you find lots of interesting and diverting things to do this week. I’m tending new seedlings and waiting for another seed order to arrive — there’s got to be more empty pots around here somewhere…
clippings 6/22/20
visit to Sculptura Botanica part 2
- what: in-situ installation showcasing botanical-themed ceramic work of Dustin Gimbel
- where: Sherman Library & Gardens
- when: May 15 through September 15, 2020
- lunch and lecture: June 26, 2020, 11:30 a.m. and tour of the exhibit by Dustin Gimbel
- other venues: Dustin will be exhibiting his work in a group show at the Ruth Bancroft Garden Friday in Walnut Creek, California, July 17, 2020
- read Sculptura Botanica part 1 here
Walking, driving, biking all over town, I probably study plants more than people. And it’s not always pretty. In fact, it rarely is. Plants are treated as the green wallpaper background to a city, awkwardly squeezed into the leftover urban spaces after capitalism gets the first pass at choice real estate. It can be dismaying to witness their rough, thoughtless treatment, but there’s some small satisfaction in knowing that gardens are where the payback happens, where plants’ central importance is acknowledged. Gardens are where plants get lifted out of the background and placed center stage, where they’re amassed in new ways to make us gasp, as if to show what just a little clever, sympathetic cooperation between people and the natural world can do.
And apart from their mission of collecting and preserving plants, isn’t a botanical garden’s unspoken message that if we pay a little attention to plants and the life they support, watch how they grow, bloom, and die, extraordinary things can happen? For a lot of us rabid plant fiends, that is enough. Public gardens, however, dealing with a more generalized customer, often add art into the mix to keep things interesting for visitors. Paradoxically, inserting art into public gardens often has the unintended consequence (for me) of relegating plants into the background again, as mere pleasant backdrop for the art work. I found the Sculptura Botanica exhibit currently at the Sherman Library and Gardens the rare exception.
The strength of the exhibit derives from the knowing dialogue between Dustin’s ceramics, which are inspired by a deep understanding of the structure and wonder of plants, his keen spatial sense as a garden designer, and the horticultural expertise of the staff at the Sherman. I thought it was a stunning example of how to integrate art into a public garden without giving the sense that the garden has been temporarily taken over as a display case. The ceramics and the plantings seamlessly work as a hand-in-glove collaboration.
Note: Everyone has to do their own risk analysis about visiting public places during these challenging times, and I can only offer my own risk calculations in that 1) I’m in the target age group for most adverse effects 2) recently post-surgery 3) and carrying the blood type that seems to have more adverse consequences too (negative). Everything I’ve read points to outdoor spaces as holding the least risk, and that has been guiding my behavior these past few months. (“We have very little evidence of outdoor transmission. It’s not zero — there are definitely cases reported — but it’s much, much lower than inside,” says Gretchen Snoeyenbos Newman, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Washington.” WaPo 6/20/20.) I visited on a Tuesday morning, and keeping a healthy distance from other visitors was no problem at all.
And with the increasing realization that, like it or not, all the world is now a garden in a “post-wild” sense, with our species’ influence felt around the globe, horticulturalists and botanists are the heroes we need. Referring to the map above, much applause is given to the following horticultural talent:
- Carol Younger, Senior Horticulturist: Tea Garden, Sun Garden, Central Garden
- Joel Friesen, Horticulturist: Tropical Conservatory, Specimen Shade House
- Dawn Mones, Horticulturist: Tea Garden, Sun Garden, Central Garden
- Tim Chadd, Horticulturist: Formal Garden, Sensory Garden
- Darla Miller, Orchid Curator: Orchid Collection, Tropical Conservatory
- Erin Aguiar, Horticulture Manager: Perennial Beds, Mediterranean Climates Garden
Posted in artists, garden ornament, garden travel, garden visit, inspire me
5 Comments
bloom day June 2020
Typical of my small zone 10 Southern California garden, the month of June is as much subtractive as additive. Gone are the winter-growing annuals like poppies, nicotiana, and umbellifer Orlaya grandiflora, and as the hot dry summer bears down, the outlines of succulents like agaves and aloes once again come to the fore. The kangaroo paws are still prominent verticals, though the reds can start looking a little burnt out and scruffy. Annual coreopsis and cosmos, in pots and the garden, can handle the heat to come, and they’re just about the size of summer daisy a small overplanted garden can handle (no to dahlias, rudbeckias, etc). A 20-degree jump from a short, intense heatwave seared stripes into the cuticle on a couple established agaves, but we’re back into the very tolerable high 70s/low 80s again, at least for this week.
The Helenium puberulum has been lightly blooming since planting last fall, but those stunning leaves are of course from eucomis and are a total cheat — one of two gallons of ‘Sparkling Burgundy’ I dropped into the garden in full sun just before the heat wave. So far I haven’t had success with eucomis in the ground, and I’ve probably grown them in too much shade and/or kept them too dry. These gallons were in a nursery’s remaindered aisle, literally bursting through the pots with multiple bulbs, and since one bulb can go for $20 it was an incredible deal. I think I’ll keep them in pots, maybe divide the two gallons into four gallons in fall.
May Dreams Gardens collects the bloom day reports the 15th of every month.
visit to Sculptura Botanica part 1
- what: in-situ installation showcasing botanical-themed ceramic work of Dustin Gimbel
- where: Sherman Library & Gardens
- when: May 15 through September 15, 2020
- lunch and lecture: June 26, 2020, 11:30 a.m. and tour of the exhibit by Dustin Gimbel
- other venues: Dustin will be exhibiting his work in a group show at the Ruth Bancroft Garden Friday in Walnut Creek, California, July 17, 2020
It seems like a ridiculously short time ago that Dustin Gimbel was asking me, Hey, do you want to take a ceramics class? Was that three years ago? Four years? As a garden designer his schedule is somewhat flexible, but I was still working full time and couldn’t fit it in. From that point on, he’s been experiencing the creative equivalent of brain fever as he’s explored at a breakneck pace the possibilities of ceramics using the visual language of botanicals and in the context of garden design. He’d already done lots of work with concrete molds and other formulations to make bespoke containers and totems, so studying ceramics seemed like a great fit. But the speed at which he’s mastered the craft has been astonishing to witness, and I happily have various iterations of his increasing levels of mastery all around my garden.
In short order his ceramics became available online and at local design shops, and he secured his first show at the Sherman Library & Gardens this May — and then the COVID-19 virus hit and seemingly upended everything. Yet in the uncertainty over how and when to open the show safely, the work behind the scenes went on, planting, trimming and polishing until everything gleams.
The extra amount of time and focus the staff had in fine-tuning the installation and plantings may have been an unintended consequence of the pandemic, but the results all that work produced are ravishing.
The Sherman has done a thorough job of ensuring health and safety of attendees. Order the tickets online, follow distancing recommendations and one-way traffic flow patterns, and you’ll have a fabulous time taking in the collaboration between Dustin and the horticultural staff at the Sherman Gardens that is Sculptura Botanica. For me, the sensory deprivation imposed by COVID-19 and being homebound for months made the experience of walking through the entrance gate similar to the moment when the Wizard of Oz movie shifts from black and white to color. The scale of the Sherman is perfect for the installation, with excitement built and sustained around each new turn in the path. The horticultural talent on view at the Sherman always rewards a visit, but they really rose to this occasion with dense, detailed plantings specifically for this exhibit.
The interplay between the expert plantings and Dustin’s musings on botanical anatomy in clay make for a thoroughly engrossing visit. From every vantage point, the views are enthralling.
I’ll order the photos as closely as possible to the prescribed traffic flow through the garden, starting with the entrance into the central garden with the Pollen Grain Towers. There is a prodigious amount of ceramic work in the show, and this is by no means representative of all of it.
Leaving the main entrance area and Pollen Grain Towers and following the recommended path, you can either enter the tropical conservatory and count the turtles and koi or stay on the path and head into the bromeliad garden.
The next big set piece is the Equisetium Towers centering a veg-planted parterre edged in santolina and possibly a vibrant chartreuse berberis (or a gold-leaved Lonicera nitida).
And I’ll leave you here and finish up the rest of the visit to Sculptura Botanica next week. Have a fine weekend!
Posted in artists, design, garden visit
5 Comments
Sculptura Botanica, Sherman Library & Gardens May-September 2020
I visited Dustin Gimbel’s ceramics exhibition at Sherman Library and Gardens earlier in the week and went crazy with photos. Pure pleasure. I’ll be sharing more next week.
Let’s hope for a slow news cycle this weekend!
Posted in artists, garden visit
3 Comments
oversharing 6/4/20
This post is not about plants, though there are some nice palm trees in the photos by MB Maher. I can tend to overshare sometimes (I got my surgical staples out today!), and this is such a time, so feel free to pass. And I feel like I’ve told this story here before too, and if so, pardon the repetition.
“What if it were your kid?” Through a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, one day it was my French-Irish kid’s turn to be terrified by police. Just one afternoon, and yet the toll a police officer’s gun to the head took on the emotional sturdiness of a happy-go-lucky adolescent boy was a long time in unwinding. In our very mixed neighborhood, a white kid coming home from school and climbing over our locked fence struck an out-of-state visitor across the street as suspicious. When the police responded to the call, it struck them as suspicious too. Surely he didn’t belong in this neighborhood and was up to no good. When he answered their door knocks, they hauled him out of his home and pulled a weapon on him on the back porch. He protested that he hadn’t broken in, that he lived here. They brought him back into the house to prove it with a photograph. Finally a photo was found in a bedroom, and the siege ended. Fortunately, that was our one-off encounter with the wrong side of the LBPD, but for us it blew wide open a window onto how dangerous assumptions can be about who belongs where and who doesn’t and how quickly things escalate. (Remember Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s arrest for “breaking into” his own home?) That African-American parents have to have the “talk” with their kids because over the course of their lives this will routinely happen to them, the institutionalized assumption that they’re up to no good — whether bird-watching, jogging, coming home with candy from the corner store — it’s unimaginably heartbreaking. To be told at a young age that being in the public square means different levels of risk for different skin colors can only be life-altering, confidence-destroying.
Mitch took these photos on June 2, 2020, in Hollywood, California.
Posted in journal, MB Maher
5 Comments
garden recovery
I knew I was going to have emergency abdominal surgery for a very large but benign cyst just a few days before it was scheduled, so of course I spent those few days in a frenzy of moving pots and heavy objects, getting this personal distantia (latin for “world apart”) ready for post-op recovery. I’ve always loved shoving stuff around and would have made a great stage hand. I can think of nothing more satisfying than whirling enormous pots filled with towering, columnar euphorbias on their bases, spinning them away from the east gate to ready the space for the metal workers who were going to get busy any day on constructing the new metal gate/fence I’ve been so excited about. (I needn’t have bothered — after several prompts and reminders, the fabricator never called back with the quote. We’ll be doing it ourselves with probably corrugated panels. And just when I was ready to throw money at a project too and bring in the pros! Nice dream. Back to DIY.) It will be a long while before I’m able to muscle large pots like that around again.
After surgery I was ordered to lift nothing heavier than 10 pounds — what a privation for someone who lives by spatial balance! (At least my own quirky sense of spatial balance and symmetry — a few inches to the left, half an inch to the right — ah, perfect! Order in my universe restored!) But the 10-pound limit allows for lots of little fiddly pots of mostly agave pups to be cleaned of debris and cleared away to the narrow, 3-foot deep potting area behind the garage/office that was also cleaned out presurgery — and where the addition of a new hose bib has been life altering. There’d be no way I could drag hoses around this summer. And to water the potting area previously, I’d have to fill a can of water and carry it back. By mid summer, any good intentions to do so daily, sometimes twice daily in heat waves, have long shriveled up along with any cuttings and seedlings.
A plant order did arrive after surgery, and I briefly waffled over what to do. In the end, I carefully, so very carefully planted the order myself. The ground was soft and I knew exactly where everything would go, so it was quick work. In early May Plant Delights’ catalogue unexpectedly listed the coyote gourd I was so impressed with at Red Butte last September, Cucurbita foetidissima, so I threw in a few more plants to justify the shipping fees: The moon carrot Seseli gummiferum, a spectacular umbellifer Peucedanum verticillare, and Sinningia ‘Cherries Jubilee.’ These gesneriads are surprisingly tough and work well with succulent plantings.
And when the world shrinks down to the size of the back garden, no detail is too small, no incident too trivial. This afternoon we sprayed the hose on a squirrel attempting to raid a nest of fledglings — not on our watch! And it looks like we’re going to be on watch in the back garden for the foreseeable future…onward to June!
Posted in journal, plant nurseries, pots and containers
5 Comments
tree ballet performance for one
In a view from the garden office, lying on the pink divan found at the Long Beach flea market (remember those?), which we keep covered in a painter’s tarp, this clear blustery day is orchestrating a magnificent performance out of the garden. The cypresses contribute deep, side-to-side, majestic swaying movements, while the acacia’s small leaves ripple like water until a really big gust hits, then a branch jumps out of the chorus and begins an electrifying improv solo. The tetrapanax’s leaves manically fan up and down in an obsequious bit of comedy, and the whole garden surges and shudders and shimmies, and sometimes even in unison. I don’t usually catch this wind-driven ballet because I’m rarely lying on the divan in the office mid-day. That I’m doing so today is completely due to an emergency abdominal surgery over the weekend. During several movements of the tree ballet I wanted to jump up and grab a camera, take a video, but jumping up to do anything is out of the question for now. So I’ll be lying even lower — however impossible that sounds! — for a few weeks. Take care out there!
Posted in journal, MB Maher
4 Comments
so I brought home another New Zealander
Yesterday’s nursery jaunt included Roger’s Garden in Newport Beach, where I found the New Zealander of the title, Cassinia fulvida, and Village Nursery in Huntington Beach. Driving empty freeways sounds like a great time, but it eerily underscores how aberrant this moment is in the life of a formerly bustling metropolis.
Roger’s seems to have methodically removed most of their heroic succulent display plantings filled with statement agaves and aloes in favor of blowsier, bloomier plantings with admonitions on signage to plant pollinator gardens. I get the outreach effort for pollinators but still miss the agaves…why can’t we have both sculptural and pollinator-friendly plantings? I suppose it’s difficult for staff to change up the plantings working around spiky plants, not to mention the water needs being asymmetrical as far as keeping the blooming stuff going…
Aloe camperi and ‘Red Planet’ cordyline.
Orange bloom against the garage wall is the vine Senecio confusus. Marty just added another hose bib at the back of the office/garage — a “watershed” moment for me. No more dragging hoses to reach the back of the garden and potting area.
At Village Nursery I found some fun things to add to the shady stock tank in front of the lemon cypresses. I’ve been using this end of the stock tank to throw in bromeliad pups, so removed a bunch and planted Astilbe ‘White Gloria’ and a Blue Bear’s Paw fern Polypodium (Phlebodium) aureum. As I mentioned last week, a container here with Hoja Santa (Piper auritum) and the False Aralia was moved out, with the Hoja Santa planted under the Chinese Fringe Tree and the False Aralia planted in the ground just about where it lived in the container, so its light exposure conditions didn’t change.
I’m sure there’s other New Zealanders I’ve left out. But meanwhile, elsewhere in the garden…
The dwarf breadseed poppies (Papaver setigerum) are just about over, but there’s still lots to keep this guy busy. Hope you’re having a good week! Take care.
Posted in journal, plant nurseries, pots and containers
6 Comments
the dappled life
So you’re planting and planting your little garden and having the best time, but because your undisciplined and eclectic taste runs to every kind and type of green life, from ground hugging to tree size, inevitably you wake up one morning and wonder:
Where did the sunlight go?
Full sun, half sun, part sun, morning sun, mid-day sun, afternoon sun, bright sun, reflected sun, harsh sun, cool sun — the latter is probably what best describes dappled light. Like the number of words Eskimos have for snow, zone 10 gardens care deeply about degrees of sunlight.
About that loss of full-day sun. There’s no need to panic, especially in Southern California, where at our latitude summer sun can be especially punishing. And I still have plenty of full sun for the plants that can handle it. But for a good quarter of the garden at least, it’s a dappled life now.
And it turns out this gentler version of Southern Californian sunlight suits a lot of plants just fine. It’s not exactly shade gardening though, because full sun does break in throughout the day.
In my back garden, the biggest reduction in sunlight starts at the east fence, where the lemon cypresses (Cupressus macrocarpa ‘Citriodora’) now soar over 25 feet and Acacia baileyana ‘Purpurea’ holds the corner. Morning light does filter through in varying intensities. Aloes still bloom here if planted where the morning sun is strongest and where the afternoon sun can slide in too. Amicia zygomeris loves it here, as does Plectranthus argentatus, bromeliads, sesleria. The new ‘Indian Summer’ alstroemeria have been tucked in here, so we’ll see if they get enough sun to bloom well. It’s dawned on me rather late in life that herbaceous stuff, grassy stuff, not sculptural evergreen succulents, are preferable for conditions under trees that rain down a steady stream of debris. And whether the tree is evergreen or deciduous, they all drop something.
Variegated agaves appreciate something less than full-day sun too.
I think I mentioned recently how I would never never underplant the Chinese fringe tree again. It’s a debris monster, so I’ve opted to sweep its flowers, berries, leaves and twiggy bits back under its canopy, letting it sheet compost in place, with nothing planted to obstruct the relentless cleanup. But then this potted Hoya Santa (Piper auritum) was wilting dreadfully in the afternoon sun hitting the base of the lemon cypresses, and I couldn’t face another summer keeping it hydrated. I wasn’t ready to part with it, because I love the big coarse leaves that resemble a brunnera on steroids. Studying my options, it dawned on me that big-leaved plants with leafy skirts that could be swept under wouldn’t have the same issues as small, low-growing plants constantly getting their crowns smothered in debris. Once the realization hit, I planted the Hoya Santa pronto into this gentler light and loved the results so much that I also released a Fatsia japonica ‘Camouflage’ from its container to grow here as well.
So many plants I love and grow, like the sow thistles from the Canary Islands and melianthus to name a couple that quickly come to mind, dislike full afternoon sun and complain by wilting when they get it.
Mediating sunlight opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities and allows for growing a really wide range of plants.
And the shrubs and trees that tame the sun also bring one of the most amazing garden features of all — birds. It is astonishing to see what wings in throughout the day. Just like us, birds crave both an open prospect and refuge, with some cover nearby if a hawk should scan the garden, and placing a bird bath in proximity to both shelter and a view is key to success. I’ve been beating myself up for dawdling in choosing a birdbath, but I don’t want to bring in a clunky, oversized monolithic white elephant I’ll regret in a couple months then not be able to move and keep clean (then in despair plant up in a dog’s breakfast assortment of succulents, etc etc.) I saw this sleek bird bath by CB2, and nearly pulled the trigger, but ultimately opted to use the little side table for now.
Playing with the light is one of the most absorbing aspects of making a garden. And this little garden, now over 30 years old, really keeps planting interesting as it evolves, bringing increasing complexities of light to exploit.
Posted in agaves, woody lilies, design, journal, pots and containers
4 Comments