The Dry Garden: Smell the roses
This may not be the time to plant a rose, but as a long rose season concludes its spring flush, it is an ideal moment to study the varieties around town, then consider which ones you like and what they might do for your garden.
How such hardy plants spawned the modern rose care industry will one day make a fabulous subject for a business writer. A 2004 Home cover story titled “Rethinking the Rose” challenged the idea that roses need pampering, if stumping their branches in winter, drenching their roots in summer, dusting the foliage with fungicides and filling their arteries with systemic pesticides can be called pampering.
What is worth picking up on here and now is that few notionally water-loving plants transition quite so seamlessly into the Mediterranean-climate garden.
Click here to keep reading about roses in the Dry Garden in the Los Angeles Times. If …
High good, low bad: Mead in May 2011
Lake Mead’s rise by two feet in May presages a total rise of 32 feet by the end of February, 2012, reported the Las Vegas Review-Journal several weeks ago. Last night at midnight, the elevation of the largest storage reservoir in the US was 1,097.89, leaving another 30 feet due for release from Lake Powell upstream. The federal Bureau of Reclamation graphic, left, shows how much water sits in reserve as snowpack in the upper Colorado region.
As the snow melts and the water makes its way through the dam system upstream, the 2010-11 water year on the Colorado will push Lake Mead steadily upward from the 1,075 elevation, at which point shortages would have been declared for Arizona and Nevada. For California to be hit by shortages, the reservoir would have to drop further because of an antique priority rights system governing the river.
While Las Vegas celebrated …
Helianthus annuus, now and then
SUNFLOWERS are the true American beauty. They have it all: stamina, fast growth, architecture, fecundity, attitude and, above all, color. The proportions twixt stem and head are so sweetly comical that all it takes is the sight of a sunflower display at Trader Joe’s to defuse the rage that brews daily in its parking lots.
In the wild, sunflowers are so stunning that driving down the 110 past Dodger Stadium, it is hard not to crash as one catches sight of a freeway verge studded with gold. As L.A.’s hillsides turn brown in late summer heat, somehow wild sunflowers still glow from the brush.
Click here to keep reading about how the only thing different from the sunflowers that you buy in Trader Joe’s and the wild type that you see to the freeway (and in the photos, left), is 4,000 years of cultivation. It’s not a recent Dry Garden …
The Dry Garden: Hillside wonder
Illustration: E. O. Murman / Margo Murman, from "Cacti, Agaves, and Yuccas of California and Nevada"
This is the time of year when even those hostile to the idea of water rationing in the garden have their heads turned by what nature has created without sprinklers. Rising from the untended hills of Southern California are spires of ethereal white flowers. They’re so big that you can see them from hundreds of feet away. If they’re backlit, double that distance.
There’s no right name for the plant that produces these arresting plumes. Common terms vary from Quixote yucca to Spanish bayonet to even the reverent Our Lord’s Candle. Science has no straight answer either. As genetic analysis continues to shake up traditional taxonomy, the botanical name is slipping from Yucca whipplei to Hesperoyucca whipplei.
Click here to keep reading about chaparral yucca in the Los Angeles Times and the wonderful …
The Dry Garden: Gambling on a cool summer
This week’s Dry Garden posts early because of May rain. After brief chivvying of So Cal gardeners to weed and sow, I get to the dark art of forecasting. For help assessing the odds of a cool summer as opposed to a hot one, and an early summer as opposed to late one, I contacted Jet Propulsion Laboratory oceanographer Bill Patzert. Some of you may remember that in September he put 80% to 90% odds on a strong cooling of equatorial waters in the Pacific, a system known as La Niña, producing winter drought for Southern California.
After nearly record rains in December, and a Christmas dinner of crow instead of turkey, he knew that Southern California ended up on the lucky side of La Niña’s traditional cutoff somewhere between San Diego and the Oregon border. This system tends to drive rain north and keep the south dry, but we …
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