Category — Shrubs

I felt little hard things hitting me on a mountain walk with a friend one year. I turned around, and he was laughing; he’d been throwing acorns at me. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that those plants were oaks. Waist-high bushes? Leaves that looked, not like lobed deciduous oak trees, or even like the different forms of live-oak leaves, but, well, like huckleberries. I’d just never noticed the acorns. I mean, does this look like an oak to you?

I think part of my problem was that shrubby bushy things just didn’t get my attention the way flashier plants do. It’s only fairly recently that I’ve come to appreciate foliage en masse–leaves that aren’t unusual close up,  like grapes or gooseberries, but make a great effect massed together. It’s probably something psychological, as if I was looking for the individual, but wasn’t interested in the community. Something like that.

It’s also just that I never imagined there could be an oak that comes only to my waist.  It’s the same high-mountain variation as the manzanitas, only in this case the leaves are entirely different from any other oak. But since I’ve read up on this, I’ve found there is another oak in the desert southwest which is called “shin oak” (Quercus mobriana) because it grows in thickets that are about knee-high. I’d imagine that this oak has adapted to severe desert conditions in the same way huckleberry oak has learned to grow in high altitudes.

Like the other high-mountain plants, huckleberry oak has a short time to make its growth and produce fruit. The catkins come out in May or June, when there is often still snow on the ground (in a heavy winter, quite a lot of it).  I took photos of these acorns in early to mid-September, and as you can see, a lot of them are still quite green. They had about six weeks to two months before the first serious snowfall. (I have seen snow sticking in September at this altitude, but it doesn’t really settle in until later.)

Many of these oaks just had empty acorn caps, and I’m guessing the critters harvested the ripe ones right away. While Native Americans used acorns as a staple food, I’m wondering if they would have left these thumbnail- to fingernail-sized acorns for the chipmunks, squirrels, and other rodents? I’m not sure about this, since there are grinding holes in the high altitudes.

Grinding holes are deep round bowls in the rocks, a sort of natural mortar made by using smaller rocks as pestles. In my area, they are called acorn holes: the assumption is that they were used for grinding acorn meal, a large staple. But maybe that wasn’t their only use.  Manzanita berries are also a huge crop in my area, and the tribes here ground them to make different kinds of food. Would the high-mountain grinding holes have been used for the high mountain manzanita berries (some of which mature earlier), but not oaks?

That might be the case, because the indigenous people moved down the hill in the colder weather, which would have coincided with acorn harvest at lower altitudes. Further down the hill, acorns come off large trees, plentiful, much bigger,  and easier to harvest. But I don’t really know.

I was interested to find that some of these bizarre miniature (as I think of them) huckleberry oaks have wasp galls, just like their larger cousins down the hill. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a decent shot of the oak galls. This kind looks like a strange swelling on the branches, about the size of a jawbreaker (or a large hazelnut): round, cream-colored, and hard, with a textured pattern weirdly like an acorn cap.

The galls are made by a type of gall wasp, Cynips maculipennis. They burrow into the branches and lay their eggs. I’m not sure exactly how the gall forms, but the larvae live in it until they are ready to hatch. According to my natural history books, they sometimes lay eggs on other plants, but I have only seen their galls on oaks.

My gardening lesson? To look more carefully at the plants around me. I might actually recognize them. And maybe the lesson huckleberry oak has for all gardeners is: look for different forms of plants. They may work in your garden better. Or they may just be interesting to know about. All gardeners like to contemplate the infinite variety of the plant world. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be gardeners.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History,  University of California Press, 1963 (There is a newer version out, but this is the one I still own and use.)

Elmer L. Little, The Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Trees: Western Region,  Alfred A. Knopf, 1980

After years of passing by this bush on holiday in the high mountains, vaguely noticing its presence, I finally identified it: bush chinquapin.

I’ll give myself a little slack by saying that this sociable bush is almost always growing in with something else: mountan whitethorn in this case (with redberry very close by, but not in this picture. It seems weird, but I really need some kind of wide-angle lens to really get these low, spreading mountain-plant communities, even though they aren’t all that huge).

See what I mean about inconspicuous?

Here it’s growing with a rather small wild currant (on the right). At least I’m pretty sure that’s a currant.

But it’s a rather handsome plant on its own.  It wouldn’t make a bad groundcovery/foundation shrub, in a dry environment. To start it growing, though, you’d need to find its seeds.

I cut open one of the seedpods–a very prickly process–to see if I could find the nuts.  They are supposed to have one to three bitter-tasting nuts which mature every other year. All I found was some very small hard possibly seed-like things, and more prickles. I picked the driest, most mature-looking seedpod I could find, so I may have gotten one that matured too soon and without seeds.  Or I might have just been expecting something more impressive from that big ball of prickly armor.

It’s very odd to see these horse-chestnut-like pods on an inconspicuous Sierra bush that rarely comes above my knee. Chinquapins (also spelled Chinkapins) are more closely related to oaks than to horse chestnuts, though.  They’re in the same family, though they aren’t in the Quercus genus.

Bush chinquapins have made the mountain adaptation of going miniature; there is a Great Chinquapin (also called Chinquapin Oak, just to keep us botanically confused), although I have never seen it. Great Chinquapin grows 40 to 80 feet, and shows the same prickly pods in its pictures. Its seeds are supposedly edible, like small chestnuts.

The underside of the leathery, stiff  bush chinquapin leaves has a faint brushing of yellow hairs, kind of like Labrador tea. The tops have the water-conserving shininess of a lot of mountain plants.

And that’s all I could find or observe on bush chinquapin. I guess it’s an inconspicuous plant to a lot of people.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with a more recent version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

The Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Trees, Western Region, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980

I’m always intrigued at the way different locations mutate plants into different shapes.

I, of course, am pleased to call them mutations, because I’m used to their other forms. So to me, the different forms are unusual. Intriguing. It’s like looking at a friend who just got plastic surgery or peacock blue hair.

In the high mountains (between 6,000 and 10,000 feet), many of these variations seem to make a plant lower to the ground, smaller.

Where there is snow eight or nine months out of the year, low to the ground is a smart choice for a spreading plant. If it doesn’t stay low, six or seven or up to twenty feet of snow load will put it there.  Smaller size may also have something to do with short growing season and soil fertility. Rock is close to the surface in high mountains.

Where I live, manzanitas are tall, shrubby plants-the mature ones are well over my head–with twisty mahogany-colored branches. When the moon or headlights shine on them, their pale green leaves turn white.

I delight in this little pinemat manzanita (Arctostaphylos nevadensis), which is a miniature version of the type that grows where I live.  In the mountains, it’s still a shrub, but it comes only to my ankles. To me, this shrubby groundcover looks like gorgeous landscaping. But it also serves some practical purposes.

Manzanitas are great soil-preservers, because they can grow and hold soil on slopes and in soils with very little nourishment. In my area, they cover sunny, dense clay hillsides.  In the high mountains, they thrive on a diet of granite and crushed granite, where very few plants can survive.

Pinemat manzanita berries are somewhat smaller than the tall manzanitas that grow in my area, but they are large in proportion to Arctostaphylos nevadensis’s tiny height. There weren’t too many berries evident this year, but they may have already disappeared down the gullets of the grouse, chipmunks, and squirrels and other wildlife who would find these berries at a handy height for eating.

But manzanita has even more to it than beauty and bounty. Manzanita is in the same family as heaths, heathers, and madrone. It’s also related to uva-ursi (bearberry or kinnickinnick), which is easy to see when you look at this creeping variety.

It’s so closely related to uva-ursi that it has almost the same chemical profile in its leaves. Both have arbutin, a natural antibiotic and diuretic. It can kill and wash away bacteria from the urinary tract. Uva-ursi is traditionally used for bladder and kidney problems, so you could use manzanita in the same way.

You’d need to be careful about the dose, though. Many people make the mistake of vaguely believing that plant drugs are safe because they’re “natural”. Digitalis and scopolamine are also natural, but how you take them means the difference between improving your life and meeting your death. It’s important to be respectful of plants and know what you’re doing.

If you take them in very large quantities, uva-ursi and manzanita can both cause collapse and death. The proper dosage is one teaspoon of leaves steeped in sixteen ounces of water, taken two or three times a day. This tea has a not-unpleasant astringent taste, a bit like the tannin in black tea (actually, manzanita has tannins in it, also). Don’t drink it if you’re pregnant, though; in some women, it can cause uterine contractions.

Historically, the Shoshone drank this tea as a remedy for venereal disease (one of the gifts of Europe to the Americas). If you look at the chemical constituency, it seems like a good thing to try. Chances are it was a lot more effective than whatever European remedy was being offered at the time (mercury, a toxin, was used on its own earlier on; it’s still included in many drugs).

Arbutin has been synthesized as a drug. You may be surprised to learn that taking manzanita or uva ursi tea is actually more effective than taking the drug. Arbutin breaks down so quickly in the body that it often destablilizes before doing its work. Uva ursi has substances in its leaves which preserve the arbutin on its travels through your body. It also has other ingredients which may work synergistically with the others, including quercetin, which is good for your respiratory system, and allantoin, the famous nerve- and tissue-healing ingredient in comfrey.

Over the years, I’ve learned over and over about herbs whose effects were better than their so-called active ingredient. We have a lot to learn about plant chemistry. When drugs are isolated from plants, they often cause side effects that are not present when the whole plant is taken. Or, like manzanita and uva-ursi, the constituents of the plant work as a team to make its action more effective.

Coincidence? I think not.

Next post: more uses for yet another kind of manzanita.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with a more recent version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

Kimball Chatfield, Medicine from the Mountains: Medicinal Plants of the Sierra Nevada, Range of Light Publications, 1997

LoLo Westrich, California Herbal Remedies, Gulf Publishing Company, 1989

‘Penelope’ is one of those obliging roses that will bloom even in shade. It’s one of the Pemberton roses, Joseph Pemberton being a British clergyman who bred them in the early twentieth century.

OK. I’m going to take a brief break here.

I’ve made a nomenclature decision. I know that, properly, a cultivar name goes in quotes. And it bothers me not to have it in quotes. But when I repeat this throughout a blog, it just looks fussy and too much. So from now on, cultivar names will go in quotes the first time in the post. After that, I’ll assume you’ve been introduced, and quotes will never darken the blog post again.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Pemberton roses are also called Hybrid Musk roses, but they don’t really have much musk rose blood (or chlorophyll) in them, so I’m calling them Pemberton roses after the styling of Graham Stuart Thomas.

When it comes to old roses, you can’t go wrong following that Font of Rose Wisdom, Graham Stuart Thomas. (I also just found a very fun and informative article on an old-rose grower north of Seattle).

Penelope, like many of the Pemberton roses, is a sort of semi-climber; you can train it over things but I wind up basically leaning mine up against a tree, where it lolls and sprawls and sometimes flowers.

One of the advantages of the Pemberton roses (besides that they will actually bloom in high shade and semi-shade) is that you can put them near where you walk; they tend to have few or no thorns. At least the types I’ve grown (Penelope, Buff Beauty, Cornelia) are like that.

Another advantage is that Pemberton roses aren’t temperamental, like hybrid tea roses. They have nice graceful foliage, usually a bit shiny, which seems to be pretty pest-resistant (barring the deer). Pemberton roses take the same care as a shrub rose or most of the David Austin roses, which is to say, they need to be fed and watered, but they don’t require constant manicuring or inordinate amounts of fertilizer and pest-killing.

Though Pemberton roses were a repeat-blooming breakthrough in their day, don’t expect them to act like roses developed since WWII, where constant blooming action has been the breeding aim. Pemberton roses give you a flush of bloom in late spring/early summer, and occasionally come up with a rose or two as the season goes on. When it starts to cool in the fall, they generally have another blooming session.

I enjoy the way Penelope fades from a pale peach to a very faintly peachy off-white. Hotter weather definitely makes them emerge in lighter colors; cooler weather deepens them.

Not all of the Pemberton roses have the simple semi-double flowers of Penelope, but many of them do. They’re ideal for blending into the woods, so I tend to put them more on the edges of the garden although “edges” in my garden are pretty wavery and definitely irregular. It might be more accurate to say that I plant them further from the house, but not too far to enjoy in my daily ramblings around.

Where to get Penelope

Just so you know, this is a lousy time to plant roses. If it isn’t hot already, it’s going to get hot soon, unless you’re in the Southern hemisphere, in which case, go for it. It’s a good time. Otherwise-do the research, plan for the space (if you’re really organized, you can even prepare the hole), and wait. No plant likes being transplanted in hot weather.

If you’re one of those annoying people who transplants in hot weather and the plants live anyway, go ahead. Mere mortals are more likely to succeed if we wait until fall. If you’re going bare-root, plant whenever the bare-root planting season is in your area.

ask at local nurseries:

There’s a growing interest (no pun intended) in older roses that has finally landed many of them back in regular nurseries. (When I started growing them some years ago, you could only get them through specialists, or cuttings.) If you ask, a nursery might get them in if they don’t have them already. Nurseries get things in to match local planting seasons, so you’ll be assured you’re getting them in at the best time.

try these web sites, or look up “heirloom roses”, “antique roses”, or “heritage roses” on the web (hint: pick a grower in a climate similar to yours. And suss out what Dave’s Garden Watchdog has to say about them (that’s actually two hints)):

http://www.heritageroses.com/welcome.htm - They grow roses on their own roots, which some people (including me) prefer. If you live in a very cold climate, you might do better with grafted roses.

http://www.antiqueroseemporium.com- Another good source of roses on their own roots. They specialize in roses that do well in hot climates.

References

Graham Stuart Thomas, The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book, Sagapress/Timber Press 1994.This book is a compendium of three GST titles: Old Shrub Roses, Shrub Roses of Today, and Climbing Roses Old and New. You can often find them secondhand. There are a lot of good books out on old roses, but Graham Stuart Thomas’s books are essential.

There’s a reason why this isn’t a picture of a gardenia. My gardenia is still in the same limbo it was in the last time I posted on it. Except it lost the single dead leaf.

This photograph of ‘Schwartzkop’ aeonium is the only peaceful thing on this page. Enjoy it.

OK, so I’m reading Robert Smaus’s 52 Weeks in a California Garden. (I picked it up at the thrift store. I tried to keep away from the book department. I knew I didn’t need any more books. But a powerful magnetic force grabbed me by my chest, and there I was, haplessly taking books down from the shelf.)

And do you know what he says about gardenias? He says that they should be grown in the sun. Even though he lives in Southern California, which is a heck of a lot hotter and sunnier than where I am. He says even in interior valleys where it’s blazing hot, gardenias like sun. He says he doesn’t know where all this nonsense about gardenias needing shade comes from.

From the Sunset Western Garden Book, that’s where. “Filtered shade in inland valleys,” it says. “North and east exposure in the desert.”

And that’s just the beginning. Logee’s catalogue shows the sun/part shade icons for their gardenias. And I trusted them. But they’re in Connecticut growing in greenhouses. I suppose they can be excused.

Hot Plants for Cool Climates says that gardenias grow best in light or part shade, but do OK in full sun–only if it’s not too hot.

I’m sure I remember the little name markers in gardenia pots having that same semi-shade icon. It’s unlikely I would have bought them otherwise, since I knew I didn’t have any space in the sun for them.

Smaus said that gardenias-in-part-shade was a widespread belief in nursery and horticultural circles. He wasn’t kidding.

Do you know how irritating this is? It’s not my fault, I had bad information. Do you know how irritating it is that I paid attention to that bad information, and not to the evidence of my eyes and hands, while all those gardenias were dying? (Yes, the full truth can be regretfully revealed. That gardenia I talked about almost killing before–it wasn’t my first gardenia. I’ve had many gardenias. And I’ve killed them all.)

To top it off, as I prowled my library looking for writeups on gardenias, I came across a final puzzler: Ruth Stout’s famous gardenia (one that she grew huge and gave away many starts from) was, by her account, “carefully kept out of the sun.” And it thrived.

Huh???

But that was in Connecticut.

References

Robert Smaus, 52 Weeks in the California Garden, Los Angeles Times Syndicate, 1996

Logee’s catalogue, Late Spring 2008 (and by the way, Logee’s is usually very reliable, and specific, cultural information. And they grow a great selection of plants (they are the source of many of my late lamenteds), and ship them in beautiful shape. And no, I didn’t get paid to write this.)

Susan A. Roth and Dennis Schrader, Hot Plants for Cool Climates, Timber Press, 2000

Ruth Stout, How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, Cornerstone Library, 1976 (reprint of 1968 and 1955 editions)