Category — Water-saving gardens

I didn’t find Lewisia cotyledon in my Sierra Wildflowers book, but I did find that the genus is named for Captain Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark. It’s in the Portulacaceae, or purslane family.

Of course these plants were well-known to those who already lived where they grew. In the Pacific Northwest, some species were used as food, but they had to be specially cooked to remove bitterness.

There are several different species, and my Lewisia cotyledon is native to a very specific spot, the mountainous pine belt of Trinity and Siskiyou counties, in northern California, where it grows at 4,000 to 7,500 feet (about 1,220 to 2,134 meters). I got it through a local nursery that specializes in unusual plants, including natives, and gears its selection to plants that do well in our area (another plug for local nurseries; for expertise, selection, and quality of plants, they just can’t be beat. The prices are usually better, too.). My own climate is similar enough that Lewisia cotyledon (it doesn’t have a common name) does well here.

But I was quite surprised to find Lewisia on a British blog, Snappy Croc’s Gardens. Much as I love this blog, it only lets you search the archives by the current month, or by the year. I wasn’t willing to go through three months’s worth of 2008, so I don’t know the variety of Lewisia that was grown there; I just remember seeing the picture of flowers that looked awfully like the plant I had just bought, and being amazed it was apparently popular in rainy England. For Lewisia, like most natives here, is used to dry summers and lots of drainage. Perhaps some of the Northwestern varieties are more water-loving.

My Lewisia (and apparently most of them) has a rosette of fleshy, succulent-like leaves, a typical water-saving device for plants.

When it’s not flowering, this makes Lewisia an inconspicuous plant, which is why, I’m hoping, I didn’t know that there is a species which is native to my own county (Lewisia cantelowii). I’ve never seen it in my rambles, but now I’ll look.

The plant is only about a foot tall when it is flowering, according to the books; the ones I’ve seen, including my own, are more like six to eight inches (about 15 to 20 cm). It has a fleshy taproot – another water-conserving device, and a good way for mountain plants to anchor themselves in stony soil.

Supposedly these plants bloom in June and July, but their altitude range means that they are actually growing in several different climates, from hot foothill chapparal to alpine mountains, where you can still find snow in June. In my area, they’re flowering in May.

Given that Lewisias seem to be versatile, they probably fit into a number of gardening climates. They aren’t a showy plant, but they have lots of charm, and make a great, easy-care low-water plant in pots or in the ground.

There may be those who feel enough has been said about sticky monkeyflower on this site. But when Catmint told me she grew this California native in her Australian garden, I had to know more.

Pomona,

This is the mimulus or sticky monkey flower I have in my garden. It’s not flowering at the moment (autumn) but I think you can see how happy and healthy it is. This one has orange flowers, others available have cream flowers.

It has had very harsh treatment. It has been transplanted about 5 times. It has been radically cut back.  It has been exposed to our horrendous summer and was not watered except when first transplanted.

I obtained this Mimulus auranticus from a nursery called The Diggers Club.  The Diggers
Club  (www.*diggers*.com.au) is more than a nursery. It is an important and wonderful institution for gardening in Melbourne and further afield. They have a beautiful garden open to the public and specialize in sourcing and propagating heirloom fruit and vegetables, and unusual and drought resistant perennials.  I have learned heaps from them, including that plants from California and the Canary Islands do particularly well in this climate. As with the mimulus in the photo. It’s so far from home, but that’s multiculturalism for you … it works.

Cheers, CM

Visit Catmint’s blog, Diary of a Suburban Gardener for more on water-saving gardens, plus  piquant book reviews and opinions. (The subtitle is: “Now Where Did I Leave the Secauteurs?”)

In times of stressed economy, it’s good to do what we can to save money.

Since I’ve been poor and cheap for decades, I’m well-prepared to inform those who are experiencing this for the first time. I have been working for years, very unscientifically, on getting my tulips to return, instead of buying them every year, as is our extravagant custom.

These Prinses Irene tulips returned year after year – until I made the mistake of digging them up

And then what do you do with tulip bulbs at the end of the year? Tossing them out makes me feel somewhat as I did in fourth grade, when the egg incubator failed in science class, and I had to pour a half-formed chicken down the drain (There seems to be a lot of trauma around science, here. Maybe this is the key to my unscientificness (lack of scientificity?).)

Keeping bulbs around seems to indicate that I should do something to help them survive. So I started looking for ways to do that.

Some of my ideas for getting tulips to return came from the folks at Old House Gardens, who have their own tip sheet for helping tulips come back. Others came from Janis Ruksans, who has been collecting, propagating, and breeding bulbs for decades. Brent and Becky’s gave me the good soil tip (which I ignored for many years). Still others are a combination of my own observation, research, and guesswork.

While I haven’t come up with the Definitive Home Method getting tulips to return, I have come up with a lot of things that will up your chances. Don’t be depressed by the length of the list; I don’t do all of the things on it, either. Bulbs are forgiving. Just taking heed of pointer #1 will give you ever-increasing returns on your tulips. Even in these hard times.

1. Buy the right varieties of tulip.

Older tulips were bred for gardeners. Newer ones (after about 1950) are bred for the cut-flower industry, which is more interested in instant results than lasting glory. But the category of tulip matters, too. Fosterianas, kauffmanias, greggis, and most so-called “species” tulips (they aren’t always) tend to repeat easily and reliably in the garden. Among these categories, some are more long-lasting than others. ‘Purissima’, ‘Sweetheart’, ‘Lady Jane’ and T. batalinii ‘Apricot Jewel’ have done well for me. (In an earlier post  I went into this in more detail.)

2. Leave tulip foliage on until it’s dead, dead, dead. And don’t tie it up, either.

For some reason, there’s a gardening tradition of cutting bulb foliage when it starts to go yellow. To me, this neatness smacks of overzealous housekeeping, but you don’t have to militate against tidiness to see that cutting foliage has a very bad effect on bulbs. Tying up foliage, often cited as an alternative, is equally bad; those leaves need sun. Which leads us to the next point.

3. Give tulips enough sun.

I learned this one the hard way. Sunlight on the foliage is what feeds it. And since the foliage feeds the bulb and the bulb makes the flower….this is starting to sound like a folk song, but you get the picture. My semi-shady garden has made me very aware that the more sun you give tulips, the better they return. Frances at Fairegarden  illustrates this with a story about her own tulips.

4. Don’t give tulips too much sun.

I learned this one the hard way, too. Hot weather can strike suddenly in spring, blasting tulip buds to tiny brown shriveled things, yellowing foliage before its time. Since the leaves make next year’s bulbs (this is beginning to be my theme song), foliage dead before its time usually means blind bulbs next spring.

5. Foliar feed tulips throughout the growing season.

I’ve been doing this for the last year for my tulips, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that suddenly, this year, I’m seeing blooms from several kinds of tulips I’ve had “incubating” for years as small bulbs in small pots. Janis Ruksans says that using foliar feed has vastly improved things in his bulb nursery, so I’m in good company. I use an organic foliar feed that promotes bloom, and I try to get it on my tulip foliage every two weeks until the leaves are gone. Every week would be better.

6. Calcium is great for tulips – as a foliar feed and in the ground.

Earlier, I posted my discovery  that Janis Ruksans, bulb hunter, propagator, and breeder, found that his small offset bulbs did far better when they were planted in rocky soil. Since he’s an experienced bulb worker, he had good drainage both places. The difference, in his opinion, was calcium. And, I think, probably other minerals. Photos of species bulbs show them in the rocky landscapes which create high-mineral soils. This is a clue to what bulbs need.

7. Ground feed tulips in fall and early spring.

Besides fertilizing with minerals spring and fall, I use an organic high-phosphorus fertilizer to give bulbs a boost. Fall fertilizing feeds bulbs as they wake from dormancy and start to send roots into the ground, seeking food; spring fertilizing (at least this is my theory) gives the foliage something extra to draw on as it feeds the bulbs for the following year. (Actually, I read up on some Experts, and found that they also believe in spring and fall fertilizing. Very gratifying.) In my own area, both feedings take advantage of seasonal rains to wash fertilizers into the soil, saving energy (mine) and water.

8. Split up tulip offsets and give them room to grow (separately).

Bulbs which are squashed together don’t have room to develop into maturity. They compete for turf and nutrients, like rats in a cage, and fail to thrive. If you’re getting a lot of blind bulbs, or the leaves are looking smaller and smaller, you need to dig them up when they’re dormant, split them apart, and give them living room. I generally use small pots for this, so I don’t lose track of tiny bulbs.

These are the small leaves that show when your bulbs are too small to bloom. They’ve been split up into pots to grow out.

9. Don’t water tulips in summer.

Unlike many plants, tulips loathe water. They rot. They sulk. They don’t reproduce. This makes tulips the ultimate low-water plant, since water is at its most precious in hot weather. If you plant tulips in pots, shelter those pots from rain until it’s time to fertilize in fall. If you plant in the ground, put tulips in low-water areas with herbs and succulents. (For more detailed info on this, check out Old House Gardens instructions on keeping bulbs going.)

10. Don’t put tulips where they will have saturated, moist soil at any time – they rot.

This is a continuation of the previous point, but it bears saying. I once put some tulips in a spot where they would receive maximum winter water (under an overhanging roof where the rain ran like a little spout). I thought this would nourish them to a fine future. What it actually did was turn them to mush. Tulips may benefit from a little water during an early-spring hot spell, but they need drainage drainage drainage, all year round. (The one exception to this might be Tulipa sylvestris, but my jury’s still out on that.)

11. Plant them deeper.

Two reliable sources said 8 inches to a foot. Do be sure that there is plenty of nutritious and amended soil under the bulb, no matter how deep you plant it; it still needs to get nourishent through its roots, not its top. And remember that tulips need drainage. Since I plant in pots, I compromise at about 8 inches. Sylvia from England writes that she has been experimenting with this; she planted her West Points a foot deep, and promises to report on the results.

12. Use good soil.

One of my antique garden books says that tulips need good soil, but not rich soil. That’s what Brent and Becky’s advises, too (it used to be in their print catalogue, but I didn’t find it online). Most tulips originally come from rocky mountain soils, so obviously they can grow in poor soils as long as mineral content is high. Like many plants, though, even species tulips enjoy a loose soil with easily-available nutrients. The big flashy ones bred in the light, sandy soils of the Netherlands may sometimes survive in hard or poor soils, but they don’t thrive there.

13. Deadhead.

Once they bloom, plants put all their energy into making seeds. They want the next generation to survive. If you want the foliage to feed your bulbs and future flowers more than the seeds, pick the green seedpods off as soon as flowering is done. If you have lots of tulips, you might be able to bribe some kids into doing it for something good to eat.

Maybe you’ve had experiences that refute these pointers. Maybe you want to exand on the ideas I’ve listed. Maybe you know of some tulips that seem to come back more easily than others, or even better, you’ve come up with yet another way to get tulips to return. Won’t you share the knowledge? And if you’ve got more questions about this (I sure do), maybe we can all put our heads together and discuss it.

Beds may be a natural place for sticky monkeyflower. According to the Flower Essence Society, sticky monkeyflower tinctures can be used for integrating human love and human sexuality; possibly some of the keys to this are the “facelike” flower,  more pointedly human (to some), and the orange color, color of the second chakra, which involves creative power of all kinds, including sexual. (Flower essences are homeopathic tinctures which address the emotions behind illnesses; they have no scent. They are often surprisingly effective where other remedies fail, and work well with other medications.)

The association of the flower with partnerships may also come from a salient plant fact: sticky monkeyflowers emerge in opposite pairs. Lots of them. The “double” meaning of one of its Latin names, Diplacus, is clear here.

Sticky monkeyflower is also used in the sickbed. The Miwoks used the root for diarrhea, dysentery, fevers, and hemorrhages. The leaves were made into a poultice for sores and burns, apparently having antiseptic qualities. This was important: in eras or places with no antibiotics, people could die of a septic cut.

The Miwoks had an aesthetic relationship with this plant, too. Flowers were used for wreaths, and put in children’s hair as ornaments. The back-to-the-landers in this area have used them the same way, but it’s a fleeting joy: sticky monkeyflower doesn’t last long off the bush, even if it’s in a vase with water.

Like snapdragons, monkeyflowers belong to the figwort family, which may be why they aren’t denuded by deer. Deer tend not to like members of the figwort family, a fine piece of news for those of us who garden in deer country. (You will have noticed that I wasn’t rash enough to say, Deer won’t eat monkeyflower. Deer will eat anything that grows, if they’re hungry enough.)

This unfurling bud shows sticky monkeyflower’s relationship to foxgloves and snapdragons. The snoutlike buds are very similar on all three flowers.

Sticky monkeyflower does attract bees and happily drunken hummingbirds, though, a big bonus in the garden. Another bonus: sticky monkeyflower is happy in serpentine soils, not the easiest type to grow plants in.

Given their beauty and deer resistance, I think sticky monkeyflower is a beautiful candidate for a low-water azalea substitute. It has the same low bushy form (it never gets more than knee-high, and usually only goes up to your shins), and the same striking display of bright flowers in spring. Liz Simpson  shows a beautiful example of sticky monkeyflower planted with native penstemon, for a gorgeous low-water spring display.

In moister, milder climates, sticky monkeyflower can bloom through the summer. While they are designed for dry rocky cliffs, clearly sticky monkeyflower has some variability in where it chooses to settle. Not only is there a coastal version of this plant, there are reports of it blooming in cool, foggy, rainy Castro Valley, San Francisco. It’s even doing well in at least one garden in  Bellevue, (in the cool part of Washington state).

Some gardeners recommend watering sticky monkeyflower once a month, for a fuller, more floriferous plant. (Most natives need to be watered somewhat through their first season, while their roots establish themselves.) Eje   at Dave’s Garden says that if you do that, it’s a good idea to hold off on the water at the end of the season, to encourage the plants into the dormancy they’d have in the wild. Of course in my area, where they grow naturally, it rains in the winter (the time they’re dormant). I’m not sure if this is a difference in sticky monkeyflower subspecies (makes a case for the splitters) or a clever idea for tricking the plant into dormancy where there is no winter cold.

While all this is beginning to sound like a lot of trouble, most gardeners who grow it stress how easy sticky monkeyflower is, and how tolerant of different conditions. I get the impression that these gardeners love the plant so much, they just want to help it show off its best.

The hard part may be getting  hold of sticky monkeyflower plants.  Like most wild plants, sticky monkeyflower doesn’t transplant well. Don’t dig it up, unless you’re ten minutes ahead of a bulldozer. That’s the only situation where you’re giving the plant more of a chance than it would have had if you hadn’t jumped in. Transplanting usually kills it.

If you want sticky monkeyflower, you must either save seed or get it from a native plant sale, or online from Las Pilitas Nursery . Las Pilitas is one of the authoritative sites which lists it as Diplacus auranticus and has some subspecies, with full explanations of their plant community and growing conditions. (If you have other sources for this plant,  please let us know. Since Catmint found it in her garden in Australia, it’s obviously got some  far-reaching conduits out of here.)

If you want to try growing your own, the easiest way to get the seed is to put a small paper bag over the almost-ripe pod. It’s always good to check the spot where it grows, so you can give the plant what it wants in your own garden: what’s the soil like? Drainage? Plant community? Sun exposure? After you gather this info, leave, then return when the seeds are ripe. The bag keeps the tiny seeds from falling irretrievably into the dust. The best time to sow seed is when nature does: in time to catch the fall and winter rains.

CApoppy at Dave’s Garden reports success from taking cuttings, something which I never even thought of trying. Root in early fall for planting in spring, is CApoppy’s advice, and you can cut it back in spring to keep it less leggy. Capoppy also suggests a remarkable-sounding combination; sticky monkeyflower with a maroon and apricot Pacific Coast hybrid iris, which presumably has the same low water requirements.

I haven’t grown this wildling in my garden (although writing this post is making me wonder why. Then I remember: I don’t have much sun. Oh yeah, that’s why.) . I hope those of you who have more experience at growing woody plants from seed and cuttings will speak up about your own methods.

(Nancy, this is the closest to the growing-off-the-cliff thing that I’ve got.)

References:

Tracy I. Stone and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963

Theodore R. Niehaus, Sierra Wildflowers: Mt. Lassen to Kern Canyon, University of California Press, 1974

National Park Service, California, wildflower page

http://davesgarden.com

This is the time of year that cars slow down as they ride the river grade. That’s because this is the time of year that the sticky monkeyflower comes out, glowing peach above your head on the south-facing cliffs as you curve down among them. When the season’s right, they’re accented by purple bush lupines.

Sticky monkeyflower can, and does, grow out of perpendicular granite cliffs. There’s generally a bit of crushed granite in the cliffs as well, and either the monkeyflowers root there or their roots help create the crushed granite that eventually (long after my lifetime) will turn into precious soil.

The name mimulus comes from the original Latin meaning of minus, comic actor (probably the same origin as “mime”; does anybody know?). “Monkeyflower” also refers to the facelike characteristics of this flower. To me, it’s no more like a face than, say, a snapdragon (which sticky monkeyflowers resemble), but okay. Whatever.

Sometimes this plant is listed as Diplacus auranticus, a way to distinguish it from its water-loving mimulus relatives. (Diplacus comes from the Greek diploos, meaning “double”.)

The lumpers and splitters are at it again. Many authoritative sources list this plant as Mimulus. But then again, many authoritative sources list it as Diplacus. You decide. The Diplacus branch of the family (for those who prefer splitting) likes dry, rocky slopes. Other monkeyflowers grow in damp places, sometimes even actually standing in water. Whatever its official name, sticky monkeyflower is the only monkeyflower I know of that is woody and grows in dry areas (“bush monkeyflower” is another name for it).

“Auranticus”, the part of the Latin name experts agree on,  means orange-red, possibly because of the color of  the coastal version of this plant. Pictures of coastal sticky monkeyflower look “oranger” to me; they have more yellow, and they’re darker than the paler peach ones we see here in the foothills. On the other hand, there’s certainly some variance in color from bush to bush, and as the flowers age (they fade a bit), so maybe this is one of those shrubs that sports or adapts easily.

Crossbreeding probably enters in, too. Calflora calls this “a highly variable complex of intergrading and hybridizing forms, many of which have received specific and subspecific names, but which the Jepson Manual has grouped together as a single species.” This photo  shows some of those variations. And I have to say, it does make a case for splitting them into subspecies – but splitting how? I’m not going to get into it. I will just continue to describe the plant, and let others carry on the good fight.

 As for the “sticky” part of its name: the bush exudes a resin, most noticeable in hot weather. Oddly, unlike most resins, it isn’t particularly aromatic, at least not to my nose. The flowers, on the other hand, have their own unique fragrance: they smell like orange bubblegum. Yet another case of art imitating nature.

Next post: sticky monkeyflower in the garden and in beds