Category — Wild plants

I’d planned to make this post a paeon to more of the weeds I enjoy (I’ve already gone on at length about chickweed and miner’s lettuce).

But, as so often happens, the post decided to go in another direction.

I identified my first weed, henbit, pretty easily, as I do every year. I seem to have a block where the name of henbit is concerned, though I did somehow remember it’s a Lamium.

I looked it up where I usually do, an ancient pamphlet from an herbicide company, identifying common weeds.

Just to check (the pamphlet pictures weren’t all that good to start with, and a few decades on the shelf hasn’t helped) I went online and found not only henbit but another weed whose identity had been puzzling me. It turned out to be Geranium carolinianum, Carolina geranium.  Now I’d identified two of them, I toyed with the notion of just leaving the mystery weed out, and doing a post on henbit and Carolina geranium, plus a couple of others I know.

The U of Arkansas weed index is a very sensible grid, easy to use: thumbnail photo with common name, scientific name, weed type, and life cycle (whether it’s annual or perennial, and what its season is).  Since it’s not very long, it’s quickly searchable, and you can print a .pdf version if you want. It does have a lot of the most common weeds you’d find in a garden, a sort of improved version of my old herbicide pamphlet.

I’d found two of my nameless plants, but I was obsessed with the notion of identifying the little white-flowered weed.  I’d  vaguely thought it was shepherd’s purse. A close look at the shepherd’s purse photo here proved that it definitely wasn’t: the leaves were the wrong shape and size, both on the flowering stems, where they were thin and vaguely spade-shaped

and at the bottom rosettes, where they were rounded and no more than 1/4 inch (a little over half a centimeter) wide, as you can see in the picture at the top of this post. And the flower heads were tiny clusters, not the spikes of shepherd’s purse.

I was on a roll, now; I thought I’d see what other university weed identification sites had to offer. Since I live in northern California, I thought I’d check out the Davis weed i.d. site first. Weeds are usually imports that spread themselves generously – that’s why they’re weeds – so it’s not as vital to look for a university that’s in your area as it might be for, say, tree identification. Weeds are mostly associated with agriculture and gardens and other places where humans have set a heavy foot. A great many of the commonest weeds are Europeans, who, like their human counterparts, set foot on this country and decided to take it over where they could.

But I know that UC Davis has one of the best ag departments in the country, and it seemed a good bet that if there was a weed common in Northern California, they’d have it on their site, whether it was native or not.

I knew it was likely that my weed was an import, and I knew for a fact that imported weeds can do well in California. My horticulture teacher told of one of the more successful weed invasions. I had always assumed that the Himalayan blackberries you see all over northern California (not to mention large tracts of Washington) were a pestiferous native. (I never understood why they were called “Himalayan”, and I think it’s an insult to the Himalayas.) Himalayan blackberries are the huge thorny tentacley shrubs that take over entire fields and can cover dirt roads in a few years.  We have special methods of weed control just for them.

But, my horticulture teacher said, he’d found  a book published in the 1940s that discussed Californian blackberries, and the kind we call Himalayan, it said, were rarely-found imports. Just goes to show how far a weed can go in a few decades. Removing the triffid-like tangles of “Himalayan” blackberries was a business opportunity by the 1970s.

Anyway, I headed over to the University of California Davis site, to see what I could see.

The UC Davis website is a much more sophisticated setup than the Arkansas one. It asks questions on a little multiple-choice questionnaire to guide you to your plant, kind of like an automated key. Knowing some botanical terms, such as leaf arrangements and venation type, is useful, but there are also questions anyone can answer: what kind of lanscape you found it in, what color the flowers are, whether it has prickles or hair. They remind you that a few right answers are better than a lot of “I’m not sure” ones.

Then you get a selection of images that might match your plant. If it had worked better for me, I’d be more enthusiastic about it, because it’s much handier than just going through a list and hoping you’ll find the right thing.

But it didn’t work for me. I got Italian arum, which doesn’t look anything like my weed. (Can anybody out there identify it yet?)

Next post, the story continues: On the Trail of the Mystery Weed

Building a moss garden is more like home decorating than any gardening I’ve done. At least building this moss garden is.

The idea of the moss garden is to have a beautiful view from my window, where there’s now a bunch of chewed up bits of board and debris amongst the leaves and needles. It has to be a shade garden, since the whole area is loomed over by a ponderosa pine. For those unfamiliar, 100 feet (30 or so meters) is a pretty normal height for a mature ponderosa. So, shade. And did I mention steep? It’s a very steep slope.

The other part of the idea was to have something green to look out on in summer, when everything is sere and dry. I appreciate my dry California dormant season; it has beauty of its own. But there are times when the eye craves green.

Part of the plan is to create a carpet of moss, as I discussed in the last post. But as I slowly piece it together, I find myself running in and out of the house: I want to see how the picture looks, framed in the window. It’s hard for me to tell what’s visible from the window when I’m in the garden, and since it’s such a steep slope, I can’t even tell what it looks like from the window even if I stand in the French drain that borders the house. It’s a little like hanging a picture; I have to keep stepping back to check.

What I thought was the right place to lay the (so far tiny) moss carpet is actually mostly invisible from the window. So I will have to start tweaking it around. But in order to do that, I also have to start pondering where the other design elements go.

Some of those elements involve more moss. As Schenck, my moss gardening guru, points out, one of the easiest ways to get moss from the woods to my garden is to carry away an entire moss-covered rock or log. So when I found this in the woods, I hauled its unwieldy wet heaviness back to my garden.

But while I’ve now got a log to cover up one of the dug-in buried rotting boards which is unofficially terracing this area, I’ve also got a problem. Well, three problems. One is that it’s hard to place this mossy log so that the thickest moss is on display, because most of its moss is on the narrow top section, and I can’t face it toward the window, because the log falls over. The second problem is that, theoretically, the moss is supposed to be oriented the same way it was in the woods. But if I did that, I’d have to dig it into the ground – and the reason I have it on that spot is so I don’t have to dig out the rotting board beneath it. The third problem is, the placement of this log looks real awkward with the mushroom-plugged oak round I’d already placed on the slope as part of the garden.

 To me, this looks posed, artificial. So, more running to the window to ponder and look and wonder what I can do. Not to mention wondering how the native shade plants I have for this area – thimbleberry, salal, native honeysuckle – will look with it. And then I had been hoping to plant some mushrooms in the ground, too. Where do they go? What would make a natural-looking flow?

Moments like this remind me that I am no garden designer. I have no principles or rules to rely on, because I’ve always gardened the way I cook: improv. I think, “Well, that might be good next to that,” and I move things around, and often, with a little tweaking, it works. Or sometimes it doesn’t, but I usually manage to work it out.

This garden is a whole new undertaking. I’m not sure if it’s the nature of the plants, the slope of the ground, or what, that has me so puzzled and at loose ends, so fuzzy-headed, like a rank beginner. But I know I’m learning something. This is how learning feels: slow, sometimes frustrating, with a frightening sense of a Grand Canyon’s depth of ignorance. My own ignorance. And here’s the weird thing: this feeling is a big part of why I garden.

Sagebrush conjures up romantic notions: Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, with cowboys, campfires, and rustlers (which probably were not all that romantic when people were actually dealing with them).

It also conjures up spiritual visions: smudging in Indian ceremonies, a purifier which has brought soul-health as well as physical health.

It’s a peculiarly Western American plant, as you can see by this map at the USDA. The USDA, in its wisdom, has included Alberta and British Columbia in its distribution map, but not Baja Norte, the northern part of Mexico, where sagebrush also reigns. Could this be the place where politics make science stupid? We may never know.

Sagebrush can be honestly confusing: since it’s commonly called “sage”  (as in the Zane Grey title), many people confuse it with the salvias. To add to the muddle, there is an actual salvia sage native to the western USA (Salvia apiana) which is also used for smudging and has a somewhat similar clean-astringent scent. If you look carefully at the smudge stick, it’s easy to tell which is which: Salvia apiana (whte sage) has the big leaves shaped like garden sage, only paler. Sagebrush has a number small tri-tipped leaves.

There’s a final reason why sagebrush could be confused with sage: the color. Though sagebrush actually has more grey-white than most garden sage, it is the green most of us imagine when we hear “sage green”. A pale, luminescent green that lights up the plain with a swatch of unexpected light.

But if you look at sagebrush closely, it’s a bit like lavender or some other Mediterranean that’s gone unpruned too long: leggy and woody. The flowering stems, which come on in late summer or early fall, are almost grasslike, adding to the feathery luminescence. It’s one of those plants that’s good at illusions.

The Latin name Artemesia refers to Artemis, who was goddess of the woods and the hunt, a wild thing. Sagebrush certainly is wild; I’ve never seen it cultivated. Tridentata refers to the three teeth at the end of each small leaf.

Goats and sheep eat sagebrush as winter forage, and the plant was used medicinally by the Spanish Californians for rheumatism, colds, headaches, and indigestion.

Probably it’s the scent of sagebrush that suggested these cures. It’s certainly memorable, a scent that makes you feel suddenly healthy and alive: clean, almost smoky, yet fresh at the same time. If you’ve smelled it once, you never forget it.

Here’s another report from the high Sierras – plus an entry in a photo contest at   Gardening Gone Wild. Their theme this month is “get down on your knees”. I was either on my knees or my belly for this one; I’m often in undignified positions with plants. And since it’s a Wild Gardening photo contest, I figured a garden of mule’s ear would be particularly apt.

It’s a wild plant that grows in its own nature-designed garden, and I think it’s worth it to take a look at how that happens. So many good garden designs appear in nature (and most of my favorite garden designers notice that).

Mule’s ear colonizes on Sierra slopes, making a repeating pattern with its leaves and, in season, flowers. Here you can see that it’s pointed up by Indian paintbrush (Castilleja); there’s also some of the miniature mountain lupine which blooms through fall, when it is also punctuated by occasional asters. An occasional low shrub leaves the sense of a meadow but gives some variation.

Mule’s ear is a good example of how a repeated plant, with a bit of variation, can be a very satisfying sight. It’s not a sight I see in my own garden much, as I tend to the botanical-garden order of gardening, but I notice I actually have been slipping a little into repeating plantings (I planted Papaver rhoeas “Falling in Love” in several containers, and really enjoyed the results), because there is a certain satisfaction to it. Maybe we’re just dialed in to like having certain plants surround us; maybe it’s an ancient survival instinct or maybe it’s an ancient magical one.

Mule’s ear is in the sunflower family, obvious when you look at its blooms:

While most dry-environment plants have small leaves (often hard and shiny) to keep in vital moisture, mule’s ear uses another tactic: soft hair all over the leaves (mollis means “soft”). And in order to avoid too much evaporation, mule’s ear leaves are oriented vertically, to get as little sun as possible.

That’s another clue we might use for our gardens: how suited is this plant for my environment? If I want to plant a lot of something, that’s a really important question, because a lot of work, water, and whining will go into it if I pick something that just isn’t suited to my climate.

In any case, I always look for colonies of mule’s ear (I admit, to myself I call this mule ears and am having a hard time getting it right for this post). I’ve been watching this particular field for years.

Even though it isn’t as spectacular in the fall, I may like mule ears best when it’s on its way out*. Half the foliage dries by early fall, and when the mountain wind blows, it makes a pleasant rustling.

Not all the ears dry at once, as you can see, so there is a depth of color and texture  as well as sound to fall mule’s ear as they slowly dry in the Sierra wind.

*For those who are unsure of the use of “it’s” and “its”, this sentence proves a guide. If a sentence doesn’t work reading the contraction as “it is” “it was” or “it has” then the word you want is “its”. And I know: many editors don’t even get this these days. That’s their shame, but it doesn’t need to be yours.

When Sylvia suggested that I write a sister piece to her post on California natives in Britain, I thought it was an intriguing idea. While researching it, though, I began to see why she wrote me that in the UK gardeners are used to plants being from somewhere else. Maybe it has to do with being an island with a long history of trade and migration? So many of the plants I looked up were “naturalized” in Britain, or even more obvious imports from elsewhere. Britain has been a seafaring nation for a long time, and one of the cargoes those ships brought back was plants.

In any case, as Sylvia points out, our climates are very different. I found only two plants in my garden which could be considered English natives, with another few possibilities if you allow for a little cheating.

The first, most obvious, is foxglove, at least the Digitalis purpurea foxgloves. I knew these were native to Britain as well as northern Europe because I remembered that from researching my foxglove series. I completely adore Digitalis purpurea in all its forms, a truly magical plant. One of the great things about D. purpurea foxgloves in my garden is that they don’t demand a lot of water (though they do need some; they’re not a xeriscape plant). They also like the semi-shade that most of my garden is in. My Shirley foxglove is down to those last few blooms towering over my head:

My Sutton’s Apricot seem to be sulking for some reason, so I’ll have to use pictures from the past.

The second plant I grow that’s native to Britain is Viola odorata, the common scented violet. Although, in my opinon, there is really noting common about violets. I grow a few cultivars; one is the highly-scented deep-colored violet that blooms every year in that protected spot by my friend (and uke player extraordinaire) Dan Scanlan’s garage. I’ve had a lot of fun making music in that garage, so that may be part of why I love them so much. But the flowers themselves have incredible charm. And this year – maybe because it was cooler longer? maybe because they just felt like it? – they bloomed for months. Well, at least two.

I also grow ‘Rosina’, a rose-colored cultivar. I like it, but somehow the deeper color sends me more. I used to have a white Viola odorata, but it disappeared.

Finally we come to the cheating part. ‘Penelope’, was bred by Joseph Pemberton in 1924 – in England. Does that count?

Do my David Austin roses, ‘Sharifa Asma’

and ‘Fair Bianca’

count? (I have more David Austin roses, but you get the general idea.)You be the judge.