gardening with nature

Aloe africana (South Africa)

Today, inspired by Alice Joyce’s wonderful Rancho La Puerta post, I’m going to write something that’s not at all seasonal. At least it’s not seasonal where I live. Alice’s post about Mexico cheered me up so much, after two weeks of overcast skies and off-and-on rain.

Mind you, I feel a pall of guilt settling over me when I admit this. Every time I set a clog in the puddling sog of my yard, I think: “Be grateful. We need the water.”

We do. Higher water table means our wells don’t go dry. Bigger snow pack means our rivers don’t go dry. And all of it means that our fire danger is greatly lessened, because the moisture will last longer. Since I had ash from a nearby fire dropping on my yard last summer, and breathed brown air from a huge wildfire futher away for three weeks the year before, that’s something to celebrate.

But there are beautiful things about a dry, hot landscape, and Huntington Gardens can show you a multitude of them.

Every year I visit LA someime around February or March. It’s just when the succulents at Huntington are at their best, and my family indulges me by taking me there.

Oh, I pay occasional tribute to the other parts of the huge Huntington Garden/museum complex. But I’m always drawn back to the succulents. I could spend days among the succulents, just learning.

There are so many, in fact, that I’m just going to concentrate on the aloes for this post.

This Aloe mariothii, from South Africa, acts almost like a palm tree: the living part sits atop a tower of old, dead leaves. This one is several feet high.

I also enjoyed the speckling on the leaves, a reverse of the light-on-dark speckles we usually see in the aloes we keep on our windowsills and porches.

The flowers of this Aloe petricola (from the Transvaal region of South Africa) flame against the deep blue sky behind them.

And who can deny the brilliance of this Aloe petricola setting, among tree aloes whose curves both echo and contrast the smaller aloes below? (I couldn’t get the i.d. on the tree aloes).

Aloe graminicola has a different kind of inflorescence, a much looser shape resembling the heads of the palms and cycads planted around them.

And underneath, Aloe graminicola has these beautiful bicolored pink-and-green leaves.

Aloe suffulta, from Mozambique, has brilliant leaf-markings that remind me of some of the checkered fritillary flowers.

And diminuitive Tanzanian Aloe dorotheae glows like embers on the ground.

Aloe suzannae, from Madagascar, looks quite unlike my former ideas of aloe, with its smooth waving stems, like a kind of succulent seaweed. (I wonder who Dorothy and Suzanna were?)

I always take another look at my personal favorite, the deep-burgundy-leaved Aloe somaliensis, when I leave. It’s near the entrance to the garden.

This is only a tiny sampling of the aloes in Huntington Gardens, which has one of the best collections in the world, and of course that collection must be only a smattering of the aloes you can see in the wild.

For those of you who want to learn more about aloes, I highly recommend  Aloe Garden Wilderness, a blog from South Africa, where many aloes come from. Eurica Teichman and her husband not only raise aloes for seed, they also travel to the aloe’s native habitats to see them there. The posts aren’t frequent, but you can learn so much from the archives.

 Aloe petricola (South Africa)

Last week I wrote that Bridget’s feast was coming up. Tonight (February 1st) is the eve of St. Bridget’s Day. For Celtic festivals, as for Jewish ones, the day starts at sunset the evening before, so tonight is an appropriate time to write about the harbingers of spring.

In my last post, I mentioned that Bridget is a force that brings resurrection. But Bridget’s feast, as a friend reminded me, is especially about those first signs of resurrection - the time when you’ve gone past hope, but are not yet near fruition. It’s the time when what you hope for begins, just a little, to show in the physical world.

Peeper frogs are noticeable sign of this early spring showing here, and they’ve been going nuts in the pond, lately, with their bell-like croaks. It’s mating time for them, and they are especially active in the full moon, just past. (It was a full moon at perigee, the closest to earth the moon gets, making it especially bright. I wonder, does this make the frogs more active?)

It’s hard to take a picture of peepers, since they plop frantically below the surface at my every slight movement. But I did find a short clip of a slow-motion film of a frog leaping. Not a peeper frog, unfortunately. This video was they key for scientists to discover that frogs can leap the way they do because they have extra-stretchy muscles.

The little crocus at the top of the page is a typical European-garden sort of spring harbinger. It’s ‘Gypsy Girl’, which paghat  says was developed by Gerald H. Hageman of the International Flower Bulb Center in Hillegom.

It wasn’t until recently that I cast aside my scorn for crocuses and remembered my childhood joy in them. Yes, they are common European garden flowers, but they are so cheerful and obliging. ‘Gypsy Girl’ is one of the early “snow” crocuses, earliest of the early. Some years ‘Cream Beauty’ (an early crocus that gets extra points for fragrance) blooms before ‘Gypsy Girl’; some years it’s the other way around. This year, ‘Gipsy Girl’ is my first crocus. And the bloom in the picture is the very first flower.

Some new leaves have come out on my roses, and swelling buds are promising more.

There are other signs of spring. The grass is newly green; from now until May is the green time of year for most of us Californians. And chickweed (Stellaria media), another European import, is showing itself:

One of my daffodil bulb pots is showing a few fat, whitening buds.

And, since this is Tulips in the Woods, of course I had to take a look at the tulip pots, where I found the species Tulipa turkestanica poking up above the surface. It’s one of the earliest tulips, which is why I’ve companion-planted it over bigger, later varieties. And here’s the nice bonus: there are clear signs that my bulbs are dividing, since I’m now getting three sprouts together where once there was one.

Since these little tulip sprouts have the telltale second leaf, like a little tongue surrounded by the bigger first leaf, I know that they will not come up blind, like many bulbs do when they divide. They will give me three flowers, instead of one. It’s one of the endearing things about species bulbs: they tend to flower cheerfully in difficult circumstances, unlike their larger, well-bred pampered cousins.

I know that many of you have colder winters than I do, but you may still be able to find subtle indications that garden hopes will be fulfilled. What are they?

In the Celtic tradition, St. Brigid’s day - the second of February - marks the beginning of spring.

My own climate must be similar, because this is the time of year when we start hearing the peeper frogs, and, despite the rain, see some of the signs of spring. Like this planting of violets and valerian, for instance.

Lightly mulched by the black oak leaves that are so common around here, they are beginning to show signs of life. I love how the valerian (Valeriana officinalis) takes on a bronze tinge with its early foliage.

Besides being among the first plants to show signs of life, valerian and violets have something else in common: they’re both medicinal.  Actually, a lot of ornamental plants started out as medicinal, a sort of hangover from the time when a garden was a pharmacy, larder, and household supply source.

It’s pretty obvious that valerian is medicinal; the “officinalis” in its Latin name means a plant that was sold in European apothecary shops, a plant that has medicinal value. Some of valerian’s medicinal qualities are pretty commonly known. Valerian root (that’s the medicinal part) is a muscle relaxant that can help reduce aches and pains and ease the way  to sleep. It can also  just calm you down when you’re too nervy.  Maybe that calming effect is also why valerian has been touted as an aphrodisiac. In some parts of England, these powers of valerian were recognized in another way: valerian was hung in the house to invite peace and harmony, and to prevent bickering between marriage partners. Valerian has also been used for palpitations of the heart and epilepsy.

Valerian root is indeed useful stuff, but just a caution to those who have not tried it: any preparations involving roots must be simmered, and simmering valerian smells a little bit like dirty socks or a very hairy dog coming in after rolling in something dead. Fortunately, it doesn’t taste the way it smells, but preparing it can stink up a house. A lot of people prefer capsules. If you buy valerian root this way, be sure you get a good brand; bad processing and storage mean very low quality, which means few effects for you.

Valerian’s also a great garden plant, especially for those of us who have a lot of shade. It grows well with foxglove, which shares its taste for shade, rich soil, and water. The pink-tinged flower heads smell like vanilla heaven, which endears it to me.

Violets (Viola odorata), while well-known as a garden plant, are not well-known as medicinal these days. Yet they have not lost the properties that made them valuable to Europeans in ancient times. I could write pages and pages on their magical and medicinal uses. (For those of you who think the two are at odds with each other, I’ll point out that magic and medicine come from the same root. I’ll further point out that people still put a lot of magical faith in the medicine of our times; our touching belief that doctors know everything, and our fascination with medical TV shows, are only two example of this.)

In ancient Greece, violets were used to embellish homes and temples, since they were believed to calm anger. This belief may be related to violet’s connection to the moon goddess. Perhaps it was that same connection that made the ancient Romans decorate their parties with violets to prevent drunkenness (maybe it was just quarrelsome drunkenness they were trying to alleviate?)

In more modern times, Euell Gibbons had violet leaves analyzed for their vitamin content. They are very high in vitamin C, and also in vitamin A (could repairing vitamin deficiency have something to do with their anger- and drunkenness-averting qualities?). Gibbons used to cook them up as spring greens; I tend to use them as a staple of what I call “garden tea”, tea made out of whatever plants are showing enough leaf for me to take some.

The leaves have also been used in ointments for swellings and inflammations, and the flowers used to be made into violet syrup, which was said to cure ague, epilepsy, pleurisy, quinsy, jaundice, consumption, insomnia, and inflammation of the eyes.

It might or might not do any of those things. But when I see the first violets bloom, it certainly does my eyes good.

Resources:

Donald Law, Concise Encyclopedia of Herbs, St. Martin, 1976

Richard Alan Miller, The Magical and Ritual Use of Perfumes, Destiny Books, 1990

Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Healthful Herbs, David McKay Co. Inc., 1966

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.

I’ve started my moss garden.

And the beginnings aren’t quite as small as this picture implies. This little window moss-garden was inspired by having some very tiny pieces left, little shreds that happened as I was gathering moss, plus the small curl of oak bark you can see rearing up its mossy head. It’s very fun having a moss garden by my sink, though (and that’ll make it easy to remember to water it).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the house, I’ve started assembling some ingredients.

Here’s a photo of the kind of “soil” I’m dealing with (mostly shreds of old boards on top):

I’d originally thought that I’d just grind up moss and spray it all over the whole thing, voila, moss garden. Like all garden fantasies, this one was torn from me forcibly. George Schenk’s Moss Gardening (Timber Press), advised me that some mosses like wood, some like rocks, and some like to grow in soil. One moss does not fit all.  OK, so one little piece of knowledge rattling in the empty cauldron which is my knowledge of bryophytes (mosses and lichens).

What I’d have to do, if I wanted mosses on the ground, was to go and find local moss growing in a similar situation (there are shade mosses and sun mosses, another tiny bit of knowledge I’ve gained. I thought they all grew in shade). Then, at least if I wanted the easiest quickest method (I do), I was supposed to cut up divots, about the size of my hand, leaving plenty of moss to grow over the blank spots.

I went to the woods near my house and proceeded to moss-hunt. I’ve permanently misplaced my trowel (yes, I know, I could have replaced it in the ensuing years), so I took a pruning knife with me. Actually, for the moss that was growing on the face of banks, no knife was necessary; I could work off the pieces with my hands (that’s where some of those tiny ones came in; they just broke off). They didn’t come with the 2-3 inches (5-8cm) of soil that Shenck recommends; they weren’t (as some gurus say) that deeply attached. The ones I cut from flat ground didn’t come up with much soil, either, maybe because I was cutting them with a knife, maybe because I was cutting them out of pretty-much solid clay.

The clay aspect worries me. Because, when you clear the debris away from my moss-garden-site soil, you get this:

Sandy loam. Really rare in our area, and one of the best possible soils for growing most things - but it is very different from the clay soil my mosses were wrested from, and they were under oaks, not conifers.

Will this make a difference? I don’t know. Next post, I’ll show how I started creating my moss garden (with a little potential fungus involved, too.)

This post, I’ll leave you with a quote from George Shenck, on why more people in the U.S. think moss is something to be thoroughly cleaned out or scrubbed off. It’s a rather grandiose justification for my little moss garden, but, like moss, the concept creeps up on you, filling in spaces you didn’t even know were blank and unfurnished.

“At a certain level of mind, mosses and lichens are allied with owls, toads, bats, and things that go bump in the night, are in league with Nature at the downturn, at one with decadence and demise…Admiration of mosses and lichens, and interest in cultivating them, represents the attainment of a certain wholeness of the civilized mind, a roundness in understanding our environment.”