This is the time of year when juniper berries are thick on the stem. These are the berries that gave gin its name (ginèvre is French for juniper) – and its peculiar flavor. So next time you hoist a classic gin cocktail, think of its origins, and salute the juniper.

Junipers can be diminuitive bushes no higher than your ankle or shin, like our native Juniperus communis montana which (as the name implies) can be found in the mountains. Las Pilitas points out that this is a very adaptable plant: rock outcroppings are its native habitat, but it also thrives given garden soil, water, and plenty of sun.

As you can see, rock outcroppings are the natural habitat of larger junipers, too. Our native Juniperus californica sets its roots right in rock, and is probably partly responsible for helping to break up some of this high Sierra granite (this tree was growing at about 6,000 feet). (For more about how trees help create soil, check this post.)

California junipers can be shrubs or trees, depending on where they grow.  Severe mountain winds and climates make them into Moore-like sculptures.

 The “fur” on their bark isn’t particularly soft; it’s more like bark having a fibrous bad-hair day. But it does make intriguing patterns and textures. For the California Indians the fiber was more than an aesthetic experience: it was valuable for diapers, clothing, and mattresses.

Probably because of the pungent essential oils in its wood, both kinds of native juniper have been prized for fenceposts. “A juniper post will outlast two post holes.”

The oils in juniper were valuable to California Indians in different ways. They were used as smudges and teas for coughs, colds, flus and fever, and they were probably effective, because juniper oil is antiseptic, cleans the digestives system, and promotes detoxification generally. High blood pressure, constipation, and hiccups were also treated with juniper (juniper oil increases circulation).

French hospitals, which use much more aromatherapy than ours, used a rosemary/juniper smudge as a disinfectant until fairly recently. (They would have used the European junipers near them, but different kinds of juniper have similar uses.)

In Native American saunas, berries were thrown on hot rocks, probably giving the same disinfectant effects, as well as feelings of health, love, and peace, which are associated with juniper. I have yet to try this, but it sounds as if it might be as intoxicating as gin, without the bad aftereffects. (I’ve always found that gin is a sneaky, somewhat crazy high, coming up behind me softly with a very big mallet.)

The berries were also used for cold medicine and stopgap food when supplies ran short in winter. If you’ve ever tasted juniper berries, you’ll know they’re very pungent and strong-tasting, a lot like biting into a succulent pine needle. They taste very medicinal, but they’d be a tough thing to make into a meal. Their medicinal qualities might have helped stave off illness in times of weakness, though.

I was surprised to find that juniper berries can be found in our own food. Besides flavoring your gin, juniper berries may be in your prepared meats, fish, and sauerkraut (this really makes me want to read my sauerkraut labels more often).

But amazing and versatile and beautiful as their berries are, there’s something about junipers I like even better. Like redwoods, junipers can keep going even when they’re mostly dead; trees that do this are often associated with death and resurrection in myths and stories. It’s a beautiful thing to see the clean, almost bonelike dead wood striped with living, furry bark. A reminder to us all that it takes only a little spark of life to keep on.

   Sources:   Las Pilitas- great California native site with lots of information on plant habitats, uses, propagation, and more

.Mojave Desert  http://mojavedesert.net/plants/shrubs/juniper.html – Desert-oriented native plant site

arboretum.ucsc.edu/pdfs/ethnobotany_webversion.pdf -  an excellent .pdf on California native plant uses, from the University of Southern California arboretum

Essential Oils Desk Reference, Third Edition, Essential Science Publishing

Some might wonder why I’m putting up a post on PLANNING gardens in late summer. Personally, I think late summer is an ideal time for planning a garden: the facts of what your garden did (or didn’t do) are  fresh. Roadside stands are still selling the fruits and vegetables you want to grow next year. The taste of what you want is in your mouth.

Kitchen gardens are not my area of expertise, so only the picture is mine.  Marco from Live to Garden  believes in small, manageable kitchen gardens that are easy to keep up and delectable to eat from. And he’s your writer from now on.

A kitchen garden allows you to enjoy the freshest, most delicious vegetables. You can grow the varieties of vegetables that are special to your area, or the ones you can’t find in the store but really like, or maybe even something you’ve heard about and always wanted to try. It’s a satisfying way to join the trend of eating what grows in your immediate area.
The kitchen garden has been around for quite some time. These gardens became popular during the World Wars, where most of the food grown in these gardens was sent overseas to soldiers in battle. You can see that from the beginning, the kitchen garden were meant to do good for us gardeners. In more modern times the luster of this type of gardening has faded as we can now buy all of our food from grocery stores. But now, high prices and lack of environmentally friendly farming practices has made growing your own food popular again.

Let’s look at how to plan for your kitchen garden.

If you have done some research on these types of garden plans, you may feel overwhelmed by how large these gardens can appear. You may even feel that in order to achieve the best success, you may need a large kitchen garden. Do not fret. The best thing for you to do is to start with a small, manageable kitchen garden.

If you are starting from scratch it is important to ensure you have clean soil and you have weeded. Any weeds left in the garden may harm the vegetables as they grow. Next, select only the vegetables you want to grow. Choosing the vegetables that you know you will use is an excellent way to start planning your garden, as you will be more inclined to care for it. It is also important to include herbs as landscaping plants in your garden, as these plants protect the vegetables from pests, and when they flower they add a touch of beauty. Of course, herbs also work very well as seasonings for many of the foods you will be eating with the vegetables you grow in your kitchen garden.

When it comes to positioning your kitchen garden, place it close to the house. If it is too far away from your home you may find yourself less motivated to tend to the garden. You may also find that because the garden is too far away, you will have a more difficult time monitoring the progress of the vegetables.

Remember that in order for your garden to achieve the most success, your vegetables will require at least 8 hours of sunlight per day.

The size of your kitchen garden depends on several factors: who is eating, how much they’re eating, and what vegetables you want to grow (squash can take up a lot of room).  If you are just starting a kitchen garden, it’s important you keep the garden to a size that is below 25′X25′.  That way, the work is kept to a minimum and the fun is at a maximum.

If you are concerned about pests, place a garden fence around the garden.

In order to properly care for your kitchen garden, be sure that you check the plants twice weekly at the very least. When seedlings are young, or the weather is extra hot, you may need to check more often.

Your kitchen garden will bring you much happiness and excellent nourishment. Take care of your garden and it will definitely take care of you.

In my area, columbines are a late spring/early summer flower. But in the high mountains – especially with the late, cold spring we had – they’re blooming about now.

It’s hard not to love the gracefulness of columbines. They’re elegant en masse, as the picture at the top shows, dangling from arched stems, with their pretty almost clover-like foliage hidden by other groundcovers. And I love their individual shapes, which you can see even in the bud.

Columbines are another instance where I find the wild flower much more graceful than many of the garden types. Though I enjoy the larger, bolder McKana hybrids, and some of the others, I find many of the garden varieties distressing.

The trend to make every columbine double, for instance, like a bad re-enactment of a Victorian bonnet, stuffed with frill upon rolled frill until the shape is just a mass of writhing loops.

Or, even worse, the spurless kind – what, pray tell, is the point of a columbine without the graceful spurs?

That’s certainly what some bees must think, because sometimes they bite through the bulb at the tip of the spurs, to steal the nectar. Otherwise, columbines have to be pollinated by very large bumble bees or hummingbirds – nothing else can reach down there. So it is clear their blooming schedule has evolved to accommodate hummingbird migration. How did that happen? It’s only one of the mysteries of life.

I found this red-and-yellow columbine in a boggy spot, a little pocket with corn lilies, sedges, and other moisture-loving plants. The soil was a moosh of crushed granite and silt, and it had an eastern exposure. As you can see, they were thriving there, so if you want to plant them, you can take tips for the garden.

I’ve also seen these columbines in drier places – the wild western columbine is supposed to be a little more drought-tolerant than its twinlike eastern cousin,  Aquilegia canadensis. But I’ve noticed that, when Aquilegia formosa grows in drier areas, it takes advantage of seasonal wetness, then dies back until another year.

We have other wild columbines in California, such as the very-long-spurred, fragrant Aquilegia chrysantha, long on my List of Desired Plants. If you’re wondering why it’s not already in my garden, well, that’s because my List of Desired Plants has hundreds of names on it, and would require winning the lottery to fulfill.

The Latin name “aquilegia” means “eagle”, referring to the shape of the flower (you can especially see it in the forming bud). The namers of this flower appear to agree with me that their spurs are their most distinctive and telling point. (So to speak.) And the species name, I think, makes an even better case for preserving the spurs: “formosa” means “beautiful”.

If you have a boggy spot (or even a container with no holes), you might want to invite some beautiful eagles  into your garden. Or just admire them in their native habitat.

I love the rhythm of tall grasses, bending in the meadow.

Gardeners could take a lot of tips from the way nature has arranged this meadow.  There’s not a clunky note in there, unless you count the power lines.

I’m a bit ashamed to say that I can’t identify this flower, which I spent so much time photographing. So I’m going to quickly move to emphasizing what a beautiful job this natural planting does, of providing interest close up

at a short distance

and in the broad sweep.

Pink and pink-purple colors are repeated in this late-summer landscape. Perennial sweet pea*, Lathyrus latifolius,  glows against the green and gold of the grasses. It grows in my area, too. But here in the higher altitudes, it takes on a delicate character absent where I live. It probably dies back in the snow, and doesn’t have the chance to become the tangle of lianas that wild sweet peas become in the foothills. (I once saw a puppy play tug-of-war with the lathyrus in our area: the lathyrus won.**)

The same situation applies to this Sierra thistle, Cirsium californicum, which provides a nice feeding place for bees but doesn’t seem to be taking over the meadow, the way thistles in my own area would.

These fetching little vetches, lower than my ankle,  are making a tiny landscape of their own, interwtined with the grasses. At least I think they’re vetches; I haven’t been able to properly identify them.  (It might be meadow hosackia, Lotus torreyi,  but the typical coloring of meadow hosackia is lighter.) In this plant, the typical pea-family flowers start yellow, then deepen into  tinges of red as they age.

Wetland meadows are probably not the first thing you think about when you hear “high Sierras”. And there’s a reason for that: most of the Sierras are seasonally dry; the vegetation runs from chapparal to sagebrush to red fir communities – and when you get to the timberline, the vegetation runs to rock and very small plants.

Most of the Sierra wetlands I’ve seen have been little pockets, tucked in among the dry clay and granite landscapes that are our usual summer fair. I’ve seen little fens on the side of a long, dusty road;  tiny oases by the side of a lake; and this more unusual wetland meadow, where, as you can see, dry sagebrushy land is not far off.

There’s an important lesson in this for gardeners as well as naturalists: take advantage of your microclimates and – I just made this up – microtopography. Gardeners can get ideas from landscapes like these. If you have a wet spot in your garden, what about making your own little pocket meadow, using wild plants from your own area?

*  Perennial sweet peas (or at least L. latifolia) aren’t actually sweet; they don’t have fragrance.

**Granted, it was a very small puppy. But still.

Some of you may already be thinking, well, that’s obvious: through transpiration, plants give off oxygen, and they take in our carbon dioxide waste.

That’s true, and very important, but that wasn’t what I meant. What I’m talking about is the circulation of air in the garden.

For someone like me, who wants to cram as many kinds of plants as possible in a small place – somehow being artistic about it – the idea of air circulation came gradually. But if you see certain plants dying or just being morose all the time, you start to wonder.

Finally I read (probably in Graham Stuart Thomas, purveyor of articulate, observant, and good-humored rose information) – finally I read that roses need air circulation. They need air flowing all around them to thrive. So if you cram them in with plants of a similar height, after a while, they start looking cheesey.

They need more air.

When I thought about it, I realized that our wild roses grow with maximum air circulation. They form huge mounds, but those mounds of roses are dotted throughout a meadow – air circulation in between the bushes, and air circulation through the meadow (you only find California wild roses in clear areas, or areas that have once been cleared).

When I found out that my lilies weren’t doing well because I had too many tall plants mashed in with them, I changed my planting habits – and got more flowers and healthier plants. Lilies like their roots cool, so covering their ground with low plants is a good tactic. And this, too, is how I’ve seen lilies grow in the wild: most often in low ground cover or thick duff (the wilderness equivalent of mulch).

Mediterranean plants, such as herbs, like a lot of circulation, too. That makes sense when you consider they are basically chapparal plants, dotted over a stony landscape, often on slopes, where air circulation is even better.

Knowing how plants grow in the wild gives us useful clues about how they’ll do in our gardens – and incidentally, helps us know our plants better. If you have plants which are mysteriously languishing, you might consider giving them a little air.