by their buds

Texas sun drops have been subsisting in our cactus and succulent bed since we brought home a three- or four-inch pot from a native plant nursery in Ventura last winter. The height of their spring blooming season (maybe three or four flowers at a time) coincided with that of a small barrel cactus and matched it in color: a yellow of almost 'neon' intensity.

Spring 2012 also brought us a good showing of California poppies. After years of planting seeds to no avail, we had bought two small pots (one the standard orange-gold and one 'mixed') at the Theodore Payne Foundation.

In spite of coming from different states, the Texas sun drops and California poppies looked very much alike -- small flowers with four rounded petals on feathery foliage. We enjoyed their simultaneous bloom, but then the poppies' lighter gray-green foliage died back while the sun drops' tiny dark green leaves kept their color and continued to produce the occasional bright blossom throughout summer and fall.

This week, with December looming, I noticed two buds on the Texas sun drops and thought they looked like tiny balloons. Not inclined to assume a nose-to-ground posture to study them, I picked the larger one yesterday and brought it inside for closer observation. The top of the sun drop bud, pale yellow cross-crossed by thin red lines like a miniature gift tie, is a square folded in on itself like a cooty catcher or origami box. California poppy buds are cones, tightly wrapped with a pale green cover (pixie hat) that's cast aside when the flower opens.

I suspect the outside of the sun drop bud will fold back to reveal the flower. On its second day of  captivity I think I see the bud's diagonal lines getting wider -- turning into cracks so as to pop apart. If the flower opens, I will be standing by to look at it under the magnifying desk lamp. Otherwise, another sun drop bud will have to be picked in the interests of science.

Googling 'Texas sun drop,*' I learn that there are at least six species of Calylophus, which belongs to the Onogracea (evening primrose) family. Wikipedia's larger-than-life photo shows "Calylophus drummondii in the Water Conservation Garden at Cuyamaca College, El Cajon, California, USA." Noting this location for our next trip to the San Diego area, I eagerly pursue more on-line links.

Calylophus drummondianus var. berlandieri, under the common name of  'shrubby primrose,' was University of Arkansas' Plant of Week in June 2008. Due to some confusion between the work of two 19th-century botanists, the Scottish Thomas Drummond and the French Jean Berlandier, shrubby primrose is often attributed only to Drummond, "a plant collector sent out by London’s Kew Gardens to collect plants in Texas," or to Berlandier, "part of the team assigned to survey and establish the Mexican borderline." In fact, however, it should bear the names of both.

I love these stories of taxonomic history, but now of course I wish I knew what these charming yellow flowers were called by pre-Columbian natives on both sides of the border.

What I do know now, to my great satisfaction, is that some people call Calylophus drummondianus var. berlandieri the 'square bud primrose.' A site devoted to native plants of the Texas hill country shows a beautiful photo and waxes eloquent: "A splash of yellow on a low mound of thin grassy foliage makes this plant special. Plant in full sun and enjoy a flush of spring bloom and additional blooms from time to time in the summer." In this mild climate, I expect a few "additional blooms" in December and look forward to a "splash of yellow"along with our California poppies and barrel cactus in March and April.
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* 'Texas sun drop' also comes up as "an exhilarating citrus soda."

P.S. (added November 30) The bud is opening! I was totally wrong about the diagonal lines, which have become the center lines of each sepal. The other crisscross (the red one) is the one that has split apart to reveal bright yellow foliage folded intricately inside. I have seen what I needed to see and will not need to sacrifice another bud from the garden!

bedfellows, part 1

Our front garden consists of three raised beds, each roughly triangular, bordered by eight-inch brick walls, and trisected by a path which Steve paved when he put in the bricks. Lately I've written a lot about the cactus and succulent bed (Bed 'C,' if you will); earlier in spring it was the bulb bed (Bed 'B'); and occasionally there's something to say about Bed 'A,' which includes all the rest -- from my repurposed Australian tree fern and a Meyer asparagus fern to a tall camellia, a clump of flowering ginger, and a patch of bromeliads.

One of my grad school professors liked to divide literature and philosophy into two processes: 'lumping' and 'separating.' This is a useful distinction, but sometimes the two are simultaneous. We have separated the garden into three parts and lumped certain categories* of plants into them.

Bed 'C' includes California poppies and Texas sun drops. Neither of these is a cactus or a succulent, but both are natives of states where cacti and succulents flourish. This year the orange poppies appeared to be finished before the yellow sun drops really got started, but the poppies have managed a 'second coming' since I cut back most of their dried-up foliage. Thus we have the plants side by side, looking very similar with their four delicate petals and wispy foliage.

I hope that, as they spread, these natives of different states will intertwine into an orange-and-yellow ground-cover reminiscent of the iconic "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" so popular in the mid 1950s.

But wait! We have true 'Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White' in the same bed with the poppies and sun drops. White gardenias, gracing the cactus and succulent bed thanks to their seniority, are mingling with cerise calandrinias, newcomers from a backyard succulent sale two years ago. 

   

The calandrinia's pointed gray-green leaves are visible in the lower left corner of this photo, while its 'cherry pink' blossoms rise on slender 30-inch stems to crowd in front of the sturdy gardenias --larger this year than ever before, though not as symmetrical as the ones we wore to junior high dances.

See the well camouflaged bee? I have to wonder whether the gardenia feels deprived of insect attention. A fall dose of iron should be good for whatever ails it -- even the yellow leaves.

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*I cannot think of categories without recalling how Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986) classified animals into types 'a' through 'n.' I hope you'll follow this link to a page of Borges quotations and scroll down to a longish paragraph beginning: "These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences . . ."

barrels of memoirs

Barrel cacti bring back memories of my family's earliest days in California at the end of World War II. Having been transferred here from Ohio by Owens Corning Fiberglas, my father was called upon to develop applications in many industries, from aircraft to sporting goods. One of his most unusual assignments was a trip to the desert (probably near Palm Springs) to develop 'guzzlers,' fiberglass-lined cisterns that collected rainwater for birds and animals. I can remember how he came home and raved about the wonders of the desert, with barrel cacti prominent among them. 

According to Quail Unlimited, the guzzler project started in 1948. Ten years later, my father was able to act upon his passion for the desert by taking an early retirement and buying a small business there. Over a period of fifty years, he and my mother lived in a series of desert towns, and he ultimately volunteered as the caretaker of a large desert garden in Arizona.

Desert living does not appeal to me, but I do enjoy cacti and can grow them easily in our Mediterranean climate. Not long after Steve and I established the cactus and succulent bed in our front garden, I set out several small cacti which had been growing in pots for years. This may have been a mistake, as some of them were so tiny that we lost track of where they were. Here's a photo of the biggest one, a barrel cactus, with a dime at eleven o'clock to indicate scale:

2013 marks the third spring this cactus has bloomed for us, making quite a show next to the Texas sundrops that match its nearly neon color. Since the barrel is almost perfectly round, it's easy to follow the line of its circumference and to see that the flowers are larger than their host.

I stood on the sidewalk to take the photo above, but when I decided to photograph two more little barrels, I had to step right into the bed. This I did gingerly though I was wearing sturdy shoes, and indeed I almost stepped on a barrel that had successfully hidden from us for over a year. Growing less than two feet from the 'big' barrel, it looks to be a younger specimen of the same variety:

When I narrowly escaped stepping on this little guy, I was heading toward the smallest barrel in the garden:

Obviously this one is a different variety, with its shorter spines and lighter green color. It would be eclipsed by a quarter. I'm eager to see what color its blooms will be, but I'm not holding my breath.

Finally, here's the last known barrel.It's very much like the first, but with longer spines and a somewhat lighter color. The dime (three o'clock) should've been closer to it, but I was not interested in pricking my finger tips.

When I asked Steve whether he knew we had four barrels, he wanted to know: "Is that like a four-barreled carburetor?" Very like that AND "very like a whale," I think.

Barreling ahead through other parts of the garden, I see gardenia buds fattening and serrano chilies setting fruit: pulling together the best of so many worlds.

narcissus, harbinger of fring

Just last month (gardenia essentials), I confidently predicted: "Narcissi and freesias will sprout before Thanksgiving; calla lilies will stand tall before Christmas." When I wrote that, of course, I still believed that Southern California's famous "fall rains" would come in early October and usher in the fring season I enjoy so much.

On November 28, 2010, I described the planting of our narcissus bed as well its sprouting in early October of that year. We were enjoying narcissus blossoms throughout November of 2011 too, but again the rains had come in October.

October 2012 is history, and it's time to admit that I remember many fall droughts and many years when there was no paperwhite narcissus until Christmas. This fall has brought one Santa Ana after another, and today's predicted high is 95.

But bulbs are powerhouses of stored energy. Last Thursday or Friday, I saw that the first narcissus of 2012 had sprouted and was standing almost four inches tall. It was high time to bring on the laundry water.* The narcissus bed will receive at least three gallons every couple of days, and I'm thinking that our Idaho daffodils (not naturalized here yet) deserve life support too.

Our resurgent clematis, thirsty dogbane, Texas sun-drops, and showy bromeliads have received the lion's share of this summer and fall's laundry water, but wizened jade trees and other sad succulents (calandrinia, bulbine, aeonium, etc.) are beginning to remind me of T.S. Eliot's "old man in a dry month."

"Use it or lose it," they say, and this is true of laundry water as well as rain water. If the gardens don't get it, the overloaded sewer system and storm drains will.
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* I haven't reclaimed much laundry water this year (see drops in the bucket, part 3 for the October 2010 inception of that laborious process). Ironically, I had simplified my method of siphoning water out of the washing machine but had not really taken advantage of this innovation. 

variegated volunteers

I haven't planted a sweet pea since 2011, and yet I've had some lovely specimens in the front garden and parking strip. You can see a history of my sweet-pea struggles (and triumphs!) in a post from 2013, where I focus on the genetics of pea blossoms and speculate about whether there will be changes (mutations?) in color among my volunteer sweet peas from year to year. I would especially like to see some all white blossoms;** these were fairly common when I planted from seed packets labeled as  'mixed' colors, but they have been totally absent from their naturalized progeny.

Due to stranger-than-usual weather in the fall-winter of 2015-16, volunteer sweet peas sprouted in early October but did not bloom until March. Steve and I returned from a spring visit to Idaho on March 24 to find that spring had actually come on schedule to our SoCal location. (It usually comes in October or November, when I delight in calling it 'Fring.') California poppies, freesias, hyacinths, azaleas, and nasturtiums were in vibrant bloom, and buds were fattening on the Texas sundrops. But the sweet peas were what caught my eye.

Examining the sweet peas closely, I observed two specimens that were like nothing I'd ever seen before among my volunteers:

 

       

The upper image shows STREAKING of bright pink on white (or vice versa), and the lower one shows the WHITEST petals I've seen on volunteer sweet peas. Plain bright pink blossoms have appeared every year, and there have been plenty of light pink with white, but none where the white part of the petal has predominated. If I were a more dedicated follower of Gregor Mendel, I would save seed from these two to see what they would do next year, but it's more fun to wait and be surprised.

To paraphrase the old saw about art: I don't know anything about plant genetics, but I know what I like!*
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* I do know enough about horticultural history to recall that streaking (most notably in tulips) can be the result of a virus. Going wild does have its risks.

** P.S. All-white blossoms have finally appeared on one of my volunteers. They're not in the parking strip, but in a bed devoted mostly to bulbs. This little vine is reaching out onto the sidewalk. Trying to get to the parking strip? When it dries out, I'll scatter its seed there. It could stay where it is, but I have ambitious plans to dig up and separate all my bulbs in August or September.