All over town here in San Diego you see the black mustard plant, Brassica nigra, now approaching the end of its blooming period. The undulating yellow mounds of it doing its thing are a spectacular sight, so much so that… Read More »wild and out of control
The Botany Photo of the Day page at the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden site is always worth a visit. They post a photo, along with a brief discussion that points to a pile of references that you could… Read More »no such thing as a boring plant
Sunday I went down to San Diego’s annual Artwalk streetfair down by the cool waterfront in the Little Italy neighborhood. This has been a seriously bipolar spring, alternating chilly periods with intensely hot ones. This weekend was one of the… Read More »jacaranda
I was thumbing through The American Lawn, edited by Georges Teyssot, a collection of thoughts on the phenomenon of American lawns by eight contributors. It’s a wide ranging collection of essays looking at the place of lawns in American culture… Read More »the dark side of lawns
When we moved into the house twenty years ago one of the first things we did was to take out the front lawn. Southern California is a desert, and it seemed like the environmentally sensitive thing to do. And besides,… Read More »turf battle
Here’s a recently reworked piece, Calla Lily Displacement, from the Destructive Testing photo series I started ten years ago: Believe it or not this work sprang from a discomfort I had with the documentary photo tradition, where the photographer is… Read More »calla lily displacement
Are gardeners more humble people? Do we know things a lot of others don’t or believe in things others choose not to believe? Here are a couple thoughts for Earth Day, the first one a soft feather bed of a… Read More »those arrogant humans…
It’s disappointing to put together a pot of several seemingly matched plants–even of the same species, only to have most of the plants dwarfed and out-competed by one of their pot-mates. Sometimes you want to throw your hands up and… Read More »altruistic plants?
In addition to the spectacular Echium candicans, you can occasionally find some smaller examples of the the genus. Because of the economics of the plant nursery industry, where people tend to buy stuff that’s in bloom over just about anything… Read More »smaller echiums
For the last three weeks Echium candicans (a.k.a. “Pride of Madeira”) has been blooming around town. Here’s a planting up at UCSD. For eleven months it’s a somewhat open, woody shrub with rosettes of long, narrow leaves, of a soft… Read More »pride of madeira