Here’s a look at a new groundcover I’m trying out. The plant, Nuttall’s milkvetch (Astragalus nuttallii) is native to coastal Central California, and seems to be adapting easily to my coastal San Diego location–maybe a little too well! Las Pilitas… Read More »a new groundcover
January can be an amazing month for succulents and other desert plants. Many aloes and agaves explode into bloom, and plants with ephemeral foliage are green with leaves in ways you don’t often see them. San Diego’s Balboa Park houses… Read More »balboa park's desert garden
When you spend your time in San Diego’s well-watered burbs it’s easy to forget that you’re living in the middle of a desert. The last significant rainfall in town occurred in February, and the unirrigated natural lands around town have… Read More »the long brown season
In the local canyons, this time of year brings about the spectacular flowers of the sacred datura, Datura wrightii. The low, mounding bushes grow two to three feet tall and easily twice as wide, and are covered from dusk to… Read More »toloache
The evidence! Okay, okay, I’ll admit it. Despite a certain resemblance to the classic “Martian popping thing” available at Archie McPhee’s, it’s actually the final two leaves on a Pachypodium geayi, a succulent and spiny first-cousin to the better known… Read More »space alien in san diego?
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
Sorry. I don’t know the species, but it’s for sure an aloe, possibly Aloe arborescens. It’s pretty common in Southern California but spectacular nevertheless, especially in bloom: This is the plant in the front yard. It’s now mounding something like… Read More »in bloom: this big aloe