Succulents and More™

Since this a gardening blog, I normally don’t talk about man-made structures other than what is typically found on a residential property. However, this one is so special that I decided to dedicate a blog post to it. The Sundial Bridge in Redding, CA, two and a half hours north of Sacramento, is a futuristic-looking pedestrian bridge across the Sacramento River. It connects the north and south campus of Turtle Bay Exploration Park and provides access to the 16-mile Sacramento River Trail . The Sundial Bridge was designed by Santiago Calatrava , one of the leading architects and bridge designers in the world. Its cantilever spar cable-stayed design was pioneered by Calatrava and first seen in his Alamillo Bridge in Seville, Spain (completed in 1992). Calatrava has created several other bridges with the same visual signature, most recently in Jerusalem, Israel and Dublin, Ireland. Calatrava is also the designer of the World Trade Center Transportation Hub currently under constr...

Yesterday , I talked about some of the clumping bamboos I saw at San Francisco Botanical Garden. Today’s post is about the running bamboos I encountered. Pleioblastus (running) Pleioblastus is a genus of small to medium-sized running bamboos, many of them very useful as groundcovers or hedges. The dwarf varieties can be cut to the ground in early spring to stimulate new growth for a clean look. All species prefer at least partial shade and are hardy to 5°F or below. If you have a small yard like we do, I would not plant pleioblastus in the ground—if you must, patrol the area vigilantly through the growing season to make sure your plant doesn’t stray. I have several pleioblastus species and they’re all contained: the dwarf species like Pleioblastus distichus and Pleioblastus fortunei to a pot or shallow bowl, and the taller Pleioblastus gramineus to one of our stock tanks . Dwarf white-stripe bamboo ( Pleioblastus fortunei ) pruned into a low hedge along the bamboo pond. This...

Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend some time at San Francisco Botanical Garden . This 55-acre sanctuary in the heart of Golden Gate Park is a great place to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city and yet it is only minutes from the Japanese Tea Garden , the de Young Museum and the California Academy of Sciences . You can park your car in the Music Concourse parking garage and easily walk to all these places. San Francisco Botanical Garden has 8,000 plants varieties from around the world, grouped into a dozen or so collections, including the Mesoamerican Cloud Forest, the Ancient Plant Garden, the Temperate Asia Garden and one of my favorites, the Moon-Viewing Garden with its gazing pond and Japanese lanterns. While San Francisco Botanical Garden doesn’t specialize in bamboo per se , there are several dozen bamboo species scattered across the various collections. I enjoy scouting for bamboo (or other plants I might be interested in) in public gardens because they typi...

Deer grass ( Muhlenbergia rigens ) is native to much of California. Some sources say that it is forage for deer but other sources suggest that deer actually avoid it. Not being a deer expert, I can’t really say what is true and what isn’t. However, I do know that this well-behaved, non-invasive perennial prefers sandy or well-draining soils and needs full sun to thrive. It flourishes even in difficult spots that are exposed to reflected heat. Deer grass is anything but rare here in the Sacramento Valley. It is often planted in public places (for example the parking lot of the West Sacramento IKEA store where it elevates what would otherwise be a pretty dreary concrete landscape) and looks stunning in mass plantings or combined with finer-textured grasses like Mexican feather grass ( Nasella tenuissima ). Each plant can form a rather sizable clump up to 5 ft. wide by 2-4 ft. high, with the flower spikes reaching another 2 ft. above the clump. It must have enough space to achieve its f...

Santa Claus must know me well because for Christmas he brought me two books that would delight any plant lover. The first one, The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession by Andrea Wulf, is about a small group of 18th century naturalists who turned Britain into the horticultural epicenter of the world. I’ve just started this book and will write a review when I’m done. The other one is Bizarre Botanicals: How to Grow String-of-Hearts, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Panda Ginger, and Other Weird and Wonderful Plants , by Larry Mellichamp and Paula Gross. I must have seemed awfully anti-social yesterday because I spent a good part of the afternoon devouring this book—pun intended, considering that 35 pages are dedicated to carnivorous plants. I’ve got to tell you right away: This is one of the most entertaining plant book you’re likely to find anywhere. It portrays 78 plants that for one reason or another are “weird and wonderful.” Subdivided into ten different categories,...

On Christmas morning we not only found presents under the tree but also a surprise on my in-laws’ back patio: These footprints were right next to the house. My father-in-law got out a tape measure for scale: For comparison, these are our black lab’s footprints: So who was our nighttime visitor? A mountain lion , also known as cougar or puma. My in-laws see tracks occasionally, but never this close to the house. For all we know, this particular mountain lion could have watched us watching TV in the living room. Or maybe it was after my father-in-law’s private stash of MGD , stored in the snow right outside the kitchen door:

Winter in my parents-in-law’s garden in Mount Shasta in the mountains of far Northern California. I love exploring their yard with my camera. In addition to the planting beds and landscaping features they created, their property has a lot of native vegetation that is very different from what we have in Davis. The elevation here is 3,500 ft. and the town receives quite a bit of snowfall because 14,179 ft. Mount Shasta, a massive volcano rising above the town on the east side, forces moisture out of the air as it rises and cools. At home in Davis we are able to putter about the yard even in the dead of winter. There’s always something to do outside, not just cleanup work, but also preparing new garden beds, even doing some planting. In contrast, here in the mountains the gardener is forced into several months of inactivity because of the weather. The most that can be done is reorganize the garden shed or winter sowing . And of course there are always plant catalogs to peruse ! Still, ...

At Thanksgiving I posted photos of the bamboos we planted in my parents-in-law’s yard in Mount Shasta, CA (zone 7) this summer. They’ve been covered by snow since mid-November, some of them completely buried. During that time, the lowest temperature was 13°F, with average lows in the high 20s. These are hardly extreme temperatures compared to what other parts of the country have been experiencing. That’s a good thing considering that these bamboos are still pretty small—some were planted from 1-gallon containers. I took a walk around the property this morning and checked out all the bamboos. Everything looks good. I saw no leaf burn and no culm damage. That gives me hope for decent growth next year. Yellow vivax ( Phyllostachys vivax ‘Aureoculis’) Even bent over and frozen in place this is a supremely beautiful plant. The culm color is stunning against the snow. Giant black bamboo ( Phyllostachys nigra ‘Punctata’) This variety is supposed to grow bigger than the reg...