(Not so) lucky bamboo

After four years I’ve finally managed to kill our lucky bamboo.

What’s surprising is not that it eventually died, but rather that it lived as long as it did. It was stuck on the edge of the bath tub in our guest bathroom where it was supposed to lend an exotic note to the décor. It was in a glass vase filled with pebbled and water, so in essence it was in water all the time (the recommended way of growing it). And for four years it was actually nice and green although it never saw sunlight—in fact the light level in that spot was pretty low. I’m not bemoaning its demise, but rather I’m singing its praises. It was as care- and maintenance-free as you could ever hope for.

Which brings us to its unfortunate common name. Most people think lucky bamboo is a bamboo, but it isn’t at all. Its Latin name is Dracaena sanderiana, and it’s an understory plant native to the rainforests of Cameroon. I have no idea how an African jungle plant became associated with feng shui but millions of lucky bamboos are sold every year. Apparently, lucky bamboo is one of the most popular feng shui cures—although this article, when talking about the wonderful properties of bamboo, completely ignores the fact that lucky bamboo isn’t a bamboo at all (which proves my point).

My lucky bamboo (Dracaena sanderiana)
looking not so lucky

The shriveled skin came off as I pulled the plant out of the vase,
releasing a rather unpleasant odor of decay

When you kill a lucky bamboo, does that mean your luck runs out? I sure hope not!

Maybe I’ll get another one at IKEA to cure the bad feng shui that no doubt exists now in our house.

Tower of jewels update

2011 has been a great year in the garden so far. My personal highlight was following the miraculous development of our tower of jewels (Echium wildpretii) as it turned from a modest but attractive rosette of leaves 1 ft. high and 2 ft. across into a 5 ft. tall conical structure covered with hundreds, if not thousands, of small flowers within a space of seven months.

Check out this post to see photos taken between October 2010 and May 2011.

After the bloom peaked in mid-May, the flowers quickly dried up and fell off. By the end of May, the tower was completely bare.

 
May 18, 2011                                                 June 11, 2011

However, the work done by untold numbers of bees was not in vain.

In full bloom on May 5, 2011

Untold numbers of seeds, neatly arranged in pairs of two, have formed all over the tower.

Seeds on June 15, 2011

What’s particularly interesting is that the seeds aren’t protected inside some sort of structure. Instead, they’re out in the open, exposed and seemingly vulnerable. But that must be the plant’s strategy for propagation. Maybe the exposed seeds are supposed to fall off as the plant sways in the wind? Or maybe they are supposed to be eaten by birds?

Eventually, the entire tower will fall over, scattering the seeds far and wide, but I wonder what will happen in the meantime? I’ll keep my eyes open—and my camera ready.

One thing is certain: There will be plenty of seeds to go around. If you’d like some, just let me know.

Bunny ears in bloom

In February, I brought home a couple of white-spined bunny ear cacti (Opuntia microdasys 'Albata') from a trip to Southern California. They were in very small 2-inch containers which they had severely outgrown. I repotted them and then put them in planters on top of the low fence around our front yard.

Bunny ears in 2" pot on 2/27/11

In our fence-top planter box on 4/13/11

In early May they started to put out flower buds, but due to unseasonably cool weather it took them a month to open up.

Flower buds on 6/12/11

Unlike our beavertail cactus (Opuntia basilaris) whose blooms are purple, these white-spined bunny ears have light lemon yellow flowers that I find stunning.

Left flower bud open on 6/14/11

View of the flower from the top

When looking at the photos, remember that these are small plants (7 inches tall) and the flowers are only 1½ inches across. Actually, their intimate size makes them even more beautiful to me.

A word of warning: As soft and cuddly as this little plant looks, the small white spines (glochids) are nasty. They come off at the slightest touch and stick to everything, including your skin and (rumor has it) your eyeballs. Handle with extreme care.

Wordless Wednesday

 

A smell vampires ought to love

It’s a clump-forming perennial from South Africa with attractive grass-like foliage and lavender-colored flowers on 2-foot stems that seem to last forever. It grows well in full sun and doesn’t seem to be fussy about soil. While it spreads by rhizome, it does so slowly and predictably, and it’s never invasive. In addition, it’s hardy to 20°F, allowing to be grown in much of California.

Sounds like the perfect plant for many situations, doesn’t it? Well, it is. It’s eternally popular, both with landscape designers and homeowners. Everybody seems to love it—except me. Don’t get me wrong: I like the leaves and I like the flowers, but I just cannot stand the smell.

I’m talking about society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea). While it isn’t in the immediate garlic and onion family (Allium), it is a distant cousin. The funny thing is that I do love onions and garlic—to me, they taste and smell fresh and, well, alive. Society garlic, on the other hand, smells like garlic that has died and started to rot. It would be the perfect scent profile for vampires if only they liked garlic. But maybe Bram Stoker got it all wrong, and they do.

Society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) featuring prominently in the landscaping of a condo complex up the street from us

Society garlic looks beautiful mixed in with lavenders

Close-up of flower
Courtesy of Wikimedia

We all have our personal likes and dislikes, and as much I’m trying to make myself like society garlic, I just can’t get over the smell. Give me lilacs and lavenders any day!

Matilija poppy update

Just last week I posted a blurb about the matilija poppy, a stunning shrub native to Southern California. I don’t typically write about the same plant twice in such a short period of time, but I just found a few more clumps near our house that are in full bloom. Since the flowers are at their absolute peak right now, I simply have to post these photos. Please bear with me and/or change the channel—I won’t hold a grudge. At least not for long.

These particular clumps are adjacent to a park and public tennis courts and must have been planted by the City of Davis. I’m very pleased that an obvious effort was made to use native plants appropriate for our climate.

Since these plants are on top of a slope, drainage is perfect. Matilija poppy prefers dry, sunny spots and cannot tolerate wet feet.

Matilija poppy (Romneya coulteri) adjacent to Walnut Park in South Davis

There are several large clumps in this location

Romneya coulteri is indeed in the poppy family (Papaveraceae), so it is related both to the California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) and to the oriental (Papaver orientale) and opium poppy (Papaver somniferum).

The petals are like chiffon—they weight next to nothing and flutter in the slightest breeze.

 

 

 

A few interesting tidbits to prepare you for a stint on Jeopardy!: Matilija poppy has the largest flowers of any California native. It was nominated as the California state flower in 1890 but lost to the California poppy, which still holds that title today.

Beavertail cactus blooming

After a longer and cooler spring than usual, summer has finally arrived, and our cacti are enjoying the abundance of sunshine.

Some of our smaller cacti bloomed a while ago (check this and this), and now it seems that our prickly pears (Opuntia sp.) are getting into the swing of things well.

The first prickly pear to bloom is a beavertail cactus (Opuntia basilaris) I picked up in January from UC Berkeley Botanical Garden. I believe they had propagated it from seed.

Opuntia basilaris is native to California and the Southwest. We saw quite a few in the wild in Joshua Tree National Park earlier this year. As far as prickly pears go, it’s one of the smaller species, growing to maybe 2 ft. in height. However, a clump can be quite wide and consist of hundreds of individual pads. The coloration is beautiful—a steel gray with a touch of purple, more pronounced in the winter. As the temperature increases, the color seems to become greener.

Opuntia basilaris in Joshua Tree National Park

Our small plant (about 1 ft tall) has had one flower bud for at least a month now but it wasn’t until three or four days ago when the thermometer climbed into the 80s that the bud started to grow larger. Today it finally opened up.

Our potted Opuntia basilaris in bloom

The color is hard to describe. Neon magenta comes to mind. It’s the kind of color your eye is drawn to from quite a distance.

The color is almost unreal

Pollination appears to be mostly by bees

I don’t know how long these flowers will last but I will sure enjoy them.

Here is a photo of an entire clump in bloom, courtesy of Wikimedia:

According to Wikimedia, this photo was taken by Stan Shebs in the “sandy area of Pine Creek Canyon east of the old homestead, Red Rock Canyon, Spring Mountains, southern Nevada (elev. about 1200 m)”

My bunny ears cactus (Opuntia microdasys ‘Albata’) has a bunch of flower buds which I’m hoping will open up soon. I’ll post photos when they do.

Done doing some potting

I spent a couple hours in the morning removing suckers from two of our ornamental pear trees (‘Aristocrat’ and ‘Bradford’) that keep coming up everywhere. What joy! I wrote about this sucker problem before, so the less said on that topic, the better!

To reward myself, I decided to tackle a few potting projects I hadn’t gotten around to yet. The first one was simple: Put the 1-gallon Puya coerulea var. violacea I bought at the last UC Davis Arboretum plant sale in a larger and nicer container.

Puya coerulea var. violacea in its 1-gallon nursery container

Puyas are terrestrial bromeliads and hence related to pineapples—the top of a pineapple looks quite similar to this puya. Most puyas are native to Chile and given time and space will form large clumps and eventually produce stunning flower stalks. This spring several large puyas were in bloom at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden but unfortunately I never got around to seeing them. My puya is a smaller species and will produce a more modest flower stalk, seen in this photo. But that’s a number of years down the line.

A couple of years ago I was given the green pot seen in the next photo and I never knew what to do with it—it simply didn’t go with any plants I had. However, it seems to be a good match for this puya, so that’s where it went.

Note: Puya leaves are heavily serrated. Wear thick gloves when handling them!

Puya coerulea var. violacea in new pot

  

Project 2 involved a rather brightly colored strawberry pot my wife bought last year at Panama Pottery in Sacramento. In the top I had planted a dwarf aloe called ‘Pink Blush’ and in the pockets a bunch of cobweb hens and chicks (Sempervivum arachnoideum).

Strawberry pot with Aloe ‘Pink Blush’ and Sempervivum arachnoideum

As you can see in the next photo, the Sempervivum arachnoideum are doing extremely well…

Sempervivum arachnoideum offsets

…at least in three out of the five pockets. The plants in the other two pockets have died, leaving ugly gaps.

Dead pockets…

The solution was simple: Simply detach some of the offsets from the other pockets and stick them in the empty pockets. Add a little bit of soil on top and water. They should put out new roots in no time considering how pleasant the weather is at the moment.

…with some Sempervivum arachnoideum offsets

The third project was a fun one. During our trip to Southern California in February, I bought a beautiful fish hook cactus at Mariscal Cactus & Succulents in Desert Hot Springs. Since I didn’t quite know where to put the cactus, it sat in its 5-gallon nursery container all this time. Last week I bought a nice square terracotta pot at Panama Pottery’s spring sale so I was finally ready to repot my fish hook.

Fish hook cactus (Ferocactus wislezenii)

I used the same technique I’d followed in early February when I repotted a large golden barrel cactus.

Step 1: Place the cactus sideways on wadded up newspaper. This fish hook cactus has even longer spines than the golden barrel and I was very careful to protect them well. The last thing I wanted was for the spines to get damaged or break. That would have seriously impacted the looks of the cactus.

Protect the spines with wadded up newspaper

Step 2: Wrap a blanket around the cactus and newspaper and tie it with a strap, belt, etc.

Wrap in blanket and tie with strap

Steps 3: Remove the old pot. While I had to struggle with the golden barrel cactus, this one came right off. Not a lot of roots considering how large and heavy the cactus is!

Remove from pot

Step 4: Plop the plant into its new pot and remove the strap, blanket and newspaper. Fill up with loose, well-draining soil. Done!

Put in new pot

Here’s the fish hook cactus in its new home on our front porch, next to two of my favorite agaves. They make quite a beautiful trio!

Ferocactus wislezenii with Agave celsii (top right) and Agave ‘Blue Flame’ (top left)

Karley Rose fountain grass

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you will have gathered that I’m a big fan of ornamental grasses. One of my recent favorites is an oriental fountain grass cultivar named ‘Karley Rose’ (Pennisetum orientale 'Karley Rose'). It was discovered by David Skwiot of Sunny Border Nurseries and named for his daughter, Karley Rose. This grass is patented and therefore only available from licensed growers. Fortunately, many nurseries now carry it.

The regular oriental fountain grass (Pennisetum orientale) is an attractive, hardy grass that grows in just about any soil and is quite drought tolerant once established. Like most ornamental grasses, it needs close to full sun to flower well. In early summer it starts to produce flower spikes with whitish to pinkish blooms that radiate from the foliage in an elegant arch. Unlike other fountain grasses, such as Pennisetum setaceum and some cultivars of Pennisetum alopecuroides (especially the beautiful ‘Moudry’), Pennisetum orientale does not seem to self-seed much, if at all, and hence is not a garden bully.

‘Karley Rose’ is even better than the regular Pennisetum orientale. It has deeper green foliage, its flowers are larger and more purple, it blooms longer, and it’s supposedly even cold hardier.

Here’s a video extolling Karley Rose’s virtue, courtesy of Great Garden Plants:

I put a couple of ‘Karley Roses’ in the ground last year and they’ve grown tremendously. Here’s a photo of our biggest clump:

Pennisetum orientale 'Karley Rose' in our front yard in late May

Our neighbor across the street has four ‘Karley Roses’, and they look stunning backlit by the setting sun:

 

Bamboo muhly in full flower

In December I raved about bamboo muhly (Muhlenbergia dumosa), a grass native to southern Arizona and northwestern Mexico that looks remarkably like Mexican weeping bamboo (Otatea acuminata subsp.aztecorum). Check out my original post for more information about this unique grass and for photos of what our plants looked like back then.

Bamboo muhly (Muhlenbergia dumosa) next to our driveway in December 2010

Things look very different this spring. Our bamboo muhly, especially the one planted in the ground next to our driveway, is in full flower. Now don’t get too excited about the word “flower.” Like many grasses, the flowers produced by bamboo muhly are nothing to write home about. They’re inconspicuous, brownish gray, and completely dull.

What is very strange this year is not the appearance of flowers per se, but rather the sheer abundance of them. In fact, from a distance, it looks like the plant is dying.

The same plant in full flower in May 2011

Flowers galore. I wonder if there will be fertile seeds?

Looking closer, you can see that new leaves are actually emerging, but the overall effect is still a bit depressing. In fact, my wife asked me recently when I was going to remove this eyesore!

I tried to find information online about this flowering phenomenon, but I wasn’t successful. This is our third year of growing bamboo muhly. Last year, the flowers were much more sporadic, appearing in between healthy leaves so they were barely noticeable. This year, the plant shed all its leaves as the proliferation of flowers was emerging. In fact, it is acting very much like a bamboo going into a mass flowering phase, which often results in the death of the plant.

The good thing is that in spite of its common name, bamboo muhly is not a bamboo. I’m hoping that after 5 or 6 weeks of constant flowering, we’ll soon see a healthy crop of new leaves which will restore the plant to its usual self: a billowing mass of a lacy green leaves.

Signs of new leaves emerging

Related posts:

• A few updates (10/23/11)
  See how the the bamboo muhly has made a complete recovery.

Wordless Wednesday

Welcome back, sun!

The Sacramento area has had the strangest weather this past spring. Temperatures 20-25°F below normal; rain and hail in the valley, and snow in the mountains; thunderstorms and even funnel clouds. These are not weather phenomena we see here very often at this time of year. In fact, an editorial in today’s Sacramento Bee compared our May weather to—gasp!—Portland, Oregon and added that by “exporting their weather” Portland may be “exacting some kind of cruel retribution” for “the flood of Californians that have moved there in the last decade.” That made me laugh because Californians are indeed considered a suspect bunch by many Oregonians.

Today, however, the sun is out and the sky is full of puffy white clouds. While some of them do look a bit menacing, the weather is supposed to finally return to normal, with temperatures in the 80s forecast for later this week.

I grabbed my camera during lunch time and snapped some photos in which the sky features prominently. It’s so good to see some blue after what seemed like weeks of incessant gray.

Black bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra)

Emerging culms of pigskin bamboo (Phyllostachys viridis)

Baby Blue bamboo (Bambusa chungii ‘Barbellata’)

Black Lace elderberry (Sambucus nigra ‘Black Lace’)

Two coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) across the street

Poker time

Red hot poker time, that is. I’ve been meaning to write about this wonderful South African native all spring. Red hot poker, or torch lily, belongs to the genus Kniphofia, of which which there are about 70 different species. Only a few of them are commonly grown here in the U.S. The most frequently seen species is Kniphofia uvaria. It comes from an area with winter rainfalls, which coincides with our weather pattern. This species is easy to distinguish from other kniphofia species because its leaves are keeled (i.e. they have a U-shaped groove).

Flower closeup

Red hot pokers are closely related to aloes but they are not succulents. In addition, they are much hardier than aloes—down to zone 6, according to some web sites. They’re not fussy about the type of soil but good drainage is a must to prevent crown rot, especially in areas with very wet winters. They need full sun to flower, and even though they will survive periods of drought, they grow much better if given regular water in the hot months.

Red hot pokers (Kniphofia uvaria) outside our front yard fence.
You can see three clumps in this photo.

This photo was taken this morning (6/6/11) and the flower spikes are almost done blooming

Red hot pokers have thick rhizomes and fleshy roots and don’t like to be disturbed or divided. Experts say that after division they will need a year or two to settle down before they bloom again. Division isn’t really needed until flower production begins to slow.

Flower spike just emerging from the foliage (April 2011)

One of the smaller clumps. This one was planted from a 4” pot two years ago. This is the first year it’s bloomed.

Here is Northern California, red hot pokers are a common sight along the coast where they have naturalized in many places. They’re not that common in inland gardens, so when I bought a bag of bare-root Kniphofia uvaria from one of the big box stores 3½ years ago, I wasn’t expecting much. I believe the bag contained six rather sad-looking chunks of rhizome. I stuck them in the ground outside the front yard fence and forgot about them. For the first couple of years we got healthy foliage but no flower spikes. Then, in year 3, we had a few flowers, and I was thrilled. Year 4 (this year) was when they finally came into their own. They’ve been producing spike after spike of brilliant two-tone flowers since April and are just now beginning to fade. I love dramatic, exotic-looking plants, and Kniphofia uvaria certainly fits the bill. Even though it only blooms 2-3 months out of the year and the foliage by itself isn’t all that attractive, I’m still happy to have five clumps now.

A few tips:

• Remove fading flower spikes to encourage the production of more spikes.
• Do plant red hot poker in full sun. I planted another bag of bare-root material in a semi-shady spot in our backyard, and some floppy leaves is all we ever got.
• If you want flowers sooner, buy gallon-size plants. They should flower within a year or two. I bought one in a 4” container a couple of years back, and it flowered for the first time this year. Seed is available in stores and on the Internet, but I read that it takes many years (5-6) until you have mature plants that bloom.

 

Foliage—not the most stunning in the world.
It would probably be best to plant red hot poker in the middle or towards the back of the border and hide the foliage behind a more attractive plant.