Everything is still growing

I love rainy season. That’s the growing season in Southern California. Poppies sown three winters ago have been blooming for almost a month it seems, on York Boulevard, and parts of South Pasadena, but not always where you’d expect.

Most of the poppies that remain are in window boxes and areas with high reflected heat (sidewalk cracks) on the north side (South facing side) of the street. In areas where they’ve survived with no input from myself or other gardeners, introduced annuals such as sowthistle and mallow, may eventually squeeze them out. But it’s hard to say. In some areas where they’ve always been outnumbered by fast-growing grasses, they’ve held their ground.

In the regularly maintained planter boxes of the Foursquare Church “The Rock” on York, the gardener has accepted them and now weeds around them.

At York Boulevard Post Office, my favorite location, someone beat me to installing a complete landscape. They came in and took out every piece of the red apple succulent that once covered those planters. They laid down a thick layer of mulch and planted a variety of fun drought tolerant things: lavender, rosemary, pelargonium, perovskia, aloe, and native salvia. This gardener laid down a calling card in the form of a big rock painted with this address: farmerdavesgardens.webs.com.

Dave is regularly maintaining the plot, and is allowing some of the poppies and cornflower that have reseeded last year to remain in the garden. It looks great and I couldn’t help but to smile at all the colors and textures when I went to buy stamps this morning. The stamps I bought said “C-E-L-E-B-R-A-T-E”… I will think of our lovely York Boulevard “community garden” when I use those stamps.

In the slide show above (on the right hand side bar) are a couple pictures of the York Boulevard local government branch "community garden" from 2007. Since 2003, it had been nothing but one rhaphiolepis and red apple succulent. I learned the latter had been originally planted by a postoffice worker just to improve the neglected space. In 2006, I approached the postoffice with a proposal to install a native design by Orchid Black, and other permaculture- inspired furniture. Though we got a positive response, we could not get final official approval. In 2007 some friends helped clear out modest patches of the succulent for an experimental seeding in poppies. Spring 2008 was the peak of the planting which I called “Everything is Still Alive”, and poppies bloomed for blocks in any open dirt space where residents and business owners allowed them to bloom. In 2009, I stopped the input of labor except for sprinkling in a diverse mix of wildflower seed at the postoffice and across the street to add color—all things which would bloom profusely with no input but what the sky offers: Cornflowers, clarkia, tidytips. Later that year, Farmer Dave took out the succulents and rhaphiolepis and is now promoting it as a permaculture design. This is going to be it’s best spring ever!

When I started planting poppies in 2007, just about everyone I talked to on York encouraged me, but also warned me that the flowers would likely be stolen, stepped on, or otherwise vandalized. To the contrary, the calling card stone Dave installed looks as good as on day one. And the vulnerable newly planted shrubs are gaining strength during the rainy season.

I’ve added a cutting of Dave’s zonal pelargonium to the Pelargonium Exchange project. This is a garden for sharing pelargonium cuttings and their stories. It doesn’t have a permanent home in Los Angeles yet, but as Robert likes to quote from the Karate Kid, “Buddha will provide.”

For the Pelargonium Project, see:

myriadsmallthings.org/pelarg.html

Rogue blooms

It's summer now. Or fall. I mean middle of winter, but the temperature during the day is hot enough for summer clothes. Perpetual spring, or a harbinger of summer? For about a month, poppies have been blooming as if it were April on two separate lots on the corner of York and Nolden, holding their orange heads up high over neat expanses of closely clipped grass. Who would have thought that California poppies and lawns could be so compatible? Could it be possible that a judiciously timed mowing might have induced bloom for poppies interspersed with lawn grasses? Subject to further research, from the York Boulevard Poppy Lab.

It's been over a year since the first poppies were sown, and I've chosen to tend the poppies only minimally this year, if at all. Let the poppies tell us themselves where they are meant to grow.

 

January Rains

It's been two months since the first seeds were sown. 

Some poppy shoots took off immediately, unimpeded by hard soil, harsh exposure, lack of care, weeds. In the easiest sites, the sprouts are lush and green, vegetal looking. I haven't touched them since they germinated, except to thin them out. In plots of the densest ground, the sprouts are lean and tiny by comparison, often bluish-green. Sprouts that germinated under the shade of larger weeds are pale, long, and stringy.

I've lost a couple plots of well-developed plants to diligent (but invisible!) maintenance people. I've also gained a couple plots just in time for this recent deluge. Several plots have been razed and then replanted. (Some of the folks who allowed me to plant were not aware of how diligent their gardeners can be. I also learned that the people who maintain the parkways are not necessarily in communication with the formal "owner"...)

People ask; "Why are you doing this?" Are you from the city?" "Then, who is paying you to do this?" "Oh, I see, it's a hobby! Your own yard must be very neat!"

The skeptical nod politely when I explain how to recognize the poppy shoots, how the first hair-like leaves pave the way for larger lacy poppy leaves.

The first month, watching for new shoots was exhilarating. After a day of tending the shoots, my subconscious would blossom with kaleidoscopic lacy foliage all night long.

In a couple of the largest Highland Park plots, however, the rains brought waves of weeds as well as poppies. First, there was the filaree. After I'd labored to save some poppies from filaree, mustard suddenly appeared, denser in some cases than the filaree had been! I attempt to battle the mustard, but cannot fight the oxalis, which also appeared with no warning. The poppies' delicate shoots and their roots are so easily damaged by weeding. Now all night long, images of tiny poppy shoots overwhelmed by the steroidal growth of hefty annuals flash through my mind.

Yesterday, I was astonished to come across this scene, which I sketched above, which reminded me of huge trees, fallen from storms or winds, which begin to grow again, with new main trunks ascending skyward from the downed trunk. The entire scene was not more than an inch and a half high. I'm drawing from memory here, so the forms of the leaf of the sprout might not be botanically accurate...