the miserable gardener

pinery irony

My interest in the single-leaf piñon, Pinus monophylla, probably started when I read Graham Stuart Thomas’s Three Gardens (one of my favorite gardening books) and wondered why it was that this pine was unavailable in the nursery trade in North America. After all, it’s native to the Great Basin, California, Arizona, Baja California, and so on. It will grow with about six inches of annual precipitation (grow slowly, that is). It’s similar to the regular piñon (Pinis edulis) but bluish, with single needles; the nuts are edible as well.

For a long time it was thought that the single needle was really two needles fused as one (because Joseph Dalton Hooker said so, and he worked at Kew, and that was that) but research, described in Lanner’s The Piñon Pine (another terrific book), showed that the growth of the second needle in the fascicle was suppressed by a mutation.

So they grow this totally cool pine in England, but not here.

You would think with all this supposed interest in saving water that everyone would want at least six of these, but, still, try finding one. I was lucky enough to get one many years ago, and it has endured everything that Denver’s weather can throw at it, including being completely knocked out of the ground in the March blizzard of ’03. (I replanted it and it took off, like a snail.)

Pinus monophylla

Peattie (A Natural History of Western Trees) says “The growth of this tree is painfully slow. A tree with a stem only 6 inches in diameter has already seen a century of arid seasons pass, and still its life course may not be half run. In youth the short thick trunks are capped by pyramidal crowns of rather straight and uplifted branches. An ancient Nut Pine, however, is almost unrecognizable, in shape, as the same thing, for the crown has become short and flat, and the branches are all twisted and bent low, and the years will but add to the gnarled look of this manna tree of the Mohave.”

Okay, there’s the reason no one wants one. It might get ugly in three hundred years.

There are a number of dwarf selections made by Jerry Morris of Lakewood; I had to have as many of these as possible, of course. These are from witches brooms.

Pinus monophylla ‘Blue Jazz’

Pinus monophylla ‘Whoopy’

I was also fortunate to get some grown from “broom seed”, that is, seed that the witches broom itself produced. There were some plants in the far corner of Jerry’s nursery that needed a home; I tried desperately not to be a hog and so left one. There are four here, well cared for (really), and are looking pretty good. For now.

Pinus monophylla from broom seed..I know this isn’t so focused

Pinus monophylla from broom seed, doing a weird two-color thing.

the bee plant

Either I’m evolving into this highly sophisticated, ecologically sensitive gardener who is satisfied with the bare minimum in the garden, or I’m just not watering enough, because there is hardly anything in bloom here right now. It’s been in the 90s day after day with hardly any rain, so expecting a garden full of flowers without a commitment to regular watering to me borders on lunacy. No water, no flowers.

The bee plant has other ideas. True, it’s only about a foot tall next door, except where it seeded next to the sidewalk so it could get the extra moisture right there, but here, where it’s growing in the sandy loam of a raised bed, it’s grown to almost six feet and doesn’t seem to care about the weather.

The bee plant, an annual, aka the Rocky Mountain bee plant, Cleome serrulata, also known as Navajo spinach but according to Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany practically everyone cooked it (seeds too,) is so easy to grow I plan to harvest the seeds and sprinkle them everywhere in the garden this fall. That’s all you do; sprinkle the seeds, which are produced by the thousand, and next year, bee plants.

I read somewhere this year that gardeners weren’t seeing any bees. They’re all over here. (The bees, not the gardeners.) There are native bees here too, but they resent having their pictures taken. I took pictures of five separate flowers to illustrate.