right before your very eyes (an editorial interlude)

Posted on April 25, 2012 by paridevita

Here is a picture of the bitterbrush, Purshia tridentata, taken this morning. A happy plant.

Keeping in mind what I said about the .7 inches of precipitation in the last post, it should be obvious to anyone receptive to the notion that natural selection shows us how to deal with drought in the garden, that growing plants adapted to drought are the answer to the problem of drought.

To anticipate the inevitable attempts to qualify this answer, no, gardens that receive supplemental irrigation are not part of the answer, and I have no interest at all in hearing about how “drought tolerant” (or, to use the current buzzword, “xeric”) the plants are in such a garden.  Who on earth would seriously care about reports on drought tolerance in a watered garden?

And no, I don’t really feel like hearing about rain barrels and water catchment systems and sustainability and “improving” the soil and fertilizers and  mulches and what an awful, awful, awful person I am for saying these aren’t answers.You don’t catch a whole lot of rain when you get .7 of an inch in six months.

Plants are the answer. The right plants, for the right climates.

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hopefully blue

Posted on April 25, 2012 by paridevita

Hoping, just because it’d be cool to say I have one (two, actually), that this is the Mexican Blue Oak, Quercus oblongifolia. Yes, the folia is not quite oblongi, but according to Flora of North America, the leaf apex can be acute, and as is evident they are pretty pointy.

Both plants remained evergreen through this past asinine winter (Q. grisea did not, but still lives), which I take as a good sign.

This plant is in the front garden, in a special cage to protect it from rabbits, who will eat anything. The front garden is never watered, no matter what, the exception being the little plants that are added from time to time. Otherwise their roots never have a chance to work themselves into the hard clay soil. Q. oblongifolia being a monsoonal species, I wonder what it will make of the anything-but-monsoonal conditions of the garden here.

Maybe it can adapt. Maybe it will like relatively wet springs (though, not this year) and summers and autumn more like the Atacama Desert than North America (last year, from mid-July to the end of December, less than seven-tenths of an inch of precipitation….which suits me just fine) and just be happy. Or at least not miserable.

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