A Most Unusual Plant

My garden is arranged in geographic sections. One of those sections is devoted to plants of the Channel Islands, primarily Anacapa, Santa Cruz and Catalina. These island plants are interesting for several reasons. They tend to be a bit more garden-friendly, especially for coastal gardens, because they are more tolerant of supplemental water. Some island plants are exactly the same as their mainland counterparts. Other species have evolved differences from mainland ancestors as a result of their isolation. Still others are truly unique and have no close cousins on the mainland.

On a personal level, I grew up in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties where I was able to see the islands often. As an adult I had the opportunity to visit Anacapa and Santa Cruz Islands several times. One of the plants I got to know on Anacapa Island was Leptosyne (formerly Coreopsis) gigantea. It's a member of the Asteraceae (sunflower) family, but a really odd one, primarily due to its main stem which is a stout, succulent (not woody) trunk up to 6 ft. high and 3-5 in. in diameter. The trunk can go straight up like the one in the photo, or it could slump to the ground or even twist itself around in a curl. The trunk serves as water storage. A few branches may be produced near the top.

Leaves are produced in a tight cluster at the stem tip. In summer they dry out and hang limply like shaggy hair, as shown above. The next photo shows new leaves emerging right now.

The inflorescence is the typical sunflower type of both disk and ray flowers. The photo below shows a dry seed head. Lots of seeds are produced and they germinate readily, typical of Asteraceae.

The trunks of tall plants like the one in the first photo can break easily, in which case they will sometimes sprout from the top of the stump.

This species grows wild in only one spot on the mainland, on coastal bluffs in the Pt. Mugu part of Ventura County. However, Caltrans has used it in seed mixes for freeway slopes in various spots, so it may be seen in unlikely locations. Thus, it is not native to Encinitas or even San Diego County, but it is doing well in my garden and it is a foundation of the Channel Islands theme.

Trichostema

In general, I prefer species to hybrids for my garden. I want native southern California plants which to me means the species, subspecies or variety that is found in the wild. There are tons of hybrid manzanitas, Ceanothus, Salvia and others. I'm not saying they are terrible. I just prefer the straight species.

However, there is one genus where I think a hybrid is truly superior for the garden, and that is Trichostema. There are several species found in southern and central California. A species that is native to the coast and foothills from Baja to San Francisco and is commonly available in the nursery trade is lanatum.  It has beautiful flowers and a great fragrance because it is in the mint family. The flowers range in color from deep blue to lavender. The new buds are very furry and look fantastic. The foliage is deep green. The downside is that it has a reputation for being short-lived and tricky to grow, and I have found that to be true.

There is a hybrid that has been around for a few years that is a cross between lanatum and purpusii. The latter is from central Mexico. Despite being somewhat rare in the wild, it has a reputation for being easy to grow, especially in terms of tolerating summer water. Its flower color is pink, but the cross has a true blue flower. It lacks the furry buds of lanatum but is still a very attractive flower.

Last year I bought one from Moosa Creek Nursery to give it a try, and it has performed well. It's in a bed with some Diplacus sp. with both red and yellow flowers, making a nice color combo. We were gone for 2 months this summer. When we got home the Trichostema looked dead, but I didn't give up on it. With some water in mid-August it came right back and is flowering now. I still love T. lanatum but I'm not going to waster any more time and money trying to grow it when this hybrid is so much easier.

Bee Plant

One of the plants I see fairly often when hiking is Scrophularia californica, commonly known as bee plant. I usually see it growing at the base of a really large boulder. It is found along the coast from Baja to Oregon, as well as the Coast Ranges and the Sierras, in woodlands and chaparral.

I have one in my garden on the north side of the house where it is mostly shaded and the soil is more moist. I don't have a big rock on it which is maybe something I should fix. Even without a rock it survived the summer without any water when we were gone for two months. I take that as a good sign.

Scrophularia has a very odd little flower. As the common name says, it is attractive to bees. Honey bees and bumble bees are probably too big to fit into the flower, so small solitary bees are best suited to serve as pollinator. Hummingbirds will also visit it. The photo below shows the size of the flower in comparison with my fingers.

The foliage looks like this.

Calflora says it blooms from February through May, but mine is blooming now in October.  One source I read says it spreads by rhizomes and seeds. I haven't seen this yet but I hope it spreads as much as it likes.

Del Mar Manzanita

I've had a Del Mar manzanita (Arctostaphylos glandulosa crassifolia) in my front yard for 20+ years. It's one of my all-time favorite plants, partly because of where I got it. In the 1990's when I was working at the City of Carlsbad, there was an apartment project planned at the NW corner of El Camino Real and Cassia Lane. I read the environmental study for the project and learned that Del Mar manzanita grew on the site. I was interested because this subspecies is found only in a narrow band stretching from Torrey Pines to central Carlsbad on eroding sandstone bluffs.

The first stage of new construction is called clearing and grubbing. It's where all the vegetation is removed and the ground is leveled. Before this happened on the apartment site, I dug up some small seedlings and planted them in my front yard. One of them did really well, and that's the one I still have. It has done really well in the Leucadia sandstone of my garden.

One of the interesting differences between manzanita species is that some of them develop their flower buds in fall, months before they are going to bloom. These are called nascent inflorescences. A. glandulosa is one that does this. The photo below shows a nascent inflorescence on my plant right now.

Some time in January or February the nascent inflorescences will transform into their distinctive upside-down-urn shape.

Fishhook cactus Update (Mammillaria dioica). I wrote about this five days ago when I first saw buds on it. The photo below was taken today and it shows the flowers more wide open and the other buds developing nicely.

The Fun(gi) Never Stops

Here's another mushroom coming that has come up in the last few days. It has a more traditional mushroom shape and is coming up at the base of a coastal mountain mahogany (Cercocarpus minutiflorus). I am simply amazed at the diversity of mushrooms in this relatively small garden.

Normally I just leave mushrooms alone, but I pulled up this one in order to get a photo of the gills on the underside of the cap.

I have posted these photos on iNaturalist in hopes of getting it identified. Several possibilities were offered by the artificial intelligence program, but I decided to go with the broad category of Agaricaceae, the family of field mushrooms, puffballs and allies. I'm hoping a fungus expert will take a look at it and suggest a genus or even species.

Mammillaria Cactus

There are two native species of Mammillaria cactus in our region - dioica and tetrancistra. Both are quite small plants, usually no more than 6" tall. The former is far more common, found from the immediate coast to the Anza-Borrego Desert. It has white or cream-colored flowers with a pink stripe on the outside of the tepals. Flowers typically appear in winter and spring in response to winter rain. Tetrancistra is found only in the desert. It has pink flowers that appear in late summer or fall in response to monsoonal rain. They also differ in some other ways, such as the number and arrangement of the spines.

I have a couple of dioica in my Encinitas garden, and one of them in particular blooms like crazy. I was doing some gardening today and noticed that it has flowers already. This is probably the result of me watering the garden one day in early October when it was cloudy and cool. I did not expect this one to flower so prolifically because it is in a very shady spot.

It looks like there are 4 fully developed flowers and perhaps 16 buds. Here's a closeup of one flower.

It looks like it has both male and female parts. Other flowers on the same plant can be all female.

I'm going to try to keep an eye on it to see how long the individual flowers last and how many times it can produce flowers.

New Phone/Camera

I got a new phone the other day, and it has a vastly improved camera that is especially good for plant closeups. Here are a few photos from my garden and nearby.

Callidandra peninsularis - Cape Fairyduster

Epilobium canum canum

Spotted Orb-weaver spider

Toyon berries starting to change color

Ribes indecorum starting to leaf out after I watered the area

Seedlings coming up after I watered the area, but I'm not sure what they are

Seedlings of Lupinus succulentus coming up after I watered the area

Another Fungus

Here's another odd-looking kind of "mushroom" that has been coming up in different parts of my yard for several years.

I posted this photo on iNaturalist and was told that it is lantern stinkhorn (Lysurus mokusin). I first noticed this fungus in my garden in 2015 and took the photo below at that time.



You can see that the fresher mushroom is covered with flies. I smelled it to see if it stinks, and it does have a bit of a poop smell, but not real strong. Since fungi are not flowering plants and do not require pollination, I'm not sure about the function of the odor. Perhaps the visiting insects help disperse the spores. As I mentioned before, I take the presence of these fungi in my garden as a very positive sign because fungi and green plants have such an important symbiotic relationship.

A Couple of Plants in Bud

I recently gave my garden a little water when we had a few days of cloudy, below average temperatures. Two of them responded by putting out buds right away. The first is Lemonade Berry (Rhus integrifolia). I've had this plant for a long time, and it has never produced any fruit. However, it blooms reliably, so I don't understand why there are never any fruit.

Here are the buds forming at the ends of the stems. Maybe the birds are getting all the young fruit. I like the fruit because they have a juicy/gooey coating on the outside that is quite sour. The native people of this area enjoyed the fruit.

The other plant that put out buds is a mission manzanita (Xylococcus bicolor). It is an unusual manzanita in that it is not in the genus Arctostaphylos where other manzanitas are classified. The genus Xylococcus is monotypic, meaning that it has only this one species in it. I am fascinated by monotypic genera, although in some cases it may be simply an artifact of our classification system.

My Xylococcus has been through some ups and downs. I planted it at the southeast corner of my garden, next to the street where it is very difficult for me to water it. In addition, through a series of events it ended up on the wrong side of the property line with my neighbor's mailbox right next to it. My neighbor's garden is on the left, mine is on the right, with the fence in the middle.

For whatever reasons it has had a lot of branch die-back. It will put out new growth in winter and spring then they will die over the summer. In the photo you can see how hacked up it is from cutting off dead stems. This year my new neighbor has been giving it some water and it is putting out buds right now.

Although it's too soon to say if this is a lasting victory, I'm very happy to see how well it's doing at the moment.

Elderberry

Another great plant that does not get enough attention from gardeners is Elderberry. The local species is currently known as either blue elderberry or black elderberry (Sambucus nigra or Sambucus nigra ssp. caerulea). Like some other plants, this one has been through some name changes. It used to be called Sambucus mexicana, so some people still refer to it as Mexican elderberry. Calflora continues this confusion by listing S. nigra and calling in black elderberry, and also S. nigra caerulea and calling it blue elderberry. I think they are the same thing. Whatever you want to call it, it's an excellent wildlife plant.

It can be a small tree or shrub, depending on where it's planted and how much water it gets. In the wild it grows all over the state except for the true desert areas. The flowers are cream colored and appear from spring through summer and into fall. The berries are blue with a powdery white coating and appear from late summer through fall. The plant is deciduous, so it will drop nearly all its leaves in winter.

The berries are edible but everything I've read indicates that they should be cooked first or they'll cause stomach distress. On the other hand, birds can eat them with no apparent problems.

Elderberry can get to be a big tree and it's also somewhat messy. Think carefully about where you plant it. I cut mine back every year after the leaves have dropped off and the berries are done.

Corethrogyne filaginifolia (sand aster)

This is one of the less well known species in our area, and I think it deserves more attention from gardeners. It is extremely drought tolerant with pretty (though small) flowers and attractive gray foliage. This is a flower that is best appreciated up close.

Since this plant is in the Asteraceae (Aster family) it has a compound flower cluster. The lavender things that we would call petals are actually individual flowers that are called ray flowers or ligules. The yellow center is a cluster of more individual flowers that are known as disk flowers. As you can see from the photo, my sand aster is blooming right now and also going to seed. In my garden this plant is very close to the Epilobium so that their stems and flowers mix together. The lavender, yellow and red colors complement each other nicely, and their gray/green leaves blend perfectly. In the photo below you may not be able to see the sand aster flowers because they are so small.

In winter the plant goes semi-dormant. It doesn't lose all its leaves but it pretty much shits down. At that time it can be cut back if needed. As with Epilobium, the seeds are prized by goldfinches and other small birds. If you cut back the plant while the seeds are still attached, you might want to scatter the seeds on the ground so the birds can get them.

Taxonomy - Don't read this paragraph if you have an aversion to scientific stuff. The Corethrogyne genus and the filaginifolia species in particular have been the subject of debate over the past 20 or so years. First the genus was called Corethrogyne. Then for a time it was changed to Lessingia. More recently it has been changed back to Corethrogyne. Going along with that has been discussion of how many varieties of filaginifolia there are. The Jepson Manual, which is the generally accepted authority for California plants, has this to say:

Some local populations and regional population systems of corethrogynes present distinct general appearances and the plants have been partitioned into 3 to 7 or more species with various numbers of infraspecific taxa (33 basionyms have been linked to the name Corethrogyne). Lane (1992) referred the plants to a single sp. with 2 varieties within Lessingia, and Saroyan et al. (2000) treated them as a single sp. with two varieties within Corethrogyne. Here, the consolidation is taken one step further and a single, polymorphic sp. with no infraspecific taxa is recognized.

In other words, some people split this species up into several species, subspecies or varieties based on differences in appearance between plants in different parts of the state. The Calflora web site which usually follows Jepson recognizes 4 varieties. The one described as Lessingia filiaginifolia var. linifolia was at one time considered a rare taxon. However, the boss (Jepson) says they are really all the same species with no distinct subspecies or varieties. This makes it easy because you can call it whatever you like and someone will probably agree with you. In any case, it is a nice garden plant with good habitat value.