Albert's Greenhouse

I found this beautiful Nepenthes truncata pitcher in my greenhouse this morning. The persitome is much more well developed than normal - maybe this huge truncata plant is beginning to form the mythical upper pitchers?

I thought I should take this opportunity to plug a few other parts of my greenhouse site including:

- The greenhouse construction page where you can learn how I built the structure.

- My list of great conservatories of the USA and also other parts of the world. Did you know that the largest conservatory space in the world is in Cornwall, England? That there's a greenhouse in Beijing, China bigger than Biosphere 2? Interested in seeing pictures of these places? Satellite views? The get over to my conservatory listing page!

- What's Albert growing? My growlist has not only a bunch of names, but descriptions and pictures of many of the plants in my yard and greenhouse.

- Lastly, if you like the pictures on this blog, you might want to check out my gallery.

Epiphyllums, or Orchid Cacti, are an epiphytic jungle cactus with huge, beautiful, and occasionally nicely scented flowers.

I grow about twelve varieties, the survivors of about two dozen that I picked up for cheap many years ago.

Epis have this problem - they are very easy to propagate by cuttings, and the cuttings can be left to sit for a week or more before being planted and turn out absolutely fine. They also easily form seedpods. These qualities lead to massive indescriminate breeding and collecting of hundreds of varieties, many of which are virtually the same. The epi collector can easily amass a huge collection for not a lot of money.

They are admittedly pretty... and I can grow them outdoors in a sheltered spot ( in this case, a under a north-facing eve ) without too much death from our cold and wet winters.

This past weekend, we went down about 60 miles south to the Monterey Penninsula for an event at the world famous Montery Bay Aquarium. Not a plant-related event, but a food-related event.

However, Saturday morning was sunny, and we took a walk along the bay. Just by the seashore, it never freezes, never really dries out, and never gets too hot or too terribly cold. They can grow a lot of neat stuff there, including some really awesome aloes.

What was in flower, however, was the ice plant. This particular form of ice plant is very small and low-growing, forming a carpet over the sandy cliffs, and displaying these beautiful purple flowers.

We also stopped by the Castroville artichoke festival that morning. There are a lot of vegetables grown in the area, including the only large-scale farming of artichokes in the United States. The fields come right up the the edge of town. There was a vegetable arrangement contest going on, with a few demonstration projects out front, including this charming entry:

Didn't your mom always tell you...

don't play with your food?

Where did I plant this?

As close to the neighbors as possible, of course.

I haven't received any threats of bodily harm yet, but sometimes I am amazed that they will even sell you these bulbs.

Dracunculus vulgaris is another smelly aroid - very similar in fact to Helicodiceros muscivorus, the dead horse arum, famed for smelling like ... you guessed it ... a weeks old dead horse.

These plants are pollinated by flies or beetles which are attracted to carrion.

The flower is huge compared to the size of the plant - this one is over a foot long on a two foot tall plant.

Surprisingly, I think I picked up this bulb at the Home Depot - it's not that hard to find.

I received last week my shipment of about fifteen plants from Germany. Ant ferns ( Lecanopteris ) and pitcher plants ( Nepenthes and Heliamphora ). They are small, they are barely out of tissue culture, and they need coddling.

However, it's not a bad deal if a couple years from now I have some full-sized plants to show for it.

The point being it's a lot of money and no small amount of work, but they guy has plants in tissue culture that nobody else is offering, and it's important to me to support these sorts of efforts.

Ah - the smell of spring.

Typhonium venosum - probably the most common "voodoo lily". The leaf comes later and is a story on its own.

The main point right now is that this thing tends to multiply like crazy, and despite giving away a ton of them, I have three or four pots of that stuff right by the front door.

I guess my friends don't come over that often, and my wife goes out the garage.

Aside from the smell, it's a beautiful tuberous aroid, and amazingly easy to grow to the extent that it can become a weed. It goes dorman for the winter, and in the spring the mature plants push up this strange flower, followed eventually by a single leaf on a mottled stalk.

How could a whole week go by without my posting about the giant Calla Lily?

When we went up to Strybing for the plant sale, I took a picture with one of theirs:


Now. I am six feet tall. In my stockings. That is almost a 7 foot tall calla lily, methinks.

A comparison between the flower sizes of the giant and normal forms:

Spring is definitely the time to be viewing Japanese maples where I live. They've all leafed out, and they have yet to take on the crispy brown extremities of the hotter, drier summers.


These last two are supposedly super-dwarf types with very small leaves. So far they seem content to grow with good form in their 2 gallon pots in my front courtyard.


Japanese maples are pretty much all propagated by grafting onto random Acer palmatum rootstock. It's the only way to get the named varieties to come true.

... and sadly for you, I don't have it.

Honestly. It was really there in the greenhouse. A first frilly flower from my Hibiscus schizopetalus. Really and for true. It was beautiful. But I figured... that it would be around for more than a day, like a normal hibiscus.

So. Sorry. Maybe next time.

Some things, no matter how dumb they sound, you just have to try.

Some things just have to have something horribly wrong with them, and exist simply by virtue of their sounding too good.

Cocoa mulch must be one of those things. It smells like chocolate, it's insanely expensive for a mulch, and I just had to try it.

It's really a very light material, and we get afternoon breezes ( if you can classify 10-20mph as a breeze ) regularly. We shall see how much of it ends up in the neighbor's yard.

Meanwhile, it smells like a chocolate factory every time I step out the front door.

No matter where you live, there things that I can grow that you cannot. There are also things that you can grow which I cannot. Due to regulations, climate, or sometimes just popularity, there are some typical plants which grow quite well in the San Francisco Bay Area and which are the subject of some envy from our more northerly or inland neighbors. These would include our Orchid Cactus, our Camelia, our Palms, Striletzia and lastly our tree ferns. We are at the northenmost end of their viable range as a landscaping plant, and there seems to be basically only one fern we can actually grow for more than a few years: Dicksonia antarctica.

I grow one in a pot, though you find them in mildly sheltered areas in the ground all over the office parks of the Bay Area. I've had mine for about 10 years or so, and it's always lived in the same pot, and probably in the same soil, which has become about 90% fern root and 10% dirt. It's survived cold winters, drying out, and been down to a singly scrawn leaf more times than I really care to count. Beside my front door, it's finally found a happy place for at least the last two or three years.

Whenever our neighbors get together, one constant topic of conversation is the state, history, and general politics of our street trees. Sunnyvale has a whole bunch of street trees, in various states of repair. Exactly what the rules regarding pruning, replacing and otherwise maintaining the trees are is often a matter of hot and bitter debate. The older residents swear up and down that the city, when they put them in, pledged to take care of them. All I know is that the city has not been by in some time for that particular purpose.

The trees on our block are American Tulip trees - Liriodendron tulipifera. Aside from somewhat interesting patterns in the bark, and nice smooth slightly divided leaves, these trees have only one thing going for them, and it's in season right now. They have these big and beautiful orange and yellow flowers. Unfortunately, most people don't even know they actually flower, since the blooms are carried above the leaves.

Most of the trees on our street are about the same age as the housing development - 30 some years old. I am told that the particular tree in front of my house was replaced quite some number of years ago. For that reason, its leaf drop appears to be out of synch with the rest of the neighborhood, and I am left with two leaf seasons - that of my tree and that of my neighbors. The leaves turn an ugly brown at the end of the season, and take nearly a month to completely fall - leading to thoughts of a massive neighborhood tree revolt each autumn.

This past weekend, I finally got fed up with all my hanging baskets being either stuck to the walls of the greenhouse and therefore blocking light, or sitting on the benches and therefore not getting good air circulation and squishing flowers that come out the bottom. So I hung a 1/2" metal pipe down the center of the greenhouse and hooked up some drip irrigation. Most of the hanging plants, and especially the Stanhopea and Coryanthes orchids now have a place to hang which is more-or-less out of the way. There's even room for a basket of ant plant.

Stanhopea and Coryanthes are really fascinating orchids. They're called coloquially the "Bucket Orchids" because of the shape of their flowers. They are definitely epiphytic, as their huge and heavily scented flowers hang down below them. They attract little metallic male bees as pollenators, exuding a fragrant oil which the bees use to attract mates. The flowers are shaped such that in order to access the oil, the bee must land on a slippery part - if the bee slips and falls into the "bucket" of the flower, there is only one way to climb out - and that involves getting pollonia stuck to the back of the bee.

My most successful Stanhopea is S. occulata. The flowers look like huge wasps or maybe butterflies, and it smells strongly of mint-chocolate.

This greenhouse job coincided with my finally getting around to taking some cuttings of my dischidia major and my Lecanopteris sinuosa, which also found a place on the new perch - albiet without automatic water.

The hanging baskets down the center aisle do make things a little more crowded, but it's better than having all the baskets on benches, at least for now. Hopefully, it'll improve the performance of the Stanhopeas and so on.

Another weekend, another plant sale. This time, in Strybing Arboretum/San Francisco Botanical Garden.

They have a sale almost every month, but this was the big yearly one - tables and tables of stuff that is supposed to grow well up in the foggy confines of the city, and which will no doubt burn to a crisp down south where I live.

There's a very active rock garden society up in the city that goes to a lot of sales, and they always have some interesting cold loving plants which I buy and try to keep from melting. I picked up another Raoulia to go with the one I got last fall. Raoulias are these little mat-forming groundcovers. The individual plants in the mat can be fascinatingly small, and have fascinatingly small flowers. Mostly, it's a textural thing.

I also got an odd little euphorbia ( well - there's basically three sorts of euphorbia - small and odd, medium and odd and huge and odd ), and a small ( and especially cheap) Kerria japonica.

Somehow, these days I am only able to make it to these sales in the final, closing hours. Not the best for getting the most desired plant of the year, but there is always something interesting. The arboretum, which I had last visited a couple of months ago for the magnolias, is in full bloom for the spring - and we're finally getting some really sunny summer weather. It seems like everything is in bloom and sprouting in these few days of spring.

If you plant it, they will come.

Much of my life has been spent in the battle against the gastropods. First in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, and now in the Santa Clara valley down in California. With the salt shaker, the boot heel and even the methaldehyde pellet, I have fought long and hard. And the snails are still winning.

Actually, I've always been kind of fascinated by snails. Growing up, all we had were slugs. Huge, orangish slugh, the standard tale of which was that they were big enough for the kids to ride on, but slugs none the less. They die, they dessicate, and they disappear, leaving nothing behind. Snails, on the other hand, were something a little different - we saw sea snails at the beach, and we saw a few garden snails at our uncle's in the city, but the idea of a slug with a shell on its back was a bit... foreign and therefore interesting.

My move to California and first attempts at gardening here were met with enough snail generated destruction to rapidly turn my fascination to a desire for genocide. No matter if these kind of snails are supposedly the edible french kind of snails - they crawl out of the bushes and eat everything. My wife (at that time my girlfriend) once lived in an apartment complex completely landscaped in ivy - instead of grass lawns, they had ivy. And in that ivy lived the most massive army of snails either of us has ever seen until this very day - it was literally impossible to walk up the path to her door after dark without experiencing the sickening ( yet somehow satisfying ) crunch of a snail or two underfoot. I don't know what they fed on. I don't know why they reproduced. I do think that my neighbors have somehow managed to recreate those nearly ideal snail conditions in their front yards.

I've got snails bad. Not so much towards the middle of my city lot, but at the edges. Maybe they live in the bushes by day and maraude by night. Whatever the case, no primrose is safe - no ligularia will be left unturned. Even the (supposedly poisonous) brugmansias are riddled with holes. And heaven help my if I ever want to plant a hosta. The only thing to do short of spreading methaldehyde pellets on my neighbors property seems to be to cut them off at the entrances. A line of defense in the form of some liquid snail poison product seems to be the only really workable solution. At least it's not the pellets which could get picked up by a passing dog. And it does work remarkably well and fast - there are little piles of snail shells on the borders now. I'd like to think they serve as a warning.

Meanwhile, those I find in the homeland, I drop-kick into the street. It's not efficient, but it is definitely satisfying.

So one of the problems of being an anal plant person like me is that people give me plants. Not a problem, you say? Well ... the enjoyment I get from my plants comes from knowing where they're from and how they fit into the great framework of nature - if I get a really neat plant that I cannot identify, all that great vicarious experience of world travel and oneness with nature is gone.

So I get these plants with no label and no specific cultural information, but with the expectation that they'll be thriving and multiplying in a place of honor the next time my plant friend happens by. They're either something a common as grass, or something so random that I have no hope of ever finding its picture in my hundred or so plant books.

Case in point is the pretty little thing above: the leaves and infloresence structure place it somewhere in the mass of irids, but I have no idea what exactly it is. Very pink, that's for sure ... a really neat little plant that I wish I knew the name of.

The mugo pine - a stunted little landscape staple, is not something we think of as a plant with great flowers - but take a look at this: if you click on the picture to increase the size, you will find a wonderful shading of pinks, whites and reds, nestled in a perfect green basket. What could be more wonderful?

Now the great question - is this the plant that's causing my pollen allergies to act up already? I'm guessing it's not, but given the amount of spring rain we've had, I expect a long and relatively hellish allergy season to be starting any day now.

There is nothing quite so deep red as the flower of my Sarracenia leucophylla, which is just opening this week. Try a boquet of these on your desk at work and see who stops by your desk - the blossoms are quite long-lived and strong in a vase of water. And different. Very different.

The tropical planting trend of the last few years has produced a marvelous resurgence of canna ( or more coloquially, the plantain lily ). While just a few years ago, there were just red, pink and yellow varieties of canna readily available at your local garden center, various leaf shapes, colors and patterns, some of which are really bright and ... dare I say it ... gaudy, have come on the market.

I grow just one canna. It's a species Canna indica that I grew from a hard, round seed many years ago. I had to sand the seedcoat down to get it to germinate, but the plant flowered in its first year.

Canna is also called "Indian Shot", because it's from tropical Asia, and because the seeds are so round and hard that they reportedly can be loaded into shotgun shells with some modicum of success.

My canna may not have the showy flowers and wide tropical looking leaves that the modern varieties have, but it has the advantage of having a story and some time behind it. Though it looks rather scraggly after surviving a cold and dark winter, by summertime, it will be green and flowering with the best of them.

After much winter weather, it's finally really looking like spring, and this past weekend, I was off to my first plant sale of the year.

At the Berkeley Botanical Garden, the spring sale had a lot of native plants, a special collection of plants from the Canary Islands, tons of relatively common carnivorous plants, succulents, bulbs, trees, vines and a few orchids. Many of these plants are out of the gardens own collection, so there is a lot of hard to find and odd stuff, all of which grows well in one of the numerous microclimates which make up the section of Strawberry Canyon where the garden is located. Of course, the microclimate in my backyard approximates none of these, so it's always a bit of an adventure.

Despite arriving in the last hour of the sale, there were plenty of plants on offer, and in fact I managed to pick up three choice specimens: A ledbouria with lovely striped leaves, a fragrant flowered species of calla lily and a little piper tree from New Zeland.

The ledbouria is destined to join my Ledbouria "Gary Hammer" in the front of the house, the calla to join my growing collection of odd calla species which includes the regular one and a giant plant, and the piper tree to the greenhouse beside my Piper nigrum ( source of black pepper ).

Next week, I believe it's the Strybing sale in San Francisco, with plenty of plants that grow well in the foggy coastal climate that my backyard doesn't even begin to approximate...