California Gardening: Daily Walks - 3, 1 by Kelli

Kelli wrote:
KaperC, the ceanothuses were planted on a slope that we did not water out of season. It doesn't even have a sprinkler system. The only fly in the ointment is that it is below the neighbor's yard and they do water. None of that water sprays to our side and the soil down to an unknown depth stays dry enough that very few weeds grow there in the summer. We have toyon and yucca whipplei in the same situation and they do all right. I have been casually observing for a couple years what grows in what kind of soil around here, and where you have the clayey and shalely Monterery Formation, you have coastal sage scrub, grassland, or sometimes oak woodlands. (Monterey Formation is just a name. I am nowhere near Monterey.) Where you have the rocky and sandy Topanga Formation and Conejo Volcanics, you have chaparral. Always, always. You never have ceanothus growing in the Monterey Formation. (That is in the Santa Monica Mountains.) Inland where I am, you have the Monterey Formation again and the rocky and sandy Chatsworth Formation. Again it's sage scrub and grassland on the Monterey and chaparral on the Chatsworth, though it is more of a yerba santa chapparal with very little ceanothus. It would seem that both soil and microclimate are against me growing ceanothus. I think the commercial cultivars usually involve very coastal species like from the Monterey Penninsula and the Bay Area, and not from this blast furnace. There happened to be an article in the newspaper where someone who lived on the same kind of soil as I do asked what kind of native plants he could grow on his slope, and a list of a dozen or more was given and none of them were ceanothus.

All that being said, there is a ceanothus species native to New Jersey or some place back east. A cultivar involving that species might be worth trying with some summer water, but I haven't bothered to look into what cultivar that might be and where to get it. It was the oddest thing seeing ceanothus being used as landscaping plants in Paris, France. I would never have expected that.

Anyway, I hope I didn't bore you with all that.


SingingWolf, the woolly bluecurls blooming out of season is in a group of maybe 6 plants that are all blooming out of season. I first discovered them in December. I only know of that one "rogue" group. It would seem to suggest some genetic diversity rather than a microclimate thing, but who knows.


I am enjoying the green while I have it.