...Gardening In The Extreme
by Lori Hubbart

Yes, along with "Extreme Homes" and "X-treme Sports," gardening can also be extreme.

The term can refer to a radical style of gardening or to the Herculean effort it takes to create and maintain a garden.

Followers of horticultural trends will remember when the decorative bowling balls in Marcia Donohue's Berkeley garden seemed delightfully outrageous.  She was the leading edge for a new wave of brilliant, fearless, innovative garden designers.

Let us, though, consider the sort of extreme gardening that involves pitting human labor and ingenuity against extreme conditions.

Gardeners in Alaska must somehow work around permafrost and visiting moose.  Desert gardeners face the challenges of blistering heat, rattlesnakes and lack of rain.

Our own gardening environment may not be that drastic, but there are three situations here that call for extreme gardening:  Acid soils on the ridges, sea-bluff conditions, and invasive species.

The ridges surely qualify as the elusive "Banana Belt" the realtors are always invoking.  It may be sunnier up there, but the soils are another matter.  These are called "podzol" soils, from a Russian term, and are highly acidic while being poor in nutrients.  Known colloquially as "pygmy soil," they are actually a group of related soil types.

One ridgetop gardener claims it took him 15 years of composting his soil before he could grow vegetables.  He wisely cultivated only a small portion of his property, creating a pleasant garden with the natural vegetation as a backdrop.  To be sure, his site is blessed with splendid views and boulders to die for, but the chaparral-like wild plants up there have their own unique beauty.

The naturally occurring plants give us one clue to the sort of thing that might do well in those soils.  Manzanitas are found there, including the coin-leaf manzanita (Arctostaphylos nummularia) with its small, shiny leaves.  Salal (Gaultheria shallon), huckleberries blue and re (Vaccinium ovatum and V. parvifolium), wild rhododendron, and the occasional madrone tree (Arbutus menziesii) are also present.  These are all in the heath family, Ericaceae tend to thrive in acid soils, so that family provides a rich source of plants to try.

Surprisingly, many plants from Australia also do quite well in podzol soils.  If you haven't gotten acquainted with Australian plants, you are in for a treat.  Beyond the clichés like bottlebrush; that continent is just rich in festively floriferous plants (try saying that three times!).

Books on Australian plants will inspire you, but you must see, smell and touch the actual plants to get the full effect.  One of the best places to experience Australian ornamentals is the Arboretum at U.C. Santa Cruz.  Go there in the springtime with notebook and pen in hand, and fall in love with Thryptomene, Pimelia, Dampiera and Eremophila.  Many of the plants there will grow in highly acid soils on our ridgetops.

On to the sea bluffs, where extreme conditions are provided by demon winds and briny,
boron-laden air and soil.  Again, great clues as to what will grow there are to be found in the native vegetation.

First, though, you must locate a stand of good, intact native sea bluff vegetation.  This is not so easy, as longtime grazing has pauperized many of our headlands.  The two best local sites are the Point Arena Lighthouse and the upper trail (actually a service road) at Alder Creek Beach.

There you will see that the indigenous plants are low and mounding, the better to stand up to those buffeting winds.  Many of these plants are actually popular horticultural subjects, available in nurseries.  If I have sung the praises of plants like seaside daisy (Erigeron glaucus), gum plant (Grindelia stricta), chalk buckwheat (Eriogononum latifolium), sea pink (Armeria maritima) and golden yarrow (Eriophyllum stachaedifolium) in previous articles, it's because they are not only beautiful, but have the deep roots needed to help control erosion.

In Mendocino and Fort Bragg, one also sees home gardens with this hummocky, undulating style using plants of Mediterranean origin.  That loveliest of workhorses, lavender cotton (Santolina species and cultivars) is used to great effect.  The common name certainly does not refer to the flowers, which are buttons in varying shades of yellow.  The blue marvel, Lithodora diffusa, looks divine with pale yellow lavender cotton, and does fine if bracketed by sheltering companion plants.

Another effective bluff strategy is to plant natives on the really exposed edges, and other things behind a low, north-south wall.  Sheltered from ocean winds, you can row all sorts of perennials and low shrubs.  One sea bluff gardener grew several plants that way, including showy inland Cal-Natives like California fuchsia (Epilobium species), and low, spreading hybrids of golden flowered flannel bush (Fremontodendron).  It's an old British gardening strategy, by the way.

Now, for those coastal pest organisms.  Which weed do you most love to hate?  My worst garden weed is sheep sorrel (Rumex acetosella), an innocuous looking herb with arrow shaped leaves.  It quickly forms an underground network of root-like stems that are unstoppable -- a non-obvious monster.  No silver bullet here -- you must keep digging and pulling it out.  Government experts advise repeated, deep cultivation of the infested area, leaving time for the plants to grow new leaves between cultivations.  This method depletes the roots of their nutritional reserves and starves the plants.  It has also worked well with the invasive, yellow flowered Bermuda buttercup (Oxalis pes-caprae) and its kin.  Although they belong to different plant families, both Rumex and the clover leafed Oxalis are know as sorrel, and both produce oxalic acid in their leaves.

Many coast gardeners rate the green, spotted cucumber beetle (Diabrotica species) as their worst arthropod pest.  A gardener from the Anchor Bay area swears he once had such quantities of them in his garden that he plugged in an extension cord, brought his vacuum cleaner outside and vacuumed all the little blighters up.  Now that's extreme gardening!

For some people the term "gardening in the extreme" is synonymous for "gardening in the altogether."  Yes, we do have nude gardeners here, too, but I think I'll stop there.  A hearty thank you to the intrepid local gardeners who have shared their garden adventure stories with me.