THE

CALIFORNIA GARDEN

A most fruitful bloom

Blueberry plants yield

more than edible

delights. New varieties

make them hardier too.

By Tony Kienitz
Special to The Times

March 2, 2006

 They first appeared on eastern shores, spreading out under skies redolent with fir, in soils sour and sodden, amid a rugged, salty, rock-strewn wilderness. Vaccinium. Creeping hugger-mugger along the bays of Maine, growing thick in the woods of Michigan, and climbing hips-high in dear old Georgia, these shrubs, hedges and groundcovers are true-blue American heroes.

 The Vaccinium genus is a big, boisterous brood, with many cousins, aunties and uncles. Azaleas and rhododendrons are invited to the family potlucks, lingonberries always get a card at Christmas, and cranberries are the tart, painted sisters whom the elders keep hush about.

  Large though these families may be, with dozens and dozens of varieties grown all over the U.S., it is only within the last decade or so that one irreverent Vaccinium — the blueberry — has immigrated to Southern California in any substantial way.

 It's the soil, you see. It's too sweet — that is to say, too alkaline. The blueberry requires acidic soil. Well-draining dirt too, please. No wet feet for these fellows. The plants also need a significant chilling to push them into dormancy, which helps them to produce flowers and fruit.

 On paper, these are life forms that shouldn't be in our company. On paper, these plants look like a lot of work. Good thing gardeners don't always read the fine print.

 Donald Merhaut, a horticulture specialist with UC Riverside's department of botany and plant sciences, has been leading field trials with Vaccinium varieties, new and old, for years.

 "We're evaluating what cultivars might be best for the homeowner," he says. "Ornamentally, some are very beautiful. For example, 'Climax' and 'Powderblue' are great. But we're looking at everything — the canopy, the flower, the chill requirements — and I'll tell you, we're getting some great results."

 Planted into the ground in Southern California, these shrubs are ravenous for attention, quickly gobbling up whatever acid soil mix you've provided. But when transplanted into large pots and placed on a patio spot with substantial morning sun, the specimens will do just fine — lovely enough to merit a whooping leap onto Oprah's couch.

 Once established, watered regularly and fed occasionally with an organic acidic fertilizer (skanky old coffee grounds will do), your Vaccinium likely will be happy for years.

 And the rewards you will muster.

 Ah, the leaves. They seem to be forever changing color. Shaped like a drowsy cat's eye, they run the gamut of greens, from frosted and pale to sun-swallowing forest floor. Young leaves often are edged in coral pinks.

 "If it's cold enough, 'Misty' will get dark crimson-colored leaves in the fall," Merhaut says, adding that the older rabbiteye varieties get a nice waxy quality. "Very attractive."

 The leaves alone could be the show, but there's more. 

 The flowers arrive in early spring and then, depending on the cultivar, continue opening up throughout the summer. They dangle from woody stems in delicate clusters, each billowing like Minnie Mouse bloomers parachuting open to save her from disaster. They are onion skin thin, strings of miniature paper lanterns. The blooms close and fade to a coppery, burnt orange hue.

 But if you haven't guessed, it's the berry that stars in this production. The infant berries are translucent and soft, like polished jade pebbles. As they fatten, pinks and violet tones blush across their skins. At maturity they are corpulent and irresistible in deep blue, purple and black. The exact color of the ripe fruit depends on how much sunlight the berry receives.

  Old-timers and horticulture enthusiasts have been playing with blueberries in their backyards for ages. Most grew rabbiteye, but this rangy fellow got the reputation for having inferior fruit and consequently wasn't offered by most California nurseries.

  "Which is too bad because it isn't true," Merhaut says.

  It wasn't until the mid-1990s that cultivars from the South came sashaying into our landscape. Southern high-bush cultivars that required significantly less chill time than their northern counterparts were crossed and refined until the resulting plants could thrive in the glare of a Hollywood summer.

 Remarkably, it is now possible to grow Vaccinium that produces fruit nearly year-round. In April, varieties such as 'O'Neal' begin to bear. 'Climax' is a good choice in the summer, and for autumn berries, a new blueberry from New Zealand called 'Maru' will produce reliably.

 Experts recommend that you tend at least two varieties at a time for optimum flower and fruit production. As in most species, cross-pollination promotes healthy offspring. Simply knowing you'll need variety and that each cultivar can grow differently will help you maximize the pleasure of growing these plants.

  You can get fancy and prune your plant's fruit-bearing stems from last year, a process that will make new berries grow bigger. Or you can thin this year's new growth to promote larger fruit. Or you can let your plants exist and do their thing; you just might be happy and feel blessed with whatever you get.

 To be fair, there are gardeners who believe that we shouldn't be growing blueberries in Southern California, that native plants are more deserving of our attention and affection. And maybe so.

  But the allure of the exotic has always captured the imagination of the gardener. All over our planet people have, from the beginning, pulled plants out of the earth, carried them home and grown them at the mouth of the cave. It could be a potted succulent in D.C., an oleander in Vienna, kumquats in Kent, beets in Bali. Whatever the oddity might be, however ecologically perverse it may appear, the habit of growing something away from its native soil is old as the day is long.

 To me, there is something incredibly heady and cool about being able to have my breakfast on the porch with a simple bowl of Cheerios made vibrant and delicious by a single handful of homegrown blueberries.

 Tony Kienitz is the author of "The Year I Ate My Yard." 

Contained

  In Southern California, blueberries do best as container plants. 

Preparation: Use a large pot — 32 inches or so. Combine one-third peat moss, one-third commercial azalea/camellia mix and one-third decomposing matter (perhaps coconut coir or shredded redwood bark).

 Location: A spot with substantial morning sun.

Maintenance: Water regularly and feed occasionally with little more than old coffee grounds. Any high-quality, organic, acidic fertilizer will do. Heavy use of synthetic fertilizer may alter the flavor of the berries. Organic fertilizers seem to affect the flavor less.

 — Tony Kienitz

THE CALIFORNIA GARDEN

The show does go on

With successive gardening, nearly every day is a planting day here, and your landscape can be a blooming spectacle throughout the year. The trick? Flout convention and buy plants in bloom.

By Tony Kienitz                                                  Special to The Times

January 26, 2006

 HOW are those New Year's resolutions coming along? Drink your daily oh-so-healthful goji berry smoothie? Have you counted those calories, hit the gym, hugged the kids  or curbed your cussing — yet?

 Good. Then you won't mind adding something to your to-do list.

 Act now and enroll yourself in a 12-step program that lets you put flowers — lots of them —  into your garden every blessed day of the year. Start now and plant a few blooming perennials every month of this year, and  you'll have succeeded at successive gardening.

 "Plant that way and you can be the designer and not have to hire one," says Wendy Proud of the San Gabriel Valley landscape design and maintenance firm Proud Murphy Inc.

 It doesn't matter if your garden is the size of an estate or a stamp. You can begin a habit that, in time, will  produce a wondrously personal and perpetually beautiful garden. Successive gardening begins quite simply. On the way to your  new Yoga for Aspiring Screenwriters class, note the plants blooming in the neighborhood. Really start to pay attention and  you'll be astonished at the number of plants that are in full flower, here, in the dead of winter.

  So  pick your favorites. Accrue a list. Follow your tastes, and your tastes alone. Conventions be damned.

 Once  you've made a cursory selection of favored flowers, find your way to a nursery and buy a plant or two from your list. Buy  them in bloom. Now, this advice strikes at the heart of an old saw that commanded home gardeners never to buy plants with  flowers on them. The traditional, East Coast-centric way of thinking was that a bush with flowers would be dead-head ready  far too soon after you plopped it into the ground. You weren't getting your money's worth.

 That's  a reasonable recommendation when you're shopping for annual flowers such as pansies or snaps or plants that would die under  a few feet of snow. Yes, avoid transplants in bloom when your flower season is only a few months long.

 But  when you live in a clime where nearly every day of the year is a gardening day, then purchasing perennials in all their glory,  covered with flashy gobs of color, makes plenty of sense. This technique also encourages you to improve the soil of your masterpiece.  You'll bed your new flowering plants into fluffy, compost-filled holes, of course, and then you'll spread your leftover planting  mix as a thin, nutritious mulch.

 Next, make sure that your new additions receive their regimented  dose of water. If you're counting on sprinklers to do the work for you, check to see that plants don't block the spray and  that water can reach the right spots. Make necessary adjustments, and you're done for the month. Apply this technique month  after month, year after year, and you'll have created a spectacle likely to attract a tour bus and a churro cart.

 Interior designer Lauren Elia of the Elia Design Group has a trained eye for color and a fierce appreciation for  how integral a garden can be in making a home remarkable, yet she has had to reinvent her frontyard several times. Her Pasadena garden faces north and has been a hard nut to crack. The light is spotty and short. Spring and summer have brought enough  bright petals to sate Elia's yen for flowers, but fall and winter often have been bleak. Each January she finds herself spending hundreds of dollars on annual flowers in an attempt to brighten up the place — a costly Band-Aid at best, like putting  a diamond tiara on Jimmy Kimmel.

 Eventually she turned to Mark Bartos Landscape Design, known for  creating beautiful, moody gardens with lots of pastels, an almost sepia-tone plant palette. "Lauren's was an unusual garden  for me. For one thing it's not mauve," Mark Bartos quips, adding that he usually designs low-maintenance year-round gardens  that emphasize foliage over bright blooms. "But I knew Lauren wanted her flowers too. So she got them. Something for every  season."

  Bartos painted a backdrop of shade-tolerant plants that contrast and accentuate the flowering  plants. This month, red cestrum blooms blaze in front of limelight green pittosporums and dark-leafed camellias, whose soft-tissue  pink buds await their turn. The electric Kool-Aid purple flowers of Tibouchina  urvilleana(princess flower) splay gaudily beside silver junipers. The leptospermums have just locked, loaded and fired  off blasts of pink. The lavenders, westringias and roses have fistfuls of flowers — and will really jump into action  in springtime, as will the abutilons and Teucrium fruticans  (bush germander).

 "I love all the ins and outs," Elia says. "There's always something beautiful  to look at." Because Bartos has used foliage colors to give the garden visual bones, the limited number of flowers are nicely  emphasized.

 Power-walk a block or two down the street and you'll spot Jan DeMartini's house. It's  the one that would prompt Monet to whistle like a sailor on leave. DeMartini's front garden has southerly exposure. Graced  with excellent light and a slope that promotes good drainage, her palette of winter blooms includes alyssum, alstroemeria,  azalea, bearded iris, camellia, echinacea, gardenia, nemesia, marguerite, Tagetes lemmonii(Copper Canyon daisy), erigeron and a Joseph's coat climbing rose heavy with bloom.

 Unlike the tableau effect created by the Elia garden, the DeMartini design is best absorbed in bites. This garden  is a boisterous tossed salad filled with familiar and reliable ingredients selected with the help of pro Wendy Proud. "She  led me in the right direction," DeMartini says.

 "They did all the planting," Proud responds. "I  just suggested where things might go."

 The DeMartini bloom-fest will continue through late winter  and into spring and summer, a progression that will include foxglove, geranium, daylilies, hollyhock, plumeria, nierembergia,  dietes, watsonia, artichokes and snow-in-summer. When one is in its final throes, another will be starting up.

 "I'm pretty much of a perfectionist," DeMartini says. "I'm in the garden all the time."

 Admitting  you're a junkie — that may be hardest part of this 12-step plan. Follow it, though, and you will begin to see the garden