Election Section

The ceanothuses are blooming! Ceanothi? Or is “ceanothus” like “moose”—singular and plural? Either way, it’s almost not a street tree, but the plantings on the University Avenue median are too gorgeous right now to let semantics stand in the way.  

Those big shrubs/little trees in the median look like Ceanothus thyrsiflorus ‘Skylark’ to me, just on a drive-by ID. They’re very nicely pruned, to show off their soft-gray trunks and masses of bloom in fanned-out domes. The thing I’ve always liked about that public planting is that, at the right time of day (usually morning) in the right kind of weather, the blue of the flowers precisely matches the blue in the distant folds of the Marin headlands that backdrop the view down the avenue. That combination plays delightful tricks with the eye, tricks of depth and distance and the color qualities of clear air.  

I’m identifying the planting so tentatively because a singular quality of the genus Ceanothus is its plurality: The Jepson California plant manual mentions 45 species, and many of those have assorted varieties within the species, and as a group they hybridize merrily for still more multiplicity. Horticulturists have used that tendency well, and given gardeners lots of cultivars to play with. And almost every one of them is a different shade of blue.  

So are their wild cousins. I’ve stood on a Sonoma hillside (somewhere up Ida Clayton Road) for a great view of a whole chaparral valley dappled with ceanothus, wave after wave of blues ranging from fresh indigo to cold-sky to a palest dust, and white. I wouldn’t begin to estimate how many species I was looking at.  

Ceanothus is called “blueblossom”—sensible, if economical—and “California (or wild) lilac,” which is a stretch. Its flowerheads are much more compact, and their scent more subtle, than that of lilacs. You wouldn’t think of blueblossom as a scent plant at all unless you stood in a mass of them, or stuck your nose right into the blooms.  

Be careful if you do that; bees like ceanothus. I’ve seen honeybees and our native bees working the flowers. Deer eat some species (though they’re generally among the plants optimistically called “deer–resistant”) and between the large and the small, they’re an integral bit of several native systems. Unusually for a non-bean, they’re nitrogen fixers, and so enrich the soil for other plants. Humans use them, too, for more than ornament. Coppiced, they put out sprigs for basketry; some species are smoked, some used for medicine, and you can produce a shampoo by rubbing blossoms in water between your hands.  

They want native conditions in your garden—summer drought, especially around the base of the trunk. Their only drawback is that they’re short-lived for a shrub/tree, tending to die after ten or 15 years. So that garden in the median isn’t planted for the ages, but in a city, who could count on that anyway? The beauty is worth the grief; sometimes it pays to burn the horticultural candle at both ends.