An Iowa Garden

When I first began gardening in Iowa, four gardens and a zone colder ago, my first obsession was tulips, which I filled the front yard with, leading to one glorious week of color every spring, traffic jams on the road in front of the house, and an empty garden the rest of the year. My next passion was magnolias, and I planted about thirty different trees, which I had to mostly abandon when I moved on... a few smaller ones were able to follow me to my present garden, and are now 20 to 30 feet tall. Next I focussed on lepidote rhododendrons. This was before PJM, and so lepidote rhododendrons were completely unknown here. I had a collection of perhaps forty plants... a few later were able to be moved to my sister's garden, and I myself only have one of these original rhodys in my present garden, Pale Lilac, which is tough enough to move anywhere, anytime. In subsequent years and subsequent gardens, I went on to other interests... daylilies, deciduous azaleas, daffodils, and presently Japanese maples and woodland perennials. However, a few lepidote rhododendrons have crept back into my garden, and this mild winter, which has allowed their foliage to remain largely intact (see the above photo of Olga Mezitt), has rekindled my earlier attraction to these shrubs, so the spring flower catalogues are out, and my pen is busy. Other than PJM (which is everywhere in Iowa yards, though usually stunted by planting in heavy clay), lepidote rhodys are still very unusual here, even though there has been an explosion in growable hybrids. The local nurseries seldom offer more than one or two common varieties, so they have to still be obtained through the mail. If our climate were a bit more temperate (warmer winters AND cooler, wetter summers), we could grow scads of them. Even so, there are numerous candidates, and as surely as the sap rises in the trees, I am bound to have another spring garden fancy... in this case my old love, lepidote rhododendrons.