An Iowa Garden

Blogs anymore are like grains of sand; almost infinite in number, mostly indistinguishable, washed up by the great internet sea today, and gone tomorrow, not even to be forgotten, as they were seldom noticed in the first place... but then there was Anne. Right after I started my modest blog, like any new tenant, I decided to check out the neighbors. I soon stumbled on a tiny gardening blog from near Des Moines in central Iowa, called Tender Dirt. It only contained about twenty short entries, and covered only three months at the end of 2004. It's author, Anne, was a young woman with a husband and child, and she was pregnant with their second child. She was a writer, and in the past had taught, and it was apparent that at present the family was financially hurting. From comments in her blog, and just from her perspective on her environment, it was clear that she was raised in the prairie states, in this case in the Flint Hill country of eastern Kansas... and how that girl could write! I've always been a sucker for female vulnerability, which she unconsciously radiated, and her writing style both captivated me and made me jealous of her talent as she threw off striking phrases and images as casually as I might rustle a newspaper... and now she's gone. Her first postings were more or less garden related, but soon focussed more and more on her troubled pregnancy. Her last post stated that she had lost her baby, but hoped to get back to gardening and writing in her blog as an antidote to the sadness that she felt about everything, but she never posted again, though her blog remains online; a small, alarming snippet of life. The great plains and prairies here in the middle part of our country possess their own unique beauty, but there is no more forlorn place to be blue... the empty spaces are too great, and the climate is too unforgiving. One's feelings, and even one's life can easily end up like so much tattered laundry blowing on a rusty clothesline. Wherever Anne is now, I hope she is happy and well, utilizing her unquestioned talent... and I wish her Godspeed.

If you've recently posted a comment here, and it either didn't appear until now, or disappeared into cyberspace, it's because my blog turned on blog moderator without my permission or knowledge, while I was away. I rather wondered why nobody had posted a comment since I returned, but it wasn't until Jenn e-mailed me, that I realized what had happened. It would seem like a good thing to activate when you're away from the blog for a long time, so you don't come home and find your blog full of porn links, but in this case I didn't do it... does blogger automatically activate it after a period of inactivity, to protect unattended blogs... I don't know. So, there are two questions here: who turned on the moderator, and just how long would I have gone commentless before I figured out something was wrong?

The brown creeper climbed up the tree,
Paying not a whit of attention to me.
He circled higher, round and round,
While I stood lumpish on the ground.
___________________________
db
Out in the garden today, to my surprise, I saw a bird that I've not spotted for so long, I'd almost forgotten about it: the brown creeper, a tiny bird with a hooked beak, that bustles up tree trunks, prying at cracks and crevices as it circles upward. I've been maintaining they are rare anymore, but I started wondering if I just don't see them as well as I did when I was a boy. I don't exactly need a seeing eye dog to get across the street, but everybody's acuity fades with time... or is it that I see without SEEING now? I must pay more attention.

The shooting star (above is shown our native, D. meadia) is in the same family as primroses and cyclamens... but is the shooting star's genus Dodecatheon or Dodecantheon? For a while I just thought I was confused about the right spelling, then I decided other people were confused, and finally I decided that EVERYBODY is confused, as even scholarly papers can't agree on the correct spelling. I think I may well have spelled it both ways in previous postings on this blog. I decided I had to come down on one side or the other, so I looked into it, and I think it's correctly Dodecatheon. Pliny apparently named it, and it may be derived from Dodeka for twelve and theo for gods (though the similar word "parthenon", with its "n", and meaning "all the Greek gods", worries me a little). Well, anyway, I've put in my vote, and I'm sticking with it. 

On the south coast of Kauai, we also visited McBryde Garden, the site of an old estate. You take a tram back to the garden, passing by Allerton Garden, shown above, which was also the site of an old sugar plantation mansion, and before that, the living site of Hawaiian royalty. 

White rumped Sharma thrush; one of the most beautiful singers in Kauai. 

You then enter a beautiful valley, with a stream; the McBryde Garden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heliconia 

 

 

Cocoa pods on tree. 

These pictures are from the visitor's center of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. 

Taro 

 

Plumeria 

Cattleya 

Coreopsis 

Hoya 

So, December was a month of record cold, January has been very warm, and now apparently we are poised to have monumentally cold weather in early February. As mentioned in a recent post, Tom Skilling of WGN weather in Chicago, predicts that the NAO that I've talked about (a persistent but migratory bubble of warm air that sits over the North Atlantic), will move westward over Greenland, blocking the jet stream over the U.S., which will buckle southward, causing polar air that has been trapped over Alaska, to pour southwards, hitting mainly the eastern U.S., but Iowa will be also under this river of cold... the temperature at Fairbanks has recently been 50 below zero, so this could be shockingly cold, especially with the lack of snow cover.

Flower gardens can, indeed, be riveting; slowly revealing one small facet of themselves after another, ensnaring your attention. If anticipation is, in fact, more powerful than realization, then can there be anything more exciting in the garden than seeing small bulbs first making their appearance in the early part of the gardening year, when the frozen ground is just beginning to thaw, and the rest of the showier plants are still in their winter slumber? This is when I most love having a more natural garden, with all sorts of bulbs scattered here and there through the woods, so that one must get down and brush aside the leaves to closely inspect these little pioneers, having to puzzle out their identity if they are wanderers. It is especially thrilling to watch for bulbs that are new to the garden, to see if they have weathered our usually rugged winters, and to marvel at the small perfection of the plant if it lifts its head to see its first Iowa spring. Above is pictured Galanthus ikariae, a snowdrop species that I planted for the first time last fall. I'm especially pleased to see it, as Mrs. Graff, in her book "Flowers in the Winter Garden", states that it was not hardy in her garden on Long Island (7a), but here it is, looking jaunty and right at home. I have hope for it, in spite of Mrs. Graff's experience, as it is native to Russia and the Caucasus, but I won't get too attached to it just yet, as she seems to intimate that it comes up, but then freezes in late cold spells. This raises the question of whether I should mulch it, hoping to retard its growth until later in the spring, or just leave it alone... stay tuned.

The first bird singing softly, on a January day,
makes me dream of flowers, in Iowa in May.
_______________________________
db
Today it begins; on a sunny, mild day, the tufted titmouse cleared his throat and began his "Peter Peter" call from an oak tree on the hill; the first bird song of the new year. The songbirds start their courtship and territorial claims tentatively and softly at first, not being sure if this is really spring, or just an interlude in a long winter (being older, wiser, and more cynical, I know it is a false spring, but I can appreciate the birds' impatience). A walk in the garden shows foliage from last year, like the epimedium above, still in good shape, and a myriad of bulbs peeping up to see if the warm sun is for real. Whenever I go out for a garden walk, I never get more than half way across the yard to the garden gate, when I hear a thump, and look back to see one of our kitten-cats, P.J., blasting out through the cat door to catch up with me, her legs being so short that I always wonder that her stomach doesn't scrape on the ground. She has become quite the little garden cat, following me about everywhere, stopping to climb her favorite trees, from whose limbs she gets so intent on looking about at all the birds, that she almost falls out of the tree.

 

Kukui-O-Lono park on the south coast of Kauai, is the site Of Walter McBryde's former estate. Most of it has been converted into a golf course, but a small remnant of his original garden remains. Shown below is the view to the ocean, a red crested cardinal (common on Kauai, but native to Brazil), and views of his Japanese garden.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The swarthy bee is a buccaneer,
a burly, velveted rover,
who loves the booming wind in his ear,
as he sails the seas of clover.
_______
Bliss Carman

A peculiar day here, for sure; it's as if a rollicking early March day has been kerplunked down in late January, which is normally the coldest time of the winter. Today we have a temperature of 40 degrees, and a bright blue sky, with puffy white clouds racing to the south, hurled and harried across the horizon by a north wind, that booms and bellows in its impatience to blow everything in front of it.
In spite of the maelstrom in the treetops, protected spots in the garden are gradually showing signs of life in the warming sun; the tiny leaves of Ranunculus ficaria are cautiously emerging from the moist soil.

 

Things I never knew: how flower bulbs divide (or, what the heck is a Fibonacci sequence?). We all wish to have, of course, drifts of flowering bulbs in the spring, but seldom reach that goal. Snowdrop drifts are particularly elusive... to start with, their bulbs are especially sensitive to being out of the ground for long, so only a percentage of purchased bulbs newly planted will ever come back in the spring. Of course, books always tell us to get our snowdrops "in the green"; that is, to obtain a clump of growing snowdrops right after they bloom. Ha! You would sooner find a browsing camel in Iowa than a neighbor looking to offload a few clumps of spare snowdrops. There is only one tiny specialty nursery in this country, in New England, that I know sells snowdrops in the green, and they are pricy cultivars. The second hinderance to getting large drifts of snowdrops is that they are such tiny things, that it just takes a while to make much of an impression; a five year old clump of snowdrops could easily be covered by a coffee cup. It is usually stated that Galanthus nivalis (the lesser, or European, snowdrop) multiplies much more readily than G. elwesii (the greater, or Byzantian, snowdrop) but for unfathomable reasons, in my garden, the opposite seems to be true. With all flower bulbs in the garden, it always seems as if they just sort of sit there for a couple of years, and then when you turn your back on them, suddenly they are flopping all over and need dividing (a job that gets done about as often as winning the lottery around here). The explanation for this seeming peculiarity in bulb division, which I found by reading an article by Dr. Frank Greer of Madison Wisconsin, a bulboholic, and mainstay of the Wisconsin Hardy Plant Society, is that flower bulbs divide in a Fibonacci sequence. Now, Fibonacci was a twelfth century mathematician, who proposed the mathematical sequence that bears his name (he used multiplying rabbits as his example, but we're talking bulbs here). The Fibonacci sequence is: 1-2-3-5-8-13... where every number is the sum of its two predecessors. Thus, after the first year a flower bulb has a bulb and an immature bulblet. In the third year, you have two bulbs with one bulblet, in the fourth year, three bulbs and two bulblets, then five bulbs with three bulblets, then eight bulbs and five bulblets, then it's time to get out the shovel. I think I'll go out and count my snowdrops.

To return to the Moir Garden in Kauai; one end of the garden, a more recent addition, I think, has been devoted to tropical orchids, mainly vandas, vandaceous hybrids, phaelonopsis, and a few sweet-smelling cattleyas. Especially striking were some phaelonopsis in the red-plum spectrum. A number of these orchids (and a couple of other plants) are shown below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is there such a word as "Adonisless"? If not, there should be, as that's unaccountably the state I find myself in again this spring. Adonis amurensis is an early-blooming wildflower of Japan, where it also is often sold in small pots, so that it will bloom at the New Year.It's given name there is Fukujusoo, which apparently means "a plant of happy fortune and long life". It is a member of the buttercup family, with ferny, green foliage and bright golden flowers, which arises and blooms very early in the spring, with the crocuses. It is a spring ephemeral, so dies back in the heat of summer and disappears, which for the most part I don't mind, as I prefer a bare spot to seeing a plant flop about in slow agony in the heat like some of the other cool climate plants do; I will allow that my track record, however, in managing bare spots is not good, as more often than not a bare spot around here becomes the recipient of some hulking, invasive plant that a fellow gardener sent home with me. It is a rite of spring that sophisticated gardeners in this country ( a category in which nobody in their right senses would place me) start rhapsodizing about their Adonis bursting from the ground with a blaze of golden flowers. It is equally a rite of spring around here that I suddenly realize another year has gone by without me adding this plant to my garden... I think I am destined to be Adonisless. For that matter, I have been wondering for years why I have never come up with a plant of Corydalis solida. After seeing several plants of heavenly blue Corydalis flexuosa wither into extinction (though one little specimen stubbornly persists), I pretty much gave up on the genus, but am now slowly adding other species in this group that do survive here: lutea, ochroleuca, leucanthema, and what is probably a flexuosa hybrid, Blackberry Wine... but still no solida. I must look into it.

Here are some pictures from the famous Moir Garden, on the south coast of Kauai. The main part of the plantings are succulents and cacti, surrounding an old plantation house, which has been converted into a restaurant, with dining out on the veranda, overlooking the garden. You wouldn't think of going to Kauai to see a dry garden, but the south coast of that island gets only 34" of rain, equal to what we get here in eastern Iowa, but with a lot hotter climate, and freely draining, rocky soil. Tomorrow, I'll show the orchid portion of Moir Garden. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday, it was 54 degrees, with green grass, and today... well, it IS January in Iowa. I took a snowdrop progress photo, shown below, before the snow started flying. The clasping, grayish-green leaves, typical of Galanthus elwesii, are now opening, revealing the white flower buds (the leaves of Galanthus nivalis, the later-blooming, European snowdrop, are greener, and more strap-like, looking like a tiny daffodil). 

 

Back from Hawaii, with a tan, and 350 pictures on the digital camera, to find here in Iowa, no snow, and the resident deer munching on green grass. However, 3-5" of snow is predicted for today, and according to Tom Skilling of WGN weather out of Chicago, the unseasonably mild weather we've been experiencing is due to end in a week... the NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation), which is a persistent, large bubble of warm air, had been over Greenland in December, steering the cold arctic air down over us; then it moved to England, steering the cold air down over Europe, so that Russia has been experiencing record cold and snow. The warm bubble is now set to oscillate back to Greenland, portending a return here in the Midwest (and the East Coast) of cold and snow by the end of the month... they are not sure how long it will last yet. So, out to the garden to see what's happening, before the snow flies (an ugly red and orange blob covers most of western Iowa on the radar), and then I'll download my pictures of Hawaii, and look at some REAL flowers.