Wednesday, December 31, 2008
A Fine Bulb Book
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
If You Like Maples...
If you like maples, especially Japanese maples, there is a very useful message board you should check out. It is the acer message board for the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden. If for nothing else, check out the gallery portion, which has multiple pictures of just about every variety of ornamental maple. The discussions are however, equally invaluable and interesting.
http://www.ubcbotanicalgarden.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=d391609bd4b486cbc7db2f4e5cef7174&f=9
Monday, December 29, 2008
Plants I Mean To Have (Part II)
I left it behind when I moved, which is probably also lucky, as they have a reputation for being very difficult to transplant, probably because of their very deep, extensive root systems; when moved they often go into decline and die.
So, I mean to have this shrub again, but I must find the right spot for it first; not an easy task in a woodland garden.
The photo above is not mine (since I am daphne-less at present); it was taken from Wikipedia Commons, for which I am grateful.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Plants I Mean To Have...
Many of the species of lycoris are only suited for the south; for example the iconic hurricane lily, L. radiata. There are, however, a couple of other species that I'd like to try here in 5a Iowa. It's a little tricky, because with lycoris you can't pull that old, cold climate trick of just planting them very deeply; lycoris bulbs supposedly will not bloom well if planted more than a few inches deep (there is not complete agreement on this; some say no more than two inches deep, a few say you can plant six inches deep; some of this disparity may be due to confusion about whether you're talking about depth to the top or the bottom of the bulb).
Basically, culturally one can divide the Lycoris into those which produce their foliage in the fall, after blooming (like radiata); these are tender. Then there are quite a number of species which (like sprengeri and squamigera that we already have) produce their foliage in the spring; some of these species may be at least borderline hardy in zone 5 (it is claimed that lycoris are more hardy than they are commonly given credit for). There is the lovely apricot-orange L. sanguinea; the "peppermint striped lily", L. incarnata; light yellow longituba; white-pink L. shaanxiensis (I put this species in here tentatively, as some say it's a tender fall foliage plant, and some say it puts out its foliage in spring and is fairly hardy); creamy yellow L. caldwelii; and yellow L. chinensis. The first three of these have funnel-like flowers like the species I already have, and the last three are "spider" lilies.
Now if a couple of roses would just suck in their guts, I think I could squeeze in a couple of new lycoris species.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Get Out The Checkbook!
I'm not quite sure why I would be worked up over colchicums that bloom in the spring, but we're not talking about logic here, anyway...this is gardening.
Friday, December 26, 2008
More Than An Afterthought
Thursday, December 25, 2008
More Fritillaries = A Better Garden
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
If I May Repeat Myself
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
A Spring Full Of Crocuses
For some reason, crocuses have never been a big part of our present garden. Perhaps it's that I'm still disgruntled about my crocus experience in my first garden; I bought a bag of 1000 mixed crocuses. The price was a trifle, and they all came in a bag that you could put your sack lunch in. I can tell you though; planting a thousand of anything, even tiny bulbs, takes a lot of time. Well, the squirrels came along, and the next spring exactly one lonely little crocus came up, and it was gone by the next year.
Maybe I've never quite gotten over that; the only crocuses we've had here have either piggybacked in here from my third garden (this is my fourth), or they are Dutch crocuses that came from a bag of bulbs I bought from my Sister-in-law, who was selling them for her church.
On a whim, this last fall I did put in a few new species crocuses, and this winter I've been looking at pictures on the internet of the amazing variety in crocuses. I've also been eyeballing a scruffy, weed and brush overgrown, south-facing bit of dry hillside that's right next to our garden. All I'd have to do to have a crocus garden is grub out all the brush and roots, dig up the whole hillside and replace the clay with loose soil, haul in a ton of rocks, and move about a hundred feet of deer fence to include this bit of land in the garden.
Winter in the midwest has a way of fostering such fantasies and delusions... it's how we cope.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Snakes Up!
It's easy to forget how cool Arisaemas look when they first raise up in the cool early spring, like so many cobras raising their dark heads, to eye the garden... wonderfully sinister amongst all the bright, frilly daffodils and primroses.
Above from top: Arisaema ringens, sikokianum, and serratum, last April.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
One Good Thing...
One good thing about gardening in the U.S. is that our garden catalogs are somewhat lacking in offerings of primroses (at least those that can be grown outdoors in Iowa). If I lived in Great Britain, I'd be fat from eating fish and chips, and I'd be broke from buying new primroses... maybe not such a bad situation after all.
Saturday, December 20, 2008
A Must-Do Spring Garden Project
There comes a point in your gardening life where in the winter you should stop plotting out new flower beds, and instead daydream about thinning out the anemones; your garden is full!
However, I for some reason can't seem to bring myself to pull up all of the hundreds of little hellebore seedlings that keep popping up in the garden... they're just so cute!. I guess deadheading the hellebores after they flower might at least be in order (kind of like getting the tubes tied after you've already got a houseful of kids). I'm going to try and find a couple of spots to move some of these seedlings to, before they get their roots down any further. I just hope they don't expect a four star room; it's going to be Iowa clay full of tree roots at best.
Friday, December 19, 2008
A Future Gardening Magazine Picture
Thursday, December 18, 2008
The First Time
I can quite clearly remember the first time I saw the place that became our present garden. It was late fall of 1993, and we just happened upon the for sale sign, pointing down a wooded, dead end road. I wandered out in the brushy woods behind the house; I stood in a spot just to the right of where the Japanese maple is now and, looking around, thought that this would be a great spot to garden!
Sometimes things work out.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Snowbirding
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
First Robin Of Spring
It looks for all the world like a little, spring-blooming colchicum, and in fact recently it has been moved into that genus and re-labeled Colchicum vernum. I had always read that this is a monotypic bulb (the only species in its former genus bulbocodium). However, I recently found that some botanists have differentiated out a second species, Bulbocodium (now Colchicum) versicolor which is smaller and native more to the east, in southeastern Europe to the Caucasus (vernum is native in the southern Alps and Pyrenees). The territories and the plants overlap and some consider versicolor just a subtype of vernum. Versicolor is rarely offered for sale and possibly is a little less hardy than vernum; it looks from its pictures even more like a typical little colchicum (though also spring blooming).
There is another small, related genus (merendera) of bulbs native in southeastern Europe that are similar and have also now been melded into the genus colchicum. Merenderas look like a prohibitive stretch to grow in our climate, being from more Mediterranean locales, and as best I can tell being fall-bloomers that put out their foliage in late fall after blooming.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Watching The Glacier...
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Pictures In A Crowded Closet
I think our garden is an interesting one to wander about in, but it doesn't photograph worth a lick; you will notice that an unusually high percentage of the pictures in this blog are close-ups, or at best medium-range shots. When I try to show one of the shrubs or trees, more often than not I show one branch, which pretty much gets lost in the picture in the surrounding background tangle. Once a reader asked me to post a full picture of an uncommon shrub, and I finally just gave up; it was hemmed in on one side by a hydrangea, on the other side by a double-file viburnum, overhung by an amur maple, and a red climbing rose draped over it. It's like trying to take a photograph in a crowded closet. Last year, a charming gal from Chicago stopped in for a garden tour; she works for a publishing company that puts out a couple of well-known garden magazines, and her job is to travel about and find gardens to photograph and feature in these magazines. I told her that our garden just doesn't photograph well, but she stopped by anyway, and took some snapshots that she would share with her editors, and they would get back to me if they wanted to formally photograph the garden. I suspect they had a good laugh trying to pick out the flowers in the jungle; sort of like 'Where's Waldo?" Needless to say, I've not yet heard back from them; perhaps they are waiting until they start their new magazine, "Midwest Gardens Close-up".
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Gardening Catalog Winter Re-Run
Above: Hosta 'Eternal Flame' just coming up last spring.
Friday, December 12, 2008
A Place Called Spring...
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Rue Anemones And Where They Went To...
So let me get this straight: Anemonella thalictroides is the rue anemone; but to me it doesn't really look like an anemone, and not really much like the rues (the thalictrums), which are mostly large plants with tall stalks producing clouds of flowers, as opposed to the demure little rue anemone with its scattered flowers. Yet Anemonella thalictroides literally means "an anemonella that looks like a thalictrum". I guess though, that the taxonomists are serious about a supposed resemblance, as they've now taken the rue anemone out of the genus anemonella and put it in thalictrum, so it's now Thalictrum thalictroides, which means literally, "a thalictrum that looks like a thalictrum" (which, excuse me, it doesn't; I don't care how many times you repeat it).
Now then, we also have the false rue anemone, Enemion biternatum, which to me looks sort of like a columbine with white flowers, and not like either anemones nor rues... nor like the rue anemone (that is "the rue that looks like a rue" but doesn't).
So (takes a deep breath): the false rue anemone doesn't look like rues or anemones or like the rue anemone. The rue anemone doesn't look like rues or anemones but is now a rue anyway. At this point you probably rue having read this.
Of course, my next job is sorting out the genera anemone, anemonella, and anemonopsis
Above at top Thalictrum thalictroides 'Cameo', then common T. thalictroides, and finally Thalictrum flavum 'Illuminator'.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Poking Around In The Garden
It turns out that the berries are the least toxic part of the plant, then the stems and leaves, with the worst being the roots (which makes sense from a plant survival standpoint; you don't want the birds dropping dead before they can spread your seeds about, whereas the plant doesn't want anything eating its roots).
Apparently it's a little hazy just how poisonous the plant is; mountain folk in the Appalachians, of course, made "poke salad" (sallet, salit) every spring, by boiling the new pokeweed shoots in water, which they changed two or three times to get rid of the poison. The plant is said to become more toxic as it matures. There is even still a Polk Salad Festival every spring in Harriman, Tennessee (I'll be busy that weekend, though the Polk Salad Queen looks cute). The festival's name, with the conversion of "poke" to "polk", comes from the song Polk Salad Annie, which Elvis covered. The "polk" might originally come from the fact that in the Presidential election of 1844, supporters of James K. Polk pinned pokeweed leaves to their coats to show their support for Polk. This is considered one of the first Presidential campaign "buttons".
Pokeweed berries were used to make pie, so heat does destroy the toxicity. The berries were also used as an early form of ink in this country (thus the plant was also called "inkberry"). Astonishingly, the Declaration Of Independence was written with this ink, as were some letters written home by Civil War soldiers; after drying, the ink is dark brown.
Pokeweed poisoning symptoms begin with vomiting and diarrhea, may proceed to convulsions, and if death occurs, it's from respiratory paralysis. So many of nature's creatures (like butterflies and tropical tree frogs), advertise the fact that they are poisonous by being gaudy. I wonder if the pokeweed, with its neon pink stems, and reddish stalks, and its large, hulking size, does the same?
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
The Undocumented Garden
Monday, December 08, 2008
The Grandfather Of All Garden Projects
Something that's been on my 'Garden To-Do' list for so long that might set some kind of Guinness record, is that of compiling a master list of every plant in our garden. It would be quite handy to have; I suppose most folks have at least once forgotten where they planted something and couldn't find it, but when you start "losing" a six foot tall shrub as I did once, it's probably time for a list.
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Keeping Up With Martha Stewart
It's funny how over the years, the so-called "signature" plant signifying a sophisticated garden keeps changing. I think when my gardening first got to the point where I knew about, and lusted after such things, that the Japanese jack in the pulpit, Arisaema sikokianum was THE plant; now it's practically a blue light special at K-Mart... I had probably a hundred of them from seed, and tried to give one to everybody who visited our garden (I even gave one to the UPS driver who delivers boxes of plants every spring, and instead of taking a bottle of wine to social gatherings with other gardeners, I'd take a couple of sikokianums in full bloom). I just planted another huge seedhead so probably will have a hundred more in a couple of years. I think the double bloodroot came along about then and was hot stuff, then maybe the lovely lilac Glaucidium palmatum from Japanese woodlands. Somewhere in there the yellow ladyslipper orchid also became the holy grail; these beauties have multiplied and been divided in our garden to the point that, during May there's a clump around every corner.
The next plant that was "the one" that I can think of, was the blue corydalis... well, that might still be the one around here, as they all die in the summer heat. It seems like the double Trillium grandiflorum has been gushed over a lot lately. I have been laudably stubborn about getting it, because the price has been quite absurd, but this last spring I picked one up for a relative song. Somehow I don't think I'll be pulling any of these out and throwing them on the compost pile.
Saturday, December 06, 2008
It's Alive!!
Friday, December 05, 2008
Wild Ginger In Winter
Asarum arifolium, native to the SE United States, has more names than any small woodland clumper should have to deal with. For starters, the evergreen gingers (and this plant is evergreen even here), have all been moved to the genus hexastylis (I'm NOT making up new labels every time some taxonomist with too much time on their hands, starts moving the furniture around). Next, this native plant goes under a slew of common names: heartleaf, arrowleaf, little brown jugs, evergreen ginger, and Virginia evergreen ginger.
With its odd little brown flowers in spring, and its large, mottled arrowhead shaped leaves which are bluish-tinged in the winter, and evergreen under the snow, I just call it "neat".
Thursday, December 04, 2008
But Then, I'm Easily Amused...
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Proper Number Of Cats In The Garden
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
Montreal Botanical Garden
It beats looking out the window here in Iowa right now.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Reality Visits Our Garden
After a warm, sunny November, reality has arrived in the form of four inches of heavy, wet snow which, with temperatures to drop into the 'teens, is rapidly freezing into a hard blanket of white death, which I fear will not melt until March. We've gone from shirt-sleeved, balmy afternoons to full fledged winter in a couple of days. Reality sucks.
