Thursday was our nicest day yet this calendar year, sunny and windy with a high around 70 F. I cleaned up the front garden and planted sixty young pansies/violas, two parsleys (a flat-leaved Italian variety), and a handful of perennials.
I’ve never grown hen and chicks before, hesitant partially because I heard a story from another local gardener that her rare prize variety of them was dug up and removed from her sidewalk-side garden by some unscrupulous succulent lover, but this week’s Q&A gardening column in The New York Times favorably mentioned them as being excellent for edging in hot, poor, low-rain conditions, so it inspired me to try them for the first time, and happily, they turned out to be one of the small number of perennials already in stock at the closest nursery. To my surprise, there were several cultivars already in stock to choose from. After weighing them all for some time, I ended up picking “Grey Dawn,” which does not appear to yet have any photos on the web – it is predominantly a mauveish color, with edging in a greyish hue. I ended up planting it next to the tiny-leaved thyme, which for some reason greatly pleased me – the tiny thyme’s tiny rosettes somehow pleasantly echo the large, bold rosettes of the hen and chicks.
In addition, I also planted a rock cress that is blooming in magenta, a perennial sweet alyssum that blooms in yellow-gold if the tag is correct, a perennial candytuft that is already blooming in white, hyssop “Blue Fortune”, and cinquefoil/potentilla “Miss Wilmott”. Other seaside plants, such as sea lavender, have done well in the front garden – I assume the combination of wind and poor soil and sloping is similar to what they’re used to – so I am hoping that rock cress will do the same. Annual sweet alyssum was one of the front garden’s stars last year, blooming nearly nonstop from spring till killed by an ice storm in late autumn, so I’m hoping that its perennial cousin will be as happy. I grew the species herb, anise hyssop, last year, and after a bit of a straggly start, it adjusted to its conditions and then bloomed for a few months, attracting bees and wasps galore (I once witnessed two American bumblebees getting into an altercation over the most nectar-rich bloom!), so I’m hoping “Blue Fortune” will do the same, and that perhaps being planted while the weather is still cool will aid in its adjustment. As to the cinquefoil, I’m hoping that it lives up to their reputation of plants that do well in dryland conditions.
The pansies and violas are planted in three main clumps according to color. One clump’s theme is maroon, very very dark purple, red, and deep royal purple; this has two pansies and two violas (six of each). The second clump’s theme is a lighter royal purple and sunny lemony yellow; this has two pansies and one viola (six of each). The third clump’s theme is much lighter than the other two, more of a washed look, and uses mostly “Morpho” pansies, the type that fade over time to a lighter version of the fresh bloom’s look. This last clump is in paler blues, mauves, yellows, and oranges. There are three pansies in this one (and no violas), again six of each type.
The parsley-growing in front is an experiment. Parsley is supposed to need richer soil than the front to get a good harvest. I’m going to see if that’s true and exactly what “they” mean by “good harvest” – whether a harvest in poor soil is still adequate enough for one person, even if it’s not a good harvest by whomever’s standards.
The time in the front garden gave me more time to assess what definitely survived the winter and the wrecking of the bed by some workmen. These are things that I am now sure survived:
- The autumn-blooming crocuses (they leaf out in spring)
- Most or all of the asters (various species)
- At least one of the two creeping bellflowers (two species)
- At least two of the hardy mums
- The catmint
- The Carolina lupine aka false lupine
- The snow-in-summer
- Most or all of the bearded iris, though at least one of them seems to be sick
- The Siberian iris
- At least one of the sedums
- One of the two yarrow “Moonshine” (and since Thursday the second one has sprouted too)
- The two sea lavenders
- One of the lavenders
- At least two of the Oriental poppies
- One of the two sages, despite being utterly trampled (to near annihilation) by workmen over the winter
There are also some things sprouting that I haven’t identified yet. There are also some things that have shown no signs of life yet that I’m surprised about, like the goldenrods.
Yesterday (Friday) rain was predicted, but in the morning it was still sunny and pretty. Last year I bought a box and some file cards from the stationer’s store and used it to store unused seed packs, and yesterday I sorted through them and picked out things that should be planted now or should have already been planted, and then sowed many of them in the front garden, hoping the coming rain would gently help them to germinate more quickly than they otherwise might. I sowed annual poppies, annual sweet alyssum, annual scabiosa/pincushion flower, love-in-a-mist, calendula, dill ‘Dukat’, more parsley, chamomile, sweet peas (in mixed colors), garden peas, and fava beans/broad beans. Now that global warming has made our winters and summers longer and our autumns and springs shorter, I find it more difficult to know exactly when to sow the seeds of things that like it cool but not too cold, like sweet peas and peas – if you plant them in soil that’s too cold, the seeds might rot or the seedlings might die of damping off, but if you wait too long to plant them, the heat can abruptly kill the plants before you ever get blooms/pea pods. So far my strategy has been to plant some and reserve some of the seeds – hedging my bets. Regardless, for peas I planted the cultivars “Oregon Sugar” and one I’m currently forgetting, and for fava/broad beans I planted the cultivars “D’Aquadulce a Tres Longue Cosse” and “Windsor Long Pod”.
Then today I sowed hollyhocks (so far none of the previously planted hollyhocks have shown evidence of survival), larkspur, and Johnny jump up (the wild viola of Europe), as well as a pack of sweet peas (also mixed colors) that I forgot to sow yesterday. My natural tendency is to coddle hollyhocks – I suppose the most common kind, Alcea rosea, being so prone to rust in my climate makes me think of them as plants in need of babying – but this is not the way to get great hollyhocks. The best way to get stellar ones is to plant them in as harsh conditions as possible – I see the biggest, best stands of them growing in thin strips of poor soil beside large parking lots here – and expect them to grow fast and emphatically and die young. Just think of them as the James Dean of cottage garden flowers.
I sowed half the larkspur and two-thirds of the Johnny jump up in back, which allowed me to take better stock of what survived in the back garden. Almost everything has, including:
- The alpine strawberries
- The columbines (various cultivars as well as the species that’s native to this region)
- Most or all of the foxgloves
- The bronze fennel (!)
- The woodland aster
- The bergenias
- At least one of the two epimediums
- The honesty plant
- At least one of the two partridgeberries
- The fringed bleeding heart
- All the colchicums (like the autumn-blooming crocus in front, they bloom in autumn but leaf out in spring)
- The Allegheny spurge
- The two woodland phloxes
- The perennial larkspur
- The leopard’s bane
- Two primroses
- More I’m currently forgetting
About the only thing, in fact, that definitely does not seem to have survived in back is the monkshood, which unfortunately does not surprise me, as the back garden plays regular host to two sweet but rather stupid squirrels, who destroyed and attempted to eat it last autumn (monkshood didn’t get its alternate common name “wolfsbane” by chance; it is extremely poisonous). At the time, it looked like the monkshood had been dealt a deathblow, and I won’t be surprised if it does not reappear.
