Books and photos 8 May 2008

The New York Times is 2 for 2 this week: Today they have an interview with Wendy Johnson, a Zen-inspired long-time gardener. Again, the online version includes a slideshow. I’ve already found a used copy of her new book, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, and I’m thinking of quitting the gardening book I’m currently reading, An Ecology of Enchantment: A Year in a Country Garden by Des Kennedy, to start reading it instead. The latter is a book I recently bought thinking it sounded like the perfect sort of gardening essay book for me to read, but so far I’ve been underwhelmed by it (though in fairness, I’ve only read one section so far; it’s arranged by month, so I thought I would start with May, seeing as we’re in it right now). Even when I agree with the things he’s saying, I find myself feeling cranky about how he says them. For example, we both have a deep love of crabapples, most particularly when they’re blooming, but the way he talks about them annoys me. For another example, he seems to have absolutely zero concern for the possibility of plants escaping, which to be honest is something I would worry about even more in a country garden than I do here in my city one, since the damage can potentially be so much worse close to wild areas. Additionally, I find Des’ writing style to be overly flowery. So maybe Wendy Johnson’s Zen-inspired prose would be a breath of fresh air in comparison.

Speaking of crabapples, this is indeed the week they are blooming here, and they are as lovely as always. Here is one of the many shots I’ve taken of them in the area this week. This one was taken at the Charles River; you can see the river in the background, blurry.

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This is one of my favorite weeks of the year here, when suddenly there seems to be an explosion of bloom: Crabapples and cherries and lilacs and azaleas and rhododendrons and sand cherries and the late magnolias (most of the magnolias now bloom before most of the forsythia here; many forsythia are still blooming now, all leafed out, looking drab - once upon a time they bloomed in late February or early March); tulips and late daffodils and grape hyacinths and columbines and perennial candytuft and vinca and euphorbia species and moss phlox and on and on and on.  This week I saw the Catbirds for the first time this spring and today, a sure sign of summer soon to come, I heard twittering from overhead and looked up to see the Chimney Swifts swooping through the sky for the first time since early last autumn. It always feels here in this cold-winter region like spring starts out as this demure being celebrating subtlety and giving us small jewels as hints of her presence and that this is the week at which she lets down her hair and exclaims, “Let’s have a big party!”

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Somehow I seem to have drawn Sundial Lupine, Lupinus perennis, to me by talking about it here recently. On Monday I stopped in at the nursery as I had to walk by it anyway, and was shocked to discover a sundial lupine for sale there (the first time I’ve ever seen one for sale in a nursery in person), and in one of the biggest pots I’ve ever seen a perennial in there. I asked the nursery manager if she thought they’d be getting more in, and she said she wouldn’t guarantee it, so I bought it and took it around with me for the day. I planted it yesterday (luckily as it was shortly before I was injured). Below are a couple pictures; note how its leaves are thinner and often longer than hybrid lupines, and how they tend to be more upturned, catching the rain more easily than hybrid lupine leaves.

The manager said a lupine this big should definitely bloom this year, but we’ll see.  For more on this kind of lupine, check out this link and (for subspecies occidentalis) this link. Both also have photos.

Stock, blooming away merrily

At least five or six different colors came in just the three pots I got. It’s a great side effect, I think, of buying young plants before they’re blooming much or at all (though I know when one has a specific color scheme in mind, it’s less great). Stock smell so, so lovely, and being planted next to the honey scent of the white sweet alyssum in this year’s garden, it’s like an olfactory explosion in that area.

Reconsiderations and native plants 27 April 2008

The pansies planted in the most sun (the most pastel grouping) are not doing nearly as well as the other two groups. I have yet to decide whether it’s worth it to try to find a new spot for them ASAP or to wait a little while, till the trees leaf out and the taller perennials further back get, well, taller, and see if that helps. It also seems that a slug or some other flower-eating thing is munching on them at night (why it is eating those and not the other pansies, though, is strange to me).

The nemesia ‘Sundrops’ that were planted on/towards the north side of the back garden bed definitely seem to be blooming more heavily than the ones planted on/towards the south side of the back garden bed. I don’t know if this is a temporary thing or if I should relocate the rest of the ‘Sundrops’ to the same area as the ones that are doing better. I don’t know if it’s because the ones on the south side are closer to a building that can cast shadows or because of something about the soil or because of their neighbors or what. So for now I am watching and waiting.

When recently ordering from Toadshade, it never occurred to me that the plants might arrive at the same time that the maples are blooming, nor that maple season would hit me so hard this year (one of my top pollen allergies is to maple pollen, pretty amusing for someone living in the Maple Central that is New England, but for some reason it’s worse this year; I wonder if the different species of maple are less staggered in their blooming than usual or something). Unfortunately, my reconsidering my timing in ordering is too late, since the plants are already here! So for now, I am keeping them (unwrapped) in (wide-open) boxes, hoping soon I’ll have a day where I can go outside without having such a bad reaction so fast. Toadshade, by the way, is a great nursery that I’ve been ordering from on and off for several years, one of the best mail-order nursery sources native North American plants, including some I’ve rarely seen elsewhere. They specify in their catalog what the native range is for the plant, including any states where it is rare, and also specify in what states it has escaped into the wild (if anywhere). In an old garden I grew tons of moist-to-wet native plants, and it was strange to have to skip over most of those this time, since this garden has “small pockets of moist soil” at best, rather than the naturally soggy soil I once worked with. However, it was lovely to be able to order plants that like sunny, dry sites, as that is something I am not as used to working with. Sun is not so easy to come by in today’s small urban garden plots!

I can kind of understand native plant purists, who think the best plants are plants that were originally native to one’s current very specific geographic area. However, I also feel like we have so changed our environment, especially in cities - which are by their very nature human constructs - that the best we can do is to provide plants that are food and shelter for the native critters whose lives we’ve also so altered. To that effect, I generally focus on native plants, but I also don’t believe that every native I plant has to have been originally found in the Boston area specifically. This area is no longer at all like what it was when colonists first arrived and to pretend that it is, is to me a bit silly. Additionally, since non-native and non-local native plants are often good sources of food - especially of nectar - I feel like incorporating them in an ecologically sensitive way (being particularly careful to avoid invasive plants at all costs) can be helpful to pollinators. I strive to have at least one or two good sources of nectar available (read: blooming) in my garden at all times.

Chinese chives, African daisies, pansies/violas, and other things 26 April 2008

More shots from earlier this week.

African daisy

Pansies in the foreground; California poppy foliage in the background

I bought a second African daisy with the general idea to plant it by the first one for contrast. However, when I went to plant it, I felt like it didn’t really look right there. So instead I planted it behind the lavender, which is just refoliating below the top (as seen in the foreground in the below shot), to draw the eye and to provide contrast with the silvery foliage of the lavender. Remember, the taller plant doesn’t always have to go behind the shorter one, especially if the taller one is loose or thin, and/or the shorter one is bushy and robust.

Behind the African daisy, Dianthus ‘Rainbow Loveliness’ is sprouting (the low green foliage to its right). Most of the other lavenders should have survived the winter too, but it seems they were killed by the trampling of the garden over the winter. Still, just in case they’re only playing dead, I’m leaving the plants standing for a few more weeks.

Chinese chives/garlic chives/Chinese leek (Allium tuberosum) and parsley

I got my Chinese chives from a division of a clump from someone I know. Here’s a link to information on Chinese chives and here is a link to culinary information on them and another.

Pansies and violas

… with dianthus foliage, autumn-blooming crocus foliage, etc.

Hyssop ‘Blue Fortune’ is continuing to grow since being planted earlier this month:

Pansies and violas

The yellow, black, and sometimes maroon viola is ‘Tiger Eyes’ (sometimes ‘Tiger Eye’). Its prettiness caught my eye and I thought it a good match for the darker pansies and violas in this section of the garden, but I did not realize that it’s apparently new and apparently pretty difficult to find until I did a web search just now to try to find a link about it for you all. Sometimes the blooms are just black and yellowy-gold in the front and sometimes they have splotches of maroon as well; it’s really unique. It’s also been a great performer, one of the most consistent bloomers of the ten cultivars of pansy and viola I planted this spring.

In this next shot you can better see the coloration of the two pansies I’ve planted as well as (hopefully) a better view of the other viola in this clump besides ‘Tiger Eyes’ (its name unfortunately currently escapes me), a pretty unusual thing with purple and shimmery copper.

Like the hyssop, the red-leaved euphorbia has been settling in well. It’s budded since being planted and looks like it will bloom soon.

Salpiglossis seedlings in the foreground.

Earth Day and peas 22 April 2008

Happy Earth Day!  In my opinion, one of the best things you can do to help the earth is to grow some of what you use yourself - vegetables, herbs (culinary and/or medicinal), fruit, cut flowers if you like keeping flowers in the house, etc. Last week I read about a site that’s helping people to do just that: Kitchen Gardeners International. I haven’t had much time to explore it yet, but what I have seen does seem pretty cool. It seems like a nice mix of stuff for novices and more advanced gardeners, and their list of gardening blogs is one of the best I’ve yet seen on the web. Another great thing to do is to  use reusable bags instead of plastic or paper ones. I even use them to carry home plants from the nursery.

Appropriately enough, today I discovered that the first peas are finally sprouting! If I didn’t think from past experience the picture wouldn’t turn out very well, I would attempt to take one to post here.  Something like tiny pea sprouts is just too much for my digital camera to typically be able to take a good macro shot of. Instead, here’s a photo of the taller, leggier, larger-potted nemesia (not the cultivar ‘Sundrops’ that I already planted), corydalis ‘Purple Leaf’, and saxifrage ‘Peter Pan’ waiting to be planted:

I checked the forecast this morning and the revised forecast says it is supposed to be 80 F tomorrow! So hopefully I will get to plant the rest of the stuff in pots today.  And hopefully the heat wave won’t keep the peas from continuing to sprout.

Snapdragons, columbines, and fern-leaved bleeding heart 21 April 2008

My route home today took me past the nursery, a dangerous path indeed.  Lured in by thoughts of going home and planting in the beautiful sunny afternoon - so far from the choke of grey clouds that looked like imminent rain this morning - I went in and ended up walking home with a tray of seedlings.  I’d meant to get more larkspur since the six I already planted were doing so well, but I got distracted by the fact that they’d added creeping snapdragons since my last visit and ended up just getting things for the front garden. Unfortunately I did not realize till I got home that my dragging a watering can out on multiple trip yesterday (well, or perhaps just germination times) meant that a lot more sown-in-situ seeds had turned into seedlings since the last time I’d checked the front garden, so it was much harder to plant things out of the way of everything else already growing than I’d expected it to be.

Why creeping snapdragons, you ask? Because of the windy site, I answer. The nursery manager suggested last year that I try creeping ones since she suspected  top-heavy non-creeping snapdragons would be likely to simply snap off in the strong winds that sometimes come to the front garden. Indeed, the creeping ones did well, even though they were tumbling onto the hot concrete wall in summertime. There were a few times when they mostly stopped blooming, but they always recovered, and went on blooming all summer and autumn till killed by an ice storm in November.

Columbine foliage, unfurling yesterday in the back garden

I had, believe it or not, never seen a columbine until I moved in to a home whose garden had, at some point, had one planted and which had subsequently seeded itself around into nooks and crannies (including a plant tucked in between the back staircase and the patio). When I first saw them bloom I thought, ‘What is this beautiful plant?’ Having discovered they were called columbines, and that they came in singles and doubles, short-spurred and no-spurred and long-spurred, various colors and combinations of colors, and one native to this area, I set about planting more. And since that day, I plant them everywhere that I plant things in the ground, I plant them. I don’t know why I was so charmed by them from the first time I laid eyes upon them, but I was, and remain so. Columbines do well in, well, to be honest, most conditions it seems, but they seem to do especially well in sites that get a fair amount of sun but not completely full sun and have average to rich soil. They seem much more tolerant of dry conditions than many partial-shade plants. Sometimes they start to look tattered by mid-summer, at which point you can shear them

Fern-leaved/fringed bleeding heart (native Dicentra eximia), budded yesterday

I love this little shade garden plant, its dainty ferny leaves, its arching sprays of heart-shaped flowers in reddish-pink or white in mid- to late spring. I also love its less-common-in-nurseries cousins, the colorfully named “squirrel corn” and “Dutchman’s breeches”, though I am not currently growing them. All three prefer some shade and consistent soil moisture, though they aren’t nearly as fussy as some shade garden plants.

Nemesia and larkspur 20 April 2008

Much of the front garden, as of yesterday:

If you click to see the larger view, you can get a better idea of the mix of annual flowers/foliage plants, perennial flowers/foliage plants, and herbs that I grow (no veggies in sight yet). Many of the perennials are still quite small right now. I’ve read that yellow is the flower color that most draws the eye and that can be seen from farthest away, and in the larger version of this shot that definitely seems to be true, at least for me; my eyes immediately catch on the yellow pansies and for the violas that are both yellow and purple, to the yellow parts.

Yesterday I planted the comfrey and the seedlings of larkspur and nemesia, all in the back garden. Two of the nemesia plants are larger plants in larger pots, so I prioritized the smaller nemesia. Though I’d been considering keeping the nemesia in pots till after last frost (since they have turned out not to be as frost-hardy as I realized), the seedlings were already rootbound and I had to water them a few times a day just to keep them alive and figured it was worth risking planting them.  They are ‘Sundrops’, the cultivar that has so many of the major gardening writers all aflutter, and their large blooms echo the primrose blooms much more strongly than I would have expected before actually seeing them in the ground, and look lovely planted in the same bed.

The larkspur aren’t blooming yet, but hopefully they will get to it before hot weather kills them, though now that the tree canopy is starting to leaf out (as of the past couple days), it should soon start to be 10-20 degrees F cooler in the back yard than the front one, which will help cool-loving annuals like larkspur survive longer before dying. The larkspur, by the way, is just the standard cultivar, ‘Giant Imperial’.  In my experience, at least in this area, it’s the only one available, even at the farmers’ market. To grow another cultivar, I have to buy seeds and grow it myself.

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Nemesia ‘Sundrops’ (mixed color cultivar)

Primrose ‘Harbinger’

The larkspur seedlings are settling in really really well. They’ve been growing lots in the less than a day since I planted them.

Saxifrage ‘Purple Robe’, waiting to be planted

Corydalis ‘Purple Leaf’, also waiting to be planted

Some photos 19 April 2008

Euphorbia

Other euphorbia

I found a book, Gardening with Colour, at a used books store recently and have been thumbing through it when I have a few spare moments. Thanks to it, I planted this red and purplish-black euphorbia (on right) next to rose campion (silver rosette on left). A California poppy is in the foreground.

Here is one of the sets of pansy/viola:

The base of the stock is in the back. Some of the sweet alyssum is in the foreground. They’re spaced that way because they will grow to meet each other.

Here is one of the other sets of pansy, with the beautiful African daisy:

Lots of other stuff in this one - the hen and chicks, thyme, another California poppy, chives, etc.

Iris leaves (two bearded irises in center, Siberian iris on right next to them) with borage (near top) and hardy mum sprouts (center left).

Mulched planted peas/etc. at top with tags.

Stock with pansies/violas and sweet alyssum

Trees blooming in the area earlier this week

Sundry 19 April 2008

Midmorning Friday

Today is another gorgeous day - sunny with temperatures already in the 50s F and forecast to go higher if the cool sea breeze doesn’t reach these few miles inland. This is the essence of spring to me.

Today I am planning to swing by the nursery again (today the garden section’s manager will be working, and she often has ideas for me; she wasn’t working on my last trip), which will give me a nice walk in the beautiful weather and time spent amongst pretty flowers regardless of whether I buy anything, do fresh cleanup (more leaves have blown into the garden since my last cleanup and there are other odds and ends I need to do) and finish planting. Since I hadn’t grown nemesia in a few years at least (if ever), I did not remember until I’d already bought it that it’s not very frost-hardy. Our average last frost date is the second week of May, so I’ve been going back and forth in my head since getting it about whether to actually plant it or to keep it inside till it’s a bit warmer, like I did last April when W. and I went to the annual herb sale at one of the estates run by the Historical Society and I kept my basil, Cape mallow ‘Elegant Lady’ (that was where I found it, which I thought was a little odd - and that’s why I have no idea where to get a new one this year, since it isn’t hardy and didn’t last the winter), etc. indoors like houseplants till the weather warmed up some more.

Yesterday I went to the hardware store, which always sells seeds and bare roots in spring. I was disappointed to see that they had fewer bare roots than in past years (and the garden store has none this year), concentrating mostly on gladiola and dahlia bulbs. I don’t like modern glads much, preferring the beautiful old ones sold by Old House Gardens, and while I adore dahlias, they did pathetically last year in my back garden, and they generally like rich soil and some moisture so I have made the assumption that they would look even more pathetic in the sunnier front garden. (I may try growing a few dahlias in pots so that I can move them around, though; I have a few tubers saved from last year.) I got a bareroot hosta and a bareroot Siberian iris (’Caesar’s Brother’), two of the few non-bulb/corm/tuber things they were selling this year.

I also got some seeds I hadn’t seen elsewhere, including fenugreek, Sweet Annie (Artemesia annua), and calendula ‘Zeolights’, which is certainly not an old strain of calendula but whose sunset-colored changing-colors orangey-pink blooms (if the illustration on the seed pack is to be believed) should fit well with some of the other annuals I’ve planted. Here is a link to a page on ‘Zeolights’ at the seed company’s website. I grow calendula (I’d already planted seeds of a couple other cultivars) not just because they’re beautiful, not even just because they’re edible and brighten up salads, but also because calendula has great medicinal properties and can be made into salves or simply crushed and rubbed over the skin. Sweet Annie is widely grown by garden-crafters but for me, I just like the look and scent of its lovely foliage, and if I happen to harvest it later on it will just be a nice bonus to me rather than the whole point of growing it. Not surprisingly since it’s an Artemesia, it is not very frost-hardy and while I sowed the calendula and fenugreek yesterday, I’ve reserved its seeds to sow in mid-May. Fenugreek, by contrast, should’ve been planted before now, like the poppies and love-in-a-mist that I belatedly recently sowed.

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Saturday

If I could bottle this string of days, I would do it without hesitation: They are the essence of spring, sunny and dry air and blueblueblue sky - the color of aquamarine in shadow - and temperatures in the 50s to 70 F, daffodils blooming away cheerily. I would save the bottles for midsummer, when the humidity is like a boulder weighing down everything, soot coating the plants and smog choking the air, making it difficult to see a block ahead.

Silly me for thinking I could go to the nursery on a beautiful day without being tempted into buying anything. Yesterday, after consulting with the nursery manager, I ended up getting two euphorbias. two saxifrages, and another plant (whose name I’m currently forgetting) on her recommendation, as well as two seedling packs of sweet alyssum (they’d added it since my last visit), Corydalis ‘Purple Leaf’, borage, and comfrey. Borage and comfrey are both considered herbs by the nursery and thus are cheaper than they would otherwise be. (To better explain what I mean, lavenders are considered perennials instead of herbs at the nursery so they are sold at perennial prices rather than herb prices and placed with the other perennials instead of with the shelves of herbs.)

Last year I grew borage from seed and it did surprisingly well in the crappy conditions of the front garden, and though it definitely did not ever attain the heights it did in my old garden with its richer soil and shelter from the wind, it bloomed nearly nonstop from midsummer till killed by frost, and attracted bees and other pollinators galore. Since it was near my bean plants, that was an especially happy thing. This year I decided to just go ahead and get a plant that was already doing pretty well. It’s got three rosettes; I think mine only had one last year.

Anyway, comfrey is a plant I love so much I can’t even begin to tell you. I grew a large species - not the standard herb - in my old garden in a humus-rich, moist to boggy soil with partial sun and it grew to tremendous heights, some of the leaves two to three feet long and the bloom stalks reaching for the sky. In addition to comfrey being a medicinal herb, it is said to improve the soil around it and its leaves are said to speed up the process of compost-making. Plus, being a member of the borage family (it often started to bloom in my old garden as the strikingly similar blooms of its cousins, Virginia bluebells and lungwort, were fading), it’s a bee favorite. Grow comfrey!

I don’t know why I’ve never grown euphorbia till this year. It’ll be an interesting experiment. Yesterday I planted the two euphorbias - an upright one with leaves in varying shades of blackish-purple and deep red, that according to its tag blooms in late spring and early summer - and one that is far more common, at least here, the floppy one with obviously succulent blue-green leaves that has chartreuse flowers in spring and is, in fact, blooming right now. I also planted the sweet alyssum, the borage, and the little alpine-ish plant whose name I just can’t recall at present, a dainty relative of the cranesbills/hardy geraniums.

I do know why I’ve never grown saxifrage, though.  For some reason they intimidate me.  They are tiny plants with tiny mounding succulent leaves and though that would make you - or at least me - think that they prefer sunny, dry conditions, they seem to be fussier than all that. So I got instructions to plant them on the slope in the back garden, with partial shade, particularly during midday. Apparently they have a tendency to go dormant when it gets too hot and sunny, so partial shade should help with that. We’ll see how they do. For now they are lovely charming mounds of various shades of green, one of them with heaps of ruby red buds sticking up on bloom stalks that are taller than the mound of leaves. If they adjust well (I’m planning to plant them today) within the next few weeks, I might buy a couple more in time for them to bloom (all the ones at the nursery bloom in spring; it’s just exactly when that varies). I try to do the majority of my hard-labor gardening in spring and autumn; it’s better for both the plants and me.

I’ve been writing this post for over a day.  It’s time to post it and perhaps I will write more later.

Annual Haul 16 April 2008

This morning was gorgeous - sunny and already over 50 F by midmorning - and I took advantage of it by taking myself and a cup of coffee to the nursery. In addition to beefing up on their pansies/violas and African daisies/Cape marigolds (Dimorphotheca) they had added salpiglossis, California poppy, stock, nemesia, lobelia, snapdragon, felicia, bachelor’s button, gazania, larkspur, nierembergia, China pinks, dusty miller, love-in-a-mist, and probably a couple more. I love dianthus but the annual China pinks typically don’t smell because their parent annual doesn’t really have a scent, so I generally stick to the biennial Sweet William and the perennial dianthus (which are typically short-lived, sometimes to the point of being annuals, but in my rocky Mediterranean style front garden they do somewhat better). I love plants with fragrances, which is why I like stock so much, and why I tend to wait to buy them till they’re blooming, since the ones commonly available at American nuseries tend to vary tremendously in their scents and the scents’ strength.

I got three individual pots of stock today, though one of them had two colors in it, white and pale purple (both single flowers; stock comes in both single and double, and I already tended to prefer the wildflowery look of the singles and their general stronger scent, but have additionally found that the doubles have a tendency to topple over in the windy front garden). The other two are pale creamy-pink and a double lavender. I also got an African daisy whose blooms fade from a pale orange to a pale yellow-cream and remind me of summer sunsets, as well as felicia, nemesia, California poppy, larkspur, and salpiglossis. I’d not grown felicia, at least as far as I can ever recall, until last year, when I saw its succulent-resembling leaves and pretty sky blue flowers with bright yellow centers at the nursery and snatched it up, assuming it would do as well in the front garden as similar looking plants. Only after I planted it there did I read that it is supposed to do poorly in hot weather to the point where it often is killed by hot summers. It did look straggly at the height of summer and for a time, I thought that perhaps it was indeed going to die, but it recovered in late summer and began blooming even more furiously than before its near-death experience. I was pleased to discover while growing it that its daisylike flowers are as good at attracting small pollinators as I would have supposed if seeing it in someone else’s garden.

I’ve more to say, but no more energy. So I’ll post this and write more another time.

Frost… or not 15 April 2008

It was forecast that we might fall into the 20s (F) overnight last night.  When I was at the nursery yesterday they said they were planning their display around that fact - putting out most of the annuals they’re getting this week today instead of yesterday in case the forecast was right.  But this morning as daylight breaks it is 34 F, not below freezing.  Spring is delightfully unpredictable.