3-H Weather Returns; More Photos 11 July 2008

Started on 8 July

3-H (Hazy Hot Humid) weather has returned.  Temperatures are in the low 90s F today in my area of metro Boston with heat indices around 100 F.  Walking outside from A/C is like slamming into a brick wall.  I’ve watered the smallest pots three times and still they droop, just like yesterday.  It’s been a week and a half since I did more in the garden than water or deadhead or fuss.  I miss working in it.  I’m so tired of hot and humid weather.

[More photos from mid-June follow; however, I think I'm close to fixing camera/computer problem]

Another salpiglossis (AKA “painted tongue”)

I know most people in the US don’t grow these and I still don’t get why.  They’re such a pretty summer bloomer in a climate like mine, they come in interesting colors and patterns, and the petals feel like velvet turned into a flower.  They are rather a pain to grow from seed, but it seems like not too many American gardeners start anything from seed any more anyway.  Many of the people I know here even buy their nasturtiums pre-started, even though they’re just about the easiest plant in the world to grow from seed.

Sundial lupine

This was its third bloom (it’s fading in the heat).  There are lots of raindrops on the leaves in this shot.  Lupine leaves hold rain so well!

Buds on sunflower

This is the gift-plant sunflower that adjusted fastest to transplant out of all the gift-plant sunflowers (it was pictured in my entry “Sunflowers, Reborn”).  It turns out to be the cultivar ‘Vanilla Ice’ (which is, to me, a rather unfortunate name, but I’m guessing whoever named it didn’t have the musical associations I do).  According to what I’ve read, this is in a separate species called cucumber-leafed sunflowers (Helianthus debilis), which explains why its leaves don’t look like those of the common annual sunflower (Helianthus annuus).  The rest of my annual sunflower cultivars are in the latter species.

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Continued on 11 July

The hot weather broke yesterday.  Wednesday (the 9th) was the farmers’ market but the plant sales are winding down since the flower farm is no longer in business (they used to sell perennials into autumn) so it’s the first week this year wherein I did not buy a single plant.  Last week I bought another six-pack of the marigold ‘Honeycomb’ since the first six-pack has done so well, and I got a morning glory with beautiful marbled leaves that look more like ivy leaves than typical morning glory leaves.  I had forgotten its name but I just looked it up online and it is ‘Mini-Bar Rose’.  It is a Japanese morning glory, Ipomoea nil.  (Ipomoea sure is a huge genus, isn’t it?)

I think I’d best post this now since it’s taken me so long to write any more in it.  I’m hoping to make another post later today with what I did in the garden today, the first time in a couple weeks that I really got to get down and dirty in it for a good while.

Herbs and veggies 4 July 2008

Cuban oregano (large plant on left) with culantro (below) and Aztec sweet herb (winding around on top/right)

In this shot are three herbs I’ve never grown before.  I’ve talked about Aztec sweet herb in another entry.  Cuban oregano (also known as Spanish thyme) is a very popular Latin American plant, so much so that according to Ethnic Culinary Herbs you can’t find plants of it for sale at markets in rural Latin America because every single garden already has one.  This shot is from a couple weeks ago.  It has been happy as a clam beside one of the largest rocks in the rock border, the heat radiating back to it.  Culantro, also known as recao, spiny coriander, and Mexican coriander, amongst other things, has been harder to situate here.  I first planted it at the front of the border beside the retaining wall, thinking the heat would please it, but instead it merely tried to bolt a second time (it was already trying to bolt when I bought it; I cut off the bud stalks, as recommended).  In retrospect, I think it may have been in too little sun for its liking in that spot.  I moved it up beside the Cuban oregano and it’s been happier, putting out new leaves instead of trying to bloom a third time. A nice article on culantro/recao is over here.  I have two other Eryngium species in the front garden, sea holly and rattlesnake master.  The genus members tend to be great for hot, windy sites.  (At the very top, in the center, you can also see a little bit of the sweet marjoram.  Like the Aztec sweet herb, it’s been winding its way around other plants.  I have them closer to the beans because they like more compost than the others.  Near the bottom, on the right, you can see one branch of the French tarragon.)

• Cuban Oregano - Plectranthus amboinicus
• Culantro - Eryngium foetidum
• Aztec sweet herb - Lippia dulcis
• Sweet marjoram - Origanum majorana
• French tarragon - Artemisia dracunculus var. sativa

Winter savory (Satureja montana)

Hollyhock leaf on the left.

Peas forming

Baby’s breath bloom

Retaining wall in the foreground.

Bean climbing a pole

Pea plants and fava/broad bean plants behind it.

Silver thyme, blooming, in front of Small’s penstemon and variegated catmint:

Creepers galore:  Creeping snapdragon and creeping thyme

This is the creeping spandragon that survived the winter!  The creeping thyme (AKA ‘mother of thyme’) is wandering around everywhere.  There are seeded annuals growing up out of the snapdragon - stalks of a poppy and some sweet alyssums. That’s a viola bloom on the far right.

Sedum, budded

This is an unknown sedum I bought (untagged) from a stall at the farmers’ market last year.  Oddly, it is the only sedum that survived the wintertime trampling of the garden by workmen, even though numerous other perennials survived.

Agastache ‘Apricot Sprite’

With lamb’s ears ‘Silver Carpet’ (fuzzy silvery leaves) and a cranesbill/hardy geranium I got at this year’s estate sale (pink blooms in background) and foliage of California poppies (at the edges on the left, right, and bottom).  Some sources say ‘Apricot Sprite’ is hardy in our average winters (USDA hardiness zone 6B) and others say it’s not, so we’ll see!

[Photos are from mid-June; camera/computer issue still not resolved]

Lately 1 July 2008

Sundrops bloom

I know this plant as Sundrops (mine is the species Oenothera fruticosa, native to the Eastern and Midwestern US), but when I was on a local garden tour last weekend I saw a very similar one and asked, “Is that Sundrops?” and got the response, “It’s Evening Primrose.”  (Just goes to show, once again, why common names aren’t the best to go by.)  I then saw the same plant at a few other gardens.  I noted one difference between the one in those gardens and my own is that the bud sheaths on mine have two little horns sticking up (you may be able to see them in the above picture) whereas the others did not have them.  When I got home I poked around online trying to figure out what plant everyone else had.  It is unlikely to be the wild species of the wildflower known as Evening Primrose, Oenothera biennis, as it is a biennial and as far as I know opens its flowers in the evening, which is how it got its common name.  I’ve seen cultivars around, but most of those seem to be mounding yellow-flowered or pale-pink-flowered ones.  So who knows, maybe it is some short-lived-perennial version of O. biennis.

The garden tour was very interesting - there were lots of very divurgent gardens on it - and it also helped to show me again that my own personal style is very different from that of most of the other people who are actively gardening in the area.  Most of the other gardens focused on perennial flowering plants (some of them having mostly perennials with a small bed of annual veggies/herbs) and generally planted the perennials in large clumps, which is something I’ve often seen recommended in articles and books on landscape design.  I think the look of large clumps is a nice one, and I appreciate the beauty of it in other gardens, but personally I don’t like to do that in my own garden.  I feel like monoculture in perennial flowers is similar to monoculture in agriculture - something that invites trouble and discourages diversity. On a more practical level, I also like so many plants that if I planted in the “large block of the same plant” style that many others here do, I would only be able to grow a tiny fraction of the plants I actually want to grow.

Wednesday was the farmers’ market, as always.  This time I got three more sunflowers (the three I already got there are doing so great!) as well as one more cardinal climber and one more six-pack each of the zinnia ‘Oklahoma Mix’ and the lisianthus.  Despite a reputation as being fussbuckets, so far the lisianthus I’d already planted are doing just fine, so I thought I’d get more.  Some of these new ones already had buds!  The new sunflowers didn’t come with tags, but I remembered that one of them was ‘Ring of Fire’ and one was ‘Sungold’ (that’s how it was identified on the sign, but it seems to most commonly be called ‘Giant Sungold’ and also sometimes ‘Giant Double Sungold’).  I did not realize until looking them up that ‘Ring of Fire’ is pollenless.  In the past I have tried not to plant pollenless sunflowers (popular in the cut-flower trade) because I grow sunflowers mostly for the wildlife and pollenless sunflowers are much less useful in that regard.  However, since this year the cut-flower farm quit the business, ‘Ring of Fire’ can be another cut-flower supply for me.  (The ones I’d already planted from the market were ‘Velvet Queen’, dwarf ‘Big Smile’, and an unknown third one.  I also seeded some in, it looks like some self-sowed, and I got some from a gardening acquaintance; the last look to me like they might be ‘Vanilla Ice’, though she did not recall the cultivar herself.  One of the ones from my acquaintance is blooming, and all three of the ones I previously bought at market have large buds.)

On Wednesday I did a lot of planting and moving things around.  As things grown and change (and the autumn-blooming crocuses go dormant for the summer) that’s always necessary in this bed.  This time I moved more gazanias, the rosemary ‘Arp’, the purple sage, and at least another thing or two I’m forgetting.  In the morning I also planted another lavender, ‘Jean Davis’, as well as the curly chives and the grey-leafed lavender cotton (at last), which I finally decided to plant with the lavenders at the recommendation of some herb book - complementary foliage/shape with a similar bloom time and pleasingly different bloom styles/colors, and liking similar conditions to boot.  After market I planted the zinnias and lisianthus and one of the sunflowers and a friend helped me by planting the other two sunflowers, the new cardinal climber, and the cardinal climber I’d bought the week before but hadn’t planted.  (I’d already planted one cardinal climber.)  I’m growing two of the cardinal climbers up sunflower stalks and the third, which had three sprouts coming from the one little peat pot, up poles beside one of the plantings of pole beans.

The clarkia have come into full bloom this week and are looking so great whenever we have dry weather (all these storms we’ve been having tend to flatten them).  In a past garden I grew them in a moist, humus-rich part of the garden that got sun early and late in the day.  This time I seeded them around the front garden to see what conditions they’d like best, though I concentrated the most on an area that was also partial sun (it gets morning sun and then sun again from mid- to late afternoon).  Literally every seed seems to have sprouted.  They are growing in a thicket in the partial-sun spot, and growing scattered around the rest of the front garden, peeking up from the base of the sedum, poking out of the thymes, wobbling beside the main vegetable patch.  Everywhere you look, there’s a clarkia bloom.  And they are much shorter in the drier, windier, sloped garden than they were in my old low-wind, high-humus, no-slope-at-all garden, though they are still very floriferous, the flowers just crowded more tightly together on their shorter stems.  The main strain I seeded this time was the “Mountain Garland” strain from Renee’s Garden Seeds, which blooms in colors such as  peach/melon, pink/rose, lavender, and white.  I’ve yet to see any white ones this year, but I’ve got heaps in peach, melon, pink, red, and rose and a smaller amount in shades of purple.

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Two days later

A white clarkia finally bloomed - a lone one amongst all the pinks and reds and purples.  Some of the annual poppies have been blooming this week too, which is really amazing given I didn’t seed them in winter like you’re supposed to, but rather in midspring.  They’re much shorter than they were in past gardens, but that could even just be the site.  The sweet alyssum I seeded in is going crazy too, blooming in tall tufts (much taller than the seedlings I planted in spring), and more annual baby’s breath has been blooming. The nasturtiums (which I mentioned sowing in a recent entry) seem to have had a pretty good germination rate and many of them are at least a few inches tall now. One of the China pinks (annual dianthus) that I seeded in very late was blooming a few days ago, the tiniest one I’ve ever seen, a regular-sized bloom on a plant that was only a couple of inches tall.  Some of the beans are already blooming!  It’s a crazy world we live in.

I’ve been very bad at finishing and posting entries lately, so I suppose I will just go ahead and post this as-is, or who knows when anyone else would see it.  Yet another hot, hazy, humid day today (warmer and more humid than most of the Southeast’s weather today), no fun at all for gardening in.

Some recent photos 24 June 2008

I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to post any of the promised photos.  My computer and my camera have been having abrupt issues communicating and I’ve only been able to upload some of the photos so far.  Here are a random selection of a few of the uploaded ones.

Rudbeckia ‘Toto’ and dill (the latter grown from seed)

On the right is one of a copious number of lavender buds.  I wish I could share some big impressive trick about the dill, but really all I’ve ever done with dill is just take a handful of seeds and broadcast them in a general area, and then repeat it a couple times if I want to seed it in various places.  This rudbeckia was one I got at the farmers’ market this year.  It has done the best out of the six ‘Toto’s; some of them seem to have totally died.  Let this be a stark reminder to you that if you purchase rudbeckia after it’s already warm out, plant it promptly and keep it well-watered while it’s settling in.  Rudbeckias, especially the cultivars that tend to be grown as annuals, don’t react well to stress, and in particular, have a habit of reacting to hot, dry weather by developing mildew on their leaves.  Not only is it not pretty, but if the plants are still small, just a day or three is enough time for it to spread enough to kill them.  (And I even watered them more often than other plants, moreso after they developed mildew; apparently it still wasn’t enough.)  At least my ‘Toto’ tragedy has led me to be more vigilant of the ‘Indian Summer’ rudbeckias (also purchased at the market) and they’ve all survived so far.

Dianthus ‘Inchmery’ blooms with pansy blooms

California poppy foliage on the left; agastache ‘Acapulco Orange’ foliage on the right.

Lima beans and garden beans with lemon verbena

The limas (a bush variety, I think ‘Henderson’s Bush’ but I can’t remember for sure right now) are on the bottom of the photo, the leaves with the rounded dip in them.  The garden beans (vining kinds; I’ve always primarily grown garden bean varieties that are either pole beans or vine well enough to grow on poles) are the leaves that look somewhat similar but are less rounded in appearance, to the left and above the limas in this photo.  The lemon verbena is flopping around in this shot.  This year’s lemon verbena has had a lot of trouble staying horizontal.  I’ve tried putting a stake in the middle of it and it still seems to flop over even with the stake there.  I suspect it’s because last year I bought one that was leggier and that seems to have actually made it adapt better to a windy site than the one I got this year, which was shrubbier (more like lemon verbena’s natural form).  On the far right are some leaves and a bloom stalk of the sea holly, which develops new buds every single day but still hasn’t opened any of them.

One of my many beloved salpiglossis plants (center), backed by pansies, violas, a ‘Tangerine Gem’ marigold, and a California poppy:

The salpiglossis (AKA painted tongue) pictured here was the first to bloom; these were its first blooms.

Pansies and creeping snapdragons:

The coloration of pansies and violas is so fascinating to me.  The blue and yellow one varies in how much yellow it has depending on some factor I have yet to determine (amount of sunlight? temperature when the bloom is forming? I don’t know).

Chive blooms starting to fade:

In the background are a ‘Profusion Fire’ zinnia bloom (orange on left), two buds of a pinkish California poppy (right), and a bloom of ‘White Lily’ verbena (upper left).  ‘White Lily’ turns out to be fairly susceptible to some kind of mildew; one of my two plants has a pretty bad infection and the other has a mild one, and they developed it so fast that the bad infection sprang up literally inbetween times I checked on the plant.

A few photos 11 June 2008

Here are some photos from Monday (the 9th), partway through the heat wave -

Part of the front border:

The yellow trumpet in the center of the shot is the first salpiglossis (aka painted tongue) to bloom this year.  A second one is opening in this shot (on a different plant).  Last year the salpiglossis seedlings I bought were heavy on the red trumpets with yellow markings.  This year so far (as of today too) all the ones to bloom have been yellow.  In this shot there are also blooms of pansies, violas, sweet alyssum, stock, blue-on-blue felicia/kingfisher daisy (Felicia heterophylla), marigolds (both French [large red/orange blooms] and signet [smaller orange blooms on ferny foliage]), Marguerite daisies, and California poppies.

Here’s the same area from a slightly different angle:

The tall deep green stalk rising behind the salpiglossis bloom is one of the parsleys.  It started to bolt several days ago (before the heat wave even started) but has yet to actually bloom.  The other one, planted in a different, less windy area of the garden, is still producing leaves.  My initial conclusion from my parsley experiment is that windy weather tends to make parsley bolt faster.

California poppy and dianthus blooms:

I believe the dianthus/pink that’s currently blooming is ‘Inchmery’ (I planted it last year, but it didn’t bloom, like so many other things in their first year in the windy, hot front garden).  I planted two of them last year and they are prolifically blooming right now.  ‘Inchmery’ is an antique pink, but like with so many antique pinks, the breeding stock has been diluted to the point where it’s honestly difficult to tell for sure if what you’re being sold and/or are growing in your garden is actually the original stock from the olden days of gardening or is a plant of a similar description.  I don’t believe it’s usually intentional on the part of sellers; I think it’s honestly just really hard to be sure, since there were no photos then, not very many color drawings have survived, and written descriptions from the time period oftentimes fit most or all of the plants now being sold as the cultivar.  Regardless, whether it’s ‘Inchmery’ or not, it’s a beautiful pink, very floriferous, whitish-pink, and carrying a lovely fragrance.  I got my stock of it from Select Seeds.

The Small’s penstemon (Penstemon smallii) is blooming in the middle of the left of the shot (a pale purplish color on the outside of the tubular blooms).  There’s an orange gazania just below it, and pansies and violas below that.  On the lower right are a felicia and a signet marigold.  Behind the poppy and the dianthus blooms are a blooming lavender (Lavandula angustifolia cultivar ‘Lady’, one of the ones I got at the first farmers’ market), a euphorbia (chartreuse bracts), and salvia (Salvia coccinea) ‘Brenthurst’ (coral blooms partially visible behind the euphorbia).

Another shot of the front border:

I thought this one might give a good sense of how tall the sundial lupine’s blooms are, as well as iris ‘Mme. Chereau’.  (’Mme. Chereau’ and fellow iris ‘Quaker Lady’ [the latter not pictured here] have faded fast in the heat wave; most blooms lasted less than a day, and there are no current open blooms.)  You can also see the full plant of the bolting parsley in this shot.  The tall silver plant is the rose campion, still budded.

Plants still waiting to be planted in the front garden:

Amongst them are two six-packs from last week’s farmers’ market (the rudbeckia ‘Toto Mix’ and the lisianthus), the baptisia/false indigo from last week’s market, sweet marjoram, winter savory, sage, a Salvia greggii that blooms in a creamy yellowish color, curly chives/German garlic/ornamental onion (Allium spirale AKA Allium senescens), lavender cotton, French tarragon, and a second rosemary, ‘Tuscan Blue’, which is a richer green color of leaf and more upright-growing than the one I already planted, ‘Arp’, and than many other rosemaries.  It’s been ages since I grew curly chives, and I was psyched to see that the nursery had added it to their herb section.  What can I say, I just love growing alliums of all kinds.

The heat wave finally broke today.  It was our longest heat wave since 2002, when it was very hot and very humid for eight days straight.  It is still fairly hot, and mostly sunny, but it is no longer humid; now the air temperature accurately reflects what the air feels like, instead of having to factor in high humidity to create a heat index. I took many more photos this morning and hope to make a post with some of them later.

Some photos 8 June 2008

It had been so long since I felt this 3-H weather (hazy hot humid) that I had forgotten how the air can feel like a weight - like it’s pressing down on you, causing you to carry yourself lower to the ground than you do in ordinary air. The haze is so thick that sometimes it’s hard to tell whether a thunderstorm is coming or if it’s just the day’s air.  As of this writing, the heat index is 101 F.

Here are some pictures.

Fava blooming yesterday

(Blooms seen from behind in this shot)  That is an ant on it. For some reason the ants have been fascinated with the favas since they were wee things.  They trek up and down them, to no apparent purpose.  I have no idea why.

One way to work with a small gardening space is to make everything closer together than recommended.  Here’s an example.  Beans are sprouting amongst the base of pea plants while Aztec sweet herb winds around them and some of the hollyhocks.

Aztec sweet herb (Lippia dulcis) is something I’ve never grown before, or indeed even knew existed until I saw the nursery selling it this year in their effort to offer a wider variety of herbs and specialty annuals than they have in the past.  The herbs have a very pleasant sweet scent when rubbed, and I find the viney plant attractive.  At the nursery small pollinators and predators were attracted to the small button-like flowers, which I wasn’t surprised about, but so far in the garden they seem to be going for more familiar food sources.  Though its leaves are, from what I’ve read, edible, it is apparently not much used as a sweetener any more.  I just thought it was a pretty plant, and thought it would look nice twining around the bases of the crop plants. According to what I’ve read so far, it was used medicinally starting in the time of the Aztecs if not before to treat various respiratory issues, but I haven’t found any information on current uses, much less how to prepare it (tea? tincture? fresh? dried? etc.). Perhaps its medicinal uses have gone by the wayside like its use as a sweetener, or perhaps relevant information isn’t written in English.

Yesterday while I was taking photos, there was an American Bumblebee that was obsessed with the sundial lupine blooms.

And another shot, this time of the other open bloom:

As I mentioned in a post on Wednesday, I got three sunflowers at the farmers’ market this week. I planted them on Friday (the 6th) so that they wouldn’t have to try to survive the then-incoming heat wave in their little peat pots.  Here is one of them, in focus in the foreground of the below shot:

Also in the shot (clockwise from the bottom left) are a bellflower (new this year), the Carolina lupine/false lupine, scallions, one of the tender salvias, sea holly, two small things in the same area (a tall verbena just starting to earn its name, and the edge of a young bean plant [I think it's a runner bean]), and the ‘Butterfly Blue’ delphinium that I got from the flower farm at the first farmers’ market.  The farmers sure were right about it loving heat and full sun!  I’m so surprised after thinking of delphiniums as such delicate little things that need lots of coddling and still often don’t even survive a year here.

The chive blooms finally opened!

California poppy bloom

The echinaceas are budding up.  Here’s one (I think it’s the one that I got last year that was just labelled as “white coneflower” - not sure if it’s a white cultivar of Echinacea purpurea or something else) with the unusual, delicate bloom of the American alumroot (Heuchera americana) that I planted this spring.

In the foreground are foliage of a California poppy, buds of an agastache (lit by the sun), and a little hardy geranium I got at this year’s historical society estate sale.

Farmers’ market salad from earlier this week -

Three kinds of lettuce, spinach, radishes, baby garlic (used like scallions), red onion.  The only things not from the market were the red onion slices and the salad dressing I added after taking this picture. I love eating food fresh from the market and/or the garden.  I can often literally taste the difference!

More photos coming.

Farm’s last day 4 June 2008

Bearded iris ‘Quaker Lady’ (taken yesterday)

Today was the organic flower farm’s last day at the farmers’ market. I will miss them. I’ve been buying plants from them for the last seven years. As my last hurrah I bought the astilbe I thought of getting last week but didn’t (guess nobody else did either!) and a false indigo (Baptisia).

That herb farm I mentioned last week (the one new farm so far this year) had no plants at all this time, just products made from their herbs. I don’t know if last week was their only week for plants, or if they didn’t bring any this week because it was raining and cool today after three days of hot, sunny weather, the current temperature lower than some of our low temps have been of late. At the same organic veggie farm I bought plants at last week, I got six-packs of mixed ‘Toto’ rudbeckia, signet marigold ‘Tangerine Gem’, and a flower I’ve never grown before, lisianthus (the common name, such as it is, is from its former genus name; it’s now known as Eustoma grandiflorum), as well as single peat pots of three sunflowers, including two I grew last year, ‘Autumn Beauty’ and the dwarf ‘Big Smile’. I wasn’t the only person interested to see lisianthus being offered, as it was the best-selling plant so far at that stand when I stopped by. Apparently in Texas it is one of the many wildflowers with the common name “Texas bluebells”. (My native lupine, Lupinus perennis, is supposed to be one of several other wildflowers with that sobriquet.) I’m hoping to plant all of these tomorrow, but we’ll see how the weather is. It’s been a wild ride here lately. So far (as in: as far as my readings tonight show) opinions on how to grow lisianthus seem extremely varied, so I’ll try to do some more reading up before I pick a spot to plant them.

Sunflowers, reborn 4 June 2008

On Sunday (the 1st) I was given some sunflower plants by a gardening acquaintance. Her sunflowers self-seeded and she needed to thin them. She said that four of them were a white-flowering one and the fifth was the  cultivar “Mammoth”. There are two common cultivars with “Mammoth” in the title, “Mammoth Russian” and “Mammoth Grey Stripe”; I will just have to wait and see which one it is.  I already knew they’d have to be dealt with that morning, but when I got the bag home I realized most of them were barerooted - no wonder they’d started drooping! She’d suggested potting them up and keeping them in the shade for a little while, but I wasn’t sure if that was the best plan, since they were used to being in the sun in her garden, and since sunflowers love sun so much that it’s even in their common name.  I planted them and they drooped further, till they were resting their tops on the ground or a nearby plant. They did not appear to actually be dead, but I was really concerned that they wouldn’t make it.  Transplanting sunflowers is already a tricky proposition; I’ve even had mixed success trying it with organically grown farmers’ market ones who were sold in peat pots to lessen the shock of transplant. So two or three times a day, I hand-watered them with a watering can with a sprinkle nozzle attachment and generally checked on their well-being.  I was amazed to notice after a day or two that they had started to grow new leaves.  By yesterday, they had partially uprighted themselves, and the new leaves were getting bigger and more robust. Here are a couple shots of one of the plants:

By last evening, they had further uprighted themselves, and the stems seemed to be gaining strength by the hour.  It really looks like they might make it!

More photos 31 May 2008

Sundial lupine (Lupinus perennis) as of yeseterday

And as of today:

The second bloom opening today:

The first bearded iris opened its first bloom finally overnight. Check out the height of ‘Mme. Chereau’!

Hailing from 1844, ‘Mme. Chereau’ is one of the oldest bearded iris cultivars still regularly grown. Here it is as seen from the other side:

From what I’ve read, Iris swerti AKA Swerti - a natural hybrid discovered in the wild and introduced to gardens around 1672 - is very similar to ‘Mme. Chereau’ and often confused with it in today’s gardens. Apparently the easiest way to tell them apart is that the blooms of ‘Mme. Chereau’ uncurl as the bloom further opens whereas Swerti’s remain partially curled.

The Small’s penstemon (Penstemon smallii) that has been doing the best (out of two planted this spring) is opening its first bloom:

It’s unfortunately difficult to tell in this picture, but the silver thyme planted below it is opening its tiny blooms right now as well. They’re a pinkish color, a lovely counterpoint to the purpley blooms of the penstemon.

The Carolina lupine/false lupine’s (Thermopsis villosa) first bloom is finally spent:

I can’t tell yet if it’s going to put out any more blooms.

I can’t remember if I mentioned here that I got a second erodium (storksbill/heronsbill) to go with the first one since it was doing so well. This one is doing just as well! I’m so pleased with them. This one was labelled as the cultivar ‘Charm’, the pale pinkish blooms with richer pink veins that’s the focus of this shot from today:

With it is in this shot is the first erodium I planted (white with pinkish stripes), the perennial sweet alyssum (yellow blooms), a bloom of the creeping Mt. Atlas daisy (white with yellow center; ferny foliage; a second bloom is in the background by the thyme), foliage of autumn-blooming crocuses (arching over the lot of them), and the lemon thyme I got at this week’s farmers’ market. ‘Charm’ seems to be the most widely available erodium in the States so far.

Yesterday the first California poppy bloom finally opened. Here it is pictured today with the blue-on-blue felicia and a still-opening chive bloom:

A bumblebee yesterday on one of the felicias:

(Click photo for larger view) The accidentally-planted blue-on-blue felicia seedlings (Felicia heterophylla) have turned out to be wildly popular with the bees and smaller wasps that visit the front garden. The bee in this shot wandered from felicia to felicia the majority of the time I was taking photos yesterday.

The same bee also stopped briefly at the sweet alyssum:

Agastache blooming:

I thought this one was called ‘Acapulco’. It was only when I tried to look it up that I realized Acapulco is a series, not a specific cultivar. Regardless, this agastache goes better with the lantana planted next to it (not blooming at the moment) than with the pansies and violas planted at its feet (they were there first, in their defense). I didn’t think it would be blooming so heavily so fast; I figured the violas would be dying by the time it really got going. So for now I’m trying to have patience with a color scheme I wouldn’t have chosen, till the weather changes it.

The amsonia has opened its first blooms as well:

That is the anise hyssop in front of it there.

This week in the garden 29 May 2008

The local farmers’ market started yesterday. I always get at least two lavenders there - ‘Lady’ and ‘French Fringed’, which are consistently sold by one of the longest-running organic farms there and not usually hardy here - as well as cooking thyme if it hasn’t survived the winter and some six-packs of annuals. So this week I got both lavenders and the cooking thyme, as well as lemon thyme, an especially pretty geranium (this one has petals with bright pink outer petals and white inner petals, as well as unusual leaves that are much darker in the rest of the leaf than the very outer edges) and six-packs of marigold ‘Safari Red’, marigold ‘Honeycomb’, and generic mixed gazanias, all from one farm I’ve been buying plants from for many years.

I also found out that the farm that’s been selling the best, most robust perennials I’ve ever had the pleasure to grow is leaving the business after sixteen years, and next week will be their final time at our farmers’ market, so I got two perennials from them (at least half their week’s plants had been sold in the first half-hour of the market by fellow panic buyers, so by the time I stopped there, their stock was already limited), monkshood ‘Sparks’ AKA ‘Spark’s Variety’ and delphinium ‘Butterfly Blue’. The farmers told me that unlike other delphiniums, this one prefers full sun and likes hot conditions, so that’s where I planted it when I got home yesterday, and so far it’s doing great even though I haven’t even taken the time to hand-water it and it’s almost eighty F and brilliantly sunny today. According to the farmers, monkshood ‘Sparks’ can easily attain heights of six to eight feet (two-plus meters) and is completely unfazed by strong winds. Today I poked about a bit online and so far, nothing comes even close to that estimate. However, I think it’s the monkshood grown by a local gardening friend and hers easily reaches five feet, often more. I don’t know if New England is a better place to grow it than the climates of what I’ve been reading or what else. I’ll be curious to see what height it gets to in the garden here.

There’s a new farm at the market this year that specializes in herbs, and yesterday they had a stand full of herb plants, but they didn’t have any signs identifying themselves as organic and the staff wasn’t the friendliest yesterday so I didn’t ask them about it, and am not sure yet whether they use pesticides/etc. or whether they are like some of the other farms and just aren’t certified as organic despite using all-organic practices (which means that they’re not allowed to use the term, now that the US government has a certification process for it). There are a few other farms at the market that are the latter, so I know it’s a possibility. Hopefully I’ll get to ask them next week. They had some gorgeous geraniums, but I forced myself to stop at buying the one from the other farm. My geranium fanaticism is getting to be a bit much.

On Tuesday (the 27th) we had severe storms, thunder rattling the buildings with rain coming so fast and thick that the gutters couldn’t hold it all and it rolled off the roof in waves, pouring past my windows as I stood at one watching newly fallen rain blow off other roofs before it even had a chance to roll off. This rain has apparently been most excellent for the garden, as so much more has been happening in it since.

For example, some of the California poppies have finally abruptly budded; here’s one:

The sundial lupine has continued its blooming progression:

A third bud has formed since the rain, too.

The blue-on-blue felicias have gone crazy, tons of their buds opening now.

The salpiglossis have budded:

Shown here with stock (peach bloom in center), euphorbia (upper left), and quicksilver (silvery fuzzy leaves on right).

Some of the new stuff –

Marigold ‘Honeycomb’

It is one of my favorite marigolds.

Marigold ‘Safari Red’

Lemon thyme

Gazania (orange) with pansies and a snapdragon

Most of the gazanias at the farm stand were already blooming. I picked a pack in oranges and yellows to balance out the (still not blooming) ‘Talent Mix’ gazanias I bought at the nursery. In my experience ‘Talent Mix’ tends to bloom primarily in mauve and pale yellow.

Another gazania (two blooms)

The two bronzy-leaved plants and the variegated one are all lantanas. The two are ‘Lavender Trailing’ and the third is a new-to-me (not sure if it’s new-in-general) one, ‘Samantha’. I’ve grown ‘Lavender Trailing’ several times before and it’s the one lantana I try to grow every year. ‘Samantha’ is budded (has been since I planted it) but has not yet bloomed. It’s supposed to bloom in a lemony yellow.

Another gazania

I don’t know if you can see the tiny pollinator on one of the perennial sweet alyssum blooms down below the gazania in this shot. This is the first year I’ve grown perennial sweet alyssum and I’ve been amazed at just how big a hit it is with small pollinators (many of whom also go on to either kill pests or lay eggs that turn into hatchlings that kill pests).

One more gazania

Dianthus ‘Double North’ with lavender foliage and iris foliage

This one’s new at the nursery this year. I got it there recently and planted it yesterday. It’s got a nice fragrance.

The front garden, half in sun and half in shadow: