Winter comes to the garden / Indoor plant update / The yearly inundation has begun 18 December 2008

[I wrote the majority of this on the 6th, but forgot to post it.  My apologies!]

Winter comes to the garden

We’re supposed to get our first real snowfall overnight and tomorrow.  This morning at dawn it was 21 F in the garden, the coldest morning yet, with frost covering the highest percentage of surfaces yet – not just the leaves fallen, crumpled and dead, into the garden, but also the roof next door, and cars at the curb, and much more.  I’m impressed with how much is still trying to grow.  Just in the front garden, which is frequently buffeted by strong winds and is right by a wide street:

• Many of the autumn-blooming crocuses (some of which are still blooming [!], and others of which have already put out their leaves
• Cover crops!!  (More below.)
• The yellow single hardy mum
• The hardy lavenders
• The silver thyme (very marginal here)
• The lisianthuses (annual here)
• The perennial scabiosa ‘Butterfly Blue’
• The horehounds
• The two euphorbias, both the succulent and non-succulent one
• The bellflower
• More I’m sure I’m forgetting

Today I did more preparation for winter in the garden, pulling up the large number of stakes, scattering the fallen leaves more evenly around the cover crop area*, moving the potted (and now almost or completely dead, depending on the mum) mums away from the front stairs, and disconnecting and moving the hose.  The hose had little bits of ice at the spigot that fell to the asphalt (welcome to the city) like little clear jewels as I struggled to disconnect it, and after I disconnected it, it dripped a little and stopped.  As to the stakes, it was interesting to me that some of the vines collapsed when I pulled them up and others stayed at least somewhat up in the air, self-supporting thick tangles of vine.  I imagine a stiff wind or a heavy snow will knock them to the ground soon enough, though.

*I was so pleased recently to discover a vivid green plant growing in the crop area and, upon bending down to peer at it, realizing it was a sprouted and decently grown cover crop!  Upon moving the fallen leaves around, I discovered numerous other sprouts at various stages of growth.  It had been a comparably warm couple of days, so I guess the soil warmed up enough for them to sprout and start to grow.   I’m quite relieved that my late cover crop sowing was not in vain after all.

Indoor plant update

The indoor plants are doing quite variably.  I’ve been happy to discover that the gotu kola seems surprisingly easy to take care of, despite the fact that I have yet to find a single piece of information on overwintering it inside in cold-winter climates.  It’s the easiest plant to water because it tells me when it needs it as surely as if it could talk.  If it needs water, it collapses as surely as a punctured balloon, and when it’s had enough water, it springs right back up as if the balloon had been reinflated.  Usually I give it enough water, but once so far I haven’t (even though it was as much as I usually give it, I guess it was drier than usual), and upon seeing it still deflated, I gave it a second dosing and, happy, it sprang back to perky life.

Meanwhile, the pineapple sage has a new issue – it’s become infested with aphids.  I didn’t even know it could become infested with them, as they were never an issue outside. I am suspicious that they came in with the tweedia, which is a milkwood family member, as milkweeds are famous for their propensity for aphid infestations (and the tweedia is infested too). I don’t really know what to do besides hope that the tiny spider who runs around the main plant table and the wall beside it kills them, because I don’t like to kill anything, not even aphids, and it’s my biggest issue with overwintering plants:  In summertime, even if there’s an infested houseplant my solution is simply to take it outside till nature sorts out the problem, and so in wintertime, without nature’s help I am stymied.

The lemongrass is doing excellently, even sending up new stalks, but the rosemaries are doing horribly, making me wonder once again why I ever bother trying to overwinter them.  I can’t remember ever successfully overwintering one indoors.  One very mild winter one survived outside, but that’s been my only success with rosemary.  I don’t know if it’s because I always live in homes with forced air (winters in climates like mine tend to be bad to rosemaries) or if I just don’t have the knack for overwintering them.

The many (many, many) scented and zonal geraniums are up and down at whims, as so often seems to be the way with me and geraniums:  They put out new leaves in patterns that are, to me, mysterious, and drop their old ones, or an entire stalk, and then put out new leaves yet again.  The fuschias and tender sweet violet (sharing a pot) seem to be doing well as long as I remember to check the pot regularly for dry soil, and the lantanans and sweet Aztec herb (the latter of which I also haven’t found a peep about overwintering indoors), which also share a pot, have recovered from near death just after I took them inside and are robustly healthy now, sending out new shoots in addition to beautiful shiny new leaves, and the lantana closest to the window, ‘Samantha’ (the variegated-leaf, yellow-flowered one), is even about to bloom!

The datura ‘Charles Grimaldi’ dropped its old leaves but has put out new ones (daturas are prone to aphid infestation, so though I haven’t actually spied an aphid on it, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve moved onto it too), and the snail vine is doing much better indoors than it ever did outside this summer, twining for the sunny window on vigorous new growth.  The cuban oregano (a common houseplant in cold climates, though I planted it in the ground this summer) has, like the datura, dropped its old leaves, but has also put out new growth.  The bay leaf tree, which has been at pretty much the same growth above-ground since I planted it in a large pot late last spring (I think the back yard just isn’t sunny enough for it), seems to be doing about the same indoors so far as it did outside. (I specified ‘above-ground’ because bay leaf trees tend to do their early growth underground, which is why it takes a couple of years for a bay leaf tree even to be salable in nursery markets, often offered in gallon pots with just a few inches of above-ground growth because they have so much root growth per inch of above-ground growth – and I haven’t poked around its roots since I planted it, so I don’t know if its roots have continued to expand even as it hasn’t grown much above-ground.  Unfortunately for nursery owners, this tends to make bay leaf trees poor sellers to people who don’t know much about them.  I noted that they were one of the main things left in the greenhouse at the nursery at the end of the season, just sitting there waiting for somebody who knows about them to realize how well they were doing.  They were even putting out beautiful new above-ground growth in the warm, humid, sunny greenhouse, but the tops still looked tiny.)

The yearly inundation has begun

Every single year, right around 1st December – just like clockwork – the yearly inundation of seed, plant, and spring-planted bulb catalogs begins.  Especially seed catalogs.  I have gotten several catalogs already, even though there are still things growing in the garden!  Still, I know that soon the garden will likely lie dormant, with just the hardiest semi-evergreen and evergreen things still growing – like the lavender, standing tall – and it will be lovely to sit with a mug of herbal tea, alternately staring out at a snowscape and looking through catalogs, daydreaming.  So for now, I’m collecting them in their own little pile, biding my time till the dreaming takes over.

Indoor plant update as I’m finally posting this on 17th Dec.

The aphids have gotten worse on the pineapple sage, though they seem to be primarily attacking one stalk, which seems to be the weakest stalk (yet more credence for the idea that pests tend to gravitate towards plants that are already weakened/damaged/whatever in some way).  There are still some aphids on the tweedia as well.  I got out the paperwhites and amaryllises that I’d oversummered around the time I wrote most of this post, and have been watering them about once a week.  The (seven) paperwhites are resprouting, one at a time, but the three amaryllises have yet to do so.  I also potted up ‘Vera,’ one of the two amaryllises I got this autumn, and she’s got one bud so far, and got an early Christmas present of the amaryllis ‘Ferrari’ – though there was no color specified with the tag, I correctly assumed it was vivid red – which also already has a bud.  I also got a little bulb garden as an early Christmas present, and that has some leaves so far but no buds.  I have one more amaryllis and some more paperwhites (a different kind, that the label calls ‘Chinese sacred lily’), but I’ve yet to pot those up.

Snow and ice (written at time of posting)

After flurrying some earlier in the winter, it finally snowed a little around the time I wrote most of this post, and then – after tremendous heavy rains that lasted three days last week – it snowed, iced, sleeted, and rained yesterday.  The garden now has a light covering of snow, though it’s melting somewhat on this above-freezing day.  My last patch of fall-blooming crocuses is still going, five buds poking out through the snow (that are open when it’s sunny in the garden, it’s just that the front garden gets very little sun in winter compared to summer).  Amazingly, some other things are still growing through the snow as well.

Cover crops / Photos 22 November 2008

A couple months ago, I abruptly realized that I had wanted to sow cover crops this autumn but hadn’t ordered any.  Unfortunately, my poor planning meant that by the time I ordered them, Bountiful Gardens’ shipping was temporarily suspended due to being in the process of moving buildings, so I didn’t get my cover crop seed packets till just about a month ago.  Combined with the fact that we’ve had a fairly cool autumn and an incredibly cool past week, I’m not sure any of them are going to make it.  Here are the pictures I took of some of the seed packets just before I sowed cover crops almost exactly one month ago.

Seed packet of mixed cover crops

Seed packet of cover crop favas

Seed packet of clover cover crop

Please note that favas are not hardy in my climate.  I am saving the fava seeds to sow in earliest spring, “as soon as the soil can be worked” as books/packets always put it.

Here are a few pictures from around the same time as the above ones:

Patrinia seedheads with Japanese morning glory and cardinal vine

Nasturtium and ornamental peppers

Centaurea Colchester White, a bit wilty in the cold wind but still going

Beans forming: Some of the last of the season. By the time of this writing, the bean vines are dead.

Caryopteris, still blooming on 25 Oct 2008: I bought this at the end-of-year sale at the nursery. It bloomed through light frosts.

The fickle fingers of frost: A mix of frost damaged and healthy cardinal vine leaves.

New York ironweed seedheads

Ironweed and Maximilian sunflower seedheads. I recommend clicking through for the full sized version of this photo.

Healthy buds and leaves of cardinal vine: an undamaged portion of one of the three cardinal vines. Anise hyssop seed head and white zinnia flowers in the background.

Fall-blooming crocuses (with nasturtium leaves)

Winter, winter, everywhere 17 November 2008

Winter has come to this fair city where I garden.  Today the air temperature wasn’t quite the coldest yet, but the wind was fierce, as it had also been yesterday when the rain finally cleared out (after over three days of sporadic rain:  this late summer and autumn we’ve almost always gotten 2-4 days of rain followed by 2-3 weeks of no rain at all). Tonight is supposed to be the coldest night yet, clocking in at the upper 20s F (air temperature) here in the towns close to the city (like mine) and lower 20s F (air temp) in farther towns, and tomorrow night to be colder yet – low 20s the rest of the week, with highs in the 30s.  (This is actually a bit crisp for this time of year, though New England has famously moody weather.)   I went to the dentist today and wasn’t feeling up to going out into the garden afterwards, so I haven’t yet dug up my hardiest annuals (many actually tender perennials) that I would like to try overwintering indoors.  I hope they’ll be OK till tomorrow, but am aware it’s possible they won’t be.  (I’d still like to overwinter Salvia discolor and a few other things.)  This is also the season’s first real chance of snow, though today they’ve downgraded it to a “slight chance.”  We have yet to have a hard frost here:  the last fall crocuses, the perennial sunflower ‘Lemon Queen,’ the Swan River daisies, the creeping “zinnia,” the sweet alyssums, the calla lilies, the greenhouse-grown mums, some brave marigolds – they’re all still blooming.  I’ve a feeling there’s even more blooming than what I’m remembering.  I’ve got new pictures, but I still need to upload them. (I’ve also got slightly older pictures I haven’t posted here yet.  Sorry about that.)

Here are my latest off-site articles:

• A Gardener’s Brief Guide to Plant Hardiness: How to Help Your Plants Survive Winter
• Adapting Structural Elements of Medieval Gardens: Utilizing Medieval Hardscaping in Modern Gardens
• Preparing the Herb Garden for Winter: Autumn and Early Winter Tasks and Tips

I’m happy to add that I have been hired as the gardening columnist for a new print magazine.  Their website should be live soon, so I’ll hopefully have a link shortly.

I’m also strongly considering taking a landscape design class at a local adult education center, but I haven’t definitively made up my mind yet.

Peonies, Hardy Cyclamen, & Bulbs / Hawk 31 October 2008

I love gardening in autumn.  Today was a perfect October day – sunny and warmer than recent days, with highs around 60 F, and a breeze that started out feeling pleasant before the wind started to feel colder.  The soil was cool, but my ungloved hands acclimated.   A friend helped me with work in the garden this afternoon.  We planted the two peony roots (Paeonia officianalis ‘Rubra Plena’ and peony ‘Monsieur Martin Cahuzac’) and the hardy sowbread cyclamen (finally!) – I talked about them in much more detail in my recent post ‘Help! I’m surrounded by bulbs!’ – and some of the spring-blooming bulbs.  We planted some of the snow crocuses, a bag of alliums (Allium sphaerocephalum), Siberian squill (Scilla siberica), Turkish glory of the snow (Chionodoxa sardensis), the original grape hyacinth (Muscari botrioydes), and silver bells (Ornithogalum nutans).  I love working in the yard in autumn because there are so many fewer fellow cityfolk outside, and it’s easier to imagine you’re somewhere other than right off one of the busiest roads in my town. Today was a beautiful day to be October’s swansong.  Happy Halloween, everyone!

As we were finishing up with the bulbs, I looked up and was quite startled to realize a very large bird was sitting above us in one of the backyard’s trees, looking out over the roof of the house to the city spread below.  About one minute later, it took off, flying over the roof and out of sight.  A short time later, after I was inside, I happened to be standing at a window when I saw it fly back this way and over the house again.  I think it was a Red-Tailed Hawk.  I had a hawk in my garden!  How cool is that?

Frost’s Fickle Fingers / Bulbs All Here 22 October 2008

Frost’s fickle fingers have so far primarily touched the Hawaiian blue eyes, which nearly died one of the coldest nights.  It might frost again tonight.  So far, weirdly, the basil in a pot in the back yard appears fine.  I say ‘weirdly’ because the back yard often feels ten degrees cooler than the front yard.

I waited too long to order from Odyssey, I discovered when I checked their website tonight and read a big red script saying their fall shipping season had ended and the remaining catalog is for reference only.  I guess it’s just as well, as my two small but impressively heavy remaining boxes from Brent and Becky’s arrived today, stuffed with dwarf irises and snow crocuses and alliums and early-blooming daffodils.  I caught a cold yesterday and between that and the crisp weather of late and prioritizing of bringing in tender plants, I have fallen behind on bulb planting.  Now that the heat is on at night and sometimes during the day, it’s getting more urgent too, as there’s nowhere truly cold left to store the bulbs.  (The basement is mildewy and prone to flooding.)  It’s supposed to be 60 F and sunny Friday, so hopefully I’ll be feeling somewhat better by then.  First I need to plant the peonies and the cyclamen, then the snowdrops and crocuses and frits and scilla and muscari, then the daffodils, last the tulips and alliums.  Small early-blooming bulbs and daffodils do best if their roots get established this fall, but tulips prefer the soil to be cool before they go in.

And in the midst of all this frost and rain (it rained on and off yesterday and today) and wind and fluctuating temperatures, the fall-blooming crocuses are going along merrily blooming.  Sometimes they flop over, what with their lesser weatherproofing than their spring relatives, but they recover and keep blooming away.  Crocuses, whether they bloom in autumn, winter, or spring, are the most amazing little creatures to me.  Frost, snow, storms, ice, hot day, cold day, wind – whatever, they just don’t care.  I can hardly imagine a more cheerful little flower, or a better return on one’s value than planting a pack of a kind of crocus that increases over the years.

Baby, it’s cold outside 19 October 2008

Wunderground.com says the nearest (unofficial) weather station to me is currently registering a temperature of 47 F with a windchill of 41 F.  Accuweather.com says the nearest official weather station to me is currently registering 49 F but that the sharp, cold gusts mean the air actually feels like it’s 36 F.   I’ve just been outside digging up more plants and I can say it sure does feel that way.  The wind is so cold it numbed my fingers, and the soil feels frigid.  Last night they had changed the forecast to where it was supposed to be in the upper 30s F again tonight (as the last two nights) but I was suspicious of this assertion given the way the weather has been feeling, and wasn’t overly surprised to see that when I got up this morning they had revoked the changed forecast and had issued a Frost Advisory, my town’s first one of the autumn.  There is alreaady no more basil at the farmers’ market, no more cut flowers, no more melons or okra, and only greenhouse-grown tomatoes and eggplants.  (All the farms are farther away from the city than I am, and always get frost before we do.)

Yesterday I dug up the Cuban oregano and the Aztec sweet herb and potted them up in an emergency pot.  Aztec sweet herb turned out to have rooted as it went along, and its extra roots were dangling in the air.  I thought I’d repot it this morning and it would be OK.  By the time I got up, though, it had begun to wilt, starting at the tips of its woody branches and working inwards towards the center of the plant.  I repotted it into a window box where it can wander around to its hearts content today, so hopefully it will recover.  Since it seemed to do pretty well underplanted with taller things this year, I added two lantanas that I dug up today to the window box too.  I dug up ‘Samantha,’ the variegated-leaf, yellow-flowering one I mentioned yesterday, and ‘Red Spread.’  ‘Lavender Trailing’ is still flowering away, but it seems much easier to find locally, so I prioritized the others.  In my experience, lantana can be killed by the first frost or take several frosts before dying, so we’ll see how it does tonight.

I also dug up the pineapple sage, and realized when i did so that it finally, FINALLY has tiny buds (we’ll see if it blooms indoors), and the two Cape mallows, because I read in that book on overwintering that they bloom well indoors (if only I’d known that, and how hard ‘Elegant Lady’ would be to find this season, I would have dug her up and brought her inside last autumn!!!), and the three rosemary plants (‘Arp,’ ‘Irene,’ and ‘Tuscan Blue,’ as I mentioned last entry), and the one heliotrope that didn’t die over the summer.

Only after I was inside, with cold fingers and sore knees, did I realize I’d forgotten to dig up the two other plants whose cold-hardiness I’m least sure of, Salvia discolor and the agapanthus. It was also only when I dug up the by now quite robust ‘Tuscan Blue’ that I realized that the French tarragon and the culander (Mexican coriander) were still alive as small plants at its feet.  I don’t know if the fussy culander is worth digging up and keeping inside for the winter.  I don’t even know if it’s possible; like with the gotu kola I brought in Friday, I’ve yet to read a single thing about overwintering it inside.

The quicksilver, centaurea ‘Colchester White,’ and the agastaches and salvais that aren’t hardy here are all still out there as well, but all but the quicksilver are hardier than the stuff I dug up, and last year taught me that a quicksilver that’s big and healthy and has been growing well all season can sustain some frost damage before actually dying, putting out new leaves to replace the frost-killed ones – though I might dig it up today anyway so that it doesn’t have to endure the damage.  (By the way, quicksilver is in the same genus as Cuban oregano, Plectranthus, and they look similar to one another, with quilted fuzzy leaves, though quicksilver’s leaves are silvery and my Cuban oregano’s are pale greenish.  [I say “my Cuban oregano” because there is apparently also a variegated-leaf Cuban oregano out there, its leaves edged in white.])

The past 24 hours or so have been so windy that many trees that had half or two-thirds of their leaves a day ago are now completely bare or nearly so.

---

Frost Advisory
National Weather Service
Statement as of 11:15 AM EDT on October 19, 2008

A frost advisory remains in effect from 2 am to 8 am EDT Monday.

Temperatures are expected to fall into the low and mid 30s late tonight. Light winds will allow areas of frost to develop.

A frost advisory means that frost is possible. Sensitive outdoor plants may be killed if left uncovered.

The Great Autumn Migration 18 October 2008

The great autumn migration has begun – the moving of tender plants from outdoors to indoors.   At sunrise today it was 38 F, not factoring in the brisk wind.  It’s supposed to reach the mid-30s tonight, and there’s a larger chance of an actual frost tomorrow night.  Yesterday I moved the potted tender plants indoors (except for the petunias, which were already not doing too well, and the potted purple basil, which was already flowering anyway), and the number of plants in my apartment has dramatically increased:

Before the First Migration:

• 12 catci
• 3 aloe: 1 Aloe vera, 1 Tiger’s Jaw aloe, 1 miniature aloe I got at the fall plant sale
• 3 other succulents: a Christmas cactus (also from the fall plant sale), a jade plant, and an echeveria
• numerous other houseplants: umbrella plant, variegated ivy, dieffenbachia, 2 sad African violets, 2 philodendrons, pothos, spider plant, tender cyclamen, and an unknown variegated plant

After the First Migration, this is what has been added:

• 7 pots of tender geraniums, 2-4 plants in each pot (mix of ornamental & scented ones)
• 2 pots of tuberose bulbs (1 pot single-flowering, 1 pot double-flowering)
• bay leaf tree
• lemongrass
• brugmansia ‘Charles Grimaldi’ (one of the oldest brugmansia cultivars still available in the US)
• a pot containing 2 fucshias and a tender sweet violet
• tweedia
• gotu kola
• cestrum ‘Orange Zest’
• snail vine

And I still have to pot up some things that are out there in the garden.

[The brugmansia and some of the geraniums have already survived one winter inside.  The rest of the plants are spending their first winter indoors.]

These are the plants I’m most strongly considering adding to the indoor fray:

• My three rosemary plants (‘Arp’, ‘Tuscan Blue’, and ‘Irene’)
• Flowering tobaccos – supposed to be easy to overwinter inside, according to a book I read this month
• Coleus plants & irisene & Persian shield & quicksilver (all foliage plants)
• Salvia discolor, which is difficult to find in the US
• Cuban oregano (a relative of coleus, it looks like a very fuzzy one), which is common as a houseplant so should be easy to overwinter, and is difficult to find in my region
• Lantana ‘Samantha’, the variegated lantana I grew this year
• Salvia ‘Indigo Spires’, which is not hardy in my climate, and is currently blooming away in the garden
• Agapanthus

Exactly where I would fit all these, I am not yet sure!  The table is already nearly full, and that’s with some of the tender plants being elsewhere in the apartment.

On top of that, when I went to the nursery greenhouse today to get a present, I ended up getting two blooming African violets and a begonia.  The begonia was because I’d never seen the cultivar ‘Escargot’ locally and I find it so charming (its leaves intricately curl like a snail’s shell), and the African violets because having sad, diseased ones makes me sad, and now that the A/C is out of the east window, African violets will do so well there (I know because before they became diseased at some point after being moved out of the window to make room for the A/C in May, my older African violets were happy in it), and so I got a couple of blooming ones.  I think I’d best put a moratorium on further plant purchases, though.

(I apologize for the lack of apostrophes in captions; WordPress’s photo software won’t allow them.)

Tender plants, just brought in yesterday: Brugmansia Charles Grimaldi is the huge plant in the foreground.

Newly indoor plants from the other side. My apartment kitchen is very large (by city standards) but makes very poor use of space, with most of it simply empty floor/walls. I take advantage of this in winter by setting up a large card table and putting most of the tender plants on it. One of the two windows faces south and the other faces east, so it gets heaps of sunlight in wintertime.

Brugmansia Charles Grimaldi, newly indoors & with six buds: I felt badly bringing this inside since it seemed to be doing so well outside, but kept reminding myself that a slightly sadder indoor plant was better than a newly dead (frost-killed) outdoor plant. I will be curious to see if its buds open indoors.

Tuberose, blooming indoors: The last tuberose was budded instead of blooming when I brought it in yesterday. Overnight, the first bud opened! This is the double-flowered variety. Tuberoses, popular in Victorian days, have a scent that makes me imagine that this is what Tahiti smells like.

Pothos (foreground), one of the philodendrons, and five of the tender geraniums (4 scented, 1 ornamental).

A closer look at the geraniums from the last photo. The 4 scented ones are some of the scented ones I mentioned here that I got at the end-of-season sale at the nursery. The pink-flowered ornamental one is the one I got at the farmers market this year.

Gotu kola, newly indoors: I have yet to find anything on overwintering gotu kola, a tender medicinal plant, so thus far I am making it up as I go along. I set it on the window seat when the sun lights it, and move it up to a shelf (out of kittypaw reach) the rest of the time. The pot is one I bought from a local potmaker last year.

Cacti in south window: The cacti seem to do well all year round in this south-facing window. If you look closely, you can see the Earth Machine composter in the background, which I now use to store finished compost that hasnt been sieved yet.

Houseplants in eastern window (L-R): Tiger Jaw aloe, 2 African violets, spider plant, another philodendron, jade plant.

Aloe vera: After taking the above photos, I rearranged one of my kitchen shelves to make a space for the Aloe vera, which loves such a direct-sun spot as this and which should be safer away from the newly indoor plants (just in case any have brought along a disease or pest).

The aforementioned present that I got at the greenhouse today, an indoor orchid. I wont be visiting till tomorrow, so for today I have it in the kitchen, sequestered from the other plants to limit chances of disease/pest transfer.

Help! I’m surrounded by bulbs! / Photos

The great bulb influx has continued unabated.  After receiving the colchicums and fall crocuses and other fall-blooming & early-planted bulbs from Brent and Becky’s (as mentioned in a recent post), I received the second half of my order from Odyssey Bulbs, and then I received my order from Old House Gardens.  I’ve still got my not-shipped-early spring-blooming bulbs from Brent and Becky’s to receive, as well as my spring-blooming bulbs Odyssey order if I remember to make it before they sell out.

I’ve spent a few hours in the garden planting fall-blooming crocuses, and have almost finished doing that, just having the plain saffron crocuses to go (I already planted the more reliably blooming – and thus, more expensive – cultivar of saffron crocus commonly sold as ‘Cashmirianus’).  I also already planted the two spring-blooming colchicums I got (only two because they are rare and thus, more expensive than fall-blooming colchicums).  I find fall-blooming crocuses more difficult to place than many things, because they like the conditions of the front garden, but since they bloom when so much other stuff has already bushed out and hasn’t died yet, I have to place them in spots where they can be seen in my sloping garden.  Spring-blooming bulbs are easier to place, because so little has grown very tall yet in the spring garden when they bloom that I can plant them pretty much anywhere to have them be seen from the sidewalk.

I’ve still got to plant some things that I should have already planted – the fritillaries, the snowdrops, and a few things from the new order from Old House Gardens – two peony roots and a hardy cyclamen and Siberian squill.  The cyclamen is a fall-bloomer known as “sowbread cyclamen” (Cyclamen hederifolium syn. C. neapolitanum), and you can see a photo of it at OHG’s site.  The peonies are ‘Rubra Plena’ (Paeonia officinalis, the peony Europeans and colonists grew [and used medicinally] before the introduction of Chinese peonies; photo at OHG’s site) and lovely ‘Monsieur Martin Cahuzac’ (a P. lactiflora cultivar; photo at OHG’s site).  (Tip:  Be sure to plant peony roots with the “eyes” close to the surface, or you’ll get plenty of foliage but few to no flowers.)  The bulbs, cyclamen, and peonies that I should be planting are all stored in dirt in bags in a cool, fairly dark closet right now.  They’re doing so-so or well (depending on what they are), but I need to get planting soon.  It’s been delayed because of new priorities due to colder nights and threat of frost, which I will discuss more in the next entry I write.   For now, here are a few of the hundreds of photos on my computer that I’ve yet to share here:

Fall crocuses blooming. These are some of the ones I planted last year.

More fall crocuses blooming. Another patch from last year.

A closer view of the same fall crocus patch as the last photo.

Autumn sun shining through the front garden

Aster October Skies & hyssop-leaved boneset

The corner of the front garden: Swan river daisies (2 lavender, 1 white), rosemary Irene (which drapes), goldenrod (Golden Fleece, I believe), Russian sage, ornamental grass Shenandoah Purple, rudbeckia Indian Summer, creeping zinnia (yellow daisy-like flowers; not really a zinnia), and more. Click photo for full-sized version.

In the garden lately 13 September 2008

The asters and goldenrods have started blooming.  It’s truly, officially autumn now, regardless of the fact that it’s supposed to be in the 80s and muggy in two days.

Fall-blooming bulbs have been arriving in boxes.  A week ago a friend helped me plant a batch of colchicums amongst the already-growing ones in the back garden.  Colchicums are the ultimate instant gratification bulb:  Just a week later, most of them are already blooming.  A new box, this one from Brent and Becky’s, arrived yesterday.  This one has colchicums, fall-blooming crocuses, and the most sensitive spring-blooming bulbs that the best bulb dealers will ship earlier than the rest; this includes snowdrops, winter aconites, and many fritillaries, amongst others.  In my case, there are some snowdrops and frits.  I love winter aconites, but I think they would struggle in the suckingly dry soil that lies underneath the several trees ringing the back yard, and the front would be too sunny even if it weren’t dry and windy.

Former tropical storm Hanna moved through here recently.  The wind from it did some damage in the garden, but it wasn’t terrible.  The rain seemed to reinvigorate much of the garden.

I’ve heard two reports this month of a Ruby-Throated Hummingbird in my town, the only reports I’ve ever heard of them in this urban environment.  (One sighting was just yesterday.)  I keep hoping it will wander over to my garden with my agastaches, my salvias, my scarlet runner beans, my red nasturtiums, and my finally-blooming cardinal climber, but if it’s come, I didn’t see it (which is not implausible though).

I also heard a report this week that this summer a young deer was spotted in a nearby (also urban) neighborhood.  Freaky stuff!

I really, really will post photos sometime soon.  My pollen allergies have been killing me this week.  Stupid ragweed.