Work in the garden today 20 June 2009

Pansy, violas, and baby blue eyes: Too bad this photo isn't as good as it looked on my camera's viewer. It does at least finally show what the easy-from-seed California native annual, baby blue eyes, looks like (center).

Licorice plant 'Silver Falls' with snapdragon: Licorice plant has done really really well over the past couple of years in the hottest part of my hot, windy front garden (it is tender, so I just plant a new one each year). I especially like 'Silver Falls' because it has smaller leaves than the species. This snapdragon has 'Cranberry' in its name; it's one of the creeping kinds. The snapdragons are putting out a lot more blooms than in this photo now that it's rained so much. That's bacopa (another tender plant) creeping away on the right, in case you're wondering.

I spent a while working in the back garden today, on the same bed I primarily worked on the last time I worked in back.  I planted six more foxgloves, six columbines, the rest of the flowering tobaccos, the lemon balm, the lovage, one of the hardy begonias, two germanders, the coleuses (6 of them, if I recall correctly), the other penstemon for partial shade, and … probably some things I’m forgetting.  I also transplanted the non-‘Telham Beauty’ peach-leafed bellflowers that had been in front into the back bed, to try to minimize possible cross-breeding in the future, and moved the ‘Telham Beauty’ that hasn’t bloomed into the front.  I also moved a couple things in front – the sundial lupine has gotten really shaded by the cup plant and has yet to bloom, so I moved it to a sunnier position, and I moved the German ornamental onions (the kind of onion that makes a circle of leaves) to a sunnier spot because they were on the edge of the crop bed and had started to be shaded by the cucumber.  That bed in back is FINALLY actually looking pretty full instead of like it’s sporadically planted with bare spots between the plants if you look ground-wards.  It’s nice to see it looking better.  I’m going to need to expand it to fit the lowbush blueberries, as their final size should be at least a foot wide each, and there’s not enough room for them in the area that’s currently dug up.  The one that bloomed in its pot has berries forming, by the way!  Yay!

Other than adding the lowbush blueberries to that bed, my next main plan in back is to work on the bed next to it, the other bed that gets partial shade (though most of it gets more shade than the bed I’ve been working on).   The colchicum leaves (for the autumn-blooming colchicums; their leaves appear in spring and die around now, and then they bloom, leaf-less, in autumn) are dying down now, and most of that area will once again be bare, so it would be nice to have something in that spot that will grow up as the leaves are dying and cover the area after they go.  I’m not quite sure what that would be, though.  I have a Baptisia I haven’t planted, but if it’s happy it would get so big that it might block the sunlight to the colchicum leaves.

I’d hoped to work in the front more as well, but that didn’t happen.  After doing the plantings in back, I cleaned out the bird bath again and put some worm castings on the bed so that hopefully they’ll start soaking in in the downpours that are supposed to come (again) later tonight.  The local nursery just started selling worm castings this year, which is nice, as previously I’d had to mail-order them, but the nursery’s supplier is pretty expensive, so maybe I’ll go back to mail ordering anyhow.  I put worm castings on the crop bed in front earlier this week as well, and the plants seem to have positively responded (I had no experience with this brand of castings prior to this).  Obviously worm castings from worms in one’s own garden are the best, but I’ve felt for a while that if you can find a reputable source for them, adding them to the garden while you’re working on building up the soil helps the plants and, ironically, also seems to help encourage more worms.

Now I just need to get someone to come help me spread the next batch of compost over the beds (it’s a big batch!), and find a leaf shredder or a push mower to chop up the leaves in the pile in back so that I can mulch the back beds with them.  I’d like to start having a living mulch under the crops in the main crop bed, but it seems difficult to find much information on living mulches that are for somewhat shady spots (since the crops would block a lot of the light) instead of for stuff like “underplanting orchards.”  So I’m still trying to figure that out.  All the stuff I’ve been rereading and reading (depending on which thing) lately on soil systems has been getting me back into doing much more conscious strategizing about how to make the soil and the surface ideal environments for plants and beneficials, rather than just adding compost as regularly as I can.  Now that I’m seeing the Robins almost every day (often multiple times a day) and, at dusk today, spied what I think may have been a pair of Catbirds (I suspect my alpine strawberries will disappear much faster now!), I am also feeling some positive reinforcement for what I’ve done so far.

Photos of spring in the garden 10 April 2009

[Started on 4 April, when these photos were taken]

Unfortunately the weather and the luminescent petals have not lent the spring-blooming colchicum to excellent photos.  This is the best one I’ve taken so far (alas):

Spring-blooming colchicum with chives (upper right), pansies (upper left/center), and, fall-blooming crocus leaves (right)

Pansies

More pansies; the one on the right is the kind (I've mentioned before) that starts out in darker colors and fades to lighter ones as it ages (an old bloom is pictured here). It is very windy (yet again) today and they were flapping in the wind, as was much of the rest of the garden.

Pansy patch with many other things, such as leaves of bearded iris, tansy, euphorbia, and crocus.

Oriental poppy foliage coming up

Spring-blooming crocuses (& a few other bulbs) coming up: One of the odd things about having a garden that varies so dramatically in light from season to season is that my snow crocuses have been the last to come up in the neighborhood!

White creeping thyme, recently planted: It is so named because it is the type of creeping thyme whose flowers are white.

Lemon thyme, creeping variety, recently planted

Euphorbia

Alumroot (native Heuchera americana, AKA "American alumroot"), dwarf cranesbill (Geranium), and other things.

Plants, waiting to be planted: Two each of parsley, borage, and dill; potted shallots; oregano; golden oregano; one more thyme; more pansies and violas

Front garden, from the side: Those are the hardy lavenders waving in the wind (sort of in the foreground). That's a large patch of violas in front of them.

Update on seedlings and other things 3 April 2009

Oh, look, it’s a day that ends in “-day” in English.  That must mean it’s raining in Boston.

Yeah, so our weather patterns have been pretty predictable lately.   It fogged up (very dramatically, until I couldn’t see the steeple across the street from the nursery) while I was out this morning, turned to mist, then drizzle, then rain.  Luckily for me, I got home just  before it quite abruptly became rain and was just futzing in the garden for a few minutes on my way to the front door at the time.

The nursery still didn’t have viola ‘Tiger’s Eye’ on my first visit in over a week, which I found disappointing.  They did have a large number of new pansies and violas, though, and I bought four more six-packs (my second-favorite after ‘Tiger’s Eye,’ that kind of pansy that’s such a deep purple it looks black in most lights; as well as one that’s nicely colored in different shades of purple, one that’s red and orange, and a viola I grew with ‘Tiger’s Eye’ last year that’s rich purple and dark bronze and difficult to describe but pretty, but unfortunately I am forgetting its name).  So far they have no other flowering annuals, just some potted bulbs that they’ve moved from the greenhouse outside.  (The people down the street planted a potted hyacinth, as their garden went from having no hyacinth sprouts at all yesterday to having fully blooming hyacinths today!  But I am guessing most people who walk by won’t even notice that’s what they did.  They are the same people who, upon having several tulips picked the spring I moved here, put up a sign saying “Please don’t pick the flowers” that featured a sketch of a crying daisy.)  Their herb section also looked about the same as before; it looked like they’d gotten in some more pots of a few things they already had, but that was the only thing that seemed different.  They’ve already almost sold out of the plain culinary sage; there were just two pots left.  I got the Greek oregano and golden oregano I’d been eyeing last trip but had not bought, as well as a third creeping thyme (a big fan of both creeping thyme and general creeping plants [with my retaining wall for them to fall over], I already bought two earlier this spring, in case you forget), this one the kind that’s called ‘elfin thyme’ in English. They had lots of rosemary out, but I didn’t get any yet, figuring I’ll wait till later in the spring.  (Unfortunately unsurprisingly to me, after doing well at the start of the winter, my overwintered rosemary plants abruptly died partway through.  I don’t know why my rosemaries always do this, no matter where I place them nor what new tricks I read about and try, but I’ve come to  accept it as their likely fate and plan accordingly.)

I ran into the owner again and he said he was getting two more deliveries later today, one from the esteemed herb company Gilbertie’s (a New England grower, they’ve been featured on The Victory Garden on PBS).  He said that he had asked them to give him some of all the herbs they already had in stock but he didn’t yet have on the shelves, except the most tender – basil, lemon verbena, and lemongrass.  My lemongrass plant that’s overwintered inside was from them.  It’s about four feet tall now and looks robust as ever, perhaps even more than before now that it’s reaping the benefits of the grow lights being in the kitchen.  Anyhow, perhaps I will stop back at the nursery over the weekend to see what herbs they have in stock.  Gilbertie’s grows a lot more unusual herbs than most of the regional growers; they’re also the grower that grew last year’s garden’s Cuban oregano, sweet Aztec herb (still surviving in a pot inside as well), and culander, amongst others.

The lettuces are doing great inside, and this week two of the three heretofore unsprouted okras sent up one sprout each, the two from Baker Creek, ‘Pitre’s Short Bush Red Cowhorn’ and ‘Vidrine’s Midget Cowhorn.’  In the same tray as the okra (though planted much later than the rest of the tray), the first eggplant seedling (‘Kamo’ from Kitazawa) is up as well, and it looks like a second one is just poking through the soil today.   The non-traumatized flower tray is also doing pretty well, with at least one sprout now of everything but the perennial dianthus – the previously mentioned painted daisy and salpiglossis (already up some days ago); two mixes of annual phlox; a mix of petunias; and a mix of snapdragons.

In my last entry, I discussed the new (well, technically revised and retitled, but anyhow) book Growing Chinese Vegetables in Your Own Backyard.  I wanted to mention the one book I already had that touches upon the same subject.  It is called Urban Gardening: A Hong Kong Gardener’s Journal and is by Arthur van Langenberg.  Despite the title, it’s not exactly a journal, and yet at the same time, it’s not exactly a how-to book.  Here’s a sample of the page on eggplant (which features two lovely photos of a long eggplant plant, much bushier than I could ever hope to attain in my cooler climate):  “The pendulous fruit are a magnificent rich purple.  I never fail to marvel at this colour, especially in the young fruit, when there may be several shades of purple.  Grow in summer, sowing the seeds from April to July.  The seeds are very similar to those of capsicum and may take up to two weeks to germinate.  Place four seeds in a small 5-cm pot and when the seedlings have put out their second leaf, thin out to leave the strongest plant.”  (‘Capsicum’ is a primarily British English term for chiles/peppers.)  The start dates are definitely Hong Kong oriented; I’d never get fruit if I waited till July to start an eggplant seed.  Unlike the other book, it is not just about produce but has a lot of information on flowers and shrubs as well.  The book is organized in a way that doesn’t make the most intuitive sense to me (but then, I am an American, not a Hong Kong resident), but there is an index at the back to make finding things much easier.

The biggest reason the book charmed me in the first place was because its entry on kohlrabi starts, “This is a vegetable that deserves far more attention,” which, as you likely already know, is my opinion as well.  (It continues, “It is grown for its light green, swollen globular stem which appears just above the ground and which resembles a leafy turnip.  There the resemblence ends because kohlrabi is far superior in flavour and texture.  A purple variety is also available.”)  I read another source recently that suggested using kohlrabi as a spring crop and turnips as an autumn crop.  I thought that was an interesting idea.  Many people seem to be of the opinion that incoming hot weather tends to make spring turnip crops risky in hot-summer regions.  Kohlrabi aren’t as sensitive and can typically be harvested more quickly than turnips anyhow.  Speaking of kohlrabi, I really need to move my remaining seedlings to bigger pots.  Maybe I will sow some more greens in their cells when they move.

Since I’ve been inside, it’s turned from a steady rain to an outright downpour, and it looks like the wind has picked up even more.  Well, at least the wind will likely blow away the fog!  I guess there will be no garden work for me yet again today.

Photos, mostly of seedlings 23 March 2009

Photos of varying degrees of quality (taking photos inside in the lower light months is often frustrating):

…

Tomato seedlings coming up on the 18th:

tomato seedlings

Kohlrabi (left) and okra seedlings on the 18th:

kohlrabi and okra seedlings

Kohlrabi (in back) and okra (foreground) seedlings today, just after a watering made the kohlrabi sprawl:

kohlrabi and okra seedlings

Again: kohlrabi and okra seedlings

One more shot of kohlrabi and okra

The ground cherries and alpine strawberries finally started sprouting over the weekend!  Here is a terrible shot of ground cherry ‘Cossack Pineapple’:

Ground cherry seedlings

Herb seedlings:

Herb seedlings, clockwise from upper right: Bronze fennel 'Smokey'; two pots of basil (four cultivars); sweet Annie; scallion 'Hardy Evergreen White'; scallion 'Ishikura'

Basil seedlings, two pots (four cultivars)

My, how you’ve grown! –

Tomato seedlings!

Tomato seedlings!

Tomatillo (foreground) and cherry tomato seedlings

Chile and sweet pepper seedlings

The nursery got their first order of pansies and violas!  I found them today and brought some home with me.

New pansies, indoors

Another shot: New pansies, indoors

Having been living the high life in the shelter of the greenhouse, I’m waiting for a warmer day to actually plant them outside.  It’s below freezing today!

But the thing about wintry weather in New England is that a peek out a window often fools you into thinking it’s warm!

The sky

Doesn’t it look like a great gardening day from inside?  It’s only when you actually go outside that you realize how cold and incredibly windy it is.

The rhubarb ‘Victoria’ root, still awaiting planting (I dampen the sawdust in the bag every day or two):

Rhubarb 'Victoria' root, awaiting planting

It looks to me like a mythic creature from a Miyazaki film.  I keep expecting it to jump up on its hind roots and start running around the kitchen.

While away / Since returning 15 August 2008

While I was gone, one of the places where I stayed had an organic garden on the grounds.  The garden was gorgeous and a lot of wildlife inhabited it.  Three hummingbirds seemed to live in the garden, and spent a lot of time nectaring at the flowers in it.

Hummingbird at cleome in Santa Fe foothills

Another hummingbird at cleome

Yet another hummingbird at cleome

I took a ton of pictures of the garden and will post more another time.

…

It’s been raining almost every day since I returned from New Mexico, so I’ve done little in the garden but weed.  (How easily most weeds slide out of soaked soil!)  I’ve still got a big pile of plants to plant, and I’ve added more to it.  The nursery is in the midst of their sale frenzy, and no surprise, as it’s the time of year nurseries go crazy for sales.  They are selling off their remaining herbs at $1.98 each, so I bought several.  I’ve got another horehound and another oregano ‘Hopley’s Purple’, as well as a “true oregano” (as the tag calls it), a basil that was starting to bolt (I saw how much the bees were going crazy for the flowers on the already-bolted basil plants, and bought it just for them), gotu kola (a medicinal herb that’s tender here and which I’m going to attempt to overwinter indoors), and four scented geraniums – lemon rose, ginger, lime, and an untagged one that smells sort of like an organic suntan lotion and has beautiful small, crinkly leaves that seem on the silvery end of green and gorgeous small white flowers (it’s the only one that was flowering at the nursery, and the last of its kind so I couldn’t check the tag of another pot of the same cultivar).  That beautiful variegated scented geranium I got in spring hadn’t fully sold out, much to my surprise, so I almost got a second one, but decided that was excessive.

The nursery got another delivery of annuals yesterday, so I went back today to get some more plants and a couple of window boxes to put the scented geraniums in.  I got four mums to pot up and put on either side of the building’s front door (and the pots to put them in), three ornamental peppers to replace one of the pansy patches that died while I was gone, two large pots of pansies to replace the other two mostly dead pansy/viola patches that also died while I was gone, and a gaura, which I got just because the bees and I like them. Later today I potted up the scented geraniums and the mums.  I put the yellow double mum and the single mum with red petals and a yellow center in one pot and the double dark mauve mum and the double deep orange mum in the other pot, and they’re now framing the doorway, making the building look much cheerier.  I bought less expensive pots for the mums than I normally would as I live on a busy street and am assuming there’s a possibility they’ll be stolen.  (While I was gone, a marigold plant was dug up and taken, and several clusters of ripe parsley seeds were simply broken off the plant and removed by another thief.  Such is gardening in the city.) The ornamental peppers were the nursery manager’s idea.  She thought it would be neat to have something so different in one of the spots where the pansies had been.  She knew the delivery was coming in on Thursday, and advised me to wait for them to come instead of impulse-buying a less fitting filler.

I still need to place my fall-planted bulb orders.  I know that I’m getting the orders in so late that I’ve missed out on some of the returning customer discounts and early bird sales and such, but I’ve had such a busy past month I just haven’t had time to even organize it all.  Yesterday I sat down and wrote out my annual list of bulbs I think would be good in the different microclimates, and soon I will go through and see what’s still available on Old House Gardens’ website and place an order.   After I see what I get from them, I’ll think about what else I’d like to order and from whom.  I also especially like Odyssey Bulbs and Brent and Becky’s Bulbs. Ideally I’d like to add some more colchicums to the colchicum bed since they seem to do so well there, but I don’t know if I’m too late to order them (they are not just fall-planted but fall-blooming, so they usually need to be ordered earlier than bulbs that simply are stuck in the ground in autumn to bloom the following year).  I didn’t understand the full glory of colchicums till I created this bed last year.  Being able to see them up close in a raised bed shows their best side.

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.

Skipping ahead 24 May 2008

I hope to write some longer posts about things that have been going on the past week-plus in the garden (bits of it summarized in the post before this one) but for now I’m going to talk about today.

The Carolina lupine/false lupine (Thermopsis villosa) has been blooming for several days.  Here’s what it looks like as of today:

The sundial lupine (Lupinus perennis) has been budded for at least a few days.  Here’s its biggest bud as it looks today:

The pansies have been doing better in this mild weather with sporadic clouds and drenching sometimes-rain. Here are the pastel ones with so many other things.

Creeping snapdragons (in pink and yellow) in front of the pansies; African daisy (orange) and perennial candytuft (white) and felicia (budded by the candytuft) directly behind them; the edge of the perennial sweet alyssum (bright yellow) and bacopa (light lavender) to their left (with a seedling).

Here’s a closeup from the same section, some of the pansies with one of the creeping snapdragon blooms

So cheerful that maybe it should be illegal, isn’t it?  I’m so glad the slugs have finally stopped eating all the blue-and-yellow pansy blooms.

More pansies, this time with violas and sweet alyssum:

The sometimes red, sometimes yellow, sometimes both viola is that new(ish) one ‘Tiger Eye’ or Tiger Eyes’.  Interesting, the color seems to vary depending on how much sun vs. shade it gets.  From what I can  tell so far, the more sun the bloom gets, the yellower it is. The more shade, the redder.   Additionally, see how well the sweet alyssum has filled in?  I’m glad I planted it spaced instead of all crammed together.

The focus of this shot is euphorbia ‘Diamond Frost’, that I talked about here around the time I got it. I wanted to take a photo to illustrate the airy look I was talking about.  It is that airy green plant with white-with-green-centers flowers in the middle of this shot.

Blurry in the foreground are lamb’s ears ‘Silver Carpet’, dianthus ‘Beatrix’ (blooming earlier than it naturally would because I ordered another one from Select Seeds this year in case the two I grew last year had winterkilled, as it was my best-performing dianthus last year, blooming in flushes sporadically all summer and a bit into autumn; I am guessing it has some border carnation heritage), and California poppy foliage. In the background is echinacea foliage and bearded iris foliage, amongst other things.

The agastache I got this week at the nursery

Rose campion ‘Gardener’s World’ (center, silver stalks/leaves) looks like it’s going to bloom soon:

I planted this last year, but it didn’t bloom, just formed a rosette that survived until an ice storm coated the garden in early December.  In the foreground are dianthus bloomstalks with buds, a pansy, one of the two Small’s penstemons I planted this year (reddish leaves), and the variegated catmint I planted this year (at the foot of the rose campion). Directly behind it is one of the lavenders that survived the winter.

This is one of the two creeping bellflowers I planted last year:

It survived the winter more robustly than the other one, though you may be able to see that it hasn’t crept as far as last year (a little bit of its remnants from last year are still visible).  It looks like it’s formed a couple buds.  I can’t remember which species of creeping bellflower it is so I’m not positive when it’s supposed to start blooming.  This one is planted near the sweet alyssums, close to the retaining wall’s edge and in the windiest section of the garden.  The other one is planted towards the other side of the bed (also close to the wall’s edge) and only within the past week or two did its leaves get big enough to become recognizable.

Stock, still blooming

The single-flowered ones are getting much leggier much faster this year than the doubles.  I don’t know why.

One of the new-this-year euphorbias (the purplish-red leafed one) has been blooming its heart away. I planted salvia ‘Brenthurst’ next to it this year.

It’s not a color choice I would choose for the long-term, but the fact that the euphorbia is going to go out of bloom led me to do such a risky color pairing.  I grew salvia ‘Brenthurst’ (tender here) last year next to the tender foliage plant quicksilver, which has very silver, very fuzzy, very large leaves on reddish stalks.  I decided to do the same again, but for now quicksilver is getting its footing, like it did last year.  (It needs a period of adjustment to my garden’s dry, windy, hot conditions and then it will flourish.)  So for now I have the quicksilver leaning against the stock clump for support, and the salvia with the chartreuse euphorbia “blooms” (I imagine they’re really bracts, like they tend to be on euphorbias). Last year ‘Brenthurst’ took some time to adjust to the wind conditions in the garden, but it seems to be doing better this year with them (and have we ever had some very windy days, for here, since it was planted). I think it might be because this year’s plant has more stems and is less leggy than last year’s initially was, but I’m not positive.

The perennial candytuft has been doing great. Here it is with a small insect on one of the blooms.

In the background in the above shot is what’s in focus in the below shot, a white-flowering heliotrope,  drooping.

Heliotrope is like quicksilver – it needs some time to adjust to this garden’s conditions.  This year I mulched it with compost, hoping that would help, but it seems to not be making much of a difference so far.  For heliotrope, it needs a little time to develop a taproot.  I know of heliotrope’s taproot (which I haven’t seen mentioned in any references, though perhaps I just haven’t read the right source) because I once kept one in a pot and was so pleased at how well it was flourishing, and then went to move it – and realized it was doing so well because its taproot had gone out a hole in the bottom of the pot and rooted into nearby soil.  This white bloomer is much less common than varying shades of purple.   Heliotrope blooms smell like vanilla.  Newer cultivars don’t always have as much of a scent as the parent species and older cultivars, so if you’re buying it in a nursery, sniff ones with open blooms to see.

I got a tip this morning that the big-box grocery store, of all places, had decent-quality geraniums on sale at around $1.75 each.  Apparently word had been spreading on the steal of a price, and the tipster warned me that they might be sold out by now.  I went down there this morning – geraniums are enough of a weakness for me that I overwinter them – and bought six in interesting colorations.  I’ll pot them up soon (meant to do it today, but the day has gotten away from me).

More another time.

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.

…

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!”

…

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.