Pansies and nasturtiums

Yesterday I bought some pansies to put in one of the new cold frames for winter bloom. Pansies sometimes survive the winters outside here, but when we have severe winters the plants are obliterated. The popularity of pansies among the casual gardener crowd thus fluctuates over the years. When pansies in the open are good, they are very good; and when they are bad, they're apt to be on the verge of death.

To get around this uncertainty, I like to have a few in the cold frames during the winter. They provide both color and fragrance, and they bloom so profusely that the flowers can be cut for the house without any concern for the plants themselves.

I bought these particular pansies because among them were some with flowers in shades of brown beautifully blended with violet and rich purple and with the occasional flare of yellow. These are colors I associate with some of the most richly colored broken tulips.

Now let's be nice to ourselves and step back about a century. You've cut a small bunch of these pansies, and you've put them on your favorite reading table. The room is quiet, the chair is comfortable, the book is absorbing, and as you relax you begin to notice the scent of the pansies. It's a scent which combines the sweet and the pungent; with eyes closed it might be confused with the scent of some of the edible crucifers. After you have finished reading, the pansies can accompany you to your writing table; and when the call for the evening meal comes, they can join you at the dining table; and at the end of the day they can be your companion on your night table. Pansies are companionable.

While I was thinking about the pansies it occurred to me that in some ways they are similar to, and in other ways compliment, nasturtiums. Both pansies and nasturtiums have forms which bloom in a rare range of colors which combine red, orange and brownish tones. And they both have a fragrance which while sweet has an undertone of something sharper. And they both are worth growing simply to provide cut flowers: pansies for the cooler months, nasturtiums for the hot months. With a bit of luck, it should be possible to have a little bunch of one or the other throughout the year. I intend to try to do just that.

Aconitum carmichaelii

Late blooming plants are always welcome in this garden, not only because they extend the season so nicely, but also because my birthday occurs in late October. I think of these plants as blooming to help celebrate my birthday. The one shown here is Aconitum carmichaelii (it has other names) and is one of the few members of its genus which really thrives under our conditions. The small cluster of blooms is hardly in proportion to the five foot stems; on the other hand, if the flowers are cut for the house, most of the stem can be left on the plant.

This plant is one of several I brought from an abandoned nursery over thirty years ago. A friend and I were taking a bicycle tour of rural parts of the county, and we passed a recently abandoned nursery. This place was a real nursery where the plants sold were actually grown on the site; contrast that to the retail "nurseries" which most of us now know where plants are brought in and sold like dry goods.

The nursery was called Perennial Place, and I eventually met a relative of the former owners. She invited me to help myself to the plants which were left. The plants were all growing in the ground, each type in a bed of its own of several square yards extent. This was before the big boom in perennial plants in the 1980s, the boom which brought a bewildering array of plants into our gardens - at least briefly.

At Perennial Place I remember seeing in particular autumn anemones, epimediums, hostas and this aconite. I returned later with the car and dug and hauled as much as I could. The place was about to be razed, utterly obliterated. I drove by years later and could not even identify the site of the former nursery with certainty.

This abandoned nursery made a profound impression on me: I still dream about that place, and I daydream about the things which I saw there, things which only another gardener would notice or understand.

Crocus longiflorus

Most gardeners seem to be vaguely aware that autumn crocuses exist, but few seem to realize that they have a long season of bloom; in mild years they bloom right up into the season of the earliest of what we usually think of as winter blooming crocuses. Some forms, such as Crocus laevigatus, have forms which seem to straddle the distinction we try to make between autumn and winter flowering crocuses. With a bit of cold frame protection, it’s possible to have an unbroken succession of crocuses of various sorts in flower from late September until well into February or early March.

The one shown here, Crocus longiflorus, has long been a favorite here. It’s known for its fragrance, a quality it shares with many other crocuses. Fifty years ago, when I was first learning my crocuses, this plant was not readily available, and my eventual acquisition of a few corms was a highlight of my gardening year at the time. At the time I grew Crocus speciosus, C. sativus and C. kotschyanus; I regarded the acquisition of C. longiflorus as a big step into the seemingly ever widening world of lesser known crocuses.

The palm grove

The image above shows what I jokingly call my palm grove. Two species of palm are shown: Trachycarpus fortunei and Rhapidophyllum hystrix. The former is native to western China and the latter comes from the southeastern US. In our climate Rhapidophyllum is widely regarded as the hardiest palm.

I first tried the Trachycarpus nearly forty years ago. That first plant survived for many years but eventually was lost in a particularly bad winter. A second trial did not last as long. The current plant in now bigger than any of its predecessors, big enough to be handsome and attract attention - and big enough to be vulnerable to a bad winter. Trachycarpus is easily protected with a pile of leaves when it is young, but once the trunk emerges from the ground there are basically two choices: elaborate protection or taking chances with an unprotected plant. I have not made any effort to protect the plant in the image above for years, and it's doing well. But recent winters have been abnormally mild.

The Rhapidophyllum is a more recent addition to the garden. It has never been protected during the winter.

The companion plants in the foreground are interesting, too. Most of what you see are Ruscus aculeatus, the European butcher's broom. Mixed among them are one of its close relatives, Danaë racemosa, the Alexandrian laurel. Most people are surprised to hear that both of these plants are monocots related to asparagus. I'm also sometimes asked why I write Danaë with two little dots over the e. Those two little dots (the dieresis) indicate that the a and the e are to be pronounced separately; in other words, it's a three syllable word.

This planting is one of those groupings which changes very little from season to season: other than the bright red fruits of the Ruscus and the Danaë during the winter, what you see here is what you will see at any time of year. These plants are now large enough that I might give in to the temptation to raid these plants for winter greens for the house. There is a long tradition of using both the Ruscus and the Danaë for that purpose, and there is an international trade in the cut branches. To this day I occasionally see branches of Danaë (with the fruits removed) in local butcher's cases. The Ruscus most often appears dried and spray painted for holiday decorations. It's a firm, even hard, spiky plant when alive and growing; when dried it is especially disagreeable.

Variegated yucca

As a rule, variegated plants do not do much for me: I can take them or leave them. Many of them have the look of virus infected plants. Yet some of them certainly have just the combination of novelty and beauty to not only catch your eye but to bring on a real bout of acquisitiveness. The variegated yucca is one which caught my eye and came home with me years ago. I had just dug out a long established clump of a non-variegated yucca, Yucca flaccida. That experience should have warned me off yuccas forever. Why in the world did I bring another one into the garden?

The variegated yucca (if it has a formal name, I don't know it) seen in the image above has grown on me over the years. It's one of those plants which looks about the same year round. In fact, it might as well be made of plastic. It always looks clean and fresh: it does not have a down season. The foliage sometimes shows tints of pink in addition to the green and the white. About the only change to be noticed is that it slowly grows bigger each year.

It's also long suffering: until this week, it had spent most of the summer hidden under a dense blanket of porcelain berry vine. When I freed it of its oppressive mantle, I had to admit that it was unexpectedly handsome and hale. It's a keeper.

Beauty in the beast

We gardeners have a lot to answer for. And the plant shown above is a good example. Take a look at gardening books of a century ago, and you will have no trouble finding authors singing the praises of the porcelain berry vine, Ampelopsis brevipedunculata. This much is still true: it's certainly very beautiful when it's festooned with those blue fruits.

That beauty was its passport into gardens all over the Eastern United States. That it proved to be adaptable and easily grown were pluses. It was also easily propagated. And as time told, it was very good at propagating itself. It is now a serious weed in this area. It has made itself at home in the local woodlands (where we already have native species of Ampelopsis). In my garden it has made itself very much at home. I spent hours the other day cutting it out. And that is only part of the solution because this plant sprouts readily from any substantial piece of root left in the ground. The battle will be continued next year.

The plant factory

I'm in the throes of what for me is the busiest part of the gardening year. This seems to perplex the neighbors, most of whom seem to think that the gardening year is coming to an end. No, it's not; it's just beginning.

This is also a prime time for sowing seeds or at least getting set up for the big sowing in late winter. To that end I've been cleaning up what I call the sunny cold frame corner of the garden. Earlier this week I readied one of the frames and soon had it filled with 450 little pots of newly planted seed. That's what you see above. With luck, next week that frame will have a mirror image facing it.

The weather this week has been ideal for getting things done, both outside and, during the rain, inside. The weather people reported record low daily highs this week - in other words, the daily high temperature on some days has been lower than ever before in recent recorded weather history. Right now we're in a period when the daily highs and lows don't move much up or down - we've been staying in the 40s F. day after day. My Scotch ancestors would probably feel right at home - I'm certainly loving it.

Hmmm....global warming, that was so last year!

Look what's new in the local grocery store

Yes, those are Brussels sprouts, in a condition a lot closer to the one in which they grow than those little green globes which we buy in boxes. They looked so fresh and succulent in the store that I brought a stem home with me. Guess what? Brussels sprouts are Brussels sprouts, on the stem or in the box. We noticed no real difference in taste.

On the other hand, when you walk into the kitchen and see a two foot log of Brussels sprouts, it's bound to get you curious.

Droppers

Some bulbs have the trick of forming their new bulbs deeper and deeper year after year. In some tulips the new bulb is formed at the bottom of a downward growing growth called a dropper.

Here you see something similar in little Colchicum parlatoris after several years of pot culture. The last year or two it experienced some neglect, and as a result its bulb (in this case, technically a corm) is run down and small. What's interesting to me about this is that the old corm tunics have been preserved. The newest growth was at the left hand side of what you see above - everything to the right is old growth from prior years (and none of it is alive).

After taking the picture, the new corm was repotted in better soil and near the surface. With luck, I'll be repeating this exercise in a few years, but I hope when that time comes the new corm will be back to its normal size. It's shown above on a quarter-inch grid.

This one didn't make it

It's a sad fact that wild animals in an urban setting are more likely to be seen dead than alive. I've gotten used to this, more or less. But I still get upset when I find animals dead on the road, especially close to home. The local populations of small terrestrial vertebrates must be under relentless pressure from cats and cars.

Two days ago, as I was getting into my car (which was parked in front of the house), I noticed something familiar in the street only a few feet away: it was a dead eastern garter snake, a mature male. I see garter snakes in the garden most years, especially in the early spring and early autumn, the two seasons when cool nights followed by warm days bring the snakes out to bask in the sun.

The death of an adult snake means that years of feeding and growth are for naught. Garter snakes are however prolific and give birth to (sometimes) dozens of live young. I can only hope that some of them are lurking back in the garden now.

Too bad they can't be trained not to cross the streets: when they do, they don't have much of a chance around here.

In the images above you see not only the dead snake but also some members of the clean-up crew which quickly took advantage of the situation.

Colchicum 'Rosy Dawn'

All of my gardening life I've had a big interest in colchicums. I've grown dozens of nominally different forms over the years. So many of them are so much alike that I sometimes wonder if I will ever feel confident about their names. Yet there are some which are more or less distinct, and among those are some of my favorites. I like colchicums with big, broad tepaled flowers. The one shown here, 'Rosy Dawn' certainly fits that description. When the flowers are new, they have the shape of a newly opened tulip. And the tepals of this cultivar are particularly broad. The flowers retain their deep cup shape through the initial days of bloom, but they eventually open wider. In this wide-open phase they are less attractive to me, but they are still very showy. In my experience this cultivar is not free-flowering: each sprout rarely seems to produce more than one big flower. The flowers have a proud, stocky poise; and unlike many colchicums they remain upright as long as they endure.

Habenaria radiata 2009

Little Habenaria radiata surprised me this year. In the past the plants I've seen and grown have had only one or two flowers, at most three, per stem. One of the plants here this year produced a stem with six flowers; another produced a stem with four. And they seem to be setting seed this year.

What should we be calling this plant? It's been placed in the genera Habenaria, Platanthera and Pecteilis. Each of those names still seems to be in use for other orchids, and that suggests that there is someone out there who considers them to be good genera.

One of my email correspondents says he has hybridized Habenaria radiata and Platanthera blephariglottis. I hope some idiot does not announce this as a "bi-generic hybrid" instead of doing the more reasonable thing - acknowledging that two plants which hybridize to produce viable offspring do not belong in different genera. In fact, some might say that in spite of whatever morphological differences exist between them, the ability to "hybridize" and produce viable offspring is a good sign that they are in fact the same species.

The daffodil season begins

I'll bet that most of you wouldn't know what the plant shown above is without my telling you. And then when I told you, you might think I'm a bit off and refuse to believe me. But it is a daffodil, at least in the current, usual arrangement of things. It's Narcissus serotinus, a plant which has been known to European plant enthusiasts since at least the end of the sixteenth century. It's in the old herbals, but few transalpine gardeners back in those days had probably seen it as a living plant. And there is a hint in those herbals which lends credence to that point of view. The illustration used in the old herbals was drawn from a dried plant. How do we know? First of all, notice that I wrote "illustration" rather than "illustrations". The illustration prepared by the Antwerp publisher Plantin for the works of Clusius shows an error, and that error (in the form of copies of this illustration in various degrees of fidelity to the original) was perpetuated for well into the eighteenth century. The error is this: if you look at that illustration, it seems as if the stem of the flower is jointed, somewhat like a bamboo stem. No daffodil has such a jointed scape. But it's now known that if the fresh, blooming scape is dried, it sometimes does develop wrinkles which in an illustration do look like joints. But so few people had actually seen the plant back in those days that the error persisted for centuries. See the account in Bowles' A Handbook of Narcissus (from which I've taken most of the information in this paragraph) for more details.

And why had so few people seen it? At first glance, it does seem strange: this species has an extremely wide range, from Portugal to Israel on both sides of the Mediterranean and on many Mediterranean islands. But it's a tiny plant; as daffodils go, it's hardly a prepossessing one. For another thing, it blooms in the autumn. But the third reason is the clincher: it does not grow as a garden plant in northern Europe. It requires very careful protection to be grown at all in cold, dull climates.

The first image above shows the blossom; the image below it shows the illustration used in the Historia of Clusius (the 1604 edition). According to Bowles, Clusius had first used this same illustration in 1576.

Jim to the rescue...

While out in the back garden today I looked down and saw something neat: a huge black rat snake, Elaphe obsoleta (aka Pantherophis obsoletus) . It surprised me by not making any attempt to get away (they often do that - as snakes go, they have a very laid-back disposition). Then I saw why: it had crawled into some of that bird netting I use to protect plants from deer and was trapped in it.

I carefully lifted the snake and netting from the ground; then I could see that it was really seriously entangled. The netting had cut into its skin in several places.

I put it down and went into the house to get some scissors. Then I very carefully began to cut the snake out of the netting. About eight inches of the front end of the snake (the business end!) were free, and although it maintained a striking pose through most of the ordeal as I cut, it never bit me. There were times when I felt as if I were doing surgery.

When I finally got the snake free, I took it in to show Mema. Then I got her to take my picture with the snake. Unfortunately she had trouble pointing the camera (at one point she was pointing it at a tree and kept saying "I can't see you"). The picture with me isn't great because it does not show the length of the snake - easily five feet. And it was a fat heavy one.

After all of this I returned the snake to the back garden. I put it on a vine, and it made a nice pose. I ran back in to get my camera, but in the meantime the snake had disappeared.

Mystic dahlias

I'm not really into dahlias. I admire the flowers, but I seem to get indifferent results in growing them. I've learned that there is nothing to be gained in our climate by planting them early: they make great growth initially, but when the summer weather arrives they go into a slump. They can be revived by cutting them back severely (at the height of summer, not exactly when one wants to do that sort of thing), watering them generously and feeding them. With luck, they bounce back for an encore during the autumn.

A simpler approach is to wait until early summer to plant them. This year I waited until the last week of June to plant my dahlias, and the result has been steady growth which is now blooming freely.

The dahlias you see above are representatives of a new group raised in New Zealand by Dr. Keith Hammett and called the Mystic series. I bought my plants last year and grew them that first year in pots. This year they are in the ground and are better for it. These Mystic dahlias are characterized by finely divided very dark foliage. This dark foliage makes a nice contrast to the vivid flowers. They look a lot like some of the Mexican wild dahlias.

The one shown above is 'Mystic Desire'.

More food for a hungry man

I prepare all of my own meals when I'm at home. I almost never eat out. I enjoy cooking, too, but sometimes it presents a dilemma: cooking takes time, and sometimes it's time better spent doing something else. And so the question often arises: what can I fix for dinner which is tasty but which won't keep me in the kitchen for hours?

You see one answer to that question above: popovers. It takes about ten minutes to whip up a batch of popover batter. One then simply pours it into the pans, puts it in the oven, and then comes back about an hour later to enjoy the result.

Popovers are one of those foods which can with equal success be treated as a savory or a sweet food. The batch above was made with a bit of blue cheese, an addition which nicely spiked the flavor profile. Mom and I ate the first ones slathered with butter; the remainder were eaten with orange marmalade.

×Amarcrinum

The plant shown in the image above is one of the hybrids known as ×Amarcrinum. The little times sign indicates that it is of hybrid origin; the name itself is derived from the names of the its parents, Amaryllis belladonna and Crinum moorei. This hybrid has been produced at least twice, and it is sometimes called ×Crinodonna.

Amaryllis belladonna itself does not seem to settle down in our gardens to become a good garden plant. Numerous Crinum grow well here, but their foliage is hugely out of proportion to their flowers - and none of the Crinum I've grown as garden plants could be called free blooming.

×Amarcrinum combines the fragrance, late season and manageable size of the Amaryllis belladonna parent with the ease of culture of the Crinum parent. For small local gardens it's a better choice than either parent. The foliage goes down during the winter and the plants make strong growth during our summers.

For more views of these plants, which I photographed today in a local garden, see here:

http://jimmckenney.com/x_amarcrinum_in_a_local_garden.htm

Two more glads

As more of the new glads come into bloom, I'm reminded of what I've been missing during the years I have ignored these plants. Two blooming this week show really startling color combinations. Above you see 'Flevo Kosmic' and below that is 'Velvet Eyes'. Of the two, 'Flevo Kosmic' is definitely a keeper.

I'm not so sure about 'Velvet Eyes': it's an interesting color but the color pattern on this one reminds me of that of a virus infected tulip. This cultivar is a reminder that glads provide a source of really good purples during the summer; that color combined with their tall stature and elegant bearing makes them tempting candidates for livening up late summer borders.

Impressive as these glads are, I still have my doubts about their role in our gardens. In our climate, the flowers don't last long - when it's really hot they seem to come and go within a day or two. It has long been known that as cut flowers they have the advantage of opening to the last flower in the spike; maybe the best place for them is in a vase.

Food for a hungry man

Last week I had been traveling back and forth between home and western Virginia; my hours were irregular and my eating was even less so. I fell prey to fast food repeatedly. When I got home for good, I wanted a meal high in bulk and fiber and low on fat - something interesting, flavorful and satisfying. Something as simple as a baked potato fills the bill, but it also means an hour wait for it to bake. Yet potato satisfies as few other foods do, so it had to be potato in some form.

The other day I was browsing a WWII era cookbook and came on a recipe which combined mashed potatoes and peanut butter. I was having trouble getting that taste combination in my head, so as soon as I had the chance I tried it. The potatoes were cubed and boiled in chicken stock. When the potatoes were getting soft, they and the stock were put into the food processor. About two tablespoons of peanut butter were added and the mixture was processed enough to make a thin puree. It was too thin, so I added some chunks of stale baguette to thicken it a bit. This basic peanut butter mashed potato combination is good in a bland sort of way. But I wanted something with a bit more presence on the palate. I began to make additions…

Talk about fusion food. Earlier that same day I had been reading a Greek cookbook (think skordalia and taramosalata), and unconsciously those preparations must have guided my next additions. The first additions were a bit of olive oil and some chopped garlic. The result? Good, but I knew it could be better. Then I added some chopped cilantro and the juice of a lime. Now I was getting somewhere.

But it still needed something, and that something was serendipitously on hand: kippers, smoked kippers if that’s not redundant. I say serendipitously because I’m probably the only person in our family who even knows what a kipper is. I broke the kipper up into small pieces and ran the food processor enough to incorporate it thoroughly into the potato mixture.

The final result was comfort food of the best sort – a nice combination of the familiar flavors of the potato, peanut butter and garlic combined with the intriguing, sprightly flavors of the cilantro and lime and the smoky quality imparted by the kippers.

What we didn’t eat right away appeared at lunch the next day, this time as little balls rolled in flour and fried until crisp in olive oil. These were delicious spread on celery.

Glamini glads

This year I’m trialing various garden glads. This week a form new to me has started to bloom. These are sold under the name Glamini Glads.

Experienced gardeners generally have plenty of stories to tell about the absurdities of the mass-distribution catalogs: the hyperbole, the misidentifications, the outrageous colors (blue tulips, roses and dahlias, anyone?) and the dubious hardiness claims. Why this happens is beyond me because, in most cases, the plants themselves deserve better than this shabby treatment.

The catalog entry for these Glamini glads provides a good example. It shows what seem to be typical garden glads cut down and stuffed into a container; such foliage as can be seen is suspiciously short, and the stumpy, graceless inflorescences squirm artlessly upwards as if to distance themselves from the deception taking place below them.

Forget all of that. In the garden these Glamini glads are really graceful and beautiful. They measure over 30” high with three inch flowers. The flower colors are appealing: they remind me of sherbet colors.

Count these as a good addition to our garden flora (at least until the thrips find them).

I purchased these as a mix and then went back to the catalog to identify them as they bloomed. So take the cultivar names given here with a grain of salt. If I've got them right, the one above is 'Emily' and the one below is 'Zoe'.

I wonder where I got it...

Late this afternoon I wandered into the kitchen to look for something. There on the kitchen table was the paper napkin and rows of leaves you see above. Mom had been out in the garden and picked up some crepe myrtle leaves which were showing early color. She has an eye for leaves showing unusual color patterns or particularly vivid color. In a few weeks she'll be bringing in leaves of the Franklin tree (glorious, waxy scarlet) and any others which catch her eye.

I have memories from early childhood of short neighborhood trips mom, my sister and I took to collect leaves, acorns, grasses, feathers - whatever chance and the season offered. My sister would have been in the Taylor Tot at that age, I would have been four or five.

Mom got us pointed in the right direction at an early age.

Hibiscus syriacus 'Blue Satin'

A plant of Hibiscus syriacus ‘Blue Satin’ was obtained earlier this year. I’ve had my eye on this cultivar for several years, and I’ve always hesitated. Why have I hesitated? Because Hibiscus syriacus cultivars, with the exception of some notable cultivars to be mentioned later, have the potential to infest your garden with hundreds of unwanted seedlings. This small shrub is one of the ultimate pass-along plants: so much so that there is inescapably something trashy and weedy about it. It’s often seen flourishing on abandoned inner-city lots and other waste places. It’s widely known as Rose of Sharon or called Althaea, a name sometimes used as the generic name of hollyhocks. They are both members of the mallow (hibiscus) family, Malvaceae.

These blue-flowered cultivars of Hibiscus syriacus (there is also ‘Blue Bird’) become a nuisance once they begin to bloom freely. One must either pick off the spent blooms frequently or be prepared to pull seedlings for years. But are there any other large-flowered, blue-flowered hardy shrubs for their season? I can’t think of any with large flowers. There are the various Buddleja, Vitex and Caryopteris, but all of those depend on flower clusters for effect: the individual flowers are tiny.

Individual blooms of ‘Blue Satin’ are about 3 or 4 inches in diameter. The color is hard to describe. Early in the morning, out of direct sun light, they seem blue, the sort of blue seen in some hardy Geranium. By noon, in bright sunlight the magenta tones are strengthened, and the color, to my eyes at least, is much less attractive. The same thing happens with the blue-flowered garden geraniums I know. Of the images shown above, the upper one was made before the sun struck the bloom, the lower one was made in full sunlight.

Something really exciting happened in the Rose-of-Sharon world in 1970: the United States National Arboretum named and introduced the beautiful triploid cultivar ‘Diana’. Not only was it beautiful, it rarely produces seed. No trash plant this, it’s a beautiful addition to our summer garden flora. The tantalizing excitement continued in 1980 when the Arboretum introduced three more of these triploid cultivars, ‘Aphrodite’, ‘Helene’ and ‘Minerva’.

Exciting as these cultivrs are, they are not the plant for which some of us were patiently waiting. The untimely death of Donald R. Egolf, who had guided the development of these cultivars, evidently brought an end to this line of breeding. What we are still waiting for, of course, is a triploid, seed-free, blue-flowered Hibiscus syriacus.

Until that happens, if you want a blue-flowered Rose of Sharon be prepared to spend a lot of time cleaning up after its prodigious seedling production.

For more information about the US National Arboretum introductions, check out these links:

http://www.usna.usda.gov/Newintro/diana.html

http://www.usna.usda.gov/Newintro/hibiscus.pdf

Lycoris squamigera is a tough one!

When I left the garden shown in the Lycoris squamigera in a country garden series, I was carrying a bag of Lycoris squamigera bulbs. My hostess offered them to me with the comment that they had been dug earlier in the spring. As she returned from the house with the bulbs, my expectations rose because she had a plastic grocery bag with what seemed to be a muskmelon-sized lump. As soon as she handed the bag to me, my hopes were dashed: the bag weighed about as much as a peanut and, as a discrete squeeze revealed, seemed to contain only chaff.
When I got to the car, I took a closer look. Yes, the bulbs were extremely desiccated; but they seemed to have a solid core. Maybe a bit of life lurked in some of them.
I soaked them at the first chance, and something amazing happened. Within a few hours those bulbs went from featherweight ghosts to heavy, plump, seemingly normal bulbs. I was amazed, although I should not have been. I’ve known Nerine to do the same thing: shrink down from a two inch diameter bulb to a pencil-thin core during the dry season and then miraculously plump up with the first good soaking.
Those Lycoris squamigera bulbs are not wasting any time: they are already sprouting new roots!

Lycoris squamigera in a country garden

At about this time last year I stumbled upon a small country garden full of Lycoris squamigera. A knock on the door of the house did not bring an answer, and I was reluctant to enter the garden without permission. It was very tempting, especially since the garden was unfenced and very welcoming.

I was in the same area this weekend and took a detour from my planned route to see if I could find this same garden this year. Not only did I find it; this time the mistress of the garden was on hand to invite me in and tell me a bit about the history of the garden and its plants. I was probably there for about two hours: an hour and forty-five minutes chatting and fifteen minutes photographing plants.

I would not be surprised to hear that others have seen similar gardens in the small towns nestled in farming country across the land. The garden I visited Friday was bright with phlox, August lilies, physostegia, perennial herbaceous hibiscus and balloon flower. But the real show came from the hundreds of Lycoris squamigera.

I hope everyone enjoys these pictures. They are a glimpse of a form of gardening which is probably slowly disappearing. And only someone with very deep pockets indeed would be able to plant Lycoris squamigera in this quantity now.

For more images, take a look here:

http://jimmckenney.com/Lycoris%20squamigera%20iacg.htm

Be sure to click on the images to see the enlarged version.

Lycoris longituba

The genus Lycoris has had an interesting history in our gardens. Some, such as Lycoris squamigera and L. sanguinea, were well known in New England gardens a century ago. Others, such as L. radiata, became naturalized in the Gulf states. L. squamigera became the common Lycoris of the North and L. radiata became the common species in the South. Other species were imported occasionally, but the stocks were typically mixed, there were the usual problems with accurate nomenclature, and commercial nurserymen here in the US did not take them up enthusiastically. Nor, it seems, did the gardening public. Was there ever a "Lycoris Society" ? I don't think so. One Sam Caldwell made a stir about forty years ago by showing a nice range of hybrids. Few people back then had ever seen a Lycoris seed, much less a home grown hybrid. Nothing permanent seems to have come from Caldwell's work.

Now there are probably more varied Lycoris available than at any time in the past. Hardy yellow-flowered Lycoris, long a holy grail of Lycoris enthusiasts, are now readily available. More to the point, there are now several Lycoris forms readily available which set viable seed: these promise an even brighter future for these plants in our gardens.

The plant shown here, Lycoris longituba, is a relatively new arrival in my garden. These were obtained in 2007 and are blooming here for the first time this year. This Lycoris longituba is said to be a good species, good in the sense that it sets viable seed which, if grown on, produce more Lycoris longituba. But from what I've read, the cultivated stocks seem to be variable.

The catalog description led me to expect white-flowered plants. Indeed, from a distance they do look white. But close up it becomes apparent that the color is more complex: the white is suffused with orange and yellow, giving an orange-juice-in-milk effect. It's very beautiful.

The fragrance of this one is pleasant, a quality it does not share with all of its relatives. The plant we call Lycoris squamigera, for instance, has a scent which to me is the scent of vinyl.

For the future: there are at least two different (purportedly) yellow-flowered species growing here: I'll show those when and if they bloom.

What triggers bloom in Lycoris? So far, it seems to be an unsolved mystery.

Fuchsia 'Gartenmeister Bonstedt'

The hummingbirds and I both like this plant a lot.

As a group, fuchsias are little grown in our local gardens. One sees them in numbers around Mother’s Day: the local nurseries sell loads of them. About a month and a half later one sees those same plants dangling from some porch rafter in a hanging basket, hanging on not only to the rafter but to dear life, mostly defoliated, partially dried up, a pathetic sight ready for the trash bin. Evidently there are cultivars which can be successfully grown here, but they don’t seem to be catching on with local gardeners.

One which does very well here is shown above. This is 'Gartenmeister Bonstedt', an old hybrid of Fuchsia triphylla. It has the potential to bloom year round: the plant in the image above has done just that. The blooming period typically begins here sometime in June as the newest growth begins to produce flower buds. Bloom continues steadily right into the new year (it comes inside sometime in November; indoor life slows it down but the blooms keep coming). In most years it will take a break from February to May or so, but last year it bloomed throughout the winter and early spring, too.

The genus Fuchsia is named for Leonhard Fuchs, a sixteenth century German botanist. The plant was not known to Fuchs; it was discovered about a century and a half after his death. The typical American pronunciation is FEW-sha; Herr Fuchs would be better remembered if we were to pronounce it FOOKS-e-a. If you know how to do the glottal ch, so much the better.

Lilium 'Black Beauty', Salvia guaranitica

If I’m ever asked to recommend a lily for a public planting, or if a gardener new to lilies asks me to recommend a good starter lily, I won’t hesitate in picking one: it’s got to be ‘Black Beauty’. To my eyes it’s much more attractive than the hybrids derived from it. It retains from its wild parents poise which is lacking in its descendants. It’s fragrant, but not overweeningly so. It’s as reliable and vigorous as any lily known to horticulture. It’s big enough to make a show in the garden, yet its innate grace saves it from being a lout.

It’s also just about the last reliable lily to bloom each year in the garden. This year it’s making a particularly good show with some nearby Salvia guaranitica. The color of this salvia does not carry, but up close it’s the sort of color on which the eye can feast. The salvia and the lily are about the same height, with the sparse inflorescence of the salvia at about the same height as the lily flowers. This is a combination I’ve grown to like very much.

Eustoma grandiflorum

Forty years ago I was in the Army stationed in central Texas. I was there for a full year, and thus had the chance to see the local flora (and some of the fauna, too) through an entire yearly cycle. For someone who grew up east of the Mississippi, this first glimpse of life west of the river was a real eye-opener. I spent every spare minute out in the field collecting and soaking it all in.
One day in the barracks I noticed that I was not the only one who collected the local vegetation. There was briefly a Japanese man in our unit, and one day I noticed that he was carefully pasting a sample of the local vegetation into what appeared to be a letter. I mistakenly jumped to the conclusion that his interests were botanical; as it turned out, he was finishing up a letter to someone back home (he was very reticent about it all) and all I could gather was that the blade of grass and blossom I noticed had a purely sentimental or poetic significance for him.
Those months in Texas certainly made a good impression on me. There were so many exciting discoveries: my life back then reminds me of a certain risible boy’s book published in the early twentieth century, a book where on every page a rattlesnake, tarantula or Gila monster wanders into the story to liven things up. In the book it was ridiculous, but in real life it was just that, real. Gila monsters don’t live in Texas, and I never saw a wild rattlesnake, but there were the occasional Texas copperheads (very beautiful, much more so than the local Maryland ones), plenty of tarantulas if you knew where to look (I quickly figured that out), and scorpions.
The flora was mostly new to me. I’ll never forget the thrill of seeing Eustoma grandiflorum in full bloom in a dry summer field. The plants were about three feet high and full of dark purple bloom. I didn’t know what it was when I first found it, but it didn’t take long to find out.
Eustoma is nothing new in cultivation – seed lists from the early part of the twentieth century sometimes list them. But the modern cultivated strains are the result of more modern effort to commercialize this plant. I have no idea why they are marketed under the old name Lisianthus. And, I believe, these modern strains were first developed in Japan.
And that makes me wonder if that Japanese man I saw putting local flora into his letters had anything to do with it: wouldn’t it be an amazing coincidence if he did!

The plants you see in the image above were a Mothers' Day gift from my sister and brother in law to Mom.

If you are new to botanical nomenclature but trying to learn, you are perhaps puzzled why the genus name ends in the letter a (suggesting that it is feminine) yet the species name ends in -um suggesting it is neuter. The Greek word stoma (which usually means mouth) is neuter, so the adjective modifying it must be neuter also. If a botanical family should ever be established based on this name, it would be spelled Eustomataceae, not Eustomaceae because the oblique stem of stoma is stomat-.

When the author of a botanical name does not explicitly state the meaning of the name, there can be no certainty about what it means. Various publications have given "meanings" for the word Eustoma, most of them focusing on the usual meaning of the Greek word stoma (mouth). These meanings tend to be infelicitous (I'm reminded of the German Maultasch) . But stoma can also mean the entire face, and with that in mind I prefer to think that Eustoma means "pretty face".

Calla lilies

Although I’ve grown these South African plants all of my gardening life, I have never felt comfortable about them as garden plants. Long ago I realized that one of them, Zantedeschia albomaculata, was hardy in our gardens. And that realization prompted me to try a few others. But as a group, calla lilies have yet to achieve a permanent place in my garden.
It’s time to change that. Evidently they are a lot more reliable as garden plants than my limited experience has suggested. A few years ago Wayne and I saw huge, floriferous clumps in a western Virginia garden. These plants topped out at three and four feet high and had formed thick clumps. The discussions on the Internet forums suggest that they are surviving winters well north of me. Get busy, Jim…
Zantedeschia are aroids, jack-in-the-pulpit relatives. What we call the flower is in fact a colorful modified leaf, technically a spathe, which surround the real flowers. The real flowers are inconspicuous little things hidden inside that spathe. The spathe lasts in good condition much longer than any true flower: little wonder that these are popular florist flowers.
I’m now growing eight different cultivars – that’s a fraction of what’s currently available. The one in the image above is ‘Sunshine’. It was planted in late June and is in bloom already.

Tuberous begonias

Although in a recent blog I said that the tuberous begonias do not thrive in our area, in doing so I was mostly repeating uninformed gossip. The prevailing attitude is that they do not do well here. But even in the older literature from eastern North America, there were those who stood up and said that although there are problems, these plants are well worth growing,
Over fifty years ago, in the Silver Spring neighborhood where I grew up, one of my neighbors grew tuberous begonias in a big way. He ordered the bulbs from California and planted them in a long (maybe 30’) bed at the back of his garden. I sometimes saw him in the woods gathering top soil for his begonia bed. As a youngster I took these begonias for granted: I had no idea that what he was doing successfully was the exception rather than the rule.
My own first trials with tuberous begonias came long after those times. For me, they were not good garden plants, and I soon lost interest in them. But occasionally I would see photographs (especially in older books) of tuberous begonias growing luxuriously in favored climates, and this would bring on another wave of temptation.
It happened again this year: I saw picotee flowered tuberous begonias illustrated in one of the catalogs. Actually, I had been noticing them for several years. And by then I had also dreamed up some schemes which might make their successful cultivation possible here. So I ordered a half dozen earlier this year, and the first of them have been blooming for weeks.
So far they look great. And they are beginning to bloom freely.
Am I counting my chickens before they hatch? Is there some serious tuberous begonia problem in my future? We’ll see: but for now, enjoy the image above. With luck, there will be many more in the weeks ahead.

The ageing gardener

I’m at the age where it’s probably appropriate to start to think about the disposition of my goods so-to-speak. And while I don’t expect a precipitating event to occur any time soon, my sense of what old age really means has changed a lot in recent years. By “really means” what I mean is the distinction between being alive on the one hand and on the other hand being a full participant in life. Although from a perspective which takes into account only health issues, there is every reason to believe that I’ll live a lot longer, I now realize that simply being alive does not count for all that much. I’m paying a lot more attention to the lives lived by otherwise healthy older people lately, and the one thing I notice is that we experience a huge drop off in physical activity as we age.

Should I live a long time longer, and should my mind still function reasonably well, I probably won’t be doing much but sitting and reminiscing. Evidently, even for those lucky enough to retain their memory, the process of recollection even slows down. I remember hearing someone on the radio describing the adaptations needed to deal with an elderly parent: the one which fascinated me the most had to do with recall. The speaker told the story of visiting her elderly father and, at one point in the conversation, asking him a question. He did not answer. But the next day, when she was visiting him again and having another conversation, he unexpectedly and spontaneously blurted out the answer to her question of the day before.

This elderly person gave on the first day the impression that he had lost his memory. But it was not his memory which was faulty, it was the recall process. And it was not really faulty, it had just slowed down. The data were still on the disk, but there was so much else on the disk that it took longer to evoke it.

So what does this have to do with gardening? Well, for one thing, I’ve collected a lot of plants and a lot of books over the years. If I wait too long to disperse these, it will never happen with my participation. So it has occurred to me that the time to do this is before I lose both the energy to do it and the wit to do it gracefully.

That’s in another forty years, right?

Indian pipes

Because this is a gardening blog, you might be surprised to see an entry about a plant which is, in most usual senses, not in cultivation.

Yet in a sense, this one is.

For years there has been a profuse annual fruiting of a basidiomycete fungus of the genus Russula along one side of our house. This is a site which has been lawn for the last fifty years. Until recently, I had assumed that the Russula were parasitizing two Pinus palustris which grew nearby. However, the pines were removed two years ago, and the Russula persist. The only conifers nearby are a huge old Cephalotaxus and some garden yews. So perhaps one of those is serving as the host plant for the Russula.

About two weeks ago I had a huge surprise: a spot of white caught my eye near the Cephalotaxus. As I focused in on this, I could hardly believe my eyes: there was a clump of Indian pipe, Monotropa uniflora, emerging from the ground.

I’ve known this plant from childhood: its flowering was an annual event in a pine woods near my home. Back then, the plant was thought to be a saprophyte (from the classical Greek word for rot; the word sepsis is derived from a related word.) The modern take on this is even more interesting. Although Monotropa uniflora is a higher plant (in fact, it is placed in the same botanical family as azaleas and blueberries) it has no chlorophyll and is a parasite. A parasite on what? As it turns out, it’s a parasite on fungi of the family Russulaceae.

So the Monotropa is parasitic on the Russula fungus, and the Russula fungus is parasitic on a nearby conifer.

Other than planting the likely conifer host, I had nothing to do with this. In the distant past I had scattered Monotropa seed in the garden, but not as far as I remember anywhere near the plant now blooming.

Lily season 2009 brings an unexpected climax

What for me was the last of three lily shows this year took place yesterday and today at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. This is the show sponsored by the Mid-Atlantic Lily Society. Off and on for the last twenty-five years I’ve participated in these shows, usually as a judge and sometimes as an exhibitor. This year I was there in both capacities. I helped judge the early part of the judging, and it was a show marked by the generally high quality of the stems. We awarded one first place ribbon after another in class after class. And then I had to step out because I had a stem in the section being judged.

When I returned to the exhibition hall about twenty minutes later, I had a very nice surprise waiting for me: the stem I brought to the show won the Longwood Award for Best Stem in Show. Although there will be lilies blooming in the garden for several more weeks, it’s hard to top that as a climax for lily season 2009!

Modern lilies

Those of you who follow this blog no doubt noticed that June was a lean month for entries. There is a reason: lilies. That is, lilies and the lily shows. Lilies bloom here in abundance and variety from early June (sometimes late May) into the earliest days of August. There are two big peaks: the first happens around the summer solstice; the second about two weeks later. We are in the throes of the second peak now: this is when the most magnificent and staggeringly beautiful lilies bloom in this garden.

I'm happy to say I've been growing lilies for over a half century, and it's been a half century marked by continual improvement in the quality and health of our garden lilies. Modern lilies show characteristics which only a few decades ago occurred mostly in our dreams. And if you are the sort of lily grower for whom bigger is always better, then you are a happy lily grower indeed. Hybridizers have successfully combined the size, fragrance and form of some of the largest flowered wild lilies with the ease of culture of some of the most garden-reliable lilies. Now anyone with sun and well drained soil can grow spectacular lilies, reliable lilies which return year after year.

Most of the lilies in the image above are the imposing cultivar 'Silk Road'. One stands under these lilies and looks up at the inflorescence.

Gardenia 'Shooting Star'

I grew up in a neighborhood where there were several keen gardeners, the sort of gardeners who were always trying something new and edgy. I remember seeing Phygelius capensis in one garden, and in that same garden there was an ongoing effort to keep a gardenia alive from year to year. It's long been known that gardenias are marginally hardy in our area: skillful mulching and covering will sometimes bring the florist's gardenia through even our winters.

I wonder what those gardeners from fifty years ago would think of the hardy gardenias we now have? There are several of these making the rounds; the best known name is 'Kleim's Hardy'. The one shown above is 'Shooting Star'. The flowers of this cultivar and those of 'Kleim's Hardy' are similar; 'Shooting Star' seems to be a more vigorous, taller plant.

You won't mistake the blooms of these plants for those of the florist's gardenia. These hardy sorts have smaller flowers, and the flowers have only five petals. But they have the luscious gardenia fragrance in abundance, and that earns them a place in this garden. They also set fruit, although I have not tested the seed to see if it is viable.

Begonia 'Fireworks'

Last year, late in the season for bedding plants, I got wind of a newish begonia suitable for summer garden and pot use in our climate. The plant in question is Begonia 'Fireworks', said to be a hybrid of Begonia boliviensis. I searched several of the local garden centers, but was unable to track down a plant. Several of the people who worked at the garden centers knew the plant - always an encouraging sign - but had no idea of where to get one so late in the season.

This year I had better luck. The plant you see in the image above was obtained in mid-May and has been dripping with bloom since then. So far it shows no sign of slowing down. This plant seems to be a better choice for our climate than the other Begonia boliviensis hybrid likely to be seen in our gardens, Begonia × bertinii (I grow the cultivar 'Skaugum').

A new begonia on the block

That the large-flowered tuberous begonias do not thrive in our climate is a major disappointment. The so-called Non-Stop hybrids are said by some to be more easily grown, but I don’t see them much in local gardens. Local shops sell them in the spring, and they sometimes turn up in summer bedding schemes.

This year Wayne spotted some begonias in a street-side planting down in the commercial part of nearby Bethesda, Maryland. When he described them to me on the phone, I assumed that they were Non-Stop begonias. He Googled Non-Stop and decided that what he saw was a bit different; in particular, the leaves were less pointed and more rounded. That sounded to me more like one of the Rieger or Hyemalis hybrids. He Googled these and decided that while the leaves were more like those he saw, the flower colors were different.

I was puzzled. As it turned out, I had been admiring some begonias in a neighbor’s garden recently, all the while assuming that they were Non-Stop hybrids. When I showed these to Wayne by flashlight one night while walking Biscuit, the owner of the garden suddenly appeared out of nowhere to see what was going on. Luckily, I knew him well, although I suspect that he was not sure he was not interrupting a begonia-napping.

We could see that they were not Non-Stop begonias, but what were they? The owner of the plants we saw did not have a name for them. A few days later I talked to his lawn and garden man to see if he knew the name: no luck there, either.

It was time to go for professional help. I asked about begonias at one of the big garden centers. Finally, someone who might know about them was located. He knew about the Hyemalis Hybrids and took me over to see a handsome display of these. When I told him that we were getting closer but had still not found the right plant, he mentioned that earlier in the season they had been selling some bedding begonias which looked a bit like the Hyemalis Hybrids. We went searching for these and finally found some mixed in among some Non-Stop begonias. At last I had a name: Solenia Begonias.

I purchased two and headed home. A quick Google search turned up plenty of information although not enough. For instance, how sun tolerant are these plants? Will they perform well throughout our summers? And are they tuberous or not? Later in the year I’ll post the results I get here.

Wayne now has three of them (pale yellow, light red and dark red) and I’ve got one (the dark red, a really beautiful color called Velvet Red). If these turn out to be good garden or pot plants here, they will be a valuable addition to our summer garden flora.

Mema and the cardinal

We no longer feed the birds with seed. We stopped this practice over a year ago because of the rodent problem. Squirrels are bad enough, but the other ones which come at night are even worse. We were making it too easy for them.

Now we feed the birds by smearing peanut butter on the deck railing. This has the advantage of making it harder for the squirrels to dominate the feeding stations, and there is nothing to fall to the ground for the mice and rats to eat. So far, the peanut butter seems to appeal to a limited variety of local birds: cardinals in particular seem to appreciate it.

In the image above you can see Mema putting out the peanut butter. About six feet to her right you can see an impatient male cardinal waiting for her to leave. The cardinals seem to recognize her: as soon as she comes into the kitchen in the morning, they fly up to the big glass doors and call to get her attention. When she goes out with the peanut butter, they sit nearby and seem relatively fearless.

Campanula trachelium 'Bernice'

Campanula trachelium ‘Bernice’

This plant has surprised me by growing well here, but it has disappointed me because the flowers bleach so rapidly in the sun and heat. It’s a pity because double flowered plants typically last in good condition much longer than their single-flowered congeners.

This is a relatively short cultivar, only about eighteen inches high here. Each flower is about the size of a big pecan. The single flower shown above does not suggest as much, but it's a floriferous plant.

Why didn’t I already know this?

A while back I was having a discussion with a gardening friend about the specialized requirements of certain plants. The conversation wandered into the realm of those plants which require acidic conditions. And then my friend dropped the bomb: in response to my complaint about the sometimes indifferent results I get with these plants, he pointed out that the local tap water had a neutral pH. Every time I watered a bed carefully prepared for acid loving plants, I was unintentionally raising the pH in the bed.

I noticed an interesting demonstration of this phenomenon lately. Several months ago I bought a plant of Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Forever and Ever Blue’ which had a brilliant blue inflorescence when I purchased it. That inflorescence faded and was removed. A new one began to develop recently. The new one is not brilliant blue: it’s a sort of purplish blue. I attribute this change to the influence of our tap water.

We Americans butcher this word hydrangea. It's commonly pronounced as a three syllable word: high-DRAN-ja. To begin with, it's a four syllable word. If you follow the traditional rules for the pronunciation of Latinized Greek, the stress is on the ge: hy-dran-GE-a. The y is pronounced like the e in hero, and the ge is pronounced gay. Now when was the last time you heard that?

The upper image (taken May 10) shows the inflorescence as purchased; the lower one (taken July 6) shows the influence of our local tap water.

My favorite daylily

My favorite daylily isn’t a daylily at all in the contemporary sense of the word daylily. It’s a hosta, Hosta ventricosa. If you read garden books from a century ago, you’ll see that hostas were called daylilies back then. They were so-called for the same reason Hemerocallis were called daylilies: their flowers are very short lived. But the flowers of Hosta ventricosa are born abundantly and bring a rare color to the July garden. The scapes will top three feet, and when the plants are in full bloom they produce a very appealing haze of cool color. I don’t know Hosta cultivars well, but if there is a better flowering plant in the genus, I don’t know it. The foliage is sun tolerant, and the plant is also seemingly very drought tolerant for such a broad-leaved plant.

This plant sets viable seed abundantly. If I were starting a new garden, I would raise it from seed in order to have it in broad masses. The foliage seems to be more pest resistant than that of some cultivars; and it’s a pleasing dark green, not at all like the foliage of the glaucous sorts or the yellow-green of the August lily. Deer and rabbits so far have not bothered the foliage very much here – although the deer do browse the budded scapes. The blooms of this plant combine surprisingly well with a wide variety of other flower colors. It is also very handsome as you see it in one of the images above, with nothing but other foliage to enhance its handsome form.

Please note that the genus name, Hosta, honors a Mr. Host, not a Mr. Hast.

The dragon yawns...

...and is his breath ever foul! Dracunculus vulgaris is blooming today. The flowering of this plant is always an event in the garden - a wonderful celebration of the grotesque, ribald, disgusting, exotic, outrageous, extravagant, repellent and of course hilariously vulgar... Hold your nose and enjoy it as long as you can.

Clematis 'Sieboldii'

This is the plant more often called Clematis florida sieboldii, or C. florida bicolor, or even C. florida sieboldiana. It’s doubtful that it is unhybridized Clematis florida, so I’ve listed it as you see it above.

It’s an old garden plant, how old no one really knows. It was introduced to European gardens from Japan in the early nineteenth century according to Bean. That means that it’s about two hundred years old at least. Clematis florida itself is not native to Japan, and that lends credence to the notion that this cultivar is of hybrid origin.

In the older literature it has a bipolar reputation: extravagant praise for the unusual flowers (when I Googled it I discovered that some are now calling it the passion flower clematis) combined with sourpuss comments about the difficulties encountered in growing it. Even now there seems to be uncertainty about its cold hardiness. I had to try more than once before I got a plant to settle down here.

This is not a large-flowered clematis: the blooms are about three inches wide, comparable to those of many of the viticella hybrids.

I’ve known about this plant for most of my gardening life, and it’s very nice now to have it – evidently established – in the garden.

Another dead rat story

I’m a foodie, and evidently a bit of a “super-taster”. Let me get wind of some obscure taste sensation, and I want to try it. More often that not, these “taste sensations” come from the humbler ranges of the food spectrum. Cilantro provides a good example: when I became aware of cilantro over twenty years ago, it took many trials before I could get used to its distinctive taste and smell. But get used to it I did: a day came when I smelled a bundle of fresh cilantro and began to salivate profusely. Since then, there has been no turning back.

Some people can not abide the taste and aroma of cilantro, even after many trials. I’ve been feeding Wayne cilantro, or trying to, ever since my own conversion. But to this day it’s “soap plant” to him. There is speculation that the aversion some people experience is genetic in origin: try as they might, these people will never get over their dislike of cilantro.

Cilantro has its enthusiasts, and I’m happy to count myself among them. But if it had turned out that I could not get used to it, I probably would not have cared much. But what happens when your genetic makeup denies you a pleasure which is, if not universally trumpeted, at least widely and persuasively pressed? I’ve got truffles in mind as I write this. It turns out that all the exquisite things attributed to truffles are genetically denied to some of us. To some people they are the food of the gods, evidently the naughty gods in partiuclar. To a smaller group they are nothing special. And to a third group, they are repellent. It’s my misfortune to be a member of that third group. To me, truffles smell like dead rat.

Years ago, when white truffle oil began to appear in the high end food shops, I parted with about twenty dollars for a tiny container which probably deserved the name phial. When I got home with this treasure, it was with a sense of exalted high purpose that I unscrewed the cap and brought the opening of the vessel up to my expectant nose. I sensuously inhaled the long anticipated essence - and nearly barfed. What a reek! It was not just the vague smell of rancid oil, it was the assertive scent of dead rodent. I was furious: had I been sold an out-of-date bottle? Then I tried it on someone else. I didn’t tell them what to expect. I mischievously waited for them to get the whiff of dead rat. But they seemed to like it. I tried it on the dog: the dog loved it!

What was wrong with me?

Years later I Googled truffles, began to read what other foodies were saying on their blogs about them, and discovered that I was not alone in my reaction to the aroma of truffles. In fact, I found one blog entry which described this odor exactly as I did: dead rat.

No one else complained about the odor coming from under the stove this week (see the previous entry). Were they all smelling truffles?

Dead rat story

For the last two weeks, whenever I open the cabinets under the stove where I store potatoes and onions, there has been a strong dead mammal reek. When I first noticed it, I assumed it was a potato which went bad. I took out all of the potatoes, sorted out any which had even the slightest sign of trouble, and sat back thinking the problem had been solved.

It hadn’t. Not only was the odor still there, but it seemed to be getting worse. My first thought was that it was a dead mouse. Mice follow the gas pipes which lead to the stove, and that takes them right to the potato/onion bins. I’ve never known them to bother onions, but on rare occasions a potato will show signs of gnawing. Sweet potatoes on the other hand are quickly sampled. And then there was this: the odor seemed to be getting worse. A week later it was as strong as ever. A dead mouse would not stink that long; was it a dead rat?

The vegetable bins are on one side of this space. The other side is occupied by an assortment of culinary potions which has accumulated over the years. This includes things like various vinegars (there were four different rice vinegars when I looked today), what in the bad old days were known as sauces (ten-year old oyster sauce anyone?) and various spirits ( port, sherry, rum, a very old un-opened bottle of Canadian Club, Marsala, vermouth) and the results of various impulse purchases at the import store (mostly Russian fruit syrups and juices – Aronia, black currant, sour cherry).

Convinced that the decomposing corpse of a dead rodent lay hidden among all of those bottles, I took each one out, dusted it off, checked the cap for a good seal, and put them aside. As the last few bottles came out, it was clear that there was no dead rodent. Yet the stench was still there. I got a flashlight and peered down along the gas pipes as far as I could see: there was no sign of a dead anything.

What was going on? If anything, the smell now seemed to be stronger in the kitchen itself rather than under the stove. But where in the world was it coming from? The only thing I had not examined carefully was the onion bin. I took the onions out one by one: they were Vidalia onions, an onion which has a half life of several hours in our kitchen. No, the Vidalias were fine. There was a sweet potato in the same bin – it was light and dry, well on its way to becoming a cork. There was a shallot – nothing bad there.

And there was a plastic bag with garlic. Uh oh, what’s this? The plastic bag had traces – stains - of some now mostly dried brown liquid all over it. When I lifted the bag, there was a nearly dry puddle of the same dark brew. The stench was now reaching the truly disgusting level. Of the three heads of garlic in the bag, two seemed fine except for the bad company they were keeping: the third head was soft and reeking.

Problem solved – well, sort of. Now that the stench is gone, the mice will no doubt return.

Clematis 'Madame Jules Correvon'

I first became aware of the excellence of this cultivar years ago when I read an article about its use at Wave Hill. It's one of the viticella group hybrids, a group known for the great vigor of its members. The best known member of this group is Clematis 'Jackmanii'. The pruning of the clematis in this group is simple: in early winter cut them down to about a foot above the ground. They respond in the spring by putting up new growth which can be fifteen feet or more long. Plants pruned in this way bloom a bit later than those not pruned, but they make much more vigorous, cleaner growth.

The clematis of this group are ideal for combining with the hybrid roses derived from Rosa luciae and Rosa wichuraiana. They nearly match them in vigor, and their colors harmonize nicely. Years ago this garden boasted a huge plant of Rosa 'New Dawn' through which grew an equally robust plant of Clematis viticella: this was a great combination.

Clematis 'Madame Jules Correvon' is frequently misnamed Madame Julia Correvon or some variant on that.

For another opinion on the name, see this:

http://www.clematis.hull.ac.uk/iclsframe.cfm?page=page69

The wash bear

Raccoons are a common sight here: they raid the garbage cans nightly, they dig in the garden, they party on the roof, they make a mess in the pond and terrorize the gold fish. They are also charming, engaging, intelligent, quick to learn and brave but not aggressive.

They are also vulnerable to rabies, and folk wisdom says stay away from any raccoon wandering around in the daylight. The other day while walking Biscuit, I noticed a neighbor peering into the bushes around his house. He told me there was a sick raccoon in the bushes, and he was waiting for "animal control" to come and pick it up.

The one in the image above was doing just that, wandering around in broad daylight. I was sitting in the kitchen reading the newspaper and out of the corner of my eye noticed something outside, something big, crossing the deck only a foot or two from where I was sitting. It was the young raccoon you see above. It looked half starved and a bit sickly. I opened the door a bit to shoo it away, and it just sat there looking up at me. And then I noticed something else: it has an open gash on its back.

I took a quick look in the refrigerator to see what I could give it, give it for what might be its last meal. A moment later it was gnawing on a piece of chicken. After it left the deck, I encountered it again in the back of the garden. I think it's a female, and I'm hoping that it will show up a few months from now with some young ones.

Lilium hansonii

Lily season 2009 opened yesterday with Lilium hansonii, Peter Hanson’s Lily, and one of its hybrid progeny, a lily I call “Preston Yellow”. Both have interesting histories.

Lilium hansonii was introduced from Japan in the 1860s. To this day there is an element of uncertainty with regard to the natural distribution of this lily. There are seemingly wild populations in both Japan and around Vladivostok on the mainland; but there is suspicion that these are introduced. The known sexually reproducing, indigenous populations are apparently all Korean.

The form of Lilium hansonii introduced to the West was evidently clonal in nature: all the bulbs introduced were pieces of one original plant. Throughout the nineteenth century it was standard practice to multiply this species from bulbs and not from seed. Viable seed was rarely set. It wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that new, non-clonal material was introduced from Korea, material collected by Richard Lighty. There have been subsequent collections of non-clonal material also. These newer collections evidently did not prove to be as easily grown as the original introduction from Japan.
Nor has any effort been made to maintain a distinction between the original clone and subsequent introductions.
The lily is named for one Peter Hanson (who?), a nineteenth century Brooklyn (yes, I didn’t make that up) lily enthusiast. It gets stranger. The lily was named by Max Leichtlin, one of the bright lights of nineteenth century horticulture.
Little is known about Hanson, and what I know mostly comes from some notes put together by Marco Polo Stufano years ago. Hanson, an immigrant from Denmark, collected lilies for his Brooklyn garden. He corresponded with Henry Elwes. He grew Cardiocrinum giganteum. In Hanson, it would seem that lily culture in North America was getting off to a splendid start. But it all seems to have come to nothing: Hanson was not the harbinger of great things to come, he seems rather to have been an anomaly. If this lily had not been named for him, he probably would have been utterly forgotten. And if there was ever a "Brooklyn school of lily growing", it, too, is gone without a trace.
The old clonal form of Lilium hansonii has the reputation of being about as tolerant of garden life as any lily. This is not one of those lilies which after being planted in November bursts into glorious bloom eight months later. It’s a slow, deliberate grower. It might take several years to become truly established. But once it digs in, it stays.
It emerges very early, so early that in areas with late freezes the inflorescence is sometimes lost. The plants do not seem to suffer long-term damage from this. David Griffiths mentions that in all the years this species was grown at the Bellingham Experiment Station in Washington State, it rarely if ever bloomed because of late frosts. Yet the stock grew and increased without other problems.

Because this lily blooms so early in the lily season, it is rarely seen at the shows unless growers from north of us are in attendance. It's also hard to determine how widely this lily is grown: yet I know that it is cherished in many gardens other than my own.

Dichelostemma week

There is mention in Col. Grey’s Hardy Bulbs of a plant known to him as Brevoortia venusta. Grey notes that Carl Purdy (a once famous early twentieth century west coast collector and seller of native plants) suggested that this plant might be a hybrid of Brevoortia ida-maia (to use the name Grey used) and Brodiaea congesta (again using Grey’s names). Over the decades I remembered this name and the speculation about its parentage. All of these plants are currently placed in the genus Dichelostemma.

When Dichelostemma ‘Pink Diamond’ came on the market I made the connection: ‘Pink Diamond’ is evidently Brodiaea venusta. I don’t know if it is derived from wild collected material or if it is the result of a deliberate hybridization to test the hypothesis of the origin of what Grey called Brevoortia venusta.

Above you see ‘Pink Diamond’ at the top followed by the parent about which everyone seems to be in agreement: Dichelostemma ida-maia. Dichelostemma ida-maia (said to have been named for either, or both, the Ides of May when it was found in bloom or for one Ida May, daughter of the collector’s guide) in the past was sometimes called the Californian Floral Firecracker. The Dutch commercial stocks seem to be very vigorous and about thirty inches tall – good for cutting.

There is controversy about the other parent. The bottom image shows the one I vote for: Dichelostemma volubile. One of the oddest plants, the scape of the inflorescence twines around other objects like dodder or a morning glory. I’ve heard that ‘Pink Diamond’ has inherited some of this tendency, and that reinforces the hypothesis that D. volubile is the other parent of D. venustum.

These name changes illustrate some of the pitfalls awaiting the unwary. Brevoortia is feminine, so the name is written Brevoortia venusta. Dichelostemma, although it deceptively ends in an a, is neuter, so in that combination the name becomes Dichelostemma venustum.

I’ve heard that these plants sometimes survive our summers, but to be safe they should get a long dry period.

Sneak attack!

I spent the morning, an overcast morning which already had a hint of the heat predicted to come later today, out on the deck reading the paper and eating a bowl of corn flakes with strawberries and banana. When I got up at 6:30 A.M., it seemed cool. But after being outside for about a half hour, it was easy to sense the slowly rising temperature.

The south side of the house is covered with what are probably thousands of fragrant rose flowers. Nearby, Japanese honeysuckle and Goldflame honeysuckle are in full bloom. Peonies bloom here and there in the garden. I ate my cereal in a cloud of gentle floral fragrances, enjoying the cheery chirping of “our” sparrows.

I relaxed and opened my olfactory sensibilities to allow me to enjoy this to the fullest.

There I was, unsuspecting and vulnerable; and then it happened. At first I wasn’t sure – there was just a hint of something wrong. This is a holiday and there is no trash pick up today. But it wasn’t the garbage can at the other end of the deck that had interrupted my reverie. This was something initially more subtle but eventually unmistakable. The odor seemed to wrap around me, as if determined to disgust me.

I know that odor. It accompanies one of the uniquely repugnant floral displays of the year. It’s a combination of warm rat feces and rotten meat which quickly evokes revulsion in me and just as quickly attracts a swarm of expectant flies. A quick trip to the garden and a brief search in some likely places turned up the culprit: the voodoo lilies are blooming. These are not lilies in the botanical sense; they are aroids, jack-in-the-pulpit relatives. And what we call the bloom is not a flower: it's an entire inflorescence. The actual flowers are tiny things deep down within the sheathing spathe.

When I was a youngster they were often sold from crates in dime stores – just the thing to give a curious boy to get him interested in science, gardening or grossing-out the rest of the family. Back then we thought they were tropical; now we know that they make themselves at home in our gardens very well. The inflorescence is followed by very tropical (and very aroid) foliage.

In books this plant is variously called Sauromatum venosum, S. guttatum and also Typhonium combined with either of the two species names.

It sets seed here; the seed clusters are about the size and color of a ripe pomegranate.

The stench comes from the spadix: remove it and what's left can be enjoyed close-up. You're left with what might pass for a very oddly shaped and colored calla lily.

Dahlia 'Goldalia'

I bought these at one of the big box stores when I was last in western Virginia a few weeks ago. The label – annoyingly – states only Dahlia Goldalia. And the same label is used for each of the several color combinations I saw. A bit of Googling turned up these likely names: 'Godalia Scarlet' and 'Godalia Rose'.

Wayne and his mom had been shopping in the store in question; when they got back his mom mentioned that she had seen a flower for sale there which she did not recognize. That was all the incentive I needed to get Wayne to hop in the car with me, go back to the shop and check things out. We drove by them (they were on the parking lot) and even from inside the car I could see that they were dahlias.
It was not until I got out and examined them closely that I saw what nice dahlias there are. Dahlias with this flower form are known as collarette dahlias, and they are an old group. I brought home the two you see above. It will be interesting to see how they take the hot weather ahead.

Paeonia 'Hot Chocolate'

There is another intriguing peony blooming in the garden today: 'Hot Chocolate'. When the bud began to open two days ago, the color was the darkest color I have ever seen in a herbaceous peony. Now that the flower is fully open, the color is more obviously red. But the bud had the sort of very dark shadows which one sees in the darkest red tulips - a really wonderfully rich color.

'Hot Chocolate' just happens to grow beside 'Garden Treasure': they make a good combination to my eyes.

Paeonia 'Garden Treasure'

There is major excitement in the peony patch this week: for the first time one of the so-called Itoh intersectional hybrid peonies is about to bloom here. The cultivar in question is Don Hollingsworth’s ‘Garden Treasure’.

Yesterday the bud had progressed to the point where a bit of the yellow color showed. I could not help wondering what it must have been like for Hollingsworth those many years ago when he stood before the first plant of this cultivar as it was about to bloom for the first time and saw that first hint of yellow. Imagine the excitement he must have felt! That’s easy for me to do, because I felt a real rush when my own plant began to show its colors.

Several good yellow-flowered garden peonies are now within reach of those of us for whom the old expression “if you have to ask how much, you probably can’t afford it” has relevance. The week before last I saw nice gallon pots of several of these intersectional hybrids for $40 each. That’s hardly inexpensive, but compared to what they brought in the recent past, it’s within reach of just about anyone.

With respect to this yellow color, peonies are now where roses were a century ago. Although there were pale yellow hybrid garden roses throughout the nineteenth century (just as, if you count Paeonia mlokosewitschii, there were pale yellow peonies), it was not until the so-called Pernetiana roses appeared about a century ago that bright yellow roses began to become common in gardens. To this day, yellow roses have a certain cachet among rosarians, a certain apartness which roses of other colors do not share.

And there is another parallel: just as the longest-known yellow-flowered garden rose, Rosa hemisphaerica, played no part in the development of yellow-flowered garden roses, so Paeonia mlokosewitschii played no part in the development of these yellow-flowered intersectional peonies. These yellow-flowered intersectional peonies get their yellow color from one of the early French hybrids of the woody Paeonia lutea. I’ve read that the tree peony hybrid used by Itoh was the cultivar 'Alice Harding'. If that’s true, it’s a nice touch: Harding did much to promote peony culture during the early twentieth century. So much, in fact, that there is a herbaceous hybrid named 'Alice Harding' and a woody tree peony hybrid named 'Alice Harding'.

To some people, flowers are just flowers; to me, they are history books.

Moraea polyanthos

This handsome South African is blooming here today for the first time. The individual flowers are said to be fugaceous; this one opened in the late afternoon (at about 4 P.M.), and I expect it to close later this evening. The frail-looking plant seems to have several flower buds on each of two scapes.

I'm still unsure about the culture of this plant. It's been in growth since last fall, yet it's coming into bloom only now. Will it have a dormant period? In the wild it grows in areas with abundant rainfall which is likely to occur throughout the year. I don't expect it to be winter hardy here, so it will spend the winter in the protected cold frame.

The remains of a giant

The huge black oak which dominated the back half of the garden was taken down this week. The tree seemed healthy, but recently it dropped an enormous, live limb. It also had a slight tilt - in fact it leaned directly towards the house. I agonized over the decision, but the thought of several tons of wood dropping onto our house during a storm helped me to make the decision.

I have not been able to find any sign of decay in the trunk.

It's surprising how little damage the tree crew did: parts of the area under the tree were trashed, but other than that the garden escaped major damage.

We're keeping the wood and the chippings. I'll be working (struggling) to store the wood at the periphery of the garden during the next few months. There is enough oak firewood there to last us the rest of our lives. And here's an idea: maybe I'll start a shiitake farm!

I'll try to make a ring count soon and report it in a future entry.

Delosperma 'Red Mountain'?

Here's another bit of brilliant color. This is one of the Delosperma - but which one? I purchased it last weekend at a small nursery in western Virginia. It was in a tray of Delosperma nubigenum, the only one of its kind.

A bit of Googling suggests that it might be the new cultivar 'Red Mountain'. Whatever it is, I'm glad to have it. The color and its intensity are hard to describe: the copper-red of the upper petal surface is wonderful to see. Turn the petal over and you'll see that it's purple-red. If this one settles in to be a good garden plant I'll be very happy.

Scarlet tanager

Wayne came by yesterday with a sad gift: he found this gorgeous bit of color dead on his patio. It had evidently hit a window on one of the upper floors of his condo building. This is the scarlet tanager, a bird we see once or twice a year here. You would think that a bird which is both common and so brilliantly colored would be easily spotted. But once the trees leaf out, this shy bird becomes very hard to find.

As I examined the dead bird I was amazed at the intensity of the red color: the red feathers look as if they had been crafted of red reflective metal.

Guaraná

Has it ever been so easy to learn? Has it ever been so easy to track down otherwise obscure concepts or assemble tenuous scraps of connections into a meaningful whole? Or for that matter, to follow up on one concept only to find yourself wandering off onto something related but utterly unanticipated? How did we survive without the Internet, Google and Wikipedia?

One amazing aspect of all of this is that it is not only the major, important issues which get the in-depth treatment. The mundane and trivial also get a good going over.

Until today I knew, or thought I knew, about the botanical families Aceraceae (maples) and Sapindaceae (various mostly tropical trees and shrubs). What I didn’t know is that some contemporary botanists now place these two groups into one family, one family for which they use the name Sapindaceae. The term I grew up with, Aceraceae, is no longer used by those botanists.

But it is how I learned this which is the point of this piece. The other night I was skimming through a forty-year-old cook book, Latin American Cooking, from the Time/Life Foods of the World series. Much of what I read was by now a bit stale: our eating habits have changed a lot in the last forty years. Ours is a household where the tortilladora gets a frequent workout, and the diners (with one holdout) have long since made their peace with cilantro (but not hot chilies). But our knowledge of south-of-the-border cooking has a strong central American flavor; other than a few well-known national dishes, South American food does not appear on our table too often.

Now try to imagine a sixty-five year old man tasting Pepsi or Coca Cola for the first time. I had that experience today. But it wasn’t Pepsi or Coke I was tasting, it was guaraná, the Brazilian soft drink. And it was all due to what Jonathan Norton Leonard, author of Latin American Cooking, had to say about it those forty years ago: “To my palate, no commercial soft drink in the United States is nearly as good”. I was not only intrigued, I was pretty sure I had seen guaraná on the shelves of the local import store.

When I got to the store I discovered that I had two brands from which to choose. Within a hour I was home having my first sip. It’s hard to describe the taste – it’s fruity, but unlike any particular fruit I know. And it’s delicious and easy to drink. It’s also sweetened with sugar, not high fructose corn syrup.

At this point an appeal to Wikipedia was in order: what is guaraná made with? And that’s where the big tie-in happened. Guaraná is made with the fruit of a sapindaceous vine, and since one thing led to another I was soon also learning that maples are now placed in the Sapindaceae by some botanists.

To celebrate all of this I poured myself another glass of guaraná.

Jonquils

The little sweeties seen in the image above are true jonquils. Each flower is about the size of a penny and has a potent, characteristic fragrance.

Just when gardeners new to the genus Narcissus think they have gotten straight the usages of the words daffodil and narcissus, they no doubt encounter the generally dubious usage of the word jonquil. The etymology helps here: jonquil itself is derived from the Latin word for rush, juncus. Have you ever seen the foliage of a rush? Jonquil foliage looks like rush foliage: very thin, superficially tube-like but actually not round in cross section. From that, it’s an easy step to the point of view (encouraged here if not everywhere) that no daffodil with flat leaves is a jonquil.

Hummingbirds and columbines

The first hummingbirds appear in the neighborhood at about the same time that the native columbine comes into bloom. I assume these little birds follow the blooming of the columbines northward, although I can’t rule out the possibility that we simply notice the hummingbirds for the first time as we’re admiring the columbines. We humans are definitely drawn to red things. Hummingbirds on the other hand show virtual catholicity in their choice of flowers to patronize. The only criterion seems to be that the blooms are full of readily accessible nectar. The cobalt blooms of Salvia guaranitica are as readily visited as those of scarlet Cuphea.

In other words, I think the reason we associate hummingbirds with red flowers is because we humans are apt to be looking at the red flowers when the hummers visit. But the hummers themselves visit any suitable flower without respect for color.

That's Aquilegia canadensis in the image above.

Asarum nobilissimum

Gross, repellent, bizarre: there is something of all three about the flowers of the members of the genus Asarum. The fact that some members of the genus are pollinated by slugs hardly adds to their allure. But they do have allure, and it’s mostly derived from their handsome, often evergreen, foliage. The flower shown here is that of Asarum nobilissimum, one of the larger, marginally hardy forms. It grows in the protected cold frame here, and seems to be taking well to life there.

The evergreen asarums would seem to be a boon for our gardens, but I have not found them to be reliable for winter interest in our climate. Some species, notably the European Asarum europaeum, although technically evergreen, collapse during the winter: the foliage becomes thin and papery and lies flat on the ground. The foliage of other evergreen species seems to be easily damaged by below freezing temperatures if not covered by a protective mulch of some sort.

In the garden of my dreams I have them growing in an extensive battery of cold frames where throughout the winter their handsome foliage will be snug under the glass yet still plainly visible to the gardener.

Those species with deciduous foliage generally are much better garden plants in my experience. The common local species is Asarum canadense, generally if misleadingly called wild ginger (it’s not related to gingers in the botanical sense; the dried roots have been used as a ginger substitute).

Several of the other evergreen species from the southeastern United States are in commerce, but as a group they don’t seem to have caught on outside of the always acquisitive coterie of most enthusiastic gardeners.

It's very unpleasant to hear so many American speakers pronounce this name a-ZAR-um. Historically, the stress has been on the first syllable. Years ago I was very happy to hear an Italian gardener refer to the plants as A-sa-ro, with the stress on the initial A: that's where it has presumably been since before the days when Latin was morphing into Italian.

Peony 'Early Scout'

This handsome early-flowering peony has been in the garden for decades. But for most of that time it rarely bloomed; in fact, it came close to dwindling away. As the back garden became shadier over the years, several once flourishing plants began to slowly decline – among them was this otherwise fine peony.

‘Early Scout’ is a hybrid of Paeonia lactiflora ‘Richard Carvel’ and an unnamed form of P. tenuifolia. It was raised by Edwin Auten Jr. and presented in 1952 (this from The Peonies edited by John Wister). It’s been a reliable grower and bloomer here, and it’s among the first of the peonies to bloom each year. The flowers are small as garden peonies go, but at their early season they are not in competition with the big garden peonies.

The plant is worth having for its foliage alone: long after the flowers have gone the mound of finely cut foliage remains handsome and distinctive.

Peony season 2009

The first peony to open here this year was Paeonia mascula. It was followed almost immediately by three others: a white-flowered Chinese tree peony with no name (one of their utility grade peonies grown for the medicinal bark), a peony long-grown here under the dubious name P. arietina, and the little hybrid ‘Early Scout’. By now, several garden tree peonies have also joined the party.

That's the medicinal bark peony shown above.

These earliest peonies bloom when the garden is at its most tender, freshest best. There are dogwoods, redbuds, tulips, wisteria, phlox, daffodils, and a bewildering array of minor players; the foliage of the trees is still tiny and pale green, giving a magical greenish haze while allowing in plenty of light.

Little by little the migratory birds are reappearing. I sat on Wayne’s patio the other morning listening to a wood thrush and watching two male hummingbirds trying to boss each other around at the feeder. The first towhee of the year appeared on the patio the other day. The dawn choruses of birds are at their best: strong and varied and urging the sleepy-headed gardener to get out of bed and get going. The chortling of woodpeckers is now an oft repeated part of the daytime bird sound: are they poking fun at me?

Bird song is not the only aural entertainment on the air now: toads continue to call at the ponds. The call of the local toads is very soothing on the sort of nights we’re having now, nights which suggest July rather than April.

What a year: we’re just out of the first full week of spring, and the weather is saying summer. In response to this, there is another less pleasant sound now demanding attention: the whine and whirring of air conditioners has already started: what are those people thinking?

One each of how many tulips?

Tulips have been a constant thread in the fabric of my horticultural life. There have been years when it took some discernment to notice that thread, and there have been years when that thread has been one of the dominant ones in the rich tapestry of spring.

This year the tulips are here in both abundance and variety. Over the decades I have occasionally done something unorthodox to enhance my tulip experience: I’ve gone out in the autumn and bought one each of every different tulip sold in local shops. I did this to celebrate my sixtieth birthday, and I did it again last autumn. The result is that there are well over two hundred different tulips blooming in the garden here this year.

In the view above you can see the main planting of these one-each tulips.