My Virtual Maryland Garden

Enjoying it while it lasts...

2012-01-27T14:52:00.010-05:00

Weather-wise it's hard to believe that it's January 27th. At 6: A.M. this morning the temperature was 58 degrees F. We then had some rain, and at 8:30 A.M. there was a thunderclap to raise the dead., soon followed by another one. It's turning out to be one of those days were we're at the edge of a cloud mass so that when the clouds obscure the sun it cools off, and when the clouds move and the sun comes through the temperature jumps. When the wind stops and the sun is shining, the sun is warm on the skin.

The first winter aconite is up: that's a record here in this garden. The winter aconites here typically begin to bloom about two weeks after reports come of blooming aconites in other local gardens. Tommies have started to bloom, too. Many hellebores are in full bloom - I picked the small bouquet shown above this afternoon.

The unnerving thing is that winter can hardly be said to have started here; so far there has been only one day when the temperature did not get above the freezing point. Occasional drops into the single digit range are not unknown for February, so there might be trouble ahead.

The Giant Snowdrop

2012-01-27T14:40:00.001-05:00

Here's a size comparison of several snowdrops blooming now.

The common snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis, is not in bloom yet, so a direct, side-by-side comparison in size between it and these very robust sorts cannot be shown. So I've done the best I can with what's available: I've included a budded scape of Galanthus nivalis and have used a stem of Galanthus 'S. Arnott' for comparison. 'S. Arnott' itself is a significant jump in size over the common snowdrop, and I hope this helps to give an idea of the size of these big ones.

The remaining ones are all forms of Galanthus elwesii in the broad sense, and it's not hard to see why a half-century ago Galanthus elwesii was marketed as The Giant Snowdrop. There was in fact a company which called itself The Giant Snowdrop Company back then. The Giant Snowdrop Company is long gone, but its spirit (and possibly some of its plants) has been revived here:

http://www.snowdrop.org.uk/

Now back to the plants shown above. From left to right they are 'S. Arnott', then four progressively larger forms of Galanthus elwesii and finally on the right the budded scape of the common snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis.

Herons

2012-01-18T09:22:00.001-05:00

Late last year, while walking Biscuit, I noticed some unfamiliar young men who had stopped on the path and were intently watching something across the street. As I approached them they assumed an attitude and gave me a look which suggested that they might be up to no good, so I greeted them and asked them what they were watching so intently. Their answer surprised me: they were watching what they thought was a big bird in a neighbor’s yard. They pointed, and I looked: indeed, there seemed to be a Great Blue Heron off in the distance. At this point, I started to laugh: the “great blue heron” was in fact a statue of a heron placed by a pond to frighten off the real thing – heron predation in local fish ponds is becoming an issue for some of us. When I told them we all had a good laugh about it. But I’m still amazed at the acuity of their eye sight: I had walked by that spot hundreds of times and looked over in the direction of the fake heron and never noticed it. Since I had been in that garden and seen the fake heron close up, I knew it was there. But how in the world did those young men notice it from such a distance?

Last week Biscuit and I were returning from our walk and as we approached a house near the site of the fake heron I thought I heard a rustling sound. Thinking it might be a deer emerging from the woods, I looked over in the direction where I’ve seen deer leave the woods. There were no deer in sight. Was the sound from a neighbor moving around the side of the nearby house? No, there were no people in sight either. Then I looked down at Biscuit to see what she thought. She was not looking at the house or the woods, she was looking up. So I looked up. There, sitting on the chimney of the house, was a Great Blue Heron. It was probably warming itself in the heat coming from the chimney. To see it sitting on a chimney reminded me of storks in Europe. The bird remained calm while we were there, and after we resumed our walk, the bird remained as long as I could still see it.

As I was leaving the house yesterday, a neighbor called over to me “Jim, a crane just flew into your back yard”. Right away I knew what kind of “crane” it was; I went back to take a look and got there just in time to see a Great Blue Heron flapping off to a new roost.

There is no sign of gold fish in my pond: presumably the herons have had many a good meal. It’s time to restock!

Kingfisher

2012-01-08T12:44:00.000-05:00

While walking Biscuit this morning I had a nice surprise as we were crossing the bridge over the creek: a long, chattering bird call caught my attention. I looked over in time to see a flash of white as the bird dropped from its perch and skimmed the water, then the bird landed on another snag projecting from the water. Now I got a good look, and as expected it was a kingfisher.
Years ago I found a place where the creek banks were high and there were holes dug in the banks: these were the nest tunnels of the kingfishers.

Kingfishers are the sort of bird of which it can be said "you see them when you see them". What I mean is that although they are probably always back there patrolling along the creek, I don't expect to see them every time I'm down there.

The technical name of this bird, Ceryle alcyon, is a bit of a redundancy: both words mean kingfisher in classical Greek, although both words were also used to name a mythological bird. The English expression "halcyon days", in the sense "the good old days when things were better, less hectic", is derived from the name of the mythological bird, which was thought to have the ability to calm the seas during its winter solstice nesting period at sea.

Looking ahead to where I want to be

2012-01-06T21:50:00.000-05:00

I'm in the throes of re-doing a part of the garden. Several aspects of the original design, while they looked good on paper, did not work out on the ground. The space available in the CGP has emboldened me to move plants and get them out of the way. The original design had its strengths, and luckily I was there to photograph some of them.

Here are two photos from several years ago. The upper one shows many aspects of the outline of the original design; here it is captured after a light snowfall which has the effect of highlighting the structure of the garden.

If this garden were in the southern hemisphere, the scene shown in the second image might have been captured today. Somewhere in the southern hemisphere the roses are in full bloom today. I need some encouragement to keep me focused on where I want the garden to be, and the scene here is one I want to repeat.

The aroma level

2012-01-06T19:31:00.002-05:00

When I walked Biscuit this evening at about 7 P.M. I had the chance to experience again one of the interesting atmospheric effects associated with living on a hill. We live at the top of a hill, and a turn to the right or the left on the sidewalk takes me downhill in either direction. The temperature at 7 P.M. was an improbable 61 degrees F – especially improbably when I consider that only a few days ago we were experiencing the coldest day since last winter, a day during which the temperature did not rise above the freezing point all day.

So it was a pleasure to leave the house and step out into a relatively balmy temperature. It was at a point about half way down the hill that the atmospheric effect alluded to above became apparent. We passed through the place where the warm air mass was layered over a colder air mass. That in itself is interesting to me, but there is another aspect of this which is notable: at the point where my face passes the level where the two air masses meet, there are always distinctive and pronounced odors apparent. Often this is the fragrance of soil itself, or more frequently (as it was tonight) the odor of the creek water. On a couple of late summer evenings it’s been the fragrance of the kudzu blooms – those are evenings to remember!

The same effect takes place in the house. When I go up or down the basement stairs, there is a point where I pass the “aroma level” – in this case typically an enhanced version of whatever I have been cooking.

As winter is coming to an end, the most poignant of these odors is the fragrance of defrosting soil after the frozen months of denial.

Winter jasmine

2012-01-05T12:38:00.000-05:00

Here’s a good example of why this plant has been cherished by generations of gardeners: it’s January 5^th and as we approach the front door we’re greeted by a scattering of cheery blooms. No, it’s not May in January, but they are flowers and they are bright enough to attract attention. It’s not fragrant, and that’s doubly curious: first of all because it is a true jasmine, a group noted for intense fragrance; and secondly because plants which bloom in winter often have intense scents, presumably to advertise their presence to the few pollinators likely to be active at that season. Sorry, the second clause in that last sentence was wildly metaphoric (plants don’t advertise, for example), but these days more and more that’s the way we talk about these things.

Time of bloom with this plant is erratic, and that only adds to its charm. In the same garden plants on a sunny bank will bloom before plants on the north side of the house. It’s usually seen as an untrained mound of arching, sprawling stems about two or three feet high and of ever expanding width. It’s easily trained against a wall or even on an isolated stake six or eight feet high, and plants trained upright can be really spectacular in bloom.

This is one plant on my list of plants I would not want to be without.

Baby, it's cold outside!

2012-01-04T12:46:00.000-05:00

This is Rhododendron 'PJM Elite'. When I saw it early this morning it was in full curled-leaf mode: it looked as if the leaves had all been transformed into little brown cigarettes. By the time I got around to taking these photos at about noon, the leaves had already uncurled a lot. It's thought that this leaf curling is an adaptation to prevent desiccation during below freezing conditions.
I've never seen this plant used as a hedge (I've been thinking about it here) but it would be easy to see through a hedge in full leaf curl mode. Most of us wouldn't want the neighbors to catch us sun bathing nude in 20 degree F weather, would we?

Or would we? It's all relative: years ago Wayne and I used to bird regularly during the winter. Several ocean-side sites were often our goal, and on more than one occasion, as we stood on the windy beaches shivering under multiple layers of coats, scarves, hats and gloves, we spotted some rare birds indeed. They're a shy, quiet species which typically lands on some far, remote end of the beach. Their bright pink color makes them very conspicuous from a distance. "No", I thought to myself the first time I saw them, "it couldn't be, could it?..." But our eyes were not deceiving us: there they were, Canadians from the frozen prairies far to the north, all but naked in the frigid air, sunning themselves under conditions which perhaps suggested spring back home to them. Brave souls indeed: all I could think of was getting to someplace out of the wind and settling down to hot lunch.

Is this the Red Line fern?

2012-01-02T13:05:00.000-05:00

The local branch of the Washington, D.C. subway system is the Red Line. Who would have thought that attentive riders of this line can do some botanizing deep below the streets of the city above? Yet there they are: as the trains approach stops such as Woodley there are illuminated signs, and if you peer closely you'll notice a fringe of green in the glow of the lights. That fringe of green is a fern, a fern of the genus Adiantum. I don't know which species it is, but the one shown above, Adiantum capillus-veneris, is a likely candidate. This species grows in many countries around the Mediterranean and from northern South America well up into North America. On the Atlantic coast it gets as far north as Virginia.

On the other hand, there are several tropical species of this genus which are commonly sold as house plants, and over the years many of these have probably been brought into the subway system by shoppers. Perhaps spores from one of these got things going.

Whatever they are, it's a surprise to see them deep in the subway system. They are abundant and easily spotted at several stops. Are they confined to the Red Line? I don't know; perhaps someone reading this will comment.

Billbergia nutans

2011-12-31T17:44:00.000-05:00

Here's an old friend helping us to celebrate the end of the year: this is Billbergia nutans, a long cultivated bromeliad often called queen's tears. It has been grown as a house plant since at least before the Second World War. It thrives under typical house plant conditions and treatment and can be potted in soil. Our plant spends the frost-free season outside in full sun. It is brought inside when night frosts are likely. This year it waited until the end of December to produce any sign of bloom. About two weeks ago I left it outside overnight during a period of rain, and within a week the inflorescences began to appear.

The plant in the image above is not yet actually in bloom: none of the flowers is actually open yet. I'll add an image of the blooms later.

Christmas Day in the garden

2011-12-25T20:17:00.001-05:00

It's been a full month since the last post: what have I been up to? I've been up to planting; the community garden plots are now stuffed with roses, tree peonies, lilies, other bulbs both ornamental (tulips, bulbous irises, alliums, musk hyacinths et al.) and comestible (garlic, shallots, multiplier onions and others). Thirty-nine roses (wichurana hybrids, large-flowered climbers, polyanthas, some early hybrid teas and old shrub types among othres) were planted last week (or was it the week before?). Most of the planting is now done, and I'm beginning to relax a bit and look forward to next year's garden. We've had two months of perfect planting weather, and the opportunities presented by the weather have kept me energized and sometimes even exhilarated: I can hardly believe what I've accomplished in the last two months.

Week after week of relatively mild weather has had an effect on the home garden and other local gardens, too. This year may well have been the best year ever for fall blooming camellias, and some precocious Camellia japonica sorts are also reported as blooming now. Those who keep lists of plants blooming on Christmas Day or New Year's Day will probably have long and varied lists this year.

My Christmas Day list from the home garden is short but sweet this year: snowdrops (Galanthus elwesii sorts), winter sweet, winter jasmine, winter honeysuckle, Camellia sasanqua and Elaeagnus pungens. Iris unguicularis was in bloom late last week, but the one flower had started to shrivel by today. Dandelions are blooming here and there. Helleborus foetidus (here) and H. niger (elsewhere) are blooming. Some garden hellebores are in advanced bud. I could not find any witch hazel flowers. In one of the cold frames Narcissus tazetta is blooming. Knock Out roses are still to be seen blooming here and there.

This morning I saw (and heard - what a pleasure to hear bird song on this date!) a flock of birds (goldfinches?) working over the buds of the red maples.

In terms of what I've accomplished in the garden, I'm better prepared for the arrival of real winter this year than in any recent previous year; but emotionally I'm not prepared at all, and it's going to sting when it happens.

That's winter sweet, Chimonanthus praecox 'Luteus' in the image above.

How little some things have changed...

2011-11-23T11:40:00.002-05:00

The top image above is the cover page of the magazine Home & Garden from April of 1914. That's two years and several months short of a century ago. Was the original for that photograph an autochrome? And look at the width and thickness of the lumber used for the framing of the cold frame: I've never seen anything that big for sale. The hat and the pipe are very much of the time, and at first glance I thought "What is Sherlock looking for down there in the dirt?" I took an immediate liking to this cover, and over the decades I've owned it have taken it out now and them to keep up my hopes that one day I might have something like it.

Now fast forward nearly a century. The lower image shows one of my cold frames at my community garden plots. It's planted with lettuces, sage cuttings, rosemary cuttings, lamb's lettuce, flat leaf parsley, chervil and some odds and ends. No Sherlock because he was the one taking the picture. I expect the plants in the cold frame to be fine until about the turn of the year; after that, we'll see.

Carrot 'Parisian'

2011-11-21T14:22:00.000-05:00

No, those are not orange radishes. The little orange globes you see above are the old carrot variety 'Parisian', sometimes called 'Parisian Market'. In addition to offering an unusual shape for carrots, they have the advantage, because of their round shape, of growing well in rough, stony soil (e.g. the soil in my new community garden plots). To attain their sleek, long form, typical carrots require deeply prepared soil free of obstructions such as stones. To harvest 'Parisian' no digging is necessary: the carrots form at the surface or just under it and pull easily from the ground.

Above you see them as freshly dug and then after a stop with the fluffers for their blog debut.

Remembering Frank Kameny

2011-11-16T21:19:00.000-05:00

I first became aware of Frank Kameny in the late 1950s when his arrest on sodomy charges made the news. I was about 14 at that time, and although I was mortified by the sodomy charges aspect of the events, I nevertheless knew very well who I was and that it was my team which was taking a very public bashing. It was not long before I heard about the Mattachine Society, although I had no idea how to become a member.

Now fast forward about twenty years. In the mid 1970s I joined the DC Gay Activists Alliance and finally met this man who had been on the margins of my consciousness for so long. That first meeting was not entirely propitious: had I been looking for a hero, I probably would have kept looking. Frank was hardly the prepossessing sort; in fact, my initial cursory impression was that he was a Marabou stork of a man. I wasn’t the only one who felt that way: there were actually serious discussions at the GAA meetings to arrange some sort of funding to pay for Frank to have dental work. ”The movement” back then was preoccupied with public images, and while no one seriously doubted his ability to speak eloquently and effectively on behalf of our cause, there were frequent backstage murmurs about the appearance of the messenger.

It didn’t take me long to realize that my ornithology was all wrong: the man was not a stork, he was an eagle. Those monthly GAA meetings could be tedious and boring, yet on nights when Frank was in good form, they provided some lively theatrics. No sooner had some injudicious newbie had the temerity to voice some poorly thought-out or logically flawed proposal than Frank would launch a keenly articulated rebuttal. If the idea being offered was one he found to be repugnant, then the rhetorical fireworks really went off in an almost ferocious explosion. But the wonder of these exchanges was that as I knew him, he never lowered himself to ad hominem attacks: he stayed focused on the issues, not the person. And when it became apparent to him that his adversary was acting out of truculence, he would abruptly end the discussion and announce – and I can still hear him saying this - “In that case, then we agree to disagree.” It wasn’t unusual to hear him later chatting convivially with the erstwhile target of his lashings.

One of the things I sometimes wondered about when I first began to attend GAA meetings was how this man, who alone for about two decades had been the most conspicuous face in the gay rights movement, would work with the younger upstarts who now surrounded him. There was a pervasive respect for Frank back then, an always present awareness of his unique status in our community, yet those attitudes did not necessarily translate into tranquil exchanges in a changing world where the young Turks were sometimes pulling for new ideas and different directions. Yet it quickly became apparent to me that he had another good quality: for all of his seeming apartness, he was a skillful team player.

Many times during a lively debate one could look over and see Frank sitting there, taking it all in. There were times when the look on his face suggested bemusement; I like to think that that look was at least partly motivated by a sort of avuncular pride: after all, he more than anyone had made it happen.

Years after I left GAA I read the diaries of Virginia Woolf; there is a passage there in which Woolf describes the fascination she experienced as she watched Jewesses (her word) listening to Classical music. No sooner had I read those words than I remembered the fascination I felt in watching Frank as he, with almost palpable intensity of concentration, followed the development of a proposal being broached by another GAA member.

The leadership of GAA in those days kept to a surprisingly high-minded standard of deportment during meetings. Those attempting a sally into the trivial or frivolous risked a public rebuke. Smarts and accomplishment won you respect. It took me a while to win Frank’s respect, but when the time came I relished it. As the one man communications committee person I had written a letter on behalf of GAA to the Washington Post in which I pointed out some shortcomings in an article which the Post had published. We desperately wanted recognition back in those days, and no one expected the Post to deign to reply. But reply they did, and surprising as that was, there was something else which pushed it over the top: the Post’s response was signed by none other than Ben Bradlee himself. Frank gave me a look that day I’ll never forget.

Years after I left GAA I ran into him around town a few times. I remember one meeting where, after a bit of prompting, he seemed to remember me. I vaguely remember another meeting much later when even generous prompting didn’t seem to elicit a response. But both times he was delighted to be recognized and responded with a profuse display of the old fashioned, almost courtly politesse with which he always addressed me (and I suppose everyone else he did not know well).

I’ve never met anyone else with such an utterly imperturbable sense of integrity; he could be persuaded by a well-articulated argument, but his core beliefs seemed to be adamantine and immutable. Once fixed on a goal, he was relentless. These qualities sometimes impelled him on to conclusions which baffled or even offended his supporters, conclusions which were definitely not ready for prime time. Yet this candor rarely left any doubt about his position on the issues.

Frank may have forgotten me, but I doubt that I will ever forget Frank. And I am glad to have this opportunity to publicly express my gratitude for all he has done for us.

A view of the back garden

2011-11-15T22:12:00.000-05:00

Here’s a view of what’s happening in the back garden right now. The image is out of focus ( I tried several times but could not get the Hamamelis flowers in sharp focus), but in a sense that improves the overall effect. The red foliage on the left is that of Hamamelis ‘Feuerzauber’, the yellow flowers in the center those of the plant onto which ‘Feuerzauber’ is grafted, the red foliage on the right is that of Franklinia alatamaha.

Rosa 'The Fairy'

2011-11-15T21:47:00.000-05:00

This little charmer is a 1930s anticipation of the modern ‘Knock Out’ roses. And like that more modern group it has almost all of the qualities of the best roses. It shares the same failing: lack of fragrance. But it finally dawned on me that it was time to get off my high horse when it comes to fragrance in roses. Yes, I definitely prefer my roses to be fragrant. But does it make sense to ignore a rose which scores in the highest ways in other qualities simply because it lacks fragrance? It does not to me, and so I’ve made my peace with the Knock Outs and am ready to really appreciate Bentall’s little 1932 beauty.

Do you have doubts? If so, I suggest you seek out established plantings of these roses in November. I wish I had the room for an allée of autumn camellias and Knock Out roses in harmonious colors; maybe some of the Encore azaleas would work in this grouping, too. The whole planting would be fronted by ‘The Fairy’. These are plants which have the ability to bring a spring-like freshness to the garden at a time when it is otherwise winding down for the year.

‘The Fairy’ is conventionally placed among the so-called Polyantha roses; but unlike most Polyantha roses ‘The Fairy’ has Rosa wichurana (formerly R. wichuraiana) in its background. It makes just as much sense to think of it as a dwarf shrub rose.

I have not grown this rose yet myself, so the image you see above is an exception to my usual rule to include only plants grown in my own garden. Wayne and I visited our Northern Neck friends Charles and Hilda last weekend, and as we were about to leave Hilda took me over to “The Fairy’ and cut a nice bouquet. The cool weather was especially kind to the color of the flowers, and the foliage of the plant was immaculate. It was hard to believe that this rose had gone through the summer: everything about it was so fresh, clean and brimming with vigor. And the color warmed up beautifully under incandescent light.

Tilling season

2011-11-15T21:38:00.000-05:00

Yikes! I have not made a blog posting in almost a month.What's going on?

The answer is that my other garden, my community garden plot, is absorbing every bit of time I give it.- and then begging for more.

I binged on bulbs recently, and as soon as I finish the tilling at the plot, I'll be planting bulbs - probably right up to the time the ground freezes.

I also built and installed two simple cold frames at the plot. New wood chip mulch was recently delivered to the plot site, and I've been busy moving it to my plot where I till it into the ground.

Newly purchased nursery stock has been lined out at the plot where it will remain until I'm ready for it back here at the home garden. There are some new hedges in the home garden's future (at least if my back holds out).

There are days when I come home from the garden plot on the verge of exhaustion; but it makes for wonderful dreams!

Variegated Fritillary Euptoieta claudia Silver and gold

2011-10-20T13:28:00.000-04:00

While working in the garden the other day I spotted this little gem. It brought to mind some metal smith working in molten silver and gold: as he worked, drops of silver and gold dropped from his workbench and clumped on the floor.

In fact it's the elegant wrapping around a gem of a different sort: there is a pupa of a fritillary inside that chrysalis. It's the Variegated Fritillary Euptoieta claudia, a species whose host plants include passion flower. The chrysalis was found not far from a rampageous tangle of Passiflora incarnata in the garden. To see Passiflora incarnata, look here:

http://mcwort.blogspot.com/2007/07/surpassing-delight-of-all-flowers.html

Canna × ‘Ehemannii’

2011-10-20T13:02:00.000-04:00

Although I’ve known about this plant – or thought I knew about this plant – for a long time, it’s blooming in my garden this year for the first time. And this is the first time I’ve actually seen it. It’s over a century old: it appeared in the late nineteenth century. It looks a lot like Canna iridiflora, and from the beginning there seems to have been uncertainty about whether ‘Ehemannii’ is a form of that species or a hybrid.

It’s unique among the garden cannas I know. The drooping flowers (some accounts say the entire inflorescence droops) give the plant a very graceful quality, and graceful is rarely the first thing which comes to mind when discussing cannas. It’s a puzzle to me why more hybrid cannas have not been produced with this style of inflorescence. In fact, it’s a big puzzle because Canna iridiflora itself appears in the stated genealogy of many hybrid canna strains.

This plant can be tall, and drooping flowers on a tall plant are an advantage in that the viewer looks up into the flower instead of looking up and seeing the underside of the bloom.

Scilla lingulata ssp. ciliolata

2011-10-16T16:23:00.000-04:00

Gardeners have long cherished bulbs which bloom in the fall, and when those bulbs are of sorts which typically bloom in late winter or spring, there is the added pleasure of having the illusion of getting a jump on the seasons.

The little plant shown above, Scilla lingulata ssp ciliolata, is not the only late-summer or fall blooming squill, but it’s certainly a distinctive one. It has the sorts of poise and charm which make for a great pot plant on the show bench. The words used to make the name of this species, lingulata and ciliolata, refer to the tongue-shaped leaves which have tiny hairs along their margins. If the light is just right one can easily see this.

I have not tried this plant in the open garden: it’s lived in a cold frame since it arrived in 2007.

Tricyrtis macrantha

2011-10-14T21:26:00.000-04:00

This is the plant widely distributed under the name Tricyrtis macrantha ssp. macranthopsis. It's been in this big pot for two years now, and it seems to be thriving, doesn't it? One advantage of the pot is that it keeps the plant well up off the ground where rabbits and slugs might easily find it. I'm getting such good growth and generous increase from this plant that I'm beginning to feel unambitious for not having used it more effectively in the garden.

Is the commercial stock of this plant clonal in nature? I wonder because my plants (two accessions from different sources) do not set seed even when hand pollinated.

Kalimeris pinnatifida

2011-10-14T21:02:00.000-04:00

The plant shown above is currently making the rounds under the name Kalimeris pinnatifida, although when it was introduced it was better known as Asteromoea mongolica. I’ve known about it for years, but until I saw it in a garden context I had no idea what a great plant it is. Some neighbors whom I don’t know have a clump in their front garden which I’ve been watching for years. The clump gets better each year. I’ve never seen anyone working in the garden, so I’m assuming that this is an easy care plant.

This plant appeals to me because it seems to be healthy and pest free; it seems to grow freely without becoming weedy or aggressive; it occupies about the same mass each year – that’s important to me when giving consideration to how a plant should be placed. Once it starts to bloom it blooms and blooms for weeks. And it reminds me of Gypsophila paniculata.

It’s a keeper as far as I’m concerned.

The Gardener

2011-10-13T19:50:00.000-04:00

While walking Biscuit the other night one of my neighbors called me over and handed me a book which she said she thought I would enjoy. She had bought the book for her six year old daughter. One look at the title explained why she thought I might enjoy it: it was Sarah Stewart’s The Gardener, and that’s one of David Small’s illustrations from the book shown above.
The eponymous gardener is little Lydia Grace Finch who is growing up in the Great Depression. In a time of family crisis her family sends her off to live for a while with her Uncle Jim who runs a bakery a train ride away. Lydia Grace’s grandmother sends her off with packets of flower seeds: cosmos, zinnia and marigold.
Now that I’ve read the book I realize why my neighbor knew I would enjoy it. I’ve often told her how this Uncle Jim spent hours long decades ago with his niece sharing the joys of gardens, plants, insects and the outdoor life – and how those joyous days were never forgotten by her and are now being shared with her son. Not only can this Uncle Jim take some credit for his niece’s love of gardening, but he’s a baker, too.
What my neighbor did not know is that my mom is a child of the depression, and she experienced something very like what Lydia Grace experienced: she was farmed out to care for her arthritic grandmother when she was about ten years old.
So for me the book was a sweetly nostalgic trip.
I returned the book tonight, but not before going up to my community garden plot and picking a little bouquet of cosmos, zinnias and marigolds for the little girl whose book I had borrowed.
By the way, and this is for those of you who know the book, this Uncle Jim smiles.
The Gardener by Sarah Stewart, illustrated delightfully by David Small, published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

× Amarcrinum

2011-10-11T11:36:00.001-04:00

The name × Amarcrinum is used for hybrids between Amaryllis belladonna and various Crinum. What looks like a little x before the name is actually a multiplication sign, and it indicates that the entity named is a nothogenus (from the Greek nothos meaning spurious, false, phony), a genus which does not exist in nature. The symbol × is sometimes read as “times” as in Amaryllis belladonna × Crinum read as " Amaryllis belladonna times Crinum". This is an old cross, one originally made nearly a century ago in the early twentieth century; the original cross was Amaryllis belladonna × Crinum moorei.

Crinums of various sorts are easily grown here, but they have several characteristics which make them a dubious choice for the small garden. For one thing, most of them are big, with 4’ sprawling leaves. Nor do they bloom freely: many I have grown bloom once a year, if that. And then there is this: the individual flowers of crinums are often literally ephemeral.

The other parent, Amaryllis belladonna, is also a problem child here. It’s a winter grower, yet its foliage generally does not survive exposure to a typical local winter. Even if the foliage is protected, it’s a very reluctant bloomer. A plant here has been growing in my most protected cold frame since 2005 – and it has yet to bloom. Each year it produces plenty of robust foliage, and the original bulb is now part of a clump. But so far it has not bloomed.

The plant shown above was planted in 2007 and is blooming here for the first time. Ten more were added in 2008, so I expect the display to get better yearly now.

The flowers are fragrant: I think I detect more influence from the Crinum parent in that regard.

'Heavenly Blue' Morning Glory

2011-09-29T14:06:00.000-04:00

According to the old books, blue flowered Ipomoea tricolor were in cultivation overa century ago, but those plants werevery late blooming. This was sometimes the case with plants little improvedover their wild forms. The Cosmosbipinnatus grown in the late nineteenth century were huge, coarse plants,tall and very late blooming. It was not until well into the twentieth centurythat dwarf, early-blooming forms were developed.

‘Heavenly Blue’ came into commerce as “Clark’s Early Heavenly Blue Morning Glory”.Anne Roe Robbins, in her 1949 HOW TO GROW ANNUALS points out that itwas introduced before there were All American Selections awards – the pointbeing that one would expect the best blue flowered plant we can grow easily inour gardens to have an AAS award. Herbook has been reprinted by Dover; be sure to at least see the original becausethe Dover reprint contains revised cultivar lists.

On the street where I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland inthe 1950s we had a neighbor whose garage in many years had a glorious swag ofthis morning glory over the doors of the garage. I’ll bet garages all over America have beenfestooned similarly, even to this day. Garages, out buildings, fences, theotherwise bare, sunny façade of a building – all are ideal places for thisplant. It pays to give it plenty of room: a sunny surface of several square yards isabout right. When you come out in the morning and see a mass the size of a bedsheet of the intensely blue flowers you won’t regret being generous with space.

Parisian surprise

2011-09-23T16:21:00.001-04:00

La décoratrice

Someone left a box of Pierre Hermé macarons at my door today - someone who knows someone who just flewin from Paris. I’ve been given strict instructions to consume them promptly,while they are still fresh. They came with a sheet identifying the variousflavor combinations, but I’m not to peek at that until the tasting is done. I’m to take notes so we can discuss theselater. This will be a very serious discussion: we’ll put the wine tasters toshame with our witty inventiveness in identifying the flavors!

And to think that, if asked, I would have settled for theremains of a baguette of Poilâine bread!

More homage to Gertrude Jekyll

2011-09-23T11:03:00.002-04:00

Here and there around the area in local wood verges the white woods aster is blooming freely. Generations of gardeners have known and grown this plant as Aster divaricatus. Recently the old name Eurybia divaricata has been revived. The name Eurybia dates from the early nineteenth century, so it is nothing new.

In her 1909 work COLOUR IN THE FLOWER GARDEN Gertrude Jekyll calls this plant the small wire-stemmed aster and gives two photographs of it. I take that as a measure of her esteem; back in those days, photographs in a book were an expense and a bother. In the garden, Jekyll combined these asters with the plant she knew as Megasea, the big, cabbage-leaf saxifrage we now call Bergenia. The plants form a great contrast: the broad, glossy, corrugated leaves of the Bergenia are an intriguing foil for the shiny, black, wiry stems and white stars of the aster .

Jekyll’s account of this plant raises a question for me. Here is her text: “There is a small growing perennial Aster – I will not venture on its specific name, but have seen it figured in an American book of wild flowers as divaricata, and provisionally know it by that name.” The genus name Aster is masculine in gender; the genus name Eurybia is feminine. Did the American wild flower book Jekyll mentions call the plant Eurybia divaricata?

Welwitschia mirabilis

2011-09-19T09:22:00.000-04:00

Now fifteen years old, my Welwitschia has not changed much in the last few years. It might come as a surprise for most of you to learn that the care of this plant is little different than that given to most pot plants. Frequent soakings don’t seem to bother it a bit. I’ve made no attempt to duplicate the conditions in its Namibian homeland.

Look carefully at the foliage: the transverse striations about two inches from the center of the plant on each leaf mark more or less the extent of this year’s growth.

When the plant was younger I was very careful not to damage the dead parts of the leaves in any way – I wanted them to get as long as possible. But the dead part of the leaf falls off if it remains wet for long, and last year most of the dead part which had accumulated in all the years I’ve had the plant came off.

Colchicum agrippinum "old Portland garden form"

2011-09-18T18:34:00.003-04:00

The name Colchicum agrippinum poses a bit of a name problem.There is no evidence that a sexually reproducing population corresponding to this plant exists any where in the world; in other words, it is not a species in the modern sense. On the other hand, more than one such plant seems to exist; and that suggests that the plants given this name do not form a clone. The plant shown above is blooming in the garden now; it came from Jane McGary in 2006. She found it in a Portland, Oregon garden where it had eviently been growing for a long time. It differs from the usual commercial Colchicum agrippinum, at least as I know them, in having much more distinctly checkered flowers and richer color. In fact, it's a fair rival for one of its assumed parents, Colchicum variegatum. Take a look at Colchicum variegatum here:
http://mcwort.blogspot.com/2007/09/glory-of-all-these-kindes.html

These colchciums with checkered patterns are to my tastes the choicest of the bulbs of the sesaon.

Sedum and a visitor

2011-09-15T13:44:00.008-04:00

Two handsome sedums can be seen in the upper image above: the upright Sedum spectabile (or maybe it is one of its hybrids) and the flat-growing Sedum sieboldii. They make a nice contrast, don’t they? I think I like sedums in pots better than sedums in the ground. In old books I’ve seen photographs of big ornamental pots at the edges of borders planted with sedums – and very attractive they are, too.

In the lower image you can see a visitor: the red admiral butterfly, Vanessa atalanta. On paper the color combination seen here might seem odd, but in life it’s gorgeous. There is something comical about this butterfly: after landing on the flowers, it slowly rotated counterclockwise when moving to a new blossom rather than moving in a line across the inflorescence.

Sedums are a must-have for butterfly gardens. And when the broccoli-like inflorescence starts to color up, it makes a nice nearly flat platform against which visiting butterflies can be photographed.

A daylily tale

2011-09-11T18:49:00.002-04:00

I’m not a daylily person. I don’t travel in daylily circles, don’t attend daylily shows and don’t know by name any of the modern cultivars. And I can easily explain my indifference to the general run of daylilies: most of them have a squat habit of growth with scapes which lean. For the most part, the daylilies I do like have rigidly upright scapes, although I’ve long made an exception for Hemerocallis minor.

Yet there are typical daylilies with qualities I like, and there have always been daylilies in this garden. And one of these days I hope to have them in numbers.

Decades ago I acquired a copy of Arlow Stout's 1934 book Daylilies. It was there that I first learned of the extremely tall daylily he eventually (in the year I was born, 1943) named Hemerocallis altissima. For years I searched unsuccessfully for a source for this plant. Several imposters came and went, and I eventually began to wonder if the true plant still survived in cultivation. I grew two hybrids of this plant: the cultivars ‘Autumn Minaret’ and ‘Autumn Prince’. Of the two, I like ‘Autumn Prince’ better because to my eyes it has the economy of build which so often characterizes wild plants. ‘Autumn Minaret’ is taller and ganglier with flowers which have a twist or flare which to me says “poorly selected hybrid”.

Two weeks ago I acquired another plant under the name Hemerocallis altissima. And in the meantime I acquired a new perspective of these plants: Hemerocallis altissima is currently considered to be a synonym of H. citrina. These nomenclatural shifts are a reminder to those of us who tend to collect names that we should really be focused more on the plants. Whatever this new plant turns out to be, I expect to have what I’ve wanted all along: a very tall, yellow-flowered, night-blooming daylily.

baby rat snake season

2011-09-09T17:34:00.000-04:00

The little one shown above is an example of the young phase of our largest local snake, the black rat snake, Elaphe obsoleta (Pantherophis obsoletus), Adults are, at first glance, pure black; but if examined closely traces of the pattern seen in young examples can generally be seen. This species climbs well, and that, as much as anything, probably accounts for its persistence and abundance in suburban areas.
The catbirds found the snake before I did: they were busily squawking in the nearby shrubbery. The heavy rain we have had for the last week probably brought the snake out into the open.

Rosa 'The Garland'

2011-08-21T23:43:00.001-04:00

This rose dates to the first half of the nineteenth century; it has had a small but loyal following ever since. But those flowers: at first glance they look like a slightly doubled Rosa multiflora. If your rose sensibilities are shaped by exposure only to modern roses, you might wonder why someone would grow such a rose. One has to catch it at just the right moment to understand why it has been cherished for so long. That moment comes when the flowers, flowers in their thousands, just begin to open. For a few hours those flowers seem to glow: the otherwise cold white is suffused with the faintest flush of warm color. Is that color pink or chamois or something else? I don't know; it is fleeting, but as long as it is there these flowers have a warm, soft, lambent quality which is distinctly and very agreeably feminine. And as the color casts its spell one is enveloped in the sweet musky fragrance.

Ordinarily I try to keep the postings to this blog timely; this one is nearly three months late. But when I saw the picture earlier today while reviewing old files, I was so strongly reminded of the day I stood before this plant and surrendered myself to its charms that I wanted to share that moment.

Corydalus cornutus

2011-08-21T22:59:00.001-04:00

As a youngster I read extensively in natural history, and as a result I know about many life forms I've never actually seen. Three months ago this one stumbled into my life. This is a female Corydalus cornutus, the Dobson fly. The lights in the dining room had drawn it in on a mild May evening when the doors were kept open. This one became trapped inside the glass shade of a lamp - I was lucky to see it before it got fried.. This female was impressive enough; the males have long pincers which make them look fearsome (they are harmless, although the females can give a good pinch).

After catching it, I put it into the refrigerator; the next day, as I released it outside, it was briefly numb enough for me to get a few pictures before it flew away.

Only today I was talking to my neighbor Bill who grew up in rural Pennsylvania. I had mentioned hellbenders; that led to water dogs eventually, but in the meantime we passed hellgrammites. He remembers hellgrammites (the larvae of the dobson fly) from his boyhood fishing days.

Gardeners take note: don't confuse Corydalus with Corydalis.

Hesperaloë parviflora

2011-08-21T22:35:00.000-04:00

This is Hesperaloë parviflora, the so-called red yucca. It's blooming here this year for the first time. It began to bloom back in June, and it's still producing flowers. The individual flowers are about the size and color of those of Fritillaria recurva, but otherwise it looks like nothing else in the garden. The flowers look as if they had been carved from coral itself or some coral colored mineral of the cryptocrystalline quartz group. And the inflorescence is tall: it got to be over six feet high.

Hemerocallis citrina

2011-08-21T21:52:00.000-04:00

The plant shown above was purchased as Hemerocallis citrina, and it might very well be that species. Yet in some respects it differs from plants grown under that name in the past. This most recent acquisition has a very short flower life: the flowers open at dusk and are already closing at the first hint of light in the morning. It's pleasantly fragrant.

I've seen this one referred to as as "commuter's daylily" because it opens at about the time many people get home from work. If you arrive home a bit late, you'll have to get a flashlight to see the blooms.

baby ring neck snake season again

2011-08-21T21:07:00.000-04:00

Wayne called me the week before last to tell me that he was finding baby ring neck snakes in his ground level condo again; this time the count (over several days) got up to six. Was it the same snake coming back in each time it was put out into the garden? Or were the snakes hatching somewhere in his unit?
I searched the basement here at home but so far have not found any baby snakes.

See this older entry:

http://mcwort.blogspot.com/2008/08/northern-ring-neck-snake.html

Sinningia tubiflora

2011-08-19T20:28:00.004-04:00

This is Sinningia tubiflora, a plant long known and grown as Achimenes tubiflora . I learned its name as Achimines tubiflora, and since I don't travel in gesneriad circles I was not aware of the name change until very recently. But I never forgot the plant because the descriptions I read contained the magic word "fragrance".

Fragrance is not the only temptation it offers; it's apparently almost hardy. I wintered the plant above in a cold frame, and that's where it will spend the upcoming winter.

Small crop seedlings for fall and winter harvest

2011-08-19T18:34:00.000-04:00

This image shows short rows of crops and flowers planted for fall/winter harvest. Most were sown in late July and are very slowly putting on size. Forty different items were planted in this bed: bok choi in several varieties, mizuna, mustard greens, kohl rabi, chives, white multiplier onions, beets, Swiss chard, parsley, coriander, dill, chervil, fennel, carrots, corn salad, zinnias, cosmos, mignonette, sunflowers, marigolds and other odds and ends - there are also bought plants of cabbage, Brussels sprouts and sprouting broccoli, and a plot neighbor gave me some seedling celery.

The short rows make sense because we only need a few of each item. As the plants are thinned I can improvise various mesclun mixes (that's right up there with shrimp scampi as a tautology, isn't it?).

I have not let my hopes run away with me: the site is crawling with fecund hungry bugs.

The view from the vine house

2011-08-19T18:11:00.000-04:00

This is the view from the vine house. It's especially beautiful in the morning and evening. There is not a house in view. It won't be long now before I take a meal up to be consumed in the vine house on a cool evening. It should be especially nice once the moon flowers start to bloom.

The vine house

2011-08-19T18:07:00.000-04:00

This is my vine house, the centerpiece of one of my veggie plots. Even now in late August it's still a bit ragged looking because I was late in putting up the wire supports for the vines. Most of what you see here is the growth of morning glories and moon flowers. On the back side of the vine house are pole beans. On one side there was a lush growth of the so-called Armenian cucumber: most of those suddenly wilted earlier this week. Next year I'll probably plant only morning glories and moon flowers - nothing seems to bother them.

The plastic "roof" has since been removed.

The morning glories have flower buds and should be blooming soon. There is no sign yet of buds on the moon flowers.

Lycoris longituba

2011-08-10T17:43:00.000-04:00

The other day a friend emailed me to ask about a white-flowered Lycoris × squamigera. I wrote back to tell him I had never heard of such a thing and offered this plant as a likely source of the rumor. It's a handsome plant with a light pleasing fragrance. It's also a good garden plant here and seems to be reliable about blooming (it's been here only four years). These plants are so conspicuous when in bloom that it's tempting to fill the garden with them; but remember, their floral presence, however arresting, is fleeting.

Lilium formosanum

2011-08-10T17:30:00.000-04:00

Modern hybrid garden lilies can be spectacular, sometimes overwhelmingly so. Wild lilies on the other hand are more apt to appeal for their grace and elegance. The plant shown above is Lilium formosanum, a native of Taiwan (or as it was often called in the past, Formosa). This lily has naturalized in southern Africa and in Australia, and self-sown seedlings sometimes appear in our gardens, too. It will bloom within a year from seed, and varies in height from 18 inches or so up to over six feet.

In contrast to garden lilies, wild lilies are often characterized by an extreme economy of substance: the leaves and stems are, as it were, no bigger or thicker than they absolutely have to be. Lilium formosanum is a good example of this: compare its slender, lithe growth to the comparatively stout form of the cultivated forms of the similar Lilium longiflorum.

Farmer Jim

2011-08-10T17:27:00.000-04:00

If you've been wondering where in the world has Jim been for the last two months, the picture above gives the answer - at least if you realize what you are looking at.

Back in May I got wind of something exciting: the local parks department had established community gardens nearby as part of the Montgomery County Parks Community Gardens program. You can learn more about this here:
http://www.montgomeryparks.org/permits/find/community_gardens_program.shtm

The home garden has been full for years; and the home lot has never really been good for a proper vegetable garden. So I jumped at the opportunity to have a site out in a sunny field. It gets better: the overall site is surrounded by a deer fence, there is water at the site and there are periodic deliveries of wood chip mulch.They've done a good job with this. Here's the cistern:

For the last two months my mind has been spinning over the possibilities presented by my new community garden plots (yes, plots). Plot acquisition took place back in May, but the May-June period was extremely busy for me, and it took me a while to get started with the vegetable garden. The first things to go in were tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos and eggplants. Here's an early harvest:

I think we have eaten more bacon, tomato and lettuce sandwiches during the last two weeks than we have eaten in the last two years. I've refused to buy those $3 per pound grocery store tomatoes for years.

Back in mid-July I began to plant seeds for fall and winter harvests: these are coming along nicely and should provide lots of herbs, root crops and greens during September and October. There is also late-planted corn, the variety Mirai. This is a 75 day corn, and it should be ready in late September. But I've since learned that insect pests are a huge problem with late planted corn. And this year, in addition to the usual corn pests, we have a new one: the garden site is swarming with brown marmorated stink bugs. They seem to be sampling everything.

I've got plenty of squash coming along, and these guys are certainly appreciating my efforts:

The photos above show the eggs and nymphs of the squash bug.

Here's something which has so far escaped the bugs: this is the so-called Armenian cucumber. It's actually a melon, not a cucumber. But it's not sweet, and it does look like a cucumber.

We've been eating a lot of vegetables lately - and so have the bugs!

Rosa 'Safrano'

2011-05-29T12:39:00.000-04:00

This is the famous old tea rose ‘Safrano’ – it dates from 1839, very early in the hybridization of modern garden roses. I grew up being told that tea roses were not hardy in our climate. And indeed that seems to be the prevailing belief even now. But I was intrigued to read Mrs. Keays’ comments from about seventy-five years ago concerning this rose: she said it was “found…in almost every garden in our neighborhood” (her home was near Lusby, Calvert County, Maryland).

Note that it is a tea rose, not a hybrid tea rose. What’s the difference? That question is a lot harder to answer than it might at first seem, because the difference is one of degree and not a difference of kind. One way to put it into perspective is to realize that the original tea roses (there were two) were almost certainly already hybrids and not, as was originally thought, new species. As a result, seedlings from these plants were much more variable than would have been the case had they been stable, relatively uniform species.

Furthermore, the first European rosarians to acquire them immediately began to raise seedlings and, later in the nineteenth century, make deliberate crosses. For the rose growers of the early nineteenth century they must have seemed unbelievably sweet eye candy. They differed from the older European garden roses in prevailing flower color, habit of growth, foliage, poise of bloom and season of bloom. That so many of the old European garden roses survive is no doubt due to the one fault these new tea roses had: they lacked cold hardiness and thus they were not good garden plants in extremely cold climates. They were eventually crossed with just about every other compatible rose available, although they were hardly universally compatible for breeding purposes with other garden roses. As a result, a new and very variable swarm of hybrid garden roses arose. Throughout the nineteenth century these roses became bigger and more variable with respect to growth habit and hardiness.

By the second half of the nineteenth century it was becoming obvious that the tea group had become a bit unwieldy; the solution was to establish a new class of roses, the now familiar hybrid tea roses. The point of division between the old tea roses and the newly named hybrid tea roses is completely artificial and arbitrary. Basically, roses which produced larger, fuller, upright flowers with stouter canes and coarser foliage became the hybrid teas. Several roses have been given the distinction of being the “first” hybrid tea; such decisions are a matter of opinion, not of fact. The fact is that all of these earliest hybrid teas were introduced as tea roses. These early hybrid teas were to be subjected to a profound change at the end of the nineteenth century with the introduction of the genes for strong yellow color. Any rose with the Pernetiana roses in its background is at least as distinct from the other hybrid teas as those earliest hybrid teas were from their tea rose contemporaries. But so thoroughly reticulated has the hybridization of modern hybrid teas been that the only obvious legacies of the Pernetiana group are the bright yellow colors and blends made possible by them and the susceptibility to black spot disease.

The tea rose shown above is Safrano, a rose which arose so early in the hybridization of modern garden roses that its identity as a tea rose has never been questioned. That’s not the case with the tea roses which were raised in the earliest twentieth century. Later in the year I hope to be able to show you a blossom of the rose ‘William R. Smith’, nominally a tea rose. The stud book, at least what we know of it, says that this is a tea rose. But the flowers, very big for a tea rose and borne on a thick-caned big and relatively hardy plant, say hybrid tea rose, and so it has been called by some observers.

My interest in this distinction between tea roses and hybrid tea roses on the one hand, and the distinction between hybrid tea roses and hybrid perpetual roses on the other hand, goes back to the earliest days of my learning about roses. The books I had were not in agreement about the placement of one rose in particular, the once very famous ‘Frau Karl Druschki’. To look at her, the Frau was a hybrid tea, and was so-considered by many rosarians. Many thought of it as the best white-flowered hybrid tea. But there were those who waved the stud book, and the book recorded the embarrassing fact that the Frau had one parent which was a hybrid perpetual; in the beliefs of that school of thought this disqualified the Frau for consideration as a “true, pure” hybrid tea.

This sort of thing was important on the show bench, and doubtless reflected a less noble concern with miscegenation in the human population. What always puzzled me is why the Frau was considered to be a Hybrid Perpetual: if one parent was a Hybrid Perpetual and the other parent was a Hybrid Tea, it seems to me that the Frau was neither. But the rules were the rules, and it seems that they were the same for ostensibly white people who just happened to have a drop or two of black blood in the family history: they weren’t “true, pure” white. In retrospect these little social comedies seem to be just that, comedies. But there was a time when people took them seriously, both on the show bench and off.

But back to ‘Safrano’: if this rose settles down in this garden and grows as well as I expect it to, it will be well worth having. A lot has changed in the rose world in the nearly two hundred years since it was raised, and yet this rose has many of the qualities we look for in a good garden rose. It’s a keeper! And as a tea rose it’s also a souvenir of one of the most appreciated and important early phases of the development of our modern garden roses.

Rosa hemisphaerica

2011-05-21T22:01:00.010-04:00

I’ve been waiting to make this entry for years, and now that the time has come, I’ll have to temper my enthusiasm with a bit of disappointment. The rose shown in the images above is Rosa hemisphaerica. The very few of you who have grown this rose probably can guess the source of that disappointment: the garden performance of this rose has not changed much in the four hundred years since it was introduced to European gardens.

Back in the late 1970s I imported two grafted plants of this rose from Hilliers in England. Although those plants survived long enough to bloom, it was apparent from the beginning that it would be an uphill effort to keep them going. They made only halting, skimpy growth and they lost most of their foliage to black spot during the summer. One survived and built itself up enough to eventually bloom, but I eventually lost both plants. I still have good Kodachrome transparencies of the flowers produced by that plant.

If there had been an easy way to do so, I would have replaced those plants. But I could not find a domestic source, and I was not up to the hassles of importing again.

Now fast forward about thirty years. While idly doing internet searches one day in 2002, I hit on a domestic source for Rosa hemisphaerica: Greenmantle Nursery in Garberville, California. But there was a catch: I would have to make a down payment and then wait for the rose to be propagated. I jumped at the chance, in particular because this would be a plant on its own roots. Marissa Fishman at Greenmantle must have the magic touch: plants in commerce in the past were invariably grafted as far as I know. I assumed I would get my rose in a year or two.

At this point add another eight years to the quest: it was not until April of 2010 that my rose arrived in the mail. Nor was it a particularly prepossessing example: it was healthy but there was not much to it. I planted it in a large ornamental tub rather than in the ground. It did not bloom that first year (I didn’t expect it to), but it did grow well- in that first season here that little plant put on more growth than those plants I had decades ago did the entire time they survived here.

This week, it’s finally blooming, and most people on looking at the images above will probably be wondering why in the world I ever bothered to acquire this rose. The plant produced over a dozen flower buds this year; every one has been so densely packed with petals that the flower has split and the resulting blossom is more or less malformed. This rose has an old reputation for producing problem flowers: more often than not, the flowers ball (fail to expand normally) rather than open properly. So that is the source of my disappointment. But when it performs well and produces good flowers, you'll be very glad indeed that you have it. I don’t have a perfect bloom to show you this year, but if it continues to thrive here there might be one in the future.

How old is this rose? No one knows; Europeans became aware of double, yellow-flowered roses growing in the gardens of the Middle East in the late sixteenth century. Those roses were almost certainly this rose, although the similar rose which became known as ‘Persian Yellow’ when it was introduced in the early nineteenth century also might have existed that long ago and been seen by those early European observers. The rose under discussion here, Rosa hemisphaerica, seems to have been introduced to eastern European gardens in the very early seventeenth century. It was known to Clusius at the very beginning of the century (1601): although there is no indication that he saw a living plant, he related a description by a Viennese noble woman of a display of paper cutouts of flowers which included double yellow roses (…inter eas erant et flavae rosae plenae…)

Here is the account from the Historia of Clusius; click on the image to enlarge it:

Parkinson, in his Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629), and the Johnson edition of Gerard (1633) both discuss it. In their time it was a very rare plant, a sort of trophy plant likely to be seen only in the gardens of the few.

Here is Parkinson's text; click on the image to enlarge it. Anyone who has grown this rose will find Parkinson's comments familiar.

This is the double flowered yellow rose seen in the still life paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It can be seen, for instance, in this piece dated c. 1720 by van Huysum from the collection of the National Gallery:

http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/timage_f?object=56255&image=13916&c=

This rose played no part in the development of modern yellow-flowered garden roses. In fact, until the end of the nineteenth century there were no hybrid roses of garden origin with strong yellow flowers. Throughout the nineteenth century there were yellow-flowered tea roses, but those roses had a pale yellow color which generally quickly faded in bright light. I’ll save the story of the development of the modern hybrid yellow-flowered roses for another post.

Later this week I’ll post an image of an early nineteenth century tea rose with some yellow in its coloration to give you an idea of the yellow seen in tea roses.

Paeonia officinalis 'Rubra Plena'

2011-05-02T08:25:00.002-04:00

The image above shows the usual garden form of Paeonia officinalis known as 'Rubra Plena'. I purchased the pot-grown plant about two weeks ago; the flower is a bit smaller and less full than those seen on well grown large plants.

Until the end of the eighteenth century, this was the common garden peony in European and American gardens. The introduction of Paeonia lactiflora to Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, and the rapid development of seed grown cultivars of that species, soon displaced Paeonia officinalis, and today Paeonia officinalis is no longer the common garden peony.

American books sometimes call it the Memorial Day peony, but here in zone 7 Maryland it blooms long before that. In most areas it is said to bloom about two weeks before the start of the Paeonia lactiflora season. The scent of peonies of the lactiflora group varies, but many have very agreeable scents, some of them distinctly rose-like. The scent of Paeonia officinalis on the other hand is usually described disparagingly as soap-like.

Notholirion thomsonianum

2011-04-21T09:42:00.008-04:00

With very few exceptions, the images on this blog have all come from my garden. I'm going to make an exception today.

The plant shown above is Notholirion thomsonianum. My friends Bob and Audrey grew it in that copiously planted and amazingly diversified garden they care for in Simpson Park, Alexandria, Virginia.

Although I grow this plant in my garden, my plant has never bloomed. In fact,until I saw the plant shown above I had never seen a Notholirion in bloom. Seeing it yesterday evening was like adding a new bird to one's life list. It also left me momentarily confused: I had expected this species to have white flowers with a narrower bell shape. When I got home I checked out the images for this species on Google: there is a bit of variation in flower shape and color. The form shown above is more decorative than those I've seen in some pictures.

When I asked them where they got their plant, their answer, "Jane McGary, 2006" had me laughing. That's where and when I got my plant! In the future, I'll set a better table for my plant.

Peony season 2011 begins

2011-04-20T12:03:00.000-04:00

The first peonies of the year began to open yesterday. In most years, Paeonia mascula opens the year quickly followed by P. emodi and P. wittmanniana. This year P. emodi is taking its time, but this morning both P. mascula and P. wittmanniana were wide open.

In the images above Paeonia mascula is the pink flower, P. wittmanniana is the white one.

Some sensible gardeners, notwithstanding their admiration for these beautiful flowers, will not want to give space for them in their own gardens: the flowers are fleeting. And not only are the flowers fleeting but they fade if it is warm and sunny.

Thermopsis lanceolata

2011-04-20T10:56:00.001-04:00

When this plant first made its debut in my circle of gardening friends there was confusion about its name. Three names were suggested: Th. lanceolata, Th. chinensis and Th. fabacea. I don't remember why we settled on Thermopsis lanceolata, but a consensus for that name seems to have emerged.

This plant is valuable for its early bloom and its ease of culture.

Tulipa 'Willem van Oranje'

2011-04-20T10:49:00.003-04:00

The tulip shown above, 'Willem van Oranje' is a member of the double early group. It's a really beautiful bit of color, isn't it?

The plant itself is rather short and squat, but this is an advantage for tulips with such heavy flowers.

Fritillaria acmopetala

2011-04-20T10:40:00.001-04:00

If you are just beginning with fritillaries and you garden in a climate like this one, then the plant shown above, Fritillaria acmopetala, is a good one to start with. If well sited it will persist and increase.

The flower reflects the overall poise of the plant: somewhat stiff and elongated, as if it's a bit distressed to find itself crowded in with so many uncouth companions. The open rim of the flower is glossy as if highly varnished, and in common with many other frits the interior of the flower deserves a peek, too.

Morning walk

2011-04-19T10:43:00.001-04:00

Here are some scenes from this morning's walk.

It's morel season, and it pays to keep one's eyes open during walks along the wood verges. At least two species of morel grow here, but neither ever seems abundant. The one in the image is the only one I've seen so far this year.

The little yellow violet is Viola pubescens , a very common species here. There are places in the woods where yellow and purple violets grow together and make a lively combination.

The final image is of a section of Rock Creek; the water is relatively high due to recent rains. I have seen kingfishers, wood ducks and mallards here, and an Eastern Phoebe haunts the nearby bridge.

Loddon lilies

2011-04-17T11:40:00.001-04:00

The flowers in the image above are those of Leucojum aestivum,the Loddon lily or summer snowflake. This is a plant with lots of name problems. In much of the American South they are called snowdrops. And then there is the book name "summer snowflake". The summer snowflake does not bloom in the summer, it blooms in the spring (now). But if you know a bit of Latin, you can see where that bookish name comes from: aestivum is a Latin adjective meaning "of summer". To add to the confusion, there is a related species Leucojum vernum (vernum is Latin for "of spring") which blooms not in the spring but rather in the late winter here.
The name Loddon lily, not commonly used in North America, derives from the presence of plants, perhaps native, growing along the River Loddon in England.

Notice the difference in the size of the flowers in the image above. The big one in the middle is probably the old variety 'Gravetye', aka 'Gravetye Var.' or 'Gravetye Giant'. It's unclear (to me at least) if this name was originally used for a particularly large-flowered clone or if the name originally was used for a group of large-flowered seedlings. Plants in commerce under this name are fertile and do form seeds, although I have not grown any on to see what they produce. The flower in the image was taken from a group which seemed to vary a lot in size.

The two flowers on the right of the image are what I think of as typical in size for Leucojum aestivum.

The flowers on the left are from plants which have been in the garden for decades. They were received under the name Leucojum aestivum pulchellum, but I don't believe for a minute that that 's what they are.

Unlike Leucojum vernum, Leucojum aestivum thrives mightily in this area. It's a familiar sight in old gardens in the city, and while there are no doubt ruderal plants in the area, for a plant so long in cultivation it does not seem to have jumped the garden fence often. It obviously is better adapted to garden life than to life in the wild. It's a distinct personality in our garden flora: nothing else looks like it. And it's well worth having both in the garden and as a cut flower.

The genus name is derived from the classical Greek words for white and violet. The usual pronunciation puts the stress on the syllable co, but since the o in that syllable is short, if you know the Latin rules for the placement of the stress it might seem that the stress should be on the syllable leu-. But there is a catch here: what looks like a j in this word is in fact an i treated as a glide (or semivowel). In the original Greek the syllabification of the word would have been leu-co-i-on, and since the i is short, the stress according to the Latin rules would have been on the syllable co - where it remains to this day. You'll raise some eyebrows if you pronounce it Latin style.

Tulipa 'Fringed Beauty'

2011-04-15T14:51:00.000-04:00

This is Tulipa 'Fringed Beauty'. The tomato-red, the cheese yellow and the anchovy-dark anthers have me jokingly thinking of it as the pizza tulip. It's a favorite here, as much for its appearance as for its rarity. It is still in commercial production but is not offered regularly - years will pass when it is not offered. So I try to take good care of my stock - the plant you see above has been in the garden for years.

This is an old tulip, but I don't know how old. It was already old when the Dutch finally got around to formally registering tulip varieties (as recently as the early 1930s!). It shows at least two mutations, the fringe effect and the double petals. It presumably arose (I'm guessing here) as a normal, six-petaled tulip raised from seed sometime in the nineteenth century or earlier. That tulip then presumably sported to a multipetaled tulip, and then to a fringed multipetaled tulip. Or maybe the fringed sport happened first. Other things about this tulip suggest that it might be much older than the guess above. For one thing, it produces very small bulbs - even the bulbs supplied by the commercial growers are small. It's a short and rather squat tulip - again, qualities seen in the oldest garden tulips.

Fritillaria thunbergii

2011-04-14T16:24:00.000-04:00

I've read that this plant is cultivated as a field crop in China for use in traditional medications.

Although the flowers are small for the genus and the color not at all exciting, the plant has a nice poise and grows vigorously and reliably in our gardens -and that's something which cannot be said for too many Fritillaria.

The plants in the image above arrived here in 2003 under the name Fritillaria involucrata.

Tulipa whittallii

2011-04-14T16:12:00.001-04:00

Tulipa whittallii is said to be a tetraploid form of the Tulipa orphanidea group. Perhaps the name should be formatted as Tulipa orphanidea 'Whittallii'. It honors the nineteenth century collector Edward Whittall. As far as I know, the plant was collected only once, and the cultivated stock is derived from the original collection.

The plant shown above has been in the garden for a long time, probably over thirty years. This is one of the tulips which spreads by underground runners terminated by yet more bulbs. After a few years, the initial planting becomes a diffuse group of scattered plants. Tulips which reproduce this way are a good choice for turning loose in the less managed parts of the garden.

Several years ago the topic of tulips which spread by underground runners came up on one of the on-line discussion groups. I mentioned this species and its long persistence in my garden. Someone wrote to me and asked for a starter bulb. I went out to the garden to dig one, but then had a thought which until then I had not considered. The plants in my garden grew in the shade of some deciduous magnolias, and although they had spread around a lot, they had not bloomed for years. In fact, I could remember planting several tulips known to spread, and now I could not be sure that the ones I was looking at were Tulipa whittallii. So for the next two years I fed the colony heavily, and this year it finally paid off: they are blooming again and revealing their identity. Someone will now be getting a surprise package in the mail in a few weeks.

Other tulips which grow this way are Tulipa clusiana and T. sylvestris, and I have seen both naturalized and thriving (but not always blooming freely) in local gardens.

A rose event

2011-04-14T13:40:00.001-04:00

In a blog entry in April of 2010 I mentioned a rose of some historic importance which was once again growing in my garden after an absence of over twenty years:
http://mcwort.blogspot.com/2010/04/gardeners-need-patience.html

The rose in question is not a particularly vigorous sort, and it did not bloom last year (nor did I expect it to). But it did grow well, perhaps because finally I have it on its own roots. As it began to leaf out a few weeks ago I kept a very close watch on the new growth. The plant was growing very well, but there was no sign of flower buds developing - that was a big disappointment. The other day I took another look: there are flower buds, lots of them. With luck, I'll be posting an image of the flower in several weeks.

For now I'm not going to tell you what it is. Can any of you guess from the image above? I'm willing to guess that only well-read rosarians even know about this rose, and fewer have actually seen it in bloom. The only hint I'll give is that it is ancient (just how ancient no one knows) and was introduced to European gardens at the beginning of the seventeenth century. So if it goes on to bloom successfully here, it will be a big event for me. I still have a few good slides made in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I last grew this rose, but it will be great to get digital images.

Batrachian chorus

2011-04-11T17:11:00.004-04:00

The local common toad, Bufo americanus, is now singing from the garden pond. At this time of year they sing in broad daylight and seem indifferent to the presence of potential predators. Or do they somehow know that there is no way I'm going to eat a toad? The air temperature when the photo was taken was over 85⁰ F and there was a breeze now and then, but otherwise it was quiet and still. Today there were at least four toads at the pond, probably three males and one female. In the past, on peak nights, I've counted over thirty.

Toads have been singing from a neighbor's house only a few doors away for about two weeks. Each year the toads there begin earlier that they do here. That site is probably no more than 500 feet away.

The toads are not the only ones spawning in the pond. The goldfish are also spawning. If you didn't know any better, you might think the spawning goldfish were trying to get out of the pond. They form groups of four or five fish and thrash,flop and splash at the very edge of the pond.

In the image above you see a pair in amplexus.

I recorded the males singing today: take a listen:

A mystery peony

2011-04-08T12:57:00.001-04:00

The botanical nomenclature of the wild peonies has been dicey for decades as each generation of new botanists takes yet another look at these plants and comes to different conclusions. With that in mind I should not have been surprised when, about forty years ago, I received a big healthy clump (said to have been imported from England) from a then well-known grower under the name Paeonia peregrina, a clump which when it flowered proved to be something else. That's the source of the annoyance here: the "something else" factor. The plant itself is big, healthy and beautiful. I've always been glad to have it. But what in the world is it? If it's an unhybridized peony of wild origin, it might be Paeonia arietina. But then it might not be. It might have been grown from garden seed of that species, and the seed might have been the result of an accidental hybridization. Or it might not have any connection with P. arietina at all.

Believe it or not, the two lower pictures above show the same plant in bloom, in bloom in different years when the growing conditions during peony season were very different. I'm sure many an armchair botanist might make them different species.

The top photo shows the new growth emerging bud-first from the ground. With this one you know where you stand bud-wise as soon as the new growth appears. This plant typically produces one big flower per stem. When the flowers first open and the dome of stamens is fresh it's a very beautiful sight.

This plant sets abundant viable seed.

Crocus reticulatus

2011-04-07T09:58:00.000-04:00

My starter corm of Crocus reticulatus arrived in the late summer of 2005. It must have bloomed at least once since then, but there are no photos to prove it. And when it started to bloom this year, I had the unmistakable feeling that I was looking at something I had never seen before. Plenty of unusual crocuses are making the rounds now, and since I've never seen a crocus I didn't like, quite a few have been invited into the garden over the years.

If you are just getting started with crocuses, save your money and stick with the readily available named ones. Many of the less commonly grown ones are less commonly grown for a reason: they really are not that exciting. That's not to say that there are not some rare and very beautiful crocus out there; but most of what the genus has to offer in terms of beauty can be experienced in a carefully chosen collection of standard named cultivars of the misleadingly named chrysanthus hybrids. If you can, grow at least some of them in pots so you can easily pick them up and examine them at close range - or enjoy the pleasant companionship and fragrance they lend to a reading or bedside table.

Sempervivum 'Fame Montrose'

2011-04-05T12:57:00.003-04:00

I know that there are those who take the attitude "if you can't grow anything else, there are always sedums and sempervivums". Some gardeners regard them as beginner's plants, hardly worth the consideration of serious gardeners - the sort of plant you would give to some kid in the neighborhood to nurture an interest in gardening. Others simply don't like the vaguely creepy, rubbery, fleshy leaves and dull, leaden colors. Our summers make their culture problematic. As it turns out, many sempervivums are not exactly care-free plants under our conditions. If you think you can plant them and forget them, you might have an unpleasant surprise coming.

And then, among gardeners who like to keep fastidious records, there is the problem of the names. Pictures in catalogs or from on-line sources are not necessarily your friend when the time comes to match a nameless plant with a name: sempervivums are at their brightest and most colorful in the spring, but later most assume more quiet, duller tints - I've given up on trying to identify them during the summer when so many of them seem to look alike. The bright colors you see in the image above will fade during the summer.

Luckily there are a few which are so distinctive that you are not likely to confuse them with other varieties. The one shown above, 'Fame Montrose', is one such. The oddly truncated leaves are not unique among the garden forms, but you'll search a while before you find others like it.

I first saw this plant several years ago while judging a rock garden show in the Pittsburgh area. Our judging team awarded the plant a blue ribbon; only later did we learn that the plant had been exhibited by Carl Gehenio, one of the best rock gardeners in the Pittsburgh area. My friend Paul was on the same judging team, and when he was back in the Pittsburgh area earlier this year he obtained plants of 'Fame Montrose' and kindly gave me one. Thus it joins the ranks of those plants in this garden which serve as reminders of pleasant days among friends and their plants and gardens.

I don't yet know the history of this cultivar, but the name 'Montrose' suggests that another famous garden might be in its background. Does anyone know?

And here's another idea: a bit of checking has revealed that this cultivar spontaneously reverts back and forth between a typical sempervivum form and the form shown above with the tubular, truncated leaves. Hmmmm...In the old days, teratological forms were also described as being monstrous.

Is 'Montrose' supposed to be 'Monstrous' or 'Monstrosa'? Was there a sempervivum called 'Fame' before the ones which sport to the distorted form were discovered? If so, then 'Fame Monstrous' or 'Fame Monstrosa' make sense to me.

Asarum maximum 'Ling Ling'

2011-04-05T12:25:00.000-04:00

This is a widely distributed cultivar of Asarum maximum named 'Ling Ling'. I have two accessions of this species; the other one was mentioned in this post:

http://mcwort.blogspot.com/2008/02/cold-frame-treasures.html

Here they are grown in cold frames, but I've seen them in other local gardens out in the open.

If the only asarums you know are the local Asarum canadense or the garden forms of A. europaeum, you will probably want Asarum maximum the first time you see it. The striking color combination is fetching enough, but the size of the flowers is what really does it. And the foliage of this species is evergreen.

Cardamine quinquefolia

2011-04-05T12:10:00.001-04:00

This little charmer is Cardamine quinquefolia, and it made its debut in the gardens of my circle of friends only several years ago. I don't think any of us had seen a pink-flowered toothwort before that. When I first saw it I assumed that it was a pink-flowered form of the native toothwort, Cardamine concatenata (aka Dentaria laciniata). But no, this is a Eurasian species.

I obtained my start only last year (thank you, Dixie), and it's off to a good start.

Hepaticas

2011-04-04T18:56:00.001-04:00

When my parents bought this house almost fifty years ago I was in my late teens and spent a lot of time exploring the local woodlands. My memories of the local flora from back in those days are, in many instances, all that remain of many plants. Native plants which were once so common as to rarely elicit notice are now rarely seen. Some plants have almost certainly been extirpated from the local woodlands. The reasons are various and now mostly widely known: deer in particular seem to have successfully Hoovered the forest floor in this neighborhood.

Back then there were two places where I could count on an early display of hepaticas. I don't think I've seen a hepatica in local woods in twenty or thirty years.

Is this impoverishment of our local flora important? The species in question, the ones we no longer see in the neighborhood, survive in abundance elsewhere. The local woodlands are probably largely second growth or more; before the deer reappeared, cows probably occupied the same niche and did as thorough a job. Even if we could get rid of the deer, there would still be a significant problem with human poachers. It might be grimly amusing to accompany a group of gardeners in a walk through our local woodlands and listen as they quote catalog prices for the remaining examples of our native plants. Surely that they are sold at all must nudge otherwise responsible gardeners into snitching a plant here and there rather than pay the going rate in the catalogs. Surely most of the plants sold in catalogs are plundered from national forests and other nominally protected sites.

Take a look at the prices for the trilliums in Tony Avent's catalog: wow, how's that for sticker shock? But you can buy those plants guilt free. They are not as expensive as you think: in the time it takes to raise a trillium from seed to bloom, someone might add an extra graduate degree or two, or watch a youngster grow from childhood into their early teens. Now you know why so many gardeners travel with an entrenching tool tucked away in the car trunk.

I don't have much if any hope for the local woodlands. They are beyond saving in my view. They are already lost, and any efforts at restoration will involve enough might-have-been fantasy to make the results laughable. And then there is this insurmountable problem: even if you could get rid of the deer and the invasive alien plants, you wouldn't be able to get rid of the people. We're the problem, and as long as we're around, the problem will be, too.

Now what in the world about hepaticas steered me in the direction of this little rant? I do miss the ones which once grew in the local woodlands, and for all I know they are still there, somewhere.

The one you see in the image above is one received from Ellen Hornig as Hepatica acutiloba "large type, blue fls". This is the first blue-flowered native hepatica I've ever seen. I also have several of the Japanese garden hepaticas. These have much more intense color, but the seemingly simple flowers have the sorts of little irregularities which characterize plants which long ago lost their innocence to long residence in the garden. And I have home-grown seedlings. In a few years I hope to have a short border of hepaticas displaying both the variations in flower color and leaf pattern. I might even allow in a multi-petaled form or two.

By the way: deer cropped the flowers shown in the image above the day after the photo was taken.

tulip increase

2011-04-04T17:20:00.000-04:00

If you are an inexperienced bulb grower about to give up on tulips as garden plants in our climate, the two pictures above have something to teach you. Back in mid-February a pot of six blooming tulips was bought as a birthday gift for a friend. The tulips might have been watered once or twice while they still had blooms, but after that they probably went on a shelf and were forgotten. You might think that that would have been the end of them - after all, the tulips in the garden seem to disappear after blooming in spite of all you do for them. But when the pot was turned out, it was found that the six tulip bulbs had multiplied to nearly fifty bulbs! To be sure, not a one would likely bloom again without a year or two of bulking up. But with good culture, there is at least a chance that those six original bulbs might provide a couple of dozen flowers a few years down the road.

The old bulb growers had a saying: bulbs like to mature into a drought. The results you see above are an example of that. Why doesn't this happen in our gardens? When the tulips are maturing in our gardens in June, the soil is full of moisture and the soil temperature is rising. Those are great conditions for soil fungi, but terrible conditions for ripening tulips. Tulips planted in well drained raised beds sometimes persist for years, but tulips planted on the flat rarely do in this garden.

In our climate, if you want to experiment with keeping your tulips going for years, either plant them in raised beds or get them out of the ground before the soil warms up too much.

St Patrick's Day Meal

2011-04-04T16:54:00.000-04:00

Steaming bowls of lamb stew and freshly baked soda bread (this time with raisins and caraway) provide a simple yet very satisfying meal for St Patrick's Day. In most years the table would have been decorated with a big bouquet of Helleborus foetidus, too. But this year the hellebores are late and show cold damage. The daffodils came from the grocery store: only a few 'Rijnveld's Early Sensation' were actually blooming in the garden, and I wasn't about to cut those. It does not get much better than a meal like this taken in a quiet evening at home.

A Colchicum of the Merendera sort

2011-04-04T16:25:00.001-04:00

For most of the twentieth century the genera Colchcium and Merendera were treated as distinct by most botanists. The current trend is to call them all Colchicum. The one shown above came without a definite name but with the hint that it might be Merendera montana (as it was better known at the time).

Garden colchciums are best known as fall blooming plants, although in fact many bloom at the tail end of summer and only a few persist long into autumn. And there are forms which bloom in late winter or earliest spring.

These flowers have a peculiarity which you can just barely begin to make out in the image above. The tepals are separate right to the point where they are attached around the ovary underground. The wide, showy part of the tepal thins dramatically just below the point where the tepals flare to form what we see as the flower. This thin part is just about as long as the wider showy part. If you look at the image carefully, you can make out these thin parts of the tepals. They form a false tube, false in the sense that there in no tube above ground. And here's what more interesting: at the point where the tepals flare, there are little hooks which hold the tepals together to form a recognizable flower. If you gently unhook them, the tepals sprawl individually flat on the ground (because other than the little hooks they have no mutual attachment). There must be a pollination story responsible for this odd condition, but I don't know what it is.

Cymbidium goeringii

2011-04-04T15:54:00.002-04:00

This lovely little bit of jade is Cymbidium goeringii, one of several greenish-flowered terrestrial orchids which have been celebrated for centuries in several southeastern Asian cultures as traditional spring flowers. As you can see, it's beautiful; and it's also sweetly fragrant. It's said to be hardy in USDA zone 7 (our zone), but I'm growing it in a cold frame for now. My friend Kevin who lives a bit north and east of here is growing it out in the open, and when I emailed him a few weeks ago he said things looked fine there (although his plant was not in bud yet). Although north of here, he's closer to the bay and at a lower elevation - and so his garden might be milder than this one.
The label which came with my plant indicated that the plant was a Japanese form of the species. Elsewhere I read that the Japanese forms are less likely to be well scented than the Chinese forms. I'll keep my eyes open for plants of Chinese provenance.

Back in the saddle, maybe

2011-04-04T15:33:00.001-04:00

It's been two full months since my last post. Here's why:
My old computer began to act up in January, and by February it had started to show signs that the end was near. I had some quick diagnostic work done, gave due consideration to the doctors’ pronouncements and decided to put the old one down. There was a nerve wracking night when the doctors evaluated the old hard drive to see what, if anything, could be saved. I was lucky: nothing was lost, or maybe I should say that I have not yet noticed anything missing. I’ve been without a functioning computer in the house for about two months: if nothing else, this experience has taught me how dependent I had become on computers.

The new box and its accoutrements did not arrive until mid-March. The fun began after I copied the contents of the old hard drive from an external hard drive onto the new one. The new pc has a new operating system. The old one ran on Windows XP, the new one on Windows 7. It turns out that many applications do not run on Windows 7 the way they run on Windows XP; evidently, some don’t run at all. For several days I was banging my head on the wall trying to get the old camera software to work. I up loaded all relevant updates and followed directions meticulously – all to no avail. Finally I gave in and called the camera manufacturer’s service center. I explained the problem and was very heartened to hear the cheery voice on the other end of the line say “I know just what the problem is.” And sure enough, as we spoke on the phone, he had the camera software up and running within two or three minutes: kudos to the team at Canon technical support.

This week I’ll be tackling the FrontPage issues. All of my web sites were done on the old box using FrontPage 2003. A bit of on-line searching has turned up some distressing commentary: Microsoft no longer supports FrontPage 2003. It’s pushing a new product which, at first glance, seems to do a lot more than I will ever ask of it. I’m also seeing commentary which suggests that FrontPage 2003 will not run with Windows 7.

Going into this new computer search, my greatest concern was losing data from the old box. Now I realize that the varied issues arising from trying to use old applications in a very newly developed operating system are going to eat a lot more of my time than I expected.

Scale propagation of lilies

2011-02-04T17:33:00.000-05:00

At the annual fall picnic of our local lily group a bulb of the new lily hybrid 'Carte Blanche' was auctioned. My friend Mary made the winning bid, and as she took possession of the big fat bulb, I teasingly suggested that she give me a scale (lilies are easily propagated from scales).

About a week later a little box arrived in the mail from Mary: it contained a scale of this still expensive new hybrid. I immediately popped it into a zip lock bag with a suitable medium, and in the image above you can see the results so far.

There is more to this story, but I'm saving the rest for later.

Annuals as houseplants

2011-02-04T17:08:00.002-05:00

The little self-sown plant of Torenia fournieri shown in an earlier entry reminded me of several things. Old books often mention annuals which are suitable for use as house plants. I’m surprised that more people do not do this: if plants from the summer garden, plants about to go down to freezes, are used, it’s very inexpensive. I’m not writing here about rooting cuttings of tender perennials such as geraniums or coleus to keep them from year to year. I’m writing here about plants selected for their potential bloom on winter window sills or under grow lights.

I get the impression that up until about the time of the Second World War, the plant we now call impatiens (Impatiens × wallerana ) was widely grown as a house plant and little used as a garden plant. I’ve seen others recommended for this use, too: nasturtiums, morning glories, and, more sensibly, anything small and compact.

I’ve even seen marigolds (Tagetes) recommended. In fact, this might very well be the first plant ever recommended for this use. As long ago as 1543, Leonhard Fuchs, in the German edition of his herbal, mentions that marigolds were brought into rooms where they bloomed at Christmas and on into the winter. I wonder what mid-sixteenth century German rooms were like – especially in the winter. The windows were probably very small, and the room in general gloomy: that would be just the sort of setting in which a blooming marigold would provide a bit of welcome brightness, wouldn’t it?

In the image above you can see the text from Fuchs. I’ve taken this from my copy of the modern xerographic reproduction of 1964 by the Munich publisher Konrad Kölbl.

Hope blooms eternal

2011-02-04T16:25:00.000-05:00

When I was a teenager I was given a copy of the wonderful first edition of America's Garden Book by Laura Bush-Brown and James Bush-Brown. This book has been a frequent companion in the more than half-century since. One of the things I learned from this book is that seeds of garden plants have a life span. As a youngster it fascinated me that seeds might live for five or six years and still grow when planted. To a teenager, five or six years is an eternity.

On page 975 of that book begins a four-plus page listing of the longevity of seeds. Since I was already collecting and accumulating a seed bank back then, I found this list indispensable. It was the beginning of a life-long fascination with the performance of old seeds. For the last twenty or more years seed here has been stored in the refrigerator (or in much smaller numbers in the freezer). And there are plenty of seed packets, mostly of home grown seed, which have been kept at room temperature for decades.

When I get bored in the middle of winter, I sometimes take out the plastic bags in which the seed packets are stored and go over the packets. The commercial packets, with their vivid colors, are an art form of their own. This always cheers me up. And while I'm enjoying the colorful seed packets, I select a few to test the germination of the seed. This year I selected some seed of Tropaeolum peregrinum, the Canary bird flower, a type of nasturtium. This seed was from a commercial packet offered for sale in 1996, so the seed was at least fourteen years old. I tested three seeds: on January 20, 2011 I soaked the seeds overnight, then packed them in damp tissue paper in a plastic bag. By now, one shows active growth, another is just beginning to show growth, and the third is still dormant (or dead). In the image above you can see these three; there is also a fourth seed of another type of nasturtium from 1981 - this one has so far showed no sign of germination.

Seed packets have become so expensive now that it pays to keep unsown seed from year to year. If you budget the amount you intend to spend on seeds each year, storing unsown seed will allow you to keep to the same budget and still buy different seeds each year.

Another mid-winter surprise

2011-02-04T15:49:00.003-05:00

I don’t grow too many houseplants; for one thing, there is not much room available in the house for them. For another, I tend to neglect them unless they are in a part of the house I use frequently. And then there is the problem of light: I have only one fluorescent light set up, and that is “owned” by the Welwitschia and the Worlseya seedlings. Any extra space under those lights is up for grabs, and in most years I tuck in as many other plants as will fit.

So many inexpensive, beautiful perennial tropical house plants are now available that it’s almost impossible not to acquire some now and then. I try hard to resist orchids and bromeliads, but somehow they find their way into the collection. One I’m growing now is the handsome bromeliad Cryptanthus zonatus. This year, the pot in which the Cryptanthus is growing presented me with a little surprise: a self sown plant of Torenia fournieri appeared a few months ago; it’s now in bloom, and as you can see in the image above, the one bloom is almost as big as the entire plant. If you look at the flower carefully, you can make out the stamens which give the plant one of its vernacular names, wishbone flower.

I meant to collect seed of these plants when they were blooming during the summer, but did not. Torenia seed used to be very inexpensive, but the modern cultivars are sold at low seed counts, often pelleted, at a comparatively high price. They self-sow in my garden, and the area near a former planting will often show hundreds of tiny seedlings the next year. It’s one of my favorite annuals.

For a view of the plants last summer, look here:

http://mcwort.blogspot.com/2010/07/torenia-clown-blue.html

A January surprise and a doubly sad conclusion

2011-01-24T13:24:00.001-05:00

Mom came to me on January 9th and told me that there was a snake on the front porch. We have had snakes on the front porch in the past, but never in January. When I went out to the porch, sure enough, there was a snake, a juvenile black rat snake, Elaphe obsoleta, about thirty inches long. It was a cold day and the temperature was just a bit above freezing.

The snake did not move when I opened the door. And at first I was not sure it was even alive. But when I touched it, it did move a bit.

Where in the world did it come from? It seemed to have some injuries on its back, and I began to wonder if one of the neighborhood cats had brought it in and the cat owner had dropped the snake off on our porch. Some people in the neighborhood seem to think that the snakes are all mine.

After taking some pictures, I moved the snake into my most protected cold frame. Because there are rodent tunnels there, I assumed the snake could easily get out of the frame when the time came for it to do so.

Yesterday I went out to see if the snake had moved. I had placed the snake in an open plastic bag when I moved it into the frame. The bag was still there, but when I touched the bag I immediately realized that the snake was not. My first thought was “Great, it has moved on.” But then I took a closer look: something under the bag had caught my attention. It was the skeleton of the snake, picked clean of almost all skin and fleshy matter. I assumed some rodents had had a feast.

As it turned out, there is more to the story. The presence of rodents in those frames disturbed me. So I set four mouse traps, expecting to catch some deer mice. When I came back the next day, I had caught something to be sure, but it was not a mouse. It was a short-tailed shrew, Blarina brevicauda. That explained the neatly cleaned snake skeleton. This only added to my sense of distress: the shrews are a gardener's friend. The shrew would have been the solution to the snail problem in the frames. Was this a solitary individual? Are there others in the immediate area? And if there are no more shrews, will mice move into the tunnels?

A Winter Visitor

2011-01-24T12:53:00.000-05:00

On December 24 I spotted an unexpected visitor among the birds feeding on our deck. At first glance, it looked like one of the white-throated sparrows thronging the food scraps. But then I noticed the beak: that was not a sparrow's beak. And then I got a look at the breast of the bird: lots of big spots. The bird then flew up to the deck railing, facing away from me. It cocked its tail, and not only did I notice that tell-tale movement but I also noticed the slight rusty color of the tail. Does any of that ring a bell? Our visitor was a hermit thrush, Catharus guttatus, a bird of passage in this area, and a bird most of whose relatives are probably in Central America at this time of year.

I saw the bird again on the next day or two, then I was away for several days. When I returned, I did not see the bird. Then it was back again, and it's been a daily visitor since. When it sees movement in our kitchen, it flies up from the shrubbery in which it seems to spend its time. If I move toward the sliding glass doors, the bird comes closer. When I open the door and toss out a raisin or two, the bird comes up to within two yards of me.

It let me take its picture the other day - that's it, above.

Winter in Washington

2011-01-24T12:37:00.000-05:00

The new year arrived with unseasonably warm weather. I heard that the last of December and the first of January were the warmest days we’ve had since early December. Sad to say, it didn't last: and we are once again in the grip of enduring cold.

I was up early January first, but didn’t get out to walk Biscuit until about 9 A.M. We took the “long” walk, a walk which takes us over to the other side of the creek and some nice views of surrounding woodland and ball fields. Our immediate neighborhood is a cul-de-sac, with Rock Creek Park on one side and the old B&O Railroad line on the other: this happy accident of planning gives our neighborhood a sense of integrity if not of isolation. It’s almost as if we are a little village of our own.

As we turned at the bottom of the hill out of our “village” to walk down to the bridge over the creek, I watched the crows picking at something on the ground nearby. Before West Nile virus arrived, crows by the thousand used to gather in the trees in the woods behind our houses each evening throughout the winter. Their hoarse calls were an evening event. Just before dark they would take flight and move on to their roost which was about a mile away. If you waited quietly after their departure, there was often something else to see: that’s when the Cooper’s hawks bolted from their cover and moved on to their nighttime roost.

But that morning there were only a few crows, and the only other signs of bird life were the muffled knocking of a woodpecker high in the branches of the oaks we walked under. The quiet was interrupted by the sudden passage of a group of bicyclists. The whirr of the bicycle wheels startled me, and just as suddenly brought back memories of the days when I used to ride regularly. On at least one occasion I rode from home down to Mount Vernon and back, and on numerous occasions I rode from home down to the C&O Canal, out to Great Falls along the tow path, and then (the bad part) in traffic for the third side of my great triangle.

Those days are long over for me, but before I realized it another powerful memory or two had been evoked. For one, I found myself remembering scenes from the movie Breaking Away (a coming of age story with strong bicycle themes). To this day I can’t hear Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony without having mental images of the seemingly effortless flight-like movement of cyclists. Bicycles, birds, slightly longer days, a hint of spring in the air: suddenly I was channeling Louis Halle’s Spring In Washington.

If you have never read Halle’s Spring In Washington, try to find the time soon to do so. Right now, as the days are just perceptibly longer and bird life is just barely beginning to pick up, is the perfect time to begin reading this book. It’s a short book: if you are a quick read you might finish it in a day or two. Or, maybe better yet, read a bit now and then try to time your reading to match the progress of the season.

I’ve reread this book many times over the years, and every time I pick it up again I immediately experience exhilaration and a sense of passing into the light. The drawings Jacques made for this book are certainly a part of that: they have the clear lines, the sure vision of the Greatest Generation: you can sense the confidence of the times with its eager anticipation of a brighter future.

In the half-century since it was written, the greater Washington area has changed prodigiously. Yet much of what Halle saw back then can, with a bit of luck, be enjoyed today. Dyke Marsh is still there, as is Rock Creek Park, and if you’re up to it you can still ride a bicycle down to Mount Vernon.

Give this book a try: it’s the perfect spring tonic for those of you who are confirmed readers.

Hugues Cuenod

2010-12-08T10:51:00.001-05:00

The news came today that another famous singer of the past has died: Hugues Cuenod. He lived to be an astonishing 108 years old.

I heard Cuenod about thirty years ago in a performance here in the greater Washington, D.C. area. A then new friend had tickets for the performance, and his intended companion had cancelled. Would I like to go? I jumped at the chance, not only for the opportunity to hear the performance, but also the chance to spend some time with this new friend. He played the viola and had a prodigious interest in opera, so there seemed to be a good chance that the evening ahead would be a pleasure.

The performance took place at Wolf Trap, and as we drove out from the city my friend mentioned that he was not too familiar with the opera to be presented, Cavalli’s La Calisto. I took this as my cue to fill him in. He was one of those people - in general both very well informed and a bit captious – who tended to dominate a conversation. I knew him from activist circles and had been there when he upbraided many a careless speaker for clumsy grammar or a less than credible grasp of events.

I began my discussion of the opera by mentioning that it was an early seventeenth century opera… and at that point he interrupted me and said “You mean eighteenth century…” “No, I meant seventeenth century”, thank you. At that the look on his face changed: it took on a combination of perplexity and disappointment. I was never sure if this change was due to the prospect of several hours of mid-seventeenth century opera or due to the realization that he would not have such an easy time lording it over his companion for this performance. I think my subsequent comments about Cavalli, Monteverdi and Caccini went unheard.

And how did the performance go? Cuenod was a hoot.

Here’s a link to a recording of Monteverdi’s "Zefiro torna" made in 1937 when Ceunod was still working with Nadia Boulanger:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyigIcK8bwk

First day of meteorological winter (meteorological what?)

2010-12-01T12:02:00.000-05:00

Today is the first day of meteorological winter. Traditional winter does not begin for another three weeks. Why can't people leave well enough alone? Or if they are going to tamper with things, why do they have to usurp the name of the existing entity? Politicians do the same thing when they rename existing buildings or amenities for one another. They should have named it the "meteorological holiday shopping season".

Fortunately for this gardener, meteorological winter is nothing like real winter: the ground is still open, and the outdoor gardening season continues. I'm still planting bulbs (and have lots to go before I finish). Yesterday I worked in the garden for several hours and had the pleasure of being bitten four times by mosquitoes. The air temperature was well above 60º F. The scent of earth is still on the air, as is the fragrance of autumn olive (should I call it "meteorological winter olive"?) Throughout the night there was rain, yet the temperature changed little - early this morning it was still above 60.But then a cold front arrived, and the temperature quickly dropped about twenty degrees.

After the sun comes out this afternoon and things dry out a bit, I'll be out there again. There probably will not be many posts during December as long as there is work to be done in the garden - and weather to allow it.

Crocus oreocreticus

2010-11-07T18:03:00.002-05:00

The little charmer above is Crocus oreocreticus, now in its fifth season here. It's a very sweetly scented member of the saffron crocus group. I was away from home yesterday, and didn't see this one coming. So it was a real pleasure to find these in bloom today. Today I noticed buds of Crocus medius on the way up, too.

If you don't grow the autumn-flowering crocuses, or if you know only C. kotschyanus (C. zonatus) or C. speciosus, then you are missing out on a big part of the crocus season. In mild years crocuses of one sort or another bloom from late September until sometime in March. If the winter is harsh, there will be a gap in mid-winter, but the potential for a crocus season nearly six months long is there.

In most years, the November blooming sorts are a sure thing. The December blooming ones are a bit chancier, and the January crocus are in many years as much a thing to be desired as something experienced in fact. The plants themselves are hardy, so if bitter weather spoils the bloom one year, the plants will be back in future years to try again.

Place them carefully: be sure they have plenty of sun. And group them with some thought: at the end of the growing season, there will not be much else in bloom, so give them the few companions available to make a spot of late year color in the garden.

November harmonies

2010-11-05T17:25:00.001-04:00

Here’s a combination which comes close to bringing the season of substantial outdoor flowers to a close. So long as the temperatures remain above freezing, there will be something outside to admire, but as we move towards the end of the year the flowers get smaller and smaller and closer to the ground.

Closer to the ground does not describe the two shown here. The Camellia sasanqua are now a twelve foot presence in the garden. The monkshood – this one is Aconitum carmichaelii – grows to four or five feet high. At the tops of those tall stems there are smallish clusters four or five inches long of blooms. This is the one monkshood which does well in our climate. (Aconitum uncinatum, native to western Maryland, is not an easy garden plant in my experience. ) The disproportion between the length of the stems and the comparatively small clusters of bloom has probably kept it out of the ranks of really popular flowers, but for this gardener its season of bloom keeps it in the front ranks.

Rosa ‘Awakening’

2010-10-28T14:20:00.001-04:00

Sometime in the early twentieth century a rose seed germinated in the care of a skilled hybridist who was a leader in using the then relatively new Rosa wichurana (or as it was known back then, Rosa wichuraiana). The seedling grew and made its very excellent qualities known: and before long it entered commerce with the name of the hybridizer, the 'Dr. W. Van Fleet' rose. It’s a huge shrub rose with one season of profuse bloom; the silvery pink flowers have the green apple scent characteristic of so many wichurana hybrids.

The rose ‘Dr. Van Fleet’ proved to be enormously popular, and was soon being propagated in numbers by many nurseries. Sometime in the late 1920's the stock of one nurseryman began to show a surprising and delightful characteristic: it rebloomed throughout the summer. These reblooming branches were themselves propagated. When it became apparent that the rebloom was a reliable characteristic, these reblooming plants were renamed ‘New Dawn’. It was introduced in 1930 and has the distinction of having been awarded the first plant patent in the United States. To this day ‘New Dawn’ is widely held in high regard. For purposes of this discussion, keep in mind that ‘New Dawn’ is an outgrowth of that original seedling.

‘New Dawn’ became even more popular than ‘Dr. W. Van Fleet’, and it too underwent extensive vegetative propagation. In the 1930’s a keen eyed Czech nurseryman noticed that one of his plants produced branches with very double flowers, flowers which had more petals than the typical ‘New Dawn’. These branches with very double flowers were propagated. When it became apparent that the extra doubleness was a fixed characteristic, the plants grown from these branches were named ‘Awakening’. That’s what you see in the image above.

The three roses ‘Dr. Van Fleet’, ‘New Dawn’ and ‘Awakening’ form a single variable clone. Perhaps you’re wondering “How can that be, they are not exactly alike, and aren’t clones exactly alike, isn’t that what the word ‘clone’ means?”

No, that’s not what it means. The word clone (in the plant science sense) was first used in the offices of the Department of Agriculture. One of the researchers was searching for a word to describe the group (note that, the group, not the separate plants) which arises when a plant is vegetatively propagated. One of his co-workers who knew Classical Greek suggested the Greek word for ‘branch’. In a conventional transliteration from the Greek alphabet to the Roman alphabet, this would be written clon. Those who knew Classical Greek knew that the “o” was a long “o”. But this spelling ran afoul of the bizarre rules of spelling we have in English: most native speakers of English who did not know Classical Greek pronounced the word the way it looks to them, clon with a short “o” sound. Some even spelled it klon. To correct this mispronunciation, the spelling "clone" came into use: this most native speakers of English will intuitively pronounce with a long “o” sound.

As far as I know, the name of the USDA employee who came up with the idea to use the word clone is not recorded, although its first use in a publication is known (but the author of that paper is not the person who came up with the idea of using the word ).

Now, back to the meaning of the word. First of all, in the sense intended by the early uses of the word, it referred to the group which arises when a plant is asexually propagated. The clone was the group, not the separately propagated elements which made up the group. Note that in contemporary street talk (and, sad to say, much scientific discussion) the elements which make up a clone in the original sense are themselves referred to as “clones”.

This metonymy in meaning is only a part of the problem. Genetics as a science barely existed when the word clone was coined for use in plant sciences. Once genetics began to gain some steam, another blunder was perpetrated: the geneticists insisted that the elements which make up a clone must be genetically identical. Although this flew in the face of centuries of empirical observation of plants subjected to extensive vegetative propagation (for instance, the nineteenth century tulip variety ‘Murillo’ was the source of dozens of successful commercial entities, all derived by vegetative propagation of one original seedling ), the new science prevailed. It wasn’t long before the standard belief was that the elements of a clone (in the original sense of the group) were identical.

Traditional geneticists seemed to ignore the abundant evidence provided by the variations seen in plants long propagated as clones such as grapes, tulips and apples, just to name a few. A new field of research called epigenetics attempts to explain some of these effects. Stay tuned: this one is just beginning.

Now back to the rose itself for a moment: rose flowers produced in the cool temperatures of autumn are often the best colored roses of the year. Rose flowers produced in the summer are often a disappointment. Do we really gain all that much from roses which bloom throughout the summer? Spring bloom followed eventually by some autumnal bloom is fine with me.

By the way, that's natural dew on the blossom shown in the image above - it's not phony dew from a spray applicator.

Ticker tape parade

2010-10-28T13:51:00.000-04:00

At about 11 A.M. today I got a call from Wayne: he was about to leave for a business trip to NYC. Among other things, I associate NYC with ticker tape parades. I had offered to drive him with his baggage to the Metro station, and it was time. To get to his place I drove through the park. As I entered the place I call "the cathedral" (see here: http://mcwort.blogspot.com/2007/07/back-of-garden-is-bordered-by-rock.html ) I encountered a continuous free fall of bright yellow tulip poplar leaves. It was like driving through a ticker tape parade - a very cheery one.

October daphne and aster

2010-10-28T13:44:00.001-04:00

October daphne and aster

Here’s a nicely harmonious combination for the late October, early November garden. The aster is Aster ageratoides ‘Ezo Murasaki’ (or a seedling of that). My two plants are new, a gift which came with the assured prediction that I would like it. I do.

The other plant is oddly named October daphne. It’s a sedum, Sedum (Hylotelephium) sieboldii. I don’t know who is responsible for this name October daphne; the sedum does not look much like a daphne to me, although maybe it was thought to resemble Daphne cneorum. The sedum certainly does not have the daphne fragrance. This sedum has a long history of cultivation; when it was first introduced it was not thought to be hardy, and was at first better known as a house plant. It’s the largest of a group of late blooming, small, pink to red flowering sedums. Somewhat similar but smaller and earlier blooming is Sedum cauticola. In many early books Sedum cauticola was named Sedum cauticolum; but the word cauticola is a noun, and thus has its own gender and does not have to agree with the gender of the genus name. And one now sometimes sees it listed as Hylotelephium cauticola.

Lemonade, as promised

2010-10-27T17:49:00.001-04:00

Plenty of flowering branches are available now for cutting from the upstart Hamamelis virginiana sprouts which are now taking over. The bright yellow of the flowers makes a nice contrast to the sooty fireplace, doesn't it? And they are scented: later this evening I’ll check to see to what extent this scent has filled the fire place room.

This plant is an example of what is sometimes called cauliflory: the flowers seem to spring directly from the branches of the tree. The local redbud provides another example.

The four crinkled petals of these flowers give them a very distinct appearance. During freezing weather, these petals will curl up and more or less disappear. When the weather moderates, they un-curl but retain their crinkles.

At this time of year hikers sometimes come upon plants of this, the only Hamamelis native in this area, in full bloom. That’s probably the only time of year anyone notices it much. But a small, bushy tree in full, fragrant bloom on a sunny, warmish late October or November day is reason enough to take a break from the hiking and enjoy the color, scent and the late autumn sunshine. If you have planned ahead, you'll have a nice tart apple to enjoy at the same time.

Birthday bouquet

2010-10-25T09:18:00.000-04:00

Over the years I’ve brought in as many plants reliable for late October bloom as I can find. These are my birthday plants, plants I can expect to find in bloom on my birthday. Today is my birthday, and I would like to share some of these with you.

In the attached image, you can find (good luck!) Camellia sasanqua (home grown from seed), Crocus speciosus, Crocus goulimyi in a white-flowered form, Crocus cartwrightianus, Rosa ‘Darlow’s Enigma’, Salvia guaranitica, Dendranthema ‘Cambodian Queen; Dendranthema ‘Sheffield’, Kalimeris pinnatifida (aka Asteromoea mongolica), Sedum sieboldii, Aster ageratoides ‘Ezo Murasaki’ (or maybe a seedling of that), Aster divaricatus (Eurybia divaricata), Aster oblongifolius (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium), Aster tataricus, Elaeagnus pungens, Osmanthus × fortunei, Hamamelis virginiana, red foliage of Franklinia alatamaha, seed pods of Iris foetidissima – I think that’s everything.

The fragrance of autumn

2010-10-21T18:24:00.009-04:00

A garden without plenty of plants which have the sort of fragrance which is free on the air is not much of a garden to me. Nothing about a plant quickens my acquisitiveness the way fragrance does. We expect it during the mild, growing months. In late winter I eagerly search out the first fragrant flowers of the nascent year. In the winter it's a fleeting and only occasional presence in our climate. But of all seasons it's the autumn when fragrance really moves me. The first wisps of wood smoke in the neighborhood, the scent of fallen apples, the moldering scent of oak leaves and the flowering of certain autumn blooming shrubs give this season a poignancy which I find uniquely and profoundly moving.

Three shrubs particularly valuable in our climate for autumnal bloom and fragrance are shown here left to right: the autumn olive Elaeagnus pungens, the witch hazel Hamamelis virginiana and the hybrid osmanthus, Osmanthus × fortunei. All are blooming in the garden now and make sunny afternoons all the more pleasurable with their commingled scents.

The Hamamelis is a part of the local flora, but the plants blooming in the garden now are the result of my sometimes unobservant gardening practices: they have grown up from the roots on which choice grafted cultivars are grafted. Last year one of these upstarts bloomed so handsomely that I was glad to have it. This year I notice that much of what I thought was Hamamelis × ‘Primavera’ is blooming now with small yellow flowers. A close examination shows that only a few branches of ‘Primavera’ remain. The big plant of ‘Feuerzauber’ can now easily be seen to be about 2/3 Hamamelis virginiana.

It’s time to make lemonade from lemons: I intend to cut a big bouquet of Hamamelis virginiana stems to decorate the fireplace for the week end.

I’ve never seen Osmanthus × fortunei for sale locally, but the readily available O. heterophyllus is even better for scent. It combines especially well with the scent of wood smoke. There are parts of Georgetown where old gardens are full of it, and nearby fireplaces provide the other element of this enchanting combination.

The autumn olive (which is not an olive but rather an oleaster: aster in this sense means inferior or spurious) is the most potently scented of the three. So strong and free is the fragrance that it can be detected in interstate median plantings as one passes at 80 mph!

There is another fragrant shrub or small tree of the season which I have not mentioned: Camellia sasanqua. It will get a posting of its own.

A great voice stilled...

2010-10-11T22:42:00.003-04:00

The news came today that Dame Joan Sutherland has died. It was a bit over a half century ago that I first heard that unique soprano voice, and I doubt that there has been a full week in my life since that I have not heard it in recording or memory. I still remember the first time I heard that voice. Long ago there was a radio program called Alan Doerr Presents on the local classical music station. I was up late studying. My keen interest in baroque music was already flourishing back then, and I perked up when an aria from an opera called Artaxerxes by Thomas Augustine Arne was announced. Vocal music from that period was a rare treat in those days. Even major opera houses made a big commotion about the performance of a Mozart opera. "Baroque music" generally meant Vivaldi's The Four Seasons.

It’s no exaggeration to say that what I heard that night changed my life in a way for which I cannot easily express appropriate thanks. The aria was, of course, “The soldier tir'd”, and the voice was that of Joan Sutherland. The first radio broadcast of a Sutherland Lucia soon followed: I remember the tension and apprehension as I listened: will she really be able to pull it off? Will she really be able to do it? Not only did she do it, but it soon became apparent that this was a singer we could rely on, one who was up to the task over and over.

People coming into opera today will probably find this hard to believe, but back then we had never heard a voice like this one. Shortly before that first hearing I was in a local record store; most record stores had a dark ghetto in the back where the classical recordings were housed (Discount Records was still in my future). I remember browsing the bins one day and seeing an album titled “The Art of the Prima Donna”. And I clearly remember scanning the contents, looking at the picture of Sutherland, and thinking to myself,- thinking it very dismissively- “I wonder who she thinks she is”. Perhaps only someone my age or older can understand that attitude. There was no shortage of so-called coloratura sopranos in those days. As a group, they were characterized by small, scratchy, metallic, mechanical, graceless, inflexible voices capable of producing the occasional improbably high tone. Not one of them had a true trill, and for singers specializing in a repertoire of typically heavily embroidered music, few of them sounded at all comfortable in fioratura. How wrong I was when I assumed that Sutherland was just another one of these annoying upstarts! How isolated we were back then, how difficult it was to keep current, how hard to gorge on the nutritious broth of solid, timely information. That late night radio program changed all of that in a few minutes.

I heard her in live performance for the first time in 1961 here in Washington at Constitution Hall. That huge barn of a hall is no friend to small-voiced singers. Thanks to some cancellations, I had a seat in the first balcony relatively close to the stage, very near to the presidential box (the Kennedys were not present).

I was eighteen years old, and this was my first encounter with a great singer live and going at full tilt. For years I had been listening to the reissued recordings of some of the great singers of what we thought of then as the last golden age of singing, the period leading up to and briefly after the First World War. Thanks to those recordings, I knew the repertoire. As Sutherland moved into encores it was a real thrill for me to recognize these pieces. But there was something even more thrilling: this was a voice unlike any I had ever heard. As so many people have said about her singing, it was as if the music had been written for her.

In reading Dr. Burney’s description of the singing of Lucretia Aguiari , where he wrote that she was the only singer he had ever heard who sang extremely high notes (what Dr. Burney knew as cork cutting notes) in real voice, I immediately thought of Sutherland. Aguiari was one of those singers capable of singing extremely high notes (contemporary accounts say up to the C above high C). Although Sutherland never ventured into that territory, her singing was characterized by a uniquely natural, limpid quality well up into the range which most singers avoid. Whether or not it was real voice or not, it was amazingly real and natural sounding.

Old photos of the great singers of the early twentieth century, the sort of photos which appeared on old reissued record albums or in magazine articles about those singers, were frequently autographed by the singer with some pleasantry addressed to a member of the singer’s adoring public. Sutherland was always very good to her public. I’m a nobody, yet I met her and talked to her on a number of occasions. The last time was when she was in Washington on a book tour. The long line extended out the door and around the block. As I entered the building, I noticed the late impresario Patrick Hays standing off to the side, taking in this phenomenon. When my turn came with the great singer, she seemed genuinely reluctant to let me go: we talked, and talked, and each time I made a perfunctory attempt to end the encounter, she moved the conversation in a new direction. More than once, as recordings of her singing played in the background, she made mild, mock-disparaging comments about the high notes, as if to elicit a counter opinion from me. I loved every second of it, and it was obvious that she did too.

When I was a teenager just getting into opera, I often read stories about those who had heard Patti or Melba, and how families passed on from generation to generation stories about the great singers. In addition to everything else she gave us, Sutherland left a legacy of accomplishment which will no doubt run for many generations. In my dotage I hope to be sharing and enjoying still this abundance.

Titanotrichum oldhamii

2010-10-09T12:14:00.001-04:00

A year ago I had no idea I would ever be writing this post. The plant shown above, Titanotrichum oldhamii, falls into the category of "the fabulous plants of my youth". I've known about this plant for decades, but until a few months ago I never thought I would actually see it or grow it. It was named almost exactly a century ago for a nineteenth century collector. I learned about it from a book published in 1975: Miracle Houseplants. The authors of that book had never seen it, and did not have access to much good information about it. They repeat the hypothesis that it might be of hybrid origin. They mention that it gets to be five feet high: that got my attention!

Now fast forward thirty-five years: it's now well known that there are thriving, sexually reproducing populations of this plant in Taiwan, mainland China and the southernmost Riuku Islands. It has been collected repeatedly, and the material in cultivation is no longer clonal. And it's available from a catalog near you; Plant Delights sells the clone they collected in Taiwan in 2008 for a pittance.

Gardening not only teaches patience, it eventually rewards it!

Seemannia nematanthodes

2010-10-02T12:41:00.001-04:00

This little charmer, Seemannia nematanthodes, began blooming this week. It’s worth having for the brilliance and grace of the flowers: notice the fine hairs which cloak the flower and the thin, arching stem of the bloom. And there is also this: it’s a gesneriad, and it’s said to be marginally hardy in this area. I expect that it will do well against a wall on the sunny side of the house, but I’m frankly dubious of success in the open garden. It's named for the resemblance of its flowers to those of members of the goldfish flower genus, Nematanthus.

The plant you see here came from Woodlanders and is evidently clonally distinct from the more widely grown clone named 'Evita'.

This is one of the several gesneriads I’m considering for use as rock garden plants. It’s easy enough to dig them and store them inside for the winter, but the real goal is to raise hardier seedlings which have potential to become real garden plants.

If there are still hummingbirds around, they will no doubt be glad to find these flowers.

Ham

2010-09-28T19:41:00.003-04:00

Familiar as ham is, it comes as a surprise to realize how ambiguous the word ham really is. I’ll attempt a definition suitable for its uses in a culinary context: a cured pork product prepared from a hind limb of a pig.
But wait a minute: is ham always cured? Is it always from the hind leg? Is it always from a pig?

As it turns out, although a good argument can be made that my first definition above is the one which shows the greatest respect for both history and etymology, in actual practice, the word often means something else. To begin with, ham is not always cured. Fresh pig leg meat is marketed, confusingly, as ham. Since it is not cured meat but rather fresh meat, it’s tempting to call it raw or uncooked ham. But there are cured hams which are uncooked/ raw. American country hams, such as the one shown above, are cured but uncooked and raw, as is Italian prosciutto crudo . The product sold as “ham” in the deli department of the grocery store might be ham, but there is also a good chance that it’s scraps of ham (probably scraped from the knives and saws used to cut up whole hams) mixed with a binding agent (gelatin) and flavoring. To my mind that makes it a ham product, not ham.

Is cured pork leg prepared from the front legs properly called ham? I say no; the front legs have a different pattern of musculature and even when given a ham cure do not have the same taste. They can be just as good in their own way, and certainly are more economical for a small family than a ham, but they are not ham.

Believe it or not there is something called halal ham: imagine my surprise as I read down the list of potential pizza toppings posted in the neighborhood pizza place. Boldly stated at the top of the list is the statement “All of our meats are halal”. And one of them is called ham. I wonder if this product also does duty as “kosher ham”? Comments will be appreciated.

Above I mentioned Italian prosciutto crudo. The Italian word for leg is gamba. In the slang of succeeding generations of Italian American men, this came to be shortened to “gams” in reference to the shapely ones sported by pin-up celebrities of the World War II period. The dictionaries I consulted don’t say as much, but it’s tempting to wonder if the English word “ham” might not have had at least one Italian parent. I wonder the same about the word gammon.

It can be difficult to sit through a viola da gamba concert if I have not had at least a light meal beforehand. The name of the instrument is an allusion to the way it is positioned for playing: against the leg in contrast to the position of the viola da braccio which is held against the arm/shoulder. The shapely viola da gamba has something of the shape of a ham, and its handsome varnish suggests a culinary glazing. Will I last until the end of the concert? Which of the appetites will prevail? And will dinner be ham da gamba or ham da braccio?

The ham in the image above is the real thing: a North Carolina cured country ham. My dad grew up in the country ham tradition, but the hams we had at home when I was a kid were mild-, wet-cure hams. The one exception is still celebrated in bad memory: we tried to cook a country ham “from the book”, and it did not go well. My first encounters with genuine country ham were not felicitous, and it was not until well into adulthood that I acquired, slowly, a taste for this delicacy. And I remember the events of my adult epiphany well: I was attending a lily show being held at the University of Virginia. Someone from the show committee had prepared a huge plate of thin biscuits with very thinly sliced country ham. I didn’t find them until after my show responsibilities had been completed. They seem not to have been touched. Curious, I tried one. The mild saltiness of the ham was a perfect compliment to the gentle biscuit: for the first time in my life I understood why this particular combination is so highly esteemed. All the while the handsome matron in charge of the food table had been watching me: I had greeted her, but otherwise there had been no conversation. She could clearly read the enjoyment on my face as I savored that first ham biscuit. And I chuckled to myself as her eyebrows arched momentarily, her eyes sparkled a bit, and the tiniest hint of a grin wiggled merrily at the corners of her mouth as I stuffed the pockets of my suit (yes, my suit) with enough more to keep me happy during my subsequent walking tour of Thomas Jefferson’s campus.

That I did not like country ham and wine when younger is not surprising: ham and wine (especially red wine) share a taste characteristic which I could not abide as a youngster. Both have a distinct aftertaste of rot: ham that of rotting flesh and wine that of rotting vegetation. A taste for a whiff of rot in meat is deeply embedded in our culinary traditions: think of the whole woodcock hung until gravity separates the body from the legs, or the dry-hung beef which has turned purple and developed a hard crust. White truffle to me smells of dead rat. No doubt it helps to grow up in the tradition: I didn’t. When I was growing up, nothing the least bit tainted went into my mouth for long.

Now, thirty years later, I still remember a dinner I attended at which was served, with some ceremony, the last batch of wine the family’s grandfather had prepared. Nonno had died a few years before this meal, and the wine, a red wine, reeked of the compost heap. The savor was not simply vegetal, is was recently-rotted vegetal. And yet the family members, who had evidently been drinking it for years, found it palatable and good. Nonno’s delightful wife, daughter and two granddaughters were there with us, and Nonna’s pride in the wine was so obvious that I did everything I could to smile and feign enjoyment. Did I mention that I did not grow up in a wine drinking family?

In case anyone reading this has not heard the oldest ham joke in the book, here it is: “What’s the definition of eternity? Two people and a ham” With that in mind, I cut the ham shown in the image above into four sections: the bony tip and three meaty pieces. I kept one meaty piece for household use and distributed the rest to my sister and niece.

Every country ham is different, and so it is with a bit of trepidation that I cut into one for the first time. This one turned out to be very good indeed: I’ve been whittling away at our piece daily. The texture of cured ham is very peculiar: it suggests the texture of firm cheese rather than that of meat. That’s an advantage in the sense that it makes it possible to easily cut paper-thin slices. The piece I kept will not be baked: I’ll continue to cut nearly transparent slices and pan fry them until it’s all used.

It was on the table again tonight: I minced a few ounces of the ham, crisped it in a pan, then added a head of roughly chopped escarole; this was cooked until the escarole wilted. Some cooked rice rounded out the meal. Yummy.

A rose mystery solved

2010-09-25T15:03:00.002-04:00

In April of this year I received some rooted rose cuttings from a supplier on the west coast. Included gratis was a plant without a label, a mystery rose. When it bloomed I did not recognize it, although I immediately liked it and decided it was a keeper. Not only was the flower beautiful; the foliage somehow seemed colorful and handsome. I took several pictures and then began to search for a name on the web site of the supplier. I had a hunch what I was looking for was a species hybrid or a shrub rose of some sort. But that first search turned up nothing promising.
Months passed. I’ve been reviewing rose catalogs intently lately because there are several roses I would like for the garden which are not readily available. And then when these do become available they sell out quickly. The early twentieth century hybrid tea ‘Mari Dot’ is an example. When I check these catalogs, I check out every nook and cranny and read all of the text for every variety.

I also do Google image searches, and these frequently link to the sites of other amateur collectors. These photos tend not to be grouped in the usual rose categories – all sorts of roses appear side by side. While absentmindedly going over yet more of these photographs, some rose foliage caught my eye: immediately I thought “I’ve seen that foliage somewhere”. Then I looked at the name of the rose: it was a name I knew. At that point I pulled up some of the images I took early this year when my mystery rose was blooming: bingo, a match!

My mystery rose is 'Thérèse Bugnet', a rose I’ve known about for maybe forty years. It was released in 1950, and I frequently saw the name in catalogs when I was young. It was generally marketed as a rose notable for its great cold hardiness, a rose for zone 4 or even 3 in Canada.

Long before I ever saw this rose as a living plant it played an amusing part in one of my life’s little social dramas. About twenty-five years ago a friend introduced me to a Canadian plant scientist from Guelph. We talked plants, talked intently, ranging over a wide field of favorite garden and crop plants. At one point in the conversation my new friend suddenly shifted the tone of his voice: suddenly it took on a folksier quality as he momentarily played the country bumpkin. “Do you know the rose Therese Bug Net?” he slyly asked. I didn’t miss a beat, and promptly responded “Surely you mean ‘Thérèse Bugnet’ “, giving the name its proper pronunciation. As we both had a good laugh over this, I merrily went on to inquire about Bug Net’s cousin, Bug Loss and his pet ox, Alice.

The rose ‘Thérèse Bugnet’ thus becomes one of those plants which I cherish not only for its intrinsic qualities but also as a reminder of a happy day long ago.

Was Ellen Shipman ever here?

2010-09-13T14:13:00.000-04:00

Here’s a scene from a garden I visited yesterday. The owner had generously given up hours of his time to take a small group of us on tour. It’s an old garden, a very old garden indeed. The signs of long habitation and cultivation are, while not obtrusive, very persuasive. The garden is separated into numerous compartments or rooms, and the one which made the greatest impression on me is shown above. In a surprisingly satisfying contrast, bold, broad, handsome, rock steps lead down into this little fern garden. The gently rounded path is green with moss; the two parallel borders are planted to ferns and companion plants, with the ferns dominating. To my eyes it’s a design straight out of the early twentieth century, when the then newly celebrated idea of firmly defined edges softened with exuberant free-form plantings was all the rage. I found it very Ellen Shipman-esque.

Four commelinids

2010-08-30T11:30:00.003-04:00

The four plants shown here are related to the familiar tradescantias.

Above is Commelina communis, the Asiatic day flower, which is widespread in ruderal situations throughout eastern North America. Its flowers are open early in the day and soon (within a few hours on hot days) shrivel. Their blue color is as beautiful as that of any blue flower, and in this case “any” includes any gentian I've seen, the Chilean blue crocus and Heavenly Blue morning glory.

Pollia japonica, above, looks like nothing else in the garden. Without knowing what it is, you would probably have a hard time placing it. In some ways it looks like a cross between a knotweed and a bamboo. By this time of year the plants have reached four or five feet in height and are blooming. The plants have wonderful poise. The individual flowers are not impressive, but the inflorescence is nevertheless interesting and catches the light beautifully. The foliage is unusually clean and handsome; the plant has no serious pests - or the pests have not yet developed a taste for it. It moves around freely in this garden by both stolons and seeds, and that makes me wonder if in the future it might become a pest. In a sense it bears the mark of the pest: it has small round blue fruits like those of the mile-a-minute vine or those of Ampelopsis brevipedunculata.

Tinantia pringlei, above, has been in this garden for only a few years, but it is making a very good impression. Is it an annual or a perennial under our conditions? It seems to be a perennial, although self-sown seedlings appear here and there. Each plant forms a mound about eighteen inches in diameter, and the lavender blue flowers are borne freely enough to make a good effect. At least one related species is known to be invasive and difficult to control, but so far this one seems well behaved. Bob Faden introduced this Mexican plant to our group.

Tinantia leiocalyx, above, is new this year for me. It’s very attractive in bud – when the flower actually opens the effect is hardly better. To me, the bud in the middle in the lower of the two images immediately above looks like a reddish-purple coffee bean. This is another Mexican species, and Bob Faden, who introduced it to our circle, says it is an annual under our conditions. The one shown here is in a pot: will it get bigger in the ground? This one is worth growing for its foliage, too.

A good match

2010-08-25T22:58:00.000-04:00

Earlier this year one of the local big box stores put out some handsome 6' tall Dipladenia. The price was too steep for me ($50), but the handsome plants caught my eye every time I visited that store. As time passed it became obvious that people were not buying them. Weeks passed, and the plants began to twine into the chain fence against which they leaned. Eventually they were put on sale for $20 each, and they began to find new homes quickly. I bought one pink and one red. It took me the better part of an hour to untangle the stems from the chain link fence, but that bit of bother paid off handsomely in preserving the developing flower buds.

I planted them in big tubs on the deck. The red one has a corner to itself. The pink one was planted in front of the crepe myrtle. I took a chance in doing this: the color of the crepe myrtle does not blend with many other flowers. But when the crepe myrtle came into bloom, the two combined beautifully,.

In the image above you don't see many flowers on the Dipladenia. That is because another member of the household has taken to picking bunches of flowers dialy. And when the flower is picked with a stem, it takes not only the blooming flower but all of the buds developing on that stem.

When I bought these plants a little voice told me that I probably would regret it. The problem is that I have no idea what to do with them during the winter. They are already really too big to bring into the house. Will cuttings root? It will be heartbreaking to leave them out to freeze.

But for now let's enjoy them.

Coleus on the deck

2010-08-25T22:26:00.000-04:00

One simple solution to the problem of keeping color going in the mid-summer garden is to rely on colorful foliage. It's hard to beat coleus for this purpose, and so many distinctive and striking cultivars are now available that it's tempting to attempt a coleus garden. In the old days they were sometimes known as flame nettles and were as likely to be seen in the house during the winter gathering dust as they were to be seen in the shady summer garden. It took gardeners a while to realize that to get the best from these plants they should get at least a few hours of sun.

Here they are grown in a medium made up mostly of leaf grow, the local soil and wood chips. If you want really big plants, select varieties which are known to put on size. Many of the traditional seed grown types top out at about a foot no matter how generously you treat them. Some of the clonally propagated sorts easily go up to three feet. And the 'Kong' series is a must if you like huge foliage.

Generations of gardeners knew these plants as coleus. They are currently placed in the genus Solenostemon.

This year there are about a half dozen big pots of them grouped on the deck. They are at their best in late summer, and it is certainly easier to enjoy them after the weather has cooled down a bit.

The dog days of August

2010-08-25T22:02:00.001-04:00

There is a group of funguses called stink-horns which naughty mycologists have had some fun with: one genus is called Phallus, and other genera have vernacular names which combine the name of some mammal with whatever vulgar name is current in the community in question for the male reproductive parts. These vernacular names are ancient and predate modern botanical nomenclature. I can't help but wonder what the doctrine of signatures had to say about the uses of these funguses.

The one shown above is Mutinus caninus, named as you can guess from the name for the dog. And it fruits during the dog days. Their appearance is disgusting enough, but just in case, be warned: they are poisonous.

Mushroom season, part 1

2010-08-25T21:49:00.001-04:00

Plenty of rain during the middle of August has brought up plenty of mushrooms. There is a place which Biscuit and I pass during our walks which was slathered with wood chips last summer. I've kept an eye on it since then waiting to see what might sprout up.

In the pictures above you see Leucoagaricus americanus in profusion. This species is edible, but the quality varies. I took one home and sauteed it in butter; it releases a savory woodsy-mushroomy aroma while cooking. But one bite was all it took for me to spit it out. It had the same disagreeable taste that I have sometimes noticed in the stems of shiitake mushrooms from the grocery store.

Rhubarb in August?

2010-08-03T12:18:00.000-04:00

Well, there it was in the grocery store, rhubarb in August! And it was good quality rhubarb, thick, fresh and plump. I have a weakness for rhubarb, so a nice fat bundle of it came home with me.

And then it sat in the refrigerator for two days. It was too hot to think about cooking. I bought that rhubarb with the idea of making a rhubarb pie. But after the second day, and with no motivation to make a pie or for that matter to turn on the oven for any reason, I began to worry about the rhubarb going bad.

So I took the easy, time-honored way out: I simply chopped the rhubarb with some sugar and stewed it. The result can be seen above, spread out on some fresh biscuits. What I did not use was packed away in zip-lock bags for storage in the freezer. The prospect of the winter ahead suddenly seems a bit less daunting.