Variegated Fritillary Euptoieta claudia Silver and gold

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’

 

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

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



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

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

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

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

According to the old books, blue flowered Ipomoea tricolor were in cultivation over a century ago,  but those plants were very late blooming. This was sometimes the case with plants little improved over their wild forms. The Cosmos bipinnatus grown in the late nineteenth century were huge, coarse plants, tall and very late blooming. It was not until well into the twentieth century that 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 it was introduced before there were All American Selections awards – the point being that one would expect the best blue flowered plant we can grow easily in our gardens to have an AAS award.  Her book has been reprinted by Dover; be sure to at least see the original because the Dover reprint contains revised cultivar lists.

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

Parisian surprise

La décoratrice

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

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

More homage to Gertrude Jekyll

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

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"

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

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

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

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'

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

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

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

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

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