Hemerocallis 'Autumn King'

This daylily was hybridized by Arlo Stout and released about sixty years ago. It's a hybrid of a daylily he knew as Hemerocallis altissima (it was Stout who named Hemerocallis altissima). Some modern taxonomists make it a form of Hemerocallis citrina. I've collected several of the daylilies derived from H. altissima, and most of them are night blooming sorts. 'Autumn King' on the other hand is diurnal. The flowers are nicely scented, so it's tempting to cut them for the house. I'll resist that temptation until I have plenty of plants from which to cut.

My taste in daylilies is completely backwards: I very much like plain yellow-flowered, well scented daylilies, especially if they are tall. The squat ones with flower scapes which lean  - in any color -  do not appeal to me at all. 

Some dahlias

Although I've grown a few dahlias off and on over the years, I've never become a dahlia enthusiast. A big part of the reason is that our climate really isn't right for them. On the one hand, they are extremely frost tender; on the other hand they do not thrive under hot, humid conditions. Once you've seen them in cool summer areas where the plants are lush, the flowers are not malformed and the colors glow, it's hard to be satisfied by the results we get here. It's no accident that the local dahlia shows are not at mid-summer but rather precariously close to the time of the first night frosts.

Generally speaking, the farther the form of a dahlia flower departs from the ancestral form, the more likely it is to have problems in our climate. When I look at the catalogs, I'm drawn to the anemone-flowered sorts. The ones I've tried produce mostly malformed flowers. 'Boogie Woogie', shown above at the top of the series of images, is an anemone-flowered sort.

The next one is 'Esther', a collarette sort. So far this year, most of the flowers this one has produced have been missing one petal.

Next is 'Sandra': I have no complaints here.

The last one is 'Gallery Art Deco': so far, the flowers of this one have been hidden down in the foliage.

I planted twelve sorts this year, so look for eight more in the weeks ahead. 

Crocosmia 'Prometheus'

The handsome old montbretia variety 'Prometheus' had to be omitted when the recently posted group photograph of montbretias was made. Although it was in bloom, all of the available flowers were distorted (by the heat?).

In order to give a good view of the flower face on, one was plucked and re-positioned on the inflorescence in such a way that it faced upward. In its natural position, the flower would have to be lifted to see the interior blotches.  

Canna 'Musifolia'

If you like your cannas big, you'll love this one. The huge leaves really do look like leaves of one of the smaller bananas: the botanical name musifolia is derived from the Latin for banana and leaf. An image of the inflorescence is included: it's a bit of an afterthought hidden on top of that mound of foliage.

The clump shown is now about six feet high: under ideal conditions it can add several feet more. 

Rudbeckia triloba 'Prairie Glow'

Until this plant began to bloom last week, I thought I knew what rudbeckias were all about. Mention coneflowers and the name brings up mental images of coarse, colorful, sometimes unpleasantly hispid plants with a proven track record for amenity plantings and contemporary grass gardens. Most likely absent from those mental images are qualities such as refinement, grace and delicacy.

I bought 'Prairie Glow' because I liked the picture on the potted plant I selected, and the written description suggested that it would provide plenty of color. And I figured that it would attract goldfinches. All of this, I assumed, in the typical cone flower  package.

Now that the plant has been blooming freely I realize that this is a real find.The flowers are, so far, small (a bit more than an inch in diameter) and are carried on very thin stems. The whole plant has a determined uprightness about it, yet the stems are thin and graceful. The flowers are the real surprise: the blooms have a lacquered quality and the color contrast in the petals is heightened as if the two colors had been painted on.

This one is definitely a keeper! Some Googling suggests that although sold as a perennial, it will probably prove to be a short-lived one. But it can be grown from seed, and probably easily.

Glads, time for a closer look...

Five corms each of twelve different modern gladiolus hybrids were planted at the community garden plots earlier this year, and they are now beginning to bloom. I'll stick my neck out and say that these plants, although they have a huge potential for garden decoration,  are little used to that end in local gardens. Their rigidly upright growth habit is in pleasant contrast to the general mounding effect produced by so many plants. And the colors they provide are really remarkable. That they are so readily available, so inexpensive and so easy to grow only make their comparative scarcity in our garden that much more mysterious.

Yes, in some years there are significant problems with thrips. And the blooming period of any one plant is not long. And what the commercial florists do with them may give some potential growers reason to be careful not to produce similar effects in the garden. Their long association with funerals probably does not help their reputation.

If you haven't grown glads for a while, do as I did and buy a "collection" of a dozen or so named cultivars. If you are not both surprised and pleased when they bloom, maybe it's time for you to consider golf instead of gardening.

It's mostly the colors I can't get over: they are so varied, so bright and so effective in the garden. This year I took another look at garden glads and began to see them in a different way. All of my gardening life glads have meant spikes of color in the garden. This year I began to take a careful look at the individual flowers. One result is the image seen above. Now I'm on the lookout for other ways of using individual glad flowers. And I wonder how long individual flowers will keep in the refrigerator. This whole experience is a bit like that of meeting up with an old friend after years of separation and discovering that, in contrast to memories of a solid if rather plain person, the old friend is a lot more colorful and interesting than you ever suspected.

That's certainly true of modern glads!

The cultivars shown in the image above are 'Green Star', 'Fun Time' (red and yellow), 'Rhapsody in Blue' (pink-red with white blotch), 'Twilight' (violet with red streaks on some tepals), 'Vista' (violet with white blotch with red blotch - it reminds me of a Miltonia orchid), 'Romance' (pink) and  'King's Gold' (yellow).

A free lunch

Although there are those who insist that no such thing exists, I had a free lunch the other day.

There was a small compost bin in my community garden plot last year. At the end of the growing season last year I gathered up debris from my garden and stuffed the bin. I had invited my neighbors in an adjacent plot to do the same. Later I tilled it all into the soil.

Evidently the “all” included some pieces of potato, because a potato plant appeared in one of the tree peony beds early this year. I dug the potato plant up last week,  and you see the harvest in the image above.  Three potatoes make a comically small harvest, but they went on to make a fine lunch! 

Beignets

While visiting mom at the rehab center last night I watched part of a television program which featured several local restaurants notable for their breakfast fare. At one restaurant a happy diner was being handed a clutch of freshly made beignets. That did it for me: I would make beignets for breakfast the next day.

It's been years since I last made them, so I went online to check some beignet recipes. I googled "beignet" and got page after page relating to something called the "New Orleans Beignet". This "New Orleans Beignet" is nothing more than a square donut made with sweetened bread dough, fried and then dusted with powdered sugar. To me, that's a donut, not a beignet.

The beignet I'm familiar with is made with  pâte à choux, not with a yeast dough. It only takes about ten minutes to whip up a batch of pâte à choux, and if the hot oil for cooking is ready, an additional few minutes to cook up a batch. I flavored the batter with aniseed and orange zest, a combination of flavors I've grown to like very much. The batter was not sweetened. The six beignets which emerged were given a dusting of powdered sugar and then disappeared quickly. The rest of the batter went into the refrigerator for another use.

What that other use was became apparent at lunch time. I had some canned salmon left over from the day before, so I mixed it into the unsweetened beignet batter. Some chopped onion, parsley and celery leaf  were added. In no time at all I had a plate of savory beignets on the lunch table. Those are what you see in the image above. 

Montbretias

Here’s a combination for lovers of scintillating color: montbretias,  marigolds and strawflowers.

The name montbretia was in use throughout the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth century for those Crocosmia hybrids which had down- or outfacing-flowers. The earliest hybrid in this group had funnel-shaped, drooping blooms; later hybrids had larger, flatter blooms variously arrayed on the scapes. Interest in these large-flowered hybrids reached a peak before the First World War, and in those days the great cultivars were ‘His Majesty’, ‘Prometheus’, ‘Star of the East’ and others.

Here are some good links to the early history of these hybrids:

http://www.norwichinbloom.co.uk/CrocosmiaLocalRoots.html

http://www.theafricangarden.com/iridaceae_iris_family_image_index.html

Evidently few of these plants ever became established in eastern North American gardens; and as they disappeared one by one from the lists, they disappeared from our gardens.  For a long time only such varieties as ‘Lady Wilson’, 'James Coey' and ‘George Davison’ (often misspelled ‘George Davidson’) were readily available.

A copy of the John Scheepers catalog from spring of 1928 kept their memory alive for me.  There, several pages were devoted to a nice listing of the then best hybrids. A gracefully written introduction introduces the reader to these lovely plants, and goes on to suggest that they are suitable for decorating the “piazza”.

What in the world, in that context, is a piazza? The uses of the word familiar to me, such as Piazza San Marco, suggested a scale not usually associated with domestic architecture. As it turns out, in some parts of the country the word has come to mean veranda or porch.

Now dozens of the old montbretia varieties are available from English sources, and some are appearing on lists here in the US. Some of my plants came from Far Reaches Farm.

In one of the images above you see montbretias combined with marigolds and strawflowers.  The strawflowers are from the 'Bright Bikinis' strain.  The fresh flowers, when refrigerated, close up; when they warm up, they open again. The marigolds are various “French” marigolds of seed strains such as ‘Disco Orange’, ‘Durango Mix’, ‘Janie Spry’, ‘Hero Orange’ and ‘Little Hero Flame’.

The montbretias shown are, left to right, ‘Lady Hamilton, 'His Majesty' and  ‘Castle Ward Late’.  These date from the late nineteenth century (‘Castle Ward Late’, said to have been raised by Max Leichtlin before 1895 according to the catalog of my source, Far Reaches Farm) and from the early twentieth century ( Lady Hamilton, raised by Davison in the period 1895-1912 and  'His Majesty', raised by Jack Fitt at Earlham Hall in the period 1916-1924).  See the Norwich In Bloom site cited above for more information.  

Several pages from the John Scheepers catalog for Spring 1928 are included. If you own the copyright to these and object to their usage here, please notify me and I will remove them.

The Struwwelpeter lily

This is the (or one of the) double flowered form of tiger lily. The first time I saw this many years ago I was immediately reminded of Der Struwwelpeter.

The ones I grew in the past rarely opened well, but the ones I have now open into cleanly demarcated tepals.

I've chosen this one to be  symbolic of this year's lily season which was, in a word, a mess. 

Incarvillea delavayi

This is Incarvillea delavayi, sometimes called the hardy gloxinia. It's not closely related to the florists gloxinia, Sinningia speciosa, and what it is related to will probably come as a surprise to most gardeners. It's a member of the botanical family Bignoniaceae, which makes it a relative of two native vines,  trumpet creeper and cross vine.

Although an old plant in commerce, and a very ornamental one in bloom, it's not common in our gardens. Its hardiness was long suspected, but in fact it is very cold tolerant. It is, however, intolerant of summer wet,  and that circumstance set the stage for a misunderstanding of its hardiness. What the gardener observes is that the plant dies down in late summer and as often as not does not reappear the following year.  The conclusion is that it died during the winter. In fact, it probably died during one of our wet, hot summers.  Kept dry from late summer on, it should winter without problems.

When I was a teenager the root stocks of this plant appeared annually in big wooden crates in variety stores. Several connected storage roots, each about the size of a big carrot, made up each plant. These quickly grew into yard wide clumps of foliage topped by two-foot stems of the pink trumpet blooms. The single root from which the plants in the image  was grown was no bigger than one of my fingers: a sign of the times and current shipping costs no doubt.

Those blooms have a neat trick: the stigma of this plant has two flaps - if you touch the stigma (as an insect depositing pollen might) the two flaps slowly close over the stigmatic surface, thus protecting any pollen which might have been deposited. Take the kids over to watch this little performance.

Glitter and be gay...

There is a short border in my community garden plots given over to plants with intense orange flowers: montbretias, marigolds and strawflowers. Here are some of the strawflowers. These are the old garden plant Helichrysum bracteatum, a plant originally from Australia. They take well to our climate and are easily grown.

The first time I grew these plants decades ago I was surprised to find that the fresh flowers are just as crispy as the dried ones. In the old days they were sometimes compared to artificial flowers made from snips of colored tin. When I run my fingers over the tips of the colorful bracts, it reminds me of the feel of Velcro.

"Glitter and be gay" came to mind when I was examining these plants recently. It's the title of a song (a sort of endurance feat for coloratura soprano)  from Leonard Bernstein's Candide. Long ago I was lucky enough to hear Barbara Cook sing this in a live performance -  she was the first to sing it when Candide was premiered back in 1956. She went on to become the fountain of youth of the lyric stage: a half century later her occasional performances are still well received.

The  wikipedia entry on Barbara Cook includes this quote from one Walter Kerr "Barbara Cook, right off a blue and white Dutch plate, is delicious all the time..."  I got a chuckle from that because somewhere around the house we have a little pamphlet published long ago by a once famous brand of Pennsylvania Dutch style noodles. After several pages of recipes, there is a picture of a very young Barbara Cook and a quote endorsing the product.

Hiatus

It's been a full month since the last post, and this at one of the busiest times of the garden year. What happened? In mid-June, mom fell and broke her leg just beneath the hip joint. She had "hemi hip arthroplasty" surgery the next day, and my sister and I have been hovering over her since. The night before last I slept ovrnight in my own bed for the first time since June 15 - I had been  sleeping in her hospital/rehab center room since the accident. She's making good progress, but it will be weeks before she is home again, and who knows how long before our home schedule and routine get back to normal.
I mowed the lawn yesterday, but otherwise the home garden looks like a bindweed and  poke weed farm. The community garden plots are in better shape, although there too the weeds are getting the upper hand in some places.  

The daddy long legs flower

The upper image is of the inflorescence of Manfreda undulata 'Chocolate Chips'. The lower image is of the inflorescence of Manfreda virginica. Manfreda are so closely related to tuberoses (Polianthes of various species) and agaves that they will form viable hybrids. Manfreda virginica is hardy here; I keep 'Chocolate Chips' in a cold frame during the winter for now; I'll try it in the open after it pups a bit.

It took Manfreda virginica years to build up to blooming size; when it finally did the scape was seven or eight feet high. The inconspicuous flowers were not fragrant as far as I could tell - that was a big disappointment. I had been growing it with the idea that it would be a sort of hardy tuberose.

'Chocolate Chips' was obtained in 2010, so it has been by comparison quick to bloom, especially for a pot grown plant. The rosette of foliage is only about a foot across, so this is not a big plant. But the scape quickly pushed up to the five foot level. My experience with the flowers of M. virginica did not prepare me for the flowers of 'ChocolateChips': they''re not showy, but they are definitely unusual and in their way eye-catching.

When I described the flowers of this species on the Pacific Bulb Society forum this week, another contributor, Nan,  responded with the information that she thought the inflorescence looked like a cluster of daddy long legs (aka crane flies). What a great description!

'Chocolate Chips' does not smell like its namesake. It has a very odd scent - my first impression was that it smelled like hot metal. But there is also a fermented fruit quality to the scent, too. What pollinates the wild forms of Manfreda undulata? I'm guessing bats.

Japanese irises

The poppies of the community garden field in the previous entry are all lightness, bright color and cheer.

Back in the home garden, the high drama of the Japanese irises is reaching a peak. Somehow these huge irises escape being ponderous in spite of their sombre colors, the substance of the petals, the solid form and the stiff bearing, And yet each iris flower typically lasts no longer than one of the poppy flowers.

Japanese irises have a devoted following, are readily available in the trade, and have been grown in this country for well over a century. Yet they are not often seen in gardens, certainly no where nearly as often as the various bearded irises. Nor are they more difficult to grow than the bearded irises. Nor do they compete with the bearded irises in season of bloom: among the widely available irises they are among the last to bloom.  And to see them well grown is to want them. Yet I don't see them in gardens that often.

Those with somewhat muddled color patterns  remind me of the Japanese morning glories more than some sort of iris. Those with dark pin stripes against a white background pull off this effect as well as the arilate irises.

Two photos are given here. The first one shows them in natural light. The exposure of the second photo was  deliberately manipulated to produce the sort of effect seen in color illustrations in books from the early part of the twentieth century.   I obtained these years ago from a sale sponsored by the local iris society. The names were carefully recorded in my notebooks, and labels were buried with the plants. I've not been able to find the labels buried with the plants, and the names recorded in my notebooks do not match images brought up in Google Images.

Papaver rhoeas, the corn poppy

The corn poppy season is rapidly coming to an end here: this might be the last substantial bouquet I get this year.

If you go out into the garden during the middle of the day and pick poppy flowers, they soon wilt. The poppy literature mentions two ways to avoid this wilting, and Celia Thaxter suggests a third. The two ways usually mentioned are 1) to sear the cut end of the stem in a flame; I have not tried this method. And 2) to pick the unopened buds the evening before the flowers are wanted. As the buds develop they hang down; when they are about to open, they become upright. They can be gathered as soon as they become upright. This is perhaps the most charming way to gather poppies, because the cut buds can be presented the night before, then the recipient has the pleasure of watching the buds pop open and drop the hairy calyces on the table top the following morning. Once the calyx falls, the crumpled petals of the flower slowly expand: it's hard to describe how beautiful they are at this stage. So much about these poppy flowers is improbable: the thin, flexuous stems; the comparatively big expanded flowers; the intense color; the delicacy of the pollen dusted dome of anthers at the center of the blossom; the crepe and satin like quality of the expanding petals and the pepper shaker at the center of the flower. Any child can grow them, and I'd be concerned about any adult too sophisticated to appreciate them.

Now here's the other method for picking them, a method suggested by Celia Thaxter over a century ago:  pick the opening flowers at sunrise. I've done this three times this year; the two times I picked the opening flowers at about 6 A.M. (sunrise here is at about 5:45 now) they held up beautifully and developed fully. The one time I picked them at about 7:30 A.M. they did not last.

It's too late to plant poppy seed and expect to get great results, but it's not too late to start reading Celia Thaxter's An Island Garden.

Two odd new lilies

The lilies shown here are (above) 'Tiny Padhye' and (below) 'Tiny Sensation'. These are new to me and were planted last November or early December. Evidently they were bred to be very short, yet the flowers are comparatively enormous.

'Tiny Padhye' has a color patern very similar to that of 'Netty's Pride', but the flower of 'Tiny Padhye' is bigger and the color contrast even more vivid.  

Canna 'Ehemannii'

Canna 'Ehemannii' is already blooming! This canna went through the winter dry in the clump of soil with which it was dug. It retained viable foliage - it never died down to a dormant rhizome as most cannas do. The foliage was in very dim light most of the time, really almost in the dark - but it persisted. Once the weather relented, the clump was placed outside in a place not exposed to full sun to allow the foliage to firm up. Once it got water, it surged into growth.

Last year this did not bloom until very late in the season; there are several other sprouts on the way up, so this one might be in bloom throughout the summer. The plant shown above is only a bit over two feet tall - later sprouts will easily go to double that and more.

Community garden plots update: poppies, larkspurs and lilies

Things are happening so fast this year! I feel guilty that I am not keeping more extensive records, but with everything rushing into bloom at once, it's hard to keep up.

Here are some photos of the community garden plots taken within the last few days. The poppies are nearing the end of their blooming period, the larkspurs are at their peak and the lilies are catching up. As of today, there are Asiatic hybrid lilies in bloom, LA hybrids in bloom and trumpets in bloom. In most years trumpets begin in late June and spill over into early July. The lilies in these photos were all planted from newly received bulbs last November and early December. I planted generously in order to have lots of lilies to cut in support of the local lily shows. It's not to be: foiled again by that trickster Mother Nature.

Early or late, they're all beautiful..

Community garden plot update: poppies!

Agrostemma githago has been blooming freely for about a week, and the other day it was joined by poppies, poppies in numbers. These are corn poppies, Papaver rhoeas.They are gorgeous, exciting and so easy to grow. Like them? Make a note to yourself to buy the seeds in September and to sow them once you have cleared a space for them in the autumn garden.
Don't make the mistake of waiting for spring to sow the seeds. By then the plants should be several months old, not just starting out.
It took three things to make this display happen. Two were of the nature of inspiration from gardeners of the past. If you love poppies be sure to read, and read again and again,  Celia Thaxter's An Island Garden.(1894, Houghton Mifflin, available in an excellent paperback reissue of 1988).
Another old book provided another: J. Horace McFarland's My Growing Garden (1915, Macmillan). Color plate xviii shows an eighty foot border planted to mixed Shirley poppies with the caption "An ounce of Shirley poppy seed... sowed along an eighty-foot border... in mid-June came days of poppy glory." Here's a scan of that plate:

The planting in the images from my community plot is of two parallel forty foot borders: so my eighty foot poppy border has two mirror image sides.

 

And then there is the third thing: a source of quality, inexpensive poppy seed. Such a thing does exist: check out Wildseed Farms in Fredericksburg, Texas. McFarland's ounce will set you back all of $4.60 the last time I checked. Try to think of some other purchase of that amount which gives even remotely so much delight.