Bay, Laurus nobilis

I’ve long envied those whose climate allows them to grow bay in the garden. The mild winters of recent years have allowed the occasional bay here and there in the greater Washington, D.C. area to survive long enough to put on some size – but until recently not in my garden.  Years ago an Eastern Shore  nursery advertised a form of bay which was said to be suitable for garden use in this area. I scribbled down the name of the nursery and then lost the information. When a famous local herb nursery moved from its Arlington location, I learned something else: a big bay had grown there outside for a long time. When I inquired about this at the new location of the nursery, I was disappointed to hear that rooted cuttings of that plant were not available. In fact, in asking around, I discovered that bay is not easy to propagate from cuttings. I don’t think I’ve ever seen domestically grown seed offered.

Several years ago my friend Alice showed up at an autumn meeting of our local rock garden group with an armful of trimmings from her bay. Her plant was about five or six feet high and grew out in the open near a porch in her Arlington garden. I took several of these trimmings and cut them into maybe ten six inch pieces for use as cuttings. I did not use rooting hormones, but the cuttings were inserted in a cold frame right away. It was a huge disappointment to watch these cuttings die off one by one during the winter. But one did not die; I have no idea why, because all of the cuttings got exactly the same treatment, but that one cutting not only survived the winter but rooted successfully and went on to grow well. This year it doubled its size and it is now about two feet high.

Of course I’m glad that it is growing so well, so well that I have not hesitated to harvest leaves for culinary use. But that growth poses a problem: the plant is still in the cold frame, and there is no way I’ll be able to bend it down to allow the cold frame to be closed. It will have to be dug out and replanted elsewhere. I have no idea where that elsewhere will be.

Elizabeth David mentions a bay leaf which got passed around family to family during the darkest days of the Second World War.

I’m very fond of frozen custard made with a base of bay-infused half-and-half, and infusing bay into the milk to be used for a white sauce is now standard practice in our kitchen.  

Harvest basket



A harvest basket, in this case one full of shallots, multiplier onions and garlics.

Most of these will be kept for re-planting, although it's hard resisting the temptation to snitch some of the French gray shallots for the kitchen.

African blue basil tugs the heart strings

At the rehab center where mom is recuperating from hip surgery I’ve made friends with several of the staff. One of the women and I were having a conversation with another visitor a few weeks ago; the staff member mentioned that she was from Kenya. I asked “Luo?” and she gave me an astonished look as she replied “No, Kikuyu”. The Kikuyu and Luo ethnic groups are two of the largest in Kenya. Her astonishment stemmed from my knowing about that, and she was very impatient to learn how I came to know about that. Things suddenly got busy, and that explanation had to wait. But when the time came, things quickly got even more intense. As I was explaining that I knew about that from watching The Flame Trees of Thika decades ago, the look on her face became even more agitated. As I babbled on, she finally regained her composure enough to blurt out “I was born in Thika”. The seeds of friendship germinate in the most unexpected places, don’t they? By the way, she pronounces the name Thika TE-ka, not THEE-ka.   

The other day I cut a bouquet of things from my community garden plots to take up to mom: the bouquet was made up mostly of dahlias, but there was a generous stuffing of African blue basil for the color of the flowers and leaves and of course for the great scent. Mom and I enjoyed these on the dinner table one night, and then I put them out on the main desk at the nurses’ station. The night before last my Kenyan friend was at the nurses’ station, and she noticed me checking out the two little bouquets of flowers there. She noticed me sniffing a scentless rose, and mentioned that she thought that something there had a fragrance. At that point I asked her to touch the leaves of the African blue basil. As she was doing this, I began to ramble on about the origin of this plant, how it was a hybrid of Ocimum kilimandscharicum and an….at this point, I noticed that her face suddenly seemed swollen, and she seemed to be holding back tears and trying not to choke. Was she having an allergic reaction? Finally she looked up at me and said “It smells just like home back in Kenya”.

Fragrances can do that, can’t they? 

Rosa ‘Clotilde Soupert’ climbing form

This is a climbing form of a once famous Polyantha rose. The Polyantha roses are one rose group about which I know very little: they have never had much interest for me. That lack of interest has an easy explanation: in the neighborhood where I grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland there were several gardens with plants of the Polyantha rose ‘Margot Koster’. The flowers of this rose have a daring color, a sort of shrimp pink. Attractive as they are when fresh, they fade unpleasantly. An old bloom is to my eyes ugly, blotched with unharmonious colors and frankly dirty looking. On top of that, the plants were small and runty looking. This caused me to write off the Polyantha roses.

Now fast forward about fifty years. I was in another garden and overheard some rose enthusiasts talking about the rose ‘Marie Pavie’: in fact, several of the plants were right there for me to see for myself why this rose pleased them so much. I was surprised to hear that it belonged to the Polyantha class. Maybe it was time for me to take another look at the Polyanthas. In fact, a plant of ‘Marie Pavie’ was soon added to the rose plantings.

In my rose reading I had frequently encountered the name ‘Clotilde Soupert’, and the name was almost always accompanied by words of praise. That made enough of a favorable impression to keep the name in my memory. The time came when I needed an extra rose to fill out a rose order, and I hit on the climbing form of ‘Clotilde Soupert’. When the plant bloomed for the first time this year, I had one of those “where have you been all my life” experiences: it’s that good.

This rose does not do brash, spectacular, flashy, exciting, blast of color, torrents of bloom or related extremes. It’s just the opposite: a very quiet rose, sweetly fragrant, one which when it opens has a very pleasing radial symmetry and globular form. I’m so glad to have netted this one in time. 

Hosta'Lakeside Looking Glass'

Here's the inflorescence of a hosta I picked out for its very distinctive foliage: Hosta 'Lakeside Looking Glass'. After a few months of growth, it produced another surprise, a very distinctive inflorescence. I'm not a hosta person, and I don't travel in hosta circles - in fact, I grit my teeth every time I hear the genus Hosta pronounced as it usually is: the man's name was Host, not Hast. But I can't resist the plants, in particular those with a distinctive inflorescence. Hosta 'Krossa Regal' made no impression on me until I discovered that its inflorescence can go up to five feet high. That immediately put it on the want list. The same is true of the forms of Hosta rectifolia: the tall inflorescence really intrigues me.

'Lakeside Looking Glass' is not tall, but the very compressed inflorescence is very cool looking to me. The effect is fleeting - the individual flowers are literally ephemeral under our condition (and as mentioned in an earlier post, that's why hostas were once called daylilies). The hosta crowd is focused on leaves: a Google images search turns up pages of images of leaves and few of flowers. I wonder how many other hostas there are with a notable inflorescence.  

Phygelius ‘Cherry Ripe’.

Phygelius are not well known in our local gardens, but they are nothing new. In retrospect I realize that there was a lot of horticulture going on in the neighborhood where I grew up in Silver Spring. One of the families we were friendly with on the block where I grew up had an intriguing small garden.  I saw a number of plants there for the first time. Among them was a Cape fuchsia, a Phygelius. Who would have thought that they were being sold here in the greater Washington, D.C. area a half century ago? You’ll have to look long and hard to find established plants now, and it’s doubtful if any of those introduced so long ago persist.

I’m giving ‘Cherry Ripe’ a trial this year up at the community garden plots. So far its performance has been puzzling. The plant seemed to be growing all along, and at the tips of the stems I could make out what seemed to be developing flower buds. But these did not mature into actual blooms until about two weeks ago. The plant is blooming freely now: but will it wait until August every year to start blooming? A bit of Googling turned up comments which suggest that it should be indifferent to day length and has the potential to bloom all year if temperatures allow.

Plants in bloom look a bit like the tall Sinningia blooming now such as S. ‘Scarlet O’Hara’ , ‘Towering Inferno’ and S. sellovii: the flowers dangle in the same way.

Googling turns up winter hardiness ratings of USDA zone 6 for ‘Cherry Ripe’: I’m doubtful, although zone 6 might be possible in a very winter dry climate. The plant here will probably spend its first winter in a cold frame. 

Tigridia pavonia and Ageratum

One of my community garden plots has a bed about twelve feet long and two feet wide given over to ageratum and tigridias. It's only a partial success because the tigridias (about 50 were planted) are putting in a lukewarm performance. Bloom has been scattered and meager. The bulbs planted came as a mixture, but so far the flowers have been only yellow or red - no whites, pinks or other colors.

I'll be trying this combination again because when it works - when the tigridias and the ageratums are blooming freely together - it's very striking.

The ageratums used this time are of two taller sorts, 'Leilani Blue' and 'Blue Horizon'. These are standard cut-flower versions of the plant most people know only in its dwarf edging forms. The flowers are sweetly scented, and the scent carries well on the air. It reminds me of the aroma of the candy known as Jordan almonds.

Ageratum is typically pronounced aj-a-RAY-tum, although it's properly a-GER-a-tum. 

Rosa 'E. Veyrat Hermanos'

This is a late nineteenth century tea rose (not a hybrid tea rose but a tea rose). It was raised late in the tea rose tradition and seems hardier than some tea roses. It has yet to face a severe winter here. It's a climbing rose - I'm not aware that a bush form ever existed. As can be seen in the images above, the color goes through several phases. In typical tea fashion, the flowers nod and are sweetly fragrant. 

Buckeye party on African blue basil

The little butterfly called buckeye, Junonia coenia,  is suddenly very abundant in my community garden plot. As you can see, it's a very photogenic species. It's also not shy: they are easily approached and photographed. There are three big, bushel basket sized plants of the African blue basil in this garden and that's where the buckeyes are. One plant had about a dozen on it this morning.

Although I've had African blue basil in my garden now and then during the last twenty or so years, until this year I didn't know the story behind it. This basil is grown from cuttings (or through some micropropagation technique): you won't find seed offered. According to the Wikipedia entry for the plant, it occurred as a hybrid for  Peter Borchard of Companion Plants in Athens, Ohio in 1983. A three or four inch plant will be a yard wide by mid-summer.

African blue basil has a distinct fragrance, very different from those of typical culinary basils, so it's not usually substituted for them. It has a strong camphor odor, and that's not an odor most of us associate with food.  Years ago a coworker from India prepared a sweet delicacy for me to sample. Many conversations had convinced her that I knew many of the spices used in traditional Indian cooking. So this delicacy was actually a test:  would I be able to identify the spices used? As a matter of fact, I did. Although she did not realize it then, and I never told her the full story, I did identify all the spices. But at the time I hesitated on naming one: I detected a distinct camphor scent, but since the only use for camphor I knew at the time was its use in moth balls, I did not want to insult her by telling her the food tasted like moth balls! So I played dumb and let her confirm that it was indeed camphor.

Camphor or not, African blue makes a great sorbet!

A great combination

A great combination, yes, but you probably won't get that impression from the image above.

The plants you see above are Iris dichotoma, the vesper iris, and Talinum paniculatum, called Jewels of Opar and sometimes pink baby's breath.

I've known about Jewels of Opar for all of my adult gardening life: each year for decades there was a tiny photo of the plant in the Park Seed catalog. From the picture it was hard to get any idea at all of what the plant was like. I didn't see a growing plant until sometime in the 1980s, and then it was love at first sight. It's such a distinctive looking plant, a plant which stands out in a crowd. They've been in the garden off and on since. But three years ago there were none, and last year I picked up three little potted seedlings at the end of a plant exchange (no one else wanted them). I never planted them in the garden, and as freezing weather approached I decided to see if they would survive the winter in a cold frame. Two of the three did. Their reward is a spot in the community garden this year, where they have luxuriated into bushel basket sized clumps. They are in full bloom now and the masses of flowering stems form a dome about a yard across. The plants I had grown in the past as annuals never reached this size for me.

It was purely an accident that the vesper irises ended up beside them.  And it was purely an accident that I discovered what a splendidly serendipitous placement this is: both the irises and the talinums open their flowers in the afternoon so that by the end of the day both are in full bloom together. The photo above does not do them justice: you have to see them together in the garden. There are so many agreeably harmonious and complimentary things going on between these two that I'm having trouble resisting the urge to sneak up to the community garden to take another look.

The vesper iris is easy from seed; the Jewels of Opar is too easy - it can get a bit weedy (if you end up with too many, you can eat them).

Baby ringneck snake season is underway

The week before last Wayne called me to let me know that he had found several baby ringneck snakes at his place. Meanwhile, I've noticed several recent hits on the previous ringneck snake post on this blog. You can view that post here: http://mcwort.blogspot.com/2008/08/northern-ring-neck-snake.html

The adults can sometimes be found by lifting flat stones, logs or boards. They are harmless to humans, but be aware that they will discharge a foul smelling fluid if you try to handle them roughly.

If the young enter ground-level rooms they can become entrapped in thick spider webs and carpeting. A search along floor boards or around ground-level doors will sometimes turn up trapped young. 

Kniphofia

Eighteen Kniphofia are on trial this year in the home garden and  up in the community garden plots. I’ve always liked these plants for their form and color – and for the novelty of growing plants of south African origin in the garden. Many of them do seem to be reliable as garden plants in our climate. And the deer don’t seem to like them. 

In the old Bailey Cyclopedia of American Horticulture there is this: “This genus includes the Red-hot Poker Plant…which is unique in its appearance and one of the most striking plants in common cultivation. No one who has ever seen its pyramidal spike of blazing red fls. borne in autumn is likely to forget when and where he 'discovered' this plant.“  Count me among those who have not forgotten. In the Silver Spring, Maryland neighborhood where I grew up few of the lots had fences. As children we ran freely from lot to lot in play. I have not forgotten the day I turned a corner of a neighbor’s house and there in front of me in full bloom was one of these amazing plants. I don’t remember how long I stood there enjoying that delightful mixture of astonishment and curiosity which occurs when I see a new, exciting plant. But I’ve never forgotten it.

These plants are nothing new in our gardens: nursery lists of a century ago describe plants which from the written descriptions could pass for some of the cultivars now sold. In the image below you can see the list of cultivars offered by Bertrand H. Farr in his 1917-1918 catalog:

Here's an image from Daniel Foley’s Garden Flowers in Color, Macmillan Company, 1943. By now most copies have probably been de-accessioned or otherwise trashed: what a pity!  Copies of this are still available and typically inexpensive: get one! Read the text thoroughly,  and you will come away with a sense of what an ideal eastern American garden from a half century ago must have been like. Many of the old favorites are here and given loving treatment. The flowers illustrated in this image differ little from the cultivars now making the rounds. Here's the poker picture:

Two Kniphofia from my garden are shown here. At the top of the post is the startling K. thompsonii. The first time I saw this one I was momentarily baffled: was it a huge Lachenalia? A strange Aloë? It took a moment to realize that it was a very distinctive Kniphofia – now one of my favorites.

And here is 'Echo Rojo':

If you own rights to the Foley image or the Farr image and object to their usage here, let me know and I will remove them. 

Lycoris, flagship of the oporanthous bulb fleet in my garden

Reports are coming in about the flowering of Lycoris throughout the greater Washington, D.C. area. I think of Lycoris as the flagship of the oporanthous bulb fleet in our local gardens: they are the most glamorous of these late summer blooming bulbs. They are also fleeting in terms of their garden effect, so plant them generously and in variety to extend their garden presence.

The one shown above came as either Lycoris longituba or L. chinensis but with the caveat that some of the Lycoris longituba were yellowish. To me it suggests what I would expect from a hybrid between Lycoris longituba and Lycoris chinensis. It's roughly the same size as Lycoris squamigera. Lots of these have turned up in gardens lately, and I suspect that we are growing a hybrid swarm rather than plants which can be attributed to a particular species with certainty.  

Oxalis depressa

Oxalis is not an important genus in local gardens, but it does provide several handsome foliage plants which, during their brief flowering period, can be very eye catching. Most of the really interesting and beautiful ones probably are not hardy here - although they are easily managed as pot plants. There are many avid Oxalis collectors; do some Googling to see what's out there.

The plant shown above is one of those borderline hardy sorts. It persists in a cold frame, but I have my doubts about its performance when planted into the garden. This species used to be known as Oxalis inops, the name under which I grew it decades ago. 

Rosa 'Bouquet d'Or'

This is 'Bouquet d'Or', another of the so-called tea-Noisette roses. It made its debut in 1872, late for this group, and it is said to be a seedling of 'Gloire de Dijon'. The yellow color of this flower is derived from the tea side of the family and is not the yellow seen in modern garden roses (which is largely derived from 'Persian Yellow').

To see this rose at its best, see it early in the day before the sun and heat fade the yellow to white. Or, cut the flowers early and store them in the refrigerator. These old yellow tea-Noisettes have a delicacy unknown in modern roses. 

Sinningia in the garden

The best known member of the genus Sinningia is probably Sinningia speciosa, the gloxinia of florists and light table enthusiasts. It’s such a lush, tender looking plant that it’s no surprise that generations of cold climate gesneriad enthusiasts have coddled the plants indoors. It’s hard to believe, but these plants might have potential for use as warm-season garden plants. I planted some this year at the community garden plots; they are right out in the sun, and although they are looking lush, they are growing and now flowering. I don’t expect these to be hardy.

On the other hand, there are several other Sinningia in that same planting which might prove to be hardy – or at least hardier than we’ve expected until recently. These are Sinningia tubiflora, S. sellovii, and hybrids such as ‘Butter and Cream’, ‘Scarlett O’Hara’, ‘Towering Inferno’ and others.  This much I know from experience with them so far: they take full sun without apparent problems, they grow much more vigorously (and bloom freely) grown in the ground rather than in pot,s and some, maybe all,  increase freely from potato-like underground storage structures.

In the garden, the flowers of Sinningia longituba and ‘Butter and Cream’  from a distance look a bit like those of some sort of flowering tobacco. And Sinningia tubiflora  is fragrant. Up close, the foliage is nothing like that of Nicotiana; and I’ll bet that most garden visitors will identify them as sages or penstemons. After all, we’re not used to seeing gesneriads in the garden. The individual flowers and the way they are carried also suggest those of Phygelius.

In the images above you can see Sinningia ‘Butter and Cream’ (with S. tubiflora off to the left) and S. ‘Towering Inferno’ just getting started. 

My plants came from Plant Delights Nursery in 2010; for the remainder of the 2010 season and throughout the 2011 season they remained in the pots in which they were received. They spent the winters dry in one of the cold frames. When I broke them out of the pots earlier this year I was surprised at the yield of “potatoes” in some of the pots. Soon there will be plenty of these with which to experiment.

If these prove to be hardy garden plants, they will make a nice addition to our herbaceous plantings. And if it turns out that they can’t take our winters, they are still well worth the small effort to dig them annually and store them dry during the winter.  If you don’t already have a good cold frame, get busy!

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.