Morning Musings

ProfessorRoush owes his readers an apology.  You see, I tried to blog yesterday, but I couldn't find my muse anywhere.  I have so much to tell you, two days spent in the warm embrace of my garden and yet the words just wouldn't come tumbling out.   Wait, that's not right; words were spewing forth from the keyboard but they were missing a certain je ne sais quoi, missing a theme, missing a purpose, missing a soul.  Sometimes, if I wait, if I keep pecking away, if I have the right photo or subject to write about, inspiration strikes, but yesterday evening I was at the keyboard for over an hour and the passion just wouldn't come.  There was no blood in the writing, no lyrics in the language, just three unconnected pictures left unpublished and disharmonious random paragraphs that didn't sing to me.

But it was waiting for me, my muse, waiting to gently guide me into the prose, the spirit of the garden biding time until I saw it.  Did you see it, waiting still in the photograph above?  Two inches of rain last night and I was out at 6 a.m., checking the rain gauges and allowing Bella to continue killing grass in "her spot".   And there it was, right in my front bed, surprised at my early intrusion, a shy muse hoping that I wouldn't notice her, moving just enough so that I would.   

My senses are not nearly so attuned as Bella, but Bella was oblivious that she wasn't alone in her mandated morning micturition and was being watched from fifteen feet away.  Dogs, and especially pampered mongrel Beagles, are triggered by smell and sound, finely tuned to things that normally escape my notice, but I'm reminded again that Man is a hunter, "motion-activated" as it were.  Our eyes are forward, binocular vision judging distance and speed in an instant, always ready to flee or fight as only a savannah-born hominid can be. I don't know how many times that I'm watched in stealth and silence in my garden, but senses born from millennia of being stalked in the tall grass, of movement in my peripheral vision, always grabs my attention.  The fauna I find in my garden are nearly always moving; the long-tailed lizard darting away, the slithering prairie garter snake alarmed by my presence, or the running rabbit unpetrified by my nearness.

This one, this quiet rainy-morning rabbit, didn't stick around for my questions after posing for the photo.  I don't know what it was up to, hopping among my landscape, and it didn't want to be asked why it insists on eating my young roses or the early daylilies, nor wanted to be challenged for shunning the catchweed and the catmint.  I give it a home here, safe cover and quiet places to nest and grow, and is it really too much to ask that it limit its diet to the flora I call "weeds"?   Some gardeners, secure in their castles with armies of hired help, philosophically hold that weeds are just a plant growing in an unwanted place, but I realized this morning, fresh from two days spent weeding garden beds, that timid rabbits are still smarter then some garden writers.  Even rabbits have plant preferences, choosing the delicious and defenseless over the bitter and barbed.  My lesson from the garden this morning is that taste in plants, literally as well as figuratively, cuts across species.  That is not to say that I am ready yet to see this rabbit's admiration of my garden as an affirmation of my own good taste, but at least I can now allow that it has love for my tasty garden, rather than malice, in its rapidly thumping heart.

Catchweed Nemesis

ProfessorRoush has briefly referred before to my exasperating experiences with "cleavers", or Galium aparine,also known as "bedstraw", "catchweed", "goosegrass" (geese eat it) and, in a modern twist, "velcro plant".   Some years it grows much faster and thicker than others and this year I almost had two different beds completely consumed by it.  So, once again, the enemy is at my gates and I'm in a wartime footing against this smother-acious pest.

Some may ask about the "catchweed" name, or wonder why I write with such vehemence about it, but if you have ever touched it, you'd know.  This weed-from-Hell attaches itself to anything and everything with the small hooked hairs on its stems and whorled leaves.  It frankly feels "icky" to touch it with bare hands.

Even worse, it has small globular fruits with the same hooks that attach to socks and shirts and underwear and sometimes skin.   I put a closeup to the left, above, and here to the right a wider picture of my T-shirt after one skirmish with the plant.  I'm sure an ecologist would be enthusiastic about the catchweed's utilization of me and every other passing animal to spread seed, but I'm less complementary about that feature, myself.

 Catchweed is an annual with sprawling stems that grow up to 3 feet long and branch and spread along the ground and climb over other plants.  It tries its best to cover and smother neighboring perennials and shrubs while the sadly smothered plant props up the square stems.  And Galium is quite successful in that regard.  In my front bed, for one example, I've got a 6'X8' area where the only recognizable plant is the catchweed on top of everything else.

Since I don't have a pet goose on the premises (nor am I willing to abide the resultant goose droppings that come with one), I've previously recommended pulling catchweed out while wearing cotton gloves as an efficiency measure, but this weekend I found this long-handled cultivator marked down on sale from $7 to $2.50 and I correctly recognized it might be just the nuclear option I was looking for.   My motto is "never use a grenade when an atom bomb is available." 

Anyway, a "picture being worth a thousand words", I'll let the next two photos speak for the efficacy of my inexpensive and effective tool.   Here, at right, I give you a daylily smothered by catchweed.

And a few minutes later, the same daylily from the same angle.   A little hacking-away occurred in the interim, but the cultivator's handle is long enough that I didn't have to bend over, and the catchweed, at least the bulk of it, is gone!  You can see that raking away the "bedstraw" hasn't damaged the underlying daylily (the streaks on the daylily are from hail damage last week!).   Yes, I know I'm not getting the root, but when the Galium grows back, by golly, I'll just do it again.  No seeds for you this year, Catchweed!

Brief Bartzella Bonanza

Despite my momentary elation at the triple alliteration of the title, Professorroush finds it hard to believe that he has never raved in lyric fashion about the peony wunderkind that is 'Bartzella'.  A search of my blog, however, says I've never mentioned the gentleman at all.  See that search button at the right of this column?  If you haven't tried it, you can search this entire blog for whatever you desire to see or know about my garden or the plants in it.  I use it to find old posts to link from current posts and to make sure I'm not writing my 40th entry on 'Madame Hardy' lest it chase my readers away.  Anyway, shameless plugs aside and back to today's subject, I've had a 'Bartzella' in my garden since 2018, purchased on a whim at a Maier's in Indiana on a trip, and this year "Mr. Bart" has outdone himself trying to one-up the sun here in Kansas.

What can I tell you about this nearly disease-free and trouble-free peony?  'Bartzella' is an Itoh-type peony, and because of that, I wasn't entirely honest when I said I purchased him on a "whim".   Since I discovered them, I'm always on the lookout for a new reasonably-priced Itoh.   These hybrids are more pricey than "regular" herbaceous peonies, often over $50 and sometimes over $100 apiece at local garden centers.  I bought "Bartzella", purchased pre-recent-inflation at a time when most Itoh's were $60, for the bargain price of $26 as I recall, a deal that I couldn't turn down.

'Bartzella' is an Itoh-type peony, yes, a so-called "intersectional" cross between herbaceous and tree peonies, but not one introduced by Dr. Toichi Itoh who hybridized the first such intersectionals.  'Bartzella' is a more recent introduction, in 1972, created by noted peony-breeder Roger Anderson.   Anderson was a self-taught breeder who began hybridizing peonies in the 1970's and introduced 50 varieties of intersectional peonies from Callies Beaux Jardins,the nursery owned by Roger and his wife Sandra.  Roger is said to have created the most named and color varieties of any peony hybridizer in the world and is considered the world’s leading intersectional peony expert.   Roger was a native of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where there is a display garden at the Hoard Museum that contains 58 peonies developed by Roger and the "largest public collection of intersectional peonies in North America."  

But, enough history, look at the gorgeous display of this peony at its best!   The bloom featured in the top right photo is bigger than my hand and its otherworldly yellow glows above the medium green matte foliage.   Gorgeous, isn't it?  It is said by some to sometimes, in some places, display these fabulous blooms for up to 5 weeks!

I'd prefer to leave you in that floral ecstasy that I just induced without telling the rest of the story, but alas, Kansas weather has shown its ugly side and smashed my dreams and this peony beneath its unrelenting onslaught.   I took the fully-blooming picture above at 6:07 p.m. on Tuesday, May 14.  the following Wednesday night we had a rain- and hail-storm come through, accompanied by high winds and tornado warnings, and at 6:50 a.m. on May 16th I took the photo at right, documenting its "new" appearance, a ragged and nearly-naked bush, brilliant petals on the ground at its feet.  Blooms for 5 weeks?  Not in Kansas!  Such are the boundless highs and the dismal fate characteristic of a Kansas gardener and his garden.

Ugly Ducklings Shine

In the midst of an otherwise disappointing Spring flowering season, there is a gem or two popping up in my gloomy garden.   'Harison's Yellow' has won the "first blooming rose" race in my garden this year with a spectacular show that I almost missed.  I saw the first bloom over a week ago, on April 24th to be exact, and then I went out of town for 6 days:  Six long gardenless days where we had several storms and several inches of rain on my gardener-less garden.  

 I fretted away the away time, wondering repeatedly if I'd missed my yellow rose beginnings, but came back to a fully blooming bush as pictured here.  Something finally is going well in the garden.

But wait, there's more.   For the first time ever, after several attempts, I have overwintered an 'Austrian Copper' to see a bloom.  Situated in a special spot where I can watch it, with better drainage than I've given it before, and I, at last, have a healthy bush with the promise of future bounty.  There are not many blooms this year, but I'll take a healthy young bush any day. 

The surprise "belle of the ball," however, is this 2019 addition to my garden, Lonicera Trumpet Honeysuckle 'Major Wheeler'.   I planted it here to replace an 'Arnolds Red' honeysuckle that had languished and expired under the multi-year assault of an annual vine.   Coming back from my "vacation", I found this beautiful display just to the left of my front door, a bright beacon from the driveway and front approach to the house.   

I have not yet sampled the nectar from this honeysuckle, but I will when I next pass it.   One never forgets the sweetness that can be squeezed from a good honeysuckle, no matter how old and gray and wrinkled the gardener grows. 

Any...way....the garden seems to be moving in fits and starts, but at least something is blooming.  And getting green.   And we've had several inches of rain now so perhaps, just perhaps the worst is past.   The main peonies are to start soon and, warm weather permitting, I'll get the dead wood pruned out of the roses and get the repeat bloomers in a better mood to fight it out with the Japanese Beetles that will come in mid-June!