2022 EMG Manhattan Garden Tour

Today, June 25, 2022, was the Extension Master Gardener tour in Manhattan.  Yours' truly, as usual, was the unofficial photographer for the group, so I spent the morning taking 814 photos in 4 hours, and 720+ turned out to be pretty useable.  I'm pretty proud of the fact that despite the heavy daylily bloom today (and at least one of the 7 gardens on tour claimed to have 800 cultivars), I only took around a dozen closeups of daylilies.  Of the other photos, I've selected my favorite dozen for you to view, my selection based on what I viewed as the most "artistic" photos. Without further ado, enjoy.   Click on the photos if you want to see them full size.

The light this morning was fantastic.

I thought this was the best daylily picture that I took.  It's not the prettiest or most unusual, but I liked the way the leaf draped across the blossom.

One of the gardeners is doing a great job recreating a prairie meadow planting.

At the same garden as the prairie above, lived this good girl.

Sometimes, a little woodland serenity goes a long way in a garden photo.

I don't know who Rex and Bogie were, but this homeowner loved them very much.

I'm calling this one "Stairway to Heaven".   That blue Kansas sky just kills me.

Oh, the colors here are just fabulous!

Had a serendipitous moment with this butterfly.

Again, Color!

Is it an entrance or an exit?   Only the homeowner knows!

2021 Manhattan EMG Garden Tour

ProfessorRoush seems to have slipped comfortably back into his continuing role as the unofficial photographer of the Extension Master Gardener's Manhattan Area Garden tour, albeit with a break during the skipped tour last year due to the pandemic cancellation of the Tour.  I won't comment here on the folly of canceling a GARDEN tour in a time when more of the population would have attended then ever, but that's all rain clouds and opportunities missed. 

Most importantly, I had planned to share in this blog what I thought were the 6 best photos from this year's tour, however, as usual, I'm failing miserably.   It's fairly easy, among 609 photos taken in 4 hours today, for me to weed out all the pictures with identifiable people in them since I shouldn't/can't post people without permission.  And my best intentions to catch a bee in the act of nefarious nectar collection went awry several times today; it was cloudy for most of the tour and the camera shutter speed just wasn't up to catching them as a still life.

It is more difficult than I anticipated to choose the best from the 50 or so daylily pictures and the various vignettes of gnomes and garden ornaments and from the delightful plant arrangements that were everywhere.  Ego aside, many of the pictures are quite good, despite the overcast and early start to the day.  My goal of  posting six photos became a battle to narrow down from 50, and then from 20, until I settled on these 8.   Well, on these 9 if you count the last wanna-be.  Who, anyway, could resist this bronze heron sculpture at the K-State Gardens in the middle of the created wetlands? 

Every photo here is unedited, just as I took them.  Normally I would have cropped them for the blog, maybe removing some of the blurred green space at the top of the picture of the fancy echinacea at the left, and perhaps reducing their size, but I thought you'd like them in all their vivid detail.  Point and click if you want to see them larger.  I apologize, in advance, for the multi-megabyte nature of this blog entry, but most these days don't have the limitations we used to have on download speed, do they?  I hope not.

Trains seemed to be the "thing" for the day and model railroads were laid out at two of the 6 gardens on the tour.  ProfessorRoush perhaps didn't fully appreciate their contribution to the garden, but the many children on the tour certainly enjoyed them.   I just kept thinking, "Okay, that's cute, but after a few times around the track, what would I do with it then?"   To each, their own tracks, I suppose.

With the garden tour a few weeks later in the year than normal, the daylilies were blooming everywhere.   I thought the prettiest daylily photograph that I took was of the pair shown at the top of this blog, but for a single entry, this yellow and purple-eyed daylily was too perfect to ignore.  

There was plenty of wildlife in the gardens today, with one garden featuring a box turtle enclosure with a half-dozen unfortunately photo-shy turtles.  I couldn't share the picture of one owner calling to her turtle, and a soundless still photo wouldn't do the moment justice anyway, but I can share these two sister felines who were intently hunting and torturing a vole in a garden.   Their actions seemed to dismay the garden owner, but then, cats will be cats, won't they?

I loved this quiet pathway fork, lit by the Japanese Maple on one side and shadowed by the 'Forest Pansy' redbud that hung above it all.  I was quite captivated by the light coming through the multi-colored leaves of 'Forest Pansy' and so the tour will cost me in real monetary terms since I'll have to seek one out now.  This was a hard area to catch without people walking through it, but thankfully, if you can identify the legs of the two ladies taking the fork on the right, then you're far more observant, or intimately knowledgeable of these ladies, than I am.

I'll close with this almost-picture of the Monarch butterfly on milkweed.   When the Monarch landed within reach of my lens, fluttering it's wings as it settled for a snack, I was adamantly sure I was about to get the perfect photo for the day, the crowning jewel of my efforts.  For a brief instant, I was still, waiting for this beauty to open its wings so I could capture that instant of miracle, of life and ecology in a single picture.  And then a nearby bumblebee came in like a Stuka dive bomber and the butterfly was gone, beyond my reach,
before my reflexes could trigger the shutter.   Such are the disappointments that come hand-in-hand with these many glorious photos.  Maybe next year.  Or the year after.

Commence Operation Daylily

Here in Kansas, the weather seems to be turning, and when the wind stops blowing for brief instances of time, ProfessorRoush can get outside,experience fresh unmask-filtered air, and see what he's been missing all week as he drives into work in darkness and comes home too tired to visit the garden.  As you can see, my Magnolia stellata burst into bloom on Friday, the first spring shrub to show up this year.   The petals are a little brown on the edges and that alluring musky fragrance is barely detectable in the nippy air, even without the mask, but it's a sure sign that spring has arrived. 

I was able to take advantage of a productive few hours on Saturday, the sun just warm enough to allow me to shed a coat and the wind just quiet enough to let me pile up some debris, so I frantically attacked the back bed, ripping out the dry remnants of peonies and daylilies.  Those piles build up quickly, as you can see to the right, but only two trips with the sheetbarrow down the hill to the burn pile and they were gone.  

This bed, as you can see, now looks much more tidy, as tidy as I'm ever willing to make it.  I'm not a fanatic about picking up every stray strand of debris; the Kansas wind and God will do the rest.  But it is clean enough that the fully-blooming daffodil clumps that live here in a full southern, unshaded exposure now look much happier in their upgraded surroundings, reflecting back the sunshine in their cheery yellow faces.

As soon as the bed was cleared, I also executed a long-held plan to fill this area pictured to the right with daylily divisions from other areas; the most beautiful daylilies of my garden.   Formerly, this area held an overgrown and suckering bayberry bush that never caught my fancy, and a struggling lilac that the bayberry had strangled nearly to death.  Resolving last year to fill it with daylilies, I had staked out the best of my daylilies as they bloomed, the larger clumps all over the garden that were ready for division.  Twenty or so divisions later, an equal number of holes dug, a little water sprayed around, and the deed was done.  You can see one of the staked daylilies in the picture above.

Why daylilies, you might be asking?   Well, an old gardener, like ProfessorRoush, is also a wise gardener.  The fleeting gardening whims and indiscretions of my youth are far behind me, set aside and subdued by the realities of sore hands and thighs and a hundred scars.  To be a wise gardener, one becomes a simple gardener, and no plant creates beauty and requires less care on the Kansas prairie than a daylily.  Plant them, watch them bloom, and each year  it requires only a few seconds of the removal of dead debris and they're renewed again, a cycle of gracefulness and self-sufficiency that I can't turn down.  As I age with my garden, I turn to daylilies more and more often to provide color and carefree joy in the hot Kansas sun.  I'll show you this area again, later this summer, so we can enjoy the "fruits" of my labor together.

Hope Lost and Found

Hemerocallis 'Blue Racer'

Life, as gardening, is a constant struggle, a process of waning and waxing hopes, heart-breaking failures and all-too-infrequent successes in a never-ending circle.  Without warning, we occasionally slam headfirst into low points, spiritual nadirs that test the strengths of our soul.  A pandemic disrupts our daily routines, throwing the world into chaos with our very lives perhaps dependent on the potential danger of a trip for groceries.  A senseless killing rips apart the fabric of a nation, leaving looted cities and downed monuments in its wake.  In my own world, yesterday, a cousin, a grown man struggling and in turmoil, committed suicide on an impulse, leaving his family devastated and lost.  Hope, at such times, seems a distant mirage, far off and never closer.

Hemerocallis 'Beautiful Edgings'

Gardening mirrors life in its roller-coaster of summits and valleys.   We fight daily against drought and heat and ice and flood, relentlessly watching for enemies, ceaselessly searching for beauty.  ProfessorRoush has been wanting for rain from cloudless skies for weeks, carrying water to quench the thirst of the weakest, ripping weedy competition from the ground, watching for leaves wilting and rolling.  Hope leaks away as the buffalograss browns.

Hemerocallis 'Space Coast Color Scheme' 

In gardening and in life, we must hold faith that the storms pass and calm mornings, like this one, will come.  A heavy rain filled the emptiness of the night during my sleepless tossings, and I rose to find the ground full and soft, and this year's first 'Beautiful Edgings' covered in jewels.  New daylilies, 'Space Coast Color Scheme' (Kinnebrew, 2008) and 'Blue Racer' (Stamile-Pierce, 2011), also greeted Bella and I on our rounds of the rain gauges, rejoicing with us at the modest 1.5 inches of heaven-gifted moisture and the cooler air.

Euonymus Scale

Three peaks and a valley this morning, the latter the finding of my 'Emerald Gaiety' euonymus suddenly covered in Euonymus Scale (Unaspis euonymi) and near death.  Twenty years of euonymus without scale ended in an instant, joy replaced by worry again to begin another cycle.

'Hope for Humanity'

This year, amidst despair, I cling to the thought and the survival of 'Hope for Humanity', the wishfully named Parkland series shrub rose with a prominent position in my backyard.  She has outdone herself this season, blooming with blood-red abandon, responding to my attentions and my efforts to give her more space and sunlight this spring.  I cling to the hope that, if we care for each other and for our world as I ministered to this rose, we can all keep a little 'Hope for Humanity'.  Just a little bright hope to grow with sunlight and push through hard times.  Shaun, I know you liked roses, I wish you'd known hope better, and I pray you find peace.

'Hope for Humanity' (the purple faded rose below and to the right is a nearby 'Dr. Hugo')

Bright Days

It's a very cold winter day here in the Flint Hills and while I was searching my phone for inspiration, I kept stopping at the bright, the cheery, the flashy photos.  Many of these were photographs of last summer's daylilies, still beaming the sunshine of July into the freezing aura of January.

I had saved the picture above of 'Southern Wind', a 2003 introduction by Stamile, for just such a blog-worthy occasion, however in true keeping with my poor-recording nature I had mislabeled it as 'Summer Wind, which it obviously is not.   Mislabeled or not, it certainly catches the eye doesn't it.  Every new daylilean thing that one could desire is there; the crinkly edging in yellow, ribbed lavender of the thick main petals so resistant to drought, the clearly marked throat.  My 'Southern Wind' is placed in back of the house with a direct southern view, exposed to all the burning sun and southern winds it could ever desire.

'Heavenly Flight of Angels'

'Southern Wind' and the rest of my newer daylilies pictured here are not your father's daylilies, as the saying goes.  I'm too parsimonious to pay for all the newest and brightest, but even the divided clumps of daylilies sold each fall as a money-maker for the Flint Hills Daylily Society suffice to show how much the field of daylily breeding has changed the "ditch lilies" into queens of the garden.  I do supplement my cheap daylily bargains with the occasional commercial purchase as well.  I couldn't, for instance, resist the aptly named 'Heavenly Flight of Angels' displayed on the left. I described purchasing it and dividing it last year. A newer spider, the bright yellow is softened to perfection by the cream edges.

'Sonic Analogue'

I won't try to name the rest of these daylilies on this page.  After some process of elimination and searching records, I could, and I've labeled a few that I'm reasonably sure of, but it would take too long today to label the rest.  I'll just leave you here with these beautiful but long-fallen daylilies, in hopes they brighten your day as much as they did mine today.

'Julianna Lynn'

Numbing Nutsedge Nightmare

Sometimes, a little gardening knowledge is a burden too difficult for the gardener's soul to bear.  We see things that others don't, the subtle hues that don't belong, the texture that doesn't blend, and it tears at us, ripping away the mantle of civil society and bearing the dark soil within.  We try to seek justice, try to shift the weight of wisdom off our shoulders, but find no relief.  Such it was with ProfessorRoush this past week.

Every day, as I come to work, I pass the simple bed pictured above along the sidewalk, a few short yards to the left of the entrance.  On May 30th, I noted with some amusement the overgrowth of yellow nutsedge in the bed (circled in red) among the struggling daylilies (circled in blue), and brought it to the attention of the individuals who oversee the care of the bed, passing along both my identification, my recommendations for a nutsedge-specific herbicide, and my general angst at discovering this unholy mess outside my workplace.

 Today, I noticed that the bed had been sprayed (see the photo directly below) and that all the plants were dying, nutsedge and innocent daylily alike.  Obviously this area was sprayed with glyphosate or some other non-selective herbicide.  While my call to arms had been heeded, my renowned advice had not.

While cogitating this distressing development, reeling and staggering from the renewed load placed upon my shoulders, I meandered to the beds on the right side of the entrance, and realized to my horror that these beds were no better, in fact far worse, than the original abomination was.  Preserving them for prosperity, I present them here for you to ponder:

Bed portion 1; Containing a world-beating crop of yellow nutsedge (circled in red in the foreground), with some barely surviving ornamental grass in the back (circled in blue).  I think this grass was originally Panicum 'Cheyenne Sky' or something similar.












Bed portion 2: A really not-delightful mix of more original ornamental grass (blue circles), crowded into the margin by what I think is a wild tri-lobed sumac (orange circle), and more yellow nutsedge (red circles).







Bed portion 3:  A miserable grouping of ornamental grass (blue circles), common dayflower (yellow circles) and yellow nutsedge (red circle).  The common dayflower, as you know from my previous rants thereof, is a virtually indestructible weed in this region.






I shall suffer on here, sickened by the senselessness of the slaughter I've seen, but not in silence, nay, I have again unleashed the furies of  unsolicited advice on the herbicidal unwashed.  Unrequited, I may soon have to resort to guerrilla gardening in the shadows of night, spray bottle and trowel in hand, a furtive figure following a path to futile madness.   

Awfully Flashy, Indeed

I did not, as I suggested recently, have to wait for my 'Heavenly Flight of Angels' daylily for the "next flashy daylily to come along."  In fact, two days later, it was the semi-awfully, but coincidentally named Hemerocallis 'Awfully Flashy' that captured my instant attention as I took Bella out for her morning wee.

Yes, despite my recent daylily mis-identification,  I'm pretty sure that this is 'Awfully Flashy', because it matches the spot on my plant map and, more importantly, because it matches the internet pictures I can find.  'Awfully Flashy' was a 1979 introduction by Monette and is described as a semi-evergreen diploid with 6.5" blooms of lavender pink blend and a green throat.

I stated my opinion that this daylily was named "semi-awfully" for a couple of reasons.  First, I couldn't resist the pun.  Second, while 'Awfully Flashy' may be flashy, it is certainly not awful. In fact, I'd argue strongly for it as a beauty.  'Fancily Flashy' would have been a better name.   I know that it is not the most modern over-bred, spectacular daylily available, but since I buy the majority of my daylilies as cheap divisions at plant sales, it's about as fancy as I grow.  The upper petals are deep pink, in fact almost fuchsia-pink, compared to the lower petals and they have a prominent lighter midrib and ruffled edges.  Best of all, that green throat has a sweet fragrance.  I'm always surprised by fragrant daylilies, as are undoubtedly some of you, because for some reason daylilies don't draw anyone to sniff them.  Perhaps we are simply put off by the prominent stamens in our way.  Perhaps we feel subconsciously improper sticking our nose in the daylily's business.  Regardless, put away your inhibitions and sample the fragrance of 'Awfully Flashy'.

Although I didn't know it, or have forgotten it, it is evidently "a thing," among daylily fanatics, to write short stories which use as many names of real daylilies as possible.  Maybe this winter, when I have more time, I'll give it a shot, but I'm not going to attempt it now, in the heat of summer, when new daylilies are opening for my pleasure with each new dawn.

Splitting the Pot

As a cheap son-of-a-gun frugal individual, ProfessorRoush was not entirely unhappy when the pot containing the  'Heavenly Flight of Angels' daylily that I was purchasing split down one side as I lifted it to carry it to the sales counter.  Yes, it served me with fair notice that the plant was pot-bound, but I also knew I could divide the $10, one-gallon plant and get two decently size plants for the price of one.  I also just couldn't, at any price, resist the combo of a 7" inch yellow spider daylily with white ruffled edges and a fragrance described, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, as "heavenly."   Everyone thinks they're a comedian these days.

And pot-bound it was, in spades.  I normally would divide a plant like this with an old serrated kitchen knife that I purloined from Mrs. ProfessorRoush for just such occasions, or sometimes, as I face a perhaps less dense clump, with simply a garden spade, but in this case I was not going to let pass the opportunity to try out the serrated side of the new Hori Hori hanging right there on my belt.  A few quick strokes of the 6 inch blade and I proved yet another use for the knife and saved myself a trip to the shed for my previous implement of destruction.  I might even surprise Mrs. ProfessorRoush and return the kitchen knife.  

We've been having some blast furnace 100º weather here, hot and sunny, but the beautiful blue skies that accompany the horrid temperatures keep my complaint levels down.  Mama House Sparrow also does not seem to have any complaints, incubating these pretty little eggs in the cool dense shade of our 'Ann' magnolia shrub, about 3 feet off the ground.  I startled the attentive incubatee Mom with my early morning weeding today, but she had returned to the nest the next time I checked, so all is well.

'Ed Brown' (not 'Cream Magic')

I'm actually welcoming the warm temperatures, for once, because we are beginning daylily season and I'd like something to go right this year.  The first few are blooming here now, and I took great pleasure in seeing this beautiful daylily open yesterday, for Father's Day.  My notes tell me it is Hemerocallis 'Cream Magic', although I can't find a picture on the Internet to visually compare it (see addendum below for correction).  The description, however, does match the official "cream flushed pink with greenish cream throat" description, so I'm reasonably certain this is the 1980 cultivar from Lenington-G.  'Cream Magic' is blooming with the 'Stella de Oro's' and a couple of other nondescript cultivars, so she's the "cream" of the ball right now.   Until the next flashy daylily comes along.  Such as my two new clumps of 'Heavenly Flight of Angels'.

Addendum 2018-06-19:  The daylily that I thought was 'Cream Magic', is actually 'Ed Brown', according to the latter's label at the K-State Garden, where I purchased my start and where it was blooming today when I also saw the real 'Cream Magic' blooming.  So much for interpreting written descriptions without photographs.  To straighten out my daylily maps at home is an impossible task.  The real 'Cream Magic' is pictured here, to the left, for Internet prosperity.