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.

Housebound Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, yes, and outside the wind is howling and the rain is coming down in sheets.  We had planned to visit my son in Colorado today, but a bad forecast and a winter storm watch convinced me that the return trip tomorrow might be a dangerous thing, and so, here we sit, Bella and I, staring out the window into the storm.  The photo to the right is from a happier moment, yesterday, when we took advantage of the last warm day to play in the sun.  Bella likes to hold the frisbee with her paws and doesn't give it up easily after she retrieves it.

Thankfully, my fall garden-related chores are essentially complete.  Hoses are drained and stored, peonies and irises and daylily beds hacked down, and the lawn mower oil has been changed, blades sharpened, and gas preservative run through.    Out the back window, the garden has entered dormancy and has turned to sienna, ocher, and umber, colors that are enhanced when the fall rains come to the prairie as you can see in the garden and distant hills below.   I wish I had not yet cut down the tall native prairie grasses in the foreground (see the bottom picture below), but in the midst of this dry fall I had given up on seeing any moisture and I wanted to stem the incursion of the field mice and rabbits this winter.  And "plant" the seeds of this year's penstemon.

Along with the fall chores of the cultured garden, one of my annual chores is to clean out the eighteen birdhouses that I've placed on the the periphery of the twenty acres I call home.  The trek up and down the property provided a perfect opportunity for me to photograph the house and gardens from the back hill, a clear Kansas sky presiding over the scenery on a gorgeous fall day early in November.  This is an overview that I don't think I've shown on this blog before.  The hill in the foreground falls away to a farm pond, hidden out of the bottom frame of the photo below, and then rises again to the house and barn.  The overall garden looks small from this vantage.

My "bluebird trail" and the Professor-Roush-customized bluebird houses were unusually successful this year, perhaps due to the extra moisture of this past spring.  Thirteen of 18 houses appeared to have fledged bluebirds, containing the thin grass nests characteristic of the species.  Four other houses, all near the woods and pond, contained the deep stick-formed nests of wrens, and one decrepit old commericial house contained only a dead wasp nest.  Thirteen bluebird nests is a PR for this little spot of land, a moment worthy of contemplation and celebration.

On the morning of the bluebird-house-cleaning, the back garden was just waking with the sun, long shadows aimed west, and somehow duller, and ready for winter.  Seen here, below, you can see the shoulder-tall height of the native bluestem that I have since mowed off.  I am always torn between leaving them unmown to capture the moisture of the winter snows and to witness the joyous rusty tones they exhibit when wet, but one of the reasons I cut them down is so that the seeds of the forbs among them drop closer, spread only by the whirring mower and hidden in the debris in hopes of increasing their density.  Spring penstemon and fall echinacea are always welcome and appreciated here in my prairie garden.   Now if only next spring would hurry up and come along.

   

 

Excogitating Echinacea

I noticed this morning that Sherry, of  If only sweat were irrigation also blogged on echinacea, but she had the good sense and grace to stay with those echinaceas whose appearance closely resembles the appearance of my native species. 



Echinacea 'Tomato Soup'

I've been exploring, with some unease I might note, various other recently-released echinacea cultivars in my garden, and I'm starting to view the results now.  I'm prone to like the oranges and reds, but I'm not very fond of the pinks and whites and greens.  I had previously tried all white 'White Swan' several times, but I hadn't been able to overwinter it yet and it really just looks too much like a Shasta Daisy to be worth the trouble to keep trying.  My favorite, so far, is the bright orange-red 'Tomato Soup' cultivar, which is right now happily enjoying the Kansas Sun with over 20 flowers on one clump.  I must have found the right place for that one and I am planning to add some other 'Tomato Soup' plants soon, because I really love that red-orange tone.
  



Echinacea 'Aloha'

I've also tried a couple of others recently, with the yellow-tan 'Aloha' making a decent first bloom in my garden.  I like this one, just the right color to offset the blue Russian sage next to it.  I have high hopes for 'Hot Summer', but that one is a new one for me this year and it hasn't bloomed yet. 

Echinacea 'Hot Papaya'

I am, of course, very picky about the echinacea cultivars I choose.  I really can't even bear to look at many of the new cultivars that have been introduced from nurseries far and wide.  Very double "poofy" echinacea such as 'Pink Double Delight' are no delight for me and remind me of a highly manicured French poodle.  The lime green 'Green Jewel' leaves an acid taste in my mouth.  Why breeed for a green flower on an already green plant? 'Marmalade', or 'Coconut Lime'? Or 'Meringue' or 'Coral Reef'? 'Fatal Attraction' would surely be the death of me!
  Please, no more of the off-line colors, my stomach can't stand it.   I WOULD like to find an easy source for 'Tiki Torch' as I believe I could use that orange in my garden, and I will admit to trying out 'Hot Papaya' last year (pictured at right), which is as far as I'll go in trying the new doubles.  Not sure yet whether I'm very excited about this one, but I'll let it live a year or two yet.   As far as purplish 'After Midnight' goes, we'll have to see.

For the rest of us, it's important to note that most of the new Echinacea have come from only four modern breeders.  In 1968, Ronald McGregor suggested that interspecies crosses were possible, but it was Jim Ault of the Chicago Botanic Garden who put that theory into practice in the late 1990's crossing Echinacea purpurea, Echinacea paradoxa, Echinacea angustifoloia and others.  Ault is responsible for most of the breakthrough colors.  Richard Saul of Saul Nursery in Georgia created the Big Sky series with Echinacea purpurea and Echinacea paradoxa crosses.  Dan Heims of Terra Nova is hard on their heels.   Arie Blom of the Dutch nursery AB-Cultivars is responsible for many of the anemone double-flowered forms, for those who like them (I'm not in that group).

 

As for the future, who can tell.  Right now I'm content to view the explosion of new garden varieties and either turn up my nose at them or bury my nose in a new, and often fragrant, bright blossom.