Red, White, and Blue all over

On this Fourth of July, in the year of Our Lord 2023, ProfessorRoush is going to let the pictures (mostly) speak  for themselves.   I went out to take just one photo of each color, hoping that I'd have anything blue blooming at all, and I was yet overwhelmed by the abundance of red, white, and blue in a garden now brimming over with oranges and yellows from the daylilies.  Okay, I cheated a little on the blue since most of the species that are currently blooming with blue flowers are native plants; all weeds in my garden.   My apologies to my British readers for the insufferable reminder of the loss of your colonies.  Warning,  picture heavy!  

First the Red:

Pelargonium potted in front of the house

'Spiderman' Daylily

Hybrid Rugosa 'Linda Campbell'

Canadian Rose 'Hope for Humanity'

Then the White:

Phlox 'David'

Shasta Daisy 'Alaska'

The impossibly delicate Argemone polyanthemos,
 or Prickly Poppy

Rose 'Marie Bugnet', not at her best

Hibiscus syriacus 'Notwooodtwo' 

Hydranga paniculata

And last, but not least, the Blue:

Clematis 'Romona'

Salvia azurea; Blue Sage
Nothing is bluer!

Hisbiscus syriacus 'Blue Bird'

My nemesis; Commelina communis

Fringe-Leaf Ruellia; Ruellia humilis

Not bad, eh?   Not bad at all for a garden that currently is dominated  by daylilies and looks like this everywhere:

  HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY TO ALL!

Hydrangea Heaven

Kansas gardens are living proof that not all hydrangeas are created equal.  I have always been a miserable failure at growing the more common blue or pink Hydrangea macrophylla, countless numbers of which I have purchased, watered, fertilized, protected, cursed and eventually mourned over.  My experiences with the more cold- and drought-resistant panicled hydrangeas (Hydrangea paniculata) have been much more promising, however.  Here in the dry sunny Flint Hills, these large shrubs are dependable focal points for the August garden.

 

 

 

'Limelight'

Without a doubt, the most floriferous display in my garden this week is 'Limelight' a fabulous panicled hydrangea that dominates its corner of the garden.  'Limelight' is an introduction from Holland patented in 2002, and it can make an enormous eight foot tall deciduous shrub in the garden, although mine seems to have maxed out at approximately 5 foot tall and wide.  The drought of the past two years seems to have worked in my favor this year, bringing the plant into a display that surpasses any other year.  'Limelight' grows in full sun and on an exposed site for me, completely unprotected from the Kansas climate, and it is cold-hardy to the tips.



'Limelight' Hydrangea

Some of the cone-shaped flower panicles of 'Limelight' are almost a foot long and 6 inches wide. They start out light lime-green and then fade to white and finally gain some pink tones in the fall, and the foliage seems to be resistant to insect and fungal damage here, although the leaves occasionally get a little crisped on the edges by the hot July and August sun.  I only regret that there is only a negligible fragrance and that the shrub is seemingly sterile in its environment, unattractive to bees and other valuable garden residents.

'Pink Diamond'

I grow several other panicled hydrangeas.  'Pink Diamond', pictured to the left and below, was labeled at purchase as a Hydrangea microphylla, but I can't find H. microphylla as a recognized species and online sources list it as H. paniculata.  'Pink Diamond' also provides a good floral display, and individual flowers turn pink quickly at the base of the panicles.  My 'Pink Diamond' shrub is about the same size overall as 'Limelight', and it sits at the opposite end of the same bed, forming white bookends at this time of the year for the other plants in the rest of the bed.

'Pink Diamond'

'Vanilla Strawberry'

H. paniculata 'Vanilla Strawberry' grows almost in the center of the same bed, and this has a much more subtle display than its show-off cousins.  At maturity, it is around four feet tall and wide, a little smaller than the H. paniculata cultivars, perhaps because it grows in the shadow of a towering  'Sweet Autumn Clematis' (seen to the left of the picture below) that also insists on trying to colonize everything within it's reach.  A note of caution is in order about the H. paniculata's:  Wikipedia states that hydrangeas are moderately toxic if eaten, with all parts of the plant containing cyanogenic glycosides.  Human beings sometimes try to smoke H. paniculata leaves, an often fatal action due to cyanide inhalation.  So, kids, don't smoke hydrangeas.

'Vanilla Strawberry' covered by C. paniculata

Although I've previously neglected to mention the garden usefulness of H. paniculata and other hardy hydrangeas as stalwart shrubs in Kansas, I would never leave them out of my next garden.  Right now, I've got high hopes for a yet small 'Pinky Winky' cultivar that I planted two years ago, although it has struggled in the drought and heat of its first two summers.  I'll also disclose that I've failed previously with H. paniculata 'Quick Fire', and with 'H. quercifolia', and 'H. quercifolia 'Little Honey',  but I think the latter native species deserves another try before I give up on it entirely.  It is supposed to have nicely-colored fall foliage that would be a good addition to my October garden.

  

Beds in the Sun

A week or two back into the past, GaiaGardener asked if I would take the time to post some overall pictures of my garden beds to help readers place some of the plants that I write about into their respective 3-D spaces. 

I have agonized for a time over the thought.  Reasonable though the request seemed, it involves an act that many, if not most, gardeners find to be unnatural;  that of the complete exposure of our gardens, with all their un-deadheaded plants, dehydrated hydrangeas, and misplaced statues.  No sanitized focus on the occasional perfect flowers or the dynamic foliage as we see in most blog posts, showing the overall beds will expose the drought-stricken, insect-eaten, fungus-stained reality show that is my garden on most days. I was too young for the free-love movement of the late sixties and have no naturist bent, but I'd bet most of us would sooner post au-natural pictures of ourselves than our naked entire gardens.  The latter seems just a little too exhibitionist-like, a little too revealing for a conscientious gardener.  

But, given the choice between displaying an old man's wrinkles and moles or exhibiting the deficiencies of my garden design, I suppose it is more humane to readers if I choose the latter.  So here we go.  I'll apologize preemptively for the drought-stricken appearance of my sun-blessed garden and for it's lack of overall acceptable design and any number of other faults you may find with it. 

The photo above is a broad, unedited view of what we'll call the Main Garden, taken from my bedroom window. This view is behind the house, faces due south, and shows a corner of my back patio and the surrounding bed, and a broad view of the beds in the "back yard" that slope away  from the small pergola down to an unseen farm pond and then back up towards the Colbert Hills Golf Course and Manhattan proper.  Outside of the photo, to the left,  are two Purple Martin houses and farther on, nothing but prairie, and to the right lies four unpictured trees (Sycamore, Buckeye, Magnolia 'Yellow Bird' and a 'PrairieFire' crab), and then a electric-fenced vegetable garden, a few lines of grapes and blackberries, and a small, slowly-growing orchard wraps to the west.  As you can see, there is no shade in this garden whatsoever, from the unmowed areas of prairie grass in the foreground, to the rose beds at the back.

For the bed descriptions themselves, we'll use the second picture, below, of the left half of the garden.  I labeled the beds with letters, so we can talk about them, and it'll likely take us a couple of posts to get through them.

Bed "A" is what I refer to as my "peony bed," so-named because the main grouping is a collection of about 20 peony varieties in the center and right hand side, backed on the left (east) by some ornamental grasses, forsythia, and Rose of Sharon. If I blog about a peony, it likely exists in this bed since there are only a couple of others scattered about my landscape.  At the far end of this bed is another pergola, covered by a pair of wisteria, that provides an east "exit" to my garden.  

Bed "B" is the second-oldest of my shrub rose beds and it contains about 20 old garden, Canadian, and rugosa roses. I call it my "East Rose Bed." There are no perennials except roses in this bed and the only ornament is my Aga Marsala statute, a chaste young woman reading a book.  In this bed are, among others, 'Pink Grootendorst', 'William Baffin', 'Harison's Yellow', 'Alchymist', 'Robusta', 'Maiden's Blush', and 'Reine Des Violettes'.

Bed "C" is a long narrow bed stretching across half the garden that I know as my "Hydrangea Bed."  It contains, as it's name suggests, 6 Hydrangea paniculata cultivars, from 'Limelight' on the east end to 'Pink Diamond' on the west.  But this is a very mixed perennial bed, with 8 roses, 7 ornamental grasses, a peck of daylilies, a forsythia, and other assorted shrubs.  The centerpiece of the bed is a 7 foot tall wire-supported Clematis paniculata tower.  This is also the bed where I've moved the Zen Frog into a permanent home.

I think we'll stop there and pick this back up in a couple of days.  Stay tuned next week, dear Readers!

Blinded to Drought

Oops, I made a slight gardening error by taking a short four-day vacation this week.  We've had higher than normal temperatures for a month (one day topping at 110F) and the last significant rainfall was 1 inch on July 14th (this is being written on August 8th).  I knew things were getting a little dry, but prior to leaving, I watered the newest plants and everything else was looking pretty solid. Oh sure, I'd noticed that the clay soil was pulling away from my limestone edging a little bit, but the plants were toughing it out.  Normally, I don't even think about watering plants that have been in the ground over a year. I prefer to practice the tough love xeriscapic approach to gardening.

Hydrangea paniculata 'Limelight'

But I should have listened to the story told by the clay and edging.  Upon my return, it was obvious that my 'Royal Star' Magnolia (Magnolia stellata ‘Royal Star’) and several panicled hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’, for instance) were showing the effects of the hot weather and drought.  And a 'Jelena' Witch Hazel (Hamamelis x intermedia 'Jelena') was practically burnt to a crisp.  Obviously I could have avoided the worst of the damage if I had recognized that the drought was reaching a critical phase and if I had started watching these indicator plants earlier.

Rudbeckia hirta

Happily, nothing else in the garden has yet been blasted in the Kansas furnace.  All the roses go merrily along, although perhaps they are not blooming as profusely in the heat, and the crape myrtles and the Black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckia hirta) are just laughing at the heat.