Ready to Burst!



'Austrian Copper'  4/10/2012

ProfessorRoush spent his lunchtime today checking in on the K-State Rose Garden, part of the Kansas State University Gardens, where he volunteers some Extension Master Gardener time.  My primary goal was to toss down some alfalfa pellets to stimulate and fertilize the roses this spring, but I was also surreptitiously checking on the early bloom of 'Austrian Copper'.

The K-State Rose Garden looks incredibly healthy this year and the roses are brimming over with buds.  It is going to explode in approximately 2 weeks time and I'm going to be in surrogate rose heaven between my own garden and this rose garden adopted by the EMG's.  The only roses blooming with any intensity in the garden yet, however, are 'Austrian Copper' (above right) and the 'Therese Bugnet' roses that surround the bronze "girl with a rose" sculpture that is at the front of the garden (below).  'Austrian Copper' is a rose I purchased at Home Depot two summers back and donated to the garden.  I had seen 'Austrian Copper' that year in Colorado and immediately purchased my own band via mail-order, only to find that Home Depot offered them in 2 gallon pots in June for the same price as the band I purchased.   Who could have predicted that would happen?   Because of the vibrant orange color and the early bloom, it never fails to draw comments from visitors to the Garden.
 
'Therese Bugnet', of course, is a stalwart rugged rose for the K-State Rose garden and envelopes the bronze statue with its furry gray-green leaves and red winter stem.  They are getting big, though, and we are soon going to have to tackle the thorny creatures to restrain their exuberance.  The modern Hybrid Teas and Floribundas in front of the statue are some of  the recent AARS awards winners, so this display is going to change its focus from background to foreground soon.  Ah, the rose year is upon us!

Mums The Word

My muse for today's blog is a coworker and friend who has become a new homeowner. She's faced with the dilemma of all non-gardeners that suddenly find themselves with a town lot whose previous owner seemed to have neither the talent nor the interest for gardening. A forsythia seems to be the only salvageable landscape-worthy plant in her yard at present. Thus, she has been slyly and periodically pestering me with questions about plants and landscaping, seeking out knowledge from her captive manic Extension Master Gardener, and probably secretly hoping that I'll show up with a bulldozer and a truckload of plants and a sixteen color, meticulously thought out plan for the landscape.  Alas for her, like most poorly-trained men of my generation, I'm oblivious to feminine hints.

Her latest gardening question though, struck a nerve, as did her suggestion later that I should write about it and call it "Mums The Word" (she loves really bad puns).  She had just asked via email if I thought that "mums" would do well under a large shade tree that borders her property.  I calmly replied that mums wouldn't do well in the constant dry shade that I knew her spot had, and that she needed to plant them where they'd get six hours of sun or more.

That's not what I wanted to say, though.  She doesn't know that I hate mums, or more properly Chrysanthemum sp. with a passion second only to my distaste for spireas.  Spireas are a special case with me as readers of Garden Musings (the book) know, but mums are about as worthless in the garden in my estimation. Yes, they provide us some nice fall color, if you just want flowers, but they provide nothing interesting in the way of decent foliage contrast or shape variation for Fall, and the rest of the year they're either just a slowly-growing blob that sits there like a green turd in your landscape or else they are just dead stems that break with the first snowfall.  To add insult to injury, although mums are a perennial elsewhere, they're really an annual in Kansas, weakening in at most a year or two likely because of the dry hot Kansas summers and drier cold Flint Hills winters.  I'd really sooner have my friend plant ragweed in her yard than a border of mums.

Look, for instance, at the picture above of the current landscaping (taken this morning) around some KSU apartments that stand opposite the exit I use every night from work.  Let me repeat that;  I'm forced to look at this landscaping debacle every night.  What insanity overtook the K-State groundsmen that they thought these alternating yellow and orange mums would make a wise display?  K-State colors, guys and gals, are purple and white. Now it's true that the most common colors of mums put up for sale seem to be yellows and oranges and russets, probably because the fall colors sell best in what people think of as fall flowers, but mums do actually exist in purple and white.  I've seen them.  If we must have round balls of color alternating in our college landscape, perhaps purple and white might have been a better choice, here at a stone's throw from the KSU football stadium.  Luckily these were just planted this year; I'm betting they don't survive till next year and thus we'll have a chance to get something better.

I have no chrysanthemums at all in my garden, just as I have no spireas.  The closest thing I'll allow is the wonderful Shasta Daisy, which blooms during the height of summer and used to be classified as a chrysanthemum, but today has been wisely moved to the Leucanthemum x superbum taxonomic group.  Please, everyone, let's not whisper the word "mum" around me again; it plays havoc with my blood pressure, as you can now attest to.

93; Not Fahrenheit

Yesterday afternoon we hit 93 here in the Flint Hills; that is, a 93 MPH sustained wind gust.  I've often lamented the windy nature of Kansas in the past and I've seen 70MPH sustained winds, but I don't know if I've ever seen a 93MPH sustained gust.

The occasion was a summer storm initiated by a cold front moving in to break our month-long streak 100+F weather, and since I was in a meeting in the interior of a very large K-State building, I missed it entirely.  I emerged to see the end of a fabulous but short rainstorm that brought about one inch of rain to break our month-long drought, to the site of limbs down over the KSU campus, and to a phone message from Mrs. Professorroush that the power was out at home. 

On the bright side, my garden survived the wind intact.  I've spent some time over the past few years learning how to prevent wind damage to the structures in my garden and it has paid off.  That knowledge was hard-won and primarily consists of over engineering structures in my garden to resist an atomic blast, to trimming trees and shrubs to encourage compact form, and to frequent prayer during storms.  I was most pleased to see the several wire towers for vining plants (honeysuckle, Sweet Autumn clematis, bittersweet) in my garden came through without a dent.  Before reinforcing them this spring, a gale like this would have left them looking like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  And my 2 year old, handmade/homemade octagonal gazebo is still standing.  During its construction, I knew better than to use a flimsy commercial kit, lest I someday have to search for the remains of the gazebo in Missouri, so it's anchored with 8 four X four posts that are cemented in the ground and so far, it's survived the worst of the Kansas weather.

My minor casualties consisted of a few splayed ornamental grasses (Panicum virgatum ‘Prairie Sky’ seems to be the worst of these), a snapped off Caryopteris 'Blue Mist',   and a broken-off rose, Griff's Red, that was down to a single cane and had been struggling anyway.  With a little luck, the only permanent damage was the Griff's Red loss and I tried to minimize that impact by planting some stem cuttings from the cane.  Time will tell.