Mowing Day

It is hot as Hades here in Kansas and ProfessorRoush chose to mow early today before the sun could sear my socks off my feet.   Mowing always brings forth mixed feelings for me.  I hate to mow, to know that I must aimlessly drive in short circles all over my landscape on a weekly basis, but at the same time, I love the neat clean appearance of the house and yard after mowing, and it gives me a chance to assess the health of the garden and it's floral population.

Take my hollyhocks, for instance.  I primarily notice these as I mow, since they're right near the edge where I start in.  This group, on a southeast corner of the back patio, is completely self-seeded, now several generations removed from a Alcea rosea 'Nigra' that I planted in the area over a decade back.  They have reverted to a palate ranging from pinks (as pictured above) to blood reds (as illustrated below), but they're dependable bridges from the first bloom of the roses into daylily season.  

Hollyhocks in Kansas need only a little disturbed soil or mulch to self-seed, and they seldom need care.   Some develop a little rust from time to time, but not normally enough that I need to spray them.   And those clumps pictured above withstood the EF2 tornado, or at least the 100 mph straight line winds, that came through Manhattan on June 11th, 2022.   I can assure you, as I was looking out the basement window at the time, that these were bent to the ground for some time as the storm passed.   The tornado actually touched down on the east side of town, damaging a few houses there, but the path of the worst storm damage to trees and electric lines seemed to go right through our house in a straight line to the area of damage.   Thankfully there was no loss of life, and I, for once, didn't even lose a shingle.

I saw today, as well, that the Knautia macedonia is out of control in my front boarder.   Pretty up close, but too small and dark-red to be impactful from a distance, they are so successful here that they tend to choke out smaller plants if I don't watch and remove them.   As a no-maintenance plant, however, I have no complaints regarding Knautia.

Mowing also forces me towards  some new vistas of my yard, making me see from angles that I wouldn't normally walk or chose to photograph.  This last photograph doesn't do justice to just how deep the shades of green were across the back yard today.   I don't know whether it is the i-Phone not picking up the depths of the green tones, or if it was the photographer not choosing the correct exposure, but I apologize for not helping you to live in the moment with me.

I guess you'll just have to take my word for how good this looked today.   However, for those who can't, I am taking names, first-come, first-served, for those who wish to experience mowing here on the Flint Hills.   Just let me know what Saturday or Sunday you want to be here between now and October.   I'll be happy to accommodate you.

So, It's Not Just Me?

 I've spoken before about the surprise to me that peonies seem to volunteer everywhere in my garden and of the volunteer peonies that have thrived here.  Until this week, I've felt like either a deep, dark gardening secret has been hidden from me despite all the reading I've done, or alternatively that I'm just blessed with a peony-fertile climate.  Just recently, however I've seen that the volunteer peony issue can plague others in the area.  I was taking my first walk of the new spring in the K-State Gardens at lunchtime the other day and came across this obvious aberrant peony growing out of the first tree peony to bloom there.

It is likely, I suppose, that since a tree peony is grafted to the roots of another herbaceous peony, the above break of a graft understock is not so really so surprising.  I'm used to rootstocks growing up and being a nuisance in grafter roses.  During the same lunchtime constitutional, however, I also observed another herbaceous peony rising from this Itoh hybrid, which I highly doubt is grafted.  Itoh hybrids are usually propagated by division according to my reading.  I predict that if I watch while the dozens of peonies at K-State bloom, I'll see other wild children, exposed by their flowers after hiding inside more similar foliage clumps.

Regardless of the wanton explosion of unplanned peonies at the K-State garden, however, my own volunteer peonies continue to crop up.  Just this week, I noticed this small seeding trying to grow next to the Knautia macedonia and Monarda of this bed.  

And I've lost count of all the volunteers that grow for me.  In this vertical line of three distinct peonies, I think that only the center one was planted and the other two are volunteers.   And then there is the volunteer peony with the burgundy foliage growing nearby (and pictured below);  it bloomed last year with a deep red, single flower.   It is worth keeping for the foliage alone.

Should I now run across the city, screaming warning about the unplanned peony population explosion?   Should I be interrogating this advance guard about their alien invasion plans or likely non-terrestrial planet of origin?   Both seem like a slight overreaction given the innocuous and welcome presence of a plant that doesn't smother nearby neighbors and will survive the worst things Kansas throws at it.  No, I think I'll just keep nurturing these babies along.  At worst, they don't have good disease resistance and don't make it.  At best, they'll survive for generations and be my legacy, my lasting joke on those who garden here long after I've become part of the landscape rather than a gardener of it, as they try, and fail, to identify what peony varieties I planted here.

Noel, how am I doing?

7/18/2019

A few weeks back, I read a blog post of Noel Kingsbury's titled "Mind the Gap," a very interesting read about the evolution toward ever-increasing plant density in garden design.  Kingsbury, whose blog I follow and whom I believe is one of the best of current garden writers and researchers, tries at least, to stick to some science-proven basics in gardening.  I find that his blog entries often break through the dry and compacted surface of homespun garden wisdom to provide some fresh nourishment to garden practices.

In his blog, Noel was sharing the results of a seven-year experiment in planting density published in the April 2019 Plantsman. and he related how "delighted at how little time I spent on this (weeding), only a few minutes per plot per year."  Despite the naturalistic planting methods he was investigating, he was able to conclude that, unlike previous widely-held gardener expectations, the plots did not become a monoculture of a dominant plant; "no one species took over."  At least in Herefordshire, about as far from my Kansas environment, in terms of sunshine and moisture, as a garden can probably get.

5/25/2019

As a gardener, ProfessorRoush is by no means so focused on a garden design plan or even a logical planting sequence as the eminent Mr. Kingsbury, but my inner farm-boy hates to see bare ground.  So my front landscape is essentially a hodgepodge of crowded plants developed over a period of now almost 18 years.  I started out with some nicely spaced plants, but my gardening has evolved and the plants in the border have undergone an intense Darwinian thinning.  When something dies, or gets crowded out, I replace it or remove it with something else, with the result of a dizzying mess of plants that I very rarely need to weed and only then usually with a quick tug at an errant solitary stem as I pass by.

The photo at the top of this blog was taken just this morning facing east at sunrise, and in a quick glance, you can take in blooming 'David' phlox, three varieties of daylilies, some bright red Monarda, and a white oriental lily.  Faded away are the Paeonia tenuifolia and Iris, and waiting in the wings you can discern some garden sedum biding time until fall.  Like Noel's experimental plot, I simply clear the dead foliage every spring and weed every third week for a few minutes.

Another view 7/13/2019

The second photo above shows the same area from a slightly different viewpoint taken in late May, with voluptuous herbaceous peonies, iris, and globe aliums predominant, while more subtle yellows are added in the background by the variegated foliage of Forsythia 'Fiesta' and Euonymous 'Moonshadow'.

Another perspective of the bed, taken recently from the front, shows the opposite end of this bed, which I fully admit is mostly a morass of Knautia macedonia that is successfully outcompeting most of the daylilies and irises of this area and pushing the red Monarda to the edges of the Knautia empire.  Next year, I need to remember to thin back the volunteer Knautia seedlings.  I certainly don't want to eliminate it; Knautia macedonia was one of the first plants I sought out that was specifically recommended for the brutal Kansas climate and it survives the droughts that have killed off other groundcovers in the area.

Turning around from the previous perspective, facing west, the opposite bed is a mass of Orienpet lilies, and daylilies, with a rose or two thrown in.  There is also a pair of barely visible panicled Hydrangea up against the garage here, planted just last year and yet to reach full growth.  Some asters to the left are overgrown this year and yet to bloom.




So my obvious question now is, "Noel, how am I doing?"  Aside from perhaps allowing the Knautia to self-seed a little too exuberantly (in defense of its neighboring plants, it seems to have been over-stimulated this year by the excess rain), am I approaching the new crowded-planting conception? Is there anything else you think I can crowd in here?

Nice & Naughty Knautia

Knautia macedonia

Occasionally, one has a nice plant that does well in your garden but is overlooked by many gardeners.  Such plants often serve the triple purposes of a conversation piece, an educational opportunity, and a bragging item.  Such is the place occupied by Knautia macedonia in my garden.  I've grown it for years in my front landscape, or rather, it has grown itself; self-seeding, carefree, drought-resistant, and pest-free.  I planted it, it grew, it spread, and I simply enjoy it and remove the dead stems each Spring.  It has survived years of neglect, drought, and, this year, an almost record amount of rain.  Frankly, although sometimes I have to point it out to visitors, I wouldn't attempt a garden in the Midwest without it, even though the common name of the genus, "widow's flower" gives me a bit of pause.

I learned of Knautia macedonia years ago from Lauren Springer Ogden's first book, The Undaunted Garden.  Mrs. Ogden had a section at the end of the book highlighting, if memory serves, about 50 plants that were well adapted to her arid eastern border of the Rockies.  Knautia macedonia was one of those and I remembered her description when I saw it for sale at a local nursery.  The photos here, I believe, represent the original species, although I think it used to be more scarlet than it seems to be now.  Or perhaps I was just younger and the colors were correspondingly brighter.   At one time, I also grew K. macedonia 'Mars Midget' in the same area.  'Mars Midget' is a shorter cultivar with this overall color, but with whiter stamens.  I don't know if it survived, or perhaps interbred with the species to give me a bit of a darker red hue.  There is another commercial selection available, 'Thunder and Lightning', but it doesn't appeal to me because it is one of those modern monstrosities of plant selection with variegated leaves combined with a more puke-purple flower.  Yuck.

Knautia grows on the northeast side of my front border, at the feet of bright red Rugosa hybrid 'Hunter' as you can see above, and it blooms for most of the summer before dying back to a reliable perennial base.   The smaller flowers in the photo above are all K. macedonia, the brighter red larger flowers are 'Hunter', and the mauve-red blobs at the left of the photo are 'Kansas' peonies that are past their prime.  A closer photo of the Knautia macedonia mishmash is shown here at the left.  The plants are relatively short, but the flower stems rise high above the border and sprawl carefree around all their neighbors.  Gardeners' who like Knautia must be willing to tolerate a moderately disheveled but predominately pretty lass who is a little loose with her limbs and who is prone to procreate at random places throughout the garden.  ProfessorRoush most definitely falls into that class of gardener.  Also self-seeding and equally flirtatious, but not yet blooming in the same area, is my bright red, square-stemmed  'Jacob Cline' Monarda that will later add more bright red to this scene sometime during the second flush of 'Hunter'.   Red without end, amen.