Red Roses and PinCushions

'Red Cascade'

 This week's lawn scalping, while always a chore and most especially during our "rainy season" when ProfessorRoush feels obligated to mow the entire yard at weekly intervals, had its pleasantries still as the rose are fading and other flowers come on to fill the borders with color.   Two of the "reds", vivid red roses, caught my eye particularly, one by itself ('Emily Carr') and one by contrast ('Red Cascade') with a neighboring perennial.  I use the word "contrast" lightly here because a color expert would almost certainly say that the vivid red of 'Red Cascade' and the burgundy of my Knautia macedonica 'Mars Midget' are complimentary hues, not contrasting. 

Knautia macedonica 'Mars Midget'

I apologize for the informality of their impromptu picture here, poised above some yet-to-be-opened bags of mulch, the latter keeping 'Red Cascade' from showing you its cascading river of red down the stone, but I was racing against the sun and heat and not inclined to stop the lawnmower, get off, move the bags, and rearrange 'Red Cascade' to capture it at its best.   A broader picture here also wouldn't show you any more rose, but it would reveal that the Knautia cultivar dominates my front landscape and is trying to escape by self-seeding into the buffalograss.   Sometimes the message is aided by the framing.

I've had this specimen of 'Red Cascade' since 1999, and have written of her before, but in fact she's a transplant from a previous house.  This 1976 introduction by the breeder, Ralph Moore, and his Sequoia Nursery has had ups and downs in my garden, but if I pay it only a little attention, it's an ironclad rose in my Kansas climate, cane-hardy in winter and disease-free in summer.  While the individual blooms are small and unremarkable, the overall effect is one of bounty and beauty, especially when she's at her peak.

I've also written before about 'Emily Carr',

'Emily Carr'

 but I felt I should update you on her survival and presence in my garden.  I obtained 'Emily Carr' in 2019, and she struggled for a couple of years, but now in her 5th season I can affirm her health and winter hardiness with some confidence.  She has always surprised me with her height (canes reaching 5 feet here in a summer) and with the vivid and almost non-fading scarlet of her barely semidouble blooms.  Opening to show golden stamens, the photo at the left shows those blooms in all stages, from unopened to petals falling, beautiful in all phases of her brief showiness.

'Emily Carr'

As a bush, 'Emily Carr' is lanky, and upright, healthy and robust, sending gangly canes up in a solid clump.   She requires no spraying and might exhibit a little blackspot on lower leaves in the most moist of summers.  Right now, fresh from bi-weekly two-inch rains for the past month, you can see she gets a little too much moisture in the clay cauldron of soggy soil at her feet, but she still shows only minimal damage and is returning the welcome rain in a burst of red happiness.  She's a Canadian of late introduction (2007) but a keeper in my garden.

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.