Gratefully, Fall

After a hard summer of rampant garden growth (accompanied by rampant weed growth), and all the incumbent lawn-mowing that accompanies abundant rain, ProfessorRoush is more than ready for Fall and the garden is finally signaling that it agrees with me!    

In late August, we finally got the heat spell we normally get in July and the rain spigot shut down and the daytime temperatures reached >100ºF for a solid week and more.  The garden and lawn responded by ceasing growth, and the gardener of my garden (i.e. ProfessorRoush) breathed easier and skipped a couple of mowings.  In the style of the Old Testament or a Cecil de Mill's epic, one could say "A sigh of relief went up throughout the land."   That was the overwhelming feeling that I had, despite the heat wave and mini-drought, and I felt that the prairie was nodding alongside me.

Two weeks later, and the garden has changed.  The green hues are mixing with ochre and umber, and the prairie bluestem grass is beginning to withdraw nutrients from leaves.  It is cooler again now, the nights appreciably so, and we are likely weeks from the first frost, but you can feel the change in the air and see it in the plants.  Rain returned with the cold front, and I'll soon have to mow again, but I'm now sure that soon the first frost and cold nights that follow will rescue me.

The Sedum telephinum pictured on this blog entry is blooming merrily pink now, another sure sign of Fall's impending onset.  As you can see, it is attracting and nourishing these bumblebees, a final gift from the garden flora to its fauna.  This variety is either 'Black Jack' or 'Purple Emperor', which were planted near each other on my garden map.  I'm inclined to think it is the latter due to its height ('Black Jack" reaches 18-24", while 'Purple Emperor' only reaches 12 inches tall) despite the fact that this plant has not yet turned as dark maroon as either should eventually get.   Further evidence is that there is a nearby, shorter dark sedum and if that one is 'Purple Emperor', then they are planted in the same sequence as my map.  We'll call it 'Black Jack' anyway.

I've just had my first Sunday afternoon nap in weeks, another gift from the garden, and yet another sign that Fall, and inevitably Winter, are just around the corner.  The prairie winters are rough, but they are a needed respite from the frantic days of summer, and I'm grateful for now as the seasons progress.  And yet still sure that in a mere few months, I'll be reborn alongside the garden, and just as surely ready to embrace Spring.  I don't know where the bumblebees go in Winter, but I bet they will be eager for Spring too, stoked on Fall's larder after a long Winter's nap. 

Sedum Seasons and Blog Trauma

So, if you think this blog entry looks messed up, you're correct.  Google Blogger made a "new" blog interface and it took me hours to figure out how to wrap text around photos...and it still ain't easy.  And I can't figure out now how to just left align the fourth paragraph.  I can center it, right align it, and justify it, but can't left align it.  Who makes a text editor so bad it won't do that?  And now, if you click on a photo to enlarge it, you can't get back to the post by "esc".  Google needs to fire its Blogger staff because it probably, based on the feedback I've seen, just ruined this portion of the business.  Time will tell if I can stay here or need to start over.

ProfessorRoush surrendered his garden to the fates yesterday.  It is time, past time, that cold weather comes in and puts a stop to this madness, the tangles of Knautia macedonia, morning glory vines, and stiff daylily stems, the decaying leaves of summer clinging desperately to the trees, and the creeping crabgrass trying vainly to slip past the gardener.  I've grown tired of 2020 and dream of renewal, of the clean slate of snow and the crisp air of winter.  My garden remains only in spirit and the color of a few futile sedums, vainly trying to seek the last rays of a dim sun.

These sedums, two among many, caught my eye yesterday while mowing, a shorter bright pink foreground Sedum spectabile 'Brilliant' against the backdrop of a taller sedum that I have on my garden map as Sedum telephium 'Arthur Branch'.  Although the latter lacks the reddish-leaves characteristic of the variety, I don't doubt its identity; it's the right height and early enough in the season that the red coloration is yet hidden.   Both are long-term garden survivors for me, 'Arthur Branch' planted in 2000, the second summer of my garden, and 'Brilliant' in 2001.   I already knew, even in those early years on the prairie, that sedums would stand the test of time and carry me into winter, and so they have, each year.  I have 8 or 10 varieties that take the flowering place of the fickle fall mums in my garden.

It seems easy enough to understand how 'Brilliant' got it's name, but I'm at a loss to explain 'Arthur Branch'.  It seems sure to be named after a gardener, but Google has failed me in my quest to find an origin, providing only a criminal in New York and the fictional Law and Order character played by Fred Thompson, the latter possible since Law and Order first aired in 1990, but neither very likely or satisfying as provenance for a plant name.  My library isn't helping either, Alex Pankhurst's Who Does Your Garden Grow? and other sources failing me.   If anyone knows of the naming source, please let me know so I can add it to the other useless brain tracks in my ever-active curiosity center.  

Sedums aside, I essentially put the garden to bed yesterday, removing peony stakes and garden markers, draining and putting away hoses, sweeping out the garage for winter, pulling up weedy grasses in the garden beds, and finishing last-minute chores such as repainting some peeling trim on the barn.  If it snows tomorrow, I'll be unperturbed, my garden secure and ready for the moment.

In fact, I think all of us, brother and sister gardeners on the planet, are ready for 2020 to end.  The pandemic, the endless election twattle and sports much-ado-about-nothing, all combining to create an early fatigue, this year preceding the color change of leaves.  The death of RBG this week can only make it all worse, the din of both sides in an endless cycle of accusation and reprimand.  Even the sun has dimmed here in Kansas, yielding to the pollution from the relentless California wildfires, 1500 miles away.  Normally, ProfessorRoush laments cold and snow, dreading the onset and the duration, but right now, a little brisk, clear Artic blast seems like just the right prescription to put 2020 out of our misery.

Sedum Smorgasbord Served

ProfessorRoush, why do you grow sedums as an edging plant?

Because, my Dear, they are drought-resistant and make nice tidy foliage clumps and they have disease free foliage and they bloom brightest and best after the roses are tired and also because the deer leave them alone.

But ProfessorRoush, why then have you clipped off the blooms on all your sedums this late in the season?

Because, as you so often make me aware, Mrs. ProfessorRoush, I was wrong.  Again.  I didn't clip them, the deer ate them.  The deer love them.  Indeed, if you search the Internet or books, there will be any number of websites that list sedum as a deer-resistant plant (including a pamphlet from a local gardening store that I based my decision on), but many of those were written by evil gnomes and are dead wrong.  As usual, I should have looked to the Universities of this fine land for definitive information.  Rutger's University has a very well laid-out webpage that lists sedum as "occasionally severely damaged."  North Carolina State Extension has a nice pamphlet as well, listing them as "occasionally damaged".   As a Extension Master Gardener, I should have known better than to trust a non-research-based source.  I am expecting a hit squad of Mossy Oak®-camouflaged EMG's to show up at my door at any minute, demanding my trowel, Felco's and my EMG name badge.

I don't wish to be full of sour grapes, but what the heck kind of a term is "deer-resistant" anyway?   I understand the evolutionary advantages for Lamb's Ear, for example, to have developed a fuzzy surface that is distasteful to deer, but the plants don't really resist the deer, the deer just resist eating certain plants. Until, in the midst of a drought, they're hungry.  After that, Watch Out, Nellie, because the stupid large furry rats won't even leave the junipers alone. 

Lesson learned.  By edging a nice rose bed with 'Matrona' (Sedum telephinum) divisions, I have merely set out a smorgasbord of sweetly-flavored succulents during a drought.  HEY THERE!  DEER!  LOOK OVER HERE!  Don't bother with all that tall dry grass, come get these velvet-lip-wetting candy treats I've set out for you.  And please, nibble on the roses on your way through, pretty please?   To quote Charlie Brown, "Good Grief!"

Queen Matrona

September, in the Flint Hills, is the time that sedums become the stars of the garden, or at least they become the stars of my garden.  In my "add no extra water" garden, sedums are a great group of plants to propagate again and again throughout the garden, tying it together and allowing you to fulfill that "repeat theme" fundamental of good garden design.

'Matrona', pre-bloom, mid-summer

My favorite sedum, and one I'd recommend for every garden, is  'Matrona', full of gray-green foliate,  dark red stems and pink flowers.  This one is a four season performer for me;  tall, strong and disease free through Summer, colorful in Autumn,  a copper-brown support for snow in Winter, and then with the cutest little purple buds in early Spring as I clean off the beds. I've copied 'Matrona' over and over in my garden, and just this year I started a hedge of it on the southeast edge of my newest rose bed.  I'm hoping the 10 or 12 clumps planted there will make a nice and neat, if tall, border to its rose backdrop next year.  The entire 20 foot line cost me just one clump from my front garden, divided a dozen ways with a shovel early this Spring. 

The foliage of 'Matrona' always acts as a foil for its neighbors, either through the fleshy, thick character of the leaves or by color contrast with the purple-blue-green color of the leaves and red stems.  Look at it at the upper right, planted alone as an accent among green shrubs and daylilies, or as pictured to the left, in the garden and in full pink flower in front of 'Wine and Roses' Weigela and between Blue Lyme Grass (Elymus arenarius) and 'Emerald Gaiety' Euonymus.  Isn't she just the center of attention?

'Matrona' was a 1991 selection from Germany, and she received recognition as the "Perennial of the Millennium' from Europe in the year 2000 and also received the Royal Horticultural Society 2006 Award of Garden Merit.  The name comes from the German word "matrone", which means "lady of well-rounded form", so just in case your spouse spends a lot of time on the Internet, I'd suggest that all the male gardeners reading this resist any temptation to compare their wives to the beauties of 'Matrona.'  In the Netherlands she is known as 'hemelsleutels', which supposedly translates as "keys to heaven", so perhaps we should refer to this sedum by that name. 'Matrona' grows trouble free to about 2 feet tall in my garden in a nice compact clump, and she gets no extra water or care.  The one mistake to avoid with 'Matrona' is NEVER overfertilize a mature clump.  Fertilization with high levels of nitrogen just causes her to grow lanky and sprawl over her neighbors, a little too voluptuous for her own good.  If she is in extremely rich soil, it often helps to give her a little beheading in late June, to keep her compact, and I sometimes use peony supports on the bigger clumps so that the Kansas wind doesn't flatten her out.  Mainly, just keep her in full sun and leave her parched and 'Matrona' will be a star in your September garden.

Mama's Sedum

If we searched, I think most gardeners could trace the roots of their love of gardening to some family or acquaintance, or, as in my case, find their lineage back to generations of gardeners (both sets of my grandparents were farmers as were, respectively, their parents).

But many of us also have plants that we can trace to other family members.  My maternal grandmother, whom we called "Mamaw," would not really have thought of herself as a gardener, since most of the gardening she did was in the process of raising food in the vegetable garden and preserving it for use throughout the year.  She did however, out the back door of the farmhouse, have a small 8'X10' plot containing, as I recall, some portulaca, a species of yellow and pink columbines, some "hens and chicks" and a tall sedum. 

Mamaw's Sedum

Sometime after I started gardening at our first home, and before Mamaw passed on shortly after that, I got a start of the columbines and sedum from her and when we moved to our current home, I transplanted them again.  Currently, the sedums, along with some goldenrod, provide the fall flowering and foliage in a bed that is composed primarily of peonies long past their prime.  They do this year after year, without any care or extra water at all, and they suffer neither from insect pest nor fungal disease.  They're not called "live-forevers" by coincidence!  In fact, looking at the list of what Mamaw grew for enjoyment, all of them are low-maintenance, low-water survival plants that don't take time away from the more important business of putting food on the table. The columbines are the same easy care plants for me as the sedums are, popping up here and there with wild abandon in my garden, but it is the sedum I associate, for some reason, with my grandmother.      

I don't know what exact species or cultivar of sedum I inherited from my grandmother.  I thought for awhile that they were simply the ubiquitous 'Autumn Joy', but I've seen the two side by side and Mamaw's sedum is a little more pink-purple and fades to a duller brown than the currently commercial 'Autumn Joy'.  It doesn't really matter.  I very much enjoy other more modern sedum cultivars and I grow, for instance, Mohrchen and 'Vera Jameson' and 'Frosty Morn and Matrona, but some stay small and sprawl and others get big and sprawl (unless cut back severely in August or grown through supports), unlike my inherited sedum who stands tall and stays vertical without support at the end of the season.

I've lost the chance to listen more to the wisdom of my grandmother, but I can still enjoy her plants.  And maybe, just maybe, she's still teaching me that it's not flashy new appearance, but long-term staying power that is the most important criteria to keep us going in gardening and in life.