Ugly Ducklings Shine

In the midst of an otherwise disappointing Spring flowering season, there is a gem or two popping up in my gloomy garden.   'Harison's Yellow' has won the "first blooming rose" race in my garden this year with a spectacular show that I almost missed.  I saw the first bloom over a week ago, on April 24th to be exact, and then I went out of town for 6 days:  Six long gardenless days where we had several storms and several inches of rain on my gardener-less garden.  

 I fretted away the away time, wondering repeatedly if I'd missed my yellow rose beginnings, but came back to a fully blooming bush as pictured here.  Something finally is going well in the garden.

But wait, there's more.   For the first time ever, after several attempts, I have overwintered an 'Austrian Copper' to see a bloom.  Situated in a special spot where I can watch it, with better drainage than I've given it before, and I, at last, have a healthy bush with the promise of future bounty.  There are not many blooms this year, but I'll take a healthy young bush any day. 

The surprise "belle of the ball," however, is this 2019 addition to my garden, Lonicera Trumpet Honeysuckle 'Major Wheeler'.   I planted it here to replace an 'Arnolds Red' honeysuckle that had languished and expired under the multi-year assault of an annual vine.   Coming back from my "vacation", I found this beautiful display just to the left of my front door, a bright beacon from the driveway and front approach to the house.   

I have not yet sampled the nectar from this honeysuckle, but I will when I next pass it.   One never forgets the sweetness that can be squeezed from a good honeysuckle, no matter how old and gray and wrinkled the gardener grows. 

Any...way....the garden seems to be moving in fits and starts, but at least something is blooming.  And getting green.   And we've had several inches of rain now so perhaps, just perhaps the worst is past.   The main peonies are to start soon and, warm weather permitting, I'll get the dead wood pruned out of the roses and get the repeat bloomers in a better mood to fight it out with the Japanese Beetles that will come in mid-June!

Anticipation Abandoned

Where, pray tell me, does one start to explain one's absence from this minor blog of over 3 months?  Many, if not most, of my readers may not have noticed my lack of attention to their daily entertainment, although dare I hope that at least a few fleetingly wondered if I'd departed for parts unknown, upward to fulfillment or slipped into the cold embrace of spring ground?   And how do I apologize to my garden, my poor garden, neglected and abandoned to the whims of weather and fate?   Where does responsibility for the care and feeding of a garden or garden blog begin and end?

'Yellow Bird'

In the case of my garden, but not yet you blog followers, I've made the novice gardener's mistake of hoping for a return of affection, or mere notice, for my efforts.  But as winter rolled to spring and spring has settled into a teasing dance of welcome warmth interspersed with crushing cold, I've found my affection for and from the garden has been less than satisfying.   Simply put, is it too much to ask for a normal transition of spring bloom in return for my cultivating and caring efforts?

The evidence of an answer to that question this spring, has been a resounding "no!" from the Kansas climate.  The first bloom in my garden was the "Pink Forsythia", Abeliophyllum distichum 'Roseum', which I noticed had just opened blooms on February 29th.  One day and a cold night later its promise of love returned was reduced to a fountain of brown, never to shine again.  Then, in sequence, my beloved Star Magnolia (Magnolia stellata) teased me one day and crushed me the next, several forsythia teased a few cranky yellow blooms and then the rest froze and browned, and then the French lilacs, too embarrassed to carry the torch, refused to bloom at all.  So, at this stage, magnolias, forsythia, and lilacs are, in sports parlance, 0-3, while the Witch of Winter is 3-0.  The redbuds on my hills made it 0-4 in short order, also adding to the general woe and despair, and the red peach tree made me 0-5 for the early season.  

'Jane' Magnolia

Oh, yes, the first Scilla, Puschkinia, and daffodils bloomed, all surviving and promptly laid low by frost as if their diminutive status needed to be removed yet farther from center stage.  Even these minor spots of color were a jumbled mess, overgrown by Henbit and abandoned to my inability to work with frozen hands and ears to clear the garden.   I simply couldn't find a single day until April where it was warm enough, or windless enough, or I wasn't away to a meeting or work, to tidy the garden.  I just fail miserably to confront 70 mph gales as I work outside.  My front garden finally got trimmed and mulched last weekend, almost two months later than in previous years, and the back garden is yet to be touched, piles of bagged mulch waiting in vain as I struggle through a respiratory virus passed to me last week by the treacherous Mrs. ProfessorRoush. Yes, friends, even my spouse has taken sides with weather and fickle seasons against my garden.  

Paeonia tenuifolia

There are a few minor bright spots that I cling to.   Both my 'Jane' and 'Yellow Bird' magnolias have snuck in decent bloom this spring, and I share them with you here.   Mind you, I take no credit as my 'Ann' magnolia didn't show near the bountiful bloom of her sister, so any hue of success is a matter of chance and the random timing of nightly lows sparing individual bloom cycles.  For future hope, the late lilacs, like 'Boomerang' are opening up with some appearance of a decent showing, and so far the peonies are budding up well.   I got one day of  a fine display by the Paeonia tenuifolia, illustrated at left, after my return from a DC trip before it was ruined by rain. 

But did I yet mention that we've been bone dry, all through winter and spring, so dry as to make the ground as solid as cement and dry as far as I can dig?  We need rain to even have grass yet!   Should I will just roll over, cut my losses, sacrifice the troops, and wait until 2025?  I need color; beautiful sunrises and hope can sustain me, but not forever. What say ye?  (that last question asked in my mind with the voice of Gregory Peck as "Ahab" in 1956's Moby Dick, as he asked his first mate to follow him to their mutual death).  

12/12/2023

 

So Long Absent, So Weak

ProfessorRoush apologizes, my gardening friends, for my long absence from the blog.   I simply haven't had anything particularly interesting to say or show for a quite some time.  Oh, sure, there have been the usual spectacular sunrises such as that illustrated below, first looking West on the morning of December 12th;  I've just been saving them until I had something to say.

A harbringer of the snow soon to come, eh?  And a little turn northward, a pink reflection of the sun to the east tinting the grass below sky.

And then looking East the same morning as I went around the "S" curve and crested the hill leading me to work, an orange horizon ahead:

 And then two days later, a similar sunrise, a repeat of the joyous awakening of a Kansas day:

But, Alas!, I cry, for the more recent days have looked like this:  my back garden two days ago.   Where you can see grass sticking up, the snow is about 5 inches deep, but that drift on the patio in the foreground is closer to 3 feet high.   That's NOT melting anytime soon!

On a less "fisheye" view, with normal perspective, we can all feel sorry for the roses in the foreground.   To the right of the white "post" below (a dead spruce stump that I painted as a stand for a bird feeder), they are in order from left to right, 'Rugelda', 'Madame Hardy', an immature 'John Davis', and 'David Thompson', all fresh from a low of -14ºF that night, with now several nights of that repeated.   The forecast shows another night reaching -9º and then some more "moderate" temps through the weekend before a night down to -7ºF on Saturday next.   I think I'm about to see how winter hardy those Canadians and Rugosa roses really are.

Anyway, if you wonder about the whereabouts of ProfessorRoush, I'm either sobbing intermittently about the plight of my poor roses, shoveling through the 2.5 foot drift that keeps reforming on the front walkway, or, just maybe, marveling in the knowledge that in about a month, it'll be 50ºF and sunny outside some Saturday in February and I'll be clearing garden beds for another year and finding the daffodils pushing up.  

Hopefully.....

White Now, Not Brown

ProfessorRoush's last post was about how brown the prairie has turned and now (with extreme misgiving), how sorry I am for posting that!   Because yesterday morning, it started to snow.

And snow and more snow came falling from the heavens, blanketing the yard and wiping out the uglies. 

And this morning, 5 inches later, you can see the results for itself, a bumpy thick covering of snow over the backyard, turning a drab landscape into a jeweled foreground for sunrise.   I shouldn't complain, but since snow means cold and shoveling and a general mess of the cars and garages, I find that I actually prefer the drab brown of fall to the icy breath of winter, even if I momentarily forgot while wallowing in my loss of gardening time.

Except for what snow does for the house.   My brick eyesore on the prairie now looks like a scene out of a Norman Rockwell scene in the snow, don't you agree?

And at night, better yet!   I took this one returning home from the pre-game function for the Kansas State-Iowa State game last night; a game played in the snow as some people (not me) think football is meant to be played.   I'm doubly pleased, both because I held the phone steady enough for almost no blurring on this 3-second exposure (it was much darker out than this photo shows), and because the Christmas Tree that we just put up yesterday is visible in the window.

We may have snow, but all seems right in the world this weekend.  I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving holiday and is looking forward to Christmas!

Brown Out There

Geez, Louise, our fall color sure went away quickly.   It was looking at least a little fall-ish out there a week ago, oranges and russets and reds and yellows and browns everywhere, and now it's gone.   Fade to brown, fade to drab, goodbye leaves.   The weather doesn't show it as it's beautiful and sunny everywhere and still days where it hits 70ºF, but that last cold spell hit the trees hard. 

I'm still encouraged on some warm mornings by the occasional fogs, though.   We had one this week and it set the colors back in place.  Except for this little redbud volunteer off my back patio.   It has given up its leaves but it is holding on hard to those proliferate brown seed pods.   I'll have a bumper crop of redbuds next spring!

On my drive to work, I was struck by the wispy clouds on the east side of town.   This picture may not do it justice, but it was surreal in real life, a landscape draped in the middle of the sky.

I did notice, outside on this foggy morning, that my bald cypress looked particularly drab and around it, the warm morning looks somehow more like winter.   It normally has a little more golden color, but not this year.   Just yesterday, driving, I was listening to a Saturday morning garden show that comes from Topeka and the host was lamenting the lack of fall color in Kansas this year and whining about how fast the leaves came down.   He blamed it on the drought we've had in the summer and fall, and on the quick cold snap of a week ago.   I blame it on Kansas.

Not so bad, it is though, when the fog hides the greater world away and leaves me with a nice, sheltered, view of my garden.   And a warm feeling that it was a good year.

For the Children

Oh, you thought ProfessorRoush had forgotten about it, my semi-annual rant against STATOMIC, the Seasonal Tyrannical Attempt To Obliterate My Internal Clock?  Well, in vain you hoped, and I tried, I really did, to ignore my feelings and not bore you with my oft-repeated rants and grumblings.   And then came yesterday morning.

It was a beautiful brightly sunny Monday morning yesterday, when, under governmentally-mandated biannual fiat, I awoke once again at an ungodly hour, forcing myself to fitfully wait until the un-Daylight-Savings-time moment came to actually get out of bed and go downstairs and exercise.   Sleep-deprived, of course, even though I fell asleep Sunday night at 9 p.m., the usual diurnal bedtime of my internal clock if not now that of my bedside clock.  Properly limbered up after biking (or, as it is now called "spinning"), shaved, showered, dressed and fed, I went forward into the blinding sunlight to face anew the increased risks of heart attack, stroke, and vehicular accident that kills extra hundreds of Americans in the week after each first Sunday of November.

It's the Children that I worry for most on these time change weeks, the collective, capitalized and cherished Children, who, walking to school, must risk a brush with eternity and my Jeep each day as, stricken by the morning sun, I drive oh-so-carefully to work.   You see, my drive to work in the mornings is directly to the east, near the walking paths to school, and in the evening directly to the west, so I'm treated by the time change to not two such periods yearly, but four, doubling up with a sun who just last week wasn't quite awake when I went to work but now blares again into my face for a few more weeks.  I'll do it all over again in reverse next Spring.    And each time the time changes, the Children are at risk.

Red Hawthorn (Crataegus crusgalli)

And I also worry for the decrepit but hardy crew of morning joggers who poorly choose my gravel road as their path these days.   Just around the bend, I come over a hill and then stare straight into the sun for a few moments.   One day, someday, it's inevitable that I'll bounce a runner off into the grass alongside the road, no matter how carefully I drive, a dull thud and an "oomphf" heard from an unseen obstacle who shouldn't even be there.   I shouldn't be there either but for the arbitrary and senseless control exerted by our witless governments on our every waking moment.

Is there no courageous leader, no champion of legislative processes, who will take on the challenge of ending this insanity?   Who will protect the innocent Children and marathoners from doom by vehicular homicide?  Who will leave my biorhythms and cardiac rhythms untouched and unlegislated so that I don't die on a Monday morning right after the change from Daylight Savings?   I despair, despondent that my tombstone will read "he died on Monday after Sunday" and no one will understand, someday, some future day, in a more sane time when hopefully this madness ends.   Please end it, for the Children if not for me.

(These pictures, of course, have nothing to do with the Time Change, they're just more garden pornography that I wanted to share from my trip to the Amarillo Botanical Gardens.)  

Cranes are good luck!

I love a banana in flower!

Amarillo Botanical Garden

(warning, picture heavy).  ProfessorRoush was away this week at a conference in Amarillo, Texas, a delightful excursion to nowhere in particular, but a nice city, as they say, to visit.   The area was clean and the weather pleasant and the north Texans were laid-back and welcoming.  Would recommend 10/10 (as my Gen Z students would say) if you find yourself in the area.   

The hosts for my travels scheduled a afternoon side excursion for my group to the Amarillo Botanical Gardens, a cooperative municipal venture created by and supported by the local garden clubs (who "set out to prove gardening was possible in the challenging high plains of Texas") and located since 1968 in the Medical Center Park.   I could hardly have planned for a better side-trip for myself and in the course of just a couple of hours took over 60 pictures with my trusty iPhone, a few of which I'll share here.   This one was taken inside the Mary E. Bivens Tropical Conservatory and the Ringed Teal ducks at the bottom of the waterfall were real.   Since these ducks are native to South America, I presume they are captive within the conservatory.

The vistas of the garden were clean and open, with focal points throughout the many separately-themed gardens.   Here, near the entrance, is a broader view from the Franklin Butterfly Garden looking towards the Dusty McGuire Japanese Garden.  

I also thought the view down this isle, towards a very large butterfly mosaic, was quite nice, and the mosaic is a spectacular garden feature.

As per my pattern, I took pictures of almost every statue, but I did not plan for the accidental optical illusion from my lens catching the "heavenly" light rays on this frog. It stands, in real life, almost 7 feet tall.  The bronze plaque at his feet reads "MELODIUS TOADIUS"

Another massive statue in the Gardens was this clay/stone large rabbit just outside the ABG's Harrington Gallery.  This handmade creation was a good 6 feet tall and long.

I did notice, and strongly-approved, of the use of pumpkins and gourds throughout the ABG, placed everywhere in abundance to brighten up and "autumnize" other focal points like the rabbit above and even mundane objects such as this bird bath and the bronze garden bench below. 

Of course, placed in the Panhandle, cold hardy cacti and succulents were flourishing in the Britt High Desert garden, impervious to the blinding sunlight and freezing winds common to the area.  I thought Amarillo was in a low-lying area, but I was surprised to discover that the city itself is at an altitude of 3662 feet.

The Attebury Amphitheater is a nice use of space in the gardens, a place where music and yoga and other activities occur regularly.   My group had a short meditation training there, a not unpleasant break in my usual frantic pace.

The whole of the Amarillo Botanical Gardens is a restful place and full of nice easy to navigate pathways and interesting focal points.  

All in all, as I previously stated, don't forget to make the Amarillo Botanical Gardens a stop if you're ever in the Texas Panhandle.  The hard-fought efforts of generations of Amarillo gardeners should be recognized and appreciated by the suffering gardeners of the greater world!

Too Soon to Bloom

"Dear Christmas Cacti, ProfessorRoush is not in the habit of complaining about flowers, but you have jumped the gun, premature in your pretentiousness, too fast in your florescence.  I understand that Walmart may have out their Christmas merchandise in full display, but it is not even Hallow's Eve and yet here you are."   Of course, I should remember that these epiphytic and lithophytic plants are native to Brazil, at coastal half-mile altitudes, where they are known as Flor de Maio (May flower), and their flowering is triggered by the onset of cooler air and dwindling sunlight.  

Imagine my surprise yesterday to see that most of our Christmas cactuses (cacti seems so abrupt as a plural) were blooming, some in full display, others just starting, and half still dormant, but all contributing to a sudden explosion of color in the sunroom.  I hadn't been watching closely and they snuck the buds in without my noticing.  Schlumbergera in the sunroom seems like poor environmental placement, but these are behind opaque blinds that shield them from the summer Kansas sun.  

I neglect these for the most part, watering every other week or every week as I remember them, turning the pots occasionally so they grow symmetrically.   They are one of those plants that respond, evidently, to inattention, because most of these specimens are pot-bound and always on the verge of a little too dry.  Oh, if every other living thing was so easy to care for!  I can only feed the heck out of these and hope they bloom in cycles as they did last year, colorful from Thanksgiving to Easter, before they peter out and rest for the summer.

I've been, as you know, collecting colors as rapidly as the breeders frantically develop them, and although the classically-marketed Zygocactus was bright red (for CHRISTMAS), their palette range over the past few years has been greatly expanded.  I used to have a red and white striped one as well, but I don't know if it's just currently reluctant to bloom or if I lost it in the great house freeze of 2004 (or whenever it was).  

I like the new colors, truth be told, as much as the old classic red or white.   I feel the vivid fuchsia at the top is just to die for, and the orange of paragraph #4 is one of the most unusual. The salmon to the right is a subtle hue, and the soft yellow variety below is much more rich-colored in person.   Notice that I've long lost the variety names, if they ever existed, and merely describe them as the welcome color they are for the dreary months of winter.   Here in the sunroom, I can look out windows at the dreary dying garden beyond and my eyes carry this color outdoors into the landscape.

One wonderful part of gardening and blogging is that I'm always learning something and today I've learned that the Schlumbergera are divided into two main groups, the earlier-blooming Truncata, with pointed teeth,  horizontal stems and flowers and yellow pollen, and the later-blooming Buckleyi, with more rounded teeth, flowers that hang down, and pink pollen.  I appear to have primarily Truncata, since the pollen of all currently-blooming seems to be yellow and the flowers are all hanging down, and leaf shapes on the 7 plants not yet blooming seem similar to those that are.  I'll have to search for the Buckleyi, now knowing there is a difference.