Burning Day

Last Saturday was "burning day" for myself and my neighbors, as we took advantage of cool temperatures and the recent rains to "safely" burn the prairie surrounding our homes.

Prairie burns, as I've discussed before, are an important factor in prairie maintenance.  Burns act to keep the prairie clear of invasive trees and non-native "weeds", and they increase the quality and protein levels of grassland intended for livestock pasture or hay.   As a consequence, of course, our intrusive government tries to regulate and prevent this useful and quite natural act, particularly during April when the burns are carefully monitored to limit their contribution to ozone pollution in overcrowded cities to the east. For untold millennia, prairie burns occurred as a result of lightning or the actions of Native Americans, but widespread burns today are unusual and it falls to the homeowners to nourish the prairie and to protect humans and human property. 

This year, we burned starting early in the morning.  Night burns can be spectacular, but our quiet morning burn was still beautiful and fretful and frightening, all at once.  Our primary goals are to keep the burns from escaping into town, and to burn our pastures thoroughly without burning our homes and outbuildings and my garden.  Hence, we usually "backburn" the perimeters of our landscaping into the wind, and then set fires to run with the wind to hotly and quickly finish the job.  In that final phase, sometimes it seems like the whole world is on fire.














Based on long experience together, none of my neighbors trust each other with a match in hand, and so burning is coordinated in person and by cell phone and burn tactics are chosen by consensus.  I view my neighbors as crazy arsonists hell bent on roasting my garden, but in their defense, the largest uncontrolled fire in this area occurred as a result of me trying to clear a bed for tulips a decade or so back.  Every year, somebody's pine trees get singed or a burn eats into someone's landscape mulch, but this year it was a perfect burn and there were almost no casualties, except for the accidental burning of four large hay bales owned by a neighbor (his own fault).  

I say almost no casualties, but at approximately 6:50 pm, several hours after the burns died down, our electricity died as well.  Pack rats often infiltrate the ground-hugging transformer boxes and nest there, and the nests will catch fire occasionally and smolder for hours in the boxes before finally taking our electricity with them.  Sure enough, on a neighbor's land, a blackened box was smoldering away and there was a large hole dug underneath one side.  Even in death, pack rats will get their revenge.   

I'll leave you teased with the view above, the blackened hills leading into town after the burn.  You can clearly see both the brush that gets burned and the rocks that litter what I call soil in this area. In about 2-3 weeks, I'll post this view and before's and after's of others, to show you the emerald paradise that burning creates on this Godforsaken land.

Warning for the UnWary

NewsFlash!  Read All About It!  This is a Special Edition of the Garden Musings blog written to you from breezy Kansas.  ProfessorRoush, your renowned gardening investigator, has caught a big box store in the act of practicing horticultural fraud!

Actually, Folks, ProfessorRoush just wants to remind you that sometimes things aren't always what they seem at the big-box gardening centers.  I was at a local vendor today, looking for shelves, not garden plants, but I couldn't resist wandering through the newly arrived shrubs and perennials to see what was available.  'Sky Pencil' hollies are on a wish-list for me, so I was drawn to these 3 foot tall specimens from across the parking lot.  Unfortunately, as you can clearly see in the front container, these specimens were recently transplanted from a one-gallon container into these three gallon containers, presumably so that they could be sold at the $25.00 price, instead of the $6.95 or $12 price that a one-gallon plant would command.  Unaware consumers that buy the other plants lined up behind this corner specimen are paying at least $12 for the 2 extra gallons of mulch.  Quite a steep price for mulch, isn't it?

Please remember, my gardening friends, that it is a good practice to shop only reputable nurseries and even then to occasionally slip plants an inch or two out of their containers to see if the roots have reached the edges of the pot, or, in the other extreme, if the roots are pot-bound and tangled.  Plants like the one above are the worst of both worlds; a pot-bound plant that was recently "planted up" without any effort to free the roots into the new soil. 

I have a feeling these 'Sky Pencil' hollies are never going to grow tall and reach the sky.  They haven't been given the chance.

Marriage and Magnolias

After years of study and accumulated evidence, ProfessorRoush has reached the conclusion that in an infinite number of universes, there are only three possible gardening relationships between spouses.   First, there are those sad couples where neither person gardens but where one grudgingly assumes the duty of pushing a roaring machine across a postage stamp lawn every week from April through October.  Often, such couples ultimately retire to a high-rise apartment with a potted and dehydrated cactus on the balcony.  Second, there are those mythical unions where both spouses share equally in the garden's triumphs and disappointments, planning and working together in perfect harmony.  The only documented example of such a relationship, of course, ended when Eve gave Adam a bite of the apple.   The third marriage, a land where there is an unequal and uneasy union between an avid gardener of vision and a less knowledgeable but still mildly enthusiastic spouse, is the one that most of us navigate, bouncing between the shores of two visions for our garden.   In these ungodly unions, in the interest of marital harmony, the gardening spouse must, at times, be willing set aside his or her grand vision to accommodate some ill-considered whim of the partner. 

My latest personal sojourn into such a gardening quagmire came last weekend, begun in an ill-considered moment when I asked Mrs. ProfessorRoush if she'd like to accompany me to one of our favorite local nurseries.  Presumably I was feeling a weak moment of the guilty pleasure of a weekend spent alone in the garden, and Mrs. ProfessorRoush was missing human contact, even if such contact occurred only in the presence of a sweaty, dirty, and sore older gentleman.  My punishment came quickly upon arrival at the nursery, where the only visible bloom was from a group of Magnolia 'Ann' and it was announced loudly that I had to purchase one immediately, regardless of my whining protests and the squeak and groans that occurred during the act of prying apart my wallet to purchase the $70.00 extravagance.

As background information, it is important to note that I had long ago considered and rejected the feminine wiles of  'Ann' for several reasons, not the least of which is that my garden already contains her lighter-pink sibling 'Jane', purchased for far less at $10 several years back.  I really don't need the sisterly rivalry to disrupt the ambiance of my garden.  Another deterrent to her purchase was that, although I am fond of magnolias, they are still reluctant participants in my garden regardless of the best efforts of global warming trends.  The more hardy magnolias will bloom occasionally here, but the blooms seldom last long in the strong prairie winds and they are sometimes caught out naked in a late freeze.  Finally, I had no inkling of where to possibly fit 'Ann' into my garden, although I freely admit that such a consideration has never stopped me before.  Thus, I grumbled and gritted my teeth, but Mrs. ProfessorRoush twisted my arm, and home we came with a pot-bound and prematurely blooming 'Ann'.

I have since planted 'Ann' in a site where she is destined to be the centerpiece of a new bed, a burgundy-colored beacon to explore deeper into the garden.  Anticipating a few days of gentle rain and mild temperatures, I lovingly teased out the root ball and fought my way into the anaerobic clay to bed her down, and I've now had two days to fondle her thick petals and inhale her thick musty fragrance.  Tonight, of course, the unpredictable Kansas weather is rolling back the clock with a predicted record low of 28°F and possible snow flurries on the 10th of April.  Tomorrow night there is a similar forecast.  There were evenings, in my younger gardening days, when such a prediction would have sent me scurrying around the garden with armloads of blankets to cover tender plants but I am long past such foolishness.   I have instead bid 'Ann' a reluctant goodbye and cast her fate to the Gods.

Next time, I have vowed to swallow my guilt, stay home, and divide a daylily or three.  Such an action may not provide any traction towards marital harmony, but at least my wallet will be more thick.

 

Lightning Fast App

This afternoon, after a day and a half of strenous garden work, ProfessorRoush quit working and took a number of photos to convince himself, and all of you, that Spring was beginning in Kansas.  I was sidetracked, however, by the quick appearance of a small storm with a negligible offering of rainwater, but a little bit of lightning and thunder.

Many of you will remember how excited I was last year to accidentally capture a lightning bolt while I was taking prairie-storm pictures (if not, it's HERE).  Least year's photo was indeed fortuitous, and at the same time it was likely the end of an era, for this year, there is a new app for iPhone that will  capture lightning, fireworks, gunshot flares, and other flashing phenomena.  You see, folks, some genius has taken the luck right out of it and now everyone will have their own lightning pictures.

I read about the app, called iLightningCam, a couple of weeks ago and the wait since for a thunderstorm has been near unbearable.  Just a few moments ago, as the sky darkened and the flashes began, out I went onto the covered porch to see if it worked...and within 5 minutes, I had the picture above, a bolt of lightning flashing over my slowly greening and newly cleaned south garden beds.  Lightning pictures are now idiot-proof and I have the evidence.

The iLightningCam app is inexpensive (disclaimer;  I get no sales revenue from mentioning it), works on both iPhone 4 & 5, and is simple to use.  There is a trial Lite free version as well.  It claims to use the iPhone light sensor to set off the camera, but I theorize that it is running a continuous loop of video and just capturing some set of frames that were taken just before a spike of light notifies it that there has been a flash.  At least that's what I believe the "15fps" in the upper left corner of my screen indicates.

Once I get over my initial excitement with the app, I'm going to try to get more artistic with garden lightning combination photos, but for now, I'm still a kid in the candy store; a kid with the gift of magic bestowed by an iPhone genius named Florian Stiassny.  As my Jeep tire cover says, "Life is Good."

Farewell to Brittany

Winter IS ending just as ProfessorRoush's endurance is waning, but Spring is accompanied this year by a heavy heart here in the Flint Hills.  I regret to report that the chief Rabbit and Snake Chaser of my garden, our aged Brittany Spaniel, has passed on to greener hills and sunnier skies than yet exist here on April's rolling prairies.

"Brittany" was 14 years old and her strength had been fading for some time, but her young spirit  never left.  From the start, when we brought her home as a small puppy while we were building the house, she was a free spirit, running for the hills whenever she was let off a leash. She would head straight for the golf course on my south fence line and on towards town, greeting the first golfers she saw, and then running on to the next hole to be petted by the next foursome.  She became a known and regular visitor at the golf course club house.  Finally, it became a game;  she would slip past one or the other of us and disappear over the nearest hill.  Several hours later, the golf course supervisor would call us to tell us they had caught Brittany and tied her up at the cart house and we would make a quick trip to bring back a happy, tired, and often extremely muddy dog.

These impromptu escapes continued on a regular basis until one summer, not so long ago, when she jerked the retractable leash right from Mrs. ProfessorRoush's hand, disappeared, and never reached the golf course.  We searched high and low for a week, walking the pastures and golf course, and had sorrowfully concluded that she had met a bad end or been adopted by someone in town.  One afternoon, though, there returned a thinner, scratched up, and dehydrated Brittany, followed by our neighbor who had found her hidden down in a ravine, the leash tangled up in brush where she at least had access to a small spring and a little shade to fend off the hot July days of her adventure.  After that, she stayed closer to home, content to roam between the house and cow pond, or to go with Mrs. ProfessorRoush to a nearby 50 acre dog-park.

Her health had been good over these 14 years, with only two little scares   At 8 years old she got into a little rat poison somewhere and developed a large sublingual hematoma, but recovered quickly.  At 10 years old, on Thanksgiving day, she came out of her kennel one morning and fainted right in front of her veterinarian owner.  A few tests and a few hours later, I had diagnosed and surgically removed a 10 lb spleen filled with marginal lymphoma ( a benign form of lymphocytic cancer) and she recovered once again and never looked back.

Recently, however, we noticed that she had begun to lose appetite, energy and weight, all quickly and simultaneously.  I've been first a veterinarian and later a veterinary surgeon for 30 years now, long enough to know what I'd find if I went looking, and sure enough, she had a different type of cancer, spread all through her lungs and liver and past a treatable stage.  All we could do was make her comfortable and pray for a few warm days to enjoy with her while we could.  She still wanted to be free, not kenneled, so we allowed her out every day to roam around the yard where she would pick a warm spot in the grass to lie down and watch the prairie come to life around her.  She collapsed at the dog park on Easter Sunday with Mrs. ProfessorRoush and her diminutive clone and I helped her pass quietly there, lying in the warm Spring sun and held by the girls.

One last story; I'm sure some of you are wondering about a veterinarian who came to name his Brittany Spaniel "Brittany".  That moniker can be blamed on my children, who were experts at unimaginative names for our pets.  During their childhood, we've had a cat named "Dane" (named by my then-4-year-old son because his grandparents had a dog named Dane and "he didn't know many animal names"), a brown cat named "Hershey", and a calico cat named "Patches".   Their crowning attempt at original naming, our beloved "Brittany", now rests near "Hershey" in my garden, in a spot where I had, in knowing preparation, fought my way down through the loose rock into the deep clay last week.  I'll let the faithful readers of Garden Musings know what rose I plant on that spot later on this summer.

(P.S.  I forgot about my daughter's current Italian Greyhound.  Named "Italee").

Sprawling Fantin-Latour

The selection of roses for planting is such a fickle action at times.  I sometimes seek out specific roses based on their reputations, while at other times I'm struck by a photograph in a catalogue, or an intriguing hint dropped in another blog.   As a result, there are roses in my garden that I take almost for granted.  Hardly noticed for their temporary beauty, they fill in spaces and trundle on year after year, never causing trouble sufficient to sentence them to elimination by spade, nor causing enough excitement to move them to a more prominent position.

Such a rose, in my garden, is the Centifolia 'Fantin-Latour'.   I obtained her ten or eleven years ago, I believe, from Suzy Verrier's former Royall River Rose Nursery, and she has long been one of the non-remonant roses that border my back patio.  Of unknown provenance, discovered before 1938, she is undeniably beautiful in bloom, a light blush pink with sometimes a green center, and her fragrance is sweet and very strong.  When she is without bloom, however, she's a stiff, rangy shrub that wants to sprawl 4 feet in all directions and stands about 4 feet tall as well.  I would give her better marks for appearance if she was the sole rose at the party, but placed in my garden next to my favorite 'Madame Hardy', she always comes off as a poor second choice for a dance partner.  'Fantin-Latour is less-refined and more loosely arranged in blossom than 'Madame Hardy', she hasn't nearly as tight or shapely legs, and she's much more awkward in appearance.   Her stiff canes are gawky and never clothed with short stems or flowers, completely naked, in essence, from the waist down.  In a Romance novel, 'Madame Hardy' would be the prim and proper Lady of the manor, 'Fantin-Latour' the blushing but willing peasant milkmaid who pleasures the Lord on his daily travels.

I don't intend, by that comparison, any ill will towards peasant milkmaids, many of whom star in my nightly dreams just as 'Fantin-Latour' graces my garden.  'Fantin-Latour' is of hardy stock, whoever her parents were, and she has no winter dieback here in Kansas.  She gets a little minimal fungus occasionally, so I watch her for blackspot a bit when the weather is most humid in order to keep as many leaves covering her angular frame as possible.  The blossoms, cupped and very double, are a little disheveled at times, and they also get a smidgen of botrytis blight in cool wet weather, but in warm dry sun they are the equal of any beautiful rose in my garden.  The biggest positive of 'Fantin-Latour', in my mind, has been the absolute lack of care she needs.  The picture above is from 2008, blooming her head off in late Spring, and the picture at the bottom is from this past summer, halfway through a drought.  Her appearance is almost identical and I haven't taken a pruner to her at all during those years, except to remove a dead cane or two.  No gardener could ask for an easier rose to care for, nor a more beautiful one.  I, for one, will always be able to overlook her wanton desire to sprawl across my garden beds just as long as she is willing to provide an annual burst of fragrant blooms.

A Spring Proposal

It is Spring, correct?   Because ProfessorRoush is having a difficult time this morning discerning a difference from the Winter he experienced just a few days ago.  On this, the fourth day past the Spring equinox of 2013, it is currently 27°F in Manhattan, Kansas and the wind is out of due North at 15mph with gusts up to 22mph.  We have, as of last count, 4.6 inches estimated new snow on the ground since 7:00 p.m. yesterday.

Enough for statistics.  Mark Twain, once said there "are three kinds of lies, lies, damn lies, and statistics."  Well, at least most scholars attribute it to Mark Twain; Twain, himself, claimed to be quoting Benjamin Disraeli but the statement cannot be found in Disraeli's private or published works.  So the authorship of this quote may be as misleading as are statistics themselves.  And anyway, Mark Twain was just a pen name for Samuel Clements; why do we attribute quotes to Mark Twain instead of Samuel Clements? Anyone?

Enough for both Mark Twain and statistics.  What the statistics of the daily weather hide is that, as you can plainly see, my little "sun face" on the garage wall looks a little blue at the moment.   And that, as you can see in the picture below, part of the ground in my garden is almost clear and other parts have drifts over a foot tall.  And that, if I take a step outside the door to pick up the Sunday morning paper, I'm liable to freeze solid in my boots.  Of course it would be a minor miracle that the Sunday morning paper has even been delivered.  I always scoff at television meteorologists who stress "wind chill" data to scare their viewers, but the wind chill for me outside right now is in the 10°F range.  The real joke is on me this morning. because I moved my "new" tractor up to the garage in preparation to clear snow this morning.  I'm convinced, however, that if I sit on it and drive it outside right now, the next time my carcass will be discovered is in 10,000 years when some scientist cores into the glacier now forming on my driveway pad.

And enough, by the way, of whining by the global warming crowd.  Take notice, I'm not going to listen to any such decrepit creatures for a few days, and maybe not until August.  I've been suspicious of their sincerity ever since they started talking about "climate change" instead of "global warming" anyway.  It is pretty tough to convince me that we're in the midst of global warming when this year's real Spring is over a month behind last year, whatever the calendar may say. I propose here and now that we do away with calendars and equinoxes and go back to "Earth-centric" time.  Copernicus was a heretic and a lawyer and his opinions should have been more suspect even in his own time.  How about if all gardening folk agree that it's not Spring until the daffodils bloom, wherever you are?  Heck, we have time zones whose strict interpretations are enforced by our Federal government, why not "Spring Zones"?  They'd just run north and south instead of east to west, so that's no big deal, especially to those gardeners who never know what direction they're facing and plant sunflowers on the north sides of their houses.  And for those of you who live in USDA Zones so hot that daffodils don't thrive, who cares when Spring is for you?  It's always just Spring or Summer for you.  You can say that it's Spring when you can't fry an egg on the sidewalk and Summer when you can.  Here in the Flint Hills, ProfessorRoush is not celebrating Spring until he sees a yellow daffodil in his garden!   Which is evidently going to be awhile yet.

Old Plants And Old Landscapes

A marketing email from K. Van Bourgondien with the subject line "Do you know how old YOUR plants are" caught my eye the other day.  The email continued with a discussion of antique or heritage flowers available from this large mail order source, but my mind had already tripped down another garden path before I read the body of the email.  I was immediately thinking "how old is this or that individual plant in my garden?"

At this point, after thinking about it for awhile, I'm not sure how I would, or should, answer that question.  My garden, from when I began to think of it as a garden, began with the construction of the house and is now 14 years old, give or take a month or two.  But because I've been adding a bed or two each year to the "garden", some plants are much younger than others.  The house landscaping was first, and so there are hollies on the north side of the house that will be 14 years old come this May.  The back patio came a year later, and thus 'Madame Hardy' and 'Marie Bugnet' are 13 years old.  There are 'New Hampshire Gold' forsythia to the West that are also 13 years old and who are unlikely to get much older because I've tired of them and they are not the showiest varieties available.  Farther down the garden, there are plants of every age, right down to the one week old 'Madame Hardy' sucker that I just detached from the original and replanted down into another bed.  And there are some garden plants on this land that I planted before it "was" a garden.  Several years before building, I planted, and lost, and planted again a few fruit trees down on the western hillside.  In a similar fashion, there are asparagus roots in the vegetable garden that date back to 1996. 

There are, of course, other ways of looking at plant age.  I would argue that an open-pollinated heirloom Sweet Pea, 'Painted Lady', for instance, is only as old as the seed that I saved from last year.  Identical as the flowers look, there is still variation in the genetic makeup from vine to vine.  But in our current "Era Of The Garden Clones," how old  should I really consider my week-old sucker of 'Madame Hardy'?  Barely rooted, it is a "division" of my 13 year old, purchased original plant.  It is also the same exact living continuation of  the rose first introduced in 1832 by Monsieur Hardy himself.  That 'Maiden's Blush' in my garden dates back before 1400, before the North American Continent that I live on was known to my forefathers.  Many plants, if not most, don't slip into senescence as animals do.  Pando, a clonal colony of Quaking Aspen in south-central Utah, is believed to be the oldest living thing on earth at an estimated age of 80,000 years.  When the same genes continue year after year, century after century, how old do we say our cloned cultivars are? 

And I'm leaving out the plants of the prairie that surround my garden.  The Big Bluestem that populates the Flint Hills prairie, and the False Indigo that brighten it, I know that each clump started from individual wind-blown seeds, but how long ago?  How long does a clump of drought-resistant Little Bluestem live? Are there grasses on my land that have survived climate changes and prairie fires and tornadoes for thousands of years?  Were some of those same grasses grazed by Mammoths? How would I know?  How long will my pampered 'Northwind' Panicum clumps survive after me?

I don't know the answers to these questions, and metaphysical subjects are too exhausting right now for this winter-weakened gardener.  I'm just going to pretend that my one week old sucker from Madame Hardy is a baby, and I'm going to baby it until it blooms true and strong.  And I think that those 'New Hampshire Gold' forsythia are far too old and need to go quietly into that gentle night, helped along by my gardening Dr. Kevorkian look-alike. I'm also going to believe that somewhere out there in the Flint Hills, there is a healthy clump of  Big Bluestem which is secure and happy that it no longer gets regularly squashed under the hoof of a Mastodon.  Just because it makes me happy to think about it. 

An-ti-ci-pa-tion

Scilla siberica

ProfessorRoush is haunted today.  Haunted by a 1971 top-twenty song by Carly Simon on the album of the same name.  Do you remember it?  Outside today, in a static landscape held hostage by the last gasps of winter chill, the lyrics played over and over in my head, Carly's syrupy tones warming the damp air around me.  Anticipation is said to have been written by Ms. Simon during her wait for a date with the formerly-named Cat Stevens, who is now called Yusuf Islam, although he was born Steven Demetre Georgiou.  Whatever the name of her date, Ms. Simon missed her calling because instead of pining over a wandering minstrel, she could have been writing for Spring-hungry gardeners.  Look at the beginning lyrics:





"We can never know about the days to come
But we think about them anyway
And I wonder if I'm really with you now
Or just chasing after some finer day."



Rose 'American Pillar'

Is that not a perfect description of the gardener's thoughts in late Winter?  Visualizing the garden, not brown and stiff and dreary here at the end of Cold Days, but green and glorious in the coming Summer?  When I walked through my garden today, I wasn't really there most of the time.  I wasn't really talking to those naked rose canes, nor were my finger's caressing the soft bud of that magnolia.   I saw only the rose that will bloom here tomorrow, only the sweet-perfumed magnolia that will soon welcome the warm rains. 





 

'Mohawk' viburnum

And the repeating chorus of the old hit song keeps bringing us back to the present:

"Anticipation, anticipation
Is making me late
Is keeping me waiting"









 

Sedum 'Matrona'

Why, Scilla siberica, are you keeping me waiting?  It's time to open those pale blue buds and color the old gray mulch with the reflection of the sky.  Come on, Viburnum fragrans 'Mohawk', come blow me away yet another year with that otherworldly sweet fragrance.  Daffodils, bring forth the sunshine that hides in your heart and release Spring with your joyful trumpets!

 


Sometimes, I wonder that old gardeners bother to enter their gardens at all during the dark months.  I know, right now, the glorious tulip that will bloom in this spot.   I know that from these tiny thick green leaves, a magnificent Sedum 'Matrona' will bloom to close the door on the Fall garden.  I know...I know...and yet I must see it again.  Or, as Carly put it: 
 "And tomorrow we might not be together
I'm no prophet, Lord I don't know nature's way
So I'll try to see into your eyes right now
And stay right here, 'cause these are the good old days." 



  Thank you, Ms. Simon.  These are indeed the good old days.



Paradigm Rose Shift

I have not entirely neglected my garden reading this Winter, but I must confess that I've struggled at times to keep a high interest level in the books that I chose to read (more on that in a later blog).  I did, however, recently pick up a copy of an older rose tome by noted rosarian, Rayford Reddell, titled A Year In The Life Of A Rose, and written in the ancient times of 1996.  My second-hand volume, by the way, seems to be autographed by the author, and thus well worth the marked-down $2.50 price.

Mostly, this short book reminded me exactly how much rose gardening has changed within two short decades.  Mr. Reddell wrote the book in a time when the AARS program reigned supreme in the rose world, annually introducing beautiful but finicky princesses who often weren't worth the trouble of growing.  He wrote at a time when Jackson & Perkins and Week's Roses were thriving and turning out promising new varieties by the dozens every year.  I expected, and was not disappointed, to find suggestions and advice based more on the classical formulas for growing good show roses, advice aimed at production of massive Hybrid Tea blooms grown in blessed coastal or southern climates.  There were many prunning and spraying and fertilizing instructions that were used 20 years ago when the modern shrub rose class was still in infancy, but few suggestions for environmental consideration or organic care.

I respect Mr. Reddell's expertise and knowledge without question, but I did not agree with his recommended rose choices and, given my Kansas climate, I'm sure he would understand.  The chapter entitled "The Future For Roses" did predict the growth of the shrub rose class and the trend for breeding disease resistant roses, but Reddell proclaimed 'Carefree Delight', in my opinion a real yawner of a shrub rose, to be the "quintessential Landscape rose."  I don't think so, Mr. Reddell.  And then he goes on to worship at the roots of 'Scentimental', the wine and white streaked 1997 AARS winner.  Every reader here knows my love for striped roses, and yes, I do grow 'Scentimental', but the rose struggles mightily to survive for me and every year I consider uprooting and composting it.  The blossoms are nice, but I'm not sentimental about 'Scentimental' at all. 

The text was most fascinating to me for what it didn't predict;  the breeding of Knock Out and the subsequent disintegration of the commercial rose world that we knew in 1996.  There is a section in the book titled "Roses by Zones,"  In it, Mr. Reddell picks a well-known rosarian in every USDA Zone to glean local advice from, and, by chance, for Zone 4B he chose to repeat advice from Bill Radler, the breeder of 'Knock Out'.  This was Radler pre-Knock Out, discussing winter protection and fertilizer choices in Wisconsin.  Not a word about the revolution to come. 

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn defined the concept of  a "paradigm shift", postulating that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but rather is a "series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions" replacing one world view with another.  Within the Rose World, there have been at least 3 paradigm shifts, first with the introduction to the West of the "China Stud roses," then the breeding of the first Hybrid Tea in 1867, and more recently, with the rise of disease resistant shrub roses, like Knock Out, that bloom madly and healthy in our landscapes in a very un-rose-like manner.  A Year In The Life Of A Rose illustrates that 'Knock Out 'was the catalyst for a classic paradigm shift, a change unforeseen by the arguably foremost expert of the field in his time, only five years before the paradigm shift to disease resistant landscape roses began.

Slow Changes

My apologies for leaving Garden Musings alone so long.  ProfessorRoush has been in a gardening funk of major proportions, accompanied, I assume, by many of my Zone 6 and lower friends.  My garden is incorporating the local signs of Spring at a snail's pace, with the warm days of yesterday faded into the cold afternoon of today. And likewise it's Gardener has also been absent-without-permission, unable to get excited even at the daily opening and closing of his snow crocus.

 

The garden is completely static, unable to rouse itself from winter at the recent pace for Kansas.  As I review my notes of years past, this Spring seems to be "normal" and I would predict the redbuds and forsythia bloom at the end of the month, with daffodils in early April, unlike last year when we had redbuds and daffodils in full bloom by now, and iris and Scilla had already graced my presence.  This year, the redbuds and forsythia are still tightly closed.  Scilla hasn't appeared above ground and the daffodils are barely peaking up in places.  ProfessorRoush only hopes that all this means a wet Spring to break the drought and shortened weeks of furnace temperatures in July and August.

I  blame the semi-annual Time Change, of course, for the combined sloth of my garden and myself, as most of my regular readers would expect.  Just this past week, around Monday, I had finally adjusted to the Fall change, sleeping in at long last several days this week until 6:00 instead of waking to frozen darkness at 5:00 a.m. As a consequence, this morning I awoke after the time change at 6:45, which on a normal work day will make me late. So now I have to readjust to life awakening in darkness again, although the extra hour at night in the garden might start to be useful. Daylight Savings Time also seems to have brought a return to the cold. Yesterday we had rain and +60F. Today, we have rain,+35F, and gale winds from the north, with snow forecast this afternoon and evening.  When, oh when, will Spring come again?

Construction on "The Barn" continues, with a roof in place, but no doors.  I did briefly rouse myself yesterday during the warm hours to fill bird feeders, pick up trash in the yard, and water a few cloched baby roses, but my only real garden progress was the planting of a daylily start from my parent's farm.  I chose this division in December from among about thirty others because it looked vigorous and strong (my father has no idea which one it is).  It has proved its vitality, because tucked away in a unheated garage in a black garbage bag for 2 months it grew over a foot of pale yellow foliage in the darkness, and so it was far overdue for planting.  With my luck and looking at the vigor of this daylily, I probably chose a clump of ugly orange 'Kwanso' to transplant.  I had plenty of that already!

Perhaps I should begin a campaign to hurry Spring along by planning some garden changes.  I need, for instance, to revise the pictured corner of my landscaping (right), which was originally a triangle of purple- and yellow-needled evergreens in front of the bluish "dwarf" spruce at the corner. Over 13 years, Juniper 'Old Gold' has overgrown and covered the plum-winter-needled Juniper horizontalis 'Youngstown Andorra' , and it threatens to move on to the adjacent roses.  Additionally, I think it has become home for several critters, as evidenced by the trails leading under it, and it needs to go.  What to replace it with?  The only danger here, as every gardener will recognize, is that I allow my Winter's despair to influence ill-advised changes in the overall garden by, for instance, inspiring me to rip out this healthy sunny border in favor of a doomed shade garden, or a 1 acre pond, or a 75 foot long pondless waterfall   Moderation is the key to garden planning by restless gardeners in Winter.

UnMundane Mundi

If a budding rosarian....interesting phrase...what exactly is a budding rosarian?  Is ProfessorRoush referring to a person who grows roses only to create flowers, rather than one who wants to promote the development of hips (a hip rosarian)?  Surely I am not referring to a rosarian who is asexually reproducing by the formation of outgrowths (buds) from their bodies?  That would be a little too sci-fi-ish even for this old Isaac Asimov fan, although it might be a useful and non-icky  method of procuring spare parts for oneself.  No, I think it can be easily surmised that I'm referring to a "new" rosarian, at "an early developmental stage but showing potential" as "budding" is defined by the Free Online Dictionary.

Let me begin again.  If a new lover of roses whimsically wants to grow a very old rose, they could scarce do better, in my humble opinion, than to grow the old Gallica 'Rosa Mundi'.  I've grown this ancient rose for a decade, this sprawling, running, short-statured clump of a bush, but I've yet to tire of it.  Perhaps it is the matchless freedom of the unique simple blossoms, each one different from another, striped or plain, as it sees fit.  Perhaps it is the understated presence of the bush when it is not in bloom, no more than three feet tall but popping up again and again as it suckers its way across the yard.  It is a stealth invader, masquerading itself within an adjacent viburnum or lilac until it announces its acquisition of territory at bloom time.  Maybe it is the history of this rose that attracts me, bound forever to the memory of a king's mistress.

The birth of 'Rosa Mundi' was not recorded, so ancient a rose that she is only referenced as existing prior to 1581.  It should be exhibited by the name of Rosa gallica versicolor, but it is known by a hundred other names.  The Striped Rose of France.  La Panachée. Provins Oeillet. R. gallica variegata. Fair Rosamond's Rose. Gemengte Rose. Garnet Striped Rose. Polkagrisrose. The "Rosamond" reference is to Rosamond Clifford, one of the mistresses of Henry II, a 12th Century monarch.  Henry's wife, his cousin and the previously-married Eleanor of Aquitaine, must have hated this rose, although stories that Eleanor poisoned Rosamond are dismissed as only legend. The Latin phrase, "rosa mundi", means "rose of the world," and was doubtless chosen instead of "rosa munda" (Latin for "pure rose") as a clear reference that Rosamund, a mistress, had her own worldly failings matched by these rose-splashed white petals. This large, hugely fragrant, semi-double rose bears all these names and the weight of history without complaint, however, growing disease-free for me in the afternoon shade of two tall viburnums to its south.  The oldest and best known of the striped roses, 'Rosa Mundi' is bushy and dense, very hardy and once-blooming, its only failing a tendency to sucker into a thicket if I turn my head for a season. She produces lots of thin canes, and it might be best to occasionally prune back the oldest canes to thin the bush.  'Rosa Mundi' is believed to be a natural sport of Rosa gallica officinalis and recent DNA analysis seems to agree.  She has some decent coloring in the Fall on occasion, and she does set hips, but I wouldn't call the hips ornamental.  They're downright ugly in fact, brown and bland, fading to black

I tried to find out the significance of the year of our Lord 1581 regarding this rose, but my google-foo was weak and it took some time.  Finally, in the Winter 2013 newsletter of the NorthWest Rosarian, and in the Heritage Roses Northwest Spring 2012 letter, I found the re-publication of Jeff Wyckoff's ARS website article, The Trails and Tales of Rosa Mundi, which states that the first reference to a striped rose, presumed to be 'Rosa Mundi', appeared in Mathias de L’Obel’s herbal Plantarum seu stirpium icones in 1581.  I can't find the original article on the web, but if you can read Latin, you can find the original text in the archive of the Missouri Botanical Garden, along with a PDF of the book..  It's simply amazing what information is available on the Web these days, is it not? 

Where've You Been, Baby?

In preparation for Christmas, as per my usual pattern, ProfessorRoush planted an Amaryllis bulb, 'Red Lion', about 2 weeks prior to Thanksgiving.  This year's selection was purchased as a dormant bulb at a local nursery, so one could say that I splurged compared to my usual purchase of the bulbs at Sam's Club or another big box store.  All according to my new resolution to support small nurseries.

In most years, that 6-weeks-prior-to-Christmas-potting results in some welcome bloom and bright colors just at Christmas, so imagine my surprise this year when the bulb just sat there.  And sat there.  It had a greenish skin color at the top, obviously still viable, but it sat there.  I kept it watered and in full sunlight and still it stubbornly stared at me, reluctantly unwilling to reciprocate with regal red flowers or, for that matter, even stems.  Christmas came and passed without a hint of growth from the bulb. 

Finally, sometime after the New Year, my prima donna bulb decided it was time to come out of dormancy and it teased me over for weeks with the slow development of a sturdy stem.  I added rotating the pot every other day to my chores since the stem kept slanting towards the light.  At three feet tall it decided to put out three buds, just in time to lull me into anticipation of bloom by Valentine's day.  Valentine's day came and went.   And then, on February 15th, it decided that since St Valentine's day was over it could finally come out of hiding to bless us with its presence.  Three large beautiful bright velvety blooms in three days.  On the 17th, as the third bloom opened, we left for Las Vegas.  When we returned on the 21st, all the blooms were sagging, their energy spent, their beauty gone.

I may never know what was so obviously amiss this year.  Perhaps the bulb was weak?  Perhaps the pot too small?  The water or light too slight?  At any rate, at least the birds got to enjoy it through the window; a red beacon of Spring, shining from the sunroom of an empty house for a few scant days.

A Little Work and Pleasure

Some of you may be wondering where ProfessorRoush has run off to the past week, and, truth be told, I've been away from the bleak Kansas landscape on a working trip where I  was scheduled to give 7 lectures (dogs, not roses), and a wetlab.  Let's see if you get a clue where I was from the picture at the left:

No?   How about this one?

And the winning answer is:   Las Vegas!   The conference I was speaking at was the Western Veterinary Conference, held annually in Vegas at the Mandalay Bay.  The topmost photo is of the Bellagio Conservatory, whose theme this year is a bright red-colored depiction of a Chinese New Year celebration.  The second picture, of course, is the famous Bellagio fountain at night.   The recently empty-nested Mrs. ProfessorRoush was able to accompany me to Vegas for the first time (I've been 4 times previously), so I felt it necessary to be on my best behavior and show her the sights and, of course, the shopping areas.  It cramped my style a bit, but hey, a good husband should take his wife to Vegas at least once in her lifetime.  While I worked, she shopped and rested, and at night there was fine dining and we were also able to enjoy the free concert given at the conference.  Kenny Loggins was the featured performer this year and gave a fabulous concert, a perfect end to our time in Vegas.

We returned, luckily, just ahead of the snowstorm that is passing through Kansas, so I woke at home this morning to the winter wonderland in the picture at the bottom of this entry.  It is surely a stark change from the brown horizon that I left.  And while I was gone, work on the barn continued, with the roof trusses placed before the snow drifted into the barn this morning.  I'm thinking now that it is going to be a few days before any more work on the barn gets done!