Mowing Bedlam Revisited

In a post written last March titled Mowing Bedlam, I described how I've completely ceased any extensive maintenance on my iris and daylily beds.  Instead of individually cutting down each iris in nice fans and individually removing the remnants of last year's daylily foliage, I have been simply mowing them off and I thought the results were quite acceptable.  

Well, year two of the experiment on the daylily beds has been complete, and the results, seen at right and pictured from the opposite end of the bed as in my previous post, are just, if I say it myself, gorgeous.  And I've done nothing at all to the bed this year (no fertilizing, watering, or extra mulching) except spend about 10 minutes weeding it.  Not 10 minutes a day or 10 minutes a week, 10 MINUTES THE ENTIRE SUMMER.  It seems that chopping up last years foliage and leaving it behind as mulch is quite sufficient to keep the decent bloom going.

You'll recall that I also threatened to start mowing off the peonies and let the foliage also lie where it was chewed up by the mower.  Well, you can compare the picture of the partial bed at the left, taken in May, with the picture below of the same area, taken exactly 2 months earlier.  I don't think the peonies look any worse for wear and this was not even a good peony year; a cool wet spring resulted in the loss of  quite a few peony buds to botrytis and it didn't seem to matter if the peonies were massed in this minimally-cared for bed or separated in other beds.   

In fact, the picture above is a decent example of one of the reasons to photograph your beds.  I thought the peony season was wasted this year, but looking back at the pictures, it looks pretty good to me.  The same thing happened with my roses; I believed I had a dismal early rose season because of the wet weather, but the pictures I took of the garden in mass look like it was blooming away with no thought for tomorrow.  Using the camera really does help us see as if we were looking through the eyes of another gardener, one separated from the frost and wind and heat.

 Anyway, all written sources to the contrary, I'm continuing this experiment.  No fertilizer, no extra water, and no extra mulch but the foliage of these perennials back on the ground again this fall.  If these beds stay looking this good, my low-maintenance dreams are realized.

Rosa Arkansana

I was giving a talk on hardy roses to a local gardening club recently and one of the members asked me if there were any native roses in Kansas.  To my knowledge, there are two;  invasive and colonizing R. multiflora, and prairie stalwart R. arkansana.

R. arkansana is, in fact, also known as the Prairie Rose and it is native to a large portion of central North America, from the Appalachians to the Rocky Mountains, and north to Canada.  This once-yearly bloomer ranges in height from one to three feet, although on the native tall-grass prairie of the Flint Hills I seldom see it above the foot mark.  There are 5 heart-shaped petals on this single, medium pink rose, and the center is covered with numerous bright yellow stamens.   According to the Kansas Wildflower site, it has roots that may go down more than 20 feet into the prairie subsoil and it is very drought-resistant.  The species name, arkansana, refers to the Arkansas River of Colorado, not the State of Arkansas.  It is the state flower, however, not of Colorado or Arkansas, but of North Dakota and Iowa.  Very confusing, isn't it?

If it has become evident that no individual identity is sacred or private on the Internet, it is even more evident for our plants.  I knew that this native rose was one of those used in the breeding of the AgCanada Parkland series roses, but during my search for information about R. arkansana, I found a 1976 article about breeding with R. arkansana written by none other than H. H. Marshall of the Morden Research Station.  I've now learned that R. arkansana is a tetraploid, containing 28 chromosomes, and so it is compatible to breed with most of our modern Hybrid Teas and Floribundas, although there are strong interspecies sterility barriers between R. arkansana and cultivated roses and so the F1 generation hybrids are hard to come by.  R. arkansana provides its hardiness to the offspring and it lends an extended blooming period due to adaptations that allow it to bloom after grazing or spring prairie fires.  It is also tolerant of the dry and moderately alkaline soils of the prairie.  To get the initial interspecies crosses, the Canadian program discovered that a few modern roses, such as Floribunda 'Donald Prior', would accept R. arkansana pollen.  The AgCanada releases 'Cuthbert Grant' and 'Adelaide Hoodless' were two of the later generation crosses that had 'Assiniboine' (a first generation cross of 'Donald Prior' and R. arkansana) as an ancestor.  Now I understand why 'Adelaide Hoodless' is essentially a once-blooming rose with a very long (over 6 weeks of bloom) season.  I also have learned that the bright red pigment of 'Adelaide Hoodless' looks a little different from other roses because it carries the pigment "Peonin", absent in most modern hybrids but inherited from R. arkansana.

I know that I've been rambling on about my Native Prairie Rose, but I would be remiss if I did not add in a link to an unbelievable fountain of Internet knowledge, the CybeRose & Bulbs site.  I don't know who is behind it, but I can already tell I'm going to lose hours and hours there. This site that contained the H. H. Marshall article is a treasury of  information on rose breeding and roses, many of them from the American Rose or its Annual and written by the giants of our rose-breeding past;  Basye, Buck, Hansen, Lammerts, Harkness, and de Vries among many others.  There is even a recopy of Luther Burbanks 1914 article, Burbank on the Rose, and  a 1976 article by a then-little-known-breeder, Mr. William J. Radler, titled Blackspot Resistant Roses.  And there is an extensive pictorial catalogue of roses.  Abandon all sense of time, those of ye who enter.

God Loves Magenta

Well, at least He seems to.  I come to that conclusion because everything in the garden, if left to its own devices, seems to turn back into magenta.  A large portion of wild flowering plants on the prairie also seem to border on shades of magenta.  Unfortunately ProfessorRoush is not that fond of magenta.

Take for example, garden phlox.  I have a pure white form of Phlox paniculata, 'David', that is extremely healthy and vigorous here in Kansas and I have divided it several times in my garden.  My fondness for this plant may have a little to do with the fact that I have an adult son named David, but it also has to do with the fact that this is a very low-maintenance plant for me, needing little more than a haircut each spring.  It is just starting to bloom this year and while I have several pure white clumps blooming on the south side of the house, the north side plant just recently began to bloom as pictured at the right.  The early blooms are magenta, although the remaining 3/4ths of the plant looks like it will bloom the normal white form, albeit a week or so from now.  

I don't know about you, my fellow gardener, but I much prefer the all-white form pictured at the left, and therefore the "bad" 'David' is going to get ripped out at the roots.  I don't know if this was a mutation of a portion of my plant or simply some wild reseeding going on adjacent to the original plant, but the magenta parts have to go. And soon. Sorry, God, but my view of the Garden of Eden includes the philosophy that white is "good" and magenta is "evil."