Plant Immortality

It's sometimes astonishing to me how fleeting the life of plants in my garden can be.  Planted one minute and dead the next, particularly if I forget to water in the midst of our annual summer drought.  Or planted one spring and never seen again the next spring, despite strict adherence to zone recommendations, site preparation, and cultural requirements.

But there are some plants who are not nearly so ephemeral.  Trees are often the one plant everyone can name, even gardening neophytes, that often outlive the planter.  Even a common American Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) often transcends a simple human lifespan, let alone the better examples given by giant California Redwoods (Sequoiadendron giganteum) or Great Basin Bristlecone Pines (Pinus longaeva) that outlive entire human regimes and societies.  But such immortality is also seemingly given to less obvious plants that are all around us.  Herbaceous peonies are a prime example of a "plant it once and it's with you ever after" plant.  They are often seen in older unkempt graveyards from more than a century back or found around old homesteads as the sole survivors of a young pioneer bride's dowry.  The peonies pictured below form a line, a herbaceous wall if you will, separating my father's orchard from the vegetable garden.  They've been there for at least 60 years, planted and left behind by the previous owners of the farm who themselves are now long deceased.  The peonies sit unknowing, their survival unaffected by the ravages of thunderstorm and snow, partially in sun and partially in shade, cared for only in a minimal way by mulch-mowing them off at the end of the summer season for the past 50 years.

So if you want to touch immortality, your choices seem to be to live a quiet life rooted in the soil, unaffected by the passage of years and seasons, or perhaps, sometimes, to just to plant a peony.

Early Roses for the Prairie

I always treasure those first blooms of each season in the garden, as I'm sure most gardeners do. There are three shrub roses in my garden that trumpet the oncoming arrival of the main rose season that I would recommend to all my readers for their very early bloom and their other unique properties.  

'Marie Bugnet'

The earliest rose to bloom in my garden is a somewhat rare Rugosa rose named 'Marie Bugnet'.  Bred by Canadian George Bugnet in 1973, 'Marie Bugnet' is a bone-hardy cross of the Canadian roses 'Therese Bugnet' and 'F. J. Grootendorst'.  The child of these respectively pink and red parents, 'Marie Bugnet' is a very well-behaved pure white rose that blooms consistently before any other rose in my garden.  Continuous-flowering, double, and very fragrant, she stays about four foot tall and three feet wide and like a proper lady, she stays home and never suckers herself around the garden like other Rugosas.  As an added bonus, the crinkled foliage is completely resistent to blackspot and mildew.  

Two other quite different roses are not nearly as well-behaved since they tend to run around the garden throwing up clumps here or there, but they have, along with their early bloom, enough positive attributes to offset that wanton proliferation.  'Harison's Yellow' is a bright yellow cross of  R. spinosissima (from which  it gets the unique small leaves), and R. foetida (from which the yellow and the slightly pungent odor were inherited).  An exceedingly thorny shrub, it can double as a protective security barrier beneath a window or exist simply as a bright spot in the early spring garden, but you need to enjoy its bloom when you can, for it does not repeat during the season.  'Therese Bugnet', a parent of the aforementioned Marie Bugnet, is a bright fuchsia-pink, continuous blooming Rugosa cross which blooms alongside 'Harison's Yellow' for a seasonal display and then keeps on blooming sporadically throughout the summer.  I once saw an article which included the tall (six foot) 'Therese Bugnet' in a group of roses whose long canes provide extra interest by dancing in the wind, but the canes of  'Therese Bugnet' also turn a dusky red in the winter, giving some late winter color to the garden similar to that of a red-twig dogwood. 

'Therese Bugnet' (left) and 'Harison's Yellow' (right)

Welcome Natives

I like to tell visitors to my garden that I have a lot of weeds in my garden because I'm trying to promote the free seeding of native prairie perennials. That gets me a lot of pats on the back from wild-eyed environmentalists and everybody likes a little praise.  It's true, though.  I don't like to use preemergents in my garden beds simply because it will also suppress native plants from sprouting wherever they like to pop up.  It means a few more weeds and crabgrass, but one pays the price for one's choices. As my garden evolves, I've learned more and more to choose to nurture the surprise native plant treasures that the Flint Hills provides me. 

I have two favorites that spread from the surrounding prairie to various parts of my garden.  One is the Blue Sage (Salvia azurea) that blooms in August and September in my corner of the prairie.   Also called Pitcher Sage after Dr. Zina Pitcher, a early 1800's U.S. Army surgeon and botanist, Blue Sage grows two to five feet tall with the five foot height more common in a cultivated and mulched garden bed. Its roots extend six to eight feet into the deep prairie soils below, so in my garden it never gets or needs supplemental water even in the current +100 August weather. I've found that the plant gets a little bushier, it doesn't sprawl as much, and I can delay the bloom if I trim it back a little bit in late July to about two feet tall. But most important is that heavenly sky blue color so coveted by many gardeners and by this gardener in particular.  There are other blue salvias, of course, but in my Zone 5 garden this is the one that sticks.  Over ten years I've got six plants now growing in my various beds, at the cost of only recognizing the seedlings when they first begin to grow and leaving them alone. And truly, how better to find the right micro-environment for a specific plant than letting them seed themselves?

My second favorite of the self-seeding prairie natives is the native Asclepias tuberosa, or Butterfly Weed.  Popping up here and there in the most barren, arid spots I have, this bright orange native draws in butterflies in July and August like, well, moths to a flame.  There are eight current clumps of this perennial in my landscaping and since it has a long taproot and is difficult to transplant, I'm lucky to have it seed itself in areas that it likes.  It is well-behaved, never invasive, and keeps to a polite two to three foot height without trimming or coddling.  A better perennial for a garden can't be found and I hope it escapes the ravages of the hybridizers so I don't have to push away my native orange variety for some muddled pink or off-white ugly cousin.   

Finicky Weeds

Have you ever noticed that certain weeds are specific to certain beds in your garden?  I just became aware this year that I've got several bed-specific weeds; weed species that appear only in one bed in my garden and nowhere else. 

Take for example my oldest rose bed, a raised berm containing a number of old garden and shrub roses.  This bed seems infested with bindweed, but yet bindweed appears nowhere else in my garden.  If I don't watch the bed closely for two or three weeks, the next thing I know, a rose is being overtaken by the twining stems pictured at the right.  I don't believe it's a coincidence that I imported this soil into my back yard while we were building the house and I thus suspect the bindweed seeds came with it, but how do I get rid of it now?  Ten years of diligent cutting of the vines before they could set seed have not decreased the sneaky little ones that start in the periphery of a rose and stay invisible until they hit the sun at the top and spread. And you learn the funniest bits of information by doing research.  I hadn't noticed that bindweed winds anti-clockwise until I read about it.   Another bit of quick research tells me that seeds were still over 50% viable at 39 years.  So maybe 50 years of pulling bindweed to go?

Another bed, again with imported soil, had an interesting vine spring up at one end of the bed that I first thought from appearance was going to be a melon of some sort.  I let it grow that first year, turning nervous only when it began leaping from shrub to shrub and threatened to cover the entire bed.  Finally, when it didn't produce any fruit from all its small white flowers, I chopped it down and have resolved to wipe it out of that bed as well.  It also is still coming up annually, just in that one area.  If it was the soil in the bed, why isn't it appearing in the rest of the bed?

I have Virginia Creeper that only appears on the front left of the house, Black-eyed Susans that only appear in my back rose bed, and a curious little nightshade-like weed that has a habit of appearing only in north foundation bed of the house.  I'm betting the presence of the latter weed has something to do with the shade that is present there and nowhere else in my landscape.  I will always encourage the Black-eyed Susans wherever they pop up, but I'd really like to see the rest of these creatures kick their habits.