Closet Occupations

I'm wondering this morning how many other MidWest closets and basements have become, in this season of our gardening discontent, a place for accumulating spring additions and surprises to our gardens.

Take me, for instance.  In my basement storeroom last week, the iron obelisk-like thing pictured at right suddenly apparated, begging me for a spot in my garden this spring.  I entertained the thought for a few moments and decided to concede that perhaps I could give it a good home as the centerpiece of a daylily and iris bed, but I admonished the rusty creature that it was going to have to spruce itself up a little before being placed into the garden.  And lo and behold, two coats of rust-preventing light blue paint have appeared this week, brightening up the obelisk in just the right shade (I hope) to make a nice background for a flimsy annual vine or smaller clematis that wants to help me provide an interest point in that particular bed.  Just for your enjoyment, it consented to have its picture taken in the snow if I did it quickly, but it has asked to be brought back inside for the remainder of winter so that it doesn't have to experience the weather extremes of the Flint Hills until spring.  The iron scrollwork and details are such that I might not be able to keep my promise very long, as the pictured obelisk and its shadows on the snow are stirring something in my soul.  

I'm sure that, as I browse garden stores in a desperate search for green coloration over the next 2 months, there will be other garden items that decide to inhabit my closets, garage or basement, biding their time until spring.  Already, out in the garage, a new pole for the purple martin gourd houses has moved in, and it will soon be joined by bags of cement needed to pace it firmly in the ground against my Kansas wind.  I'm thinking it may not be long before it is joined by a sack or two of summer bulbs, some seed packets, and maybe a new birdhouse or two.    

What, perhaps, is stirring in your closets or garage this winter, begging to join the garden?

Cloche Encounters of the Fourth Kind

If I were Catholic and this was a confessional, I'd have to admit here that I've long had a hankering to obtain and use a real cloche in my garden.  Hankering?  Okay, call it a barely controllable lust. Pictures of beautiful classic bell-shaped glass cloches placed over perfect green tender foliage always light my soul on fire.  I've never, however, been able to physical and financially acquire the real thing, substituting instead plastic milk jugs or recycled bottles of large size when I needed protection for baby plants. I've always viewed the latter as poor tradeoffs, about as rewarding as eating dinner with your sister instead of dancing the night away with Marilyn Monroe.  Real, heavy, gorgeous glass cloches, though, have always been just too expensive for my budget.

 

Up until now, that is.  This weekend I wandered into the local Hobby Lobby to find that their large clear glassware, including two large heavy glass cloches, were all on sale for 50% off.  If I borrow J. Allen Hynek's classification for UFO encounters, I therefore just had a cloche encounter "of the fourth kind," or one that involved abduction (me) into the world of the Cloche.  Many gardeners have had a cloche encounter of the first kind (where they might have glimpsed one at a distance) or of the second kind (actually up close and warming the earth beneath it) or even the third kind (with a  tender plant actually covered and being protected by a cloche), but few are lucky enough to be proud glass cloche owners.  I joined that group with a quick local purchase and then added three more cloches from a weekend trip that included a visit to two more regional Hobby Lobby stores. so I now have a thriving set of cloche quintuplets inhabiting my garden.

And just in time.  The first snow of the season hit Kansas on Monday, as the pictures of these 16 inch tall cloches illustrate (the second with a little snow knocked-off so you can see it better).  Somewhere beneath the drifts, my glass sanctuaries already protect some fall-planted Gallica bands hybridized by Paul Barden and a rooted 'Prairie Harvest' start from last spring.  And my winter landscape looks a little less like a milk-jug garden and more like somebody is gardening with a little class.

Cloche is the French word for "bell," referring to the classic shape.  For those uninitiated, a cloche acts like a miniature cold frame, controls temperature and humidity around young plants, and protects them against insects, wind, frost, hail, turkeys, and wayward dogs. The Internet describes the real cloche as being either of vague French origin or as having been invented in Italy in 1623, but my bet is on the French because of the name and because a plant in the French climate is more likely to need the protection than one in Tuscany.  Many gardeners, like myself, have rationalized for years that plastic milk jugs and jars are adequate and perhaps even preferable, but all of us know, deep down, that a good, heavy glass cloche is what we have always really craved.  There are commercial bell-shaped plastic garden cloches available at reasonable prices, and one can make a decent home-made garden cloche that looks nice, but in my Kansas winds, I need something heavy enough to stay put instead of tumbling along to the Atlantic.  Besides, I'm tired of picking up pieces of weathered, shattered milk jugs from my mulch.  

So, if you're also seeking a cloche encounter of the fourth kind, watch for the next Hobby Lobby sale cause this one ended last weekend. If you're in Kansas, you are just out of luck anyway since I bought all the cloches currently available in the state.

A Pale Ivory Pink Rose

One of my readers commented recently that I should write about a rose bearing her favorite color, that being a "pale ivory pink color" like "Spice' or 'Souvenir St. Anne's."  I immediately thought of one particular Griffith Buck rose to bring to her attention, but I was initially afraid it might be a little too pink to meet her desires.  After looking at web pictures of 'Spice' and 'Souvenir St. Anne's', however, which are pinker than I anticipated, I think I've got just the rose for her, with the right color and with a moderate nice green-apple fragrance from this rose to sweeten the pot.

That rose, of course, is 'Prairie Star', one of my favorite of the Griffith Buck roses.  Introduced in 1975, this classically-formed, fully double (45-60 petals) rose is best described as a light yellow shrub rose with a pink tint.  I personally find this rose to be somewhat of a chameleon because in the heat of the summer I would call it ivory-yellow with only a bare hint of pink, as shown in the photo above left, but the blooms formed in the colder spring and fall months tend to have more pink tones as shown in the picture to the right.  'Prairie Star' also has a tendency to ball up for me a bit in colder weather, but this is certainly a non-stop bloomer over a long period of spring through fall.  Blooms come from the neatest ball-shaped buds and grow both singly or in clusters. It grows as a somewhat smaller (about 3 foot round) bush in Zone 5B, with dark glossy leaves and brown prickles, and it is fully cane hardy in the coldest of winters here.  I wouldn't say that the bush is blackspot-free, but I see only an occasional lesion despite my complete lack of fungicide application, and the bush has never gone into September with any denudation (if I can coin a word) at its legs. A cross of  the hybrid tea 'Tickled Pink' and 'Prairie Princess', 'Prairie Star' is a rose that should grow well over most of the continental United States up through Zone 4.

I am not an impartial observer though, because, as I've mentioned elsewhere, the road I live on bears the name "Prairie Star Drive" and was named by myself and my neighbors, so this is a rose I had to obtain and grow if I was to have any credibility as a gardener.  Elizabeth, if 'Prairie Star' didn't hit that color point you wanted, I won't give up.  'Comte de Chambord', 'Coquettes des Blanches', 'Great Maiden's Blush', and Canadian rose 'Morden Blush' are waiting in the wings for a feature of their own.



'Morden Blush'



Waiting for the Garden

I'm trying diligently to follow some sage garden advice of my own, but there will soon come a time, I'm sure, when my desires intersect with the greater flow of Time through the Universe, and I'll step in, prematurely as usual. That advice, for gardeners of all ilks and manners, is to WAIT, just wait, for the Garden to tell you what to do.  It is a simple enough concept, but there are some depths to the wisdom, and in fact, the advice applies to our garden activities in two vastly different ways:

First, it is a way to tell myself that when the Kansas winds are howling, and the garden is changing rapidly from 55F highs (as yesterday) to 12F highs (predicted for 3 days from now), it is certainly not the time to get ahead on spring garden chores.  I have a number of things I'd like to be doing in the garden, of which a partial list might be:

1.  Dormant spray on the fruit trees.

2.  Replace the corner post of the electric fence around the vegetable garden.

3.  Prune the Ramblers and tie up the new canes.

4.  Trim off the ornamental grasses and move some of them.

5.  Set the foundation pole for the new Purple Martin house.

6.  Prune the grape vines and remove dead Blackberry canes.

I know that I could bundle up in 16 layers of clothes and do these chores now at 23F in a brisk north wind, risking that the cement around the post freezes before it cures.  Or, I could hold off and do them all in a single glorious late-February day when the thermometer touches 70F and the sun is shining. And they still won't be late. In reality, I'm sure my winter-starved soul will break down sometime in early February and I'll hustle out and scurry around with numbed fingers and chapped lips for a few afternoons.

The other, deeper, way to look at the advice of "waiting on the Garden to tell us what to do" is related to finding the best designs for our gardens.  Instead of feeling the need to do something grand this year and arbitrarily imposing your will upon the garden, maybe it would be best to wait and listen for your garden to tell you what it needs.  Does your garden need a new frame for a distant scene?  Do you hear it whispering that  there should be a water feature in the corner, there, by the tree?  Is the path from the door screaming for brick pavers because the old concrete walk is decaying looks out of place?  Gardens will tell you all this, and more, if you just listen to the whispers that come from the earth and the trees and the flowers. 

Of course, alternatively, you could just plant some hidden microphones around and then arrange for other gardeners to tour your garden.  The opinions of others might be harsher but may be clearer than the ramblings of a viburnum hedge.