Life Lessons

Yesterday was an absolutely great Spring gardening day in Kansas.  Well, almost, except for the sustained 20 mph winds with gusts to 40 that set in by mid-afternoon.  But otherwise it was everything a gardener could ask for, although some might argue that it would be nice to give plants, and the unacclimated gardener, a day in the 70F or 80F range before we go from the 60's to 92F, as it was yesterday.  Straight from winter to summer as usual.

I puttered in my garden doing a lot of the odd chores that need done this time of year.  A little transplanting, a little more trimming, a little early weeding, a little watering of new plants.  I edged some planned future beds with landscaping stone, laying out the shape of the beds in my usual haphazard arrangement.  I took note of the continued increase in the Magnolia stellata flowers and the opening of my first lilac to bloom, 'Annabel'.  And, checking that wondrous source, the Internet, I discovered that the leading edge of the Purple Martin migration had been sighted in this region two days previously and so I placed out my Purple Martin houses.  Twenty minutes later, five Martins and a bunch of sparrows were duking it out for the housing.  It is astonishing how quickly the Martins, which I had not yet this year seen in evidence, detected the house.  Where did they come from?

I also participated in a Faculty-Senior student softball game late in the afternoon.  I probably hadn't touched a softball for almost 40 years, but I was lucky and got on base my first time at bat with an anemic hit.  The next batter up hit a ground ball to shortstop and, sprinting slowly to second base, the buried instincts of my 12-year-old self assessed the situation and commanded the 51-year-old body to SLIDE.  And slide, I did: not the face-first slide of a manic Pete Rose, but still an impressive feet-first slide that brought me to second base before the ball.

At that instant I had, for me, an astonishing epiphany and I learned a couple of important life lessons right there on 2nd base.  First, that the instincts and training of a 12-year-old are still buried deep all these years later and that they will surface when called upon, albeit with a less supple and higher-body-fat frame to command.  Second, I learned that the instincts and training of a 12-year-old do not include the likelihood of the presence of car keys in one's back pocket when a slide is attempted, having had no experience at that time with driving anything more powerful than a bicycle or lawnmower.  I now have an egg-sized bruise on my gluteus maximus that hurts while I sit and type this blog.  It would have been nice if some 51-year-old wisdom would have given me the foresight to move the keys to the front pocket. At least it wasn't my cell phone.

It is the same in the garden.  The 12-year-old inside us knows instinctively which weeds to pull and how to grasp them to get them up roots and all.  The 51-year-old knows to wear gloves for the stickery ones and knows that the first sunny Spring day in the 90's is not the time to stay out in the sun all day in the garden.  Well, it should be that way most of the time.  Excuse me while I go find some aloe vera.

A Perfect Blush

When a gardener comes to me and asks for a continual-blooming, hardy white or off-white rose, the first rose that comes to my mind is the Canadian rose 'Morden Blush'.  This white/blushed-pink rose has provided color in my landscape for over 10 years, and although it blooms in the shadow of a taller Zephirine Drouhin, it still manages to never be out of flower during what passes for spring, summer, and fall in the Flint Hills.

'Morden Blush' was introduced by Collicut in 1988 as one of the Parkland Series bred at the Morden Research Station in Manitoba.  According to one report, she has been voted as the favorite Canadian shrub rose by the Canadian Rose Society, but I cannot find a reliable source to confirm that award.  One Internet site describes 'Morden Blush' as "shy," and I believe that an apt adjective for her.  'Morden Blush' stays well-refined, perhaps 3 feet high and 2.5 feet wide in my garden, unlike her rampant Explorer series cousins.  Both her blush pink color and her soft scent add to her demure allure.

 Despite her non-vigorous nature however, she is completely hardy, with no die-back here in Zone 5b and she is reportedly hardy to Zone 3 with some tip-kill there. She is heat-tolerant as well, blooming and keeping good flower form throughout the worst of the Kansas summers and several writers suggested she is tolerant of MidWestern alkaline soil.  She blooms as vigorously as any rose I grow.  The very double blooms come 5 or so to a cluster, and open white with a pink center, fading to an ivory pink as they age. They repeat continually here Kansas and are listed at 12.3 weeks of annual bloom by Ogilvie and Arnold, the most prolific of the Morden group.  I view this rose as a "cutting rose" and she lasts well sitting in a vase on the kitchen table.

The only deficit I can ascribe to this rose is that her glossy deep green foliage is moderately prone to blackspot in my garden.  I don't know if it is because she grows in the shadow of taller Zephirine and Prairie Joy and surrounded by daylilies, or if it just her nature to be easily diseased, but I use this rose as a blackspot indicator for my garden and start spraying my few susceptible roses when I see "Morden Blush' begin to lose her hemline.  In fact, she is susceptible enough to blackspot that she'll sometimes can end up completely naked in my garden by Fall if I don't keep an eye on her, hardly a proper finish for such a coy beauty.    

A-Pear-antly Popular

As I drove to work this morning down from the highest point in Manhattan (a small hill called "Top of the World" overlooking the river valley the city sets in), I was suddenly struck by a vista of endless white trees sticking up over and around the roofs of all the houses.  Manhattan in Spring, it seems, is a monoculture sea of spring-flowering trees that makes it appear as if the very city itself was drowning in a tub of foamy soap bubbles.

I blame this sensory overload on the local landscapers, professional and amateur, who were planting 'Bradford' pear trees (Pyrus calleryana) ad infinitum twenty years back, and who, when Bradfords proved too weak for the Kansas winds, turned to the stronger 'Chanticleer' pear trees, or 'Snowdrift' and "Spring Snow' crabapples. You would think that in an area where Eastern Redbuds (Cercis canadensis) grow as a native understory tree there might be more use made of them in the landscape.  You would think that landscapers could choose randomly from a number of KSU-recommended crabapples, many of which happen to be something other than white (such as pink 'PrairieFire' or magenta 'Radiant').  There are pink-flowering ornamental peach trees, pink cherry trees, scarlet Hawthorns, dogwoods, and even a few purplish or yellow Magnolias that will survive here.  In contrast, I know of only a few tree-size Magnolias that survive in town, all of them white.

I don't have anything particularly against planting white-flowering trees.  My rebellious nature kicks in when white is the only choice and when the planted trees all bloom white and simultaneously.  Landscape architects are seemingly as bad in this regard as they are in using purple barberry and 'Stella de Oro' daylilies to excess.  Have they no imagination?

In my own yard, I could actually use a few more white-flowering trees.  I've got a 'Royalty' purple-pink crab, a pink 'Red Barron' crab, a 'PrairieFire' crab, a red peach, a Scarlet Hawthorne, and a bright yellow Magnolia (to be featured in a few days) that all are blooming now or will bloom soon.  My only currently-blooming white trees are an honest-to-god fruiting apricot tree and a Star Magnolia (Magnolia stellata).  Neither of the latter really matter as white trees because orchard trees don't count and the Magnolia stellata is still too short to see.  Maybe someday I'll fall into lockstep with the herd, but for now, I'm just going to keep being a pink blight on the white horizon.

Puschkinia Perfume

I bless the good  fortune, ten years now in the past, that allowed me to find and  try a few bulbs of Puschkinia scilloides var. libanotica, commonly known as Striped Squill.  I am always partial to the sky-blue Scilla sp. family and I am always on the lookout for species bulbs that will survive the wind and wayward Kansas Spring.  These minor bulbs (as Elizabeth Lawrence referred to them) are a match made in the heavens for my garden.

Puschkinia  are small bulbs of the hyacinth family that one website claims have been "gardened" since 1808, but I'm sure that must be the Western history of gardening with these Turkish natives.  Growing only 6 inches tall, a decent-sized clump at a distance looks primarily like a white ground-hugging blob, but up close, the beauty of these little guys is striking.  It took several years for this bulb to "grow" on me since I started with such a small clump,  but they have begun to spread on their own through the bed I planted them in, and they've now earned a permanent place in my garden.  VanBloem lists them as being hardy to USDA Zone 7-8, but they've survived and spread 10 years in my Zone 5 garden.  They also come in a completely white form, but these are harder to find and are probably undistinguished in terms of garden impact.  I've had enough lately of pure white mutant forms of otherwise spectacular flowers.

I didn't know until yesterday that they were also scented, but if you lay on the ground and bury your nose in the clump, they have a very sweet, but not overpowering scent.  I am personally put off by the strong odor of so-called Dutch Hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis) up close, and can't eat with a Dutch Hyacinth or Oriental Lily smelling up  the room,  but I appreciate the more delicate scents of these hyacinth-relations.  I suppose you could also cut these somewhat waxy flowers and raise them up to your nose rather than  flatten yourself down to their level to sample their aroma, but then, that would be cheating and would deprive you of experiencing another world, a little world, where these flowers are the gardening universe of their surroundings.