Whence thou comest?

I realize that I was neglecting my garden in the past few weeks of heat, in favor of my own personal survival, but how, oh how, did I miss this stray mulberry seedling to the point that it got so big? I mean, talk about embarrassing. This one popped up in a hillside bed of purple-leaved honeysuckle so it was hardly inconspicuous as soon as it got taller than the honeysuckle mounds.  If I had let this errant creature get any bigger, I'd have had to hire a tree service to haul it off!

Every verdant area of the planet, I suppose, has a group of first colonizers, "weeds," and then a group of scraggly, undesirable weed trees that make way for the more stalwart forest citizens such as oak and beech.  In Kansas, the weed trees that pop up most often in my borders seem to be mulberries, red cedars, osage orange, and cottonwoods, although russian olive trees also lately seem to be frequently trying to gain a foothold.  Of the main four, I'm a sucker for our native cottonwoods, so I commonly transplant them somewhere where I can allow a large, rustling tree.  Red cedars are easy to spot because of their foliage differences from most of the plants in my deciduous borders, and I can't allow them to proliferate because I know that any untended land in Kansas quickly becomes a crappy red cedar forest if neglected.  Osage oranges usually announce themselves by stabbing me with their thorns when I pass, so they are often both easy to find and simultaneously provide me with sufficient motivation to remove them.  The mulberries, however (I believe these are native American red mulberries or Morus rubra), blend in somehow, the right color or the right shape, and my eye often misses their incursions until the sunlight is just right to set them off from the surrounding foliage.  There are two other mulberries in my garden right now, one that I keep forgetting to remove at the base of a mature 'Carefree Beauty' rose, and another hiding out among the blackberries, whose leaf shapes aid it in camouflage.  

Red mulberry saplings don't grow to be large or very useful trees, but I often think about letting a few grow on the periphery of my garden; for the birds, you see.  There are several wild ones growing down around the pond and around my acreage and I know they've got to be valuable resources for the wildlife, whatever I think of their messiness and lack of value to humans. Okay, I know some of you eat them, but the wild mulberries here lack any sufficient flavor for me to favor them. But I have a bigger problem than that with the idea of leaving mulberries to grow for birds.  Male and female flowers usually occur on different trees, so to transplant a fruiting tree to my landscape I have to let it grow tall enough to allow me to identify it.  And by that time it is so big that moving the chert rock to create a nice planting hole would seriously test my innate laziness.  The birds, I think, are just going to have to find their sustenance elsewhere in my garden, or fly down to the pond at suppertime.

Weatherman Wrong

Well, not just the weatherman, but the entire weather forecasting system is sometimes stumped by the fickle nature of the Kansas Flint Hills.  Yesterday at 8:00am., weather.com and the local news all predicted a return to highs in the mid-100's for the Flint Hills after a brief respite in the high 90's late last week.  I hurried outside to mow and get at least some minor work done in my neglected garden before the heat rose.  A warm south wind was blowing and the temps quickly rose towards the 90's. And then low and behold about 10:00a.m., as I mowed, the wind increased rapidly and it got darker and darker and then simply ominous to the west and north.

It didn't rain, as a big summer storm slid just north of us, but I didn't complain a bit because by 1:00 p.m. the temperature was a cool 81 degrees and it didn't rise back into the 90's all day.  Last night a little rain came, and this morning it was downright chilly to my heat-wave-adjusted internal thermometer.  Forecasts for the next 10 days show a number of low nights in the 60's and only two days into the 90's.  The heat wave has broken here!  The only creatures in my garden that aren't happy about that are the cold-blooded snakes and lizards slinking around in my peripheral vision.  I don't know if my fellow Kansas blogger Gaia Garden is right in her eloquent post about global warming, but at least I know now that I'll see Winter once again in the Flint Hills.  I was beginning to wonder.  Even the sun yesterday evening, exiting with a golden sunset, seemed to want to apologize to the Flint Hills earth and gardeners for all the troubles it has caused in recent weeks.

Crapes by Chance

You would think, given the summer heat in Kansas, that crape myrtles, those southern summer stalwarts, would be an ideal plant to brighten up the August doldrums.  And in fact, they are a blessing in the hot times, but due to the split personality of the Kansas climate, it is too cold here in winter to see them reach their full potential as they do in Oklahoma, or even Wichita, where I've seen several hardy tree-sized specimens. 

Crape myrtles, you see, are a shrub in my 5B climate, not a tree.  I first began to add them to my garden a few years back when they suddenly began appearing in the local gardening stores.  Ten years ago, you never saw them for sale here, but I suppose that the onrushing tide of global warming has spread far enough north that the great commercial gods of Lowes and Walmart decreed that they might sell a few to Zone-defiant idiots, and so I began to purchase them when I saw them.   In fact, one of my best plant bargains ever was to purchase a 2 gallon 'Centennial Spirit' crape for $10 in August on sale at a big box store about 5 years back. At the time, I bought it merely because I couldn't resist the bright red, cheery color, but it has turned out to be my most dependable and tallest crape.  Every year, it grows up to become a 5 feet tall bush in my garden, and it opens up in early August to be a beacon in its border. 

'Centennial Spirit' (Lagerstroemia indica 'Centennial Spirit')  is a plant with just about everything going for it in my climate except for a partial lack of  winter hardiness.  It is attractive to bees,(see above) impervious to insect pests and disease, blooms its head off, and has a great fall color as you can see at the left (in a picture from late October, 2009). The deep green foliage is resistant to drought and never wilts.  Patented by Oklahoma State University in 1988, 'Centennial Spirit' is only listed as hardy to Zone 7, so I guess I should be thankful that it grows here at all, instead of bemoaning the fact that it won't ever reach its advertised 10-20 foot mature height as a true tree.  Alas, however, like every other crape I grow, it dies back to the ground or almost to the ground every year, so I cut it off like a spirea in the spring and wait for it to show up during my August despair to drag me along into cooler September.  I can't fault it entirely for not being "stem-hardy", though, since I grow a number of crapes and none of them grow unscathed through a winter.  Diminutive 'Cherry Dazzle' grows back every year and has the same nice bright red color, but only makes it a foot high by September.  Rose-red 'Tonto' and white 'Natchez' were specifically bred for Northern climates and will grow decently tall, 3, and 4 foot respectively, but they still die back to the ground each winter.  And none of these have the fall color of 'Centennial Spirit'.

'Centennial Spirit' is a product of the vision of Dr. Carl Whitcomb, an Oklahoma State University professor who established LaceBark Inc., a horticultural research company located near Stillwater, OK, in 1986. He has produced a number of new crape myrtles, including Dynamite, Pink Velour, Red Rocket, Raspberry Sunday, and 'Prairie Lace'.  If I could send Dr. Whitcomb a message, I'd ask him to please help out the poor neglected souls just a few hundred miles to the north by breeding hardy crape myrtle trees for Kansas. My only other hope is to pray for global warming to continue, and if this summer is any indication, it would be just my luck to have crape myrtles that are winter-hardy, but succumb to the summer heat.

Announcing! Thirteenth Tribulations

Just a short note to announce that starting on August 13th, Garden Musings will host a monthly blog link party titled "Thirteenth Tribulations".   As readers know from this previous post, I've got a hankering to provide my fellow bloggers with a cathartic "show your garden errors" linky thingy.  So, providing I've got the linking system figured out, we'll try the first one about a week from today (the reason I chose the 13th of each month for a recurring blog party about garden mistakes should be obvious). 

So fellow bloggers, be saving up your anti-gardening lessons;  plants that performed terribly, blooms that clashed next to each other, stories about the neighborhood kids who pulled up all your crocuses, or the time that the rain storm washed away your stepping stones.  It'll be fun I promise.  Well, if not fun, at least we can all have a good cry together.  See you next week on the Thirteenth!