The Biggest Disappointments

Sometimes it doesn't pay to get your hopes up, does it?  As my own example for tomorrow's inaugural "Thirteenth Tribulations" blog party, I'll give you a look at a plant that I had the most tremendous hopes for.  Early this spring, the yellow-foliaged plant pictured at the right popped up in one of my beds and I couldn't remember planting anything like it for the life of me.  I was able to identify it later from my plant maps as Coreopsis tripteris ‘Lightning Flash’ (introduced in 2007), which I had planted in 2009 but don't remember seeing at all in 2010.  All spring and early summer it grew up, keeping the delicious yellow foliage until a few weeks ago.  The picture is from April 27th, but the clump eventually got over 3 feet tall and kept that yellow hue to the foliage, a fine counterpart to the bluish Panicum it was planted near. 

Well, at least it kept the yellow hue until it got ready to bloom.  At about the 3 foot height, this beautiful plant turned a nondiscript green and disappeared into the border. I was still hoping for a spectacular bloom from it, but alas, the pretty yellow flowers, pictured up close at the left as they began to bloom last week, are lost from a distance as you can see below to the right.

Talk about your letdowns. None of the published descriptions of  'Lightning Flash' that I could find suggested that it would have a disappointing bloom, although the Kemper Center website suggested that it is "perhaps better known for its foliage than for its yellow flowers."  The plant IS drought tolerant and needed no extra water in full sun, so I'm not going to throw it out of the border, but it has left me wanting.  I'm hoping that all those buds that remain open simultaneously to give me one last, large peep show.  I never expected such an exhibitionist plant would turn so shy as it flowered. 

Daylilies Still

Hemerocallis 'Chorus Line'

I note that my earliest post about daylilies blooming this year is on June 23rd, but here, over 8 weeks later, a number of daylilies are still bravely holding on even after one of the hottest July's on record.  And I'm not just talking about 'Stella de Oro' or 'Happy Returns', either.  Despite the heat, the colors seem to be more vibrant than ever.  Now, I give you 'Chorus Line', a 1981 diploid, in brighter and more refined color than any of the thirty or so pictures of it I found on the web:

Hemerocallis 'Old Barnyard Rooster'

Tetraploid 'Old Barnyard Rooster', a red self, is holding up well and bright as the dickens.

Hemerocallis 'Dream Legacy'

Tetraploid rebloomer 'Dream Legacy' bloomed throughout the season, but seems to have lost most of its purple edging to the heat.

Hemeroclalis 'Frans Hal'

And then, of course there are the oranges.  Old standby 'Frans Hal', introduced in 1955, is a late bloomer that performs well despite the browning foliage supporting it, as does the unnamed orange daylily below.

And, proving once again that you don't need to know your name to be both beautiful and tough, this lovely lavender in my front bed is numbered "7", but I have no idea what its name is today.  Gorgeous, though, isn't it?   

Bird Gifts

While we are on the subject of volunteer plants (see yesterday's post), I'd like to show you another shrub that popped up on its own, this time in a border next to the house.  This is a 6 inch tall specimen of Cotoneaster apiculatus, or Cranberry Cotoneaster, that has seen fit to try to sneak in unnoticed to my landscape.  Compared to my cultivated, nursery-purchased specimens, which are attacked by spider mites and look wretched every year during August, this one is either in a spot more to its liking or it is too small yet to be noticed by the spider mites.  It is green and healthy and proclaiming its right to life, and I think I'm going to transplant it and give it a chance somewhere. 

I always have trouble pronouncing certain species and Cotoneaster is one of them.  Wikipedia tells us the phonetic spelling is  kəˈtoʊniːˈæstər, which is even worse for me than trying to interpret the Latin.  There are symbols there that aren't even English for gosh sakes. I turned, as usual to the excellent Fine Gardening Magazine's pronunciation guide which audibilizes the word for you and which I would say as "Ko-tone-e-aster."  There, now, isn't that simpler?

Because of the uncertain genetics in this volunteer, however, I suppose that I can't assume that it will stay in an expected 3 foot tall by 6 foot diameter space, so I'm trying to find a spot somewhere on the periphery of the garden where it can romp away if it feels a genetic need.  I presume that this one is from a seed spread by a bird, just as the mulberries in my yard must be, and so hopefully it will bear and increase the food available to my flying winter garden inhabitants.  Of course, this bird-sown gift may benefit the bees more, because my larger cotoneaster's are covered in white flowers every spring and the bees flock to them as an early source of nectar.  The birds helping the bees.  There's got to be a metaphor for love in there somewhere.

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.