Beds in the Sun

A week or two back into the past, GaiaGardener asked if I would take the time to post some overall pictures of my garden beds to help readers place some of the plants that I write about into their respective 3-D spaces. 

I have agonized for a time over the thought.  Reasonable though the request seemed, it involves an act that many, if not most, gardeners find to be unnatural;  that of the complete exposure of our gardens, with all their un-deadheaded plants, dehydrated hydrangeas, and misplaced statues.  No sanitized focus on the occasional perfect flowers or the dynamic foliage as we see in most blog posts, showing the overall beds will expose the drought-stricken, insect-eaten, fungus-stained reality show that is my garden on most days. I was too young for the free-love movement of the late sixties and have no naturist bent, but I'd bet most of us would sooner post au-natural pictures of ourselves than our naked entire gardens.  The latter seems just a little too exhibitionist-like, a little too revealing for a conscientious gardener.  

But, given the choice between displaying an old man's wrinkles and moles or exhibiting the deficiencies of my garden design, I suppose it is more humane to readers if I choose the latter.  So here we go.  I'll apologize preemptively for the drought-stricken appearance of my sun-blessed garden and for it's lack of overall acceptable design and any number of other faults you may find with it. 

The photo above is a broad, unedited view of what we'll call the Main Garden, taken from my bedroom window. This view is behind the house, faces due south, and shows a corner of my back patio and the surrounding bed, and a broad view of the beds in the "back yard" that slope away  from the small pergola down to an unseen farm pond and then back up towards the Colbert Hills Golf Course and Manhattan proper.  Outside of the photo, to the left,  are two Purple Martin houses and farther on, nothing but prairie, and to the right lies four unpictured trees (Sycamore, Buckeye, Magnolia 'Yellow Bird' and a 'PrairieFire' crab), and then a electric-fenced vegetable garden, a few lines of grapes and blackberries, and a small, slowly-growing orchard wraps to the west.  As you can see, there is no shade in this garden whatsoever, from the unmowed areas of prairie grass in the foreground, to the rose beds at the back.

For the bed descriptions themselves, we'll use the second picture, below, of the left half of the garden.  I labeled the beds with letters, so we can talk about them, and it'll likely take us a couple of posts to get through them.

Bed "A" is what I refer to as my "peony bed," so-named because the main grouping is a collection of about 20 peony varieties in the center and right hand side, backed on the left (east) by some ornamental grasses, forsythia, and Rose of Sharon. If I blog about a peony, it likely exists in this bed since there are only a couple of others scattered about my landscape.  At the far end of this bed is another pergola, covered by a pair of wisteria, that provides an east "exit" to my garden.  

Bed "B" is the second-oldest of my shrub rose beds and it contains about 20 old garden, Canadian, and rugosa roses. I call it my "East Rose Bed." There are no perennials except roses in this bed and the only ornament is my Aga Marsala statute, a chaste young woman reading a book.  In this bed are, among others, 'Pink Grootendorst', 'William Baffin', 'Harison's Yellow', 'Alchymist', 'Robusta', 'Maiden's Blush', and 'Reine Des Violettes'.

Bed "C" is a long narrow bed stretching across half the garden that I know as my "Hydrangea Bed."  It contains, as it's name suggests, 6 Hydrangea paniculata cultivars, from 'Limelight' on the east end to 'Pink Diamond' on the west.  But this is a very mixed perennial bed, with 8 roses, 7 ornamental grasses, a peck of daylilies, a forsythia, and other assorted shrubs.  The centerpiece of the bed is a 7 foot tall wire-supported Clematis paniculata tower.  This is also the bed where I've moved the Zen Frog into a permanent home.

I think we'll stop there and pick this back up in a couple of days.  Stay tuned next week, dear Readers!

Anguish and Joy

Yes, I know that I haven't posted in several days.  No big excuses here, though.  When last Tuesday came around, and the thermometer crossed back over the 100F mark and stayed there through yesterday, I just couldn't face my garden or anything to do with it.  Aside from watering a few potted plants and the surviving roses of the Heirloom Roses shipment from a few weeks back, I hibernated and dreamed of winter.

And dreamed of rain.  We haven't had over 2/10ths of rain in the past month and things are beyond drying up, they're dry.  I haven't done more than mow the edges of the blacktop (where the crabgrass always grows fastest) in a month, so I guess the positive side is that I haven't been sitting on a roaring mower every week.   Last weekend, knowing that summer wasn't saying goodbye without another heat wave, I watered many of the beds, feeling guilty that I was breaking my "no extra water" rule but wanting to protect the  roses, and then I withdrew from the garden and garden thoughts.  Read some trashy vampire-mystery novels (James Butcher and Laura Hamilton) and pretended I was in Alaska.

But, as the psalmist wrote "...Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30:5).   Temperatures today (Saturday) in the low 90's are supposed to lead to daytime highs in the 70's through the weekend and a 40% chance for rain tonight.  I don't hold much hope for the rain, since I've seen several weeks of 30% chances come and go, but at least the temperatures will mean that whatever moisture gets added to the garden might stay around more than 30 minutes.

I'll leave you with this; one of my favorite pictures of my now-grown son.  He was born in Wisconsin but we moved here shortly before his first birthday, and in this picture, taken at about 1 1/2 or 2 years of age (he walked before he was 9 months old), he proved himself to be quickly adapting to Kansas weather as he was rejoicing in a surprise shower after a long hot dry period.  I remember I could hardly get him to hold still from slapping those bare feet down in the puddles on the still-warm concrete.   I don't think the Batman shirt would fit me, but this is otherwise exactly what I plan to do the next time it rains here, if it ever rains here again.
   

Sweet Fragrance Abounds

'Sweet Fragrance', 8/26/11

In contrast to my last, less than glowing post about 'April Moon', let me show you a rose that HAS earned a permanent spot in my landscape.  A local nursery that I frequent, Lee Creek Gardens, has a number of the  Bailey Nursery "Easy Elegance(tm)" rose offerings, and several years ago I picked up three of them to try out.  The best of these, I believe, has turned out to be 'Sweet Fragrance', a coral/apricot rose that is aptly named for the sweetly fragrant blossoms.


'Sweet Fragrance' (registered as 'BAInce') blooms continually in my garden, but the sometimes occasional blossoms are bordered by four to five waves of blooms during the season.  She is a Ping Lim-bred rose, introduced in the US by Bailey Nurseries in 2007.  The picture at the right was taken recently during the 4th bloom phase of this summer, still quite prolific despite just coming out of the recent heat wave.  I did not edit or crop the picture at all, it is straight from the camera (except for some compression), as flower-filled as it was taken.  Buds of 'Sweet Fragrance' are hybrid-tea-shaped, but open into somewhat unorganized double blossoms in large clusters that have tones of yellow, orange, coral, pink and apricot all mixed together.  The older the blossom, the pinker it becomes.  The three foot high shrub has had no dieback in three winters and it needs no spray here in Kansas to keep it healthy. 'Sweet Fragrance' was awarded Portland's Best Grandiflora in 2008 and again in 2010.

Ping Lim has only recently come to my attention, but he is already an acclaimed rose hybridizer, with three All American Rose Selections ('Daydream', 'Love and Peace', and 'Rainbow Sorbet') to his credit.  On his website home page, http://www.rosesbyping.com/, there is a fabulous picture of a cream pink and yellow 2012 introduction named 'Music Box' that has me drooling already. Please don't go look at i,t because I'm afraid everyone will want one and they'll be sold out before I find one.

Easy Elegance(tm) roses are all grown on their own roots, and they came to me potted as fairly large plants compared to most marketed own root roses.  All three of the varieties I grow are vigorous and healthy, and sooner or later I'll blog about the rest of them.  But for now, search out 'Sweet Fragrance' to add a peachy note of color and fragrance to your garden.

Too Hot for April Moon

Batten down the hatches! Unusually for me, I'm not going to try to spin any perfect yarn about my love for the rose in today's blog.  Dr. Griffith Buck's 'April Moon' is one of those roses that I've tolerated, but that has yet to grow on me.  It isn't that it is terribly diseased, extremely ugly, or a sparse bloomer, it is simply never quite lived up to my expectations for it.

'April Moon', introduced in 1984, is officially described as a "medium yellow shrub", with "lemon yellow buds" tinted red, opening to double (25-30 petal) blooms of lemon yellow (color code RHSCC 14C).  Here's a neat note;  according to helpmefind.com, 'April Moon' has "28-30 petals.....large double (17-25) petals) bloom form."  Let's make up our minds, shall we?  Is it 30 petals or 17?   'April Moon' is supposed to grow 3 foot tall and four feet wide and have a sweet fragrance.  It was a cross of 'Serendipity' with a seedling of 'Tickled Pink' and 'Maytime'.    

So what is my problem with 'April Moon'?  Let me count the ways.  First, I would never in a million years have called her lemon yellow.  The only blossoms I ever see are white with maybe the mildest yellow tinge.  Perhaps she just can't stand the summer heat in Kansas.   Buck's 'Prairie Harvest' is a much better yellow from that breeding program, if still a very light yellow one.  Second, the rose is barely double in my eyes, seldom reaching 20 petals. And it opens so fast that I've never been able to photograph a bloom in that "half-open" phase.  It seems to be tightly wound in bud one day and then fully open the next.  It has no fragrance that I can find, and three years old, my plant has barely made it to two feet high, let alone three.  In fact, my 'April Moon' is so different from descriptions that I wonder if I was sent the right rose when purchased.

Are there positives about this rose?  Yes, of course there are.  It does seem to be completely hardy without dieback in my Zone 5b climate, and it has good disease resistance.  The photos on this page were taken recently and you can see from the healthy foliage that blackspot is not an issue on this rose (remember that I don't spray for fungal disease in my garden).  The bloom does repeat well throughout the growing season. Most importantly, if you are the sort of rosarian that likes to rave about golden stamens, then you may like this rose because it has stamens in spades.  Me, I'm not ready to spade-prune this rose, but so far, it has been a poor sister to 'Prairie Harvest'.