GGW September Photo contest

Like others who took on the challenge of Gardening Gone Wild's September Picture This Photo contest, I had a hard time choosing between entries.  The guest judge, Christa Nue, picked a very open subject, "Late Summer Garden," and then made it harder by providing examples ranging from closeups to colorful garden beds, to wild vistas.  Late Summer and Fall subjects are apt to be more difficult in the Flint Hills, a landscape which is often at its best in Fall as the late cool rains turn the grasses and hillsides red in contrast to the late sunflowers and goldenrod that rise amongst them.

As an example, I briefly considered this more natural vista of wild goldenrod on the prairie.  I got lucky with an early morning mist for this picture, taken across my neighbor's pasture.  This golden, unplanned field is composed of a mix of native goldenrod species, including Downy Goldenrod (Solidago petiolaris), Rigid Goldenrod (Solidago rigida), and the ubiquitous Missouri Goldenrod (Solidago missouriensis). 

When I think of a Fall garden, I often think of rose hips, so a recent picture of Rosa eglanteria hips appealed to me on a closeup level. Orange skin and wicked curved barbs, rose hips hold the essence of the fading sunlight.

 And for a pure late summer flower show, nothing rivals Hydrangea paniculata in the Flint Hills.  This cultivar is 'Limelight', no less interesting in late summer for the browning, drying petals, their demise hastened by the drought which still lingers.  Seeing this, I remember why they're popular subjects for dried flower arrangements.

 

Roush GGW September Entry 'Goodbye Summer Harvest'

But, I finally settled on entering the picture at left  into the contest; an overripe, overgrown, group of forgotten cucumbers on a fence.  I know that the overall subject is a little unusual, but the title of "Late Summer Garden" suggested more of a vegetable garden feel to me.  And in the end, I couldn't resist the papery, detailed texture of the dried leaves and prickly stems of these cucumbers.  Make sure you look beyond the overall "orangeness" of the composition and click on the picture to see the full size version to appreciate the detail.  To me, this picture screams, "Summer Is Over!"  

(Rats, it's been automatically compressed because it is so large....really, the leaves look great in full size!)

Perky Betty Boop

One of the delights of the gardening act is that occasional moment when, despite all the careful planning of the gardener, despite the research about and the search for special plants, despite the careful site selection, and the arduous care afforded many plants,  the gardener finds a miraculous unplanned beauty, a serendipitous excitement, that was still unplanned for.  Sometimes, I wonder if the very plants are conspiring against our plans, growing bountiful and beautiful not "despite" the gardener, but to spite the gardener who believes the beauty is all due to him.

Rosa 'Betty Boop' is one of those plants that I never expected to really love, nor that she would return my love.  I bought her on a whim as a bagged $3.00 specimen several years ago, merely because a gardening friend loves the rose.  I was never really attracted to the rose by the published pictures I've seen but somehow I still felt that I should give her a chance in my garden.  And I never expected much from her.  Many floribundas struggle in my Zone 5b garden, surviving, freezing back to the ground every year, but, once on their own roots, at least providing me with an occasional bloom that keeps me from spade-pruning them.  That's all I really expected for 'Betty Boop'.

But, for reasons I can't explain, I dumped this cheap, grafted rose in the front of my house, a place of pride next to the edge of the walk, stacking the odds against her by placing her at the edge of the bed where it would be coldest in the winter and driest in the summer.  And she has defied me by growing stronger and more beautiful every year.

What gardener cannot love the delicate mix of yellow, pink and white displayed by the newly opened flowers of 'Betty Boop'? The open, welcoming cheerful faces presented to the sun? The yellow pistil and stamens, private parts of the flower on full display for dashing bee drones with their minds on food and sex?  Yes, the yellow fades as the blossoms age, and the pink becomes slightly less vivacious, but she still welcomes all who would admire her.  I've been stunned by my growing appreciation for this rose and I'm grateful that she chose to surprise my expectations right there, at the beginning of my front walk. Even in Fall she shines, placed accidentally next to Sedum 'Purple Emperor', welcoming my visitors with a contrast of deep purple and bright pink and white.

'Betty Boop' was a 1998 introduction by Carruth, so she is a relatively new floribunda to the trade compared to some of the old classics. Her semi-double form matches the delicate nature of her shading to perfection. I'm told she has a strong scent and I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't even tried to inhale her blossoms although I've grown her now 5 years. She grows about two and a half feet tall in Kansas by the end of the season, and despite my lack of winter protection in Zone 5B, she usually doesn't freeze entirely to the ground but retains about a foot of thick canes to start her off strong every year.

For the record, I'm not old enough to have viewed this roses' namesake Betty Boop cartoons, but for the younger gardeners in the audience, Betty Boop is arguably the most famous sex symbol of animation, a symbol of the Depression, and a caricature of the carefree Jazz Age flappers.  I actually don't think I've ever seen one of the original cartoons, created in the 1930's, but I've always known Betty Boop was a sex symbol instinctively, right down to my XY chromosomes.  If nowhere else, you've seen her painted on the nose of many a pictured WWII fighter plane or bomber, a reminder of home and love to the young pilots of that era.  And the rose 'Betty Boop' captures that image perfectly, reminding a young-at-heart gardener that beauty and perkiness is a good thing for the garden as well.

Beds in the Sun II

In the continuing saga of my back garden beds, today's post details a few more of the beds:



Bed D is an Iris-only bed in terms of the perennial planted there (Okay, in truth there is a bunch of daffodils in the bed as well).  Bed E and another bed that I'll show later were mixed daylily and iris beds (about 60 irises and daylilies in each), but the daylilies there are slowly outcompeting the irises. Or else the irises are fading because they're in a flat area with too much clay and they don't like wet feet. Or perhaps the iris there don't like to live in a rundown daylily neighborhood.  Anyway, Bed E is now primarily daylilies, a few remaining struggling irises, and a Witch Hazel ('Jelena'), while the majority of the irises have been moved to their survival to Bed D, where I hope they get better drainage and where the fighting will stay within the family.

Bed F is a smaller mixed rose and ornamental grasses bed containing 14 smaller shrub and Old Garden Roses and 5 grasses.  One big mistake that I'm about to rectify was placing Panicum 'Prairie Sky' into the center of the bed, because it is flopping over all the roses and smothering them.  The two Calamagrostis in the bed, 'Overdam' and 'Avalanche', are tall and strong and much better behaved.  The roses really are a varied crew; 'Purple Pavement', 'Belinda's Dream', 'Salet', 'Duchess de Rohan', 'Duchess of Portland', the Griffith Buck rose 'Golden Princess', 'Westerland', and 'Austrian Copper', among others.  Right behind this bed (south) lies a small Scarlet Oak (Quercus coccinea), eight years old now and only four feet tall.  Talk about your slow-growing trees!

Bed G is my "Evergreen" bed, containing a small assortment of very common broad-leaved evergreens and conifers, of which the largest is a Wichita Blue Juniper (Juniperus scopulorum).  I also cheated in this bed and placed a volunteer red-flowering peach tree (Prunus rubra) that lights up the spring.

Beds H, I, and J are the newest beds, just started last Fall or this Spring.  "H" contains primarily my newest Griffith Buck roses, just planted this Spring and still continuing to be planted (I added 4 new roses to this bed just this weekend).  So if you've been enjoying my descriptions and pictures of  'Bright Melody', 'Iobelle', and 'Queen Bee', they are from this bed.  One side of the bed outside the roses are 6 divisions of Sedum telephinum 'Morchen', planted there in the spring, and the other side is a line of new daylily starts just planted.  Bed "I" is still under development.  I was thinking a big bed of annual cottage flowers, but now I'm thinking of a bed concentrating on ornamental grasses, particularly timely right now so that I can move all the grasses that are now elsewhere and currently smothering the adjacent roses, into this spot, so they can just lean against each other.  Bed J was started last Fall.  As a teaser for coming attractions, it is full of Paul Barden's creations, and so it is my "Barden" bed, and I'll describe it better next time.

Best Laid Daylily Plans

My, how often the best-laid plans of mice and gardeners succumb to the realities of life!  I really thought I had it set up perfectly this year, my latest attempt at the acquisition of cheap, perfect daylilies, but alas, I failed again miserably in the execution of said plan.

I always look forward to the first weekend of September, because it promises the Daylily Society sale at the local farmers market. Thus it appeals to my miserly gardening pocketbook.  But in the past, I've come to the sale completely unprepared, choosing daylilies because the name sounded nice or because the description of the color seemed promising, only to later find myself disappointed once again that "melon" was orange, and "peach" was orange from more than two feet away.

But this June, I made a special effort to visit the local indoor mall during the annual Daylily Display, an event at which the local Daylily nuts...err..uh...enthusiasts display their prettiest daylilies during the height of the season.  These people are pictured in the dictionary next to the term Addict Enablers, in this case the addiction in question being my incontrollable need to grow the newest daylily varieties.  Several of the evil Hemerocallis pushers are local breeders who also exhibit their latest creations at the Display.  Unlike my previous visits to the Display, however, I came prepared with pad and pen, writing down the names of what I considered to be the choice 15 to 20 varieties. 

When I got home, I even went one step further and typed up the list while my memory was fresh, in lieu of my usual policy of relying on my mostly illegible handwriting and failing memory come September.  I also purchased, for the bargain price of $10.00, an annual membership in the Flint Hills Daylily Society, which entitled me to attend a pitch-in dinner and have first choice at the daylilies for sale on the night before the big public September sale.  I couldn't miss this time.

Well, I did miss.  Work intervened and I didn't make it to the pitch-in daylily dinner, nor to the Extension Master Gardeners bimonthly meeting on the same night.  Desperate, I went first the thing Saturday morning to the sale, armed with my list of delicious names such as "String Theory", "Red Hot Mama" and "Bella Donna Starfish".  And they didn't have any of those varieties for sale.  Oh, some of them had been in the sale the night before, but they had all been snatched up by my fellow FHDS fiends.  So I resorted to looking at the pictures compiled by color of each variety, a time-consuming activity, and I missed several other beautiful cultivars while doing so.  There was even a special table of "expensive" daylilies, some divisions as high as $10, and I failed there as well, looking at the names and then looking at the pictures, and then finding the ones I wanted snatched up before I could decide about them.

But, I guess I did okay in the end.  I came away with 12 or 15 varieties (see the picture above), generous clumps for $5 to $7 dollars apiece that were actually often three small divisions in each clump, leaving me with 35 or 40 new daylily starts for $99.  And such pretty names and colors too. 'Apple Tart'.  'Butterfiles in Flight'.  I'm just sure that the highly touted melon and peach daylilies I purchased won't look orange this time.