Winter Gardening Reading

In Winter, my reading about gardening takes the place of my gardening, so I'm already in that phase where I'm accumulating things to read for the winter.  There are times I like serious gardening texts and times that I'd rather vegetate in what is the garden equivalent of a summer read.  You know what I'm talking about; those mostly mindless novels that have a little gardening, a little mystery, and a lot of relaxation.

Along that line, I know of two authors with a plant-focused novel series that other readers might enjoy.   Just last week, I learned of a series of around eight or ten mysteries written by author Kate Collins.  Of course, I just had to find one immediately to see if I liked it and was able to purchase the first book of the series at a local bookstore.  The series is called The Flower Shop Mysteries, so named because the main character, Abby Knight, is the busybody owner of a flower shop, "Bloomers", and is a former flunked-out law student.  Abby is constantly involved in some kind of trouble, and the series seems to be popular since it makes it onto local bookshelves. The first book of the series is titled Mums The Word, and it's a fairly decent tale of a local murder and Ms. Knight's investigation of it.  The other books in the series follow on the first, and all have clever titles like Slay It With Flowers, and Dearly Depotted.  I so love a good pun.

To be frank, I think Mums The Word was an engaging read, but I don't know how many of the rest of the series I'll be reading.   Don't get me wrong, they are good, but they are definitely written for a female market, and (as a middle-aged, hopelessly archaic, male) I'm just not the prime demographic.  In Mums The Word, the villains are easily recognizable, the women are often victims of bad dates and bad men, and there is a gratuitous hunk named Marco who makes several appearances as Abby's rescuer and heartthrob.  Being male, and hoping for a twist in the plot, I kept expecting Marco to turn out to be one of the bad guys, but, no, he just stayed a sweaty, bodice-ripping savior.  Really didn't do much for me since I never could understand the pirate-lusty maiden genera.  Carrying the book around bothered me a little as well, because, as you can see above, the cover is designed a little frilly and pastel-colored for my tastes.  Maybe I can put a plain book cover over the next one?

I thought I had already blogged about the other author, Ann Ripley, whose series I finished long ago, but it turns out that I haven't. I guess I'll make this week a "two-fer" on that front so stay tuned in a couple of days for that review.  And in the dead of winter, when you're staring out the window at a snow-covered landscape, Mums The Word could be just your ticket.  If you are a middle-aged or older female who likes pirate novels.  Hey, come to think of it, Mrs. ProfessorRoush might like this one.

Either Fruit or Die, Please?

This weekend I was starting to read Peter Schneider's excellent 2009 book, Right Rose, Right Place, when a great line jumped right out of the text and tweaked my nose. 

Peter had been introducing the main themes of the book (the gist of which is that all roses are not created equally and that we should spend time choosing the roses that will thrive best wherever we want to grow them), when he wrote the striking sentence: "There are two kinds of rose failures; plants that die and plants that won't."  Now, Peter was writing primarily about roses, but for sheer calling a spade "a spade", the concept he expressed can't be beat.

I've got a number of plants that I wish would die, and my usual modus operandi in such cases is to neglect the plant until it succumbs to disease and pestilence.  Sometimes, though, I've chosen the plant so well for Kansas that I simply can't neglect it enough to kill it, no matter how dry the summer or cold the winter.

The particular plant on my mind this morning is my ugly and hopeless bittersweet plant, pictured from this morning at the upper right and to the left.  This is one of those dual sex plantings (bittersweet is a diecious plant) that I purchased with both a male (Celastrus scandens 'Hercules') and female (Celastrus scandens 'Diana') vine potted together by the nursery.  I planted them next to each other on a large wire cylinder so they could climb high and provide me with the females beautiful orange and red fruits as Fall came.

But this pair has been nothing but trouble since it was planted seven years past.  They are healthy to a fault, and they survive sub-zero winters, triple-digit summers, flood and drought with impunity.  They quickly overwhelmed the trellis, which I've had to strengthen twice previously as it was bent down by strong winds. Again, now, it is bowed to the East at about the 5 foot level from a storm that occurred in August.  Even worse, even though both vines have survived and had a typical flowering period each of the past five Springs, the plants have never set fruit.  Not a single orange kernel.  Perhaps they don't like each other and have chosen to be celibate, or perhaps the nursery sold me two male plants instead of a mixed-sex pair.  I'm discounting the possibility that they could both be female plants because wild bittersweet occurs in the woods nearby and even if these are refined and gracious cultivars, they surely would be desperate enough by now to dally with the local peasants.  In any circumstance, there's no debauchery happening in my garden and I'm tired of it.  In my view, a garden should be all about sex and procreation and 'Hercules' and 'Diana' aren't contributing to the party.

I'm done waiting on them. Since they won't either fruit or die, I'm spade-pruning them.  Well, in truth, I think I'll move them down onto the barbed wire fence in the pasture, where they can challenge the prairie for dominance or let the grasses beat them.  Maybe a little adversity will scare them into trying to reproduce themselves in a Darwinian last-ditch effort.  I don't care.  I guess you could say that I'm bitter about the failure, but anticipating the sweetness that a nice Clematis will add to that site.

Luck for a Buck (or Nine)

Yesterday I took Mrs. ProfessorRoush and her younger clone on a shopping trip.  After dropping them off into a sucking money whirlpool known to human females as a "mall", I bided my afternoon visiting the bookstore (which means more garden book reviews to come later), and browsing aimlessly at various harmless home improvement stores. 

Not expecting to find any outdoor plants for sale here late in November, I was nonetheless pleased to discover the last remnants of summer's bounty at Lowes, which consisted of several 2 gallon specimens of 'Diana' Althea (Hibiscus syriacus 'Diana'), and a number of gallon containers of variegated sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium 'River Mist').  It was surprising enough that both plants seemed to be in somewhat survivable shape this late in the season, but of more immediate importance was the fact that the 'Diana' was marked down from $16.98 to $3.00, and the 'River Mist' were all $1.00, down from $7.98.  Needless to say, there will soon be a 'Diana' planted somewhere in my beds, and a half dozen 'River Mist' edging some taller grasses.  Even if only half of the latter make it through the winter to come, I couldn't miss the price of those 'Mist', now could I? 

I either just got a heck of a bargain or else I just wasted a whole $9 and had to dig a bunch of worthless holes in my garden beds.  I'll let you know next Spring.

October into November

One sure aspect of gardening is that we come more and more, over time, to appreciate plants that dependably put on a show.  Take for example, my 'October Glory' maple, highlighted against our first dusting of snow of the coming Kansas winter.  It has otherwise been a pretty dismal fall display here in Kansas.  The drought and summer heat combined to make most of the fall foliage sparse, fleeting, and of hue subdued.  At this time, the leaves of almost all my other trees are down, dry and crispy, blown here and there by the Kansas winds.  But here, even in this subpar Iphone photo taken at the break of dawn, stands 'October Glory', now glorious deeply into November, holding onto its leaves and glowing like a burning flame on the prairie.

In fact, looking around the garden this morning, only four trees are still holding onto leaves.  Other than 'October Glory', a paperbark maple and a swamp oak both cling to dry, ugly brown leaves.  But I'm further intrigued by the fact that one of my three Cottonwoods, a volunteer specimen that I transplanted to a useful spot, is still holding on to some gorgeous yellow leaves while the other two have long been reduced to nakedness.  I'll have to watch this one over a few years, to see if this color and foliage longevity repeat.  If I'm very, very lucky, maybe there is a 'November Sunshine' Cottonwood in the future of the gardening world.