UnElectrifying Failure

'High Voltage'

I'm sure many of you out there in roseland grow some of the Bailey Nursery Easy Elegance Roses, a new-ish line of shrub roses bred over the last decade by Ping Lim.  Ping's roses are gaining wide acclaim for health and performance, and have won a number of national awards, including the honor of having three recent AARS winners. I grow and enjoy several of the Easy Elegance line myself, among which are 'Sweet Fragrance', 'Super Hero', and 'The Finest'.  I'm especially fond of the apricot color and fragrance of 'Sweet Fragrance'. 

'High Voltage' at 2 years of age

In the interest of full disclosure I have to tell you, however, that I'm disappointed in the light yellow Easy Elegance shrub 'High Voltage' ('BAIage'), introduced by Bailey in 2009.  I am not trying to deny that 'High Voltage' is a vigorous and healthy rose.  At four years of age she stands about 4 foot tall and wide in my garden and I've never seen her badly affected by blackspot or other disease. And she is reliably cane-hardy in my climate.  The rotund little vixen has not, however, atttained her advertised "vase-like" shape, and the stiff thick canes are now making a massive attempt to smother adjacent, less vigorous roses.  I am also not overwhelmed by the beauty of the light yellow, double blooms. They are small and barely double and definitely not electrifying.  The advertised moderate to strong fragrance has not appeared and the color of just-opened blooms is not bright enough to grab my eye as a garden fixture.  Here in the blazing Kansas sun, they fade quickly and melt, and the delicate petals seem to spot easily with rain. 

'High Voltage' hips

Most disappointing of all, to me, has been the lack of rebloom.  As you know, I don't deadhead the vast majority of my roses and I wouldn't even think of deadheading this shrub offering any more than I would deadhead  'Knock Out'.  I discovered this year that if you don't deadhead 'High Voltage', at least here in Kansas in a drought, you get a mass of ultimately uninspiring dull orange hips, but no significant rebloom. This year, I admit, has been a tough test, but although this rose put on a strong first showing, there was not a single bud again until very recently, when a few random blooms appeared right before the freeze that ended my garden year.  And those just aren't enough for the formal part of my rose garden.

Since I'm one of those gardeners who is unable to kill a plant outright, I think I'm going to move it next year to one of my beds with more non-remonant roses, where I won't be so disappointed in its inability to rebloom.  Maybe somewhere out there, among the pilgrims, it can still earn a place in my garden, but I can't recommend her as a landscaping plant for the more-discriminating homeowner.

Who Digs There?

I had an unexpected and unpleasant surprise last weekend in my garden.  All over several beds, some devious night-walking creature had excavated holes; here, there, and everywhere.  Not deep holes, most around 6 inches deep, and all had the appearance that a frantic, clawing Tasmanian Devil had occasioned across my garden.  I say this despite never having seen a Tasmanian Devil except in the Bugs Bunny cartoons I was allowed to watch in my youth.  I wouldn't even know that a Tasmanian Devil existed but for the Warner Bros. cartoon character, but that puts me one up on all of the younger gardeners reading this who have been deprived of even that knowledge.  Isn't it a shame that our modern enlightened society now views Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner as violent cinema and indicative of poor parenting?  

In Kansas, of course, a Tasmanian Devil would be quite unlikely due to geography, and I have no idea about their actual digging habits beyond what Wikipedia tells me.   I have, however, no real evidence as to the culprit since no prints or scat or fur remnants exist to provide clues of identity.  I suspected first that Mrs. ProfessorRoush had allowed our Brittany Spaniel to run unsupervised, or perhaps we'd had a visit from our daughter's Italian Greyhound or the neighbor's Labrador, but quick blanket denials were issued by all suspected parties.

As regular readers know, I edge my mature beds with limestone to protect the mulch and contents against the occasional prairie fire.  The vast majority of the holes were next to the limestone edging rather than in the center of the beds.  Knowing that there are a number of voles and newts that like to hang out under the limestone edgers, my logical conclusion is that whatever sentient organism dug these holes and threw loose dirt all over the mulch and adjacent plants was after food in the form of those small garden delicacies.  I suppose it is also possible, since about 10% of the holes were in the middle of the beds (some were close to damaging young roses!), that the culprits were after the fat white grubs that inhabit every spadeful of my soil.  With this chain of logical reasoning, I hypothesize a nocturnal coyote as the most likely villain, with perhaps badger or anteater as other geographically possible criminals.  For now, my only chance at identification is if the culprit returns and provides me a footprint or poses for my game camera .  Maybe it has already since I never identified the animal in  the second picture I posted earlier.

I feel somewhat chagrined, however, that barring an escape from the Sunset Zoo in Manhattan, a Tasmanian Devil is quite unlikely in my garden.  A resident Tasmanian Devil would be a cool addition to my garden and the carnivorous nature of the creature might help me prevent rabbit and rodent damage.  On the other hand, reading that the Tasmanian Devil has the strongest bite per body mass of any predator, and that it can take a back leg off sheep in a single bite, I might eventually regret having the creature around.  A badger might even be a better, if not exactly safer, choice.

Dampened Desire

In the middle of the heat and drought this summer, ProfessorRoush had an epiphany!  Surveying my dry and disappointing garden during the first week of August, a time when even daylilies were failing me, I realized that I was deeply in lust with the defiant Orientpet and Asiatic lilies.  When everything else was turning to dust, those intrepid bulbs were putting out green foliage and colorful blooms;  strikingly cheerful flowers, if somewhat smaller than usual.  It was the perfect collision of opportunity and need.  I needed more, wanted more, just had to have, more lilies.

So I quickly did what every color-hungry lily-deficient gardener would do.  I sprinted to the computer, credit card in hand, and ordered lily after lily, bulb after bulb, until my bank account was screaming under the strain.  Restraint didn't matter, my lily insanity had no bounds.  I was mentally eyeing the bare spaces in my landscape and visualizing a few gorgeous and gigantic lilies in every spot, each aspiring to stand tall next year among the roses, grasses, and viburnums.  I intended to shoehorn lilies into every spare inch between roses.  I was planning a lily blitzkrieg of my garden.

Now, of course, in October, my lily craze has come home to roost.  Long forgotten, the lily bulbs made a sudden appearance on my front porch this past Wednesday, just two days prior to a predicted bout of colder weather and rain.  Work and the ever shorter Fall days, of course, immediately conspired to keep me from planting the bulbs before the rains set in.  Today, Saturday, I stare out at a sodden landscape, a brief foray into the garden rebuffed by mud and wind.  To be truthful, of course, I have absolutely no desire now, when the roses are again in bloom and the garden is green, to go about planting several hundred assorted bulbs, most of them lilies that require deeper holes than other bulbs.  Oh yes, I couldn't buy a few bulbs here and there, I had to buy the Asiatic naturalizing mix with its hundred bulbs and the Orientpet mixture, and I threw in a few hundred Crocus chrysanthus for good measure and I thought that a few 'Mount Everest' allium's would be a nice surprise for myself next spring.  Needless to say, the thought of excavating several hundred holes in my rocky landscape make my arms and insoles ache already.

From the somber experience of previous overzealous binges however, deep down I know that starting the task is hard part, and forcing myself into the garden tomorrow will get me underway and the digging day will pass quickly if not painlessly, after that.  Once the deed is done, I can lay up for awhile with aspirin and hand lotion, ready for a winter's rest and knowing that drought or not, next year's garden will be scented and colorful in the face of searing summer.  Because I'll have lilies while the prairie burns.

Maria Stern Mopes

Among the roses I grow is one of those beautiful and elegant roses that also somehow remind you of a slow-motion nightmare.  You know what I mean; you're having a beautiful dream and then suddenly it all turns bad, in slow-motion you see the car crash or the long fall coming and you try to stop it but you just can't?  Well, that's how I feel about 'Maria Stern'.

'Maria Stern' is an orange blend Hybrid Tea bred by the Brownell family in 1969.  The blooms are admittedly, fantastically-colored, double, and non-fading, but typical of many of the '60's Hybrid Teas, that's about all I can find to recommend her.  She is one of the "Sub-Zero Roses" of the Brownell clan, bred to survive tough winters, but I'd give her a "D+" for vigor.  The bush under the strongly fragrant flowers is nothing special to see.  My 'Maria Stern' is a little over a year old and stands about 2 feet tall, with only two decent canes.  Several other roses planted at the same time, most of them Griffith Buck roses, are a foot taller and much broader and healthier.  'Maria Stern' has moderate blackspot resistance but by this time of the year, her legs are starkly bare and her hair is thinning as well.  A cross of 'Tip Toes' (another Sub-Zero rose) and 'Queen Elizabeth', she certainly isn't living up to her pedigree.  'Maria Stern' is supposed to grow to 4 feet tall and be hardy to Zone 4B.  The only recommendation I can find for it is that it was the Twin Cities Rose Club's Rose of the Month in March, 2010.

I absolutely love the color of this rose, I really do, but, alas, I feel that she is trying her best to slip away into the dark abyss on me.  This is my second 'Maria Stern'.  The first loss I attributed to being a decrepit bagged and budded rose, but this time she's on her own roots and still isn't thriving.  I planted her last year, almost lost her again right away,  protected her against all ill weather, and pampered the heck of of her this year, but no matter how many chocolates and wine coolers I bring her, she just sulks.  Maybe next year, if she makes it through winter, she'll finally find her way to shine.