Bench 2.0

ProfessorRoush places a high value on permanence when selecting garden ornaments or furniture.  I like concrete or iron rather than plastic or wooden.  I want unpainted statuary versus stained or painted figures that need to be refinished every few years.  Heavy pieces are chosen so that I don't need to travel to Missouri to find them after every thunderstorm. Tasteful pieces appear when I can find them, although my tastes are subject to debate and questionable in many instances.

Consequently, when my old iron and wooden garden bench to the right of the front walkway started to deteriorate beyond the point where staining the wood was curative, and to the degree where sitting on it was a chancy proposition, I knew it was time to find a new one, but I couldn't part easily with the ironwork.  This old bench had stuck with me through wind and rain, snow and heat. Who wouldn't have a little interior rot when you spend each of 10 winters outside under a blanket of ice or snow? This bench deserved a second chance and I was just sentimental enough to give it one.

Enter Bench 2.0, my amateur remake using the original iron sides and back.  I used composite/permanent redwood-colored deck material for the seat and back.  The decking material didn't come in the right widths, but I overcame and adapted with selective use of the pre-drilled iron holes and bolts with lock washers.  I tend, when building something, to build crudely but to over engineer everything, so I assure you that six weight-challenged individuals and a dog could sit safely on the new bench.  The curved back iron piece would have required too much work to make it fit, but I reversed it and screwed it back onto the back to increase the weight of this piece and keep the floral print visible.  At this point, nothing short of a tornado is going to move this bench, which I've relocated to my growing "redbud grove" near the shade of a Cottonwood.  Not as formal, but still classy, eh?  It won't need to be redone again for like the next 6 million years and only then to repaint the iron.  And the cost to redo?  Less than a new bench (in fact less than the metal bench that replaced it out front).

You're wondering about the light blue sides aren't you?  That happens to be my "color" for the garden.  I paint almost all the iron in my garden that hue of rust-inhibiting paint, known variously as "wildflower blue," "brilliant blue," or "periwinkle blue" depending on the brand.  I think it looks nice when placed among almost anything in a garden, and it stands out just enough to call attention to itself without screaming at visitors.  Please don't tell Mrs. ProfessorRoush that my garden has a "color" though.  She'll laugh at me and call me strange. There is no accounting for taste is there?

Chorale

In this year's young group of Griffith Buck roses, the award for the best performance by a newcomer goes to little-known 'Chorale'.  This rose has wowed me over and over with its color and its form.  In my "Central Buck" bed, it grows right next to 'Quietness', the latter a better-known and highly regarded Buck rose, yet 'Chorale' is out-performing it day after day.

'Chorale' is a light pink Shrub rose bred by Dr. Buck in 1978.  There is little information on the Internet regarding this rose beyond its parentage, listed on helpmefind.com as a tetraploid cross between a seedling of 'Ruth Hewitt' X 'Queen Elizabeth', with a seedling of 'Morning Stars' X 'Suzanne'.  'Suzanne' is a pink Spinosissima and gives 'Chorale' her presumed hardiness and perhaps the moderate thorniness, but I can see little other evidence of Spinosissima in her.  The other three ancestors are all Modern hybrids, with 'Queen Elizabeth' the only well-known rose of the group.

'Chorale' has nice, high-centered, fully double blooms of 50 petals and the color is a perfect pale pink that will blend well with almost any other rose or perennial.  The blooms are large, approximately 3 1/2 inches in diameter, and they fade to white as they age.  She has a strong apple fragrance that is particularly prominent on hot days, dark green, healthy leaves, and she blooms continually; since she was six inches high, I've never seen her without a bloom and already this summer she's on at least her 3rd flush in the photo at the left.  I can't ask for more from a baby rose. 

'Chorale' was chosen as a blackspot-susceptible control plant in one Earth-Kind study (Zlesak DC et al, HortScience 2010;45:1779-87), but the results of challenging the plant with 3 different "races" of blackspot did not show 'Chorale' as the worst of the test group.  In fact it had less blackspot than Belinda's Dream, a designated Earth-Kind rose for two of the three strains of blackspot.  Since rose cultivar resistance to blackspot is dependent on the blackspot strain or strains in a region and since resistance changes as the pathogen evolves, I can only state here that 'Chorale' is blackspot free in my garden at present (unsprayed), as you can see from the photo above.   

A "chorale" is a "hymn or psalm sung to a traditional or composed melody in church," or it refers to a "chorus or choir".  When Dr. Buck named this rose, I'm not sure if he was paying homage to the beauty of the blooms or if he was referencing the fact that this rose always seems to have a group of blooms on it, but I suppose he could be referring to both meanings of the name.  Regardless, this is a rose that I'm going to expect a lot out of in the future. 

To Trap or Not To Trap

I hope that Shakespeare will forgive me for my corruption of his prose, but that is the million roses question, isn't it?  Conventional wisdom holds that the use of Japanese Beetle-specific traps will increase beetle damage on plants adjacent to the trap sites.  You can find that "wisdom" repeated everywhere, Extension articles, Internet blogs, over and over, accepted and final.

Well friends, ProfessorRoush had a mentor who once said to me "If I wrote that the sky is green in a book chapter of an authoritative text, in 10 years the entire world would be repeating that the sky is green."  Phrases like "conventional wisdom" just raise my hackles, because if we've learned anything from the past millennium, it's that "conventional wisdom" often isn't worth a darn.  If we followed "conventional wisdom," all maps would still be Flat Earth-oriented, we would still believe the Sun revolved around the Earth, the New World would never have been discovered and I wouldn't be trying to garden in the hell-hole of Kansas.

In the throes of anguish that Japanese Beetles have finally reached Manhattan, Kansas, I set out to look at some of the actual research behind the no-trap recommendation, and I can already tell you that the question is far from settled.  Most of the statements that Japanese Beetle-specific traps increase plant damage and don't affect beetle numbers are referenced back to two papers in the Journal of Economic Entomology, 1985 and 1986, authored by F. Carter Gorden and Daniel A. Potter from the University of Kentucky.  The papers indeed reach the referenced conclusions, but if you examine the materials and methods of their research you'll discover the interesting fact that they placed their traps at 1.2 meters above the ground in both studies.  I already knew that a more recent study, by Alm in 1996,  found that a height of 13 cm above the ground was the most efficient trap height, which just happens to also be the average height that Japanese Beatles fly around a garden.  The 1985 and 1986 papers, for those metrically-disadvantaged, had their traps at 120 cm, so, in essence, they were expecting these lumbering insectoid rocks to find the traps approximately 10 times farther off the ground than they normally fly.  Thus science advances gardening.

 I also reviewed a 1998 Journal of Arboriculture paper by Wawrzynski and Ascerno that found that mass trapping over 15 acre area caused a 97% reduction in Japanese Beetles within 4 years.  Consequently, I really question if "conventional wisdom" hasn't been keeping gardeners from using the best tools for this particular job.   Commercial traps that use both floral attractants and pheromone lures are demonstrably effective, and the one pictured here is readily available and performed pretty well in a 2003 report by Alm and Dawson. 

What does that mean for ProfessorRoush's garden?  It means that I'm going to buck the conventional wisdom and trap the bodacious beetles out of my garden for a couple of years to see if I can slow down the Beetle Invasion (For baby boomers, I'm referencing the current Japanese Beetle Invasion as opposed to the 1960's Beatles invasion of the U.S.A).  Based on the research available, I will place my traps as close as possible to the recommended 13 cm height and I will place them at least 30 feet away from the nearest important plant so as not to attract beetles right onto my roses.  I will empty the traps regularly so the dead beetle stench doesn't drive others away and I will make sure the lures stay attached.  I'll let you know how it goes.

I've already caught three hard-shelled fiends that won't be breeding little beetles for next year.  I hope that it is simple logic.  Less breeding, less beetles, more roses.

Speaking of Presents

'Timbercreek Ace'; Lovell, 2004

While I'm on a roll with gifts from fellow gardeners, a pair of other long-awaited newcomers to my garden bloomed for the first time on Tuesday last.  The beautiful yellow-throated deep purple daylily to the right is 'Timbercreek Ace' (Lovell, 2004), a gift this Spring from a K-State client whose hunting dog I was treating.  Somehow, veterinary visits with me often end up in discussions of gardening, prompted perhaps by something the client was reading while waiting or an offhand comment that is made.  In this case, I discovered the client was a daylily aficionado, and he learned that although I'm a rose nut, I occasionally dabble in daylilies, resulting in the welcome gift which was planted in a prominent place in my garden.  'Timbercreek Ace' is a diploid, early to mid-season, reblooming daylily officially listed as a black dark purple self above a yellow green throat. 

I should note here that as a state employee, I can't accept gifts of over $25 so to the K-State auditors listening in, I checked and a start of 'Timbercreek Ace' is commercially available for under that price...at least from some places.  As a 2004 variety, it is, however, both one of my most recent daylilies and one of the pricier ones.  I'm grateful to the client for it, especially after reading that a mature plant will have better than 22 buds/scape.  What a display this will be someday!

The gorgeous bicolored daylily to the left is an unnamed daylily(#45BO5) bred by a local Hemerocallis activist and breeder, Dr Steve Thien.  I obtained it two February's back as the winning bidder in an auction to benefit the K-State University Gardens.  It wasn't, therefore a gift to me, but it was a nice gift from Dr. Thien to the Gardens that I "intercepted."  Last year, it struggled in the drought, overshadowed by a native Asclepias tuberosa that I allowed to grow too close to it, and it didn't bloom.  This year, with the butterfly milkweed cut back, it's doing better and has two nice scapes full of blooms.

Daylilies take a lot of grief from WEE (wild-eyed environmentalists) who disdain non-native plants.  While I grow as many native forbs as I can in my pseudo-lawn of native prairie, and allow the self-seeders into my garden beds when I recognize their seedlings, I still appreciate daylilies for their acceptance of the searing summer heat and their bloom during an otherwise dead period in my garden.