Timid and Demure

On Saturday last, I discovered this tiny retiring flower hidden deep within my climbing 'Jeanne Lajoie'.  Nestled and covered by the new foliage, visible only from inside the pergola on which the climber rests, she is the first blossom from 'Jeanne Lajoie' for the new season.  What a metaphor for the year we're having, this coy little pink jewel hiding and protected within a green-leafed cave.

I've wondered if the climate is ever going to settle down this year; warm, then cool, warmer, then back to freezing.  Yesterday it was 90ºF in Kansas, but there was snow on my son's lawn in the Colorado foothills.  I finally purchased tomato plants on Sunday and then found that I couldn't plant them yet, learning this morning that the lows of the next five nights are all in the low 40's, a temperature that will stunt the tomatoes.   I have full sympathy for the reticence of this quiet pink blossom to cast caution aside and declare that rose time has really arrived. 

My Saturday chores included an effort to finish trimming the roses near the house for the second time this year.  I had pruned most of them minimally near the end of March, but late freezes in April had blasted the canes of many down to near ground level.  'Jeanne Lajoie' survived at her six foot height, but the canes of her arbor neighbor, 'Zephirine Drouhin', were blackened and dead, similar to several other roses in that border.  Separating and removing dead canes from within foot-high new basal growth is a delicate task, requiring concentration worthy of a jigsaw puzzle enthusiast.  One should always, however, pause respectfully from one's labors in order to admire great beauty.  The lure of a beautiful woman or a perfect flower both similarly affect an aging gardener. 

 My Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "coy" as having a shy or sweetly innocent quality that is often intended to be attractive or to get attention.  I doubt that a better description exists of this early flower of 'Jeanne Lajoie'.  It playfully caught my eye as I was quickly examining the bush looking for dead canes, quietly whispering from within the shaded interior in an effort to be noticed, to be appreciated for the gift of its mere presence.  This is not the first of my roses to bloom.  'Marie Bugnet' led off the parade a few days prior and 'Harrison's Yellow' and 'Therese Bugnet' have since joined the queue. This flower is the first to remind me, however, that full summer is just around the corner, just a few days or weeks farther down the path.   I paused in quiet homage to the demure gem and then moved on, secure in my new knowledge that at least one rose believes that the world is due for another summer.

Impulse and Impact

Oh, ProfessorRoush was a bad boy today.  A very bad boy.  I did the exact thing that every good gardener knows to avoid.  Further, I did it joyfully, happily, and ecstatically, even with full knowledge of the potential mistake that I was making.  I made an impulse buy in the garden center.  At the Home Depot garden center to be exact.   Can you tell what I bought from the photo at the right?

I had ventured forth innocently this afternoon to buy a couple additional cans of Thompson's Water Seal for the concrete patio.  As is my habit in the early days of a new gardening season, I entered Home Depot through the garden center.  I mulled over one of the new "Smooth Touch" thornless roses, but decided to investigate them more before buying any.  I looked for a new S. vulgaris lilac to replace a really ugly forsythia  in the side yard, but I could only find short and squat 'Miss Kim'.  It was then that I noticed a few small trees with this really unusual leaf coloring sitting off to the side.  For the unwashed, this tree, the tree of my dreams, is Fagus sylvatica, the European beech.  And not just any European beech.  No, this is Fagus sylvatica 'Roseo-marginata', also known (incorrectly) as F. sylvatica 'Tricolor'.

I first came across this tree years ago on a family visit to New York City.  I had slipped away for the afternoon to the Bronx with my father and son to visit Wave Hill.  In the midst of that gorgeous public garden, I first fell in love with the dark and brooding Copper Beech (Fagus sylvatica purpurea) shown to the left, but even then I knew better than to place this dark purple blob in the middle of the prairie.  Later on the tour of Wave Hill, however, I came across the Fagus sylvatica 'Tricolor' pictured below and I knew that someday I'd own one.


You would not be wrong to surmise that this tree would be on my bucket list, if I actually had a bucket list.  Yes, I know this is a tree of deep and humid woods and that the tender leaves may burn in the Kansas sun.  Yes, I know that it will do better in partial shade and moist soil and I have neither.  Yes, I know it is slow growing and I likely will not live to see this tree top 30 feet tall.  Who cares?  My $50 impulse buy may not live to see next Spring.  But it is worth every penny to try.


Where to put it?  Where it will be shaded by a Cottonwood?  Down on the flat where the clay is so wet the roses struggle?  High in the front yard where, if it survives, it will be visible for miles around? Imagine.  Just imagine the impact it could have in my garden.  

Beware of Boxwoods

ProfessorRoush would like to call down a pox on all those garden authorities who have advocated various winter hardy boxwoods to be excellent landscaping plants.  A further pox on the "Big Box" stores who sell the cheapest boxwoods available and thus limit the selection of available cultivars to us.  Boxwoods are everywhere these days.  Southern Living, for instance, has an 18 page internet extravaganza on boxwoods as "the backbone of Southern gardens for centuries".   Boxwoods for landscaping.  Boxwoods as the perfect container plants. Trim and tidy boxwoods. Lavender and boxwood gardens.   Boxwood...BS, I say!

 

I jumped onto the boxwood welcome wagon a number of years ago when I grew tired of mustache landscaping with junipers and arborvitaes.  In Kansas, those two conifer stalwarts are plagued annually by bagworms, leaving the gardener only a choice between marathon hand-picking sessions or toxic wastelands.  During the landscaping of a new home, I went with less traditional choices for my front entry; large-leaved evergreens such as hollies and boxwoods.

 

I was so enamored by the survival of my first boxwoods that when it came time to screen the wind near my front door and outline the circular driveway (or, if you prefer, to slow and divert the feng shui flow of qi in the area), I chose to buy 12 inexpensive Buxus microphylla koreana 'Wintergreen' plants to create a hedge.  I will admit openly that the effort has created a really functional low-maintenance hedge over the years, at times a bit winter-damaged as I've noted previously, but a very nice screen as pictured above.

 

Functional, yes , but undesirable.  You see, the one thing that most boxwood advocates fail to disclose is that boxwoods, at certain times of the year, smell like....well, they smell like cat urine.  Unneutered male cat piss to be exact.  If you realize the source of that stench around your house comes from the boxwoods, then search terms such as "boxwood" and "cat piss" will turn up any number of entrys about the problem, ranging from how it will diminish the sale value of your home, to sources where the authors claim to like the odor, claiming "it reminds me of happy hours spent in wonderful European gardens, surrounded by brilliant flowers, the hum of bees and the redolence of boxwood."   I'm sad to confirm that if you park your car in my circular driveway right now, the odor as you step outside the car will not remind you of happy hours in European gardens.  Until I read that the stench should have been expected, I thought my cats were using the area as a toilet.

       

Adding insult to injury, however is not beyond the reach of the most diabolical garden authorities.  One D. C. Winston, author of an EHow article I found titled "How to find a boxwood that doesn't smell like cat urine," is a prime example. The advice given in the article?  Avoid the Buxus sempervirens cultivars because they are have the strongest "acrid" odor.  Seek out the species Buxus microphylla.  Mr. Winston specifically recommended 'Wintergreen'.  Ain't that a hoot?

 

Take it from me,  don't plant boxwoods by your front door. Ever.

 



Charred Satisfaction

Yesterday was Prairie Burn Day for my neighbors and I.  We waited till very late to burn the prairie this year compared with previous years, all the better to suppress invasive sumacs and other brush plants which are now fully leafed out and more susceptible to fire.  In fact, the burn went slowly because of a lack of wind and all the green grass underneath last winter's detritus.  There were no casualties this year, not even to any of our electrical boxes or minor outbuildings.  Most of my prairie is presently characterized by blackened earth punctuated by smoldering piles of donkey poo.

Burn Day's are communal and family events.  My wife and daughter both participated, tolerating my constant direction about water stream and fire spreading technique as they complained incessantly about spider webs and the possibility of giant female-eating ticks.  Burning Day also allows me to burn my garden debris piles in relative safety (surreptitiously photographed by my wife in the upper right picture) and they are a chance to burn out pack rat nests which accumulate in the woods around the pond.

This year, I took advantage of the occasion to check on the health of my son's Scotch Pine, shown here next to my daughter.  It was a gift from some well-meaning foresters at his elementary school some 17 or 18 years ago, a tiny seeding that I planted near the pond in hopes that it would be isolated and escape the rampant Scotch Pine disease in the area.  Its stands now almost 20 feet tall and healthy as an evergreen ox.

During every burn, I learn more about the prairie and my little portion of it.  This year my daughter found and rescued this little turtle crawling in the grass about 50 feet from the pond and wanted to keep it.  She was less excited when I told her it wasn't a box turtle but a snapping turtle searching for water.  We left it down by the pond, safe from the prairie fire sweeping in its direction.  I can't count all the rabbit and pack rat sightings of the week.

I rest now, content to let the passage of a few days clothe these burnt hills in emerald green.  In the picture below, you can see the blackened prairie to the north of my house, and the green hills of K-States Beef Unit, burned three weeks ago, beyond.  Soon the entire horizon will look like those hills, a sea of green grass ready once again for the summer passage of ghostly prairie schooners.