Made in the Shade

ProfessorRoush has had a busy week of gardening with more to come.  In addition to last weekend and the evenings, I took a couple of days off work so that I could exhaust myself in the garden.  Two days, sunup to sundown, and I'm tanned like a tanning-bed addict.  No, now don't get too excited, girls.  Only on my arms, face and neck.  My snow white legs are the really titillating image.  A classic "farmer's tan" on a gardener.

It's time to unveil  the skeleton of a project which began on delivery of a large package last Wednesday.  There, down in the vegetable garden.  Do you see it?  I'm not going outside on this rainy Saturday morning to give you a better view, but how about the closeup below?  Sorry about the window screen in the way, but that's a frame for a shade house, amazingly and partially erected by yours truly.




I can live without many things in my garden, but I'm tired of growing a nice crop of strawberry plants each spring and then watching them burn to a crisp in July and August.  So I resolved this year to build a shade house to help the plants get through the brutal Kansas sun so that I can enjoy a proper harvest next year.  This shade house is 24'X14' and covers the entire patch.  Using a sledgehammer for the first time in a decade, I drove the 14 posts down through the rock and clay all by myself in a single evening.  Well to be honest, I drove 10 of them and I dug and cemented the 4 corner posts in place to help hold the house down against the occasional tornado.  Chalk up one victory for the aging gardener!   Right now I estimate the first ten years of strawberries will work out to about $1/berry.

By no means is this the end of my gardening week, either.  Today, over 100 gardeners from Omaha are visiting my garden.  They came down to Manhattan to see the KSU Gardens and ended up asking the Chamber of Commerce to visit a couple of "large" local gardens.   My garden may not qualify as unique or educational, but "large" got me on the list.  The garden, despite the waning roses and the long gone irises and peonies, is in about as good a shape as I've ever had it after a week of effort.  And to top it off, tomorrow is the annual Manhattan Area Garden Show and I'm the roving photographer for it.  My gardening week will end Sunday night, and for once I'll be glad to leave the garden and go back to paying work!        

Banshee or Banshees?

My reading is causing ProfessorRoush an identity crisis about a rose.   'Banshee' is a great rose in my climate, but the rose I call 'Banshee' may be one of several different roses known under the same name, sort of a reverse alias, if you will.  My faith that I have the "real" 'Banshee', if there is such a plant, is only based on my faith in Connie of Hartwood Roses, from whom I purchased 'Banshee'.  She obtained her plant from a cemetery in King William, Virginia.

'Banshee' is a pink Damask-like once-blooming shrub known prior to 1773.  My specimen is four years old and approximately 5 feet tall by 6 feet wide and is still growing .  Blooms are lightly double (17-25 petals) and start out medium pink, but quickly fade to blush.  Individual flowers last about 5 days before petal drop and are intensely fragrant.  Leaves are light green (sometimes described as pea green) and usually come in compound leaflets of 7.  She reminds me a lot of 'Maiden's Blush', in bush form and in flower, but she exhibits none of the wet weather balling and blight that 'Maiden's Blush' does here.  'Banshee' is completely hardy here, surviving last year's very cold Zone 5 winter without any cane dieback or loss.  I don't recall seeing any hips form but will watch again this fall.

Paul Barden has a lot to say about 'Banshee', in fact reproducing a 1977 American Rose Annual article by Leonie Bell titled "Banshee: The Great Impersonator".  Bell  regarded "the Banshees" as a strain rather than an individual rose, and believed her to be a Gallica.  Newer sources suggest that it is a R. turbinata hybrid.  The real 'Banshee', or one of her suspected full sisters, should have an acorn-cup shaped hip and a calyx more than twice the length of the bud and glanded.  And the pea green leaves.  The blown up photo at the left is a good example of the long calyx and the glanded bud.

'Banshee', faded and older flower

'Banshee' is a rose that is either loved or hated, perhaps dependent upon climatic influence and on whether a particular rose is the real 'Banshee' McCoy or an impostor.  In my climate, my 'Banshee' doesn't ball up or drop 90% of the buds before opening as other writers complain about, although 'Maiden's Blush', often been marketed as 'Banshee', does.  'Banshee' does seem to be a bit unorganized in habit, opening later to a flat and mussy flower with lots of stamens.   I have seen no blackspot or other fungus on Banshee, and in fact it seems an iron healthy rose.  Or a healthy family of roses, as the case may be.




 

Distant Drums Doubt

Friends, you would think that an old gardener could catch a break.  Out here on the Kansas Prairie, I garden in defiance of scorching sun, bitter blizzards, desiccating droughts, gale-force winds, rocky soil, and even the occasional prairie fire.  Is it too much to ask if the gardener's wife could cut him a little slack?

I took the picture above yesterday morning when the ground was still wet with dew and I sent it to Mrs. ProfessorRoush after telling her that I thought I'd captured a photo of a rose with exquisite coloring.  After receiving it on her iPhone, sitting in an adjacent room to where I was engaged on the computer, I heard her immediately exclaim "no way!".  And she then proceeded to accuse me of faking the coloration by photoshopping it.  And wanted to know where it was in the garden (even though she passes by it every day).

Mrs. ProfessorRoush is a wonderful wife and human being, but I was deeply hurt that she could suggest I would resort to falsifying a photo to deceive her.  I'm certainly not above cropping out a decaying bloom from the corner of a picture, nor occasionally playing with the brightness/darkness setting of a photo, but I would never, and probably could never, fake a picture like this one.  I don't even own Photoshop.  I do my cropping and compressing on the Microsoft Picture Manager  that comes with the computer.  If I had really faked this photo, I'd have certainly smudged out the insect bites on a couple of the petals.

The photo is, of course, of Griffith Buck's 'Distant Drums' rose, a rose that I've written about before and one that is admittedly not one of my favorites.   The blooms of this rose always have a unique coloration, but this trio went above and beyond their usual palette.  Since it just gave me a chance to astonish Mrs. ProfessorRoush, I may have to raise my personal ranking of 'Distant Drums'.  It's not often that I can gain a little respect at home, even if I have to loudly and fervently assert my innocence to get it.

I liked the photo so much, in fact, that I just made it my "masthead" for the blog.  What do you think of it?

Chasing the Rose

From Carol, at May Dreams Gardens, I learned of a new and very readable book about a "found" rose and I put it on my birthday list to purchase and read.  Of the three books I purchased as a self-gift for my now past birthday, I chose to read Chasing the Rose: An Adventure in the Venetian Countryside first.  Chasing the Rose is by Andrea di Robilant and it has kept me captivated for several nights this week.

The book is a journey of the search for the identity of a rose, known as  'Rosa Moceniga', that was found on the author's ancestral home of Alvisopoli, Italy (a city named for its founder, the author's great-great-great-great grandfather, Alvise Mocenigo).  It's a journey that covers vast spaces, as di Robilant searches for clues about its origins in several countries and gardens, and also covers vast time periods, for it is, in part, a historical essay on his great-great-great-great grandmother Lucia's relationship with the Empress Josephine of Malmaison and a history of the "China" roses. 

The story is quite entertaining regarding the rose and, because of the historical info, educational at the same time.  It was also eye-opening for me, because the author interacts several times with Professor Stefano Mancuso of the University of Florence.  Professor Mancuso is one of the pioneers in the field of plant neurobiology, a field that views plants less as insensate organisms battered at the whims of man and nature, but as information-processing organisms with communication between all parts of the plant and responses to the environment.  He even gave an interesting TED lecture in 2010.  There is even a Society for Plant Neurobiology, which you may belong to for the annual membership of $60, and a Journal of Plant Signaling and Behavior that publishes manuscripts about plant responses to environmental stimuli.

Heck, I thought we'd left all that behind in the 1970's after the publication of SuperNature, a bestseller about ESP and plants and other mystic crap that captivated me in my teens.  It has since been discredited, but the book made a wave among the wannabe hippies with its reports that a razor blade left in the pyramid of Cheops will magically become sharp again and that plants can sense the death of nearby snails, among other made up or poorly investigated crap.  Now here the idea is back, complete with all the controversy.  Wikipedia has even stepped into the fray, moving an entry on "plant neurobiology" in 2012 into an entry regarding "plant perception."  

I don't know where you stand on the subject, and keep in mind that there have been no discoveries of neurons or a brain in plants, but in the future, you might be a little nervous about missing a watering of your potted plants.  You never know when they might retaliate by psychically strangulating us in our sleep.