Persicaria polymorpha

Now that's a mouth full of Latin, isn't it?  I believe that you'll find that if you say it fast three times, Persicaria polymorpha is easier, however, than repeating "giant fleeceflower" quickly three times.  This beast of a plant lives in my front landscaping, near the walkway, and it always causes a scene when a visiting gardener sees it in flower.

I discovered it myself several years ago while on a gardening tour in the neighboring county where it was shining brightly and stealing the show at a friend's garden.  I immediately left the tour and proceeded to my then-favorite garden center to ask if she had any.  Thankfully, she had one small plant left over from a custom order for a landscape job and I took it home and planted into a nice spot.  One thing to admire about Persicaria;  a small plant will flower and one year later it will be spectacular!


I called my giant fleeceflower a beast, but, other than its size, it is an impeccably well-restrained garden citizen.  Actually a strain of knotweed, Persicaria polymorpha might flop on some more diminutive neighbors after a heavy rain, but it will soon stand itself back up (mostly) as it dries.  It helps if you don't ever fertilize giant fleeceflower, starving its growth to stay within the constraints of its genes.  It doesn't spread by runners or self-seed, as far as I can determine.  I've recently divided my now 5 foot diameter clump to start others in my garden and it is as simple as dividing a daylily.  Well, perhaps similar to dividing a slightly tough-rooted daylily.    I'd certainly recommend putting it among shrubs or perennials.  Standing alone in a lawn, Persicaria will just look like a big weed you should have removed.


Persicaria polymorpha was formerly known as Polygonum polymorphum.  Because of its good behavior, some speculate that it is a hybrid, rather than a species.  It grows about 5 foot tall, takes all the drought and sun you can throw at it, and is hardy in the worst of my Zone 5 winters.  A perennial, all the care that giant fleeceflower needs is to cut it to the ground each spring.  No pests seem to bother it, it blooms all summer long from early June through mid-September, and those creamy white panicles don't brown and enter an ugly phase.  Even in my hot Kansas sun, I might call them a little "toasted", but they primarily stay creamy for a long time and then turn reddish-brown in fall.  I leave them on all winter to provide some structure in the snows.

Dung Beetles

Ladies and Gentlemen, gardening friends of all ages, I bring you today, for the first time to be witnessed by many of your naive eyes, that most industrious of insects, creatures without which the world would be in a sh**storm of trouble.  I bring you the lowly dung beetle.

Look how busy Frick and Frack dung beetle are.  They had formed this almost perfectly round ball of cow or donkey manure (likely since those are the major source of poop in the area) and they were rolling it across a 15 foot asphalt road in the hot afternoon sun.  Why they didn't build their home on the same side of the street as the poop, I'll never know.  I'd love to tell you what species these guys are, but since there are several subfamilies of dung beetles in the superfamily Scarabaeoidea, and more than 5000 species in the subfamily Scarabaeinae alone, I don't have a chance of even coming close.  For some fun dung beetle facts, consider the following:

a)  There are three groups of dung beetles;  rollers (like the ones above), tunnelers (who bury the dung wherever they find it, and dwellers (who just live in the manure).
b)  A dung beetle can bury dung 250 times its weight in a single night.
c)  Dung beetles are the only insect known to navigate using the Milky Way.
 d) It is likely that this ball of crap I photographed is intended as a brooding ball; two beetles, one male and one female, stay around the brooding ball during rolling, the male doing all of the work (as usual).  When they find a spot with soft soil, they bury the ball and then mate underground so the female can lay eggs in it.
e)  The successful introduction of 23 species into Australia resulted in improvement and fertility of Australian cattle pastures and reduction in the population of bush flies by 90%.
f)  If the idea of these things grosses you out, try and remember that the Egyptians worshipped the scarab, a dung beetle.

Hey, waste collection is a lousy job, but somebody has to do it.

Here and Gone

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of hosting a tour group of gardeners from Omaha for a brief period.  They scheduled a tour of the KSU Gardens through the Chamber of Commerce and had asked to visit a couple of "large gardens" while they were in Manhattan.  So a little over a hundred gardeners suddenly descended on my garden this past Saturday evening. 

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

They seemed to enjoy the visit.  Sadly, the roses were all almost gone, with 'American Pillar', at left, bringing up the rear as usual.  Some Asiatic lilies were beginning to bloom and some late, frozen over roses were blooming out of turn.   I heard "beautiful" a number of times and I answered questions as fast as I could.

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

When a group of unsuspecting gardeners encounters a rose zealot in his natural environment, they risk an epidemic of glazed eyes and aural exhaustion.  That's me, holding forth on the right of this photo.









I was most often questioned about this plant, a giant fleeceflower or knotweed (Persicaria polymorpha), slightly drowned by the last rain storm, but still a spectacle in the garden.  You can read more about Persicaria in a blog later this week.

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

Bella, our not-so-new-now-puppy, was excited by the visit and all the new people she got to meet.  That right ear seems to flop up whenever she gets bouncy.  But doesn't she stand with pretty lines?

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

The tour group was here, and then just as quickly gone on their buses, but they left behind a nice gift certificate that I used to purchase two new daylilies and a hollyhock.

Photo courtesy of Ben Brake

The garden is quiet again.  All the photographs here, except for the Persicaria, were taken by a family friend, Ben Brake, whom Mrs. ProfessorRoush imposed on at the last minute.  Ben can be seen with a camera at every K-State sports function toting a Nikon camera that makes me salivate and he's pretty good at it, don't you agree?  Photos of people enjoying the garden are always so nice to view again after the frenzy is over.

 

Intuited Love

'Red Intuition'

This, friends, is the rose that ProfessorRoush has been waiting for.  I don't recall where or how, but somewhere last year, I came across a picture of 'Red Intuition'.  Given my fondness for striped roses, it was inevitable that this one would eventually grow in my garden.  I bided my time over the past year, staring daily at the post-it note above my phone with only its name listed in my poor penmanship.  And this Winter, while ordering roses for the current season, I obtained it from Palatine roses in Canada.  

And ever since then, I've been waiting still.  The bare-root, grafted rose came on time, went straight into the ground, and began to leaf out.  I had a brief scare with our very late April frost, which knocked it back a bit even though I had covered it up overnight, but it shook off the frostbite and eventually sent up a bud.  A bud that opened slightly 3 days ago, as you can see below at the left, and then proceeded to tease me petal by petal until today, in the late afternoon, when it was finally fully open (as above) and met all my expectations.

'Red Intuition' is recorded as discovered in France by Guy Delbard in 1999, and introduced in 2004. It is patented in the US as DELstriro.  The rose is described as red, with dark red streaks, stripes, and flecks, and double with 31 to 39 petals (it's also listed as having 17-25 petals on the same page of helpmefind.com).  It's a large bloom of about 4.5" diameter, borne solitary or in small clusters.  The bush is described as tall, nearly thornless, and with semi-glossy foliage.  'Red Intuition' is a sport of 'Belle Rouge' (or DElego), a 1996 Hybrid Tea by Delbard.

'Red Intuition' is certainly a beautiful rose all on its own, but my interest in it goes far deeper than its stripes.  There is a "lost" Griffith Buck Hybrid Tea rose that Dr. Buck patented and named 'Red Sparkler' and I'm playing a hunch.  I've only seen one really poor picture of it (the same picture is reproduced everywhere), and to my eyes it was the splitting image of 'Red Intuition'.  Official notes indicate that 'Red Sparkler' was the same 4.5" diameter size as 'Red Intuition' and had a similar number of petals, but it differs in that it is listed as a velvety red rose with pink AND WHITE stripes so maybe I'm all wet.   My concern is that 'Red Intuition' has leathery, semi-glossy foliage, while 'Belle Rouge' reportedly has glossy foliage, so if 'Red Intution' is a sport of the latter, it was a double sport, both in foliage and in flower color. That would be darned unusual.  Add that to a rumor that Dr. Buck is rumored to have sent bud wood of 'Red Sparkler' to Europe at one time and maybe you can understand why I'm going to get a plant of 'Belle Rouge' and grow it right next to my 'Red Intuition' to compare the foliage.  Just in case the lost rose isn't really lost.