Alas, Sweet Marianne

With a heavy heart, ProfessorRoush feels that he must give a full accounting of 'Marianne', sweet wonderful 'Marianne', who fills me each Spring with such deep hope and yet year after year leaves me with bitter disappointment.  Soiled 'Marianne', too delicate and too beautiful for the harsh realities of gardening in the Flint Hills.

'Marianne', full view, 2015

I planted Paul Barden's 'Marianne' in 2010, and despite some early setbacks from the ravages of wind and animals, she reached her mature 6'X6' frame by 2013.  She remains at that size for me, without the need for pruning or protection of any kind.  This is a gorgeous, voluptuous untouched bush, and yet she manages not to sprawl over her neighbors and, with proper attention, a little nip and tuck here and there, I think she would make a perfect shrub rose.  She is completely disease resistant and cane hardy here in my garden.  She also never suckers, a most impressive feat considering that her 'Duchesse de Montebello' mother suckers everywhere.  A truly trouble-free rose.

Each Spring, she fills those hardy canes with buds, fantastically obese creamy buds, which occasionally open into the most beautiful apricot brushed flowers any rose nut could desire. As the buds form, my heart swells, ready to explode with the first flush of bloom from this rose.  But each May, her bloom coincides with our "rainy" season, the humid days and damp grounds of mid-Spring, and the delicate petals of those beautiful buds ball up and wither, or the petal edges turn brown and shrivel, or the deep copper tones fade away to sepia.  With the damage to the flowers, the spectacular scent also seems to wane, refusing to fill my nostrils with the nectars I need.  You can see what I mean here, at the right, the nearly perfect flower in the center, but the buds around it all beginning to show a little staining, a little bedraggling of the edges.

About one bloom in ten or perhaps twenty opens to full glory for me.  The bush always makes a fine conglomerated display from 20 feet away, but appears a hopeless mess up close.  Even the top photo of this blog shows some damage, almost perfect, but a little frazzled.  I'm disappointed again and again by her easily damaged nature.  She also forms no hips to otherwise save the display for another season.  Most often, the fully opened blooms look like the examples at the left, sometimes beautiful, but never quite good enough to show to highfaluting visitors.  Don't get me wrong, 'Marianne' is not a bad rose, she is just not right for a Flint Hills climate.  In another setting, where her bloom period would coincide with a hotter, drier season, I think she could bowl over a platoon of gardeners and leave them breathless in the grass.  Here, in rough and rowdy Kansas, she is just too delicate and refined.  I will never shovel-prune her, but I suspect I will remain ever disappointed, ever waiting for her perfect year.

2015 EMG Garden Tour

The 2015 Riley County Extension Master Gardener's Manhattan Garden Tour (27th Annual) came and passed last Sunday, and I believe it was the best ever.  Today, we learned that it was, in fact, the most attended ever.  For a small band of gardeners and a small city in the middle of the country, Manhattan gardeners did themselves proud.  ProfessorRoush could be slightly biased, however, because one of the gardens on the tour was that of a friend.  Of likely greater consequence in my bias, however, is my "status" as the tour day roving photographer for the Master Gardeners.

With a relatively new Nikon camera, I captured over 600 pictures in the six tour gardens in 3 hours, not including over 250  additional photos of the gardens last Thursday on the "pretour."   These, I have culled down to about 600 photos that were in reasonable focus, of decent composition, and pretty cool.  For instance, I hope the painted pine cones above captured your attention as surely as they did mine.  They were a table accent in one of the gardens and a fine accent at that.  The fabulous deep red lilies against the white fence in another garden provided another bright spot of color.  Make sure you click on the photos to see them a bit larger.

Due to various and sundry Federal regulations, the vast mass of which I'm completely unaware and likely violate to some degree or another on a daily basis, I can't show you any photographs of people on the tour or I'll violate HIPPA or FIRPA or one of the OTHER-PAs.   I can, however, show you these two ingenious "pot people", Clay, and Terra.  Near them; in timeout, the gardener had placed their daughter, Mary Jane.  Get it?  Timeout?  Mary Jane?  How's that for garden creativity?  I sense these homeowners may have some history within the 70's as former hippies.

The same gardeners with the pot people also had a wonderful butterfly garden, where I captured these two beauties feeding on the milkweed.  Here lives a gardener that truly practices what she preaches.

On the garden pretour, near the end as dusk was falling and a storm cloud was rolling in, the night lighting and landscaping around this pondless water feature turned the whole area into magic.  I could have spent hours taking photos from every angle at this garden.












As a gardening voyeur, ProfessorRoush is mad about plant combinations, and several of the gardeners could teach lessons in style.  One standout is the grouping around this angelic statue; blue spruce, Japanese Maple, variegated Fallopia japonica, and yellow-tipped arborvitae, an almost flowerless garden with lots of color, restful and serene.  The same gardener had the spot of various hostas accented by a green globe seen at the left, below.  A green paradise in a single photo!


















Another combination I appreciated was the soft gray foliageand pink daisy combination from a second garden:















ProfessorRoush does not get excited over heuchera as a general rule.  I've lost several varieties to sun-burn in my  own shadeless garden, but I could not ignore the beauty of the dappled sunlight on this specimen heuchera.  What a sight!






 I'd love to show you the whole photo set, all 600+ of them.  They might not appeal to your everyday crowd at a NASCAR race, but I suspect that many of you would enjoy seeing them.  I'll leave you, however, drooling at the prospect of another few hundred fabulous photos and contemplating this simple photo of a statue that left me determined to locate a copy of my very own.  This little reading child would look great in my reading-themed garden.  And if I  can't find a copy, well, do you think this gardener would notice its replacement by a cement pig with wings or a nice stone rabbit?

Nice & Naughty Knautia

Knautia macedonia

Occasionally, one has a nice plant that does well in your garden but is overlooked by many gardeners.  Such plants often serve the triple purposes of a conversation piece, an educational opportunity, and a bragging item.  Such is the place occupied by Knautia macedonia in my garden.  I've grown it for years in my front landscape, or rather, it has grown itself; self-seeding, carefree, drought-resistant, and pest-free.  I planted it, it grew, it spread, and I simply enjoy it and remove the dead stems each Spring.  It has survived years of neglect, drought, and, this year, an almost record amount of rain.  Frankly, although sometimes I have to point it out to visitors, I wouldn't attempt a garden in the Midwest without it, even though the common name of the genus, "widow's flower" gives me a bit of pause.

I learned of Knautia macedonia years ago from Lauren Springer Ogden's first book, The Undaunted Garden.  Mrs. Ogden had a section at the end of the book highlighting, if memory serves, about 50 plants that were well adapted to her arid eastern border of the Rockies.  Knautia macedonia was one of those and I remembered her description when I saw it for sale at a local nursery.  The photos here, I believe, represent the original species, although I think it used to be more scarlet than it seems to be now.  Or perhaps I was just younger and the colors were correspondingly brighter.   At one time, I also grew K. macedonia 'Mars Midget' in the same area.  'Mars Midget' is a shorter cultivar with this overall color, but with whiter stamens.  I don't know if it survived, or perhaps interbred with the species to give me a bit of a darker red hue.  There is another commercial selection available, 'Thunder and Lightning', but it doesn't appeal to me because it is one of those modern monstrosities of plant selection with variegated leaves combined with a more puke-purple flower.  Yuck.

Knautia grows on the northeast side of my front border, at the feet of bright red Rugosa hybrid 'Hunter' as you can see above, and it blooms for most of the summer before dying back to a reliable perennial base.   The smaller flowers in the photo above are all K. macedonia, the brighter red larger flowers are 'Hunter', and the mauve-red blobs at the left of the photo are 'Kansas' peonies that are past their prime.  A closer photo of the Knautia macedonia mishmash is shown here at the left.  The plants are relatively short, but the flower stems rise high above the border and sprawl carefree around all their neighbors.  Gardeners' who like Knautia must be willing to tolerate a moderately disheveled but predominately pretty lass who is a little loose with her limbs and who is prone to procreate at random places throughout the garden.  ProfessorRoush most definitely falls into that class of gardener.  Also self-seeding and equally flirtatious, but not yet blooming in the same area, is my bright red, square-stemmed  'Jacob Cline' Monarda that will later add more bright red to this scene sometime during the second flush of 'Hunter'.   Red without end, amen.
 

Strong Survivor

Let us talk now of courage and survival in the face of adversity.  No, I am not even remotely referring to the trials faced by reality tv stars, nor to that of politicians who are in constant need of help to remove their feet from their mouths or other orifices despite their coincidental fortunes donated by special interests.  Let us talk now of 'Survivor', a rose that has earned a place in my garden by sheer tenacity and determination.

'Survivor', also known as 75659-5015, is a gangly, tough, thorny shrub rose of a fabulous, deep red, cluster-flowered semi-double once-blooming form.  If I haven't given you enough adjectives to describe her, let me add she is scentless, resistant to blackspot, has dark-green semi-glossy foliage, forms hips, and occasionally suckers,  She grows to about 4 feet tall with supple canes that sprawl randomly about.  She is also completely cane-hardy here and is said to survive in Zone 3b and lower.  Although I noted she suckers, she will not massively invade a bed like a Gallica rose will, and she is easy to keep under control.

'Survivor' is, without a doubt, the most aptly named rose that I grow.  I grew her first in a garden in town, then moved her via a sucker to my prairie before there was a home on the land.  I later moved a sucker to the second rose bed that I created where she survived for a decade shaded on one side by taller 'Seven Sisters', and another by 'Maidens Blush', with towering 'William Baffin' at her back.  Finally, two years ago, I took pity on her and moved the majority of the bush onto a more sunny spot next to 'Madame Hardy' (recent photo at right) and also placed two suckers into another bed.  Every single one of those roses are still growing, including the lonely cane of shining red flowers placed amidst the prairie grasses where it gets burned almost every year, and, as I noticed last week, a resprout of the rose beneath 'Seven Sisters' (below left).  

'Survivor's parentage is a partial mystery.  I obtained her in the 90's from Robert Osborne's Corn Hill Nursery, where she was originally introduced in 1987. Osborne obtained her labeled as 75659-5015, believed her to be bred by Dr. Svejda and part of, but not introduced with, the Explorer program.  He described the parentage as 'Old Blush' x 'Fru Dagmar Hastrup'.   That origin has been called into question and denied by Dr. Svejda.  'Survivor' is still listed in Modern Roses 12 as bred by Dr. Svejda, but on helpmefind.com/rose as bred by Henry Marshall in 1975.  It is likely that she was a sister of Morden #71659501, a cross of 'Adelaide Hoodless' and a seedling descended from 'Crimson Glory', 'Donald Prior', and R. arkansana.  Looking at her, I expect that the latter parentage is correct, because she has many characteristics in common with 'Adelaide Hoodless', although 'Survivor' is much more resistant to blackspot in my garden than Adelaide Hoodless, and she is of less dense form.

Regardless of how she is considered, as an orphan, a cast-off, or an unintended release, 'Survivor' has earned her name and her place on my Kansas prairie.