Glorius Sunrise

There are mornings, beyond understanding, when we wake up and the world that has lately seemed small and brown and drab is suddenly made golden and magical by the sunlight.  As I went outside to do the morning thing with the dog, what greated me on a recent morning was this sight at sunrise:

Sometimes the gray, late Fall mornings just steal the life from the morning here on the Flint Hills, but other times, most times, the sun turns haze to a prism and brings the prairie alive.  Yes, the picture shows this area of the garden needs some ornamental grasses moved and a better wall to block garden from prairie. And yes, the milk jugs protecting the new rose bands distract from the picture. And, yes, my Marsala Aga statue in the center background looks lonely and small on the greater scale of the garden. But the morning dew has picked up the red tones from the grass and the few evergreens in this view are holding on bravely.  And I'm happy that the prairie has chosen to greet me with a smile this morning.

I've often said that Manhattan has the most sunny days of anywhere I've ever lived and somewhere, sometime, I always remember that I heard the number quoted as 330 sunny days a year.  However, I confess that I can't find anything near the 330 day figure on an Internet search.  According to a USNews report of best places to retire, Manhattan only has 36% (131) sunny days/year.  Okay, that site may not be accurate anyway, particularly since it states that the OZ museum is in nearby Lincoln (it's in nearby Wamego, 20 minutes away, and the closest Lincoln is Lincoln, Nebraska at 2.5 hours away).  Manhattan is listed as having 127 sunny days/year on an astronomy site, 145 clear days on a Hi-Tunnel Gardening site (126 additional days that are partly cloudy), and 219, 218, or 214 sunny days as listed on various pages of bestplaces.net and finally 218 days on realestate.yahoo.

Who's to say who is right?  The low figures seem to count only cloudless days, and since our clouds here are often small and intermittent, the 271 day total listed on the Hi-Tunnel site as having some sun may be closer to our real figure.  I don't know where the real answer lies except to say that there seems to be plenty of sunlight here to feed the full value of life and I'm thankful for what each day brings.

Chicken Fetish

One of the definitions of "fetish" by The Free Online Dictionary is an "object of unreasonably excessive attention or reverence."  If that's the case, then I must admit that along with my collection of cement rabbits in my garden, I also have a certain small fetish for artificial roosters in my garden.  Oh dear, Sigmund Freud, what exactly might that say about my psyche?

The rooster at the right watches over my lavenders right outside the back door.  This is a straight western exposure, lots of sun and wind and cold during the winter.  Made of cast iron, I was pretty sure when I purchased it from the garden store that it would withstand the prevailing Kansas winds in this exposed site, and so far, it has "withstood" the worst that the prairie can throw at it.

The second rooster, at the left, is a nice addition to my front landscaping, even placed as it is overshadowed in the summer by the bright red bee's balm (Monarda didyma 'Jacob Cline') surrounding it.  It is also a perfect example of why "permanent" garden ornaments shouldn't be formed from terra cotta.  It slowly decays a little bit each year, but at the same time, I so love the patina and the color of the thing that I can't bare to provide it any shellac or coating.  I assume that someday, after another long winter or two, it will become just another an unrecognizable crumbling clay pillar, but till then it stays vigilant for me to scratch out  any insects that try to invade the house from the front. 

There's just no accounting for garden taste now, is there?  Wait till I finally write about my rabbits!

Fall Foliaged Roses

'Morden Centennial' Hips

There is no doubt that I miss the roses when winter hits and the final buds shrivel as they decide it just isn't worth it to continue struggling through the cool days and cold nights.  I've been watching my garden carefully for the opening of those last buds, grabbing them greedily each night for a quick trip inside so we can still enjoy their beauty before Winter grips the Flint Hills.

Rosa 'Purple Pavement'

Roses, in the past and currently, have not been great contributors to the fall and winter garden.  Yes, there are a number of roses that provide some nice red or orange hips that contrast nicely against the snow.  There are also a few roses whose leaves, given the right fall conditions, turn a nice yellow or yellow-orange before they finally tumble down.  In my garden, 'Purple Pavement' is one of those roses that gives me a nice yellow before the leaves drop and sometimes it might even leave a nice juicy red hip or two around.  And gardeners in-the-know have been aware for a number of years that a few roses, such as 'Therese Bugnet', have a nice purple-red hue to their winter canes that even rivals that of the red-twig dogwood.

  

'Therese Bugnet' winter canes

The future, though, is bright.  Paul Barden has been talking about breeding new bright-red fall foliage into roses on his website and his blog here and here.  He's reporting good results from crosses of 'Therese Bugnet', R. foliolosa, R. solieana, and R. arkansana, among others.  He doesn't know what all the blooms look like yet, but with further breeding, I'm sure he'll end up with some beautiful four-season roses.  I didn't purloin the pictures, so you'll have to follow the links to get there, but make sure you take a look at them and while you do it, dream of an improved Knockout with bright red fall foliage to rival a burning bush.  Now if Mr. Barden can just improve the yucky red-orange color of Knockout in the process!  

P.S.  Yes, I've been a little slow posting the last 10 days.  Alas, preparing lectures and allowing for the twists and turns of life sometimes interfere with my hobbies.  Readers, please keep checking back when I get lax.

Rose Readings

I've been long in the midst of a wonderful book combining some of my favorite roses and their histories.  Titled Pink Ladies and Crimson Gents, by Molly and Don Glentzer, this one is a must read for any rosarian who loves old garden roses.  Molly is the writer and Don is the photographer and they've collaborated on a unique project.

This colorful text looks at fifty different roses, most of which are old garden roses but some of which fall into the modern category.  For each rose, there's a delicious full-page photograph of a perfect specimen of that rose, taken against a pure white background to be free of distractions.  No insect damage or blackspot on these roses! You can almost feel the roses on each page and sometimes you think that the briefest wisp of old rose scent has passed by on a draft as you read.  'Mme Eugene E. Marlitt', 'Mme Isaac Pereire', and 'Lady Banks', 'Sir Thomas Lipton', 'Napoleon', and 'Don Juan', all the cultivar-honored names of history are there, along with the individual stories of both the breeder of the particular rose and a short biography of the honoree.  

It's a highly readable book, and in a perfect format, one of those books that I refer to as "throne reading."  You know, those books that can be read a page or two at a time while you are otherwise briefly occupied in a sitting position on a white porcelain chair and biding your time with necessary physiologic pursuits.  It takes me a while to get through a book in that manner, two pages at a time, but I'm pretty sure that 'Gertrude Jekyll' and 'Graham Thomas' don't mind, as long as I get to their stories at last.

Old Rose fanatics will appreciate that the authors acknowledge that many of the blooms were taken at G. Michael Shoup's Antique Rose Emporium in Texas and at Vintage Gardens.  I myself grow several roses from the former, having enjoyed its Brenham, Texas establishment once as a sort of side-trip pilgrimage during a visit to friends.

Time Change Blues

If there is any motivation that is most likely to change a mellow-natured gardener into a raving anti-government libertarian, I believe that it is the semi-annual ritual we go through here in America involving the move to and from Daylight Savings Time.  No greater proof exists that government has intruded into our private lives than its audacity to mess with our internal biological clocks.

As lamented by other gardeners this week on several garden forums, most perturbing of all is that I no longer get to see my garden in the daylight during the weekdays since it is suddenly dark as I come home from work. My relaxing evening stroll around the garden is gone and my quick jaunts outside to photograph the last rose or the last daylily are over. I'm entering the long winter's depression of not being able to see anything living or growing for days at a time.

The whole history of Daylight Savings Time (called "summer time" in Britannia) is quite interesting and entire books have been written about it. Whether you want to blame Benjamin Franklin or George Vernon Hudson (an entomologist who liked the increased evening light for collecting bugs) or Robert Pierce (a Liberal Member of Parliament who wrote the first legislation), or your respective meddling government divisions, most of what you think you know about Daylight Savings Time is either not true or is debatable. It doesn't routinely save energy, in fact in warmer areas it increases energy use because air conditioners are used more when the evenings are longer. It reduces late afternoon traffic accidents, but causes difficulties and increases costs for business with travel, timekeeping, and record-keeping efforts. It primarily benefits retailers and sports venues, at the expense of late night entertainments and farmers. And we have no idea what fiddling with our biological clocks is doing to our health. I'm sure that if I ran enough statistics, I could prove that DST causes cancer.

 

Benjamin Franklin, by the way, shouldn't be blamed. His 1784 suggestion to Parisians to rise earlier and use less candles (complete with suggestions for governmental taxes on window shutters and candle rationing) was a satire. Somewhere a number of governments haven't gotten the joke.

Please, I beg of the vast uncaring federal bureaucracy, either send us to DST year-round or at least leave us alone on Standard Time so we can adjust once and for all. I am a simple native farmboy, raised to open my eyes with the sunrise and close them at sunset, and I have never adapted well to sudden changes in my wake-sleep schedule.  My failure to roll with the clock is arguably worse than for others because I was raised and spent my first 20 years in one of the small areas of the continental United States (Indiana) that never changed time until the bureaucrats messed with our biorhythms further in 2006. When I take trips, like my recent trip to the two hour-delayed time zone known as the West Coast, I've always found myself waking at around 4 a.m., raring to go while the rest of the city is still long asleep.  And then when the nightclubs or late evening business meetings beckon, I'm sure to be semi-somnambulate, or else actually dozing quietly between the rented hotel sheets, while the parties rage on.  I can only sleep in when I travel east.

My semiannual aggravation with DST is getting worse, not better, as I get older.  I just know I'm going to end up being one of those old farts who walk into the living room in my pajamas around 8:00 p.m. during the wife's Christmas party and proceed to tell everyone goodnight. Of course, as I age further and I cycle through DST a few more times, the guests will be lucky if I remember the pajamas.

Secret Assassins

The website "Garden Adventures" runs a weekly creature feature that I learned about from Toni's Signature Gardens blog, so I just had to add a plug for my own candidate for Little Shop of Horrors.  The picture below was taken last weekend while I was on my Bluebird Trail, cleaning out the boxes for winter.  Near one of the nestboxes, sitting on the top rail of an iron fence and presumably soaking up the sunshine to warm it and start the day, was this 1.5 inch long monster with an iridescent back and a central ridge of spikes.  Since I'm not one to collect insects, nor to touch them without provocation, I hoped that the picture would suffice for an entomologist to identify it.

This spiked creature was subsequently identified for me by a KSU Entomologist as a Wheel Bug, Arilus cristatus, the only member of its genus and a formidable predator of soft-bellied insects, particularly caterpillars and pests such as Japanese beetles.  It is considered a beneficial insect, although it has also been noted to feed on other beneficials such as honey bees and lady beetles. The larger females kill and eat the male after copulation, similar to the fabled Black Widow spider.  One of the largest terrestial North American bugs, it pierces its prey with a sharp beak and injects saliva to dissolve the soft tissues from the inside-out, first immobilizing and then killing the victim in less than 30 seconds. My reticence to touch it was wise as I've learned it can inflict a very painful bite on people, described as being worse than a hornet's sting, and it will create a wound that may take months to heal and often leaves a scar.  For such a vicious bug, one web site noted that in captivity, it quickly becomes accustomed to being handled, but I, for one, am not contemplating keeping one as a pet.

Do you ever wonder, with such a killer bite, why this bug needs all the scary appendages, the ridged back spine and the spikes on top and in the middle?  This thing is right out of the movie Aliens, only needing a wee Sigorney Weaver to make it fit the part.  Does an insect predator really need to advertise that it is a predator?  Isn't that counterproductive to obtaining dinner?  I would have predicted that it would make more sense for predators to look like lambs and lambs to look scary, but I guess it doesn't work that way in the bug world.

October Glory Survives!

While the fall colors have generally been disappointing in the Flint Hills this year, I had held out hope for my October Glory Maple (it was so spectacular last year!).  Alas, it too is lacking some of its normal vibrant red tones in this long warm fall, although the leaves still look pretty darned good against the clear Kansas sky.

I should be happy though, about this tree's continued survival amidst my rocky soil and the past summer's drought.  I planted this beauty in 2007, and as you can see from the pictures at planting time, chiseling out a hole from the loose flint took some effort and resulted in a pile of flint chips that rivaled the tree's root ball.  I wanted it in the front yard, high near the house, so it could be a flaming beacon seen for a long way away when fall comes, but the soil on the top of these hills is a bit sparse.  The local Extension Horticulture agent and I have a bet as to the ultimate survival of the tree, but so far, it seems to be holding its own, having grown about a foot in each of its three years in my yard.

Acer rubrum 'October Glory' is a rapid growing Red Maple cultivar with one of the best fall displays of red leaves in commonly available cultivars.  As advertised, it holds its leaves longer than most other trees, and as I look now across my yard, it is currently the only tree out there with a full compliment of leaves, except for the dull brown Bald Cypress and my tiny Scarlet Oak out back.  It grows with a nice globular form, ultimately stretching 40'-50' high with a 25'-35' spread.  Although it is said to prefer slightly acid and moist conditions, it seems to grow fine on my alkaline, dry prairie. 

One never thinks of a maple tree as being lethal, but as a veterinarian I was interested during my research to learn that the dead or wilted leaves of red maple are extremely toxic to horses, with ingestion of three pounds considered lethal.  I don't treat horses anymore, but I'd better file that one away and make sure I don't put my compost pile near the north fence lines where my neighbor pastures horses. 

Anti-Knockout Cultivarist

Okay, I'm just going to say it.  Somebody's got to say it first, so I will.

I absolutely hate the Knockout series of roses.

Well, okay, I don't absolutely hate them, I just regret their existence on the earth. And I don't really hate Knockout's existence, per se, I simply resent what they've done to the marketplace for roses and to local landscaping in general.  Oh fine, I do hate them. Be honest with me, won't you?  Don't we all?

Too much of a good thing is almost never a good thing.  The American electorate recognizes the fact and rarely gives either political party full control of  Executive and Legislative branches at once.  If they do, they quickly realize the error and correct it, as we saw yesterday on Election Day 2010. 

So it is with Knockout and its cousins Double Red Knockout, Pink Knockout, Double Pink Knockout, Sunny Knockout, Rainbow Knockout, Blushing Knockout and whatever other Knockout deformities there are to come. Bill Radler is a genius as a rose breeder, and he may indeed have, as one website said, "single-handedly brought rose genetics from the 20th Century into the 21st Century," but he also may be partially culpable in the recent bankruptcy of a number of large rose-breeding companies. Don't get me wrong, Knockout is a great rose. It is certainly disease-free, hardy, self-cleaning, and it blooms and blooms and blooms. It's just that in its original form,"red" Knockout is really a kind of a dark, dark pink, not anywhere near crimson red, and so I find the color clashes against my preference for bright, clear colors in my landscaping. It also has no fragrance and thus, to a real rosarian, lacks a soul. Unfortunately, Knockout is becoming so ubiquitous around town that it is about to join my common, oft-derided trio of Stella de Oro, gold-tipped junipers, and purple barberries as the fourth member of an uninspiring contemptuous landscaping quartet planted everywhere we turn our gaze. What is wrong with professional landscapers that leads them back repeatedly to those four plants?  It is so bad around here that I recently noticed that the little traffic dividers and parking lot planters in the newest commercial development were reddish-pink Knockout's as backdrops to the lower-grown dayglow-orange Stella de Oro's as far as the eye could see. Yuck. I turned my Jeep away and hightailed it to more soothing vistas.

I didn't see the tsunami coming until this year, when every local box store had nothing for sale but own-root Knockout's of various types and when the local independent nurseries were reduced to selling Knockout alongside the various normal smattering of Hybrid Teas and Grandifloras. And although all these commercial establishments were just in competition with each other to sell the most Knockout's, and although it seemed like many of them had a lot of Knockout's left over on sale at the end of the season, I've got an uneasy feeling about where the trend is leading for next year.

I'm already on the fringe of the rose gardening world with my preference for shrub and Old Garden roses, so I really detest being shoved farther towards eccentricity as rose fashions change. I can't help it: the graceful ladies that I love have better scent and form and even though they're a little more diseased and older than the newer Knockout harem, and although they don't clean up after themselves but need me to help them get rid of their spent old parts, I loved them first and always will.  Yes, I do grow a couple of the Knockouts; the bright red Double Knockout and the Double Pink Knockout, and I have another Radler rose, Carefree Sunshine that somehow, inexplicably, isn't listed as one of the Knockouts.  But all three of them are just "there" for me, nothing special, needing no care, no spraying, no pruning; just plain boring. I need the variety of bloom form, I need the heavenly scents of myrrh, musk and lemon, I miss the need for my expert care by my Old Rose gals.

In a well-discussed GardenWeb thread entitled "In Defense of Knockout," one contributor wrote "Some of you are just snobs.  Admit it."  Okay, I will.  I'll go even further. I'm declaring a class war against the new vanguard of Knockout's.  Go ahead, feel free to call me a "cultivarist," a term I just coined to describe those who are bigoted against certain bourgeois rose cultivars.  Or better yet, join me.  We can wear the label proudly as we fondle and sniff our 'Madame Hardy' blooms.

The White Poppy

Two summers back, I came across quite a surprise in the midst of the tall prairie grass.  I suppose I'm pretty decent at keeping my eyes open for the unusual any more when I walk on the land I now know so well, but I was unprepared for the sudden appearance of a stunning plant I'd never seen here; Argemone polyanthemos, perhaps better known as the "prickly poppy", or "crested pricklypoppy"

This beautiful, delicate, perfect white tissue paper of a flower was growing on my prairie in a single spot down on the slope leading to my pond, and in about as dry and lousy soil as I have. A closeup of the bloom demonstrates both the delicate nature of the petals and the contrast of the golden stamens and red-tipped stigma of the flower, but it really doesn't do the flower justice compared to the real-life experience. The blue-green spiny leaves make the plant almost as attractive as the blossoms, although the white really pops out from the foliage around it.  I've seen the plant before in Colorado, where it seems more prevalent, but never seen it here even though it is listed as a Kansas wildflower. It didn't pop back up the following year (it is an annual) that I could find, so now I'm wondering if it was a fluke or whether I'll see it again.  Because of the long taproot, it is resistant to transplantation and so should be grown from seed where desired.  I'd like to try to save seed and grow it in my garden proper, but I may have to seek seed elsewhere unless I get lucky again.

Argemone polyanthemos may be found blooming on the Tallgrass prairie from June through September, primarily in disturbed areas and along roadsides. References sources state that it may indicate areas that are overgrazed, which I would further take to mean that the plant may have been more plentiful on the prairie in olden days when the praire was less managed and was overrun by massive herds of buffalo. The prickly nature of the stems cause livestock to leave it completely alone and all parts of the plant are said to be poisonous. Even the bright yellow sap is supposed to be irritating to the skin, and was supposedly used by Native Americans to remove warts, but I handled the plant without incidence.

Readers of Garden Musings already know that I'm a sucker for sky-blue plants.  And that I lust after the Himalayan Blue Poppy, Meconopis betonicifolia, which survives about 3 days on average in my Kansas garden (yes, I've tried, even to the extent of putting ice cubes on the ground around it). Now, if someone could just breed Argemone to be sky-blue in color, I might just have a chance to reach Nirvana!

Great Gardener's Wives

Behind every dedicated gardener is a Significant Other who may sometimes complain that the gardener is spending too much time in the garden but who, at other times, secretly hopes that the gardener quits lazing around on the couch and surrenders the remote.  Now that I've referred to my own SO in the requisite politically-correct way, let me be frank: A Sunday or so back, Mrs. ProfessorRoush kicked me out into the garden.

It's true that I've been slow to get back into the garden as the weather cooled down this Fall, but a couple of frenzied days in September seemed sufficient to keep my low-maintenance garden in a condition better than a complete disaster and they allowed me to keep the Winter preparatory chores caught up to my vague gardening chores schedule.  Additionally, since the immediate surrounding lawn of my house is buffalograss, now entering dormancy, and the outer lawn is mowed prairie, also entering dormancy, I have mowed the lawn a grand total of once in all of September.  I have yet to have to mow at all in October, here at the end of the month and it appears, in fact, that I'm done mowing for the year except that I'm still waiting for seedheads in my new wildflower garden to mature before I mow it off. Only then will I stow the mower, add winter stabilizers to the gasoline, and sharpen the blades in preparation for spring.  I've planted the Fall bulbs and I have tied up some of the taller rose canes so that they don't whip themselves to death with winter wind. 

But I suppose that She Who Must Be Obeyed (SWMBO) was perplexed that I wasn't pushing on with a new project such as bulldozing berms into the back yard or constructing a 20X100 foot greenhouse. Since SWMBO doesn't garden herself, she may not easily recognize the remaining symptoms of August gardening depression, that melancholy that hits gardeners when the temperatures soar over 100 and the garden shrivels to brown crepe paper.  Or, perhaps more likely, she just wanted some alone time in her domain of the house proper.  So she used the feeble excuse that I looked pale and needed a little sun and sent me packing with instructions to find something to keep myself busy outdoors.

And, of course, needing little urging beyond a well-timed spousal kick in the pants, I did just that.  I spread some well-rotted alfalfa tea that had been percolating for a week on several roses, divided a couple of daylilies, took pictures of a few late flowers for the blog, watered the compost pile, watered the recently-transplanted irises, cleaned out the bluebird nest boxes on my bluebird trail, took down and cleaned out the purple martin houses, drained two hoses and put them up for winter, and sat down for a minute or two in my gazebo.  That pretty much constituted a full afternoon of garden dawdling.  Well, I guess I also daydreamed a little bit about future garden plans and projects while sitting in the gazebo. On that beautiful October day, the perfect garden seemed yet within my grasp.  Refreshed, I returned indoors alongside the fading sun. Most importantly, SWMBO seemed satisfied with the duration of my exile to the garden and pronounced on my return that I had some color back in my cheeks.

Good marriages are made of many things, but great marriages are made when a gardener's spouse recognizes those moments when the soul of the gardener needs to merge with the soil of the garden. I am lucky to have found my Helen of Gardening, she sufficiently beautiful to launch a thousand garden beds. If puttering in the garden is what it takes to keep Mrs. ProfessorRoush happy, then puttering is the least I can do.

Happy Bluebird Trails

Yes, I'm one of those wild-eyed environmental (WEE) wackos that cares to keep bluebirds from the brink of extinction, and so I annually maintain a "Bluebird Trail" for the purpose of providing proper nest areas for those beautiful creatures.  Former President Jimmy Carter may have his Habitat for Humanity thing going, but I'm much more interested in seeing the bluebirds stay on the prairie.



Eastern Bluebird in my backyard

Bluebirds are in danger of becoming the next Carolina Parakeet or Passenger Pigeon without our help. Their numbers became dangerously low in the 1970's because they are cavity nesters.  Man, in his infinite wisdom, cuts down and destroys all the dead tree stumps that would otherwise provide natural cavities for the bluebirds and they also have competition for the few remaining natural cavities from sparrows (introduced to this country in the 1850's, again as a mistake by Man because He thought sparrows would eat crop insects, not become the nuisance pests they proved to be) .

Bluebirds and I have a special relationship.  My spirits are revived each spring as they arrive to begin nesting in February.  When we were building our current home, more than once I visited the framed but not yet walled-in house to find a bluebird sitting on a windowsill, as if blessing the building of our house with his presence.  Their quick little bounces while flying always lighten my mood.  And if you've read this blog long, you know I'm a sucker for light sky blue colors in the garden in any shape or form.  I've maintained a Bluebird trail, now up to sixteen boxes, for a number of years in my small attempts to aid the bluebird comeback.  This year I fledged 6 bluebird families from the 16 boxes, with 2 more nests of other species found.  My record was 8/12 bluebird nests several years back.





 In fact, I'm so into the Bluebird Trail concept that I've done some investigation into box design and also designed my own.  I started out by purchasing some typical commercial boxes from Walmart, but along the way I've built and tried lots of others. Somewhere out there on the Internet, you can find specific designs for different forms of bluebird nestboxes, from the NABS (North American Bluebird Society) box to the Peterson box and back again. Bluebird enthusiasts can debate front- and side-opening designs, floor designs, hole shapes and diameters, and hole positions till eternity passes.  Placement and construction of the boxes is critical to draw bluebirds and repel other species.  The box should be placed in grasslands away from trees and shrubs and about 4-5 foot high.  It should be away from houses as well to deter sparrows.  Size dimensions for the nest box are critical and the hole is also carefully shaped and sized (Starlings don't use oval holes and sparrows need wider ones than the 1 3/8 X 2 1/4 inch oblong hole now recommended).  Classically, the hole is placed closer to the top of the box, but another researcher has suggested that sparrows are also deterred if the nesting cavity is shallow, with the hole nearer the bottom.  Every year you must clean out and maintain the boxes to prevent disease in early Winter, before the bluebirds return to nest in February.

I've taken the best features from research to create my own simple design, which I must say seems to be remarkably effective on my little patch of prairie. Five of the six bluebird nests I had this year were produced in the six nest boxes that I've built of my own design and the sixth box was simply empty (without a sparrow nest).  The other ten boxes of commercial and other designs had only one bluebird nest among them, but two other nests from other species. At Photobucket, you can download a jpg of the "Roush Bluebird House" construction (page 1) and a diagram of how to cut up the boards (page 2) if you click on the links.  It's cut from standard lumbar widths; cedar is best for durability. It's a similar box to the Peterson box, with a larger bottom and a lower entrance.  I find front-opening boxes to be the easiest to clean.

So please, whatever design you choose, choose to help the Eastern Bluebird. I regret that I will never be able to see a Carolina Parakeet or Ivory-billed Woodpecker and I wasn't even responsible for those extinctions.  I'd like my grandchildren to still be able to enjoy a flash of blue in their gardens.

Late Surprises

I have seen a lot of posts lately on GardenWeb about late-blooming daylilies. There seems to be a relative contest to see who has the latest blooming daylily this year. And I've seen several of my own precious orange garden stalwarts come on and bloom late.  But I never expected, on October 26th, to see a daylily still blooming happily in my Zone5B garden.  

The daylily here is 'Hesperus', which I've never seen listed as a reblooming daylily, but which has certainly gotten mixed up this year and decided that the proper response to a summer drought and intense temperatures was to brighten up the garden one last time before a long winter's nap.

'Hesperus', hybridized by Hans Sass in 1940, happens to be (have been) the first winner of the Stout Silver Medal, in 1950.  The Stout Silver Medal is given in memory of Dr. Arlow Burdette Stout, a director at the New York Botanical Gardens and the father of modern daylily breeding in North America. It is the highest award a cultivar can receive, given only to candidates who have also previously received the Award of Merit and Honorable Mention status from American Hemerocallis Society judges.

'Hesperus' is a very tall daylily at 36 to 48 inches, one of the tallest in my garden, and its large 5 inch wide blossoms certainly provide a focal point. Now, I must admit, that I've never been a real fan of the orangeish daylilies, partially because of how common they are and partially because of the ridiculous ubiquitiousness (what a phrase!) of the garish Stella d' Oro. 'Hesperus', seemingly another nondescript, albeit healthy, yellow-orange daylily just converses along with its neighbors when the other daylilies in the bed are blooming, but, all alone in Autumn, it shouts "Hey, here I am!" and it becomes the most beautiful daylily the gardener has ever seen. Certainly it brightened my heart as I returned back from dark, wet Seattle on Sunday to the bright sunshine of the Flint Hills where the daylily still reigns as king of the summer garden.

Addendum;  Yesterday (10/28/10) Hesperus was beaten in the Late Sweepstakes by 'Happy Returns', which posted a cheery goodbye for me.

Borrowed Thoughts

I've had some readers inquire where I get the ideas for all the blogs. It's true there are slow times for blog ideas and other times when the thoughts tumble out like high mountain streams.  I've found that two infallible areas that stimulate blogs are looking through the many pictures I take in my garden (and my garden photography has increased substantially since I started blogging) and from simply observing and noting what plants look good or what activities I'm doing in the garden in a particular week.  But when I get stuck, picking up a new garden book will always trigger a few new opinions to blog about.

My latest read was found on the trip I just took to Seattle.  Titled The Gin and Tonic Gardener, by Janice Wells, it bore a 2006 publication date, but I don't recall that I'd ever seen it before. Certainly, I chose it because I felt the short, humorous essays of the book would make a light refreshing read on the trip and for no other specific reason.  Sometimes, a gardener likes to just sit and read, okay? 

The Gin and Tonic Gardener was exactly that, an interesting, loosely autobiographical chronicle of a year's worth of gardening efforts by Ms. Wells.  But, like many of the gardening manuscripts I read, here and there were statements that either made me sit up and think "well, there's a new thought", or "there's a beautiful thought," or "really?  That's not what I think."  The latter more critical opinion comes, of course, from the cynical professor side of my nature; that mind-image that is always sitting in a comfortable chair in the den, reading in dim light in a well-worn sweater, and mumbling "Hhhmpfff, Humbug" once in awhile.

I ended up jotting a note for 9 different potential blogs from The Gin and Tonic Gardener, so you can look forward in the future to blogs about purple-leafed honeysuckle ground covers, puttering in the garden, and the concept of waiting for the garden to tell you what to do.  These notes/ideas are written as simple one-line concepts to remind me what random thought crossed my mind, sometimes supplemented by the page number of the book I was reading at the time. I certainly never copy anything from a book without quoting it, but I'm not above expanding on good ideas from other writers or taking off on a tangent from their words.  If I were to paraphrase the famous quote by Sir Issac Newton about "standing on the shoulders of giants," it would be to say "If I have gardened or written about gardening better, it was by picking roses planted by great gardeners past."

Polonaise

I fear I am at risk of writing too many blogs in succession about the wonderful roses of Dr. Griffith Buck, but I have promised the GardenWeb rose community that I'd post soon on 'Polonaise', so I should get that done before I move on down the list of roses that I eventually want to accentuate.

The first question one might have is "why did Dr. Buck name this red rose 'Polonaise'?"  Many of the Buck roses have whimsical or unusual names and I wish I knew more about the selection of this one. The definition of polonaise, according to the Free Online dictionary, is either a) a stately, marchlike Polish dance, primarily a promenade by couples, b) the music for the traditional, triple meter rhythm of this dance, or c)  a woman's dress of the 18th century, having a fitted bodice and draped cutaway skirt, worn over an elaborate underskirt.  Now personally, I'm hoping that Dr. Buck was referring to dance or music which might make a little sense considering the dramatic fall display I just had in my garden, but it's always possible that an old professor might have had other ideas in his head when he named this beautiful rose.

Regardless of the name's origin, 'Polonaise' the rose is a beautiful red hybrid-tea like rose which opens to somewhat blowzy full-double flowers.  I think I actually prefer the fully-open flowers to the barely open, but I tend to like double roses and more old-rose style in the blossoms.  I was quite surprised about 10 days back when I realized that my two year old 'Polonaise', shown at right, was the most blooming rose in my garden at this late time in October.  And it continues to bloom, a rose that has been quiet and parsimonious with its blooms earlier in the summer, but now has decided on its own to dress up the garden.  

'Polonaise' is described on the Iowa State Buck Rose website as a deep pink rose, but I would have said it was closer to bright red in my climate than to pink.  You decide, because the closeup picture is pretty true to color (although these late blooms are a little bit weather-beaten).  I will agree with the official description that it is a very double rose (40-45 petals) with 3.5-4 inch clustered blooms that age lighter.  The rose has a light fragrance and the bush is fairly tolerant to fungal disease as you can judge yourself from the picture taken in a garden (mine) that hasn't been sprayed for fungus all year.  It grows 3.5-4 foot tall and is supposed to bloom continually.  From the way it looks now, in Fall, I think my early-year sparse bloom on this plant was probably just that it's a young bush and had some growing to do before it started blooming.  It also survived a pretty tough Zone 5B winter last year without protection.  What more can one ask from a budding garden stalwart?

Local Bookstores; Neglected Writers

I know that my posting and times have been erratic this week, but dang it, my real life sometimes interferes with keeping a schedule for something that is, when you come right down to it, only a hobby. From the picture at the right, you can probably guess where I spent the past week, so I hope I’m excused.

As a minor garden writer, I’ve long had a small complaint regarding local bookstores that my Seattle trip confirmed and magnified, and so I have to finally get it off my chest. When visiting two national-chain large bookstores (stores that have destroyed most of the local independent booksellers, but I’ll leave them nameless since I’m not into lawsuits), I found that they were stocked, as elsewhere, with the usual encyclopedias of plants and basic how-to gardening manuals and both had a conspicuous absence of the more conversational gardening writing that I adore. For instance, several well-known local Seattle-area writers with a number of books to their credit were absent from both the gardening and local/regional sections of the bookstores. I’m fully aware that Des Kennedy gardens and writes just a little bit north of Seattle and Ann Lovejoy is a fixture of Pacific Northwest garden circles and gardens on Bainbridge Island just across the Sound from Seattle. Of these two eminent writers, Kennedy wasn’t represented at all and I found only the Ann Lovejoy Handbook of Northwest Gardening to represent the latter. Amy Stewart, currently a very popular and prolific garden writer based in Eureka, California, had only a single book on either shelf; in both cases it was her latest text, Wicked Plants. But there were lots of unenjoyable texts on the shelves that were probably originally conceived by some editor who thought the world needed another book on the basics of how to compost or a book listing which plants were useful perennials and then said tyrannical editor created one by hiring a mercenary writer. They’re useful references, but they’re terribly uninteresting to read.

Now it’s true that bookstores are in the business of selling books and that Stewart’s recent book is currently ranked #7265 in books and #9 in gardening reference books (behind several books on growing marijuana and wine and some quasi-gardening books that are bestsellers in a wider audience than gardeners). But in truth, people only buy in local bookstores what the bookstores sell and promote (Amazon and other online stores may be an exception in that regard for book choices). And even though I’m a relatively unknown writer self-published by a vanity press, my experience is that local bookstores were astonishingly resistant to placing my book on their shelves. I sent over 100 flyers announcing the book to every Kansas and Nebraska bookstore I could find on the internet, including two chain bookstores in Manhattan. None of them, to my knowledge, ever stocked the book, nor did several local outlets that I contacted repeatedly in person. The only success I had influencing the local stocks of Garden Musings was by following up the flyer with a personal talk with the manager of a large national chain bookstore in Topeka.  On a subsequent visit, I found 4 copies of my book in that bookstore (1 hardback and 3 paperbacks). All were gone before I checked back a month later, but yet the store, over the past year, has never restocked the book. So it seems they’re even ignoring that their own sales tell them local garden authors would sell well in local markets. And in this day and age, even with thousands of titles on the shelves of large stores, I'm sure their inventory can tell them exactly how long a book stays on the shelf.

I suspect that better known authors are more successful in getting new books on local shelves, but my experience in Seattle tells me it is not that much better. BOOKSELLERS: WISE UP! If you don’t show the average gardener books written by local authors, then the average gardener doesn’t know they exist. And thus, the average gardener doesn’t get a chance to gain knowledge from experienced garden writers in their area. In the Flint Hills of Kansas, for instance, you can’t learn much about gardening by reading plant references or gardening technique books from England or the Pacific Northwest.  I assume the same would be true for be true for gardeners from New Mexico or Arizona or Michigan. 

For local gardeners wanting to read local authors, it might help slightly that if you know of a local writer, please request that your local store stock the book rather than ordering it online.  Online sales may help our Amazon ranking, but it doesn't help us reach the audience that would be the most interested in our writing.

Fall Color in the Flint Hills

The colors of Fall here in the Flint Hills are not the bright reds, oranges and yellows characteristic of the NorthEast forests, but rather a more even russet that coats the landscape in late Autumn.  Native and invasive tree species that are common here either don't change color much before they drop their leafy coats onto the ground, or else they turn some form of brownish-yellow that just fades away.  It's just the prairie grasses, particularly the blue-stems, that provide the red to brighten the browns.  The russet color is especially pronounced on misty or rainy mornings, so it's those Fall and early Winter days that I look forward to, knowing the landscape will come alive with reds. 

We often borrow the red shades by choice, though.  Certainly, in town, the varieties of chosen trees improve the variability of fall color for the eye.  And there are sometimes some happy accidents that Man can't improve on.  In the case of the tree on the left, an otherwise unassuming Siberian Elm on my drive to work, the brilliant red is provided by a wild Virginia Creeper that is entirely invisible the rest of the year, yet it proclaims its existence in the colding months before it fades away again.

Another form of a darker wine-red that dots the prairies in some areas is the Smooth Sumac (Rhus glabra) pictured to the right above.  Smooth Sumac can be almost an invasive weed if left unchecked, or more exactly unburned, in some areas of the prairie, but in the Fall I welcome the clumps that often outline the peaks of the ridges.  Backlit by the morning sun, the leaves of Smooth Sumac glow a very bright red, and the seeds make up for the dull unnoticed spring flowers of the sumac by providing a red "drupe" of frosted berries above the plant.  Smooth sumac, a member of the cashew family, is said to be eaten by deer (although I've never seen deer nibble on it at all) and was used by Native Americans to treat sunburn, sore throats and mouths, and to make red and black dyes.  Since I haven't tried any of these uses, I can only attest to its welcome addition to the Fall colors of the Flint Hills.

All in all, I can't complain that we can't match New England for fall tourist color.  The colors of the Flint Hills are what God gave to this unforgiving soil and they are quite sufficient to propel me into winter.

GGW Photo Scanner Contest

 Time flies, and although I had prepared these photos some time ago, I thought I had a couple of days left to enter the GWG monthly photo contest, which is the formation of one of my previous blogs on Garden Scanner Photographs.  Since I think I'm now 3 hours late for the contest and hope to still get in, I think I'll just post this without much comment.  My entry is a dual photo, suitable in real size, for hanging on a wall, that I call "Impossible Flower A" and "Impossible Flower B"  Click on them and you'll see them larger, but not yet full size.  Enjoy.  And call me if you want the real files to print out and decorate your home.

Mama's Sedum

If we searched, I think most gardeners could trace the roots of their love of gardening to some family or acquaintance, or, as in my case, find their lineage back to generations of gardeners (both sets of my grandparents were farmers as were, respectively, their parents).

But many of us also have plants that we can trace to other family members.  My maternal grandmother, whom we called "Mamaw," would not really have thought of herself as a gardener, since most of the gardening she did was in the process of raising food in the vegetable garden and preserving it for use throughout the year.  She did however, out the back door of the farmhouse, have a small 8'X10' plot containing, as I recall, some portulaca, a species of yellow and pink columbines, some "hens and chicks" and a tall sedum. 

Mamaw's Sedum

Sometime after I started gardening at our first home, and before Mamaw passed on shortly after that, I got a start of the columbines and sedum from her and when we moved to our current home, I transplanted them again.  Currently, the sedums, along with some goldenrod, provide the fall flowering and foliage in a bed that is composed primarily of peonies long past their prime.  They do this year after year, without any care or extra water at all, and they suffer neither from insect pest nor fungal disease.  They're not called "live-forevers" by coincidence!  In fact, looking at the list of what Mamaw grew for enjoyment, all of them are low-maintenance, low-water survival plants that don't take time away from the more important business of putting food on the table. The columbines are the same easy care plants for me as the sedums are, popping up here and there with wild abandon in my garden, but it is the sedum I associate, for some reason, with my grandmother.      

I don't know what exact species or cultivar of sedum I inherited from my grandmother.  I thought for awhile that they were simply the ubiquitous 'Autumn Joy', but I've seen the two side by side and Mamaw's sedum is a little more pink-purple and fades to a duller brown than the currently commercial 'Autumn Joy'.  It doesn't really matter.  I very much enjoy other more modern sedum cultivars and I grow, for instance, Mohrchen and 'Vera Jameson' and 'Frosty Morn and Matrona, but some stay small and sprawl and others get big and sprawl (unless cut back severely in August or grown through supports), unlike my inherited sedum who stands tall and stays vertical without support at the end of the season.

I've lost the chance to listen more to the wisdom of my grandmother, but I can still enjoy her plants.  And maybe, just maybe, she's still teaching me that it's not flashy new appearance, but long-term staying power that is the most important criteria to keep us going in gardening and in life.

The UnFrightened Gardener

Of all things, it was the November, 2010 Reader's Digest that triggered my thoughts for this blog.  An article written by Lenore Skenazy, The Petrified Woman! is in the issue.  Skenazy's article was a rant on what she termed "Watch Out! mania" by a media warning us continually about the dangers of  everything from consuming onion dip to riding elevators to thunderstorms.  Since I have an ongoing low tolerance to similar nanny-state actions that affect my gardening practices, it tripped my own similar frustrations.

For starters, every day I open up my att.mail home page that briefly lists the weather high's and lows and other weather data for Manhattan, Kansas.  Nowadays, it seems like there's always a severe weather warning out, for heat, cold, ice storms, thunderstorms, wind, you name it, seems like it whatever it is, it's  "severe."  I've seen severe weather alerts listed for bright clear windless days when the air temperature was going to reach 87F.  C'mon, I know it's Kansas, but we do get some normal days, and global warming just hasn't advanced enough to make that much difference yet.  I promise that if it's hot out I'll drink more water and seek shade more often without being warned.  And there is a similar panic epidemic among television weather people.  I've seen television programming interrupted more and more here, for everything from a misty rain shower to storm clouds that pass over without precipitation.  When we had a real tornado in Manhattan a few years back, we had over a half-hour warning and by the non-stop coverage you'd have thought Satan was coming in on a black horse.  Really, the best indication I have that the weather is really bad is that right at the moment that I'm most interested in hearing what's coming at us, the satellite reception always goes out.  That's the time to batten down the hatches.

Look at the warning label above. "Rotating blades cut off arms and legs." Really?  And just how do you remove blades from children so you can carry them safely, by the way?  As a gardener, I'm sick and tired of the government bureaucrats ruling my life.  Riding lawnmowers have become impossible to use since they are rigged to shut off every time you get off them.  I can't move a hose or a tree limb or empty the grass catchers without having to restart the lawnmower or at least having to set the parking brake and turn off the mowing deck.  For god's sake, I mowed my father's lawn when I was 8 years old and I still have both hands, both feet, and ten fingers and toes on them. Maybe I just have more common sense than most kids, but I never stuck my hands into the mowing deck without shutting off the mower, nor did I ever stand in front of the mower and leave it in gear and running. 

How many readers mow without ever backing up to catch a little tuft of grass you just missed?  You can't back up a riding mower anymore because it will shut itself off unless you first push a button that says, "hey, I'm awake and I've looked all around and I'm not going to back over the two-year-old's cute chubby little feet."  I'm surprised you don't have to push it twice while some electronic message shouts "Are you sure?"  The last time I used a push mower, if you weren't gripping the handles with a death grip, it would trip the stop bar and shut it off, and my hands got cramps after mowing a few minutes. So of course, since I don't want to restart mowers every 10 minutes to empty the bags or move the hose, I rigged it to bypass the sensors so that it would stay running but stationary while I moved a hose.  That in itself wouldn't be so irritating if I didn't know that I paid more for the mower to have the "idiot safeties" on it in the first place.  And the warnings in the equipment manuals!  "Don't try to mow slopes exceeding vertical."  "Don't mow over large boulders."  "Avoid trying to cut off full grown trees with this mower." 

Just this summer, I learned that all those years I've been drinking out of garden hoses, I was placing my life at dire risk. Really? Walmart had three different hoses labeled "safe for drinking" this year that were made of antibacterial rubber or some other such artifical concoction.  Walmart! What makes any marketing genius think that I wouldn't be more worried about the chemicals keeping the vinyl sterile than I am about the bacteria growing in the hose?  And anyway, what is more satisfying on a hot summer day than that cool clean vinyl taste coming out of the hose?

When was the last time you bought a new hoe or axe and didn't find it as dull as a spoon?  The issue here is that most young gardeners don't know anymore that hoes are supposed to be sharp so we can cut off weeds at the surface, not hack away at the dirt.  What's that? I think just heard several of you get up to run out and sharpen your hoes.  Heck, I'm surprised they allow Felco pruners to be sharp these days. 

Soon there will be a government agency whose sole purpose is to inspect our lawn mowers to make sure they're as unfunctional as possible and whose agents come around to dull our hoes if there's a possibility they might cut butter.  There will be a special SWAT team tasked to search out foxgloves and hot peppers in our gardens with the use of specially trained dogs.  At some point, if this keeps up, I'm sure that any plant capable of producing allergens or poisons or irritant sap, or thorns capable of scratching will be banned from our gardens by government decree.  Let's see, that'll leave us with spireas, mums, and maybe, if we're lucky, a strawberry or two.  I'm going to go out on a limb and state right now that they can have my mums and spireas too, but if they mess with my strawberries, that's the last straw.

Autumn Color, Winter Sunset

One of the rarest colors of roses has always been that perfect apricot-orange color that I, myself, happen to really covet.  Do we like it only because it is rare?  Is it just a hard color to reach with a rose-breeding program?  Is it rare because yellow, itself, is such a relatively new color in Western-bred roses, considering that they were unknown before the Persian rose was introduced to Europe?  Regardless, it seems like every rose that hits that perfect hue of golden-peach-orange ends up on the popular list, whether it is 'Alchymist' or English rose 'Abraham Darby', or the new Paul Barden gallica 'Marianne'.

 Every year, as Autumn rolls around and provides other red and gold hues to mix in arrangements, I appreciate more and more the glorious display and delicious color of another of these copper beauties, the Dr. Griffith Buck-bred rose 'Winter Sunset'.  'Winter Sunset' is a shrub rose introduced in 1997 whose deep saffron-yellow buds open as large, fully double orange-yellow blossoms. Parentage of this rose is supposed to be the Buck rose Serendipity (seed) and a cross of Country Dancer and Alexandra (pollen). The blooms are borne continually from June through frost in clusters of 3 to 7 flowers on a three foot tall shrub.  The foliage of 'Winter Sunset' is dark green and glossy, and here in my Flint Hills garden it seems to be almost completely resistant to blackspot and I've never seen mildew on the plant.  This rose, like many of the Buck roses, is completely cane-hardy here in my zone 5B winters.

If I've had any difficulty here with 'Winter Sunset', it is that new canes seem to be easy to topple in the Kansas winds, so I have to make sure I "tip prune" each new cane before it reaches two feet high so that I cause the cane to strengthen and thicken before the large flowers weight it down. 

 

'Winter Sunset' will eventually open to expose a more yellow base and golden stamens, and it ages to a pink-orange hue on the outer petals, but the hybrid-tea style buds open slower than most of the Buck roses in my garden and so I get to enjoy them longer, both outside and, if cut, as house roses.  Fragrance is slight but present, and Mrs. ProfessorRoush tells me that she considers it fragrant so I don't quibble over its true degree of fragrance.  In a vase, with red fall leaves and foliage from other shrubs, it will make a dazzling group for the house.

 
So if you are in the market for hardy, unusual, healthy roses, try 'Winter Sunset' in your garden.  I consider it one of the best flowers Dr. Buck created, rivaled only in health by 'Prairie Harvest' and 'Carefree Beauty'.