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.