Blog Action Day 2010

Yes, Gardener/Reader, I know that it's a Friday and I know that I just posted recently that I try to write something about roses on Friday.  But I was tipped off to a rather special event held today and decided to postpone the rose blog until tomorrow. You'll have to bear with me because Friday, October 15th is Blog Action Day 2010, and this year, October 15th is all about water.  Safe water, clean water, plentiful water for all.

Regular readers of this blog probably don't take me as a crusader for anything except the art and practice of gardening, but stay around a minute while I mentally don my nonexistent (in reality) Birkenstocks and tie-dyed shirt (also doesn't really exist) and join the U. N. and bloggers worldwide in an effort to raise awareness of the condition of our global fresh water supplies.

Fresh, unpolluted water is an important consideration to inhabitants of the tall grass prairie ecosystem here in the Flint Hills because we simply don't have enough of it even here, in the midst of the North American bounty. Once you get to wandering around the Flint Hills, you'll find the remains of many old, very small, limestone houses, usually near the shallow muddy streams at the bottoms of the hills.  Frankly, I look at those houses and the terrain and wonder how anyone survived here before modern plumbing and septic systems.  I, at least, hope the cows were pastured downstream from the homes.  The biggest issue with potable water for the pioneers here was that clean water is deep.  In fact, one of the most advertised tourist spots on any Kansas guide is the "world's deepest hand-dug well" at 109 feet deep and 32 feet wide in Greensburg, Kansas (What can I say?  Aside from the world's largest prairie dog and the world's largest ball of twine, we suffer for tourist attractions around here).  Contrast that with my native soils of southern Indiana where the picture at the right is of a pump andwell in my father's vegetable garden, hand-driven by my father when in his late 60's.  Heck, in our bottom ground there, I used to dig fence post holes and hit water.  Here in the Flint Hills, I could probably dig past the center of the Earth without moistening my shovel.

Average annual precipitation in the Flint Hills is around 34 inches, not bad compared to the majority of North America, but the wind and summer heat dry it off fast.  Besides, as I've said before, we get about 25 inches of that rain in April, May, and June as torrential rains with dark storm clouds.  The rest of it is spread over the rest of the year, with very little normally in the hot months of July and August.  My point is that generally, this is an arid land, with native yucca's and cacti starting to make their appearance in untilled areas only an hour west of me.

I try to do my part to conserve water here, as every good gardener should.  I'm a deep mulch fanatic, and I try very hard to select plants that will do well both in the cold wet clay of spring and the hot brick-hard clay of summer.  It certainly limits my plant selection, but as a general rule I water plants and trees only the first full year that they're in the ground.  Beyond that, it takes a pretty bad summer to get me to provide water.  This year, in the midst of a 6 week drought with 100 degree temperatures, I watered the garden beds exactly once, in late August when established shrubs shriveled to brown.  I have no permanent irrigation at all and my immediate lawn is buffalograss.  I am considering adding some drip irrigation on my strawberries and blackberries to supplement their growth and my harvest, but the rest of the vegetable garden and orchard is on its own as well.  I use artificial fertilizers as little as possible and used no insecticides this year save some Sevin on the squash.  Somewhere down the hillside from the house and garden is a pond muddied by cows, but with a thriving amphibian population, which I take as a good sign for the impact of my runoff.  

Anyway, all of this to say that I believe that gardeners can and should do what we can to minimize our impact on our local environment.  We may fight tooth and nail to hold back the ferocity of nature, but we CAN keep our gardens without resort to chemical sterilization and nuclear holocaust.  For further viewpoints, you can read all about the global effort to improve water supplies at the Blog Action Day site and visit over 4000 blogs about all aspects of the effort.  And I promise, the roses will be back tomorrow.

Burbank's White Blackberry

I've been caught up recently reading a wonderful biography of Luther Burbank titled The Garden of Invention, a 2009 publication authored by Jane S. Smith.  For a biography of a non-exciting and non-current public figure, this is a surprisingly easy read that introduced me to a whole aspect of gardening history of which I had little prior information.

Luther seems to have been an odd duck, born as a New Englander, but transplanted to California on a post-Civil-War whim to make money.  His methods, coming on the heels of the dissemination of Darwin and Mendel's discoveries, seem to have been as much mystical as science, based more on the writings of Emerson and Thoreau than the new science of hereditary.  Descriptions of his poor note-taking and nebulous written records of crosses only contribute to his eccentric persona.  I didn't know he was awarded an early Carnegie grant, but it doesn't sound like the Carnegie Foundation put up with him long. 

In a table that appears before the table of contents in the book, Ms. Smith lists Luther Burbank's most famous introductions.  I was both shocked and disappointed that, although I consider myself a pretty knowledgeable amateur gardener, I could only recognise a few from a list of about 40 plants.  I recognized the Burbank potato (1873), Shasta daisy (1901), and elephant garlic (1919), which most other gardeners would know as well, but I wasn't even aware that the latter was a Burbank introduction. I always knew that the Shasta daisy, which I hold in high regard, was a Burbank creation, but I, an avid rosarian, had never heard of the 'Burbank Rose' and I still don't know what his 'Surprise Daylily' looks like.  Neither it nor Luther Burbank are mentioned in Sydney Eddison's A Passion for Daylilies or any other daylily encyclopedia I can find.  I have had some previous experience with Burbank's Sunberry, mentioned in the book although it didn't make the top 40 list, which I had purchased a few years ago from Seed Saver's Exchange and which I found to be extremely disappointing in taste quality and a bit of a nuisance in terms of reseeding itself. 

I am currently captivated though, by the thought of the white blackberry (named 'Iceberg'), that Burbank had introduced in 1894 after crossing the wild New Jersey blackberry marketed at the time as 'Crystal White' with the well-regarded 'Lawton' blackberry.  A pretty good description of the development of 'Iceberg' can be read on the web at the bulbnrose.org website.  The white blackberry leapt from the pages of the Smith book into my compulsive mindset and I HAD TO HAD IT. Even if it was disappointing in taste, I reasoned it would be worth growing as an heirloom conversation piece.

Alas, after three frustrating hours trying to find a current source to procure the white blackberry, I struck out.  It isn't offered for sale at any commercial nursery that I can find and my only remaining hope is an email I sent to another blogger who posted last June that he is growing it in California.  Of course, I could have missed finding a nursery offering on a Google search, given the difficulty of this particular search.  Just try searching for "white blackberry" on the Internet.  Today, all you get is 100,000 sites about some crappy second-rate phone called a "Blackberry."  Who the heck would name a phone after a fruit? And I'm going to write a letter to the Gold Ridge Experimental Farm.  That's the former experimental farm of Burbank's, now made into a tourist attraction.  The gift shop to the farm sells only typical tourist shirts, notecards and other crap.  No plants.  I don't know who runs the gift shop but it ought to have dawned on the curators that most of the visitors may have some gardening interest and might be interested to buy some of Burbank's famous plants.

Like a white blackberry for instance.

Mums The Word

My muse for today's blog is a coworker and friend who has become a new homeowner. She's faced with the dilemma of all non-gardeners that suddenly find themselves with a town lot whose previous owner seemed to have neither the talent nor the interest for gardening. A forsythia seems to be the only salvageable landscape-worthy plant in her yard at present. Thus, she has been slyly and periodically pestering me with questions about plants and landscaping, seeking out knowledge from her captive manic Extension Master Gardener, and probably secretly hoping that I'll show up with a bulldozer and a truckload of plants and a sixteen color, meticulously thought out plan for the landscape.  Alas for her, like most poorly-trained men of my generation, I'm oblivious to feminine hints.

Her latest gardening question though, struck a nerve, as did her suggestion later that I should write about it and call it "Mums The Word" (she loves really bad puns).  She had just asked via email if I thought that "mums" would do well under a large shade tree that borders her property.  I calmly replied that mums wouldn't do well in the constant dry shade that I knew her spot had, and that she needed to plant them where they'd get six hours of sun or more.

That's not what I wanted to say, though.  She doesn't know that I hate mums, or more properly Chrysanthemum sp. with a passion second only to my distaste for spireas.  Spireas are a special case with me as readers of Garden Musings (the book) know, but mums are about as worthless in the garden in my estimation. Yes, they provide us some nice fall color, if you just want flowers, but they provide nothing interesting in the way of decent foliage contrast or shape variation for Fall, and the rest of the year they're either just a slowly-growing blob that sits there like a green turd in your landscape or else they are just dead stems that break with the first snowfall.  To add insult to injury, although mums are a perennial elsewhere, they're really an annual in Kansas, weakening in at most a year or two likely because of the dry hot Kansas summers and drier cold Flint Hills winters.  I'd really sooner have my friend plant ragweed in her yard than a border of mums.

Look, for instance, at the picture above of the current landscaping (taken this morning) around some KSU apartments that stand opposite the exit I use every night from work.  Let me repeat that;  I'm forced to look at this landscaping debacle every night.  What insanity overtook the K-State groundsmen that they thought these alternating yellow and orange mums would make a wise display?  K-State colors, guys and gals, are purple and white. Now it's true that the most common colors of mums put up for sale seem to be yellows and oranges and russets, probably because the fall colors sell best in what people think of as fall flowers, but mums do actually exist in purple and white.  I've seen them.  If we must have round balls of color alternating in our college landscape, perhaps purple and white might have been a better choice, here at a stone's throw from the KSU football stadium.  Luckily these were just planted this year; I'm betting they don't survive till next year and thus we'll have a chance to get something better.

I have no chrysanthemums at all in my garden, just as I have no spireas.  The closest thing I'll allow is the wonderful Shasta Daisy, which blooms during the height of summer and used to be classified as a chrysanthemum, but today has been wisely moved to the Leucanthemum x superbum taxonomic group.  Please, everyone, let's not whisper the word "mum" around me again; it plays havoc with my blood pressure, as you can now attest to.

Books and Blogs

Those who have been following this blog in its short life since late July have been seeing its evolution and my slow learning process here, so I thought I'd take a single blog to address the whole "why do you (I) blog and write?" and "where is this thing going?" series of questions.

Here is the key;  I've always been a bibliophile and I've always said that someday I would write a book about something.  I started writing the book Garden Musings (pictured and linked on this blog) a few years back solely as a release for me.  I simply enjoy the writing process and years ago I was conditioned by a great set of high school English teachers to be able to sit down and vomit my thoughts in a relatively coherent fashion onto paper.  But, after a couple of decades where my writing was confined to dry scientific papers in my chosen profession of veterinary orthopedic surgery, I simply missed the more creative outlet of writing for the fun of it.  And I know I'm not even close to being a horticultural expert (I should barely claim amateur status based on the survival rate of flora that I place into the ground), but I didn't want to write about veterinary patients after treating them all day, so the next best choice was a book of gardening experiences. So I started slowly writing Garden Musings and finally, during the cold winter of 2008-09, I made a push to put enough essays together to make a decent-sized book, went to an independent publisher (iUniverse), and got it out. What a learning experience publication was! 

Now, notice that I said I started writing Garden Musings solely for me.  Because I, like many others, stated loudly and clearly at the beginning that I was NOT writing because of ego.  Well, the second key here is this:  I don't care who you are, writing may be for the writer, but publishing is ALL about ego.  You may think you start writing for yourself, but once your baby is out there in the world, you suddenly CARE that others read it and you suddenly want to know what they thought of it.  There's even a whole new addictive syndrome, "Amazon-Rank Fixation," where the gardener begins checking the ranking of his book on Amazon at hourly intervals and comparing the rank to books by other well-known garden writers.  Not that that ever happened to me. 

I've had good feedback on Garden Musings the book. Much of the feedback was surprising, though.  I didn't write it to be a comedic work but I was told by some readers that it was side-splitting funny in places.  Some did think it was informative, those few poor souls who didn't realize that I kill more plants than I grow.  I was told by one reader that it's the perfect book for reading on the toilet;  each essay is three-four pages long on average...just long enough.  My mother said "I suppose it's a good read if you like gardening" (she doesn't) and my father suddenly realized, as he told my sister, "that I was a deep thinker."   

Regarding Garden Musings the blog though, there is, if you haven't run across it yet, at least one book out there specifically about writing on gardens, Cultivating Words by Paula Panich, and of course I came across it after I already published my book.  Cultivating Words covers the whole gamut of garden writing, from weekly newspaper columns to monthly magazines to books, and it's a very informative work. Using ideas from Panich's book and elsewhere, I even put together a pretty good presentation for gardening groups on the process of garden writing (lecturing is, of course, yet another form of ego-stroking as any other professor will tell you).  Ms. Panich cautions "book writers" not to become "blog writers" because blogging funnels the creative instincts away from finishing books.  And I heeded her advice for awhile, but at heart, I tend to be a little resistant to authority. A friend suggested starting the blog and that sounded like a new and fun experience, and the software seemed to be easy enough to figure out, and off I went. 

Blogging, though, is also still all about the writer's ego and it is even easier to measure the ego boost by counting numbers of comments and page hits and ranking sites and all that. These days it is all about the voice provided to me by the audience. I write for you. If you have followed me long, you may have guessed that I'm trying to settle down into a pattern: a random thought that has been occupying me on Mondays, something I'm reading or reviewing on Wednesdays, a rose feature on Fridays, a gardening technique on Saturdays and a little garden philosophy on Sundays. Of course, my obsessive-compulsive disorder occasionally rears its head and I blow that schema, but I'm trying.

I'd love to have feedback whenever my readers get time. What articles did you like?  Which were thought-provoking?  Which will keep you coming back?  God knows, except for the poor curious souls who click on the advertising and provided the $2.26 I've earned so far, I'm not in this for the money, I'm in it for the camaraderie of gardeners.  And, to be honest, the occasional ego boost of having someone else listen.

Kon-Tiki Seasons

When I considered the suggestion by horticulturist Kelly D. Norris to take pictures repeatedly of the same view in the garden (see my blog titled "Sometimes a Diversion"), I realized that I had presciently taken that advice, but only in regards to one or two specific places in my garden.  And "The Head" was one of those places that I haven't yet written about.

The Head, an Easter-Island-type statue I obtained from a local garden store, has been in my garden since the beginning.  It was the first statue of any size that I placed in the garden.  I keep the somber Head on a pedestal in the middle of two yellow 'Rugelda' rugosa hybrid roses, backed up by the white 'Marie Bugnet', and facing, of course, due east on the compass.   There it waits daily for the sunrise and stands watch for me to spread the alarm in case of the return of the Gods.

I'd always thought The Head provided a handsome conversation piece, flanked by the glory of the 'Rugelda' roses, but since I purchased it, it was always a point of ridicule for me from my loving wife, who despises it.  The last laugh was mine, though since the identical piece of concrete appears frequently on HGTV in the garden of Paul James, the Gardener Guy, forever muting my better half's questioning of my gardening tastes.  Anyway, when the 'Rugelda' fades, pink 'La Reine Victoria'  and blush white 'Comte de Chambord' are there to pick up the slack.

The Head is a good soldier, standing firm in the face of thunderstorms, prairie fires, and the ever-present Kansas wind (at least after I finally created a stable concrete foundation for it to keep it from slowly listing and falling off the pedastel).  It takes the harsh eastern sunrise on its face and the full burning Flint Hills non sun on its hatless skull without complaint.  And even when the ice comes down and glazes its features, it stands silent, immune to the world.

 

But I have seen The Head, in the depths of winter, weeping with me at the cold damage to the naked rose canes surrounding it and its poor perennial friends shivering in the show. The Head is always a good garden companion for the plants and for me alike. It doesn't talk to me though, really it doesn't.  At least not that I'm telling.  And I'll let you know if it informs me that the Gods have returned from space.

Hope for Humanity

'Hope for Humanity'.   If ever there was a rose named to increase sales to the WEE (wild-eyed environmentalists) and the Birkenstock herd, it is certainly 'Hope for Humanity'.  It's fortunate for the more cynical human personality types, including the many gardeners that prefer to spend time with plants rather than their fellow Homo sapiens, that 'Hope for Humanity' is also a healthy and beautiful rose so that we can claim we appreciate it for something other than its name.

'Hope for Humanity'

'Hope for Humanity' is a 1995 introduction in the Parkland Series from Agriculture Canada that was released to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Red Cross Society. Appropriately for that commemorative purpose, she is not the muddy magenta-red rose color that many "red" roses have, she's a deep vivid crimson red that makes the bush appear to be studded with enormous rubies.  The Red Cross had exclusive rights to market the rose until 1998 when it was released to sale by commercial outlets.  Like most of the Canadian releases, you will most often find 'Hope for Humanity' growing on its own roots, increasing the hardiness and survivability of the rose here in Kansas.  She blooms continually with those blood-red, fully double blooms held in trusses of 4-5 blossoms about 3 inches in diameter.

There seems to be a lot of recent interest in this rose on several gardening forums I frequent, particularly among the zone-poor gardeners like myself who are denied the less cold-tolerant rose families.  As I stated in an Internet posting recently, I constantly fight a bad case of zone-envy and regret that I can't grow tea roses or Noisettes, or camellias or gardenias outside of my house. And there's a lot of confusing information about 'Hope for Humanity', particularly in regards to height.  Agriculture Canada lists this rose as growing only 2 feet high, but numerous internet gardeners describe their specimens as being from 2 feet variably to 6 feet high.  Here in Zone 5B, my 'Hope for Humanity', about 6 years old at present, has never been cut back and is about 4 1/2 feet tall at present, with a half-dozen strong canes.  It is reportedly hardy to Zone 3 (it should be since it was developed at the Manitoba-based Morden Research Centre by Colicutt and Marshall) and I can confirm that I've seen no winter-dieback at all here in Zone 5. There's also some argument as to the repeat flowering of this rose, with sources listing it anywhere from 2-3 repeat cycles during the growing season to continuous flowering.  As I said, mine is continuous flowering from May through September and into October, rarely, if ever, without a bloom.  And it's a disease-free rose;  I never spray it and it gets only mild blackspot in the most humid weather.  It has survived wind storms, ice storms and the determined cane-gnawing by a family of rabbits in its short time with me.

If you're a suppressed Victorian who prefers hybrid-tea roses and is turned off by the shrub-like form and floribunda blooming of 'Hope for Humanity', another Canadian rose that might better fit your desires is the less sickly-sweet named, red hybrid-tea style 1967 introduction named 'Cuthbert Grant'.  The majority of internet sources list 'Cuthbert Grant' as another Parkland series rose, but the rose is named after the Métis explorer and leader.  'Cuthbert Grant', the rose, is a good hardy performer in my climate (also rated as hardy to Zone 3), of almost the same red color but perhaps a little more venous than arterial blood-toned in its particular red.  Growing a trifle taller to six feet and a bit faster, Cuthbert is also more suited to bringing into the house in a vase for display and has a better fragrance than HFH.    

Luckily there's a rose for every fool, a fool for every rose, and still some 'Hope for Humanity.'

The Undaunted Garden

I had occasion recently to re-read Lauren Springer's (now Springer-Ogden) first text, The Undaunted Garden.  What a treasure trove it is of gardening information for the Kansas gardener beset by wind and storm and ice.

Subtitled "Planting for Weather Resilient Beauty," it remains one of the most readable and beautifully illustrated garden-related books I've ever read.  First published in 1994, the text and photographs were all created by Ms. Springer in an obvious labor of love and belief in what she was producing.  It has become a classic garden read, first, I believe, because the writing is aimed not at the highbrow level of garden designers, but at the dirt's-eye level of the struggling gardener.  Second, the lessons for plant selection and plant survival on the Great Plains are well thought out and presented in logical order and in language easily understood by all levels of gardening experience.  Lastly, Springer's Undaunted Garden heralded her embrace of native plants, and further yet, her recognition of "adapted" plants as a means to transform gardens in the prairies and Colorado foothills, beginning her reputation as the premier garden designer and writer she has become.  Until this book, I don't think that I had ever seen the concept that one can create a garden that smiles through the worst of a climate by not planting just with natives, but by extending a home to plants that are adapted to similar climate conditions, whether those plants were found bordering the Mediterranean or in Australia.

I've always sympathized with her opening thought "I don't understand the concept of the low-maintenance garden...to desire a garden that requires no time spent except the occasional stroll in well-laundered clothes is like having the most beautiful and appetizing food laid out on a table before you and not wanting to take a bite."  Ms. Springer invites us in, and then teaches us, with named examples, to select plants that survive the extremes of drought, hail, wind, and driving rain, all while keeping an eye on the design of a bed or garden.  My favorite chapter, Roses for Realists, increased my own interest in Old Garden and hardy roses, to which I was especially susceptible after only a few short years of beginning gardening where I learned that Hybrid Teas were perhaps not the best choice for the Flint Hills climate.  And the last section, Portraits of Indispensably Undaunted Plants, which is a glossary of Plains-adapted plants, provided us all the tools we needed to reform our own gardens.  In reviewing that section, I found that I have tried most of the plants highlighted for sunny exposures.  It was the first time, for instance, that I ever heard of Knautia macedonia, which is now a mainstay of my front border.      

I see from the Amazon.com site that a revised second edition is coming out soon, expanding both the photographs with new additions and increasing the number of highlighted plants from 65 to 100.  Although the bibliophile in me will always prefer my first edition hardcover, I may have to fork out the money from my gardening budget to get the revised edition as well.  I can always consider another 35 recommendations for my garden from an established expert, particularly one writing, it seems, especially for my Flint Hills weather. 

Just Cut It Out

I must admit there are times, even though I'm a plant fanatic first and a garden designer second (or, truthfully, last), that I am forced to see the folly of my ways and can even grow to hate a given plant. I don't often hate the plant for being a bad plant, mind, I usually just hate a specific specimen because of my own error of putting it in the wrong place or underestimating its ultimate size or for not providing the proper maintenance, or some combination of all of the above.

At such times, the longer I garden, the more willing I am to face facts and sever the apron strings; or in this case, the plant's stem.  Look if you will at the 'Josee' lilac (Syringa x 'Josee') in my front garden (arrows).  Now five years old, it has grown far bigger than the tag suggested, it obscures a window, and it is out of proportion with the rest of the front shrubs and perennials.  I tried cutting it back severely once, but a year later it is right back where we started; too big. To make my distaste for this plant worse, although I planted two of these beauties because they were the only reblooming lilac on the market (one in this bed and one in back of the house), neither has rebloomed well;  they do have a nice bloom in the spring towards the end of the period of the S. vulgaris hybrids, but then they have only a few sporadic small blooms over the summer and fall.  Now I could be partially to blame for that problem since the front bed of my house faces almost due north and so this particular lilac gets too much shade except in the summer, but the specimen I planted out back doesn't bloom any better and it gets southern exposure, full-day Kansas summer sun. 

So, on my list of things to get done this fall, I included banishing this lilac to a far bed on the property, perhaps never to be seen from again if it doesn't survive the move.  As you can see in the second picture, my front garden benefited tremendously from not having this behemoth squatting and pouting in the shade, and you can now see the house has a third nice window on that side.  And I'm happy, oh so happy, to be rid of that display of my horticultural ignorance. 

Sometimes I think I just need to let my surgeon side shine through more in the garden.  Amputation or excision is almost always the best first choice for treating a cancer and I know that, at least on a professional level.  Remove the tumor, cleanse the soul.    

Sometimes a Diversion...

...is just what a gardener needs.

As the active gardening year is winding down (I say "active" gardening year because the fantasy gardening season pf winter is getting ready to begin in Kansas), I had the wonderful opportunity today to see a really exceptional gardening presentation by Kelly D. Norris, of Rainbow Iris Farms. The occasion was the annual Extension Master Gardener continuing education meeting here in Manhattan and Mr. Norris gave the keynote address, titled "Zoneworthy."

Kelly is a young guy, full of vigor and excitement and knowledge, but best of all, a great presenter with lots of beautiful pictures and sarcastic humor thrown in to spice up the lessons.  If fact, he had everything I love to see in a speaker, except maybe a sense of deep cynicism, but since he's young and not a jaded, tenured professor, I guess I can forgive that. 

Being somewhat local to me here in Kansas, from western Iowa, Kelly certainly understood what we go through to garden here in Kansas.  I've taken several lessons and witty comments to heart from his lecture, including:

"Nobody plants something thinking, gee, I wonder what this will look like covered in ice?"  I've never heard a truer statement about Flint Hills gardening, and Kelly accompanied this with a great picture of an ice-covered plant in his own garden.  As shown by the picture of  the ice-covered 'Heritage' English rose on the right, and of my front garden pictured below in December, 2007, I'm right there with him.  It never occurred to me to picture rose hips on 'Heritage' with a half inch of ice on them when I purchased it.

"There are five gardening seasons in the Midwest; spring, summer, fall, winter, and hell.  No, actually there are six; spring, summer, hell, fall, winter, and hell."  The first season of "hell" was defined as being the last week of July and first week of August, and the second the last two weeks of January.  Absolutely an accurate description of my climate, except I'd add that spring and fall are only two weeks long each. As an example, we just went from the 95 range to the 67 high of today in less than two weeks.  Tonight it's supposed to get down to 35 and we've got a chance of frost.

"Grow know-maintenance versus no-maintenance plants."  Kelly's point here was that there is no such thing as a "no maintenance" plant, so we should select plants knowing what their maintenance requirements are and if we can fulfill them in our gardens.

"Stop looking to see if a plant merely survived through a year and stop celebrating when it does."  His point being that we should select plants that not merely survive in our gardens but we should seek out those that THRIVE there.  Zonal denial is not a healthy state of mind for a gardener.

"Take pictures of the same spots in your garden over and over."  Great advice for a guy who likes to take garden photographs anyway.  What better way to see the seasonal progression of our gardens.  I'll start today.

There were lots of others, but that should give you a sampling of the wisdom of a good gardener and a great presentation.  If your garden group needs a speaker, take it from this old Professor who lectures for a living and get Kelly to come down your way.  I'm betting I just saw the guy who will be the next Paul James or P. Allen Smith of gardening circles.  

 

Pictures for Ourselves

Do you take pictures of your own garden?  If you don't, I'm going to take this moment to demand that you go find or purchase a camera and get to it.  If you already take pictures of your own gardens, then I'm going to request that you take them more often.  Nowadays, with digital cameras, hundreds of pictures cost pennies, so the downside of have developing and printing costs decrease your budget for plant purchases are no longer an excuse.  I promise, you'll see your garden differently through a camera lens.

I find myself in the garden more and more often with a camera in hand, and I never regret the time spent taking or looking at those pictures.  I catalog plants by their photos, I document my garden's growth and development in pictures, and I mark the change of seasons and the frequent Kansas storms with pictures of their majesty and their damage paths in my garden. But most of all, inside all those pictures, instead of seeing the garden through the eyes of its gardener, I see the garden through the eyes of a visitor.  I can experience the garden, instead of experiencing the process of gardening.

    

We find it difficult, the "we" of gardeners in general, to separate our vision of our gardens from the little things that irk us  I can't look at my garden and not see the occasional weeds, the faded mulch that I know is there, the drab grass clippings, the phlox I should have deadheaded, or the blackspot on the roses.  But through the camera, I forget about all those things and I'm able to see the garden through different eyes; the eyes that can appreciate the garden instead of the eyes that work in my garden.

For example, I was thinking lately that my garden, here in September at the end of a hot summer, was lacking color, a little drab, or maybe a little beaten up.  But look at the picture of my front garden above, facing away from the front door of the house, taken on September 25th.  Boy, was I wrong about the color!  Look at combinations of the 'Betty Boop' rose on the left, the 'Emerald Gaiety' euonymus of the foreground, the burgundy foliage of 'Wine and Roses' weigela in the background, the two varieties of sedum in bloom, and even the bright red rugosa rose 'Hunter' out of focus in the far right background.  I also know that on the left, just out of the picture, are the still-blooming remnants of the white phlox 'David' and to the right, the red Canadian rose 'Champlain'.  How much more color could I expect?  With my "gardener's eye" I just couldn't see the color separate from the sidewalk, the mulch, and the surrounding fields.  With my camera's eye, I can see the beauty that others see.

If I'd just been bright enough to remove the dead daylily scapes before I took the picture it might look even better to me.

Good Grief; 'Griff's Red'

It never fails, does it?  A gardener gives up on a plant and then low and behold there it comes again, fighting its way back from oblivion.  Right after you've planted something else in its stead, of course.

I've had a 'Griff's Red' rose for several years while it struggled along (the most charitable way I can put it) in my more formal "hybrid rose bed" in the shade of  three taller roses, a 'Variegata de Bologna', a 'Prairie Star', and a 'Prairie Harvest'.  It has meagerly clung to life in the shade and clay, barely putting up a cane for two years running.  This spring I decided to move it to the front of another bed (to replace yet another failed rose) where it would get more sun and better attention from the gardener.  Again, it put up a single cane about a foot high, limping along with one bloom to reward me for the summer, and then in July, a high wind took out the final cane.  I waited and waited for signs of life and finally in late August, I gave up and planted one of the new Paul Barden gallicas, 'Marianne', in the spot (see my blog titled I Dream of New Gallicas).

But, as I'm fond of quoting, "life found a way."  The picture above is of the 'Marianne' on the right, in the ground only a month, and the 'Griff's Red' on the left, the latter looking healthier than I've ever seen it with two young canes.  As soon as the August heat left, up popped 'Griff's Red' to remind me why I choose to grow own-root roses as often as I can find them.  Of course, I moved the  'Marianne' immediately, fortuitously to a new rose bed I had started with four other Barden roses.  Griff deserves another chance.

'Griff's Red' is a hybrid-tea style rose bred by the late Professor Griffith Buck at Iowa State University and introduced in 2001.  In fact, it's one of the "lost Buck roses," which means it was introduced after his death, by Dr. Buck's wife and daughter from the Buck rose-breeding stock.  Of the Buck roses, it's the best, brightest red, the four inch double blooms colored a fine ruby-red.  It's a well-refined bush, reaching only about three by three feet maximum and hardy to Zone 4.  It seems to be fairly resistant to blackspot and mildew, since I've never seen either on it, but I'm at a loss to explain my struggles with the plant except that I never gave it a chance to get going well, I guess.  I got mine from Heirloom Roses, which, last I checked, still offers the rose for sale.

Next time, I'll wait longer.  I promise.

Reblooming Iris?

Are there really reblooming irises? It does sound like a great concept, primarily because irises are ALL ABOUT the FLOWER;  after the spring bloom, the foliage, with a few notable exceptions such as I. pallida 'Variegata', doesn't add much to the garden and in fact, can look pretty ratty at times.  I've yet though, to my chagrin, to find the intersection of good care and good weather that will allow irises to rebloom consistently here in Kansas.


Earl of Essex

I first became aware of the possibility that some irises could have fall rebloom a couple of years back and once the concept sunk in, I sought out and planted a row of eight or ten varieties that were labeled as "reblooming" on the edge of a raised west-facing bed.  I now find that it was not as simple as it sounded.  The Reblooming Iris Society (yes, there is one), actually lists several types of reblooming irises including "cycle rebloomers" which bloom spring and fall, "repeaters" that produce new flowers right after the first spring flush, extending the spring bloom to one or two months, and "all-season rebloomers" which produce flowers irregularly over the season.  Unfortunately, most retailers, including some specialty nurseries, don't distinguish between these types and call them all "rebloomers", so you takes your chances.  I also have learned that gardeners in zones 3 and 4 can forget it;  little or no rebloom is seen in those areas ('Immortality', a white reblooming iris that is almost continually blooming in Southern California  may be the exception for cold areas).  And tropical areas may not see rebloom because cooler weather is needed to set off the second part of the cycle.  Finally, some varieties take a couple of years to start reblooming, so, once again, the gardener is asked to be patient. Luckily for us, selection for patience in gardeners is a Darwinian process. You are either patient, learn patience, or you don't garden long.  

This fall, my ' Immortality'  has produced a couple of anemic-looking blooms and the iris 'Earl of Essex', pictured above, did save the day with a few gorgeous and fragrant specimens.  Thus, two out of ten varieties that should rebloom have given me back a little bit for my efforts so far.  Even then, the 'Earl of Essex' was a bit aggravating because that particular plant in that place should have been the purple 'Grape Accent'.  I've become a fanatic about recording plant positions in my garden (because I long ago lost the names of most of my daylilies and the once-blooming irises) and when I put the new reblooming irises in the bed I made a special effort to get their positions right.  And, somehow, I still got them messed up.  Fiddlemuffins.

If you're going to try the reblooming irises, they require just a little more attention because they are said to grow more vigorously.  They benefit from a little low-nitrogen fertilizer in spring and fall and they should be watered more often during the summer to prevent dormancy.  And, of course, since water tends to make iris rhizomes rot, it is recommended to keep the rebloomers separate from other iris and to take extra efforts to make sure the soil drains easily.  They also need to be divided more often than usual for best results.  And good luck.  Schreiner's Iris Gardens lists 65 iris varieties that consistently rebloom in Oregon, including three iris that I grow with my regular iris and which I've never seen rebloom, and then they follow the list up with the admonition to "remember that remonancy is NOT guaranteed."

Garden Game

Recently, O.N.E. at her blog "Onenezz" or "One with Nature and Environment" challenged me to list ten things I enjoy doing as part of a little "Garden Game," which is in reality a little gardening blog ponzi scheme.  Okay, what the heck, I'm game:

Ten Things I Enjoy (in no particular order):

Planting

Despite the horrific clay mixed with flinty boulder soil that I have to dig in, I love to plant something new.  Particularly something that I've never grown before.  It's a little like giving birth, over and over, with the expected amount of sweat but not with all the icky fluids associated with animal births.

Reading

I'm a reader, always have been. As you can tell from my blog, I follow most of the better known garden authors, and beyond that I read fiction and mysteries and current events and biographies and generally most everything I can lay my hands on.

Browsing Garden Centers
There's nothing better to waste time than browsing garden centers. Doesn't matter if I've got a need, I can always make another hole to plant something in. That I enjoy this is something long recognized by my family, who refuses to go anywhere with me unless I promise I'll stick to a route that doesn't pass a garden store. Once, when we pulled up to a store and parked, my three year old daughter exclaimed "Oh No, Not More Roses!" with the same timber and pitch that a Titanic passenger would have exclaimed "Heaven Help Us!"

Waiting for the First Bloom

The first bloom on any new plant is always an anticipated joy.  Okay, sometimes it's a disappointment, but most of the time it's a joy.

Eating Strawberries

When the Greeks talked about ambrosia, I think they were referring to Strawberries.  Particularly sun-warmed, and eaten directly in the garden.  There is no fruit above them, in my opinion and they're the only fruit really worth all the trouble to produce.  Felt that way since I was a small boy. 

Garden Sounds and Fragrances

Nothing like closing my eyes and listening to the rustles of the Kansas wind in the Cottonwood trees. Or the Meadowlarks singing on the prairie in the morning. Many of the plants I grow are grown for their fragrance. Honeysuckles, Sweet Autumn Clematis, Roses, Peonies, and Iris all work best on the Kansas prairie for providing scent.

Writing

Writing follows as a natural consequence of reading and gardening and it also is an integral part of my work as an academic veterinary surgeon and educator, so I write during a significant portion of my time in one way or another.  That won't be new to those who have been to this blog before, nor will it be new to those who read the Garden Musings book that came before the blog.

Veterinary Orthopedic Surgery

What can I say? I'm lucky that I like what I do for a living. Surgery is a place where I immerse myself in a smaller world without the greater world's troubles, a world of anatomy and bone and muscle that is fixable and finite and leaves me at the end of the day with a feeling of accomplishment.  It's a Zen thing for me.  And I think the dogs appreciate it.

Watching Movies with my Wife

Dating, for us, was always a movie and it still is. Almost every week.  Not a lot of talk, just some popcorn and quiet time spent in proximity to one another.

Target Shooting

Yeah, with guns.  I won't try here to analyze the Freudian implications, but late in life, I've come to enjoy the concentration and satisfaction of placing a lead projectile into a small area of paper from a distance. Maybe it's a surgeon thing;  doing something carefully and accurately, the first time and every time. 

I've invited  the bloggers listed below to join in the game.  For those invited, the rules are simple:

a)  List ten things you enjoy doing.

b) Tell who invited you and where they blog

c) Invite another ten bloggers (or thereabouts) to join in.

A Photographer's Garden Blog
A Way to Garden
Fold, Fallow and Plough
Gardening Gone Wild
Hartwood Roses
High Altitude Gardening
May Dreams Garden
The Citrus Guy
This Garden is Illegal

And good luck.  In the meantime, we'll all get to know each other better, right?

Ban the Dust in the Wind

I thought I'd heard the pinnacle of supreme bureaucratic overreach when I learned about the EPA considering the banning of our annual spring burn (see my blog titled Burn the Prairie!) but it seems the EPA was just getting warmed up.

Recent frantic headlines and editorials across the Midwest, all something on the variation of "EPA to Crack Down on Farm Dust," have alerted anyone with the slightest interest in current events that the EPA is reevaluating the dangers present in the air we breathe; particularly regarding PM (particulate matter).  Twenty-one farm state US Senators signed a letter on July 23rd opposing changes in PM standards.  The local news picked it up about 5 nights ago and the local Manhattan, Kansas newspaper even ran an editorial on the subject late this week.   

All the hubbub is about the Policy Assessment for the Review of the Particulate Matter National Ambient Air Quality Standards (released to the public via the Federal Register on July 8, 2010).   Now, I'll tell you, even with my generally good scientific background, the 357 pages of this report are tough to read.  And it's difficult to take away anything that suggests that this is a farm issue.  The word "farm" only occurs in the report when discussing past litigation of standards and listing the American Farm Bureau Association as being one of the parties to the litigation.  And "agriculture" is only mentioned referring to a previous study that found that western airborne "contaminants were shown to accumulate geographically based on proximity to individual sources or source areas, primarily agriculture and industry."  In fact, all I can essentially glean from the report is that it is a comprehensive review of the evidence that particulate matter has detrimental effects on the cardiovascular, respiratory and visual systems, among other important body stuff.  All the hype about farmers having to wet down their fields before harvest and all dirt roads needing to be paved is coming from somewhere else, not from the report.  The big news that I can understand comes in Appendix 2, Table 2A-1 where it's revealed that under current PM standards, 12% of US counties (and 24% of the population) fail the standards, while the alternative standards being considered would result in anywhere from 29% to 79% of the counties (accounting for the living area of most of the US population) failing the new standards.  

So, I don't get it, myself, but out there in the public view there's a fairly dry report on particulate matter standards by what I'm sure are a bunch of highly knowledgeable, well-meaning scientists working for the EPA, and somewhere, some other intelligent scientists, who can draw conclusions from that report far better than me, are raising alarm sufficient to rile 21 US Senators that the EPA is trying to destroy America. 

I don't know how all this will finally shake out and whether we'll all just agree in the end that we can't really control (or it's too expensive and cumbersome to control) agricultural dust, or whether the EPA will establish new standards that will either lead to the total destruction of agriculture and business in the US or to another Revolution.  In the meantime, my feeble brain is pretty aware of the fact that "all we are is Dust in the Wind" to quote the famous rock song by Kansas.  Since most of the problem here is recognized as being created by human action, maybe People are the dust that the EPA will ultimately recognize should be banned.  Seems we're heading in that direction.  

Idiot-Proof Scanner Photography

For all those poor souls who, like me, sadly have the artistic ability of a donkey no matter what the canvas, I've got to show my first results with a new technique; using a computer and scanner to create collages with my garden bounty.

I became aware of scanner photography through the GardeningGoneWild Bloom Challenge website which had wonderful examples and was itself linked to a blog containing the works of photographer David Perry titled A Photographer's Garden Blog.  The breadth of possibilities and expression demonstrated on Perry's blog inflamed my obsessive-compulsive nature and, although pausing for supper, I spent the evening after my discovery choosing flowers and vegetation and trying the technique out my home scanner, and after a little photo editing, I created, among many others, the images here.

You've just got to try this technique out.  To get started, you need only a computer, scanner, and some garden material and after that, the sky is the limit.  Literally.  As far as tips go, I've already got a few from my brief experience:

a)  Use only perfect blooms and foliage;  the scanner will pick up every little imperfection.

b)  Keep the scanner surface perfectly dust- and streak-free.  Again, any defect will mar the final picture.

c) The only perfectly focused items will be right on the scanner surface. Items and blooms even slightly off the surface quickly lose focus.

d)  For pictures without a background, keep the room lights off and do the scanning at night to get a background that a little photo manipulation will turn to seamless black.

e)  You can try colored or patterned backgrounds, but in practice, I found it tough to make the textures of these backgrounds fit the pictures.

f) The photo editing software need not be sophisticated, but you will need some editing capability.  I used Microsoft Office Picture Manager for these pictures.

Give it a shot;  you'll amaze yourself and stun the friends and family who've given up on ever seeing your artsy side!

Ravishing Madame Hardy

Over forty posts into this blog and I am remiss by not admitting that while I don't, as a general rule, pick favorites for most things, I do, however, have a favorite rose.  I confess publicly that I love the delectable purity of Madame Hardy.


Madame Hardy

'Madame Hardy' is an 1832 Damask rose that is probably one of the most unique and recognizable roses of all time.  The first indication of her delicate nature is the unique fringed sepals that surround the developing blooms. The blooms open flat and completely, normally revealing a fully double rose of pure white petals around a central green pip, but  in cool weather Madame Hardy seems a little embarrassed about revealing so much of herself at one time and there will be a slight cream or pink blush when she first opens.  Those perfectly formed blooms are held above a light matte green foliage on a bush completely unlike that of modern roses.  Instead of coarse, thick-caned, thorny and stiff legs, Madame Hardy has a perfect vase-like form, with thin long canes that seldom branch, but run from foot to head, and her thorns are reserved and ladylike in their lack of aggressiveness.  And the fragrance!  Sweet honey with overtones of lemon, Madame Hardy has a perfume that is strong and at the same time light upon the senses.  She doesn't beat you with fragrance like an Oriental Lily, she entices you, she lures you, and finally seduces you into worship.  If I were to chose a single word to describe this consummate lady, it would be "elegant."  She blooms only once a year, Madame Hardy, but when she blooms the angels have come to earth and blessed us with a glimpse of heaven. 

Madame Hardy was known to be a special rose from the beginning.  Her breeder, Monsieur Jules-Alexandre Hardy, was the Superintendent of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris and an acknowledged expert on fruit trees, dabbling in roses on the side.  Some references, including Michael Pollan in Second Nature, a Gardener's Education, state that Monsieur Hardy was the head gardener for the Empress Josephine's rose collections at Malmaison, but the timing seems a bit off to me since Monsieur Hardy was born in 1787 and would only have been 25 years old by the time Josephine died in 1812.   All sources agree that Monsieur Hardy named this rose after his own wife, a testament to his devotion for eternity, and if that was his intention, he couldn't have chosen better.  One source states that the original name for this rose, after his wife, was 'Félicité Hardy', while another source gives the wife's name as Marie-Thérèse Pezard, but regardless, the rose has come to us down the ages as 'Madame Hardy'. According to Alex Pankhurst, in Who Does Your Garden Grow?, "by 1885 there were over six thousand varieties of rose available....that year a French rose journal recommended 'Madame Hardy' as one of the best..."  More recently, the celebrated British rose expert, Graham Thomas, wrote, “This variety is still unsurpassed by any rose.”

Alas, for all rose fanatics, Madame Hardy remains chaste in the garden and won't form hips or contribute pollen to other roses.  She would have undoubtedly been a great source for breeding a line of fantastic modern roses, but leaves us with no rivals, only her own beauty to be admired.

A Little Piece of Texas

Like most of the US population, Kansans sometimes exhibit a little bit of Texas envy, manifested in the gardening population of Kansas by a desire to grow Texas Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush.  Since neither of the forementioned plants are reliably hardy in my climate (don't think I haven't tried!), I've turned to another native Texas plant to satisfy my yearnings; Red Yucca, also known as Texas Red Yucca or Red False Yucca.

Of course, since I've only been in Texas once, not counting a few hops through the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, I was introduced to Red Yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora) in Las Vegas, where it serves as a common xeri-landscape plant.  I'm sure any native Las Vegans, if in fact there are any, could identify the plant on sight, but I suffered on that particular trip from being in a foreign climate where a) I had no real idea what I was looking at, and b)  neither did any of the people working for the hotels and casinos that I asked.  From experience, I'm guessing that casino dealers and hostesses as a general rule don't spend a lot of time admiring the casino landscaping.  Identification had to wait for my return home and access to a computer, where I recognized Hesperaloe on the High Country Gardens website as the plant I'd just spent three days lusting after.

Hesperaloe parviflora 'Yellow'

Red Yucca is found native to the Rio Grande and northern Mexico area, in the Chihuahuan desert, where it matures to a 2-3 foot high and 4 foot wide succulent mound with narrow blue-green leaves and filamentous edges.  The plant flowers over a long period with inverted bell-shaped flowers of coral red, and it is well-suited for xeriscaping by its drought-tolerant, full-sun requirements and its preference for alkaline soil.  I was happy to see that it's a favored plant by hummingbirds and requires little or no maintenance beyond cutting down the flower stalks.  In fact, one helpful Internet gardener commented that it grows in very poor soil, "virtually no soil," so it seems made for my Flint Hills clay.  It's supposed to be hardy to zone 5, and evergreen to boot, so I'm giving this one a chance in my garden.  I've planted two different varieties from High Country Gardens, the red Hesperaloe and a yellow form (Hesperaloe parviflora 'Yellow'), both in somewhat well-drained poor-soil areas. Both survived the hot, dry summer we just had and needed minimal extra watering for establishment.   The yellow form, pictured at left, is doing great and probably has doubled in size since June, although it hasn't yet bloomed. I have great hope for it as I've seen reports of it growing in Denver, Colorado, and Shawnee Mission, Kansas, the latter just a hop, skip, and dead plant away.

So, once again, I'm stepping out into the murky waters of zonal envy and pinning my dreams for garden excellence on a whimsically-chosen plant glimpsed in someone else's climate.  You'd think I'd learn, expecting providence while staring from warm September down into the depths of a Kansas winter.  You'd think all gardeners would learn, but gardeners, more than all other human strains, seem to remain eternal optimists in the face of repeated failure.