Another Show in the Sequence

The grasses provide a seasonal show in September.

The white purple coneflower and Liatris offer up a beautiful show in July.

The meadow is especially nice in June with these oriental poppies and assorted other flowers.

I continue my work with my "meadow", or as I read in Peter Thompson's book, The Self-Sustaining Garden, my matrix garden. While trying to construct this self-sustaining planting, the aesthetics have not been forgotten. I am conscious of having a series of big seasonal shows. After the early spring daffodils comes the June show of blood-red oriental poppies and company, then in July the garden features white purple coneflower with Liatris. Now that a grass (Calamagrostis brachytrica)I planted last year has matured I have a show in September that precedes the fall color show in which the Amsonia hubrichtii is magnificent. I need to bolster the daffodil show and add something more for August. I have a lot of Crocosmia 'Lucifer' that I need to move. Perhaps it will help the late summer show and fit into the community.

Heroin Chic in the Garden

Now here is something different for the garden - the parasitic look. Of course there are many fascinating parasitic plants that would be kind of fun to have in the garden, but they would be tough to grow. The above picture of Colchicum (autumn crocus) at Kingwood Center sending up their leafless flowers in the shade always remind me of parasitic plants. Could this be a step toward reviving the heroin chic motif but this time in the garden?

Harvesting Mixed Feelings

Around the country, apparently in response to economic hard times, a record number of people have grown fruits and vegetables this year. I wonder how their harvests have been. Because in spite of my many years of experience, I am still frustrated by my failure to make satisfactory use of what I grow. I have concluded that unless I am committed to a concerted effort to can, freeze, or otherwise preserve. I will never do more than amuse myself with small bits of food now and then. For example I grew a row of beets this year and we ate beets four or five times. We could have eaten beets every day for months. I don't want to pickle or otherwise process them, so most of the beets are going to go to waste. The same is true for the green beans I grew. One seed packet of beans or beets is enough to provide fresh produce to twenty people! I am processing cherry tomatoes from my eight plants while the two full size tomatoes are largely going to waste. I bought a machine to dry the tomatoes and have amassed enough dried tomatoes to make all my friends and family hide from my anticipated dried tomato largess. Raspberries are great. I eat them with my cereal every morning like I did with blueberries before them. My five Asian pears from my young but precocious trees were delicious, but what do I do when that number is two hundred and five along with my existing Bartlet pears? Potatoes are satisfactory because they can be stored. I can provide home grown potatoes for most of the year. I am about to harvest about a bushel of carrots from another individual seed packet. What am I going to do with all of those?

Obviously I am growing some of the wrong things and/or growing them in too large of a quantity, but I never seem to learn. I need to hone in on the produce that suits my lifestyle and just forget about the other things. Spring is when that resolution goes out the window. Oh! let's try Brussels sprouts this year, and Lima beans; how about kale; I've never grown that!

More on Self-Seeding

I can't seem to stop being fascinated with plants in my garden that are seeding themselves around. I have already written in this blog about Cyclamen purpurascens and Gillenia trifoliata self-seeding to my delight. Now I am infatuated with my display of Cimicifuga japonica pictured above from my front yard making a very gratifying display. I wish I could have captured the full display in a good image. I guess one of the reasons it is so gratifying is that the show is a better one than I would have constructed myself, and it was a lot less expensive. It is also fascinating to see which plants find which garden settings so much to their liking that they seed themselves in. Of course, there is the down side to this self-seeding. I had to commit genocide on my Salvia forskaohlei a few years ago to get control of its spread throughout the garden. Yesterday I found one still lurking in an overlooked corner. I ripped it out. More recently I had to begin the process of removing all my Knautia macedonica because they were insinuating themselves into far too much of my garden. Perhaps in a wilder garden the aforementioned Salvia and Knautia would not be considered offensive.

Exciting Seedlings

Recently discovered seedling of Cyclamen purpurascens

One of the above seedling's likely parents in August toward the end of its blooming cycle.

This is Cyclamen hederafolium that E.A. Bowles wrote about in the quote below. It has the weird habit of blooming in late summer and putting out leaves in the fall.

There is something particularly gratifying about a desirable plant really settling in and making itself at home in my garden, and what could be more domestic than raising a family. This gratification is especially noteworthy when a plant that is a bit of a challenge to grow not only persists in my garden but also puts out a few seedlings. I discovered the above pictured seedling of Cyclamen purpurascens recently about thirty feet from my little planting of the parent plants. A likely parent, also pictured above, has been in my garden for about seven years and it and its companions are growing at a glacial pace. (In light of global warming we may have to change that expression.) So, given the slow growth of the parents the appearance of a few seedlings here and there was even more satisfying than usual.

A quote that caught my imagination about hardy cyclamens was from E.A. Bowles in his book My Garden in Autumn and Winter. In speaking of what we now call Cyclamen hederifolium he says, "You get as good value year in and year out from Cyclamen neapolitanum as from any one plant I can recall, and I think it must be one of the most long-lived of all that are not trees. There is one immense old root here, that would not go into the crown of my hat, and my dear old mother used to tell me she brought it from Atkins' garden at Painswick soon after her marriage, and it is now many years since my parents celebrated their golden wedding. Sixty years is a long life for any one plant, for C. neapolitanum does not renew itself annually as most bulbous plants do, but just grows a little wider from season to season and the older and larger it grows the more vigorous it gets, and the greater number of flowers it produces."

What are the chances one of my children will carry-on the cultivation of my cylamen? Ummm.

Texture and the Color Green

Green Composition


Paeonia veitchii in bloom

One of my most satisfying garden vignettes is pictured above. I love the textural combination of leaves, the various shades of green and the weed excluding, self sustaining massing of foliage. In the background is a Kirengeshoma; over to the left is Glaucidium; in the foreground and a little bit chlorotic is Primula kisoana; then on the right is a woodland peony, Paeonia veitchii. A bit of Epimedium is apparent and the thin leaves are a couple of different species of Carex. This is all growing in the shade of a big white pine. To repeat myself from recent blogs, my overriding goal is to develop more stable plantings like this one that need almost no care, have interesting seasonal flowers and, most importantly, look good in green the rest of the year. And just for good measure I am throwing in a picture of that Paeonia veitchii in bloom. It lasts very briefly, so thank goodness the foliage is attractive.

Keeping up with the Weeds

This modestly assertive Veronica (upright blue flowers) is no match for the weeds. I should replace it with something more substantial.

I just spent about twenty hours over a three day week-end weeding, after which I would describe my gardens as "still weedy." It is the sort of frustration that makes me question my commitment to the scope and nature of the gardening I do at home. It also makes me scrutinize my strategies. With gardens relatively massive in scope, like mine, weed minimization strategies are essential. My "meadow" planting (an experiment in said strategy) is depressingly weedy in spite of dense, mature plantings and frequent and thorough weedings in the past. This experiment in sustainable gardening has been revealing. I have heard speakers talk about their successful "meadows", but with my own experience in mind I would like to see in-person how they cope with persistent weeds like goldenrod, Canada thistle, quack grass, oxalis, etc. (I am developing a new approach in another bed.) In my more conventional mixed planting beds I notice that some big vigorous plants like Nepeta subsessilis, Euphorbia palustris, and my several Monardas have no weeds growing up through them. What I need to do is to better merge my perennials into a continuous, weed excluding mass. It is actually a fairly small list of desirable perennials that have good weed exclusion properties. A look back at my meadow demonstrates that fact convincingly. Another strategy, of course, is to have gardens small enough that keeping up with the weeding and mulching is manageable. I can't bring myself to scale down. There is just too much to learn from my far flung gardening efforts, and since I am usually desk bound at Kingwood Center I don't get my gardening fix at work like I used to.

Know Your Seedlings

I was weeding my garden the other day and was surprised to see a few score of an unfamiliar seedling which I thought to be a strangely odd weed. After pulling a few I stopped to think and realized they were seedlings of the nearby Gillena trifoliata (Bowman's Root)(seedling and mature plant pictured above). It was a pleasant surprise to have such a desirable plant self seeding. I have grown it in that garden for years and this was the first time I noticed its seedlings. Perhaps I wasn't so heavy on the mulch this year. Coincidentally a few days later I read a brief interview with English horticulturist Noel Kingsbury. He was asked for his top gardening tip, which he gave as, "Get to know what plants in your garden self-seed, so you can recognize the seedlings and not weed them out. Then watch a natural, dynamic process take over." I would add a qualifier to that and say watch the natural, dynamic process take over with caution. I have many times been thrilled to see something self-seeding only to later curse its abundance and difficulty to control.