Home-grown Successes

Here are some successful plants I grew from seed last year and this.  One I find very exciting is Geum chiloense 'Mrs. Bradshaw', with seed purchased from J. L. Hudson.  I have Geum macrophyllum growing wild in my yard, a local native, so know the Geums are strong growers and good at self-seeding.  I started Mrs. Bradshaw last year and she waited until this year to bloom.  The flowers are quite intense in color though the buds started out yellow and I was concerned they would stay that way.  

Here they are growing with Verbascum phoeniceum and Anchusa azurea, other plant successes started last year.   The Anchusa is a qualified success since it seems to be the only survivor of several I set out last year.

The Verbascums did very well, some even bloomed a little last fall, and have a range of colors from pink to light and dark purple and magenta.  Another plant success in this photo is Fibigia clypeata, with fuzzy leaves and yellow flowers, similar to money plant in having silvery discs in its seed pods.  It also bloomed last year.

Another shade in the Verbascums, a light magenta, surrounded by an edible winter-growing plant, Corn salad, that in addition to making a nice flavorful addition to a salad makes a nice spring ground cover.  It has tiny white flowers and takes a while to mature the seeds so I can rip them out in early summer.

An annual I'm growing for the first time this year and hope to see naturalize is Limnanthes douglasii, Meadowfoam, which looks like poached eggs.  I found it to be a rather delicate seedling and somewhat hard to transplant but seems to be doing OK.  They have a lot of buds coming so should continue to bloom for a while and hopefully self-sow since they are a native plant.  It would be great is they would actually cover the ground in big sheets of bloom as is their reputation.  Don't they look unreal.

The Agastaches are slowly getting planted out, rupestris bloomed very early and is still blooming in the garden, I hope to see what the others can do and if they will come back next year.  This has been such a crazy year, with so much cold and wet weather, it made it hard to get out and work in the garden but that didn't stop the weeds from growing gang-busters so it's very hard to find a good place to plant anything and will require a lot of work.  The vegetable garden comes first, unfortunately for the Agastaches, but is about finished planting, so more perennial planting can be done.  Some Agastaches are out, though.

Some shrubs I'm trying this year, requiring cold stratification and succeeding so far as seedlings, are the cute-as-a-button Berberis fendleri, native to New Mexico, and with berries tasting like sour cherries according to the High Country Gardens catalog.  I have still to get it planted out and living through the winter before I can consider it a success.  It will be getting transplanted soon and will have to be a bigger size before going in the ground.

Next is Rhus aromatica, a Sumac with edible berries that should stay low, on the left.  I just looked at it and was surprised to find it is now 18" long.  On the right is Rhus trilobata.  It can get 5-6' tall and wide, and both can have orange or red fall color.  They are related to poison oak, so while edible I am a little hesitant to try them, and hope they will be good to grow.

So for all the successes here, there are many that were no-shows this year, or worse did not germinate or sprouted then failed.  But it is worthwhile whenever I find anything that does well as it makes up for the failures.  And perhaps someday I will learn to grow those.

Hannah

Next Wave of Fragrant Flowers

The roses have started to bloom, first as usual is Zepherine Drouhin, which has a delicate rose scent.

And she is thornless, as well.  Another thornless rose is a white once-blooming old garden rose (OGR) given to me, so NOID.  It has a light OGR type scent and is very prolific, but lost its support so is flopped over.

Champney's Pink Cluster has really outdone itself this year, really loaded and fragrant enough to waft a light rose scent.

The flowers are borne profusely and blow rather fast, starting pink and becoming whiter as they age.

Another fragrant rose, with very large apricot blooms, is my favorite for blossoms, Apricot Nectar, an older Floribunda, now over my head.  The flowers are 5-6" across when fully open, and truly magnificent.

Another rose which is nearly scentless but included for its brilliant color, is Dublin Bay, which has extremely long-lasting blooms.  It has been a very slow grower but seems unaffected by the rose disease that decimated some of my roses last year.

Sombreuil, a climbing rose, has an old rose scent and a high petal count in a quartered bloom.  It doesn't have a very long bloom season.

On to some non-rose scented flowers.  One of my favorites is Valerian, with an intense scent that demands a lot of sniffing.  They self-sow slowly so can multiply, and this year are over my head.

The flower famous as a perfume scent, Lily of the Valley, has enchanting small bells but a very short bloom season.  White flowers have such a glare, they are hard to photograph.:-(

A rare scented flower, one I got from Collector's Nursery, is Abelia mosanensis, which I admired for its wonderful fragrance in their gardens, and bought in '02, but it is just now blooming for me for the first time.  I did have it in a different location where it did not seem to be doing well and moved it to my concrete front porch bed where it receives more heat and frost protection.  It is quite different from the other Abelias in flower form and leaf/shrub form, being a rather lax grower that for me requires some support from a trellis.  I hope to get several flushes of bloom but I'll have to see how it does.  Nice little bouquets.

 Finally, a real spring charmer, earlier than the regular daylilies, Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus, the lemon lily.  Rather than smelling like lemons it smells like orange or lemon flowers, and has a nice strong scent unlike regular daylilies.  It multiplies well and has been divided several times to produce several nice clumps.

You can see it is a regular bloom machine for several weeks.  This plant has been in place for 3 years.  The fragrance even wafts a little and is delightful.

Well, I hope you are taking time to smell the roses and other worthy scents in your garden, and happy summer!

Hannah

Spring Fragrance

Here are a few plants that are blooming with some amount of fragrance in my garden  None are wafting fragrance so must be smelled up close.  A little known charmer with kind of erratic branch structure is Lonicera syringantha, flowers resembling lilacs.   The light lavender flowers are tubular and in small clusters.  The fragrance is very nice though a little faint on a wet day.

Next, planted also next to a concrete porch for added warmth, Choisya ternata, and with bigger flower

clusters, more attractive foliage, slightly more scent, and bigger plant size, Choisya 'Aztec Pearl'.

It's a good thing they only call these "Mock Orange" because their fragrance can't compare with actual orange blossoms, which can waft their beautiful scent quite a distance.

But the winner in my garden is the wild False Solomon's Seal, Smilacina racemosa, with an exquisite scent worthy of a great perfume.  It is a scent that seems to overwhelm the senses.  While they are blooming, assuming the deer leave them alone or I put wire around them, I try to make a daily pilgrimage to delight in sniffing them.

Over time they make delightful clumps.

The true Solomon's Seal, Polygonatum commutatum, has charming little flowers hanging down under the stems but no fragrance I can detect.  They spread by rhizomes that add an angular bead-like joint on every year, and have medicinal uses.

Second prize would go to Daphne odora but it is not blooming yet this year.  It has a vibrant scent as well.

An honorable mention is given to Daphne x transatlantica 'Summer Ice', which has a lovely scent but just not as strong or entrancing.

So, what is your favorite fragrant flower blooming now?

Hannah

Alpine Strawberries

One of my successes last year was to start Alpine Strawberries from seed and get fruit the same year.  The varieties I started last year were Alexandria and Delicious.  Here are some in a strawberry pot-

They are blooming already.  The ones planted in the ground are also blooming.  This year I bought more seeds from The Strawberry Store-  Fragola Quattro Stagioni (4 Seasons), Fragola di Bosco, these 2 are Italian Alpines; also Ali Baba, Baron Solemacher, Mignonette, Reine des Vallees, Ruegen, and Yellow Wonder, all of which are runnerless, and finally a Wood strawberry that makes runners from ebay.  Even though the seedlings are initially very small, they develope quickly and seem tough, I haven't had trouble with them dying off like some native plants I have tried.

Alpine Strawberries have small delicate berries, but with a more intense flavor than large strawberries.  They also keep blooming and fruiting all the way until frost.  It is fun to look for the little fruits, and they make a neat and well-behaved plant in the border.  I'm trying to work them into more of my borders where they add a lot of charm.  The Wood running strawberry will have to be planted where it can spread.  It is already making runners in the pots as a seedling.

Hannah

Fast Starting Plant Winners

A couple of plants that I started this year win the Fast Starting Award, achieving bloom under lights in a short time.   Agastache aurantiaca, a native perennial, was started 1/17/11 and has been blooming since 4/18/11, and Asperula orientalis, a Euro-Asian annual that self-sows, was started 2/7/11 and has been blooming since 4/15/11.  The remarkable thing is they are blooming under lights.  The Asperula is supposed to be sky blue but is a pale magenta or lavender under lights.  I will have to see how that changes if grown outdoors.

The Agastache aurantiaca smells heavenly, too.  I am in process of hardening off some plants and getting them set out but have been hampered this year by cold temperatures and lots of rainy days, still continuing.  I also started Agastache foeniculum last year and it has made it through the winter outdoors, and this year I started other Agastaches as well- cusickii, occidentalis- a Northwest native, cana, rupestris, and a few other native plants with seed from Alplains.  None of them are blooming yet.

My Cinnamon Basil also is blooming but is not getting an award since that is not a desirable quality in a Basil plant.

Happy growing , Hannah

Ephemerals- Now You See Them, Now You Don't

Ephemeral plants work very well  in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), since most start growing from seed from fall to early spring when the rainy season begins, or emerge from bulbs or tubers from late winter to early spring, bloom in spring, then by the time the dry summer weather arrives go to seed or dry up and go dormant until the next rainy season.  This means they require no irrigation and also they start growing before the terrible weed grasses, my biggest weed problem, have started to grow, so can suppress them once they are established enough to come up thickly.  My favorite plant for this is Anemone nemorosa.  They grow from underground rhizomes that look like little woody sticks.  I started out with just a few from a friend, and over time they multiplied extraordinarily to become dense stands of delicate leaves sprinkled with colorful flowers.

 I started a program to dig them in summer when dormant and then I replant the area sparsely, and use the extra rhizomes to plant in other beds.   Those come up the next year sparsely, but bloom-

They can transform a very weedy grassy bed-

 into a delightful patch of flowers that suppress grass, but do best in shade to part shade-

The blue-purple variety 'robinsoniana' is delightful-

As is the frilly variety 'vestal' with a pompom in the center, ethereal but less vigorous, so rarer, than the others-

I surveyed some of my beds that used to be overrun with weeds, some of them are getting close to being filled in sufficiently with successful plants to keep weeds from coming in.

But my long front bed where I killed grass over one winter with newspaper and black plastic had too much exposure to the large lawn area and the irises, roses, daylilies, and fig trees I planted there didn't cover the ground enough to shade out invading grass, so it is a nightmare of reinvasion-

Mulching with newspaper can help a little, here some Ajuga and Columbine are valiantly waging war on weeds for me, maybe they will make it-

Columbines can do a fantastic job of self-sowing, I tried scattering the seeds in the front bed last year-

They are the scalloped leaves with slight purple tints on them mixed in with the Ajuga.

Another ephemeral that I am enjoying is Lunaria annua, the Money Plant.  I have 2 colors, white and the usual purple.  They sow themselves delicately and like shady places, so are a welcome accent with heart-shaped leaves.  And after the seed pods dry out, they make lovely silver dollar-sized shimmering dried floral arrangements.  I also learned they have an edible tuber like a parsnip-rooted parsley, and may actually try some out this year.

 The white ones are coming up more thickly, but I don't consider either one as problems, they are sedate self-sowers.

Then there is the queen of the native ephemerals, Trilliums, which make a lovely bouquet and have deepened here to a magenta from their initial white.

Then there are the incredibly elegant Bleeding Hearts, which at least here are not in evidence much in the heat of the summer.

  And who could forget these blue charmers, which are too aggressive in their exuberance and have to be yanked in late spring because of their decline into grey masses of mildew-

I just love the borage family.  I'm not going to go into all the bulbs which fit this category.

Happy gardening, Hannah

Even Thorns Can Have Serendipity

Today I took on the unpleasant task of removing some diseased roses.  I have 5 climbing roses on a deck.  Last year I had to cut a lot of dead wood out of Reve d'Or from some unknown disease, and this year he was all dead except for one twiggy cane from last year.

 He had been vigorous and a good bloomer of peachy blossoms, this is 2008, so it was sad.

But he was very thorny, and was always catching my clothing or hat when I went by.  I have a painful knuckle where he got me today with a thorn through my glove.  But I was very surprised to find on the thick base of the plant a nice clump of Turkey Tail bracket fungi, which makes a nice medicinal tea.

So I broke them off and need to trim them up, then I can actually try making the tea!

Next rose over is my favorite, Zepherine Drouhin, who has the distinction of being first and last rose to bloom in my garden as well as keeping a few blooms all season of a lovely hot pink.  This is the first flush in 2008.  She shows little sign of the disease.

 Peeping out on the left is the magnificent red, Dublin Bay.  He is younger a few years and a slower grower.  His blooms are a fantastic red and very long-lasting on the bush.  He shows almost no signs of the mysterious disease.  He was finally achieving the height of the deck in 2008, which gives him better sunlight.

Next rose down the line is similar to Reve d'Or in color but a deeper peach, Crepuscule.  She was very beautiful in full bloom (2008) but also very susceptible with only one new little cane untouched.

She has very lovely coloration, deeper in the center.

On the far side of the overbearing Hall's Honeysuckle and therefore in too much shade is a rose that was supposed to get very large but has not yet, same age as Dublin Bay, Awakening, with a smaller light pink bloom.   Someday when she makes it to the top of the deck perhaps the additional light will spur her on.

But a newer addition to the garden, a NO ID once-blooming white rose, has been vigorous growing on one of my deer fences, and was knocked over last year when my husband was taking out a hornet's nest, necessary in spite of hornets being valuable in the garden for eating pest insects, because it was too close to foot traffic and hornets were aggressive and stung 3 people.    Perhaps it will fill in where the other roses are missing.  Once-bloomers do have a vigor of bloom that compensates a lot for not reblooming.  I freed a couple of heavy T-posts when I removed the Wisteria and Silverberry that I used to strengthen the fence and hold up the rose, so it should put on quite a show again this year, thanks Carol O.

Present also by the deer fence are the short climber Fourth of July, with fireworks-like splashes of red and white, Austin roses Evelyn and Heritage, fragrant pinks, and the large and magnificent Apricot Nectar.  Hopefully they will not be affected. It is good to see new growth, and new hope springing forth.

Hannah