Bookish Gardener

Yaass Queen

Some plants were whupped by last winter: the 6-foot burning bush (Euonymus alatus 'Rudy Haag'), now down to a handful of new growth from a nub of whatever-didn't-get-felled by the -27ºF polar vortex; the Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus 'Bluebird'), same; and the more-than-a-decade old climbing hydrangea (Hydrangea anomala subsp. petiolaris) now wending up the chimney with only sparse foliage surrounded by dead twigs.

But others liked it cold, apparently: the peonies bloomed by the hundreds; all the daylilies are punching above their weight and setting multiple buds upon multiplied stalks; and I have never seen the Queen-of-the-Prairie (Filipendula rubra) hold court like this. The blooms are the purest deep pink, just this side of classy without taking that short walk to brassy magenta. Up close, you see the sewingpin-head-sized pink pearls of the fluffy foam blooms to come. From afar, the grove of the Queen's blooms outshines everything else around it.

As with every season, timing is everything. The pollen-heavy blooms of the Queen are irresistible to insects, especially (or most disgustingly visibly) the Japanese beetle. This year, the Queen bloomed early, and the Japanese beetles are late, though they'll have their way with the Queen soon enough.

The Queen moved herself toward the front of the bed, now in a sightline of other reds: scarlet beebalm (Monarda didyma), and a dun-reddish daylily on her side of the bed; and, across a strip of lawn to another bed, Monarda 'Raspberry Wine,' the color of a sophisticated lipstick, and too-red-to-be-orange and too-orange-to-be-red Maltese Cross (Lychnis chalcedonia). All these reds don't go together in the most wonderful way, like the so-wrong-it's-right chords in a Monk tune:

"Ugly Beauty," indeed.

 

Die schöne mullein

Oh, how I wish the common mullein (Verbascum thapsus) were more common in my garden. I've heard that our subdivision (developed in the '70s) sits on land originally planted to pasture, so the woolly rosettes of farm weed mullein will show up once every few years or so, most often in the inconvenient path of the power mower.

But we have a gift this season: a flowering mullein that has sat itself down right next to a five-alarm fire red Lychnis chalcedonia (with many aliases, including the better known "Maltese cross," or my favored, "Burning Love"...a hunk of, hunk of burning love...aahh). The mullein's just begun to flower with a yellow whose clarity is outdoing that of the Carolina lupine and even the short, medium, and tall Oenothera around the garden. It's a sight to see. Come back soon.

Amo amas amelanchier

Spring's imperative: to visit all the amelanchiers at the Arboretum when they're in bloom once a year. Their finery is on display for only a short time, and this week is that week. Amelanchier is a delicious-to-say botanical name; Wiki-know-it-all puts paid to the urban legend (well, a legend, probably not urban) that its common name of "serviceberry" comes from its bloomtime coinciding with the time when the frozen ground has thawed sufficiently to allow digging of burial plots. Serviceberry, shadbush, Juneberry: they're all lovely. The delicate white blossoms drape like Chantilly lace over deeply colored, athletically sinewed limbs and branches. Even those with abstractly improvised branching pose artfully (although I just saw one in a commercial landscape hedge-trimmed into a lozenge; don't do them like that). With some, the white raiment shines bright against the emerging lime green foliage; with others, the flowers and leaves merge into a sepia haze that somehow tints their surroundings too, and transports you, wibbly-wobbly, to a past time not your own. Glimpse them while you can; it won't be long until the amelanchiers change into their street clothes and recede into the crowd.

Promenade in green

"53º Cloudy." It's a falling mist that only aspires to rain. The garden is a quiet monochrome of green after the weekend's first fresh lawn mow and a lively thunder-and-lightning show last night. It's the stage of the season when everything is up but the blooms are accents only to the expanse of green foliage, the promenade in green.

Evonymus, to Linnae(v)s

Euonymus alata 'Rudy Haag'. (Photo credit: Jessamyn Roll)

Our little* burning bush bloomed for the first time this spring, with barely noticeable yellow blooms, the size of a pinky nail. This fall's first berries are sprinkled delicately throughout the denuded branches. Its fall color was rich this year, thanks (I think) to rain and more rain. The berries and the leaves were persimmon and pomegranate juxtaposed, colors that shouldn't go together, but they did, and they do.

*'Rudy Haag' is actually compact, smaller than 'Compactus', and way smaller than the species, which is alatus? or alata? or just apparently the topic of another taxonomical food fight: "This is because botanists disagree as to whether the genus name Euonymus should be treated as feminine ("alata") or masculine ("alatus")". 

Perception colored

Dog days already. The peonies went from lush to louche in less than a fortnight. These days, all I need for my impression of Albert Brooks in Broadcast News is to step outside and stand stockstill.

Just before the sun sets, the duskglow of the garden takes on a sepia-toned cast from the sodden, humid air, like a historical flashback in an artsy movie, or a fugue state. Pinks, yellows, reds, grays and blues buzz through the haze like old neon light fixtures.

The other night, my husband was out in a stretch of the back border sequenced in jewel-toned 'Caradonna' salvia, yellow coreopsis, purple-bronze sedum, red-to-yellow blanketflower, magenta petunia, lemon yellow 'Happy Returns' daylily, pale blue catmint, this meadow buttercup, sunshine orange calendula, and blue-purple 'May Night' salvia. He was stopped at one spot, looking at the buttercup, and then the salvia, and then back and forth again. Look, he said. See how the blue looks after you stare at the yellow. He was right. In daylight, 'May Night' is pretty much a plain blue salvia, without the pizzazz of 'Caradonna' or the subtlety of 'Blue Hill', but it turned electric in that light with our little gaze-shifting exercise.

Which all brings to mind this from Gertrude Jekyll, the first and last word on color in the garden:

Each portion now becomes a picture in itself, and every one is of such a colouring that it best prepares the eye, in accordance with natural law, for what is to follow. Standing for a few moments before the end-most region of grey and blue, and saturating the eye to its utmost capacity with these colours, it passes with extraordinary avidity to the succeeding yellows. These intermingle in a pleasant harmony with the reds and scarlets, blood-reds and clarets, and then lead again to yellows. Now the eye has again become saturated, this time with the rich colouring, and has therefore, by the law of complementary colour, acquired a strong appetite for the greys and purples. These therefore assume an appearance of brilliancy that they would not have had without the preparation provided by their recently received complementary colour.

Gertrude Jekyll, The Gardener's Essential Gertrude Jekyll (selected and with an introduction by Elizabeth Lawrence). David R. Godine, 2000. ISBN 0-87923-599-3.

Newly blooming: Ratibida columnaris (Mexican hat), Alcea rosea (pastel hollyhocks), David Austin rose 'Bibi Maizoon', Monarda didyma 'Jacob Kline', Hemerocallis 'Happy Returns' (daylily), Clarkia unguiculata (mountain garland), Linum grandiflorum (red flax, self-sown), Zinnia tenuifolia 'Red Spider' (self-sown), Nicotiana langsdorfii (green flowering tobacco, self-sown), Phlox paniculata (pink and 'Bright Eyes'), Asclepias tuberosa (white butterfly milkweed), Cichorium intybus (chicory), Aconitum (white monkshood), Heliopsis helanthiodes (false sunflower), Echinacea purpurea (white coneflower), Prunella grandiflora (selfheal).

Color my world

A few days ago I got startled and suckered into a supermarket checkout-stand impulse purchase. I had to have this magazine. Its glossy cover radiated color: bright blue flower planters, stuffed with pink pelargoniums, purple petunias, egg-yolk yellow marigolds, and rose-red dragon wing begonias, set against the soft-focus shimmer of chartreuse and gold in the background. (Yeah, it was the cover, but it might as well have been a centerfold.) It's as though I'd forgotten what color was, in these latter days of gray, with crusted snow banks like the insides of an overfrosted old freezer, and evergreens faded to khaki. Even dreams these days are dun-colored (and sometimes fretful and ridiculous: last night's featured an extremely large rabbit hoisting an extremely tiny rabbit up to one of the whiskey barrel planters, the better for it to gobble away at the tops while simultaneously digging out the plants by their roots). When I can't claw my way out of this total failure of imagination—how could it ever be warm again? and green again?—I turn to these memories of summer past, stowed away for this chilly day, from Hands in the Dirt, and try to start dreaming again in "green bean green".

Changeling

A lovely lagniappe: one of my "blue" columbines (Aquilegia caerulea) is blooming in an unexpected color this spring. The photo doesn't adequately depict the subtlety of the parchment coloring of the petals, with faint streaks of purplish-blue and green. I don't have any other columbines in my garden, so there's no logical explanation for this baby-that-looks-like-the-milkman. (Indeed, another bud from this same plant is blooming in the expected purple-blue.) It's a welcome—and needed—surprise; this smallish front bed has been mostly given over to my "any color, so long as it's blue" tendencies ('Bertram Anderson' lungwort—blue; comfrey—blue; corydalis flexuosa—blue), and this turns out to be just the thing to give the bed some rest and balance. (Now, what'll I do if it doesn't come back in this color next year?)

Euonymus Fall Color

Last week's hard freeze has been followed by several days of Indian summer, and the deciduous trees have "bloomed" into fall colors seemingly overnight. Around our neighborhood, the most-of-the-year-drab burning bushes (Euonymus alata) are finally redeeming themselves. How to describe the color? A strong pink, just shy of a red, not tipping over into magenta, infused with a matte, almost chalky coral undertone. (Yeah, yeah...a picture's worth a thousand words.) All I know is that it would be a fabulous color for lipstick or nail polish. Of course, nothing gets on the cosmetics shelves these days without a just-so name. Take, for example, these specimens from my moldering collection of MAC lipsticks, courtesy of a girls'-day-out shopping spree a few years ago: "Diva". "Rebel". "X-S". "Underworld". And my personal favorite, "Smoove". (The color doesn't do much for me, but the name put me in stitches.)

By these standards, "Euonymus" probably doesn't cut it. How about..."Hue Ominous"?

(Sorry.)