Bookish Gardener

Come on and dance with me

Lathyrus odoratus..."He said that her friends just call her 'Sweet Pea.'" Oh, it's January, the month of seed catalogs, and my eyes will be bigger than my stomach—that is, the contents of all the packets of sweet pea seeds that I'll put in the shopping cart will overcrowd the modest four-foot trenches allotted to them alongside the undulating arched trellis that bisects one of my three raised beds. The heirlooms, the Spencers, the one from the monk, the new varieties and hybrids—they are all irresistible.

I've made my share of mistakes in tending to my sweet peas over the seasons, though not the obvious one of letting the Midwestern summer heat and humidity get to them—as long as I'm diligent with watering and feeding, and happily, obsessively picking off the buds as soon as they're on the wane and before they form...peas...they'll chug along through the first touches of light frost and beyond. No, the mistakes I've made have been unforced errors: waiting (i.e. procrastinating, then letting time slip away) later than I should to get the seeds in the ground; forgetting to soak or scrape the seeds before getting them in the ground; pinching the seedlings to encourage branching when they are crowded enough already and this will only delay them reaching the trellis; noticing too late that they've grown so vigorously and thickly that the trellis is about to...too late! topple over.

But each growing season, the sweet peas manage to survive that season's malministrations and reward the garden, and the gardener, with their beauty of form, color, and especially scent, like no other. From the first signs of successful germination, to how could these things have grown three feet already and where is the twine to tether them to the trellis, 

Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight:

With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white,

And taper fingers catching at all things,

To bind them all about with tiny rings.

Keats, "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," 1817.

 

Elb-OW

I looked up this morning, and this summer's gone

(Aaand TIL upon verifying the lyrics that that's a mondegreen that's happily resided in my brain all these years, in the stead of "I looked out this morning / and the sun was gone.") But yes, today is the autumnal equinox. Hello fall, goodbye summer.

There's still some juice, and color, left in the growing season. My garden's Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus 'Blue Bird'), insulted but not felled by the last harsh winter, and finally unmolested by Japanese beetles, unfurls perfect blooms in a perfect hue every day these days. Also happily beetle-free, at last, is the self-sown Kiss-Me-Over-The-Garden-Gate (Polygonum orientale), casually elegant in cerise. Enabling the illusion that all won't be quiet, and brown, and then white, by the next quarter-turn of the calendar, are a half-dozen stolid and florid late-blooming daylilies, and the wildflower mix bounty of white, pink, and magenta cosmos and orange marigolds, still chugging along.

But I can only avert my eyes from the (so many) weeds making their late-season resurgence. And cry "uncle," and wave the white flag of surrender, with my non-dominant hand, since my dominant hand, and arm, and elbow are on the injured list, after overenthusiastic weed pulling sessions in early summer. The technical term for it is "tennis elbow," they say. Yanking hurts, pulling hurts, gripping hurts, lifting my coffee cup hurts. I fought the weeds, and the weeds won.

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.

 

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.

Happy first day of (metereological) spring!

{(Blows dust off.) Do I still know how to work this thing?}

Happy spring, one and all. It's 16°F at the moment, and it won't get above freezing today, and there's a single-digit high and a below-zero low in the forecast for three days from now, but...

I love the light this time of the year. In the hour or so before sunset, it quiets everything down and slowly turns the seasonal affect dial toward..."hope."

Spring joy, or as Clifford Brown and Max Roach would play:

 

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")". 

Try to remember

Last summer's June: Lavender, penstemons, mullein, petunias, snapdragons, hops, marigolds and cabbages.

Snow Friday, snow Saturday, snow today, snow tomorrow, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The shrubs are waist-deep in it. The night sky, glowing white, softly pelts its flakes, interminably, inexorably, down, down, down.

Spring in my step

With the flip of a switch, spring has arrived. We cut the winter garden to the ground two Saturdays before last, and not a moment too soon. Within days temperatures jumped to preternatural levels (shorts, if not swimsuit weather), and the early warmth and steady rains have accelerated and compressed the comings and goings of the spring flowers.

The list of things to be done is endless, of course, but what I like to do in the garden these days is just wander around and around. I can't see the same new bud or bloom too many times. It's as if I were holding the face of a prodigal, long-lost loved one, and saying, with great melodrama: It's you; It's really you. The thickening carpet of Scilla siberica, the blue of the squills shown off to its best not in sun but in deep shade, against a wall of deep green yew hedge; Helleborus foetidus, ready to bloom for the first time in my garden (hurray!), drooping with a dozen pendulous pasteled chartreuse berry-like buds; the Best Astilbe Ever, valuable 365 days a year, already a foot tall with fresh bronze elegant foliage, in the sump garden (a/k/a, alas, The Weed Farm); the actually compact euonymus 'Rudy Haag', hinting at autumn with thin racing stripes of burning-bush red up through its stems and its emerging leaf buds; and David Austin's Redouté, which rocks, waking up from its unprotected winter with new growth already two-thirds the way up its tallest stem.

I've resisted keeping Jeffersonian records of the day-to-day history of plants in my garden, seeing as it would put me over the guilt-trip baggage limit of things that I am continually failing to maintain to perfectionist excess. But...I'm going to try keeping note in the sidebar of the coming blooms, dividing the month into decanates ("E" for early, days 1-10, "M" for mid, days 11-20, and "L" for late, days 21-month's end). I may miss a date here or there, or confuse a cultivar or two, but it'll be okay...right?

Early spring's bulbs

Photo credit: Jessamyn Roll

From top left, anti-clockwise, Crocus tomasianus and Iris reticulata 'Pixie', 'Harmony' and 'Cantab', which opened day by day in the gravel garden in this sequence, starting about ten days ago, in an arc of violet—purple—royal blue—flax blue. (They were briefly kept company by Puschkinia scilloides var. libanotica until the latter was served up for lagomorph hors d'oeuvres.)

At day's end these days, the light is golden amber, calming the mood and elevating the spirit. Yesterday, the first daffodils began to bloom.