Sweet Marjorie, an impulse justified

The thermometer hit 100 (not a misprint, one hundred) degrees on the porch yesterday. The peonies are in overdrive and ‘Sweet Marjorie’ is already fading, just days after the first bud opened.  But while she lasted she was lovely – proof that irrational impulses can sometimes be worth following.

After all, it’s basically stupid to get seduced by the name of a flower. Makes no more sense than buying wine because you like the label. But Marjorie was my sweet mother’s name. I bought one, even though I didn’t find the photo particularly exciting and it seemed unlikely there would be much in the way of fragrance.

That was 2 years ago, in the great Let’s Have More Peonies spree, and not surprisingly there were no flowers in 2009. It takes a while for peonies to get established. I wouldn’t have been upset if there weren’t any this year, either. But in fact there were  seven blossoms, each quite different from the other. Every one beautiful.

I got her from Klehm, the nursery where she was bred, and although I didn’t find her in this year’s online catalog, a quick check on the phone confirmed there are indeed plants for sale.

In this case a happy ending, along with a good reminder to ask for what you want before assuming it can’t be had. But it doesn’t always turn out that way. There are thousands of named cultivars, so there are always thousands “not currently available.”

And of course a lot of what is available is only available in limited quantities, so it’s best to shop early. Peonies don’t ship until fall, but nurseries reserve their stock on a first come first served basis, and  if you wait until closer to planting time you may be too late.

Peonies and I… well, let’s just say other peony posts include: shopping tips; my love affair with the beautiful, shade lovers found among species peonies; full directions for peony planting (along with quite a bit about the heirloom cultivars that came with the Hudson Valley house) and of course the truth about ants and peonies.

I did of course buy a few other little things, and then as usual a few more, at my annual TS day next stop, Greystone Greenhouses, on rt. 343 right outside of Sharon CT and no I can’t put in a link because they have no website. What they have – in addition to all sorts of gorgeous tropicals you didn’t know you needed but gee the prices are so reasonable –  is the tree peony of the century, in bloom early this year just like everything else.

depending on the weather, you probably have two or three more days to see this on the way in to buy your never-saw-a-pink-one before Clerodendrum thompsonii and other necessities.

Base of thumb to middle finger tip = 6.25 inches

The flowers aren’t especially large, as tree peonies go, but they have unusual substance and are actually a rich lavender (my camera has pink/blue issues).

So of course I asked what it was, only to learn it has no name. Ed Powers, who owns and runs the place with his plant-powerhouse wife, Laurel, told me it was grown from a seed.

The nursery sold it to them at a bargain price, he said, with no guarantees. But he thinks the fact that it IS a seedling, rather than a clone or graft, may account for its unusual vigor.

The Powerses planted it in 1992, and it has already been this size twice ( it took a great deal of damage in an ice storm, a few years back).

But I digress –  the thing is indeed worth a detour but Greystone is not about peonies…or conventional bedding plants, although they do sell things like marigolds and coleus.

The thing that’s great at Greystone is Laurel’s eye for the unusual: terrific fuchsias and begonias, papyrus galore, variegated brugmansias, all for prices so low they put the box stores to shame.

left: Clerodendrum thompsonii, right: clematis alpina

This is a picture of why I should have an MG or something. The clerodendrum is tropical; over a single summer in Maine it will become huge and gorgeous and then at least in theory I will either give it away or let it die. The sweet this-time-it-IS-pink species clematis, bought at Trade Secrets from Loomis Creek Gardens is hardy, and will grow larger and lovelier each year ( in the Hudson Valley) with minimal attention from me.

Ezra Pound, my latest adventure in tree peonies. There are purple flares inside but it rained hard the day Ezra opened and that was the end of that.

I have to say I’ve never had good luck with tree peonies, but that may not mean much;  in 40 years of gardening I’ve only had three of them.

The first, an unnamed white, did beautifully for about a decade, growing ever larger and ever more floriferous – until it went into a rapid decline for reason or reasons unknown.

The white tree peony in the Maine white garden, at about 5 years old

Next came a weed-buried mystery, discovered after we moved into the Hudson Valley house.

Paltry and flowerless when we found it, under Bill’s tender care it grew – slowly, in the manner of tree peonies – into a huge bush, covered each spring with silk tissue flowers 6 to 8 inches wide. Magenta, unfortunately, but you can’t have everything.

You also can’t have the tree peony, if you have to dig it up and move it in the middle of the summer so you can get at the well pipe it was planted next to.

It hung on in the new spot for a few years but never really recovered, and when we moved it again it croaked.

Insert a gap of many years, during which I got more and more interested in species peonies. But then I was ordering a bunch of new garden peonies and what the heck, here comes Ezra.

So far, same old same old. His first summer was last year – cold, dark and miserable. The plant, small to begin with, barely hung on. No new wood added. This spring, all woody stems except one five-incher were dead. Grumble.

But then, lots of healthy new growth from the roots! A good sized extension of the woody stem, with a big fat bud attached! Another bud, much lower on the stalk! And then the propane-delivery guy whacked off the extension by dragging the heavy hose over it. He saw the teepee of protective stakes and tried to avoid the plant, but somehow my cranky tree peony gods guided his subsequent movements.

Hope springs eternal however; the rest of the new growth is still in fine shape. And this weekend is super garden show Trade Secrets, in Sharon CT., a reliable source of rare peonies – if you get there early.

Garden Tour Alert: Ezra Pound was hybridized by William Gratwick lll, a major luminary of tree peony breeding. The fabulous collection he built lives on at his estate, still in family hands. The gardens are open just a few days a year, starting this very weekend: the 2010 season begins with a preview on May 15.  If you are anywhere near Rochester, New York,  it’s worth a special journey. Garden and tour information is here.

Nomenclature disclaimer: No, I have no idea why Mr. Gratwick decided to name this beautiful plant after the brilliant poet/notorious fascist sympathizer, nor have I been able to learn the answer by googling. Please write and tell us if you know.

Not wishing to miss the bandwagon, I’ll go ahead and be early too. It’s time to order bulbs for fall planting: pretties for the borders, shallots for the plate.

clockwise from left: chionodoxa, muscari, puschkinia, muscari, chionodoxa, scilla, puschkinia, chionodoxa, scilla

On the Ornamental Front – Singing the Blues

I don’t think I’ve ever met a “minor,” aka small, bulb I didn’t like, but this year my mind is on the little blues: scilla and chionodoxa, muscari and puschkinia.

In addition to being blue, already a major plus, these old favorites are terrific bargains – inexpensive to buy, easy to plant (see below), and, bless ‘em, reliably prolific.

Once you get them going they not only persist forever, they also multiply and move around. Clumps expand into little puddles. Adventurous volunteers pop up far from the original plantings, wildflowers once more.

PLANTING TIPS

Placement: These are early bloomers, but not that early, so it’s unwise to plant them where they’ll get mowed before the leaves have fed the bulbs and the flowers have set seed. I’ve put most of ours at the edges of beds and in the skirts of the trellis of Dutchman’s Pipe that borders the crocus lawn. Annie next door has a wavy blue sea below the trees at the edge of her drive, and she just lets the grass there get shaggy until it’s safe to mow.

Deep blue scilla is dominant in this stretch at Annie's, but there are also plenty of chionodoxa and grape hyacinth, once you start looking.

Planting:

In grassy areas:  For each clump of 10 to 20 bulbs (depending on size of bulb, not size of budget), envision a rough circle about 10 inches in diameter. Cut all the way around it with a shovel, then cut underneath 2 to 3 inches, so you have a disk of sod. Remove it, loosen the dirt underneath, then position the bulbs on it, pointing up, about 2 bulb-widths apart. (Do not add fertilizer) Replace the disk and press down firmly with a foot.

Elsewhere: In thickly planted beds, you can just use a trowel to lever a wedge-shaped opening and put a few bulbs in it. If the soil is soft after a rain you can sometimes simply push them firmly into spaces between perennials.

Putting some in the cutting garden is usually unnecessary, but if you were planning the sort of wedding that gets planned many months in advance you might want to plant a patch to be harvested for nosegays - Muscari armeniacum have a lovely, not-too-sweet fragrance –  and table decorations.

Shallot planting info coming shortly. Meanwhile, get those orders in;  less-common varieties, including French gray “true” shallots ( Allium oschanini) sell out fast.

I get my little blues from Brent and Becky and from Van Engelen. Shallots come from my personal friends at Johnny’s Selected Seeds,  from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and from Kitchen Garden Seeds (the food branch of Van Engelen).

* The National Weather Service declares the growing season’s start each year,  based on a number of mostly  pretty obvious factors. Once an area is officially in its growing season, frost and freeze warnings are issued whenever warranted until the season is declared officially over.

Iochroma cyanea by Bobbi Angell

The artist, Bobbi Angell, is my former partner-in-column at the New York Times, and after many many trips to exotic places, drawing plants for the New York Botanical Garden (among others),  she has no doubt forgotten more about tropical plants than I will ever learn.

“I tried overwintering one in the cellar ,” she wrote, “and had just brought it up two days ago so don’t know yet it if survived but I sure hope so… here is an etching  from a wild plant in Ecuador that I saw last year. I love the plant! ”

In her next e-mail, she wrote “Now tell me to quit poking at my dormant plant checking for signs of life lest I kill it off in anticipation. There is green under the bark but won’t be for long if I scrape any more off with my fingernails.”

What she doesn’t know is that I should do that telling while looking in the mirror. I was just down in the basement scratching – vainly; I’m going to need a pruner – at the lemon verbena, and at the biggest brugmansia, which I have a feeling is going to emerge somewhat less big.

No worries about the smaller brugmansia or the giant herd of figs (well, 5 seems like a herd); they all have pale green new growth and must be moved back into the light asap.

That’ll be as soon as we get back… I’m playing semi hooky to go hunting for black morels, always the first of the season.

Any of the pale ones look familiar?

My friend Gary Lincoff, author of The Audubon Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, teacher at the New York Botanical Garden and crocus enthusiast, is a naming things kind of guy. So when he saw the crocus picture in the Maple Syrup post he wanted to know exactly which species and cultivars they were.

Both looked like Crocus sieberi to him, and I knew he was right about the purple one (far left above); it’s C. sieberi ‘Firefly. But I don’t have any white C. sieberi, so I’m thinking the original picture is deceptive and the pale one is actually C. chrysanthus ‘Cream Beauty,’ ( 2nd in from the right) C. biflorus ‘Purity’ (2nd in from the left) or – less likely – the purple blotched one 3rd from right or the pure white one at the end, both also mysteries. (The dark yellow one with the stripes is C. chrysanthus ‘Gypsy Girl,” in the lineup to show what the bases of that group often look like.)

You’d think I’d at least be able to show a single mugshot of our quarry, even if I didn’t know its name. Unfortunately, there are several candidates because I’m not sure which possible clump is the one in the picture – reproduced here for your convenience.

name the pale one and you win --- undying gratitude

So I just went out the first chance I got and gathered all the pale ones it could have been and if anyone would like to help us out, we’d both be very happy.

Here they are again, reversed

This is a stem of Benfica, reputedly the deepest, darkest red. It's much darker and redder than this picture suggests.

or this one either, for that matter.

Thus we arrive at the moment for talking about long-term amaryllis care. Questions have been coming in, so here’s the drill:

There are about 80 species of Hippeastrum, to give the genus its proper name, and not surprisingly they grow in a number of different habitats. But most of the “Amaryllis” sold in the US are hybrids like this Elvas, derived from deciduous species that live in well-drained soil where winter is temperate and dry, spring is heralded with warm rains and summer temperatures are toasty but not downright tropical.

Well, it was sold ( at the supermarket) as Elvas; I think it may be Dancing Queen

On home turf, the spring rains wake the dormant bulb. It sends up a flower stalk, closely followed by a sheaf of strappy leaves. The leaves grow and feed the bulb all summer, then gradually die back as the rains stop and the ground grows drier. Cold – well, cool, they can’t take frost – weather keeps them dormant until late winter, when the whole cycle starts again.

Translation:

1. After blooming, or when there are leaves if there weren’t blooms, encourage strong growth by keeping the plants warm (70 – 80 degrees), giving them bright but not scorching light and watering just enough to keep the soil barely moist; better to err on the side of dryness if you’re unsure. Avoid pouring  water into the neck.

Feed with all purpose fertilizer diluted to half strength, every 2 or 3 weeks from spring to fall. Don’t start until the leaves are well on their way and stop when you see they are no longer growing actively.

2. If you can move the potted plants outdoors for summer, that’s a good thing, though it’s important to protect them from narcissus bulb flies if these pests are in the area.

3. In mid to late summer, stop watering. If the plants are in pots outdoors, just turn the pots on their sides. If there are serious autumn rains; put the pots under cover, especially the terra cotta ones.

4. When the soil is dry and leaves are flabby and yellowing, cut off the leaves. If the bulb is extremely crowded or has produced many offsets, repot in very well drained potting mix in a slightly larger pot, leaving the upper third of the bulb exposed (to forestall rot at the neck). Removing the offsets will direct more strength to the mother bulb; leaving them will eventually produce a more handsome clump. Be warned “eventually” means 3 to 5 years.

5. Let the bulb experience winter – temperatures in the 50 to 60 degree range – for 8 to 10 weeks. You don’t have to put them in a dark place unless the place they’d be in otherwise is so brightly lit after dark they’d completely fail to get the message about winter’s short days.

6. Water well, just once, to restart growth. Be patient; it often takes a couple of weeks before anything starts happening, and over watering at this stage is a sure invitation to rot. When you think about those bulbs in the bin at the store, sprouting away while their naked roots are just dangling there in the dry air, you can see that lack of moisture is seldom the thing that’s holding them back.

Warm Climate Armaryllis Growing

Gardeners in zones warm enough to grow hippeastrums as garden plants – 8b and warmer, basically – have better or worse luck depending on soil, weather and placement. Slightly sandy, quick draining soil is essential; pH can be anywhere from 6 to a little above 7.

“Bright but not scorching” applies, a bit of afternoon shade is a good idea in truly torrid areas. There’s not much you can do about giving them the requisite dry period if you live where it rains in late summer, but you can be sure to site the bed away from plants that get watered in the normal course of things.

Bulbs in the ground may fail to experience 60 degrees as winter, especially if it’s never any colder. I’ve heard of people digging them up and putting them in the fridge but I’m against that degree of fussing around even if it does work.

Sources: I got the Benfica from Brent and Becky’s Bulbs, which may well have been the source of the original Papilio – unless I got it from John Scheepers, an equal possibility. Next fall I may try an offering or two from Easy To Grow Bulbs. Never ordered from them before but they have both a good reputation and a large selection.

Butterfly amaryllis, photographed yesterday

There are 5 more – 2 papilios and 3 Giant Dutch Hybrids – in various stages of budded up. Also, par for the course, we have 4 in healthy-but-not-promising mode; 1 pot of 3 robust papilios that has “wait ‘till summer” written all over it and 6 bulbs that have refused to green up well and will not be with us much longer.

They may be harboring bulb fly or simply be discouraged by last year’s cold dark spring.( It didn’t get warm and bright enough for them to grow until it was almost time for them to stop.) On the good side, they’ve underlined a lesson I probably should have absorbed some time ago.

None of the unhappy ones are papilios and only one of the budded-ups is a carried over Dutch job (the other 2 are new this year). In fairness, this has been an unusually poor year for the giants, but I’ve about decided to admit reality; start saving only the butterflies and thus free up a whole bunch of window and garden space: H. papilio is clearly a more willing species than the standard.

This bulb is at least 5 or 6 years old, and the parent of many ( note pups at left)

In addition to being tough, papilios are low- hassle, because they’re more or less evergreen. Although old leaves turn yellow and die eventually, new ones are always being made. There are no worries about when to stop watering, whether to cut off leaves that still look healthy or any of that. Butterflies don’t need (or want) the usual dry down/leave dormant/wake up cycle. You just give them as much warmth and sun as you can and fertilize as indicated by how much warmth and sun that is – the more the more is close enough.

amaryllis always leave the greenhouse last, to (try to) foil the bulb fly

Added benefit: instead of the dramatic but rather fake-looking naked stem with giant flower rising context-free from the pot, you have a naked stem with giant flower growing dramatically from a leaf-cradle that is itself no slouch.

Slight inconvenience: Butterfly amaryllis bloom sporadically year round. Flowering is most common when most needed, in late winter and early spring, but you can’t count on it. And dramatic as they are they can get kind of lost in high summer when everything else is blooming. I’ve tried nestling the pots among perennials, but they look much better isolated in a patch of hardscape. Last time I had a pot of summer bloomers I put it on a pedestal on the porch, where it looked surprisingly classy, and that’s what I’ll do with this batch – if they do indeed bloom before next fall which they very well may not.

Philosophical note: No matter the species, amaryllis are always on their own schedules, sometimes blooming by the Solstice holidays, sometimes holding out until Valentine’s Day has come and gone. Nor do they always follow The Amaryllis Rule: If there are at least 6 leaves after blooming the bulb will bloom again the following year. My own feeling is that amaryllis were placed on this earth to keep garden writers from getting too full of themselves.

Butterfly flowers are on the slender side and don't open as wide as Dutch Hybrids. A lovely effect in person but difficult for duffers like me to photograph

Juniper in winter garb

Beautiful big snowstorm on Sunday, not predicted but not minded. Glittering blanket smoothing the world, nowhere to go but a chair by the fire and nothing to do but read and try not to eat leftover cookies – until it was time to shovel a foot of it off the driveway.

Today it’s still bliss-productively white, white white everywhere. Including in my head where after Sunday’s catalog wallow I’m looking eagerly ahead to spiffing up the white garden

A corner of the white garden (in Maine)

and that brings us to the story of my adventures with Fragrant Angel,

'Fragrant Angel'

in all respects except one an enormous improvement over good old White Swan.

White Swan

The one respect is very long stems and very large flowers, a combo guaranteed to have falling over problems. White Swan always stands bushily by itself.

The story: I bought the well named ‘Fragrant Angel’ a couple of years ago when it was still quite expensive and put it next to a very nice peony, where it grew into a vigorous clump, flowering profusely from midsummer through fall.

But although I kept frugally hoping, the Angel never spread itself around the way ‘White Swan’ does, so when I noticed a robust seedling last spring it looked like cause for celebration.  Certainly seemed to be the same plant. Like ‘Fragrant Angel’  it had very thick stems and large coarse leaves, a conventional Echinacea purpurea on steroids.

Took it a while to start flowering, but eventually buds appeared. Rather dark buds, I’m sorry to say, with a suspicious reddish cast. Sure enough; no dice. The new plant was more or less a throwback to one of the Angel’s parents, ‘Ruby Giant.’

Nice but no seegar.

The new plant isn’t quite ‘Ruby Giant’ but it’s far handsomer than the common run, a splendid echinacea in its own right, and I’m sure I’ll feel splendid about it when I figure out where to put it. Meanwhile all I can think is: “Oh great, more magenta, just what I always wanted.”  Common E. purpurea is such a willing spreader you might as well call it a weed.

There’s no point in waiting for the next kid to turn out better. It turns out ‘Fragrant Angel’ has to be vegetatively propagated, so all I can do is divide the one I’ve got or buy a couple more.

Would go the latter route except I don’t trust myself to be restrained. A quick look at the echinacea listings of a few trusted sources reveals selections that have grown almost obscenely large and tempting. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised; gardening magazines have been jumping up and down for some time now about new breakthroughs in coneflower breeding. This simple, single purple-pink wildflower now comes in unheard of colors – red! orange! – and undreamed of doubleness (about that the less said the better, as far as I’m concerned).

Echinacea wonderlands include Plant Delights Nursery, Lazy SS Farm and Garden, and Big Dipper Farm, which possibly takes the assortment prize with 47 possibilities. The last 11 are labeled “reference library only, not for sale,” but still…

'Fragrant Angel' and an offspring that will move as soon as a home is found

A close-up of the foliage shows the whorled-arrangement of needles along the stem. This is distinctive to all of the Cedars.

BLUE ATLAS CEDAR

Cedrus atlantica

By Eric Larson

We have a young Blue Atlas Cedar growing in a sunny area that had been a problem site for me from my first days here at the Garden. Those of you who have visited us here know that a too-large part of our surroundings is the old Winchester Repeating Firearms Factory, due west of our gate. This derelict hulk of a building is a great example of potential modified by reality.

Four stories tall, with a courtyard to increase exposure to the out of doors, the structure is for sale at a bargain price to someone who can develop it. The potential for a mixed-use facility with condos, shops and offices is high, as Yale’s campus moves towards the north: two new residential colleges, the new health center, the existing offices at 25 Science Park among other developments.

But the reality is that the building is a hulking remediation site, with lead at least a prominent pollutant. This is not to say that something can’t be done, but that in the present economic climate, there is little push for such a high initial outlay.

So we have to plant evergreens to block the view as best we can.  There are several large Pines and Hemlocks in that general area, but as they are nearing senescence, new younger trees must be in the ground to take the place of the older ones.  A stable population in other words.

This so-called stable population is just what the forester and especially the urban forester tries to attain.  As older trees die and have to be removed, new ones are already there to replace the shade, the carbon-fixing, the pollution abatement and the many other advantages that a tree provides.

Blue Atlas Cedar is a variety of Atlas Cedar, Cedrus atlantica. This member of the Pine family (Pinaceae) is native to the Atlas Mountains of Algeria and Morocco, where it grows at elevations of 4200 to 6500 feet above sea level, often in forests with Algerian Fir  (Abies numidica), Holm Oak (Quercus ilex), junipers of various types and other plants.

The species has dark to medium green needles, while the glaucus or blue varieties have a blue-gray to bluish-silver cast to them. This species is listed by some as a sub-group of the Lebanese Cedar (C. libani), and indeed there is very little difference morphologically.  With the advancements in genetic testing moving forward, we should be able to answer that question in the near future.

Growth habit and placement

This tree grows at a moderate to fast rate as a young plant, but slows significantly as it gets into its middle age. Eventual size will reach 50-60 feet in cultivation, though much taller specimens are found, especially in Great Britain where one-hundred-footers are not uncommon. As a young plant, it is a narrow pyramidal shape, but the top widens and flattens as it ages.  The spread can be almost as much as the height in an older tree.  When given enough room to grow and spread, the tree is as good as it gets for evergreen specimens.

This image shows our young Blue Atlas Cedar three years after planting. It was not a foot high when I put it in the ground. It has done very well, and seems to like its location.

Atlas Cedar, Cedar of Lebanon and the Deodar Cedar are all closely related, but it is the Atlas Cedar that you find most in cultivation and available from nurseries. This is due partly to the faster growth as a young plant, but also to their ability to live in hot and dry locations, on less-than-perfect soils. All of the true Cedars (as opposed to Juniperus virginiana, which is called the Eastern Red-Cedar, but is not related) are well adapted to dry conditions, but the Atlas Cedar seems to translate best to our soils. By the way, I would love to find a Cedar of Lebanon to add to our collection.  If you know of a purveyor with one available, do drop a line.

The blue or glaucus types are just one of the variations in Atlas Cedars. There are weeping types (there is one in a yard near the entrance of East Rock Park), varieties with golden-needles, and weeping blue types.  My advice is to treat them as specimens, and don’t overplant. I have seen a few lawns with several weeping type trees, and it makes you wonder about the mental outlook of the designer.

In closing this column – and this year:

I adhere to Vincent Kay’s suggestions for the Winchester factory: raze it and build a peace monument or park.  For the opening, invite representatives of every constituency that a Winchester was aimed at (tribes of First Americans from the Plains, Germans, Japanese, you name them, we should invite them), and let the healing begin.

I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, or Perfect Pagan Holiday among many others whichever you celebrate. Remember to be less caught up in the commerce of the moment and mindful of the connections that help us be human. I will take the next two weeks off to recharge my batteries and get ready for a new year of pet plant columns.

Your friend,

Eric

Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the author.  Yale University and Marsh Botanical Garden and Leslie Land are not responsible for the inane and sometimes off the chart craziness of this publication