Let's Elect Some Annuals

        Who can think about anything besides the coming election? I can't wait to see how many greedy congressmen lose their jobs.  I suppose the current crop of congressmen is no worse than previous incumbents but because I have a subscription to  the Wall Street Journal, I read about the latest political horrors every day.
         I wrote a column back in 1990 at election time reporting that Congress had just raised the legislative budget 16%, which included $33 million to pay for the previous year's franked mail.  I looked up the word "frank" and found "a pigsty, also the fattening of animals."  Perfect!  Franked mail could certainly be classified as pork!
        Politics hasn't much to do with gardening, but I'll see if I can weave a few flowers  into this column.  What comes to mind are all the new faces that I'm  hoping will appear in  the House and Senate come January.  I guess these freshmen could be compared to annuals, plunked down in a well-established bed of perennials.
        A flower bed full of perennials usually doesn't guarantee a riot of color all summer.  To have constant bloom, it needs annuals, the same way Congress needs new representatives.  Adding little mounds of white allysum, clusters of snapdragons or a sprawl of petunias to the front of a border promises blossoms from June through September, and with global warming, right through October. 
        These tender seedlings need help before being installed among the established perennials.   They must struggle in their race for space. Like freshmen congressment, newly planted annuals can be totally intimidated by the plants that have been soaking up the garden's perks for years.  If their roots have been cramped in a nursery container all spring, those roots need to be loosened and spread before planting.
        Most garden books refer to annuals as bedding plants.  I wasn't sure why so I looked up "bedding" in Webster's.  Obviously annuals are not bed clothes or material for animals to sleep on.  How about "something that forms a foundation or bottom layer"  since they're usually planted at the front of a flower bed.
       There is a huge selection of annuals to choose from as far as color and size, but I'm ashamed to say the ones I listed above are the ones this unimaginative gardener usually chooses.  White petunias planted at the front of a border show up through rain and fog and even as night falls in the garden.  They bloom all summer long if they're dead-headed frequently.
        Pansies don't last that long, even when dead-headed, but their little faces are so appealing I always grow a few in the Abitta garden.  Dusty Miller, that small gray plant with lacy leaves that makes a nice contrast to other annuals, doesn't require dead-heading as it doesn't set seeds.
        Oh, dear, my comparison of annuals and newly installed congressmen doesn't work very well with dead-heading.  I'd hate to see those freshmen ostracized if they were producing sparkling new legislation.  What an unattractive term "dead-heading" is!  But  it really is an important garden chore.  All plants have one big aim in life - to produce seeds.  If we bother to remove the spent flowers on our annuals before they manage this feat, the plants will continue to  flower, determined to succeed in producing the next generation.
        "Do as I say, not as I do," a motto my husband said often.  The petunias in my photo were never dead-headed, but despite that fact they are still blooming.  Their stems, lined with seeds,  extend for close to a foot in all directions.  Of course this has been a crazy summer when every sort of vegetation has had enormous growth, not just petunias.  Did you grow cleomes this year?  Also known as spider plant, these are one of the few tall annuals.  Mine reached six feet by August, but then fell over, probably for lack of water. 
        I just pulled a book off my library shelf I didn't know I owned, "All about Annuals."  It must include well over 200 plants. You would certainly have learned more about new and unusual annuals if I'd found it sooner.    I usually try to include a few helpful garden hints or fresh ideas in my columns, but I had too much fun playing with my election metaphores.
                                                      DONT FORGET TO VOTE!

End of Summer Thoughts

I’ve just been going through my Website’s Archives to see what columns I’ve already written about Autumn -  fall chores, Jack Frost, turning leaves, October’s flowers,  and a half dozen other appropriate subjects. I seem to have covered every aspect of what gardeners go through at this time of year.  Since I’ve been writing garden columns since 1982, I suppose that isn’t too surprising, but it does present a problem – what new and different feature of October can I write about that won’t be a repeat of an old column?

            As I reread some of those earlier columns, however, I found that I hardly remembered most of them, so why should you?  And since a gardener’s summer varies from year to year depending on the weather, I’m going to stop worrying and give you a review of Locust Hill’s  2010 vegetable garden.

            Talk about weather!  Global warming certainly turned New England into one hot summer, and every sort of vegetation grew fast and furiously, didn’t it?  Having ripe tomatoes in mid-July was a delicious treat. And no tomato blight to ruin the harvest. That warm weather turned everything in my vegetable garden to speed demons, which was both good and bad.  The peas climbed up the fence and toppled over to start down the other side. I’d much rather have had them put their energy into the peas. They had hardly any flavor at all.

The same sort of problem was caused by my string beans.  I planted a row of bush beans right between a row of onions and a row of radishes as I usually do.  A few weeks after they appeared they stopped sitting up and began looking around for their poles, at least that’s what it looked like. Did I buy pole beans instead of bush beans?? No, the packet of seeds had “BUSH BEANS” in large letters.  Stupid seed company!

I did not want pole beans shading my radishes and onions.  But what’s a gardener to do?  I gave each plant a pole to climb. I also gave each plant a demonstration of how to wind itself around the pole and climb. Not one plant took my advice. In a week they were sprawled over the ground and smothering my radishes. Obviously they were bush beans gone wild with the heat. They produced an adequate crop of beans, just a bit muddy from lying in the dirt.  Fortunately they left my onion row alone. As for the radishes, I planted another row in a safer spot.

The rest of my vegetables behaved normally.  As usual the zucchinis got as big as Goldie, the goldfish I wrote about in my last dozen cantaloupes column, before I could harvest them. I had two-foot long cucumbers, a crop of about a dozen canteloupe that were quite tasteless, three planting of delicious lettuce, and a row of zinnias that were really spectacular

Here it is almost the 10^th of October and still no frost.  I guess that’s another affect of global warming. I suspect it will be well worth covering tender crops for that first frost because it will probably be followed by many weeks of warm weather.  Predicting when or whether a frost will hit is tricky even for the weather man.  He probably uses the dew point to help him. The whys and wherefores of the evening dews and damps and that thing called a dew point can be pretty confusing, but very helpful in predicting frost. Dew is the result of water condensation.  As air cools it is able to hold less and less water vapor.  When it can hold no more, the water vapor condenses forming dew, and the temperature at that exact moment is the dew point.

When dew forms it releases energy and that energy keeps the temperature near the ground at the same level as the dew point.  Therefore if the dew point is hovering in the low 30s, prepare for frost.  If the humidity is high, so is the dew point. A night of dry air, no wind and clear skies indicates a low dew point and you'd be wise to cover all the tender vegetables with blankets or buckets. 

A Double Day Lily Bed

      There are lots of flowers I like better than daylilies, but I have to admit they have some sterling qualities. The plants last for many years and produce new flowers every day for many weeks; they adapt easily to that magical formula - divide to multiply. And best of all, they rarely need to be weeded. With all these attributes, daylilies were what I chose last year when I decided I needed a flowerbed I could see from the terrace at the front of the house.
      I have a perennial border that stretches 100 feet in front of the sheep pasture's split-rail fence, but it can't be seen from the terrace where we spend much of our time. I wanted another flowerbed to weed about as much as I craved an aching back, but the idea of looking across the pond at a colorful display of blooms overcame my common sense. Fortunately preparing the bed was surprisingly easy since the bank on that side of the pond, unlike most areas of Locust Hill, contained no stones or nasty clay soil. It was made up of the excess sand we'd used as a base when we built the pond.
      The field grasses that grew on the bank had very little to hang onto and I was able uproot them with ease. The half-dozen clumps of daffodils I'd planted there in previous years (rarely noticed as they bloomed when it was usually too cold to eat on the terrace) I left in place. In fact by the time I started planting the daylilies, I'd forgotten the daffodils were there, and periodically found myself running into them as I dug my holes.
      I had several common lemon lilies in the perennial border that I divided to make a start on the new flowerbed, and my friend Angie gave me some she'd divided, but I wanted a few really exotic daylilies as well. I waited patiently - no, impatiently - for July when Gerald Hardy has his yearly daylily sale in Falls Village.
      The Hardy daylily gardens on Sugar Hill Road are something to see - two solid acres of daylilies showing off their colors is quite a sight. Mr. Hardy and his wife Marilyn have been raising daylilies for 25 years. They hybridize over 1000 plants from seed each year, producing many unusual and beautiful new varieties. This year's sale has started and will go on until August 17th - Thursday through Sunday, 9-5.
      When I went to buy my daylilies, I kept going round and round trying to make up my mind which ones to choose. Most are sold by the "fan", so a large plant with three or four fans is far more expensive than one with a single fan. There are also very reasonably priced lilies for landscaping. I bought three fancy hybrids, each with only a single fan, and three that were large enough so that in only a few years I'd be able to divide and multiply them.
      The bed still looked pretty sparse after I'd planted all these treasures, but I knew that eventually even the beginners would begin to fill in the spaces. In the meantime, however, I knew just what would fill those spaces - weeds. So, having learned that North Canaan's transfer station offers free mulch to anyone in town, Hank and I drove over and watched as an enormous bulldozer scooped up a bucket load of beautiful looking mulch and slowly dumped it into our pickup. Between us, grandson Eli and I spread it on the daylily bed.
      That fall my friend Noreen brought me a dozen Asian lily bulbs. Not having a better place to put them, I planted them in the empty spaces in the new bed. I didn't have a clue as to their colors, so I just hoped they wouldn't clash with the daylilies.
      Nothing is more fun than watching a new garden project come into its own. I could hardly wait to see what sort of display the new bed would make this summer. The Asian lilies were the first to appear. The pinky red ones were so short they could barely be seen. The yellow ones just grew and grew and grew until some were four feet tall before they put forth their huge blossoms.
      A gardener can't expect to get everything just right the first time around. One has to learn about sizes and colors and bloom time in order to arrange the plants artistically. By the time the daylilies began to bloom I knew I had my work cut out for me. Tall plants were hiding short ones; all the yellow blooms seemed to be planted next to each other; the creamy white lily was buried behind a deep maroon one.
      So yesterday I went out to tie up the stems with different colored yarn in preparation for the big rearrangement come fall. Where to start? An hour later I hadn't tied my yarn around a single plant - too busy weeding all the Queen Ann's lace, vetch and bindweed that had happily moved into the bed from the big meadow just beyond the bed. Tonight I'll make a plan and tie up just the ones I need to move.
      By next summer when the youngest plants have grown up and filled out, and the color scheme has improved, the bed should look much better, but in the meantime, I wanted to show you the unexpected pleasure I'm getting this summer. Whenever the wind drops out and the pond becomes as smooth as glass, I have a double flowerbed as all those colorful blossoms are reflected in the mirror of the pond. At dawn one day last week when not a single ripple broke the surface of the water, I caught a photo of the reflected flower bed showing off its colors in the pond.

A Tiny Walled Garden

        I don't like to tell stories I've included in my book, but because today's column is about the Abitta Garden, I really must explain its beginnings.  It was originally a small stone hut built into the side of the cow pasture's hill by a hired man around the turn of the century, who preferred to sleep in this dank, windowless hovel than in the house. Later someone added a cement floor, making the ceiling so low you couldn't stand up inside. We used the building to store garden tools, broken furniture, old tricycles and trash, and it soon became known as the Alotta as it housed such alotta junk.

        One evening as we were eating dinner we heard a loud crash, followed by the frantic bellowing of a cow.  When we rushed out the back door we discovered one of our neighbor's heifers inside the stone hut, thrashing around in the midst of rotted roof beams and alotta junk. Since the building's roof was on a level with the pasture at its back edge, this silly young cow had lumbered onto it and fallen through.  She was too big to get out the door so we spent the next hour pulling down the front wall in order to free her.

        As we started hauling away the debris next morning it suddenly occurred to me that the remains of the Alotta would make a sweet little garden, a space 8 feet by 10 surrounded on three sides by the remaining walls of the hut.  The fact that there was still a cement floor was a minor detail. At least that was my thought, but as it turned out it was major. We not only had to break up the cement with a pick axe, we had to haul away a deep layer of stones from underneath it.

        We filled the resulting hole with dirt and well-rotted manure and rebuilt the front wall into a foot high edging for the garden. By then it was too late to do much else but dream about what I would plant the next spring to turn the Alotta into the Abitta, a tiny walled semi-secret garden.

        Having had little experience in designing a flower garden, my sweet dreams turned into bad ones as I struggled to create the perfect tiny garden. It took four or five years just to figure out that my flagstone path was all wrong. Entering the garden from the front, the flags were laid out in the shape of a cross, an esthetically unpleasing design.  Eventually I came up with a better arrangement, entering the garden from the side and making a curved path that led to the far corner where I placed a small pool I'd made with cement.

        Over the years  I tried many different plants, both annuals and perennials, but I had more failures than successes. I planted phlox in back of the pool, but in that airless corner the leaves were always covered in mildew by July.  I planted pansies, which looked fine in May but were scraggly by June. I put in sweet alyssum, but  these delicate little plants were always smothered by the annual pink poppies that self-seeded by the dozen.

      As you can see, I'm not exagerating.

The garden became a poppy party because

I never even thinned these annuals.  It's

hard to pull up flowers just because they're

growing in the wrong place, so besides the pink poppies other proflagate flowers sent their seeds to join them -  feverfew, Chinese forget-me-nots, columbine, dianthus.

       Despite all these greedy interlopers there were a few successes.  The nice old-fashioned hollyhocks on the back wall in that photograph, managed to keep coming every year, even though they're biennials - new ones replacing the old.   By pure luck I planted two peonies in spots where they looked well.  Daughter Bridget gave me a little machine to make a small fountain in the pool.

        Daughter Trum brought me five different varieties of thyme from Oregon ( plant prices in Oregon are a quarter as much as they are in Connecticut) and helped plant them between the flagstones where they thrived and spread their tight mats of tiny leaves.  And last year I picked just the right places to plant a white lupine and a stately delphinium.

          Take heart all you inexperienced gardeners.  I struggled for more than thirty years  to get the Abitta garden even close to what I'd envisioned as I broke up the cement floor of that hired

man's hut. The Abitta garden is still far from perfect, but each year it gets closer to my dream of what a tiny walled garden should be. 

Plant some bulbs

        Having lived on Locust Hill for close to fifty years, I've planted a great many bulbs on the property.   No gardener should let the fall slip by without planting a few bulbs so there will be something new and exciting to look forward to come spring. What other flower can you plant that is more rewarding than a daffodil , a few crocuses or those first harbingers of spring, the snowdrops pictured above?  They go on and on forever, free of diseases, increasing in size and beauty each year?

        Plant a single narcissus and in a few years it has turned into two or three.  In five years they can be dug up, separated and the results replanted.  This endless cycle can be endlessly repeated, provided you've marked the clumps that need dividing before their foliage disappears so they can be easily located when it's time to dig them up come fall.

Do you know the difference between a narcissus, a daffodil and a jonquil?  Not even the botanists do any more, using the terms indiscriminately.  Narcissus is actually a genus of the amaryllis family and includes both jonquils and daffodils.  Jonquils are a single species with rush-like leaves and sweet-smelling, short-cupped flowers in clusters.  There are many species of daffodils, all hardy and having trumpet flowers like those found in the handsome white Mt. Hood variety.

I have daffodils with pink trumpets in my perennial border,  a mix of white and yellow  in the sheep pasture, and although it took many year, I now have a cloud of golden daffodils up on the knoll.  Several years ago I had so many divided clumps of different daffodil varieties that I couldn’t think where to plant them. It was Hank who finally offered  the solution.  We have a large Carpathian walnut tree that we mow under so we can find the nuts each fall.  I planted a border of bulbs at the edge of the mowed grass circle.

Tulip bulbs are the one exception, a different story altogether.  Unfortunately tulips don't last for years and years. You’re lucky if they last more than one.  That’s because unlike narcissus bulbs, which are poisonous, tulip bulbs are edible, and field mice consider them a tasty treat. Many gardeners have the mistaken idea that moles are the culprits when they see tunnels bumping along under the soil and no tulips gracing the garden the following spring. But moles are carnivores.  They're only interested in bugs.  It's the vegetarian field mice who dine on tulip bulbs.  They use the mole tunnels to get underground.

       
        Because tulips rarely last for more than a season
or two, even when planted with moth balls or buried in

wire baskets, I stopped bothering to grow tulips many
years ago as it didn't seem to be worth the effort. The
one planting that turned out to be the exception was the
tulips daughter Bridget and I planted the fall before her
wedding.   That wedding was in the spring of 1987,
almost twenty years ago.

        The following year I planted that area with pach-
ysandra, not wanting to care for another flower bed. I
guess both mice and moles just aren't interested in tun-
neling through a vast maze of pachysandra roots.  The
tulips in today's photograph are some of those planted
for Bridget's wedding, still popping up each spring sev-
enteen years later.  I don't particularly want tulips in my
pachysandra beds, but I think I’ll try putting a few in the
bed of periwinkle up by the barn.

A New and Different Perennial

        I just looked up the word perennial in the dictionary to see if it fit the plants in my perennial border.  "Appearing again and again; continually recurring." Hmm. I guess that's a fair definition, provided your plants aren't killed by winter frost or summer drought, aren't attacked by insects or crippled by disease and are divided periodically.  I'm lucky if my hybrid lupines last three years, and my delphiniums only last one if we have a dry summer.

        There's one perennial, however, that requires no care at all and literally lasts forever.  It needs no watering, fertilizing or dividing, and can add interest and even grandeur to the garden.

        Rockus perennialis is more commonly known as a boulder.  The Asians are the experts in using rociks in a garden. To them a stone is a pure piece of nature, unaltered by man.  Silent, unmovable and permanent, stones suggest eternity.  Not just any old boulder will do, however.  It should be picked for its color, texture, surface, grain and sometimes the sound it produces when struck.

        According to the Chinese, a flower brings butterflies, a willow brings the oriole, a pine the wind, a pond the croaking of frogs, while the rock promises the cheerful chirp of the cricket and invites cloud formations. A rock's natural line and composition can be as beautiful as a winding river or a sailing cloud.  One with cracks, veins of white or pink marble, or perforations which allow wildflower seeds to nestle and grow, is particularly desirable.

        Back when Hank and I lived in Fairfield, I had a wild garden, a most appropriate place to plant a few good-looking rocks.  Hank made a drag cart for Pipsissewa, our burro, which enabled Pippy and  me to bring home several spectacular boulders covered in moss and lichens, and one that actually had a wild columbine growing in a crack. 

        Locust Hill, surrounded by 40 acres of open meadow, had no shady  place for a wild garden or handsome rocks. As a consequence, we planted none until  1990.  Elihu Carlson, our favorite bulldozer man, was coming to do some landscaping.  The day before he arrived with his backhoe, I mentioned to Hank that I'd found a special stone in the woods I wanted to bring home and use as a seat beside the sauna, the little round building at the end of the lawn.

        Before I could describe the rock or its location Hank said "It's that great flat stone by the brush pile at the edge of the heifer pasture, right?  Soft, reddish color, about two feet high, smooth as glass on top?"
        Well, no question but great minds think alike.  We'd never discussed this natural stone seat, but had obviously both been eyeing it for years.  Elihu scooped it up with his backhoe, carried it across the meadow and "planted" it.  There's something very nice about sitting on this sun-warmed seat after a summer night's skinny dip, and since we planted the weeping hemlock behind it, the rock looks as it had been born there.

        When I started writing this column I had in mind using an old photograph of Bigger, our Collie-Shepherd, sitting on the rock, but when I got it out of the album I realized that you couldn't see the rock at all. I decided to use it anyway and convinced Clover and Rumple to take their turn on the rock for a new photo.

        Stones with strange shapes, irregular surfaces or striking veins of color can be an excellent focal point in the garden.  Our rock seat is a little boring, except for the fact that it makes a fine place to sit. We have far more interesting boulders in our woods, craggy and mossy, but so far I haven't found an appropriate place to put one. 

        I realize that not everybody has a backhoe or a woodland filled with interesting stones, but did you know that garden nurseries sell landscaping rocks? I have a friend in West Hartford who purchased  a red rock from Cassio's Nursery that is shaped just like an old man's head.

        Think about these easy-care perennials.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a perennial that really was perennial?

The Children of Perennials

 

        Regular readers of Weeds and Wisdom all know what a parsimonious old Yankee I am, and since opposites attract they've probably guessed that Hank is a charmingly generous fellow.  By the time our three daughters reached their teens they'd come to their own conclusions about managing money.   One handled her finances conservatively, but not as tightfistedly as her mom.  Another was a free-spender, generous beyond her means.  The third saved and hoarded her money for months, then suddenly would splurge to the point of being stone-broke. Of course now that all three are married their spending habits are not my concern.
        Having just come in from dead-heading iris and dozens of spent daffodils in the flower border, I've decided that perennials are like children in how they handle their lives.  Despite the fact that they're raised in the same bed with the same love and care and basic rules to live by, they all have different ideas about how to get on in life. Some are overly generous with their seeds, squandering them all over the place while others don't bother producing any seeds worth counting. 
        Chinese forget-me-nots are real profligates.  Each year these heavenly patches of blue that dot the border in early May throw away their seeds like rich American tourists scattering dollar bills.  They end up so destitute that they wither away.  The next spring their children are so numerous they form a new sea of blue in the border.
        The little daisy called feverfew is not quite so extravagant.  It, too, scatters seeds that soon grow into new plants, popping up in all sorts of unexpected places.  But unlike forget-me-nots, feverfew parents keep hanging on tenaciously the following year.  I uproot these old plants and let the children take their places.  If the parents are allowed to stay a second year their tough old stems must be cut down with a clipper to make them look respectable.
        Phlox is a pretty conservative perennial, rarely self-seeding.  Its clumps get a little larger each year and needs some thinning in late spring but otherwise take care of themselves.  Once in a while though, a weed like bedstraw or vetch will sneak into a clump and establish itself so firmly that there's no removing it.  At first it just looks ugly, but after a few years it may dominate the clump.  Then it's time to dig up the phlox and throw it away.  Replace it by dividing another clump that's weed-free.

        Iris propagates itself by adding offshoots to the end of its rhizome each year.  Eventually these extensions crowd each other and need replanting or they'll get root rot, a very unattractive disease.  Less crowding will occur if you plant the rhizomes in a circle so new growth forms away from the center. Do this in July when bloom is past but there's still time for the new planting to get re-established. The self-centered peony just gets bigger and better without investing in anything but itself. The tree peony in my photo gets even more spectacular each year and has the additional advantage of having sturdy stems that don't require staking.  Unlike many perennials which offer the gardener new plants if allowed to self-seed, the peonies don't seem to care about producing offspring.  Deadheading these handsome perennials is merely for looks.

              I've never minded the job of deadheading.  I love walking down the border on a dewy spring morning, breaking off the dried-up fleur-de-lis of iris  that have finished blooming, or removing the spent spires of lobelia as dusk settles on the October garden. What I don't like is the name - deadheading. I just looked it up in the dictionary and was surprised to find the first definition was "A person who uses a free ticket for admittance."  Three more definitions preceded the one about pulling dead or dying blossoms from a flower.
        Well, whatever it's called, it varies from one perennial to the next. Some plants such as Shasta daisies look brown and ugly if their tired blooms aren't removed; others like astilbes can be left all summer long. Removing the finished blooms of delphiniums has its own reward, as this perennial will often produce a second bloom. 
        Then there are greedy perennials that may not produce lots of seeds but can take over areas of the garden as their roots expand.  Artemisia is a prime example.  Evening primrose and beebalm are two more.  All three need to be kept in check by pulling up their roots as they become too invasive.
        Oh, I almost forgot one of the easiest flowers in the garden - daylilies.  These perennials have almost no faults. They are so hardy and grow so thickly that they are hardly ever attacked by weeds.  They carry on for years and years, just getting more attractive each year.  Yes, one has to cut off the old dead stalks in late fall or pull them (much easier) in early spring, but that's it until you decide to divide one and get two. 
        And that's one of the greatest things about perennials.  What a mathematical miracle - divide and you're multiplying. For this old penny pincher all those "freebies" are a treat.  After dividing and multiplying I feel just like Lady Bountiful as I give away the extras.