Sprouting roots

OF BULBS, BULBILS, BULBLETS, AND CORMS

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Admission

I’ve admitted to this addiction before and I’ll do it again. I’ll even hope you become addicted. You are forewarned.

My addiction is to propagating plants. No harm done, you say? How about all the plants that you become inundated with. Perhaps you plant them; that can be overdone. Give them away, please. Or sell them.

Anyway, here goes another wrinkle on plant propagation. You are forewarned!

What’s in Your Hand?

You’ve perhaps bought some spring flowering bulbs for planting. Wait! Before you drop all those tulip, daffodil, crocus, and hyacinth bulbs into holes in the ground Read more

Meadow with monarda

A WILD AND CULTIVATED BALM

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Taming a Wild One

Bee-balm is one of those plants I once long admired in the wild and contemplated planting in my garden. Especially in midsummer when these flowers brighten the dappled shade of woodland borders and paint meadows with their pale lavender heads, perched high atop four-foot stems.Meadow with monarda

The plants’ desire to spread put me off planting them. Not that they’re an invasive plant in the general sense, but in a well managed garden they do require regular attention. Read more

Goldenrod in meadow

EASIER MEADOW PREP

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Genesis

In my previous blog post, I described various ways to prepare the ground for a meadow. With that said, I admit to not following any of what I wrote about ground preparation for the meadow here on the farmden. Not that my instructions were wrong. As the old Chinese proverb goes, “There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.” Meadows also.Goldenrod in meadow

Last week’s meadow prep is geared to the meadow steward who wants to be presented with a riot of color for as long as possible. That view necessitates the killing of existing vegetation and sowing seeds or setting out small plants of desired species.

My own meadow began life under the ownership of my elderly neighbor who, with two riding lawnmowers helmed by her granddaughter Read more

Teenager rolling eyes

PLANTS FOR TEENS

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Do This! Do That!

The teenage years are turbulent times. Yet there are a couple of plants that could soothe the teen spirit, whether said teenager is a gardener or not.

Newfound independence makes a teenager soon tire of being told to “do this” or “do that.” Letting a teenager dish out some of this himself or herself might assuage some of the bother in hearing it. And the plant for this job is obedience plant, a plant that gets it’s name for how well the flowers obey. Botanically, the plant is Physostegia virginiana, but it also parades under the common name “false dragonhead”. Hmmmm.

At any rate, point the plant in whatever direction desired — to have them all flowers face outwards in a vase, for example — and theyill stay put.

Even we parents of teenagers can enjoy obedience plant, not because it obeys without an upward roll of its eyes or murmuring, but because it’s a pretty plant, obedient or not. Teenager rolling eyes Its flowering wands rise three or four feet high, each closely studded along its top portion with tubular, lipped blossoms that are lavender pink with darker speckles. Read more

Dayflower

FLOWER FOR A DAY, JUST ONE

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So Sad

The cheery blue color of dayflowers — so named because each flower lasts but a day — does nothing to dispel some pity I feel for them. Not that the petals cry out for my sympathies. You have to get fairly close to the plant, or really stop and look at it, to even see its blossoms.

The reason for my pity demands an even closer look at a dayflower. Zoom into the flower, where you’ll see two prominent azure petals, and then, further below, behind two prominent, anthers that swoop forward, you’ll see a third petal, this one pale in comparison to the other two, and much smaller.Dayflower

Those petals are what give dayflower its botanical name. Carl von Linnaeus, the founder of our present system of plant nomenclature, gave dayflowers the botanical name Commelina to honor two brothers of an eighteenth century Dutch family who were shining stars in botany at that time.

Why two brothers and three petals? It turns out that there was a third brother Read more

Rose d'Ispahan fully open

GARDEN AROMATICS

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Some Good, Some Not So Good

One of gardening’s pleasures  —  for me, at least  —  is that it makes scents. Ha, ha. But seriously, wave after wave of scent has wafted across my terrace since the garden awakened in early spring. Back then, the most prominent aromas were from daffodil blossoms, followed by those of plum, clove currant, Koreanspice viburnum, and then dame’s rocket.

clove currant

Clove currant

Olfactory pleasures, like the other sensual pleasures that flowers afford us, are incidental to the flowers. Evolutionarily speaking, we don’t return the favor with anything more than the carbon dioxide that we  —  and other animals  —  exhale.

Rather than smelling pretty for us, flowers do so to attract pollinators. Read more

Marigolds

A GEM OF A MARIGOLD

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Some Marigold Species

Marigold is among the most widely planted and, hence, mundane of flowers, so merely writing the word is might make you yawn. Still, I count myself among those who enjoy marigolds, and welcome them as part of summer’s essence with their yolk-yellow blooms and pungent foliage. To please both camps of reader — those of you bored by marigolds and those of you enamored by marigolds — let me introduce Lemon Gem and its other lesser know kin.

Lemon Gem is unlike the marigolds familiar to most people. In fact, it belongs to a different species (Tagetes tenuifolia) than the French marigold (T. patula) or African marigolds (T. erecta) soon to open their sunny heads all over the place. You grow those marigolds for their flowers, large, solid color pompoms in the case of the African marigolds, smaller, sometimes multicolored single or double flowers in the case of the French marigolds. Read more

Old pear tree and barn

THINNED TREES AREN’T SKINNY

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Avoid Extremes

A week or so ago, fruit trees were so full of blossoms that they looked like giant snowballs, foreshadowing a heavy crop of fruit later this season. Too heavy, perhaps, for the branches to support. Too heavy, perhaps, for fruits that are large and luscious. Surely so heavy that next year’s harvest could be paltry.Pears in bloom

Some fruit trees are more prone than others to getting into a feast and famine cycle of a heavy crop one year and a light crop the next. My Macoun apple tree, although it bears delectable fruits, is the worst in this regard among the few apple varieties that I grow. Read more

Tulips in a vase

DEER FOOD

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Big Bulbs Uneaten

Chomping down on a rosette of freshly emerging tulip leaves is just the thing to drive away winter’s doldrums — for a deer. Tulips in a vaseCrocuses probably taste almost as good to these creatures. There’s no need, though, for you or me to forsake the blossoms of spring bulbs; plenty of plants don’t appeal to deer palates. Read more

Cherry blossoms

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GEORGE

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Was He a Bad Boy?

Washington’s birthday is a proper time to think about cherry trees. Rather than question whether or not George did chop down the tree, and whether or not he had the honesty to admit to the act, I wonder what kind of a cherry it could have been. (The story, incidentally, is apocryphal, having been fabricated by Mason Locke Weems for his 1802 book, Life of George Washington; With Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honorable to Himself and Exemplary to his Young Countrymen. “Parson” Weems also wrote of Washington throwing a silver dollar across the Delaware River).

That cherry tree could very well have been something akin to the sweet cherries we can buy or grow today. Sweet cherrySweet cherries (Prunus avium), sometimes called bird cherries or, in their more wild state, mazzard cherries, were amongst the plants ordered from Europe by the Massachusetts colony in 1629. By 1650, there was a cherry orchard in Yonkers, New York, and before the end of that century, there were plantings in Rhode Island, Maryland, and Virginia. Trees became so abundant that in 1749, Peter Kalm wrote that “all travellers are allowed to pluck ripe fruit in any garden which they pass by, provided they do not break any branches; and not even the most covetous farmer hindered them from so doing.” So it is not unlikely that Papa Washington had a few sweet cherry trees planted at his farmstead along the shores of the Rappahannock River.

That abundance of cherry trees and cherries is interesting because here in the Hudson Valley, in Eastern US in general, sweet cherries are not an easy crop. Read more