There’s a rocket in my garden, and it’s not in the sky. The rocket? It’s dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis). Individual plants are ho-hum, but these plants like to congregate. Here on the farmden and beyond, dame’s rocket is now blanketing the dappled shade of woodlands and roadsides with its white, mauve, or purple flowers. In mass, they will bowl you over with their sweet scent, especially pervasive on late spring and early summer evenings.
I don’t know if this is happening in your neighborhood, but in my neighborhood a fungus is reported to be ravaging rhododendrons. Except that it’s not a fungus. Those browning, wilting leaves are caused by cold.
This past winter, temperatures did drop a few degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but that’s pretty much par for the course these days. In years past, winter temperatures here on the farmden regularly dipped down to near minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit, which was why I was always reluctant to plant rhododendrons.
You’re rummaging in the attic, in your greatgrandma’s steamer trunk, and you come upon a dusty, old packet of garden balsam seeds. An heirloom! This heirloom’s probably more valuable for the picture on the packet than for the seeds, which probably have lost their vitality. You could, though, if you wanted, get your hands on heirloom plants seeds or plants that would grow.
Winter is a good time to look at some of the finer details of trees and shrubs — their buds, for example. Buds!? Bo-o-o-oring, you say? Not really, if you take the time to appreciate details such as their shapes, colors, and textures.
Plum buds about to pop
Buds can do more than just help you wile away winter hours. They can disclose a plant’s identity as well as foretell for you what what’s in the offing for the upcoming growing season as far as flowers and fruits. Read more
As children, my friends and I were well acquainted with mountain ash trees. European Mountain Ash (Sorbus aucuparia) was ubiquitous to suburban home lots in the Northeast in the 1950’s, and the trees were readily recognized by their ferny leaves and clusters of flashy berries that also served as artillery.
European mountainash
Since that time, mountain ashes have fallen out of favor — and rightly so in many cases. Like our native white birch, European Mountain Ash is native to cool, moist habitats. When planted in sun-drenched backyards where summers are hot, sometimes droughty, they fall prey to borers and other ills. Those berries aren’t actually berries, but pome fruits like apples, to which mountain ashes are closely related and with which they share many of the same ills.
No reason to ignore the whole Sorbus genus, though Read more
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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
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. 
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
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.
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
