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FLOWER BED MAKEOVER

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A recent visit to the garden of Margaret Roach (http://awaytogarden.com/) inspired me to makeover a flower bed. Margaret’s garden is all ornamental, a sometimes lively, sometimes subdued interplay of plant shapes with leaf textures and spots of color. My garden is mostly for eating, although I balance that functionality with rustic arbors, shrubbery (some of it edible and ornamental), and interplay of sight lines. And I do have a couple of flower beds.

My flower bed 10 years ago.
Looking at photos of one of my beds from years past highlighted for me just how much in need it was for a makeover.

The attack began on ‘Miss Kim’ lilac. She was supposed to be a dwarf lilac (a different species, Syringa patula, than the common lilac, S. vulgaris), and I suppose she is a dwarf, comparatively speaking. But she’d grown too big and too dense for the flower bed so I did an extensive renovation, cutting to the ground a few of the oldest stems, thinning out some of the youngest ones so that those that remain would have room to develop, and then shortening or removing any other stem that was creating congestion or was in my way. The new ‘Miss Kim’ took some getting used to, like a new haircut, but now I’m pleased and other plants in the bed have more light and space.

I was more brutal with the butterfly bush. Butterfly bush is one of my favorite shrubs but this one takes over the bed each summer. And I’d just received a sample plant of a new series  — the Flutterby series — of butterfly bushes, notable for their small stature and long bloom period. The humongous root system of the old butterfly bush was no match for a chain and the Kubota tractor. Into the waiting hole went a Flutterby.

Next, I took a shovel to the Siberian irises, wonderful plants with pleasant, blue blossoms and spiky, green foliage — until the plants become overcrowded, at which point they become mostly just foliage. The plants need dividing every 3 years or so to prevent overcrowding. Dividing them was actually the hardest job because of the tough root systems. I probably removed about half the plants.

Finally, more herbaceous interlopers — which included a lot of garlic, jewelweed, and errant irises and daffodils — got cleaned up. What’s left is a clean palette, some patches of bare soil ready for some new plants. Thus far: an orange osteospermum off to one side, and deep pink rose campion with purple-pink coneflower on the other side.
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Digging in the flower bed unearthed some golfball-sized tubers connected together like a chain of beads. I immediately recognized them as tubers of Apios americana, sometimes called Indian potato or groundnut (not to be confused with that other groundnut, the peanut). How did I recognize them so quickly? Because I planted groundnuts about 25 years ago!

Groundnuts should be more famous; they are the unsung heroes of Thanksgiving. The Wampanoaga Indians introduced the Pilgrims to this plant, and the Pilgrims’ diet during one of those first winters was supplemented by an Indian cache of groundnuts and corn discovered by Miles Standish. The Pilgrims soon coveted this food for themselves, to the extent of issuing an edict in 1654 ordering that: “if an Indian dug Groundnuts on English land, he was to be set in stocks, and for a second offense, be whipped.”

Native Americans didn’t really cultivate groundnuts, but merely coaxed them along where they grew naturally. Modern Americans became interested in domesticating groundnuts a few decades ago. Hence my groundnuts, sent to me by one of those modern Americans.

Groundnut can be weedy, spreading all over the place via those tuberous chains. I’ve been half-heartedly weeding groundnuts out of my flower bed for 23 years, looking in vain for tubers each time I weeded. Evidently, I didn’t dig deeply enough — until this flower bed makeover.
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Clematis ‘Piilu’
The flower bed is also home to a couple of clematis vines that climb up 5-foot-high wire towers, and beyond. No clematis vines will be touched by a shovel for the makeover, especially since this has been such a spectacular year for those two and other clematis vines I grow. Why this year? Who knows? Clematis are generally winter hardy and not particularly at the beck and call of the weather.

My favorite clematis, named Piilu, arrived here a couple of years ago from Klehm’s Song Sparrow Farm and Nursery (http://www.songsparrow.com/). Piilu grows only about 5 feet high to make a very densely flowering column (with support) of flowers. The flowers have pale lavender petals whose intensity deepens towards their bases, at which also sits a dense bottlebrush of creamy white stamens. The plant blooms all season, with later flowers, borne on new stems, having double rows of petals.
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Gardenias, Good books, and Spring Freeze

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If I might brag a bit . . . It’s been just over a couple of years that, in the same breath and on these very pages, I bemoaned the loss and decided to again take up the challenge of growing gardenia. I purchased a new one, with which I now claim success. My plant is bushy with lush, glossy green leaves, nine creamy white blossoms are fully open, and buds foreshadowing more are on the way. Fragrance from each blossom is heavenly sweet.


Gardenia is a temperamental plant, ready to be attacked by scale insects, ready to drop its flower buds, and ready to let its leaves yellow and drop. For the scale insects, I sprayed the plants weekly at the end of last summer with a “horticultural oil” spray before cold weather creeping onwards ushered the plant indoors. This benign spray smothers the insects. I kept the plant on a sunny shelf next to my desk where I could keep a close eye out for the insects and when they started to appear in late winter, I sprayed the plant with Safers Soap.


I avoided leaf yellowing by using an acidic potting soil and with regular feeding using a water-soluble fertilizer, again beginning in late winter. Except for a few weeks of yellowing leaves, probably because the leaves were getting old (even evergreen leaves eventually get old, yellow, and drop), the leaves remained healthy and attached. I’ve never experienced drop of flower buds even though gardenias allegedly do so if moved to a different window or given any other slight change in conditions.
I credit most of my gardenial success to keeping the potting mix consistently moist. And, although I checked the soil often, I credit most of that consistent moisture to an automatic watering device I described two years ago. To quote myself, the device is “a porous, hollow spike, the pointed end of which gets pushed into the soil while its opposite, open end fits to a [thin] plastic tube the end of which sits in a jar of water. As the soil dries out, it sucks moisture out of the porous spike which, in turn, draws it in from the reservoir via the plastic tube.” It’s sometimes sold as a “Water Siphon” but also parades under such names as “Blumat,” “Hydrospike,” and “Ceramic Watering Probe.”
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Now is the time to get hands dirty in the garden rather than to read about gardening. Nonetheless, 3 gardening books that crossed my desk are so noteworthy that they’re worth a look even now.


Marijuana Pest and Disease Control by Ed Rosenthal might raise a few eyebrows, but if I hadn’t already done my research and had experience with scale insects on my gardenia, Ed’s book would have been most useful. Marijuana is attacked by aphids, mold, fungus gnats — that is, by many of the same pests and diseases that attack our other plants, making Ed’s book a useful general guide to common pests and diseases. Because you don’t want to be smoking poison, the controls are organic.


Moving on, everyone knows the ecological nightmare that mowing, watering and pest and weed control can make of the average lawn. One attractive way to avoid the nightmare is to make your lawn smaller and let part of it become a meadow. Imagine the crisp edge of an expanse of mown lawn rising up to a sea of wildflowers and taller growing grasses with a mown path beckoning you to come within. Catherine Zimmerman’s Urban & Suburban Meadows is one of the clearest expositions for creating a meadow. With many photos and straightforward text, she leads the reader from ground preparation to planting to maintenance, also including plant lists and sources for supplies, plants, and further information. If I didn’t already have a meadow (entered via a meandering, mown path) and didn’t already have the book, I would buy it.


And finally, for a good read, there’s Margaret Roach’s And I Shall Have Some Peace There: Trading in the Fast Lane for My Own Dirt Road, a very engaging account of how Margaret traded in her job as editorial director for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia for full-time life in her once-weekend home in rural Columbia County. The book is funny, open, and informative but, best of all, very well written. And Margaret has been a knowledgeable gardener for decades.
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Last night’s (April 29th) low of 26°F was, I hope the last freeze of this season. Hardy kiwi fruit vines awoke blackened and forlorn although I’m still not totally discounting the possibility of a crop from buds still to open. Many pear fruitlets are blackened within, dead. Apples look okay and, of course, pawpaws, berries, and persimmons are also okay. 
Vegetables are easy! Any sort of covering thrown over them provides ample protection.


The last spring frost around here is, on average, shooed out the garden gate around the middle of May so I should not be surprised if another frost sneaks back in some night in the next two weeks.