Garden Rant

Guest Rant: Low-Hanging Fruit

Y'all welcome Friend of Rant William Alexander, with this interesting horticultural report:

It seems like I’d just barely picked the apples from my 4-tree orchard at my home in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley last fall when a freak October snowstorm come through, the foot of wet, heavy snow clinging to the leaves like glue, dragging two of the semi-dwarf trees to the ground, leaving them uprooted. When the snow melted I tried to upright them in case some roots remained intact, but it was impossible – and pointless. The average life of a semi-dwarf fruit tree is 15-20 years, and these were 18 years old. Plus there were virtually no roots left attached. The next good storm was going to fell my old friends one way or another. And these trees are my old friends. They were the first things I planted on my property (preceding even the vegetable garden) when we moved here.

I looked on the bright side: my 4-tree orchard was now an easier-to-manage 2-tree orchard, and I had the late fall pruning ­– an arduous task that I never look forward to – done in half the time. I’d planned to cut up the fallen apple trees for firewood, or even wood for smoking, but one thing led to another and I never got around to it before winter set in.

Judging by the photo, perhaps I ought to wait a bit. “I’m naught dead yet!” the trees are crying in Monty Python-esque fashion. “Feeling bettah now!” Both have leafed out, and one of them, an Empire, is in full bloom, roots or no. Well, you can’t cut down a living apple tree; it just isn’t done. So I’ve put away the saw for a while. I’m going to tend these fallen trees with the same care I give my standing ones, and see what happens. In fact, I rather like the idea of an apple tree that is no taller than a blueberry bush! No more arm-aching reaching to thin the fruit out; no stepladder needed for harvest; I’ll just bend over to pick the fruit! If this works out, I may plant a row of trees in a berm at a 45-degree angle.

Except there is one slight problem: if the fruit is so easy for me to reach, it’s also easy for any uninvited visitors to reach. My Empire tree could easily become the local snack bar for every groundhog, squirrel, and possum – and whatever else wanders by – in the neighborhood. Still, I’ve got nothing to lose except a little labor by trying. These trees have been very, very good to me over the years. This may be my last chance to pay them back.

I’ll check back during the season with updates.

 

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William Alexander is the author of The $64 Tomato: How One Many Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden and, most recently, 52 Loaves: A Half-baked Adventure. His website is http://williamalexander.com.

Techno-teasing trauma

Here's another guest post from Friend of Rant, professor of veterinary medicine, and master gardener James K. Roush, who blogs at Garden Musings. Hark to his tale of frustration with QR codes and questionable, albeit tempting, spring bulbs.—Elizabeth

I was out running errands around town yesterday and, entering a large home improvement box store that will remain unnamed, I was captured, as usual, by the entry display of various bagged up bulbs and perennials. As a general rule, I try to avoid spending any time in front of those racks because I know that most of these plants and bulbs will be dehydrated with little chance of survival and also because they are very common perennials and thus below the standards held by a real gardener. Since I'm not a real gardener, however, I nearly always leave with a bag of something or other. Call them impulse purchases.

Anyway, today, it was a bag of Tigridia that caught my eye. Having never seen them before, and seeing that they were promoted as "Sun Lovers" (see the package above), my first thoughts were a) "That would be good for a novelty," and b) "I wonder if they are hardy here?" The packaging didn't list a USDA hardiness zone, but it did have one of those wonders of modern convenience, a QR code, shown here. And I, being of an early technologic bent, have just such a code-reading app on my Smart Phone.  (Go ahead, try it out.  It works from the screen.) 

So there are the Tigridia, on sale at Home Depot, and here you are, the technically-proficient and thoroughly modern gardener.   The package QR Code links you to more information from the Longwood Gardens website. And what do you find? The message"LFGinfo.com spring bulbs coming soon." To quote Charlie Brown, "Aaarrrgggh!"

HELLO! STOP TEASING ME WITH YOUR PROMISES OF KNOWLEDGE!  It's already spring, almost past it in many parts of the country.  I'm a poor, uneducated common gardener just looking for help.  Don’t you think it is about time to post the necessary information?  Why put the QR code on the packaging if it is not active?

I've since found out that Tigridia pavonia is only hardy to Zone 8, and furthermore, is short-lived, each flower blooming only for a day.  Wonderful.  I just purchased an annual daylily. Of a magenta coloration I now find truly ugly.  

Well, so run the disappointments of our gardening lot.  Doomed forever to take a $6.98 chance on twenty dehydrated, decrepit bulbs that will not survive winter in my Zone 6 climate, and may not even come up for one season. Tigrigia  is noted on one website to grow in Olathe, Kansas and Lincoln, Nebraska, if, like dahlias, you are industrious enough to dig them up every fall and replant every spring.

I don't grow dahlias for just that reason.  As I've noted many times, digging and replanting bulbs in my stone ridden soil is a Sisyphean recipe for a broken back and a broken spirit.  But I will try to enjoy the Tigridia for this summer, fleeting as they may be.  Those few flowers, at least, whose bulbs survive their dessicated state in my drought-stricken Kansas soil long enough to grow and bloom.

A guest rant and giveaway on alpines

I am so pleased to present Friend of Rant Joseph Tychonievich. Joseph has a new position at rare plant nursery Arrowhead Alpines and wants to share his enthusiasm about alpines, as well as share some alpines!—Elizabeth

The winner will be announced Friday (tomorrow) at 10 a.m. EST.

The great garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence said “All gardeners become rock gardeners if they garden long enough.” I'm not sure that is true, but it is undeniable that all gardeners, if they garden long enough, run out of space. A taste for wonderful trees and shrubs will fill up even the largest garden in no time, as will gorgeous sweeps of perennials in the style of Piet Oudolf. That may be why so many gardeners then become rock gardeners. When your plants' mature size is measured in inches not feet, you can easily install an entire miniature landscape in the space that had been occupied by just one sprawling ornamental grass

The traditional rock garden is an elaborate affair, recreating the look and drainage of a mountain top landscape with lots of, you guessed it, rocks, but the easiest way to get into these fascinating group of plants is containers. Growing wild in small amounts of soil in crevasse of rocks, these plants are perfectly adapted to life in containers, which are a perfect way to provide them the excellent drainage they crave, and also raises them up where you can appreciate their tiny, intricate forms.

Convinced to give them a try? Well, here's your chance for a jump start. Leave a comment for a chance to win a Trough Garden Collection from Arrowhead Alpines. You'll get four rock garden plants and a dwarf shrub, perfect to plant up a tiny landscape in a trough or other container.

But be warned. Alpines are highly addictive, and once you have a little container of perfect, miniature beauty, it is a slippery slope to replacing a great chunk of your perennial boarder with a exquisite alpine meadow.

Chicken Gardens: We Have a Winner!

Thanks, everybody, for your comments in response to my chicken gardening dilemma. Jessi Bloom, author of Free Range Chicken Gardens, chose a winner and offered all kinds of interesting ideas for keeping the girls out of the vegetable beds. 

First, our winner is Kerry, who Jessi chose because she loved her ideas about creating a chicken "spa."  (Oh, please do not let my chickens find out what a spa is.  I'll never hear the end of it!)

Okay, here's what Jessi has to say on the subject:

 

It is no surprise that Garden Rant readers have a lot of great suggestions about how to handle your free range chickens and a vegetable garden.   No one wants to go through all of the hard work of growing your own food to have it scratched up or eaten by your hens. 

There are a lot of factors in deciding what to do and it depends on several things: how many chickens you have, how serious you are about growing food, what kind of food you are growing, and how does your garden currently function – is it good chicken “habitat” with a lot of food and shelter for them, or does it have sparsely planted beds with an expansive lawn and a few raised raised beds?  The same solution isn’t going to work for everyone. 

For this situation there are a few main options:

1) Protect your plants with some kind of barrier method. This is what I do personally in my vegetable garden and in a recent blog post I wrote about what I keep in my “chicken garden toolbox”.   By using these tools, you can still employ the chickens to help you with tasks like pest control without confinement, but it might be kind of annoying to set up, move and take down your barriers every season.  And then there is the aesthetics factor.  I personally don’t mind it one bit and early spring my veggie garden starts out with a little touch of steam punk style.  Then it quickly turns into an edible jungle.  

My vegetable garden mid season – the small wall is to keep rabbits out, but the chickens can hop right over it

2) Keep your chickens in a separate area away from your food crops. If you have too many hens to free range or your garden is only for your own food production, this is going to be a lot easier for you to manage.   

3) Integrate your chickens into your garden by using a confined range system.  My favorite method would be to use paddocks.  Basically you rotate the flock through different fenced paddocks or zones at different times of the year.  Much like a rotational grazing system that a smart farmer would use with their livestock on pasture so the land isn’t overgrazed.  You could have different types of edibles (perennial and annual) in each and rotate them out when the crops are ripe or starting to get overgrazed.  I envision many ways of doing this and it is great for the chickens to food to forage, keep pests in check and help with soil fertility without a lot of work on your part after the initial set up.

This is an example of what a paddock system layout could be in a small back yard

Amy, on page 88 in the book there is a sample drawing with 3 rotational zones for edibles which you could use as a guideline if you wanted to go that route, but for now you may find that barriers are the easiest way to manage.  And, if you are up for a redesign and I am ever in your neck of the woods I’d love to stop by, have a few drinks and help you come up with a brand new chicken garden with lots of edibles!

Frost and the Lost Garden

Guest Rant by Robert Valenti

Mornings used to be spent in the garden. That was before the frost.

These days, I prefer to admire the garden through a bay-window in my kitchen. I stand before the window each morning, coffee in hand, and just stare.

I stare at the Labrador-Coonhound mix urinating on my Cherokee purples. I stare as he winks at me, circles, and sits to deliver a garden gift. I stare at the patch where my prized heirloom tomatoes once ripened sugar-sweet, now being defiled by a mutt. Probably a good thing, I convince myself. Ammonia might kill the blight. As for the other business, he is fed holistic food, and I will pick it up later.

When did my beautiful garden become a glorified dog-park? I should have finished putting up that new fence. Better yet, I should have never taken the old one down. Damn picket envy. I’ll get to finishing it soon enough. In the meantime, I’ll keep the lumber piled where it is, in the garden.

Pumpkins are done -- vines shriveled, brittle, and grey. I’ll pull them later.

Cucuzza line my fence like Louisville Sluggers, spotted brown with rot. I’ll yank them with the pumpkins.

Ghostly shoots of pepper and eggplant sway in the breeze. Shriveled veggies still hang from them like pathetic ornaments. Later.

Somewhere in that garden is a traffic jam of bugs, beetles, and borers of the worst kind. They are all heading down to cuddle up and over-winter in the soil. I imagine these critters honking horns and hitchhiking on one another’s back. The thought of battling them next spring makes me sweat. I better get an early start and order all the ladybugs and diatomaceous earth North America has to offer -- when I find the time.

It is cold outside. Birds are poolside somewhere in Aruba. There is much garden maintenance to be done. So I sip my coffee and continue to stare.

The garden was my child. How could I let it down this way?

“Poop patrol!” my wife calls to me.

“I know,” I tell her, nodding to our old Lab.

“Nope,” she says. “Here you go, Daddy.”

I grab our infant son from her outstretched hands and give the garden a final glance.

See you soon, old friend. I will take care of you. Not now, of course. Maybe later.

Yes, later.

Robert W. Valenti is a green-thumbed father, teacher, and writer living in New York. He has sold strawberries to Rachael Ray, herbs to Martha Stewart, and helps provide much of the produce used on the Food Network. To enjoy more of his humorous tales, visit:  One Cool Parent, One Cool Parent on Facebook, or Twitter: @OneCoolParent

Anyone else fed up with eco-evangelists?

Here's a guest column from Toronto Star garden writer and author Sonia Day. Watch for our review of her new book, The Untamed Garden. (The heirlooms in the photo were grown by a Buffalo-area gardener.)

Heirlooms can provide a successful crop—and sometimes not.

Happens every year. Regular as clockwork. The moment I mention heirloom tomatoes in my Toronto Star column, I get a nasty email from a woman I’ll call Martha.

Martha doesn’t like my stand on these kinds of tomatoes.  I tell my readers that they can be cranky (for a variety of reasons) and advise them to plant a modern hybrid too, so they’ll be assured of a good crop.

Yet Martha objects. Strongly. This year, she called me “ a ridiculous joke” who knows nothing about gardening.

I didn’t bother to reply to Martha (although I used to, because I love getting feedback about my columns and  answer every email I get). I didn’t bother to tell her that I’m a master gardener, the author of six books on gardening and that I grow just about everything I write about, so I can give readers solid, practical advice.

No, I ignored her email for the simple reason that Martha belongs to a tribe of zealots who increasingly make me see red. They are the eco-evangelists, the plant purists, the plant Nazis, the well-meaning but misguided people who insist that the only good plant has the tag “heirloom” attached to it.

Whatever. I have another name for these folks. They are the new Puritans. Because hasn’t the environmental movement taken on all the trappings of a new world religion? To me, its dedicated adherents are exactly like the original Puritans— that is, a bunch of humorless, preachy, politically-correct purists who insist that their views are “the right ones”—and that anyone who dares to disagree with them on any topic is destined to fry in hell.

For example: These new fundamentalists have dissed me for saying there’s nothing wrong with having a lawn. (Let’s face it, guys like lawns. And living in the country, with a whopping area to care for, I actually enjoy my lawn, too. It’s easier than flowerbeds and keeps bugs down, although I do point out that expecting pristine turf is unrealistic and using noxious chemicals to achieve that goal is definitely out.) And last year, I created an uproar in my column by saying that a few invasive plants—periwinkle, for instance—could be useful in places where absolutely nothing else would grow. One gent was so enraged by this suggestion, he tried to get me fired from the Star.

Then there are the faithful who insist that “foreign” plants are the bad guys, but native plants—ALL native plants—are angels from heaven, because they don’t get out of control. Well, bollocks to that, I say. Because what about the Manitoba Maple? (a.k.a. box elder or Acer negundo).  This tree gallops everywhere it can, in my experience. And the Indian Cup Plant? (Yes, the native Indians loved it, so we’re supposed to love it too, I guess, but this towering perennial is so bossy, I’ve decided to banish it from my own garden.)

And about those contentious heirloom tomatoes. Sure, I grow them. They’re delicious. I love their flavour. After much experimentation, my faves are Black Krim, Costoluto and Persimmon. (Get seeds from Renee's Garden because Calfornia-based Renee, bless her heart, sure knows her stuff and personally tests everything she sells.) Yet other kinds, I’ve found, can be cantankerous—prone to bacterial disease, cracking badly on top, their shoulders stay green, and they take far too long to mature in the chilly Zone 4 area where I live.  So I always plant a modern hybrid too, to be on the safe side.

But don’t tell Martha, will ya? I think she wants to kill me.

Sonia Day is gardening columnist for the Toronto Star. Her column, the Real Dirt, appears in the Friday edition, Living section, usually from the April until mid-December.  Read it here. Her seventh book, The Untamed Garden, A Revealing Look At Our Love Affair With Plants, is being published by Random House in the U.S. and McLelland & Stewart Canada on Nov. 8, 2011. Contact her at soniaday.com

Don't get the Drift

Here’s another guest rant from James Roush, a professor of veterinary medicine who blogs at Garden Musings.

Was anyone else seduced by the hype of the Drift® roses this year?  The slogans were enticing:  "From the introducers of the Knock Out family," and "The Next Big Thing for Small Gardens."  Well, I might be alone out here on this limb, but even so, I'll be the first to say that I'm underwhelmed.  Was I biased from the start?  In the interest of full disclosure, maybe a little bit, since I know that while Conard Pyle had introduced the Knock Out roses to commerce, the creator of Knock Out, Bill Radler, is not the breeder of the Drift roses; they came from the lines of French hybridizers Meilland International.

I attended a seminar last spring on these and was told by the speaker that his personal favorite was 'Peach Drift'.  Despite being a shrub and old garden rose fanatic, I was encouraged enough by his enthusiasm to decide that I'd try one or two out this year, particularly if I could find 'Peach Drift'—although one-foot tall roses are really not to the scale of my garden.  Perhaps, I thought, a container on the patio might work well? (They are marketed as excellent choices for containers.)

Fortunately or unfortunately it took me a week to start looking and by then the local nurseries had all sold out except for the pink and red varieties.  And they were priced at $30.00 each!  Given a price 50% higher than most potted hybrid teas, and taking into account that 'Red Drift' is more double-petaled than 'Pink Drift', I chose the red and only purchased one. I put it into a very large container in full sun and gave it more attention than any other plant this summer. 

And it is a good thing I only ended up with one, because I'm not impressed at all by my 'Red Drift' rose.  You can see it above, pictured at the end of what was admittedly a very hot summer, the leaves a little scorched from all the Kansas sun.  Yes, it seems to be blackspot resistant, but I did have to fight a bout of spider mites with pressurized sprays of water.  It didn't grow 6 inches in any direction all summer long, despite almost daily watering in the extreme heat and careful attention to fertilization.  And what you see above is the best bloom display I saw all summer, as pitiful as it is.  The lack of bloom was a bit understandable during the heat spells, but I would think that the cooler weather of September would have kicked off a bloom cycle, wouldn't you? 

So, pending further evidence, I'm done with the Drift.  They're just not enough of a landscape spectacle for me to overlook the fact that the blooms are not individually striking. I'm going to keep the container outside, so by next spring, I will have a strong test of how hardy mine really is.  I also plan to see how these roses did in the garden of a friend who planted 50(!) of them this spring, so there's still a chance I'll change my mind. Or maybe not. If you get my drift.

Guest Rant: Why a Flower Reminds Me of 9/11

Thirteen or maybe 14 years ago, when I was living in New York, I took home an unusual-looking plant. I visited my uncle’s mother, who lived in Manhattan surrounded by cactus-like plants that were surprisingly soft, without any spines. She gave me a small one for my apartment in Brooklyn.

My taste in plants was not diverse at the time. The new plant, whose name I didn’t know, sat by my window alongside a spider plant and a straggly ficus tree. For a few years it just sat there until, for no apparent reason, it produced a gigantic bud. It flowered on September 11, 2001 and looked something like this:

 That is what it looks like today, and I now know that it’s called a carrion plant, which I learned recently after spotting one in Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory. Each flower is a wide yellow-green star with a mesmerizing, pink pattern. If you stare into the petals, it feels like staring into an abyss. But the flowers stink and are covered in small hairs that attract flies – my husband says the bulb reminds him of Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors. And it’s all very fleeting because the petals on my plant start to contort and shrivel after just a day or two.

This plant gives me a charge each time it opens because it is so unusual and because it bloomed when it did. It has flowered every year since, and I mark September by the changing weather and the carrion bloom.

Now that a decade has gone by since the attacks, we’re putting that era behind us. It was a confusing, scary time, with sadness magnified by fear and a feeling of vulnerability. I found solace that fall in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which if I remember correctly lifted its $3 admission charge and invited everyone in for free. Someone working there clearly knew what I did not yet understand, that plants can help heal by blooming in their predictable, expected, cyclical order.

My plant has grown and now drapes over the side of its terra cotta pot. I barely water it, but it seems to require little care. Now every September my carrion flower revives that feeling, and I see why even a foul-smelling flower has a place in this world. Plants aren’t always pretty, but they can be remarkably resilient and reassuring. 

Emily Lambert is a reporter at Forbes, author of The Futures, @lambertem on Twitter. She now lives in Chicago.

Guest Rant: Gardens and Criticism

I'm sometimes asked to include images of my own garden in my slideshow when I give a talk. I always make a point of including this photograph, which shows what my garden looks like in the middle of winter, when all the flowering perennials are cut down to the ground. It's beautiful in June, but it looks like crap in January. Here's UK writer Anne Wareham, author of The Bad-Tempered Gardener, to stir the pot on the question of perfect magazine gardens--and their opposite:

 

It’s hard to know what the US and the UK actually have in common in our gardening. We do seem to have some interesting differences. Like edge to edge lawns fronting your houses with never even a fence in between? Very strange to the British with our fetish about privacy, and self consciousness about being seen in the garden, even fully clothed. And whoever heard of dyed mulch??? Approved Exterior Plant Selection??? And does anyone on the US open their gardens to the public?

Interesting questions. But I bet we have one thing in common – a tendency for all garden media to overdose on the positive and treat us to arm waving enthusiasm about everything horticultural? For some reason it appears impossible to approach gardens and gardening soberly, reflectively and as if we are intelligent grown ups.

Here are some examples, picked randomly by turning the pages of a magazine. Someone, straight faced, describes their own garden thus: “Suddenly it is full of twinkling colour, as though the ground had been scattered with jewels.” Someone else’s garden is “a sublime blend of pretty planting and effortless style”. A flower show, inevitably, “Despite mixed temperatures…did not disappoint” (would they tell us if it did? They would not.) Plants never turn their toes up for no good reason and none come with faults except vigour and good health described as ‘thuggishness’.

And just to annoy any of us with less than perfect gardens and some less than ideal plants, each article is prefaced by people with inane grins. Makes me choke over my cornflakes.

Garden websites are the same, all talking their gardens up, so that the hapless traveller might imagine that the UK is full of amazingly great gardens. Which sadly is far from the case. (see http://thinkingardens.co.uk/garden-tweets/ for greater accuracy) When I put up my new revised website for my own garden with occasional comments about my failures and difficulties, someone emailed me to tell me I ought to talk it up more.

Someone tweeted me today, with reference to a garden blog which discussed the difficulties of keeping a border going all summer, to say “Very interesting piece and helpful too, partly just because I discover that "proper" gardeners actually have same problems as me – oddly comforting!” (Jean Sherry) How many people harbour feelings of shame and embarrassment at failures and problems in their gardens which are simply ordinary. Or feel inadequate because they fail to feel the prescribed level of passionate delirium every time they step outside?

The irony is that the garden media love to tell us that achieving garden paradises is simple and that they will tell us how. They then proceed to instruct us in all the most difficult and labour intensive ways of doing everything. But that’s another story…

Guest Rant: Rubber Mulch: I've been Converted

Please welcome Katie Elzer-Peters, who, in addition to her love of Civil War battlefields, runs a business writing and marketing company for garden businesses called Garden of Words.  She's also recently taken charge of Great Garden Speakers, our ever-growing horticultural speakers bureau. Here's Katie:

I used to be an across-the-board hater of rubber mulch. No way, no how, no where could there be an appropriate use of that "junk." I didn't care how many tires it kept out of the landfill. In my mind, there were absolutely no applications for it. Then I visited the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania Battlefields Memorial near Spotsylvania Court House in Virginia.

Pre-Conversion History

Part 1: As a young child, I read every historical fiction novel about The Civil War that I could get my hands on. I will watch the History Channel or, even, the Military Channel on television, so the names of the places where major Civil War battles occured are etched in my mind. After driving past Fredericksburg for 10+ years (first, while making every-other-week drives to see my boyfriend), then when driving to a reunion and conference this summer, I finally decided to stop and see what was there.

Part 2: My hate-hate relationship with all landscape things plastic began when I was a summer seasonal at The Indianapolis Zoo. Cleaning out garden beds that had become infested with weeds on top of landscape fabric, trying to plant inside the landscape fabric, and ripping out the landscape fabric cured me of any industry brainwashing about the benefits of plastic mulch-like materials.

The "AHA!" Moment
After days and days of walking around on concrete paths in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Washington, D.C., my feet were feeling it. I'd also had enough of people and cars and yammering. Turns out that Spotsylvania is a good place to go if you're tired of people, because there are NO PEOPLE THERE. Signs in the battlefield park describe Spotsylvania Court House as a small, unknown  community prior to the battles that took place there. There's about as much going on now as there was in April 1864 (before the May battles took place). There's no visitor center at the battlefield. No running water. No structures. No park police. Just a few signs and acres and acres of earthworks and fields.




How do you keep people off of earthworks, from running all over a national monument? Well, you have to rely on common courtesy (another rant, another day), but paths help, especially across fields that look the same as far as the eye can see for untrained eyes. At Spotsylvania, there are seven miles of foot paths and a road that takes visitors through most of the monument. I parked near the Bloody Angle and got out to walk for a while.

Three steps in, I looked down. "What IS this stuff?" I wondered. It looked like regular mulch. I bent over to look closer. IT WAS RUBBER MULCH. Now it is possible that rubber mulch is being used everywhere for these types of paths and I just didn't know about it, but to me it was a revelation. It's springy! It lasts! It doesn't wash away! It needs no maintenance! (or very little)




Save Time Save Money
I'm still no rubber mulch advocate for the home landscape. I think it is tacky. But for municipal parks, monuments, and battlefields, if rubber mulch means the difference between paths and no paths, preservation and no preservation, parks or no parks, I say "Go for it!" I'd rather see these remote monuments and historical sites remain open to the public than insist on chopped wood mulch. I'd hate to see these battlefields paved and turned into theme parks. It's hard to convey the remoteness of Spotsylvania along the highly-traveled I-95 corridor. It's in the sticks. There's no way that someone can get out there and rake 7 miles of pathways every time a thunderstorm washes through the rolling fields. Rubber mulch can also be easily picked up (these looked like pieces of mats)

This doesn't sound too fire and brimstone, but for me, admitting that rubber mulch has its positive attributes is tantamount to a vegetarian cultivating a taste for NY Strip steaks. I thought rubber mulch was vile. Turns out, it's not.

How about you?

 

 

Roses—now more than ever

How did your roses do this year, and are they still going strong? Friend of Rant Pat Leuchtman/ Commonweeder wants more people to grow roses—here’s her guest rant explaining why.

Pink Grootendorst

How many times have I heard people say, “I love roses, but they are too much trouble and I can’t be bothered with all that spraying.” The problem with that statement is that the people who make it are usually thinking about hybrid tea roses—which means they are not keeping up with the real news in the rose world.

When I met with the amazing Peter Kukielski, Curator of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden I learned that he has tripled the number of roses in the garden since he arrived four years ago. He chose roses that are disease resistant and will not need spraying. Indeed, they cannot be sprayed because New York State has outlawed most of the ingredients in the traditional sprays.

Where did he find all these disease resistant roses? It turns out that this isn't such a new idea. During our chat, he mentioned the EarthKind varieties, which are old roses that have been tested by Texas A&M. The test involved caring for roses for one year, with proper planting, watering and weeding. For the next nine years the rose care was minimal. The result? A list of hardy roses that can take it, providing carefree beauty, as well as (often) scent. Last spring The Rose Garden began hosting a Northeastern version of the EarthKind trials. I am eager to see what they learn.

Speaking of Carefree Beauty, the popular variety was hybridized by Dr. Griffith Buck at Iowa State University. He wanted to create roses that were hardy and disease resistant, a novelty in 1950. Now dozens of Buck Roses are available.

Applejack

Buck got help and advice from Wilhelm Kordes, the world famous German rose breeder. Over the years the Kordes family has continued to work on disease resistant roses; they stopped spraying their fields entirely 20 years ago. American gardeners can now buy Fairy Tales roses like the brilliant orange yellow Brothers Grimm (highly resistant to black spot and mildew) and Felicitas (equally resistant with double pink blossoms on arching canes). And the Fairy Tale series is just one of the disease resistant Kordes families. There are also low growing Vigorosa landscape roses, climbing roses and even Kordes hybrid teas.

Most people are familiar with Conard-Pyle’s KnockOut roses, but may not know about hybridizer Ping Lim’s Easy Elegance line. Easy Elegance is so confident about the hardiness and disease resistance of these roses that they offer a two year guarantee.

Currently the NYBG website lists the top 115 roses of 2010. I watched Kukielski and a volunteer go over an exhaustive evaluation form. When he says a rose performs well he is speaking from documented evidence.

Harrison's Yellow

If Peter Kukielski at the NYBG can find thousands of disease resistant roses, we can all find at least a few varieties that will provide beauty and scent without compromising the health of our gardens for ourselves, our children, and all the other creatures we welcome.

Trophy weeding

While I am in Chicago sans laptop, here's a guest post from Kansas blogger and professor of veterinary medicine James Rousch.--Eliz.

 
A post by Carol of May Dreams Gardens, suggesting that a dandelion she had pulled was at least a 4-pointer, got me to thinking that gardeners everywhere need a common scoring system to rate their weeding efforts.  After all, the Boone and Crockett Club has been scoring trophy bucks for decades, allowing armed vicious meat-hunters everywhere to compare and brag about the size of their antlers, so why shouldn't gardeners be able to codify their weed slaughter from region to region?  Think of the possibilities: trophy presentations at monthly garden meetings and at national floral shows; record-winning specimens dry-mounted for home or office display; income potential for gardeners selling weeding rights to prime weed growth areas; competitive teams of weeders vying for world championships;  professional weeders with big-money contracts for advertising endorsements of horticultural products.

Since I claim credit for developing the idea to its full potential, I also feel responsible for creating the rating system for measurement.  I would therefore propose the following as the Professor Roush Official Weed Demise (PROWD) scoring system for domestic horticultural invaders:

A.  # of individual flowers/ flower buds on the weed at the time of extrication.
B.  Length of the longest point of the root system from soil level to tip, in centimeters.
C.  Overall mass of the weed (soil removed by washing) in avoirdupois ounces (28 grams/ounce).
D. Relative adverse environmental conditions during weed collection awarded from 0-10 points, with recent rain and 70F conditions scoring 0 and dry soil and 110F ambient temperatures receiving a score of 10.  If the gardener is actually dehydrated or suffering sunstroke at the time of weeding, a bonus of 5 points may be added.  If the gardener is actually hospitalized after collection, an additional bonus of 5 points is awarded.
E.  Relative removal completeness, scored on a scale of 0-10 points, with full roots and no breakage receiving a 10 score.  Subtract 2 points for ripping off a tap-rooted specimen at ground level.
F.  Use of mechanical devices for assistance are scored from 0-5 points with (-3) points awarded for rototillers and 5 points awarded if the weed was pulled bare-handed.  A ten-point bonus is awarded if pulled bare-handed and the weed causes contact dermatitis or has thorns.  Another ten-point bonus may be awarded if the weed was gathered in close proximity to a fire-ant or hornet nest and the gardener was bitten or stung.

The guidelines above should be sufficient to establish records for individual species trophies. However, for comparison between species, the following category should also be assessed:

G. Relative invasiveness or reproductive potential of the species from 0-10 points, with government-recognized invasive species scoring 10, kudzu 25, Chameleon Plant (Houttuynia cordata) 50 and the common dayflower (Commelina communis) rating 100 points. Zero points are awarded for pulling up Lamb's Quarters during a rainstorm.

The competing gardener should note that careful attention to certain details during weed collection may increase total scores. Therefore, it is advisable to attempt to inflate scores by delaying the actual weed collection until the gardener is actually suffering delirium and muscle cramps, but such acts must be officially witnessed and attested to by a friend or spouse who had previously told the gardener repeatedly what an idiot he or she was. 

So, that's it, the Professor Roush Official Weed Demise scoring system.  On that scale, the above pictured dandelion collected on 4/22/11 would score 6+27+9+2+10+5= 59 PROWD points, presently a world record dandelion (as it is also the only one entered in the official record book).

Additionally, since Professor Roush recognizes the deep competitiveness rampant among gardeners that leads some of them to acts of espionage and sabotage at Rose Exhibitions and Dahlia Shows, any claim for a record-setting specimen is disqualified if the gardener has made any attempt to fertilize or use growth stimulants on an individual weed, or to selectively breed weeds for size and invasiveness. Don't bother to deny it, I know some of you out there were already contemplating how to improve your entries.

Drinking the Witch Hazel Kool-Aid

Here's a guest rant from Kansas master gardener, blogger, and veterinary surgeon James Roush. And be sure to check out Michele's beautifully-illustrated essay on this plant in the current Garden Design.—Elizabeth

One of my many, many pet gardening peeves (which should be differentiated from the many pets that peeve me in my garden), is the manner in which the fiendish ghouls who create plant catalogues enlarge and enhance an otherwise insignificant flower until the catalogue reader (i.e. the gardener) is compelled to grasp frantically for the phone and credit card and purchase a dozen for their garden. Every Midwestern gardener who has ever drooled over a plant catalogue in the depths of a cold, snowy winter could name at least one, if not several, horticultural mail-order firms that are notorious for the practice. Close-up, voluptuous pictures of hybrid tea roses are moderately tolerable, but the act of magnifying tiny asters or honeysuckle until  the gardener feels that he or she could utilize the flower as a scented and comfortable spare bedroom just isn't fair.  Heck, even the surface of male bovine manure looks interesting when viewed at a microscopic level, but it is still male bovine manure when viewed in normal size.

I give you, as evidence of my dissatisfaction, the witch hazel. Witch hazels are hailed as the first blooms of spring in many areas, flowering boldly on leafless stems in late winter. Each flower has four slender strap-like petals that are always pictured everywhere as the most glorious, showy flower in all of creation. Every gardener just has to grow one—especially those gardeners who haven't seen anything but mist and snow and ice for the past three months.  For years, I indulged in the fantasy of adding one of these scented beauties to my garden so that I could enjoy the simple beauty of natural flowers without resorting to artificially forcing bulbs or flowering shrubs. Pictures such as this (at top)  drew me in: enormous, frilly, impossibly delicate, bright blooms that look as if they would cover your hand. I was told time and again that witch hazels were difficult to grow in Kansas, and in support of that wisdom, I admit that I have yet to find a surviving specimen in a public garden in this area.  But I couldn't call myself a gardener if I didn't at least try.  In fact, I failed the first time I attempted to overwinter an expensive specimen, but I'm now into my fourth year of survival of a 'Jelena' (Hamamelis x intermedia 'Jelena'), and I couldn't be more disappointed at the reality of the bush.

Garden writers are no better than garden photographers in describing that reality for us.  The late Henry Mitchell, in One Man's Garden, stated "Nothing equals the hybrid Asian witch hazels for delight in late January-February-early March, depending on the weather....Usually, as in the variety called 'Jelena', they are orange-bronze in effect and surprisingly showy."  Showy?  I, for one, love Henry Mitchell's writing and use of language, but he failed me this time. If you, the reader, will think back really hard, you'll realize that you have never seen an entire witch hazel bush pictured in bloom in a book. They are pictured in toto only as an example of nice fall foliage color. The real reason the blooms are always pictured in close-up is that in reality they are only 1-2 cm long and are practically invisible from 3 feet away regardless of the bright color—as represented by the picture above, a sad and impossible standard to worship, even for a winter-starved gardener.  If one has to use a magnifying glass to view a flower in the garden, the overall landscape benefits of the plant are dubious. 

I don't know how many of you grow witch hazel and would agree with me, or how many have swallowed the Kool-aid whole and feel that I'm just a crotchety old gardener who expects too much and gripes too loudly.  But I submit to you that if we are all being truthful with one another, we would admit that witch hazel wouldn't be worth growing if it bloomed in June instead of February.  And in full disclosure, I am suspicious that my witch hazel is not actually 'Jelena'.  The blooms of my bush are more yellow than other pictures I've seen of the variety, and up till now the fall foliage has been uninspiring.  The most likely explanation is that I was sold a mislabeled plant and didn't obtain the variety I sought.   Which brings up another pet peeve …

The rants that made you rant, part II

We regularly invite and post guest rants, but in 2009 Susan had the great idea to devote the last couple weeks of summer to guest rants. It gives us a break and you a chance to let it all hang out. Our guest ranters have written some fearless and fascinating posts—and we love it! All the guest ranters here will receive special badges for their sidebars (as they did last year). Please click on their posts to see what all the fuss was about and link back to their blogs. Comments will be closed on these posts, but you can continue the discussion here.

10.  Guest ranter  Ginny Stibolt doesn’t mince words about P. Allen Smith’s lame tree-planting photo.

9. Tee Riddle explains why seed packets suck.  

8. The normally mild-mannered Graham Rice is mad as hell about HOA required plant lists. 

7. Tom Alexander is curious—why doesn’t the GWA recognize the growing of certain plants as gardening? 

6. Benjamin Vogt finds flagpoles and their plantings of questionable benefit in the domestic landscape.

5.  Barbara Pintozzi asks IGCs to shape up or lose her business. 

4.  Shawna Coronada maintains that the health care reform bill promotes a gardening life.

3. A city in Illinois mows down someone’s easeway garden without notice. Can they do that? Yes. Should they do that? Michelle Clay thinks not.

2.  Susan Hampshire dares to take on whimsy. You can guess the rest.

1. Robin Ripley suggests that aesthetic quality control can be applied to vegetable plantings as well as to ornamental gardens. 

Great expectations

A guest rant from Joseph Tychonievich. See more of Joseph's cartoons here.

(Joseph was a popular attendee of garden bloggers' Buffa10. Many of us wanted to adopt him.)

99 and 44/100ths Percent Organic

Guest Rant by Steve Bates

There is a largely unspoken, unwritten, undeniable truth among gardeners. Let’s bring it out in the light of day: It’s impossible to be a totally organic gardener.

Let’s start with the soil itself. Gardening organically means not adding or using anything that was not alive. Fine. Let’s even assume that the ground you are about to cultivate is virgin soil. It’s never been used for cultivation before. Generations of humans passing by never casually spilled the slightest drop of toxic chemical. Okay, now let’s say we pledge never to add anything made or processed in a factory. Like, for example, that potting soil I bought in a bag. Sure, it might say “organic.” Or it might not say anything. But the plastic bag it’s in, and the machinery it touched during the preparation and packaging, can all be contaminated with the slightest traces of oils, chemicals, plutonium, whatever, even if the soil itself is pure.

So, for the sake of argument, let’s avoid the bags of potting soil. Fast-forward to summer. Got to stake the tall plants. That wooden stake looks organic, but unless you chopped down the tree and milled it into stakes yourself, who knows what it came in contact with? Was it pressure-treated or coated with vile rot-resistant chemicals?

Maybe a metal pole would be better. Metal, typically coated with PVC or some other non-natural chemical. It won’t touch the plants, you say. Well, at some point it will be chipped by some accident, or over time it will begin to degrade on its own. Where do the nasty bits go but into our precious garden soil?

The wooden slats that hold together the sides of my raised beds? Same possibility, even if they are cedar, which holds up well without chemical treatment. Clean wood or compost to mulch the crops. Newspaper to layer over walkways. Plastic sheets with holes for water to pass through. Everything has some contact with nonorganic substances.

If, by some miracle, every fence post, every bag of mulch, every root ball of every seedling you plant is organic, your prize will be the knowledge that organic things tend to break down very fast. How long before that wood post is a pile of sawdust?

So those of us who aspire to garden organically, at least in part, vow to do our best, to recognize, maybe even to embrace, the compromises that life demands, like the ice cream cone that we just can’t turn down despite so many weeks of staying on that low-carb, low-fat, low-fun diet.

Gardening, like politics, is the art of the possible. Compromise, at the right time and in the right way, is the essence of being human. Confronted with difficult choices, we strive to do the right thing, or at least to do the least bad. We know our limits as humans. We make smart choices at times and bad choices at times, but we try to learn from them.

WIN A COPY OF STEVE'S BOOK
Just leave a comment and I'll pick one at random.  Entries close a week from today at 6 p.m. EST.

Steve Bates is a gardener and journalist living in Ashburn, Va. His first book,“The Seeds of Spring; Lessons from the Garden,” was released in November 2010.  And here's his "Seeds of Spring" blog.

A Tale of Tree-Dwelling Thieves

Here's a guest post from Zoe Poster, who blogs at Pearled Earth.

I am easily vacuumed into the dark vortex of anxiety created by Unwanted Chaos in My Garden (wild self-seeding of Eschscholzia amongst eggplants = good chaos; wild animals with giant gleaming teeth laying waste to my carrots and beets = bad chaos).

So I knew I had better enjoy the window of relaxation afforded me once my evil resident woodchuck had been captured and relocated. Fruit was ripening, and I was getting to eat it! Flowers were blooming. I knew it was the calm before the shitstorm, of course, because I am that kind of person. No one will ever accuse me of being oblivious to the fact that the next worst thing is out there, lurking.

Our prize crop, still ripening, was the organic espaliered apples - our first ever. Remarkably unblemished fruits, surprisingly bountiful. We were so proud.

Then a dark cloud passed overhead, and in its shadow I saw... A horde of ravenous squirrels.

They worked quickly, hauling Northern Spies and Crimson Galas up into the neighbor's maple tree, spinning single fruits rotisserie-style in oversized mitts, spewing juicy scraps of apple meat all over the place. Deliciously tart and puckery, I'm sure, being harvested so early.

Really, what claim did I have to the apple crop? Sure, I lovingly pruned, mulched, composted, and sprayed. But the neighborhood squirrels said: Big deal—we spent even more time cramming peanuts into holes in the dirt!

So, there you have it. I could not think of any conceivable way to rid my garden of squirrels. While we have a plumber friend with the impressive ability to simultaneously drink his morning coffee, smoke his first cigarette, pop off a few squirrels with a pellet gun, and hold a conversation with cellphone clamped between jawbone and shoulder... the truth is that I'd have cried if he shot my squirrels.

I resigned myself this year. If we couldn't have baskets of apples, we could at least have pictures of them before they ripened completely, as a sort of memorial to what might have been. I snapped a few photos. I sighed and shrugged my shoulders. One man's horticultural highpoint is another mammal's midday snack. That's just how it goes, in gardening.

Bulb Fever Thwarted

Guest Post by Sandra Knauf of Greenwoman Zine.

I've had my share of bulb fever over the years. It's always the same, coming on in late summer, intensifying  with fall, eased only by hours poring over full-color bulb-porn catalogs and long, excited lists. I've splurged a few times, putting in big orders that included the practical (species tulips, muscari, Darwins) to the extravagant (parrot, fringed, and peony tulips, Allium 'Globemaster' and shubertii.)

And, I have loved them all.

For me, it began sixteen years ago, during the first fall in the home we live in now, with my first real garden. I wanted bulbs and lots of them. Early in November, eight months pregnant with our second daughter, I planted 180 in one day; dozens of fancy tulips for the front of our bungalow (most lasted one season), King Alfreds by the street, drumstick alliums, crocus, and blue Glory of the Snow. I remember my sister-in-law Victoria's charming comment on how the husks enveloping the daffs were their "little jackets for the winter." She helped me dig big holes and instructed me in proper bulb planting--sprinkle the holes at the bottom with bone meal, add enough bulbs to make a nice show.

I ended the day sore and happy. The next spring, in a new home, with a new baby and so much floral beauty, was glorious.

Looking back now, with the girls mostly grown and nearly two decades of gardening behind me, I realize what made it glorious was not really the bulbs. What filled my heart was springtime itself, our young family (I see it now as a mirror image of the youthful abundance then around us). In a word, love. The bulbs were just icing on the cake. I know this because three years earlier I felt just as happy sitting on a small porch in May, with no garden to speak of, and our first baby in my arms. That spring I fawned over what grew in a section of our cramped yard--a few scruffy grape hyacinths (not planted by me), scrawny wild roses canes that came from who-knows-where, beginning to bud, and the antics of a single robin. Simpler but just as sweet.

That said, I know that hopping on the bulb-buying bandwagon is hard to resist. Gardening, for many of us, is a giving pursuit, and pleasure comes in delighting not just ourselves, but others. When I see a neighbor on our sidewalk, stopping, smiling, pointing at something I've planted, I am thrilled. If you are in the business, it's pretty much a duty to have a show-stopping garden and first-hand plant education. But for those of you who don't have money to spend on bulbs this year, and are feeling blue, to you I say, it's okay. Personally, my bulb catalogs are where they've been stashed for the last few years, in the "maybe" pile on the reading table, as in, if something happens where a ton of money comes my way, I'm gonna buy me a LOT of bulbs. It's not going to happen again this year, and you know what? It's fine.

When spring comes I'll enjoy those hardy bulbs that have persisted in my garden, grape hyacinths, the six 'Globemasters' that get smaller each year but are still fascinating, the few bright spots of Darwin tulips that always bring a glad surprise, and a patch of those prolific species tulips, the Tulipa clusianas. If I find I can't live without buying something this fall, it'll be a small purchase, maybe a box or two of those $2.99 bulbs I've been eyeing at the grocery store, or a fragrant hyacinth at the neighborhood garden center to force in a colorful glass (it is a lot of fun).  As the proverb goes, it only takes one to feed the soul.

Top photo by Paul Spielman; lower photo by Kim Gravestock.

Mums: where's the love?

Here's a guest post from James Roush, who hates mums as much or maybe even more than I do. James's blog is Garden Musings.—Eliz.

My muse for today's blog is a coworker and friend who's also a new homeowner. She's faced with the dilemma of all non-gardeners who suddenly find themselves with a town lot whose previous owner seemed to have neither the talent nor the interest for gardening. A forsythia seems to be the only salvageable landscape-worthy plant in her yard at present. As a result, she has been slyly and periodically pestering me with questions about plants and landscaping, seeking out knowledge from her captive manic Extension Master Gardener, and probably secretly hoping that I'll show up with a bulldozer and a truckload of plants and a sixteen-color, meticulously thought-out plan for the landscape.  Alas for her, like most poorly-trained men of my generation, I'm oblivious to feminine hints.

Her latest gardening question though, struck a nerve, as did her suggestion later that I should write about it and call it "Mums The Word" (she loves really bad puns).  She had just asked via email if I thought that mums would do well under a large shade tree that borders her property.  I calmly replied that mums wouldn't do well in the constant dry shade that I knew her spot had, and that she needed to plant them where they'd get six hours of sun or more.

That's not what I wanted to say, though.  She doesn't know that I hate mums—or more properly Chrysanthemum sp.—with a passion second only to my distaste for spireas.  Spireas are a special case with me as readers of Garden Musings know, but mums are about as worthless in the garden in my estimation. Yes, they provide us some nice fall color, if you just want flowers, but they provide nothing interesting in the way of decent foliage contrast or shape variation, and the rest of the year they're either just a slowly-growing blob that sits there like a green turd in your landscape, or they’re dead stems that break with the first snowfall.  To add insult to injury, although mums are perennials elsewhere, they're really annuals in Kansas, weakening in—at most—a year or two thanks to the dry hot Kansas summers and drier cold Flint Hills winters.  I'd sooner have my friend plant ragweed in her yard than a border of mums.

Look, for instance, at the picture above of the current landscaping (taken this morning) around some KSU apartments that stand opposite the exit I use every night from work.  Let me repeat that I'm forced to look at this landscaping debacle every night.  What insanity overtook the K-State groundsmen that they thought these alternating yellow and orange mums would make a wise display?  (K-State colors, guys and gals, are purple and white.) Now it's true that the most common colors of mums put up for sale seem to be yellows and oranges and russets, probably because the plants sell best in what people think of as fall colors, but mums do actually exist in purple and white.  I've seen them.  If we must have round balls of color alternating in our college landscape, perhaps purple and white might have been a better choice here—a stone's throw from the KSU football stadium.  Luckily these were just planted; I'm betting (hoping) they don't survive till next year.

I have no chrysanthemums at all in my garden, just as I have no spireas.  The closest thing I'll allow is the wonderful Shasta Daisy, which blooms during the height of summer and used to be classified as a chrysanthemum, but today has been wisely moved to the Leucanthemum x superbum taxonomic group.  Please, everyone, let's not whisper the word "mum" around me again; it plays havoc with my blood pressure, as you can now attest to.

Sound of a Wild Snail Eating--We Have a Winner!

Everybody loved Pam J.'s comment on Elisabeth Tova Bailey's guest post, so we're sending a copy of The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating to Pam!  Here's what Pam had to say:

This reminds me so much of my dad and his relationship with a tiny spider in his bathtub. Dad was dying of cancer, refused treatment, and insisted on staying in his house to the end. As he began to lose the ability to walk or get out of the house he started relationships with some of his fellow house creatures, including the bathtub spider. He treated it like a pet, or like a housemate. I'm convinced that the spider taught him more about mortality than any of the earnest talks he got from the hospice clergypeople. It was sweet. Thanks for reminding me.