Garden Rant

Aunt Tilly Needed a Drink

This just in from Jay and Ken at Atlock Farm, a most intriguing place in Somerset, NJ:

After some 20 years, perched high above the succulents,in a green houses at Atlock Farm, (in Somerset, New Jersey), much beloved Aunt Tilly, cut loose and unceremoniously plopped to the ground.

Owner Ken Selody felt it only fitting to give the girl a chair and a cheer, by having her join us for cocktails. She had a Cosmo. A double.

This report was followed quickly by the following:

Okay...Ken said I must be honest here... Tillandsia had suicidal tendencies, and unbeknownst to me, she'd tried this before. We'll never know for sure, but she might well have purposely thrown herself from the top of the greenhouse....plunging to... her, well.... nearest cocktail? She liked to drink...albiet sparingly, considering her genus.

That is all.

And of course, it wouldn't be May...

...if I didn't brag about my tulips. This year, I focused on hybrids in containers, as well as in the two round raised beds on the hellstrip. In the containers: Triumphs Prinses Irene and Passionale (these are the ones I brought inside).

On the hellstrip: Temple of Beauty (Single Late). I also added more species and greigiis in the ground; greigiis are my new favorites. These are Oratorio.

The Fence Line

Do gardeners want to put down deep roots, plant trees, and watch them ever so slowly become massive and still presences in the landscapes of their personalities?  

No, the people who do that are not gardeners.

Do gardeners strive to take a slice of earth stuck in this noisy contemporary moment and make it timeless, to express some eternal mystery in the relationship between humanity and nature?

Only in theory.

In my observation, the more passionate a gardener is about the series of acts called gardening, the more perverse and restless he or she is, too.  Oh my, did that plant just die?  Let me cry a crocodile tear and stick in a replacement, something exciting and weird I've never tried before!  Did the garden just get flooded out?  Did I downsize my way out of a place I've shaped for 20 years?  Did I just get fired, foreclosed on, divorced, widowed, thrown off the land I've been squatting on by the city?  

Yeah, it's terrible.  

And now let's start anew! A new plan!  More plants!  New plants!  Better design this time!  A new kind of soil! Experiments galore!

Gardeners see the yard the same way billionaires see marriage.  Life is a banquet, and if the current situation has become unsettling, there is always another lovely blonde out there to offer a fresh start.

I was thinking of the weirdness of our attitude towards change just this week because my neighbor stopped by to discuss the new fence she and I are getting on our property line.  The old wooden fence has been falling down for years, thanks to a post or two that wandered in our light, sandy soil.  She can't take it any more.  And indeed, it looks crazy from my side, but certifiable from hers.

But a new fence on our property line means dealing with the denizens of my side of the fence, particularly a ridiculously healthy 'New Dawn' rose; the accompanying large-flowered clematises, which are doing surprisingly well for large-flowered clematises, a fussy group of characters, I find; a pair of hardy kiwis that haven't yet flowered; an 'Alchymist' rose that isn't nearly as much of a feature as 'New Dawn,' but is growing pleasingly into an 'Adelaide Dunbar' lilac.  Plus the lilac, lots of lilies, an unhappy blue mist shrub or two, many undistinguished perennials and one that I happen to love--telekia--a meadowy weed with huge, coarse chartreuse leaves and yellow daisylike flowers at shoulder height.

My neighbor's yard guy Ralph, who has been engaged to put up the fence, refuses to go near the issue until I saw down 'New Dawn.'  Ralph is not foolish.

So my neighbor said to me with that saintly combination of good manners and puzzlement that characterizes most of my neighbors' interactions with me, "Are you sure you want to do this? I feel so bad for your beautiful garden."

Oh, I'm sure. And besides, why would anyone pity 'New Dawn'? Yes, I'm sorry that 'New Dawn' won't get to produce her thousand flesh-colored, hybrid tea-like perfect blooms this year.

But 'New Dawn' is a meat eater that has evolved to ensnare gardeners with its hooked thorns, wait until they expire, and then use their corpses for fertilizer. I once got a New Dawn thorn caught in my ear and would have decomposed there if my son Milo hadn't bravely wrestled the cane off and out of me.  So, it's not as if I expect to be consumed with sorrow, sawing this thing down to stump.  Instead, it will feel like an act of revenge. Besides, 'New Dawn' will surely exact its own revenge in the numerous bloody injuries it inflicts on me as I conduct this operation.  And any plant this healthy is sure to regrow alarmingly from its scaffold anyway.  I think that if I really wanted to kill it, some kind of accelerant would be required.

When I was 20 years old, I got to hear Martin Scorcese speak at UCLA.  He took questions from the audience, one of which was along the lines of, "Why aren't your movies nicer?"

He said a great thing: "If you don't like violence, you don't like the movies."

Well, if you don't like death and destruction, a least a little, you don't like gardening.

Yes, what's happening on the fence now is pretty.  But it is not nearly as interesting as taking my accumulated wisdom and sharklike character and starting anew there.

D.C. Awash in Cherry Blossoms

Washington's new Martin Luther King Memorial sure looks better now than it did last fall when those cherry trees were bare and newly planted and leafless.

Really, anything looks better with blooming cherry trees somewhere in view.

Thanks to pal Harvey Leifert for uploading these and more of his photos here on Flickr. 

And for more about these famous, now 100-year-old cherry trees and the whole history of Japanese plants in American landscapes, visit Adrian Higgins in today's WashPost.

Dear Seed Companies: Please Stop Making It So Damn Hard To Love You.

Just look at this amazing, astonishing, beautiful, very unusual new purple tomato.  Does it not fill your heart with lust?  Do you not want to order one of these RIGHT NOW?

What?  You don't see it?  Why is that?

Because the seed companies make it so damn hard to get a picture, that's why!  I have spent way too much time this morning looking for a photo I can use of 'Indigo Rose,' this glorious new tomato I read about in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning.

I took the time to search around and find seed companies selling the plant, and even emailed a few of them asking for permission to use their photo, all to no avail.  I also hunted around on their website for some sort of Terms of Use section that would tell me whether or not I could grab a picture, or a Media section with downloads I could use.

Nothing.

So.  Here's a hint, seed (and plant) companies:  Make this easy.  Put a link in your footer that says,
"Use of Photos" or something very obvious.  On that page, just say whether or not we can grab a photo for use online or in print.

Or!  If you want a little more control?  Have an online form that people fill out.  Have them link to their publication, and link to the photo they want to use.  Send an auto-responder message back that either says "yes" or "no" depending on the photo.  If the answer is "yes," be sure your response says, "You can use this photo as long as you link back to us (or whatever).  Remember that you have to use this form every time you want to use one of our photos, because copyrights vary and we want to keep track of who's using our stuff."

Or something.  Figure it out.  But please, make it a little easier to love you.

I'm talking to you, Johnny's, High Mowing, Nichols, Territorial, and even you nice people at OSU who developed the thing.

OK.  Follow the links.  Look at the pictures.  Commence lust.

Now roses are too hard

"At some point, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. [Landscape] roses will be all you have; the beautiful, unique hybrid teas will be gone."
—Charlie Anderson, president of Weeks Roses

 This makes me sad. I’m no big fan of hybrid teas, but for me the romance of growing roses includes all the different types. An article in the Sacramento Bee discusses a decline in the use of hybrid teas, as homeowners plump for low-maintenance landscape roses (think Knock Out), which don’t need any special care (extra fertilizing, nurturing through diseases and infestations, etc.). If “special care” means using more chemicals, I’m all for not using hybrid teas. But I haven’t used chemicals on my roses for eight years. I have a few David Austins, climbers (above), and old roses (Louise Odier, Blush Noisette), and I would never consider giving them up in favor of any of the new easy-care series.

When I started planning a garden, the first flowers I thought of were roses and lilies. I pored through rose books, then catalogs, and ended up ordering mainly old roses from a couple vendors. Exactly two of them survived, and I think that’s pretty good, given the generally shady conditions and equally general ineptitude of the gardener.

The fragrance-free, nondescript flowers of the new easy-care shrubs wouldn’t be worth the space they’d take up in my small urban property, though I have seen them in action as large public plantings, and heartily approve for the most part. In fact, I’d agree with this telling quote from the Bee article—"People don't even see Knock Out as a rose any more; it's a landscape plant." Exactly.

I think these big companies like Weeks should start pushing their heirloom and antique roses more. Many are just as sturdy as any of the new shrubs, and though they may not bloom as much, I would take one blowsy, deliciously-scented  Louise Odier or Abraham Darby—neither of which gets or requires any special care—over 100 Knock Outs.

I can have Lilium canadense? Really?

Flickr Creative Commons photo by Franziskas Garten

If I hadn’t already put in a sizeable order for these with Brent & Becky’s, I wouldn’t be sharing the news of their new—and startling—availability. The picture in the B&B catalog isn’t the best I’ve seen of these—use Google or Flickr if you want to see them in their full glory. According to Michele, they flourish in the wild throughout her part of New York State, but I’ve never seen them around here. I have seen amazing images on various websites showing immense chandeliers of down-facing yellow-orange trumpets. The length of the flower tube, the flamboyantly outstretched petals, and the sheer number of blooms that each stately plant can hold—it all adds up to drool-worthy in my book.

That’s why—though there are plenty of native lilium—I’ve always focused on this one. Many gardeners grow the superbum (Turks cap), but that variety is too similar to the henryi, martagon, and other downward-facers I already have. I have a feeling that canadense will flourish in the same terroir as my martagons—dense, acidic, and slightly shaded. (Speaking of martagons, there seems to be a new, cool hybrid of these on offer every year—check it out.)

Canadense is rarely offered commercially (Old House Gardens had it once), though I have seen it in various online seed exchanges. It’s getting rarer as a wildflower, and is listed as endangered in a few states and in its namesake.

Writing for Dave’s Garden, Diana Wind lists canadense as one of her top ten hummingbird attracters. The buds and roots were eaten by North American Indians. And here’s my favorite Lilium canadense factoid. It has a Facebook page, which I just liked, for the heck of it. Except that Facebook apparently thinks it’s an animal, and the page offers very little credible information.

I can have this? Really? If so, then here are the ones I want next:
L. nepalense (green outside, deep purple outside)
L. majoense (white with purple spots)
L. taliense (white recurved with near-black spots)
L. papilliferum (dark purple, rare and difficult)
L. nielgherrense (failure guaranteed, only included for name)

With bizarre species like these to yearn for (and occasionally get), who needs orange double echinacea?

Reaching the fifth stage with poinsettias

It never fails. Every year, a plant that I’ve dismissed with contempt in seasons past manages to weasel its way into my good graces by displaying attributes I never seemed to appreciate before. I still don’t like the crazy glittery and painted ones—and fail to see how they’d enhance anyone’s holiday décor—but some of the newer poinsettia colors are really beautiful. In spite of everything, I couldn’t resist.

The gateway drug was a pink variety I found at the wonderful Lockwoods, a sophisticated nursery we are lucky enough to have here. It opened my mind to consideration of the other varieties around it—greenish white, dark maroon, deep rose … and so on. (They all have names, but I don’t care about them enough to know what they are.)

When buying poinsettias, you need to go all out—get 3, 6, or more for a banked display. Just like swaths of perennials, these ubiquitous creatures look their best when displayed en masse.

I also like the tree forms, though I didn’t see any this year. The double forms are pretty, but kind of lanky. My mother used to practice an elaborate methodology for saving the plants over to the next season—I feel certain it involved some kind of basement dormancy—but that’s just crazy. Into the compost they’ll go, along with the dried-up evergreens. I’d want to have room for the newest colors—well, some of them. A horticulture center in Ontario has one that looks like a ketchup chip (ketchup-flavored potato chips are another Canadian specialty).  Red-dusted poinsettias and ketchup-flavored chips. No and no.

Goofy colors of winter

Last year it was honeysuckle pink; this year it’s tangerine tango. Each year Pantone picks a color. This year’s shade, like last year’s, is resolutely loud and brash, notwithstanding the dim socioeconomic climate. The recommendation is aimed at fashionistas and home designers more than gardeners; I'm not saying that nurseries will be overflowing with red-orange plants this spring.

But I do like to use bright colors when it comes to forcing bulbs in the cold months. Like the bright yellow Golden Rain tazetta, the flame-orange Prinses Irene tulip, and the deep rose Double Hollyhock hyacinth. If all goes well, all three (plus Orange Princess) will be blooming this winter. I think the Hollyhock and the Irene are actually pretty close to the Pantone shades, if you don’t get too scientific about it.

It could be that I’m using them for the same optimistic reasons the Pantone people picked their hot pink and bright orange—for the aggressive cheer they’ll bring when other conditions are less than ideal.

The show has already begun with these Wintersuns, a mildly-scented tazetta with a nice bright yellow interior.

Is another reason to avoid Norway maples needed?

Photo by JP Thimot.

It’s been a bad year for maple trees. Norway and silver maples across the Northeast and Midwest are ravaged this year by tar spot (the Rhytisma acerinum fungus) and (maybe less widespread) anthracnose, as I posted on GWI last week.

In Western New York, the Norways look the worst; their shriveled leaves have been falling since August. The silver maples (shown at top) aren’t quite as bad. If I needed another reason to dislike these trees, this blight provides it. Apparently, the soaking we got in May gave the fungus what it needed; it is visible almost every year, but usually not so much that we don’t get some decent color.

Treatments other than conscientious leaf removal (which I always do anyway) are not advised by the various extension sources I’ve consulted, and I’m glad there are no plans by the city to carpet bomb the streets with fungicide. I did hear of one possible remedy—though I’m doubtful. A Facebook friend contacted me after my GWI post, and said she noticed the problem in midsummer and her arborist did this: “provided in-ground injections of concentrated fertilizer. Within one week, the tree markedly improved, and has been fine since that time.”

I’ve never fertilized any of my trees, other than the usual additions of mulch and compost to the garden beds that surround them, and I’d never heard that injecting fertilizer would help with disease. Well, I’m only vaguely aware of the practice of injecting fertilizer—I’ve certainly never done it.  Interesting!

Performance anxiety—It’s now or never

June-July-August

Here’s the progress of the street planter I planted with randomly chosen Ball annuals (in addition to the cannas we always have in these). Sorry—the images were not taken from the same angle. (I always think of these scientific criteria too late.) But from any angle, it’s clear that the Ball starts did very well in their streetside planter. As did the cannas this year. Considering that it’s been very hot and not that wet, I’m happy with the results.

You can’t see the verbena and angelonia, which are hiding under the canna leaves, but they’re thriving, considering that handicap. I also tried some of the Ball osteospermum in planters at home with less than admirable results. Boy did they get leggy! And it would be nice to get a critical mass of blooms before frost. Still waiting for those.

Strobilanthes at right; rudbeckia everywhere

This is the time of year—though there is plenty of season left—when I take a good look at what worked and what didn’t in terms of summer-peaking annuals and perennials. As always, strobilanthes is a big winner. I am now using this metallic purple foliage plant in the ground as well as in containers; it branches gracefully and weaves itself among the bulbs and perennials, which—thanks to the rudbeckia lacianata, rudbeckia hirta, heliopsis, and some of the lilies—are trending yellow. Love the lacianata “Golden Glow.” Who needs a yellow dahlia, zinnia, or mum when this plant is around?

And of course, the biggest thrill this year is finally entering the vegetable sweepstakes (Saturday’s pickings above).

Did you play favorites this year?

Old-fashioned annuals are awesome

Sometimes my experience with these falls under the “interesting” category rather than “delightful,” but this year I am very pleased with the results from two starts I got from Select Seeds in the spring.

This Martha Washington geranium (developed c. 1870s) is better than anything I can get in local nurseries. SS calls it “Gardener’s Joy.”

And you probably recall my ravings about the sacrifices made to get over-blooming, voluptuous masses of petunias. I love the various Waves for public plantings, but for my own yard, I like older varieties that don’t bloom nearly as much but have a scent, like the deep violet ones you can still get at many nurseries, or the “Rainmaster” whites, which have a light, sweet fragrance, especially at night. Their upright growth is perfect for me since I’ve got them in a container on the pavement.

Other old timey annuals I’d find it hard to get along without include my tall, branching heliotrope and my “outhouse flower”—rudbeckia laciniata “Golden Glow.” The image above is from last year; they are much taller this year. Nine feet easy, I'd say.

Doubles—it depends

The other day, while I was trying to look up why my L. tigrinum flore-plenos have white fuzz all over their stems and buds, I came across the following: “has double flowers, but, in my opinion, is rather coarse. The style and grace of a lily flower lies in its clean lines and simple architecture. Double-flowered lilies destroy such grace.”

That’s in Armitage’s Herbaceous Perennial Plants. Thankfully (as I suppose I should have known), he also informed me that the white fuzz comes with the plant. I am not so sure a single tiger lily is that much more elegant than the flore-plenos (above), which are not really fully double. I’m not sure I’d apply the word elegant to either, actually, though I like both.

There does seem to be some prejudice against double hybrids, depending on which authority you read. Here’s Christopher Lloyd: “Double daffodils may seem like an unwelcome aberration, …”,—although he does modify the statement.

I can see where a double Casa Blanca or Silk Road would make very little sense—the single forms of these are heavy enough on their slim stems and can seldom get along with staking. But the flore-pleno, rare among my lilies, can stand up on their own, and I prefer the fascinating henryi to a single tigrinum, which too often get confused with orange daylily types.  That said, I would agree double forms aren’t a good idea for lilies.

As for daffodils, I’m fascinated by the doubles, but recognize their problems (mainly, too heavy, especially in wet spring weather).  Mileage varies widely with attitudes toward extreme hybridization. Should it be anything the market will bear or are there limits? The only thing I worry about is the disappearance of the traditional cultivars or species from stores. (Imagine a world of nothing but Endless Summer hybrids with not an arborescens or oakleaf in sight.)

And then there’s the problem of all the crazy names under which lilies are sold.  Tree lilies, anyone?

And it reblooms

It’s true, David Austin roses have their downsides. They are marginally hardy below zone 5, they have tall, leggy bushes that really would like to be climbers, and I guess they’re somewhat susceptible to blackspot and other rose-related ills.

Nonetheless. I still love all the DA’s I’ve tried, including my new ones, Darcey Bussell and Lady Emma Hamilton. They smell heavenly, they rebloom better than shrub roses I’ve had that were supposed to be foolproof, and I love their old-fashioned flowers (very similar to authentic old roses), which are infinitely preferable to the easy-care roses used for landscaping.  I like hybrid teas in theory, but wouldn’t have one in my garden. Also, there are ways to plant DAs so they'll survive in colder zones. Kathy Purdy/Cold Climate Gardening has some good advice about that.

Yesterday, I slipped back to a neglected side garden, where the composter is hidden, and found the Darcey Bussell—which I’ve only had for a year—exploding with deep red blooms. I also have the gorgeous yellow Charlotte, whose perfect blooms are sometimes the last I see at the end of October.

 
AD with Louise Odier in the background.

As for Abraham Darby, shown at top, I am sure there are better roses out there, but not that much better.

Cheerleading for lilium

These L. Robina (oriental/trumpet) were bred by Arie Peterse for their buds as well as their flowers.

For years I have been wondering why more gardeners I knew did not grow lilium. Apparently, I’m not alone. A couple weeks ago, an electronic press packet representing a big lilium promotion by Netherland Bulb arrived in the Rant mailbox (and some of yours as well, I am sure).  

It is true that many gardeners have still not gotten past Stargazers—in fact, a local florist I know who generally has a nice selection of Oriental lilies tends to call them all Stargazers no matter what they are. It’s also true that some of my Garden Walk visitors still look at my lilies in amazement and ask if they need to be overwintered inside. So maybe a new round of lilium education is called for.

And there’s news! Those of us who have learned to embrace orienpets will now need to figure out a whole new alphabet soup of hybrids which culminate in a new LAOT hybrid—a four way cross between Longiflorum, Asiatic, Oriental and Trumpet. Lilies are being bred to have different colors, subtler fragrances, more up-facing blooms, and—as you see above—brightly colored buds.

Which is all very well. I ordered and planted some of the new OTs myself this year. But I wonder if it is the lack of new hybrids that stops many gardeners from adding more lilies. There are other issues with lilies—like their general need for staking (Asiatics need it less), thanks to their height and heavy flowers. The blooms and scent have to be worth it for the gardener—placing them against or among equally tall camouflaging plants helps.

It also seems a shame that promoters are not reminding gardeners about the really foolproof lilies, the ones that will put up with partial shade, bad drainage, and general incompetence to persevere, bloom, and return year after year. These are the lilies I depend on, and I’m guessing none of them will be the subject of special promotions:

L. martagon. My June lily. This never needs staking, and has interesting foliage, unusual in a lilium.

L. henryi. Wild, tall, and with goofy orange bumps.

L. Scheherazade. Tree-trunk –like stalks and stately long-lasting flowers.

 

L. auratum. Also known as Gold Band. I sometimes have problems finding this, but there are some hybrids that must be related to it (like Amazing, above).

L. Casa Blanca. Always fabulous.

I can easily envision limiting myself to just those five. Ha.

Thanks to Dan Hinkley, Tony Avent, …

… and an extensive  roster of hellebore breeders, including Ernie and Marietta O'Byrne, Joseph Heuger, Glenn Withey and Charles Price, and many others, I now have something truly distinctive to admire when hardly anything else is growing in the slowly thawing Buffalo spring. Not to mention that even the most exotic hellebores don’t seem to mind my maple-root-choked soil.

I first saw these on the back of the Wayside catalog about ten years back; I think they were offering the hybridus ‘Party Dress” strain, a Heronswood introduction, but I could be wrong, and no longer have the catalog. I do have several old Heronswood catalogs with dizzying arrays of not just hybridus but also foetidus, niger, and multifidus strains. Ten years ago I bought the plants featured on the back of the Wayside catalog and they have matured into large clumps, one with white single flowers, the other with pinkish greenish single flowers.  (I think one gets more shade than the other.)

These days I rely on Plant Delights for interesting hellebores via mail order, but increasingly I am seeing beautiful doubles and singles offered at area nurseries. The double purple/maroon varieties here are from Plant Delights. One of them is ‘Kingston Cardinal,’ a Hinkley introduction. Neither of these appears in the PDN offerings now.

I made the mistake of picking up and paging through a couple old Heronswood books just now. Never again. Not only did I see all the hellebores I never ordered, there were also 4 types of podophyllum and 6 types of hepatica. What was I thinking?! What a woodland garden I’d have if I had stocked up on all these when I could.

Oh well. The hellebores make up for it. Unlike other fleeting spring beauties, the flowers last well into June, and after that you have magnificent clumps of foliage. These plants are an amazing boon for the cold climate gardener. I couldn’t care less about orange, yellow, and lime green echinacea; just give me more hellebore strains, and I’ll plant them, as long as I have room.

I’ll never admire a city dogwood again

These trees are near a former homestead that has been preserved.

Not after last week’s trip to the Great Smokies National Park and nearby Tennessee towns. Here, they are thriving at the edges of the forest, set off by Eastern hemlocks, tulip poplars, and other, much taller trees. Sure, dogwoods are not rare trees—we have plenty in WNY, including a lot of Kouzas in the city—but they have never taken my breath away as they did last week. The dogwoods around here don’t burst forth as they do farther south.

I didn’t even bother looking at the bulbs that were up when I got back home—it was daylight, but it was also snowing. (Just an ephemeral dusting, but still.) Never mind that. Check out these trilliums—grandiflorum and luteum—found along the Roaring Forks nature trail. There were also showy orchis (galearis spectabilis), cardamine, and other flowers I can’t ID from the resources I have.

Though it’s impossible to reproduce the subtle beauties one finds in a place like this in a home garden, I was struck by how we were followed by water wherever we went. Done well, water can make a garden work. The sound provides a (to me) necessary background.

In my region we generally think of trillium as the first indigenous flower of spring. Which is yours?

(Here's the showy orchis--living up to its name.)

Bulb forcing trials continued, out of necessity

These are some kind of parrot tulip from the big box. As the years go by, I am experimenting with forcing varieties of bulbs that aren’t recommended for forcing. It seems to be simply a matter of waiting longer. (Maybe I’ll move on to iris next year.) And judging from what’s going outdoors, I have all the time in the world.

   

Here's the first PlantCam experiment. Not great, but sort of fun. The cat seemed to realize it needed help.

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 …

On the Dissing of Knockout Roses

Yesterday I heard master gardening teacher Gene Sumi give his famous talk about basic pruning.  It's but a 90-minute summary of the full course he teaches on pruning at community colleges, but a great beginning for anyone afraid to pick up their first pruners and give it a go.  I'd heard the talk at least once before but still heard some things I'd never heard before.

Like?  What Gene had to say about Knockouts and other landscape roses - that they're bred from the roses that grow wild in Europe and have been used there for centuries as hedgerows.  Commonly called dog roses, they're super-tough, and easy to grow without any particular care, but because they have small flowers, they've been ignored all these years all of horticulture - breeders, gardeners, and especially the rose societies, which favor the highly bred roses with huge blooms, like grandifloras and hybrid teas - the ones that are so disease-prone they require weekly spraying.

Ignored by breeders until the 1990s, that is, when Wisconsin breeder William Radler, who'd been growing roses since he was a kid, decided to use the wild stock of dog roses to develop repeat-blooming, cold-hardy roses that resist disease - the qualities that his 'Knockout' is so famous for.  The qualities that made it the fastest selling new rose in history - 250,000 the year it was introduced (2000).  According to some, it's now the bestselling plant in the whole U.S. of A.

BRING ON THE WILD!
So here's my question.  Why is it that among today's enlightened gardeners - the ones who abhor chemical maintenance regimes - there's so little love for these super-sustainable plants?  These wild-type plants.  Wild is good, right?  If they were native to the U.S. would these super-common plants be more appreciated?

Hey, maybe that's why they're ridiculed - because they're so common.

BRING ON THE COMMON!
Me, I love common plants.  Maybe it's because I'm a low-maintenance type, drawn to plants that succeed with little intervention.  And maybe it's because as a gardening coach, I need my garden to exhibit the easy, common, and inexpensive plants that I recommend to my clients, most of whom are new to gardening.  So I grow not just landscape roses but other common and sometimes disparaged shrubs - like spireas, weigelas, and cherry laurels.  Good thing I've never claimed to be a plantswoman. 

BRING IT ON!
Go ahead.  Tell me why YOU don't like Knockouts and landscape roses as a group.  And it had better be about more than the lack of scent.  Really, how often do you get close enough to smell your plants, anyway?

Top photo: Knockouts on Capitol Hill (see the Capitol building in the distance).  Lower photo: Knockouts at the beach with daylilies.