George's Current Ramblings and Readlings

Gardener’s Heaven

May 23rd, 2023

   There’s a place on this planet where the soil is rich and well-drained, where temperatures sit in the pleasant 70s all year, where the sun shines day after day, and best of all, where deer don’t tread.

My favorite garden view on Madeira… the quilt garden in Funchal’s Madeira Botanical Garden.

   This gardener’s heaven is the Portuguese island of Madeira, a volcanic blip in the Atlantic Ocean located 320 miles off of the west coast of Morocco.

   Its southerly location (about the same latitude as Charleston, S.C.) ensures year-round warmth, while its surrounding water keeps it in that stable and plant-perfect 70s range. It’s like eternal spring.

   Unlike in our deer-infested yards of root-blocking clay and extreme, erratic weather, plants in Madeira show their gratitude with incredibly lush, diverse, and healthy growth.

   I got to see what a difference prime conditions breed on a visit earlier this month to Portugal and its Azore and Madeira islands. (See pictures in a new collection I’ve posted on my Photo Gallery pages.)

   Given the trifecta of great soil, ideal weather, and few bug, disease, and animal attackers (a side benefit of ocean isolation), it’s easy to see why Madeira is sometimes called a “floating garden” and the “pearl of the Atlantic.”

How One of the Warmest Winters Ever Caused Some of My Worst Plant Damage Ever

May 16th, 2023

   How could this be?

This is what winter did to my planting of sweetboxes.

   After one of our warmest winters ever – including a January that was nearly 9 degrees warmer than average and a February that averaged 7.3 degrees above normal – my landscape looked like it had been to Alaska and back.

   Most of my variegated boxwoods were the color of toast by the end of March.

   A dwarf nandina, a leucothoe, an aucuba, a band of sweetbox, a trio of gold-variegated box honeysuckles, and a pair of Red Beauty hollies were in various states of brown with rings of fallen leaves at their feet.

   A dwarf ‘Hedgehog’ cedar – an elegant new specimen going into winter – came out the back end completely brown and brittle. Ditto for that little osmanthus I got as a freebie at last year’s Philadelphia Flower Show.

   The ‘Tonto’ crape myrtle I planted two seasons ago had nothing but brown, brittle branches and has died back to the roots.

   Even my plenty-hardy roses suffered noticeably more branch dieback than usual.

   You’d expect this kind of damage in a cold winter, like the kind of sub-zero ones we used to get… or that year the low went down to minus-22 degrees.

   But when winter days are primarily in the 40s and 50s, plants should be safe and happy, right?

   Not necessarily.

   The explanation here is twofold.

My Bulb Experiment: Three Years Later

May 2nd, 2023

   I wish I could say that my experiment growing 955 spring bulbs of 16 kinds has been a rousing success, carpeting my yard with vibrant color at a time when most everything else is just waking up.

These ‘Mando’ daffodils have been my strongest bulb-trial performer.

   But three years after planting, only four of my bulb groupings put on a good show this spring. The rest have dwindled into meagerness or disappeared altogether.

Read more on the bulb game plan and what got planted

   To get right to the point, the four winners have been:

   1.) Yellow-blooming ‘Mando’ daffodils, which have bloomed long and strong all three years from mid to late March in several front-yard beds. These are actually growing in number.

   2.) Siberian squill ‘Spring Beauty’ (Scilla siberica), a low-growing blue-bloomer that’s spread and seeded its way into a colony on a morning-sun driveway terrace bed that later fills with astilbes, brunnera, sweet woodruff, and hydrangeas. These also bloom in mid to late March.

A 25-bulb planting of summer snowflakes ‘Gravetye Giant’ is thriving after three years.

   3.) Summer snowflakes ‘Gravetye Giant’ (Leucojum aestivum), foot-tall plants that produce hanging, bell-shaped white flowers for about two weeks from mid to late April. All 25 bulbs I planted in another driveway-terrace bed are still growing, blooming, and steadily expanding.

   4.) Camassia leichtlinii ‘Caerulea,’ a little-known, seldom-used bulb that grows about a foot tall and produces bluish-purple flower spikes in late April. The 25 bulbs of these also have come back reliably for three years now, despite deer gnawing off the foliage of this supposed deer-resistant species.

   I should add here that I’ve had excellent results, too, with allium ‘Globemaster,’ a softball-sized purple bloomer that I planted four years ago (technically not part of this experiment).

   And now, the losers.

Spring at Phipps

April 18th, 2023

   Since few of you likely made it to Pittsburgh to see Phipps Conservatory’s 2023 spring flower show, I thought I’d share a few photos of it this week.

   Phipps Conservatory, if you’ve never seen it, is a 14-room Lord and Burnham Victorian glasshouse that dates to 1893. It’s filled with changing exhibits of tender specimens from around the world (including desert plants, ferns, tropicals, orchids, and a butterfly house) and is surrounded by 15 acres of outdoor gardens.

   Each spring, the conservatory stages a spring flower show. This year’s four-week show, which just ended, centered around a theme of Five Senses of Splendor.

A spring-time scene featuring a pond, Japanese fountain, and tulips was the centerpiece display in the central glasshouse.

   As visitors enter the main glasshouse through a second-floor entry, they were greeted by an oversized perfume bottle, adorned with succulents like strings of jewels. The bottle was surrounded by colorful gardens of fragrant plants.

Just Say No to These Pass-along Plants

April 4th, 2023

   This is the time of year when gardeners get outside to grapple with plants that are growing beyond their intended space – or growing where they aren’t wanted at all.

Here’s a patch of ribbon grass — a common pass-along plants — invading its way through a garden bed.

   But since gardeners tend to be kind, benevolent, and nurturing souls, they often have a hard time digging and tossing these “surplus” plants.

   It seems so hard-hearted!

   And so lots of gardeners – dug-up rootballs in hand – go looking for foster parents for their newly homeless plants.

   Sometimes these plants end up at plant sales, plant exchanges, and yard sales.

   Unfortunately, many of these botanical castoffs are, to put it nicely, “overly frisky.” OK… they’re often weedy or invasive. In other words, people tend to dig and get rid of what’s turned out to be maintenance headaches.

   Now that doesn’t mean you should run the other way when you see a neighbor heading your way with a mystery clump.

   Sometimes pass-along plants turn out to be welcome gifts. If the culled-out plants aren’t invasive and match a site in your yard, this is a great way to fill or expand garden space at no cost. And the digger-outer feels like he/she has saved a plant’s life while doing a good deed for a friend.

   My own gardens have been enriched over the years by gardening friends who gave me divisions of really nice plants.

   I got a gorgeous velvet-purple bearded iris that way as well as a clump of betony ‘Hummelo,’ a long-blooming perennial that’s way under-used and at that time, hard to find in garden centers.

   My first Polianthes tuberose – a tremendously fragrant white-blooming tender rhizome – also came via the freebie route.

   On the other hand, before I knew any better, I once graciously accepted a division of variegated ribbon grass. Within three years, the clump was running around my perennial garden to the point where I had to dig everything up, unravel, and start over.

   The trick, then, is sorting out the good stuff from the Trojan horses.