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Garden journal

May 15, 2012. Columbines are marvellously promiscuous. Through the years, I've grown numerous species, along with some named varieties of common columbine, and most likely some hybrids. Their volunteer offspring is always welcome, and for the most part the results are predictable: the majority of seedlings turn out to be Nora Barlow-type doubles in shades of plum or purple, or in a white/pink bicolor. Sometimes, we're charmed by a more traditionally shaped bicolor. But every so often, something really surprising shows up. So it was this spring, when the plant in this photo turned up (uninvited, but oh so welcome) at the front of our driveway bed. It's not exactly like any variety we've grown, although if I had to guess at its ancestry I'd include our purple Nora Barlow and the curiously shaped 'Cap de Rositier' as parents. Regardless of how it came to be, I'm wowed by the neat arrangement of the petals, as well as the quite subtle two-tone purple coloration. I'd be delighted if this one decides to produce look-alike children!
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May 12, 2012. First significant butterfly sighting of the year. On an early morning stroll through the garden, this red admiral (Vanessa atalanta) alighted on a boulder in our curve garden, and sat there sunning itself for a while. Conveniently, I was on my round of garden photography, so I snapped a few pictures. Although I've seen its kind before, red admirals aren't the most common butterflies to visit the Lush Gardens. Judging by the state of its left wing, this one has been flying around for a few days. I'm glad it chose our garden as its hangout for part of its short life span!
Visitor comments
Jennifer Wingate Canada May 14, 2012 We have had clouds of the red admiral butterfiles for the past two weeks or so, perhaps because of our very mild almost snowless winter in Southern Ontario. Glad to catch up with your latest news about the garden, I am enjoying a colourful combination of yellow trollius with dark purple irises. The hellebgores still lingering on, they have bloomed profusely and I am pleased to see a couple of seedlings flowering in their third spring. I always wait to trim the flowers until after they have dropped seeds. All the best.

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the onion forest
May 07, 2012. I think it was two years ago that I planted some Egyptian walking onion (sent to me in a generous trade) as well as some 'He Shi Ko' Japanese bunching onion (grown from seed). I left them in place to observe their habit (especially the walking onion, which I'd heard much about) last year, and was duly amused. This spring, the vegetable garden was a giant mess – awful perennial weeds such as mugwort, bindweed, and thistles run rampant through the fertile soil, undeterred by the mulch I applied in fall, and took a good few hours to beat into submission (actually, I'm still working on some parts of it). But one section of the garden looked vibrant and bountiful: the onion forest. In the photo here, the walking onions are on the left, and the ones just opening their puffy flowers in the back are the bunching onions. Alas, as good as they looked, I couldn't justify keeping them in place (I don't actually find much use for them in the kitchen), so I moved just a couple of each to a smaller corner of the garden, and reclaimed the segment for other veggies. Perhaps my fun new assortment of peppers: I finally paid a visit to Meadowview Farms in Bowers, the storied Mennonite operation that offers hundreds of different varieties of hot and sweet peppers (as well as other vegetables and garden staples) for sale. Upon returning, I found that I was so taken by the interesting varieties that I sort of forgot to buy a few plain old jalapenos. Oh well, I'll make some creative culinary substitutions this summer!
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In time, the plants should fill out so they take up more of the interrock space
April 27, 2012. All of my perennial seedlings spend their first season in my orchard nursery area, to grow to a large enough size to survive in one of the regular garden areas (or into the plant sale, as the case may be). The nursery area is divided into about 20 sections by rows of bricks, which makes it easier for me to record and recall which plants I've placed where. It also conveniently divides the area into sections with more or less sun exposure, and better or poorer drainage. The two areas with most sun exposure are where most of my smaller rock garden plants start out their outdoor life. To accommodate their wishes for excellent drainage, I've amended the soil in those sections with sand and grit. Sure enough, the drainage is pretty good – but that brings the opposite problem: keeping them supplied with enough moisture through the hottest weeks of summer. Rock gardening is not synonymous with xeriscaping: many of those little plants appreciate and require a regular supply of water, which can be difficult to provide in a free-draining, unmulched expanse of sun-soaked garden. Partly as a consequence of this (but also due to the fact that even the best draining soil cannot make up for the winter conditions in Pennsylvania, which aren't friendly to plants requiring dry crowns through winter), I lose more than half of the plants I set into these sections every year. What's worse, the soil conditions are perfect for frost-heaving my plant markers (strips of vinyl blinds), so that in early spring I get to look at something resembling the aftermath of Mount St. Helens' eruption: tags laying criss-cross everywhere across the bed, with little indication of what should be where. This spring, I decided to try something new: I broke up a bunch of flat bluestone rocks left over from garden pathway projects into irregular pieces a few inches on a side, and have started placing these shards around the seedlings as I'm setting them out. I also make sure to stick the plant markers all the way down into the soil, and setting a shard on top of them. The effect, I hope, will be to provide a mulch of sorts for the small plants; one that doesn't collect water as organic mulches do, and that won't get incorporated into the rest of the soil as pebble or gravel mulches would. But it should still serve prevent evaporation, thereby keeping the soil underneath the rocks cooler and moister, while allowing all the water that lands onto the bed (from rain or overhead watering) to find its way into the soil. Meanwhile, I hope the rocks will keep those plant markers in place through winter. Of course I won't know if this is just a waste of time till much further into the season – and the final verdict won't come until next spring. For now, it just looks like a strange patchwork of rocks. Which suits me fine.
The smallish area shown in the photo holds a surprisingly large number of plants, including anemones, several species of draba, penstemon, and limonium, and erigeron.
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April 23, 2012. The double take. You think you spot a plant with a very interesting flower: it's a different color than usual, or much smaller, or appears at the wrong time of year. Only upon closer inspection is it obvious that the flower belongs to a different plant, which has sneakily commingled with its more obvious neighbor to a surprising effect. Some gardeners specialize in making these things happen on purpose: they grow clematis vines into shrubs to make it seem like the shrubs are in glorious outerworldly bloom when the clematis flowers open, or they painstakingly ensure that neighboring plants in the border mingle and combine well. As for me, any double takes occur by accident – usually a happy accident. In my old age, I may become better at planning how my garden unfolds through the seasons, but for now I'm content to tuck plants into pockets where I hope they will do well, without much regard for how they'll look with their neighbors. Yesterday's double take came courtesy of a few flowers of candytuft, several stems of which had interloped with a nicely mounded germander (which blooms in a shade of lavender or purple, never white). Hardly spectacular, but worth a getting up close and personal with the combination, and made me chuckle.
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April 15, 2012. April: time for combing through the plants that survived summer and winter in my nursery areas (disappointingly few, this year), and finding places for them in the various garden areas. For the most part, that's not a hard thing to do, since last season left so many holes in the garden beds. But the little ones, which can really only go into the rock garden (or get lost as soon as bigger neighbors in the regular borders overpower them) can be harder to place. So I decided to use a little hypertufa trough to house a few of them (a couple different species of miniature limonium, a bergeranthus, and edraianthus, and a cluster of unknown alliums). I've never really tried planting in troughs (and I'll need something bigger if I want to be more serious about it), but I hope that this will allow me to keep these little guys alive for up close inspection (and maybe winter protection). It doesn't look like much for now, but if the experiment is at least half-way successful, I'll be posting an update here a bit later in the year. Fingers crossed.
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April 08, 2012. We interrupt our programming for this brief message (sounds like a nice event!):

April Johnson, Landscape and Garden Visionary of Rodale Institute, will give a talk called “Creating Backyard Water Gardens” on Thursday, April 26th at 6:30PM at the Lower Macungie Township Community Center located at 3450 Brookside Rd., Macungie. She will demonstrate how to create your own backyard water oasis. Learn how to create a water feature from whiskey barrels. She will talk about plants, fish and frogs, water quality, and how to keep your pond healthy throughout all seasons. There will also be a slideshow of larger water features to get your creative juices flowing, and plenty of time for questions and answers. Come to this presentation and see what water gardens can bring to your backyard. Lower Macungie Library is sponsoring this event. Please register at the library’s circulation desk or contact the library at 610-966-6864.
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March 29, 2012. Disaster strikes! The warm early-spring weather colluded with an overnight freeze into the mid-20s to do in the flowers and buds on our hybrid magnolias - the Betty shown in this picture as well as Elizabeth. The latter was already severely damaged by our freak Halloween snowstorm last year, which severed its main header as well as several main branches, so that it only seems fitting that the flower display is aborted this spring. Betty will rebloom sporadically throughout the year; I hope that Elizabeth will once again grow into a graceful small tree as years of new growth erase the damage done last fall. For now, she has all the grace of a gangly teenager covered in zits!
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March 28, 2012. When I overhauled the rock garden a few years ago, I constructed the south-facing side as a fairly steep slope, with just narrow slots of planting space between the upward rocks. My aim was to establish drought- and heat-tolerant plants that would appreciate excellent drainage on that side of the garden. This spring, the vision is coming to some sort of fruition: the sedums, sempervivums, eryngium venustum, and penstemons are doing a nice job of filling the spaces, with some fine cascading action. The photo also highlights the fact that, due to my rock selection strategy (pick up any rock you can find at construction sites etc.), the rock garden isn't exactly convincing replica of a natural mountainscape. But for now, I'm content with the performance of the plants. If only the finnickier species reserved for the north and east sides of the garden would prove as hardy and resilient, I'd have it made!
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March 25, 2012. Assessing winter damage – an annual spring ritual in the garden. I start so many species from seed every year, including ones that aren't quite hardy or that need the sharpest drainage to survive, that probably fewer than half of my new attempts are successful. This past winter was exceptionally mild, which gave marginally hardy plants a leg up on survival – but for some reason, frost heaving was more of a problem in our nursery area than I remember it being in years past. Nearly all of the vinyl-blind plant markers lay strewn about in the nursery beds, leaving me to guess which plants they belong to – if in fact there still are plants; there's an awful lot of bare ground, which may be due as much to the drought - wet double-punch of last year's summer and fall as to anything winter wrought. The photo here is of a barely surviving Bergeranthus jamesii; as ugly as it is in this heaved-up, freeze-discolored state, it's actually a triumph, because this plant is not rated as hardy to our normally zone 6 garden. In the next few weeks, as more of last year's seedlings make their re-appearance, I'll be taking inventory and moving them "live" to areas of the garden that need sprucing up. There are many of those, so I have my work cut out for me!
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March 22, 2012. It's not often that Amy likes something in the garden enough that she comes to fetch me from a far corner of the yard to point it out to me – so when she does, I pay attention! The combination that caught her eye this evening, just before dusk set in, was a low-growing assembly of Puschkinia scilloides and myrtle spurge, planted underneath a viburnum in our front yard that is just barely starting to leaf out. The squill has been there for years, from a long-ago bag of mixed bulbs, while the spurge seeded itself in that position (as it does in many places near its mother plant in our rock garden). In our garden, early spring bloomers usually act solo, surrounded by barren garden areas – so it's nice to see a duo working together so nicely.
The weather has been amazing for over a week now, with short-sleeve temperatures from dawn to dusk. That means that gardening has started early, which is fine by me. I'd be delighted if the early-season warmth was offset by some mid-July coolness!
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Sarcococca hookeriana
March 17, 2012. Fragrance eludes me. I'm olfactorily challenged. While many gardeners go to great lengths to plan and build fragrance gardens, and describe the multitudes of sweet scents wafting their way as they amble through their gardens, for me the sense of smell is mostly an afterthought. I don't know why – I don't seem to have trouble spotting (and enjoying) the smell of fresh bread being baked in a nearby bakery, or the sinful scent of a Cinnabon outlet. Perhaps the sensitivity of my nose is tied closely to the satisfaction receptors in my stomach – which probably wouldn't much appreciate a meal of lilacs. In any case, I find my enjoyment in gardening elsewhere, but I sometimes feel like I'm missing out. Like with sweet box, whose creamy white little flowers have appeared early this year. They aren't much to look at, but many horticulturists wax poetically about their sweet scent. I put it to the test today, and found I had to stick my nose just about right up to the flowers to discern the fragrance. It was sweet, indeed, but unlikely to charm me from a distance. Oh well, I'll continue to enjoy the visual, tactile, and gustatory delights of my garden – along with the olfactory ones that are so powerful that they defeat my scent defenses (some roses come to mind, as do the aforementioned lilacs).
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March 04, 2012. I think it's about two years ago that I started working on a page about the different species of Digitalis that our garden has harbored through the seasons. Things got in the way, and the partially finished page just languished in linkless webspace. Finally, I found the time this week to put the finishing touches on the article, which now joins its neighbors celebrating the clans of amsonia, thalictrum, geranium, and scutellaria. As with those others, I hope to expand and refine the content of the article as my experience with the foxgloves grows. If you've not yet grown many of the species described, I suggest you try a few new ones!
Visitor comments
Jennifer in Richmond Hill Ontario Mar 05, 2012 I was so pleased to once again read your garden journal. I have logged in a few times to see if you had started up again and now I feel Spring must be almost here. We have had an extraordinary mild winter with forsythia blooming out in Jan., snowdrops up mid Jan but we have had more wintry weather since mid Feb.- wind chill this morn.is -20C. My witch hazelsuddenly burst into a mass of bloom yesterday. Wrote to you about a digitalis last year so shall explore you new page and enjoy. Thanks for all the information about the lesser known and grown plants. JW
Very mild winter here as well - but no way our forsythia has bloomed! You must have some super-micro-pockets of mild :-) Happy spring!

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as you can see, spiders find their way into my stash of recycled pots...
March 03, 2012. OK, so it's been a disgracefully long time since I've written here. I was going to post an update after the freak Halloween snowstorm hit and took out large parts of our curly willows (among other things) – but the photos were on Amy's camera, and I never got around to pulling them over. That event pretty much spelled the end of the season: whatever outside time was available in November was taken up by lopping off the destroyed branches (using a newly acquired electric chainsaw), chopping the bigger bits up into firewood and kindling, and clearing out all of the other storm debris. Somehow, a fitting end to a gardening season that started to go south from July onward. As a result of the generally cool and wet conditions in late summer and fall, I didn't get around to much seed collecting – which in turn meant I did hardly any seed trading. Without the enticement of lots of new varieties to try, my seed-starting season got off to a slow start, but I'm glad to report that by now it has kicked into gear. Following shipments from the HPS/MAG and NARGS seed exchanges (with lots more coming soon from the NARGS surplus round!), I have six shoplights in action to keep the various seedlings happy and growing. The rest of them will go into service soon.
So let's start off this year's round of journaling with my traditional seedling picture. In this case, seedlings of Amphicarpaea bracteata, whose enticing common name is American hog peanut. This is one of those plants that I've managed to grow from seed successfully on several occasions, but have never grown to maturity. A common problem with vines, for me: they don't belong in my nursery area (where there is nothing to climb), so I set the seedlings out in various other garden areas, usually out of the way, where I won't remember to give them some water in times of drought, or make sure that they grow clear of their rapidly growing neighbors once the busy time of late spring comes around. But I'm going to do my best this year to follow the progress of the hog peanut sisters. They are native to moist woods of the northeastern United States, where they show off their clusters of pretty pale pink flowers. My garden doesn't much resemble moist woods, but I'm going to try to keep them happy as best I can.
Visitor comments
Carol Mar 03, 2012 I cannot get the link to send you email to work. Would you please post your email address. (I only have AOL - I don't have Microsoft or Outlook). I would love to come to your plant sale this year. I am a Berks County Master Gardener so I also want to tell others about your gem of a sale. (I was there once a few years back). Are all the plants you sell native to PA? Thanks Rob.
I avoid posting my email address in bot-readable form, since I don't need any more spam than I already get. You can send to rob at the name of this website (robsplants.com). Unfortunately, probably no sale this year. My plants are a mix of natives and non-native ornamentals.

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