Brie Goldman. Food Stylist: Annie Probst
21.07.2023 - 23:06 / awaytogarden.com
TA-DA! That’s what I hear when I see the vivid red martagon lily named ‘Claude Shride’ open up his blossoms in June and throw back his tepals (the technical word for what in lilies look like petals). Ta-da! We’re in a very “ta-da!” mood here this week at A Way to Garden, so it seemed perfect that he decided to open as if on cue. Want to know more about my beautiful boy?Martagon lilies (Lilium martagon), also referred to as Turk’s cap lilies, have been in cultivation since 1596, and hail originally from Eurasia (meaning in this case Portugal to Siberia, with lots of color and height variations along the route). The individual blooms aren’t gigantic like modern hybrids, but there are many of them on a stem: like 12 or 15 by my count today. Stems can rise up to head-height, though many varieties are just 4 or so feet high.
The best thing about martagons is their adaptability: They are as good, both aesthetically and culturally, in a quite-sunny flower bed as in a woodsy-looking shade garden (not too dark, now; at least give them good filtered light so they bloom well). The worst thing is how hard it is to get your hands on some. Martagons aren’t fast to multiply, so bulb vendors can come up short year to year, and you won’t always be able to get what you are looking for. Meaning: Grab them up while you can, and tuck them in for years and years of beauty.
I love the martagons’ whorled leaves that ring the stem at regular intervals, and how sturdy they are. Besides dear Claude, who came a couple of years back from the Klehms out in the Midwest, I have a paler seedling who remains nameless (bottom photo), but strongly resembles ‘Mrs. R.O. Backhouse.’ They don’t have Claude right now, but Tony Avent in North Carolina does. Leave
Brie Goldman. Food Stylist: Annie Probst
The green swards in front gardens throughout the UK are not as environmentally friendly as you may think.
Pamper your plants by all means but resist the urge to over feed.
A rose is not a rose when it is a Lenten or Christmas rose!
‘What else did the Romans do for us’ asks Monty Python. ‘All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? ‘ Well if you include Latin as a language they gave us modern gardening nomenclature.
The year 2020 is set to be memorable for far too many reasons. At the moment I will only stick to comments about plant and garden viruses but note we ‘caught a cold’ on the wet winter.
Yorkshire has suffered an exceptionally wet autumn culminating in disastrous floods at Fishlake and around the river Don. One plant that will thrive in these wet northerly conditions is our old friend Moss. As this has been covered before I am just using this post to link you to other observations and tips about moss.
Fall brings that time of year when leaf color can be its most vibrant! However, as time marches on towards the winter season, leaves quickly begin to fall to the ground and create a blanket of opportunity. Opportunity, you say. Yes, indeed.
While many think of vegetables when using the word garden, the basic definition of a garden, as a plot of soil in which plants are grown, is widely inclusive. Gardeners are passionate about native plants, fruits & vegetables, turfgrasses, roses, houseplants, container plants, mosses, and other plants, too numerous to list.
There’s a spot beside my patio where Nicotiana and annual poppies like to propagate–don’t ask me why–and I’ve learned to let them do so, above, until they’re just big enough to move around where I want them. (This means we each get our way half the time, I guess you could say.) In the driveway gravel, wonderful sedums like ‘Matrona’ sow all the time, and I’m happy to have the freebies to add to the garden.If the colony of volunteers is in the right place but just too thickly sown, I edit (with repeated pinches of my fingers, removing enough to allow the survivors good spacing). If the colony isn’t where I want it at all, I scoop up trowelfuls (above, with Nicotiana) and move them, above, or sometimes even individual young plants.This is my system with not just the poppies and flowering tobacco, but with tall verbena (Verbena bonariensis), and would be with Nigella and larkspur and other things I no longer grow (though who knows why?).I know, I should neaten up my act–how messy to let the dill grow 6 inches high before weedi
First, the disclaimer. I know I said the plant is specifically Pinus strobus ‘Nana,’ and that’s how mine came to me, but here’s the wrinkle: ‘Nana’ is kind of a grab-bag name for many relatively compact- or mounded-growing Eastern white pines, a long-needled species native to Eastern North America, from Canada to Georgia and out to Ohio and Illinois.Today, you can shop for named varieties that are really compact, with distinctive and somewhat more predictable shapes, like‘Coney Island’ or ‘Blue Shag’ (to name two cultivars selected by the late Sydney Waxman at the University of Connecticut, who had a particular passion for this species).I could have pinched the tips of the new growth, or candles, by half each year to keep
SHE LOVES ME, SHE LOVES ME NOT.Andre Jordan seems to keep hoping for the best, despite a few well-documented cases of rejection (as in, loc. cit., The Girl I Love With All My Heart. Caveat emptor: Deliciously not PG!).