I have tried to grow several Pelargonium varieties this year and been pleasantly surprised at the various forms and colours I have succeeded in producing.
21.07.2023 - 22:52 / awaytogarden.com
JUST WHEN I WANT to give up, the hellebores convinced me otherwise—reminding me not to rush things, and that the right moment for everything would arrive in its own time.I was fighting the cues: wanting to get on with cutting miles of clean edges between turf and beds despite sodden soil (answer: don’t!) or rake some grassy areas that are still plastered with leafy, twiggy winter detritus but likewise still soft. Again: no can do, without pulling up the lawn.
As much as I want to make it all “just so” in time for Open Day next weekend—maybe I can’t.
The orientalis hybrid hellebores (Helleborus x orientalis) know about timing, often refusing to bloom for a couple or few years from transplant time until they settle in—when the gardener is all the while wondering what they did wrong (probably nothing).
Even once established, they wait and wait in a year like this recalcitrant one to arise and open, weeks after my “usual” hellebore moment. They finally got on with it last week (one photo of a little section of them, top of page).
They remind me to be not just patient but also adaptable, and those hybrid Lenten roses are that, too—blooming here mightily in my Northern garden in sunny spots, not just shady ones. The slate-colored clump below is one such example, with 50-something blooms (some not open yet when the photo was taken).
More on how hellebores work is in this interview with the late Judith Knott Tyler, hellebore breeder and author—who taught me to think of them like peonies: a bit slow to get acclimated (keep an eye on watering in the first year or two), then long-lived, and asking not much more once they do than an annual tidying of old foliage and maybe some compost.I have been cheered on in recent days by the firstI have tried to grow several Pelargonium varieties this year and been pleasantly surprised at the various forms and colours I have succeeded in producing.
A bit of light relief for a dark corner! Spreads well but easliy controlled like butter (take a knife too it..
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
Since the book “Planting in a Post-Wild World” came out in 2015, co-authored by Claudia West with Thomas Rainer, I’ve been gradually studying their ideas and starting to have some light bulbs go off, on how to be inspired to put plants together in the ways that nature does, in layered communities.Claudia joined me on the July 17, 2017 edition of my public-radio show and podcast to about some of the practical, tactical aspects of plant community-inspired designs that we can app
I have been known to plant spinach in my mittens, actually, as late as Thanksgiving, and again as early as March if the raised beds have drained out and the soil is workable. Seeds sown from September until the ground freezes up, then topped with a floating row cover, will offer a real headstart of a harvest in the North in April, when much
Easy does it: You don’t need a flat of cherry tomato plants; one or two is plenty for most households. Give the majority of space to paste tomatoes for making sauce, and others for eating fresh in salads and sliced.Hybrids or heirlooms? A mix is better, probably, as hybrids sometimes fare better under duress than heirlooms, which don’t have the benefit of bred-in disease resistance. (That’s‘Juliet,’ a delicious and prolific hybrid small plum, up top, for instance.)At planting-out time, rotate the crop to minimize the chance of soil-borne troubles. A th
Charley Eiseman and Noah Charney’s 2010 book is full of photos of all the oddball things you see outside (if you stop long enough to notice!): egg cases and cocoons and all kinds of webs; folded and curled-up leaves as if something’s hidden inside (it is!); and all manner of bumps, lumps, notches, and holes in foliage, bark, you name it. Even tiny previously unexplained pattern in the sand…and soil…a.k.a. tracks and signs of insects.“I’ve always been interested in everything around me,” says Charley, whose Master’s degree is from the University of Vermont’s field naturalist program. “Then someone gave me a digital camera right after I graduated from college, so I started paying closer attention to the little things. And then I started wishing I had a field guide to tell me what all these signs left by insects and other invertebrates were—but it just didn’t seem to exist.”Charley and Noah took it upon themselves to create that guide, in “Tracks and Sign of Insect
Adam and I talked about not just the Japanese types, but also other garden-sized maples for adding interest in every season and garden situation–in pots or the high shade of woodland gardens, to full-sun locations.my maple q&a with adam wheelerQ. When I was at Broken Arrow recently, there were many choice things to look at—but I kept noticing the maples you offer, particularly. How many do you grow?A. In the collection at the nursery, I suspect we have 150 or 200 different maples, and really that’s the tip of the iceberg with this genus.Q. There are a lot of native A
Ten size-XL paw prints adorned the back porch; on the front welcome mat was deposited some apparently undesirable reject from the compost pile–not tasty enough, I guess. Feeding the birds? Not me, at least not right now. Project Feeder Watch, a bird-counting program with Cornell Lab of Ornithology that I look forward to each year (as you can read here), starts Saturday, but I think I’ll skip a week or two before I put out any more feeders. Extra-warm weather has at least one of the local bears on an extended feeding frenzy; the birds will have to be patient. After all, look what happened to the iron pole holding up the one feeder I
A PAIR OF NEW PODCASTS HAVE PILED UP in the queue, last week’s on taking a tough-love approach to the gone-by spring garden, and Monday’s on quite the opposite thought: going out to shop for more. You can make your way to the goodies over at my podcast archive page at Robin Hood Radio/WHDD, the nearby NPR affiliate where the show is created, and stream at will, or click the yellow “Subscribe in iTunes” button there instead if that’s your delivery vehicle of choice.
TIME FOR A LITTLE NON-PLANT MOMENT, captured in a quick jumble of other-than-botanical snapshots from around the garden lately.
The guy up top (a green frog, Rana clamitans) spent most of the season tucked into a big pot of Oxalis vulcanicola by the bigger frogpond out back, soaking up the rays and waiting for unsuspecting insects to pass his way. The male green frog who made his summer home my above-ground seasonal water gardens–two big troughs I fill with water by my kitchen door, like this–considered a nearby bromeliad (in this case a Vriesea) to be his digs, when he wasn’t at poolside. (Some years little tree frogs have tucked the