Naked ladies

We call them "naked ladies" because they pop out of the ground unexpectedly with no clothes on - just a bright green stem with a bud at the top. But soon enough that bud opens up to reveal the "lady," a beautiful flower.

Technically, and correctly, called Amaryllis belladonna, they grow as wildflowers in South Africa and they prefer hot and dry conditions. I can provide the hot if not the dry, but last fall I planted several of these bulbs in one of the driest beds in my garden and recently a few of them have come up to remind me of the bulbs I had almost forgotten. Not all of them have emerged by any means, but I live in hope.

Later, by spring, the leaves should emerge around the base of the stem to provide nourishment to the bulb and, if all goes well, the ladies themselves will pop up again next fall.

The plants have other popular names such as surprise lilies and resurrection lilies, both for obvious reasons. Some even call them hurricane lilies because they do emerge at the height of the hurricane season. But, personally, I prefer the more salacious and descriptive name. It'll always be naked ladies for me!

Wordless Wednesday: The first dahlia of summer

Wednesday in the garden: Fast and furious edition

Yes, fast and furious is how the flowers are coming these days.

The first sunflower of the season.

Tawny orange daylily.

Lemon yellow double daylily.

Raspberry salvia.

Scarlet salvia.

Blue morning glories.

Blackfoot daisies.

Yellow cestrum.

'Julia Child' rose, just a bit faded on its third day. 

'Darcy Bussell' rose.

'Christopher Marlowe,' another David Austin rose.

Orange milkweed.

Orange cannas.

Oakleaf hydrangea.

And even more coming along every day. It's a great time to be in the garden.

Wednesday in the garden: Tomatoes and peppers and roses, oh my!

The bee garden

Planning your spring garden? Spare some thought for the pollinators. Here are some plants that you can include in your garden to help them. Even if your garden is only a few pots on a patio, consider planting a few of these plants. The bees and butterflies will thank you.

Another point of view

Last week, I wrote a blog post about the dangers of invasive species and listed several species of plants that may be available at your local garden center but that you should steer clear of, never adding them to your own garden. Conventional wisdom among gardeners for a few years now has been that we should use native plants in our gardens and that we should be attempting to restore our ecosystems to their pristine state that existed before human interference. This is the view still held by most gardeners that I know.

But there is another point of view, one that holds that introduced species are not necessarily so bad and that sometimes the introduction of exotic species can actually benefit natives. That view is expounded in a book that was published in 2011 called Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. The author, Emma Marris, argues that we live in a "post-wild" world where global warming and the ecological disturbance, as the world adapts to human domination, has created a situation that has turned the whole planet into a novel ecosystem. In this circumstance, she says, the exotic species of the world are moving, evolving, and forming new ecological relationships. Thus, the despised invaders of today may be the keystone species of tomorrow's ecosystems.

It's an intriguing theory, one that I need to know more about. I have not read the book. I read about it today in one of the blogs that I follow, "Garden Rant." If you are interested in gardening, you might want to follow it, too. The team of bloggers that write there always have something interesting to say.

I'm not planning to change my gardening practices tomorrow. I still intend to use native plants in my landscape, but there is food for thought here, and as Thomas Christopher, the writer of today's Garden Rant, says, "To be the best gardeners we can be we need to challenge our assumptions from time to time."

What is true in gardening is also true in life.

The Roots of My Obsession redux

I was idly thumbing through my shelves of gardening books yesterday when I came across this little gem. I had frankly forgotten that I had it.

I picked it up and read a few random pages which were more than enough to remind me that I really, really loved this book. I had read and reviewed it back in 2014.

The essays here speak to the gestalt of gardening, the thing that makes the enterprise more than just about planting seeds, weeding, pruning, harvesting. The committed gardener sees the world in the garden and sees gardening as a transcendent experience. 

If you want to understand why people garden, you might want to pick up this little book and read these essays.

~~~


The Roots of My Obsession: Thirty Great Gardeners Reveal Why They Garden by Thomas C. Cooper

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love this little book. It speaks to my soul and to my own obsession.

Yes, I admit it - I, too, am obsessed with gardening, sometimes to the point of nuttiness, but reading this book with its short essays by thirty great gardeners (thirty-one including the introduction by the editor Thomas Cooper), some that I knew about and some I had never heard of, made me realize that this particular obsession of mine is a holy gift from the universe and from all my gardening ancestors who, somewhere, must be laughing up their angelic sleeves to see that I have finally joined their band after so much whining and complaining.

You see, I learned the basics of gardening at my mother's knee, but I didn't do it willingly. I hated every moment of my childhood gardening experiences. At least, I thought I did. Now I look back on those days with fondness and with regret that I was not a better listener.

The reasons for gardening and the paths that one takes to becoming a gardener are as myriad and unique as the gardeners themselves - in this case thirty of them. Some people are born to gardening, some have it thrust upon them, and some come to it later in life in a roundabout fashion, but however we get there, all gardeners share the impulse to achieve their own personal vision of beauty through the creation of their gardens. It was fascinating and instructive for me to read how that impulse found expression in the lives of these thirty gardeners.

Although I enjoyed each one of the essays presented here and I found something to identify with in each of them, there are a few of them that particularly stand out in my mind and that had special meaning for me.

One of those was "The Web" by Douglas W. Tallamy. The first two sentences of his essay explains it all for me: "Most people garden because they love plants, but I garden because I love animals - all kinds of animals. Animals with two legs (birds), four legs (box turtles, salamanders, and foxes), six legs (butterflies and beetles), eight legs (spiders), dozens of legs (centipedes), hundreds of legs (millipedes, and even animals with no legs (snakes and pollywogs)." I found myself nodding as I read that. As a habitat gardener myself, I knew exactly what he meant.

Another favorite was "Chaos Theory" by Page Dickey who expounds upon the pleasures of weeding. You see, weeding is all about bringing order out of chaos and achieving that personal vision of beauty, but each gardener knows in his or her heart that this is a battle that can never be won. The aphorism that "Nature abhors a vacuum" is too true. She will continue to fill that vacuum with weeds and, in the end, we will be defeated. Any victory is only temporary. But that's all right, and knowing that and accepting it is the beginning of wisdom. Acceptance is learning to be at peace with what Nature brings us and seeing that imperfection can be beautiful, too.

It is Thomas Christopher, though, who sums up my feelings about gardening and about the wisdom contained in this book in his essay, "The Apprenticeship." He writes:

This is for me the greatest power and attraction of gardening, the transcendence it yields at unexpected moments. Occasionally, when I excise a dandelion from the lawn with one of the patented weed-pullers I inherited from my mother, who, late in life, developed an insatiable appetite for gardening gadgets, I hear her telling me how the task should be done. When I plant a tree, I may see my father, still young, punching holes in the hard earth of a pasture with a digging bar, sweat dripping from his nose, his glasses slipping off, a bucket full of saplings resting in the shade nearby.

A physicist has told me that time is a dimension that extends as readily backward as forward, and that our inability to see what we think of as the past is just a peculiarity of our limited powers of perception.

It's only in the garden that I have ever felt myself escaping this perceptual constraint. Sometimes the experience takes the form of an instant so beautiful and rich as to move me, for a moment, outside of time. In others, usually while planting, the sensation is of jumping forward to glimpse the seedling grown large, the landscape as it will be. What I continue to prize most, though are the reconnections with people, places and times otherwise lost to me.

Yes. Transcendence. That's what the gardening experience is all about. In the end, that is what each of the essayists here is saying.

(Note: A free copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher in return for my honest review. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.)

Making the garden great again

Our honeymoon of tropical winters without freezing weather ended last weekend. Actually, it had ended a couple of weeks before that when temperatures tippy-toed slightly to the freezing mark and a degree or two below, but this time the old mercury in the thermometer sank like a stone right through that barrier and went straight on down to the low 20s. It was territory that my garden had not visited in a few years. It left its mark.

The Cape honeysuckle was still in full bloom and feeding the passing hummingbirds and butterflies when the low temperatures hit. Now its bright orange blossoms are frostbit and turning brown along with the leaves. And the bright little Sulphur butterflies that sipped from them all day long will have to find other sustenance.

The clumps of lemon grass were just about to bloom, but the cold put the kibosh on that. Last year, these clumps grew right through winter, never slowing down, but this year I'll be cutting them back and letting them grow afresh from the roots.

The Hamelia patens (hummingbird bush) succumbed to our first bit of cold weather a few weeks ago and now there is nothing left but brown stems and blackening leaves.

The big old split-leaf philodendron that lives by my back porch can tolerate some pretty cold weather, but two consecutive nights of temperatures in the low 20s were too much for it. There's nothing left but a pile of mushy leaves.

Well, I could go on with these sad pictures, but I don't want to depress you too much. A walk around the garden these days is enough to dishearten the staunchest gardener, except...

Every dead plant is an opportunity! 

And, in fact, all of these plants that I've showed you are not dead. They are in retreat at the moment, resting and storing their energy to burst forth and reclaim their rightful places in the spring. But there will be a few plants in the garden that will not be returning and that will have to be replaced. Moreover, there are a handful of others that I've grown bored with over the years and I've decided to either rid myself of them or to reduce the space they are given in my garden. 

Now comes the opportunity. In spite of the difficult times ahead when I'll be pruning and digging and moving plants and, in some cases, removing plants, I will now have a chance to try new plants, especially new perennials. Perennials are the backbone of my garden and new and improved ones are being introduced every year. There are several that I've been longing to try but didn't have room for. Now I will!

In addition, there are all those bright and beautiful annuals that can create wonderful focal points in the garden. Maybe I can tuck some of them in this year, too.

My frozen plants, then, are not the disaster that they look. They are merely a temporary setback. This is my chance to make my garden better than ever. To try new and improved perennials and brighter and better annuals. It is my chance to make my garden great again!
     

As the seed catalogs continue to pile up day by day, I will have plenty of tools to get me started.

There is joy in the garden, even in planning the garden, and even in the darkest days.

Gardening as metaphor

Laser eye surgery last week put a real crimp in my reading schedule. As it happened, the book I was reading at the time was not exactly scintillating so I didn't feel the loss as much as I might have. 

I did resent the fact that I wasn't able to work in the garden for a couple of days, because before I was interrupted I had been on a roll, completing some of my fall chores such as weeding, adding compost to beds, cutting back perennials, moving plants, adding new plants, and doing general clean-up. 

Even on the days when I wasn't able to actually work though, I spent a lot of time in the garden, mostly contemplating life and the garden and changes that I wanted to make in both, and being aided in my meditations by my two eager garden helpers, Oliver and Perkins (aka Purrkins).  

Oliver

Perkins

They are six-month-old novices but eager to learn and especially good at helping me dig holes and at chasing fallen leaves.

Once I was able to get back in the swing of gardening, I had a lot of herb plants on hand that I had ordered from Grower's Exchange and bulbs from Southern Bulb Company, a company that specializes in bulbs that will actually grow in our area. So, I got busy planting.

Now, planting bulbs, in particular, is an act of faith for me.  My record with the finicky tubers is spotty to say the least. Often, I've lovingly placed bulbs in their planting holes and they've never been heard from again. Sometimes they'll show up and bloom for the first year, but then, after that, I only get foliage, and sometimes I only ever get foliage. But gardeners are by nature eternal optimists so I keep making the attempt.

This time around I've tried to be careful to only choose bulbs that I have at least had some success with in the past; bulbs like Narcissus tarzetta 'Grand Primo' and Leucojum aestivum 'Snowflakes.' These both bloom in the spring. 

I've also added red and yellow spider lilies to the mix. It'll be almost a year before I know whether those plantings were successful, because they don't bloom until the fall.

Now all I can do is wait and hope. Each bulb is tucked into its little planting hole along with a dollop of the food that it needs to grow. It will be a few months or even a year before I see any results from all my labor.

That is the essence of hope, isn't it? We plant seeds - or bulbs - and try to nourish and encourage them, but often we see no results at first, and that's when it is easy to become discouraged or even to despair. At some point, when we've done everything we can, we just have to have patience and faith that what we've done will take root and grow and some day flower or bear fruit.

There is that famous saying by the much-quoted Anonymous in regard to gardeners: "Who plants a seed beneath the sod, and waits to see, believes in God." Or, if not God, then at least Nature. But perhaps it is the same thing.

All of my sitting and contemplating over the last several days has persuaded me that there is hope for my garden and that gardening really is a metaphor for life.

Backyard Nature Wednesday: I remember Mama

My mother died on the first day of spring in 2004. I've often ruminated on the unfairness of that - that she should have died on the first day of the season she loved best.

My mother was a gardener, you see, and she looked forward to spring as the time that her garden would begin again. She spent winter poring over seed catalogs and planning what she would plant. She was a farm wife and her emphasis and most of her energies were always spent on the vegetable garden. As a farm family, we grew most of our own food. But she also grew some flowers and other ornamentals as food for the soul. I have essentially reversed her gardening practices, growing mostly ornamentals with a few vegetables on the side.

I often think about my mother when I'm gardening. I sometimes feel that she is very close, looking over my shoulder and maybe shaking her head at my stupidity. I think of her most often when I'm working on some of the old-fashioned plants that she grew. 

Plants like four o'clocks. When I was very little, my mother grew four o'clocks by our back porch steps and I often played there next to them. I must have been no more than five or six years old when I first started noticing how their blooms would only open up late in the day. Throughout the rest of the day, they remained tightly closed. That seemed somehow magical to me, but I wondered why the blooms would be open only at night when there was no one around to enjoy them. Of course, much later I understood that this was the strategy the plant had developed to get itself pollinated. It opened its flowers at night to feed the creatures of the night, things like moths and bats, and their symbiotic relationship worked perfectly.
  

My mother also grew a few roses. The pride of place in her garden belonged to a big red rose and an equally large white one. I don't know their names. Every Mother's Day when we went to church, my mother would clip one of the red roses and pin it on me as a corsage. She would take one of the white roses and pin it on herself. She explained to me that the red rose symbolized that my mother was living and the white rose showed that her mother was dead. My mother had lost her own mother at age twelve. I never understood what a terrible loss that was for her until very much later in my life.

Of course, everyone grew the old tawny day lilies, called ditch lilies because, in fact, they have naturalized and grow wild in and around ditches all over the South. My mother grew them, too. Much later, after I had married a Texan and moved here, I dug some of those ditch lilies from her garden and brought them here. They remind me of her every time they bloom.

A couple of years before she died, my mother gave me some cypress vine plants from her garden. I planted them next to the fence that surrounds my veggie garden and they have grown there ever since. They are annuals but they reseed profusely and every year there are more of them. Want some cypress vine plants? 

The tubular-shaped blossoms of the cypress vine are perfect for attracting hummingbirds. Butterflies also love them.

And petunias, of course. My mother always grew petunias and they had the most wonderful scent, unlike so many of the modern varieties that seem to have no scent at all. My mother also gave me my start with these petunias, and, like the cypress vines, they reseed themselves every year, sometimes in the most astonishingly unlikely places - like the crack in a concrete walkway.
   

Gardening is an arduous, sweaty, exhausting activity, but it is also meditative and a transcendental exercise that allows us to connect with Mother Earth, and, if we are lucky enough to have had a mother who gardened, with our own physical mothers. I'm very glad that I finally learned that. One of my deepest regrets is that I didn't listen more carefully when my mother was trying to impart her gardening wisdom, but I'm grateful for what little I can remember. Thanks, Mama. 

How many caterpillars does it take to make a chickadee?

I've been checking periodically on the bluebird nest box outside my kitchen window which a pair of Carolina Chickadees have claimed as their own this spring.

The pair chose the box early on and started building a nest and then they paused for a while, during a period in which it rained almost every day for about a week. But a week or ten days ago, they resumed construction on the nest, and yesterday, I decided it was time to check on their progress. Well, progress, indeed! Guess what I found?

  

The nest, it seems, is complete and the female had already deposited five tiny eggs there. The eggs are indeed tiny - no bigger than the tip of my smallest finger. It is hard to believe that it is possible for a fully formed chick to develop in one of them and hatch within a couple of weeks. Of course, the parents themselves are among our tiniest birds, weighing no more than a third of an ounce each. Surprisingly for such little birds, they do have fairly large clutches of five to eight eggs,  so this particular clutch may not yet be complete.

  

Finding the beginnings of this new chickadee family reminded me of a column that I read in The New York Times just about a month ago. It was by the entomologist Douglas Tallamy and was entitled "The Chickadee's Guide to Gardening." The point of his article was the importance of planting native plants in our gardens, plants that support local wildlife, including birds, by feeding the insects that they need to survive. For the chickadee chicks, this mostly means caterpillars.

Once the tiny chicks hatch, it takes them 16 to 18 days to develop sufficiently to fledge. During all that time, both parents are working as hard as they can from dawn until dusk every day to provide their growing and very hungry family with food. They bring food to the box, on average, once every three minutes all day long. Tallamy does the math and estimates that it takes from 350 to 570 caterpillars a day (depending on the size of the clutch) to keep the family fed. That's an incredible 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars from chicks' hatching to fledging. And, with luck, at the end of that period, we have more one-third ounce chickadees to grace our world.

So, how can we help to produce all those caterpillars that chickadees and bluebirds and robins and woodpeckers and all the other nesting birds need to raise their families? We can plant trees that caterpillars can munch on without dying, and preferably without killing the tree. Oak trees, for example, are very good choices, says Tallamy. Lots of leaves there, food for caterpillars, and they are very hardy trees, impervious to a lot of insect damage. They are a much better choice than something like a Bradford pear, a non-native tree that is not so friendly to insects, and, moreover, is weak and short-lived. But the pear trees are beautiful when they bloom in the spring and lots of people plant them for that reason.

Fortunately, gardeners are becoming more educated and more aware of the interrelationships between plants and wildlife and the need to choose native plants for our gardens whenever possible. It's one of the ways that we can be better stewards of the land, better landlords for the birds that honor us with their presence in our yards.  

March's end

This is what the end of March looks like in my garden.

The bluebonnets are blooming.

American Goldfinches in their summer dress are passing through and stopping to have a snack at the nyger seed feeders.

Over the weekend, I saw my first Giant Swallowtail butterfly of the year. 

And my first Tiger Swallowtail of 2015. Just beautiful!

But the stars of the show these days are the azaleas. For most of the year, their shrubs are inconspicuous, but in early spring they put on a show for us. Mine have never been so full of blooms as they are this spring. This is an old plant in the backyard garden. 

This is one of the everblooming azaleas that I added to my front garden last fall. They had a few blooms all through the autumn and winter, but now, in spring, they are absolutely full of these bright blossoms.

Spring in Southeast Texas is typically a very brief season. Some years, we go from winter to summer in the blink of an eye. This time, our winter hardly even qualified as a winter and we've been in spring mode practically since the middle of February. Soon enough, summer will be rearing its fiery head. But for now, we luxuriate in mild, glorious days, enjoying the early blossoms and the spring migrant birds as they pass through, the first swallowtail butterflies of the season, and, especially, loving the feel of dirt on our hands once again. 

Note: I'm linking to the "End of Month View" post at The Patient Gardener's Weblog.

Designing and Planting a Woodland Garden by Keith Wiley: A review

Designing and Planting a Woodland Garden: Plants and Combinations that Thrive in the Shade by Keith Wiley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Keith Wiley is a gardener in the U.K., where he is a regular contributor to horticultural and lifestyle magazines and has appeared on many television programs about gardening. Over the last ten years, he and his wife have created a new garden from a bare field and they now run their own nursery there. His book is mostly directed at gardeners in his own country, but the principles he discusses, as well as many of the plants, have applicability in the U.S.

Woodlands are popular places in Nature the world over. They evoke a powerful response in people. The colors, textures, interplay of shade and lighting of such a place can impart a sense of peace and tranquillity which is extremely restful to the spirit. Thus, creating a woodland garden can mimic the atmosphere of that natural setting, which might help to explain why they are so popular.

Wiley explores the characteristics which help to make a well-designed woodland garden. Such a garden would certainly contain towering trees but could also have moss-covered stones and pockets of shade where colorful blooming bulbs can flourish. It might even contain a quiet water feature.

The key to a woodland garden, and indeed the key to any successful garden, is probably first of all the soil, but second, surely, is the choosing of the appropriate plants that will thrive in the setting. Much of this book is given over to a listing of woodland plants from trees and shrubs to ferns, grasses, and grass-like plants with a discussion of what is needed for their proper care and cultivation.

Wiley explains about the need to combine plants that enjoy similar conditions in order to create self-supporting colonies. He gives us his hand-picked selection of interesting, often less well-known, shrubs, perennials, bulbs, ferns, and grasses that will mingle easily with familiar favorites in order to create the woodland effect in a naturalistic style.

The principles which the author discusses are applicable whether one has a postage stamp-sized garden or several acres. His book should be a useful tool for anyone seeking to design and plant a woodland garden and see it grow and succeed.

(A copy of this book was provided to me free of charge by the publisher for the purposes of this review. No other remuneration was received and the views expressed here are entirely my own.)



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The December garden

We got just a touch of frost a couple of weeks ago, but we are still waiting our first killing frost here in my zone 9a garden. Historically, it comes, on average, around December 10, so some of the blooms that I saw as I walked around the garden today may be on borrowed time.

Not my sweet little violas though. They'll be here throughout the season. This patio table planter had wax begonias in it over the summer. They are now resting in another pot and purple and white violas rule the day.

I like these violas so much that I found other places around the patio to tuck some of them into - like this pot of gerberas. The gerberas will go down when the frost comes but the violas will bloom on.

I liked adding this one to its own individual pot on the side table.

This Red Admiral butterfly liked it, too.

Muscadine leaves are now scattered far and wide over the backyard.

Although most of the leaves are gone, many of the fruits still hang on and continue to ripen.  

The Cape honeysuckle is in full bloom now.

And so is the blue plumbago. The blooms are not as full as the ones that flourished all summer, but they are still there.

The purple trailing lantana sprawls all over its bed. It usually attracts a big following of butterflies, but not on this gray, foggy day.

Most of my beautyberry bushes have already been stripped of their berries but this one next to the vegetable garden still holds plenty of fruits for winter-hungry birds.

By the goldfish pond, some of the toad lilies still bloom. That pink spot in the pond is not a goldfish - it's a reflection of one of the pink plastic flamingos that stand guard over the pond!

Even 'Old Blush' rose is getting into the blooming act.

I love almost everything about Copper Canyon daisies, except for the fact that they sprawl all over the place. They are worth this minor inconvenience though.

Next to the daisies, their companion 'Mystic Spires' salvia is in bloom again after being cut back severely in late summer. 

Turk's Cap 'Big Momma' still proliferates with its unique blooms.

These are the last of my brugmansias. Most of my brugs got bitten by that "touch of frost" which we had earlier, but this one is located next to the house in a rather protected spot and it stands next to one of my rain barrels which retains its heat through the night and helped to keep the brugmansia cozy.

My front yard is mostly covered in a thick blanket of red oak leaves today. They seem to have fallen almost overnight.

But as you can see from the tree, there are still plenty more to fall!

One of the staples of my winter garden is red cyclamen. These are in a planter near my front door. 

I added these "everblooming" azaleas to the entry bed at the front of my house in the fall and they are performing as advertised. They are said to bloom from spring through fall and only pause for a bit in winter. So far, so good.

Also near my front door, I added these pansies to this pot for a bit of color. 

I managed to kill my last Christmas cactus, so I recently bought another. It seems happy enough in its spot on the room divider between my kitchen and living room. I'll try to take better care of it than I did with my last one.

I love my December garden. It doesn't demand so much from me. Mostly it just wants to be left alone and occasionally visited. During this busy season of holidays, that is just about what I can manage.