Thursday, January 30, 2014

Frosty Morning (Yesterday)



It was a frosty morning yesterday.  As the sun rose it glinted off the east window where Mr. Frost had left a painting, "Winter in Historic House".  That I am able to capture the "glint" at all is a miracle of sorts.  Today it has warmed up enough to snow.  And given the size of the flakes, I am predicting 4" here.



The view of the Italianate parterre shortly after sunrise shows only the largest of the spaces bones.  The longitudinal, over-grown privet hedge, the fountain in the middle, the Alberta spruce in each quadrant needing their "spirals" clipped.  It does not show the spirals of yew, the pea gravel paths, nor the 'Autumn Joy' sedum in the shape of a diamond distally from the inner fountain circle.

But they are there, waiting for spring, and the Artist in Residence, Mr. Vortex, to go home...

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

New (to Me) Plants for 2014

(Photo: Proven Winners)  Clematis 'Diamond Ball'
I have been plant hunting.  Oh, I haven't been scaling mountains in Turkey or Japan looking for something incredible, beautiful, and rare.  I have been traveling down the alleyways of the internet, which for someone curtailed by a walker and fairly housebound, is almost as much fun.  The cold weather makes it even more fun to contemplate possibly warmer days.

Anticipating walking unaided and removing myself from my brother's family's bene-magnificient care,  I have been spending some time looking at some of the new plants out there. 

Now, I can't possibly keep up with all the new annuals or the new and improved veggies on the market (and I have been saving veggie seed to develop some provenance, anyway, so sweet corn is about all I will look at these days).    Having no access to water for the family vegetable garden is something which I may have to deal with this year, so seed and vegetable selection and planting methods will need to keep drought-tolerance in mind.  I have also been analyzing how to incorporate more edibles into my borders in my home garden, too.  Curly parsley and 'Thai Queen' basil could be most enjoyably incorporated into the long border, a touch of deep green and dark purple.

Those struggles aside, perennials and shrubs are something I can wrap my hands around, though.

I have to say I am still waiting on the opinions to completely form regarding the pink Annabelle, Invincible. I'm waiting for that to mature in a couple gardens I know to see what I think of that one.  After Endless Summer series hype, I have become a bit leery regarding hydrangea other than the paniculatas, of which I am a confirmed big fan.

Clematis 'Diamond Ball' looks promising.  Almost no one I know grows any double clematis.  Double clematis look tropical in this area of central Wisconsin, which with the Polar Vortex and the sun hanging so low in the sky for almost the entire day, seems to have more in common with the Artic Tundra than places such a clematis might grow.

Researching 'Diamond Ball' and clematis scotti (actually hunting plants or seed on that one, with no luck) have led me to admire several beautiful images of clematis alpina.  I realized I choose two years ago to add to a pergola as a companion to a rose.  Last year I had just a scant half dozen blooms near the ground.  As it blooms on old wood it is a perfect companion for the unidentified (might be 'Eden') rose which is its companion, Neither climber will need much grooming other than for shape over the coming years.  given the exuberant growth this clematis experienced last year, I am anticipating loads of bloom competeing for trellis space.

Unidentified rose, maybe 'Eden'?

(Photo: Proven Winners) Rhododendron 'Handy Man Purple'
I would love to add more big, showy rhododendrons to my garden.  The breeding behind 'Handy Man' makes it a possible candidate.  I also have a couple 'Diabolo' ninebarks I have been trying to keep small.  'Tiny Wine' might make a better choice.
(Photo: Proven Winners) Ninebark 'Tiny Wine'
I have also been fascinated by alpine plants of late and have been hunting seed.   In addition to looking, make that drooling, over clematis and the continual hunt for that one rose; I have been looking at sub-tropical bulbs.

The cranberry taro (also known as red stemmed rhubarb colocasia) combined with this airy grass and peachy orange coleus  in this planting in the Janesville Rotary Gardens last fall.captured  my imagination.
I would also like to see if I can grow dierama from a bulb each year like we do dahlias.

I am also anticipating the corner of my garden where the black Austrian pine was shading a lot of the plants there to be much more spectacular this year.  Lacking sun, plants were diminishing, rather than expanding there.  Also this coming summer, I will be enjoying some new daylilies purchased from Dr. Apps through the Kiwanis fund-raiser last fall.  I think they will bring me much joy.

These are some of my plant musings keeping me warm these days of the Polar Vortex.  What new to you plants are you considering this year?

Monday, January 27, 2014

Bitterly Cold!

The sun is shinning, but I don't need to venture out, even if easily could, to know it is so cold outside.  I have never seen the rhododendron's leaves clasped so tightly to the stems!  If the rhodie was human it would have both arms wrapped tightly to its body, stomping its feet, and blowing into gloves.  Like my son it might be wearing its "bank robber face mask", that knitted affair with holes for the moth and eyes only.  I bought it for him in high school because he often walked to school early to work out in the weight room for basketball.  Previously he has been lax on wearing it as it gives too menacing a look on the head of a 6' 4" man.  Like the commercial, evil is lurking.


Evil does lurk this year.  It's name is Polar Vortex. 

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Over 100 Days Later...

On October 4, 2013, I fell.  I fell hard.


Running down a ramp that runs out from under wide over-hanging eaves at my parents on a wet soggy, autumn day, wearing flip flops, with car keys in one hand and a pair of my nephew's shoes in the other; I fell.


I fell so hard, I had never hit the ground so hard in all my life, that I lay there a moment not moving a muscle.  I fell so hard I wondering for more than that moment whether I truly may have broken my neck.  There was no "snap" or audible crack.  I didn't feel any pain at all.  First, I cautiously wiggled my fingers and without moving my head could see them moving, then my toes, and same result.


I realized right away that I had wrenched my left leg.  On the way down, my knee caught between spindles on the rails.  I gingerly pulled myself up, without any sharp pains, and stood hanging onto the railing for a moment.


Thinking, I had bruised nothing more than my knee and self-esteem, I took a step...


And realized my whole world had indeed shattered.


It had shattered along with a chip of bone on the anterior of my acetabulum.  That's the big load-bearing joint that the femur fits into forming a ball and cup socket allowing a most incredible range of motion through three planes while bearing weight.


The next week passed in a blur, with lots of crying on my part.  I guess I do not possess that stern upper lip, I thought I had.  Fortunately, my Handsome Son and his good-natured, kind girlfriend were home from college that weekend.  The result of my fracture was frantic activity and in-the-moment decision making.


As a result, I closed up my house and garden.  I moved into my brother's house while I would be recovering.  As those first couple weeks passed in a fog of sleep, pain, sleep, very bad TV, and more sleep, I started to understand how long the recovery for this type of injury would be.  Statistically, the outcomes are not good.


The odds are not ever in your favor...


Yesterday, I ventured outside for the first time since the beginning of this ordeal.  The seasons have changed.  It is a new year. I drove a car, with my son along as my able-bodied companion. I drove pass my house and garden-- TWICE.  I miss my house and its cute yard.


The 'Red Jade' crab apple is having a truly magnificent year.  It is LOADED with half-inch bright red apples.  Its form denuded of leaves is truly remarkable, gorgeous, perfect.


I am not yet walking with out the use of a walker, but excuse the pun, I am making strides everyday.  This morning, I was able to sit in a butterfly position and stretch.  I went down and up a flight of three steps, with no pain.  If there had been a handrail on both sides I could have done it without support of the two fine men in my life.  It went surprisingly better than my brother and son thought it would.


It is progress.  Discernible progress.


I have been depressed.  I have been crabby.  But by spring, I may be walking unaided, and that my friends will be truly remarkable, gorgeous, and perfect as well.


Monday, January 6, 2014

"...and then the head of that hydrangea rolled by..."

See it lying there, caught under the left corner of the rhodie in the center?
Out my bedroom window is the view of this 60' by 90' semi-formal parterre.  The rhododendrons at the entrance tell me by their deeply curled leaves closing in on their stems how very cold it is.  ,Looking for signs of wind, I notice in a sudden gust the head of an Annabelle hydrangea from the hedge around the wrap-around porch blows across my view to lodge under that same rhodie.  The bright sun, the light of which I am attempting to soak up through my east window; all tell me it is so very cold out there.

Stay warm everyone!

Saturday, January 4, 2014

On the Hunt: That Rose

What rose?
I don't really know the name of this rose.  I saw it at the Chicago Botanical Gardens in late June 2011.  I have been trying to find/identify it ever since.  It is a rose that says rose to me in no uncertain terms.  I have sort of nailed down a couple different possibilities, but no real source of any. 
 
At first, I believed it to be Henri Martin, part of the famed Canadian Explorer Series.  Now I am not so sure.
 
Then possibly a species, not selected, moss rose.   Or maybe a noisette, although I tend to think of them as small blooms.  Hmmm...
 
...then La Ville Aux Bruxelles.
 
Some of the roses here are possibilities.
 
It just was not clearly or even labeled at the CBG.  They usually do a great job labeling their plants, which is great, because if someone like me is looking for the label, almost everyone that views that plant probably does not know what it is.
 
I have a system.  My camera has taken over that role of note taker.  Rather than scribble the name of a particularly interesting plant on paper, I take a picture of the nametag and try to capture enough of the plant to identify it.  The subsequent photo is a picture of the plant at large.  This predictable rote is particularly helpful with larger herbaceous plants, or plants with discretely hidden nametags.  Perhaps it was not labeled, or I was distracted by a bee.  Or someone asked me a question.  This time my methodology failed me.
 
Does anyone know this rose? 
 
How do you deal with note taking on must have plants?  Does anyone else use their cameras this way? 
 
What are you, the plant collectors, hunting for this coming garden season?
 

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Cold and Root Hardiness

This is a picture of the stone Labrador at my PA sister's garden,  They've had a couple intense ice storms and quite a bit of snow, but not the cold temperatures we've had here.  Still, it appeared one of their dogs had frozen by misadventure similar to Tuesday's predicted -50 wind chills. 

I have been fascinated by the concept of horticultural zones and root hardiness for years.  It may be because I have lived in the frozen tundra of central Wisconsin for a lot of my life, where it seems the artic dip from Canada visits us fairly often.  It may be because I seem to live on the edges of zones fairly often and like to push them.  I have gone so far as to track the daily temperatures and use the statistical formula to plot a particular winter's actual horticultural zone. (That year I was living in Elgin and it came up as zone 7a which at that time was zoned 5b.) 

I don't know.

What I do know is with the extended bone-numbing cold we seem to be experiencing here in central Wisconsin I am starting to be a bit concerned about my garden which I left in fair condition but very abruptly because of my falling and fracturing my acetabulum.  I directed a few final day plantings of potted plants, shuffled my potted annuals and houseplants plants off to a dear friend, and left.

I would not be concerned with a couple atypical days of bone-chilling cold, but the length and depth of this cold throughout December and now extending into January is starting to concern me.  As gardeners many of us have not had experience gardening beyond our one zone; but as any gardener with a bit of zone envy and horticultural zone denial will tell you,  it is not too difficult to have collected plants which push the zone in your garden.

Taking into account the number of days and the depth of cold, it is almost as though my garden has been magically transported from zone 5b into something like zone 3b.  Up until 2012, my area was listed as zone 4a on the official chart.  Gardeners being what they are, many in my area had been reacting to what they had been seeing, trowels in the ground. 

We have been planting into zone 5b for a number of years.

On Tuesday, January 7, 2014, our predicted high air temperature (not wind chill) is -16 F

Root hardiness is key to winter survival.  Now the factors influencing overall plant hardiness in relationship to horticultural zone are many and they are discussed fairly in this document.  I'm going to add my own observations to this information. 

First, snow is a great insulator.  In the absence of snow a good layer of mulch helps a lot.  Snow exists at a temperature around 32 degrees Fahrenheit.  Once water freezes, that's about as cold as it gets.  Sometimes good snow cover in the swamps where I grew up, with the additional mulch layer of fallen autumn leaves could keep the ground beneath relatively unfrozen most of the winter.

This points up the second aspect of hardiness, the amount of organic material in our garden soils and its ability to retain moisture, and the hydration of our soil at the time it freezes, is also critical to how well our plants survive.  The better the moisture content of our soil, the closer to 32 degrees our soil will freeze.  This may surprise some.  This is part of whether a plant will survive in a pot over winter.  With less soil around a plant's roots, that soil is apt to be drier.  Also with less soil separating the roots from the air temperature, the root are exposed to even colder temperatures than the temperature frozen soil achieves.

The last factor I would stress is how well prepared and how healthy a plant was going into dormancy.  The growing season of 2012 and its winter was fairly hard on plants.  Some were just coming out of that at the beginning of the 2013 growing season when a protracted late spring topped off by a suffocating late spring ice storm on April 12 of this last year caused significant damage and eve may have killed some plants.

There are some plants rated for my zone which with I have had poor results.  They just do not grow well in central Wisconsin, and not just for me.  These include hibiscus, some heuchera and tiarella, buddeleia, and ferns. 

There are others which I have pushed the zone and which this might be their terminal year. These include my Japanese cypress 'Sagu suki, caryopteris 'Dark Knight', and the 'Bloodgood' seedling I transplanted in early October.  Even plants like cotoneaster horizontalis, Korean boxwood, and viburnum may not be safe.  Bold gardeners grow magnolia soulangiana and stellata here in their shrub forms rather than as trees for the opportunity for seasonal regrowth from roots when top growth in a tree form could kill or severely damage a specimen.  Still, this may be a killing year for any newly planted or stressed magnolias.

And then there were the plants in trouble even before this winter; that bit of my privet hedge that had such a hard year in 2012-2013, my dappled willow which had suffered heat stress in 2012,and  my smoke bush 'Nordine' that died to the ground in 2013.

This large-leaved rhododendron encased in ice is another from my sister in Pomeroy, PA.  Rhododendrons and many azaleas are among the surprisingly hardy plants.  Some of the best displays of these early spring bloomers are in the area around MN's Twin Cities Minneapolis and St. Paul, zone 3b.

Many years, I plant right up to within 4-6 weeks of the date I feel is average ground frozen day, Thanksgiving.  This year I am thankful I did not have that opportunity.  Our October was misleadingly warm and pleasant.  Those of you that did plant late, I hope you mulched and watered well any transplants right up until Thanksgiving.  It may well be your saving grace.