Mood Indigo & Garden Updates

For some reason, all of our (very limited) stock of indigo flowers all popped into bloom at once. Frost was dead wrong about gold being Nature's "hardest hue to hold"--as anyone can attest who has ever tried to identify one of the [fake statistic:] 47,568 species of yellow daisies. In June and July, hot, blaring, gaudy, distressing gold--along with sulfur, canary, and banana--is everywhere, making you feel even hotter and more exhausted. Indigo, on the other hand, cool, crisp, clean, bright indigo, is much harder to come by.

So here's what we've got. One two-inch tall larkspur.

Several leadworts (which I had to molest violently in Photoshop so that the color would come out at all right)
And some morning glory that we keep trying to get rid of without success.

It's not a lot, I know, but I have to appreciate it while I've got it.

Things That Are Thriving (Or Making a Miraculous Comeback. Or at Least Looking Less Puny Than Expected)
In other happy news, we have about 4 big lemons on our Meyer lemon and a good 4 or 5 more that are still teensy--smaller than the pink part of my pinky fingernail.

We have the variegated pink Meyer lemon, which has this wonderful mottled foliage and striped fruit with a pink interior.


The two Kimberley Queen ferns Mom gave us nearly crashed upon arrival. But now they've greened up and have some nice, new foliage. I think they've decided to live, which is great--we're counting on them to provide much-needed privacy on the front porch.


The cordia keeps blooming, somewhat to my surprise. It's put on some new foliage as well, though not as much as I'd like. Its scrawniness makes the blooms that much more of a coup.


And the tilia/linden/lime/basswood has shot up a good foot or so in the past month! It's handsome, leafy, fast-growing, and one of the few trees we own that isn't crooked--it's gone from being a tree I viewed with mild curiosity to a fast favorite. Plus, I love all the history and folklore around tilias.

At the same time, our little bur oak seedling from Mom & Dad is looking healthier and bigger than ever. I assume this means that it's finally got a good root system going. Back in Houston, the sister seedling to ours is apparently 3 times taller--ah, the copious rains (and irrigations) of Houston! Our little fellow has a tougher, more rigorous life ahead of it, but he seems to have finally girded up his loins and accepted his fate. Funnily enough, this one's leaves are actually bigger than the leaves of our much older ~6-ft bur oak by the garage. Rather variable species, apparently.

The 'Fruit Cocktail' shrimp plants, while looking a bit scrawny in the shade garden, have put on some of their adorable lime-and-cherry-colored blooms. Why isn't everybody growing these?

And the roses are beginning to bend their wills to the task of climbing the gazebo. ' Buff Beauty' is slowly recovering from whatever it is that's been inhibiting her for the past two years. It's growing and blooming a little. Nevertheless, the roses we bought last fall after Pete & Christi's (brother-in-law and sister-in-law-in-law's) wedding are still out-thriving BB. Climbing Cécile Brunner, in particular, is growing and twining with enthusiasm.


In other good news, the Crinum jagus that I got early this spring is--slowly, cautiously--leafing out. We've got C. x powellii all over the place (fruits of an early propagation effort on Matt's part), several C. macowanii seedlings in the ground, and now the C.j.



The only fly in the ointment is the fact that the crinum I actually wanted (C.j. was a bonus freebie), C. jagus scillifolia, has been very reluctant to come to life. This sad green stub is all we've got, at present. Grow, little C.j.s., grow!

And the last bit of good news is that one of the Texas Mountain Laurel seedlings Mom & Dad gave us a couple of years ago is finally growing. The other two seem to have stalled out (too much shade? Too little water?) but this one may actually go somewhere. A few decades hence.


Plants That Are Grumbling (or Worse)
So the baldcypress is still alive; it just isn't very alive. What it is, is very crooked. Below, I superimposed a straight line and a protractor. The tree has a 20-degree angle. I assume this is drought damage.


And the oak-leaf hydrangea we bought this winter has been annoyingly wussy. The good news is that it lets you know when it's feeling the least bit neglected. The bad news is that it always seems to feel neglected. So I use it as an indicator species to let me know when to water the shade garden. Since I intended it to act as a screen, I dearly hope it toughens up by next year, when, presumably, it will have a stronger root system.


And finally, worst of all, the farkleberry is no more. Apparently, I didn't use anything like enough sphagnum when I planted it. It's been scorching and dying limb by limb. It was a beautiful dream. And now it's dead.

1 Less Mystery Rose

(For Happy Reasons)
It's been a good spring for this mystery rose, which I thought sorta kinda looked like 'Monsieur Tillier.' It was this year's first bloomer, and it's currently boasting a healthy crop of buds and blossoms.

Best of all, I think I finally know what it is! Yesterday, Matt & I went to the "Passion for Plants" East Austin Garden Fair, an annual event whose main goal is to promote fruit/vegetable gardening for better health, but which also supports general gardening skills and sustainability ideas. It was a slightly weird event for Matt & me, given that he hates vegetables and that it's more or less pitched at a novice level. We learned a lot of things we already knew, but in the vast and varied world of horticulture, it's always wise to be humble. We had never seen a demonstration of double-digging, for example, and I immediately add a garden fork to my mental horticultural shopping list.

But best of all, at the exhibit on so-called "Earthkind" roses (a label that's applied to roses of all classes and origins that happen to be particularly environmentally friendly), I saw a picture of a fat pink tea-looking rose that looked immediately familiar. I know it as the ersatz 'M. Tillier,' but I think it's known to most rosarians as "Georgetown Tea." (Like the "Maggies" we belatedly identified, this one is a found rose. In our case, they're twice-found roses.)

Here's its latest big bloom in our garden:

Our "Georgetown Tea" rose

...and here are some images of "Georgetown Tea" from the Earthkind website, from Buchanan's Native Plants, and from the Antique Rose Emporium.

Earthkind: "Georgetown Tea"

Buchanan Native Plants: "Georgetown Tea"

Antique Rose Emporium: "Georgetown Tea"

Note the variable shades of pink, the profusion of petals, the classic tea-rose shape, and the tendency toward pointiness on the older petals. All characteristics of GT and of our mystery rose. We'll see what Matt says, but I think we've got it.

Farkleberry Flourishes
In other news, I thought you would be pleased to learn that our little farkleberry is thick with new foliage--it looks perfectly healthy and happy. They said it couldn't be done, ladies and gentlemen... Of course, it's easy to flourish in April. The true test is August. I'll let you know how it goes.

Farkleberry Fetish

Ever since I first heard of the farkleberry (Vaccinium arboreum) back at A&M, I've wanted one. I'll admit it: it's about the name, pure and simple. It's so whimsical and ridiculous. The fruits are apparently nasty to the point of inedibility, the flowers are practically nanoscopic, and it wants to live in something like 5.4 pH. So. Not a practical choice. But then, only a very silly person would expect practicality from a plant called "farkleberry."

And it does have some redeeming qualities. The wildlife, having a less refined palatte, like the fruit. And the flowers, though tiny, appear in delicate little sprays of urn-shaped buds that are somewhat fetching up close. And while the fruit is unappetizing, it's not poisonous--you can eat it, if, say, you live in a time of economic meltdown and you have nothing in your garden but rotten turnips and farkleberries.

In any case, I'm doing what azalea fanciers in the area do: I dug a hole much deeper than the pot, and mixed sphagnum moss into the soil at a 1:1 ratio. Here's hoping.

Anyway, here's my little farkleberry, looking a bit scruffy from his trip through the mail.

Baby farkleberry

The Winter is Over and Done
So, 8 days ago, I wrote a post called "Winter Garden." Now it's spring. What can I say? Things move fast in March.

For example, the oak-leaf hydrangea, still sporting increasingly limp-looking winter foliage, is also budding all over with silvery new leaves.

New hydrangea leaves

Similarly, last year's revenant pomegranates still hang on the tree, even as new olive-green leaves appear. (What does one do with pomegranates, anyway? Other than sprinkle their seeds on top of fancy chiles rellenos? How do you know when they're ripe? How can you tell when they've gone off? There's something unnerving about pomegranates. Do you eat the skin? How do you extract the flesh? And thus ours hang on the tree, slowly mummifying.)

An undead pomegranate

And the roses are beginning to flower--intermittently for the moment, but with increasing frequency, sort of like popcorn slowly beginnging to pop.

Naturally, it's the chinas that go first. Wonderful roses, chinas. They frequently have a full, old-fashioned look with a breezy, loose, no-fuss attitude to them. And they bloom all the time, require no pruning, and once established need almost no extra water.

Here is a slightly over-blown blossom of pale lemony-creamy-white Ducher, a gung-ho yet delicate flower that I never appreciated until I grew one myself.

'Ducher' in bloom

All five of our 'Mutabilis,' that much-loved and eminently useful china, are in bloom. This flower is in the late apricot stage of bloom.

'Mutabilis' bloom

And our 'Cramoisi Superieurs' seem to have finally settled in, after a slow start. The one in the rose bed, in particular, has put on some growth and is sporting this lovely thing.

'Cramoisi Superieur' blossom

Here's the funny thing about Cramoisi: I absolutely cannot capture that shade of red, either with my camera, or with the aid of Photoshop. It always comes out too pink, no matter how I diddle with the greens, blues, and reds.

Uf! Spring is Hard Work
All was not rose blossoms and light, however. We decided it was time to clean out the pond. Matt got started while I was still gathering the tools, and I knew the moment he began even though I was on the other side of the yard because the Stench was omnipresent. There was a thick layer of black, oozying, fibrous exceedingly stinky muck at the bottom of the pond. We transferred this to the compost bin, potted up the waterlilies, which had been growing straight in the muck, and refilled the water. Which promptly drained out of the other giant crack in the liner. So put a new pond liner on the list of Things to Buy. The old one, really, is too small for the yard, so it's a good excuse to upsize to something (moderately) more appropriate.

Things We Learned about Water Gardening:
- Really do plant your water lilies in clay or kitty litter. Even if you get dirt to stay in the pot and not float away, the water lilies unearth themselves and go drifting all over the place.
- Waterlilies have many and strange parts. I'm still not sure if I saved the right bits. There were (1) things like tiny clusters of bananas, (2) long knobbly tubers, and (3) jointed stems with clusters of roots coming out of them. I planted some of each. We'll see what happens.

As you may have inferred, we did no research whatsoever before starting this project, and once we realized that we were facing a knowledge deficit, we were already plastered in muck and couldn't come inside to google. So item three on the list of things we learned would be
- Do your research before getting covered in black, slimy detritus.

Garden Bones

Oak-leaf hydrangea pic pinched from the NY City Parks & Recreation Dept.

I finally bought some of those trees I've been yammering about since November. We got a good-sized weeping yaupon from Matt's old nursery, a Cordia from Plant Escapes, and an oak-leaf hydrangea from The Great Outdoors. Also, tomorrow morning I plan to fulfill a decade-old ambition and finally order a farkleberry for my very own. Farkleberry, baby!

All three of our new purchases provide what I think of as essential bone structure in the garden. As you may know, there are landscape architects, on the one hand, and landscape designers/horticulturists on the other. The principle difference is that landscape architects view plants principally as three-dimensional shapes which can be arranged in various striking and artiful ways to create a powerful overall effect. Those with more training in plants and less training in architecture tend to be less alert to the structural possibilities of plants and more alert to their intrinsic interest as specimens. It's a continuum, of course. A place like Peckerwood, in Hempstead, excels at combining intrinsically fascinating plant materials in very artful, sculptural ways. And many very plant-oriented people are also capable of arranging those plants in an effective and beautiful way. But there is an underlying tension between the two tendencies, and I, as a horticulturist and not an architect at all, definitely lean toward the lumpish accumulation of beloved cultivars.

But even I can't help but notice that my rose garden is basically a row of bumps. It needs bones. It needs some strongly defined verticality to break up the monotony of similar shapes and sizes and also to provide boundaries.

Last year we took our first step to remedy the problem when we bought our 'Little Gem' magnolia for the corner of the house. It was just what I wanted--a tall, columnar, dark green exclamation mark. But then west of the magnolia the rose garden just sort of dribbled on. This summer we added our rather massive trellis--more to provide privacy than for aesthetic reasons, but it did vary the shapes and heights in the rose bed. Still, the western corner of the bed was dangling about unanchored, plus we still wanted more in terms of privacy. Thus the weeping yaupon. It's not terribly tall, but it's pleasingly dense. And we know it can handle drought, which is, sadly, a required feature.

The Cordia boissieri will also provide bones--in this case, it will replace the creaky old ligustrum on the corner of the study. The ligustrum, for all its many faults (ligustrums are deprecated for being invasive non-natives, and the trunk on this particular specimen is partly hollow) does provide a nice, heavy shade to the study, and it's everygreen. It puts the "shade" in our shade garden in the winter, when the cottonwood is leafless. The Cordia (sometimes called a Mexican olive) is nativish, evergreenish, will get to be about the same height, and has showy white trumpetty flowers. Once the Cordia gets big enough, we'll whack the ligustrum, and its replacement will anchor the corner of the shade garden.

The oak-leaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia) is the first installment in the enlarged shade garden that will encircle the shade patio. It will feature lots of lovely, cool, woodsy plants, with a heavy green-and-white theme. There'll be a couple more hydrangeas, some American beautyberries (Callicarpa americana), the farkleberry (Vaccinium arboreum), two white Crinum macowanii, and some white cemetery iris (Iris albicans). Some day, if I'm feeling very ballsy, I may attempt a little Japanese maple in there (!)

So we've made good progress on the bonesiness. We do still have an urgent need for a chitalpa on the southwest corner of the house to anch0r the impending blue-and-purple bed by the kitchen, and we need some tall, wide thing growing up the west-facing wall by the rose bed to break up the giant, blank emptiness. And maybe a Magnolia × soulangiana by the driveway. But then our garden will have pretty much all the bones it needs.

Happy meteorological news, by the way--we've been getting some light rain for the past week or so. Sad news: I need to uninstall and reinstall my rain gauge--it isn't reading the rain, probably because it's not level enough. Probably because I attached it to our drunken sailor of an old, warped wooden fence. Judging from surrounding areas, though, I'd guess we've got between 0.6" and 1" all told. The ground was soft when I planted my new trees/shrubs.

Farkleberry pic pinched from www.missouriplants.com