Garden log, 5.17.13

Aside

Woke up in the middle of the night remembering I had planted out seedlings of Echinacea purpurea ‘Magnus’ a few days ago and forgot to water them. This is not a good sign of my mental health. This morning made an emergency nursery bed for seedlings of Belamcanda chinensis, Celosia ‘Crimson Pink,’ what’s left of Echinacea ‘Magnus,’ some Linum perenne (flax), purple bee balm, ‘Mammoth’ dill, Thymus vulgaris, and something else that has lost its label. Assuming, hopefully, that they survive, the bed will be a design disaster. Put white Nicotiana in white garden, fingers crossed. Moved remaining suffering seedlings to the shade and gave them a good water and a low-strength fertilizer. Hope I can get to the rest tomorrow before projected thundershowers.

I knew it would come to this when I planted all those seeds during my winter sowing mania. I love to sow; love having cheap new plants; hate to thin, prick out, and pot up. Must think of better way to do this, because I like the winter sowing technique. Could nursery beds be the answer?

Garden log, 5.14.13

Aside

New growth on azaleas looked chlorotic; fed lightly with blood meal. Used growing-season strength hort oil on backyard roses, osmanthus, azaleas, gardenias, camellias, viburnum tinus for spider mites. V tinus looking good after treating black spot with neem some weeks ago. Fed seedlings of senna, linum, zizia, fennel, iris tect, alcea, echinacea p. ‘Magnus’ with diluted fish emulsion. Spotted vole in pile of dead leaves–SO tiny! Sunny; high 72.

Christmas for Mother’s Day

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What to do with those leftover Amaryllis bulbs you forced over the winter?

By Dwight Sipler from Stow, MA, USA (Amaryllis Uploaded by Jacopo Werther) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

By Dwight Sipler from Stow, MA, USA (Amaryllis Uploaded by Jacopo Werther) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

If you live in USDA Hardiness Zones 7 or warmer, plant them outside in your garden.

I love Amaryllis and my neighbor usually gives me one every year as a holiday gift. I have never been able to manage bringing them back into bloom in containers–I always forget to tend them–but I thought I’d start planting them out and seeing how they fared.

I have three ‘Red Lion’ bulbs planted in the hot border (so called because it is planted in hot colors: red, orange, yellow, etc.), and one more is ready to go in. Although the first year or two they produced heavy foliage, they didn’t bloom.

Last fall, I scratched in a bit of bulb fertilizer. This spring, I fed the garden with blood meal per my soil test report. And last week:

Bud first emerging
Two days later
Almost there…
Amaryllis ‘Red Lion’ in bloom

I think, if you live in Zones 5 or 6, it might be worth a try growing them outside. Make sure the drainage is good, and add a thick layer of mulch in the fall. If you know of a microclimate in your garden where plants bloom early, consider siting it there.

Above all, have patience. While providing proper soil pH and fertility directed by my soil test probably had some positive impact, the reason my amaryllis flowered this year is because they were finally ready. Amaryllis, like the crinums to which they are related, need time to get comfortable in their new surroundings. But once they are settled, they thrive with minimal care.

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My very hungry caterpillar(s)

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(an homage to Eric Carle)

At some point last summer, a butterfly lay an egg on a leaf.

One morning, when I wasn’t watching, out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar. Then his brother hatched. And his sister. And his other sister…

They started to look for some food.

On Monday they ate through one Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll.’ But they were still hungry.

very hungry caterpillars

On Tuesday, they ate through some gardenias. But they were still hungry.

gardenia 1

On Wednesday, they ate through three 6-foot Osmanthus. But they were still hungry.

osmanthus 3

On Thursday, they ate through a Heuchera. But they were still hungry.

heuchera 2

You know the rest of the story.

We all love butterflies. We want them to fill our gardens and delight our children and ourselves. But if we want them, we had better accept that we must also have caterpillars. As depressed as the chewed-up foliage leaves me, I won’t reach for any sprays. Soon they will be big, fat, sleepy caterpillars and I can pass some time with my kids finding cocoons. I grow several plants that are favorite hosts of different butterfly species: rue (Ruta graveolens), favored by the Old World swallowtail;  bronze fennel (Foeniculum vulgare), favored by the Anise swallowtail; butterfly bush (Buddleja), Senna marilandica, Golden Alexanders (Zizia aurea), Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium purpureum) and others. When caterpillar season is over I will cut off the decimated foliage, and wait for the butterflies to emerge.

Iris obsession puts me in good company

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Henry Mitchell loved irises. Me, too.

Iris time is peaking here in my garden. All  the rain of the past two weeks has left me with  soggy-tissue lumps to deadhead. But I have been delighted to see many of the pass-along plants I’ve received in the past two years blooming for the first time.

I thought my collection of miscellaneous iris might be redundant, but I am nothing compared to Henry. In his garden in Memphis, he apparently grew more than 500.  Schreiner’s Iris Gardens continued to honor Mitchell posthumously for many years with gifts of rhizomes to his widow.

In a post last year, I wrote about inheriting this property in which iris seedlings grew like grass. Most of them couldn’t be salvaged, but a year or two after the surgery I do have a healthy stand of several different cultivars. Now, I am increasingly fascinated with identifying which ones I have.

If you have any tips on sources that can definitively identify iris, bearded ones in particular, I’d love to hear them. I did find the World Iris visual gallery, and their “QuickFix index” which is helping me slowly. “Quick” is relative when there are so many iris cultivars out there, and plant identification apps seem to be low on the programmer-type’s priority list.

I’ve got (that I’ve counted) a total of 13 varieties of bearded iris, Iris germanica:

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Then, there are the ones I don’t know:

This iris is tall and mostly white, with flushes of pale blue. It blooms in early to mid May. Maybe ‘Helen McGregor’?
Maybe Cardinal? Maybe ‘Col. Candelot’? Maybe ‘Coralie’? ‘Dauntless’? ‘Frank Adams’? ‘Garden Flame’? ‘Golden Embers’? ‘Indian Chief’?
Unknown variety; bright red-lavender with orange in its center. Maybe ‘Constance West’?
This iris smells like grape jam. It was the first iris to bloom this year, in mid-April. It’s quite tall and has very thin, stiff stems.
This is a very short iris, less than 18 inches tall. It blooms in mid-April in my Zone 7b garden.
A cluster of my tall white bearded iris, which bloom in mid-April to mid-May in Zone 7b. The flowers are massive and often weigh down the stems, which are substantial.
I have had this purple one the longest.
The inside of the old purple one is spectacular.

Iris germanica ‘Carolina Darkness’ has never bloomed for me before, but it looks as though it will in the next few weeks. I cannot find a picture of it online. And there is the muddy yellow one of which, inexplicably, I do not have a picture.

Then, there are the other species:

Dutch iris; the variety is around here somewhere
Dutch iris
Yellow flag; Iris pseudacorus
Iris virginica (blue flag iris) in bud
Iris tectorum, Japanese roof iris
Iris japonica ‘Eco Easter’
Iris sibirica ‘Caesar’s Brother’

This spring, my neighbor Martha gave me Iris cristata, dwarf crested iris. I understand it is white. Other not-yet-bloomed characters include the purple Japanese iris that I received from my sister’s garden some years ago, and Iris x louisiana ‘Black Gamecock.’

I understand it is possible, in a not-unreasonable amount of time, to actually watch an iris unfurl. If it ever stops raining, I shall treat myself to a sabbatical long enough to do just that.