Category: Botany

Soggy times

Helianthus maximiliani reached eight feet, both vertically and horizontally. I’ll need to stake it more strongly next year.

Usually during Kansas summers the problem in the garden is not enough water. Once in a while we get a wet summer, though, and this year’s has been the wettest I can remember. We got heavy rain nearly every week, often three or five inches at a time. It’s still happening; it’s only Tuesday, and already this week an inch and three-quarters has fallen. The problem is compounded by topography. I live in one of the flattest areas of one of the flattest states, and there’s very little slope in my yard. Insufficient moisture can be remedied with a hose, but a surplus is not so easily dealt with. Some of the plants in my garden like all the water, as do weeds and mosquitoes. Others don’t. I’ve been experimenting with dryland plants, which often do well out in the prairie, and everything looked happy and vigorous back in June. But the rains never stopped, and I’ve lost a number of species I had high hopes for.

For those interested in Penstemons: species native to Kansas did fine with all the rain. P. strictus and P. barbatus also look healthy despite the downpours. I’ll have to wait and see on the others.

Snapshots from the summer:

Silene regia, first year from seed.

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Eye-crossing time

Rudbeckia subtomentosa

It’s been a while since I last posted any stereo pictures. Here are a few recent ones. These are “crossview” pairs, i.e., the right-eye image is on the left and vice versa. Cross your eyes so that you see three images, and focus on the middle one. When everything is properly aligned, the subject will pop into three dimensions. Once you can manage this with the small pictures, click on each to view it at a larger size. There’s a knack to it, but once you get it, it’s easy.

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I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore

From the University of Alaska at Fairbanks campus.

I spent the last week of June in Alaska visiting family. Circumstances precluded any long trips outside of Fairbanks, but I still found plenty of subjects for my camera. Disappointingly, the Alaska Range was generally concealed by haze and clouds. The above was as good a photograph as I was able to get, though I did spot Denali/Mt. McKinley once when I didn’t have the camera in my hands. It will probably take a week or two to go through all the hundreds of pictures I took. For now, here are some of the peonies and roses at the Georgeson Botanical Garden at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the most northerly botanical garden in the world. In Kansas, peony season season is long over, but in central Alaska it’s just starting. The roses are mostly hybrids of the very hardy Rosa rugosa.

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Western colors

Penstemon “Blue Lips”

The Great Penstemon Experiment is returning some preliminary results. While there are penstemons native to every state except Hawaii, species from the eastern half of the country tend to be white or lavender — nice, but generally not brilliant. Out west, however, they’re much more eye-catching, with many blues and reds. I’ve started a number of these from seed and purchased a few plants, focusing on species said to be “easy” or “adaptable.” The following all survived a full year in Kansas and are blooming now.

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Springtime blues

Penstemon mensarum

Last year’s experiments are starting to bloom. The Penstemons native to Kansas are fine plants, but if you want the vivid blues that the genus is legendary for, you need to look to the arid west. The very blue P. mensarum is found only in a small region in Colorado. Fortunately, it is easy from stratified seed, and the plants seem perfectly happy in Kansas.

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Botanical links

Most horticultural writers live in places where the climate is temperate and gardening is easy. This is understandable; if you are obsessive about plants, you would probably choose to live in a place where many plants grow well. The books they write are for readers in similar areas, where the same plants flourish. Such books are of little use to gardeners in Kansas, where it is either too hot or too cold, usually too dry and always too windy. I have yet to find one I can recommend. However, I discovered a downloadable pamphlet that actually is of use to people in Flatland: Garden Design with Native Prairie Plants.

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Nero Wolfe, the great and large detective, grew orchids. Here’s a list of the genera mentioned in the books, and Archie Goodwin’s account of Wolfe’s activities as an orchid grower.

Incidentally, if you are as much a fan of the FBI as I am, you might enjoy the Wolfe mystery The Doorbell Rang.

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Talon Buchholz, who for many years ran a nursery in Oregon, maintained the Flora Wonder Blog. In it he discussed various horticultural matters such as evergreens, nomenclature, plant explorers, gardens elsewhere, propagation, and much more, all with lots of pictures. And maples, a particular interest of Buchholz. If you want to see the variety within the genus Acer, browse through Flora Wonder. Buchholz recently retired from blogging, but the blog remains and is worth perusing.

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Out-of-seasonal note: Walmart has already replaced gardening supplies with Santa crap. This is unfair.

Additional garden notes

Grasshoppers have been a plague, as usual. The only control I have found that works at all is the orb weaver spider. I observed one in my garden wrap up two grasshoppers almost as large as itself in five minutes.

Roundup is no longer Roundup. It used to contain glyphosate, and it was the best chemical solution for most weeds, particularly invasive, difficult-to-dig-out grasses like bermuda.1 However, it’s been reformulated without glyphosate, and it no longer reliably kills weeds. I sprayed the above plant above three weeks before I took the picture. With the old Roundup it would have been completely dead and ready to scrape off the pavement. With the new, disimproved formula, it looks uglier than it did before but is still vigorously growing. I checked every herbicide at Home Despot; not one of them contains glyphosate any more.

Sleep, creep, leap: the conventional wisdom is that growing perennials from seed to bloom takes three years. The first year they produce just a few leaves and concentrate on developing their roots; the second year there is more top growth but most of the action still takes place underground; the third year they’re ready to put on a show. I find that this may be true of some, but most are quicker. I’m still waiting for the Baptisias, Asclepias and the rest of the Silphiums that I started last year, but all the Penstemons bloomed this year. Quite a few bloomed well their first year, e.g. Helianthus, Aster Symphyotrichum, Dianthus, Rudbeckia, Echinacea.

I spotted the above while reviewing Monty Python recently. The yellow flowers look like Mentzelia, possibly M. lindleyi — a plant of the American west, and not something I would have expected from a bunch of silly Brits (and an expatriate American).

What color?

Horticulturalists see colors differently than most people. I’ve mentioned before that “coerulea” forms of orchids look lavender to me, not blue. Something similar happens with daylilies. This is “Hall’s Pink.”

Does that look pink to you? Parts of it may look a bit pinkish, but overall I’d call it orange.

“Artist Etching” is generally described as “pink.” Judge for yourself.

Meanwhile, “Snowy Apparition” is called “near white.”

Not very “near” to my eyes. I’ve seen pictures online in which it does look very pale, but the plant in my garden is definitely yellow.

It’s possible that in a different garden with different conditions, or photographed at different times of the day under different lighting, the colors may be truer to their descriptions, but calling these “pink” and “white” is wishful thinking. Still, even though the colors are not as advertised, they’re reliable plants that bloom well.