Category: Gardening

TheGardenLady’s Garden in Bloom

TheGardenLady’s garden is a flowering garden. I attempt to have flowering plants for as long as the year allows flowers to bloom.  I recently found the book Continuous Bloom by Pam Duthie in the local library and was pleased that I had almost every plant she suggested blooming in my garden. (I have more than Duthie suggests because she only writes about perennials and I have a lot of flowering shrubs and add flowering annuals.)

The earliest plants to flower in my garden are Hellebores, which open in the winter. Can you believe that one Hellebore plant is still in bloom? From that first flower, I insist on having flowers in continuous bloom.  Some of the flowering plants blooming now are echinaceas, buddleias, brugmansia, phlox, among others.  These blooming flowers are mostly along the street where there is most sun and fewest tree roots so everyone who passes the house sees the flowers. This is not a hidden garden.

Because of the problems of the property, my garden is not a particularly beautifully landscaped garden. But because of the visibility of the continuous blooms, the most interesting sociological phenomenon has occurred. This GardenLady thinks the phenomenon is amazing.  She thinks that someone should do a study about it. What has happened that I find so amazing is that every day, more than once a day, mostly when I am out working in  the garden, people stop to tell me how much they love the garden and how beautiful the garden is. I say that it happens mostly when I am in the garden, because sometimes when I am in the house people come to ring my door bell to tell me how much they appreciate the garden. Many of the people are neighbors or people that I know but most of the people are complete strangers. People stop their cars to tell me of their enjoyment. Many of these people have become new friends.  People tell me that they love seeing the flowers so much they purposely drive out of their way to see what is in bloom. Complements have ranged from “You have created a little piece of paradise” to “It is another world walking past your garden”  to a two year old asking if any flowers had more than one color. I showed him my lantana flowers.

When I grew up in the small farming village, this was a common occurrence. People would stop over to discuss gardens and plants all the time. But in the town I have now been living in for about 38 years, people were more formal. People would never just drop over. I missed the friendliness of the town of my childhood. But now my gardens have brought this friendliness back. As I said, I am amazed. Neighbors now drop over and strangers stop and talk or ring my doorbell and talk. This garden attracts people as it does birds, bees and butterflies.  I have met such lovely interesting people of all ages. Today a young man who looked like he was in his twenties stopped. I have been invited to see other people’s gardens – people who don’t live in my town. I now can give plants to people when I divide plants instead of composting the overgrown plants. People have offered me plants that I don’t have.

I can not tell you how much I enjoy this phenomenon. In a more and more impersonal world, my garden is bringing people together. Who would have expected?

Papaver nudicaule (Iceland Poppy) by Luigi FDV

TheGardenLady hopes to write about each type of plant on her property. To start off the list, I would like to talk about the Iceland poppies–Papaver nudicaule.

I love poppies and have tried, unsuccessfully, to raise them for years. The major reason, I believe, I have not had success is because my property is mostly shaded. I may be wrong because a friend had poppies along the back of her house for years and I usually visited them when there was shade.  I just do not know the amount of sun she had in this location. If she had at least 6 hours of sun, then they would thrive. Poppies need a lot of sun.

My friend very generously gave me poppy plants.  I believe they were the oriental ones, but they always, sadly, left my garden after one year of bloom and never returned the second year. But I am persistent and try planting plants in different sites on my property in the hopes that one spot will make the poppies happy enough to return the following year. Mostly I have planted the Iceland poppies because I love orange and yellow in the garden. None has ever reseeded.

This year once again I planted Iceland poppies in three different sunny spots. This year I also planted seeds of the California poppy– Eschscholzia Californica. A neighbor has them and they reseed and bloom for him in the same spot every year. I hope some of the California poppies will take- I forgot where I planted them, so I am hoping one day as I inspect my garden some California poppies will appear to say, “We’re here.”

As I said, I had never been lucky enough for my poppies to reseed. But this year I saw a strange plant in one flower bed. To pull or not to pull was the question. It was such an unusual looking “weed” that l left it thinking that it didn’t look too difficult to pull if it later turned out to be an obnoxious weed. Then a second “weed” started growing across the walk from the first. The first “weed” kept growing and growing. I kept asking gardener friends if they could identify the plant. Most thought it looked like lettuce. So to really ID the plant, I needed the flower. The second plant grew much more slowly. Then, voila, one day I saw the buds on the first plant. They were the give away. Finally, after many years of trying, I had an Iceland Poppy that had self seeded. Now almost every day my “weed” produces a pink flower for me.

I read that pink is the recessive Iceland Poppy color. I had never planted a pink poppy. It is very exciting for me to see this 3 ft. tall poppy with its ethereal pink flower.  The second plant is just showing its first bud. I will be curious to see what color it is. And the three other Iceland poppies that I planted this year are orange and yellow.   Iceland Poppies are native to the northern parts of North America and Asia. They are said to like poor gravelly soil but the plants that self seeded for me are in an area richly mulched with aged horse manure.

I found some on-line sites that sell poppy seeds.  See here.  I plan on ordering the blue Meconopsis poppy next year.  See here.

Palouse Falls custodian -“Pete” by oldmantravels

When readers write to say how they struggle to save a marigold, I must tell readers that I have lost more than just one marigold given to me by a friend. There is a saying among gardeners that to learn one has to have killed one hundred plants. This may or may not be an exaggeration. My father-in-law jokingly said that being in the nursery business was the best business because plants were always dying and people were always replacing them. So though I came from a farm, the problems on this property where I have now lived for 35 years were so different from that sunny farm that I had to learn a lot.

For example, mine is a property with trees. Much of the property is covered with huge trees whose roots are wide and the tree canopy shades much of the ground. And where there weren’t native trees, the previous owners had planted sycamore trees that are huge. The farm was open and sunny all day long. You can’t really farm in the woods. Some of the trees on this property are black walnuts. Nut trees in general and black walnut trees specifically give off a toxin called juglone that kills many other plants. We never had one nut tree on the farm.

Continue reading “Growing Plants is a Trial and Error Learning Process”

Here is a video in French that TheGardenLady thought was cute.

This is a video from a French documentary about a certain type of tree in Africa. TheGardenLady is not sure if the video is real and she believes that it is the African Marula tree (Sclerocarya birrea).  It’s also known as the Elephant Tree or the Marriage Tree.

Once a year, the African Marula Tree produces a very juicy fruit that contains a large percentage of alcohol. Because there is a shortage of water, as soon as the fruit is ripe, animals, big and small, belly up to the bar.

A 4th-grade student at the Lycee Francais de Chicago who goes by the name of Monkey Muesé translated the French for TheGardenLady. 

Selva means jungle forest.

“At the beginning of the season, the fruits are delicious but hard to get. You have to be really strong or very old (clever elephant). But after some weeks, the ripe fruits fall, so the animals come and eat them. But the fruit is very alcoholic and goes to their heads. So they all leave drunk.”

Despite the cuteness of the video, there’s no reason to believe that it represents what is true.  According to National Geographic News, there’s no evidence to support the view that elephants get drunk off of the fruit these trees.  Apparently, elephants’ biology makes them teetotallers.