Monthly Archives: May 2012

Poppies, or how quickly pride goeth

24 Thursday May 2012

Posted by in poppies, Self-sowers

≈ Leave a Comment

About ten years ago, a friend brought me a baggie of Opium poppy seeds from his garden in Birmingham, Alabama. “Just throw them on the ground and they’ll grow,” he advised in a slow Southern drawl.

I did, and they grew. But not well. I hadn’t dumped out that baggie in the smartest place. It wasn’t quite bright enough and there were too many other things already growing there. Each year a few seeds would germinate in that moist soil and eventually one or two anemic looking poppies would force out a flower before collapsing from failure to thrive. Efforts to transplant the seedlings to a more favorable location failed every time.

When I moved last year I took a couple of plants with me, including the great daylily ‘Mauna Loa’ which I couldn’t bear to leave behind. I replanted it on a steep, sunny slope with poor soil and hoped it would be tough enough to make it there.

This reveals how exciting my life is, but one of the best moments of the spring was the day I realized that a poppy seed had hitchhiked with the daylily and was growing like a weed. Lettuce-sized leaves started appearing as the plant grew to four feet, followed by at least eight buds. (Although I love flowers, you can see I am not obsessed enough to do more than estimate the number of buds on one plant.)

It’s open now, and it’s beautiful. Sound the horns for the triumphant gardener!

Then yesterday I was driving around looking for a parking spot when I was compelled to stop in the street and get out of the car. Suddenly my pride in that one self-sown flower seemed ridiculous.

Besides poppies of all kinds, this garden was filled with penstemon, bachelors buttons, larkspur, and other self-sowers.

It was a glorious sight to behold, and one impossible to think of begrudging.

An appointment with Dr. Huey

21 Monday May 2012

Posted by in Cemeteries, Roses

≈ Leave a Comment

Perhaps you’ve come across a garden in which lives a rose that blooms only once a year, unfurling crimson, yellow-centered semi-double flowers that fade to the color of a bloody handkerchief. Its foliage is a little prone to black spot, and its lanky canes are unable to stay upright, preferring to lean on a fence or other shrubbery. If this description sounds familiar, it’s bound to be a rose called Dr. Huey, still making house calls after all these years.

In 1914 the first edition of The Practical Book of Outdoor Rose Growing was published. The author was George C. Thomas of Philadelphia, and the dedication page reads:

This book is affectionately dedicated Dr. Robert Huey, who gave me my first inspiration in rose growing.

Dr. Huey was besides a rose breeder a dentist who pioneered a technique of whitening discolored teeth. In his spare time he was president of the English Setter Club of Philadelphia.

George Thomas, the author, was interested in growing roses outdoors. The estate hothouses that kept roses on the 19th century table were becoming cumbrous and too expensive to maintain in the age of modernity. His mission was to create hardy new roses that could thrive in a regular garden environment.

He bred his roses at Bloomfield Farm, incidentally now part of Philadelphia’s Morris Arboretum. A crimson flowered wichuriaina seedling he developed in 1914 was named in honor of his friend and colleague, the illustrious dentist.

Most of Thomas’ hybridizing work reached obsolescence pretty quickly. But in the 1950s it was discovered that one of the best and toughest roses to use as a rootstock when grafting was old Dr. Huey. Soon many of the roses for sale in this country went out into the world on Dr. Huey rootstock. This is why it’s still so pervasive in old gardens and cemeteries today.

When the original graft is either cut back too low or dies off, tough Dr. Huey sprouts from the base.

If you have Dr. Huey in your garden and you feel like getting rid of it, don’t feel too guilty. Whoever put it there did so unintentionally. And if you like your Dr. Huey, now that you know its history you can appreciate it even more.

Spirea vanhouttei

13 Sunday May 2012

Posted by in Gardens, heirloom plants, Spirea

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

Once, not that long ago, lived a gardener who thought she knew a lot. She had read a bunch of articles in magazines about exciting new plant introductions, and was eager to explore a world of chartreuse foliage, bold color combinations, and winter interest.

Armed with this knowledge, she began to dismantle her yard, which was in fact pretty boring. The stiff, waxy Euonymous hedges that blocked light into the house went Sayonara, as did the stolid yew hedge in front. Ditto the overgrown Japanese holly bushes that took up large circles of precious real estate.

Feeling cleansed, the gardener went even further and began pulling out almost everything else in the garden. Banished were the boring Rosebay Rhododendrons. A Spirea was easily pried out of the spent soil with most of its roots still attached. Considering this shrub as it lay on the ground, the gardener thought to offer it to a neighbor, who readily took it into her own garden.

A few years later, the gardener had turned that boring, hedgy yard into quite a nice place.

Then she moved. Her new garden had only two landscape features; a crumbling swimming pool in which was growing a number of swamp trees, and a terrarium made of a Chevy Nova filled with bamboo growing up through the underbody and pressed against the inside of the windshield.

Once again she cleared almost everything out of a garden. This time it was the palette of neglect she was dismantling. Poison ivy, porcelain berry, box elder, poke.

The garden was very bare when she was finished.

The neighbor came over, and offered her the old Spirea vanhouttei back. She wanted to put up a chicken run and it was in the way.

The gardener gratefully took repossession of the Spirea. It didn’t look boring to her anymore. She now truly appreciated it; its graceful form, its undemanding character, the beautifully sweet-smelling flower clusters that brought back memories going back to childhood.

Besides being the only mature shrub in her garden, this plant reminded her that sometimes knowledge is not the same thing as understanding.

Ghosts

02 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by in Cemeteries, Columbine, heirloom plants

≈ Leave a Comment

Driving through the country and stopping at old cemeteries a few summers ago, I came across some little columbine seedlings at the edge of an old graveyard someplace in Central Vermont. They must have been mowed just as they were going to flower, because I only saw just one little bloom low down on a plant.

I dug a few out and brought them back to a garden the size of a baby pool I started up there. It houses my cemetery plant collections. For two summers I watched the columbines grow into huge, healthy plants. But I never timed my vacation right to see the flowers in bloom.

Late last fall I dug out one of the now-big plants and drove it across three states back to my garden in Philadelphia.

I planted it in a protected spot that gets a few hours of sunshine, and by late April it was in bloom. Voila.

It seems to be the variety Aquilegia vulgaris var. plena, Double Pink Columbine. I can’t find too much information about it, but the cemetery where I found it didn’t have any graves after about 1908. So it must be an old variety that escaped the grave it was planted on and has been haunting the edges of that pretty little graveyard ever since.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.