Monthly Archives: June 2012

Growing jasmine in the north

29 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by in fragrance, jasmine

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Extremely fragrant plants have always interested me. Partly this is for historical reasons. I love reading about how fragrant flowers were soaked in wine, stuffed into songbirds before roasting, made into poultices, chaplets, unguents, syrups, and otherwise utilized in concoctions many centuries ago.

I also love that fragrance is an entirely other realm beyond beauty. Some plants have one quality or the other, and a few have both. Jasmine is one of these plants. There are a few varieties which are hardy in the Northern garden, and these are not fragrant. The amazing ones have to be brought indoors in the winter, where they don’t exactly thrive, at least not for me. But spring comes just in time, and the withered plants are sent outdoors where they recover, and begin to bloom by the end of June.

The easiest and showiest is the Jasmine pictured above, which I’m going to call fragrant jasmine, because that’s how it’s referred to in the White Flower Farm catalog. I can’t figure out the Latin name, but maybe someone can help me out with this. Polyanthum?

But my favorite is the fussy Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose double ivory blossoms smell like jasmine tea. This image shows it just about to open, and I would have liked to get an image of it in full bloom but that would have meant postponing my vacation, which I considered, or bringing this large plant with me in the car, which I also considered. Reason eventually prevailed.

The most fascinating is the night blooming jasmine. Its tubular-shaped green flowers smell exactly like nothing all day long, but once night falls the fragrance is so strong one small branch can perfume a room, one plant a whole house. For some people this is too much fragrance, but not for me.

Crop failure

19 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Gardens, poppies

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I’ve never been one for growing my own food, but this year I thought to put an unattractive and awkwardly located chunk of the yard somehow to use, and so we built raised beds. The plan was to join the legions of urban homesteaders that have already discovered the joy of the family vegetable plot.

I planted lettuce, which we ate. It was good. But somewhere in the second month we lost steam on the project, and then yesterday as I walked by I took a long look for the first time in awhile.

The plot is all flowers. I don’t know how it happened.

I had planted a few nasturtiums and some marigolds, because I think of them as vegetable garden flowers. Calendula flowers are edible, in theory. The bread seed poppies sounded like something fun to try, as did another packet of mixed variety poppies which I threw down. The antique sweet peas grow on a trellis. Since they don’t take up any space they don’t count.

Someplace underneath all this stuff is a row of unthinned carrots. The rosemary is still alive. Four unstaked tomatoes seem to be having a fine time, their indiscriminate sprawling side branches fraternizing with the blossoms.

Not for the first time, I failed as a vegetable gardener. But I did accidentally rediscover how much fun it is to grow flowers from seed.

Wearing white in the garden

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Floral design, Gardens

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A friend and I each have new gardens this year, and we’ve been going on some plant hunting trips together to complete our visions for the gardens we want.

She’s a minimalist for which every plant is deliberately chosen to fit with a predetermined design scheme of blue and white. She’s careful and not swayed by the impulse to make a purchase unless the plant is precisely what she’s looking for, down to the exact named cultivar.

And I, on the other hand, like it all. I’m not much of an editor when it comes to flowers. the only thing I’ve ripped out and disposed of recently were some carnations from the dollar table which opened the cheapest of cherry red.

Except for those red carns, there’s room for everybody here.

What I’ve noticed in designing is that very colorful and eclectic gardens look best if a little white is woven into the mix. An occasional pale bloom seems to pull together a garden, and adds a harmonizing effect. Surprisingly, white flowers actually seem to dial up the intensity and brightness of everything else.

This is true with flower arranging as well. Some crisp white filler flowers will make the rest of a bouquet even more effective.

I don’t love white- it’s not on my walls, not in my clothes closet- but I’ve come to appreciate its importance in the garden. And for an otherwise unrestrained gardener like myself, its calming presence is a good influence.

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