Here's looking at you

In this, the season of endings, there are still new beginnings happening in Janet's garden.



My grape-leafed anemone has produced a couple of clutches of flower buds, vaguely reminiscent of alien eyes, but promising to be so much more beautiful. Not that I have any personal experience of staring into alien eyes, you understand. I may be a bit of a science fiction fan, but not to the point of being delusional.

This is another candidate for relocation, as the foliage stays somewhat lower than I expected. In front of some lilies might be good, as the anemone would stay lower than the lily blooms earlier in the season, and mask the less interesting foliage later on.

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Halcyon days

Halcyon is such a wonderful word. It is invariably associated in my mind with the phrase "halcyon days of youth". It's a great word for a garden, too: tranquil, peaceful, joyful. So it's entirely appropriate that this is the name of the first hosta I ever owned. In honour of that fact, I planted another one when I moved into this house. (I do tend to get a little sentimental in my plant choices. They often have connections to former homes or particular people.)

Halcyon is a prize-winning hosta, and there are good reasons for that. Its thick sturdy leaves are slug-resistant and of all the blue hostas, it keeps its blue colour the longest. My picture, I'm afraid, doesn't do it justice. Like almost all hostas, it's tough and uncomplaining, and is happiest with only a little sunlight. The flowers, while unspectacular, are charming and much beloved by bees.

It is sterile however, so it won't set seed. This is an advantage if you don't want volunteers and a disadvantage if you do want them. It is also very slow to establish. In my last house, it took four years to get up to five eyes.

All this makes it sound like a rather placid member of the garden club, but it does have a quiet sense of humour, as I discovered last year. I'd bought a bare root plant by mail this time and I became quite convinced that they had sent me a mini hosta instead. The leaves were much smaller and narrower than I remembered them. I concluded it must be a Blue Cadet, seeing as it was the only mini blue this particular catalogue offered, and labeled all my pictures as such.

Well, it came up with bigger, wider leaves this year and I have since learned that an immature Halcyon does indeed look different. I could almost hear the darn thing snicker as I changed all my pictures back to the Halcyon label, both on my computer and online.

Still, no hard feelings. I'll probably move it to set it to better advantage to prove it.

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Gardening myth: dangerous raindrops

Myth: Don't water during the day, because water droplets on the leaves will focus the sun's rays and burn holes in the leaves.

This one was in the newspaper again last weekend. In print. In the gardening column. *sigh*

OK, let's stop and think a minute. How many of you found holes or burn marks spread over your entire garden last time the sun came out after a summer shower? Lift your hands. ... I thought so. By that logic, virtually every gardener who ever lived should have experienced massive burning at some time or another.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I use magnifying glasses to burn holes in paper, I have to hold the magnifying glass some distance above the paper to get the focus right. Putting the magnifying glass directly on the paper just doesn't work. So, when was the last time you saw water drops suspended in the air above your leaves?

Lesson: just because somebody says it, doesn't necessarily mean it's so.

On the other hand, it's true that it's not a great idea to water in the middle of the day, especially with sprinklers, because evaporation rates will be way up and you'll waste a lot of water. But your leaves will be just fine.

Technorati tag: Gardening myths

Caladium schmaladium!

I have a love/hate relationship with caladiums. The leaves are so cool and so striking, how can you not love them? And I do love them.

I also hate them. Stubborn little blighters!

I say this because the caladium corms won't sprout till they are nice and toasty warm. Now, I don't have all kinds of fancy equipment like bottom heaters to bring the little darlings up to their preferred temperatures, which are definitely significantly warmer than my preferred temperatures. There's no way I'm cranking up the thermostat to sub-tropical conditions for their sake.

Why don't you stick them on top of the fridge, you ask? Because it's you asking, I'll answer politely, instead of growling in frustration. My fridge is new, so it doesn't generate the heat the older models do, so parking caladiums on top of the fridge is a no go for me, and probably for most people nowadays. (If you've been wondering why you weren't getting the promised results for your caladiums or heat-loving seeds, now you know why. Your fridge is too efficient.)

I pot them up early just the same, hoping against hope. I put them in a sunny window, thinking the solar energy might persuade them. No dice. Weeks go by and nothing happens. So I determined to give up on the stupid things. Yeah right. Like I am going to throw out something living that has a chance. The last little corm that had survived past abuses got shoved unceremoniously into a pot with a bunch of other things and forgotten about.

When I got back from my vacation IN LATE JULY, two bright red leaves were there to greet me. That's how long it took. Sheesh! Why do I even bother?

Because those red leaves are sooooo pretty. And when you stop and think about it, shoving it into a pot with other things and forgetting about it is not that great an effort, now is it?

Technorati tag: Caladiums

Garden portraits for September 4

Ernesto's clouds and rain have not yet pulled out, so I won't do much labouring in the garden in honour of Labour Day. So here are a few of last week's sunnier photos.



Bloom on potted hibiscus.



Burgundy pansy



Red Flash caladium

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I am a heartless gardener

Literally. And here is the proof.

In my mini-frenzy of cleaning up the other day, I started whacking back the shrivelled brown leaves on my bleeding heart. Then I said, "Why not?" and whacked back the yellow ones. It looked so pitiful after that, I just went ahead and cut off the remaining ones that still had a slight flush of chlorophyll left in them.

Which left me with two gaping holes in the same bed. Fighting the urge to plant something else in those holes wasn't easy, so I had to use the gardener's equivalent of a nicotine patch.





The patio is looking pretty bare, but that's OK. One of the reasons I fill so many pots in the spring is for back-up like this. Even if many of them have been a bit of a disappointment this year, they still provide a few leaves and colour. And help me curb the urge to put in plants that would just get overrun next year. You fight your addiction any way you can.

Previous post on the topic of Bleeding hearts, Container gardening

Technorati tags: Potted plants, Bleeding hearts

It felt like moving all of Siberia!

Even the queen of procrastinators eventually gets off her butt and moves. I could no longer stand the dishevelled clutter of the back bed and the gaping hole left by the removal of the overbearing, white fly-infested greater celandine in the side bed. You do get the connection, right? Too much stuff in one bed, big hole in another? I can connect dots too, and the obvious remedy was to move something from one place to the other. I'd been putting it off because August heat is not prime plant-moving season. Gardeners (this makes it sound like it's not just me, so humour me) are in a heat-induced stupor and it's hard on the plants. Which means gardeners don't have to confront their laziness, because the welfare of the plants comes first, right?

A couple of weeks of cooler weather was beginning to make that argument wear thin though, even to my own ears, so I seized the day and the shovel and sallied forth. I have determined not to buy any more perennials until the moving issue is settled, so the empty corner had to be filled with plants on hand. Not a hardship.

A Siberian iris that was supposed to be Caesar's Brother but which was inexplicably taller and lighter than the others (and naturally, at the front of the bed) was a natural candidate to be moved, so I dug the baby up. This wasn't easy. The soil was dry and dense (my lawn had cracks in it, as I realized during this whole procedure) so I had to lever the clump out from both sides with the shovel, through masses of deadnettle and Rozeanne geraniums. The clump just went into giggles of derision when I tried it with the trowel.

Once the clump was pried out of the ground, I split it up, just by cracking it apart with my bare hands.



Then I trimmed the plants back. This helps prevent dehydration, as the roots are in some shock after this kind of treatment and can't draw moisture up as well.



I popped them into planting holes augmented with sheep manure and bonemeal, then watered them in well.

In front of them went a tiny PG hydrangea I had grown in a pot from a piece that had broken off the bigger one I planted in the front this spring. And in front of THAT went a Patriot hosta, well chewed by slugs and totally overwhelmed by its overbearing neighbours in its previous location. I finished the job by sprinkling some bloodmeal around to keep the squirrels away, a necessary measure in this neck of the woods.



I want to boast a bit. That big chunk of bare dirt is uncovered primarily because the royal fern nearby lost most of its leaves as collateral damage in my war against white flies. I SUCCESSFULLY RESISTED THE URGE TO PLANT SOMETHING IN THAT BARE DIRT! This is significant, because one of my besetting sins is to overplant. I hate to see an empty space.

It took some compensatory measures, but more on that tomorrow.

Previous post on the topic of Siberian iris

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