gardening with nature

I’d planned to make this post a paeon to more of the weeds I enjoy (I’ve already gone on at length about chickweed and miner’s lettuce).

But, as so often happens, the post decided to go in another direction.

I identified my first weed, henbit, pretty easily, as I do every year. I seem to have a block where the name of henbit is concerned, though I did somehow remember it’s a Lamium.

I looked it up where I usually do, an ancient pamphlet from an herbicide company, identifying common weeds.

Just to check (the pamphlet pictures weren’t all that good to start with, and a few decades on the shelf hasn’t helped) I went online and found not only henbit but another weed whose identity had been puzzling me. It turned out to be Geranium carolinianum, Carolina geranium.  Now I’d identified two of them, I toyed with the notion of just leaving the mystery weed out, and doing a post on henbit and Carolina geranium, plus a couple of others I know.

The U of Arkansas weed index is a very sensible grid, easy to use: thumbnail photo with common name, scientific name, weed type, and life cycle (whether it’s annual or perennial, and what its season is).  Since it’s not very long, it’s quickly searchable, and you can print a .pdf version if you want. It does have a lot of the most common weeds you’d find in a garden, a sort of improved version of my old herbicide pamphlet.

I’d found two of my nameless plants, but I was obsessed with the notion of identifying the little white-flowered weed.  I’d  vaguely thought it was shepherd’s purse. A close look at the shepherd’s purse photo here proved that it definitely wasn’t: the leaves were the wrong shape and size, both on the flowering stems, where they were thin and vaguely spade-shaped

and at the bottom rosettes, where they were rounded and no more than 1/4 inch (a little over half a centimeter) wide, as you can see in the picture at the top of this post. And the flower heads were tiny clusters, not the spikes of shepherd’s purse.

I was on a roll, now; I thought I’d see what other university weed identification sites had to offer. Since I live in northern California, I thought I’d check out the Davis weed i.d. site first. Weeds are usually imports that spread themselves generously - that’s why they’re weeds - so it’s not as vital to look for a university that’s in your area as it might be for, say, tree identification. Weeds are mostly associated with agriculture and gardens and other places where humans have set a heavy foot. A great many of the commonest weeds are Europeans, who, like their human counterparts, set foot on this country and decided to take it over where they could.

But I know that UC Davis has one of the best ag departments in the country, and it seemed a good bet that if there was a weed common in Northern California, they’d have it on their site, whether it was native or not.

I knew it was likely that my weed was an import, and I knew for a fact that imported weeds can do well in California. My horticulture teacher told of one of the more successful weed invasions. I had always assumed that the Himalayan blackberries you see all over northern California (not to mention large tracts of Washington) were a pestiferous native. (I never understood why they were called “Himalayan”, and I think it’s an insult to the Himalayas.) Himalayan blackberries are the huge thorny tentacley shrubs that take over entire fields and can cover dirt roads in a few years.  We have special methods of weed control just for them.

But, my horticulture teacher said, he’d found  a book published in the 1940s that discussed Californian blackberries, and the kind we call Himalayan, it said, were rarely-found imports. Just goes to show how far a weed can go in a few decades. Removing the triffid-like tangles of “Himalayan” blackberries was a business opportunity by the 1970s.

Anyway, I headed over to the University of California Davis site, to see what I could see.

The UC Davis website is a much more sophisticated setup than the Arkansas one. It asks questions on a little multiple-choice questionnaire to guide you to your plant, kind of like an automated key. Knowing some botanical terms, such as leaf arrangements and venation type, is useful, but there are also questions anyone can answer: what kind of lanscape you found it in, what color the flowers are, whether it has prickles or hair. They remind you that a few right answers are better than a lot of “I’m not sure” ones.

Then you get a selection of images that might match your plant. If it had worked better for me, I’d be more enthusiastic about it, because it’s much handier than just going through a list and hoping you’ll find the right thing.

But it didn’t work for me. I got Italian arum, which doesn’t look anything like my weed. (Can anybody out there identify it yet?)

Next post, the story continues: On the Trail of the Mystery Weed

As my geek complement to Daffodil Planter’s Daffodil Blogarama and the many other daffodil posts flashing yellow, pale pink, and white over the web, I’m offering a peek into the daffodil world of a hundred years ago.

Although maybe it’s not so geeky, since it’s mostly concentrated on sex. Daffodil sex, that is. Though a man of the cloth, the author of the “Daffodils” book in the British Present-Day Gardening series, Reverend Joseph Jacob,  has a passion for breeding. And, even more shockingly,  he thinks everyone should share it. “This fascinating pursuit, hobby, or business, to give it names which are appropriate to the different ends in view, is one which I advise every Daffodil cultivator to take up; whether it be for pleasure or with a view to business it is equally alluring and interesting.” (pg. 39) He talks of going from town to town in England, lecturing at daffodil societies, and how the members hung on his lips, asking questions about do-it-yourself breeding.

I wonder if the national convention of the American Daffodil Society will have any similar seminars? These days, we think of daffodil breeding as something only specialists can do, with special equipment and large fields and greenhouses. But, Jacobs says,  all we really need are labels and notebooks, plus little boxes for storing and carrying pollen (it’s viable for about two weeks, if you keep it dry and clean in a loosely covered box) and a camel’s hair brush, gently moistened in the mouth so the pollen will stick to it.

‘Minnow’, a miniature unavailable in Jacob’s time

That’s all the physical equipment that’s required. The rest of it lies in knowledge, and patience.

One of the bits of knowledge we need to try our hand at our own hybrids is knowing when the time is ripe for sex. “…the best time for cross-fertilisation is between 10 A.M and 4 P.M….that in cold and sunless weather the operations should be repeated more than once…that the pollen brushes must be kept very clean, and all the pollen of one variety carefully removed before the same brush is used for any other variety; that it is not found necessary in practice to cover the fertilised bloom in any way with glass or muslin; and that, the seed-bearer should be growing in a  good open position.” (pg. 44-45)

But the deeper knowledge that’s required, the one all those daffodil societies were swarming around Jacob hoping to get, is the knowledge of family background. Some daffodils are good pollinators, some are not.  Since most of the daffodils of a hundred years ago are lost or obscure, I’m going to save his complete lists for the very end of this post, in the hope that some of you have grown the ones I don’t know about, or will be able to point out sources for them.

From his list of “Potent Pollen-Parents” (I told you it was about sex), only  a few remain that are available today: all the poet varieties, W.P. Milner,  and King Alfred. (King Alfred, as I’ve explained before,   is an antique daffodil that’s actually hard to find. If you read the fine type, you will see that below most ‘King Alfred’ blurbs is “King Alfred type”, which basically means any yellow trumpet daffodil that looks more or less like King Alfred and is cheap in production. They may not have the same pollen potency as their predecessor.)

King Alfred is also on the list of “Good Seed-Bearers”, as are most of the poet varieties. Golden Spur, another good seeder, is available through Old House Gardens, as is Lily Langtry. (I’ve grown Golden Spur, a simple yellow trumpet that makes the modern ones look a bit as if they’re on steroids; I have yet to make the acquaintance of the divine Mrs. Langtry.)

Of the “Shy Seeders” I recognize only Maximus (also available at OHG) and Empress, a daffodil I have admired but never bought due to price (I save my most extravagant bulb purchases for tulips, it seems. I might as well admit my prejudice; I have favorite children in the garden).

Amateur breeders today may have a harder time finding this kind of information, as breeding has become something specialized and hard in our minds. It’s making me wonder if a little diligent research among breeders might be a good idea.

But research won’t give me the final attribute I need for breeding: patience. “The one great drawback that can be urged against [breeding] is the time that must necessarily elapse between the seed-sowing and the harvest. From four to six or seven years is a long time to wait for results, but, as the oft-repeated quotation from old Philip Miller (1733) says, ‘After the first five years are past, if there be seeds sown every year, there will be annually a succession of flowers to show themselves; so that there will be a continual expectation, which will take off the tediousness which, during the first five years, might be very troublesome to some persons…’ ” (pg. 39-40)

Is it any wonder that I love old garden books? Where in modern literature would we find someone urging us, urging anyone, to go out in the garden with a camel’s hair brush and start our own hybrids?  Even if it takes seven years. And why not follow these old urgings? Many things have changed in the last hundred years, but, as a look at the emerging spring around us will show, sex still goes on in the same old way.

‘Colleen Bawn’ - an antique now, but still in the future in Jacob’s day

Reverend Joseph Jacob’s Lists of Breeding Daffodils

(I don’t know what the ordering system for these lists is; clearly, not alphabetical. Maybe order of bloom time?)

List of Thirty Good Seed-Bearers:

Duke of Bedford

Lady Margaret Boscawen

Minnie Hume

King Alfred

Mrs. R. Sydenham

Madame de Graaff

Weardale Perfection

Firebrand

Judge Bird

W.B. Hartland

Oriflamme

Most of the Poet varieties

Emperor

Henry Irving

Golden Spur

Pallidus Praecox

P.R. Barr

Eyebright

Glory of Nordwijk

Bernardino

Acme

Golden Bell

Alert

Mrs. Walter Ware

Princess Mary

Mrs. Langtry

Albicans

Evangeline

Lord Muncaster

Decora

List of Shy Seeders

Empress

Horsfieldii

Glory of Leiden

Homespun

Maximus

Sir Watkin

Gloria Mundi

Flora Wilson

Crown Prince

Duchess of Westminster

Autocrat

Potent Pollen-Parents

King Alfred

Maximus

Eyebright

Emperor

Weardale Perfection

Circlet

Madame de Graaff

W.P. Milner

All the Poet varieties

Lulworth

Castile

Poetarum (for its colour)

As the doctor stole nearer to Mary’s bed…he discovered the two sturdy little green heads pushing themselves above the brown earth….

‘I wonder if they-feel it so hard-to struggle up-as I,’ said Mary.

The doctor came close and bent over the pot. A small electric bedside light, shaded from Mary’s eyes, focused its rays on the two little green heads.

‘They’re not struggling at all. Nature’s gently pushing them up. When she’s ready–she’ll push you.’

Foursquare, Grace S. Richmond, pg. 197 (a little bit altered by me)

It’s been raining a lot lately. Today, it even snowed.

I believe we should always be grateful for rain. Water is wealth, and safety from fires, and no plant grows without at least some of its quenching force.

But I have to admit grey day after grey day is getting me down. So one rainy day lately, I picked up an old book I have around the house, and in it I found this passage about a pot of two tulips by a sickbed. I thought: I’d like a pot of tulips in my own house. Just to remind me that spring is coming.

I didn’t think I could actually have one, though. I like bulbs in big pots at least 18 inches (about 48 cm) across. Unless they’re my precious antique tulip bulbs, each of which gets its own pot.

And then there’s the unsavory fact that I’ve never successfully forced a bulb. My hyacinths linger in the cupboard under the sink in their bulb glasses, sulkily spouting a few fitful half-submerged stubby blooms, or simply rotting. My carefully-cultured indoor narcissus bloom - about the same time the ones outdoors do. Sometimes later.

So I’d kind of given up on the idea of bulbs indoors. And that wasn’t what was in my mind as I went to my outdoor bulb pots, poking around to see what was up, and what looked as if it were going to flower this year.

But there, completely forgotten by me, was a plain black plastic pot I’d planted with four leftover ‘Golden Melody’ tulips, the ones that didn’t fit in the big pots. Even though I’d bought a hundred of them, I wasn’t going to throw them away-and in my neighborhood, planting in the ground constitutes throwing them away. If rot doesn’t get them, usually the gophers do. Tulip bulbs are like hot french fries for gophers.

Four tulip noses* were poking out just above the soil, sampling their first breath of spring air. I picked up the pot. It was just the size to try indoors, and I could put it in one of my ceramic cachepots. That is, I could do that if they hadn’t all chipped from being left out in the big freeze last December.

They hadn’t. I found a gold-yellow one, and put it on my kitchen table with the tulips in.

In the next week, I found out what a pleasure it is to really watch bulbs grow close up. I’d thought I was doing that outside; when bulbs are going, I check them at least every few days to see how they’re evolving. I kneel on the ground. I look at them from different angles. And when I photograph them, I find myself looking at them in even more ways.

But nothing beats living a few feet away from a growing bulbs. First, their shoots came up with astonishing rapidity; in a few days, they were inches taller than their kindred, out in the cold. I got to watch the whole show, the unfurling of the tight nose into a cylinder of leaves

which opens out to allow the green bud to slowly rise on its stalk. Its lips get tinged with color and then they part, letting out the petals in an explosion of yellow, the exact same yellow as the trumpets of my ‘Dutch Master’ daffodils, blooming outside by the door.

One tepal** even did that delightful and typical tulip thing: it sported into exuberant green feathering.

Tulips seem to enjoy changing themselves; if you grow them long enough, you will see one tulip out of a batch breaking away from the others with its own variation of colors and patterns. They have the verve of individualism. They’re not afraid to try something new.

Each day I look at my pot of tulips in yellow flower, thrusting up on sturdy stems unlike the weak, staked ones from the florist. I see them blooming in a place no tulip ever thought to grow. I look at them and see the history of a Mediterranean wildflower that was stolen by northerners and introduced into eugenic breeding programs, its looks changed out of all recognition over the centuries, until a small part of its descendants came to me in a box that crossed an ocean and a continent.

I look at them and I think: yes. Spring will come.

*OK, confession time: the photo is not of that particular pot. Those of you who count will have noticed that. They’re other tulip noses I photographed that day.

**Tepals are a name for petals and sepals which look the same. Three of the tulip’s “petals” are actually sepals, while three are true petals. The layer of sepals is outside the layer of petals, and in many flowers the sepals are green and of a different texture from the petals. But in some flowers, like tulips, the sepals morph into a form so like the petals that it’s hard to tell them apart. I learned this in horticulture class so I just had to put it somewhere. I never cease to be amazed at how plants tweak themselves into so many colors and shapes.

We’ve received a letter from Sylvia on a bulb I know very little about - snowdrops. And it explains why my few spasmodic attempts to grow them have failed.

Pomona,

Snowdrops are a common flower in the UK; I don’t mean the hundreds of expensive varieties with very little difference, that galanthophiles (collectors of snowdrops) love. I mean our single snowdrop Galanthus nivalis, which is found in hedgerows, woods, and gardens. Apparently snowdrops were introduced to Britain in the dim and distant past and naturalised clumps are a sign that there has been occupation at sometime in the last 1,000 years (more or less depending on what you are reading).

My first memory of snowdrops is on our farm, where I lived as a child, the wood on a small hill was covered in snowdrops. I wonder who lived there and when - no sign of occupation now. Snowdrops will always conjure up the memory of my childhood and that wood, now gone. One of the owners after us, dug them up and sold them! One day I will go back to see if just a few survived, you never know, snowdrops are survivors. Snowdrops increase by seed as well as producing new bulbs as offsets which is why they spread very gently over time.

Fast forward a lot of years to my own garden. I buy snowdrops ‘in the green’ at this time of year, they are dug from the field and posted, this way the bulbs do not dry out. I am not sure why you can buy dry bulbs because their success rate if very low, less than 10% in my experience. The galanthophiles like to transplant in June after the leaves have died down. I do find that bulbs take a while to settle, the first year after planting I will get a few flowers, but the year after the clumps will start expanding.

They like shade and moist soil, which is why they are often found in woodland. They also thrive in woodlands because they don’t get disturbed. I find they don’t like being moved (although I have seen lots of advice to divide them each year), so I am careful where I plant them - I don’t want to dig them up each year. I have snowdrops under a shrub, where they are planted with hellebores and pulmonaria and either side of a new (2008/9) path. On one side I put all the snowdrops I had to move when we took a hedge out, these are flowering sparsely this year and on the other side of the path I have just planted 100 bulbs.

I have one other variety of snowdrop, the double form Galanthus nivalis f. pleniflorus  ‘Flore Pleno’. These are planted under a small weeping willow, Salix caprea ‘Kilmarnock’, they are completely shaded in the summer, not ideal, but they manage to flower each year. The double form are lovely but do not have the memories or magic of the single form, for me anyway. These are really winter flowering coming out at the end of January just as we are often having some of our coldest weather but as the days are beginning to lengthen and the sun gets higher. They are the first to flower in the new year and they shine aainst the dark earth in my garden but they are also seen in lawns and with green leaves and ferns in the hedgerows and banks.

Galanthus nivalis f. pleniflorus  ‘Flore Pleno’

Do you have somewhere to plan snowdrops? Somewhere cool, shady and moist - where they won’t mind the heat of summer. I think in your climate they would need to be slightly moist. Similar conditions to your moss bank, they look lovely growing out of moss! The leaves of G. nivalis are not too big, so though they are around until May, they are not obtrusive. They are happy in pots as well, this is how galanthophiles often grow theirs. I have never grown them in pots, I want them in the garden where I can see their ‘beacons of hope’ or along the roadsides where the little white flowers stand out reminding me that spring will soon be here.

Best wishes,

Sylvia

Last year, I tried an experiment with Iris danfordiae; I planted it deeper. (If you want to read more about why I did that, look here.)

The idea was to see if this would make my Iris danfordiae more perennial. I’d love any flower that comes up in February. But the tininess, the scent, and the detailed markings  (a landing strip for pollinators) make Iris danfordiae even more desirable to me. (I’ve elaborated on why I love it, and how I use it in the house and garden, here.)

While Iris danfordiae is one of the cheaper bulbs you can buy (if you buy in quantity especially), I have kind of a thing about getting bulbs to perennialize. Yes, it has something to do with plant-greed: I don’t think I’ll get away with pretending otherwise. I’d love to have scads and scads of different kinds of bulbs, and I can’t go buying them all every year.

But it also has to do with something else. If I can understand a bulb well enough to get it to come back every year, to come back and flower and make more bulbs, then I’m really starting to understand that bulb. (It’s the same with people: knowing what makes them come back, what makes them flourish, what makes them spread themselves - those are ways of really understanding someone.)

So, for reasons sacred and profane, I had dreams. Dreams of masses of returning Iris danfordiae spreading themselves out and becoming a permanent feature in my garden.

Are these dreams coming true?

Well, maybe. And then again, maybe not. I’m not sure.

The Iris danfordiae are coming out maybe a little later than they usually do, and there don’t seem to be too many of them.  They seem to be coming up differently, too. They always have short stems, but it seems to me that the deep burial has made them sit on top of the soil like a decapitated flower floating on thick water.

On the other hand, we’ve had a lot of rain for the past few weeks, so the dim light could have shortened the stems. Rain could also have slowed everything down. Maybe what I’m seeing now are only the first brave volunteers. Maybe in a week or two, I’ll see scads of bright golden Iris danfordiae all over the place.

And maybe I’ll just see these few vanguard flowers, while the rest meditate, deep, deep in the soil.