Category — Bulbs

 Sylvia (from England) sent this letter for us to share.  My friend Ed tells me that changing author names is not something WordPress allows you to do, so I’m just announcing that the photos and the rest of the text in this post are all by Sylvia. 

Dear Pomona

December and January is the hardest time for me to have flowers in the garden. There are a few hangers on like these yellow Banksia roses and I have some winter bedding like this viola I grew from seed but the gem in the garden is Iris unguicularis Mary Barnard. I bought this plant in March 2007 and was delighted that it flowered last winter from January to March.  This winter it started flowering in November. It will only have one or two flowers at a time but it has flowered continuously with only short breaks.

I had seen this plant in other gardens and coveted it for a while - don’t we all do that! But placing it in my garden was not easy.  It requires a sunny, dry place in poor soil and as it is winter flowering it didn’t seem much point growing it if I couldn’t see it from a window. In winter the only time I get to see the garden is as I have breakfast and at weekends, usually looking out of window over looking my tiny back garden - so this would be the best spot for the Iris. Planting it in this spot was a risk this spot doesn’t get sun all day, it is shaded by the house.  It is helped that it is backed by a wall but there are other plants on the sunny side of it as you can see from this view. In the right corner is one of my hellebores getting ready to bloom.

It wasn’t until I looked at the photo that I realised it had been eaten, not a perfect flower but beautiful colour and I can’t see any imperfections from my window. The leaves are rather tatty looking but it is forgiven because of the winter flowers.

Can I take this opportunity to wish all my blogging friends across the world a very Happy New Year.

Best wishes Sylvia (England)

Sylvia (from England) emailed me about her black-and-white poppy, which had lost track of the season and was blooming with cyclamen. Since black and white poppies have been on my want list for a long time, I asked to see photos. Then I thought: why not ask her for a guest post?  Here it is.  PB

Dear Pomona,

This is a photo of my poppy ‘Black and White’ (Papaver orientale ‘Black and White’) flowering this week, it hid its bud near to the ground around a pot (which has tulip bulbs in, waiting for spring) and managed to avoid the two spells of frost we have had, to delight me with its November flower.  This poppy often has a flower in the September but never this late in the year.

The second photo was taken 3 days later when the flower was more open. The poppy is called black and white for the “black” blotches in the centre, but they are dark burgundy which matches some white cyclamen growing near by. It wasn’t possible to get a nice photo of them both together.

Normally this poppy flowers at the beginning of June - looking through my photos I found this photograph from 2006. This part of my back garden looks nothing like this now, the grass has been replaced with gravel and the bed is much bigger but the poppy is still there as well as the white and green variegated iris. This Iris was inherited and is a favourite of mine because it always looks good with the other plants around it, even when not flowering. The poppy is a fleeting beauty, as are the blue iris flower, but I always look forward to seeing them in summer.
Best wishes Sylvia (England)

 P.S. Sylvia– my apologies. I couldn’t find where to change the author name on this post, which is all yours. PB

One of my garden correspondents from the UK writes that Prince Charles has given up on planting tens of thousands of tulips every year along the drive at–I forget which dwelling. Instead, he is substituting fritillaries, which come back year after year.

What a lot of people don’t know is, that if you plant the right varieties, tulips are very likely to come back year after year. Most of the ones that come back are species tulips (types that are selected from the wild and cultivated), so they don’t look like the typical florist’s tulip. But they can be appreciated on their own merits.

There’s a caveat here, though: no matter what variety of tulips you plant, if they don’t have good drainage (especially in summer, when they would have a dry spell in their native haunts), tulips will rot instead of flowering.

That taken care of, here are categories of tulips with a good return rate.

Fosterianas or “Emperor”  - Purissima, or White Emperor, is the tulip at the head of this post; it’s the size of a typical garden tulip.  One of my tulip books says they had a stand that lasted twenty years; I had a stand for several years, until I dug it up; they didn’t like the new location as much.  ‘Sweetheart’ and ‘Apricot Emperor’ show every sign of lasting as long, but ‘Flaming Purissima’ went down for the count after one season with me (twice). ‘Red Emperor’ is a selection of the wild species, so it should be persistent–but I haven’t grown it.

Batalinii  - The tulips above are the ‘Apricot Jewel’ variety–there are several of these tall, species-like tulips in various shades of yellow, peach, and rose. In full sun they are about as tall as most garden tulips, but the flowers and stems are much slimmer. In semi-shade they flop rather appealingly on whatever other foliage you have going on.

Greggi - These are short tulips with mottled foliage and many varieties of color in the rose/pink/white/yellow spectrum. They bloom in tulip midseason.

Kaufmannia - These early bloomers are also known as water lily tulips, because their short-stemmed flowers open out like stars. The flowers are disproportionately large for their stem size, and come in various hybrids in the red-and-white spectrum.

Cluisana-type  -  A real clusiana is hard to find, but it’s easy (and cheap) to get ‘Lady Jane’, below. These trouble-free tulips are about ten inches high, and last well in the garden or vase.

Be sure to check out the species section of your bulb catalogue (or nursery) for more possibilities. Species bulbs are usually cheap, so it doesn’t cost much to experiment a little.

Some other older garden varieties of tulips seem to come back well, too: ‘Prinses Irene’ and ‘Insulinde’ have been good repeaters for me. ‘Crème Upstar’ was for a while, then petered out.  If anyone’s had good results getting other varieties of tulips to come back, I think a lot of us would like to hear about it–maybe even Prince Charles.

After many years of trying, it’s happened: I’ve gotten flowers from Gladiolus callianthus ‘Murielae’ (also known as Acidanthera bicolor, Gladiolus murielae, and Abyssinian glad).

I’ve always loved the idea of graceful species glads, and, as my readers may have noticed, I favor plants with fragrance. I’m also a bit of a sucker for white flowers. Another point in their favor: these glads are inexpensive (they have been in cultivation a long time, and are probably easy to propagate), which is a nice change from the species plants I usually covet.

The problem in the past has been lack of sun; the leaves have always come up in nice thin spears (a bit thinner than hybrid glads), but nary a bloom. This year, some trees were cut, there was more sun available: I gave them another try. And, while most of them still show no signs of blooming, I’m out-of-proportion grateful for the ones that did.

Niels Ploughman, at Roses in Gardens, kept my hope alive. He emailed me the info that, in his Danish garden, they don’t flower until October. When I read up on them, I discovered the reason for the long season: they originally hail from tropical Africa. Sierra Leone is their westernmost reach, and they (and their close relatives) stretch as far east as Ethiopia (which is probably what gave them the name “Abyssinian glads”).

I thought that in Northern California they might come on a bit earlier, but as September and October both passed with leaves bare of buds, I began to feel I was just cursed: I’d been trying to get Gladiolus callianthus ‘Murielae’ to bloom for years, and they just never did.

In November, I was walking by them with my mind on something else and suddenly I noticed: there was something white. It was a bloom. I put my nose to it, and got a whiff that reminded me of gardenia or jasmine, only lighter. Finally, I was smelling a Gladiolus callianthus ‘Murielae’ (or whatever it’s called)  in my garden.

Out on my front porch, belatedly cutting down dead things, I had another revelation: ‘Freckles’ clematis, finally blooming.

Just as Tony Avent says in the Plant Delights catalogue, it kind of went quiet through most of the summer. Not dormant, exactly; it leafed out in April, and the leaves stayed on. It just didn’t do anything. Didn’t grow, didn’t flower: just stayed.

In late September or early October, I noticed the vines were starting to work their way up the doorway trellis. Good, I thought, at least I didn’t kill them, and they’re getting in some growth for next year. While Avent says that they don’t flower until October, mine, continuing the late-arrival trend, have just started in mid-November. (For those of you who read my last post: no, I haven’t been brainwashed by Tony Avent (if you’re a gardener, wouldn’t you want it to be brain-dirtied?), and I don’t plant to take him on as my guru. He does provide really good information, though, and he makes me laugh.)

The flowers swing freely in breezes, as I can attest from photographing this one, and are fragrant in a way that reminds me of orange blossoms, only  a little softer, and with a hint of freshness that might almost be lemon. (The scent is pronounced in the mornings, but seems to fade out by evening.) I have inhaled other fragrant clematis (clematises?), but I had no idea a clematis could smell like this. I’m not sure if I knew it was fragrant when I got it, but now I feel it was a doubly good choice for my front-door arch: fall-flowering and fragrant.

I didn’t know ‘Freckles’ was from the Balearic islands until I read Avent,  but that’s another sign that it was meant to be: in my late teens, I spent several magical weeks in the Beleares, wandering around gathering wild rosemary (some of it grew over my head; some of it was scrubby and knee-high) near a crumbling Roman tower, walking the dirt roads with other foreigners, and drinking plenty of very cheap Spanish wine and that local liquor called yerbias, deep green from the herbs that were steeped in it.

These are only a few flowers, but they still give me the bubbling-up sensation of bringing an old memory into a new world, of realizing a dream: that intoxication all gardeners long for.

“A thrill that I have never known…for you are mine at last.”

References:

Plant Delight catalogue 2008

Brent and Becky’s Summer Bulb catalogue 2008

Niels Ploughman at Roses in Gardens (he has been on sabbatical lately, but there is a huge stockpile of information-packed posts and luscious photos awaiting you there).

Peter Goldblatt, Gladiolus in Tropical Africa, Timber Press, 1996

“At Last” by Jack Keller and Jay Booker,  from  Gene Watson’s site

I just got my order from Plant Delights, which offers a desset cart full of the finest. *

Plant Delights is not your usual type of nursery. Based in the Juniper Level Botanic Gardens in North Carolina, they specialize in the fine and unusual: plants from small breeders, and species or heirloom plants gathered by themselves or horticultural friends and propagated by the nursery.

Since they’re in North Carolina, they also specialize in plants that can take a really hot summer. The fuchsia in the header picture is “Sanihanf’, a heat-tolerant fuchsia from the Suntory breeding program in Japan.

As Tony Avent truly says, the usual version of “heat-tolerant” in catalogues means, “the plant will tolerate more than one day above 90 degrees F (32 degrees C) before croaking.” I love fuchsias, but I’d given up on them; the corpses were piling too high. When I read this, I thought: this is someone who really gardens, someone who knows how I’ve been led on by other catalogues. Maybe I’ll try again.

The true test will come next summer, of course. But meanwhile, my plants arrived in gorgeous shape, a good sign.

Plant Delights plants are bigger than most mail-order nursery plants. They are also more expensive; this is not a commercial nursery, and they don’t deal in the quantities that make plants cheap. Their mission is to get the plants out, so the commercial nurseries will adopt them and make them widely available.

The other plants I got were: Gladiolus dalenii ‘Bolivian Peach‘-found on a roadside near Bolivia, NC.;  Lilium brownii ‘Szechuan Splendor’, a species collected at 6700 feet (2042 meters) on sun-baked cliffs in Sichuan Province; Alocasia wentii, a bronze-leaved winter-hardy alocasia from the mountains of New Guinea; and  Aloe polyphylla,  a spiral-form aloe which is also hardy in our winters (I’ve killed  a few aloes, too. Most of them just don’t like frost. This one is from the high mountains of South Africa, and is reputed to take it.).

Plant Delights is in zone 7b, so most of their plants are extra-safe in my zone-8 garden. That’s nice, because most of the exotics I desire and order tend to be just a little bit risky;: zone-9 plants, liable to disappear in the night.

There are much hardier plants in this catalogue, down to at least zone 4; they collect growing information from their friends and customers in much colder places, and encourage experimenting with zones. Many of these plants are so new to horticulture that your own research can expand zone knowledge. A contribution to gardening, and yet another justification for spending money on plants.

In case you’re wondering why I’m ordering plants now, it’s because fall is the best season to plant perennials in hot-summer areas. Our spring lasts either three months (if you start from when the grass gets green and the first wild things start sprouting) or three weeks (if you count from when the weather is that beautiful temperature between chilly and broiling). If you start a plant in fall, it will have several months to build a root system and get strong and acclimated before the brassy blast of heat. They do a lot better than spring-planted plants, which don’t get nearly as long to adjust.

Plant Delights is not the place to shop if economy is your goal. But it’s the kind of place that can make you want to save your pennies for a good splurge.  I’m already making my list for next year.

Note:
* Just to make this clear: I have no commercial relationship with Plant Delights. They aren’t paying me to say this. Although, just in case Tony Avent is reading–I wouldn’t say no to a couple of free plants…

Reference:

Plant Delights Nursery catalogue 2008; Plant Delights website