Category — Flowering plants (that aren't 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)

Campanulas were the first successful shade flower I ever grew. At that point, I was pretty dim on sun and shade requirements of plants; I just started some Campanula medium seeds, and put the plants out under the high shade of a live oak, where there was some room for them. I thought they’d look pretty there. (As far as I can tell, these are the campanulas whose common name is Cups and Saucers–but there seem to be different schools of thought on this. If anyone can clear it up, please do.)

Unlike most of my garden dreams, this one actually came true. The plants grew into 5-foot spires that flowered pink and violet for many weeks, against a background of orange sunsets glinting off the hard live oak leaves. They also didn’t need inordinate amounts of water. I was sold.

These days, I grow all my campanulas in containers, where they seem quite happy. The single Canterbury Bells in bud in the photo at the top of the page are also Campanula medium, but a different variety. They are supposed to be biennial, like the double Cups and Saucers, but for me many of them act as perennials. Either that or they are very discreetly reseeding and reproducing themselves in the exact same spots.

Sometimes they sport to a hose-in-hose double that’s a variant of Cups and Saucers,

sometimes they sport to a variant that’s closer to the Cups and Saucers form, but doesn’t quite make it.

I don’t have picture of what I think of as real Cups and Saucers for two reasons: the seeds seem to be very hard to find in recent years, and they take two years to flower. Though I love them, this seems to be enough of a barrier that I don’t have them in my garden. If I could find plants, I’d buy them, but alas, they are out of fashion, and therefore unavailable.

C. persicifolia alba to the left; C. medium ‘Canterbury Bells’ in an unadorned single form to the right.

One campanula I love which doesn’t flower well in the shade is Campanula persicifolia alba. I guess that means I should move them out of the shade, where they occasionally vouchsafe a small spire, or a single bloom or two on short stems.  I had a hard time getting them to grow from seed, but a friend gave me a ragged chunk of plants she’d been thinning, and they’ve been growing and spreading ever since. C. persicifolia alba (and the purple C. persicifolia) are rampant spreaders, so use caution. But they are also beautiful early-summer flowers (with occasional repeats) that last for weeks in the vase.

Campanula pyramidalis alba has flowers very similar to C. persicifolia alba, but it is a much taller and grander plant, going to four feet in semishade for me. It also blooms much later, often into late fall in our area (this photo was taken in November). Like the other campanulas in this post, it’s conservative on water, though it does need some. It is supposed to be perennial, but mine flowered gloriously one year, and was seen no more. I got my seeds from JL Hudson, where S. Calkins calls it, “Stunning in arrangements.” I must start more, because C. pyramidalis alba is one of the most beautiful and easy-care plants I know.

More on campanulas:

There are so many kinds of campanulas, it would take an expert to know them all. Northern Shade seems close to an expert to me.

JL Hudson has many kinds of campanula seeds, some of them unusual species; pithy descriptions of each.

This is the time of year when I start to spend more time in by the fire than out in the garden (although I still have more bulbs to plant…). One of my amusements is to look through the garden pictures, with an eye to what worked and what didn’t.

I want to make my grouping of plants under the big madrone into a more cohesive group, so one of the things I’ve been looking for is plants that have worked well in semishade for me. Northern Shade has opened my eyes to how much texture and color you can get with the right foliage, something I might have worked out by looking at the forest floor. But sometimes gardening is like a crossword puzzle: somebody fresh has to come along to fill in the blanks you can’t get.  I’ll need to do research on the plants Northern Shade recommends, though, since my climate is a lot hotter and dryer.

Before I was reminded of the possibilities of foliage, though, my original shade-plant-finding focus was a hunger for flowers; flowers for summer (after the bulbs) and for shade to semishade, which is mostly what I’ve got.

The digitalis in the photo at the head of this post obviously did very well under the madrone (the red-barked shiny-leaved tree you can see in the picture). And I have a past history of digitalis doing well in places like this, where they get some morning sun, and occasional dapples throughout the day. This foxglove (an unknown variety from the drugstore) kept on gradually increasing its spire as it flowered, until it had a whippy spine of seedheads several feet high, topped with a few flowers.

My ‘Royal Standard’ hosta is a common plant, but a new venture for me. It sulked in the full shade I gave it before, putting out a few leaves but never flowering. I had mixed feelings about hostas; they seemed kind of like, I don’t know, plants for gardeners who had completely matched wardrobes and sock drawers with no strays: not plants that would fit in my garden.  But in my continual research for shade plants that flower, I’d found that hostas fit the bill, and that some of them even had fragrant flowers. When I went to a local plant sale, it was pretty easy for me to get persuaded into a good deal on Royal Standard.

I found that this junior leaguer actually fit quite well into my garden, once I put it in a pot on the back porch where it got more shots of sun. It brought forth the beautiful rose-flushed buds that turned into a modest scape of (to my nose) mildly sweet-scented flowers. (For those of you who are wondering about the dead leaves in the background: those are buckeye leaves, which are the earliest to come out, and shrivel by late summer.)

My prejudices began to tumble. I started to see what people saw in the leaves: the innocence of the tiny leaves on the flowering stem,

the sensuous ribs of the broad leaves below–

which turned gold all at once in fall.

Next post: more flowering shade plants

It’s December, but some plants here think it’s spring. These violets are among them.

They’re either some passalong kind of Viola odora from my friend Dan’s garden, or they are ‘Queen Charlotte’, long ago purchased from some nursery I can’t remember. I do label my plants, but, as I keep whining, the labels keep getting buried and lost, complicated by the fact that I have moved those violets at least twice.

I have to bend low to get the wonderful whiff of violet, which is like nothing else on earth. That’s because my violets are limited to containers. I have a friend who has violets running through her orchard in profusion. In early spring, everyone asks her, “What’s that great smell?”

In the also-ran category is this moonvine (Calonyction alba, also sometimes filed under Ipomea, various species). As so often happens, none of my moonvines flowered this year–but this flower on my back porch did give it a good try. As the weather cooled (relatively speaking), it started to open–but it just didn’t quite make it.

Strictly speaking, this ‘Sharifa Asma’ rose isn’t blooming out of turn; it’s a David Austin rose, and they are technically reblooming.

My experience of Sharifa Asma, though, is that they give a big flush in the late-spring/early-summer rose season, then sporadically rebloom through the summer. I don’t recall them ever blooming this late, though I wasn’t surprised to see a small fall flowering from Pemberton rose ‘Penelope’ (now gone to the tissue-paper stage). Sharifa Asma is in a bit more sun this year, and it did get severely deer-pruned late in summer (I didn’t keep up with the deer-repellent spray as I should have), so maybe it’s making up for lost time.

It took about two weeks for this bloom to go from bud to flower, a slow-motion opening, and the bee-like insect pollinating it is definitely on extended season. The special transclucent quality of Sharifa Asma sends me. See what you think.

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