Category — Fragrant plants

I never really got what the big deal about Juno irises was.

But last fall, when I did my very-last-minute-end-of-sale order, Iris bucharica was still on the list of one of my favorite bulk suppliers. It’s one of those ones I was always planning to try, and always knocking off the list as I honed down my original thousand-dollar wish list to a ghost of its original self.

Now I was left with the ghost list to choose from, and I picked these irises.

As is my thrifty habit, I put them in a container with some of the mid-season tulips I bought, ‘Golden Melody’. I wouldn’t honestly have bought ‘Golden Melody’ usually, either, but it was one of the few tulips left on the list. I’m not actually a big fan of really bright colors in tulips, but how bad could bright yellow be?

As it turned out, not bad at all. ‘Golden Melody’ exactly matched the buttercups in the field behind and around them, and had a nice sturdy quality that made it an excellent cutting flower. I gave away a lot of bouquets involving ‘Golden Melody’, and of course I had it in the house myself.

But my favorite ‘bouquet’ turned out to be in my container.

It wasn’t an auspicious start: when I first saw the Iris bucharica foliage, I thought the chickens had been in my plant pots again, biting off foliage to little layers of whacked-off leaves.

All the other irises I’ve grown have had nothing like the fantastic pleated unfolding of Iris bucharica foliage.

And each level of foliage (doesn’t it remind you of polygonatum?) puts out a stubby flowering stem, so Iris bucharica blooms a long time.

I loved watching the snub-nosed, finely-marked buds of Iris bucharica open out into two-colored marking-etched flowers.

I had originally figured that the Iris bucharica would bloom early, and ‘Golden Melody’ would take over about the time they were giving out. I hadn’t known about the multiple blooms of Iris bucharica, and I hadn’t known we were going to have such a cold rainy spring: flowers lasted (and in some cases are still lasting) weeks beyond their usual time.

So I wound up with a big bouquet of Iris bucharica and ‘Golden Melody’ in a container - and it was a pleasure to watch it develop and flourish over the course of almost a month. (That’s crimson-and-yellow-striped ‘Professor de Monsseri’ in the background.)

It’s sad that I didn’t do the research on Iris bucharica first, the way I usually do. I didn’t know it had multiple flowers; I didn’t know, as Janis Ruksans points out, that in the wild it has many variants, (His favorite form is one collected near the Afghanistan border, a lemon yellow with green markings, which he selected.) The form most commonly used in the garden, he says, is a good grower and an exellent increaser.

I’m glad it’s going to increase, because not only is Iris bucharica beautiful and long-lasting, it’s fragrant. I only found that out toward the end of its life, though, and sniffing fading irises in the rain is not a true indicator of scent. I didn’t get any.

But you can benefit by my loss. When you order your own Iris bucharica, be sure to inhale.

I love brugmansias and daturas, but they’ve been a disappointment to me. Especially the brugmansias.

Brugmansias (they used to be called tree daturas) just barely make it in my climate (USDA zone 8). My common experience with them is, just about the time they form a bud, frost hits. And that’s the end of the brugmansia for that year. Next year it will rise again, but not until later than you think possible: usually in the middle to end of May, when things start really warming up. Brugmansias (and their herby sisters daturas) love heat, and shrink away from the cold.

So that’s why I was shocked to come home from a holiday trip to find that my little struggling brugmansia, all of fourteen inches high (about 36 cm), had spouted a bloom.

In order to have a hope of seeing flowers before frost next year, this fall I laboriously made it a place  indoors - a place where I didn’t think it would thrive, but trusted it would at least not die to the ground (making more work for itself to get to blooming point next season). I had no anticipation that it would bloom, especially not when I went away, leaving the house cold.

What made this happen? Well, I did treat all my houseplants with an organic fertilizer called Voodoo Brew. Voodoo Brew inoculates the soil with some of the microorganisms that make soil nutrients more available to plants. You’re not supposed to use it on houseplants, but it makes my outdoor plants so happy, and my houseplants were looking crummy, and I’m not much of one for rules until I’ve tried them myself. And you’re supposed to use it in the growing season, not the dormant one, but (see above).

Another contributor to this miracle may have been the variety of brugmansia, ‘Cypress Gardens’.  This plant was bred (or selected, I’m not sure which) for containers, and it’s also meant to flower younger than other brugmansias.

Whatever the cause, I’ve got one, just one, beautiful flower trumpet breathing fragrance into the room of a night,

and showing off that particular sheen I’ve only found on the somewhat-stiff brugmansia trumpets.

An anthropology professor of mine once told me that brugmansias made her think of love; she and her husband had met in South America, and slept under the downbreathing trumpets of a brugmansia.

Actually, she said datura, because at that time the genus hadn’t been broken in two. Now it’s generally accepted that the shrubby plants with downward hanging flowers are in the genus Brugmansia, while the herbaceous (non-woody) plants with upward facing trumpets are in the Datura genus (these are the ones that are called Angel’s Trumpets in many catalogues).

The reason my professor and I were discussing daturas is that I was doing a paper on them; even then I loved them. The chemical constituents of  the different types of daturas and brugmansias are very closely related, although there are individual variations; in that paper I wrote I reported on a custom of some Amazonian shamans, of having several datura trees in their yards. Each variety had a special trait; each variety was used for a different type of divination. Finding a lost item might mean using one tree; helping an adolescent through the spiritual transformation into adulthood meant using another. The shaman knew which to use, how much to use, and how to guide someone through the experience safely.

No such shamans exist in my own culture (although many believe that European witches used daturas as their “flying” ointment, and had some skill in judging the dose and using the experience for spiritual gain). The datura/brugmansia reputation as a hallucinogen naturally attracted me as a teenager, although fortunately I didn’t find any to experiment with at that reckless age. Later, I did try smoking the leaves, since they were long listed in the U.S. pharmacopoeia as a remedy for respiratory problems, to arrest coughing.

They did arrest my cough somewhat, but by that time I knew that too much datura could also arrest breathing, so I was pretty cautious in my experiment (it tasted very bitter, even in smoke, which made me inclined to limit the experience even further). I have seen at least one young woman permanently altered for the worse from eating datura; I would never ingest it.

But I can admire its power through my nose and my eyes and those other senses all of us plant lovers use when we commune with green friends.  I can feel brugmansia’s power of death and resurrection spreading invisible fragrance through my house. That means a lot, this time of year.

Sagebrush conjures up romantic notions: Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, with cowboys, campfires, and rustlers (which probably were not all that romantic when people were actually dealing with them).

It also conjures up spiritual visions: smudging in Indian ceremonies, a purifier which has brought soul-health as well as physical health.

It’s a peculiarly Western American plant, as you can see by this map at the USDA. The USDA, in its wisdom, has included Alberta and British Columbia in its distribution map, but not Baja Norte, the northern part of Mexico, where sagebrush also reigns. Could this be the place where politics make science stupid? We may never know.

Sagebrush can be honestly confusing: since it’s commonly called “sage”  (as in the Zane Grey title), many people confuse it with the salvias. To add to the muddle, there is an actual salvia sage native to the western USA (Salvia apiana) which is also used for smudging and has a somewhat similar clean-astringent scent. If you look carefully at the smudge stick, it’s easy to tell which is which: Salvia apiana (whte sage) has the big leaves shaped like garden sage, only paler. Sagebrush has a number small tri-tipped leaves.

There’s a final reason why sagebrush could be confused with sage: the color. Though sagebrush actually has more grey-white than most garden sage, it is the green most of us imagine when we hear “sage green”. A pale, luminescent green that lights up the plain with a swatch of unexpected light.

But if you look at sagebrush closely, it’s a bit like lavender or some other Mediterranean that’s gone unpruned too long: leggy and woody. The flowering stems, which come on in late summer or early fall, are almost grasslike, adding to the feathery luminescence. It’s one of those plants that’s good at illusions.

The Latin name Artemesia refers to Artemis, who was goddess of the woods and the hunt, a wild thing. Sagebrush certainly is wild; I’ve never seen it cultivated. Tridentata refers to the three teeth at the end of each small leaf.

Goats and sheep eat sagebrush as winter forage, and the plant was used medicinally by the Spanish Californians for rheumatism, colds, headaches, and indigestion.

Probably it’s the scent of sagebrush that suggested these cures. It’s certainly memorable, a scent that makes you feel suddenly healthy and alive: clean, almost smoky, yet fresh at the same time. If you’ve smelled it once, you never forget it.

‘Black Beauty’ isn’t really black. It is mysterious, though. Iwonder why its breeders decided to give it that name? Its dusky-wine-red coloring deserves credit on its own.

Nonetheless, I’m not about to quibble (much), because Black Beauty is a fine lily. Though it’s offered by Old House Gardens, it’s not really an heirloom lily, it just looks as if it should be. “We followed our hearts on this one,” says owner Scott Kunst. “As we talked about all the great heirloom bulbs we might celebrate, we kept coming back to how spectacular ‘Black Beauty’ is and saying ‘too bad it’s not that old or endangered.’ Finally we decided if we all loved it so much and thought it belonged in everyone’s garden, it didn’t really matter if it’s only 45 years old and not yet on the edge of doom.”

In different lights, the color of Black Beauty comes off lighter or darker. Since I’m a nut about the way the stamens come bursting out of the deep starlike cleft in its center, I take pictures of it in lots of different lights.

The back view has its own curvy complex beauty.

Black Beauty is a hybrid of two species, Lilium speciosum rubrum and  L. henryi. It was bred in 1957 from Leslie Woodriff, who specialized in crosses that people had thought were impossible.  Its breeding makes it an Orienpet, which is lilyspeak for an Oriental/Trumpet lily cross. Since neither of these species is a trumpet lily, I’m a little puzzled as to why, but that’s what the authorities say. We must bow to the authorities.

Dave’s Garden reports good results from growing this lily in zone 4; it’s also trouble-free in my zone 8 garden, where it takes weather from 15 degrees F to 105F without turning a hair. It does well for me in anything from pretty shady semishade to pretty sunny. It comes back after abuse (such as not watering too well), and, I just found out, it’s another unexpected hummingbird plant! (Yet another excuse for planting more lilies.)

Something I still haven’t captured to my satisfaction is the texture, which has subtly sparkling bits of light mixed with the smoothness and stubbly spots.

All this and fragrance, too.

Here I have to make a confession: I’m a lily freak, but I just don’t like Oriental lilies that much. The species, yes: the big honking hybrids - not really. I’ve tried, I really have. But Black Beauty, with its graceful species look, is the only Oriental hybrid I want in my garden.

For years, I’ve been drooling over descriptions of this flower: it’s a bulb, it’s fragrant, it blooms in the middle of hot summer: what more could I want?

I did try it once. Reading somewhere that it was drought-tolerant, I got three bulbs and planted them in one of my containers. Results: nothing.

I still wanted to try again.

Yet somehow, year after year, I kept cutting it off my list. Next year, I’d say to myself. Next year I’ll have it. And year after year, I kept reading and seeing pictures of all the beautiful species as well as the hybrid cultivated forms (Scott Ogdens’s book, Garden Bulbs for the South, was the catalyst for many of my fantasies).

Last fall I finally ordered them again. Bowing to my climate and budget, I picked one of the best-known, easiest-grown, and easiest-to-find cultivars. Hymenocallis festalis is hardy to zone 8, where I live. The graceful, elegant, desirable species I saw were from Mexico, and hardy only to zone 9 or 10. I’d been down that road before. I chose the road most traveled by: I ordered a plant I knew would survive in my climate.

As usual, I had to work at finding places to stash all my fall-planted bulbs, and I’d forgotten not only where I’d put them, but that I had them. So when these strange fat light-green amaryllis-like stems started emerging from the large container with the Goodwin Creek lavender and Berggarten sage, I didn’t know what they were.

Until the day one opened. For a minute, when I saw it, I thought: what’s that white trumpet lily doing on such a short stalk? My hymenocallis is shorter on its stalk than the picture, only about eight inches tall; that’s usually caused by late planting. Since I didn’t keep records of when I planted last year (bad, I know), I’m not sure if planting late was the cause this time.

I happened to pick up Two Gardens, letters of Elizabeth Lawrence and K.S. White, while I was mulling this over. In one of the letters, Elizabeth Lawrence points out that hot-freeze-hot can create short bulb stems. We certainly had that this spring – and summer.

I’m also wondering if they came up this time because of a mistake I made. I got distracted watering one day, and I left the hose on that big container with the lavender and sage (and Hymenocallis).

Some hymenocallis like a boggy situation (I saw some in a greenhouse that were growing in water);

others prefer light watering and good drainage. Hymenocallis festalis is the light-water type according to most of my sources (including Select Seeds, where I bought them). But it’s interesting that I got the hymenocallis sprouts right after I gave that pot a good soaking.

Gaygardener says that H. festalis multiplies better if it’s kept moist all the time. I might test that out at some point, but our water table is low from drought, and I’m not going to make my lavender/sage pot into a bog anytime soon

In any case, in the obliging way of bulbs, it’s opened. The fragrance is of the orangeblossom/gardenia/ tribe, but somehow diluted and softened in a very pleasing way.

Hymenocallis X festalis is a cross of the Mexican H. narcissiflora with H. longipetala. (Maybe those are some species hymenocallis I could grow, if I could locate them. Or maybe not.) Hymenocallis is in the Amaryllis family, which is why its emerging stems reminded me so much of amaryllis. Daffodils are in the same family, as you can tell by hymenocallis’s looks, and one of its common names.

As for the Latin name, “Hymenocallis” means “beautiful membrane”, and refers to the flower’s corona. The “festalis” part of the name means, as you might have guessed, festival or holiday. So it’s a beautiful festive membrane. (I do think the curling-back petals of hymenocallis look like some party decoration.)

Someday, maybe I’ll find a way to grow some of the species hymenocallis. Meanwhile, I’m happy to finally celebrate my little Hymenocallis festival.