Category — Fragrant 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.

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’ve decided—a little arbitrarily–that this is the type of lily I dug up and refrigerated in my last installment. I based my decision on foliage, and on the fact that the anemic lilies in the other, identical pot, have bulbils in their axils, which is a typical tiger lily thing, which (I hope) means that the other pot has Lilium cernuum in it. At least, I’m going to go with the cultural directions for Lilium cernuum album,  and if all goes well, I’ll have proof. If all doesn’t go well, I won’t have proof, but that’s gardening–and scientific inquiry–in a nutshell.

Actually, I think gardeners can more easily say that they’ve achieved proof. With science, another variable can always come along. But once you’ve grown, flowered, and identified a lily, it’s pretty tough to argue the point further. Until DNA testing proves that this lily is really a subspecies, or related to another lily, and then the lumpers and splitters are at it again. and we all have to learn new Latin names.

There isn’t a common name for this lily, as far as I know, so Latin-spurners will just have to ignore the binomials and move on.  It is  blush-pink (album means “white”, but horticulturalists, as Tony Avent of Plant Delights so truly says, are color-blind), a fragrant, head-hanging lily that hails from the Diamond Mountains of Korea.

Europeans have known about it since about 1910. McRae puts a well-grown Lilium cernuum (the deeper pink lily that L. cernuum album is a variation of) at about 3 to 4 feet (90 to 120 cm), but Brent and Becky’s lists it as Lilium cernum, a dwarf of 12 to 24 inches (about 30 to 60 cm). Mine stuck to the smaller height, but since they were lolling over the side of the container, obviously unhealthy, it’s hard to know what this signifies. Rockwell, Grayson, and de Graaff recommend Lilium cernuum for fragrance, cutting, and hybridizing. They do not recommend it for beginners or containers, facts I intend to ignore.

Deciding that I’m going to treat my dug-up lilies as L. cernuum album is a big deal in terms of their care. I’ve spoken before of the way species bulbs develop very particular tastes, so they can grow in very particular places. It turns out that, according to Ed McRae, these lilies don’t like water in summer, and prefer full sun.

“The bulbs must remain relatively dry following flowering; wet conditions in late summer are disastrous. In the wild, these lilies grow in sandy loam, alluvial, or rocky soils among grasses or shrubs, usually in full sun but sometimes in light shade.  I grew the species very successfully in a field of volcanic soil near Parkdale, Oregon at 700 meters (2300 feet) ; the plant was breathtaking in its sheer beauty, with stems reaching 90 to 120 centimeters ( (3 to 4 feet) in height and an average of 8 flowers per stem.”

I had my lilies in semi-shade; they fell over in the container, pale and reaching for sun, which did give me a tiny hint that they needed more light. I also had them in a self-watering container which kept them moist all summer, something I thought all lilies except madonna lilies liked.

Not necessarily, it turns out.

It also turns out that it pays to read more than one resource when you’re looking up plant care. “L. cernuum does well in full sun and does not seem to have any special requirements,” trills the usually reliable Complete Book of Lilies. It just goes to show that you can’t trust anyone all of time. Because either Ed McRae is off, or Rockwell, Grayson, and de Graaff are.

All of them are respected (in the case of de Graaff, you could say “venerated”) in the lily world. Their different kinds of counsel have to do with their own experience. If they arrive at different conclusions, it’s because of different experience. This is why you can never trust anybody all of the time: their experience will often be different from yours.

So I’m creating my own L. cernuum album experience, based on what I now know.  I’m relying on Ed McRae’s story pretty heavily, mainly because he gives such particular descriptions of how it worked for him. And also because while Jan de Graaff also grew lilies in Oregon, Grayson and Rockwell grew theirs on Long Island and Cape Cod, a very different kind of environment from my own.

And also because I have never gotten these lilies to actually flower, and I’ve had them for somewhere between three and five years. I’m in the mood for something drastic.

I’ll plant the Lilium cernuum album in a pot where they won’t get summer water-maybe in with the naked ladies. Or maybe not: neither of them may like the competition. In any case, I’ll have to either water the minute I plant, or keep the lilies in my refrigerator until the fall rains settle in.  I’ll probably underplant them with some low-slung spring ephemerals that don’t want summer water, either (hm. I wonder if I can fit in small bulbs and poppies).

The other thing I plan to do is add extra minerals to the soil . McRae’s description of their native growing conditions, and of his own experiments in volcanic soil, show that they do well where there is rock available to them. I might gather some creek rock and sand, which will also help drainage, and I have mineral amendments that I can add extra dashes of.

And this year I plan to put all my bulbs on a strict regimen of calcium–but more about that another time.

References:

Edward Austin McRae, Lilies,  Timber Press, 1998, 2001. Quote pg. 124

Brent and Becky’s catalogue, Fall 2008

F.F. Rockwell, Esther C. Grayson, Jan de Graaff, The Complete Book of Lilies, Doubleday & Company, 1961. Quote pg. 235

Mrs. R.O. Backhouse, one of the many lilies I’m not mentioning in this roundup. Except in absentia: it was one of my usually-reliable lilies that didn’t flower this year.

I just got in my annual shipment of bulbs.

I mean, I just got in my annual three shipments of bulbs. My house is full of bulbs; my refrigerator is full of bulbs. And I’m currently trying to figure out how to rearrange the food so I can fit in more bulbs, because heaven knows it’s going to be awhile before they all get planted.

I do a kind of triage with bulb planting. Lilies go first, because lilies are never really dormant, like other bulbs. They’re always in one stage or another of growing.

For those who are interested in my lily experiments earlier in the season, here’s what I have to report: not much. I have seen sign of only one of the four species lilies I planted: Lilium longiflorum gave me about two feet (70 cm) of reasonably healthy stem. Not enthusiastic, but not sickly. The others, Lilium nepalense, L. wallachianum, and L. auratum,  all sank without a trace.

There are a lot of possible reasons for this. Most lilies seem to like a moist but well-drained soil, something that’s not easy for me to achieve in my climate and in the containers I put lilies in. Also, mine is a climate where lilies really do better planted in the fall. It’s hard for spring-planted lilies to get established, because the hot, dry weather comes along before they really have a chance. Yes, I water, but the plants know: they feel the dry air, and the heat, and they know the difference between rain and artificial irrigations. Their root systems just don’t get the same chance.

In cold-winter climates, it seems to be better to spring-plant lilies. (Except madonna lilies (Lilium candidum), which always need late-summer planting.) The longer, moister spring may be a better way for them to establish themselves than the short and brutal falls.

I’m backed up in these ideas by Edward Austin McRae, which gives me a good, smug feeling: I had the same insight as a famous lily expert. Of course, his is a bit more exact.

“Lily bulbs planted [in fall] form basal or contractile roots almost immediately when the soil temperature and moisture level are satisfactory…Spring planting times vary with climate and soil conditions. The most important difference between fall and spring planting is that in the latter the bulbs have been in cold storage during the winter months, where they have been conditioned to sprout and grow…a very early spell of bad weather (perhaps in early February) can be followed by weeks of inclement weather…bulbs planted under these conditions deteriorate rapidly. ”

In any case, I spring-planted those species lilies because-well, because I have bulbomania. It’s a chronic disease, which seems to have particularly virulent flareups in spring and fall. And this year, I got an especially vicious attack in late spring-not a good time to plant any bulb, except maybe gladiolus and dahlia (which are really corms and tubers, respectively).

It’s not always easy to find species lilies, and when I do, I take what I can get. So it’s possible that bulb quality as well as bulb timing may have contributed to my bad results. To circumvent the bulb quality issue, this fall I decided just to buy a limited number of the plumpest, juiciest, priciest lilies I could, leaning toward the species and the garden-tested.

Another problem with my earlier lily choices may have been the persnicketiness (botanical term) of species bulbs. Species bulbs grow in places where very few other things will-and they make very particular adaptations to do that. After infinite generations of forming theses tastes, they are not always happy to be transported to our gardens, where very different surroundings await them.

Some adapt easily, though, so I leaned toward those when I made my fall choices: Regal Lily (Lilium regale), Lilium speciosum album, Lilium formosanum, and a Jan de Graaff hybrid from about sixty years ago, Citronella lily. Old hybrids that are still around are garden-tested, and I like the wild tiger-lily look of this one. It’s also supposed to be very resilient, music to my ears.

Well, I got those planted, but I also want to figure out what to do with my established lilies that didn’t do much this year. The ‘African Queen’ and ‘Nerone’ were wonderful, but I got a no-show from most of the others, as far as flowers go. So I dug up one batch of lilies that I think have just not been getting enough sun. I need to put them in a place where they’ll thrive and flower. Possibly I also need to give them something in the soil they haven’t been getting.

Another thing I probably haven’t considered enough is air circulation. Lilies don’t like to be jammed up against other plants, apparently. In a small garden such as my own, it’s easy to forget this in trying to fit everything in where I can easily admire it. Some flowers just need space. I can be like that myself. For some lilies, this feeling extends to their very roots: McRae suggests that lilies in containers may even need air circulation under the pots. I may try propping lily pots up on rocks or pot shards, at least during winter rains.

The problem is, I haven’t figured out what kind of lilies these ones I dug up  are. They’re either white tiger lily, pink tiger lily (both hybrids), or Lilium cernuum album,  a kind of blush-white martagon-looking lily. (I do use those infinitely-lasting self-engraving aluminum plant labels, but they don’t come with a doesn’t-get-lost-and-buried guarantee.)

While I’m figuring out if that makes a difference in their cultural requirements, these lilies are living in my refrigerator. They have plenty of company.

References:

Edward Austin McRae, Lilies,  Timber Press, 1998, 2001. Quote pg. 321

Old House Garden lily culture instructions (comes with the lilies)

Louise Beebe Wilder says that, on cloudy days, four o’clock flowers open early and stay open all day.  Gerard says that if the air is temperate, the flowers stay open all day and close at night. I’ll have to take their word for it: by the time it’s late enough in the summer for four o’clocks to bloom here, both rain and temperate air are long gone.

They have a tendency to loll and flop, and are fairly thirsty plants. On the other hand, they’ll come back nicely from water neglect, as I can personally attest, and the floppiness isn’t altogether bad if you’re growing them closely with other plants. You can kind of lay the plant out of the growth path of the ones they’re interplanted with. They will continue to bloom, upright or sideways.

A Canadian garden book says they’re supposed to grow only one to two feet tall, but the first one I ever saw was a wide round bush of at least three feet, and one of my plants that is flopping and growing sideways is getting to about that length. My Sunset Western Garden Book agrees with me: they grow to 3 or 4 feet. The likelihood is that hotter weather gets them to come on faster. But don’t lose heart if you live in a cool-summer climate, since they are reputed to grow, and flower prodigiously, in Canada and England. Maybe you’ll get to see their flowers open all day, to make up for shorter plants.

I’ve planted one of my four o’clocks in a container by the door, so that each day I can witness the miracle of new parti-colored flowers just by walking out the door. And each evening the flowers open, release their slightly-sweet pale lemon scent, and stay open until shortly after the sun hits them the next morning.

Gerard describes the scent as being sweet like narcissus, but it isn’t to my nose. This could be because of a difference in our senses of smell, or because of a difference in varieties of Mirabilis jalapa. David Squire says its scent is “fruity and sweet”, which is more like my reading.

A sense of smell is an evanescent thing, and the interpretations and associations we give each odor are entirely personal, though there may be many people who share the same feelings about a single scent.

Mirabilis jalapa is not the herb called jalap, which comes from the root of Ipomoea jalapa, or High John the Conqueror root. Gerard claims that he heard from someone that the roots could be used as a purgative, but he doesn’t appear to have tested this claim. I’m thinking there’s a possibility he mixed up the two; jalap has long been known as a powerful purgative, and Gerard heard the purgative report from someone in Italy. It’s easy to get information scrambled when it comes a long distance, as anyone who has ever played the party game “Whisper Down the Lane” (sometimes known as “Telephone”) can testify.

Mirabilis jalapa caused quite a stir when it arrived in Europe (and what is now the UK) from the Americas. Gerard spends about three pages going on about it in his Herball (approximately 1636).  He says that the seed was brought from Peru to Spain, and thence to the rest of Europe, and England.  Parkinson, a bit later, is still excited about the diversity of the colors, but only enough to go on for two pages.

Among his observations on the habits of Mirabilis jalapa is,  “And I haue often also observed that one side of a plant will giue fairer varieties than another, which is most commonly the Easterne, as more temperate and shadowie side.”

This is strangely unlike my own experience with four o’clock, which mulishly refuses to bloom for me unless it gets a fair dose of sun throughout the day. Maybe morning sun was enough for the eastern side of Parkinson’s plants.

The name Mirabilis jalapa reflects an older name, Mirabilis Peruana, which translates into one of its modern common names: Marvel of Peru. Belle-de-nuit (“beauty of the night”) was common name for it in France, at least as late as the 1930s, and apparently it goes as “Beauty of the Night” (in English) in at least parts of North America. In older times, it was also called Marvell of the World (nursery-grower hype seems to be a tradition that has come down through the centuries). HachalI was, supposedly, the Peruvian name for it. Other European names were  Solanum Odoriferum; Jasminum Mexicanum; Carolus Clusius; Admirabilia Peruviana. All of which goes to show what Linnaeus had to deal with a little later, when he started standardizing plant names.

Educated people of the time used Latin as a common tongue, which is why all these names are in Latin, and why Linnaeus chose Latin for his binomials. Unlike the Latin-speakers above, he made the astounding move of relating plant the names to the family the plants were actually in, instead of just using names that plants reminded him of, or names of people he wished to honor (as in Carolus Clusius). We do, of course, keep to the European tradition of naming plants after people, but now we use cultivar or species names for that.

It’s an interesting cultural custom. In many cases, the plants named after European people were already well-known by non-European people in the plant’s country of origin. While I think the people who bring plants from one country to another, often at much peril, deserve credit, this makes me uneasy. European culture does seem to have a propensity for putting a stamp on things and calling them ours. I am not sure why we feel so compelled to do this. Fear, probably.

Gardens and plants make my mind wander down lengthy and little-used trails.  But it always comes back to the plants, the landscape, and our connections with them.

References:

John Gerard, Gerard’s Herball: The Essence therof distilled by Marcus Woodward, from the Edition of Th. Johnson, 1636, Crescent Books, 1985

John Lust, The Herb Book,  Benedict Lust Publications/Bantam, 1974/1979

Steven R. Smith, Wylundt’s Book of Incense, Samuel Weiser, 1989

Reader’s Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening in Canada, Reader’s Digest Association (Canada) Ltd., 1979

Sunset Western Garden Book, Lane Magazine and Book Company, 1967, 1973

Louise Beebe Wilder, The Fragrant Garden, MacMillan, 1932; Dover reprint 1974

David Squire (with Jane Newdick), The Scented Garden, Rodale, 1989