Category — Fragrant plants

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.

This is the time of year that cars slow down as they ride the river grade. That’s because this is the time of year that the sticky monkeyflower comes out, glowing peach above your head on the south-facing cliffs as you curve down among them. When the season’s right, they’re accented by purple bush lupines.

Sticky monkeyflower can, and does, grow out of perpendicular granite cliffs. There’s generally a bit of crushed granite in the cliffs as well, and either the monkeyflowers root there or their roots help create the crushed granite that eventually (long after my lifetime) will turn into precious soil.

The name mimulus comes from the original Latin meaning of minus, comic actor (probably the same origin as “mime”; does anybody know?). “Monkeyflower” also refers to the facelike characteristics of this flower. To me, it’s no more like a face than, say, a snapdragon (which sticky monkeyflowers resemble), but okay. Whatever.

Sometimes this plant is listed as Diplacus auranticus, a way to distinguish it from its water-loving mimulus relatives. (Diplacus comes from the Greek diploos, meaning “double”.)

The lumpers and splitters are at it again. Many authoritative sources list this plant as Mimulus. But then again, many authoritative sources list it as Diplacus. You decide. The Diplacus branch of the family (for those who prefer splitting) likes dry, rocky slopes. Other monkeyflowers grow in damp places, sometimes even actually standing in water. Whatever its official name, sticky monkeyflower is the only monkeyflower I know of that is woody and grows in dry areas (“bush monkeyflower” is another name for it).

“Auranticus”, the part of the Latin name experts agree on,  means orange-red, possibly because of the color of  the coastal version of this plant. Pictures of coastal sticky monkeyflower look “oranger” to me; they have more yellow, and they’re darker than the paler peach ones we see here in the foothills. On the other hand, there’s certainly some variance in color from bush to bush, and as the flowers age (they fade a bit), so maybe this is one of those shrubs that sports or adapts easily.

Crossbreeding probably enters in, too. Calflora calls this “a highly variable complex of intergrading and hybridizing forms, many of which have received specific and subspecific names, but which the Jepson Manual has grouped together as a single species.” This photo  shows some of those variations. And I have to say, it does make a case for splitting them into subspecies – but splitting how? I’m not going to get into it. I will just continue to describe the plant, and let others carry on the good fight.

 As for the “sticky” part of its name: the bush exudes a resin, most noticeable in hot weather. Oddly, unlike most resins, it isn’t particularly aromatic, at least not to my nose. The flowers, on the other hand, have their own unique fragrance: they smell like orange bubblegum. Yet another case of art imitating nature.

Next post: sticky monkeyflower in the garden and in beds

Now that the Annie Schilder has come out again  I’m remembering why I ordered rafts of it, three years ago. The subtle glowing-ember flames out in a changing show as the flower matures – and as an extra bonus,  Annie Schilder is fragrant.

Since I’ve had a good repeat showing from these bulbs the past two years, I deduce that it’s one of the easier ones to perennialize. As most people know, it’s not always easy to perennialize tulips, especially not Triumph tulips, which Annie Schilder is. Very likely that’s because Annie Schilder is an heirloom tulip, dating from 1923, when they made things to last.

Annie Schilder’s fragrance is somewhere between the faint spring hint of Apricot Beauty and the heavy musk cloud of Generaal de Wet. You may have noticed that these fragrant tulips are all orange. There’s probably some genetic reason that scented tulips are mostly orange – and I haven’t listed them all.  Prinses Irene, orange with purple flames, is another of the fragrant tulips. (I suspect the deep-orange species Tulipa whittalii in the background, but that’s just a guess.)

There are fragrant tulips which aren’t orange, and probably have different backgrounds. I collect fragrant tulips; if you’ve grown any,  I’d be interested to know which ones.

Besides her scent, Annie Schilder puts on quite a visual show. OK, I know I’ve recently gone on record as saying I don’t thrill to straight-ahead yellows and oranges in my garden. (See my blog mission statement (at the bottom of the linked page) for an explanation.) But to my eyes, Annie Schilder is a little more subtle than that. She starts out a burning-embers deep orange.

 As the tulip ages, the color lightens, with brushes of yellow in the orange, as in the photograph at the top of the page, and as this sunlit picture below.

The colors get more distinct as it fades and swirls out.

And now it’s time to bid goodbye to Annie Schilder for another year

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.”

*This clematis flowered in amazingly cold weather in winter, too.

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