Category — Fragrant plants

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

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