Category — Heirloom plants

For that full fluffy look, garden books caution, hyacinths need to be replaced every five years. Myself, I think hyacinths are just getting good after five years. They get the way I like my jeans: worn in, graceful, softer: more comfortable in the woods.

I can’t help wondering if I’m supposed to admire those fat, flower-stuffed hyacinths because they’re more productive, more more more: they did get developed in approximately the same age as colonialism, and reached their heights in the U.S.  in the prime of our industrial age, the late 1800s and early 1900s. A time when “more more more” was certainly the cry of the land, if that cry has ever faded, and too bad about what happens in the context of all that production.*

To me, hyacinths fit the landscape much better (even in pots) when they fine down; instead of stiff fat spires suggesting civic plantings, they turn into newly-introduced woodland creatures. As an extra bonus, none of the other woodland creatures has ever eaten my hyacinths.

Once hyacinths get to the point of pleasant woodsiness, they seem to stay there. At least the older varieties like my pink ‘Lady Derby’ do.  I’ve had them for over ten years, mostly in containers, and they just keep coming back.

L’Innocence, another heirloom hyacinth,  is beautiful, I think, even when it’s fined down to this:

Some of my white L’Innocence have kept a heavier supply of their white curlicues, perhaps the ones that get more sun? You can see some of them in the picture at the top of this post.

Festival (sometimes called Festiva) hyacinths have that sparsely woodsy look from the get-go. They’re designed that way, worthy heirs of the old Roman hyacinths which had the same form, several small spikes curving gracefully. (They’re also called multi-flowered hyacinth.)

You can find true Roman hyacinths at Old House Gardens, specializers in heirloom bulbs. While they’re not cheap, Roman hyacinths are meant to go on indefinitely, blooming year after year and even spreading. Modest flowers often do last longer, I’ve noticed. Probably because they’re nearer the species types and further from ones that are bred for professional flower growers, who tend to be geared toward a big one-time show instead of  steady stamina in the garden.

I haven’t invested in Roman hyacinths yet, mainly because I’m happy with my White Festivals, which I’ve neglected shamefully; I put them in the ground near the door, and basically ignored them since then. I don’t even think they got the fertilizer I usually give to my bulbs, since they were not in a spot where other bulbs were. I often neglected to fertilize them in spring for that reason, and of course by fall I have only the vaguest notion of where they are.

But even neglected, they fine down beautifully. To me, this hyacinth looks very like some of the native woodland bulbs we have here: small, unassuming, beautiful. It fits into the landscape almost seamlessly. And this is important to me. I’m not a purist, but if my writing could do what I want it to do, it would remind us all to look up from the garden plans occasionally, look at the bigger world we’re gardening in, and see how we can enter into conversation with it.

*such as grinding poverty, child labor, dangerous work conditions with no health care or insurance, open-pit mines, clearcutting, incredible amounts of pollution, and the general ascendancy of money over kindness, thoughtfulness, and community connections. Sadly, these are both old customs and part of the modern work ethic, but they became institutionalized in the slave workforces of monocropping colonialism, and the social upheaval of early industrialism.

I think we’ve gotten so used to forysthia we often forget to look at it. Some people are so bored by it, they don’t want to look at it.

But forsythia is worth looking at closely, for its ancient history and medicinal uses, and for its own sake in the present, paying special attention to how the light radiates through its massed petals. Forsythia makes a cheering blaze against a stormy sky, and a radiant force in sunlight.

(

Forsythia, named for English plantsman William Forsyth, must have had many names before we got to it: it’s a longstanding staple of the Chinese materia medica (list of medicinal remedies). While we plant forsythia for the flowers, forsythia was probably originally cultivated as a medicinal plant (or maybe for both reasons; before the concept of ornamental gardens, people didn’t feel obliged to make that distinction). The medicinal part of forsythia is its inconspicuous fruit. It’s a traditional Chinese remedy for all kinds of overheating: toxins, fever, swollen lymph glands, flus, and other inflamations. It’s also used to relieve carbuncles (staph abscesses that go deeper and get larger than boils) .

If you want to experiment with forsythia fruit tea, pick the fruit while it’s green.  But that’s just beginning of the process. Chinese herbology, unlike European herbology, wasn’t interrupted by a few hundred years of practitioners being burned, tortured, and otherwise persuaded not to pursue their art. So Chinese herbology has had the time to develop highly complex ways of extracting active herbal ingredients. Here’s what one Chinese materia medica recommends for processing gardenia fruit: “The green fruit gathered in the period of White Dew (fifteenth solar term) is better than the yellow fruit picked in the period of Cold Dew (seventeenth solar term). The fruit is steamed, dried in the sun, and its seeds separated from the flesh.” (TCM Basics)
Combined with other herbs, forsythia fruit is part of formulas for a number of what the Chinese call heat-related conditions (interesting in a plant that’s famous for blooming while it’s still cold). Forsythia is contraindicated where there is deficient yin, or spleen disorders. Mixed with honeysuckle flowers and ground into a powder (yep, plain old ubiquitous Hall’s honeysuckle), forsythia fruit can be used for what western medicine calls upper respiratory tract infections, acute bronchitis, acute endometriosis, measles, acute tonsilities, encephalitis B, meningitis, and parotitis - as well as the ever-present flu.
The variety of forsythia that’s used medicinally is Forsythia suspensa, the weeping forsythia. I’m honestly not sure if the pictures on this post are F. suspensa or something else; it’s my neighbor’s bush, and it was there before she moved in, so she has no way of finding out. It isn’t a particularly weeping form, but there is a variety of F. suspensa, ‘Fortunei’ (most likely named after Robert Fortune, the Royal Horticulturalist Society’s plant collector in 1840s China) which is more upright, and F. suspensa does seem to be the popular choice for specimen (as opposed to hedge) planting. If there are any forsythia experts out there, please let me know.

References:

The World in Your Garden, Camp, Boswell, and Magness, National Geographic Society, 1957

Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons Complete Home Medical Guide, Montague Books, 1985

Sacred Lotus

TCM Basics

Your Nature, Your Health: Chinese Herbs in Constitutional Therapy, S. Dharmananda, Ph.D., Institute for Traditional Medicine and Preventive Health Care, 1986

Sunset Western Garden Book, Lane Magazine and Book Co., 1973 (there are many useful editions of this book)

‘Rijnveld’s Early Sensation’ seems to be something of a secret (despite the name). It’s just a yellow trumpet daffodil. But I think it deserves more attention.

“This two-toned yellow daffodil wouldn’t win a ribbon, but it has won a place in our hearts,” says Brent and Becky’s catalogue. Since I don’t move in show circles, I don’t know what they consider to a good daffodil. And to be honest, I hadn’t even noticed Rijnveld’s Early Sensation was two-toned - unless they mean the green streaks which linger from the opened bud, making a green star.

If you like the star effect, I found the deepest-colored ones came from the just-opened flowers I picked and put in a vase inside; sun seems to fade them a bit, though not entirely.

While Rijnveld’s Early Sensation is early, this year, its first year of planting, it has been beat out by my old established Dutch Master.  The first year bulbs are planted, they tend to come out later than they do in subsequent years, so next year Rijnveld may come before Dutch Master. (It may do that anyway; the number of flowers from Dutch Master has drastically dropped this year, not my previous experience. Maybe the calcium treatments I’m giving all my Mediterranean bulbs will help.)

While my Rijnveld’s Early Sensation opened in late February and are blooming in early March, Brent and Becky, who are in Virginia, say that this daffodil often blooms in January for them. Once it opened in December. And they report that it doesn’t mind snow a bit, something I can testify to.  Scheepers, which also carries Rijnveld, says the flower dates from 1943, and that it’s “the earliest to flower by two weeks, with several flowers per bulb.” The difference in bloom time could mean B&B and Scheepers have different strains of Rijnveld; I haven’t noticed any multiple flowers from my own bulbs, for instance, but it’s early days yet.

Of course the difference in bloom time could simply be a climate difference: there’s a lot of ground to cover between the Netherlands (where Scheepers gets their bulbs) or Connecticut (where Scheepers is located in the U.S.) and Brent and Becky’s trial gardens in Virginia (which does have cold winters, but not as cold as in the north).

Despite its 1943 date, I haven’t found Rijnveld’s in my heirloom (or just old) books and catalogues, unlike its early-blooming yellow-trumpet kindred, Golden Spur and Narcissus obvallaris (the Tenby daffodil). Rijnveld’s isn’t  statuesque: only 12 to 14 inches (about 30 to 35 cm); it’s not unusual (except possibly in its time of bloom). The scent is pleasing, but mild. I suppose, among all the other, showier daffodils, this one just gets lost, so you don’t see it in most books or catalogues. But I love Rijnveld’s little snouts and green stars. I think more gardens should have an Early Sensation.

P.S. If this post has gotten you interested in Rijnveld’s Early Sensation, check out Fairegarden’s  post on how it has colonized and spread in her garden.

Who could forget a plant with a flower stalk as long as your leg?

I tried and tried to photograph the way this stem of flowers twisted and turned like a huge arm of artistically-shaded pastel flowers bent at the elbow, never breaking (well, I did tie it up at the top, so it wouldn’t topple of its own weight),  and opening blooms from shoulder to tip for weeks.

This was in the beginning of my photographic career, so I had even fewer ideas than I do now of how to capture the personality of The Shirley, curled and crowded with flowers. In my garden notebook, I noted that I’d read somewhere that this variety has more flowers gong all the way around the stem than other purpureas. Mine certainly lived up to that claim, even when the flowers at the lower end were past their prime.

‘Shirley’, by the way, refers not to a woman, but to Shirley, England, home of Rev. William Wilkes, who did such a fine job selecting Shirley poppies.  I love both his poppies and foxgloves, bred the old fashioned way, by years of selection. Considering all the fine varieites of foxgloves and poppies available, it’s saying something that, a hundred years after he developed them, Rev. Wilkes’s plants are still going strong.

His foxgloves aren’t as well-known as his poppies, though, and they should be.

JL Hudson describes Shirley foxgloves as “one of the finest, a giant variety to 5 feet, sometimes towering to 9 feet (3 meters), with long, dense spikes to 2 feet (61 cm) long.”

This is gross understatement, in the case of The Shirley I grew.  Since it was curved, I had a hard time measuring the flower spike, but you can see for yourself that it’s a lot longer than two feet. It was probably longer than my leg. It was certainly as big around as the calf of my leg. People who actually stake their foxgloves will have an impressive plant towering gently over their gardens - if they have stakes tall enough.

More than any other foxglove, The Shirley delights with the tasteful color change of its flowers from bud to pollinated bloom, creating an ombre-dyed effect as the color flushes up the stem. And it is the densest-flowering digitalis I have ever grown. Words and pictures cannot do justice to The Shirley. You must grow it in your garden.

Next post: Yes, even more D. purpurea cultivars.  A list of four, with pithy commentary. I hope.

One of my garden correspondents from the UK writes that Prince Charles has given up on planting tens of thousands of tulips every year along the drive at–I forget which dwelling. Instead, he is substituting fritillaries, which come back year after year.

What a lot of people don’t know is, that if you plant the right varieties, tulips are very likely to come back year after year. Most of the ones that come back are species tulips (types that are selected from the wild and cultivated), so they don’t look like the typical florist’s tulip. But they can be appreciated on their own merits.

There’s a caveat here, though: no matter what variety of tulips you plant, if they don’t have good drainage (especially in summer, when they would have a dry spell in their native haunts), tulips will rot instead of flowering.

That taken care of, here are categories of tulips with a good return rate.

Fosterianas or “Emperor”  - Purissima, or White Emperor, is the tulip at the head of this post; it’s the size of a typical garden tulip.  One of my tulip books says they had a stand that lasted twenty years; I had a stand for several years, until I dug it up; they didn’t like the new location as much.  ‘Sweetheart’ and ‘Apricot Emperor’ show every sign of lasting as long, but ‘Flaming Purissima’ went down for the count after one season with me (twice). ‘Red Emperor’ is a selection of the wild species, so it should be persistent–but I haven’t grown it.

Batalinii  - The tulips above are the ‘Apricot Jewel’ variety–there are several of these tall, species-like tulips in various shades of yellow, peach, and rose. In full sun they are about as tall as most garden tulips, but the flowers and stems are much slimmer. In semi-shade they flop rather appealingly on whatever other foliage you have going on.

Greggi - These are short tulips with mottled foliage and many varieties of color in the rose/pink/white/yellow spectrum. They bloom in tulip midseason.

Kaufmannia - These early bloomers are also known as water lily tulips, because their short-stemmed flowers open out like stars. The flowers are disproportionately large for their stem size, and come in various hybrids in the red-and-white spectrum.

Cluisana-type  -  A real clusiana is hard to find, but it’s easy (and cheap) to get ‘Lady Jane’, below. These trouble-free tulips are about ten inches high, and last well in the garden or vase.

Be sure to check out the species section of your bulb catalogue (or nursery) for more possibilities. Species bulbs are usually cheap, so it doesn’t cost much to experiment a little.

Some other older garden varieties of tulips seem to come back well, too: ‘Prinses Irene’ and ‘Insulinde’ have been good repeaters for me. ‘Crème Upstar’ was for a while, then petered out.  If anyone’s had good results getting other varieties of tulips to come back, I think a lot of us would like to hear about it–maybe even Prince Charles.