Category — Plant care

I just got my order from Plant Delights, which offers a desset cart full of the finest. *

Plant Delights is not your usual type of nursery. Based in the Juniper Level Botanic Gardens in North Carolina, they specialize in the fine and unusual: plants from small breeders, and species or heirloom plants gathered by themselves or horticultural friends and propagated by the nursery.

Since they’re in North Carolina, they also specialize in plants that can take a really hot summer. The fuchsia in the header picture is “Sanihanf’, a heat-tolerant fuchsia from the Suntory breeding program in Japan.

As Tony Avent truly says, the usual version of “heat-tolerant” in catalogues means, “the plant will tolerate more than one day above 90 degrees F (32 degrees C) before croaking.” I love fuchsias, but I’d given up on them; the corpses were piling too high. When I read this, I thought: this is someone who really gardens, someone who knows how I’ve been led on by other catalogues. Maybe I’ll try again.

The true test will come next summer, of course. But meanwhile, my plants arrived in gorgeous shape, a good sign.

Plant Delights plants are bigger than most mail-order nursery plants. They are also more expensive; this is not a commercial nursery, and they don’t deal in the quantities that make plants cheap. Their mission is to get the plants out, so the commercial nurseries will adopt them and make them widely available.

The other plants I got were: Gladiolus dalenii ‘Bolivian Peach‘-found on a roadside near Bolivia, NC.;  Lilium brownii ‘Szechuan Splendor’, a species collected at 6700 feet (2042 meters) on sun-baked cliffs in Sichuan Province; Alocasia wentii, a bronze-leaved winter-hardy alocasia from the mountains of New Guinea; and  Aloe polyphylla,  a spiral-form aloe which is also hardy in our winters (I’ve killed  a few aloes, too. Most of them just don’t like frost. This one is from the high mountains of South Africa, and is reputed to take it.).

Plant Delights is in zone 7b, so most of their plants are extra-safe in my zone-8 garden. That’s nice, because most of the exotics I desire and order tend to be just a little bit risky;: zone-9 plants, liable to disappear in the night.

There are much hardier plants in this catalogue, down to at least zone 4; they collect growing information from their friends and customers in much colder places, and encourage experimenting with zones. Many of these plants are so new to horticulture that your own research can expand zone knowledge. A contribution to gardening, and yet another justification for spending money on plants.

In case you’re wondering why I’m ordering plants now, it’s because fall is the best season to plant perennials in hot-summer areas. Our spring lasts either three months (if you start from when the grass gets green and the first wild things start sprouting) or three weeks (if you count from when the weather is that beautiful temperature between chilly and broiling). If you start a plant in fall, it will have several months to build a root system and get strong and acclimated before the brassy blast of heat. They do a lot better than spring-planted plants, which don’t get nearly as long to adjust.

Plant Delights is not the place to shop if economy is your goal. But it’s the kind of place that can make you want to save your pennies for a good splurge.  I’m already making my list for next year.

Note:
* Just to make this clear: I have no commercial relationship with Plant Delights. They aren’t paying me to say this. Although, just in case Tony Avent is reading–I wouldn’t say no to a couple of free plants…

Reference:

Plant Delights Nursery catalogue 2008; Plant Delights website

I found these weird springy coils in mid-March. Now I know what they were: the flower stems to my Cyclamen hederifolium (also known as C. neapolitanum, also known as ivy-leaved cyclamen and sowbread, maybe because they seed themselves so nicely).

The coily things  looked like they were something cyclamen when I saw them in spring, but I couldn’t figure out what part. The leaves were just coming out then, and I thought they might be more emerging foliage, but no. It turns out that, at least for this variety, cyclamen flower stems come out when the foliage does, even though the flowers don’t emerge until fall.

Cyclamen are corms, not true bulbs. But these premature flower stems act much like the inside of true bulbs, where the flowers form fully the year (or at least several months) before they bloom. (This is why it’s so important to keep watering and feeding your bulb foliage until the end: it’s making next years’ flowers. And never cut it down, at least not if you expect more flowers out of them.)

This is also the first time I’ve had serious evidence that cyclamen corms really do get bigger and give more flowers over the years. I learned this from reading Nancy Goodwin, who specializes in raising cyclamen at her nursery in North Carolina.  Last year, I had several scattered flowers from the same plant, but  nothing like this flush of display. And I know from past experience that it will keep flowering for at least another couple of months.  

Goodwin says her C. hederifolium can start flowering in May, and go all the way to October. She thinks flowering is triggered by cool nights after a period of warmth. Mine have never bloomed that early, but they do go long: they start around September and always go through December, and sometimes as late as January or February, depending on the weather.

Besides the florist’s hybrids, there are several species of cyclamen: a good collection can flower throughout the year. The varieties that are easiest to get tend to be fall and winter bloomers. I originally ordered three species, but Cyclamen hederifolium was the only one that succeeded. Goodwin says that cyclamen corms don’t travel or store well, and many are sold too dry to sprout; she recommends trying them from seed, or buying them from nursery specialists such as herself, who know how to give corms the right treatment. We both recommend buying corms that are nursery-grown, not collected from the wild. Many wild-collected bulbs are gathered wholesale and none too carefully, which means that entire stands can be wiped out for no good purpose: the collected plants don’t get the right care, and they die before reproducing. If you are fond of a plant, it doesn’t make any sense to wipe it out in its native environment-especially when there are plenty of sources for nursery-grown bulbs and corms.

Once the corm is happily settled in, cyclamen are one of my favorite kinds of plants: easy. They need some shade, and they need fairly fluffy soil with good drainage, but they don’t care about soil pH. Goodwin recommends an 8-8-8 fertilizer, but I give my cyclamen what everything else in the pot gets, and it seems to be happy with that. The main thing is not to overwater. Their handsome silver-and green foliage makes a pleasing groundcover; the flowers are a bonus.

I really must move this plant so I can get a close-up view when it blooms. When summer plants are starting to look a little weedy (at least in my garden), it’s great to see the chrysanthemums, cosmos, and dahlias looking fresh and happy. (My dahlias are still struggling to get to the flowering point, but never mind. Other dahlias are happy and flourishing. Someday, mine will be, too.) I can now add cyclamen to this select group of plants that give their all in the fall.

References:

McClure and Zimmerman catalogue, spring 2008

Nancy Goodwin, “Cyclamen for Garden Use”, Gardener’s World of Bulbs, Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, 1991. The BBG series are written by various experts in their field and are a great resource for any gardener.

Yet another incarnation of the gorgeous ‘Apricot Beauty’, which I hope to bring back year after year.

I just discovered something that may keep my tulip bulbs coming back season after season, fat and full of flowers.

In his book Buried Treasures, Latvian bulb hunter/breeder Janis  Ruksans (this is not the proper spelling of his name; anyone know how to do special characters in WordPress?) mentions how he found only small bulbs one year when he was harvesting tulips. Tracking down the reason, he came to conclusion that soil pH was the problem.

The soil was acid, at 5.5 pH. While this wasn’t harmful to the daffodils he’d had in that field the year before, lack of calcium upsets tulip bulbs, so they make only tiny bulbs.

I’ve dug up a fair amount of tiny tulip bulbs myself, and wondered why I couldn’t breed them, since weather conditions are ideal in my area, and I thought I was giving them all the nutrients they needed. This was interesting news.

“A few years earlier I had applied lime to all of my fields, but the following years were rainy, and calcium is one of the elements that quickly wash out of the soil,” Ruksans says.

In my area, the soil is acid. Real Gardeners I’ve known (and even I) have put lime in the soil to make it more neutral, but my understanding was that it takes awhile to be effective. That could be faulty understanding on my part, or maybe calciium is more persistent in our soil than Ruksans’s. (Local soil is usually clay and granite, so it holds everything.)

On the other hand, the soil I plant most of my bulbs in is potting soil, which is light and fluffy. Calcium probably leaches out of it every time it rains.   And the fertilizers I use have some calcium in them, but not a lot. One way or another, it could well be that my tulips need calcium.

Actually, all plants need calcium. More than a lot of us think.

Earlier this year, my lilies had buds that  shriveled and turned brown, never producing a flower. This has always happened to one or two of my lilies, but this year, it happened to a lot of them. I started trying to figure out why.

My Spray-N-Grow catalogue said that their foliar calcium spray makes plants more resistant to disease, prevents blossom end rot, and helps them recover from stress. It’s also something they need to grow properly.

My Peaceful Valley catalogue recommended foliar calcium sprays for higher yields (30-50%, depending which university study you’re reading). Some of their customers reported Brix readings tri;pled with the foliar calcium spray.

Brix is the sugar content in plants, and when you raise the Brix, you increase flowering and fruiting.

So all in all, foliar calcium seemed like a good idea. Since I was putting it on my lilies, I decided I might as well put it on my whole garden. Both catalogues suggest spraying every 2 to 4 weeks. I admit I didn’t quite keep up on that schedule–I already do two kinds of general vitamin/fertilizing sprays, both of which are not supposed to be used with anything else, and sometimes I just don’t have it in me to spray again that week. (By the way, Ruksans is also big in favor of foliar sprays; he says it’s made a huge difference in his nursery.)

The foliar calcium spray Peaceful Valley carries is quite expensive, but you don’t need much of it–one teaspoon of dried calcium salts for a gallon of water. I’m lucky to have a local store that has an open jar of the salts and sells them in bulk, if that’s the word: I bought about two tablespoons’ worth and I still have some left.

I don’t know for sure if this increased my yields or flowering. There are way too many variables, including deer. But I’m willing to keep it up, especially if it means my all my lilies will flower every year. It just seems like a good idea generally. It seems plants need calcium as much as we do.

And if calcium can keep my tulip bulbs from going tiny and disappearing, I’m for it.

So here’s my plan: this fall, all my tulips–heck, all my bulbs, why not–will get an extra dose of calcium in the soil mix. And when the first leaves poke up (which is time to start fertilizing anyway), I will give those bulbs a foliar spray with calcium.

That won’t affect my flowers this year: bulbs have a flower already formed inside them from last year. But it will affect the future of my bulbs.

And if it means I don’t have to re-buy my longtime favorites, like ‘Apricot Beauty’ and ‘Queen of the Night’, then it will also affect my bank balance. Positively.

References:

Janis Ruksans, Buried Treasures: Finding and Growing the World’s Choicest Bulbs, Timber Press, 2007, pg. 45. This is a great book, much of which is devoted to bulbs growing in their native areas. Ruksans climbed mountains and forded lakes, hunting bulbs. Much can be learn about where species bulbs come from, and their many variations (most of which we don’t see on the bulb market). Ruksans is also a  minute observer of how these bulbs and their seeds behaved when he got them home to his nursery.  (I apologize for not giving the author his proper diacritics; I haven’t found a way to do this online. Suggestions welcome.)

Spray-N-Grow catalogue, summer 2008

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply 2008 main catalogue, pg. 96

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)