Category — Vines

If I want to see some good sweet pea foliage in spring, I’ve got to start it now.

This may come as a surprise to those of you who think of sweet peas as an early-spring-planting flower. And if you live in a climate where springs are mild and winters are harsh, they are: under those circumstances, an early spring or late winter planting (sweet peas can take snow and a fair amount of freezing) gives the sweet peas time to develop the roots that support abundant, beautiful flowers.

For those of us who live in climates where spring goes from cool to broiling in 30 days, it’s another story: fall’s the time when cool-loving plants can develop their roots.  So late summer or early fall’s the time to get in the seed. The best sweet peas I’ve ever had got several inches of vine growth before they went dormant for the winter. The next spring they went crazy, flowering long and lusciously.

Since sweet peas can take freezing, this technique may work in climates much colder than my zone 8, where freezes are usually (but not always) light.  You can use the same technique for edible peas.

Until now, I’ve planted only peas and sweet peas this early. For other cool-weather plants, I’ve waited until the rains come, which is when I plant the perennials and wildflowers. Waiting for the rains makes keeping up with the seedlings easier, and, of course, by then the weather has cooled down.

But it’s just occurred to me that the same late-summer growth that does peas and sweet peas so well might give me a better display with all those cool-weather annuals that usually shrivel away before they have time to thrive. Maybe I got the inspiration from my food-farming neighbors, who are already setting out their cool-weather seedlings: cabbage, broccoli, and greens.

This year, I’m going to try planting my larkspurs and asters and agrostemma and other cool-loving annuals at the same time as the sweet peas. Growing them out earlier will be more work, but it might give a lot happier plants, and more of the flowers I love.

Do any of you have a system for getting the best out of your hardy annuals?

Last month, Sylvia (from England) revealed the winter flowers of her garden. When I found a flower on my ‘Freckles’ clematis one morning, I decided to follow her lead. To me, it’s amazing to find things flowering when, every night, I am draining my pipes so they won’t freeze.

‘Freckles’ (a Clematis cirrhosa cultivar) is pictured at the top. I wrote about it earlier this year, describing it as a winter-flowering clematis. I didn’t know how right I was. Since it’s a selection from the Beleares, where they don’t have much frost, or may not have any: huge, old bearing fig trees are common, some of the rosemary grows well over your head, and almonds have green fruit in March), I thought this clematis would shut down for business once the weather got really cold. It hasn’t. Not only have I got this flower, the leaves are still fresh and green.

All pretty sparse, as you can see, but I’ve had this clematis for less than a year. Can’t wait to see what it does next winter.

Another flower that is gracing my doorstep is the ever-beautiful Iris danfordiae. A small iris, all head and no stem, it has a fresh mild fragrance which you can enjoy more of in the house. I put Iris danfordiae in shotglasses or tiny jars, one or two at a time; they last for a few days. I like to put them someplace handy, like the kitchen table, so I can lift the whole bright nosegay up and sniff it for refreshment. They’re also great for sickrooms, because they’re small enough not to take much room on the bedside table, low enough that someone lying down can really see them, and easy to sniff from a prone position.

Those of us who plant bulbs in containers can bring these treats up close, where we  can see (and smell) every bit of drama as they unfold. Since no porch is big enough to hold all the plants I want to have close to me, I like getting to rotate plants in their prime so that they’re nearer to me. It helps that I plant bulbs in lightweight fiber pots, easier to schlep.

Iris danfordiae has always been an annual for me, but this time may be different. In Janis Ruksans’s well-named book Buried Treasures, I found a possible cure. Ruksans (his name is spelled incorrectly, as I don’t have diacritics in WP –if anyone knows of how to do them, I’d be grateful to know) – Ruksans tells of how I. danfordiae tends to split into tiny grains after flowering. This would explain the disappearance of my bulbs. His solution is to give them a good dose of fertilizer and plant them more deeply, 15-20 cm (about 8 inches), about twice as deep as you’d ordinarily plan a bulb this size.

So I planted my Iris danfordiae deep this year, and next year will tell if that tactic works in my area and in pots.

Violets are great in containers, forming a kind of miniature groundcover which allows other plants to grow through later in the season. Right now, they’re in their own,  coming out in strength. This unnamed passalong variety I got from the yard of my friend and former bandmate, Dan Scanlan. He lives in a twenties-era house which has a lot of plants from the old garden in it, including these violets. When our band rehearsed in his garage, these violets scented the entryway every February. I remarked on them so much that he gave me a few clumps.

I’m fascinated by violet varieties and history – at the beginning of the twentieth century, they were the most popular cut flowers in the U.S.  I’ve bought fancier named varieties, in search of exotic beauties – but this nameless Viola odorata, living on in abandoned homesites and old gardens around our county,  is the one I keep liking the best.

The final flower – and I do mean ONE flower – is even more common than the violets. For some reason, one of my Dutch Master daffodil pots is far in advance of the others. I can’t think why; I planted them all last year (usually, an old, established pot will bloom before a just-planted-this-fall one). And they were all pretty much in the same place, so none got more sun exposure than another. Just another of the mysteries of garden life.

Dutch Master is a common hybrid: too old to be new and different, to young to be antique. Yet when it is blooming on my doorstep in winter, it’s not common at all.
Next post: A letter from Sylvia. All about hellebores.

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

For many of us, it’s not the seeds of morning glory that are most important, or their twining vines.

For most of us, it’s the flowers. The flowers that bloom exuberantly, extravagantly, even in poor soil, with very little care. Flowers that cover trellises and mailboxes and broken fences. That beautiful touch of color that picks us up when we go out first thing in the morning (it even works for those of us who get up in later morning).

Even people who don’t know about flowers generally know what a morning glory is. Morning glories are the poor person’s beautifier. They cover less-than-perfect structures with beautiful flowers in late summer and fall. They feature as symbols of hope and renewal in literature, or sometimes a kind of open innocence.

We had a rare early-fall rain, so I got to see for myself that morning glories really do stay open all day when it’s cloudy or rainy. These closed at about dusk. You’ll also notice that there are some white sports in here, which look like the variety called Pearly Gates.

I don’t know if my seed just had a few Pearly Gates rogues in there, or if this is a replica of the sport that brought us Pearly Gates. But while I prefer Heavenly Blue the best, it’s nice to have these white ones sprinkled in for variety. And the dying purple blooms make it fully multicolored.

Morning glories start flowering late. In my case, really late: there were a few sprinkled blooms beforehand, but they didn’t really get going until September. Part of the reason, my neighbor illumined me, was because the deer were coming up to the fence and eating all the morning-glory vine they could reach. So the vines couldn’t flower until they got high enough to be out of the range of deer mouths. Note to self: morning glories are not deer-proof.

I did buy an entire ounce of seed, since I have many time come up morning-glory-less from one planting. Having read the usual propaganda that morning glories are easy from seed, I had an attack of gardener’s schadenfreude when  a friend of mine told me she nicked them, she soaked them in hot water, everything, but still no morning glories.

Mine took three plantings,

I also do the soaking in hot water, but it still took me three plantings of seeds before I got one that took. (If you really want to get elaborate about this, you can put the seeds into damp paper towels or cloth after soaking,  roll them up, and put them in another cloth, or an open plastic bag. This gets you a very high germination rate, but you do have to either rip paper towel or very carefully disengage new sprouts from cloth if these go further than you meant while you weren’t looking.)

We did have earwigs pretty badly early in the season. I’m not sure what the other problem was, besides sulking seeds. They don’t like cold soil at all (my memory is that they are originally from South America, but at the moment I can’t find anything to back that up. Anyone know?).

In any case, I’m glad I got a lot of seeds to try with, because the final results have really perked up the last six weeks. We did have a sort of almost-frost a week or two ago, and they died back some, but seem to be recovering. If they ripen, I will also have a lot of seed to try next year.

As Emboden points out, if anybody seriously wants a supply of seeds, all you have to do is plant the packet and wait a few months. Morning glories bloom heavily, and every flower brings a  pointy two-seeded pod. So it was pretty hopeless what the seed companies did many years ago, in an attempt to safeguard people like me and my friends: they coated the seed with foul orange poison.

The seed companies knew, because they’d read the same pamphlets we had, about how morning glory seeds have some of the same chemicals in them as LSD.  Devilish drugs and intoxication: that sounded very attractive to us as teenagers. We were looking for some way to connect ourselves to what seemed like an alien adult world; those good upright stalwart principles just weren’t working for us, newly-awakened to a world of war and cruelty. We needed to find the meaning of it all, but there was no coming-of-age ritual to help us. Turning to drugs was one way we tried to understand our world–and it often helped.

I’m not trying to downplay the harm that can be done by drugs–but I think the fact that some drugs can do harm doesn’t mean we should stop using them. And I think a lot of that harm stems from our culture’s puritanical notion that no one should really take them.

Unless they’re prescribed, of course, in which case we can feed them to our children for breakfast. And ourselves. We get very little education about pharmaceutical drugs, too, in fact: we’re just supposed to have faith in the doctors who prescribe them, never mind the side effects, which often mean we wind up taking more drugs, which also have side effects…many people die this way.

We don’t often get educated in how to use drugs in this culture, intoxicating or not. In fact, we rarely even discuss the subject. We either use them or we do not. Any ideas about intelligent use are passed on through subterranean folk culture (the best person to consult about avoiding hangovers is a person who has had plenty of hangovers). We rarely get educated in how to be sensitive to our own bodies, so we know if the drugs are doing us well or not.

Traditional cultures in Mexico, Central, and South America show their newly-adult children how to use local drugs in ways that benefit them.  Then the young adults decide if, when, and how often the use of any plant is called for. This even happens occasionally in North America. A friend of mine told me how, when she was sixteen, her parents started taking her around to cocktail parties, so she could learn how to drink and socialize. So much more sensible than the introductions to alcohol I saw, which generally include an inelegant and undignified purging ritual.

My discussion of morning glory has led to me spouting a lot of my opinions on what may seem to be diverse topics. But maybe that’s because of the way morning glory is itself. It’s a strong, multifaceted plant: it provokes strong reactions. Whether you think it’s beautiful, horrible, sacred, or terrible, it’s hard not to have some opinion about morning glories.

References:
William Emboden, Narcotic Plants, Collier Books/Macmillan, 1979, pg. 95-97

James Underwood Crockett, Annuals,  Time-Life Books,  1971

Sacred plant. Noxious weed. Beautifier of the poor. Devil’s drug. People have a lot of takes on morning glories.

The Aztecs called a related morning glory, Turbina corymbosa, ololiuqui, and put it in their sacred paintings. It was considered a male plant, one which had a close connection with the female plant called Mother of Water (botany unknown). Zapotecs grind seeds of  Ipomoea purpurea  species together with Turbina corymbosa–or they did as of a few decades ago. The meal is soaked in water, and the infusion is taken by shamans to divine the cause of an illness, a disturbance in town, or find a lost object.

In high school, my friends and I put morning glory seeds in a blender with some water. The resulting mess provided us with no more cosmic result than nausea. It’s likely that the active ingredients need to soak to be extracted by water. It’s also true that plant drugs taken in a sacred setting behave differently than ones that are not. Teenagers trying to get high in the kitchen while the parents are away is not perhaps the most sacred of settings.

While we were doing that, other people were trying their best to keep morning glory plants entirely out of their orbits. They were pests, noxious weeds, something that could take over a field. “There are three annual Morning-glory species that infest fields and gardens throughout the greater part of the United States,” cautions Edward Rollin Spencer, in no flattering tones.

Clearly this is an eastern U.S. book. Out here in dry-summer territory, it’s easy to get rid of morning glories: don’t water. That and a freeze pretty much takes care of it.

But in the fertile, rained-on fields east of the Rockies, morning glory seems to have felt like an ever-present danger to Spencer. Even his translation of the Latin name sounds nasty. “…Ipomoea is from the Greek and means wormlike…Purpurea…means purple. So Ipomoea purpurea L. means the purple-flowered plant that crawls like a worm.”

Actually, the proper name may be Ipomoea violacea. I was unable to discern which is most current, but since my handy at-home reference, J.L. Hudson, uses purpurea, that’s what I’m using here. Purpurea or violacea, it means the same thing.

“Like snakes, those slender vines crawl up over the plants they select for their trellises, and soon the big Morning-glory leaves are shading the leaves of the trellising plants, and very soon after that those glorious flowers will be smiling on all the world like a big woman obstructing the view of a small boy at the movies.”

Sinister.

Next post: Beautifier of the poor, and devil’s drug.

REFERENCES:

Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann, Plants of the Gods, Healing Arts Press, 1992

William Emboden, Narcotic Plants, Collier Books/Macmillan, 1979, pg. 95-97

Edwin Rollin Spencer, All About Weeds, Dover edition 1974; originally published 1940, 1957 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, pg. 188