Category — Wild plants

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.

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.”

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 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.

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