Open Sesame

I found this interesting little blob -- a moth's cocoon if I am correct -- the other day when I was cutting down last year's dried aster stalks.  Let me pause a moment to beg of you, if you are the kind of gardener who flinches at the thought that I was cutting back dried stalks well after the daffodils have come and gone in the spring, that you try not to imagine what it looked like when I cut back only three-quarters of the stalks and left a lopsided clump of them remaining standing for the convenience and safety of this small creature.  Furthermore, don't even think about the fact that this particular clump of aster, the only perennial I had not already cut down in fact, is right at the corner of the front walk leading to my front door.  Anyway, when I first spotted it, it didn't look quite like this.  It didn't have the hole.  The emergence of my newest garden visitor happened yesterday, while I was at work.  Go figure.  This looks similar to photos I've found on the web of Promethea moth cocoons, but I don't know for sure that there aren't other moths that might make similar ones.  I hope it is a Promethea.  I hope I get to see the adult moth.  But even if not, I'm happy to host creatures like this in my garden.  Even if it means some incomplete spring cleanup.

Arugula

I sowed arugula in a pot on my deck in the fall and it survived through the winter, as I had read that it would.  Unfortunately, I didn't end up harvesting most of it because I kept expecting it to get bigger.  It never really got past the "baby arugula" stage before blooming.  I'm letting it bloom, hoping I can collect seed and try again next fall.  I'm not sure what I did wrong.  Possibly I just sowed too late in the fall, but I was waiting for it to cool down a bit; I don't think it can take the heat of our late summers.  I also realized (duh!) that the spot on the deck does not get as much sun during the winter as it gets during the summer, because the lower winter sun doesn't clear the house as long during the day.  Maybe next winter I need to put the pots out front on the south side of the house.  Always a learning experience....  At least the flowers are cute.

Dutch Iris

Spring is flying by.  My garden has arrived at a kind of awkward stage where there doesn't seem to be a lot blooming.  Driving around I see lots of azaleas and dogwoods, but I don't have very many azaleas since I know deer like them and I get a lot of deer browsing.  When I take a careful look, I realize that I do have several things in bloom.  Maybe if I group them better it will look more like I have a real garden, but it might just be that for this brief window in spring, my garden will never look as flowery as the rest of the world.  Oh well, in a few days their azaleas will be gone and I'll still have ... what?  Well, a little of this and that, anyway.  I'm looking forward to the swath of larkspur that is just about to explode.  I have chamomile that charms me every spring around the same time, too, and the first stem is already blooming (along with cilantro). 

For now, what I'm most enjoying are the Dutch Iris.  These bulbs do well for me and multiply each year.  I originally bought a mix and ended up hating some of the colors so much I dug some up and threw them in the compost.  That might be the first plant I ever bought that I intentionally killed.  On the other hand, I adore these ones, that combine my favorite garden colors, blue and yellow.  These are really blue, not purple or lilac or indigo.  Yum.

This particular individual flower is a bit weird.  Do you see it?  On most of the flowers, there are three yellow falls and three blue standards.  This one has two yellow falls, two blue standards, and a mutant blue-and-yellow freak petal.  Here's a close-up of the mutant petal.  It's kind of beautiful in its own right... which is not going to prevent me from pulling it up and putting it in the compost of the rest of the flower buds on the stalk open like this too.  I'm pretty curious to know if this kind of "sport" is common.  I haven't noticed it before.

There were also a lot of white iris in the mix.   Initially I wasn't crazy about them, but I gave them another chance and now that they have multiplied into a decent size clump I like them a lot more.  They blend very nicely with the deep purple ones. 

The only problem with the Dutch iris is that, unlike most (or all?) other iris varieties, the foliage is nothing to write home about.  It doesn't even necessarily wait until the flowers are done blooming before it starts looking hideous.  I need to come up with something to plant with it that will be green and full at this time, leaving just enough head room for the iris to stick out the top.  The larkspur actually is about the right height in some spots, but is a bit too short near the iris.  I have marjoram that might be tall enough right now to hide some unsightly foliage... something to think about.  Any other ideas?

Great Dismal Swamp

The Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge is a huge patch of forested swamp lying on the border between Southeastern Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina.  It's less than an hour away from my suburban home but seems like another world.  I've heard stories about entire runaway slave colonies being hidden in this vast wilderness.  Obviously that was long ago, but it's not hard to imagine a small clandestine city thriving there undetected by anyone.  Last year lightening started a forest fire that burned 6000 acres.  People in this area grumbled about the smoke.  But no one needed to worry about their homes, because it was a tiny portion of the refuge's acreage deep in the center.  It amazes me that this exists smack in the middle of the Eastern Seaboard with urban and suburban spaces all around.

My husband and I visited this weekend ostensibly with the idea of birdwatching.  There are amazing birds in the swamp.  We hear incredible, unfamiliar birdsong every time we go.  And every time we go, even this time when we specifically went with the idea of getting there before the trees fully leafed out, we have trouble spotting very many of them.  The huge density of trees and shrubs, fully in leaf or not, means that a bird can be belting out its spring song at high volume very close by and still be utterly and completely hidden.  We did get to see some very cool birds, a white-eyed vireo, prairie warbler and others, but it didn't take long for other spring features of the swamp to convince us to promote cameras over binoculars and make it a photo expedition.

There were a surprising number of wildflowers.  I often think of spring wildflowers as primarily the herbaceous ephemeral wildflowers you find on the forest floor, but the stars of this visit were incredible blooming shrubs.  This deliciously fragrant native deciduous azalea (Swamp Coast Azalea, perhaps?  Rhododendron atlanticum) was beautiful both in flower (above) and in bud (below).  The clear black water in the canals (some of them dug by George Washington) has more tannin in it than a cup of Earl Gray.  It made a beautiful inky black background to show off the white blooms.

This native flowering vine is familiar to me from my own front porch, Carolina jasmine (Gelsemium sepervirens).

I was just reading about native plants in the heath family in the March/April 2012 issue of The American Gardener magazine, so I recognize that this shrub is probably in the Leucothoe genus, but beyond that I'm just guessing that it's Leucothoe fontanesiana, or Doghobble.

The Red Maples (Acer rubrum) bloom very early in the spring and are now already putting out seed capsules.  A few trees were festooned with beautiful peachy orange keys like these.

The Great Dismal Swamp also seems to be heaven for butterflies.  It warmed my heart to see so many so early in the season.  There were small butterflies like Carolina Satyrs, Horace's Duskywings, Spring Azures, and dozens of one of my favorites, the tiny Pearl Crescent....

Swallowtails were also out in force.  Palamedes Swallowtails are very common in the swamp, as is their host plant, the Redbay, Persea borbonia.  This is a rare (for me) view of the underside of the wing. 

This Palamedes was "mud puddling" with a group of Tiger Swallowtails.  We also saw a cluster of up to eight Zebra Swallowtails obtaining nutrient from a pile of manure.  Butterflies and gardeners share the same tastes, equally happy with a field of beautiful flowers or a big pile of manure.

Finally just before we turned back for a late lunch, we spotted this Luna moth.  It was sleeping, perhaps, or whatever moths do during the day, and didn't react to us at all.  Once again, the tea-black water makes the perfect background for the photo.  

Macro Monday: Great Dismal Swamp

I took a trip this weekend with my husband to the Great Dismal Swamp, an amazing, eerily wild place that is less than an hour away from home.  The swamp is bursting into spring with new growth, birdsong, butterflies, and wildflowers.  This exquisitely colored Red Maple samara (Acer rubrum) is just to give a taste of what we saw.  Check back in later this week for more photos and descriptions of the swamp.  Meanwhile, go to Lisa's Chaos and check out other Macro Monday posts. 

Diggin'

Last weekend when I really wanted to be out gardening, it was a bit rainy, cool and muddy.  So I decided to get to work on "ex-terra" weeding of my Ginger Lilies (Hedychium coronarium).  I figured the damp muddiness would help cut down on the shock to the plants, and I would probably warm up quickly doing such a mucky labor-intensive job (I did).

I borrowed the fantastic descriptive phrase "ex-terra weeding" from this post by Carol on May Dreams Gardens.  And here is another excellent post on renovating an entire garden bed to get rid of a weed that spreads by runners, by Kathy Purdy of Cold Climate Gardening.  Good, so I don't have to go into a lot of painful details about the effort this took.  I really would prefer not to remember in too much detail.  I was so exhausted at the end of this that I wasn't even going to take photos.  The effort of walking a whole 20 steps to get into the house to get the camera was just too much.  Fortunately, my wonderful husband who came out to help me in the end took a couple of photos.  This one counts as sort of a before (in the distance) and after (closer to the camera) all in one, since I only did half the bed. I had developed tunnel vision and just wanted to get done so I didn't bother to stop pitching finished compost on the bed as he snapped the photo.

But the long and short of it is that I was putting up a fight for the Hedychium coronarium and some other good guys in this bed, but I had to severely inconvenience them for a bit to be able to get at their enemies, primarily Bermuda grass and English Ivy, and really give them the heave-ho.  The good guys are shown below.  Hopefully they aren't too embarrassed to be shown bare-root.  From top to bottom, they are Lily of the Valley (Convallaria majalis), Four O'Clock (Mirabilis jalapa), Ginger Lilies (Hedychium coronarium), and garlic chives (Allium tuberosum).  They are all a bit thuggish in their own way, but these are definitely the good guys.

I'm not completely sure this was the best time of year to do this.  I was afraid to do it over the winter because I am never convinced that the Hedychium is quite hardy.  Some of the bulbs often seem to go mushy.  However, when I dug them up, I found them all very muscular.  They were growing under, over, and through each other and really made the job pretty difficult.  It was digging up the Hedychium that made this job hard, not the Bermuda grass or ivy.  In fact, the weeds really never seemed to bother the Ginger Lilies, just the gardener, since the bed looks so awful in the winter time and is impossible to weed in the summer.  I waited until I started seeing a few shoots growing before starting this project, thinking that this is generally a good time to dig and divide.  However, the growing shoots are very brittle and I snapped off more than a few of them.  I was pretty annoyed with myself each time.  Even some of the ones that I managed to carefully work around in the excavation stage ended up snapping when I put them back in the ground.  I think it will be OK anyway, though.  The amount of plant mass in the rhizomes is so much that I can't imagine them not finding a way to put out new growth.
 
The Ginger lilies were here when I moved to this house.  I think they probably came from a division from the house next door (or perhaps vice versa).  My next-door neighbors had a huge row of them all the way along the side of their garage, but last year, before they even bloomed, took them all out.  I do not understand why.  That clump also had an infestation of Bermuda grass, so maybe the prospect of trying to get rid of it was too overwhelming, but I think getting rid of the Ginger Lilies was a mistake.  Now the neighbor's bed has basically nothing but the Bermuda grass.  How sad.  If they change their minds, I'll be happy to share some of mine back with them.  That's the best part of sharing plant divisions and cuttings.  If ever by some disaster out of your control (or in this case, seemingly in your control) you lose your plant, there is insurance out there: you can get some back from whomever you shared with.

In my opinion, the labor-intensive renovation was definitely worth the trouble.  Ginger lilies are a truly awesome plant if they are happy in your garden.  They grow to about four feet tall and have thick strappy pointed leaves all up the stalk.  They like moisture and tend to curl up temporarily if it gets too dry, but when they are happy the foliage is a beautiful contrast to all the small-leaved plants I have.  The fragrant flowers begin blooming in August and continue usually until frost.  Each flower lasts only a day or two, but there is a seemingly infinite supply in each fat flower cluster.  The frost was so late this year that I did actually see the end of the blooms and the start of some crazy-looking seed pods, but I had a few blooms even in December.  I had blooms on the Ginger lilies and paperwhites on the same day for the first time ever in my garden.  The flowers bloom in the evening, attracting sphinx moths, but last throughout the day too.  They are extremely fragrant.  When frost threatens, I cut off some of the stems and put them in water and the flower buds continue to open for several more days indoors.

As I labored, my mind wandered (it tends to do that) and it occurred to me that perhaps I have graduated from being a beginning gardener to an intermediate gardener.  That is, if this theory of mine is correct.  Perhaps a beginning gardener can be thought of as a person who grows bunches of plants pretty much indiscriminately because they are still learning about the plants and what will do well in the garden.  Meanwhile, some things are doing too well and some things are going wrong and a beginning gardener is not necessarily aware of it.  That is why the intermediate gardener, years later, ends up spending so much time renovating entire neglected-looking garden beds.  The beginner wasn't even necessarily neglecting them, but until they have become "intermediate", they aren't particularly effective at dealing with it.  Or maybe all this renovation is just a sign that I am still a beginner.  Maybe my commencement as intermediate is still to come.  I am very much looking forward to the time, in another 20 years or whatever it takes, when I will be "advanced" and all my garden beds will be lovely all the time.  Don't burst my bubble about that fantasy, please! but intermediate and advanced gardeners out there, what marked the turning point for you?  Beginners, what do you think the next stage will bring?

Stinky flower

My Hoya is blooming.  I probably should not even attempt to name it specifically, but I think it is Hoya carnosa.  This is a houseplant I started from a cutting from my mom's very old plant about four or five years ago.  She had just moved from the house I grew up in and I found her plant banished to a low basement with only a small window.  I feared for its life, having flashbacks of Oscar, another trailing hanging houseplant she wanted to throw out when I was a teenager because it was too sloppy looking.  Lots of gardeners cringe at the idea of throwing a perfectly good plant in the trash, but I wasn't a gardener yet.  Instead I think I just knew that I was sloppy too (being still a teenager), and felt it would be a mistake to let my mom get a start on tossing out everyone in the house who met that description!  Anyway, years later when I found the Hoya in the basement there was no way to get the behemoth into my car for a 350 mile trip.  By now I was a gardener, so I knew that the best insurance for a plant is cuttings.  I put one cutting in a plastic cup of water on my Mom's kitchen windowsill, so she could pot it up and have a nice, neat houseplant that could live in the main living space.  I put mine in a plastic water bottle and it survived the journey home very nicely.

A week or so ago, I visited my Mom again for her birthday and was amused to see her Hoya cutting still growing in water on her kitchen windowsill.  I'm impressed it has survived for years without ever seeing a particle of dirt.  In fact, there were cuttings of two other plants rooted in water on the kitchen window sill, and another in the basement.  I found more plantlets growing hydroponically than actual potted plants, but the original Hoya is also still holding on in the dim basement.  On another visit I guess I should buy a bag of potting soil and pot them all up for her.  

Meanwhile, I potted my cutting four or five years ago and it bloomed the first year.  I don't know if it's normal or not, but I wonder if it has more to do with where you take the cuttings than any great hort skill.  I think I probably took the cuttings from the very long trailing tendrils that the plant puts out.  I now know that these are where it blooms as well.  Mine has flowered many times since the first time, always in the same spot.  This is an interesting thing about Hoyas; the flowering occurs on a specialized flowering spur that grows incrementally longer with each bloom.  This is why you should not deadhead a Hoya, since there's a risk you could put a stop to the blooms.

I must confess I have been tempted to put a stop to them because there's another odd thing about my particular plant.  It stinks!  I remember the first time we noticed the original Hoya blooming when I was a kid.  There was a wonderful fragrance in the evening that took several days to track down.  The nearly leafless trailing stem with the flower spur on it had made its way almost unnoticed up over the door frame of the front door.  I had never actually seen a house plant of any kind in flower - it was momentous.  The memory of that mysterious and wonderful fragrance was another reason I wanted a Hoya of my own, but my plant, genetically identical to the plant of my childhood, STINKS!  The fragrance is both extremely strong and unpleasant and makes the room uninhabitable for several nights in a row while it blooms.  This is a bizarre and still unsolved mystery, and if anyone out there has a clue, I would love to hear it.  Maybe my memory of the fragrance is colored by the idealism of youth?  Or maybe I was not allowed to stay up late enough to get the full overpowering sticky stink of it?  I know that different people perceive fragrances differently.  Could my own sense of smell have changed as I got older?  I thought it must be one of these explanations until just a few days ago, when I got another conflicting clue....

My Hoya is now in bloom again.  But now, for the first time, it has two flowers.  One of them is on the same flowering spur where it has always bloomed, and the other is on a new spur.  This time, as evening falls, the fragrance is still overpoweringly strong ... but maybe a little ... just a little ... less offensive.  It's a weird thing, really; I almost get the feeling I'm smelling two different scents that play back and forth, sometimes smelling like one thing (nasty) and sometimes another (nicer).  Could it be that the old flower is stinky and the flower on the new spur has the nice fragrance I remember from years ago?  The odors are so strong I can't be sure.  Maybe the old flowering spur has mutant stinky genes.  I really hope next time it blooms, it blooms only on the new spur, so I can assess this theory non-destructively.  But if not, the old spur might just go the way of Oscar, even though I can't be sure.  Now that I have another flower spur for insurance.