A Touch of the Tropics

     My husband and I took to our local botanical garden this weekend.  Norfolk Botanical Garden is one of our favorite places to go for an outing in any season.  It was chilly but probably not as cold as we deserve at this time of year.  I suggested we go because I knew the Wintersweet would be in fragrant bloom.  

Chimonanthus praecox (Wintersweet)

     I didn't know about the Japanese apricots ahead of time and their fragrance wafting down on us was a delicious surprise.

Japanese apricot

     We ended up spending most of our time in the indoor conservatory they call the Tropical Pavilion.  It's steamy and warm inside ...

     ... and there are lots of interesting and fragrant blooms ...

Amaryllis

A begonia I think (no label)

     ... foliage ...

     ... and exotic botanical features I am so thoroughly unfamiliar with that I won't attempt to put a name to.

Painted Feather Bromeliad

Bromeliad 'Del Mar'

     If you are stuck in a cold-weather place without much sun, I hope you can find a conservatory or botanical garden to visit.  I always enjoy the warmth, color and intrigue I find here.

Macro Monday - Make a Wish!

     Today I'm joining Lisa's Chaos for Macro Monday.  I found this backlit dandelion seedhead so I had to shoot it.  Only problem is, I'm not sure which version I like best.  Maybe this one ...

     But in this one, you can see right into the inside, and I think that's cool too.

     This is another dandelion that has lost a lot of its fuzz, but that makes it easier to see individual filaments.

     Yes, I leave dandelions in my garden.  There's not much else blooming in January.  It was an unseasonably delightful 57 degrees on Saturday with bright warm sun (and how lucky to get it on a weekend!)  On days like those, there might be some active bees or butterflies who are going to need a snack.  I like the jolt of color myself, too.  And finally, you never know when you might need to make a wish.  Here's wishing you light and warmth wherever you are.

A Discovery!

A new nest

     I apologize for the somewhat lousy photos in this post, but I'm very excited to have found a bird's nest under construction!  My husband and I spotted this nest about 7 feet up in a young pine tree.  There are grasses in it that we believe are pampas grass fronds that have been drifting around our yard since we paid a friend to remove the clumps this fall, so we're pretty sure this really is new construction.  (Actually the friend left them pretty neatly stacked in the compost bin, but I made a mess -- I'm very good at messes -- trying to chop them up smaller so they will compost faster.)
     The nest is probably a robin's, which is not particularly unusual in our yard, but it's interesting and exciting for two reasons.  First, while I knew that winter residents like robins get a jump-start on nest building, I had no idea they would start to build this early in the year.  Second, this is the first definite nest we've had in our "habitat restoration" area.  I'm putting quotes around that because this is nothing official and really a quite small area on the grand scheme of things.  But this is an area where we are encouraging native loblolly pine trees and other native vegetation to provide a natural buffer between the cultivated and utilitarian parts of our yard and a swath of tidal marsh at the back of our property.  We lost a few very large trees to storms in the first few years after we moved in and decided to plant more trees.  

Roots of a 70 foot oak felled in a Nor'Easter in 2006

We planted a lot of bare root trees from the National Arbor Day Foundation but had a lot more success when we realized that seedling pines were appearing everywhere in the new sunny gaps.  We just stopped mowing and ended up with a mini pine nursery. 

A place to sit at the end of the path

     The trees are about 10 feet tall now and the only maintenance we do is mow the main path, occasionally trim or cut some of the pines and shrubs closest to both paths (there's a wide grassy one and a narrower leaf-litter covered one), and work on keeping the invasive plants out, including sweet autumn clematis which blankets our neighbor's backyard, and Phragmites australis.  

Sunlight shining through the autumn leaves and Phragmites seedheads

     The phrag is a scourge of almost every wetland and the strip at the edge of "our" marsh has probably been there for hundreds of years (my city of Hampton, VA, bills itself as the oldest continually inhabited English-speaking community in the U.S.).  It's almost certainly not going to be eradicated anytime soon, but encouraging trees in the adjacent area has the happy consequence of limiting its spread in that direction, since Phragmites does not do as well in shade.  The pampas grass was probably not terribly invasive, but it didn't sit well in this natural habitat and I never liked it.  I don't have the lower back strength to dig out such a behemoth, though, so it was great that our friend agreed to it (thanks, Mike!) 

Wax myrtles, favorite of Yellow-rumped warblers and kinglets

    The wooded space is very green.  The dominant plants are loblolly pine and wax myrtle.  There really are not very many flowers here so many people would probably not consider it a garden.  The only blooms are some high tide bush and goldenrod in the fall and a pretty native pink mallow right around my birthday.  Even if I were not determined to keep only native plants in this area, it would be a real challenge to garden here in the traditional way since we have salt flooding seemingly every couple years now.  But this space holds its own charms for me.  It's green and pleasant all year round.  In winter, the taller oaks and sweet gums have lost their leaves so the sun shines in on the green world.  It's so sheltered that it's often pleasant enough in the middle of the day to sit back there and eat lunch even in winter.  In summer, in contrast, it is much shadier and cooler than the adjacent areas.

White-throated sparrow

  
    Best of all, it really does attract wildlife, including some that is quite unusual for a suburban backyard.  The first time I saw a wood nymph butterfly I considered that we had achieved a real woodland.  Better still, we have even seen a woodcock and an ovenbird (both only briefly during migration).  I even had a brief glimpse of a fox trotting across the path once.

Butterfly garden

     It was actually nice today, both sunny and unseasonably warm, a little preview of spring.  And I was stuck at my desk or in meetings all day.  Bummer.

Red admiral, Mexican bush sage

     But the winter gray and innumerable meetings can't stop me from daydreaming about butterflies.  I'm thinking I need to renovate my butterfly garden, so I'm daydreaming about what new plants to buy.  The "butterfly garden" is a bit of a misnomer, at least right now.  It was the first garden I put in.  Less than a year after we moved into this house, hurricane Isabelle took out several fruit trees (and many other trees) and left a big hole in the landscape.  I had almost zero previous gardening experience and my husband didn't have any more than me.  If we were going to learn by doing, we were not going to waste our efforts on figuring out how to install boring lawn.  So we decided on a butterfly garden, and all through that winter I made ridiculously intricate and overwrought plans for every square inch of it.  Since I knew nothing at all, none of it was practical.  For a few years it was the only big bed of our own making and so ended up being the place to put all the experiments, butterfly related or not. What's there now is the result of natural selection.  I'll keep everything that's doing well, but there are some times when not much is in bloom, so it's time to start scheming.

Gray hairstreak on Abelia grandiflora

     Meanwhile, we've put in another garden in full sun that has lots of flowers that do attract butterflies.  I chose a Glossy Abelia for this spot specifically because I read that it's a host plant for Tiger Swallowtails.  I don't recall seeing too many Tigers, but its blossoms attract plenty of butterflies.  This year, that included Gray Hairstreaks like this one and our yard's first Pipevine Swallowtail.  I don't grow any pipevines, so I guess it was just a passing visitor.  Hmm, maybe I should grow a pipevine in the renovated butterfly garden....

     Lots of butterflies don't really come for nectar but have other less pretty tastes.  We did get great looks of a Tiger Swallowtail lingering for a long time on a pile of raccoon droppings.  I will spare you the pictures.  Isabel spared a pear tree which produces more than enough pears for us every year, so I leave some on the tree.  A stroll under the pear tree in August or September can produce an explosion of Red-spotted purples, Question Marks, Tawny Emperors and Hackberry Emperors that are imbibing on fermenting fruit.

Hackberry Emperor

     We have hackberry trees in our yard and I would not want to be without them.  Perhaps they are not the most attractive tree to a gardener's eye, but for the butterflies and birds there's almost nothing better.  

     The next photo is a butterfly that was not only a first for my garden, but the first I've ever seen, a Juniper hairstreak.  The host plant is the Eastern Redcedar, which I do have, but I've read they are usually found around "stands" of redcedar.  I don't think there's anything on my property I would characterize as a stand, but there are lots of redcedars in the area.

Juniper hairstreak

Checkered skipper on Verbena bonariensis

     Here's a before-and-after if I've identified the caterpillar correctly.  I think this is the caterpillar of the Checkered Skipper. As you can see, they like to eat mallows, including Seashore Mallow (Kosteletskya virginica).  

Kosteletskya virginica

I think these fuzzy skippers are pretty cute and I always look for them once the wild mistflower blooms (Eupatorium coelestinum is what I think it is) in late August or early September.  Right up until I was composing this post I was thinking there was some link between the Checkered Skipper and the Mistflower, but I think I'm a little dim.  The host plant is enough to explain the timing.  The Checkered Skipper caterpillar eats the blossoms -- not the leaves -- of the mallow, as you can see in the photo.  I first see a large number of adults in my yard about a month after the Seashore Mallow is in peak bloom.  I'm not sure if these eat other mallows in my yard as well, but the other mallows I have also are late-blooming perennials. 

     This last butterfly even knows garden design.  See the color echo?  If only I could ask her for help in redesigning my garden.

Common Buckeye on "Sheffield Pink" mums

Virtual Garden Tour - Sissinghurst

     Today is a virtual tour of Sissinghurst Castle Garden.  Sissinghurst was the home of the writer (garden writer, novelist, poet) Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson.  According to Gardens of the National Trust by Stephen Lacey, Vita Sackville-West fell in love with the castle in April 1930.  She says "It was Sleeping Beauty's Castle; but a castle running away into sordidness and squalor; a garden crying out for rescue."  Sordidness and squalor have been thoroughly routed, but there is certainly a fairy-tale charm about it.  Let's take a brief tour.  Step this way...

     One of the most famous bits of this famous garden is its tower.  Vita Sackville-West used it as her sanctuary where she could write in peace.  From the top of the tower you can look down on the garden and get a real birds' eye view.

     In the center of the picture is one of the "rooms" in the garden at Sissinghurst Castle. I think it's called "The Cottage Garden" which appellation appeals greatly to me, but I would call it the "hot garden".  It was stuffed full of trumpeting oranges and reds which I probably would have appreciated more on a cool day, but this particular day was quite hot and muggy enough, more like Virginia than like I expected England to be in June.  I did love these kniphophias, though.

      We were too late for most of the roses unfortunately, but some were blooming romantically around a dovecote found in a blowsy orchard.

      The orchard is bordered on two sides by a moat, deeply shaded by trees.  This was a pretty good protected spot to be when the inevitable rain broke out.  It didn't last too long.  I was standing in deep shade looking across the moat into the well-lit orchard when this little sprite ran by in the sunshine with hat askew.

     Bryan suggested this trip to England to see gardens, both famous and private ones, for our 10th anniversary.  This is almost impossibly sweet, since I'm the one that it entirely addicted to gardens.  After the idea first came up, I kept reading or hearing the opinion that visiting gardens in England is a learning experience.  I don't dispute that at all.  But actually, I was getting to be a bit intimidated by the thought.  My garden is in that "crying out for rescue" stage and it has been since we moved in shortly after getting married.  (Well, actually the evidence suggests significantly longer than that.)  We have been oh so gradually rescuing it, but there are still huge swaths of ground that I would love to fill up with charming paths and flowery borders, except that they're bulging with hard-to-remove invasive plants like wisteria, nandina, and ivy.  I'm gradually learning some tricks for getting rid of these things and I'm sure some future posts will discuss them, but the point of this is that I wasn't entirely sure I deserved to go to England and try to learn things from the gardens there.   
     I learned stuff anyway.  Here's a nice unexpected example of color echos.

     The gardens at Sissinghurst Castle (and a lot of other ones we saw in England) have color themes.  Sissinghurst's are quite lovely, but in other places I started to get a little sick of the color coordinated flower borders.  Me!  It was weird but educational in an unexpected way to find that I could actually get fed up with row upon row of perfect flowers.  There were certainly more sophisticated than a bed filled with bedding annuals, but it was kind of the same effect, an aristocratic and high-maintenance sort of gaudiness.  I'm not thinking of Sissinghurst specifically with this criticism; I'm not sure exactly what the difference was.  Something about moving through the garden on a path (at Sissinghurst Castle) rather than viewing long borders from a lawn.  Something about letting the plants do their own thing a little bit.  Something about the garden being a symphony with loud parts interspersed with quiet parts, rather than a medley where the catchiest phrase of each song is patched together.
     The most famous of the color gardens at Sissinghurst castle is the white garden. 

     I believe this was the white garden from which all white gardens spring.  I expected to find one of those scenes that has lost some of its luster from being too famous and too often copied, but I was totally charmed.  It was very crowded with tourists, but I shuffled through it with the hordes back and forth and back and forth in different directions to try and really drink it in.  I hate crowds but the garden was worth putting up with this unideal viewing condition.  I expected it to be perhaps a little washed out, because we saw this room before the rain clouds and it was brilliantly sunny and hot.  I expect a white garden to not be at its best in the middle of the day.  But it was as bright and fresh and crisp as sheets on a laundry line.  I'm not sure I can explain this.  I attribute it partly due to an exquisitely precise choice of white-flowering cultivars.  (Lots of gray foliage and a little bit of dappled shade from some arbors helps too.)
     I also learned that I want more clematis.

    
     Another thing I learned from seeing gardens in England is that it's OK not to have one.  I do love the jam-packed flowery look.  I already knew enough to know that I can't grow, say, delphiniums in Southeastern Virginia, but I have read what sounds like good advice, which is that you can have a cottage garden feel with what does grow in your climate.  But what I can never get is the timing.  I would love to have more combinations like the lilies and alliums shown above in my garden but the plants I want to combine never seem to be blooming at the same time.  I have plants blooming most of the year, but not usually a lot of different kinds at once.  I'm going to keep plugging along and grow more plants and try to keep making notes about what does well and when it's in bloom (I love looking at people's Garden Blogger's Bloom Day entries to help with this too).  But I noticed something odd in England.  I was there in June.  There were poppies and chamomile blooming.  The poppies and chamomile were already pretty much done in my garden.  And there were sunflowers and goldenrod blooming!  I have no expectation of sunflowers and goldenrod until August.  I have some half-crocked theories to explain this English unseasonal magic but none of them hold water.  If anyone reading this has an explanation, please enlighten me with a comment!  But I'm chalking it up as one of the unknowable mysteries of nature.  Like all the unknowable mysteries, it is both humbling and comforting.  Here's how I see it.  I cannot have both chamomile and sunflowers in my garden at the same time so a true English garden may be fundamentally unachievable.  On the other hand, I don't want to have chamomile and sunflowers in my garden at the same time.  I love the seasonality of gardening here too much for that.  Being in England among all these beautiful and sophisticated gardens taught me something absolutely priceless.  Squalid and sordid though it may be, I love my own garden best of all.

Oxalis - Macro Monday

     Another dreary January day, so I look to my neglected houseplants for a little color.  Hey, that's interesting, this is a green oxalis, not a purple one...  This plant shows up in the garden store every year around St. Patrick's day and I always fall in love with it's adorable green shamrocks and delicate white flowers, and its charming habit of closing up its leaves every night at bedtime.  There's a burgundy-leaved version but it's the fresh green that appeals to me.  They can live outside here (I think) but I don't really have anyplace suitable to put it in the ground and I usually don't bother keeping it.  However,  this one stayed in its impossibly tiny pot all summer in a tray with cuttings so it got more watering and attention than most of my plants usually do.  In such a tiny pot, I thought it had a slim chance of also getting through the winter, so I brought it inside.  After a very brief winter's nap (too brief?), it's now putting on new growth.

     The purple on the new leaves' undersides caught me by surprise more than once, not just because the tops of the leaves are green, but because the purple is more or less intense as the viewing angle and light angle change.  It's like an outlandish hat worn by the outlandish wife of Mr. Elton in the movie Emma (in the scene where she tells Emma that she plans to throw a party for Jane Fairfax).  Mrs. Elton is wearing a green dress and a green hat, but as she swirls around Emma to conspiratorially take her arm as they walk, the hat changes color remarkably from green to red and back again as the satiny sheen catches the light from different angles.  Or, it's like the colors on some bird's feathers, grackles and starlings most accessibly -- take a good look next time they settle in your yard and gobble up all the seed in your feeders.  Or the spot on a mourning dove's neck as libido awakes in the early spring.  (Really! Make a note to look if you haven't seen it.)

     I just watched Emma again for the upteenth time.  The dialog in this movie always makes me laugh (like Miss Bates's line "it left us speechless!  Speechless, I tell you, and we have not stopped talking about it since.")  More than that, it's a great garden movie.  Once you have watched it as many times as I have, you won't need to pay so much attention to the plot anymore, and you may find yourself absorbed by the gorgeous flowery places, indoors and out, images from a gardener's fantasy.  I just wish I could stop the movie and jump in.  Click here for a trailer, including glimpses of some of the beautiful garden scenes (the colors in the movie are lush and vibrant, despite the trailer looking washed out) and even the outlandish hat very briefly at about 0:34.

     For today's post, I'm joining Lisa's Chaos for Macro Monday for the first time.  To see what other people are looking closely at, visit Lisa's blog.

Herb Garden in January

     Today has been dreary and gray and I've hardly gone outside.  Only twice for about a minute and a half each time, to harvest herbs from the herb garden, once at lunch time and once for dinner.  Right now my sweet husband is cooking up something that smells delicious that will have two tablespoons of chopped cilantro in it.  Yum! 

Herb garden in January

     That's cilantro in the lower right, parsley in the upper center of the picture, and dill in the lower left, with some chamomile sprouting next to it.  The brown stick is my sadly departed Spanish Lavender.  I'll have to replace it in the spring.  There's nothing but green here now.  I should have planted some pansies in October to overwinter and bloom in the warm spells, but I often don't think of buying annuals.  I like plants that take care of themselves.  Everything in this photo seeded itself -- hence the haphazard arrangement.  But the green certainly cheers me up in the winter.
     Harvesting cooking herbs from just outside the door in all weathers including rain and occasionally  snow is something we have really enjoyed for the past few years.  There's nothing like fresh basil for the pasta in the summer, parsley for just about anything in the winter and spring, and marjoram on the pizza all year round, just exactly how much I want.  

Marjoram and 'Sweetness' daffodil

     The pictures are from a few days ago when it was sunnier.  Even though it was bright and fairly warm for part of the day, and I was even home instead of at work, I was trying to sleep off a virus and didn't get to enjoy it much.  But for a little while I sat on the brick wall and weeded a little corner of the herb garden.  It's the warmest spot in my garden, and relaxing there on chilly days has been one of my exquisite garden pleasures since we built the low brick wall several years ago.  So, it's about the only spot in my yard that's thoroughly weeded (and only in the cool seasons!)
     As mentioned before, this has been an unusually mild winter.  I'm not sure if the cilantro will make it all the way through to spring, especially the two that are stretching to bolt already (what's with that?).  The daffodils seen here are "Sweetness" which I have in several places but which bloom earlier here than anywhere else, last year even before the ubiquitous early Ice Follies have ended.  This year I notice that the Sweetness foliage is up much taller than Ice Follies, but I don't know if that's unique to this strange season or if I just haven't noticed it before.
     Gotta go!  Dinnertime!