Gardens by Kelly Productions

Though I’m betting ol’ Frank never laid eyes on Clematis heracleifolia, I’m still going to make reference to that classic cocktail standard like he had.  I suppose I could beg the question “what else”, sounding a little cliche at the incinuation that the only August-blooming plants worth raising a glass to are, of course, the bush or tube clematis.  But frankly, that’s even a little overboard for me.  With over 250,000 flowering plant species on this globe, I’m sure I’ve missed gardening with one or two (only) that could excite me so on the ides of August.  For now, though, I’m content with my clematis.

With purple cloying my fingertips tonight, I can’t help but extol a few of the many virtues of these fall-blooming, non-vining clematis.  Inevitably, if I say “clematis”, most would think ‘Jackmannii’, the enduring purple rambler that’s climbed up everything from barns and doors to mugo pines and even the occasional ,well-tended trellis.  So for many, adding the adjectival phrase “non-vining” before the word “clematis” looks like an oxymoron, seemingly impossible when considering the countless queens of vertical spaces that have for so long comprised our public knowledge of the genus.  In fact some of the best clematis, in my less than humble opinion, laugh in the face of trellises and much prefer to scramble about their neighbors or flow tidily just above ground from bunchy, stemmy clumps. 

In fact some might say that a few of these non-viners verge on shrub-like, an assertion I’d agree with in the case of the easy-to-grow Clematis heracleifolia.  The largest form I grow is just over four feet tall, rigid, and stout.  A gale force wind assailed my garden over the weekend, laying flat almost everything or at the very least giving all my flora an eastward slant.  But not so with the bush clematis.  Tonight their many-flowered stalks held tall those perky, dangling blue blossoms for the camera, the stuff of dreams for plant-sick nerds like yours truly.  The two forms pictured below came from my dear friends Steve and Caroline Bertrand at The Perennial Flower Farm.  The light blue form boasts a rich, citrus and gardenia blended fragrance that flirts with adjectives like intoxicating and sumptuous.  Remember, I have a poor sense of smell too!  My mother just rolls her eyes and smiles at each sniff.  Truly delicious!  I don’t know that it has a formal cultivar name, but ‘Citrus Caroline’ seems altogether perfect.  I’ll suggest that on my next visit.  The other form has cobalt blue flowers that contrast the golden, shimmerous foliage of my beauty bush in fine style.  The flowers look bigger, have longer pedicels (that’s the little “stalk” that attaches flowers to the flower stalk, in laymen’s terms), and dangle, dangle in a different way than the former too.

What do you need to know about growing them?  They’re easy, real easy.  Spot them a home in part shade, give them good drainage, and plant them nearby plenty of pretty perennials and you’ve got a classic vignette that’ll have everyone envious of your outlandish creative abilities.  These plants are real doers!  Go for it!

(And in all honesty I must admit–I do get a kick from champagne.)

I suppose it sounds a bit trite to ask “can you believe it’s August?”  But really?  It’s at this point that I start to get a little wistful and reminiscent, looking back over the season from its March beginnings until now.  I can’t even find the corydalis anymore.  Daffodil foliage has mostly faded.  The seedheads of my Monarda bradburiana stand tall and proud, but I’d rather them be covered in those lavender flowers that I saw before I left for the Ozarks. 

But it’s really just the eve of my second favorite season.  Autumn, by many accounts in garden literature, is the forgotten season.  Folks busy themselves raking leaves, shuffling kids to school activities, and catching up on those must-do cleaning chores before the depths of winter set in.  My Midwest garden reminds me of all this, a calendar of sorts throughout the year.  Have you ever thought of the garden as a living calendar, a timepiece for the progress of the seasons?  In Iowa, I suppose I’m fortunate to experience four seasons (occasionally a fifth one too, called hell), though in mid-January I’m probably not as optimistic-sounding.  But gardening in a temperate climate affords gardeners this primal experience of seasonality that many take for granted or never experience at all.

In each of these seasons, the garden possesses a unique feeling.  Spring looks, feels, and smells different in the garden than summer, fall or winter, and vice versa.  It’s my opinion that this living timetable motivates our gardening endeavors, like today when I’d rather sit indoors looking at the window-high Henry Eilers coneflower (Rudbeckia subtomentosa ‘Henry Eilers’) then actually go outside in the heat and stick my nose in its bevy of flowers.  In the cooler days of fall, I race around pulling back falling leaves for a last look at my autumn crocus (Colchicum spp.) or to clear a new spot for more daffodils.  On days of thawing in winter, I putter around the garden in snow boots hunting for glimpses of ephemeral life surely waiting to spring forth at the onset of warmer weather and longer days.  Aren’t these the moments that add up to gardening, the verb of our passion and the acts that beautify our spaces? 

The garden also shows us when to take on tasks like pruning, deadheading, and dividing.  We chalk-up these to-do lists to past experiences gleaned from seasons before.  Spring is the time to divide late summer-flowering perennials.  Early summer is the time to cut-back shrubs that bloom on old wood.  Summer brings deadheading.  Fall brings planting.  With winter comes planning. 

In my calendar garden grows not only a chart of the seasons, but a constant reminder of my own progress outdoors.  Tell me about your calendar garden and celebrate the beauty of the seasons!

I talk a lot about vignettes, justifiably so considering the rhapsodic nature of my garden.  Like a rhapsody, my garden is a composition of irregular forms with generous freedom of expression.  It employs the full measure of my creativity, at least I hope.  If a garden space doesn’t employ or at least challenge the full measure of our creative devices, what really have we created?  Another median planting with daylilies and barberries, no doubt!

So in this spirit of vignettes united by equal measures of dimension and freedom, let me share with you a few combos that caught my eye this weekend.

Combo #1:  Tightly knit, this merry duo repeats itself throughout my front garden.  Yellowdicks (Helenium amarum), which I’m obviously enchanted with, happily shine in concert with my favorite soapwort (Saponaria lempergii ‘Max Frei’).  Some soapworts have an unsavory reputation for being rock garden thugs.  Not so here.  Mindful and ground-hugging, ‘Max Frei’ brightens up any floor spot in the garden, a colorful filler while nearby and taller neighbors prep for the next round.  This particular vignette has shone strongly for nearly three weeks.  The soapworts just started to go down hill this week.

Combo #2:  I liked this so much I made it the front page photo on the website!  What a startling palette of texture, color, and personality, right?  You’ll recognize the beautybush from earlier posts.  Prairie sage (Artemisia ludoviciana) adds silver to the menu, juxtaposing the glowy chartreuse foliage of the beautybush.  These two alone could seal the deal for me, an unexpectedly compatible interface of opposing forces.  Yet the drama comes from the emergent blossoms on my bush clematis (Clematis heracleifolia) whose dark, pseudo-jade foliage and cobalt blue flowers tactfully grace the vignette with star power.  It all comes together to spell bold like no other vignette in my garden does, a momentary semblance of my personality cropping up in the forms of plants.  As I reflect though on the island bed in toto, similar strokes of boldness grow throughout.  In effect, one vignette forces a reconsideration of the piece at-large, something garden designers would say alludes to thematic development of the garden space.  The power of one, maybe.

Combo #3:  I use #3 to illustrate how the same idea (like in #1) can happen with different plants.  One of the best evening primroses for the home garden, Oenothera macrocarpa ssp. fremontii blooms endlessly from June through early fall.  Many forms sport shimmering foliage in silver tones, the perfect accent as illustrated in previous vignettes.  Here, though, this endless summer bloomer has waded into a sea of cutleaf beardstongue (Penstemon richardsonii var. richardsonii), a perfectly hardy endemic of the Pacific Northwest mountain ranges.  I love sprawling plants.  Their roving tendencies and friendly door-knocking invite serendipity to the garden, precisely the case here.  That improvisational element accelerates a native, natural feeling that’s present in my front garden.  It goes on unplanned throughout the season, versing its freedom.

What vignettes do you have in your garden?  What do they look like and what plants shine?  It’s easy to get lost in the big picture sometimes (I can relate since I consider myself a “big picture” kind of planner).  But the value lies in the details, those little vignettes that add up to the garden at-large.