Gardens by Kelly Productions

Well, the announcement is here.  It’s in a festive mood with great pleasure that I finally share some exciting news with you–I’m writing another book for Timber Press!  It’s tentatively called Dig This–A Style Guide to Kickass Gardening.  

Freshly approved, this next project will embody the very essence of what this Plantsman’s Advent Calendar–chic plants for hip gardeners, the ethos of much of my creative work for the last several years.  From the introduction in progress:

“Kickass gardening isn’t only a way to garden—it’s a mindset and an attitude, and age has nothing to do with it.  Sass, irreverence, candor, audacity, and independence are marks of a kickass gardener, some ever young-at-heart soul who just wants to make a little paradise where it doesn’t otherwise exist.  Kickass gardening is about digging in the groove, finding the niche where you can unplug, connect with the earth, beautify some space, and be you.  There are no rules, just good taste and style.”

The book itself though isn’t just another twist on a philosophy for horticulture, no matter how pragmatic.  It’s a book for people who love plants and who want to live in plant-filled spaces.  Plants, after all, are the very essence of taste and style in the garden.  The book will craft an ethos around what it means to be a ”gardenista”—remember, if you don’t have to be a fashion designer to dress well, then you don’t have to be a professional horticulturist to create a great garden.  I look forward to sassing up the world of cool, kickass, waiting-to-be-rockstar plants with this next project.

And now a plant.  I mean what kind of advent calendar would this be without a chocolate treat on Christmas morn?  In an homage to the colors of my alma mater, I’m sharing with you one of my favorite species tulips Tulipa acuminata, the flame tulip of heirloom renown.  Native to Turkey, these twisted-petalled flowers scream to be the topic of conversation in mid-May and always look photogenic.  Planted in drifts, there’s nothing quite so irresistible.  Fortunately, too, this is available from several bulb suppliers including two favorite nurseries below.  Plant abundantly and light up your spring life.

In closing, Merry Christmas to those celebrating this hallmark occasion of love and joy across the world.  I’ll be back on New Year’s Eve to reflect a little and to look ahead.  Until then, have a blessed holiday season.

Sources:

Brent & Becky’s Bulbs

Odyssey Bulbs

Tulipa acuminata, ©2011, Kelly D. Norris

A plant like this is the mark of fine taste.  My first encounter with bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) was in the 10 acres of oak savanna woodlands on my family farm.  Each spring like a ritual, I would sojourn into the woods, scouring the ground floor for crowds of my favorite ephemerals–Claytonia, Erythronium, Cardamine, and Sanguinaria.  Named for the morphine-like substance exuded from their rhizomes, bloodroot makes an easy groundcover in the woodland garden, slowly spreading over the years to form a carpet of pristine, virginal flowers that harbinger spring.

The double form called ‘Multiplex’ trumps any of the rest.  A loosely defined cultivar (no doubt any double mutation discovered over time has donned this name), it’s finally starting to become more available, descending from its lofty three figure price tags into an affordable range.  Collectors have long coveted their clumps of ‘Multiplex’, hoarding them behind tall trees in the back of shady areas–floral moonshine–in fears of them being stolen (which has happened; smart crooks).  Though it clumps at a moderate pace, it’s hardly so slow as to warrant obscurity.

But it’s that coveting, that hoarding that has resulted in its rarity.  Hailed in the U.K. by the Royal Horticultural Society as one of the top plant introductions of the last 200 years, it’s a dashing, double-petalled example of our native North American flora and the impact such gems have had on international horticulture.  It’s a shame then that so few domestic gardens have them, at least in comparison to that international popularity.  No need to borrow or steal (begging however is condoned), these fine nurseries listed below offer them at a reasonable price.

Sources:

Avant Gardens

Plant Delights Nursery

Sanguinaria canadensis 'Multiplex' ©2011, Kelly D. Norris

I’ve decided to wrap up the last three days of this Plantsman’s Advent Calendar with three distinctive and vastly different plants.  Today’s plant is also the first and only tropical species on the list.  Let me explain.

Many gardening friends have frequently heard me espouse my barely tepid interest in tropical plants.  ”If it’s not hardy, throw it back,” I’ve often retorted, suggesting that the pool of plants I cultivate need not include those that can’t withstand a brutal Iowa winter.  I’ve never had much of a knack for tropicals as houseplants either, much preferring to grow plants in the free outdoors than the ever-too-dry containers of my bedroom and living room.  While I like the idea of living among my plants, I’d just assume live in the garden instead.

But ever in search of a plant that makes my head turn, I’m smitten with Crinum ‘Menehune’ (marketed under the name Purple Dream™) for its sultry, seductive, and purple foliage set against sprays of pink flowers.  Crinums are pretty awesome to begin with, especially if you live in the south (shout out to my buddy Jenks Farmer, the Crinum dude).  Beyond the tenderness of Zone 8 and above, this plant has great potential to light up a container garden with two dashes of zing like you couldn’t believe.  While I don’t take charge of making container gardens at our nursery, I’ve always had opinions about how I’d like to see them done (hint, hint mom).  Random trivia–the name Menehune comes from an elusive, forest-dwelling, dark-skinned race of Hawaiian island natives.

This Sean Callahan hybrid of C. oliganthum x C. procerum ‘Splendens’ may not make a huge play in the American market, given its limited hardiness, but it’s well worth the effort to find one.  Despite my advocacy of hardy garden plants for temperate gardens, I think there is a real place for tropicals in garden design, a way to spice things up, change up the texture, and artistically transport the viewer to another environment.  Whether that happens in the open garden near a bog or in a large container to accommodate its 20″ x 20″ dimensions, I’m open to the possibilities.

Sources:

Hines Nurseries (wholesale)

Pond Megastore

Crinum 'Menehune' Purple Dream™, photo courtesy of Garden Media Group

Happy Winter Solstice!  The day of reckoning, the shortest of them all thankfully, is upon us.  Let the march (trudge) towards spring begin…

On this the first day of winter, I think it’s appropriate to celebrate with something silvery.  Some of you in the Mountain West and northern plains today get to enjoy another less comely version of silvery white and to you all I offer my condolences.

Onto silver.  Oenothera macrocarpa is a fascinating species for a couple of reasons.  First, it’s just a great garden plant.  I’ve grown forms of it since I was a kid, back when I just thought it was pretty and got excited at its rampant vigor.  Second, the variation across its range is marked and pronounced.  Fremont’s Evening Primrose (ssp. fremontii) grows in chalky, rocky soils (read: hell) in northern Kansas and south central Nebraska.  At one point it was considered a separate species, owing to its smaller, more abundant flowers and slight differences in the shape of its seedpod when compared to other provenances.  But bringing it back into the fold of O. macrocarpa makes plenty of sense taxonomically and helps to underscore the importance of collecting and evaluating germplasm of broadly distributed species from across their geographic distributions.  Enough with the provenance soapbox…

In the garden, O. macrocarpa ssp. fremontii rues a silver day, flirting with my wandering eyes from its emergence in May to its disappearance in late fall.  The plants I grow don’t have cultivar names, but rather owe their origins to wild-collected seed.  In other words, variation abounds, and I love it.    These silver salvers serve up yellow flowers, sunny and tastefully lemony, on the eve of high summer; an eloquent way of saying that these flowers show up when it’s blisteringly hot out.  Though I don’t have any specimens worth of higher selection, I enjoy the undercurrent of pewter that moves through my rock garden each time the wind rustles through their foliage (and thankfully for once not due to powdery mildew).  Can you tell I’m just a little struck with puppy love here?

But there are several nice forms and selections of this showy Great Plains native available, carry image-conjuring names like ‘Shimmer’, ‘Silver Wings’, and ‘Comanche Campfire’.  I can attest to the fact that all of them deserve a place in American gardens.  Of these, ‘Shimmer’ takes top honors for its dazzling foliar presentation, floriferousness, and high ‘hot or not’ score (plant-style).

Sources:

High Country Gardens

Jelitto Seeds

Plant Delights Nursery

Oenothera macrocarpa ssp. fremontii, ©2011, Kelly D. Norris

Don’t mistake for a minute that all plants in the garden have to be loud-mouthed and sassy.  Hip gardeners know that classy, chic plants fit into comely garden spaces whether recliner- or votive-candle-sized.  Sometimes it’s the little details (channel your inner Bob Ross and think “happy little trees”) that make or break the stylistic essence of a garden.  Today I’m featuring one of those little details in my shade garden–Polygonatum humile.

Ever running around the garden floor in search of a neighbor to cuddle next to, this dwarf Solomon’s seal never grows more than six or eight inches (at least the majority of forms in commerce).  Little fluted stems with white, teardrop-shaped flowers pop up early in April here in Iowa and join an ephemeral crowd in full swing–violets, hepaticas, and epimediums to name a few.  Fortunately, this plant is a little more available than others I’ve featured, which means you should all run out and buy 10 or so if you don’t grow it already.

And what do I need to say culturally about a plant that’s so easy to grow?  Drop the roots into some decent humus, cool in the shade, and you’re on your way to enjoying these little votives of the woodland garden.

Sources:

Joy Creek Nursery

Lazy S’S Farm Nursery

Polygonatum humile, ©2011, Kelly D. Norris

So continuing with yesterday’s themes of ‘biennial’ and ‘absent from my garden,’ I thought I’d give a shout out to a really awesome plant that just surfaced on my radar a few seasons ago.

Named for French royal botanist André Michaux, Michauxia campanuloides is a member of Campanulaceae, the bellflower family.  Now, I’m not hung up on every generic bellflower just because it has dangling, bell-shaped flowers (I gots Irids with tepals, yo).  But I do get hung up on Michauxia, not only because it dangles but because it’s anything but generic.  As it came into my view during a visit to Dancing Oaks Nursery last summer, I thought I’d come across a flowering ghost.  Eerily topping out at 5′ tall, these inflorescences drip pendent white flowers that look more wraith-like than floral.  I’d love to know why this particular plant was named in honor of Michaux, having a hunch it was credited with his name after one of his pre-American expeditions through the Middle East to Persia.  He was a character and one of the most significant botanists of his day.  Incidentally, his name is found as an epithet of several plants including Quercus michauxii, Lilum michauxii, and Carex michauxiana.

But back to the plant.  How is something so creepy cool, so otherwise absent from modern gardens?  This native of Lebanon and Israel is hardy to Zone 5 (and ironically, like Anthriscus yesterday is often underrated in terms of hardiness), thrives in clay and rocky soils, loves full sun, freaks people out, and reseeds a little when it’s all over with.  How can we go wrong?  It’ll soon have a home in my garden.  Yours?

{Can I just give a shout-out to the fine ladies at Annie’s Annuals who seriously keep the world going round with cool plants?  I don’t know how many times this month they’ve been credited as a source, but let’s all pick up the reigns here a little.  Though there’s nothing wrong with supporting  a great nursery like Annie’s, we really can’t expect them to keep the rest of us in supply of this stuff forever.  Let’s get some of these gems spread around!}

Sources (updated 12/20):

Annie’s Annuals

Arrowhead Alpines

Michauxia campanuloides, ©2011, Kelly D. Norris

Now, biennials don’t get a lot of love.  It’s puzzling–to be a horticultural favorite you either have to have a shelf-life of nine months or four years (or more) to get any kind of respect.  Two-year affairs mean nothing.  Where have we gone wrong?  Do short-term relationships mean nothing nowadays?  At any rate, I’m just as guilty of promulgating anti-biennial rhetoric.  I say words like ‘sustainable’ and ‘thrive’ a lot, which don’t necessarily apply to a plant that only hangs around for a couple years before checking out to the big compost pile in the sky.  But for this plant, I’ll admit to the errors of my ways.

Black plants, particularly ones like Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Raven’s Wing’, have a way of bewitching the soul.  For the prudes among us, I’m sure they’re just as good as lepers, outlawed from general use for standing out just a little too much from the crowd.  For us brazen sorts, they grow right at home.

Surprisingly though, this is one of the few plants on this list that I don’t currently grow, though have loved from my travels enough to share with you this month.  It’s not that I can’t find it or wouldn’t want it.  I just haven’t brought it home and for no particularly good reason.  Remember the saying too many plants, too little time?  But I’ll tell you why I would and some day will plant it.

First, I’d do it just because I could.  This plant’s hardiness is too often underrated.  It’s perfectly hardy to Zone 5, evidenced by my own eyes.  Even if it wasn’t, it’s really not the flowers that anyone cares about (unless you’re aiming to nab a few seeds), but rather the foliage, which would look comely spilling out of a huge container right next to your front door.  Stick it to the man, hipsters.

Second–texture, color, texture, color, blah, blah, blah.  All the stuff that’s self evident.  She’s a rock star, a diva, and she’s got what words don’t.  Plus, black foliage in the second season finds a dancing partner in sundry white umbels that bloom with seeming laxity.

Third, just because it reseeds.  The beauty of so many biennials is that they freely reseed, perpetuating another cycle of short-lived, though extremely satisfying two year ordeals, over and over.

Fourth, because sometimes they will live longer than just two years, though I never hold my breath (you know how these flings go).  It seems in warmer climates, longevity increases.  How true…

Sources:

Annie’s Annuals

Arrowhead Alpines 

Anthriscus sylvestris 'Raven Wing' ©2011, Kelly D. Norris

Following yesterday’s post, I thought it appropriate to feature another plant that came to my garden via Ellen Hornig of Seneca Hill Perennials.

It’s no secret really that I’m addicted to hollyhocks.  I’ve fiddled with selecting and crossing them for over 10 years, starting when I was a mere boy gardener with absolutely no conscious clue of what I was doing other than selecting ‘the prettiest’ of the bunches I grew.  But breeding hollyhocks is a lot like herding cats–what advances you do make inevitably veer off in some random direction away from the intended goal.  I always chuckle when I come across a fellow plant breeder who breed hollyhocks (it’s happened exactly once).  It’s kind of like running into a mirror and laughing at your own outfit (what the hell was I/he thinking?)

Anyway, Iliamna grandiflora, doesn’t really sound like a hollyhock if you’re used to hearing Alcea rosea roll off the tongue.  But this North American genus of “wild hollyhocks” calls various parts of western North America home (with the exception of eastern disjunct populations of I. rivularis, which occur in Illinois and Virginia).  Little is known about these species in cultivation and they are barely available commercially.  Ellen was one of the only sources around when the genus came to my attention a few years ago.  Now, I’m not sure who’s propagating them.  If you can find one (a Google search turned up a fat ZERO nurseries listing it as of today), you’ll love it.

Onto the plant purple prose.  I. grandiflora grows about three feet tall, sports white, typical hollyhock-esque flowers, and flowers almost non-stop from spring through summer.  The best part (and why it’s of interest to a hollyhock breeder)–it’s resistant to hollyhock rust.  I’m always hesitant to use the word ‘resistant’, but as near as I can tell, I’ve not spotted one damn pustule on it yet.  This past summer was the worst for hollyhock rust in my garden ever.  Even seedlings I previously had rated as exceptionally tolerant were obliterated by early July (and there goes the cat).  Growing within feet of some of these seedlings, I. grandiflora has never shown signs of infection.  Ladies and gentleman, that’s a plant worth talking about.

Though the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it’s my hope to bring this species and its gardenworthy congeners into broader distribution (eventually).  They have a certain wildflower quality to them, in addition to looking all to familiar to everyday gardeners as “ye grandma’s ol’ hollyhocks.”  Growing in my scree garden, they’re an exciting addition to my gardenscape, even if they’re like little chocolate candies that nobody else can have (for now).

Iliamna grandiflora, ©2011, Kelly D. Norris

Well I did it again–I goofed up the interwebs.  To my subscribers, apologies if you received an email link to this post this morning and then found it defunct.

Today, let’s talk about one of the most divine spring ephemerals in my garden–Lathyrus vernus ‘Flaccidus Roseus’.  This gorgeous vetchling came to my garden via Seneca Hill Perennials, the now former nursery of plantswoman extraordinaire Ellen Hornig.  Ellen’s taste for plants is exceptional, and better yer, her taste for selecting fine seedlings resulted in this Latin-esque cultivar from a seed strain she developed.  The word flaccidus in Latin literally means limp, but in this instance refers to the fine, narrower, and linear texture of the foliage in comparison to other strains of the species.  It’s an almost feather-like and hovering aesthetic.  At various times, it’s earned recognition as a subspecies, variety, and cultivar, all the result of horticultural/botanical arguments which are never won and too easily fought.  Ellen’s decision to name a strain of pink-flowered seedlings as ‘Flaccidus Roseus’ is probably the safest way of circumscribing these lovely, early spring peas.

As you may know, the genus Lathyrus is quite diverse and is best known for its vines–the sweet peas of our grandmother’s back fences.  But this lassy clumps and mounds, handsomely growing into a robust clump over several years that shimmers ever so slightly with the rustling of the breeze.  It’s also a perennial that enjoys a little shade.  I grow mine at the edge of my wooded backyard in the company of a merry troupe of daffodils, Carex, and a selection of unusual ferns–a handsome vignette in the waking days of spring.

While this cultivar isn’t in wide distribution, do snatch it up when you can.  These vernal peas are all too rare in the garden and for no good reason.  Early spring flowering, delicate, and tough as nails–what more could you want?

Sources:

Lazy S’S Farm Nursery

Lathyrus vernus 'Flaccidus Roseus' ©2011, Kelly D. Norris

As I said just a few days ago, succulents are all the rage.  While sedums are undeniably a focus of this attention, for much of the last decade, new sedum introductions have come in tall, upright forms.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  Finally, though, some of that succulent love has crept on down to the lowliest, but most virtuous members of the genus–the groundcovers, those just as perfectly suited to a green roof as the crest of a rock wall.

And dipping into the 2012 crop of new introductions, I’m proud today to feature a great new groundcover sedum from my friend Chris Hansen of Great Garden Plants.  Chris has done some exciting breeding work over the last few years and selected several eye-catching varieties on the down low that all hit the market in 2012 under the catchy series moniker Sunsparkler™.  ’Dazzleberry’ caught my eye at the Garden Writers Association symposium back in August, and Chris gladly shared a few plants with me that now call my two rock gardens home.  Let me share a little about why I went screaming with glee up to my hotel room with these plugs…

First, in the architecture department, these sedums take top honors.  For years, I’ve bemoaned the floppy, rangy habits of cultivars like ‘Sunset Cloud’ and ‘Vera Jameson’, even as I praised them for their dazzling color and contrast on the backdoor step of autumn.  In fact they still call my rock garden home, though perhaps not for long.  ’Dazzleberry’, as an interspecific hybrid, brings together the best of both worlds–a lovely array of flowers that reportedly last for up to 7 weeks in Michigan and with a superb, compact, ground-hugging habit.

Second, in the floral department, the inflorescences are bigger than its competitors.  Yes, in the plant world, size does matter, though there’s an argument to be made for using small flowers effectively (NOT in the case of sedums, exactly).  But let’s not go there today (I’ll explain it all when you’re older).

Third, in the disease tolerance department, all indications point to ‘so far so good’.  I’m hoping to repeat Chris’s good luck with it in Michigan throughout the course of my bestial Iowa summers.  Stay tuned.

As a closing thought, I have to candidly admit that I swoon for any flower in this shade of lipstick verging on carmine–my Achilles’ heel.  If you start counting the number of times I say that, you’ll rack up a long list of major weaknesses in my horticultural constitution.  What’s a plantsman to do?

Source:

Great Garden Plants

Sedum 'Dazzleberry', photo courtesy of Chris Hansen