Gardens by Kelly Productions

Growing up, living, and gardening in a winter-stricken, temperate climate gives you a unique perspective on the rhythm of life, particularly the cadence of the seasons.  I feel like that cadence is lost on many people, September bleeding into February and sinking into June without fanfare or celebration for the simple tide of weather, flowers, and birds.  Philosophical?  Maybe.  But impractical?  Not so!

With that celebration of the seasons in mind, please enjoy these images from my garden.  It’s not a perfect canvas, and I don’t care!  It’s mine, and that’s what matters.  If you take away nothing from this blog other than a feverish passion for independence and uniqueness in your own gardening space, rock on!  Happy digging!

Spring:

Summer:

Fall:

Winter:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today I’m thankful for friends, family, and the flora of my garden that bloom without end, even after a dip into the 20s last night.  What’s more is that here at Rainbow Iris Farm, we’re celebrating our first ever iris in bloom on Thanksgiving!  We’ve often had rebloom into the week of, but never enjoyed it on Thanksgiving day proper.  Check out out Twitpic stream for photos of floral do-gooders like Helenium amarum and Echinacea ‘Tomato Soup’ still in bloom, and of course that little iris.

Check out some of the autumnal divas (below) showing off late season color.  Who agrees that this fall has been a grand season for heucheras?  Some of the best fall color I can remember.

Each year I reflect on the season past, usually for most of the winter.  (That’s a period of cold, gray, dismal nothingness for you southerly sorts.)  When I think about the season, I think about my plants.  My favorites.  The stars and divas.  The sulkers and misbehavers.  For ridiculous fun, I’ve decided to reduce my 1,000 + taxa plant collection to my top 15 plants for 2009.  This class of plants is mostly certainly a thriving crowd of plants–hardworking perennials and shrubs that don’t give in to the whims of Mother Nature.  (This is not a ranked listing, simply a sorted alphabetical list.)

1. Aconitum umbrosum
This recent acquisition from my friends Steve and Caroline Bertrand at The Perennial Flower Farm really took me for a spin.  I’m an Aconitum fan, albeit a casual one.  But this green and cream-flowered species from northeastern China and the Korean peninsula (unfortunately quite rare in commerce) really has me raving.  Maybe the coolest feature is the emerging foliage in spring–dark jade speckled with silvery spots, much like a Pulmonaria.  Choice and all too unavailable.

2. xAlcalthaea ‘Park Allee’
You may know this plant by the incorrect genus name Malva.  Around since the early 70s, this hollyhock-look-alike actually arose from crosses of Alcea (hollyhock) and Althaea (mallow) in a Hungarian garden.  Four cultivars were introduced, of which two remain relatively extant.  I was turned on to these bigeneric hybrids several years ago when doing research for my own Alcea breeding program.  Though sterile, ‘Park Allee’ is everything a gardener wants in a hollyhock.  It’s resistant (or highly tolerant) of hollyhock rust, suffers no herbivory from beetles or other insects that keenly nibble away at the foliage of neighboring hollyhocks, and blooms virtually non-stop from the end of June through and after frost.  I KNOW!?  The swarm of plants in our west perennial border was the subject of many conversations with visiting gardens, usually in disbelief at its utterly brilliant performance.

3. Clematis heracleifolia
I was so enchanted with this species this year that I wrote an entire post about them.

4. Gentiana septemfida var. lagodechiana
I promised my mom that I’d include this plant this year, and for good reason.  Gentians are one of those “blue” flowered plants that make you reeavaluate your definition of blue.  They really know how to pull it off!  This ground-hugging, sprite, and perky rock garden doyenne thrives with good drainage and scoffs in the face of Midwestern humidity.

5. Helianthus maximiliani
I’ve loved this native for years.  I shared a brief profile with y’all back in 2007.  It’s grown up even more and has earned a midsummer haircut next season to keep it manageable and enjoyable.

6. Heucherella ‘Sweet Tea’
I’m so getting brownie points for plugging this.  Dan Heims gave this to me back in April.  Now typically I don’t rush my evaluations of first year plants because it’s just not good science or logic.  But ‘Sweet Tea’ is an exception.  From a 72-cell plug (SMALL), this sumptuously colored, bigeneric hybrid between Heuchera (coral bells) and Tiarella (foamy bells) grew vigorously all summer long.  Since I’m also practically an adopted child of the south, I couldn’t pass up mentioning one of my favorite southernisms….sweet tea!  ‘Sweet Tea’ should be widely available in 2010.  Look for it!

7. Iris ‘Gene’s Lora Lavelle’
Here’s some shameless self promotion for quite possibly the worst named plant ever….and it’s mine!  Regardless of its lack of nomenclatural catchiness, my 2009 introduction deserves a spot in your garden.  Visitors love it.  We love it.  Just forget to tag it, for its sake.

8. Iris x norrisii
Though I like to take credit for the specific epithet, this newly reclassified irid was named for Sam Norris (maybe a relative?) who developed this horticultural species from repeated crosses of (then) Pardanthopsis dichotoma (now Iris dichotoma) and Belamcanda chinensis (now Iris domestica).  These so-called candy lilies (or xPardancanda, if you’re stuck in your ways) razzle dazzle the garden at a time when few other perennials (let alone irises) look their grandest.  A focus of our breeding and development work, we can’t wait to share the fruits of our labors with you in a few years (hopefully).  Take a look at some of this year’s seedlings derived from Harlan Hamernick’s Dazzler series and seed-grown I. domestica ‘Hello Yellow’ (sometimes erroneously named Belamcanda flava).  Oh and did I mention they are drought-tolerant, heat-loving, and capable of growing in clay?

9. Kolkwitzia amabilis ‘Maradco’ Dream Catcher™
I know I’ve babbled about this thing all summer too.  But really, it looked stunning all summer.  The stuff of my dreams…

10. Lespedeza thunbergii ‘Samindare’
I can’t wait for the day I can build a seven or eight foot tall wall and have it planted with Lespedeza cascading over the edge.  Correction…that’s the stuff of my dreams!  But in the meantime I’m more than satisfied with ‘Samindare’, the posh-looking, free-wheeling babe of the pea family that delightfully graces the east border of my family’s home.  Bloom time- SEPTEMBER.  Mark it down, mark it down…

11. Penstemon richardsonii var. richardsonii
I couldn’t compile a list without a Penstemon.  Such would be an act of heresy!  I once had a shirt that said “Penstomaniac” but I don’t think it fits anymore (I think the American Penstemon Society still sells them).  I picked up this pent on one of my trips to Portland.  Native to colder valleys in the Cascade Mountain range of Oregon and Washington, Richardson’s penstemon has no trouble surviving the brutality of Midwestern winters.  Given good drainage it seems thoroughly content.  The flowers are almost indescribable and difficult to photograph since they glow in neon blue tones.  If you think ‘Husker Red’ when you hear Penstemon, displace that idea for a minute.  This mountain girl rambles at ground level, a subshrub of sorts that meanders in and between its associates.  Not widely available or even grown much outside of its native range.  I found plants for sale recently at Laporte Avenue Nursery, a fine rock garden plant specialist.

12. Phlox paniculata ‘Peppermint Twist’
I know, I need an intervention with this plant.  But how can you not fall in love with this dwarf, everblooming, and disease-tolerant cultivar?  A diva of necessitous consequence.

13. Rudbeckia subtomentosa ‘Henry Eilers’
If Henry Eilers ran for office, I’d donate to his campaign fund.  I can’t think of a more sensational perennial black-eyed susan on the market.  Here’s a shout-out to Dan H. for bringing it to the wholesale market.  If you don’t own it, buy it.  Sales pitch:  Long-blooming, durable, rugged, and non-flopping black-eyed susan that’ll have you swooning and singing Sinatra.  I’ve got about 600 photos of the same plant in my garden from the last several years.  I can’t get enough.

14. Silene ‘Rockin’ Robin’
Another Dan Heims introduction of considerable worth that failed to hit it big.  Sometimes the market doesn’t always know best!  Such is the case with this phenomenal catchfly bred by Thurman Maness.  Sporting all the standard markers of hybrid vigor (vigorous, larger flowers, etc.), ‘Rockin’ Robin’ politely screams at garden visitors in the most audacious visual flavor of salmon pink humanly imaginable.  And it doesn’t stop!  After nearly a month of bloom in early summer, I hedge back the sticky remnants and watch it slowly tank up for a repeat show in late summer and early fall.  Wouldn’t garden without it.  Still available from the niche suppliers who recognize good plants.

15. Symphytum x uplandicum ‘Axminster Gold’
Sexy?  Comfrey?  Same sentence?  YES!  These plants of rhyme and lore typically don’t call up images of vixens.  Yet take a look below at this well-regarded variegated cultivar called ‘Axminster Gold’.  Bawdy, right?  When planted in the middle of groundcovers or in the depths of shade, it’s like a light bulb in a dark closet.  Suddenly color floods in and that once dreary corner of the garden changes forever.  I deliberately planted it with this very purpose in mind and it has grown into the job perfectly.  Can’t wait for it to just keep getting bigger (and now I just have to have more).  Please note other species and variegated cultivars do exist.  I think I’ll buy them all.

Now…what were some of YOUR favorite plants for 2009?  Rules:  you have to grow them yourself (ie-can’t be something you saw somewhere and loved…that’s another list!)

Nothing thrills me more than the October ritual of planting bulbs.  The thrill of grabbing my straw hat for the last time this weekend and using my trowel before stowing it for winter excites me more than you could know.  Though I’m not an athlete, any coach would say to finish with exhilaration, capturing the thrill of the quest soon to end.  Such is bulb planting for me!

But my favorite bulbs (actually corms) show up in autumn.  No, not in dried, bundled, boxed and ready to plant form either.  They’re the autumn crocus, just finishing up now in places all over the country.  Planted in the fall like other crocus, to which they are absolutely NOT related, the so-called autumn crocus possess an unimpeachable suite of ornamental qualities not the least of which is their peculiar bloom time.

I stumbled head first into autumn crocuses when I was a teenager, fascinated as I was with their paradoxical nature.  Their waxy, rippled foliage appears in mid-spring, hangs around just long enough to make you wonder what on earth you could’ve planted there, and promptly disappears.  Many might express alarm.  Others, like me, forget that fleeting glimpse of tropicalismo-inspiring foliage and proceed ignorantly through the summer months–until September.  That’s when I got hooked.  I might have been 15 or 16, I don’t quite remember.  But I do remember the overwhelming sense of excitement when I stumbled upon that tidy pink bouquet of ground-springing, shell-like flowers freckled with lavender checker-square boxes.  I was in love, seduced by their lustiness at the onset of fall. 

Since that ephemeral moment I’ve tried to rustle up as many of these central Asian natives as I can find including C. kesselringii (which I’m determined to grow at all cost), C. cilicicum, and C. byzantinum.  Unfortunately, many whimper and die in the summers of my mid-continent garden.  They’d love to be drier I’m sure.  But hardier and more robust forms of C. autumnale and C. speciosum offer most Midwesterners just the treat needed in the waning months of the growing season.  Take a look at some of my favorite,  Zone 5 hardy Colchicum cultivars.

I ask this question every year.  Don’t you?  You’d think after so many years of gardening, the answer would be empirical, at least to an extent.  But it’s far from empirical.  Where did the growing season go? 

Sure I’m wistful, wanting badly to relive the evening of July 7 when my ‘Peppermint Twist’ phlox roared in full bloom.  Or July 10 when that lusty orienpet lily called ‘Shocking’ ruined normalcy in my backyard with its startling, to say the least, flowers.  In contrast, I could go all the way back to June 14, the day after I got home from the Ozarks and recall the sparkling, pristine racemes of foxglove penstemon (Penstemon digitalis). 

I recall more recently the sunset-lit heads of my Northern sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium), an assured sign of closure in my Midwestern garden.  Maybe then, or earlier, I started to take the hint.  Gardens have a way of signalling change, passing days on the calendar with floral bounty and ripening fruits.  As a timepiece they remind us of the rhythm of the seasons, keeping us in time with a natural clock that has ticked for longer than we can know. 

Leaves fall, the ground freezes, and life retreats to chambers.  But the passion for gardening lacks such a good, steady watch and a place to persist when conditions don’t permit flourish.  Though for many of us in the temperate north where the act of gardening begins to subside, the passion springs eternal through snowflakes and cold.  Where has the growing season gone?  No where too permanent at all.

Autumnal nights come fast. Racing the setting sun, I sped with trowel and bucket in tow around the garden, quickly tucking in the last of my weekend purchases and watering them. Bats buzz bye, darting past my head as they bypass the security light. Though I love fall, I can’t help scorn the last of the light that flickers beyond the horizon shortening the hours I can spend in my garden. It’s an assured consequence of my second favorite season.

Though I disapprove of shortening days, I grimace more when I hear fellow gardeners decry the hardness and dryness of fall. “Oh the garden looks tough,” they moan, suggesting that fall marks an end.  While it’s logical to regard fall as bold and vibrant ending to a well-sung concert, I relish its span of time as much as I did the measures and bars before it.  The end is the best part, right?  So in defiance, I go shopping every fall in search of the best divas capable of hanging on through overture after overture to appear only in a gallant end scene.

This fall I’ve got a few stops planned.  First, I made my way to the coolest plant haven in Iowa, The Perennial Flower Farm of Ionia.  Owners Steve and Caroline Bertrand relish the closing acts too, propagating numerous clones of bush clematis (Clematis heracleifolia), the adorable yellow waxy bells (Kirengeshoma palmata), and giant bugbane (Actaea simplex ‘Pritchard’s Giant’).  I bought some of each, even though I already own several bush clematis and yellow waxy bells.  I’m insatiable, what can I say?  The giant bugbane has been a lust plant for me for years, even though I’ve had ample opportunity to buy one.  Plant geeks have priorities though, and somehow I kept passing up this skyscraping tall boy in favor of something else.  Yesterday, however, was its day.  Even though my photo fails to do the plant justice, imagine the scent with me for a moment.  Bawdy and lusty, bees and all manner of winged pollinators swarmed six-foot tall flower stalks despite my prodding lens and investigative eyes.

My next stop lies 1,200 miles from my fair garden home.  Next Sunday I embark with fellow plant geeks Dan Heims, Kate Bryant, and Bob Pries on a whirlwind tour of North Carolina’s finest, all before the annual Garden Writers Association (GWA) convention in Raleigh.  I’ll post photos and stories of our trek as I do every year from GWA.

In the flurry of fall, I look to my garden for stability, and even though I’ll miss the entirety of the ending this season, I’ll know it’s nothing but the best.

Check out more photos from my annual trip to The Perennial Flower Farm below:

Listed in order of appearance: Giant bugbane (Actaea simplex ‘Pritchard’s Giant’), Clematis viticella (seed wild collected in Poland), Sanguisorba tenuifolia, and a very petite-flowered clone of the unfortunately weedy Clematis tangutica.

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.

I’ve said before that, while I love to travel, I hate leaving the garden.  But I relish the return.  The newness, weeds, and occasional surprise delight my senses and take my mind off the mountain of emails that need replies or the phone messages that need return calls.  My stroll with the camera tonight turned up nothing in the way of surprises, but did find me coddling the dangling stems of the long-awaited Gladiolus ‘Atom’.  My grandma shared corms with me this spring from a sampler collection she ordered.  They were marketed as “dwarf” and “hardy”. 

‘Atom’ is certainly not dwarf.  At nearly 3′ tall these towering spires have flopped under weight of their flowers into nearby sedums and irises.  I’m nonetheless enchanted with ‘Atom’, a vintage variety from the 1940s with vivid and emblazened scarlet flowers that sport a foxy white rim.  Another diva plant for sure.  You can order ‘Atom’ from our friends at Old House Gardens.

As alluded to in June, I’m keenly interested in the little vignettes that in concert compose my garden.  I’ve long held that this approach, with a respect for the united work in toto, creates a greater tapestry of expression and interest while allowing the gardener to tastefully assemble a unique collection of assorted plants.  While some might label this as “plant collector design” (a term which others still would call an oxymoron, suggesting that when one collects plants, one cannot also have any design sense), I prefer to think of it as a way in which gardeners can immitate nature without seeming formulaic.  Themes in nature arise from patterns in ecology, geography, and the geology of sites where plants natively thrive.  While the garden, in any way, will never replicate the ecology of native environments around the world, it does possess its own ecology capable of fostering interactions between and among plants, insects, animals, and birds.

So manifesto aside, that’s how I like to pursue gardening; one vignette at a time with an overall appreciation for the total environment I’m creating.  Sure, some people think my garden is a plant zoo.  Others see the beauty resulting from well-considered combos marrying with one another in a unified space.  While all this is merry well and good, I couldn’t help critique myself today while puttering about the yard.  Let’s face it, with good intentions come occasional failure.  Without further adieu I present now a few combos for you to critique with me.

I call this combination groundcover mayhem.  It inspired this whole diatribe.  “Itsa no good!”  If you can even make sense of the photo, this little spot grows poppy mallow (Callirhoe involucrata) and yellow archangel (Lamiastrum galeobdolon).  Lesson learned here: two groundcovers don’t necessarily play nicely together.  They’ve overrun each other, despite my best guess that they might layer within each other, highlighting their departing textures.  Instead this less-than-dynamic duo looks like a Phil Specter bad hair day, the likes of which I never hope to see again.  There’s even a little Thalictrum minus ‘Adiantifolium’ fighting for its life.  Votes for transplanting to somewhere more hospitable?

Here’s “run together” for you.  Lots of cool plants, but clearly overgrown and planted much too closely to be appreciated in the rock garden.  Arguably, the geraniums fouled it all up.  I collected seeds off of the petite cultivar ‘Dusky Crûg’ last fall and sowed among rocks.  You can’t even see the rocks now!  These kids outgrew their parents in one fell swoop!  Perky and petite no more!  They’re getting moved so I can evaluate them.  After this dreadfully damp season, not a single one of them has any powdery mildew.

This next one is comical, perhaps.  I love natives, and despite the fact that most would label my friend Oxalis corniculata (red form) a weed, I adore its serendipitous habit.  I’ve fiercely guarded this “combo” all season.  What do you think?  Great textures, right?

This last one may just be a judgment call, a work in progress, something.  I was cutting back my Solidago drummondii (the one I hacked back a few weeks back, remember?) this spring and accidentally ripped a stem out with roots attached.  Not wanting to throw away a plant, I tucked this cascading goldenrod near the cornerstone of my rock garden dreaming of its pendulous waves of yellow and gold about mid-September, just like in the Ozarks.  But in my fervor I forgot about another favorite rock garden plant, Saponaria lempergii ‘Max Frei’.  This groundcovering character already had dibs on the wall edge and now happily engulfs the goldenrod.  But it doesn’t look all that bad, does it?  Just wait until that goldenrod hulks up in a couple of years.  It’ll be an all-out war.  We’ll see.  Maybe the stress of being in hotter soil will limit the root growth of the goldenrod and keep it in check?  Wishful thinking I bet, but that actually is exactly how it works in the wild.

What all this does, I hope, is encourage y’all to get out there and plant a few mistakes.  Gardens are like little experiment stations for people who like to play God, so long as you can deal with the consequences.  Go on now, be nature.