Gardens by Kelly Productions

Iowa weather is admittedly strange.  We whine about the cold in the barest months like January and February, while often sporting a few degrees more than places farther north.  We whine about the sweltering heat in stifling months like July and August, while still registering cool temperatures and less humidity than climes farther south.  But what we really can complain about, on nights when we’ve got nothing better to write about, is the change–constant change.

Just a week ago, I left the house for an hour or less a day, driven to hibernate in the wake of a warm, humid streak that made for highs in the upper 90s and dewpoints that hovered around 80.  This morning I woke to find a cool, September-esque breezing floating through the house and never saw the thermometer rise about 69 all day.  How Seattle…

I smiled as I walked around the garden tonight.  The lawn has all but disappeared in some places, retreating to dormancy and leaving behind dying algae and moss–stark irony indeed!  Some newly planted acquisitions, like two hardy sweet peas (Lathyrus vernus ‘Flaccidus Roseus’ and Lathyrus aureus) aren’t sure what to do.  After spending most of the spring and early summer in rich, humusy potting soil, I imagine my now, hard excuse for topsoil seems like a sick joke.  August stalwarts like rosinweeds (Silphium spp.) and tube clematis (Clematis heracleifolia) rage on against the dying of good growing conditions, delighting me almost daily with their perseverance.

My trip round the garden tonight after the rain reminded me of an ever-present list of chores.  I have three Ozark bluestars (Amsonia illustris) that need moved, badly, but I’ve been putting it off so as not to sacrifice their lovely fall color display.  I may bite the bullet and relocate them to the corner of the house I’m revamping soon, possibly tomorrow if all works right.  They’ll join a host of ornamental grasses, false indigos (Baptisia), ironweeds (Vernonia), and new bearded irises (no surprise).

And after donning a jacket for this thoughtful poke-around, I’ve decided I can “feel” fall.  What garden chores top your list as fall inevitably nears?

Though you may be familiar with the story of Sisyphus from Greek mythology involving a boulder, my version involves a 10-gallon nursery container of black bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra).

According to mythical legend, Sisyphus was a Greek king punished in death for his deceitfulness with the endless and unavailing task of pushing a boulder up a hill only to watch it tumble down again as he neared the top–an eternity of frustration.

In some grossly overblown way, I think Sisyphus would feel my pain, hauling buckets of water to an ever-thirsty bamboo as I do on a near nightly basis.  If I sunk it into a swimming pool, I’m positive it would wilt by evening.

Of course the easiest way to end my condemnation to hydrological eternity would be to just plant the damn thing.  But my plans for a bog, sterling and firm last fall when I inherited this bamboo from my gardening friend Rosemary, seem to have fallen through.  So without any immediate home, I’m sure I’ll continue to prolong its plastically confined existence one 5-gallon dousing at a time.

I’m beginning to think a boulder wouldn’t be that bad.

, at least in places with real summers, requires a tenacious constitution and a steady supply of hard liquor (for us drinking sorts).  As for a tenacious constitution, I indulge in aimless teeth-gritting, occasional swearing, and fitful stamping as rivulets of sweat run down my nose.  But I grow on in spite of whatever weather throws my way.  I may rip out some corner of the garden this weekend, saving it from further melting.  But then again I may just retire at day’s end from my nursery work.  That’s what the hard liquor is for.

For as long as I can remember, Augusts in my Midwest garden call to mind the word baked.  Particularly the last few years.  It rains, rains, and rains for days and months on end, breaking records and flooding fields.  Yet just as abruptly as it began, it comes to a fast halt.  Then it gets hot, and then we bake.  The ground splits open in revealing cracks, and the garden gets dry and parched.  Happy August!

But three plants caught my eye tonight.  Three toughies that know how to stick it out, even better than this gardener who retreated long before dusk tonight as a hard line of mosquitoes doggedly pursued his every step.

Scutellaria incana-  You may remember me extolling the virtues of this plant, commonly and unfortunately known as hoary skullcap, during my travels through the Ozarks last year.  In effort to stem the tide of inevitable purple prose from my fingers, I’ll offer these brief words of praise.  This shade-loving, rocky woodland native glows in cobalt blue tones in the months of June and July.  Electric blue, in the shade, in JULY!?  What more should I say?  The habit can be a little lax on some forms, but not to the point of flopping over into a disheveled heap (unless you garden in 10 feet of pure compost, at which point most things will probably collapse).  If you can’t handle lax, prop it up with a shrub or something.

Sedum telephium ssp. ruprechtii ‘Hab Gray’- This unfortunately uncommon sedum deserves a place in American gardens.  The Royal Horticultural Society no doubt did a disservice to this plant when they decreed in their last sedum trial at Wisley that this plant lacked comely, ornamental traits.  For the record, I’m not quoting here, but at least trying to emulate the haughtiness.  They chided its cream flowers which turn to shades of chocolate (although they chose some ghastly adjective like brown to describe them in their report) as altogether unsplendid.  They bashed its mysterious marine-colored foliage as boring.  Bleh.  This workhorse plant deserves greater praise.  Only this year has it collapsed in my garden, likely due to extraordinary amounts of rain and not of any innate problem.  It’s foliage is exquisite, its stems red and contrasting, and its cream flowers merely creamy topping to an already pleasant dessert.  It even seeds around politely, so once you like it you’re guaranteed just a few more.

Rudbeckia subtomentosa ‘Henry Eilers’- Perennial followers of this blog know that I have a fetish for this plant.  It’s on my desert island list (as is the Scutellaria mentioned earlier), a list of a few dozen plants (or more if I choose) that I absolutely couldn’t live without, even if stranded on a desert island in an otherwise temperate climate.  Many personalities have had a hand in this plant, and a simple search of my site reveals too much about this plant already.  Bottom line–even when in a baked garden, it still looks fab.

P.S.–Dearest readers….I’m going to try a more regular, shorter, and truncated blogging strategy.  So you may be hearing from me more often in the form of little ditties like so, rather than the expository essays which you all, no doubt, find endearing and charming.  And so it goes with good intentions and all…

Last June, I wrote about my Veronica collection in a post entitled “The Veronica Parade”.  I have a habit of interjecting the phrase “oh I collect those” in conversations between plant nerds, prompting many of my close friends to mockingly reply “Kelly, what don’t you collect?”

Today I thought I might take you on a little parade through the sedum collection.  I have no idea how many different taxa I grow–surely dozens upon dozens.  Many of us no doubt appreciate the ‘Autumn Joy’ “types” that start to bloom now and continue through fall.  I’ll do a round with those later.  Today I focused the camera on groundcover sedums.

Sedum album ‘Murale’ –This chocolately, sedum family wunderkind is one of my newfound favorites.  In just a couple seasons, this little white-flowered sedum has taken off with vigor and apparent glee, cozying up to nearby rock cress (Arabis) and shining in the garden through four season thanks to its evergreen nature.  A must have.

Sedum ewersii var. homophyllum –Here’s one ultra-hardy sedum, reported by some to thrive winters as far north as USDA Zone 2.  Bright pink flowers occasionally complement marine, blue-green foliage, but I can’t recall seeing them more than a couple of times in the last few years.  It’s really all about that cool kid foliage.  I always expect it to be cooler to the touch for some reason–it’s just looks “cold”.  Terrific.

Sedum sieboldii –There are more Siebold stonecrops floating around gardens and nurseries than any one of us needs.  It self-seeds freely, but not enough to make a nuisance of itself.  I’ve saved some fun seedlings over the years with different leaf margins, etc., but nothing to get all worked up about.  The cultivar ‘Mediovariegatum’ is one of my favorites.  Commonly known as October daphne, it throws up hot pink flowers very late in the fall and spells dynamo when paired with those sharply variegated, coin-shaped leaves.

Sedum spurium ‘John Creech’ –This sedum tops my “desert island” list (a list of my 25 must-have plants should I ever be shipwrecked on a lonely island with the option of a having a lovely garden).  Nothing fancy about the foliage.  But it’s reliably tough, blooms well, seeds around a bit (that’s a plus for me–a sign of happiness), and forms the perfect ground-hugging mat.

Sedum tetractinum –This may also be a candidate for the “desert island” list.  This stonecrop has the weirdest-colored foliage ever.  Bronze, green, and yellow blend together to create a pseudo-metallic color that catches my eye every time I’m in the garden.  It’s hardy, shows off yellow flowers in late spring, and laughs at our Midwestern winters and summers.  It’s also seeding a bit in its immediate vicinity.  Kind of reminds me of carpet colors from the 1960s, only with far more class and style!

Sources for sedums:

SMG Succulents (formerly Squaw Mountain Gardens)

Joy Creek Nursery

Plant Delights Nursery

{Terribly important side note:  You may have already noticed that I’m not following my usual etiquette of capitalizing and italicizing the word sedum.  That’s because the genus Sedum as we know it has been broken into a number of other nomenclatural monikers.  The genus Sedum does still exist in this new state of taxonomic fun, but for now they’re still sedums in my garden, vernacularly and botanically.}

I don’t claim to have much of a sense of smell.  Because I don’t.  For whatever reason, I don’t pick up on smells like the rest of the human race, remember them very well, or recognize them easily when I do manage to sniff across one.  But recently I’ve had something of a nasal epiphany, far and away from the kind of surgical procedure that the phrase ‘nasal epiphany’ no doubt sounds like.

I’ve been entranced by heady scents–not the kind of subtle, sweet perfumes that often elude my nose.  Rather, bawdy and cloying scents that hang in the air and drip, otherwise described as the sorts of smells not associated with conventional moralities.  Imagine fragrances that would make you blush from self-indulgence.  Those smells permeate my garden these days, thanks in part to a few fragrant characters that obviously have a pseudo-evolutionary way of catching just a little attention.

In the “I’m Rosie, and I’ll be here all week” department grows the Orienpet lily ‘Robina’.  With nearly a dozen flowers held atop six-foot, green-plastic stems, this pinkster is programmed for gaudy and outrageous.  She’s like the bombshell blonde (in pink) at the party.  Twelve feet away and somebody notices.  Except this time it’s her smell.  I’ve decided after much contemplation and personal reflection that this nose-nabbing scent, though associated with an absolutely lovely flower, obstructs my sensibilities just a little too much.  Admittedly though it does make for animate storytelling.

Jumping off the house of ill-repute high, my nose ambles over to an astounding clump of my favorite phlox ‘Peppermint Twist’.  I’ve said too much about this plant already, and my friends are tired of hearing me rave about it.  I know, you get it.  It’s fabulous.  But I’ve never mentioned the scent, because until now I’d never really noticed it had one.  While weeding in the front garden a few weeks ago, I couldn’t help but taste, yes taste, sugar.  Not sugar cookie sugar.  More like cotton candy sugar–the sort of sugary goodness that sends 10-year olds into mania at carnivals and fairs.  I suspected nearby ‘Peppermint Twist’ when the taste (and smell) crossed my palate.  But I needed a confirmation, and my mother came to the rescue.  Cotton candy indeed.

All this raving about “scentsibility” lately has caused me to notice the increasing presence of sphinx moths in the front garden at night–an observation intricately bound to fragrance.  Within the hour before dusk, these soundless Lepidoptera whiz through the garden, probing nectaries for sugary juices with a long and nearly invisible proboscis.  These elegant creatures stop me in my tracks.  With the calm curiosity of a 10-year old just before a sugar high, I’ve watched a trio of sphinx moths for several nights in a row.  For whatever reasons, we apparently drool over the same lily and phlox, though I suspect they derive more sustenance from them than I do.  For those sphinx moths, that air-flooding fragrance triggers the very basest of evolutionary instincts.  For me, that cloying odor merely incites vivid adjectives in my brain for the purposes of blogging.

Normally I wouldn’t call the 8th of July midsummer, but in a year like this it feels like it already.  Maybe it’s because I’m not here nearly everyday like I was last the past two summers.  Time rolls on in waves of new flowers, color in and out with a rhythm I admire.  That rhythm can be seen beautifully in the restored, remnant, and reconstructed prairies across my home state where the seasons fade into each other with paradoxically exacting effort.  Each week seems to own its identity.

Some day, maybe next year, I’d love to start a calendar project that documents the passing of each week in my garden photographically.  You can join in too!  It’ll truly be a garden calendar that causes us to revere the seasons as they evolve across the tapestry of our landscapes.

Until then, here are a few of the garden-worthy natives gracing the stage of my garden and/or local prairies this week.  More again soon, but for now, I’m headed to the garden!

To date, I think I’ve spent one, all-out serious day in the garden.  Yesterday.  Sure, I was home for short weekends back in April, gardening for hours on end.  I was here most of May during iris bloom season, and lived outside for most of that month too.  But as far as days go where nothing crosses my mind but the blunders of my trowel, I count a lonely one.

And likely as a carryover from yesterday, I sat at my desk today, peering through a window pelted by rain, and found myself in a gardening state of mind.  I like to think I always am, but usually it’s only most of the time.  There are days where paperwork and email and voicemail clutters my head, instead of the sights and smells of the garden.  But in a gardening state of mind, all that disappears.  My mind at that point refuses to leave alone the mental list of garden chores to do, or the tempting idea to wander and stroll without any purpose at all.  It’s those moments, those humble blinks of unshaming ecstasy that I wish I could share with non-gardeners in my effort to create a more beautiful world.  When we can finally give up the din of life’s motor for something more human and less mechanistic, we’ll come to a much greater understanding about the peace and beauty of the natural world around us.

Poet Wendell Berry explored such peace and beauty in his poem The Peace of Wild Things.  The ultimate sentence  summarizes my gardening state of mind: “For a time/ I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

Thought you might like to see what other perennials besides irises caught a little camera time this spring.  As most of you well know my plant afflictions run deep, and honestly irises are probably the least of my worries some days.  Here are a few noteworthy lovelies:

Amsonia tabernaemontana ‘Short Stack’ –A terrific, dwarf selection of Eastern bluestar selected by Tony Avent.  What’s more, in all the years I’ve grown it, I’ve never seen a stray seedling, something I wish I could say for its taller cousins A. tabernaemontana and A. illustris.

Aruncus aethusifolius –First off, this genus is burdened with the one of the most unflattering vernacular names.  Seriously, goat’s beard?  Watch it fly off the shelves with that!  Second, I’m not a fan of A. dioicus.  Words like thuggish come to mind, despite its adaptability to a wide array of conditions.  I much prefer the tidy, bijou, and uber cute dwarf goat’s beard.  It’s just as versatile, save the back row of the border.

Clematis addisonii –I love the species Clematis.  This exceptionally rare rambler from West Virginia bloomed for the first time this year, to my giddy delight.  It’s very happy in the saxatile garden under the shade of a soon-to-be-hemmed cliff goldenrod (Solidago drummondii).

Clematis hexapetala ‘Mongolian Snowflake’ –This is a compact new selection from Harlan Hamernick.  Clematis are certainly sleepers, creepers, and leapers.  This plant needs a few more years yet to grow into its own.  But until then, it’s certainly worth sharing its progress.

Paeonia ‘Garden Treasure’ –We’re fortunate that our local nursery community includes famed peony breeder Don Hollingsworth.  Don has pioneered a number of intersectional crosses (sometimes called Itoh hybrids) like ‘Garden Treasure’.  This peony is truly a golden diva!

Symphytum x uplandicum ‘Axminster Gold’ –Okay, I need an intervention here.  I’m absolutely bonkers about this light-bulb diva for shade.  I raved about it last season, it’s in three of my lectures, and I show everyone who visits the towering fountain of variegated foliage that rises from the crown planted underneath its namesake tag.  Gush I do…

Yes, I’ve been away.  I haven’t posted on this blog in nearly two months and at that during one of the busiest times of a gardener’s life.  I trust you won’t be too upset.  If you’re like me, I’m just rediscovering what an inbox is after traveling back and forth between Ames, our nursery, and around the country for a few engagements.  Let’s catch up.

Probably the most noteworthy item of business to report on is the iris bloom season at Rainbow Iris Farm.  We had one of the best bloom seasons of recent years, due in large part to a cold, snowy winter and ample rain this spring.  The early temperatures of April exponentially powered spring into the early days of May only to be brought to a cool compromise by mid-month.  Rain has since ensued with some regularity–an eloquent way of saying we’re about to float away, again.  It seems southwest Iowa in recent springs is like a little outpost of Portland, OR.  Oy vey…

But check out some pictures of iris season below.  I had a great seedling crop too, which left me filled with ideas about the future of iris breeding.  From what we’ve heard, many of you experienced similar bevies of rainbow flowers.  Here, here to the queens of spring!

In just a few short days, I’m headed home to really garden.  I’ve managed to accumulate plants for three months only to plant about 1% of them.  No longer!  Root-bound, pot-weary, and in need of incessant watering, this tired collection of shrubs and perennials will see dirt by week’s end (weather permitting, sigh).  Even if I can’t plant, I’ll do something.  At some point, gardening becomes an occupation of time for me.  Not because I’m avoiding something I’d rather be doing, but simply to toil away at what makes me truly happy.

I promise the blogging drought won’t last any longer.  I’m away to the garden, and if history tells us anything, I’ll be glad to report.

P.S.–Don’t forget to follow my other blog, Dirt-Y over at http://digthismag.com/blog/dirtyblog.  If you haven’t yet subscribed to Dig This, the bookazine for people who love dirt, you can do so at that link.