‘horticultural how-to and woo-woo’
the source for organic gardening inspiration
margaret roach, head gardener
BETWEEN WEEDING, WATERING, EDGING, MULCHING, I noticed there are some new things blooming…like several dozen. Here are a few of the latest faces watching me go positively mad as I try to keep up with the unfolding drama.
I ADMIT IT, I am overwhelmed. Is it time to give up yet? This always happens to me when spring passes from promise to has-been, and the gardener passes from excitement to insanity. You? How are you holding up out there?
REMEMBER IN APRIL, when I inadvertently fished an Eastern Spotted Salamander out of one garden pool while cleaning it? He/she hasn’t been heard from since, but a smaller cousin, the Red-Spotted Newt, is here. My Pal Sal. Who knew that this red phase is actually just one stage of his little but longish life?
I KNOW MY CRABAPPLES WELL ENOUGH to know that 2 of 10 were not happy this spring at flowering time, and now I know why. My friend Dennis Mareb of Windy Hill Farm in Gt. Barrington, MA, a nurseryman and longtime apple-orchard owner, performed the diagnostics this week: not good. Apple-bark borer has found its way into at least two of the trees, and from the looks of things, they are goners. [read more…]
I WAS GOING TO SIMPLY NOTE TODAY how much I like the moment (now) when dame’s rocket, or Hesperis matronalis, blooms wherever it wishes among alliums and other late-May-and-June things, adding shades of lavender to the borders in its casual, self-sown manner. And then I read up on it (damn this internet thing…so much information, not all of it good).
IT’S NOT A FLOWER, but it’s beautiful. And it can make that claim 365 days a year. The plant with the peeling, camouflage-pattern bark is Pinus bungeana, the lacebark pine, a long-needled conifer that rates a place in more home landscapes, a true four-season plant. Well, at least it was until a yellow-bellied sapsucker moved in on my beauty. Want to see the little devil’s handiwork?
MY 2 CENTS IS THAT EUPHORBIA PALUSTRIS is the best euphorbia, or at least for cold-zone gardens that cannot grow the really best ones of all (those Zone 8 types like E. rigida, for example, or handsome, tall characias subspecies wulfenii, a Zone 7-hardy beauty). Now that those words are out of my mouth I am thinking how much I love every Euphorbia, so maybe I am a big fat liar by saying one is best. Oh, dear. Want to know why I wrote that first sentence anyhow, and what I love about this plant?
OVER HERE IN MY CORNER OF THE EARTH we call it the godlight, the kind of light there’s no explaining other than to call it that. That slanted light that makes elongated, high-drama shadows and turns everything warm and glowing. So when it shone the other afternoon I thought hey, let’s just snap and post a photo of the godlight and see if it’s shining anywhere else this spring? Any sightings? (Note: This light is non-denominational, hence the lower-case “g.” All are welcome to witness it. And this photo’s worth clicking, by the way…better bigger.)
PEOPLE WHO KNOW ME know I say over and again that I am not a lover of white flowers. (Like all of us, I say a lot of stupid things.) But then I look around and, surprise, I have a whole lot of them. In these three cases, though, all blooming now, I have the plants for an entirely different reason than for their blooms. You’ll learn what other attributes these winners have if you click on each.
