Evergreens

I like Spring for many reasons and I was reminded of one of those reasons yesterday as I was running around doing errands.

At this time of the year as Spruce, Pine and even Larch are putting on new growth, the trees look as if they have just come from the hairdresser and had some tints put in their hair. You see the light green on the new candles darkening to the mid to dark green of the older growth. How gorgeous is that! In the case of the Larch, it is all new growth but what really attracts me to the Larch is the strawberry looking cones (colour and size) that begin to show a little later in the season.

Everything is so new and fresh and the colours are so vivid. What a wonderful time of the year!

Fragrance in the Garden

At this time of the year, I find fragrances in the garden particularly noticeable and inviting - you just want to linger. The other night, I was visiting someone's garden and as I walked up to the house there was this really welcoming smell. It wasn't until I was leaving that I realised that it was coming from the Snowball Vibernum. Wow, how nice it was.

I realise that for some people with allergies and some with particularly acute sniffers, garden fragrance may be troublesome, but for me, I love it. Not only does the garden smell really fresh in the morning but fragrant flowers make the morning so much better.

If you are like me and appreciate the different fragrances, there are many plants to choose from. In the early Spring, while I find the Hyacinths overpowering (we don't include them in our garden) there are the narcissus that have different levels of fragrance. We particularly like the little Thalias and Tete-a-Tetes but others are equally pleasant. Then come the flowering trees and shrubs such as the aforementioned Hydrangeas.

The summer brings oh so many more fragrant perennials and shrubs. Have you ever noticed how nice some of the Echinacea smell? Everyone knows about Lily of the Valley, Daphne and Roses, but what about Sweet Woodruff, Summersweet (Clethra), even Wormwood (Artemesia). And then there are the 'Climbers and Twiners'.

If you like fragrant plants, there are many to choose from and if you are creative, you can have something different for each part of the growing season

Iris borer

So now, how do you protect your tall bearded Iris from being destroyed by the borer.

In days gone by, we might have sprayed the rhizomes with rotenone or pyrethrum but now with the ban on pesticides, we need to find alternative methods. Some of us chose not to use pesticides in the past and used preventative methods. The best thing to do is simply to clean up your Iris stands once the Irises have finished their blooming.

In the Fall, you need to cut off the dead leaves (give the plants a mohawk style haircut) throw the leaves in the garbage, not the compost, as the leaves can harbour insect eggs. You could even dig up the plants, cut out old sections, divide the rhizomes and replant. You might even move the stand to a different part of the garden.

During the course of the year, I also examine the leaves and visible parts of the rhizome to try to safeguard the plants. If I see a hole in a leaf, I squeeze around the area in the leaf to kill any borer that is active in the plant. I have even taken a thin wire and run it down as far as I can into the hole to detroy any borer at work in the plant.

Tall Bearded Iris

Yesterday, when I went out into the garden, the one remaining Tall Iris that I have was in bloom. We once had a number of different varieties but an infestation of Iris borer decimated our collection. Now we still have the early Iris reticulata,several stands of a dwarf iris and the tall white Iris that made it through the infestation. Oh yes, we also have a flag iris in the pond.

I think enough years have gone by for me to again try some other varieties. The one that made it through the infestation is a pretty white repeat bloome that I believe was called Immortality - good name given my experience with the borer. It is described as a "reblooming wonder" that "flowers heavily in the regular iris season and then again in late summer" (from the Cruickshanks catalogue Summer 1993). It has indeed lived up to its billing.

Other varieties that we purchased from Cruickshanks include Breakers ("bluest of blues"), Pink Capers ("perfect pink") and I believe, Thriller (wine coloured) - how I miss Cruickshanks although GardenImports has filled the gap quite well.

In addition to some of the really attractive colours that are available, I quite want to try some of the borderline hardy varieties for this area. I find Irises really attractive and they fill that little gap in time between the Spring bulbs and the Peonies.

Redbud

Meant to add the photo of the Redbud to the previous posting. Here it is.

Redbud

On the route I take to the downtown there is this really pretty tree at this time of the year. I wasn't sure what it was until a colleague pointed out a similar tree near Rockway Gardens. Apparently there is one at Rockway as well.

The Eastern Redbud or Cercis canadensis is borderline hardy in this area (Zone 5). It blooms near the end of April and is still in bloom today, May 20th. It can be really breathtaking and I'll attach a photo I took of one today. The flowers are described as a rosy pink in the texts that I read but they look almost like a light purple to me. The Cercis canadensis is shown in books as a single stem tree whereas the one that I saw was more like the Cercis chinensis which seems to be a multi-stemmed shrub.

The canadensis will grow to a height of about 20 to 30 feet with a spread of 25 to 35 feet. If you have the room for it, it is an incredible specimen plant well worth including in your garden. It adapts well to a number of soils and can even be grown from seed as a colleague has done.

Check it out.

emigration

Do you ever think that maybe nature has it right and we don't really have a clue what we are doing in this gardening thing?

I have been working for years to have the perennial border just perfect - no grass, no weeds and everything just bloomin perfect. Likewise the lawn that I try to keep weed free. But no matter how hard I try, the grass seems to prefer the good soil in the perennial beds and some perennials try to move into areas that have been dedicated to lawn. In weaker moments, I have thought that maybe I should convert the perennial borders to grass and the lawn to perennial borders. The resulting plan would look rather peculiar don't you think.

Then I think about what it is that is attractive to grass and what plants seem to prefer the open spaces of the lawn. We add compost to the perennial border every year to improve the soil - maybe we should be doing likewise for the lawn. Just a light top-dressing of compost will do wonders for the soil and should make that lawn better.

The plants that I have that seem to like to move to the lawn area are plants that seem to be able to handle any kind of soil - shasta daisies, rose mallow, sorrel and some ground covers. Some of these I understand as they can handle most any kind of soil and do well in full sun. Sorrel however, likes a rich moist soil but can do well in full sun.

I think maybe if I pay a little more attention to the needs of my plants they'll do better where they are but then again plants will tend to wander and I will always be working to keep the little lawn I have rich and beautiful and the perennial borders flowering and attractive.

What's in bloom now

I was gathering some flowers from the garden the other day for a show and tell at a local Retirement home and was quite surprised by the number of different types of flowers that I was able to collect. There were several different bulbs in flower, scilla, chionodoxa, tulips that included a species tulip (Tarda), and at least 6 different types of daffodils that included two multi-stemmed narcissus(Thalia and Tete a tete). Are your daffodils expanding as quickly as mine? Last year, I divided several clumps giving many away - over 100 bulbs in each clump. This year the bulbs that I left in the clump seem to have expanded again to the extent that the clump needs dividing again.

I also found several groundcover type plants (lamium, aubretia, arabis, sweet woodruff and phlox). There were also a few of the flowers that we all find in our gardens such as the Forget-me-nots, the violas and even a dandelion. Close to the house, the first anemone of the season had bloomed and it joined the rest.

Next to the retirement home, there were a couple of trees in bloom that I took samples of too. The worst smelling example was a cutting from an ornamental pear while the most fragrant was a toss-up between the Sweet Woodruff and some of the Narcissi.

What do you have blooming at this time?

What's your favourite perennial

Mine is the Fern Leaf Peony (Paeonia tenuifolia). I love the way it starts to come up in the Spring and then one day it just bursts out into bloom. It would be nice if it stayed in flower for a longer period of time but you can't have everything can you. I've attached a few photos.

This is the first of the Peonies to bloom and it frequently flowers when the tulips and some of the narcissi are still in flower. Mine grows to a height of about 2 feet. A source I use (Peonies the Imperial Flower by Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall) describes it as "having the fragile beauty of a large scale anemone or pasque flower" and is apparently from the Black Sea area in the Ukraine. I liken the flower more to the poppy than the anemone but that's me. Regardless of what you think it looks like, you can't help but be attracted to it.

And even after the flower disappears, you still have the unique foliage to attract your attention for a good part of the Summer.