More Volunteers

I admire the experts who seem to know everything about plants and can identify them in all stages. But I do enjoy the sleuthing required when I find mystery plants in my yard. Like Z's weed, I've enjoyed the bounty of volunteers that crop up in the middle of nowhere.

Last year I transplanted anything that looked a little different, hoping that I might get lucky. I was rewarded for my kindness this year with a sea of blue forget-me-nots complemented by cheery yellow poppies. (We won't dwell on the saga of the yellow hawkweed I nurtured to unforgettable heights before its ultimate identification!)

Forget-me-nots and poppies spread quickly one year after transplanting volunteers from the lawn

This year I found a chocolate lily (which was unfortunately squashed before I could try the transplant and official identification). I also found some low-bush cranberry and dwarf dogwood that are quite happy right where they are.

Another mystery plant that multiplied by itself this year is the dogberry, or timberberry. I was quite curious about the difference in color between individual plants before I read that the variegated specimens are likely taking over roots of other plants, as it is semi-parasitic. Since the berry is reportedly not very tasty, this may be one volunteer I'll send packing!

Low-bush cranberry

Dwarf dogwood

These are both timberberry:

Volunteers of America

One of the wonderful things about having an explosively healthy garden is that we always have plenty of free plants if we want to make a new bed. We've just about run out of room, but we did get around to planting this last corner about a month ago with the offshoots of our established plants.

For anyone who's even more amateur than I, you have a volunteer on your hands when you see a smaller, separate plant of the same type, next to the one you planted. Dig it up and find it a new home, and it will grow just as large as your original! It will probably be even hardier, too.

The largest plant in the photo is maiden grass, which might look half dead, but it's impossible to kill. In fact, we pried this one out of the ground after several neighbors complained that they couldn't see around it when they were trying to turn the corner around our lot. It's easily 8 feet tall by the end of the summer, crowned with gorgeous red plumes.

The others, which are also looking pretty sad right about now, are dwarf fountain grass, yarrow, Russian sage, sedum and echinacea. I especially recommend this last one; it has gorgeous flowers, which are in full bloom right now. A friend of ours makes a tincture from the dried plants, which he swears keeps him healthy through the winter. But if you let them dry in your garden, you'll get some wonderful visitors in the late summer - goldfinches love them. In fact, those visitors are probably the reason we have so many plants: they're very efficient at spreading seeds!

Z's Weed

Gardenaut bloggers and readers discussed weeds recently - what constitutes one, and why. We've seen a new twist on this at our home this season as Z insistently watched and watered a plant we were quite confident was a weed that appeared in a disused planter on our porch. It slowly grew for weeks before, to Jenni's and my surprise but not our nearly four-year-old daughter's, a bud appeared.

A week later...

What's particularly strange about this development is that this is not a flower I can remember us growing, not just in that particular pot, but anywhere.

The situation reminds me of the Ruth Krauss/Clement Hurd collaboration The Carrot Seed. That book has always bothered me a bit because the protagonist gets nothing but discouragement from his whole family. We, of course, were never explicitly discouraging. But maybe it reflects the "me against the world" perception that toddlers and young children inevitably develop at some point as their closed-minded elders ignore their dreams, callously but perhaps entirely unintentionally.

At any rate, we were all thrilled to see this new friend, which Z crows about every day on our way to the car. We have made a special point of noting to her that she was the one who grew that flower, and she was the one who knew it was not a weed.

Anyone know what this lovely flower is?

Update: It's a zinnia! Thanks, MissoulaChick!

Divide and prune

The Secret Garden was one of my favorite books as a child. I especially love the scene where Mary discovers large green shoots beginning to poke out of the ground: she doesn't know a thing about plants, but she instinctively thinks they won't be able to breathe with all the other plants around, so she clears a space around them. Rob and I are certainly not experts, but we've learned how to trust our instincts while following conventional gardener's wisdom regarding pruning and dividing. Both can help ensure you will have more and bigger blooms.

Our old-fashioned climbing roses are taking over the side of the house. Rob plans to build a trellis for them later this month, which we hope will detract from the old, flaking, peeling shutters - or, alternately, add to their charm.

To prune these guys, wait until the blooms have faded and shriveled and the ground is covered with dry, crunchy petals. Then simply cut off the dead blooms along with the closest pair of leaves. It takes longer than lopping off the stalks to a uniform length, but over the years, we've found it is incredibly effective, encouraging many, many blooms. We'll often even get a second flowering out of them later in the season.

Dividing is one of the easiest things you can do to your plants, and we love it because we feel like we're getting free plants out of the deal! With many plants, you can simply dig out the clump, chop it in half and replant the halves. The timing has to be right, though, so do some research first.

We had some yellow irises along the side of the house which grew to about a foot tall. We liked them so much that we decided to divide them to see if they'd take over more territory. Since they bloomed in the spring, we divided them in the fall.

They don't grow down but rather across, as they're rhizomes (think of the clumps of ginger you see at the grocery store). It was easy to pry a huge clump out of the ground, and I didn't follow the precise instructions of cutting them with a sharp, sterile knife; I just broke them into pieces, each piece with a small bud attached. We replanted the pieces in three places, including their original home, and had 4 or 5 gallon-sized bags of leftovers, which we gave away to friends.

We weren't sure if they'd bloom the next year, but they did. And this year, they have surprised us by growing at least twice as tall. They love the extra breathing room!

The moral of the story is, check with the pros, but trust your instincts. Just like Mary.

Some beautiful native plants for the garden

These four plants grow wild in the woods around Seattle. But they're showy enough to merit a place in the Northwest garden.

Twinberry: Twinberry is a honeysuckle relative. Cute yellow babydoll-dress flowers ripen into a conjoined pair of dark black berries in a peacock colored serving tray.

Lupine: You probably have a native lupine (pronounced "lupen") too. Ours has adjusted to our summer drought. But as a legume, these beautiful flowers are nitrogen fixers too. Note the bee!

Vine Maple: Whenever I see a hybrid azalea, covered in pink like a big ball of cotton candy, I feel a little sad. To ask so much of this plant, that it may be admired, then forgotten the rest of the year. In contrast, a vine maple's flowers are tiny treasures in an oasis of green. When planted in shade, they become beautifully leggy, their leaves like chartreuse clouds supported on storks' legs.

Foxglove: OK, so they aren't native (they're European), but foxgloves been polite guests on our shores long enough to have earned citizenship. Once invited, they'll spring up in new locations every year, remodeling the structure of your garden every year. But it's easy to pull them up if they come up where you don't want them. They transplant well too.

Flowers are OK, too

I'll confess that as a gardener, I'm rather edibles obsessed. I admire others' flower beds and think, Oh, that would be nice. But then I pick up some seed catalog and can't help myself from ordering mundane-looking yet delicious vegetables. Flowers, if they must be grown, are for eating, such as nasturtiums.

In the past couple of years, however, flowers have, if you'll pardon the pun, begun to grow on me. Last year, it was sunflowers and zinnias providing some color, and this year it's a wider array, with yarrow, alyssum, and other fun things added to the mix, even snapdragons and petunias, those stalwarts of the annual annuals ritual. Part of this conversion is due to the fact that a space that was occupied by a stand of dour eastern red cedars is now wide open, as the last semi-healthy cedar was damaged by a nasty ice storm last December. Actually, I'm not sure it wouldn't have bounced back just fine, but I was tired of it and its space- and light-eating ways. As my wife put it the other day, this yard was filled with way too many things that hurt when you run into them. No longer, thankfully. Some pretty sharp barberries in front of the house are next on the list.

The kids seem to like flowers, too, and anything that increases their interest in gardening is a good thing. Here's my youngest tending to the young flowers, to which she is very attached. Note the red cedar stump that I left as a bird perch and visual "feature." That's the story, anyway. Really, I don't have a chainsaw and there's only so much cutting one can do with a simple crosscut saw before one's arm nearly falls off.

Too much of a good thing

Once again, the sun and rain in our corner of the world have given us entirely too much success. This corner by the front steps is kind of a mess:

Competing for the same space we have:

1. A large white azalea. At its peak right now, and lovely!
2. Resurrection Lilies. Growing through the azalea; the ungainly foliage dies back, and the flowers emerge alone in a couple of months.
3. Arum. Probably the main mistake here; I planted it for the little berry-like red flowers that emerge later in the year, and obviously didn't take into account the huge triangular leaves, which are gorgeous but rather out of place here.
4. Daffodils. Bottom left; planted by the squirrels, who move them around every year.
5. Tulips. Tthis is the saddest part. Look at them, trying so valiantly to be seen! I thought the dark purple/black flowers would be so nice next to the white azalea, too.
6. A lone peony. Can you spot it? We've tried twice to dig up all the peonies in the front and move them to the side, where the blooms last longer in the shade. But this one stalk continues to defy us.
7. Weeds. You'd think there wouldn't be any room left for them, but you'd be wrong.
   

Any suggestions? How can this space be nicer - or at least have some room to breathe?

Waiting for spring in Minnesota

Nothing is more discouraging this time of year than getting pictures or reading blog posts about what is growing in friends’ yards. Here in Minnesota, the only thing new in our yard is the most recent bunny damage as the snow melts.

The dad, the big one, the little one and I have lived in this suburban Minneapolis house for just about five years. At the house closing, the previous owner said, "Oh, nothing will grow in that backyard." We've made it our goal to prove Helen Larson wrong.

Each year we've tackled a few projects, including garden beds, brick and pea gravel paths, a fire pit, and stone retaining walls. This year, in addition to maintaining our garden, we'll build a new deck and, if things go as planned, a little garden house.

We've had many failures and a few successes. Most of our neighbors don't garden. Most of them don't even mow their own lawn, so we are pretty sure the omnipresent pile of class five gravel in our driveway is how they identify our house.

Our house faces north and is in the middle of a hill sloping from back to front, so most of our yard is shaded. We have lots of rabbits and deer, lots of trees and lots of strong opinions, like how much I hate marigolds. Last week the snow began to melt and I noticed little crocus peeking up from the garden bed the dad ran over with a backhoe last fall. Things are looking up.