Takoma Gardener

What, Me Water? Notes from a Drought-Stricken Suburb

I think I just wrote my first newspaper column that's pure rant.  I haven't heard from the editor yet but meanwhile, whadaya think?

Everywhere we look this fall we're seeing dead or doomed plants that didn't make it through the drought. Why?  Not because they did anything wrong.  Plants behave in pretty predictable ways.  No, what's to blame is this worst-case scenario - the climate changing and humans having to adapt.  Starting with our government, there's plenty of evidence that we humans don't DO adaptation to nature very well, but it's obvious that too many homeowners think the drought doesn't affect them.  It's just those farmers out in the hinterlands that have to pay attention, right?  For us suburbanites this summer has meant great beach weather and no bothersome rains to spoil our parties and baseball games.  It hasn't even been intolerably hot, so to most Americans, the summer was just grand.

Let the Garden Ranting Begin

Readers, it can now be revealed that I've been meeting privately behind your backs with two other gardening bloggers -  by email, by telephone and even in person! - to plan and implement our scheme for world domination.  In fact, the introductory feeler Amy Stewart sent to Michele Owens and me was entitled "World Domination," which got our attention.  That's Amy - a trim wisp of a woman who thinks BIG.  And all that scheming has paid off because Garden Rant is already more than I'd hoped for - good-looking, funny and provocative as hell.  And isn't that provocative element exactly what the online world has added to the gardening conversation?  Damn right, and long overdue.

So meet me over at Garden Rant for rants and raves and the kind of smart-aleck behavior my mother tried so hard to discourage.  But Mom, this is so much more fun.

The Witch-Hunt is On

Wikipedia tells us that witch-hunting is the persecution of a perceived enemy with extreme prejudice and disregard of actual guilt or innocence; it's a type of "moral panic."  Okay, I think I have the right term, but you be the judge.

I saw this item on a garden writers listserv.  The Columbus Dispatch published a story about "Invasives and their Alternatives."  Unfortunately, it included "day lilies" (sic) in the list of bad guys and even showed a photo of a lovely red one above the caption: "New aliens climbing out of the bed, into the wild."  Trouble is, only the species daylily - the orange "ditch lily" - is a problem, not the untold thousands of hybrids that are available - you know, the ones we might actually buy and put in our gardens, like the lovely and falsely charged red one in the story.

Well, of all the places to malign daylilies unfairly, Columbus has gotta be the worst.  Not only is it the home of prominent daylily hybridizers and nurseries, but the site of this year's American Hemerocallis Society Convention, for god's sake, so you could say that notice was taken of this article and its misdirected accusations.  The Society jumped on the case immediately, seeking a retraction from the Dispatch, but you know how effective that will be.  Damage has been done. 

My second example is from a talk I heard recently by a plant expert from the University of Maryland.  When asked if ornamental grasses are invasive she declared that Miscanthus sinensis is, yesiree.  At which point I jumped into the fray to ask, "Isn't it just the species, not varieties like 'Morning Light'"?  And to my surprise she responded that yes, in our area it's just the species that's a problem.  So why the hell didn't she say that in the first place? 

So like the listserv member who raised this interesting item and suggested that perhaps the Columbus Dispatch writer could learn to "pay more attention to her research," I wish everyone who uses the dreaded "i" word would at least try to get their facts right. Like exactly what plant, where, and under what growing conditions.  After all, when that label is directed to gardeners and the plants we grow, isn't the purpose to induce us to rip them out and toss 'em?  And I may be going out on a limb here but in my experience, we'd rather not.

[Photos:  I promise this is the last of the tulip shots, both from the Tulip Library on the Mall.]

Jerry Baker, "America's Master Gardener" or Master Quack?

Well, the most amazing gardening shows are running all week on WETA, the local PBS affiliate - Jerry Baker's how-to videos.  He not only calls himself "America's Master Gardener," he's actually trademarked the term.  Takes cajones, don't ya think?  Well, that's just for starters (though I can't help wondering if "Maryland's Master Gardener" is still available.  Hmm.)

Anyway, his advice for a "spring clean-up" is to spray everything with a mixture of antiseptic  mouthwash, dishsoap, the juice of chewing tobacco, and any "medication" that we think is needed.  And by "everything" he means lawn and all your "trees, shrubs and evergreens."  He used that nonsensical term so often during his show on the subject, I almost forgot how stupid mistaken it is.  This homemade formula is supposed to start our gardens out "clean, green and mean" and is to be followed by spraying everything with dormant hort oil, followed by a combination of "any old fertilizer" to which is added sugar and epsom salts.  This is not only to be sprayed on everything but also inserted into holes drilled around every tree.
 

"The Culture of Invasion" - More Questions than Answers

John Peter Thompson grew up in the nursery business and is now president and chairman of Behnke's, a large Maryland nursery, so when he talks about the history of gardening, I'm listening. But he's also an ex-hippie and the title of his recent talk at the nursery was "The Culture of Invasive Plants," so gardeners, beware!

During Thompson's fascinating one-hour talk I learned that the history of gardening in Western culture is all about dominating nature and creating an enclosed space that's safe from the evils of the wild.  From the tightly wound knot gardens of Medieval monks to Suliman the Turk's walled gardens to Versailles, the slides on the screen were a parade of horrors and any viewer would have to admit that gardeners through the ages have been a pretty tight-assed bunch.  And it only gets worse.  Another feature of gardening history has been its purpose of flaunting wealth and power, as evidenced by English estate gardens.  Who else but the superrich could maintain those parterres, fountains and great lawns?  Even on a smaller scale, English cottage gardens are a helluva lot of work to keep up. (And though not mentioned, Japanese gardens are also extremely high maintenance, so shouldn't these criticisms be leveled equally against all gardening cultures and not restricted to those in the West? Just a thought.)

Death to my Bradford Pear

My list of complaints is long, starting with its short life.  Plus, it just doesn't work in a border.  To make room for other plants you end up removing so many lower branches the damn thing looks ridiculous.

Worst of all, this plant reminds me of how little I knew when I planted it and how thoughtlessly I made choices.  Its large all-wrongness is getting me down.  Not once but twice I bought this horticultural mistake produced by our own National Arboretum.  But one has already fallen and the other won't last long.  And thank goodness, too, because its very weakness means the City of Takoma Park will allow me to remove it.  Hey, not long ago even this crappy tree would have been protected, until our crazy tree law was finally relaxed to the level of sanity. (Have I mentioned how knee-jerk-left we are here in kooky Takoma?  It's still way better than knee-jerk right.)

But moving on.  After hating this thing for about a decade, I've excitedly decided to remove it and replace it with my new passion in plants - no surprise to readers here - conifers.  So imagine this: a small grove of something like pine, cedar, cyprus or arbovitae.  I'm thinking three of one kind in a dark green mixed with two of another species in a lighter green.
O gardeners of the world, what conifers make your heart quicken?

Keeping my 'Morning Light' Miscanthus

This time of year many of us are admiring our ornamental grasses, now at their best, but some of us are also hearing warnings about their invasiveness.  Just that - "Don't you know they're invasive?"  Well, I hate it when that happens.  In fact, my number one gardening rant is about too little information, or even misinformation, about plants, usually with the words "native" or "invasive" being used rather loosely.

Still, being the nature-lover and dutiful student that I am, I hit the old keyboard and read all the websites I could find about badly behaved plants in Maryland.  Sure enough my favorite, Miscanthus sinensis, is listed as a "plant of concern."  Which might steer me toward buying a different one but what about the ones already in my garden? 

I'm happy to report finally finding the answers I was looking for - on HGTV's website, of all places.  An article there on this very subject quotes from the Timber Press Pocket Guide to Ornamental Grasses to explain that invasiveness is a matter of genes, region, and culture, and then goes on to list exactly which grasses are problems and which aren't.  Bless you, Timber Press.  Turns out Miscanthus sinensis, the bad boy of ornamental grasses, isn't a problem in cold or dry areas, and there are some cultivars that aren't problems anywhere because they're sterile, don't self-seed, or simply bloom too late in the season.  And even if I had an early bloomer, I could prevent its spread by simply removing the seedheads.

The specific cultivars recommended for the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic are 'Morning Light' (YES!), 'Zebrinus,' 'Gracillimus,' 'Purpurascens,' 'Hinjo,' and 'Little Zebra.'  And it's recommended that we limit the number of cultivars in our gardens to one or two, because cross-pollination can result in reversion to species - the worst offender of all.  See, we gardeners want to do the right thing and with enough information, we can (and without ripping out our gardens.)

Dissing all of Blogdom

I've decided to start my rants with a pretty picture to soften up my readers, and this one is fresh off the old digital.  It's a lovely blue plumbago, the airy foliage of amsonia (lower left), cross vine foliage, and some mostly spent butterfly bush flowers.
   
Now for the rant, which is about some folks I know who say, when asked if they've checked out this blog, "Oh, I never read blogs."  So I ask you, blog-readers all, why do some people feel such aversion?  I liken it to people who dismiss all of television - including public TV, HBO and the Daily Show, for crissakes.  I say yeah, most people would be bored by most blogs, but if something important is happening on them (the major political ones) or someone you know is expressing herself through one, isn't it worth a look?  And as blogs become a more entrenched part of our culture, do you think some of these stalwarts will come around?

So now to praise the (sometimes) mighty blog.  After a bit of writing for print and for static websites, I'm totally enamored of this medium.  I love the cumulative nature of it, especially when you can file posts away in categories for future reference.  I love the comments and the community that they foster.  It's also a great place to display photos.  And the experience of posting daily, or trying to, means that the photography, the writing and the posting  all become parts of your everyday life, so you're stretching those little muscles daily.  Not to mention just thinking of something to say.  And say you?

"Designing" with Daylilies

Daylily-lovers should just click off to another site because their love object is about to get dumped on.  After years of devotion to these guys and the gradual winnowing down of 30 kinds to the best six, it's still a dud in my garden.  Why is that, you ask? Because with blooms lasting only a day each, there are never enough blooms to really have an impact.  And just as importantly, because the foliage is ugly. The large ones looks like corn stalks and the small ones, though better, look like ratty liriope.  This photo shows a couple of blooms but basically the area between the red-twig dogwood and the spirea looks empty of anything but slovenly old foliage.

With this photo in mind, I was a tad surprised to read today in a book I won't name that "The foliage of all daylilies is extremely graceful" and again "When massed, it looks particularly graceful."  Here's my reaction:  Proof positive that we can't believe everything we read about plants.  Fortunately, when we've grown them ourselves and observed them over time, we don't need to. Seeing is believing.

But back to daylilies, there's one more thing I'm going to try before I dump them all at next fall's plant exchange.  This summer I visited Fenwick Island, Delaware while they were blooming and saw them used perfectly, to my eyes.  Most of the homeowners had used professional landscapers and from the looks of it, excellent ones.  What they did was to mass daylilies so tightly they looked like, or actually were, a few very large ones.  So they had punch, which is what mine had better have next year after they're rearranged in bunches, or they're out of here.

Plant "nativity" --- My First Rant

Okay, I've been really well behaved so far, but that could get boring, don't ya think? So let me introduce one of my pet peeves in the gardening world - the wanton use of certain new buzzwords, like "native" and "invasive." You'll hear more on this in future posts but for now let me point out something from the new White Flower Farm catalogue. The description of Amsonia on page 48 describes it as "native to the Northern Hemisphere." Okay, we've ruled out Brazil, South Africa and the Australian outback. Now how about narrowing it down to, say, Europe, Asia, the Yukon or the Mid-Atlantic? Help us out here, nurseries. A humongously general description like that might serve to show a company's political correctness, but does it convey any useful information?

Now if White Flower Farm ever sees this - I know I'm a pain. But take it as friendly customer feedback and tell us more next time, or leave the term to more detailed discussions of plant origin and how information about it might be used by gardeners or others.
And while I'm at it I'll contribute my 2 bits. Isn't it really only helpful to know if a plant is native to a particular local area?? Surely "American native" is an equally meaningless description, unless plants have gotten all patriotic -- maybe since 9/11?