prairie break

Eye of the Pheasant (Adonis)

2012-02-06T12:01:00.000-08:00

Almost a year ago I blogged for Denver Botanic Gardens on Adonis amurensis, one of only a handful of plants that will bloom in the depths of winter. I recall the first time I saw this species was at my mentor's house (Paul Maslin), well over forty years ago, blooming during a January thaw. A small clump in the Rock Alpine Garden just managed to pop a few flowers last week, maintaining, its unsullied reputation as harbinger...

This is one of my champion clumps at home: I have not been on the famous spring bank at Winterthur in early spring, but apparently they have hundreds if not thousands of these that bloom there in March (weather dependent of course)...that I would like to see! I blather on quite a bit about this in my other blog, which you should reference (it is hypertext in the first sentence of this blog), but for now, all I wish do ask is why pheasant's eye? that seems to be the only common name attached to this genus...

Perhaps this is the reason: I have seen pictures of some gallinoid birds with bright red eyes. Maybe this annual Adonis anuus is the source of the fanciful common name. Strange to think those hoary yellow perennials (that can live for decades) share a genus with a handful of evanescent annual species. Each year I am nervous at how many of these return on my big xeriscape: even though their flowers are the fraction of the size of their winter cousin's, the color makes up for size. Now all I need is a real pheasant or two, and life would be perfect!

Just a few more months...

2012-02-04T08:40:00.000-08:00

We just had Scott Winter talk to our rock garden club--the very talented fellow who created this gem of a garden at the Colorado Springs' Untilities' Xeriscape Demonstration garden just north of Fillmore on Mesa: this is just one corner of an extensive and beautifully designed garden that features no end of microclimates and rocky gardens. I know there are great charms in winter--and it is stunningly beautiful outside as we accumulate nearly 18" of snow in much of Denver (and over 45" in one day in Gilpin County nearby!)...and in a few weeks I shall be in the Swiss Alps at a ski resort gazing at glaciers and freezing my Euro-tooshie...

The Nobel-prize winning Greek poet, George Seferis wrote a poem that has resonated through my life (and expresses some of my yearning for spring coincidentally)...recalling Xenophon and his tattered troops, perhaps, after the nightmare crossing of Anatolia:

Just a little more and we shall see the almond trees in blossom
the marbles shining in the sun
The sea, the curling waves...

Just a little more.
Let us rise just a little higher.

(Sherard & Keeley translation virtually identical to Rex Warner's [and mine for that matter])

Almond (Prunus dulcis) blooming in Denver two springs ago...

Disaster! Time to move on...

2012-01-30T05:24:00.000-08:00

I know it looks fetching here: a solid blue cloud of aster flowers in late summer. Aster x novi-belgii 'Wood's Blue' was undoubtedly another pick of the great Portland Nurseryman who also developed the well known rooting hormone. I met Ed several decades ago when he was at his prime, and his summer aster has provided quite a few years of delight. The problem is...it keeps spreading and spreading. And the flower show is just a tad too short to justify the real estate.

So this year i shall be removing it. Not an easy decision! Does a week or two of cloudy blue splendor justify fifty weeks of blah? If I had several acres of garden, I might be happy to create a vignette combining this with a few other thugs in a sort of battle of wills...

For now the matted mass of foliage is still out there, and I am contemplating how and when this spring to do the dirty deed: as lovely as it looks in the picture, I can't really pawn it off on anyone else around here where it blooms for such a short period, so the plants will be composted. And then...what to do with all that wonderful space? Woo hooo!

Gnomic poem on Facebook...

2012-01-25T13:36:00.000-08:00

Watch your thoughts
They become words

Watch your words
They become action

Watch your actions
They become habits

Watch your habits...
They form your character

Watch out! Your character
becomes your destiny ...

Πρόσεξε τις σκέψεις σου
γίνονται λόγια

Πρόσεξε τα λόγια σου
γίνονται πράξεις

Πρόσεξε τις πράξεις σου
γίνονται συνήθειες

Πρόσεξε τις συνήθειές σου...
γίνονται χαρακτήρας

Πρόσεξε το χαρακτήρα σου
γίνεται η μοίρα σου...

Consonance: walking in step

2012-01-24T14:47:00.000-08:00

Our body politic may be hopelessly polarized, but our gardens can provide a salubrious model of how opposites can conmingle. Here a rare and obscure daisy from the Eastern United States (Marshallia grandiflora) is happily sharing space with a cool green African Galtonia viridiflora. The delicate tracery of lady fern behind (Athyrium filix femina) completes a cool midsummer idyll. I think that is Athamanta turbith in the picture below, yet another good companion (this time from Eurasia) in this vignette.

These pictures were all taken two summers ago in the Rock Alpine Garden at Denver Botanic Gardens....I feel comfortable posting these because they all date from the times (ever receding into the past) when I did much of the design and gardening in this area. These plants have comingled and persisted here--waxing and waning over the decades--with a sort of quasi ecological balance belying their ancestry and associations in Nature.

Marianne Moore tells us the poetry is real frogs in imaginary gardens (close enough). I think poetry is real plant combinations that are unimaginable in nature!

Winter seems longer than I remember (despite my blissful several week sojourn in Southern California in December). As I label and scroll through old digital images preparing for two talks in Germany, I am warmed by these images in the verdant and seemingly distant Colorado summer...

Tempus fugit

2012-01-19T19:07:00.000-08:00

Sandy Snyder has been scanning old transparencies and recently sent me this one, threatening to post it on my Facebook page. I know my tennis shoes are pretty shabby, and my beard is shabbier, but having one's image posted when one is half the age, and a good deal slimmer than I am now... NOT a problem!

I am much more interested in what is around me. First off, not one in many billion people would probably notice that the picture is flipped horizontally. I notice that sort of thing (of course the Rock Alpine Garden was my virtual Universe for several decades...I ought to know it (although I worry about it almost not at all with Mike Kintgen at the helm nowadays).

I am mostly amazed that there is a flourishing colony of what must be Primula reidii at my feet. I could never dream of growing that hardly anywhere I garden nowadays: it needs super fluffy soil and a cool root run, of course. Now the competition from other plants, not to mention tree roots, shrub roots and compacted soils would make this plant almost impossible.

[Insert a mental image of Primula reidii closeup here]
{Maybe someday I will scan a closeup I think I took in this spot if I ever get around to it!}

This garden nowadays is chockablock full of all manner of other treasures that had not been planted 30 years ago when the picture was taken. And what was growing there is as mysterious to me now as though i had never worked there. My memory of the garden then back then is based on the pictures I took. If I did not take a picture (and file it and revisit that picture over the years) the plant has ceased to exist for me. My memory is my photo library to a great extent.

Oh well...come to think of it I don't recall the last time I wore jeans or tennis shoes either!

Farewell, Oh Virgin Mary

2012-01-16T21:28:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare may have said that "parting is such sweet sorrow". There is a great resonance to poems and songs that express that sorrow, and this is the anthem of Constantinopolitan Greeks, throngs of whom left Istanbul in the last century.

For those of you who read this blog for plants, you might as well skip it. In the depths of winter I stroll down various paths, (or should I say sokakia?)...And in my imagination I return to where my ancestors possibly five hundred years ago trod the narrow passages of Constantinople.

If you are the least bit curious, you might want to listen to this anthem to a lost culture: don't get me wrong. Despite my Cretan ancestry, I am far from being a Hellenic jingoist who destests all things Turkic: I love Turkey and Turks and all things Anatolian. And there is something hauntingly Anatolian about this song, a sort of farewell anthem that so many Rums sing and sang as a memorial to a world that is no more. As my name derives from Panagia, and since my ancestors were some who departed, this has a special resonance. To get the full flavor, you should play one of the countless Youtube renditions of this song as a background. I recommend this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPyflvceZ5U&feature=related

Or for a completely different version that is perhaps a tad more haunting perhaps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCRC3gAip3A&feature=related

There is a strange blend of emotion and rhythm in this song: the driving beat, the minor key and the shifting emphasis between the stanzas: and hovering over it, of course, is melancholia of loss and longing. The love millions of people bore (and still bear) those four hills in the mist somehow is captured in this strangely lively dirge. The words in Greek with my translation are below.

Στο Γαλατά ψιλή βροχή
και στα Tαταύλα μπόρα
βασίλισσα των κοριτσιών
είναι η Mαυροφόρα.

Έχε γεια Παναγιά
τα μιλήσαμε,
όνειρο ήτανε,
τα λησμονήσαμε.

Στο Γαλατά θα πιω κρασί,
στο Πέρα θα μεθύσω,
και μες απ' το Γεντί Kουλέ
κοπέλα θ' αγαπήσω.

Έχε γεια Παναγιά
τα μιλήσαμε,
όνειρο ήτανε,
τα λησμονήσαμε

Γεντί Kουλέ και Θαραπειά,
Ταταύλα και Nιχώρι,
αυτά τα τέσσερα χωριά
'μορφαίνουνε την Πόλη.

Έχε γεια Παναγιά
τα μιλήσαμε,
όνειρο ήτανε,
τα λησμονήσαμε

Farewell, O Virgin Mary

At Galata a gentle mist, on Tatavla a norther’
Queen of the girls, was she clad all in black.

Farewell, O Virgin Mary, we have said it all
It was a dream, and now it is forgotten.

On Galata I will drink wine, At Pera I’ll be drunken
And in Genti Koulé I shall fall in love with a girl.

Farewell, O Virgin Mary, we have said it all
It was a dream, and now it is forgotten.

Genti Koulé and Tharapeia, Tatavla and Nichori
Those four boroughs beautify the City.

Farewell, O Virgin Mary, we have said it all
It was a dream, and now it is forgotten.

Remembrance of plants past...Schivereckia

2012-01-15T09:07:00.000-08:00

I have recently begun scanning some of my old transparencies (a depressing task at best) and I keep finding plants I once grew that have somehow disappeared from my garden (and other gardens I know as well). Here is the first of these lost little lost souls (plants must have souls: they deserve them more than we do). Schivereckia podolica is not likely to make the short list of most people, and certainly never classed among the best alpine plant by any means, nor has its demise kept me awake at night. But as I look at these faded, nostalgic pictures of plants in my old garden twenty years ago, where it persisted for many, many years (and produced enormous quantities of seed) I realize how evanescent things are. If a plant like this can disappear, what hope is there for us, or civilization for that matter? This is not a fussy plant by any stretch of the imagination.

OK: I admit a white flowered plant that blooms in April is about as novel as rain in Portland in the winter, or wheat in Kansas. But it made such a nice cushion of silvery, evergreen leaves, and the flowers are held quite gracefully, and they develop rather attractive seedpods....and how many Siberian plants do you have in YOUR garden? And it's dead easy to grow.

I have yearned to grow dionysias, and killed my share of Aretians and watched many a Meconopsis wither. There is something said for a tough little Siberian crucifer that grows gangbusters, blooms its little head off and sets tons of seed. And what a crazy name! I want it back! Time to comb the seedlists...

Rosulate, Roseate but not a rose!

2012-01-09T21:35:00.000-08:00

Dudleya cymosa, near Springville

There is something about rosettes: the sympathetic symmetry (surely not all have fibonacci sequencing?), the rotundity...something there is that likes rosularity. Nature certainly seems to--at least in some of her more challenging ecological environments. This first picture was taken two years ago this March in the southern Sierra Nevada foothills, near our friends' Susan Eubank and Paul Martin's wonderful mountain homes. I collected seed of this plant in the Yuba River canyon with my buddy Ted Kipping twenty years ago on my first field trip with Sean Hogan (I knew there had to be winter hardy forms of Dudleya). Since that time I have grown dudleyas in three gardens for years....but now I suddenly am bereft! Encore cherchez la rose!

Physaria alpina on Horseshoe Mt.

This lovely boutonniere grows only on two mountain ranges in Central Colorado. It was only described to science in the early 1980's, how strange that I and so many others walked by such a distinctive and showy plant and never realized it was new! Surely, the most rosulate of crucifers, it too is a wonderful garden plant...although I realize that it too has slipped through my fingers...Time once again to find that rose!

Rosularia turkestanica

Surely, no plants were better named than this genus of Crassula cousins from the Mediterranean and continental Asia. I purchased a plant with this name decades ago that turned out to be Rosularia rechingeri from Turkey. I believe Mike Bone and I from Denver Botanic Gardens are the first to collect and introduce seed of this to cultivation. This is one rose that has not slipped away as yet!

Claytonia megarhiza on Horseshoe Mt.

The bigroot spring beauty (Claytonia megarhiza) is one of our most abundant rosulate native plants at high elevations, seemingly growing bigger and more robust as the altitude climbs. My friend, Loraine Yeatts, once pointed out the strange anomaly that dryland plants from the subtropics and tropics like Echeverias, bromeliads and agaves have evolved the same succulent rosulate form as montane and high alpine plants such as those I'm featuring here. Notice that the Claytonia is actually growing in running water (something anomalous for it to be sure)...how can the same morphological adaptations: rosulate form and succulence, work both for desert xerophytes and high alpines growing in running water? The mystery of rosularity!

First flower of the year: Titanopsis calcarea

2012-01-05T20:31:00.000-08:00

Titanopsis calcarea, photographed 1-4-12 at Quince Garden, Denver.

The first flower of the year was actually Rabiea albipuncta, which was in full bloom on 1-1-12 in the rock garden along the north side of the parking lot at Timberline Gardens. Of COURSE I did not have my camera with me. But Woody Minnich did, and photographed it and some day perhaps I will get a picture from him...meanwhile, you shall have to settle for the image below, scanned from a transparency I took decades ago...

I suppose there are fussy gardeners addicted to gargantuan floral effects (you know the type: peonies, lotus flowers, colocasia...anything gigunda) who might find this tiny, warty, scrunched up little plant a tad homely. Even those luminous lemon blossoms would not melt their bloated, overblown fleshy-flowery hearts.

I read once that Titanopsis was discovered when a botanist sat on a limestone boulder and felt it give a bit with his butt. There is no way of tactfully saying that, so I am being vernacular. I mean, I could say "a botanist detected a certain resilience in the Magnesium carbonate exudant with his Gluteus maximus." But the demotic gets the point across better, don't you think?

I wonder if any other plant owes its initial discovery to an ass?

Whatever! Any plant that mimics rocks is fine by me. As for the Rabiea, their huge flowers are a shock whenever I come upon them! They can bloom now and again for the next three or even four months, a charming trait in any plant.

Long live these winter bloomers! And may we find even more to add to their glory!

Brave heart

2012-01-03T22:09:00.000-08:00

Since this is my 200th Blog posting, not to mention the first of a new year, the selection of which plant to feature borders on the fatidic. Should I pick a flamboyant petaloid monocot (an Onocyclus iris perhaps?)....or some flashy steppe denizen? A Penstemon or Acantholimon (my avatar after all). I fret and decide to scroll through my albums. Not far into the "A's" Adlumia floats by...for that's this image that is so similar to our beloved bleeding hearts (Dicentra). If Botanists can lump Belamcanda or Pardanthopsis into Iris, one wonders how long it will take them to make Dicentra swallow up Adlumia: to the casual eye of the gardener they certainly seem every bit as close...let's see if a botanists rises to this bait.

So why Adlumia? This monocarpic vine of the Eastern hardwood forests forms a lacy rosette year one that is charming in its own right. The second year it starts to climb, and if there is a post or plant nearby it can clamber over, soon it will reach amazing heights (I have had them grow over 15' tall!). If the soil is rich, if there is enough water and they are happy, these will produce hundreds, nay thousands of flowers over the course of the growing season. This is a plant of woods and hedgerows in nature, and seems to do best on the fringe of woodlands. Mine are mostly concentrated around my nursery which has fences to lean on and lots of water. I always seem to have plenty of seedlings each year, and I find that young first year rosettes pot up easily and can be moved. And shared.

My picture really does not do justice to the lacy charm of foliage, nor the sprightly bleeding hearts. But I hope my prose pricks your curiosity (if you are not already growing this) to seek this gentle treasure out.

I confess, I love it for more than its intrinstic charm. I first saw this twenty or more years ago in the remarkable garden of Vera Peck, one of the pillars of the Alpine Garden Club of British Columbia. Vera was an incredibly energetic and passionate gardener. She contributed countless hours to her rock garden group in all manner of service, primarily managing their ambitious seed exchange (I suspect she did a lot of the work herself). She had a large garden full of all manner of gems, which is where I first saw Adlumia and fell in love with it. Vera pressed a packet of fresh seed upon me, and I have grown it ever since.

I may have met Vera a mere dozen times over the decades, exchanging occasional pleasantries and asking questions back and forth here an there at a study weekend, or visiting a garden together or at a meeting. She would put up a sort of blustery facade of pseudo-gruffness to stangers that fooled no one: I knew that behind that crusty exterior lay a heart as sweet and mellow as the vast vistas of her native central European homeland, rich and evocative as a Dvorak symphony. She passed away six years ago, but like my myriad gardening friends over the decades (so many, like her, now gone) they persist, they endure and propagate their memory and essence through the seeds they share. And their hearts grace my gardens quite literally, just like this Adlumia. Long may they self sow around my garden, and the gardens of those I share them with. And they continue to blossom in our hearts as well.

New Year's resolution #1: gather, grow and share more seed!

Diminuendo: a year comes to an end....

2011-12-30T21:30:00.001-08:00

Of course, the beginning and end of years is (or are) highly artificial boundaries. Nature never sleeps really...although our long winter (already several months slogging with five or six sizeable snows) does imply a sort of pause. Time to reflect. I naturally begin with a glimpse of my home rock garden, which gives me so much delight and which will be blooming gloriously again in a few months...nay! Weeks! (The first flowers always manage to peek out in January after all!)

Peering backward through the calendar year, and slogging in reverse alphabetical order, I can count my blessings phytologically, as it were. Each group of plants seems to embody some quality or feature. Veronicas seem to ratchet a bit up every year: most are very fine indeed, and some are simply divine like Veronica bombycina var. bolgardagensis. My British and European friends tell me this is not an outdoor plant for them, which gives me an extra measure of pride. I planted a husky plant of Veronica densiflora out this summer thanks to Bill Adams: the spectacular high alpine of the Altai mountains. Maybe I shall feature that next year this time? Veronicas are those gems that you take for granted, that are always there for you and show up special new traits, like old friends.

Phlox albomarginata has convinced me that I must rededicate myself to growing, loving and seeking out this fabulous group of American natives. Along with Penstemon and Eriogonum, Phlox is the special glory and vast treasure trove of alpine treasure unique to our country. I have a sneaking suspicion not many people have seen, grown or loved more of these than I have, and I intend to renew my vows to our triumvirate of treasures! I vow to find a few more species in each of these genera in nature or my garden this coming year!

Aaaah, South Africa. If I were wealthy, I would live there in November, December maybe up to March every year. And I would explore endlessly in the East Cape mountains and elsewhere. The six trips I have been blessed to take there have been summits in the mountain range of my life....lofty summits. This picture was taken in the Menter garden and conveys just a smattering of the magnificence of Kniphofia caulescens. My torch shall blaze for these and their compatriots until the day I die!

Irises and Salvias (I am eschewing the mints: they are simply too diverse and wonderful to encapsulate in a single taxon) are my bugabears. I can never have enough. Iris cycloglossa is miraculously sold by the Dutch for a very reasonable price nowadays. What a joke! This most magnificent of bulbous plants (Iris cycloglossa) is sold for a pittance, while sports stars are lavished millions: tell me that there isn't something amiss in the body impolitic? When I win the lottery and build my castle in the hills, I shall plant a parterre filled entirely with this.

There are people who don't love cacti. I pity the poor souls. I can't remember where I took this picture of this champion Echinocereus triglochidiatus, (there are quite a few superlative specimens of this in my own garden, Denver Botanic Gardens in in my friends' gardens). This may be from Kendrick Lake. I probably have twenty kinds of trig and coccineus, and it's not nearly enough. Certain plants (Eriogonum ovalifolium and Zauschneria californica spring to mind) are so wonderful and variable that you must have every form that you find. Most cacti fit into this catergory as far as I'm concerned!

I never met a daphne I did not lust for. Daphne x shytleri in two forms graces my garden (and my life). I possess perhaps sixty daphnes. Several have profound significance for me as they were gifts of dear friends. Four or five of my choicest came to me this past year from Bob Stewart, mere months before he died. He speaks to me each time I see them.Tell me plants don't bear a burden of great meaning, and carry it with unutterable grace (and fragrance in this instance). When I look at many plants, I see in them the associations of so many I have loved and lost. Miraculously, they live on, and can even be propagated and spread far and wide. What better immortality can we want than to be personified by a daphne...

I have not properly acknowledged woodies in my life. My first love was trees, and shrubs like this Cotoneaster multiflorus are not just the backbone of my gardens, but they are the companions and delight of my daily lilfe. This specimen is in DBG's Plantasia. I will not be content until I have a wonderful cascading mound of it of my very own....

I end with Corydalis shanganii ssp. ainii, a plant of great allure for me. There is something evocative and daring about combining sulphurous yellow and lavender pink. I visited the very valley where this plant originates in Kazakhstan in 2010, and the very next spring it bloomed for me. Tell me there is not a wonderful pattern in life.

The patterns in my life are many, but the amazing grace of plants constitute many of the leitmotifs and often the very substance of the tapestry. I am profoundly grateful for the gene flecked with chlorophyll in my chromosomes. And for those who share that gene!

Happy New Year!

For we are most artistically caged

2011-12-20T23:58:00.000-08:00

California is a lovely cage indeed! The view from Kristen McNany's lovely home in Palos Verdes where my girlfriend Jan is staying right now. Jan has never not spent Xmas in California, and this year is no exception. She called tonight to say there was another fabulous sunset (I took this one two weeks ago already). Los Angeles has more than its share of glorious sunsets this time of year.

Our view from Debra Lee Baldwin's wonderful guest quarters in Escondido. The Baldwin's made Jan and me feel utterly at home and Debra more than dazzled us with her garden, the gardens of two of the leading designers of San Diego and a sampling of nurseries a stone's throw from her house including the one below. The Escondido to Vista area has to be the succulent equivalent of Heaven: I can't imagine another place on earth with so many extensive and fabulous nurseries of all sorts, but especially for succulents.

Another of our wonderful California hostesses was Robin Parer, the undisputed royalty of Geraniaceae in North America (at the very least)...This is the second year that Jan and I have visited Robin and her husband Bill (who had only just arrived from a trip to visit crows in Hawaii--I kid you not). I could easily spend a lifetime at the Parer's and I doubt that I could exhaust their phenomenal library, not to mention Robin's gourmet repasts! We visited her nursery in Richmond yet again, taking away some treasures. Robin drove Jan and me out to Tamales bay for a wonderful oyster lunch and a hike out on to this point, another vista peering out to the Pacific.

Finally a glimpse of San Francisco from Kristen's wonderful home in Sausalito where we dropped in for an open house the Sunday after her daughter Britt was married. If, as Nabokov suggests, we are indeed caged artistically, what a commodious and lovely cage California comprises in December. I came back to a sere, windy, cold Colorado. Enough said...These still warm memories linger nonetheless.

Geranium magniflorum: underappreciated and then some...

2011-12-10T04:35:00.000-08:00

Few plants are more useful in the garden than geraniums. I have patches of geranium I planted decades ago that cheerfully persist with little fuss or bother, providing masses of flowers in season, often with a second season of fall color and of course months and months of just plain great foliage. I just spent a few days with Robin Parer, the proprietor of Geraniaceae, and I shall blog about her wonderful nursery anon (once I download the images) but my visit with her reminded me of this amazing South African gem: Geranium magniflorum. If you click on that hyperlink you will see that this plant is being promoted by Plant Select, and several of the nearly sixty cooperating wholesale nurseries produce it...well, I believe they do. There's this little problem you see...

Despite the fact that this plant is incredibly cold hardy (South African pedigree notwithstanding: it's tough as nails!)...despite the fact that it has the most finely dissected foliage of a lustrous green that is soundly evergreen (unlike most geraniums that die down in winter) albeit it takes on lustrous, purple tones in winter...despite its stunning display of lavender salvers over a long season...despite its resemblance to the very similar (and very tender) Geranium incanum-- a mainstay in subtropical gardens--

This plant has somehow missed the mark. People just don't get it. I suspect part of the problem is the Latin name: "magniflorum" sounds a tad too much like "magnificum", the latter being a buxom Asian, with coarse foliage by comparison and large lavender flowers that last a bit too short of time. EVERYBODY has grown G. magnificum, but hardly anybody grows G. magniflorum, and more 's the pity. There are spectacular plantings of this all over Denver Botanic Gardens and the Gardens at Kendrick Lake. And up at PERC in Fort Collins: what are we to do about this pitiful state of affairs?

I guess I am a tad too attached. After all, I collected the first seed of this on my 1997 March trek to South Africa with Jim Archibald. It was one of hundreds of fantastic plants we collected back then on that amazing occasion. And it deserves to be known! Do put it on your want list for this coming year: there are lots of places you can get it...mail order check Laporte Avenue Nursery or one of the many wholesale sources at Plant Select if you represent a retail nursery. Let's get this wonderful plant out there!

Little lilies...the glacier and trout lilies

2011-11-25T02:49:00.000-08:00

I've just been sorting images, and this picture I took last July between Aspen and Crested Butte on a wonderful trip I took with the Ratzeputz gang probably is about the best I did this year: I doubt if there has ever been a better summer for our mountains...although the show only really kicked in at higher elevations (in the northern half of the state to be sure) in mid July! It was an anno mirabili for sure! I realized gazing on this how emblematic plants are: no wonder they are the logo and symbol of so many things (e.g., War of the Roses, the Fleur de lis, the Colorado Columbine). I have touched on the Columbine elsewhere...but glacier lilies are every bit as redolent and resonant for me.

Throughout perhaps half the high mountains of Colorado (mostly the Western slope) glacier lilies grow in unbelievable profusion. I recall marvelling at them from my earliest childhood: I have spent goodly amounts of time through my life simply sitting among them and revelling in their amazing grace and beauty. I have sniffed them like a bee and I have examined them carefully and with great joy. I have been horrified when as a child I heard my brother in law Allan Taylor, tell me that in Blackfeet language, they are called little shits, because their slender, graceful corms reminded the Blackfeet of shit, apparently. And I remember being almost as shocked a few years ago when my best buddy, Bill Adams, announced to me that "the one plant that leaves me cold is the Lily: I just don't like it" although he redeemed himself a tad when he went on to say that he did like the Erythroniums considerably more than true Lilium. I adore Lilium, you see: and Erythroniums are the early spring harbinger of their summer sexpot sisters. Lolitas, as it were, to the summer Audrey Hepburns, Sophia Lorens and Dolly Partons of the woodlands! But when Erythroniums are out, just call me Humbert Humbert!

I've grown a bevy of Erythronium in my day, although the gorgeous West Coasters are not as fabulous here as they are for the British and Western Europeans. It is almost annoying to see how they grow in Scotland. I am astonished that some Briton has not cranked out a Kew monograph on Erythronium: It takes an Englishman (or perhaps a German) to really appreciate our native wildflowers!

And I wish I could take them all up to Rabbit Ear's Pass in late June, or Kebler Pass a few weeks later and watch them gasp at the miles and miles of yellow magnificence. It is astonishing to me that we pay such ridiculous sums to Sports and Acting luminaries in America. I love my computer, but I cannot fathom the worship of I-Phones and the endless addiction of young people to texting. But they perhaps, would be chagrined if they knew my secret addiction to these nymphets of the spring!

That second picture, by the way, is Erythronium albidum--one of the wonderful and underappreciated Eastern species which has thrived for decades at Denver Botanic Gardens, spreading around here and there modestly, and blooming predictably every April and May. At least two of the easterners are widely spreading by underground runners: not a problem, incidentally! You see, Erythronium grandiflorum will grow poorly for us, withour the vigor or abandon that the Eastern American species. The only one that self sows for me is the European Erythronium dens-canis which shall merit its own blog in due time....

I realize this is a wordy blog: it is all about emotion and reminiscence, and the nuance of flowers--which all take time. For those of us with chlorophyll in our veins, the endless permutation of flowers in our lives, their comings and goings, their performance one year after the next: well, this is really the stuff of our life. They become the touchstones that lend a sort of meaning to things. I sniff glacier lilies, ergo my life is worthwhile!

Glacier Lilies on Rabbit Ears Pass (Mid 1960's)

As soon as highway 40 rose a bit
Above the sagebrush suddenly I'd see
A yellow gauze of bubbly flowers flit
Outside the rushing window and I'd plead

To my dad: "Stop!" and he'd say "wait
A few minutes till we get to Walton Creek
There'll be plenty there, and you can sate
Yourself with flowers", (all of this in Greek

Of course) and as usual he was right
We were there "fishing", but I was lily
Rapt, lily struck: morning to night
Treading on them, everywhere: willy nilly

Glacier lilies: utterly verklempt!
I'd count up to seven blossoms on a stem,
and sniff them. I have never dreamt
As sweet a dream as Walton Creek was then.

The mornings were still frosty, but by noon
The freshets would swell up and there, below
Their glassy, rushing waters I'd discern
A throng of throbbing lilies in the flow

Beneath the water as their brethren jerked
Wafted and bobbed in windy gusts above.
Meanwhile my slightly worried father smirked
At his flower besotten son, absurdly in love

With lilies, casting my rod with less than manly
Elan, shall we say? Distracted by Erythronium
The only man in all my extended family
Who fished so bad. Lost in the Pandemonium

Of lilies. I could care less about brook trout,
Till lunch. that is, when we would clean and gut
And powder them with flour and fry them up
A better lunch I've never had. I doubt

Those halcyon days of lilies and my father
When seconds slowed to minutes, then to hours
Will ever end. I wish I hadn't bothered
Him so much. Another twinge: More flowers!

If we could really go back and relive any day
In our lives, I would opt for those trips with my dad
On Rabbit Ears pass, clouds scudding away
And the glacier lilies driving both of us mad!

A very hoary Ironweed: Vernonia larseni

2011-11-23T03:31:00.000-08:00

The ironweeds may be one of the largest genera of plants in North America: although the USA only has a dozen or two species (many of which look rather similar to one another) there are nearly 1000 species scattered across Eurasia, Africa and South America. Rather like Senecio and Aster, Botanists one day will likely try to hack this genus into smaller bits. There is something gratifying about seeing how a genus adapts over such a vast area. I was enchanted with several species of Vernonia I found on my late summer visits to South Africa, some of which rather closely resembled this one from the Big Bend: Vernonia larsenii has a rather restricted distribution in West Texas (and something tells me it isn't that common there even)...

Mike Kintgen must have put this in several years ago: this year it has produced a stunning sheaf of blooms that were very striking in late summer and fall, and continue to provide terrific color even now in late November. I have a hunch the show will go on through winter...I imagine it would make a top notch dried flower for arrangements. Alas, the seed doesn't look very viable on these plants (maybe our early frosts got them?). I suspect it will come easily enough from cuttings. I am anxious to try one out at my home, which will be a greater hardiness test. We grow a large number of Zone 6 and even 7 plants well at the Gardens which homeowners who live a bit further from the Urban Heat Island sometimes find difficult: Caesalpinia gilliesii, Arizona Rosewood; Chilopsis and suchlike that seem to thrive everywhere at DBG but are a tad fussier in real Zone 5 gardens. I suspect that most of Big Bend is a solid Zone 8, although this past winter was likely a test for them as well! And winters like that are probably the reason this Vernonia has made it for us. Why "hoary"? Throughout the summer the narrow leaves are wonderfully silvery gray. That's why! Plus it does catch people's attention...

November sonnet...

2011-11-20T09:10:00.000-08:00

Sacred Earth

I confess I am quite particular
About my trees above all, and yes, books.
This season when brooding lenticular
Clouds loom above and the frenetic looks

Of shoppers tell me that winter solstice
Is nigh and the sun hides mostly from our gaze
I yearn for a Southern Hemispheric poultice
Exulting upside down in summer days.

The last few colchicums are spiting frost.
The first few snowdrops are pretending spring
Is not so far away, but I am lost
In winter’s chill embrace. Oh! hear her sing!

Shear clouds, sere fields, sad heart (for what it’s worth)
A clarity of light on sacred earth.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Huggable cacti

2011-11-19T03:12:00.000-08:00

I attended my first meeting of the Colorado Cactus and Succulent Society nearly a half century ago...believe me, I find that a lot scarier than you do. I hasten to assure you that I was very young. My brother-in-law, Allan Taylor took me along (he has just built his extensive cactus garden--another story, another blog)...

Over the years I would drop in from time to time when CCSS had speakers like John Trager of the Huntington, or Gordon Rowley, or Bruce Bayer. I grew hardy stuff, and Cactus clubs are really about tender things like Astrophytum myriostigma, Ariocarpus fissuratus and of course Mammillaria plumosa, featured above. [those first two are hyperlinks, if you missed it!]Somehow, I've gotten more and more "stuck on" cacti and other succulents (obligatory pun) that my windows are suddenly crowded with these tender (and paradoxically tough) little minions in winter and I find myself performing that potentially painful dance all succulent fanciers know only too well, schlepping plants in and out in spring and fall. I have gradually come to realize that the three taxa I just listed (and which have graced my blog this year) are darlings of all cactus collectors for many reasons 1) they do take a modicum of skill for nurserymen to produce and gardeners to maintain 2) they are relatively rare in either nurseries or the wild and therefore "choice" 3) these are three of the least lethal cacti. You can pet all three of these safely. In fact, you could rub your chin (or other tender body parts) against them (depending on your peculiar bent, shall we say) and not hurt yourself. The first two are utterly lacking in spines, but in the Mammillaria, the spines are transformed into amazingly frilly and gentle snowflakes of softness. These form amazing snowballs of furry beauty with time, and studded with creamy flowers for much of the late summer and autumn, the plant is irresistible.

I will always grow and enjoy my hardy succulents....but more and more windows in my house (and even my office lately) are burgeoning with these chubby and prickly little imps. I can't imagine my home or my life without them! (Warning, however: I find I'm now president of the darned cactus club! You too may find yourself cheerfully lolling in the cactus patch if you don't watch out!)

A word may be stronger than man

2011-11-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

Enough pictures! I want to share one of my favorite poems (sad to think Volodya would have expunged this post Onegin commentary)...This poem has cheered me up many a gray day. Khodasevich apparently really did live in a circular room.

Translation of Vladislav Khodasevich's "Ballada"
By Vladimir Nabokov

Orpheus

Brightly lit from above I am sitting
in my circular room; this is I--
looking up at a sky made of stucco,
at a sixty-watt sun in that sky.

All around me, and also lit brightly,
all around me my furniture stands,
chair and table and bed--and I wonder
sitting there what to do with my hands.

Frost-engendered white feathery palm trees
on the window-panes silently bloom;
loud and quick clicks the watch in my pocket
as I sit in my circular room.

Oh, the leaden, the beggarly bareness
of a life where no issue I see!
Whom on earth could I tell how I pity
my own self and the things around me?

And then clasping my knees I start slowly
to sway backwards and forwards, and soon
I am speaking in verse, I am crooning
to myself as I sway in a swoon.

What a vague, what a passionate murmur
lacking any intelligent plan;
but a sound may be truer than reason
and a word may be stronger than man.

And then melody, melody, melody
blends my accents and joins in their quest
and a delicate, delicate, delicate
pointed blade seems to enter my breast.

High above my own spirit I tower,
high above mortal matter I grow:
subterranean flames lick my ankles,
past my brow the cool galaxies flow.

With big eyes-as my singing grows wilder--
with the eyes of a serpent maybe,
I keep watching the helpless expression
of the poor things that listen to me.

And the room and the furniture slowly,
slowly start in a circle to sail,
and a great heavy lyre is from nowhere
handed me by a ghost through the gale.

And the sixty-watt sun has now vanished,
and away the false heavens are blown:
on the smoothness of glossy black boulders
this is Orpheus standing alone.

Dragons in the garden...the Dragon Arum anyway!

2011-11-14T17:37:00.000-08:00

Time slips by almost imperceptibly, but it slips by. Some time in the 1990's I was working in the Rock Alpine Garden and a couple from Arkansas struck up a conversation...somehow the topic of the Dragon Arum (Dracunculus vulgaris) came up: this widespread Mediterranean is sold by mail order nurseries nowadays, but back then it was a sort of mythical plant that was not available commercially anywhere. The picture cannot begin to convey how elegant the leaves are, and how immense and striking the flowers are as well: they both can be nearly 2' long! Steve Marak asked if we'd grown it yet: well sort of! We'd gotten some seed that year form a European botanical garden and were nursing the plant along. He said he thought had a particularly hardy strain. It may have been a year or two later, even, but Steve eventually sent us a box full of a dozen or so fat roots late one summer. I planted these with some trepidation...worried I (or Colorado's fierce winters rather!) might destroy them...

Well, I believe every corm lived, and most bloomed the next year or so. Nowadays, every June we have quite a spectacle. I have counted a dozen open simultaneously (you have to be courageous to get close enough to count accurately because they stink to high heaven!)...Dare Bohlander planted white Gas Plant among them: they do overlap in bloom time and the contrast is more than stunning.

As I was sorting through this summer's pix I noticed I finally got a passable picture of that outrageous seedhead they produce: I have a dozen or so super pix of the plant at my work computer of course...the one above was taken last June and is passable, I think. Almost a half year has elapsed since they bloomed, and hard to believe in half a year the spring time will be slipping away again.

By the way, by the time Steve's Dracunculus were blooming, the ones we grew from seed started to bloom as well: they are both rather green leaved forms. There are wonderfully striped and stippled leaf forms out there, and even an albino! Dan Johnson purchased bulbs, and his are self sowing in his front yard (I believe there are seedlings showing up here and there at the Gardens as well): obviously the plant is suited to Colorado!

Another year has slipped by, and though we have grown these for almost two decades, I keep forgetting to get some for my garden, even though they are not expensive (and I could doubtless beg some seedlings from Dan).

Look at that spadix! We probably had ten like that. I did remember to collect a bit of seed: but why haven't I suggested we grow lots of it for our plant sales? Why haven't I sown it myself? Are we so sated, so glutted that we allow wonderful, alluring and strange plants like this to languish beneath our noses? I confess, I haven't quite figured out where to put this at home: it is a monster if not an out and out dragon, and one must place smelly (if glorious) things like this with a bit of care...

But truth be said, we have had an enormous influx of hundreds of exquisite ornamentals in our local industry, at the Gardens and sometimes it gets challenging to find a way to shoehorn them all into a garden, even a sizeable one like mine...

I remember seeing this along the roadsides in Greece in April of 1994 (my last trip there): it grows near both my parents villages and lots of other places as well...another compelling reason for me to get it!

I am beginning to compile my lists of acquisitions for the coming year and this will be near the top of the list.

I know Steve frequently haunts cyberspace and might stumble on this some day...and if you do, know you were absolutely right. This is one of our most spectacular plantings in bloom or in majestic seed! Thanksgiving is nigh, and I am indeed thankful to Steve Marak! And to my lucky stars!

When is a weed a weed? Aristolochia clematitis!

2011-11-09T04:18:00.000-08:00

You know you have reached a new plateau in horticulture when you dote on weeds. I'm not talking sow thistle (quite yet) or Cardamine oligosperma--two plants I will not likely ever cotton on to. It would take a super horticulturists to warm up to those accursed little poppers! There is something a bit sad, perhaps, when you grow fond of brown, tan, gray and black flowers. We Fritillaria fanciers I suppose are prone to occasional bouts of melancholia. I have been quite keen on Dutchman's pipes for some time now, although I only have a few species thus far in my garden. They are a pretty strange lot. Most have strangely shaped flowers in neutral tints. It took quite a while, but eventually tracked down Aristolochia clematitis and planted one out in the Rock Alpine Garden...perhaps fifteen years ago. It took it a while, but I am beginning to see why I was warned never to plant it! "It is a goddamn weed, man!". Since I still do not have it in my home garden, I cannot say it is a weed for me. It is a desirable ornamental I do not yet possess in my garden, after all. OK, the flowers are rather small, and a sort of strange chartreuse color. Up close, they don't look quite as pipe-like as the more climbing sorts. But there is something sculpturesque about them, as there is about the peculiar flowers of their cousins, the wild gingers (Asarum) which hide their gloomy charms under their leaves on the forest floor: the ultimate in floristic depression. I love those too!

Don't they make graceful colonies? Like their close cousin Saruma henryi, which some gardeners also believe is a terrible weed, they can make a fine upright statement in a shady corner. Now to find a spot where they will not inundate their neighbors with their enthusiastic charms (and widely spreading rhizomes...)

So now the question is, where is that magical spot where I can display this rambunctious plants charms without cursing it after the passage of a few years...I have a spot in my garden to display Euphorbia cyparissias 'Fen's Ruby'--another potential menance, after all...not to mention Clary Sage. various thistles and other potentially wildly seeding and spreading treasures...

Perhaps it is a just a tad like playing with fire. Remember, however, that fire is essential for grilling, and paradoxically for maintaining healthy forests...and a garden without a few weedy plants properly modulated and controlled (just as one keeps the embers in the firepit!) is tame and dull indeed. Bring on the weeds!

Twenty years ago this year...

2011-11-03T20:46:00.000-07:00

Delosperma sphalmanthoides

Twenty years ago this past year John Trager, curator of the desert conservatory at Huntington Botanical Garden, was visiting me at Denver Botanic Gardens. He was intrigued when I showed him a small, tufted mesemb I'd received the year before from John Lavranos: John had sent me some plants he'd collected on the summit of Komsberg Pass. He was amazed that I had succeeded with South African succulents outdoors in Colorado, and hoped he might add some plants to our palette....boy! DID he!

"Sphalmanthus resurgens" or Phyllobolus pearsonii?

One of he plants he sent looked a great deal like a white flowered mesemb I'd grown from Mesa Gardens years earlier called (at the time..it's changed name since) Sphalmanthus resurgens: that's it above: they do look rather similar don't they? Do you blame me for thinking they were in the same genus?

John rooted the cuttings at Huntington, and when they bloomed, showed them to Steve Hammer, who immediately realized they were unrelated, and that Lavranos had discovered yet another new species (he is blessed that way!). He published the name of the plant in the Cactus and Succulent Society of America journal in 1993, immortalizing my mistake!

This is the first of a half dozen species new to science I've had a hand bringing to light. I believe it is the first new species of plant described from specimens cultivated first at Denver Botanic Gardens. And it has set a very high standard indeed!

As I type this, I suspect that this is blooming on the rocky half acre or so (where Lavranos first collected it). I found the same spot in 1994...a year after the type description: there were a few dozen plants, perhaps, on the rocky pasture and that was about it. As far as I know it has not been found elsewhere. When I went back three years ago, a very high fence had been erected along the entire road in this vicinity: the Komsberg is now a game farm and henceforward it will be very hard indeed to check up on this Delosperma in habitat without connections!

Hopefully, it is still there. One thing is for certain: it is firmly established in horticulture: I know several nurseries that grow large numbers of it. I cannot say it is an easy or permanent garden plant. This last shot shows the sort of show it can make in April for a year or two. Inevitably it seems to fade away. The Gardens at Kendrick Lake have probably planted out more specimens of this last year than may exist in all the wild. That seems to be the one place where this is happy and seems to persist (so there is hope for the rest of us mere mortals!).

Perhaps some day I will be lucky enough to get permission to seek it out on its rocky home on that lofty and wonderful pass. I recall one visit finding incredible bulbs in seed everywhere(Moraea, Ornithogalum, Lachenalia, Laperousia, Romulea, Babiana, Geissorhiza, Tritonia, Ferraria, Hesperantha, Gladiolus and Ixia), simply countless species. On my last trip there, at the height of spring I saw practically none! Go figure!?

Like the American West and all steppe climates, the Karoo is infinitely rich unpredictable and mysterious. I feel like a lucky mortal indeed to have visited on six occasions at six different times of year...and to have these karroid mementos studding my life life and garden like glittering, magical, prismatic gems. None more evocative than this tiniest of Delosperma!

I can almost smell the pungent...

2011-10-31T10:42:00.000-07:00

... aromatic tang of the karoo in my nostrils when I look at this miniature gem: Arctotis adpressa has haunted me for nearly two decades. Unquestionably the hardiest of its genus, I first found it forming a huge mat (2 m. across!) on top of Hantamberg, in January of 1994: I scrounged a few dubious looking seedpods, and of course, they did not germinate. I found it again here and there along the Roggeveld plateau, where it is not terribly rare..but always in off season until a decade or so ago when I obtained some fresh seed that grew for Bill Adams of Sunscapes, the only nursery in the world that propagates and sells this that I know of (except, of course, for a few garden centers in the Denver area that by this from Bill).

I am sure as I type this that tens and thousands of mats of this are blooming gloriously in the high Komsberg, on the ridges of the Niewveld mountains, on those magical high places of the High Karoo where I have spent just a few days now and again, and which nevertheless are branded on my memory and haunt my sleep. If I could only muster a few extra lifetimes, I would gladly spend one or two of them up there, in the wind, with that incredible biodiversity of bulbs, succulents, little shrubs and herbaceous treasures everywhere.

The picture above was taken last year at Denver Botanic Gardens. The one below at a private garden in Golden where it thrives.

I have a few husky specimens in my garden at home (not enough): like so many other gems I have collected, this hovers on the fringes of cultivation in America, and is by no means certain to persist. You should get one from Bill next spring! He sells them far too cheaply.

Some say autumn is a lovely season, and I guess I have to agree. The fall color was spectacular this year. But if I were a rich man, I would be treading the Eriocephalus and wandering the kloofs and koppies of the Great Karoo right now...and perhaps forever.

Improbable crosses

2011-10-28T05:51:00.000-07:00

Can an alligator really have crossed with a waterlily and planted its progeny in the Chihuahuan desert? There are those plants that have a certain manna. You can't really call yourself a rock gardener until you have had your first feeble flower on blue Meconopsis, your giant wands on Saxifraga longifolia, or killed a few Eritrichium or Dionysia! No self-respecting Irisarian would be without an Aril iris or two, or clumps of Iris tectorum in the woods...and let's add a few clumps of 'Beverly Sills'. For us succulent types, there are a number of "touchstones": one surely is those outlandish Chihuahuan cacti that look more lizardy than cactoid: Ariocarpus fissuratus is surely one of these...

As President of the Colorado Cactus and Succulent Society, I need all the street cred I can muster. I know, I know, I may have invented Delosperma for all intents and purposes as a garden plant, and I have grown a few hundred (or thousand) hardy succulents in my day, but it's these tender things that give you credibility...the reward for schlepping out all summer, and then bringing them in again is their miracle flowers you can enjoy up close on the window sill as the season transitions abruptly outside the window: last week there were dozens of flowers still making a spectacle in the garden. 8" of snow and temps down to 14F have put an end to that nonsense!

There I am: proud papa! And did I mention that Mammillaria plumosa has been blooming for the last few months? And Lithops? I can wield the gavel at our next meeting with renewed authority! Hold the applause!

Three wild and crazy guys!!!!!

2011-10-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

I don't have a CLUE who took this. I suspect we must have taken the picture in Mexico, on the fateful trip Paul Maslin, Baldassare Mineo and I all took to collect the Chihuahuan phloxes way back in October of 1981--almost precisely three decades ago. It was about the time that Steve Martin and Dan Akyroyd invented those intrepid Brothers, although I daresay we were seeking Mexican phloxes rather than American foxes...our taste was nearly as brash in retrospect.

I scanned a hundred or so old pictures like this of friends and acquaintances that I would like to bring out of the land of boxed transparencies into the new digital realm.

The pictures have brought forth a tsunami of remembrance and nostalgia. There I was at 31, relatively svelte. Of course, Baldassare is still svelte and remarkably similar nowadays (he no doubt has a hoary portrait in his closet). Little did I imagine thirty years ago that this would be the last big trip I would take with my mentor, Paul, and that a few years later he would develop brain cancer and die in February of 1984.

I have a very few other pictures of Paul, to whom I owe so very much. The one above is from our first trip in 1978 (if you look carefully you can see Phlox 'Mary Maslin' to the left of him!) Would I had taken many, many more pictures and notes and paid better attention to this greatest of Colorado gardeners of the 20th Century. Oh, if I could only bring him back to see Denver Botanic Gardens. I can imagine few things on earth I would rather relive than my trips to Chihuahua with Paul. To hear his gentle voice and chuckle and listen to his stories one more time...

Phlox 'Mary Maslin'

Phlox lutea 'Paul Maslin'

Oh yes...and I'd like to have these phloxes back too (which I once grew in vast swaths...)

Times do indeed change.

Rage! Rage! Against the dying of the light! Celebrating endless autumn....

2011-10-18T02:48:00.000-07:00

Fireworks goldenrod in the O'Fallon Perennial border a few weeks ago: what a great plant! And what an amazing autumn: on and on and on it goes...ordinarily we would have had at least one, maybe two dustings of snow by now and hoar frost at least. They predicted hard frost tonight and tomorrow night, and now maybe not. Gotta love Colorado! You NEVER know what to expect!

Found this self sown sporeling of Pellaea atropurpurea growing on solid Limestone in the Rock Alpine Garden a few days ago. I wonder if one out of 100 visitors notices (despite the fact it is at eye level)....maybe one out of 1000? Would you?

Many is the year this Hosta tardiflora would have been fried by now. Come to think of it, Bergenia ciliata right next to it shows a bit of damage, so the Rock Alpine Garden (which is a frost pocket and gets the first frost anywhere in Denver) has been kissed by the Frost goddess...but not enough to fry this yet.

I blogged about this elsewhere, but can't resist yet another shot of this stunning grass introduced by Scott and Lauren Ogden from central Texas: it is obviously a huge winner: Muhlenbergia reverchonii. I regret to say it is not a plant for dry gardens (it grows in my unwatered border but will not bloom much): not that this matters much. 99.9% of Colorado gardens are horribly overwatered...Sheesh! What will it take to wake people up?

I end with a closeup of Aconitum carmichaelii...or is it A. henryi? Or A. cammarum? I have seen a dozen names attached to this giant, late autumn blooming gem from East Asia. Whatever the name, few plants are more majestic or gratifying in the dying ember of the growing season...

I, for one, rejoice in this sempiternal fall. I feel about winter as Dylan Thomas does about "that Good night" in one of the greatest poems of the English Language:

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTOTHAT GOOD NIGHT

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Last Love

2011-10-15T20:34:00.000-07:00

Love at the closing of our days
is apprehensive and very tender.
Glow brighter, brighter, farewell rays
of one last love in its evening splendor.

Blue shade takes half the world away:
through western clouds alone some light is slanted.
O tarry, O tarry, declining day,
enchantment, let me stay enchanted.

The blood runs thinner, yet the heart
remains as ever deep and tender.
O last belated love, thou art
a blend of joy and of hopeless surrender.

-Fyodor Tyutchev

I remember when the horticultural staff at Denver Botanic Gardens would practically dance snow dances to hasten killing frost this time of year: they were so tired of dead-heading annuals, I suppose, and were waiting for...what? Death I suppose? Nothingness?

Winter may have it's threadbare appeal...but don't we have time enough for that? Although Tyutchev undoubtedly had an aging couples romance (rather like Antonio Machado's Guiomar poems)--love so deep, so tender that young love pales by comparison...It is a bit dramatic to say I feel that way about the growing season. But I do: they are predicting killing frost Tuesday night, and I shall drink in the banks of Salvia splendens I saw the other day on my commute with passionate ardor! A few glimpses of a few of Denver's terrific annual plantings around town (mostly torn out, I fear, by now...why are they in such a rush?)

Hardy in Cortez? Salvia guaranitica? Get real!

2011-10-13T10:20:00.001-07:00

I took this picture last Saturday at the truly amazing home and garden of David and Pati Temple who live in an enchanting and remote canyon 16 miles from Cortez. The plant is Salvia guaranitica, native to warm temperate and subtropical South America (Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil specifically). It is generally regarded as marginal, even in Zone 7 (maximum lows above 0 Farenheit). This plant has survived 4 winters here and come back strong (as you can see it is a husky individual). Yes, yes, I know...it's on a south wall, and it is Southwesternmost Colorado. But they do get winter, and last winter was fierce!

I should not have been so surprised that this made it for the Temples: we have grown Salvia uliginosa for years in Denver, which has a similar range in nature. Needless to say, I asked them to save seed for us to work on this seemingly hardier strain....

While I'm showing off the Temple's Salvias, it would be wrong, wrong, wrong if I didn't post this picture of Salvia darcyi, practically the size of a Smart Car, growing a few feet away. Wonders never cease! Few places I know are as wonderful as this Trail Canyon paradise....aaaaaaah.

Gem of a garden

2011-10-12T03:21:00.001-07:00

A cloudy, blustery day in October is hardly the time to visit or photograph a garden, but there are those who are up to the task! I had visited Lisa and Drew Bourey's gem of a garden a half dozen years earlier (in September that time) and was anxious to see it again. Like all plantsmen's gardens, this one is multidimensional: I can only imagine what it must be like in the magical months when there are hundreds of flowers everywhere. But autumn has its compensations, like the heavy fruit set on the Pyracantha espalier!

Durango is not just in Southwest Colorado, it is a beacon in the Southwest! I think this may be one of the great gardening climates, judging by the astonishing array of plants not just in the Bourey garden, but everywhere. What impressed me most about this area is that the plants LOOK good right now after a very hot summer: the cool nights at the relatively higher elevation are no doubt part of the reason. And more reliable snow cover. I love the melting tones of the zinnia with the casual purple Amaranth (Lisa had cut the giant purple amaranths the night before: they had predicted 23F and of course it didn't freeze at all!)...

This is, of course, a modest sized lot in a city neighborhood: my pictures just catch a few glimpses here and there: I love the way the Snow in Summer Euphorbia (E. marginata) picked just the right spot to come up!

This is a native around Denver, and yet we hardly ever see it in gardens hereabouts. I was surprised to find it grown in Kazakhstan, and in Europe it is a popular passalong plant: and here it is growing with debonaire charm on the West side of the divide...where it isn't native!

I forgot to ask which Carex this is...but I think it is particularly enhanced with the lush, green spread of Geranium magniflorum in front of it. Lisa made much use of this woefully neglected Plant Select offering, which warmed the cockles of my heart (I collected this with Jim Archibald in the late 1990's on Joubert's pass)...

Two enviable specimens: a gargantuan blooming Sedum cauticolum, and next to it one of the biggest Pelargonium endlicherianum I have ever seen: I would love to see that one in bloom! Plantsmen's gardens are above all about plants themselves, their intrinsic majesty and beauty, but these gardens are also about juxtapositions and combinations and a story. In this case, Lisa has decades of experience with plants a nursery manager at a local garden center, as the leading landscape designer in Durango. Her husband, Drew, obviously shares much of her enthusiasm, and is no horticultural slouch! He takes the initiative with the large collection of succulents scattered throughout (check out his blog: you can see evidence of his and Lisa's formidable photographic skills)...and read about a man who lives his dreams!

A few more vignettes from here and there in the garden: isn't this a great way to show off the seedheads of Allium christophii?

A cloudy, chill October morning, yet this garden entranced me: I could tell that Lisa and Drew and their kids have endless fun there. Despite the small size in square feet, it really seemed endless in its convolutions: what a great place for kids to grow up! I doubt I have seen more great plants superbly grown in such a small area, nor more imaginitive design. I nominate the Bourey garden as the epitome of the Colorado garden: rich, varied and lovely year around!

Zillions of zany zinnias!

2011-10-05T04:12:00.001-07:00

"...to set budding more later flowers for the bees
Until they think warm days will never cease
for summer hath oerbrimm'd their clammy cells."

Ode to Autumn, John Keats

We rarely have mists although mellow fruitfulness is apropos. The last few autumns we have had such a promising beginning: I have all the windows open (it's 5:30 AM) on October 5--it is almost summery in coolness with just a nip of fall. Although cooler weather is predicted in a few days...

My last blog showed a sumptious Salvia at the Gardens at Kendrick Lake (that Lakewood wonderland I have not yet truly done justice to on this blog--I just show snippets here and there of the many treasures there)...that garden is quite spectacular this time of year with literally dozens of plants in full glorious bloom. None are more lavish in their display than our modest Zinnia grandiflora,

I say "our" advisedly: the late Andrew Pierce, whom I have eulogized recently, insisted that he and I introduced this to Denver Botanic Gardens early in the 1980's on a field trip he and I took to Phantom Canyon. I am happy to take credit for this introduction (our accession files should tell the tale): I wonder if this might not be the earliest evidence of its being cultivated--at least locally? I suspect Plants of the Southwest must have offered it in the sixties and seventies...

I think each of these pictures is actually taken of a different spread of zinnia at Kendrick Lake. We grow this at DBG and I had a fine spread in my own home xeriscape, but our's are not quite so lusty. The finest planting ever was (and I suppose still is) at Centennial Park, once an outpost of DBG which we sadly released to oblivion...perhaps I shall share pictures of that one day.

What can I tell you about this zinnia? Common throughout southernmost Colorado southward to Mexico, throughout the Chihuahuan uplands (it could almost be the mascot of the Chihuahuan steppe/desert). It often begins to bloom in late spring, and lasts through the summer (older flowers turning parchment yellow and papery) so it presents the same sort of floral show one would want of an annual. Except this plant is totally drought tolerant, and will grow in the stickiest clay with equanimity.

Some time in the late 1980's I wrote an article about this plant for the Denver Post: I remember getting angry calls and notes from local nurserymen who of course were caught with their pants down: you see, it was not being produced commercially at the time and customers were demanding it after reading my piece. I learned a lesson there! That was a lesson I took to heart! One or two local nurseries are growing this now (Little Valley Wholesale Nursery and Country Lane spring to mind) so Plant Select should really revisit this plant.

It belies' Robert Frost's wonderful short poem, "Nothing gold can stay" which I read to conclude my eulogy for my dear friend Andrew's memorial service on Monday night. This is gold that indeed stays and lasts and blooms its zany head off for months and months.

Salviapalooza!!

2011-09-29T22:08:00.000-07:00

A year ago I blogged about Salvia pachyphylla (pssst! You're supposed to click on where I said "blogged"...I have a hyperlink that will call up that very blog). I am publishing this blog for several reasons: first off to show you the very same plant growing at the Gardens at Kendrick Lake exactly one year later. Several things should stand out if you compare the two pictures:

1) they were taken at different times of the day, so the plants look really DIFFERENT, even though I swear on a stack of bibles it's the same individual.
2) This is one hell of a clone. Definitely deserves to be propagated and named. (Hint).
3) The aster in last year's picture is missing: Greg Foreman tells me some yahoo dug the sucker up (i.e. stole it). I think that is a very sad commentary on humanity.
4) One of the greatest things that have happened in my life is to be party to the introduction of such stunning plants to general cultivation. Life is good: even though jerks steal plants.
5) Greg Foreman, his incredible colleagues and Kendrick Lake Gardens are among the loveliest people and places on Planet Earth.

I've written more than enough about this Salvia. I have seen it at any number of local nurseries this autumn (even though people tell me it is hard to find). It is worth any effort to obtain and grow--especially those blessed with pedocals and exposed gardens. It is the OFFICIAL plant of Lakewood, Colorado (a very wise town indeed). There are those who dislike the extremely aromatic, pungent (and did I mention fragrant?) foliage: bruise a leaf and you can smell it for yards and for hours. I think it smells terrific. Why are we pumping metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere every few minutes (shame on you, Republicans, for denying manifest truths like evolution and global warming), endangering a fragile planet and our future we are lucky enough to share this sacred earth with salviapaloozas like this. Sigh.

Scare the shepherds! Colchicums!

2011-09-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

Colchicum "Big Sucker"

I read somewhere that the Spanish call Merendera pyreneica (now Colchicum pyreneicum) "Espanto pastores" ("Scare the shepherds") because when they begin to bloom it means snow is not too far away...Well...my C. pyreneicum bloomed last week, and I forgot to take a picture of it, but I have realized that just as you can spend years going through classes, noticing that one who always would sit in the back, and then suddenly one day you realize you are in love, so too have I fallen in love with these diaphanous, predictably vigorous and utterly wonderful Colchicums! No, it's not really its cultivar name: I am not sure which big sucker is blooming like crazy under the Crabs here at work. I have something similar lighting up my garden here and there: I can tell I will be figuring it out soon (love leads to enlightenment you know...)

Of course everyone knows 'Waterlily' I planted three many years ago and these are now huge clumps I should have divided last July. I shall divide them NEXT July for sure, and sell a few (at their current cost that might pay off my debts)...I just planted a single, fluted corm of its pure white congener ('Alboplenum'): how many years before THAT is all clumpy like this...you know it's autumn when these poke up!

This is Colchicum filifolium which I featured in a blog a long time ago. I took this picture last spring (it is an early spring species)...I must have a dozen or more of these tiny colchicums planted everywhere, some bloom in early spring and some in the Autumn. I never paid much attention to them in the past, but this year I find them consumingly fascinating and wonderful! Aaaaah, love! Ain't it grand? Those lucky shepherds! Can't you just see them cowering as they tiptoe through acres of these?

I know very well I could not

2011-09-18T00:33:00.000-07:00

I have been writing a few too many memorials in recent years. I suppose when you enter your seventh decade (a grim way of saying I'm 61 years old) you can expect to lose friends. Most recently, it was Andrew Pierce, a much loved and ubiquitous presence in our regional horticultural scene, and most importantly to me, my friend.

If you click on that link you can read a short tribute I wrote in another Blog I contribute to about the man, or a very cursory allusion to a few of his contributions to my workplace. No memorial can capture the true essence of the day to day interactions over the years that accrue to create a friendship.

How could I begin to encapsulate nearly forty years of interactions with an individual with whom I had nearly daily contact with during much of that interval? When the terrible telephone call comes, and you choke back the tears and start philosophizing, you try not to be too overwhelmed with the reminiscinces that begin to jostle your memory. Andrew bringing me coffee as I worked in the Rock Alpine Garden and telling me to stop for just a minute, and chat. Andrew driving me up to his home when I was a bachelor, for dinner with his wife and kids (I would stay overnight almost every week at least once at his home in the early nineteen eighties), for friendship of course, but also because he wanted his young solitary friend to have some companionship. He felt sorry for my bachelorhood. And I was a bit lonely to tell the truth at that point in my life.

The many memories over the years of the distinctive laugh, the lunches at work, the lunches here and there all around Denver over the years, the banquets, the hikes on Mt. Evans, on Horseshoe Mountain, on Squaw Peak...

All the meetings we attended together, and the strolls in gardens. The countless hours spent in one another's presence. Hundreds and hundreds of conversations and interactions down through the mirrored hallways of reminiscence. How utterly one takes one's friends for granted.

Suddenly he is gone. Of course, one mourns one's friends for themselves. But John Donne tells the terrible truth that no man is an island, and what we also mourn is the loss of love, and half that love is directed to you and that half is now missing. You love your friend, but that friend loved you, and that you feel profoundly diminished because all the memories you cherish were reciprocated, and the other half is abruptly gone. It is we who are ineluctably halved thereby. No wonder we hurt.

This year I have lost so many people who knew me as no one else ever shall. They knew and loved me as no one else can ever quite accrue: for decades, from my youth, through my entire middle age and on the threshhold of my old age. These are the selfish thoughts that those of us who are, perhaps, a bit too reflective, whose complicated lives are prone to thinking strange thoughts.

Andrew had been losing his hearing for years due to meningitis as a young man, and a few years ago somehow miraculously began to hear quite well (an operation? new apparatus? Why can't I remember? How I marvelled at it and rejoiced for him)...but like all gardeners he was visual in the extreme. He created innumerable gardens in his life, many like Hudson and Denver Botanic Gardens were highly conspicuous and extensive. I could dredge up no end of appropriate images for him. But I find words are a greater salve for me when I suffer loss. Especially poetry. The Donne poem always reverberates in my heart when I experience loss. When my mentors pass (and I have had a few) Whitman's "Oh Captain" comes to mind, and I begin to hear the words echo in me. For Andrew, however, I think a sprig of oak with some clinging Spanish Moss says much of what is making me ache so much tonight, keeping me awake at 2:00AM remembering sweet days--decades really--of companionship. And feeling very sorry for myself.

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
by Walt Whitman

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

Icons

2011-09-12T20:42:00.000-07:00

I was labeling slides from this past summer and saw this iconic image of my work place (an icon in and of itself): I'd already forgotten the day I took it. But it is fresh enough a memory that I can recreate the day and remember something about it, other than the floriferous border and classic conservatory shot. The angle and the composition is better than any others this year: this is a keeper I shall use in talks. It will become a symbol, as it were, of a symbol.

The Rocky Mountains (Horseshoe Mountain in the Mosquitos to be precise) and Jan Fahs, my girlfriend. Two of the most pervasive icons in my life: I live in the shadow of the Rockies, and watch them morning, noon and evening every day. Jan is the one I spend most time with and have chosen to be my companion. Both loom large in my life, like the Pantocrator in a byzantine chapel. Large icons indeed!

I took this picture of Iris missouriensis a few months ago on a fishing trip with my two kids (my own personal symbols). Each year I make a point of seeking out this iris, and some years I may see it on five, ten, fifteen or more mountains almost anywhere in the West. I also have grown it and we have lusty plants at DBG. It is one of the many touchstones in my life: icons as it were. I have enormous volumes of reminiscences around this plant: around every plant. Plants are my icons and gardens are a sort of cathedral for me...just what does that mean?

These are my two kids, Jesse and Eleni. They have flown the coop (he to school in Arkansas, she to New York City). They are living reliquaries that contain large, pulsating chunks of my heart, where my dreams and hopes reside . They are leading their own separate existences far from me, although they stay in touch and come and live with me now and again, although I fear the gaps between their visits will inevitably extenuate. My thoughts about them are tender, complex and utterly different from my plant obsessed work and play life. For me, they are perambulating images with minds, hearts and feet of their own that wander farther and farther away it seems. Like all parents, I revere them with a sort of religious fervor....

Late in the summer every year the Bird of Paradise (Caesalpinia gilliesii) blooms prolifically here and there, all around Denver Botanic Gardens. It has become iconic for me as well: a flamboyant symbol of the magnificence of the waning growing season. A token of tender-seeming plants that are quite durable (at least at the Gardens!). An evocation of the Pampas whence it comes. Argentina! that silvery land of promise in the Southern Hemisphere, where Borges and the Andes, tango, gauchos and so much else romantic is encapsulated in this outlandish, utterly magnificent plant.

Our lives are every bit as iconic as the Byzantine churches that perdure millenia in Arta, in Thessaloniki, Constantinople, Daphni. At Hosios Loukas, not to mention Sicily and Ravenna. Above all, let us not forget Saint Catherine's on Mt. Sinai. Of course for the couple dozen mosaic churches that remain, there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands that collapsed in earthquakes, that were burned in sieges, bombed in wars, scraped by infidels or knocked down by change. I would like to think there may be one or two out there lurking, plastered over, perhaps. Undiscovered in Phrygia or Cappadokia.

We light the candle, and for an instant a flash of recognition glimmers from the tesselated wall.

Basking in the glow (still)...Suncrest Nursery

2011-09-10T02:02:00.000-07:00

It's been over a week now, but I'm still basking in the glow of a really fabulous visit to the Bay area...judging by the amazing crunch of people at the rent-a-car complex, everybody else in America knows what a great destination San Francisco is (I couldn't believe the lines). In fact, as I was waiting in the Budget line two very impatient foreigners tried to cut in front of the patient American throngs. Of course, they had to be Greek...they stormed out (probably looking to see if they could find a shorter line elsewhere), but came back later with their tails between their legs, so to speak. I struck up a conversation with the husband: the Greek-American wife was here on business (American diplomatic service, actually!), he a tag along for vacation...he had a Cretan accent, I asked him where he came from. Wouldn't you know, it's a village not far from my father's birthplace, the beach town of Kalives where I spent many an enchanting weeks as a kid. Of course, we ended up knowing a lot of people in common. If we'd spent more time together, we would have probably found out we were cousins!

What I ought to be talking about is Suncrest Nursery: I don't think I have found more spectacular landscape plants I could use in Colorado anywhere ever before in such a short period of time. The place is huge: dozens of acres. They are noted for their native Californians. We got that mindboggling Monardella macrantha from them, for instance. They grow an unbelievable range of plants from trees and shrubs to all manner of perennials, succulents and bulbs. Nevin Smith is their horticultural mastermind (he was visiting daughters up north), and he hooked me up with Ginny Hunt, of Seedhunt, who works at Suncrest three days a week and has an amazing grasp of the place. Her seedlist rocks, by the way. I've known Ginny for decades: she is one of America's premier plantspeople. Nevin is obviously a horticultural wizard. I wish I had taken a picture of Ginny (she is very photogenic). I wish I had taken a jillion more pictures, and worked at it (these do not do the place justice). I snapped a few, and am sharing these with the proviso you not judge Suncrest by them. They were placeholders to remind me to go back this winter and bring back stock plants of Agastache and Salvia greggii cvs. to plant next spring in my garden. Suncrest has a dozen or more unique Agastache, all of them stunners. I liked the orange one very much (above) and the pale one below: these would make spectacular additions to the Butterfly hyssop palette of Denver (where we almost invented these as major horticultural attractions: it is such a trip to see huge clumps of them this time of year as I drive around my native town here!)

Fortunately, I took at least ONE picture of a Kniphofia (they had a ton of them, but this is one I have yet to try and took a picture to remind me to get one. It's K. thompsonii, from central Africa, and not likely to be hardy, but we need to at least try. And they had spectacular clumps of these--they had to be 6' or more tall. For just a few bucks! Sheesh! How to get them back in my luggage!

Then there were the Salvia greggii and S. microphylla block. Literally dozens of selections of these, most of them crosses made by Nevin. The flowers were huge, and they were just awesome. I wish I had a truck to get a sampling of these: I can just TASTE them on my big West Ridge in my Xeriscape (where I have several greggii blooming now as I type)....if these prove as hardy as 'Furman's red' or 'Wild thing' they would trump these in the market place. And those have been cash cows for the local garden centers. I don't think Nevin has tried to patent any of these: Plant Select could make a MINT on any of them...(Pat, are you listening?)...but whatever Plant Select does, I can assure you next autumn I will have these blazing away in my own garden...(insert all sorts of snorting and grunting sounds here)...Brawww hahhhh hhhhhaaaaaaaaaa!
Is this not the most luminous, moonlight, glowing yellow thing you've ever seen (a selection of Salvia "jamesii"--basically just yellow greggii). It comes from the same area in Nuevo Leon where S. darcyi, Scutellaria suffrutescens and Hedoma ciliolata all come from (all of which are hardy, and all of which I have blogged about--I'm too lazy to hyperlink these, sorry): I gotta go there before I get to be even older and more decrepit and check that area out...I'll bet there's TONS more good stuff around Galeana the Yucca do boys missed....(insert more grunts and snorts here). Get a load of this lovely pink one: me wanny! me wanny! (insert jumping up and down)

Just LOOK at these massive blocks: pinks next to yellows next to magenta: all under a wonderful slightly foggy light. Suncres,I love you! (Gawd, I admire production nurseries: how do they do it?)

Another pale yellow. We have GOT to get some hardy forms of these. I know that if I planted them out of gallons like this in late April they would all thrive in my big Xeriscape and bloom like crazy after each rain. And I have a hunch most of them will be landscape plants across most of America before too long. Nevin: you are amazing!

Twenty years ago they would think you were crazy if you suggested Salvia greggii was a hardy plant in much of America. Even in Denver, there are lots of great gardeners who struggle with it...not me: if you leave off the damn hose in late summer and harden them off (and put them in the right microclimate, needless to say), you can grow a wide suite of these. And of course, they are great even as annuals. We only have three or four cultivars growing at DBG: I can't believe my clever colleagues haven't figured out about these. My 'Hot Lips' (a microphylla from Southern Mexico for God's sake) has thrived for nearly a decade on the south side of my house, blooming for MONTHS AND MONTHS with its astonishing red and white flowers. It must be nearly 4' tall and wide. Is there one at DBG? (Do put on your best Belushi voice for this one.... )

NNNNOOOOOOOOOWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Are any of my several dozen horticultural colleagues reading my blog? I doubt it. Oh well. They're young and have better things to do. But you can trump those clever youngsters by hightailing it out to Watsonville and loading up....

I'm already planning my raids next December and April. See you there!

P.S. Thank you again, Nevin and Ginny. You give Walters, Kurt and Pierre a run for their money... and have even more plants for sale I can't live without!

Plant heaven: Annie's Annuals...

2011-09-07T10:20:00.000-07:00

I briefly mentioned Annie's Annuals in my last blog...well, that was cruel! If you do not know this unbelievable nursery, well, you are still in the Dark Ages and might as well go drink some Grog. The name is misleading: of course, they offer what has to be the most amazing selection of non-traditional annuals (i.e., what you could get from Park Seed Co. or the like) in America, and probably beyond. Things like a full range of California, Mediterranean and every other kind of poppy imaginable, really hard to get treasures. But they have all manner of perennials, bulbs, shrubs, trees and succulents: you name it! Don't expect anything common or humdrum: Annie grows only the best!

There are delightful display gardens everywhere, and containers galore...the next few images are to tantalize you with some of the specimen plants blooming late summer. Namely, a fabulous assortment of buckwheats...

Drool on!

I think just about everything at this nursery is grown at this nursery, mostly from seed. The quality and size of plants for the price have to be the horticultural bargain of the decade. Do restrict your budget before you visit. You will want far more than you can afford: even you too, Bill Gates!

I finish with a bang: Crassula coccinea modestly exploding in the succulent section. I first visited last December and was dazzled (how could it be so good midwinter?). I just checked it out at the end of the long California summer: just as dazzling. I suspect it will be like that no matter when you drop in. But if you are in the Bay area, do check them out. You will be as hooked as I've become (already planning my next visit in December, then next April....then next fall again....). Easy to find using their URL I listed above: here it is again:

http://www.anniesannuals.com/

I warn you, however. You will never again visit the Bay area without dropping in there. Annie and her crew ROCK!

Hallelujah!

2011-09-05T08:51:00.000-07:00

Seedpod of Magnolia hypoleuca

I finally looked up the words of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah! and I confess, they are a complete disconnect from k.d.lang's haunting rendition of that classic which I was privileged to hear from the artist herself at a Botanic Garden's concert early in August. What does this have to do with California? The soaring harmonies of that song somehow colored my month, a scorching August culminating in a cool week in the Bay area. I shall share a few treasures of that week (during which you should have the golden notes of the song soaring to give you a sense of the utter quiddity of things...the textures of time are evanescent. Prose, rough to the touch, only hints at the magic of the moment. I nevertheless will try. Hallelujah!

Magnolia hypoleuca (see?)

Quarryhill has loomed big in my life the last few years. Bill McNamara (it's CEO and mastermind along with the late Jane Davenport) have created a stunning concatenation of East Asian plants (all of documented wild origin) on a steep hillside in the heart of Sonoma County. I first visited not long after they opened, almost two decades ago, and have gone there every few years since. No matter what season you visit, any month, any week, any day, dozens of exquisite plants will be in their peak bloom or foliage color or fruit. Not many public gardens can boast that! Bill received the
Arthur Hoyt Scott award this past spring: no recipient has ever deserved it more. Hallelujah!

To your left you have Ted Kipping. To your right, Clerodendron trichotomum, which has quietly haunted me for many years. I have seen this growing cheerfully in New England, which means this outrageous Oriental ought to be hardy in Denver in a properly prepared microclimate.... Getting back to Ted, he is my "B.B.C." (Brother By Choice): for decades we have wandered gardens and mountains and conferences together, sharing some of the most enchanting days in our lives...Hallelujah!

A closer look at the Clerodendron: the seedpods are even more entrancing...What astonishing transformations in a single taxon on this hallowed planet we are ineluctably despoiling...Hallelujah!

Fleurs-de-lis are not just the sacred blossoms of the French: here we have Iris ensata in its wild form ("spontanea"), the ancestor of the outrageous Higo iris of Japan, which resemble nothing so much as Majolica porcelein, with all the lustrous pastel tints characteristic of Chinese porcelein. I grew this svelte, elegant thing for years, and shared seed widely back in the 1980's. Decades have elapsed, and here it is in California, reblooming in late summer (they never did that for me in my godforsaken Steppe!) and taunting me with their memory. Hallelujah!

As the afternoon shadows lengthened and the light grew golden, the sizeable crowd of botanic gardeners gathered for drinks and delicious hors-d'oevres as a prelude to two days of Symposium on Plant Collecting at nearby Rohnert Park. Four past recipients of the Scott Medal were lined up for pictures: what a treat to be grouped with the likes of Peter Raven, Peter Del Tredici and William MacNamara respectively....Hallelujah!

At the summit of Quarryhill, overlooking the verdant, rolling Sonoma countryside there stands this monument with Tibetan prayer flags. Perhaps there is hope for us, for me. For us addled creatures addicted to Carbohydrates and Hydrocarbons. What are these botanic gardens, but cathedrals to Carbon, that chemical that is the basis of life itself, and yet which in excess may yet snuff out life as we know it? Hallelujah!

(Postscript...I fought and resented taking these 8 days away from hot, dusty Colorado to visit California and attend the APGA meeting. The meeting itself took several days, but packed into this week I spent a day at the University of California at Berkeley (launching the Jepson Herbarium monthly lecture series and reconnecting with a colleague, Andrew Doran, and meeting many interesting new people). I spent an enchanting afternoon [and a wad of cash] at Annie's Annuals (arguably, the most amazing garden center on Planet Earth). I drove to Watsonville in the fog and spent an incredible day at Suncrest Nursery with Ginny Hunt, another treasured friend of decades. (that is likewise arguably the best wholesale nursery on the planet). And did I mention that I spent much of the rest of the week with my B.I.F. (Brother In Fact--but I would choose him too!) George and my niece, Eleni Callas--wonderful repartee, eating his awesome gourmet food and drinking fine wines? You get the drift--I am truly blest and when it comes to the Golden State, all I can say is: Hallelujah!

Ad astra per aspera...

2011-09-02T21:29:00.000-07:00

" Through difficulties we reach the stars" goes the Latin tag. Aster is also Greek for stars, and this delightful morsel is a star among our native plants. In a way it doesn't exist. Right now it would key out to Machaeranthera bigelovii, a rank biennial usually of the foothills and Great Plains. But this grows above treeline, is perennial, and tiny as all get out (bigelovii is usually a yard or more tall)...It USED to be called Aster pattersonii (or Machaeranthera pattersonii if you insist) but taxonomists have lumped the two together. Sometimes we horticulturists would like to lump a botanist or two we know on the noggin...

Above you can see one of dozens of plants in the new Children's Garden where it can

be found many places in the Alpine Section (there are even a few flowers lingering this month!)

Above is one taken last July on Mt. Evans, one of only two places I have seen this congested race in nature: the other is on Grays Peak. It is very distinctive and delightful. For a non existent flower, it is looking pretty lively, don't you think? Perhaps one day we shall see through Taxonomic difficulties, and settle on suitable a name for our Star, if only on a subspecific basis!

Aha! I found a picture of the malefactor: Aster bigelovii! Alas, this one is hardly typical (growing a fraction of its usual size) since it's starved on my Xeriscape. Blow this up three times and then compare it with the tiny morsel from Mt. Evans: Me no think they are the same animal.

Some floral highlights of 2011 so far, Part one...

2011-08-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

I am a fortunate mortal indeed: I dwell at a home surrounded by magical flowers, and work at a botanic garden with vast collections. Above is Anemone ranunculoides in the Rock Alpine Garden in spring....I will never get around to blogging about all these, so I will just cram in a bunch all at once with a sigh. Life is too short to get it all said...and pictures are supposed to be worth lots of words aren't they?

Anthriscus sylvestris 'Ravenswing' growing in full sun in the Schlessman Plaza at the Gardens...drives me nuts!

Aquilegia pyreneica (or something close) at Laporte Avenue Nursery...don't live or work there, but wish I did!

Argemone munita in my garden. Not for sissies (the poppy). Neither is my garden, come to think of it...

Asclepias subverticillata at DBG: there is more crazy stuff there..

The lower meadow in the Rock Alpine Garden filled with Asphodeline lutea...Dare started this and Kintgen has perfected it...aaaaaah!

Catanache caespitosa at my house with a little ice plant...(shhhhh!)

Clematis albicoma in the Rock Alpine Garden....this is so awesome. I think it was Mike Kintgen who put this here? To DIE for, don'tcha think?

But I did this: Convolvulus assyricus at DBG.

Erythronium albidum, also left over from my reign...

Galanthus nivalis 'Viridapice' at my place...

Globularia spinosa in my garden with lots of choice morsels around it..

Helichrysum praecurrens in the Rock Alpine Garden, from seed provided by the Bartletts from Sani Top...I could write twenty blogs around this plant. Oh well...

Iberis taurica (I think?) This is an incredible plant...some day I must blog about it.

Inula verbascifolia, from Mt. Olympus...

Iris bucharica growing like mad in the Lilac Garden...

Iris vicaria, in my garden!

Lilium concolor in Plantasia..

Monardella macrantha 'Marian Sampson' in our Orangery (this is everywhere at DBG!)

Nananthus transvaalensis bloomed most of last winter in my home garden...

And much much more!

A few highlights from an Amazing year...(last half)

2011-08-23T20:02:00.000-07:00

Origanum acutidens, with its cool lime green bracts, makes a stark contrast to the cobalt blue of Delphinium pylzowii, a wonderful miniature delphinium...both self sow a bit and live forever: classic rock garden gems! (Did I mention they bloom all summer?)

Where has this been all my life? We have a splendid colony of Ornithogalum magnum in Birds and Bees Garden at DBG, and Bob Nold had an almost equally lovely one...It seems to like a bit of shade, and is simply huge! What a great cut flower it would make...

No, I do not know the name of the white peony, but the red is none other than the double form of fernleaf peony...These are amazing clumps throughout the growng season, I especially like them in bud...

Whoever thought Papaver alboroseum would be so stunning growing out on ordinary loam in full sun? Haven't checked lately to see if it is still alive...

I think every shade they come in is my favorite. Still waiting to get the truly Vermilion 'Beauty of Livermere' but this pink one is not too shoddy...

Of the dozen or so pediocacti that I grow, the loveliest is the little snowball that grows just at the west end of the Metro area... or grew may be more accurate.

Penstemon eatonii in the Children's Garden. looking just like it would in Canyon country...

Pokeweed may be a horrible pest in the East but we love it out here, especially in this ghostly form.

Outlandish I know. Wish I had even more dwarf Platycodon grandiflorus...

Primula veris loves us, and self sows. Toughest primrose...

Mystery nodding gray pasqueflower...any ideas of its name?

Another nodding pasqueflower: believe this came as P. campanella

A stunning evergreen Pyrrhosia from Mongolia

Saxifraga x apiculata 'Alba' in a trough....

Sempervivum octopodes, with jade green flowers...

Biennial, I know, But I can never do without Symphyandra wanneri...

Tulipa albertii in springtime (amazing color!)

The typical pink form of Tulipa humilis: probably my favorite (self sows a lot and blooms two or three years...)

Yuccca rostrata was over the top. Unbelievable this year! They were everywhere at the gardens...(Dan Johnson knows no shame)...

There ain't nuthin' better'n a rock garden!

2011-08-18T20:18:00.002-07:00

Late April...daphne and draba time

Same berm, a month later, Aethionema and Iberis spreading cool pink and lavender matlets and Daphne alpina blooming at right...

June has a conflagration of delosperma, orange Anagallis monellii from Morocco, and more...

July adds more poppies and dwarf verbascum joining the mix...

August is cooler, with pastel Origanums and blue gentians just out of sight: but still trim and appealing...why on earth doesn't everyone have rock garden?

A closer look at the neoclassical extravaganza of oreganos and Inula verbascifolia, recreating Mt. Olympus in my back yard...makes me feel positively Zeusian! There ain't nuthin' better'n a rock garden my friend!

Red letter days and pale yellow cactus

2011-08-17T08:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder if I'm not like just another peak bagger, or hoarder, only I am gathering plants, plants and more plants into my life. I guess that is my business, as well as hobby (and obsession). So this isn't perhaps surprising...I generally grow hardy plants outdoors, and my indoor plants are afterthoughts and accidents I shimmy outside for the summer. They have to be pretty tough...and sometimes look it. When one of these likes me and thrives, I am impressed!

I acquired Astrophtum myriostigma somewhere along the way, a not terribly rare (in gardens), nor is it a terribly difficult cactus to grow. But not just everyone has one, and I've actually never seen it bloom before.

It's bloomed for me several times this summer: this is a cactus for anyone (even for those folks who say they hate cacti) since it has no spines, no glochids, just that incredibly sleek, smooth stem. And wonderful pale yellow flower. Somehow it's perfect!

I have much in my life to be thankful for: family, friends, relationships, work, Colorado...but having a new plant bloom for me is always a red letter day....I seem to have quite a string of these come to think of it! Such a tough life...but someone has to live it!

Salvia mundi!

2011-08-16T07:06:00.000-07:00

Salvia phlomoides ex Morocco

It seems as though just about every year in my life, a new Delosperma, Penstemon, Eriogonum or Salvia seems to show up and shake things up again! Of course, these are all gigantic genera that have seen an enormous amount of interest in recent decades. I've probably grown more of the first three genera than just about anyone, I suspect, and have been one of the first to promote them on the mass market (although my name, alas, shall be primarily wedded with the first genus)...Salvia is just too damn pantropical. There are no end of weird Salvia in the new and old world tropics that just won't grow worth a damn in Colorado: just as they start to bud up in the fall they are inevitably felled by frost. Not that I'm bitter or anything. My friend Rich Dufresne (who practically invented both Agastache and Salvia in their current popularity) keeps tempting me with tender morsels, so to speak...I try hard to resist. There are so many temperate Salvia, and the best may be yet to come! This first haunting backlit image is of Salvia phlomoides a Spanish and Moroccan species introduced by the redoubtable Mike Kintgen, photographed in his garden in June. It is in the hypargeia/daghestanica/canescens tribe, and probably the best of the lot (which is saying a lot). It sets lots of seed....S. hypargeia was nearby, so let's hope some of it is non hybrid!

Not everything sexy HAS to be new: I have grown Salvia forskahlei for years, suffering over how to pronounce the accursed name. I finally got a little stand growing under my big blue spruce next to my driveway, and when it bloomed a few weeks ago (in late July! What a clever time for a plant to bloom! No way you can ignore it then) I was captivated by its blossoms in the backlight: lucky placement. I adore the elegant outline of these things, and their birdlike poise. I can never have enough Salvia. No, I am not talking divinorum (one of those tropical thingies)...

I blogged about Salvia caespitosa several years ago, but my lovely little clump (now gone) was horribly trumped by Mike Kintgen this spring who had numerous clumps scattered hither and yon in his jewel box garden. Surely, this is the alpine gem of the genus. I shall long remember Jim Archibald's picture of a lemon yellow form of this that hopefully persists on some Turkish hillside. What a thrill it would be to see it myself! And what a joy to collect it!

I am quite sure I shall continue to find gems in this genus: from Salvia indica in April to the rabble of late autumn sages, there is not a day in the growing season when one Salvia or another doesn't share its grace and fragrance in my garden. Salvia mundi indeed!

More horseshoe.....by popular demand (Jeff anyway)

2011-08-13T14:28:00.000-07:00

Common around the world (including on Horseshoe) I never tire of finding and sniffing Moss Campion (Silene acaulis), as good a reason as any for climbing a mountain. And no, mine don't bloom like this in my garden!

Physaria alpina is a great specialty of the Mosquito and Saguage mountains in central Colorado. It was only named in the 1980's: wonder what people thought it was before that? People includes me, since I hiked up there back then and must have seen it!

Ranunculus eschscholtzii may be the most annoying of all buttercups to spell. In Colorado, it is much less common than R. adoneus, and just as lovely.

Horseshoe has fine displays of Dryas octopetala, literally carpeting the slopes! And there is more (much much more)...but this should keep you amused for a while!

Horseshoe Mountain hike

2011-08-11T22:56:00.000-07:00

It's almost two weeks, but the sweet memories persist of a marvellous hike I took with many colleagues, Ernie DeMarie and Jan Fahs on Horseshoe Mountain, in Colorado's Mosquito Range. We hit the alpines at just about their optimal peak of bloom, and the weather was cool verging on warm at times, with only the gentlest breezes. In other words, Perfect! We saw dozens, probably hundreds of plants, including many unusual plants and endemics a few of my faves include this tiny, high alpine race of the generally very tall Penstemon whippleanus:

There were spectacular, nay! splendiferous masses of snowlover in many spots (Chionophila jamesii)--that strange little penstemon cousin with brown lips. Here it is growing with whiplash saxifrage (Saxifraga flagellaris) and Claytonia megarhiza: quite a concatenation of loveliness.

Speaking of claytonia, here is a particularly bright pink one.

And there was a lot, lot more...if you ask, I will post!

Lavender cloudburst

2011-08-09T06:58:00.000-07:00

A year ago we lost the greatest plant collector I have known: Jim Archibald succumbed still in his sixties to cancer. Just as Horace erected his monuments in poetry, a plant collector leaves graceful footprints in our gardens through the wonderful plants he introduces: my gardens are positively cluttered with Archibaldiana. I have a special weakness for a dozen or more Turkish Salvia that have somehow escaped Plant Select (I know, we have S. daghestanica, but that was a Zetterlund collection). Chief among these is this lovely lavender cloudburst: Salvia cyanescens which I have treasured since the early 1980's, here photographed in front of the Succulent house at Denver Botanic Gardens where it is now reblooming (a wonderful trait in a plant). I scattered seed of this at my girlfriend, Jan Fahs', house and there hundreds--nay thousands--of plants of this salvia have made a virtual groundcover. I filled a garbage bag with their crispy (and intensely aromatic) seedheads a few weeks ago: very gratifying.

Here you can see the silky rosette of foliage. It looks for all the world like some sort of sexy gesneriad: a strangely delicate texture for a plant that thrives on heat and drought. I have grown this in several unwatered gardens where it thrives.

If you email me your snail mail address I will be happy to send you a plump packet of seed of this Turkish treasure: panayotik@yahoo.com. You will not regret it...a memento not merely of me, but of that Scottish prince of plant collectors, may his memory be eternal.

I regret however, I will not have enough seed to share of this gem (yet another Archibaldian Turkish salvia): Salvia pisidica really must get into Plant Select before too many more years. It is one of the most scrumptious and wonderful of garden plants and should be in every temperate garden (at least those blessed to be situated in steppe climates)....

This is a glimpse of an especially fine spread of Salvia pisidica in Mike Kintgen's gem of a garden I photographed in June.

There must be some compensation as one strolls through life being reminded of a friend through the plants he gave you, or (more accurately in this case) the plants you grew from seed he gathered. I summon the trim beard and the Edinburgh burr quite often, and the nasal tonalities of that extraordinary presence that shaped--still shapes--so many of my garden views. Our gardens gradually become repositories of these memories, and the very flowers are celebrations not just of their intrinsic beauty, but the associations surrounding, emanating and buzzing around them, sweet as their fragrance or sonorous as the busy bees.

Catch a few "z's"?

2011-08-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

No, I do not mean a nap (although I do love to take a nap in the PM most days), I am referring to plants whose generic or specific names begin with "z": why are they so charming? Above is the most remarkable of Ziziphora growing at Mike Kintgen's house. He keeps promising a propagule (hint, hint)...but really, anything with a "z" seems to be zippy and jazzy: Zauschneria, Zinnia, like these Zinnia grandiflora above at Kendrick Lake... or below, the yellow umbel is Zizia aptera, a little known native perennial from the Midwest that makes a wonderful picture with blue veronicas.It's possible, however, that my current favorite "z" plant is a bellflower from the Caucasus: Symphyandra zangezura has not one, but TWO "z's" in its epithet! The flower is a wonderfully strange purple-lavender color, and picturesquely shaped...and the foliage is very distinct and unusual. Best of all, unlike all its congeners, this symphyandra is reliably perennial--even long lived. And it blooms during the dog days of summer! Excuse me a minute: I must catch a few more "z's".....

Onions. Enough said.

2011-07-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

Or has there been enough said about onions? Most chronic gardeners have tales to tell about them: like violets, onions tend to be either horrendous weeds or annoyingly hard to get going. There are no end of fairly dullish, weedy onions. But truth be said there are vast numbers of terribly choice, terribly distinctive and terribly hard to find species. Mark McDonogh, Allium guru of the World (I believe he has no peer) has championed onions much of his long, rich horticultural life. His Plantbuzz website has a whole section devoted to onions. He has written a two part article in the recent Rock Garden Quarterlies that are enough seduce even the biggest Onion-doubter.

I start this blog with an onion in seed: there are no end of seedy onions in my garden now, and this is as good of time as any to remind you to collect some seed: I managed every smidgeon of this particular plant, of which I have three portraits...

The first is of the plant in seed, the second two were taken in late spring when it was in bloom, one in oblique light, the other in back lighting. Conventional wisdom says flowers and garden should be taken in oblique light: it is somehow truer or honester or something like that. Backlighting is dramatic...true. But in a sunny climate like Colorado, drama is the norm! I wish I had photographed it in full sunlight at mid day too for comparison purposes...

What is this plant? I have had several determinations from several people. Mark believes it is a form of Allium tolmiei: it came to me as a Californian species under a different name. It is in the top handful of new treasures that have bloomed for me this year: any clue what it might be for sure? It is quite different from the other Allium tolmiei I have grown, albeit this could be a variable taxon.

And are you a backlighter or an obliquer?

Obviously, there can never be enough said about Allium!

Summer (not so) dolrums

2011-07-24T11:38:00.000-07:00

There was a time when July and August seemed interminable and dull. Not at the botanic gardens where I work (where summer has always been high season) but in my various home gardens. If I only grew a few more annuals, daylilies or giant phlox, perhaps things would be different. But alpines just seem to want to bloom in April and May (with some notable exceptions) and fall is a second spring. This, at least, has been my conventional wisdom...but suddenly I've noticed that summer isn't quite so bad. There are all those plants from monsoonal climates (the American Southwest, the Himalayas and South Africa) and lots of other anomalies that wait till the hot season to bloom. Once you pack enough of these among your spring and autumn blooming minions, the summer can be quite colorful. The colors may be neoclassical, but the Origanums blazing in my rock garden are primo: in fact, the whole garden is amazingly trim and attractive right now...

I should have placed the Platycodon grandiflorus 'Astra Blue' a tad closer to the Helichrysum plicatum: who thought they would bloom at the same moment? Both are stellar plants that would shine in any month...

I am amazed how many cacti bloom mindsummer: this morsel I got from Harlan Hamernik at Bluebird is one of the best: Escobaria sulcata (or is it Coryphantha now again?) is near the top of my list of favorites...although it does look like a greener, less spiny E. echinus....How could a plant frome east central Texas be so tough? Mammillaria wrightii was blooming a day earlier a short distance away.

Most garden visitors would hardly notice it, but this tiny Himalayan gentian is the sort of thing alpine gardeners coo over: Gentiana stipitata is one of innumerable treasures I've gotten from Beaver Creek Nursery, that purveyor of marvels...

Last year Jim Borland gave me seedlings of Campanula americana (now classed as Campanulastrum americanum in some places...not on my inventory however...). I had heard it was big...but I was not expecting 5 or more feet tall! I have known abbout this amazing plant for years, and am thrilled to finally bring it to bloom--and have it grace my midsummer garden: wait! I haven't shown you the edelweiss, or the masses of Mondarda pectinata blooming alongside the Tansy daisy, nor the sunflowers tangled with cowpen daisies and the deep maroon red orach everywhere, and reblooming larkspurs, and ten or more kinds of Salvias blazing in every color of the rainbow, and did I mention that the summer gentians are opening the first of their thousands of cobalt cups? Or Pelargonium endlicherianum (and a dozen more sorts of tender ones) and lilies everywhere... Summer doldrums? Pshaw!

Prickly Heaven

2011-07-22T22:44:00.000-07:00

It was over a month ago, and I was only there late in the day as their flowers were closing, but it would be stingy if I didn't share these pictures from Timberline Gardens' astounding prickly pear berm....They are simply amazing. Kelly Grummons has contributed so much to our local and national horticultural scene, and this is yet another of his triumphs: who ever thought putting some cuttings on a berm of heavy clay would produce this sort of show? I don't know if anyone else would do it as good, however! Long live Kelly, the prickly magician...

Consider the lilies...

2011-07-11T20:09:00.000-07:00

My friend Bill Adams says he doesn't like lilies. Harrumph! I am quite sure he is the only person I know (maybe the only one on the planet) who doesn't dote on these quintessential flowers of woodland and garden. I have always regarded almost any lily I have grown as a sort of holiday, almost a holy day: there is a waxy succulence to the petals and a sort of graceful bearing they possess that summons images of ballerinas, or heavenly mobiles of lucent purity. The orange Turk'scap above is Lilium pardalinum, one of many clumps around Denver Botanic Gardens that are reveling in our wet summer.

This is the pure white form of Lilium martagon in Woodland Mosaic at Denver Botanic Gardens. It is self sowing all over this garden and also in the thick mat of English ivy at Waring House gardens: what a plant! It positively glows in the shadowy light!

This is the dark purple form growing in my garden: it looks just like this today: I have seen this lily in Kazakhstan, and it grows over much of Eurasia. The variability is enormous over its range. How I would love to have samples of it from everywhere! Few plants endure such dark and dismal spots as this and grow so vigorously!

And finally, the turkscap form of Lilium pumilum from the interior of East Asia. This is growing in my rock garden, and always rivets the attention of visitors. It blooms the second year from seed invariably, and sometimes even the first (what more can you ask of a gem of a plant?)...

When the iris are largely done and the peonies just memories, the lilies chime in with their infinite variety of form and color to make the dog days of summer echo with their majesty. I must remember to order a bunch more this fall! And you should too, by the way...

"Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin..." (Matthew, 6:28)

Chocolate stock: Unloved Unknown Unseen

2011-07-06T04:44:00.001-07:00

In a garden with many thousands of kinds of plants, most of which clamor for attention with bright colors or outstanding textures or form, there are always a few modest ones that get overlooked. This little Turkish stock is a perfect example. I had to photograph it from several angles, none of which is flattering...

I guess this one is a tad better. Brown flowers (this one also comes in gray and near black) are unusual. Perhaps rightfully so. Although I have sweeps of phlox and masses of peonies here and there, not to mention mountains of cobalt larkspurs and massive masses of Glaucium and other poppies, I derived great pleasure from my chocolate stock. I believe it might be Matthiola septentrionalis. That's one of the names I've acquired it under. I grew it for several years on a flat border-like garden where the variation among seedlings was stunning: all the dullest neutral tints. They petered away in the less than optimal spot. But this clump has been luxuriating in a crevice that seems to suit it and has set heavy seed this year (hope it is viable)...

Botanical Interest Only is the category this sort of thing is crammed into. When I point it out to friends (and many saw it: it blooms for an extraordinarily long period of time--March to June) they usually chuckle or make a bad joke. Next time they visit, they are the ones who ask me its name, and a year or so later, some even ask for a pinch of seed.

Beauty can be flamboyant: Sophia Loren or Katherine Hepburn or your average advertisement in Vogue or centerfold in soft porn magazines are all immediately as stunning and accessible as a spray of fresh roses or gladiolus. And yet those I love (notwithstanding my gorgeous girlfriend, some of my photogenic friends and kids, who are certainly eye candy), let's say the bulk of those I love beginning with my dumpy self are more chocolate stock than Stargazer lily shall we say diplomatically. But give us a while, and we too beguile. I shall never want to be without my chocolate stock (although I have let many a daylily and marigold slip through my fingers...) Form does not always prevail over substance my friend!

Gold!

2011-06-23T10:43:00.000-07:00

Just a few days ago, as I hiked Gregory Canyon west of Boulder, I saw the common sulphur flower in its full glory. This is Eriogonum umbellatum v. umbellatum, the type form of the most universal of western buckwheats. There are those who don't like yellow in the garden: to them, I say "fiddlesticks" or "phooey!". Nature loves yellow, and lavishes it everywhere...There are dozens of subspecies of just this one species of buckwheat: I've grown nearly a dozen in my day. But these two forms are the ones that have stuck by me longest.

Here a month ago is the Western slope subspecies of E. umbellatum, var. aureum, in Wildflower Treasures garden.

This picture just taken a week or so ago shows why this is one of the great groundcovers: thrives in Denver with no supplemental water, but certainly loves it when it gets a bit. In a week or so this will turn a burnished orange, with reddish tints. Even the plant in seed is stunning. And of course the mat turns a burnished red all winter long.

The common sulphur flower is anything but common in its utility: it is a rare plant that delivers such a long season of glory for us, requiring so little attention or fuss. And it delivers gold in spadefuls. It always comes into fullest bloom around the solstice, reflecting the shimmering brilliance of the very sun when we enjoy the longest days and hours of golden light.

Yellow flowers? I say Hallelujah!

Flocks and flocks of phox

2011-06-16T21:11:00.000-07:00

Few spectacles enchant me more each spring than the masses of creeping phlox that carpet the steppe, prairie, meadows and tundra of the West. Everyone knows the Eastern phloxes--the ones sold at every garden center. There are a half dozen species (or less) found east of the Mississippi, and these are pretty well known in garden centers and are certainly revered among rock gardeners. The dozens and dozens of species of Western microphloxes are another matter: they are wonderfully treated in a brand new monograph by Jim Locklear (do check out the hyperlink if you don't know this modern classic)...

But I have a quibble with this book: Jim lumps this luscious phlox shown above (and below) with the straggly Phlox longifolia found universally in the west. I don't deny they are related (after all, Twiggy and Dolly Parton could well be cousins). But for gardeners, Phlox grayi is THE Western phlox. These pictures were taken on the green roof (for Heaven's sake) at Denver Botanic Gardens new Children's garden. There are vast sweeps of the phlox that have been blooming for the better part of the last two months. And the variation is spellbinding.

I first obtained this phlox from Sonia Lowzow Collins, a wonderful gardener who lived in Showlow Arizona. My plants thrived a few years over twenty years ago and finally perished. I was thrilled when Allan Bradshaw recollected seed of this plant, and from his seed Laporte Avenue Nursery produced abundant plants, which found their way onto the Children's Garden last fall: these have thrived and bloomed prodigiously.

Among them are a few particularly stunning selections, like the one below...

A xeric phlox, with that sort of color, that blooms for months in the spring and reblooms in late summer: I don't know about you, but that sounds like a winner to me.

If you get by the Gardens in the next few weeks, you will see what I mean. Do make sure to check out the Children's Garden: it's not just for tykes. It's full of gorgeous rarities not found elsewhere at DBG (or at any other public garden in the world)...

Aaaah. What wonderful times these are!

Dark beauty

2011-06-01T13:16:00.000-07:00

Iris barnumae v. barnumae

Iris 'Oyez'

Various Arilbreds on East Ridge

There is a problem area in my garden we've dubbed East Ridge: not many choice or interesting things seemed to grow there because of the deep sandy soil and extreme dryness until one day when I put an arilbred on the slope. It waxed and thrived so (something arilbreds don't often do) I realized I'd inadvertently discovered a perfect spot to collect this marvellous group of plants. Two years worth of bonanzas from the Aril Society international, some trades and purchases, the slope now has dozens, maybe even a hundred or more plants established.

For the last month or more I have had the delight of watching a parade of aril and arilbred irises bloom along the length and breadth of East Ridge. The show is not over yet, but it's past its peak. We were blessed with incredibly cool, often rainy weather this past month, so the flowers lasted and lasted. One blossom lasted a whole week!

Although I am a devotee of the tiny and delicate beardless irises (in fact, most anything in that family enchants me), I grudgingly admit that Tall Bearded irises join peonies and roses as queens of garden sumptuousness. But when it comes to allure, the arils and arilbred irises are right up there with the sexiest aroids and orchids for sheer gorgeousness and exoticism.

You may have noticed that my posts have slowed to a trickle in the last month: I've been to busy worshiping these amazing plants. I am sad to see the show slow down and just can't wait till NEXT April now as the clumps increase and the show goes on again!

Wallflower wonders

2011-05-31T13:36:00.000-07:00

Wallflowers are one of those groups....lots of color, lots of variety and yet somehow overlooked. Taken for granted. This spring this amazing spectacle graced the San Juan trough in Wildflower treasures at Denver Botanic Gardens. The bronzy phase of our native Rocky Mountain wallflower (Erysimum asperum) is something I have admired here and there in the mountains. Usually a wand here and a wand there: nothing to write home about. Nothing to actually grow. But one of my colleagues (not sure which one) managed to get a pinch of seed, and several were planted out here and there.

To my astonishment, they have made terrific garden plants. You can't judge a plant by its looks in the wild, obviously. If this proves perennial, it will be treasure indeed! But even a biennial with this flower power (and long season of bloom) is worth growing. Our propagation staff produced many flats at the plant sale, so lots of our customers will be finding out if it works like this at home....including me!

Little iris

2011-05-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

Certain plants forever retain their charm for me: I never seem to tire of Salvia, of bulbs, of succulents and high alpine cushion plants of almost any description. But nothing enchants me more than little iris. And of all the little iris I have ever grown, Iris tenuis, from the Clackamas and Molalla drainages of Mt. Hood just outside Portland has to be near the top of the list. This enchanting pot is in the hands of Karen Lehrer, Propagator and co-owner extraordinaire of Laporte Avenue Nursery, of the finest alpine nurseries in America. I sorely wanted to swoop that pot out of her hand...

But I can wait until she propagates it like she does so many other treasures...above is one of many forms of Iris ruthenica, which bloomed magnificently for me this year. I trod past countless thousands of this magnificent iris in the high Altai two years ago, and my few clumps here and there have gained a whole new level of association because of that.

The northern hemisphere is peppered with little irises: and seeking them out in their wild haunts, and growing them in my garden is one of the touchstones of my life.

Venerability and vulnerability

2011-05-17T11:33:00.000-07:00

I remember a few years ago an eminent plantsman from LA was visiting, and viewing our succulent collections commented that "there aren't that many venerable plants here": a put down if I ever heard one before. Venerability is not an American virtue, alas. I have always been so charmed and amazed at how the British value their homes the older they are: those with thatched cottages whose beams positively sag are the most envied of all. The Chinese and Greeks venerated the elderly (used to anyway: maybe they too have been corrupted by the fast, glitziness of modernity). I remember my middle aged uncle addressed my grandfather in the formal "You" (as opposed to the familiar thou one used almost all the time). There are still southern boys who say "Sir" to anyone a tad older than them, but that's not quite the same, somehow. A sense of respect transcending mere convention should be the dues paid to venerability.

I drove past this amazing Artemisia tridentata in a shopette close to my home years ago. Now each time I go nearby, I make a point of driving by it and admiring its hoary sculptural trunk--something you can't cook up in a day. If it were a tree, of course, it would take decades. one of the charms of sagebrush is that it hoaries up real quick. I have nearly a dozen pots around my garden with big sagebrush planted in them, waiting optimistcally for them to gnarl and age like this one, only portable.

Of course, there are ten trillion venerable sagebrush in the West: not exactly a novelty I know. Ranchers love to chain them down (just as they do the equally venerable pinon pines and junipers). Put a nice shopette on top of them, or sow to smooth brome, no doubt.

As I grow more venerable myself, I can only wonder.

Japanese gold: Hylomecon japonicum

2011-05-08T20:06:00.000-07:00

I grew this stunning little Japanese poppywort many years ago in Boulder...and fitfully since. We had a flashy clump or two persist at the Gardens a few years, and like all good things, it disappeared (didn't propagate, you see). So what do you do when you have a great clump of something like this? There is only one good answer to a question like that: what you do is bust it up. This year I finally dug up almost half the plant for Karen Lehrer, and a chunk for Mike Kintgen. That's what you do if you want to keep a plant: give it away!

I am sure my show may be diminished for a year or so: but with some fresh compost in the hole, it will be sure to respond the year afterwards and thenceforward.

There are a few mail order sources for this gem: put it in part shade (mine is growing with lusty clumps of waterlily Colchicum and Iris cristata. Mark the spot they are growing (they go dormant in summer) and sit back and enjoy!

Lucky star

2011-05-01T05:31:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think I was born under a lucky star. Less than two years ago I am in email correspondence with an eminent Succulent authority in Switzerland, and a picture of an astonishing scarlet Sedum booleanum is sent to me. Mexican. But hardy in Switzerland. Yeah right.

A few months later, I open a small envelope with four or five very petite cuttings. I put them in small pots and send a few Bill Adams (Sunscapes Nursery) way for safekeeping. I plant mine out last spring and they practically disappear among the pebble mulch. I forget about them.

Bill sends me this picture a few days ago from his greenhouse. What can I say? Wowza? Last winter it got down to -22F. What are the chances mine survived outside? I go out and check just in case....and there one is (one at least made it)...

I remember the day I saw Delosperma nubigenum open its first blossom on the Steppe slope of the Rock alpine Garden in late April 1981. Ditto D. cooperi a few years later (same slope, only June). I recall watching the first flowers open on Agastache rupestris in 1994: I know in my heart of hearts that the millions of plants in cultivation of these three items all emanate from those very plants I admired. Will booleanum follow suit? Stay tuned (it may take two or three years), but all I can say is that I thank my lucky stars.

Daft for Daphnes

2011-04-28T10:28:00.001-07:00

I remember fifteen years ago or so when my ex (that's Gwen Moore) started buying every daphne she could get her hands on. I thought she was a tad daft at the time: do we really need that many daphnes? They are expensive and come as tiny rooted cuttings. Of course, with time, you realize that's the only way to grow daphnes.

And grow they have! the last ten years they have been sheared repeatedly by Laporte Avenue Nursery, By Sunscapes, By Mike Bone of the Botanic Gardens...and a few others too. Hence their delightful compactness. They would bloom quite well...and then last year no one came. They had enough cuttings from their own plants, perhaps. I reminded them in the springtime, but everyone was too busy. I reminded them again in the fall: big projects at all these places precluded the yearly haircut. So my poor daphnes spent a year unsheared...

And they liked it! In the picture above, the small white one on the left is Daphne x hendersonii 'Ernst Hauser' (A hybrid of Daphne petraea and Daphne striata). The big one on top is Daphne x susannae 'Anton Fahndrich', (a hybrid of Daphne collina and D. arbuscula) and the more sprawling one on the right is Daphne x schlyteri 'Lovisa Maria', a hybrid between Daphne cneorum and D. arbuscula.

This is another view of the two larger ones, from the front, with 'Lovisa' on the left and 'Anton' on the right.

I think the garden now boasts over 60 species and selections of Daphne, and a Wikstroemia to boot (and I've just gotten seed of Dirca). And that's not nearly enough...I ascribe to the philosophy that one can never have enough thyme nor Thymeleaceae in one's garden. I confess I'm daft!

The lines from my very favorite English poem (Marvell, "The Garden") ring ever so true....

"...Apollo hunted Daphne so

Only that she might laurel grow

And Pan did after Syrinx speed

Not for a nymph but for a reed.

What wondrous life in this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine.

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach

Stumbling on melons as I pass,

Insnared with flowers I fall on grass..."

Iris bucharica: treasure from Bokhara

2011-04-21T03:36:00.000-07:00

I believe I obtained my first Iris bucharica from Cruickshank Nursery (do they still operate I wonder?) in Canada nearly a half century ago. Even back then I was a little nutty about irises and grew many well I no longer do (not everything progresses!), although I have to confess that in most spheres of my life, reality has far outpaced my fondest expectations. My first few irises prospered in Boulder and formed clumps--eventually about like what you see above (although I just took that yesterday in the Rock Alpine Garden).

Above is one of many incredible plantings of Iris bucharica throughout Denver Botanic Gardens: this one in the Lilac garden (a bit of an understatement that name: it contains lavish collections of daffodils, irises of all sorts, peonies, daylilies, phloxes and all the garden classics grown to amazing perfection by Ann Montague, one of the most talented horticulturists I've ever had the privilege to know: and I get to work with her every day!)...there are similar super plantings of this iris in the Rock Alpine Garden and Plantasia. These all derive from the even more lavish and remarkable plantings of this iris made almost ten years ago at Centennial Gardens, once under the aegis of DBG. They persist there, although could use some dividing (hint hint).

I have rhapsodied elsewhere and repeatedly about Juno Iris, including quite recently. Obviously I like them. More to the point, they are very well adapted to Colorado's amazing climate (don't get me going). Much of the genus Iris can be grown very well in Colorado, but I suspect most of the section Juno could actually be adapted to gardens here without water. And since they have such an astonishing range of colors, form and habit, what a great group to pursue.

And if you do, begin with this one. I have not been to Bokhara, nor to Samarkand, Chimkent, Herat, Tashkent nor many of the other mythical cities of Central Asia (with the notable exception of some places in Kazakhstan and Pakistan)...they are near the top of my list however.

Growing plants named for these cities and places may seem a bit lame, but so be it!

I remember digging my four or five big clumps if Iris bucharica from my private garden in 1980 and dividing them into a few dozen pieces and planting them on the steep, hot south facing slope of the Moraine Mound in the Rock Alpine Garden. The next year each division produced a stem or maybe two, and within a few years I had a modest show that I was inordinateloyo proud of. The site was not optimal, however, and gradually these petered out. I never dreamed that a few decades later there would be lavish plantings throughout Denver Botanic Gardens and that we would be dividing our own clumps and making divisions available fresh at our autumn bulb sale!

This is just one example of how my dreams and expectations have been repeatedly outstripped by the wonderful reality of a career I happened to stumble into. Although there have been the occasional setbacks and disappointments (I still rue the fantastic Spuria collection that we bulldozed to create a mediocre garden that itself is now long gone): the net gains have been astronomical. And come to think of it, I may yet help resurrect those Spuria!

And I imagine an early morning, after breakfast, going out to the car and driving through the bustling morning crowds of Bokhara (a distant mosque glinting gold over there, and blue tiles shining)...the neighborhoods thin out and soon we are on the sage-green steppe on the hills not far from town, already speckled with early bloom. A half hour later or so I stop the car: there they are, scattered in groups here and there, butter yellow and cream irises, still dewy from a light rain the night before glinting in the early morning light.

True blue

2011-04-17T19:33:00.000-07:00

I don't think I have ever met anyone who doesn't like blue in flowers, and I have met a good many people who are crazy about it. Meconopsis, Delphinium and Gentian are three genera that have a sort special cachet for their true blues. And all three have their "issues" that make them somewhat problematical for many to grow them. Meanwhile, Veronica spreads vast mats and positive carpets of true and dazzling blue, and no one seems to notice.

There are pink and even white veronicas, and they have their place. But most veronicas are a clear, pure blue. And most are very accommodating. The genus (including a few bona fide weeds) seems to really thrive in Colorado, and I have written for Fine Gardening and elsewhere about some of the commoner sorts.

But right now the queen of the genus (or one of the royalty anyway) is in peak bloom in my garden, and I thought I'd share a picture of it: Veronica bombycina var. bolgardaghensis is a rather long name for such a compact plant, but so be it.

When I began rock gardening a long time ago, Veronica bombycina was a rare and elusive alpine I actually grew on several occasions. The only form grown once was the Lebanese form, with pale flowers and narrower leaves. This and another subspecies were introduced over the last few decades by several Czech seed collectors: I believe my seed came from Josef Jurasek. It is the form growing on Bolgar Dag (as reflected in its name) in the Cilician Toros mountians. It is a high alpine crevice dweller there, but in Colorado it grows in almost any well drained site in a sunny rock garden or trough. And if you find a good spot, it seems to settle down: both specimens photographed today and posted here have been in the garden for five or ten years and show no sign of slowing down.

I love my gentians, dote on my delphiniums and wish I could grow more Meconopsis (horrida is the only one that seems to like us, and it's monocarpic!). But I love my veronicas, and they (bless their blue little hearts) seem to requite the love!

Coming full circle: Iris orchoides blooms for the first time in my garden

2011-04-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

Juno irises have enjoyed quite a vogue for some time in Britain: the Scottish and Alpine Garden Society journal's have scrumptious pictures of huge clumps in full bloom on show benches. You must go to considerable lengths to grow a juno iris in a pot. We have almost the same climate in Colorado that juno iris experience in Asia, so mine are just planted out in a dry garden. Fortunately, they seem to like it. I received this as a seedling several years ago from Beaver Creek greenhouses, and it has finally built up the stores to bloom.

I collected seed of several forms of this iris last autumn in Kazakhstan: It is an act of faith to grow these from seed, since they can take five or more years to bloom. It is worth the wait. I photographed this gem in several qualities of light: which one do you prefer?

Plant crush on Fritillaria raddeana...(blush)

2011-03-28T09:52:00.001-07:00

Every so often something comes into your life that captivates you: for the late lamented Elizabeth Taylor it was husbands. I have a few friends that fall in love every few days with someone new (a charming, if somewhat problematical trait). For us plant geeks, our infatuations are somewhat less perilous to our well being. I fall in love with plants at the fall of a leaf. Right now I'm enchanted with Fritillaria raddeana. Frits are an acquired taste. Most are brownish or purplish (not the most thrilling of hues). Many are checkered and spotted and otherwise mottled. They are the plant equivalent of baroque music: intricate variations on a theme, leaving many people non-plussed. Poor them (the people, not the frits!) I, for one, dote on Vivaldi and Handel (and let's not even TALK about Boccherini, Albinoni, Scarlatti and the rest of those paragons whose names so sensibly end in "i"!)...to carry the tenuous metaphor one stage further, this Frit is a veritable Bachian cantata! The Crown Imperial has been a garden classic in the West since the Elizabethan era at least, and the flamboyant scarlet, orange or yellow trumpets merit all their renaissance clamour. This relatively unfamiliar fritillaria is obviously allied to them with the same ruff of foliage on top of the stem, but it is altogether smaller, more graceful and a good month earlier to bloom in the garden. And it seems even more accommodating to the gardener as well. And suddenly it's widely available in the mail order bulb trade. For a price of course. I couldn't resist finally shelling out the ten or fifteen bucks for a bulb. Alas, this year I will have to shell out more since who can have just one? Chartreuse is not usually my favorite color, but among the acid yellow drabas blooming nearby and the hot pinks of Tulipa humilis and the brash blue of reticulate iris and muscari, this cool as a cucumber green delights. According to literature sources, it ranges in the wild from Turkmenistan (in the former Soviet Union) through to Iran and Kashmir--a rather extensive (and scenic) range in nature. It is also purportedly grown in China for medicinal purposes. Considering this came into bloom in mid March, it obviously has toughness in its consitution (which it may need as temperatures plummet into the lower twenties this coming week). In addition to my single plant, this has been planted in very different sites in Plantasia and also in Marcia Tatroe's garden in Centennial: each place it seems to grow with vigor and ease.

Tell me you aren't a tad beguiled yourself? I knew I was smitten when I went out five or six times last weekend into my garden, and made a beeline for this earliest and most amazing of Frits right past all the "minor" bulbs.... it's a major crush indeed!

Spring is a coumin' in....

2011-03-21T05:37:00.000-07:00

Thirty one years ago I visited Ernie Lythgoe's incredible garden in Victoria that had a long border full of hundreds--nay thousands--of hot magenta flowered Cyclamen coum. A few years later I visited Lawrence Crocker (co-founder of Siskiyou rare plant nursery) who was busily weeding Cyclamen coum (and a good many other bulbous treasures) out of his lawn. I can still visualize the sizeable mound of cormous, bulbous booty he had accrued (no doubt to be composted or thrown away)...why didn't I ask to put it in a bag for me to take back home? I naively thought, I believe, that you couldn't transplant bulbs "in the green", that they had to be dormant. And yet again a few years later I saw the round leaves of Cyclamen coum scattered abundantly in the late Nina Lambert's lawn. All of these great gardeners have passed on (they don't get greater than these three), but I suspect the cyclamen are persisting in their gardens...

Nina gave me a handful of corms a long time ago that went into my first home's garden, and settled down cheerfully. It was a dark corner of my rock garden, and the soil was none too rich, and mulched with gravel, they nevertheless did quite well. Since then I tried them here and there: no great shakes. Then somehow a few corms found their way to a shady spot north of a large douglas fir in a wide border of my new home and garden. Each year these have produced more and more flowers, and the first seedlings are showing me that THIS is the spot they want to grow. Over the years I've put them here and there, and they have persisted and blossomed a bit: nothing to write home about. But in this spot they are luxuriating, don't you agree? They've been blooming for nearly two months and aren't over yet. Plants no less than people have opinions, and Cyclamen coum hath spoken with its blooms. Now that I know the spot, I must get a flat to add to the mix so that I too may one day have masses of coum to dazzle some young visitor before my time is up! May the circle be unbroken...

What's in a name?

2011-03-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

The late Jim Archibald told me several times of his fondness for the Hodgkins, great rock gardeners and close friends of his from the south of England who have left a peculiar monument or two. Of course, this iris--strange, diaphanous and ruggedly tough, now growing in countless gardens across the globe is monument enough: 'Katharine Hodgkin'* (Eliot grew all manner of rock garden plants: campanulas were a special interest of his, as were saxifrages: I am quite sure he would be surprised to know that a lifetime's gardening has been condensed down to a single cultivar name with variable spellings.)

Iris 'Katharine Hodgkin' is a hybrid between two rarely encountered species. Iris histrioides was once fairly common in the Dutch bulb trade, but has more or less disappeared in recent decades. It is the largest of reticulate irises: we still have a clump or two of var. 'Major' persisting at Denver Botanic Gardens from the 1980's! The other parent, the fabulously rare and challenging Iris winogradowii is endemic to a tiny area in the Caucasus. It thrives in cooler parts of Britain and Europe where I believe far more exist than in its native range (a damn good argument for cultivating rare plants)...

I notice that the Worldwide web is chockablock full of rhapsodies about this strange bulb and its color. A blend of chartreuse and icy blue that almost achieves gray (a rare and dubious color in flowers): it is luminous in the landscape and I am sure I am not the only one who wonders why we like it so much. Of course, we love it because of its constitution: this is one reticulate iris that thrives on clay, in sand, in shade, in sun. Just about anywhere. It clumps up in just a few years, and is easily divided as soon as the flowers fade.

I recall when it first came on the market many years ago: bulbs sold for what was then fabulous sums for me: double digits for a bulb struck me as ludicrous. When my friend and mentor Paul Maslin shelled out and bought one, I was impressed. I recall admiring it year after year as it waxed and grew, and wondering if I too should plump for a bulb, or buy dozens of cheaper (and still desirable) bulbs for the same price: ever the bargain hunter I went for quantity. Time has rewarded my patience.

Nowadays every self respecting garden center has sheaves of plastic sleeves of 'Katharine Hodgkin' in the autumn selling for a fraction of the original price. Like computers, bulbs get cheaper and cheaper with time.

But as much as I love her (and I do: Katharine is blooming all over my rock garden right now, and thick clumps are undoubtedly blooming everywhere at my old house I sold four years ago)--it is the weave of relationship that fascinates me early this morning as I type in this blog: just as Jim treasured his relationship with Eliot and Katharine, I treasure the times I spent with Jim and with Paul Maslin, the first undoubtedly to grow the Hodgkin namesake in Colorado. Then one day I as I was reading Bruce Chatwin's essays, I stumbled on the name again: Bruce rhapsodizes over the Hodgkin's son Howard's miniature paintings . (To extend the web of coincidence, there was also another Eliot Hodgkin, yet another great painter and writer to boot!) He too has passed away, like everyone else mentioned here. Even Hodgkin's lymphoma is named for a family member--quite the family: artists, medical researchers, gardeners! All of whom have left a legacy: what's in a name?

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, perhaps, but words preserve entire lives.

I imagine Eliot calling Katharine out into his garden one early spring day in Dorset: "Come quickly, dear: that iris we hybridized all those years ago has just opened its first flower: isn't it amazing!"

*"Katharine" outpaces "Katherine" on Google search when it comes to this little iris: but where is the truth? This name seems to retain the Elizabethan creativity when it comes to spelling...I have no doubt that Mrs. Hodgkin had strong opinions as to how her name should be spelled: can any one out there provide a definitive answer?

It's a mystery...Draba that is.

2011-03-13T15:10:00.001-07:00

There is a very small, very select group of congnoscenti who like drabas, and an even smaller coterie who seek out white drabas. I confess I belong to both idiosects. Drabas come in yellow, egg-yolk yellow, daffodil yellow, plain old yellow and white. Each day this time of year yet another species of draba pokes open a blossom, like prying open a sleepy eye, to see if perhaps there are any pollinators foolish enough to be out there already.

I obtained the draba above as Draba dedeana, which I am quite sure it is not. I have grown D. dedeana several times as a matter of fact--a lovely thing--and it is much coarser in foliage. This thing makes an incredibly dense cushion almost as diminutive in rosette as D. bryoides. I have seen white Draba oreibata on Mt. Borah, and Mike Kintgen collected seed of D. oreadum on the Atlas Mountains of Morocco: lovely indeed, but not my wooly cushion. I grew a wonderful white dwarf from Wyoming whose name I have forgotten, and the tiny, white-flowered D. handelii, And there is the universal native white D. fladnizensis: all are little treasures, to be sure. But this monster is extraordinary. It blooms from March to May and sets lots of decorative seedpods that seem to have viable seed (although it has not self sown). It is certainly one of the best of hundreds, nay thousands of kinds of plants in my alpine garden. And do I know what it is?

Perhaps you do: if so please let me know. I hesitate to give away cuttings without having a clue what to call it.

One of the occupational hazards of being a rock gardener is getting misnamed or simply novel plants that no one has ever heard of. It's a tough hobby, and I'm glad I can live with mysteries! I would welcome more on this order of cuteness!

Scroffy? Yes! Scruffy? No!

2011-03-06T20:33:00.001-08:00

I agree it doesn't exactly knock your socks off...I doubt you know this plant: Scrophularia chrysantha from Western Asia. but their are plants whose quiet charm creeps them into your affections. The genus Scrophularia contains more strange, negligible plants than almost any other I know of in its namesake family (which botanists are busy busting up and parcelling elsewhere: Penstemon, for God's sake, is NOW classed as a Plantaginaceae: a friggin' plantain!) If there's one genus homelier than Scrophularia, it's Plantago. I cannot tell you how many homely brown-black-gray flowered Scrophularia I have seen across Eurasia and America for that matter. Some are so ugly that they are actually interesting. Scrophularia macrantha has achieved an apotheosis--I shall deal with her anon. Plantago is the epitome of dowdy by and large (plaintain flowers are usually GREEN, not even brown or black). Both genera have their winners...and believe it or not, this is one. What makes this rather modest little thing a star? The foliage for one thing: those wonderfully flannelly, rugose, hairy leaves form a rosette that lasts pretty much all winter. And they are starting right now in Colorado's frigid March to unfurl. I recommend the winsome combo with hyacinths highly: it's a show in one woodsy corner of my yard for much of March and April. At first the yellow nosegay is huddled near the ground, but they expand and stretch and by May they are dangling a foot or more in the air.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I am an endless font of stories. My history with this plant has a story to tell as well. I obtained it decades ago from some European Botanic Garden (don't make me look up which one!) possibly twenty years ago. I planted it in an out of the way corner of the Rock Alpine Garden where it did pretty well for a few years. Saved a bit of seed, and tried it in another scree-like spot--same story. In the interim I obtained seed of a form of this from Central Asia collected by Josef Halda which made quite a dense cushion with more creamy flowers: I grew that as well, and it too went away. And has yet to return. Life went on several years quite cheerfully...when you grow thousands of species of plants you hardly notice when a rather modest little thing like this disappears. I didn't even realize I missed it. I was visiting Bob Nold (redoubtable author of Penstemon and Aquilegia tomes, not to mention High and Dry--which you ought to get): he had a thriving stand of these in his garden: his plants might even have traced their ancestry to mine. It just happened Bob had some in pots! That was many years ago: I happened to plant these in a woodsier soil and an exposure that suited them so that now they have settled down to a long life, produce enormous quantities of seed and look as though they're here to stay. It took twenty years or more for me to find out how to grow this plant. This sort of saga could be repeated for almost any plant in my garden--or in your garden for that matter. The romance of seeking plants, learning to grow them, creating interesting combinations with them and finally succeeding beyond your expectations--this is what makes gardening so intriguing and satisfying a pursuit. Maybe it is a tad scruffy, but I love it all the same!

Crocus dawn

2011-03-03T12:19:00.000-08:00

"With this the son of Saturn caught his wife in his embrace; whereon the earth sprouted them a cushion of young grass, with dew bespangled lotus, crocus, and hyacinth, so soft and thick that it raised them well above the ground. Here they laid themselves down and overhead they were covered by a fair cloud of gold, from which there fell glittering dew drops."

The Iliad by Homer, XIV 346 translated by Samuel Butler

Just as crocus makes an appearance at the very beginning of Western literature (in a most sexy manner, need I point out?) so do these impossibly bright bulbs signal the very start of the gardening year. Above is a picture of the common Dutch form of Crocus flavus, very possibly the same bulbs Homer might have conjured, since they grow in the Ionian environs where the poet lived.
A vast literature has accrued around these tiny bulbs, and they have cropped up just as liberally in world literature since Homer. Much of the writing is dedicated to saffron, which has such hoary culinary associations (and blooms in late autumn to boot, so we will gloss over it...)

You could do nothing better than visit John Grimshaw's wonderful blog posting where he reviews the latest monograph and reviews the scientific literature...

Best of all, go out and worship your crocuses, which must be showing up now too!

One of my favorite more recent Crocus references in literature is from a Greek folk song that was very popular when I was a teenager when I spent several summers in Crete. A poem by Kostas Varnalis, a great Modern Greek poet was set to brooding music: Brace yourself, this is "rebetiko", Greek blues...and it's well worth hearing it sung well!

In the basement tavern
In the smoke and cusswords
Above, a street organ whining
All of us buddies drinking together last night!
Last night, like every night!
Drowning the poisons down with liquor!....
Squeezing tightly one against the other
Someone spitting on the ground
"Oh what a grief it is to live!
However hard you struggle to imagine
You can't summon a single bright day!"
Oh Sun, and azure sea
And oh, the depth of the skies,
Oh, dawn's crocus-colored gauze
And carnations of the twilight
You shine and dim so far from us
And never enter our hearts!

(Them dad-burned little crocuses pop up everywhere!)

Sempiternal rosularity

2011-02-28T06:03:00.000-08:00

That's Agave havardiana growing in the Watersmart Garden at Denver Botanic Gardens. Thank Heavens it was chilly and snowy in Seattle last week: typically the weather would be balmy there and chilly here on the Plains, but somehow returning to much warmer temps on our blasted heath made the transition somewhat less painful: March is a telling month for me. You see, Colorado is perhaps its least fetching right now. Things are in tatters, sear and raw. There is an austere poetry, I know, to the crisp horizon, the fringed and bleached grasses. It was, however, going to California in March repeatedly as a child that inspired me to dedicate my life to gardens. Surely things could be better!

Thank Heavens for woody lilies. Agaves (when they're not too crisped: and this year they've sailed through -22F relatively unharmed) are the queens of succulence and rosularity (don't bother looking it up: I think I coined it: sempiternal, however, is basically just another way of saying eternal). None are queenier than this Texas beauty: one bloomed a few years ago in my neighborhood (see below) and I made a point of driving by it every day to glory in its lavish display. The orgasmal flower display notwithstanding, it is these giant rosettes in the winter landscape, fresh as they are in summer or fall or spring, that makes them so irresistible and welcome.

The Chinese revere pine, bamboo and mume plum as the three friends of winter. In Colorado I daresay we would have to replace Mume with agave and probably our tattered bamboo with Mahonia or yucca to tell the honest truth!

The best American primrose

2011-02-25T07:21:00.000-08:00

What I mean, of course, is the best American primrose to grow in your garden. There isn't really a best when it comes to nature: nothing could be better than the tundra on Pikes Peak studded with Primula angustifolia or freshets ringed with giant Primula parryi almost anywhere above 11,000' in Colorado. But who would have thought that a narrow endemic that grows only in tight limestone crevices on the summit of the Sandia mountains of New Mexico would settle down happily and bloom year in year out in a shady rock garden and in troughs in Denver, Colorado? Ellis' primrose (Primula ellisiae) has been lumped into Primula rusbyi by botanists, and it is clearly allied to the more southerly plant which is much commoner, growing on various mountain ranges of New Mexico, Arizona all the way to nearly central Mexico. I have only grown the northernmost form well, so I'll stick to the old name.

There are nearly a dozen species (depending on the botanist of course) clustered in the Parry section of the genus Primula. Aside from the two Colorado near-endemics I mentioned at the very top (they grow beyond our state borders, but so sparsely compared to their amazing abundance all over Colorado we can practically claim them!), the Great Basin is filled with micro-species clearly allied to one another, but which I think deserve recognition because they each occupy a narrow ecological niche and have strange little morphological quirks that defy lumping in my opinion. I have only seen a few of these, although I have trod high up on Thomas Canyon in the Rubies looking for Primula capillaris (at the wrong time of year: it was undoubtedly dormant), and I stopped several times in Logan Canyon hoping to glimpse Primula maguirei. I have great affection and respect for Tass Kelso and Noel Holmgren who would gather many of these little Great Basin waifs under the umbrella of Primula cusickiana. But geography and habitat are so distinct, and some of us cling to habit and tradition. I have been lucky enough to tread through acres of the microform of Primula cusickiana that grows in amazing profusion here and there on the White Cloud Peaks. And I have seen where its lowland cousin grows around Boise. Perhaps I shall even go there in a few weeks to finally see it in the chlorophyll, as it were.

I only wish I could grow some of these Great Basin blues: I have heard one or two of them can be tamed, so one day perhaps I can post a blog with an icy blue primrose depicted. Meanwhile, you can enjoy (as I will in a month or so) this rosy wonder from New Mexico! You can even buy yourself one if you wish (as Primula rusbyi) from Laporte Avenue Nursery.

Memento

2011-02-20T10:04:00.001-08:00

Today would be my sister Mary Callas Taylor's 78th Birthday. This was her high school graduation photograph (taken about the time I was born). I think it conveys quite a bit about her. No words, no matter how eloquent, how labored can begin to convey the sadness, nostalgia and yearning one still feels decades after losing a loved one. The only compensation in her case is that I can see bright glimmerings of her style, of her looks, of her character in her three wonderful daughters.

Candid comments

2011-02-20T00:37:00.000-08:00

I wish I could say these clumps of Sternbergia candida were taken in my garden. The plant is indeed blooming today in my garden, but with only one flower per clump...but my clumps do look happy! The picture above was taken by Bill Adams of his Methusalah. My picture of the same plant a few days earlier is below (where it belongs!). I have no doubt the plants look just about the same this year, and I am publishing these for several reasons: first of all because I am going to copy this posting to Bill to remind him to divide the rascal this summer. When plants get this big and congested, they are apt to rot. And more importantly, I have a pretty good hunch that Bill has a goodly proportion of all the Sternbergia candida in cultivation in his clumps! It would be good to spread the bounty around (particularly since he is a nurseryman!)...I know people who would cheerfully spend $20 for a good bulb of that plant, in which case he's sitting on a small fortune... [P.S....it did the trick: he sent me the picture above and a note saying he promised to propagate this summer!]. Read on, however!

Yet another picture of Bill's marvellous Amaryllid. In case you are not aware, this is a plant that has quite an interesting history in cultivation: it was only discovered and described a few decades ago (restricted to a rather small area near Fethiye in Southwesternmost Turkey). Not long after it was found, a large proportion (it was feared that all) of the wild plants were mysteriously transported to Holland. Not soon thereafter draconian measures were enacted worldwide to stem to trade in wild bulbs (the despoliation of this plant likely being one of the reasons)...incidentally wild bulbs are still dug on a fairly large scale for commercial purposes in many countries. And lelt me underscore: that's not always a bad thing. Although what was done to this bulb was unquestionably criminal in my opinion.

I once wrote a dramatic account of how I was given several boxes of "Sternbergia lutea" at season's end by the late Gordon Koon of Englewood Garden Center (that operation has been defunct for decades, so we are talking the 1980's)...Over the following years those sternbergias mostly morphed into Sternbergia candida, although quite a few S. clusiana turned up in the mix as well. I know that in the Denver area alone, hundreds of sternbergia continue to be dumped at season's end every year by garden centers who never sell that many of this plant that's so poorly known to gardeners locally. I suspect this scenario plays out in hundreds of cities and towns across America, and who knows how many other countries: it takes a strange sort of intelligence to mourn the loss of plants like this: my own peculiar genius I guess...

I would like to know how many Sternbergia candida were simply trashed back in the 1980's when the big Dutch firms decided they'd pass off their collected sternbergias as "S. lutea" since a plant as rare as this white gem would never pass muster as a commercial item in the short term. At least that's the scenario I surmise...I could be wrong! Maybe those who collect Sternbergia lutea in Turkey just mistook the foliage of the white one for the commoner species as they collected for the export market? Very possibly. I doubt we shall ever know for sure.

I have read that more colonies of S. candida have been found in the wild unbeknownst to collectors, and perhaps the original colonies have regenerated from seed by now. That some day I may discover. And the novelty of this gem is somewhat faded. More importantly, at least one gardener in Pueblo is growing it superbly. (And most importantly, it seems to like my garden too!).

Overlooked gems

2011-02-16T06:18:00.000-08:00

Every serious gardener knows the cobweb houseleek (Sempervivum arachnoideum), or I suppose I should say every serious ROCK gardener. Which the plant pictured above is not, by the way. As I was skimming over my pictures from last year I noticed it and thought: why is it that I have never seen this grown in very many gardens? This is Sempervivum ciliosum var borisii, from the Balkans. It does not have cobwebbing, but fine cilia, or hairs around the margins of the leaves. It makes every bit as lovely of mats and mounds as its stunning cobwebby cousin, but the flowers are a soft yellow rather than the chalky pink of its better known congener.

There is another form of this species, a cultivar named 'Mali Hat' for the Balkan mountain where it was collected. I grow it too: similar only the rosettes are stained reddish.

Succulents are staging a major come back in gardens and especially in container gardens. Here is one that is incredibly cold hardy, beautiful all times of year with lovely flowers to boot. Why is it not in your garden? I, for one, would not be without it!

Be my valentine, O! Hedeoma ciliolata!

2011-02-14T12:52:00.000-08:00

I am always surprised florists don't do more on Valentine's day to sell flowers. I suppose they have enough trouble just fulfilling the demand that day, but I have always thought there would be a market for diminutive plants, like this wonderful Mexican treasure. You will find an even more startling image of this gem on the web taken on the gympsum barrens near Galeana where this is restricted to a very small area. Wouldn't this look imply stunning in a little pot? Wouldn't it be charming if we gave our loved ones endangered plants like this, with a label telling them about where they grow. Then, perhaps, they can even plant them out a few months later and they will continue to prosper...

Come to think of it, it would be good to see even a few more generic Cyclamen out there (with its heart shaped leaves, a natural for this holiday).

But this post is an excuse to show off this tiny mint...and let you know how nervous I am about it. I have planted it several places on my rock garden. The rock is granite, not gypsum. This winter has been quite cold: down to -20F just a few weeks ago (a lot colder than its lofty home in Nuevo Leon)....why would this little morsel be hardy and not Agave victoria-reginae that grows not far from it on the mountain nearby? Good questions, these. I will answer them in a few weeks or months. If it is not hardy this winter, you will have had a glimpse of it...if it turns out to be hardy, perhaps in a few years I can post a big hunker like the one Carlos photographed...Now THAT would be a kick!

Meanwhile, Happy Valentine's day!

Winter blaaahs....

2011-02-11T13:47:00.000-08:00

Nothing wintry about George here...I post this as a reminder that in barely a month I expect that we will have Draba hispanica and the first Corydalis in full bloom. This week the temps have dropped below zero repeatedly and daytime highs have been in the lowest double digits (Farenheit to be clear!) and icy snowpack is everywhere. Everyone is starting to get the gardening itch, and the local industry trade show was hopping.

I first created this acetic combination at Eudora--a garden that is gradually decaying as I type. We redupicated and amplified the combo in the new rock garden at my Quince house, where both the draba and the corydalis are expanding. I noted the Spanish Draba's Latin epithet above, but Corydalis solida 'George Baker' is now my focus. There are dozens, if not hundreds of named selections of what used to be called Corydalis transylvanica: coupled with Corydalis solida, you can find the entire spectrum of pinks, magentas, pure quite, appleblossom and quite a few varying reds. But good old 'George' is still the brightest to my eyes. I added another red clone at Eudora and they began to hybridize and proliferate from seed, but we have kept this one pretty pure and seemingly childless. It is dead easy to divide, however (I like to do so while they are still in full bloom). Dig up the clump, pull each piece apart and replant promptly, water in, and next year you will have a husky stem or two or three each with their hot red flowers. You may or may not want to repeat the red and yellow combo (it's not patented). It does work!

I am including several pictures of 'George' from different angles and in different lights to demonstrate several things: most of all, how much plants differ in the brightness of their colors depending on ambient light, and also to show the charm of a rock garden planting. As you move around the rock garden, a single cluster of plants changes perspective and loots utterly different. Just as a kaleidoscopoe shifts dramatically with each turn of the cylinder, every few steps around a rock garden reveals new vistas and vignettes. Even now, blanketed in snow, a rock garden has the pleasing contours and smooth curves I admired much of this past year at work with the monumental Henry Moore sculptures...although my rock garden cost a lot less!

Aaaah Spring...will it ever come?

Witch Hazel in January!

2011-02-04T05:37:00.000-08:00

Okay...I confess. It was January in Portland...more precisely on Sauvie Island at Sean Hogan's phantasmagoria called Cistus Design Nursery. There were a dozen or more things blooming in the area: Iris 'Katherine Hodgkin' and Iris unguicularis in full force, Camellia japonica and C. forrestii, Daphne bohlua and D. odora, and time and again I would catch the bewitching fragrance of Sarcococca....But there is something about witch hazels that really captured my imagination.

That's Linda Buley, a grower in the Portland area who produces standards on witch hazels (many selections) as well as other unique plants. She's hawking her wares at Cistus: I wish I had the cash and that she had some wares in Denver: it would be wonderful to have a small, treeform witch hazel in my back yard. As it is, my 'Arnold Promise' is still in tight bud (and hope it got through the -20F of the other night OK)...

So if you live near Portland, shimmy on down to Cistus and pick one of those treasures up!

Son of sage...

2011-02-01T07:05:00.000-08:00

Last August I did a tribute to my mother, Artemisia Kelaidi on the centenary of her birth...at the time I did not have a picture of her scanned. My nephew-in-law (John Sooklaris) has conveniently scanned one of the loveliest images of my mom when she was about the age I am right now: she was a beauty! And come to think of it, her silver hair did justify her generic honorific (sagebrush [Artemisia], to cut through some of my baroque prose).

Although she passed away a decade ago, I probably think of her more frequently now than I did when she was alive...one of the compensations of aging, actually. Some of us realize, as we age, that we are treading on familiar footsteps.

We think we are so original, so different. As I grow older I realize that much of what is best in me is the result of my parents' aspirations and deliberate molding. Most of my neuroses are a consequence of what I have resisted and still avoid. They say, "may I be the man my dog thinks I am", I might coin another truism, may I grow up to be the man my mother hoped I might become.

Oh! The tales I could tell...

2011-01-25T19:06:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in my voluminous slide library (and I mean SLIDE library: 35 mm.: remember those?) I have a picture of the first specimen of this plant I ever saw. Not far outside Bristol, with a wonderful view of the Severn estuary lived Eric and Mabel Hilton. Eric was a keen rock gardener, and he and I had corresponded and swapped seed many years. I visited them on my very first visit to England, and his expansive garden "Severn View". I recall the wonderful days I spent there, photographing and marvelling at the hundreds of wonderful alpines thriving in Eric's endless screes and rock work, all in crisp, bright April sunshine with the sea shining below. There were hundreds of plants in that garden I yearned for, but none more so than a tiny bergenia with white flowers. I photographed the clump, easily a meter across, studded with hundreds of flowers...

This picture isn't that original plant, incidentally. It's a rooted cutting I brought home from the plant below, which was in turn a rooted cutting from Eric's original clump. He brought a single piece to me in Denver as one of his host gifts when he and Mabel visited in 1982. The plant is Bergenia stracheyi 'Alba'--a nearly pure white form of the predominant bergenia that grows in the Western Himalaya in unbelievable abundance. You see, the leathery leaves are apparently unpalatable to sheep, goats, cattle etc., and in September of 2011 when I visited Pakistan, this species dazzled me with its abundance and ubiquity above treeline. We managed to get a pinch of seed, and now grow a pinker, somewhat larger form in Plantasia of this taxon, but this tiny, white flowered one is still my favorite of the genus. Perhaps because I saw it in the wild. More likely because it brings back memories of Eric and Mabel--two wonderful gardeners--who treated me so splendidly nearly 30 years ago!

In addition to the wonderful flowers, the terrific fall color recommends this to rock gardeners especially: here is the best colony I have grown, which still occupies this spot in the Rock Alpine Garden at Denver Botanic Gardens. Over the years I have foisted cuttings of this plant on no end of garden visitors, most of whom aren't terribly enthusiastic...until last weekend. Of the thousands of plants in my garden, the one that John Lonsdale fixated upon in my garden was this plant. I managed to send him off with lots of cacti and other goodies from my garden and cold frame, but I forgot to give John a piece of this wonderful, tiny bergenia...I am writing this (and copying it to him) so that he knows I haven't forgotten. By the way, if you have not visited John's website, you're missing out on one of the high points of the world wide web...I shall root some for you, John, and post them this spring!

What amazes me about plants and gardens is that every plant has this sort of history! Truly amazing...

Strange bedfellows...

2011-01-22T02:07:00.000-08:00

Perennial gardeners dwell on plant combinations with almost annoying persistence: a border is all about color repetitions and contrasts: rock gardeners are strangely silent on the subject. It's as if every rock garden plant is a gem set apart from any other neighboring plants. But in fact, rock garden plants often jostle and combine, and they certainly sit in proximity to one another. I find these combinations fascinating: who would think that a buckwheat from Wyoming, a woodruff from the Mediterranean and a South African succulent from the Eastern Cape province would grow so cheerfully next to one another? The buckwheat is Eriogonum ovalifolium, one of the most widespread and variable and truly wonderful plants in that great genus--this being a very congested form that Mike Kintgen brought back as seed from central Wyoming. The Asperula eludes me: I grow a half dozen or more and they are all wonderful and I get them mixed up: I'm sorry. I am not perfect. Sorry to disappoint...but the mesemb is another matter. I collected seed of it on a private farm near Tarkastad in the East Cape on my March expedition with Jim Archibald. Bergeranthus jamesii blooms from late spring to autumn, producing inch wide shaving brush flowers of luminous lemon. They are closed in the morning, revealing an orangy tint to the back of the petals, but in the late afternoon and evening the flowers positively glow. It is one of the longest blooming and most rewarding rock plants. I am amazed that it has not seemed to have attained much notoriety. It is dead easy to grow and produces buckets of seed. The buckwheat and Asperula have a long history in gardens, and are widely known and grown--but both only bloom for a few weeks and that's it for the year. The Bergeranthus is a summer long winner: and yet I don't think it is mentioned in a single one of the hundreds of rock garden books in my sizeable book case dedicated to the subject.

And yet not long ago, Graham Stuart Thomas in his magnificent book on rock gardening bemoans that everything in the way of alpines has already been introduced!

I don't think so!

Graceful, no?

2011-01-18T20:53:00.001-08:00

Everyone loves orchids, and our gardens are chockablock full of all manner of daylilies, hostas, penstemons--you name it. But who cares about milkworts? Well...I do! If you Google image Polygala you will an astonishing range of treasures found throughout the Northern Hemisphere, with some of the most outlandish restricted in nature to South Africa. Only a very small number have made it securely into North Temperate gardens, notably the alpine Polygala chamaebuxus, which you may find in early summer in the Alps, usually in its yellow phase.

The lovely pink milkwort above is Polygala amoenissima, although I had a very similar plant once labeled P. amara--both originating in the Caucasus of Western Asia. This has proved to be a very vigorous, long lived plant in my rock gardens, producing a few welcome seedlings to expand the display. Its first flowers can appear in late April, and it continues to sport its little pink orchids through summer and into the fall: quite a display for any plant.

I grew this blue gem for several years as Polygala vulgaris, although a simlar species (Polygala calcarea) is well established in British Gardens. Come to think of it, I remember that Betty Lowry found it to be almost a pest in Western Washington: I have yet to get a blue milkwort to persist for very long, although I have great hopes for Polygala hybrida, a taller kind I found everywhere in the Tian Shan last September. It has virtually the same habit and stature as the pink one above, only the flowers are always a brilliant sapphire blue.

I have seen so many tiny polygalas in Africa, and I've seen specimens of many more strange ones in Asia. I think this family still holds great promise, at least for rock gardens.

Who says all the best plants have been introduced?

Baroque interlude

2011-01-10T12:36:00.000-08:00

Of course, I'd heard of Balboa Park in San Diego: big park, nice trees people would say. Why didn't anyone tell me this is America's grand recreation of Spanish Renaissance architecture? The endless complex of buildings in Spanish style at the heart of the Park are almost surrealistic in their extravagance: I was enchanted (despite the drizzle) and amazed at the scope and the extent of the illusion. And the trees and gardens are there....but those buildings!

We spend enormous amounts of money on things nowadays: the Olympics for instance. They seem to have taken the place of the old Expositions and World Fairs. But any buildings constructed are always contemporary and functional. There is something amazing that people would have gone to such enormous extremes a hundred years ago to honor the Spanish heritage of California. I have not researched it yet, but I suspect there was a single person at the bottom of it all--and a damned persuasive one at that.

Many images and vistas crowd my mind from my recent 3 week sojourn in lotusland: California is a beguiling place any time of year, but in the depths of Colorado winter, it's heaven. It didn't hurt our family and friends there are all connoisseurs and consummate hosts...

In fact, my feelings upon returning are perfectly captured by this little vignette from Balboa Park:

Gold for the New Year...

2011-01-01T08:40:00.000-08:00

One of the highlights of this past year for me was finding this delightful umbel growing practically everywhere in the Altai Mountains: after much searching and seeking and groping on the internet (or should I say googling) I believe that it appears this is the REAL Bupleurum aureum, which everyone insists on lumping into Bupleurum longifolium...utterly different from the animal of that name I have grown for decades (and which I can't even find a picture of in any book or on the web, but which grows everywhere in my home garden and Denver Botanic Gardens)...

So this may likewise prove annual: but it is very different from anything I grow as Bupleurum, and much much showier. I found a similar plant in 2009 that was even flashier (if someone bugs me, I will unearth that picture) which seemed perennial. But even if this is an annual, who can't use some glorious gold like this in the New Year? It grew practically everywhere: in moist spots and dry, high and low. It had been blooming for a long time (there was abundant seed) and had lots of buds to go. I look forward to having some of this Altai gold in my life and in my garden.

Seemed like an auspicious way to begin the New Year! Happy New Year to you and may gold and good health come into your life this year!

Aloe madness...

2010-12-29T08:58:00.000-08:00

I am back in Southern California (again) for the Holidays, although the picture above was taken exactly a year ago at the Huntington, right now almost every other house in Palos Verdes estates where I am staying has a massive Aloe in bloom (if not a Poinsettia tree, or Bougainvillea or some other brash explosion of bright color): with heavy rains on and off for weeks, the landscape is unbelievably lush and green, and when the sun comes out the L.A. basin is crystalline, with the dark blue ocean on the left and the San Gabriels and San Bernadinos snowy white to the East..... it really is a paradise (albeit a populous one)!

That's Kelly Griffin, photographing one of his amazing hybrids at Rancho Soledad, one of America's premier nurseries for succulents, palms, cycads, tree ferns: you name it when it comes to the exotic and wonderful. Kelly is renowned for his amazing aloe hybrids, many of which he sells at this site. (Click on site to connect to the URL).

Of course, what makes these new aloes so fantastic is not just for their showy winter bloom, but the amazing colors of the rosettes. I have a hunch I will be back down here again next year: winter in Southern California is pretty habit forming (the person who took all the pictures in this post, my girl friend Jan Fahs, has never NOT spent Christmas and New Years in Southern Cal.)
Oh oh...time to put on my clogs and stroll along the Strand to watch the surfers come in and sip mojitos while the Aloe colored sun sets...

[Truth in advertising: it's raining cats and dogs outside my window: hence my blog entry...]

Summer snow

2010-12-26T20:40:00.000-08:00

Clematis hexapetala

Since it has apparently forgotten how to snow in Denver, I thought a bit of whiteness this time of year might be in order...This is a picture of an astonishing Mongolian clematis that was blooming a few years ago at Denver Botanic Gardens. I was so delighted and impressed with this I hightailed it out to Bluebird Nursery in Clarkson, Nebraska, expressly to obtain a few specimens, which did bloom for me last year at my home garden, although not nearly so lavishly. Surely this has to be the most amazing white flowered novelty to have come around in many a year. We now have this several more spots around the Gardens, and I know a few others have obtained it hereabouts, so we can judge its merits more accurately. My suspicion is that this will become a garden staple in Denver in the next decade and a classic beyond over time as well...

How many more gems will that genus keep producing? I know Dale Lindgren has crossed this with various purple gems and produced some very striking hybrids. But can you really beat a species of such glorious purity and crispness of flower? Just thought you should know about it. (Let's hope Bluebird still has a few in their larder...)

Blobs, fillers, space holders, gems

2010-12-14T02:38:00.000-08:00

This last week I've been carrying on heated email conversations with Arrowhead Alpines' Bob Stewart: I've been rueing the demise of Mt. Tahoma Nursery as a mail order source (although I intend to make pilgrimages there as soon as this February!), which was my main source of daphnes in the past. Well Bob has amassed an incredible collection of daphnes and I am lining up my order for this coming spring with him. Puhlease don't click on that URL until I'm finished placing my order...

Now you went and did it! You are going to probably not come back to this edifying post on the un-Daphnes. Daphnes are sexpots. You know: Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch....no, no, I have it wrong. Those ladies are more like Hydrangeas and Azaleas, perhaps. Daphnes are a tad more demure and complex: Audrey Hepburn or even Katherine Hepburn. Or maybe even Audrey Meadows or Catherine Deneuve: daphnes are not just pinups, they have personality and depth and allure and a sense of humor (often at your expense).

But this post is not about daphnes. Really. It's about Plain Jane plants. Fillers. Junipers. Euonymus fortunei. And the ultimate Plain Jane: squawbush, threeleaf sumac, lemonade berry. Rhus trilobata. Truth be said, I suspect not more than one in a hundred Coloradoans would know this plant in the wild or the garden. It is not exactly a thriller.

Somewhere I have a picture I took of one at the magnificent Colorado Springs Xeriscape Demonstration Garden a few years ago: it was blood red in the fall (if someone clamours enough I may have to go find it). But I took these pix a few weeks ago in the Ponderosa Panorama at Denver Botanic Gardens where a rather typical specimen is doing its thing: filling in, being its wonderful blobby self. Dan included several of these in the garden (sited perfectly, as you would expect from him) since it is representative, abundant and universal in the foothills and in fact over much of America (the Eastern Rhus aromatica is essentially the same thing). This is a rather hum drum plant, but in the fall it usually takes on good color and it lasts for a long time. (Plain Janes often surprise us when they doll up!)

You probably won't want to plant daphnes on a median strip in Denver, nor would you necessarily want to have an alluring actress fill every role in your day to day life. One does not need Angelina Jolie working at the checkstand (although, God only knows, she shows up there enough on the magazine racks!), nor do you want Paris Hilton as your baby sitter to drive the point home. We need our Marge Simpsons and lots and lots of everyday plants for everyday places. One of these days I will rhapsodize about carpeting junipers, so watch out!

The world needs a lot more Rhus trilobata. Some day I will remember to remind my friends in the Springs to flag that scarlet one to see if it strikes easily from cuttings (if so, move aside Euonymus alata!). There is a place for one or another of the wonderful new cultivars of threeleaf sumac in many industrial and large scale landscapes, especially in parks and for gardeners who yearn for the "Low Maintenance Garden" (gag me with a spoon!). I've even got one in my big, dryland shrub border. Unlike the various blobby plants landscapers often use (spiraeas, Vickery privet, shrubby potentilla) squawbush is completely drought adapted: it sailed through our great drought of 2000-2003 unscathed in various unwatered gardens I've been observing. And since we've only had an inch or less of rain in the last seven months, this could be the start of another period of "Water Provider Incapacity to Supply Demand" cycle (drought doesn't really occur in nature, there are wetter years and drier years. Nature doesn't care). So pretty soon everybody will be in a state of hysterical idiocy over lack of water once again...ho hum.

Or we could just plant more native and adapted dryland plants like this one. There are even some that qualify as sexpots...but that's another blog...

Fulfillment and desire

2010-12-09T18:48:00.000-08:00

Paraquilegia microphylla, on a high granitic ridge above Almaty in the Tien Shan of Kazakhstan in early July of 2009. For years I dreamed about this plant. Way back in the 1970's Boyd Kline collected seed of its cousin, Paraquilegia grandiflora in Kashmir: I will never forget the pictures he showed of the high crags where it grew and the cushions like this one on the cliffs, and I thought would I ever see it? Would I ever grow it?

Boyd gave me seed, and I did grow it and bloomed it several years in a row in the Rock Alpine Garden in the early 1980's: it was pure white and every bit as condensed as this form. This past September I saw the third of the three closely related species, Paraquilegia caespitosa in the Western Tian Shan on Ulken Kaindy Pass in the Djabagly nature reserve. Should I now not be replete? Fulfilled? Why is there still a burning desire to seek more of these gems out in more places. After all, I have not yet seen Paraquilegia grandiflora in the wild, nor have I seen P. caespitosa in bloom. It's true they are sometimes all lumped into one species...so all this may be moot in some ways...I say Pshaw to lumpers! I do not doubt that new forms--perchance even species--are clinging to high cliffs, waiting to be found.

What does it mean "to yearn?" To lust for something and then suddenly it's drifting irrevocably into the past. The past is really just as inaccessible as the future, you know. How few people have the privilege I have enjoyed to go not once, but twice to the Tien Shan. Shouldn't I just rest on my laurels, and be content to bask in the glow of these images that I, myself, once took?

Like Don Juan in Hell (my favorite of Shaw's fine dramas) hell is contentment and complacency. Hell is fulfillment, an easy chair and violins. Heaven is to strive, to yearn to desire. And never to give up.

I hope one day to grow all the paraquilegias in my garden, in troughs in pots. I want them supersized (as they say in commercials) and in excess. I want to seek them out in the Pamir, in the Hindu Kush, in the West of China. I want to visit them in their secret hiding places in Mongolia and across all the stans. Of course, the little rascals only choose to grow in the highest, most inaccessible and inhospitable cliffs on planet earth: who cares? I shall not be content until I have seen every last Paraquilegia across their range of thousands of miles (both latitude and longitude incidentally) in the fastness of Asia, until I have sniffed and nuzzled and adored every last bud and blossom of Paraquilegia on planet earth. Then, and only then, will I be truly fulfilled.

(We humans are hopeless, really. Don't you agree?)

Sotol (like: Soooo Tall!)

2010-12-06T10:48:00.000-08:00

Sotol, or Desert Spoon is not for everyone. For one thing the leaves have spines pointing in both directions, so you are sure to get lacerated if you try and get too intimate. (Not a good idea). And frankly, it's not the toughest of Southwestern upland plants: the several species we have grown at Denver Botanic Gardens sustain winter damage most years. And I've noticed they are horribly attractive to aphids (not a good thing). This is the hardiest one: Dasylirion texanum, available very widely and cheaply nowadays thanks to Mountain States Nursery. Dasylirion wheeleri grows much further north into New Mexico. I remember seeing this the first time over 30 years ago on one of my early field trips with Paul Maslin: it grew in the Malpais near Carrizozo, one of America's most outrageous, surrealistic landscapes. This area gets quite cold (Corona, not far to the north, is downright frigid in winter) and I always assumed it would be tough. We have grown it repeatedly from this area, and it will survive in a perfect microclimate in Denver, but only just.

A few years ago I drove to Del Rio in Texas with my daughter so she could get a taste of Mexico. The highway northward from Del Rio to San Angelo is enchanting in midwinter: and there are countless spires of this hardiest of sotols rising on all sides of the road for seemingly hundreds of miles (if you know Texas...you know this is not much of an exaggeration).

One or another of the plants of this remarkable native semi-succulent bloom here or there around Denver Botanic Gardens every year now. It would take a hard heart (or perhaps someone very sensitive) to spurn this plant, despite its many drawbacks. I find these spire-like flower stalks inspiring, and the vicious foliage is perfect for crowd control issues: may trespassers bleed! (Braww haa haaah!)

My American idol: Robert Michael Pyle

2010-12-01T20:01:00.000-08:00

No, that's NOT a slenderized Santa Claus checking who's good or bad: it's America's masterful nature writer and one of my heros, Bob Pyle. Bob has written a dozen or more books, and probably a dozen butterfly field guides of various descriptions. He is one of America's premier lepidopterologists, and a prose stylist second to none.

I have been re-re-reading The Thunder Tree, which is still available as a first edition, hard cover on Amazon for peanuts. This gem of a book is going to be reissued this coming spring and I hope it will get renewed attention in reviews and bookstores as a consequence. I don't think a better book has ever come out of Colorado. I believe it is a classic. The blend of Bob's personal history with the natural history of our region, and the cultural history of the Highline canal is as contrapuntal and pleasing as a Bach cantata. If you haven't read it, I urge you to do so (buy one of those cheapo first editions, Puhlease! Let's get those suckers out of circulation: just click on the hyperlink at the start of this paragraph!) This book is really a must for any serious reader. It is the Walden Pond of our time, only the pond is attenuated and human in its origins. The theme: that children need untramelled space and time for their imaginations to soar and a rugged private piece of nature or near nature to bond with the cosmos. This book is said to have inspired Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods, and indeed, Louv is writing the foreword to the next edition.
I have resisted reading the book he is signing in the picture (that's my copy!): Mariposa Road. I know if I start it will gobble up several days (you can't speed read Pyle: his writing is so musical and rich that it would be like downing a milk shake in one gulp. You would get a brain freeze for sure!)...I'm saving it for my vacation time in California in a few weeks.
There are probably a hundred writers I admire enormously. Most are deceased. Quite a few are living (Coetzee, Roth, Gordimer, Rushdie, Pamuk, Snyder to name a few)...but Pyle is the only one whom I have actually befriended. I never cease to be delighted with his enormous goodwill and gentility. He is as fine a person as he is a writer, and that's saying a great deal.
Do get one of his many books and get acquainted. He'll be touring around the country this coming Spring, when The Thunder Tree is reissued. I'll remind you about that once the dates are set in concrete!

"Naked Poetry, mine forever"

2010-11-28T16:53:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure who's responsible for the moniker, "Mojave Sage" since a dozen or more sages are found in and around the Mojave desert. Oh well...it is probably the loveliest sage not only in the Mojave but in the world. Salvia pachyphylla was launched into stardom by Plant Select in 2005, although High Country Gardens and a few rare plant nurseries and seed companies had offered it sporadically the decade prior. I first saw pictures of this plant at a native plant conference at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in the late 1990's. Bart O'Brien was lecturing on California Salvia, and I was feeling sorry that we were denied so many of these in Colorado's fierce climate when he flashed astonishing images of this Salvia he had taken at high elevations in southern California. "Panayoti should be paying attention" cautioned Bart "since we can't grow this nearly as well as he will if he ever gets his hands on it". A few years later I had several accessions thriving in my private garden and at Denver Botanic Gardens.

The specimen in this picture was taken in late September at the Gardens at Kendrick Lake, that incredible showcase and anthology of the best in Watersmart gardening. That particular plant is nearly 4' across, and nearly as tall: I am amazed how the violet-purple bracts show up so vividly even in the twilight when I photographed it. The cool lavender blue aster behind provides a terrific foil. There are a dozen superlative specimens of this plant all over this garden. Just yesterday I strolled through with Lauren and Scott Ogden and Lauren commented that "I think I like this garden better this time of year", no doubt because the architectural and textural structure of the garden stands out so dramatically. You are not distracted by the myriad flowers and confusion of the garden season.

Juan Ramon Jimenez, the great Spanish poet writes: "O pasion de mi vida, poesia desnuda, mia para siempre!"

"Passion of my life, naked poetry, mine forever!"

When it comes to Mojave Sage, decked with flowery lingerie, it's sexy too!

Ima Sumac lover

2010-11-23T10:50:00.000-08:00

I would never have done it: staghorn sumac is a consumate, irrepressible and probably reprehensible weed. It's the sort of plant you don't even want in your neighbor's yard (since it will find its way into your yard before long). You'd enjoy having it across the street though (at that neighbor's, you know, the one with the offensive bumper stickers and 90 decibel leaf blower?). But someone (Dare? Mike?) went and planted one along the Cheesman park fence in the Rock Alpine Garden at Denver Botanic Gardens.

And I love it. This was several weeks ago (don't go rushing out to see the spectacle today or you will be disappointed). For once the camera caught the fiery glow, that incredible blending of orange and red, and the refulgence that makes sumacs fulminate even below overcast skies. Notice the soft purple Viburnum mongolicum right next to it (what a nice foil!) and the green leaves of a seedling fastigiate English Oak (Quercus robur) that found a perfect place to grow.

There's lots to be said for the world's weedy, trashy trees, (like sumac, or even Ailanthus--another story). A world of nothing but taste and elegance could get pretty dull after a while. We need these ostentatious, unruly things that blaze and crackle with positive fury. Just let fussbudgets swoon!