Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG’s Gardener for Public Education.
After a week of election post-mortems, the NYBG is now ready to follow suit with the results from our ‘choose your favorite mum’ poll. For those of you not already in the know, I posted a blog on October 26 entitled ‘Mum Madness.’ In it, I explained our breeding program for Korean mums at the Garden.
To make things easy for newcomers, here is the encapsulated version: every year we collect seed from our Korean mum collection and grow them on through the next year to see if we have any new varieties. We look for certain traits–compact growers, flowering time, flower forms, and color. When we find one we like, we keep it to propagate via cuttings.
This year we asked the public to join us in the selection process. We went out to the Korean mum Trial Bed in the Home Gardening Center and chose six mums that differed from our current collection and had great appeal, photographing and displaying them in the October 26 blog. They were also labeled in the garden and, through signage, visitors were asked to vote for their favorite selection by texting in their answers.
As I mentioned the other week, I have been making the Garden rounds to talk to different colleagues about their favorite bulbs. We often like to use tulips here at the NYBG as part of large annual displays in springtime. We plant the bulbs in November, which then flower in May. By June, they have all been dug up and recycled in the compost pile.
The reason why tulips are not often part of permanent displays is that many varieties don’t come up consistently in subsequent years. They look glorious the first year, spotty the second year, and prove fairly anemic moving into the third and fourth years. Happily, this is not true with all tulips, and many make wonderful, long-lived additions in a garden provided they have good drainage.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG’s Gardener for Public Education.
Korean mums were first hybridized (bred) in Connecticut in the 1930s by a nurseryman named Alex Cummings. He was working on hybridizing cold-hardy varieties that would flourish in New England temperatures. A tall plant–a wild species he mistakenly identified as Chrysanthemum coreanum–fell into his hands and the results were the lavish Korean mums you see planted today in both our Jane Watson Irwin Perennial Garden and the Home Gardening Center.
The chrysanthemum that Cummings was working with turned out to be Chrysanthemum sibiricum, a wild mum with white-pink daisies, vigorous growth, and good branching. This species is also native to Korea, so the popular name of “Korean mum” is correct. Korean hybrids tend to be four feet tall with spectacular, daisy-like flowers that come in a wide range of colors, from pale yellow and dusty pink to burnt-orange and fiery red.
At The New York Botanical Garden, we have a selection program for the Korean mums. Each year we grow a wide variety of Korean mums in a kaleidoscope of colors. In the Perennial Garden, we group them as separate colors–a selection of red mums in the hot room, pink in the cool room–paired beautifully with fall shrubs and perennials to create vibrant autumnal displays.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG‘s Gardener for Public Education, and can often be found hosting gardening demonstrations on Saturdays and Sundays.
Hyacinthus orientalis
Next weekend, I will be teaching visitors to the Home Gardening Center how to properly site, plant and protect their bulbs from hungry critters. It is a demonstration that I enjoy giving every year. We examine a number of bulbs, learn all the basics and then find a few nice empty spots around the Garden to plant. It is one of the demonstrations where I like to get hands-on with visitors, encouraging them to jump in and help prepare a nice display for the spring.
Last week, I made the rounds with a few of the curators and gardeners asking them about their favorite bulbs and planting techniques. The first stop I made was to meet with Jody Payne, the curator of the Rock Garden. I asked her for some good recommendations for the homeowner.
Our discussion started with one of my favorite spring blooms for fragrance–hyacinths. Jody recommended the Festival Series as a good choice. Festival Series hyacinths have a more open form than your traditional hyacinth and they are not so prone to flop over once they are in full bloom. Each bulb produces several flower stalks providing a full display. The Festival Series comes in pink, white, and blue, with a delicious fragrance. They create a nice, naturalistic look in the garden.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG‘s Gardener for Public Education, often hosting live gardening demonstrations for visitors on Saturdays and Sundays.
The other week, I was with the Students of Professional Horticulture, taking them on a walk around the Home Gardening Center while discussing wildlife gardening. Technically, any time of the year presents the opportunity to lecture about attracting wildlife into the garden, but fall is a spectacular occasion.
We passed by one of my favorite asters, Aster tartaricus ‘Jindai’, that was smothered with bees and butterflies–monarchs and red admirals on this occasion. ‘Jindai’ is a compact tartarian aster that reaches three to four feet in height (the species can grow up to six feet tall). It was discovered at the Jindai Botanical Garden in Tokyo, Japan.
This sturdy variety has stolen my heart since it doesn’t require any staking. The large foliage of the aster is full at the base of the plant and then tapers nicely as it extends up the stem. In September and October a profusion of flowers adorns these tall stems, a lovely combination of medium purple ray flowers with bright, buttery yellow disc flowers. The complementary colors play off of each other exquisitely.
For centuries, water lilies have been thought of as emblems of purity and beauty. Philosophers marveled at how a stunning, symmetrically perfect flower–sometimes with a sweet, subtle perfume–was capable of arising from such muddy waters. But if the pristine blooms and large, glossy lily pads give the illusion of cleanliness, every gardener who has ever reached down into a pond to deadhead a spent bloom will attest to the fact that underneath the façade of exquisite beauty is a slimy mess.
As we approach the end of our Monet’s Garden exhibition (Sunday, October 21), the water lily display–one of the centerpieces of the show–is still in its full glory. But while this exhibition took its inspiration from Monet’s garden at Giverny, the artist found his love of the flower elsewhere. Monet’s water garden was transformed when he met Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, the son of a wealthy, landowning French family. After studying law in Paris, Latour-Marliac returned to his home near Bordeaux to help his father manage his property. As an avid botanist, he soon developed a vast network with horticultural societies and botanists throughout the world.
The other week I was out in the Home Gardening Center teaching Garden visitors how to divide their favorite perennials. The demonstration ended and several visitors lingered around the display table in the Ken Roman Gazebo, inspecting the divisions and their various root systems.
This is the informal part of the demonstration when we unwind by chatting informally about our gardens, comparing seasonal notes, and planning for our future. It was during one of these conversations that a woman suddenly exclaimed, “You know, what I would really like to grow next year is the moonflower!”
The funny thing is that I had been admiring a moonflower just several nights earlier while downtown in the Financial District. I passed around several pictures taken on my smartphone, listening to the “oohs” and “aahs” of the small crowd.
The moonflower (Ipomoea alba) is a night blooming member of the morning glory family. It is a tender perennial in the American tropics and is used as an annual in the north. It has heart-shaped (cordate) leaves and flowers that are in the typical saucer shape of a morning glory. Ipomoea alba’s pristine white blooms reach five to six inches in diameter and exude a delicious perfume.
New York City has made a wonderful commitment to greening up the neighborhood and the High Line is one of its finest examples. It is one of many local initiatives–such as Hudson River Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, A Million Trees, and Battery City Park–to bring nature back into the urban environment.
The High Line is the reclaimed site of an abandoned railroad track that has been turned into a vibrant park and a magnet for city dwellers. People swarm to the park during their lunch break or after work, and it has rapidly become a premier tourist attraction.
The park is emblematic of good city planning. It has user-friendly peel up benches that rise organically from the walkway and decadent chaise lounges that give a spectacular view of the Hudson. One of my favorite spots is the 10th Avenue viewing station. In an age where we are bombarded by electronic stimulation, the viewing station offers a place to congregate and quietly watch the city moving below.
Sometimes the ordinary can look extraordinary just by making a few changes. This is the case with dusty miller (Centaurea cineraria) in the Home Gardening Center. In one of the beds we have ‘Gloucester White’ growing alongside Salvia ‘Wendy’s Wish’ and Petunia Supertunia® ‘Vista Silverberry’. This is how you would expect to see it in a display–partnered in a nice color combination with other annuals.
In an adjacent bed, however, we have done something different. The same dusty miller, ‘Gloucester White’, has been grown into a standard. The two specimens that you see are between four and five years old. Dusty miller is a vigorous grower and forms a woody stem fairly quickly, making it an ideal candidate for a standard.
As you walk through the Home Gardening Center and peer into the Trial Beds, you will see some unusual sights this year. The Trial Beds are well represented with plants from a number of exotic places such as New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Africa, and Thailand.
When you enter the Garden, the first bed is a riotous collection of oranges, chartreuse, and gold. One of the centerpieces of this display is a plant that is indigenous to Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Cambodia. Flag bush, or Buddha’s lamp (Mussaenda frondosa), is a tender shrub. In this region it will grow to look more like a large perennial than a shrub, reaching about three or more feet in one season. It has large white poinsettia-like bracts and small, bright orange flowers. You can place the flag bush in full sun or partial shade. It likes rich, well-drained soil, so remember to amend your soil with organic matter such as compost before you plant.
After a week of election post-mortems, the NYBG is now ready to follow suit with the results from our ‘choose your favorite mum’ poll. For those of you not already in the know, I posted a blog on October 26 entitled ‘Mum Madness.’ In it, I explained our breeding program for Korean mums at the Garden.
