This morning when I was walking to my office I noticed that the southern magnolia, Bracken’s Brown Beauty (Magnolia grandiflora ‘Bracken’s Brown Beauty’) was in bloom. My first impulse was the right one—to go up to the voluptuous, velvety petals, shoo the bees and other insects away, and stick my nose into it.
Not all magnolias have fragrances, but many do, and it is always worth investigating. ‘Bracken’s Brown Beauty’ has a distinctive lemon dishwashing detergent smell to it. It’s not a fragrance that is going to have you traveling from miles away to visit the flower, but it is nonetheless pleasant and worth a sniff or two.
Honestly, the fragrance is just a poor excuse to get close to the magnificent flower. The flower is substantial at 4-6” wide, with petals that are reminiscent of the undulating wings of a dove. Botanically speaking, since the petals and the sepals look so similar in a magnolia, they are classified as tepals. Sepals for the botanically less-inclined are the outer layer of the flower—in trees they are generally green leaf-like structures that protect the flower when it is in bud and then support it when in bloom.
I often have visitors tell me that they love perennials, but their big challenge as gardeners is finding combinations that make it easy to synchronize bloom times. This is a real challenge particularly when the desire to create appealing plant partners meets a wish to provide multi-seasonal interest in the garden.
Annuals are an easy way to ensure season-long color, but they often lack the textures, stature, and architectural interest that perennials supply. In my walks around the Garden this year I have found two “garden moments” worth sharing—one serendipitous, the other planned. They are instructive examples in creating satisfying designs with limited plant palettes in your garden.
A few years ago, on a low stone wall in the Home Gardening Center, I planted a climbing hydrangea (Schizophragma hydrangeoides ‘Moonlight’). The climbing hydrangea is a woody vine that has blue-green, heart-shaped leaves and creamy white lace-cap flowers. It has stretched itself happily over the stone wall and filled in nicely.
Since the vine wants to crawl on the stone wall we needed to fill the space below, by its feet, and along the edge of the border. Lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis) seemed like a logical choice. This perennial only grows 12-18” tall and forms a nice clump, with large, scalloped, light-green to blue-green foliage. Furthermore, lady’s mantle flowers alongside the climbing hydrangea in June, producing clusters of showy chartreuse flowers.
This past weekend, we were out in the Louise Loeb Vegetable Garden in the Home Gardening Center covering vegetable gardening basics. Knowing how to plant and grow vegetables is one thing, but the love and the labor means nothing if you don’t know what to do with the harvest. Bearing that in mind, I made the visitors a simple tomato and bread salad that was loaded with fresh herbs. Traditionally it is an old Tuscan recipe made from left-over (read: stale) bread. It is a quick and easy recipe that adds life to everyday meals.
The ingredients for the recipe toss together the most basic herbs and vegetables from the home garden:
– 4 ripe tomatoes cut into ½-inch cubes
– 3 small Persian cucumbers cut into ½-inch cubes (or one small regular cucumber, deseeded)
– Handful of basil (approx. 2 tablespoons)
– Handful of parsley (approx. 2 tablespoons)
– Small handful of oregano (approx. 1 tablespoon)
– 4 scallions chopped into small pieces
– 1-2 garlic cloves minced (optional)
– 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar (optional: tear a few basil leaves and soak them in vinegar for a few hours overnight to give the vinegar more flavor)
– ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
– 2 cups few-days-old Italian or French bread cut into small cubes (optional: toast the bread lightly in the oven)
– Salt and pepper to taste
Last week, I was out in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden with Ken Molinari, our Rose Garden Foreman, where he told me that we’re using a lot of foliar feeds this year. With so many roses—over 680 varieties and more than 4,400 roses—we have to fill up a large 100-gallon tank and go down on Mondays, when the Garden is closed, to spray the organic fertilizer on the roses. But it’s not solely out of convenience that we time this application for a day when the Garden is closed to the public; many of the fertilizers that we use are fish-based, and only a cat would be happy with the scent.
We have been using a blend of a number of products, including Organic Gem® liquid fish fertilizer, Monty’s® Liquid Plant Food (otherwise known as Monty’s Joy Juice), and Dyna-Gro Pro-Tekt®. The latter is a silicon solution which supplies potassium and silicon to help the rose build stronger cell walls, which in turn helps protect it from black spot and piercing insects. Add all of these ingredients together and you have a recipe for healthy roses that are better able to defend themselves from pests, diseases, and environmental stress.
As the rain fell heavily on Friday, I found myself worried that it would do a number on the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden. It’s in its prime right now, and if I told you it was “ablaze with color” that would easily be an understatement; looking down from the top of the hill, all before you is a sea of color. Thankfully, my fears were at least somewhat unfounded—things looked a little wet, soggy, and disheveled come Saturday morning, but gardens are resilient and the roses perked up quickly without too much loss.
Every year I select a few of my favorite roses to discuss, and I thought this would be a good time to do just that considering the Rose Garden is in peak bloom. With it looking so spectacular, it wasn’t easy making my choices, but I managed to come up with a few that caught my eye.
For those with a romantic inclination, I would like to guide you to rose ‘Traviata™’—a hybrid tea from the well-known and respected French hybridizer Meilland. The rose is cherry red, the flowers are enormous and fully double, and the stem is sturdy and fit for a cut flower arrangement. Another classic in the Rose Garden is a German Kordes rose called ‘Brother’s Grimm Fairy Tale®’. It’s one of those roses that display a mélange of colors, with orange, yellow, pink, and salmon all swirled into one breathtaking concoction. This four-foot rose is a floribunda, meaning that instead of just one large flower on a sturdy stem, each stem is covered with a bouquet of blooms. ‘Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale®’ really does get smothered with blooms. The Fairy Tale series from Kordes are hybridized to look like old-fashioned roses with their fully double blooms.
This winter I attended a lecture by Bill Calkins, Retail Business Manager for the Ball Horticultural Company, a well-known seed company founded in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. Its reputation for innovative new introductions and high quality product lines—including Simply Beautiful Gardens and Burpee Home Gardens—is renowned in the industry.
I enjoyed Calkins’ lecture not only because it covered an impressive array of new annuals and improved varieties flooding the market, but cast the subject of annuals in a refreshing light. The highlight was his discussion of the Dr. Seuss garden, a child-friendly garden containing fun and bizarre-looking annuals to inspire the imagination. Any initiative to encourage children to explore and engage in the natural world is a good one, so this endeavor sounds really fun. And, after all, who doesn’t like Dr. Seuss’ wild and wacky creations?
I don’t know if you have ever encountered a nettle while out on a walk, but I certainly have, and there is one experience in particular that leaps to mind. While out with friends on a botanizing excursion, I managed to stick my hand straight into a huge patch of nettles (Urtica dioica). A big mistake, as you can probably guess.
We spent the rest of the walk searching fruitlessly for broad-leaved dock (Rumex obtusifolius) to relieve the itching, swelling, and burning caused by the nettle’s stinging hairs. This situation was perfect to put the best survival watch I got as a gift many years ago, I noted the time I got stung and kept a journal with time signatures on my watch as my skin progressed. My arm was on fire. But the glassy hairs themselves were not the driving force behind this irritation, nasty as they are. That blame lies squarely with the formic acid and histamine released as the spiny hair pierces the skin.
Luckily, there are several wild cures to the nettle’s sting that the natural world offers. Weeds can be useful, even though gardeners view them (often rightly so) as a nuisance. Broad-leaved dock is just one example. To counter the effects of nettles, the dock’s leaves can be collected, torn into pieces, and pulverized until they produce a green sap. This juice will offer near-instant relief from the nettle’s sting.
Our newest garden, the Native Plant Garden is a 3.5-acre notebook of ideas for your home garden. Native shrubs—like the ones you will see here—are an asset to any landscape, as many of them are durable plants which serve as homes and food for native bird species. Native shrubs often have beautiful spring or summer flowers and colorful fall foliage.
Deciduous winterberry hollies, Ilex verticillata, a standard in the nursery trade, are indigenous from Nova Scotia through Florida and west to Missouri. In their native habitat they prefer moist soils and swampy areas where they tend to sucker. However they will still grow prodigiously in average garden soil, but with a more upright form that can tolerate full sun and light shade.
These hollies are dioecious meaning there are male and female flowers on separate plants. The females are covered with berries later in the season. The male, meanwhile, can be tucked back in a corner. The bright-colored berries, technically drupes, are often red, but can vary from scarlet to orange-yellow, and are eaten later in the winter by over-wintering birds. They are too hard for migratory species which mean they hang on into the winter when they can nourish the birds toughing out the winter, hence the name “winterberry.”
I was out in the woodland area of our soon-to-open Native Plant Garden and found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of all the different species of trillium we have planted there. Trilliums bloom in early spring, taking advantage of the time on the forest floor before the trees grow leaves and cast shade upon them. Trilliums, much as their name might suggest operate in threes: three leaves, three sepals, and three petals. The leaves are arranged in whorls wrapping around the stem from a single point. The result is a graceful zygomatic symmetry. Triullums are undoubtedly one of the most showy and elegant trichotomous woodland native plants.
There are two types of trillium, sessile and pedunculate. The flowers of sessile trilliums rest on the leaves without a flower stalk while pedunculate trillium flowers are elevated by a stalk. Sessile trillium tend to have mottled leaves that are spotted with silver or maroon coloring while pedunculate trillium have green foliage. Trilliums are slow to grow on their knobby rhizomes, but will slowly spread and form a nice clump, though it may take up to seven years before they flower if you plant them from seed. But, the pay-off is that once a clump is established in your garden it will live for decades.
Last week I announced that spring is here and the weather promptly rose into the 70s for three days. I watched everything unfurl, some early bloomers senesced, and then we had a welcome day of rain which supplied good moisture to get even more things jumping.
We are heading into the season where the Garden changes dramatically every week. This morning I walked out to the Azalea Garden and admired the early season blooms in their full glory. The Korean rhododendron Rhododendron mucronulatum, ‘Cornell Pink’ is smothered with flowers. You can find it planted in a pleasant band that runs through the Azalea Garden and lights the hillside up with girly pink flowers.
This morning when I was walking to my office I noticed that the southern magnolia, Bracken’s Brown Beauty (Magnolia grandiflora ‘Bracken’s Brown Beauty’) was in bloom. My first impulse was the right one—to go up to the voluptuous, velvety petals, shoo the bees and other insects away, and stick my nose into it.
