Each Little World

When is a fern not a fern?

That's the phrase that caught my eye when I saw this charmer on the Far Reaches Farm website last year. Pteridophyllum racemosum is a Japanese plant that looks like a fern that flowers.

It made it through its first winter and bloomed! I am thrilled as it is even lovelier in person than on-line.

I planted it by this mossy grindstone thinking that the growing conditions would be right; but it turned out to be the perfect photo backdrop as well. Far Reaches is not offering this plant at the moment, so I am even more pleased that I splurged last year. 

Loree made me do it!

You know who I mean: Loree Bohl of Danger Garden. I don't know how many times she's shown her stunning Hellebore, 'Jade Tiger' (below). Every time I see her photos of this plant, I swoon. Then I say to myself, "I really need to get one of those!"

LOREE BOHL/DANGER GARDEN

But finding one for sale locally has not happened. Nor has it been easy to find them online. But this year I finally discovered them at Fraser's Thimble Farms. The price was pretty typical until I realized that not only was this nursery in Canada but it was in B.C. and not eastern Canada as I had been thinking.

It's bad enough that I order from nurseries in California and Washington state, but I decided I had to draw the line somewhere. So I gave up on my dream of 'Jade Tiger' in my garden. Until it unexpectedly appeared at White Flower Farm (below) under "new" plants that they'd just put online. 

No more oohing and aahing and searching. I plunked down my credit card and bought three of them. Whether I will keep them together to create a swath or spread them around the garden is still up in the air. But I am going to have fun playing with these beauties. Thanks, Loree. That GBBD photo made me finally do it!

Slim favorites

I get email updates from a lot of garden sites as I am sure many of you do as well. Thus I signed up to get a free catalog from Proven Winners. I am not crazy about their emphasis on what I consider overly-colorful foliage, but they do offer some nice plants. I trust their name and the quality of their plants, so I took a long look at their "Gardening Simplified" catalog when it came in the mail Monday.

But I didn't turn down a page corner marking something of interest to me until I was more than halfway through the book. I found two shrubs under space-saving hedges that caught my eye. Both are fastigiate, meaning nice and narrow and able to fit into tighter spots in the garden. 

This spring I am going to go looking for Taxus x media 'Stonehenge,' a shade-tolerant yew (above). Our Arborvita hedge (last May, below) is suffering from growing in too much shade and its multi-trunk form is getting severely battered from snow and miserable winters. I am thinking that perhaps I can replace a couple of the Arborvita or just start another hedge in front of it. We put in the original hedge to screen our neighbor's parking area where they keep a camper along with their cars.

They are fabulous neighbors but they need to shovel snow from their parking area too close to our hedge for its health — something we did not think about when we sited it. So a replacement hedge that is not as close to their parking spot — or maybe even a fence — needs to be something Mark and I look at this spring. 

On the same page as the Taxus 'Stonehenge' was this skinny Elderberry, Sambucus nigra 'Laced Up.' I moved Sambucus 'Black Lace' because it was too much of a spreader. But I would like a dark leaved shrub in that same spot to echo the Cotinus across the path. So this might nicely do the job. Then again, I saw this lovely treatment of 'Black Lace' Elderberry on Plant Lust. I don't know if it ever occurred to me before I saw this photo that this Elderberry could be a willowy, elegant plant.

It made me think twice. Perhaps what I really need to do is to prune out the horizontal growth and try to make the Elderberry I already have grow as vertically as I can make it. Or maybe I should  put my 'Black Lace' in a pot where I can shape it to my heart's content — and add 'Laced Up in my tight corner. 

A number of local nurseries carry Proven Winners plants and shrubs, so I can wait to decide what I want to do until I see the actual plants this Spring. 

Snowdrops make an appearance

Ha! Don't be silly. We still have deep snow cover though the temperatures are finally rising up to normal for this time of year, so perhaps Spring will make an appearance. Despite the weather I do have snowdrops, courtesy of Carolyn's Shade Garden in Bryn Mawr, PA.

I have ordered snowdrops "in the green" from Carolyn Walker a few times over the years. Buying them this way — in growth — is the best way to guarantee snowdrop success according to the experts. Though it will be a while before they can go outdoors, they should manage quite well potted up by a sunny, cool window. 

I've found ordering snowdrops "in the green" has advantages that I had not realized when I first ordered some:

1. First, I get something green and growing at the moment when I am most desperate to get out into the garden, but can't yet do so.
2. Unlike a bouquet of Tulips from the grocery store, these plants will go into my garden and not onto the compost heap.
3. And most important, when I plant them out, all the spring bulbs — including other snowdrops — will be emerging. I will be able to easily add these newly-arrived snowdrops to groups of the same already in place in the garden. And I can see where there are holes at this season where I can easily slip in a few new snowdrops. Something that is very hard to do in the autumn when I could plant them as dry bulbs. By that time of the year I can't remember the spring garden at all, nor can I work well from photographs. So snowdrops "in the green" are a win-win purchase for me. 

Carolyn mailed them last Monday and they were at  my door Wednesday morning. You can see how they were packed in shredded paper that cushioned them from the slightest bump or jarring. I slowly let the shredded paper slide into a plastic bin until I could see the ziplock bag holding the plants. 

I double-checked Carolyn's receipt against my original email order to her and then got to work potting the snowdrops up. I'd brought a bag of potting soil and a group of pots from the cold garage into the house a few days earlier in preparation. I knew I would not want to work with such cold material, nor would I want to subject the plants to yet another shock.

I bought some very typical varieties like G. elwesii ex Carolyn’s Shade Gardens (a species snowdrop from Carolyn's own naturalized plantings) and G. nivalis ex Carolyn’s Shade Gardens (another species snowdrop which Carolyn described as the "progeny of the vigorous strain that has thrived on her property for over 100 years".) The pots are on a shelf under my big Boston fern. 

I also opted for two snowdrop varieties that are new to me: G. 'White Dream' (syn. G. nivalis ‘White Dream’) which have a pronounced white stripe on the leaves and according to Carolyn are a vigorous strain and should multiply rapidly. The stripe is visible on the few larger leaves but not from the angle I took the photo.

The other new variety for me is G. ‘Jonathan’ (unique single snowdrop, G. elwesii) with extra large, globular flowers and broad blue leaves. It was found in 2000 in a North Yorkshire garden by snowdrop author Michael Myers. The picture below is from Carolyn's website, but you can easily pick this one out in the photo of my group of potted snowdrops. It reminds me somewhat of G. 'Diggory,' which has large flowers but is much more expensive. 

My two G. 'Jonathan' bulbs!

Everyone is potted up with their id tags, ready and waiting for the snow to melt and the ground to thaw so they can be planted in the garden. Exactly how long a wait that proves to be is anyone's guess!

Cornish inspiration

We all have certain flowers that we love; the ones we never tire of and can't have enough of in our gardens. Among my loves are Erythroniums, Fritillarias, Primulas and Hellebores. So I was thrilled when Gardens Illustrated magazine took its subscribers on a digital visit to Bosvigo, Wendy Perry's garden in Cornwall. I'd come across her garden before and fallen completely in love with it because we're clearly fans of many of the same plants. I printed out the pictures of the garden from this digital tour on 8 and 1/2 x 11 inch paper so I could study all the details.  (Frits, Erythroniums and Aenmones in Bosvigo below). 

Looking at these pictures of her woodland garden made me think about what I am growing in the garden where the Tiger Eye Sumac came down last summer. That area in my garden has all four of my favorite plants but they're not knitted together nearly as well as the ones in Wendy's garden. The appeal here lies in both the related colors and the spread of the plant clumps.

So, of course after drooling over these pictures, I went online and added a few more things to my previous order from Klehm's Song Sparrow Nursery. Two mostly yellow Hellebores ('Sandy Shores' and 'Spanish Flare'), another dark one ('New York Night') and Epimedium x youngianum 'Royal Flush' (below). I first saw this Epimedium on the website of the Elizabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden in Seattle and have been on the lookout for it ever since.

There are already Erythroniums, Galanthus and Primulas growing in this area that should be ready for diving this spring. The Hellbore and Epimedium foliage will help to cover the bare spots left by the ephemerals. Wendy has wonderful dashes of blue in her garden from Corydalis (below) which I will swap out for the blue of Brunnera or Jacob's ladder (Polemonium) which I am already growing successfully, 

Wendy's garden is two acres so she can grow more plants and larger swaths of them than me. But these views offer inspiration and ideas for smaller gardens based on color, texture, foliage and understory trees. It's a perfect classroom image for a spring garden! Here are the plants from Klehm that I will add to the area in the photos at the bottom.

Hellebore 'New York Night' (above) and H. 'Spanish Flare' (below)

Here are Primulas, Epimedium and a Hellebore already growing in the area where I will add these new plants. 

You can see I've already got the yellow, pink and purple color combo started. 

At the far edges of this bed are two different pink Peonies and Dicentra spectabilis 'Gold Heart' with its pink flowers and yellow foliage, so I think my new plant purchases will work well here.  I don't think I will ever miss the Sumac that I took out since its given me all this lovely space for new plants. 

The other zonal denial

Since I don't have a greenhouse or room indoors to keep marginal plants alive when the temperatures fall, I've pretty much avoided growing things above my USDA Zone. But in the spring of 2017, I tried a little zonal denial by planting a beautiful Alstroemeria 'Inca Ice' and a Sarcococca 'Fragrant Valley.' Both of these are plants that typically need a zone warmer than where I live. But these varieties were both listed as hardy for my zone. Alas, they died along with a depressing number of older shrubs and trees in the winter of 2017/18 when we had extremely cold temperatures with little to no snow cover. In fact, our biggest snowfall last season happened in late April.

PHOTO: DEC. 15, 2017

When I look at the print garden catalogs that are now arriving in the mail, I always look to see what zones are listed at the end of a plant's description. When I go plant shopping online, I tend to click on all those special ways of digitally searching — like listings of new plants, rare plants or those that a nursery has hybridized themselves.

Now and then I look at what plants a nursery offers that are specifically appropriate for my USDA hardiness zone. When I used my Zone 5 as a search tool recently, I had a bit of a lightbulb moment. Something I've known for as long as I've gardened in Wisconsin was right there in front of me; I realized I had been seeing it but not really acknowledging it in recent years. 

What I saw were the temperatures that go with a Zone 5 designation:

USDA Zone 5a:  —20° to —15° degrees F.

USDA Zone 5b: —15° to —10° degrees F.

In reality, we recently woke up to a low temperature of -28° with a wind chill of -48°,  significantly colder than the expected lows for Zone 5.

PHOTO: MARCH 2, 2017

According to the map, I live in Z5b. I have an urban garden which makes it a little more protected but I have been ignoring, if not denying, that very cold zonal truth. We've had multiple snowstorms since the Winter Solstice (Dec. 21). They've beautifully covered garden with a deep blanket of snow which I hope was enough to protect everything from the Polar Vortex temperatures we just went through. We had a few days were the temps went up into the mid-40s: a change of 70°almost overnight. Then back to snow and freezing rain and snow again. 

Despite all of our talk about warmer weather as part of climate change, it is the drier winter with little snow cover and cold temps like we had last year that is deadly for gardens like mine. Rather than playing with Z6 plants, I should be thinking about Z4 or even Z3. Time to get real in the garden again. No more planting for hotter summers. It's the colder winters that I need to be thinking about when I go plant hunting from now on.

The garden photo I didn't take

Our prolonged cold and snowy weather meant that I've been spending a lot of time paging through the latest print garden catalogs that came in the mail as well as trolling for plants on-line. I kept making lists of plants to order and crossing them out; constantly adding and subtracting.

My garden, for example, has a beautiful Glaucidium palmatum (below) and I finally found a source for a white-flowed version that I've lusted after. But what I could not find were any photos of what my garden looked like at the end of the season to figure out if I have room for another big shrubby perennial — no matter how long I've longed for it! 

In the spring, I am out in the garden on my hands and knees working or wandering around with a camera — noticing and capturing every little thing as this shot from May shows.

By mid-summer the garden gets more and more full of plants and my digital files get equally full of photos. 

Then came the massive rains and flooding of late August which put paid to this 'Tiger Eye' Sumac. I dug it out rather than try to get it back in the ground, propped up who knows how long. Once I'd done that chore, I loved the open look of the bed. It inspired me to start dividing and moving crowded plants as well as adding a few new things. 

But now here I sit with no good photos of what things looked like as I reconfigured this bed and the one across the path from it. All I photographed were images that show how the big leaves from the stripe-bark maples cover this area when they fall. I had to rake them up before I could put down the mulch of chopped leaves we'd created to help insulate these new plantings in case we had a winter like last year's.

There are snowdrops and Erythroniums and Primulas and all the other old and new plants growing here that were dormant or cut back when I took this photo. I do have id cards on what I planted in the fall and where, as well as notes in my journal. But I can't get over the fact that I did not think to take some pictures to jog my memory. Once the snow covers this area, it is fairly inaccessible until spring. I will just have to restrain myself from ordering anything for this area or only order bulbs and ephemerals which can always be shoe-horned in.

Peony Heaven

When I think about my family's garden "history," it's mostly about vegetables. Though there were flowers in the yards at the houses where I grew up, I think they were there when we moved in. In his later years my Dad had Alzheimer's, and while he was still able to live at home, my most lasting memories of him are in the garden tending Peonies. Thus the Peonies in my garden always remind me of him even though I mostly grow species Peonies and not the big blowsy beauties we had. 

Though my garden is packed full, I think I have room for one more Peony. And this spring, Klehm's Song Sparrow Nursery in Avalon, Wisconsin, is offering the beauty I've had my eye on since it was first introduced. I've been waiting for the price to come down but it hasn't. And I'm not going to wait any longer to add Paeonia 'Golden Angel' to my garden.

KLEHM SONG SPARROW WEBSITE PHOTO

Here's Klehm's description: "Newly emergent stems have red and gold color to add an intriguing accent to spring bulbs such as daffodils. Then, as the foliage completely unfurls it shows the gold tones that inspired its name. As the season progresses the foliage matures to green. Single soft cream yellow blossoms are lovely atop the foliage."

SOLARIS FARMS WIKI IMAGE

Isn't this a stunning plant?!! I have had little success with P. Molly the Witch and this seems like an excellent replacement for her. I wish I had a bed that I could devote to Peonies. I'd grow one or two old classics for the fragrance because the newer ones usually only have a very slight fragrance. But I love the colors and forms and quirky flower types that are available these days. 

'Coral Charm' (below) was a big breakthrough in Peony color and it's easy to see why it is an award winner. 

P. 'Spumoni Whisper' is swoon-worthy beside having a great name!

I used to only like the very traditional Peony flowers. But over years of looking at Klehm Peonies, I've come to appreciate some of the forms that are quite unusual and not at all what comes to mind when one says "Peony."

'Daisy Coronet' is a perfect example of what I mean. She's kooky but has a large dose of dramatic charm with those dark maroon-red pistils! It's worth mentioning that 'Daisy Cornet' is an early bloomer with small 2-3" flowers and the plant is only 22 inches tall. That means she can be blended into a garden more easily than some of the more showy Peonies.

Roy Klehm is the sole hybridizer for 'Daisy Coronet' and 'Spumoni Whisper' and shares the honors with another hybridizer on the other Peonies show here. Though the Klehm family has been specializing in Peonies for generations, they offer a wonderful selection of perennials, shrubs and trees as well. I've bought a lot of different plants from them over the years and highly recommend them. Good value and great packaging so I've never had a plant get harmed in shipping. 

Roy Klehm has spoken to the WHPS many times over the years and often lets members shop in person one day each spring. But I wrote this post because I discovered Klehm long before I found WHPS and think the nursery is well-worth recommending. 

What we learned

I had a great time at my Saturday workshops on "recording" the garden and people seemed to find the experience useful. And just as I hoped, there was a lot of sharing of tips and techniques for keeping track of our gardens. Here are a few of the things that surfaced at the workshops that I thought might be of use to other gardeners.

Recording on paper vs. online: The dozen gardeners who came to the workshops were different ages and levels of experience, but it turned out that just about everyone used some kind of paper record-keeping — index cards, journals, notebooks — even if they did most of their note-taking on the computer. I think that was a surprise to all of us.

Use Pinterest as a garden shopping tool: Make a Pinterest board for each garden bed or project. Include images of the what the garden bed looks like now, along with any inspirational ideas that show what you are hoping to achieve. Use this board as the spot to put pictures of all the plants you want to buy for the area. Since you can access Pinterest from anywhere on your various devices, you will always have all this information with you when you go plant shopping. You can show it to nursery staff if they don't know the plant or need more info. 

What's in a name: I suggested that garden "records" should tell the story of your garden. They don't just need to be lists of plants and projects. One of the other gardeners noted that she names her garden beds but they all have a personal story and connections. It hadn't occurred to her before our gathering that the names of the different areas could tell that story, rather than being based on location or the type of plants growing there.

Organizing information by area vs. the entire garden: I happen to have an old library card catalog so I keep track of my plants via an index card for each one. They are filed alphabetically by botanical name. Another gardener uses an accordion folder for each area/bed in her garden. In it she puts all the plant tags, index cards with information for each plant and any other information she wants to keep. If she moves a plant from one bed to another, she moves the card from its current folder to the folder for its new location. I thought this was a pretty efficient and effective system, especially if your garden has clearly delineated beds and areas. 

The downsides of 3-Ring Binders: Most of the gardeners who came to the workshops all used binders for various garden records and tasks. But one of the gardeners mentioned that she finds that once something gets put in a plastic sleeve in a binder, it never leaves. I think she's absolutely correct. I have a garden binder that has some great magazine clippings of garden ideas that I will never do. But inertia keeps them in the binder. And we all agreed that a binder is not easy to schlep around the garden making notes in place. 

I thought Mark or I would take some pictures while everyone was here, but it did not happen. The groups spent the better part of two hours looking at my Keynote presentation, asking questions of me and each other and making suggestions. Then we spent half an hour looking at all the various record-keeping methods I showed them in the pictures in person. 

IVOM: Christmas roses

Most of the Hellebores in my garden are what are commonly called Lenten Roses  (H. orientalis) because they bloom in the spring near that religious occasion. Most of mine typically start to flower in late March or early April.

But I have two clumps of what are known as the Christmas Rose (H. niger) in places like Britain where it blooms at this time of year in their warmer climate. In Wisconsin where I live, it is usually too cold for anything to be actually flowering.

My H. niger were purchased as Zone 5 plants from the late Seneca Hill Perennials in New York State. They referred to them as "Thanksgiving Hellebores" because that is when they bloomed for them. Mine are usually up and budded at turkey time, but it is usually already too cold for them to open.

This year's on again/off again winter had me outdoors on the afternoon of the Winter Solstice with my garden clippers. I created the arrangement in these photos then and it is still looking good almost two weeks later.  Until I had these H. niger flowers in front of me every day, I never realized the buds are washed in pale pink. 

I put this vase in my bathroom hoping the higher humidity would help it survive. The flowers have continued to open but it is a much more restrained display than these plants offer in the garden. The bouquet includes leaves from two different Hellebores, Heuchera foliage and one of the beautifully patterned leaves from Arum italicum 'Ghost'. 

To add a holiday glow to my bathroom, I suspended a pair of large glass ornaments from the wall scones. 

Since these are made of clear glass they get lost when hung on a Christmas tree. This let them shine center stage for a brief time. 

I put out my grandmother's silver dresser set as well to really up the shine factor.

To see what other gardeners have found in their gardens to use in a vase today, visit Cathy at Rambling in the Garden, who hosts this lively and long-running meme.