There's A Riot Going On

With over 6" of rain (so far) this month, things are banging in the back garden...

...and in the front.

Cold Frame

It wasn't exactly life giving me lemons, but when someone asked us to throw out a piece of 48 x 60" plexi at work, I threw it in my car instead.  It took me a few months, but in December I picked up some pre-treated lumber, hinges and adhesive and made a cold frame.  I installed it under the stairs to the deck, on the concrete slab, where it gets good southern light midday.

Even with few plants in it, I could see that it was moist inside, and a few degrees warmer I hoped.

(Yes, I tend to have a rock pile around to provide materials for planting troughs.)

After the brutal deep freeze around New Years, I was finally able to work outside again last week.  Neighbor Ray and I added a layer of 1/4" hardware cloth to the bottom to keep out varmints, lined the  bottom and part of the sides with landscape fabric and poured in a couple hundred pounds of sand.  The sand should provide some thermal stability and insulation for the pots, while also acting as a moisture reservoir.  Any roots that escape their pots can run freely in the sand.

I cut two 2x4s to hold the lid open while we worked in it.  Into the cold frame went a couple rooted cuttings of my favorite lavender, a pot of cotoneaster franchetii cuttings, and some dormant first year vernonia noveboracensis.  Also into the mix went a few pots of seed like eryngium yuccifolium that need to be stratified.  I'm hoping that we can use the cold frame as a little nursery for germinating seed and growing on precious seedlings. With the lid closed the small pots will be safe from the never-ending squirrel inspections.

The cold frame should also function like an alpine house, keeping cold hardy but moisture averse plants like this delosperma happy throughout our wet winters.  

Signs of Life

I was squishing through the yard yesterday on my way to the compost pile and was struck by the vibrant green of the arum italicum subsp. italicum under the Judd viburnum.  It's a pass-along plant from my friend's yard so I've never known for sure if it's 'Marmoratum', though I suspect it is.

The leaves say 'May' though it's only January.

How can this plant be leafed out and seemingly happy in this crazy weather?  It's been near zero this month as well as in the 60's.  The arum doesn't care.

Mid-September Good Things

Summer seems to have moved on without the normal 6 weeks of heat with no rain.  It's been dry, but not terribly so, and relatively cool.  The garden and I are both relived that August is in the rearview mirror.

Above is a late hyacinth bean flowering on the fence.  I look forward to the burgundy bean pods every year, and diligently collect the huge seed for the next spring.

Ilex verticillata 'Red Sprite' is having a great year, despite being grown in a hypertufa planter.

 The kirengeshoma is opening on schedule.  Although the flowers don't last long, I love their puffy firmness.  They remind me of those orange circus peanut candies we had as kids.

Hardy begonia livens up the shady side of the garage.

Thanks to Matt Mattus's suggestion on his blog, I started using organza drawstring bags to protect the dahlia buds from the earwigs.  As ridiculous as it looks, the bags guarantee that I have pristine dahlias to cut for the kitchen table, and less kids freaking out about earwigs at the dinner table.

It's cooled off enough that I've been making hyptertufa troughs for the last three weeks.  These are only some of the planters curing under the deck.  I'll start opening them next week and will deliver the sold ones in October.

Be sure to let me know if you're in the north Jersey area and are interested in a trough.

The Good Part of Summer

We've gotten plenty of rain the last couple weeks and the garden is pretty lush right now, in mid-July, when it's usually on the ropes as we head in to the driest, hottest part of the year.  Above, the reddish pink flower in the foreground is knautia macedonica.  The tall pink on the right is a thalictrum.  The Japanese painted ferns have colonized the Gothic planter on the patio, an example of nature sweeping aside (gently) my idea of a planting scheme, and proposing a better one.

It's coneflower week in the garden, apparently.  Yes, they are common, but they always remind me of the Midwest.  I'm happy to step outside and see them each morning.

In the front garden the coneflowers are mingling with the blue blooms of hydrangea macrophylla 'Dooley'.   I used to take this hydrangea for granted, but after no flowers the last two years I'm happy that the inevitable late spring cold spell didn't doom the flower buds this year.

Big Yellow

I've wanted to grow rudbeckia maxima for a couple years, for the height as much as the cool name.  That's it in the middle of the photo above.  I saw a couple member-grown pots of it at my garden club's plant sale last year so I bought them all.  They stayed small last year and were overgrown by the asters and other tall perennials in this bed.  I kind of forgot about them and figured they were goners after the green wave engulfed them.  I was happy to see them come back strong this year.  There are a few in this bed but one has ambition to live up to its name.

Close-up of the maxima at eye-level.

It looks great with the 'Raspberry Delight' monarda.  Maybe the other rudbeckia maximas will poke their heads up high next year and make a show of it.

Pine Barrens Hike

I had the chance to go on a guided plant hike in the NJ Pine Barrens yesterday, led by the incredible Janet Novak of the Delaware Valley NARGS chapter.  I've wanted to dive into the Pine Barrens since I read John McPhee's book 25 years ago, but had never gotten around to it in 11 years of living in NJ.  Neighbor Ray and my 9-year old botanist (above, with beaver stump) made a long, humid day out of it.

We started at Pakim Pond in the Brendan Byrne State Forest in south Jersey.  We shuffled around the mucky edge of the small pond on boardwalks and pine needle-covered paths.  The acid sandy soil is host to carnivorous plants, ferns, a few orchids, pitch pine, blackjack oak, and a wide range of ericaceous shrubs, including the high bush blueberries that we snacked on as we walked.

I've come to think of pitcher plants as rare, fussy, expensive and hip (lately), but here they were in the wild, growing at the wet edges of the pond.

Here's the super-famous curly grass fern, a really tiny thing.  Note my errant finger in the photo. 

Each hummock in the pond was a little garden.

We moved on next to Webb's Mill, a bog that looked like an impressionist painting yesterday.

Pitcher plants, sundews, bladderwort...Monet, right?  I felt like a kid.

Pitcher plant and compatriots.

More bog beauty

Incredible things were everywhere.  I took too many photos and inevitably failed to capture the excitement of this site.

Dwarf pines growing in sand just outside the Warren Grove Bombing Range

Dwarf pine

The last stop of the day was at Bill Smith's garden in Warren Grove.  We walked around the corner and found this 10' x 30' raised bog garden in full bloom.  Bill is growing many of the same plants that we'd seen growing wild in the local bogs, but what floored us were the pitcher plants.  I had that feeling that I have in front of a masterpiece in a museum: overwhelmed by the combination of beauty and skill.

Gorgeous containers lined the raised bog bed.

Another of the many, many saracennias

A mini masterpiece.   The yellow is bog asphodel.

Red + Blue= Wow

These guys looked hungry.

This dude survived 5 hours of plants, plants, plants with Ray and me.  He had a well-deserved burger followed by a nap on the ride home.

That 'Whoa!' Moment

I rounded the corner of the garage to head out back to the garden on Saturday and let out an audible exclamation when I saw the honeysuckle.  I hadn't realized how large it had gotten until it flowered.  The fence above is six feet tall and the honeysuckle is trying for more.

I guess it liked the recent 3" of rain followed by three days above 90 degrees.  I'm glad somebody did...

Helleboricide?

After a couple very unseasonal warm spells in late March, it was 12 degrees last Sunday morning. I was horrified to find all of the hellebores, including this gorgeous purple one in front of the house, face down on the cold ground.  They stayed that way for a couple days and I wondered if that was it for hellebore blooms this year.

By midweek the stems had started to perk up one by one, rising off the canvas like knocked down boxers ready for more.

Friday morning's snow was kind of pretty, although unwelcome.

The same hellebore is covered today, like many of its brethren, as the weather early next week looks anything but pretty.

When can we get off this rollercoaster?

Yellow Constellation

Even on the dark days of February, the winter jasmine, jasminum nudiflorum, lights up the deck. It's planted at the base of one of the deck support columns, about 8' below this level.  Over the years we've trained it on the trellises under the deck.  It's quietly putting on quite a show now.

This jasmine is quite possibly the best $2 I ever spent.

Mini Fall Color

As most of the alpines in the troughs go to sleep for the winter, there are still little bits of color and interest.  Above is dryas octopetala.  Fingers crossed that it blooms next year.

Androsace sarmentosa.  Imagine wallpaper in this pattern.

A baby sedum sieboldii (red, lower left) and sprawling dracocephalum argunense Fuji Blue (the thin orange foliage)

Saracennia, of course.