Garden Update Five Years On by Susan Harris

Since ripping out the turfgrass in my new townhouse garden in 2012, I’m still waiting for the turfless garden to look DONE, like Evelyn Hadden’s new garden seems to have done in barely a season.

Here you see the front garden in late May, after the azaleas were done. The evergreens on the outside are barely growing at all. Wish I were more patient about them but that’s never been my strong point – in gardening or in life.

Last year’s new perennials are taking their sweet time, too. Who doesn’t love Amsonia hubrichtii – and wish they could buy them full-grown already? I recently added some Little Bluestem ‘The Blues’ to fill up the border and they looked good immediately, however short.

Thankfully my favorite volunteers are going strong and because I’ve massed them over the years, they have a real impact – Rose Campion and Pink Evening Primrose.

Vigorous as always is the groundcover Sedum takesimense lining the path. Every visitor asks about it.

Sun-tolerant Coleuses have been outstanding in these containers in recent years but they look better than ever with a new skirt of Sedum ‘Angelina’ creeping down the sides. Who knew these seeming opposites could share a pot so happily – the thirsty Coleus with the dry-loving Sedum? Maybe adaptability should be added to plant descriptions.

The Coleus on the right is suffering, though the Sedum sarmentosum is cascading like a champ. Any guesses what’s eating the Coleus?

Another favorite with visitors is this Iresine ‘Blazing Lime.’ Love the rhubarby stems! I’m growing a redish Iresine potted up in a sunnier location and it’s wilting by mid-day. I’m wishing I’d done something like this instead in the pots.

From the house this is my view out front, still dominated by parked cars. The ‘Emerald Green’ Arborvitaes may not be growing but the Rudbeckias have filled in, at least.

Here in the back yard there’s more S. takesimsense (because no lawn, y’all) and this year I’m going a bit New-Dutch Wave with the addition of short grasses, like this Mexican Feather Grass. They filled in around the asters, which don’t look like much in the early season.

This week the Echinacea purpureas look so fabulous, I’m giving them a close-up.  Someone told me this is a short-lived plant but please let that be wrong! My patch is finally (almost) as large as I want.

Trying my patience in a good way are the trees I added to my back garden in recent months – two Japanese maples, two Redbuds and a fast-growing ‘Royal Purple’ Smoke Tree (or Bush). It’ll take a while for them to achieve their full glory but they were all beautiful on day one, so I’m a happy gardener.

For these last photos I drove the Beltway back to my old neighborhood on July 4th – because they do July 4th Parades like nobody else. On my way to the parade route I couldn’t resist stopping to stealthily shoot this garden and mentally thanking the unknown gardener for brightening my day.

Garden Update Five Years On originally appeared on Garden Rant on July 21, 2017.

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The 11th Garden Cruise Club

Our tenth garden cruise to benefit the Greening of Detroit was this past Sunday. As usual, I spent the day at home. My garden is on tour every year as I so enjoy meeting and talking to everyone who stops by. And I enjoy talking to those people who have taken our tour year after [...]

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Visiting Seed Savers Exchange

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On a perfect summer day last week, Mike and I made the trip to Decorah, Iowa to visit the Seed Savers Exchange. I’ve heard about Seed Savers Exchange for many years, but since our trips to Iowa were often very short, we just didn’t have time to include this in our itinerary. Not so now!

 

Seed Savers Exchange Mission:

We conserve and promote America’s culturally diverse but endangered garden and food crop heritage for future generations by collecting, growing, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants.

 

 

 

The very charming Lillian Goldman Visitors Center was our first stop. I probably should have taken a photo of the inside of this building, with walls filled with their seed offerings and various gardening books and tools, it was a little bit of heaven! I purchased several packets of seed and off we went to explore the test gardens.

“Diane’s Garden” is certainly a highlight!  Surrounded by a white fence with a gorgeous red barn as the backdrop, this garden is packed with flowering plants, vegetables and herbs. Many are labeled (and I have a feeling the few labels I couldn’t find have been engulfed by the plants!) and makes it easy to go inside and purchase additional seeds.

Seed Savers Exchange hosts many special events throughout the year and on the day we visited they were preparing for an evening concert.

These Heritage Farm poppies struck a cord with me. For many years we would visit a nearby neighbor who would grow these beautiful flowers and then share their seed pods with us. Their clear pink flowers aren’t too long lasting, but the strong seed pods seem to make up for this.

It was nice to see the plants being grown in a garden setting as well as in more rigid trial beds. It is much easier to appreciate how these will behave when grown at home when you can see how they interact with their neighbors.

In addition to the gardens, there are miles of trails for exploring the property.  I won’t lie, it was hot and I only had sandals on, so our hiking was limited. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the folks at Seed Savers Exchange even allow visitors to bring leashed dogs on their visit.  If you are traveling with a pet there are no excuses to not stop by here!

 

Our bit of walking did take us to the historic orchard on the property. The Historic Orchard has over 900 varieties of apple trees and the newly planted Amy Goldman Heritage Orchard featuring Midwestern apple varieties. These apples don’t look like your grocery store apples. They are different colors and sizes and the Seed Savers Exchange serves as a sort of “vault” for these historic varieties.

Just outside the charming town of Decorah, we spent about an hour and a half here but could easily have stayed longer with better shoes and cooler temperatures.  Visiting Seed Savers Exchange was a great first stop to our day and we were happy to spend time enjoying the restaurants and breweries which also call Decorah home.

Ready to plan your visit? Go ahead, enter this in your phone and find out just how long it will take you to get here.

Address: 3074 North Winn Rd Decorah, IA 52101

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Buffalo’s first green roof, ten years later by Elizabeth Licata

The roof now

Buffalo is not landscape architecture central. Aside from a large Olmsted park system (that’s been adulterated in spots), I find many WNY public landscapes uninspired. Private gardens are the thing here; almost 500 of them will be open to the public next week.

However, I do have a favorite local landscape architect. I’ve written before about Joy Kuebler’s forward-thinking public and private garden designs. We worked together on an unusual Show House exterior landscape in 2009, but, before that, in 2007, I visited Joy’s house to see my first green roof. It was also the first to be installed in WNY.

The 200 square foot roof is over her office, a separate building behind her house. The October installation was quite an event, with local green industry professionals and students invited to witness it. A company from Pennsylvania (Lichtenfels) provided the complex structure, as no local nursery had the training to do this (at that time). In fact, when Joy told people she was putting in a green roof, many assumed that she was referring to the paint color. Go here for a detailed technical description of the installation. As my small image (above) shows (go to her website for bigger ones) the roof was very pretty the following summer, with Russian sage, grasses, and various sedums.

This year, I returned for the first time to see the ten-year-old structure. There have been changes, to be sure, but many of the original plants have survived (some seeding themselves in the yard as well as on the roof). The Russian sage and Karl Foerster grass did not survive the first big drought (the roof is never watered) in 2013, and have been replaced by yarrow and Japanese palm sedge, but the red and yellow sedums are thriving. There are also grape hyacinths in spring (snowdrops, which love moisture, did not fare well).

We discussed a couple aspects of the roof:

Weeds: These are really not much of a problem due to the dry conditions. The roof is cleared once of year of maple seedlings (you can see it’s surrounded by trees), but many ground weeds are simply not supported.

Planting: Fall is the best time, because of the moisture, but the plugs have to be tiny—about three inches—because of the grid structure.

Pitch: At 7:12, the roof has the maximum pitch advised.

Joy Kuebler’s garden has some other cool features; this water feature was designed for the 2009 Show House project.

There are now a few more green roofs in Buffalo, though not nearly as many as many as I’d like. You’re far more likely to see solar panels these days. Too bad, because this one demonstrates how beautiful and easy a residential green roof can be.

Buffalo’s first green roof, ten years later originally appeared on Garden Rant on July 20, 2017.

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Give Your Property A Lasting Impression

Have you ever stopped and really observed the front entrance and surroundings of your commercial property? If so, what are your initial thoughts? Is it appealing? Would it make you want to explore more? Is the landscape neat and well kept? First impressions are lasting impressions.

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What is “cute”? by Thomas Christopher

The other day, a visiting friend gasped when he saw a rat run across a corner of the suburban Connecticut yard where I garden during the week.  I shuddered when he told me.  I could guess what had drawn the creature:  we have a henhouse full of geriatric chickens who are not the neatest of creatures.  Indeed, I found the mouth of a burrow in one end of their run, and I took measures to evict the burrower.  I didn’t hesitate; I know that if the rat proliferates, the neighbors rightfully will complain and the chickens will have to go.

Yet later, as I was pondering this visitation, I spotted a chipmunk sitting in the crotch of the sourwood tree (Oxydendron  arboreum) that tops the tangle of bare-knuckled perennials my wife and I grow in front of our house.  And the unfairness of the situation struck me.  Why is it that the chipmunk, also a rodent, passes as cute, while rats are almost universally hated?

In fact, most of the charges leveled at rats also apply to chipmunks.  For example, chipmunks are disease vectors:  out west they are carriers of plague and here in the east they are among the most dangerous reservoirs of Lyme disease.  Depending on where you live, they may also host leptospirosis, salmonella, hantavirus, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, encephalitis, and, of course, rabies.

Chipmunks are less prone to invade our houses, it is true, though they will occasionally gnaw their way into attics.  If cornered, chipmunks, like rats, will bite.

What’s sure is that chipmunks are far more serious than rats as garden pests.  Chipmunks, along with squirrels, are demons for looting new plantings of small bulbs such as crocuses, and like rats, chipmunks are burrowers, creating tunnels that may damage the roots of desirable plants.

When I posed this question to my wife (a level-headed scientist), she responded that chipmunks are cute and that rats, with their pointy noses and hairless tails, are creepy.  That, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.  I had a girlfriend once (yes, before I was married) who was also a scientist and who had adopted a retired laboratory rat.  She adored this creature, who was smart and playful and clearly was attached to her.  I must admit, though, that I never took to it.

I have a neighbor, a retired college professor, whose backyard is shaded by a row of enormous Norway spruces.  One of these became the favored roosting spot for a flock of black vultures.  The vultures were also messy, covering the terrace below the tree with excrement; I think that the professor, a man in his 80’s also found the constant scrutiny of scavengers ominous.  At any rate, he began to annoy the birds with a BB gun, persisting until, after several months, they moved on to another, distant tree.  Would the college professor have responded the same way had his visitors been a flock of bald eagles?

What is “cute”? originally appeared on Garden Rant on July 17, 2017.

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What does poison ivy look like?

The post What does poison ivy look like? appeared first on Miss Smarty Plants.

What a way to start a blog post, eh?  “What does poison ivy look like?” has been heard a few times around here lately.

We are clearing out an area of old trees, shrubs and underbrush and my lack of familiarity with some of these plants is prompting this question.

 

So, what does poison ivy look like?

• Leaves of three, let them be… Leaves of five, let them thrive.  This little rhyme is keeping me in check these days with my poison ivy “sightings.”  Look for plants with leaves in groups of three as an initial indicator. Not to get too technical, but I have to put in here that technically these are leaflets, comprising a single leaf.
• As a vine, look for hairy roots that are holding on tightly to a tree or wall.

This plant, Virginia Creeper, is the plant most often confused with poison ivy. It can be a spreading plant on the ground or a climbing vine, but its five count of leaflets will help to rule it out as the cause of unwelcome itching.

The folks at GreenPal have put together this handy infographic for identifying poison ivy. It helps me to see these poisonous plants next to each other, and, even though they gross me out, the photos of how your skin looks after an encounter with poison ivy. If nothing else, the next time you hear “what does poison ivy look like?” you will be all set to help sort out the confusion.

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