Cold Climate Gardening

This spring, I had the most beautiful peonies in the world.

I was especially taken with the foliage of ‘Bev,’ the one on the far right. It was a smoky purple. The flowers were spectacular, too, but I never managed to get a photograph this year. You can see them, here, though.

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Michelle Owens is right. As soon as spring has sprung, I’m already behind. I used to think, “Oh, there’ll be plenty of time for that later.” This kind of thinking explains why I was always planting stunted seedlings in July.

And then there’s the climate. Discerning when mud season ends and spring really begins–well, that’s not always so easily discerned. This year, I think I picked the exactly right time to rake my beds. It only took me fifteen years to figure this out. The soil has to be most of the way thawed but not yet to the point where the crocuses are blooming, otherwise the rake shreds the crocuses. I’ve decided not to worry about the advice not to rake your beds too early, because you’ll expose the tender growth to freezing. If the plants can’t take the exposure, it’s time to find new plants. It seems more important to me to uncover the vole runways as soon as possible, so that vole predators have an easier time whittling down the rodent population. And a raked bed makes the wintered-over weeds more visible. Of course, if everything was mulched as it should be, there wouldn’t be any wintered-over weeds–but the voles would be so much more comfortable. All right, I’ll confess: it wasn’t because of voles that there is no mulch on many of my beds. It’s because I just didn’t get around to it.

Of course, figuring out the best time to rake is only part of it.

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This time of the year, it’s amazing what a difference a day can make. Thursday, snow on the ground. I couldn’t have taken these photos on Thursday because these plants were still buried under snow. Friday, snow had melted, but nothing had bloomed. Yesterday (Saturday) the sun was shining and I had snowdrops blooming in three different locations. These first ones are ‘Sam Arnott,’ purchased from Odyssey Bulbs, who assured that they are the real thing. (Apparently there are impostors lurking in the trade.) But I remember them being much taller last year. This year, they give the appearance of being buried too deeply, as if (speaking anthropomorphically) they are buried up to their chests instead of their shins. I suspect our wacky winter may have something to do with this. The double snowdrops in the next photo have the same problem.

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In a dark sort of way, I was inspired by Don’s garden tour to give you one of my own. Both of our gardens have been plagued by drought, but judging from his photos, he is able to water his garden, which is never as good as plentiful rain from the sky, but helps a lot. I can’t water on a regular basis because we have a shallow well and we put a high demand on its resources. Consequently a walk through my garden is a painful exercise. Here we have a wilting lilac bush accompanied by wilting swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata).

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If you have a rash or other skin problem that you think might be plant related, trying using the search engine at the Botanical Dermatology Database. I checked out my family’s old enemy Pastinaca sativa (aka wild parsnip), and learned a few things. First of all, wild parsnip and cultivated parsnip are the same thing, and you can get the blisters and subsequent skin pigmentation from either. Secondly, if your skin is wet (and whose isn’t on a hot summer day?) the reaction is more likely. Third, “the active spectral band for evoking phytophotodermatitis from the plant was found to be 320-360nm.” Okay, so that last part isn’t too helpful, but the other two things were good …

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One thing the internet has done for gardeners is made us all more aware of the conditions others garden in. To see the photos of narcissus and cosmos growing in warmer climates when for me it is the dead of winter continues to astound me. A couple of weeks ago, this post on an eclectic garden kind of took me aback. At the time, my area had just come out of a very dry May and was in the midst of an unseemly June heat wave. I found the fact that the eclectic gardener can normally expect only 1.21″ of rain in May just as astounding as narcissus in December. The average rainfall in May in my area is 3.55″, and we are glad to get every bit of it. This May, however, a mere 0.75″ fell to the ground. The lack of precipitation, coupled with cooler than average temperatures (we had a few nights in the low 20s F.) slowed our spring quite a bit. I think both my mock-orange and some of lilacs had poor bloom because of those hard freezes.

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Dear Kathy,*

The bladder campion is back again. This weed, Lychnis alba, always pops up in one place or another in my sunny back perennial bed. Last year this time, I moved one that had sprouted elsewhere in the back bed to my “white” garden, which had just been dug out and needed filling in. It sulked for a couple of weeks, but then began blooming vigorously (well, in the evening–it’s a night bloomer) for quite a few weeks. I then dug it out before it could set seed. This spring’s weed lychnis is already over two feet tall, and is crowding one of my coneflower plants. I have a bunch of “thugs” already covering plenty of space in the white garden (lady’s mantle, lambs’ ear, snow-in-summer, ‘Silver King’ and ‘Silver Mound’ artemisias, feverfew), so there’s no room for it there this year, and dug out it will be. But I’m sure I’ll see it again, somewhere.

A giganto farmyard verbascum has shown up near one of my shrub roses (David Austin ‘Bibi Maizoon’). It is a massive, gorgeous rosette of pale gray-green foliage that is softer than wool. Finicky Bibi suffered substantial winter kill on its canes (as she does every year) and has not been a reliable bloomer (she blooms, but her buds are droopy, or don’t open fully out of their tight cabbages), so I’m reluctant to yank out the verbascum just yet. I’m no fan of the verbascum’s flowering stalk, so if it shows up this summer (I think this may be the second year of its biennial life cycle), that will be the cue to give it the hook.

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