Cold Climate Gardening

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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The other day I was looking for a website that had a good tutorial on how to start a blog along with a description of the major blogging programs. I googled the phrase “how to start a blog” and was really amazed at how many of the hits were business sites. Blog as sales tool, dontcha know? I don’t have any problem with a business owner publishing a blog providing information in his or her field of expertise and enterprise. Two come to mind right off the bat: The Clearwater Garden Journal and Scenic Nursery. Real people writing about what they know, and hoping, if you’re in the area, that you’ll buy from them, too.

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As you can imagine, when a garden is neglected for a significant length of time, some of the weeds take on gigantic proportions. Especially on a psychological level, it helps quite a bit to pull these up all over the garden, before concentrating on any particular area. They take up so much space that the garden immediately looks better–more civilized–when they are gone. And that encourages the gardener not to give up in despair.

I was particularly anxious to root up what I think of as public enemy number one: Pastinaca sativa, also known as wild parsnip. Not only does this non-native weed spread rapidly through seed dispersal (think dill or Queen Anne’s lace, both in the same family), but if you get its juice on your bare skin and the skin gets exposed to the sun, it will burn you, raising blisters and discoloring the skin for months after the blisters heal. For those of us who like big words, this process is called phytophotodermatitis.

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This is my purple-leaved smokebush, Cotinus coggygria ‘Nordine Red.’ I purchased it in 1996 as a small potted plant, and it has always been a strong grower. However, in the last five years or so, branches have started breaking off for no apparent reason. Let me restate that. The branches that break off always look like someone applied a strong downward pressure to break them off. When I discover them broken, it’s usually a day or two after we’ve had a fairly strong breeze, but certainly nothing gale force, nothing that damages any other plant. So to me, it doesn’t seem like it is wind damage, but that is the closest proximate cause that I can discern. The branches that break off don’t show any signs of disease or decay. At least one of the branches has rooted where it touched the ground, and that’s one reason why I’ve left some of the others. (The other reason is I just didn’t get around to cutting them off.) If anyone knows why these branches break off, or can send a link my way that explains it, I’d sure appreciate it.

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This is a photo of my beloved crocus bank. The driveway runs roughly east to west, downhill all the way. On the south side of the driveway, the lawn runs down fairly steeply to the driveway, forming a bank that I have planted quite densely with crocuses. The crocuses are just getting started, but it is obvious that depredations occurred over the winter under cover of snow. Voles. This bank faces north and, with snow shovelled off the driveway piled on it, is one of the last places to lose its snow cover. Although I have trouble with voles all over the property, they had never found the crocus bank before.

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If there is a rose in your future, you may want to consult the Purdue Plant and Pest Diagnostic Laboratory’s list of blackspot-resistant roses. As the article states, gardeners”could increase their leisure time and decrease their fungicide expenses by using disease resistant and tolerant roses.” There are so many different rose cultivars out there, why ask for trouble by planting one that’s prone to disease?

Sigh. As soon as I wrote that, I realized there’s probably dozens of rose aficionados out there who could make a cogent argument for planting a disease-prone rose. But that’s not me, okay? I once thought all roses had to be sprayed to a fare-thee-well to amount to anything, and it put me …

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