I join Helen Yoest of Gardening With Confidence this week to talk about Colchicums on Web Talk Radio. They will be blooming in about a month, you know.

You might think after a 26F freeze there would be nothing left blooming in the garden, but you would be wrong. The colchicums continue to shoot up new blossoms. Pictured above is Colchicum autumnale ‘Album’.

A vigorous but nondescript colchicum lines the shrubbery and looks fine from the house.

These are the mongrel colchicums. They grow well in grass and make a good show from a distance.

Colchicum speciosum 'Album' peeks out from hosta leaves.

'Lilac Wonder' colchicum blooms in a mass of catmint leaves.

Colchicum autumnale 'Alboplenum' looks like a carpet of stars.

My one and only chrysanthemum, an unnamed passalong.

Mysterious Blue Flower Hanging Out with the Vegetables

Mysterious blue flower showed up in the vegetable garden. (Click to enlarge)

The Johnny-jump-ups are thriving in the cooler weather. The tall border phlox, especially the white one that came with the house, has just enough bloom that I hesitate to cut it down. The frost ruined the opened blooms of black-eyed Susans, dianthus, and flowering tobacco, but new blossoms have opened since then. I appreciate the stubborn hangers-on, the ones who are willing to give it one last shot. But I know the party’s over. Time to clean up.

Inspired by the words of Elizabeth Lawrence, “We can have flowers nearly every month of the year,” Carol of May Dreams Gardens started Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. On the 15th of every month, garden bloggers from all over the world publish what is currently blooming in their gardens, and leave a link in Mr. Linky and the comments of May Dreams Gardens.

Many gardeners complain that it is difficult to place colchicums in the garden because of their unusual growing cycle, in which their leaves grow in the spring, die down in the summer, and then the flowers emerge in the fall. The colchicum bed at Montrose Gardens in Hillsborough, North Carolina, pictured above, contained many colchicum design ideas that could be implemented in any garden.

Approaching the bed from this direction, we are actually leaving the house and gardens proper and moving toward the entrance gate.

Colchicums star in this bed, but the other plants were carefully chosen to work with them. (Click on the photo to enlarge)

Different hues of pink and green play off each other.

The black grass makes the white flowers stand out.

Colchicum autumnale var. alboplenum stands out in a bed of dark ajuga

The hellebores are background plants now, but were in their glory when the colchicums were leafing out.

Colchicums are hard to love when they're going dormant.

Even I, the self-appointed colchicum evangelist, must concede that they are not at their best at this stage. What you may not have noticed in the Montrose photos above, but which I could see at the time, was the presence of hardy geranium foliage. Hardy geraniums are making lovely mounds of greenery, spangled with blooms, just when the colchicums are at their worst. Depending on which hardy geraniums you plant, you can easily camouflage the waning colchicum leaves with some lusty geraniums. And the geraniums are usually due for a cutback shortly before the colchicums bloom. It’s a win-win situation that I first read about in an essay by Brian Bixley in Essays on Gardening in a Cold Climate. (Catchy title, yes?)

I was very happy to find these colchicums blooming at Montrose Gardens. Since so many of these southern plants were unfamiliar, stumbling across these flowering bulbs was sort of like meeting up with your next door neighbor when traveling abroad. I was pleased to see that the same siting and planting techniques that I have used to incorporate colchicums in my garden were also used at Montrose Gardens, though with a southern plant palette.

Colchicums: isn’t it time you planted some?

My first colchicum is up but hasn’t pinked up yet.

This is Colchicum byzantinum.

Did you know I am a colchicum evangelist, spreading the good news of colchicums wherever I go? For some of my earlier messages, check out the archives.

Poppies, peonies, and iris: the three Grandes Dames of June

In a cold climate, the gardening season is shorter and more compressed. By the time the spring flowers get going, boom! it’s summer. Consider this: on May 29th we had our last frost. The next day it hit 80F (27C), which we reckon to be summery, and a mere nine days later it was 92F (33C). So anything you wait until danger of frost is passed to plant gets hit with summer before it knows which way is up. That doesn’t happen every year, but it shows why we often have what other people consider spring flowers blooming with summer flowers.

Around here, there are three flowers synonymous with June: Oriental poppies, peonies, and several kinds of iris. I think of them as the three grandes dames of spring. They are all “look at me” flowers, reliable plants that have been in gardens–and memories–for over a century. I’m going to feature the grandes dames in my photos and just list the rest of what’s blooming. I’m trying out a new feature of WordPress that’s supposed to create a gallery of photos. It’s not working quite as expected, but I’m calling it good enough for today. Hover over each photo to see its title; click on each for a larger image.

Also Blooming Now

• feverfew
• catmint
• giant yellow scabious (just starting)
• ‘Wanderin’ Wind’ rose (my Griffith Buck rose)
• German catchfly (Lychnis viscaria ‘Plena’)
• ‘Sooty’ sweet William
• perennial flax
• bloody cranesbill
• various columbines, including the native one in our field
• maiden pinks
• ‘Joan Elliot’ clustered bellflower
• garden heliotrope
• ‘Miller’s Crimson’ primrose
• Lady’s mantle
• snowberry bush (very tiny)
• native rose (probably Rosa virginiana, photo here)
• dames’ rocket
• ‘Black Stockings’ thalictrum
• ‘Concord Grape’ spiderwort
• pink foxgloves
• Johnny-jump-ups
• forget-me-nots (on the decline)
• mockorange shrub

Check out all the Garden Bloggers Bloom Day posts here.

These plants don’t look too happy, but I’m not sure if it’s the cold that put them in a snit, or a viral infection. Left to right: Daylily 2E, Colchicum giganteum, Daylily 4B, C. ‘Harlequin,’ Daylily 4C, C. speciousum

After nearly two weeks of warm, frost-free weather in April, my garden got socked with a 22 degree (-6C) night. I would like to think these poor plants are suffering from frost damage, but I know streaking in the leaves is a symptom of many plant viruses.

Please, faithful readers, if any of you have seen plants with this kind of leaf damage and know what it is, I’d love to benefit from your expertise. If you click on either of the above close-ups, you will get a much larger image that may make diagnosis easier.

The first Colchicum byzantinum of the season

I confess I’ve had my nose pretty close to the grindstone lately, but I decided to take a brief stroll around the house yesterday.

What! Colchicums already? What day is it, anyway? What! September 4th? Already?

Last year I spotted my first one on September 1st. In 2005, it was September 5th. And they were about as far along as these three clumps pictured, which were taken yesterday. So the colchicums are right on time. It’s just me who’s in denial. If you’re a cold climate gardener, this is when you should be planting or moving perennials and shrubs. Don’t dawdle. But if it’s as dry where you are as it is by me, you’re probably waiting and hoping for rain before you get started. Dawdling on account of drought. It’s been happening a lot this year.

This is what greeted my eyes Friday (Nov. 3) morning: the first snow this season that remained on the ground instead of melting on contact. After the freak snowstorms in Buffalo and elsewhere, it’s rather yawn-inspiring, I know, but it does help one turn one’s face like flint toward the coming storms. No more remaining in denial, telling myself surely there will be a few more good days to get my yard-long “things left to do” list whittled down to size.

I’m standing on the porch, but the photo above is what I see through the kitchen door. We’re looking south onto the main play area for the family. This is about as level as it gets around here–and it is uncommonly uncluttered. The hundred-foot driveway runs along the house, and further to the left of the big clumps of uh, not-yet-cut-down perennials, the driveway turns into a parking area. By the way, we don’t own this entire expanse of cropped meadow. There is a conifer partially obscuring the house across the street, which is planted pretty close to the corner of our property, so some of the lawn you see here belongs to the neighbors.

Turning to my right, I look to the western hillside.

See that orange-looking clump at the far right? That’s a stand of larch trees (Larix laricina), also known as tamarack. They are a kind of conifer that is not evergreen. Their needles turn this glowing color and then all fall off. They grow in full sun, in areas that are moist to wet, so we can guess that the soil is poorly draining where they grow naturally. You may have noticed that the hillside is bathed in sunshine, while it is rather gloomy around the house.

That’s because we live in a valley, and at approximately 8 o’clock in the morning, the sun is just coming over the ridge.

Zoey is always complaining about garden bloggers not showing the big picture–images of the garden as a whole. Most of the time, the long views of my garden are filled with the detritus of childhood: play equipment large and small, the odd mudpie making operation, plus a lot of things that look like junk to everyone else, but are a crucial part of the latest “make-believe” game on the part of the little people. I am just about blind to most of it, except when taking photos. Since we had just finished fall clean-up, the landscape was relatively uncluttered, and some relatively uncluttered photos were possible, though I couldn’t resist a little cropping.

Sunday, October 8th, was a gorgeous autumn day, sunny and warm. I decided to go up the hill for a walk in the woods, camera in hand, and you get to share the results. (Be forewarned: this is an even longer than usual post.) But first, a little bit about where we’re going. Our family lives on 14 acres. It is a narrow slice of hillside, with our house near the road at the bottom of the hill and our land going uphill for about half a mile. Once upon a time, it was all forest. We figure our house was built sometime in the 1880s, so that’s probably about the time the trees were cleared for pasture, though it’s always been marginal land for grazing: not especially fertile acid clay, with a high water table that leaves many areas soggy during years of average rainfall. The forest has been growing back as the occupant before us (and maybe the one before him) gradually stopped mowing the areas furthest away from the house, though we still have a field of about 4 to 5 acres.

The field gets mowed yearly with a brush mower, which is also used to keep paths through the woods cleared enough so a suburban girl like me can pick her way without carrying a machete or getting lost. The path starts out in what I call the Secret Garden, which is an area closer to the house that reverted to trees early because it’s clearly too wet to mow. I have dreams of turning it into a native plant garden, but for now, that’s mostly all it is, an idea that, maybe someday . . . After meandering through the Secret Garden, the path starts going up, and threads through the hedgerow alongside the field before joining the woods proper.

Don’t these berries look ornamental? And the birds love them. Such is the recipe for disaster, for these are rose hips of the invasive Rosa multiflora. This shrub is growing on the bank of the seasonal brook that borders the northern side of our property, right before it narrows and becomes easy to cross at the top of a hill. As you cross the brook at this point, you can look back down the slope and watch the water spill over the rocks. I used to dream of sitting on a bridge and enjoying the view, which I would enhance with ferns and native flowers planted into the steep bank. But it took a mere decade for this little glen to fill up with the thorn-infested brambles, which I’ll have to remove before I can ever realize my dream, and I’ll have to be eternally vigilant ever after. Don of An Iowa Garden has been working on eradicating this shrub, and it sounds exhausting.

After crossing the brook I continue to walk alongside it, stopping every couple of yards to disentangle myself from the thorns, until the brook and I part company and I enter the poplar grove.

Populus tremuloides is known as popple, small-toothed aspen, and, most commonly, quaking aspen, but we just call it poplar.According to Janine Benyus, writing in The Field Guide to Wildlife Habitats of the Eastern United States, poplar is a pioneer tree, “coming in after a disturbance and preparing the ground for yet another kind of forest.” Poplars are regarded as weeds by those who evaluate trees for their commercial value, but their white trunks and fluttering leaves are beautiful, and I am glad to have a stand of them. Not much besides asters seems to grow beneath their dappled shade, probably because the earth is knobby with their roots.We’re going to walk down this path through the poplar grove towards that red gleam in the distance. (If you can’t see the spot of red I’m talking about, try clicking on the photo for a closer view. It’s just about in the dead center of the photo, but I have to admit it’s pretty small.)

This is the brilliant red that was drawing my eye. Believe it or not, this is called gray dogwood (Cornus racemosa), but that’s because there’s another shrubby dogwood that has red stems, while the stems on this one are–you guessed it–gray. What I really like about this shrub is that it holds its white berries on red stems, as in the photo below:

As a matter of fact, another name for this shrub is red-panicled dogwood, but that is kind of a mouthful. In some years, the leaves drop before the berries are eaten, and the contrast of the berries with their stems against a thicket of gray bark is quite dramatic. Moving beyond the dogwood, I enter the woods proper and walk past a huge fallen evergreen that I nicknamed “The Playground Tree” for its ability to become a pirate ship, an army tank, a rocket ship, or anything else massive and climbable. But while it served the elder half of my offspring well, it is now too decomposed to amuse the younger ones much. Further up the path, we come to what is for me one of the main reasons for a traipse up the hill in autumn:
These are blossoms of the native witch hazel, Hamamelis virginiana. The first autumn we lived here, my husband took me up in these woods. He was obviously looking for something, but I couldn’t figure out what. Finally, he stopped and said, “Look up.” There before us was a rather large witch hazel completely spangled with the feathery blossoms. I was enchanted. It looked like stars had fallen and gotten caught in the branches.

Every year I walk into the woods this time of year, looking for that special tree, but I never find it. Most years, it seems, the main flush of witch hazel bloom occurs while the leaves are still on the trees. But also, I think, that particular witch hazel grew on the neighbors’ land. Still, the romance of it calls to me every year.

Another interesting thing about witch hazel is that last year’s seeds are dispersed at the same time as this year’s flowers. Here you can see seed capsules and flowers together:

Eventually the path through the witch hazel grove bears right and joins the main path, which starts at the house and goes through the field, straight up the hill. The main path forks and circles around to rejoin itself.

At this point I have taken the right fork and have gone about a third of the way around the loop. In late spring this area is carpeted with the native cranesbill (Geranium maculatum), but what strikes me today is the brilliant, almost fluorescent green of the beech leaves (Fagus grandiflora), sharply contrasting with the yellows and russets of the other trees. The beech leaves will eventually fade to tan and remain on the tree most of the winter. I find this annoying–don’t ask me for a rational reason. I feel like autumn is the season for the leaves to color and drop, and in winter the trees should be bare. The beech is just procrastinating and ruining the spare elegance of winter. It just looks messy. After I make my way down this section of the path, I’ll be turning left and starting back downhill.

Here’s a little jewel in the leaf litter. I’m pretty sure it’s Selfheal or Heal-all (Prunella vulgaris), though in most pictures the flowers aren’t such a saturated hue. It’s not a native plant. In fact, I found the most information about it in Weeds of the Northeast by Richard Uva, Joseph Neal, and Joseph DiTomaso. Presumably it is a straggler from the days when this area was pasture.

We’re almost all the way around the loop, and fast approaching the fork that will join us back to the main path. Hmmm, what have we here? It appears to have been erected by the juvenile form of

Homo sapiens. This is probably what my nine-year-old son was talking about when he said he was building a hut in the woods.

The path moves more steeply downhill, and I have to pay attention to my footing as I retrace my steps. I pass the beginning of the path to the witch hazel grove, but I keep to the main path, for another romantic destination lies up ahead.

This red-berried shrub is a native; do you recognize it? I had to look it up when I got home, only to discover I’d planted five of them just this spring. Sheesh. Since this is a fruiting female, there must be a male shrub nearby, but I didn’t see it. But male and female winterberries is not what I meant by romantic.

This is romantic:

I know, you just can’t see it. This log is under an oak tree, and from this log there used to be two views: one straight ahead, looking over our field to the house and then the hill beyond, and one to the right, a view of distant hills. (I said “used to be” because saplings have grown up and obscured both views. I’ll have to see about getting this remedied.) Many years ago I wanted a bench to take in this view with my beloved. I’m not sure whether we couldn’t afford a bench, or the price just seemed disproportionate to the quality of the benches we found, but, instead of buying a bench and carrying it up the hill, my husband chose to walk to the top of the hill. He cut down the widest diameter tree he could find, and cut a bench-sized length from the bole. Then, with the help of our oldest boys, he rolled, heaved, and otherwise finagled it down to the base of the oak tree, and somehow halved it lengthwise, to make a bench. We walked up the hill and sat on that bench many a fine evening, and I’ve often enjoyed the views with friends as well. But as the log decayed it became less comfortable to sit on, and for other reasons my husband and I no longer walked up here together. But I think I will have to figure out exactly which saplings need to be thinned out, and perhaps I can find a rustic, lightweight bench to replace the log with. This is a grassy area hedged in with shrubs and saplings, and gives the feel of a sheltered room with a great view:

See what I mean? What looks like a lawn in the front of our house is actually the field across the street. Beyond the field you can see a row of scattered trees that marks the brook that runs through our valley, and then the opposite hillside rises up before you. When I take people up the hill the roundabout way through the Secret Garden, and save the field for the return trip, this view always takes them by surprise, which of course I enjoy. Wild columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) blooms here in the early summer, and asters are blooming now:

This one struck me as markedly different from its brethren in its pale flowers. I’m not sure if it is a different species, or just a variation of one of the other kinds growing here in profusion. It looks more purple here than it did in the field when I snapped the picture.

The vegetable garden is at my back as I’m looking toward the opposite hill. I include this photo mostly so you can compare it with the second photo in this post, giving you a better idea of just how much the fog was obscuring. In Justin’s photo the view is a little further back, and you can see a bit of the vegetable garden on the right. The same maple is in both photos, though it is tinged orange in mine, and the same mound of Polygonum cuspidatum is visible, though in my autumn photo it looks like a heap of brown, the leaves burnt by frost. That mound of Japanese knotweed obscures the foundation of our old barn. I decide to go down the hill behind the barn to check the progress of some colchicums, but wait–what’s that noise?

You couldn’t hear it like I could, but did you see it? Look closer:

Just the neighbors, out for a Sunday drive.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes, that colchicum. It’s finally bloomed:

This white form seems to bloom much later than its pink counterparts, and much later than the other white colchicums planted in this bed. All the white colchicums that I have seem to be a very pure white, beautiful and dramatic against dark-foliaged ground covers.

That was my walk in the woods. I hope you enjoyed the scenery, and maybe even learned a little bit.