Cold Climate Gardening

The growing season gets a slow enough start around here that many annuals don’t really strut their stuff until September. This is a real liability for the frost-sensitive ones like cosmos. I learned to seek out early blooming varieties because the old-fashioned ones often only had two weeks of bloom before shriveling in the first frost. On the other hand, many of the spring bloomers, enjoying the return of cool evenings and plentiful rain, make a comeback. This includes pansies, foxgloves, mountain bluets, and catmint.

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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. speciousumAfter 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.

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Odyssey Bulbs has long been a favorite of mine for unusual bulbs (including unusual varieties of colchicum) that you’re not likely to find elsewhere–not even at Brent and Becky’s. I recently learned it was featured on Martha Stewart’s tv show on January 22nd. If, like me, you missed it, you can still view it on marthastewart.com or go straight to Odyssey, where they’ve conveniently profiled those selections. The video clip makes it sound like they can all be planted this spring, but I don’t think that’s the case with the crocus. I am probably shooting myself in the foot telling you about my favorite micro-bulb nursery before I’ve placed my own order, but I …

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Unseasonably warm autumn
Thanks to our unseasonably warm autumn, many of September’s flowers are still lingering around. We just had our first frost on Saturday morning (13 Oct 30.4F;-0.8C) and the leaves haven’t really turned color yet, and usually by now they are almost all off the trees.
Cut back and came back
I had cut the mallow and yarrow back and they are reblooming. The phlox was deadheaded and sprouted four blossoms from the original stem. This particular phlox is blooming in a stand of ‘Bright Eyes,’ and I presume it is a self-sown seedling. It is taller than the surrounding phlox and a deeper pink, and I think I like it better, so I am going to see if I can encourage it.

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I suppose there exists, somewhere on this planet, an ornamental gardener who has never grown a plant that they had been given from someone else’s garden, but it is hard for me to imagine it. Before I even knew myself to be a gardener, when I was just a kid, I tagged along behind the lady next door as she planted annuals, despite the fact that our game balls were always flying into her garden, and she was always yelling at us, and I thought she hated all us kids. I don’t remember the conversation between us that day, but I probably pestered her with questions without realizing it, because she gave me half a dozen dwarf marigolds from her flat to plant in my own yard.

I wasn’t even out of grade school yet, and I had my first passalong plant, sort of.

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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.

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