Cold Climate Gardening

She says, he says
She says: “Mom, you’d better cut that plant back. It’s blocking the entrance to the house!”
He says: “What gorgeous color! Don’t touch it! I’d be happy to inconvenience myself for that plant!”
I have this dilemma just about every year. To chop or not to chop. Many years ago, I ordered a packet of Malva sylvestris subspecies mauritiana ‘Bibor Felho’ from Thompson & Morgan. The best of the original plants attained shrub-like proportions, with blossoms three inches across. Those plants died after the first year, being more of an annual than a perennial for me, but every year since then new plants have grown from seed.

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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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Over fifteen years ago, my very first plant order had an error in it. I had ordered coral bells (Heuchera) and I was sent Heliopsis ‘Summer Sun’ instead. The mail order nursery very quickly remedied their mistake, sending me the coral bells and advising me to keep the false sunflower. Great, I thought, free plants.

Only, I really don’t care for that yellow-orange color that all the plant catalogues call “gold,” but to me looks like no jewelry, cheap or otherwise, said to contain that precious metal. Being a long-time fan of the adage, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” I tried to think what I could do to make the color more pleasing to me, and thus was born the Purple-and-Gold bed.

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Mr. Hinsley, the publisher of the Malvaceae Info site that I mentioned in my previous post, emailed me concerning the meaning of Bibor Felho, and addressed himself to other statements in my blog entry that I didn’t bring up in the email. He is better at search engine use than I am. He searched on bibor and felho individually, something that I neglected to do. He discovered that the words were quite common on Hungarian websites, so he looked them up on a Hungarian-English online dictionary and came up with ‘Purple Cloud.’ He notes, “Felho is correctly spelt, in Hungarian, with an accent on the o. (I think the accent is a double acute accent, also known as …

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I can tell by the dirty footprints leading from the front door to the bathroom. All the compacted snow is off our driveway, which used to be a gravel driveway but is now a dirt driveway, due to all the snow shoveling over the years, which throws both snow and gravel onto the lawn. You try to rake it back into the driveway, but you never get it all. And a dirt driveway this time of year is a mud driveway. Well, the birthday garden, which has a southern exposure and borders the driveway, has lost three-fourths of its snow cover, and I can definitely see some snowdrops! Not the ‘S. Arnott’ ones, but some smaller ones that I just poked into the ground when I unearthed them somewhere else and promptly forgot about. No telling if they’ll have enough oomph to bloom this year. But it’s definitely encouraging. More encouragement: it’s not even supposed to get below freezing tonight, and it’s supposed to rain. Nothing like a good steady rain to melt the snow and drive the frost out of the ground. Last week we had gloriously sunny days but very cold nights, often below zero. That did melt the snow some, but also put a glaze of ice over everything in the morning. This whole week promises to be milder at night, and rain is predicted for several of those days. Most of our snow should be gone by the end of the week, I’m thinking.

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