Cold Climate Gardening

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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This looked spectacular earlier in May, but the narcissus were already done by the time Gardeners Bloom Day came around.

Those orange-cup daffodils were blooming at my neighbor’s, between her house and the brook, but too far away from the house to be noticed. I marked them and dug them up and got half for myself for the labor of digging and replanting her half. The hellebore came from Seneca …

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Yes, I know the Garden Bloggers Bloom Day was yesterday the day before yesterday. I didn’t get finished in time. So just pretend this is May 15th, okay? (As always, hover your mouse over any thumbnail for a caption, and click on any photo for a larger image.)
Narcissus
Let’s start off with the narcissus. The early daffodils are all gone, but the later ones are in their prime. Do you remember those new ones I told you about? Let’s start with them.

Left to right, the most recently opened first: Malin Head, Achnasheen, Rimmon, Eland, and (second row) Vernal Prince. Angel doesn’t look like it will bloom, as Mr. Burdick suspected. It’s been a cool spring–until today, when it got up to 88F–and many of my daffodils have remained good looking for a long time. Here’s more that are blooming right now:

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Time to put my money where my heart is

When I was in college, I lived in a third-floor walkup with two fellow students. Whenever anyone shut the front door to the building, all the tenants felt the resulting vibrations. And we subconsciously monitored the sound of footsteps on the stairs, calculating in the back of our minds how likely was the prospect of company. Consequently, my roommates and I looked at each other inquiringly when footsteps going at a dead run did not stop at the second floor but continued up to our landing. Was the stair climber for us, or for our neighbors? Are you expecting anyone?

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First I’d better define my terms. By narcissus, I mean plants in the genus Narcissus, which many know as daffodils or jonquils. By heirloom, I mean that I inherited them. There is probably an official definition of “heirloom” as relates to Narcissus, but I don’t know what it is. I have seen some of my daffodils called heirloom in other places, but I haven’t made a positive i.d. on all of them, so the names by which I call them have either been discovered after some research or simply made up. I will describe them all in order of their bloom time. Several of the heirloom narcissus that are growing in my garden now were growing here when I arrived. Most of them, however, were growing blind, and I didn’t know what I had. (Growing blind means foliage is coming up but there are no flowers. One cause of this is overcrowding due to not being divided for years and years.) I dug them up, divided and replanted them, and it sometimes took two or three years before I was rewarded with a blossom. These trumpet daffodils bloom early, earlier than the ‘Rijnveldt’s Early Sensation’ planted elsewhere on the property, and as you might suspect of a plant that survives long periods of neglect, they bloom and grow vigorously. How fortunate that I planted them near the road, where the whole neighborhood can enjoy them.

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Just in case you’re too busy enjoying summer, I’d like to point out to you that many fall bulb catalogs have deadlines coming up. If you order before the deadline, you get a discount that, while not stupendous, might offset some, or all, of the shipping cost for you. Odyssey Bulbs and Brent and Becky’s Bulbs both have July 1st deadlines, and McClure & Zimmerman has a June 30th deadline. So, this weekend, while you’re lounging by the pool, or lazing in a shady hammock (my preference, though we don’t have a hammock at the moment), bring along your bulb catalogs, a red pen, and a calculator, and see what you come up with.

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