Hollyhocks

The last day of the month and the last chance to write about this month's featured flower on my calendar - hollyhocks.

Hollyhocks are one of my favourite flowers and, after last year's success, I planted loads last autumn. But it was obviously too late for them to flower this year, and they've settled for being triennial rather than biennial. They all got to about two foot in height and then stopped, though they've gone on putting out new leaves. Despite the caterpillar damage, they should be fine for next year.

Before I saw the calendar, I'd not realised that hollyhocks had medicinal uses, but apparently the flowers are good against things like sore throats, laryngitis, bronchitis and so on. You make a tea by steeping the petals in cold water for two hours, draining the liquid off and then either drinking it in small sips, or gargling with it - within five hours, so that it's fresh. The liquid can also be used externally for skin problems.

Browsing various articles on the web for more information on hollyhocks, I came across the book A Contemplation Upon Flowers: Garden Plants in Myth and Literature on Google books. It tells of a legend concerning a fairy island that would appear every Midsummer's Day at the point where the Wye and Severn rivers join on the border of Wales and England. Mortals were allowed to reach the island by means of a tunnel under the river and, though they never saw the fairies, would be treated to a day of music and feasting. The only condition was that nothing should ever be taken from the island, which the humans respected until one year a young girl wanted to take back a bunch of flowers which she had picked there. Her mother stopped her, but in secret the girl slipped one of the flowers into her pocket. As the people returned home through the tunnel, the girl turned into a hollyhock, her pink pinafore becoming the pink flowers of the plant. And never again did the island appear.

Read more...

They're Back!

Two extremely busy weeks at work have meant no blog posts and a very neglected balcony. I'd rushed out a few times after dark to water, but apart from that hadn't really looked at anything in daylight for a fortnight. And so hadn't realised that the caterpillars were back ...

I've said before that they were bad this year, but I'd hoped that the worst was over. yet in the past couple of weeks they seem to have come back with a vengeance. Half my plants look like lace doilies, several have been completely stripped of leaves, and this poor hollyhock has just given up the fight.

Even worse though is the mess - both balconies were completely covered in caterpillar droppings. If you have a garden, you probably don't realise how much a couple of teensie caterpillars excrete, but on a balcony they just plop onto the floor and stay there. Here's hoping that next year they won't be quite so bad .

Read more...

Wait until the moon is full

Last night was the full moon. It was the Harvest Moon -- the full moon closest to the Fall equinox.


















It was beautiful here - bright, rising about 8:15 pm, and creating plenty of moonshadows.

The nocturnal symphony here in the Southeast is somewhat muted because of drought, but there are still plenty of field crickets singing and tree frog choruses.

I had a group out with me, and one of the sharp-eared participants could hear the squeaking of bats as they left for their night hunting. I think my hearing is still good, but I couldn't hear what she did. A young boy was enamoured of my calling for barred owls -- who cooks for you, who cooks for you -- and kept calling himself -- he and his mom thought they heard a reply, although I think it was a bit of wishful thinking.

I told the story of how my mother liked to read to my sister and me one of our favorite nighttime stories -- Wait until the Moon is Full. This is a lovely children's story about a mama raccoon, who wants her children to 'wait until the moon is full' to go out and play.

Read more...

A new focal point with Lobelia x speciosa

The Lobelia x speciosa and the Monarda 'Raspberry Wine' have new homes next to the bird bath. Searching for an appropriate site (of course, there's no place that's really damp enough normally), my gardening partner suggested that the area under the big oak might be good.

It is currently getting full sun for several hours in midday, which may be ideal for these species, although I'm not sure what the sun's angle is in spring. We have our bird bath and bird feeders there, my containers have done quite nicely with the light levels, so I thought, why not? After all, I clean and empty the bird bath at least 4 times a week; it might as well help something grow (in addition to the oak, that is).

I set about digging up an area for the two Lobelias, the Monarda, and a Heuchera, all of which I thought would be perfect for that level of partial shade. I nixed an attractive Euphorbia that I had bought recently, since our friendly squirrels had chewed one in one of the porch boxes to bits. The soil was quite nice, and looked rich with with organic matter, and didn't have many roots, as it's been mulched for some years.

Then, I added a good measure of 'top soil' -- really a half peat, half sand 'product' and mixed that in to hold moisture. Plenty of water, and then I was ready to plant.

It was a pleasure walking out the door this morning on my way to work, and seeing the results. This is why we garden.

Read more...

Perennials to add

Since we finally had some rain and it's cooled down, I'm feeling hopeful that fall really is a good time for planting. A quick run up to two local nurseries (actual nurseries, not just the garden centers at the big box stores) found me nabbing some good additions for my fall garden. A lobelia, set aside for a butterfly-gardening client who never showed up, caught my eye. These plants had beautiful large blue spikes, were being visited by carpenter bees and butterflies, were flowering in small pots and were labeled Lobelia x speciosa 'Fan Blue.' In spite of not really having appropriately moist soil anywhere, I thought I'd try them. They were half-price, anyway. I also picked up some selections of one of our native asters, Aster novae-belgiae (New York Aster), a pot of society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea), some Viola, and a couple of pots of Spanish lavender, which flowered profusely in one of my containers this summer, and was heavily visited by bees.

A web search revealed that Lobelia x speciosa is a hybrid of two of our North American natives, L. cardinalis (Cardinal flower) and L. siphilitica (Great Blue Lobelia), which results in a range of flower colors that have subsequently been named as cultivars. Wray Bowden, a Canadian horticulturist, apparently did the original crosses, although the hybrid is also credited as being of German origin, and one of his early successes ('Queen Victoria') was a Royal Horticultural Society Award winner in 1993. Since the hybrids proved to be great in gardens, they're now being grown in temperate climates around the world. I found references in New Zealand, Australia, and Europe. The nice picture is one taken by a Swedish botanist, foto: Hans-Otto Tengrud, from his website: http://www.arborea.se. Unfortunately, I couldn't make out the Swedish (just enough to identify the country, I think), but he seemed to be a photographer who took pictures of plants.

The garden centers, to be sure, had some interesting selections, too, thanks to the tendency of the wholesale nursery businesses to keep providing 'something new' even if they're not really new, but just a new form or an old favorite rediscovered. A perennial I picked up at one of the garden centers, not in flower, so easy to overlook, was a robust quart size pot of Raspberry Wine Bee Balm. It had beautiful foliage and looked very healthy, and even though, again, I really don't have a moist soil site, I succumbed.

This turns out to be a White Flower Farm introduction, the source of this photo. It sounds like a great selection, mildew-resistant and long-flowering. and attractive to hummingbirds (which is why I bought it in the first place). Monarda didyma is a great Eastern U.S. native, and its selections certainly are worth trying. Our Monarda 'Jakob Kline' in the pollinator border outside the Nature Center at work attracted lots of hummingbirds, although it suffered in the dry summer this year.

Read more...

Composting is fun

My mom's house in Texas was nestled on a woody, juniper-filled hillside in a upscale neighborhood in NW Austin, only marginally "landscaped" above and below the house. The deck extended over a scruffy lawn (no sun, of course), so from the deck, it was easy to throw the odd banana peel or lettuce leaf into the scrubby forest.

She wasn't a gardener, so there was no need to create compost, but I think it appealed to her thrifty ways and sense of environmentalism. Her mother was a gardener, though, so maybe she had composted back when the vegetable garden was a source of food for a good bit of the winter, after canning. I still remember being impressed by the jars of canned beans and tomatoes in Grandma's cellar and the vegetable gardens and berry patches that she had when I was a child.

Even before I was a gardener, I enjoyed putting our vegetable and fruit scraps in a compost heap, being environmentally-inclined myself. We had established one within one of our shrub borders in our first house in Georgia, so we didn't have to toss vegetable scraps in the trash. When we moved to Clemson, our neighbor asked if he could have the compost -- "solid gold" of course, for those of us who want to add nutrients and organic matter to their gardens. We said, of course you can have the compost, but it certainly got me thinking more about it.

Here in SC, I set up a simple wire-bin compost system, and we started throwing more things into it-- all of our kitchen vegetable trimmings, but also the results of our weed-pulling efforts, spent vegetables from the garden, etc. It's now grown to a 3-bin system, especially after we moved in against the fence, post garden shed. I've also added a garage-can composter to hopefully 'cook' any weed seeds left in the compost, so have tried to ramp it up to being efficient.

Essentially, what we're doing is cold composting -- turning is somewhat of a chore in these bins, since they're surrounded by hay bales to prevent Mocha (our dog) from foraging for nasty spoiled bits, so it's a bit of a reach to "turn" the compost, as recommended by many 'experts.'

In one of my programs, a participant said that she blended up all of her compostable materials, eggshells included, to speed up composting. A lovely idea, if you have a spare blender and the initiative to do it. Do I need to admit that eggshell bits are part of the compost I spread on the vegetable garden?

But it's great to see that pail of compost go out almost every day, and see how small the trash bag is each week, since we also recycle everything we can! There are all sorts of attractive compost pails that coordinate with kitchen decor. This one is a Turkish copper pail from Gardeners Supply. Quite nice, and certainly a lot better than an open plastic container!

Read more...

A new visitor munching sunflower seeds

An unaccustomed visitor dropped by the bird feeders yesterday. His markings caught our eye. Beautiful white eyestripes, a rosy breast and flashy black and white feathers. He avidly zipped through a lot of black sunflower seeds, while watching alertly in all directions. The normal cardinals, titmice, and Carolina chickadees were seemingly a bit perturbed at the large intruder. When I looked him up in our bird field guides, he turned out to be an immature male, so had the rosy breast, but not yet the solid black head of the adult male. Here in Upstate SC, rose-breasted grosbeaks are visitors briefly in the spring and fall, as they pass through from their summer breeding grounds in the mountains to the lowcounty. There was no hope of getting a photo, since he was so skittish.

But this lovely photo of an adult male, taken by Rhonda Weldon, from Hanceville, AL -- the first place winner in an Outdoors Alabama contest shows you what attractive birds these are.

Read more...