Category Archives: Gardening

The Japanese painted fern is said by some to be the most beautiful foliage plant in the world. I’m inclined to agree with that bold statement, given the variety of color and shades in a single frond. I also enjoy how these hues change and evolve as the plant grows. Come fall, these will turn a creamy yellow, sometimes almost a pale white, ghostly echoes of the green and teal and gray and maroon tints you can find on them now. 

Ferns like this provide a visual cooling system for the garden when the days get hot and bothered. That hasn’t happened much this year, but their beauty is still appreciated, and they are hardy and reliable perennials that can withstand a total takedown by rabbits or groundhogs and rebound before the season is completely done. 

The relatively cool and wet summer we’ve had this year (courtesy, no doubt, of our new pool liner and the way the universe will always screw you no matter what you want) has a few silver linings (or lilac linings as the case may be) and that comes to light with this Wolf’s Eye Kousa dogwood, still enjoying some creamy bracts that look like flowers this late in the season. In most years, this show would have ended by early July, burned away and forgotten by the heat of the sun and the dryness that summer most often produces. This time around the ‘blooms’ have persisted to this moment, and don’t look to dissipate anytime soon. 

I’m not mad about that.

I am mad about the rain. 

This is a deeper, darker variety of the common daylily – that ubiquitous orange beacon currently blooming along many roads and ditches. The plant pictured here has been growing at my parents’ house for at least three decades. For some reason, they always struck me as gorgeously exotic when I would see them in banks and ditches in my childhood. The blooms and foliage would be relatively unremarkable – perfectly fine and pretty, but not of particular note among the variety of grasses and plants that grew beside them – but when they started opening their bright flowers, they were all I would notice. 

Andy and I don’t currently have any daylily plants in the garden, and I am always claiming that I’m going to rectify that. Despite the fact that each bloom lasts but a day, they are produced in such profusion that the entire blooming period should last a couple of weeks. Some varieties even deign to re-bloom, extending the season even further. And that foliage remains green and fine for the entire summer. 

A few years ago I purchased a couple of ‘King Tut’ papyrus plants on a whim, and after drowning them in water and sun they rose to tower almost over my head by mid-summer, pumped up from  a steady diet of moisture and fertilizer, and lined pots that only let a little bit of drainage occur. Papyrus do quite well when they are practically standing in water, and the ‘King Tut’ variety that was available took in all the nourishment, and the regular supply of sun that summer, to soar skyward. 

This year, I found a few papyrus plants at Lowes – an unmarked variety so I had hoped they were less-hybridized, and even taller when treated well – but they turned out to be some dwarf version. Better for a smaller pot or garden, but not the larger trio of urns I’d wanted them to fill. 

That said, they are starting to fill out – sunless days be damned! – and their smaller stature and finer form actually draws the onlooker in, demanding a closer inspection.

Set against the blue water, their bright green hue looks especially striking in the sunlight, which may have made a comeback this week. Echoes of the Nile, and Cleopatra glamour, come with the territory of the papyrus plant. Or maybe that’s just my overactive imagination…

In the arrival of the cup plant flowers and the re-blooming of the Korean lilac, this past week has felt a bit like the rebirth of the summer season, which never fully found fruition since it began. Certain summers are like that – slow to start, slow to burn – and sometimes they never fully catch fire. Bathed in rain, they make for a different kind of season, one in which water adds a constant element that only works when you learn to embrace it. 

At the very least, it makes for some interesting photos that wouldn’t be possible if there were only sunny days. 

The hosta is one of those ubiquitous and yet unheralded garden plants that anchors many a shady nook yet gets none of the glory that showier and more floriferous counterparts seem to get. While the foliage is the main attraction, let us not forget the flower show that many are putting on right now. The flowers are like little lilies, with a more subtle fragrance to go with their understated appeal. 

Often I forget about the flowers, too preoccupied with all the other stunners of summer, until these spikes start emerging. Then I pause and take stock of their form and their beauty, and on a larger scale of the garden and where it stands. This is when we are usually feeling some sort of summer fatigue. With the lackluster weather this particular year has brought us, there is no reason for such fatigue. Even the ostrich ferns, typically starting to brown and wither away, are holding onto their color and form, quenched by the abnormal amount of water they’ve received. 

These hosta have also enjoyed the excess of wetness, but they’ve also suffered for it. Slugs have invaded the garden, and made a mess of the beautiful hosta leaves. For every benefit there is a detraction it seems. Such is life in the garden. Thus far these flowerheads have managed to rise above such nastiness, and so let us focus on them for today. 

Uncle! Uncle! Uncle!!!

Please, no more rain!!!

We are waterlogged already!!!

Presenting for evidence this photo of a pine seedling growing out of a wooden fence door that is now so thoroughly soaked it has made a viable place for seedlings to take root. When I first walked by this, I thought it was from a batch of weeds that had snagged on the door as I went past. Upon closer inspection I could see that a pine seedling had germinated and begun growing in the wet wood itself. Nature will find a way.

This doesn’t bode well for the garden. An excess of anything is rarely good, and in the excess of rain we have been overrun by slugs that have decimated our once-beautiful hosta, and started the rotting process on several sections of wood around the house. 

On the other hand, the ferns and the cup plant and the fountain grass are all having banner years. Pity we can’t get out as much to enjoy them when it’s pouring rain outside. Whatever happened to a happy medium?

Not even the overload of rain could stop our little suns from blooming in the backyard, and this year all that rain means that the cup plants have reached towering proportions. These flowers were barely able to be captured by me, as they’re about two feet taller than my head, and on the overcast days we’ve had of late they’ve been all the sun we’ve seen. 

Andy has seen that the gold finches that favor the eventual seedpods have returned as well, scoping out future meals and lending another dash of cheerful yellow to the drab days. Summer continues – muted and subdued – but still shining in the petals of the cup plant. 

Along with their speckled throats, these foxglove blooms, if you examine them closely enough, also offer little patches of fuzzy hairs. The fox moniker works on many levels, and the most basic and noticeable of these is simple beauty. That makes for a compelling post without these pesky words. 

If you want to grow these, and ensure their return, it’s best to do so in a more casual garden, where seedlings have the freedom to pop up in a general area. As a biennial, the foxglove has about two years of reliable bloom, and the rest is up to the volunteers that pop up if the flowers are allowed to go to seed. There are some foxglove varieties that are reliable for a few more than two years, but they don’t seem to have the same color power. As with so many things, trade-offs are required. 

Summer phlox were once the backbones of any proper perennial garden, and in some places that still holds true. Our backyard, however, is not one of those places, and whenever I come across a specimen like this, with its pink eyes and charming white frills, I make motions to find a space for a plant or two, and then always end up giving up. The moth of July is filled mostly with watering and fertilizing and pruning and editing. Planting is mostly already done, or waiting for a safer and later date. And so something like phlox, when it comes to mind, gets shuffled and debated and teased, most usually to no avail. 

The brain is scattered in summer, and the garden suffers slightly for it, but beauty will not be stopped or dispelled by my misguided mental meandering. See this lovely phlox plant as evidence that flowers will find a way. 

For years I struggled with keeping the Endless Summer hydrangeas in the front yard as blue as possible – asking Andy to save all his coffee grounds and religiously amending the soil with them, collecting all our rusty metal items from the garage (nails, screws, washers, paper clips) and inserting them into the soil around the roots, and mixing scary-looking acid-green acidifiers into the watering can and carefully pouring the mixture just onto the hydrangeas. For the occasional bloom, here and there, it worked, but only in the slightest – the petals would fight to turn pink, moving from the blue where they started through a purple tone, and into the pink they so clearly desired. 

At the same time the front yard hydrangeas went in, I planted a blue variety – not the Endless Summer variety which bloomed on old and new wood – this one only bloomed on old wood. The trade-off for the blue I so sought was paid for by the fact that our winters usually killed off any potential flower buds. For many years – a full decade at least – this one barely deigned to bloom. When it did, there was maybe one or two small stalks that were hidden in the shade of its foliage. 

This year we must have had a milder winter, coupled with a less-aggressive pruning practice, and the results are these beautiful blue blooms on our backyard hydrangea. It is located right outside our bedroom window, and makes an especially stunning sight when the afternoon sunlight is slanting through its flowers. It’s so nice when things are worth the wait.