The Garden On The Ridge

Colour Inside

2012-02-11T17:43:00.000-08:00

We gardeners are never happy, are we? We no sooner get a good covering of snow, which we've been begging for to keep the garden cosy for the winter, than we start to want colour. I found myself feeling that very much after taking Kip for a cold and snowy trudge yesterday. I could hardly wait to get into the plant shed (can't call it a greenhouse anymore, it's too dilapidated) and see if there were any flowers open.

And there were!

I have quite a few pots of Amaryllis, and while only a few apparently plan on blooming this year, one was gloriously open. This is Bolero, a medium-sized semi-double.

Such a fabulous bright scarlet! The main bulb has this stem, with 6 blooms, 4 open so far, plus a smaller one coming up fast. It is surrounded by 5 other slightly smaller bulbs, one of which is also showing a nose. I don't know why they don't all bloom at the same time - maybe they will next year. I started with 3 bulbs and now there are 6. Not too shabby.

On the other hand, most of the other 50+ Amaryllis won't be blooming this year. My guess is that I left them growing too long in the Fall and thus they haven't had a long enough dormancy. Getting Amaryllis to re-bloom isn't quite as bad as growing Morning Glories (I know 50 ways to kill a Morning Glory) but they do have to be treated exactly right or they just don't bloom. Usually I leave them outside only until October, at which time I tell them firmly that they are going dormant, cut all the leaves off, and lie them on their sides in the back of the plant shed where it is warm and dark, but this Fall was so warm I didn't bring them in until late November. I brought them into the light in January as usual, but so far there are a lot of leaves and very few flower stalks. Guess I learned something.

Another of the Clivia seedlings is showing buds. These seeds were from a strain bred to give yellow flowers. One bloomed in the Fall, and truly was yellow. Maybe this one will be too!

Several of the orchids also have buds developing.

It may finally be cold and snowy outside, but it's warm and colourful inside!

The 'New American Garden', last part

2012-01-19T15:17:00.000-08:00

So here's the plan.

My rock garden (rockery) will be a rocky outcrop among the trees.

My border will be a sunny hillside clearing in the woods.

My fern garden will be a shady grove, with narrow winding paths and Spring wildflowers among the trees.

My bog and pond gardens will be the Marsh edge.

The rest of my 'garden' will be native plants spread along trails through mixed woods.

I used to worry about how to manage the change from a worked garden to a natural area, but now I will think about every planting area as being part of the surrounding woods. I will make my garden fit into the existing natural landscape.

Interestingly, it'll be a garden with no edges.

The 'New American Garden', part 2

2012-01-19T14:00:00.002-08:00

Hmmmm.

Now you're thinking, 'what about my garden, my rock garden, my pool garden, my Fall Border....'?
'The designed landscape should fit into the natural landscape.' Does this mean I can't have a rock garden if I live in an area the scientists call the 'Eastern Transitional Mixed Forest Region'?

No, I don't think it means that. I do think, though, that you should carefully consider whether your design might not be more successful, as a design, if you make it fit into the type of landscape natural for your area.

For example, my garden is in the woods, on a rocky ridge. It is situated on the Canadian Shield and is considered to be in the Eastern Transitional etc. etc. I could, if I had enough loose money, bring in a large bulldozer and have it flatten me a nice space, say 200 feet square. I could have topsoil brought in and spread, and I could have hedges planted all around it. Then I could make borders and beds inside the hedged area and make, if I had enough money, a mini-Sissinghurst. Just imagine that for a minute. If you were to come and visit, you'd drive through the Eastern Ontario mixed farming belt, then drive through a mixed forest, then stop at a tall green hedge. You'd go inside and find.... an English garden. But wouldn't this be silly? It might be a fun novelty, but in the end, wouldn't you step back and think, this is silly?

It makes more sense for me to try to incorporate the garden elements I want, such as a rock garden or Fall border, into the existing landscape. No hedges making 'garden rooms', which I have always thought only make sense in totally urban gardens, no straight borders with precise edges ditto, no ornate Italian garden seats. Instead, my rock garden, really more a rockery, sprawls over the natural granite and limestone outcroppings and blends into the woods. My so-called border, really a hillside, climbs in crooked terraces up into the surrounding trees. The only fairly formal area is the little herb garden between the house and the Studio and you know how formal herbs are....

I'm not saying my garden is a great success along these lines, but I think I know what I'm aiming for, and more or less how to proceed.

Actually, maybe I am having some success already. I think I've told this story before, but it's a favourite: one summer a customer and her husband came to the Studio to pick up some pottery. As they were leaving, walking down the path through the herb garden, they stopped and she told me about the husband's garden. I made suitable impressed sounds. Then she glanced around and said to me, 'Do you have a garden, dear?' Now that I think about it, that's a pretty good compliment!

The 'New American Garden', part 1

2012-01-19T14:00:00.000-08:00

Wolfgang Oehme died last fall. Those of you who read about gardens or the art of landscaping will have run across his books, or at least mentions of them. In an article about him which I have just read, he and his partner James van Sweden, are referred to as having 'redefined the American Garden'. In obituaries and book reviews, this phrase keeps popping up.

In most cases, this 'new American Garden' is illustrated with pictures of large expanses of waving grasses. Every thing I've read about this lately concentrates on this use of grasses, and nowhere do I see a mention of what I think is really a larger lesson to be taken from their work.

Yes, they (I will say 'they, because Oehme worked with van Sweden for decades, and it is their work together that is usually referred to) did create a new garden model, one that is a welcome addition to the British model of the velvety green grass lawn surrounded by a perennial flower border surrounded by a tall green hedge. As we see it in books or pictures, it involves large expanses of waving grasses set off, often, by quite strict and rigidly controlled hard-scaping. It is a garden model based on a cross between the natural North American prairie and the Atlantic ocean beach, and as such is indeed new.

But designing a garden is not the same as designing a landscape. What the obituaries and reviews seem to miss is that while Oehme/van Sweden did invent a new garden model, their real achievement was in then using it in their projects as a brilliant way of making the designed landscape part of the natural landscape.

To put it another way, what was new about their idea is not that it uses grasses, or that it resembles the prairie/beach. What was new is that they designed gardens to be part of the surrounding landscape. If you think of other garden styles, such as the Italian style with it's sculptures and cypresses, theFrench style with it's rigidly pruned shrubs, the Eastern enclosed garden, the Oriental garden.... these are all gardens in, but separated from, their surrounding landscape. Their whole point is to be comfortable, safe, prestigious spaces removed from the surrounding wild landscape. Oehme/van Sweden gardens, most of which happen to be in the mid-atlantic states, are not separate from the landscape. They are in fact a concentration of the elements of the surrounding landscape and so lead directly into it and become part of it.

That is, I think, the real lesson landscapers should take from Oehme and van Sweden's work. The designed landscape should fit into the natural landscape. Where woodlands are the natural native condition, there should be woodland gardens. In the desert areas, xeric gardens. In small inner-city backyards, old-style English flower borders.

(More soon....)

Turning Over....

2012-01-03T07:05:00.000-08:00

.... a new leaf.

I hereby resolve that, in 2012, I will:

1. Repot that agave. It is so crowded in it's pot that it is starting to climb out! It being winter, the pot is inside right beside Loyal Husband's chair, and he is started to edge away....

2. Get rid of the mealy bugs on the hoyas. More about this later.

3. Make a habit of keeping my garden tools in one place. Better yet, putting them away now and then. Last year I spent 3 weeks wondering where my crowbar was.... then discovered it was standing up in the ground among my bird feeders so I wasn't seeing it because it looked like just another bird feeder pole.

4. Do something about the Clivias. I do not need 27 pots of the same Clivia.

5. Make myself a bird bath. I make them for other people, I should have one too. What self-respecting potter doesn't have a bird bath????

6. Give Lis's Trowel a chance to talk. I kept him pretty well smothered last year, but I guess he's due a turn.

7. Win the war with the garden hoses. I bought cheap hoses, then used those handy repair kits to repair them when they split/developed pinholes/lost their ends/developed unfixable kinks. What I put away this fall was a gawdawful mess of kinks, short bits, hoses with duct tape on them..... (no, that doesn't work). I will buy 200 feet of new hoses in 50' lengths. I will not leave them on the driveway for people to run over them. I will not stab them with the garden fork. I will coil them away when done with them....

8.Buy a new trowel. The old one is getting too cheeky.

9.Plant more than one acorn squash. Turns out, if you only have one, the squashes are nasty tasteless things. Who knew.

10. Build a fence around my tomatoes and cover them with screen or something. I got pretty tired of tomatoes with one bite taken out by the local chipmunk.

11. Re-do the Hillside Garden. That includes removing two Spirea bushes. Owwww, I'm tired already just thinking about it. Hope I can find the crowbar on that day!

12. Go for a daily walkabout. Last year I tried concentrating on one area at a time and as a result I missed whole bloom sequences. Did the dwarf Jacob's Ladder bloom? Did it look good with the Polygala? I don't know, I missed it. Get up half an hour earlier if I have to, but no more missing out on the fun stuff.

OK, that's enough. With my short attention span, I'll be lucky to accomplish half of these!

Wait, Kip insists I add one more:

13. Take him (Loyal Dog) for a walk (almost) every day. He points out that our new trails in the woods need regular use to stay open and we don't want to miss any plant excitement there either. Actually, he said 'wildlife excitement', but he can't read this.

Happy 2012 in the Garden to All of You!

Christmas Wishes

2011-12-22T11:36:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers,

For Christmas, I give you colour! It is cold and wet and icy out; with dark clouds overhead and fog hanging thick in the trees. Branches drip and rocks are covered with a sheen of ice. At first glance everything seems dark and dreary, but if you look closely there is colour everywhere.

Have a Merry Christmas, and I wish you much joy for 2012!

Where's Winter????

2011-11-13T13:07:00.001-08:00

My husband said it this morning: 'Where's winter?' he asked.

Good question. It's the middle of December and it's like early November out there. Practically no snow, no frost. Just drear, drear, dreary wet grey woods, soggy raspberry canes, dripping branches and ferns flat on the ground looking bedraggled. One thing, you can sure see the evergreen ones!

Kip and I went for a walk just now to see if we could see anything worth photographing. After half an hour we both agreed the answer was 'no' and we came back in. Here's Kip looking damp:

Notice his fine eyebrows! When he was a wee pup I chose him because I liked his brown eyebrows.

We did admire some mosses, though. I love those 'moss balls'. These are mosses that have the acrocarpous (upright, clustered) growth form. Here's one:

Here's a moss that has the other growth form, that is, creeping or sprawling, or pleurocarpous:

OK, end of lesson.

We did see a curious fungus. It was only about 3" high and at first glance looked like a patch of scales from a pine cone nibbled apart by a squirrel. Each one is flat, with an outline like a lozenge or tongue, and with the bottom sides of the lozenge curled in to create a sort of tube. I'm sorry the picture isn't clearer, but it really was dark out there!

Tomorrow is supposed to warm..... if this keeps up I'll have to do some garden work!

Trail Making

2011-11-11T14:16:00.000-08:00

There's just something about paths! Is anything more satisfying than making a new path.... suddenly new areas are accessible, new plants become visible, new ideas develop in the gardener's mind.

I've been working on my trails the last couple of weeks. There was plenty of other work I should have been doing but I've been itching to work on my trails all summer, and now with the cooler weather I've gotten right into it. I've been chopping, snipping and clearing like a path maniac. You can now walk all around my property without having to push through thick stands of young Balsam Firs or climb over (or through!) fallen trees. Not that it is a walk in park, mind. I'm a firm believer in following the path of least resistance when it comes to paths through the woods, so my trails are rather twisty and winding, and have the occasional large log to leap over or leaning tree to duck under. Not for the faint of heart perhaps, but good for the walker's fitness!

One small area I found as I was scouting a way through for a cross path is on top of the rock ridge, sloping gently towards the north, and bare except for wonderful mosses, lichens, and small, first-year rosettes of Rock Harlequin, Corydalis sempervirens. This is a biennial, forming the small rosette one year, and growing tall and blooming the next. It likes dry rocky places, and while the flowers are a bit 'meh', the blue-green leaves are gorgeous. Here's a closeup of a couple of plants in the moss:

You can see why I wanted my trail to go near that. It's going to be a very neat spot in the spring! Actually, it's pretty neat already.

I don't want to walk on the mosses and lichens, so I placed small rocks along the left and across the back of the area shown in the picture to remind myself where to walk. Just at the top of the picture you can see one of the huge Pines that went over in the 'not-tornado' of (I think) 1997. The weather people called it a 'micro-burst', but it had a lot in common with a mini-tornado. About 30 huge White Pines were blown over, making one heck of a swath of deadfall. I still can't easily get through there, but Kip just walks down one tree to the next to the next and leaps off when he gets where he wants to go. I think he's tickled that I can't follow him!

Making new trails allows me to see more of what is growing. I found a nice patch of Dewdrop, Dalibarda repens which I'll photograph in the Spring, a fruiting patch of Spinulum annotinum, Bristly Clubmoss, a small Christmas Fern, Polystichum acrostichoides, and a patch of Northern Ground Cedar, Diphasiastrum complanatum. I have acres of it's cousin, D. digitatum, but only (so far) this one patch of this one. I knew it had to be here, but couldn't find it anywhere. Ha, it was there all along, just hiding!

Compare it to D. digitatum:

Given that snow is in the air tonight, I've finished my trails just in time!

Small Cuttings

2011-10-27T17:22:00.000-07:00

Chipmunk Tomatoes

I've had a great crop of chipmunk tomatoes this year. They didn't start to ripen until past the middle of August, but once they started, there was no stopping them. I know more ways of serving tomatoes than an Italian restaurant.... What are chipmunk tomatoes? Well, the chippie that lives near the veg patch is a tomato lover, and he takes a bite out of each just when it is ripe to claim it for himself. I've been keeping an eye on the tomatoes, trying to beat him to them, but with no success. Every ripe tomato has a bite taken out. At first I didn't want to eat them, but now I just cut off the chewed bit. Ya do what ya gotta do, sometimes.

Geranium cuttings

I like to keep my geraniums. By now I have a nice little collection of different colours and leaf forms. I mean pelargoniums really, but you know what I mean. Those red things you get at the nursery in the Spring and plant in pots. Ah, but there are also many shades of peach, white, different pinks, dark plum red, bright crimson..... and leaves of all kinds. I have a gorgeous oak-leaved one which gets to about 3' tall in a good summer, and a little one with bright red flowers like perfect miniature roses. Also some scented ones, and one called Mrs. Taylor which has the most beguiling deep scarlet flowers with darker spots.

Late in the Fall, just before frost in fact, I take cuttings and stick them in some pots I made. I just tidy up the cutting, jam it into the soil, water it, and put the pot on the windowsill. All but the pine-scented one always root. To see them, you wouldn't think they were cuttings at all. Most of them even bloom, and by Spring they are nice, if small, rooted geraniums. Then I move them into large pots outside. By July they fill the pots and bloom like maniacs. If I manage to keep them dead-headed they go on until frost.

I took the cuttings yesterday and brought them inside to pot up. I was too tired to do it right away (I'm in the middle of a nasty cold) so I put them in water in a blue pottery bowl. How beautiful they looked!

Burning Bush

Bah, humbug. Until now, I liked that bush. It was planted behind a Mugho Pine and the Christmas colour combination appealed to my sense of humour. Today I looked at them - bright red Burning Bush, bright green Pine. All around them, brown seedheads, bare Sumachs, grey rocks.... that Bush has got to go. It was hideous! Totally out of key.

One Squash

You may recall I planted a single squash plant this Spring and I wondered if I would get squash. Short answer: yes. The vine got huge, leaves 18" across, stems trailing 10', and there were 8 large acorn squash. Unfortunately, they seem to be watery and tasteless. Is this because it was a single plant, or because I watered the plant (it was a very dry summer) or was it a weird seed? Rogue squash?

Potato Fact

I always knew you had to hill your potatoes. When I was a kid my parents made us hoe and hill the potato patch. Naturally, we resisted mightily but I can't say it actually did us any harm and it probably did the family diet some good. Anyway, when I started growing my own potatoes I knew how to plant them, how to hoe them, how to hill them.... and my potatoes were always pretty good.

This summer I ran out of time soon after the first hoeing and never got them properly hilled up. When I harvested them, each plant had one or two large potatoes and that was all. Reading an old gardening book one night, I came upon a scientific reason for hilling potatoes. Seems the tubers grow at the ends of stolons, and stolons only form if the root of the plant is deep enough in the ground. So if you don't hill them (or plant them in a trench and fill in the trench as the plants grow, same thing really), no stolons, and few potatoes.

Why is it that....

Why is it that when you dig a 1-gal. hole to plant a 1-gal. plant, there is never enough soil to fill in around the rootball? I dug a nice hole the size and shape of the rootball of a White Spruce which had gotten much too big for its pot, and put it in, and had to go get a wheelbarrow load of topsoil to fill in around it. This seems to keep happening to me....

Wm Cody Memorial Fern Glade - Part 2

2011-10-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

OK, fast forward to last Sunday. I finally got out there again, planning to work on my new path. I was delighted to see that all the ferns are alive and well, and that the other wildflowers all looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as well. No sign of the Clintonia, but then, it goes dormant in September. The Fletcher people had put some dead birch logs along the edge, which looked a lot better than the yellow tape we had there before! A lot of people walk (and walk their dogs) along the various trails, and the fern area looked empty so without the tape or now logs, people would walk on the plants.

You can see the logs here. The existing path is on the left, the start of the fern area is on the right of the logs. The spot so far is about 40' by 10-15'. You can see the wonderful dappled shade cast by the huge trees which are just, as the film people like to say, 'out of shot'. What you can't see is the ferns - told you they were small!

Here are some pictures of the new path:

I started by clearing where I wanted the path, pulling out Vine, leveling the ground a bit with my drag hoe, moving a couple of small rocks and so on. Then I put down a double layer of permeable (cloth) landscape fabric, the kind the lasts about 3-4 years and then deteriorates to nothing, pinning it down with wire staples every couple of feet. Then I covered the fabric with a few inches of wood chips. Getting the wood chips was almost the hardest part of the job!

The hardest part of the job was talking to all the people who came by and stopped to find out what I was doing. It was fun talking to them all, but I soon found I had to stay alert as some of the questions were hard to answer. Why was I doing this?( Um, well.....) How long before the Glade would be finished? (Um.... never?) Did squirrels, of which there were two hanging around hoping I had squirrel lunch in my backpack, eat ferns? Why had the Fletcher people mowed down the meadow? (Did you read the sign???) And so on. Quite a few people were out with kids, and they were all very interested. Anytime I felt I had answered enough questions I would ask them, with a smile, if they would like to help. It really worked with adults, who all promptly decided to continue their nature walk, but the kids were all keen to work! They were great at stomping down the wood chips. One kid patiently picked up about a hundred acorns. Not sure what he was planning with those, but by the time he left his pants were hangin' a bit low.

Anyway, that may be it for work on the Glade this year. The weather is changing and I think snow is not far away. Not really enough warm weather left for ferns to establish before winter, so I think I 'll wait before moving more of them in. Dan (remember Dan) plans to plant a few Spinulose Wood Ferns, Dryopteris carthusiana, and some Marginal Woods, D. marginalis if he has time. Next spring, Christmas Fern, New York Fern, Silvery Glade..... lots more to come! And some more native ground covers (I snuck in some White Trillium plants already) and a concerted effort to get ahead of the Dog-strangler. I plan to approach it like a science experiment. I intend to mark about 20 plants, then each week cut down whatever growth it made that week. If I keep records, I should be able to find out how often it needs to be cut down to eventually exhaust the roots. Even grass will die if you cut it low enough often enough. At the same time I hope to cut the rest of the Vine in the Glade every couple of weeks so at least it won't seed, and to dig it out in small areas as ferns get planted. It's not a huge space, so it would be possible.

What Dan and I really need is some help! Anybody up for a challenging project? We could be the Fern Team.... I'm serious here, guys. If you are in the Ottawa area, willing to work hard for a few hours each week, and would like to join us, get in touch.

Wm Cody Memorial Fern Glade - Part 1

2011-10-18T13:50:00.000-07:00

Curious how some projects seem so simple, and then turn out to have all kinds of inherent difficulties. The practical difficulties are nothing compared to the philosophical ones, although in the case of the project I want to talk about, the practical ones are also daunting.

The William Cody Memorial Fern Trail at the Fletcher Wildlife Garden is a case in point. Several months ago Sandy Garland (chair of the Fletcher committee) asked me if I'd be interested in working on such a thing. I don't really know anything about Mr. W. Cody, except that he worked for Agriculture Canada, wrote a booklet on local Ottawa Valley ferns, and is now deceased. Since the little book is an absolute classic, a 'must-have' for local fern-ers, I loved the idea of a memorial garden. Sandy said she had a spot in mind, and, later, took me down to see it.

Right away I could see a practical problem that will loom large in this project's history. Dog-strangling Vine, or Pale Swallow Wort, Vincetoxicum nigrum; syn. Cynanchum louiseae, is rampant in the area she showed me. It is also a very dry spot, with a number of fine large Maples, a few conifers such as White Pine, and, a little further back from the trail, a large stand of mature Eastern Red Ash. Now the Ash is under threat from the Emerald Ash Borer, so any plans for the Trail should take into account that conditions may change dramatically in a few years. But for now, the Maples and Ashes give good high dappled shade. The area is a bit of a hill-top, so well-drained, but dry. This year in particular it is dry.

Sometime in June, I think it was, Sandy lucked into a couple of volunteers who wanted to work for a day or two, and she put them on to clearing the fern area of DSV. They did a great job, but when I went there a few weeks later to do some work, I saw that instead of clearing a square bounded by the two intersecting trails, they had cleared a rectangle along one of the trails. OK, but it threw my sketched plan out of the water. As well, someone had planted a bunch of Whorled Aster, Oclemena acuminata, right where I had mentally placed ferns.... so, right, Plan B coming right up.

I started by doing a bit of exploring. I found a patch behind the trail with some Jewelweed, Impatiens capensis. The plants were stunted, but alive. Not really a damp spot, but a somewhat damp-er spot. Possibly an area could be made there, suitable for ferns that need more moisture. Another person, Dan, had expressed interest in moving some of his ferns to the Trail, and he had mentioned moisture-lovers like Interrupted Fern, Osmunda claytoniana, and Marsh Fern, Thelypteris palustris. Neither of these would do well in a bone-dry situation under Maples. But perhaps (you see my Dutch problem-solving mind working here), perhaps, one could dig out a depression, line it with old pond liner with a few holes poked, fill it with good humus-y soil, and have a place for ferns that need more moisture to thrive. Further exploring took me back to the existing path which crossed the path the Trail is on. Clearly, a new path, curving around and enclosing the fern area, and joining the two intersecting existing paths, would be the way to go. (pun not intended!)

Then it could be called the Wm. Cody Memorial Fern Glade, no longer being a Trail. I had trouble with the concept of a 'trail' anyway, particularly with the difficulty of maintaining an area which would have no border..... I mean, how would I ever keep the DSV out if there was nothing to stop it from spreading into the fern area? Apparently lawn edging is not allowed, I guess because it isn't exactly natural, but somehow the Vine's stolons have to be stopped. Otherwise it would be a never-ending job to dig it out of the ferns' domain. It's seeds will be bad enough, but at least small seedlings are easily yanked.

Anyway, I then settled down and weeded the area the volunteers had cleared, digging out some more DSV that had come up again, removing a quantity of what I call burr-bush because I don't know its name, but I know it is a pesky weed, trimming the shrubs of overhanging branches and dead wood, and digging spots for the ferns I had brought. The volunteers had planted Clinton's Fern, Dryopteris Clintoniana, in front of Crested Fern, D. cristata, which put the taller one in front of the shorter one, but I figure in a few years we can move the Cresteds. The Whorled Wood Asters got in the way, but I put the Northern Lady Ferns, Athyrium angustum, behind them. It didn't look too bad, although of course all the plants are still very small. There were also a few Blue-bead Lily, Clintonia borealis, a small clump of Bunchberry, Cornus canadensis, and a sad-looking straggle of Foamflower, Tiarella cordifolia. The dry summer hasn't helped them, but at least they were still alive.

I went home feeling encouraged and vowing to be back the next weekend.

The Low-maintenance Myth

2011-09-25T09:01:00.000-07:00

"A Manager is a person who finds a competent person to do a job, gets their commitment to doing it, and then gets out of their way. A supervisor is someone who assigns some part of a job to somebody, monitors them closely, and ends up doing most of the job herself."

One of the things I was musing on the other day, as I forked bushels of Pale Swallow Wort roots out of the ground, was the idea, widely circulated in the 1980's, that native plants are low-maintenance. I was at the Fletcher Wildlife Garden, working on a Fern Trail project (more about this in a later post), and I was remembering that one of the goals of their Model Backyard Garden was to show suburban gardeners how to use native plants to reduce the garden maintenance they would have to do. There were other goals as well, but that is the one I was thinking of between swatting late mosquitoes and wiping sweat out of my eyes.

One of the players was Landscape Ontario. They were pushing a sod they said was low-maintenance. I forget just what they called it, but the implication was that because the sod used native plants, it would require less work than regular grass. Of course they charged a premium for it. The thing that blew it out of the water, at least for me, was that the natives they were talking about were things like white clover. Probably a lot cheaper to produce than pristine sods of various grasses..... but they were charging a premium. They knew a money-making opportunity when they saw one. Unfortunately for them, most homeowners knew a marketing boondoggle when they saw one, so I don't think it caught on all that well. Anybody can have lawn with clover in it, all you have to do is wait.

If you do little or no maintenance, you will have a low-maintenance lawn. You might not like it, and your neighbours may point and whisper, but you're not spending hours and dollars fertilizing, rolling, raking, cutting and weed-killing your lawn.

The other thing the 'experts' got onto at about the same time is the idea that native plants require less maintenance. Reluctant gardeners thought, 'Oh, I'll just plant some wildflowers and I won't have to do any work'. Seed companies, knowing a marketing opportunity when they saw one, got into the act right away. They advertised various 'mixes', supposedly designed for various conditions, like, for example,'Sunny Meadow Mix' which was supposed to work in sunny conditions, or 'Shady Corner Mix' for, right, shady corners. Every 'mix' was illustrated with large pictures of glorious flowers of all colours waving in the sun. Probably you remember this. Of course this didn't work. What came up and eventually flowered were annuals such as Cornflower or Cosmos. Nice enough plants, but whether in the sunny corner of the yard or the shady one, they were scrawny and soon overpowered by weeds. Gardeners began to see another marketing boondoggle.

Since I've been talking up native plants every chance I get for years, I caught heck from quite a few disgruntled gardeners who, now not having to do so much garden maintenance, had time to come and yell at me about how native plants were no good. One older fellow, wearing the white belt and shoes of the officially retired, came to the Home Show once where I was fronting a large display of photos of beautiful native plants, and gave me a good blasting, and then demanded his money back! He had purchased a tin of 'mixed wildflowers seeds for the sunny border' from a seed company who shall remain nameless so I don't get sued, and he felt that he deserved his $12.95 back. Had he carefully prepared a weed-free, well-dug spot for his seeds? Of course not. Had he painstakingly removed all the grass and Creeping Charlie that came up? Naturally not. Had he watered in late May after it hadn't rained for three weeks? Nope. Why should he? Wasn't this was supposed to be low-maintenance?

I tried to reason with him, politely explaining the facts about weeds, water and wildflowers, but once he saw that he wasn't getting any $12.95 from me he lost interest and wandered over to listen to a slightly brain-scrambled Person lecturing about how to achieve Serenity and Happiness by growing roses.

The problem is, that when it comes to native plants and low-maintenance, almost everybody misunderstands.

Any plant is low-maintenance if it is happy and you allow it to do it's thing.

The wild Sweet-scented Waterlily, Nymphaea odorata, is low maintenance. Provided, that is, that you have a large enough body of clean water of the right depth, beavers to eat some of the tubers to stop it from crowding itself out of the water, and you are prepared to let it grow where it wants.

Peonies are low-maintenance, if you put them in a good spot and don't hack them down with the lawn mower too often.

Delphiniums are low-maintenance if you don't mind them falling over in June.

On the other hand, Sweet-scented Waterlily will be very high maintenance if you are determined to grow it in that dry sunny spot beside your garage.

Native plants are exactly the same. Put them in the right situation, give them whatever care is critical to their survival, accept them for what they are, and they will be low-maintenance. Put them in the wrong situation, ignore their survival needs, expect them to act like British society matrons, and they will be high maintenance.

Now, go back to the top of this post and re-read my definitions. If you manage your plants, they will be low-maintenance, if you supervise them, they will be high-maintenance.

Same as people.

Garden Renovations

2011-09-15T18:46:00.000-07:00

Leaves are starting to show red here and there, especially some of the show-off Sumachs, there is a nip of frost in the air, and the season of garden renovations is in full swing.

There's something about August that exposes all your gardening weaknesses. You see them, but it is too hot to do anything about them. You maybe make an entry in some notebook: must move that daylily...... or you brush by some overgrown thing and give it the 'just wait until I get my secateurs' glare, but you don't actually do anything. It's too hot, the garden is too dry, and that glass of chilled white wine is calling.

But September, ah September. It is cooler. The border revives. Asters bloom. A tomato finally ripens. Birds check out the feeders, notebooks in hand, with an eye to winter patronage. Out come the secateurs, the garden fork, the spade, and, in my garden, the crowbar. To work!

So far, I've done bits in a number of different areas. It would make more sense to do everything in one area and then move on, I know, but I can explain. I started in the Crabapple garden, where I removed a 100-sq-ft patch of Adenophora 'Elizabeth'. Nice flowers, nice leaves, too bad about the garden manners. It was taking over the whole area, and I was not, simply not, moving three large Peonies. I intend to reduce the Japanese anemones too, but will wait until they finish blooming. For some reason they all fell over this year, but then the ends turned up and now the flowers are all facing forward nicely at about the 2' level. Odd, but looks fine.

Then I putzed around in the Rock Garden several afternoons, planting the stuff I never got around to planting in the spring. Doesn't every gardener have pots that sit around for months waiting to be planted? Of course I couldn't just stick them in the ground, I had to dig new places for them, move some rocks, carry buckets of pea gravel over for mulch, you know the drill. It's fun to make new garden! A new plant is the best excuse to indulge! My tiny bog is doing fine and I had to sit on the rock above it and admire it. So far no weeds, and the moss is green. The steps down to the lower part of the rock garden were overgrown with Viola labradorica, the Dog Violet (what a name for a flower!) and I dug those out. Then I got sidetracked a bit and spent a couple of afternoons clearing more trail in the woods. I basically hacked a path through the patch of young maples and hornbeams behind the Rock Garden. Used my trusty secateurs to do it, too. Who needs an axe or a saw if she has secateurs? But I ran into a fallen spruce, spiky branches sticking straight up ready to scratch or poke anyone who tries to climb over it, so I had to back off on that project. October is for things that need axes and saws.

Then I cleared around my Goldenrod and Aster test beds, put down landscape fabric around them, and covered the fabric with pea gravel. Looks like a million bucks and took all of an hour to do. Where the fabric is now will be paths later; these little beds are the pioneers in the rough patch at the far end of the rock garden. I hadn't planned to extend the garden that far, but a certain bulldozer pushed a certain pile of crushed rock too far and .... never mind, it's a great spot for some of the 'wilder' plants.

In between, I've been attacking the Hillside Garden, which needs major work. It's become a difficult area. The soil is clay, and I haven't been able to mulch it the last couple of years. When it is dry, and this summer has been very dry, I can hardly get the fork in, let alone up-end any perennials. It rained a bit last night, and I got some Goldenrods dug out (too many of them) and got a start on removing the Geranium Sanguineum. (Some call it Bloody Cranebill, and that's not an adjective.) Now there's a thug for you. Spreads like the dickens, and roots to China. And always only has a few flowers. One plant, surrounded by rocks and gravel, is a fine thing, but a patch of it is a boring mess.

Of course, that's only one side of renovating. The other is new planting, and that will wait for Spring. I have some ideas......

Oh, and I promised some more pictures of Fringed Gentian, so here they are:

The flowers only open in the sun, but aren't they worth waiting for?

Hare-brained Scheme

2011-09-02T17:30:00.000-07:00

Some are born to hare-brained schemes, and others have hare-brained schemes thrust upon 'em. I don't know if I fall into the first category, but I definitely suffer from the latter.

My latest one was born of necessity. The gravel walkway beside my Studio, actually between it and a short clay bank, has been impossible to keep weed-free. It is often damp, with runoff from the hill behind, and the clay is heavy and sticky. I've pulled.... I've hoed, I've even resorted to Nasty Chemicals. Nothing worked for very long.

During heavy rains water runs down the walkway on its way across the driveway and then down to the Marsh. I've made a shallow swale along the edge to channel this a bit. Still, I think the rain is washing tons of seeds down with it.

Now Horsetails, Equisetum arvense, have come up in it.

Frustrated, I thought of landscape fabric. I had a bit, given to me by a friend who moved away, tucked in the shed. There wasn't nearly enough, but I also had a roll of house-wrap, left over from when the house was being built. It was some kind of synthetic, waterproof, sturdy, black.... well, why not, I thought.

Here's the result:

Take that, horsetails!

You can see there's still lots more work to be done: the path up the hill is a mess, the clay bank needs a complete overhaul, I need to put more gravel on the fabric.... but maybe now this area won't be quite so daunting.

And maybe this will be one of my more successful hare-brained schemes.

Fringed Gentians

2011-08-30T15:58:00.000-07:00

I defy anyone to find a flower more blue, more brilliant, more astonishing, than our native Fringed Gentian.

Fringed Gentian, or Gentianopsis crinita if you want to be formal about it, is one of our showiest natives. It has a large distribution, the entire Eastern side of our continent in fact, but it seems to be one of those flowers that is either present in large numbers or entirely absent. It is a biennial, forming a very small rosette of rather succulent pale green leaves the first year, and a cluster of flowering stems the second. I have seen it by the acre on the Paden Road alvar, sprinkled like blue stars under the willows and aspens at Limerick Forest, and as a ribbon of blue along a section of the K&R Trail in Lanark County. But do you think I could get it to grow at my place? No. So far, Pine Ridge has been one of those places where it is entirely absent.

And not for lack of me trying. I brought seeds home several times, and tried starting them in pots like I do a lot of seeds. I could never get them to germinate. In a baggie with damp vermiculite in the fridge they did, putting out very tiny white roots, but they didn't survive being moved into a pot. Pots I left outside to germinate over winter remained disappointingly empty.

Two years ago I brought home seeds from the Fringies along the K&R Trail. These were very robust plants, close to three feet tall, and covered with blooms. They grew in the narrow strip between the gravel of the trail and the weedy slope down to the ditch. Not wanting to try them in pots again, I sprinkled most of them in a spot along my driveway that is somewhat alvar-like, having underlying limestone pavement with the resulting sparse plant cover, and being, like an alvar, damp in spring and fall and dry in summer.On my way back to the house, there were a few seeds left in the envelope and I dumped them out at the end of the
Rock Garden near the Canada Lily. Still along the driveway, but higher up the hill and a rather weedy spot.

Of course, I kept checking my sort-of-alvar for Fringed Gentians, even going so far as to closely inspect the ground for signs of pale green rosettes. Nothing.

Coming back yesterday, I checked again. Still nothing.

But what did I see near the Canada Lily?

Yes! Fringies!!!! A whole patch of them, at least 20 plants, about two feet tall, and with many flowers and buds.

They weren't quite open - the flowers only open in the sun, but the colour! So blue, so perfectly shaded with rose, so delicately touched with green.The calyces are an unusual diamond-shape in cross section, giving the blooms a strong sculptural quality.

I had to check them again today, just to make sure they were real. If it is sunny tomorrow and the flowers open more, I may just have to post more pictures!

World's Smallest Bog

2011-08-26T17:49:00.000-07:00

Wandering around in my rock garden, coffee cup to hand, I once again found myself studying a deepish depression in the underlying granite. The garden was made, and is being made, on a large outcropping of pink granite. I have cleared off some of the stone, moving what soil there was into the depressions, and then I've planted into these 'beds'. But this particular depression is different in that it doesn't drain very well. It isn't large, maybe 25 square feet at surface level, but about 3 feet deep and drained only by a not-very-large crack. It is often full of water. Reeds and bullrushes actually sprout in it.

Looking at it, I decided that what I really wanted there, in fact what I absolutely had to have there in order to achieve True Garden Happiness, was a bog. A real bog, and right now.

While it might seem strange to have a bog in the middle of a rock garden, it does make a certain amount of sense when you realize that, in the mountains, you go up to find water. In the lowlands, you go down, but in the mountains you go up. And what's a rock garden if not a pretend mountain side?

I got at it right away. Carried pails of sand up and dumped them in. Scraped up a few loads of old decomposed moss and covered the sand mound with it. This stuff, which I got from the edge of the marsh, is not quite peat, but well decomposed and 'peaty'. And light to carry!

I still had 3 small Pitcher Plants, Sarracenia purpurea, in pots. I had planted them at the edge of the marsh, in the peaty area, but some critter kept dragging them out and I got tired of re-planting them so put them back in their pots. Amazingly, they have done just fine. One even bloomed this summer. Anyway, I planted them in my new 'bog', added some baby Sundews, Drosera rotundifolia, and some clumps of live Spaghnum. I sprinkled some sand on top to keep the peat from blowing away and voila:

The Sundews are on the mossy log you see on the left. Too small to show up, but they'll grow! Here's a closer look at the Pitcher Plants:

Hopefully the moss will 'take' and spread to cover the whole thing. I'll probably have to add water during dry spells, but hey, that's only sometimes. The rest of the time I can pretend I'm in the mountains!

Garden Oops

2011-08-21T10:05:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the garden the other day with a cool drink (just root beer, don't get excited) I distracted myself from the contemplation of all the work that needed doing by looking at some of the 'oopses' around me. For example:

Great colour combo...... not.

Ah, the horizontal shrub gambit, very creative......

'Always plant the taller things at the back and the shorter things at the front.' Very good advice. I really should follow it.....

Creeping Phlox, P. subulata - lovely sheet of white flowers in May. Can you see those sweet little Alpine Daisies in the lower half of the picture? Neither can I.

And that was only while sitting in one spot!

Blooms Day

2011-08-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

It was dark and dreary here today, but there were plenty of things in bloom. I won't bore you with all the yellow daisies, just this one:

it is Elecampane, Inula helenium. Not a native, it was brought by the early settlers, probably for some medicinal use. The leaves are huge - as much as 3 feet long, and the stems can be 6 feet tall or more. Naturally this latest one has come up in the middle of a bunch of low things! The shaggy daisies have charm, though, and the whole effect is fairly graceful. Just don't try moving them - the root goes down to Texas.

Lots of phlox in bloom:

Some years they mildew badly but not this year. Something to be said about drought conditions, I guess. The phlox pretty much hold the border together this time of year. The darkest one is 'Nicky', and the white one is 'David', but I don't know the names of the others.

The Lobelia cousins are all in bloom: Lobelia cardinalis, L. syphylitica, and L. symphilitica alba. All three make good clumps, and all three seed around a bit. I find that if I want to keep L. cardinalis going in the garden, I have to lift and divide it every spring. It just dwindles if you don't separate the rosettes in early spring. It likes damp feet, but like its cousins, it can manage without. Both are native plants.

Another native, Whorled Aster, Oclemena acuminata, is blooming in the woods. It seems to be the first one of the Asters, although the Heart-leaved, Large-leaved and Lance-leaved ones are also starting. Not very impressive, but when you realize that it grows and prospers in dark dry places under pines and spruces you will have new respect for it.

Goldenrods are blooming too. The roads and fields around here are all edged with Solidago canadensis - an attractive if spready weed. There are three species of native Goldenrod that look very similar and there are two methods of telling them apart. In the first method, you take a number of samples, your hand lens and your calipers, your textbooks and your field guides, and you carefully disect, measure and identify each tiny part. After several hours of hard work, you may feel fairly confident in saying 'this is, most likely, Solidago canadensis.' The other method involves sweeping your eyes over the patch and announcing grandly, 'this is, most likely, Solidago canadensis'. Your chances of being right are about equal.

(This is, most likely, Solidago canadensis.)

Something else in bloom that I'm kind of excited about is my first yellow Clivia from the seeds I got a couple of years ago. I bought 6 seeds of Clivia miniata var. citrina, and 5 produced good plants. The first one bloomed this week:

Wow! Definitely yellow! The edges of the petals are practically white, which gives an over-all pastel effect. Now I can't wait to see the others bloom! The other plants are all smaller, but I think they'll bloom next year, in time for Blooms Day, August 2012.

Lady's Mantle

2011-08-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

I do believe I've finally figured out how to handle Lady's Mantle, Alchemilla vulgaris.

This plant looks wonderful in the early spring and Summer, but then you have to cut it right back, leaving you with.... yes, a big hole. And since the Lady looks best when there's lots of it to froth over rocks and paths, you tend to end up with a rather large empty space in your border. It self-seeds for me, maybe a bit too freely, so I have been leaving many seedlings and enjoying it a lot when it blooms. The chartreuse green flowers and the only slightly greener leaves make a wonderful foil for almost any colour of flowers. It sets off white Daisies, blue-violet Geraniums, pink Roses, in fact any pastel colour to perfection. Alas, it only blooms for a couple of weeks, and then it turns really shabby. And it's no good just cutting back the spent flowering stems because the leaves that accompanied them will also turn brown and tired looking and you really need to shear the whole thing to the ground.

It re-grows fairly quickly, but still for a few weeks you have a big gap.

The notion I hit on was to treat it somewhat like a rock garden plant. I mulched all around the plants with some of that lovely pea stone I lucked into last year. The plants spread and covered the gravel and bloomed wonderfully, then today when I cut them right back they went back to looking like small plants surrounded by a large area of beautiful small stones! Perfect!

From this:

To this:

I'm really liking that idea a lot! And the pea gravel makes weeding much easier. The weeds that do come up, are so easy to pull out it's actually fun!

On the Trail for Ferns

2011-08-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

Monday being a national holiday (Emancipation Day, who knew?), I decided to go to Eagles' Nest Lookout and see if I could get spores of Fragrant Fern, Dryopteris fragrans.. This fern is quite rare this far South, occurring only along the rivers and streams branching off the ancient Fossmill Drainage which once drained the enormous Lake Algonquin to the West and North of the Ottawa Valley. It is known to grow on the cliffs of the Barron Canyon, but I have found it on the cliff below the Eagles' Nest Lookout as well.

I grew many small plants of Fragrant Fern two years ago, but only one of them survived the winter of 2009-2010. It is still alive, but very worried. I think I planted all of them in too much shade.

It was a beautiful day for a hike - sunny, not too hot, and a bit of a breeze. The trail I took is called the Manitou Mountain Trail. I don't know if there is a Manitou Mountain, because I've never gone down the trail that far! I get side-tracked by all kinds of interesting things and don't end up going very far. Botanists are people who can spend hours and hours in the woods.... and travel all of 30 feet. Not this time, though. I went as far as the giant dead maple which marks my place to head up into the rockfall area, and once up there, I followed the cliff edge looking for Fragrant Ferns.

And found them this time! I tried a few weeks ago but headed up towards the cliff at the wrong place and wasn't able to reach ferns. The rockfall below the cliff, which consists of boulders the size of small apartment buildings, is impossible for me to cross at one point, and if I don't go up to the cliff beyond that point, then I can't get to the ferns. As you can see, they grow in cracks and crevices in the cliff wall. They are right out in the open, facing pretty well due West. It was while I was looking up at them and thinking this that I realized it was pretty smart to go look for them in the morning because the sun was still over the other side of the cliff and I was nicely in the shade!

The ferns looked reasonably good. I found a few plants that looked the worse for wear, maybe only a couple of small fronds left, but others were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I had a bit of a struggle getting close enough to a plant to inspect a frond to see if there were any ripe spores, but by dint of digging my toe into a crevice and clinging to a (rather bend-y) cedar, I got up there. Yes, there were ripe spores! I grabbed one frond and fell, not gracefully, back to the path. Success!

After that I sat on one of the huge fallen boulders, feet sticking out over about 200 feet of empty, and ate my lunch.

The way back to the truck was pretty interesting too. First I wandered a bit further up the main trail. The normally swampy bit that had been under about 3 feet of water in the spring was now so dry I could walk around in it. That was fun. There was absolutely nothing growing there except some Sensitive Ferns and some sedges; I guess the flooding killed off all the other stuff. Going back, the far end of this swampy area narrowed into a bit of a stream bed. Since it seemed to go more or less in the right direction, I stayed in it. Easy walking! Then I saw that there was a long low ridge of quite mossy rock to my left and I climbed up to take a look.

To my delight, I found quite an extensive colony of Maidenhair Spleenwort, Asplenium trichomanes. Here's a close-up of this charmer:

I've seen this before, but a bit further West in a place I can't easily get to on my own, so I am very happy to know there are some at Eagles' Nest. It's fronds are only about 6 to 8 inches long, each pinnule maybe less than an inch long. The spores are microscopic. I do have it growing well in my garden, from spores from the Black Donald Lake population, but I took a frond with ripe spores anyway. More genetic diversity will be my excuse.

And yes, I did see an eagle.

Allium confusium

2011-08-01T06:23:00.000-07:00

I first got to know Allium cernuum, Nodding Wild Onion, in Banff National Park where I would occasionally come across it in the woods at lower elevations. It tended to be solitary, one stem, and rather delicate. The white and pink flowers hovered delicately above the various other woodland plants. A couple of times I found it blooming with the purple Alpine Clematis, a rather good combination. Needless to say, when I started my garden here, I wanted it, so when I saw Allium cernuum in one of the seed exchanges, I asked for some seed. Better yet, I eventually saw A. cernuum f. album listed, and sent for that too.

A. cernuum grew easily and bloomed the next spring. I put it at the base of some large rocks in the rock garden, and it has been happy there. A little light shade, good drainage and reasonably good soil are all this plant needs. It blooms in June and has spread to be a fair-sized clump now. It does set a lot of seed, like all the Alliums, but it's easy enough to remove them.

Then I got seeds of A. cernuum album and grew those. Look at this now:

Very nice, but not A. cernuum! The huge bracts (maybe they have another name, alliums have their own vocabulary, the straight stems and the fact that this is blooming now, nearly a month after A. cernuum tells me it is something different.

So I asked for seeds of A. cernuum album again, and what did I get but this:

Again, very nice, but not A. cernuum, and certainly not anything forma album. This one is probably A. stellatum, Wild Onion, and a good addition to my native plants list, but dang it, I wanted A. cernuum album!

Finally, this bloomed this year:

Allium cernuum forma album, as I live and breath!

Now, will someone please explain why it is much smaller than A. cernuum (look at the leaves and seed head arching in from the right hand side which are from the A. cernuum plant right beside the white one), blooms a month later, and has round flower clusters instead of the 'fireworks' shape of its cousin?

Bloom Day

2011-07-16T19:14:00.000-07:00

Can anybody play? I gather from blogs I read that every month (even January?) has a Bloom Day and that it is the 15th. Am I right here? Anyway, I thought I'd post some pictures of some good things that are in bloom here right now. Yes, I know I missed the 15th. I've been super busy getting pottery made for Midsummer Herbfest.... which is a plant-related event so I can mention it here. Check out the link - Herbfest is just what it sounds like and lots of fun!

So, what's in bloom at Pine Ridge? Heaps of hot colours: Red-flowering Raspberry (Rubus odoratus), Spirea (no idea what species), and Lychnis Fulgens against the rail fence. This Lychnis is about 18" high, blooms for several weeks or more just when you need it, and is solidly perennial. It mixes well with daylilies, too.

My pale yarrow is blooming. It has the size and stature of Coronation Gold, but the soft ferny leaves of the gone-native Achillea millefolium. The flowers are a soft yellow. I am convinced it is a cross of the two species, and an improvement on both.

While we are looking at cool colours, the green flowers of Anemone riparia are really quite striking when you see them under the sumachs. They seem to like shade, but don't let them into your garden unless you are prepared to let them run free - they seed themselves around with the usual, er, anemone abandon.

Milkweeds of all kinds are in full bloom: the weedy Ascelpias syriaca in its multitudes (but not in my garden, thank goodness), the Swamp Milkweed, A. incarnata, both pink and white forms, and my favourite, A. tuberosa in its wild orange form. This plant likes, indeed must have, deep sandy soil. It has a deep but brittle tuberous root, so is hard to move, and can take a while to establish. It grows here locally only in one location, that I know of, and that is an area of sand dunes along the Ottawa River. I have it here with ornamental grasses and it is quite happy, thanks.

That Fireweed is another one I wouldn't recommend for the border, but in a wild corner it is quite attractive.One of those plants that you don't really want, but if you don't have it, you need to get it. Gardeners will know what I mean.

All kinds of yellow daisies blooming, of course. Rudbeckia, several species and many colour forms, Coreopsis, Ratibida, Anthemis..... July is certainly the month of yellow daisies. Here are the developing flowers of Grey-headed Coneflower in front of a pale inky-blue Delphinium.

My favourite Delph is always the white one, of course.

There are lots more good things in bloom, and I want to include them all, but my mouse is getting over-heated! I'm not kidding - it is jumping around just like a real mouse that's been in the sun too long.

I can't wait for Bloom Day in August, this was so much fun!

Garden Thoughts

2011-07-01T06:41:00.000-07:00

Somebody said gardening is a matter of pushing back the wilderness. I was reminded of this just now when I read a post on one of the lists I read asking if it was alright to make something in the garden which would be good for the plants she wants to grow, but which wouldn't look very 'natural'. Given that the wilderness around her is already well pushed back, I don't see why not!

The idea of 'pushing back the wilderness' really resonates with me, on many levels. For one thing, I really am. My place is smack in the middle of forest which has never been cleared. It is mainly a rocky ridge, with a large marsh on one side and a stream, now beaver pond, on the other. No pioneer was ever dumb enough to try to clear it. It could not have been plowed anyway. Some of the trees were burnt in the great fires of 1860-1890, but that has quite a different long-term result from clearing. Clearing means cultivation, and cultivation changes the soil and the drainage patterns. So my spot is still wilderness.

The bear that came and smashed my bird feeders (again) is at home. I have to remember that.

The sumachs, maples, horsetails and other wild things that keep coming up in my garden want their wilderness back. I get no chance to forget that.

Areas that are in the sun today won't be in a few years when the trees all around them grow tall enough. Another thing to remember.

The driveway keeps getting narrower and narrower - the brambles and shrubs have as their job the task of colonizing new openings to get them ready for the trees to move in. It takes a large bulldozer and huge truckloads of crushed stone to push back simple shrubs. The wilderness is a worthy opponent.

On another level, we humans have a deep need to push back the wilderness. We need to create areas of safety and comfort for ourselves. Even in a City, we make gardens to satisfy our impulse to improve on the wilderness around. A precise bed of hostas and begonias, carefully mulched with purchased bark chips, edged with a metal surround, and needing daily watering, gives us a feeling of security against the wilderness of streets, buildings, cars, jobs, and other people.

The expanses of open front lawns that define the American and Canadian city garden are a visible (but polite!) way of thumbing the collection nose against the wilderness.

Which we need to do, to keep up our courage.

Whew, Survived the Garden Tour!

2011-06-27T14:40:00.000-07:00

Saturday, the first day of the Botanic Garden Tour, dawned dark and damp. Scudding clouds and a fine drizzle at 6am. did not bode well. But gardeners and garden lovers are made of stern stuff! Before 10 am a pair of determined tour-ers walked up the driveway. They had decided to park on the main road and walk up because they wanted to see the woods. They told me three more cars were waiting for 10am!

My signs were up....

The bird feeders were in place....

The ferns were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.....

And there were flowers, here and there.

The big winner was Digitalis grandiflorum, a terrific Foxglove with the happy combination of lovely soft yellow bells and a cast-iron, fully perennial constitution. People asked about it and wanted it and I dug up many little plants to give them. Luckily I hadn't weeded the patch above the Hillside Garden where they were growing in a solid mat! Some advantages to not weeding! Here it is beside the Herb Garden fence:

The weather improved a lot on Sunday, and we even had some actual sunshine. The light coming through the trees above the marsh is always striking. I love the feeling of airiness it gives.

We did lose one party of 3 in the woods. I noticed them starting off down the Marsh Trail but figured with the woods so wet they would soon be back. After 45 minutes I was starting to wonder, but then they came out. They looked happy enough so I stopped worrying about them, but they came over and asked me how far the trail went. I guess they went pretty far! Another pair of visitors brought a sweet white miniature poodle-something (these dogs all have such silly names but they all look alike: poodles with legs too short for their bodies!) and they went down the same trail. When they came back the poor thing was covered with green bits and black muck. He'd apparently stepped off my neighbour's boardwalk, thinking the duckweed on the water was solid! We washed him under the tap and dried him off. Not a happy pup.

It was interesting to see people in my usually empty garden. For a little while, it didn't seem quite as 'mine'. Probably, a little distance will do me good. I get too wrapped up in things and lose perspective.

On the whole, though, it went very well. The volunteers were great, the visitors said nice things, Kip the Border Collie was A Very Good Dog, it didn't rain too-o-o-o hard, and I survived!

Brer Bunn

2011-06-20T10:19:00.000-07:00

The wildlife around here is getting too doggone cheeky. This morning I was weeding in the Rock Garden, pulling weeds with my right hand and collecting them in my left. I was humming along, alone in my own little dream world, not paying attention to anything, listening to the birds, swatting deerflies and so on, when I felt a little tug on my left hand. At first it didn't really register, but I did feel it. A minute later I felt it again. This time I looked down, and there was a brown bunny pulling at one of the weeds in my hand!

I think it was the same long-eared lo-lopper I have been seeing in the mornings. When I sit at my computer, my window view is of the Hillside Garden with the path coming down off the hill. Several times lately I have seen a brown bunny come hopping down the path. He's no doubt headed for my Herb Garden, going to see what new things I've arranged for his dining pleasure. My basil and parsley are practically endangered plants this year. I planted a dozen baby basils and have 3 left, and they have teeth marks on them. The parsley is getting nibbled too. He's a distinctive kind of a guy, with a blackish look all along his back, shading to a quite black little tail. In colour, he's a lot like a German Shepherd dog. These critters are actually hares, called Snowshoe Hare or Varying Hare. I think that's a great pun, given that it is their hair that varies.

I was startled and said 'Hey!' loudly. He twitched those long ears of his and then bounded off into the woods.

If he likes these weeds so much, why doesn't he pull them?

'Over The Hedge' Botanic Garden Tour

2011-06-17T07:05:00.000-07:00

Nothing concentrates the gardener's mind like an impending Garden Tour. Knowing that large numbers of strangers are going to be looking at your garden really makes you look at it. And not usually with joy and admiration, I'm afraid.

The first thing you become aware of when you know your garden is about to be inspected, is paths. Visitors need paths in order to know where to go, and you need the paths in order to keep the visitors out of the plantings. I'm not kidding about that - I've had people tromp right through sensitive plantings because they wanted to see something more closely. So it is imperative to have paths that keep people moving, allow them to get close enough to see the interesting bits, and yet keep them away from anything you don't want pinched, brushed, fondled, or otherwise abused. One person gently feeling the furry back of a New York Fern frond is one thing, but 50 people doing it is quite another.

And mine is a garden of paths.

Some, the ones in the sun, are covered with the same grey limestone gravel as the driveway and parking area, so they are easy to spot and people intuitively know where to walk. They do have an awful propensity for weeds, though. Everything wants to grow in the gravel! Until recently, I could spray them with a weed killer, but those are now illegal here. I'm not sure if they are illegal everywhere or in all situations, but the home gardener can no longer buy them. I've done a bit of experimenting with vinegar, and it does seem to work. You mix a bit of dish washing liquid and a bit of salt into the vinegar, and spray. One really good thing about this, actually there are two really good things, is that if it accidentally gets on something you don't want to kill, you can wash it off and no harm done. The other thing is that the sprayed thing turns brown within an hour or two. I'm thinking this might be the answer for the flagstone-type paths I have in the Herb Garden and the Rock Garden. It's practically impossible to pull grass or dandelions from between tightly fitted stones, but a spray will make it easy. And I don't believe vinegar and a bit of salt will be that bad for the environment. I hope.

In the Sampler Garden, and of course in the woods, my paths are just bare earth. In the Sampler I once spread many many wheelbarrows of wood chips,which looked wonderful. They weren't really that nice to walk on, but they sure looked good. Of course it didn't take very long for them to rot away. Now I have a system where, in the early Spring, I rake the leaves off the planted areas on to the path, and leave them there. After a month or so, they are pretty much broken up and I can move them back on to the plant areas as mulch. By then, too, I can see where the plants are. Probably most of the woodland things would come through the leaves fine, but I like to have seedlings pop up, and they won't if the leaf cover is too thick. I'm getting a bit of very welcome help in the Garden just now, and my Super Helper cleared all the paths in the Sampler. A good path makes the garden look good!

Woods paths suffer from windfalls. No tree will fall beside a path if it can fall across it. No branch will land in an open spot where you can easily pick it up if it can land on a precious plant where you will have to cut it into small pieces in an effort to save the thing it is crushing. And no small trees crash, only chain-saw-sized ones do. Enough said. My tree guy will be happy this Fall. (He's going to be very happy in fact. He's a bit of a dare-devil, and likes nothing better than to take down trees no insurance-minded person would go near. I have several waiting for him. One is a huge White Pine, over 24" diameter, leaning across a main trail.... the other is a giant White Spruce which has died and is much too close to my hydro line. Paul will be thrilled!)
The Rock Garden path suffers from Trilliums. They come up in the path, and I can't bear to yank them. I would dig them out and move them except that moving one path stone would mean moving the adjacent ones, which would mean re-building the path. I guess this week (the Tour is next weekend) I'll have to grit my teeth and yank.

Then, with a Tour imminent, one starts to count up what will be in bloom on the fateful day. This time, to my disappointment, I'll have to say, not much. A garden with a lot of native plants in it is a Spring and Fall garden. My peonies are in full bloom today and will be gone by next Saturday. My roses might be good, but the lavender that I count on to set them off is far behind yet. Quite a few of the lavenders didn't make it through the winter in good order and I have replaced them. They will bloom, but a bit later than usual. The geraniums, lady's-mantles, iris, yarrows and so on are all either over or nearly so. The heat and dryness we have been having have hurried them through their season. Obviously, I need to think more about flowers for the Summer.

Another thing a Tour makes you think about is those areas in the garden that you just haven't been able to cope with. The compost or burning piles that aren't very hidden..... the old shed that would teeter if you leaned on it but you haven't had time to take it down..... the bit of path that doesn't quite connect to the next path because there is a huge boulder in the way.... the side garden that the Horsetails have overrun totally.... well, we just won't go there, and that's the only solution to deal with them, don't go there.

Luckily, my ferns are in very good shape! Ferns do start a bit slowly in the Spring, but they hit their stride in June. They are in full growth, bright and bushy-tailed, right now and will be for the next several months. The Sampler Garden, the Fern Bed and the Marsh Trail are very nice right now. So there will be something worth looking at at Pine Ridge next weekend!

A Surprise, A Mystery, and, finally, some Rain

2011-06-11T15:59:00.000-07:00

Surprise!

There really are times when you see something and can hardly believe your eyes! A couple of days ago I went to open the bedroom window because it was cooler outside than in, and I happened to glance over towards a messy spot which started as a compost pile, morphed into a stuff-to-be-burned pile, and then became one of those don't-go-here-it's-just-too-awful garden corners. We all have them. Anyway, I saw something reddish.... ran outside to look, and there was a fine Lily with buds almost ready to open. I must

dumped seed pots which hadn't germinated on the pile, and one seed was able to grow. What is most amazing is that I had left the spot alone long enough for it to grow to blooming size. Actually, given that this garden is too big and I never have enough time to do everything, maybe it's not so amazing.

I wonder what it is!

It's a Mystery....

Have you ever had something bloom, and had no idea that you had such a thing, where you got it, or why you put it where it is? That happened to me this week. Suddenly there was a gorgeous wine-red Iris blooming in my Hillside Garden. It was behind a blue Oat Grass, getting engulfed in with a huge patch of Rudbeckia 'Goldsturm'. Why on earth would I have put a Bearded Iris there? And who gave it to me? I gave up on the large Bearded Irises years ago. I love those opulent flowers, but not the dreadful spotted leaves the rest of the summer. And the gales we usually get right at Iris time were the final straw. So now if there is a large Iris in my garden, it must have been a gift. Whoever gave me this one, thank you, it is very beautiful, and I promise to move it.

What a good thing that 'Goldsturm' isn't blooming!

Finally, some Rain

It's been very dry for a couple of weeks. First we had oceans of rain, then none. Most of my garden is well mulched and has stayed damp and workable, but the Hillside is solid clay, faces South, and slopes. It turned into a rock. I put the tines of the garden fork on the ground, stepped on the fork, and nothing happened. It wouldn't even go in, it was that hard. Weeding was impossible, and moving plants was not to be thought of. A fine soft rain has been coming down for an hour now, so it should be good for working there tomorrow.

Weeds, you have been warned!

My Garden-making Secret - Potatoes

2011-06-09T18:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's the small things that give you the best sense of satisfaction. Never mind if I accomplished anything serious today, I did at least plant my potatoes.

Last spring I planted peas and lettuce and as soon as they came up the raccoons dug around and ate the seeds and trampled the seedlings. I was so mad I gave up and didn't so much as look at the veg patch again all summer. But it bothered me. I kept feeling I hadn't tried hard enough. And to live in the woods in the middle of a large garden and not even have any fresh peas.... well, I wasn't happy about it.

So far, my peas are climbing up their sticks nicely, thank you, and we have already had several salads of lettuce, spinach and assorted nameless greens. I like those packages of seeds called Mesclun. You get a variety of lettuce-like leaves, and the mixture both looks good in the bowl and tastes good. You can add regular lettuce leaves, if you have any, some green onion and maybe a tomato and you have a fine salad. And you can have some fun when you collect the leaves by tasting the unfamiliar ones. Some are very spicy!

My veg patch is pretty small. It's basically 20' square, although a corner is taken out to accommodate an inconveniently located Crabapple tree. That's quite enough for only two people, except that there isn't room for potatoes. So I have been eyeing the area beside it. There is a space there almost as big, but roughly triangular, and sloped steeply to the South. At the bottom of the slope there are Daylilies and Canada Anemone, and at the top and along one side, the woods. I've had a compost pile there, and have periodically hacked down the thistles and mulleins that seem to favour the spot. Today I dug it over. Yes, that is my crowbar standing up on the left - a vital gardening tool in my rocky garden. I found several fine rocks! The soil looks pretty good, though, and I had no trouble digging it.

Then I planted 10 pounds of Yukon Gold seed potatoes.

This is one of my favourite tricks. When I want to make a new garden, I get it roughly dug and tidied and plant potatoes in it. They come up quickly, nice dark green plants which look pretty good, and they fill the space until I can get other things to plant there. You're not supposed to plant potatoes in soil which has stones in it, but I haven't found it a problem. A root hits a rock, it just detours around it. Not good with carrots, but fine with potatoes!

There was some space left, so I put my two large and several smaller tomato plants, and my one squash plant there too. Only one squash seed germinated, and I don't know if one squash plant will grow any squashes, but I might as well plant it. Here's the spot as it looks now:

Those little green things are the tomatoes..... you can see the space is larger than it seems at first. It looks kind of rough, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to be enjoying tiny new potatoes soon!

Native Plants Sale at Fletcher Wildlife Garden

2011-05-29T09:32:00.000-07:00

The annual sale of Native Plants at the Fletcher Wildlife Garden in Ottawa is next Saturday. I've been brushing up my baby ferns and other plants to get them all spiffed for their turn in the shop window. I've got some nice things - Yellow Ladyslippers, Wild Ginger, Blue Iris, Foamflower, Wood Poppy.... Ebony Spleenwort, Clinton's Wood Fern and Polystichum tsus-simense (not a native but nice) and more. Here's a shot of the table, in the rain:

Doesn't look like much, but there are almost 100 plants there, and mostly only two or three of each species. The reddish things in the middle are from Connaught Nursery. They are baby Pitcher Plants (Sarracenia purpurea). They must be 3 or 4 years old now but still babies, and super-cute! Pitcher Plants are carnivorous, well, maybe we should say insectivorous, and you can some fun growing one in a basin on your deck. All it needs is a few inches of sand, some peat moss on top, and enough water to stay damp at the bottom. The 'pitchers', which are modified leaves, fill with rainwater. Insects go in, perhaps to shelter from the sun, perhaps in response to some chemical lure, and can't climb out because of the downward-facing hairs on the pitcher's inside walls. The victim decomposes in the water, and the plant absorbs the nutrients.. A sneaky way to survive in wet, nutrient-poor bogs!

The wet bud is on one of the Yellow Ladyslippers. We've had a lot of rain lately, and today is no exception. Hard to get any weeding done in the garden, but good for the ferns!

Shaw Woods

2011-05-14T18:45:00.000-07:00

Went for a walk in Shaw Woods yesterday. Millions of blackflies were delighted.

Shaw Woods (Shaw woods) is an outdoor education centre located South of Pembroke, Ontario, and West of Cobden, Ontario. It includes a beautiful stand of mature Beeches, a grove of Hemlocks, a Pine plantation, a wetland area, a rocky ridge, and some mixed woods. Just about every native plant habitat you could wish for!

I parked in the small parking lot, taking a bit of care not to get stuck like I did last time.... the ground is soft, and the truck sinks in a bit. (I wasn't stuck for long.) Clouds of blackflies immediately arrived, but I decided to soldier on, and headed off towards the Pine plantation. I wanted to see if the Pink Ladyslippers were showing their noses above ground. On the way I walked past a large patch of mixed Violets growing in a sunny part of the trail.

Didn't find any Pink Ladyslippers.

Then I headed over to the Trillium Loop Trail. What an amazing number of Trout Lilies there were under the trees! And so many flowers. Some years not so many bloom, but this year there is a bumper crop. Gardeners puzzle over how to get Erythronium americanum to bloom in their gardens, but I am starting to think they just need good soil, enough moisture, and time to mature. And enough sun in the spring.

The Trilliums were also out in full force. A lot of fine Red Trilliums, T. erectum, including one group of three stems with cream and pink blooms. White, pale yellow and cream flowers are not all that unusual for this Trillium, but I have never seen one this shade before.

Near the Hemlocks there are a lot of Blue Cohosh, Caulophyllum thalictroides. The dark foliage shows up well in the bare Spring woods. The flowers are rather goofy, but the berries later in the Summer are a beautiful dark matte blue.

After this I could hardly wait to get back into the truck to escape the flying fauna. Hot, sticky and itchy only begins to describe how I felt. But a peanut butter sandwich, a drink of water and 5 minutes with the air conditioning on in the truck did wonders and I decided to check out the other part of the Shaw Woods, across the road. This isn't really part of the main area, but there are trails there so I went over. I drove there, all of about 200 feet, so I wouldn't have to walk back later. I parked over to one side in the short driveway.

There is a Hydro dam there, with a large pond on one side and a rushing stream on the other. After this the path goes up fairly steeply, up to an interesting rocky ridge. The glacial erratics in the Woods on the other side of the road apparently came from this Ridge. The ridge face has interesting lichens on it, including several kinds of Rock Tripe.

Up on the ridge the Early Saxifrages were blooming. These always seem to grow in lines. I guess they root into cracks in the rocks. The seeds that don't fall over cracks probably can't get established. I looked at them with some envy. I've been trying to get this plant, Saxifraga virginiana, in my garden and so far I have managed to lose all but one tiny plant. The first batch of seeds drowned when I forgot and left the pot out in the rain and the flat filled with water.... the second batch didn't make it through the hot dry summer we had that year, and the third batch, which only gave me a half-dozen plants, the darn squirels dug every one of them up. I re-planted them but the damage was done. So this Spring all I have in the rockery is one tiny plant. At least it is growing in a crevice!

Barren Strawberry, Waldsteinia fragaroides, was spread like a carpet under all the trees and shrubs.The flowers are much like a Strawberry flower, only yellow. The leaves are a fine fresh green. This is a great ground-cover in a lightly shaded garden. Just for fun, I took a picture of a real Strawberry to put beside the look-alike.

In among the Waldsteinia I found a number of plants of Hooked Violet, Viola adunca. This is a violet that likes dry places - a bit contrary of it.You think of Violets wanting a damp spot, but not this one.

Also on the ridge was a plant of Rusty Woodsia, Woodsia ilvensis, it's fresh fiddleheads covered with long white hairs and looking like little furry balls. That's another plant that you'd think would like a shady damp spot, but like Viola adunca, it thrives in sunny, rocky spots.

When I got back down to the hydro dam, a white truck with the Ontario Hydro logo on it was parked right behind my truck. I looked around and sure enough, there was a fellow on the dam, fiddling with the winches and things there. I dropped my pack in the truck and moseyed down. I said 'Hi', which didn't impress him. He just scowled. 'Fine', I thought, 'be that way'.

'How long are you going to be?' I asked.

'Oh', he said, 'about half an hour'.

So I figured, well, he parked behind me, now I'll get some revenge. So I hung around and showed great interest (feigned of course) in what he was doing. It backfired, though, because he became quite chatty and explained everything! They use the winches to place large square logs on top of the concrete weir to raise the dam level. Somewhat ingenious, and somewhat awkward, I thought. He admitted that occasionally a log would get away on them and have to be dragged back up on to the dam.

We parted friends.

Sort of.

Spring Favourites

2011-05-10T09:28:00.000-07:00

Ah, Spring!

What joy to see my old favourites in bloom again, yet what heartbreak when the flowers shatter and they are gone again for another year. Sometimes I think joy and heartbreak are two sides of the same coin. Babies, puppies, flowers...... all bring such sudden leaping joy, and leave such longing behind when they grow up. At least with babies and puppies you have the children and the dog to enjoy in the future, with flowers there are just leaves or, worse, bare spots in the garden. I'll just have to look at my pictures a lot! And stop being so greedy!

The Trout Lilies, Erythronium americanum, are wonderful this year. Far more of them have flowers this year than usual. I have acres of the leaves at the back of my property, but most years there are only a few blooms. This year there are dozens.Nobody is quite sure what makes them bloom or not bloom.... quite a puzzle.

Another great favourite is Trailing Arbutus, Epigea repens. It is a shrub, but a trailing one. It likes north slopes and pine woods, so I put a few plants under the huge pines beside my driveway. They seem happy there. The flowers don't last long and the plant is not terribly impressive, but it is one of the first things to bloom every year. It is also sweetly scented, quite worth getting down on your hands and knees for.

Bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, is also very early. It's flowers only last a few days, but are spectacular when they all open in the Spring sunshine. My plant is spreading nicely and seeding around a bit. I'll have some to move into my woods this summer. There are already a few but I want sweeps of them! Bloodroot loves rocky terrain, so it ought to be pretty happy here.

A tiny plant that I wish were more inclined to do the same thing is Dutchman's Breeches, Dicentra cucullaria. The original plant is certainly spreading, but there are few flowers and so far no seeds. It needs a slightly damp spot, I think, and mine is perhaps too dry. Either that or it is intimidated by the Pink Ladyslippers all around it. These are just showing their 'noses' and it looks like it's going to be a good year for them.

Here is a non-native plant which is another spring ephemeral. It is Jeffersonia dubia, or Japanese Twinleaf. It is just like our native J. diphylla, except that the leaves and flowers are suffused with pink-mauve. I've been looking for our native one for years. I know where there are some plants, but I've never managed to get there at the right time to snaff some seeds. And I would have to snaff them as they are in a Conservation Area run by a person who never lets anyone have any seeds. I'm not sure if I'd actually do it, but the plant is so hard to come by that crime is beginning to appeal to me. I'm not sure what the 'bug' is that is visiting the Jeffersonia, but there have been lots of them this Spring.

Ah, Spring, indeed.

Hepaticas

2011-04-24T18:20:00.000-07:00

Last year, when I visited the Morris Island Conservation Area, I was surprised by all the Hepatica plants. Of course the flowers were long finished, but the leathery mottled leaves were everywhere. The leaves of Hepatica americana are evergreen, but a new crop grows every year after the flowers are finished. Needless to say, I made a mental note to come back in the spring to see the flowers, and today was the day. Easter Sunday today, and the sun shone and it was warm, and I totally enjoyed wandering around under the bare maples looking for different forms of Hepaticas. I really had to watch not to step on them!

They were just opening, not at their peak yet, but I still found quite a few forms and colours. Most were pale blue or white, but I found a lot of medium blue or blue-purples, and a few plants with quite dark rose or rose-purple flowers. I made a mental note of one particularly fine rose-purple and will have to go back later and hope for seeds.

As far as I'm concerned, these are Hepatica americana. The botanists can call them Anemone hepatica, or Hepatica nobilis, if they want, but I'm sticking with the old name. The other species native here, H. acutiloba, seems sufficiently different to me to retain its own name as well. Its leaves have much sharper points, with more definite mottling, and, in my experience, the flowers have quite a different 'look' to them. They usually have 8 or more petals, each one narrower than in H. americana, and the flowers are almost sure to be white or a very very pale blue or pink. It also prefers more shade and blooms a bit later.

Neither is difficult to grow in the garden. A good woodsy soil, sun and moisture in the spring followed by dappled shade for the summer, are all that are needed. If you don't have a deciduous tree or shrub to plant it under, a tall peony or rose will do. Put the Hepatica north of either one, and it will do fine. Hepaticas are very long-lived plants, bloom while the early bulbs brighten the bare garden, and like them, they have the market cornered on charm.

A Sense of Purpose

2011-04-14T14:13:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, in the grip of a sudden whim, I signed up for a special Meeting of the Field Botanists of Ontario. It was last weekend, and I mostly enjoyed it. The speakers were all terrific and it was a buzz to be in with a group of actual botanists.

The reason I mention this, is that I came away with what I think may be a Useful Insight. Practically every speaker mentioned making field collections, and they all talked about the importance of herbaria. The point they all made, is that samples of plants are collected and preserved not so much to answer current questions, but to be available to answer possible future questions. Herbarium specimens are regularly consulted decades after they were collected in order to answer questions that weren't thought of until much later. Today's collectors now also save a bit of the green plant material for drying and saving for possible DNA work later. So the point of the herbarium specimens is not to have a snapshot of the plant at the time of collection (although it is that too), it is to have the plant available for possible research many years later. I think this same idea can be applied to the making of a native plant garden.

I'm one of those people who tends to want to have a purpose for things. I understand perfectly doing something just for the sake of doing it - such as lying on the beach in the sun - but you notice I don't do that an awful lot. I enjoy things far more if I think my efforts might actually add up to something.

As a result, I have been more than a little bothered by the simple question of 'Why?' as applied to my garden work. Why make a native plant garden? Why go to lengths to grow, say, Chimaphila umbellata, from seed and then spend time trying to get it established in a suitable area? Why study the plant, document it, protect it, weed around it, start all over again when the slugs eat all the plants, and so on? Why spend hours and days working in the heat and bugs to make a garden at all?

The answer is.... I don't need to answer that question! I'm making my native plant garden, both the actual 'garden' part and the natural area around it, not for today but for tomorrow.

The chance that my garden might be of use sometime in the future is purpose enough.

Suddenly......

2011-04-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

Suddenly, everything is alive! Sunday night we had a torrential rainstorm, and the next morning there were signs of life everywhere.

One of my favourite little daffodils, Tete-a-tete, with its two blooms on each 4" stalk, went from tiny green nubs showing to full bloom, literally overnight.

Snowdrops appeared all over the Sampler Garden, pushing up through the leaves and grasses. There are two species of them there - the flowers look exactly alike but the leaves of one are greener and wider than the other.

One of these days I'll do some research and figure out which is which species. They were both sold as Galanthus nivalis, but obviously at least one is wrong.

The Elder bushes were suddenly covered with their improbable flower and leaf buds. They look sort of prehistoric, as though they are going to develop into something really scary..... come to think of it, Elderberries are kind of scary. They spread like the dickens and the bushes are super brittle. The birds love the berries, though.

The Hepaticas (both Hepatica americana and H. acutiloba) have fuzzy buds tucked down at the bases of the leaves and I expect the flowers are only a few days away. When Spring is late the plants grow faster to compensate. Too bad the gardener can't move faster as well! So much to be done, and all of it at once. I spent several hours today gently removing leaves from the fern beds and part of the rock garden. They'll become mulch once I know where the plants are and can tuck them in around them. Right now a lot of things aren't visible yet.

And the first crocus! This is Ruby Giant (which is neither ruby-coloured not giant but gorgeous anyway) and it looks a bit forlorn surrounded by the mud the rainstorm washed down around it. The Geranium behind it is almost completely buried. I tried to dig it out but it was still so wet I figured it would be better to wait a bit and not trample the rest of the crocuses.

Finally, Spring is here!

Signs of Spring

2011-03-29T18:24:00.000-07:00

So far, the signs of Spring are few and far between.

The buds on the Maples, one of the key things I look for to see if Spring is around the corner, are only just barely starting to swell.

The stems of the Red-stemmed Dogwoods are not very red yet, although the stems of the yellow-stemmed one do look brighter than they did.They got buried in a huge drift of snow by Snow Blower Man so it may just be relief at having their heads out again.

And speaking of snow, there's still plenty of it in the woods. In the morning it is frozen hard and Kip can run all over on top of it, but by afternoon it is softening up and he keeps falling through. It's funny to watch him, but the wild turkeys are even funnier - every time they go through the crust they give a little jump to get back on top, then they lift their feet high as though they think that will help. Of course it doesn't and down they go again. There are three males here that seem to be hanging around the bird feeders. If they think that they've discovered something the girl turkeys will admire them for I'm afraid they are going to be disappointed.

But...... the driveway is muddy, some of the rocks are showing through in the Rock Garden, there are hundreds of Red-winged Blackbirds in the Marsh (making a heck of a racket!), and I found some snowdrops!

Shivering Snowdrops, but Snowdrops none the less.

Obviously, we are having a late Spring. And just as obviously, when it does finally come, it will come in a rush. We'll go from snow lurking under the trees to weeds a foot high in about 15 minutes. Tulips, Daffodils, Crocuses and all their cousins will bloom for 5 of those minutes. I'll be able to park my lawn chair between the Hillside Border and the Rock Garden, and enjoy an entire flowering season during a (short) coffee break.

Looking for Seeds

2011-03-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

I'm always looking for seeds of native plants. Right now I'd really like Viola selkirkii or V. lanceolata seeds.....

A google search on these names didn't turn up any sources of these, no surprise. So I checked my favourite seed company, Gardens North, and no luck there either. The beauty of getting seeds from Gardens North, for me, is that many of the seeds Kristl Walek sells are collected in Ontario, so if she has them, I figure the plants will have a more-or-less local genome. Not that I am that fussy about that - I'm not planting them as a restoration project, just in my personal garden.

What I did turn up: the North American Native Plant Society, which is the somewhat-revived former Canadian Wildflower Society, has a seed exchange. I signed up as a member right away! Some mixed feelings about it, I must tell you. I was one of the first members of the CWS, and took the group very seriously. It was focused on Toronto, of course, but I had hopes that they would start chapters in other areas. They had a terrific magazine, Wildflower, and at one point they seemed to be growing steadily. Unfortunately, they made some bad decisions (yes, I squawked loudly), such as devoting too much of the magazine to plants from areas we Canadian types just weren't interested in, spending too much of their resources on the magazine to the detriment of any other activity, and, worst of all, renaming themselves the North American Native Plant Society. There would have been a roar of outrage, if they'd had enough members left by that point. I didn't renew my membership either and I guess they pulled back to only a small, Toronto-based club.Now they seem to showing new life again.

Their website (new) also mentions that they are having a plant sale May 7th. Wish I could go! But it's the opening day of my local Farmers' Market, and the day of a local crafts sale called Handmade Harvest and I'll be selling my pottery at both. How will I be at two events simultaneously? No, I haven't managed to clone myself - my long-suffering spouse will be at our booth at the Market. He's an excellent salesman - his Irish ancestry is a real asset sometimes!

I'll be looking for these violets this summer.They are listed as occurring in few locations where one can go hiking, within driving distance, and I'll focus on looking for them. Maybe, just maybe, I'll find them. Then I'll go back and hope for seeds....

And send some to the NANPS seed exchange. Maybe.

Jack-in-the-Pulpits

2011-03-12T07:16:00.000-08:00

Or should that be 'Jacks-in-the-pulpit'? No, that would imply many Jacks in one pulpit, and it could get crowded.

I'm thinking of these rather oddball plants now because somebody asked a question about them the other night. I was giving my fern talk to a local garden club, and one of the pictures I showed included a Jack. She basically asked if she could grow them in the City and I said, 'why not?'. Her question reminded me of my husband's late great uncle, Alfred (whose brother was named, yep, Wilfred). We were once invited to dinner at his place, and he invited me to come out back to see his garden.

It was a pretty typical inner city yard. About 35' by 30', with a board fence across the back, a cedar hedge on one side, and the garage wall on the other. The garage wall was completely covered with a climbing rose, which, this particular day, was in bloom. And what bloom! I looked in awe at a 30' long wall of gorgeous, deep red, velvety roses, every one of them facing us as we stood there looking up at them. Alf told me he planted it in 1920, just after he got home from The War.

'It's not hardy here, of course,' he said. 'So every fall I loosen the roots around the top of the crown, dig a trench from there to the end of the wall, and carefully bend the rose over to lie in the trench.'

'It works,' he said.

In the spring he would dig it up, stand it straight again, and re-tie all the canes to their lattice support. The tie-ing in alone must have have taken days!

The rest of his garden was one bed, I would guess about 4' deep, running the length of the fence. And it was filled with Jack-in-the-pulpits. Hundreds of them. The ones at the back were the tallest, some of them over 3' tall, and the ones at the front were the shortest, from about 6" up to 12" or so. There were many flowers under the leaves, and they varied quite a bit in colouring. Some were all green, with slighter darker stripes, some were white with purplish stripes, and some even had hints of pink. Alf explained that the Jack-in-the-pulpit, Arisaema triphyllum, grows from a tuber very much like a tuberous begonia does. The tuber keeps getting bigger, and you can, if you wish, divide it to make more plants. He didn't, he said. He liked to see big tubers.

'Hold out your hands,' he said. 'Flat, side by side.'

I did.

'Those tubers at the back, now,' he said, 'they are as big as your two hands together.' He went on to say that the flowers would give way later in the summer to stalks carrying large shiny red berries. Each berry could have up to 8 seeds inside. He cut them off, he said, because he didn't have room for more plants, and even so, he would always miss a few and they would come up under the bigger plants. If he liked the flower, he would move it to the front to grow on, and then if he really liked it, he would make room for it further back.

Yes, you can grow them in the City, Barbara! Just give them decent soil, not too dry, not too soggy, a bit of shade, and stand back. In about 40 years, you'll have tubers the size of your two hands.

Fern Talk

2011-03-07T06:54:00.000-08:00

Got some serious snow yesterday. Thick, heavy snow which didn't pack down much. Here's a picture of my Sampler garden in the new snow:

Looks cold, doesn't it? It was!

The area inside the rail fence is what I call my Sampler Garden, and the area to the left and up the slope is part of my Rockery.

Although the snow makes everything seem black and white, I'm always impressed by how some of the colours, particularly those in dried grasses and leaves, become more vivid. Maybe because there are so few colours left, we appreciate them more. This rose is Iceberg, which seems rather fitting:

I spent the entire day inside, didn't even go out to the Studio or the Plant Shed (formerly called the Greenhouse but now too dilapidated for that grand title), and worked on my Ferns slide show. I'm giving my talk on Ferns for the Ottawa Valley on Wednesday to a garden club in Barrhaven. It was very nice to look at slides of beautiful green fronds all day, with scenes of deep new snow outside both office windows!

As part of the Ferns presentation, I made a list of websites of interest to fern enthusiasts, and one of them is Les Fougeres Boreales, a specialist nursery near Montreal. I'd heard of them before, but was told they only sold wholesale.Now I see from the website that they are having an Open House May 28 to June 4 this year. I checked their catalogue and there are plenty of ferns I want.

Now all I have to do is learn to speak French by May 28th......

Fragile Fern

2011-02-27T08:31:00.000-08:00

Just what is it that makes us feel Spring is coming? I had a real feeling of it yesterday, so took K-dog for a walk and thought about this interesting question as we stumbled about in the ice-covered snow. There's not much snow right now, but what there is, is covered with a crust of ice so you stay on top of it for two steps, then you crash through the next. Add in the fact that much of my path is at a sharp angle (sideways, I mean) and you can see why we were stumbling about. Kip didn't have as much trouble as I did of course but even he took a few lurches. At one point he walked easily up a large boulder, and then slid back down! We went down to the rock wall where the Fragile Ferns are. I half-way thought there might be visible fiddleheads, but of course it is much too early yet.

The light is brighter, that's one sure sign Spring is coming. On the other hand, while I understand the maple sap has been running for several weeks, I see no sign of the buds on the trees swelling yet, nor do I see that red flush over the marshy areas that are always first signs of Spring around here.

Springtails, those weird tiny black bugs also called Snow Fleas, are another Sign and there were plenty of those. They hatch in their multitudes on warm days, covering the snow with black specks. I wonder what eats them. Apparently they spend most of their time underground and are one of the partners in a complicated three-way deal involving underground fungi, and Pine roots. I've heard that many Fleas means many mosquitoes, so we'll see. Not so many Fleas as usual this year.

When we got to what I call Fern Rock there were of course no fiddleheads yet. Here's a picture of the rock

showing them in early May. It's amazing how this small fern can grow in only a crack in a vertical rock face. If you look just right of middle, you can see a small plant all by itself in only a crevice. This rock is pretty well vertical, so how does rain get in? Maybe it trickles down and is slowed and diverted by the lichens. Come to think of it, the picture does show an area of rock above the little plant with less lichen cover, and a trail of moss below it.

Fragile Fern, Cystopteris fragilis, is one of the very first ferns come alive in Spring. It's called Fragile Fern because it goes dormant in dry times, but fragile it is not. It occurs all the way into the Arctic Circle, so it has to be tough. It's botanical name makes more sense. 'Cystopteris' refers to the sori, which start with indusia that look like tiny bladders. As the spores mature they push out the side and the indusia rupture and wither. Mature spores are black, and you can always tell a Fragile Fern by the black spore dots. In the picture below (bottom right) you can see the immature sori, and above it some mature ones. Note that some of the sporangia, which hold the developing spores, are already empty, and thus look brown. So the pinnule in the picture has some sporangia still holding spores, and some that are empty. The spores develop fast so it can be tricky to get some for propagating.

Mind you, this fern is not hard to propagate. Cuttings of the rhizome work quite well and are easy as get if you can find a Fragile Fern growing on a rock (instead of in it!) or even in the ground as it sometimes does. Spores germinate readily and the sporophytes develop rather quickly. That said, the plants I have in the fern propagator right now are a year old. They have matured enough to have fertile fronds! Don't know how they'll react to being planted out this summer. They will have skipped a whole winter..... sort of like some of us like to do.

Fragile Fern is great in the rock garden, usually staying under 18" high, and fine in dappled shade or even full sun, as long as you either keep it watered or stay philosophical when it goes dormant.

And it's a sure sign Spring is here.

Trilliums on a Snowy Day

2011-02-02T08:23:00.000-08:00

Snow day today! It's snowing steadily and we are supposed to be getting a fair-sized accumulation. So far there is about 10cm down, so I am going to considering my path to the Studio (all 30 feet of it) totally impassible, and have a Snow Day!

(For those who caught it, yes, I am fully bilingual when it comes to measuring systems. I mix feet and centimeters to suit myself. Very Canadian.)

I have some Trillium seeds from the Trillium-l seed exchange ready to put into pots. The best instructions for germinating Trillium seeds are to give them 2-3 months of warm, that is, damp and warm, conditions followed by 2-3 months of cold ditto. As soon as they arrived, I put the seeds along with a bit of a lightly dampened mix of peat and perlite into little baggies, and put the baggies in an airtight container on my desk. Today I'll move the seeds into pots of the same mix with a bit of soil added, cover them, and put them on the floor at the back of my plant shed, covered with a thick blanket of pink insulation. They should stay cold without freezing like that. Then, when the snow starts to melt, I'll move them outside to warm up naturally as Spring arrives. If all goes well they should form tiny rhizomes with a single root. Only next Spring will they put up a green leaf. And this first leaf won't look like a Trillium leaf although once you know what they look like you can recognize them. They look like little green flags! Look at all of them at the base of these clumps of T. grandiflorums:

(No points for spotting the Dandilion.)

The year after that they will put up 3-parted 'real' Trillium leaves and in another year to two they should bloom.

Trillium grandiflorum is easy to grow in Ontario. They aren't very fussy about soil, but they do need enough sunlight and decent drainage. They won't 'do' in deep shade or a soggy spot. Other than that, just remember that they are Spring Ephemerals, which means they will be up early, will bloom early, and will go dormant in the summer. I had a fellow a couple of summers ago, came with his wife to buy some of my pottery, who was determined that he wanted to have a White Trillium in his tiny garden behind his row house. Always the helpful beaver, I sent him home with a nice three-stem potful. The next Spring they were back. I asked him how the Trilliums worked out.

"Oh, he said, "they died.".

I was kind of surprised, and asked him when did they die.

"August. First they got shabby-looking, and then they died."

I reminded him that they go dormant, and asked him if they had come back this Spring.

"No. I planted some geraniums there instead, they're good and give colour all summer long".

I was able to restrain myself.

Toronto Gardens (link on the sidebar) has a thought-provoking blog about ethical questions relating to native plants. One that they touch on but don't go into detail about, is the often dubious origin of native plants being sold at nurseries. Since many of the more interesting natives are slow and/or tricky to propagate, they are dug from the wild, potted up, held for a few weeks, and sold as 'nursery propagated'. In my opinion, this is bad and wrong, on a number of counts. Where I lived before there were a lot of Wood Lily, Lilium philadelphicum, around. One day they were all gone, and there were holes where they had been. Somebody dug them, and there were far too many for any garden so we know what happened.

I have a hunch the problem isn't as wide-spread in Canada as it is South of the border, but we still need to be careful when we buy plants.

Here's a picture of a nicely round-petalled form I am encouraging in my garden. This is one of the best forms I've seen and it came up in my Sampler Garden. I moved it to a better spot and I'm hoping it will become a large clump. When it does, I'll divide it and eventually build up a bit of a stock of them. It's fairly large, too, and will have real presence in the garden. You saw it here first!

Cinnamon????

2011-01-30T07:38:00.000-08:00

Cinnamon.... or Not

There has been some discussion lately on one of the Lists I read about using cinnamon to deal with fungi, algae and other such nasties in seedpots. The first thing that got my attention is that the cinnamon you buy at the grocery store is not cinnamon. Apparently it's a mix of cassia and other things finely ground, with a bit of cinnamon oil added. Apparently real cinnamon is very sharp and not a bit like what we like in our apple pies. Who knew? Anyway, even the stuff I have in my spice rack is supposed to kill algae. I've just sprinkled tiny pinches of it on the surface of the fern tray that is currently suffering an algae attack. We'll see what happens!

Seed-starting Mix

Mixed up another large batch of mix for seed-starting. I bought all the bags of African Violet Soil the garden store had, plus a large bag of vermiculite and several bags of what they call 'Seed Starting Mix' which is really just finely ground peat moss and perlite. I mixed everything together in a large plastic feed bin. These bins are sold at the Farm Supply and are great for lots of things. They're about the size of large garbage pails, but shorter and wider, have polyprop rope handles, and are made of quite sturdy plastic. Unfortunately they don't come with lids, but most of the time that doesn't matter. I have several parked behind the house right now and I dump my kitchen compostables in them while the snow is too deep for me to get to the real compost pile. In the spring it will be easy to wheelbarrow them to the pile and dump them. Anyway, my super mixture filled the feed bin. I watered it a bit and covered it with a piece of plywood, and I'm ready to fill pots for seeds or transplanting seedlies. Some of my ferns are ready to go into larger pots so that will be today's entertainment.

Commercial seed-starting mixes tend to be all peat and additives, and I find it doesn't work well for me. The mix itself soon separates into a thick layer of dry peat on top of a potful of smelly wet whatever, with, of course, a dead plant in the middle. I did hear that the mixes contain wetting agents which are supposed to solve this problem, but some of my seedlies and fern babies need to stay in their pots for months, and the wetting agents only work for a few weeks. Might be true. In any case, I have found I have much better success with African Violet Soil mixed with some inorganics. Used to be able to get a product called Turface which is a lot like ground-up terra-cotta pots, but I can't get any this year. It was heavy, which helped keep small pots from tipping over, and it helped a lot with drainage. I'm hoping the vermiculite will do that. Perlite works, but floats too much.

Toronto Gardens

Found a great blog! It's two sisters writing about their gardening life in the East Toronto area. I've listed it on the side under Toronto Gardens - take a look. It's so good I even signed up as a follower!

January Chill

2011-01-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

It's been pretty cold for the last couple of days. Minus 27C and supposed to get even colder tonight. Brrrr. But it's not cold in the plant shed! It was a treat to go up there this afternoon and inspect the orchids, several of which are coming into bloom for the first time.I bought them as small plants at the Ottawa Orchid Show in 2009. I can't afford the large plants and anyway I would worry about killing them as I don't have that much experience with orchids. The fun part of buying seedlings is that you never quite know what you are going to get, and you could get something really nifty, but of course the down side is that it is equally possible that what you'll get will be something dull. I bought six, and all of them have grown well. One bloomed in December with a gorgeous, and very large, white flower with a yellow lip. I've managed to lose the label so can't tell you the name, but it was some sort of Catleya cross. Today there is a similar one with several large frilly lemon yellow blooms just starting to open, and these two:


Slc. Hsin Buu Lady


Lctna. Lawless Gloriana

The red one is a bit twisted on the stalk, just like the leftmost of the yellow flowers. Not sure what causes this. I tried not to change the plants' orientation once the flower buds appeared, but maybe I did. Or maybe they will still straighten out, or maybe it is because this is their first flowering and they will be better next time. Anyway, they were a nice treat on a cold day!

Happy Newish Year

2011-01-08T15:30:00.000-08:00

First, Dear Reader, Happy New Year! All the Best to you for 2011! May all your garden favourites flourish... may the weeds take a breather.... may it rain when you need it... all those good things I wish for you in the coming year!

Well, it's been busy around here. I took a couple of weeks off over Christmas (off from work, not from thinking about plants) and between the naps, cups of tea, sudoku puzzles, naps, snacks, more puzzles, more cups of tea, rests and so on, I'm just about worn out.

Luckily, seeds are arriving soon. I've ordered all I could from both the North American Rock Garden Society and the Alpine Garden Society. Some will be the quick germinating sorts, which I won't start until later, but the others I plan to pot up and put on the floor in the plant shed, which I used to call my greenhouse but which is now too dilapidated for that name, to stay cool for a couple of months. It stays pretty close to 40F down there and is pretty dark. Then in early April I'll put them up where they'll be warmer and hopefully they'll germinate. Can't offhand remember what I asked for, but I'm sure they'll be interesting. I know some Solidagos are coming, and two Violas (lanceolata and Selkirki) which I have been looking for.

Now these violets illustrate a problem. I want to have them, because they are known to be native to my area. But if I get seeds from, as in this case, Britain, they won't be the local form. Does this matter? I feel it does, so will keep these violets, should I get them to grow, in the cultivated garden and not let them into the woods. Some day I may get the local forms, and those I will allow in the wild area.

Amaryllis are starting. I have a huge new one coming on in the Studio. It's called 'Bolero', and is the biggest 'Ryll I've ever seen. The stem is a good 3' tall and the flowers are 10" across and there were 5 on the first stem. The second one is just opening and promises 5 more. A photographic challenge for sure! Of course I have too many Amaryllises. It started with buying one for Christmas, then somebody gave me one, then a friend said, 'Ah, Lis likes Amaryllis' and gifted me with several more.... before I knew it there were over 50 of them. Of course I had to purchase a few of the really nifty ones, too. 'Giraffe', for example, is so different it's a hoot. One mistake I made last summer: I planted several bulbs of the same varieties together in large pots, thinking I'd have a great show. Unfortunately, the bulbs went dormant at different times, creating a watering problem, and now they are re-starting at different times. One of three in one pot is about a foot high while the other two are rock-solid dormant. Won't do that again!

First Real Snow

2010-12-14T13:28:00.000-08:00

Good thing I finally got those seedling ferns and wildflowers tucked away for the winter! It's been quite cold the last couple of days and today it is snowing. Real snow, the kind that spreads its tailfeathers and stays.

What I did, which worked very well the last couple of years, is put the pots down on the ground between a row of rocks at the base of the Daylily Wall and some large cedar logs. Then I piled all the fallen leaves within rake reach on top.Sort of an above-ground cold frame.

Rooted cuttings such as Trailing Arbutus (Epigea repens) went there too. I've had good success with them, and some other things like Partridge Berry (Mitchella repens) by leaving them in their rooting pots over winter and planting them out once they show new growth in the spring. Planting them in the fall never seemed to work before.

I'm quite enjoying the feeling of the garden being put away for the winter! I'm looking out at my Hillside, where the Yucca leaves are sticking up bright green in front of the brown-gold grasses, looking quite picturesque, and the best part of it is, I don't have to go out there and do anything!

As Harvey here says:

'Tis the Season!

Hope yours is a Merry One!

The Fun Continues

2010-10-31T07:13:00.000-07:00

Pretty much as expected.

The wheel on my wheelbarrow quit because I put too many rocks in at once. My trusty rubber boots developed a worn-out-boots hole in the heels. I can't find the pry bar anywhere. I have poison ivy rash on both arms, and my chin.And my dog, Kip, rolls his eyes when he sees we are headed for the rock-digging area.

But! I do have a large pile of rocks ready for further building, and two sides of the mini-grotto done. Whoo hoo!

Starting the Mini-Grotto

2010-10-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

I'm having so much fun this week!

Last Sunday was a gorgeous cool sunny fall day, just right for starting a project that has been on my mind for a while. I knew the project would involve a good deal of hard digging, heavy lifting, and searching through rocky areas in the woods, all of it in mosquito-happy locations, so I was waiting for just the right time to start it.

When I started my Sampler Garden I didn't know what to do with a spot which was basically a hole. The entire Sampler is not very big, maybe about 60' by 100', in an egg-shape, and it is slightly sloped to the West. It has some large trees (too many large trees) and some smaller ones (which are getting to being large trees, see 'too many' above), an exposed rock ledge along the East side, and this strange Hole. At the time, the hole was about 12' across and about 6' deep in the deepest spot.

My first attempt to deal with the hole was to make an artificial bog in it. I filled in the deepest part by scraping the rather sparse topsoil from the higher bits down into it, then lined the depression with some 6-mil plastic, and filled it with a mixture of peat and sand. I had plenty of sand because I knew where there was a large sand deposit nearby at the edge of the marsh, but I had to buy the peat. Lots of peat! It took many wheelbarrows of mixture to fill the hole. I planted some boggish plants such as Pitcher Plants (Sarracenia purpurea) and Yellow Ladyslippers (Cypripedium parviflorum sp. pubescens) and it looked not too bad. Trouble was, it didn't get enough sun. The weeds, particularly several kinds of reeds, moved in with a vengeance, and the plants I wanted sulked and whined. After a couple of years I gave up on the bog idea, moved the remaining plants to better spots, and tried to ignore the hole. And it was back to being a hole, because the peat in the mixture had all disappeared and the sand had settled.

A year or so later I took a whim and dug a little pond. I had an old pond liner in the garage, never used, and a new spade and away I went. In two hours of easy digging in a sandy spot, ironically just above the Hole, I had a nice pond shape. It was rather too easy, actually. And, except for one problem, which I'll get to, it has been very easy indeed. The pond has stayed clear, I've seldom had to add water, the frogs love it, and it is very nice to sit beside it, look out over the Sampler Garden, and contemplate Life.

But Life did continue to have that Hole in it.

Then, in the winter, looking through an old book, I came upon a garden scene which included a tiny waterfall, just a trickle of water dripping over a flat stone into a tiny, tiny pool. Dreaming over this picture I imagined looking at just such a tiny waterfall. I saw ferns arching gracefully over the stream.... a few Ladyslippers in a sunny spot along it....stepping stones up to the stream edge.... Almost unconsciously I connected the little stream to my little pond. The water would gently overflow the edge of the pond, trickle down a narrow channel, eddy out into a wide but very shallow sunny pool, then seep over a flat rock to drip into a deep black pool below. A deep black pool surrounded by damp and mossy rock walls. The mossy rocks made me think of the Hole....

Which could be a mini-grotto!

Like all Brilliant Ideas, it seemed perfectly feasible and I could hardly wait for Spring to get started on it. Unfortunately, when Spring came there was so much to do I never got to it except for standing beside the Hole with a bemused expression on my face trying to figure out how to actually do it. The hard part would be digging out the former bog and building the rock walls. The clouds of mosquitoes this summer didn't help, either.

Anyway, long story short, I decided to wait for Fall, and this week I started. My plan is to dig the soil out along one side of the rock-wall-to-be, build a section of wall, backfill with the dug-out soil, and do the next section. I've got an area along my Fern Trail which is actually tricky walking because it goes over a pile of broken rocks, which I figure will be just right for the grotto and using them will improve the path. Not easy to get them out because they are down a steep bit, too steep for me to push the wheelbarrow up with a load of rocks (I tried it, my feet kept slipping out from under me!), but I can carry them a few at a time. All the easy rocks near the garden are already in use, and anyway they are mostly roundish and I want flatish stone for the grotto. I can build up the rock wall on the lower side of the Hole and make a couple of steps down into it, a flat bottom lined with the flat rocks I dug up near the truck's parking spot, and sink the tiny pool for the water to drip into in the corner below the new stream.

In two afternoons so far, I've completed about a quarter of the new mini-grotto's walls, and the project is looking really possible! In fact, when I cajoled Husband into coming and looking at it, he actually looked semi-impressed. The 'what the heck is she up to now' look was almost entirely replaced with a 'this might be cool' look.

The problem with the pond? It got a tiny leak this summer, just a wee rip about half an inch long, and I can't seem to fix it. I went to the Pond Clinic (www.pondclinic.com) and they sold me a circle of pond patching stuff with the instructions to 'peel off the backing and stick it over the hole'. Fine, but it didn't stick. So I went back and this time the instructions included leaving it for 24 hours before re-filling the pond. Worked for one night, then it came unstuck again. The third time I went back they said to clean the liner with rubbing alcohol, let it dry completely, then stick the patch on and wait 24 hours. They seemed to think I should have known this but how could I? I went back and checked my books on ponds but all any of them said was that liners could be patched. I certainly cleaned and dried carefully around the rip before sticking on the patch but didn't think of cleaning it with alcohol. Frankly, I'm not convinced that it will help, but I'll try it. If it doesn't work I'll get new liner for the pond and use the old for the stream I'm planning. I need to get the mini-pool for in the grotto and the pump, too. Any why doesn't the Pond Clinic carry solar systems to power pumps? Should be an easy thing to do. I'll figure it myself, but it seems to me an obvious thing for them to offer. Must be plenty of gardeners who would like a small pond but don't want to get into major electrical work. And I'm convinced ponds don't need constantly moving water so a solar system should be fine.

Goldenrod Research

2010-10-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to collect all the locally native Goldenrods. Some are quite easy, such as Solidago graminifolia, the Grass-leaved Goldenrod, but others are totally confusing.

In some cases the plants are so affected by growing conditions that I simply can't tell them apart. Solidago nemorosa, Grey-leaved Goldenrod, is usually quite easy to spot: short, one-sided wand-like flower spikes which nod over to one side, only a few small leaves along the stem, and no rosette of leaves at ground level at the time it blooms. So what the heck came up in the rock garden? The flower stalk was about 20" high, well-branched, with flowers all around each branch, and a healthy rosette of leaves on the ground.The individual flowers matched the description of S. nemorosa in J.C. Semple's Goldenrods of Ontario, but the form of the flower stalk did not. It was in no way wand-like, much more what I'd call a plume. The rosette leaves matched, but should not have been there at the time the plant bloomed. Then there is a plant I brought back from an alvar I visited, which in fact looked exactly like this one except for being 4" high. It was growing in a huge field of Grey-leaved Goldenrods, all of which looked 'normal'. So is it a dwarf Grey-leaved or is it a regular one that got stepped on or chewed by a deer? Does S. nemorosa, when cut back early in the season, produce a plume instead of a wand?

I have a similar problem with a Goldie from Shaw Woods. When I try to key it out I get lost every time. It's not quite S. hispida, Hairy Goldenrod, yet it's not quite S. nemorosa either. It also bloomed very late so is not likely to be a form of S. juncea, Early Goldenrod, although the rosette leaves look a lot like it.

The answer: try to grow them all together in a test bed, so they all get the same conditions, and see how they do. Put a regular Grey-leaved, the dwarfish one, and the one from the rock garden all together and see if they are still different next year.

So I dug a couple of beds for a Goldenrod Research Garden. Doesn't that sound grand? There is a spot below my rock garden which I have been planning to incorporate as a sort of transition between the rockery and the start of one of my woods trails and which I hadn't really done anything with yet. Full of weeds of course and I'll have to deal with them next year, but for now I just lifted the top six inches, dug up the six inches below that, added topsoil from the conveniently nearby pile, and called it a flowerbed. I'll put down some dark landscape fabric to make paths for now. One bed is for Goldenrods and the other for Asters. On the left you see the end of the two beds, looking a little like dog graves, and on the right you see the rosettes of some of the unknown Goldies. I've had them in pots for several months, so they should do fine. The smaller rosettes are some that might be Downy Goldenrod, S. puberula, a rare Ontario Goldenrod. They came from Constance Bay, growing on the trail and getting stomped by the horses that people like to ride through there. The two medium sized ones are the possible S. nemorosas, and the large one is goodness-knows-what from a marshy area. It's not S. uliginosa, Bog Goldenrod, but what it is I don't know. It didn't bloom this year but maybe next year. Gardeners are nothing if not hopeful!

Phlox Phacts

2010-09-26T09:08:00.000-07:00

One more person says to me 'Oh, no good growing Phlox, they always run out and turn purple' and there might be an explosion!

Someone said that to me again yesterday, as we stood looking at my Hillside which still has quite a few phlox showing a few last flowers. There were white ones, pale pink ones, bluish-mauve ones and a dark almost red pink. Earlier, there had been the almost purple 'Nikki' and a variegated-leaf one with medium pink flowers as well. The Phlox did very well this year - they seemed to like the heat! If she had said only the 'run out' bit, I would have tried to explain about Phlox being hybrids and their seeds not necessarily giving plants like the parent, but once she threw in the other bit about them coming back 'purple' I gave it up as a bad case. One thinking error I can handle, but two are beyond me.

The original Phlox paniculata, what you might call your Natural Phlox, was magenta. Perhaps a washy magenta, but magenta. Not purple! Purple is darker, bluer, much closer to indigo than to red. Campanulas are sometimes purple, as are some grapes and some plums. The hybridizers have done their magic tricks and given us Phlox in a range of colours, all of them charming, but none of them really purple.

Just for fun, here's a picture of a late Harebell, Campanula rotundifolia, in the rain. All pictures lately have been 'in the rain' because I'm convinced it hasn't stopped raining since middle August. Ok, and a picture of Geranium sanguineum just to have a true magenta to look at.

A Very Fine Day

2010-08-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

Had the most excellent day! Packed my larger backpack with essentials such as camera and lunch, and headed down to Marlborough Forest. This is a huge natural area, something like 45 by 60 kilometres, completely inside the City boundary. It's a mosaic of City-owned, Province-owned and privately-owned properties, more or less administered by the City according to Provincial regulations, with the co-operation of a number of groups like Ducks Unlimited, the Ontario Snowmobile Association, the Rideau Trail Association and others. In practice the deer hunters and the ATV enthusiasts do what they want. This means you stay out during hunting season!

But it's a great place to explore an alvar. The area I went to, off Paden Road near Burritts Rapids, is an enormous alvar. It took a bit of a walk to get in to it, and walking on the chunks of rock they put down to make the trails is no joke, but once I got there it was great fun. Completely flat as far as I could see, with clumps of junipers interspersed with open grassy areas and the occasional low willow or alder clump. What I was looking for was Solidago asteroides, the White Upland Aster or White Goldenrod. It has had a number of names, but the botanists now put it firmly in with the Goldenrods. I have one plant in my garden, grown from seed, but I really wanted to see it growing 'in the wild'.

There were thousands! The picture on the left shows a typical plant, about 16 - 18" high, growing in with the sparse grassy alvar plants.


White Goldenrod, Solidao asteroides

There were also a great many Fringed Gentians, Gentianopsis crinita, Slender Gerardias, Gerardia tenuifolia, Grey Goldenrods, Solidago nemorosa, a tiny purple flower I can't find in my field guide, and few just-opening Nodding Ladies Tresses, Spiranthes cernua.


Fringed Gentians - several colour forms

Slender Gerardia

Nodding Ladies Tresses

An almost white Fringed Gentian


A mystery! The plant is only 4" high.

OK, I'm having trouble arranging these images! But the captions should explain them. If you know what the tiny purple thing with the startling blue stamens is, please tell me!

The pale Fringed Gentian was a real find, too. I didn't get good pictures but enough to prove that I saw it. Most blue flowers have the occasional white clone. I'd love to have this in my garden, but I'm not having any success growing Fringies, so far. I've had the seed germinate but lost the seedlings to damping off, I've have little seedlings which I forgot to check on and which died (I assume) in the first dry week, and seed sprinkled in a wet area down along the driveway has so far not resulted in sheets of blue. Maybe next year? They are biennials so maybe I'm just not seeing the new plants. I searced the Paden alvar area for next year's Fringies, but couldn't find anything that looked like a gentian rosette. Do they only start to grow late in the season?

It was getting late by the time I hobbled back to the truck. And I did hobble. Those miserable rocks on the trail were so hard to walk on my feet were so sore I could hardly get my hiking boots off.
Then, just as I was ready to drive off, I happened to look over my shoulder behind me, and saw something I've been looking for for years. At first glance I wasn't sure it was what I thought it was, but I had to stop and take a look. Yes! A white (almost white, anyway) form of New England Aster!

It was growing on a mound of rubble obviously pushed back by a bulldozer or some such machine, and right beside the trail the dirt bikers had made to get around the 'no vehicles allowed' gate across the trail. I admit it, a small piece of the plant came home with me. A research sample! I potted it up, and so far so good. These asters are really easy to grow so I am hopeful.. It may be a purchased plant discarded there or it may be a lucky accident, but whatever it is, I'm delighted to have it.

What a day!

An Icy Job

2010-08-04T18:46:00.000-07:00

Trimmed 'Iceberg' yesterday.

That is to say, I was the one with the secateurs, and 'Iceberg' was the rose bush that got smaller.

I can't really say I pruned it. The darn thing was sprawled across both of the paths that meet at its corner, lying in wait for any ankles that might be going, or trying to go, by. It is much too big and too sprawly for that spot, but is so healthy, and blooms so exuberantly for nearly a month every summer, that I just can't remove it. I didn't intend to have a monster rose in that corner but there it is, sort of like an Uncle Fred who has to be invited to family events but whose behavior than causes eyes to roll and voices to sharpen. I actually wanted 'Seafoam', but the nursery man told me 'Iceberg' was just the same. Right.

I thought at first maybe I could get in underneath and remove some of the longer canes, but that wasn't possible. It was a tangle of canes, most of them over 6 feet long, and there was no way I could get a hand or arm underneath without serious injury. Iceberg is one of those bushes that has stiff curved thorns, which catch and grab whatever gets close. The many canes all criss-cross into a dense tangle. Reaching in and cutting out canes at ground level is nerve-wracking. You work your hand in very carefully, secateurs at the ready, and a twig springs back and embeds itself in your wrist, you jerk your arm back and three more twigs catch hold. Since you're holding several canes back with your other hand, you now need a third hand to work the first one free.... I had heavy leather gloves on, and a long-sleeved shirt, but even so I got half a dozen long scratches and any number of pokes before I was done. After that I wasn't about to carefully cut back each spent flower cluster, so just cut everything that extended beyond an imaginary circle about 6 feet across or higher up than about 3 feet. Now it looks like a turned-out pudding, but at least you can get past it without bloodshed. Usually.

I wonder if it was 'Iceberg' that gave someone the idea of the 'pavement rose'? Or is mine the only 'Iceberg' in the world that wants to be a ground cover?

Yarrows

2010-07-31T18:00:00.000-07:00

I've always liked the tall Yarrow called, I think,' Gold Plate'. I grew some from seed and put a group of them in the hillside garden and I've liked them there. They provide a bit of muscle in what could be a flabby setting of Phlox, Shasta Daisies, blue Veronica and such.(There are also a lot of Coneflowers in that border, but they are over to the one end.) The Yarrow's fairly sharp mustard yellow is a bit jarring, but there is such as thing as too much good taste.

A plant of wild Yarrow, Achillea millefolium, wasted no time in joining its cousin. Since it bloomed a very clear crisp white I left it. It's not visible from the front of the border, but when you go around the back, up the rock steps, it's there and fits in well with it's slightly shorter stature, dusty green foliage, and rather open flower clusters. A Yarrow is of course one of the Compositae, so what looks like a flower is really a group of small flowers, called florets, each of which is itself composed of a group of even smaller flowers. Confused? Sorry. The thing we call the Flower, in a Yarrow, is a corymb, and is composed of multiple Heads, each of which is composed of two types of flowers - Ray flowers, and disc flowers. Each one is actually a tiny Daisy. There is no end to the designs, combinations of designs and groupings of combinations of designs in nature.

Just as there is no end to the hanky-panky that goes on behind the scenes.

My yarrows have now produced an intermediate form. It has the shape and size of 'Gold Plate', in fact it might even be a bit taller, the greyish foliage of the Wild Yarrow, and a colour right in between the two. It is a soft but distinct yellow. When I look at the individual heads closely, I see that the disc flowers (the ones in the centres of the flower heads) are pale yellow, while the ray flowers (the 'petals') are white.

I just checked the books. Apparently, 'Gold Plate' is a variety of Achillea filipendulina. Also listed is a plant with pale yellow flowers like my seedling called A. 'Taygetea' which it describes as 'a hybrid of uncertain origin, probably between A. millefolium and A. clypeolata'. Hmmm. I don't have A. clypeolata around, as far as I know, and in any case the leaves on my plant look different from those in the book. The leaves on my plant look exactly like the leaves on 'Gold Plate' only with the colour of the A. millifolium leaves.I can't tell whether the ray flowers of the plant in the book are white like on my plant. In any case, I guess it's safe to say my plant is 'of uncertain origin'.

The Yarrows are coping well with the drought this summer, another reason to like them.

They can be cut right to the ground after they bloom (and they stay in bloom a good 3-4 weeks), or you can cut each flowering stem off at ground level. If you have only a few plants and enough time, you can cut the individual stalks, but if you have lots of plants or little time, you can just give the whole thing a bean shave with the garden shears. My kind of plant!

The pink, red and rust coloured Yarrows, by the way, are of quite different parentage, and behave very differently, at least for me. They are much shorter, need to be divided every year to keep them from running out, and do not do at all well in a drought. I keep one clump going in the Herb Garden just to be able to say I have Yarrow.

A Word from the Trowel

2010-07-16T10:06:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks,

This is Lis's Trowel speaking. If she's going to leave me out all night with my head stuck in the sand in the Cactus Patch, well, no more Ms. Nice Trowel, I've kept my mouth shut long enough. Who do you think does all the work around here, anyway?And don't tell me not to be bitchy, I'm blunt at one end and sharp at the other so what do you expect?

What's with this Cactus Patch thing, anyway? Doesn't She know that this is zone 4? Cactuses (yes, I know the La-di-das say 'cactii', but that's not us, is it?) are desert plants. They do not grow where snow covers them about half the year. They like to be hot, not cold. This is not a desert, except maybe a cultural desert. Mind you, She does listen to the CBC in the Studio, maybe that counts for something, but given how little classical music is left in their programming, I'm not sure that it's much. It's so bad that in the afternoon She turns the radio off, which leads to Her humming while She works.... not pretty, I assure you. But I digress. My point is, it's not cactuses that want to grow here.

Bugloss wants to grow here. Viper's Bugloss, Echium vulgare. A perfectly good plant with no airs or graces. It has nice blue flowers, too, which you can't say cactuses ever have. Oh, and it's prickly, too. So, why does She insist on pulling it out and leaving those Opuntia fragilis wusses in the ground?

Opuntia fragilis 'Potato'. Sheesh. Who ever heard of a plant called 'Potato'? Except maybe a potato, I guess. A lumpy green thing, that's all it is. Never a flower, nooooo.

Another thing that wants to grow here is Bladder Campion, Silene cucubalis. Now, there's a name for you. Sounds like another vegetable, doesn't it. Anyway, She keeps trying to get rid of it but it's pretty smart. It has its roots down way deep and they're kind of grippy so it's impossible to pull them up. Hee hee. Even spraying them with a nasty weedkiller doesn't bother them too much. They come right back. I like those guys, tough is the word. Not like that Opuntia polyacantha that She keeps fussing over. It shrinks every winter and looks like s..t in the spring but thanks to all the fussing it does look a little better by about now. It did bloom once, too. For about three minutes early one morning before anybody was out of bed to actually see it.

Crown Vetch, Viccia cracca, wants to grow here too. It gets pretty cosy with Opuntia basilaris var. aurea, which is smart because She can't hardly get it out from between the prickles without pulling out most of the cactus pads. At least that thing blooms. Large yellow flowers, which I think look pretty good with the blue Vetch flowers. Fetching, in fact.

Oh, apparently Crown Vetch, Bladder Campion and Bugloss aren't 'native', whatever that means. Well, excuse me.

Oh, oh. I hear we're going to weed the Cactus Patch this afternoon. Ow, my poor skin.... ow, my handle, ow....

White Alkanet

2010-07-16T07:45:00.000-07:00

Like a lot of collector-gardeners, I like the unusual forms of things. If the plant is normally green, I want the yellow version. If it is normally yellow, of course I want the green version! (And if it comes in seven different colours, I want all of them, but that's a different story.)

So while I like the regular dark blue Alkanet, naturally I like the one with white flowers even better.

Now Alkanet, Anchusa officinalis, an Herb sometimes used in dyeing, is not a particularly impressive garden plant. The leaves are raspy and mid-green, the stems are lanky, and the flowers are small. Numerous, but small. Still, I like it because the stems weave themselves in with other plants in the border and poke their bright blue flowers out here and there. They look pretty good with Daisies, Shasta or otherwise, or among Lamb's-ears or between stout Peony bushes. This spring, they happened to bloom at the same time as some very late tall white Tulips, and the effect was something to see. They do however seed around badly. I pull the ones I don't want, obviously, but I've been leaving some that bloomed in either paler blue or white. In one area I have white ones pretty much coming true from seed. Heh, heh.

(If anybody would like some seeds of White Alkanet, drop me a line.)

Rare Fern

2010-06-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

Northern Adder's Tongue Fern, Ophioglossom pusillum, is a very small, 'un-fern-like', fern, which is not often found because it is so hard to see among the grasses and low vegetation it typically grows with. I have been a bit keeping my eyes open for it but never really expected to find it.

Last Sunday I went to one of my favourite natural areas, the Eagle's Nest Trail near Calabogie, and trudged up the trail well past the actual lookout. I was determined not to slow down until I was past the lookout because every other time I've gone up there I've gotten sidetracked by the rock face and the Woodsias and such and never gotten past them. This time I kept going, in spite of the heat, the big and hungry deer flies and the lure of the many small cliffs all along the way. I did side-track a bit, following a small side trail to what is likely a blueberry picking area, but didn't see much there so went back to the main trail. After a couple of hours I was getting a bit bored! The trail is actually somewhat barren because the ATV-ers damage everything in their path, and what they don't destroy they cover with mud, so very few interesting plants survive there. Anyway, by this time I was hungry and decided to stop at the next possibly interesting spot and have my sandwich. I came to a tiny bog and pushed through the undergrowth to get to it. There were some orchids, not in bloom yet, and a nice tree to sit on for lunch. The deer flies were so bad I sprayed my hands and neck (the only exposed parts of me other than my face) again, figuring that if nothing else, they might get their feet stuck in the spray, and unwrapped my sandwich. I took one bite and glanced down at my foot and saw something. 'What did I step on?' I wondered.

I looked more closely and discovered I was in a fairly large patch of Northern Adder's Tongues. What a surprise! What a shock!

The plants were mostly quite small, only about 4" high, but some were taller, and the fertile fronds extended up to about 12" in some cases. There were many plants in about three large patches. I counted to 50 in the first patch and stopped counting. They were growing in the crevices in rocks which stuck up just above the surface of the tiny bog, and among various grasses, sedges, orchids, Twinflower and other low things. They were indeed hard to see because of being the same colour as the grasses.

I don't remember what my sandwich tasted like.

Slightly Silly Idea

2010-06-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

What the heck is this? Good question!

A couple of years ago, a little Eastern Cedar started to grow at the corner of my herb garden. It was kind of cute so I left it. Over the next few summers it got bigger and bushier and by this spring it was crowding the rose bush on the one side and the lungwort on the other... I looked at it for a while and couldn't make up my mind what to do. I didn't want to completely remove it because it did nicely define the corner of the garden, but my rose and other things needed more light and space. In a moment of, perhaps, madness, I trimmed the lower branches right off and sculpted the rest of the bush into a sort of teardrop shape. Not sure if I like it or not, but so far it's kind of growing on me.

It's either a very large and clumsy bonsai, or a very small hedge-on-sticks!

Bracken Fern Attack

2010-06-07T18:01:00.000-07:00

I looked at that title above, Bracken Fern Attack, and thought, 'oops, that's ambiguous. Does it mean I attacked the Bracken, or that it attacked me?' Then I decided both were true so I'm leaving it like that!

Part of my Fern Trail through the woods winds along between the edge of the marsh and the steep slope of the ridge. Every summer the Bracken surges up and threatens to engulf the entire trail, the ferns along it, and the trees and such on the slope. The only thing I can do is pull it. One good thing about Bracken, it apparently contains a bit of a natural herbicide. You can throw the pulled-out fronds on the trail and they act as a mulch and growth suppressant. I've done this every year for a decade now and while there is never any less Bracken, at least doing this keeps it from competing too much with the other ferns. It's a bit of a job, and one that needs tough gloves, but it works.

The other attack today was on the poison ivy patch on the new spring hillside garden. Naturally, as soon as I opened the area up by removing a lot of the small maples and such, the Poisonous One moved right in. I sprayed it with the last of my Poison Ivy Killer. Normally I am totally opposed to stuff like that, but I am so allergic to PI that it has put me in the hospital twice and I just can't risk it again. I once lived beside someone who insisted on burning it, and the fumes carried the oil into my lungs and I was sick for a year. My doctor couldn't figure out why my lungs were so inflamed. This was the same neighbour who built a beautiful deck on the back of his house, beautifully stained and finished, and then got out his chainsaw and cut down a huge poplar which fell, you guessed it, across the new deck.

Anyway, the trail is walk-able again and the PI's days are numbered... heh, heh, heh.

Native Plant Sale at the Fletcher Wildlife Garden

2010-06-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

This morning I went to the Native Plant Sale at the Fletcher Wildlife Garden to sell some of my baby ferns and wildflowers. The Sale is a fund-raiser for the Garden. You can bring plants and swap for others, or buy from people like me. The Garden itself is behind the Interpretive Centre and features many native plants. You can see how they can be used in a typical home garden. There's a small pond and a winding path..... a woodsy trail, bird houses and so on. I didn't have time to walk around there this morning so I'll have to plan a visit soon.

The Sale was quite busy, lots of visitors. I talked and talked! Dorothy Dobson from Connaught Nursery gave me a tray of baby Pitcher Plants, Sarracenia purpurea, to sell for her. (Check out their website - they sell bedding plants and vegetables as well as native plants, and have a native plant garden you can visit - www.connaughtnursery.com) which I picked up at the Carp Farmers' Market this morning. Going out with them I walked by a vendor named David who sells wonderful cut flowers and he looked at the tray and asked me what they were. I said 'baby Pitcher plants, aren't they as cute as puppies?' and he studied them and looked at me and said, 'Well, actually, they're kind of ugly'. This made a great story to tell the people who looked at them at the Sale! Who can resist an ugly puppy?!

It was a lot of fun to catch up with other keen native plant gardeners, some of whom I haven't seen since the Fletcher Sale last year. A great boost to the gardening enthusiasm. I'm thinking we should have some sort of a native plant gardening/photographing/studying network in our area. So if you happen to be in or near the Ottawa, Ontario, area, let me know and we'll figure something out. It ought to be easy in this day of websites and email lists. Not that I know how, but I'm open to suggestions. I know we have naturalists groups here, in fact, I belong to a couple of them, but they do tend to be interested mostly in 'fauna'. It's not that I'm not interested in birds or insects or whatever, but they seldom have programs of particular interest to us plant fanatics.

Speaking of fauna, I just saw an amazingly beautiful Leopard Frog in the rock garden. Big, and his markings were crisp and clear. Green, brown and a kind of brown-y gold. I ran in and got the camera, but unfortunately, he (she?) had moved on by the time I got back there. Maybe I'll see it again tomorrow.

Bugleweed and Glaze Idiocy

2010-05-05T17:29:00.000-07:00

Saying about a plant that at least it stays green all summer may be damning with faint praise, but I'm not sure that Bugleweed, Ajuga reptans in its many guises, deserves even that amount of good press.

Why ever did I plant it in the Herb Garden? Wait, I didn't. It came in on some other plant and I wasn't vigilant enough to spot and uproot it at once. Now I have just spent two hours digging it out from underneath the rue and the wormwood and the Rosa Mundi, that Rose of the World, which has about the largest and fiercest prickles of any rose in the garden. Actually its the understock, I think the Rose of the World has long since moved on to a better World, but it still blooms with amazing deep carmine flowers that look just like those kleenex flowers we used to make to decorate wedding cars with back in our wasted youths. So I leave it there. Besides, it somewhat hides the telephone pole in the corner of the Herb Garden, and that's worth something.

Ajuga, as I prefer to call it, comes in a number of forms and colour phases. You can get it with gnarly twisty leaves, very ugly, with reddish leaves, somewhat less ugly, with variegated green and white leaves, even with plain green leaves. I like the plain green one best because its flowers are the bluest. All the others have flowers which lean heavily towards the mauve/purple part of the spectrum. The plain one is Cambridge Blue. The leaves are shiny and mid-green. There is a white form, but it isn't nearly as vigorous. I have some, but every spring I forget that I like that one and weed it out and then wonder where my white one went. Luckily I usually miss a few and so still have some.

Ajuga spreads from seeds (and it produces them by the zillions) and by stolons. One plant of Ajuga sends out a dozen or more stolons, radiating around the plant like a starburst, and each one forms a new little plant, which promptly sends out a dozen or so stolons.... by the end of the summer you have a solid mat and Ajugas growing on top of Ajugas. Their roots are strong and pulling them up isn't the easiest thing in the world.

For some strange reason, I did buy two slightly different ones, though. Last summer I got one with tiny leaves. The leaves are shaped like tongue depressors, not like the usual spoons, and are only about 2" long. They are quite an interesting purple/dark green colour mix, too. I stuck it in an impossible spot on top of a small rock ledge and it has made itself completely at home there. No doubt it will soon rampage up or down from its perch and take over real estate meant for more exciting plants, but until then I admire it. It's flowers are alright, not brilliant, but alright. The pink granite sets them off well.

The other one has been around for a couple of years and I am about ready to admit it might not be as much of a thug as the regular Ajuga. It was labelled 'The Giant', and the reason is obvious. Its leaves, instead of the usual 3 to 4 inches long, reach as much as 8 inches, and the flower stalks stand up a good 14 or so. The flowers are dark blue. The leaves are coloured much like the little one and rather nice. So far it has only overpowered a few admittedly unassertive things like some mauve columbines somebody gave me. I note with amusement that it has grown carefully all around a seedling of Cirsium muticum, the Swamp Thistle.

Maybe this business with the Ajugas has affected my brain. One of my two main glazes in the pottery studio has been giving me trouble lately. Over the past three or four months it has gotten darker and shinier. So I tried mixing a completely new batch (I use laundry tubs for my production glazes and mix large batches at a time and keep adding them to the existing glaze in the tub) and tested it. It was too matte and too pale. So I added a measured amount of the old stuff and tested the mixture. That came out of the kiln looking pretty good, so I mixed the old and new glaze batches in the sink. Now suddenly it hard-panned, that is, the glaze particles all sang out 'Dive, dive!' and headed for the bottom. Even while I was stirring it, it settled. The layer on the bottom of the tub the next morning was absolutely solid - no amount of scraping or digging had much effect. I appealed to ClayArt, that wonderful list, for help. Several potters suggested Epsom salts. So I disolved some in water and, in a moment of total idiocy, added a small amount to the glaze batch directly. I should have tested it by drops in a small cup, but instead I just put some right into the tub of glaze. To my horror it turned into cottage cheese. Dark reddish brown cottage cheese.

Back to ClayArt for more help. What an idiot I felt. John Britt came to the rescue and suggested I add sodium silicate. He also reminded me to try it first in a small amount, and then to add it drop by drop so as not to over-shoot, which I deserved. Just for fun I did try adding too much to my small amount and the result was impressive. The glaze turned into quite solid pudding. But I was more sensible this time with the large batch and only added the amount suggested by the test, and to my relief, the glaze became reasonably liquid again. I dipped a number of pots and they are in the kiln now. Fingers crossed!

If it doesn't work I'll throw the whole mess out (how does one throw out glaze?) and start over and go out in the garden and eat worms, I mean, plant Ajugas.

Real Trilliums

2010-05-01T15:33:00.000-07:00

It must be about time for the deer to come by and eat my trilliums. They are in full bloom, although perhaps a bit short. The Spring was so early and so fast this year that the plants hardly had time to get out of the ground before the flowers opened. Usually around this time a deer or two will wander by, munching on a flower here, stepping on a plant there..... I gnash my teeth and have earnest conversations with my supposed-to-be-guard-dog but to no effect. Kip won't chase them, he knows perfectly well that they are much faster than he is. In fact, they know it too because last year when he did try to chase one it stood its ground.

Several of the plants in the Sampler Garden (a shady woodsy area in front of the house where I am trying to have samples of all the interesting native plants on the property) are pale pink. They are pink in the bud, open pale pink, and stay pale pink. They don't get quite as dark as the others when they start to fade. T. grandiflorum flowers typically fade to pink. That sounds pretty but actually isn't. They look a bit tired by then so the pink makes it worse, not better.

The rockery has its share of T. grands, too.

2010-04-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

The, absolutely, totally, most beautiful flower in the Spring rock garden has got to be Crocus Seiberi, the three-colour crocus.

The very centre of the flower is a brilliant deep yellow, then there is a wide band of pure white, then the petals shade into a sumptuous violet-purple. The large stigma in the centre is a deep orange. At any other time of the year we would think it garish, but in the Spring, with everything around still wet and draggled from Winter, nothing could be more beautiful. It cheers, it revives, the weary Gardener.

The second most beautiful flower in the Spring rock garden has got to be.... but no, there are so many second most beautiful flowers we won't even try that.

Excitement in the Night

2010-04-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

I woke up about one o'clock last night with the clear thought in my head that a mouse had walked up my arm.

As I became a little more awake, I thought 'that's silly, I must have been dreaming....' Then I felt, unmistakably, tiny feet walking down my arm. Cold tiny feet! Whatever it was then stopped on the back of my hand and I felt the lightest lightest brush of something soft on my fingers. At this point instinct kicked in and I jerked my hand to get it off.

I went into the living room where my husband was still awake reading and told him 'A mouse just ran up my arm!'

He looked at me over his glasses. 'Don't be silly, you must have been dreaming,' he said.

I went back to the bedroom and turned on the light. There, sitting on my pillow, was a sleek and elegant brown, well, mousy-brown, mouse.

I called to Robert to 'come, quick!'

We watched the mouse, he or she, sitting on my pillow. It sat just like our cat does, with it's two neat front feet together and it's tail wrapped around them. It was mostly mousy brown-grey, with a lighter tummy and white feet. It had large ears, but they weren't round like in the cartoons, they were more like rounded-off squares in shape. It's eyes were like cartoon mouse eyes, though, black, shiny, and round. It looked all around, then went over to investigate the other pillow, sniffing at the corners and standing up against the headboard to see if it could see over....

Robert's big idea was to go and get the cat.

He put Pepper down on the floor near where the mouse had jumped (a three-inch mouse jumped over two feet), and she walked right over to it. I expected violence, but no, she sniffed the mouse, who showed no signs of fear, and turned and left the room! Kip, our Border Collie watched with interest, but he also made it clear he wasn't getting involved.

So I ran to the Studio and got a clear plastic bin I had just bought. When I got back with it the mouse was sitting in the middle of the floor looking around and I just put the bin down over it. Then I found a large piece of stiff paper which I slid under the bin to trap Mouse inside. We admired him (her?) for a while, then took him outside.

Meanwhile, of course, I will go right on complaining about the mice in the garage getting into my papers.... and yes, I changed the sheets before going back to bed!

Good Advice

2010-04-03T15:41:00.000-07:00

"Do not put your rock garden under deciduous trees' is good advice, and I should know. I have just spent a long day carefully removing last summer's maple and oak leaves from my rock garden, and I'm not finished.

But sometimes good advice just can't be followed. When I started making my garden here, not only was the spot under these trees the only place where I could put a rock garden, but also a rock garden was the only thing that could go there. It is to the South and East of the house, and is basically a large granite outcropping. On the top there are a number of maples, probably all Red Maple, and one very old but still healthy Red Oak. The area slants down to the driveway and the Sampler Garden. The rock is mostly pink granite, but part-way up there is a long ledge of what I think must be limestone. It very much looks like it was once the edge of a lake or something. Some of the granite has fractured and the pieces have tumbled down, so the rock garden is basically on a large pile of broken rock.

Over the years, the leaves and needles from the trees have built up a bit of soil on top, and a few interesting plants have established themselves. There is a lot of Rock Polypody, Polypodium virginianum. It gets a bit dried out in August, but the rest of the year it is a crisp light green ruffle along the North-facing ledges. One good rain in the fall and it revives completely. What it lives on is hard to understand - there seems no soil at all under the plants. The easiest, in fact almost only, way to move this fern to a new spot is to move an entire rock with it already on it. I've tried transplanting it, and had no luck - I think pulling it off the rock damages so many roots it can't recover. It does grow on the ground in the woods in a few places, though.

Partridge Berry, Mitchella repens, also grows happily on the granite. In one spot quite a large patch drapes over a rounded boulder, its little dark green leaves a sparkling contrast to the pinkish rock. In the spring it is covered with its tiny white flowers. They aren't large, nor are there a great many, but they have real presence. Then of course the berries which appear in late summer are a spectacular red against the green. It's not hard to grow in a shady spot, wanting only good drainage and not too many smothering leaves lying on it over the winter.

The other thing that has really set itself up for happiness on the rock ledges is some species of raspberry, but since I can't say anything good about it, we'll not talk about them.

You Can't Get There From Here Day

2010-03-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

Ever have one of those 'you can't get there from here' days? I got up early, and went out to the Studio even before the coffee was ready, I was so keen to see what the glaze tests in the kiln were like. Big bleah. Dull and boring blue, no life, too dark.... sigh.

Then I uncovered the bonsai pots I have been trying to make. I had covered them to dry them very slowly as I have been having trouble with the corners not holding. Sure enough, two out of three were cracking again. Guess I'll try them in a different clay, one with some grog in it. The porcelain I am used to for most of my work just does not assemble well as slabs.

In the afternoon two ladies came looking for a mug with yellow tulips on it. After dithering around for over half an hour one of them chose a pansy mug and a sunflower mug. She felt that a sunflower was sufficiently Spring-like! Her friend wanted to see the Studio so I took them in for the 10-cent tour, and Friend looked at my ferns and brightly told me that I was starting my tomatoes early...

Didn't have quite enough Frit 3124 to mix the glaze I needed.... went out to buy groceries and forgot the very thing I went for.... decided to get started on the window cleaning and banged my finger on the corner of the frame.....

Should have stayed in bed!

Trillium Platters

2010-03-24T15:32:00.000-07:00

I'm relieved to say that china paints have once again saved my butt. I had promised a platter with a Trillium design to a local Wildlife Festival and had painted a half dozen of them. When they came out of the kiln, however, they were disappointing. The leaves were alright, the platters were fine, but the flowers just hadn't any 'poomf'. I looked at them for a day or two, trying to convince myself they would do, but it wasn't working. So yesterday I got out the china paints, mixed up a tiny bit of black, and added thin black outlines to the flowers. After re-firing to cone 010, they were much improved!

I bought these china paints many years ago. I only have the basic colours, but they are endlessly mixable and keep forever. I just mix a wee bit of the powder with a drop of mineral oil, and they are ready to go. I'm not skilled enough to paint whole pieces in china paints, and anyway that is a very different medium from pottery, but I can fix the odd piece. I once had to paint back in all the soft rose colour that had burned out in a batch of mugs with pink hearts on them - a lot less work than re-making them, and much quicker.

So now I can bring the Wildlife Festival their platters for their Silent Auction this weekend. Not sure why I am doing this, an ego thing, I guess. I also made a very fine bookmark with info about my pottery and garden and had 1000 of them printed so I'll bring some of them as well. Never hurts to advertise!

Flowers!!! Studio Tour!!!

2010-03-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

I have flowers! This has to be the earliest there has ever been anything in bloom in my garden. Mid-March only and I have flowers!

They are Snowdrops, which seems appropriate. There is still a lot of snow, especially in the woods, but these tiny things are blooming happily right beside large drifts of snow. I found several clumps in the Sampler Garden and a largish patch in the Crabapple bed. I was a bit surprised to see some of them in a certain spot in the Sampler, as I totally don't remember planting them there, but I must have. They can't be the other ones seeding around because they seem different. The leaves are wider and the flowers seem to open wider. They are tricky to photograph - easy to over-expose the white flowers and end up with no detail in them. So these pictures aren't the best (must try again today), but worth seeing just because, well, because it's only March and they are really blooming!

One thing about Spring coming, it does make it hard to stay in the Studio and work. I'm trying to get ready for a Studio Tour next weekend and it's a challenge to keep working and not go out into the woods looking for signs of green.

The Maple Run Studio Tour is next weekend, Saturday and Sunday, 10 to 5 both days. There are a variety of stops on the tour, including Fulton's Pancake House. If the weather is nice, it should be a great weekend - interesting stuff to see and maybe purchase, from pottery (three potters!) to blown glass to jewellery..... followed by pancakes with maple syrup. There is a website too: www.maplerun.on.ca. I'm at Stop 7, which is an interesting log house. The owners are log house builders and are on the tour to advertise their building company. I do hope the visitors will take a break from looking at the walls and look at my pots!

Well, to work.

Spring is sprung....

2010-03-13T06:14:00.000-08:00

Spring is sprung! OK, maybe not quite sprung, but Kip left muddy paw prints on the kitchen floor! It's supposed to rain over the next couple of days and that will really get rid of the white stuff. It's been a very easy winter, hardly enough snow to bother shovelling, and never very cold. Luckily the snow did stay in the woods and on my garden so I'm not that worried about winter kill.

The snow storm two weeks ago that dumped a foot of wet heavy stuff on us did bring down a lot of branches and weak trees. I've started cleaning up - my paths as usual will need clearing. Maybe tomorrow I'll be able to get the bits of pine branch off the edge of the driveway. The huge pines there dropped a number of branches in that snow storm, and several landed on or right beside the driveway. Trouble is, then the oil truck drove right over them, as did my husband when he came home late, and then the broken bits froze into the driveway. For a while the driveway was pretty slippery and I said that at least the broken branches provided some traction!

I started seeds of a couple of dozen of alpine plants in the window in the Studio. Got the seeds from the Alpine Garden Society seed exchange. It's amazing to get free seeds, and of things that aren't in seed catalogues, but I wish they had sent me the seeds I asked for! I got a few of the ones I thought I wanted, but many others I hadn't asked for. I have no idea what they are. The packets come with only a number on them. I looked many of them up and at least found the names, but I haven't had time to research them all and find out what they really are. They may be treasures, or they may be useless. Many probably won't be hardy here. Well, it'll be interesting.

Photography Day

2010-02-15T08:53:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm off to a great start, not. Blocked off the whole day to take new pictures of my pots for my new website, cleaned off a table in the Studio to use, got my lights and background ready..... and discovered that I had let my camera battery run down.

So I'm waiting while it recharges.

It's been slow month in the Studio anyway. I won't go into detail, but will say that the family member worried about her job is still and more happily employed, and the seriously ill family member is on the mend. Big 'Whews' from me! Now I can dig through the chores that I've let slide a bit and get back to work on my pottery.

Making some cereal bowls. I'm going to try out several basic shapes, and see which ones sell the best. A cereal (or soup) bowl sounds so simple, but I haven't been able to get it right yet. One of the problems I have with them is, where do I decorate? My flowers don't fit inside, the outside isn't very visible. Then there is the problem that if I spend too much time decorating a small bowl, it becomes too expensive to sell well. I've already tried some ideas, such as making the outside a solid colour to go with the flowers, or leaving it white, or putting a small line of colour around.... but none have hit the spot. I'm not happy with them, and they haven't sold well. I've made lots of cereal bowls to go with dinner sets, and people seem happy with them, but the ones I just put out for sale sit there. I get requests for other sizes, other shapes, other decorations. Cereal bowls seem to be like mugs - you can't please all of the people all of the time, but maybe with work I can please more of the people more of the time!

I'll post some pictures when they're done.

Should my camera battery ever get fully charged....

On Cooking

2010-01-08T07:40:00.000-08:00

Somebody I know has just sent me an email about her new cooking website and newsletter. What a great idea!

Normally, I'm not too interested in recipes and the whole cooking schtick. When I was first married, never mind how many years ago, it was a shock to find myself with a partner who thought boxed macaroni and cheese was food. For someone brought up with a more European attitude to food, this was hard to understand. And it got worse. I soon learned that he didn't eat anything that swam.... or anything that wasn't cooked to a porridge.... or anything with a seasoning other than salt in it....

Turns out his Mother, who was a wonderful woman in many ways, but a product of her times as we all are, was one of those who made mac&cheese on Mondays, meatloaf on Tuesdays, tuna casserole on Wednesday, beans on toast on Thursday and so on. Her one and only sauce was Campbell's Mushroom Soup. I never thought to ask her, but now I'd bet that she didn't like daily cooking much more than I do.

Needless to say, my cooking career was not off to a great start.

I've learned, though, to be a fairly good or at least competent, basic cook. Our usual daily fare is simple enough to keep Number 1 Husband happy, and he now likes many many more things than he used to, even appreciating fresh foods and creative preparation. The creative preparation he's had to get used to, because in cooking as in all else, I simply can't do things the same way over and over. He says I've never made the same meal twice, and that's probably true although some of the hamburger dinners must come close.......

But when we have company I like to cook something more ambitious. Not being an avid foodie, I don't have masses of cookbooks (why buy a whole book when you might ever only use one recipe, and why read the whole book to find it), and I don't have a huge repertoire of interesting recipes at my fingertips. I was rather stumped at my Open House just this Christmas for appetisers that weren't greasy and wouldn't need me to stay glued to the kitchen. Help needed, for sure!

Take a look at www.best-party-recipes.com - sounds like fun! I have hopes of appetiser recipes in time for next Christmas's Open House!