Wort's New

What Hannibal Lecter said in Silence of the Lambs is true: coveting begins with what we see every day. And when I'm out walking in my neighborhood, admiring the things I see growing in my neighbor's yards, I sometimes find myself wishing I had the same plant. Thus it was with Hypericum f. 'Sunburst' (St. John's Wort—the shrub, not the herb). After long noticing it in a nearby garden, I finally broke down and got one of my own.

As with most new plants, I had to figure out what was normal behavior, and what wasn't. The fact that it died back to the ground late last autumn? Apparently that's normal, kind of like my beloved Caryopteris 'Snow Fairy'.

Hypericum forms a nice, medium-sized shrub with leaves that remind me of eucalyptus. This year it started blooming in early July, and stopped around early September. It didn't flower as prolifically as the neighbor's plant, or get as large, but this was really its first full year in the yard, so it'll take a little time to get established.

I had appreciated its bright yellow flowers from a distance, but really like them up close, especially the gazillion filaments, like a firework exploding. Hey, maybe that's why this variety is called 'Sunburst'!

Feathery Amberboa

Some of the new plants that we try each year are just a different species of a familiar genus. Some I've never even heard of at all. Such was the case with Amberboa muricata 'Sweet Sultan'.

It looks a lot like your basic centaurea (bachelor's button), and both plants are in the same family, so I'm not sure what distinguishes one from the other. But my husband was intrigued by the picture in the Thompson and Morgan catalog, and so we ended up starting some of the seeds last winter.

The young leaves in the cells looked so much like calendula that I inadvertently planted the amberboa in an area that I had intended only for yellow flowers. Ah, well. I can always say that I intended its purple blooms to provide a contrast.

Although all of the Calendula 'Sherbet Fizz' that I planted melted away under the strong spring rains and winds, the amberboa hung in there. The 18- to 24-inch plant started blooming in early July, and even though I've been negligent in deadheading it—I haven't done anything in the yard for weeks, it's been so hot!—it still has buds.



Amberboa is an annual, so I'll have to decide if I want to grow it again, but it's easy to germinate, tough in the face of environmental adversity, and adds a nice bit of color, so we'll see!

Hello, Dahlia!

In spite of the fact that we have numerous flower and veggie beds, and spend several hours a week tending to them (except when it's unbearably hot, as it has been recently), I consider myself a somewhat lazy gardener because there are some tasks that I just won't do, and lifting bulbs or tubers or whatever is one of them. I have often admired dahlias, but wouldn't grow them for that reason—I knew I wasn't going to bother digging them up in the fall and replanting them in the spring.

Then last winter my husband noticed some dahlia seeds in the Thompson and Morgan catalog, and that I could do! We started them indoors in mid-March, and they grew so vigorously that I didn't even realize that they were overwhelming the basil in the adjacent cells. (Most of the basil seedlings were so weakened by this that they ended up dying when I transplanted them to the yard, but I had extra seed that I direct-sowed, so I'll still have pesto this year if I remember to harvest the leaves before the first frost!)

I generally think of dahlias as tall plants, but Dahlia 'Fireworks Mixed' is low-growing. I ended up putting it in front of some taller calendula that had self-seeded from the year before. They also have a yellow Hypericum f. 'Sunburst' (St. John's Wort bush) as a backdrop, and tigridia just around the bend, so this little corner of the yard has developed into the Yellow Bed. (It's next to the veggie garden, so hopefully all this bright color attracts pollinators!)

These dahlias have a single row of mostly yellow petals with streaks and splotches of red, although a few are almost coral-colored.

They started blooming in late May, and are still going, although they don't bloom quite as prolifically as I would have liked. Perhaps that's my own fault; I'm not very conscientious about deadheading them. Nevertheless, I definitely like them quite a bit, and I'm wondering if, like the calendula, they'll self-seed. But I don't think I'll leave that to chance; I think I'll be including more dahlias in my seed order this winter!

The Daylily Awards

Choosing my favorite child is easy; I only have one. But choosing my favorite daylily? That's a challenge. We have almost 40 different varieties in our yard, and I love all of them, but I must admit that I do not love all of them equally. Some have qualities that make them stand out from the others. To that end, here are my own personal award-winners:

• Early Bird Award. The winner in this category is Hemerocallis 'Bitsy'. This year, its lovely lemon-yellow flowers started opening on May 24, a good two and a half weeks before any of our other daylilies. The initial flush lasted for more than 30 days, and last year it rebloomed in late July/early August, making it not only the first to bloom but also one of the last to bloom, prolonging the show.
  
  
  
  
• Be Fruitful and Multiply Award. Maybe it's just because I really need to divide the clump, but it seems to me that Hemerocallis 'Siloam Gumdrop' still sends up an awful lot of scapes. With most daylilies, I'm happy to get anywhere from two to ten stems. With Gumdrop, I'm looking at 20 or more! Each with multiple buds, of course, so I have this mass display. It takes me almost as long to deadhead Gumdrop alone as it takes to do the rest of the bed, but I'm not complaining!
  
  
  
  
• Eye-Popping Award. When you step into the back yard and just scan the beds, it's impossible for your eyes not to rest on Hemerocallis 'Chicago Star' for two good reasons—size and color. This star of the garden has the largest flowers of all my daylilies in a bright yellow shade that makes you want to put on your sunglasses!
  
  
  
  A close second in terms of brightness is 'Buzz Bomb', a fiery orange-red variety with a yellow throat.
  
  
  
  Planted together, you just can't miss them!
  
  
  
  
• Best Imitation of a Sunrise Award. If 'Chicago Star' and 'Buzz Bomb' are the most garishly colored, Hemerocallis 'Little Rainbow' is the most subtle, and one of the most beautiful daylilies I've ever grown. It's a dainty plant, but the understated blend of pale yellow and pink makes it a standout.
  
  
  
  
• Ruffle My Feathers Award. Although I probably tend to choose daylilies for their color, with Hemerocallis 'Smokey Mountain Autumn' I found both a gorgeous apricot hue and a pleasing form. This one has the most pronounced ruffled edges of any of my daylilies, and I find it utterly charming.
  
  

So those are my favorite picks...for this year, at least!

Birch Bed, Revisited

Sometimes, in a garden, you just have to go back to the drawing board. That's what we recently did with the bed at the back of our property that we call the Birch Bed because of its proximity to one of our river birches.

It was one of the few beds that existed when we bought our house, and it consisted of two gargantuan clumps of 10-foot bamboo-like grasses, two burning bushes, two white buddleia (butterfly bushes), two large clumps of perovskia (Russian sage), a small clump of yellow achillea (yarrow) and stokesia (Stoke's asters), three beautiful red daylilies, some orange Asiatic lilies, and a large clump of bearded iris that I had transplanted from a different part of the yard but that barely bloomed.

Occasionally I would throw some other plants back there, but there was no rhyme or reason to the design, and the grasses (which were a real pain to cut down each year) were on a mission to crowd everything else out. The bed did have some nice color in autumn, but we wanted to be able to admire it more often than that.

We were so happy with the improvements that Garden Room Design made to the corner bed (formerly known as the Bermuda Triangle, now known as the Fertile Crescent) that we decided to have them draw up a plan for the Birch Bed as well.

Out went everything except for the daylilies and the bearded iris, and even those got transplanted from the shady portion of the bed to the sunny side, which should encourage them to bloom more.

The tall grasses have been replaced with two good-sized but not overwhelming plants. One is a Limelight Hydrangea, which is supposed to have greenish-white flowers in mid-summer that turn deep pink in the fall. I wasn't expecting any flowers this year, but when I was walking through the yard this afternoon, I noticed buds!

The other large plant in the back is Persicaria polymorpha, which is tiny now but within a couple years will become about six feet high and wide, and sport white astilbe-like flowers in late summer.

On the sunny side of the bed are the transplanted iris (both bearded and Siberian from elsewhere in the yard), two Geranium 'Rozanne', and three Geranium 'Shepherd's Warning'. The 'Rozannes' that we have in front are fabulous plants that bloom from late May until frost without any care or attention; I'm not sure yet what to expect from 'Shepherd's Warning', which is a smaller, more low-growing plant, but we'll see how they do.

Several other plants that we've never grown before include Leucanthemum 'Banana Cream', a Shasta daisy with lemon-yellow blooms that gradually turn butter-yellow...

...Veronica 'Royal Candles', adding a touch of blue at the front of the bed...

...and Baptisia 'Carolina Moonlight', a very graceful plant that should have pale yellow flowers spikes at the beginning of next summer.

I've grown Monarda didyma 'Panorama Red Shades' from seed, and have been moderately pleased with the results, but the Birch Bed has 'Cambridge Scarlet', and I'm eager to see how it compares. For now, they're just little guys.

Equally small this year are the Phlox 'David's Lavender'—a plant that always reminds me of the garden my mother grew in our back yard when I was young. Of course, it'll be another year before that's really going as well.

On the shady side of the bed, we've got some Astilbe Ostrich Plume, still just getting established...

...Heuchera 'Plum Pudding'...

...'August Moon' and 'Stained Glass' hostas (well-sprayed with deer repellent) and Hakonechloa m. Aureola...

...and finally some Ceratostigma plumbaginoides, which were fabulous in the Fertile Crescent last year, but have been struggling this year. We'll see if they like the Birch Bed better.

Our designer also recommended an accent piece, like an attractive birdhouse, and when we were at Summerfair (the local arts fair), we came across a wrought iron and stone piece that struck our fancy.

All in all, I like the new design, and can't wait to see it become more established in the years to come!