Vinca minor

This morning I planted 200 more vinca minor (also known as periwinkle or creeping myrtle) on the back side of the berm. It seems a shame to put something so pretty where I'll hardly ever see it, but it tolerates the shade back there, keeps the soil on the slope from eroding, minimizes the weeds, and will eventually spread enough that it will eliminate the need for mulch. These photos are from last year, and you can see some ground between the plants. This year, the same area is a solid mat of vinca.

I got a good deal on bare root plants from Wayside, and probably planted them too close together. The little stake said they should be 18-24 inches apart, and I probably planted them 6-12 inches apart. But you never know how many will take, and it's not like I can't transplant them if they get too dense.

Geranium

First, I need to clarify that I'm not talking about the bright red/pink/white annual geraniums that many people grow in window boxes and containers. Those are actually pelargoniums. True geraniums—sometimes referred to as hardy geraniums or cranesbill geraniums—are generally perennial, have divided leaves rather than scalloped ones, and are typically pastel in color.

The first geranium I ever tried was 'Johnson's Blue', and although it didn't bloom nearly as long as the catalog said it would, I just loved it. The plant had a very round form, like a big green basketball, and very pretty blue flowers in May/June. It did get a little scraggly after the flowers were spent, but once I cut back the stems, it resumed its nice shape.

At a different house, I tried Geranium sanguineum 'Striatum', which had a pink flower. It was a much smaller plant than the 'Johnson's Blue', and behaved more like a ground cover, sprawling along the edge of the bed.

I didn't even realize it was possible to grow geraniums from seed until I met my husband, who had discovered 'Splish Splash' in a Park Seed catalog. (They no longer carry them.) The plants were still fairly small when we moved, so I don't know what form they eventually took when they got established, but they, too, seemed more like a ground cover than a specimen plant. Their flowers were white with lavender splashes (or lavender with white splashes, depending on your perspective).

When we lived in New York, we tried a new variety, 'Jolly Bee'. Like 'Johnson's Blue', 'Jolly Bee' had a pretty blue flower. I can't tell you much about the plant's form, though, because we abused it so badly! We didn't mean to! The portion of the garden where it grew had a horrible infestation of bamboo, one of the nastiest invasives I've ever seen. It spreads via runners deep under the ground, and in digging up the bamboo, my husband sometimes accidentally dug up the 'Jolly Bee'. I would be sweeping up the remnants of our weeding activities, find the poor plant in the heap, and then pop it back in the ground. It did rather well, given its circumstances!

Here in Ohio, we grow two varieties of geranium. One of them, 'Victor Reiter, Jr.', is just now starting to leaf out.

'Victor Reiter, Jr.' isn't as large and shapely as 'Johnson's Blue', but it does have a more compact, upright form than the creeping geraniums. Its leaves are more bronze than green (at least initially), and it holds its lavender blue flowers above its leaves on long stems (long for a geranium, that is) from late May to late June, with a sparse second flush later in the summer.

It doesn't seem to be quite as hardy as some of the other geraniums I've grown—I planted five, and one died the first season—but it does appear to self-seed. I discovered a baby on the other side of the stone path last year, and this spring I moved it back in with its relatives, replacing the plant that died.

But the glory of the garden, my very favorite geranium ever, is 'Rozanne'. Indeed, I'm a little nervous at the moment, since my two plants have not yet shown any new green growth, but I will be shocked—shocked!—if this plant doesn't make it. It's a very vigorous grower, spreading two to three feet each season while still maintaining some fullness, and once it starts flowering in late May, it keeps going and going until a good, hard frost in the fall.

In these pictures, the flowers look pink, but it's just the the way the sun is hitting them— they're actually lavender blue. Rozanne is among my most treasured plants. It requires absolutely no maintenance (other than being cut back in the fall), and it blooms extravagantly.

Rosa 'Blanc Double de Coubert'

We have 18 different varieties of roses growing in our gardens (not counting the two scruffy ones of unknown parentage that we're going to pull this year), and I don't plan to write about each one individually, but at least one merits its own post: Blanc Double de Coubert, which is now starting to leaf out.

I do need to mention that I'm not the rose expert in our household; that's my husband's specialty. But I've learned a thing or two about them along the way.

Blanc Double de Coubert is a rugosa rose. It gets its name from its leaf—the term rugose means that the veins of the leaf are sunken with elevated areas in between, creating an effect kind of like a wavy potato chip. But in my mind rugosa evokes the word rugged, which is what this plant is. Sheets of snow and ice fall on it from our roof, and it barely bats an eye. Deer are afraid of it. I have no doubt that when Maleficent created a hedge of thorns around Sleeping Beauty's castle, they were rugosa roses. You don't mess with Blanc (unless you're wearing heavy leather gloves!).

We planted five of them in front of our screened porch, not to fend off princes (my husband gets past them!), but because this particular variety is so fragrant, and we wanted to have them close at hand.

The white flowers do not look like the standard hybrid teas that most people imagine when they think of roses, but they're quite pretty in their own right, and they bloom longer than any other rose we grow (in successive waves from early May to mid-October).

The flowers grow in clusters on very short stems, so they're really not good for cutting. (And who would want to risk touching those extremely thorny branches?) In theory, they're supposed to form nice red hips in the fall, although I have not seen this happen yet; mostly the hips seem to dry up and fall off. On occasion, when I feel obsessive about tidiness, I clip them myself.

Another virtue of this particular rose (and perhaps all rugosas?) is that the bright green foliage is immune to black spot and other fungal diseases that plague other varieties. The leaves look as good at the end of the season as when they first unfurled, no muss, no fuss. Fragrance and fortitude, who could ask for more?

Pulmonaria

Another spring plant that's perking up is pulmonaria. This was another one of our transplants from New York—we just popped it in the ground near the front door in November 2006, and it's actually been happier there than in its original home.

The common name for pulmonaria is lungwort, which makes sense etymologically: the term pulmonary relates to the lungs. But this made me wonder: what does my pretty little pulmonaria plant have to do with lungs? So I checked out Wikipedia, and it turns out that its mottled leaves were once thought to symbolize diseased, ulcerated lungs, and therefore the plant was used in the treatment of pulmonary diseases. (Here I always thought the leaves were kinda cool-looking.)

I do like the leaves; I think they give the plant year-round interest even when it's not in bloom. But to be honest, I bought it for the flowers. I especially love the mix of pink and blue in the same cluster. This particular variety is Pulmonaria 'Samurai'.

Pulmonaria is a fairly prostrate plant, keeping both its leaves and flowers close to the ground. In our garden, it bloomed from mid-April to late-May.

It reminds me a little of Mertensia 'Virginica' (aka Virginia bluebells), which lacks the mottled leaves, but blooms in similar clusters, and has a more upright form. Something new to try one of these days...

Aquilegia alert!

After three weeks in the refrigerator and two weeks under the grow lights, my Aquilegia hybrida 'McKana Giants Mixed' seeds have popped!

I believe I had a 100% germination rate (thinned down to nine plants here). Now I just have to nurture them until they're big enough (and it's warm enough outside) to transplant them to the berm.

Myosotis

Another non-bulb spring plant that's starting to show activity now is myosotis (aka Forget-Me-Not).

I'm actually a little intrigued by this development, since the new growth appears to be coming from the same plant that died back last year. When we grew myosotis in New York, it behaved like a true biennial: the first year we got only plant growth, the second year we got flowers, and then the plants that flowered did not come back. They did self-seed, giving rise to new growth during the second year so that it could bloom the following year. In that way, we had flowers every spring, but not from the same plants.

If the myosotis here in Ohio both comes back from the original plant and self-seeds, then I'm going to have a really nice patch of flowers under my crabapple, which suits me fine, as it's a very pretty little woodland plant, and blooms for a long time to boot. Last year it went from late April to mid-June.

Primula

In addition to spring bulbs, we grow a number of other spring flowers, including primroses, which are starting to put out new growth.

Our luck with primroses has been hit and miss. We tried them for the first time when we were living in New York, and they did very well. Unfortunately, I don't remember the variety, but they had clusters of lovely nodding yellow flowers, and they either self-seeded or otherwise spread to form a nice colony.

Encouraged by that success, we tried other varieties, including drumstick primroses, but never got any others to germinate until we tried some Primula x polyanthus here in Ohio. Those germinated nicely, and I planted about six of them, but only two survived, and they don't show any sign of spreading nearly as much as the ones we grew in New York, perhaps because they're a hybrid. I think this spring I'll try to start some more and see if I can fill in the bed more thoroughly, as I do like the flower.

Once they do get established, they bloom from mid/late April to mid/late May.

Transplant time!

It's probably a week early to be doing this, but the roots of the veggies were coming through the bottoms of their cells, and the temperature has been in the 60s, so after hardening them off for a few days in the shelter of our screened porch, I decided to transplant them to the raised beds.

In the first bed I planted 16 cauliflower seedlings. Many years ago I read an article in Organic Gardening by Mel Bartholomew about square foot gardening, and I really liked his approach. In this case, I planted one cauliflower seedling in each square foot of my 4'x4' bed. (As you can tell from the photo, it was a very blustery day.)

In another bed I used the same technique with 16 cabbage seedlings. In each hole, I mixed in a couple tablespoons of organic fertilizer (Vegetables Alive from Gardens Alive), and although we're expecting rain tomorrow, I gave them a little drink to help them recover from any transplant shock. I was pleased to see a few worms as I turned the soil—worm castings, as they are euphemistically called, are wonderful for enriching the soil.

Between those two beds I also planted some sugar snap peas, and put in my pea fence. Not quite visible in this picture, but trust me, it's there.

Finally, since I know the temperature is going to dip down again, I put some row covers over the cabbage and cauliflower. In theory, you can put row covers directly on top of the plants, but I'm still a little skeptical about that. I used to have metal hoops over which I could drape the row covers, but somehow those did not make the trip from New York, so I stuck a few wooden shims in the corners of the beds and used those to hold the covers up a little. It was no easy task, doing this on so windy a day, but I got it done. (I have heard that you can just bury the edges of row covers to keep them in place, but I don't believe it. I use metal pins to keep them from blowing away.)

As I mentioned earlier, this is my first attempt at both cabbage and cauliflower. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to pin the cauliflower leaves over the flower heads; I recall reading that somewhere. Or perhaps this variety is self-blanching (which is to say, its leaves will naturally curl up over the heads to keep them white). Time will tell.