(St)ring Theory

I had written earlier about my experiment with daylilies and onion rings, and the results are...drum roll, please....inconclusive.

I can say with certainty that hanging onion rings on daylily scapes is not an absolute deterrent, as one of the scapes with a ring did get nibbled.

But the question remains...would the deer have eaten all of the buds if the onion ring had not been there? Or would it have just eaten that one bunch and moved on, no matter what?

I'm also toying with the idea of making my own deer repellent—blending water with onion and garlic and anything else that I think deer might not enjoy, straining out the solid bits, and putting it in a sprayer. Less unsightly than the onion rings, and it can't hurt.

Who knew that gardening would bring out the mad scientist in me?

Loveland Garden Tour

Every year, the Loveland Garden Tour committee puts together a self-guided tour of several local residents' gardens as a fundraiser for a local food pantry and the Loveland Historical Museum. This is the first time we've taken the tour, and I thought I'd share a few photos here.

Each house on the tour had not only lovely plantings, but artists on hand painting pictures of the flowers, and musicians from the local music academy playing in the background. It was really a delightful way to spend a Saturday afternoon!

We visited five different gardens, each with its own name. We started at Stonehenge (so called for the owner's extensive use of landscaping stones and boulders)...

...then on to Commune with Nature, which might have been my favorite...

...although the Estate Gardens were pretty spectacular, too...

...and how can you resist the 85 different varieties of daylilies at Hill's Lilies...

...or not succumb to the charm of My Blue Heaven?

If you're keen to see all 50+ photos, you can go to our online photo album. Enjoy!

Ring Around the Lily

I sometimes think that the subtitle for my blog should be "Living with Plants...and Deer, and Rabbits, and Moles, and Japanese Beetles, and Tomato Hornworms, and..."

We have a fence around the veggies, and generally stick to deer-resistant plants in the open beds, but we can't imagine a garden without roses and daylilies, in spite of the fact that these appear to be dinner bells for the deer, who wander about the neighborhood without fear or shame.

I've been using Deer Scram as a repellent, which seems to work pretty well, but I sometimes forget to put it out before the damage is done. We have a patch of daylilies that we got from White Flower Farm, and I have yet to see what a few of them even look like because for the past two years, all the scapes have been eaten before they've bloomed!

So this year I decided to try an experiment. I know that deer generally don't eat plants in the onion family, and after a recent party I had lots of leftover fresh onion rings that didn't find their way onto burgers. And I thought to myself...why not loop them onto some of the daylily scapes? If the smell doesn't repel the deer, then at least they'll get a nasty taste if they dare to bite the buds!

Of course, it doesn't look great up close, but neither do bare stalks. From a distance you really can't tell that the rings are there. And I'm betting that they'll shrivel and be less noticeable after a couple days. So I'm going to see if this makes any difference. Plus, an onion is a lot cheaper than a big bucket of Deer Scram!

A Rose by Any Other Name...

For years, my favorite David Austin rose was Tamora, which has lovely apricot-colored flowers that glow like the sun, and a delicate, pleasing fragrance.

But after planting Crown Princess Margareta, I have to admit that my affections are wavering in her favor. For one thing, Maggie's flowers have an exquisite form—the outer petals form concentric circles around a ruffled center in an absolutely charming fashion. The apricot color is a little deeper than Tamora's, which helps the blooms stand out at a distance, and they last much longer on the stem than almost any of our other roses. Maggie also seems to bloom more regularly and is less disease-prone than many of our other roses, which is always a selling point with me.

We have a few other roses of similar hue in the rose bed. I had almost given Tea Clipper up for dead, but it finally did send up new canes, and has been doing nicely. I'm less smitten with the crinkled form of the blooms, but they're still pleasing to the eye in their own way.

Charles Darwin has been a bit of a disappointment. He's supposed to produce golden yellow flowers, and they do start out with a gold hue, but then quickly fade to almost off-white before the flowers fully open. We have had a fair amount of rain, but I wouldn't expect the color of a rose to wash out so quickly. The large flowers are supposed to be a positive feature, but the stems tend to be spindly, and as a result, many of the blooms end up bending the branches down near the ground. Perhaps this quality will diminish as the shrub matures. But if anything ever happens to Charles Darwin (natural selection, perhaps?), I'll replace him with Charlotte, a clear yellow rose that I've grown and liked before.

I'm grouping Lady Emma Hamilton among these light-colored roses, but she really is in a category all her own. For one thing, although the new shoots of many roses start out with a bronze tinge, Emma's leaves hang onto that color for a long time, not turning fully green until after several weeks, so she stands out among her peers even when not in bloom. Her other distinction is the color of her flowers. The buds start out almost red-orange, and then open into a bright coral with yellow and pink undertones.

Emma doesn't have the beautiful form of Maggie, but she still might make my top five.

Florida Flowered, Kousa Cowered

I'm partial to flowering trees, and I'd like to be able to say that we have two flowering dogwoods, but that would not be accurate. The Cornus 'Florida' that was here when we moved in has been a reliable bloomer, gracing us with its white flowers from late April to mid-May.

The Cornus 'Kousa' that we planted in 2007 has yet to produce a single flower. It seems to be doing better than it had in past years, when I noticed many dead branches and leaves that were dried around the edges, but I wouldn't say that it's thriving.

This is particularly disheartening because we had a magnificent Cornus 'Kousa' in New York, and I know what a splendid tree it can be. Like Magnolia 'virginiana', the Cournus 'Kousa' blooms in late spring/early summer, after its leaves have formed. But while the Magnolia's display is more subtle, the Cornus 'Kousa' puts on a dazzling show of abundant white flowers, which then form bright red fruits. Yes, it makes a bit of a mess if the birds and squirrels don't get them all, but as long as you don't plant it near a paved surface, it's not that noticeable...nothing like a sweetgum, which drops horrible spurred seed pods that are a pain to clean up (and a worse pain to step on in bare feet!). If I ever buy another home with a sweetgum, I'm going to cut it down if I have to do it with my bare hands. But I digress...

One thing that has puzzled me about our current 'Kousa' is that its branches are very erect. The one we grew in New York had much more horizontal, architectural branching. Is this something that the tree develops with age? Or are there different forms? I suppose I'll find out, assuming it hangs in there.

Polemonium Pandemonium

I had thought that my Polemonium caeruleum was an early spring flower, like the primroses and Pulmonaria, so when I saw new growth back in March, I was all psyched for flowers in April.

Well, it was a longer wait than that. My Polemonium finally started blooming back on May 20, and just finished up last week. This is probably when it has always bloomed; I just forget from year to year.

I've always grown Polemonium from seed, and I've never had a plant for more than two years at any one place, so I really don't know how large it gets when mature, or how floriferous. So far, I've gotten only a couple flower stems, and given the fairly delicate nature of the blossoms, that's not a big display. Like many woodland flowers, its form and color are subtle. And while my Polemonium in New York was never eaten (to the best of my recollection, which is clearly faulty), one of the flower stalks here in Ohio made some critter a nice lunch.

Still, even when it's not blooming, the leaves are attractive. I assume it gets its common name, Jacob's Ladder, from the even arrangement of leaves along the stem, like rungs of a ladder.

Or perhaps someone just thought that its angelic blue flowers with tiny yellow stamens were heavenly.

The Diablo Made Me Do It

My husband is a huge fan of physocarpus (aka ninebark), and I must admit it's growing on me as well (pun intended). It's yet another of our burgundy-leafed plants—not that we have anything against plain green plants (we have a lot of those, too), but it does provide a little visual variety in the garden.

We have two kinds of physocarpus: two 'Summer Wine' flank either side of the front porch, and two 'Diablo' anchor one end of the sunny border.

As far as I can tell, the main difference between them is habit; 'Summer Wine' is more compact than 'Diablo', growing to maybe 4-6 feet. I would also say that it's more upright, except that this year several of its branches decided to "weep", so I'm really not sure what to expect from it as it gets better established. (We had originally planted the 'Summer Wine' under a birch, and although they're generally drought-tolerant, they found the competition for water a little overwhelming, so we relocated them to their current home, which seems to suit them better.)

From 'Diablo' I know what to expect: out-of-control growth. We've had this guy for a couple years now, and he likes to send out long branches every which way, like a botanical Doc Ock. He's at least 6 feet tall, and shows no signs of stopping. Physocarpus is a native plant, so that doesn't hurt.

His little brother, who's a year younger, is better behaved, but I know it's only a matter of time. See him stretching out that one tentative arm?

Both 'Summer Wine' and 'Diablo' bloom in May, and the clusters of white flowers look sharp against the dark foliage. Physocarpus appears to bloom more on new wood than old, which might be even more incentive to prune the shrubs back in the fall and see if that encourages new growth and more flowers in the spring.

They bloom for only a week or two, but then the flowers turn into bright red fruits or seeds or some such thing. And again, the contrast really pops.

And if spring flowers and summer fruits aren't enough, the plant gets its nickname from its bark, which peels away in layers like a sycamore or river birch, providing fall and winter interest. (This is not a great picture, but you get the idea.)

I Did Promise You a Rose Garden

In addition to the roses in the sunny border, we have a bed entirely dedicated to these lovely plants.

The bed is dominated by 'Abraham Darby' (we have the climbing version rather than the shrub version) and 'Constance Spry', a rambling rose if ever there was one.

'Abraham Darby' is a vigorous plant, blooming profusely at the beginning of the season and to a lesser extent throughout the summer. The flowers themselves can get to be a good four inches across when fully open, and their color is striking. The pale apricot at the base gradually blends into the soft pink petals, creating an effect like a sunrise. Abe has a very pleasant but not overwhelming fragrance.

The flowers typically grow in clusters, with some in bud and some in bloom at any given moment.

The first time I grew 'Constance Spry', she took over the adjacent split-rail fence, sending out 15-foot canes the very first season, which were absolutely covered with almost hot pink, strongly scented flowers. At our current home, the growth has been more reserved, and we didn't get flowers the first season, but Constance has bloomed nicely this year.

Unlike all the other roses in the bed, Constance is not a rebloomer. When the show is over, it's over until next year. But if she flourishes as well here as her sister did at our previous home, I'm content.

What the Hail?

No one moves to southwestern Ohio for the weather. The winters can waver between bitter cold and unseemly thaws, wreaking havoc on plants. Springs can be cold and wet, or non-existent, going from temperatures in the 30s to the 80s in a week or two. Summers are both humid and drought-prone. Thunderstorms can cause flash floods, and a tornado or two is not uncommon. But hail? We can go for years without hail, and yet we've had three hail storms in the past couple weeks! It has toppled one of my tomatoes and broken their branches. It has pummeled my peas, leaving unsightly scars on otherwise perfect pods.

The only silver lining I can find in this is that the hail has done little damage to the flowers (other than knocking the petals off some of the spent roses). Still, I'm done with it, thank you very much. No more hail!