A Look Back

Lately in the evenings I have been going through my old garden photos, not just this year's, but photos from previous years as well. I have a big backlog of pictures from the last two years that hadn't been weeded through. It's been rather cheery to look back at the garden during growing season. The daylilies especially look so sunny and colorful on days that are damp and gray.

All of the pictures below are from 2010.

From mid-April, 2010. The garden between the house and the drive was so much smaller then! Monarda 'Raspberry Wine'and rugosa roses have taken over the area where the iris was then and stand a good 6' high in the middle of summer.

Early May, 2010. The white rose to the right is the tiny princess 'Clotilde Soupert', whose flowers are packed with petals and fragrance, and the rose peeking out from the left is 'Hansa'.

'Blush Noisette' has now been moved to a spot on the far side of the front sidewalk.
In this location her long thorny canes were always reaching out to grab as one edged past.

Rugosa alba

This European wood anemone is gone now (voles?), but I really enjoyed it when it returned and bloomed for 3-4 years. I love anemones and they always remind me of the Sisters' Garden in Chapel Hill.

Monarda 'Raspberry Wine' just getting started.

'Crepuscule'

2010 was a stellar day for daylilies. Then I did a butcher's job of dividing them too late in the fall of that year and some are still in the process of recovering.

'Ada May Musick'

'Ada May Musick', with 'Moonlight Masquerade' behind and 'Jedi Blue Note' in front.

'Lemon Berry Frost'. I even love the name.

'Lemon Berry Frost' and 'Ah Youth'

'Ah Youth'

'Lion in Winter'

H. citrina

Yellow daylily from a trade and probably my favorite yellow. Vigorous, elegant, and sweetly fragrant.

The daylily at the top is my favorite yellow (also pictured above), the bottom left is H. citrina, and the bottom right is not 'Hyperion' (although the picture makes it look a lot like it), but a very tall and very fragrant yellow that pales to a light butter yellow by the end of the day. I may still find the tag for that one.

'Smuggler's Gold'

'Lavender Deal'

clockwise from top left: commuter daylily (Hemerocallis citrina), mystery pink
daylily from Wayside, 'Tupac Amaru', and 'Lavender Deal'

'Lavender Stardust'

'Bleu Celeste'

Not sure of the parentage of this one, but I believe it may be a
'Strawberry Candy' seedling. The pink color is outstanding.

The daylily at the top right is an unnamed Bachman seedling. The
other pictures feature a lot of H. citrina and 'Bleu Celeste'.

I don't have many red daylilies, but I love them anyway even if they don't really fit into the overall "cool" palette of white/cream/lavender/blue/pink that I have here. I think the red can work out as exclamation points in a sea of other colors.

The warm burgundy of 'Chocolate Splash' doesn't really fit in either, so it's been moved elsewhere where its rich coloring can be set off by other hot-colored daylilies: 'Sparkling Orange', 'Spellbinder', 'Kwanso', and orange ditch lilies (H. fulva). It is a beautiful daylily, with petals like velvet.

Hay

Hay. Those three little letters add up to some complicated stuff. Especially horse quality hay. Difficult to make and difficult to store. It must be clean and dry, free of poisonous weeds or bugs or mold. If hay is baled while it's still damp mold grows inside the day. Even keeping moisture from getting to hay during storage can be a problem, especially in a humid climate.

We feed coastal bermudagrass because it's grown locally, affordable, and most importantly because it tends to have low sugar levels. Our pony is insulin resistant, a common problem among many ponies and horse breeds such as Arabians and Morgans. Our pony is half Shetland and half Arabian. Coastal is harvested from June to October and getting good coastal hay during the winter can be problematic. I've had to throw out hay every month of the year but by far the most during winter. Believe me, the hay not worth the mileage on the truck or the hassle of returning it to the feed store. I use it as mulch even if doesn't make a very pretty mulch. Along the driveway, around the trees up above the house, and on beds that are still developing.

The bed next to the neighbor's pasture in the spring of 2010.

At that time Bidens were the main thing growing at the front of the bed and I couldn't face weeding the entire bank (it's a looong bed), so I put down hay on the bank to feed the roses and hardy ginger and Hubricht's Amsonia seedlings there. Mirrors the broomsedge in the neighbor's pasture nicely, don't you think? ;) Until the Bidens start getting height, which may be May, June, July or August, depending on rainfall and temperature in a particular year, I mow high with the tractor, or, if I'm feeling particularly masochistic, weed by hand. I tried to add various perennials to the Bidens over the past few years, but in a hot dry year that place is surprisingly brutal. So far only a clump of Joe Pye, a Swamp sunflower, and a couple of seashore mallows have stuck. I've added a few swamp roses and they are sizing up nicely. I'm going to add more Amsonia seedlings next fall, and some wild blueberries. I'd love to add some winterberry too, but so far I've only managed to grow one plant from cuttings. I've had a remarkable lack of success propagating hollies of any sort from cuttings or seeds, be it American holly (Ilex opaca), winterberry (Ilex verticillata), or Possamhaw (Ilex decidua). It's a shame too because the wild winterberries are spectacular.

The bed beside the backyard paddock, April 2012. See the sleeping kitty?

The long bed beside the paddock is only about 3 years old and mostly planted with young Baptisia seedlings which are taking their own sweet time maturing. So I also mulch that bed with hay. Only two of the baptisias are of good size ~ 'Carolina Moonlight', shown above, and 'Twilite Prairie Blues' ~ and they were purchased as 2 or 3 gallon plants. 'TP Blues' has been very vigorous, this despite the machinery-compacted soil that results in the roots going down through the cut-out bottom of the pot (used to protect the baptisias from voles) and then sideways instead of continuing down as baptisia usually do. The ground underneath the soft mulch layer is still too hard.

Two big clumps of Verbena bonariensis and some Siberian iris provided some color to the bed along with the baptisias. Bidens later came up through that hay layer and filled the bed this year, thank goodness, because that really helped it out.

Two butterfly bushes in a small bed by the back porch door are gone, so I added a couple of spare blue mist shrubs and mulched with hay to encourage the catmint to grow more. If the blue mist shrubs don't make it through the winter I need to come up with a sturdy woody plant on the small side that can cover the view of the hardpan underneath the back porch. As much as I love blue mist shrub it is a bit fragile. After the house was moved I tried a 'Victor Velidan' at the back of the house, a beautiful fragrant ivory tea rose that fried its first summer. That was sad, because tea roses are so beautiful here in winter. Anyway the cats enjoy napping in the sun on the hay. This fall I threw caution to the wind and planted some starts of showy pink primrose to the beds next to the back porch and beside the paddock as a ground cover. I really, really need something on the ground under the baptisias besides hay.

Last year we tried converting the front half of the bed beside the paddock to a tomato garden. The tomatoes were a major failure but we enjoyed Tommy's company while prepping the site.

I also put down hay to edge the beds and later regretted it because it really stuck out! I've resolved to put it on the compost pile and let it break down from now on.

Looking through flowers of Baptisia 'Twilite Prairie Blues'

Eventually we're going to have a lot of compost with the horses being in the paddock full time with Prince's injury.

Paperwhites and other blooms on Christmas Day

Ta da! Ladies and gentleman, I present the first paperwhite blooms in my garden in over 10 years. Ever, actually. This story could be a garden oops (goops). I forced the bulbs indoors one year over a decade ago, and then, following Elizabeth Lawrence's advice, I planted them out in the garden. They sat wimpy and bloomless in the lean soil by the driveway at the old house site for 5 years. When we moved the house I moved them into the big perennial bed hoping the richer medium would give them a boost.

The bulbs' numbers had trebled but they were small bulbs. The narcissus continued to look wimpy, not helped by the fact that every. single. year. I mistook the foliage for weeds and yanked the leaves off. In my defense, the weak foliage strongly resembles grass that grows in the garden in winter. I figured the fact they never bloomed was a combination of my gardening ineptitude and the fact that according to Scott Ogden many modern paperwhite bulbs will increase and increase and not size up. Last year I managed to refrain from weeding them and this year, viola! Flowers! I've never forced any more paperwhites because DH is a hater and they hadn't done anything in the garden before now. I actually like the fragrance, even with the mothball undertones. Hopefully this year's flowers were not a fluke and they will bloom again.

Elizabeth Lawrence wrote that in her Raleigh garden the first flower of winter was the paperwhite narcissus. In winter her presence as a garden muse is closest to me than at any other time of year. Her A Southern Garden was written about her garden in Raleigh, just 30 miles from where I live. Both she and Billy Hunt (who deeded the land to UNC where the NC Botanical Garden is now) were champions of flowers in the garden year round, and writes "ever since I first shared Billy Hunt's enthusiasm for winter bloom, I have been collecting January and December flowering plants for my garden. I still have that buttery list that I made as we talked and lunched, and I pictured myself as living henceforth in a sort of Hesperides of perpetual spring, perfrumed with sweet olive and gay with camellias ~ both Sasanqua and japonica ~ winter heath, winter heliotrope, and in particular the white cowslip, Saxifraga ciliata."

In the section on "Winter-Flowering Trees and Shrubs" she writes of wintersweet and the Asiatic witch hazels and states that "loveliest of all is the Japanese apricot, Prunus mume, so called because the delicately colored and delicately scented almond-like blossoms are prized by the Japanese for winter flower arrangements".

Our Japanese flowering apricot is about half open. Sometimes it flowers in December, sometimes in January, sometimes in February, sometimes in waves, and sometimes all at once, depending on the weather. The tree is covered in buds and flowers in varying shades of pink and the perfume is so sweet. Yesterday bees were buzzing all over it. The 25th of December felt more like the 1st of April, with temps in the mid 60's.

Winter honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima) is also blooming. It's the other winter stalwart in our garden, often blooming from late December until April. I noticed the first flowers on Christmas. Fragrantissima is a good descriptor of this plant, as the flowers are hugely fragrant, up close and far away, sweet and sharp with a strong lemony tang.

The witch hazel has been blooming for at least 2 weeks. Ugly as sin covered as it is with rough brown leaves but also sweetly fragrant, kind of like Fruit Loops but with a little bit of a clean antiseptic edge.

Wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox) and the native winter-flowering witch hazel (Hamamelis vernalis) are lacking from my winter garden repertoire. Yulan magnolia has been a great winter performer at the JC Raulston Arboretum but I'm not sure I want to add another tree.

I think violets bloom almost every month of the year here. I always loved blue violets and wanted them in my garden. Now they are practically a weed in the garden next to the house but I am happy they are there. They make a fine ground cover and the ground is paved with purple flowers in the spring. My grandfather used them the same way in his Indiana garden.

So those are our Christmas flowers. I hope you had a merry Christmas and best wishes for a happy new year!