My list of complaints is long, starting with its short life. Plus, it just doesn’t work in a border. To make room for other plants you end up removing so many lower branches the damn thing looks ridiculous.
Worst of all, this plant reminds me of how little I knew when I planted it and how thoughtlessly I made choices. Its large all-wrongness is getting me down. Not once but twice I bought this horticultural mistake produced by our own National Arboretum. But one has already fallen and the other won’t last long. And thank goodness, too, because its very weakness means the City of Takoma Park will allow me to remove it. Hey, not long ago even this crappy tree would have been protected, until our crazy tree law was finally relaxed to the level of sanity. (Have I mentioned how knee-jerk-left we are here in kooky Takoma? It’s still way better than knee-jerk right.)
But moving on. After hating this thing for about a decade, I’ve excitedly decided to remove it and replace it w
ith my new passion in plants – no surprise to readers here – conifers. So imagine this: a small grove of something like pine, cedar, cyprus or arbovitae. I’m thinking three of one kind in a dark green mixed with two of another species in a lighter green.
O gardeners of the world, what conifers make your heart quicken?
It all started when I couldn’t find clover seed at my corner hardware store. They’d had it in bulk last year but not anymore. So I do the sensible thing. Having had a few successful transactions on Ebay, both buying and selling, I put “clover seed” in their search engine and ended up making a purchase from somewhere in Canada. That was my first mistake, not realizing how long it takes to get a tiny package from there to here. Three weeks later the truly tiny thing arrived with this written on the outside: “Glass Beads.” What the hell? Tearing open the package, I find indeed a couple of hundred glass beads. Next stop, the Ebay sales information, carefully filed away with my saved email messages. Of course I’m thinking this seller has screwed up and this wrong will be righted.
The denouement to this tale of frustration is that I found the following description of what I’d bought: “GREEN CLOVER bunch-of-letters-and-numbers glass beads.” Man, I hate it when it turns out I’m the one who screwed up, although in this case can you blame me? And remember I wanted to plant the damn stuff a month ago.
Okay, the beads arrived on Monday and I’ve calmed down by now. I made constructive plans to check out another hardware when I’m out driving around today, but there isn’t one handy. Now I’m really proud of the next bit. I went right back to Ebay and ordered the presumably right thing this time, and for much less ($3 including shipping versus the original $11). And it’s from the faster side of the U.S.-Canada border – I’m hoping – in good old Maine. Wish me luck.
“McMansions” are a hot topic these days, whether the huge homes are part of new developments or the result of tear-downs amongst much smaller homes. And this letter to the Washington Post editor caught my eye the other day. The quote follows an account of visiting a new mansion in her modest neighborhood.
“The thing is, I really believe that as a community, we need to make do with less. We don’t need to heat massive living rooms with cathedral ceilings in the winter. We don’t need to dig granite from the earth to make our kitchens fancier. Most of us don’t need his-and-hers walk-in closets, home offices or designer appliances.
“The bigger the house, the bigger the waste. We waste our time maintaining the house and grounds. We waste our money on upkeep and updates. We waste precious natural resources on cooling and heating. We permanently alter the landscape around us, usually for the worse. And in most cases we keep filling our space with more stuff. Who needs that? Not me. But what I wouldn’t give for a mudroom…”
Which raises some interesting questions. Like is the writer a gardener? (Why else want a mudroom?) What about her assertion that maintaining the grounds is a waste of our time? Okay, on second thought she’s definitely not a gardener. But I have to say that her opinion that “we permanently alter the landscape around us, usually for the worse” is probably correct. Certainly that’s true of new developments – you know the ones that look like Monopoly boards with houses on otherwise empty lots? Even in older neighborhoods, tear-downs often require the destruction of large trees, though the new homeowner may end up installing more plants than were there before.
On a personal note, I faced a tiny, poorly made house for many years until it was torn down and replaced with a large but beautiful and well made home by its architect-owner, so I have mixed feelings on the subject. I mean that little house was butt-ugly. Maybe the moderate position is that it’s okay to replace bad housing with better housing, but let’s question how big the replacement really has to be because her thoughts about our excessive lifestyles are definitely on target. I await your thoughts.
This time of year many of us are admiring our ornamental grasses, now at their best, but some of us are also hearing warnings about their invasiveness. Just that – "Don’t you know they’re invasive?" Well, I hate it when that happens. In fact, my number one gardening rant is about too little information, or even misinformation, about plants, usually with the words "native" or "invasive" being used rather loosely.
Still, being the nature-lover and dutiful student that I am, I hit the old keyboard and read all the websites I could find about badly behaved plants in Maryland. Sure enough my favorite, Miscanthus sinensis, is listed as a "plant of concern." Which might steer me toward buying a different one but what about the ones already in my garden?
I’m happy to report finally finding the answers I was looking for – on HGTV’s website, of all places. An article there on this very subject quotes from the Timber Press Pocket Guide to Ornamental Grasses to explain that invasiveness is a matter of genes, region, and culture, and then goes on to list exactly which grasses are problems and which aren’t. Bless you, Timber Press. Turns out Miscanthus sinensis, the bad boy of ornamental grasses, isn’t a problem in cold or dry areas, and there are some cultivars that aren’t problems anywhere because they’re sterile, don’t self-seed, or simply bloom too late in the season. And even if I had an early bloomer, I could prevent its spread by simply removing the seedheads.
The specific cultivars recommended for the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic are ‘Morning Light’ (YES!), ‘Zebrinus,’ ‘Gracillimus,’ ‘Purpurascens,’ ‘Hinjo,’ and ‘Little Zebra.’ And it’s recommended that we limit the number of cultivars in our gardens to one or two, because cross-pollination can result in reversion to species – the worst offender of all. See, we gardeners want to do the right thing and with enough information, we can (and without ripping out our gardens.)
I’ve decided to start my rants with a pretty picture to soften up my readers, and this one is fresh off the old digital. It’s a lovely blue plumbago, the airy foliage of amsonia (lower left), cross vine foliage, and some mostly spent butterfly bush flowers.
Now for the rant, which is about some folks I know who say, when asked if they’ve checked out this blog, "Oh, I never read blogs." So I ask you, blog-readers all, why do some people feel such aversion? I liken it to people who dismiss all of television – including public TV, HBO and the Daily Show, for crissakes. I say yeah, most people would be bored by most blogs, but if something important is happening on them (the major political ones) or someone you know is expressing herself through one, isn’t it worth a look? And as blogs become a more entrenched part of our culture, do you think some of these stalwarts will come around?
So now to praise the (sometimes) mighty blog. After a bit of writing for print and for static websites, I’m totally enamored of this medium. I love the cumulative nature of it, especially when you can file posts away in categories for future reference. I love the comments and the community that they foster. It’s also a great place to display photos. And the experience of posting daily, or trying to, means that the photography, the writing and the posting all become parts of your everyday life, so you’re stretching those little muscles daily. Not to mention just thinking of something to say. And say you?
Daylily-lovers should just click off to another site because their love object is about to get dumped on. After years of devotion to these guys and the gradual winnowing down of 30 kinds to the best six, it’s still a dud in my garden. Why is that, you ask? Because with blooms lasting only a day each, there are never enough blooms to really have an impact. And just as importantly, because the foliage is ugly. The large ones looks like corn stalks and the small ones, though better, look like ratty liriope. This photo shows a couple of blooms but basically the area between the red-twig dogwood and the spirea looks empty of anything but slovenly old foliage.
With this photo in mind, I was a tad surprised to read today in a book I won’t name that "The foliage of all daylilies is extremely graceful" and again "When massed, it looks particularly graceful." Here’s my reaction: Proof positive that we can’t believe everything we read about plants. Fortunately, when we’ve grown them ourselves and observed them over time, we don’t need to. Seeing is believing.
But back to daylilies, there’s one more thing I’m going to try before I dump them all at next fall’s plant exchange. This summer I visited Fenwick Island, Delaware while they were blooming and saw them used perfectly, to my eyes. Most of the homeowners had used professional landscapers and from the looks of it, excellent ones. What they did was to mass daylilies so tightly they looked like, or actually were, a few very large ones. So they had punch, which is what mine had better have next year after they’re rearranged in bunches, or they’re out of here.
My list of complaints is long, starting with its short life. Plus, it just doesn’t work in a border. To make room for other plants you end up removing so many lower branches the damn thing looks ridiculous.
ith my new passion in plants – no surprise to readers here – conifers. So imagine this: a small grove of something like pine, cedar, cyprus or arbovitae. I’m thinking three of one kind in a dark green mixed with two of another species in a lighter green. 
