sprig to twig

The fiery, spectacular Susan Hayward won an Acadamy Award for her performance as a condemned killer in a movie of that name. My reference is considerably less grisly.

Usually, when I trim back succulents before moving them inside for the winter, I just stick the pruned sprigs into potting soil and let nature take its course. This piece, however, broke off of the Kalanchoe fedtshenkoi mother plant when I was moving the pot around. Since I have a hard time throwing away any kind of plant material, I put it in water on the windowsill. See those roots beginning to fill up the bottle? Looks like these things will grow no matter what is done to them.

Need further proof? Here’s a leaf from that same plant. It cracked horizontally and then fell into a nearby pot with exposed soil. There are new little plants forming all along the crack.

There are two sedums that are quite similar. Both form long stems packed with fleshy leaves that trail over the edges of their pots. Sedum burrito, or Burro’s tail, has rounded, very plump leaves which cling to their stems fairly tenaciously. Sedum morganianum, on the other had, has slightly more pointed and slender leaves which fall off at the slightest touch. Each fallen leaf can become a new plant, as is beginning to happen in the above picture. The new plant draws strength from the reserves in the fallen leaf. By the time nothing but a flake is left of the leaf, the new plant will have sent down roots and be well on its way.

Don’t you just love it?

Meanwhile, out in the garden, each Eremurus ‘Cleopatra’ that I planted last year is sending up at least two, and in one case five, new shoots. I am feeling compensated for the things that may not make it (too soon to give up on anything quite yet, but it’s not looking good for quite a few things that used to be reliably hardy here).

The Hardy Plant Society of Oregon provides its members with many opportunities to get involved, i.e. volunteer. You can open your garden to other members, help out at events, write for the bulletin. It’s all fun, and a great way to meet new gardening friends. If that is not enough to prompt you to sign up, how about this? Each December, there is a volunteer appreciation event in the HPSO offices, where, besides coffee, treats and chatter, there are books for sale at cost. I never seem to be able to work the event into a busy holiday schedule, but the sale continues during office hours for the entire month. I have been picking up succulents wherever I see them for some time now, and often the labeling is slipshod or absent. I was looking for a book that I could use to identify my growing family of nameless urchins. This was not exactly the book I was looking for, but at half the cover price, it would do.

The emphasis here is on design and grouping succulents in containers, but enough of the plants in question are identified to do me some good. Mostly, it is a visual treat, and I am sure that some of the ideas are seeping into my brain, where they will be stored, regurgitated, and claimed as having originated in there.

Some of the ideas that have made it into the pages of this book will never be claimed as my own. I imagine stately Agaves and Yuccas blushing with humiliation over having been tarted up for the holidays.

HPSO also runs a lending library, where I found exactly the tome I sought. Succulents II, the new illustrated dictionary, takes a no nonsense approach, with alphabetized photos accompanied by the basic pertinent information. I checked it out for the allowed three week period, but I think this is one I will have to put on order, along with the first volume. Together, they cover about 2000 species. The authors are Maurizio Sajeva and Mariangela Costanzo, and the book is from Timber Press.

Making plans to visit Cistus Nursery this time of year can be a crap shoot. The appointed time arrived. It was cold. It was raining. It was super-windy. We went anyway. There were cars in the parking lot, but we were the only two people in sight. An assortment of umbrellas were thoughtfully placed near the door to the outside. We huddled under them and made the rounds (at a brisker pace than I have ever managed that circuit) before looking at each other and conceding that “maybe we should just come back on a nicer day”. The indoor spaces were crammed with interesting plants, as usual, so we lingered there for quite a while (it felt downright cozy compared to where we had just been).

This was Laurie’s first visit to Cistus, so she was following my lead. We both came away with one of these Aloe ‘Carmine’.

I seem to be gravitating to the Aloes of late. Look at those toothed edges in a deep pinkish orange…what’s not to love?

Seldom have I come away from that nursery with just one plant, but it opened up new possibilities. I immediately went shopping for just the right pot to set off its spotty, jagged beauty. I think I found it. Now TODAY would be a perfect day to visit Cistus. The sun is shining and the sky is blue. Since it is also my birthday, I might just mosey over there and indulge in one more plant. I’ll let you know.

If I see an unfamiliar succulent, I must have it. Each year, when their summer vacation outdoors comes to an end, they have overgrown their containers. That plant front and center is Ledebouria socialis. It has been divided so many times that wherever I go its offspring are in evidence. This year I rounded up all of the containers that I have been squirreling away and turned them into little succulent gardens.

It won’t take long for these little transplants to gain some presence. Don’t they look cute in this wooden wine box?

This metal box spent a lot of time in R’s studio, where it accumulated the patina of paint dribbles and drips, making it a fitting home for three Kalanchoe fedtschenkoi cuttings.

Good thing I like the look of little plants all in a row, because many of my available containers were oblong box shapes. The divisions here are Haworthia attenuata ‘Zebra’.

Here is a little sampling of the mini-succulent gardens in a toddler’s cowboy boot, a bag balm tin, a tea tin, a dolmas tin and a tuna tin. The last two also served a stint in the painting studio. I’m thinking these will make nice little hostess gifts. They definitely need to find new homes elsewhere, because we are being driven out of the dining room by overwintering plants.

Above is how the lavender walk looked back when it was in full bloom. I think it was a photo in an architecture magazine that put this bee in my bonnet. It showed a sloping field of row upon row of lavender, each individual plant forming a perfect mound. Now, if one were to ask me about my own style of gardening, I would have to say blowsy and undisciplined, as much as I admire controlled minimalism. Oh, well, I guess that is how garden rooms got started: gardeners loathe to commit to one style of gardening figuring out a way to have it all. At the last YGP Show, a respected speaker warned that lavender would eventually turn woody and die, but back when I was contemplating this project, the advice I had seen, and have followed with success for 6 years, was to cut it back by about one third each year after blooming.

Last year, for the first time, I left this chore until spring. It did not seem to make a difference at blooming, but the plants did seem a little bit woodier at this pruning. The last two days were ideal to the task: sunlight played with the clouds, a light breeze was blowing and this chore could easily pass for aromatherapy. It did take the better part of two days to accomplish, with only sixteen plants involved. That field in France that got me started must have a better method, or a slew of workers. Anyway, I usually start from the bottom, cutting out dead wood (but be careful, not all wood is as dead as it looks), sculpting as I go to form each plant into a rounded tuffet, with the top getting that third removed. The new growth coming along will be a sagey gray-green, while the old stuff will be regular old medium green. Along with the flowering stalks, I take off the first two or three little tufts of new. This is a sitting down job. The perspective is better that way, and my back says “thank you”.

The bed is 30″ wide and the plants are planted 30″ apart on center. In the above view, we are looking towards the SE. From this angle they look like shocked Marine recruits.

But from the other side the view is just as I envisioned it. Guess the moral to that story is to site such a feature accordingly (not what I did). The brown lawn is a Portland signature. Around here, being green means seeing brown for a good part of the summer.

I fully intended the plants to be all of a kind. Purely by accident, three oddballs snuck in. Luckily, they wound up at the end of the line. As you can see, the plant in the foreground is better suited to my purposes. It is Lavenda ‘Melissa’. The others, due to their undercover stealth, are anybody’s guess. I will be on the lookout for two more Melissa’s to replace them. Why only two? Because the gap for people and wheelbarrows to pass through has become overgrown.

Speaking of overgrown, here’s a lavender more characteristic of the approach in this garden. It is still throwing up fresh wands, and the bees love it. It is a different variety, with longer wands, planted before I paid much attention to nomenclature. Hard for me to say which style I prefer. What do you think?

Remember Janet’s plant sale? I got a message from her the other day with photos of a magnificent stand of 8′ tall yellow, daisy-like flowers on sturdy stems that need no staking. I bought one of these unidentified plants at the sale, and while it tops out at 6′, I thought photos of my single plant would be easier to see plant structure as I send out my plea to all the ace plant-identifiers out there.

Here is a shot of the leaf structure.

And the first blossom, with a few of the buds waiting in the wings.

If you look carefully, you can see the overall architecture of the plant in this not-so-hot photo on a hot day. I expressed my desire to have more of these to Janet, and she said not to throw any more money her way, as they multiply quickly. How’s that for truth in advertising? I intend to buy more next spring anyway, as I am impatient to smother this fence in plant life. If you can enlighten us with a name, Janet and I will both be eternally grateful.

Megan did a post about coastal gardens and how well Phormiums do there…blooming, even. I didn’t even know they did that until I saw a hothouse specimen in full bloom at Cistus. While there, R looked at my plant selections and asked why I didn’t go for one of those big, dramatic plants with the strappy leaves. I explained about recent flax deaths in Portland gardens.

But what have we here? Weeding in the east berm uncovered the remnants of Phormium tenax astropurpurea given up for lost. I took a division to move to the dry berm (foolish, probably, but at this point I figured what have I got to lose?), filled in with amended soil and mulched with gravel. It had been in the ground for about 3 years before we started having nordic winters, so maybe the root system was strong enough to see it through.

There is the transplant, way in the back, to the left of the yucca bloom. We shall see.

Then our good friends moved from their big old Victorian house into a condo and gave us their collection of potted plants. Among them was this colorful flax. I plan to move it to the covered deck for the winter.

Never say “never” is, I guess, the moral to this story. I would not have laid out cash to add more of these plants, but I do love them, and under these circumstances I am sure willing to give them another chance (and even provide a little extra tlc to help them along).

We headed out one Saturday to see a matinee, and instead wound up at Portland Nursery (and it wasn’t even my idea). Guess the transformation to plant geek is complete. We went our separate ways, but somehow both ended up in front of this tree. The $75 price tag was way too rich for our blood, so we wandered on, only to find the same tree, not much bigger, with a tag of $499! Suddenly the first one seemed like a real bargain. I don’t know what was going on there: maybe marketing genius at work. Anyway, we had found the excuse we needed to justify bringing it home, and who cares if the genius was snickering up his sleeve at the saps who fell for his ruse?

Richard set about building up the berm to give it a nice perch, where it can spill over the edges.

Here is a close-up to show you how gracefully the branches cascade. On the more mature specimen there were juniper berries in abundance, in all their silvery splendor. Can you tell we’re in love? Once the berries show up, we can always go into business making bathtub gin to support our plant habit.

James, over at Lost in the Landscape, did a post recently bemoaning the difficulty of staging shots of big, bold, dramatic plants. Oh, man, can I identify. A work in progress is the planting along the fence between us and our oh-so-wonderful neighbors. They are tidy in the extreme, but the collection of outbuildings, woodpiles, etc. make for a poor background when taking pictures or just sitting on our deck gazing over the landscape. These three Eremurus are ‘Cleopatra’. They are new this year, and it looks like I have finally found the spot where these temperamental beauties can be happy.

I tried taking pictures from many different angles, but nothing quite does them justice. Others that have been moved around from year to year looking for a happy home will be moved to this bed in the fall. It seems to have it all: full sun, good drainage and no watering after the bloom cycle is completed. Now I just have to figure out how to create the background to set them off as they so deserve. Any suggestions?

With all the driving around I’ve been doing lately, the dogwoods have especially captured my attention.

The pink ones seem to be the first to put in an appearance. While these would not be the chosen ones for my own yard, they do add sparkle to roadsides.

Here’s a closeup of those pink blossoms.

One property that I visited had this tree sporting both pink and white blossoms.

Upon closer inspection, I could see that the white-flowering branches were sprouting from below the graph.

This was probably my favorite of the early blooming dogwoods. I love the simplicity and purity of the bract/blossoms.

When we were shopping for a dogwood, we were warned away from the native Cornus florida because of its susceptibility to dogwood anthracnose. Indeed, the whips of dogwoods that came from the Arbor Day Society would seem to bear out that theory. The Kousas grew to adulthood and the Floridas konked out. On the other hand, this fine specimen stands in a field near our house. What to make of it?

The Kousas have a charm of their own, pointy little things that they are. Maybe if they were the temperamental ones, they would be my favorites…isn’t that kind of how it works? Here’s a site with info on all the many kinds of dogwoods. I still hanker after the red twig variety for winter interest, and am coaxing a few Cornus canadensis to act as ground cover in the woodland. Oh, and then there is that layer cake variegated beauty that would surely feel at home somewhere around here. We gardeners are so lucky…we never run low on things to wish for.