Spring Dreams, Summer Realities

As long as there are people like Betty around, the horticultural magazine business will prosper.  No fewer that four publications arrive each month by subscription, and several others find their way over the transom unbidden.  Each gets scrutinized for interesting new plants as well as for anecdotal gardening information.

           

The gardening magazine industry
is alive and well

Oddly, these magazines aren’t always read when they first arrive.  Rather, they accumulate until the (hopefully) last snow of the season is melting.  Then, they’re brought out and savored like a fine wine (and are occasionally accompanied by a glass of same or a rich dark chocolate).  This is a perfect time of year for such an activity: nothing is yet growing, and the garden palette is nothing but grays and browns.  The garden centers and nurseries are just getting their earliest spring stock.  In the New England gardening world, all things are still possible in early April.

It takes more than a pretty face to sell a plant to my wife.  First, with a commitment to creating a garden that is 95% native, lots of plants are rejected even though they’re cute as a button.  She flips past most of the Asian imports and focuses on cultivars with their roots – figuratively and literally – in North America. 

What did this Echinacea give up to
get such a prolific bloom?

Even native plants are subject to scrutiny.  That new coneflower with the bright green center (most Echinacea eyes are brown)?  It certainly looks attractive, but the description says it ‘matures to a bushy mound with a ratio of blossoms to foliage of nearly 1:1.’   The green center can be a naturally occurring mutation encouraged by good propagation.  However, plants can’t expend that much energy in creating blooms without giving up something.  What did the breeder lose in gaining all those flowers?  If it is pollen, the plant will be pretty for humans to admire, but of no use to pollinating insects.  She says she’ll look at it, but the perennial had better be covered with bees if it is to go home with us.

This is the 'traditional' Calycanthus,
not many flowers but oh, that scent!

Similarly, Carolina allspice, also known as sweetshrub (Calycanthus floridus), has undergone a metamorphosis.  A few decades ago it was a rangy green shrub with dull reddish-brown flowers that bloomed prolifically in the spring and sporadically in the summer.  But oh, that scent.  You closed your eyes, inhaled, and you were transported to a South Seas island.  

Propagators have bred for prettier
flowers, but lost much of the scent

Then, the breeders got busy.  More compact cultivars were introduced and, even better, the flowers became brighter, redder, and near-continuous. We have three ‘original’ specimens on our property and were ready to add more until Betty stopped to sniff the new specimens at a garden center.  That was when she discovered plant breeders had been willing to give up scent to get more flowers.  A plant has ‘x’ amount of energy to give over to flower production to attract pollinators.  The ‘old’ Calycanthus wasn’t such a great bloomer, but what blooms it had were pollinator magnets.  The new plants?  Prettier to look at, but the scent was nothing special.  We’ll stay with what we have.

Betony 'Summer Crush' is at the top
of Betty's 'to-buy' list

But there’s a double blue circle drawn around a new betony offering pink and white blooms.  Betony (Stachys) is a native that found its way into our garden two years ago. Last year, our five plants exploded with a burst of foot-high flower stalks that attracted every bee and butterfly in a mile radius.  The purple blooms were attractive, but we already have a lot of purple in our early summer garden, and Betty was hesitant to plant ‘more of the same’, especially given that our betony was spreading nicely on its own.  The new cultivar, ‘Summer Crush’ is at the top of her ‘to buy’ list.

Our garden continues to grow and mature each year, and we have a budget to bring in new plants that complement what we have and fill in the shrinking blank spots in our canvas.  The barrier to entry is getting very high, but those gardening magazines help get us ready to be discerning consumers when the nurseries begin filling with their new offerings.

A Welcome Burst of Late Autumn Color

We’ve had a great autumn here in New England.  Rainfall was close enough to normal that trees and shrubs were not stressed, and there were no heavy storms in September or October to strip plants of their foliage.  While it’s now slightly past peak, the colors this year have been delightful.

Our oxydendrum

Our property offers a tutorial in the use of uncommon trees and shrubs that extend the season’s color.  For example, the sourwood (oxydendrum) we planted four years ago in the inner sidewalk bed has started to hit its stride, growing by about a third in size this year.  The unexpected delight, though, is the brilliant, multiple-shades-of-red to which its previously green leaves have turned in the past two weeks.  We’re not counting on the show to last past the end of the month but, for now, it’s an eye-catching display.

The left-hand side of the shrub bed.  That's the smokebush in purple at farthest
left with 'Miss Rubyspice' in front of it.

The shrub bed that lies at the front of our property has the best autumn display. The bed is comprised mainly of drought-tolerant natives, and it gets a great deal of sun and wind.  Stretching more than a hundred feet from end to end, it provides space for roughly 30 specimen shrubs.  Here’s how it looked this morning (October 23) There’s a purple smokebush (Cotinus coggygria) with purple-brown leaves that soar above the bed.  In front of it is a clethra ‘Miss Rubyspice’ with brilliant yellow leaves.  The brown theme is continued with a small Enkianthus, a slow-growing Asian native that has settled happily into the bed.  There are two Devil Ninebarks (Physocarpus opulifolius), a ‘Diablo’ with burgundy-colored foliage that will linger well into November, and a Dart’s Gold that will keep its golden leaves for another one-to-two weeks.

Fothergilla Mt. Airy; each leaf
is like a painting

Scattered among the shrubs in the bed are several that retain their leaves – and striking color - for an extended period.  One of my favorites is Fothergilla.  We have two in the shrub bed:  Blue Shadow and Mt. Airy.  Both produce a dazzling palette of autumn colors on each leaf and both are long-lasting.  Our Carolina sweetshrub (calycanthus) now shows with large, lemon-yellow leaves that will reward us with color well into November.  Our two wigelia ‘Wine and Roses’ have turned a speckled dark red and will stay that way until the weather turns bitter.  

Spirea Ogon Mellow Yellow is just
starting its long-lasting autumn turn

The two champs, though, are an itea ‘Henry Garnet’ (sometimes called a Virginia sweetspire) and a spirea ‘Ogon Mellow Yellow’.  We have two iteas on the property.  They’re a pretty green from spring through September, then begin a metamorphosis to a coppery color with specks of red, yellow and brown.  Last year, the one at the front of the property eventually went bare sometime in late December.  The second itea is in a sheltered area behind our house, and it lost its foliage only when the new leaves pushed out in late April.

‘Mellow Yellow’ puts on two shows each year.  The first is in very early April when it flowers a pale white-yellow when little else is in bloom.  Now, its profusion of small leaves have turned a specked yellow red and orange.  Those leaves will still be in place for Christmas.

Two other deciduous shrubs are still green: a viburnum ‘Catskill’ will not turn yellow until the beginning of November.   Its color will last about three weeks.  Finally, an oakleaf hydrangea (hydrangea quercifolia) will stay stubbornly green until well in November, after which its leaves will gradually become a mottled brown.

Ours was not an ‘instant’ landscape.  The shrub bed, like everything else, has evolved organically over a dozen years with lots of trial and error.  But now, in late October, it appears as a coherent whole.  Someone looking at that bed today might conclude that we put it together with the purpose of showing visitors how to have late-autumn color with a variety of leaf textures and sizes.  They’d be wrong, but I wouldn’t correct their perception.

The right-hand side of the shrub bed.  The large yellow shrub is calycanthus.