Plant Talk

It's Show Time...

Hard to believe the Northwest Flower and Garden Show opens this coming Wednesday....it's a couple of weeks earlier this year, and since when did winter fly by so quickly??? Anyway, the show is bearing down upon us, and I think everyone is a little skeptical of this first year with new owners...but it sounds to me like the seminar series remains strong and most of the vendors, plants and paraphernalia, will be back, along with fun non-profit booths like Great Plant Picks.

I'm speaking at 11 a.m. on Friday morning in the Hood Room on a topic near and dear to my heart - how to simplify your gardening life - hope to see you there. And on Tuesday afternoon I'm part of a team judging gardens for Pacific Horticulture magazine, so I'll be among the first to see the show gardens. Watch for a blog post on Tuesday night with garden highlights, and no doubt low lights as well....in the meantime, although as a judge I'm going in without preferences or knowledge, I'm liking the buzz about Seattle Tilth's Urban Homestead, dubbed "A Family's Little Farm in the City".  Nothing could be more timely than a garden showing how to grow food and live sustainably on a small city plot, integrating native plants, recyclables and rainwater harvesting. The trick will be making all this earnestness visually attractive, and if anyone can do that it's the innovative young designer Jessi Bloom. I'm excited that the garden features mini-goats and chickens ....let's hope the other display gardens prove as smart and timely. Stay tuned....
 


 


 

Sweet Peas

Sweet peas are the star benchmarks of the gardening year; planting them kicks off the gardening season for me, and picking my first bouquet of sweet peas means summer has arrived. It's time to order sweet pea seeds, especially if you're one of those good, thrifty gardeners who starts them indoors. I'm afraid I don't - the last couple of years I've had sweet peas in bloom from mid-June through mid-September by planting starts from the nursery (Wells-Medina in Bellevue and Swansons Nursery in Ballard carry a good assortment) and seeding directly into the soil around the starts for a second flush of bloom. The result is an array of colors over a very long season.

My tips for sweet peas are simple. Wait to plant until the soil dries out a bit,  usually by mid-March. Dig lots of manure into the soil - you can't overfeed these prolific bloomers. Sweet peas like a deep root run, and require regular watering, full sunshine, and a scaffold to climb. Sweet peas  earn the best real estate in my little garden with their abundance of fragrant, frilly flowers.

Renee's Garden Seeds offers an enticing array of sweet peas - I choose different kinds to grow each year, just making sure to choose a few dark purples for contrast with the pastels, and always the most fragrant varieties. I asked Renee Shepherd what she's excited about this year, and she reminded me that the supremely fragrant 'April in Paris' is her favorite. But she also recommends the new knee-high introduction 'Jack and Jill' and also 'Watermelon' for its "glowing color and perfume'.

Rose and soft blue 'Jack and Jill' grows only about three feet tall and are heat tolerant

The sweetly fragrant 'Watermelon' & my favorite dark purple, early-blooming 'Zinfandel'

'April in Paris' is quintessential sweet pea pretty and fragrant

Land Bridge - natives & art....

Next time you're traveling south on I-5, it's worth getting off the freeway at Fort Vancouver (just before the Oregon border) to walk across the new land bridge that's one of seven sites in Maya Lin's Convergence Project. Designed by JohnPaul Jones, it's a feat of engineering, an historic restoration project, an art installation, and a showcase for Northwest native plants. It's so delightful to walk across the bridge's packed earth and basket-weave patterned surface, that it's easy to forget the bridge serves the vital purpose of re-connecting the old fort to the Columbia River waterfront.

The land bridge is forty feet wide and so organically curvaceous that as the plants grow up you'll feel submerged in nature and forget how disturbed this beautiful, historic site has been for so long.....The bridge was completed in August, 2008 and cost $12.25 million dollars. Thanks to Maya Lin's vision, the connection between fort and river, interrupted for a hundred years by the railroad and highway, has been quite literally bridged.

Basketry-patterned paving

Interpretive panels explaining the history, landscape and plants of the surrounding prairies

 Welcome gate designed by Native American artist Lillian Pitt 

Art and Plants

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Modern Courtyard

Modern garden design is so exciting and so unfortunately rare. We were in Portland over the weekend, and couldn't believe the very cool courtyard at the refurbished Hotel Modera on Southwest Clay Street. This freshly refurbished 1960's motor lodge is a celebration of sleek mid-century modern design. We visited for the restaurant Nel Centro, which has delicious southern Italian food, but were most impressed with the courtyard garden which features a luscious green wall, cut out squares of plantings, an inspired mix of hard and soft surfaces, and the coolest fire troughs I've ever seen.

Jane Hansen of Lango Hansen Landscape Architects was inspired by Columbia Gorge cliffs, and its true that the 64 foot long wall is rugged looking and thickly grown in with evergreen huckleberry, grasses and ferns. But the grid of rusted metal panels and the geometric design fits in beautifully with the sparely designed space. Take a look at this gorgeous wall - believe me, the courtyard at the Hotel Modera and the menu at Nel Centro are worth a jaunt south to Portland...

Circus Razzle-Dazzle Flowers

  I'm usually the cheerleader for bouquets cut from the garden, but this time of year I long for color. We don't live by evergreens and flowering branches alone, which is about all the garden offers in January.

"The Greatest Show" running from today until March 1st at Museo Gallery in Langley was the inspiration for this razzle-dazzle of a flower arrangement. Sometimes we just need all out color - nothing subtle here, as befits the circus theme celebrated by a variety of Whidbey artists.

The show opens tonight, Saturday January 23, with a party, 5-7 p.m. - drop in to see a stunning assortment of work. You can enjoy the excitement of the circus, including the gallery draped in a simulated big-top, without watching a single poor animal demeaned or mistreated (I've been boycotting real circuses for years.......)

The yellow, orange and striped tulips are from Metropolitan Market, 3 bunches for $10. The pussy willows were foraged and dried last winter, the red branches pruned just yesterday from my little coral bark maple (Acer palmatum ' SangoKaku') -  even in January the garden does yield up its delights....

Yes We Can

As long as we don't get overzealous and clear away all the dead parts protecting plants from future freezes, we can get out there and make the most of this amazingly mild spell of weather. January is on the way to being the warmest on record, with soul-strengthening glimpses of sunshine.

Don't get carried away by those daffodils and precocious crocus pushing up so bravely out of the soil...it's still too wet to tramp around in the dirt and many plants, like hydrangeas, roses and hardy fuchsias are best left alone until mid-March....

But go ahead, clean up your pruners and indulge your garden lust. These chores are best done in the depths of winter, even though it doesn't feel like it out there:

Prune out winter damage and thin out the oldest, largest canes on woody shrubs like forsythia (above), flowering quince, mock orange, and plums. But don't toss the clippings...cut them to a reasonable length for a tall vase, bring them in and submerge the entire branch in lukewarm water for a few hours to jolt it out of dormancy. Then put the bare branches in warm water in a vase to force them to flower indoors for a lovely burst of springtime.

Kiwis, grapes and figs are best pruned when they're fully dormant, so now's the time. Thin out 1/4 to 1/3 of the oldest canes on your blueberries. You can also prune apple, elderberries, gooseberries, white currant and European pears. According to the folks at Raintree Nursery (and they should know) it's best to wait to prune Asian pears until at least April. 

Flowering quince

Dreamin' Seeds....and the Huff Po

If you have a moment, check out my first-ever story for the Huffington Post - I'll be blogging regularly for them, always different posts than you'll find here...

These last few warm days are catnip for gardeners - sunshine and temperatures in the high 50's make it hard to recall we still have two months of winter, and no doubt deep freezes, to come...

So, no, it's not time to work the soil - but you can take solace in seed catalogs. This is the time to dream, not to dig...

If you start seeds indoors, or even if like me you buy starts (thank you, Loghouse Plants) or plunk seeds right into the ground come spring, it's time to start making your list, checking it dozens of times, and sending in your orders  - like for these scarlet runner beans climbing the fence in my Whidbey garden last August.

But wait - there are far more exciting choices....how about these new Ping Tung Long eggplants (could they really be so electric blue??) from Nichols Garden Nursery, which are pretty in the garden, mild-tasting and ideal for curries and stir-fries?

You could easily get lost in Territorial Seed Company's new catalog, featuring 210 tantalizing new items, including these showy Goldmarie beans and tasty lime crisp cucumbers.....

 

New Garden Blog

Since you're reading this blog, I think you'd enjoy the just-launched gardening blog OverPlanted: Deep in the Undergrowth, from Timber Press editor-in-chief Tom Fischer.

I'll admit right up front that Tom was my long-time editor at Horticulture magazine and now my editor at Timber Press, but I'd be excited about this blog even if I'd never met the man. He combines clever writing with expert plantsmanship, curiosity about the natural world, and delight over gardening in our mild Northwest climate. Tom freely shares his garden, his essays, plant profiles, and his lengthy and impressive experience in the gardening world. Even though it was six years ago that Tom moved to Portland from Boston, you can sense his palpable enthusiasm about gardening in zone 8.

Tom's blog is rich in humor, quotations, inspiration and cocktail recipes, including "Bee's Knees" (honey, lemon, gin and a twist), offered to relax after a long day in the garden or to ameliorate a gardener's dark night of the soul brought on by a marauding dog in the peony patch, etc. etc. Well, you get the drift...

A recent post ("What I did for Love") includes a photo of a little tent Tom made to protect his jelly palm from Portland's 4th coldest winter on record.

Feed The Hummers All Winter

  It's easy to keep hummingbirds happy in the summer - it only takes a few lobelia, fuchsias, agastache, sage, or honeysuckle to have hummingbirds whirring madly around your garden. But it's now, in the bleakness of winter, that our native overwintering Anna's hummingbirds need help finding sustenance. 

Nix that sticky red sugar syrup and beautify your garden with winter-blooming plants beloved by hummers. Indian Plum and salmonberry are native plants that bloom in the first months of the year. Starting early in January, winter jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum) brightens the garden while nourishing hummingbirds. The bold evergreen foliage of Mahonia x media 'Arthur Menzies' is topped with huge racemes of fragrant yellow flowers this month. When the mahonia flowers fade, winter flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum) flowers through March. By that time, bleeding hearts, columbines, snowberry and elderberry are beginning to flower to carry the hummingbirds into spring.

Mahonia

 

Winter jasmine and red flowering currant

Reverential Ecology

 If gardeners don't have time to read in January - and I'm not talking about gardening catalogs, which we somehow always find time for - when might we ever actually finish a book? 

On these wet, dark days when I'm stuck indoors much more than I'd prefer, I'm finding solace by reading two authors that bring me closer to the natural world, remind me of its wonders and resilience. At this time of year I'm less interested in specific plants than I am in the green, growing world out there...

John Hanson Mitchell is a lovely, thoughtful writer, and his book "The Wildest Place on Earth: Italian Gardens and the Invention of Wilderness" is all about our enduring and vital connection to the natural world around us. In a quest to find the essence of wilderness, Mitchell ends up exploring and celebrating Italy's ancient gardens. In these enchanted gardens' statuary, venerable cypress, and especially hedge mazes, Mitchell discovers a wilderness surprisingly close to his heart and his roots. It's no wonder that a minister friend recommended this book to me, for Mithcell's writing emanates spirituality, profound ideas, and a questing nature.

No one has a more adventurous and questing nature than the ultimate pilgrim Satish Kumar, and I'm savoring his memoir "Path Without Destination: The Long Walk of a Gentle Hero" more than anything I've read in ages. Peace activist Kumar, a former Jain monk who has edited the journal "Resurgence" for the last 30 years, left his home and family in India as a young man, determined to protest the arms race by walking to the nuclear capitals of the world (Moscow, London, Paris, Washington D.C.) After covering more than 8,000 miles on foot, he found that each country blamed the others for nuclear proliferation - sound familiar? Many years later, when Kumar was living in England, he honored the Indian tradition of marking a 50th birthday with a pilgrimage. He set out walking through the British Isles, taking no money with him and depending on freely given hospitality to make his way. This is the part of the book I love most, as Kumar rediscovers his passion for footpaths, mountains, water, trees and nature as he slowly and appreciatively walks across England, Scotland and Wales. Inventor of the term "reverential ecology", Kumar never hurries...he quotes his illiterate Indian mother who often said,  "Remember, when God made time, he made plenty of it."