Plant Talk

Heat Up These Overcast Days with 'Lucifer', Lilies, and the First Hydrangeas...

Okay, this gloom is getting to me - isn't this week supposed to be the best weather of the summer? Yesterday the thermometer topped out at 66 degrees in Seattle...

When I woke up longing, again, for sunshine pouring in the windows, I went right outdoors and started picking every hot-colored flower I could find.

Crocosmia 'Lucifer' is the star of this bouquet, with its dramatically shaped flowers that look like self-important little Birds of Paradise with their arching stems and brilliant flowers.  Intensely violet buddleia adds a lively contrast and a sweet honey scent. Now is not the time to worry about color clashes...such trying weather demands color and more color.

A purple mop-head hydrangea just coming into bloom anchors the disparate mix of sizes and shapes, colors and textures. Airy fennel blooms soften the big, freckle-faced orange lilies. There are some orange and gold Helenium autumnale in there to echo the color of the lilies. The whole bunch is bulging out of a tall cylinder of matte white vase that strikes a cool note to counteract the voluptuous vividness of the flowers.

Somehow the warmth and life of this arrangement, plus garden fresh raspberries for breakfast, helped to soften the cloudiness of the day....and I'm back to hoping for sunshine rather than lamenting the gray skies...

A Neutral Bouquet of Herbs, Pods and Flowers to Quiet Summer's Abundant Noise

Not that I don't love the garden when everything is happening....but with lilies, roses, sweet peas and hydrangeas all going full tilt, I need a little calmness indoors. So today, without thinking much about it, I picked this neutral bouquet, blending colors and even textures that compliment and soothe rather than amp up the contrasts. This creamy gold vase, one of my favorites for its slightly crackly texture and warm, mottled color, supports and harmonizes with the washy greens and terra cotta colors of leaf and flower. The overall effect is like a soft breeze, a dialing down of summer, a long, slow afternoon reading a novel in a hammock.

Now that didn't happen, but at least the bouquet lends a whiff of calm and serenity...

I started by picking lunaria pods in the alley, added some parsley and dill gone to seed, yellow hypericum flowers with their multi-colored berries, 'Terra Cotta' yarrow, and a chartreuse paniculata hydrangea head.

Later in the day I moved the bouquet to the top of the bookshelf beneath the windows to see how it looked with a wooden bowl of beach stones. And who knows why, then I thought it needed a dark note, so I stuck in a couple of Rudbeckia 'Green Wizard', past their prime, with elongated brown center cones...I love how bouquets change in feel when paired up with various objects in a vignette, and also the sight of flowers inside and garden outside...aren't those lunaria pods cool with the light shining through to show the seeds?

A Botanical Fence of Steel and Subtlety - Built on Whidbey Island and Headed to Olympia

I'm continually impressed by the stunning confluence of artistic talent on South Whidbey Island - and no more so than at Jean Whitesavage and Nick Lyle's Studio Open to reveal the botanical fence they've been working on for many months. Both delicate in its tracery and intricate in its patterning, the fence is one harmonious, impressive hunk of heavy steelwork Jean designed for the new Department of Information Services Building on the Capitol campus in Olympia. It's to be set into a landscape of native plants, including hundreds of our native orange trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa, left).

The fence is built in a series of panels with intertwining rhododendron leaves (truly big-leaf rhodies...), honeysuckle leaves and remarkably lifelike tubular flowers. Well, maybe not lifelike considering each blossom is nearly a foot long and made of steel...but Jean has managed to catch the essence and flair of a honeysuckle bloom.

You can be sure I'll follow the fence to Olympia, and write a story about it for Pacific Northwest magazine once its installed. I'm fascinated to see Jean's work set into a landscape of native plants planted in a grid, garnished with hundreds of honeysuckle.

Jean at work in her studio, sorting leaves, flowers and stems

On of Jean's to-scale drawings of fence panels...

You can see the scale of the pieces compared with Jean's hand

The metal will be painted a soft, matte sage green, quite pale, which should show up amazingly in the landscape..

And here are the amazing honeysuckle blossoms...

 

 

 

A Freckled Lily, Sweet Peas, and a Snow White Poppy....

  Every morning now when I go out in the garden to cut flowers for the house, I'm thrilled by the abundance of choices. Lilies or sweet peas? Roses or the striped helenium just coming into bloom?  It's only a few weeks of the year when we suffer such a delicious dilemma.  Such bounty is heady, made more precious because it's so fleeting. Many more months I'll be searching high and low for pods, cones, branches, buds and a bloom or two to bring inside....

I started out this week with fragrant sweet pea bouquets for the house and a larger, yet still simple bunch of flowers for the yoga studio. Masses of sweet peas in varying colors are perfection just plopped into a vase, with perhaps a little rearranging of shades. Be sure and cut their stems again right before they go into the vase's cool water...it'll help them to last for five days instead of three.

For the bigger bouquet I stuck to just three kinds of flowers; the warm, earthy color of the yarrow (Achillea millefolium 'Terra Cotta') is a supporting player the Asiatic lily 'Kentucky', and single, white blossom of matilija poppy (Romneya coulteri). I asore this ethereal perennial, which grows like a weed on abandoned hillsides, but I've tried to grow it for years and never succeeded until I planted it in a raised bed (good drainage) in a warm, sunny spot and left it alone to colonize...

Here's a gathering of vases...

I believe the lily is 'Kentucky', an especially large Asiatic hybrid that almost makes up for its lack of perfume with its rich color and multiple freckles.

Romantic Gardens - England's Dreamiest Gardens Don't Have Anything on Seattle

The June issue of Gardens Illustrated, a stunningly well photographed and written British magazine, has a feature on romantic retreat gardens. From a cottage in Sussex to a moated castle in Oxfordshire, the gardens are flowery idylls; it's a gorgeous issue. Just when I was mooning around over roses and iris, ancient golden stone and pink peonies, my friend Thomas Allsopp sent me a photo of his fragrant garden that is every bit as heart-stirringly appealing.

Thomas is a garden designer, a painter, and the chaplain at Seattle Children's Hospital. His little garden is a continually changing work of art, rich in classical sculpture, potted plants, evocative vignettes, fragrant flowers, places to sit and relax, all squeezed into minute garden rooms wrapped around his wine-colored home near Greenlake. (See more photos and my story about Thomas's garden in Pacific Northwest mag here).

Influenced by trips to Europe, Thomas is fond of formalism and classicism, which is perhaps why his garden reminds me of the estates in Gardens Illustrated, albeit on a much smaller and more personal scale. His garden teaches so much, and in such a pleasant way, about the value of structure, hedging, and especially how to make the most of every inch of your garden.

Here's an evening photo of Thomas's fragrant garden, complete with columns, candelabra, statuary, pediments, and swathes of ivy. Isn't this a romantic little corner? Then add the olfactory dimension, for the garden is perfumed by lemon lavender, heliotrope, clove pinks, roses, lemon verbena and scented-leafed geranium, and you have a little bit of Europe by Greenlake.

 

Garden Mysteries - A Daphne of a Tree,a Lily Mutation, and What's That Plant, Anyway??

After being obsessed with plants for as long as I can remember, gardening is still full of mysteries. Thank goodness, because if I could explain everything that's happening out there, I'd get bored of it. Instead, every time a flower blooms for the first time I'm struck with awe, let alone when a shrub reverts, a hummingbird hovers, or nature, as she so often does, throws together a combination I never dreamed of.

New gardeners too often worry they're doing something wrong when a plant is dying or another has decided to romp through the beds more aggressively than they ever thought possible. Not your fault - the plants are simply fulfilling their genetic potential in sometimes surprising ways.

It's like when something goes wrong with some piece of technology and I'm sure I've screwed up (again), forgetting that if I just shut the thing down and turn it back on, it'll probably work just fine. Navigating cyberspace is an endless, unknowable conondrum for me, and I'm resigned to that. Try to extend that respect for complication to the garden - just think of all the intricate relationships between air, soil, sun, wind, cold, heat, moisture, micro-organisms, insects (seen and unseen), plants and people...and rest assured that even the most expert of gardeners are flying blind (or enamored by their own theories) more times that not. I love that no matter how much I study, consult experts, and dig in the dirt, I'll never really have much more than a glimpse of the deep and unknowable workings of the natural world.

And yet I'm fretting over the sad sight of Cercis canadensis 'Forest Pansy', the centerpiece tree in my garden, which is seriously declining after thriving for seven years. Last year it was fully leafed out with huge, burgundy heart-shaped leaves. Here's the sad remnants of that tree today. Now I know this redbud is considered the daphne of trees...it just up and dies...but why now, when it just got to the perfect size and shape? And what should I replace it with?

And then there's this mystery plant growing up in the succulent trough by my front door - it looks like a rock tulip? I never planted rock tulips there, and it's July, not April....the foliage is beautiful, and it's outcompeting everything else...at least part of this puzzle will be solved once it blooms, but I'll still have no idea how whatever-it-is got there...

Or how about this Oriental lily that's mutated to have a wide, flat stem?  I believe such distortion is caused by a virus, kind of like with broken tulip patterning...although I'm probably guessing that, or maybe someone suggested it when they, too, were puzzling over this grotesque of the lily world. And why, out of the dozens and dozens of lilies in my garden, is it just this one that morphed into something so weird? Strange looking as it is, especially when it blooms, I love it for its most graphic representation of all that remains unknowable going on right outside my back door.

Strawberries Are Peaking...In Easter Baskets

Last April, Langley gardener Marcia Wiley decided she didn't want strawberries taking over her vegetable garden again this year. They do tend to colonize every bit of spare (and some not so spare) ground with thier runners.

And yet, Marcia did want fresh, ripe berries come June and July....so right after Easter, when baskets are cheapest and most available, she made the rounds of thrift shops on the island, picking up dozens of baskets inexpensively.

Marcia already had a wire and wood fence around her vegetable garden, decorated with bottles topping the fence posts. So she simply added to the folk art look of the plot by wiring the baskets to the fence. She filled them with soil, moved her strawberries up where they'd get plenty of light and sun, and last week the berries started turning red.

Not only do the baskets with berries dangling down the sides look charming, but the strawberries are easier to control and to pick. Plus Marcia opened up lots of space for more lettuces and other vegetables.....This is repurposing at its best, putting inexpensive, nearly-throw away items to artistic use while solving a common gardening challenge...

You can see Marcia's garden from the road as you drive from Langley toward Bayview - it's on your right as you drive out of town, just before the tunnel of purple leafed plums.

Simple Summer Color Bouquets Are A Reflection of Shadows and Sunlight

It matters not a bit which flowers you use to create a color bouquet - just get out there and clip the colors that stir you and mix them together for an evocation of summer finally arrived.

This simple bouquet, cut this morning and popped into a vase, is all about the purple and deep bourdeax shadows of a summer dusk, and the bright golden sun of mid-day, with no mitigating shades in between to dampen the contrasts.

Elaborate bouquets are unnecessary in summer when flowers are so fresh …now arrangements can be as casual and welcome as a cool breeze blowing through the house. An overwrought bouquet looks as out-of-date as an Ivana Trump sculpted hairdo, or worse yet as passé as fake nails (have you seen those disturbing reverse French manicures? No bouquet could be as bad as that!)… You get the idea….as spontaneous as a tossed salad just cut from the garden, as simple as a shift dress and flips on a hot day…

The dark purple sweet peas are tantalizing fragrant, the 'Hadspen Blood' astrantia adds texture. The summer shout out of golden Peruvian lilies and nasturtiums is bright, brazen, cheerful and no more subtle than the sun at high noon on a clear day in July....

Dreaming of Chickens? Seattle Tilth's Popular Coop Tour Coming Up This Saturday, July 14th

Chicken coops are the new studios - everyone wants one, as well as chickens to cluck around and enliven the garden. This Saturday, 10 a.m to 4 p.m., Seattle Tilth invites you on a self-guided tour to see what's going on chicken-wise in our city and surrounding areas. 

According to the folks at Seattle Tilth , and they should know, Seattle is a national hot spot for chicken-keeping - the tour will show off everything from simple home-built coops to more elaborate chicken-centered structures and working urban farms.

 Whether you are looking for ideas on how to raise city chickens, or you just want to enjoy the ingenuity and skills of others, this tour is full of good ideas.

Click on Seattle Tilth's Facebook page to preview some of the properties, birds and coops. Warning: Look at these photos (see a sampling, below) and you'll be spending next Saturday traipsing from one chicken-rich garden to another.  You can buy tickets  and/or to check out the tour map here.

Chicken love....

The girls at Floppy Ears Farm in their coop built of recycled materials -

The Farm at Langston Heights - one of many covetable destinations on this Saturday's Coop Tour

 

It's Lily Time, from Martagons to Orientals - Plant Talk Welcomes B&D Lilies

Lilies are the anti-depressants of the plant world. Tall, gorgeous, truly perennial, and fragrant enough to perfume an entire garden, lilies raise the spirits at the same time they make you feel like a gardening wizard. You simply bury an inauspicious looking lumpy bulb in autumn, and next summer you have lily bloom.

I'm so pleased to have B&D Lilies partner with Plant Talk because my garden is full of lilies I've bought from them over the years - their lilies are not only the main show in my garden, but fill the garden and the house with fragrance June through August. A stem of lilies alone in a vase is perfection, mixed with other flowers, lilies carry the bouquet.

What makes the plants from B&D Lilies in Port Townsend so special? The owners, Bob and Dianna Gibson, have been growing lilies in Pacific Northwest soil for nearly 30 years, and the hard-working duo are endlessly knowledgeable. They share  their expertise freely in their catalog and blog, which are both pure plant porn, packed with a mind-blowing selection of lilies.

The Gibsons not only sell big, healthy bulbs, but give you all the information you need to grow them successfully.  And what's easier to grow than a lily? Plant the bulbs in November in a sunny spot with free-draining soil and they'll spread into sturdy clumps of scented grace and beauty.

Lilies give so much for so little work in such little space... like this new, easy-to-grow Asiatic lily, (top right), the orange and maroon-splotched 'Easy Salsa', just opening in a big pot on the side of my house.

B&D has everything from snowy 'Casablanca' lilies to the Martagons which can take some shade and are ideal for cottage, woodland and naturalistic gardens.

How do icy white Casablancas manage to look both voluptuous yet cooly serene? They grow 6-7 feet tall and bloom later in August.....

Is that color for real? Raspberry pink 'Glen Moray' is a sturdy, fragrant Orienpet that blooms in August.

'Pepper Gold' is a striking Martagon with freckled, recurved petals; it blooms earlier in the season and adds a sense of motion and wildlness to the garden, as wel as its lovely, warm coloration.

B&D ships in October and November for fall planting. (Be sure and add a few packets of Dianna's ruffly purple poppies to your order). Plant plenty - going overboard on lilies is one horticultural indulgence you won't regret, and you'll spend next summer in a pleasant haze of lily fever.