Plant Talk

Winter Bouquet and a Question for You....

Dear Readers - Coming up on the first anniversary of launching this blog, I'm giving content some thought, and would love a little feedback from you...

Would you like to see a fresh, local, handmade bouquet every week of the year? I've often posted photos of little bouquets just picked from my garden. There's no foristry, no wiring involved, just the intimate experience of picking what's fragrant, what's at its best, loosely arranging the flowers and foliage (usually in one hand) then plunking them into a vase. I think of it as a wabi sabi take on flower arranging.

The wonder of it is that even my tiny garden (less than 2500 square feet) provides bouquet fodder year-round...you just have to think of every tree, groundcover and everything in-between as a possibility for cutting. 

Can you please comment right here on the blog and let me know if enjoying these bouquets? Please tell me what you think... If you're keen, I'll try to give you a bouquet a week...

Here's a winter bouquet, picked yesterday, with three colors of hellebore hybrids, euphorbia for texture, and several twigs of Daphne odora (in bloom amazingly early).. The  hellebores hold up well if you cut several slits up their stems, and the daphne perfumes my entire little house with its sweet scent.

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

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

The Earliest Hellebores

It's often said of hellebores that if these quiet perennials bloomed in June we'd never notice them. Such belittling totally misses the point. We worship hellebores because they flower when we so desperately need a jolt of color and the promise of spring. You can't help but admire these sweet-faced, delicate-looking flowers blooming their hearts out during winter's darkest days.

Hybrid hellebores, with their yellow, ebony, soft green, spotted, pink or ivory flowers, are most plentiful and easiest to grow, but they won't bloom for at least another month. But you don't have to wait... nurseries are stocked with hellebores that are budding up, and in the case of the Christmas rose (Helleborus niger) unfurling their flowers. These earliest hellebores will tide us over until the wave of hybrids swirl us on into springtime....

All photos, including the mossy reindeer, were taken yesterday at Bayview Farm and Garden on south Whidbey Island:

The snowy white Helleborus niger 'Jacob' (a.k.a. the Christmas rose) is the first hellebore to bloom, and a little harder to grow successfully than the hybrids- give it partial shade, and rich, moist, well-drained soil.

Helleborus x ericsmithii 'HGC Silvermoon' - the silvermoon hellebore, was bred in Germany, has pewter colored leaves, and is theoretically deer resistant. 

Helleborus x Balladiae 'HGC Pink Frost', with rosy buds and showy foliage, is new this year....

Helleborus lividus 'Pink Marble' with variegated leaves, pink stems, and mauve-ish flowers

Witch hazels

I really don't have the space for a witch hazel, but I had to plant at least one. Not for the garden, but for the house; I can't imagine getting through January without the pleasure of bringing branches of their spidery, fragrant flowers indoors.

The supremely fragrant yellow flowers of the Chinese witch hazels, like Hamamelis mollis 'Pallida' and H. x intermedia 'Arnold's Promise' show up best in the garden. While they disappear in the bare winter garden, the rusty orange flowers of  H. x intermedia 'Diane' are stunning cut and brought into the house. 'Diane' has a Chinese parent, so is sweetly fragrant. In autumn, the foliage turns dramatic shades of orange and purple.

Right now 'Diane' is in full, glorious, coppery bloom. For an elegant arrangement,  just stick a few branches in a sturdy vase...cut and enjoy....

If your witch hazel isn't large enough yet to cut whole branches, even a few twigs can make a lovely arrangement combined with a hellebore bud in a little crystal vase....

Winter Respite

Albert Camus wrote "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer".  Well, good for Camus, but I couldn't find a single shred of summer in me yesterday after two straight days of drizzle.

The antidote? An hour in the Witt Winter Garden at the Washington Park Arboretum, where the air is laden with sweet scents even this first week of January.  Flowers, color, hummingbirds, fragrance all reassured me that the earth is alive, the plants are growing, and springtime will return.

You can stay warm and dry indoors and enjoy Bridget and my expedition...Can you believe all this is going on out there right now during the darkest depths of winter?

Viburnum bodnantense 'Dawn' has supremely fragrant little pink flowers

Yellow twig dogwood (Cornus stolonifera 'Flaviramea') set into black mondo grass

 

The gold-splashed leaves of Elaeagnus pungens ‘Maculata’ light up a shady pathway.
  

Winter blooming mahonia feed our native Anna's hummingbirds

 

Sarcococca's tiny white flowers smell sweetly of vanilla 

Helleborus foetidus flower early and long

 

Anyone know what earliest blooming rhododendron this might be? 

Enjoy the spidery flowers of the witch hazels (Hamamelis spp.) - I just wish this was a scratch-and-sniff blog so you could inhale their clean, astringent fragrance...

 

 

Frost on the Sedum

Hoarfrost coated South Whidbey Island this weekend, turning the world as sparkling white as a snowfall without the treachery. I don't remember ever seeing such exuberant, furry-looking frost. Turns out such thick ice crystals are known as hoarfrost - what an old-fashioned, poetic word for one of nature's most amazingly lovely phenomena. Here's the definition:

"Hoarfrost refers to the white ice crystals, loosely deposited on the ground or exposed objects, that form on cold clear nights when heat losses into the open skies cause objects to become colder than the surrounding air." 

Such simple, scientific words fail to evoke how hoarfrost softens and transforms the world from dull and dark to glistening reflectivity...Here's the hoarfrost settled on a pot of sedum, a glass ball and a wooden table in my back garden in Langley about 10 a.m. this morning:

 

Go Outside

I'm grateful for the shelter of a warm house on these frosty winter days...and yet, I crave fresh air and being outdoors. The forecast is for a break in the weather over the weekend; here are some ideas for post-Christmas outings:

Visit the dignified and friendly camel at  Swanson's Nursery. I'm afraid he's stealing all the attention from the reindeer, who are beautiful, but uninterested. This camel seems to love people, and his long-lashed eyes and velvety nose, proffered for a pat, are enchanting. I've visited him a half-dozen times in the last couple of weeks, picking up pots of fragrant paperwhites and amaryllis while I'm at Swanson's..and, yes, a hellebore or two.

 
Stripped to its winter bones, the Japanese Garden  at the Washington Park Arboretum is beautiful right now. Its evergreens, bare-branched maples, teahouse and ponds come into their own in winter. A quiet stroll along its paths is a reminder of the season's elegant serenity. 

Don't forget the extravagant light show at the Bellevue Botanical Garden on these clear, starry nights. Even a blustery day, with the Olympic Mountain range on the horizon and ferry boats passing by, is a delightful time to visit the Olympic Sculpture Park for a blast of art, snowberry thickets and groves of wintery white aspen bark.

The Witt Winter Garden, also at the Washington Park Arboretum is exuberant with bloom; witch hazels are budding up, mahonia, sasanqua camellias and
heather are in flower. If you visit on a sunny day, the garden is full of birds, sleepy bees and the sweet vanilla scent of sarcococca in bloom.

My most favorite hike in any season is along the cliffs at Ebey's Landing on Whidbey Island - the photo below is of Bridget and me on a February morning at the top of the cliffside trail (taken by Alice Doyle of Loghouse Plants). My nieces are visiting from Edinburgh and Anchorage, my children home for Christmas, so I'll be taking a blog break until the new decade....if I don't see you at the camel cage at Swanson's, maybe we'll meet up strolling the paths of the sculpture museum, or hummingbird watching at the Witt Winter Garden (they crave the yellow flowers atop the mahonia this time of year). Enjoy...get outside...happy holidays..

Happy Winter Solstice

 
Our descent into darkness is complete; we've reached the longest night, the shortest day and now the earth begins its oh-so-subtle tilt toward springtime. Today is a quintessential darkest day, with wind, rain and falling temperatures. The sun didn't rise until nearly 8 a.m. and it'll set at 4:20, with twilight descending shortly after 3... Even if the sky was clear tonight, the waxing crescent moon would shed little light, being only 23% illuminated - look for a full moon on New Year's Eve to usher in the new decade.

A traditional way for gardeners to celebrate the solstice is to plant garlic, which will be ready to harvest in mid-June on the longest day of the year. I've been marking the solstice by bundling up and getting out into the garden for an hour or so most days, cleaning up, enjoying the robins, chickadees and the Steller's jays rustling around in the leaves. All the bird activity reminds me of this favorite childhood poem by Oliver Herford, a gift to us all in the dark of the solstice:

I heard a bird sing

In the night of December

A magical thing

And sweet to remember

'We're nearer to spring than we were in September'

I heard a bird sing

In the dark of December.

 

 

Frozen Flowers & Fruit

Try to overlook the blackened blossoms on the poor sasanqua camellias; many plants are holding up just fine to the extreme temperatures. Even after overnight lows in the teens this week, plants from hellebores to viburnum are thriving in this frosty, freezing weather:

Helleborus argutifolius 'Silver Lace' is a smaller, paler version of Corsican hellebore, budded up in my garden next to a mosaic egg made by Vashon Island artist Clare Dohna

The bloom of Viburnum tinus 'Spring Bouquet' may be delayed by this freeze, but the flowers will open as soon as it warms up a bit.

The birds have left a few crabapples on a tree in the downtown Langley park at 2nd and Anthes

This yellow siding is an inspired backdrop for beautyberry's metallic lavender fruit (Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii 'Profusion').