Here are two plants that have almost nothing in common, except that they both flower in late November.
Crocus cartwrightianus var. albus
Crocus cartwrightianus is a small autumn-flowering bulb that is native to mainland Greece and the Cyclades. It is a fertile diploid species and is thought to be the wild ancestor of the sterile triploid Crocus sativus, the cultivated saffron crocus. The typical color form is purple, but I love the contrast of the bright orange stigma with the sepals and petals of this white-flowered variety. C. cartwrightianus grows fairly well in this climate, but the flowers are often damaged by slugs when we have a warm, humid autumn.
Paphiopedilum fairrieanum
While C. cartwrightianus is flowering outside, Paphiopedilum fairrieanum is flowering inside my greenhouse. P. fairrieanum is native to the foothills of the Himalayas in northeast India and Bhutan, where it experiences a summer-monsoon climate. To mimic these natural conditions in cultivation, it should be kept warm and watered well in summer and then given a cooler, drier rest in winter, when temperatures can drop as low as 45-50 F (7-10 C). In my greenhouse, the thermostat is set to 60 F, and the plant probably doesn’t experience temperatures below 55 F (13 C).
With its small, slightly nodding flowers and delicately down-swept petals, P. fairrieanum has an elfin or fairy-like quality that has intrigued orchid growers since its discovery in the mid-1800s. You might think that the species name alludes in some way to the plant’s appearance, but in fact, the species was named after a Mr. Fairrie who flowered the plant that John Lindley used for his species description in 1857.
This week’s Six on Saturday includes a couple of native species, an unusual vegetable, a cute little bulb from South Africa, a classic Victorian hybrid, and a greenhouse orchid that is really very nasty.
1. Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis
This is not an orchid for growing on your windowsill or decorating your table at a dinner party. If you think that the flowers of Bulbophyllum phalaenopsis look a bit like rotting meat covered with yellowish maggots, I can assure you that they smell exactly the way they look. B. phalaenopsis is pollinated by flies looking for a place to lay their eggs, but if the fly is fooled by the ersatz carrion, the maggots will starve.
2. Canna ‘Ehemannii’
C. ‘Ehemannii’ is an old Victorian hybrid of C. iridiflora crossed with (probably) C. indica, and it has inherited its drooping inflorescence from C. iridiflora. Several modern C. iridiflora hybrids, including Canna ‘Orange Crush’ failed to survive the winter in my garden, but this plant, which I received from Bittster of Sorta Like Suburbia fame, has survived two winters so far. I’m glad, because I adore the intense magenta color that is so very different than any other canna in my garden.
3. Sabatia species
This pretty little native wildflower often shows up at the edge of my lawn (i.e. the patch of weeds and moss that survive being mowed). I think it is Sabatia angularis (rosepink), a widespread annual, but I am not certain.
4. Eucomis vandermerwei
E. vandermerwei, from South Africa, is one of the smallest of the pineapple lilies. Along with E. zambesiaca, it seems to be resistant to the wilting exhibited by many other Eucomis in hot sunlight, making it a good choice for a North Carolina garden.
5. Allium cernuum (nodding onion)
The nodding onion has a very wide native range, spanning the United States from Atlantic to Pacific. In North Carolina its distribution is spotty, and although it has been reported from this county, my plants were purchased from the North Carolina Botanical Garden. Leaves and flowers are edible but strong tasting. I prefer to eat garlic chives.
First fruit from from a plant that we bought on a whim from a veggie seedling rack this spring. The little vine looks almost identical to the weedy Melothria pendula but its fruit are better tasting. I could probably have left these to get a bit bigger, but then I’d risk losing them to the tree rats.
The Propagator is the host of Six on Saturday. Head over there to see his Six and find links to the blogs of other participants.
Happy Independence Day to all readers from the U.S.A. As befits the Fourth of July, today is forecast to be hot and humid, with the highest temperatures so far this year. It seems we have finally left the prolonged period of cool, wet weather and have entered a more typical summer weather pattern with highs in the low to mid 90s (32-35 C) and occasional thunderstorms
1. Sinningia araneosa
Several of the Brazilian sinningias have proven winter hardy in my garden, but with only a single plant, I haven’t been willing to test this little beauty. I currently grow it in a plastic pot, exposed to full sun outdoors in summer and with a dry winter dormancy in the greenhouse.
2. Sinningia ‘Towering Inferno’
And here is one of the hardy varieties that grow well in the open garden. Sinningia ‘Towering Inferno’ is a complex hybrid that probably incorporates genes from S. aggregata, S. sulcata, S. tubiflora, and S. warmingii. Hummingbirds love the flowers, for obvious reasons.
3. Hemerocallis citrina
Hemerocallis citrina (syn. H. altissima) is a very tall daylily species, perhaps the tallest, with inflorescences about 6 feet (1.8 m) long. The flowers open before sunset, are strongly fragrant all evening, and collapse before dawn. Perhaps it should be called a nightlily?
4. Hemerocallis ‘Free Wheelin’
H. ‘Free Wheelin’ is an interesting spider daylily hybrid with enormous flowers, 9-10 inches (~24 cm) wide even with the curled tepals. I have never seen anything like it before. My young plant had only one inflorescence this year, so only a single flower at a time. Hopefully it will be bigger next year.
5. Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’
‘Lucifer’ is an absolutely gorgeous plant when in bloom, but think hard about where you want to grow it. The corms multiply rapidly underground and are almost impossible to remove completely, so once planted in a flower bed, it will be there forever.
6. Kniphofia ‘Lola’ (red hot poker)
Kniphofia flowers are more than a little bit garish, but this large form looks pretty good in a “hot colors” bed mixed with other bright red and orange flowers. In their native South Africa, the large Kniphofia species are pollinated by sunbirds, so it isn’t surprising that in North Carolina they attract hummingbirds. Some websites indicate that ‘Lola’ is a cultivar of K. uvaria.
The Propagator is the host of Six on Saturday. Head over there to see his Six and find links to the blogs of other participants.
Is it Saturday again? Here are six plants that are currently flowering.
1. Amorpha canescens (leadplant)
This is a plant that rewards close inspection. Its purple flowers with golden yellow stamens are gorgeous, but tiny. A. canescens is native to the central United States, from Minnesota and North Dakota to Texas. I grow it a sunny, dry location near our rosemary bush.
2. Canna ‘Lucifer’
The somewhat dull orange-red flowers of ‘Lucifer’ can’t hold a candle to Canna ‘Flaming Kabobs’, but ‘Lucifer is probably much better suited to small gardens. It is a miniature, standing only 3 feet high with inflorescence (90-100 cm), less than half the height of ‘Flaming Kabobs’. I am growing it in somewhat poor, dry soil, but it has proven to be a tough little plant and has slowly spread into a clump about four feet wide.
3. Habranthus tubispathus var. texensis (Texas copperlily)
This is a rather nice weed. Seed must have drifted from some potted bulbs, and now a little Habranthus is blooming right at the edge of our driveway. H. tubispathus has a disjunct range in southern South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the gulf coast of the United States. It seems likely that it was originally native to Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, but was introduced to other areas by early Spanish explorers and settlers.
Although some selected cultivars of our native L. sempervirens flower on and off for much of the summer, this wild vine at the edge of my garden usually blooms only in April. I suspect it has been induced to flower again by the unusually cool and wet weather we have been having.
5. Buddleja davidii (butterfly bush)
I’m keeping a watchful eye on this plant. It volunteered in the garden and has the potential to become quite invasive in our climate, but so far I have not found any more seedlings. I keep it around, despite its large size and ungainly branches, because butterflies adore the flowers. Some years, it is completely smothered in several species of swallowtail butterflies, but this year there are hardly any around. I wonder if the wet weather is to blame.
I have shown this plant before, but it is blooming particularly well this year. Gardeners generally think that blue flowers occur when H. macrophylla is grown in acidic soil and pink flowers in neutral or alkaline soil, but the situation is a bit more complex, depending on availability of aluminum ions and the amount of phosphate in the soil. Having blue and pink flowers on the same plant, and even on the same branches, should probably tell me something about my soil chemistry, but I have no idea what.
The Propagator is the host of Six on Saturday. Head over there to see his Six and find links to the blogs of other participants.
File under things that are counterintuitive: the Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina area, which I perceive as being fairly sunny year-round, receives more than twice the annual rainfall of notoriously damp London, England. Part of the answer to this apparent conundrum is that London has more drizzly days (RDU has 109 days with some precipitation vs London’s 164). Furthermore, we tend to have tropical-like afternoon thunderstorms during the summer, so many of those 109 rainy days are mostly sunny with thirty or forty minutes of heavy rain around the evening rush hour.
But sometimes we do have prolonged wet periods. The freeze warning two weeks ago proved to be a false alarm, but this week has also been cooler than normal. It was the cool of clouds and heavy rain, though, not the chill of dry Canadian air driven south. Between Monday night and Friday morning, we received 6 inches (~15 cm) of rain. The garden is looking particularly lush, but some plants are a bit floppy after growing like crazy for a week under heavy cloud cover.
Despite several of this week’s Six on Saturday originating in South America, all are garden plants that grow outside in the ground year round. Most of these photos were taken last Saturday, before the heavy rain. They’d look a lot more bedraggled if I photographed them today.
1. Cypella herbertii subsp. brevicristata
Cypella herbertii subsp. brevicristata
Cypella herbertii is a small iris-relative from Argentina and Uruguay. I have previously written about C. herbertii subsp. herbertii, and everything I wrote about culture applies to this subspecies, too. Technically, the two subspecies are distinguished by the length of the stigma lobes, but the two forms that I grow also differ in their color: my T. h. brevicristata has flowers of a clear yellow, while those of my T. h. herbertii are more orange. This is the first year that my T. h. brevicristata has flowered, so it will be interesting to see if I get a mixture of colors among the volunteer seedlings in future years.
For comparison, here is Cypella herbertii subsp. herbertii
2. Hippeastrum x johnsonii (St. Joseph’s lily)
I featured this hybrid in my very first blog post. At that time, I was growing it in my greenhouse, but I have since transplanted it to several places in the garden. The best clump grows in full sun beside the bird bath, in soil that stays damp year round. H. x johnsonii, a cross of H. reginae (southern Brazil) and H. vittatum (Peru), was the first artificial Hippeastrum hybrid. Its name commemorates Arthur Johnson, an English watchmaker and horticultural enthusiast who first made the cross at the end of the 18th century. Surprisingly, given the origins of the parent species, H. x johnsonii is reputed to be among the most cold-hardy and vigorous of all Hippeastrum hybrids.
3. Clematis ‘Rooguchi’ (?)
The first flower on a Clematis that I planted last autumn. I’m not entirely sure that it is correctly labeled. The flower looks right, but Missouri Botanical Garden’s Plant Finder says that C. ‘Rooguchi’ is a non-vining hybrid lacking the twining petioles that help the vining varieties climb. My plant definitely has twining petioles and is enthusiastically climbing some deer fencing stapled to the pergola. Some websites agree with MoBot, while others say ‘Rooguchi’ is a climber like my plant. Perhaps there are several different clones of the same cross all going under the same cultivar name?
4. Foundation plantings
A two-for-one entry. Along the south-facing foundation of our house, I planted a row of Rosa ‘Home Run’ and a clump of Phlomis fruticosa (Jerusalem sage) which is slowly spreading to surround the roses. The Home Run rose is single-flowered (which I like) but lacks fragrance (which I do not). Most importantly, though, it is very resistant to blights and mildews during hot, humid weather.
P. fruticosa is marginally hardy here, so planting along the south foundation gives it sun in winter and protection from cold north and west winds. Even so, it doesn’t flower very well and is sometimes damaged by snow and ice sliding off the roof. I do like the foliage, though, and the contrast with the glossy rose leaves.
5. Oxalis tetraphylla ‘Iron Cross’
O. tetraphylla is from central Mexico and is one of the Oxalis species that grow from little corms. I received it as a freebie in a bulb order five or six years ago and decide to chance growing it in the ground. So far, it has been well-behaved in the garden, tolerating freezing temperatures and showing no tendency to spread and become a weed like some Oxalis.
6. Oxalis articulata (syn. O. crassipes)
I found this plant growing on our property when we first moved into our newly built house. O. articulata is a South American species with a long history in cultivation, so I suspect that like the Gladiolus ‘Eno Orange’ it may have been planted by previous owners of the land and survived the intervening years when the property was left fallow. I have since dug it up and distributed the knobbly little rhizomes to several places in my garden. O. articulata can apparently become mildly invasive in some climates, but my plant seems to be sterile, at least in the absence of another clone, and shows no inclination to spread on its own.
The Propagator is the host of Six on Saturday. Head over there to see his Six and find links to the blogs of other participants.
Sweetgum and Pines 