Below are several articles on plants that I have written.

Childhood Plant Memories

 

We lived in a large gray house in town til I was 7. While this house did not really have a garden I have five plant memories from that period of my life. First, the giant (to a child) green barberry bush groupings on either side of the front walk were menacing. They were always taller than I was, and very, very thorny. When I was very small, I would hide under them. But when I was too big to fit between the bushes, I had to stop, not liking being poked by the thorns. Second, there were “snowball” bushes in the back yard. As I remember them, they were hydrangeas as their flowers were in huge clusters, curved on top and their leaves were huge, rather than viburnums which have more flat topped flower clusters and smaller leaves. They were very showy. Third was the rhubarb out behind the garage. We would “steal” salt shakers, rip a blade out, and suck it and eat several a week through the short season. Fourth, my father left a large patch of white lawn clover in a corner of the yard. Many times we would share hunting four leaf clovers in that patch. Somehow, we nearly always found several. Lastly I well remember the majestic American Elm trees that canopied the streets in that era. We especially loved to collect the cicada skins they left behind climbing up to emerge as adults. As adults, they would sing and keep us awake at night.

 

Late Childhood through Teen years:

When I was 7 we moved to a place with 3.5 acres. Our east fence was the west boundary of the city at that time. There was a scraggly row of eastern ash on that boundary. It provided wood for me to split .

 

Half of that land was devoted to a horse pasture, mostly brome grass (ugh) and a few forbs providing a little color. There was a small pond in which we fished in summer and on which we ice skated in winter. It was my job to blow the snow off the ice, and to resurface the ice with the hose. We had a pump especially to keep the pond up. The soil was very porous and the water seeped through and away rapidly. Bentonite did not hold the water in as advertised. My father told the planners of Skyview Lake, less than half a mile to the west, of the difficulties. They scuffed at the idea. But, now they have a well devoted to keeping Skyview Lake full.

 

I remember helping plant the Austrian Pines on the dam. My mother put cattails on the far side of the pond and water lilies on the near side. My brother and I spent many happy hours in the big sand pile my father had dumped there for us to play in. Several times my father commented on our deep tans from playing shirtless outside so much.

 

There was a small orchard of apples and cherries. My favorite was the “Queen Ann” apple tree in the corner. Once my uncle came from Washington State. He had a small orchard there. My father was very upset at the “severe” trimming my uncle did of our apple trees. But they bore much more fruit the next year.

 

The long driveway, over 100 feet, had a wall on the east side. The entire length of that wall were spirea bushes, with a cap on the taller end of lilacs. In front of the bushes my mother kept tulips. Nearly all of them were the yellow darwins streaked with blood red. It was beautiful in the spring.

 

There were about a dozen rose bushes pushing up out of the grass on a gentle slope. Cross the drive way was a weeping willow tree with gooseberry bushes surrounding it. The cluster of Solomon’s seal by the garage was striking every year. The columnar populars screening the garage suffered in a twisting wind one year, requiring us to remove several.

 

We had a patio covered with an arbor of wisteria vines. Many were the picnics we held out there under the hundreds of beautiful drooping purple clusters. My mother would carry many of our regular meals out there in the wisteria flowering season. The back yard was surrounded with a tall brown fence covered with trumpet vines. The big orange trumpets were pretty. But in the later years, the plants grew to an amazing width of over 5 feet. Many were the humming birds that visited those vines.

 

I helped my father plug the large lower lawn to zosia. It was a thick brown carpet, changing to green for only mid June til late August. It was fun to watch the zosia spread and take over the area. But it required less mowing – a task delegated to me through my teen age years there. My father loved to plant trees, and several he planted there are still there 50 – 60 years later.

 

 

 

 

 

So You Have Bad Soil

 

First of all, what is bad soil? Soil can be bad in several ways. Probably the most common is either too much clay, or too much sand. But also soils can be compacted, or contaminated, or rocky, or too wet or any combination of these.

 

What is the desirable soil? For the gardener, the easy answer is “stuff” that plants grow in.
But different plants like different soils. So there is no easy answer to the question, “What is the best soil?” You have to adjust both the soils to the plants you want, and the plants have to be chosen for the soils you have. Choosing the plants for your soil type is easier than amending or correcting your soil. Desirable soil is coffee colored or darker, particulate that falls apart in your hand, holds moisture, but not too much moisture, rich in organic matter, and smells good AND grows the plants you want in your garden. But how do we get there.

 

First a few definitions. There are three particle sizes that make up the inorganic part of soil. These particles differ in how they hold water. Mostly they are made up of silicon bits, and their characteristics depend on their size.

 

CLAY is very fine particles of silicon. These particles are so small that a teaspoon of clay, if laid out one lay of particles thick would cover more than a basketball court. For comparison, a teaspoon of sand, one particle layer thick would only cover about a silver dollar. This very large number of particles gives a very large surface area and thus clay will hold lots of water. But it is not available for the plants. Clay is sticky, clumpy, slick when wet, gums up on your shoes or boots. Here in Northeast Nebraska we have hundreds of square miles of heavy clay. Clay is what you will usually find when you dig deep enough into your garden, or in a trench. It is generally yellow in color, although other colors such as red exist depending on the parent rocks from which it is formed.

 

SILT is larger particles, primarily also of silicon. These particles can not been seen by the naked eye. Silt holds more water than sand, but less than clay. Pure silt is not good soil, as can be experienced in the debris called silt left by flowing water.

 

SAND is large particles of silicon or other minerals. These particles can been seen by the naked eye. A pile of sand will hold some water, but mostly water just runs through the sand.

 

To determine how much of each you have in your soil, take about one half cup of soil from your garden. Put the soil into a quart jar with a tight lid, along with 2 cups of water and a tablespoon of water softener. Shake the mixture vigorously and let sit. The larger heavier sand particles will fall rapidly to the bottom. Slowly the medium sized silt particles will layer on top of the sand. The clay particles may take a day or two to layer on top of the silt. Organic material will mostly float on top of the water. Ideally you would have 30 – 40% sand, 30-40% silt, 20 to 30% clay, and 5 – 10% organic material. Measuring and comparing the layers gives you a start in how to amend your soil.

 

WARNING: Just adding sand to clay soils makes a very compact, near concrete mixture, the opposite of what you want.

 

Now look at the structure of your soil. Soil can be of various structures. The best is GRANULAR, like cookie crumbs. This represents soil in which roots have been growing and improving your soil for you. Otherwise the soil can be BLOCKY in irregular chunks up to 2 inches; PRISMARIC or COLUMNAR with caps of salt as frequently found in dry, arid climates; PLATY like stacks of plates, found in compacted soils, all too common in our yards or fields after the machinery to build our houses or work the fields went back and forth; SINGLE GRAINED breaking apart far too easily as in heavy sand soils; or just plan MASSIVE with no visible structure, hard and in large clods. You want to work your soil to be granular.

 

Your plants need food. This food is humus, or compost, or other organic material. This material has to be broken down by weathering, aging, composting, rotting. Look at the floor of a old natural woodland area or river bottoms, or prairie. There is lots and lots of decaying plant material in various stages of decomposition. The old ashes to ashes and dust to dust concept is at work here. We all live in a vast web, taking and giving, growing and decaying, in turn eating and being eaten. The thatch in your lawn is an example. The thick layers of decaying branches in the forest that burn so hot in forest fires is another example. Your leaves in the fall, the twigs from your trees, the petals of the flowers after they have finished their reproductive cycle, the pods of the seeds all return to the earth to recycle again and again. An acre of good soil contains 2-3 pounds of small mammals, 133 pounds of protozoa (small single celled animals and plants), 900 pounds of earthworms, insects, and algae, 2000 pounds of bacteria and 2400 pounds of fungi. That’s a lot of stuff, and that is why we say soils are a living creature.

 

Soil should also be about 50% spaces between the particles. These spaces should contain a mixture of air and water. You should be to fairly easily push your shovel or your hand trowel into good soil. If you can’t get a hand towel into your soil with ease, you need to work on your soil.

 

So how to go about improving bad soil. First, compare your soil to the above concepts. This comparison will tell you what you need to add or to change, or to bring in. Check especially for contamination or compaction. Did your builders mix their concrete in your front yard, leaving residual lime there. Did your builders run heavy machinery over your yard, compacting your soil. Most expensive is to just replace your soil. This can be done, but costs lots in money, time and effort. But it is also the fastest way. To achieve this, many people use raised beds, importing soil, put on top of their original soil and contained in boards or rocks or logs.

 

But that’s often not an option. THE BEST WAY TO IMPROVE YOUR SOIL, but the long slow way is nature’s way. Add organic material on a regular basis to your soil. Unless your soil is way way off in the sand / clay ratio, adding either to the soil will not make much difference. Adding organic material on a regular basis, be it compost or organic mulches will slowly improve your soil. Remember that fall leaves and grass clippings, unless handled properly, tend to mat, rot and smell bad in their process of returning to the soil to feed their successors. Composting is a labor intensive way of getting good soil additives. There are also commercial soil additives of many kinds and brands. WARNING: gravel or rock “mulches” add to the heat at the base of the plants, and do not improve your soil.

 

Make sure you plant plants with deep roots, that dig deep into the soil, break it up, and add their own body to the soil. Our lawn grasses vary their root depth with the season of the year, working hard on the soils underneath themselves. You can plant such plants as coneflowers, or other native flowers (forbs) that work the soil. But for the best soils add organic material, as much as you can, as often as you can, without overdoing it to the point of unsightly or smelly.

 

Main Reference: Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis. “Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardner’s Guide to the Soil Food Web. Timber Press. Portland 2010. ISBN: 978-1-60469-113-9

 

 

2014-01-12 Addendum: The various wood mulches are excellent soil additives. But they take 3 to 8 years to break down, and in the meantime, adsorb the nitrogen in your soil. They do release the nitrogen finally, but only as they finally breakdown. Some of the evergreen wood or pine needle mulches yield acidic soils, and others will yield more neutral soil pH’s.

 

 

 

 

 

The Spring Garden I left Behind

 

 

When we lived on Norfolk Avenue, we were fortunate to have over three feet of high quality loam soil. I enriched it some with leaves and other plant debris to make it more woodland/rock garden like.

 

Up by the back door to the house was a space about 20 x 25 feet with another area directly adjacent about 10 x 10. In the middle of the larger space was a black walnut tree. I was never aware of any juglin problems there. Perhaps I was just lucky in my plant choices. The only plants I tried there that did poorly were hyacinths, both the grape and the giant varieties. We had 5 large boulders hauled in and placed in a semi circle. And along with a front boarder of bricks to the patio, the other sides were a sidewalk and the house foundation.

 

Spring in this garden was fantastic. I hope I have the sequence right below, but this is my memories of that space.

 

The first flower up was a march iris. This little darling grew in a small patch, about a foot in diameter, right up close to the house foundation. In late March, green spikes came up out of the ground. These developed a typical light blue iris flower. They typically never exceeded 8 inches in height. The leaves remained a nearly round spike. They retreated back into the ground to await another spring. I tried to transplant them to our new house, but failed. I have since learned the march iris is very particular in when it is moved.

3 – 4 weeks later, the delicate, native dutchman’s britches came up in front of one of the rocks. These never exceeded 4 inches in height, and were a dark green cluster with the typical pantaloon or heart shaped white flower. They are a close relative of the bleeding hearts, and the flower is similar.

The following weeks, the few native blood root plants came up just south of the dutchman’s britches, in front of the same rock. They had large lobed leaves with the single stemmed white flower. They always seemed larger and stronger than the dutchman’s britches.

Meanwhile the native jack in the pulpits were starting to sprout along another part of the foundation. This well named all green plant and flower had 3 large leaves.  The flower was the hooded pulpit with speaker inside. They actually flowered later. The ferns began to grow, but were slow in the spring to come in. The daffodils spouted and heralded that the spring had arrived with their bright yellow trumpet flowers. Across the driveway were patches of an early blooming dwarf miniature bearded iris of royal purple color in patches.  There were a few of the smaller varieties of native Solomon’s seal with their zigzag stems up close to the house.  I had started some wild ginger before we moved, but it did not have time to settle in before we moved.  

The native prairie columbine came in next. I planted three plants, and shortly had the whole area covered, and it reached out into the more distant beds. These were elegant red and yellow, narrow vertical flowers on tall loose racemes, formed like the Colorado Columbine, but not fat, were all over. They looked like lanterns hanging in small trees. Actually they are a bienniel and self seeded themselves very successfully. Between the columbines were the darwin tulips. I had selected early, middle and late blooming varieties. Thus we had tulips from early May into June. The few tall bearded iris came through in early June. Mrs. Ferguson had lived there before us, and had left several unusual varieties planted there.

In late May, early June, as the columbine began to die down, the Virginia Bluebells popped up through them. Again, I had planted about three plants, but had the entire area filled with the pretty racemes of blue flowers on wonderful arched stems and broad dark leaves. At about the same time as the bluebells, the bright red stemless tulips with the stripped leaves started across the driveway.

Meanwhile, in mid June, the hosta were starting to come in. The various varieties all popped out of the ground at different times. Every spring I swore that the Francis Williams had died, but up it came, later than all the others. Beside it were bleeding hearts, one red and one white. The tardiness of the Francis Williams Hosta left a space for the bleeding hearts.  Slowly, the hosta took the bluebells down. Slowly they conquered the darwin tulips and the tall bearded iris. I had to cut the bleeding hearts back as the hosta devoured them, leaving the flowering stems of the bleeding hearts looking like hands of a corpus twisting up between the hosta. By mid June, this was a hosta bed with over 20 varieties from a 2-3” miniature boarding the patio to 2 or 3 giant varieties standing 30 – 36 inches tall and over 6 feet in diameter with ferns in the dark corner.

I should add that all the natives above I was fortunate enough to actually transplant in from various river bottom lands in the area. With the soil and the dappled shade/sun in the river bottom lands being similar to the rich loam and dappled shade/sun of the garden, they succeeded.

Daylilly Facts

 

1. In the early 1980’a some experts attempted to place the Daylilly in it’s own family, Hemerocallidaceae. They no longer considered it a “lily” in the Liliaceae. Note: Kaul,/  Nor“Flora of Nebraska” 2006, does not separate the genus Hemerocallus out into its own family. Nor does “Flora of the Great Plains,” 1986, Nor did Britton and Brown “An Illustrated Flora of Northern United States and Canada” 1912, or Rydberg 1932, or Gray 1950.

2. The darker colors tend to absorb heat and fade late in the day, unless they receive some afternoon shade.

 

3)

In some dictionaries and other reference works, this plant may be referred to as a “day lily,” but the spelling was consolidated into a single word in 1923 upon the recommendation of the American Joint Committee on Horticultural Nomenclature, as reported by the publication Standardized Plant Names, 1923 edition, Preface, p. x and p. 199.

4) The genus Hemerocallis is native to Asia. It consists of 20 species, distributed in Eurasia, particularly in Japan. Since 1930 it has been extensively hybridized in the United States and elsewhere.

5) The colors range from near-whites, pastels, yellows, oranges, pinks, vivid reds, crimson, purple, nearly true-blue, and fabulous blends. There are no true whites or true blue daylilies.

6) Modern daylilies display a complex variety of color patterns that were unknown in the original wild types. The patterns include: self, blend, polychrome, bitone, bicolor, eyed, edged, tipped, dotted, dusted, midribbed, diamond dusting.

7) Currently, the AHS officially recognizes the following flower forms for exhibition purposes: single, double, spider, unusual form, and polymerous flowers. Several other terms are on the registration forms, but not used in exhibitions.

8 The cold-hardiness of daylilies is quite variable. Some are iron-clad hardy. Others are extremely tender. Cold-hardiness is not determined by the foliage habit. Evergreen, dormant, and semi-evergreen can be anything from extremely cold-hardy to extremely tender. To avoid risk of losing a cultivar, choose daylilies which others have already grown successfully in your climate.

9. While we consider the daylilly very hardy, Early spring planting in Nebraska is best. Fall planting can be fatal as the plant does not have time to set roots. Hot weather planting, July – August, can lead to crown rot. However to be sure of variety obtained, I have bought most of my plants in late June and early July, while flowering, and had no difficulty.
10. Like most plants, daylilies show maximum performance in soils with good aeration, fertility and microbial activity. The ideal soil holds sufficient moisture to sustain the plants, yet is at the same time well-drained. These characteristics can be improved in soils that have too much sand or clay by amending with compost.

11. Daylillies have their own specific aphid which feeds only on daylillies. Control requires mild systemic pesticide. Do not use Kelthane, which may harm the daylilly.

Most material from the American Hemerocallis Society webpage which is an excellent source of information on daylillies.

 

 

 

 

 

Late Fall Garden Virtue

n my opinion this has been one of the most beautiful falls in my memory. The sharpness and depth of the colors has been fantastic. Thus, I went into my yard and took pictures of several of the plants in their fall mode. Some might think that pictures of plants going into their winter hibernation is melancholy or just not quite right, like pictures of the dead and dying. Yes, these images are of living creatures, not at their prime, but doing necessary things in their life cycle. So, like the gentle, handsome pictures of the aged people, these pictures of aged plants are part of life. And there is beauty in them.

 

Most years, my hosta just slowly lower themselves to the ground, turn brown and wait to be removed. This year, many of the hosta stood up, turned a nearly transparent yellow. I expect they will fall over eventually. I well wait until that stage to remove them.

 

The burning bushes and the eastern wahoo bushes this year are especially bright red. Driving around town I am greeted from many yards by the bright red show of these bushes in their fall coloration. It is gaudier than many birds or insects in their mating season.

 

My red stemmed dogwood, and the service (June) berry have been especially colorful this year. And the color has lasted weeks. These are on a berm at the back of my yard. I have left them grow naturally, filling out from ground to the top.

 

I feel fortunate to have an aspen variety in my back yard. Many years ago, traveling the back roads from the North Bass Trailhead on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, in September, the roads were lined for miles with this bright gold. During September hikes into the Collegiate Peaks in Colorado the aspen groves stood out with their beautiful golden yellow spots on the mountain sides. Mine has been bright gold for over three weeks. Magnificent, both for itself and for the memories.

 

Never have I seen the solomon’s seal turn this luscious butter yellow as the leaves aged to fall for the winter. These are down between a bench and a rock wall making a spot of true beauty.

 

Even though I have big and little blue stem grasses, and other natives, this has not been a good year for the native grasses. Thus no pictures. Other years, they have been their usual proud, tall, magnificent selves, but not this year.

 

The huge leaves of the rhubarb have turned nearly black, and give a Halloween appearance as they threateningly surround the still green creeping phlox. Just a reminder of the dark forces out there.

 

And today, the albino winter variety of the fruit fliesi8s swarming, leaving their beautiful white blanket over everything. This is why I live in Nebraska.