Linum perenne 'Appar'

Blue flax (Linum perenne) was a common plant to see when I first moved to Albuquerque. It's funny that it isn't seen that much anymore. Perhaps it's because it is a short lived plant, a single plant not lasting more than a few seasons. But it does self seed, from what I understand. I had forgotten about blue flax until I saw a plant in a friend's garden last year, and thought to myself, "Why don't I have that in my garden?!".

So last year, I planted this variety 'Appar', which was available at High Country Gardens.  It's supposed to be a darker blue. Planted March 30, 2019, it didn't do much that first summer, and I didn't expect a newly planted perennial to do much. It didn't look great, rather weedy in fact, but didn't seem to look any different if I forgot to water it, and I forgot to water it for weeks after the initial planting. After that, I didn't really bother.  It formed a tuft of leaves and a few longer stems by the end of summer. During the winter, it froze back a little, and when it started growing again, I pruned the damaged lanky stems back to the basal tuft.

As the flower stems and buds developed, I appreciated the fountain form, the buds and the ends of the flower stems drooping dramatically.

The first bloom opened April 9,  impressed me with the silky texture of the flowers. It still has a rather weedy appearance, but now, three weeks later, it has the light texture of a blue cloud that is hovering above the ground. Flowers last only one day or less, fading with the heat of the afternoon, and are without fragrance. They do stay open through the afternoon if the weather is cool and cloudy.

Am I happy with it? Would I want more in the garden? Will I allow it to self seed? Probably. The durability and ease of growing it is something that I appreciate, although if it self-seeds too much, I may regret it. Still, that true blue color and long season of flowering so far, is impressive. But the rather scraggly appearance of the plant without blooms is something to deal with in using it in the garden. I just learned that this is not a native plant as I originally thought, coming from Europe. If it were invasive though, I would have thought that it would have been found to be so by now, having been grown here in gardens for decades.

anticipation fulfilled

'Ila Crawford'

'World Premiere'

anticipation

For gardeners, part of the joy of the garden is the anticipation. Are the plans you made going to come to fruition? Are the plants you labored to choose, spent time to source, spent hard earned money to purchase, labored to prepare the ground, worked on irrigation, and months or years to grow, going to grow and perform as you had envisioned? That sweet anticipation of each plant is a great joy.  The pinnacle of anticipation each season may be the emergence of the flower, some days or just before the flower opens. I tried to share this with some friends, and was met with a tepid response. I almost feel sad for those people who only see the end product, the full bloom, a "finished" landscape, while ignoring the process and the full process of development from the beginning of the season to the end, and even the dormant season. Perhaps it is a metaphor for life to appreciate each moment of the process.

Just the emergence of the flower stems appearing from the base foliage is cause for excitement. 

Iris 'Belize'

 The first buds of the roses fills me with great anticipation. In this case, one of my favorite roses, 'Abraham Darby' whose buds appear yellow, and open apricot and fade to pink. The anticipation of that fruity fragrance has me sniffing the buds as soon as color shows in the petals. In this case, the fragrance is already there.

'Abraham Darby'

I planted this tiny cherry tree last year. This year I got to eagerly looked forward to what would happen. Would there be flowers? Even cherries? The tree is still quite a baby, about 3 feet tall, but there were flowers and even the beginning of a cherry. Will there be fruit to taste this year?

'Montmorency' Cherry.

Scabiosa caucasica 'Fama' has been green all winter. One of the plants even had a flower bud  that lasted through snows and winter cold, waiting for warmer weather to bloom. I was waiting, too.

Scabiosa caucasica 'Fama'

I moved this Erigeron to a pot last year since even though it was described as drought tolerant, it really struggled in the dry slope where it was planted. In a pot, it took off and bloomed exuberantly with long lasting spring blooms. From a small plant, it filled the 18" wide pot. I was tempted to transplant it to the garden again, but I decided to let it have another bloom in the pot and I'll move it in the fall. Will it be as glorious this year?

Erigeron speciosus 'Darkest of All'

One of my new tall bearded irises is about to bloom. Will it look like the catalog photo?

'Marie Pavie' rose was damaged by the late freeze we had this year. Last year it was incredible. Will it be able to pull through?

Another of the new irises. Almost there!

 

A new rose is always a great anticipation. I spend many hours choosing a rose bush, partly for the joy of it, and partly because roses can vary to great degrees depending upon the climate, and I want to choose a variety that will do well in my climate. Then there is the expense. Roses are not cheap plants. For good quality plants they can be thirty to fifty dollars plus shipping for a small plant. If ordered from a rose specialty nursery, there is the wait for the right time to ship, the anticipation of arrival (will it come in good condition?), the rush to get them planted, and the seemingly interminable wait for it to grow. This rose arrived with the canes looking shriveled. I soaked it in water for a a day, carefully covering the canes with plastic and misting them to try to rehydrate them. To my relief, they plumped up and I planted it in this pot to trial the plant for a season before committing it to the ground. It's been a month since then, without any growth, even though the roses in the garden were well leafed out even when this one arrived. In the last couple of days, the leaf buds have expanded. Soon there will be leaves, and hopefully, blooms. For the new peonies, the anticipation is even longer, since the first year after planting in the fall, it is normal for there to be no flowers at all, and only the second year after planting might there be a few flowers. Ah, sweet anticipation.

amsonia jonesii

There are those plants that take some time get established and show their beauty, but after years of coddling, fussing and worrying, they come into their own, and it is all worth it. Amsonia jonesii has not shown to be one of those plants, at least not in my garden. 

Peak of bloom

If I were to encounter this plant in the wild, I would be delighted and charmed. And the photos on the web show lovely plants. But in my garden, so far at least, it lacks presence, contributing little to the garden.

April 25, 2020

April 11, 2020

Two plants were planted in my dry border 6/12/2017, four growing seasons ago. Planted in the hottest month of the year, I thought they had died, but to my surprise and delight, they returned the next year. Since then, the plants have become slightly larger each year, but did not bloom and did not exhibit the golden fall foliage that the amsonias are famous for.

Emerging in the spring

The plants have shown good drought tolerance, but not as shockingly drought tolerant as two other plants in my dry border: Penstemon linariodes, or Oenothera caespitosa. This year, after a particularly wet winter, is the first time they have bloomed. It's not clear to me if it is due to the wet winter or the developing maturity of the plants, but it is probably some of both.

The flowers are quite small, no more than a quarter of an inch across and are of a pale washed blue/purple in clusters. First bloom this year was April 6, and the last of the flowers are blooming today April 25, so almost 3 weeks of bloom. Charming? Yes. Garden presence? I'm sorry to say, no. Will I keep them? Well, I don't discard plants on a general basis unless they have shown some serious transgression of garden etiquette, so they will stay. I'll give them a bit of extra fertilizer and water this summer, and we will see how they perform this fall and next year.

April 25, 2020

linum perenne 'Appar'

I'm not sure why I was so resistant to putting Blue Flax into my garden. Perhaps I thought it too weedy looking. Perhaps I was afraid that it would self seed too much. I suppose that those concerns still haven't left me. But I didn't let that stop me from planting a couple last fall.

 The color is just amazing, and the petals have a silky sheen that has to be seen in person to appreciate.

 

 I still think that plants are kind of weedy looking.

 
So we shall see if this plant stays in my garden.

late freeze, 5 days later

As a few days have gone by, the freeze damage becomes more apparent. Even the Little Bluestem (above) which is a native grass, got damaged, looking like burned hair.

'Abraham Darby'

 Even the buds that didn't look damaged before are turning brown.

'Alnwick Castle'

'Bishop's Castle'

'Boscobel'

'Bishop's Castle'

'Radio Times'

townsendia glabella

It's too bad that Townsendia glabella does not reseed in my garden. Usually those native daisies are too happy to reseed and become a bit pesky. I purchased two of these in 2015, and every year they produced this tuft of flowers in early spring. One of them died two years ago, after producing what appeared to be many, many seeds that blew about in the wind. Most native plants reseed prolifically in the gravel mulch (ahem...Penstemon linarioides, Scutellaria resinosa), but not one appeared as far as I can tell. That's a shame, because this little daisy is really a gem.

late freeze

My roses had been coming along very well. There were buds everywhere developing on the abundant strong growths. Then two days ago, the snow came down all day, collecting on the new growths of the roses. I rushed to get all the potted plants into the garage. By late afternoon it had stopped and melted, and with even colder temperatures predicted for that night, I hurriedly covered my roses with sheets and plastic. My garden became a tent city.

The next morning there was ice in the tarps, and I was hopeful that the growths were saved.

Uncovering the plants, however, the damage was evident. The tarps had weighed down and broken many of the new growths, which were also frozen. That night was supposed to be even colder than the previous one, and I desperately covered my plants again. This time I used stakes to keep the tarps from touching the shoots of the roses. Today, the roses didn't seem to be any worse, but the damage had been done. The new growths on the lavender were mostly destroyed as well, and the lilies new growth was damaged or completely destroyed.

In fact, the covered roses seemed to be much worse than the ones that were left open (although the open ones were damaged, too). 

 I'm devastated. Heartbroken. A response from my question posed on Gardenweb's Rose Forum from Seil, said:

"All is not lost. When it warms back up just snip off anything that is dead. It may only be the tips. The rose will recover and still put on new growth and bloom this spring. Your spring flush will most likely be delayed but it will occur! I go through this almost every year here in Michigan and I always get a spring flush anyway.

For future reference I do not recommend covering roses. Sometimes the covering can do more harm than good. Roses can take temps down to about 27 degrees for a few hours at night with little or no damage. Only a severe and prolonged temperature drop will do bad damage. Covering can cause a lot of breakage of canes and new growth. Particularly if there is rain or snow to weigh it down. Also trying to remove the coverings can easily break off tiny new growth buds. And NEVER EVER use any kind of plastic to cover any kind of plants. It can actually make the freeze worse."

Nope, I will never do that again. Seems like both the plastic and the sheets had similar results, the plastic may have been a bit worse. The plants that were left open, had some slight damage to the youngest leaves, but not much more. Lesson learned. I will see what will happen as spring goes on.  Not much else I can do anyway.

pruning lavender vs. lavandin

There are two main types of lavender grown here in the high desert. What is most commonly referred to when people say "lavender" is Lavandula angustifolia, also known as "English Lavender" or "True Lavender". I think that the term "English Lavender" is because this is the form that is most commonly grown in the UK, but it isn't actually native to that region. "True Lavender"is a funny name to me, but it is called that because when Lavenders were first named, what is now known as L. angustifolia was also lumped with what is now known L. latifolia, and was called L. spica.  "True Lavender" was renamed L. officinalis denoting it's medicinal use. It was later renamed L. vera, and now is known as L. angustifolia.  I don't really like either of the common names, but I tend to use "English Lavender" since two other lavenders are "Spanish Lavender" (L. stoechas) and "French Lavender" (L. dentata). Spanish Lavender is occasionally to rarely grown here, and French Lavender is not hardy in this area so can only be grown as an annual. The other lavender that is commonly grown here is known as "lavandin".  Lavandin is a hybrid between L. angustifolia and L. latifolia, and is botanically Lavandula x intermedia.

Now the reason I point all this out is because when I started growing lavenders, I didn't know the difference. All I could find is hat the lavandins grow larger, are sterile, have very long stems good for craft work, and that lavandins are described as what is grown in the french perfume fields. I knew I had to have that one. I grew both 'Provence' and 'Grosso', both of which are highly perfumed, although the darker color of 'Grosso' makes it stand out in the landscape more.

'Provence' (left) and 'Grosso' (right). Note the long stems.

I struggled with pruning them those years, because they grow from the branch tips, and while I pruned them back as far as I could see any live growth, the plants became larger and larger each year, until they were five to six feet across, and then tended to die out in sections leaving a very unattractive mess of bare branches and tufts of growth at the ends. The only option was to replace them. Pruning back hard to the base results in dead stumps that do not regrow.

I then moved to this house which has what I believe is 'Hidcote', an English lavender, and learned how differently the English lavenders grow. English lavenders grow at the ends of the branches, but only until they get to a certain predetermined height. Then those branches die back in the winter and the plants grow new branches from the base. Because of this, all the dead branches need to be removed, to allow the new growth to come in. What it also means, and this is the important thing for a garden, is that the plants tend to stay the same size. When pruned back to the basal growths, those growths will achieve about the same size plant as the last year by blooming time.

English lavender 'Vicenza Blue'. Yep, an Italian English lavender. Note the short stems.

Yesterday when I was pruning my lavender, I was noticing not only the the fragrance is indeed sweeter than the more camphorous lavandins, but the way they are pruned are totally different.

Here is my English lavender yesterday before pruning. You can see that the new growth is at the base. For lavandins, the growth would be at the ends. 

After pruning half of it, you can see the the new growth more clearly.

 

The end result.

This 'Provence' lavandin had gotten too large for the spot. I tried cutting it back hard last spring, and you can see the result.

There was a tiny twig on the right that was near the base, and that is the only part that survived. The entire plant to the left did not regrow, and you can see the many dead stumps. (By the way, in a climate any more humid or moist than this one, don't mulch your lavenders or they will rot. Here, the mulch is needed to keep in moisture.)

Closer up, you can see the difference. You can see that the growth is only at the last couple of inches where there are green leaves. Further down, there is no active new growths from the leave nodes, and they won't grow them if you cut back below the new growths. You can also see how the lavandins die back - a large chunk of branch at a time, leaving a bare section in what would be a mound.

So although there are benefits to each, keep in mind the growth habits and care of each, in addition to the floral qualities. English lavender (L. angustifolia): short stems, smaller plants, sweeter fragrance, longer plant life. Lavandin (L. x intermedia): long stems, larger plants (each year larger), shorter plant life.