NoID Phalaenopsis

 I'm guessing that I've had this phalaenopsis for 10 or 11 years. It's a miniature phalaenopsis from Trader Joe's that I bought when I was staging my old house for sale.

Choosing new roses

 

It used to be that choosing roses was as simple as picking the ones whose flowers I liked best. Even that pleasurable activity was daunting due to the multitude of varieties available, and photographs in catalogs showed many varieties that looked similar. That was many years ago, and in a different climate. Many purchases and growing years later, I’ve learned that there is much more to choosing a rose than that photograph of the flower that a catalog shows. First of all, the photo doesn’t show the size of the bloom and the plant once in the garden my have blooms of a different size than expected. It may bloom very differently than the photograph. There may be less or even more petals. The form that was so lovely in the photograph may be transient or even entirely different. The color may be very different, rich yellows in photographs may rapidly fade to off white or even open pale. These variations are not necessarily false advertising, as all of these things may vary depending on climate or the catalog showing what the blooms CAN look like in the brief moments of their most beautiful stage (beauty being in the eye of the beholder). This doesn’t even touch on the vagaries of fragrance, also subject to advertising hyperbole and to climatic variations. 

I soon realized that the beauty of the bloom is actually one of the least important qualities to consider when choosing a rose for the garden. Unless the plant will be in an out-of-sight cutting garden, the most important thing in choosing a rose bush is how it will actually look in the garden. Will it grow tall and stringy? Short and bushy? Will it spread out or be just a bean pole? Will it form a tall graceful fountain? Will it even like its location at all and grow? What form will the shrub contribute to the garden? This is a much more important quality to consider but not something a catalog or a plant in a pot at the nursery will show you. 

Then there is disease resistance. Roses are susceptible to many diseases depending on the climate, and some climates are horrible for rose diseases. Some varieties are much more resistant to disease such as blackspot and powdery mildew than others. Some are very susceptible to insect damage such as thrips. Here, I have terrible thrips, but not foliar disease, so in that at least, I am lucky.

Another thing the catalog won’t show you is how often the shrub will bloom. We tend to get the impression from catalogs that roses are ever-blooming, always covered in perfect flowers. This is far from the truth. The original European roses and species only bloom for a few weeks in the late spring. Most modern roses are bred to bloom throughout the growing season, but that doesn't mean that they will or how much they will if they do. How long a bloom lasts is also not something a catalog or label will tell you. Some roses blooms last only a few hours or few days, whereas some last for a week or more. Some of this may be due to how a rose responds to a particular climate, or it may be its character. The most beautiful rose in the world will not find a place in my garden if the blooms last for only a few hours once a year. Or if it doles out a few blooms once in a while. 

So now I have probationary status on my roses and many rose growers do the same. It takes a few years for a rose to show its character, and how it will respond to MY conditions. So now I plant a new rose in a pot for a year or two to see how it does. It is not necessarily how it will perform in the garden, with different soil/potting mix quality, and different root competition, but it gives an idea. Above, I decided to put 'Olivia Rose Austin' in the ground, taking out one of my 'Evelyn' roses, since 'Evelyn' grows tall and stringy with not many blooms even if they are gorgeous and fragrant. I'm not terribly confident that Olivia will be satisfactory, since I was not impressed with her at the beginning. But her repeat bloom was very good and she developed much better blooms as the plant grew.

‘La Paz’ getting ready to pop

 

I stated with one bulb of ‘La Paz’ about 2012. It’s such a joy to how this one and see it multiply. I can’t get enough. The buds are already starting to poke out of the bulbs but I’m keeping in the cool garage to delay the blooming for a bit. If they bloom too early, they will grow before it’s warm enough to put the plants outdoors, and I don’t have enough sunlight in my windows for them. 

Streptocarpus ‘Bristol’s Tie Dyed’

First bloom on Streptocarpus 'Bristol's Tie Dyed'. It's actually more blue than the photo shows. It's grown rapidly since I got it, and it seems to be a bigger plant than the others I have. I'm liking it!
 

Composting

 

There are many reasons to make compost. If you grow vegetables and flowers, it makes them very happy (although you wouldn't want to use a lot of compost on dryland plants).  It's much better than putting garden waste into a landfill. It's much better than buying compost, which might use a process that isn't good for the environment (i.e. chopping down trees, gasoline powered machinery, and transportation). Why buy compost when it takes even more gas to transport it from the store, and plastic bags to bag it that go into a landfill? And honestly, purchased compost isn't really all that good. It's like buying grocery store cake instead of making your own. Making compost doesn't take much more work than loading and unloading a vehicle and since it is made on-site it is low carbon footprint. In fact, it is considered to be reducing your carbon footprint. Composting is an important skill to have if you are an organic gardener, or if you want to do good for the earth. 

There are many techniques to composting, and I've tried a number of methods. It's been a learning process. The easiest is to just dig a hole and put your kitchen refuse into it and cover it back up. If you do this in a vegetable garden, the trimmings go directly back to the plants. I've tried the small spinning composter bins for kitchen waste, but frankly, it doesn't work very well in my climate, since it is harder to manage the moisture level. It dries out too fast, and I don't have the time/energy to monitor the moisture every day. Or it gets too wet and and makes clods of half decomposed material which get anaerobic and stinky. It's for a small amount of compost in a more humid climate. For making a lot of compost, or if you have a lot of garden waste (i.e. a lot of fall leaves that need to be raked off your porch), you need something with a lot more volume. The best way I've found is still the the old fashioned bin composter. The benefits of a bin composter is that it holds moisture better due to its large volume, even better if covered with a tarp. It does not tend to get too wet, and it gets enough air to help with the process. 

Composting in a bin composter is a little like baking in that you put together ingredients and then let it "bake". Yesterday, I filled by 4' x 4' bin. I took out all the older compost, then made layers of fallen leaves (we raked out the courtyard yesterday), garden waste such as lawn clippings, the older compost (which retains moisture and acts as a "starter" microbiome), and used rabbit bedding (a gift from a friend who raises Angora rabbits). The compost is best when there is a balance of high nitrogen ("green" material such as green lawn clippings, horse manure, or rabbit manure), and high carbon material (dried leaves, woody material). It is best if the material is cut or chopped to a certain size, say 1-3". If you put whole branches or large pieces in, they decompose unevenly (the small parts like leaves decompose faster than the woody parts), and the long pieces make it hard to turn the compost (more on this later). The magic ingredient, at least in this climate, is water. Dried leaves are water repellent, so it's important to wet down each layer or even better, mix the water in to the dry material. It's like making a cake when the dry ingredients get blended into the wet. If you don't moisten all the dry parts, you get lumps. In the case of compost, it doesn't compost evenly since the dry parts do not decompose, and in a dry climate, they don't get enough moisture just by being in the proximity of wetter things. You don't want too little water or it won't decompose, but you don't want too much, which will make things compact into soggy mess that stinks as it decomposes anaerobically (without air). 

The compost will need to be turned (mixed and fluffed) periodically, and I must admit that I'm not disciplined enough to do it regularly as I should. But my haphazard way seems to be adequate for my needs. The turning is important because it redistributes the nutrients, aerates the mix which may become compacted, and mixes the moist decomposing parts with the dry areas which are not decomposing. It's also a good chance to chop up the parts that have remained too large so that the compost is more even. I have mixed feelings about this, since the mixture of large and small pieces would actually be a good thing. If everything is finely composted, it gives a jolt of nutrient to your garden beds, but like a hit of sugar, it doesn't last long. The larger pieces will contribute to the soil for much longer. After all, isn't this the way that nature does things naturally? But of course a garden is not a natural thing. Turning does take some work. It would be a lot easier if I had two bins. Because then I could just move the compost from one bin to the other and that would be the turning. As you work down the pile, the top of the old pile becomes the bottom of the new pile. As I only have one bin, I have to take all the compost out and then put it back in, which is double the work. I wish KitchenAid would make a 3 cubic foot mixer for this job! Again, each layer gets moistened by a sprinkling of water as I go. If I turn the compost once a month, in about three months, the compost is ready for the garden. Easy, right?

Helleborus x ballardiae ‘Snow Dance’

 

Three and a half years ago I planted three of these Helleborus x ballardiae ‘Snow Dance’. I thought this would be the perfect spot for them under a pine tree, with some morning sun. I chose them because I have been very happy with my H. x ballardiae ‘Pink Frost’. But they all shriveled and disappeared. I wasn’t sure if it was the plant quality from the grower (they didn’t look very healthy), or my care of them, or if I had chosen the spot poorly. The following year, a single tiny leaf appeared from the location of one of the former plants. It survived all year, but there was no growth and no additional leaves appeared. This past spring, that tiny leaf died as another single leaf formed. This one was a bit bigger. I held out hope. All summer I kept an eye on it, but it too stayed the same. This fall a couple more leaves appeared. To my surprise, about a month ago, I noticed that a flower bud had appeared. Now I started getting excited. But with the cold weather, the bud stayed unchanged for weeks. Yesterday, I noticed the bud beginning to loosen, and today it began opening! It should still open up more, but I’m surprised and thrilled that this tiny plant has bloomed. Hellooooo, ‘Snow Dance’!

prunes

 

When the plum tree finally lost all its leaves, I noticed that there were some plums that the birds (and I) had missed that had dried into prunes. I wasn't gutsy enough to try eating them. They were hard as rocks.

Amaryllis gift

 

December 20, 2021

My friend Wayne gave me this "Amaryllis" (Hippeastrum) as a gift. Of course I had to peel off the wax and plastic on bulb and pot it up. I broke off one of the flower stems as I did so, but I think the bulb may actually have been grateful for that, since being water deprived in the wax would have put a lot of stress on the bulb. Still the stem grew amazingly fast and within weeks it bloomed. I love the white blooms with green center. I hope it will grow to bloom again next year. I haven't had much success with growing these types of hippies.

December 5, 2021

Designing for winter

 

When choosing plants for a garden, it's important to choose those that look good together in all seasons. The most important, in cold winter areas at least, is not when the plants are blooming, but in the winter, when the plants remain relatively unchanged for months. If they don't look good in the winter, hat's a long continuous time for the garden to be in doldrums. I'm pretty happy with this combination of form, color and texture, which will hold up until growth starts in the spring and I cut down the previous year's growth. Flower color, which lasts only a few weeks for many perennials, shrubs and trees, is secondary, particularly since they may or may not overlap. That's not to say that flowers are not important. They are what give the garden sparkle and excitement during the growing season. They are, after all, what most people focus on the most in the garden, and orchestrating a succession of harmonious blooms throughout the growing season is a challenge that many of us struggle to obtain. But if only half of the year contains flowers, to get year-round enjoyment from the garden, one needs to spend a proportionate amount of time in considering the non-flowering times. I wouldn't say that half of the design energy needs to go to winter planning. The dormant season has less complexity to consider, as the forms and colors are stable and one doesn't need to account for the succession of blooms. But one does need to account for color, form, texture, size. It's too bad that catalogs and garden books don't usually show the winter color and form of the plants. They typically focus on peak appearance of the bloom and ignore the other 40-50 weeks of the year that the plant is in the garden. So the design of the winter garden must come from one's experience or observation of plant appearance in local gardens. Without that experience, one could, as I did, plant for growing season appearance, balancing bloom time, color, form, plant size, growing conditions, plant needs. Then when winter comes, make adjustments.

Below freezing

 Oh my, the plants look cold today. And taking the photos, I would agree. Time to dash back inside.

Hawthorn

 

My neighbor's hawthorn tree is always covered with colorful fruit all winter. My tree also produced abundant colorful fruit, or rather potentially colorful fruit, since the birds ate every single one as soon as they showed even a bit of color. Even so, I removed Vlad the Impaler, not solely because of lack of winter color, but because of getting the sharp end of the 2" thorns into my scalp on more than one occasion. When I almost got one in the eye, out he came. My neighbor has a thornless version. Maybe the birds don't like the fruit on the thornless ones for some reason.

Streptocarpus ‘Fernwood’s Minuet’

 First bloom on Streptocarpus ‘Fernwood’s Minuet’. Isn’t it a cutie? This is a miniature strep. Like most streps, this one is not fragrant. 

‘Sharifa Asma’ is back

 

December 13, 2021

December 7, 2021

 

Once a rose cutting grows roots, the first burst of shoot growth can be rapid. Here, ‘Sharifa Asma’ gets potted up, a week after the first signs of growth appeared. There is already a good amount of roots. Compare this to the photo from a week ago. Amazing! This is one of the great joys of growing roses. Interestingly, the other cutting in the same pot did not grow any roots at all, although it is still green. I find that this happens quite a bit. When cuttings of the same rose are in separate pots, they seem to root at about the same time. When there are two cuttings in a pot, frequently one fails. I was disappointed with the growing habits of Sharifa when I had her a few years ago, but in the garden of my friend Ginger, she was so beautiful, that I had to try again. 

Streptocarpus ‘Bristol’s Potpourri’

 

Streptocarpus ‘Bristol’s Potpourri’ has put out a few more blooms. I’m amazed at how fast it is growing. When given some direct sunlight ( filtered through the window) the flowers have a piercingly sweet fragrance. 

Trader Joe’s moment of extravagance

 

It’s been a few years since I got a new orchid. The last time I got a new orchid was when I went to an orchid talk with my friend Kevin, pre-pandemic. That one was a tiny baby cattleya in a 2" pot, which was probably at least 5 years away from blooming. I've long admired the "French spot" phalaenopsis, and this one at Trader Joe's called out to me to bring him home.

Last of the Crocus speciosus for the year?

 

‘Ispahan’ in the fall

 

Although I chose 'Ispahan' for the fragrant blooms and likeliness to be adapted to this climate, this fall it has had lovely fall foliage color. 'Ispahan' is said to come from Isfahan, Iran, and as such should do well in this climate which is similar. It has grown well. Some say it comes from a garden in Isfahan in the early 19th century, although I have read some accounts saying that it is a strain that is grown in the area. In the US it seems to be a cultivar, a clone of an original plant, since seed grown plants would be variable.

Lc. Rojo ‘Barbara’

 

Laeliocattleya Rojo 'Barbara'  is an intergeneric hybrid between Cattleya aurantiaca (from Mexico) and Laelia milleri (from Brazil). 'Barbara is a clone that I think was selected by Carter and Holmes orchids (not sure about that, but that's where this one came from). I don't find it to be as vigorous as the ones I remember from my childhood. The flowers are more orange-red than the sealing wax red I remember from Acres of Orchids. And the specimen plants they had on display had umbels of maybe 50 flowers on plants two feet tall. I've had mine for a number of years, and it shows no sign of wanting to get bigger than about 8 inches tall. It's nice, but I'm tempted to try other clones of this cross...if I can find any.

Cotinus coggygria ‘Winecraft Black’

 My baby smoke bush (Cotinus coggygria ‘Winecraft Black’ is new to me this year, and this fall it has turned a glowing red. I don’t know if it will turn this color every fall since it changed color late and this has been a mild and gentle fall. With different weather it might freeze before the leaves turn color. This fall color is just the cherry on top anyway, since I purchased this plant for the summer long deep burgundy leaf color. 

Streptocarpus 'Bristol's Potpourri'

 I got a few baby streptocarpus a month ago for winter entertainment as an alternative to my orchids. These relatives of African violets will bloom throughout the year, but winter is when the blooms will be most appreciated. The first to bloom is 'Bristol's Potpourri' which has a light sweet fragrance. Compared to orchids, these plants are much easier to grow and way, way faster. Instant gratification compared to orchids. I'm talking about my Neostylis Baby Angel, which has yet to bloom and I've had it about 9 years.

Neofinetia falcata ‘Shutenkaku’

 

Neofinetia falcata ‘Shutenkaku’ is an uncommon pink form of the Japanese wind orchid. It has the same luscious fragrance, but is not as floriferous as the wild form plants that I have. I’ve had this plant for about 8 years. I got my first “Neo” about 26 years ago and I still have it, despite a number of cross country moves. 

Phalaenopsis I-Hsin ‘Dream Bubble’

 My orchids are not happy with the new LED grow lights. They are much smaller this year, with fewer flowers. I may have to change the lights back to fluorescent, or try a different brand.

‘Annie Laurie McDowell’

 

I’ve been taking ‘Annie Laurie McDowell’ into the garage at night because she started opening buds just as the temperatures at night started dropping below freezing. I’m also not confident of her hardiness. Her flowers are said to be scented of lilacs. Her early blooms made me think of hyacinths but that’s probably because my limbic system is more oriented to hyacinth than lilac. If I imagine lilac, then it’s lilac.