Six on Saturday: Opportunities for Change

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  Our first roses bloomed this week within their protective scaffolding of last summer’s Lantana stems.

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After decades of collecting roses, mainly heirloom roses, I began ordering roses for our new garden back in 2010. I scoped out those sunny spots where roses would thrive and planted them with hope and a generous helping of Rose-Tone. It didn’t take long to understand that rose buds are really deer candy, tasty treats to be nibbled in pre-dawn hours. Our few roses that have survived either climbed high up into surrounding shrubs, or found a safe haven in the tangle of sharp, woody Lantana stems.

As we started clearing out the old Lantana stems last week, we noticed that there were rose buds hidden in the mess. We discovered this trick last year, leaving the Lantana standing way too late into the season, and enjoyed flowers from this rose for the first time in several years.

This lovely old rose continues to bloom year after year even without any special spraying or pruning. I gave up spraying the roses when we certified the garden as a wildlife habitat. It seemed at the time that providing a safe place for birds to nest and raise their young was perhaps more important than our enjoyment of a few weeks of roses. But the roses keep coming so long as they remain out of reach of the deer, even if their leaves are a bit marked with black spot. David Austin Roses keeps sending their catalog every winter and I still enjoy reading it and surveying the new introductions each year. But there will be no new roses planted here.

Strawberry begonia blooms alongside Violas that survived the winter. This week I added a few Caladium tubers to this container.

Opportunities for change invite us to widen our perspective, and maybe to grow a bit, or maybe to retreat. Like pruning a shrub, retreating may just allow growth in a different direction. I only know that when I was studying such things years ago, the ability to adapt and change was always listed as a sign of intelligence in creatures of all sorts. But especially in people.

This has been the week for us to enjoy roses, blooming foxglove, Iris, Clematis, Aquilegia, and even the tiny Saxifraga stolonifera, strawberry begonias that I love so much. Late April and early May bring us so many flowers blooming all at once. There are still a few daffodils in bloom and the ferns are still unfolding. I’m getting a sense of which perennials will perform well this year and which may not. My battle against the goldenrod is well-underway as I pull every stem I see coming up close enough to crowd out something else that I want to grow.

It turned hot this week. Hot enough to be uncomfortable working outside and run the air conditioning indoors. It was time to plant out the Caladiums and begin bringing out more potted plants. With less than 3″ of rain throughout April, this may be a warning of what is to come in the next 5 or 6 months. We know now that April broke another record for heat, the hottest April on record globally. We had some appreciated cool stretches here, but certainly not enough consistent rain. What happened to ‘April showers…’?

This week I finally wrote for our MG website about what to do in the garden in May and June, what to do less, and what to avoid doing; and wrote a lot about watering in that article. We can lose our investment in garden plants if we don’t keep them irrigated. And we use thousands of gallons of water to irrigate ornamentals when it is hot and dry. We’re coming into a time when we have to consider that equation, and whether we should be using fresh water to keep our flowers in bloom, and what we might plant that can thrive on nature’s watering without our intervention.

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  Ferns in planters bring a bit more interest to this spot of dry shade under the mountain laurel thicket. Following are close ups of some of the planters featuring mostly Athyriums and Adiantum x mairisii.

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Needless to say, we are already watering the garden every few days this spring. Especially the new ferns, and they are rewarding us with beautiful new growth. Once they establish their roots, I expect them to be fine without the extra attention, and to also help hold and channel the rain, when it comes, so it sinks in to the earth instead of running off to the creek. Ferns are great to check erosion.

I’ve wanted ferns to grow under our patch of mountain laurel shrubs for many years. And experiments with planting a few near this dry, shady area have been underwhelming. It’s impossible to even excavate planting holes near the shrubs because of their extensive, shallow roots. So we will see how the ferns perform in containers instead of in the ground. Two of the containers feature maidenhair ferns, Adiantum x mairisii, and two feature eared lady ferns, Athyrium otophorum. Each planter is filled out with some of the sporeling ferns I’ve been growing on for the past few years. This batch was mostly hybrids of Japanese painted ferns, Athyrium niponicum var. ‘Pictum.’ There were a couple of tiny Dryopteris and Polystichum mixed in, and we will see how they do as they develop.

Maybe with good soil and no competition from the trees, these little ferns will thrive in this spot. We’ll see as the summer progresses. An A. otophorum planted nearby last spring was eaten mid-summer, but has returned with new leaves this year. Ditto for some of the Christmas ferns and an autumn fern. We’ll see whether they can survive the wildlife this year.

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  We are enjoying foxglove, Irises, and still a few daffodils this week. Most of the Azaleas are finished but the mountain laurel is in full, beautiful bloom.

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The challenges and rewards of this garden keep shifting my perspective away from ‘what is pretty’ to ‘what will serve.’ I used to collect plants mainly to watch them grow and to round out my collections. That impulse no longer serves reality on so many levels. Now, I’m delighted with what survives, what grows, and with those plants that enhance the ecosystem of this site. It looks a bit messy and a bit rough these days, but it is a fascinating experiment to watch develop over time.

Critter count this week: Our first molting cicada, two rabbits, several skinks or lizards, a baby turtle, too many squirrels, dozens of songbirds, bees, a few small butterflies, and something small and grey that went skittering past my feet so fast before dawn that I still can’t decide what it was. Maybe a vole?

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  The garden on Saturday morning just after sunrise. The tree in bloom is scarlet buckeye. The second photo is the first cicada we have found this spring.

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With appreciation to Jim Stephens of Garden Ruminations, who

hosts Six on Saturday each week.

Early Summer: To Do, To Do Less, and To Avoid (JCCWMG.ORG)