The Fall Garden

This morning is misty and the grass is still wet at 10:30.  We might see the sun sometime in the mid-afternoon and we might try to do more garden grooming.  I got restless and went out anyway to take some pictures of what's interesting in the garden now.

This is a hardy geranium named Rozanne, growing next to Russian Sage in one of the berms that define the two corners of our pie-shaped lot.  We believe in using multiple plants of the same variety when planting a large feature like a berm.  Rozanne has grown well this summer, and some plants have increased to over a two-foot spread, such as the one down the line in the same berm (below).

In May of 2011 we planted three Redbud "Forest Pansy" trees in this berm.  A year later we watched them snap off, one by one, from the force of wind gusts.  Thinking the bad luck was a fluke, we replaced the first casualty with another single-stem Redbud.  When the second one broke a couple of weeks later, we replaced it with a shorter, multi-stem Redbud.  And then when the third went down we decided not to replace it.  Clearly, the location is too exposed to strong winds.  Before I got around to removing the stump, suckers sprouted in a beautiful fountain shape, providing us with a "replacement" multi-stem tree, which will stay there just like that.

The exceptional heat stress this summer, together with a growing season that began with warm weather three weeks earlier than usual, subjected our daylilies to a climate like the Deep South.  They have seemed to grow more powerfully because of the amount of warm weather, but they have also suffered the random yellowing and death that is common in Houston, but seldom seen here.  I'm afraid I'm going to lose this new plant of Steve Moldovan's LOVE AND MARRIAGE.  It has the telltale appearance of a daylily that is sick and rotting above the crown.  I'm seeing this in four or five of my seedlings and in four or five other named varieties in a collection of about 900 varieties.

The varied response to multiple weather shocks is something I have not seen in twenty years of collecting daylilies.  Here's an interesting contrast in response.  I bought new plants of converted diploids in the spring and planted them next to each other.  The picture below shows the robust growth of Tet. CRYSTAL BLUE PERSUASION, which responded to the weather shocks by not flowering at all.  If you look on the ground to the right of this plant, you may see a very small fan emerging from a badly damaged crown of Tet. OUT OF THE BLUE, which flowered and then disintegrated.

The tiny regenerated fan is near the right edge of the picture above.  I moved about 3" of mulch out of the way so the little fan could feed on sunlight to the max.  Here's a picture of the sprout:

A few days ago, this fan was barely visible.  It's growing rapidly now; but if the crown tissue is rotting, the fan will lose its life-support system.  If the fan does not die from rot, the open question is whether it will have the cell mass necessary to withstand the multiple freezes of our winter.

We seem to have two kinds of Butterfly Bush in the back yard.  This taller one needed to be staked a couple of weeks ago when powerful winds just about uprooted it.

It is a nice presence in the large open space of the yard, but I wouldn't want it to grow any bigger.  In the adjacent bed we have a more squat variety that I also like very much.

I think I prefer the shape and size of this one better.  Off to the left of these beds is the area of Kathy's raised beds, which she has planted in cool-weather crops in the past two weeks.

The photo below is entitled "Give Peas a Chance," that's all we are saying about it.

Kathy tells me these are Snow Peas for our stir-fry dinners.  She has mapped each bed so she can tell what to call the sprout-du-jour.  These below look to be beets.

The earlier planting in Bed 1 is now up several inches beneath a porous garden cover.  Snap beans galore!

And at the other end of Bed 1, "shell peas."

Finally, in bloom today in one of the seedling beds, is 12-25 Wren's Song X Heir to the Throne.  It's good to know that it shows the blotches from all the mist in the air today.  That will be something to watch for next season.  It's one of many potential deal-killers in evaluating seedlings.  But for now, it's one of just a handful of daylilies in bloom at the end of September, and it's pretty.

Who is Ruliff?

My son Ben took his wife Beth on a delayed honeymoon to Ireland two weeks ago.  In preparation for that, he asked me for details about the Irish side of the family, which would be my mother's grandmother Sheerin, who came to America from Dublin.  

During many of my father's retirement years, my mother worked as his typist on a massive Bouman family history.  She never learned to use a word processor and never owned a computer, which is a shame!  What she had was an IBM memory typewriter with 50 pages of memory.  There were many occasions when Mom had to redo large sections of Dad's book because he'd decided to format a page differently, or he wasn't happy with some aspect of the narrative, or he had to insert a section.  I doubt this was ever a labor of love for her.  More likely, it was a labor of duty which evolved into a labor of hellish feelings of oppression and resentment.

When the duty was done, my sister Chris asked Mom why the only genealogy we had was the Bouman family's.  What about her side, the Feasters?  This gave Mom something personally fulfilling to do, and she had a great time contacting her relatives and even discovering cousins she'd never heard about.  They had somehow fallen from favor and "were not spoken about."

In 1998 I had the task of taking Mom's research notes and putting them into a computer database called Family Treemaker.  I printed out my work and she hand-corrected the drafts.

Ben's question to me a few weeks ago sent me back into material I hadn't looked at in fourteen years.   (There is a lot more on the internet regarding family histories than there was fourteen years ago!)  The point of fascination for me was the most distant relative Mom had traced, a farm laborer in Cape May Courthouse, New Jersey variously named Rulof, Rulla, or Ruluf Feaster in the scant archival records.  The family had oral lore to hand down, but just like the phonetic spellings of his name, it was often inconsistent or just hearsay.

And the family name Feaster?  That seems to have been an Americanized "Pfister," changed by Swiss immigrants to Pennsylvania in the mid-eighteenth century.  It's a common enough name that sorting out "our" Feasters from anyone else's is a thorny problem.   

"Our" Feasters were in the environs of Cape May Courthouse, New Jersey from the 1820s onward.  My grandfather was born there, but moved with my great-great-grandfather into central New Jersey -- Jacobstown and New Egypt -- at the end of the 19th century.

If "our" Feasters were in Cape May, were other Feasters living there, too?  One must assume that rural people tend to stay in their home area.  Did my great-great-grandfather "Rulof" have brothers who lived in Cape May, or was he the only male?  Did he have several Feaster uncles in Cape May, and did any of them also have male children named Ruliff or Rulauth?

That's the puzzle I can't solve.  The gravestone at the top of this post is purportedly that of my great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandmother.  It looks too clean to date back to Ruliff's death in 1893.  I wonder if one or more of their eleven children chipped in at some point to give their parents' grave a more dignified marker.  I just obtained that picture a week ago.  I just learned his name was Ruliff, not Rulof or Rulla.

Were his children certain that he was born in 1820, though?  I know of only two scraps of information pertaining to that question.  The 1850 census lists a Rulauth and Ellen Feaster and gives his age as 26 (born 1824).  Our family lore says he was married to an "Elener" before he married Elizabeth Grace.  There an 1849 birth record for Richard C. Feaster, son of "Ruluf and Elener"  The 1850 census has a "Rulauth and Ellen" with children born in 1847, 1848, and 1850.  Richard isn't on the list, but he fits the pattern of one child every year.  Chester family history says "Elener" is Eleanor Chester, died 1856.  Ruliff was suddenly alone in 1856 with four young children, assuming Eleanor had no more children after 1850.  If the pattern held true, though, Ruliff could have had eight or nine children, or ten, when Eleanor died in 1856.  What happened to them all?

The 1860 census lists "Rolla" Feaster and wife Elizabeth with 2 of their own children and Richard, age 11.  My great-great-grandfather, John Grace Feaster is on that list as a three-year-old.  This "Rolla" is certainly my great-great-grandfather, then.  If this "Rolla" is the same man as "Rulof," the father of Richard and former husband of "Elener," then he married Elizabeth and started another family very shortly after Eleanor's death.  His occupation was "farm laborer."  It's conjecture that he sent the four or more  young kids to live with relatives and retrieved Richard after his marriage to Elizabeth Grace.  The 1860 census also gives Ruliff's age as 33 (born 1827).

One or more of the children of Ruliff and Elizabeth bought that grave marker that gives his birth year as 1820.  Neither of the two census documents supports that year.  

Fog.  My family tree is built of foggy pieces.  The closer you look at them, the less "factual" they appear.  My great-great-grandfather is in that fog, but he surely wasn't born in 3 different years in Cape May.  I need a nap.

Holmes, Holmes on the Range

I've known Mike and Sandy Holmes via email since early in 2011, when I got involved in testing and working on the help desk for the AHS Membership Portal, a participatory web site for daylily lovers who are members of the American Hemerocallis Society.  Mike and Sandy were the keystones, if there can be more than one, on the design and technical side of the project.

Yawn, I hear you say, so here's a picture to get things rolling.  This daylily is numbered C860.  I saw it in the Holmes garden on July 12 during an added day of garden touring in the Dayton area before the AHS Convention kicked off in Columbus.  Mike and Sandy are both fine hybridizers, and I wish I could say which one of them created this beautiful seedling which was marked in the garden for awards judges' consideration for the Junior Citation Award.

The J.C. award is reserved for distinctive seedlings of exceptional merit in every observable regard.  It requires the vote of ten awards judges, who are advised in the voting rules to "walk on by" and stop evaluating if they can't say why the seedling is distinctive, meaning something that represents an advance in hybridizing daylilies.

It's not just the color, form, or pattern on the flower.  There may be distinction in the health of the plant's foliage, in the spacing and number of branches on the stem, on the apparent rate of increase, or on the "floral presentation," which is what got my eye when I took this picture.  Three flowers open in the same visual plane without crushing each other.  Good color retention on a hot day after lunch.  

I'm sure that more than ten judges saw that seedling on the day I was there, so it will be interesting to see if it pulls in the votes.  There were other fine seedlings up for J.C. votes in the Holmes garden as well as in the Polston garden earlier in the day, so we judges had a lot to remember and consider, not to mention the seedlings we see in our own regions.

Here's a look at Mike and Sandy's "plantation" as I stepped off the tour bus.

An even larger area to the left of this picture is planted even more densely with named varieties and thousands of their seedlings.  I envy photographers who are able to position themselves instinctively to get the front of people rather than the back.  I hardly ever do!  That's Keb (my wife Kathy) on the far left side of the picture in the orange top.  I can tell by her posture that she is on a mission to see as many examples as possible of the sort of daylily she started hybridizing this summer...large open forms with great color on tall scapes.

I stoped to admire the color on "C1485" and noted that it blooms in a way that gives me multiple perspectives on the form of the flower.

The one below was labeled "SD156 Best," so I suppose SD156 was the number assigned to a particular cross, and "best" means this one is the pick of the litter.  I confess I wanted to grow every marked seedling, but I doubt every one will make it to registration.  They've got so many winners here that they can be very picky.

Here's some "landscaping" to provide a break from optic overload.

I wish there had been time to savor the details of this, but there were too many good daylilies to see, and I barely scratched the surface before the bus captain blew the departure whistle.  I did happen to notice, back under a shade tree, my friend David Kirchhoff, who was offering refreshments to the visitors.  Susan Okrasinsky took this picture of David and me as he pointed to where I had to go immediately and see "the blue daylily," PIGMENT OF THE IMAGINATION by Ohio hybridizer, Richard Norris.

Here is Richard's astounding flower.  It changes color during the day, but I think I saw it at the maximum illusory moment of "blue."

Mike and Sandy sell their registered daylilies, and the garden had signs in front of what was available.  Here's IMPRESSIONIST SKY.

Here's SORCERER'S MASQUERADE.  You can see how the exceptional Midwest draught has burned the foliage on some of these plants.  I imagine untold thousands of gallons of irrigation water have been lavished on these beds to help the plants bring their seed pods to maturity as well as keep the garden attractive for visitors.

Smiles wherever you look.  Here's a tree of bottles to go with bottle bushes.  In the background, the bus is waiting, and I'm late!  Thanks Sandy and Mike!

Miracles of Water

Blooming beautifully in my garden today is Larry Grace's ANGELS GATHER AROUND.  This cultivar miraculously was internally timed to be unaffected by the shocks of a long, early spring with a hard freeze chaser in mid-April.

Angels have surely gathered around some of our new trees and shrubs, and they are all named "Treegator Junior."  We saw the "senior" style of Treegator around trees in Ohio two weeks ago during the AHS National Convention.  Didn't know the name of them, but looked up various watering devices in the online catalog of Hummert International and found them.

On Monday of last week I drove to Hummert's and bought two packs of ten at about $158 per pack.  If you buy them individually on Amazon, they run over $21 apiece.  The Junior version holds 15 gallons of water and releases it through two small valves on the under side over a period of five or six hours.  You fill each one with a garden hose.  Kathy set them around twenty shrubs that were in danger of being grown this year as "annuals," and she worked out a system to fill all of them within an hour.  That is quite a feat of planning.

All the green you see on Weigela "Wine and Roses" appeared on this shrub in the past few days, as did the flowers.  All the green on the Feathergill below appeared in the past few days.

This Tiger Eye Sumac has not looked this good since I planted it one sweaty day at the end of March.

Most in need of abundant water are our new River Birches.  Look at how the grass near the Treegators responded to all that water.

The surrounding front lawn as been baked hard.

After any normal rain, this cracked area is the bottom of a puddle.  The ground in front drains very poorly, and the low spots look like I should be raising water buffalo after a fall storm.

This greener part of the front lawn benefits from my sprinkler, which has been watering the daylily beds with regularity.  This morning in sub-90 temperatures I finished weeding, edging, and mulching this bed with a three-inch layer of leaf mold and a sprinkling of Preen to keep new weeds to a minimum.  I'd never used Preen before this year, and I don't imagine I'll ever garden without it, now that I've seen what a difference it makes.

Cutting Edge Daylilies From Pleasant Valley Gardens

For years and years I have seen the name "Polston" on gorgeous daylilies in tour gardens here in Missouri, and in Kansas and Oklahoma -- "Region 11" of the American Hemerocallis Society.  I learned that Tom Polston was one of the noteworthy breeders of daylilies in Ohio, but until last week I didn't know that he and Doug Sterling also breed Cyldesdale horses.

This is the only Tom Polston daylily I grow currently, DRAGON EMPRESS, photographed in my own garden this year on June 24.  It's a fine example of one of his major breeding goals, which is to put the voluptuous form the deep-south breeders are known for onto hardy northern plants.

Tom is probably better-known these days for his daylilies with toothy edges.  I think the dragon sculpture near his seedling beds is meant to affirm that.

We saw his garden a week ago Thursday as part of an extra day of touring at the National Convention of AHS - the American Hemerocallis Society.  All the official tour gardens were in the vicinity of Columbus, where the convention took place.  The bonus day of touring took us southwest to the Dayton area.

I wonder if the metal daylily sculpture at the top of this blog was inspired by this seedling:

There were a lot of seedlings like this.  Tom had stuck blue flags in the soil next to the ones he will dig out and save for further evaluation.    I became absorbed in trying to follow his thinking as I compared the flagged ones with the unflagged.

I surmised that he is outcrossing his lines with the best toothy daylilies by other breeders.  Here is Jamie Gossard's HEAVENLY BOMB SHELL.

This is Karol Emmerich's GNASHING OF TEETH:

Here is LARRY'S OBSESSION by Ted Petit:

The seedling below was prominently displayed "under number:" 12-JTP-111T.  I'm guessing JTP is Joel Thomas Polston and that the letter T at the end designates Tetraploid genetics as opposed to Diploid, terms that only hybridizers need know about.  The fact that one daylily may have four sets of chromosomes (tetraploid) rather than two has nothing to do with whether you'd enjoy the look of the plant in your garden.

I stopped several times to look at seedlings without flags that seemed to have clearer color than more toothy seedlings with flags.  A wild guess makes me think this is from a cross involving something of Karol Emmerich's, many of which have amazing frosty edges.  I imagine this wasn't flagged for several reasons: (1) it looks like somebody else's work; (2) it doesn't have the dramatic edge the flagged ones exhibit; and/or (3) it's low-growing.

The flagged keeper below has that "southern belle" look on a northern-hardy plant.  I love the powdered salmon bisque pink color, the sculpting coming out of the lemon creme throat, and the bubbly ruffled edge.  

With thousands of daylilies calling for attention, a guy can go on optic overload fast, so after my inspection of the new keepers, I savored the landscaping around the other side of the 1848 house.

This side of the house is about beauty.  Shade is welcome on this side, and so is flowing water.  As you approach the addition to the house, you notice features of the private life (the public life is on the other side where sun in full strength feeds the daylilies).  Here in the private area is a small Japanese feature such as I'd like to put in my own back yard.  Here it is placed in perfect balance with everything else.

Up close to the addition is a really nice sculpture and water feature situated with outstanding variety and harmony.  The gentleness of this garden adds dimension to our sense of the hybridizer who is pursuing an interest in the big, bold, and jagged.

I probably spent more time in this tranquil zone than out in the blaze of color and the riot of teeth, or maybe I didn't.  I fed my mind on the sunny side and my soul here in the shade.  We all probably wished for more time at Pleasant Valley Gardens.  As it was, I never went to look at the Clydesdales close up!

As Tom bid us goodbye, I wished I'd stopped taking so many pictures and gone up to tell him how much I enjoy DRAGON EMPRESS.  There will be more of his daylilies in my garden next year.

Majestic Struggle With Draught

Last Thursday morning following a sublime visit to Bob Faulkner's garden, our bus took us to Jeff and Karen Pansing's Majestic Gardens.  The Pansings live on a "century farm," six generations in one place, and it's a beautiful place to live and raise a family and grow pumpkins and mums and daylilies.  Here is one of their pictures of the huge daylily plantation in full bloom in an average year.

Back almost twenty years ago, when I was first ordering daylily catalogs and building my garden, the Majestic Farms catalog was one that I pondered and memorized.  I knew this was a big operation, so the chance to see a farm that helped form my consciousness of daylilies loomed large in my imagination.

The bus pulled into their property, Jeff came aboard to welcome us, and we heard about his three irrigation wells and fifty thousand gallons of water per day not being any match for the draught.  I looked outside and saw his pile of pots for the mum trade.  It's hard to imagine the hours of potting that go into making a business of mums.

We walked just a little ways to the left of this scene and entered a tranquil yard that looked out onto the daylily fields.

As I snapped this picture I could hear the goats in their pen.  I turned to look at them again and saw my friend, the hybridizer Margo Reed, saying hello.  I include this picture of her with her permission.

Animals or statues of animals made for a lot of small delights at this convention.  To the right of this scene is the door into the Pansing daylily greenhouse.  I looked in there and saw a concentration of seed pods such as I've never begun to see in my own garden.

Jeff said it had been a real struggle to keep the temperature down to a safe level.  Fortunately for us tourists, this was not a scorching day.  The shade of the yard was calming.  The unrelenting sun awaited anyone who walked the rows of the daylily garden.  But that's why we came here, so walk we did.

The peak of bloom season was past, that was clear, and the water had been rationed to keep the nearest beds, the ones with seedling crops, watered adequately.

These plants were doing well, and the blooms were full-sized and colorful.  There was actually a lot to see.

The gardens were meticulously weeded and mulched, and we could walk several long rows and never think of the terrible dryness and heat that is crushing Midwest agriculture right now.

But not too far out, I found the line of demarcation between what had been watered for our visit and what had been sacrificed.  It is hard to gauge the economic impact of a draught on a daylily business like this.  Much of the business is conducted in May, when the rains are greening up the plants.  There are virtually no sales or mail-order in the month of July.  Even in the North Country, zone 4, people generally stop buying garden plants on the fourth of July.  This row of MINNIE PEARL is likely to come back to life toward the end of summer.  Right now, though, it's a sight to make you sympathize with farm families everywhere.

You can see some green in there, some remaining sign of life.  I took this picture because I remembered seeing MINNIE PEARL at the 2000 National Convention in the Delaware Valley area, in the garden of Stu Morton.  I don't think I'd ever seen such a perfect clump.  Most of the convention-goers agreed with me, because that daylily won the President's Cup for best cultivar at the convention.  Here's what I saw that day twelve years ago.  Here's what MINNIE PEARL can do when it has good soil and good water.