Emergence

This time a year ago we had already been tree- and shrub-shopping for a month and had begun to realize our plan for restoring a three-dimensional look to the landscape here.  We had removed a lot of overgrown, ill-placed, or trash trees in our first year on this sloping, pie-shaped lot.  The arrival of three fringe trees, three river birches, two dura-birches, three Japanese maples, two ninebarks, three magnolia trees, a black gum tree, a witch hazel tree, three blue spruce bushes, lilacs, hydrangeas, potentillas, a fathergill and a tiger eye sumac all provided joy that quickly mixed with anxiety.

Heat and drought settled in and threatened to kill the water-loving birches.  In mid-July we bought "tree gator" water collars for all the trees and shrubs and brought them back to life within two weeks.  But in October, as a result of constructing a new landing at the front door, we had to dig out and re-pot the tiger eye sumac and hope for the best.  Here is what "best" looks like!

A week of warm days have triggered the emergence of new growth, and I can now plant this tree with confidence.

You might notice a scape forming on the potted daylily to the northeast of the tiger eye sumac.  That is ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN, a new introduction from Karol Emmerich's greenhouse in Minnesota.  Karol did me the favor of sending that plant in March, knowing I wanted the pollen for liberal use in the garden this season.  Had I waited for delivery in late April, I'm fairly sure that Karol would have had to cut the scape to fit the plant into the box.

She had called this daylily one of her best ever.  I remember the pleasure several years ago of buying her "best ever," HEARTBEAT OF HEAVEN.  It cost a bundle, as "best ever" does, and I have never regretted having that beautiful creation in my garden.

I might as well show the other pots in that line.

These arrived last week, and I was not about to plant any of them because we can still have a frost until mid-April.  Dan Trimmer's WAVES OF JOY, another "best ever" plant, is in that line with a scape that will give me pollen in another week or two.  I will let these prize plants bloom in the pots and then plant them in the garden.

All of these arrived from Florida.  I had a large garbage can of recycled Pro Mix BX and just about ran out of it to pot these plants.

More huge boxes arrived this week, and I decided to hold them for planting in buckets of water.  I'm going to put those into the garden starting Monday or Tuesday.  Meanwhile, dozens more will trickle in.

Back near the brick wall you might notice another scape.  Guy Pierce (Floyd Cove Nursery) took pains to preserve that scape on his "best ever" introduction, BLUE WRANGLER.  Chances are, the plant will sustain the scape after planting and there will be a second scape later in the season.

I got my "line-out" beds cleared of weeds last week, applied Preen to fight new weeds, and watered in the Preen.  Then we had a good rain.  The plants and trees have been superbly watered by Mother Nature this year!

This is a line of plants that shows the beauty of dormant foliage as it rises in the spring.  The plants are a seedling of mine from (Tarta x America's Most Wanted) X Michael Miller.

I'm going to collapse this line of plants into a single clump in my keeper bed for use in breeding.  The line-out bed is for possible "futures," and this one didn't make the cut for reasons of floral color.

What color is this?  I call it "oatmeal," though it is some kind of melon blend with scant value in a garden.  However, the plant structure is excellent, and it is the parent of my clearest rose pink seedling, shown below.

I want to make a lot of new crosses on my oatmeal seedling to discover whether it is truly a "doll-maker."

Here's another vigorous dormant plant, a seedling from my VINCERO! X Whatley's DELIBERATE PACE.

My friend, Mary Baker bought this seedling--the entire row of it--to use in the campus landscaping of North Dakota State University.  She plans to register it as BISON VICTORY, and she's letting me keep one plant.  Most of the divisions in this line are increasing just like this.

I have a powerful liking for the appearance of dormant foliage when it emerges in the spring.  My eye goes immediately to these plants because they are ready to provide beauty at the start of the growing season.  Here's a beautiful example of a daylily that makes a great clump, Bart Beck's DUSTY BLUE.

I've never met Bart Beck, but I bought DUSTY BLUE on the Lily Auction several years ago and have been quite impressed with the stature and beauty of the plant when in bloom.  The plant habit is outstanding and the flowers are perfection.  Except....they haven't set pods for me.  No matter; I can use the pollen and get the same results.

Here is the mixed look of an Evergreen daylily emerging in early spring, Jack Carpenter's PATSY CARPENTER.

The older fan that grew foliage last season and into the winter is just behind the plant label.  You can see how the new growth is trying to throw off the "boiled lettuce" look of the leaves that were killed by winter freezing.  The unblemished fan to the left is new growth.  It emerged after the freezing and so is undamaged.

A few days ago our new daffodil collection began to bloom.  I'm glad I got a few pictures because the heavy weather night before last pushed them all down into the mud!  This is Dave Niswonger's beautiful EARLY TO RISE.

In a week or two our small peony collection will come into bloom.  The earliest we grow is named HAWAIIAN CORAL, and it looks fully leafed out today.

We grow one tree peony, which my friend Oscie Whatley ordered for me in 2005 a couple of months before he passed away.  It's named RENKAKU (Flight of Cranes).  Oscie grew that one to perfection and he knew I admired it above all others.  The plant Oscie gave me did not survive the move from University City, so I replaced it last fall from a peony farm in Centre County, Pennsylvania, near my alma mater, Penn State.

There are some new varieties on the market now called Itoh peonies.  They are the result of crossing tree ponies with standard peonies.  They have strong stems and large flowers.  I bought two Itoh peonies at nurseries last spring and watered like crazy during the drought.

This variety is named YUMI (Beauty).  Some shoots are emerging from the ground, just like a standard peony, but some are also emerging from the bottom of last year's stems.  It is a thrill to see these plants renewing themselves.

Although we have more daylilies than any other plant, it's the "other" plants that keep us active as "gardeners."  We enjoy learning about the special needs of Siberian and Japanese Irises, of peonies, butterfly bushes, baptisias, hardy geraniums, hostas, and chrysanthemums.  We grow these plants for the beauty of their forms, their leaves, the butterflies and hummingbirds they attract, their fragrance, and their personalities in the garden.  

Let me go! Turn me loose!

All this long winter I've been pondering the need to de-select daylily seedlings and give myself fewer opportunities or dead ends to think about when the pressure's on and the pollen is fluffy.  I shed about fifty of them in February on the Lily Auction and then the itch to simplify hit me again last night and I put this one up for bidding.

This is seedling 09-21 from Forestlake Ragamuffin x Belle of Ashwood.  When I look at this picture I see the form of Belle of Ashwood combined with the orange toothy edge from Forestlake Ragamuffin.  In fact, it has some edge properties from both parents, and the orange on the edge is intensified.  Unfortunately, I succeeded only in creating a more interesting face than I saw on either parent.  I failed to put this flower on a tall, well-branched scape, though it grows vigorously.

But as interesting as one might find this, I just don't want to find out where this might lead.  I'm not enthusiastic about the possibilities.  Yesterday I heard it sing to me, "Let me go, let me go, let me go, lover."  This morning it sang, "Turn me loose....I'm gonna get a thousand kicks and kiss a thousand chicks, so turn me loose!"  One confirmation of my disinterest in this is the plain fact that I've walked right past it and not grabbed the pollen in the last four seasons.

There's another one in the keeper bed that sings, "lover, come back to me!"

This is 10-74 from Desiree x Belle of Ashwood.  The flower is 5.5", the scape 35" tall.  It's dormant, a mid-season bloomer with 5 branches and 36 buds.  The halo around the throat suggests the potential for breeding a patterned blue eye, something I haven't tried with this one yet.

The color drew me to this one.  It reminds me of a color that might have been fashionable for women's evening wear or the boudoir back in the nightclubbing era of the late 1930s or early 1940s, which I must imagine, as I wasn't around to see these garments first-hand.  I don't mind the brassy edge on the petals, though I certainly would not want to see any more of it.  I would prefer to see a platinum edge or a white one on this color.

Hybridizing is a romantic chase.  Nobody wants to chase all the girls.  You just chase the one or the ones who work their way into your nature and say or do something irresistible.

No Longer Winter...Not Yet Spring

You may ask, "what's so special about a Witch Hazel bush with dead leaves on it?"  I will sing the answer: "Tra-la!  It's alive!!"  We planted it last Spring during the freaky weather, the unseasonable heat and drought that tried to kill all the trees and shrubs we had just put in.  But we discovered "tree gators," the plastic circular reservoirs of water that release water around the base of the plant at the rate of about 15 gallons over about five hours.  We bought them toward the end of July after we saw them in use at the AHS National Convention in Ohio.

Shazam!  All the trees and shrubs went from nearly dead to vital and alive within two weeks.  

We planted this beautiful Witch Hazel to grow into a large color accent when there is virtually no other color on our landscape, placed it where we would see it every time we open the front door, placed it so the front door and stonework would make a "frame" for it.

In front of the stonework on either side of the door is our new daffodil garden, featuring the bold creations of our friend Dave Niswonger from Cape Girardeau.  Dave began hybridizing irises sixty years ago, then got into daffodils, and then got into daylilies.  In the next week or so we'll have some pictures to share on the blog.

We have an old-time tall, blue bearded iris clump in front of the garage.  This one made the move to Missouri from Vermont in 1996, and from University City over to our new place in St. Peters because its tall stems don't need staking.  What would March be without the surge of growth of a weed called Henbit?  There it is amidst the iris clump, and it's coming into flower, which means I've got to pull it right now or see a lot more of it next fall.

Finally, just down the walkway from the irises, the hardy pansies we put in last November are about to spring into active growth.  That daylily in the center of the picture is my red SAN PICKED ME.  It's dormant and it seems to be among the first daylilies to wake up and resume growth.  Sooner or later this bed will be lovingly groomed, but for now, in this time that is no longer winter and not yet spring, I'm waiting with the seasons.

First Trip to the Beauty Parlor

Gertie and Della, the two poodle pups who came into our lives last Thursday, made their debut at Waggers grooming salon this morning.  I picked them up at three o'clock, and Kathy knew we had to grab photos of them before they lose that "just brushed" look.  So here they are, looking somewhat intrigued by the array of strange sounds Kathy made to arrest their jitterbug motion and make they look her way.

Gertie's on the right with the gray lead, G for Gertie, you know; and the smaller Della's on the left with the bright blue lead chosen because it's not pink and not black.

The intelligence of poodles is some kind of wonder.  They already know the phrase, "Kennel up!"  That means it's time for another blissful rest time in your cage.  Last night Gertie walked right in on her own.  Della didn't but she did hang around nearby so that I could nudge her in.  Then, as I reported earlier, I read them more Swamplandia! and heard not a peep nor a whimper, and they slept through the night again until the reasonable hour of 6:30.

Their potty training is short of complete, but we're doing better, and one or both of them appear to realize that if an accident is to be had, it is preferable to have it on the hardwood floor rather than on the oriental rug.  Accidents, however, are on a sharp decline as trips outside are more frequent.

They are thrilled to have been provided with an indoor racetrack for their war games.  They love the long shot from the refrigerator all the way down to the end of the hall at the far end of the house, and the big loop through the living room is almost as much fun as the obstacle evasion course we set up for their enjoyment in the dining room.  We know this course as a table with four chairs and a glass top, but to them it's more of a playground, sometimes with an unexpected cat.

I can't say that I'm getting very much done, other than studying my new kids.

Bedtime Story

Last night was our third night with the poodle pups, Gertie and Della.  We put them into cages at the foot of our sleigh bed, and then I climb into bed and read a bit before turning out my light.  Kathy is a night owl and comes to bed an hour or two later, after the mournful howling has ceased and the dogs are quiet.

It's Della who is the howler.  Gertie seems confident enough about going to bed in a cage.  She may be aware that I'm in the room, or she may not care at that time of night.  But Della, oh, Della!  She feels abandoned when I am out of sight.  I've let her cry herself to sleep the first two nights, but last night some new idea came to mind.

Translation: "Cease from trembling; prepare yourself to live!"  That's a quotation from the fifth movement of Mahler's second symphony.  Several years ago the St. Louis Symphony Chorus sang this.  Our Music Director, David Robertson, stepped in as a last minute replacement for an indisposed guest conductor.  It was Robertson's first-ever performance of the Mahler 2nd, and he led it as if he'd written the piece himself.  During rehearsal, he told us the first line of this quotation is a common Austrian parental comfort phrase to a distressed baby.

So I said, "Hoer' auf zu beben, go to sleep now" the first few times Della was about to launch her epic wailing, and each time she quieted down.  It is not surprising that she has picked up some German even before I began her lessons.  Poodles are smarter than people sometimes.

Then I remembered telling Kathy that puppies are like human babies in the crawling stage.  They must be allowed to explore their environment, but they must be watched with vigilance.  And so it happened that I drew on my experience with babies and decided to read the puppies a bedtime story, and the story at hand was Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.

This is one of the best books I've read.  I could use a sappy word and call it "magical," but that would actually devalue the book, as "magical" is so overused as to induce nausea.  It is also "enchanting" and "spellbinding" and touching.  It is funny and (here comes another terribly overused word in advertising blurbs) "wise."  Whenever I hear a book being described as "wise" I resolve not to read it.

Lately, Swamplandia! has been the book at my bedside, so wherever I was in the story, that's the part I began to read aloud.  Della never even began to wail once I began to fill her environment with the sound of my reading the story.  She began to imagine Ava and the Birdman putting in at Stiltsville, and Ava's brother, Kiwi, trying to get the hang of a placement exam from hell for a night school G.E.D. class at the Community College.  She wondered if Ava's sixteen-year-old sister Ossie was dead or alive with the ghost she had eloped with.  And she was fascinated about the red foot-long baby Seth, a mutant alligator Ava carried as a pet in a wooden box, Ava being a Seth-wrestler, even at her tender age, at Swamplandia!

Here is a photo of the author who comforted my Della and Gertie last night, Karen Russell:

Thank you, Karen, for such imaginative, funny, brilliant writing.  Thank you from me, from Della, and from Gertie the two poodles in a new home.  I hope things come out well for Ava, Ossie, and Kiwi.  Gertie and Della hope so, too!

Gertie and Della

Keb and I are parents.

 Thursday we drove to Little Rock to meet two standard poodle pups, female, aged sixteen weeks.  They were bred at a kennel named Renowned Poodles, located within a bird sanctuary 15 miles west of town in the mountain wilds.  Getting non-blurred pictures of puppies is a challenge!  Here they are in a typical "jump up and kiss me!" attitude with Kathy.  She was about to decide that the smaller one on the right is Della Street and the stockier one on the left is Gertrude Lade.  Their mother is the white dog on the left.  The dad isn't black, either.  The girls show their parti-color heritage with little white patches and a white toenail here and there.

Friday morning we returned to the kennel to pick up the girls and bring them back here.  They traveled well, with Gertie taking constant interest in the potential to jump up front and see better while Della hunkered down and bided her time.

We chose these names because of our enjoyment of the Perry Mason TV series.  We've been collecting DVDs of that series and have eight of its nine years on hand.  Della Street is Perry's legal secretary.  Gertie is the receptionist in the outer office.

Kathy had ordered crates for the puppies so that they could sleep in our bedroom without getting into the million varieties of puppy trouble while we slept.  Puppies of all varieties take lots of attention and vigilance, but poodles distinguish themselves by a trickster trait.  They are so smart they need to invent games that involve blitz-theft.

 There's Della yesterday afternoon during a 30-minute free play time in which I served as the Watcher and Alpha Male, barking "OFF!" whenever I saw tooth-testing of rugs, leather furniture, and the many house plants in the area.  Della is testing the tensile strength of a Christmas cactus with a view to carrying off a piece to nibble on.  Behind her on the hearth is a little arrangement of stones and driftwood found on the Oregon shore years ago.  That is now up on the mantle, as the pieces of wood seemed great chew toys for a few seconds.  OFF!

We bought two litter mates so they would have a familiar companion before meeting our two cats and possibly freaking out.  Here they go into Kathy's office to explore all the old dog smells on the rug she brought here from West Plains when we combined households and lives four years ago.

The kitchen is proving to be a very interesting place.  The door they use to go in and out is there.  Their food and water is there.  Even more interesting, there are dish towels, hand towels, and many counters at a good height for thievery.  Gertie-with-the-big-white-patch is measuring the distance to my banana peel this morning.  Too far, alas!  OFF!

This is Della, smaller of build, with a smaller white patch, looking for another fun opportunity.

This is Gertie, trying out her "who, me?" expression after a minor transgression, such as testing the dining room seat cushions for chewability.  We've given them chew toys, which are the hit of the party, briefly, until other things come to mind.

Neither likes the nose leads we use instead of "choker chains" or leather collars.  After two days of trying to rub them off while we go "walkies," they are figuring out that heeling in the perfect position results in no bothersome tension on the loop around the snout.  They are adapting to what feels best, and I am heaping praise on them in my baritenor range, "GOOD GIRL!"

I am sure they will easily learn the Latin names of all our plants in the coming months.

Yuletide Work in the Daylily Database

Fierce winds and horizontal snow defined yesterday and gave what I hope is the promise of some real winter cold in the offing.  There's not even enough snow on the ground to hide the grass, but the wind chill is something else.  I want to see truly dead foliage on all the daylilies, no exceptions and no excuses.

I've begun the work of continuous running through of my photo-enriched database to try to come to grips with a game plan for the pollen-dabbing in the summer.  The down side of having too many keepers is that each one expects me to imagine a couple of smart crosses to improve the turkey, or latent babe, as the case may be.

Here's what my database screen looks like.  I built it with FilemakerPro a few years ago.  It has three places for pictures and two windows where I can write the pollens I want to bring to a daylily and the daylilies I want to take this one's pollen to.  This seedling 07-153 on some days is white with a blue eye, and the plant is Dormant, but not pod-fertile, so I'm about to erase the names of pollens I want to bring to this one.  I want to use this a lot, so I'm going to consider carefully the crosses that might yield tall, large flowers with clear backgrounds and blue patterned eyes.

This coming year has to be one of heavy purging after serious early evening evaluation.  I can become too easily encouraged by pictures I take before 8 am, before a day of sun has revealed flaws in substance and color.

I got a good handle on plant habit, rapidity of increase, and hardiness last March when I ventured to confirm the foliage classification of my whole collection as well as my keepers.  I need to do another check of plant vigor before the foliage is up in 2013 because everything has been in place undisturbed since May of 2011.  Anything that seemed a slacker last spring had better show better growth three months from now, or show cause why it should not receive a disposal flag.  Here's one I know I must discard:

It's one of several beautiful keepers from SHERRY LANE CARR X SASSY SALLY.  All the flowers in the cross are "melon blends" with quasi-oatmeal tones.  All have nice yellow ruffles, green throats, and plant vigor.  All are too short to care about, and none have the good scape I hoped would come from SHERRY LANE CARR.  I could make more crosses to try to improve these in the next generation, but I could do as well or better by starting over again with different parents.  In fact, I have much better yellows and blends from other crosses already made.  

This cross was an attempt to do better than either parent, but only the flowers of the kids are interesting.  Their presentation is a disappointment.  I've got to dig these keepers out and work on something else.

Now I'll show a few keepers I will keep working with.  This lovely flower is a result of using WYOMING WILDFIRE to correct the opening flaw of MAPLE HUES.  I did correct that flaw, and I got a dandy flower, but the scape is shorter than either parent and the flower is extremely reluctant to set a pod.

I'm going to take this pollen to my collection of orange flowers with red centers and edges.

Here's another I like, and will take here and there to see what will come of it.

This is the result of trying to improve a favorite seedling (BEST KEPT SECRET X ROSE IMPACT) by crossing it with GREAT WHITE.  My favorite seedling very often imparts its form, as it did here.  GREAT WHITE gave this seedling a well-branched scape.  But I want to see more height, and want to overcome this flower's habit of beginning to decay in mid-afternoon, and I want to see fewer flowers open at once.  I've got a nice keeper from attempting those reforms through a cross with SHANTIH.  Now I want to cross this one with some others and see if I can retain the clear rose pink coloration.

There are several things I do not want to work on, much less achieve.  Among them is an increase in the already Rococo look of attention-grabbing yellow edges on convoluted petal surfaces.  I know, I know, some people like that look...it's well beyond the metaphor of "full-figured" and even "Overfull-figured."  Metaphors engaging the mind in memories of skin mag models and soft porn are avoidable, but not very, as we're conditioned to spicing our talk of flowers with words like "mighty," "husky," "feminine," and "voluptuous."  And, may I add, without a libido, where would we be?

So, these somewhat excessive flowers exist, and I am a garden judge, and my job is not to criticize the taste of such creations but to take them for what they are and find the ways to discern merit and demerit.

One other thing I am not working on is "fringe."  But this seedling came along a couple of years ago, and I saved it to see if I could make anything good happen with it.  I call it my "Shaggy Dog."

The cross is HEARTBEAT OF HEAVEN X ((BUTTER CREAM X VICTORIAN LACE) X J. T. DAVIS).  The pollen parent was a craggy-edged cream seedling with a big flower and lousy substance.  I knew I would have to compost it, but thought I'd see if anything good might come of it anyway.  The smoothly-ruffled edge of HEARTBEAT OF HEAVEN came though with rough, shaggy stuff in this mongrel.  The color is poor, the substance is poor, the scape is poor, and it won't set pods.  I believe the odds are against generating success from such a monster, but God gave it to me and I have to see what it will do.

I'm still a disciple of Oscie Whatley.  I like size, vibrant color, and a great healthy plant.  Unlike Oscie, I like patterns and want to fool with them.  But I can't fool with all of them in my keeper bed, so I'm going to have to cull and "add value by subtracting."  Wish me luck.