On The Verge

I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large Garden.
~Abraham Cowley, The Garden, 1666

A bit of lawn can be nice to have. It’s soft to rassle on, restful to look at, but it takes a lot of mowing, edging, water and fertilizer to maintain, especially if you just gotta have it like a putting green. Do you want to put in a garden and reduce the amount of lawn you currently have? Maybe you want to get rid of all your lawn or just whittle it down to a little patch surrounded by more garden, or put a perennial bed smack in the middle of it. Do you have big dreams but the back breaking thought of digging up all that tough turf has smothered your dream for years? Well un-smother that dream and smother your grass instead! You don’t have to do ANY turf digging. Here’s how.

First, figure out where you want the new garden space to be. Outline it with stakes and twine or simply lay out your garden hose in a square or a nice curvy pattern till you get the size and shape you want. If you do a curved line and the garden will be bordering grass, be sure not to make the shape too tightly curved. The example in the photo is too tight. Keep in mind you’ll be mowing and mowers don’t like tight curves, nor do most edging materials.

Next, figure out how much soil/compost you’ll need to smother the grass. Buying it in bags is fine if you’re doing a small plot. But for larger plans getting a cubic yard or more delivered may make more sense. One cubic yard = 27 cubic feet. Delivery companies can help you with the square foot calculations if need be. Some companies have delivery minimums, so if you don’t need 3 yards but that’s their minimum, ask around, maybe a neighbor with gardening aspirations will go in halfsies with you. Most soil and compost delivery companies have specific mixes depending on your project. If you’ll be growing food in the bed, definitely shop around till you find a certified organic source. For vegetables a light mix of compost, sandy loam and sand is great (often called a three-way mix). For ornamental plants and trees, a 50/50 mix of compost and sand is perfect (often called two-way topsoil).

If you want a raised bed you can simply pile 12 inches or more of the soil/compost right over the turf. The thicker the better. If the layer is too thin, any of that grass poking through will grow. If you don’t want to buy that much soil/compost or don’t want it to be raised you can put 1 layer of cardboard (get those boxes out of your recycle bin) or 3-4 sheets thick of layered newspaper down first. Next, put 4-6 inches of soil/compost on top of the cardboard/newspaper layer. Be sure to cover everything, even the edges where grass blades poke out. It will take a few months for the cardboard to decompose enough to be able to dig through it. Years ago I used the cardboard method in my backyard to cover my grass in July and by late September most of it was soft enough to dig holes in to plant trees and big perennials. The soil/compost is fluffy, so as it settles the volume of height will go down so don’t be skimpy if you want a raised bed. Never use plastic for this smothering method. Garden soil hosts many living organisms. Plastic sheeting will starve them of air, water and nutrients and can create water runoff catastrophes for your home.

Seeds, shallow rooted vegetable seedlings (save the root veggies for next year), annuals or small potted perennials can be planted into the new top layer of soil/compost providing it is thick enough. Six inches should work here.

If you piled six inches to two feet you can also plant veggies or bigger potted plants, provided it is deep enough to support the root ball and plant itself. For big potted plants, shrubs or trees wait till the cardboard and turf is soft enough to dig through. You’ll need to go deeper and wider for those. Be sure to stake shrubs and trees for the first year so the roots can reach out and the soil will settle and hold them up.

At some point you may want to put in some sort of retaining system to hold the dirt in if you haven’t already. You can choose from a wide variety including brick edging, plastic rolled edging you can mow over if this bed is adjacent to grass, or for raised beds concrete blocks, timbers, or plastic ‘wood’ edging all work well. Please never use any wood that’s been soaked in creosote and pressure treated wood is ok if no food will be grown in the space. Both contain chemicals with differing levels of toxicity, harmful to the soil organisms and you. In my opinion, nothing with chemical treatments is best. Most edging material will be easier to set after all the turf is smothered and cardboard is decomposed because most edging material does have to be dug down abit for stability. It’s so much easier to dig after decomposition than to dig through turf. There are also rigid plastic or flexible steel edgings that can just be hammered into place, no digging needed.

Some gardens that border grass are simply defined from the grass by a “V trough edge”. With the back of a shovel against the lawn, slice straight down 3 inches, then scoop the dirt up and into the garden bed. Do the whole edge length this way. The 3 inch cut will prevent the grass roots from spreading into your garden bed, pretty effectively corralling it. A motorized blade edger can then keep this edge nice and clean. Otherwise you’ll have to go over it each spring with your shovel like I do, as the trough can fill back in as dirt shifts and settles.

So what would you like? A little patch of lawn, grassy paths meandering through your garden or no lawn at all? I’d love to hear what your future garden ideas are.

In bloom in my garden today: Galanthus elwesii (snow drops), crocus, primrose, Sarcococca confusa, hellebore


Author’s photos

Fragrant Sarcococca

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

~Robert Louis Stevenson

Sarcococca…well now that’s a mouthful isn’t it? However, the fragrance that is filling the garden right now from this shrub’s blooms is definitely a nose-full!

The common names that I’ve seen for this plant here in the western USA are ‘vanilla bush’ and ‘sweet box’. The botanical name is Sarcococca confusa. Be sure to take the botanical name to the nursery to ensure finding the shrub described in this post, as there are other varieties with different habits and characteristics.

Sarcococca confusa is hardy to USDA zones 4-9 and grows to about a 4 foot by 4 foot sized shrub, with evergreen, waxy, dark green, pointy leaves that have a graceful waviness to them too. Its flowers produce black berries, the likes of which I’ve never witnessed any wildlife devouring. But they are pretty, interesting and hang on for a long time (the photo shows last years berries with current flowers). Its flowers are small, white, spidery looking blossoms that fill the surrounding air with a sweet (to my nose) lingering aroma. Mine is in the side yard, but when I’m in the back yard I’ll catch a whiff as the air currents circle around. Deep breath…ahh, heavenly. I just love fragrance in the garden. Bringing more than one stem into the house for a vase is really overpowering! My neighbor never fails to comment on the lovely aroma every January as she steps out her front door, which is at least 15 feet from the shrub.

**Alert!** My plant was mislabeled by the grower as sarcococca ruscifolia. Apparently confusa is often sold as ruscifolia, and yes, you too can be a victim of sloppy labeling. Luckily for me I got confusa which grows to 4 feet which was my priority. Ruscifolia is a larger variety, reportedly growing 6-7 feet tall and wide, sporting red berries with the same flowers and fragrance.

Sarcococca reportedly comes to us from China. It thrives in dry shade once established, often the most difficult garden spot to fill. Western Garden Book says “they maintain slow, orderly growth and polished appearance in deepest shade, will take sun in cool summer areas”, maybe Canada or Alaska and northern Europe? But for the rest of us (in USDA zones 7-9), if you have a spot that is on the shaded side of the house, too far from the sprinkler system or hose for convenient watering, then this is the plant for you.

The term ‘once established’ means that for the first year or two (depending on the plant species) a newly planted shrub or perennial will need watering till it’s roots have ventured out into the native soil, even plants that like it dry. This is very important; it can be the difference between plant survival and failure. For the first year only, I watered this plant once a week for the first month, then once a month till the cooler fall weather returned. Now that it’s been in the ground for several years and is full size I rarely water it at all…maybe only during an excessively dry, hot summer period. Most garden experts would probably say even that is not necessary after the first year.

Just the other day it was warm enough for my bees to fly.  They definitely discovered its pollen and nectar, as did the hummingbirds!

If natural fragrance in your garden is something you’d like to increase, this is definitely a plant for you to consider.

In bloom in my garden today: Sarcococca confusa, hellebore, Daphne caucasica ‘Summer Ice’


Photos courtesy of Pat Chissus

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January Cheer!

"Every gardener knows that under the cloak of winter lies a miracle ...a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to the light, a bud straining to unfurl. And the anticipation nurtures our dream."
- Barbara Winkler

It’s a new day and a new year! January 1st ushered in the New Year with the gift of an unseasonably warm morning to the garden at 50 degrees F! I loved it! Even the bees flew on New Year’s day…unheard of in our little part of the world. What a lovely morning it was, but by afternoon it turned back into our norm of cold, wet and blustery!

I much prefer the warmth but cold weather is perfect for this hellebore blooming in my garden today. As you can see, last winter its blooms were unfazed by a snowy blanket.

This particular variety is evergreen, with large, long, serrated, leathery leaves. Its flowers appear at the tip of the leafy stems and are chartreuse green, one of my favorite garden colors. The blooms stay on for a good 2 months, even offering the honey bees nectar or pollen on those warmish days when they venture out. When the blooms are mostly finishing, the main stems will begin to droop and fall over. That is when I cut them down to the ground and new growth will begin soon. The plant will regenerate itself to full size again in about 2 months.

I can’t positively identify it beyond this because I’ve lost the tag but I think it is helleborus lividus corsicus (Corsican hellebore). Sorry about that my friends. I have a box where I keep ALL the identification tags of the plants that are current in my garden. It’s the only way to refer back to a plant’s needs should something go wrong or when your friend wants to know what that plant is but your memory fails you. I don’t stick them in the dirt with the plant. I think the garden is not attractive with colorful plastic tags poking up all over the place and the weather will deteriorate them quickly, making them brittle and unreadable. But by all means don’t throw them away! They tell you the basics that you need to know about the plant you are spending your money on. If you don’t follow its instructions you often have no one but yourself to blame if your plant dies.

That’s not so say the tags are infallible, naturally there are exceptions. Over the years I’ve found that in rare cases the information given with the plant is just plain wrong. But you have to realize that these tags are written for a broad spectrum of gardening locations so generally the water needs, hardiness and sun exposure info should be correct. For example, when you buy hellebores the tags and nursery staff will tell you they need shade. When I bought this one I put it in the shade as specified and for a few years it was unhappy. It would stretch tall and flop over onto the lawn. What a pain that was every summer when I had to pick the thing up to mow under it. I was thinking of getting rid of it when I heard this one variety likes more sun than others. So I moved it to part sun. Again for 2 years the same thing happened. It kept reaching for more sun. So I moved it to full sun and it’s been happy ever since, standing up and blooming for me every January. Sun exposure information can be tricky. For instance, the sun’s intensity in southern California is hotter than here in western Washington, so this plant probably should be somewhat shaded in California but can take our full northern sun. All that to say, if a plant is unhappy in your garden it may not be your fault if you followed the requirements given. Try moving it till you find the perfect spot. This has worked for me time and time again.

Back to the subject of hellebores. When you are shopping for them, understand the other flower colors are not necessarily going to be the same variety with the same requirements as that which I have mentioned above. While their leaves may stay green year round, others don’t bloom from the old stems like that green flowering one does. I have a pink one that needs full shade, blooms later and sends its flower buds straight out of the ground. Start checking for emerging buds in February (times may vary at your location and air temps). To make the flowers more visible cut off all the old tattered leaf stems VERY carefully so you don’t cut off any flower buds. While it’s blooming new leaves will begin to come up from the ground too.

I’m ashamed to admit I don’t have the tag to identify this one either, but I think it is Helleborus orientalis (Lenten Rose). I know, I know I’ve committed the gardener’s sin and broken my own rule! SAVE THE TAGS!! I’ve said it to my friends till they’re ready to compost me and now I’ve lost two! And you see how important it is to have them?? I’ve had these plants for more than a decade, probably even before I made up that rule, and if I still had these tags I could share the plant names with you. Happily though the last several years have seen enormous growth in the number of helleborus hybrids available to us and many can flourish in all zones according to Sunset’s Western Garden Book. So I encourage you to run, don’t walk to your favorite independent local nursery in these early months of 2010 to see the blooming helleborus and buy your favorite to bring you some January cheer too!

I’d love to hear your comments, so till I can fix my comment section please click the “post comment’ button again if you get an error message.

In bloom in my garden today: hellebore, daphne caucasica ‘Summer Ice’


Photos courtesy of Pat Chissus

Mulch, Compost or Fertilizer?

The best fertilizer is the gardener's shadow.

~Author Unknown

A while back reader Christine asked me to write about compost. She wants to recycle waste from her kitchen and garden rather than send it to a landfill. Composting and mulching are great ways to make your waste work for you.

Mulch is material that is laid on top of the soil and left to decompose as a top layer. It can be leaves, wood chips, grass clippings etc, that decay and enrich the soil. Beauty bark is not recommended as it is said to contain salts, which can harm plants and soil organisms. Rocks and decorative stones are considered a more permanent form of mulch, and while they provide minerals as they break down they won’t necessarily enrich the soil like decaying plant material. Mulch helps to smother seeds that will be future weeds and keeps the soil moist and cool in the summer. It is a natural and easy way to nourish your soil as it releases nutrients gradually, just like nature does. Take a walk in the forest and you’ll see the soil covered with fallen leaves and plant debris, leaving a loamy rich top layer. In her book No Work Garden Book, Ruth Stout writes she only mulched, never weeded, never messed with compost and stopped fertilizing. She was quite successful by simply covering her soil with hay. Since mulch keeps your soil cool from the sun’s rays you may want to remove it from vegetable beds in spring so the sun can warm the soil for better seed germination before spring planting. All my fall leaves go straight onto the garden beds just as soon as they are raked, like a blanket, so they are mulch, not composted. You can find more information and photos of my leaf mulching in September’s post titled “Fall Cleanup, More or Less”.

Compost is the result of a pile of mixed plant debris (grass clippings, leaves, stems, twigs, vegetative food wastes) that has heated up and decomposed into a fine, dark, crumbly material and is also nutrient rich. It is not considered fertilizer by some experts but Organic Gardening magazine says it is. In fact OG maintains that if you use compost, mulch and cover crops you may not need to use any fertilizer.

Commercial composting facilities create compost that has heated up enough to kill weed seeds and disease pathogens. You can buy it in bulk or bags or you can create your own by simply corralling and layering ‘green’ materials and ‘brown’ materials. Green materials are grass clippings, weeds, green leaves/stems, coffee grounds. Brown materials are dried stems, twigs, dried leaves, shredded paper. Thinly layering each is the way to create your pile and once it heats up, turning it with a garden fork brings air into the process and helps it to break down. Come spring there will be lots of dried, dead brown plant materials to remove from your garden beds and green grass clippings (the first few cuttings) high in nitrogen are great to mix together for your compost pile.

I compost most of my chopped up plant trimmings, weeds, all of my organic vegetable kitchen waste, coffee grounds, tea leaves and egg shells (shells supply calcium to the soil). The finer the materials are chopped the quicker the breakdown. You can chop by hand or by running a mower over large leaves and stems or dumping the lot into a garbage can and plunging in a weed eater (string trimmer). The plant materials I exclude from my compost heap are large woody branches and rhododendron leaves, both of which take too long to decompose, also no trimmings that will contain seeds go in. My compost doesn’t get hot enough to kill seeds. If viable seeds remain in compost they will sprout and you’ll have to weed later. Nor do I include rose leaves (which often carry disease) and any leaf or plant material that appears or is known to have disease because home compost doesn’t often get hot enough to kill disease pathogens either. I live in the city where we have free recycling for yard waste. Any undesirable materials go in that bin, which is composted at a commercial level and does get hot enough to kill seeds and pathogens. 

Compost needs nitrogen to get it to heat up quickly. There are compost starters you can buy in a box but are expensive and I think more a gimmick than necessary. Early spring grass clippings are high in nitrogen and free if you have a lawn. Alfalfa meal is inexpensive and high in nitrogen if you don’t have grass. A few cups of that added to your pile will start the process and the balance of the bag is great fertilizer for your roses. (Be sure to lightly mix the alfalfa and any organic fertilizer you use into the soil surface so the microorganisms can break it down to release the nutrients.) A pile of plant trimmings with a good mix of green and brown materials will decompose and will smell earthy. The pile that just rots and is smelly has too much of one material.

There are 2 ways to make compost: aerobic and anaerobic.

Aerobic piles are turned about once or twice a week. Aerobic compost finishes faster, between 2-6 months given sufficient heat generation, water and volume. To get finished compost in 2 months the green/brown ratio is important and you turn it daily for the first week or so. Pile temperature should remain between 135 and 155 degrees for 3 days to kill seeds and most pathogens. If you don’t want to pay that much attention to it, it will simply take longer to break down. Mine usually takes more like 6 months. When I had a pile in four sided wire fencing, a hay fork was my tool of choice for turning the pile, with 5 skinny, long, curved prongs. A shovel or pitch fork can be used also but were awkward to me. You turn the hot core out and the cooler sides in creating a new pile each time, which gets more of the material to heat up. The more heat the quicker the decomposition. Moisture is important too. You need some but not too much. Most articles say as damp as a wrung out sponge. You can cover the pile in winter if you get a lot of rain, but in a dry summer you may need to hose it down now and again.

Anaerobic piles are never turned. You just keep adding materials in green and brown layers to the top. Finished compost is pulled out from the bottom of the pile. Plastic bins designed for this type of compost have a door at the base where you can shovel out finished compost. Anaerobic compost can take a year or so to finish the bottom layers.

Since winter keeps many of us out of our gardens, it is a good time to research compost bin designs, think about what kind of composting will work for you and where you might like to locate your pile. What ever style you choose it needs to allow a pile at least 3 feet tall by 3 feet wide. This size or bigger heats up best. The better the heat and aeration the quicker the decomposition and the sooner you can spread it on your garden. Some people simply make a pile with no boundaries. Some choose to corral their pile by making a ‘bin’. Some use found wooden shipping pallets, stood upright and fastened into a square, some use concrete blocks stacked to make a 3 sided bin and some use a big circle of chicken wire. There are many commercial designs made of plastic. One is even made to tumble by simply kicking it around, eliminating the need to mix it by hand. Some municipalities offer wire or plastic bins at a discount to encourage composting which cuts down on land fill usage. What ever you do, if you choose to turn your pile, make sure your bin will allow you to get in there easily and often with your hay fork. Having two aerobic piles side by side is helpful, because at some point you need to stop adding to a pile to let it decompose. All the while you keep finding plant material in your garden to add, so a second pile is needed.

The ‘bin’ I have now I made from a 55 gallon pickle barrel. To use less garden space I adapted a ‘spin’ design I found on the internet (sorry but the site is no longer up or I’d include it). I made it to hang between 2 fence posts so I can spin it on an iron bar that I inserted through the barrel and both fence posts. I live near the now vacated Nalley's pickle factory. When the company closed I bought four food grade barrels for five dollars each and used one as a composter and three for rain barrels. Finding food grade barrels was important to me as I garden organically and wanted to know that no chemicals were ever stored in the barrels I was going to use.

Worms help decompose plant debris too. Normally they will come up into your pile from the soil underneath, but since my bin is a ‘closed’ system I toss in worms as I find them. They must thrive in there as they have multiplied by the time my compost is finished and ready to spread. When your compost is finished you can either spread it as a top dressing on your soil or dig it in. Some say you must dig it in for it to improve soil structure but that’s a lot of work. I just leave it as a top dressing and let the worms and soil organisms mix it all up over time. It seems to work.

I hope this has been a helpful overview and perhaps an incentive for you consider composting in the near future. Happy composting Christine!!

In bloom in my garden today: Daphne caucasica ‘Summer Ice’

Author’s photo

Garden Ornament

O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

In the absence of blooms, the winter garden can still be full of beauty, especially if you have added plants that color up from the cold like red twig dogwood, winter bloomers like Camillias and those that produce berries like pyracantha and hollies.

At this time of year I like to gather evergreen boughs that have been blown down by the winter winds to make arrangements, swags and wreaths. To these I can add from my garden red pyracantha berries (pyracantha koidzumii ‘Victory’), red rose hips, green Solanium crispin (potato vine) berries and various greenery or bare branches. Both the knobby twigs from my Katsura trees and the evergreen huckleberry’s (Vaccinium ovatum) leafy stems stay nice long after being cut and add height to an arrangement. The evergreen branches of sarcococca confusa (sweet box) have deep green leaves and interesting black berries right now. Even after our unusual week and a half of below freezing temperatures my daphne (Daphne caucasica ‘Summer Ice’) has begun blooming again, and both the evergreen Heleborus (soon to bloom) and the sword ferns have bounced back. In neighboring gardens I’ve seen Jasminum nudiflorum (winter jasmine) blooming its cheery yellow flowers.

At my front door I have attached to the outside wall, a green metal basket. Throughout the year I gather lovelies from the garden to make arrangements in it to ornament the porch. Today’s arrangement is made up of my evergreen huckleberry leafy stems, the silvery Russian sage (Perovskia ‘Little Spire’), the broad leaves of skimmia with its flower buds, and red rose hips. You may be surprised what beauty you can find in your gardens even now. 

It’s the Christmas season at our house, so to all of you my gardening friends around the globe, thank you for visiting my garden blog and may you have the gift of faith, the blessing of hope and the peace of His love at Christmas and always.

Merry Christmas

In bloom in my garden today: Daphne caucasica ‘Summer Ice’
Pyracantha berries photo courtesy of Pat Chissus

Bye Bye Birdie...not!

To me, the garden is a doorway to other worlds; one of them, of course, is the world of birds. The garden is their dinner table, bursting with bugs and worms and succulent berries.

-Anne Raver

Brrr! It’s December and it’s cold here in the Pacific Northwest. This week the sun is shining but the temperature is ranging between the 30s in the day and the teens (F) at night. I know there are colder places but this is plenty cold enough for me.

Our little feathered friends seem to winter over well enough, some smart enough to head south to warmer climes. Well I would too! To keep them coming back I offer a smorgasbord of their favorites. In addition to the plant seed heads I leave intact in the winter garden, I stock birdfeeders with seed, and hummingbird feeders with syrup year round. Feeding them not only provides a helping hand with their survival, it also brings more of them into my garden where they eat bugs, helping me keep down insect destruction. It’s definitely win-win.

Our region has a hummingbird species that stay all year, opting out of the trip south. For them, I make my own syrup of sugar/water, as the boxed stuff with red dye is not only unnecessary color but the dye is reportedly harmful to them. The feeder tube has enough red plastic to attract them. In a one cup measure I put ½ cup sugar and fill to the 1 cup mark with boiling water. Stir to dissolve and cool. Boiling the water first keeps the syrup from spoiling a little longer. They come to sip 365 day of the year. And since more than half their diet is comprised of bug eating, that’s a lot less bugs eating my plants. In this freezing weather, even the sugar water can freeze, but wrapping the bottle with bubble wrap helps keep it thawed longer. And have you ever noticed the chickadees steal a sip of syrup from the hummers feeder? They do! They must have a sweet tooth beak.

For the songbirds, I fill their feeders with black oil sunflower and nyger thistle seeds adding seed imbedded suet cakes in winter. Suet provides the fats they can use to stay warm and these cakes are very popular in my garden. Pictured here are the tiny bush tits (a most disagreeable name) which stay in flocks. It’s not unusual to see more than a dozen all sharing on one cake.

Also the downy woodpecker, flicker, junco, chickadee, nut hatch, starling and even squirrels come to it for a nibble. Ok, yes admittedly starlings and squirrels can be piggy, tearing the whole thing apart in no time but I don’t begrudge them. It’s worth it to get the others to come. You can make your own suet cakes using beef suet, available from the meat dept in your grocery store, melting it, stirring in seed and pouring it into a mold. There are lots of recipes but to me it’s an icky and time consuming job. At around a dollar each, I just buy them.

To keep the squirrels happy and off the suet, I put out ‘Sweet Corn SquirreLogs’, which are simply made of compressed ground corn. I used to put out the dried corn on the cob, but the squirrels would bury the kernels and I’d find corn stalks sprouting up all over the place. I just lay the SquirreLogs on the ground near the suet. It works pretty well and after rain softens the logs the birds eat off them too. You can find them next to the suet cakes at the store. I had a few mushy apples, put them out and the squirrels loved them too!

I like to keep bird houses up for spring nesting, and I often wonder if any birds utilize them during the cold winter weather. I bought a ‘roosting pocket’ once for winter roosting (shelter from the weather) but I never noticed any bird use it and it was made of grasses or reeds or something which didn’t fare well in our wet weather.

A most excellent resource for bird feeding and housing is Russell Link’s Landscaping for Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest, published by University of Washington Press. While it was written for the PNW I think the information within can be utilized in most parts of the country and outside the USA as well. Page 112 has a suet recipe and there are several pages devoted to building bird houses with plans and dimension specifications. Did you know the size of the entrance hole on a bird house is really important for bird safety from predators and which bird species you want to attract? And by all means, if you have a store bought bird house, be sure to cut off that peg just below the entrance hole! Nesting birds don’t need it and it makes a great perch for nest robbers who are after the eggs or babies. The book also has plans for building mason bee ‘houses’, butterfly houses, bat houses and more. Bats are important because they consume bugs and moths which fly at night, while birds dine on the bugs that fly during the day. Did you know some bat species are insect eaters and some bats are nectar sippers and pollinators? This book contains a wealth of information about creating a habitat for critters in your gardens from woodlands to wetlands, pond construction and planting hedgerows. Apparently sometimes a messy garden is a wildlife friendly garden. He includes many pages of plants suited to wildlife that you could incorporate into your garden. I could go on and on, but if you’re interested in encouraging wildlife in your garden, this is a great book for your library.

Birds need access to not only food and shelter but also water. In temperatures like these, birdbaths and puddles never thaw. I keep a birdbath heater in my birdbath. It runs on a thermostat that turns off at temps 40 degrees F or higher so I can leave it plugged in all winter. It perches on the rim of the bowl with the heating coils sitting in the water. Be sure to watch the water level for evaporation. The birds are a little wary of the thing at first but necessity wins out and they are soon sipping again.

What are your winters like? What steps do you take to keep the birds coming back to your garden throughout the colder weather?

In bloom in my garden today: in these temps, everything is toast. Even the Borage gave up.

Food ready for the birds: Caryopteris seeds, Mountain Ash berries, Pyracantha berries, Echinacea seeds, Solanum crispum berries (squirrels love them)

Photos courtesy of Pat Chissus

Energizer Bunny Borage

"There remaineth one necessary thing...
which in my Opinion makes as much for Ornament, as either flowers, or forme, or cleanness...which is Bees, well ordered."
~ William Lawson,
New Orchard and Garden 1618

I’ve mentioned in my profile that I am a beekeeper. I have one hive in my urban garden.  I love seeing honey bees buzzing around and pollinating my flowers, but mostly I have to walk a few houses down the street to find legions of my bees gathering nectar and pollen in my neighbor’s yard. I’m happy to share so I don’t intend to duplicate her garden in mine, but one day she mentioned my bees had been all over her Borage for weeks. Well, I knew nothing about Borage but I just had to get some of that!

So I looked it up. Borage (Borago officinalis) is an annual that grows to two feet tall. It comes to us from Corsica, N. Africa and Europe. It is speculated that the name borago came from the Latin burra meaning “a hairy garment”. Hmmm….I wonder what it means by that? It reportedly grows in sun or shade, wet or dry conditions, and tolerates poor soil. Sounds pretty fool proof to me. The leaves are supposedly slightly cucumber tasting and flowers can be used as edible garnish. Even better! I like to be able to eat what I grow.

So I ordered a seed packet from http://www.nicholsgardennursery.com/ along with my vegetable seeds order. I planted 4 seeds in March indoors in 4 small pots. All four came up and three survived. I planted the seedlings outdoors, one in the sun, two in semi-shade. They grew quickly and began flowering, beautiful true blue single flowers. And sure enough the bumblebees and my honey bees found the flower’s sweet nectar in no time. The taller the plants got the more leggy they seemed, but the one in the full sun was better. Then they needed staking…I very much dislike staking, but did it anyway, for the sake of the bees of course. Then after a wind blew through a few of the stems broke down. More staking and trimming, grrr. And on and on it went till I gave up the tiresome staking and just let them break down. I figured I’d be ripping them out when I got around to it but the bees still came to the flowers, even the flowering branches lying on the ground. As I removed the damaged stems I noticed lots of fresh new shoots coming from just below any damaged area. The plants just kept going and going and going, rejuvenating themselves!

Since I just left them alone, they have become nice and full and still blooming even now in November. That’s one energized annual! I wonder when they’ll quit. The few hard frosts we’ve had haven’t fazed them at all. Last month I noticed a humming bird sipping from the flowers too.  And I gave up trying to save all the seeds this plant produces, so I’ll be hoeing seedlings for sure. It is a prolific self seeder!

Were you wondering still about that “a hairy garment” comment? Be forewarned, the leaves do taste cucumber-ish but are so furry, they are unpleasant to chew on. Every bit of the plant except the flowers are covered with soft spines.  The flowers are a true blue color, a rare find in garden plants. Mostly ‘blue’ plants are on the purpley side, and some gardeners search high and low to include true blue in their garden scheme. Give borage a try.

In bloom in my garden today: Kirengeshoma palmata, Borage, Daphne, Digitalis (foxglove), Salvia, Nepeta (cat mint), Solanum crispum (potato vine), Phygelius (cape fushia) Schizostylis (river lily), Alyssum


Food ready for the birds: Caryopteris seeds, Mountain Ash berries, Pyracantha berries, Echinacea seeds, Coreopsis seeds, Liatris seeds.

Photo's courtesy of Pat Chissus

A Day For Cannas

It takes a while to grasp that not all failures are self-imposed, the result of ignorance, carelessness or inexperience. It takes a while to grasp that a garden isn't a testing ground for character and to stop asking, what did I do wrong? Maybe nothing.
~Eleanor Perényi, Green Thoughts, 1981

I spend some of my time volunteering at my local municipal greenhouse. There they grow the plants for the city’s park gardens, conservatory and create the huge hanging baskets that line some of the main streets. At the greenhouse this was Canna week.

Cannas are native to the tropical and sub-tropical Americas and West Indies. South Americans reportedly used the rootstock for food. They are grown for their fantastic foliage and flowers and some species can grow to over 6 feet tall. Leaf color can be green, bronze, maroon, orangey, solid or striped.

Three to four weeks ago the cannas that jazzed our city parks were dug up to make way for fall plantings. They were then piled up outdoors and covered with permeable cloth at the greenhouse. We’ve had a few hard frosts here which blackened the leaves, so the time was right to prepare them for winter storage. They’ll be replanted in spring when the gardens are designed for summer color.

While others tended the poinsettias, my task was to cut off all the Canna’s foliage down to the rhizomes (tuberous rootstocks) and place them on wire racks to dry out for winter storage. It was pouring buckets that day, so I was a muddy mess pronto.

Around here, Cannas are normally hardy. Most people leave them in the ground or pots. Last year was my first year to plant Canna in my garden. I bought Canna indica from http://www.oldhousegardens.com/. Their catalog reports it is a Canna from the Indies introduced to Europe 400 years ago. The leaves were reason enough to have it…bright green and looked just like a banana leaf, but the red flowers intrigued me more. Indica’s flowers look so delicate, unlike the typical Canna and are reportedly a hummingbird magnet. Planted in late April, it came up too late in the spring for the flowers to form but the leaves were fabulous! A must have for the leaves alone, I am hooked. What a statement they made in my garden which has mostly medium to small leafed perennials.

To get it safely though winter in the ground, after cutting down the leaf stalks, I filled a small garbage can with leaves and turned the whole lot upside down over the rhizome. It worked great, as in the spring I could easily find the firm, white rhizome. So I waited…and waited…till June and it never came up! I dug around and found a rotted brown mass of fiber where the rhizome had been. Somehow it had disappeared. Boo hoo! I was so looking forward to having it again and seeing the flowers this time.

So I bought another, this time Canna ‘Ermine’ pictured here.  It also has big stately green leaves but with a white flower and butter yellow throat. It was wonderful too. Last week I dug it up after frost blackened the leaves. This winter I’m storing the rhizome in the garage so it won’t freeze, but cold enough to become dormant and I will plant again in spring. I don’t know anyone around here who dig or lose their Cannas over the winter but I don’t want to lose mine again. It’s been a long time since I considered anything worth digging, storing and replanting, but I’d like Canna back again next year.

Do you grow Canna? Are your winter temps not optimal for its survival? Do you dig it to save it or plant new every year? If you’ve never tried one I encourage you to give it a go next spring. If you mail order you’ll want to get your orders in now for best selection.

In bloom in my garden today: Kirengeshoma palmata, Borage, Daphne, Digitalis (foxglove), Salvia, Nepeta (cat mint), Solanum crispum (potato vine), Phygelius (cape fushia) Schizostylis (river lily), Alyssum

Food ready for the birds: Caryopteris seeds, Mountain Ash berries, Pyracantha berries, Echinacea seeds, Coreopsis seeds, Liatris seeds.

Author’s photo

Are You Latin-o-phobic?

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
-- Cicero, 106-43 BC


Do your eyes glaze over when gardener-geeks use those mind numbing Latin sounding names for plants? Believe me, I know that look. I’ve received it many times. Do you prefer names like creeping jenny, candy tuft or love-in-a-mist (aka love-in-a-puff)? Ok, well I agree the common names may be easier, cute and even historically quaint, but they are not really all that helpful in a plant search since common names do not usually jump regional lines. Even within the USA, ‘star creeper’ can be the name for several different plants, depending on your locale. And when your friend in the UK just raves about the delightful Busy Lizzie in her shady garden borders “and you’ve just got to get some luv”, unless she can identify them by their botanical name you’ll be hard pressed to find American nursery staff who can lead you to the Impatiens. Busy Lizzie, Policeman’s Helmet and the like are just not helpful names if you are trying to find at the nursery exactly what your long-distance friends rave about in their gardens. More helpful is to use the scientific names which are recognized world wide, no matter what language you speak.

Lest you think me a plant snob and immediately jump to another blog, please understand I’m not calling for an end to common names. I’ve read many an article defending their use and historical significance. I’d simply like to see them used in tandem with their scientific universal counterparts. In my opinion, any gardening magazine and catalog worth its salt will identify plants with both the botanical name and the common name together.

Scientific botanical names are referred to as “Latin” but really are mostly comprised of Greek and Latin, with some from other languages and some personal names of those who ‘discovered’ the plant or hybridized it. Greek and Latin, in the 16th and 17th centuries were the languages of the educated and intellectuals of Europe, so it was the language of choice when the universal classification and naming of plants became serious business. You don’t have to become fluent in Latin, just understanding how the system works is a step in the right direction. The scientific botanical nomenclature is simply a system of various levels of classification. Not so simple is understanding it in its entirety, but here’s the basic idea.

Each plant, based on structural characteristics is assigned to a family. For example the Lily family is Liliaceae. You don’t see the family name very often so don’t be too concerned about it.

Within the Liliaceae family are further divisions called genus, narrowing down the similarities even more. The genus is the first Latin name of the plant that you usually see on a plant’s tag or in a magazine. It is always capitalized and is treated as a noun. In the Liliaceae family we find the genus Hosta, Muscari (Grape Hyacinth), Convallaria (Lily of the Valley) and many others. All three of these plants belong to the Lily family, but they are so different from each other, you can see why they have been separated into their own genus.

The genus is followed by a second word, the species name. It is not capitalized and is in the form of an adjective to describe the noun or explain a property of the plant. Species names may tell us where the plant originated, or what the leaf or flower looks like, or which conditions it likes to grow in, or the shape the plant will grow into and more. For instance lancifolia means lance shaped leaf (long, narrow and pointy). So my Hosta lancifolia (lance-i-fo-lee-a) is a hosta with lance shaped leaves, not ovoid leaves. Or the second word can be the name of the person who created it through hybridization, or ‘discovered’ the plant in it’s native habitat and brought home it’s seeds, divisions or cuttings. For example Viburnum carlesii (karlz-ee-eye) is a Viburnum that was discovered and developed by plantsman W. R. Carles.

Sometimes there is a third name denoting a subspecies or variety, further describing a property of the plant. And finally a fourth name would be a cultivar name. A cultivar name will be in quote marks, is capitalized and is a variety that has been cultured or produced by human hybridization. For example, the shrub Ceanothus gloriosus exaltatus ‘Emily Brown’ is a Ceanothus that is superb (gloriosus), grows very tall (exaltatus), and is the cultivar Emily Brown. Ceanothus horizontalis is a low growing species. The Ceanothus dentatus  has toothed leaves.

Isn’t that cool? See how descriptive the species names are? Once you get used to seeing and deciphering them, they can be really informative. And for us English speakers, much of our language has its roots in Latin and Greek so many of these words are not too hard to figure out. What do you suppose tardiflora means? Late flowering!

Gardener’s Latin, A Lexicon by Bill Neal and Barbara Damrosch is a book that has taken much of the confusion out of trying to make sense of botanical Latin for me. Like a dictionary, it is an alphabetical list defining many of the species names you’ll see on plant tags, and is also full of humorous and interesting botanical facts and folk lore. Sadly for gardeners everywhere this book is now out of print but used copies are available. I found mine at amazon.com or your local bookseller may be able to find a copy for you.

Dictionary of Plant Names by Allen J. Coombes is another gotta have book that lists the Latin family, genus and species names, their meaning and pronunciation. I think both are indispensable.

To audibly hear pronunciation you can go to finegardening.com and find their link there.

I hope this has taken the intimidation factor out of botanical Latin for you. There is truly a wealth of information in it. Give it a try!

In bloom in my garden today: Kirengeshoma palmata, Borage, Daphne, Coreopsis, Digitalis (foxglove), Salvia, Nepeta (cat mint), Solanum crispum (potato vine), Phygelius (cape fushia) Schizostylis (river lily), Alyssum
 Food ready for the birds: Caryopteris seeds, Mountain Ash berries, Pyracantha berries, Echinacea seeds, Coreopsis seeds, Liatris seeds.

Author’s photos

World Wide Gardening

It’s important to take care of your little patch of earth no matter where you are.
-Jamie Durie
“The Victory Garden”


I have great news! My garden has gone global!

I have many visitors to my garden blog from USA’s coast to coast, which is so cool in and of its self. My visitors garden in cities in New York, California, Colorado, Michigan and Washington State to name some, and recently from Shiraz, Iran! I can’t tell you how exciting it is to have all of you as my gardening friends. It feels like all of our gardens combined create one extended global garden.

Having a visitor from Iran started me thinking about gardens around the world and I wondered how far Shiraz is from the site of the Garden of Eden. So off to my atlas I went and found that Shiraz seems to be close to the vicinity, at least from my perspective which is oceans away. What a spectacular garden Eden must have been. Genesis documents its location to an area encompassing a river that branches off to feed the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This would put it in modern day Iraq, near the Persian Gulf. What is gardening like where you are in Shiraz? Do you have moist, tropical conditions like Hawaii and other Pacific islands? Or do you have dry conditions where Palms, Agaves, Cactus and Salvias thrive like our southern states and Mexico and Central America? Does Bougainvillea cover your walls in glorious color? Do you have Jasmine fragrance wafting in your breezes? Is it too dry there for native orchids? Perhaps you have an abundance of aromatic herbs and grasses. What kinds of vegetables do you grow in your family gardens?

Many of the plants we enjoy in North American gardens have come from the Middle Eastern region. For instance, Tulipa turkestanica is a native of Turkey (note the second word, ‘descriptive’ name), likewise the ‘fall crocus’ Colchicum autumnalis, pictured above in my garden, come to us from the Greek and Turkish regions.
Many of our drought resistant herbs like rosemary, sage, thyme and lavender come from the dry, sandy Mediterranean Sea coastlines. I read articles relating how these shrubby herbs are prolific on rocky cliffs and sandy shores.

I also am reminded of the many botanical explorers and plant collectors, past and present who travel the globe for intriguing plant species compatible to their own regions. They make the world a little smaller, allowing us to enjoy flowers and plants in our gardens that come from far away places. You may have met some of these plant collectors at the nurseries when reading the tags of the plants you pick up. For instance, if you picked up a pot of Camellia williamsii, you held in your hand not just any Camellia, but an effort and passion of the plantsman Williams. Many of us know a Camellia, but here the second word is the name of the person who either ‘discovered’ the plant in its native habitat and brought home seeds or cuttings, or it’s the name of the person who created it through hybridization. This particular Camillia was created by a plantsman named Mr. Williams who crossed Camellia japonica (‘japonica’ = originally found in Japan) with Camellia saluenensis. That word ‘williamsii’ (pronounced william-see-eye) is like his signature on his piece of art. I’ll write more explaining Latin botanical names in a future post because once studied it becomes really informative.

In reading this blog we all have an opportunity to share our gardens with each other around the globe. So let’s grow this garden blog into one vast global place of beauty. Visit me often, write to me your thoughts, tell your friends about it. The world may not be at peace, but we can create peace in our own world through our gardens. By planting in our individual outdoor spaces, or volunteering at our local botanical gardens, we can create places of serene beauty for ourselves and those who visit. Are you with me?

In bloom in my garden today: Abyssinian Gladiola, Borage, Eupatorium ‘chocolate’, Daphne, Coreopsis, Rose, Digitalis (foxglove), Salvia, Nepeta (cat mint), Solanum crispum, Gauara, Fushia, Phygelius (cape fushia) Schizostylis, Alyssum.

Food ready for the birds: Mountain Ash berries, Pyracantha berries, Echinacea seeds, Coreopsis seeds, Liatris seeds.

Author’s photo