My list of complaints is long, starting with its short life. Plus, it just doesn’t work in a border. To make room for other plants you end up removing so many lower branches the damn thing looks ridiculous.
Worst of all, this plant reminds me of how little I knew when I planted it and how thoughtlessly I made choices. Its large all-wrongness is getting me down. Not once but twice I bought this horticultural mistake produced by our own National Arboretum. But one has already fallen and the other won’t last long. And thank goodness, too, because its very weakness means the City of Takoma Park will allow me to remove it. Hey, not long ago even this crappy tree would have been protected, until our crazy tree law was finally relaxed to the level of sanity. (Have I mentioned how knee-jerk-left we are here in kooky Takoma? It’s still way better than knee-jerk right.)
But moving on. After hating this thing for about a decade, I’ve excitedly decided to remove it and replace it w
ith my new passion in plants – no surprise to readers here – conifers. So imagine this: a small grove of something like pine, cedar, cyprus or arbovitae. I’m thinking three of one kind in a dark green mixed with two of another species in a lighter green.
O gardeners of the world, what conifers make your heart quicken?
This time of year many of us are admiring our ornamental grasses, now at their best, but some of us are also hearing warnings about their invasiveness. Just that – "Don’t you know they’re invasive?" Well, I hate it when that happens. In fact, my number one gardening rant is about too little information, or even misinformation, about plants, usually with the words "native" or "invasive" being used rather loosely.
Still, being the nature-lover and dutiful student that I am, I hit the old keyboard and read all the websites I could find about badly behaved plants in Maryland. Sure enough my favorite, Miscanthus sinensis, is listed as a "plant of concern." Which might steer me toward buying a different one but what about the ones already in my garden?
I’m happy to report finally finding the answers I was looking for – on HGTV’s website, of all places. An article there on this very subject quotes from the Timber Press Pocket Guide to Ornamental Grasses to explain that invasiveness is a matter of genes, region, and culture, and then goes on to list exactly which grasses are problems and which aren’t. Bless you, Timber Press. Turns out Miscanthus sinensis, the bad boy of ornamental grasses, isn’t a problem in cold or dry areas, and there are some cultivars that aren’t problems anywhere because they’re sterile, don’t self-seed, or simply bloom too late in the season. And even if I had an early bloomer, I could prevent its spread by simply removing the seedheads.
The specific cultivars recommended for the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic are ‘Morning Light’ (YES!), ‘Zebrinus,’ ‘Gracillimus,’ ‘Purpurascens,’ ‘Hinjo,’ and ‘Little Zebra.’ And it’s recommended that we limit the number of cultivars in our gardens to one or two, because cross-pollination can result in reversion to species – the worst offender of all. See, we gardeners want to do the right thing and with enough information, we can (and without ripping out our gardens.)
I’ve decided to start my rants with a pretty picture to soften up my readers, and this one is fresh off the old digital. It’s a lovely blue plumbago, the airy foliage of amsonia (lower left), cross vine foliage, and some mostly spent butterfly bush flowers.
Now for the rant, which is about some folks I know who say, when asked if they’ve checked out this blog, "Oh, I never read blogs." So I ask you, blog-readers all, why do some people feel such aversion? I liken it to people who dismiss all of television – including public TV, HBO and the Daily Show, for crissakes. I say yeah, most people would be bored by most blogs, but if something important is happening on them (the major political ones) or someone you know is expressing herself through one, isn’t it worth a look? And as blogs become a more entrenched part of our culture, do you think some of these stalwarts will come around?
So now to praise the (sometimes) mighty blog. After a bit of writing for print and for static websites, I’m totally enamored of this medium. I love the cumulative nature of it, especially when you can file posts away in categories for future reference. I love the comments and the community that they foster. It’s also a great place to display photos. And the experience of posting daily, or trying to, means that the photography, the writing and the posting all become parts of your everyday life, so you’re stretching those little muscles daily. Not to mention just thinking of something to say. And say you?
Daylily-lovers should just click off to another site because their love object is about to get dumped on. After years of devotion to these guys and the gradual winnowing down of 30 kinds to the best six, it’s still a dud in my garden. Why is that, you ask? Because with blooms lasting only a day each, there are never enough blooms to really have an impact. And just as importantly, because the foliage is ugly. The large ones looks like corn stalks and the small ones, though better, look like ratty liriope. This photo shows a couple of blooms but basically the area between the red-twig dogwood and the spirea looks empty of anything but slovenly old foliage.
With this photo in mind, I was a tad surprised to read today in a book I won’t name that "The foliage of all daylilies is extremely graceful" and again "When massed, it looks particularly graceful." Here’s my reaction: Proof positive that we can’t believe everything we read about plants. Fortunately, when we’ve grown them ourselves and observed them over time, we don’t need to. Seeing is believing.
But back to daylilies, there’s one more thing I’m going to try before I dump them all at next fall’s plant exchange. This summer I visited Fenwick Island, Delaware while they were blooming and saw them used perfectly, to my eyes. Most of the homeowners had used professional landscapers and from the looks of it, excellent ones. What they did was to mass daylilies so tightly they looked like, or actually were, a few very large ones. So they had punch, which is what mine had better have next year after they’re rearranged in bunches, or they’re out of here.
Okay, I’ve been really well behaved so far, but that could get boring, don’t ya think? So let me introduce one of my pet peeves in the gardening world – the wanton use of certain new buzzwords, like "native" and "invasive." You’ll hear more on this in future posts but for now let me point out something from the new White Flower Farm catalogue. The description of Amsonia on page 48 describes it as "native to the Northern Hemisphere." Okay, we’ve ruled out Brazil, South Africa and the Australian outback. Now how about narrowing it down to, say, Europe, Asia, the Yukon or the Mid-Atlantic? Help us out here, nurseries. A humongously general description like that might serve to show a company’s political correctness, but does it convey any useful information?
Now if White Flower Farm ever sees this – I know I’m a pain. But take it as friendly customer feedback and tell us more next time, or leave the term to more detailed discussions of plant origin and how information about it might be used by gardeners or others.
And while I’m at it I’ll contribute my 2 bits. Isn’t it really only helpful to know if a plant is native to a particular local area?? Surely "American native" is an equally meaningless description, unless plants have gotten all patriotic — maybe since 9/11?
My list of complaints is long, starting with its short life. Plus, it just doesn’t work in a border. To make room for other plants you end up removing so many lower branches the damn thing looks ridiculous.
ith my new passion in plants – no surprise to readers here – conifers. So imagine this: a small grove of something like pine, cedar, cyprus or arbovitae. I’m thinking three of one kind in a dark green mixed with two of another species in a lighter green. 
