Lucky natural landscape

Structure is the interesting elements remaining when plants are winter dormant. These include man-made structures, trees, shrubs, and natural land variations. Some yards are situated with beautiful natural views, but most of us have our neighbor’s yard, roads, back alleys, or a commercial building to look at – not so an inviting a background for your winter view.

As herbaceous plants die to the ground the garden’s ‘bones’ or structure appears. Walkways, fences, ornaments, arbors, planters–anything built forms the unchanging structure of your garden. Trees and shrubs form the living structure. If your garden has ‘good bones,’ its skeleton remains interesting through the bleak months of winter.

Winter gardens are often quiet and subtle, providing simple pleasures. The focus changes from the rampant color to softer, grayer colors, and from the abundant flowers of summer to berries that persist on branches long after the first snow, interesting bark, and the pattern of shrub and tree branches.
The goal of a winter garden is for you to select plants that add interest to the structure of the garden while hiding less desirable views. Texture and shape become important. Ledges, fences, branches, shrubs, and other landscape items hold the stark white, often sparkling, snow against their darker color. If you yard held mature trees or shrubs when you move in, you were lucky — you already had structure. You can add more. Vines branches add texture to flat fences and walls. Hedges add definition, evergreen shrubs add living freshness.

Evergreens come into their own in winter. Their variations of green and blue-green color, the natural texture of their branches, their shape, and the bark on trunks of mature trees are appreciated more in winter. Be aware, however, that a wall of the same evergreen tree or shrub can be oppressive in its sameness, especially when close to a window. By mixing evergreens with deciduous plants you add the interest of contrast to your view.

As plants are added to the garden, it is important to consider their year-round qualities. Many Viburnums keep their berries well into winter. Rugosa roses develop colorful red or orange rosehips. Crabapples, junipers, hawthorns, cotoneasters, chokeberries, and mountain ash provide berries that not only add color but also attract birds.

Ornamental grasses add wispy accents to the winter garden. Light snow on the blue of Festuca glauca, and frost clinging to the plumes of Miscanthus are pleasing sights. These features may not last as after several heavy snowfalls, they often break down. If you cut them down in the fall, you miss a valuable addition to the winter landscape.

Winter gardeners appreciate the red and yellow twig colors of the dogwoods and willows, the peeling bark of river birch, or the new birch-borer resistant paper birches. These are the obvious shrubs. There are many that display winter interest.

So if your garden disappears under a blanket of snow leaving you with an uninteresting, blah view, start looking around at other gardens. Study the roadside for all the color and texture of shrubs and the interest remaining plant stalks provide. Through careful selection and placement of features and plant materials with structure you can create good ‘bones’ for your garden.

A Winter Table Arrangement

I”m sure you have noticed how flowers are used in all our celebrations and ceremonies. We use flowers at church services, weddings and funerals. Parties, banquets and guests coming for dinner require floral centerpieces. We give congratulations with flowers. A blanket or red roses covers the derby winner, and Miss America also receives red roses when crowned. We give sympathy and condolences with flowers. Everyone receives flowers when grieving, or while in the hospital, or for celebration of a birthday, new home, new job, or retirement. Every holiday has its plant or floral association. The only ceremonies I can think of that don’t are baptisms and graduation, but perhaps that oldish custom of corsages?

Florists are correct when they say we celebrate with flowers, and they certainly encourage us to spend freely. And while many arrangements have changed to plastic or silk flowers, nothing gives such pleasure as fresh flowers; still, why flowers? The giving of flowers and their use in all our rituals comes from ancient customs, usage so lost in time its roots are forgotten. Certainly in the beginning flowers symbolized fertility, but slowly the meaning evolved to encompass much more.

That flowers were used in the most ancient of burial rites is known. The Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans celebrated with flowers, as did the ancient oriental cultures. Victorians codified the meaning of flowers, probably based on much earlier usages.

Everyone probably knows the rose represents love and the lily purity. These two flowers have been tied to mythology since Cleopatra slept on a rose-stuffed pillow. According to the Victorians, different colored roses told different messages. While the red rose said ‘I love you,’ the yellow rose spoke of infidelity. In today’s flower meanings, sending red and yellow roses in a mixed bouquet means ‘congratulations.’

If you want to find all the meanings, just get on the Internet and type in ‘flower meanings,’ or ‘flower language.’ Some have to have been recently devised. Who knew giving bells of Ireland meant you wished the receiver good luck? Or that a cactus plant represented giving endurance? And how did the cattail come to represent peace and prosperity? It’s all very confusing.

Flower usage changes over time. For many years white gladiolus were know as funeral flowers, now it’s the calla lily. I’ve seen calla lilies used in more weddings recently, too. Roses and carnations were traditional wedding flowers, but now anything the bride wants is used, often orchids, but occasionally even more exotic selections like bird of paradise.

If you pluck a daffodil blooming in your garden and give it to someone, it can tell of your regard, or of your unrequited love, or that individual is the only one for you. However, in mythology, Narcissus was a young man who saw his own reflection in a pool and fell so deeply in love with his image he stared at it until he turned into a flower. Narcissism is not a good quality to have and yet Narcissus is the botanical name of the wonderful daffodil genus. Send daffodils and you might be giving a mixed message.

Perhaps it’s better to just forget the language of flowers and give a bouquet of daffodils with the simple idea of bringing some springtime sun into someone’s day, or place flowers on the Christmas table to let your family or guests realize this meal is a very special occasion, so mind your manners, enjoy the company and food, and reflect upon the true beauty of the world as displayed in flowers.

Merry Christmas! (Put some flowers on the table!)

Steel horse sculpture at Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park

After lunch we went to the Bunker Interpretive Center at Calvin College south of the gardens. Their specialty is green building and using native plants to landscape. Great learning center, and the restrooms had composting toilets! (I didn’t take a photo of those!)

Tropical Atrium at Frederick Meijer Gardens

Cactus Atrium at Frederick Meijer Gardens

Native plants landscape the front of the Bunker Intrepretive Center.

Sunflower

These huge, geometrically structured annual flowers vibrate with color, and never fail to grab attention. Over the last few decades they have have become iconic in nature, decorating many household and clothing items. According to Allan M. Armitage in his Manual of Annuals, Biennials, and Half-Hardy Perennials (Timber Press, 2001), this is due to a few factors. Armitage states the first acclaim for the sunflower emerged upon the ‘centenary of van Gogh’s death in 1990′ and the subsequent promotion of his art.’ Van Gogh is famous, of course, for his paintings of sunflowers. Another event Armitage mentions is the introduction of a pollenless hybrid from Japan at about the same time. I don’t know about that. I have always loved sunflowers and gladly put up with the pollen falling from the flowers onto my tables, but I suppose florist found this a welcome trait which probably led to the flower’s greater use in professional arrangements and a wider exposure to the public.

Named after the Greek sun god Helios because the flower heads seem to always face the sun, it is myth that the flowers actually follow the sun across the sky. Some claim they only face east, but mine face south. It may surprise flower lovers to know the genus also includes many perennials. (Jerusalem artichokes, anyone? Very tasty!) However, it is the huge flowers of the annual species, Helianthus annus, that arouses human adoration, and this species originated in North and Central America where the Aztecs first venerated them. The Spanish took seeds back to Europe where growers developed flowers with spectacular results.

The plants grow from three to twelve feet tall, depending on species and cultivar, and the flowers may be a few inches in diameter to as much as a foot or more across. Newer cultivars may be shorter in stature, but the flowers come in amazing colors ranging from lemon yellow through gold and mahogany colored rays. They are well worth the effort to grow. Needless to say they make a statement in the garden or a flower arrangement, and a field grown for seed production is a stunning sight.

Online you will find herbal remedies and all types of lore, legend, and myth about sunflowers. Some witch and pagan oriented sites speak of the flower’s ‘energy.’ How could a genus that provides such beauty, food and oil with such little care not engender legendary acclaim?

Sunflowers do best if planted directly in soil at or just before the last frost date in a site chosen for its sunny location. Once established the plants do well for themselves, but fertilizing every two weeks or so helps them grow to their full potential. It is amazing to watch them grow to the heights they can achieve, but beware! Deer love sunflowers, too. The stalks are often thick and fibrous, especially with the very tall growing types. It takes strength to hold those large flower heads so high! The leaves correspond in scale and size to the flowers. Do to their size they look coarse and ungainly, and can sometimes irritate a susceptible person’s skin. Another warning: bees often hover in the flower’s central disk. Despite these few drawbacks, if sunflowers don’t make your heart glow with warmth, you might not be human.

Purple Coneflower

In 1980 I traveled down Highway 54 in Missouri. Wild purple coneflowers lined the roadside in waves of pink flowers that resembled shooting stars headed for the heavens. The long pink petals fell back from the orange seed head in wavy rays. The beautiful flowers seemed to float above the tall roadside grass. At the time I wondered why it was call purple rather than pink coneflower, but that’s just one of its mysteries.

Ten years later they were gone. The coneflower, or Echinacea, had become a ‘cure’ for weak immune systems and AIDS had become a prevalent disease. Coneflowers roots became a valuable commodity. A friend told me it took one year to empty the roadside of coneflowers. Diggers waited until the plants bloomed, then dug them wherever they spotted the flowers, filling trucks with plants taken from public property. At that time Missouri had no law against digging roadside wildflowers.

Coneflowers are vestige plants of the prairies that once stretched across America. They have a long history as medical plants. Native Americans used the roots of this wildflower for everything from snakebite to cleansing rites for ceremonial rituals. European settlers soon used the coneflower as a blood purifier to cure a wide variety of ailments such as unidentified infections and ailments.

As garden plants, the mid-to-late summer flowers of Purple Coneflower punctuate the border with large, vivid blossoms on three-foot stems. The orange cones contrast with the pink petals in an unusual color harmony among flowers. As prairie plants, coneflowers thrive where many plants fail. Coneflowers grow from zone 4 to zone 8 with equal ease. They withstand drought, love hot sunny sites, and don’t need regular applications of fertilizer.

They are easily grown from seed, but the plants take two years to reach flowering size. Most garden centers carry pot-grown plants, usually already in flower. Transplanting doesn’t seem to bother them anymore than the type of soil in which they are planted. Known as ‘clay busters,’ coneflowers grow in clay as well as sandy soils like mine.

Hybridizers produced a cultivar ‘Magnus’ with petals that extended nearly straight out from the cone rather than drooping, making the flower appear more daisy-like. Since ‘Magus,’ the hybridizers have gone wild with new cultivars in amazing colors like the orange petals of ‘Tiki Torch,’ the green, stubby petals of ‘Green Envy,’ and the yellow petals of ‘Sunrise,’ plus they have produced some blossom configurations that look like a mum flower on top of the regular coneflower like the cerise red ‘Razzmatazz,’ and the green ‘Coconut Lime.’

The foliage has never been as attractive as the flowers. The large leaves have serrated edges and are coated with fine hairs. They look coarse and can be attacked by mildew making them even more unattractive. If mildew is a problem in your area, try growing some of the mildew resistant cultivars available.

This is a great plant for any garden and although blooms throughout the summer sparkles especially in late summer and fall.

There are still great days left to summer and early autumn, so I’m not complaining, but boy, how the last hundred days have flown by! The plants I wanted to move in August were not transplanted and remain on the to-do list. The weeds got away from me in certain parts of the garden (started sorting that problem out yesterday), and I didn’t get some of the things accomplished that I wanted. It was way too hot here during almost all of late July and early August for me to want to be outside.

Today I planted some perennial seeds in planters that hopefully will sprout and grow a little before the first frost. Even then I can move the containers holding them into the green house and they’ll be able to grow some more before winter claims them. Maybe this will work better for me than planting indoors in late winter. That hasn’t been spectacularly successful.

Had a wonderful August garden club meeting in a member’s beautiful yard. Take a look.

Bracken Fern

You can’t miss bracken fern. It has two fern-like fronds emerging from an upright single, frond-topped rigid stalk. When newly emerged, the fronds are soft and pliant. As they age, they toughen making a walk in shorts through a colony of bracken an unpleasant, scratchy experience. This large fern grows knee-high or taller, and is most often found in partial shade to sunny, dry locations. Matter of fact, you won’t find it in waterlogged soils or heavily shaded areas where you expect to find ferns.

Bracken is a pioneer plant. It can grow on many types of soils, and the soil’s acidity or alkalinity doesn’t seem to matter. Wind-born spores allow it to quickly inhabit newly disturbed soils. It will be one of the first to start growing after a fire has swept through an area. Its dried fronds cover the ground in fall. This dried material helps fuel incipient fires and insure bracken’s survival by burning away competition while its rhizome root enables it to survive the same fire. This rhizome also forms the stalk, which is not the hollow ‘stem’ of most herbaceous perennials plants.

During bracken’s long survival it has evolved methods to ensure its continued existence. These methods do not make it a garden friendly plant. It secretes chemicals into the soil that inhibit the growth of neighboring plants. Chemicals in its leaves kill or inhibit the growth of insects. The plant invades crop fields, competing for the soil’s nutrients and moisture. It can poison cows and horses grazing on its fronds. Research has shown eating bracken can produce tumors in animals; the only plant known to have this capability.

Resistant to many herbicides, the only reliable way to eradicate bracken from an area is to repeated cut the above ground growth. This weakens the rhizome and eventually kills it.

An important crop used to thatch roofs and fuel a quick fire in Medieval Europe, today bracken is a human food crop. The emerging tightly curled fronds or fiddleheads are considered a delicacy raw, cooked, salted or pickled. It has been used as an ingredient of beer, the ground rhizome dried and ground for flour, and it is still used in parts of the world as an herbal remedy. Yes, despite the carcinogenic results of tests on lab animals and ties to leukemia and cancers of various digestive organs in humans.

To its credit, with it’s poisonous traits, bracken may become the source for new insecticides.

Another benefit come from the bracken. Their rhizomes extract phosphorus and transmute it into a type more readily available to plants, so the presence of bracken can indicate a nutrient rich soil. The fronds are sensitive to acid rain and act as an indicator of air pollution.

Long ago someone thought this upright, triangular arrangement of fronds made this fern look like an eagle. Bracken’s botanical name Pteridium aquilinum reflects this, aquilinum meaning ‘eagle-like.’ The genus name ‘Pteridium,’ derives from the Greek word for fern, and bracken comes down from Old English for any fern, but the word applied in particular to this fern. Its survival is more certain than that of its namesake.

sempervivium

The species name tectorum comes from ‘of the roof,’ for they have grown on tile roofs of houses for over 2,000 years in their native regions of southern Europe. It was claimed Zeus gave man houseleeks to protect his home against lighting and fire, and that centuries later Charlemagne in his conviction of that belief, ordered it grown on every roof. Don’t know this for certain, perhaps they’re just legends.

Sempervivum are listed in one of my herbals. The leaves have an astringent quality and the inner juice rubbed on irritated skin can relieve burns, insect bites and other itches. Their taste doesn’t recommend them for any culinary purpose, and there is no proven method of preserving them.

For many years they have languished, overlooked in neglected garden nooks and crannies while newer more exciting plants took the spotlight. A few years ago they became very popular for use in ‘living wreaths,’ but are more commonly grown in almost any type of container from worn out shoes to elegant urns. Their interest as garden plants rekindled as gardeners sought plants with easy upkeep. Sempervivum certainly provides that, along with a unique form that provides a geometrical dimension and a fine soft blue-green color that makes them a stand out among dozens of leafy mounding type groundcovers.

The flat rosettes of overlapping thick, fleshy leaves seem architectural in arrangement, and the abundant offshoots (the chicks) easily root providing many new plants. Given time a hens and chicks plant will form a low mat in even extremely difficult garden locations. A relative of Sedum, Sempervivum like fast draining soils, full sun or partial shade, survive drought and neglect, and succeed just about everywhere except boggy soil.

These evergreen succulents come from the Alps and Pyrenees mountains in Europe and are hardy to zone four. The flowers are more interesting than beautiful, notable for growing long rope-like stems covered in scale leaves and hold their small flowers in thready, coarse bunches. After flowering the rosette dies, so don’t feel bad about pulling it out and giving the chicks a chance to grow on.
Many interesting cultivars are available changing the color spectrum of the plant a little, and more nurseries are carrying Sempervivum, so look for new ones to become available. Other species are not reliably hardy to zone four, but will survive in dish gardens where they can be stored in warmer locations during winter. Sempervivum arachnoideum or the cobweb houseleek is one to try.