The Friday Question

What the heck is this weed?

The dry spots in the garden got Israeli names: the West Bank, the Gaza Strip. The Weed completely took over a patch about 5 feet x 4 feet on the West Bank that I had left totally weed-free only two weeks (okay, maybe three weeks) ago. I had to pull out most of the accidental Love-in-a-Mist patch to get rid of The Weed and I see it's spreading underneath the azaleas too.

At least it's very easy to pull out, has the tiniest little roots, doesn't sting or poke or smell bad. What can I do to avoid another rampage? Would I have to go nuclear (I wouldn't)? Can I eat it? I've got two five-gallon buckets so far. Can I sell it? Make a craft item with it?

Chinese jasmine

The first blooms of this jasmine, which I grow in a pot on the south side of the house, showed up on May 29th.

It doesn't grow like mad, like other jasmines, and it also doesn't have the awesome scent. I fell in lust with it during a visit to Portland's Chinese Garden, hunted it down, then treated it with all the respect a fickle young man treats a girl who's finally said "Yes." I couldn't say I treated it like dirt, or like bad dirt, because I treat bad dirt good! I brought this girl home, put her in a big black nursery pot for lack of anything better, and shoveled basic untreated garden dirt on top, planning to do something better soon. There she sat for four years, in a windy spot on the patio atop the garage.

She's been in this warm, protected spot, in a decent pot with great dirt, on the south side of the house, for a little over a year now, and I'd say she's doubled in size.



"What are you gonna do with those pots by the jasmine?" you ask. Well, first, let me tell you where I got them: Rite-Aid! For $4.49 apiece! They're made in Thailand of a hollow-sounding terra cotta (so bring them in for winter). The price sticker includes a five-line warning to USE AS DECORATION ONLY because the paints are "known to contain lead . . . ."

Yep, Rite-Aid drug stores. One of the formerly best-kept garden pottery secrets in town.

Moving maples

The south side of the house is the perfect, and only, place for roses and jasmine. Much of the small space (perhaps 15' x 4') is taken up by an Acer palmatum dissectum, perhaps "Burgundy Lace," in the middle of this photo. Japanese maples mostly grow quite slowly. This one hasn't put on much height in the 10 years I've known it, but its weeping branches grow like Rapunzel's hair. I tip-pruned it two years ago and now it's completely shaggy and hanging to the ground again. I'd love to move it but am not sure where.

The last time I moved a Japanese maple -- a "Hogyoku" that had been in the ground only three years -- it took some manly help, an hour, two spades, a shovel and – it would have been a lot harder without this – a crowbar. Also, a pair of pruners and a pair of loppers. And several compromising positions on my part, pulling hard around the bottom of the trunk while Rob pushed up the rootball with the crowbar. It was the farthest thing from a gentle upheaving. “Hogyoku” was left with a rootball the size of a very large pumpkin. We spoke to it kindly, encouraged it to flourish, amended its new home with soil from its old spot and a bag of steer compost, watered it in well with just a hint of Miracle Grow, spread our fingers and urged it to "Live long and prosper." That was in early February, 2004, and here it is today:

Clematis "Niobe"

Can you believe this is one of my better rock walls? The first one I built was twice this high and, when it was done and I was about dead, the friend who got me started on the darn thing said, "Yeah, looks pretty good. Usually the flat side of the rock faces out." Makes sense, but then how do you stack 'em?

The vinyl-coated chain-link fence, the rock wall and the plantings are new, except for the big Solanum crispum 'Glasnevin' that you can see about half of on the right. This whole area was wiped out by our neighbors' picket fence when it blew into our yard during the December 2007 "hurricane". I had to cut the Glasnevin back to nothing but a structure, a gorgeous structure at that, and didn't know until about three weeks ago whether it had survived.

That's a Pieris 'Forest Flame' in the middle, flanked by red snapdragons and scarved with a clematis 'Niobe'. There are maybe 50 types of Pieris, aka lily-of-the-valley shrub because of the look of their unscented flowers. Forest Flame may be one of the best for this area because it grows tall and narrow compared to most other Pieris. It's also gorgeous in winter and early spring, with glossy leaves in four separate colors -- bright red, white, medium green and salmon -- and then the pendulous racemes of white flowers. They'd make a good Christmas tree for a rich family. This one, which is maybe 2-1/2 feet high, was $45.00 at Portland Nursery. (Am I drooling? Sometimes I drool when I think about Portland Nursery.)

Joy Creek Nursery, in Scappoose, Oregon, has the best collection of clematis I've ever seen or heard of outside of the speciality nursery Chalk Hill Clematis, which is your best bet for mail order.

Look at how red 'Niobe' is in my picture. It is supposed to be red, Barry Fretwell thinks it's one of the best reds (outside of the texensis varieties), because it doesn't fade to a nondescript color; and it's just what I wanted. But through my naked eyes I don't think it looks much different from the purple 'Gipsy Queen'. The picture from Chalk Hill Nursery is much more the way I see it. But here it is, red as all get-out, and the other colors in the photo are true.

Roses

In the late afternoon on May 28th, the sun peeked out from these stubborn gray skies and that's all the light Cornelia needed to put on her first blooms.









Planted in front of her is a white shrub rose, Dr. Robert F. Korns, named after the man who directed the nationwide field trials of the Salk polio vaccine. Dr. Korns has white flowers, in clusters like Cornelia, and is listed as growing to 3' tall; it is at least 4-1/2. He'll be blooming in another week or less, depending on the sun.


Here they are together, with a red laceleaf maple on the left and Oriental lilies in between; at their feet is galloping Gallium odoratum, Iceland poppies and geranium. This is the south side of the house.







Many roses have come and gone from various parts of this garden. Whether I put them in the ground or in a pot, they all looked awful after a couple years and eventually I pulled them out. One was sent to live with a relative in southern California but most went to the dump.

I first saw Cornelia in full bloom at Huntington Gardens, in Pasadena, California, growing on a pillar in bed 26. The Rose Garden isn't my favorite (a toss-up between the Japanese Garden and the Desert Garden), but it's a central place to sit and rest your hips while your friend takes another look around. I was drawn from my seat by the delicate apricot-pink that completely covered the pillar and smelled like the height of summer.

For our climate I think the smaller the flowers, the fewer the petals, the better the rose, whether climbing or not. Look for shrub roses, polyanthas and singles. Forget hybrid teas; they get every disease there is. The gobs of petals on "old" roses will turn into wet mush. Single roses usually have very little fragrance but otherwise do very well. Rugosas also do well almost anywhere and can be very fragrant, but need lots of room to ramble. Rosa glauca, aka Rosa rubrifolia, is very pretty, with its blue-tinted ("glaucous") leaves, its deep-pink flowers (no scent) and lots of purplish-red hips in the fall. It is very thorny and will get 6-7 feet tall and gracefully droopy. It also self-sows, so you'll get babies to give to friends.

You can get Cornelia and just about any other rose from Heirloom Roses, in St. Paul, Oregon, where I also bought Dr. Robert F. Korns. I'll never buy a rose anywhere else, unless there's another own-root nursery in Oregon. I recommended their roses for our local community radio's plant sale a few years ago, thinking they'd sell like grande frappuccinos, and Heirloom graciously donated a couple dozen plants. But people didn't understand why they should pay $15.00 for a rose "bush" no taller than the palm of their hand. Unless I stood by the rose table and talked them up, they were passed by like the Frog Prince.

The love they need is little more than a kiss. Transplant one of those small plants to a medium-sized pot, a tallish one with lots of room for long roots if you have one, and the next year the plant will be twice the size of the hybrids you can buy at your local garden center. It will be virus-free and almost entirely resistant to the blackspot that denudes every other rose I've grown. Then put it in the ground and watch it explode into healthy, lush foliage; gorgeous, prolific flower; and fabulous scent.

Clematis Mrs. N. Thompson (see also Joy Creek Nursery, in Scappoose, Oregon) grows fairly low and stays mostly with Dr. Korns. Another Clematis whose name I can't remember now grows through Cornelia. Every year, usually around February, I shovel about an inch of steer or other compost, mixed with a few handfuls of Whitney Farms' 5-5-5 organic fertilizer, around the group. (What happened to the big bags of Whitney Farms? I can only find the boxes, which don't cover much and which are expensive.) A little more Whitney Farms in May, before the soaking rains stop. Once a summer, in a spate of coolish days, I water the whole garden with a Miracle Gro feeder attached to the hose (best to do this in May if you live in warmer climates); and then another handful of Whitney Farms in early September. I'm not rigorous about any of that: I tell you what I've done in the year or two when I think I've taken very good care of this group of plants.

Cornelia and Dr. Korns have been in the ground for about five years, and so far, so beautiful. But I've been optimistic about roses before. In a journal entry dated February 23, 2003, I wrote:

I’m planning the whole bed around “Royal Sunset” because it’s such an incredibly beautiful rose, always met with oohs and aahs, always in bloom and relatively disease free.

The next year, Royal Sunset, bought at a local garden center, was sent to the dump for poor performance.