June 2012: Roses

No doubt about it. Roses and hydrangeas reign supreme in June, and this year they are spectacular.

Roses first.

While it was difficult to decide which of my bewitching, lushly fragrant roses to talk about, Rosa ‘Belle Vichyssoise’ won out because of the fascinating history of Belle’s rose-class, the Noisette.

In the early 1800’s John Champneys, an amateur rose hybridizer in South Carolina, developed the first reblooming rose in the western world, R.’Champneys’ Pink Cluster’. Then, as the story goes, he distributed the rose to a number of people, including his French-born neighbor and nurseryman, Philippe Noisette. Philippe, in turn, sent the rose or seedlings of the rose to his brother, Louis Claude, a nurseryman in France, who used the roses as seed parents in his own hybridization program.

Louis invited the renowned botanical painter Redoute to draw one of the roses. On the drawing Redoute wrote: “Rosa Noisettiana, Rosier de Philippe Noisette.” The rest is history: Redoute’s paintings became world famous, along with the name Noisette, and all the hybridized roses in the class are now called Noisettes — not Champneys.

Was Champneys robbed?

William R. Prince, of the Prince Nursery in Flushing, New York, the purveyor of plants to many notables, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, certainly thought so. In 1846 he wrote: “The origin of the first varieties of this remarkable group has been announced erroneously to the world by various writers, arising first, from the want of candor on the part of Philippe Noisette of Charleston, when he transmitted the plants to Paris; and secondly, from the ignorance of those who have discussed the subject.”

Was Champneys robbed? Probably.

But don’t let this sorry history deter you from enjoying the splendid Noisette, my treasure, Rosa ‘Belle Vichyssoise’. Unlike most Noisettes which prefer southern climes, Belle is winter hardy here in the northeast, zone 7. She is in continuous bloom from late Spring thru Fall, flaunting fat clusters of small pink blossoms that perfume the air with intoxicating fragrance. And she enjoys robust health, a sine qua non in my organic garden. Truly a must-have rose.

I purchased mine from Roses Unlimited (www.rosesunlimitedownroot.com).

Update on Rosa ‘Golden Fairy Tale’. ( See “2011 Successes”)

This year R. ‘Golden Fairy Tale’ is better than ever. No change in the foliage—-still clean and healthy. It’s the flowers. The shrub is bursting with them; one large stem even jumped the fence looking for new worlds to conquer. The blossoms are fragrant and beautiful from bud to mature bloom. Another must-have rose.

I purchased mine from Palatine Roses ( www.palatineroses.com) on the recommendation of one of the owners, Eva Schmitz.

May Surprise: Azalea Leaf Gall

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At the beginning of May I found a very unusual and interesting growth on my azalea, Rhododendron ‘Gibraltar’. It looked like a baseball-size, smooth, light green fruit. Wow, I thought, a HUGE seedpod.

So wrong!

Jim Fry, an azalea guru, set me straight. My azalea had a fungus disease, Exobasidium vaccinii (or E. japonicum), otherwise known as azalea leaf gall. During cool wet Spring weather the fungus enters the tissue of plants, incubates over winter, and the fleshy galls appear the following Spring. When the galls turn white—looking as though they have been dusted with flour— they are actually coated with fungal spores which can infect other plants. Cut them off before they reach this stage.

The fungus doesn’t kill the plant or cause serious damage but the galls do replace flowers.While a single plant sporting a bouquet of galls might be quite a garden showpiece, don’t be taken in. The fungus spores are airborne takeover artists.

Reportedly, the French solved the problem of galls the French way. They eat them. Adventurous diners, the French. Me, not so much.

R.’ Gibraltar’ is a gorgeous deciduous orange azalea. One of the best. Don’t let the possibility of galls stop you from having it in your garden.

And forgive me as I digress a bit to recommend another orange May beauty, my favorite tree peony, Paeonia ‘Nike’. Exquisite flowers and fragrance! (Available from Klehm’s Song Sparrow Nursery).

March Bloom 2012

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Rhododendron mucronulatum ‘Mahogany Red’ usually blooms in April, but this year it jumped the gun and was in full dazzling flower in March. The bees were delighted. Not wanting to be left behind, Mahogany’s longtime garden companion, the fragrant Magnolia stellata ‘Royal Star’, also made an early appearance with its lovely rosy-pink buds that open white. These two loving intertwiners have shared star billing in my garden for over fifteen years and have bloomed reliably and heavily every year. Both flourish in compost-rich, well-drained acid soil.

Camellia ‘Governor Mouton’, a hardy April bloomer, also flowered in March because of the unseasonably warm weather. A old favorite introduced in the eighteenth century, the Governor is quite the showstopper with vibrant red flowers splashed with white. (For hardy camellia culture information, see William Ackerman’s book, “Beyond the Camellia Belt”, and click on my post, “Exciting Plants for Shade”).

Edgeworthia chrysantha always blooms in March and this year is no exception. Despite the unexpected competition from the fabulous plants described above, Edgeworthia had no problem attracting attention with its showy yellow and white flowers that perfume the air with intoxicating fragrance; and when the flowers fade, the shrub sports beautiful, tropical like foliage for the rest of the growing season. All this on a woodland plant that appreciates shade.

Edgeworthia chrysantha copyright 2012

March 2012 has been both a surprise and a joy.

More 2011 Successes and 2012 Obsessions

Feb5

2011 Successes

Everyone needs an occasional bit of sunlight to chase away the winter blues. I’m no exception. So when Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate, I bask in the warm glow of Pinus densiflora ‘Burke’s Variegated’. Endowed with green needles banded in gold, this dwarf conifer resembles one of my long-time favorites, Pinus wallichiana ‘Zebrina’, but when its foliage matures and turns a luminous pale yellow, there’s none can match it in the winter landscape. My own burst of sunshine.

Whenever I see a plant with dazzling trumpet-like flowers I’m breathless with longing. It’s a case of lust at first sight. (See “Hot Tips: Great New Plant”). British Dame Penelope Lively understands. “For me,” she said, “gardening is a sequence of obsessions — the tingle of discovery, the love affair with the latest acquisition.” And so it was with me and Begonia ‘Bonfire.’ I filled three containers with this glorious annual and was rewarded all summer with a sea of vibrant orange flowers. They made me happy. Bonfire is a keeper.

Ditto for Rhododendron ‘Mrs Furnivall’, an oldie introduced in 1920 but new to my garden. No demure Mrs this one. More like a Las Vegas showgirl flaunting her stuff: a luscious display of saucy pink flowers splashed with red. She doesn’t need trumpets to be irresistible. (The bees agree).

2012 Obsessions

This year I’m after Fuchsia ‘Pour Menneke’, an annual with captivating, long, slender, soft orange trumpet flowers. (Yup, those trumpets again). An ideal plant for a container, Pour Menneke will be available this year in England, but as far as I can tell, not available here. More’s the pity, but it takes time (Drat!) before their best newbies reach us. (Yeah, yeah, I know. HAVE PATIENCE).

NEWSFLASH: Just read an alert about the Fuchsia gall mite from Andrew Halstead, Principal Entomologist with the Royal Horticultural Society in England. He warns that this predatory insect is a “devastating microscopic pest of fuchsias that will probably eventually spread throughout Britain. Because the damage cannot be controlled, it may lead to a decline in the popularity of this valuable garden plant.” (He’s right about that. ‘Pour (Poor?) Menneke’ is no longer on my wish list.)

No problem whatever with the fabulous shade plant, Heuchera ‘Stainless Steel’, from the breeding program of Charles and Martha Oliver of The Primrose Path, Pennsylvania. With silver foliage (flipside reddish-purple) and lush sprays of white bell flowers on chocolate stems in May, this unique beauty is nothing short of sensational. Grab it while you can.

credit: The Primrose Path

And thank goodness for Dan Hinkley, plantsman-explorer extraordinaire, who teamed up with Monrovia to offer a select group of his plant hunting finds, The Dan Hinkley Plant Collection, which will be available in nurseries and garden centers this Spring. Topping my wish-list is the lovely and rare Golden Crane Hydrangea, H. angustipetala ‘MonLongShou’. Not only does it flaunt showy white and chartreuse lacecap flowers with scalloped-edged petals, this hydrangea is intensely fragrant.

credit: Dan Hinkley

Finally, I can’t wait for my Genie to arrive. While this one doesn’t live in a bottle, she is magical. Magnolia ‘Genie’ has reddish black buds and masses of plum-red (dare I say magenta?) flowers in the spring with repeat bloom in the summer. She flowers at a young age, only grows to about ten feet, and is already an award winner. As the song goes: ” Who could ask for anything more?”

credit: Rare Find Nursery

Prunus ‘Snow Fountain’

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My spring garden is full of wonder and surprise. One year I was startled by the appearance of a diminutive red tulip, which grew right through the brown-stemmed skeleton of a withered ageratum. How did the tiny bulb get there? Its a mystery to me.

Equally puzzling are the single daffodils that suddenly unfurl hundreds of feet from the bulbs I planted. Daffodils naturalize, but do they also fly?

Perhaps a bird is the carrier. But only one intent on suicide would molest a toxic daffodil bulb; birds are, in fact, health freaks, sensible enough to prefer rose hips which contain 400 times more vitamin C per ounce than oranges.

And that may explain the rosa rugosa which sprang from the middle of a thick mound of juniper on the north side of the house. An unlikely spot for a rose, so unlikely that I’m rather inclined to think its the work of a squirrel, the ultimate haphazard gardener.

To my amazement and delight, the garden plays host to a wide assortment of extraordinary volunteers, so I’m especially careful when I rake and weed because I never know what wonderful plants may magically appear. Like seedlings of my treasure , Prunus ‘Snow Fountain’.

Twenty years ago at the Philadelphia Flower Show I saw this luminous weeping cherry for the first time. I had to have her. Easier said than done. She was not labeled; she was not part of a sponsored exhibit; no one at the show knew who she was or to whom she belonged. Kidnapping crossed my mind but this angel’s 12-foot wide arching wingspan smothered in fragrant, snowy white blossoms was a tad much for the Metroliner.

What’s a crazed, lovesick, gardener to do? Hit the phones, of course. You know, six degrees of separation. It worked. She was identified and two months later she was mine. (Not the Philly goddess. A lovely, young New York model).

And we are living happily ever after. Snow Fountain is very healthy, blooms reliably and heavily every year, and flaunts dazzling Fall foliage in shades of burnt orange and red. When her flowers fade, she produces tiny ornamental fruit that songbirds love. And thus, the wonderful cherry tree seedlings which pop up in the garden every now and again.

Ain’t Mother Nature grand?

Identity Theft

Nov26

Where is the FBI when you really need them? Con artists stole my darling Merrill’s identity, and he is so bloody mad it’s enough to make his teeth curl. That is, if he had teeth.

Merrill is a gorgeous, fragrant, white flowering magnolia, la crème de la crème of magnolias. No wonder imposters abound. A few years ago I was reading Montrose: Life in A Garden by plantswoman Nancy Goodwin, when at pages 37 and 38 I was confronted by a magnolia purporting to be Merrill, flaunting pink buds and flowers with pink stripes. There’s no pink in Merrill! I should know; he has graced my garden in Southampton, New York for over twenty years.

Yet upon further reflection I thought, what if my Merrill is the pretender? I raced to the study and checked the definitive magnolia references. Ah, vindication! The experts agree. No pink in Merrill. Goodwin’s magnolia must have been wrongly labeled. (At pages 181-182, she acknowledges that this happened to another of her magnolias.)

Magnolia x loebneri Merrill was hybridized in 1939 at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, the child of a marriage between M. kobus and M. stellata, and in 1952 was named Merrill in honor of Dr. E.D. Merrill, a former director of the Arboretum. Merrill is part of the hybrid magnolia group loebneri, which originated in Germany with Max Löbner, who made the first kobus/stellata crosses shortly before World War I. Why is the group styled loebneri and not lobneri? I haven”t a clue. But my meaningful-other says the answer is no mystery. The German letter ö with a diacritical mark called an umlaut over it is pronounced ee and is always rendered as oe when German names are spelled out in English texts, unless the translator is sloppy. (Is anyone still there?)

In the year of Merrill’s christening, the Arbotetum’s publication Arnoldia reported that Merrill was covered with beautiful white flowers (Arnoldia, vol. 12, no. 6, 1952) and thereafter that Merrill was “[o]ne of the best and most vigorous of the early white flowering magnolias (Arnoldia, vol. 20, no. 3/4, 1960). Indeed, these observations are entirely consistent with all of the documentation provided me by the Arboretum. Pink is not mentioned in connection with Merrill, not ever. Case closed.

Magnolia x loebneri Merrill has much to recommend it: While I garden in USDA zone 7, Merrill will thrive in zones 5 to 8. Growth is rapid , two feet a year , and my trees are now over 30 feet tall. Despite the energy invested in such vigorous growth, Merrill bloomed abundantly at an early age and reliably every year thereafter. The beautiful, snowy-white flowers have a lovely fragrance which carries on the air. Come Fall, when the lustrous green foliage turns a rich autumnal gold, plump scarlet red fruit attracts an assortment of migrating birds.

Why settle for less?

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A Garden Blog by Lois Sheinfeld

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