[ Lost in the Landscape ]

flower trials and tribulations

I ran across William Miller’s Annual Flower Research page of Cornell’s Depart­ment of Hor­ti­cul­ture the other day. It’s one of those sites where you can spend a fair amount of time but still feel good about your­self in that you’re learn­ing fun stuff while you’re there.

I don’t have a lot of space in my gar­den for annu­als and I want that space to count. Seed cat­a­logs usu­ally sell you on a plant’s good qual­i­ties but, quite frankly, when was the last time you saw one of them talk about a plant’s minuses? Annual Flower Research tri­als sev­eral dozen of the newest intro­duc­tions and rates them on plant uni­for­mity, flow­er­ing, foliage and land­scape value. These rat­ings are based on how well the plants per­form over the sum­mer in Ithaca, New York, so the results won’t be applic­a­ble to all regions in all sea­sons. Still there’s lots that is gen­er­al­iz­able to many situations.

What I like most are the pho­tos which, begin­ning with their 2005 tri­als, are taken at two-week inter­vals through­out the grow­ing sea­son. Do you want to get a sense of how your bed will look like as it pro­gresses through­out the year? Do you want to see how well the plants grow? Do you want to see whether the plants stay in bloom through­out the sum­mer? The pic­tures can help you answer those questions.

One spe­cific ques­tion that the sequen­tial pic­tures answered for me is how plants of red mil­let develop their color over the sea­son, a ques­tion that’s espe­cially inter­est­ing because I’d just plants out of the ‘Red Majesty’ strain. Unfor­tu­nately their trial of this strain was in 2004, before the bi-weekly pho­tos started up, but their 2005 tri­als included the ‘Jester’ strain, devel­oped from a seedling of ‘Red Majesty.’ That would prob­a­bly give me a good approx­i­ma­tion of how the color of the mother strain would develop. [ The source of these images ]

June 30

July 12

August 1

August 18

Sep­tem­ber 3

So…I could expect mostly green foliage with red-purple flower stalks. Then about a month later every­thing would turn dark pur­ple. Cool site, eh?

The one thing that I’d love to see added would be details of the flow­ers. It’s nice to see how the plants would do in the land­scape, but I usu­ally buy plants based on how deeply in love I fall with the indi­vid­ual flow­ers. Add that fea­ture and I’d be spend­ing even more time at this site.

October 20 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Annual Flower Research • annuals • flower trials • Pennisetum glaucum 'Purple Majesty' • purple millet | 1 Comment »

garden-deficit disorder

It’s get­ting to be that sea­son. My morn­ings are now see­ing me at work around sun­rise and home at a time when it’s almost dark by when I’ve fin­ished prepar­ing and eat­ing din­ner. And for the next two months it’s only going to be get­ting worse as we head towards the dark­en­ing maw of win­ter. At least I only do these long days four times a week. Still, I’m get­ting a seri­ous case of with­drawal from the garden.

This is the time of year when I really start to feel envi­ous about John’s posi­tion, work­ing out of the house. In between doing what he does on the phone and com­puter he gets a chance to keep up with the hap­pen­ings on the street. The neigh­bors across the street just had a new baby, John reported, and he’s really cute. John also reported that the mother of one of our neigh­bors just died, and the neigh­bor two houses down is now in a nurs­ing home, com­pletely inco­her­ent, after being ambu­lanced away from the house not much more than a week ago.

Look­ing at the implaca­ble facades of the houses on the street, it’s hard to tell that any­thing is hap­pen­ing. But being home, around the neigh­bors, John is able to keep up with dramas.

John is also able to keep up with things hap­pen­ing in the gar­den. A story from the past week was of look­ing out the win­dow to see the cat din­ing on the ten­der new leaves of the mil­let seedlings that I’d set in the ground not many days before.

“You didn’t stop her?” I protested.

“It was soooo cute,” he said.

Well, this was the cat over last week­end. How can you dis­ci­pline basic instinc­tual behav­ior in such a sweet cat? Okay, okay, I calmed down a bit.

But I was still wor­ried about the mil­let plants.

Left: Orna­men­tal mil­let, Pen­nise­tum glau­cum ‘Pur­ple Majesty’ [ source ]

Orna­men­tal red mil­let hit the gar­den world in a big way with the intro­duc­tion of the Pur­ple Majesty F1 strain in 2003. This slen­der four– to five-footer was awarded the All-America Selec­tions Gold Medal, which basi­cally assured that the plant would end up in gar­den cen­ters and seed cat­a­logs all over. That strain spawned oth­ers, includ­ing the shorter ‘Jester,’ which I’ve been start­ing to see a lot of–even at the Home Depot gar­den center.

Even though pur­ple mil­let is now so déclassé, now that it’s hit Home Depot, I decided I wanted to try it. A seed order a few weeks back brought me a hefty packet of the orig­i­nal Pur­ple Majesty. Some of the seeds went into pots and they sprouted in less than a week. And then the lit­tle fel­las were ready for the gar­den, when they were adjust­ing and start­ing to increase in size. And then the lawn­mower cat attacked.

Well, I’m glad to say, I could hardly see any cat dam­age to the seedlings–a chewed blade here and there, but noth­ing major. Here’s a lit­tle clump of them as they stand today. The largest is push­ing eight inches tall, and the red col­oration is start­ing to develop now that they’re bask­ing in full sun half of the day. It might be too late in the year for them to develop the dra­matic seed heads, but I’ll have some nice pur­ple, ver­ti­cal plants in the gar­den in no time. Since these are hardy to zone 8, they’ll make it through win­ter just fine and be bloom­ing away before you know it.

Any­way, now that I’ve have a cou­ple hours in the gar­den this morn­ing I’m feel­ing reju­ve­nated, espe­cially now that I know that the plants I’ve been slav­ing over lately have come through unscathed. And of course it’s been nice to have some gar­den time to spend with the cat. To pro­tect the mil­let, I’ve been point­ing out to her the lit­tle grass seedlings that are real weeds. So far the feline lawn­mower seems con­tent with the other options.

October 17 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles • rambles | Tags: cats • October • Pennisetum glaucum 'Purple Majesty' • purple • purple millet • the neighborhood | 2 Comments »