Flowers this week
My state of mind on the vernal equinox this year is hopeful though not joyous. My condition has changed irretrievably with the loss my father, the experience of coming through a 100-year pandemic, a year of spending most days working alone in a rural setting. And other shifts in my situation. I feel sober.
Being of a sober frame of mind is normal for me, so it wouldn’t have taken all this to put me here. I know that security is, to a greater or lesser degree, an illusion, but I have always done what I can for the sake of security in everyday life. I was lucky to have the income last year to spend money on things like a new garage/shop building, but the fragility of my situation (and everyone’s) seems close to the surface, more so than usual.
But there are flowers coming to the farm and the North Lawrence garden. I have always had flowers. That has always been a requirement, to have at least a few, if not a flower farm. Here is the report.
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The early varieties of peonies—the earliest being ‘Coral Charm’, ‘Etched Salmon’ and ‘Red Charm’, are shooting up, with some nearly 6 inches tall now. Later varieties are a couple of inches tall or just have their noses out of the ground, or not at all. The ‘Etched Salmon’ were just planted last fall; they are new to me, and I look forward to seeing how they look and how they hold up.
Peonies probably are the best long-term investment a flower grower can make, with the wait of two-and-a-half years from planting to cutting worth it. They require so little, live for decades and reliably produce the lushest flowers of the year at a time when the buying public is starved for such things.
The tulips are all up, buds not visible yet. The tulips this spring are limited to two whites, ‘Mondial’ and ‘Mount Tacoma’; the early-blooming pale yellow ‘Verona’, and ‘Black Hero’. Bulb shipments could not be counted on last year, and I was too late with my order of ‘Copper Image’ and ‘La Belle Epoque’ so have none.
All the narcissus are up. I have none of the yellow trumpets; everyone has those in the yard. What I have out are ‘Cragford’, a very early, fragrant variety with several blooms per stem, white petals with soft orange centers. Otherwise, there are hundreds of ‘Actaea’ and ruffly double ‘Sir Winston Churchill’. I likely will take bunches of these to the Merc for sale in April. Narcissus are not long-lived, and I don’t want to invest too much in them because they are so easy to grow and everyone has them. The ‘Ice Follies’ are blooming at the North Lawrence garden.
The hellebores are up. Most of mine are short garden varieties I shouldn’t have bought, fancy flowers with stems too short—‘Red Racer’ and ‘Onyx Odyssey’—and planted four or five years ago where they have a little too much sun. But I admire them.
Iris plants are beginning to grow and promise flowers for late April.
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Nearly all the fall-planted spring-flowering annuals made it through our run of sub-zero temperatures. I lost the ‘Amazing Grey’ poppies—an experiment in fall planting that failed—but I put heavy frost blanket on the scabiosa and the Ammi majus ‘Graceland’, two favorites that are more sensitive to cold than the other varieties I plant in the fall, and they have survived. The past couple of years I have limited my planting of Scabiosa purpurea to the ‘Black Knight’ and ‘Fata Morgana’ varieties because these colors are so useful. Scabiosa is tedious to harvest and works best, in my experience, as an accent flower, so I limit my investment in it, though I love it.
This past weekend I began pruning some of the crops. Their job in autumn is to grow and form strong root systems, and in spring their initial growth will in many cases form either a clump or a rosette from which the flowering stalks will burst forth. The snapdragons first grow tall then fall over, and I prune off the ratty old growth in early spring. Last fall was long and warm, and the snaps came close to wanting to bloom (and if I had the right varieties growing in a hoop house instead of under wire wickets and row cover, they would have). A fairly normal winter followed, but with extreme cold over a week’s time in February, these conditions made a mess of the plants’ initial growth. On Saturday I cut all this off and was left with nice small bushy plants that should flower well.
The Sweet William grew more lush than I have ever seen it and was already was covered with green flower heads that would have bloomed later, but they looked ratty from the cold and the stems were short, so I did something I’ve never done before: I pruned the entire plants back hard. We’ll see if that was a mistake, but I expect it will spur new growth and more, stronger stems and better flowers. Sweet William are so tough and yet so softly fragrant, so useful from April into June. I plant the ‘Sweet’ series in white, black cherry and coral.
The rudbeckias are still hunched down low and look fine; they’ll bloom in June. The foxglove looks good; I am impatient for their blooms. The dusty miller is as reliable as ever. The yarrow and the chocolate-flowered carrot, the toughest of all, seem unaffected by the cold. I planted twice as much yarrow as in past years, I love it so much.