Yeah, this is why I kept the azaleas

I am not a photographer, so I can only try to color in words the way this azalea's blooms glow in the early morning light, like a silky summer evening gown worn by a woman a bit woozy with too many daiquiris but still holding her balance as she stands at the top of a grand flight of stairs in strappy high-heeled sandals in the wee hours of a chill April morn.

Or like an unpruned azalea.  I don't think azaleas should be pruned much, but on the other hand they should then have space to express themselves, perhaps best in the slightly wild area in the far back of one's garden where one can look at them in April (or whatever month they choose to bloom in) from a nice blurry distance as they glow (preferably in colors that make some attempt at coordination, and not the usual glaring mismatch, but who really cares anyway) and then can be pretty much ignored for the rest of the year.  Because, let's face it, azaleas are not very interesting when they're not blooming.  And they're usually planted in full sun so they get lacebugs and spend their lives gradually dying.  And there are way too many of them, except when they're blooming.

I now possess three azaleas, and unless I decide to put some in the wild blurry area out back, that is all I will ever have.  They all came with the house.  This one (I don't know what kind it is: pinky-lavender and large flowers) is a "foundation plant" in front of the front porch, where it gets late afternoon sun and not enough lacebugs to destroy its happy existence.  It has a twin that is much smaller because it lives under a Japanese pieris.

Here's what was planted in front of our house when we moved in 24 years ago, from right to left as you face the house:

Pieris
Azalea
Arborvitae
Two small azaleas
[Door of screened porch]
Two small azaleas
Arborvitae
Azalea
Rhododendron

And then a yew around the corner.  They had been planted a few years before, because by the time we moved in it was already clear that the two small azaleas on each side of the door had been a mistake that was threatening to eliminate passage.  They must have been very cute and tiny at the garden center.

The arborvitae got bagworms and died.  The rhododendron died of exposure when we had to cut down the Giant Maple Tree in the front yard.  The four small azaleas I dug up and moved out back (one of them is still alive, now blooming in white under the self-planted redbud).  Here's what we have now:

Pieris (has put on another third at least in size)
Azalea (growing entirely sideways but still managing to peer fetchingly out from under the pieris)
[Opening of now unscreened porch]
Azalea (mostly unpruned)
Viburnum 'Mohawk'

And the yew is still around the corner.  Across the front: was 10 plants, now four, or three and a half if you give the sideways azalea its due.  Plan for growth, people.

Weed triage

As I just said over on Grow It Eat It, I pulled out 35 gallons of garlic mustard this morning, counted by the 5-gallon bucketful.  What I was coy about there was just how much remained to be pulled.

That's some of it.  Not just in the foreground; check out further down the hill.  Another 7 buckets there, I'm guessing.  Luckily I have near-eradicated it in the front part of the half-acre.  Well, almost near-eradicated.  You can pull the stuff up and it grows back from a piece of root you missed or a seed that was shed three years back.  Eventually I may win, or you may start seeing posts praising the subtle beauty of the stuff.

Kinda pretty, no?

It has allelopathic chemicals that kill other plants in its vicinity, so it takes over entire fields, and it grows in sun or shade, though best in part shade.  Woods with thin understory?  Perfect.  The parks around here have competitive garlic mustard pulls in the spring.

Anyway, I've decided to take a new approach to the endless battle against weeds: triage and selective attack.  Instead of trying to pull all the weeds from one or two beds, I'm going after one type at a time in a broader area, preferably that which provides the biggest threat, like garlic mustard about to go to seed.  Another priority for this week: Japanese honeysuckle, about to become inaccessible under shrubs that are filling out.  I already missed my chance to get the vines living under the lilacs before they gained camouflage.  The honeysuckle is evergreen, which gives it an unfair advantage.  A month ago I could spot it clearly; now the lilac leaves hide it well.  But I'll give removing it a try.

Clearing aggressive weeds like these is kind of like cleaning up a neighborhood that's been dominated by drug dealers or gangs, not that I have any personal experience with that, but it seems to me that if you only take out most of the hardened criminals, the ones that are left will have a clear field to advance themselves.  Weeding in sections, I always leave a few garlic mustard plants behind by accident, and that's enough to seed a whole new set of thugs.  Better to get them all out of one part of the yard with a few years of thorough clean-out, ignoring the small fry if necessary (I can get to like ground ivy, really).  Where I don't have "lawn" (mostly ground ivy) and never intend to have civilized beds of Gardener-Approved Plants, I am putting in aggressive but pleasant-smelling spreaders such as lemon balm and mountain mint, so at least I have something there that I can pretend is on purpose.  I'm not sure how that works into my fraught analogy.  Well-meaning politicians and community organizers?  Who breed out of control?  At least lemon balm makes nice tea.

The South is another country

This is part of the back yard of the house we stayed in last week at Folly Beach, SC.  I mean, really.

We did a garden tour in Charleston, as well, at which I was not allowed to take pictures (state law, apparently), so I can only tell you that classy city gardens do not generally contain palmettoes, though mine would if I lived there.  They do contain entire brick walls covered with creeping fig (which I don't think is hardy here), and camellias that were mostly past blooming since spring is weird to the south as well, and lots of boxwood and yew, and rosemary (everyone has rosemary hedges.  I am so jealous) but not a lot of edible plants otherwise, though one place had a small vegetable garden with tomatoes already almost two feet high, and citrus trees they merely have to cover in the winter.

And then there were all the plants whose identity I was clueless about.  I love traveling because I see new things, including plants, and I hate traveling because it makes me feel ignorant, but at least I learn stuff.  Mostly not stuff that is useful for gardening here, of course.

More photos will be posted when I get them off my son's hard drive, but he is intensely thespian this week so it will be a while.

Tulips, surprising and otherwise

One of the nice things about a spring that starts a month early with unseasonal heat and then cools down to normal again is that for once we get to spend time with our late season bloomers.  Tulips are hanging on longer, as are the late daffodils that usually show up for three days and then die of heat exhaustion.  You can see a couple of them in the background of this photo.

In the foreground... surprise!  Or rather, 'Surprise,' which is a tulip I bought I swear ten years ago because it had the name of Jack Aubrey's ship (oh dear, am hopeless) and planted out front by the mailbox in eight inches of mostly clay, and it is still pumping out a few blooms each year.  Do not believe anyone who tells you tulips are not perennial.  (They are, technically and botanically, a sort of annual that reproduces itself underground, for which there is a word, and they make for interesting metaphors, which is basically how I see the world.)  As I have said before, the secret to perennial tulips is to plant ones that clash violently with something else that blooms nearby at the same time.  In the case of 'Surprise,' this was the magnolia with the purple-pink flowers a few feet behind.  In the 2012 spring oddity, however, the magnolia is leafed-out and pretty much done blooming, so the tulips don't contrast so horribly.

They also go well with the clusiana tulips behind them, which are the real secret to perennial tulips (along with anything else in the "species" category, or Kaufmannias, or Greigiis, or Emperors, or even the Triumph sort that 'Surprise' belongs to, or even Darwin Hybrids if you have just the right spot).  I adore clusianas; they are petite and delicate and transition every day from a perfect closed bud to a wide-open display of petal interiors, and back again.  I think these must be 'Lady Jane,' though I don't actually remember buying those; they might also be an unspecified species type.  I've got bunches of them, and I'm so glad to get to enjoy them at length this year.  These photos were taken over a week ago and they're still going strong.

Didn't post sooner because I was away in South Carolina for a few days.  Photographic evidence coming up.

Worm update; and interior squeamishness

It is a dark time for the Rebellion...

The worm pacification strategy seems to be working.  I'm still getting a few little clusters like this up at the top, but not nearly as many.  So on to having a normally functioning worm bin, I hope!

Also, I have an observation to make about my own behavior; this goes under Garden Psychology, if there is such a field.  When I'm outside, in the garden, I sometimes wear gloves, but half of the time I take them off and forget to put them back on, so I'm bare-handed.  And those who have worked with me know that I am not squeamish about picking up worms, bugs, etc., as long as I know they're not going to bite me.

That's outside.  For some reason, this does not carry over to interiors.  Now, long ago I used to be bug-phobic; I'd go all Annie Hall over spiders and so forth, but I got over that, and I can handle bugs in the house... just not with my bare hands.  Out in the garden: pick the stink bugs off the plants and squish them, preferably with gloves on, but I have been known to do it without, and I can certainly take having them crawl on my bare skin.  In the house: I always use a tissue to carry them to the toilet for flushing, or a piece of cardboard to knock them into a jar of soapy water.  Out in the garden I pick up inconvenient worms and fling them away (gently, although I do confess that if my cat is "helping" me garden I let him pounce on the worms.  I'm sure this is evidence of a deep-seated psychosis).  Inside, I use wooden spoons or pieces of stiff cardboard to push my Rebel Worms back to their labor below or to poke around in the Worm Mines to see what's going on.  (On the other hand, I then wash the wooden spoon and use it to stir my dinner, so I'm still sure to gross someone out.)

I suspect this means that, deep down, I don't think bugs and worms belong in the civilized (sort of) atmosphere of my house, which of course they don't, but I'm not sure why I can't touch them to put them in their rightful place, while having no problem doing that outdoors.  The worm bin brings composting indoors, so it may eventually bridge the gap.  Not that I stick my bare hands in outdoor unfinished compost either.

Mertensia: notes on confusion in nomenclature

For someone who really loves Virginia bluebells, I have very few of them.  But I'm dividing and acquiring as I can, and someday I will have lots.  They're blooming now, and looking splendid in part-shady spots with the bleeding hearts (which will eventually swallow them, so I'll probably have to move the bluebells.  They are unassuming little dears, that take over by slow colonization rather than by getting enormous and overwhelming).

But this post isn't about the plant, really; it's about the genus name.  There are a bunch of Mertensias, though virginica is the only one I know well.  I've been taken with the name since I first learned it, and (this is the way of writers) decided that it would make a great girl's name, not for any real-life girls but for a fictional character, possibly the daughter of a botanist.  I had a couple of vague potential characters in hypothetical novels whom the name might suit, both born in about the 1750s.  So I looked it up to see if a botanist of the time would have known the name, and immediately plunged into confusion.

Just about any source you'll read (including Wikipedia) says this about Virginia bluebells:  "The Latin name Mertensia was given to this plant by Carolus Linnaeus in honor of the German botanist Franz Mertens."  Sounds good, right?  Except that Linnaeus died in January 1778, and Mertens was born in April 1764.  If I'm doing the math right, that means Mertens was 13 when Linnaeus died.  He might have been a precocious botanical genius, perhaps... but on investigation it turns out that he studied theology at university, and only pursued botany in his spare time, though he did have some substantial achievements in the field.  And no, his father was not a botanist.

I had to poke around a good deal more, into the International Plant Names Index and a scholarly article, to figure out that Linnaeus did indeed first (scientifically) name the Virginia bluebell, but he called it Pulmonaria virginica. It was later segregated from that genus and given the name Mertensia pulmonarioides by A.W. Roth in 1797, and the name was later stabilized as Mertensia virginica by J.H.F. Link in 1829 (with help from Persoon).  Presumably Roth and Link were honoring Mertens, who was by then old enough to have achieved something in botany deserving the honor.  Linnaeus probably never even heard of him.

So this is a lesson to you: a) do not read too much into those (L.) nomenclature notes without investigating (it says "Pers. ex. Link" too for a reason); and b) don't copy your information off Wikipedia.  Really though, I probably would have accepted the "Linnaeus honors Mertens" thing if I hadn't been trying to figure out the date the bloody thing was named, so I could tell whether giving a character who was in her 20s in the 1770s the name of the genus was possible.  Alas, it is not; I will have to reserve the name for someone in that Victorian novel I will never write.  I did name the laptop on which I am typing this Mertensia.  (All our computers have names, though this is the first one called after a plant.)

The worms of Monte Cristo

So, things are still a bit unsettled in Wormville.  I was, in fact, rather worried that I had a sort of Worm Rebel Alliance making a bid for freedom, since every time I checked the bin a dozen or two of them were up around the top trying to sneak out.  As usual, the internet came to the rescue, and I found this post, which is reassuring in the "you may have done something stupid or you may have bought stupid worms" way - but apparently it happens to everyone, just about.  (Everyone with a worm bin, I mean.  Though it may bear some thematic resemblance to the embarrassments of adolescence.)

The Rebels Without a Cause are not great in number, so I'm not going to worry much.  From the worm-advice post, I can see several things I may have done wrong.  Potting soil was probably a bad plan, because it can have fertilizer salts in it that can hurt worms.  I didn't add much, but what I did add was Miracle-Gro, I admit (a totally organic potting soil might be okay).  Also, white office paper isn't the best, and that's what I used since we already had some in the shredder.  (My son has since added the remains of a college rejection letter.  I think this is legitimate worm food, and I plan to do the same with all publication rejections I receive.)  And I set the system up right before adding the worms, so the food scraps were fresh and harder for the worms to process.

I poked around down below and most of the worms seem to be settled in and well distributed.  None have actually escaped out the top and none have gone through the holes into the empty lower bin, so they are not entirely stupid.  Per advice, I added some leaves and manure, and filled up the rest of the bin with dry shredded newspaper, which may keep the upper levels drier and discourage questing behavior.  We shall see.

Really one should not equate this management plan with Keeping the Little People Happy so as to suppress revolution.  Worms will not find a better life on the kitchen floor (especially if the cat discovers them).