Cottage Garden Annuals (20 NOV 2011)

What's in a name?  That which we call a roseBy any other name would smell as sweet.- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
 A row of unlabelled roses, planted in the flower-beds along the right border many years before I owned the property, is the enduring legacy of the previous gardeners. I don't even know their names, but they certainly took care to choose plants for all seasons including a

Meadow (27 AUG 2011)

 
Seeds sown in Spring 2011

In June I wrote about the annual & perennial seedlings, which I planned to fill my flower beds with this summer, that were decimated by slugs & snails using my plastic greenhouse as a sauna and salad bar. I managed to save a few which I planted in pots outside and covered with netting.

Having realised that I had made a big error by trapping moisture in the

Eleanor Perenyi on herb farms

Borage, a Jupiterian herb

Photo credit: Jengod

You've done it, I've done it--the over-buying of herbs. Eleanor Perenyi comments, in the fourth of a series of excerpts from Green Thoughts (1981):

My corner of New England happens to be well endowed with herb farms and my will power easily sapped by the sight of plants for sale. Surely a gold-leaved marjoram wouldn't be amiss? What about a Lavandula viris from the Canary Islands? And inevitably the car fills up with plants that will turn out to be too large, too small, or simply not as interesting as their history and provenance have made them sound. There is, I find, that drawback to herbs. No other class of plant bears such a weight of myth and symbolism, and it can be oversold. For me there comes a time when it isn't enough to know that a plant was sacred to Jupiter, used to ward off snakes, a symbol of loyalty or mentioned by Theophrastus, when all it looks like is a not very exciting wild flower/weed.

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Eleanor Perenyi on old-fashioned flowers, and a garland of tributes to her

Love in a Mist, Sophie Gengembre Anderson* (1823-1903)

This is the second in my series of excerpts from Green Thoughts (1981) by the late, great writer Eleanor Perenyi. Here is some of her commentary on old-fashioned flowers:

The Victorians meant hardy annuals when they spoke of old-fashioned flowers, a term that used to puzzle me. In Little Women, Beth grows 'old-fashioned flowers,' and I always supposed this was part of Alcott's goody-goody emphasis on out-of-date virtue. That isn't the case. The sweet peas and larkspurs and pinks beloved of Beth actually were old-fashioned by the middle of the nineteenth century--having been superseded by the newer, smarter, tender annuals imported from the tropics and sub-tropics of Mexico, India and South America. The old annuals in contrast were natives of the north temperate zone, age-old denizens of cottage gardens where familiarity and the folk imagination bestowed on them their common names: love-in-a-mist, pincushion flower, bachelor's buttons, sweet sultan.

Several garden bloggers have written on the passing of Eleanor Perenyi and I have gathered the tributes here as a virtual garland for her. Please let me know if there are others to be included.

Country Gardener

Garden Rant

InterLeafings

Recreating Eden

the bark tree

*Sophie Gengembre Anderson was a Pre-Raphaelite painter.

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Vote for your favorite summer herb

It's 86 degrees, the end of May--all danger of a late frost is past. Time to plant tender herbs in Zone 7! 

I know I want sweet basil. 

I have five redwood planters that came with the house and they'll be my summer herb garden on the deck, near the kitchen door. One for sweet basil, one for peppermint, one for chocolate mint.

What to grow in the fourth and fifth planters? Our garden is already full of rosemary and lavender. Does anyone go wild for cinnamon basil? Lemon verbena? Maraschino cherry sage? What's your summer can't-live-without-it herb?

Cast your ballots and I'll plant the top two winners!

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White cottage garden in my head, puddles underfoot

Hard choice: go for a walk in the heavy rain, or stay inside and plan a new garden? 

I have a sunny, irrigated, six-foot by six-foot dooryard that cries out for a design. It used to be a shade garden, filled with Bergenia cordifolia and Acanthus mollis by the previous owners. The Incense Cedar that towered over it all suffered a tragic end, the Bergenia have gone to live under a plum tree in Grass Valley, and the Acanthuses manfully grow then faint in the heat of our summers.

The county government may be sending Plant Protective Services over to rescue the poor Acanthuses. We promise to dig down deep and move them as soon as we safely can.

We have neglected this dooryard, thinking that next year we will revamp and expand the front walk. So here is a desert eyesore, banked on either side by woodsy shade gardens. Something pretty and temporary is called for.

My brilliant idea yesterday was a potager, and then I remembered my good friends the mule deer. A deerproof potager of garlic, onions and rhubarb did not beguile me.

Today's thought is a cottage garden of white blooms. I love white gardens and there is an old patch of Iberis Candytuft in place. Here is a list of other possible flowers, short to tall. Please let me know if you have experience with these:

Alyssum 'Tiny Tim'

Eschscholzia californica California Poppy 'White Linen'

Tanacetum partheniven Feverfew

Nigella Love in a Mist

Zinnia elegans 'Polar Bear' 

Nicotiana alata 'Jasmine Alata'

Nicotiana sylvestris Indian Peace Pipe

Cosmos bipinnatus 'White Seashells'

Helianthus debilis Sunflower 'Vanilla Ice'

And what cottage garden is complete without Alcea Hollyhock? Mine--the deer delight in it.

To seed or not to seed?

There is no annual tradition of annuals in my family. My mother is a great rosarian and can talk hybrid teas and aged steer manure till the cows come home, but springtime seed trays were not a regular feature of my upbringing.

Should I be starting from seeds or not? I cannot rely on adopted lineage for guidance, as two of my favorite garden experts go opposite ways. Henry Mitchell waxed poetic about sowing seeds indoors (but this was a man who could make painting garden stakes in the basement sound like a numinous experience). 

The alternate point of view is from Dianne Benson, who draws a line in the sandy loam and refuses to cross over into propagation land. And she has a point--the trays, the lights, the schedules, the hassle. It's enough to make you wait until May and pay $10.95 for a moonflower in a one-gallon pot.

Also, there's the whole process of thinning that is so blithely discussed. Call me a wimp (and then do it again, because it's true), but I think it's rather unkind to pull up a lot of plants just because they're smaller than their peers. A few weeks earlier one had prepared new abodes for them, invited them in, encouraged their growth with light and water--now if they lag behind a bit, YANK, they're dead. 

Seems a bit harsh.

But that is, in fact, how all those one-gallon moonflowers at the nursery were raised. And complaining about thinning them myself is like the time my 6 year-old granddaughter saw a fisherman with a live fish on his line and cried out, That's so mean! Why doesn't he just buy fish at the grocery store?

You can see the end of the story, can't you? I'll space the moonflower seeds far apart so I don't have to thin them, get them all safely into pots on the deck, enjoy them as they flourish in their viny way, and then knock them off when I forget to water them during a heat wave in August.

There's more than one way to be harsh to a plant. I'd better stay busy with the watering can this summer.