What's my name?

I always have a tough time when people ask me for a plant name. You see, plants have more than one name. They have a true botanical name and many of them have nicknames. Some people only want the nickname, others use the botanical names and some people don't care either way.

Most of the time I use the botanical name although some plants have such charming nicknames that I can't resist using them. This photo shows Lysimachia clethroides but its nickname is Gooseneck loosestrife. You can easily see why this is its nickname as it looks just like a big gaggle of geese with their heads sticking up.

Besides their true botanical name, specific plants also have cultivar names. Daylilies are one of the few plants that I break the rule on, their botanical name is Hemerocallis but I just don't want to be bothered calling them that (or typing that over and over again). The true name of this plant would be Hemerocallis 'Raspberry Goosebumps' but I'll just call it a daylily. It happens to be one of the top performers in my garden this year.

Echinacea purpurea is nicknamed purple cone flower. I really don't know why it's called that as the cones are orange and in real life, the petals are more a dusty pink than purple.

Platycodon grandifloris is another name I rarely use in the garden. The nickname of Balloon flower is easier to say and certainly understandable when you see how the buds blow up like little balloons.

Yesterday I saw this unusual bloom on a balloon flower and just had to grab my camera and take it's picture!

If you want to be a good gardener, I really recommend that you make the effort to learn the botanical name besides the nickname. When you use nicknames, you can end up with the totally wrong plant. For instance, many people call daylilies "lilies" and yet there's also bulbs that are called lilies. If you are shopping for plants and ask for orange lilies, you could end up with Asiatic lilies which will stay in one spot or the orange roadside daylily which will run all over your garden.

As for being able to pronounce those names correctly? Don't worry, you don't have to say all those names, just have a good idea of what they are. The spelling doesn't even matter that much, you can always google the name and it will tell you the correct spelling.

Off to see what's in bloom today,
Melanie

Rambling thoughts

Tonight my brain is all discombobulated, there's just so many thoughts tumbling around it after spending the day setting up for our big flower show that opens tomorrow. Rather than form something cohesive from it, I thought I'd just continue to ramble around through some photos I took yesterday.

Cute little birdbath here but I was actually taking a photo of the teeny weeny Aruncus athusifolius seedling just in front of it. So far it's the only Aruncus seedling I found this year.

Want to learn more about Aruncus? After all, it's one of the most perfect perennials for Long Island Gardens. Just click here on Old Country Gardens (after you finish reading this post) and you can see why you need to grow this beauty.

Here's a new little planting area I'm working on. The brown bun at the bottom is a new Sedum I just bought. Hopefully I'll have enough energy to get out there and get the name of it and also remember to post it here someday.

Never be afraid to cut foliage. In order to take the above photo I had to trim back some of the daylily and iris foliage. It was worth it!

Calie the wonder-doodle (with dirt covered nose) is asking me why I'm such a softie that I let that silly Foeniculum vulgare seedling grow right in the middle of her path.

I MUST work on dividing that Hakonacloa macra 'All Gold' clump because it's just breathtaking and I need more, more more!

Hello, I thought I was taking an inspired photo of how these two beds flow together. What the heck is that old pool slide doing stuck in the back of the pool house?

Lamium 'Pink Nancy' (I think), this is what foliage is all about!

Hey, the shade border is filling in nicely. If I squint, I can almost not see the mold covered white vinyl fence at the back...almost...

Ok, time for some paperwork for tomorrow's big day. Hope you get the chance to stop by our flower show and say "hi".

Melanie

Teaching Gardens

Chandrika asked a question on my last post. It reminded me that so many people are new to gardening. One of the things I worry about is people who try gardening, end up making a mistake and then decide they aren't "gardeners".

I've made hundreds of mistakes over the years I've been gardening and I still make mistakes today. After time though the mistakes are fewer and the successes are greater.

One of the best ways to learn about gardening is to visit other gardens and talk to other gardeners. I've belonged to a number of gardening clubs but in today's hectic world, their schedules don't always work with mine.

Don't worry though, there's plenty of places to go to learn about gardening. The first photo here was taken last week in my back shade bed. I have many different growing conditions here, dry shade, moist shade, rock garden, sun perennial border and so on. My ultimate desire is to make my garden a teaching garden, a place where people can come and learn about plants that do well here on Long Island.

By visiting other gardens, I've been inspired to think outside the box and try new things. Chanticleer Gardens are in Wayne Pennsylvania. Their growing conditions are very similar to ours here on Long Island. It is an easy day trip from here, I would love to get there again. This photo I took of succulents growing on a rock wall inspired me to make my own little rock garden.

Stonecrop Gardens in Cold Spring New York is another great teaching garden. While they are known for their rocky outcroppings and amazing alpine plant collection, I was totally enchanted by their potager. A potager is a formal (or semi-formal) vegetable garden. It was so incredibly beautiful that I'm still drooling over the thought of having a little vegetable garden of my own (working on it this weekend!).

You don't have to leave Long Island though if you want to see some great gardens. Planting Fields Arboretum has an amazing array of trees and shrubs. They have perennials too although I wouldn't list them as the top teaching garden if you are looking for flowers that are easy to grow.

On the other hand, Old Westbury Gardens has a fantastic collection of perennials, I haven't been there in a few years and hope to get back there soon.

With this Holiday weekend ahead of us, we have temperatures that are cool for the beach, too cool for the pool but perfect to tour a garden. Maybe this Sunday I'll hit one of the local places. Who knows, I've never been to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and only went once to the New York Botanical Gardens. Will I run into you there?

If you know of a good place to go see plant material, leave a comment here for us all to share.

Of course, we'll be here tomorrow, Saturday, if you want to stop by and say Hi!

Melanie

Soils for the garden and for potting

No glamorous photos today. In the last two days I've had enough conversations about garden soil to convince me that many people are confused over what to use and where to use it.

I'll begin by letting all of you know that I do not have a degree in horticulture and have never taken a formal class in soil science. What I do have is 23 years of experience as a home gardener.


The soil you need for pots and containers is greatly different than the soil you need for bedding plants in the ground. In containers plants need soil that won't dry out too fast, is heavy enough to keep the pot from falling over on a windy day, is light enough for the roots to grow and will also feed the plants. That's a pretty tall order!

For my pots, I mix 2 parts of potting soil with one part of compost. I also throw in a good sized helping of shredded leaves and most importantly, try to mulch the plants to keep the soil from drying out too quickly. The added weight of compost (top soil works too) keeps the pots from being too light. You can also add fertilizer to this mix, a slow release fertilizer works well, I add milorganite to my pots here as a bonus.


Buying large bags of potting soil and adding them to your garden is a waste (in my opinion). You are much better off buying bags of compost or having a yard or two of compost delivered to your home. Last year I ordered a mix of compost and aged horse manure. I made the mistake of ordering too much at one time (in order to save on the delivery charge). This year I'll order less and take my chances.

If you can find aged horse manure, go for it! Here on Long Island horse manure is readily available from local horse farms. Cow manure is not readily available in my neighborhood but if you have it where you live it's just as good as horse manure.

Last but not least is mulch. Mulch is an organic (hopefully!) product that you put on top of the soil to help slow the germination of weed seeds, help water retention in the ground (keeps it from drying out), add nutrition to the soil and just to help the garden look neat and clean.

I'm not a fan of the huge deliveries of mulch, in many cases it's died and I can smell the chemicals while I'm walking past a house that has freshly mulched beds. At our house we save our leaves in bags over the winter and then shred them to use as mulch. From past experience I can tell you that the worms will love you for mulching with leaves. Worms are great for the garden, they help aerate the soil and add more nutrients (worm poop is a great soil booster).

One last tip on mulch, for spring mulching I wait until the soil has warmed up (not yet in our area) and for winter mulching I wait until the soil has frozen. The reason is that in summer you want to use the mulch as a blanket to keep the soil temperature consistent and in the winter you want to keep the plants from heaving during frost/thaw periods. If you mulch a winter soil while it's still warm, you will invite lots of burrowing creatures (voles, chipmunks, moles and so on) to your nice warm beds.

Today looks to be glorious outside so I need to get dressed and get out there to start digging and potting. Also have to plant some veggies :-)

Happy gardening!
Melanie

Perennial annuals

The other day I posted about perennials, what the term "perennial" means to me. As I wrote then, a perennial is a plant that returns year after year.

Annuals are plants that live their life in one growing season and then do not return. And yet, the strange thing is that sometimes, some annuals do return. This does not make them perennials. The difference is that a perennial returns from the same root stock while some annuals will make seed, scatter those seeds and the seeds grow to form a new plant that just happens to be identical to the previous years plant.

Hopefully this makes sense. In the first photo there is a perennial in the bottom left corner and an annual in the top right corner. The annual is Silene armeria (nicknamed "catchfly" because of the sticky bands on the stem) but it self seeds quite nicely in my garden.

Here you can see the Silene combined with a lovely sky blue Iris that I happened to divide up yesterday.

It really is wonderful to have a plant that happily seeds itself all over. I find the Silene is not at all invasive, all you would have to do is pull a rake through the bed a few times and the seedlings would not return.

I don't know though if I've ever seen this plant in anybody else's garden...ever! Have you?

Melanie

So what is a Perennial anyway?

Dicentra spectabilis (Old Fashioned bleeding heart)

I've been blogging for about three years now at my other site, Old Country Gardens (click on the name to visit that site). The blog is listed with a Garden blog site named Blotanical. Most of the readers that visit that blog are avid gardeners, lots of experienced gardeners and also beginning gardeners.

Hardy Geranium (Cranesbill)

Today I realized that so many of the words and terms that advanced gardeners take for granted are words that many people just aren't familiar with. My new business cards came and I began handing them out today. At first, I handed them out at my garden club and of course, everybody knew what I meant when I said that I'd be selling "perennials". Next though, I started handing out my cards at the local school and it quickly became apparent that while some people enjoy gardening, they were not as familiar with gardening vocabulary.

Now, I am quite open about the fact that I am not a scientific person. My goal is not to stump all of you with lots of words when more simple words would do the same job. Even my definition of a "Perennial" and for that matter, an "Annual" will not be the same definition you would find in a dictionary.

(My herb garden in early spring, all perennials, all came through the winter)

For me, a perennial is a plant that returns year after year. Here on Long Island we live in zone 6b (further away from the water) or zone 7a (near the shore). Most people in Huntington village or north of it are 7a, those of us further south are 6b. These are really numbers that just say that we have cold winters, temperatures stay below freezing for long time periods, we don't get reliable snow cover and Long Island suffers a prolonged frost/thaw period during spring.

So, once again, a perennial is a plant that returns year after year. Some perennials only return for 3 or 4 years. That is called a short lived perennial. Some will come back for as long as you are living at your house. Some are called perennials but still die after one winter. It might just be that they are perennials in a different part of the country. My focus is on plants that perennially return here, on Long Island.

Coreopsis (Tickseed)

The photos I've been showing here are of some of the perennial plants in my garden. The first was a Bleeding heart. It's true botanical name is Dicentra spectabilis. While you don't need to know how to pronounce that name, it helps if you can at least copy and paste the name into Google. By doing this you can look up growing information for anything once you know it's name.

Inside the parenthasis I will also list the nickname if I know it. Nicknames are not a reliable way to find information about a plant because nicknames change drastically in different parts of the state, country, and world. That's why I take the time to write out the botanical name.

(Shade perennials such as Hosta, Epemedium, Pulmonaria, Brunera and more...)

Perennials are attractive to me because I could never afford to purchase new plants every year to fill all the gardens on my 1.3 acre property. If you came past my place right now, you'd see tufts of fresh growth filling all my garden beds and even some early spring blooms. Those plants were not planted this year, they were planted sometime during the past 12 years and have returned once again.

A plant that is killed by a frost or freeze, that does not live through our winters, is called an "Annual". The most well known annuals are Impatiens, Marigolds, Coleus and so on. I grow them too but I grow just a few of them as they just don't fit into my budget. When I purchase annuals, I am extrememly picky, looking for something to add to a container or a certain spot of the garden that I want to highlight. Actually, the Coleus at the right of this photo would live for years in a tropical garden but here it's not winter hardy so Long Islanders think of it as an "annual".

Now here's the crazy thing, there are annuals that will come back year after year. How's that? Well, you'll just have to come back and visit me again to find out!

I'm typing this late at night in hopes that the rain we are having will stop by morning and even though it will be muddy, I have dreams of getting some time in the garden tomorrow.

Wish me luck!
Melanie