What do you see on your garden walks? 2012

Hei Jandals!
Thank you for the info and the links.
Campbell Island seems to be nice place as the the climate is a little drier than here! However we have more sun . . . .
I have never been to Orknøyene (Orkney) (although I have visited Færøyene (Faroe Islands)) but I presume the climate is not very different from here.
A question, where is it possible to get hold of seeds from these plants - both Anisotome and Pleurophyllum - I have seldom seen them in any seedlists?

Fantastic! I suspect those islands but that plant looks pretty big. I might have some trouble feeding it here. So; what is it; bird duff?

Thanks, a lot Steve! Think I owe you some beers already! BTW, the Clematis seeds germinated like cress ;D

A rocky garden moon.

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November 25

cohan wrote:

Cool plants, Steve! Those islands sound pretty interesting- to actually walk among those megaherbs would be very cool!

Yes! When does the next boat go? 8)

Bundraba! wrote:

A rocky garden moon.

Do you mean you try to create a moonscape? My first thought was icebergs ;) Very cool :o

No, completely incidental; back late from duties to the ever refreshing garden and I saw this so I had to run for the camera -which worked great on flash and focus until it got cold!  :(

An interesting observation regarding Zephyranthes spp.
I am laughing right along with you when you see how puny these seedlings are...  they were an afterthought, and obviously didn't receive the care they deserved, but...

They have served a purpose, at least, when I neglected to rescue them from my pot menagerie before temperatures plummeted outside.  These small 1.5 inch pots endured two successive nights of 17F (-8C).  Photos taken eight days after.  Arranged from the least damaged to the most affected:

Z. minima
z. drummondii
Z. citrina
Z. primulina
Z. rosea

Memory of rain isn't that faint although now the colour of the precipitation has  changed to the same colour as the meconopsis! I prefere the meconopsis though ;)

Today, 2 December 2012: Two inches of snow and -2C. A very late flowering ling strive to flower still while the Saxifrage rests and spares it strength till a spring display!

Cactus Park on Friday; Cotoneaster apiculatus seedling; 'Color Guard' Yucca and Satureja.

Cactus Park on Sunday (today); Geranium dalmaticum and Sage Brush. It looks like another Champlain Valley winter in progress. Next might be severe dry frost on bare ground -after 50+ balmy degrees expected on Tuesday, of course, but I hope not for the sake of the living things here.

cohan wrote:

Nice Geranium, Michael! Now you and Trond are only about a month and a half behind us  ;D

Well Cohan, I hope I'm not that much behind you when the spring arrives ;)

Dave, which one is it? Here is Codonopsis clematidea from 2011:

Quite the coincidence guys (Dave and Trond), that you each have taken remarkably similar photos of a Codonopsis flower, they look like the same species, both very nicely photographed and showing off the intricate detail of the flowers. :)

Saxifrages gussied up for the season etc. December fourth 2012 was a fine day to be out in the garden. The last photo is a Sclerocactus glaucus seedling good through two winters so far.

And these: Dianthus simulans, a wooly thyme and Goldthread: And a tiny Iberis from friends in Quebec that always sets buds in the fall.

Very colorful, Michael

One of the problems with troughs in a very exposed garden is that they don't seem to have a very long lifetime.  The first pictures show what's happening with a trough (hypertufa) that I've had many years.  The plants of note are the white form of Astragalus spatulatus, Phlox pulvinata (ice blue form) and Hymenoxys acaulis caespitosa.  They perform beautifully every year so this is a trough I want to keep.  I moved it and damaged a corner in doing so.  Replaced the corner by cementing a stone that looks like the head of a wolf, depending on how much imagination you have.  Now the side of the trough is also wearing down.
The last two pictures are of a trough that Maichael Peden made which is all cement, I think.  It is incredibly heavy, but is sailing through the winters with no problems.

Michael, festive color on those Saxes, nice, but it's the late senescence of Allium thunbergii that always amuses me, with that charmingly gauche color combination of pinkish-purple drying florets and orange stems. The Eriogonum color is awesome as well, truly all-season plants.

Anne, beautiful troughs, I can imagine how impressive these are in full growth and flower.

Charming and gauche... you don't hear those words conjunctively used very often. ;D  But I have to agree, it's quite accurate in this case.

Fall/early winter brings out the colors in lots of the cool plants.  While a "normal" person sees this time of year as drab and colorless, there is a good deal of vibrant examples here.  

Ann, I had no idea there was a propensity for multiple flushes of western phlox spp.  I just thought the few times that I have seen such examples were anomalies.  The troughs are wonderful.

Micheal, was the Schlerocactus from seed?  And at what point did you plant it out?  
  Such exquisite work on those troughs of yours that Ann showed.  As a companion to this topic:
Styrofoam Trough Innovations
would you consider starting a new topic with those troughs, perhaps labeled "Hypertufa and Cement Trough Innovations", and explain your method?

Cohan, Anne et. al. thanks for nice comments. One of my aims here has been to display my "common man's" garden and a garden that is not intensely managed; ie. tons of compost, fertilizer, and mass plantings involving the constant addition and removal of material. I wish it to be a partnership with nature with ME as an ACCEPTED partner! The blue spruces in the photos are quite popular around here -those are on the neighboring properties  ;) The path photo was chosen to hide the house across street -Ah! tricky! -although it is not a bad looking little house.

Anne, IMO that is fantastic material you grow in those troughs! I often wonder how a solid concrete vs. a hypertufa trough might differ in cultivation, the solid trough presumably being less amenable to the immediate loss of water (water tables etc.?); less permeable; less "airy". That, and all my troughs have a single drain hole. You may be on front line of any testing along these lines. Sorry the troughs aren't a bit more mobile  ;D but well conceived concrete is extremely durable; that's why I did it the way I did. Is the coin still there? (BTW -love your repair job.)

The Sclerocactus was grown from Mesa Garden seeds (I also planted S. parviflorus). A general (developing) "philosophy" here is: get it out of the pot and into the garden as soon as possible or it is toast! That plant must have been quite a bit smaller when it was first put out. Planting seedlings seems to work well for a lot of things here including cacti -but one must remember to keep watch over them.

And here's another quick endorsement of fall planting/propagating; It works really quite well. It's a little late here because ground can freeze and heave in some situations, but , being reminded by the "International Rock Gardener" that I had Potentilla nitida -though never bloomed in a dozen years- wanting to stretch its toes in new conditions, I went out and ripped up a couple of small "Irishman's cuttings" from my waning plants yesterday to plant in my new limestone rockery. I still think I may see a blossom some day  :-\

A few more treasures in winter garb: Areneria hookeri from 2009 seed; A favorite little thing -Sphaeromeria capitata; Potentilla nitida; Eriogonum caespitosum spare blooms for many weeks!; An old Minuartia from the high screes NE of Cortez, Colorado (Paronychia, Dianthus, etc. too); Acantholimon litwinovii color progression and A. ulicinum -still just green -(Moltkia too) interesting to note the difference in winter strategies of not just these, but of other evergreen plants as well.

And, of course, moss which finds this time of year most delightful.

Roughly in the 10 to 15 year range, Lori.  The concrete troughs I got from Michael Peden remain absolutely perfect.  They are very rough on the outside as you can see from the pictures and that makes them look very nice.  My favorite troughs are 1) a real stone sink from Ireland and 2) troughs I got at Berkshire when Sally Cummings was bringing them from a company in England.  They are not real, light enough to pick up and twirl around with one hand before planting and so far indestructible.  Naturally, the company is no longer making them.  Attaching a picture of one of them.

Don't know why it didn't attach, sorry.

The stone sink (will try to remember to photograph it tomorrow) was part of a display the year the Philadelphia Flower Show had Ireland as a theme.  I talked to the fellow who made the display and we had a meeting of the mind and the trough became mine.  It was a birthday, Christmas and everything gift to myself for a few years!
The plants in the trough pictured include:  Daphne x hendersonii 'Ernst Hauser', Astragalus purshii, Oxytropis sp (grown from seed as an astragalus and never could identify it), Aquilegia jonesii, Penstemon thompsoniae desperatus, Douglasia nivalis, Phlox pungens, Phlox sp, Lewisia brachycalyx,  Paronychia sessiliflora, et al.  The trough is almost 4' long and it's 18" deep in the interior.  Everything loves this trough and I'm convinced it's the depth.  It full sun until late in the afternoon.

Somebody has to start a separate trough thread :o Or does it exist already? Then make two: What does my trough look like now! and How I make my troughs ;)

I am collecting ideas for my own trough(s) ;D

Tim, that's the great thing about troughs.  You can make a specialized mix that will keep certain plants happy.  That's really difficult to do in the garden if what the plant needs is contrary to your natural soil conditions.  I like to group plants that need similar soil, water, and exposure.  The only other qualification is that they are plants that really please me and that I want to grow.  It's rare that I'm able to water troughs so most of mine feature dryland plants.

Goat Plant! I found this Prenanthes-like plant in the Magdellena Mountains but it varies widely in the Southwest. Its foliage smells decidedly like billy-goat, so; Goat Plant it is. I clip the 25 cm stems back in fall and each time there is hard frost this interesting winged pattern appears on the stems. The next photo is a view from east to west along the spine of the Great Cordillera. from a recent spreading of shale back to the white garden is some 70 feet or so.

R. 'Ken Janek' and 'Springwood White' Erica are two plants that will be fantastic come spring but only if the winter is kind.

Funny how even a dead looking prenanthes like plant can be interesting - and not even in relation to the aforementioned winged patterned frost (which is fascinating): I assume the leaf blades senesced, fell off and blew away, while the petioles dried and remained...
I don't think I have ever seen that on a herbaceous plant before.