Gardening 2

“The influence of her taste was seen also in the family garden, where the ornamental began to mingle with the useful; whole rows of fiery marigolds and splendid hollyhocks bordered the cabbage beds, and gigantic sunflowers lolled their broad, jolly faces over the fences, seeming to ogle most affectionately the passers-by.”

     —“Wolfert Webber, Or Golden Dreams,” in Tales of a Traveler by Washington Irving

A few years ago, I had the happy inspiration to surround my vegetable garden with a floral border mixing “fiery marigolds” and “gigantic sunflowers.” My thought was to cut as many bouquets as I might like, and I have gathered armloads of blossoms from the prolific display of flowers surrounding my beans and squash. Even so, I have experienced an irrational reluctance to turn to my borders for blooms. The profusion of petals is so spectacular en masse and such an invitation to butterflies and birds that I am hesitant to claim any zinnias or cosmos for my kitchen or living room. To demur is silly. After all, at the end of the season, the flowers will have gone to seed and, in the spring, their stalks will be plowed under. I might as well remain true to my vision and cut flowers at will.

My Garden on May 12, 2016

Unlike the character in Irving’s tale, I have no cabbages for my flowers to accompany. While I like cooked cabbage—especially on St. Patrick’s Day—I seldom have enough use for cabbage to justify growing any in my garden. When I was growing up, my mother planted rows of cabbages. For exhibits at the annual 4-H fair, we walked up and down in search of the largest cabbage, a heavy one with great waxy leaves spread so wide that it was all I could do to hold it in front of me and to lug it back to the house. In retrospect, I wonder what my mother did with all that cabbage. When I was very young, she made sauerkraut in ancient crocks that huddled in the darkness of a cellar beneath our smokehouse, but, by the time I participated in the gardening projects at the county fair, she no longer made kraut. Our family ate plenty of cooked cabbage, but we could not possibly have consumed as much as my mother grew. A cabbage conundrum!

Sunflowers I have in abundance! Small and large, yellow and red, my sunflowers may not “ogle most affectionately the passers-by,” but they serve as banquets for birds and squirrels. At precisely the moment when their diamond-pattern seed cushions become ready for shelling, the birds come to help themselves to the bounty. In only a day or two, the seeds are pecked loose. The birds are not tidy. They drop many seeds on the ground. The squirrels do not pause to thank their feathered compatriots; rather, they busily comb the ground to scavenge every seed abandoned by the birds.

Alas! I have no hollyhocks. I admire them in the distant yards of neighbors, but I grow none of my own. Up close, they are so dry, dusty, insect-ridden, and full of spiders that I am loath to plant any.

My borders feature the delicately arching cosmos, the frankly sturdy marigold, the utterly dependable zinnia, and the wonderfully robust tithonia in rainbows of hue and tint. Going to the garden to fetch a batch of beans is a treat for the eyes!       

Why I Plant the Iris, Poppy, Daylily, Coneflower, and Naked Lady (Last Installment in This Series)

Five Spectacular Easy-Care Flowers

If you would like to grow low-maintenance flowers with spectacular displays from late spring through early fall, here are five of my favorites.

1. You can’t go wrong with the iris, named for the Greek goddess of the rainbow. When I was growing up, my father clipped the long stems of the iris to place on graves on Memorial Day. In those times, no one resorted to artificial flowers. The iris and the peony were the flowers of choice in the cemeteries that I recall. Most likely, the iris, not the lily, is the basis of the fleur de lis, the well-known symbol. I turn to heraldica.org for this explanation: “It is a stylized flower, but which flower? It looks more like an iris than a lily. Moreover, lilies are never yellow in the wild, whereas some irises are. Could there have been confusion between the two flowers? The word ‘lis’ appears in French in 1150, whereas the word ‘iris’ designates the flower in the 13th c. The term ‘fleur de lis’ in the heraldic sense is attested in 1225. … a hypothesis ventured in the 17th c. sounds very plausible to me. One species of wild iris, the Iris pseudacorus, yellow flag in English, is yellow and grows in marshes (cf. the azure field, for water). Its name in German is Lieschblume (also gelbe Schwertlilie), but Liesch was also spelled Lies and Leys in the Middle Ages. It is easy to imagine that, in Northern France, the Lieschblume would have been called ‘fleur-de-lis.’ This would explain the name and the formal origin of the design, as a stylized yellow flag. There is a fanciful legend about Clovis which links the yellow flag explicitly with the French coat of arms.”

Yellow Iris Gracing My Flower Garden

2. Poppies can take center stage when the iris blooms are fading. I have always thought of poppy petals as crepe paper, maybe because, when I was little, flowers made from the paper were distributed in my church on Mother’s Day. Anyone whose mother was living wore a red flower, and anyone whose mother had passed away wore a white flower. While the simple flowers were supposed to be carnations, I mistook them for poppies. Whenever I see poppies, I still believe that their petals might feel like crepe paper.

Poppies Providing Bursts of Bright Color

3. After the poppies have dropped their petals, the daylilies can have their day in the sun. Actually, they can have months in the sun! When you plant different kinds of daylilies, you can ensure fresh blooms throughout the summer. Some varieties will keep flowering for four or five weeks. Others will bloom for one cycle, rest for a while, and bloom again. New blossoms open each morning to replace those that had gladdened the previous afternoon.

Daylilies in Stately Profusion Along My Driveway

4. For a thick planting of fairly tall blooms that continue throughout the midsummer, coneflowers are ideal. I like seeing the multiplicity of butterflies that visit the display, but few sights are more aesthetically pleasing than that of an orange monarch butterfly perched on a purple coneflower with its velvety orange center! Coneflowers require almost no care, other than watering during dry spells.

Coneflowers in a Thick Display

 

Velvety Orange Centers of Coneflowers

 

Purple Petals That Butterflies Find Irresistible

5. Finally, we have the shockingly nicknamed “naked ladies”! They are really the belladonna lily, but, under the circumstances, who can remember their real name? The green leaves of their springtime modesty die down by midsummer. In late summer, up leap naked flower stalks, and large pink trumpets unfold! “Amaryllis belladonna” was the name (Amaryllis) and description (Italian bella donna, or “pretty woman”) of an alluring rustic woman in Greek myth. The naked ladies are, thus, a form of amaryllis—and a toxic form, as suggested by the horticultural meaning of belladonna. If for some unknown reason you were considering the possibility of nibbling these flowers, be warned not to ingest naked ladies, for they are mildly poisonous. The sap of the plant causes blistering rashes. It is advisable to wear gloves during fall plantings of the big bulbs.

Naked Ladies with No Reason to Be Ashamed

Why I Plant Flower Borders Around My Vegetable Garden

Ever since I moved to the country, I have had a vegetable garden behind the barn. When I was in college, had you asked me if I would want to plant vegetables, I would have said, “No! Never again!” While I was growing up, my mother forced me to plant, weed, and hoe in her massive garden, and I was delighted to go away to college and avoid sweating and swatting flies while working in the dirt of a vegetable patch. Years later, when I knew I would be moving to a renovated farmhouse, I could not wait to plant a garden. I wanted to revive my dormant knowledge of growing vegetables, and I wanted to honor my mother, who had instilled in me the important values of gardening.

As my mother knew, growing beans and carrots is not done just for the exercise; rather, producing food is meditating, appreciating earth, embracing life, loving neighbors, and a host of other qualities so fundamental that other tasks shrink to relative insignificance in comparison.

Zinnia in My Garden Border

My initial forays into the joys of raising vegetables were not entirely successful. Raccoons and deer helped themselves to my first garden without as much as a thank you. The next year found me at the local livestock supply store, where I bought an electric fence. When I tested it, I was standing in a pool of April rainwater, and I received such a jolt that I literally landed on my butt in the mud. The fence kept my garden free of deer and raccoons, but I felt sorry for the awful shocks that I must have been delivering to them. The next year, I dispensed with the electric fence and grew mostly vegetables that are found beneath the surface of the soil or that are not so desirable to wildlife. This meant that I could not grow sweet corn, but I bought plenty of it from the local farmer’s market. What I could grow were beets, potatoes, carrots, onions, and turnips. I found that animals left my squash and Swiss chard alone.

I have a story to share about how remarkable Beananza bush beans are. Unidentified animals repeatedly gnawed the tops off my beans. Each plant had not more than about eight leaves, yet, surprisingly, week after week, the rows produced more beans than I could use!

Grasshopper Posing on a Giant Marigold in My Border

As my central purpose for writing this posting is to share information about flowers, let me turn to them. Two years ago, I thought how pleasant it would be to plant a border of flowers around my vegetable garden. I added two rows of flower seeds around the perimeter of what is practically a square garden area. In the mix were zinnias, giant marigolds, and cosmos. Like snowflakes, no two of which are alike (they say), my zinnias were as varied as varied can be. On many summer mornings, I brought fresh flowers from the garden to my home and filled vases in all the rooms.

Flowers Filling Border in 2013

Last year, I enthusiastically added a border of flowers again. I chose marigolds, zinnias, tithonia (which I had never previously grown), and different kinds of sunflowers. The ground slopes slightly to the west, and, where the rain ran, the fertilizer must have flowed, too. The tithonia along the western border exceeded eight feet in height. I was so stunned by their stature that I dug out the seed packet to read it again, and, yes, it said that the flowers would reach a height of four feet. I wasn’t dreaming, either. Mine rose far above my head!

Flowers Filling Border Again in 2014

My photographs of the flower borders are deceptive. The images fool me, as well, and, having pulled weeds for years, I know how big my vegetable garden is. The photos make my garden look small: really small, perhaps not larger than thirty-six square feet. The area within the border is actually about three hundred square feet! In the pictures, there is nothing to indicate the scale. The flowers have been simply huge!

Tithonia That Grew to Eight Feet in My Garden

 

Marigolds are said to keep rabbits away, but, last year, I was delighted to discover baby rabbits beneath my squash and cucumber leaves. All summer, I watched them grow. Whenever I harvested squash, I would find the growing rabbits discreetly hopping to hide among the zucchini. Unlike Elmer Fudd, I regarded them as my friends.

The sunflowers and other seeds attracted flocks of birds and large contingents of butterflies. They, too, were my constant acquaintances, and their colorful flitting about made my gardening experience all the richer.

The seeds for this spring’s flower border have already arrived!