Liebster Blog Award

The Sage Butterfly has kindly nominated me for the "Liebster Blog" award. I have only been blogging for one week and am very grateful to her for the kind recognition! It is very encouraging to me as a new blogger. "Liebster Blog" means favorite blog in German. Here is a wild rose of thanks for Sage Butterfly:

Rosa pimpinellifolia altaica

The Sage Butterfly's blog of the same name contains many inspiring reflections on nature, and truly beautiful photography. I'm sure many of you know it already, but if you do not you should definitely pay a visit. I've enjoyed many of the posts there - to choose just one, Autumn Amble shows some lovely fall scenes with reflections on the word "ephemeral."

The rules in accepting the Liebster Blog award are:

1. Copy and paste the Liebster Blog award on your blog.
2. Thank the bestower and link back to them.
3. Select five blogs with less than 200 followers and list them with a link to their blogs. Visit their blog and write a comment telling them you have nominated them for the Liebster Blog award.

Here are five blogs that I really enjoy reading (I'm not always sure how many followers a blog has, so sorry if some these are already too popular to qualify):

1. Talking to Plants - a blog from a gardener in Central Wisconsin, about vegetable and ornamental gardening. I especially enjoyed this post about a trip to the Chicago Botanic Garden - beautiful roses there!
2. Nadezda's Northern Garden - a gardener from near St. Petersburg, Russia shares her northern garden with the world. One of my favorite posts was about the installation of a lovely pond in her garden.
3. Garden Head - this Pennsylvania blogger has a condition she calls "Garden Head" - gardening on the brain. I think we can all relate to that! She gardens organically, is friendly to frogs, and grows a variety of perennials, annuals, and vegetables. You can see some of her nice ligularia in this post.
4. Ernie and I: Adventures in a Sussex Garden - this blogger showcases his wonderful garden in Sussex, England. I really enjoyed this recent post about a visit to Rosemoor.
5. Japanese Garden - this gardener has amazingly neat and productive square-foot vegetable gardens near his home and office in Japan. He grows fava beans, which is enough to put someone on my favorites list right there. This post entitled Yoga, Fragrant Flowers, and Squirrels has some beautiful shots from a trip to India.

Thank you, happy valentine's day, and happy gardening to everyone.

-Rebecca (spurge)

Hardy Azaleas at the Arboretum

It's snowing outside this February morning, and my thermostat reads 26 F. Despite the tease of warm weather we had recently, it's still a LONG way until Spring. So... I'll just dream of my walk through the azalea collection at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum last spring. They have quite a few of the "Northern Lights" series azaleas, extremely cold-hardy plants developed by the University of Minnesota's Woody Landscape Plant Breeding program. Here were some of my favorites:

Azalea 'Golden Lights'

The best of the bunch, in my opinion, is 'Golden Lights.' The color is a deep primal glow in the garden, the plant is astonishingly floriferous, and the overall habit is just so elegant (as opposed to many azaleas, which can be really awkward in flower). Its only sad fault is that it is not as fragrant as the others in the series. I have planted one of these in my own garden, but it is still a baby. Can't wait for it to look like this!

Azalea 'Golden Lights'

 Here you can see the entire plant, and its graceful demeanor. It's hard to tell the scale from this picture, but those shrubs are quite a bit taller than the average human - at least 6-7 feet. So nurseries which tell you this plant grows to be only 4 feet tall and wide are pulling your leg. The smaller 'Northern Hi-Lights' makes a wonderful companion to the left.

Azalea 'Lemon Lights'

 If I had just looked at the close-up pictures of flowers you see in nursery catalogs, I would have selected 'Lemon Lights' for my garden rather than 'Golden Lights'. The color is certainly a very pleasing soft primrose yellow. Good thing I went to the arboretum! I have seen many specimens of 'Lemon Lights' and it always looks something like the above - just does not have the grace and floriferousness of 'Golden Lights.' To its credit, this plant does have the strongest and most delicious scent of the Lights azaleas I've yet sniffed. It may be worth growing for that reason alone.

Azalea 'Northern Hi-Lights'

 'Northern Hi-Lights' is another one of my favorites. It's a bit smaller than 'Golden Lights', but just as graceful and floriferous. Up close you can see the center blotch looks very contrastive, but from a distance (below) it blends with the white to make a picture of soft undulating yellow.

Azalea 'Northern Hi-Lights'

Azalea 'Rosy Lights'

If you want a pink azalea up north 'Rosy Lights' is an outstanding choice. I've seen lots of specimens of this cultivar and all have made me smile inside. The one pictured above (which is actually at the Allen Centennial Gardens rather than the Arboretum) has been neatly pruned to make a shorter, rounder plant, but the natural shape is also quite pleasing. The color of the pink is intensely bright without being garish, and with no hint of the sickly violet-mauve that so many rhodos torment us with. I hope to add one of these to my garden, if I can find a spot where it will not be in the same visual field as my 'Golden Lights'.

Azalea 'White Lights'

 As you can see from the picture, 'White Lights' is actually pink, at least in my climate. It is floriferous and very fragrant, and has rather soft-textured flowers.

Azalea 'Tri-Lights'

The arboretum had two newer cultivars, 'Tri-Lights' and 'Candy Lights'. 'Tri-Lights' is medium pink with a yellow blotch, giving it a very tropical look. 'Candy Lights' is a light shade of clear pink with hardly any blotch. Both specimens that I saw were still young plants, so I couldn't get a good sense of habit. Might be worth considering if 'Rosy Lights' is too bright for you (although why would that be? :-)

Azalea 'Candy Lights'

 All of the cultivars in this series have nice fall color, and bloom from mid to late May here in southern Wisconsin. I'm going to imagine that fragrance as I watch the snow swirl!

Wintersowing Memories

This year's wintersowing containers are out on the deck, safely nestled in a blanket of snow. It will be a while before we see any action in there. So what's a gardener to do, stuck in the middle of dreary February? How about trawl through the photo archive for memories of wintersowings past...

Anchusa 'Blue Angel'

 Wintersowing is an easy and inexpensive way to grow perennials like this anchusa from seed, without having to worry about complicated and difficult seed treatments. If you haven't tried it yet, check out Wintersown.org for instructions and lots of tips. The basic idea is you plant seeds in deep soil in old plastic milk jugs or soda bottles, then put the containers outside during winter where they will be exposed to natural cycles of snow, frost, sunshine, and rain. The freeze-thaw cycles break the seed coat and produce excellent germination results. The seeds themselves decide when it's time to germinate, and they know what they're doing! After germination, you'll have lots of teensy little babies that look something like the below. (If your labels get rubbed off and you can't remember what's where, The Seed Site has an excellent database of seedling pictures for identification.)

Wintersown anchusa seedlings

Then you cut away the container and slice your soil like a wedding cake, and transplant out in the garden. The tops are tiny but the root system will be extensive. It is an easy and fun process, and best of all gives you an excuse to garden over the winter! Most perennials will not actually bloom their first year, although some will. The top picture of anchusa is from its first year - as you can see it bloomed nicely in year one. There is a great forum where you can ask wintersowing questions at the GardenWeb.

Here are some more past wintersowing successes:

Poppy 'Venus'

 I wintersowed lots of poppies, and this particular crazy puff-ball always attracted lots of attention. You can see the anchusa blooming in the background as well. This is an annual poppy, and I had just as much luck direct seeding annual poppies as with wintersowing, but you get more precise planting control with the wintersowing.

Stocks 'Vintage Red'

 Stocks are another annual I experimented with both wintersowing and direct seeding. I actually had much better success with wintersowing on these. I would do anything for that awesome fragrance!

Lupine 'Lulu'

 My favorite wintersown perennial was this lupine. This picture is from its 3rd year after wintersowing. It did bloom the first year, but not as much and the plants were much smaller. Sadly, I'm a bit too far south for lupines (not many times a Wisconsinite gets to say THAT!), so they only lasted 4 years in my garden before giving up the ghost. Lupines don't like humid summers at all, so that gorgeous foliage gets a bit tatty after blooming. I still think that blaze of glory is worth it - not bad for the price of one seed packet!

Phlox drummondii

Phlox drummondii is another annual that wintersowed better for me than direct seeding, for some reason. Here it is adding bright color to a planting of California poppies. Not my personal favorite plant because the foliage is kind of "Eh."

Hollyhock 'Queeny Purple'

I loved the purple color and large double flowers on this hollyhock, but as you can see here the foliage is already starting to look terrible. Hollyhocks always sound so good in theory, but in practice they are a bit of a mess. I've never seen one that didn't look as if it were being eaten alive. It did bloom in its first year though, despite being technically a biennial.

What joys will next year's containers bring...?