Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Monday, April 14, 2008
Spring Surprises - Good and Bad
Surprise! It was 86 degrees (F) on Friday. Not springlike, but I enjoyed it all the same.
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| Tulipa clusiana 'Tinka' |
Salvia patens is springing back. According to Thompson & Morgan, this is only hardy to zone 8, and I'm in either zone 6b or 7 depending on which version of the hardiness map you use.
Verbena hastata 'Pink Spires' has not sprung back. Supposedly hardy to zone 3. No sign of Eupatorium purpureum yet either.
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| Agastache foeniculum volunteer seedlings |
I'm learning to know the frogs by their sounds. The earliest ones were Upland Chorus Frogs. Now we have Spring Peepers and Gray Tree Frogs, as well. Did you know that frogs start singing very early in the morning, even before the birds? We slept with the windows open on Friday night, and before the dawn was perceptible to me, the frogs began calling.
The march of the branded plants continues. This isn't really a surprise, but Saturday I discovered a new (to me) brand - Hort Couture. I have to grudgingly admit that their packaging is very attractive and the plant selections were interesting. The very idea of branded plants still makes me a little queasy though. When I got out of college I worked at a wholesale/retail nursery where we dug customers' desired number of plants out of wooden flats and wrapped them in newspaper. They were just beginning to move to plastic cell packs. Geez, I feel like a garden geezer....
Labels: branded plants, frogs, tulips, weather
5 Comments:
You must live on a fairly busy street for your Tulip siting strategy to work. It's quite amusing to imagine bunnies dodging cars & risking death to eye your Tulips. (Okay, I'm sick & twisted.) I share your concerns about brand-name plants, but I have to admit that "Hort Couture" is a pretty good name.
HA, like MMD, I can imagine the critters at the edge of the road, invisble to drivers due to their height deficit, getting their just reward for eating your tulips. That is bad, I don't really mean it, maybe a less drastic means of stopping their voracious appetites would be better. It is still a good idea though. Our eupatoriums are very late to emerge in the spring, I was just out looking for them and saw no signs. They are there though. Good deal with the salvia, and cool for the froggies singing.
MMD: The road isn't too busy, but it's in the country so whatever traffic there is comes fast. I just hoped that if the rabbits/deer could find enough to eat away from the road, they'd prefer to stay away from the road. My next layer of defense is going to be to surround the tulips with as many woody herbs as I can fit in. I stay up nights thinking about this stuff (kidding). The Hort Couture plants and displays were actually rather attractive, but still. I guess if we have to have branded plants, we might as well have good ones.
Frances: Come to think of it, I haven't seen the Eupatorium coelestinum yet either and I'm very sure that one will be back. I grew E. purpurpeum from seed last year - was happy when it started to flower, then unhappy when the plants were neatly cropped off by some critter just below the flowers. I thought they weren't supposed to like Eupatoriums.
Just catching up on your latest posts - the Bluebells are spectacular.
Your tulips are beautiful. Another way to try to protect tulip bulbs from underground feeders (striped gophers, here) are to surround them with daffodils. ;-)
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