Tangled Branches: Cultivated

happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Ravens Roost

Last Saturday brought spectacularly clear weather - perfect for a drive in the mountains. We were hoping to see just a little fall color on the Blue Ridge Parkway, but no luck. Still, the view doesn't get much better than this.

These photos were all taken at Raven's Roost Overlook at milepost 10.7 - the location of our favorite picnic table. The procedure is as follows:

Stop at the Blue Ridge Pig in Nellysford,
Get a pork BBQ sandwich,
Walk next door to the gas station for Route 11 potato chips,
Drive up the mountain, and
Drink in the view while eating the sandwich and potato chips.

Repeat when necessary.

P.S. The spouse couldn't find the Rt. 11 potato chips at the gas station last time, but they were there a couple of months ago, and have been there every other time we've stopped. I think he didn't look in the right place.

P.P.S. After seeing the bird's eye view of the mountains, how about a bug's eye view of the parking lot?

Labels: CeVA, roadtrips

Monday, September 17, 2007

Anniversary/Bloom Day/Photo Tour

In two weeks, we'll celebrate the first anniversary of our retirement cottage in central Virginia. That is, it's supposed to be our retirement cottage, but the spouse is dragging his feet on the retirement thing. We'll continue to stay there on weekends for the foreseeable future, but neither garden (NoVA or CeVA) gets my full-time attention. Nevertheless, I'm pleased with how the vegetable garden (dare I call it a potager?) turned out this year. So, trying to kill 3 birds with one stone, this is an early anniversary "neighborhood" photo tour of how the garden looked a week before Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day. I posted these pictures on Picasa last week, but didn't get around to writing anything here.

I cleared a garden space out of the abandoned field at the front of the property. We've kept a small border around the garden mowed, but all around that is "weeds" and a few trees. This is the back row of the potager, looking toward a willow oak tree beyond.
The flowers in the foreground above are Nepeta transcaucasica 'Blue Infinity' and Dianthus 'Rainbow Loveliness'
The misty morning left jewels behind.
Stepping around that back row, and looking across it back toward the house, the center of the potager is home to a sundial - a gift we received many years ago from friends we've lost track of. Flowers in this picture include Verbena bonariensis, Agastache foeniculum, A. foeniculum 'Golden Jubilee', 'Marvel Bronze' Amaranth, Salvia farinacea 'Evolution', Tagetes lucida, and Salvia farinicea 'Strata'.
Just behind us, in the "weeds", is this pale blue morning glory.
Continuing around the back row and looking down the path in front of it we see tomato plants covered in plastic deer fence. I know it's ugly. Next year I'll try to come up with a better solution. Bordering the tomatoes are rosemary, rue, bronze fennel, Achillea 'Summer Berries' (was hoping for brighter colors from these), and the previously seen Salvia farinacea 'Evolution'. That sequence of plants repeats in a mirror image on the other side of the central path.
Turning to the right, instead of following the path above, we're distracted by my new favorite butterfly - the Common Buckeye.
The butterfly flew away and we continue on the path on the southeast side of the potager to look back at the center from another angle. Some of the plants visible here are 'Striped Roman' tomato, 'Papri Sweet' pepper, 'Chile Grande' pepper, 'Mexican Cinnamon Spice' basil, Thai basil, Salvia farinacea 'Strata', Tagetes lucida, 'Serrano Tampiqueno' pepper, sweet marjoram, and 'Sweet Petra Dark' basil.
The sun has completely burned off the mist, leaving a brilliant blue sky. We're thinking another cup of tea would be good about now, and so we leave the potager and head back down the path to the driveway and the house.

Labels: CeVA, in bloom, potager

Monday, June 25, 2007

Parasitic Plants

This is cool. I had never seen this before, except in photographs, but I knew immediately what it was because it's on the cover of one of my most useful wildflower books. Indian Pipes, aka Ghost Plant, aka Monotropa uniflora is a parasitic plant, getting its living not on the roots of other plants, as was once believed, but on the mycorrhizae attached to the roots of other plants. This site does a wonderful job of explaining it all.

I found this plant while checking up on my Illicium floridanum (one of which is doing fine, BTW). It had probably been flowering for a while, because according to missouriplants.com, the flowers open white and darken as they age.

Labels: CeVA, wildflowers

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless because I don't know what most of these plants are. I photographed these last weekend in the country, and haven't tried to put a name to them yet.

Update: With a lot of help from my friends, I can now identify several of these. I need to check the leaves on some of these to nail down the species.

Deptford Pink (Dianthus armeria)

Ragwort (Senecio sp.) and Erigeron

Galium tinctorium?

Venus's Looking-glass (Triodanis perfoliata)

Deptford Pink again (Dianthus armeria)

And the ones I know - a much shorter list.

Blue-eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium sp.)

Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia)

Partridgeberry (Mitchella repens)

Labels: CeVA, wildflowers

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Friday, May 11, 2007

Breaking New Ground

For 20 years I've wanted a vegetable garden, and now that I have space for one, I'm turning it into a potager. Do you think I've been living in DC too long?

When we bought the place in the country, one of the things we wanted from it was a place to grow vegetables. We had grand visions of sweet corn, tomatoes, beans, squash, peas, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, okra, onions, garlic, spinach and on and on and on. And we may still do that someday, but for right now, we just don't have the time. I also had grand visions of a long sweep of shrubbery and trees bordered by every flower you can imagine. Well. No, I don't think there's going to be time for that either. So I scaled things back a bit and ended up with this manageable plot.

The idea of the potager seems to be part of the gardening zeitgeist. 129,000 hits on Google for "potager" for pages updated in the last 3 months. Is it no longer good enough to plant a few rows of vegetables out back - now it has to be pretty? Or maybe we're just saying potager instead of vegetable patch because it sounds more upscale? Or has the publishing herd just latched onto a new topic? I don't know. Something to ponder while I plant. And it's ironic, because I've been planting my tomatoes together with ornamentals for a couple of years now, trying to get them into the sun while hiding them from the homeowners' association. Now I don't have to do it and I'm doing it anyway.

So I've got the geometric layout and started my tomatoes, eggplant, herbs, y muchos chiles. Good so far, but where are the ornamentals? They're going to be tucked in here and there in any leftover space. OK, where are the vertical elements? Maybe the deer, munching the whole thing to the gound?

Labels: CeVA, potager, vegetables

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Need Fern Expert!

Anybody know anything about ferns? I spent some time plant-scouting in central Virginia yesterday and I have several pictures with no IDs, several pictures with shaky IDs, and approximately One picture with a positive ID.

I know Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides) because I planted some myself in my northern Virginia garden. These particular ones are at the country house, growing in the side of the streambank under a tree root.

I think I've correctly identified the Cinnamon Fern.

Not so sure about Bracken.

Then there are these. This one is a nice thick stand growing near the stream.
This one is a cute little fragile-looking thing, growing nearby the Uvularia I wrote about several days ago. The first picture in that post is the suspected Cinnamon fern, by the way.

So, while I'd love some help with IDs here, I'm really looking for a good field guide. The recently updated Peterson Field Guide appears to be a good one or at least this article thinks so. Any recommendations?

Labels: CeVA, ferns

Monday, April 30, 2007

April Wrapup

Reader: Hey! If this blog is called Cultivated, do you ever post anything about gardening here?
Entangled: Um, er, I've been busy..... Would some pictures do? I made an album on Picassa just now.

Update, May 1: New! Now with functional links!

Tangled Branches: Cultivated: April 2007

Labels: CeVA, in bloom, NoVA

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

CeVa Journal: Wildlife

Wild turkey and wood thrush. Whatever next? I was hoping to see new birds at the country house, but somehow wild turkeys didn't cross my mind. Two weekends ago, I saw this turkey hen amble through the woods in back. It is a hen, isn't it? Hard to tell from the crummy picture, but that's the best one I got.
Last weekend, something similar caught my eye, but this time I had the good sense to grab the binoculars instead of the camera. It was a tom turkey with red head and wattles and that strange beard thing sticking out from its chest. He scuffled through the leaves a while and moved on.

This morning, I heard a beautiful, distinctive bird song and tracked it through the woods to the singer. A wood thrush! It let me look and listen for a long while before it figured out I was following it around, and then flew away. It was back in a short time, but I didn't go chasing it again.

Yesterday, while hunting for wildflowers in the woods, I came across this tiny iridescent spider in the middle of its pollen-spangled web.
We started seeing dragonflies over the weekend. This one posed on the deck railing yesterday afternoon. I'm only just beginning to learn about dragonflies, and this one doesn't look like any of the pictures in my book. Maybe it's a damselfly instead?
Update, 4/25 5:30 pm EDT: Thanks to a comment from Annie in Austin, I think I've ID'd the dragonfly. She sent me here, and I clicked through to here, and said "Hmmm, that top picture looks quite a lot like my photo." My field guide only showed the Common Whitetail adult male, and that's what confused me. To be fair, if I had read the text in the guide instead of just looking at the pictures, I would have learned that the Common Whitetail juvenile male has a different abdomen coloration. And they're even more confusing when they go through puberty. ;-)
Saturday, there were at least five different kinds of butterflies around. We didn't pause in our work to identify them all - some kind of azure, something that looked like a fritillary, the same duskywings we've been seeing for weeks, sulphurs, cabbage whites and....ta da!...the first Tiger Swallowtail.This is a good argument for leaving your dandelions grow, if you ask me.

Labels: birds, butterflies, CeVA, dragonflies, spiders

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

CeVA Journal: Wildflowers

This started out to be a post about our long weekend in the country, but a long weekend leads to a long post, so I decided to break it up.

When we bought the country place last fall I couldn't wait for spring to discover all the wildflowers that were just bound to be springing up in the woods. And I'm still waiting. Yesterday afternoon, I was determined to do a thorough search. Who ever heard of a woods without spring flowers? There must be some somewhere. So I crisscrossed the woods with my gaze firmly on the ground. I'd already found a few patches of bluets several weeks ago - I'm skipping over them here, but they're still blooming and even more numerous.

In front of the house, there are lots of ferns. We're going to regard ferns as honorary wildflowers for this discussion. Christmas fern was with us all winter and is now putting up new fronds. Then there are several others that are new to me. I don't know what this one is but it's going to be big.
I think this is bracken, Pteridium aquilinum, but I welcome corrections.
Near the stream, I found this. It looks like Solomon's Seal to me, but it's much smaller than the ones in our suburban woods.
I've been watching the shrubs that I think might be blueberries. Very early in the spring, the tall white-flowered ones bloomed. This one is a low-growing thing that's part of a thick colony towards the back of the lot.
At first I thought this was another Solomon's Seal, but it appears to be Uvularia sessilifolia, or Sessile Bellwort.
A closer look at the Uvularia flower.
But while I had my nose pointed at the ground looking for tiny flowers, I almost missed this, which was above my head.
I believe this is Rhododendron periclymenoides. There's only one shrub like this blooming back in the woods, but there are several others nearby with just foliage. I may try to take a few cuttings and get it growing closer to the house. I liked it so much I went back and took more pictures today.

Labels: azaleas, CeVA, ferns, wildflowers

Monday, April 23, 2007

Narcissus Update

The suspense is over. The narcissus we discovered in the woods looks like this when in bloom:

The small white flowers are about 1.5 inches in diameter with a tiny, tiny yellow cup. Some are two to a stem, but most are only one. There isn't much fragrance.

Any guesses what this might be? It looks similar to some jonquilla hybrids, but the lack of fragrance surprises me. Also, this is on the late end of the narcissus season.

Labels: CeVA, narcissus

Saturday, April 21, 2007

A Tale of Two Narcissus

Throw away your horticultural rulebooks! I did and look what happened.

These are my first cultivated flowers at the country house and I did just about everything "wrong" when I moved them from their suburban location. I dug them up just after they bloomed and before the leaves had withered. I spread them out in the shade and left them for, oh, 6 or 8 weeks. They still seemed OK, so I gathered them up and put them on a tray in the garage. They stayed there all summer....and fall...and winter...and early spring. Then I noticed they were starting to sprout, so I brought them to the country to see if they'd put down roots. Looks like they're gonna be just fine.

Meanwhile, we were working on clearing greenbriar and dead wood at the country house, and my spouse said "There's something here I want you to see - it looks like daffodils." Well, I can't tell you how proud I was of him. They were daffodils - just the foliage - and I had no idea that he could recognize them that way. I didn't see any flower buds, and thought they might not bloom, but by last Tuesday they looked like this.

I can't wait to see what the flowers look like, but I wonder how they got here. Are we living on the remnants of someone's long ago garden? A nice romantic notion. Someday when I have too much time on my hands, I'd like to research the property's history. Until then, I'll just continue to discover what's growing there.

Labels: CeVA, narcissus, NoVA

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