Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Saturday, March 06, 2010
If Spring Won't Come to Us...
...then we will go to Spring.
Last weekend, very weary of looking at piles of dirty snow, the spouse and I headed for a 24-hour respite in Virginia Beach.
Spring isn't quite there yet either, but close. We arrived late afternoon and immediately went for a walk on the beach (in our winter coats). It was sunny, but cool and breezy.
The next day we surveyed our tourist options and chose to see the Norfolk Botanical Garden on the chance that there might be camellias blooming.
Above is one of the paths in the Hofheimer Camellia Garden. The Norfolk Botanical Garden has a collection of over 1700 camellia plants, with about 750 of them in the Hofheimer Camellia Garden. I'm no camellia expert, but it appeared to me that the C. japonica varieties were just beginning to bloom. Many blossoms looked frost-nipped. We found one plant covered in brilliant red flowers and that was an interspecific hybrid - Camellia x 'Tango'.
My little old Fuji FinePix never did a good job of capturing reds and it still doesn't. Believe me, those flowers were very red.
We didn't linger too long at the garden due to the cool and breezy weather, but stayed long enough to see most of the early spring flowers, including the daffodils at the top of this post, some hellebores, a few crocuses and snowdrops, several witch hazels, and the beautiful and fabulously-fragrant Prunus mume.
The variety here is 'Kobai', and it looks quite similar to one I loved and lost - 'Peggy Clarke'.
On the way out of the garden, we discovered a novel use for wine corks.
I have the corks, now I just have to get some agaves.
Back at home and looking at dirty piles of snow again, I noticed something green at the edge of one. I cautiously raked through it with my fingers and underneath found this.
Crocus buds! Horizontal from the weight of snow and ice, but still obeying their biological alarm clock and going forth to meet Spring.
14 Days Until the Vernal Equinox...
Labels: camellias, crocus, vacation
Monday, September 15, 2008
A Day at the Beach
Let's not work in the garden this weekend - let's go to the beach.
So we did. After living in Virginia for over 20 years, we visited Virginia Beach for the first time this weekend. For a longer vacation we prefer the relative seclusion of Hatteras Island, but Virginia Beach is closer and doable for an overnight trip.
The beach is completely lined with high-rise hotels behind a long "boardwalk" (actually concrete) and adjacent bike path. The view is better looking out from the hotel than from the beach looking back. The beach itself seemed quite clean and orderly given the number of people there. This photo was taken Sunday morning when there were fewer people than Saturday afternoon.
We'd probably go back, but not in the middle of summer and not for a long stay. A night or two is about right.
Labels: vacation
Monday, September 01, 2008
Extreme Gardening
Greetings from the last day of my stay-at-home vacation! The weather is beautiful! It rained for 2 and half days and again Saturday night. I'm completely serious when I say this is beautiful weather. The garden looks happier than it has in weeks and I got a chance to catch up on some reading and basically just loll around the house.
As I leafed through a stack of magazines, I found a theme emerging - extreme gardening. I suppose I was primed to look for it. Early in the week we watched a video about competitive growers of giant pumpkins. This video, Lords of the Gourd, is worth seeing even if you don't think you're interested in enormous cucurbits. The focus was on the human drama of competition - the motivations and emotions - wrapped in a humorous package. Even the spouse enjoyed it and he usually has little patience with films that don't feature car chases or espionage.
I picked up the September issue of Saveur and browsed the cover story on watermelon, where I learned that Hope, Arkansas (of all places) is the Giant Watermelon Capital of the World. Some neat old pictures of the festival are here (scroll down). There must be something about cucurbits that inspires competition. But then I discovered that there's an entire forum on GardenWeb devoted to Giant Vegetables, including okra, sweet potatoes, tall amaranths, and I don't know what all else. Doesn't appear to get much traffic though. Probably the growers of giant vegetables are all specialists and only hang out in specialist forums like bigpumpkins.com.
Then there's the chile peppers. You may have noticed the huge interest this year in growing Bhut Jolokia (the spouse says Bhut means ghost in Hindi and Jolokia is the name some use for chile peppers). Bhut Jolokia is the world's hottest pepper as measured by the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State. Dr. Bosland of the Chile Pepper Institute wrote up some tips for growing it in the March 2008 issue of Chile Pepper magazine. If you want to know more about how this pepper became a global sensation, there's a looooong article at fiery-foods.com that covers just about everything. I'm not growing this pepper, but Ki, Layanee, and Miles are. Anybody else?
Well, if I have an extremely long life I should still have plenty of time to grow extreme vegetables. Sunset magazine did a feature in July on California centenarians, and at least some of them attributed their longevity to gardening. The article prompted letters to the editor (published in the September issue) with more anecdotal evidence supporting the theory.
We've been extremely lazy in the garden during our stay-at-home vacation. The most strenuous thing I've done is pick some big tomatoes. I guess I better get back to work if I want to live to be 100.
Labels: magazines, vacation, vegetables
