Emptying the Greenhouse

Oh, the greenhouse was crammed. And the weather predictions were for upper 80's and low 90's over the weekend. Yiiikes. I was not about to allow all the plants I'd been growing all winter to be fried. Ever since the fan broke in my greenhouse, I've been trying to get it emptied and planted out before it gets really hot. I hated the drone of that fan anyway, and if it's hot enough for it to be running, it's too hot for the plants. At least that was my rationale for not having somebody come out to install a new fan. So I had the devil chasing me to get the Pod emptied before the big heat hit.

I have to say I was as pleased with my plants this year as any. I was a good girl and pinched back the geraniums instead of letting them all get huge. I toughened my stance on bringing in big huge pots of flowers from the yard. It would only be cuttings this year. And I didn't go nuts--just one or two cuttings of each.

One difference this year from others is that I switched from giving liquid fertilizer (Peter's, dissolved in water) to Osmocote, which is fertilizer bound up in round, time-release pellets. You mix it into the soil and it does its work steadily and slowly as the months go by. What a difference. Instead of the huge spurts of top-heavy growth, I got slow, steady, sturdy growth in my plants.

Gartenmeister fuschia, the first time I've grown a decent specimen indoors. Yay!

Heliotrope, which smells like cherry pie. It's now out in the flower border. Rabbits don't like it. Yay again.

The poet's jasmine loves Osmocote. It was looking sickly and yellow, and Osmocote and some pyrethrins brought it back from Red Spider Miteland. It has a heavy, musky scent all its own. I crave it. And it blooms year 'round. What a dinkum plantie.


These are the geraniums I can't live without: star geraniums in red and hot pink, little bitty Grey Sprite, Occold Shield with its chestnut-splotched chartreuse leaves, Vancouver Centennial with its chestnut star-shaped leaves edged in chartreuse; Rosina Read in pink, Wilhelm Langguth with its white-bordered leaves, Frank Headley with its ridiculously white leaves and salmon flowers. The list goes on. At one time I had 28 varieties of miniature and dwarf and fancy-leaved gerania. They are my weakness. Well, one of my weaknesses. People of passion have many weaknesses.

But now it was time for them to go back out in the big world.
And so I planted them in nine planters and five baskets, all to keep them out of the reach of wabbits. Wabbits are huge geranium fans. They like them so much they chew them into tiny bits, leaving a neat pile of leaves and stem chunks where once there was a plant. Leaving me jumping up and down, firing my sixguns fruitlessly in the air like Yosemite Sam.

So what's a geranium freak to do? Why, elevate them, of course. You're never going to get rid of rabbits. The really precious plants go in hanging baskets, and the rest in planters, which are themselves elevated to about 18 inches, which is high enough to deter all but climbing rabbits (and they sometimes do climb to get to them). RRRRRR. Chet Baker. Where are you when they are doing that?
Sleeping? Cooling my tummeh in the green grass? I do not know. Rabbits are crafty. They do it at night, when I am asleep in my Jedd Bed. That's what I think. You cannot blame me for what the bunnehs do, Mether.

Here is my HotPot, with a red star geranium (so called because the leaves and flowers are like pointy stars), Occold Shield, and Vancouver Centennial. I put it next to the cool Bird Spa, and get photos of warblers in the crazy foliage. By September, Vancouver Centennial will look like a chestnut and chartreuse waterfall over the whole pot.
And here's the Cool Pot in the shade of a birch, with Gartenmeister fuchsia and a pink and purple fuchsia I love. Other than having to spray them with pyrethrins or insecticidal soap every couple of days for whitefly, I like growing fuchsias. Once they go outside, I don't have to spray them any more, nor do I want to, because the hummingbirds are visiting then.


You can see the elevational element in all my plantings. Of necessity. I'd love to have planters right on the ground, but then there would be no plants in them. And forget planting geraniums right in the ground around here. Gone, overnight. Good thing I like planting in containers, huh?


Mary Alice, my giant hibiscus tree, was made into a standard by rabbits, who ate every bit of foliage they could reach.
She's too tall now for rabbits, and the spicebush swallowtails love her so much.
I'm forever carving away at this miniature Ficus benjamina "Too Little." It's waist high to me now, and it's easier to keep the scale under control on a small tree. Still and all, scale and ficus go together like white and rice. They're awfully sticky plants, with all the scale pee dropping from them. Bleh. Still, it makes a very nice miniature tree. I guess it qualifies as a tropical bonsai at this point.


Phoebe got this jade tree as a tiny cutting from her first grade teacher, Mr. Jennings. Marty's gone now, cut down in his prime by cancer, but Marty the jade tree, and our loving memories of him, live on. He was an amazing teacher, a loving disciplinarian, and he taught those first graders to read in nothing flat.

That's an awful big jade tree, six years later. Chet can stand in Marty's shade.

Speaking of trees, I've trained a little gardenia into a great big standard with a braided trunk.
Every stem tip has a flower bud. It killed me to keep pinching it back to keep its nice round shape, and it ticked the plant off to have its new growth continually pinched off, and I knew as I did it I was preventing the possibility of flowers, and I haven't smelt a gardenia flower since way last summer, but... when this thing finally bursts into bloom after a year of pinching and training it will all be worth it. Woo!

Meanwhile, the bonsais are all potted up and leafing out beautifully. I gave them a huge root pruning this spring, which always gets them going strong.


My favorite. Or one of them. A Japanese maple, perfect subject for bonsai. This one, in the pot 25 years. A coon knocked it off the deck and split its trunk in 1993. I thought it would die, but I taped it together with electrician's tape and hoped for the best. This is the glorious result. I suppose I owe that coon.

The tree comes up to about mid-thigh on me, just FYI.


The bleeding heart has expanded beautifully. Bill indulged in some little solar lamps that delight us all out of proportion to their cost. We love to sit out in lawnchairs and watch them come on, just as the whip-poor-wills start to sing. Nepeta "Walker's Low" and King Alfred daffies. Too bad I don't have cats, that catnip is rampant. (But I don't miss them ).

I hope you've enjoyed this little tour of my gardens, container and otherwise. They make me feel alive.

Gardening With Exotic Plants

It occurred to me, looking at my photos, that pretty much everything I shot this morning was an exotic plant. Collective gasp. I've got natives, and I've got exotics, and I don't get my panties in a bunch about being true to one or the other. I go for pretty and useful, fragrant and beautiful, and as long as it doesn't take over, and it's one or more of those attributes, it gets a place in my garden.

A stroll around the yard on a sunny morning... Here's a variegated bougainvillea vine I've had for several years. I've discovered a few things about growing bougainvilleas in Ohio.

One: They will drop all their leaves if a cold draft blows into the greenhouse.
Two: They will grow more if you wait around.
Three: They will only bloom in the greenhouse, starting in January, and they quit blooming the minute I bring them outdoors in May. That has to be OK with me.
Four: They love a lot of food, and their favorite is Jobe's Plant Spikes. You can't give them too many Jobe's.
Five: They love water, too.
Six: I love these plants, though they are a bit fussy; I have two and they are both enormous, and they remind me of Mexico, and thinking about Mexico makes me happy. Especially in January.

This is a funny little abutilon, or flowering maple, from Africa, whose name is Abutilon megapotamicum. I got it as a cutting from a friend many years ago. The rabbits ate it down to stubs twice this spring, and this is its first bloom. I like the flower form. It's related to hibiscus, actually.Purple heliotrope is a year-round must for me. It smells like cherry vanilla candy. Mmmm. I can't pass it without stooping to sniff, which is why it's planted right on the edge of the raised bed. Gotta get those things up right under your nose or you miss what's wonderful about them.
Speaking of sniffing, a gardenia opened this morning. Show me a more heavenly scent, a better-rounded, more complex earthly delight than the aroma of gardenias. I will plant the flower. Or I probably already am growing it. (Tuberoses are in bud!!)

This little hosta, Baby Tears, is just going nuts this year. One-foot-tall gnome for scale. It's the smallest hosta I know, but knowing hosta freaks, they've come up with something tinier by now.Speaking of going ape, here's Fuchsia magellenica, from southern South America. It's a perennial fuchsia and the hummingbirds love it when it finally gets going in late August. There's something utterly disarming about having a fuchsia come up after the snow melts, having lived through the winter, and throw out little red and purple ballerina flowers all summer.
It's so vigorous this year, I'm wondering if it's planning to die, like the other three that used to be in this garden bed. I'll take some cuttings into the greenhouse this fall, just in case it has something up its sleeve. I've read that in California, this fuchsia can make a 6' high hedge!

It wouldn't be a Zick garden without Russian sage and Mexican zinnias, mixing together in perfect exotic harmony. I've had to individually cage each zinnia I've planted this year, no thanks again to the rabbits. But oh, they're worth it.
I hope you've enjoyed this little garden tour. How I'll miss them all when frost comes. I'm rolling in beauty right now. And we got three inches of rain thanks to the hurricane, so I won't have to water for a couple of weeks.

I'm in constant motion these days, delivering and fetching kids, rehearsing for a Swinging Orangutangs gig on Sept. 5...we play 9-2...AM; taking lessons, taking kid to lessons; recording commentaries. I'm tired, and so are the kids--the first couple of weeks of school are murder. I guess we'll get used to getting up at 5:45 but it hasn't happened yet. Ahh, country life.

Magic Cuttings

Salvia coccinea (red) and S. guarantica "Black and Blue" (ultramarine). A hummingbird fiesta.

I know that all too soon, summer will be gone. Heck, it's gone already. Finally, after a sweltering September, the nights are crisp again. I can't remember a hotter September--days in the 90's, nights in the 60's. October: even worse. Everything is fried to a crisp. Took Baker on a hike yesterday and he took off after something and came back overheated. There was no water to douse him in where we were so I found a hose and drenched him. But they're promising a cooling off for tomorrow, and the sun has this wine-rich quality that, even when it's hot, isn't. The light is pellucid and penetrating; the heat somehow false.
Every year, I've fallen into the trap of taking my cuttings too late. I wait until October or, worse, November, when the plants are practically dormant, when their hormones are not flowing any more, and I take cuttings, and have a heck of a time getting them to root. Duh. You take cuttings when plants are actively growing. My plant friend Gordon told me that. So this year I took my cuttings in early September, and as I write they are already throwing out roots.

I'm a plant hoarder. There are plants I have decided I cannot live without, and I carry them over in the greenhouse from year to year. One year I lost ALL my fancy-leaf and miniature geraniums in the greenhouse, 28 varieties, to a power outage on an 8-degree night. It hurt. But the mercurial electric heat has now been replaced by good ol' gas, and we put a drip valve on the gas line, and we haven't had an unplanned gas outage since. And so I take cuttings.
I cannot live without heliotrope. Smells like cherry vanilla pie. Ergo: Must have it. So, apparently, must this clearwing hummingbird moth. Heliotrope roots well from cuttings, though I usually wind up digging up the whole plant, cutting it back to about 4" tall, and keeping it over the winter that way. Heliotrope is very forgiving. This time, I rooted cuttings. My three-year-old plant is getting too darn big for the greenhouse.
Here are some of this September's cuttings, already dipped in rooting hormone. Did you know that rooting hormone has pretty much the same chemical makeup as angel dust? Well, it does. Maybe that's why it's getting so durn hard to find in the grocery store any more, kind of like cough medicines that are a precursor to methamphetamines. I can't be bothered with either angel dust or meth. Life's too good, too full of beauty and possibility, and too short for "recreational" drugs.
The cuttings, ensconced in their rooting planter. I put Saran wrap over the top for humidity for the first week or so, until they settle in and stop wilting.Dinner outside, with hibiscus and parrot. A touch of tropicalia in the waning light of summer.

In the fall of 2006, my friend Mary Alice brought me a large peach-flowered hibiscus. She apologized for its size and the lateness of the season, but said, "I walked up to it and it spoke to me. It told me it was meant for you." And it occurred to her that I had a greenhouse where it could live over the winter. All true. I kept it over the winter, and it got about three feet tall and took a gallon of water every day. Come spring 2007, I breathed a sigh of relief, took it out of its pot, and set it in the lower garden. It's now as tall as my chin and covered with huge peach blossoms. Needless to say, it's not coming back in.

At the start of the winter of 2007, my horticulturally-inclined friend Jason took a few cuttings of this hibiscus, because we both knew it was going to get too big for the greenhouse. He grew it over the spring and summer, and gave it to me this August. Oh, thank you, Jason, for all the wonderful plants you brought me. You are theRooting King, the King of Salvias. Here's its first blossom. And mine. Come spring, they'll probably both be looking me square in the eye.