Shrubs

The Point and Place Gardener

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Sadly, I have gotten to that age where my cast iron back has given out. My knees gave out long ago. And my ankles are shot too. So for all but the most trivial gardening projects–or container gardening, my favorite type of gardening anyway–I now have to hire muscle.

Hence the title of this post. It actually came about when I was telling the Spoiler about my re-design of the gardens at work.

Work garden in full bloom, June 2019

You may remember this from a year or two ago. I had planted all this myself a few years’ back. I had bought the plants and installed them and they were flourishing–until last year when the roses came down with rose rosette disease. I understand that it is particularly bad on the East Coast–but in a pandemic year, it just made the loss of these roses sadder.

So the roses all had to go and new plants had to come in that were not roses. That was too big a job for me to handle, so as I described to the Spoiler, I had our landscape company do it. I told them what plants I wanted, I told them what cultivars to buy, and when the plants arrived, I placed them–the point and place gardener.

Late May, 2021

And this is how it turned out. Of course there’s quite a difference–and quite a lot of mulch, which normally I don’t generally use. But when the shrubs are this small, and I am not weeding because this is work and not home, and it needs to look presentable because this is a business, you use mulch.

Shady area at work

This area is shady so we used shade perennials. Honestly, I am a little nervous about this because we have woodchucks but we’ll see. I’m thinking that the hosta, especially, look like lettuce to the woodchucks. I sure hope I am mistaken!

We had no sooner gotten everything planted and the woodchuck–whom we hadn’t seen all spring–waddled out to begin dining in our grassy median.

This planting was done right before Memorial Day weekend. I am very afraid to go back to see what’s left on Tuesday.

[Update: I still haven’t been back to see it because of an emergency appendectomy on June 1st with complications. From what I understand, the plants are fine and the visitors–with the exception of our woodchuck–like what we have done. The woodchuck has decided to show its displeasure by tunneling through the mulch everywhere. I have been told there’s a pile in the corner by the steps that we could remove with a truck. Ah well.]

More Insects of Summer

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Hydrangea leaves with leaftier caterpillar inside

Here’s an insect that’s very easy to find and very easy to deal with.

Inside this crumpled up set of leaves is yep, you guessed it, another green worm. Hard to imagine that the world is so full of green worms, isn’t it?

This guy is called the hydrangea leaftier–kind of a crazy name, leaftier. Maybe it sounded like leaf-tyer to whomever came up with it. For you scientific types, it is Olethreutes ferriferana. Anyway, as you can clearly see by the photo, that’s what this little worm does–it sews itself into a little cocoon of hydrangea leaves–almost always near the top of hydrangea arborescens, or smooth hydrangea plants.

What’s lovely about this insect is that to deal with it, you just cut off the little clump of sewn together leaves and dispose of them in the trash. Don’t compost them or you will give the little worms time to hatch out into the moths which they become and start the whole vicious cycle all over again–because once you have these things, you have them forever unless you manage to rid yourself of them early.

And in addition to marring the appearance of your plants, why do you want to go around cutting off your leaves–or better yet, peeling open the leaves and smashing the little caterpillars, for those of you who like that sort of thing–every year? I know I have enough to do in the garden in the spring without that, thanks!

STOP! Before You Prune Those Hydrangeas, Know What Kind You Have

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A mix of blooming mophead and smooth hydrangeas

I am famous for saying that if I had a nickel for hydrangea question I got (and specifically the question “why isn’t my hydrangea blooming?”) when I was working in retail gardening, I would never have to work another day in my life.

Even with all the newer types of hydrangeas on the market–the “so-called” reblooming hydrangeas that bloom on old and new wood, in my climate, they can be notoriously finicky and NOT bloom when they’re supposed to–or stop blooming completely for some reason.

This is heartbreaking in a state like Connecticut, which is so close to places like Nantucket and Cape Cod, where so many people vacation. They go there, they see huge mounding shrubs of blue hydrangeas–and they come home to sticks and twigs of their own blue hydrangeas with no blooms.

Or worse yet, they come home to incredibly healthy shrubs of hydrangeas–and still no blooms. It’s enough to make one want to get a backhoe and just rip them all out!

I have advised folks about proper pruning, about knowing the type of hydrangea that you have and about replacing the types of hydrangeas that bloom on old wood with those that bloom on old and new wood (because here, we can get very late frosts–or worse, snows–that kill off those developing flower buds).

But if you haven’t spoken to me back when I was working in retail gardening, Proven Winners has put together and excellent guide to hydrangea pruning. It’s called Hydrangeas Demystified,

https://www.provenwinners.com/sites/provenwinners.com/files/pdf/hydrangeas_demystified_2015.pdf and while you still need to know the “type” of hydrangea that you have,  once you determine that, you’ll be able to figure out how to prune and when to prune. You might be able to save yourself a lot of heartache by not cutting off developing flower buds–or having your landscaper do so.

While we still can’t solve the problem of not being able to grow those gorgeous Nantucket type blue hydrangeas here in Connecticut (at least not in central Connecticut!), this guide can at least help us not prune off any flower buds that we might have developing.  I have more than once cut into wood that I thought was dead, only to discover that it wasn’t–I now only prune my mopheads very, very late!

So I hope this guide is helpful–and I hope that I have posted it early enough for most of you. Enjoy!

Walled Off

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This post is another example of a situation where “garden management” left undone has become a huge asset.

Mind you, I am not advocating for this sort of thing. But for a few years, I had unfortunate surgeries that kept me from doing just about anything in the garden–certainly anything as major as pruning large hibiscus syriacus shrubs after they bloom and before they go to seed, as should be done.

And so they self sowed everywhere. As with all weedy plants, I am still dealing with that unfortunate problem.

But in this one instance, the hibiscus actually solved a problem that I had been battling for 20 years in this garden.

This great wall of hibiscus hedge now keeps my neighbor’s riding mower from throwing all sorts of grass and weed seeds into this garden.

I even lost a viburnum to pesticide drift from their property–because of course we don’t spray at all. So there will be no more of that. If anything, some of the great wall of hibiscus might get hit with their toxins–but there’s plenty more where that came from!

Now I just need to keep the “mother plants” pruned after flowering or it will become one great garden of hibiscus!

Happy Accident

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This all looks so nicely composed, doesn’t it? The hanging impatiens above the ferns and the container below, with all sorts of nice contrasting textures from the ferns and the Japanese maple.

You can see by the title of my post that very little of it was planned. Lately, my best gardening just seems to “happen,” (although perhaps that is my imagination and my perfectionism talking).

But I will tell you that I didn’t plant any of those ferns. Nature sowed them for me. I just encourage them by watering (which is a feat, some years, like this one, when I am getting precious little help from nature!)

There is one spot where they don’t want to grow so I put a planter there. It has an impatiens plant the same color as the one in the hanging basket but you can’t tell. It’s been completely overrun by the oxalis. Oh well.

The color of the oxalis at least picks up the foliage of the Japanese maple leaves, and the cordyline. So you don’t miss the impatiens much.

And after I went out to get the impatiens plant, the Spoiler said, “oh. I thought you were going to plant a pot for the lawn.”

So I had to make a second trip to the garden center–not generally a hardship except in a pandemic–for more plants.

And that’s why he’s called the Spoiler.

Hydrangeas as Food for Pollinators

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You probably remember this photo from Wednesday. It’s not one of the ones that has the real mist and fog behind it.

If I want to work around these plants, I try to do so either very early in the morning or later in the evening. As soon as the sun hits them, the bees find them–and they are covered in bees.

You may remember my remark from Monday about not being able to get good photos of bees. I see lots of good photos of bees on social media and I marvel.

I think with me it stems from 2 things: the first is my own limitations. I am not nearly patient enough to wait for the right shot, to set it up, etc.

I also don’t use the right equipment. A tripod would help steady the camera and a macro lens would get me closer to the bees without getting on top of them.

But all of that comes from me believing that a bee has to do its thing without any more interference from us humans. Isn’t its job already hard enough? Do you really need to see a picture of a bumblebee? We all know what a cute fuzzy bumblebee is.

But I digress. And yes, bumblebees are one of the bees on my hydrangeas. As are honeybees. And smaller bees that I haven’t identified.

And even a couple of steel blue cricket hunter wasps.

So you can see that these hydrangeas are magnets for pollinators. Or you can at least hear about it.