Scanner art by Craig Cramer, gardening & more
Herbaceous perennials I grow.
If you enjoy the bud as much as the flower, the emergence as much as fruition, then you extend the ‘season of interest’ of every plant you grow. (Click on images for a larger view.)
Blanched sedums:
Clockwise: Emerging eranthis, hellbore bud, emerging hellebore stems, another hellbore bud.
Something I don’t even remember planting coming up around cyclamen.
The first day of spring dawned at 4 F. Â But since then, it’s been in the 50s and 60s and most of the snow has retreated again — except for the drifts in the veggie garden and some of the piles along the driveway and in the ditches. There’s a lot more to see than there was two weeks ago when the snow retreated the first time.
Crocuses are peaking where the soil is warmest. (Click on images for larger view.)
What else is flowering? Clockwise, an orange crocus, an iris (cristata?), the now trite clump of snowdrops (still my favorite spring ephemeral), and a nice spotted hellebore flower.
Last Saturday, our local Adirondack Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society held a tufa workshop with Harvey Wrightman (right), owner of Wrightman Alpines in Kerwood, Ontario. Harvey sells many alpines that are well-suited for tufa gardens, rock gardens, crevice gardens, and troughs.
Tufa is a relatively soft, high-lime rock that forms when calcium carbonate precipitates from water. It’s also pretty pricey. It’s not to be confused with hypertufa, which is made from concrete and usually some peat. I’ve made a bunch of hypertufa troughs, but this was my first experience with the real thing.
Harvey brought along hunks of tufa that had already been planted. (Did I get any pictures? Of course not.) They mimicked slides he showed in a presentation earlier in the day of alpine plants growing out of rock faces.
The process is pretty simple. Drill half-inch holes in the tufa, no more than 2 inches deep. Nestle in rooted cuttings (foreground of top picture) along with a mix of crushed tufa and some of the fines leftover from drilling the hole. Water.
Once the weather settles, the planted tufa can live outside year-round, with occasional watering when it’s dry. Over time, the plants actually sink their roots right into the rock, and form cute little buns or mats that flower in their particular season.
I’ll add a list of species later when Harvey sends one along. (I was in drilling and photographing mode and didn’t write anything down during the workshop.) Will post some pictures when there’s something more to see than little bits of plant in a rock.
Here are the hunks of tufa before planting.
The cuttings, rooted in pumice, before planting.
One of the finished products.
Update: Here’s a short list of some good species for tufa.
Harvey said he’d pass along some mature tufa pictures in a bit. I’ll get them up as soon as I can.
I love the frenzy of flowers in late spring/early summer.  And the garden here peaks in September when the shear mass of plant  material is nearly overwhelming.  But nothing beats seeing what pops up as the snow retreats.
We hit 63 yesterday and today, and had a little rain today. Â The snow has retreated quickly, and we had a nice blanket of ‘melting snow fog’ this afternoon. Â (Click on images for larger view.)
The rain and melting snow has our little creek up over it’s banks.
The snow pealed back to reveil Eranthis (winter aconite) in full flower.
The hard cyclamens are also looking good and flowering within a day of seeing the sun.
And the Hellebores are getting off to a good start …
I’m just as excited to see vegetation that amazingly survives (if not actually grows) under the snow, like these Digitalis ferruginea …
… Verbascum …
… Lamium …
… and this viny groundcover that’s taking over the patio.
Best picture of the batch: This Verbascum has been nibbled on a bit. I wonder by what?
Snowdrops, iris and other goodies are coming on, too. More pix from the compressed spring coming soon.
No secret. I’m a big fan of Piet Oudolf.
Tonight, I stumbled into Yolanda’s Dutch gardening blog, Bliss (lots of great images), where she posted about her October 2005 visit to Piet and Anna’s nursery.
About the only pictures I’ve seen of the nursery have been from books — real professional shots that make the place look too good. I like Yolanda’s better. It looks like a real working garden/nursery.
In the comments, Gloria from Chicago (visit her Pollinators Welcome blog) pointed to her album of pictures from Oudolf’s installation at the Lurie Gardens. As luck would have it, I had a two-day meeting about 10 blocks away just months after that garden was planted. It still looked a little rough. Great to see that it’s filling in nicely.
Here’s a one shot from Gloria’s album:
Gloria wrote about Lurie Garden in Garden Rant in December, where she points to this slide show illustrating Oudolf’s idea of birth, life, and death in a garden. Lots of great dead plants.