Botanical Names 101 - Lesson 2

The latest Bluebird newsletter has some more fun species names.

angustifolius (an-gus-ti-FO-li-us). Narrow-leaved.
australis (as-TRA-lis). Southern.
canadensis (kan-a-DEN-sis). From Canada.
deltoides (del-TOID-ez). Triangular shape.
mollis (MOL-lis). Soft, hairy.
nutans (NU-tanz). Nodding.
pallida (PAL-lid-a) Pale.
rupestris (ru-PRES-tris). Rock-loving.
scandens (SKAN-denz). Climbing.
speciosus (spe-si-O-sus). Showy, good-looking.
spicata (spi-KA-ta). With spikes.

I can only think of a couple of these off the top of my head but they do fit. For example, Lady's Mantle is Alchemilla mollis and the leaves are indeed soft and fuzzy. Gayfeather or Liatris spicata blooms on long, narrow spikes.

Bouquets for Monday April 20th

For the first two or three weeks each season, all the bouquets look pretty much alike. I've only got tulips and daffodils to work with so they differ mainly in colors and types of greenery. Here is one for today that has boxwood. The daffodils (which were open by today) are pale yellow so they look pretty good with the pinks.

Bouquets for April 13th and 17th, 2009

The first bouquets of 2009 looked very similar to the one shown below. This picture was taken on Tuesday evening of a bouquet made up for Monday. In the bouquets for Monday, I had cut some of the daffodils too early and they did not all open properly. They still looked OK until they started to actually fade, but they didn't look exactly like daffodils. You can see how the daffodils look like yellow tube flowers instead of daffodils.

Here is the same bouquet on Wednesday evening. The tulip stems have lengthened even more now.

On Thursday evening I recut the tulips to different lengths and rearranged them. The daffodils are looking pretty tired.


And here they are again on Friday evening.

Last of all is a picture from Saturday. I pulled out the daffodils but the tulips are still looking pretty good.

New Infrastructure - Mini-hoophouses

One of the problems I have had over the years has been coming up with a good way to suspsend insect barrier row covers over china asters and snapdragons. China asters are terribly susceptible to aster yellows and need row covers to keep out leafhoppers which transmit the disease. Snapdragons have the bad characteristic of dropping the lower flowers as soon as they are pollinated. To get nice, long spikes, snapdragons need to be grown in a greenhouse or covered with rowcovers to keep out pollinating insects.

The row covers used for these purposes need to be suspended with some structure because if the row cover is allowed to "float" on the flowers, they can be bent or broken in high winds or when it rains. In the past I have rigged up supports using pvc pipe but have always had problems with the row cover tearing on the corners of the support. I have also had problems anchoring the row cover to the ground. I can't bury it the way some vegetables growers do because once the flowers start blooming, I need to lift the cover a couple times a week to cut the flowers.

Most often row covers are supported using little wire hoops but I didn't think these would work over a 4 foot wide bed containing plants more than 2 feet tall. I finally had the idea to adapt designs for do it yourself hoophouses. The materials I used were 2 foot sections of 3/8" rebar and 8 foot sections of pvc pipe. After squaring up the bed, I set the rebar ever 2 1/2 feet along each side of the bed and pounded them in so only about 6" stuck out of the ground. Then I bent the pvc pipe and slid each end over a rebar stake so they arched across the bed. To add stability, I joined pieces to make a 25 foot piece of pvc and attached it under the top of each arch.

The row cover can then be stretched over the entire frame. The cover is gathered and twisted together at the ends. Because I will be lifting the cover frequently, I decided to just weigh down each end with a big rock.

Seed catalogs sell fancy (and expensive) pegs for holding down row cover but I read that you can just use ground staples on top of a piece of wood.

I put all this together in a couple hours today. I wanted to set it up now so I can see how it performs before I actually put in the plants.

New Infrastructure - Coldframes

Over the past year I have become more interested in growing vegetables. I'm already growing so many flowers that it doesn't seem like it should be that much more work to grow some of the stuff I most like to eat - leafy greens, peas, tomatoes, radishes, peppers and so on. Partly this is to be eating better, fresher food and partly it is to try to eat more locally.

While investigating eating locally, everything I read kept mentioning Eliott Coleman's book "Four-Season Harvest" which I finally purchased. I built a couple 4'x8' coldframes based on Coleman's design. I glazed mine with sheet fiberglass instead of glass or polycarbonate because I already had it. The frames are made from 2x12 and 2x8 lumber with a 4' piece of 2x2 lumber in the middle connecting the front and back.

The frames for the covers are made of 2x2 lumber and are not hinged to the frame. This makes the frames much easier to move around. The covers are edged with 1x3 inch lumber so they fit snugly like the cover of a shoebox.

I built the coldframes with the plan of growing some greens for winter harvest, but then realized I can start using them before that. I am going to try placing them over one of the beds I use for lisianthus and try planting out the lisianthus directly into the beds in mid-April. Hopefully this will bring in an earlier crop of lisianthus.

2009 Delphiniums Part 2

I have always been careful about not frittering money away on things, a good virtue to have these days. Since leaving the exciting world of data processing last year, I've become particularly careful, buying clothing at thrift stores and asking myself, "Do you really need this" about every discretionary purchase. However, I do still sometimes indulge my passion for plants, especially when I can justify it as a business expense. This is not always good for the bottom line but delights me and hopefully my customers, too.


After hearing from Terry Dowdeswell of Dowdeswell's Delphiniums in my last post, I decided I had to send off for some of their seed. Terry had mentioned 'Green Twist' as a good cut flower and it was one of the ones I was most intrigued by so that is what I ordered. It only took about a week to get the seeds from New Zealand and they generously gave me a bonus packet of another good cutting variety, 'Morning Lights'. Here are pictures from Dowdeswell's website:





The seed plus shipping cost $26 for 100 seeds. That sounds pretty steep when 'Clear Springs' costs less than $4 per packet for 500 seeds. But, when I figure in the fun factor of ordering seeds from New Zealand and growing a couple varieties no one around here has ever seen, I think it's a bargain.


I love my job.

2009 Delphiniums

I just took the delphinium flats out of the fridge where they have been for the past 3 weeks. This year I am growing 200 'Aurora' as well as 200 of a new one called 'New Century'. I'm not sure they are any better than 'Clear Springs' which is what I usually grow. Both 'Aurora' and 'New Century' are hybrids so all the plants of a particular color should look identical. On the other hand, because 'Clear Springs' is open pollinated, each plant is slightly different and that means you sometimes find interesting surprises like nearly turquoise blues or whites with faint green markings in the bees.

I recently read the delphinium section of Hardy Perennials by the English garden writer Graham Rice. In most parts of the USA, delphiniums are short lived perennials so our only option is to obtain seed grown plants. In England it is a different story. England's climate allows delphiniums to be long lived perennials so many individual cultivars (i.e. clones) of delphiniums are available, with names like 'Giotto', 'Summerfield Miranda' and 'Tiddles'. There is a Delphinium Society, special RHS medals for delphiniums and annual RHS trials at Wisley where you can view all the latest delphimiums. I don't know why this seems so eccentric to me, it is really no different than our Hemerocallis, Dahlia and Hosta societies which also have display gardens, medals, and so on. I guess I'm just not enough of a fanatic about any one plant to want to belong to a society devoted to it.

Nevertheless, if I ever have some spare time and space (I can dream, can't I?), I'd like to order some delphinium seed from New Zealand where some of the recent English medal winners have originated. You can check it out here: New Millenium Delphiniums. Of course, these New Millenium delphiniums will not be the dwarf 3-5 foot varieties I grow for cutting, but the 5-8 foot monsters which require a stake dedicated to each flower spike. If anyone decides to grow some, please send some pictures and I will post them here.