Tree Tour

After last weekend's inch of rain, things look refreshed, and there have been some lovely cool mornings with bright sunshine. Perfect weather for walking around inspecting trees.

I'm a little concerned about the red buckeye (Aesculus pavia) tree by the gravel garden. I moved it in April. It was crowding the entrance and needed to be moved over about three feet, so I did. It tolerated the move nicely, and I even got a good show of red firecracker flowers in May.

But now all the leaves appear curled and quite small. In other years, even as a small sapling, the palmate leaves were big and crisply pleated and were open flat.

Red buckeye leaves are small and curled this year

Red buckeye leaves in a prior spring

Verdict: I'm going to assume this little tree is still adjusting to its move. It is conserving energy to re-establish roots, and will keep its leaves smaller and curled until fully settled in. That's my hope. It looks healthy enough, and green, and it did flower, so I'm not going to panic.

The American holly (Ilex opaca) on the east side has yellow leaves all over, and they have fallen at its base.

American holly is flowering, but yellow leaves litter the ground

It's looking fuller and greener than ever. The gangly red oak to its left is growing like a weed.

Verdict: Yellow leaves are simply the holly's annual shedding of last year's foliage, so there is no concern. Because it is an evergreen, at some point the old leaves have to go, and they drop in yellow piles. Fresh new leaves are unfurling, and inconspicuous little flowers are blooming, and this tree is doing well.

By the way, if you have a real desire to know whether a holly is male or female, check out this excellent explanation of the flower differences. My tree is a female.

Male holly flowers have stamens that stick out.
Female flowers have knobby swellings in the center.
Now you know.

My 'Forest Pansy' redbud always gives me fits. This winter it did better -- no branch dieback, so that was a relief, and it even put out some tiny pink flowers in May, but not much. But it just doesn't look full this year. The color is muddy maroon, not beautiful red. The canopy looks diminished and the leaves are smaller than in previous years. I think this tree is shrinking; it gets smaller every year.

The leaves of 'Forest Pansy' redbud look flat purple-brown this year, and the tree looks skimpy.

Usually in early summer 'Forest Pansy' leaves have a shimmery garnet hue and they are big, fluttery, and  heart shaped.

Verdict: Eh. I'm tired of worrying about this fussy tree. It's a keeper -- it does have nice qualities as a focal point in the middle of the yard, but it never makes me feel good about it.

The 'Orange Dream' Japanese maple has remained bright and fresh, easily seen at the back of the Birch Garden, even from afar. I pruned it rather heavily this spring to get rid of the bunchy branch growth that plagues the form of this tree. It still needs some work.

I pruned off much of the top of this tree to get rid of congested branches.

This was 'Orange Dream' last year, with a strange heart shaped dip in
the center from odd branching at the top.

Verdict: Japanese maples grow funny. They all do, and they all need pretty severe pruning. My big weeper in front of the house (a purple leaved 'Crimson Queen') needs constant chopping, but even this upright little 'Orange Dream' needs help. I just don't quite know how to do it. No matter what I do, it wants to be a lollipop shape with congestion at the top.

Other trees on my cool morning walk are looking good.

A brand new Stewartia from Broken Arrow. It's 'Skyrocket' and will stay narrow

'Gold Cone' juniper is looking kind of stately anchoring the front walk.

This unknown oak was a tiny volunteer seedling that I ripped up
from the back hill and planted in the meadow 10 years ago. Wow.

Another oak -- this time a swamp white oak that I bought as a
skinny sapling at Bosco's and planted 7 years ago.

There were so many more trees to inspect on my morning tour. The persimmons leaf out so late -- they are the last -- but they are coming in now. A rangy little hophornbeam in the meadow finally looks like something this year.

A tiny blue beech sapling, Carpinus caroliniana, that I transplanted this spring and then transplanted again a few weeks later, looks nice and leafy.

My Persian ironwood, Parrotia 'Vanessa" looks tall and full -- it's going to remain much narrower and more upright than I had thought it would.  Very vertical.

The 'Silver King' sweetgum by the driveway always worries me. Its variegated leaves tend to scorch and it doesn't like dry and the size of the leaves seems to be variable in different seasons. The leaves are curled like the red buckeye's leaves this spring.

Sweetgum 'Silver King' foliage is small this year.

'Silver King' is full and getting larger, and managing to stave off a
threatening 'Summer Wine' ninebark that wants to swallow it.

Verdict: With so much cream edging on this variegated tree's leaves, they are overly sensitive to conditions, I think. It was dry for so long this spring, just as the sweetgum was leafing out, and the leaves emerged small and somewhat curled. But the tree is putting on size and seems to be okay.

The viburnums are not looking good. One of the blackhaws is definitely declining, I think it has a root problem. And 'Dawn' viburnum has dying branches, but is still managing to overtake the side of the house in a grand bid for domestic dominance.

My brand new green dissected-leaf Japanese maple, 'Seiryu', came back from winter and is growing well. It refuses to be photographed -- the finely cut leaves and its small stature are impossible to capture.

All the black gums look good, the sassafras grove is going strong, and the dogwoods, including a graceful little gray dogwood shrub-tree and my prized pagoda dogwood hidden in the shady woods, are all doing fine.

All in all, a lovely morning for a tree tour.

Gratitude

A soaker. Soft rain overnight and this morning. An inch in total.

Thanks for this needed rainfall in my garden. And much, much greater thanks this Memorial Day for the sacrifices so many have made.

With gratitude,
Laurrie

Hot and Dry End of May

Hot and humid and quite uncomfortable for days. No rain.

Plants are struggling, especially the new divisions and things I've moved. I had to replace plants I lost  this spring, as a mild winter was just as spiteful to my garden as severe ones have been, and the new things need watering all the time.

There are holes I need to fill where some perennials didn't reappear and others just won't bulk up until rain comes, but tenacious dry-loving weeds are more than happy to close any gaps. There is a mat-forming bushy weed that I don't recognize -- it's new to me this year -- and it is carpeting absolutely every inch of concrete dry soil and wrapping itself at the base of every plant.

The things I want to spread out and fill in and get leafy are holding back. The weeds I don't want are exultant.

Even the lawn is browning, despite running the sprinklers.

I hope the turtles are okay in all this hot dry weather.

Pulling Up Persicarias

It turns out the lovely compost that I spread all over my gardens this spring was full of weed seeds. I'm seeing easily recognizable smartweed seedlings popping up densely everywhere I added compost. They are little, easily removed, and absolutely everywhere I look. When I pull them up more appear.

I kind of knew that would happen. A huge stand of smartweed surrounds the compost pile, and I know my nice crumbly dirt and leaves did not really cook enough to sterilize anything.

Weedy smartweed. Kind of pretty, but ugh.

Pink flowered smartweed gets to be a huge arching plant. It's a Persicaria -- fortunately not the horribly invasive Japanese knotweed that is in the family, but smartweed also takes over wherever it seeds. And it is now seeded in all my gardens. I am so tired of endlessly weeding this plant.

I have another Persicaria in my garden, but it's one I planted and loved and now I don't know what to do with it. It's a well behaved dwarf, Persicaria affinis 'Dimity', also called Himalayan fleeceflower. It is a groundcover that spreads nicely into a lovely mat of clean foliage with pink and white pipe cleaner flowers held upright over the leaves. The mat is thick and suppresses weeds.

A lovely patch of clean green 'Dimity' foliage and little wands of pink flowers under a bush clover shrub.

In most autumns it turns bright red, making a fantastic contrast with buff yellow amsonia foliage and strappy green grasses.

Fall color. Some years it is rustier brown, some years redder.

I adore the funny flowers, and they last all summer, then remain standing up in fall as they turn rust colored. 'Dimity' forms the lower level of the Blueberry Garden and I love it. Most of the time.

Pipe cleaners!

The problem is that if it is very dry in spring, the leaves never green up. Then this cute groundcover is just a brown desiccated mess. Not reduced, not skimpy, not waiting for wetter weather to burst forth; the whole mat simply stays brown and dry.

It's alive this spring, with green leaves around the edges of the garden where a little moisture collects. Isolated pops of green are emerging here and there.

The bush clover in the center will fill out and get large in summer,
but the groundcover fleeceflower won't green up this year.

But I know from past dry springs that it won't fill in. Rain too late in the season won't help. It's such a beautiful, fresh looking mat of green when it's happy, and it's so dry and dead looking when it's not.

So, I think I want to take it out. As much as I love this groundcover most years, I can't stand it in others when it looks so bad all season.

I can't just pull up the brown stuff and leave the pockets of green -- the plant spreads by rootlets and all the stems are hopelessly entwined. So it's getting ripped out in large tangled masses. I think I'll put in some nice leafy green alchemillas, Lady's mantle, instead. They will make a mounding groundcover and be more reliably leafy and green.

So it seems this spring I am destined to spend pulling up Persicarias. Both the weedy seedlings  --goodbye to those -- and the cute pipe cleaner Himalayan fleeceflower plants that I had loved so much.

An Unpretty Spring

This has not been a pretty spring.

First, a too warm winter exposed plants to damage when cold hit. And when deep cold did hit in early April, it totally eliminated any forsythia blooms, or star magnolias, or 'Dawn' viburnum flowers. There were none.

We went away. Ten days gone. Time to forget the inauspicious start and come back to a refreshed spring garden.

It got too dry here while we were in wet, lush Normandy. It has only rained a dribble or two in all of April and May, just a few tenths at a time, a few times.

So some of the trees are reluctant to do anything -- like my sourwood (Oxydendrum) tree, which still hasn't opened its leaves fully, despite Memorial Day bearing down on us.

The black gum (Nyssa sylvatica) trees in the front yard haven't completely leafed out either, and hydrangeas are all just stick piles right now.

The dwarf deutzias, 'Nikko', are usually pretty bloomers in May, but not this year. It''s so dry they won't leaf out either. No pretty white flowers at all, and just a few leaves clustered at the base. They are alive, they will fill in eventually, but this spring has passed them by.

Another plant that hates this spring is the groundcover Himalayan fleeceflower, Persicaria 'Dimity'. It needs a very wet spring to get going, and once it has leafed out it can take some dry conditions. But it simply cannot tolerate a dry spring, and stubbornly remains blighted brown and crispy in large swaths throughout my whole garden. Ugh.

There are a few orange geums blooming now, and some tiarellas, but they are sparse and tentative, while in prior, wetter springs they were lovely and widespread.

Nothing is pretty this year. Even the groundcover sedums are struggling.

I pruned the redtwig dogwoods by the front door in April, to rejuvenate them. They will take another year to fill back in. Meanwhile, they bloom, but the open, rangy, pruned branches give them a weedy look. In other years, although congested and too overgrown, the blooming redtwig dogwoods were spectacular.

This corylopsis, or winterhazel, did not bloom in April and is barely putting out any leaves now. Not the pretty accent I wanted at the corner of the front walk.

I could go on. It's just not a spring I want to remember in my garden.

I lost the New Jersey Tea shrub, Ceanothus americanus -- a charming white flowered plant seen here in a prior season, flowering under the green, leafy Stewartia monadelpha that I lost last year. Neither plant is my garden this spring. This space is now a big blank.

I will miss it -- what a pretty, tidy, low shrub it was, and the bees loved it. I also lost one of the 'Mt. Airy' fothergillas by the gravel garden. Dead sticks remain.

How do you keep gardening when major elements disappear each year and must be replanted, making every season a new, immature version of what you imagined, with continuous blank spaces, open spots and unfinished designs? I understand a garden is never "finished", but mine can't even get started.

I know, I know, I promised to come back from France in a cheery mood and not complain. But I am discouraged. Spring here has been such a disappointment. Let it be over.

Okay, to end on a better note, Doublefile viburnum 'Shasta' is beautiful. We call it the wedding cake shrub, and it blooms, even in an unpretty spring, on our wedding anniversary.

Seventeen years. We celebrated with a cruise down the Seine, and then came back to this sight, to mark the actual anniversary date.

Even a disappointing spring has joy. Now, please, let it rain.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *
Well, I asked for rain, but didn't specify exactly where. The rain on the doppler map this morning is heavy, but is rotating in a perfect circle around a completely rain free center -- where the blue pin is dropped at Hartford my struggling garden sits and the precipitation is not forecast to circle into the area. Maybe we'll get sprinkles.

Seven Gardeners

When I got home from France, my garden welcomed me with some pleasant sights. But it was dry while we were gone, and not all the trees are fully in leaf even now.

It all looks skimpy. I still have in mind the lushness of Paris in full spring leafiness and especially Monet's garden exploding with color. Everything here seems diminished in comparison.

The streets of Paris and every little town in Normandy were lined with horse chestnuts, or what I call buckeye trees, in full bloom. The Seine riverbanks were too, all up and down the river, and they were massive.

We spent days on the Normandy coast at St. Malo and Mont Saint Michel, and of course the D-Day beaches, then more days cruising up and down the Seine river to Paris and Rouen and Vernon and St. Andelys. The medieval towns and cathedrals were awesome, but it was the flowering buckeye trees on the way that captivated me just as much.

Crabapples and laburnum, or golden chain trees, were also in bloom, like these in Monet's garden.

All over Normandy, where apple cider and calvados are king and queen, the apple orchards were in bloom.

Did you know that Normandy is named for the Vikings who invaded in the 9th century? They were the "north men" or Nor-men who settled this part of Europe. Now you know.

My own garden is nice, and I was so glad to see it after a long flight home. But in no way can it compare to the intensity of Giverny. It's the way Monet's space is so densely layered, crammed, stuffed and eye-poppingly rich that I can't get out of my head. It is, of course, an Impressionist painting made with plants.

There isn't much actual design -- the layout is not a feature, it's the use of plant colors that is so amazing. Such as clear purple in the abundant wisteria at the waterlily pond.

There really is no other plant so exotically lush when in bloom. The gardeners must work to keep this rampant monster vine in check and looking so delicate and perfect for the space. They must prune it hard and often.

Even the silver gray mauve of the pond itself has a complex, rich color.

Bright tones abounded all over. What I can't wrap my head around is that it is all concurrent -- roses and tulips and azaleas and forget-me-nots and foxgloves and irises and camassias were all out in full bloom at the same time.

How does that even happen? I have most of these plants in my garden and each is nice in its brief time of flowering, but is gone by before the next opens. None of those are ever remotely in bloom at the same time.

But they all are in Giverny.

Of course, Monet had seven full time gardeners, and apparently he ran them ragged. It is speculated that he was bipolar, and his gardeners took the brunt of his stormy whims to create his artistic vision in plants.

I will never have the benign damp climate, the painterly eye, or the funds and energy to come close to what these gardens look like. I don't live where spring comes early and opens lush.

And I will never have the seven full time French gardeners it takes to make a garden like Monet's.

Ah, c'est la vie.

Claude's Garden

Monet's garden at Giverny, France on a misty, cloudy day in May.

May Gloom

Last spring, in 2015, I wrote a blog diary entry about how discouraged I get in May, and how much I hate it. Cold weather, skimpy bare branches, wet mud, grim skies. Early May is an end-of-winter slog.

The lawn turns brilliant green while the black gums stay
bare -- they are always very late to leaf out

I never published it. It was too gloomy and whiny. This year I am again mired in damp chill, waiting for May to be over. I really do not like the slow, cold, gray season that is spring in my part of the world.

The black gum by the creekbed is also still just bare branches,
while forget-me-nots bravely bloom by the bridge

We had some warm sunny days here in late winter, in March and April. That was a tease. I see wonderful pictures on blogs all over the country showing spring ephemerals and sunny bulbs and opening leaves, but that just sets expectations that May will bring the same here too. It doesn't.

Yes, early things are leafing out, tentatively. Forget me nots are bright blue, and creeping phlox is magenta, and the flowering dogwood should bloom by Mother's Day. Blueberries are defying the cold damp with tiny flowers. The grass is lurid green except where Creeping Charlie makes purple incursions.

'Fort Hill' phlox subulata looks good this year, although photographing hot pink
on a gray day is a challenge

But it's been drizzling and raining off and on for a week now. Skies are leaden. The air is chilly, in the 40s, sometimes inching up into the 50s (4 - 10 C). It's hard to get pictures on a dark day of what little color has opened. What does bloom looks plaintively brave, rather than pretty.

I promised myself last year I wouldn't complain so. But it's May again.

I'm going away for a while -- I'll be back at the end of the month, and by then the garden will be cheerier and I have made a promise to myself that I will be too.