Gardening by Mistake

I’m slow getting this last batch of pics up, but better late than never.

It was so hot the day we were there that this guy couldn’t be bothered even when the flash went off in his face.

More pictures from our recent visit to Lake Shawnee.

Last Saturday, our family spent some time at the gardens of Lake Shawnee in Topeka, Kansas. What a gem! As I understand it, these gardens were done entirely by volunteers. They did a fantastic job!

Enjoy!

I mentioned a week ago or so that my young talinum have started blooming. They are an unusual plant for me (my first succulent). I had guessed that they were about one and a half inches tall but, after looking at them, they are maybe 3 inches tall (excluding the flower stalks). I promised a picture of the flowers, so here’s a picture of the plant and the flowers. (These are in a single small 3-inch pot).

I had a minute to get out to the garden this evening to look around. I ignored the flood-ravaged area and just concentrated on enjoying the other parts of the garden. A week ago tonight I spent a considerable amount of time weeding my B bed in the rose garden.  I had it looking fairly decent. Tonight, wow. It looked like I hadn’t pulled a weed in a month. I guess that’s what a week of rain does for weeds.

Among the weeds there were some pretty sights. Here are just a couple:

From C bed:  coreopsis ‘Zagreb’ in the foreground, penstemon digitalis ‘Husker Red’ to the right and up a bit. Above the ‘Zagreb’ on the left is a shasta daisy (I’d have to look up the name for it, Snow Lady, I think), and consuming everything in its path is a monstrous hardy geranium which I will be dividing as soon as I figure out how. The last time, it took two of us to get it out of the ground and an axe to chop it up.

This is asclepias syriaca in bloom. It’s a butt-ugly plant, but the blooms are something else. Everything goes crazy for them, bees and beetles of all kinds. They have a wonderful fragrance, too. A friend across town has monarch caterpillars covering her asclepias. I checked and I didn’t see any. I always have them heavily in August. I think it’s odd that she’s got them now and I’ll have them in 2 months.

This is is a volunteer echinacea purpurea plant. What a show it’s getting ready to put on! It sprouted on the outside of B bed, but I left it there. Every year I intend to move it a few feet so it’s in the bed instead and yet there it is, probably 4 years old now. Now it’s so big I’m reluctant to move it!

Monday, I was surprised to discover this among some weeds:

I thought it looked like a gentian of some kind. I’ve never grown them before and in the 10 years I’ve had this garden I’ve never seen one in the garden before, although there are some native gentian species. What is funny about this is that I tried to grow some gentian from winter sowing. I didn’t have any germinations, which was disappointing. And then this guy pops up!

I cannot tell which kind of gentian it is. I’d sure love it if someone could identify it for me. (Or if it’s not a gentian and you know it, I’d like to know that, too.)  Notice there are no leaves to help me identify it. Just one really long stem.

Here is what it looked like Wednesday evening.

Update:

The Name That Plant people over at GardenWeb tell me they don’t think this plant is a gentian. They think it’s a brodiaea. I’d say my plant looks a lot like those in many respects, but the stamens on mine look different. So I’m completely puzzled. I suppose it will have to be enough that I like the flowers and I’m happy to have it in my garden. I do appreciate the responses. They could be right; I just don’t know enough to be able to say for sure.

I added this own-root plant of Alexandre Girault last July. Right now it’s just a baby plant. City of York was once this size, too, and now it covers half the arbor.  Alexandre Girault is a once bloomer so its current bloom was my first chance to see it in person rather than in pictures. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take pictures until after it had passed its prime (duh!), but this will help me to remember it until next year’s display.

I wanted something that would grow monstrously large like City of York on the opposite corner of the arbor. I also wanted something that wasn’t white like CoY. This is definitely both: it’s pink and it’s going to be every bit the arbor-eating rose bush that CoY is. These beautiful pink blooms are set off nicely by the silvery-gray weathered wood of the arbor and they will be very visible even to the street, which is quite a distance away. Now I just have to be patient for a few years until AG achieves some size.

I planted City of York in 2002. It was a small own-root rose. This is how it looked next to the back of the arbor three years later in 2005:

City of York, a once-blooming rambler, is in full, glorious bloom right now. Here’s how it looks today, five years later. You can see why I was so worried that our unusually harsh winter might have caused significant die back and a lesser show. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. The white blooms are City of York.

From the front of the arbor:

The back of the arbor. The bush covers 2 sides of the arbor at this point. Who knows how it will look in another few years.

The arbor is 8 feet tall and the rose canes rise another 2 feet above that.

And, finally…

The rose is highly fragrant and you can smell it for long distances away. Mmmmm!

The other day some noise prompted me to look out the window to the feeding station. I saw a male and a female cardinal, confronting each other:

I wish I had video of it because the pictures don’t do a good job of showing it. As you can see from the above picture, the female is not feeling friendly. The male was raised up and leaning forward and his feathers all flat and his mouth opening and closing threateningly. The picture can’t show that he held his wings close to his body but fluttering.  They were in this standoff for several long seconds and then, without any visible warning, the male cardinal launched himself at the female. She jumped out of his way and then they became a brief whirlwind of fighting activity. The camera was too slow to capture all of this.

I have no idea what prompted this. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

The other day I think I mentioned that a brown thrasher chased a dove away from a feeder and then helped himself to seed. I was surprised by that. I was surprised to see him quite aggressively run off the dove, and I was surprised that he then ate seed.

(With the same apology as with the grosbeak and oriole pictures, these were taken in a hurry through a screened window in need of cleaning. They are not as clear as I’d like).

I was also happy to see the dove sneak back once the thrasher was occupied on the other side of the feeder.

Brown thrasher sharing the feeder with the dove.