Hepaticas

Last year, when I visited the Morris Island Conservation Area, I was surprised by all the Hepatica plants. Of course the flowers were long finished, but the leathery mottled leaves were everywhere. The leaves of Hepatica americana are evergreen, but a new crop grows every year after the flowers are finished. Needless to say, I made a mental note to come back in the spring to see the flowers, and today was the day. Easter Sunday today, and the sun shone and it was warm, and I totally enjoyed wandering around under the bare maples looking for different forms of Hepaticas. I really had to watch not to step on them!

They were just opening, not at their peak yet, but I still found quite a few forms and colours. Most were pale blue or white, but I found a lot of medium blue or blue-purples, and a few plants with quite dark rose or rose-purple flowers. I made a mental note of one particularly fine rose-purple and will have to go back later and hope for seeds.

As far as I'm concerned, these are Hepatica americana. The botanists can call them Anemone hepatica, or Hepatica nobilis, if they want, but I'm sticking with the old name. The other species native here, H. acutiloba, seems sufficiently different to me to retain its own name as well. Its leaves have much sharper points, with more definite mottling, and, in my experience, the flowers have quite a different 'look' to them. They usually have 8 or more petals, each one narrower than in H. americana, and the flowers are almost sure to be white or a very very pale blue or pink. It also prefers more shade and blooms a bit later.

Neither is difficult to grow in the garden. A good woodsy soil, sun and moisture in the spring followed by dappled shade for the summer, are all that are needed. If you don't have a deciduous tree or shrub to plant it under, a tall peony or rose will do. Put the Hepatica north of either one, and it will do fine. Hepaticas are very long-lived plants, bloom while the early bulbs brighten the bare garden, and like them, they have the market cornered on charm.

A Sense of Purpose

A couple of weeks ago, in the grip of a sudden whim, I signed up for a special Meeting of the Field Botanists of Ontario. It was last weekend, and I mostly enjoyed it. The speakers were all terrific and it was a buzz to be in with a group of actual botanists.

The reason I mention this, is that I came away with what I think may be a Useful Insight.  Practically every speaker mentioned making field collections, and they all talked about the importance of herbaria. The point they all made, is that samples of plants are collected and preserved not so much to answer current questions, but to be available to answer possible future questions. Herbarium specimens are regularly consulted decades after they were collected in order to answer questions that weren't thought of until much later. Today's collectors now also save a bit of the green plant material for drying and saving for possible DNA work later. So the point of the herbarium specimens is not to have a snapshot of the plant at the time of collection (although it is that too), it is to have the plant available for possible research many years later. I think this same idea can be applied to the making of a native plant garden.

I'm one of those people who tends to want to have a purpose for things. I understand perfectly doing something just for the sake of doing it - such as lying on the beach in the sun - but you notice I don't do that an awful lot. I enjoy things far more if I think my efforts might actually add up to something.

As a result, I have been more than a little bothered by the simple question of 'Why?' as applied to my garden work. Why make a native plant garden? Why go to lengths to grow, say, Chimaphila umbellata, from seed and then spend time trying to get it established in a suitable area? Why study the plant, document it, protect it, weed around it, start all over again when the slugs eat all the plants, and so on? Why spend hours and days working in the heat and bugs to make a garden at all?

The answer is.... I don't need to answer that question! I'm making my native plant garden, both the actual 'garden' part and the natural area around it, not for today but for tomorrow.

The chance that my garden might be of use sometime in the future is purpose enough.

Suddenly......

Suddenly, everything is alive! Sunday night we had a torrential rainstorm, and the next morning there were signs of life everywhere.

One of my favourite little daffodils, Tete-a-tete, with its two blooms on each 4" stalk, went from tiny green nubs showing to full bloom, literally overnight.

Snowdrops appeared all over the Sampler Garden, pushing up through the leaves and grasses. There are two species of them there - the flowers look exactly alike but the leaves of one are greener and wider than the other.

One of these days I'll do some research and figure out which is which species. They were both sold as Galanthus nivalis, but obviously at least one is wrong.

The Elder bushes were suddenly covered with their improbable flower and leaf buds. They look sort of prehistoric, as though they are going to develop into something really scary..... come to think of it, Elderberries are kind of scary. They spread like the dickens and the bushes are super brittle. The birds love the berries, though.

The Hepaticas (both Hepatica americana and H. acutiloba) have fuzzy buds tucked down at the bases of the leaves and I expect the flowers are only a few days away. When Spring is late the plants grow faster to compensate. Too bad the gardener can't move faster as well! So much to be done, and all of it at once. I spent several hours today gently removing leaves from the fern beds and part of the rock garden. They'll become mulch once I know where the plants are and can tuck them in around them. Right now a lot of things aren't visible yet.

And the first crocus! This is Ruby Giant (which is neither ruby-coloured not giant but gorgeous anyway) and it looks a bit forlorn surrounded by the mud the rainstorm washed down around it. The Geranium behind it is almost completely buried. I tried to dig it out but it was still so wet I figured it would be better to wait a bit and not trample the rest of the crocuses.

Finally, Spring is here!

Signs of Spring

So far, the signs of Spring are few and far between.

The buds on the Maples, one of the key things I look for to see if Spring is around the corner, are only just barely starting to swell.

The stems of the Red-stemmed Dogwoods are not very red yet, although the stems of the yellow-stemmed one do look brighter than they did.They got buried in a huge drift of snow by Snow Blower Man so it may just be relief at having their heads out again.

And speaking of snow, there's still plenty of it in the woods. In the morning it is frozen hard and Kip can run all over on top of it, but by afternoon it is softening up and he keeps falling through. It's funny to watch him, but the wild turkeys are even funnier - every time they go through the crust they give a little jump to get back on top, then they lift their feet high as though they think that will help. Of course it doesn't and down they go again. There are three males here that seem to be hanging around the bird feeders. If they think that they've discovered something the girl turkeys will admire them for I'm afraid they are going to be disappointed.

But...... the driveway is muddy, some of the rocks are showing through in the Rock Garden, there are hundreds of Red-winged Blackbirds in the Marsh (making a heck of a racket!), and I found some snowdrops!

Shivering Snowdrops, but Snowdrops none the less.

Obviously, we are having a late Spring. And just as obviously, when it does finally come, it will come in a rush. We'll go from snow lurking under the trees to weeds a foot high in about 15 minutes. Tulips, Daffodils, Crocuses and all their cousins will  bloom for 5 of those minutes. I'll be able to park my lawn chair between the Hillside Border and the Rock Garden, and enjoy an entire flowering season during a (short) coffee break.

Looking for Seeds

I'm always looking for seeds of native plants. Right now I'd really like Viola selkirkii or V. lanceolata seeds.....

A google search on these names didn't turn up any sources of these, no surprise. So I checked my favourite seed company, Gardens North, and no luck there either. The beauty of getting seeds from Gardens North, for me, is that many of the seeds Kristl Walek sells are collected in Ontario, so if she has them, I figure the plants will have a more-or-less local genome. Not that I am that fussy about that - I'm not planting them as a restoration project, just in my personal garden.

What I did turn up: the North American Native Plant Society, which is the somewhat-revived former Canadian Wildflower Society, has a seed exchange. I signed up as a member right away! Some mixed feelings about it, I must tell you. I was one of the first members of the CWS, and took the group very seriously. It was focused on Toronto, of course, but I had hopes that they would start chapters in other areas. They had a terrific magazine, Wildflower, and at one point they seemed to be growing steadily. Unfortunately, they made some bad decisions (yes, I squawked loudly), such as devoting too much of the magazine to plants from areas we Canadian types just weren't interested in, spending too much of their resources on the magazine to the detriment of any other activity, and, worst of all, renaming themselves the North American Native Plant Society. There would have been a roar of outrage, if they'd had enough members left by that point. I didn't renew my membership either and I guess they pulled back to only a small, Toronto-based club.Now they seem to showing new life again.

Their website (new) also mentions that they are having a plant sale May 7th. Wish I could go! But it's the opening day of my local Farmers' Market, and the day of a local crafts sale called Handmade Harvest and I'll be selling my pottery at both. How will I be at two events simultaneously? No, I haven't managed to clone myself - my long-suffering spouse will be at our booth at the Market. He's an excellent salesman - his Irish ancestry is a real asset sometimes!

I'll be looking for these violets this summer.They are listed as occurring in few locations where one can go hiking, within driving distance, and I'll focus on looking for them. Maybe, just maybe, I'll find them. Then I'll go back and hope for seeds....

And send some to the NANPS seed exchange. Maybe.

Jack-in-the-Pulpits

Or should that be 'Jacks-in-the-pulpit'? No, that would imply many Jacks in one pulpit, and it could get crowded.

I'm thinking of these rather oddball plants now because somebody asked a question about them the other night. I was giving my fern talk to a local garden club, and one of the pictures I showed included a Jack. She basically asked if she could grow them in the City and I said, 'why not?'. Her question reminded me of my husband's late great uncle, Alfred (whose brother was named, yep, Wilfred). We were once invited to dinner at his place, and he invited me to come out back to see his garden.

It was a pretty typical inner city yard. About 35' by 30', with a board fence across the back, a cedar hedge on one side, and the garage wall on the other. The garage wall was completely covered with a climbing rose, which, this particular day, was in bloom. And what bloom! I looked in awe at a  30' long wall of gorgeous, deep red, velvety roses, every one of them facing us as we stood there looking up at them. Alf told me he planted it in 1920, just after he got home from The War.

'It's not hardy here, of course,' he said. 'So every fall I loosen the roots around the top of the crown, dig a trench from there to the end of the wall, and carefully bend the rose over to lie in the trench.'

'It works,' he said.

In the spring he would dig it up, stand it straight again, and re-tie all the canes to their lattice support. The tie-ing in alone must have have taken days!

The rest of his garden was one bed, I would guess about 4' deep, running the length of the fence. And it was filled with Jack-in-the-pulpits. Hundreds of them. The ones at the back were the tallest, some of them over 3' tall, and the ones at the front were the shortest, from about 6" up to 12" or so. There were many flowers under the leaves, and they varied quite a bit in colouring. Some were all green, with slighter darker stripes, some were white with purplish stripes, and some even had hints of pink. Alf explained that the Jack-in-the-pulpit, Arisaema triphyllum, grows from a tuber very much like a tuberous begonia does. The tuber keeps getting bigger, and you can, if you wish, divide it to make more plants. He didn't, he said. He liked to see big tubers.

'Hold out your hands,' he said. 'Flat, side by side.'

I did.

'Those tubers at the back, now,' he said, 'they are as big as your two hands together.' He went on to say that the flowers would give way later in the summer to stalks carrying large shiny red berries. Each berry could have up to 8 seeds inside. He cut them off, he said, because he didn't have room for more plants, and even so, he would always miss a few and they would come up under the bigger plants. If he liked the flower, he would move it to the front to grow on, and then if he really liked it, he would make room for it further back.

Yes, you can grow them in the City, Barbara! Just give them decent soil, not too dry, not too soggy, a bit of shade, and stand back. In about 40 years, you'll have tubers the size of your two hands.

Fern Talk

Got some serious snow yesterday. Thick, heavy snow which didn't pack down much. Here's a picture of my Sampler garden in the new snow:

Looks cold, doesn't it? It was!

The area inside the rail fence is what I call my Sampler Garden, and the area to the left and up the slope is part of my Rockery.

Although the snow makes everything seem black and white, I'm always impressed by how some of the colours, particularly those in dried grasses and leaves, become more vivid. Maybe because there are so few colours left, we appreciate them more. This rose is Iceberg, which seems rather fitting:

I spent the entire day inside, didn't even go out to the Studio or the Plant Shed (formerly called the Greenhouse but now too dilapidated for that grand title), and worked on my Ferns slide show. I'm giving my talk on Ferns for the Ottawa Valley on Wednesday to a garden club in Barrhaven. It was very nice to look at slides of beautiful green fronds all day, with scenes of deep new snow outside both office windows!


As part of the Ferns presentation, I made a list of websites of interest to fern enthusiasts, and one of them is Les Fougeres Boreales, a specialist nursery near Montreal. I'd heard of them before, but was told they only sold wholesale.Now I see from the website that they are having an Open House May 28 to June 4 this year. I checked their catalogue and there are plenty of ferns I want.

Now all I have to do is learn to speak French by May 28th......