A couple years ago I did something a little careless in the garden. My intent was to move a couple of plants from the Crabapple Bed to the Parkway Bed. However, I failed to carefully examine the shovel full of roots that I carried from bed to bed. If I had, I might have noticed some bits of Starry Solomon’s Plume (Maianthemum stellatum) rhizome (an underground horizontal stem used by some plants to attempt world domination).
Lately I’ve been preoccupied much with the prospect of drought. So far, this is the second driest May on record. April was also very dry. Normally, this is a region of fairly generous rainfall, but we haven’t had a good rain in months. Precipitation for this year so far is less than half what we usually get: 5.5″ versus an average of 12″.
Turns out that Long-Beaked Sedge (Carex sprengelii) has all the qualities I am looking for in a grass-like plant for the shade garden.
Some may ask, how is a sedge different from a grass? The short answer is that sedges are like grasses, but different. A longer answer is that Sedges belong to a different family of plants, the Cyperaceae, as opposed to the grasses who belong to the Graminaceae. Grasses have round, hollow stems (except for the nodes), while Sedges have triangular, solid stems. The thing to remember is that many Sedges can play the role of short or medium-sized grasses in the garden.
Catching the Crabapple at peak bloom at the Chicago Botanic Garden (CBG) involves some tricky timing, but we gave it another try last week on the first day that worked. Last time we visited the buds looked as if they were just getting ready to burst.
Passing the Regenstein Center, CBG’s building for indoor displays and public education, we noticed that there was an exhibit of the work of Philip Juras, an artist who specializes in prairie remnants. We stopped to look and are we glad we did.
In the spring of 2019 I planted 5 plugs of Golden Groundsel (Packera aurea, also known by the less appealing common name of Golden Ragwort) in our shady Back Garden. Some two years later, Judy and I are happy with the results.
Tulip season has passed its peak around here, a peak that came early for some reason during this cold, dry spring. While several of my favorite Species Tulips have already come and gone, there are several still gracing us with their cheerful presence.
Only a few weeks ago I was complaining about how our ‘Schubert’ Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana) had never bloomed, and now – it’s blooming! I guess patience has been rewarded, since this tree was planted 6 years ago as a bareroot whip less than 3′ tall (it’s now about 15′).
I wanted to do just a quick post on the ‘Donald Wyman’ crab blooming now in our Front Garden. For me, the flowering of this tree is one of the most joyous moments defining spring in our garden. For the last two years in a row the bloom has been unusually prolific.
Maybe the title is a little misleading. It’s not that we don’t have a bunch of beautiful tulips. It’s just that we don’t have as many as I feel we ought to have.
On Friday Judy and I visited the Chicago Botanic Garden (CBG); it’s been a great place to visit since the pandemic struck. Since last June, CBG has been open to the public on a time-reserved basis. Getting our entrance passes online has been easy each time we’ve tried it. Here’s a link from our first visit to CBG after the reopening last year.
