Still Waiting . . .
Amorphophallus Titanum on the verge
The Corpse Flower (Amorphophallis titanum) hasn’t bloomed yet, but it’s getting close. The plant, dubbed ‘Izzy’ by its keepers, likely will open at night. Which night though ‘Izzy’ hasn’t decided upon yet. Titan followers are keeping close watch on its progress on Twitter, and the botanical garden promises to stay open until 2 a.m. to give fans a chance to celebrate with Izzy. It’s a marvelous chance to feel sick to the stomach without having to get drunk.
The first mulleins I ever saw were growing close to the railroad tracks near my home. I was about ten or twelve then and not very tall. The mullein’s stocks of yellow flowers were nearly twice my height and taller than any flower I had ever seen before. The mulleins thrived where little else would grow. The ground along the tracks was rocky, dry, dusty, and hot. There was no shelter from sun or rain, ever. The lower leaves of some of the plants were spotted with oil and grease that spewed from fast moving freight trains. Yet they thrived. I respected these plants. I was never tempted to mow them down with the stick I always carried when I walked along the railroad tracks. I often stroked their soft furry leaves though. Odd how such a tough plant could have such gentle, inviting leaves.
The mulleins blooming in the botanical garden today link me to those plants that grew along the railroad tracks so many decades ago. I knew nothing about the plant then – not even its name. Over the years, I learned the plant was called a mullein. The sign near this one identifies it as a Common Mullein (Verbascum Thapsus). It’s also called the Great Mullein – a name that fits better.
I searched for mullein on the web and spent a couple of hours looking at many uses the plant has had throughout history. The tall mullein stocks were said to be light the way for mourners in funeral processions, to keep witches, demons, angry gods, and wild animals at bay, and in the hands of Moses, to part the Red Sea . The flowers and leaves of mulleins also have been used for centuries as a remedy for respiratory infections, rheumatism, burns, rashes, and earaches. Missouri Wildflowers, the field guide to wildflowers in the state, says that early settlers even used the big, soft lower leaves of mulleins as diapers for their newborns.
The exhibit of Lego creations inside the tropical greenhouse continues until after Labor Day. I have yet to see it. The press release says it includes 25 oversized Lego sculptures of plants and animals. The only pieces on view without paying admission are a full-sized garden tiller and a sundial with a blue bird perched at the end of its gnomon.
The leaves of this hosta Hosta ventricosa ‘Aureomaculata’ aren’t much to look at. The tough-looking big leaves have a clumsy look about them. They’re all piled on top of one another with no thought to symmetry. The flowers though are something special. Apart from the late-season Hosta Plantaginea, these are largest flowers I’ve seen on a hosta. The flowers are borne on tall scapes and spaced far enough apart so that each blossom gets it due.
The daylily gardens are at their peak. Splotches of color line the curving walkway. Hundreds of varieties, each there because of their pedigrees, their heritage, or their “Hey there, you. Stop. Look at me.” qualities. This one made me stop. It’s named ‘Spacecoast Devil’s Disciple.’ It’s got luminous yellow ruffled toothy edges that border very dark petals that converge in a yellow throat. Such beauty doesn’t come cheap though. A pot of ‘Spacecoast Devil’s Disciple’ is being sold by the breeder for $75.
What a difference a week makes
Peach poppies going to seed and Amorphophallus Titanum just starting out
The thousands of peach-colored Opium Poppies that filled the three display beds fronting the Linnaen House are all gone. I thought there might have had a week or two left in them before they turned into field of ripening seed domes. But I suppose they were pulled up early make way for their summer replacements: hibiscus, canna, and pineapple sage. Still there’s an off-chance that they were cleared because the keepers of the Garden wanted to prevent visitors from being tempted to harvest a few pods for their own purposes. I read that these poppies become ripe for illegal activity when the pods turn dark green and the points on the seed domes stand straight out or curve upward. The few poppies that remain are blooming in the Ottoman garden.
Gone too is the Amorphophallus that I saw last week in the Linnean House. It was past its prime when I saw it, but it was quickly replaced by another. This one is the crowd-pleasing Amorphophallus Titanum – the corpse flower. A corpse flower bloomed here a couple of years ago. Then it drew crowds eager to be nauseated and reporters who covered its progress. I was there too waiting in a long line to see and smell this botanical curiosity.
Six years ago, the American Hosta Growers Association picked a small hosta named ‘Blue Mouse Ears’ as its Hosta of the Year. The 4” to 6” tall clump of rounded, curled blue leaves that made people say “Ahh, isn’t that cute?” came along just the right time. It and many other new hostas that were even smaller coincided with the hot trend of fairy gardening. Miniature hostas fit nicely into these miniature gardens where tiny fairy creatures lived. At last count there are more than 25 hostas with ‘Mouse’ in their names. This botanical garden has about a half-dozen of them with names such as ‘Church Mouse,’ ‘Ruffled Mouse Ears,’ ‘Dancing Mouse,’ And ‘Cat and Mouse.’ This one is named ‘Mighty Mouse.’ It’s a naturally occurring genetic mutation of ‘Blue Mouse Ears.’ ‘Mighty Mouse’ has blue-green leaves and begins with a yellow edging in the spring that turns to white as the season wears on.
I thought it might happen – the hostas with pedigrees and prices to match have been reduced. The gift shop has reduced the entire stock of hostas left over from a hosta sale by 25%. Even so, few are being sold. I watched as a visitor to the sale picked up a quart-sized pot of Hosta ‘Timothy,’ a small hosta with dark green leaves trimmed with a rippled yellow border. It was originally priced at $34.99 – a price that seems fair for a variety that hosta lovers describe as stunning, limited, and rare. Discounted to $24.25, it’s a real bargain. The visitor though quickly put ‘Timothy’ down saying, “At that price I should be able to dry the leaves, roll them up, and have a relaxing smoke.”
I don’t think I would have even seen this plant growing close to the walk in the Woodland Garden if not for its name – Mouse Plant (Arisarum proboscideum). Why mouse plant? It’s just an ordinary green plant with arrow-shaped leaves growing close to the ground that’s doing its best not to stand-out. Turns out I missed the show. At the height of spring, the Mouse Plant produces maroon and white flowers with 6” long brown tails. Even when the plant is in flower, the two-inch blooms are easy to miss because they hide under arrow leaves. The website Stupid Garden Plants has some great pictures of the Mouse Plant in flower.
Some flowers are so bright, so vivid, so intense that it’s hard to look at them for very long. Two that fit that category are blooming in the Trial Gardens of the Kemper Center. On the left is a Coneflower named ‘Cheyenne Spirit,’ the winner of the All-American Selection Award last year. The one on the right is a Portulaca named ‘Rio Grande ORANGE.’ This one I especially like because the foliage has very tiny leaves that stay close to the ground forming a dense mat that sets off the flowers.
Just nosin' around the place
Amorphophallus paeoniifolius from an 1838 issue of Curtis's Botanical Magazine
The many pots of citrus trees that overwintered in the botanical gardens glass-covered Linnean House have been moved outside. A few of the Garden’s extensive Aroid collection have moved in for the summer. This Amorphophallus paeoniifolius called either a Peony-leaved Voodo-Lily for shape of its leaves and the look of its flower or an Elephant Foot Yam for the size of its gigantic corms is in bloom this morning. Peak bloom has passed since the maroon bulb on top has lost its sheen, its most of it signature scent of rotting flesh, and is beginning to shrivel.
Deep inside the English Woodland Garden, an unruly, tall shrub called a swamp azalea (Rhododendron viscosum) is nearly finished flowering. Still, even with just a few of the pure white blooms left, the air all around the shrub is filled with the sweet scent of the flowers. Before today, I never knew that rhodis had a scent. I think I never noticed because most of them don’t. But after checking the web, I read that a rhodi expert says that fragrance is genetically linked to pale colors: the paler and whiter the flowers, the stronger the scent. Like most visitors, I tend to pay more attention to rhodis with the deepest or more vivid colors while ignoring the paler shades. So next year, I look at the whites too, especially this Swamp Azalea when it’s at its peak.
These Sweet Williams planted in the Scented Garden make people stop and stare. They’re called Sweet William Sweet F1 Purple White Bicolor. There’s a plot of them --tightly packed fists of two-toned flowers on strong short stems planted close together. No one I saw (including me) bent to smell the flowers, but from what I’ve read they’re supposed to be extremely fragrant. The flowers are so striking that they’re often grown specifically for florists as cut flowers.
Hostas for sale. Who will buy? Several weeks ago this botanical garden had a huge sale of some very choice hosta cultivars. They were arranged on tables in the Garden’s display hall and were neatly sorted by size that ranged from extra-large varieties to ultra-miniatures. Prices ranged from about $7 to more than $40.00. Most pots were priced between $10 and $20. For the cultivars offered and the quality of the plants, the prices were fair and reasonable. Fair and reasonable for hosta aficionados that is, but apparently not so much for casual visitors who saw a few green leaves sprouting from a small pot marked to sell for $15. After the sale ended hundreds of the unsold hostas were moved to the Garden’s gift shop for sale there. The prices have yet to be reduced and the number of hostas left hasn’t been reduced by much either.
Also in the gift shop in the nick of time for summer: this battery operated misting bottle with a fan on top. Fill it with ice water. Press the trigger, and the fan catches the water droplets and turns them into a spray aimed to cool any part of your body. You say a regular spray bottle will do the same thing at a fraction of the cost. Yes, but do you want to expend all that energy squeezing the trigger every time you need a shot of cool?
“Oh - oh - what's happening? What is it? I can't run any more. I'm so sleepy . . . I have to rest for just a minute. Toto...where's Toto?”
Poppies, sky, and a bee reflected in a still pond.
The display gardens just inside the botanical garden are in full bloom. The tulips that flowered in April were replaced in early May by hundreds of small frail-looking poppy plants. Now in less than a month, the young plants have matured and are flowering. For gardeners with short attention spans, poppies are hard to beat. Easy come, easy go though. The flowers last for just a couple of weeks before they shatter and the seeds begin to ripen.
The tallest, most spectacular poppies in the garden are the Papaver somniferums. Nearby signs just call them Poppies. Translated though, the flower’s double name means “sleep-bringing poppy.” This is the Opium Poppy that Gerard wrote about 400 years ago in his Herbal: “It mitigatheth all kinds of paines; but it leaves behind it oftentimes a mischiefe worse that the disease it selfe.” That mischiefe is balanced though because the Papaver somniferums is also the source for the toppings on bagels and for the paste that fills poppy danish.
The poppies in the display gardens are all peach-colored. But there’s lots of variation in the blossoms. Some look exactly as poppies as expecteed to look: papery-looking petals that frame a ring of yellow-stamens that surround a ribbed dome. Don’t like the spare look? There are poppies that are so densely packed with stringy unruly petals that they look like a character out of Sesame Street.
When I see poppies of any kind in bloom, I think of how closely they are tied to thoughts of war and to the remembrance of all who fought and died in those wars. It seems right that the poppies are blooming today -- a few days from that bloody day 70 years ago.
Every summer this botanical garden seems to choose some flower as its signature plant of the season. One year the Garden was brimming with fan flowers (Scaevola aemula), an odd-looking flower that looks as though it's been cut in half. Another year the enormous furry bluish leaves of the Cardoon were everywhere. This year the Garden is decked out with Sunpatiens -- whites, pinks, reds, and magentas. They’re all here. Sunpatiens is a cross between New Guinea impatiens and the old standard six-pack variiety impatiens. Unlike standard impatiens though, Sunpatiens hate shade. They produce fewer flowers that impatiens do, but the flowers are twice as large with deeper richer colors than any impatiens could manage. Most importantly though, Sunpatiens are don’t get a fungus called downy mildew.
I first noticed Sunpatiens when they were being featured in two of the garden centers where I usually shop for bedding plants. Both centers had prominent shops had prominent signs saying they would no longer be selling regular impatiens this year because they are highly susceptible to downy mildew. The fungus starts with yellowing leaves or yellow-spotted leaves. Then the leaves begin to wilt and the flowers and the leaves drop off leaving bare stems with just a leaf or maybe or flower or two on top. Finally the stems collapse as though hit by a frost. All this happened to the impatiens I planted for the last two seasons. It’s happened too to the impatiens planted in at least 33 states. According to Greenhouse Grower, only the big box stores are selling impatiens now. Other sellers are steering buyers to alternatives like the Sunpatience, New Guinea impatiens, begonias, torenia, coleus and caladiums. This year I planted the wishbone flower, torenia, instead of impatiens.
Here’s the first daylily of the season. It’s an early blooming spider daylily named Free Wheelin’.
Botanically this plant surrounding the reflecting pods is named Tradescantia spathacea. But the odd-looking pods tucked into the base of a rosette of lance-shaped leaves has unleashed a string of imaginative common names for the plant. Here are some of them: boat lily, boat plant, boat-lily, cradle lily, Moses in a boat, Moses in a cradle, Moses in the basket, Moses-in-the-bullrushes, oyster plant, and three men in a boat. Signs near these plants at the botanical garden call it ‘Moses in a Basket’ (Tradescantia spathacea ‘Vittata’). I’ve never seen this plant before but from what I’ve read on the web, it’s pretty common and sometimes a nuisance in places like Florida and Australia because it’s so tough and spreads so easily. It is pollinated by insects or absent those it will pollinate itself. Its seeds are spread by the wind and they sprout easily. If the plant is damaged, the broken parts will root themselves. I read that Moses in a Boat has even been seen growing in the cracks of buildings.
The crowds gathering in and around the iris garden for the past three weeks are gone. All of the bearded irises have finished blooming. Even the flower stocks are gone – cut to their bases. Now it’s time for the second wave of irises – the ones without beards. Just across the walkway from iris garden there’s a clump of spuria irises named ‘Adriatic Blue.’ Bearded iris seem bloated and overweight compared to spurias. The bearded ones have wide, stubby, short leaves and often have blooms that are too heavy to be supported by their stocks. Spurias are irises that have slimmed down. Their leaves are tall and slender. Their flower heads are spare and light, easily held up by their stocks without toppling. An added bonus according to the American Iris Society is that they don’t need to divided for 10 to 15 years.
All of the cherry trees in the botanical garden are filled with ripe fruit this week. A flock of birds are eating the plump sweet fruits of Bird Cherry (Pyunus avium 'Lapins' STARKRIMSON SWEET) in the Ottoman Garden. There’s a Sour Cherry tree with good-sized fruit in the Kemper Gardens. In the Japanese Garden I wanted to see if the famous Yoshino Cherries (Prunus x yedonensis) had any fruit. They did. They had these pea-sized, inconsequential, hard to spot dark cherries. I tasted one. The kindest thing to say about the taste is something I read about these trees: “The Yoshino cherry tree has been bred for its ornamental quality, as opposed to its fruit.”
There was a black pepper vine (Piper nigrumon) display at the botanical garden’s holiday show last year. The theme last year was edibles so it fit right in. I had never seen a pepper vine before and didn’t even realize that black pepper grew on a vine. I never was able to get close enough to the vine to take a picture of it because it was blocked by pots of poinsettias and a toy train display. Now I can. The pepper vine was moved (along with the Citrus that spent the winter in the Linnaen glasshouse) to a spot outside the Herb Garden. Curious about how paper vines are grown commercially and how they get from plant to table? Here’s a guided tour of Starling Farm, a gourmet pepper farm in Cambodia.
Let the Dance Begin
A large-cupped daffodil named ‘Johann Strauss’
Everyone’s grumbling about a winter that’s played with us until we're exhausted. Cold days and north winds just keep coming. Here at the botanical garden though, spring won’t be denied. The early flowering spring bulbs are blooming. Beds that were bare ground a week ago are now marked with leaves that will turn into thousands of tulips by Easter. The Garden seems poised to begin the new season, ready or not.
This year the botanical garden is highlighting hyacinths. The main seasonal display gardens are stuffed with hyacinth bulbs planted just inches apart. Some of what I think must be ‘Pink Pearls’ have already begun to bloom. Imagine the beds in a couple of weeks though – a solid blanket of pink blooms filling the air with their distinctive heady floral scent.
Not to be missed – a story of resurrection. Alongside the Linnean House is a double row of heart-leaved bergenia (Bergenia cordifolia). Two weeks ago the plants were prostrate. I had called them. I thought that they would have be composed and replaced by now. Instead, they survived. The leaves inflated themselves and even more amazingly the plants threw up stocks filled with buds that soon open. If these bergenias were people, they’d be declared a miracle. The variety planted here is named 'Winterglut' WINTER GLOW.
As a prelude to the big, tightly packed flower stocks of the hyacinths in the display gardens, the smaller toothier, wild hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis) are in full bloom in the Ottoman Garden. Every year when I see these in bloom I make a mental note to order some for my spring garden. That doesn’t seem to work, so this year I’ll stick a Post-It note to my Brent & Becky’s bulb catalog.
Apart their habit of blooming in the gap between the crocuses and snowdrops and the main season bulbs, I like the way the stocks of wild hyacinths with their loosely spaced flowers catch the wind, almost like wind chimes. Their flexible stocks are a nice contrast to the ridged corncob stocks of the showier hyacinths.
Just up from the ground with dirt still clinging to their petals is this Kafmanniana tulip named ‘The First.’ And it is. The candy-cane stripped flower is so new to the above ground world that it still has a typical tapered tulip shape. As it gets acclimated, it will splay its pointed petals and begin to look more like a star fish than a tulip. I’ve read that when ‘The First’ is open, the backside of the petals is pure ivory.
Everywhere magnolias. Nowhere though is there a more spectacular tree than this one. It’s in full bloom along the walk just south of the maze. The ground hugging branches of the tree circle the tree for at least twenty feet from the trunk. I can’t even estimate how high the gum-drop shaped canopy thick with 3-inch white flowers might be. The sign near the tree says the tree is cross between a Kobushi magnolia and a Star magnolia. The cross was first made about a century ago by Max Loebner, a German horticulturist. Since then, many varieties were developed from the cross. This one is named Magnolia x loebneri ‘Merrill.’