There’s one other usual hollyhock blooming wildly in the Ottoman Garden. Spires of stocks that I have to look up to see are lined with over-sized lemonade-colored blossoms. This one is labeled Alcea rugosa and it’s a native of southern Russia. It’s called “Russian Hollyhock” in the Plant Delights Nursery catalog, the only place that sells the plants as far as I could tell. Plant Delights touts it as a “superb, but rarely encountered, hollyhock” with spikes that are “are clothed along the bottom half with typical hollyhock foliage, while the top half is adorned all summer with large 4" single buttery-yellow flowers.” Plant Delights Nursery is in North Carolina, so if it blooms all summer there, I’d expect nothing less here. This variety should be a welcome change from the usual hollyhocks that shoot up like Roman candles and then quickly fizzle out.
I saw a tiny skittery spider perched on one of the buds of a Russian Hollyhock. I doubt if it was more than a half-inch long. It had goggle-eyes and a spiky hairdo. I looked at it and it seemed to look back. Then I did a tracking test like the docs do during eye exams. I moved my finger from side to side and then up and down. That spider passed with flying colors.
Last season I planted four burgundy sweet potato vines in a container pot that I have on my deck. Four was too many. The vines were meant to be an accompaniment to the flowers. Instead, they expanded and crowded out everything else. I thought about my planter when I saw a large container pot in the entrance courtyard of the botanical garden.
The intent was to have a tiered planting of gold-colored Rudbeckia ‘Indian Summer,’ Phlox ‘Grammy Pink and White,’ Angelina ‘Angelface Blue,’ and at the center, Sunflower ‘Ballad.’ Now all is gone except for Sunflower ‘Ballad.’ It has claimed the entire pot. Pan American seeds, the developer of ‘Ballad,’ say “This petite plant is perfect in a pot.” However they do go on to warn that if you plant ‘Ballad’ in a large pot, then “expect to get larger plants with larger flowers and more prominent secondary flowers.” Judging from what I see here, they’re right. But I’d still take a pot of bright sunflowers over a lot of purple vines anytime.
Two pieces of sculpture from different times and different cultures: both deal with the important of acquiring knowledge. They differ though in how to best to attain it.
Housed in an octagonal building of limestone and glass near the daylily garden, there’s a 19th Century marble statue of a classically clothed seated figure writing on a shield. The piece is called “The Victory of Science over Ignorance.” The inscription on the pedestal reads “Ignorance is the curse of God / Knowledge is the wing wherewith / We fly to heaven."
Near the rose garden is a springstone sculpture that was made five years ago by an artist from Zimbabwe. The piece is named “Nzuzu Returning Child.” It shows two figures holding a child. The text beside the sculpture explains “The water spirit, Nzuzu, takes the child into the water, imbues it with much knowledge and then returns it to the father.”
Two different paths to knowledge: hard work and individual effort or a gift from a greater power to anyone who asks.
clear: calm: 75ºF
Once year for a week in June, the lotuses bloom.
hazy: calm: 78ºF
Summer visitors to this botanical garden probably look at the rose garden and wonder why the shrubs look spindly and have so few flowers. In many of the plots a single cane bearing one small rose pokes up from a base of dead canes. The roses here were badly damaged by freezing temperatures in early April. Until that record-breaking run of hard-freezes, the shrubs were full and beginning to set buds. After the freeze the canes withered and died.
This morning I looked for survivors. Out of more than seventy varieties of roses planted here which ones were able to endure the cold and then snap back? I found three – all of them shrub roses: ‘Knock-Out,’ the lively red-colored winner of the All American Rose Section in 2000; ‘Home-Run,’ a new offspring of ‘Knock-Out’ with deeper shades of red (pictured here); and ‘Lady Elsie May,’ another All American Rose Selection winner with fuller, coral-colored blooms. None of the nurseries that developed these three roses list “resistant to cold” as one of their virtues. Maybe they ought to.
Hollyhocks are in bloom. Tall stocks filled with buds and flowers open from the base of their stocks and then move upwards in a zig-zag. Until this year hollyhocks were hard to find in this botanical garden. Maybe they were too English cottage gardenish to find a place here in the company of exotic pentas and Persian Shields. However with the opening of the Ottoman garden, all things Turkish now are welcomed.
The Hollyhocks blooming here are a variety called Alcea pallida. I had to check the web on this one because the variety wasn’t listed in Flora, a comprehensive encyclopedia of garden plants. Turns out that the flowers I was admiring were a rare species of wild Turkish hollyhock. Unlike most hollyhocks that have unlobed flowers and lobed leaves, these plants have deeply scalloped petals and round, unbroken leaves. The blooms are soft, washed orchid etched with white lines that radiate from a star-shaped center.
The peak of the daylily season is here. Hundreds of varieties are blooming this morning. The peak season will last another week, maybe two. I’m taking pictures of my favorites to make a top ten list that I’ll put together when the season ends or after I’m fed up looking at daylilies.
I found it: a grass that doesn’t look like a weed and that will grow in a shady place. The grass is called ‘Bottlebrush Grass’ (Elymus hystrix). I happened on to a patch of it in an almost shady spot in the English Woodland Garden. They were hard to miss because a slat of early morning sun caught their spiky tops. Turns out that Bottlebrush Grass is a native rye grass that recently has come out of the woods and into the nursery trade as an ornamental.
George Washington Carver used to talk about the “humble peanut.” Not so humble at this botanical garden. The sign that identifies ‘Virginia Jumbos’ gives them a more upscale name: ‘Earth Nut.’
Last stop on our garden walk today was the Chinese Scholar’s Garden. Apart from trying to spot bull frogs in the central pond, I always look at the Tai Hu boulders placed throughout the garden. The rocks come from Taihu, a fresh water lake in Southeastern China. They are natural limestone rock riddled with holes and wrinkles made by years of water wearing them down. They look like whatever I want them to look like on any given day.
Today when I saw the rocks I remembered an article I read about Taihu headlined “Pollution puts Chinese lake off limits.” The piece reported that “a bloom of algae has covered 70 percent of the lake's surface” cutting off the source of fresh water for four million people who depend on the lake for their drinking water. The carpet of algae comes from a decade of using the lake as a dumping ground for industrial waste.
fast moving clouds: breezy: 70ºF
This botanical garden’s display gardens change with the seasons. The spring bulbs moved out a couple of weeks ago to make room for the summer residents. The plots now have been filled with closely spaced young plants that by August will expand, hiding the bare ground.
I always look forward to seeing the new summer plantings. September invariably means mums. Like clockwork, spring brings tulips, and pansies use the plots to winter-over. But summer plantings are often surprising and unpredictable.
This year though, most of the selections are familiar. So is the layout – tall plants at the back, ground huggers in front and a buffer of knee-high plants between them.
Taro ‘Black Magic’ is the single tall center plant at the back. It’s short and spindly now, but I know from the container plantings I’ve done at home using this dark tropical, that it will tower over everything by summer’s end. Next, planted in a crescent on either side of ‘Black Magic' is a line of Russian Sage (Perovskia ‘Filigran’) and Fountain Grass (Pennisetum messiacum ‘Red Bunny Tails’). For the shorter plants near the front, the keepers choose ‘Red Frame Ivy’ (Hemigraphis alternata), a creeper with purple-bronze leaves, and an ornamental pepper named ‘Chilly Chilli.’ When I saw an ornamental pepper that would produce lots of small brightly colored fruit planted within a toddler’s picking distance, I saw a lawsuit looming. Turns out that according to a bulletin from The Ohio State Extension, “the fruit is non-pungent, so it is CHILD-SAFE.” Now I get it: CHILLY chili.
The plants in the middle of all this are the Pentas ‘New Look Red’ (Penta lanceolata). Not only are pentas plentiful in this display garden, they also are being used extensively this year in most of the other plots that casual visitors are likely to see. I’ve been planting Pentas in my home container gardens for years. They flower non-stop (as long as I dead-head them), and they seem to enjoy days on end of sun, heat, and humidity. They attract hummingbirds too. The only time I’ve even seen them droop is when I watered them too often. Truly, this is just the plant for a warming planet.
When I first started planting pentas, they weren’t easy to find. When I did find some in one of the specialty nurseries, they were always red. Now there’s no need to call ahead. Even the chain stores have pentas in lavender, cherry, pink, rose, and deep red. For about two bucks, I can get a 4” pot.
Here and there the cannas have begun to bloom. I think they are at their best right now. A single canna bloom is magnificent. A cluster of them is better seen from the window of a fast car. Here is first bloom of a canna whose name I forgot to get.
The gilded stone pedestal fountain at the entry to the Ottoman Garden has been moved to an inconspicuous spot at the corner of the garden. Water flows in the fountain when a visitor opens a faucet just above cupped basin near the ground. This botanical garden’s website says that the “fountain invites visitors to rinse their hands in the cooling water as they begin their tour.” Nothing more. More likely, because the faucet is placed not at hand height, but is instead near the base of the fountain, the intent is encourage ablution – the ritual washing of one's face, hands, arms, head and feet with water – before entering this garden of paradise.
If it’s no longer at the entrance though, what purpose does the fountain serve? And why was it moved? Before we happened to meet the keeper of the Ottoman Garden further along on our walk, we tried to think of possible reasons for the move – perhaps vandalism or maybe the water had been turned on full force and then left on. Wrong on both counts. The keeper said the fountain was moved because anyone who washed in the waters would have been facing north. After it was moved, visitors to the garden who wash will be facing east. The keeper told us that another type of fountain was being made in Turkey to replace one that was moved. Even so, does this move mean the whole Ottoman Garden should really have been oriented a quarter turn to the left?
Once a year for just a week or so, the Japanese Iris bloom in raised beds along the sides of the zig-zag walk over the lake in the Japanese Garden.
There’s one other usual hollyhock blooming wildly in the Ottoman Garden. Spires of stocks that I have to look up to see are lined with over-sized lemonade-colored blossoms. This one is labeled Alcea rugosa and it’s a native of southern Russia. It’s called “Russian Hollyhock” in the 
I saw a tiny skittery spider perched on one of the buds of a Russian Hollyhock. I doubt if it was more than a half-inch long. It had goggle-eyes and a spiky hairdo. I looked at it and it seemed to look back. Then I did a tracking test like the docs do during eye exams. I moved my finger from side to side and then up and down. That spider passed with flying colors.
The intent was to have a tiered planting of gold-colored Rudbeckia ‘Indian Summer,’ Phlox ‘Grammy Pink and White,’ Angelina ‘Angelface Blue,’ and at the center, Sunflower ‘Ballad.’ Now all is gone except for Sunflower ‘Ballad.’ It has claimed the entire pot. 
Near the rose garden is a springstone sculpture that was made five years ago by an artist from Zimbabwe. The piece is named “Nzuzu Returning Child.” It shows two figures holding a child. The text beside the sculpture explains “The water spirit, Nzuzu, takes the child into the water, imbues it with much knowledge and then returns it to the father.”
This morning I looked for survivors. Out of more than seventy varieties of roses planted here which ones were able to endure the cold and then snap back? I found three – all of them shrub roses: 
The Hollyhocks blooming here are a variety called Alcea pallida. I had to check the web on this one because the variety wasn’t listed in Flora, a comprehensive encyclopedia of garden plants. Turns out that the flowers I was admiring were a rare species of wild Turkish hollyhock. Unlike most hollyhocks that have unlobed flowers and lobed leaves, these plants have deeply scalloped petals and round, unbroken leaves. The blooms are soft, washed orchid etched with white lines that radiate from a star-shaped center.
I found it: a grass that doesn’t look like a weed and that will grow in a shady place. The grass is called ‘Bottlebrush Grass’ (Elymus hystrix). I happened on to a patch of it in an almost shady spot in the English Woodland Garden. They were hard to miss because a slat of early morning sun caught their spiky tops. Turns out that 
Today when I saw the rocks I remembered an article I read about Taihu headlined 
Here and there the cannas have begun to bloom. I think they are at their best right now. A single canna bloom is magnificent. A cluster of them is better seen from the window of a fast car. Here is first bloom of a canna whose name I forgot to get.
The gilded stone pedestal fountain at the entry to the Ottoman Garden has been moved to an inconspicuous spot at the corner of the garden. Water flows in the fountain when a visitor opens a faucet just above cupped basin near the ground. This 
Once a year for just a week or so, the Japanese Iris bloom in raised beds along the sides of the zig-zag walk over the lake in the Japanese Garden.