My rose seedling Enjouée that I bred is blooming. It’s two years old this spring. Sun’s a bit bright here, but you get the idea. It’s a very vigorous, leafy shrub with a nice vase form so far, pretty impressed. 

That green blob is the rose Enjouée I grew from seed. It’s growing really really well, put on maybe 1/3 of new growth. Head to toe foliage everywhere. I’m not sure if it is wanting to be a climber or stay shrub-like yet but it is extremely vigorous either way. It already has flowerbuds and it’s in contention with a few other roses to be the first rose to bloom. Either way I’m excited about it.

The fall of the American Elm and American Chestnut and Butternuts. I feel most people in America have forgotten them in only a generation. It’s really sad. I really think it might be good for people to learn about the history and what happened to them in America due to introduced fungal blights from Europe. Genuinely heartbreaking, and we are, of course to blame. Luckily the Elm has new hope in the ‘Princeton’ and ‘Jefferson’ varieties that are resistant to blight and are only NOW becoming widely available for planting outside of the Washington DC region so we may again have mature elm promenades in our lifetimes. I know I’ll be planting some elms at future clients houses for sure. But Chestnuts still have a long way to go. It is really disheartening.

Persimmon tree laden with fruit in Nakagawa, Nanyo City, Japan

Hey tumblr followers, I made a tumblr page for my fledgling perennial garden design business as a portfolio for pictures of most of the various landscaping projects and designs I’ve done from the past three years. I favor impressionistic looks that fuses North American native plants and xeriscaping principles alongside traditional antique and heirloom bedding plants and flowers from storybook-cottage and English country garden design. It is essentially trying to acheive a balance between the ornamental and the sustainable functional without having to skimp on either too much.

My tastes however are not limited to the antique and overstuffed and am quite proficient in creating pseudo-tropical and super modern xeriscopic alpine, succulent and cactai type looks as well. 

Whimsy and effective use of color is always a point of my work, I have a few design palettes based on actual fairy-tales like Cinderella and Red Riding Hood, and can recall one design based on magma and lava, one on ocean waves,  and have made at least two designs that have been based around chartreuse plants of strange shapes and textures that to me evoked ideas of alien flora, Planet X and Mars Attacks! Afraid to play I am not.

I do need to decide on an official name soon and while I’d prefer something more ornamental and in line with my aesthetic tastes, I’m currently considering for the sake of being specific; M.J.E (my initials) Perennial Garden Design as the name for my business as I specialize in small to medium perennial and mixed-shrub border gardens. If anyone has suggestions to an alternative please message me, I’m welcome to ideas.

I’ll be helping renovate the Goucher College Co-Op garden this spring with my friend Peter Wells to encourage beneficial insects and local biodiversity as well as help increase productivity of the space  and the variety of usable things produced by the school for students to enjoy during times they are actually there (hint: tea camellia bushes!).

I really hope you take a look and browse my work and if you live in Baltimore and Baltimore County, perhaps consider a consultation in the near future hopefully sometime soon after March when everything should be submitted, official and set.

I have a flat with maybe about six to twelve small rose seedlings right now next to the washer. I think half are  ‘Roseraie de l’Haÿ’  open pollinated seedlings, so said seedlings can be a cross with anything else in the garden through bees that visited both flowers. The baby leaves show distinct rugosa rose “rugose”  or crinkled traits even on their first tiny set of leaves. It’s variable though so it’s clear they are hybrids.

The second half of seedlings are ‘Arethusa’ x ‘Lynnie’ which is my first carefully recorded and documented from flower to seed direct cross.  The results I assume will be pink, pink, and more obnoxious girl’s school supply pink which is not ideal but it was a “what the hell cross” as they were blooming at the same time.

I want to cross this rose ‘Crépuscule’ with this rose, ‘Arethusa’ and plan to this summer, after checking on my rose seeds in the fridge today I know it’s gotta be done.

They are tea-noisette and china hybrids from the early 20th century, both introduced in a two year span between 1903 and 1904 and both are certainly representative of what was in fashion at the time. A lot of the roses from that era are really my style. Lots of yolky buffs, apricot, yellow and pink.

‘Crépuscule’ is the tea-noisette, something of a climber with apricot-buff colored flowers, while ‘Arethusa’ (named after the fountain and its namesake nymph) is a short, bushy buff-pink hybrid-china, starting off apricot and going through a color shift to more of a pastel pink as it ages. Most china roses come in shades of deep scarlet, medium reds and deep rose-pinks so ‘Arethusa’ is a bit atypical of its class due to it’s coloring, which no doubt was and still is its novelty.

Both plants due to their china and tea blood are not terribly cold hardy, but ‘Crépuscule’ is a very healthy plant with shiny peach-leaf like leaves that have a distinct droop, while ‘Arethusa’ while not as healthy foliar wise has compact size on its side and a bit more hardiness. Both are known to be very fertile,  ‘Crépuscule’ while it forms hips is said to be more useful as a pollen parent and I’ve been told by a professional rose-breeder to put its pollen on everything, as it often breeds good yellows and other apricot buffs like itself. ‘Arethusa’ is a good seed parent with good germination rates. I applied pollen from an electric (and I mean electric )  hot pink shrub rose ‘Lynnie’ onto ‘Arethusa’ which took and formed a hip in late summer, which I harvested. Checking on the seeds from that hip in the fridge today I saw I had good germination and just planted them up in a tray to sprout. That for me attested that ‘Arethusa’ is easy to work with.

The goal of the cross would be something of an in-between both plants; to tame ‘Crépuscule’s sprawling and rambling ways and have a more mounding smaller shrub as opposed to the porch swallowing mass it can become. Essentially put it’s coloring and foliage onto ‘Arethusa’ shrub size and habit and I’m good to go.

mothernaturenetwork:

Todmorden: A town where greenthumbs, not sticky fingers, prevail
The Daily Mail pays a visit to Todmorden, a quaint British town that’s littered with raised vegetable and herb gardens where residents can grow — and take — whatever they fancy.

The ethnically and economically diverse mill town of about 15,000 residents is home to Incredible Edible, an ambitious, agrarian-minded scheme that’s brought together an entire community under one common goal: to become completely self-sufficient in food by the year 2018.

I just had an idea to help solve both ecological and socioeconomic problems in America. I’m sure people have thought about this, but I’d like to share. People are starving in America, living on food stamps and our economy and export percentages are shot, we’re importing our foods….all while we’re  sitting on a goldmine that is the South…er, covering the south……fucking KUDZU.

Kudzu is an invasive, tenacious vine from Asia that has a wicked growth rate, at times a foot in a few days. It was introduced to the US around the turn of the century as an ornamental and of course, like oriental bittersweet and wisteria, it escaped cultivation, and now has literally since then eaten the south of the US and is now creeping its way across the East Coast as the climate gets milder. It outgrows mowing attempts and climbs over trees and shrubs and grows so rapidly that it kills them by the shade they create. Old homesteads are englufed in the stuff. From wikipedia:

It has been spreading in the southern U.S. at the rate of 150,000 acres (61,000 ha) annually, “easily outpacing the use of herbicide spraying and mowing, as well increasing the costs of these controls by $6 million annually.”^[1] Its introduction has produced devastating environmental consequences

  We should be taking advantage of this evil vine! It’s entirely edible, the vines can be used for weaving and wicker among other things, I’m sure home building can find a use for them? Floring? 

The roots can be used as a starch and thickening agent for food and drink (said to be one of the best in the world and is lauded by the Japanese for its properties) and the plant itself shows great promise in helping aid hangovers and other   alcohol related problems when used as a medicine, tincture or tea.

Everyone should just eat Kudzu. Make it from weed into food source.Harvest it. Send the cattle and goats to go at it. Hey, the harvesting of so much kudzu, God knows there’s a lot of it, would mean a lot of jobs. Look at what the U.S. could do with this, we have a surplus of this plant that has multiple uses and yet we just spray it with chemicals. Why not take advantage of it not going anywhere and just harvest it- put it to use and send the products nation-wide. The leaves can be cooked like spinach (I think) and young shoots can also be cooked. I’m astounded there isn’t a national push by the government; we’re destroying forests and parks by letting it be. We should just eat it. How can we be so stupid not to?

Leucothoe fontabesiana ‘Girard’s Rainbow’

Leucothoe, doghobble or fetterbush, is a relatively rare shrub in the Ericaceae, or heath family (one that also includes Pieris, the blueberry family Vaccinium, as well as Kalmia and the showy Rhododendron family of shrubs) that is native to the mountains and forests of the southeast United States and the Mid-Atlantic region. The slow growing evergreen shrub’s new growth and leaves often blush red in cooler weather and blooms in spring clusters of drooping white flowers that very much resemble those of Pieris and Vaccinium; small bells that remind me of small individual legs of old fashioned bloomers clustered together in a lily-of-the-valley like manner.

‘Girard’s Rainbow’ is a very interesting variegated sport from 1949 whose foliage is splattered, mottled and striped with all shades of green, cream, maroon, and pink. Extremely colorful with multi-seasonal interest, and generally though not 100% deer resistant, this small shade and moisture loving shrub fills a niche that not many native shrubs tend to fill, which is the ability to go toe to toe with the showier and more common evergreen landscaping shrubs in our area in terms of that cultivated “look”; mainly pieris and rhododendron derived from Asian species. I have planted a plant of this at my cousin’s house and here in zone 7a Maryland, the plant does not like being in full sun or out in the open and instead flourishes in a sheltered, shady location. So plant near your home, under some trees and near a wall. A good compliment to dark evergreens as its colors stand out better against a dark backdrop. It’s more of a dwarf than the species, being slightly less robust, which means it can make excellent company to larger shrubs to hide their “ankles” or lower halves, if taller and leggy, as well as blend rather easily with perennials that enjoy the same conditions.

Being said , it’s a wonder to behold. I have a young plant whose current overall variegation is  mostly pink at the moment so it’s very funny to walk past a “pink” shrub every day. They are appearing more and more at nurseries as people discover this native plant’s merits, at least last year and this year where the first time I saw it at the nurseries around here so I’d like to think its popularity and use is increasing. So while it is a bit fussy and calls for the same conditions as many exotics do for the shade garden (moist), I’d say the look is unusual enough that it is worth it, as it is also hardier than its appearance looks (some say hardy down to zone 5, -15-20 degrees Fahrenheit) and is native to a good portion of the country. Very novel and worth the attention.

(Source: fantasticplants.com)

My own rose seedling, now given the moniker of ‘Enjouée’ which means playful, cheerful, kittenish or gamesome as a pun on one of its presumed parents ‘Plaisanterie’ which means ‘joke’, ‘prank’ or ‘trick’. What does a child do when they’re acting kittenish? They pull pranks. (Hur hur hur)

This rose has somewhat of a bi-color staining and color shift on the outer parts of the petals, which are about an inch in diameter. I attribute this to ‘Plaisanterie’, which starts out with cherry-orange buds, open buff colored and then age to pink with some darker ‘staining’. The color shift in ‘Plaisanterie’ is a trait inherited from and is the hallmark of its own pollen parent, ‘Mutabilis’, a china rose. The other presumed parent to this particular seedling, ‘Sven’ doesn’t have as visible mottling, but will compare flowers next time both are in bloom.

Each flush the flowers are becoming a bit prettier and cooler weather has brought out that raspberry-pink stain even more. I’m thinking this rose hasn’t settled into it’s proper bloom form yet, so I may get an increased petal count next year. Overall, it’s a cute rose, can’t wait to see what it does.

I’m so proud of this.  I designed and planted (most) of the plants here for my cousin’s front yard. She let me design it with some input of what she liked and didn’t like, but has pretty much given me free range and trusts my taste. It has a long season of interest and looks quite different during different months of the year.

Their house’s siding is mostly a creamy pale-yellow siding, sort of like unsalted butter, very light with black shutters. They also have stone siding too, which has shades of orange, ruddy-maroon, slate-blue and other rusty tones all sort of marbled together.  To compliment I chose a palette of dark greens, true dark purple-red maroon, silver, a lot of light periwinkle purple-blues to provide a hazy, dreamy look at sundown, generous doses of scarlet in the spring from quite a few azaleas and then peonies, and then in mid/late summer as seen here through crape myrtles and red annual vinca and verbena. I also included some white and pale yellow was also added via some shrub roses thrown in to echo the siding. There’s also some pink, but that appears and disappears depending on the season, it’s not a constant. Personally I would have had the walkway, if it was my money and house with their siding and colors, have done in either a blue-slate colored stone or a darker more rustic cobblestone in a slight winding ‘S’ shape manner instead of a straight promenade, but that’s just me…I didn’t have a say in their hardscape choices when I began work on their yard, they had already chosen it out and had it set.

All of this was started being planted last June or so and we’ve been adding more and more as we tweak and edit. My cousin is a saint at watering, so the plants generally are thriving if not almost two times bigger than they should be and it is such a thrill to see everything come together as I sort of imagined it in my head. I’m not a very technical designer, I’d like to think I more “paint” with the plants, as obnoxious as that sounds, but it’s more how my thinking process goes when it comes to color and texture of the plants and maintaining an aesthetic balance. 

A lot of my ideas when it comes to landscape design are much out of my reach monetary wise, for both my family and myself as a working individual. That fact hinders a lot of my horticultural projects for myself at home, and for some of my clients as well. I can’t go buy all that I want to buy and often have to compromise, so to be able to work somewhat in a sandbox environment for my cousin, who is quite financially secure and has been a glowing patron, is fantastic.