Random plant events: Leuchtenbergia principis, Zamia furfuracea

Everything was going fine, and then it was time to dig up the Cannas and bring them in for the winter. And you've seen the Cannas.¹

As of 18 October, direct-weighing on a bathroom scale has given us the approximate figure of 787 lb. (357 kg) of Canna rhizomes brought inside for the winter, and we haven't even dug them all up yet.² My best guess is that another 200-300 lb. (91-136 kg) remain to be dug up.

Meanwhile, one of the Leuchtenbergia seedlings has decided to bloom, in the basement, under artificial lights. I'm surprised that this is even possible.

The seedling in question was sown on 8 May 2013, so it's about five and a half years old. In some ways that feels like a really long time to wait for a bloom, and in other ways it feels incredibly fast. (It's not as if Leuchtenbergia is known for its speed.)

Also, I purchased four kinds of seeds from seedman.com at the beginning of September. Three of them are sort of disappointing. There's nothing at all going on with Chamaedorea cataractum, and one of the six seeds in that package was rotten when it arrived, so I kind of suspect that was wasted money. A few seeds of Ficus religiosa and Ficus benghalensis have germinated, but they're developing slowly and I'm not optimistic about getting actual plants of either one.³

But the fourth one, Zamia furfuracea, is doing more or less what it's supposed to.

I have germination on eight of the ten seeds so far, and it's only been four or five weeks (the first seed to germinate, photographed below, took 26 days; the package instructions said to allow "several weeks to a few months"), so I'm hopeful about the other two.

Not that the Zamias are much to look at so far. But still. It's something.

I have no idea when I might get back to regular posting again.

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¹ (Well, some of the Cannas. There were a lot of Cannas.)
² Also, this omits a box with about 35-40 lb. of Cannas that we just gave to a total stranger because he stopped at the house and asked. (He knew we had them because we piled all the cut stalks on the curb, in hopes that the city will eventually take them away for us, and the pile was kind of . . . unmissable, I guess is the word.)
³ Though you never know. I tried F. religiosa once many years ago, and got at least one plant that survived long enough to develop some leaves. It didn't transition to a pot well, probably because I was asking it to go too long between waterings. There's probably a reason people don't normally grow these species indoors anyway; I just thought it might be fun to try. (It hasn't been.)

Anthurium no. 0728 "Sister Dimension"

It's not particularly on-topic, but I'd like to say that I hate Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica). So much. Two days in a row now, I've been out picking them off the Cannas¹ and gotten about 200-250 individual beetles both days. I'm pretty sure that's the worst it's ever been, and I don't know if the reason is because it's an especially bad Japanese beetle year or if we're just growing that many more plants, but surely it's one or both of those.²

Does milky spore live up to the hype? 'Cause I'm interested.

As for our actual subject today, I'm pretty happy with seedling 0728.

There have been other seedlings with similar coloration, most notably 0097 Colin Ambulance, 0694 Brad Romance, 0791 Joslyn Fox, 0805 Triana Hill, and 1181 Tajma Stetson. Sister Dimension doesn't do everything better than all of them, but she blooms more frequently than Triana, has bigger spathes than Tajma, seems less prone to thrips damage than Colin, holds her color better than Brad, and doesn't flip her spathe back like Joslyn, so she's at least playing in the same league as the others, if not decisively superior to them all.

Left column, top to bottom: 0097 Colin Ambulance, 0728 Sister Dimension, 0805 Triana Hill.
Right: 0694 Brad Romance, 0791 Joslyn Fox, 1181 Tajma Stetson.
The plant as a whole could be better:

the leaves are nicely-shaped and glossy, but there's more thrips damage than I would like.

Nevertheless, Sister Dimension is a keeper.

It's easy to find websites that mention the drag queen Sister Dimension, but very difficult to find anything that explains who she is, what sort of thing she did, or whether she's still performing. Which is irritating. Best I could come up with on short notice is that she was a queen in the East Village drag scene in the 1990s, in the same circles as RuPaul and Lady Bunny. Not sure which one she is, but she's apparently in the (in-?)famous "Pickle Surprise" video (as are Ru and Lady Bunny):


Which is itself probably sufficient to give an idea of the sorts of things going on in the East Village in the 1990s.

You're welcome.

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¹ They don't, so far, seem interested in the houseplants I've got outside for the summer (mostly Euphorbia tirucalli, Ficus benjamina, and Coffea arabica. I pretty much never have to worry about the Euphorbias, which is why I love E. tirucalli so much even though it occasionally tries to blind me.).
² We also got the plants out later than usual this year, and the squirrels have gone after them worse than usual too. Dunno if either of those makes a difference?

Question for the Hive Mind: Unknown Weed

This plant had leaves similar to those of the strawberries it was growing among; I didn't realize it was something else until it had gotten noticeably taller than the strawberries, and started blooming. I suppose I don't actually have to know what it is, but I'm curious, and a bit of poking around online didn't help. Anyone know?

The garden: Cannas

I have apparently managed to grow large numbers of Cannas outside, for a few years, and managed to take large numbers of photos of them, without ever showing you those pictures in a post here at PATSP. How did this happen? It is a mystery. (Weirder still: I appear to have deleted most of the photos I've taken, so I don't have that much to show you even now.) But since the subject's come up:

The fence bed, 2014.
As best as I can remember, I got the first Canna rhizomes in 2010, from a friend in town, and we planted them in the spring of 2011. Since then, every year we dig them all up in October, store them in the basement for the winter (probably too warm, but the best we have, and they don't seem to mind too much), and then plant them outside again in May. I then spend a couple months trying and failing to keep them weeded, until they get big enough to block light from competing plants and become essentially self-weeding. In July, they start to bloom. In August, I see a hummingbird. Also in August, I start collecting seeds from them. And then it's October, and the Circle of Cannas begins all over again.

The fence bed, 2014.
Before 2015, we've always planted all the Cannas we had in a bed along the north edge of our property (the "fence bed"), as in the first photo, above; in 2015, we found we had so many of them that they wouldn't all fit there, so two new beds were created. We put one of the new beds along the far west edge of the property (the "west bed"), where they sort of blocked the view of the cornfield. (Ordinarily, this would have made me mildly unhappy, because I like the cornfield, but 2015 was a soybean year, and soybeans can blow me.) The other new bed was a square maybe 10-15 feet on a side a nearly square rectangle, 93 inches by 113 inches (2.4 x 2.9 m), the "square bed," located along the south side of the property, where the previous owners had a garden, and where we have experimented with outdoor gardening in the past, with mostly-dismal results. (Cannas work just fine there, though.)

The square bed, 2015. The cinder blocks did go all the way around it, before the husband took them away for some project or another.
The west bed has never really seemed to reach its full potential in terms of growing the biggest, baddest Cannas possible, but it was interesting anyway, in that it more or less turned into a living graph:

The west bed, 2015.

The left side of that row is right under the neighbors' maple tree, so the plants there get more shade than the ones on the right end. There's also probably something of a rain-shadow effect going, since the maple hangs way over the fence. I suspect that the rain is the more relevant problem, since the square bed is also in shade for most of the day and got a lot taller: it was close enough to the house that we occasionally watered it ourselves, and it didn't have a tree overhanging it and stealing its water.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for Cannas in Iowa, from what I can tell. Nobody seems to have very many, and there are two main ways I see them used around here: 1) in a row, to hide a fence or cover the side of a building, and 2) as The Tall Thing in a group container. Maybe if they were winter-hardy here and one didn't have to dig them up every fall and re-plant them every spring, people would use them in regular gardens more often. Or maybe it's that (digging/replanting aside) they're too easy to grow, so Iowa gardeners just don't respect them. (Maybe just gardeners in general: DCTropics recently wrote a Canna-celebratory post that nevertheless characterized them as being for lazy gardeners.¹)

We have sometimes had bug problems: 2015 was terrible for Japanese beetles. I dumped hundreds of them into jars of soapy water, for weeks, and never felt like I was even making a dent in the overall population.

And there was one year (I think 2010) with incredible whitefly swarms: some years I don't see any, most years I see a few, but that one year was like a never-ending snowstorm.

Candy-striped leafhoppers (Graphocephala coccinea) hang out on them from time to time, but don't seem to be causing the plants any serious problems, and they're never in huge swarms. We've had quite a few grasshoppers in 2015 after the Japanese beetles left, but they didn't seem interested in eating the Cannas; they just liked to hang out on them after they finished eating other plants (mostly Iris).

ARACHNOPHOBE WARNING: BEGIN SCROLLING DOWN REALLY QUICKLY

In 2015, for the first time, the Cannas also attracted remarkable numbers of spiders, of a species I wasn't previously familiar with and couldn't identify even after a good hour of online searches.

My best guess is Neoscona crucifera, which is at least hairy, known to live in Iowa, and a builder of vertical, orb-shaped webs. Still uncertain because N. crucifera is supposed to be nocturnal, and these didn't appear to be (I saw them both hiding and out in the middle of their webs during the day; they didn't seem to have a strong time-of-day preference), and because the ones on my Cannas had a consistent, distinctive, and vaguely octopus-/Cthulhu-looking way of folding their legs up over their heads, whereas the photos of N. crucifera on-line frequently show them with all legs stretched out wide.

Whatever they were, there were a lot of them.

--ARACHNOPHOBES MAY STOP SCROLLING--

My personal dream for the back yard, which the husband is aware of but not particularly enthusiastic about,² is that we replace the lawn in much of the back of the yard with a meandering path, with Cannas on either side. (If we had more yard, I'd want a Canna maze, but the property is too long and narrow for that. Also this year's experience with the west bed suggests that we couldn't count on the Cannas reaching a uniform height, which would ruin the maze effect.) I intend to try to sell the meandering-path idea hard this winter as a "but think how much less lawn-mowing you'd have to do,"³ and we'll see if that works. If not, I suppose I can encourage the incremental expansion of the existing beds until we reach full lawn-replacement.⁴

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¹ When it comes to outdoor gardening: guilty as charged.
² (because he's the one who would actually have to plant it and dig it up)
³ (The husband does the lawn-mowing too. I'm not actually opposed to lawn-mowing or Canna-digging, but I overheat too quickly to be much good at either. I mostly handle the weeding and the strawberry-picking, though, so it sort of balances out.)
⁴

Pretty picture: Canna NOID

It doesn't feel like it could possibly be Canna-blooming season again, and yet here we are.

Which means we must also be getting close to the Annual Sighting Of The Hummingbird as well. We planted Salvia elegans at the far edge of the property this year for the hummingbirds too, but we were expecting the field behind the house to be planted in soybeans this year (last year was corn; they've alternated in the past) and instead got corn again, which means that the pineapple sage is getting shaded out. Or at least I assume that's the reason why it's been staying so short. Goodness knows we've gotten enough rain. (Officially no longer in a drought as of a few weeks ago!)

This picture's from July 9, but they look about the same now, except that one of them has shattered and died. (It looked like something heavy fell squarely on the center of the plant.) I am choosing to believe that this was a case of Sheba running over it while chasing a tennis ball, instead of a mowing accident, which I can do because I didn't see it happen and can consequently explain it to myself in whatever way causes me the least upset. Though the mowing thing is more likely.

I have decided as of this year that it doesn't really make sense for me to try to overwinter the Salvia elegans indoors anymore, and I'm going to stop trying. It's not that it's hard exactly; the problem is more that the cuttings outgrow their containers so quickly that I wind up having to take three or four rounds of cuttings in the course of a winter. Which is nice, in that I start with one plant and wind up with twenty-five, but they also always get spider mites in early/mid spring, regardless of where I have them in the house, which means a few weeks of worry about that, plus all the time it takes to keep them watered, pruned, and propagating. I could just spend $4 at the garden center in February, propagate off that for a few weeks, and wind up in more or less the same situation by May, just without all the work. So that's what I'm going to try next year.

Oh. Reading back over this, I realize I just kind of jumped topics without explanation. I went from hummingbirds to pineapple sage because the hummingbirds also like pineapple sage. Though my pineapple sage plants are going to have to grow quite a lot before September if they expect to be hummingbird-worthy. The hummingbirds have standards.

Pretty pictures: Portulaca grandiflora

I am firmly convinced that Portulaca grandiflora is the best blooming annual of all time, period, full stop, and nothing you could do or say could ever convince me otherwise. So don't even try. And yes, I'm including Gazanias in that assessment. Gazanias wish they could be as cool as Portulaca.

I neglected to start them indoors, so the first blooms didn't appear until late June; this was the very first, on June 24, and includes a bonus fly of some kind:

There has been a satisfyingly large number of orange blooms:

I've caught a glimpse of a single (so far) green metallic bee again this year, unlike last year:

as well as a handful of other pollinators, mostly the tiny black bees from this post, though I didn't get any pictures of those.

We also have, for the first time, some Portulaca growing around the oak trees in the front yard (on purpose), which include this pink-on-pink speckled bloom:

I'm skipping the marigolds (Tagetes) this year, for a number of reasons.

The Tagetes crowded out the Portulaca by the end of the year, attracted lots of whiteflies, and although they bloomed constantly, I don't like the blooms as well. Granted, I've seen lots of tiny grasshoppers in the bed, which I don't know for sure that that's not related to the Portulacas.

Grasshoppers is the best explanation I have for what happened to this one, though I admit that I don't know for sure. . . .

The bloom colors are a lot more varied than Tagetes, if nothing else.

Oh, and yeah -- a few pictures up, that's a red clover (Trifolium pratense) in the bed with them. (One at the front on the right, and another in the back left corner.) It also gets big and sort of crowds out the Portulacas, and attracts pests (rabbits?), and the color doesn't really go with the Portulacas, but I've always kind of admired T. pratense, so when I saw a couple coming up at the beginning of the spring, I thought why not, what could it hurt, and let them grow. It's possible that I'll come to regret this, as I eventually regretted letting the Oenothera biennis stay, three years ago. But it's okay for now. The clover even turns out to be mildly fragrant, which I didn't realize. (One possible shortcoming of Portulaca is their lack of fragrance.)

In any case, I feel like I only have just so much energy to devote to outdoor plants, and this bed is a good size for me to keep weeded and stuff. Also Portulaca won't all collapse the first time it gets dry, it's happy to bloom continuously for about four or five months, and it self-sows even when I don't go to the trouble of gathering the seeds.

Though obviously I'm gonna gather the seeds.

In conclusion, Portulaca is a land of contrasts the best.

Pretty pictures: Iris cvv.

So last year, as you'll remember, I got two stalks of Iris flowers, on the NOID blue-purple plants, and that was it. No other blooms, no other colors.

It's looking like that was mostly due to 2011's drought, because this year I got blooms on all the Irises except for the NOID blue-purple one.

(N.b. before we launch into the pictures: I request that the reader pay no attention to the dandelions and other weeds in the background. Or if you must notice them, at least don't judge us for them. Not that we don't deserve the judgment. I'd just rather you didn't, is all.)


'Reincarnation:'

'Reincarnation' bloomed last fall as well (it's a rebloomer), but I apparently didn't blog about that even though I took the pictures. Go figure.


'Shelley Elizabeth:'

'Shelley Elizabeth' previously: 2012


'Frivolous:'

I'm not sure I was aware, prior to hearing about 'Frivolous,' that yellow irises could be bright dandelion yellow, as opposed to pastel gender-neutral-nursery yellow. But they can. Oh, how they can.


All three varieties were gifts from Ginny Burton. (So was the NOID blue-purple that didn't bloom, as far as that goes.)


Bonus unidentified irises that aren't mine:

Spotted here in town. There was also a completely unreal number of orange poppies¹ in this yard, which may or may not get a separate blog post later.

This purple and white combo from the University of Iowa Hospital would have been much more impressive if I had been able to capture the whole planting at once. There were other priorities that day, though,² so the above are the only two shots I attempted.

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¹ Having trouble with subject-verb agreement here. Is it "was . . . a number" or "were . . . orange poppies?" I'm about 75% sure it's the former, but somehow both sound wrong. Maybe I still have enough of a cold that it's impairing my grammar. (Evidence in favor of this theory: in the previous sentence, I wasn't sure whether it should read "enough of a cold to affect my grammar" or "enough of a cold to effect my grammar," so I reworded it to get around the question. Though affect is right, isn't it?)
² Neither I nor my husband were the patient, and we're both fine as far as we know. The explanation for what we were doing there is long and complicated, has an unclear diagnosis and an ambiguous prognosis, and isn't something I feel like sharing with the whole internet, so that's all the explanation you get.

Random plant event: Huernia oculata, Plus an Outdoor Question

I realize that I just posted about Huernia oculata a month ago, and it wasn't that interesting then either, but not much is going on with the non-Anthurium plants lately. This is also the first bloom I've seen on this particular specimen of H. oculata, which presumably makes it at least a little newsworthy even if it isn't fully open yet.

On an unrelated note: when we first moved to this house, I had bought a bunch of plants from the ex-job. Planted most of them in containers, because we didn't have beds established yet (and, five years later, we still mostly don't, though we're working on it), and I remember being struck by one color combination in particular -- Geranium 'Rozanne' (blue-violet) and some unnamed red-orange Zinnia. (See the last picture on this post.)

I'm wanting to do something like that again somewhere, eventually, though maybe with something more of a true blue and true orange. Would anybody want to recommend some plants for me? Ideally, they would:

1) Be reseeding annuals (preferred) or slowly-spreading perennials, that
2) bloom at more or less the same time (ideally over a long period of time),
3) either aren't fussy as to soil type or could live together in the same soil type, whatever the ideal type might be,
4) could coexist for a reasonably long time without one crowding or shading the other out,
5) would survive a very windy, bright location in zone 5b.

The idea got re-sparked when I ran across the Annie's Annuals page for Nigella damascena 'Miss Jekyll Dark Blue'; I'm also possibly interested in thoughts on Lobelia erinus 'Monsoon', Eschscholzia californica, orange Tagetes patula cultivars, Zinnias, or whatever.