Site-related: three things about books

I will be hosting a book giveaway for America's Romance With the English Garden (Thomas J. Mickey) in early June. It's apparently¹ about the beginnings of the American garden industry, and how the English gardening style became the default style for American gardens. Not really normal PATSP fare, but it seemed like an interesting topic. If this interests you, you may wish to check out its page at Ohio University Press.

The cover:

I've added another plant to my endorsed houseplant books in the sidebar: Tempting Tropicals: 175 Irresistible Indoor Plants (Ellen Zachos). It's more or less a general-purpose houseplant book, as opposed to the Griffith book, which aimed at commercial producers, so it's probably better suited to the average PATSP reader. The main thing I like about Tempting Tropicals as opposed to many of the other houseplant books I've looked at is, Zachos has better information than most of them. Instead of the usual short and fairly meaningless care instructions most houseplant books give you,² Zachos actually goes into some detail, as well as providing more information about problems specific to each type of plant. There are other general houseplant books I approve of to one degree or another, but Zachos is the only one I would actually recommend to someone at the moment.³

I am also still technically working on my own book, or whatever it's going to be, though it's not going particularly well. The reasons for this may include but are not limited to: laziness, depression, poor time management, excessive physical exertion related to moving hundreds of plants in and out of the house and garage every time the weather changes, bad luck, not having a clear vision of the completed project, blogular interference, over-researching, declining enthusiasm for the subject matter, low self-esteem, or some combination of the above. But I am nevertheless still working on it. Technically.

-

¹ I haven't read it yet (only on page 42 as I write this). I received a free review copy of America's Romance With the English Garden from the publisher, though I didn't promise to review the book, so you may or may not ever hear what I think of it.
² E.g. "Light: Bright. Water: Keep evenly moist."
³ I have not received anything in exchange for this endorsement, and in fact don't actually even own a copy myself -- the copy I read, I got from the Iowa City Public Library.

Pretty pictures: Mertensia virginica

Once again, the neighbor across the street from us has a large swath of yard covered in Mertensia virginica. The occupants have changed two or three times since we've lived here, and every time that's happened, I've been worried that the new people might decide to dig it all up. So every spring when the Mertensia blooms again, I feel relieved: they've gotten through another year. And so have I.

Most of the plants are in their heavily-shaded back yard and don't photograph particularly well,¹ but there's another group on the corner under a walnut tree, of all places,² that were willing to pose for me.

In previous years, there have been a couple plants that were blooming pink, and a few more that bloomed white; this year I didn't see any pink ones, but there are several white ones. One kind of prefers the blue anyway,³ but variety is nice.

Really what I should do, I know, is ask them for some of the plants. Or at least seeds. (They seem to be spreading: I assume that means that they're producing viable seeds.) Then I wouldn't have to live in fear that they'd all vanish some year. Though it's possible that the fear is part of why I enjoy them so much.

-

¹ Or at least didn't this year; the set of photos I took in 2011 were from the heavy-shade area.
² Walnuts are allelopathic: they produce chemicals (in the case of the black walnut, juglone) that repress the growth of other plants beneath them. Not all plants are affected by juglone, but enough of them are that it's a little surprising to see something as pleasant and ornamental as Mertensia shrugging it off.
³ (You know how one is.)

Double Hose Seven

(Via Know Your Meme.)

Pretty picture: Paphiopedilum Faire-Maud

The name makes more sense than you'd think at first glance: Paphiopedilum Faire-Maud is a cross between Paphiopedilum fairrieanum and Paphiopedilum Maudiae.

Saturday morning Sheba and/or Nina picture

Technically Sheba's on the neighbor's lawn in this picture, not ours; our lot has a corner taken out of it for unknown historical reasons.

Three Unidentified Cactus Blooms

I seem to be kind of on a roll this week as far as posting every day -- which hasn't happened since December -- so let's see if I can't make it seven for seven just to prove that it's still possible.

All of these pictures are from the ex-job, over the last three or four months. Anybody who can identify one of the three plants here with any degree of confidence should let me know in the comments.

This one's obviously a Mammillaria of some kind. (Right?)

Pretty pictures: Portulaca grandiflora cvv.

We've bought some Portulaca grandifloras this year, both a couple six-packs and a couple packages of seeds. It's maybe a little late for seeds, but if we plant them soon, we can still get some flowers from them before the summer's done. (Unfortunately, we had one spot in mind for them when we bought them, then decided that we didn't want to plant anything there after all, so now we're trying to figure out what else to do with them. I'm leaning toward giving them their own dedicated bed somewhere, but there aren't any obvious places to put one. So we dither.)

I've missed Portulaca. In the apartment in 2008, we had some, and they were nice. Bought more when we moved, and had lots in 2009. Never had enough for proper reseeding, though, so we wound up with fewer and fewer every year, and none last year. So hopefully we can start over this year.

In the meantime, though, we have twenty-one pictures of Portulacas past, arranged in color order, because I took that many pictures in 2009 and 2010.

Random plant event: Billbergia NOID

This was blooming at the ex-job last week. Sorry about the crappy photo: the light was bad, the background was cluttered, and there's only so much I can do to clean these things up. Hopefully you get the idea regardless.

I'm not sure the color of the actual flowers comes across properly here; in person, it was sort of navy blue, which is what I thought was the most interesting about the whole thing.

I don't know which Billbergia this is, though I can narrow it down to two: I'm pretty sure the only ones they have are 'Borracho' and 'Hallelujah.'

Billbergia 'Borracho.' (This is my personal plant, from a couple years ago.)
Billbergia 'Hallelujah.'
The sharp-eyed reader will notice immediately that neither of these look like the plant at the top of the post. This is because both varieties need fairly bright light in order to maintain proper color, and this is prime annual-buying season. So they've gotten shoved under tables to make room for Impatiens and stuff, causing the reversion to plain green.

If I had to guess, I'd guess this is 'Hallelujah.' Not only do the leaves appear to have a little bit of reddish-purple in them still, the inflorescence matches the search results for 'Hallelujah' a little better than 'Borracho.' Whichever it is, I'm happy I got to see it.