Kiss the Earth

We aren't in a drought - not officially, at least - but it sure feels that way. I broke down last night and watered a particularly parched section of my garden. Even doing a small patch takes a long time since we all know that quick, shallow watering is worse than none at all.

It was good for the spirit to see the hydrangea perk up. It was quite dramatic. One didn't need water, though - the native oakleaf. It looked fresh as ever, while the mopheads took a while to come back to life.

I noticed, too, how wonderfully well the sedums tolerate this heat and dryness. They're always on lists of drought-resistant plants, and they certainly deserve to be there. But others on that list looked dreadful .. things like black-eyed Susans. What a mess!

I'm becoming a sedum fan. A neighbor gave me a ground cover sedum, which eventually will form a nice thick carpet under foot. It has large starry flowers in bright yellow. Gets about four inches tall. My neighbor Frances has it growing all over a bank along the driveway and one night, as I stopped to chat during a walk, she grabbed a pot and sent me home with some.

I have a lot of 'Autumn Joy,' a tall sedum that starts small in spring with beautiful green rosettes and turns into full-blown flower heads in July. By now they look like broccoli, with a tinge of pink. Slowly the flowers will turn red, and then in fall a deep rust color that tells me this plant knows what colors go well in what season.

The 'Autumn Joy' in my front and back gardens is tall and bushy now, and this morning during my daily garden inspection, they were glowing a warm pinkish-green. And why not. I think it was about 110 degrees!

But that's what these babies love. Sedums are made for "green roofs," for cracks in the rock garden, for open patches in the stepping stones. You can walk on them and ignore them, let them bake in the sun, no water, no water, and they not only love you, they come back for more!

During garden inspection this morning, when I check for zucchinis that exploded in the night and toss the spent hibiscus blooms, I looked up and found a green umbrella over me. It was a mammoth sunflower in the middle of the garden. It must be 10 feet tall.

Hasn't bloomed yet, but several smaller varieties have. Can't recall their names now - the seed packs are carefully stored in an envelope which is carefully stored somewhere ... but they're lemony yellow and this morning were literally smothered in bumble bees. Moments like these are very humbling. I am still awe-struck watching bees at work.

Sunflowers are a favorite (the list is long, I know) and I love photographing them. They look good from any angle at any time of day. Not like the rest of us ...

They never fail to make our burdens lighter, perhaps because their bloom seems so much like a smiling human face. This morning I put my hand around the stalk. It was very straight and surprisingly sturdy.

Then I remembered last fall. After the sunflowers finished their show, the birds went to work cleaning each flower head of every seed. It was so much fun to watch. Then the sunflower stalks turned brown and flopped over and soon it was time to pull them out and let them make compost.

But it took some doing, getting them out. By the end of the season, these mammoths were trees. We dug and pulled and finally they came out, a time that's often sad for gardeners. But these guys are so joyful, and useful. Every season of their existence they add something positive to the landscape and to all the creatures that inhabit it.

I got a little carried away with photos, but perhaps, after looking at them, you'll feel you were standing in my garden with me this morning, chatting away and marveling with me at these North American natives.

Treasures.

That's official speak for hyacinth bean. Funny name, beautiful plant, and one of the few vines I've been able to grow from seed this summer. I had no luck with moonflower, something I've craved in my garden for several years now, not just for the huge white flowers but for the scent.

There are a couple of gourd vines growing out front again, which is fun. Once established, they spurt about six inches a night - or so it seems. Their small white blossoms come out late in the day and if pollinated, produce little gourds that practically start elongating before your eyes.

The hyacinth bean, which has the hilarious botanical name of Lablab purpureus , is a first for me this summer. I started it in a pot on the back patio, then moved the pot out front so it could climb along a fence. Several more Lablabs are growing in the garden out back, twirling around some wrought iron and up a couple of walls. Even the tendrils are pretty. They have an more buoyant spring, a darker color, than most other vines.

Hyacinth bean is an annual that grows to about 20 feet and makes quite a splash with its purplish-green leaves and rosy-purple flowers. Yesterday the first blooms opened up on my vines. It was cause for celebration. I've seen photos of this flower, which is like a string of tiny orchids and supposedly very fragrant, but I've not had a close encounter before.

It's getting to be very popular, but like so many plants we "discover," this old bean's been around for a long time. Thomas Jefferson grew it on the arbor of his vegetable garden at Monticello and supposedly it's still being grown there.

This historic link is probably lost on the folks walking past my fledgling vine, as it was for me until I "discovered" hyacinth bean a few years ago. But perhaps it will inspire someone to ask about it or plant one.

We could create a corridor of color and fragrance up and down the street. Call it Jefferson Walk.

Imagine. All this from a bean!

My sweetbay magnolia is already setting fruit, which is cause for both joy and melancholia. Joy because these cone-like red fruits are extraordinary to look at and provide great snacking for many birds in my neighborhood.

But looking at them this morning made me melancholy, too. Here we are in the midst of a heat wave (that finally looks as though it might give us a break for a few days) and already Nature is gearing up for fall and winter. I'm not quite ready for that transition, although cooler temperatures are welcome anytime! It seems as if my sweetbay's creamy blossoms just faded. Guess what? That was a couple of months ago. What happened to summer?

All this got me thinking about fall and my to-do list. The garden looks terrible right now, despite occasional deep waterings over the last two weeks, and it's difficult to think about planting and transplanting when the ground's as hard as a sidewalk.

But like my sweetbay, the industry is already headed that way. The catalogues are pouring in. As if I haven't spent enough money on the garden ... is there ever a cheap season??

I actually found myself looking at a $300 two-in-one chipper/shredder, thinking how useful that would be in making leaf mulch. Am I crazy or what? Think I'll take a pile of catalogues on vacation next week and spend, oh, a few days mulling this over. Between lobster roll lunches and dips in the ocean, two decidedly summer-y activities.

Somehow the summer is slipping away. The leaves are already crunching under foot, the catalogues are piling up, and I'm thinking about leaf shredders and new plants and where on earth I'd find the room in this garden to plant something new.

Here comes fall, and I haven't learned a thing!

This, I think, is a photo of lavender cotton or Santolina chamaecyparissus, a plant worth mentioning in these dry days - even though we got quite a downpour last night. I sat outside enjoying the drops on my face and, more importantly, watching them hit all the crispy sticks that used to be flowers in my garden.

I was thinking that every time we go through a dry spell like this one, I vow to buy and plant accordingly in future. But like New Year's resolutions, these never quite carry through all those seductive plant sales in spring and fall or guide my choices in the 10 truckloads of catalogues that stuff the mailbox every month.

Lavender cotton is something to keep in mind for longer than a nanosecond. It's an old-fashioned herb, native to the Mediterranean, that has been used in American gardens since colonial days. I was first introduced to it over at the Physick Garden at Pennsylvania Hospital, which basically is a recreation of a typical medicinal garden from that era in our history. Apparently, it was used to keep away moths in linens and to purge parasites, poisons and putrefaction from human innards.

Let's think about these neat little flowers resting elegantly in the bureau drawer and not their other purposes. Honestly, colonial Americans knew more than I'd ever care to about the yucky messes our bodies get into. Did enough people suffer from putrefaction and poison to warrant experimentation with every flower in the front border? I guess so.

These days lavender cotton is wonderful because it's just so darned cute. I love its light, breezy name and its bright yellow button flowers with silvery foliage provide a terrific contrast to all the greens in a garden. Imagine them dried.

Come to find out, and this is the point of all this palaver, lavender cotton is also a good plant for drought. I think, having seen it a week or so ago in a garden that was as parched as mine, I can safely say this one truly is a smart choice for dry times. Just hope this message sticks after we've had a lot more rain.

With that small pearl, not entirely original but certainly heartfelt, I bid you adieu for the next week. I'll be on vacation, headed up north for some time on the beaches of Rhode Island. The sand-tolerant lavender cotton, which isn't a true lavender at all but really does like sand, would feel right at home.

The lotus is a flower we rarely think about in our part of the world. It's an Asian water lily and almost always associated with shrines and gardens "over there." But lotuses are a spectacular addition to water gardens anywhere. If only we all had the space and the scale!

I found this one last week on vacation in Rhode Island, at a pond in North Kingstown that is so well known for its lotuses, photographers and artists come from miles around to take pictures, sketch or paint. You'll see traffic stopped. You'll see cars parked by the side of the road, and tripods and easels set up all around the pond.

Lotuses truly are traffic-stoppers. They're tough, believe me, able to survive and flourish in muddy ponds that look to be a tangled mess under water. I'm sure you've seen their dark brown, hole-filled seed pods on long, sturdy stems. These alone are worth parking the car.

But the blossoms are what people seem to love most. There's something mystical about the way the stems shoot up from their chartreuse-colored leaves and then produce the most exquisite pale pink or white blossom that seems perfectly shaped to fit within two cupped hands.

That may be where the religious significance of this flower came from. Cultures from Egypt to India and China have considered it sacred.

I'm not much for that, but you can certainly understand why people everywhere marvel at the lotus. I couldn't stop taking pictures of it from every angle.

This bud was the palest of pinks, and it was much more beautiful than the photo conveys. So beautiful, in fact, that I sat down on the grassy bank and just enjoyed it for about 15 minutes. From every angle ... up close, far away, sitting, standing. Before I knew it, my breathing was slower and deeper.

That's what vacation is for, no? The lotus seemed perfectly cast.

I don't think I knew was a rose hip was till fairly recently, though, as they say, I'd seen them around. On vacation last week I saw them all over the beach - covering the ancient Rosa rugosa or "beach rose" bushes that grow in pure sand and unfiltered sun. I picked a few to bring home to remind me of those languid days at the beach, days of long walks along the water and hours spent indulging in that rarest of luxuries: unhurried reading.

These rose hips are the size of cherries and a bright orange-red color. Were I feeling adventurous, I'd had picked many more and started cooking when I got home. Did you know you can make a ton of delectable-sounding goodies from these little nuggets that are high in vitamin C?

You can dry them and make rose hip leather. You can puree them to add to apple sauce. You can make rose hip soup and pudding, syrup and bread, tea, candy, jelly and pie. I've had rose hip jelly, which is light and delicious, and rose hip tea, which is fruity and spicy, a bit like cranberry.

Before we all get carried away with recipes, it's important to remember that first and foremost, rose hips feed the birds. And I'm for that.

So my handful of hips will be all I'll save. They're in a large clam shell, also salvaged from the beach, here on my desk, reminders of a lazy vacation that's already fading. If I really get hard up, though, all I need do is take a walk in Center City. Rosa rugosas positively covered in rose hips line the cross streets over the Vine Expressway.

Tea, anyone?

Visiting a gardening friend this weekend I started second-guessing my decision to hold off on watering most of this summer. My garden is all about shades of green and brown, mostly brown. There is so little color, I hate to admit it, I've been bored. Nothing wrong with green and brown. Those are the colors of so much in nature, but this summer flew by before I had a chance to savor the bright, rich colors of the season.

I've watered in places ... the plants that droop a lot or those that get the most sun or the seeds and seedlings in the vegetable bed. But mostly, I've held off. It seems so wasteful to water day after day and eventually, it rains, right?

This summer has been rough. Except for three days of rain, very dry. My poor garden looks bedraggled after so much heat and water deprivation.

My friend's garden, on the other hand, is lush and green. You'd think it was early June! She's got more shade, a smaller space, and she's obviously watered more than I have. And P.S., this photo is of a container in her back yard. It has sweet potato vines and employs a little trick to keep things interesting. She took her spent alliums, which are so pretty dried, cut them off, tied them to small, thin bamboo stakes, and stuck them in her containers to provide a spikey feature and some height.

Cool!

In my garden, I have my choice not just of dried alliums but dried lupine, dried baptisia, dried hydrangea, dried lilies and coneflowers, dried absolutely everything.

So what to do. On Saturday I did something I've never done before - I went out and bought a few flats of annuals to plant around for color. They were half-price but still, the bill was way more than I'd wanted to spend at this time of year. They're not a conversation piece. But tell ya what. They go a long way toward perking things up.

I remember once seeing a bumper sticker - and you know this had to be at a hard-core horticultural event - that said "Friends don't let friends buy annuals." That, to me, is the height of snobbery, but then, every field has its snobs. Last year, I tried to keep my annual purchases to a minimum solely because of the expense. If I was going to spend a fortune on new plants, I figured, I'd just as soon have it be an investment in perennials.

This year, who knows why, my garden desperately needs a color lift. So bring on the annuals. We'll enjoy these flowers for probably another two months, maybe more if we have another mild winter.

How much is satisfaction worth? How much money would you spend to prolong your blooming season, to eke as much pleasure out of your garden as you can before the weather turns frosty?

Thought of that way, a few impatiens and begonias are a bargain! That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

This morning's garden stroll left me a bit more optimistic about the end of season. Earlier in the week it seemed all was dull and brown. Today, in the muted morning light, some things really stood out. This hyacinth bean has taken off, bloomed and begun to go to seed, all in due time and delightful color.

The vine in this picture twirls around a garage doorway. I like the idea of framing the entrance with sweet-smelling flowers. You come through the door, up the stairs, past the thinned-out vegetable bed and into the rest of the garden.

Also mood-enhancing this morning were the climbing nasturtiums, which I planted in large containers last spring and hoped would trail, rather than climb. Finally, they've begun their downward journey. It took long enough! For the entire summer, these perky little annuals faced up, lots and lots of them filling the pots and, I thought, looking a bit silly for their great big container.

Now they're in scale and looking better, their small, elegant orange blooms a bright contrast to the charcoal gray of the pots.

Nasturtiums don't seem to get much attention, but I do love their perfectly round, lily-pad leaves. If you think you need to plant a whole pack of seeds, realize that every single one will probably germinate, giving you enough nasturtiums to fill the whole thing.

Reminds me of the many seeds, bulbs and plants I put in the ground five years ago when we first moved to this house. In my excitement and ignorance, I failed to note that the soil was compacted and sick. How could I miss that? The yard had been used for years by local kids - generations of them, I'd later learn - as a fun place to toss beer bottles. Nothing productive had been done to it for decades. It was your basic landfill covered with grass. Actually, pathetic grass.

Excited at the idea of finally having space to plant, I happily bought stuff I'd always wanted in a border bed and that first spring, put it all in the ground. What a dope. Almost nothing came up, and what came up failed to thrive. It was sooo disappointing.

Many truckloads of excellent soil and compost later ... well, now I have a jungle, which is another problem. But at least the soil is healthy.

I guess the lesson here is that the more you learn, the more you realize that what's going on underground is vitally important to the health of what you want to grow above ground. Not very glamorous but true, in the same way that nonglamorous things like wiring matter in a house.

All these thoughts popped into mind this morning, as I drank my tea and strolled around the garden. At this rate, I'll be working parttime in no time.

.