Hot Tubs Look Good in the Snow

Staying warm?  I'm trying to; anything below 20 and I avoid going outside if I can.  Guess I shouldn't be living in Wisconsin...

Anyhow, I think I promised to put up a picture of the neighbor's new hot tub, the crowning glory of his back yard landscaping renovation, and it is indeed glorious!  Hot tubs look good in the snow!  Now, I just have to figure out how to get an invite (insert scheming smile here).

Before it snowed I noticed that I have a lot of plants in my yard that haven't gone dormant yet.  And of those plants, a lot of them have purple or burgundy foliage.  I've scattered some pix of them throughout this post.

'Caitlin's Giant' Ajuga-bought some of these on clearance
 to try under my cedar out front; it's a tough spot-
even lamium and lamiustrum didn't care for it

January is starting off pretty quiet.  Not much new happening in my gardening life currently; we finished the retaining wall before the ground froze but not in time to plant the boxwoods I got on clearance late fall.

They are in my basement under a full spectrum lamp, along with some of my less-loved houseplants and outdoor tropicals.  It must be a pretty tortuous environment.  The cilantro plant I bought from the store died immediately after I put it down there.  My coleus starts also died pretty much as soon as I put them there; I guess I should have kept them in water on my kitchen windowsill a bit longer to build up the roots.  Too bad about the coleus, they were very pretty over the summer.

Some type of sundrops/primrose-
I didn't plant these so I don't have a tag for them

As for my Amaryllis; it doesn't want to go dormant this year.  Not sure what that's about. I'm wondering if it will bloom for me this year.  Last year it went dormant first before it put on new leaves and bloomed.

Buglossoides- these kept their color last year until the very end of winter

Other than trying to keep plants alive in the basement (it's cold down there but those plants are just too big and heavy to haul upstairs) I've been reading up on unrefrigerated cold-room food storage.  I think I'm going to dedicate some space in the basement for this purpose and give it a try.

Regular Heartleaf Bergenia-during the
summer I couldn't tell the regular from 'Eroica' (seen below);
however the difference in their fall color is striking

This winter I need to prune out the black knot fungus I found on most of the chokecherries in our side yard.  I also plan on taking down some big buckthorns.  I marked them with string earlier in the fall when they still had leaves.  I'm just not very skilled at winter tree identification.  There's always a winter tree ID class in late winter at the Retzer Nature Center but it's always on a weekend that I am unavailable.  Frustrating!

Other than that I don't have much gardening stuff to do other than drool over catalogues and draw out plans for the spring and summer plantings.  Oh, I even gathered up all my plant tags and sorted them.  They have their very own labeled plastic box now.  Ooh, I feel SO organized!

Well, gotta go and figure out how to get the fungus gnat infection I've got going in the house under control...

'Eroica' Heartleaf Bergenia's fall color

Buggy about Buglossoides!

2 Sahohime and 1 Hanakisoi blooms perfume the kitchen

You know the excitement you feel when a perennial blooms for the first time and it's a plant you've never grown before?  Well, I got a double dose of that excitement this week when both my tree peonies and Buglossoides (Purple Gromwell) bloomed.

I'm guessing you've heard about tree peonies.  I've got two in one of my perennial beds.  One is Sahohime and it has large bright pink blooms that are pretty but not very fragrant.  The other is Hanakisoi with flouncy pale pink flowers and lots of scent.  I love the scent of peonies; they are one of my favorite plants and I was waiting all year to see if these newcomers to my garden would flower this spring.  (I've grown herbaceous peonies for years but this is the first time I've tried tree peonies and I heard that it can take several years for them to start flowering.)

I had been watching and waiting as the peony
buds fattened but was still surprised once they bloomed



The other surprise bloomer is one that I doubt you've heard of.  I know I had never heard of it until I asked a worker at Flower Factory in Stoughton for a list of deer, shade, drought and alkaline clay tolerant plants.  You can imagine that the list wasn't very long.  On it was Buglossoides.   I thought the name was weird and decided to give it a try.

If only they lasted a bit longer!

I planted it below a group of spruce trees where there's lots of root competition and it's

pretty dry.  The first year, my two clumps didn't do much other than put out some thin vine-like shoots, hugging the ground and not looking particularly vigorous.  I noticed that the foliage didn't go fully dormant over winter but was totally crispy and dead-looking by spring.  I was worried it had died.  But surprise!  Not only did the foliage emerge later looking happy and lush, there were now four clumps instead of two. 



This was when my buglossoides first starting blooming;
there's a lot more flowers now
(but I can't get you a picture 'cuz I can't find my camera)

 And another surprise!  Buglossoides just bloomed and the blooms are bright blue.  True blue, not that purple that some catalogs call blue.  (I think we've all been taken in by that at some point or other in our gardening careers.) And it's a really bright hue, that blue.  (Geez, now I'm sounding like Dr. Seuss.)



Anyhow, now I'm wondering how long it'll bloom for and if it will put out vines again like it did last year.  It'd be great if it kept blooming until the yellow daylilies and sundrops bloom.  Here's hoping!



Flowers that are blue, not purple, folks!