Criptic Cold Damage

Saturday morning as I walked around the yard I was surprised at all the new brown leaves on some of the plants in the garden. The low that morning was above freezing and the day turned out to be the warmest in weeks, a high in the 60`s and yet new brown leaves were everywhere!

The Rhapis excelsa at the front of the house had some brown spotting on the leaves that reached beyond the corner of the house. On the other side of the house my Cycas taitungensis that sits under the mystery citrus was heavily damaged. This same plant came through 18 degrees untouched while its more exposed sibling had about half its leaved burned.

Checking weather records for the previous week the coldest temp was 23 degrees a few days earlier, not enough to cause the new damage. I can speculate that it may have been the constant wind drying leaves pushed to their tolerance limits or it may be that the plants have been exposed to their maximum below freezing tolerance and are now beginning to show the damage.

The sago (C. taitungensis) was protected from the initial cold by the citrus, which is now losing leaves as a result of that cold. This more open canopy of the citrus tree may now be allowing the cold and wind to penetrate and Cycas taitungensis is very sensitive to drying winds in winter.

In the end this is all cosmetic damage, the brown leaves will be removed later this winter and the new growth will hide this winter sins.

More Late Fall Yellows l

I do not want to deal with winter, so I`m continuing to writing about the final blooms just before 18 degrees did most of them in. This little guy had been blooming away for a couple of weeks before the cold burned the flowers off and yet the plant is almost undamaged. The name of this delight full little bromeliad is Aechmea calyculata. His home is under an old sasanqua along with many other broms being tested for cold tolerance and he is one of the best!

The plant carries an 8" tall yellow drumstick flowers on a 1' tall plant. It`s leaves are a dark green because to its extremely shady location. I plant my broms here to keep winter frost off the leaves to prevent burning, but this year the cold and extreme wind created havoc and left many plants scorched.

None of the bromeliads are dead just damaged but some will begiven to friends with warmer gardens. I plan to keep A. calyculata and devide it come warm weather.

Yellow Bells

Now that the weather has grown cold it is time for some summer memories of warmth and bright flowers. One of my favorite tropical plants is yellow bells (Tecoma stans)! This is one of the easiest plants to grow and gives so much for so little work.

Yellow bells have a cluster of one to two inch lemon yellow trumpets at the top of the stem. My plants always freeze to the ground but by Memorial Day are 2' tall and beginning to bloom. The blooming season last till the first killing frost and I then cut them down.

I must let you know they grow fast and get 6' to 7' tall! The common type from the wet tropics grow a number of tall stems that are wands capped with flowers. A more refined look is the desert variety Tecoma stans angustifolia. This type has smaller flower clusters but the plant is bushier and each stem branches more often for a fuller look. The leaves are much finer cut and shinier making the plant more garden worthy than the tropical type. Best of all it is less likely to set seed and thus is not loaded with 6" bean pods by the hundreds.

The picture is of the desert yellow bell!

Citrus

The year of abundance, so much fruit that the trees are still full!A hot summer with regular rains must be citrus heaven. I`ve given bags away and still some of the trees are full, especially bad with the cold we been having.

The Kimbrough Satsuma has been picked, packaged for friends and eaten! The fruits were much bigger this year and extremely juicy but didn`t have the exceptional flavor of other years. I planted the the tree eight years ago and it has lived up to all the satsumas billing of a cold hardy delicious tree. She is grafted on a trifoliate root stock which adds to the cold tolerance and dwarfs the tree but she is no beauty. Satsuma have a lanky growth habit and send out long branches in any direction making them a sprawling plant.

The beauty of the dwarf citrus is the Nippon Orangequat! It grows as a tight mound spotted this time of year with hundreds of 2" bright orange fruit. I personally do not like the taste but many do. The fruit is eaten skin and all just like its kumquat ancestor. It will keep its fruit all winter dropping a few at a time until it blooms again in the spring. Early cold like this dries them but some will stay good all winter.

My poor Meiwa Kumquat would have needed another week to ripen, the cold has frozen them solid and they will dry out quickly now. It' like the orangequat and the satsuma is on a trifoliate root stock dwarfing the plant to a tiny 4'.

This year had a couple of firsts; my Changsha mandarin and Taiwanese lemon both fruited this year! The Changsha is a seedy Mandarin that bears small fruit five years after planting the seed.
The lemon is a year older and has so many fruits the branches are hanging at right angles to the main stem. It`s a sour seedy fruit but easy to grow and not likely ever to be hurt by my cold.

There is another citrus, the mystery tree that was supposed to be a sunquat(a type of lemonquat) but is gigantic. I purchased the seeds year ago from the now defunct Indoor Citrus Society from a reputable grower who must have also had a grapefruit in the yard. The tree and fruit are huge, the leaves look like grapefruit leaves but the plant is more cold tolerant. As to the fruit, they are as large as a grapefruit, yellow as a lemon and shaped like a pear. Delightfully smelling and tasting of both lemon and grapefruit but bland to the taste. The wind causes a little damage each year at the top but it always leafs back with almost no die back. A happy accident.

Green-Fly Orchid

This basket of green fly orchid and fern has hung under this live oak at work for eight years, prior to that it lived in a former garden of mine. The picture was taken a couple of weeks ago and quite often it has a late season bloom even at this latitude.

The basket is composed of pieces of bark containing orchid and fern, rescued after a storm and placed inside a wire basket with a coco-fiber liner behind the bark. I do not remember what the basket is filled with but I think it was regular potting mix. The fiber has long decomposed and other types of fern have moved in on their own but the orchids continue to grow pretty much uncared for.

The peak bloom is early summer with an occasional spike anytime while the weather is warm. The basket hangs out all year long and the only protection is the canopy of the live oak. It would be hard to find a simpler plant to grow, but it is a hard plant to find or purchase!

While hunting for fallen snags with orchids on them I quickly learned that deer are also fond of collecting it after storms and if I want to find it uneaten I better be willing to go wading in the swamps the day after the storm. It is worth the trials because it rewards you with blooms for very little care.

A Fall Vignette

Just a quick flash of fall for us Southerners, since the trees won`t provide the color we let the herbaceous and tropicals do it. This grouping of Mexican cigar flowers, Acalypha Jungle Dragon and a variegated hibiscus in a pot provide the warm rich colors that give us that fall feeling . That is if we are transplanted Northerners.
The potted hibiscus was just brought in the house for the winter and cut back. I also took cuttings of the acalypha because it doesn`t always return from the roots. The cigar flower is just a good doer and will be back with the spring. So far there has not been a frost or freeze, but this far inland it will happen soon and I want to be prepared.

Favorite Ficus

All gardeners lust for plants we can not possibly grow in our yards due to some local factor, mine is the climate of N. Charleston. FROST! Tropicals are not fond of it and yet we gardeners try to grow them and ocasionally succeed.



Ficus auriculata is one of the triumphs! I first learned of this plant from a fellow palm society member who was growing it in Augusta,Ga.
If it could survive there it would do just fine on the coast.



The plant is fast growing and recovers rapidly in spring and reaches 15' by fall. In my yard it alway freezes to the ground but in milder situations it can survive because it is a cold/drought deciduous plant and thus has a dormant period that increases hardiness.



It`s a beauty, large dark green leaves that are large enough to give a garden that tropical look. My 8 year old plant produces ten stems all reaching heights between 10' and 15'.



I have tested many other figs for cold tolerance, some such as F. petiolaris and F. aurea survived the winter as root hardy but return too slowly to be garden worthy. These plants are the nothern most species in North America.



Ficus elastica is written to be a good candidate for colder areas but it also returns to slowly. Older books recommend this one often so the problem may be that todays cultivars have all been selected for slow or compact growth.



There is one other that is proving to be a good candidate and that if F. religiosa. This again is a plant that has a dormant period and also returns at a good rate in the spring. I have not had it long enough to give its ultimate heights but it has impressed me so far.




Since the Genus Ficus is so large there are probably many other candidates so let`s keep trying.

Red, Green and Gold

Some combinations are happy accidents that if you had planned them would never have looked as good.

Abutilon megapotamicum and an old Aucuba are just such a combo. Both are common in Southern gardens but I have never scene them together before and even here they met serruptiously and surprised me with a red blooming Aucuba this spring.

The Abutilon is a viney sort that disappears into the Aucuba`s foliage and weaves around the plant. The gangliness of the Abutilon is hidden by the stiffness of its companion. The result is beautiful.

The Abutilon slow down its blooming during the heat of summer but starts up again as the nights cool. The heat tolerance of the flowering maple(Abutilon) is amazing for a plant from southern South America. It shows its heritage by blooming off and on durying my zone 8b winters.

I heartly recommend trying this combo out in your own yard.

Textures

As a plant nut I usually worry about if the plant will grow here ,not what it will look like and because of that I`ve spent a lot of time moving things around. There are happy accidents where everything turns out right and not because I tried.

The pond is a small 20+ gallons that a friend found in a trash pile. I placed it near another small pond at the edge of my woodland garden so it would get some sun part of the day. It`s an ugly plastic thing that I used resurrection fern to hide the edge. The only plant in the pond is a veriegated Acorus.

The bright colored Acorus shines against the dark water and at the same time contrasts with low clustering ferns. Along side the pond the golden Sedum picks up the color of the Acorus and the texture of the ferns. On the backside of the pond the fern Phlebodium aureum 'Blue Crisp' adds a new color while continueing the fern texture on a bigger scale.

Oh the happy mistakes!

The other plants in the photo are some radiclis palms, Aspidistra and Agapathus. The Blue Crisp has proven to be not only winter hardy but with an overhead canopy is evergreen.

Something Special

Yellow is the color of spring for me, it jumps out and says winter is over! This shrub is my spring herald along with the daffodils. I have never heard a common name for it though there may be one in Mexico its home. In fact all I know it is a Senecio I bought from Yucca Do Nursery many years ago.

It will grow to 6' if you let it but looks better cut back to the ground every couple of years. In full summer sun it tends to wilt like a Hydrangea so be nice and plant it in the shade and hose it off on a hot day.

The Senecio is a coarse looking plant that fits well in a woodland setting but should be tried in a typical suburban landscape. It is an evergreen but not a dark dense plant. The branches are limber and the flowers sit at the ends. If I ever find the name I`ll pass it on!

A Male Medusa

He is always ahead of the rest, anxious to be the first to leaf out and often he is burned by the frost. This year he is late and the leaves will be undamaged but he is still the first.

This fabulous plant is a Cycas taitungensis! A huge fast growing plant that regularly put out three spurts of growth a year. The first growth has always been a set of leaves the second is always a cone and it is definitely a male cone.

The leaves are up to 5' long and a deep green in color. As you can see from the picture they brown in the winter some, more from wind damage than cold. It has a growth rate that puts Cycas revoluta the common sago to shame.

In the garden give this plant plenty of room it is huge and quick growing if fertilized regularly. A common mistake is to plant it in a spot that will cause it to looked cramped in the future because people think that it will grow just like the common sago.

Winters End

The sun is back out and actually feels warm! Too much cold ,too much wind and finally the snow have made a mess of my garden. My Chamaedorea are a mess; the radicalis foliage was broken by the weight of 4" of snow and the microspadix by the incessant wind. All the tall Aspirdistra are wind burned which I will cure with a quick clip of the foliage this weekend to make room for the new growth. The horizontal leaved species are fine.

There have been surprises, the Australians have survived the vagaries of Charleston weather better then I would have thought. The Telopea speciosissima shows only a little leaf burn and the Grevillea victoria 'Murray Valley Red' is undamaged. Both plants have been through two winters with lows of 22 degrees. More surprising is that the summers have not done them in.

If this winter has taught me is that the wind does as much damage as cold can. An example of this are the bamboos. My Bambusa textilis is just fine while the B. textilis 'Scanton', B. eutuloides 'viridi-vittata and B. tuldoides 'ventricosa all suffered defoliation from the wind and cold which had not happened before at comparable temperatures.

Soon everything will leaf out and the winter ravages will just be lessons learned.

Good Gardening

Surprise Return Engagements

I love the surprises that emerge in the spring garden - those plants that I thought I'd said a last goodbye to with the first frost but nonetheless come peeking out of the ground in the spring. We had a weird winter here with too many freezing temps and lots of wind to stir that cold air up. My expectations for winter survivors were pretty low so I was shocked to see these emerge: angelonia augustifolia (maybe AngelMist Plum), a red penta, two acalypha wilkesiana, acalypha pendula, and a caladium. These are all "maybes" in Mt. Pleasant so after a mild winter I would have expected them to survive. But this year, not so much. All of them were in a very exposed, very windy corner of my yard with no overhead protection, no special mulching, no advantage working in their favor.

Being the obsessed gardener that I am, I'm now hovering over them and can't wait to see how quickly they grow. And I'm also on the lookout for other survivors. It is all part of what makes gardening so much fun, isn't it?

The Lowly Azalea

My mother always said that the problem with a lot of Charleston gardeners is that they just stick a slew of azaleas and a handful of camellias in the yard and call it a garden. There truly is an azalea overload around here and hence I vowed to never plant an azalea...way too common for me, I thought. Leave azaleas to the "garden variety gardeners".

Ha, ha, and ha again. It turns out, I'm no more immune to azaleas than the next person. They are just too beautiful and too easy. As spring rolls in, I find myself in the garden centers drooling over all those luscious colors and wanting to take every one home. So I've put myself on an azalea "diet" but when I first saw Elsie Lee, I couldn't resist. This has got to be the most feminine of azaleas: the flowers are ruffled, double, and the color is an absolutely ethereal shade of orchid. Very girly.



My Elsie Lee's started blooming about a week ago and are in full bloom now. I can't wait till they've gained a bit of stature and make a real statement in my frontyard.

Jump Down, Pick a Bale of Cotton

I'm not a fan of winter. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it is a necessity but it curtails the bloomy goings on in my yard and I just can't get beyond a bit of resentment over that. So I take it out on my yard and ignore it for a couple of months. The problem with petulantly turning my back on the garden all winter is that Mother Nature takes up the gardening chores in my absence and we have quite different taste and styles. She tends to like Florida Betony and Chickweed. Me, not so much.

But in anticipation of our average last-frost date just around the corner, I've emerged from semi- hibernation, rubbed my eyes a few times, eaten a few honey-soaked biscuits and marvelled at what a speedy gardener Mother Nature is. The weeds are thick. Some of them I know I will have to spray with herbicide but others I'm trying to handpull and it is overwhelming!

Overwhelming, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Being a bit of history geek and a born southerner, looking at all those weeds made me think of the old song "Jump Down, Pick a Bale of Cotton" (to see a vido of folk musician Lead Belly performing the song click http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE9QYkkxyVQ) and that made me think of all the agricultural workers, past and present, black and white and every other color, here and abroad, who've picked bales/buckets/pallets of cotton/whatever day in and day out for years under a hot sun and with meager rations for meager compensation if any.

Yikes, what a wimp I am!

Elephants of Winter

It has been awhile since I have written anything- holidays and computer problems are my excuse. But now it is a new year so lets start with a bang of a plant. This hunk of a plant is called Farfugium japonicum 'Giganteum' or F.reniforme , either way it is one spectacular plant.

It has just finished blooming after a two month season but even without the 30" high yellow daisies the plant is still striking. The foliage is 2' tall, shiny and so large it looks tropical. Those big leaves demand shade and a good supply of water as they will wilt even in winter. Keep the hose handy!

The plant can be divided every spring and soon you too will have a herd of elephants in your garden. They call attention when massed better then any plant in the garden so use them with care. They can easily create a visual barrier that can act like a hedge and hide smaller plants. Plant them so they lead the eye into the distance.

The herd pictured started as one plant six years ago and with careful dividing has grown into a mass of twenty-five plants. Start your herd today!

Okay, So I'm a Bit Obsessed

But it isn't my fault really. Charleston is just such a great laboratory for observing microclimates. Like this tropical hibiscus blooming today in downtown Charleston long after the hibiscus in my yard just across the harbor were killed by the frost. This particular plant bloomed all last winter and never had any frost damage at all and is now reaching for the second floor of the building.

This plant, though, was born with a horticultural silver spoon in its, ah, mouth:

• It is planted up against a heat-retaining brick wall.
• It is located just a few hundred feet from the Charleston Harbor where the heat retained by the water warms the air a bit. The entire penninsula of Charleston is warmer than surrounding areas because the two rivers that flank it provide a slight warming to the air.
• It is located in downtown Charleston which is warmer due to the effects of the urban heat island.

I'm very jealous. The hibiscus in my yard won't bloom until next fall because they will have to come back all the way from the root IF they come back at all. What a difference a few miles can make.

Broms of December

The surprise of tropical color on a gray winters day should be enough to convince anyone in the coastal South to grow bromeliads. I've watched many a woman stop in her tracks and ask me what that beautiful flower is and may she have a piece. Aechmea gamosepala has that effect on people. The blue flowers on a pinkish-purple spathe screams "hello" while the thornless leaves are gardener friendly.

The above picture shows the plant crawling up a live oak trunk providing both the shade and shelter from frost that this plant needs. White frost will damage this plant but I've seen it undamaged by 22f under an evergreen canopy. Just place it at the base of a tree and this plant will make itself at home with a minimum of care. As a small ground cover it is so dense few weeds can penetrate.

Another great one is Aechmea distichantha (above), with its bright pink spathes that remain brilliant for months after the flowers fade. The plant is wickedly thorny and depending on the variety can be huge, with leaves over two feet long tipped with a spine that can penetrate leather.

Easy to grow whether in a crotch of a tree or as a specimen on the ground all the plant requires is part shade and a well drained site as do all broms . Under the canopy of a tree the plant has taken temps down into the upper teens undamaged. There are three different forms on the market that vary in size from 1' tall to a variety that has curved leaves that are 3' long. The bloom season varies but it is always at the darkest time of year.

The Tropics Are Just a Live Oak Away

The tropics are just a live oak away? Okay, maybe not. There are no coconut palm lined beaches magically appearing on the other side of my live oak tree. There is no secret door in the trunk that magically opens to a warmer, sunnier place. But.....there are tropical plants that thrive under the live oak.

Charleston straddles USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Ho-Hum (or 8b), with minimum temperatures of 15-20 degrees, and USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Ooh-La-La (or 9a), with minimum temperatures of 20-25 degrees. What grows in Zone Ooh-La-La? Think tropical hibiscus, some bromeliads, an expanded range of palms, tropical ferns. I want that! So I keep shoving more marginal plants under the protective canopy of my live oak.

The happy little collection of strobilanthes, aechmea, vriesea gigantea "Nova", and monstera in this November 30 photo was unscathed by the scattering of freezing temps that had knocked back other tender plants in exposed areas of my yard. Will they all make it through the winter? Who knows. I have serious doubt about the monstera and even the sturdier plants in that group may die if we have an exceptionally cold weather. In the meantime though, I love having that bit of color hanging on in my yard.

A live oak can help gain those few precious degrees that mean a tropical that would normally die is instead root-hardy (hopefully the case with the monstera) or that a tropical that normally would only be root-hardy is evergreen (for example, the Persian Shield). On a cold night, the closed canopy of the live oak acts like a cozy down blanket by trapping the warmer air radiated up from the ground. That same "blanket" also prevents plant cell damaging frost from settling on leaves and stems.

How much of a difference does it make? Seeing is believing. In a downtown Charleston park, this Persian Shield, lying just a few feet outside the dripline of a Live Oak, was top-killed by freezing temps a few days ago:

But just ten feet away, under the protective cover of the same Live Oak, this Persian Shield is untouched by the cold:

And because it hasn't been killed back in years, it has these great big leaves:

Same story with this groundcover which is also outside the dripline of the Live Oak:

And again just ten feet away, is the same plant, same day:

I have no idea what this little groundcover is. Any suggestions? I do know that under that tree it is perennial.

Of course, it isn't only live oaks that afford some freeze protection. This Blue Daze is sheltered by the lorapetalum in the background but just a few feet away ten more Blue Daze are all top-dead:


If these plants all thrive this winter, my azaleas and holly ferns had better watch out... Zone Ooh-La-La will be moving on in!

Christmas Cheer Charleston Style

Poinsettia in Charleston

While we winter weather wimpy Charlestonians were turning our thermostats up and complaining about a few hours of freezing temperatures, this garden poinsettia maintained its focus and was thus able to pull off a few blooms just in time for the holiday season. Now as anyone knows who has ever mistreated their brand-new florist poinsettia, they don't like the cold, much less a freeze. But this poinsettia was protected from the freeze by the top-secret frost protection gizmo of....

Deep eaves

very, very deep eaves that kept white frost from settling on the leaves. Lots of tropical plants in Charleston that were unlucky enough to not have such protection were knocked back by freezing temps a couple of weeks before this picture was taken. The old Navy base where we found this plant has been closed for years so it is pretty safe to say this plant has been neglected.

We both remember when there were several poinsettias in the ground in downtown Charleston which for the most part, modern landscaping has eliminated (the plants, that is...not Charleston). And that is quite a shame as poinsettias are part of Charleston history. Their discover, Joel Poinsett, was born right here. He served in a number of political roles including being our first minister to Mexico (that was an early form of ambassador and yeah, I had to go googling for that detail) which is what he was doing when he found this member of euphorbia family growing in southern Mexico.

I think the moral of this story is to experiment with planting some marginally hardy plants under hard shade in the form of an overhang, an evergreen tree like a live oak, or even an evergreen shrub. I'm obsessed with the topic of frost protection right now so stay-tuned...more to follow.