Waiting for Spring

It is about 20 degrees outside and there is snow on the ground, so I have to look at photos from last year to keep my spirits up.  Although, there are a number of plants that look great right now including the yellow and red twig dogwoods, the grasses, and my beloved beech trees, but it's just so cold out there.  This is why you landscape in such a way that the views can be enjoyed from the inside of the house!

I do hear the winter birds gathered around the feeders whenever I let the cats in and out.   There are some very pretty songs going on out there.  Need to add "Install an outdoor microphone hooked to indoor speakers to hear the birds indoors" to my list of things for "him" to do.

Here is a lovely little clump of mosses I typically sees while walking down the path to the shelter house. It is a mix of reindeer moss from the woods around Dale Hollow Lake and some native moss.  The reindeer moss doesn't seem to want to establish here in my woods.  I collect a bit every once in awhile and bring it home.  It is such a nice texture and color in a woodsy setting.  I have a photo from several years ago of a hillside at Dale Hollow Lake that is just covered with it.  The effect is very fairytale-like.  You would expect to see tiny nymphs and gnomes in such a setting.

I mentioned the large witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) in the Jens Jensen landscape I worked on last summer in an earlier post.  Here is a photo of it from March 2009.  My six-foot tall son is standing next to it, so my estimate is that it is at least 30' x 30'.  I think Michael Dirr would find this one to be a contender for National Champion.  He lists one in Bedford, VA at 35' x 30' in his fifth edition of "Manual of Woody Landscape Plants". 

I need to go out and check my Hamamelis vernalis in the nursery for signs of blooming.  They bloom in late winter as opposed to  the H. virginiana which bloom in fall.  I found a large colony of witch hazel in the woods last summer, but did not think to check for bloom in the fall.  So I will check them this winter for signs of bloom and solve the mystery as to their species.  I will have to pull on the winter boots for that trek.

You're Never too Smart to Learn

I learned something this morning at the Garden Rant blog.  That there is an even better blog at The Garden Professors!  I may never make it back outside.  Anyway, it seems that each post on The Garden Professors is a short lesson suitable for Advanced Master Gardener Training.  The Friday Puzzlers are always great, and even though it is only Wednesday, I have one to share.

In the photo above you see a planting of Chamaecyparis pisifera probably 'Mops', well established for over ten years, healthy and yes, they are all the same species planted at the same time.  I think there are six plants total.  No trick photography, just a nice picture taken on a January day in Indiana.  As you can see there is a great deal of variation in the coloring.  They are supposed to be bright yellow as exhibited in the plant on the left.  So what is going on here?

You can post your thoughts and I will let you know if you are correct.

In the meantime, I would like to report that the learning continued at the Porter County Master Gardener Show in Valparaiso, IN this past weekend.  It was fantastic as usual.  Kudos to the Lake County MGs who also helped.  We always take a large group to this show because they have such great presenters including Connor Shaw of Possibility Place Nursery, Galen Gates from the Chicago Botanic Garden, Rich Eyre of Foxwillow Pines Nursery, Kunso Kim and Donna Smith from The Morton Arboretum, garden writer Jean Starr and several local MGs who lead programs as well.  The vendors are fantastic, too particularly Gene and  JoAn Bush of Munchkin Gardens, and I hear the food is good, but I never get away from the presentation room long enough to find out.  All this for $7, what a deal!  Gee I said that last year, too.

It's About Time

As you can tell, it has been almost a year since I posted anything.  Needless to say, it was a busy year.  My gardener friend Diane and I spent a great deal of the year restoring a Jens Jensen landscape in Indianapolis at a private residence.  The project is important to me on so many levels, and I am anxious to see the plantings develop over the next several years.  Diane and I had help from our husbands and various other people on occasion, but for the most part it was her mostly and me and the homeowner out there in the yard.

Here is Diane watering in a super quality native Hawthorne from Possibility Place Nursery.  It took some effort to find the native species plants indicated in the original Jensen design, but we are sure it will be well worth it.  In all we put in thousands of plants ranging from daffodil bulbs and tree seedlings to 1 3/4" caliper crab apples.  Diane and her husband also spread two semi loads of mulch on this 3 acre project.

The original stone paths were found by the homeowner during prep of the site.  It was completely overgrown with locust trees, honeysuckle and big leaf winter creeper.  The large oaks and maples were saved.  Here is a new bench placed per the design near the pond.  It looks lovely at the base of this tree.  A "house of bugs" was found at the base of the bench which turned out to be yellow jackets.  They were sprayed repeatedly and finally cleared out.

Here is the witch hazel in full bloom in October.  It is a glorious specimen at least 30' tall and wide.  We planted several more to form a colony.  I have no doubt that this was an original from the 1920s. Way in the back of this photo you see the neighbor's house.  They were so upset by the removal of all of the vegetation that they had a row of very large arborvitae planted right on the property line as a screen.  How sad that they will miss out on the view of a Jensen design out of their windows.

Diane and I will be preparing a program about this project  that we will present at our local Master Gardener meeting in November 2010.  We will have a whole year of photos to share.  I'll keep updates on the landscape's progress on this blog.