quite early one morning

Posted on August 11, 2012 by paridevita

The dog got me up at a ridiculous hour this morning; maybe he heard something he didn’t like, I don’t know. It was just as well because he was such a terrible bed hog last night (I was sleeping on a pair of hind feet), and I set the alarm to wake up early and take pictures.

Some people have this idea that because I’m retired and spend a lot of time in the garden that I get up with the chickens and rush outside to work in the garden. They can keep thinking that. I get up when the dog says it’s time to get up, and if he’s spent the night lying on his back, feet in the air (and in my face), with the fan blowing cool air on him, then he’s likely to want to stay in bed until 8 o’clock. And so am I.

Anyway, yesterday morning I noticed a couple of flowers blooming on plants I thought were never going to do anything but get bigger and bigger. There’s not much blooming here because it hasn’t rained in quite some time and I’m disinclined to have a watering regime that lets me have a huge floral display during a drought. It just seems weird to me.

But this oenothera, which was beginning to look suspiciously like a weed to me, opened a couple of flowers, and they were so spectacular I tried to take a picture of the one that was open last night, with zero success. It’s not very easy to focus a camera in the dark.

There was just one tattered flower this morning; not sure if the wind did something to it last night, or it was savaged by some over-eager hawkmoth, but here it is.

It thought this was labeled Oenothera longiflora but when I looked that up, the search engine said “Did you mean Oenothera longifolia“, and since there were dozens of entries under that name, I thought I did mean longifolia until I looked at Tropicos and The International Plant Names Index and no, I did not mean longifolia because there is no such thing as Oenothera longifolia. No such thing. A totally imaginary name, and yet there are dozens of references to it online.

It’s Oenothera longiflora, and it’s from Argentina. Or, at least, if it is that, it’s not called longifolia. It blooms at night, the flowers fading by morning, which is just too bad, because there are lots more flower buds, but I plan to be asleep.

P.S. It’s Oenothera longissima, not longiflora. A biennial from Utah. I should read labels more carefully.

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what to do ….

Posted on August 10, 2012 by paridevita

The little seedlings in the seed pots are crying out for me to do something with them. This is the time of year that I find it best to transplant seedlings out into the garden; they just seem to be able to go into winter more easily with a few months’ growth.

Sphaeralcea munroana, left, and S. parviflora, right. Or is it the other way around?

Of course I could wait for those autumn rains that everyone talks about. It would be a long, long wait. Instead, since I know I don’t live in a place where it rains in the autumn, reliably anyway, I’ll plant them out, stick flags next to them, water the daylights out of them, and push them back into the ground if they try to escape after frost heaves them out of the ground.

If left in the pots outside over the winter, the plants might live, and then again, they might not. I don’t know enough about root hardiness to say anything either way.

The other choices are to have my garden staff (oh, wait …..), that is, for me prick out the seedlings and plant them extra carefully and watch the little plants die in a day, or plant out the whole pot. Planting out the whole pot is the smart thing to do. I do a lot of stupid things (and not just in the garden, either), so doing something smart might come as a surprise to the little plants and they just might live.

 

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