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Wrestling with nature
May. 19th, 2003 01:13 amNo, it's not that kind of entry, honest.
I spent a completely unbelievable amount of time on Saturday digging up hairy bellflower. It's a pretty enough plant, with long spikes of bell-shaped purple flowers in June and July and August and September. I like the way it fills in bare spots. It's green early in the spring, after the motherwort but before much else.
It's taking over my garden.
It must be a biennial. It comes as rosettes, and as much taller plants with different leaves and long flower stalks. Underground, however, they are all connected. The flowering plants, or those that will flower if you don't dig them up, have long white roots. The rosettes have a tidy small ball of pinkish roots, but attached to most of those is a long white one. Following those is an exercise in futility. For all I know, every single hairy bellflower plant in the universe is part of the same root system.
I dug and pulled and dug and pulled and dug and pulled. It was a glorious day, albeit a trifle too warm for me. This made me concentrate my efforts on the flower bed beneath Lydy's office window, which gets shade early in the afternoon.
It now contains a few wilting daffodils, a new small plant of blue flax, a gigantic volunteer hollyhock that will bloom this year and probably be pink, a good healthy clump of very weird chrysanthemums, a struggling crop of physostegia seedlings, two determined purple coneflowers, offspring of those I planted too far back in the bed, a defeated-looking coral-bell plant with pale green ailing leaves and two defiant flower stalks, a bunch of nasturtium seeds, and the stump of a buckthorn bush.
I also dug almost as much hairy bellflower out of a larger bed, rescuing a batch of irises that don't look likely to bloom this year, a really happy crop of trumpet lilies, and the newly-planted anemone and pastel yarrow, from certain asphyxiation. I discovered in the process that the phlox "David" has seeded itself neatly all over, plunging through the hairy bellflower, wild grapevine, dandelion, lawn grass, and violets as if they were not there.
Perhaps most pleasing of all, the Zone 5 Oriental lilies I planted two years ago have suddenly sent up two tentative spindly stalks. I cleared their immediate area of hairy bellflower and orange daylily, and fed them.
Today I mowed the back yard.
I still have a lot of seeds to plant, and a large foxglove to put into the rose bed once I have finished the vivisection of the Henry Kelsey rose bush.
*whew*
Pamela
I spent a completely unbelievable amount of time on Saturday digging up hairy bellflower. It's a pretty enough plant, with long spikes of bell-shaped purple flowers in June and July and August and September. I like the way it fills in bare spots. It's green early in the spring, after the motherwort but before much else.
It's taking over my garden.
It must be a biennial. It comes as rosettes, and as much taller plants with different leaves and long flower stalks. Underground, however, they are all connected. The flowering plants, or those that will flower if you don't dig them up, have long white roots. The rosettes have a tidy small ball of pinkish roots, but attached to most of those is a long white one. Following those is an exercise in futility. For all I know, every single hairy bellflower plant in the universe is part of the same root system.
I dug and pulled and dug and pulled and dug and pulled. It was a glorious day, albeit a trifle too warm for me. This made me concentrate my efforts on the flower bed beneath Lydy's office window, which gets shade early in the afternoon.
It now contains a few wilting daffodils, a new small plant of blue flax, a gigantic volunteer hollyhock that will bloom this year and probably be pink, a good healthy clump of very weird chrysanthemums, a struggling crop of physostegia seedlings, two determined purple coneflowers, offspring of those I planted too far back in the bed, a defeated-looking coral-bell plant with pale green ailing leaves and two defiant flower stalks, a bunch of nasturtium seeds, and the stump of a buckthorn bush.
I also dug almost as much hairy bellflower out of a larger bed, rescuing a batch of irises that don't look likely to bloom this year, a really happy crop of trumpet lilies, and the newly-planted anemone and pastel yarrow, from certain asphyxiation. I discovered in the process that the phlox "David" has seeded itself neatly all over, plunging through the hairy bellflower, wild grapevine, dandelion, lawn grass, and violets as if they were not there.
Perhaps most pleasing of all, the Zone 5 Oriental lilies I planted two years ago have suddenly sent up two tentative spindly stalks. I cleared their immediate area of hairy bellflower and orange daylily, and fed them.
Today I mowed the back yard.
I still have a lot of seeds to plant, and a large foxglove to put into the rose bed once I have finished the vivisection of the Henry Kelsey rose bush.
*whew*
Pamela
