Fall bloom of Colchicum outside the study window with benefit of automatic sprinklers
Fall With No Rainfall
Joan Katherine Shaw
The
leaves are falling. They're coming down as if in capitulation to the
drought, a kind of throwing up of hands -- We give up! they say, We
give up!
I can hear them falling in rustling waves through the window here in the study and the sound is something like rain. But it's not rain, and the forecasters are saying that the drought we've been experiencing for the past five years in Cache Valley is showing no signs of a letup.
Moreover, the water situation in the West and in fact all over the world is something that's seriously worrying people who see parts of the world in the near future as simply dying of thirst -- not just the plants, but people themselves. One local water official, in asking that gardeners in Cache Valley take extreme care in how much culinary water they use in their gardens, said something that made me nearly catatonic about putting anything other than ditch water on my flower beds -- Remember, he told us, that you're using drinking water on your lawn.
Indeed.
Well, the lawns aren't worrying me. The lawns will come back. It's the shrubs and roses and the perennials that worry me. And it's the orchard. It's impossible to water 350 apple trees with culinary water in any case, and the irrigation pumps were turned off in the middle of September. Yet the warm weather goes on, plants are not going dormant, and the dry weather persists. What to do in a case like this?
Protecting Drought-stressed Plants
The fall colors around the place right now are spectacularly lovely, especially the aspens, such as the one shown below with a still-green poplar in the background. But speaking as a native Eastener, growing up where water came from the heavens with fair regularity, the effort of gardening in an area that receives a scant 17 inches of rain a year has never stopped being a burden. But when 17 inches drops to near zero and irrigation water is in danger of disappearing altogether, a gardening life seems particularly hard.
Luckily,
we have managed to accumulate a good-sized woodlot on the farm
which needs yearly, often twice-yearly,
trimming. So we have plenty of
brush, large limbs, occasionally an entire tree to be chipped by the
arborists who come here to work on the place. Just this past
week, Shirlaine and Jodie, our horticulture service these days, spread
three truckloads of this mulch on
our flower beds on the north.
Wood chips, as opposed to bark, draw nitrogen out of the soil, so fertilization is necessary when spreading woodchips on flower beds, but that's no problem. The problem is in keeping the flower beds as cool and as moist as possible during a summer of drought and, this fall, preparing them for a safe sleep through the winter.
In Cache Valley there is available in the Logan Landfill, by the truckload and at reasonable prices, mulch of various kinds to supplement our own supply. Some of it is evergreen mulch which is nicely fragrant and helps acidify the soil. There are also many nursery and building supply outlets here that offer supplies of bark by the truckload, too, both chipped and ground. If you have nothing but your car to haul your mulch, it's possible to get mulch by the bag. We have taken advantage of this availability for years now.
During late fall, also, I'll be using the two grass catcher bags on the back of our Snapper rider-mower to mulch the leaves along with the grass as I mow. I use this material as a matter of course to cover the more sensitive roses, especially our few hybrid teas, so as to protect them over the winter. This mulch also helps to add nutrients to the soil. But because this winter could well be a dry one, I intend to cover everything -- roses and perennials -- except the most hardy of the larger shrubs, in case we're plagued with an "open" winter -- a winter without protective snow cover. Judging from the gloomy predictions I'm hearing lately, an open winter could well happen this year.
No Good News on the Horizon
According to The National Drought Summary, put out by NOAA, almost all of Utah and large parts of Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, and Montana are areas of extreme drought, as are scattered pockets throughout the Midwest. Along the border of southern Idaho where it meets the northern borders of Nevada and Utah is an area of exceptional drought -- which is about as bad as it can get. Unfortunately, DragonGoose Farm is located right in this long, east-west strip. As an indication of the severity of the drought, the Summary reports that as of last Tuesday, October 7, Lake Powell in southern Utah is 90 feet below its typical level in October. As a further addition to our joy, NOAA predicts that most of the interior West will see below-normal rainfall and above-normal temperatures over the next two weeks.
So the four clumps of narrow green leaves that have suddenly emerged from the bed outside my window could actually be the miniature daffodils I suspected they were, and I wonder if they're going to go ahead and bloom five months early.
The many and scattered plants of Japanese Anemone in the brick garden are blooming with abandon at about the right time, but they've had the privilege of an automatic midnight spraying with culinary water.
In her book, Springer, who lives in Colorado, writes of weather resilient plants, especially those that thrive in spite of everything. The best advice she gives to me is how to have a luxuriant garden in this sun-blasted, winter wind-blasted, and now drought-plagued Rocky Mountain West.
Here in the West, she writes in her preface,"Many of the plants that grow so well on the coasts and in England don't thrive, let alone survive." And I can second that. In the iris walk, most of which is filled with water-wise plants including the iris, I decided that some Foxglove spikes (Digitalis grandiflora) would look nice from my bedroom window, and I planted two of them there this past spring next to the one I'd planted in the spring of 2001. During this past hot, dry summer , the earlier one turned yellow then simply disappeared. The one I planted this spring managed to put up a dwarfish spike and then languished to near nothingness. Since I had enough forethought to put markers by both of them, I know where they are, and plan to dig them up and replant them somewhere near a permanent sprinkler head. I hope they'll take heart and decide to grow again but Digitalis grandiflora is definitely not a waterwise plant and the spot I chose for it received much too much Utah sun in any case.
Springer, in her chapter, "Through the seasons in the lush, dry garden," describes and illustrates lavishly, a cornicopia of plants requiring little or no irrigation. At the end are long lists of water-wise bulbs, shrubs, and perennials. This chapter alone was a joy to me, who had looked upon water-wise plants for so long as fairly dull and colorless. It also gave me hope for the iris walk, locale of the sadly misplaced Digitalis grandiflora, for there are other Digitalis species that are indeed waterwise -- for instance, Digitalis lanata (Grecian foxflove) and Digitalis obscura (Spanish foxglove). The flower spikes of these two species are not so exhuberant as those of Digitalis grandiflora, but they are nevertheless lovely (and nevertheless spikes).
The Iris Walk
I should take a minute here and describe this walk for you. It's comprised of a 60- by 6-ft bed separated by a grass walk that fronts a longer, deep, curving bed bordering the hillside. Along with native wild plum trees, a few Chestnut Crabapple trees, and three rampant grapevines, the hillside bed is fairly stuffed with tough-as-nails granny irises (discovered as apparently long-time residents when we moved on the farm thirty-four years ago). In front of the iris are plants of pink Penstemon, blue Jacob's Ladder (Polemonium caeruleum), clumps of bright pink cone flower (Echanacea), a smattering of small yellow daisies (Anthemis tinctoria), patches of Sedum purpureum 'Autumn Joy' , entirely too much lamb's ears, and our ever-faithful single-flowered hollyhocks.
North end of the Iris Walk showing Alba Semi-plena just starting to bloom and,
in the foreground, lamb's ears, early yellow daisies, hollyhocks
Perennials
fronting the iris In the separate bed, are more hollyhocks, Veronica picata 'Red Fox' and 'Blue
Peter', Monarda didyma (Beebalm),
'Cambridge Scarlet' and 'Croftway Pink', Rudbeckia (Black-eyed Susan
and Gloriosa Daisy) , Coreopsis
verticullata (Tickseed),
Centaurea montana (Perennial Bachelor's Buttons), Gaillardia (Blanket Flower) and, in
the spring,
narcissus and tulips, both species and Darwin, with wide swaths of blue
Forget-me-nots. I also have some
hardy, once-blooming roses in there -- the species roses, Rosa xanthina (a yellow single)
and Rosa glauca (deep pink
single blossoms and delicate blue-green leaves), and the hardy upright
shrub, Rosa Alba Semi-Plena (white
single, fragrant blooms), shown above. This Alba reaches to eight feet
and has
thick, tough, well-armed canes.
All these plants do well out there with hit-or-miss supplemental watering, though they can't do without water altogether. Springer's Colorado hasn't been hit so badly with this drought we have in Utah, so I imagine the flowers described in the chapter on lush, dry gardens get a bit of water from the heavens along with Colorado's plentiful sun.
Pictured below is a swath of blue Foregt-Me-Nots with Narcissi in the spring. Later in the season, the Narcissi foliage dies down and becomes hidden by the emerging perennials. The Forget-Me-Nots dry out and get pretty awful looking. We pull them up, shake out the myriad seeds, and watch for them to come up around the end of summer. The next spring they will again bloom -- there, and just about anywhere else the seed happens to scatter.
A Sincere Recommendation - Buy
This Book
One of the great things about Springer's book is that it's written specifically for gardens in the Intermountain West. Coupled with the long lists of recommended flowers, shrubs, and vines suggested for our climate, it's truly a godsend to gardeners, especially those of us in Utah struggling with an ongoing drought. Speaking personally, it's given me a tremendous boost out of the drought-funk I'd fallen in around mid-summer. She has chapters on roses for realists, the problems of hail (which we experience here all too often), annuals as season-spanners, and the last chapter, "Portraits of Indispensably Undaunted Plants." This last is an illustrated description of some really tough friends to see a gardener through the worst the Intermountain climate can throw at her.
I can hear them falling in rustling waves through the window here in the study and the sound is something like rain. But it's not rain, and the forecasters are saying that the drought we've been experiencing for the past five years in Cache Valley is showing no signs of a letup.
Moreover, the water situation in the West and in fact all over the world is something that's seriously worrying people who see parts of the world in the near future as simply dying of thirst -- not just the plants, but people themselves. One local water official, in asking that gardeners in Cache Valley take extreme care in how much culinary water they use in their gardens, said something that made me nearly catatonic about putting anything other than ditch water on my flower beds -- Remember, he told us, that you're using drinking water on your lawn.
Indeed.
Well, the lawns aren't worrying me. The lawns will come back. It's the shrubs and roses and the perennials that worry me. And it's the orchard. It's impossible to water 350 apple trees with culinary water in any case, and the irrigation pumps were turned off in the middle of September. Yet the warm weather goes on, plants are not going dormant, and the dry weather persists. What to do in a case like this?
Protecting Drought-stressed Plants
The fall colors around the place right now are spectacularly lovely, especially the aspens, such as the one shown below with a still-green poplar in the background. But speaking as a native Eastener, growing up where water came from the heavens with fair regularity, the effort of gardening in an area that receives a scant 17 inches of rain a year has never stopped being a burden. But when 17 inches drops to near zero and irrigation water is in danger of disappearing altogether, a gardening life seems particularly hard.
Luckily,
we have managed to accumulate a good-sized woodlot on the farm
which needs yearly, often twice-yearly,
trimming. So we have plenty of
brush, large limbs, occasionally an entire tree to be chipped by the
arborists who come here to work on the place. Just this past
week, Shirlaine and Jodie, our horticulture service these days, spread
three truckloads of this mulch on
our flower beds on the north. Wood chips, as opposed to bark, draw nitrogen out of the soil, so fertilization is necessary when spreading woodchips on flower beds, but that's no problem. The problem is in keeping the flower beds as cool and as moist as possible during a summer of drought and, this fall, preparing them for a safe sleep through the winter.
In Cache Valley there is available in the Logan Landfill, by the truckload and at reasonable prices, mulch of various kinds to supplement our own supply. Some of it is evergreen mulch which is nicely fragrant and helps acidify the soil. There are also many nursery and building supply outlets here that offer supplies of bark by the truckload, too, both chipped and ground. If you have nothing but your car to haul your mulch, it's possible to get mulch by the bag. We have taken advantage of this availability for years now.
During late fall, also, I'll be using the two grass catcher bags on the back of our Snapper rider-mower to mulch the leaves along with the grass as I mow. I use this material as a matter of course to cover the more sensitive roses, especially our few hybrid teas, so as to protect them over the winter. This mulch also helps to add nutrients to the soil. But because this winter could well be a dry one, I intend to cover everything -- roses and perennials -- except the most hardy of the larger shrubs, in case we're plagued with an "open" winter -- a winter without protective snow cover. Judging from the gloomy predictions I'm hearing lately, an open winter could well happen this year.
No Good News on the Horizon
According to The National Drought Summary, put out by NOAA, almost all of Utah and large parts of Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, and Montana are areas of extreme drought, as are scattered pockets throughout the Midwest. Along the border of southern Idaho where it meets the northern borders of Nevada and Utah is an area of exceptional drought -- which is about as bad as it can get. Unfortunately, DragonGoose Farm is located right in this long, east-west strip. As an indication of the severity of the drought, the Summary reports that as of last Tuesday, October 7, Lake Powell in southern Utah is 90 feet below its typical level in October. As a further addition to our joy, NOAA predicts that most of the interior West will see below-normal rainfall and above-normal temperatures over the next two weeks.
So the four clumps of narrow green leaves that have suddenly emerged from the bed outside my window could actually be the miniature daffodils I suspected they were, and I wonder if they're going to go ahead and bloom five months early.
The many and scattered plants of Japanese Anemone in the brick garden are blooming with abandon at about the right time, but they've had the privilege of an automatic midnight spraying with culinary water.
 |
Melanie
planted these Japanese anemones (one of which is pictured at the left)
when she was still in
high
school. Its varietal name, she tells me, is 'Robustissima', the only
Japanese anemone that can survive Cache Valley's winter. It's done well
(along with the pink
Colchicum pictured at the head of this piece), thanks to regular
watering. It's produced
many suckers over the years that we've dug up
and planted in
other beds. The blossoms have delicate, pale pink overlapping petals
around a button of gold stamens. The leaves below are luxurious and
make a
lovely picture all through spring and summer. Then, just before the
first frost in the fall, up come the blossoms on long, thin delicate
stems. But the ones in less favored sites this fifth year of drought
are barely holding their own
and have no blooms.
So What Do We Do About the Drought?
One thing we don't do, especially in droughty years, is plant anemones in a spot that doesn't get regular watering. Lauren Springer, a professional gardener and garden writer for Horticulture and Country Living Gardener magazines, has written a book, The Undaunted Garden, that was recommended by the American Horticulture Society as one of the best 75 gardening books written in the last 75 years -- quite an honor! |
In her book, Springer, who lives in Colorado, writes of weather resilient plants, especially those that thrive in spite of everything. The best advice she gives to me is how to have a luxuriant garden in this sun-blasted, winter wind-blasted, and now drought-plagued Rocky Mountain West.
Here in the West, she writes in her preface,"Many of the plants that grow so well on the coasts and in England don't thrive, let alone survive." And I can second that. In the iris walk, most of which is filled with water-wise plants including the iris, I decided that some Foxglove spikes (Digitalis grandiflora) would look nice from my bedroom window, and I planted two of them there this past spring next to the one I'd planted in the spring of 2001. During this past hot, dry summer , the earlier one turned yellow then simply disappeared. The one I planted this spring managed to put up a dwarfish spike and then languished to near nothingness. Since I had enough forethought to put markers by both of them, I know where they are, and plan to dig them up and replant them somewhere near a permanent sprinkler head. I hope they'll take heart and decide to grow again but Digitalis grandiflora is definitely not a waterwise plant and the spot I chose for it received much too much Utah sun in any case.
Springer, in her chapter, "Through the seasons in the lush, dry garden," describes and illustrates lavishly, a cornicopia of plants requiring little or no irrigation. At the end are long lists of water-wise bulbs, shrubs, and perennials. This chapter alone was a joy to me, who had looked upon water-wise plants for so long as fairly dull and colorless. It also gave me hope for the iris walk, locale of the sadly misplaced Digitalis grandiflora, for there are other Digitalis species that are indeed waterwise -- for instance, Digitalis lanata (Grecian foxflove) and Digitalis obscura (Spanish foxglove). The flower spikes of these two species are not so exhuberant as those of Digitalis grandiflora, but they are nevertheless lovely (and nevertheless spikes).
The Iris Walk
I should take a minute here and describe this walk for you. It's comprised of a 60- by 6-ft bed separated by a grass walk that fronts a longer, deep, curving bed bordering the hillside. Along with native wild plum trees, a few Chestnut Crabapple trees, and three rampant grapevines, the hillside bed is fairly stuffed with tough-as-nails granny irises (discovered as apparently long-time residents when we moved on the farm thirty-four years ago). In front of the iris are plants of pink Penstemon, blue Jacob's Ladder (Polemonium caeruleum), clumps of bright pink cone flower (Echanacea), a smattering of small yellow daisies (Anthemis tinctoria), patches of Sedum purpureum 'Autumn Joy' , entirely too much lamb's ears, and our ever-faithful single-flowered hollyhocks.
North end of the Iris Walk showing Alba Semi-plena just starting to bloom and,
in the foreground, lamb's ears, early yellow daisies, hollyhocks
All these plants do well out there with hit-or-miss supplemental watering, though they can't do without water altogether. Springer's Colorado hasn't been hit so badly with this drought we have in Utah, so I imagine the flowers described in the chapter on lush, dry gardens get a bit of water from the heavens along with Colorado's plentiful sun.
Pictured below is a swath of blue Foregt-Me-Nots with Narcissi in the spring. Later in the season, the Narcissi foliage dies down and becomes hidden by the emerging perennials. The Forget-Me-Nots dry out and get pretty awful looking. We pull them up, shake out the myriad seeds, and watch for them to come up around the end of summer. The next spring they will again bloom -- there, and just about anywhere else the seed happens to scatter.
A Sincere Recommendation - Buy
This BookOne of the great things about Springer's book is that it's written specifically for gardens in the Intermountain West. Coupled with the long lists of recommended flowers, shrubs, and vines suggested for our climate, it's truly a godsend to gardeners, especially those of us in Utah struggling with an ongoing drought. Speaking personally, it's given me a tremendous boost out of the drought-funk I'd fallen in around mid-summer. She has chapters on roses for realists, the problems of hail (which we experience here all too often), annuals as season-spanners, and the last chapter, "Portraits of Indispensably Undaunted Plants." This last is an illustrated description of some really tough friends to see a gardener through the worst the Intermountain climate can throw at her.
Hoping for rain,
Joan
Katherine Shaw
October
2003
Photos by Joan Katherine Shaw
Book
mentioned in this essay:
Click to buy from Joan
Shaw's Garden - The Undaunted Garden by Lauren Springer
Click to buy from Joan
Shaw's Garden - The Undaunted Garden by Lauren Springer
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