Many of the roses and fruit trees sold from Wayside Gardens are grafted plants. Grafted plants are simply your desired plants grown on top of a hardy rootstock. The top part of the plant, the part that matters, is called the scion. The scion bears all of the fruit, flowers, or foliage that we want.
Grafted plants are beneficial because they serve to increase variety, improve quality, and reduce prices. The extra hardy rootstock ensures survival for plants in zones that would normally be way too cold, allowing you to grow plants which would otherwise be off-limits. When a fruit tree is grafted to a mature rootstock allows fruit production much sooner than if you had to wait for the original roots to mature. You also know exactly what you are getting. Your plant has been cloned and will be exactly what you wanted. Clonal reproduction is also much quicker than growing from seed, making it more cost-effective.
Plants are grafted onto very similar plants, usually the of same genus. Most of Wayside Gardens’ grafted roses are grafted onto ‘Dr. Huey’, a hardy old rose with flat blooms that are deep crimson with a golden center. You will see them often at old home sites where the scions have long died off, and the Dr. Huey rootstock has flourished. The Wayside Gardens fruit trees are often grafted onto strong, wild versions of themselves. For example, there is pear rootstock, which, left to it’s own devices, would grow tangled branches with nasty thorns. Make sure you trim back the growth from your rootstock if you don’t want it to take over. Sometimes, in a case where the delicate scion cannot take the extremes and dies back, the rootstock may take over completely. Make sure you pamper your young grafted plant until it gets established.
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We have been shown the importance of color from the artistic point of view, your garden as a masterpiece, colorful and pretty. But what do those colors mean? Why do plants have color and what causes plants to be different colors? Almost everyone has heard of chlorophyll, but have you heard of the other two type of plant pigment? Do you know what their functions are?
It is not exactly simple, and most gardeners might not even care. However, I think it would be safe to make the assumption that for just about every person who sees their garden as a medium for artistic expression there is another who could only describe a flower in terms of its morphology and functional benefits for the particular plant. From my experiences here at Wayside Gardens, I can also promise you that neither will do so with more or less passion.
American kids officially learn about chlorophyll in seventh grade life science, though they may be introduced to it a little earlier. So we’ve all heard of it. We know what photosynthesis is- the method by which plants turn light into usable energy. Plants store this energy, animals eat the plants, animals eat animals that ate the plants, and humans eat plants and animals. Ultimately, almost all energy for growth and movement on Earth comes from the Sun via photosynthesis. Yay! Everyone give a round of applause to plants for shouldering such a huge responsibility for the rest of us.
Chlorophyll is the pigment responsible for absorbing most of the light during photosynthesis. There are two different kinds: a, green to blue-green and b, red. Chlorophyll a is the most common. Thus, most leaves are usually green. You’ll notice, in the summer that trees are completely covered with leaves because this is when they are doing the bulk of their growth.
Butterfly™Rainbow Marcella Echinacea shows off its pink and orange tones
Carotenoids are the pigment that give plants, carrots for example, colors ranging from yellow to orange. They have many functions in nature, and though they are important to many animals, they cannot be synthesized and must be ingested. In plants they also have functions in photosynthesis. During Autumn, the leaves of deciduous trees change color because they no longer need to collect sunlight and the green chlorophyll thins out revealing the colors of the carotenoids and another reddish chlorophyll before the leaves fall.
Flavonoids are the third kind of pigment and provide the largest variety of color to flowers, ranging from red to blue. When combined with the first two, the overall combination determines the look of a particular plant.
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While probing for ideas that might add a little intrigue to the pitifully uninspiring flora of my backyard, I was told by a friend to check out bog gardens. My first thought was of a marsh or swamp, something more appropriate for a wildlife preserve or ghost story than my simple little yard. However, trusting my source, I dove, head-first into that murky swamp of information, the all-knowing internet.
Apparently, if you have a low spot in your yard that never completely dries and you plant some elephant ears there, you have not created a bog garden as some of the sources I found would lead you to believe. It is a clever way to turn a problem into an asset, but not a bog garden. A bog is actually a type of wetland formed from a deposit of dead plant matter, most commonly some type of moss or lichen. Its moisture comes almost completely from precipitation and tends to be slightly acidic. An exotic environment for exotic plants- It’s exactly what I was looking for.
I also found that recreating this environment on the small scale is not very difficult; some people even create indoor bog gardens in terrariums, which would be a perfect way to display those bog-loving carnivorous plants and make an excellent conversation piece. I just needed a place that will hold moisture and that I could fill with peat. I had the perfect place, that gross little pond insert that I installed two seasons ago, or as I like to call it, my “mosquito nursery”. I just cleaned that out and poked a few holes in the bottom for drainage- lined the bottom with coarse sand and filled it with moistened peat. The moss maintains the acidity and I use a soaker hose to keep my bog damp. I planted an Iris, this very interesting Juncus Effusus Unicorn, and two Pine Hibiscuses. Situated in the center of my garden, accented with two lawn gnomes and a pink flamingo, my bog has definitely added spice to my back yard.
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Marco van Noort named Sweet Heidy for his wife. All those plant introductions, all that labor, and this is the one he’s chosen to give his wife’s name to! This alone tells us how special Sweet Heidy is.
The biggest distinction between Sweet Heidy and Orkney Cherry, aside from the foliage and bloom colour, is the habit. Sweet Heidy is partly trailing, a good plant for hanging baskets, flower pots, low walls, terrace gardens, that sort of thing. Give it a place to trail and it will do so, stretching about 2 1/2 feet long if need be. Simply lovely, needless to add.
Orkney Cherry is a spreader, and for a Geranium, it wastes no time! Give it bare soil and it will grow a 2 foot mat of fairly dense (this is a Geranium after all, not a creeping Phlox!) foliage of absolutely beautiful green spotted and veined faintly in deep pink, the same colour as the blooms. It’s a good choice for the border, because while it’s aggressive, it won’t choke anything out or really get in the way.
That said, most people will prefer Orkney Cherry because it’s the heaviest-blooming Geranium I’ve ever seen, full stop. The bloom season is endless too, but Sweet Heidy has an extra long season as well. For sheer number of flowers in a season, there’s no beating Orkney Cherry.
To give Sweet Heidy its due, the flower colour is its remarkable (and unique) merit. The flowers emerge a sort of cream colour with infusions of pink, which darkens as they mature. Finally they acquire blue edges, whilst keeping the pink further in, and the cream around the base. It’s the only hardy Geranium I know with this multi-ringed look. I hesitate to call it tri-coloured because all the shades aren’t present throughout the life of the bloom, but it is really distinctive and rather amazing.
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It begins in 1936, when a fellow named Rex Pearce (used to own a nursery name of Pearce Seed) got a hold of a bunch of Belamcanda flabellata plants from Japan. These plants had clear yellow to gold blooms. He crossed them with Belamcanda chinensis, and came up with a selection he named the Avalon Hybrids. I get the idea that these plants were various colors, and definitely had reds, oranges, and yellows in the mix.
As luck would have it, a while later the two species of Belamcanda he’d crossed were found to be just one, so the Avalon Hybrids were really intRAspecific rather than intERspecific. (That part’s for you, Tamsin! Only us plant nerds could care about the distinction!)
Meanwhile, Carl Hansen went on one of his plant-hunting expeditions and brought back, from “the wilds of Siberia” (matter of fact, I think it was near the town of Shilka, but I guess that doesn’t sound as dramatic), Pardanthopsis dichotoma, the so-called Orchid Lily, which Zilke Brothers Nursery in Michigan marketed under the name Hansen’s New Everblooming Orchid Iris. Now there’s a name to sell some plants!
In the 1960s, a plant fellow named Samuel N. Norris out of Owensboro, Kentucky, comes along and buys seed of the Avalon Hybrids from Park Seed and nursery plants of Hansen’s New etc. from Zilke Bros, and starts crossing them. I understand that the Hansen’s plants — the Pardanthopsis — were a reddish-purple bloom and the Avalons — the Belamcanda — were yellow, orange, and red, so he got himself a good rainbow effect going. In 1967 he harvested about 500 seeds from these crosses, and the original F1 (that means the first cross, Kay, if you haven’t fallen asleep yet with my rambling on!) hybrids were very uniform as to color and height. But the second generation (F2) hybrids began to show a much wider range of color and size.
Hartlage Wine Raulston Allspice (x Sinocalycalycanthus raulstonii)
Nonetheless, in the spring of 1970 Norris sent what he’d got of the new crosses to Dr. Lee W. Lenz out at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Gardens in Claremont, California. Lenz thought they were terrific, and went ahead and got the new plants named and registered as x Pardancanda norrisii in July of 1972. (The “x” comes first to show an intergenetic cross, like our x Sinocalycalycanthus.)
Now here’s where Park’s own Doc Alston came in. He was a young firecracker out of Texas in the 1970s when he came to Park, and he continued Norris’s work. He found that the fourth generation (F4) crosses varied greatly in color and patterning as well as height, and he created a mix that included as wide a range as he could possibly get. This is the mix that Park’s been selling for some 30 years now, and a fine one it is. These plants are drought-tolerant, the blooms really are spectacular, and you never know what you’re going to get in terms of color. Most folks like the seedpods that follow the flowers best of all — they make good everlastings — but I like those orchid-like blooms about as well as anything in my garden.
And there you have it: the forebears of this new Sangria everyone’s talking about!
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That’s x Pardancanda, if you please — it’s an intergeneric cross of Belamcanda chinensis x Pardanthopsis dichotoma. The name is taken from part of each genus name: Pardan + canda. I have wondered if they knew they were going to call it “Candy Lily” when they came up with the new genus, because the “canda” bit does fit in nicely. (And if you’ve never heard of Pardanthopsis, it used to be called Iris dichotoma. It’s one of the beardless Irises, and has the lovely common name of Vesper Iris — presumably because the blooms opened at the hour for Vespers?)
Anyway, x Pardancanda was introduced by our own Doc Alston in the early ’70’s, but Doc will tell you that all the breeding was done by Sam Norris, who purchased the original plants from Park Seed. The species is named for him, but Mr. Norris never released any varieties onto the market, so Doc redid the crosses and came up with the mix that Park Seed has been selling so successfully for 40 years. Doc claims he played around with selecting individual colors but was never satisfied with the results, which does sound just like him — too modest by half! At any rate, there have been other selections, but I believe ‘Sangria’ is the first individual color. The flowers are larger and the season of interest even longer. Candy Lilies have those big, shiny, blackberry-like seedpods that people are keen to use in indoor arrangements, so after the blooms pass in late summer or early fall, the performance continues with a new look.
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Mount Hood Daffodil
Mt. Hood is a fine Daffodil for the south. My buddy in south Texas grows it in a big patch with King Alfred Improved where his lawn used to be. He’s one of these fellows who won’t grow anything introduced later than the second World War, for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom. But I must admit that the combination of bright white and yellow looks good even from a distance. Jim — my Texas buddy — says that water makes all the difference to bulbs in his climate, and that if you don’t get a wet enough winter, you’d better start watering in January or so. I don’t think things have ever gotten that extreme here in Greenwood (though we still call ourselves zone 7b instead of 8, which is where we really are these days climate-wise), but it’s an interesting point.
Mt. Hood is kind of fun because when it first opens, the whole thing is a sort of cream color. The perianth fades pretty quickly to white, but the trumpet — it’s one of the Giant Trumpets, you know — remains off-white for some time before finally bowing to the inevitable. Once you’ve got a big planting you can see the blooms at all stages at once, since the older ones will come up and open sooner than the johnny-come-latelies.
All I know about Mt. Hood is that the RHS took its time recognizing this Daffodil’s worth. The variety was introduced in the late ’30’s and I don’t believe the RHS gave it the nod until the ’90’s — hope the breeder wasn’t counting on that Award of Merit in his or her own lifetime!
King Alfred Improved Daffodil
By the way, King Alfred Improved won’t let you down here in South Carolina either. Say what you will about King Alfred Improved — it’s like poor Stella de Oro, too commonly used to be appreciated — it blooms anywhere, and those flowers are huge.
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The Encores are on everyone’s list these days, and why not? They are fantastic houseplants, sending out blooms almost every month of the year if kept indoors properly. (Speaking of Scots, this year-round bloom business reminds me of Miss Walker of Drumsheugh. She felt about plants the way her fellow Victorians seemed to feel about children: why stop at just one or two if you can have a dozen? Now, Rhododendrons were streaming into Britain at this time, so Miss Walker could have stocked her considerable garden with many, many more. But she “restrained” herself to about 50, choosing them carefully to assure herself of having at least one in bloom every month of the year! This was in 1860, no less, and here we are nearly 150 years later, still limiting our gardens to spring bloomers with the occasional fall rebloomer! –Of course, Miss Walker had a few pennies to rub together, and a lovely conservatory, and plenty of staff, and leisure time — all those perks of a bygone age!)
But back to modern times. The Encores are absolutely priceless for gardeners who can’t bear to see the end of those spring blooms: they should grow several indoors for yearround beauty and more in the garden, where they send out a few summer blossoms and then fully bloom again in autumn.
Beyond the Encores, we carry a good line of many of the major groups: the Exburys, Leaches, Robin Hills, and even a Tony Shammarello and a bonsai Satsuki. For customers looking for cold-hardiness, Golden Lights is absolutely the best. It’s hardy into zone 4, and was bred in Minnesota, so you can imagine it’s felt a chill or two. This Azalea is one of the many bred from Northern Lights, and we chose it because it’s easily the most mildew-resistant and among the most fragrant. Now, the Robin Hill Hybrids are good for the north too because they bloom much later than others. Betty Anne Voss is a big favorite because the blooms are large and double, and the habit is semi-weeping. But my personal favorite will always be Hilda Niblett. There’s something about that ground-hugging habit just covered in big peach and white blooms that does it for me.
For those with the opposite problem — too much heat, with its attendant evil of mildew — the classic Exbury Gibraltar is the best choice through zone 8. And Betty Anne Voss goes into zone 9 with great vigour. Yaku Princess, a Tony Shammarello hybrid, is simply one of the hardiest Rhododendrons of all, and its densely set, evergreen habit is a year-round pleasure. I would recommend it for north and south alike, including “difficult” climates where other cultivars may not have been successful.
For those looking for a longer season of bloom, aside from the Encores, the David Leach hybrids are to be recommended. Everything about these cultivars is top drawer, from flower size to hardiness to colour — look at the colour of Trinidad! And Capistrano is the clearest, purest yellow in the entire family, I believe. These are rugged shrubs bred by perhaps the best modern Rhododendron plantsman of all. (I mustn’t shun those intrepid Victorian plant-hunters!)
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