Posts Tagged Baptisia x ‘Purple Smoke’
So much to see …
Posted by piedmontgardener in Favorite Plants, Greenhouse growing, Native Wildlife, piedmont gardening, Vegetable Gardening on May 8, 2014
An iris (name forgotten) thriving in a neglected corner of my vegetable garden.
Is is just my yard, or is everyone seeing an explosion of growth from their gardens? There is so much to see that I really need to be outside every day with the camera. I am certain that I’ve missed peak moments of some of my spring beauties.
Everywhere I turn, I am wowed by another gorgeous flower — like that iris in the above photo. Long ago, I chunked some irises into a bed in my vegetable garden, thinking it would be nice to have a place for cut flowers and to bring in pollinators. I’ve forgotten the names of the varieties planted there, and most years, I am very slow to get their area weeded. But despite nearly complete neglect, they reward me with spectacular flowers every year. I love that about the bearded irises.
Speaking of which, check out these:
Iris ‘Batik’
These jaw-droppingly gorgeous blooms live in my front garden — another currently very neglected part of my yard. But do they complain? Never! They continue to multiply, blooming ever more magnificently every year.
Another plant that stops everyone in their tracks in my front garden this year is the coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens ‘Major Wheeler’). It grows and blooms so wonderfully that I’ve had to prune it severely several times over the years to prevent it from pulling down the trellis it perches on.
Major Wheeler’s scarlet wall of beauty
Why, you may ask, am I missing daily walks and neglecting beauties like those above? Two things: the vegetable garden and the greenhouse. As you may recall, my greenhouse was jam-packed with plants I grew from seed — veggies and flowers. However, in my part of NC, by early May, our temperatures are usually getting summertime hot. Even though the roof of my little greenhouse is covered by shade cloth and ventilated with a temperature-sensor-controlled fan — and I keep the door wide open during the day — temperatures get into the 100s in there pretty early.
Thus, I’ve been in my annual race to get everything growing in the greenhouse planted and/or moved to their summer spots before they sautéed themselves in the greenhouse. I’ve been working dawn to dusk at least every other day (weather permitting) to achieve that goal. And I just finished yesterday. Yes, I am tired, and yes, my aging, overused joints are not entirely happy with me. But it’s done. Every seed-grown start has been transplanted, watered, and mulched. Now it’s up to them and the whimsies of weather.
Top priority was the vegetable garden. Food plants always trump flowers. If I do say so myself, that part of my yard is looking pretty darn good. See for yourself.
Squashes grow large within their tents, surrounded by peppers, flowers, and herbs.
The Fortex pole beans are making excellent progress.
It wouldn’t be summer without Fortex pole beans for dinner.
One thing I love about a late spring vegetable garden — everything looks so neat and tidy. After the plants have grown a while, weather, bugs, and diseases create a more “lived-in” look.
Potatoes in the foreground, onions, lettuces, and the summer veggies in back.
Today is the first day my area will go into the 90s since last September. I have not missed those temperatures. Also, all the bugs are back — the good, the bad, and the really annoying — biting flies, gnats, ticks. It’s a jungle out there again, or getting there anyway.
No more working dawn to dusk for this gardener. As summer temperatures settle in, I’ll be up at dawn for a bit of quick pruning, tying, watering, and harvesting, then back indoors by 9:00 a.m. Unless a rare cool spell stops by.
Also stopping by this week, a couple of critters I don’t often see. A Red-headed Woodpecker hung around my yard for about 4 days, even sampling my suet feeders. I see them every once in a while, but they never seem to stay. I’ve always wondered if the Red-bellied Woodpeckers drive them away.
A gorgeous Red-headed Woodpecker sampling my suet feeder.
This other critter was trying to hide in my garage when I found him. I suspect he escaped from a load of wood chip mulch that I’d been spreading. That’s where these beetles live, so it was likely my fault that he was wandering around my garage. I relocated him to the mulch pile.
Eyed Click Beetle
I haven’t begun to enumerate all that’s showing off in my yard right now. The Ash Magnolia blooms will be open very soon. The deciduous azaleas are amazing this year. The swamp wildflowers are ridiculously enthusiastic, likely from all that rain they had last summer.
I confess I spend my too-infrequent walks around the yard exclaiming over the loveliness of a bloom, the rate of growth of a particular shrub, the tiny discarded cones beneath my towering Dawn Redwood. Spring in my garden makes me a child again — surprised and delighted by every gift Mother Nature bestows on me.
Baptisia ‘Purple Smoke’
A Passion for Purple
Posted by piedmontgardener in Favorite Plants, piedmont gardening on May 20, 2013
Chives and friends
Color in the garden is a personal choice, and you will find entire books devoted to this subject. Personally, my eye is not offended by a rainbow of blooms of many species decorating my landscape, but I know that some gardeners with a perhaps more finely tuned aesthetic sensibility prefer to coordinate flower colors with more precision. In my landscape, however, pretty much anything goes.
That being said, I do have a special fondness for the color purple in all its myriad shades. Purple has always been a favorite color of mine, and because it is a mix of red and blue, I think it serves to help many other colors blend harmoniously in my landscape. Truthfully, I don’t much think about harmony when I add another purple-blooming and/or purple-leaved plant to my landscape. I just don’t seem to ever get enough variations on purple to stop me from wanting more.
The chive flowers above are on the lavender side of purple, but they still say “purple” to me. The red flowers in the distant background are those of Crimson Clover, a winter cover crop I sow to protect and enrich dormant vegetable beds.
The bit of delicate bronze/red/purple foliage in the back right corner of the photo is Bronze Fennel. The leaves of this herb are a subtle purple-red. The plant grows to about three feet, then sends up zillions of flower stalks that add another two feet to its height. Leaves impart a delicate anise scent/flavor to the nose and palate. It draws admiration from all visitors and requires no work on my part. I grow it for its beauty, and to serve as a food source for the caterpillars of the Black Swallowtail. We have a deal: they leave my carrots and dill alone, and they can have all the Bronze Fennel they want. The fennel always survives without significant impact, and I get more butterflies — win-win!
Today, I want to show you some of the purple plants currently (or recently) showing off in my landscape. I think they all bring passion to my garden.
Siberian iris, cultivar forgotten
Spring is iris season in my yard. I love all of them, but the three main types I grow are Siberian, bearded, and Louisiana. I’ve lost track of the name of the cultivar of the above Siberian iris, but its gorgeousness doesn’t need a name, does it? Irises thrive in my yard, I think because they receive nothing but benign neglect from me. If you make sure their rhizomes aren’t too deeply buried and that they get at least four hours of sun a day, the Siberian and bearded varieties do the rest of the work, multiplying steadily every year.
Here’s another Siberian iris whose cultivar name I’ve lost:
On the magenta side of purple, another Siberian beauty.
Bearded iris remind me of my mother and her mother. Both always grew lovely irises, mostly the pale lavender ones that smelled like bubblegum to my nose. I grow somewhat fancier ones. I invested in several varieties about twenty years ago, and they’ve been multiplying and beautifying ever since.
I knew its cultivar name once, long ago.
And here’s another one in the purple family:
Delicate in color and form, but actually quite sturdy and long-lasting in the landscape.
I’ve showed you my other bearded iris variety before. This one’s name I remember, because it is named for how it looks:
Bearded Iris ‘Batik’ was a gift from my thoughtful mother-in-law many long years ago. Thanks again, Jerree.
My bearded irises are just finishing their bloom period, and the Siberians are about half done. But just yesterday, my Louisiana iris cultivars began their blooming cycle. Louisiana irises originated from that part of the US, but I’m not clear on the history of this type. I do know that they thrive in wet conditions, which is why I added them to some of the soggier parts of my floodplain, and one cultivar is planted beside the water feature in my front yard, where I can be sure it gets extra water.
The Louisiana iris by my front water feature is especially lovely. Its first bloom opened yesterday during a brief sunny spell between rain showers.
Louisiana iris, cultivar forgotten
Although it looks a bit pinkish in this photo, its color is really in more of the magenta family. I think it looks especially fabulous surrounded by my Tradescantia cultivar ‘Sweet Kate,’ which is in stunning full bloom right now. A happy accident on my part is the way the yellow center of the iris echoes the color of Sweet Kate’s foliage.
Here’s a close-up of the flowers of Sweet Kate, so you can more fully appreciate them:
Sweet Kate draws admiration from every visitor who sees her.
After I noticed the above iris blooming, I made a quick hike to the floodplain and discovered that the water-loving varieties down there are just opening. They will bloom in waves for several weeks, especially if the wonderful rains keep coming.
A truly purple, well lavender anyway, Louisiana Iris
I don’t just love purple flowers, however. I’m also a huge fan of purple-leaved plants. Most of these have new leaves that start out purplish, then morph into green that might be tinged with purple. But some plants retain leaves that are distinctly in the purple family. Take for example, this ridiculously enormous Loropetalum:
At its feet is long-blooming, almost indestructible Verbena ‘Homestead Purple.’
Many Piedmonters have fallen in love with the native Redbud cultivar, Forest Pansy. If you site the tree so that it doesn’t get too much direct afternoon sun, the leaves will remain purplish all season.
Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy.’ Of course, the spring flowers of this tree also feed my passion for purple.
One other purple-leaved beauty that I haven’t written about yet is Cotinus ‘Grace.’ It has been adorning my landscape for at least fifteen years now, and I really must show you its flowers and cotton candy puffs of pale pink seed heads when they appear this year. The contrast between leaves, flowers, and seed heads is made more dramatic by the distinctly purple color of the leaves.
Cotinus ‘Grace.’ If you click to enlarge the photo, you can see the just-emerging flower stalks.
These are a few of the purple highlights of my landscape at the moment. Even the wildflowers get into the act this time of year. The Lyreleaf Sage, for example, is currently adorning all parts of my lawn. But for now, I’ll close with another favorite purple perennial:
Baptisia ‘Purple Smoke’
This cultivar was developed by the talented folks at the NC Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill, then introduced into the horticulture industry, so that gardeners everywhere can enjoy it. The only trick to this beauty is to plant it exactly where it will thrive, because it doesn’t do well when you try to relocate it. Baptisias thrive in sunny, well-drained sites, reflecting their heritage as prairie natives. Site them wisely, and your reward will be ever-expanding, trouble-free plants adorned by long-blooming spires of lovely lavender pea-like flowers. What more could anyone afflicted by a passion for purple desire?
Baptisia x ‘Purple Smoke’
Posted by piedmontgardener in Favorite Plants, piedmont gardening on May 12, 2011
Baptisia x ‘Purple Smoke’
I admit it’s not my best photograph, but I think it manages to convey the effect achieved by a mature specimen of this perennial Wild Indigo. It’s a naturally occurring hybrid between Baptisia alba and B. australis, and was discovered by Rob Gardner, a former curator at the North Carolina Botanical Garden (NCBG).
In 1996, the NCBG and Niche Gardens introduced this lovely perennial to the gardening public. The specimen in the photo above has been growing in my front flower bed for about ten years now. Every year, it produces more bloom spikes. The Niche Garden folks say that when this perennial is truly happy, it can produce as many as 50 blooming stalks.
I suspect mine doesn’t bloom quite that much because it’s receiving too much shade from a nearby ever-expanding Southern Magnolia, and because my naturally fertile soil is probably not as lean as this prairie-habitat-loving native prefers.
My Baptisias bloom spectacularly for about three weeks, blending seamlessly with the purple-leaved Loropetalum, and the bright pink-flowering Weigela behind it.
The Rob Gardner/Niche Gardens team also introduced another Baptisia hybrid — Carolina Moonlight — that produces soft yellow flowers. It’s on my must-get list — just as soon as I figure out the perfect spot for it.
Wild Indigos require careful placement by Piedmont gardeners. Heavy clay soils should be amended to offer excellent drainage. These plants don’t appreciate being moved, so you need to be certain you’ve sited them correctly on the first try. But if you give them what they need — excellent drainage, lean soil, and full sun — you will be rewarded with a near-month of springtime gorgeousness.
Piedmont Gardener 