Posts Tagged Lonicera sempervirens ‘Major Wheeler’
Photographic Miscellany
Posted by piedmontgardener in Favorite Plants, piedmont gardening on September 21, 2015
It’s been too long since I posted here. My apologies, but life has been unusually busy of late. I’ve got several posts planned, but today I want to share a few of the photos I’ve taken recently. I’ve learned not to walk out of my house during daylight hours without my camera in hand.
I discovered the mushrooms in the top shot growing in my boulder garden next to a milkweed. As the autumnal equinox nears, mushrooms of all colors and shapes begin to appear in my yard, especially after our all-too-rare rains. That’s when these popped up — after our last good rain.
Snowberry Clearwing caterpillar
Every year in about the middle of August, I notice that the leaves on my trellis full of native coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens ‘Major Wheeler’) begin to disappear. That’s when I start looking for this caterpillar, which practices excellent camouflage techniques. Its adult form is one of the clear-winged sphinx moths that you’ll see hovering over flowers like hummingbirds as they drink nectar. The caterpillars produce no lasting damage to my very healthy honeysuckle vine. In fact, they help prevent it from growing too large for its trellis.
House mantis
This is the time of year praying mantises, especially the Chinese mantises like this one, become more apparent in the landscape. They have grown large devouring the insects that abound in my gardens, and now they’re on the move seeking mates. During last week’s cool spell, this one parked itself on the west-facing side of my house, where it could catch afternoon sun while snagging a few pollinators visiting my lantana.
Mantis on the move
The house mantis didn’t appreciate being the subject of my photo session and relocated itself to a nearby pineapple sage plant. Here it is actively climbing the plant as it attempts to avoid my camera.
Appreciation of Autumn Daffodil’s re-blooming efforts
I was delighted when my late-blooming stand of Daylily ‘Autumn Daffodil’ pushed out a few more scapes about a month after its main bloom period had ended, as was this carpenter bee.
Hurricane lily
Right on schedule, the hurricane lilies began blooming just before Wonder Spouse’s birthday. I love the way their bloom stalks seemingly pop out of nowhere.
A view from the top looking down.
Tradescantia ‘Sweet Kate’ cranking out late-season blooms
Around my front water feature, my Sweet Kates are once again blooming enthusiastically. They always take a break during the heat of July and August, but return with more glorious purple flowers as summer fades into autumn. The pollinators love the flowers as much as I do.
I’ll close this post with another purple beauty. This one is a true late summer-early fall bloomer — Aster ‘October Skies.’ Individual flowers are not gigantic, but the bushy plants are literally covered in blooms, so their visual impact is stunning. Their appearance always signals autumn’s imminent arrival.
Pollinators love this aster too.
Check out the heavily laden pollen baskets on this pollinator!
That’s all the photos for today, folks. I promise a more information-rich post soon. Meanwhile, I suggest you enjoy our cooler days by going outside and appreciating all the beauty that abounds this time of year. That’s what I’ll be doing.
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’
Bountiful Blooms
Posted by piedmontgardener in Favorite Plants, Native Wildlife, piedmont gardening on May 6, 2013
Eastern Tiger Swallowtail enjoying flowers of Halesia diptera
As always happens this time of year, Spring is blasting through my yard so fast that I cannot keep up — at least, not in my blog postings. Since early April, every day new bloomers have started while others have stopped. Because I’ve been focused on the vegetable garden, I have not had time to share all the beauty that surrounds me. But fear not, faithful readers, I have been taking hundreds upon hundreds of photographs. Today’s post is the first installment designed to catch you up on all the glorious blossoms.
Let me take you back in time to the middle of April, when my 35-foot tall Two-winged Silverbell (Halesia diptera) was in full bloom. I told you about this spectacular understory native here, but I’ve mentioned it in several other posts over the years. If you search on the name, you’ll find all the relevant posts for this tree. The close-up of the flowers above demonstrates their loveliness — and their popularity with native pollinators.
Here’s what the entire tree looked like this year:
Thirty-five feet of Wow!
I had to stand pretty far away to get all of it in the photo. That little bit of white at the top right is a bit of the large dogwood trying to show off some of its flowers in the shot.
In the interest of fairness, that aforementioned native dogwood deserves a photo of its own:
About 40 feet tall, this dogwood is probably about 50 years old, maybe even older.
To the left in the above photo, you can just see a few blooms of the native redbud variety, ‘Forest Pansy,’ and, of course that’s a bit of Loropetalum ‘Zhuzhou Fuchsia’ filling up the right side of the photo.
Because the showy part of a dogwood flower is actually its bracts, they aren’t quite as pure a white as the petals of the Two-winged Silverbell. But they persist much longer in the landscape.
They may be bracts rather than petals, but that doesn’t diminish their beauty.
And, since I mentioned Redbuds, I feel obliged to show you one of the standard natives in my yard in full bloom. Its lavender blossoms are emphasized by the green backdrop of the native Red Cedars behind it.
Cercis canadensis is breathtaking in bloom when sited where it can achieve its full potential.
Now I want to turn your attention to the deciduous azaleas in my yard. I mention them in passing regularly, and you can find all the links by searching on the species or the category. The links that follow point back to the first posts from 2011 in which I described these wonderful understory natives.
Since 2011, all the azaleas have grown considerably. Some attain mature sizes in the 20′ x 15′ range, and I can tell that several of my specimens are well on their way to achieving their full potential. Some species and/or their cultivars bloom magnificently every year, while others seem to alternate years.
First to bloom, as usual, was Pinxterbloom Azalea (Rhodendron periclymenoides). It had its lushest bloom season so far, and thanks to the mostly cool weather, the blooms persisted longer than usual.
Pinxterbloom Azalea is native to the southeastern Piedmont.
Soon after, it’s cultivar, ‘Purple,’ also bloomed, but its blooms were sparse this year.
R. periclymenoides ‘Purple’
Overlapping the bloom time of Pinxterbloom was my R. austrinum hybrid, Pastel #19. This shrub is always ridiculously floriferous, and its potent perfume carries halfway across my five-acre yard on spring breezes. When it is at peak bloom, it stops visitors in their tracks every time.
Pastel #19 is almost six feet tall and five feet wide now.
Only inhale deeply of Pastel #19’s flowers if you like very, very sweet fragrances.
While Pastel #19 continued to bloom, another hybrid, Pastel #20 started its bloom cycle. Perhaps hybrid vigor explains why both these hybrids bloom with spectacular consistency every year.
The perfume of Rhododendron ‘Pastel #20’ is much more delicate than that of #19.
I love the golden throats on these flowers.
Next to bloom was my R. alabamense, a native that is also reliably floriferous even without the benefits of hybrid vigor.
My Alabama Azalea is now about six feet tall and four feet wide.
Its flowers emit a faint perfume that I enjoy for its subtlety.
R. alabamense is only now finishing up its bloom cycle.
The mostly cool spring has definitely prolonged bloom time for the azaleas this year.
My Oconee Azalea (R. flammeum) is over 8 feet tall now. Its form is more open than some of the other deciduous azalea species. My specimen bloomed heavily last year. This year, it’s not quite as floriferous, but still a knockout in the landscape.
R. flammeum buds just beginning to open.
R. flammeum in full bloom.
Last of the azalea natives to bloom so far this year is Coastal Azalea (R. atlanticum). This native of southeastern US coastal plains keeps a much lower profile than my other deciduous azaleas. So far, it’s only about three feet tall in its high spots. The native species is a colonial spreader, but my cultivar, ‘Winterthur,’ is supposed to be more polite. It has gotten wider, but not aggressively so.
The flowers of Coastal Azalea are pure white, with no throat blotches as you see in R. alabamense. They are very potently fragrant — a cloying sweetness that is not my favorite. Because of its smaller size, I often smell the open flowers on this specimen before I see them the first time.
Coastal Azalea flowers are almost sticky, perhaps encouraging pollinators to linger?
Flowers of a couple of my other deciduous azalea varieties are almost open for business. I’ll show you those soon. Meanwhile, let me close today’s post with a photo or two of my trellis full of blooming Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens ‘Major Wheeler’).
Unlike invasive Japanese Honeysuckle, the Major (as I like to call him) does not spread aggressively. However, it is enthusiastic, so I do cut it back severely every other year. The Major doesn’t object to this treatment, continuing to bloom so magnificently that every visitor to my house stops, gapes, and begs to know his name.
Lonicera sempervirens ‘Major Wheeler’
Hummingbirds adore these blooms.
Landscape Animators
Posted by piedmontgardener in Native Wildlife, piedmont gardening on May 17, 2012
Few people probably love the native plants of the southeastern Piedmont more than I do, but as much as I enjoy their nearly infinite diversity and adaptability, I think I would have long grown bored with them without being able to observe their interactions and interdependencies with native wildlife. For example, the native coral honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens ‘Major Wheeler’) is beautiful on its own, but that corner of my landscape truly lights up when the Ruby-throated Hummingbirds stop by for drinks.
From birds to insects to reptiles, amphibians, and mammals — all the wildlife inhabitants and visitors animate what would otherwise be a basically static landscape — no matter how much the trees and flowers sway in winds and rain. The animals generate many of the most interesting stories in my landscape as they go about their daily lives.
Yesterday morning as the sun rose, I spotted this cranefly on my garage door as it admired its shadow:
On an early morning trip to my compost pile, I discovered that my laziness in failing to cover a recent donation had attracted an unexpected visitor. A Spicebush Swallowtail was dining on a bit of beet leaf. I knew that Eastern Tiger Swallowtails like to collect at mud puddles to drink up trace elements they don’t get from nectar, and I knew that Red-spotted Purple Butterflies were notorious for their appreciation of unsavory items. But I have never seen a Spicebush Swallowtail dine on anything but flowers.
The recent increase in humidity has brought out most of the bugs, including ticks, mosquitoes, and biting flies. But along with these pests come the sky hunters — dragonflies — in every color and design imaginable. I caught these two taking a break from sky patrol:
I think the sky dragons are attracted to our little water feature in the front garden. They aren’t the only ones. I caught this Cope’s Gray Treefrog waiting for an evening chorus session on the side of my house near our little pond:
The treefrogs and the Eastern Narrowmouth Toads have been singing lustily around our little pond for over a month now. At first, it was just the toads chorusing, then the treefrogs joined them for a couple of weeks. Now, the nightly serenade sounds to be all treefrog all the time.
The calls of both amphibians are quite distinctive. I had never seen a Narrowmouth Toad until this year when I was digging a vegetable bed about six weeks ago. I accidentally unearthed two of them, and I wasn’t sure what they were until I did a little research. Then I was glad I had been wearing my gloves when I handled them, because their slimy skin secretions are toxic, designed to repel the ants that they eat. Given the enormous number of ant species that live in my yard, I say bring on the Narrowmouth Toads!
These amphibians have been doing more than singing around my pond. It is now teeming with tadpoles. I can’t tell if they are all toad tadpoles, or if the treefrog tads are in there too. In this shot, I think toad tadpoles may be dining on a treefrog egg mass, but I’m not certain.
The water isn’t as green as it looks here, I promise. But it is definitely not as clear as it was during pre-tadpole days.
My final picture today is not of the landscape animators themselves, but of their nest. About a week ago as I walked to the compost pile, a bird flew past me in a blur, seeming to want to distract me. I assumed I had merely startled it — I often unintentionally surprise wildlife — and continued. But as I approached one of our huge mature dogwoods, another bird flew past me. It seemed to come right from the tree, so I turned and looked.
The dogwood is double-boled, with the split beginning not more than two or so feet from the ground. In that low crotch, I discovered a distinctive nest — Ovenbirds! We’ve spotted these ground-nesters often during the growing season, but we had intentionally never looked for a nest. I have never read of these birds building in a tree, but this wasn’t far off the ground, and perhaps it looked a tad more secure to them. My yard is inhabited by many black rat snakes, so I can well imagine that a tree might look like a safer bet to the Ovenbirds.
They’re called Ovenbirds, because their nests resemble Dutch ovens, with little holes where the birds go in and out. I think you can make out the structure in this photo that I took some distance away from the nest, so as to minimize their disturbance.
I think the entry hole is near the bottom, but it’s hard to be sure. Alas, less than a week later, I discovered that the nest had been torn apart. Whether it was the work of a snake, raccoon, possum, or greedy squirrel, I’ll never know, but the nest is gone, and I haven’t seen or heard the Ovenbirds since.
That’s the way of life with my landscape animators. Sometimes Death wins, but Life triumphs more often. And the dances between them are always captivating.
Hummingbird Heaven
Posted by piedmontgardener in Favorite Plants, Uncategorized on February 8, 2011
Yesterday, I showed you the caterpillar that ate my native coral honeysuckle, but you didn’t get a chance to appreciate why I love this vine so much. So today, I offer you a photo of this beauty in its full flush of spring bloom:
Native Coral Honeysuckle
The flowers are not fragrant, but the bright red tubular flowers have no difficulty attracting visitors. Hummingbirds defend it the same way they defend favorite feeders. Numerous butterflies also stop by for drinks. Some years, the Carolina Wrens nest deep inside the tangle of vines.
The foliage is nice too — a deep blue-green that will endure through milder winters.
As I said yesterday, my variety is Lonicera sempervirens ‘Major Wheeler.’ Several re-blooming varieties are now available.
The deer only take an occasional passing bite of the vine growing on my trellis. But when I tried to encourage another plant to ramble over a large stump in an unprotected area, the deer ate it to the ground.
It looks lovely on a trellis, creating a vertical wall of color animated by visiting pollinators. If you’ve got a semi-sunny spot for a trellis, consider the coral honeysuckle option. I guarantee you’ll be pleased.
Piedmont Gardener 