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Daily Archives: April 9, 2012

Marvelous, Mystical, Motherly Poppy Plants: Ancestor Gardens

09 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by ninagarden in garden, gardening, roses

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I’ve read all the sexy stuff that people have written about poppies–the opium, the seductive red hues, the Laudium making. Decked out with teasing, luscious fringe and lavish sage green foliage, they are bee-seducing, hypnotic, sleep-inducing (think Wizard of Oz), intoxicating. Yep. They are all that, I guess, but for me, the poppy is forever associated with my dear Mama. Yes, my mama. The number one –the only—person, besides myself, I’ve ever known who grew them. They are part of my ancestor garden, and remind me of her as I hope they will remind my children of me. Below is a picture of my mom in her Arizona garden–here she is photographed with African daisies.

In writing this, I realized I didn’t know where my mother acquired them because she has been growing them as long as I can remember. She racked her brain a minute and told me that she couldn’t really remember but thinks they came from a guest speaker at her Garden Club meeting many years ago. She said she got a little packet of them at the meeting and has planted them ever since.

Every year she collects the seeds and one year, she passed some to me. Now I plant them every year and my kids love to help me collect the seeds once the pods are dry. They call them “little salt shakers” and they go around scattering seeds everywhere. We also keep them in a jar, distributing them to friends who can’t believe they are easy to grow.

I always plant them in the empty strip along the front garden. One year I got a phone call from an elderly neighbor. She left me a message saying her gardener told her I was growing opium and I needed to pull them out before they sprouted all over the neighborhood or she would “call the police.”

I told my mother and this sent her into a furious frenzy of research. How dare, that nice neighbor, say that!  She called the experts at the University of Arizona Extension Service on gardening.  She looked in every gardening book and I helped her research on the Internet, intent on proving her favorite flower was not illicit. Of course, even though I felt better when I found that they were for sale, legally http://anniesannuals.com, I was nervous from the threat that my neighbor, who was normally sweet and wonderful, had left on my voice mail. I pulled all the poppies out in my front yard, street-side—my husband laughing at me during the whole process—but I kept the ones in the front courtyard behind my patio wall. The final conclusion was that they weren’t illegal, but perhaps, we should not plant such showy, potentially controversial flowers in front of our house.

My mother still plants them (although I noticed this year that they were growing only in what she calls her “dog yard” even though the dog never goes there, and I quit letting the kids scatter them outside our wall, but they still grow, remnants of my previous enthusiasm. I now mix in toadflax and California poppies so they don’t stand out as much. It still isn’t clear in my mind if my neighbor was upset that I was growing them, or more upset that the seeds might blow across the street and sprout in her yard—scandalous! I have thoughts of scattering the seeds all over our neighborhood canyon, but the source may be so obvious that I don’t have the nerve.

So the poppies grow and mutate each year. There are ruffled ones, purple ones, red ones, red ones with crosses inside. The bees love them and they are filled with humming and buzzing. The thick green stalks grow in cracks and driest soil. They thrive with little water and little care, lending their magic to our yard, making smiles, brining memories, maybe making little gardeners who enchanted by the poppy magic will one day grow them — behind garden walls, of course!

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Erysimum

09 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by ninagarden in Uncategorized

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April is here and there is so much going on in the garden. First, the roses — they are about to bloom.  Looking at them now, I’m comforted that I did not prune too much. Maybe the first year I pruned the climbers when I shouldn’t have, but every other rose seemed to take the aggressive pruning well. Buds are everywhere waiting to bloom. I cut my first rose on Easter morning.

The second news is somewhat disappointing but not uncommon to my garden—I dug up my seed nursery. Well now, what can I say? It had originally been the home of a nice fat Erysimum Bowles (mauve) that died. When it did, it left me with a garden hole, not one you could see, but one that was sheltered and became my “nursery” where many plants such as this nemesia self-sowed. But I dug it up and planted a new Erysimum Bowles “Mauve”, popularly called wallflower, and now, who knows.  The Rudebekia seeds were so tiny. I’m sure they are buried under too much dirt now. But at least, I had a “control” set in peat pots along with some Coneflowers. There are a few tiny sprouts now.

The Erysimum Bowles, by the way, is a great perennial. It takes little water, grows in a nice even mound, blooms almost continuously. The only complaint I have is that a few of mine have bloomed themselves out of existence after a few years. They grew woody and split open, which I’ve heard about lavender, but I seem to encounter that more with the wallflower—I read it’s “short-lived” somewhere so maybe this is expected.

I’m also not quite sure how to prune it. Perhaps this leads to the problem above (the splitting open), but the leaves and flowers seem to reside in the outer orb of the plant and when I’ve cut it back, it looks dead so go figure!

Let me know if you have any ideas. I have three in my front garden right now and they do look good against a wall.

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Erysimum

09 Monday Apr 2012

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erysimum

Erysimum

The purple-flowered bush on the right is the one Erysimum.

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Posted by ninagarden | Filed under Uncategorized

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