Shade Bed

Weather: Cloudy days followed by rain Thursday, Friday and Saturday. It would have been an ideal time to plant seeds if the winds didn’t howl all day Wednesday and Thursday, and the temperatures hadn’t fallen yesterday.

What’s blooming in the area: Persian yellow, Austrian copper and pink roses, spirea, snowball, silver lace vine, bearded iris, red hot poker, peony, Oriental poppy, donkey spurge, blue flax.

Beyond the walls and fences: Tamarix, alfilerillo, western stickseed, tumble mustard, hoary cress, oxalis, bindweed, goat’s beard, common and local dandelions.

In my yard: Beauty bush, grape hyacinth, vinca, pink evening primrose, golden spur columbine, snow-in-summer, Bath pinks, Johnson’s Blue geranium.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, pansy, marigold.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small birds, ants. Some animal ate through my hose in the winter; it ate through the replacement this week.

Weekly update: It’s not that I don’t envy people who draw up garden plans and execute them exactly. It’s just I don’t believe those published before and after pictures. I’ve yet to find a plant so domesticated it follows a diagram.

A couple years ago I got tired of constantly weeding an area along the blocks supporting my back porch. A soaker hose runs along the base on its way to the roses at the other end. I’d tried to get grass or Dutch clover to cover it but failed.

Like everything in my yard, it was on a slight slope. I though it might help if I terraced the section with a row of bricks that could hold level the soil and hold water. After all, it was only a foot wide and twelve feet long, a mere thirty-two bricks to haul in my compact car and lay.

I put in various left over seeds and covered them with decent dirt and leaves. The bricks trapped water from the hose, the rain, and drips off the edge of the metal roof. The soil and mulch washed out. Only a few Sensation cosmos germinated.

I decided part of the problem was the area had gotten much shadier than I realized when the lilacs to the south and west matured. The next year, I tried various shade loving bedding plants, just to see what would work. The wax begonias did OK, but I their flowers were always hidden in their leaves. I only see the plants from above. The periwinkle went out of bloom. The impatiens and pansies died.

Then, I remembered something I’d seen in a ditch in the village. There were violet leaves at the bottom at the end were water entered. I’d been so surprised, I took a picture to convince myself I wasn’t imagining them. Violets are a woodland plant I grew in Michigan.

I found some violets at an Albuquerque nursery and ordered some lilies of the valleys and ferns. If I was going to try a northern shade bed, I figured I might as well experiment. The Labrador violets turned out to be dog violets and shrank in size. The others didn’t make it.

Undaunted, I ordered more last year, and, wa lah, they came back this year. One violet put out a small flower. That isn’t what mattered. There was evidence they had begun to spread underground. That’s what they do in the north to fill in large areas. I didn’t care if they bloomed in the spring, if they stayed green all summer.

Lilies of the valley are like violets in the north. Given them a chance, and they spread. So far, mine are still discrete plants, although a few put out 2" high stems.

I had no expectations about the ostrich fern. I had learned in Michigan, it was very difficult to get any type started. I ordered the only species I thought might survive. Last year the rabbit ate the fronds. This year, the ostrich fern came back. I only wanted it to get some variation in height.

Pansies have been trickier to grow. They like cool weather and the nurseries don’t offer them early enough for them to get established. This spring was too warm, and now it’s wet and cold. I got lucky with the plants I bought to fill the spaces between the perennials. They probably won’t bloom much until fall, but they may stay green.

Nothing will keep out the weeds, but it’s more pleasant to weed a bed with something in it than it is to weed to keep an area clear. Also, it’s more fun when you don’t know what will happen from season to season. Diagrams are for football fans, and even those are after the fact.

Photographs:
1. Pansy and lily of the valley, 16 May 2015, between showers.

2. Dog violet, flooded by rain, 19 May 2013.

3. Shade bed, one foot wide between line of outer bricks and tiles along the foundation, with soaker hose through the center. Ostrich ferns, 16 May 2015.

4. Village ditch with violets growing in bottom, 19 January 2012.

5. Violet leaves in #4 ditch, 22 May 2012.

6. Violets spreading in Michigan, 2 May 1991. They’re on the east side of the garage in the shade of a neighbors tall lilac. Yellow flower is dandelion.

7. Colony of lilies of the valley in Michigan, 11 May 1991. There shaded by a neighbor’s tree.

8. Miracle Bride White sweet violet has two offspring, one at a distance to the left, the other under the leaves to the top right; 16 May 2015.

Bedding Plants

What’s blooming in the area: White and pink flowered trees, including Bradford pear and choke cherry, forsythia still sparse, first lilac, tulips, daffodils, moss phlox; apples leafing.

Outside the walls and fences: Western stickseed, tansy mustard, native and common dandelions, cheat grass; prickly pear, blue grama and rice grass greening; leather leaf globemallow, sweet sand verbena, bindweed and heath asters emerging; chamisa leafing; leaf buds on tamarix and Russian olive; many new leaves on the prairie are emerging next to clumps of grass, not in open spaces.

In my yard: Sweet and sour cherries, Siberian pea tree, hyacinth, tiny pushkinia; coral bell leaves turning green; peonies, Maltese cross, lady bells, tansy, pink salvia, catmints, Parker’s Gold and Moonshine yarrows poking up; cottonwood, spirea, purple sandcherry, privet and Japanese barberry leafing; buds on yellow alyssum.

Bedding plants: Buds on pansies and snapdragons.

Inside: Pomegranate, zonal geranium, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Uncovered an earthworm when I was planting pansies near the Japanese barberry; bees around Lapins cherry; stink bugs are back.

Weather: Winds all week, rain Wednesday night; last weekend the arroyo bottom was dry enough to work the calves; 13:27 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: The 1970's energy crises changed the definition of early blooming.

When the tetraploid Sensation cosmos was introduced in 1930 as an earlier blooming plant, advertisers meant it would flower before frost. Now, when seed companies tell growers a plant blooms early, they mean it requires less time in an energy-intensive greenhouse.

When OPEC stopped shipping petroleum to the United States in October of 1973, in response to this country’s support of Israel’s war against Egypt and Syria, greenhouses were particularly hard hit by sharply increased prices during their winter growing season. Owners replaced glass and plastic, insulated, improved their lighting, and took whatever other steps they could afford.

However, no sooner did they make an improvement, than increased prices ate the savings, and left them where they were. In 2008, Walter Nelson figured heat represented 13% of the production costs for western New York nurseries, while Wayne Brown found total energy, including heat, light and irrigation, was 25 to 30% in neighboring Ontario. Both suggested it would take only a very small increase in petroleum prices to severely damage the profits which were simultaneously being squeezed by big box customers who were setting low contract prices for vendors while making demands for more services that increased their labor.

Some nurseries tried saving energy by growing their plants at lower temperatures, something pansies especially like. However, Erik Runkle found that, while the resulting plants were more vigorous, they required a longer crop time, so the actual costs were higher. In Grand Rapids, the total energy cost for a 288-cell plug of heat-demanding petunias transplanted on January 29 for sales on April 1 and grown at 58 degrees was 56¢, while it was 31¢ for plants grown at 68 degrees after being transplanted on March 2.

Others have looked at lowering their labor costs, which Nelson says were 45% of the total in New York and Brown set at 30 to 35% in Ontario. The latter suggests larger operations, with greater financial resources, had been adopting some of the automation used in Europe to do such tasks as seeding, transplanting, mixing soil and filling cell packs.

Traditionally, bedding plant growers planted seeds in shallow flats, then hired seasonal help, often women, to transplant the small seedlings into sale packs. Some would eliminate the transplanting by planting several seeds in each cell, then hire local people to prick out all but the most viable plant from each unit. With plants like moss roses, they left the extras to give a fuller look with smaller individuals, even though the plants were probably weaker from having to compete for resources.

When I planted out my pansies last weekend, I discovered the consequences of these attempts to save money. The sale packs had the usual four legs for roots, but the top third wasn’t subdivided. I assume this was done to make it easier for unskilled labor or machines to drop seeds.

In one pack, there was an empty cell. In another, one seed had taken root on the bridge between two legs, and its roots hadn’t been able to develop. In the third, the one that had landed on the bridge sent its roots into the leg with another plant, making them impossible to separate. In effect, each four cell pak had only three plants, which effectively increased my purchase price from 55¢ to 74¢.

Seed companies have responded to higher energy costs by developing seeds that are ready for market sooner. Once people were told to plant pansies in late summer and let them winter over for spring blooms. Now, Sakota tells growers the elapsed time between sowing and marketing for the Crown series is ten to eleven weeks. Stokes tells nurserymen that Karma and Mammoth are ready in ten to twelve weeks, while HPS suggests the total crop time for its pansies is twelve to fourteen weeks. In other words, seeds can be planted in January for April sales, saving five months of worry that something will destroy the seedlings.

The problem for home gardeners is that ready for market means “in flower,” not “strong enough to survive transplanting.” My largest pansy plant is three and a half inches high and four inches wide; the smallest is one and half by two inches. It would take a great many plants to create a massed effect of color, at least nine per square foot at a minimum cost of $6.66.

Brown found consumers had responded to these changes by no longer buying bedding plants, but would buy larger plants in containers and hanging baskets. They simply weren’t willing to nurse along puny seedlings or look at bare ground while immature plants gradually came to size. Plants like pansies, after all, are only good for about a month before rising temperatures stop them from blooming.

The problem with the new seeds for growers is they are more expensive. A thousand Swiss Giant open-pollinated pansy seeds are sold for $3.63 by Stokes and for $4.75 by HPS. In contrast, a thousand Majestic Giants II F₁ hybrid seeds are $32.50 and $42.50 respectively. According to Nelson, seeds and plant stock represent 16% of the total cost of production in western New York, more than is spent on heat.

HPS suggests the cost of the Majestic Giant II seed is somewhat offset by the fact the plants are naturally compact and don’t require growth regulators. Most of the chemicals nurseries use, as well as their plastic packages, are ultimately dependent on the same energy conglomerates that supply the natural gas for heat and gasoline for transportation. All these additional overhead costs increase when the price of a barrel of crude oil rises.

I no longer expect much from bedding plants. I only buy those like tomatoes and snapdragons that I can’t grow from seed and that have proven their ability to survive. However, if I ever want to see more than the usual yellow composites in summer, I’m dependent on nurseries to provide me with plants. They must continue to exist for me to be completely happy.

Ironically, while energy costs have radically changed the industry since 1973 - sending cut flower production to South American and Africa where labor costs are cheaper and moving winter vegetable production to the southwest and México where energy costs are less - the high cost of transporting bulky, perishable products with low profit margins has kept bedding plant growers near areas with large population centers. Even though California, Texas and Florida were three of the top five bedding plant growers in the middle 1990's, Michigan and Ohio were still in the top five, while Ontario increased its exports to this country since the middle 1980's.

The pansies I bought two weeks ago came from Colorado.

Notes: 2011 catalogs from Stokes Seeds, Inc., and HPS, the Horticultural Products and Services division of RH Shumway’s.

Brown, Wayne. “A Profile - The Ontario Greenhouse Floriculture Industry,” 1 June 2003, reviewed 18 March 2010.

Nelson, Walter E. “Greenhouse Energy Management,” 2008; it’s possible his price for seed and plants combines the costs of nurseries that specialize in germinating seeds and those that buy the plugs to grow for market; petunias were more severely affected by being grown at lower temperatures than were pansies.

Runkle, Erik, Jonathan Frantz and Matthew Blanchard. “Energy-Efficient Annuals: Scheduling Bedding Plants,” Greenhouse Grower, April 2009. He’s not including the cost of the time for germinating seed when temperatures can’t be manipulated, and heat and moisture requirements are usually higher. For Pansy Crown, Sakota Seed says the pre-transplantation time is 5 weeks and post transplanting time is 5-6 weeks.

Sakota Seed America, Inc. “Pansy Crown,” revised 15 August 2007, available on-line.

Photograph: Pansies, 6 April 2011, 15 days after purchase and 3 days after transplanting; snapdragon in back

Pansy

What’s blooming in the area: Few apricot or forsythia flowers, perhaps because of the dearth of snow and rain; daffodils, lavender moss phlox; silver lace vine leafing; lilacs leafing with buds emerging; village ditch running.

Outside the walls and fences: Dandelion, cheat grass; Siberian elm bright green.

In my yard: Lapins cherry, hyacinth, oxalis; leaves opening on Bradford pear and roses; buds forming on sand cherry; Silver King artemisia emerging.

Inside: Pomegranate, zonal geranium; first aptenia flower since the cold of winter.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, light colored snake, gecko, harvester ants, hornet in the house.

Weather: Warm afternoons and winds; last rain 3/8/11; 12:59 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: I have strong memories of pansies, but, strangely, no recollection of what they looked like.

The first comes from my childhood when pansies were the only bedding plant my mother would buy - perhaps the only ones she could afford, and possibly the only ones available. They were put in the shade of the apple tree where they survived until fall, blooming off and on. I suppose most were purple, as pansies were then, but they could have been white or yellow. I don’t remember.

They probably hadn’t changed much since the late nineteenth century.

Pansies had begun as wild members of the violet family. The first were natural hybrids of Viola tricolor and Viola arvensis grown in the gardens of Mary Bennett and James Gambier in the early 1810's. James Lee, a nurseryman, introduced new species from Europe to encourage men like Bennet’s gardener, William Robinson. Gambier’s gardener, William Thompson, produced the first modern blotched flower in 1830.

While the English aristocracy was primarily interested in cultivating perfect individual flowers for exhibition, seeds of the improved viola crossed the channel where French and Belgium breeders experimented with massed plantings grown as annuals. By 1900, the major growers of what was soon called Viola wittrockiana were Bugnot, Cassier, Oldier, and Trimardeau.

When my mother was buying her plants in 1950's, the Thompson and Morgan seed catalog still reflected the aesthetic distinction between England and France. Swiss Giants, which won an All-Selection award in 1933, were bred for cut flowers, while Westland Giants were listed as a “Continental variety.” The rest of the 26 cultivars were individual colors or strains, including Maxima, advertised as a mix of show varieties “saved from one of the finest prize collections in England” and Roggli, introduced in 1930.

By the time I began trying to grow pansies in Michigan in the mid-1980s, the British seed catalog had expanded to 40 choices, divided by bloom size. They still carried Coronation Gold, King of the Blacks, Roggli, and Ullswater Blue, but the abilities to survive adverse conditions and look good in beds were mentioned.

A great deal had changed between the two publications. Sakota Seed had introduced the first F₁ hybrid, Majestic Giant, in 1966, and breeders’ knowledge of ideal conditions had increased. Today, Sakota recommends its Crown series be planted in acidic soil with a pH between 5.5 and 5.8 and fed nitrogen and boron. Humidity should be 100% , with the germinating temperature between 64 and 69 degrees and 3,000 foot candles of light. As they grow, the temperature should be reduced to 55 to 65 and the light increased to 7,000 foot candles.

Not everyone follows those instructions. When researchers at the University of Florida tested pansies, they improved their germination potting mixture with dolomite, superphosphate and hydrated lime, then planted them out in fields of augmented fine sand. On their ranking scale of 1 to 10, most were judged fair (6) to good (7). Crowns, evaluated by color, varied between 6.6 and 6.7, Sakota’s Crystal Bowls were between 5.5 and 7.3, Sluis and Groot’s Roc between 6.4 and 7.6, and Goldsmith’s Universal Beaconsfield was 6.6.

Needless to say, when I’ve tried to grow pansies, my conditions were less than optimal, and my experiences haven’t matched those of my childhood. After trying two years in Michigan with what was available, Majestic Giant, Crystal Bowl, Universal Beaconsfield and Roc, I gave them up as a waste of money. The Majestic Giants and Crystal Bowls I bought in alkaline New Mexico in 1995 and 1996 died within a week of being planted.

My next memory of pansies comes from my only visit to Europe in the mid-1980's, where my hotel was a converted hunting lodge near Chantilly. The grounds were small, but the owners wanted to give the illusion of Versailles or the Tuileries, which they did with a large mound of pansies placed at a middle distance from the entrance. I think they were planted in tiers of color, but I don’t remember. I suspect, as soon as they went out of bloom, they were replaced with some other flowering plant.

The inability of the new cultivars to survive was unimportant, so long as they bloomed for several weeks. Pansies served the same function as cut flowers, disposable symbols of elegance whose very ephemeralness was a sign of luxury.

This year I decided to try the squarish stemmed flowers again, in a place so shaded that whatever grows there leans across the path after the sun. I figured if I treated them like the French, as a temporary spot of color to be replaced in a month, they were worth the 55¢ I paid per plant.

Alas, I’ve gotten older. I’ve lost by childhood illusions that wonderful flowers last all summer. I’m now forced to sample the more sophisticated European acceptance of fleeting beauty captured for an instant. To paraphrase Maurice Chevalier in Gigi, “I remember them well.”

Notes:
Cuthbertson, William. Pansies, Violas and Violets, 1910.

Howe, T. K. and W. E. Waters “Two Year Evaluation of Pansy Cultivars in the Florida Landscape,” Florida State Horticultural Society Proceedings 109:311-318:1996.

Sakota Seed America, Inc. “Pansy Crown,” revised 15 August 2007, available on-line.

Thompson and Morgan. Catalogs from 1955 and 1986.

Photograph: Rose Crown pansy, 30 March 2011.