June 8, 2021 Peonies and Columbine

 Hi Gardener’s

I’m inside writing on a hot and steamy Tuesday. Plants may like the humidity, but I don’t. And I think the plants would like it more if it also included some good rain. I know rainfall has varied tremendously across the country- and even across Michigan.  Some are getting lots of rain, some of us aren’t.

I have seen so many pictures of dried-up hanging baskets and pots. In hot dry weather you may need to water hanging baskets and pots twice a day. Check your baskets and pots even if there has been some rain. Sometimes foliage in full baskets and pots sheds the lighter rains over the sides and the soil inside isn’t getting any water.

If your plants look dried up all may not be lost. Submerge the pot in a bucket of water. You may have to hold it down until it sinks and bubbles stop coming up. Let it sit an hour in the water if you can, then take it out. It can take a couple hours to overnight for the plants to recover. Then don’t let the pots or baskets get that dry again.

If you planted new perennials, trees and shrubs this year and it’s been dry you must water them if you want them to live.  Even plants labeled drought tolerant should be kept watered their first season.

Conversely if it’s been raining a lot in your area make sure pots and baskets are draining well.  They must have drainage holes. It can help drainage if you lift the pots up off the ground or deck surfaces a little. Use little wood blocks, pop bottle caps, tiny stones and so on to lift the corners of the pot up an inch or so.

In my garden lack of rain is keeping things shorter and the flowers look smaller on some plants. Color is starting to come back as the yellow evening primrose, blue clustered bellflower and orange poppies are beginning to bloom. The Siberian iris, columbine, various landscape roses, mock orange, clematis, Love in a Mist, cornflowers and Maltese cross are also blooming.

My ninebark is in bloom, but the flowers are really small this year. I have been mowing around patches of yellow and orange hawkweed. I remember once a researcher called me at Extension asking if I had seen both colors in bloom in my area or just one. She believed only one color would grow in an area. I wish I remembered who she was so I could show her both colors in my yard, although they occur in separate patches of color.

The vegetable garden is doing great.  There are tiny tomatoes on my plants.  The pumpkin vines are getting huge. Cukes are flowering. So far the grow bags are a success.

Bird activity has been different at my feeders this year too. I noticed the purple or house finches (hard to tell apart) are also eating the grape jelly in the oriole feeder.  I’m seeing fewer orioles and hummingbirds. Tons of baby red winged blackbirds, grackles, and starlings are devouring suet from the feeders. I am seeing meadow larks, which I haven’t seen in a few years around here. (They don’t come to the feeders.) I’ve also seen yellow warblers up by the house. I have not seen any bluebirds here.

Usually, I am seeing tons of tiny frogs and toads by now and I’m not. I have seen some adult toads and 1 frog up by the house. I generally have 3-4 frogs in my little water feature by the back door and I don’t have any this year. Ponds around here are drying up.

Chipmunks, however, seem to be having a population explosion. The little buggers are everywhere and eating at my bird feeders all day. I have one on my back porch and there’s one living under the platform the dog’s doggie door opens onto. I guess it’s too hot for cats and dogs to hunt them.

I hope you get rain if you need it and sun if you have too much.

Columbine- Aquilegia spps.

People often ask what flowering plants they can grow in shade. The columbine is a pretty, late spring, early summer bloomer that will thrive in light or partial shade. A bonus is that many species of columbine or aquilegia are native to North America. The plant is also native to many parts of northern Europe and Asia. Columbines grow at the edges of woodlands and in moist meadows.

There are dozens of species of columbine and many varieties, both natural and man cultivated. Aquilegia species hybridize easily. Two common North American native species found in gardens are Aquilegia canadensis, Red columbine and Aquilegia coerulea, Colorado Blue columbine.  Garden columbines are often hybrids of many species.

Columbine 'Bluebird'

The columbine has composite leaves that have 3 leaflets, each leaflet has 3 lobes. There are usually several stems about 2 feet tall to each plant, with cultivated varieties being taller and having more stems than native type plants.

Flowers appear on the ends of stems in late spring. Each flower has 5 sepals, 5 modified petals that have a long tube, each with a nectar gland at the end called spurs and a flatter blade shaped portion on the top. Depending on the species, spurs come in many sizes, positions and lengths. In the center of the flower are a large number of stamens, grouped in 5’s and 5 pistils.

Columbine flowers come in a variety of colors, usually the center petals are a different color from the sepals, but some are solid colors. Blue, red, orange, white, yellow, purple and pink columbine colors can be found.  A few species are fragrant, but most garden columbines are not. The flowers turn into long pods filled with tiny seeds.

Columbines got the common name from the Latin word for dove. It is said that when you turn a flower upside down it looks like 5 doves in a ring.  Columbine is pollinated by hummingbirds and a few butterfly and bee species. The flowers are edible if you don’t consume too many. Some people suck the nectar out of the long spurs, but this seems a waste of a flower to me.

Columbine blooms for about a month, after which the plant may go dormant in hot conditions. In milder moist areas foliage persists but may turn purplish toward fall. The foliage is food for several larval species of butterfly. Deer and rabbits tend to leave columbine alone, maybe because it is toxic.

Growing columbine

Columbine does well in a variety of soils but dislikes heavy clay soil. In moist but well drained loam soils it can handle full sun, but partial or light shade is a better position for it, especially in zones 6 and higher. In deep shade it may not bloom well. It is hardy to zone 3.

Gardeners will probably want to start with plants, but columbine does grow well from seeds if they are treated correctly. Seeds should be sown in fall where they are to grow or sown in pots and left outside for winter. Alternately seeds can be cold treated and started inside in early spring.

Columbine is a short-lived perennial, but it usually seeds itself in the garden. Watch for little plants coming up in spring and protect them. Thin plants so they aren’t too crowded.

Keep columbine watered in the spring through it’s flowering, if the weather is dry. After flowering plants don’t mind dry conditions. But if not watered and it’s dry and hot the foliage may go dormant and die down. A light fertilization in spring as plants emerge will give you more and larger flowers, but over fertilization leads to floppy stems.

Columbine doesn’t like being too crowded by other plants. Keep weeds away and don’t let other plants crowd it out.  

The biggest problem columbine seems to have is leaf miners, which leave squiggly white trails across the leaves. While this makes the leaves look bad it generally does not harm the plant and no treatment is necessary.

ALL parts of the plant are poisonous. Eating plant parts could cause death. The flowers are the least toxic parts, and you would have to eat quite a few to get sick, but why would you want to eat them knowing they are mildly poisonous?  Just small amounts of roots or foliage could kill. Native Americans had some herbal uses for the plant, but I advise against them.

Columbine or aquilegia is an excellent plant for blooms in shadier areas and for those who like native plants. Make sure to add some to your garden.

Why your peonies don’t bloom

One of the common garden questions this time of the year is why aren’t my peonies blooming?  Peonies can survive and bloom with little care on old farmsteads for fifty years or more, yet many gardeners have difficulty getting them to bloom.  So just why are these gardeners having problems with their peonies?

One of the most common reasons peonies don’t bloom is their age.  It takes 3-5 years from seed to the first flower.  But most peonies are sold as root divisions and while these root divisions technically come from an older, blooming plant it can also take a year or more after you plant a peony before you get blooms and a few more years before you get a full, mature plant full of blooms.

Did you move the plant? Peonies don’t like transplanting or dividing. Every time a peony is moved or divided it can take a year or more before it blooms again and several years before it becomes a large plant with numerous blooms. 

Which brings me to another reason your peonies might not bloom, planting them too deep.  Peonies have small red bumps or “eyes” on the top of root clumps, and these should only be about 2 inches below the soil surface. 

There is some debate among experts as to whether a peony you suspect was too deeply planted should be dug up and replanted.  Over time many plants have the ability to correct the depth of their roots, the plant pushes upward or downward as needed. This may take years and the peony may not bloom during that time.  But if you dig it up and re-plant it, the peony could also take years to bloom again. You might try carefully removing a few inches of soil from around the peony. 

Not getting enough sun is another reason peonies fail to bloom.  Yes, there are some peonies that continue to bloom in partial shade, but these are exceptions, and no particular cultivar is better in shade.  Peonies need full sun, at least 6 hours of sun midday, to bloom well.  Often if peonies bloom less as they age it’s because a tree has grown larger and is now shading them.

What did you do last year? Peonies need their foliage the whole season to make enough energy to set next year’s blooms. Don’t cut down peony foliage before the first frost even if it looks unattractive.  The only exception is if the foliage is infected with botrytis, see below.

Sometimes failure to bloom may be caused by a common peony disease, gray mold or botrytis blight (Botrytis paeoniae).  This disease is prevalent when spring is wet and cool, and some types of peonies are more susceptible than others.  If the disease comes on early and affects shoots and buds, you are unlikely to get blooms. New shoots may get covered in gray mold, rot and fall off, young buds blacken and shrivel up, older buds and flowers get a gray mold, rot and fall off.

Peonies are a plant that thrives without much fertilization. In fact, if they get too much nitrogen, they can stop blooming. This can be a problem if they are planted in a lawn that is heavily fertilized, as lawn fertilizer is high in nitrogen. 

One last thing to mention, ants and peonies.  Peonies do not need ants to bloom, and ants do not harm peonies. Peonies and ants can have a symbiotic relationship, the ants eat a sweet secretion from peonies and in turn defend the flowers from some pollen stealing or petal munching insects.  But peonies don’t really need ants and since ants don’t harm the peonies there is no reason to use pesticides to kill them.  To get ants off peonies you have cut for inside gently submerge the flowers in cold water for a few minutes.

 

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

Alfred Austin: 

 

 

Kim Willis

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