Jill Severn's Gardening Column

Garden Year Awards

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All this rain has made the grass green again, and my Seven Son tree was so pleased it unfurled a few new leaves even while the rest were starting to change color. Between downpours, it’s been pleasant to stroll around the neighborhood and watch the progress of fall colors on everyone else’s trees too.

While it’s raining and I’m indoors, I’ve been reviewing the growing season and dwelling on garden favorites of the year. It’s the Garden Year Awards season.

And the winners are:

Queen Anne’s Lace: Miss Versatility

When I went about 10 days without mowing, a Queen Anne’s Lace plant that was hiding in the grass jumped up barely five inches and bloomed. This is a plant that usually blooms when it’s three or four and sometimes five feet tall.

I had noticed over the years that when the county mows the roadside, this highly adaptable plant will shoot back up and bloom when it’s just a foot tall, but my little five-incher amazed me. I mowed around it until it had gone to seed. If more of them come up in the lawn next year, I may do the same.

Not everyone shares my fondness for this non-native but ubiquitous weed, because it reseeds itself so freely it can become a pest. But it’s easy to pull up by its long taproot when the ground is damp. And I think it’s well-named; its lacy white flower is royalty in my yard.

Purple perennial asters: Passion that lasts

The longer I’ve grown asters, the more I appreciate their tolerance for shade – a quality that contradicts the garden books’ recommendation for full sun. It is fast-growing but not invasive and provides a generous supply of long-lasting late summer and fall color.

Two years ago, I bought a little start of a deep purple one. It’s a vivid, intense color that is rare in the garden world. It has all the aster virtues of adaptability and fast growth and blooms even later than the lavender ones I’ve enjoyed for years.

Asters are long-lasting cut flowers if picked soon after they begin to bloom; a little vase of the purple ones has been on my table for a week and is still going strong.

Mexican shell flowers: Wonder of the garden world

Mexican shell flowers (tigridia pavonia), are surely the eighth – well maybe the ninth – wonder of the world. (I know there are always a lot of nominees for eighth.)

Bring home some bulbs, or buy them online, poke them about four inches into the ground in a sunny or semi-sunny place. Their flowers will amaze your eyeballs in late summer. (You’re supposed to plant them in the spring, but I didn’t know that and planted them in the fall, and they did fine.)

There’s nothing remotely like them: they grow narrow, foot-tall pleated leaves and bloom in shades of pink, red, yellow and white. Each flower has three large petals, and within those, three smaller spotted petals, hosting an erect pistil and its surrounding stamens. A bit erotic? Well yes. Each one blooms only for a day, but each plant produces a succession of them over several weeks.

The bulbs reproduce freely and are likely to get crowded in two or three years; then you can dig them up and thin them and give bulbs to your friends.

I have some at the base of a tree in front of my house. When they bloom, people stop and stare.

Cow manure: Fertility nobility

I was sad when the Ostrom mushroom farm decamped from Lacey to Sunnyside, because for many years I’ve used its mushroom compost on my garden. It was reliably weed-free and produced great results. I was bereft this spring when Great Western Supply had none left. It was with trepidation that I bought two yards of their new substitute: composted cow manure. But lo and behold, it also contained no weed seeds, and produced even more exuberant results. Go cows!

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com

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