Small Fun With Fake Stone

Diamond rings, gold watches and the keys to a new Porsche – all good things in small packages.  While I don’t have much experience with any of those, I am crazy about tiny plants in special pots, a unique branch of horticulture known as trough gardening.

Who invented the trough garden?  The answer may be lost in time.  Perhaps someone with a green thumb had a stack of obsolete stone animal watering troughs lying around, as well as a few stone sinks, and decided to plant something in them.  Or, maybe a plant collector with tiny alpine plants, succulents and other wee treasures found they looked good and grew well in troughs.  Like peanut butter and chocolate, a great combination was born.

Then the laws of supply and demand kicked in.   Old stone sinks and troughs are rare antiques, and the few available command big prices.  Luckily, some genius came up with a substitute version, which could be made by hand using a mixture of cement, peat moss, and sand.  These troughs became known as ‘hypertufas,” since they resembled lightweight, somewhat porous tufa stone.  Today, all sorts of variations on the faux stone trough garden exist, most far exceeding the average rock.

I’ve been making hypertufas for years and have a modest collection of a dozen or so planted with unusual sedums, sempervivems (think hens-and-chicks) and other small plants.  While real stone troughs can be several feet long and hundreds of pounds heavy, hypertufas can be much smaller – mine have been made using plastic dishpans or storage bins as molds and weigh less than 20 lbs.  They stay outside all year, so the diminutive plants inside must be cold, heat and drought tolerant.

If you have at least one small creative bone in your body, you can make a hypertufa trough.  Here is a rough outline of the process – look for details on the web.  Find a moderate-sized plastic storage bin of attractive shape that is somewhat flexible.  In a large bucket or wheelbarrow, thoroughly mix one part Portland cement, one part sand and one part peat moss.  Add water, a little a time, to these ingredients and keep mixing until the product has the consistency of very stiff oatmeal.  Remember that the stiffer cement is when mixed, the harder it will become as it cures.

Next, cover the bottom of your storage bin with one inch of the hypertufa mix.  Pack it down tight.  Then form the sides, working up evenly all around, until you have something that looks like a planter.  Carve a drainage hole in the bottom.  Cover the new-born trough with a plastic bag and place in a cool location, occasionally spraying it very lightly with water, for one week.  Then pop it out of the plastic bin, and use a screwdriver or wire brush to scratch up the surface, making it look more stone-like.  Let the trough cure out in the sun and rain for a few weeks before planting.

You’ll have fun planting your diamond-in-the-rough with real jewels:  mini plants.

Lilacs: Beyond The Standard

We third graders always knew when Mrs. Bouton, the substitute, was in school:  the smell of lilacs.  A woman of great age, large stature and ample bosom, she liberally applied some form of lilac perfume before she faced the munchkins.  Perhaps it gave her stamina.  This spring, with its abundance of long-lasting lilacs, Mrs. Bouton seems to be hiding in every hedgerow.

The standard common lilacs have their faults, however.  They’re large, wanting to grow twelve or more feet high, and working them into a small garden is like fitting an elephant into a Mini.  Sometimes they take years to start flowering.  Powdery mildew is often a late summer problem.  Fortunately, other members of the lilac tribe offer answers.

Chief among my favorites of these alternative bloomers is the ‘Miss Kim’ Manchurian lilac, which opens during the second half of May.  ‘Miss Kim’s’ buds are medium lilac purple, with the open flowers a much paler shade.  Dozens and dozens of the conical flower clusters hold scores of the small blossoms, ensconcing the shrub in purple.  Plant tags sometimes list it as growing only three feet high and wide, while mine is now seven feet high and five across.  A key point to remember is that plants don’t read the tags.  Powdery mildew is not a problem, and some years a good reddish-purple fall color develops.  A new version, ‘Baby Kim,’ is more compact with a darker flower.

An extremely fragrant lilac is Syringa meyeri ‘Palibin,’ cuttings of which are making me woozy as I write.  Palibin is a slow grower, perhaps stopping at five feet, but it flowers well when still small.  I hesitate to tell you mine is blooming its heart out in partial shade, lest you go and plant one in darkness and have a failure, but it is true.  Lilacs usually demand full sun for optimal flower production, in this case mostly following what the tags suggest.

I would like to have a later flowering Preston lilac (Syringa x prestoniae), the first of which were developed by a woman named Isabella Preston in Ottawa in the 1920’s.  She named many of her hybrids after Shakespearian women, but in the nursery trade you are also likely to find such notables as ‘Donald Wyman’ (deepest pink), ‘Miss Canada’ (bright rose-pink), and ‘James MacFarlane’ (bright pink and vigorous), all trying to attract the attention of shoppers.  Flowers are formed on new growth and open two weeks after the common lilac, which blooms on last season’s wood. 

The last of the razzle-dazzling lilacs is Syringa reticulata subspecies reticulata.  Its also the largest of the genus, often reaching twenty feet or more, hence its common name, Japanese tree lilac.  Very cold hardy and fairly pest free, it could be useful in many landscapes and has even been successfully pressed into service as a street tree (the toughest job known to plants) in Troy.  Only white flowered types are available, and common cultivars include ‘Ivory Pillar,’ ‘Ivory Silk’ and ‘Snowdance.’  Only one problem:  all smell more like a privet than a lilac.  Perhaps they should take a lesson from Mrs. B.

A Blushing Beauty

Don’t go by what people tell you, judge by what you see in the landscape.  I learned this from the redbud.  Some folks claim it isn’t hardy hereabouts, but take a look in Chatham, in Niverville, and along Schodack’s Brookview Road, and you’ll see them now, in full spring color mode.  Normally blooming after the shadbush but before flowering dogwood, this crazy year they’re all overlapping, with the redbud the queen of the show.

While neither the buds nor the flowers are red on Cercis canadensis, it doesn’t matter, since their hot pink-purple-magenta hues hint that Mother Nature might have spent time as a showgirl.  Initially shaped like miniature Christmas bulbs and covering each twig, branch and the smaller trunks, the buds open into small pea-like flowers.  Since all this color happens well before the obscuring leaves emerge, redbuds can be identified a quarter-mile away.  This makes a good pastime for us Yankees when we can travel south in April, since they’re common understory and woodland-edge trees from Pennsylvania all the way to Texas.

Redbud’s flash fades as spring rolls on, but it still retains charm.  The overall habit ranges from vase-shaped to rounded, with the youngest branches exhibiting a distinct zig-zag growth pattern.  The matte green leaves are heart-shaped, up to four inches across, and usually turn a handsome yellow-orange in autumn.  The pea-like flowers yield pea-like pods that don’t prove to be as obnoxiously prolific as a maple’s.  Growing to only perhaps 25 feet, it can fit into a small garden, in either a sunny or shady spot, in average soil.

One vice attributed to redbud is a propensity to split under a heavy ice load.  I witnessed this three winters ago, when a sizable branch was peeled off the main stem of my young tree.  Without the branch, the tree was essentially destroyed, so in a fit of optimism I trudged through the ice and fastened the limb back in place, using three two-and-a-half inch drywall screws.  Heck, I reasoned, if a surgeon can screw bone back together, why can’t a horticulturist fix living wood?  The wound calloused over, the limb continued to live, and today the tree is still an attractive specimen.  While this isn’t a Cornell-approved remedy, faced with another injured woody plant I wouldn’t hesitate to give it another try.

A cousin to our native tree, also called redbud but with the botanical name Cercis siliquastrum, figures large in a Biblical legend.  This redbud grows in a wide range, from southern France all the way to eastern Asia, and is a bit taller, but similar in flower and foliage.  The story goes that after betraying Christ, Judas Iscariot hung himself from this Cercis, which blushed pink in shame (it originally featured white blossoms).  With this heavy cross to bear, it developed weak wood so that it would never be considered for such a dirty deed ever again.  The tree was thereafter known as the Judas Tree, a name which some even apply to our own American redbud.      

Two Yellow Bettys

I like when plants make me do a double-take.  The enormous weeping beeches at the Vanderbilt Estate, an entire field ablaze with sulfurous dandelions and the giant witches broom in a white pine along a central New York road all had me putting on the brakes for a prolonged investigation.  So last week when a small front yard tree in Rensselaer appeared to be filled with yellow canaries, I came to a complete stop, then rejoiced over a yellow magnolia.

Afterward, I rather sheepishly decided that I shouldn’t have been so surprised, since I have a yellow magnolia in my front yard, too.  While such a thing might seem like a horticultural myth, akin to a truly blue rose or lawn grass which stays green but doesn’t need mowing, the real story goes back to 1977, when the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (BBG) patented what is generally acknowledged to be the first yellow magnolia, a hybrid called ‘Elizabeth.’  I saw a plant of ‘Elizabeth’ for the first time in the early 1990’s, when it was truly rare, at BBG’s Kitchawan Research Center in Westchester County, and I vowed that someday I would have a tree of my own.  The woman behind the tree, Elizabeth Van Brunt, was a friend and benefactor of the BBG who donated the Kitchawan site for the research facility.

‘Elizabeth’ (the tree, mind you) came about as a cross of parents from two continents.  Cucumbertree magnolia (Magnolia acuminata) is a hardy to Zone 4 native, growing quickly to fifty feet or more and having yellowish-green, slightly fragrant flowers.  The Yulan magnolia (M. denudata) hails from central China, grows to perhaps 40 feet, and has white, fragrant flowers.  Both are fairly site-tolerant once established, but like many other magnolias, they can be a bit touchy about transplanting.  While I can’t tell you which was the father (pollen parent) ) and which was the mother (ovary parent), how many other offspring were produced or what the two had for dinner the night before, we do know that ‘Elizabeth’ was selected as something special.  With a neat pyramidal habit and an eventual height of perhaps fifty feet, she produces beautifully tapering buds of pale yellow which open before the leaves begin to gain any size, showing off her blossoms nicely.  Today, ‘Elizabeth’ is established in the nursery trade and can adapt to making a home almost anywhere, growing successfully from Maine to Florida.

Success breeds many imitators, and the floodgates have released newer yellow magnolias, some perhaps better than stately ‘Elizabeth.’  At least ten have the word “gold” in their name (‘Gold Cup,’ ‘Goldfinch,’ ‘Golden Endurance’) and of course there are ‘Sundance,’ ‘Sunburst’ and ‘Solar Flare.’  Many produce deeper yellow flower than ‘Elizabeth’ and are truly magnificent in flower.  Which leads me to my own tree.  Last year it had one single bloom.  This year it sported at least fifty bright yellow, highly fragrant blossoms.  Not ‘Elizabeth,’ but who?  Too bad I lost the tag.