Fit For The King

Poking along Ridge Road by bicycle, I stumbled upon a handsome example of a powerful plant.  Proudly in flower, and growing boldly out of a living maple tree trunk, it’s an herb of presidential politics and festive celebrations.  Used with skill it might cure, but cooked wrong it can easily kill.  ‘Twas once renowned enough to make the sensational swiveling singer from Memphis croon.  It’s a plant with a resume so slick it could turn a Harvard grad green.  I give you pokeweed.

Growing from Maine to Minnesota and southward, Phytolacca americana is an herbaceous perennial that pops up in pastures, cleared areas, fencerows and open spots in the woods.  Covered in simple green leaves, its purplish, branched stems can reach an impressive eight feet tall and bear elongated racemes of white flowers which become attractive purple berries.  This botanical exuberance is fueled by a deep and extensive root system.  While visually impressive, consider this:  the entire plant is poisonous, and swallowing enough may cause vomiting, spasms, convulsions, then death from respiratory failure. 

Despite this gruesome little fact, pokeweed has long been considered a culinary delight, especially below the Mason-Dixon.  The trick is to harvest only young leaves, before they exhibit any reddish pigment, and boil them thrice, discarding the water each time.  This regimen gives us the basic ingredient in poke sallet, which reportedly has a flavor between asparagus and spinach.  While it sounds simple, my advice is, “don’t try this at home.” 

A much safer option would be to bring your appetite to one of the four annual pokeweed festivals.  The doings in Harlan, Kentucky feature a poke sallet feast with side dishes of boiled eggs, green onions, cornbread and buttermilk.  A cooking contest gives $25 prizes for the best poke recipe, appetizer, and dessert.  Whether one has to be an expert in poke preparation to enter is unclear, but I imagine the judges pay up on their life insurance before the tasting.  And the one tune sure to be blaring from the loudspeakers is “Poke Salad Annie,” popularized in the ‘70’s by none other than Elvis Presley.

What might drive people to eat the horticultural equivalent of a hand grenade?  One historic reason would be plain hunger, especially problematic in spring, the “safe” period for poke.  Eventually, poke sallet became a supermarket staple, sold by the Allen Canning Company of Siloam Springs, Arkansas.  Medicinally, topical applications of pokeweed were used to treat itching, inflammation and acne, while careful ingestion might aid arthritis, mumps, or constipation.  Recently, investigations have probed the use of poke extracts in curing cancer and HIV-AIDS.

But wait!  There’s more.  As a child, a friend and I collected a large jar of poke berries and spending an afternoon squeezing a wonderful juice that permanently stained our shirts.  We didn’t know this same stuff was dye to Native Americans and ink for Civil War soldiers.  Supporters of Polk’s candidacy wore a sprig of poke, a potent plant for the least known consequential president.       

Full of Surprises

If I wrote that every garden needed some Lycoris squamigera, I probably wouldn’t tickle the fancy of too many people.  If I said you would die for some Resurrection Lilies, some interest would arise, especially among the church folk.  A pop-up advert for Surprise Lilies would stir up the optimists, who think everything is coming up roses, but might turn off the pessimists, who can just picture a new invasive.  But if I showed you some Naked Ladies, everyone would clamor, and guys might even get interested in horticulture.

All these wonderful names belong to just one plant which has a rather odd life pattern.  In spring, along with the awakening of most other plants, a cluster of thick, dark green, strap-shaped leaves is produced.  Shortly thereafter, however, these die, and the space is taken over by daylilies, lady’s mantle, and other garden plants, or even weeds.  Weeks go by, then in early to mid-August comes the magic.  Two-foot tall flower stalks emerge from the ground, crowned by clusters of magenta buds.  These open into pink, trumpet-shaped, lily-like flowers enclosing a cluster of yellow stamens.  For those who have forgotten the early set of leaves, it seems terribly odd and more than a little surprising that these leafless flowers have sprung from seemingly nowhere.  If you remember the leaves, but thought the plant died and vanished, then it’s resurrection is a joyful occasion.  And the curvy, fun, pink flowers certainly do hold more than a little of the feminine mystique.

Just where Naked Ladies comes from is a bit of a mystery, too.  Signs point to Japan or China, and it might be a hybrid of two different Lycoris species. Dr. George Rogers Hall of Rhode Island is credited with introducing it to New England from Japan in 1862.  Hall was a medical man seeking his fortune by opening a small hospital in Shanghai, but he entered history by being the first to import plants from Japan to the USA.  Having proven hardy in the chilly climate, Naked Ladies spread through various distribution channels across the country.  Given its disappearing act, it is difficult to offer in garden centers, where the task to sell a pot of non-descript leaves or fragile, fast-fading flowers is mighty.  Designated more of a “garden novelty item,” Naked Ladies has found a home within mail-order catalogs and web sources, where it can be easily acquired.  It is also undoubtedly a pass-along plant, since it can easily be dug up after the leaves fade, divided, and then shared with friends and neighbors. 

I can certainly attest to the hardiness of Naked Ladies, having several clumps in my old garden planted many decades ago by the previous gardener.  One patch pops up next to an ancient forsythia, a large group lives in my perennial garden, and one poor soul struggles to survive under an expanding magnolia.  Naked Ladies need their sun and don’t like competition, and who can blame them?

Those Darn Yellow Daisies

Talk to botanists and they’ll tell you that the world is full of DYCs.  Botanists don’t care about DC (a thorny place full of prickly issues), the DMZ (a borderline patch between North and South Korea that is no place to garden) or AC/DC (loud rock music is not good for plants).  But DYCs are both a source of amusement and puzzlement, because in botany, they are the damn yellow composites.

Composites are plants with two part, daisy-like flowers.  Each bloom consists of a center disk flower, which may be green, brown, yellow, black, or any other shade, and the “petals,” or ray flowers around the disk.  So far, so good, so why the swearing?  Because there are so many species of yellow composites and they all look so much alike.  A botanist’s street cred (even if she works in the woods) hangs on being able to properly ID a plant, and DYCs create mayhem and foolishness.      

Of the dozens of wild DYCs, a relative handful have found their way into cultivated landscapes.  Three of them are in bloom at our Demonstration Garden right now.  Oxeye sunflower (Heliopsis heilanthoides) reaches a height of three to four feet, has dark green, opposite, toothed leaves, and covers itself in yellow daisies with a yellow center.  Its minor faults – that red aphids find hanging out on the stems beneath the flowers an irresistible place to be, and that it self-seeds a little bit – should be overlooked in favor of its jaunty demeanor.  Ashy sunflower (Helianthus mollis) is less well known but deserves consideration.  It has blue-green, opposite leaves without teeth and similar yellow flowers.  Cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum) has higher aspirations, producing its DYC flowers six feet or more above the earth.  Its paired leaves encircle the stem, hence the common name.  Michigan lists it as an endangered native plant, while Connecticut calls it invasive, so go figure.  All three of these species, like most DYCs, will live happily for years in full sun to slight shade in a wide range of adequately drained soils.

If cup plant excites you for its stature, you’ll also love the towering cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia nitida ‘Herbstonne’), which reaches over seven feet.  Its ray flowers of an even more luminescent shade than most DYCs droop a bit and the disk is mounded and slightly green.  Double-flowered variants of this also exist, but the blossoms look like used Kleenex to me.    Most bizarre is Cabbage  leaf coneflower (Rudbeckia maxima), which shoots up seven foot leggy stalks, each topped with a single bloom of very limp rays encircling a big brown disk.  The base is a set of strappy, blue-green leaves which reminded someone of the main ingredient in cole slaw. 

Lest we forget the plant that swept the ‘1980’s, consider Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm.’  With black-eyed Susan cheerfulness and Terminator toughness, it became the poster child for the “new American garden” school of landscape design, made millions for the nursery industry and thrives coast to coast.  Damn good for a yellow composite.    

Fuzzy, But Not Cute

Appearances can indeed be deceiving.  When I saw the white fuzzy stuff on the flower stalks of the hostas, I thought “must be a woolly aphid” and kept going.  Then it appeared on the Joe-Pye, the wild senna, and the dwarf lilac.  After receiving a phone call about this mystery critter, I took a better look.  These woolly aphids could jump!  Some searching revealed the proper identification:  citrus plant hoppers, a.k.a. mealy lantern flies or frosted lightning hoppers.  Gadzooks, what next?

Since I like the name “frosted lightning hopper” best, I’ll call these creatures FLH’s for short.  Scientifically, they are Metcalfa pruinosa.  The genus name honors entomologist Zeno “Zippy” Metcalf, a North Carolina State University researcher who was dedicated to the study of leafhoppers and their kin, while “pruinosa” means frosty, referring to the insect’s aforementioned fuzz.  They feed by sucking the sap from plants, and while a few FLH’s may not cause much damage, a higher population may induce stem twisting, stunting or dieback.  The fluff may also be off-putting to folks who like their plants neat, and might be troublesome to nurseries selling plants.  Perhaps most problematic is the waste stream of sugary liquid called honeydew which FLH’s emit.  This backdoor by-product lands on plant foliage and then grows a crop of an ugly black fungus called sooty mold.  If the FLH’s are high in a tree, the honeydew and resulting mold can land on patio furniture, parked cars or slow-moving pets, creating more clean-up work for the gardener and adding to the “honey do” list.

Just like I found in my own garden, the FLH feeds upon a wide variety of plants, including azaleas, magnolias, viburnums, and citrus trees.  A native to North America, it ranges over a large area, from Quebec to Florida, and west to California.  While we often complain of foreign insects invading our shores, we don’t often consider that our bad bugs go wandering, too.  This is in fact the case with the FLH, which is now found in parts of Europe, and has been causing problems in agriculture in South Korea.  May they’ll try a tariff.    

Life for FLHs starts out as eggs hidden in woody plant tissue or under tree bark.  Young nymphs hatch in mid-May.  These are covered in white waxy filaments, probably as a protective aid.  If you’re fortunate enough to be familiar with mealybugs or cottony cushion scales, these will seem superficially similar.  The adults, sporting a completely different look, are smooth, gray to brown, and wedge-shaped, with prominent yellow eyes.  I can reliably report that their vision is very good.  Each time I approached the infested hosta stalks with my secateurs to snip a sample, they moved slyly around the stem to hide.  But even more remarkable is their jumping ability.  Once I got my sample into the office, opening the bag allowed the FLH’s to jump several feet, onto the shoulders of the Master Gardeners, which caused a mixture of consternation bordering on fright.  They ain’t called “hoppers” for nothing. 

Beauty And The Zits

Shooting skyward, over six feet tall, the handsome stranger peeked over the stockade fence.  This mystery was accompanied by some commoners, including daisy fleabane, Queen Anne’s lace, and pink cosmos, all living in the giant’s shadows in a narrow strip along the gravel.  Featuring short, dense, bottlebrush leaves on a few lanky stems, it was topped by brilliant scarlet, trumpet-shaped flowers.  Not a well-known wildflower, and not a nasty invasive, a little Wednesday morning detective work pinned this suspect as Ipomopsis rubra, a.k.a. Texas plume, standing cypress, or scarlet gilia.  A truly beautiful thing, it can tolerate hot, dry soil, and exists as a biennial or short-term perennial.  Hummingbirds, legendary for their attraction to flowers in shades of red, not surprisingly serve as pollinators of this species.  Probably not a garden stalwart to count on for a floral display, but lovely when it appears, a gift from the gardening gods who all too often send us crazy snake worms, tomato blights, and, as I’ll later describe, plant zits.

But where is it native?  This is a question recently asked and answered by a team of botanical researchers from the Universities of North and South Carolina.  They note that I. rubra was a well-known garden plant at the time of the Civil War.  Bartram, traveling through Georgia and Florida, described it growing wild in 1791, and even earlier, Johann Dillenius was studying the seeds and growing it at Oxford University in England in 1732.  Yet it remained unclear where exactly the species originated and where it later traveled, aided by humans.  By studying every available herbarium record, the scientists have concluded that standing cypress is native in small pockets, from low country North Carolina to Texas and Oklahoma, and lives in a wide variety of habitats, from prairie to seashore, from granitic soils to limestone.  Occurrences north of Arkansas and ranging all the way into Ontario are likely introduced, including the plant growing right here in Troy.

Much less desirable and even more obscure, the Rudbeckia psyllid is making its presence known in a local garden.  We first learned of this strange insect in 2016, when a Master Gardener found it in her brother’s garden in Massachusetts, feeding on the ever-popular botanical megastar Goldsturm Rudbeckia.  Apparently not an entomologist, the brother described the damage as “zits,” but a more prosaic description could be purplish-black spots with greenish raised bumps. 

Although the details of their biology remain obscure, these creatures have several names, including psyllids, triozids, and “jumping plant lice.”  When in the mature nymphal state, they are about one-eighth inch long, flattened and very colorful with a light green abdomen, red-orange head and thorax, and white wing pads. They feed by inserting their needle-like mouthparts into lower surfaces of the leaf and sucking out plant juices. This feeding causes a distinct, shallow depression and purplish spots.  We aren’t sure how much trouble these triozids might cause in the future, but acne is no acme of anyone’s summer.

Stout and The Tawny

The ditch lilies are out in force.  Excuse me for using what seems to be a tawdry name, perhaps you know them by the more accepted monikers tawny orange daylilies or Hemerocallis fulva.  Natives of Asia, legend has it they were brought here by sea captains bearing gifts for their wives (who might have longed for something shinier).  No doubt their bright orange flowers, with pale stripes and yellow throats, delighted nineteenth century gardeners, who were daylily-deprived.  Although each blossom lasts for only a day, they flower abundantly and possess a tenacious spirit, growing in a wide range of conditions and re-appearing after being mowed, grazed, or even sprayed with herbicide.  Given their ability to spread, H. fulva is considered an exotic invasive through much of the eastern U.S. and in pockets farther west.  But as intruders go, it is difficult to thoroughly dislike the eye-dazzling trumpets, which seem to scream, “its summer, its hot, and so am I!”

With both rhizomes (spreading roots) as well as tubers (swollen underground storage organs), tawny daylilies are tough customers which can move.  Oddly enough, for all the show of the flowers, most of the plants we see “in the wild” are somewhat useless from a biological perspective, since they rarely reproduce from seed.  This is because they are a triploid form, and while producing viable pollen, they are otherwise sterile.  This triploid form is scientifically known as Hemerocallis fulva variety fulva.  Other forms of H. fulva, many long-cultivated in Asia for food, medicine, and beauty, also made their way to European and American gardens, along with other species of daylilies, which total about twenty in number.

Providence smiled upon the daylily when a Midwestern farm lad met H. fulva in the 1890’s.  Young Arlow Burdett Stout was intrigued by his mother’s tawny daylilies, growing by the porch, which produced no seeds.  He went on to study botany at the University of Wisconsin, and soon earned a Ph. D. from Columbia.  By 1911 he was working at the New York Botanical Garden, where in the 1920’s he obtained daylily plants and seeds from Asia.  Keeping meticulous records, he started hybridizing, eventually making over 50,000 crosses and raising thousands of seedlings, which were evaluated and culled, leaving only about 100 plants good enough to become named varieties. 

And oh what varieties they were!  The first one to hit the market, in 1929, was ‘Mikado,’ a strong yellow with dark red bands.  One of ‘Mikado’s’ parents was, unsurprisingly, H. fulva.  Daylily popularity boomed with the introduction of more of Stout’s hybrids, encouraging other plant breeders to get involved as well.  Today we have almost 50,000 named hybrid daylilies in vast array of colors, forms, and sizes.  Each year, one new daylily cultivar wins the Stout Silver Medal, the highest honor given by the American Daylily Society.  2018’s winner, ‘Entwined In The Vine,’ is a lavender pink, with a darker lavender multi-colored eye, yellow-green throat, and rippled ivory edge.  You’ve come a long way, tawny.      

Surviving Shock

In spring, along with rising sap, a gardener’s passions run high.  Most of us need to get in the car, travel to several nurseries and garden centers, and exchange some green (cash) for some green (plants).  We tote our purchases home, plant them, then expect them to perform.  What do the plants do?  After realizing they aren’t in Kansas anymore, some adjust to their new digs just fine, while others sulk, entering a phase some call “transplant shock.”  That’s just what we want to avoid.

Plants live on a slower schedule than we do.  It is not at all uncommon for a newly-planted tree to take three to five years to re-establish itself in a new location.  During this long re-adjustment period, the tree may show a host of distress symptoms.  These range from delayed leaf emergence in the spring, smaller leaves, off-color leaves, and early fall color to stunted growth, stem dieback, secondary insect and disease issues, and limited flowering.  Of course, the ultimate expression of dissatisfaction is when the tree checks out and dies.  Good gardeners can read these symptoms and possibly provide some corrective action, while the non-horticultural remain blissfully ignorant, become helpless or get angry.  Unfortunately, there is no mandatory coursework required to enter plant parenthood, but maybe there should be.

The list of reasons why transplanted plants fail to thrive could fill a textbook, and since plants can’t talk, we probably don’t know the half of it.  Consider that some nursery plants are of poor quality – with undersized root systems, or excessively pot-bound roots, or stresses from pest issues or poor handling techniques.  Any sort of root damage along the way from the production farm to the sales lot to your home is likely to show up as dieback on top.  Mishandling plants can have lasting results.  I get a chuckle when I see trucks flying down the road, nursery stock hanging on in back, leaves blowing in a fifty mile-per-hour breeze.  What foliage does hang on after that joyride is likely to become a desiccated mess. 

Matching the plant to the site is critical.  Some plants like shade, some like sun, some tolerate both.  For example, a rhododendron is not a good plant for a hot, dry parking lot, but I’ve seen it attempted.  Heavy clay soils are likely to retain a lot of water and have low oxygen content, so choose plants which can tolerate “wet feet” here.  Sandy soils are likely well aerated but may lack moisture, so drought tolerant species are a must.  It pays to stick a shovel in the ground and take a look at the soil before choosing what to put in it.  Windy areas are typically difficult locales for broadleaved evergreen plants, and even needled evergreens may have trouble establishing there.  Places which are exposed to road salt require salt-tolerant plants.  Even simply low spots and high spots have their challenges.  While plant tags are helpful, there really isn’t any substitute for knowing the likes and dislikes of the plants you bring home.