Savannah Garden Diary

I planted this Loropetalum chinense var. rubrum ‘Chinese Pizzazz’ in 2005 to hide a length of chain-link fence. It is just beginning to flower. The leaves will become more burgundy-colored as the season progresses.

The National Arboretum calls this the “neon lights of the witchhazel family.” I like the fact that it blooms for a long time, is a cheerful color, forms a dense hedge, and has small leaves, so that it is easily pruned by shearing.

What most people fail to realize is that loropetalum is fast-growing and gets VERY LARGE–meaning about 10 feet in all directions in only a few years. There are several places on our little island where it has been planted recently to landscape a parking lot and within a few years will completely block the entrance to a shop or sidewalk.

p.s. I planted the pimientos seeds on December 26 and they are doing fine. Heirloom seeds are a burden, but Beezoo said pepper seeds would germinate when two years old and it appears she is right.

Podranea ricosaliana still has a few flowers. This one is behind the shed, but there are some on the pergola as well. All my plants were cuttings from ones Jane had growing up telephone poles at her B&B in Homerville. I now know that growing them up telephone poles is not a good way to go, since they have no climbing mechanism, so would need to be tied in all the time. Also, they are much too aggressive for such a location.

Woodlanders (which is where I first discovered what this was) says “Plant in sunny site with well-drained soil and allow ample space to grow.” True, I’m sure, but this gives no idea of what a friendly vine this is. Yes, it gets big. But it is not invasive, in that it doesn’t spread underground. Now that it has reached the top of the pergola, it doesn’t need to be tied, but just sprawls over the pergola. I never water it, and the only maintenance is chopping off the branches that come drooping down between the rafters. And the flowers are very showy. All in all, an excellent vine for a big pergola. (Of course this may be famous last words and it will turn out to be a wisteria-mimic, eventually tearing the pergola down.

These are the seed heads of some 8-foot high Helianthus angustifolius that I have yet to cut down.

Yesterday, I looked out the window and they were shaking like crazy, although there was no wind. They were covered with American goldfinches, which obviously love the seeds.

Thom says, “Hey. There are thistle feeders in the back yard, you know.” But the birds didn’t seem to care.

Pennisetum rubrum by the pond with the frost-bitten crinums behind. The Pennisetum clumps are much happier here than they were in pots on the patio. A dry sandbank is what they like.

This photo disguises the fact that that bank is riddled with trumpet vine, which is a right beast to remove. In fact, I don’t think you can get rid of it. I just have to weed it out every year. I have done that with the one in the middle of the fig, and it still comes up every year.

We’re having a lovely spell of warm, damp weather. Perfect for planting. Yesterday, I moved the blue agapanthus from the front bed. Amazing how much it has grown. It was a single bulb 4 years ago and now it’s a huge clump that took ages to wrestle out of the ground.

Killer afternoon making the patio more respectable. Don’t know that my tendonitis-ridden ankle will ever recover. The toughest bit was dividing the Phyllostachys nigra (black bamboo).

Here is one in a pot looking beautiful soon after the patio was built. But I drowned this one with irrigation when we were in California. Although they like plenty of water, they also need drainage! That left one pot. I was inclined to kill it off and put something really easy like skyrocket junipers in the pots. But when I hacked the survivor to the ground in November, it bravely put up lots of new growth, so I decided it deserved to live. They’re horribly expensive, so I had to divide it to fill the other pot. This took half an hour with the (blunt) axe.

I went to Ace this morning for paint for the blue bench in front, but got distracted by Hester & Zipperer. So instead of just weeding, hacking the vines, and getting leaves and crud off the patio, I also had annuals to plant.

Also a Daphne odora over which to dither. I think it needs dry, dense shade, and I can’t decide where to put it. The one out front is not a doer, perhaps because it gets too much sun. That’s the second one that’s let me down here, and I can’t think why. The one at Walthour Road was spectacular, stuck under a live oak and never watered.

Flats of violas and snapdragons, but I also wanted something that might survive on the patio. The beds near the house have got awfully dry and shady, what with all the vines, and the usual annuals don’t do well there. I’m trying Nemesia fruticans ‘Compact Innocence’ and Diaschia x ‘Flying Colors Orange.’ I was going to add some Lamium maculatum, which I keep meaning to try, but I think it likes loads of water, which it ain’t going to get in a flower bed, so I put that in a couple of planters over by the shed.

Prunus mume ‘Peggy Clarke’ is blooming in back. Or at least it has a few flowers fully open. I guess it gets more sun than the one in front. I find this a slightly vicious pink, so the two I bought from Woodlanders this year are ‘Bonita’ instead. My absolute favorite, I think is ‘Rosemary Clarke,’ which is nearly white, but I have managed to kill both of mine. I really can’t imagine why, since they are said to dislike wet feet, which nobody gets in my garden outside of the bog.

Yesterday, I erected two bird boxes. One was the bluebird box that’s been sitting on my workbench for a year because I had no way to attach it to its pole. During my pre-Christmas trip to Wild Birds Unlimited, I rectified that. The other was a little wren/chickadee box to replace Thom’s tufted titmouse box on the pole in the front garden. That box was always inhabited by chickadees, not tufted titmice. (In winter it was often inhabited by a hairy/downy woodpecker.) It succumbed to old age and a colony of bees. (The box, not the woodpecker, which for all I know is thriving yet.

This morning, two bluebirds are in and out of the chickadee box.

“Hey, guys. There’s a brand new bluebird box out back. That one’s not big enough for you and it has no baffle, so a snake will get the babies. I vow and swear, you guys are more trouble than the twins.”

This Camellia sasanqua is going over now. It’s been blooming since September. Mine is 4 years old and about 8′ high. There is one down the road that is about 15′ high and has been pruned into a multi-trunk tree.

I don’t know the variety. I thought it was in my notebook, but I can’t find it. Might it be ‘Pink Snow’? Can anyone enlighten me?

The petals fall to the ground (beautifully mulched with pine straw) in a pale pink carpet that looks like snow.

I love it.

This is an amazingly bad photo of a crested egret fishing in the bog garden this morning. It caught at least one goldfish. It is hard to photograph because when I open a window, it flies away and it is too cold to leave the window open.

We have had great blue herons fishing in the pond before now, but this is the first egret I’ve seen. One glorious afternoon, I came home and found 2 great blues displaying at each other on our small back lawn. The winner hung around for a few days and caught a few fish, but eventually it went away and didn’t come back.

We’ve been in Ithaca for Christmas, where the weather is exactly as it is here today–gray and chilly.

Everyone thinks we’re in the middle of a drought, what with dear Sonny praying for rain and all. But here on the coast, we’ve had plenty of rain. I just looked it up in the paper. Normal precipitation year to date is 48.65″ and this year we have had 48.93″. Including about 4″ while we were away, which is excellent. In fact, it’s a damp December. I need to plant the pimientos de Padrón this afternoon.

Despite good average rainfall for the year, however, we have had long periods with no rain and I have lost several plants. My longleaf pine is dead, as well as 3 camellias I planted last March. Of course you should never plant anything in March in Savannah if you don’t have irrigation. Which means you have to buy camellias when they are not in flower. Better, however, to have to rip out a perfectly healthy camellia you don’t like than to have 3 that you do like die on you.

Jan McDougall, who is a very fine Charleston horticulturist, says she cannot live without this book. I can’t say I use it as much as she does, but, if you live in the southeast, it is very useful in helping to figure out which varieties of a plant are most likely to do well in your area. It is not for beginners because it is sparsely illustrated, so you pretty much have to know what you are talking about before you begin.

For me, it suffers from the “coastal orphans” syndrome, meaning that Dirr is at UGA in Athens, and knows a lot more about conditions there than he does about the hot, steamy coast. For instance, he’s in love with Itea virginica (sweetspire), which is indeed a very nice shrub but, I discover to my sorrow, likes a lot more moisture in the soil than is common in a garden on the sandy coast sans irrigation.

I just oiled my bench. What virtue! And I need to get around to the other garden benches. Maintenance chores are not my favorite, but there is no doubt that they vastly improve the appearance of the garden. At the same time, I swept up the heap of palmetto berries in front of the bench. Palmettos are very attractive, but they are messy.

This is the bench you are supposed to sit on while meditating in front of the pond. I got it from Gardener’ Supply Company, along with a can of expensive Penofin Oil. I suppose I could just let it go gray, like teak, but I like this golden color, so it has to be oiled occasionally.

I love having benches scattered through the garden. The theory is that the gardener and guests will sit on them and admire the garden. This doesn’t work very well, at least for me, because I only have to sit down and look around and I spot some chore that should be done to vastly improve the appearance of the garden, and up I leap. In practice, I use the benches as focal points or, in the case of this bench, to complete the appearance of the pond.