🌿 ONE JULY 2017 🌿

"We might think we are nurturing
our garden,
but it's our garden nurturing us."
Jenny Uglow, OBE.

Mexican Bell Vine
(Rhodochiton astrosanguineus)
Shaw Island, WA.

🌿 ANYONE CAN BE A GARDENER 🌿

These examples and many more
 locally grown and harvested herb and
flower seeds are now on the racks.
Stop by the Gatehouse,
Reefnet Bay Road,
Shaw Island, WA.
What an easy to pack-home-souvenir
or gifts for your gardening friends
who would like an
organic treat from the
San Juan Archipelago.

"Anyone can be a gardener. It's simply a matter of choice. On the day you find yourself fretting about the first frost or ruminating about Rhododendron color, the day you say to yourself, 'I'm a gardener'––you are one. You need no degrees or doctorates, no accumulations of blue ribbons at a prestigious Iris Society Competition, no title bestowed by an intimidating gardening society, no personnel official to declare, 'you're in,' nor any special knowledge of pH factors or compost heaps. What is essential is training your vision to see beyond what's already there; having enough strength to haul around a garden cart filled with fifty-pound bags; and money, because you can't start planting without any plants.. 

Dianne Benson. Dirt. The Lowdown on Growing a Garden with Style.

  Here is a customer review of the above-quoted O/P book by Benson, one review of 16 on Amazon, each rating the book with 5 stars.

"I don't even remember how I found out about this book. I bought a used copy on Amazon about a year ago and am today ordering another copy as mine is falling apart and dirty from being used outside. I couldn't garden without it in my Zone 7 shady garden with horrible clay soil. Along with the basics of gardening, it is a personal, opinionated account of creating a garden. I may not ever grow the exotic tropicals Ms. Benson loves (I am too lazy to dig them up for the winter) but there is so much information in this book on what to grow, how to do it and what to combine it with you are sure to find something you love. Be aware that there are no lush color photographs, just some black and white and line drawings. Love it, Love it, Love it!"

🌿 ISLAND SUMMER ROSE 🌿 2017

"Then I will raise aloft the milk-white rose
For whose sweet smell the air shall be perfumed."
William Shakespeare
Henry VI, Part 2, 1.1

ROSA banksiae 'alba'
LADY BANKS rose.
Mideke hand-thrown porcelain pot
and Oyster drills from an island beach.
Shaw Island, WA.
Anno One June Two Thousand and Seventeen.

🌿 A Deer and Drought Resistant Garden 🌿

Herb 'Golden Feverfew'
A deer-resistant Shaw Island garden plant.
(Most often deer resistant.)

"A vegetable garden almost anywhere in the San Juans requires a fence to keep out the deer. However, there are a lot of beautiful plants you can use in an ornamental border that the deer won't touch––and many of them are drought-resistant as well. Doug Bayley, a landscape gardener who worked at the Farm Nursery on Orcas Island had an experimental deer-resistant and drought-resistant garden there and he learned a lot.
      Some plants were more inviting to the deer than he expected and got nipped in the late summer after the lush growth in the fields tapered off. Those included Shasta Daisies, gaillardia, tulips, pansies, and almost all the annuals except zinnias. Deer also eat yew shrubs (although they're supposed to be poisonous) and cypress, and in the fall they rub small trees and shrubs with their horns and strip the bark off. 
      But there's a long list of plants that came through a full year untouched by the deer, and he recommends them for unfenced areas. All the herbs did well, including rosemary and lavender. Rosemary is considered good luck next to the front door, he added, and rosemary cuttings make a traditional housewarming present. Successful shrubs included potentilla, especially Ellen Willmott; choisya and skimmia, both plants with fragrant white flowers; ceanothus, rock rose, broom, juniper, rhododendron, cotoneaster, heather, hypericum, buddleia, boxwood, ilex, Pieris, and barberry.

Rhomneya coulteri
Deer resistant.
Photograph by Far Reaches Farm Nursery,
Pt. Townsend, WA.

      Among the perennials, Rhomneya is both deer and drought-resistant but difficult to propagate. Doug tried a couple hundred cuttings at the nursery and was successful with five. 
      Peonies, daylilies, and delphinium lasted as long as they bloomed, but then "the deer munched them down," Doug said. Iris, "are pretty cast iron." Other successful perennials included santolina, dianthus, bergenia, crocosmia, pulmonaria, hardy geraniums, Ajuga, Campanula, Lychnis, poppies, evening primrose, hellebores, and catnip.
      Most of the drought-resistant plants are California natives. Some of the more successful plants were Ceanothus, California wild lilac and rock rose. Doug pointed out that many plants will take a lot of drought in August if they get plenty of water in May. In fact, a dry August helps them harden off for winter. 
      We have some limitations in the San Juans, including the deer and the lack of water––but Doug pointed out that the climate here is ideal for almost all kinds of gardening."
Text by San Juan Island writer, Louise Dustrude. San Juan Islands Almanac. Friday Harbor, WA. Volume 11. 1984.
      
For her Shaw Island experience, Diana includes these on a list of deer-resistant plants:
Lily, Aster, Gladiolus, Alyssum, Cosmos, Dahlias, Zinnia, Sunflower, Crocosmia, Pieris, Viburnum, Stachys byzantina (Lamb's Ears) and Helleborus.

     Others that Cherie can add; Agastache rugosa, Boxwood, Camas, Foxgloves, Fritillaria imperialis (Gatehouse flower spring '18), Cotoneaster dammeri, Crocus, Cyclamen, Daffodils, Dianthus, Echinops, Epimedium, 'Honey Bush', Leucojum (Summer Snowflake"), Lonicera nitida, the winter-blooming Mahonia x 'Charity', Magnolia grandiflora, Papaver cambricum (Welsh Poppies), Nicotiana sylvestris, Oriental Poppies, Trillium, the old-fashioned Kniphofia (but not the gorgeous large yellow-flowered cultivars), Common Mullein (Verbascum) which are being tested around the Gatehouse garden. Alyssum has been devoured in the Gatehouse garden summer of 2018. The names in red ink are stocked on the seed shelf at the Gatehouse.
🌿 In 2019, Shaw Island deer enjoyed the juicy center buds coming on the new growth in a pot of Dahlias at the Gatehouse and dined on the red flowers of Crocosmia 'Lucifer.' Some pots are climbing higher to the top of a spool-table so let us see how that goes.
In July of 2019, the deer cleaned off the flower heads on Yarrow, Rubeckia, Persicaria, and several Red-Hot Pokers. But the flowering tobacco is strong and without teeth marks.
🌿 There is an informative essay by Jeff Chorba on Designing with Deer Resistance. Click here.

🌿 BLUE-EYED MARY for MAY 🌿

Blue-eyed Mary
(Collinsia grandiflora)
Mideke porcelain pot.
In early April on coastal bluffs, on through June,
whole ledges and slopes reflect the sky color as
myriad Collinsia open their buds.
It can be a rather tedious gleaning of seed from the
small capsules, so we might not find it for sale at
Gatehouse Seeds.
Enjoy her in the wild.
Anno One May Two Thousand and Seventeen.

🌷 TULIPS 🌷 NOW AND THEN

There are only a few more days to catch the riot of color in the tulip fields of the Skagit Valley for the spring of 2017.
      The Tulip Festival folks have a helpful site--here is a link to Bloom Status, the source for this beautiful photo. RoozenGaarde lists they will have tulips blooming until 7 May 2017.

Skagit Valley tulips
RoozenGaarde Farm,
as of 27 April 2017.
Photo from the Bloom Status site.

If you'd rather I stay within the bounds of our garden isle of Shaw, I can do that with one of my favorite tulip photos from the garden of Gwen Yansen, from fifteen years ago. These are Menton Tulips, an attractive blend of three colors.

Menton Tulips ©
A late-blooming, single tulip bred in 1971.
As pretty as the grower, Gwen Yansen (1915-2012.)
Gwen's garden, Shaw Island, WA.
Photo by author 2002.

🌿 HAPPY EASTER 🌿 2017

🌿 Swamp Beauty 🌿 "YELLOW ARUM" One April 2017

YELLOW ARUM
(Lysichiton americanum)
Most often known in the PNW as "Skunk Cabbage,"
they are more stunning up close and personal; if you are
on the island, it is worth a stop to view this native happy
along a small stream on Ben Nevis Loop Road,
where lives a lot of the March rain.
Shaw Island, San Juan Archipelago, WA.
Anno One April Two Thousand and Seventeen.

"The large tropical-looking swamp plant whose brilliant yellow spathes illuminate the dark swamps as early as February or March [is still out to greet us this day on Shaw Island.] The spathe unfolds to reveal the spadix, a thick stalk bearing hundreds of small greenish flowers. Shortly the fleshy oval leaves emerge from the mud, ultimately to form huge fans. These are the largest of any plant occurring in our area. Some have measured 56" long by 29" wide!
      The whole plant has a smell of spring, of surging growth, that would be objectionable in a closed room but is not unpleasant in its own habitat. For the record, it does not smell at all like the mephitic spray of the skunk. Bears consume the whole plant, including the short thick rootstock, while deer occasionally browse the leaves.
      This huge plant is related to the taro, staple food of the Polynesians. Both plants produce a stinging sensation in the mouth, due to calcium oxalate. Ages ago, the natives of our area discovered, as did those of the South Seas, that roasting and drying the root drove off the substance responsible for the stinging, burning taste, after which it could be ground to an edible flour.
      Look for the yellow torches of the Yellow Arum (Lysichiton americanum) in the mucky ground and swampy areas along the coast from Alaska south, and in the interior of BC south from about the latitude of Prince George to central California."
Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest from Alaska to Northern California. Clark, Lewis. Sidney, BC; Gray's Publishing Limited. 1976.

Nancy J. Turner (Plant Technology of the First Peoples of British Columbia. UBC Press, 2001.) tells us that the large, flat, water-repellent leaves were used as wax-paper by virtually all coastal aboriginal cultures and even some cultures in the interior. They also made makeshift berry containers by folding and pinning the leaf edges together with sticks.