🌿 LOVE-IN-A-MIST 🌿

Nigella damascena
delicate looking but hardy enough
for growing on Shaw Island.

Botanical Name: Nigella damascena
Common Name: Love-in-a-mist
Life cycle: Hardy annual.
Native Growing Region: Southern Europe and northern Africa.
Zone: 4-8.
Height: 12"-24"
Bloom time: mid-summer. 
Maintenance: Low.
Water: when dry and fertilize monthly.
Flower: Showy flowers open pale but mature to an intense pure shade of sky-blue such as we all find irresistible. Self-sowing but not a thug. Deadheading spent flowers will extend the bloom period, but will also prevent the development of attractive post-bloom seed pods.
Cut flowers in the morning to minimize water loss. 
Culture: Should be sown directly by broadcasting seed in the autumn or spring. Resents transplanting.
Days to Sprouting: 10-15.
Uses: Mixed borders, cottage gardens, cut flowers, dried fruits, bedding, and containers. Stems with dried capsules make excellent additions to dried flower arrangements.

Notes: A popular cool weather annual. Flowers are followed by pine green, globular seed pods that have reddish-brown markings. They like full sun to part shade and ordinary garden soil with excellent drainage. The drying seed capsules can be viewed here

Van Dusen Botanical Garden, Vancouver, B.C:
"A favorite of Victorian gardeners, adds a delicate touch to almost any planting scheme. Seeds of Nigella damascena are NOT edible. The edible Nigella seeds are Nigella sativa."

      Here's a passage from An Island Garden by American author and poet Celia Thaxter (1835-1894). They wrote primarily about the Isles of Shoals, a group of nine small islands located ten miles off the coast of Portsmouth, N.H. Her family operated a large resort hotel on Appledore Island and Celia's presence helped to attract many of the leading artists, musicians, and authors of the day. Celia devoted uncounted hours to her spectacular flower garden. 

"I hold a flower of the pretty Love-in-a-Mist, the quaint Nigella, and scan its charming face. It blossoms late and long and is a flower of most distinguished beauty. It is star-shaped, in tints of white, blue, and purple, with full rich stamens and anthers of warmer red-purple, the petals on the back delicately veined in each variety with fine lines of faint green. The rich luster of stamens is surrounded at the base by eight smaller inner petals in different tints, so wonderful in detail, so ornate in decoration as to be simply indescribable. Each large outer petal is curved and cup-shaped, yet each has its finishing point that makes the blossom starry, and these eight inner petals radiate from the center within, above the larger ones. The foliage, whence it gets its old-time name, Love-in-a-mist, is like a soft green vapor, and in the double varieties, runs up and mixes itself with the petals. The single varieties are much the finest. They have a faint perfume of anise, and they are among the quaintest and most interesting flowers I know."

(Nigella damascene)
Seed packets usually for sale at the
Shaw Island Gatehouse,
Reefnet Bay Road, Shaw Island, WA.

🌿 CAPTURING SHAW ISLAND SUMMER, 2017 🌿

"Love-in-a-mist "
Summer harvest for Gatehouse Seeds.
Ripening seeds releasing from
Nigella damascena capsules.
Shaw Island July 2017.

"Summer is a promissory note signed in June, it's long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January." 
American writer Hal Borland

Thomas Jefferson grew Devil in a Blue Dress on his plantation. Celia Thaxter planted it on her island. And Gertrude Jekyll spent years selecting a cultivar for color -- a pure, soft blue of a quality distinctively its own. With that distinguished past, it is now more commonly known as Love-in-mist. Franziska Reed Huxley tells of it as fine to plant in autumn but she prefers successive plantings in the spring. Many choices for those of us in USDA zone 8b.

♦︎ Seeds from an island garden are now processed in packets for the seed-shed racks, at the Gatehouse, Squaw Bay Road, Shaw Island.

🌿 Shaw Island Summer Roses 🌿

Summer Roses
Glassybaby Jade vase
For honeymooners, Paul and Sandra.
Best wishes & thanks for the Gatehouse visit.
Shaw Island, July 2017.

🌿 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.