Since new management took over the Chicago Flower & Garden Show, the organizers have made audience participation a priority. There’s the Horticulture Competition, for example, in which gardeners can bring in their prize plants for judging by a group of local professionals. All entries are displayed at the show, along with their ribbons. See www.chicagoflower.com for details. Then there are the Potting Parties in which you pay a participation fee to the charity of your choice and then get to pot up a plant to take home.

Another worthy effort is the photography contest. The entry deadline for getting in your photos is February 1, 2012, so if this interests you, it’s time to get a move on. The theme for this year’s show is “Hort Couture” and the different categories for the photo competition reflect the theme and are equally clever. Listed below are the different classes (categories), including one for youth under 16 years old. You can submit one photo per class.

• “Hemmed Up”: Close-up of a plant or flower
• “Accessorized”: Photo of people and plants/flowers
• “Seasons Collection”: Landscape photo
• “Pattern Freeze”: Still-life photo with its focus on plants or flowers
• “High Style”: Abstract photo with plants or flowers as primary focus
• “Stone Washed”: Photo incorporating water and flowers
• “Triple Stitched" Triptych: Three related photographs featuring Chicago and plants mounted on a single board.
• “One of a Kind" Diptych: Two color photographs—one original and one manipulation of the original, mounted on a single board.
• “Go Overboard”: Single photo featuring any item or event on Navy Pier. Plant material not required in this class.
• “Novice Eye”: Photos in the youth class (ages 7-15) only, focused on a single plant or flower.

Other important rules for the photography contest:

Photos can be printed in color, black-and-white or sepia.  All photos must be mounted on black foam core and submitted by mail with a proper registration form. Full competition details and a registration forms are available at www.ChicagoFlower.com, listed under the “How to Participate” tab. Winning photos will be judged on a point scale based on creativity, composition, technical merit, distinction and interpretation of the show’s “Hort Couture” theme. Winners will receive a special award and have their photos displayed during the Chicago Flower & Garden Show, from March 10-18 at Chicago’s Navy Pier.

“The snowdrop and primrose our woodlands adorn, and violets bathe in the wet o' the morn.” — from the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796)

 

 

How fitting that quote is to welcome in 2012. The mild December weather has given way to some unusual sightings in local gardens. The common snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) put forth its buds in Jan Lord’s south suburban garden on New Year’s Day. Snowdrops are known to bloom from January through March, depending on the weather, but this could be a first. The common snowdrop grows naturally in a wide area across Europe and is found from the Pyrenees mountains to the Ukraine. It is extremely cold hardy and can withstand temperatures up to -30 F.

 

Also in Jan’s garden is the common primrose, (a.k.a. polyanthus primrose; grocery store primrose), which also decided to bloom during the very mild weather last week. In their native habitat, these little beauties are found in marshy areas in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in the Himalaya mountains. Primroses bloom indoors for several weeks from late winter through early spring. Bright, eye-popping flowers in red, orange, yellow, magenta, white, purple or pink cover a rosette of crinkled leaves on plants about 4 to 6 inches wide and tall. Indoors, they tolerate indirect, bright light and cool temperatures. What they don’t tolerate is hot, dry air, dry soil or standing water around the roots.

 

“In some climates, these plants do well outdoors in a shady, moist spot,” says Judith Sellers, vice president of the American Primrose Society.

 

Once they’re planted in the garden, primroses will bloom for a few weeks — typically in May, not January — while the weather is cool. If the spot is shady and moist, they may return for several springs.

 

And, to round out Robert Burns quote above, Carolyn Ulrich, Chicagoland Gardening’s editor, reports that violas are blooming in a neighbor’s garden. We’d like to hear from you. What, if anything, is blooming or flitting through your gardens? If we have a few more mild days this month, you may even spot a butterfly or two. A few butterflies — the mourning cloak, eastern comma and Milbert’s tortoiseshell — become adults in the fall and hibernate during winter under loose bark, in leaves or in hollow logs. They may emerge on warm days and while it would be rare to see them in January, it’s possible if these mild spells continue.

 

We’d like to hear from you. What’s happening in your garden right now?  Happy New Year and Great Gardening in 2012.

 

— Nina Koziol

www.thisgardencooks.com

Now that the 2011 garden scene has flown by and the last shriveled leaf has disappeared under the snow, gung-ho gardeners are scrambling through the debris of old Christmas mail, looking for new catalogs or squinting through miles of web sites searching for the next great plant. With eternal optimism, gardeners think about the new year and new choices.

Maybe this is the year we can believe the headline that reads “this is the year of the herb garden.” If the results of a survey of more than twenty local garden centers are any indication ,hydrangeas and Knockout® roses win the popularity poll. Herbs were not mentioned.

Tony Fulmer, manager of Chalet Nursery in Wilmette, marveled as he checked the shrub department, “The customers just keep coming for hydrangeas, especially ‘Little Lime’. It is by far the hydrangea mentioned most often, along with ‘Vanilla Strawberry’ and other newer hydrangea cultivars. ‘Bloomerang' lilac with its reblooming flowers in late summer is a popular shrub choice, along with tri-colored beech for a choice tree.

“Knockout roses, while not new, are sought after because people see them and want them,” remarked Heather Lee, manager, Berthold Nursery, Elk Grove. The colorful light green pot helps the pink and red roses to stand out. There was little interest in the old standby perennials such as nepeta, the action was in peach foliage of heucheras, as buyers were told to grow them in raised beds to keep them warmer and improve their drainage. Echinacea in bright colors were sought after.  Calibrachoa is the big basket favorite.

Elizabeth Hoffman, owner of West End Nursery, Wilmette, was about the only garden center owner who mentioned vegetables for either containers or raised beds. Large tropical plants were desirable for container planting. She highly recommended that gardeners buy cotton burr compost, which gives a nice finished look to an area. “Do it this season because the cost of the product is going to be higher due to the drought in Texas,” Hoffman advised.

Instead of lounging in front of the TV, get up and start working out to be ready for the new plants in 2012.

— Adele Kleine

Here it is, a couple days after Christmas, and I can see that I’m going to have a bumper crop of forget-me-nots among the tulips this spring. The forget-me-nots are annuals that have been self-seeding in my garden for years, and when there are enough of them, they form an attractive foot-tall light blue haze over the front garden bed. Eventually the plants start getting leggy, the foliage loses its luster and I uproot them, always trying to leave a few to drop their seeds for the next year’s display. Sometime during the fall they germinate, and by December they’re about a half inch tall with inch-long leaves, just waiting for winter to be over so they can bloom. 

Also dotting the garden beds are inch-high seedlings of larkspurs, whose purple spikes make such a wonderful counterpoint to roses and catmint. They too are self-sowers whose seedpods ripen to a telltale black in July and August, a clear signal that I can harvest and scatter them at will. Open the pods and check the seeds. If they’re ripe, they’ll be black too.

The advantage of growing self-sowing annuals is that you get flowers on the cheap. The disadvantage is that you never know for sure where your plants are going to come up, and since larkspurs in particular don’t enjoy being transplanted, you basically need to let them choose their spot.

My forget-me-nots and larkspurs have now lived through a couple snow dustings this December and worse is surely to come, but I’m not worried. They’ve done this before. For centuries.

—Carolyn Ulrich

Chicago-area gardens typically experience that first fall frost in mid-October, but this year we’ve been lucky. It’s been pretty darn mild up until now.

That’s been a boon for some annuals, like the blue-flowered Salvia guarantica, cosmos and sweet alyssum, which have bloomed for several months.

Gardening season has pretty much come to the final chapter for 2011, but this is a good time to evaluate your landscape. Do your plants offer more than one season of color? That’s something to think about as you plan for next spring’s purchases.

—Nina Koziol

Driving down Lake Shore Drive on the south side of Chicago has been an absolute delight recently, mainly because of the shapes and colors of red along the way. Most prominent in the center median strip are the sumacs that turn a vibrant clear red in fall. This year they’ve been particularly fine.

But making their display even more interesting are the masses of flame grass (Miscanthus sinensis var. purpurascens) growing alongside. Not really purple despite the name, this is a grass you don’t notice all summer long, but when the days shorten and the nights grow cool, its leaves turn a unique rosy hue that really sets off the sumacs. The frothy beige plumes contribute valuable textural contrast.

Flame grass (Miscanthus sinensi 'Purpurascens'
Photo courtesy of Bailey Nurseries

Also looking splendid this year are the Boston ivy and Virginia creeper I’ve seen throughout the city. There’s Virginia creeper in the Lake Shore Drive median strip, planted to be a ground cover rather than to play its usual role as a climber.

But what has really caught my eye is the Boston ivy clambering up the west wall of McCormick Place. The convention center’s gray brick wall is borderline depressing, but with the Boston ivy turning yellow, orange, red and a dozen shades in between, that wall has become a thing of beauty. There’s all that color but also the shiny, shifting textures of the leaves.

Joseph’s coat of many colors was surely no finer than this.

—Carolyn Ulrich

It's hard to believe that we're well into November and that the holidays are creeping up, but don't let that stop you from planting a few pots or a window box with tulips, daffodils or other spring-bloomers. One of my favorite spring displays is the Chicago Botanic Garden's bulb garden where the tulips are spectacular, unlike any that would survive on my own deer-infested acre. Vibrant-colored tulips in Crayola crayon shades—yellow, red, orange. Backlit by the soft spring sunlight, they are stained glass. Then there are the pastels—the palest pinks, rose and creams—opening their delicate blossoms, abuzz with the season's first pollinators. Bambi, chipmunks, squirrels and rabbits aside, 'How can I get that effect in my garden?' I wondered. 



 

"Just pack in your new tulip bulbs 'cheek-to-jowl' to maximize your spring show," says Galen Gates, curator of perennial herbaceous plants at the Chicago Botanic Garden. "Be sure you have the bulbs below the surface, and where there are squirrels or chipmunks, hardware cloth is a valuable part of the equation." Hardware cloth—think window screen fabric—is cut to fit and can be used year after year.  "By doing this, you'll keep pests from uncovering and eating the bulbs. If you have deer, I suggest you plant window boxes and place them so you can enjoy their color each time you pass a window."  Great advice, especially for those of us who have deer-infested gardens. The bulbs blooming in my window box never made it into the ground last fall. I saved them in heavy-duty paper bags in the garage where they began sprouting in early March, so into the potting mix they went. In other years, I've kept leftover bulbs until January when I "forced" them to bloom indoors in pots.

"The forcing of spring bulbs is so simple," Galen says, "I’m surprised more people don’t do it. The procedure involves planting, watering, then tucking them away. After planting, water them thoroughly and let them sit outside for a day or two so the top of the soil dries off, which will keep any fungal growth from appearing. Next, move them into a garage that's attached to the house, an unheated basement or a crawl space. In the garage it's best to set them at the back of the building (away from any arctic blasts that are sure to appear), and ideally near a window. I always place a section of newspaper over the top to moderate temperature swings." 



Come late February, Gates uncovers the pots to let the bulbs continue growing in sync with the normal cycle of the year. "This is a good time to move them outdoors so the cool temperatures pace their growth appropriately, and I begin watering again. Remember that the bulbs need to establish roots in the fall — in this case requiring planting by Thanksgiving—and need to actively grow again in spring. As with most plants in containers, they benefit from water, and in this case you can water and water and water, and there won’t be too much. I have found that, around the country, gardeners trying this technique do everything except for the initial watering. Bulbs in these growing conditions often flower for 3 to 4 weeks, much longer than in the ground where there isn’t the air and gas exchange that comes with a professional growing medium and the right amount of moisture for maximum effect."

There's still plenty of time to head to your local garden center and snap up some of these beauties for a great display. Indoors or out. 

— Nina Koziol
www.thisgardencooks.com

This is the time of year when the weather forecasters turn up the talk about night temps that can dip down into frost territory.  We’re way overdue for that first killing frost of autumn.    

There’s a subtle difference between a frost and a freeze. You can have a freeze without frost and vice versa. Here’s why: A freeze occurs when the air temperature drops below 32  F. Sometimes we get frost (a deposit of ice crystals) when it’s above freezing and we can have a freeze without frost. It all has to do with the amount of water in the air. There are two different ways to measure humidity, the amount of water vapor in the air. The one that weathermen (and women) use is “relative humidity.”


(Thanks to photographer Ellen Hodges for capturing the frost on my frost-tolerant marigolds.)

Warm air holds more water than cool air. The relative humidity changes throughout the day as the temperature rises and falls. If the temperature drops low enough, the amount of water in the air is more than it can hold at that temperature. The air is saturated and water vapor in the air condenses as water on cars, lawns, sidewalks—and voila—dew.

The dew point measures the absolute amount of water in the air. It is the temperature at which the air is saturated and the relative humidity is 100%. For a given volume of air, with a set amount of water vapor in it, the relative humidity varies with the temperature but the dew point is always the same.

What does that have to do with frosts and freezes? It all has to do with the dew point. If the dew point is much above freezing, a frost is unlikely. The higher the dew point is above freezing the less likely we’ll have freezing temps. If the dew point is below freezing then a frost becomes more likely.

If a dry air mass moves into the region at this time of year in the Chicago area, a freeze is likely. Dry air has a low dew point and a low relative humidity. The dry air warms quickly during the day but also cools quickly at night. When there are clear calm conditions, the ground cools rapidly at night, losing heat to the open sky. As the ground cools, the air next to it also cools. On windy nights, the cool air mixes with warmer air above and the warm air helps heat the ground. On calm nights, the ground continues to cool and can be colder than the air.

Water condenses on the ground and other surfaces as dew. If the dew point is near freezing, the water vapor condenses as ice, freezing as frost. So the air can be above freezing and the surface of your car is colder than freezing causing a frost even thought the air temperature is above freezing. That is how we get a frost without a freeze. If the dew point is much below freezing then we can get freezing temperatures cold enough to freeze plants without any frost. When frozen plants thaw, the turn black, mushy and die. This is sometimes called a black frost, a freeze without a frost.

— Nina A. Koziol
www.thisgardencooks.com

I smell a skunk...or maybe it's a stinkbug. I have been hearing reports, for two years now, of a new Asian pest in Georgia that seems to be both a blessing and a curse. The stinkbug, dubbed the bean platispid, eats kudzu. Kudzu of course, is that vine of Biblical proportion that covers forests, billboards and even parked cars in the south. Kudzu was described in the book “Deliverance” as a "vegetable form of cancer." This bug apparently devours kudzu. On the surface a good thing right?

Well, Midwestern farmers should be quaking in their Carharts because the bug also seems to fancy soybeans. And worse yet for us, it behaves much like the Asian ladybug beetle and covers houses in the fall. Plus, it is twice the size of those ladybugs, exudes a very foul- smelling substance and stains everything orange. Then there’s its strange quirk of fastening itself to white cars, leaving orange stains on the paint job and taking joyrides to other states. Like ours? It won't be long folks; you heard it here first.
 
My concern is over the head-scratching mystery of the bug's arrival on our shores. I remember reading several years ago how a pest had been introduced that was showing some promise in controlling the vine. I remember thinking at the time that this seemed as fast and loose as Soil Conservation Service’s introduction of kudzu itself back in the 1930's.

It was brought here from Japan, en masse, to control erosion. Didn't anyone wonder then just what might happen when you introduce a nitrogen-fixing legume that puts Jack's beanstalk to shame, into poor, depleted soils in which natives were already struggling? Sounds like a no-fail recipe for a rampant weed to me.

Somehow, any early reports of this newly introduced kudzu-eating pest have disappeared and the entomologists of Athens, Georgia are all feigning ignorance as to just how this bug just happened to be found in Athens. “Where did it come from? How did it get here? I didn't bring it. Did you bring it?” No one seems to know.
 
Now, anyone who knows anything about Athens, Georgia knows that, apart from being mentioned in a Tammy Wynette/George Jones duet, this northwestern Georgia town is to botany and entomology what the Silicon Valley is to technology. I find it a little suspicious that this kudzu-eating bug just happened to blow in on a hurricane (an actual theory) and land its ugly, stinky little self right in the nation's lap of kudzu, botany and entomology. The conspiracy theorist in me, well-honed by decades of finding that many conspiracy theories are well-founded, thinks that the Athens intelligentsia are experiencing a bit of amnesia over the bug's, shall we say, travel arrangements.
 
How many times do we need to introduce a living organism, for what seems like a reasonable purpose at the time, only to find a monster lurking in the near future? Starlings, house sparrows, pigeons, fire ants, kudzu, crown vetch, the Asian carp, water hyacinth, melaleuca trees, and the gypsy moth were all brought here to solve a problem or create commerce. Yeah. The way I have it figured, I have about five years before the new bean platyspid starts buzzing and clicking around my light fixtures. Plenty of time to sell the house and move away from the nearby soybean field. In the meantime, I hope whoever brought the bug to Athens Georgia is having fun washing his siding and vacuuming up stinky, leaky bugs. And I hope he or she drives a white car.

— Deb Terrill

Dry shade. Those two words are enough to frustrate any gardener. The culprit could be a wall, an overhanging roof, a fence, a hedge, or a towering tree, but the result is usually the same—dusty soil and lack of direct sunlight—two growing conditions that make life difficult for many plants.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There are fabulous plants that can tolerate these conditions if you can improve the soil and give transplants sufficient water until they are established. One of my favorites is the hellebore, which includes a wide range of relatively carefree plants that bloom in late winter and early spring. Neither deer nor insects seem to bother them. Their leaves stay green into early winter. But it’s the flowers that are lovely, especially the newer cultivars that feature upward-facing blossoms. Hellebores look lovely paired with hostas, epimedium, Japanese forest grass, painted fern, Solomon’s Seal, and with smaller daffodils, such as Jack Snipe, Ice Wings and Thalia.  



Tom Cooper, the long-time editor of Horticulture magazine, compiled his Editor’s letters in a book called “Odd Lots,” a collection of great essays. Here’s how he summarized the shade garden. 

“A garden in shade is a different kind of garden from one soaked in sun. There’s little that’s grand and much that’s fleeting. You won’t find the brilliant colors of a rose bed, but you will find rich, dark shadows and a sense of coolness and calm. You won’t often hear visitors gasp with awe; you may hear a contented murmur. And you may find the gardener just standing there, admiring a lone shaft of sunlight come to rest on the lawn.”

A sense of coolness and calm. That is what a good shade garden offers.

Learn more in a class this coming weekend, “Successful Shade Gardens,” Saturday, Oct. 22 from 1-3 p.m. at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

— Nina Koziol
www.thisgardencooks.com