A Couple Of My Favorite Cultivars
Alcea-AKA Hollyhock This old-fashioned annual is so delightful to behold!
Now that it is officially spring and I can actually see my yard again; it's totally time to think about spring-like things. Hello Flowers! I love flowers! Most of the flowering plants that I have growing around the farm tend to have a function, but truth be told, sometimes I enjoy just growing something for the pure sense-providing enjoyment that it provides.
We live in a challenging growing zone, and that alone would make variety selection a bit interesting, but we also have a couple of added formidable obstacles to consider.
Wandering wildlife and livestock. Idaho is an open range state. That means if I don't want someone's errant goat or cow in my yard, it is my responsibility to fence them out. Nothing kills a bit of your soul like witnessing ol' Bessy the bovine from down the road snacking on your beautiful clematis vine. I could snack on Bessy, but that wouldn't be moral or ethical. (Relevant side note: All twenty acres of my farm is now fenced and cross-fenced, so this issue is not much of a problem anymore.)
Wildlife however, still are a consideration. I did put in varieties of plants over the years that are detestable to deer, but you know what variety is the most detestable to deer? My neighbor's 130lb Airedale Terrier! He is definitely not their favorite dish!
Another challenge we have had is our poor, extremely well-drained, glacial silt soil. Over the years I have amended my glorified sand with yards of compost and I must say that I can now grow almost anything in my resulting loam of glorious-ness. For a few years though, anything that I planted looked like a a sickly version of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Anything, that is, but the following plants:
Achillea Millefolium- Yarrow
Common, white yarrow grows all over the farm, and I love it. Winter is more bearable when you have a nice steaming mug of yarrow tea, so I dry a lot of the wild yarrow every year. However, around my house there is a plethora of domestic yarrow of every color imaginable! It's an amazingly tough plant! Children can plow through it with a barrel and it will spring back and assume it's enduring repose. I can mow it down by accident with my weed-eater on wheels and it will grow back with a lush defiance. I LOVE yarrow. So do the bees. It is drought tolerant, deer resistant, cat defiant, and completely lovely to behold.
Rudbeckia Hirta- Black-Eyed Susan
These cuttings came from our yard, and please excuse the lavender sugar cookies, there was a very important tea party in progress!
These things are the Little Engine That Could of plants. They just keep blooming and blooming. They also spread, but that never bothers me, and I admire any plant that can take a severe lawn-mowing and re-bloom again. Which of course these plants do. BES's are super drought tolerant, and they will grow and bloom in the worst, un-amended soil that I have on the farm. It can get pretty mono-chromatic in the shades of green department in our heavily coniferous forest neck of the planet. Rudbeckia in all it's manifestations provide some much needed color variation to our green and brown existence.
As of right now, my yarrow plants have yet to emerge from the dormant stage, but here shortly their lacy, fern-like fronds will set forth and I will soon be surrounded with a host of colorful blooms. I might also get to enjoy a few acres of the Black Eye-Susan show this year! Well, that all depends on whether the my children and the neighbor kids don't go through a yard trimming phase again. I might hide the scissors and sheers this year...
And as always, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's pollen-coated iPhone