Glads from Ebay

Ebay has a lot of overpriced junk for sale in its plant listings, but a careful search does turn up some good bargains, and some cool plants. I got this form of Gladiolus dalenii (or hybrid thereof) from someone down South. I got a good number of corms for something like 99 cents plus shipping. It apparently is one of the common passalong plants in parts of the South, but it is never seen up here. I got around to planting the corms rather late but they did bloom nicely in the school garden, and the corms produced dozens of baby corms as well. Propagation will not be a problem! The flower is more open in form and a bit brighter in color than other forms of dalenii that I grow, except for "Halloweenie", a dalenii form that, while gorgeous, blooms too late to be of much garden use here. I dug most of the corms for winter, but left a couple behind to see if it is hardy in our climate. Its a nice old "antique" variety that is very hard to find via commercial retail nurseries.

Hemerocallis "Real Wind"

I got this daylily from Greg Pitrowski, a daylily expert who has a nursery in NC now, when we both worked at the NYBG. A lot of daylilies were being moved out of an area for some reason I don't recall now, so I asked Greg for some that he thought were particularly nice and reliable varieties. I got a lot of nice no names and seedlings, but he gave me a divsion of one called Real Wind. He told me that Real Wind was an oldie but goodie, and I have to say that he was right. It is a tough as nails plant, which didn't sulk even when I moved to to the slope garden at school after a few years in my home garden. The flowers have great form, are beautifully colored, and the plant seems to do well regardless of how dry or wet the summers are. The foliage looks good too. I worry that the deer might find it, but I do spray it when it starts to grow and when it is in bud with obnoxious smelling stuff like a spray that keeps cats of furniture, and a homemade deer repellent mix of garlic powder, milk powder, hot pepper, soap and/or raw eggs, and (my secret ingredient) a tiny but funky touch of lime sulfer. I should note that lime sulfer should not be used when it gets really warm, since it can burn leaves and flowers at high temperatures. The deer did explore the garden briefly in early spring, but stopped after I made things smell less attractive to them, and they did not return during the summer or fall. Most of the surrounding plants are also not attractive to deer, so that probably helps as well.

Pelargonium luridum

I have a special affection for this plant, since it was the main subject of my doctoral thesis work on micropropagation of geophytic pelargonium species. Basically I developed a protocol to grow new plants from leaf sections, since P. luridum cannot be propagated from stem cuttings as there is very little stem to begin with. I also made some really cool hybrids with it that required a modified embryo rescue technique to bring into existance. I no longer have those hybrids, but I did distribute them so hopefully someone has some of them, such as the hybrids I made with P. incrassatum, sericifolium, and cortusifolium, among others. P. luridum can also be propped by dividing the tuberous roots, which resemble small potatoes on a string. It is a summer growing plant, with large divided foliage (foliage gets more divided as daylength increases) and cream, pink, or yellow flowers in the forms I have grown. A closely related species, P. zeyheri, is essentially identical except for its very finely divided foliage, so fine that it resembles fennel--it is a gorgeous foliage plant.

P. luridum is winter hardy in protected locations, if the tuberous roots are planted deep enough. I keep some inside for the winter too, just in case something were to happen to the outdoor plants. It does not set seed readily unless another clone is around, and prefers a sunny place to flower well. The flower stalks are pretty tall so they will flop unless supported in some way.

My most treasured form is a yellow flowered form from Malawi, which I keep in a large pot and would not think of putting outside. It is much more reticent to flower, and when it chooses to it does so before the foliage emerges, unlike the South African forms which will flower continuously during the summer if they have enough sun.