moxiegardener.com

Multiple flower colors on same plant

A staple in the gardens of our grandparents, Four O’Clocks are worthy of a place in our gardens.  Four O’Clocks are members of the Nyctaginaceae family with the Latin name Mirabilis jalapa.  Native to the mountains of South America, they are also known as “Marvel of Peru.”

They’re commonly called Four O’Clocks because the blooms open in late afternoon and stay open all night.  A couple hours after opening they begin to emit a sweet, heady fragrance that makes them a favorite near entrances and patios or potted on decks.

Four O’Clocks are actually perennials grown as annuals in the northern part of the United States.  Due to their long tap root and prolific reseeding they can be considered invasive in the south.  Four O’Clocks are tough resilient plants that handle drought and poor soils as well as pollution, fumes, and smoke.  They will bloom in sun or shade and produce seeds that often germinate and bloom before frost in warmer zones.

As dependable as they are at producing seed, northern gardeners will get earlier blooms if they dig the tubers in fall and store in damp sand or peat moss in conditions similar to a root cellar.  Plant outside in late spring about the time you set out your tomatoes.

The leaves of Four O’Clocks lure Japanese beetles in a kind of “fatal attraction.”  The Japanese beetles are drawn by the scent and poisoned by the leaves.  Some claim Four O’Clocks are effective as a deer repellent or at the very least deer resistant.  Hummingbirds like them and dive deeply into the elongated flowers searching for nectar.

Four O’Clocks are available in red, magenta, pink, yellow, white or striped flowers and have the unusual trait of producing flowers of more than one color on the same plant.  They grow to about three feet high but can grow much taller in long season areas.  In the south they die down to the roots when cold weather arrives.

There is a wild variety native to the Dakota prairie called Mirabilis nyctaginea.  It was discovered by French botanist Andre Michaux in 1792.  Native Americans used the plant to make a tea for colic, eye infections, sore muscles, swellings, rheumatism and indigestion.  Some say the plant has sedative properties and several native tribes smoked the dried leaves.  In South America Mirabilis jalapa was used as a hallucinogen.

The seeds of Four O’Clocks are poisonous.  If you’re plotting a mystery novel add motive and opportunity.

And an alibi.

Short yellow marigold variety unknown

Nothing pops from a distance like yellow flowers.  If you want your garden noticed from a distance, plant only yellow flowers.  While there are plenty of perennials with yellow blooms, use annuals if you just want to try out a yellow garden and don’t want to make a long-term commitment.

Start with a medium height sunflower in the back.  Add tall yellow marigolds, and any of the several varieties of gold or yellow zinnias.  Some notable varieties are Yellow Flame, Golden Yellow, or Old Mexico.  Then layer in calendula, medium-tall yellow marigolds,  yellow petunias, and Bright Lights cosmos.  I know Bright Lights also have orange ones in the mix but trust me, it works.

Peach Melba, Moonlight, and Milkmaid are all yellow varieties of nasturtium for the front of the bed.

Burpee has a yellow variety of helenium called Dakota Gold.  The daisy-like flowers and feathery foliage will contrast nicely with the familiar annuals already mentioned.  They grow 12″-15″ tall and you can order them at www.burpee.com.

Burpee also exclusively has a couple of single French marigolds in yellow:  Nema-gone reaches a height of four feet for the back of the bed, and Jaguar (yellow with deep orange-red splotches near the center of the flowers) comes in at just about a foot high.

These caught my eye as I drove by a neighbor's house

Sprinkle in some annual baby’s breath for filler and add a few short to medium sunflowers.  There’s even a yellow variety of snapdragons, but they’re usually part of a mixture of colors.  Rudbeckia are heat tolerant, yellow daisies that will stay spectacular all summer into fall.  Varieties vary in height from eighteen to forty inches.

A yellow garden works best in the front yard to wow everyone who passes by.  If you keep your palette in the yellow and gold area you can’t go wrong.  By using annuals, you can vary the look from year to year while keeping the color scheme constant.  There are enough varieties in the yellow-gold-orange-rust palette that you can keep it pure or branch out into the “yellow” neighborhood.  Start planning next year’s yellow garden now while you can observe varieties already growing and blooming.

Send me pictures of your yellow garden.

I love, Love, LOVE my garden.  I could talk about it endlessly and gaze upon it for hours.  Every morning I inspect the plants, mentally comparing their size to the night before.  In spring I even use a ruler to measure their overnight growth.  (By midsummer their growth is self-evident.)

I am starting this blog to share my enthusiasm for gardening and to learn from my visitors.

Why “moxie?”  Webster’s Dictionary defines moxie as “energy, pep, knowledge, enthusiasm, courage, and determination.”  These six words encompass my gardening philosophy.

I’ll get back to energy and pep in a moment.

Knowledge refers to the ability to understand your plant’s needs.  Meeting those needs gives you a return on your investment a thousandfold, be it in bloom or in produce.

Enthusiasm is what we all have for gardening or we wouldn’t be here on this blog.

Courage means we aren’t afraid to take a risk.  We’ll plant that untried specimen, try out that just-discovered pest deterrent, or eat that unfamiliar vegetable we grew because we couldn’t resist planting it.

Determination is what makes us, for example, cover up the pole beans with buckets every night and uncover them every morning for a month until they grew enough to climb the poles, out of reach of the rabbit that insisted on eating them.  Sure, I could have put up a fence or covered them with fancy row covers, but that just wasn’t in the budget this year.  My beans will come later than usual, but my determination rescued them from not bearing at all.

Energy and pep are part of the dictionary’s definition of moxie and truly belong in my philosophy of gardening.  If we are to succeed in bringing forth a crop we must expend energy to achieve that.  However, my energy is expended primarily in spring preparing and improving the soil and applying an effective mulch.  This gives the plants a rich fertile soil in which to grow, retains moisture and checks the growth of weeds.  Expend energy in spring and indulge in laziness all summer!

As for pep, it is defined, among other things, as initiative.  What gardener lacks that?