Sylvus' Garden---Fuscia

Fuscia

Or, How to make Bad Flowers Look Good (or at least passable)

The moral of this story is to check your merchandise carefully. I love the Eastern Market, and it's certainly the cheapest place I know of in the Metro Detroit area to buy bedding plants. Any fuscia and violet colored flower, especially one that grows in shade, is guaranteed to attract my interest, and when I found a hanging basket for six or seven dollars, I said, sold.

Alas, this plant was infested with mealybugs, a common problem in greenhouse raised plants, as fuscias often are (I gather they're perennial in southern parts of the country). When I discovered its problem, I isolated it, hanging it off a section of fence. I doused it with compost tea and squirted the bugs off, but nothing really ever helped. But a few of the flowers looked okay, and I photographed them in this closeup.

Florabunda, var. Purple Tiger

More Bug Problems on Cool Plants

Or, I Adore Patterns: Stripes, Spots, Speckles...

Having ordered many oriental lily bulbs in 1996 to plant in the fall, and then, after given up on them ever arriving, having them plop on my doorstep in the depths of winter (or at least very late fall) with the bed unready, I resolved not to spend a lot of money on plants unless the beds were already and waiting.

Jackson and Perkins was advertising a wonderful candystriped rose they called Scentimental (which I knicknamed peppermint), along with a volume discount package that included their purple tigers, also patterned with the stripes and spots associated with tulip mosaic virus. I have few areas on my lot that get the kind of sun roses need, but one area along south (side) edge of the front lawn more or less qualifies.

So I dutifully dug 2 feet deep, added cow manure and spagnum, and did all those other things you're supposed to do to rose beds. It was so much work I ended up expanding the bed so that I could add other sun loving annuals. Then the roses looked sort of lonely, and the annuals small, so I added a few perennials, such as the coreopsis, and when it still looked empty (because the roses started out okay, but then got these nasty brown curls in their leaves, so they didn't grow very much) I added the zinnias, and they did indeed fill the bed. Oh, well. I did try protecting the roses this year, and maybe I'll stay on top of their problems better in 98.

And those asian lily (not to be confused with the daylilies shown) bulbs that sat in the box three weeks and got all nasty and moldy? Well, I put them in the ground anyway, and they did surprisingly well. So well, in fact that I ordered 100 more, plus 50 orientals, which I put against the back of the house. I didn't get any really good pictures of true lilies last year, but stay tuned: I should this year!

Links to other garden photographs.