[We have a remarkable crew of volunteers who work in the Asian Collections. Their knowledge level and experience are intimidatingly high. After 5 years, I'm continually amazed at how much work they get done. I don't want to imagine where we'd be without them. Every Wednesday I try to write them a letter letting them know where things are in the collection and what we'll be trying to do the next day. I've been writing these for a few years now. I decided to post them on the blog thinking maybe they're give some insight into the Collection.]
Hello everyone,
But wait, enough about lawns
and gardens, how about more about me?! Just quickly I swear. Saw Dr. Daoud this
morning and my physical constraints have been removed. I am able to do the
normal things that people do. No lifting extremely heavy objects, swinging mattocks,
digging ditches… but usual gardening tasks including blowing and spraying are
okay. That sounds good to me; it’s been years since I enjoyed swinging a
mattock! The graft continues to look good. It heals from the outside in and the
small area still “unattached” has trapped a pocket of fluid that is keeping my
vision blurry. The doctor assures me that it is not unusual for transplants on
transplants to take months to completely heal.
The Osmanthus fortunei at the junction of the road and the path to the
pagoda is in full bloom. Yesterday I could smell it 30 feet away. Great smell. O. fragrans is probably flowering at the
pagoda. The Gymnaster Savatieri we moved from bed J-M to the sidewalk by the women’s
restroom is starting to flower. The
flowers are nice and it’s a weedy (I mean vigorous) thing, a good
groundcover. We may need to move the hostas out of its path! K & K continue
to work at the GCA Circle. They finished excavating the gravel bed and are
adding gravel as I write. It was frightening looking last week; after K&K worked
on it for a day, we’re all feeling much better about prospects for restoration.
The dwarf mondo that you all planted on the other side of the circle has re-greened
after the depredations of last winter and is keeping soil/mulch from washing
out of the beds. Little improvements like that are wonderful. It’s easy to
forget you’ve done something like that, but remember how messy those edges used
to look? Now the interface between the edging bricks and the paving is sharp
and clean. The big things and the little things keep adding up…
This week I’d like to
concentrate on K-0 at least for the beginning of the day. We can weed out the
dead nutsedge and plant the Lysimachia
‘Persian Chocolate’. There is pruning to do, and some cutbacks as well. We’ll
plant the begonias,'Shaanxi White' that
are eating up a corner of one of our lath beds. I’d like some of them to
go into bed C-5 in the moist area in front of the stone bench and possibly
trailing down the south side of the steps a few feet. We’ll find a spot for the
rest. I’m thinking maybe in Ca-2 (the
bed between the Dogwood Collection and
the main Camellia path). They like soil that’s rarely dry and a bit of sun but
not too much. Like B. grandis, they
are beautiful when they’re happy and ugly when they’re stressed. While we’re in
C-5, let’s move some more dwarf mondo from the steps below the pagoda to the
steps in C-5. We made a good start at this project but there are places that
still need planting. There are other miscellaneous things including de-leafing
the tree peonies at the GCA Circle and in bed J-N2. I’m thinking we ought to
move the Rosa x odorata ‘Mutabilis’
from bed C-8 where it’s being shaded out to the open space in the middle of
C-5. Eventually that’ll be too shady too, but not for 4-5 years.
Happy fall,
Chris
