Plants with meaning, part 4

Time for another blog post about growing plants from cuttings! 🙂🌸

To continue yesterday's post, I successfully started two hydrangeas from cuttings over the last couple of summers; my second went from a small cutting to a small shrub in the course of a year.  (Which was amazing considering how little I was home to nurture it.)

Years ago, in one shady corner of my yard, I planted a small hydrangea from Lowe's.  It struggled, it didn't seem too happy in it's corner, we left town for a while and when I came back it was gone.  I think the person mowing our lawn let the grass get a little high, didn't realize it was there, and took it out.

So I had to start over.  I kept getting hydrangea cuttings that didn't want to root.  I finally got one going, it made it a year and died.  So I've put my time in working on this corner!  But I didn't want to give up.  I really, really wanted a hydrangea in this spot, and I really, really wanted to grow one from a cutting.  So I tried again.

At the entrance to the neighborhood next to ours, there are several large-ish hydrangea bushes planted behind the sign with the neighborhood's name.  They are visible, but not very.  I fell in love with this hydrangea every time I passed it walking my dogs.  It's beautiful.  It's a hydrangea with blooms of different colors at once; some purple, some pink, and some in-between.  I love it.

So I clipped some small cuttings from the back of the bush that was behind the sign, from a spot that wasn't visible unless you were standing behind the sign, in front of a fence.  (Translation: the spot was not visible at all to 99.9% of passers-by, hence my reason for clipping from it.)

And finally, I got one to root.  My cutting showed some growth, than made it through the winter.  I'm not sure what I did right this time, but I did something.  I saw the first flower last summer and it was exciting!  Here it is:

Ignore the tree lily growing behind it and the passion flower vine in front...

The pink flower on the right is the first flower it's given me.

For some reason the left side looks bigger and more vigorous, but the whole shrub seems happy in it's spot!

(Note the little fence around it; I learned my lesson about weed wackers and trying to grow cuttings!)

I passed the mother of my hydrangea baby one day last October when it was full of blooms and looking absolutely beautiful.  There was a deep freeze coming that night, the first one of the year.  I knew the temperatures would drop so low that all the flowers would freeze and die off.  I couldn't stand the thought of them gone, so I waited till dark, went back to the shrub, and clipped the flowers off to put in a vase.  Here they are:

Aren't they lovely?? 💕

The initial colors of the first blooms on this shrub are vivid and bright.

By October they had faded to these soft shades of cream, pink and purple.

As they dried they continued to look beautiful  I kept them dry in the vase for months.

That's another thing I love about hydrangeas; the color shifting!  The flowers of certain types bloom one way and slowly change to another - and they are very long lasting as cut flowers.  What's not to love?

This hydrangea's story will be: the-one-I-finally-got-to-grow-from-a-cutting-from-the-neighborhood-next-door.  (After the little one I bought at Lowe's died!)

And finally, I've got one more cutting I tried to root last summer.  Here it is:

This little hydrangea cutting came from a plant I gave to friend for her 50th wedding anniversary.  It was a pretty purple hydrangea.  Such a small cutting!

I wasn't sure this was going to do anything, but I put it in a glass of water to see.  (I love my plant experiments so much that I have little cuttings in little cups of water all over the place in my windows during summer...)  After a month, it was just as green and vibrant as when it was first cut.  So I thought I'd put it in the ground and see what it would do.

After a couple of weeks, it looked like there was a small green node growing at it's base.  It was definitely alive!

I covered it when it got really cold, but it's hard to tell when I check on it now if it's alive or not.  It started, but were the roots big and strong enough to last before the weather changed?  I'll have to wait and see.  It doesn't look so good.  But you never know!

And that's what's so much fun about gardening!  The surprise successes, the tiny babies that come to life with a little bit of love and nurture.  The surprise deaths are the NOT fun part of course, but I suppose they make the survivors seem all that more special.  I must have tried to root a hydrangea in the corner of my yard at least six times before I got one to take.

But it has, and I can't wait to see what it does this year!

Plants with meaning, part 3

Here's the third installment of "plants with meaning" - also known as "gardening success from cuttings." 🌺  I was pretty excited about a couple of new baby shrubs I got going from parent plants last summer.

A disclaimer before I start: of the cuttings I took to try to root, two of these came from public places.  While I don't normally help myself to cutting from plants in public places (without permission), these came from plants in unusual circumstances, where I thought it was ok.  I'll explain as I go.  

In the summer, when I'm visiting the town where I grew up, I often park my car in an empty parking lot at my former elementary school in the middle of town and go run.  I do this because there are a lot of great jogging routes from the school, and they pass a lot of the beautiful old houses I like to look at.

Anyway, each time I returned to my car last summer, I noticed a small garden on the side of the school that wasn't there when I was a child.  The grassy area on the side of the school was cordoned off, and there was a painter's lift machine parked outside the school.  The school was locked and the entry way blocked as repairs were being done on the historic building.

The garden was overgrown and in awful condition, which was sad.  (It had obviously been planted with love at some point.  I wondered if the person who planted it had passed away?)  You couldn't walk over to the garden without crossing some yellow tape, which I always did.  (There was never anyone working there when I was there; it was strange, all the signs of work-in-progress were there every day, yet I never saw anyone there although it was always the middle of the day.)

I would end every run walking around the garden and looking at the flowers growing through the weeds.  (This is the second year I've visited the overgrown garden; if it's in the same shape next summer I'm tempted to go and weed it; it just seems so pitiful.)

Anyway, on the side of the garden was a big hydrangea bush, with exactly two flowers.  (Maybe it was wanting some fertilizer?)  Anyway, they were beautiful blue flowers.  I've always loved blue hydrangeas.

Finally one day I decided to clip one of the hydrangea flowers.  After all, the garden was a mess, it was cordoned off so no one could get to it, and I doubted anyone even saw it.  Me, I could enjoy this hydrangea flower every day.  So I cut it.  (That was my justification, anyway.)

I took my little flower home and put it in a vase in the window.  It was *beautiful.*  (I really believe no one could have enjoyed this flower like I did!)

The blue hydrangea looked perfect a week later.  So perfect, that I took it home in the vase to Tennessee, where I put it in a window and it continued to look perfect for another month.  (Another thing I love about hydrangeas?  Their incredibly long lives in vases...)

From time to time I would take the hydrangea flower out of the vase.  I noticed it was growing LOTS of roots, without my doing anything to encourage them.  (No root hormone added.)  This hydrangea wanted to live!

So when the Tennessee heat began to subside at the end of September, I planted the hydrangea stem in the backyard.  I was thrilled to note that it held it's flower and looked green and vibrant all fall.  When the cold hit in December, the flower head finally fell off.  We had a super freeze at the end of the month; I covered my little stem with a towel for a couple of days and kept my fingers crossed.

Just the other day (mid-January) I checked it, and saw two green growths at the stem coming out of the ground.  Yes indeed, it wants to live!  With the smallest of effort (all I did was put it in the ground and cover it when it got super cold) this hydrangea rooted and established itself.  This is one hardy plant!

I'm so excited about it; I've always wanted a blue hydrangea, and I didn't imagine this one cutting would root on it's own.

So now I have a blue hydrangea in my yard that came from the garden of my elementary school.  I love that!

Here's what it looked like when I planted it:

The Kingsford Park blue hydrangea.
After about five weeks, the blue flower head faded to a beautiful light green color.
Look how healthy this cutting looked after five weeks in a vase!
It's hard to tell in this pic, but the bottom is completely covered in roots it developed.

Well, I was going to continue but this post was longer than I expected.  I'll save my next cutting success for the next post.

To be continued next time...🌸🌺

Plants with meaning, part 2

Over the years, I've planted a lot of shrubs along our 6' privacy fence.  I thought it would be pretty to have something that flowers in front of every post. (The fence posts are 6' apart).  Of the original shrubs I planted, at least half died.  The rose bush and it's replacement?  Too temperamental.  With one exception, every rose bush I've ever planted has succumbed to disease.  They always get leaf blight, slowly lose their leaves and die.

I had a weigela that grew well and gave me beautiful pink flowers.  Than suddenly it just died.  Just like that.  I never knew what happened it to it.

I planted a lily tree that my son weed wacked three years in a row.  I finally got to see it flower last summer for the first time in years!

To be honest, I can't remember what happened to the others.  Some of them never established from the beginning.  So now I've got some small shrub-lings in front of the posts, shrubs I'm growing from cuttings.

I was outside last summer when I became very aware of my secondary reason to plant shrubs along the fence.  While I love our neighbors, there's one place along the fence where the view from their patio looks directly over ours.  When they're out and we're out, it's not very private.  So I thought I'd plant something that would grow tall - and quickly - in front of that place.  Something that would block the view, but have flowers.

I have a rose of sharon tree in my garden with light pink flowers, and when it blooms in the fall, it's just beautiful.  It's the kind of plant that blooms so generously, it's just covered in flowers when it blooms.

Rose of sharon trees (or shrubs, depending on how you prune them) grow quickly.  They also can be grown easily; just cut a piece of branch from a rose of sharon, stick it in the ground, keep it watered and you have another.  

So when my neighbor Teresa was moving two years ago, I asked her if she minded if I took a few cuttings from her tree while I was helping her move.  Of course she didn't!  Teresa had a beautiful purple rose of sharon in her back yard.  I figured if I was going to plant a second, I'd get one with a different color.

It took a couple of tries.  I had to go back to her house for new cuttings once or twice.  But on the third of fourth try, I got one growing.  I stuck the little cutting in the ground in the spring of 2021.  Last fall (a year and a half later), I saw it's first flowers.

From a little 6" cutting, it grew this much in a year and a half.
After it bloomed, I cut the side branches off.  I want it to grow into a tree, not a shrub.
I want it to be tall rather than wide.

While I know rose of sharon trees are pretty ubiquitous, this one is still special to me.  My friend Teresa may have left, but I remember her every time I see this tree.  It's not just ANY rose of sharon!

And to bring the blog back on point...I was at Lowe's last summer, and I happened to see this:

A rose of sharon, about the same size as mine.

But THIS one cost a bit more than free!

Not only did I save $30, but I had the fun of growing mine myself.

And my rose of sharon came from someone special.

I think I'm growing a garden of memories.

I was just looking through photos from 2018, and I couldn't believe the photos of the first rose of sharon in my garden.  It was tiny!  In four years, it grew enormously.  It shouldn't be long before my new one  is taller than the fence.

My new tree-ling may be a rose of sharon, but she's a rose of Teresa to me.  

Plants with meaning

Last fall I was thinking about a series of blog posts about plants I wanted to write, but it was such a busy season I just didn't get to it.  Now that it's January, and I've only got my indoor plants to take care of, I've found myself thinking ahead about gardening next summer.  Seems like the perfect time to blog about plants. 💗🍃 

You might be wondering what a blog about thrifting and recycling has to do with plants, so here's the connection: I'm always pursuing how to find the things I love without having to spend a lot of money to get them, and as my gardening interest grew, so did the realization that it's an expensive hobby!  I started trying to find ways to save money gardening, which led to my interest in growing plants from cuttings.

For some reason I've never had much luck growing from seeds, but then I've never put a lot of effort into doing it, either.  I've always shopped at Lowe's, because it has an incredible discount plant section, and that was my main source for acquiring plants.  But even purchasing half price, plants aren't cheap, especially considering how often they die.

Perhaps the biggest frustration gardening is having plants suddenly (or slowly) die, when you've taken the best care of them you can, and you have no idea why they don't make it.  Or in my case sometimes, as I come and go from town frequently, I'm not there to nurture them the way they need.  Last summer we left town for a month during a hot spell with a drought.  Even though we have an irrigation system, the city mandated we turn it off and water by hand only, which I wasn't there to do.  I was surprised how many of my plants had actually made it when I came home.

All that to say, that was perhaps why I became interested in growing plants from cuttings.  I didn't grow up in a gardening family, everything I've learned I've had to learn by trial and error.  So my first discovery was learning which plants could be divided, and multiplied that way.  

The second was learning what I could grow new plants from plant cuttings.

I started doing both.  Somewhere along the way, I had some friends and neighbors share plants they had divided.  Free plants!  That was nice, but what was even nicer was that when the flowers from my friends bloomed, it made me think of them.

And somehow, what became more important to me than saving money on new plants, was where the plant came from, or who gave it to me.  Instead of seeing my flowers and thinking of the discount section of Lowe's, I think of friends, or special places.

My friend Jeanne who passed away last year loved gardening.  She passed some iris bulbs on to me, and when they bloom I think of her.  I always will.

My neighbor Martha, who is also gone, gave me some small yellow daylilies, and some pink phlox, and I treasure them.

An obsession of cultivating new plants - plants with meaning - was born.  I love the challenge of trying to grow a new plant from a cutting; seeing if I can get it to root.  My husband asked me recently if I do it for the challenge, to save money, or because of where the plant came from/who gave it to me and I told him it's really all of the above.  They are all great reasons.  But the ones that came from someone special are the ones I care for the most.

So all of that is to explain my next series of posts.  And here is today's "plant with meaning:"

These are two small mountain laurel plants

The back story: when I was growing up in New York state, my family spent every summer of my childhood at a cottage on a lake in Pennsylvania.  It was a wonderful place to be as a child: an old Victorian cottage in the midst of trees by the water.  My brothers and I spent all summer playing outdoors.  One memory that has stayed with me all my life was wandering around the shoreline, surrounded by huge, old mountain laurel shrubs.  At the beginning of summer, when the mountain laurels were in bloom, they were absolutely beautiful.  I've always associated them with that place, and with the joy of childhood summers.

My parents still live there, and I got the idea in my head years ago to see if I could get some mountain laurel cuttings and transplant them so I could have one at home.  I must have tried three or four times, and never succeeded.  Once or twice I got the cuttings to stay alive for awhile, but they never survived the transplant.  So last summer, when visiting my parents, I was determined to get a viable cutting.

I went out to survey the plants, and even better than a cutting, I found four mountain laurel babies that I was able to dig out of the ground by the roots!  (There's a much better shot at success with transplanting a whole plant than trying to make a cutting grow.)

I put them in pots and was thrilled when I saw the first new growths on them.

In the fall, I put one in the ground under an oak tree outside.  Mountain laurels prefer dappled sunlight and moderate temperatures (most of my backyard receives full sun and intense heat in summer).  They also like acidic soil - which ours is NOT, it's heavy alkaline clay - so I mixed a lot of coffee grounds into the dirt.  I know my growing conditions are not ideal, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.  

It's January, and so far, so good!

So far my little mountain laurel seems pretty happy in the back yard.

Time will tell!

I have never seen a mountain laurel in middle Tennessee, or seen one for sale at a plant nursery.  I assume there is a reason for this; aside from the wrong soil I will be curious to see if it makes it through the heat of it's first summer.  But it made through an extreme freeze in December (I covered it with a blanket) so hopefully that means it's roots are developing.

I do know there are laurels all over east Tennessee (I saw them everywhere in the Smokey Mountains this fall), but the climate there is more moderate and the forest would probably be ideal growing conditions.

I planted another of the babies at the House of Goodwill in September; I could only stay for a few days before I had to leave.  When I returned in October I was thrilled to see it seemed to be doing well.  In December I was back again, and this time, it looked dead.  I'm not sure what happened in the months between, did it dry out?  Did it freeze?  It's hard to know not being there...but I was trying to hedge my bets; so if one didn't make it at one location, one might have survived at the other.

So now I've got one live mountain laurel in the ground, and two still in a pot.  I'm not sure when I'll try to plant the ones in the pot, we'll see how the one in the back yard does first.

One last note on the mountain laurels, here's an up close pic of the leaves this fall:

You can see some small black spots on the leaves.

Over the last few months the small black leaf spots have been multiplying.  I did a little research, and I think it may possibly be due to a lack of iron, so I bought some iron chelate and sprayed the plants today.  We'll see if it makes them improve!

Incidentally, when in bloom in spring, a mountain laurel looks like this:

There is nothing else like it!

Rhododendrons are cousins of mountain laurels; their foliage is similar, but the flowers are different.  There is just nothing else like a mountain laurel flower - they're unique!

Perhaps this is the plant that rooted earliest in my memory (yes, the pun was on purpose 🙂); like I said, there were no gardens in my childhood.  The mountain laurels and wild orange daylilies of the northeast bring a unique happiness to my spirit when I see them.  They'll forever be a symbol of a time and place close to my heart.

This is what I love about gardening the most. 💗

From 1996 to 2022

Here's another belated post from Christmas, but I have to do it.  

When we decided to host a foster child from Colombia for the month of December, I realized I needed to come up with some good activities for us to do during the day.  I didn't know much about Yara, except that she liked doing arts and crafts.

Rewind 26 years.  In December of 1996, I was reading the newspaper one day (wow, that sounds so old-fashioned) and I saw a food column by Martha Stewart that included recipes one could use to build a gingerbread house.  My twenty-year-old self thought it seemed like a great idea, so I made a plan with my then-boyfriend (now husband) to build a gingerbread house.  

I had never seen a kit in a store; I didn't know they existed.  I jumped in with no idea what I was doing, I mean, how hard could it be?  So we baked sheets of gingerbread and then measured and cut them into walls and a roof for a house.  It was time consuming, but it was fun!  It was the first and only gingerbread house I have ever made.  Until now.

Fast forward to this December.  I had always wanted to make another gingerbread house, but after making the first one I realized what a big project it would be.  And if the first house was just a small, square house, the second should be grander, right?  I'd think about it every year at Christmas, but it was never the right time.  

So I asked my son and Yara if they would like to build a house (they had no idea what they were signing up for), and they agreed.

So our team of three created a house.  Tavo watched a video of a gingerbread house build on Youtube, and decided to use the style of the house in the video.  So he got a cardboard box and a ruler and created a pattern for the same style house, then he and Yara built a model.  It was much bigger and more elaborate than my original house.

We spent a couple of days baking all the gingerbread and cutting the parts; the third day we assembled the house, gluing it together with the icing.  It was indeed a long project.

Would you like to see the result?

First, here are some pics of my original house from 1996 (taken with a crappy point-and-shoot camera):

This was back in the days of no internet, so the whole project was done using just our own ideas; I think it's more fun that way.

It was a simple house, but I like our chimney and the brick foundation made with red candies.

We also had a little fishpond and a garden (with little candy pumpkins and watermelon slices 😊).

I also impressed myself with our Hershey bar roof.

It was a great little house if I do say so myself.

But back to 2022.  Here are some construction photos of our house:

Here are Tavo and Yara making the design and building the cardboard model of the house:

Next we made batches and batches of gingerbread to have enough to make all the house pieces.

Years ago I found this cookie cutter kit on a discount sale after Christmas at Williams Sonoma.

It makes 3D trees, snowmen, a sleigh and reindeer.

Knowing I always wanted to do another gingerbread house, I thought it would be perfect to use.  (Or else to decorate cakes with at Christmas.)  All these years it had been waiting in the back of the pantry for the right time for it's debut.

And here is the completed house!

We had to put the project on hold because of commitments to other things; we spent Yara's last day here decorating it.  We covered the whole house in frosting and used Life cereal for the roof.

But I didn't want to leave it incomplete...

Here is the final, final house.

Tavo and I spent the afternoon of New Year's Day completing the outside parts.  

Yara painted the gingerbread people before she left.

Just like before (except for patterning the house from one in a Youtube video), we didn't use the internet for ideas, we just used whatever we could think of ourselves.

I love it!

We recycled the fish pond idea from the last house, and used all the 3D cookie cutters.

Years ago for Christmas I made "stained glass cookies" - these beautiful cookies that looked like stained glass windows.  To make the "windows" in the cookies, you cut the center part out, then pulverized hard candies of different colors to dust.  The hard candy dust was placed in cut out part of the cookie, as it cooked in the oven the candy melted into "glass."

I thought the same thing might work for our windows, so we ground up butterscotch candies and baked them in the window spaces of the gingerbread.

They came out perfectly!

The house has twelve windows; they were even solid and strong.

The house is sitting on a piece of wood we covered with aluminum foil, and then frosting.

The hardest parts?  Well, the rooves (which were large and heavy) each broke in half when we were trying to put them on.  We were all afraid they would collapse inward and the whole project would be over.  We had to glue them back together with frosting and hold them in place.  Fortunately, when the icing dries it's better than liquid cement.

We also had pieces of the 3D tree and reindeer break; the sleigh was hardest of all, as it broke in three different pieces during painting and assembly.  We covered the breaks as best we could.

I realized afterward the house was missing a chimney.

Our house was definitely a labor of love!  It was also the perfect project to occupy three "artists" for about a week's worth of time.

I'm really glad it's done.  But now I keep thinking about how to design the NEXT house...(How about one with a Santa up on the chimney?)  If my timeline stays consistent, I'll be 72 when I make that one. 

Wow. 🤯  On that note, I guess I'll wrap this up.  I'm feeling a little bit lost for words at the moment.

Some belated new year's inspiration

I thought for sure I'd post something before now but after the busyness of December, I spent the last week doing very little.  It felt good!

On New Year's Day we opted to watch church online, as there was only one service that morning and I thought it might be crowded.  There was a guest speaker (I actually don't remember his name, just that he is a pastor in Oregon) who gave one of the most inspiring messages I've ever heard.

It was on prayer, and wow, it was motivating!

Here is a link:

I've been looking for interesting stuff to listen to lately when I'm working on my crochet blanket project, or doing dishes, and I imagine I'll listen to this again.  It was that good.

On December 28th we had to drive our visiting foster child from Colombia to the airport in Atlanta to return home, so it was a long day in the car.  I randomly pulled this book off my shelf for the trip, I guess because it was short.  It has been sitting there for years.

So, when I was in college there was a dormitory on campus named after Samuel Morris (my brother lived there), but I never really knew who he was.

Once I picked this book up it was hard to put down.  Why is it so good?

Well, the story (it's not long) is about a teenage boy in Africa who had been captured by an enemy tribe and was being repeatedly tortured.  When he was near death God miraculously freed him, healed him, and led him to a Christian settlement where he learned about God, and gave his life to him.

Seeking a Christian education, he headed to America by ship and enrolled in my alma mater, Taylor University.

So why was it so good?

Well, the story begins with a series of miracles and continues with them; instance after instance of God healing, saving and setting people free.  Samuel Morris was clearly a man who God chose to use, and the hand of God was very clearly upon him.

I always enjoy hearing miraculous stories (who doesn't?); they leave me inspired to experience God in a deeper way.

I'm not quite done with the book, but I probably read most of it in two hours or less.

After a challenging year full of so much division and drama in the world, it felt great to begin the new year with a reminder of how powerful and loving God is.  The more we give ourselves to Him, the deeper we go in our knowledge of who He is.  

Our church is in the middle of 21 days of fasting and prayer to begin the new year; I'm excited to see what this month brings.

Happy New Year!