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. 💗