The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

In southern Arizona, the cities of  Phoenix, Tempe and Scottsdale encircle an area of the Sonoran Desert known as Papago Park.  Within the Park , surrounded by red sandstone geological formations, is the Desert Botanical Garden.

I visited the Garden last week and was delighted by the setting of the 50 acre garden.  It’s collection includes over 20,000 plants, 139 of them being rare, endangered or threatened desert plant species from around the world.  For someone who was born and raised in the Great Lakes area, such as myself,  the desert landscape is quite a contrast.

A red sandstone butte in the distance

One of the things that caught my eye was the large number of different agave and aloe plants that were planted along the walkways. I did not have time to study all of the sometimes subtle characteristics of each specie.

Walkways and handrails make it east to get around

Speaking of walkways, all of the major walkways are paved and are easy to negotiate.  There’s also plenty of architectural features as well as artistic sculptures  to keep  non-botanists from getting their eyes glazed over from the desert landscape.

Arched Structures and sculpture add visual interest

The arched structures have an assortment of desert plants that you can view close up, ranging from the relatively common Saguaro and Prickly Pear Cactus…

The arched structures provide a feeling of enclosed space.

…to the more exotic looking Creeping Devil Cactus…

They look like they're about to come after you!

…and Cristata Cactus:

The shy Cristata Cactus huddle together

You can enter the Desert Botanical Garden for free if you are a member of The U of M Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor, otherwise adult entry fee was $15 per adult when I visited Arizona last week.

Bob

So far it has been a good November to be working outside.  This has given us a lot of time to catch up on fall gardening chores.

One of those fall chores is cutting back your “Fall Raspberries”.  By fall raspberries I mean varieties that have been specially selected to bear fruit from September until the first hard frost.

Years ago, raspberries were only available in the summer.  We still see summer raspberries offered for sale, but the labor involved has made them quite a bit more expensive to grow. They had to be pruned at just the right time and  were often trained to a wire system, much like grapes. The canes produced fruit only on the second year’s growth, then they died shortly afterward. So you had to get into the patch and cut out the old canes one at a time while leaving the new canes to grow for next year’s crop.

Which brings us to the topic of today’s discussion: cutting back your fall bearing raspberries.  All you need to do is simply, cut off the canes, pick them up and dispose of them. That’s all there is to it. No critical timing, no trying onto wires…see how much easier they are than the older summer raspberries. This method can, however reduce your total crop yield by 25% or more.

If you have just a small patch, you can use your hand pruners to do the job like I’m preparing to do here:

If your patch is too big to do by hand, a weed-whacker with a metal brush-cutting blade works great.

A patch of fall raspberries, if not cut back in the fall will revert to an ever-bearing habit of growth. That is to say, they will begin bearing fruit in the summer and continue again in the  fall.  Some gardeners prefer to pick raspberries earlier in the season rather than waiting to pick their crop in the fall.

Cut off the canes near ground level.

If you have a place to do it, burn the cut-offs, they can harbor disease which may infect next season’s growth.

One last thing, if you can’t get to them right now, they can be cut down any time during their dormant season…all the way up until March.

Bob

Have you ever seen a flower with two colors on one blossom? Yes, of course you have.

Have you ever seen a flower with two colors on one blossom where the colors are divided exactly down the middle? Now that’s a little more rare.

How this occurs is an interesting process.

Let’s briefly review how a flower is formed.  Think back to your high school biology. Plants are made up of small, microscopic structures called cells.  The cells grow and divide over and over again until you have a fully formed plant.

Inside of the growing tip of a bud (called a meristem) there are many many cells dividing like crazy in order to get a flower to form and blossom in one growing season. Each time they divide, they pass on a blueprint of how the flower is to be built. This is called genetics.

All of those millions of cells start out as just one cell. That one cell divides into two cells.  At this very early stage, something happened to one of those two cells.  The genetic blueprint didn’t get copied exactly right, the blueprint says it is supposed to be a Mum blossom but instead of painting it yellow, it specifies pink as the color.

All of the descendants  from that one pink cell “thinks” the flower should be pink, while all the descendants from the yellow cell know it is supposed to be yellow because it is a yellow Mum.

Those darn pink cells are stubborn and continue with their pink idea until the flower is completely built.  And guess what? Exactly half of the flower is pink and the other half is the color it is supposed to be…yellow.

In the horticulture trade this is called a chimera.  This is one way how different varieties are begun.

An observant grower will notice something unusual happening with a single plant, often just a single stem on a plant. If it looks promising, he will reproduce it and hopefully turn it into a new variety.  If he has a crew of farm hands helping and he doesn’t go to check his crop, this small detail will more than likely go unnoticed and the opportunity to create something new will be lost.

Chimeras don’t always reproduce themselves very well. They are unstable, which is how they became chimeras in the first place.

A couple examples of chimeras include thornless raspberries and different colors of Poinsettias.

So, will I make a million dollars producing pink and yellow Mums?….probably not.

Bob

A couple of weeks ago I had an early morning visitor to the garden. Actually I believe he stayed over night until I found him in the morning.

He reminded me that gardening can have many pleasent surprises.  Sometimes, things come  your way unexpectedly.

It was still pretty chilly out, the sun wasn’t very high in the sky, so he was still resting on one of the potted Mums we are growing.

I knew he would be leaving as soon as he could so, I hurried in to the garden shed to grab my camera.

The visitor was a dragonfly covered with so many droplets of dew that he looked like he was encrusted with jewels.

I know I’m not the only person to be delighted by this sight. The American Society of Jewelry Historians has a brooch in their collection made of gold, platinum, demantoid, ruby and diamond. It was made by Emmanuel Gattle & Company way back in 1900. I’m sure the designer was inspired by a dragonfly he saw.

I imagine him being given an assignment by his boss to come up with an idea for a new piece of jewelry. He was probably unable to sleep all night and got up before breakfast to take a walk in the garden. He looked over and saw… well, we know the result of what he saw.

Recent international politics have been influenced by dew covered dragonflies and other insects.

Former US Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright owns at least seven dragonfly brooches  that she has worn  during diplomatic visits to  foreign countries.

Here she is wearing a brooch in the shape of a bee during talks with Yasser Arafat…who knows where she wore the Dragonfly!

These unexpected sights in the garden can really get you thinking of things. I better stop this “stream of consciousness” right here.

Madeleine Albright’s book Read My Pins became available in book stores just last week.

Bob