The national terrier specialty this week

A highland Nepenthes, a carnivorous pitcher plant from Borneo, grows in a corner, well established in a hanging teak basket. It was easy to believe that it was 1909, and that I was lost in the maze of 100 year old wood and glass greenhouses at Longwood Gardens, in Pennsylvania.

These back greenhouses are what greenhouses are supposed to look like, the sort that we see in period films where the wealthy kept exotic black orchids and man eating plants. No man eating plants here, but I thought that I might share some of the images that struck me as interesting from our trip this past week to PA ( Lydia, our Irish Terrier was in a string of national dog shows, and the national terrier specialty this week). Sometimes, the simplest of ideas can inspire us - I liked this thermometer box, protecting the device from the hot sun.

This name may be a mouthfull, but once you disect its name, you can see where it came from. It is a what is known as an intergeneric cross between three species, here, a Brassavola, a Cattleya and a Laelia. Many growers abbreviate this name as Blc.The Cycad relative Encephalartos are investments for any collection, with even tiny plants selling for hundreds of dollars. This South African native is Encephalartos woodii, or Wood's Cycad, and it is nearly 14 feet in diameter.

Madonna was caught on camera

Has Madonna changed her tune?  No.  Not really, because while all of these hydrangeas rebloom to some degree or another, they typically don’t live up to expectations.The problem remains that our crazy spring weather kills the old-wood flower buds (or stems) of these new varieties just as well as it killed the buds (and stems) of the old varieties. Unless we have an unusually mild spring or lots of snow-cover, the flower buds are killed and you don’t get the reblooming flowers until late summer or fall.  And this sparse, late season flower display looks nothing like the June blooms  they get in Cape Cod.  No wonder Madonna loathes hydrangea: she’s from Michigan, not the East Coast!

Madonna was caught on camera emphatically stating that she “loathes” hydrangeas. And while some have criticized her for her harsh words, I don’t begrudge her. After all, she was only expressing a view shared by millions of people. Yes, millions for people loathe hydrangea. So how can it be that a beautiful flowering shrub evokes such disdain? It’s simple, really. For years, Martha Stewart and her East Coast friends have shown us an endless stream of outrageously beautiful hydrangeas, covered with big, colorful blooms - but they failed to tell us something important. We need to move to Cape Cod to get them to flower. 

That’s right, you have to move to the coast to get hydrangeas to bloom like they do in the magazines! That’s because these bigleaf hydrangeas, Hydrangea macrophylla, have evolved in the mild maritime climate of coastal Japan. These plants detest the harsh continental climate of the Midwest with its wacky spring weather that ping-pongs between 85 and 20 degrees; their flower buds swell up and are zapped like flies in an electric bug killer. The dirty little secret is that we don’t live in Japan, or Cape Cod, or the Hamptons, and our climate is perfectly suited for killing hydrangea flower buds. This is why Madonna is so pissed off!  She’s sick and tired of being teased with the promise of beautiful, bodacious blooms only to be fooled, faked, and frustrated by season after season of flowerless foliage.

Bear Mountain

Near the head of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, the Chamberlain Lake ecological reserve lies on the Bear Mountain peninsula in Chamberlain Lake. Nearly all of the reserve was classified as regulated timberland, and less than 5% is wetland (mostly coniferous wetland). Many locations sampled during the Ecological Reserves Inventory and later monitoring efforts indicate past selective harvesting, but harvesting has apparently not occurred within the last 50 years, based on ages of stumps and old logging roads. Several areas of matrix-forming natural communities are in outstanding condition.

The most noteworthy stands are mixed hardwood-conifer stands supporting trees over 200 years old. Interestingly, charcoal pellets were found in all stands sampled, although the dominance of mid to late-successional stand types suggests that fires in most locations occurred long ago. Other intact forest types include a large black spruce bog and swamp just north of Lock Dam and a small, stunted spruce slope forest on top of Bear Mountain. The northern part of the Reserve includes the Tramway, remnants of an old logging railway that transferred logs from Chamberlain to Eagle Lake over a century ago.