Faith in a Seed Part 2

I couldn't believe my eyes in late June when, searching Geepop's grave for the dozenth time, I found a dozen good-looking plants of Sabatia angularis in bud. Where in the Sam hill had they come from? Heaven?

It would be almost another month before they would bloom. But bloom they have.

They're the smaller pink flowers to the left, beneath Bill. He put a bench out there, and it's one of his favorite places to sit and think and talk to his dad.

A mighty nice big bunch at Geepop's feet.

A dozen of them!

You  may be sure that I will keep sowing that dust-fine seed, to try to have Sabatia in bloom every summer out there. It's the least I can do. How I wish I could do the same to remember my dad, but he wanted to be buried in Thornton, Iowa, and that's where he is.

I miss my dad something fierce, and we sure miss GeePop, his music, his humor, his genuine warmth and his wisdom. It is a comfort to have a place to go in the orchard to feel all that coming through.

Bill and I sat for awhile out with Geepop on Sunday evening, present in the moment for once, waiting for a thunderstorm, listening to the thunder, savoring the long-awaited success of my little Sabatia ranch. 

Chet listened to the thunder, too. He didn't much like it. 

We got up and walked a little farther in the orchard, and we found a beautiful male box turtle, very old, but unscarred by cars. Unscarred box turtles only occur well away from roads. It seems like every one I help across a road has some dreadful scar from a car encounter. It's nice to find a traffic naif like this one, especially an old one.

Did you hear that? Was that thunder again?

Yes, Chet Baker. But I am here. You don't need to tremble. 

Sometimes, if you keep trying and you don't give up, you can make magic happen. It surely seems like magic when these amazing, fragrant pink flowers sneak right past you, then suddenly spring into bloom. But it's not. It's work and hope and care and most of all love. 

It's faith in a seed. 

Faith in a Seed

Longtime readers of this blog will recall that I have a favorite wildflower. Sabatia angularis, Rosepink, or Rose Gentian, or Bitterbloom, or Pure Heaven (my name for its scent).

It's a big blustery showgirl of a wildflower when it's happy, each plant making a great big perfect bouquet of spectacularly fragrant pink five-petaled flowers. 

It blooms every year on my birthday. True. 

It grows on dry roadside banks and meadows in poor soil, companion of Queen Anne's lace and black-eyed Susans.

What is not to love? 

I've had my struggles protecting favorite stands from mowing, and I've seen rosepink come and go, mostly go. I decided I had to try growing it from seed so I could spread its rare and precious joy around. Little did I know what I was getting into. 

I first planted its dust-fine seeds in a long planter in the fall of 2010. They came up the following April in my Garden Pod, and the seedlings looked like this. Essentially invisible. 

By the next spring, the ones that lived all that summer and through the winter on the floor of my Garden Pod looked like this.

Lest you get excited, here is a year-old Sabatia with my fingertip for scale.

In the spring of 2011, I steeled myself and planted the precious surviving seedlings out on Bill Jr.'s grave in our orchard. I carried watering cans out there (more than a quarter mile away) all summer long, trying not to wash the minuscule plants away with the flow. I mulched them lightly with straw and prayed for rain that never came. As far as I know, all but one withered away despite my care. It grew to about three inches and made a tiny miniature bloom in July 2012, and that was that. It wasn't meant to be.

I did not give up. In the fall of 2011, having roped off the plants so they wouldn't get mowed, I gathered a honkin' bunch of seedpods in my favorite roadside patch.

The darn things don't even come ripe and dry enough to split open until November!

 Split pods, dust-fine seeds.

Yes. Those are seeds on my thumbnail.

I decided that something in my soil, water, light regime, or general karma was amiss. I couldn't grow decent Sabatia seedlings. So I'd let Mother Nature do it herself. I'd just sow those dust-fine seeds where I wanted them and see what happened. It'd be two more years before I'd know...Sabatia is a biennial, blooming in its second year of life, spreading seeds, then dying that winter. The seeds sown in the fall would make those tiny rosettes the following spring, and the plants would just sit there, growing roots and getting bigger, until they were ready to burst into bloom in their second summer of life.

 Let's see...that would mean that I wouldn't know if it worked until sometime in the summer of 2014.

In the spring and summer of 2013, I got down on my hands and knees and weeded Geepop's grave, peering intently at the soil for the tiny rosettes of Sabatia. I found nothing. I didn't understand how I could sow thousands of dust-fine seeds on suitable soil in full sun and get nothing. But again, it appeared that it wasn't to be.

I didn't give up. If I had to sow a million seeds there, I would see rosepink raise its beautiful blossoms. I gathered more seed in the fall of 2013.

I planted purple coneflower there, and it flourished and bloomed beautifully. I could only hope that someday there might be an understory of rosepink.

In my next post, come walk out to the orchard with me and see what happened.

Rosepink Harvest

I'm feeling grateful today. You may recall my ongoing struggle to perpetuate Sabatia angularis, my favorite wildflower (also known as rosepink or meadow gentian). That fragrant showy beauty that seems always in peril of being mowed at its peak. 

Well, this year instead of roping off the stands, I simply put a bamboo stake with pink flagging next to each plant. It was so dry this summer that after a point the township didn't mow. So it worked. And then one late September morning I got a call from Mr. Antill, who mows for the township. 

"I'm out here and I'm about to mow. Do you want to do something with these plants before I do?"

Oh, yes, I did! The timing was perfect. I knew the seed pods had awhile to go before they were dry and mature enough to split open, but I also knew that the plants were for all intents and purposes done. The perfect time to harvest them.

Here are the green seedpods. Not ripe yet, not ready, and the seeds within are still white and soft, but you can see that the leaves are pretty much dead and the rest of the process now would just be drying.

My most faithful companion came along. He is used to watching me do inscrutable things with plants, bugs, tadpoles and the like.  He is patient. He watches for cars while I do my stuff.

You be careful. There might be yellowjackets in that hillside. I got stungted already this fall. So I will wait for you by the car.


I visit each plant and take a sprig of seed capsules off each one. I figure the rest can dry in place and disperse naturally. Mowing won't hurt them now. It may even help disperse them.

The clammy cuphea is seeding out, too.

 This is the first time I can recall seeing clammy cuphea around my home. In the end I had to ask my friend Tricia West what it was. It's extremely gummy and sticky. So much so that I wonder if it's carnivorous; there are little gnats caught all over its glandular surface, in the shining beads of stickum on the end of each hairlike process. A pretty little native wildflower. I'm delighted to have another new wildflower to look forward to. These photos were taken Sept. 20, when it was in full bloom

when I wasn't sure what it was. Love digital photography for just that--as a record of what I don't know, to be identified.

 It's a leggy thing, maybe 2' tall or much less, depending on the individual.

Its little seedpods look like Moses in a boat, just like the tropical cigar plant's do.

I'm pleased to find a relative of one of my favorite greenhouse plants. I grow it from seed, too. This is a Mexican cuphea commonly called cigar plant or Mexican firecracker. Hummingbirds dig it.

Before long I have a lovely harvest of rosepink seedpods. I'm so thankful Mr. Antill thought to call me. There are tens of thousands of seeds in these stems.

I take up the stakes, too.

I go up the road to find Mr. Antill and thank him for sparing the plants and calling me.

I'll show him the seedpods.

"Oh so that's all it is," he says.

Much ado about a bunch of brown seedpods. But oh, what promise in a seed. I'm going to plant this batch out right where I want it to grow, on the still-bare soil on Geepop's grave in the orchard. Rosepink grows out there naturally, but sparsely. I want a whole mess of it there. I've had my fill of trying to grow this fussy little biennial in planters, in the greenhouse. Besides, I don't have a greenhouse yet.

He goes on with his work and I head home with seeds that are precious only to me.

and my buddy, ditto. Well, no, lots of people love Chet.

When I come back up the road I see Mr. Antill has mown the living crap out of the wild coreopsis around our mailbox. And the little red oaks that were coming up where their mother perished. 

Oh. Thank you, I guess.  It's all about communicating your wishes. It's kind of hard to communicate to someone not to do something you didn't dream they'd do, though. I'm sure Mr. Antill did it to be nice. Clean it up. It was messy, to the eye that doesn't distinguish coreopsis from multiflora rose. I liked it. It'll come back, though.

I'm so happy I got some gentian seeds I just laugh when I see what was our coreopsis patch. We're going to plant an American chestnut there, anyway. With a sign and a fence around it. Good fences make good neighbors.

Mission accomplished. Got mah seeds!!

Success is Relative

The mower laid this plant down in June but somehow didn't cut it off. It's blooming while lying on its side. I know how it feels. My arthritic toe's been acting up lately. Cortisone shot I got in March has worn off. I still run, but I'm grateful nobody's around to see how. Not much looking forward to another shot, but I see one on my horizon. Kind of like hoping a ten-foot long wasp will fly down and sting you in the big toe.

You will recall that I have been trying to "grow" rose gentian, Sabatia angularis, from seed. For two years I've been trying.

Nature is forever trying to explain to me what is possible and what isn't. I just won't listen. See toe, above.

For two summers and one winter I have nurtured teeny tiny seedlings of this plant, grown from seed gathered in November of 2010. I started with over 120 seedlings. That got narrowed down, and narrowed down a few more times. The marvel is that any lived.

So this spring I planted them out, all nine or so that made it for two years. They were so pitiful, so tiny. Nothing like the robust two-year-old plant shown above that's currently blooming its head off, untended, unwatered--nay! practically mowed to pieces on a dry bank along my running route. 

At the same time, I planted out another hundred or so rose gentian seedlings started in April of this year that were so tiny I had to take off my glasses to see them. I lugged water out to them in 5-gallon jugs, in the garden cart.  Big Toe didn't like that much.  I tried to keep them alive. But when we had to go to Maine, the temperatures soared and they went unwatered for over a week. And they all simply disappeared. Withered away. And so did the nine two-year old plants I'd worked so hard to bring along. 

A lot of other stuff happened here at the farm in that week. It wasn't one of my favorites. 

But some good things happened, too. When we came home, the royal catchfly I'd been growing for a couple of years was finally in full bloom. All its leaves have since turned yellow. I guess it doesn't like 103 degree blazing sun so much. Tough summer. BUT it is setting seed, and for that I am grateful. This plant may not survive, but I'm going to take its seed and start over this fall. This plant, I think, I have a hope of growing. After all, one of my two plants lived long enough to bloom. For me, that's a pretty good batting average.

Here is the bank where the rose gentian grows without anybody caring for it but me. And all I do is mark it off so the guy won't mow it AGAIN. Phoebe is coming back down from smelling the fabulous cluster shown in the first photo.

Phoebs has always loved flowers, like I do. We've been admiring the chicory. Chicory is one huge reason to get up early in the summer, because it's done by noon.

 This chicory has been cruelly mowed once this summer. It sulks for a couple of weeks and then sends up a zillion bushy stalks and blooms more beautifully than ever. Wow, what a show. I don't give a fig that it's Eurasian. You could never call it invasive because it grows where nothing else will--in the compacted, bone-dry gravelly soil of roadsides and waste places. Chicory is my second favorite wildflower, right behind rose gentian. There is no blue like chicory blue.

 Our chicory comes in pink, too. I photographed a little girl by a pink chicory plant a bunch of years back. Now she's driving her brother to Open Track and the pool. And I am beginning to believe that they will come home again each time I watch them roll down the driveway, talking and laughing and listening to the songs they like on the radio. I watch my whole world drive away, and I force myself to have the faith that it will roll back home again.

She's a good driver. 

If I look hard, I can usually find a purple intergrade between the pale pink and the true blue chicory. Bewitching.

They go so well with goldfinches.

I'd make a lousy plant breeder because I don't appreciate things just because they're different or rare. I don't find the pink an improvement on the blue. It's kind of wimpy. But I love to spot the pink plants in our population.

Anyway. Back to the rose gentian. When we left our heroine she had squandered approximately two hundred rose gentian seedlings by transplanting them out on Bill's dad's grave. None, apparently, had made it. At all. 

And then on the evening of July 15, 2012, she walked out to check once more. To see if the catchfly was setting seed. To see if she could find any trace of the gentian seedlings. 

And there was one. She laughed aloud to see it there.  One rose gentian plant that had made it through the storm and the drought and the neglect and the general ineptitude of this wishful wildflower horticulturist. 

It is three inches tall, but it is going to bloom.

 Success is relative.