Party in the Greenhouse!

It's really coming on here. The forsythia is opening a few tentative blossoms, and the peonies have curled red fingers pointing toward the sky. I've finally gotten all the garden beds cleaned out and the first spring weeding (always the worst) done. I plop down on my butt in my Round House Overalls from Woodward OK and scoot along digging up grass and grass and grass.

I go out and watch the rhubarb grow every morning. It's thrilling, and not as slow as you'd guess. But I have already bought two bunches at the grocery store because I just couldn't wait for that spring tonic, that tangy bite, those soft strings on my tongue.

Note dogbomb above. I am getting creaky enough that I don't want to get down on all fours for every photo, so I am not always sure what I'm getting when I put my iPhone on the ground. I was trying for him...Got eeeem!

So spring is here, in a quiet, hang-on-I'm-coming way. 

But in the greenhouse, there's a party going on. 

This little orange abutilon, saved over from last summer, did the funniest thing. It put out a sport branch that has two all-yellow bells, and one orange bell with a yellow petal. I think I'll keep it.

A "sport" is a mutant shoot that shows up on an otherwise normal plant. Sometimes you cut them off, which is why I said, "I think I'll keep it." Sometimes they're undesirable because they're throwbacks to an earlier form of the plant. Geranium "Frank Headly" will grow along being superdwarf and heavily variegated with white, throwing salmon blossoms, but sometimes from the root will come this shoot that's all green, very vigorous, with red flowers. A parent variety, I guess. Because I like the dwarf variegated type, and I've noticed the plain green sports grow like mad and sap energy from the rest of the rather delicate plant, I usually cut off the sport shoots. I'm not completely sure what's going on there, but I find it fascinating. It's not as if gerania are grown from root grafts, so where does this wild type limb come from? Just a branch reverting back to its original type?

Wikipedia says:

In botany, a sport or bud sport is a part of a plant (usually a woody plant, but sometimes an herb) that shows morphological differences from the rest of the plant. Sports may differ by foliage shape or color, flowers, or branch structure.

Sports with desirable characteristics are often propagated vegetatively to form new cultivars that retain the characteristics of the new morphology.^[1] Such selections are often prone to "reversion", meaning that part or all of the plant reverts to its original form. An example of a bud sport is the nectarine, which developed from a bud sport from a peach. Other common fruits resulting from a sport mutation are the red Anjou pear and the white currant.

So apparently you can propagate sports via cuttings, but not seeds, because they're just a mutant branch of a plant. Ironically, the variegated salmon-flowered Frank Headly geranium was probably originally a sport off the vigorous plain green form that I choose to cut and remove when it arises on my weak-growing but treasured Frank. If you can follow my bizarre thought process. If not, read on...

 Here's another sport, this time off geranium "Wilhelm Langguth." The flower, interestingly, is normally colored, but oh those pure-white leaves! Obviously they have very little chlorophyll in them, so they can't photosynthesize to feed the plant, and don't do it any good. This sport is pretty, and I'll leave it for now because it looks so cool. Generally white sport shoots wither up on their own as the plant realizes it's made a mistake, putting out leaves that can't feed it. I do like the dash of green in the center! We'll see where this one goes. It's all a big experiment for the Science Chimp.

See, if this sport off the white-edged "Wilhelm Langguth," which was probably a sport off a plain green-leaved geranium, had, say, a nice big green patch in the center of the leaf such that it could make enough food to sustain the plant, I could cut it off, root the cutting, propagate it vegetatively, and name it "Zick's Weakling" or something similarly funny. If I cut this sport off right now and tried to root it it would die without delay, because it is entirely dependent on the mother plant for its survival. But given a little more green on the leaf, I could develop a brand new geranium variety. I'd be RICH I tell you RICH!!! Yes. I am crazy. Poor and crazy.

Pallid winter blooms of "Gartenmeister Bonstedt," my favorite garden fuchsia. They'll be deep coral red when I put the plant outside. I'm so happy this one has prospered. I'm about to divide it and get an entire shade garden's worth of expensive fuchsias off this one plant that I successfully carried over the winter. Here's to not driving around looking for it, here's to the fun of dividing it and spending nothing for all the plants I'll get from this one pot. We'll ignore what I spent on the new heater and 10 rolls of Gorilla Tape to hold the Groanhouse together...har. So far so good, though I cowered and covered my head when the March gusts hit 50. High winds now evoke a powerful PTSD in me. I know the boundless joy I get from the Groanhouse is worth it, but the real prospect of losing it all with one strong gust is not a pleasant one. It makes me afraid to go away, afraid a windstorm will blow panes out when it's in the teens and kill everything. It's made me an even worse weather nerd and Intellicast freak, if I weren't already one. Guilty!

A close contender for fave fuchsia: "Trandshen Bonstedt." I'm frantically trying to get cuttings from this marvelous plant to root, because she's losing vitality after blooming hard and fighting aphids for most of the winter. She does not send up new starts from the root like her cousin does--her stems get incredibly long and woody instead. This pot has a fountain of yard-long woody stems blooming like crazy, and no new root shoots I could divide off. Please, cuttings, root. Then I will replicate you many times over. It's your shot at plant immortality. Give thyself over to my care.

My iPhone is unable to capture the deep velvet-curtain maroon red of this geranium. It pumps it up to scarlet. Bah.

It's in contrast to Scarlet Graffiti, which is just the color of a tanager. The maroon flowers in the foreground are sort of close to the right color for the big geranium.

Hibiscus "The Path" is going NUTZ I tell you, BONKERS.  Got buds?

Losing her mind at the prospect of being sent outside for summer vacation, she is. Honey, don't sing "School's Out" just yet. We have some freezing nights to come. But I do adore your enthusiasm.

You keep singing. Does my heart good. 

Rhubarb, Full Circle

When we last left the Horticulture Chimp, she was grubbing out two baby rhubarb plants from an abandoned farmstead in North Dakota. Ann Hoffert had just seen and heard her life veery, and everyone was happy. Except perhaps the rhubarb plants, which rode to their new home in Ohio in the Chimp's boot, got potted up, yellowed and dropped a couple of leaves and then shrugged and made more. It was mid-June 2011.

The rhubarb went into the Heirloom Bed, where only the most special vegetables and flowers live. It's full of sandy loam and manure, memories and dreams.

The rhubarb liked it there with the asparagus and the spearmint and the old birdbath my dad made out of a disc. Disc, like a disc from a tractor implement. I'd be using it as a birdbath yet but it rusted through, iron being iron. I took it to a welder to fix it but it rusted through again so now it is an odd and not very pretty lawn ornament, unless you knew my dad, and then you'd think it was beautiful.

The rhubarb grew and grew, spreading great flat leaves to the sun, making lovely red stems full of tart flavor.

September rolled around and Ann Hoffert came to visit and attend the Midwest Birding Symposium with her lifelong friend Terry. Who is wearing my binoculars in this photo but don't be confused. I'm a little taller.

I took them for a walk down Dean's Fork (a must-see for Ohio guests)

and Ann Hoffert was so happy to see my habitat, as I am always so happy to see hers

that she hugged us both as we took in the old houses and barns of my favorite dirt road.

I shook her down a pawpaw and showed her tall ironweed

and great lobelia

and an adorable young guy who was checking the oil rigs in a homemade truck made out of plywood, Plexiglas and an ATV

and we went home and I made Ann and Terry the perfect avocado and homegrown lettuce and tomato BLT (I am drooling just looking at this)

and we ate and talked and for dessert

I had finally harvested the rhubarb

and mixed it with fresh September local apples

and covered it with cobbler crumbs cut with almonds and coconut

and butter and vanilla

and baked it (this is before baking; we were too busy eating to take a post-baking picture)

and served it, this rhubarb that had grown beneath the singing veery, Ann's life veery;

rhubarb that had come home in a boot from North Dakota and was now growing happily in Ohio, donating stems to a dessert I'd made that was now on a plate in front of our dearest North Dakota friend.

 It's for full-circle moments like that that I live. 

Veeries and Rhubarb

One of our new favorite destinations in North Dakota is the area up near Devil's Lake. Devil's Lake itself has a refuge where you can drive through and see bison lolling in the grass.

The babeh bison are a nice color of orange.

and very sweet.

We saw a light pole in someone's farmyard. They must do a bit of hunting...those are all whitetail antlers. Yow.

and we walked up our favorite road, which is our favorite because it is heavily wooded and you can see things like redstarts and vireos and thrushes and tanagers there. Those are hard birds to get on the prairie!

It was like walking out of North Dakota and into Pennsylvania. So we've learned over the past two years that if we want a nice fat Big Day list, we must hit this one magic road near Devil's Lake.

And on that road there is an abandoned farmstead

with a not-so-very-old house, which is unusual in itself

and just across the road from there is an overgrown place where once upon a time there might have been a garden

and growing in that garden was a beautiful plant in full bloom that looked to me to belong to the dock family (Polygonaceae) and it hit me that this must be rhubarb abloom.

And at the same time we heard a veery sing deep in the woods and Ann Hoffert had never seen a veery so Bill whipped out his iPhone and called that bird right in.

So not only did we have its breezy song sending shivers up our spines; we had the Real Bird Right There for Ann to See.

Which was wonderful. But the Horticulture Chimp was beginning to hyperventilate, because that blooming rhubarb had obviously done it before and dropped a few seeds. There were baby plants at its base. And though the stems were not yet red, there was something very familiar about their leaves. The Horticulture Chimp dropped to her knees. "Ann, is this rhubarb??" She bent over, looked. "Yes, I believe it is."

Well, it wasn't long before the Chimp had a pointed stick and had begun digging doggedly around the root of the giant rhubarb plant, and it became clear that the babies were actually root propagules, which made digging them out that much more interesting and effortful, a little dirtier.

But the HortChimp always gets her plant.

                                                                                        photo by Bill Thompson III

Two, in fact, which she dampened down with water from a bottle, wrapped in plastic bags, and stuffed in her boots for the long flight home to Ohio. Because she had always, always wanted rhubarb in the garden, and North Dakota rhubarb from right under a singing veery would be ever so much more special.

But it gets better...