PBS Forum

William Doreen's lily book, Species Lilies of the World, arrived last week. I sent copies to two reviewers to confirm my initial decision to not proceed to get copies, based on a need for proofreading, incomplete descriptions, lack of photos, and other problems. 

Everyone who contacted me by email was notified. I got 2 "failure to deliver" messages, and will send messages out again to everyone I did not hear from the first time. 

Thank you to everyone who responded, and sorry, this book did not meet some basic quality standards. 

That is quite a pot! Is this a design line for Janet? And the iris is a nice touch for all those flaring bits of clay. 

I have always enjoyed non-binary folks in gardening, because they bring wonderful design energy to the gardening esthetic. I'm thinking Heronswood, Cistus, Joy Creek, and locally, Bradley Huson, who designed three gardens that were in a recent garden tour in Oysterville, WA. 

But do I care about anyone's orientation? Not at all. It's the soil and the plants that matter. 

I concur, roots pull bulbs down and sideways both. As Diane and others do, so do I--pull the flowering shoots before seed set to reduce spread. I have 1000s, one of several legacy bulbs from a prior gardener more than 100 years ago. The shoots do go into the garbage, not compost, to keep down seeds spreading in the garden. Despite my vigilance, the seeds still pop up in new beds and under shrubs, where I can't easily dig to get at them. 

MarcR's green gopher snake reminds me that along the West Coast, keeping garter snakes in your garden is a great way to control slugs. 

YDMD--that is a great term, Diane. As far as I can tell, deer are different everywhere. And from year to year. I grow camas bulbs, and this year for the first time, my deer decided the leaves are tasty enough to eat. Luckily, they did not eat them to the ground, and they left the flowering stems alone, so today I have flowering camas once again. 

I have posted more than once about the copious mammalian, bird and molluscan pests in my garden, which this year include elk, deer, European hares (a dark coated clan, mostly black haired, that has moved in this year from about a mile away), eastern gray squirrels, Douglas squirrels, chipmunks, the occasional bear, opossum, coyote, raccoon, rat, and last but not least, voles. 

Well, this month I have a new resident mammal, one I haven't seen for years, and am very pleased to say is back in residence:  weasels are denning under our house. Hurray! My first sighting was a foraging weasel returning to the den area with a very fat vole. I sincerely hope they hang around for a few years and seriously deplete the local rodent populations. 

As for pea fowl, the last male has not been seen or heard since last midsummer, so perhaps my flower beds are safe from their depredations for the year. 

I am down the coast a few hundred miles from Diane Whitehead, on the south coast of Washington, in sand, and grow many of the same natives she does, less those that prefer drier summers (madrone, oaks, etc).

For trees:  western red cedar, incense cedar, shore pines, Douglas-fir, Sitka spruce, red alder, Douglas maple, vine maple, Pacific crabapple, cascara, coast redwood (planted in 1951 as a sprout from a burl), and a thicket of cherries from a former orchard, likewise cultivate apples and plums, and two seedling Japanese maples of unknown provenance, which the birds adore for perching and nesting. 

Pacific wax myrtle is one of my main hedge species, along with evergreen huckleberry, random red elderberry plants, salmonberry, which I keep but limit, likewise thimbleberry, lots of trailing blackberry, the birds haul the seeds in. 

Sword fern, lady fern, maidenhair fern and several other maidenhairs, dryopteris, also Blechnum chilense, a lovely large frond that looks like it should harbor dinosaurs. 
Lots of Pacific iris, some Lilium varieties/species (those that survive elk, deer and voles from year to year), Erythronium species, Trillium species, several Allium (crenulatum, cernuum, and more in seed pots). 

Thousands of Hyacinthoides xmassartina, a legacy bulb that I cannot eliminate, only subdue. I resort to pulling foliage and flowers on a cloudy cool day during flowering each year to reduce seed set. 

Tulips, deer and voles--a snack duo that devastate tulips in my garden. I have resorted to only growing species tulips in hypertufa planters. Deer eat buds and flowers, and prefer hybrids. Voles eat the bulbs and are notoriously unpicky about hybrids or species.  

My peat alternative has been to run decomposing woody chips through my shredder, then sift the fines to concentrate the humic materials. This lets me separate out the larger woody bits.  I grow mostly native species, and pots are held outside, so I skip the sterilization, thinking that mycelia are better for the seeds than sterile mix is.

Lovely! I have not yet succeed with this genus (snails and slugs!).