Defying Death in the Greenhouse

One of my chief methods of beating Old Man Winter at his depressing game is standing in my Garden Pod, breathing the oxygen created by dozens of potted plants. I just went out and took stock. Seven of them I bought, albeit years ago in some cases. All the rest I've propagated from cuttings or been given by friends. So should it be in a greenhouse. It's full of plants I love, plants that bear association with people and places in my life. For an audio musing on this topic, please listen to my NPR commentary, "Rosemary is for Remembrance."

Some of the Pod denizens are plants I just couldn't say goodbye to in November, when it finally got seriously cold. They were thriving, and I couldn't let them die. I've been pleasantly surprised by the beauty and floriferous nature of this Rebel chocolate-leaved geranium (pale pink blossoms, on the floor in the photo below). I have to admit that selective breeding does produce some real wonders, like this nearly-perfect geranium. The blossoms hold well without shattering; they're nice and full and round; the leaves are gorgeous, and this creature has not stopped blooming since May. I'm so glad I hauled it in. And I made a cutting, just in case, and it's doing well, too.
Early Saturday morning, I awoke to the sound of coughing, miserable children, as I had for the last four nights. Both Phoebe and Liam are dreadful ill with sore throats, congestion, headaches, coughs, and fevers. They're marginally better tonight (Monday), but I'm pretty sure this is a viral illness, as it's not responding to the antibiotic they were prescribed. I dose them twice a night with palliatives. I finished my rounds, blearily measuring ibuprofen and cough syrup, and realized that it was cold. Much too cold for 6 AM. I checked the thermostat, 58 degrees. It had been set to 67. I raced to the cookstove, fully awake, and turned on the gas. The ignitor clicked, but the burner didn't light. Oh, crap, oh crap, oh crap, the gas is off. Must move fast now.

We heat with  natural gas, from a well on our land. It comes through an orange plastic pipe from a welljack out at the end of the meadow. Homegrown natural gas is great when it works, and it's free. Consider that for a moment, free heat...when are you all moving to southern Ohio to be my neighbors??

When it cuts off, though, you have to act fast, and you have to know what to do. Bill hurried out to the regulator, pulled the pin, and with a prayer, listened for the hiss that would mean the gas was operative, but just off thanks to condensation in the line (a hazard when temperatures fluctuate wildly in the winter).

My greenhouse is heated with gas. It's a little plastic pod that does not hold heat in the least.

I have two variegated bougainvilleas in that greenhouse who are right below Charlie and my tankful of emperor tetras on the hierarchy of my favorite creatures. Bill gave me the first one for my birthday three years ago. They remind me of Mexico, where in 2005 we had one of the happiest vacations of our married life. They make me happy. They take me back to a frost-free place and time in my life.

I looked at the thermometer. Twenty-two degrees outside.

I put on a coat and went out to the greenhouse, strangely calm and collected, for what was going on in my poor head. Twenty-two degrees inside the Pod. Breath panting, showing in the black night air. Bougainvilleas, geraniums, basil, fuchsia, ficus, cacti, succulents, gardenias, hibiscus, abutilon, heliotrope, mandevillas. None of them hardy, all of them standing at 22 degrees.
I lit the pilot and cranked the heater up to six. I prayed. Although there was a slight scent of green leaves dying on the air, none of the leaves were crispy, and none were translucent--the kiss of frosty death. I prayed some more, stayed with them, like a priest at their dying bed. But I stayed calm. In previous greenhouse disasters, I've curled up in a fetal position and howled. Not this time. I knew somehow my friends would be all right. I felt as if someone had his hand on my shoulder, though I was alone. Dad? Old Man Winter? God? I don't know. But someone helped me and my beloved plants. It almost felt like all that love defied the frost.Red Satin mandevilla, proudly grown from a tiny cutting last winter. I let the mother plant, 15' high, die in December, clinging to the house in a freezing wind, knowing I had her children inside.I've had this Mammilaria cactus for 16 years. It blooms all year 'round. And it loves living atop the little gas heater in the greenhouse. Can't think of another plant that would appreciate furnace-like heat. Every plant has its niche. Sorry about the photo's orientation. Sumpin' happened in iPhoto. May have to do with the 13,000-plus photos I've dumped there...must delete, must delete, can't delete. Must.

Throughout the morning, I kept checking on my plant friends. One abutilon wilted completely, but by 4 pm it was fine. I lost a couple of leaves on a young Vancouver Centennial geranium; a couple of shoots on a Frank Headley fancy geranium. That, my friends was it. How these tropical plants survived 22 degrees, I will never know, but I trust my thermometer and my eyes and the condensed fog of breath that I saw hanging before my face in that frigid greenhouse in the predawn dark. Tonight, it's supposed to plunge back down to 8 degrees. On just such a night about five years ago, before I converted the Pod to gas heat, I lost everything, including 28 varieties of miniature geraniums, when the electricity cut off. You can be sure I'll wake a few more times tonight, to smooth a brow and give medicine, to arrange covers, and to listen for the whirr of the furnace, doing its job. I look like holy hell these days, hair sticking up like Clay Aiken's, huge dark circles under my eyes, but my poor sick coughing kids are on the mend, and my greenhouse is still growing and thriving, and that's something to keep a hopeful old girl going.

Hummingbird Tracks

Mandevilla sanderi, the red mandevilla featured earlier.

As mandevilla flowers open, I have noticed that they twist clockwise. A petal which was at 6:00 when the flower opened will be at 9:00 by the next day. I don't know why they do this, but I know they do because I scrutinize my mandevilla flowers every morning. I'm looking for something, tiny scratches on the lower petals. They will tell me who's using the plant.

Mandevilla "Alice DuPont" is a fabulous plant, but it has a problem where native American pollinators are concerned. Its brilliant pink color pulls tiger and spicebush swallowtails in from afar, as well as hummingbirds. But it guards its nectar in a very deep throat, and I'm not sure they can access it. The hummingbirds try once or twice and give up--no big deal. But tiger and spicebush swallowtails get stuck trying to reach that throat, and when I've grown this plant, I've had to go around all summer and free struggling butterflies, or remove their carcasses, from the flowers. I'm not saying this is a huge problem, but it does make me sad, and it underscores the importance of planting native plants, or at least ones whose nectar is accessible to native pollinators, in preference to exotics.

By contrast, Mandevilla sanderi is highly attractive to hummingbirds, and they can access the nectar in its shallower throat. And they leave little scratches on the lower petals when they feed.

I first discovered scratches on the petals of an orange daylily in Connecticut, back in the 1980's. I watched a hummingbird feeding at the lily, landing lightly and scrabbling for purchase on the lower petal. When it left, I wondered if it had left tracks, and examined the petal. Tiny scratches. Hummingbird tracks. Tracks, from a bird that flies so well it never walks; that was put in the family Apodiformes (without feet) when the first specimens, with feet conveniently or accidentally removed, were sent to Europe from the New World.

I loved to show these marks to visitors to the Connecticut preserve where I lived for ten years. "Ever seen hummingbird tracks?" I'd ask. People would look puzzled until I showed them the little scratches. A simple thing, a tiny thing, hard to see and harder to photograph. But sometimes the simplest, tiniest things hold the greatest magic.

The Great Red Mandevilla

One of my greatest (and easiest) horticultural triumphs this past winter was the successful rooting, in water no less, of two cuttings of a red mandevilla that I love. Here's how it (and Phoebe!) looked in September 2006. The mandevilla was so beautiful I could not leave it out to freeze. (Brought Phoebe inside, too). I sighed and grunted the plant into the greenhouse for a long winter of cutting back its wild tendrils, spraying it for aphid and whitefly, and dumping two gallons of water on it every other day. Urrrrgggh. I put it in the biggest pot I own (which also happens to be the upper size limit of what I can lift, not coincidentally), and it completely dominated the greenhouse all winter, cutting sun for everyone else. It wound its long tendrils around every plant within six feet of it, and I had to keep slashing it back. I cursed it and wished I had thought to root cuttings in the summer of 2006, so I wouldn't have to house that 60-pound, eight-foot-tall monster in my tiny Garden Pod all winter long. I had found this plant at the Greenbrier Nursery in West Virginia, and I was loath to lose that wonderful genetic material. It was the first red mandevilla I'd seen. By about January, to my great surprise and delight, I had two tiny cuttings throwing out roots, and after a winter in the greenhouse and a summer outdoors, they're just now coming into maturity, putting out delicious red blossoms. Come the first of May 2007, I just about broke my back getting the mother plant out of its pot, and I put it right into an enormous hole I dug in the ground next to the front door, where it is putting on a spectacular show and climbing a trellis up the front of the house. Thank you, darling. You've been an asset, overall.There it lives and thrives, and there it will die come November, because I have these two gorgeous little starts from it, who have promised not to dominate the greenhouse the way their mother did. I love this plant so much that I'm also layering it, burying low-hanging stems in moist soil. Those buried sections should put out roots by fall, and then I can cut them off the mother plant. This is one of the great joys of gardening, and Bill likes to say it's my only vice: plant propagation. What I'm going to do with the starts come October is anybody's guess. Most of the people I'd give it to don't own greenhouses. Given the growth potential of this tropical vine, I'll probably be cursing those cuttings all through the winter of 2007, too.

This plant was formerly in the genus Dipladenia, along with a pink variant which I also grow. Now, though they've put it in the genus Mandevilla, where it's called M. sanderi. The other Mandevilla is M. amabilis, sometimes called Chilean or Brazilian jasmine. The most frequently grown variety of M. amabilis is "Alice Dupont," boasting enormous, fragrant pink flowers and quilted, rugose leaves, unlike the sweet, shiny dark green leaves of M. sanderi. There's no denying that Alice Dupont puts on a spectacular show. I've grown them for years, and always used to plant one for my mother, where people would stop in front of her house to ask her what it was. I give them to my mother-in-law every year, too, and she loves them. This vine loves the cruel humidity and heat of Virginia and Ohio summers, though like mine, it dies at the first frost. It's much more a vine than a shrub, growing in a straight line if you don't cut it back.

Of the two mandevillas, I now prefer to grow the shiny-leaved red-flowered M. sanderi, because it's much less prone to attacks by whitefly and red spider mite. It also has a much more compact growth habit, gorgeous shiny deep forest-green leaves, and dark red flowers that just can't be beat for beauty.

There is one more thing I love about this plant, but I'll tell you about that tomorrow. I seem to have gone on a bit long about mandevillas. It's going to be a long winter in the greenhouse, with three to bring in!