The first rose to bloom in my garden is Rosa xanthina f. hugonis, syn. ‘Father Hugo’s Rose’ — the golden rose of China, as it’s sometimes called. I just call it Father Hugo — like a comforting old friend.

Every year this yellow rose surprises me with how very many buds appear on its long arching canes, how quickly the buds develop, and how very showy those pale gold cups of flowers are during their brief time of bloom. The leaves and buds are tiny, compared to many rose bushes; yet the flowers are relatively large although they’re single.

Yes, it’s an old-fashioned rose.

If memory serves, Father Hugo’s rose was written up with enthusiasm by gardeners as a new discovery just before the First World War: and who Father Hugo might have been, I have no idea. It’s not well known these days, giving way in popularity to the new and improved varieties with a longer blooming period and a tidier habit of growth.

True, this is not a rose for every garden or every gardener.

Winter wind and ice is hard on Father Hugo, breaking the long canes, and it sprawls around and spreads those long canes like a skirt on the ground. Use mulch, if you don’t want a constant battle to trim the edge of the lawn around it, the way my rose edges into lawnmower territory in its growth. The thorns are like organic barbed wire, too, so pruning back the dead wood in the spring is not a whole lot of fun.

But it’s all worth it for the early pale gold cascades of roses… lovely!

My rosa hugonis grows well on a gentle sunny slope at the edge of the driveway– it doesn’t seem to need very rich soil at all, fortunately — where it can tumble around at will. In a small garden, however, I think I’d be inclined to experiment with an espalier against a fence or wall.

We have our Garden Giveaway contest winners! Email addresses of our 3 winners have been pulled from our usual Mexican basket-hat by He Who Hogs The Power Tools, and the lucky ones have been notified of their great fortune:

Thanks to Comtech, a CatStop goes to JCF (who apparently has a very specific pesky stray cat in mind for discouragement), a SquirrelStop to Queen Marlene (her songbirds will be happy!), and a SlugsAway goes to Peggie (they say everything is bigger in Texas, so I don’t want to see her slugs!).

Thanks for playing! Your prizes will go out in the mail this week, so cross your fingers for prompt and efficient postal service… And for others, less fortunate, who must now weep over their pest-ravaged gardens in disappointment: Better luck next time! And there will be a next time, you know it!

Sweet spring in the garden, with all the fresh little green sprouts: it’s like heaven from now until harvest! Except for the harsh reality of garden pests. If pesky slugs, cats or quirrels are planting frustration in your lovely garden, my friends, this Garden Giveaway is the contest for you.

3 Great Garden Pest Control Prizes

SlugsAway electronic slug and snail fence

Keep slugs and snails out of your garden without using chemicals. Safe for children and pets, it can protect your garden all season on a single 9-volt battery.

CatStop automatic outdoor cat deterrent

Keep cats out of your garden, safely and efficiently. A motion-activated burst of ultrasonic sound will startle cats and teach them to stay away.

SquirrelStop automatic spinning squirrel deterrent

Keep your bird feeder safe from squirrels. When a squirrel climbs on to the feeder, it triggers the SquirrelStop motor and makes the feeder spin! (Ha! Let’s see you try to stay on that amusement park ride, little seed-stealing rodent!) Works with any hanging feeder weighing up to 10 lbs.

Contest Rules

This contest is open to Canada and USA readers only, sorry — otherwise I’ll go broke on the postage for shipping these things all the way to Uruguay. (Not to worry, there’ll be another giveaway contest for our international friends very soon!)

Deadline to enter: Saturday, 31 May 2008, at 11:59 pm (Eastern)

Winners will be selected by my usual clever method of matching up email addresses with numbers, writing all the numbers on bits of paper, and putting the bits of paper into a hat (actually, a charming Mexican basket since I’m not a hat-wearing kind of gal). As usual, He Who Hogs The Power Tools will close his eyes, reach into the basket, and draw the winning numbers one by one.

First prize winner gets his/her choice of the 3 available prizes; then the 2nd prize winner gets to pick from the other two; and finally, the 3rd prize winner gets whichever prize has not yet been claimed.

Winners will be notified by email on Monday, 2 June 2008, and announced on DomestikGoddess.com at the end of that week.

3 Ways to Enter

1. Sign up to get Domestik Goddess updates by email, if you haven’t already done so, and you’ll be automatically entered for a chance to win.

or

If you’re already a subscriber, drop me a note (my email address is on the About page) or leave a comment on this other post to say “Count me in!”

or

2. Bonus! Get your name put into the hat twice by posting a note on your own blog to help spread the word about this contest — don’t forget to link back to this page, so I’ll see that you’ve entered!

or

3. Super bonus! Tell us your best story about garden pests for an extra chance to win. You can tell your tale in the comments on this other post, or send me an email, or post your garden-pest adventure on your own blog — whatever works for you — just make sure to let me know about it, so it will count towards a ballot in the giveaway!

All clear?

Good.

Remember, Canada and USA only for this one, please… and the deadline to enter is Saturday, 31 May 2008, at 11:59 pm (Eastern).

Now, let the Garden Giveaway begin!

While our friends Down Under are basking in gardening season, we in the Frozen North can’t see our gardens for snowdrifts… ah, but that never stopped a keen gardener from planning ahead for a new season’s harvest!

Me, I’m dreaming of sweet strawberries, fat gooseberries, tart white currrants, raspberries bursting sweet on my tongue, blueberries hanging in dusty indigo clusters…

Too easy, from the vantage point of winter dreams, to forget one of the great frustrations of growing your own food — the constant battle to defend it against wildlife! And birds, in particular, can be quite tricky when it comes to raiding the berry patch.

Sure, you can spread a fine mesh netting over the strawberry beds and currant bushes, but it’s not at all attractive. Plus, if you’re growing a lot of different berries, the cost for bird netting can get ridiculously expensive.

Some gardeners have had good luck with stringing fine line in a criss-cross fashion between poles in the garden, but I am not one of those people.

If the strings is too loose, the poor little birds can get tangled up or trapped down below among the fruiting plants — not nice, either way. And if the strings are too loose, it’s just a lovely perch on which the birds can rest while they decide the best way to get through and eat your berries anyway.

And it’s not that I would ever want to live without songbirds in the yard — I’d just prefer them to go eat the bitter wild chokecherries and leave my garden alone!

There are sticky substances to smear on bird-popular tree limbs, motion activated noisemakers, and all manner of hi-tech electronic devices designed to drive the birds away. And then there are the bright balloons with big scary eyes, and glittering reflective tape that you’re meant to drape about the yard. I can’t tell you from firsthand experience if they work or not — but who wants to see a mess of strange scary objects all over the yard, amongst the pretty fruit and flowers?

A more discreet solution that works quite well for my hobby-farmer friends downriver is to fool the birds into thinking the berry patch is full of snakes. They cut up an old length of garden hose into pieces about 16 or 18 inches long and lay those bits of hose among the garden plants.

Apparently, to the birds, the recycled hose looks like so many snakes, lying in wait for lunch! So the birds stay clear of landing in the berry patch.

But do you know those big plastic owls that some city folk use to scare pigeons away from their balconies? You’ll see a fair number of those out here in the country, too, perched on poles around the kitchen garden. My own experience is that the berry-stealing birds are scared of this watching “predator” at first, but by the time the crop is ripening, they’ve figured out that there’s nothing to fear.

Now they make a version of the owls with rotating heads. Obviously, movement helps… maybe.

At least with the fake garden-hose snakes, you can easily move them around from time to time…

Which brings me to the beautiful copper garden snake I found at Modern Artisans. I’m not sure if it would protect the berries from birds as well as my friends’ old hose sections do, but at least it would be something lovely to look at in the garden…

You know, something more decorative than a lot of bird tracks in the dirt and sad strawberry plants from which every fruit has been stripped!

There is, however, one thing that has worked for me with strawberries, over the years. I have given up completely on the usual large red berries and grow only white strawberries.

Yes, white!

Well, more of a creamy off-white, the colour that normal strawberries are before they start to turn red and ripe…

These strawberries simply stay that colour — they ripen beautifully without ever turning red, so the birds (and kids) can’t tell when they’re ripe and ready to eat.

White strawberries are not quite as large as the more widely grown red-fruited varieties, but they bear a great many berries to make up for it. The tiny Alpine strawberries are available as white ones, too, but mine are a hardy old-fashioned bunch that I swiped from my grandfather’s garden, and the fruit is larger than the Alpine strawberries.

As sweet as you could ever wish for, though, with a faint sun-warmed pineapple flavour — just as sweet as those wild strawberries we used to pick at the sunny edges where hayfields met hedgerows, back in that endless summertime when we were kids…

Technorati Tags: birds, berries, garden

I can live with the adorable little deer eating my apple trees. Well, I can tolerate it because there’s not any practical way to protect the orchard, short of a ten-foot-high electric fence (not practical) — but when it comes to the flower garden, the deer had better keep off!

My pride and joy (and the result of a heck of a lot of digging and weeding) is a 40-foot mixed perennial garden bed. The deer seem to feel that this lovely garden is a buffet table, laid out for their browsing pleasure.

Asiatic lilies don’t stand a chance. Every year I get all excited to see my gorgeous exotic lilies budding up, and then comes a night when the deer tiptoe in and work their systematic way down the length of the border, eating off the top half of every single lily.

This year, even the delphineum plants have been thoroughly browsed, and the heuchera, and the lavatera. The deer have even been eating my daylilies, and I just gave up on growing hosta plants some years ago… It wouldn’t surprise me to go out some morning and find the prickly Scottish thistles eaten down to the ground.

It would break a gardener’s heart.

You know those lists of garden plants that are supposed to be “deer resistant”?
Don’t believe a word of it!

If there are enough deer in an area, they’ll start to eat almost any plant they find.

Adventures with Deer Repellents

There’s no point in using one of the bad-tasting deer repellent products, because the deer have to actually eat the plant in order to know that it won’t taste good. So you’ve still lost the flowers…
Fortunately, there are options.

Now, if I weren’t too disorganized to get myself to the garden centre early in the growing season, and invest in a bottle of Plantskydd, my garden might survive. Because that stuff is one deer repellent that actually works. But you do have to actually have some Plantskydd on hand… and I always seem to be fresh out, when the deer come around.

My Fight Against Plant-Eating Deer

In the absence of Plantskydd, my methods seem to be a combination of:

(a) wishful thinking that maybe this year the deer will find something else to eat;

(b) fingers crossed for good luck, and

(c) desperate attempts to encourage my male dogs to piddle near (but not actually on) my prized flower garden.

The deer around here have gotten wise, though — in a landscape amply supplied with deer-hunting coyotes, Bambi is none too frightened of a few domestic dogs who are kept indoors at night!

(Speaking of coyotes, they say that coyote urine and fox urine can be an effective deer repellent. I just want to know how to get a fox to pee in a bottle, that’s all.)

I’ve been known to run out of the house at night in my rubber boots and dressing gown, waving my arms at the deer and shouting, “I eat venison, you know!” That works for, like, half an hour. The deer just wait for the crazy lady to go to bed. I haven’t asked the neighbours what their impressions are…

I’ve also been known to spray a particularly repulsive no-name highly scented air freshener at the edge of the flower bed. It did seem to keep the deer away, but the smell was so offensive to me that I couldn’t bear to go near the garden until we had a few heavy rain showers to dilute the odor!

So much for that plan…

I wrapped a battery-powered radio in weatherproof plastic and tuned it to an obnoxious talk radio station, and placed it in the garden. After two nights, the deer just tuned it out.

My amazingly life-like scarecrow also worked for about two nights, until the deer realized that this was just another cheap trick.

So, last week, in absolute desperation, I mixed up a batch of my grandmother’s rotten egg deer repellent. Do you know that recipe? It’s one of those hardy pioneer-woman type potions that makes your kitchen smell bad for hours, but it does seem to keep the deer away…

Homemade Deer Repellent with Eggs

Recipe:

Boil up a few garlic cloves in a cup of water, let it cool, take out the cloves (and throw them into the garden), and blend in a couple of eggs. Mix a cup of skim milk powder into this egg-garlic-water mixture, and stir to dissolve. Pour it into a gallon jug and top up with more water.

Now you’ve got to let the mixture sit in the sun for a day or so, to get really rancid. Pour some into a spray bottle — and I really must recommend using gloves, because you’ll never get the rotten-egg smell off your hands if you slop it onto yourself when pouring! — and spray it lightly onto your vulnerable garden plants.

You’ll be relieved to know that the rotten-egg smell goes away when the liquid dries — at least, humans can’t smell it any more. But the deer can still smell the repellent, and they don’t like it one bit!

Yes, it’s pretty horrible. If your garden is under attack by hordes of hungry deer, however, a half-hour or so of rotten egg smell is a small price to pay for saving the flowers you’ve poured your heart into nurturing and growing…

(So then you can cut them to make a nice bouquet. Life is all about the irony, isn’t it?)

You may know by now that I’m a big SIGG fan on a daily basis, but I have to confess that I am not without sin.

The hard truth is, in the real world, every so often you just end up having to buy some beverage that comes in a plastic bottle. (Big family-sized pop bottles for a birthday party, for example, or a bottle of water when you’re stuck in an airport queue for hours on end.)

And the beverage bottle issue comes up again, just now, with yet another news story about the growing waste problem caused by the North American passion for bottled water. Some municipalities are talking of a ban on bottled water, it’s that big an issue! (But what about other bottled beverages, I do wonder…?)

I don’t get many of these bottles, true, but it’s good to try to reuse the ones that do come into my hands.

Okay, then —

• Refill the empties with other beverages?

• Freeze water in them to act as a cold-pack in a picnic basket?

But then, what?

Bird feeding station

I’ve got a little gadget that converts a 2-litre bottle to a bird feeder, and that’s better than nothing — although it’s very far from being squirrel-proof, and it tends to spray birdseed around if caught in a good brisk wind.

Slow-release watering system

A more practical gadget is a spike with holes in it that screws onto the top of a soft drink bottle filled with water. You poke it into the garden or planter, and it’ll release the water down at the plant’s root zone, to keep everything green and happy when you abandon your garden for a few days away. (My mother has a half-dozen of those, for her big pots of geraniums on the sunny deck. The plants are big and bushy enough to hide a 750ml or 1-litre bottle, just fine.)

Instant watering can

Now here’s another interesting bottle conversion: Twist & Spout comes in two versions, for kitchen and garden (the difference is in the size of the spout.)

In the kitchen, the twist-on handle and spout makes a big fat beverage bottle a bit easier to handle and pour, especially for little people with small hands. In the garden (or among the house plants, for that matter) the attachment turns an old bottle into an instant watering can.

Twist & Spout fits “virtually any soda or water bottle with a screw-on cap” and goes for $5.99 at Perpetual Kid.

I’m in two minds about this kind of product, to be honest —

Should we buy another piece of plastic just to make it easier to reuse the first one? But if it kept you from buying a plastic watering can, would that balance out the plastic-consumption equation? Oh, but hey! Is the Twist & Spout made of recycled post-consumer plastic, by any chance? They don’t say on the sales page… but if it was, that would make a difference, wouldn’t it?

Sheesh.
As the frog said, “It’s not easy being green.”

[via The Green Head, who also prefers a stylish reusable aluminum bottle.]

photo by amberdc.

Want to grow a variety of herbs, but only have a small space for a garden? Stuart Robinson, one of our favourite Aussie gardeners, offers the Herb Spiral as a unique solution!

Basically, an herb spiral garden is an attractive and useful “permaculture” gardening method, a construction that winds its way up from its base, curling in to the centre as it goes up to about three feet in height.

The spiral structure means this herb garden has a small “footprint” in terms of garden space, but lots of room to plant a variety of herbs to please any gourmet cook-gardener. Easy to reach everything for picking and weeding, too.

Build your own herb spiral garden out of whatever materials are affordable and most available to you, whatever will best suit your landscape — Stuart has seen these interesting gardens made from PVC piping, clay tubing, and rocks and stones…
I think I sense a use for my old eavestrough piping, here!

Plant sun-loving herbs at the top of the structure, where the water drains away most efficiently, and those plants that prefer damp soil can go down at the base, where the water ends up! Which side of this semi-vertical garden you use for a certain plant can be determined by how much sun exposure it needs, because parts of the spiral will naturally offer more shelter and shade than others.

Friends are very forgiving about small garden imperfections (that’s why they’re friends!) but this year, we’ve got A Big Wedding Anniversary coming up in the extended family and everyone’s keen on making the party an outdoor event. We’ll want the place to look its very best for the occasion — but re-designing the landscape completely is out of the question!

So I’ve been going back through some earlier garden-related posts of mine, seeking inspiration, and remembering my Aunt Virgie’s old tried-and-true methods of getting a show-stopping yard and garden without actually going to a lot of trouble or expense.

5 Ways To Fake A Show-Off Garden

(with thanks to my frugal and green-thumbed Aunt Virgie)

1. Planter Magic

Need some colour? Group a few containers of lush flowering annuals wherever your borders look tired or dull. Keep your planters in the one single family of materials for unity — if you do terracotta for one, do terra cotta for all — but do mix up the heights and sizes of the pots to increase the interest.

2. Weed Wisdom

If you don’t have the time to weed all your borders before a big garden party or flower-loving in-laws are expected, concentrate your efforts on tidying up the front six or eight inches of each bed. A clean edge gives such a good impression, no one will notice a stray weed among the back-of-border specimens.

If time permits, do crisp up the meeting of soil and turf grass with an edger or straight-edged spade. And if your budget permits (which mine never does, oddly enough), consider a layer of decorative mulch.

3. Artful Dodges

Locate the lawn art with care. A piece of garden sculpture or a wind-driven whirly-gig can do a lot to dress up a garden, if chosen well, but it will draw the eye to whatever you place it near. If your roses are overblown and going brown at the edges, for example, move those garden gnomes out of the rose garden and over to the late-season lilies or whatever else is looking its best at the time.

4. Put It In Perspective

In general, concentrate your major tidying-up efforts for the areas of garden that are closest to the house or outdoor seating area. Distance, when it comes to viewing a garden, can hide a multitude of flaws!

If the view form your patio leaves something to be desired, despite your best efforts, you can make the patio itself the centre of interest. Go for bright cushions on lawn furniture, a pretty table setting, groups of potted plants at the edges of the seating area, maybe a shade umbrella or two for a festive air… This is a great place for a stunningly original piece of garden sculpture, unusual windchimes, decorative pavers, all the small close-up touches that will draw the eye away from a less attractive vista.

5. Cosmetic Measures

Every yard and garden, like every house, is likely to have some bits and pieces lying around that you yourself don’t even see any more because you’re so used to them.

Try to look at your place with an outsider’s eye — the way that real estate people tell you to do when “set dressing” your home for a prospective buyer to view:

• Pick up the kids’ toys (and, of course, the dog’s droppings!).
• Tuck away your garbage cans, garden tools, water hose, and other work-a-day necessities in a garage or garden shed, out of sight. If you don’t have a building in which to hide your tools, a good-looking large deck box will do the trick — and it can double as outdoor seating, too.
• Remove or replace any outdoor furniture or garden ornaments that are showing age and wear, or just plain getting shabby.
• Seed quick-growing annual vines like Morning Glory to clamber up a network of well-placed plant sticks and screen the compost pile (or use one of the many tidy compost bins on the market).
• Consider some flower-filled windowboxes or a new coat of paint to perk up an old garden shed.

Of course, if your nearest neighbour is stockpiling old rusty automobiles in his yard, that’s another thing.

Pick an attractive point in the middle distance — in your own yard — and focus the attention there, perhaps with a show-stopping floral display (in containers, if you must) or a busy bird-feeding station.

In your long term plan, consider a free-standing trellis, overhung with vigorous grapevines or fast-growing Virginia creeper, to screen the unpleasant view. A solid privacy fence can do more than block a sight line, so think twice before installing one: there’s a chance it could block out a welcome cooling breeze, or even make your yard or garden seem smaller.

“The Queen Mother lovingly created the garden at the Castle of Mey on Scotland’s northern coast and it became her summer retreat for more than half a century,” says
Tamsin Hope Thomson in The English Garden magazine, September 2005 issue:

Her Majesty, the late Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother noticed the Castle of Mey on her first trip to Caithness back in 1952. As friends drove her to their house along the Scottish coast, she saw a neglected castle, then named Barrogill. It had been up for sale for months. The gardens were overgrown, there were no bathrooms or electricity but she took a liking to it immediately.

What a gardening challenge, even with a royal budget and extensive gardening staff!

There’s no castle further north in Scotland, and the Castle of Mey is open to gale-force winds “known to rip up cabbages and toss them 60 feet” it is said.

A twelve-foot stone wall protects the kitchen garden — a delightful hedge-edged maze of veggies and flowers — but the sycamore trees in the East Garden are wint-bent into living sculptures, “braced against the elements as though brushed by a giant arm.”

The castle and gardens have been open to the public since 2001, so travelling gardeners can wander the woodland paths or enjoy a quiet moment in The Shell Garden, where Her Majesty liked to sit on a summer evening.

Head gardener Grant Napier has been experimenting with more perennials — “a wee bit here and there,” he says — to extend the gardening season, and the flower display is apparently magnificent right through the season.

The panicled Hydrangea may be slow to leaf out in the spring, compared to other popular shrubs for the northern garden. Once it gets started, however, Hydrangea paniculata puts on an everchanging show until the snow falls… and beyond.

From a mass of lush dark green foliage, the shrub blooms with loose cone-shaped clusters of small white flowers that are intensely attractive to beneficial pollinating insects, such as honeybees.

As the flowers age, the white takes on a delicate pink hue, darkening with the first frosts to a lovely dusty-rose. The flowers have the added bonus of drying well and retaining their colour for off-season bouquets of dried flowers.

It’s a hardy old-fashioned shrub that can easily be trained to a standard — the shape of a small tree, with one central stem — and it’s very tolerant of pruning at most times of the season.

“PeeGee” hydrangea (Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora) is the most common cultivar but many lovely varieties are readily available and equally well suited to our tough eastern Canadian climate.

In a treasured old copy of The English Garden magazine I revisited recently, Helen Gunn wrote:

There is a general feeling, mostly unspoken, that English names are low brow and folksy. Latin implies education and expert knowledge, no matter if it also sounds affected.

She doesn’t deny that it is sometimes very useful to have a precise Latin name by which to identify a particular plant, but regrets the fading-away of more colourful traditional plant names like kiss-at-the-wicket, leopard’s bane, love-lies-bleeding, wake robin and Oswego tea.

There is such poetry in the English names that it seems an impoverishment of our literary heritage to lose them. I would rather think that I was growing sweet sultan than centaurea or bishop’s hat than the dreary epimedium. We could even reinstate some really old names, and refer to gladioli as corn flags and nasturtiums as lark’s heels.

Around here, for example, that tall white-flowering plant I love is called snakeroot, but we are quite able to identify it as cimicifuga if forced to do so.

Oh, but didn’t I read somewhere that the garden gurus have started changing the Latin names around? So now cimicifuga is supposed to be called by another name entirely…
Well, it’s still snakeroot to me!

In the various pet-owners groups where I hang out, a common topic of discussion is dangerous plants, and whether a favorite garden plant might be harmful to dogs, cats, horses, or other pets and domesticated animals who might wander up and start munching away.

What common wild and garden plants can harm your pets?

And what part(s) of those toxic plants would be harmful to the animals we love:

• Roots?
• Shoots?
• Leaves?
• Berries?
• Stems?
• Flowers?
• or all of the above?

Who knew that horses shouldn’t eat chives – or red maple leaves?

Horses are poisoned sporadically in the northeastern United States after they ingest red maple leaves. Signs of toxicity are similar to those seen with the Brassica anemia factor after animals ingest plants of the genus Brassica (such as canola, kale, cabbage).

Now we’ve got every hardy herbaceous plant known to eastern Canada and New England growing around this place, I think — no poison ivy, though, happily! — but I don’t spend a whole lot of time obsessing about whether our domestic dogs are going to start snacking on the Aconitum. Still, handy to have a searchable database of poisonous plants at my fingertips, courtesy of the Government of Canada, and a whole bookshelf of reliable field guides and reference books!