Back in 2018 I started a flat of amaryllis seeds I was able harvest when two of my bulbs, a sparkly white and a rich crimson, bloomed simultaneously and I was able to cross-pollinate.

It took four years but last spring I was blessed with several nice salmon colored flowers, the fruits of that patient growth. After starting the bulbs stashed from the prior summer around mid-February I was rewarded last year with more blooms than ever, taxing our limited window space but well worth a bit of pot crowding. After the blooms had faded I eased their transition to outside with a few weeks of shaded sun in May before I then planted the bulbs in the garden to fatten up for the next year. (One year they got introduced to too much sun too fast — sun scald, lost some leaves.) Well, fatten they did this year. Nights are getting cooler so I’ve dug them up and (reluctantly) trimmed the tops so they can spend a few months in the cool dark of our basement. I now have more than a dozen capable of putting on a show in the spring:

The largest are easily 5+ inches in diameter, and I couldn’t resist weighing the lot: I’m now blessed with 10 pounds of bulbs! In previous years the bulbs spent a fair amount of energy on offsets. While you can see a couple in this photo, there were only about half a dozen, and the lack no doubt contributed to larger bulbs.

Now I just need to remember to check on them periodically this winter and I could be rewarded with quite a show this spring. Going to have to give a few away though: definitely won’t be enough window space with this bunch!

I imagine that people who has spent even just a moderate amount of time studying fine art will be able to say “Oh, that’s an Edward Hopper” or “That’s a Picasso” even if they’ve never seen the particular work in question. The blocked colors and city scenes of a Hopper or the seemingly-casual strokes in a Picasso are often emulated but not quite the same.

This is largely true with scanographers as well. I can reasonably pick out from a lineup the works of at least three or four scanner photography artists, their subject matter and style leaving fingerprints all over their work (but not their carefully cleaned scanner glass!).

One such artist who’s style is readily recognized with her intricate designs packed full of flowers is Sandra R. Shulze, here with her “Floral Collage 18”:

(My wife would never let me get away with cutting so many flowers from our garden…but it’s a moot point, we don’t have that many!)

Sandra’s works evoke memories of fine floral needlepoint works from the 1800’s, though I imagine the fine ladies making such would be jealous of the brilliant colors captured by a scanner that couldn’t be accurately captured in their delicate threads. But we get to enjoy both — assuming you have a great-grandmother that bequeathed such an embroidery to you!

I was able to take a bit of time off this week for some camping in Maine and was able to include a visit to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. I was blown away. I hadn’t heard of the gardens before, just stumbled upon it in a “things to do” web search, and boy am I glad. I’ve had the good fortune to visit numerous botanical gardens such as Denver’s gem and the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill in Massachusetts and Coastal Maine holds it’s own very well, and quite possibly surpasses even the Denver example. Delightful gardens around every curve of the paths, plenty of ponds, whimsical 20 ft tall wooden trolls residing in forest area understory, ponds, stone or teak benches scattered generously to rest for a few and soak in the beauty, and of course an impressive array of nature’s floral glory. Despite being the latter half of September a wide range of plants were blooming profusely, attracting some better-get-a-move-on Monarch butterflies and Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds trying to stock up on nectar for the next leg of their daunting journeys.

The Garden is a relative youngster, first opening in 2007 after the first all-volunteer steps to bring it to fruition starting back in 1991. You wouldn’t know it to see it: the plantings all have that “we’ve settled in nicely, thank you” feel to them, all designed to flow seamlessly from one area to the next, a little surprise awaiting around every curve of path. The volunteers and staff were invariably friendly but there just to guide and answer questions, otherwise they quietly receded to let you enjoy the gardens.

It helped that the weather was stellar – clear blue, pleasant temps – but even in a drizzle I think I would have had a memorable visit.

My only complaint? At 3+ hours away it is too distant to easily explore multiple times per year to enjoy the different flowers that celebrate each season. But a return visit (or more) are certainly on my to-do list.

Highly recommended!

Back in March I reported that my 5-year experiment in growing Amaryllis from seeds was about to pay off – big time, with eleven bloom stalks coming up from my now sizeable bulb collection. Those 11 stalks on nine bulbs resulted in a whopping 42 flowers, some reaching seven inches across.

Here’s the main collection:

I would have been quite satisfied if I had gotten four or five of them to bloom, and even with two or three flowers per stalk that would have been quite a show, but the way they rewarded my patience this year with so many stalks having at least three, and most having four blooms, far exceeded my wildest hopes.

They’re winding down now, just a handful of blooms left as I write this, but I’m definitely motivated to give them TLC again this summer!

Back in 2018 I started the “Great Amaryllis Experiment” — well, that may have been a bit over the top but I was partly spoofing myself because, truthfully, I didn’t think it would pan out. I had been fortunate to have a couple of amaryllis bloom at the same time, a white with some lovely pink striations and a deep, rich silky red. What the heck, I’ll try cross-pollinating them. Got some seeds, planted them, and about 9 or 10 sprouted!

And man were they tiny, especially in light of the 3 to 4 inch diameter parent bulbs. A little reading confirmed: can take five years to reach blooming stage. As I tucked their pots away in the cool basement late last fall for their dormant period I was thinking, nope, gonna need another summer. And when cross-pollinating flowers you can’t say for sure if you’ll get a decent result or a dud.

Surprise! One of them decided to honor us this year, right on schedule year 5:

As you can see it is a lovely dark salmon color, making it closer to it’s red parent than the white by far, but a very pleasing addition. (I can’t remember which flower was the pollen donor and which the recipient.) We now have nearly twenty bulbs crammed into half a dozen pots, which, given our very limited window space, is all we can handle. Assuming they put on some bulk this summer in their outside stay I’ll have to gift a few of them to neighbors. In the meantime, loving this result — especially after the long wait!

We have several clusters of brilliant crimson monarda plants in our garden beds, and in addition to their weeks long show of blossom heads throughout July they are a magnet for ruby-throated hummingbirds in our area. Every evening they challenge each other for possession of this obviously desirable nectar source, with chases zooming around and up into the surrounding trees. How they don’t skewer themselves into a branch is amazing.

I’ve been noticing a lot of sneaky behavior this year. There’s one obviously dominant male who stakes his claim sitting up on the nearby clothesline or an adjacent tomato cage. Should a challenger try to sneak onto his turf and try to snitch some nectar from the monarda, the chase is on, with the top dogfighter chasing off the interloper. They’ve not been gone for a second when in from the opposite side come diving in what I assume are some submissives, darting in from the opposite side to grab a quick snack before the top hummer comes back to chase them off. It’s an aerial combat that goes on all evening until well into dusk – fascinating and entertaining!

The monarda are easy to grow, one of those “plant and forget” species, although they do keep expanding so can crowd out other plants if you’re not careful.

The only downside that I can see? Despite being so showy, they make a lousy subject matter for scanner photography. While they keep producing florets for several weeks, there are inevitably a few dead ones on any head that detract from any scan image captured. Those could perhaps be plucked and so dealt with, but the more significant shortcoming is that the small individual florets are too delicate. Laying the big base head onto the scanner surface flattens the individual blossoms and makes an unflattering result.

Oh well, I guess I’ll have to enjoy them “in situ” and the amazing flight show put on every day by the hummingbirds!