Pruned Hedges

Weather: This was the first week that temperatures did not go below freezing. We had a good rain on Tuesday with brief showers on Friday and Saturday that watered in fertilizer. The snowy winter may have killed a buddleia, but the spring bulbs and rhizomes are flourishing. The continued moisture may be setting up summer-blooming plants for hard times when it gets hot and dry.

Last useful rain: 4/23. Week’s low: 34 degrees F. Week’s high: 80 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming in the area: Apples peaked, purple leaf sandcherries, flowering quince, forsythia peaked, lilacs, redbuds, Dutch iris, tulips, daffodils, donkey spurge, lavender moss phlox

What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Alfilerillo, tansy and purple mustards, hoary cress, western stickseed, oxalis, fleabane, native and common dandelions, June and cheat grasses; elm seeds in the air

What’s blooming in my yard: Sour and weeping cherries, sandcherries, choke cherries, fruiting crab apples, grape hyacinths, vinca; pansy that wintered over

What’s reviving/coming up: Cottonwoods, Russian olives, black locust, grape vines, Virginia creeper

Tasks: Spent my time digging out brome and cheat grass that were invading the mums and daylilies. I planted coreopsis and blanket flower seeds in openings, and fertilized the mums. It may not be the right time, but it’s the convenient time.

Animal sightings: Chickadees, cabbage butterflies, small ants. The small bees prefer the Siberian peas and lilacs to the crab apples and sour cherry. The neighbor’s cat is back. An earthworm was sluggish when it was uncovered.

The quail landed on my back porch rafters again. When I chased it off, it flew under the porch roof of my neighbor. I suspect it’s hiding from the black hawks that have been soaring overhead.

Weekly update: Neatly pruned hedges always mystify me. I wonder why anyone would bother to plant something that flowers, only to chopped the branches so it never blooms. If someone wants to go to the trouble of maintaining a clipped hedge, there are evergreens that are ideal, and they don’t even drop their leaves in the fall.

The shrubs that get this treatment are the ones that tend to have lots of dead wood that needs trimming out: spirea, forsythia, roses of Sharon. Apparently some garden advisor sometime in the past thought, since you have to do the work anyway, why not make the effort pay with something visible.

The spirea takes it, though it looks like it has mange when it blooms. One person keeps a row of roses of Sharon cut down to low squares. The lavender flowers looked pasted on in summer. The forsythia does not do well when it gets cut arbitrarily. Some years it can take it, and others it can’t.

Privet not only does ok, but volunteers to be a green hedge. Mine have begun to send out suckers along the wettest land, which means in a line. I don’t prune mine, so they fill in and bloom in late spring. As I mentioned in the post for 21 November 2010, my aesthetic reasons developed when I had a neighbor in Michigan with a privet that grew so large it resembled a tree.

Lilacs are another shrub that sends out suckers that form copses. A couple people in the area have them in hedges. The one is tall and doesn’t look like it’s ever been pruned. Another died after people strung an irrigation line through the top branches and ran water in winter than froze. I don’t know if the ice killed it, or if it was suffering and the water was a fatal attempt to save it.

My lilacs, especially the uncultivated species, have created forests of stems. They compete with each other for light so the flowers appear up higher every year. I probably should cut them down a little, but I’m always afraid insects will invade if I do it during the summer.

Notes on photographs: Photographs taken 27 April 2019.
1. Common lilac (Syringa vulgaris) on left and Paul Thirion cultivar on the right. You can see the dense number of stems on both.

2. Common lilac suckers that found the hose laid down last summer.
3. Cheyenne Privet (Ligustrum vulgare) that has suckers to the left.

Lilac Buds

Weather: Rained Monday. Seeds germinated Tuesday, probably unwanted. Spits since with winds and occasional thunder. Stronger winds yesterday. 13:08 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Apple, crab apple, flowering quince, forsythia, wisteria, tulips, first bearded iris, moss phlox, donkey tail spurge; lilacs almost open; silver lace vine leafing.

Beyond the walls and fences: Choke cherry, cottonwood, western stickseed, alfilerillo, hoary cress, purple and tansy mustards, dandelion; tree of heaven budding.

In my yard: Sand cherry, purple leaf sand cherry, Siberian pea, daffodil, baby blue iris, vinca; buds on spirea, yellow alyssum; snow ball leafing.

Bedding plants: Pansies, sweet alyssum, petunia.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geranium, pomegranate.

Animal sightings: Small birds, gecko, harvester and small black ants.

Weekly update: There’s something to be said for Nits and Lice, a tiny plant you don’t know exists until you see the flowers. Growing lilacs is more like raising elephants - there’s a long gestation period when anything can go wrong. If you thought much about it, you’d go insane.

Last year promised to be one of the best. It had been cold, if dry. The flowers opened April 20 and immediately attracted bees. The next morning I could smell them. Then, before they’d had a chance to completely open, on the first of May, it snowed.


The snow turned to ice. The open flowers turned brown.


The unopened buds died, but didn’t fall away. The shrubs’ hormone systems abandoned them. The carcasses hung around until a week or so ago when the repeated high winds finally broke them lose.


New leaf buds appear as soon as the leaves all drop, usually late November.


Then you wait. In December, after our heaviest snow I went out to see if there was still snow protecting the roots when the sun threatened to evaporate the snow covering just as temperatures fell.


The buds stayed hard shells. Then the weather warmed prematurely. The middle of March, a bit a green showed through the tips. A week later, the expanding buds outgrow their wraps.


Then, the first week of April, the incipient flowers showed themselves, tight little cobs of tiny dark buds, rather than miniature ears of corn.


Within days, the stems between the buds grew and the clusters were revealed, still skeletal versions of themselves.


This past week, the shrubs nearer the river were close to blooming. On mine, the individual florets inflated into round balloons, and turned rosier.


Then, the floret throats extended


before, then, the four petals opened to reveal the true lavender color.


In the village, the shrubs are farther advanced, some in full bloom,


while the weather forecast for the weekend is rain or snow, depending, with temperatures falling below freezing, or not.

It’s one thing to watch something unfold in the time lapse photography of Walt Disney’s Living Desert, when there’s no suspense to suspend. You just know they wouldn’t show something they couldn’t complete. With lilacs, you have the time lapse with no assurance there'll be a happy ending.

Photographs:
1. Persian lilac, with buds and leaves, 6 April 2012.

2. Common lilac the day after last year’s late snow storm, 2 May 2011.

3. Paul Thirion lilac a few days after last year’s late snow storm, 5 May 2011.

4. Persian lilac, with last year’s dead buds and this year’s new leaves opening, 29 march 2012.

5. Persian lilac with new buds, unchanged from late November, 4 March 2012.

6. Paul Thirion lilac in snow, 23 December 2011.

7. Paul Thirion lilac with expanding buds, 21 March 2012.

8. Persian lilac with just emerging racemes and last year’s dead buds, 27 March 2012.

9. Persian lilac with extending racemes, 6 April 2012.

10. Common lilac with inflated buds, 12 April 2012.

11. Common lilac with extended throats, 14 April 2012.

12. Paul Thirion lilac with first florets open, 14 April 2012.

13. I have three lilacs, but there’s little difference in timing between them. The differences come from distance from the river, with the one in the village closest to the river the first to bloom (picture taken April 2014)

14. and the one a quarter mile up the road, still rosy and bursting open the same day, 14 April 2014.

Lilac

What’s blooming in the area: Tamarix, snowball, yucca, Austrian Copper and pink shrub roses, golden spur columbine, fern-leaf globemallow, white evening primrose, stickseed whitebristle, oxalis, bindweed, native and common dandelion, goatsbeard, hoary cress; tansy, tumble and purple mustard; rice, needle, downy chess, and three awn grass; June grass going to seed.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Perky Sue; buds on fern-leaf yarrow and blanket flower; butterfly weed emerged; fruit developing on sour cherry.

Looking east: Siberian pea shrub, coral bells, thrift, pinks, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on peony, pink salvia, creeping baby’s breath, Kellerer yarrow; last year’s sunflowers coming up.

Looking south: Spirea, lilac; buds on beauty bush.

Looking west: Tulip, iris, flax; buds on sea lavender; fruit forming on peach.

Bedding plants: Sweet alyssum, snapdragons, Dahlberg daisy.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë, zonal geranium

Animal sightings: Rabbit prospecting; ladybug, bumblebee on pinks, large black butterfly, darning needles.

Weather: New moon; cold temperatures killed leaves on locust Tuesday; rain mid-week, but winds returned even on hot afternoons.

Weekly update: Lilacs like a cold spring, or so I was told by neighbors when I lived in Wyandotte County, Ohio, the year newly flushed flowers filled the town with their fragrance.

This apparently is more than folk wisdom. Remains of common lilac’s progenitor appear in Hungarian fossils from the tertiary, and, according to Kim and Jansen, the shrub probably evolved 12 million years ago when ice-caps were developing. Glaciers may have isolated it from its Oleaceae peers in Asia.

Joseph Caprio determined common lilacs still need 1049 hours between 37 and 48 degrees to set their buds. Those minimum 44 days represent a few more chilling units than apples require, which may explain why they emerged about four days after the orchards this year.

Temperature is such a strong factor governing Syringa vulgaris that scientists have been using it to evaluate the effects of changes in climatic conditions. When they were establishing a baseline, Caprio’s colleagues discovered lilacs were unfolding an average 7.5 days earlier in the western United States in 1994 than in 1957. Peter Marra’s team found the date for bud burst was 3 days earlier for every degree of increased average temperature in the east between 1961 and 2000.

This year, we had a snowy winter, followed by warm temperatures in mid-March. My first florets opened April 25. I planted the shrub in 1997 and it first blossomed two years later. The earliest date the racemes appeared was last year on April 21; the latest was in 1999 on May 10. A twenty day fluctuation is not unusual.

Lilacs may demand cold weather, but they did not like last weekend’s cold winds and frosty mornings. My lilac was in full fluorescence Friday, but has had only scattered, four-petaled trumpets since. Towards town Monday, there was only one white lilac left with much color. Revenants of light lavender remained in 15 yards; some white sprays remained in two places and two people had dark purple heads.

The affinity between lilacs and cold is obviously conditional. Last year a man down the road watered his shrubs when morning temperatures were still low enough to freeze. This year, those are the only shrubs I don’t see with even a hint of leaves. I don’t know if the iced branches, the prior year’s grasshoppers, or something else killed them, but established lilacs don’t die willingly: they might have lived another hundred years and pirouetted through most of them.

Notes:
Caprio, Joseph M. "Flowering Dates, Potential Evapotranspiration and Water Use Efficiency of Syringa vulgaris L. at Different Elevations in the Western United States of America," Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 63:55-71:1993.

Cayan, Daniel R., Susan A. Kammerdiener, Michael D. Dettinger, Joseph M. Caprio, and David H. Peterson. "Changes in the Onset of Spring in the Western United States," American Meterological Society Bulletin 82:399-415:2001.

Kim, Ki-Joong and Robert K. Jansen. "A Chloroplast DNA Phylogeny of Lilacs (Syringa, Oleaceae): Plastome Groups Show a Strong Correlation with Crossing Groups," American Journal of Botany 85:1338-1351:1998.

Marra, Peter P., Charles M. Francis, Robert S. Mulvihill and Frank R. Moore, "The Influence of Climate on the Timing and Rate of Spring Bird Migration," Oecologia 142:307-315:2005.

Photograph: Common lilac, 12 May 2007, after cold temperatures killed most of the flowers.

Cool Weather

What’s blooming in the area: Yucca, cholla, datura, milkweed, bindweed, buffalo gourd, golden hairy aster, tumble mustard, wooly plantain, sweet pea, roses, daylilies, bouncing Bess, Russian sage, trumpet creeper, silverlace vine, grama grass, rice grass, three-awn grass. Someone down the road has yuccas at least 5' tall with flowers that bend from their weight; corn in one garden is 24" high with 6" tomato plants in front.

What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Blanket flower, golden spur columbine, lance-leaf coreopsis, chocolate flowers, perky Sue, Hartweg evening primrose, fern-leaf yarrow, Mexican hat, miniature roses (Sunrise).

Looking east: California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, coral bells, cheddar pink, rock rose, coral beardtongue.

Look south: Climbing rose (Blaze), rugosa, rugosa hybrid (Elisio).

Look west: Oriental lily, perennial four o’clock, white spurge, catmint, blue flax, purple ice plant.

Bedding plants: Dalhburg daisies, marigolds, sweet alyssum, snapdragons, petunias, profusion zinnias, supersweet 100 tomato.

Animal sightings: Power line birds, small green hummingbird, quail appear to be testing the Russian sage for a new home, geckoes, orange Tiffany butterfly, ants, grasshoppers, bees, including bumble bee, crickets; someone down the road has brought in 3 ewes and a lamb to crop the vegetation; gopher attacked one of two hollyhocks that survived last summer, killed one stalk.

Weather: Hot days, warmer nights, mild afternoon winds with area storms that leave no trace; 16 days since last rain.

Weekly update: The solstice has come and gone, and the house is warming up so much during the day it no longer cools off completely in the early morning.

We had a long run of cool nights. It got warm early, but afternoons only turned hot in June. This followed a long fall that saw no killing frost until after Thanksgiving.

Despite the drought, trees and shrubs down the road are haloed in bright leaves. Some trees have branches of brilliant chartreuse among the dark green of old growth. As near as I can tell from the road, most are cottonwoods, some globe willows, and apples.

One yard in town is graveled with a half dozen or so wide yuccas. In one corner there’s a wisteria, that bloomed this year for the first time in several. As long as I remember, it draped sparingly over an arch trellis. Now it’s a large round mound of dense foliage at least as wide as the trellis in every direction.

My woody perennials still have lots of bare stems, but there are also new shoots and growing branches with leaves filling in bare areas. Some, like the Siberian pea trees, look normal. The roses of Sharon look the way they did two years ago. The lilacs, beauty bush and cherries have new growth, while the peach, forsythia and locust have branches blocking walkways. Only the weigela and roses remain diminished.

While some may water or have irrigation rights, I can’t believe every sprouting tree is getting attention. These must be plants more sensitive to temperature for growth than daylight or water. They probably are also established plants with roots deep enough to reach water stored last summer. Young or weak plants of the same species are not thriving. My globe willow and new cherry are only stable, staying alive and prey to grasshoppers.

Nature is indifferent. Lilacs should have had a wonderful, cool spring; and, there was one plant in town that had suckered into a 10' long copse covered with light lavender flowers. But the blooming period was unusually short, and most plants had few panicles. Someone down the road lost his lilac hedge, and in the village there are shrubs like my weigela with few green branches amidst much dead wood.

Nature may provide ways for plants to recover from the hard summer of drought and grasshoppers and the harder winter of drought and cold temperatures, but they are not panaceas. Darwinian selection rules.

Grasshopper watch: First grasshoppers were brown. Then came the green ones, which are dominant now. I’ve seen some with orange and black stripes, and some that had black and brown stripes. Also, there are insects that look like grasshoppers until they spread their wings and fly.