Guest: Renée Clermont
When you garden on an idyllic island where many people are there to vacation and enjoy life to its fullest, you had better know how to make your creations look good. Reée Clermont has a gift for that.
She and I had a jolly garden chat about basic garden design, putting together beautiful containers, and the challenges of running a business on an island.
Renée particularly loves designing containers, and many of the window boxes you may enjoy on Main Street in Edgartown would be that of her and her wonderful team. She believes that container design is closely related to floral design. Except you have to know how plants grow.
It was interesting to hear how Renée’s floral design background informs her garden design. Just look at these amazing images from her Instagram feed to drink in her amazing aesthetic.
Get more information and inspiration from her Instagram and her lovely website.
Plant of the Week
The Paeonia lactiflora is one of the most popular plants there is. I have some beauties in my garden right now and I should go out and snap photos of them for you, but have you ever heard of Unsplash free images? Sometimes, they just do it better. :)
Oh, and it’s raining. So just enjoy these images.
Peony Care Tips
Photo by Cristiane Teston on Unsplash
Don’t plant too deeply, and don’t mulch. The tubers love to be about an inch below the surface of the soil.
Think about where you are planting them. Peonies can be moved, but they don’t love it.
You can stake them if you don’t like the flops, but you could also just cut them and bring them in!
“Peony Rings’ are handy, but fairly visible. You can make the support system disappear with stakes and green twine if you are crafty.
Peonies will re-seed, which is kind of fun, but the are such slow growers. Maybe you dead head so that seeds don’t form if you want good flower performance next year.
At the end of summer when your peony foliage gets tatty and mildewed, don’t worry. If you have it planted in enough sun, it will flower next spring. Just cut away what is bumming you out, and don’t be tempted to try to fix it with any sort of spray. They will be fine.
coffee time!
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Garden Questions, Answered
(or at least opined upon)
When can I prune my overgrown roses?
How do you transplant roses?
What is a Knockout Rose?
Gosh, so many roses that you would think it had been the plant of the week! But no. But maybe soon!
When can I prune my overgrown roses?
The best time to prune roses is late winter or early spring. Barring that, mid summer is not a bad option and in fact when I had my crew and the onus was on us to make people’s roses look as good as possible all summer (not an easy task) we would prune lightly but constantly to encourage outward growth and open up the middle of the shrubs.
If the early spring ship has sailed, but your roses are just too big, maybe you enjoy that first May or June flush of flowers and then prune. Summer is usually a quieter time for rose blooms, particularly here in hot and humid Central Virginia. If you want to prune them hard after that first show, not only will you discourage the Japanese beetles, but you will also shape up your shrubs well for fall, when you should get a second show.
How do you transplant roses?
Lots of ways to do this right, but here are some tips. A cloudy cool day will help your rose stress out a little less.
Here’s an informative sketch from The Spruce. Lots of good info, but I don’t think bone meal is essential. Not a bad touch, though.
Prune hard first (less biomass for the roots to support; fewer thorns for you to brave) and few days ahead and water well for a few days in advance too.
Dig, or at least start your holes where you want the rose to go.
Dig Big— get at much root mass as you can.
Make sure you hole is 1/3 again as wide as your root mass— some folks say twice as wide. This lazy gardener thinks 1/3 will do.
Consider watering the hole before you backfill, BUT…
Let the water drain at least somewhat and back fill gently so there is air in the soil.
Plant your rose to so that the crown (where the branches start to come out of the trunk is just above the soil line.
Expect your rose to pout for a few days, but just water well and a layer of mulch (not touching the woody trunk) will help.
There’s even a new dwarf cultivar.
What is a Knockout Rose?
The Knockout Rose is THE type for easy, fungus free roses that will even bloom a bit in the shade!
This is going to look like paid information, but, sadly, it is not. But I don’t need podcast support dollars to be able to say what a great plant it is.
Still lots of gardeners don’t like them. Why?
They are ubiquitous! I don’t want to grow a plant that the local Texaco station grows.
Answer: Avert your eyes while pumping. Unless you actually like to look at beautiful flowers.
They don’t smell.
Answer: Actually, they do smell. Not very strongly, but they do.
You have to prune them.
Answer: Yes, it’s true. Or not, if you don’t want to. They may get big and hairy, but they will keep blooming.
They don’t have long stems like hybrid Tea roses.
Answer: Correct. They are Knockout roses.
Still, they do, in my experience, succumb to Rosette Rose disease at least as easily as other roses do. And that is indeed a sad rose situation that cannot be fixed. You have to remove the impacted rose.
Next Week
Well here’a big, fat, beautiful hint…
Photo from GreatBritishGardens.co.uk