July is a good month for wandering in the Medicinal Herb Garden. Some plants haven’t flowered yet and some are long past, but there’s probably more flowering in July than any other month. For the first time since I started this plant a decade ago, the bush morning glory (Ipomoea leptophylla) is flowering. The bed where it lives has a problem with tree roots filling the space and sucking it dry. Until you’ve dug into an irrigated bed that has dense tree roots growing into it, you don’t know what dry is. Bone dry and powdery, that’s what the soil is like. Many trees are planted much too close to the garden’s borders and they know a good thing when they find it, so their roots wind up where the water is. It’s too late to change that. Instead, I remove as many roots as possible from as many of the problem beds as I can get to every spring, but it’s a stalemate at best.
Bush morning glory (Ipomoaea leptophylla) in section D, flowering for the first time. I’d almost given up on it.
This year I got around to clearing roots from the bed where the bush morning glory lives and I think the extra water getting down to its large taproot during the growing season did the trick. Either that or the taproot happened to store up enough energy over the decade to finally flower this year. Or maybe it was a combination of both factors. Who knows for sure? Learning to live without the comfort of surety is…hard…but necessary. There’s precious little most of us will ever know for sure.
Hopefully we all know the bush morning glory is a close relative of the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), which is native to southern Mexico and naturalized throughout much of the tropical world. The bush morning glory has a native range from southern, central Canada, south to Texas and New Mexico, west of the Mississippi and east of the Rocky Mountains. Its roots are said to be sweet and edible when young, but bitter, tough and quite large, supposedly up to 40 pounds or more when older. I wonder if anyone is working on a cross between the two species that might be hardy in temperate regions, sweeter and faster growing than the bush morning glory. Maybe the amazing and inspiring Wes Jackson will take it on at the Land Institute. http://landinstitute.org/. I’ve mentioned in the past on this blog, what a shining light of hope and determination we have in Wes Jackson and his colleagues at the Land Institute. Cheers from afar.
Elecampane (Inula helenium) flowering and attracting bees in section B.
Bumblebees and honeybees are in the news a lot these days. Seems they’re not doing so well on this warming planet, constantly exposed to increasing heat and all sorts of environmental poisons like herbicides, pesticides and other residual toxins that are the result of our modern lifestyles. Alas, there’s only so much a gardener can do to help them, though I think most of us wish we could do more. But we can plant a wide array of flowering plants from a variety of families, so the bees have the nectar and pollen they need to survive. This year, I have to say that bumblebees seem to be everywhere. I’m not sure why, but they seem to be present in greater numbers than past years, though I have no data to support my observations.
All things considered, it still looks like a pretty good life, being a bumblebee.
This coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) shot was taken at the Beacon Food Forest. The nearby catnip (Nepeta cataria) was alive with bees, probably hundreds of them, but my camera couldn’t do them justice. If you haven’t been to the Beacon Food Forest, you should get over there as soon as possible. It’s an inspiration.
Chuan dang (Codonopsis tangshen) in section B is one of three species of Codonopsis in the garden. It has the fanciest flowers.
Some perennials, like the above chuan dang, flower in their first year, while others like the opopanax which is flowering for the first time in this border area, take many years to flower.
Opopanax (Opoponax chironium) in section A and adjacent border has a resin which was once used for medicine and is still used in perfumery.
Scarlet sage (Salvia coccinea) in the border areas is not hugely important as a medicinal herb, but it attracts hummingbirds.
There’s probably a hummingbird hovering nearby. Plant scarlet sage if you want to see hummingbirds.
Hmmm…I wonder why they call it pineapple lily? (Eucommis autumnalis) Section A
Sacred datura flower (Datura inoxia) in section C, which is night-scented to attract its moth pollinators.
Yes, that’s the extremely problematic, invasive weed, milk thistle, and it is growing in the Medicinal Herb Garden. Why?
Milk thistle flower (Silybum marianum) section A.
Because milk thistle saves lives, that’s why. I remove the flowers before they produce seeds.
The two signs posted in the milk thistle bed.
Pleated gentian (Gentiana affinis) in Cascara Circle is looking better every year. It seems to like being next to the canal by the bog and it has survived being stepped on. But please don’t step on it.
Mixed bed of blazing star (Liatris spicata) and button eryngo (Eryngium yuccifolium), pale coneflower (Echinacea pallida) and slimflower scurfpea (Psoralidium tenuiflorum) in section C
Wild artichoke (Cynara syriaca) flowering in section C right now.
Closely related cardoon (Cynara cardunculus) in section E. The flowers smell so good that if I were a bee, I too would be sprawled out on this cardoon flower.
flowers opening
hummingbirds and bumblebees
closing the circle
See you in the garden.