The power of the press.
I write today in The Baltimore Sun about planting pansies. About how it started with landscapers filling bare spaces in fall and winter and then migrated to the home garden.
Lo and behold, the column no sooner hit the streets than pansies arrived at The Sun!
I love it when it all comes together!
Photo credit: Baltimore Sun/Susan Reimer
Went shopping this weekend. Bought plants.
It takes a certain amount of courage to buy perennials at this time of year, especially when they are marked 50 percent off because they look dead.
You have to believe that they will have time to collect themselves before the winter sets in, and will emerge with renewed strength next spring.
I sat with a catalog in the warm sun, and made a list of the plants I wanted for a bed I am re-designing and another that I am rethinking.
I went to Bru-Mar nurseries in Annapolis, looking for some bargains, and I found a few. Well, more than a few. And some weren't even on sale.
I found the Echinacea "Mac 'n Cheese" that I had been searching for all summer, and a Nepeta "Blue Dragon"
I found an orange agastache, a coreopsis "Jethro Tull" and a gaillardia "Frenzy," which wasn't what I wanted but was close enough.
I got a couple of cinnamon ferns and a couple of very pale yellow and apricot columbines for my shade garden, but I am waiting for the heuchera I want, "Stoplight," to go on sale.
I also found a new rudbeckia variety I am going to try..."Goldstrum" succumbed to the mildew this year after a three-year battle.
Now, to get them into the ground.
She who dies with the most plants, wins.
"Every year is a good year for sunflowers," said Jon Traunfeld of the University of Maryland extension service, and he was laughing.
He was responding to a question I posed from Garden Variety readers. Several, including Linda Nelson, daughter of Colt great and barbecue purveyor Andy Nelson, wrote to say their sunflowers seemed especially tall this year and the seed heads especially heavy.
"As long as they get the heat they want and the moisture they want, they are happy," Traunfeld said.
Sunflowers are native to the high plains states, where it is hot and dry. They are used to drought conditions. When you get a rainy summer, as we have had here in part of the Mid-Atlantic, sunflowers go crazy.
Even in Hampden, where Laura Durington says her sunflower seem to grow inches every time she looked away.
While Linda Nelson used her father as a measuring stick, Laura used the 6-foot fence in her yard. She thinks her flower is more than 15 feet tall.
She can thank the rain, not the rat poop, which was one of her theories about why a sunflower grew so large in the city.
"It is a big plant and it needs lots of moisture," said Traunfeld. "But their production can really increase with good rainfall."
Photo courtesy of W. Atlee Burpee & Co
I find myself humming Cat Stevens these days. "I'm being followed by a moonflower...moonflower, moonflower."
It was "moonshadow" in his song, but it is a moonflower in my garden.
My friend Susan Iglehart of Susan Iglehart's Flowers in Glyndon, Md., gave me a moonflower (Calonyction aculeatum) when I arrived at her home in May to pick up my order of annuals, vegetables and herbs.
Susan works hard over the winter to find the newest and best seeds to "custom" grow for her gardening clients. She sends us a checklist in February, and we pick up the results from her greenhouses in May.
(It is always a bit like Christmas to visit Susan. I never remember what I ordered, so it is always a surprise. And I always find one or two plants that I absolutely must have. And then she sends one of her newer varieties home with me, too. It might be an heirloom tomato, or an unusual geranium. This year, it was the moonflower.)
I tucked it in a spot at the corner of the deck, where the steps lead down into the yard, and now its vines and heart-shaped leaves have found their way up the steps and along the railing and into the bird bath that is attached there!
Moonflower is an annual tropical vine that is a slow starter. But it thrives in the heat and as the summer warms, it quickly grows, flowering around the 4th of July. It is like the morning glory in one sense - it is almost invasive. Deadhead if you don't want it to self-seed. (Warning: seeds are poisonous.)
Each evening, as I welcome the soft night, there are giant white blossoms to welcome me -- as big as dinner plates and as white as French porcelain.
The flowers are only there in the evening, and each bloom lasts only until dawn when it closes and waits to drop from the vine.
But every night, there is a new moonflower to follow me.
Susan Reimer has spent 16 years writing about raising kids - among other topics - in her column for The Baltimore Sun. And every time son Joseph or daughter Jessie passed another milestone - driver's license, college, wedding or a move to a new military duty station - she has planted another garden. Now she will be writing about those gardens - and yours - here on Garden Variety. 
