A Transplant Sucess

Many years ago I tried a flower I'd never heard of before to go in the home garden: balloon flowers.  Go look them up. You'll find they grow about ten inches tall. They also come in multiple colors.  My research was wrong on both points, or at least for what I bought, and not at all helpful for replacing it. 

It's not that anything happened to the original plant. Unless, that is, you count freely reproducing as something happening to it.  One plant became a clump, added an adjacent clump, became a third clump in the middle of a former garden path, the one that cuts across the corner of the "L" so we don't have to walk down the driveway to get into the rest of the yard. With that path blocked, we stopped using it, and it became more blocked, filling with lily of the valley, hostas, coneflowers,  small volunteer burning bushes,  daylilies, columbine (the small native red/yellow ones), thistles, dandelions, violets, and grass. I'm sure I missed a few plants in there, along with a multitude of baby trees. It's not even that large a path! Plus it was covered with square paving blocks!

Still, the major obstacle was the balloon flower. We kind of hated to step on it. Stepping over it wasn't an option. Remember my research showed it was maybe a foot tall?  Try over 5 feet! And colors - plural - was a light pastel blue. No plural. Just blue, so pastel it shows in pictures as more white. The shape of the flowers is as described, where the bud petals stick together along the seams, puffed out in a balloon, a bit smaller than a ping pong ball, and with some corners. Then they suddenly separate into a familiar flower shape.

This is part of a mature clump in front of the former house, the original one. The siding is medium blue, making the flowers look white. This was shot years ago before I had the ability to enhance colors on my computer. You can see the heaviness of the tall stems leaves them vulnerable to tilting and breaking, but they do bloom prolifically once established. Note down in the right bottom corner is a yellowish bud from a foreground daylily, an old-fashioned tall one, not the short ones like Stella D'Oro.

You can easily imagine the challenge stepping "over" one of these would present.

I wanted some in the new garden after we moved back north. I couldn't find a duplicate. This is where selling your old house to a son comes in handy. He's been a willing provider of sections of anything I wanted from 35-year-old gardens. Clear the path by digging out that balloon flower? Sure!

So we watered everything before a major digging spree, this one plant especially. It turns out they have a lonnnnng tap root. Some of that got left in the ground, so I'm a bit curious how stubborn it will be about returning. But I got a section, top cut way back, root about a foot long. This made it interesting because we're not supposed to dig deep holes here, per the lease. Lots of infrastructure, electric, gas, water and sewer, crosses unmarked underground. They don't tell us where. Since it's technically private property and I'm not an owner but a renter, I'm not entitled to the information. It's why so many gardens here are raised beds. So I dug carefully, wider than deep, and slanted the root - a bit shorter than when I received it - at about a 45 degree angle, and buried it by putting a circle of rocks around it and filling an extra 3 inches of dirt over the top.

Fingers crossed.

It survived its first summer. I'd left the stems about a foot long, giving the roots less work to do to nourish the top, and before frost it produced two balloons. Yeee-haaaa!

So, spring is here. All over, things are beginning to leaf out or sprout up. The first blooms are showing, except those chopped off or dug up by our abundance of rabbits and squirrels. The red peony which came with the property is as tall as its cage already, and tiny buds are showing. It's next to the balloon flower, which now has it's own cage, 4 foot tall above the ground. Winds here are fierce so they'll need protection.

I've been watching the ground daily, looking for signs that the balloon flower survived winter as well.

Finally, one shoot! Then two!  Paul came over to help with more planting over the weekend, and took a close look, gently brushing dirt aside to show more tiny buds. We counted 7. The next day I found 9. Now perhaps 11. It's getting watered daily in this heat, and more tiny hopefuls poke up. The above photo is from this morning, before today's watering, and the ground is splitting even more. I get a kick out of green on top of purple stems where first was a whitish bitty bump. Looking down on these you can't tell the first two are 3 inches tall.

There is a paved path through the yard so folks on our block can easily access the community center / mail boxes on the middle street. These face it so we can all watch them grow, along with my circle garden and the lilies in the back which were just planted after starting indoors, then hardened on the porch inside mesh walls.

Right now the bleeding heart, also a legacy plant from previous owners, has been doing a bang-up job of showing off for everybody. The above photo is about a third of the plant, since I can't get far enough away to fit it all in the frame. In a couple months it will have disappeared back into the ground, if it's on the same schedule as last year, but the lilies will be taking over. And weeds.

Wind straight off the lake shoots up that corridor between back yards, so we'll have to see how those hold up and whether we need cages next year.