{"id":85,"date":"2008-03-19T03:55:30","date_gmt":"2008-03-19T11:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=85"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:33:24","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:33:24","slug":"beardtongue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/beardtongue\/","title":{"rendered":"Beardtongue"},"content":{"rendered":"

BEARDTONGUE
\n<\/font><\/font><\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One of the wonderful things about being a gardener is that you get to fall in love with different plant species and varieties as often as you want.\u00a0 Successful relationships can last a lifetime.\u00a0 Less successful pairings are easily ended with cheap divorces that frequently involve the compost pile.\u00a0 Some gardeners are monogamous, like the lily lovers who fill their garden with every lily imaginable, forsaking all other plant families.\u00a0 Others, like me, are polygamous, committing themselves to roses, hardy geraniums and iris simultaneously.\u00a0 Both monogamous and polygamous plant relationships can be labor intensive.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Last week I fell in love with a penstemon.\u00a0 I was paging through the High Country Gardens catalog and saw the beautiful blue-flowered Penstemon virens, also known as blue mist beardtongue.\u00a0 It is a small perennial that thrives in lean soil, grows only eight to ten inches tall and is native to the western United States.\u00a0 The flowers bear a slight resemblance to those of snapdragons, which are part of the same plant family.\u00a0 Blue mist beardtongue’s most striking asset is the flower color, which appears to be a shade of forget-me-not blue–at least in the catalog.\u00a0 The copy says that the throats tend towards lavender.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I decided that the match was made in heaven.\u00a0 After all, I have an abundance of lean soil and some of it is even well drained.\u00a0 My garden has enough sunny space to accommodate a few new plants.\u00a0 The blue color will go well with the yellow nasturtiums that I grow from seed every year and both species thrive under the same conditions.\u00a0 The only thing left to do is arrange the match with the help of my credit card.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Having fallen in love, I wanted to know more about the family of my intended.\u00a0 The penstemons are a large group–numbering over 270 species–and the vast majority are native to the United States. \u00a0\u00a0In addition to their kinship with snapdragons they are related to flax, foxglove and verbascum, all of whom they resemble.\u00a0 The flowers are tubular and flared at the tops and come in colors ranging from white through a host of pinks to reds, purples, blue-purples and blues.\u00a0 Heights vary according to the species and variety.\u00a0 Penstemon generally prefer full sun and the kinds of lean, well-drained soils that they enjoy in their home environments in the western United States and northern Mexico. \u00a0Too much moisture will rot many varieties.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0Penstemon also have a wonderful pedigree.\u00a0 They were christened in 1748 by Virginia colonist John Mitchell who took their name, which means “five stamens,”\u009d from the Greek language.\u00a0 The plants became popular in Europe.\u00a0 North American exploration brought more new species to light and by the nineteenth century, hybridizers, including France’s famed lilac breeder Victor Lemoine, found them irresistible.\u00a0 By the end of the nineteenth century hundreds of varieties were commercially available.\u00a0\u00a0 Those numbers declined somewhat in the twentieth century, but penstemon remained a reliable garden performer.\u00a0 My 1948 edition of the Wayside Gardens catalog contains listings for three varieties: ‘Pink Beauty’, ‘Garnet’ and ‘Firebird’. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

By the waning years of the twentieth century, penstemon found themselves in vogue once more as the craze for xeriscaping or dry gardening spread around the world.\u00a0 In 1996, the Perennial Plant Association, a trade group, named Penstemon digitalis ‘Husker Red’, “Perennial Plant of the Year”\u009d.\u00a0 The award is given annually to a plant that has proven to be attractive, hardy and relatively easy to grow under a wide range of conditions.\u00a0 ‘Husker Red’ features fashionable reddish-bronze foliage and white flowers, and is still widely available.<\/font><\/p>\n

Every year more penstemon arrive on the market, which can make choosing difficult.\u00a0 Among the more notable varieties is ‘Stapleford Gem’, an English cultivar with white-throated, pale purple flowers and dark red stems.\u00a0 ‘Stapleford Gem ‘received the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit in 1993.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

For those with smaller spaces or containers, Penstemon barbatus ‘Elfin Pink’ may be a good choice.\u00a0 Though only a foot tall, it sports lots of rosy pink blooms.<\/font><\/p>\n

Penstemon have an organization, the American Penstemon Society, and a festival in July at the Arboretum at Flagstaff Arizona.\u00a0 Butterflies and hummingbirds celebrate the species in their own way by flocking to the flowers wherever they grow.<\/font><\/p>\n

My recent involvement with penstemon is my first horticultural crush of the new garden season.\u00a0 I know that it won’t be the last, but for right now I am counting the days until my Penstemon virens wings its way to my doorstep. <\/font><\/p>\n

To find out more about the genus, go to <\/font>www.penstemon.org<\/font><\/a>, which will lead you to the American Penstemon Society’s newly developed website.\u00a0 If you are planning a trip to Flagstaff, seek out the Arboretum’s website at <\/font>www.thearb.org\/penstemon_festival.htm<\/font><\/a> for details about the festival.\u00a0 Major garden centers should stock at least one or two penstemon varieties this spring.\u00a0 For an interesting selection try High Country Gardens, 2902 Rufina Street, Santa Fe, NM 87507, (800) 925-9387 or www.highcountrygardens.com.\u00a0 Catalog free.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BEARDTONGUE \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One of the wonderful things about being a gardener is that you get to fall in love with different plant species and varieties as often as you want.\u00a0 Successful relationships can last a lifetime.\u00a0 Less successful pairings are easily ended with cheap divorces that frequently involve the compost pile.\u00a0 Some gardeners are monogamous, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-summer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1695,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/1695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}