Ghosts and Owls

It's Halloween in New Mexico even though it's still spring. I have ghosts and owls in my gardens. 👻  🦉  

Kintzley's Ghost honeysuckle is opening its funny discs to show off a spray of goofy yellow flowers. It's a ghostly plant both because of the round bracts that turn silvery white later in the season, and because it is a lost plant, gone for generations, now resurrected.

This vine was originally propagated by William Kintzley in the 1880s in Iowa, and was shared among family for years but never grown commercially. Then it disappeared and no one had seen it for generations until a nurseryman in Ft. Collins, Colorado was driving by a home in town in 2001 and spotted a vine with unusual silvery bracts. The story goes he slammed on the brakes and hopped out to investigate.

He knocked on the door and the elderly gentleman who answered told him the vine was a family heirloom, passed to him from his grandfather who had worked at the greenhouses at Iowa State. This ghost plant, resurrected in the early 21st century from a family pass-along plant propagated in the 19th century, is now widely available commercially.

I love having this revived discovery in my garden, although I struggle to get it to climb the fence.  

It wants to flop forward into a bushy heap. I tie it with twine to the fence posts to hold it upright, but every time the wind blows hard I have to retie some of the branches. It's a ghost with a mind to escape and wander I think.

I have owls in my garden too. This orange rayed flower is blooming on a plant called Owls Claws. I guess I see the resemblance to owl feet. It does look kind of menacing.

It's a native helenium and many heleniums are elegant plants with bright rayed flowers similar to asters or daisies. They've been colorful staples of mixed cottage gardens for ages. This one, Helenium (or Hymenoxys) hoopesii, is anything but elegant. It's a big, ungainly prairie plant. And the flower is an odd rusty orange.

These tall gawky structures belong out in a grassland somewhere, surrounded by other prairie plants where the wild orange blooms can mix with other coarse looking things and make a meadow.

In my tidy courtyard garden under an aspen they look out of place as specimens. I planted them because of the name -- Owls Claws. I wanted to see what that looked like. Now I know. They are too coarse and an odd color in flower for my little garden and may have to be moved.

. . . . A ghost plant tied to my fence, strange owls haunting the aspens . . . .  

Halloween in my gardens in spring, wildly out of season.