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DUCHESS OF DIRT: October heat is stretching out the flower season

By Leslie Cox
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The Cannova ‘Bronze range’ (canna lily) was in full bloom in the Cox garden this month. Photo by Leslie Cox

By Leslie Cox

Special to the Record

Heard the latest? October has a new nickname – Hotober. Definitely fits. With continued record-breaking high temperatures, it certainly has been an unprecedented October.

Being able to enjoy outdoor activities later into fall has been a bonus but also a worry. The extreme drought and fire risk conditions are indeed dire.

The drought has also not been kind to our gardens, especially in light of extended watering restrictions, but there are some surprises all the same.

A walk around our garden reveals roses still in bloom, sweet pea flowers smelling divine, the blue of the Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’ (monkshood) flowers looking richer than ever and my geranium ‘Ann Folkard’ is still plastered in blooms with new buds still coming!

Not to be left unnoticed, the plants in my new tiered garden - Heliopsis helianthoides ‘Bleeding Heart’ (perennial sunflower), Rudbeckia hirta ‘Cherry Brandy’ and ‘Autumn Colours’ (black-eyed Susans), Chelone lyonia ‘Tiny Tortuga’ (dwarf turtlehead) and Agastache ‘Mango Tango’ (anise hyssop) - still have masses of blooms.

But I must admit, the queen of the tiered beds has to be my Cannova x generalis ‘Bronze Orange.’ At roughly 1.2 m (four feet) tall, the showy deep orange flowers rising on branched stalks above the dark, bronze-coloured foliage sure add a tropical look to this garden area. Glad I didn’t listen to my inner warning bell as I contemplated not buying this lovely new addition to the canna lily line. The reason for the hesitation was that cannas are not winter-hardy in our garden. Like dahlias, the canna tubers have to be overwintered indoors.

Going back a few years, we had quite a selection of tender perennials in our garden… some cannas, numerous dahlias, brugmansia, a slew of scented and zonal pelargoniums, a few begonias and an ultra-lemony-scented lemon verbena. It finally got to the point the extra work to prep all these tender plants for winter storage and trying to find suitable storage space indoors got to be too much. We essentially moved on to other, less demanding plant species for our growing zone. Or so I thought.

We did keep one borderline plant in the garden… the pineapple lily, Eucomis comosa. Then we added Eucomis bicolor ‘Sparkling Burgundy’, the dark-leaved species. A few years later, I came across the dwarf pineapple lily, ‘Leia’, which is in the Aloha series. I was hooked. The addiction was back and a couple more eucomis, a begonia and some zonal pelargoniums were added to the collection. And then the new canna this year, as I said.

Now I wait for a light frost to hit our garden. Getting close as we have slipped to 2.5 C overnight one clear night. Once the leaves on the canna plant start to fade from a light frost, I will dig it up, cut the foliage back to about five centimetres (two inches), clean the soil off the tuber, air dry it out of direct sun for five to seven days and store it in animal bedding shavings in a container or paper bag.

I will do the same with my pineapple lily bulbs but I leave the foliage to desiccate naturally on the bulb, then remove it. Once the bulbs have dried a bit, I give them a gentle rub with my hands to remove excess dirt. They are placed in shavings in their own labelled containers so I don’t get the bulbs mixed up. Both eucomis and cannas should be stored at 10 C (50 F) and checked periodically for any possible decay.

Guess I can handle the extra work for the pleasure of their exotic blooms next summer.

Leslie Cox co-owns Growing Concern Cottage Garden in Black Creek. Her website is at www.duchessofdirt.ca