FOOTHILLS FOOTNOTE

Cowboy's Delight

	Cowboy’s Delight (Sphaeralcea coccinea)

I sat in the garden today and contemplated my continual battle against a seemingly impenetrable foe: clay. To be more precise, thick, compacted clay subsoil. And here’s the real kicker: clay subsoil with poor drainage. The really nasty kind where, if you dig a hole two foot deep one evening (no mean feat in and of itself) and fill it with water, there will still be eight inches of standing water in it the next morning. After six years I have made some inroads—mainly where I have added copious quantities of topsoil to create nice loamy berms with reasonable drainage. One area remains what local garden guru Lauren Springer refers to as a “hellstrip”: for her a “strip between the sidewalk and the street… pounded to the consistency of baked brick by decades of errant foot traffic, graced by a fine mesh of weeds intertwined with cast-off cigarette butts, and often only appreciated by dogs with a mission.” She (of course!) has created stunning floral displays in such places. However, I suspect there is at least one key difference between my hellstrip and hers: hers has good drainage.

For years I have searched the local nurseries, books, and online catalogs, always to find those dreaded appended words: Does well in any soil! (Oops, provided it has good drainage!) I have tried a number of so-called clay-loving plants: poppy mallow, purple coneflower, Joe-pye weed, coreopsis, Johnson’s blue geranium, and last but certainly not least, roses. Roses that supposedly grow best in “heavy clay soil.” Of course, this is ridiculous! Heavy clay soil that is amended with “lots of organic matter” is no longer “heavy clay soil” in my book. I have several roses that are doing quite well; they are the ones located in two-foot berms of loamy top soil mixed with organic matter—safely away from the heavy clay. My Johnson’s blue geraniums and Moonbeam coreopsis likewise are doing well…also in places I was able to amend and build up to temper the clay and improve the drainage. I have discovered that one of the best plants to grow in the low spots with their alternately too wet and baked dry rock-hard clay is spiderwort (Tradescantia spp.). But I need something taller for the fence row, which remains most problematic: It can’t be built up because other areas must have somewhere to drain into; it collects too much water from the neighboring lawn (I am unable to set the controls on the neighbor’s automatic sprinkler system), and at the same time the west-facing location takes a beating from the intense Colorado sun.

So I was cautiously optimistic to come across a new candidate for the truly heavy clay along my fence row: Munro’s mallow, Sphaeralcea munroana. This is a taller (supposedly three to four feet tall), commercially available cousin to one of my favorite local wildflowers, S. coccinea, also known as “Cowboy’s Delight.” I love to find the delicate orange blossoms amid the dusty trampled sage and barren brown hard-packed ground of the prairie dog villages in my neighborhood. S. munroana is listed as a deep-rooted wildflower native to the western United States, which is “not the least bit picky about its soil and thrives in heavy clay.” Well, we shall soon find out about that! My fence row will provide the ultimate test. Now, a few months later, a couple of the delicate new plantings have succumbed to the elements. Too much water? Too little water? There is an extraordinarily fine balance between these two that must be achieved to ensure success in the hellstrip. But (delight of delights) it appears to have been achieved in one spot: One little plant, which admittedly has not yet grown upwards very much (it is struggling mightily to put down roots), is still there, still green, and just the other day opened up a tiny flower bud to reveal the loveliest pale orange face. Mine may not equal the delight of a weary cowboy riding the dusty range to come upon such a sunny countenance as this, but it is surely the next best thing.

Nan Eckardt
neckardt@aspb.org