Bookish Gardener

Incredible edible

In the modest 48-square-feet-plus-whiskey-barrel allocated to edibles in my garden, form often trumps function in the things I grow to eat: lemon cucumbers, red okra, scarlet runner beans (two varieties), rainbow Swiss chard, Chinese long beans, Green Zebra tomatoes, purple-black Diamond eggplant, Jimmy Nardello's red sweet chili pepper, a collection of herbes de Provence + herbs of "Scarborough Fair", and the 6-foot endive that looks like a big weedy mistake for all but the first hours of the morning, when it blooms with the blue that I cannot live without.

I've purposely stocked my vegetable beds with ornamental edibles, but the balloon flowers in my perennial back border are a surprising edible ornamental, as it turns out. Platycodon (platy, the prefix, meaning "broad", and codon, the suffix, meaning "bells": thank you, Dictionary of Botanical Epithets!) grandiflorum's an invaluable garden citizen. It blooms tall and long, and the blue velvet texture of the specimen in the photo above (looks much better "in person", trust me) is a knockout against bright pink phlox or lemon yellow daylilies.

Platycodon is doraji in Korean, celebrated in folk song. What's edible is not above-ground, but below: the fleshy taproots (pictured here, if you scroll down some) are peeled, soaked, julienned and spiced, and eaten as banchan. It's crunchy and very yummy; I'd been eating it for years and years before finally cluing into its floral connection.

I'd never sacrifice the balloon flowers in my garden just to get to their roots, but they're prompting a summer day's fantasy: a platycodon farm, with acres planted to billowing fields of the broad bells, in blue, pink and white. Mmmm.

Like looking in a mirror

My Simpsons avatar, courtesy of my 10-year old, from this site. It's a shocking revelation of both my inner Milhous and the fact that I really should become reacquainted with the gym sometime soon.

Will yew be my valentine?

The yews made it out of rehab this year, and the garden is benefiting from their triumphant comeback. Five years ago, they were the typical overlooked foundation hedge, trimmed into the classic crew cut, barely concealing barren, knobby-kneed branches and a hollow interior of brown and dying needles. They're planted in a tough site—fully shaded northern exposure in inert subsoil, "mulched" with black pumice stones that look like charcoal briquets—so the thought of tying them to the bumper of a pickup and extracting them like an achy tooth was briefly tempting, but impractical.

Instead, I pruned them severely, especially trimming the tops and sides with the hope that it would allow more light and encourage new growth from the bottoms up. The four little evergreen stumps looked ridiculous for a few years, but growing they were, and every spring, I kept trimming, and trimming. And, finally, this spring:

Gentle, lush sprays of succulent, lime-green growth. Look; touch.

Drive, she said

Corinna: It says here that Sweetwater hosts the annual sorghum festival. What the h*** is sorghum?
Alex: Third most popular cereal grain in the country.
Corinna: How do you know that?
Alex: I'm a gardener. I know crops. What's the address again?
Corinna: Four fifty-five.
Alex: No, no way.
Corinna: No what? You don't even know what this says.
Alex: It says that we have to rob the bank.
Corinna: How do you know that?
Alex: I wasn't always a gardener.

Alex Tully, we hardly knew ye. Drive got cancelled after just four episodes over three nights. Those of us who got hooked too quickly are waiting for the final two episodes to show up somewhere, anywhere, after they were scheduled to air July 4th, then yanked and rescheduled for July 13th, then apparently scrubbed altogether. (Hey, Fox...ya might want to check into that Long Tail thing.) 

I'm back from a 2,700-mile drive myself. We took the quintessential summer family car drive vacation, looping through the Great Plains, with Mount Rushmore as the epicenter. My favorite serendipitous soundtrack moment of the drive: switching on the radio after heading onto the interstate out of Miles City in "Big Sky" Montana; a station comes in, clear as a bell. It's playing The Who's "I Can See For Miles and Miles."

When I drive, music is essential company (although sometimes to distraction). The CD's in my commute car/mom taxi have to wear well over weeks, and sometimes months, of repeated listening, and now it's time to change out the CD changer for these summer tunes:

Pale Young Gentlemen, Pale Young Gentlemen
David Daniels, Serenade
Sly and the Family Stone, Greatest Hits
Haydn, Auenbrugger Sonatas (Ronald Brautigam, fortepiano)
Bangles, Greatest Hits
Elvis Costello, Armed Forces.

Mullein spice

I'm told that our house sits on what used to be farmland not more than a generation ago, and mullein (Verbascum thapsis; common mullein, wooly mullein, flannel plant...you get the idea) is a farm weed that shows up here and there every season. I'm fond of this weed. The leaves are softer and silkier than lamb's ear (but to describe them as "a kind of Native American Charmin"? Eeuuww).

Mullein in the wrong place at the wrong time is gangly, ugly, and yes, weedy. But sometimes it just shows up where, it turns out, it needed to be. This summer, it's next to the David Austin rose 'Graham Thomas', punching up the yellows in a mostly bronze-leaved bed, and helpfully obscuring the rose foliage that's already tattered and pitted with blackspot.

Last summer, it added heft and textural contrast to the agastaches and penstemons:

In the early days of this garden, I sought out and planted the verbascum 'Helen Johnson', enthralled by the description that I'd read in Jamaica Kincaid's garden book. Her delicate buds were pretty, her dusky peach-salmon color unusual, and she didn't last more than one season. I think I'll stick to the great mullein, and look forward to its surprises in the seasons to come.

Long live Sempervivum!

Power to the flower! The solitary fist (with a few extra knuckles) is upraised in a final, defiant, dramatic gesture. "Mansei!" (Korean for "10,000 years,"  equivalent to the Japanese "banzai") it cries, but it's this monocarpic hen's last stand.

Soundtrack

From Jontillman.com, via Asymmetrical Information:

"If your life had a soundtrack, what would the music be?

Here’s how it works:
1. open your library (iTunes, winamp, media player, iPod)
2. put it on shuffle
3. press play
4. for every question, type the song that’s playing
5. new question – press the next button
6. don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool"

Most of my audio library lives outside my media player, so the selections below aren't all that representative of what I listen to from day to day, although the overweighting of a certain artist (overlooking the gruesome fact, which has me in an irrational adolescent rage, that he has recently begun hawking a line of luxury cars and, if that wasn't bad enough, had to bring Beethoven—Beethoven!—into it...because, what, the second movement of the Ninth is the most luxury car-like of all the symphonic movements? Or maybe I'm just annoyed that I won't be able to smirk "sellout" to my husband anymore when Robert Plant caterwauls for Caddys) is.

Opening Credits:
"Everything to Me" - Rockapella - Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

Waking Up:
"Trail of Broken Hearts" - k. d. lang and the re-clines - Absolute Torch and Twang

First Day At School:
"Big Sister's Clothes" - Elvis Costello & The Attractions - Trust

Falling in Love:
"Do You Love What You Feel" - Rufus & Chaka Khan - The Very Best of Rufus featuring Chaka Khan

Breaking Up:
"Fantasy" - Earth, Wind & Fire - Greatest Hits

Prom:
"Shallow Grave" - Elvis Costello - All This Useless Beauty

Life’s Okay:
"After the Love Has Gone" - Earth, Wind & Fire - Greatest Hits

Mental Breakdown:
"People Make the World Go 'Round" - Marc Dorsey - "Crooklyn" Soundtrack (Vol. 1)

Driving:
"Fish 'N Chip Paper" - Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Trust

Flashback:
"Let the Good Times Roll" - Harry Nilsson - Nilsson Schmilsson

Getting Back Together:
"Seasons Change" - Exposé - Exposure

Wedding:
"(I Don't Want to Go To) Chelsea" - Elvis Costello & the Attractions - This Year's Model

Birth of a Child:
"I'll Take You There" - The Staple Singers - "Crooklyn" Soundtrack (Vol. 2)

Final Battle:
"Sunday's Best" - Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Armed Forces

Death Scene:
"Pretty Words" - Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Trust

Funeral Song:
"It's Time" - Elvis Costello - All This Useless Beauty

End Credits:
"Moods for Moderns" - Elvis Costello & The Attractions - Armed Forces

Eminence verdigris

Statue of Linnaeus, The University of Chicago, early fall 2005.
Photo credit: Jessamyn Roll

When they named any thing, they turned toward it, and as they spoke, I saw and remembered that they called the thing they would point out by the name they uttered.

        Saint Augustine, Confessions

Linnaeus was born about 300 years ago. (His birthday is officially commemorated as May 23, 1707, but given the fits and starts of Sweden's Julian-to-Gregorian calendar transition between 1700 and 1753, I believe I'm within the grace period of not having to turn to the "Belated Birthday" rack at Hallmark just yet.) His father, Nils, created the surname "Linnaeus" after the littleleaf linden tree (Tilia cordata) on the family homestead.

His love of flowers developed an an early age, and it is recorded that when only eight years old he was nicknamed "the little botanist."

        Encyclopaedia Brittanica (1958 edition).

The Prince of Naturalists, Barton called Linnaeus. The Great Architect. The Swedish Sage. God's Registrar.

        [Narration of the imagined Meriwether Lewis]

        Brian Hall, I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark.

I love those botanical names, even when I'm bamboozled by pronunciations (Cotinus coggyggria, anyone?) and frustrated by the it's-Mahonia-no-it's-Berberis types that keep rearranging the sock drawer. Forest for the trees, folks, forest for the trees:

The first word in his scheme of Latin binomials tells the genus, grouping diverse plants which nevertheless share a commonality; the second word names the species, plants alike enough to regularly interbreed and produce offspring like themselves. It is a framework for understanding, a way to show how pieces of the world fit together.

        Sue Hubbell, A Country Year: Living the Questions.

"It is a marvelous creation, isn't it? Linnaeus's system? The most valuable contribution to natural history since Noah put saw to gopher wood. His binomial standard reminds me of terrestrial coordinates, the genus, say, representing latitude, and the species longitude, so that the two of them in conjunction enable you to pinpoint the one precise location or the one recognized scintilla of Creation, that is here, this one, and no other."

       Dialogue of the imagined Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, from I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company.

This statue and I arrived on campus the same year, 1976, but it wasn't until one spring morning last year that I spent more than a passing moment in its company. I was at the medical center to accompany a family member (with an ailment favorably resolved for now), for a procedure that would take most of the morning. I was reading King Dork, and figured that my steady stream of low chuckles occasionally punctuated by the poorly suppressed outburst of laughter would be inappropriate comportment for the waiting room of the PET scan department, so I walked down the Midway and visited Linnaeus. The statue's surrounded by beautiful gardens (which wasn't always the case), and I sat down on one of the garden benches. Across me was a crabapple tree, every limb full and drooping with blossoms, and behind me another, which pelted me with petals like ticker tape with every musky sweet breeze.

This statue of Linnaeus is uncommonly expressive. He's on the go, with one foot stepping off his pedestal. A book is tucked under his arm, and he's clutching a bunch of flowers—could they be of his beloved tea plant (Camellia sinensis)? The visage is intelligent, engaged, and even a little bemused:

I read in one of my handbooks, written before it was considered necessary to be dull to be taken seriously:

"Delightful Linnaeus, who dearly loved his little joke, himself confesses to have named the day-flowers after three brothers Commelyn, Dutch botanists, because two of them—commemorated in the showy blue petals of the blossom—published their works; the third, lacking application and ambition, amounted to nothing, like the third inconspicuous whitish third petal."

    From A Country Year: Living The Questions.

To the man, our latter-day Adam, who named living things: Happy three-hundredth birthday.

Back to bookish

My review of Tom Turner's Garden History is posted at Human Flower Project. I'm very grateful to the delightful, generous and patient Julie Ardery for the chance to read and write about this very cool book.

Put on the red light

Geranium 'Rozanne'

Ah...the weekend that was. Three Whole Days of weeding, and mulching, and (plant) shopping, and (plant) planting, and (picture) snapping, and (garden) gazing (the peonies this year are early, tall, and gorgeous), all under temperate skies—not too hot, not too cold, not too sunny, not too rainy. Heavenly!

Or so it would be, but for the strange syndrome that affects me after extended periods of silence in the garden: the uninvited earworm, summoned by the merest and feeblest association with a plant name:

Roz - anne
You don't have to put on the red light
Roz - anne
You don't have to put on the red light

Last summer, growing tomatoes, it was:

Cherokee Pur - ple
Cherokee Tri - ibe
So proud to live,
So proud to dieeeeeee

And, judging from the self-sown seedlings showing up in the back border, later this summer it'll be:

Love - cle-o-me
Cle-o-me
Cle-o-me

Won't you please, please help me?

Try to remember

Last summer's June: Lavender, penstemons, mullein, petunias, snapdragons, hops, marigolds and cabbages.

Snow Friday, snow Saturday, snow today, snow tomorrow, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The shrubs are waist-deep in it. The night sky, glowing white, softly pelts its flakes, interminably, inexorably, down, down, down.

Bud by bud

Afghan iris. I saw this flower open last spring. The blossom was furled in a tight, pointed whorl. I looked away. When I looked back, one of the falls had snuck out from behind the curtains, as if to say "Ta da!" with its tongue out. I vowed to stay and watch the pot come to boil. (My patience would be rewarded sooner than I expected.) As soon a gnat-sized flying something-or-another alit on the bud, the petals sprung open with a whfft and the minutest of tremors. Then there it stood, in pristine glory, sky blue and heaven-scented.

Oriental poppy. This treasure emerged last spring from the one-inch crack between concrete patio and concrete foundation, the product of my poor aim in scattering seed two seasons before. The petals are softer than tissue, but saved from preciousness by the edgy, contrasting, lush, weedy foliage. The purplish-black stamens undulate in the breeze like the tendrils of a sea anemone, guarded by Haman's hat. In twenty-four hours, the petals are gone with the wind.

Blackberry lily. I don't know why, but I think this flower's botanical name, Belamcanda chinensis, is indescribably luscious. The provenance of my garden's blackberry lilies is the garden right next door, courtesy of my neighbor friend's gift of a generous stalk of blooms gone to black-berry seed. All the seeds were meant to be scattered near the stand of Russian sage in the perennial border, but one must have slipped out of my hand right here, just outside the back door, where it took root behind a trellis container and, last summer, flowered more vigorously and more colorfully than its brethren (who keep getting elbowed out by the Perovskia).

"Congratulations, Universe. You win."

It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected.

Laurie Colwin, "A Mythological Subject," The Lone Pilgrim.

So! Within 48 hours after I last rang off with such high hopes, we had a bit of unwelcome excitement at my daughter's school, and I've been in hyperinvolved- activist-public-school-parent mode for the past several weeks.

Yes, we've got to get ourselves back to the...

More soon. Really.

Essential

Your garden will reveal yourself. Do not be terrified of that.

        Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman

(Herewith my very tardy contribution to the Henry Mitchell Festschrift at May Dreams Gardens.)

The Essential Earthman was my introduction to the art of garden writing and to the wonders of Henry Mitchell. It's a book that I reread often, each time with familiar comfort and deepened appreciation: let me count the ways.

(But first: Earth-MAYON? or EARTH-mun? I think I'd always thought of it as the former, but now I'm tending toward the latter. Prospective next year's resolution: find a setting where this usage controversy can actually rear its pretty head in real, live, audible conversation.)

And now, let us praise Henry Mitchell's paronomasia—that is, his hearty embrace of the pun ("The Wrongs of Winter, the Rites of Spring"). And his rimshot jokes, almost always at the expense of cats. And his metaphors, weirdly apt ("The flowers suggest a Santa Barbara girl who gave up tennis for macrame, that is, they look a bit odd, as if they had tried drugs and lived in Tangiers awhile"), and gleefully mishmoshed ("We begin, often enough, by hoping to knock the neighbors' eyes out with the largest mass of color since the lions ate the Christians"). And his allusions that remain just beyond my ken ("The first [Anemone blanda] out with me this year was the somewhat startling raw rich red 'Radar,' like a dandelion that fought at Shiloh, so to speak." ...that one I kind of get; "Once they saw we were not going to catch them for a Brunswick stew, and once they comprehended that the hounds were actually awake only on the rarest occasions, then the squirrels arrived like the guests at Andrew Jackson's cheese board." ...that one was beyond me until I looked here [—see "Anyone could come to Andrew Jackson's public parties..."]). And his sly riffing satire (fictional named varieties of Japanese irises "Moon over the Tortoise Cat's Ear', "Shimmering Brocade of July Charcoal Pit', and 'Glory of Titmouse Nest').

You don't have to agree with Henry Mitchell about everything to enjoy him. (I for one go for cats over dogs.) He's mad about bearded irises, I'm meh about them. He rues the rudbeckia, which I regard as the savior of my summer-slumping perennial border. And what's this? He dislikes the rose 'Charlotte Armstrong' because: "It's very like Beethoven, a towering composer, no doubt of that, and yet you may dislike most of his music, though the late quartets sound much like Mozart." (But But But!...I sputter, affectionately.)

There are no photographs in The Essential Earthman, because they would be beside the point, and would only detract from descriptions like this: "The flowers [of the moonflower] are strongly scented, a trifle sickly in character. They are like thin strong silk, so white they appear to be illuminated, even on a fairly dark night." How confidently he strides in each of his pieces from wisecrack, to erudition, to self-deprecating admission, to the moral of the story, without missing a beat.

When Henry Mitchell writes of the gardener's nearly universal love of the color blue, he theorizes that "there is some numinous aspect to blue and that other gardeners sense it as much as I do." That's what I seek and find whenever I read Henry Mitchell. If his writing were a color, it would be the color blue.

Report:

Still here! With a suitcase full of sorries for the sabbatical. I've been navigating some rocky shoals from left field (metaphor mixmaster operational, sir!) this past year. (But please don't worry, if you were to be so inclined: husband and children are fine, livelihood is fine, I'm fine, all blessings too numerous to be counted.) I'll blame the reluctance to show up here on a self-editor that's been exceptionally unforgiving, and on the fear of sounding too much like HG2G's Marvin upon each occasion of opening my mouth. But enough of all that. It's been long enough. Let's proclaim December YahMoBlogMo, er, Month. See you?

O pioneers!

I love looking into other people's gardens. Each garden seems to say something about its gardener in a way that's as intriguing and mysterious as the unique slant, velocity and pressure on the page of an individual's cursive hand. Some of what a garden tells about the gardener seems obvious: compact plants predominate in the garden of a garden friend who's shorter in stature, while six-plus foot heliopses, towering hanging baskets and statuesque potted tropical shrubs populate the garden of another garden friend whom I look up to in more ways than one. (The garden of this average-height gardener follows the "eye-level" theme as well, with tall plants as the backdrop and short plants as border accents to a vast army of mid-sized plants.) And maybe genteel pastels mirror a gentle soul, while exuberant primary colors are the natural expression of an extrovert's outsized enthusiasm. But these generalizations are anecdotal at best, likely inaccurate, and mostly not even the point. When I'm in someone's garden, I get a sense of the gardener in a way that can't quite be expressed in words. (Which, by the way, is not at all affected by the garden's state of housekeeping. Weeds are irrelevant! Which I ought to remember every time I'm tempted to panic at the prospect of someone approaching my garden.)

I love looking into other people's gardens, but I am mostly too reserved to invite myself in, even with (or, I should say, especially with) gardeners that I know well. And so I observe and appreciate (or spy on and lurk about) other gardens by reading garden writing on blogs, including most of those in Kathy Purdy's terrific series of interviews with garden blog pioneers (nine parts in all; the link will take you to part one, with each part containing a further link to the next part of the series). Garden writing worth reading, whether in print or in pixels, isn't merely, or really, about the whats and hows of the same old things (not gonna use the phrase "perennial topics" here)—whether daylilies, blackspot, foraging four-legged creatures, or the caprice of weather. When I read about your garden, I want to know what floats your boat or (to steal my seven-year-old's latest favorite phrase) grinds your gears. The essence of the pleasure of reading a dozen, or a hundred, good garden writers—long may they proliferate—is getting to experience each writer's unique mix of humours. (Yours truly? The melancholic, diluted with the phlegmatic, with occasional bubbles of the sanguine, and tinges of bile, mostly during Japanese beetle season.) The best garden writing, as with the best writing, answers the question that I always pose in my mind to a writer that I want to find worth reading: How are you finding this life?

Of course, garden blogging isn't immune from the tension between doing for love and doing for money. (Which is where I get to say, "Thank goodness I'm an amateur.") If life were fair, gardening magazines would be filled with the bylines of the garden bloggers that I most enjoy, and I'd be rushing to open their covers instead of setting them on the shelf for future, mostly indifferent perusal. To those whose value should be, but isn't, recognized or remunerated, I say: Even deserved fame is fleeting (Lou Grant to Mary Richards: "Look at Winston Churchill. Great man. Probably the greatest man of the century. When was the last time you heard anyone mention Winston Churchill?"). And an out-of-print copy of Thomas Mann's Joseph The Provider from the used-book counter, with the price of thirty-eight cents, speaks volumes about the half-life of commercial and critical success. "Traction" is not the slope of a stats chart but the staying power of your writing. There are blog posts that I've read from years past, and even from blogs that have gone to 404 heaven, which still resonate as much as a well-remembered conversation with an old friend. Those are the blogs that I want to read (and, I hope, to write once in a while). So plants grow, bloom, set seed, and die in mindless cyclicity, and who cares? Except that we're still reading Virgil's Georgics, and Karel Čapek, and Henry Mitchell, and with any luck will be reading even more from those who happily travel along the same dusty road. I'm grateful for and grateful to the garden blog pioneers for widening the path. Go pioneers!

Remembrance

(Photo reposted from 9-11-2004.)

25 characters in search of a vast wasteland

Time for a silly blog list, yes? Here are my 25 favorite TV characters ever (originated by James Gunn, via Whedonesque, including a list from Joss!). I've broken some of Gunn's rules (whaddya mean no cartoons?), and arranged these somewhat chronologically:

1. Morticia Addams (Carolyn Jones), The Addams Family. Wife, mother, gardener...who says you can't have it all?
2. Chet Kincaid (Bill Cosby), The Bill Cosby Show. Noteworthy ep: "A Christmas Ballad." First season just released on DVD(!).
3. Dr. Bombay (Bernard Fox), Bewitched. The cranky quack was the only thing that saved this show from the switch from B&W to color and from York to Sargent.
4. Arnold Ziffel ("Arnold the piggy"), Green Acres. Some pig!
5. "Nanny" Phoebe Figalilly (Juliet Mills), Nanny and the Professor. Noteworthy ep: "A Letter for Nanny"...the one where Nanny cries. 
6. Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk), Columbo. Noteworthy ep: "Try and Catch Me" with Ruth Gordon.
7. Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin), The Night Stalker. Goofy, scary, perfect.
8. Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper), The Mary Tyler Moore Show. At her best before she got skinny. Noteworthy ep: "Love Blooms at Hemple's."
9. Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx), Sanford and Son. Favorite mixed drink: Cranberry juice and Ripple: 'Cripple'.
10. Sergeant Foley (Bruce Solomon), Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. The inexplicably irresistible almost-love interest of the pigtailed Louise Lasser.
11. Assistant Crown Attorney Heather Redfern (Janet-Laine Greene), Seeing Things. The buttoned-up lawyer whose teenage crush was not Paul McCartney, but Glenn Gould.
12. Detective Ron Harris (Ron Glass), Barney Miller. Dapper and literary...I'd always hoped to be set up on a blind date with someone just like him.
13. Bradley Raines (James Rebhorn), Guiding Light. The indelible soap opera role. (District Attorney Norwalk in Carlito's Way? That's evil stepfather Bradley! Dr. Bowman the psychiatrist in Far From Heaven? That's evil stepfather Bradley!)
14. 'Coach' Ernie Pantusso (Nick Colasanto), Cheers. To whom thanks are owed for teaching us that Albania's chief export is chrome, and for (as director Nick Colasanto) the two best episodes of Columbo ever, "Etude in Black" and "Swan Song".
15. David Addison (Bruce Willis), Moonlighting. If you ignore the smirking, the "singing" and the bogus final chase scenes, there's actually something to see here. Noteworthy ep: "Knowing Her," with Dana Delany and the Isley Brothers' "This Old Heart of Mine.".
16. Dana Scully (Gilllian Anderson), The X-Files. Held her own even after this show jumped the shark and skidded down to the bowels of hell. Noteworthy ep: "Beyond the Sea."
17. Sheriff Lucas Buck (Gary Cole), American Gothic. The perfect role for the always awesome Jeffrey MacDonald-Mike Brady-Bill Lundbergh-Cotton McKnight Gary Cole.
18. Executive Assistant DA Benjamin Stone (Michael Moriarty), Law and Order. The first and the best.
19. "Sideshow Bob" Terwilliger (Kelsey Grammer), The Simpsons. Noteworthy ep: "Cape Feare".
20. The Chief (Lynne Thigpen), Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Authoritative and soothing, she was the first talking head that got a smile out of my colicky first born.
21. Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Noteworthy ep: "Once More, With Feeling."
22. Hal (Bryan Cranston), Malcolm in the Middle. Noteworthy ep: "Rollerskates". Please tell me that was not a stunt man skating to "Funky Town".
23. Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), 24. Let me get this straight: Tony is dead, and Audrey is alive? 24 writers got some 'splaining to do...
24. Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), Firefly. Coming back to TV in reruns next month, in high-definition (!), if you get Universal HD on cable.
25. The Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), Doctor Who. My other car is The TARDIS.

Worth the wort

The dowdy shrub in the background is shrubby cinquefoil. Cinquefoil, used to be Potentilla fruticosa...and now (depending on the source) Dasiphora fruticosa, or Dasiphora floribunda, or Pentaphylloides floribunda. (Ahem...taxonomists! This kind of thing does nothing...nothing!...to bring those skittish about botanical nomenclature into the fold.) But, as I was saying, this potentilla is mostly a disappointment on its own. It's unable to thrive in the deep shade and chalky soil of this north foundation bed, and bears a paradoxical habit of being too upright and shapeless at the same time. It's never thickened up enough to allow its tiny yellow flowers to accumulate any visual impact, and demands too much pruning of its tiny gangly winterkilled stems every spring.

The shrub in the foreground—Hypericum 'Hidcote', or St. John's Wort—is helping uncover the potentilla's potential. (And as beautiful as it is, the hypericum doesn't have the stature of a specimen, so the potentilla's contrasting foliage color and size repay the favor.) The hypericum's stems arc elegantly to soften the unkempt bristling of its neighbor, and draw attention to the five-petaled miniature blossoms of the potentilla through the amplified echo of its oversized, waxy, warm yellow single blooms.

Flutter by

Yes, it's the obligatory butterfly-among-summer-flowers picture...