Bookish Gardener

Mea maxima culpa

I made it out to the garden, for the first time in over a month, to get some last things done before the Siberian freeze hits tonight. Ach, I've been a woeful caretaker of the garden this fall. I've succumbed to excuse after excuse for leaving things undone. I walked through the garden, reciting my litanies of couldawouldashoulda, and turned my mind to all the ways in which I bring the seven deadly sins into my gardening:

Lust: You mean there are reactions to seeing a desirable plant other than: "How do I get that into my (garden) bed?"
Gluttony: Two words: seed catalogs.
Avarice: Sharing beats hoarding...I should try it sometime.
Sloth: Oh, should I have dug up the dahlias two months ago?
Anger: Bunnies...Floppy. Hoppy. Bunnies.
Envy: I don't really envy those who can, say, fill their gardens with full-price designer perennials with a flick of the checkbook. I do envy those with sprawling space, with room for garden room upon garden room, and nooks and vistas...and water.
Pride: Because every time a bloom opens to perfection, it is so all about me.

And then the garden worked its grace, as my thoughts quieted enough to take in the sound of shears cutting burlap, the scent of scrapings from the bayberries turned white from blue, and the sight of the bare trees against the low haze of cloud cover.

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

"Simple Gifts", Shaker traditional, 1848.

(The sins are presented in reverse order of their sequence in Henry Fairlie's The Seven Deadly Sins Today, which is worth your while if you, like me, tend to suffer from recurrent, highly deliberate amnesia about these things.)

Just a little bit longer

We seem to have gone straight from summer into Indian summer, with barely a glancing blow from the season's first two frosts. Their temperatures dipped into the "killing frost" zone of the twenties, but must not have lingered long enough to do the usual slash-'n-burn damage. Sure, the tropicals and tender annuals are gone, and there was no reason to keep the warm-weather veggies on life support, but look at the things still blooming that really aren't supposed to be around anymore: Cosmos bipinnatus (the Cosmos sulphureus, as expected, is gone); a few ageratum; moss roses; and even a smallish castor bean plant tucked in a sheltered ell between concrete patio and foundation. I spent as much time as possible out in the garden in this weekend's t-shirt weather, doing the first stage of garden cleanup and trying to enjoy every second of every bloom of this late season reprieve. But it's time to start collecting thoughts for an end-of-season post-mortem, and to start imagining what to do differently for next year's garden. So: I will plant more sunset hibiscus (on this day it is my favorite flower—overlapping tissue-like petals in a newborn chick yellow, with an eye the color of clotted blood—and, yes, it was blooming today). I will plant at least five times as much calendula as I did this year, and use it wherever I'm tempted to plug in (blecch) chrysanthemums. I will sow blue flax in the front bed around the cranberry bush viburnum and the Rosa carolina, given the performance of the scarlet flax this season, which has bloomed every blessed day since June 15 and is still going strong. And I will let the scarlet runner beans make many more of their long fat pods and many more handfuls of their purple-pink beans, which look good enough to be gathered into a little cloth sack and traded for a little boy's cow.

Paperwhite 'Omri'

Well, aren't these bloomin' lovely. If you're looking for instant gratification in the dead of winter, paperwhites are a better bet than a Chia pet. Alas, the fragrance of the readily available 'Ziva' tends to give me a headache like those induced by petroleum distillates, so I was happy to have the chance to pick up a different variety, 'Omri', at an end-of-season bulb sale in mid-December. These have come up tall and straight, with multiple blooms on a stem, and multiple stems in a bulb.

Behold: the delicate cream coloring of the six perfectly formed outer tepals (anagram of "petal"), harmonious with the pale yellow of the corona, which might otherwise be a mundane combination but for being taken to a new level by the turmeric orange of the three inner stamens. The fragrance is pleasingly noticeable when just entering the room, with the sweetness of tuberose, without being oppressive.

I forced these bulbs in gravel and water, but will try something different next year, having since read Thalassa Cruso's piece on "Paper-Whites" in The Gardening Year. In this chapter, she experiments with a number of different ways of indoor forcing. She describes her methods, the variables, and the results, with a literate precision which predates, but is reminiscent of, the recipe testing at Cook's Illustrated. In short, the problem of forcing in pebbles in water is that the growth takes the "aggravating course of rising on stilts formed by their own roots [...] with the bulbs twisted about lopsidedly on their elevated root systems." Cutting to the chase, Cruso's recommendation (which she reports as having been repeated with success in subsequent years): use an undrained container, with 3 inches of "roofing pebbles" at the bottom, topped with an inch of "rough half-made compost", with the bulb set in the compost, and covered loosely with more compost up to the bulb's neck. Ta-da: "The bulbs all flowered at the same time and at the same height without need of staking, and looked like an advertisement for paper-whites, an effect I rarely achieve."

And after they're done blooming? I think I'll leave them up for a little while, finding beauty even in the dried blooms as Rob Proctor does in Passionate Gardening: "As they dry, the petals of paperwhites resemble parchment--rather nice against gauzy curtains."

The Gardening Year. Thalassa Cruso. Lyons & Burford, 1990 edition. ISBN 1-55821-082-2 (paperback).

Passionate Gardening: Good Advice for Challenging Climates. Lauren Springer & Rob Proctor. Fulcrum Publishing, 2000. ISBN 1-55591-348-2.

Amaryllis

It's that time of year again...time to try to get the amaryllis to bloom again. There's a lot of information out there on how to grow these things, all far too contradictory to synthesize: pot in sterile soil; pot in peat moss; pot in manure-amended soil; water once and only once; water every week; grow in cool temps, then warm when the bulb blossoms; keep cool when the bulb blossoms to prolong bloom; plant outside in summer to renew the bulb; keep in the pot in summer to avoid root disturbance; wait until the plant goes dormant before bringing it indoors to rest for a few months before forcing; don't wait until dormancy, but bring it indoors when the weather cools.

My head hurts.

I thought I'd give a couple of amaryllis bulbs a go last winter, the classic 'Appleblossom'. They were on sale chez Sam Walton in a pot+soil+bulb "kit". Followed the directions: "soil" was peat moss with a moistening agent; bulb seemed in good condition; it said to keep it watered. Several weeks later, lots of foliage, no blooms. I skim through various amaryllis how-to guides, all of which are (amazingly) consistent in reporting that the bloom stalk appears before the foliage...so no blooms that year. Unpotted bulbs went into the garden in late spring, never went dormant, grew a lot of roots, not too much foliage. My heart sinks when I read this from Katharine White's Onward and Upward in the Garden:

Hamilton P. Traub's Amaryllis Manual (Macmillan, 1958) tells me that "the achievement of nine leaves will mean that three new inflorescences will be initiated between the bulb scales--one after each third leaf." .... I find that one of my amaryllis plants, a last year's salmon Warmenhoven from White Flower Farm, has nine leaves, which is good; my two reds have seven leaves each, which is fair; the fourth, an ancient white, has only five--very poor.

By this calculation, I can only expect one "inflorescence" from one of the plants, and two-thirds of an inflorescence in the other. And, of course, they never went dormant. And, of course, they could not be dug out in the fall without having their roots disturbed. And, giving them the required two-to-three month rest period would mean that they'll come into bloom around...May Day?

Sigh.

So I'll try, try again this year. I spent my "Jung bucks" (frequent flyer miles for the gardening set) this past weekend and picked up a couple of amaryllis bulbs from McClure & Zimmerman. One has already pushed out a flower stem...and we'll see about the other. I've gone ahead and stubbornly potted last year's bulbs to see if they'll do anything. My cultural tack this time: soilless potting mix with time-release fertilizer; I'm watering once, only once (I dunno, it just sounds good); I'm keeping them in a coolish room--the rooms where they'll be moved to (where we'll want the blooms to be seen) will be warmer. I'll bury them in-pot in the garden this summer, and will pull them in, dormant or not, on Labor Day, and will throw them in the mini-fridge for ten weeks.

Wish me luck. Or give me the following good advice: next time, buy fresh bulbs for full price.

Onward and Upward in the Garden. Katharine S. White. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979. ISBN 0807085618 (for the recent 2002 reissue).

"Sweet Potato" Lagniappe (Updated)

One of my last chores, bringing closure to the season, is to clean out our south-facing windowboxes. They've been blooming and blooming and blooming since May, with Frillytunia petunias (home grown from seed), store-bought bedding 'Tahiti'-mix snapdragons, and 'Marguerite' and 'Blackie' sweet potato vines from mail-ordered plugs. The petunias and snaps have kept on going well after the early October frost that pretty much decked the sweet potato vines, but (even though they probably had at least a few more weeks' life left in them) it was time to move them along. The petunias were clearly suffering from not having been deadheaded since the end of summer, and had become leggier than Twiggy due to my irrational inability to cut them back even once during their six months of vigorous growth. Lesson learned for next year: I hereby vow to get rid of my "Every Bloom Is Sacred" mindset (or, I'll at least try to coax myself into cutting back alternate stems if I find my resolve shaky):

Every bloom is sacred,
Every bloom is great;
If a bloom is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

I had a momentary frisson of confusion when I found a red lump in the potting soil. It was a...potato? What's a potato doing in the window box? Beat. Oh, a sweet potato...from the sweet potato vine (or, rather, the other way around). Sure enough, the window boxes have yielded the unexpected bounty pictured above. In some variation on ginseng root, which (much like the "man" in the moon) often seems to grow in the image of the human body, these tubers seem to look like either seal pups, manatees or water fowl. I don't think I'll be frying these up for supper, since these aren't really potato relatives. The botanical name is Ipomoea batatas...yes, as in morning glory ipomoea. Instead, I'll chop up the tubers and try to start some new plants for indoors until next May...then back out to the window boxes.

Update:
Turns out these would be edible after all...Ipomoea batatas is sweet potato (yes, the kind we eat--it's not just a euphemism). (But not yam, which is Dioscorea species. A li'l bit of trivia: "yams" sold in supermarkets are actually sweet potatoes, and, if they're following US Department of Agriculture regulations, you'll find that the labels for "yams" will include the words "sweet potato".)