Bookish Gardener

When the heat gets subtropical

(...and the talk gets so topical*)

The caladiums are happy in today's humid heat. I used to think that I didn't like caladiums. I'd seen them in too many desultory container plantings, where it seems that they could be swapped out with a fake fabric floral counterpart with no one the wiser. But a bargain-bin bag of a a dozen tubers came our way this spring, which I tucked in here and there in the north-facing shady garden. The spaethes are unfurling gracefully, some with a faint tinge of pink, and complement the minichromatic greens and white of this bed nicely. They might convincingly pretend to be a long-lost distant cousin of 'Jack Frost' brunnera, or of 'Beacon Silver' lamium.

*Gratuitous reference to a pair of lyrics from Elvis Costello's "Riot Act", on the occasion of hearing that he'll be opening for Sting [updated: The Police] in Milwaukee next week [updated: today (July 25)...and through serendipitous happenstance, I'll be in the audience].

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.

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.

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

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?

Today is fantastic Friday

The sign in the first-grade classroom reads: "Today is fantastic Friday."

My seven-year-old tugs at my sleeve and asks, "Eight o'clock tonight, right?"

It's our new Friday night routine: me and our new little Whovian watch the revived Doctor Who (the "first" season, which originally aired last year in the UK), with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor—thrilling, smokin' hot, and, (as this Doctor would say,) Fantastic!

We're already more than halfway through this incarnation of the Doctor, whose 13-episode lifespan will turn out to be shorter than that of a Firefly.

In the episode "Rose," an obsessed amateur who's been investigating and tracking the Doctor shows Rose (the Doctor's companion in this series) photos with evidence of the Doctor's time-travelling appearances in pivotal scenes in history: the JFK assassination, the launch of the Titanic, the eruption of Krakatoa. If he had dug deeper, he might have also unearthed evidence of the Doctor's influence in the history of popular music:

If you wanna feel groovy, give the Doctor a call:


Called the Doctor, woke him up:



Doctor! Doctor! Can't you see I'm burnin', burnin':

Doctor, Doctor, gave me the news:


I got a bad case of lovin' [Who].

Sow what

Well, I
said

This year would be
different

An end to order-
ing; seed lust border-
ing on a mani-
a for which there's no cure

But then they came

Select Seeds,
Fedco, Pinetree

Tantalizingly
beckoning, siren
songs calling to me

Variegated po-
lygonum kissing over
garden gates

Wave at me pet-
unias

Salvia argentea,
splendens, coccinea
and farinacea to
save me

'Orange Fanta-
sia'
'Bright Lights'
'Black Velvet' and
'Lemon'

'Envy'
my zinnias
and soybeans
of green

The plumèd
celosia and
ama-
ranth love-lies-bleeding

Rows of
merlot for lettuce

Pass down the heirloom
Amish snap peas climb up
when the tulip's in bloom

Snap-
dragons
'Liberty'
launching 'Rocket'

'Dia-
mond' eggplant, 'Burgundy'
okra, squash
'Magda' cousa

Somniferum
pa-
paver,
calendulas,
consolidas, mal-
vas

A hundred packets of seed
You may de-
ride my greed

SO WHAT

Miles and Eddie, I am sow, so sorry.

Burying the lied

Madonna's over, or so saith Camille Paglia (subscription or site pass required). But that news is at least twenty years old. "In the Groove", which came out in 1985 (Madonna's best dance song, and for that matter one of the best dance songs of all time, if we're getting hyperbolic here), was the last song in which Madonna would be successful in using her sticky-fingered street urchin persona to distract us from her, well, fundamental repellence. Paglia's piece is an amusing read, but concludes with a predictable disrobing-in-the-middle-of-Main-Street stunt, as she writes of "Chaka Khan's phenomenal 'Ain't Nobody' -- which I would argue is an art song that bears comparison to Schubert's famous 'Serenade.'" I'll need more than a moment to dig myself out of that steaming pile, but then let me say: Chaka Khan is a phenomenal singer, and was never more so than in her work with the uniquely talented musicians of Rufus in the '70s. In her solo work, her vocal gifts (thenceforth responsible for begetting Whitney, who begat Mariah) don't do much more than transform mediocre songs into songs that you don't mind listening to, but mediocre songs they are nonetheless. Such as "Ain't Nobody": with pedestrian lyrics ("Ain't nobody / loves me better / makes me happy / makes me feel this way"), a melody that sounds like it was composed by someone who was limited to five keys on a toy piano, and a beat, too fast for funk and too slow for disco, that mostly goes nowhere.

The Paglia disco playlist is not bad, although it includes too many songs that are better to listen to than to dance to. (I like that it includes the often-overlooked Rick James's "You and I", and especially "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" by The Gap Band...if this song doesn't make you break out into an Apache war dance as it beats down the door of your house with its chthonic boom-boom-boom, get your pulse checked.) May I immodestly suggest Bookish Gardener's disco playlist, instead.

The spheres are in commotion

Pardon this detour into escapism. Work has been in overdrive this week, and there is nothing I can say that can do justice to the continuing suffering on the Gulf Coast [wordless motion of head to link at top of right sidebar]. This meme from Robert at The LLama Butchers is just what I need right now: Go to Music Outfitters and find their list of the 100 top songs for the year you graduated from high school. Bold the ones you liked, strike the ones you hated, and leave alone the ones to which you were indifferent or that you can't remember. Since I seem to be under an attack of blessed rage for useless order right now, I've tweaked the categories a bit, as follows:

Bold: Would listen to an oldies station that had this song on the playlist
Italicized bold: Would start singing along and dancing in the car when the oldies station played this song
Unchanged: "Meh," but wouldn't change the station
Small font: Don't remember this song
Strikeout: Would change the station if this came on the oldies station
Brown strikeout: Would change the station, then puncture my eardrums with a chopstick, if this came on the oldies station

These songs are from the year 1976, the year that my high school graduation present was a store-brand turntable/radio/8-track/cassette player combo (as a rule, there is always one component on these multifunction gizmos that does not work; the cassette player was the one that was kaput out of the box), and when I spent many hours and a not insignificant chunk of my meager discretionary starving-student income at the Reynolds Club basement record store, buying albums for the first time:

1. Silly Love Songs, Paul McCartney and Wings
2. Don't Go Breaking My Heart, Elton John and Kiki Dee.  Even though I was in a major Elton John phase then, I could take or leave this one.
3. Disco Lady, Johnnie Taylor. Oh yes I am.
4. December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night), Four Seasons
5. Play That Funky Music, Wild Cherry
6. Kiss And Say Goodbye, Manhattans
7. Love Machine (Part 1), The Miracles
8. 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, Paul Simon
9. Love Is Alive, Gary Wright
10. A Fifth Of Beethoven, Walter Murphy and The Big Apple Band. I plead the fifth.

See and say

I got your picture hangin' on the wall
It can't see or come to me when I call your name
I realize it's just a picture in a frame
          - Ashford/Simpson (via Gaye/Terrell)

But all I've got is a photograph
And I realize you're not coming back anymore
          - Starr/Harrison

The camera can never go as far as the eye can see. How many times have I been thwarted from capturing a vision? The jeweled green glint of a hummingbird in blurred darting flight. Plumed ornamental grasses standing sentry in a hundred-foot formation. The sun of high noon so bright that everything is seen in an illuminated haze through a squinty gaze. The big sky in summer so cloudless and clear that you feel like you're standing at the bottom of a deep blue sea. The serendipitous glimpse of three clumps of three different agastaches in three different beds yards apart, echoing hullo-ullo-ullo in an unplanned but perfectly spaced diagonal. But even shots that adhere to the limits of light and dimension and yield pleasing results are, ultimately, no more than pretty pictures. Their beauty can be enjoyed, they may even evoke a memory or two, but they cannot send you into a time machine where you get to relive the experience you were trying to record. I certainly should know better; every parent learns this lesson a couple of hundred rolls of film or so into their first baby's first year; but the urge to catch and to keep that which cannot be possessed is one that I can overcome only with intense conscious effort, accompanied by much ersatz zen-talk.

I was sitting in the "sunroom" the other day, the name given to a room built onto the back of our garage, with its south-facing front and ceiling all in glass. It's a wreck, really, isolated from the house's heating and ventilation, prone to roof leaks, and subject to temperature extremes that make it unsuitable for growing any plant known to me. Except: the door, when open, frames one of the most beautiful views there is of the garden as a festive and orderly jungle, with magenta petunias and chartreuse and black sweet potato vines billowing out of the window boxes, flowering and done-flowering spikes of agastache and penstemons in their most attractive profile view, and mounds of multicolored snapdragons and petunias, sown from seasons past, filling in the blanks. Sitting in the sunroom, I was rereading Henry Mitchell's The Essential Earthman, and he (as is his wont) set me right straight:

Gardening is not some sort of game by which one proves his superiority over others, nor is it a marketplace for the display of elegant things that others cannot afford. It is, on the contrary, a growing work of creation, endless in its changing elements. It is not a monument or an achievement, but a sort of traveling, a kind of pilgrimage you might say, often a bit grubby and sweaty though true pilgrims do not mind that. A garden is not a picture, but a language, which is of course the major art of life.