Bookish Gardener

Plant of the Year

For maturing into a 4-foot specimen from a modest 6-inch starter plant within a season of growth;

For blooming almost immediately with an indescribable combination of "soft" magenta and "bright" orange sherbet, and then blooming continuously until after hard frost, with no deadheading, cutting back, or pruning;

For bestowing the subtlest mint fragrance upon those who brush against its foliage, pleasing to the human, baneful to the rabbit;

For making the bumblebees really, really happy (and, maybe, next year, the hummingbirds); and

For holding its stems in the most graceful of arcs for winter interest, until it's time to bloom again;

Agastache x 'Desert Sunrise' is Bookish Gardener's plant of the year for 2003.

(Aren't you relieved it wasn't a top ten list?)

Happy New Year, everyone!

Isn't it time (you don't have to wait)...it must be time

I've known about the third collection of Henry Mitchell's gardening columns (Henry Mitchell On Gardening) for some time now, but have held myself back from acquiring (and devouring) it. This book was put together after his death, and edited by no-slouch-he Allen Lacy, who also contributed the introduction. I can't wait to read this, but I have made myself wait. Why? Because this, Henry Mitchell's third garden book, is his last garden book.

~ ~ ~

When I was a teenage bookworm, my reading tastes heavily favored fantasy, sci-fi and horror. One of my favorites was an anthology published by Scholastic books, titled 11 Great Horror Stories, selected and edited by Betty M. Owen. It has survived three decades of culling and triage, and moves from Okinawa, to Lake Bluff, Illinois, through three dorm rooms, an apartment, and a condominium in Chicago's Hyde Park, to San Francisco, California, and now rests comfortably on a built-in basement bookshelf in Madison, Wisconsin. Don't know quite how this happened, but it's now the book in my library that I've owned the longest (to put it more starkly: when I first cracked its spine, Spiro Agnew was not only still alive, he was the sitting vice-president of the United States). It includes stories by the greats (H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker), but the story in this volume that I have remembered most vividly and often re-read over the years has been "The Love Letter" by Jack Finney. It's a time-travel story, written before Finney's "cult classic" time-travel novel Time and Again. (Finney also wrote the novel "The Body Snatchers", from which the two great and creepy "Invasion of..." movies were made.) The story in a nutshell: bachelor in mid-20th century NYC--who still hasn't found what he's looking for in the bright lights of the big city--finds a portal to the 19th century and a brief ("yet eternal") courtship of a woman who lived and died long before he was born. This is a lovely story that takes only a few pages to move the reader from ennui to sentimentality. I heard that a "Hallmark Hall of Fame" TV movie adaptation of the story came out a few years back, but I haven't sought it out...although the thought of seeing the actors who played Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker in another film, as the protagonists in this movie, is bizarrely intriguing.

The thing is, the hero of the story "receives" three, and only three, letters from his bygone beloved, and, knowing that the third letter will be the last, makes himself wait before allowing himself to open it:

It was a long week. I worked, I kept busy daytimes, but at night I thought of hardly anything but the third secret drawer in my desk. I was terribly tempted to open it earlier, telling myself that whatever might lie in it had been put there decades before and must be there now but I wasn't sure, and I waited.

Then, late at night [...] I pulled out the third drawer, reached in and brought out the last little secret drawer which lay behind it. My hand was actually shaking, and for a moment I couldn't bear to look directly--something lay in the drawer--and I turned my head away. Then I looked.

~ ~ ~

So I've held off, but now I think it's time, with the winter solstice behind us and the New Year straight ahead, to open Henry Mitchell's third letter.

Henry Mitchell On Gardening. Henry Mitchell, Allen Lacy (introduction). Mariner Books, 1999. ISBN 0395957672.

11 Great Horror Stores Including The Oblong Box and The Dunwich Horror. Selected and edited by Betty M. Owen. Scholastic Book Services, 1969. No ISBN and out of print, but used book copies appear to be available from a number of online sources.

A "fun with Google" postscript: I came across this thread in one of the forums at Garden Web, on the subject "Who is your favorite garden writer, and why?" No surprise that Henry Mitchell figures prominently, and passionately, in the responses.

Fenisse la-di-da

The caption being my four-year-old's mondegreen of "Feliz Navidad".

To everyone, then: I want to wish you a Merry Christmas, from the bottom of my he-a-art.

Paeoniaphilia

The fattest and most scrumptious of all flowers, a rare fusion of fluff and majesty

--Henry Mitchell on the peony, in The Essential Earthman (publication information at the end of this post).

"The Peony Bloom Time Project" is a new guide charting the bloom sequence of peonies, prepared by Michael Denny from data collected by himself and others. (I learned about this site from the Peony Group at Yahoo!.) Denny plans to update the guide at least annually with additional data which he hopes to receive from viewers of the site.

I was pleased to read that Lindsay D'Aoust of La Pivoinerie D'Aoust Peony Nursery of Quebec helped Michael Denny create the project's website. Peonies have been my favorite flower ever, for ever, and I was excited to learn, as a newbie gardener, that they do well in this (cold) climate and (clay) soil. So, the first perennials I ever planted were peonies from La Pivoinerie D'Aoust. In revisionist history, I'll claim that excitement trumped anxiety as I opened the box from Canada (oh, so that's what a peony root looks like!) and planted, carefully following the included instructions and using a desk ruler (this was before I got my trowel with inch-markings on it) to make sure the eyes weren't planted too deep. All four plants came up and flowered beautifullly the next spring: 'M. Jules Elie', 'Lillian Gumm', 'James Pillow' (a wonderful flower, but especially dear to me as one of the few plants with "James" in its name--the name of my middle child and my late father), and 'Dai jo kuhan'. And I thought: I have peonies. I have peonies! I've since planted even more from Lindsay's pivoinerie and am already making out my wish list for next year--I know just the place for a big, blowsy stand of them (see: front yard garden project).

Redoute redux; Poor Napoleon

While thumbing through Katharine White for this post, I came across this helpful thumbnail history and commentary on Pierre-Joseph Redoute, the botanical illustrator previously mentioned in posts here and here:

The best portraits ever painted of the old French roses about which Graham Thomas writes are by Pierre-Joseph Redoute, the great botanical artist of the Napoleonic era. Redoute was born in Belgium; the Empress Josephine was his patron, and he worked at Malmaison for years, painting the roses in her garden. The Ariel Press, in London, published, in 1954 and 1956, a pair of folio-size volumes that reproduce four dozen of the Redoute plants .... I have seen only Volume 2, which has an over-ecstatic and none too accurate English introduction by Eva Mannering. The Redoute plates are what matter; every one of them makes a modern rose look clumsy.

Josephine retired to and died at Chateau de Malmaison, which she called her favorite house (no kidding: lose Napoleon and get great gardens and Redoute. I'd take that deal.). More Napoleon: The unseen presence of "Boney" looms large in the two latest installments of the Horatio Hornblower TV-movie series (only to be quickly and happily overshadowed by Ioan Gruffudd's scenes in long, flowing, curly locks and open nightshirt. /Homer Simpson 'mmm...burger' drool). And yesterday's Beethoven day brought a drive-time performance of the "Emperor" concerto (composed after Napoleon's invasion of Vienna), which, it's been suggested, would be more aptly titled "Anti-Emperor". Funny to have Napoleon (or the shade of his twisted, shrunken spirit) buzz-buzz-buzzing around here like his emblematic imperial bee.

[Technical note: The final e in Redoute should have an accent aigu, but my attempts to reproduce it look like this: RedoutJ. I've read the "Help" file in Typepad on adjusting my browser settings to fix this, but haven't been able to effect the recommended fix...I'll leave it for another day when I have more time, patience and brain cells. All apologies.]

Beethoven's Birthday

Today's the 233rd anniversary of Beethoven's birth. Our local classical station is playing all Beethoven, all day long. It's great to have this classical channel--in fact, I count it as yet another one of the reasons that I love living in Madison, Wisconsin--but I have not listened to it very much in the last six months. The reason: I have been playing John O'Conor's performance of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas almost as a continuous tape loop. I love this recording. O'Conor's playing captures Beethoven's delicate romanticism as well as the hotheaded passion with which Beethoven is more typically associated. His playing merges seemingly contradictory aspects of some of the pieces; one of my favorites is a movement (Sonata No. 22, opus 54, second movement, F major Allegretto) with Bach-like contrapuntal finger exercises, which O'Conor performs in dazzling technicality without being cerebral or arid. He finds ways to use tempo and rhythm to (no other way to put this; pardon the split infinitive) jam.

My allegiance to favorite artists makes me a willing sucker for plants that are evocatively named. Hence I'm determined to snap up, if I can ever find a source for it, Bergenia 'Beethoven', bred by the tantalizing mystery man (well, at least to me) Eric Smith, of whom Jamaica Kincaid writes, in My Garden (Book): (publication information at the end of this prior post):

...with the simple question of What is the Tardiana of Eric Smith? I stepped into a sort of family controversy. Mr. Ruh told me that Eric Smith was a gardener and hosta hybridizer who eventually bred some of the bluest of the blue-leaf hostas. He, Eric Smith, was the gardener (that is, the working hand) to a famous gardener (that is, the person who owned the garden), but instead of doing his work (gardening) he kept breeding hostas. The person for whom he worked hated hostas, and was fed up with his neglectfulness, in any case, and so fired him. Smith in a fit (of anger perhaps) threw all his experiments into the compost and went home. Shortly after that, he died, and some time after that, his experiments were found in the compost.

Along these same lines, I'll be expanding the phlox population in my perennial border with lots of Phlox paniculata 'Franz Schubert' (fortunately, readily available); my occasional breaks from the Beethoven sonatas have recently been devoted to Schubert's Winterreise song cycle.

Happy birthday, Ludwig!

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).

...every time that I plant a seed, he said 'kill it before it grows', he said 'kill it before it grows'...

This tale of prosecutorial indiscretion is a couple of years old, but new to me: a wreck at the intersection of law enforcement and horticulture. Link via joyfulchristian.

Mad keen gardener

I've been enjoying The Adventurous Gardener by Christopher Lloyd this weekend. The edition I'm reading is a used book, yellowed and faintly musty, which only adds to its appeal (completely irrational, I know, as I'm equally enamored of the smell and feel of new books too). There's great garden writing throughout its pages, as wide-ranging in topic as it is specific in detail. It's the kind of book you can pick up, open to a page at random, and invariably find a useful nugget of information, or a great turn of phrase:

...the other extreme that we see in so many front gardens: the colour addicts who lurch incontinently from lumps of forsythia and double pink 'Kanzan' cherry, through a blaze of rhododendrons and dumpy blobs of azalea, floribunda roses, scarlet salvias and so to a dying exit with mop-headed chrysanthemums.

That sort of gardening is a bore, especially as there is so much of it, but at least it is full-bloodedly boring. It wallows in its vulgarity with a sense of enjoyment.

Color-holic that I am, I was ready to slink out the back door, cheeks reddened, upon reading this, before realizing the backhanded compliment hidden in the passage above. To my relief, elsewhere in the book there is plenty of useful advice about color in the garden and how to use it...including a defense of the bougainvillea in its "original startling magenta".

Interesting feature: the heading of each right-hand page (where you would usually find the book or chapter title) includes a title that describes that page's contents. So, for example, in the 13-page "Experiments in Bedding" section of the "Seasons and Situations" chapter, you find the following page headings:

Rituals Need Rethinking

Late Sowings Catch Up...

...But Sow Sweet Williams Early

Scented Blue Petunias

Mixed Results from Dahlia Seed

Stayer Phloxes

Early Tulips are a Luxury

There's a lot in this book that I know I'll be returning to again and again, but these words from the preface have special resonance:

Gardening is endlessly fascinating and diverse. Those of us who are irretrievably committed are immensely lucky. I am an enthusiast and I do believe that, numerous as the world's band of gardeners is, there should be more of us. Not just routine but mad keen gardeners.

The Adventurous Gardener. Christopher Lloyd. Random House, Inc., 1983. ISBN 0-394-53676-2.

How cool was that?

Met a new business acquaintance for a suit-and-pantyhose lunch yesterday. I'm a lawyer; he's a banker; this was set up as one of those let's-meet-to-network-and-explore-mutual-business-interests deals. Now, after 15+ years in the corporate world, I can pretty much haul out the usual repertoire of chitter-chat on I-could-care subjects (such as, say, college sports) for these types of occasions. What a mind-bending surprise, then, to find that my lunch companion was a fellow garden-head! We managed to squeeze in a couple of minutes on cap rates and trends in underwriting, but ended up devoting most of the conversation to the joys, wonders and addictive pleasures of gardening. Very cool...or as my 10-year-old would say, sweeee(t).