Bookish Gardener

Heh.

From the latest PowellsBooks.com newsletter:

City officials reported four separate incidents this weekend of overzealous gardeners fainting in their yards, having held their breath too long for the season's first blooms. "I can't speak for the others," the local paper quoted one woman as saying, "but, with me, I just stopped breathing too early. In all the excitement, I timed it totally wrong."

Now...what on earth could they be talking about? And...isn't it about time that I made sure my husband learns CPR?

Charles Darwin (...not the E! True Hollywood Story)

What? Charles Darwin, in the news again? Right on the heels of that whole Georgia-schools-science-curriculum kerfuffle? The way this man has managed to stay in the spotlight, nearly 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, nearly 80 years after the Scopes Trial...I just gotta ask—who's his publicist?

By all accounts, it seems that the last thing Darwin would have wanted is this kind of status as a misbegotten icon and lightning rod. You can almost imagine him, bent over some object of intense study, blissfully--or deliberately--oblivious to all the shouting around him. Yet there's something about his story that draws us in, to want to get inside his head, and to understand and explain the man.

Of course, what's got me thinking about all this is Amy Stewart's The Earth Moved (pub. info here), in which Darwin's life and his work on nightcrawlers (link via Stewart's Worms of Endearment blog) serve as fertile inspiration for the book's themes and musings. It spurred me to go back and re-read other writing, similarly inspired.

So here's Loren Eiseley, from The Unexpected Universe:

Darwin had been gazing backward upon the ways of pigeons, apes, and earthworms in extravagant profusion. Upon these creatures and their origins he had expended a sizable proportion of his life. Nature he loved, but by his own words he had become a hermit. Man he achingly endured, as he endured the visitors at Down. He was looking back upon an increasingly remote and violent past, through spectacles few men had raised to their eyes before, and none before him so effectively. Though he occasionally rendered lip service to the idea of human progress toward perfection, cultural man was really a disturbing element in his system, an obstruction difficult to account for, and introducing strange vagaries into Darwin's own version of the Newtonian world machine. In spite of a vast world journey, enormous reading, and a wonderful glimpse, as through the mosaic of a stained-glass window, at the imperfect changing quality of life, Darwin remained an observer held in the bonds of the European social system of his day, and overimpressed by Malthusian struggle. The oncoming world of the indeterminate and the possible that he had helped to initiate he never fully grasped. He looked, and his spectacles brought him light, but it was sometimes the half-light with which Oz has so frequently chosen to shade the eyes of men.

And Henry Mitchell, from One Man's Garden (pub. info. here):

I have again been reading a book I find fascinating, Darwin and His Flowers, by Mea Allan (New York: Taplinger, 1977). I can hardly believe the wonders that Darwin discovered simply by close observation. Anyone could have seen the same things, conducted the same simple experiments that he did. He had no computers, no fancy laboratory, no laboratory of any kind. He just took time and he asked questions. How do vines climb? That was one of his questions, and he found the answer. The rest of us never dream there is an answer, we just go plodding nicely along admiring our wisterias, never thinking to ask, never dreaming we might learn something.

Really, it is hilarious to think of it—thousands of years, and nobody bothered to ask questions or bothered to examine plants carefully, not as Darwin did. He was a great lover of plants; he caressed flowers, and he knew nothing of botany at first. And yet he became the most important botanist of the world. Beyond that, plants, not birds or mammals or insects, were the impetus for Darwin's view of life on the planet, culminating with the Origin of Species.

The man had a brilliant intelligence, but the things he learned about plants did not require more than ordinary intelligence. He asked the questions that we might have asked as children (how do vines climb?) but no longer ask once we grow up and become stupid. What terrible chaos, what grief, sprang from Darwin's simple experiments and endless careful notetaking. And, of course, what miracles of new freedom, new knowledge, and old truth that nobody before him had bothered to discover.

Now, whither Lamarck? Indulging in a life-after-life flight of fancy, we might just wonder: is he glowering at having been overshadowed and overlooked...or relieved at having dodged the bullet of infamy?

The Unexpected Universe. Loren Eiseley. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1969. ISBN 0-15-692850-7.

Update (April 19, 2004):

And from "Darwin in 1881", by Gjertrud Schnackenberg (pub. info here):

He'd quite by chance beheld the universe:
A disregarded game of chess
Between two love-dazed heirs
Who fiddle with the tiny pairs
Of statues in their hands, while numberless
Abstract unseen
Combinings on the silent board remain
Unplayed forever when they leave the game
To turn, themselves, into a king and queen.

Green Goddess! Part Deux

Here's 'Green Goddess', the second of the two amaryllis bulbs (the other being 'Pink Floyd') I picked up in December. The Green Goddess bulb was already sending out a flowering shoot when I bought it, and was in full bloom (two four-flowered stalks) through Christmas and New Year's. When the flowers were done and cut down, three leaves of foliage came up, and then...what's this? Another flowering stalk, six weeks later. Oh, no. I'm being sucked in, headlong, into a Dysfunctional Relationship. Because I'll want to see these blooms again next year, and especially those of the Floyd. Which means another attempt at the art-science-voodoo of keeping and reblooming amaryllis bulbs. Oh, but it will be different this time. I'm motivated. I've gotten great advice in the comments to this post from Cold Climate Gardening's Kathleen Purdy. And, for comic relief, I can turn to Thalassa Cruso in The Gardening Year (pub. info. here), who sandwiches several pages of precise and helpful instructions on growing amaryllis between an opening salvo of exasperation:

I am, of all things, being harassed by amaryllis (Hippeastrum) bulbs, probably because these are not great favorites of mine. In spite of their spectacular bloom, I have never cared much for this particular bulb. Their enormous size is a problem in the small pots their culture demands, the flowers do not last very long nor, to my mind, combine well with other potted plants.

and, in the end, grudging admiration for the plant:

No matter how you look at it, carrying on an amaryllis is a long-drawn-out job, but if you have room, and patience, it is worth trying to get more out of such an expensive bulb. The fact that seven flourishing potfuls are more than I can handle is surely no reason for anyone else to condemn a worthwhile plant!

Season's change

All at once, you notice that the light is different. It draws your gaze; it makes you look up and around for the first time in a long while. For (how long?) it's just been a sliver of harsh glare squeezing out from under a distant door. Both too much and not enough. But now, the light--it's there before waking, and still there as commuters make their way home. Finally, you can feel it: winter is on the wane.

But these fellows say it so much better:

What might be called the ideal February, the best that can be hoped for, occurs when the arctic air mass that deep-freezes our state extends far to the south of us. Though the consequence of that can be some of the bitterest weather we can endure, it also brings a series of crystalline skies and unblemished days through which the sun shines with determined persistence. The thermometer may still read below freezing day after day, and three or four feet of snow may still lie on the ground (and should, for the protection it provides is as needed now as ever); but light streams into the house, illuminating corners of rooms that have not been bright since October.

Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, A Year at North Hill

Most days these days, I quiet my racing mind just before bedtime by dipping into A Year at North Hill. I doubt anyone needs to be reminded that this is, or why this is, a wonderful book--but I'm especially fond of this: its monthly chapters do not start with January and end with December, as do so many garden books (even my beloved Henry Mitchells). The book begins with April and ends with March...the most hopeful month.

And the riverbank talks of the Waters of March
It's the end of all strain
It's the joy in your heart

"Waters of March", by Antonio Carlos Jobim, English lyrics by Susannah McCorkle (highly recommended: Art Garfunkel's version from Breakaway).

A Year at North Hill: Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden. Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996. ISBN 0-8050-461403 (paperback).

Hooked by the worm

I've really enjoyed reading Amy Stewart's new book, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms. There's something here for just about everyone. Even if you do not care one whit about earthworms, you'll enjoy her graceful and fluid writing. If you are a would-be Thoreau, pondering the mysteries of existence, the material world and our place in it all, the themes of this book will strike a reverberating chord. If you are curious about earthworms, you'll be amazed at how much information you will absorb—painlessly—about their lives and their world. And if you are predisposed to regard earthworms with affection, you just might find yourself, as I did a few days ago, welcoming a parcel from the postman, courtesy of Happy D Ranch, containing two pounds of real, live Eisenia fetida, the red wiggler.

I especially like how this book points the way to Big Questions with No Easy Answers, in a clear, personable and unpretentious voice. (How much can we say that we really know, when there are phenomena that are impossible for us to investigate? How do we regard the success of a "good" species which comes at the destruction of other "good" species?) I'll value this book for fermenting my thoughts about questions like these long after I've put it down.

The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms. Amy Stewart. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2004. ISBN 1-56512-337-9.

Milkweed and Monarch...

...being the name of this poem by Paul Muldoon. From Dispositive, via Crescat Sententia.

The poem's not really about monarch butterflies or Asclepias plants, but hey--it's February--anything that turns my thoughts in that direction is more than welcome. My first-grader and I have a deal--he wants an Asclepias planted in the garden for his birthday (late April), with the hope of attracting monarch butterflies (and, more importantly, the wondrous monarch caterpillar). A clay-friendly cultivar of Asclepias tuberosa is on order, and I'll be starting some seeds of Asclepias curassavica later in the season. Check out this site for a list of the various Asclepias species that monarchs and monarch relatives find especially nosh-worthy.

Once more, with Giles

I've been very late to the party on the whole Buffy thing. So it's only recently that I caught the first episode of its final season, in which Willow is taking the rest cure in England, and summons a blossom of, er, passionflower vine from the good green earth. Rupert Giles points out, "It doesn't belong there," and further observes, "Passiflora caerulea. Native of Paraguay." Pahss-i-FLOR-a kah-eh-ru-LEH-a. May I never utter another botanical name unless I can say it just like that. Ah, the thought of Anthony Stewart Head reciting the Index Hortensis, entry by entry, cover to cover. A gardener's dream (and, no doubt, an actor's nightmare).

Garden Expo

The monochromatic still of winter has its own beauty, of course. But if it's hard to shake off that fog of s.a.d.-ness this time of year, it's because it seems impossible that tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that, will be any different. Think Groundhog Day without the happy (or any) ending...and with the clock radio perpetually playing "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" at the alarm.

I couldn't have asked for a better antidote (well, other than maybe getting that imaginary winter home in New Zealand--peonies in December!) than spending a day at the Garden Expo yesterday. The displays of real, live, flowering plants--daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, lilacs, crabapples, fothergillas--cast a spell (or broke the spell?), making the hope of spring seem more than just a hope.

The best thing about the Expo is the programming--seminars all day long on great garden topics by great speakers. It feels as though you're attending a fantasy version of college, where every minute of every course is interesting, you only enroll in classes that you want, and all without any papers due, exams to take, or grades given. (A bit of intruding reality: too many presentations of compelling interest scheduled for the same time slot. Guess I should have taken Human Cloning as a prerequisite.) So here's what (after a painful process of triage) I went to see, and just two (of the many) things I took away from each presentation:

"Diversify Your Garden with Ornamental Grasses" (speaker: Nancy Nedveck of The Flower Factory). #1: Karl Foerster (of the eponymous Calamagrostis cultivar) spearheaded breeding of North American grasses in Europe, during a period when they were virtually ignored here. #2: Consider planting daylilies and Miscanthus silver feather grass in combination; the plumes of miscanthus will emerge in September after daylily flowering has ended. (I like this idea--the chance to extend into fall the span of my daffodil-to-daylily strip in the back border.)

"Integrating Spectacular Roses in Your Garden Landscape" (speaker: Jeff Epping, Horticulture Director of Olbrich Botanical Gardens). #1: Olbrich's new rose garden will feature landscape uses of roses integrated into borders (the garden design work at Olbrich is always so fresh and imaginative that I cannot wait to see this); #2: crushed gravel can raise the pH of surrounding soil, which may cause alkaline-induced chlorosis for rugosas (good to know when considering hardscape and path design alternatives). (Gratuitous #3: It's "cle-MAT-is" for the very winning Mr. Epping.)

"Home Composting How-To" (speaker: John Reindl, Recycling Manager, Dane County Public Works Department). #1: Compost benefits plants by helping the plants' ability to absorb nutrients by improving their "cation exchange capacity" (Whoa--whoa--I'm a liberal arts major!); #2: Grass clippings compact too much, limiting aeration, and don't decompose well in compost piles, hence are better left on the lawn (good...we already do that).

"What's Wrong with This Photo: How to Make the Best of Your Garden Shots" (speaker: Pat Behling, photographer, Trillium Woods). #1: A tripod or monopod will make a big difference in getting a crisp image; #2: a chameleon background reflector is a good accessory, and can be homemade with clotheshanger wire and store-bought fabric.

"Vermicomposting: Indoor Composting with Worms" (speaker: George Dreckman, City of Madison recycling coordinator). Preface: I was primed for this one, having just finished Amy Stewart's new book, The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms. Post on The Earth Moved to come; in the meantime, get the book, read her blog, and hope with me that her book tour will include a stop in Madison. #1: Try shredded corrugated cardboard for worm bin bedding (the worms like the glue); #2: (From an audience member) Sprinkle lime on top of the bedding to control fruit flies.

"Trying WOW! Annuals in the Garden" (speaker: Mark Dwyer, Rotary Gardens). The title may have sounded a little corny, but let me tell you...by the end of this program, the audience was near nigh ready to salute the speaker with flickering lighters. #1: I must visit Rotary Gardens at least monthly during the growing season, to see how they integrate their 100,000 annuals into their border plantings; #2: You can't overuse sweet potato vine, and while 'Ace of Spades' is a nice leaf shape, 'Blackie' holds its color better.

"Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Container Gardening" (speakers: Jan Wos of Mayflower Greenhouse and Glenn Spevacek of Paine Art Center & Gardens). Another tremendous audience-pleaser; you should have heard the collective groan of disappointment when time ran out just as the speakers were beginning to get into their examples of season-extending fall container plantings. #1: On the importance of foliage: "With fronds like you, who needs anemones?" (I know. Only for certified pun-lovers, like me.) #2: Two words: Centaurea gymnocarpa. Best border and container combiner ever.

I managed to resist most of the garden decoration and accessories booths, until I came across an exhibit featuring works from "Jessy's Originals" in Black River Falls, Wisconsin -- the dried-flowers-in-frames thing, but done in more artful a way than I've ever seen before. I had to pick up a small frame featuring a bloom of Hydrangea macrophylla, dried with just the right mix of denim-blue and khaki-green coloring retained in the florets.

I wish I'd taken my camera for the exhibit at the Expo put together by University of Wisconsin students for the Allen Centennial Gardens display, on garden themes in the works of Edgar Allen Poe. An intriguing idea, which I hope they're planning to expand upon in the gardens' displays this coming season.

All cheered up now: let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Chacun a son gout (Updated: Chacun à son goût)

(...or, how many more accented characters that I don't know how to reproduce in Movable Type can I use on this blog? Just wait for my post on Roseraie de l'Hay; quick: which letter has the umlaut?)

"Sonnet: Daffodils" by Gavin Ewart was the featured poem on today's radio broadcast of A Writer's Almanac (to get to the poem, you'll need to scroll down to February 5).

I'm ambivalent about this poem. There's nothing incorrect about what the poet says about daffodils here, yet the tone puts me off a bit: a bit too arch, yet at the same time a bit too blasé*. Ah, well. As one who's stone in love with Henry Mitchell, that great lover of daffodils, I guess it's hard for me to warm up to an opinion about daffodils that's anything short of intensely felt. This poem...well, it's almost like hearing a stranger talk dismissively about a good friend behind her back.

Which is not to say that the daffodil should be everyone's favorite flower. This reaction by Jamaica Kincaid (from My Garden (Book), pub. info. here) is an honest feeling, honestly expressed:

I do not like daffodils, but that's a legacy of the gun-to-the-head approach, for I was forced to memorize the poem by William Wordsworth when I was a child.

Nor should daffodils be merely a saccharine symbol of spring. A.E. Housman gives us his take in "The Lent Lily", sobering as it is ("And there’s the Lenten lily / That has not long to stay / And dies on Easter day."), and well worth reading.

So if, as the poem of the day puts it,

The Spring too (teenagers witness) has its own kind of boredom.

well, then, all I can say is...lay some boredom on me.

*Accent aigu shamelessly purloined from Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening, who was kind enough to leave it in a comment to an earlier post.

Botanical artistry

Today's imperative: stop surfing and start strolling through the collection of lovely botanical prints posted at the University of Delaware's The Art of Botanical Illustration site (link courtesy of iconomy, via Reflections in d minor). The categories in this curated collection include Herbals, Travel & Exploration, Scientific Botany, Women Artists, Modern Botanicals, and...of special interest to those of us who are, not to put too fine a point on it, seed-heads at this time of year...Seed Catalogs.

Botanical art is irresistible to me, whether in an elegantly framed-and-matted limited edition lithograph or a mass-produced poster on the walls of a fast-food burger place. Good news: secondhand stores, rummage sales, import stores and discount stores all seem to have an abundance of botanical prints these days at prices that don't seem to be more than what you'd pay for the frame. Interestingly, the increasing popularity (and ensuing mass availability) of botanical styles in the market doesn't diminish their aesthetic appeal to me one bit. In fact, I'm hopeful for the day that everybody else gets so sick of botanical stuff that I can finally afford to add to my Portmeirion collection (currently consisting of a single serving bowl, decorated with Helleborus niger, received as a wedding present almost thirteen years ago).

To my mind (or to my eye), botanical drawings seem to capture the identity and essence of a plant better than photographs. (Alas, I have no art-historiographical linguistic tools to explain why I think that is, so please bear with me.) Interesting case: Margery Fish's Carefree Gardening. It includes both line drawings (mysteriously uncredited) and black-and-white photos (credited to Pat Brindley). The line drawings are terrific; the photographs show the plants, but fall flat. I do think that it's very hard to convey proportion in the "right" way (I don't want to say "accurately", since photographs are almost always "accurate"), and somehow hand illustrations tend to do better justice to the dimensions of what you see when you look at a plant than many photographs. I also find that drawings (particularly line drawings) seem to do a better job of capturing the texture of foliage, with the effect of elevating the visual impact of foliage to a level deservedly on par with the otherwise diva-like blossom.

I've enjoyed the botanical cover art on Cook's Illustrated for so long that it's clearly time to start a rotating display of the covers in the kitchen. The back cover of the latest issue is titled "Stalks and Shoots," featuring delicately colored illustrations of harvested celery, rhubarb, artichoke, asparagus, cardoon, fiddlehead fern, fennel, and lemon grass. No, it's not too early to start dreaming about summer.

Carefree Gardening. Margery Fish. Faber and Faber Limited, 1989 reissue. ISBN 0-571-115325-9.