Bookish Gardener

This 'n That Harvest

The warm-weather vegetables have made only desultory progress this summer. (The sweet peas, on the other hand, are now seven feet high and still going to town.) So I did what I could with these, er, slim pickins' from the raised beds today: Swiss chard ('Bright Lights'), some Stupice tomatoes, a green-ripened-to-orange pepper (it only took three months), a Hungarian black hot pepper (it's not very hot, though, just a little piquant), a handful of Fortex string beans (which I learned about from the mavens at Cold Climate Gardening), a small clump of garlic chives, some plain ol' basil, and a few nasturtium blossoms. I sautéed chopped (store-bought) Vidalia sweet onion in a generous amount of olive oil, then added the tomatoes (chopped in chunks), both the peppers (the sweet pepper in narrow slices, the "hot" pepper in thin rings), the green beans, some salt, and let the whole thing cook down and blend for about ten minutes. The chard, basil (both cut in chiffonade strips) and garlic chives (finely chopped), were tossed in for the last minute or two, then the whole thing got ladled over spaghetti noodles and topped with shredded Parmesan, with the nasturtium as a garnish. I'm not calling this a stir-fry, because you don't want to undercook the vegetables; if you give the onions, tomatoes and peppers at least ten minutes to get comfortable, their flavors will play together very nicely. I enjoyed what I got to taste of the Fortex beans, but most were snuck out of the pan by my 11-year-old. The Stupice is an heirloom Czech tomato noted for early maturity, but its flavor, eaten straight from the vine, is a little tart. When cooked, though, its acidity really woke up the dish in a good way. Mmm...yum.

Roll out the barrels

My garden's whiskey barrel planters, designed impromptu and on a shoestring, have filled in nicely. Here's Whiskey Barrel One:

This planter started out with Icicle pansies from last fall and self-sown borage and dill, all of which have stayed in flower throughout the summer. A few petunias, left over from seed starting, have been tucked in here and there, along with a marigold and zinnia brought home from first grade and preschool by my son and younger daughter. Store-bought plants were kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate (which nine out ten Japanese beetles prefer to roses, apparently), white heliotrope, pink pelargonium, and lemon thyme (which I'm hoping will overwinter). A couple of coleus, leftovers from my garden club's plant sale, complete the picture.

And here's Whiskey Barrel Two:

This was inspired by the image of blue cabbage and parsley I read about earlier this year. This container was planted with a dirt-cheap nine-pack of cabbage from Wal-mart and curly parsley started from seed, along with Icicle pansies from last fall, which are popping up here and there, and a couple of leftover petunias whose lack of enthusiasm at being crowded by the cabbage doesn't mar the effect too much.

Off-the-cuff remarks, with heart on sleeve

I'm not sure what to expect from Elvis Costello's new full-length orchestral score for ballet, Il Sogno. Reading these two wildly divergent perspectives on last month's performance of Il Sogno at Lincoln Center, I feel like the blind man that grabs the elephant's fleshy ear in one hand and wispy tail in the other and tries in vain to synthesize the information into some unified theory of the beast. Right after reading about the concert, my curiosity whipped me into a blessedly brief frenzy of bidding on eBay for one of the promotional sampler CD's that had been handed out to the concertgoers. I finally talked myself down from the ledge as the bids started going way up. (I told myself: for that price, you could get half-a-dozen used CD's on your wish list...or three or four gallon-pot-size designer perennials...or a nice lunch with your husband at a restaurant with white tablecloths and no kiddie menu. Did I say "as the bids started going way up?" Try one dollar short of the ridiculously high winning bid. And all this when the CD of the full score, conducted by MTT, goes on sale in a month anyway.)

The coolest lunchroom (updated)

So...Kathy at Cold Climate Gardening and I were chatting off-blog about the vagaries of Verbena bonariensis week before last...then Don at Hands in the Dirt blogged about his overabundant Brazilian verbena the very next week (and I really should pick his brain about his secret, because too much tall verbena is a problem I would like to have!). Then, I needed to find out the name of a new-to-me plant, and within hours Douglas at A Gardener's Notebook was there with the answer. And then, the next day, feeling all warm and fuzzy about the world of blogging, I read this from a post (well worth reading in its entirety, by the way) by Mark Liberman at Language Log:

One of the things that I like about weblogs is that they add a new dimension to the virtual conversation that began when people started keeping a record, in cultural memory and then in shared texts, of their otherwise-ephemeral observations. Without the blogging medium, Bill and Chris and Naomi might have mentioned some of this stuff in a letter or a lunchtime conversation, but I never would have heard about it, and neither would you. And just as I can butt in with my own observation, so can you.

With millions of weblogs out there -- "3,547,057 weblogs watched", says Technorati -- no one is going to be even a passive part of all of these conversational strands at once. However, we each get to pick where to sit in the Global Lunchroom, and if we're bored or annoyed with the conversation at our virtual table, we can always assemble a new one. It's not a substitute for face-to-face interaction, or even for one-to-one exchanges by phone or mail, but it enriches one's life all the same.

I'm quite taken with the lunchroom metaphor, especially since the discussion that inspired his post involves the unexpected intersection of two blogs that I read frequently, but think of as being at very different tables in the lunchroom. The "Naomi" referred to above is the blogger at Baraita, which I frequent as I eavesdrop on the "Religion" table, and I always want to be within earshot of the Language Log folks (at the "Language" table, of course) whenever there's a fight about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. So—pull up a chair, set a spell...and y'all come back now, y'hear?

Update, August 23, 2004: See what I mean? Thank you, Don.

Around the bend

This is the view of the annual bed that you come upon after you've walked through the side [you say "allée", I say] alley that's planted with hydrangeas, hostas, hellebore and grape hyacinth. (Will I ever permit another plant in that row whose name doesn't start with an "H"? Well, I've made an exception for Crocus speciosus.) This garden isn't so goth anymore. The blue salvia has self-seeded for the second summer in a row, the tall ageratum is finally coming into its own, and this is the first bloom of the annual larkspur, which spent most of the spring and early summer being gnawed knee-high to a grasshopper by the you-know-what hoppers.

I wanna know about the mystery plant.

Do you know this plant? It's a small tree or a tall shrub with delicate bipinnate foliage. The flower, as you can see, makes a butterfly bush look like a 90-pound weakling. I came across this in the middle of one of the animatronic dinosaur exhibits (I forget which 'saurus it was next to) at the Milwaukee County Zoo. (I note with slight regret that we came to the zoo about a day and a half too early to get to see the Average White Band perform at the zoo's "A la Carte" fest. Wow...they're still using that bare-buttocked logo from the '70s. I like "Pick Up the Pieces," with its Ur-Bernard Edwards bass line, although it's beginning to wear a little thin after being played about 500,000 times over the past thirty years.)

Joe Pye is a star.

Joe-Pye Weed (Eupatorium purpureum 'Gateway') is the star of the border right now; it commands attention with its stature and workmanlike beauty. When I first started gardening, I knew next to nothing about hardy plants, and so I planned the layout of and shopping list for the border based on catalog descriptions of height and flower color, making sure to include plants whose names stuck in my head after reading about them—even if the passage told me nothing about what the plant actually looked like. So, with joe-pye weed, from Jamaica Kincaid's My Garden (Book) (pub. info here):

I was taking an indirect route going to the grocery store and I came upon a field of joe-pye weed in bloom. I had recently started bringing mullein into my garden, and when I felt I had enough of those, I started raiding my own field for joe pyes and bonesets. I love these flowers, and when I saw the field of joe pyes, it made me feel so happy and giddy, because it was so unexpected (I had no idea any were growing there). Then, when I got to the store, I heard the woman who waited on customers say to the man ahead of me, "Hi, honey. God, you're beautiful today," and this struck me as untrue, because I had seen the man quite clearly. After he left, I said to her, "What made you say that to that man? He was one of the ugliest men I have ever seen," and she replied, "That was my husband." Retracing my route on the way home, I so blind with humiliation and anxiety and shame that I did not even see the joe pyes.

Madtown Sounds: Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society

The one-of-a-kind chamber music series put on this summer by the Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society featured three concerts of music by Czech composers. The performances were superb—top-notch musicians playing with palpable excitement and enthusiasm. The programs included lots of gorgeous Dvořák (most notably the "American" String Quartet, Op. 97—composed in Iowa!; the Romance in F Minor, Op. 11; and "Silent Woods" for cello and piano, Op. 68). I also appreciated the introduction to some of the works of Vítězslava Kaprálová, the brilliant young composer who died from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five shortly after fleeing Paris in advance of the Nazi invasion. The year before she died, she wrote a work for violin and piano titled "In Memoriam", subsequently retitled "Elegie", in remembrance of Karel Čapek, who had died the previous year. The "Elegie" is a short piece, but more than elegiac; the emotions the performance evoked for me were a wrenching combination of sadness and anger at the loss of Čapek. I could not imagine a more appropriate tribute to Čapek...or to Kaprálová, for that matter. But what I really want to say about the Czech festival is this: Zdenko Fibich, where have you been all my life? Zdeněk Fibich was a late 19th century Czech composer whose works haven't been performed or recorded as much as his contemporaries. I was blown away by the performance of his Quintet in D Major (Op. 42)...this work is intensely romantic without being excessively sentimental, and I simply did not want it to end. For more of the same, I've since picked up a collection of Fibich's piano pieces, which I have been listening to in between numerous return visits to the Quintet on CD.

Passionflower

Quest in a Ghazal

Last night she asked you for a passion flower --
that sweet lover's metaphor, a passion flower!

How would you know one if you found it,
having never seen before, a passion flower?

You search old books of myth and alchemy,
in all the convoluted lore, a passion flower.

And yet, it seems outlandish and exotic,
growing on some far-off shore, a passion flower.

Why does she want it anyway, this wrangler's girl,
the sort who'd call "a bore" a passion flower?

She'd be much happier with a mountain meadow
all abloom with hellebore. A passion flower!

Better humor her for now, and offer this
ghazal of rhymes galore: your passion flower.

Taylor Graham

(Reprinted by permission of the poet. Thank you, Taylor.)

The ghazal (pronounced "ghuzzle") is a Persian and Urdu poetry form that has influenced and inspired poets in many other languages. Read more about it here. The ghazal has also become its own genre of music and song in India and Pakistan, as described here.

The passionflower pictured above ("Passiflora caerulea. Native of Paraguay.") is just about open, after three months of nothing but foliage. The widely reported symbolism of the passionflower is rivaled in its bogosity only by The DaVinci Code, if you ask me (sniff), but I do like how the flower's used in this stained glass window from a Texas church.

Cucumber harvest

I harvested the first cucumber of the season today...three weeks before Labor Day (sigh). This is a no-name "burpless" variety that I picked up as a transplant from the big-box at the beginning of the season.

Now, when it comes to slicing cucumbers, there's no two ways about it—the mandoline reigns.