Bookish Gardener

First bloom...woo hoo!

Pardon the internal redundancy of the post title. But spring is here! I came back from a long Easter weekend to find these beauties in bloom yesterday afternoon:

Crocus tomasianus. The bulbs for these were planted fall before last, and I'd simply assumed that varmints had done away with them when they failed to flower last spring. The photo doesn't do justice to the rich color of this flower, but perhaps these words can:

I am not sure C. tomasianus is not the most lovely of its kind. It blooms about March 20th here, slight and silver-gray in the bud, but opening out starrily in warm sunshine to reveal the warmer colour of the inner sepals and the hot orange stigmata. Its delicate appearance belies it, for it is in reality quite vigorous and sows its seed about, raising up lovely young to rejoice our hearts. This precious species belongs to Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Serbia.

Louise Beebe Wilder, Pleasures and Problems of a Rock Garden. Hartley & Marks, 1998 (reprint of original 1928 edition). ISBN 0-88179-157-1.

And Puschkinia scilloides var. libanotica. This is my favorite little bulb, long-blooming and delicate. Mrs. Wilder is not overly impressed with this striped squill, but manages nonetheless to charm with her description of it:

This is a little bulbous plant growing only three or four inches tall, with flaring bells of very faint blue with a line of deeper colour down the centre of each petal. It is a pretty and dainty little plant, but too pallid to make much of an impression. Its early flowering is the chief of its virtues.

Elizabeth Lawrence, on the other hand, is more enthusiastic:

Puschkinia scilloides var. libanotica, the Lebanon squill, has come into bloom in my garden as early as the ninth of February and as late as the twenty-first of March, flowering with nemophila and Hyacinthus azureus, and looking very charming with them, for its pale bells are washed and delicately striped with the same pale blue. Not the least of their charms is the fine, spicy fragrance.

Elizabeth Lawrence, The Little Bulbs. Criterion Books, 1957 (too old for an ISBN, but the 1986 Duke University reprint edition is ISBN 0822307391).

A perennial classic

The long unbroken stretches of time for reading and ruminating (which one promises oneself as a kind of consolation prize for winter) never quite materialized for me this season. But I finally treated myself to a cover-to-cover read of Frederick McGourty's The Perennial Gardener, which had been sitting for too many months in the holding pen of my bookshelf. This book's renown as a modern-day garden book classic is wholly deserved. It makes garden design intelligible even to the (ahem) spatially dyslexic, along with providing exhaustive coverage of plants and planting ideas. (Now I've got to try sweet cicely, Myrrhis odorata, which is the plant that gets perhaps the most repeated mention in the book.)

Obtaining all this Knowledge from the book is well and good, of course, but it's always the voice and the attitude of the writer that seal my affection for a good garden book. And, sometimes, a flash of recognition that the writer is just my kinda guy:

Three or four times a year I am dragged, kicking and screaming, to a cocktail party by a wife who accuses me of becoming a hermit. I am not very good at such affairs and usually retreat to study a bookcase if I think I can get away with it. No one bothers a bibliophile, especially one who reads books. Every so often there is no bookcase, and I have to stand by the brie talking with someone whose eye reaches beyond my shoulder as soon as I answer her question about my occupation — a horticulturist. Not surprisingly, the conversation turns to cheese and I remark about my fondness for brie, even when it is heated and has almonds on it, which seems increasingly the case in this complicated age. At the last bash this brought a swift retort: "But it's so common. Nobody serves it at the better parties anymore. Everyone's into chèvre now, with shredded macadamias on top." I almost spilled my Campari and soda.

(And how is it that I never get to run into a fellow like this at these things, when I'm flopping about like a fish out of water.)

Frederick McGourty. The Perennial Gardener. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989. ISBN 0-395-45373-9.

En prière

We did end up taking a spring-break family trip to Chicago after all, combining touristy stops for the kids with my own private commemoration of a long-ago graduation, more on all of which later sometime. We attended Mass on Palm Sunday at the church where I was received into the Church, and where I returned a decade later to marry. Fr. Fitz, the priest who baptized and confirmed me, is no longer there, but the stretch of Kimbark in front of the church now bears an honorary street sign in his name. Tom Weisflog, the organist at our wedding, is still there, and the eucharistic acclamations we sung on Sunday were to music that he composed. The cantor, Tambra Black, accompanied by Weisflog on piano, sung Gabriel Fauré's "En prière", moving and beautiful, as the communion meditation. Yesterday I hunted down a CD of Fauré songs, the better to hear it again and again. And then, just today, flipping through channels and settling on the tail end of an unfamiliar movie, "The Music of Chance," I heard it again, sung by Wendy White.

Si la voix d'un enfant peut monter jusqu'à Vous, O mon Père,
Écoutez de Jésus, devant Vous à genoux, la prière!

Si Vous m'avez choisi pour enseigner vois lois sur la terre,
Je saurai Vous servir auguste Roi des rois, O Lumière!

Sur mes lèvres, Seigneur, mettez la vérité salutaire,
Pour que celui qui doute, avec humilité Vous révère!

Ne m'abandonnez pas, donnez moi la douceur nécessaire,
Pour apaiser les maux, soulager la douleur, la misère!

Révèlez Vous à moi, Seigneur en qui je crois et j'espère:
Pour Vous je veux soufrier et mourir sur la croix au calvaire!

Stéphan Bordèse

What's your popsign, baby?

This is too silly to resist:

Popstrology is the science of the pop stars -- a revolutionary method for gaining self-knowledge by examining the alignment of the pop music charts on the date of your birth.

From Popstrology.com (þ: The Fredösphere).

Popstrologically speaking, I am a Double Bobby Darin, born under the influence of Mack The Knife, with my birthstar aligned with the constellation Shape-Shifter. I am married to a Sheb Wooley, born under the influence of Purple People Eater, in The Third Year of Elvis Presley, with his birthstar aligned with the constellation Novelty Merchant.

Why, this explains everything.

Winter's Riddle

Phototropism, a cottage-meets-Zen garden, and the Chihuahuan desert: all in a column by Dean Riddle in this month's Upstate House. (And, yeah, he's sick of winter too: "I've had it with winter and I'm hungry for spring. I'm dying to open the windows and let in some fresh air. Winter is fine for a while. More than fine. I have plenty of time in winter to read and to write and to think about the world. But I'm through with introspection and solitude and the world can take care of itself. I want to be a slave to my garden. I long to have lots of plants to plant and too many seeds to sow. I want to smell the earth and clean out the shed and cook on the grill and sit on the porch till dark. I want to be warm.")

I stumbled across the link to Riddle's column in the "related pages" sidebar of a Gmail-email conversation on gardening. Reading the column, I'm reminded of all the things that make Riddle's Out in the Garden one of my favorite garden books. He writes about the garden—and about life—from the heart, with charm, wit, intelligence and a distinct point of view. In working my way backwards through the Upstate House archives, here's news from Riddle's column from last month that's music to my ears: "This winter I'm writing a second book." Yayyy!

Croakus

Trust me on this. A precious handful of purple, white and yellow crocuses did bloom this week at the foot of the south-facing picture window of my daughter's kindergarten classroom. "Expect a picture on the blog tomorrow," I told my colder climate friend. But I forgot to take the camera to school the next day. "I'll remind you tomorrow, Mom," my daughter said. And she did. But it was too late! The crocuses no doubt had been (in the immortal words of Krokus, and why doesn't this band have a heavy metal umlaut?) "Screaming in the Night" at having a bushel of snow dumped on them (six inches Thursday night, and another six inches last night). I know they're under there. Somewhere.

Booked!

Courtesy of Mixolydian Mode:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?
The October Country, by Ray Bradbury.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Tony Almeida in 24. Oh...you mean from a book? Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of A Lady.

The last book you bought was...?
My bought-and-unread stack is growing so tall that I've been restraining myself this winter...so the last book I bought was Thomas Mann's Joseph The Provider, from the used-book bin in an after-Christmas sale for 81 cents.

The last book you read was...?
Re-read Aloft by Chang-rae Lee.

What are you currently reading?
Memento Mori by Muriel Spark (small world, Mixolydian Don).
 
Five books you would take to a desert island...
1. The Bible, King James Version.
And then the rest are pretty much off my favorite-books-of-all-time, must-reread-at-least-once-a-year list:
2. The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford.
3. The End of The Affair, Graham Greene.
4. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh.
5. The Habit of Being, Flannery O'Connor.

Who are you passing this stick on to and why?
To the erudite and exceedingly well-read Llama Butcher Robert...as a li'l bit of karmic payback for that song meme thing.

An unofficial Henry Mitchell web site

David Neumeyer in Austin, Texas has created, in his words: "an unofficial Henry Mitchell web site, which has, among other things, information about his books, searchable tables of contents, and links to online quotes. The highlight of the site, however, is a set of images taken by Nicholas Weber during visits to Mitchell's Washington garden in 1987."

I learned about the site in one of the forums on GardenWeb (in a message thread that's worth a look itself, as it includes anecdotes of two posters' personal encounters with Henry Mitchell), and was amused to find that the site included a certain "Wisconsin blogger" in its list of links. I love the photos on the site, particularly the one of Henry Mitchell on the site's home page, and the photo of the famous (infamous?) "dog statue" (Henry Mitchell readers of the same degree of obsessive fanhood will know what I'm talking about).

Black dianthus

Last Sunday's half-day marathon of Columbo on the Hallmark Channel included my favorite episode, "Étude in Black," with guest villain John Cassavetes playing an irresistible cad of a symphony conductor. Nick ("Coach") Colasanto directed the episode (as he did with my next favorite episode, "Swan Song" with Johnny Cash). Steven Bochco wrote the episode, and Myrna Loy and Blythe Danner (then enceinte de Gwyneth Paltrow, according to imdb.com) are featured in significant roles. Cassavetes' conducting is a joke (deliberate, I'm convinced), as he waves the baton wildly out of beat with the music, and affects a laughably beatific expression during a random passage of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. He makes an after-concert visit to the home of his mistress, wearing his sunglasses at night (don't mess a-round with the guy in shades, oh no), and even indoors, the only purpose of which is to allow the camera to show (in a split-second, hilariously clumsy special effect), reflected in the lenses of the sunglasses, the incriminating flower that fell on the floor of his mistress's living room while the maestro was committing his crime.

That flower is a border carnation, in a beautiful, pale, slightly cyanotic pink, from plantings grown by the conductor's heiress wife (played by Blythe Danner) in a large oblong planter next to the tennis courts of their estate. She hesitates through the botanical name of the flower: Dianthus----caryo--phyll--us, and explains to Columbo that it's a "shorter and scrubbier" version of the typical florist's carnation. Her husband wears a carnation from her garden as a boutonniere whenever he conducts, she says. And when it's proven that he didn't on the fateful night, he's busted, of course.

I ordered some Dianthus caryophyllus seeds from Thompson & Morgan this year, in a variety named 'King of the Blacks', promised to flower in deep, dark red. T&M earns high marks from me for customer solicitude: it enclosed an extra packet of the seeds with the order, explaining that it was concerned about reports of irregular germination, and recommending that all the seeds in both packets be planted. Whoa...after exceedingly successful germination (and excessive required thinning), it looks like I may end up with enough border carnation (blood red instead of pale pink) to fill a large planter, in homage to this Cassavetes Columbo, and to be renamed, during its stay in my garden, Dianthus caryophyllus 'Étude in Black'.

Saucy

Saucy, the new webzine from Bookslut's Jessa Crispin, is all about food (and includes a column from yours truly this month). Check it out!