Bookish Gardener

First peony of 2005

Welcome Richard Carvel.

Also newly blooming: Paeonia lactiflora 'Monsieur Jules Elie' (Crousse, 1888); Rosa rugosa 'Blanc Double de Coubert'; Centaurea montana (mountain bluet); and more penstemons.

Ka-bloom!

It's been a little over a week since my last "newly blooming" update, and this time I had to take a memo pad out to the garden, because this one's a long list:

Narcissus poeticus (the pheasant eye pictured in the post below) and Narcissus poeticus var. odoratus 'Albus Plenus'; Amaryllis 'Green Goddess' (my only success so far in getting an amaryllis to rebloom in its second year indoors); shrubs: Potentilla fruticosa (shrubby cinquefoil), Weigela (cultivar unknown), Viburnum trifolium (cranberry bush viburnum), Cornus sericea (redosier dogwood), Rhododendron x 'Nova Zembla', and Cotoneaster horizontalis (rockspray cotoneaster); Aquilegia (columbine, er, "love children") in purple, deep purple, and parchment; oxalis (unknown species or cultivar) with unusual narrow palmate leaves and magenta flowers; a blue perennial lupine from a wildflower mix sown three years ago; self-sown Silene armeria (catchfly), Escholzia californica (California poppy), snapdragons and petunias; Iris cycloglossa (Afghani iris), Dianthus gratianopolitanus 'Firewitch' (Cheddar pinks); Allium schoenoprasum (common chives); Salvia nemerosa 'Caradonna'; Allium aflatunense 'Purple Sensation'; dark blue Iris siberica (Siberian iris); Phlox glaberrima (smooth phlox); Ranunculus acris 'Flore Pleno' (double meadow buttercup); Clematis 'Blue Ravine' and 'President'; Aquilegia vulgaris var. stellata 'Nora Barlow' (columbine); Baptisia australis (blue false indigo); Centranthus ruber (Jupiter's beard); Penstemon strictus (Rocky Mountain penstemon) and a coral-pink penstemon whose name I've misplaced; and Geranium clarkei 'Kashmir Blue'.

And...the peonies are poised in taut expectant perfect globes, well over a hundred of them. Ahh, it's a dream come true.

Poet's daffodil

Narcissus poeticus

in time of daffodils(who know

in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me

                E. E. Cummings

Reading and writing: Letter from the Hive and Robbing the Bees

My review of two new books on bees, Letters from the Hive and Robbing the Bees, is up at Saucy.

Again with the books

Another gift that keeps on giving, this time from Robert the Llamabutcher and ever so humble:

1. Total Number of Books I've Owned. Let's see. I've had overstuffed bookshelves and on-floor book piles for about three decades now. If I even attempted to count the books I have now, plus the libraries'-worth I've discarded to charity or sold to used bookstores over the years, I am sure I would just sit myself down and weep.

2. Last Book I Bought:  Technically, the answer to this would be Seize the Work Day: Using the Tablet PC to Take Total Control of Your Work and Meeting Day. (Why? I actually won a Tablet PC recently as a door prize at a conference. Downside: I can never say "I've never won anything in my life" again. Upside: I know I never have to bother buying a lottery ticket again.) But that's really more of a manual than a book, isn't it? The last "real" books I bought were a couple off of my Amazon Wish List: Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and Jim Gustafson's An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt.

3. Last Book I Read: I've had lots of assigned reading these days, the most recent of which was The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, for my neighborhood book club. It's a breezy cotton-candy read, pretty much an R-rated Harlequin romance. I liked it being set in Chicago, although the author gets Hyde Park and the U. of C. mostly wrong (crossing the Midway from 59th Street won't quite get you to the Smart Gallery), and I am permanently irritated with her use of the ethnic sidekick Mrs. Kim, aka "Kimy" of the "flat Korean face", who should be played by Joel Grey in the inevitable movie version, if you ask me. The plot was clever, but aggregations of fantasy characteristics do not a character make. (Although I'll grant that having your dream guy be able to recite Rilke in the original German would probably have been found in my own Android-Identikit. When I was younger. And didn't know any better.)

Although it has been way too long since I've sat down with a book that I've chosen for myself (won't let that happen again), I've started Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea, and am luxuriating in it.

And, of course, I am rereading Dracula.

4. Five Books That Mean A Lot to Me: Well, there were the ten books on this list, and then the five "desert island" books on this list. Do we need another list? I think not.

5. Tag five people and have them do this on their blog.  Reader, tag thyself!

Here and there

I've joined the party over at Cold Climate Gardening with the post "My favorite weeds". Thanks for having me, Kathy!

And my column for May, "Doing My Share," is up at Saucy. (It includes a bit about another favorite weed, chicory.) The spring farm share I talk about in the column is from Vermont Valley Community Farm, in Blue Mounds, here in Dane County. The newsletters posted on the site will give you a taste of what's been coming home in the spring share boxes.

Newly blooming: Azalea (oops, lost track of the cultivar--it has tangerine-colored blooms and, most notably, survived the winter!); Lamium maculatum 'Beacon Silver' (spotted deadnettle) and a self-sown "sport" of Beacon Silver; Ajuga reptans 'Bronze Beauty' (bugleweed).

Dracoola

Dracula Blogged is a new blog that's posting the contents of the Bram Stoker novel based on the chronology of the various diaries, journals, letters and other papers that comprise the story. I'm just thrilled about this. I've reread Dracula pretty regularly since first checking it out of the Yongsan 8th Army base library in the sixth grade, back in the heydays of the Hammer Studios Dracula movies. Christopher Lee absolutely terrified me, and such was the power of his chilling portrayal of the vampire (or my utter impressionability) that it seemed entirely plausible to me that I would encounter him, in dark cape and bloodshot stare, when making twilight trips to the facilities of our rented house (without indoor plumbing) in Kimpo. Being scared witless, of course I had to go read the book, and discovered a monster even more complex and frightening than the one I'd encountered on the screen. Dracula is also, strangely, a book that I experience with the sensation of smell. The rank breath of the vampire...garlic...Renfield's flies...the boxes of earth...blood. The corruption of flesh is palpable in every way in this novel.

Although we're only a few days into the entries (Jonathan Harker's journal started on May 3), I'm already enjoying the very lively comments section on the blog. There were a few early Trekkie-esque fisticuffs in the comments section over dates (which were amusing but, thankfully, quickly died down), but there are also frequent substantive comments from the blogger and other contributors annotating the entries, and I loved it when one of the commenters referred to "Harker and his Scoobies". Because the blog will be posting entries in "real time" (so to speak), some of the entries will be published in a different order than the book (for example, the May 9 entry of Mina's letter to Lucy and subsequent letter back from Lucy to Mina have been posted on the blog according to plan, although the letters do not appear in the book until after the last of Harker's journal entries in Transylvania, on June 25)--but that's intended to be part of the experience. I'm looking forward to reading along all the way through (the last entry of Mina Harker's journal is November 6).

Thanks to So Many Books for this very cool webfind.

Newly blooming: Pulmonaria longifolia 'Bertram Anderson' (lungwort); Symphytum caucasicum (comfrey); Aronia melanocarpa (chokeberry); Geranium x 'Rozanne' (cranesbill); Penstemon virens (blue mist beardtongue).

Gold bleeding heart

Finally, a plant that my kids can get excited about. "It's like a heart that's dripping blood!" says my wild one, the six-year-old.

This is the bleeding heart Dicentra spectabilis 'Gold Heart'. This is its first spring flowering in my garden; it never went dormant last summer. I'm enamored of the golden foliage, the reddish stems, and the opalescent white around the "drips".

Also newly blooming: Phacelia campanularia (California bluebell, self-sown); Viola blanda (sweet white violet).

Japanese gardens

This is the ceiling of the tea house at Anderson Japanese Gardens in Rockford, Illinois, which are just over an hour south of Madison. I visited the gardens for the first time today. I tend to be ungenerously skeptical about and, yes, sometimes even a little disapproving of Occidental fetishization of the Ways of the East, so I went in with neutral expectations. Two hours later, I was profoundly regretting that I had not arranged my schedule to allow me to stay all day. These gardens are an experience. They are already green with lush spring growth, and the trilling drone of the pond frogs (in the height of mating season, we were told) outdid the soothing white noise of the coursing waterfalls. There were a few rare botanical wonders (flowering dogwood trees in both pink and white, tree peonies in bud, cinnamon bark maples), but most of the gardens are filled with readily available garden-variety (so to speak) plants such as groundcover pachysandra, viburnums, green and gold spireas, yews, pines, Japanese maples, Siberian irises, and hostas and more hostas decidedly not of the rare and expensive collector varieties, all arranged to exquisite effect. True to type, these gardens emphasize foliage over flowers, but numerous azaleas were blooming, including what looked to be Rhododendron mucronulatum, sometimes known as the "Snow Azalea," "Manchurian azalea," or "Korean rhododendron," which blooms before its leaves emerge in the spring.

There's a haiku by Issa that hits the spot:

Hyaku ryō no
ishi ni mo makenu
tsutsuji kana

Here's a translation of this haiku into English by David Lanoue, from his Haiku of Kobayashi Issa site. And, hey! I'll give it a shot too, taking advantage of the very convenient syllable counts of the subject azalea's botanical name:

Beaucoup-bucks boulder
outrocked by Rhododendron
mucronulatum.

Inspiration: the Photo-haiku Gallery, a site where visitors can post photos and post their own haiku to photos. I enjoyed the page with this photo of a Japanese garden, and chuckled (no, make that laughed out loud) at one of the accompanying haikus (scroll down the page; it's the one that begins with "summery garden"). I've included more photos from today's garden visit in the extended post, just in case you might be so inspired too.

Spring.

Newly blooming: Muscari armeniacum and Muscari botryoides album (grape hyacinths--the bunnies didn't get them all after all), Geranium maculatum (wild geranium), Lobularia maritima (sweet alyssum, self-sown), and Akebia quinata (chocolate vine).