Bookish Gardener

Come on and dance with me

Lathyrus odoratus..."He said that her friends just call her 'Sweet Pea.'" Oh, it's January, the month of seed catalogs, and my eyes will be bigger than my stomach—that is, the contents of all the packets of sweet pea seeds that I'll put in the shopping cart will overcrowd the modest four-foot trenches allotted to them alongside the undulating arched trellis that bisects one of my three raised beds. The heirlooms, the Spencers, the one from the monk, the new varieties and hybrids—they are all irresistible.

I've made my share of mistakes in tending to my sweet peas over the seasons, though not the obvious one of letting the Midwestern summer heat and humidity get to them—as long as I'm diligent with watering and feeding, and happily, obsessively picking off the buds as soon as they're on the wane and before they form...peas...they'll chug along through the first touches of light frost and beyond. No, the mistakes I've made have been unforced errors: waiting (i.e. procrastinating, then letting time slip away) later than I should to get the seeds in the ground; forgetting to soak or scrape the seeds before getting them in the ground; pinching the seedlings to encourage branching when they are crowded enough already and this will only delay them reaching the trellis; noticing too late that they've grown so vigorously and thickly that the trellis is about to...too late! topple over.

But each growing season, the sweet peas manage to survive that season's malministrations and reward the garden, and the gardener, with their beauty of form, color, and especially scent, like no other. From the first signs of successful germination, to how could these things have grown three feet already and where is the twine to tether them to the trellis, 

Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight:

With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white,

And taper fingers catching at all things,

To bind them all about with tiny rings.

Keats, "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," 1817.

 

Elb-OW

I looked up this morning, and this summer's gone

(Aaand TIL upon verifying the lyrics that that's a mondegreen that's happily resided in my brain all these years, in the stead of "I looked out this morning / and the sun was gone.") But yes, today is the autumnal equinox. Hello fall, goodbye summer.

There's still some juice, and color, left in the growing season. My garden's Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus 'Blue Bird'), insulted but not felled by the last harsh winter, and finally unmolested by Japanese beetles, unfurls perfect blooms in a perfect hue every day these days. Also happily beetle-free, at last, is the self-sown Kiss-Me-Over-The-Garden-Gate (Polygonum orientale), casually elegant in cerise. Enabling the illusion that all won't be quiet, and brown, and then white, by the next quarter-turn of the calendar, are a half-dozen stolid and florid late-blooming daylilies, and the wildflower mix bounty of white, pink, and magenta cosmos and orange marigolds, still chugging along.

But I can only avert my eyes from the (so many) weeds making their late-season resurgence. And cry "uncle," and wave the white flag of surrender, with my non-dominant hand, since my dominant hand, and arm, and elbow are on the injured list, after overenthusiastic weed pulling sessions in early summer. The technical term for it is "tennis elbow," they say. Yanking hurts, pulling hurts, gripping hurts, lifting my coffee cup hurts. I fought the weeds, and the weeds won.

Yaass Queen

Some plants were whupped by last winter: the 6-foot burning bush (Euonymus alatus 'Rudy Haag'), now down to a handful of new growth from a nub of whatever-didn't-get-felled by the -27ºF polar vortex; the Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus 'Bluebird'), same; and the more-than-a-decade old climbing hydrangea (Hydrangea anomala subsp. petiolaris) now wending up the chimney with only sparse foliage surrounded by dead twigs.

But others liked it cold, apparently: the peonies bloomed by the hundreds; all the daylilies are punching above their weight and setting multiple buds upon multiplied stalks; and I have never seen the Queen-of-the-Prairie (Filipendula rubra) hold court like this. The blooms are the purest deep pink, just this side of classy without taking that short walk to brassy magenta. Up close, you see the sewingpin-head-sized pink pearls of the fluffy foam blooms to come. From afar, the grove of the Queen's blooms outshines everything else around it.

As with every season, timing is everything. The pollen-heavy blooms of the Queen are irresistible to insects, especially (or most disgustingly visibly) the Japanese beetle. This year, the Queen bloomed early, and the Japanese beetles are late, though they'll have their way with the Queen soon enough.

The Queen moved herself toward the front of the bed, now in a sightline of other reds: scarlet beebalm (Monarda didyma), and a dun-reddish daylily on her side of the bed; and, across a strip of lawn to another bed, Monarda 'Raspberry Wine,' the color of a sophisticated lipstick, and too-red-to-be-orange and too-orange-to-be-red Maltese Cross (Lychnis chalcedonia). All these reds don't go together in the most wonderful way, like the so-wrong-it's-right chords in a Monk tune:

"Ugly Beauty," indeed.

 

Amo amas amelanchier

Spring's imperative: to visit all the amelanchiers at the Arboretum when they're in bloom once a year. Their finery is on display for only a short time, and this week is that week. Amelanchier is a delicious-to-say botanical name; Wiki-know-it-all puts paid to the urban legend (well, a legend, probably not urban) that its common name of "serviceberry" comes from its bloomtime coinciding with the time when the frozen ground has thawed sufficiently to allow digging of burial plots. Serviceberry, shadbush, Juneberry: they're all lovely. The delicate white blossoms drape like Chantilly lace over deeply colored, athletically sinewed limbs and branches. Even those with abstractly improvised branching pose artfully (although I just saw one in a commercial landscape hedge-trimmed into a lozenge; don't do them like that). With some, the white raiment shines bright against the emerging lime green foliage; with others, the flowers and leaves merge into a sepia haze that somehow tints their surroundings too, and transports you, wibbly-wobbly, to a past time not your own. Glimpse them while you can; it won't be long until the amelanchiers change into their street clothes and recede into the crowd.

Lapin farci aux Tommies

Love: Bugs Bunny, Watership Down. Hate: Cottontail rabbits, not least the one that sat itself down, figuratively tucked in its fine dining napkin under its chin, and methodically and leisurely chomped through the Crocus tommasinianus that were just beginning to show their promise. (Nope, Tommies are not rabbit-resistant.)

The pelt of this rascal might be regarded Cruella DeVillishly, with its splotch of ginger and streaks of black and cloud-cover gray. And certain other ideas might come to mind as one leafs through Joe Beef's Surviving the Apocalypse or Fergus Henderson's The Complete Nose to Tail. Yes, fine sir, I've got a recipe for rabbit leg confit with your name on it.

Back to bookish

My review of Tom Turner's Garden History is posted at Human Flower Project. I'm very grateful to the delightful, generous and patient Julie Ardery for the chance to read and write about this very cool book.

Astilbe my heart

Astilbe x arendsii 'Bressingham Beauty' (tucked in the middle) and 'Erika' (to the right). These shade lovers are thriving in southern-exposure full sun, thanks to the steady effluence from the sump pump hose into the sump garden. 'Erika' is a single plant that's grown into a clump the size of a small shrub, and is a year-round highlight, from the time its perfect, glossy bronze fronds appear in early spring through the stately display of its dried plumes all winter. 'Bressingham Beauty' is a contrast in size (smaller), plume shape (arched), and scent (vanilla).

The sump garden is jam-packed now, a mere two years after the lawn was dug up to make it. A smaller astilbe will be coming into bloom soon, to be accompanied by black cohosh, the plant whose foliage looks like a black astilbe. (Yes, we all came to know it as Cimicifuga racemosa, but now it's been reclassified as Actaea racemosa. Taxonomists, stop that right now, please.) Ligularia dentata 'Othello', with its leaves of oversized spoons with purple undersides, is pushing its neighbors aside. Its neurasthenic cousin, Ligularia stenocephala 'The Rocket' stands brave and unwilted in this site, with a new yellow spike that matches the yellow in the blooming Lysimachia ciliata (fringed loosestrife), which is happily taking over the bed, and whose matte reddish brown foliage is complemented by the glossy brownish red foliage of hardy hibiscus 'Kopper King', which has grown four feet in two months. Darmera peltata (umbrella plant) bloomed pink in early spring (and won't it be nice if it reblooms late summer, just like it did last year). No sign, sadly, of the "reseeding biennial" Angelica gigas, which turned out to be an expensive annual.

This garden will go dramatically tropical soon, as the black elephant ear (from the farmer's market) and the green elephant ear (from a bocce-ball sized bulb, acquired for the cost of a latte from the always-always low priced store) upsize, the siren-red cannas unfurl, and the castor beans called 'Carmencita' join the party, in the garden that never needs watering.

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.

My husband got me a bowling ball.

Not to worry—it's not my birthday, and he doesn't bowl. (But he wields a mean etching pen!) So here it is: the official gazing ball of Willoughby.

Ratatouille Garden

I'll be gardening edibles this year in three new, small (four foot squared) raised beds. Madison has a great farmer's market, so I'll limit the home vegetable garden to things that taste appreciably better when just plucked off the vine (or so to speak), that don't take up too much garden space for the yield, and that I'm enthusiastic about eating. The short list: tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, zucchini--ratatouille! Round out the list with lettuces, chard, endive, scallions, shallots, pole beans, okra, and cucumber. I'll also be tucking in ornamentals here and there. I'll leave the indoor seed starting on most of these for future years when I know what I'm doing; this year, I'll try to pick up as many transplants as possible from the spring sale at Seed Savers Exchange's store in Madison.

Since I'm new to this aspect of gardening, I'm (as per usual) stoking my enthusiasm and quelling my anxiety by scouring the used bookstores. My growing stack (pardon the pun):

Step by Step Organic Vegetable Gardening: The Gardening Classic Revised and Updated. Shepherd Ogden. HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. ISBN 0-06-016668-1.

Making Vegetables Grow. Thalassa Cruso. Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. ASIN 039449783X (hardcover).

Square Foot Gardening. Mel Bartholomew. Rodale Press, 1981. ISBN 0-87857-340-2 (hardcover).

Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding! Patricia Lanza. Rodale Press, 1998. ISBN 0-87596-795-7 (hardcover).

Crockett's Victory Garden. James Underwood Crockett. Little, Brown and Company, 1977. ASIN 0316161209.

I'm working my way through these books, hoping to be able to synthesize their useful parts without ending up with too much of a Frankenstein's monster. I'm enjoying and learning a lot from each of them in its own way, but I was stopped dead in my tracks when I picked up The Epicurean Gardener by John F. Adams. For me, this hits the same sweet-spot as Henry Mitchell's writing. It's funny, punny, full of know-how and fully down-to-earth, philosophical without an iota of preciousness or pretentiousness, and brutally honest and caustically opinionated—which, to my mind, renders it utterly trustworthy. And, by the way, it's also beautifully written. Here's Adams, having a little fun with a well-meaning gardening publication of the USDA:

Consider these instructions for planting horseradish:

["]In planting, make furrows 3 to 5 inches deep. Plant the cuttings with the tops all in one direction in the row, dropping a cutting every 24 inches. As the cutting is dropped, draw a little soil over the lower end of it with your foot and tamp firmly. After all cuttings are dropped, they are covered with soil to slightly above ground level (to allow for soil settling), being sure that the soil is firmly in contact with the cutting.["] Gardening for Food and Fun. The Yearbook of Agriculture. 1977 U.S. Department of Agriculture, p. 243.

What this means is, "Plant cuttings 3 to 5 inches deep, 24 inches apart." So awkwardly is it written with its shift in tense and vacillation in person that I had to read it several times to figure that much out. With this much information—if you need this much—you can grow horseradish until its cultivation is prohibited by some other agency of the U.S. Government. Actually this Department of Agriculture publication uses an additional three pages to discuss the proper home garden cultivation of this pungent condiment.

Clearly the expert assigned to do this segment of the Yearbook felt he or she had some information to pass on and a certain amount of space to use up. To use up space the author began to become a little stern and uncompromisingly exact in the information, implying a kind of superiority in the exactness and a false importance to the significance of the instruction. I have seen no recorded instance where a planting of horseradish has failed. I think if you were merely to pronounce the word horseradish with a clear intonation above a spot of soil, horseradish would germinate there spontaneously in a few days. What this horticultural bureaucrat should have done to fill the space, of course, was to tell a couple of interesting stories about the history of horseradish and its cultivation—magical properties attributed to it, what cultures consider it an aphrodisiac, and one or two particularly brutal murders committed with it. With that information the space would have been read gladly, with no less instruction or decreased likelihood of success.

The Epicurean Gardener. John F. Adams. E. P. Dutton, 1988. ISBN 0-525-24597-9.