Bookish Gardener

Essential

Your garden will reveal yourself. Do not be terrified of that.

        Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman

(Herewith my very tardy contribution to the Henry Mitchell Festschrift at May Dreams Gardens.)

The Essential Earthman was my introduction to the art of garden writing and to the wonders of Henry Mitchell. It's a book that I reread often, each time with familiar comfort and deepened appreciation: let me count the ways.

(But first: Earth-MAYON? or EARTH-mun? I think I'd always thought of it as the former, but now I'm tending toward the latter. Prospective next year's resolution: find a setting where this usage controversy can actually rear its pretty head in real, live, audible conversation.)

And now, let us praise Henry Mitchell's paronomasia—that is, his hearty embrace of the pun ("The Wrongs of Winter, the Rites of Spring"). And his rimshot jokes, almost always at the expense of cats. And his metaphors, weirdly apt ("The flowers suggest a Santa Barbara girl who gave up tennis for macrame, that is, they look a bit odd, as if they had tried drugs and lived in Tangiers awhile"), and gleefully mishmoshed ("We begin, often enough, by hoping to knock the neighbors' eyes out with the largest mass of color since the lions ate the Christians"). And his allusions that remain just beyond my ken ("The first [Anemone blanda] out with me this year was the somewhat startling raw rich red 'Radar,' like a dandelion that fought at Shiloh, so to speak." ...that one I kind of get; "Once they saw we were not going to catch them for a Brunswick stew, and once they comprehended that the hounds were actually awake only on the rarest occasions, then the squirrels arrived like the guests at Andrew Jackson's cheese board." ...that one was beyond me until I looked here [—see "Anyone could come to Andrew Jackson's public parties..."]). And his sly riffing satire (fictional named varieties of Japanese irises "Moon over the Tortoise Cat's Ear', "Shimmering Brocade of July Charcoal Pit', and 'Glory of Titmouse Nest').

You don't have to agree with Henry Mitchell about everything to enjoy him. (I for one go for cats over dogs.) He's mad about bearded irises, I'm meh about them. He rues the rudbeckia, which I regard as the savior of my summer-slumping perennial border. And what's this? He dislikes the rose 'Charlotte Armstrong' because: "It's very like Beethoven, a towering composer, no doubt of that, and yet you may dislike most of his music, though the late quartets sound much like Mozart." (But But But!...I sputter, affectionately.)

There are no photographs in The Essential Earthman, because they would be beside the point, and would only detract from descriptions like this: "The flowers [of the moonflower] are strongly scented, a trifle sickly in character. They are like thin strong silk, so white they appear to be illuminated, even on a fairly dark night." How confidently he strides in each of his pieces from wisecrack, to erudition, to self-deprecating admission, to the moral of the story, without missing a beat.

When Henry Mitchell writes of the gardener's nearly universal love of the color blue, he theorizes that "there is some numinous aspect to blue and that other gardeners sense it as much as I do." That's what I seek and find whenever I read Henry Mitchell. If his writing were a color, it would be the color blue.

A poppy grows in Parkwood Hills

Success (at last, and none of my doing) with the oriental poppy. I'd become resigned to thinking of the perennial poppy as a flower that I could admire only from afar, in someone else's gardens. About three seasons back, I'd bought and planted a few potted ones, in their late summer dormancy, and they didn't care to stay. What happened?

During the period in which the poppy is getting itself entrenched the gardener will be sorely tempted to stick in a few other things—a peony here, a redwood there—since the poppy is not occupying as much room as the gardener thought. No. And it never will, either, if we start plopping in other plants over it.

Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman

Urp...guilty.

Then, two springs ago, I scattered the contents of a couple of seed packets in the eastern annual bed—a small rectangular strip of unredeemable soil, bounded by concrete foundation on two sides and by concrete patio on a third. These were oriental poppy seeds, bought in my earliest gardening days before I learned to become intimidated at the prospect of attempting perennials from scratch. These seeds were old, and were being weeded out (so to speak) in one of my all too infrequent de-cluttering sprees...so I figured they could just as well be thrown out into the garden as thrown out.

Early this spring, foliage from this plant (and from a second plant, in the garden bed proper) emerged, large and alien. Having had no real-life, up-close experience with a healthy oriental poppy, I almost thought these were weeds...a cross between a dandelion and thistle. But some instinct stopped me from pulling them. Then, a few weeks later, in a visit to Allen Centennial Gardens, I came upon the same foliage, with the plant tag Papaver orientalis.

The poppy pictured will have salmon-colored (if I remember the seed packet correctly) blooms, as frilly and delicate as an antebellum debutante. Henry Mitchell advises that an oriental poppy requires a bushel basket (a "thirty-inch circle," to be precise) of space to thrive. But given that this plant has somehow made it in the space of a three-centimeter crack—a veritable botanical snail darter—I think we'll need to reroute our plans to install new steps on this side of the patio.

See and say

I got your picture hangin' on the wall
It can't see or come to me when I call your name
I realize it's just a picture in a frame
          - Ashford/Simpson (via Gaye/Terrell)

But all I've got is a photograph
And I realize you're not coming back anymore
          - Starr/Harrison

The camera can never go as far as the eye can see. How many times have I been thwarted from capturing a vision? The jeweled green glint of a hummingbird in blurred darting flight. Plumed ornamental grasses standing sentry in a hundred-foot formation. The sun of high noon so bright that everything is seen in an illuminated haze through a squinty gaze. The big sky in summer so cloudless and clear that you feel like you're standing at the bottom of a deep blue sea. The serendipitous glimpse of three clumps of three different agastaches in three different beds yards apart, echoing hullo-ullo-ullo in an unplanned but perfectly spaced diagonal. But even shots that adhere to the limits of light and dimension and yield pleasing results are, ultimately, no more than pretty pictures. Their beauty can be enjoyed, they may even evoke a memory or two, but they cannot send you into a time machine where you get to relive the experience you were trying to record. I certainly should know better; every parent learns this lesson a couple of hundred rolls of film or so into their first baby's first year; but the urge to catch and to keep that which cannot be possessed is one that I can overcome only with intense conscious effort, accompanied by much ersatz zen-talk.

I was sitting in the "sunroom" the other day, the name given to a room built onto the back of our garage, with its south-facing front and ceiling all in glass. It's a wreck, really, isolated from the house's heating and ventilation, prone to roof leaks, and subject to temperature extremes that make it unsuitable for growing any plant known to me. Except: the door, when open, frames one of the most beautiful views there is of the garden as a festive and orderly jungle, with magenta petunias and chartreuse and black sweet potato vines billowing out of the window boxes, flowering and done-flowering spikes of agastache and penstemons in their most attractive profile view, and mounds of multicolored snapdragons and petunias, sown from seasons past, filling in the blanks. Sitting in the sunroom, I was rereading Henry Mitchell's The Essential Earthman, and he (as is his wont) set me right straight:

Gardening is not some sort of game by which one proves his superiority over others, nor is it a marketplace for the display of elegant things that others cannot afford. It is, on the contrary, a growing work of creation, endless in its changing elements. It is not a monument or an achievement, but a sort of traveling, a kind of pilgrimage you might say, often a bit grubby and sweaty though true pilgrims do not mind that. A garden is not a picture, but a language, which is of course the major art of life.

Cichorium emporium

If the chicory of our roadsides is divided in the spring, it blooms in August rather than early July, and its sky-blue daisy flowers are to my mind quite beautiful.

Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman.

Chicory one: I'm not sure whether this is Cichorium intybus or Cichorium endivia. It has dandelion-like, medium-green leaves, not quite as curly as escarole, but suitable (in small doses) for including in a salad green mix. The flowers are the classic ice-blue of the roadside chicories.

Chicory two: This is Cichorium intybus of the type that can be forced into Belgian endive heads. The foliage of this plant is thicker and a deeper green than that of "Chicory one", and although the blue of the flower is only a notch darker, it's almost periwinkle against the deep green leaves (this photo doesn't quite get the color right, alas).

Passengers in my car were getting impatient with my habit of craning for a closer look at flowering chicory along the highway, and I really wanted the chance to be able to look at chicory flowers up close without convoys of semis whizzing by, so I introduced these into my vegetable gardens last year, starting from seed. Cichorium intybus is perennial, and Cichorium endivia is annual or biennial, so these grew like leafy salad greens last year, then overwintered and put up tall stalks this spring that began to flower a few weeks ago. The flowers open by the dozens along knobby-kneed stems first thing in the morning, and close up by early or mid-afternoon, followed by masses of new flowers the next day.

Chicory is known as a weed just about everywhere, but is also called "blue sailor weed" in some parts, a nod to botanical folklore that claims that the flower is the avatar of a lovelorn lass whose heart was broken by a sailor who returned to his true love, the sea. I think her name was Brandy.

He came on a summer's day
Bringin' gifts from far away
But he made it clear he couldn't stay
No harbor was his home.

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).

Happy birthday, Henry Mitchell

Henry Mitchell was born on this day in 1923 and died on November 12, 1993. I knew next to nothing about garden writers or Henry Mitchell when I first picked up The Essential Earthman, but it was love at first read. I'll try to refrain from my usual gushing (although you can find plenty of that in this blog's "Henry Mitchell" category). Instead, let me offer up a sampling of his wit and wisdom, plucked almost at random from a quick flip through the pages of Henry Mitchell on Gardening:

From "Thomas Jefferson, an Optimistic Gardener":
This broadening of scope is the single most definitive quality of the true gardener: if you fail in small things and cannot perfectly manage your small garden, then expand and take on three times as much. That is gardening orthodoxy and Jefferson believed it with all his heart.

From "The Perfect Moment":
With tender new leaves and flowers all about, it is easy for the gardener to think he has done well. Payday will come in summer, when all defects shall be revealed. This is Scarlett O'Hara time in the garden. Tomorrow is another day. These are the few days the gods give us to jump up and down in. Tomorrow, when all that is wrong will be evident in the garden — tomorrow, well I say tomorrow is spinach and I say the hell with it.

From "After the Rain, a Deluge of Tasks":
As I watched Nightline on television, it suddenly struck me that the moonflower vines have not yet been planted. The seeds should have gone in the first of May. That program specializes in things to worry about and often reminds me of dreadful deficiencies in the garden.

From "The Wings of August":
In 1933 I had my picture in the paper in the town I grew up in, with the mayor standing beside me. We looked equally stupid, as I recall, but the point was that I was planting a crape myrtle that had been proclaimed the official tree of the city. It does seem so long ago, and I often wonder if those crape myrtles I planted as a kid are still in that garden.

From "Support Groups on High":
The totalitarian frame of mind is now so common in America that I know there are apartments in which you cannot have a dog, cat, or pet mouse or grow anything on the balcony railing. Such apartments also forbid corn bread in the kitchen, I suppose, and if you like tyranny you go along with it, but my advice, if you find yourself living in such a place, is to wake up, tell the landlord to go to hell, and move out.

From "The Latest Dirt on the Garden's Doings":
Some months ago I had to cancel a talk in Lawrence, Kansas, and a television crew arrived here to show, I suppose, that I was seriously off my feed and could not travel. We waddled about the garden, which was ill kempt. Months later I finally screwed up the courage to play the tape of this ill-considered venture, and as I had feared (in my initial protests at the very idea of television), it showed me as rather fat and far from youthful. Talk about distortions. But the star of the program was a mockingbird, singing in top form at top volume. Yet at the time of the filming we were unaware of so sweet a songster as we galumphed about. The moral is clear enough, that most of the beauty of a garden we were oblivious to, being preoccupied with absurd concerns about bugs on the nasturtiums or a certain rounding out of the body. And I will say this for the garden in that film, and it's about all I can say for it: it was rather funny, and the growth was as luxuriant as a jungle — it showed a place where mockingbirds sing like mad.

Possession

I ended the previous post with a gratuitous dig against the color yellow. What did it ever do to me, anyway? It wasn't that I was in a "bad mood", really. I'm not wired to get bad-moody; when I'm bluish, I tend just to contract and withdraw. But I could feel myself slipping down a scary slope, and after writing, revising and erasing a paragraph or two of mawkish blather, I just had to jump off that bobsled.

I wanted to write about what it's been like this fall. How, at the tree farm, I kept turning around, and around, and around, to take in the vistas, barely remembering to breathe. How I was imagining the surrounding forested hills sitting quietly in their spring and summer green, then stepping forward in their fall bronze, gold and copper. How I stopped myself from even trying to snap a picture, because I knew that the photographic image would have been so far removed from what I was experiencing that it would have been just this side of blasphemous. (I think I finally understand that whole "stealing your soul" thing.) How, a few weeks ago, I got to see a giant "tree" at the Arboretum which, up close, turned out to be three closely spaced maples (the tallest in the middle), with the three sets of foliage each maturing at a different pace to give the effect of a clown's psychedelic wig. How, walking to the elementary school these mornings, the sidewalk is thronged with Norway maples on the right, which have taken weeks to turn color in a languid slo-mo, so that you see green, and yellow, and orange, all on the same tree, all at the same time. (Norway maple, did I say I hated you? I take it all back.)...and on the left in the school's yards, a pageant of a maple in maroon, a birch in lacy lime green, a crabapple denuded of all but its ruby jewels, more of the fabulous multicolored Norway maples (strike me dumb; I've used "fabulous" and "Norway maple" in the same sentence), and an Amur maple in fluorescent tangerine and yellow.

I want to hoard these memories like treasure, knowing they can't be collected in that way. Although I've gotten better at setting a dry-eyed stone-faced gaze at keepsakes that pass briefly through experience before falling away into fallible and evaporating memory, that doesn't mean that I've gotten any better at letting go. I know that that's the most important lesson of the garden, for Henry Mitchell tells me so, but all the while I know exactly how Elizabeth Lawrence feels when she writes here, of miniature daffodils:

Of all the little bulbs, the flowers of these miniatures are the most endearingly diminutive, the most daintily perfect in proportion, and the most delicate in color. When they are in bloom I feel as if I could not stop looking at them for a moment, and when they are gone I am almost ashamed of the sharpness of my regret.

Elizabeth Lawrence, The Little Bulbs: A Tale of Two Gardens. (Criterion Books, Inc., 1957; reissue ISBN 0822307391.)

I'm smiling

It's time for my favorite gardening ritual of the year...the annual planting of more peonies. This year, it's three plants of 'Bev' (low curtsy to Kathy for the recommendation), with places along Peony Promenade already chosen for them. I also have a new single peony, Coral 'N Gold, for which I need to find the perfect place somewhere...somewhere...but where? Ah, the delicious torment.

I'll also be adding a few new bearded iris to the garden for the first time. I already have Siberian iris (perpetually molested by rabbits), as well as early spring-blooming dwarf reticulated iris, and I've killed a few Japanese iris, but I hadn't made the time, room or plans for any bearded irises until now. I picked up three 'Edith Wolford' today, and will try to choose a reblooming variety or two in time for planting this weekend. What can I say? I can't not grow bearded irises, which were, of course, a legendary favorite of Henry Mitchell, and which are the subject of my favorite-titled piece of his, from Henry Mitchell On Gardening: "Where Iris Is, I'm Smiling."

De gustibus disputandum est

...the orange marigolds that offend the eye when they're planted right next to annual salvias of fire-engine red...

Allen Lacy, from the Introduction to Henry Mitchell On Gardening.

It's funny. I'd been one of those who'd pooh-pooh'd the lowly orange (tagetes) marigold...so much so, in fact, that I'd sought out the creamy-white 'Snowball' marigold for seed-starting because I wanted nothing to do with any marigold that was yellow. Or orange. And red salvias? I thought of them as weeds, because that's how they grew in Korea when I was a child, and I was no more impressed with them as an adult, seeing them vomited out of whiskey barrels laid sideward in fast-food parking lot landscaping. But one of the most beautiful plant combinations that I remember from last summer turned out to be a simple orange marigold and a red salvia, together at the base of a dwarf crabapple tree. That marigold's orange happened to be in perfect harmony with that salvia's red, and the two colors hummed together, the whole transcending the sum of the parts. I've seen marigold-salvia combinations before and since that have been more junk than jewel, but I hope that I'm now able to encounter more beauty by learning not to prejudge where I think I'll find it. For, as Henry Mitchell says in his essay on the daffodil 'Cantatrice', found in the very volume that Allen Lacy introduces:

What happened with the flower is that the road gets wider, to such an expansion that the gardener is led far past a mere flower, however beautiful, to the outer courtyard, almost, of divine things.

Oh, Henry.

He was right, of course:

The blue dawn flower, Ipomoea acuminata, is finally in bloom, and so gracious are its three-inch salvers deeper than sky blue that I cannot complain, though I like it to begin in June, not September. As my plant was new this spring it got started late, and I hope next year will find it blooming right through the summer.

....

The flowers are borne in small clusters on six-inch stems, and while you would say they are the purest of blue, they in fact have much red in them, and this gives the color a somewhat electric quality such as you see in some gentians.

....

Other glorious vines flower now, along with this morning glory, which by the way is rather similar to the often seen 'Heavenly Blue', but which I think is even more beautiful and exciting.

I've wanted this plant since reading about it in January, but I didn't make any effort to hunt it down from a mail-order nursery, strangely...I had this feeling in my bones that I would run into it when the time was right (which is somewhat illogical, since this is a plant that is far from hardy in this zone). And last weekend at the big box, there they were: several fine, full-grown and blooming specimens. I'm a huge fan of 'Heavenly Blue', but Henry Mitchell's right: there's more to the blue in this plant, and it keeps blooming all day long, not just in the morning or when it's sunny. (This picture was taken in mid-afternoon, under cloudy skies, two minutes prior to a major downpour.) As the afternoon turns to evening, the blue will shade to violet, and in the morning, the edges of the bud curl as the flower is finished. Oh yeah, it's not remotely winter-hardy here, which means that I'll need to find a sunlit place indoors to overwinter these. Henry? "I can think of only a few tender plants that are worth the bother of bringing indoors for the winter and setting out again in April and May. But certainly the night jasmine (Cestrum nocturnum), blue dawn flower (Ipomoea acuminata), and white potato vine (Solanum jasminoides) are worth the trouble of getting them safely through the winter." Right again.

Henry Mitchell, Henry Mitchell On Gardening (pub. info here).