Bookish Gardener

Literary gardens

Looks like Prairie Tide and I have a book in common in our garden libraries: The Literary Garden: Recreating Literature's Most Beautiful Gardens in Your Own Backyard. This book combines garden-related excerpts from classic literary works with illustrations, history and how-to information for the plants, flowers and garden creatures featured in the works. I picked up this book about a year ago (in the bargain section of the very same bookstore chain mentioned in Laurie's post) and have enjoyed it too. You can open this book to almost any page and be fascinated by the words of Proust, Fitzgerald, Cather, or Turgenev, just to name a few...but I have a quirky fancy for L. Frank Baum, whose The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is excerpted for the scene where Dorothy, Toto and the Lion are felled by the sweet scent of a vast field of scarlet poppies.

There's another literary garden on the web these days at ever so humble, where you'll find photos, quotes and impressions artfully spotlighting some of our favorite garden friends. Enjoy a leisurely stroll and pick yourself a bouquet of honeysuckle, blue flag iris, daisies, chives, and phlox.

The Literary Garden: Recreating Literature's Most Beautiful Gardens In Your Own Backyard. Duncan Brine (introduction), Lea Richardson and Jesse Kaplan (illustrations). Berkley Books, 2001. ISBN 0-425-18341-6.

Newly blooming: David Austin English rose 'Graham Thomas'; Anagallis arvensis (pimpernel—Baroness Emmuska Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel is featured in The Literary Garden, although what I'm growing is a blue-flowered variety); Papaver somniferum (breadseed poppy—Surrender Dorothy!).

Rose to the occasion

Time to stop and smell the roses. It's that all too brief moment in the season when they're fresh, flush, and as yet unmolested by descending hordes of Japanese beetles. The rose pictured above, the David Austin rose 'Redouté', is perfection in a punchy pale pink. It survived last winter without any protection and suffered only inches, if that, of winterkill on its stems. If last season's performance is any indication, it'll rebloom heavily into autumn.

For someone who's never drawn up a garden plan with a rose in it, I've ended up with a lot of them: besides 'Redouté', there's 'Bibi Maizoon', 'Othello', and 'Graham Thomas' of the David Austin line; polyanthas 'Fairy' and 'Red Fairy'; rugosa roses 'Roseraie de l'Haÿ' and 'Blanc Double de Coubert'; and native Rosa carolina. But I still don't think of myself as the rose "type". I picture the quintessential rose gardener as someone who wafts gracefully and charmingly through rows of perfect pampered specimens. And so it seems to be in Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden by the writer-naturalist-poet-pilot-gardener Diane Ackerman:

The first roses of the season have unfurled—two pink spicy-smelling Paris de Yves Saint Laurent. "Mes roses," I say as I cut them, echoing Cocteau's rose-adoring, sensitive beast in the film La Belle et la Bête.

Being more oaf than diva, "mes D'ohs" is more like what you'll find me saying in the garden (ask me about the rusty whiskey-barrel-band metal shard I managed to jam deep underneath my fingernail a few weeks ago). I've also tended toward a knee-jerk contrarian reaction against the overdone romantic symbolism of the rose, ever since getting two dozen long-stems in my youth from a would-be beau with stalker tendencies. (A hat, on the other hand...now that's romantic.) But there's no reason to begrudge my roses their involuntary baggage. Taken for what they are, there's no other flower with petals as soft and scent as sweet. I'm happy to have them.

Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden by Diane Ackerman. Perennial, 2002 (paperback). ISBN 0060505362.

Newly blooming: Allium nigrum; Allium caeruleum; yellow Dutch iris; Lamium maculatum 'White Nancy'; self-sown Borago officinalis (borage); Cynoglossum amabile (Chinese forget-me-not); Agastache neomexicana (New Mexico hummingbird mint); peonies 'Alberta Kelsey' (Kelsey, 1937), 'Sarah Bernhardt' (Lemoine, 1906), and 'Ann Cousins' (Cousins, 1946); Cotinus coggygria (smokebush); and clematis 'Comtesse du Bouchard' and 'Rhapsody'.

Reading and writing (and chatting): You Grow Girl

My interview of YouGrowGirl's Gayla Trail is featured this week at Saucy, where you'll also find my review of You Grow Girl, the book.

Newly blooming: Lavandula angustifolia (lavender), Knautia macedonia (crimson scabious), and Cerastium tomentosum (snow-in-summer).
 

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!

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).

Reading and writing: Seeds of Wealth

My review of the book Seeds of Wealth is up at Saucy.

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.

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!