Bookish Gardener

Put on the red light

Geranium 'Rozanne'

Ah...the weekend that was. Three Whole Days of weeding, and mulching, and (plant) shopping, and (plant) planting, and (picture) snapping, and (garden) gazing (the peonies this year are early, tall, and gorgeous), all under temperate skies—not too hot, not too cold, not too sunny, not too rainy. Heavenly!

Or so it would be, but for the strange syndrome that affects me after extended periods of silence in the garden: the uninvited earworm, summoned by the merest and feeblest association with a plant name:

Roz - anne
You don't have to put on the red light
Roz - anne
You don't have to put on the red light

Last summer, growing tomatoes, it was:

Cherokee Pur - ple
Cherokee Tri - ibe
So proud to live,
So proud to dieeeeeee

And, judging from the self-sown seedlings showing up in the back border, later this summer it'll be:

Love - cle-o-me
Cle-o-me
Cle-o-me

Won't you please, please help me?

Today is fantastic Friday

The sign in the first-grade classroom reads: "Today is fantastic Friday."

My seven-year-old tugs at my sleeve and asks, "Eight o'clock tonight, right?"

It's our new Friday night routine: me and our new little Whovian watch the revived Doctor Who (the "first" season, which originally aired last year in the UK), with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor—thrilling, smokin' hot, and, (as this Doctor would say,) Fantastic!

We're already more than halfway through this incarnation of the Doctor, whose 13-episode lifespan will turn out to be shorter than that of a Firefly.

In the episode "Rose," an obsessed amateur who's been investigating and tracking the Doctor shows Rose (the Doctor's companion in this series) photos with evidence of the Doctor's time-travelling appearances in pivotal scenes in history: the JFK assassination, the launch of the Titanic, the eruption of Krakatoa. If he had dug deeper, he might have also unearthed evidence of the Doctor's influence in the history of popular music:

If you wanna feel groovy, give the Doctor a call:


Called the Doctor, woke him up:



Doctor! Doctor! Can't you see I'm burnin', burnin':

Doctor, Doctor, gave me the news:


I got a bad case of lovin' [Who].

Sow what

Well, I
said

This year would be
different

An end to order-
ing; seed lust border-
ing on a mani-
a for which there's no cure

But then they came

Select Seeds,
Fedco, Pinetree

Tantalizingly
beckoning, siren
songs calling to me

Variegated po-
lygonum kissing over
garden gates

Wave at me pet-
unias

Salvia argentea,
splendens, coccinea
and farinacea to
save me

'Orange Fanta-
sia'
'Bright Lights'
'Black Velvet' and
'Lemon'

'Envy'
my zinnias
and soybeans
of green

The plumèd
celosia and
ama-
ranth love-lies-bleeding

Rows of
merlot for lettuce

Pass down the heirloom
Amish snap peas climb up
when the tulip's in bloom

Snap-
dragons
'Liberty'
launching 'Rocket'

'Dia-
mond' eggplant, 'Burgundy'
okra, squash
'Magda' cousa

Somniferum
pa-
paver,
calendulas,
consolidas, mal-
vas

A hundred packets of seed
You may de-
ride my greed

SO WHAT

Miles and Eddie, I am sow, so sorry.

Burying the lied

Madonna's over, or so saith Camille Paglia (subscription or site pass required). But that news is at least twenty years old. "In the Groove", which came out in 1985 (Madonna's best dance song, and for that matter one of the best dance songs of all time, if we're getting hyperbolic here), was the last song in which Madonna would be successful in using her sticky-fingered street urchin persona to distract us from her, well, fundamental repellence. Paglia's piece is an amusing read, but concludes with a predictable disrobing-in-the-middle-of-Main-Street stunt, as she writes of "Chaka Khan's phenomenal 'Ain't Nobody' -- which I would argue is an art song that bears comparison to Schubert's famous 'Serenade.'" I'll need more than a moment to dig myself out of that steaming pile, but then let me say: Chaka Khan is a phenomenal singer, and was never more so than in her work with the uniquely talented musicians of Rufus in the '70s. In her solo work, her vocal gifts (thenceforth responsible for begetting Whitney, who begat Mariah) don't do much more than transform mediocre songs into songs that you don't mind listening to, but mediocre songs they are nonetheless. Such as "Ain't Nobody": with pedestrian lyrics ("Ain't nobody / loves me better / makes me happy / makes me feel this way"), a melody that sounds like it was composed by someone who was limited to five keys on a toy piano, and a beat, too fast for funk and too slow for disco, that mostly goes nowhere.

The Paglia disco playlist is not bad, although it includes too many songs that are better to listen to than to dance to. (I like that it includes the often-overlooked Rick James's "You and I", and especially "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" by The Gap Band...if this song doesn't make you break out into an Apache war dance as it beats down the door of your house with its chthonic boom-boom-boom, get your pulse checked.) May I immodestly suggest Bookish Gardener's disco playlist, instead.

The spheres are in commotion

Pardon this detour into escapism. Work has been in overdrive this week, and there is nothing I can say that can do justice to the continuing suffering on the Gulf Coast [wordless motion of head to link at top of right sidebar]. This meme from Robert at The LLama Butchers is just what I need right now: Go to Music Outfitters and find their list of the 100 top songs for the year you graduated from high school. Bold the ones you liked, strike the ones you hated, and leave alone the ones to which you were indifferent or that you can't remember. Since I seem to be under an attack of blessed rage for useless order right now, I've tweaked the categories a bit, as follows:

Bold: Would listen to an oldies station that had this song on the playlist
Italicized bold: Would start singing along and dancing in the car when the oldies station played this song
Unchanged: "Meh," but wouldn't change the station
Small font: Don't remember this song
Strikeout: Would change the station if this came on the oldies station
Brown strikeout: Would change the station, then puncture my eardrums with a chopstick, if this came on the oldies station

These songs are from the year 1976, the year that my high school graduation present was a store-brand turntable/radio/8-track/cassette player combo (as a rule, there is always one component on these multifunction gizmos that does not work; the cassette player was the one that was kaput out of the box), and when I spent many hours and a not insignificant chunk of my meager discretionary starving-student income at the Reynolds Club basement record store, buying albums for the first time:

1. Silly Love Songs, Paul McCartney and Wings
2. Don't Go Breaking My Heart, Elton John and Kiki Dee.  Even though I was in a major Elton John phase then, I could take or leave this one.
3. Disco Lady, Johnnie Taylor. Oh yes I am.
4. December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night), Four Seasons
5. Play That Funky Music, Wild Cherry
6. Kiss And Say Goodbye, Manhattans
7. Love Machine (Part 1), The Miracles
8. 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, Paul Simon
9. Love Is Alive, Gary Wright
10. A Fifth Of Beethoven, Walter Murphy and The Big Apple Band. I plead the fifth.

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.

Joey, Joey, Joey

I've dipped a toe into water gardening this season with this half whiskey barrel. (Which whiskey? The interior of the barrel was still fragrant as we carried it out of the garden center. One deep whiff each, and my husband and I looked at each other and said: "Jack Daniel's.") For this instant garden, put in a plastic barrel liner, and just add water. Toss in a Bacillus thuringiensis mosquito-larvae-killing donut, and let the water sit for a few days to off-gas the chlorine. This garden is "planted" with triangle-stemmed dwarf papyrus, parrot's feather, horsetail rush, some submerged oxygenating plants, and the lovely hardy water lily pictured above, 'Joey Tomocik'. Its gently fragrant bloom is a bright, but not strident, pale yellow. The undersides of the leaves are wine-colored, and the tops of the leaves are lightly splotched with the same color. The flower is held up above the surface of the water, opening in bright sunlight and closing by mid-afternoon. After a day or so, as future blooms lie loosely coiled underwater, then it's time to go...time to go.

Newly blooming: Tricyrtis hirta (toadlily); Impatiens balsamina 'Blackberry Trifle' (self-sown).

School's out for summer

Photo credit: Jessamyn Roll

Newly blooming: Polyantha roses 'The Fairy' and 'Red Fairy'; David Austin English rose 'Othello'; Nigella damascena (love-in-a-mist); Lychnis coronaria (rose campion); hosta (green with gold edge, unknown cultivar); Erigeron annuus (daisy fleabane); Gaillardia aristata (blanketflower); purple Dutch iris; Papaver rhoeas (corn poppy); lavatera (rose mallow, unknown cultivar); tradescantia (spiderwort, unknown cultivar); Stachys byzantina (lambs' ear); Valeriana officinalis (garden heliotrope); Oenothera tetragona (sundrops); Oenothera macrocarpa (Missouri evening primrose); Hemerocallis 'Double Cutie' and 'Black-eyed Stella' daylilies; Digitalis ambigua (yellow foxglove); Campanula glomerata (clustered bellflower); Veronica austriaca ssp. teucrium 'Crater Lake Blue' (creeping speedwell).

Babel on

For this spring fever interlude (courtesy of Robert the LLama Butcher), take the lyrics to a song, and translate it in Alta Vista Babel Fish from English to German, then German to French, then French to English. Think of it as a game of telephone gone very, very wrong:

Why you establish me with the butter flower,
the baby made precisely
confuse me in the passage and me around
and then most badly all
it that you never name, baby,
if it to say that to become to him,
I love you still me requires you more
however than darlin' you know all the world,
than I have as of the beginning,
therefore me butter flower, made not break my heart to establish

Here's the original. All liability for intentional infliction of earwormial distress is hereby disclaimed.

Newly blooming: Allium moly (mountain bells); Nepeta faassenii (catmint); Clematis integrifolia (solitary clematis); Petunia x violacea 'Laura Bush'; Salvia x sylvestris 'Blue Hill'.

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.