Tangled Branches: Cultivated

happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Bloom

Am I the last one to find out about this?

We were in a café in Richmond over the weekend, and said café is also something of a bookstore - just a few shelves of used books. BUT, they had some interesting garden titles, among them Bloom Book: Horti-culture for the 21st Century by Li Edelkoort. Had it not been for the price tag ($75) I would have bought it.

Anyhow, a little research this morning tells me that this is related to a similarly expensive magazine of the same name. Have you heard of it?

BTW, the poppyseed waffle at Café Gutenberg is DEElish.

Update: just found this blog post which is worth reading all by itself.

Labels: books, magazines

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Dear Friend and Gardener

The December/January selection for the Garden Bloggers' Book Club, brainchild of Carol at May Dreams Gardens, is Dear Friend and Gardener by Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd. The book takes the form of two years worth of correspondence between the authors. I knew the names Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd, but my knowledge of their work and accomplishments was only slight. I'd heard of Beth Chatto's famous Gravel Garden and read some short articles by Christopher Lloyd in Country Life. So, I was eager to get to know them better.

The book was perhaps a bit predictable - a lot of "we went here and saw that", "so-and-so came to dinner and we talked about....", "the weather has been miserable", etc. The sort of thing you would expect two friends to tell each other. Except, these letters were not spontaneous communication. They were written as a project for a book publisher. Contrived? Well, maybe. That's what I thought at first, but there was still much to be enjoyed and learned.

One of the most enjoyable aspects was watching the seasons change through the eyes of Chatto and Lloyd. The descriptions of the weather and its effects on their gardens were vivid enough that I could imagine myself there seeing it. Beth Chatto, writing on New Year's Eve:

...the wind is bitter (straight from Russia, so the papers say), but it is brilliantly sunny, even warm on my face as I sit by the window looking out onto the garden. The bleakness of winter is relieved by patches of green; feathery bamboos, various conifers and evergreens, and the bright green algae growing along the shady side of oak boles and branches all illuminated by the long, slanting rays of sunlight. In contrast, leaf-losing trees trees and shrubs form delicate traceries of buff, brown and black against the blinding whiteness of the snow.

This isn't a how-to book, but if you're looking for garden wisdom, you'll find it sprinkled in here and there. A bolt from the blue for me, came in Lloyd's complaint about the renaming of plant families. This happened while I wasn't paying attention and I never knew why. Here's Christopher Lloyd on the subject:

I got in a word with dear old Prof. Willie Stearn, and asked him why we'd been forced into using the suffix 'aceae' for all plant families, thereby impoverishing the English language, which has taken on board words such as composites, umbellifers, crucifers, legumes, labiates and so forth. Apiaceae for Umbelliferae, Poaceae for Gramineae, are not nearly so user-friendly, in any case.

He took my point, but said that we were going back to what Lindley had decreed. Lindley was a great man and his dictum should be followed. Not much comfort there....

Fortunately, the book has a very good index, so if I want to find an exchange about, say, Galanthus, I'll be able to do it easily. I liked the book well enough, and will probably keep it on my shelf to re-read passages and to use as an occasional reference.

I found myself wanting to know more about Chatto and Lloyd. Obviously, I could and should seek out their other books, but internet searches rewarded me with additional details.

Beth Chatto on her friendship with Christopher Lloyd, and how Dear Friend and Gardener came to be
Beth Chatto Gardens website
Great Dixter House and Gardens (some nice pictures and descriptions of the house, which Lloyd mentions frequently in his letters)
Many photos of Great Dixter, taken by Christopher Lloyd's father. Lots to see here, including the young Christopher, a gardener in hat, coat and tie trimming a hedge, and much more
Christopher Lloyd obituary

Labels: books, gbbc

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Green Thoughts, Red Face

Did you read the part of my Green Thoughts review where I said "An illustration would have been nice here"? Ask and ye shall receive.

Annie in Austin kindly pointed out that the cover illlustration on some editions of Green Thoughts was the very illustration I wished to see.

For a nice clear picture of that cover, I refer you to Annie's Addendum.

Those who read that edition must have wondered what I was complaining about.

So, to quote Emily Litella, never mind.

Thanks for helping me out, Annie!

Labels: books, gbbc

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Green Thoughts

When I first opened the cover of Green Thoughts by Eleanor Perényi my heart sank. Approximately 270 pages of small type, no illustrations, very little white space, and no coherent story to draw me along - just a series of essays arranged alphabetically by topic. How on earth was I going to finish this in time for the Garden Bloggers' Book Club November meeting? We still hadn't had a freeze when I began reading, so there was lots to do in the garden plus the holidays coming up....

But I pressed on and I'm glad I did. It's a marvelously dense book, and I mean that as a compliment. Open it to any page and you'll find something interesting, useful, or just opinionated (but learned and well-considered opinions).

A few examples.

Have you read The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon? Have you heard of it? I hadn't. It's very interesting and now on my wish list. Ms. Perényi quotes extensively from it in the essay titled Seeing Eye.

Did you know that in Italy in the sixteenth century trees were pruned and trained to form treehouses? That's really interesting. I wonder how long it would take to grow a good treehouse. An illustration would have been nice here, and she had an engraving in front of her as she wrote.

To me, the most useful tips were in her long section about herbs. I've always been skeptical about putting fresh herbs in the freezer, but she says "Dill...freezes well, especially the fall crop with bulkier foliage. I freeze the stalks in bunches and when I need a tablespoon or two, remove the whole thing and clip from the end..." I can tell you that this works because I tried it after reading about it. Last night's baked potato was topped with fresh-frozen dill. On the subject of the nomenclature and identity of oreganos and majorams, she ends up as uncertain as I, but certain that the plant sold as oregano in the US does not taste like pizza.

A good deal of the book is given over to opinion. Many of these read like blog rants and take the form of "Why can't we....

...find skillful gardeners for hire?
...have clover in the lawn?
...procure seeds of better vegetables?
...find precise instructions for pruning and grafting?

She likes her gardens more formal than I do, but she uses her preference to make the point a garden is a human rearrangement of nature and the skills needed to create a formal garden are vanishing from disuse.

When it comes preferences and opinion, she's particularly vehement in her dislike of Miss Ellen Willmott. I hadn't known much about Miss Willmott before reading this book other than that she has serveral cultivars of various plants named after her. Ms. Perényi begins thusly "...the grand, somewhat tragic, more than a little hateful woman whose garden at Waverly Place...was famous throughout Europe and America..." She goes on to describe Miss Willmott's accomplishments, and then gets right back to dishing the dirt. "It is nevertheless apparent that she was an insufferable woman... She was spiteful, and a terrible, pretentious snob." All this was under the essay titled Two Gardeners, the first part of which is devoted to praising Hidcote and its owner - Lawrence Johnston.

There's humour here too, if a bit subtle. Her story of smuggling French fingerling potatoes into the US, and then finding them for sale in the Gurney's catalog, made me smile.

In short, I liked this book, and if well-written gardening essays are your thing, I think you'll like it too.

Labels: books, gbbc

Monday, October 01, 2007

A Hoe Lot of Trouble and other mysteries

Today being the start of a new month, I was browsing Baer's Agricultural Almanac this morning and happend on this bit of information about my astrological sun sign: ...Marked by perserverance; enjoy mysteries...

Well, that explains it! I read one book for the August/September Garden Bloggers' Book Club, then another and another and even managed to work a video into the mix.

I began with A Hoe Lot of Trouble by Heather Webber. This was a quick read, not requiring much mental effort and therefore a good choice for early August. That said, I don't plan to read any more books by this author. It was a little thin. There wasn't much horticultural content. I didn't find the plot believable. I couldn't work up any sympathy for the main character - Nina Quinn. And mysteries are escapist reading for me - I prefer a setting that carries me away from the here and now, preferably a different century and continent. But I didn't hate it either - I kept turning the pages until the end, nevertheless I was eager to move on to the next book in the stack, which was...

Thyme of Death by Susan Wittig Albert. This I liked. It was detail-rich and well-written, so I overlooked my preference for fiction set in a different time and place. And, besides, Texas is different than the East Coast or the Midwest. There was more horticultural content in this book than A Hoe Lot of Trouble, and further, I didn't quarrel with the author over it. I immediately liked China Bayles, where I reflexively disliked Nina Quinn. I now have the second book in the series on my shelf, and I'm currently reading the first book of a different series by the same author. Haven't made up my mind whether I like that one or not, but definitely will start Witches' Bane when I've finished The Tale of Hill Top Farm.

I had intended to read another Brother Cadfael mystery after Thyme of Death, but I couldn't locate the only one I think I may not have read - The Rose Rent. I saw that one when it aired on PBS, but I can't remember whether I read the book. I loved all the Brother Cadfael books and I have read every other one in the series, even though the characters were mostly predictable. Ellis Peters portrayed Brother Cadfael's world in a way that made me wish I had been there. I particularly admired the way she evoked lives lived closer to nature than we do now. But I couldn't find the book I was looking for, so instead I read the third book in Candace Robb's Owen Archer series - The Nun's Tale. Candace Robb's Middle Ages is much more hard-edged than Ellis Peters', and there isn't much gardening content to these books, but I've enjoyed the first three books in the series. Owen Archer's wife is a master apothecary, so there's the same hook to horticulture as Brother Cadfael, but not all that much detail. Candace Robb's interest in the Middle Ages seems to be more political than horticultural.

Reversing the old-fashioned custom of writing a book first and then adapting it to the screen, we have Rosemary & Thyme. We're back in the present, but still in England for this mystery series. I only watched the first one, and found it rather implausible and a very obvious effort to attract middle-aged women viewers, but the scenery was lovely so I'll give the second show a chance before judging it too harshly.

Another set of semi-horticultural mysteries that I don't believe any of the GBBCers have mentioned is the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout. I've only read the first one of these - Fer de Lance - but I intend to read the rest of them someday. These books have a double horticultural hook - while Nero Wolfe is a reclusive orchid fancier, his creator, Rex Stout, was the brother of Ruth Stout - the queen of mulch.

Labels: books

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

My Summer in a Garden

This summer the Garden Bloggers' Book Club has been taking it easy, reading a short and charming book by Charles Dudley Warner - My Summer in a Garden.

I am inclined to think that the substratum is the same, and that the only choice in this world is what kind of weeds you will have.

That quote sums up the book nicely. Warner good-naturedly chronicled his battles with weeds, marauding animals, and theiving humans - all attempting to thwart his efforts to grow good things to eat. His most vexing enemy was a weed he knew as "pusley". Nowadays we call it purslane, and Warner would be dismayed but not surprised to learn that it's now considered a nutritious crop.

Who can say that other weeds, which we despise, may not be the favorite food of some remote people or tribe? We ought to abate our conceit. It is possible that we destroy in our gardens that which is really of most value in some other place.

Warner gardened in the mid 1800s in the Northeast, but his frustrations and joys are echoed by many of today's garden bloggers. And late summer is a wonderful time to review the frustrations - creatures great and small are intent on consuming the products of our labors. In the present day, I think most of us are happy not to be chasing the neighbor's cow out of the garden, but Warner has nothing at all to say about deer, or Japanese beetles. Different combatants, same war.

The gardener believes that the struggle and toil is worth it. Apparently even in 1870, many things were not regarded as worth doing unless there was a monetary reward. Warner tries to calculate whether his potatoes were profitable, while wishing it wasn't necessary to justify himself in this way.

Shall I compute in figures what daily freshness and health and delight the garden yields, let alone the large crop of anticipation I gathered as soon as the first seeds got above ground? I appeal to any gardening man of sound mind, if that which pays him best in gardening is that which he cannot show in his trial-balance. Yet I yield to public opinion, when I proceed to make such a balance; and I do it with the utmost confidence in figures.

I like old books and clever writing, and this selection for the Garden Bloggers' Book Club seemed custom-designed to please me. I must admit that many of the political references were lost on me, but it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the book. I only wish I had the actual book in my hand instead of reading it on a computer screen. (My alibris.com order didn't arrive.) I'm wondering though, if the reprint editions include all the wonderful old typographical ornaments that the original had. They really set the stage for the author's 1870 style of writing.

Thank you once again Carol, for bringing bloggers together to read and discuss great garden books.

Labels: books

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Passalong Plants / Garden Bloggers' Book Club

I was pleased as could be to learn that the April/May selection for the Garden Bloggers' Book Club was a book I already had on my shelf - Passalong Plants by Steve Bender and Felder Rushing. I started reading about a year ago and just finished a few days ago. Not that it's thick and tedious to read, not at all. It's the kind of plant encyclopedia I wish there were more of - each entry comes with a story. Why would anybody want to grow this plant? How did the author learn of it? Any reason not to grow it? The kind of conversation you might expect from a friend who's just handed you a division or a seedling. But, most people don't sit down to read an encyclopedia from cover to cover. I'd say this is a great browsing book, especially if you're not a plant snob and if you live in zone 6 or better. Or maybe even if you are a plant snob, because some plants only need a new generation of gardeners to make them fashionable again (like Miz Friedman's Montbretia, p. 56).

Felder Rushing has been a Garden Hero of mine ever since I read a profile in the NY Times. There was a quote from him to the effect that his garden was a Southern Old Lady's Garden - she puts what she wants where she wants it, and if you don't like it, you can go home. But I always assumed that his books were not for me, being focused on the Deep South.

So I was surprised at how many of these plants I have. Four O'Clocks, Sweetshrub, Lily of the Valley, Cosmos, Cleome, Money Plant, Spiderwort, just picking a few out at random. And some I used to have, but no longer - Balsam, Hedychium, Bletilla, Moon Vine, Crinum, Tuberose. Did I choose these because they're old-fashioned or because they're easy to grow (in some places) or because everything old is new again? But I chose them all, and I paid for them all. Didn't acquire a single one via the passalong method. And I'm wracking my brain trying to remember if I've ever had any passalong plants. Well, yes, there have been a few houseplants (spider plant comes to mind). And I'm growing some tomatoes this year from seeds my dad saved a couple of years ago (Kellogg's Breakfast, to be specific). But many years ago (over 30), and not in my garden, but in my parents' and grandparents' yards, there grew some plants that spanned 4 generations (if you count me).

My great-grandmother was a collector of a sort - she saved everything. Several months after she died, the family held an estate sale. As I recall, it took place in a long-ago early summer at the house where she spent most of her adult life. This was in central Ohio, and we lived far away in northern Illinois but we had come out to help. Near her front porch grew a large Japanese honeysuckle. Yes, the same one that's now on every Invasive Plant hit list. Well. It was blooming and I had never smelled anything so wonderful in all my young life. I got the bright idea that growing a bit of Grandma Gordon's plant would be a nice remembrance and so I suggested that we take some cuttings and grow them at home. Somebody else got the brighter idea that it would be easier and faster to just dig some up. So we did. To the best of my knowledge, nobody else in northern Illinois had a Japanese honeysuckle. I had certainly never seen one. It grew and grew and my parents whacked it down and it grew back and grew and grew and.......I think they finally pulled it all out one day. Just too much trouble to keep up with it.

Now, of course, I know what a common plant it is (but I still don't know if anybody is purposely growing it in northern Illinois). And here in northern Virginia, I've dutifully ripped it out of the woods behind the house. It keeps coming back.

Maybe this is why:

The neighbors didn't see any reason to get rid of theirs, and at this time of year, I'm glad they didn't.
I'll try to waft a little fragrance your way....

Thanks, Carol, for graciously hosting the Garden Bloggers' Book Club.

Labels: books, heirlooms, weeds

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

The Little Bulbs

I believe that I haven't written a book report since grade school, and I'm not sure I remember how to do it. Carol is graciously letting me get away with writing a review of a completely different book than the one everybody else read for the February Garden Bloggers' Book Club. Thank you, Carol. I chose The Little Bulbs by Elizabeth Lawrence, partly because it was an unread book from my collection and partly because spring is coming and all those little bulbs are going to be blooming any day now.

The subtitle - a Tale of Two Gardens - might lead you to believe that you were picking up a book comparing and contrasting the bulbs grown in different gardens, but the great majority of the book is given over to description of plants generally grown from bulbs (or corms, tubers, etc.) and which are short or possess small flowers or just look more delicate than, say, a Darwin Tulip. It would be interesting to count the number of species described. The author grew most of them in her own garden at one time or another. That's a remarkable accomplishment, but to bring these plants to life on the printed page without photos or illustrations is even more remarkable. Think for a moment about writing a garden blog without the aid of pictures. Hard to imagine? But Miss Lawrence had a wonderful command of her subject and of the English language. Some of the terms she used were unfamiliar to me, particularly the use of color names. Anybody know what Hay's Maroon looks like? How about Indian Lake? (Wasn't that a song by the Cowsills?) She was apparently using color names as set forth in a book by Robert Ridgway - Color Standards and Nomenclature, and she must have had the book in front of her when she was writing up the Ixias. And of course, much of the taxonomy has changed since the book was written in 1957.

All this descriptive prose could get tedious, but Miss Lawrence manages to keep it readable by frequent references to her correspondence with a special garden friend, Mr. Krippendorf, and many other bulb-growing gardeners and merchants as well. One wonders how she found time to garden and keep up with her letter writing and filing. She further rounds out the text by quoting other authors, and detailing her specific experiences with certain bulbs. That said, I have to mention that I liked this book better while I was under the influence of caffeine - or in other words, I couldn't read it in bed at night without dropping off to sleep. It's just not a page-turner.

The book is a pleasant time capsule, but is there any information the modern gardener can put to use? Miss Lawrence's enthusiasm for certain plants is clear, and I'm now thinking of trying some plants I hadn't considered before, especially the fall crocuses and colchicums. Some of the bulbs are still readily available under the same names used in the book. She obtained many of her bulbs from specialist growers and many from friends and correspondents, so they weren't necessarily common in the trade then either.

I'll probably keep this book on my shelf to reread certain sections from time to time, but I doubt I would sit down and read it cover to cover again. I decided to buy The Little Bulbs after I read Gardening for Love: The Market Bulletins, which I thoroughly enjoyed and would reread in its entirety. I'm looking forward to picking up a copy of the book everybody else read - long ago I read Onward and Upward in the Garden, and still have it on my bookshelf.

A couple of pertinent web pages for those who'd like to know more about Elizabeth Lawrence:

The House and Garden of Elizabeth Lawrence
Amaryllids in a Southern Garden. This is a reprint of an article Elizabeth Lawrence wrote for Herbertia, the journal of the International Bulb Society.

P.S. I lied about what time I posted this. I'm ashamed to be late yet again.

Labels: books

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Twigs

Always on my nightstand, for the last 20 years or so, has been The Gardener's Bed-Book by Richardson Wright. It's written in the form of a diary - one entry for each day of the year - with a longer piece each month. Every year I resolve to read it properly, each entry on its day. Every year I fail. Last night while I was getting caught up with February, the suggested activity for February 2nd seemd worth doing. He writes:

If, on one of these days, when Spring seems very far behind, you are seized with a desire for living color, go forth into the garden and make you a bouquet of twigs. ... Bring these home and set them in a bowl under a light: you have color variation, differences in texture and formation on a day when all Nature seems drab.

He offers suggestions - Kerria, Willow, Red-Twig Dogwood - but I have none of these. Looking out the window at the garden I see lots of gray and brown twigs. I cut some and brought them inside. Still gray and brown. I have some very tiny Japanese maples with colorful twigs, but I couldn't bring myself to cut them just yet. I know where to find some twigs with better color, but they're on public property. Nobody would miss just a few, but a little voice in my head says "What if everybody did that?!?".

So I try to appreciate the form and texture, and am reminded of a passage in a book I read over the weekend. Celestine Sibley had tried her hand at Japanese flower arranging and her daughter came into the room:

"It's not very flowery looking, is it?", she asked.
"I should say not, " I said. "Line and texture and feeling are there. Not flowers. Do you sense the somber mood...?"
"Of that stick?" she asked. "Yes, ma'am."

That was a really delightful book, by the way, and thanks so much to Annie for the suggestion.

Now...must order some Kerrias, Willows, etc.

Labels: books, plants for winter, seasons

Friday, December 01, 2006

Wild Weather

Windy, very windy! Just decided to take a break from watching the neighbors' unraked leaves blow into my laboriously raked yard. I hope when the wind shifts later this afternoon, they all go back into the neighbors' yards.

But our weather is positively tame compared with what the Midwest is getting. I wonder how many snowflakes it takes to make, say, 12" of snow over an average sized city? The answer might be somewhere on this site, if one had the time to go through it all. Individually, snowflakes are so pretty. Some of them even look like flowers. Like this one, for instance. And this one looks a lot like Ipheion uniflorum to me.

I'm choosing to ignore winter this year. Yesterday, I bought some hardy (I hope) plants to replant the containers on my front steps for the season. I got white heather (in bloom), creeping cotoneaster (with berries), and variegated English ivy. I promise not to let the ivy escape into the wild, assuming it lives through the winter. If the containers turn out looking like anything at all, I'll post pictures, otherwise forget I said anything.

I'm too late for the Garden Bloggers' Book Club, but I hope to post my review of The Essential Earthman next week. I plan to be on time for December's selection. I don't want to read any of the other reviews before I write mine, so it's time for me to get offline before I'm tempted.

Labels: books, plants for winter, weather

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Tangled Branches: Cultivated

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Bloom

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Dear Friend and Gardener

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Green Thoughts, Red Face

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Green Thoughts

Monday, October 01, 2007

A Hoe Lot of Trouble and other mysteries

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

My Summer in a Garden

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Passalong Plants / Garden Bloggers' Book Club

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

The Little Bulbs

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Twigs

Friday, December 01, 2006

Wild Weather