Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Friday, February 13, 2009
Great Backyard Bird Count
There's still time to count and report your backyard birds to the Great Backyard Bird Count, if you haven't yet. Most of today's birds were the usual suspects (like the White-breasted Nuthatch above), but a few Pine Siskins are still here, and a Yellow-rumped Warbler was lurking nearby.
Not a great photo, but good enough to prove I didn't make it up.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Beautiful at All Seasons
As I read Beautiful at All Seasons by Elizabeth Lawrence - the Garden Bloggers' Book Club selection for April/May - I had to keep reminding myself that these essays appeared weekly for 14 years in a newspaper column. I wonder if the readers of the Charlotte Observer realized how lucky they were to have such charming and learned writing delivered to their doorsteps. This is the third Elizabeth Lawrence book I've read and now I feel I must read them all.
What I admired espcially is the sense that the reader is accompanying Miss Lawrence on her own gardening odyssey. Unlike some garden writers (Henry Mitchell), she doesn't give the impression that she thinks she knows everything - quite the contrary, she seems to be constantly reading, experimenting, attending lectures, and corresponding with gardeners and vendors.
Some of her gardening friends appear frequently in these columns. Mr. Krippendorf, I'd met in reading The Little Bulbs, but I'd always wondered about Caroline Dormon and so was pleased to find "Meet Caroline Dormon" on page 179. "Miss Dormon is the kind of gardener who wants to plant everything that grows, and she corresponds with her kind in England, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia." Sort of like Miss Lawrence. No wonder they got along so well.
I hadn't thought of Elizabeth Lawrence as a humorous garden writer, and she doesn't seem to have a bad word to say about anybody, so I was caught off guard to read her thoughts on what would happen if the public were encouraged to plant crape myrtles as street trees. "I have two objections to their wholesale planting on city streets. One is that the colors most likely to appeal to the general public are the hot rose reds and watermelon pinks. We already have too many of these. The other reason is that few householders are likely to allow crape myrtles to grow into graceful little trees. Most of them are going to grow them as shrubs, butchering them every year so that all winter long they are a bunch of hideous sticks, and in summer a menace to traffic as they block the view of oncoming cars." I wonder if she was thinking of azaleas when she wrote about too many hot rose reds and watermelon pinks. Elsewhere in the book (and I can't find it now) she wrote about a plant as being "one of those that we are constantly removing in order to plant more azaleas". These passages made me smile, but they're not typical. Most of the columns are gentle suggestions about interesting or useful plants and garden features.
But I have one serious disagreement with Miss Lawrence. How on earth could she encourage people to plant Smilax? After having seen Smilax growing over a doorway, she wrote "It seems a pity that these charming and useful native vines are so seldom grown". Useful? I've been clearing impenetrable tangles of at least two species of Smilax from the woods for a while now. I can't hope to eliminate it, but I do hope to tame it. But useful? Hmm, maybe, possibly, to the birds certainly. But humanly useful? Well, I learned in that column that the owner of the doorway Smilax waits to cut it down until there's an occasion to use the trimmings as a decoration. Aha, there's an idea.
Yes, useful. And if you want any, stop by my place and cut all you like.
As when I read The Little Bulbs, I felt I should have been taking notes the whole time. That's not my style of reading, however, and I'll just have to search and reread from time to time. That won't be a chore, believe me.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Purple Finches and the Other GBBC
I resisted the temptation to put up a bird feeder at the country house for about a year and a half. I didn't want to create a squirrel vermin problem where none existed, and I figured the birds had been getting along just fine without my help. But along about mid-January when I couldn't see the end of winter, my desire to watch birds while sitting by the window with a cup of tea got the best of me. My self-imposed rule was that I wouldn't buy a new feeder. Not much of a rule, considering that I had several feeders which proved not quite squirrel-proof that were taking up space in the garage. It took the birds about a week to find the feeder, but when they did, it was the same old backyard birds that frequent the northern Virginia feeders - chickadees, titmice, juncos, nuthatches. I think I was secretly hoping for something more exotic in the country. Well, last weekend I got something interesting if not exotic - purple finches!
House finches are often mistaken for purple finches (tips for distinguishing them here), and I have house finches in abundance in northern Virginia, but rarely see a purple finch there. So I wasn't expecting much when I raised the binoculars to look at the reddish bird on the feeder. Hmmm, I thought, that looks like a purple finch. And another and another and... I had trouble counting them, but I think there were about 5 adult males and 5 or 6 females or juvenile males. These two look like they just had a spat and want to get away from each other. I know, I know - don't anthropomorphize.
I hope they hang around until this weekend for the Great Backyard Bird Count (not to be confusing with the other GBBC, the Garden Bloggers' Book Club). If you have a window and a spare half-hour or so, please consider participating. Sometimes you discover birds in your yard you didn't know were there. I've been counting for several years now, but I think it was my very first count where I saw my very first ruby-crowned kinglet. I probably wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't been trying very hard to see and list all the birds in the yard.
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
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!
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.
