True Dirt

in my mother's garden

Sunday I loaded up my flat of poppies (papaver hybrids), pentstemon, and snapdragon and drove to my parents' place about an hour away. It was a startlingly bright morning with no storm clouds in sight. There has been so much rain, so many storms these last four weeks that a moment of sun caused me to squint deeply as if I had emerged from long habitation in a cave. I counted on the blue skies to give me a few hours to get all the plants in the ground, and then for predictions of a new storm today to provide the post-interrment watering.

I had some trepidation on the drive over. My mother, who has just turned 80, and is rather frail, recently took a fall in which she fractured her pelvis. Painful, and it required her to use a walker, but it wasn't a break requiring surgery. I've been fretting about the health of my elderly parents and their need for some help around the house. In fact, they are tenacious and stubborn and don't want my help, or anyone else's. My mother loves company, eating, and playing dominoes. My father, a crank by nature (not age), is sometimes garrulous when he is pitching some new philosophy or crank idea, but often prefers to remain out of sight when there are visitors.

I was hoping that the planting project would give me something positive to focus on, and limit the visit to the bit of gardening and maybe a game of dominoes. When I arrived, my mother, looking startlingly thin, declared she was "off the walker" and to prove it, lurched determindly about the kitchen in her robe. I asked her if she would like to go out to lunch at Mike's, a little cafe we frequent nearby in the sleepy business district of this aging, and weirdly metamorphosing suburb (more about that later). She said no. I think. Her hearing is quite impaired these days, as is her speech, and I really wasn't sure if she knew what I had asked, or was able to articulate what she wanted. A kind of metaphor for our relationship.

I gathered up my tools--my gloves, Felcos, and a narrow trowel--and went out front to the raised planters where I intended to deposit my spring bloomers. Now this front garden is a strange affair, evoking highly structured 1960s design and yet coming off as a sort of kitchen garden with a central diamond-shaped planter surrounded by triangular planters, separated by cement-pebble paths and surrounded by a low split-rail fence. It fronts the ranch house facade, and is adjacent to a pitched-roof carport--the only one on a street of ranch/bungalows fronted by enclosed two-car garages.

This is all beside the point to my mother. She simply filled in the weird architectural spaces with the most traditional of garden mainstays--hybrid tea roses along the fence, and a series of spring blooming bulbs in the planters: tulips, Dutch iris, poppies in the center planter, and bearded iris, penstemon and dahlias in the triangular ones. Then my father filled in the blanks around the rail fence with man-plants: hedge juniper, hedge privet, and the indestructible glossy-leaved star jasmine.

I proceed to the planters and realize I have to pull out a pile of weeds before I can plant. That takes a while. The my mother yells out the open window (her bedroom overlooks the front garden) to hurry up and get the plants in because she wants to go to Mike's. Who knew. I plop the plastic pots on the ground where I want them to go and stab the wet dirt, thinking it should be softer than it is. Oh well. I get the poppies in, then the pentstemon, and lastly the Antirrhinum "double apricot azalea" purported to have a scent (unlike any other snapdragon I've met).

My mother appears at the door all dressed and raring to go. It occurs to me that she has gotten a hankering for a hamburger and fries, foods she is not supposed to eat but has a passion for. Then my father appears in the front where I am packing up my garden tools, and says "what's happened to the Eureops!" He is apparently referring to the massive, rather gouche shrub covered with primary yellow daisy flowers that has fallen over with the weight of rain and it's own prolificness. I had no idea it was a Eureops or that my father knew Latin plant names.

I ponder the fact that there are still surprises to be experienced with these two ancient beings I am the product of, as my mother and I lunch on tuna melt (me) and hamburger with lots of mayo (her), and she sips her (forbidden) glass of chardonnay. Life is sweet.

a few new things

for spring....

a poem: from Austin Valentine at Watermelon Moon that reminded me how truly surprising compost can be.

an appreciation: while we in the Mediterranean climes may be planting our tender annuals, Garden Djinn reminds me that Zone 5 is still thawing; a first crocus in the Hogglebog garden evokes the spare beauty of a northern spring.

a puzzle: from Kathy Purdy at Cold Climate Gardening, e.g. what would you do with 14 acres of land to garden? For myself, it's an overwhelming notion. But then there's this idea I had for a massive labyrinth of fruit trees and berry hedges....

another way to grow tomatoes: and "early adopter" Amy Stewart has signed up for the Fog-Buster Tomato Trial; check it out at Dirt. Just when I thought I'd given up on Early Girl forever....

plant women

Gertrude Jekyll notwithstanding, most of the big names in plant history, plant collecting, and gardening are men's--Pliny the Elder, Carolus Linnaeus (the culprit who gave us Latin plant names), Sir Joseph Banks, Capability Brown, and Graham Stuart Thomas, to name a few. Arbiters of gardening taste such as Rosemary Verey and Martha Stewart are not to be discounted but there are a lot of women in the history of plant discovery and garden innovation that have not quite gotten their due. I think Miss Ellen Willmott is one of them. The intrepid California amateur botanist and writer Lester Rowntree is another.

Cercocarpus traskiae immediately brings to mind the wind-blown slopes and sheltered cañons of the Santa Barbara Channel Islands where Mrs. Trask went plant exploring--Lester Rowntree, in Hardy Californians (1936)

The hardy Californians Rowntree is referring to are plants; quite hardy herself, Lester traveled solo throughout the deserts and mountains of the west during the 1920s and 30s in her car (a Model A or T or something of that ilk), camping out and tramping through what any backpacker or desert rat knows is wild and often hostile terrain, taking notes and photographs. I can only imagine how Mrs. Trask, some decades earlier, got around Santa Catalina Island.

My first field guide to California wild flowers was written by a woman. Mary Elizabeth Parsons' "The Wild Flowers of California," was published in 1897, just four years after the hugely popular "How To Know the Wildflowers" by Mrs. William Starr Dana. From opposite coasts, the American public was being introduced to native botanicals by a couple of ambitious plant women.

Parsons and Dana were just emerging from an era when women did not publish, at least under their own (female) name. Think of the Georges--Eliot and Sand. Miss Willmott, of Eryngium fame, managed to publish what would be considered today a scholarly work and not many read it. Her illustrator, however, an artist by the name of Alfred Parsons is more well known. Graham Stuart Thomas reproduced a number of Parsons' watercolors from Miss Willmott's book in his "A Garden of Roses".

What we know of Miss Ellen Willmott falls into the "eccentric" category for the most part even though she obviously had a kind of talent. Here is how she is described in a short piece by Ilene Sternberg at theBrooklyn Botanic garden web site:

Miss Ellen Willmott, a great plantswoman of the same era, dwindled away a fortune largely owing to her gardening obsession. When she outgrew her 50 acres in Essex, she bought a French château and an Italian villa to plant up, at one point employing more than 80 gardeners. Imperious and autocratic, she would blow her stack over the presence of a single weed in the garden or the discovery that the bloom time of one of her plants had been imprecisely documented. Her descent into bankruptcy never interfered with her purchase of any rare plant she coveted....Once, detained for shoplifting, Willmott called upon her friend the Queen to intercede. The department store, after a yearlong hullabaloo, had to apologize for its "error." As her fortune faded, Willmott became increasingly paranoid, toting a revolver in her handbag, booby trapping her home against intruders, and having her daffodil display trip-wired so that air guns would blast anyone attempting to filch a few.

Well, who of us has not veered close to the cliff of bankruptcy in the throes of garden or plant obsession? As for the revolver, a bit extreme. But the air guns are pure poetry.

Miss Willmott did not spend all her money on herself however, and I won't let her get dumped in the dustbin of botanical oddpersons. She also supported plant hunting expeditions, in particular those of Ernest Wilson who made four famous trips to China and collected some 1500 species of plants that were then introduced to the "west". On Wilson's third trip to China, he found, high in the Tibetan Plateau near the source of the Min River, a brilliant blue-flowering plant--Ceratostigma. He sent some seeds back to Harvard, a sponsor of the expedition, and the director of Harvard's arboretum sent the seeds on to Miss Willmott; she propagated two plants in her garden at Warley Place, Essex. The species was subsequently classified by Kew Gardens in 1914 as Ceratostigma willmottianum. Miss Willmott also gave several specimens of the rare plant to her friend Gertrude Jekyll.

And what gardener would not.

(this unattributed photo is from the web)

$110 and 29 plants later....

On a beautiful, blustery, sunshiney, non rainy Sunday my friend Brenda and I drove out to Annie's nursery in Richmond to engage in some serious garden shopping. Brenda had not been before and I warned her not to hyperventilate when we finally reached the gates of paradise. There actually are gates. Since the last time I was at Annie's a year ago a rather impressive entryway has been built, including a wall and stately gates with lamps atop. This seems rather grand in the context of the neighborhood which is a dilapidated but thriving semi-industrial area crisscrossed by old railroad tracks and dotted with cyclone-fence enclosed empty lots.

To get there you must print out a map from Annie's web site because the usual Yahoo or Google maps will get you lost. After leaving the freeway on San Pablo Dam Rd. (the dam is important; we took the San Pablo Rd. exit which turned out to be a mile or two in the wrong direction), you proceed into the tiny village of San Pablo and its casino which is nearly as big as the town; turn left at the WalMart and leave the strip malls and parking lots behind as you drive over railroad tracks and past small four-corner business districts and tiny bungalows until at last you see the brightly colored and welcoming sign for Annie's.

We enter the yard (Brenda gasps) and pick up our little red wagons, upended against the board-clad trailer that serves as a check-out counter and lounge area for the staff. We bypass the small demonstration garden at the entry and head straight for the rows of tables stretching to the horizon upon which are massed the green plastic four-inch pots of garden dreams.

We started with the California natives section where I picked up several pots of "meadow foam" (Limnanthes douglasii), a bountiful yellow groundcover that reseeds easily (but had been devoured in my garden this year by starving slugs); "slender hair grass" (Deschampsia elongata), that is good for shady borders and doesn't get too big; a stunning pale pink penstemon (palmeri), native to the high desert but somehow adaptable to adobe soil (if well drained) and (my holy grail) scented; a grey-leaved pale blue lupine (formosus), and a "sticky" phacelia (Phacelia viscida) which grows on the coast in sandy soils (so that will be a test case in my very unsandy garden).

I also stumbled onto my new obsession. In addition to the old obsessions, every gardener I know gets struck by a new obsession periodically, usually in spring, as if Eros had a sideline business hooking up plants and people. This year it's Papavers. I know it's an obsession because I didn't even stop to think about appropriate soils or bloom time. I just went gaga for the colors. I justified it all by telling myself that the poppies would be perfect in my Mother's somewhat barren raised planters and that I could plant them all out next Sunday (Mother's Day). This may actually require a stealth planting, a la Miss Willmott. Anyway, I was besotted by the following poppy plants: Papaver "Drama Queen", P. rhoeas "Dawn Chorus", breadseed poppies (the kind whose seeds appear on your bagel) "Lavender Breadseed" and "Persian Princess", P. "Raspberry Ripple", and P. setigerum "Poppy of Troy".

Just to round out the collection, I also picked up some unusual hybrids--for color, of course--including a couple of columbines (Aquiligia chrysantha "flore pleno", and A. vulgaris "magpie"), some peach-colored Cosmos, and a spectacular double pinky orange snapdragon (Antirrhinum "Double Azalea Apricot") touted to have a tropical scent. Killer.

Cretan Poppy Goddess of Health and Euphoria

Miss Willmott's ghost

It was actually Miss Willmott's peas that first got my attention, on a seed packet rack at the local garden and hardware store. Very pink and, as the lovely packet cover informs, an "heirloom" variety from 1901. After planting the sweet peas and impaling the seed packet to the accompanying wire trellis, and then whimsically photographing the packet (see last entry), an errant memory floated to the surface of my distracted brain. I went into the house and rifled through the flotsom on my desk to find the stack of seed packets left there since returning from London last fall. There was Eryngium 'Miss Wilmott's Ghost'. Apart from the alternate spelling of the name, I guessed this was one and the same Miss. (Her peas are the correct spelling).

Names are important to the gardener. Whether Latin, Linnean or common the gardener lives by plant names, and those names all tell a story. My poppy may not be Flander's poppy but we have a beginning. Latin may not be your cup of chai but if you want a "tulip tree" you had better learn the difference between Liriodendron tulipifera and Magnolia soulangiana. Both are commonly called "tulip tree" but one is a huge, small-flowered, poplar-like native of the eastern United States and the other is a small, slow-growing, spectacular flowering tree native to China. Both are in the magnolia plant family. ( If learning Latin is right up there on your to-do list with changing the car's oil filter, try "Gardener's Latin," a lexicon by Bill Neal; you will learn that edulis means "edible" - as in the mushroom Boletus edulis.)

Then there are the honorifics, ubiquitous in the world of rose growing; "the madames" I call them. Named for grand dames of the Second Empire, European queens, and movie stars these flowers aim to flatter or to sell, and all are carefully selected and developed by professional hybridizers.

Another category of names are the ones that have become attached to a plant, often a hybrid but sometimes not, through legend and history; Jimson weed, that infamous member of the potato (Solanaceae) family known for poisoning cattle and causing hallucinations (and possibly death) in humans, is also Jamestown weed, named for the ill-fated Virginia colony where the Powhatan chief's daughter Pocahontus fell in love with the English sea captain John Smith. The plant, which the native people added in small quantities to their smoking tobacco, became notorious seventy years after the founding of Jamestown when colonists added it to the salads of British soldiers come to put down the uprising known as Bacon's Rebellion, with apparently comic result:

In this frantic condition they were confined, lest they should, in their folly, destroy themselves- though it was observed that all their actions were full of innocence and good nature. Indeed, they were not very cleanly; for they would have wallowed in their own excrements, if they had not been prevented. A thousand such simple tricks they played, and after 11 days returned themselves again, not remembering anything that had passed. The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705, Robert Beverly

I have not forgotten Miss Willmott. An English woman of independent means, a friend of Gertrude Jekyll and a fanatic gardener herself, she also underwrote plant hunting expeditions, and wrote an exhaustive history of the rose, The Genus Rosa. It is also said that she had a habit of carrying seeds of her favorite garden flower in her pockets and, when visiting friends, would secretly scatter them about. What eventually sprouted in the unsuspecting gardener's borders were the silvery-blue, perniciously spiked flowers of Eryngium giganteum--Miss Willmott's ghosts.

you don't need a weatherman...

But you might need an Almanac. Sitting here at my window watching the rain fall on my just-interred plantlets I got to thinking about how long this late winter (ah, today is the first day of spring) monsoon might linger, a longer rainy season portending some unusual benefits for the gardener (longer planting season for perennials and biennials) and some disappointing drawbacks (wait and wait and wait for the right time to plant annuals and food crops).

This winter I didn't have to worry about frost killing the dwarf Meyer lemon in its terra cotta pot, or the cymbidiums. But who could have predicted multiple hail events? Pretty much made mush of the camellias, and turned the delicate ivory pinwheels of the Clematis armandii to crumpled spotted spokes. I was watering by hand in December to keep potted things alive that had emerged during the unexpected warm and windy days. But in March it looks like a few California native buckwheats succumbed to too much rain (is that possible?). I did plant my sweet pea seeds but now I wonder if they have drowned or been devoured by slugs. The slug poison seems to have been diluted to mere indigestion levels or washed away altogether.

Out of curiosity I went browsing for some historical weather data for my bit of the planet....

For the San Francisco Bay region (from the Wine Country north of the bay to Silicon Valley in the south, and including the Santa Cruz coastal mountains and the east Bay coastal hills) average rainfall ranges from as much as 60 inches a year (that's 5 feet - or to the top of my head) in the Santa Cruz mountains, to 14 inches (could slosh your Wellingtons) in the Silicon (nee Santa Clara) Valley.

In San Jose in 1918, four days of rain in September (a highly unusual month for rain in this region) swamped the entire prune plum crop that had been set out on the ground to dry, prompting one observer to remark that "Every corner of the valley smelled like a distillery..." Needless to say, there were no prunes that year for sufferers of irregularity.

Rainstorms in 1861, 1918, and 1982 were "100,000 year events" bringing deluge and floods to the Bay Area. Considering the frequency of these events it might be suggested that they be renamed "60-year events so far".

There have been nine El Nino/La Nina (boy/girl) years since 1950, the year this badly-named and near incomprehensible oceanographic/climatological phenomenon was "discovered". Recent research reveals absolutely no correlation between El/La events and more or less rainfall on the Pacific coast. However, all TV weather persons continue to report on it like we are supposed to know what to do about it.

January is supposedly the most reliable rainy month in the Bay Area. But, looking at rainfall totals in downtown Oakland from 1971 to 1993 indicates that in any given January, rainfall can be zero to eleven inches.

This year we're at 130 percent of normal rainfall--at 22 inches and still raining. I think I'll go out and check on my sweet peas....

hail March!

It may have broken the buds of my daffodils but the sudden hailstorm also brought a warm moment of schadenfreude as I watched the powergardening crew mow and blow the neighbor's lawn to perfection while being pelted by ice balls. This after five hours of high-decibel powerblowing from the other neighbor's crew yesterday.

As the gasoline mower whined across the throw-carpet of a lawn, the blower guy shot his air gun at soggy grass blades that refused to move under the barrage of hail. Yesterday, I watched different blower guy herd leaves down the path as the wind picked them up and blew them back over his head. Then he turned around and blew them the other way. Needless to say, only the lawns are tended. The yards themselves are ungroomed and unloved.

Across the street for the last week a dessicated christmas tree has stood by the curb. Since no one bothered to dismantle the stand or branches to fit the trash bin, it will sit there probably forever. Except yesterday when the wind rolled it into my driveway. I dragged it back to its post--a lone sentinel for the passed and the forgotten...