true dirt

ok. I missed January. and most of December. I didn’t even look in the backyard until I had to wrap the potted dwarf lemon in plastic last week to keep it from freezing. I have spent most of my time under the down quilt with my ibook not even looking at nursery catalogs. I began to think I would abandon gardening altogether. I went for a little hike with a friend – the first all winter – out in the East Bay hills on the first Saturday in ages that it was sunny. I had forgotten about the oak groves of winter. I had forgotten some of the most beautiful gardens anywhere are tucked into hollows of deeply creased Miocene sandstone where small creeks, hidden for most of the year in tangled underbrush and poison oak, and often dry during the summer months, emerge gurgling and plashing over fallen logs and tumbled rocks, ponding beneath mossed tree roots where the offspring of amorous newts returned briefly to their aquatic nurseries will turn from gelatinous blobs to bright orange swimmers and finally take their first steps, like the amphibians they are, upon dry earth.
We walked through the day, among sunlit groves of deciduous oaks carpeted with the neon green of new grass, and past steep slopes of blue oak and still wizened grasses, and in the alluvial plains of ancient creeks we passed the stately, leafless sycamores with their multi-hued puzzle bark trunks. And finally, still sweating with effort that chilled us in the evening breeze, a full moon began to rise over the hilltops and silhouetted groves. A buck trod leisurely from the shadows into the last golden pool of light on a grassy knoll, and we strode silently under the darkening canopy of twisting oaks back to the car, and home.
The winter oaks were harbingers of a new era in their geologic youth. They emerged in the last phase of the Miocene epoch, about 7 million years ago, when the rain forests and savannahs of North America were disappearing along with the giant vegetarian mammals and their predators whose abundant bones lie buried under the oak groves and creek beds. The summer rains began to disappear as well, while the Sierra Nevada and surrounding Coast Ranges began to rise up. The trees of the Beech family had become well established and diverse, with Quercus species divided among evergreen (coast live oak) and deciduous (valley and blue oak).

Whatever the causes, the long summer of the Miocene came to an end some five million years ago. The great North American savannas, with their multitudes of hoofed mammals and attendant predators, gave way to a world more like our own. Modern plant communities, such as live oak woodland and chaparral, took shape during that transition. Grasses continued to diversify, and other plant families – composites, legumes, mints, mustards – produced an array of new species. The advent of dry summers favored the evolution of annuals – plants whose seeds can wait out unfavorable conditions.

I am depending on those seeds that can wait out unfavorable conditions, much as the traveler on a long, discomfiting journey waits out the mental millennia of the road for a a transcendent vista of some long-imagined paradise.

In the dark days of the garden I avoid the tasks that would take me into the shadow land of the back yard where the day’s light penetrates only a sliver’s worth across the fence and the borders are brittle with last season’s petrified leaf. There is no transforming snow to bury the sad scene in mounds of glistening white, and so far not even the soggy mulch of rain soaked debris. There are no birds and no sound but the whoosh of cars on the freeway, and even the squirrels are scarce, tucked in their bowers sleeping away the long hours of winter.
Last night, as I stood on the front porch at dusk, the full moon rose in the southeastern sky through winter mists, and a tiny companion, the red planet Mars, floated in the moon’s halo. This morning, Christmas eve day, I walked out the front door to get the paper and happened on sunrise–the first after the longest night of the year: a gilt-rimmed bank of clouds in the southern sky suddenly breached by a blinding ray of that familiar star.
Though the earth be lifeless and still as a grave, the celestial mechanism still moves in perpetual rhythms, with and without us.

Moon & Mars photo
Sun rays photo

Back in September I entered a garden design to the Hadspen Parabola competition, and eventually was notified that my idea had made it to the second round of judging. Here, at last, are the finalists – as best as I could represent them from the pdf files and assorted documents now posted at the site.
The entries varied from a typewritten page describing a redwood tree to an open source “wiki” that allowed anyone to design the garden. I was pleased to see that one finalist envisioned a grotto excavated into the garden slope, and intrigued by the entry proposing a “night garden” which few would visit since it would be open only after dark. It was nice to run across one entry that simple described a fruit and vegetable garden – with a prominent display of compost piles.
The vocabulary of the design ideas sometimes startled me: a wandering “flaneur”, functional form versus “desuetude”, and the inevitable “exclosed disciplines” (sounding vaguely Foucault-ian). If you think garden design is a relatively straightforward affair involving scale drawings and a plant list, consider how the old kitchen garden at Hadspen has been re-imagined by these dreamers – a giant beehive might be just the thing for your next garden…
The Hadspen Parabola by Anouk Vogel, Johan Selbing, Eva Radinova (Netherlands)

The concept is for a gradient planting scheme dictated by the amount of sunlight and moisture in each “microclimate” of the hillside….”Instead of putting supposedly natural forms against artificial forms, the garden is a man-made “texture” that forms a gradient and that amplifies existing natural conditions, and present the parabola, with the surrounding wall, as an object or a “brand”.
The new Hadspen Parabola Garden by Ethel Rae Perkins (Germany):

A simple plan that keeps getting more complicated….
“It should be kept very simple with the “patches” [refering to the diamond patches created by the expanding grid pathways] covered in a rhythm to be determined with stone, wood, grass, with a solitary ornamental tree, some superb sculture at focal points and water, still and running….Lighting for events after dark….more room for art….potting shed converted into a theatre or concert venue….and no nursery.”
The Hadspen spirit, put back into the garden by Andy Atkinson (UK):

“…space inside the parabola is not just defined by the verticality and surface of the perimeter wall but also by its perspective, its parallax movement, enjoined with it on the land plane – where feet are placed….a long, gentle, straight stair….planting informed by the garden’s water movement….referencing exclosed disciplines (e.g. fashion/costumes)….vegetables giving historic reference and realism. Identity created.”
ok. what?
the night garden by Lucy Carter, Robert Carter, Francette Pacteau (UK):

“Not a garden of colours, nor a vegetable garden, our garden is neither colourful nor useful. Open only from dusk to dawn, it offers a monochromatic setting within which scents and sounds guide the visitor inviting him to relinquish clarity and explicitness in favour of imagining…. Plants are selected for their scent and pale colour.
This garden will not bear the presence of many. But on occasion the night garden becomes the setting for recitals and performances. Shepherd’s steps furnish a modest amphitheatre. A raised island provides a stage for such intimate events when is does not offer itself as a repose for the visitor.”
Make Space Not Thing by Teresa Koo (Australia):

“This entry proposes that the variety and beauty of spaces created between plants – their spatiality and texture – to move within and among, takes precedence over the beauty of plants as objects to be viewed….the Hadspen walled garden and its surrounds [will] be planted with a morphing grid of trees and tall shrubs. ”
A Cultivated Grotto by Patrick Lynch, Naomi Shaw, Michael Gollings, Pete Yothed (UK):

“We propose to dig a hole and to plant a cider orchard or a vineyard. Every proper garden needs a grotto, since it is there that the earth & the sky, and their respective divinities meet. The true purpose of a garden is to reveal the cosmic scale of time, to embody this and to make it spatial so that we can actually see, hear and smell the world anew. Theatres & gardens share this cosmic dimension, they both reveal the drama of nature and the ruination of human time. A grotto recreates the birth of the union of the natural world & representation, in space. Whilst a vineyard enables the reunion of pleasure and agriculture, what is correctly referred to, by Petrarch and Pliny, as cultivation, in all senses of the word. ”
The Hadspen Hive by Pierre Belanger (Canada):
a garden basically for the bees, the parabola has been cleverly placed on end and reimagined as a hive; and incorporates the old British practice of hive tending using walls of “bee boles” ….”Hives are distributed across a hyper-functional field of crops such as clover, buckwheat, lucerne, raspberry, lavender and mint. Crop width and configuration are determined by the modular size of the hives to distinguish different species, to maximize solar exposure, to avoid extreme temperature gradients and thermally insulate the hives. Wrapping around the field is the existing brick wall, dotted with recesses for vernacular bee boles on the inside and for storing beekeeping equipment (suits, nets, smokers, tools) on the outside.”

NEW GARDEN INSIDE THE PARABOLA by Charles Dowding (UK):
“My aim is to show how one can create a garden that is both beautiful and productive, of many different fruits and vegetables….harvesting of leaves, pods and roots, for sale or use on site….The garden walls….apricots and asian pears pruned in different ways to display various options in training and cropping….a mixture of herbaceous plants and annual flowers, leaving a bare area, mulched and composted, around the base of each fruit tree….an ornamental fruit cage, perhaps over one of the large central beds, in which many currants and berries could be appreciated from the four pathways….careful and consistent fertility building of the beds, using both bought and home-made compost….A range of compost heaps would be established outside the garden, as close as possible, to be part of the garden’s appeal and interest.”
Some basic facts about the Sequoia Giganteum (Nowhere in the world does the Sequoia Giganteum grow in pure stands) by Jessie LeBaron, Mac Carbonell (USA):
“Proposal: To plant and grow within the walls of the Hadspen Parabola Garden the only living forest grove of Sequoia Giganteum started from seedlings….. The brick wall, like a Petri dish, offers space for a new experiment; another century’s interpretation on the design of observation.”
Open Source Space by Anne Stevenson, Bridget Snaith (UK):

“A visual wiki interface will be created on line to allow multiple authors to manipulate a virtual model of the garden. A horticultural advisor will develop a base palette of site-appropriate plant materials, on which others can provide commentary….A garden is by its nature a continually adapting system. The open source space concept reflects this reality and provides a parallel design process to match it.”
(no title, no text) by Jean Martin (France):


The Parabola provides a frame for a real time painting by Sarah Price (UK):

“Suggestive of patterns of misaligned print or of shadows shrinking & growing, planting
playfully self-seeds & spreads. Sketching successive moments never to be repeated,
this transient composition evades a maintained, predetermined ‘gardened’ state.
Framed within a rhythm of pathways, sequential drifts of ‘theme plants’ such as
ornamental grasses provide visual & structural continuity. Evoking romantic associations of ‘natural’ plant communities, this stylised meadow extends its seasonal vocabulary with a blended palette of native & non-native perennials, biennials & annuals. A running section of tonal planting appears to ’shadow’ the curve of the Parabola wall, creating a defined backdrop to cascading rhythms of more complex, intermingled planting textures & associations.”
A Sunken Wall by Lucy Carter, Robert Carter, Francette Pacteau (UK):
“We propose to lower part of the garden wall into the ground so that the top of the
wall does not project above ground level….The part of the wall remaining above ground functions to reinforce this perception of a ruinous condition, as it stands, the survivor of the catastrophe that caused the rest of the wall to ‘fall’ or ’sink’. It speaks of a ‘before’ the event….situated between function, the form of function and desuetude- aims to symbolically inscribe within the design of the garden its history as a functional garden as well as the catastrophe that is its recent destruction….As one enters through the remaining gate, the garden thus announced vanishes as one comes into an almost imperceptibly defined expanse of tall grasses that espouse the forms of the land.”
We are imagining a secret garden by Justine Miething, Gerwin Gruber (France): .

“Aligned trees are planted densely along the existing levelling . According to the door the visitor chose to enter the garden, he discovers different ….sceneries: Coming from the south from the beginning of the slope he sees a small wood with various clearings.
It is like entering the scene of a theatre-stage. Coming from the north he discovers a garden with various flowers and dense tree plantations. Coming from east or west he experience aligned trees with a lawn path and benches to sit. For the one who has less the soul of a flaneur criss-crossing is allowed in between the lines of trees and planting….We are thinking of small willows for the tree plantations. Some areas under the trees are covered with wildflowers and groundcover plants. The major part is planted with lawn. Only the path along the wall is in lava stone or mulch (shredded tree trunks). ”
Initital Response by Jantiene T Klein, Roseboom van der Veer (UK):
“Landscapes and the gardens within them should be designed to enclose nothing less but the entire universe….the paths are simplified and the perimeter is now empty….the islands within the parabola are ever so slightly revised and re-ordered according to phyllotaxis patterns….on a subconscious level, most will instantly recognize and intuitively respond to the rhythm of a natural form developed over millions of years….The pond inside the wall does not belong….The parabola itself is to become the ordered world, and the straight wall enclosing it….representing the invitation to explore the existence of unspoken infinitudes that exist outside the known boundaries….Standing guard where the ordered and unordered meet is the Obelisk, in a new position.”
[In case you didn't know (I didn't) "phyllotaxis" is the botanical term for the arrangement of leaves on the stem of a plant.]

A glimmering on the hilltop beyond the freeway is all that the morning can muster in the way of sunshine, and a ruby glow has begun to seep from the tangle of tree canopies, wisteria and grape vines. The neighbor’s fig tree is shedding great flaps of yellow leaves upon the exhausted annuals below, and drips of rain cling to the ragged edges of the oak leaves outside my window. A bruised blue sky is puffed with storm clouds. A melancholy West Coast autumn.
The congested streets steam and stink as droves of pedicured toes in fashionable flip-flops maneuver up and down the sidewalks of Manhattan. The human parade of baby doll dresses, tank tops and shorts up and down Madison Ave. mocks the shop window mannequins swaddled in dark wools and leather. “30% Off Fall Fashions!” scream the signs in Bloomingdale’s. The East Coast sweats into October.
Maybe it’s just a statistical freak that the first week of October in New York City felt like July in New Orleans. I walked around for five days in the same pair of jeans and close-toed shoes feeling like a polar bear in the Bahamas. At least I could remove my extra layers at the end of the day. Back home in Oakland, however, it was the end of tomato season in one cool wet swoop. Even as the garden droops from the waterless marathon of the dry season.
As the polar ice shelf melts and floats south, and the mythical Northwest Passage suddenly becomes real, a gardener has to wonder not what the season will bring but what it will be. Do the young oak trees in my garden, bristling with a bumper crop of acorns, know something I don’t? In spite of the early rains are the trees gearing up for a long, fruitless drought? Or are they just as confused as I am by the erratic weather.
Here in California we live by snow as much as by rain. If the winter does not blanket the Sierra Nevada in reserves of frozen water to be delivered in spring through the pipeline of the Sacramento-San Joaquin rivers to San Francisco Bay – there will be no fish spawn, no ocean food chain, no drinking water in the reservoirs, no water for crops in the irrigation canals. Rain will water the garden but snowmelt fills the bathtub and the washing machine.
For years now we Western gardeners have been educated in the ways of “water-wise” landscaping and drought-tolerant plant species. We’ve learned to let our lawns die and our native “weeds” flourish. My experiment with “dry farmed” tomatoes in the front yard this summer proved to me that there’s a lot I don’t yet know about sustainable gardening. As the hydrangeas and azaleas wither in the cracked adobe, the California currant seedlings pop up in the driest corners of the backyard. As long as there is kitchen waste there will be compost for the small raised bed where only a little water from the Sierra Nevada, via hose, will keep the dahlias (native to Mexico) blooming. Roses (from Damascus) may rely on their ancestry to survive.
But for the humans, it’s going to be a long weird season.

Well. As many long time readers of this blog are aware, there are often long pauses between thoughts at this space. This summer I was unusually preoccupied. With the inevitable months-long preparations for a wedding which finally took place on July 29. Which is sort of an excuse for not gardening or writing about it. BUT, something happened one morning a few days before the wedding, beginning with my reading an article by Alice Rawsthorn about a rather famous English garden, on the estate of the rather famous garden designer and writer Penelope Hobhouse’s son Niall Hobhouse. The article intrigued me as it concerned a bit of a dust up over the razing of an old walled garden on the estate. It was Niall Hobhouse’s idea to bulldoze the site, leaving the wall intact, and invite anyone to submit a design for a new garden; the Hadspen Parabola garden competition has the British gardening world in a tizzy. The controversy became so heated that it piqued the interest of the New York Times (where I read Rawsthorn’s article, published originally in the International Herald Tribune).
The controversy, as Rawsthorn describes it, is not only about scraping a famous garden off the face of the earth but about who can or should design gardens, how garden plans are chosen and who owns the finished product. Garden designers of the kind typically profiled in gardening magazines, and who dominate the field of garden books, have traditionally been independent professionals who create commissioned works for private landowners. Landscape architects, on the other hand, typically design public spaces. Rawsthorn notes that public competitions, a common practice in the design and architecture world, are rare in gardening.
There were some lovely photos of the old Hadspen garden as well as a drawing of a proposed plan, designed by an architectural firm, that envisioned a mass of zig-zag paths covering the hillside garden site. And there was a photograph of the bulldozed site, looking upslope to the old brick wall on the horizon of the hill, and the parabola of bare dirt that was once a garden.
That bare dirt was irresistable. It is the gardener’s curse, and cure. An idea came to me, of course, about how to inhabit that unusual sweep of hillside with it’s old wall limning the curve of the hill. The wall, first of all, is how gardens begin, a “geard” being an old English word for an enclosed space, or yard, for flowers and vegetables. Entering a garden is a kind of journey to a very human place. Even though we think we are there to “see Nature” what we really are seeing is an idealized human self represented by an ordered wilderness. Secondly, gardening is about dirt and Earth. And yet dirt – the source of garden life – is rarely visible in gardens.
So I grabbed my thoughts and sat down at my computer and wrote a garden design. Yes, wrote. I cannot draw. The Hadspen Parabola competition was asking for a design concept and concept was the only thing I had in mind. I had no idea how this idea might get manifested in a patch of dirt in Somerset, on an island far away. The competition entry could contain an explanation of no more than 300 words. That’s about what I had written. In a tinier nutshell, the idea was this:

the existing garden wall, an open meadow, greensward or lawn, and a continuous path or series of paths, one of which leads to and terminates at an excavated well or grotto or quarry in the center of the hillside, placing the wanderer deep beneath the surface of the garden.

.
The garden concept is called “Imagine Eden” and my explanation included a sort of poetic journey round the garden….

Imagine standing on a hillside looking up and seeing the earth and sky separated by a wall
In the beginning there was the wall and the wall created Eden. The wall limns a parabola, curved in response to the curve of the slope. One steps through the gate and perceives that true nature is now without, but within is the garden.
Imagine an opening in a dark forest, ahead a bright sward illuminated by sunlight
She spied a gate, ajar, amid brambles and wild rose canes, and entered into the garden. Nothing delights the human eye and heart more than a small open space in the dark forest of the mind, a place in the sun to sit and regard the effulgent and the sublime, even a flower.
Imagine a path down which the wanderer will discover soil and the core beneath the garden’s brilliant skin simply by walking into deep earth
The path spirals past the wall and then through the meadow, meanders along groves of shimmering trees and through beds of bright herbs and flowering plants, then descends beneath the soft clods of dirt to the realm of roots and worms and burrowing creatures, and finally to the heart of the earth, conceived in stardust, a mote in the eye of the edgeless universe.

As for the plants and such, I simply added a sentence, “Plants and other garden features, including accessories and appurtenances, typical of garden styles since the Middle Ages should be used freely”.
In order to enter a design, I had to get an anonymous entrant pseydonym, via email, from the website (it’s BAMPOPO, ??). It took me all day to make my printer approximate some European standard paper size (kind of like “legal” but not), get it packaged and addressed, and mailed out to arrive in England by the deadline two days later. I won’t tell you how much the postal fee was.
Last week, I got an email message from the people at Hadspen requesting an electronic version of my design entry for the second round of judging. I have to admit I’m shocked that my crazy idea was read, much less voted on by a panel of judges. But I am pleased that something so untraditional would be considered in the land considered by many gardeners – Americans especially – to be the epitomy of traditional gardening.
And did I mention it was my wedding?

Reading Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Winning of the West”, one comes across this argument for the moral necessity of the American settlers’ conquest of the territory long occupied by their human brethren:

All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.

Disregard for a moment the picture of the be-spectacled amateur historian and future president astride a noble equine beast in a rakish sombrero and spurs, brandishing a shotgun–and think about the wild beasts, specifically, ants.

Ants are the world’s most diverse and ecologically dominant eusocial [altruistic] organisms.

(Evaluating alternative hypotheses for the early evolution and diversification of ants. Sean G. Brady, Ted R. Schultz, Brian L. Fisher, and Philip S. Ward, 2006)
They also evolved on the planet long before human-like mammals. They were here probably 180 million years before us, in fact. Over that time we were basically a statistical question-mark waiting for our genetic entry into earth ecology. More than a hundred million years before ants came on the scene the whole insect family had already incorporated metamorphosis into its trick-bag of survival tools, plants had adapted to northern and southern hemispheric conditions, and angiosperms had arrived giving plants the ability to flower. It makes the invention of the plow look a bit puny.
By the time humans began walking upright, everything else on earth looked essentially the way it does now. With a few exceptions. There have been at least five major mass extinctions before humans arrived, the most recent, 65 million years ago, was likely caused by an errant asteroid hitting the earth mid-latitude and wiping out the biggest mammals on the planet, dinosaurs, and over half the plants.
Here’s how that event looked to scientists, based on fossil and other evidence: after the asteroid hit it took about ten years for the sulphuric acid released into the atmosphere to dissipate, reducing the amount of sunlight to about 10-20 percent of normal during that time. Most photosynthetic plant life was wiped out, but fungi and ferns gradually reappeared. Polar dinosaurs, able to withstand the cold temperatures brought on by lack of sunlight, still perished, indicating the lack of food, rather than lack of heat, killed them.
The other four major extinctions had variable causes, probable among them glaciation, volcanic eruptions, and supernova explosions. The main earth extinction events have occurred about every 60 to 100 million years. There is no rhyme nor reason to this frequency. But the next extinction may be very different from the previous ones. There is speculation by some, and in fact a majority of biologists believe that we are, in fact, in the middle of another extinction event. For it’s probable cause we need look no further than in our bathroom mirrors.
While the “big five” earth extinctions happened over a long geologic timescale, taking millions of years to play out, the current extinction event is happening very rapidly – in tens and thousands of years. In the last fifty years, the rate of species extinction has accelerated to exceed the rate during the previous five extinction events. Estimates today are that up to 140,000 species disappear every year. The eminent biologist E.O. Wilson predicts that in the next 100 years, human activity could cause the extinction of over half the species living today.
And who will be left standing (or rooting) after the current extinction event? Well, in previous extinctions the die-out of species was to some extent selective, affecting mostly those species and genera that were least able to cope with the conditions brought on by the extinction event–cold temperatures or lack of sunlight (leading to lack of vegetation and thus lack of food). Rare, localized, and specialized species are probably most at risk of extinction, as shown by fossil studies of extinction events and their aftermath. Widespread or adaptable species are likely to survive.
One of the features of the most widespread species is social behavior. Social insects, for instance, account for more than half of all the world’s insect “biomass” (a measure of total living weight versus total numbers of individuals). But only about 13,000 species out of a total of 750,000 insect species are social. Social insects – ants, wasps, bees – are the most common insects. All ants are not only social, they are eusocial – meaning they employ division of labor in reproduction, generations overlap, and they cooperate in the care and protection of young. Eusociality is a genetic trait, passed on from one generation of ants to the next. Worker ants who do not reproduce (are not able to reproduce) yet pass on more of their genes by caring for their sister ants with whom they share 80% of their genes than they would by having their own offspring, who would carry only 50% of their genes.
So, my point was? Just that the beasts of the earth may, by virtue of their longevity and social behavior, be better equipped than humans to sustain life on the planet. That the “scattered savage tribes” who lived here before us “civilized” humans may have been better equipped to sustain life on the planet, as hunter-gatherers instead of as industrial agriculturists. And any little ecological niche that you can protect from destruction, even the ones in your own backyard, are worthy of saving.
I will try to remember that the next time I am standing in a swarm of ants when turning the compost, or worrying about the paper wasp nest in the garage. Making or reserving a place for the bees or wasps or ants may be the best thing we can do for our planet.

Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs–
To the silent wilderness
Where the soul need not repress
Its music lest it should not find
An echo in another’s mind,
While the touch of Nature’s art
Harmonises heart to heart.
I leave this notice on my door
For each accustomed visitor:–
“I am gone into the fields
To take what this sweet hour yields.
Reflection, you may come to-morrow,
Sit by the fireside with Sorrow–
You with the unpaid bill, Despair–
You, tiresome verser reciter, Care–
I will pay you in the grave–
Death will listen to your stave.
Expectation too, be off!
To-day is for itself enough;
Hope, in pity mock not Woe
With smiles, nor follow where I go;
Long having lived on thy sweet food,
At length I find one moment’s good
After long pain–with all your love,
This you never told me of.”
Radiant sister of the Day,
Awake! arise! and come away!
To the wild woods and the plains,
And the pools where winter rains
Image all their roof of leaves,
Where the pine its garland weaves
Of sapless green and ivy dun
Round stems that never kiss the sun;
Where the lawns and pastures be,
And the sandhills of the sea;–
Where the melting hoar-frost wets
The daisy star that never sets,
And wind-flowers, and violets,
Which yet join not scent to hue,
Crown the pale year weak and new;
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue moon* is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun.
–Percy Bysshe Shelley
*a blue moon is the second full moon within a single month. In England this year the blue moon fell on June 30. In the Americas (west of Greenwich) the blue moon appeared in May, and east of Greenwich it will appear in July).

The rose obsession continues…until the last petal drops in my soon-to-be-a-memory spring garden. A friend invited me to join her on an expedition this last Saturday to El Cerrito where the annual “Celebration of Old Roses” event is held in the community center. I have heard about this event for years from fellow gardeners and rose enthusiasts and both me and Sally were expecting something rather grand. In reality, it looks like a neighborhood BBQ held at the community pool (which is next door and was on this sunny Saturday emiting the happy shrieks of children frolicking in chlorinated bliss). There were two aisles of folding tables covered in white cloth inside the center’s main room – a utilitarian hall with sliding glass doors opening to a small patio and lawn where an actual BBQ was producing grilled items for the free lunch. There were also some vendors of roses, geraniums, and arts and crafts for garden decoration. Inside, the vendors included the Mt. Diablo Porcelain Painters and sellers of rose jelly and jam products–which I realize now I was crazy not to sample. But I was preoccupied with my camera trying to capture the roses themselves in their jelly and Mason jars laid out on the tables in their major groups: Floribundas, Teas, Chinas, Gallicas, Portlands, Bourbons, species, musks and “miscellaneous”. And with pausing to sniff and admire the celebrities up close. It’s one thing to peruse gorgeous photos of these fragile beauties and quite another to meet them in the rose flesh. The colors are not always describable in pixels or pigments, and the scents certainly are not even the same from one sniffer to another.

The event was the brainchild of Miriam Wilkins who also founded a breakaway sect of rosarians in 1975, The Heritage Roses Group. Not finding particularly interested company in the national American Rose Society, Miriam felt a new society was needed that would focus on the preservation, history, re-introduction, and identification of roses which were rarely grown commercially and are now lost to the memory of most modern gardeners. Miriam was honored in 2003 as a Great Rosarian of the World (GROW) for her championing of forgotten heritage roses at the annual lecture series hosted by the Manhattan Rose Society. Other honorees of GROW include names any rose enthusiast would recognize – like Peter Harkness of the British rose growing house (Just Joey, Ballerina, Buff Beauty). Ann Raver, columnist for the New York Times, wrote about attending the illustrious event which this year honored William Kordes III, of the famous German rose breeding family (Alchemist, Dortmund, Erfurt).

Back to El Cerrito….I stopped at the table for the Heritage Roses Group and realized that without a check book (and, as usual, short of cash) I would be unable to pay the $12 membership fee which includes four paper issues of The Rose Letter (or $10 for the pdf version). The group’s website is beginning to feature an archive of scanned back issues but there are only two available now (of 120 issues). I chatted awhile with the two women at the table after they answered my question about a very prolific “Indigo” that was sprouting up in unexpected places in my garden. They confirmed my suspicion that the rose was “suckering” and not reproducing from seed. A natty gentleman in blazer and tie joined in to wax prolific on the necessity of mulching roses in the East Bay and also encouraged me to visit Miriam Wilkin’s fabulous rose garden just a few blocks up the hill from the community center. I had been hoping to see Miriam at her signature event but she was not there, nor does she appear to be writing her personal newsletter, The Old Roser’s Digest. But then the rose group itself is pretty free-floating, choosing to neither meet regularly, elect officers, nor have a constitution. Perhaps Miriam preferred the company of her own roses that day.
Back at home (Sally got snared by a couple of 2-gallon “Cherokee” roses, and a collection of pelargoniums but my cash-less strategy saved me) I went looking for Miriam Wilkin’s rose group on the web and printed out the November 1999 quarterly letter. On the first page the editor apologizes for late delivery citing “writer’s block and the onset of holiday madness”, and I felt immediately at home. There were gems abundant in the 17-page “letter”, including a long article on fragrance in old roses and a sceptical piece on the very English David Austin’s (then) new rose growing operation in Tyler, Texas. In response to an inquiry by the Rose Letter editors as to whether the Texas Austin roses were “budded” (i.e. grafted) rather than grown on their own roots, they replied that the rootstock was coming from “…a well known large scale producer, under our control, and is all from virus free Davis stock.” The editors assumed they were talking not about a virus-free individual but the agricultural research powerhouse University of California campus in Davis. Having never heard that Davis produced rootstocks of old rose budwood (they are reknowned for wine grape rootstock), The Rose Letter editors inquired after the name of the “well known large scale producer” and Texas Austin replied that it would not be “constructive” for them to disclose the producer “at this time.” The White House press secretary could not have done better.
Under “Plants/Information Wanted” Jim Donovan of W. Bruces Place, Canyon Country, CA (I have no idea where this is) makes a plea for someone with “Louis van Houtte, the 1886-or 69 hybrid perpetual from LaCharme” to share one with him. I wonder if anyone did.

I leave you with the “Old Roses For Fragrance” author Lily Shohan’s advice for purchasing fragrant roses: “Ignore those described as having “light fragrance”; in Catalog Speak, that generally means none or very little…look for a description where the seller especially notes the fragrance. And, “remember that it is truly said, ‘a rose without fragrance is a flower without a soul.”

More has been written about them than any other flower, to the point of terminal cliche. The symbol of love and war and everything hunky dory, they have decorated the homes and objets de art and gardens of the rich and powerful, and the tiny dirt patches and chinaware of the most humble and obscure. There are more kinds and colors of roses than any other flower and more are being created – and lost to posterity – every day. Roses both fascinate and repel the gardener and there is probably no gardener who has remained totally and entirely immune to their magnetism.
Curiously, they are the easiest of plants to grow and yet many gardeners are baffled by their cultivation. They are the hardiest of plants and yet we have an entire industry devoted to the idea that they are fragile and susceptible to the least blight or bug. There is a rose for every taste, unfortunately, and many roses are downright ugly while others merely bore; they can be prolific or stingy, exquisite or gauche. And that’s just the flowers. The plants are another universe altogether: massive climbers and spindly twigs, luxurious leafers and scraggly dullards, deadly flesh rippers and thornless canopies; there is even a rose without a flower. We won’t even mention the hips.
As a completely unqualified expert on some roses in very particular circumstances (West Coast climate, adobe soils, hillside garden, coastal fog, rainless summers), here is the dirt on (my) roses….
You can’t kill ‘em. Excepting a hard freeze, or a firestorm there is nothing that will kill a rose. They may lose all their leaves to rust and black spot, be covered in mildew, and not have a drop to drink for months – and they will live on, probably still bloom too. You don’t need to spray them with anything, feed them, or prune them. In fact, for most roses, the more you ignore them the better they do.
They can kill you. Really. Though I actually do not know of any mortality stats. There is a fungus, Sporothrix schenckii, that grows on rose thorns, morphs into a yeast in the body and attacks the lymph system – causing lesions in lymph nodes. The infection is called Sporothricosis. It is treated by oral doses of potassium iodide. A gardener friend contracted this little nasty after falling into a particularly thorny rose bush (I think it was Eyepaint) and gouging her arm. However, you are much more likely to lose an eye or scratch a cornea, suffer puncture wounds anywhere (any where!) or clip your finger with the Felcos while pruning; and in the case of the climbers, ladder accidents are always a concern. My expert advice: wear elbow-length leather gloves, safety googles, and non-slip gardening shoes – and a helmet wouldn’t hurt either.
More bloom is not better. It’s just more. There are places in the garden for a continuously blooming plant and places for one that delivers an exquisite, and ephemeral, moment. The roses that bloom continuously in the growing season (they are called remontant) often have nothing else going for them because other qualities were lost in the hybridizing. Gallica roses exude a perfume more complex and intoxicating than Chanel No. 5 but they only bloom once a year. The rich dark colors and dense petaling of many roses also gets lost when they are bred for repeat bloom.
Roses have leaves too. And they often look like s—. And not because of disease or bad weather. Perhaps the worst offenders are the classic 1950s creations called “hybrid teas”, to be found in every Payless and Home Depot, and most gardening catalogs, often carrying the label of rose purveyors Jackson and Perkins. The category is characterized by huge blooms on long stems – perfect for the cut crystal vase – often in bright, toneless colors. The plants grow into large round shrubs (if they aren’t climbers) supported by thumb-width canes bearing massive thorns. Often the leaves are huge, dark green, and leathery. This is not a plant you want to show off unless it’s got an endless supply of distracting great gobs of bright blooms.
There are many roses with perfectly charming leaves that look fine when not in bloom. They can be pale green and diaphanous, golden and russet, or glossy as glass and thick as a hedge. There are also nearly leafless roses that concentrate all their energy into the top of the cane in either leaf or bloom. These plants are best tucked into a border where their nakedness will be covered by other plants.
Roses are architectural. They can roof a garage or scale a wall, be a canopy or a tower, or disappear the neighbors. Forget the “standard” rose-on-a-stick, I’m talking about a rose that can give you a whole other territory above your garden, out your second-story window, or hide a telephone pole. A house I once had a room in (a slightly seedy mansion in the Los Altos Hills occupied by a motly crew of bohemians) had a large pond in the middle of its grand circular driveway, over which draped a monstrous old live oak tree and roped about the oak’s massive limbs was an equally monstrous rose. The luminous roses were big as an Easter hat and hung suspended over the mossy pond like pale pink moons. I found the rose at the old Roses of Yesterday and Today in Watsonville years ago – colonizing a hillside. It is Belle of Portugal and you need a mansion or Rapunzel’s tower to really appreciate it.
You can never have too many. I’m up to 28 or 30 and there is always room for another pot. Yes, a pot. I have some roses that have flourished in 5-gallon containers for years. Two are in 1-foot square redwood planters. One rose is growing in the cement driveway (a wild Sierra rose); a couple are wandering off into the neighbor’s trees and may reach the next town soon. I’ve got roses cheek by jowl in several borders and lashed to the fence, windows and crude arbors constructed of rotten fence decking. An old pitchfork with a bent tine holds up a couple more. I just put some in the front yard (former container inhabitants) squeezed between pittosporum shrubs and burgeoning oak trees – and then stuck some tomato and bean plants around them. And all of this in a rented yard.
Most of my roses are not remontant and that means they are rather invisible in the garden most of the year. And I tend to forget why I have so many when I’m looking for new real estate for the latest Annie’s Annual purchases. But then May rolls around and it is la vie en rose for me.

ply your hammock among the trees, settle your skin upon springy skein, relax your mind and drift back in centuries two, three, four where

“…Cromwell could not cease
In the inglorious arts of peace
But through adventurous war
Urged his active star…”

and Andrew Marvell escaped prose’aic politics in his poetic Garden, though

Society is all but rude
To this delicious solitude.

and no industrious bee was yet clichéd….

How well the skilful gardener drew
of flowers and herbs this dial new!
Where, from above, the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run:
And, as it works, the industrious bee
Computes it’s time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers.