Category — Catalogue/book/website reviews

It’s the time of year when I visit old haunts, figuratively and literally. One of the oldest (literally speaking) is the Providence Atheneum, a library that’s been around so long that all the reading desks and chairs are antiques, and gardening books from the 1800s are still on the shelves, waiting to have their depths plumbed by people like me.

Plumbing, it turns out, is the mot juste. On this year’s expedition, I was surprised to discover that radiant floor heating was the heating system of choice for hothouses in 1841.

But as I started writing this post about it, I remembered a long-ago visit to the Alhambra, where I found radiant floor heating systems much older than that. Eight hundred years ago, the architect had caused a bath area to be built, and I remember the guide saying that the hot water was piped under the floors above, as heating. (Why is it that I can remember this comment from over thirty years ago, but I can’t recall the name of someone who introduced themselves five minutes earlier? Memory is indeed like a sieve, as a friend of mine used to say.) Since the entire palace is out of stone, the heating was probably welcome in the winter.

I am not sure if radiant floor heating was invented by the Arabs, but it seems likely. They were leaders in water engineering, likely due to their development of mathematics. I still remember the water in the gardens of the Alhambra, because they amazed me: though the place was neglected and crumbling around the edges (it was the very end of the Franco regime), all the fountains and pools and watercourses still worked: they had been designed to run on gravity alone, no pumps needed. On one staircase, where railings would normally have been, there were channels in the tops of the sidewalls, cascading water down to yet another pool and fountain. The flumes in my goldrush area sent timber from the mountains to port cities on the same principle, but they didn’t last nearly as long as the watercourses of the Alhambra gardens.

If anyone knows the history of radiant floor heating, or cares to speculate, I’d be interested to read your comments. But for now I will jump ahead to 1841, and Robert Buist’s The American Flower Garden Directory.

Garden writers of the mid-eighteen hundreds usually ran nurseries. They also bred plants, traveled long distances to see what other breeders were doing and to find new stock to introduce into their lists and breeding programs. Any aspect of gardening was their purview; there was much less specialization than there is today.

That’s because in 1840s U.S., gardening and plants were undergoing a huge boom. For the first time, the newly monied middle class could afford the ornamental plants and gardens that had been a rich person’s privilege in the century before.  Farmers wanted to know what the latest crops and plant techniques were. Literacy had become common, so there was a large readership for the books nursery owners began putting out, books that covered everything from the poetic values of tilling the soil to how to deal with the Rose slug, one of the catastrophic insect invasions of the 1800s.

Hothouse building was definitely on the agenda, and in The American Flower Garden Directory,  Buist tackles the construction of hothouses and greenhouses. He describes the siting of the hothouse: “…set the front directly to the south. Any deviation from that point should incline to the east.” And he gives a detailed description of the heating system.  “As workmen are not generally conversant on the subject, nor yet understand the effect or distribution of heat in these departments, we will give minute details on their construction.”

Coal- or wood-fired furnaces were the basis of the heating system  (wood-fired furnaces had to be built twice as big as the coal ones). The cheaper way was to run flues from the furnace through the greenhouse.

“Where capital, taste, and practical science can be united, a more elegant disposition of heating conveniences can be adopted: an excavation should be made for the flue to pass along under the pathway, which pathway may be a casting of iron, or wooden slats, fancifully put together, and at least six inches above the flue.”

But the flue system created problems with smoke and coal gas–dangerous to humans as well as plants. By adding a small boiler to the furnace (he recommend a size about 2 feet (about 61 cm) by 2 feet, and 4 inches (10.2 cm) wide), hothouse owners could have fumeless heating that was better for them and the plants.The boiler was built of cast iron or copper, with a zinc or copper lid. Two pipes were attached to the boiler, one to run hot water through the flues, the other to take the cold water back to the boiler for reheating–a simpler version of the way a boiler works in a steam-heated apartment building.

Clearly, it was the day of different manufacturing methods and abundant cheap skilled labor. Buist expected the incipient hothouse owner to easily find workmen who could build not only the boiler and the plumbing system, but the many wooden frames needed for the 6 by 6 inch (15.2 cm) panes of glass he thought were ideal. But a handy person today could easily rig a similar system for a hothouse, using modern materials.

Next post: How to Heat Your Hothouse: 1841 and Later

References: 

Robert Buist, The American Flower Garden Directory, Philadelphia, Carey and Hart, 1841

Great Buildings website

I just got my order from Plant Delights, which offers a desset cart full of the finest. *

Plant Delights is not your usual type of nursery. Based in the Juniper Level Botanic Gardens in North Carolina, they specialize in the fine and unusual: plants from small breeders, and species or heirloom plants gathered by themselves or horticultural friends and propagated by the nursery.

Since they’re in North Carolina, they also specialize in plants that can take a really hot summer. The fuchsia in the header picture is “Sanihanf’, a heat-tolerant fuchsia from the Suntory breeding program in Japan.

As Tony Avent truly says, the usual version of “heat-tolerant” in catalogues means, “the plant will tolerate more than one day above 90 degrees F (32 degrees C) before croaking.” I love fuchsias, but I’d given up on them; the corpses were piling too high. When I read this, I thought: this is someone who really gardens, someone who knows how I’ve been led on by other catalogues. Maybe I’ll try again.

The true test will come next summer, of course. But meanwhile, my plants arrived in gorgeous shape, a good sign.

Plant Delights plants are bigger than most mail-order nursery plants. They are also more expensive; this is not a commercial nursery, and they don’t deal in the quantities that make plants cheap. Their mission is to get the plants out, so the commercial nurseries will adopt them and make them widely available.

The other plants I got were: Gladiolus dalenii ‘Bolivian Peach‘-found on a roadside near Bolivia, NC.;  Lilium brownii ‘Szechuan Splendor’, a species collected at 6700 feet (2042 meters) on sun-baked cliffs in Sichuan Province; Alocasia wentii, a bronze-leaved winter-hardy alocasia from the mountains of New Guinea; and  Aloe polyphylla,  a spiral-form aloe which is also hardy in our winters (I’ve killed  a few aloes, too. Most of them just don’t like frost. This one is from the high mountains of South Africa, and is reputed to take it.).

Plant Delights is in zone 7b, so most of their plants are extra-safe in my zone-8 garden. That’s nice, because most of the exotics I desire and order tend to be just a little bit risky;: zone-9 plants, liable to disappear in the night.

There are much hardier plants in this catalogue, down to at least zone 4; they collect growing information from their friends and customers in much colder places, and encourage experimenting with zones. Many of these plants are so new to horticulture that your own research can expand zone knowledge. A contribution to gardening, and yet another justification for spending money on plants.

In case you’re wondering why I’m ordering plants now, it’s because fall is the best season to plant perennials in hot-summer areas. Our spring lasts either three months (if you start from when the grass gets green and the first wild things start sprouting) or three weeks (if you count from when the weather is that beautiful temperature between chilly and broiling). If you start a plant in fall, it will have several months to build a root system and get strong and acclimated before the brassy blast of heat. They do a lot better than spring-planted plants, which don’t get nearly as long to adjust.

Plant Delights is not the place to shop if economy is your goal. But it’s the kind of place that can make you want to save your pennies for a good splurge.  I’m already making my list for next year.

Note:
* Just to make this clear: I have no commercial relationship with Plant Delights. They aren’t paying me to say this. Although, just in case Tony Avent is reading–I wouldn’t say no to a couple of free plants…

Reference:

Plant Delights Nursery catalogue 2008; Plant Delights website

I’m always intrigued at the way different locations mutate plants into different shapes.

I, of course, am pleased to call them mutations, because I’m used to their other forms. So to me, the different forms are unusual. Intriguing. It’s like looking at a friend who just got plastic surgery or peacock blue hair.

In the high mountains (between 6,000 and 10,000 feet), many of these variations seem to make a plant lower to the ground, smaller.

Where there is snow eight or nine months out of the year, low to the ground is a smart choice for a spreading plant. If it doesn’t stay low, six or seven or up to twenty feet of snow load will put it there.  Smaller size may also have something to do with short growing season and soil fertility. Rock is close to the surface in high mountains.

Where I live, manzanitas are tall, shrubby plants-the mature ones are well over my head–with twisty mahogany-colored branches. When the moon or headlights shine on them, their pale green leaves turn white.

I delight in this little pinemat manzanita (Arctostaphylos nevadensis), which is a miniature version of the type that grows where I live.  In the mountains, it’s still a shrub, but it comes only to my ankles. To me, this shrubby groundcover looks like gorgeous landscaping. But it also serves some practical purposes.

Manzanitas are great soil-preservers, because they can grow and hold soil on slopes and in soils with very little nourishment. In my area, they cover sunny, dense clay hillsides.  In the high mountains, they thrive on a diet of granite and crushed granite, where very few plants can survive.

Pinemat manzanita berries are somewhat smaller than the tall manzanitas that grow in my area, but they are large in proportion to Arctostaphylos nevadensis’s tiny height. There weren’t too many berries evident this year, but they may have already disappeared down the gullets of the grouse, chipmunks, and squirrels and other wildlife who would find these berries at a handy height for eating.

But manzanita has even more to it than beauty and bounty. Manzanita is in the same family as heaths, heathers, and madrone. It’s also related to uva-ursi (bearberry or kinnickinnick), which is easy to see when you look at this creeping variety.

It’s so closely related to uva-ursi that it has almost the same chemical profile in its leaves. Both have arbutin, a natural antibiotic and diuretic. It can kill and wash away bacteria from the urinary tract. Uva-ursi is traditionally used for bladder and kidney problems, so you could use manzanita in the same way.

You’d need to be careful about the dose, though. Many people make the mistake of vaguely believing that plant drugs are safe because they’re “natural”. Digitalis and scopolamine are also natural, but how you take them means the difference between improving your life and meeting your death. It’s important to be respectful of plants and know what you’re doing.

If you take them in very large quantities, uva-ursi and manzanita can both cause collapse and death. The proper dosage is one teaspoon of leaves steeped in sixteen ounces of water, taken two or three times a day. This tea has a not-unpleasant astringent taste, a bit like the tannin in black tea (actually, manzanita has tannins in it, also). Don’t drink it if you’re pregnant, though; in some women, it can cause uterine contractions.

Historically, the Shoshone drank this tea as a remedy for venereal disease (one of the gifts of Europe to the Americas). If you look at the chemical constituency, it seems like a good thing to try. Chances are it was a lot more effective than whatever European remedy was being offered at the time (mercury, a toxin, was used on its own earlier on; it’s still included in many drugs).

Arbutin has been synthesized as a drug. You may be surprised to learn that taking manzanita or uva ursi tea is actually more effective than taking the drug. Arbutin breaks down so quickly in the body that it often destablilizes before doing its work. Uva ursi has substances in its leaves which preserve the arbutin on its travels through your body. It also has other ingredients which may work synergistically with the others, including quercetin, which is good for your respiratory system, and allantoin, the famous nerve- and tissue-healing ingredient in comfrey.

Over the years, I’ve learned over and over about herbs whose effects were better than their so-called active ingredient. We have a lot to learn about plant chemistry. When drugs are isolated from plants, they often cause side effects that are not present when the whole plant is taken. Or, like manzanita and uva-ursi, the constituents of the plant work as a team to make its action more effective.

Coincidence? I think not.

Next post: more uses for yet another kind of manzanita.

References:

Tracy I. Storer and Robert L. Usinger, Sierra Nevada Natural History, University of California Press, 1963. (They have recently come out with a more recent version, but this is the one I own and still use.)

Kimball Chatfield, Medicine from the Mountains: Medicinal Plants of the Sierra Nevada, Range of Light Publications, 1997

LoLo Westrich, California Herbal Remedies, Gulf Publishing Company, 1989

Clusiana tulip opening out. This bulb is named after Clusius ,a famous botanist who grew it in the Leiden Botanical Gardens in the late 1500s/early 1600s. The much more common (and much cheaper) Tulipa clusianus var. chrysantha has yellow interior and edging, instead of white. (For a rundown on a pale yellow cultivar of chrysantha called ‘Cynthia’, chcek out this site.)

McClure & Zimmerman is a place where you’ll find bulbs you won’t see everywhere. I know I’ve said that about all the catalogues I’ve reviewed, and it’s true about every one. This is part of the reason I’m fond of these catalogues. That and the fact that they all offer a wide variety of many kinds of bulbs.

McClure & Zimmerman has a heavy emphasis on species bulbs, and they also provide thoughtful information on bulbs for warm-winter areas. I’m not in a warm-winter area, but if you are, try bulb-shopping here. You can either try special mixes of narcissus or tulips that don’t require chilling, or your can read through the selections and look for “no cold period required” and “perennializes/naturalizes in the south”.

This is a real service to those who believe they can’t grow any tulips or narcissus. The tulip varieties for warm winters are generally the smaller species types. They don’t have the big-splash appeal of their flashier sisters, but they are charming, and sometimes fragrant. They may also perennialize well in no-chill winter areas. (After all, they come from rocky cliffs in mountains or untended wild meadows near the Mediterranean and Black Seas, so they don’t get a lot of coddling there.)

Warm-winter narcissus are not necessariy small, but tend toward certain breeds: jonquil or tazetta chlorophyll is often present in the line, although some of them look very much like the typical trumpet daffodil. I apologize for not having pictures. It is my experience that warm-winter bulbs don’t perennialize well in my chill-winter garden; I get one or maybe two years of them, and that’s it.

They might do better in the ground (most of my bulbs are in containers), since there are some tazetta daffodils that have naturalized in a nearby town. But that area has a noticeably warmer climate; it’s about a month ahead of me in spring and noticeably warmer in winter. Never mind. I get to grow all those other bulbs that warm-winter growers can’t.

The fritillary section has varieties that are hard to find, and the species lily selection is the best I have seen in a single place. I have to admit, though, that my luck with these fritillaries and lilies has been bad. Since species plants tend to be particular in their needs, this might well laid up to me and not the bulbs. I’m just saying. And it’s also true that, while two of them faded away, one of the species cyclamen I got from McClure and Zimmerman has spread, seeded itself, and bloomed in fall for years without any particular help from me.

In their summer catalogue, you’ll find species and heirlooms in the gladiolus department. Never believed a glad could be dainty and woodsy? Check this out.

Gladiolus x colvillei ‘The Bride’, introduced about 1870.

Here’s a warning, though: these color photos are all you’ll get. McClure and Zimmerman has beautiful line drawings and occasional black-and-white photos, but it’s a strictly not-coated-stock kind of catalogue.

For some of us, that just allows for a little extra room to dream.

It may look as if I’m talking about two catalogues here. But really, they are big sister and little sister.

John Scheepers is the catalogue to go to for trying things out. You can buy in quantities of ten (sometimes even fewer). You can also buy in larger quantities, 50 or 100.

Jan Ohms, who heads up the company, is related to the Scheepers family, tulip breeders since at least the 1920s or 1930s. Many of the tulips they’ve bred from that era are still very popular, and the work keeps on. Another catalogue lists several of their tulip breeds as “Scheepers Sports”, and says they are among the most sought-after tulips.

You won’t find them under that name in the Scheepers catalogue, but you will find them under their cultivar names, as well as a lot of tulips named after Ohms and Scheepers family members, and other relations who are tulip breeders. While the catalogue business is based in Connecticut, there’s clearly a strong Netherlands connection here. Which is cool, because if you read this catalogue carefully (yes, this is another of my catalogues that goes floppy from wear every year) you can learn a lot about what’s happening in the Netherlands bulb-breeding world.

Because the Netherlands is probably the foremost bulb-breeding center in the world (though there are important bulb-breeders in several other areas), you can also find bulbs here that you won’t find anywhere else, along with  a huge selection of old standards. And a surprisingly large selection of species narcissus and tulips.

And if you’re a hog about it—if you really really have to have a hundred or more Apricot Beauty tulips or Mount Hood narcissus-then you want Van Engelen, the big-sister catalogue.

It’s called a wholesale catalogue, but their minimum order is only $50, a mere nothing for a true bulb enthusiast. By wholesale, they really mean, “in quantity.”

Bulbs in quantity. In flower, starting at bottom left and going clockwise: Annie Schilder tulips, Purissima tulips, Hawera narcissus, West Point tulips and more Purissima tulips, garden hose, Invasion tulips. (Not all of these are from Scheepers/Van Engelen, but most are available there.)

If you’re a landscaper (or a fanatic bulb homeowner), you can even find some of the more popular bulbs priced per 250 or 500.

Quantity prices mean that you pay a lot less per bulb than you do when you order them in smaller amounts. I won’t lie to you: I’ve found the occasional withered or flattened bulb in my quantity bags, and they aren’t always all the same size. But in general what I get from my Van Engelen bulbs is a good show for a really good price-and enough bulbs to give some away without feeling I’m denying myself.

The Van Engelen catalogue doesn’t have photos, so if you want to see what the flowers look like, you must either have a Scheepers catalogue by your side, or go on their web site. I don’t consider this a hardship, but you’ve been warned. This is a catalogue for readers and addicts.