Category — Catalogue/book/website reviews

As my geek complement to Daffodil Planter’s Daffodil Blogarama and the many other daffodil posts flashing yellow, pale pink, and white over the web, I’m offering a peek into the daffodil world of a hundred years ago.

Although maybe it’s not so geeky, since it’s mostly concentrated on sex. Daffodil sex, that is. Though a man of the cloth, the author of the “Daffodils” book in the British Present-Day Gardening series, Reverend Joseph Jacob,  has a passion for breeding. And, even more shockingly,  he thinks everyone should share it. “This fascinating pursuit, hobby, or business, to give it names which are appropriate to the different ends in view, is one which I advise every Daffodil cultivator to take up; whether it be for pleasure or with a view to business it is equally alluring and interesting.” (pg. 39) He talks of going from town to town in England, lecturing at daffodil societies, and how the members hung on his lips, asking questions about do-it-yourself breeding.

I wonder if the national convention of the American Daffodil Society will have any similar seminars? These days, we think of daffodil breeding as something only specialists can do, with special equipment and large fields and greenhouses. But, Jacobs says,  all we really need are labels and notebooks, plus little boxes for storing and carrying pollen (it’s viable for about two weeks, if you keep it dry and clean in a loosely covered box) and a camel’s hair brush, gently moistened in the mouth so the pollen will stick to it.

‘Minnow’, a miniature unavailable in Jacob’s time

That’s all the physical equipment that’s required. The rest of it lies in knowledge, and patience.

One of the bits of knowledge we need to try our hand at our own hybrids is knowing when the time is ripe for sex. “…the best time for cross-fertilisation is between 10 A.M and 4 P.M….that in cold and sunless weather the operations should be repeated more than once…that the pollen brushes must be kept very clean, and all the pollen of one variety carefully removed before the same brush is used for any other variety; that it is not found necessary in practice to cover the fertilised bloom in any way with glass or muslin; and that, the seed-bearer should be growing in a  good open position.” (pg. 44-45)

But the deeper knowledge that’s required, the one all those daffodil societies were swarming around Jacob hoping to get, is the knowledge of family background. Some daffodils are good pollinators, some are not.  Since most of the daffodils of a hundred years ago are lost or obscure, I’m going to save his complete lists for the very end of this post, in the hope that some of you have grown the ones I don’t know about, or will be able to point out sources for them.

From his list of “Potent Pollen-Parents” (I told you it was about sex), only  a few remain that are available today: all the poet varieties, W.P. Milner,  and King Alfred. (King Alfred, as I’ve explained before,   is an antique daffodil that’s actually hard to find. If you read the fine type, you will see that below most ‘King Alfred’ blurbs is “King Alfred type”, which basically means any yellow trumpet daffodil that looks more or less like King Alfred and is cheap in production. They may not have the same pollen potency as their predecessor.)

King Alfred is also on the list of “Good Seed-Bearers”, as are most of the poet varieties. Golden Spur, another good seeder, is available through Old House Gardens, as is Lily Langtry. (I’ve grown Golden Spur, a simple yellow trumpet that makes the modern ones look a bit as if they’re on steroids; I have yet to make the acquaintance of the divine Mrs. Langtry.)

Of the “Shy Seeders” I recognize only Maximus (also available at OHG) and Empress, a daffodil I have admired but never bought due to price (I save my most extravagant bulb purchases for tulips, it seems. I might as well admit my prejudice; I have favorite children in the garden).

Amateur breeders today may have a harder time finding this kind of information, as breeding has become something specialized and hard in our minds. It’s making me wonder if a little diligent research among breeders might be a good idea.

But research won’t give me the final attribute I need for breeding: patience. “The one great drawback that can be urged against [breeding] is the time that must necessarily elapse between the seed-sowing and the harvest. From four to six or seven years is a long time to wait for results, but, as the oft-repeated quotation from old Philip Miller (1733) says, ‘After the first five years are past, if there be seeds sown every year, there will be annually a succession of flowers to show themselves; so that there will be a continual expectation, which will take off the tediousness which, during the first five years, might be very troublesome to some persons…’ ” (pg. 39-40)

Is it any wonder that I love old garden books? Where in modern literature would we find someone urging us, urging anyone, to go out in the garden with a camel’s hair brush and start our own hybrids?  Even if it takes seven years. And why not follow these old urgings? Many things have changed in the last hundred years, but, as a look at the emerging spring around us will show, sex still goes on in the same old way.

‘Colleen Bawn’ - an antique now, but still in the future in Jacob’s day

Reverend Joseph Jacob’s Lists of Breeding Daffodils

(I don’t know what the ordering system for these lists is; clearly, not alphabetical. Maybe order of bloom time?)

List of Thirty Good Seed-Bearers:

Duke of Bedford

Lady Margaret Boscawen

Minnie Hume

King Alfred

Mrs. R. Sydenham

Madame de Graaff

Weardale Perfection

Firebrand

Judge Bird

W.B. Hartland

Oriflamme

Most of the Poet varieties

Emperor

Henry Irving

Golden Spur

Pallidus Praecox

P.R. Barr

Eyebright

Glory of Nordwijk

Bernardino

Acme

Golden Bell

Alert

Mrs. Walter Ware

Princess Mary

Mrs. Langtry

Albicans

Evangeline

Lord Muncaster

Decora

List of Shy Seeders

Empress

Horsfieldii

Glory of Leiden

Homespun

Maximus

Sir Watkin

Gloria Mundi

Flora Wilson

Crown Prince

Duchess of Westminster

Autocrat

Potent Pollen-Parents

King Alfred

Maximus

Eyebright

Emperor

Weardale Perfection

Circlet

Madame de Graaff

W.P. Milner

All the Poet varieties

Lulworth

Castile

Poetarum (for its colour)

I was researching for another article when I came across an amazing find.

Amazing to me, anyway. Some of you may have known about this for years. Googlebooks has a collection of old garden books which have been scanned in, so you can see the original layout, font, and often very beautiful illustrations.

(We often believe that color photography is the apex of illustration - and sometimes it is. But a skilled artist can show us more about the textures and colors and personality of a plant than a photographer, who must work at least partly in the realm of the literal.)

More importantly, for historial garden book addicts such as myself, you can read all of anything that no longer has a copyright.

For instance, you can check out Robert Hogg’s 1879  Florist and pomologist (which looks like either a bound magazine or an encyclopedia of sorts) and read how to have new potatoes at Christmas, primula culture, the preservative qualities of seawater, and a number of other things about the fruits and flowers that were popular in 1879. (In those days, a florist was a person who grew flowers, not a person who sold them.) In the case of potatoes, “pomology” is used poetically, since a potato is a tuberous rhizome. The rhizome, in turn, is a modified stem (the eyes on a potato are the same type of bud you would see on a branch of a tree).

Or you can move up a generation or so, and read The School Garden Book,  which has the most thorough, clear instructions on forcing bulbs I’ve found in many a day - and which encourages you to tell the story of your plant as you saw it grow. It’s long been my habit to read a children’s book if I want clear, non-jargony instruction. This one may be from 1911, but the writing is clear and easy to follow. I also like all the little science suggestions, such as cutting the bulb in half and drawing a picture of the proto-flower inside (someday it’s my aim to cannibalize a bulb to such purpose. So far I haven’t been able to make myself do it).

The section  for August includes an essay on “Useful Flower Jars” :

“In few things could the average American home be so greatly benefited by a little careful attention as in the choice of receptacles for displaying cut flowers,” it starts, and goes on to lay out some very simple, cheap arrangements very suited to modern gardeners who don’t want to spend a lot of money and time.

My old friend Peter Henderson  is back with his classic 1904 Handbook of plants and general horticulture (they didn’t necessarily capitalize every important word in a title, then; initial caps were more of an art). Since Henderson started writing in the mid 1800s, this would have been a summing-up of his considerable output and knowledge. Henderson was one of the first serious U.S. garden and farm writers, and he did phenomenal amounts of research. Liberty Hyde Bailey’s 1906 Cyclopedia of American horticulture is also available. Bailey wrote the first Hortus, whose later editions are still standard references, so the information in this compendium is bound to be thorough. Bailey, who started the Cornell School of Agriculture and wrote some of his classic works there, retired to spend his time campaigning for the environment, natural studies classes in schools, and to travel the world researching plants, becoming an expert in both carex and palms. He also kept writing books into his hardy old age.

Googlebooks also has garden books from other countries and in other languages. Even a cursory review shows that this is a meaty collection you can find a lot of good stuff in.

Online books aren’t substitutes for books on paper: I love the smell of old books, the indented letterpress print, the way they open out (the art of bookbinding was well understood in those days); I love the idea that I’m holding something some gardener held in 1841 or 1880 or 1904. But while it’s more informative, in many ways, to travel to a library where you can have access to historical books (for one thing, you learn a lot from the books next to the ones you think you want), not all of us can do that. Googlebooks opens the attic door to treasure chests of old garden lore. A great spot for a gardener to spend a winter day.

It’s time to plant seeds. For those of us in mild-winter climates fall is the best time to plant cool-weather annuals. For those of us in any climate, it can also be an ideal time to plant perennial seeds (they often have cooling or cooling/warming requirements which are naturally met by  overwinter germination. Why not have nature do the work instead of fiddling with stratification and the rest?). And it’s a good time to plant wildflower seeds (after all, when does nature do it?).

So I was already tuned into seed when I got my fall letter from the miso company I patronize*, and found an article by Christian Elwell about planting seeds in a way that’s designed to strengthen plant/human communion.

The article describes a Siberian healer (real or imagined), Anastasia, who says that one of the big problems in plant/human communication is that plants no longer know whom they are serving.

Think about it: we grow huge monocrops of plants, plants which are often untouched by human hands, and which get attention only from machines. Our culture thinks of plants sheerly in terms of production.

But every gardener knows that there is far more to plants than that. We know that plants satisfy our souls in some way we may not be able to describe but would be devastated without. Gardeners also tend to be more aware than other human beings that we need plants: for the air we breathe, for the food we eat, the places we live in, the clothes we wear, the medicines we take, and for that valuable soul-sustenance.

What we might not quite be aware of is that plants may also need us. And not just for our CO2.

Humans and plants have been working together for thousands of years. But in the last several decades, humans have been separating themselves from plants more and more. According to Anastasia, plants need the feedback of our being. They need their souls fed by us. When we withdraw our personalities and attention, plants suffer.

One way to heal this lack is to plant seeds imbued with our consciousness. Anastasia recommends a three-part method for doing this. The first step is putting the seeds to be planted under the tongue for nine minutes, to infuse them with the invisible but tangible messages of our bodies.

The second step is to put the seeds in our palms, and breathe on them. Breath has holy meaning in many cultures; in ours, the word “inspire” means to take in breath or spirit. And by the way, seeds breathe, too. Just very very slowly. But that’s how they manage to keep viable for years (sometimes centuries, or even millenia).

The final step to conscious seed-planting is to  stand barefoot on the ground where we will be planting the seeds, and hold them  to the sky.

If we are planting a large crop (Elwell plants rice), we can just do this with a few of the seeds; they will communicate the messages we’ve given them to the other seeds.

Sound whacky? Maybe. But to me, it sounds like some of the less formal rituals I like to do when I plant, and it sounds worth trying.

Gardening and wandering in the woods has led me to a clear understanding: plants are sentient beings. In fact, I’ll come out of the closet and admit that for me, everything is sentient: I’m an animist. Working on that assumption can completely change your life. In fact, working on that assumption might be just the change our fast-moving produce-produce-produce culture needs so badly.

So, even if you think treating seeds this way is crazy, why not try an experiment, if only to prove that it doesn’t work?  Plant some seeds without this attention and some with it. See if you notice a difference in the growing plants, the flowering, and the harvest.  Or yourself.

* If you haven’t tried it, South River miso is an entirely different experience than other misos.They make the miso in wooden tubs over wood fires, doing everything the traditional way. At first I wondered why their miso was so much more expensive than others. Then I tried it, and all was revealed: it was the difference between a bottle of table red and a bottle of fine vintage wine. (And no, they aren’t paying me to say this: it’s unsolicited enthusiasm.)

Charlotte at The Galloping Gardener   was kind enough to give me a MeMe award – which gives me the opportunity to write up some of my favorite blogs. The Galloping Gardener will reward you with spectacular photos of gardens from around the world, and some of the people who live near them.

Of course the problem with naming seven blogs is that there are so many to choose from. If I’ve named your blog, please don’t feel obliged to accept the award; not everybody has the time or inclination to fit a post about blogs, with all that linking, into their blogging schedule. Just know I really like your blog! And if I haven’t named your blog, it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it; it just means that my memory is only so good and this list is only seven blogs long, and I read –and enjoy- a lot more than seven blogs.

If you do want to accept the MeMe award, it works like this: link back to the person who gave you the award, reveal seven things about yourself, choose seven other blogs that you want to nominate, and post a link to them. Then let each of your choices know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog. Finally, let the tagger know when your post is up (glad I revisited Charlotte’s site, I’d forgotten that one!).

Seven things about me:

I go barefoot whenever possible

A friend once said that a city penthouse would be hell for me. True. At least after about two weeks to a month of theater, concerts, nightclub music, opera, bookstores, libraries, botanical gardens, museums,  and restaurants…maybe it wouldn’t be such a nightmare, after all.

Dark chocolate is the only real chocolate – a precept I live by.

I read everything, including product labels.

I love the dark.

I leap into any living water I can possibly manage, including some that’s near freezing.

My ideal spots combine woods and ocean.

And now for the real meat of this article, the blogs:

Whenever I need guidance and inspiration on foliage, I go to Northern Shade. She always has some new combination to tweak my fancy. Plus, she’s my go-to for campanulas, a genus I love.

Lost in the Landscape  looks at the details, whether it’s sidewalk plantings, Luther Burbank’s farm, or a book on low-water gardening. I like getting the full story, plus there are gorgeous artistic photos, to bring out even more detail.

Another waterwise gardener with interesting design ideas is Steve Snedeker , who is my go-to guy for all things stone.

Barbee at The Garden at Crocker Croft  has years of garden wisdom, lore, and experience to offer. “I suspect the day I have to stop gardening is the day I start dying.” Barbee, I know you’ve had enough of the MeMe thing, but I just wanted you to know I appreciate you.

Susan Morrison (aka garden-chick) gets into really green gardening on her Blue Planet Garden Blog “Plant right; water less; garden more.” She’s also a landscaper with design ideas.

Frances at Fairegarden  ranges from lyrical to laugh-provoking, with beautiful photos to point up the narrative of her extremely diverse garden (I get a lot of plant lust when I read her blog).

I love keeping up  with Chandramouli’s Indian garden at In Art Lies My Heart .   He’s an inveterate experimenter, and you can tell he really loves Plantville, and his human family, too.

If I get another award like this one, it will give me an opportunity to name seven other blogs just as deserving. As for comments: how about letting me know what some of your favorite blogs are? You don’t have to name seven; one or two will do.

I was intrigued by hyperlocavore when I found it on Twitter. The short version (that’s all you get on Twitter) was that this site helps you find gardening partners in your area, so you can share your yards or dig up your lawns and grow food locally.

A lot of people in my area are involved in the slow and local food movements; in fact, a lot of people in my area moved here in the earlier “grow your own” era, and some of the ones who are still moving here have the same sentiments.

While this site is definitely in favor of “grow your own”, the vision is a lot bigger than that. I checked out some of the videos to get the flavor of what was on offer here.

One of the videos, “Transition Towns”, caught my attention.The video might benefit from a little editing. Peak oil philosophy is not a riveting opening for most. But I kept going, and found original and inspiring thinking about how gardens might be a part of  dealing with an oil-based culture that is running out of oil, and choking from the bad effects of oil dependency. That’s what Transition Towns are all about, according to Rob Hopkins, the movement founder.

“We could do nothing, let this unfold as a series of lurching crises, or we could do something…there’s no  reason why a world with less oil couldn’t be preferable to where we are now,” says Rob Hopkins “We really need to re-discover what was actually good about the life before cheap oil.”

So they set about doing it - what else? - locally. In Totnes, Devon, UK, Transition Town enthusiasts began mining their own resources; old people, with their memories from the time before cheap oil  came in and really started to change things.

One thing you notice when you start interviewing, says  Hopkins, is “how resilient people were in those days, how everybody had skills they could turn their hand to. Dig for Victory - Victory Gardens I think it was called in the U.S.  - that was possible because everyone knew how to garden. They hadn’t been to gardening college, they knew it by osmosis. Nowadays, if you said, ‘here’s a spade, dig a hole,’ you’d have lots of people who could design a hole, you’d have lots of people who could quantity survey the hole, inspect the hole up for you, put the hole-digging out to tender, and they could insure the hole-digging process against public indemnity,  but actually there’d be very few people who could actually dig: so we’ve moved away from being a practical, hands-on society.”

Transition Towns is no pie-in-the-sky idealist movement; their idea is to find workable community solutions - solutions that are, in fact, much more workable than the ones we use now.

“The idea is to look to draw what was good  about  those times before cheap oil, not to romanticize it. We try to apply the best of the old and the best of the new, but it’s really about getting people to ask the right questions. We don’t claim to come in with all the answers.”

What they’re looking for is a way to replace common misconceptions with common sense. “If you look at all the plans the government draw up, town planning, it’s based on the assumption that oil prices will always remain cheap, the move away from the household economy will continue.” Hopkins points out that we really have no basis for those assumptions, and so we make bad decisions based on shaky foundations. In the U.S., such decisions have allowed us to become a sedentary, obese, depressed people, whose food travels long distances, and is often highly processed and without nutritional value.

For  Hopkins and the Transition Town movers, one of the first obvious good decisions is to produce food locally. The old model puts “good economy” as the enemy of “sustainability”. The Transition Town movement seem to be saying that we need to work together, locally, toward a richer and more sustainable economy. Which only makes sense. If we mortgage the future, how good is our economy, anyway? Any gardener knows that if you deplete the soil, you’re going to have to pay somewhere down the line.

But I think the most inspiring part of the Transition Town movement is the concept that we don’t have to wait for Big Experts to Solve the Problem for us. “Rather than breezing in with lots of experts who design everything for everybody, it’s a question of unleashing the genius of the community around you.”

(To read more about local food gardening, visit http://hyperlocavore.ning.com/)