Category — Food plants

I started out full of myself. And multiple enthusiasms. This would be the most unusual, fresh version of the Three Sisters the world had ever seen. And it was all going into my prize bronze-brown Vietnamese pot, the big one that I’d splurged on at the discount store (it was only a few dollars more than a plastic one the same size, I told myself). I had vague, secret-from-myself dreams of how I’d win the Fine Gardening container contest, with becoming modesty of course.

Then came the reality.

Those  yin-yang beans I bought to twine up the cornstalks? Well, as it happens, they were bush beans. They weren’t going to twine anywhere. And they didn’t seem to like the circumstances I’d put them in, either; I harvested two pods with two beans in them and that was it.  The leaves had a ratty white-spotted look, too, that I think was due to nitrogen deficiency. I did get enough beans to replace the ones I planted, though the ones I harvested were kind of scrawny.

OK, then there were the violetto trionfo beans that actually do climb. (I planted three of them, and three of the yin-yang beans. Six stalks of corn.) I’ve got at least one of them running up the cornstalk now. But they’re just blooming, and the way those corn cobs feel, the corn’s going to be long dead before the beans get ready.

And then there’s the corn itself. A Japanese exotic corn, striped pink, cream, and white. How cool is that? And it’s actually very pretty-but not nearly as healthy (or colorful) as I’d envisioned. I do admit to getting a laugh out of pruning corn, which has got to be the most Garden Society thing I’ve ever done.  The leaves would go dead, and the corn would look funky, so I’d cut off the dead ones. Pruning corn.

Even though it wasn’t what I expected, I have enjoyed seeing the corn evolve, from its first pale stripes to the dark burgundy color that’s spreading ever further along the stalk. And even though it’s not as tall and bushy and strong as I would have liked, I did get one small ear of wine-red corn on each stalk.

The cucuzzi climbed rampantly out of all the other pots I put it in-but it made a few pale leaves and petered out in this one. The Waltham butternut squash  I also put in there is just putting out its first blossom now. And the surprise Brown Sugar canna (deep brown foliage, pink flower, reputedly) I planted late? It did show a tentative green point a month or so ago. And then sank back into the earth.
I think this trio, or quintet, (or sextet, if you count the canna), needed a lot more water than they got in that pot. I put in a reservoir insert, so they did get some bottom watering. And I put in some water-conserving polymers into the soil. But  I think that reservoir just wasn’t big enough for such heavy drinkers. Especially in a ceramic pot that allows water to evaporate. It’s  a glazed ceramic pot, which is a lot less porous than unglazed. But still.

I think they all needed a lot more food than they got, too. Oh, I did use a heavy-on-compost mix for soil, and put in amendments, the way I do with all of my container plants. And I foliar fed them, the way I do my whole garden. But corn, beans, and squash are notoriously nitrogen-hungry. They are heavy feeders and drinkers, and I treated them like anorexics.

Recently, I also read that the Three Sisters idea was about handy harvest, as well as space saving. The corn would have been field corn-the kind you gather when it’s ripened hard, to feed to livestock. (William Alexander suggests a modern version: use popcorn.) The squash would have been winter squash or pumpkins–not harvested until their shells were hard. Late, like the corn. And the beans would have been dry beans, not ones you’d pick off the vine to eat fresh. Dried beans that get harvested when the pods dry.

I could look at this season’s formerly-known-as-star container and be disappointed. But you know what? I’ve enjoyed the little purple curling edges of the corn leaves, and I’m enjoying the purple bean flowers and vines spiraling around the almost-dead corn, and I enjoyed the magic of opening up my two little pathetic yin-yang pods and finding replicas of the little seeds I planted.
I even enjoyed pruning corn.

Reference:

The $64 Tomato, William Alexander, Algonquin Press, 2006

Places to get seeds:

yin-yang beans: Park’s
violetto trionfo beans (I  notice they are not in the current catalogue. They’d been sitting for some years): Pinetree Gardens
Japanese ornamental corn: JL Hudson
cucuzzi squash: JL Hudson
Waltham butternut: Pinetree Gardens

John Muir describes finding a manzanita whose trunk was four feet in diameter, but branched out at eighteen inches high. That was at 6,000 feet. The resulting tree-bush, as he describes it, formed a broad round head ten or twelve feet high. So obviously not all mountainous manzanita is petite.

I’m guessing that the manzanita he found was the taller, brighter-green manzanita that grows in the high mountains, Arctostaphylos patula. It doesn’t usually get as high as twelve feet, so the one Muir found was exceptional.

The ones I know go to about four or five feet.  I always find their bright green leaves a novelty, since the  manzanitas where I live are such a pale white-green. When the sun shines through the bright green leaves of mountainous manzanita, they are a stunning sight.

These manzanita leaves can be used in the same way as Arctostaphylos nevadensis. And there’s an additional use for them which isn’t needed in the high mountains: as a poison oak remedy. In my area, there are two commercial preparations for poison oak which involve manzanita-leaf tea. One is a spray; the other is a very effective clay concoction with manzanita tea in it.

Arctostaphylos patula bushes are also heavy bearers of berries. “Manzanita” translates to “little apple”; you can see why this name might have come to mind. This bush is loaded with berries which are the size of the berries on the taller manzanitas where I live. They’re food for a lot of wildlife. These lower bushes in the rocks are especially climbable for little critters without wings.

People eat manzanita berries, too. They aren’t juicy, the way you usually think of berries. When manzanita berries are ripe, they are dry, a bit powdery, and astringent-sweet. When you’re walking in the woods, sucking on a manzanita berry can quench your thirst. Make sure it’s really ripe, though, or you’ll get a lot more pucker than saliva. And don’t crunch through to the seed: they’re astringent enough to dry your mouth up again.

It’s most likely that this thirst remedy was passed down by the Native Americans in manzanita-growing areas. Manzanita was a major food crop in the areas where it grows, since it’s abundant and easy to harvest.  The lower-elevation manzanitas had many names, since it was an important crop. I haven’t found names for Arctostaphylos patula, but since many Native Americans summered in the high mountains (and left their grinding holes to prove it), it’s likely they made use of the high-mountain manzanitas as well as the ones in their winter homes down the hill.

Manzanita berry powder was made into a sort of cider, or ground and cooked in hot ashes like mush. Some people ate the powder in cakes, or stirred up with dry powdered salmon–an early energy food.  There seems to have been a lot of celebration with the manzanita harvest. Manzanita berries are not only abundant, they’re sweet, and a craving for sweetness is not just a modern trait.

Sweetness is certainly what’s attracted me. Besides eating the berries straight, I’ve also had the pleasure of manzanita-berry lemonade, which is basically a tea of the powder soaked in cold water.

If you want to try the easy modern way, you can use a blender, as a friend of mine does. After you’ve blended them, though, you still have to find some way to sift or sieve the fine powder from the substantial seeds. Or you can just leave the seeds in and strain out the tea. The taste is a little less sweet, but doubtless there are useful nutrients in the seeds.

I had never thought of growing manzanita before I read up on it for this article. Manzanita is just there. But if you want to try it,  Chatfield recommends getting starts at a nursery. Like many wild plants, manzanita is hard to start or transplant, and like many shrubs, it’s slow-growing.  He says that, while they tolerate drought, watering them will make them grow faster, and bear more flowers and berries.  He also says they grow in sun and shade.

This may well be true. Since I haven’t grown them, I can only say what I’ve observed about seeing them grow: the few I’ve seen in shade look straggly and small and rarely bear anything. This Arctostaphylos patula is growing in the high part-shade of red firs (the little bush in front of it is a chinquapin). Obviously it does get some sun, but you can see it’s much skimpier than the ones in the sun; it’s got a lot of its elegant red-brown skeleton next to it. And there are no berries.

There are many varieties of manzanita, so it might make sense to look for one that lives in the climate closest to yours. And while watering may help them thrive, especially in the first couple of years,  I’ve never seen or heard of any manzanitas growing in any area except a dry-summer one.  And they tend to grow either on slopes or crushed granite or both, so: drainage drainage drainage.

Meanwhile, I’ll enjoy manzanitas in the wild. The ones in my area are long since over (they bloom in about February; the fruit’s ripe in early summer). But, in the moutains, Arctostaphylos patula is just getting to harvest season. The berries will turn dull red when they ripen.

They haven’t got long. You can get snow in September in the high mountains. Six weeks to two months after this picture was taken, things will start freezing up.

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

I don’t know the name of this burgundy hollyhock, and neither does the friend whose garden I found it in. But I sure like it. It’s very similar to A. rosea nigra, but has just that little difference in color that makes it wine red instead of eggplant black. If anyone can give me a cultivar name for this, I’d be grateful.

It’s fitting that this post should start with a mysterious hollyhock. There’s a lot of mystery to the story of how hollyhocks became a part of European and British gardens.

Clearly, hollyhocks came to the Middle East early on. Several sources quote this area as the native home of the hollyhock. But since I’m working on the theory that they originate from China, my guess is that they got to the Middle East via the many ancient trade routes between the Middle East and China. (Besides the overland Silk Road, there were probably routes by sea as well.) The hundreds of years of the Caliphates and the Ottoman Empire were a huge influence in plant breeding and gardening; those of us of European heritage use many of their garden designs today.

Walled gardens, irrigation, fountains, and formal ideas about garden design originated in Arab culture. Even the idea of paradise as a garden did (remember Eden?). The very word “paradise” derives from an Arabic word for garden. And these garden ideas spread: the Caliphates and the later Ottoman Empire were vast enterprises which in their heyday spread as far as present-day Russia, Austria, Southern France, most of Spain, and pretty much the entire Mediterranean perimeter.

The sultans of the Ottoman Empire were so interested in plants that they had traders on the Silk Road collect promising bulbs for breeding, starting off the beginning of the modern tulip (you knew I’d work tulips in here somehow). So it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to imagine that they also asked their traders to come back with desirable plant seeds. One of those might have been the hollyhock.

The first mention of hollyhocks in English literature is in the John Gardiner’s poem “Feate of Gardenini”, copied into a 1440 manuscript. Since manuscripts were a lot rarer then than they are today, probabilities are good that this was an already-known poem already in circulation through the oral tradition. This means it might have been composed generations earlier.

Which fits in well with the accepted theory that the Crusaders brought back hollyhock seeds with them. Hoc is Anglo-Saxon for mallow (hollyhocks are closely related to mallows, and, until recently, they were in the same genus). Holy has the same meaning it has today: the whole name signifies “a mallow from the holy lands”.

The Crusaders weren’t happy with Arab rule of Europe, and their goal was a lot more expansionist than holy. In many areas of Europe, Moslems coexisted peacefully with Christians, and introduced many of the arts we now think of as European. But sadly, as so often, religion became the battle flag for cultural and political differences.  The Crusaders were looking for lebensraum, and they thought they knew how to get it: invade the Arab lands, as theirs had been invaded hundreds of years ago. They called it a war of Christianity with Islam.

Like many other wars, it became more complicated as it went on, because by this time Arab and European cultures had been entwined for hundreds of years. When you spend time in a country (and slow travel meant the Crusaders spend a lot of time in lands that were Arab-dominated, including their own), you begin to adopt its rhythms, learn its language, maybe even want to settle there. For some, it might have been a little like the influx of former colonists to the UK: the ruling culture becomes the culture of reference, and the colonized people are drawn to its center.

While it is true that the Crusaders committed many atrocities in their holy land-grab operations, it’s also true that some of the Europeans stayed, intermarried, and became traders in the Middle East. It was the start of a commerce that brought us many of the spices that are now considered common in European cooking. Pepper, for instance, was a great and expensive rarity in the 13th century. Maybe hollyhock seeds were another trade commodity.

Or maybe some of those Arab rulers of Europe longed for the hollyhocks of the Middle East, and sent for seeds. As with so many other plants, the gardeners of the wealthy take cuttings and seeds, and within a generation or two, exotic rarities become cottage-garden commoners.

However they got into European gardens, hollyhocks were originally grown there not as an ornamental, but as a food.

And if you look at the way they grow, this makes a lot of sense. They are easy to grow and have large leaves which come up in early spring, when food is in short supply. The taste of the leaves is actually quite good, and though the slight hairiness is a bit off-putting to modern palates, the basic texture is nice, also. I steamed some hollyhock leaves with fish to try them out. They were really pretty tasty. If you put hollyhock leaves in a soup or ratatouille, I think the hairy factor would fade, and the good flavor and nutrition would be left.

Chinese tradition says that hollyhocks should be cooked in the seventh month, which is equivalent to August, so I felt free to try their leaves in late summer. It does seem to me, though, that they would be tenderer and better earlier on. There’s also a reference to the flowers being prized in Chinese cookery, but no information on how.

Food wasn’t the only value to hollyhocks, though, in China or Europe. They were also medicinal. Being so closely related to the mallow, they were (and probably still are) used for many of the same illnesses: respiratory complaints and inflammation. John Gerard, who lived from 1545 to 1612, put them in his herbal. “The roots, leaves, and seeds serve for all those things for which the wilde mallows doe…”

But Gerard also was one of the many to note how pretty and easy to grow hollyhocks were. “Hollihocks with purple floures hath great broad leaves, confusedly indented about the edges, and likewise toothed like a saw…The floures are double, and of a bright purple coulour…The second yeere after they are sowne they bring forth their floures in July and August, when the seed is ripe the stalke withereth, the root remaineth, and sendeth forth new stalkes, leaves and floures, many yeares after.” So hollyhocks were a short-lived perennial in England, too.

It’s interesting to see that double hollyhocks were around this early. It seems that there was a huge variety of colors and shapes of hollyhocks available even in the 1600s. Parkinson, who wrote one of the early English gardening treatises , describes hollyhocks “both single and double, of many and sundry coulours, yeeld ouat their flowers like Roses on their tall branches, like Trees, to sute you with flowers when almost you have no other, to grace out your Garden.”

He even mentions one “of a darke red like blacke bloud”, which could be that very hollyhock that grows in my friend’s garden.

Next post: big fluffy hollyhocks, plus more hollyhock history

References:

The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1971

Alice M. Coats, Flowers and Their Histories, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1956, 1968

Mrs. C. F. Leyel, Officier de l’Academie Francaise, Fellow of the Royal Institute, Elixirs of Life, first pub. 1948 faber and faber London. pb reprint 1987

Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Great Confrontation: Europe and Islam Through the Centuries, Ivan R. Dee, 2003

John Gerard, Gerard’s Herbal, The Essence therof distilled by Marcus Woodward from the Edition of Th. Johnson, 1636, Crescent Books reprint, 1985

Cucuzzi in the evening.

Cucuzzi in the morning.

Cucuzzi all around: ornamental, fragrant, edible, and a rapid grower.

Because this vine is an edible gourd, it takes the same rich soil, water, and heat that garden squashes do. But its flowers are more delicate, and, like all gourds, white-at least in the evening, when it first opens and gives you a chance to inhale a fresh, gentle fragrance. If you plant them by your door, as I did, they can greet you coming home from work. By morning, they’ve turned a gentle pale tan.

Cucuzzi seeds are different from squash seeds, too: more or less rectangular, with stubby little antennae on each end.

Unlike squash, the smaller leaves of cucuzzi won’t overpower everything else.

In fact, I think they mix quite fetchingly with these Oriental lilies. (I’m a sucker for tendrils.)

I first heard about cucuzzi in The 20-Minute Gardener, Tom Christopher and Marty Asher’s treatise on how not to let gardening take over your life. Gardeners who take things too seriously should be laid in a hammock with this book and a nice glass of lemon balm iced tea.

The only bad thing about The 20-Minute Gardener is that it lacks an index, so I must flip through page after page to find the entry. And after some flipping, I did find one, but not one with the recipe I remembered. Oh well.

These Italian-bred young gourds can be eaten like summer squash. Rumor has it that they are even more flavorful than regular summer squash, but so far I’ve had only male flowers, so I can’t report. I am happy to find a vine that looks as if it’s going over the top of my trellis-shade, fragrant flowers, and fruit all in one season.

And I really like my garden chair.

References:

Tom Christopher and Marty Asher, The 20-Minute Gardener, Random House, 1997

JL Hudson - you can get cucuzzi seeds here.

Okay. Look at this flower. Then tell me how anyone can prefer the fat, bloated-petal daylilies that are in vogue now.

I know this won’t make me popular with daylily breeders. I’ve even looked at picures of the new daylily types in catalogues and on blogs (okay, drat. I found a daylily blog with gorgeous pictures through Blotanical, but now I’m unable to perform the search that will lead me (and you) to it again. So here’s a place that specializes in daylilies, with well over 700 varieties–enough to prove my point) and websites. But then I take a look at the older types like Hyperion, with their graceful, wing-like shapes. And then I just don’t want to buy the newer types. No matter how pretty the colors, or how fetching the closeups. When you back off and look at newer daylilies as a whole, they just aren’t as graceful as the old types.

The closeups on Hyperion are no slouch, either. And you get to inhale. Because another thing a lot of modern plants are missing (and daylilies are no exception) is fragrance. Hyperion has a faint, freshly sweet scent, an added bonus.

I think black-and-white does a better job than color when it comes to showing form and texture.

But color’s fun to look at, too.

When a plant has been in gardens for over eighty years, you know that it has some lasting qualities that endear it to gardeners. Heirloom plants have passed the tests of time. Newer, bolder, brighter plants pass them by–and yet still people keep the old standards in their gardens.

Besides form and scent, and the power of memory, a lot of the reason for growing heirlooms is practical: heirloom garden plants tend to have a lot of that flexibility that gardeners such as myself find so appealing. When neglected, they spring back. They don’t require a lot of care. And they stand up to a number of different conditions. In this case, as you can see, this Hyperion doesn’t even have full sun; it’s growing in amongst the cedars, with a few hours of full sun a day. (The canna behind it also blooms in the same situation, but not very enthusiastically.)

As a friend of mine once pointed out, daylilies make fine cutting flowers: each bloom lasts only a day, but you get several buds on the stem, and they can open in the vase just as well as on the plant. Daylilies are hardy enough to naturalize well, but they also do well in containers, where I’ve got mine. I bottom-water it by putting the big pot in a big plastic bulb pan, then filling the pan (now a saucer for the pot) with water. This gives the daylilies all they want to drink. Daylilies seem to prefer wet spots when they naturalize, but again, the older types are forgiving: they may not thrive if you have to let them dry out, but they will come back.

Daylilies are also edible, though I’ve only tried Hemerocallis fulva, which used to grow on the roadsides when I lived in New Jersey. As I recall, they were quite bland; I didn’t batter and fry them, as some recommend, because once you batter and fry something, you’re basically tasting oil and batter, with a touch of the texture of whatever’s in there. Euell Gibbons says that daylily buds and just-opened flowers are popular in some parts of Asia as a stir-fry vegetable and have a great taste. Maybe I picked them at the wrong time or cooked them the wrong way, but my memory of daylily flowers is that they are kind of soft and slimy. While they might be nice as a novelty or helpful as a food when nothing else is available, they’re not something I’d seek out. I prefer them on the plant or in the vase. Daylily tubers are also edible, but I’ve never tried eating them. Their tubers (not bulbs) are small, so you need a big stand of them to try.

The tubers (not bulbs) are a clue to clearing up a vexed subject: daylilies aren’t lilies, they are their own thing. Some misguided catalogues actually include daylilies in the lily section; I consider this a sign of a company to avoid. Good catalogues give a cross reference from lily to daylily, so we can learn what’s what and avoid the problems that might come up if we tried treating daylilies like lilies. Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus (formerly flava) is another older daylily I’d like to try (it’s been in cultivation since the 1600s). Like Hyperion, it is also lemon yellow-in fact, another name for it is Lemon Lily. (Very likely, Hyperion has Lemon Lily blood in it.) It’s also fragrant, gracefully narrow-petalled, and requires little care. Until I see a modern daylily that lives up to these standards, that will complete my daylily collection.

If you feel indignant about my spurning of newer daylily varieties, please feel free to leave an opinion. Preferably with some reference to pictures, so we can all judge for ourselves.

References:

Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Healthful Herbs, David McKay Company, Inc., 1966 (and reprinted many, many times since then)

McClure and Zimmerman catalogue, spring 2008

Old House Gardens catalogue, spring 2008-9