Category — Food plants

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

Earlier in the year, I posted a picture of California buckeye (Aesculus californica) leaf buds. I thought it was only fair to show the rest of it. The most spectacular part, of course, is the amazing flower spikes, about 8 to 12 inches (20 t0 30 cm) long, with a mild scent and amazing coloration, if you look closely.

But even apart from their flowers, buckeyes are stellar plants. Many might disagree with me, calling them shrubby or weedy. And it is true that, while they are the first trees to show that brilliant chartreuse-green in spring and then fan their leaves out, they are also the first to drop their leaves, usually sometime in September, when all the other leaves are still growing strong, and the dying falling buckeye leaves are a bit depressing in an already-sere landscape.

Buckeyes are prominent natives in my landscape, and they used to be a major food for the Pomo Indians, who leached the poisons out of them in order to eat the meaty, chestnut-like nut. Their name for this tree was De-sa Ka-la, which means “food tree”.

It may sound odd, then, to hear that other native Californians (possibly the Pomo, too) used them unleached, to stun fish: put in a river pool, fish die and float to the surface. Not a method for sport-fishing, but used judiciously, a good way to be sure of fish when you depend on them for food.

The substances that poison the fish can also poison human beings with nerve and respiratory failure: the bark, twigs, flowers, and leaves are as dangerous as the unleached nuts, which are a beautiful shiny glossy brown and fit beautifully in the palm for stroking with your fingers. (I’m sure this is stress-reducing). These toxins are also in the Ohio buckeye Aesculus glabra.

The Asian horse chestnut (Aesculus hipposcastanum), on the other hand, was used medicinally in Europe for intermittent fevers and respiratory problems-though it was also known to be a nerve poison, like its American relatives. (If you find this strange, think for a moment about the toxicity of many medical drugs today.) Its folk use was in salves for rheumatism and hemorrhoids. The skin probably filtered the active ingredients somewhat, so that it was relatively safe. These trees are often found in the eastern U.S., and have looser flower spikes with hints of pink and yellow in them, if you look close.

California buckeyes have adapted well to their environment; while they tend to like streamsides and wet places, they also grow in places with no obvious water. I don’t know if they indicate a high water table or if they are just very tolerant of a wide range of places. They grow in semishade as well as full sun.

Buckeyes also range in size and shape: they can be small shrubby plants several feet high, and they can be many-branched tall trees up to about thirty feet. I’d guess this has to do with available water and nutrients. Their bark is smooth and pale, although in my area it tends to accrue lichen and moss-both of which accentuate its appearance, to my mind, rather than mar it.

I’ve never grown a buckeye, simply because there are so many around already, I’ve never felt the need. If you want to try, I’d suggest choosing a variety that suits your area. Rather than struggling to fit the dry-summer-loving California buckeye into a cold or wet-summer place, choose A. glabra (Ohio buckeye) or A. hippocastanum (horse chestnut). Horse chestnuts are tall beautiful thick-trunked trees, so if you want to grow one of them, make room.

Winter hardiness is another thing to consider when choosing your variety. California buckeyes grow only in lower elevations, which means they will take some freezing, but probably would not do well in prolonged-cold winters.

It’s interesting to ponder that a tree that is entirely toxic can also be a food staple. Yet more proof that inconsistency is not a strictly human trait.

References

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

Charles F. Millspaugh, American Medicinal Plants, originally published in 1892. Mine is a Dover reprint.