Category — History of gardening

History may be recreating itself in a small pot on my porch. I mean that  part of history where a tulip grower, in a muddy patch somewhere in 17^th century Netherlands, noticed that one of the tulips had come up funny. Had come up beautifully weird, in fact.

When my own tulip came up beautifully weird, I thought at first it was a sport. A sport is the botanical equivalent of a whim; the plant suddenly decides it wants to be, or look like, something else. Some plants have a family (or at least a genus) tradition of sporting; tulips are one of those.

But now I’ve had a few days to look at these tulips, I’m leaning toward the theory that some of the soil I’ve grown my few, precious broken tulips in got in this pot and infected ‘Annie Schilder’ with the virus that makes broken tulips into the intricate, variable gorgeous things that they are.

I’ve had several tulip sports in my garden. I’ve even had another Annie Schilder sport.

As you can see, the sport patterns are beautifully flamboyant, but they don’t have the refinement of the tulips in this pot, with their fine-brush patterns dividing the colors, spreading their way across the tepals, lacing into a new pattern each day.

(yeah, that’s a dog behind the tulip. Honi soit qui mal y pense.)

There aren’t a lot of true broken tulips on the market anymore, so people tend to confuse them with what are called Rembrandt tulips, tulips that also have streaked patterns. I like Rembrandt tulips, but their markings are nothing like true broken tulips. Once you’ve seen the two, you’ll understand what I mean.

‘Zurel’ tulip, a purple-and-white modern Rembrandt

‘Insulinde‘, a true broken tulip

It’s lucky for me that not all of my tulips turned into exotic beauties, so I can be sure of the identity of the original. In 17^th century Netherlands, my remaining ‘plain’ Annie Schilder (Annie Schilder has some beautiful, subtle flushes of coloring, plus fragrance, so I wouldn’t really call it plain) - my plain Annie Schilder would have been called a breeder tulip. Breeder tulips were the solid-colored tulips whose coloring was so beautifully broken up when all went well.

In order to make that happen, the early broken tulip growers used strange concoctions of crushed bugs and other arcane ingredients, or cut tulips in half, bound the different halves together, or did all sorts of  mysterious garden rituals to make their tulips break into the patterns that could make them prestigious millionaires.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that it became evident that the very ingredient that made the tulips so beautiful might also be the ingredient that made the tulips so likely to be sickly and die off.  Broken tulips are created by a virus.

Their sickliness is the reason that they fell out of favor with commercial breeders. Broken tulips are chancy, delicate things, the Elizabeth Barrett Brownings of the tulip world. Once commercial growers knew that broken tulips carried a virus, a virus that could make their tulips spindly and weakly and unreliable, they phased them out. Gardeners were warned (and still are, though few of them now understand what the warnings are about) to plant broken tulips away from all others, lest they be infected.

But I - well, I never practiced garden hygiene. I’m a dirty gardener. In garden scicnce, I take Fleming for my model: his discovery of penicillin was based on an accidental contamination of a petrie dish.  While I’ve planted my broken tulips in pots so that I can identify them and give them special attention, I’ve sometimes used the soil from those pots for other tulips, or even put a surreptitious pinch into a pot, just to see what would happen. Once I had grown my first true broken tulip, I was quite willing to sacrifice some of my plainer ones to this beauiful, inspiring virus.

 It’s unfortunate that my record-keeping habits are also dirty, because I honestly can’t say that this pot of tulips is the fruit (or flowering) of my experiment. But I hope it is, and I look forward to further developments.

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.

I like to see what gardeners of the past used against pests. Partly it interests me because some of those older pests don’t even seem to be around today; partly I’m curious about  some of those old pesticides that are less toxic (and less expensive) than many of the pesticides we have today. But not always, as this story will reveal.

I recently got several books in the Present-Day Gardening series, which ran from about 1910 to about 1912 (for some reason, they stopped putting dates on the later books in the series). I enjoy these British books for the view they give of gardening a hundred years ago: an intimate look into the varieties and methods British authorities thought made good gardens.

In the Sweet Peas book, I saw my old friend, tobacco spray, recommended for green fly (a British term for aphid). Tobacco was the all-purpose pesticide of the 1800s and early 1900s; many still use it today. Novels from the time before smoking became a public evil talk about asking smokers to sit near the rose bushes, because the smoke helped defend the roses against various bugs and blights.

In Sweet Peas, the first line of defense is supposed to be picking off aphids, because “When this pest becomes comfortably established on the plants it will need all the grower’s patience and perseverance to exterminate it; but it should never be allowed to settle itself so firmly. If a close look-out is kept at all stages of growth, and every fly that is seen is promptly destroyed, the trouble will be lessened materially. It multiplies with extraordinary rapidity, and the descendants of one or two pairs become a crowded city in a week.”

Some things don’t change in a hundred years. Aphids still multiply like crazy, and for organic gardeners, hand-picking (more like squishing, really) is still a good first line of defense.

If this doesn’t work, Horace J. Wright says, then it’s time for snuff (finely powdered tobacco) or a tobacco spray made with paraffin. (Paraffin means kerosene, not the hard wax we call paraffin in the U.S.)

The recipe goes like this: soak two ounces of shag tobacco in one gallon of water. While I don’t use such large quantities, this is the basic recipe for a tobacco spray. Adding the kerosene/paraffin solution sounds a bit more complicated: you boil 4 ounces of soft soap in one pot, and 4 ounces of quassia  in another.

Quassia is a West Indian tree noted for its insecticidal properties, so here I have to wonder if maybe you couldn’t just leave the other items out of this recipe and still have success.  Interestingly, quassia protects beneficials such as bees and ladybugs, while it kills plant-predator bugs. Quassia is also used for human health; readers of Louisa May Alcott may remember that Rose, the heroine of one of her books, was given a quassia cup by her sailor/doctor uncle, returned from foreign climes. If I recall rightly, Rose was pale and thin from loss of appetite. In the West Indies, these cups were filled with water, which was allowed to sit until it leached some of the properties from the wood. Then the water was drunk for fevers and indigestion.

Okay, so now we’ve got the tobacco solution, the quassia solution, the soap solution. (As with many old recipes, you don’t get the exact amounts of water the quassia and soap are supposed to be cooked in.) You put them in a gallon and a half of water: “place on the fire, and when the whole lot is boiling furiously, remove the pot, put in a wineglass full of paraffin, and stir vigorously; the working in of the oil when the water is boiling hard will go far to ensure perfect amalgamation.” They wrote so nicely in those days. Perfect amalgamation. Sounds like an album title. Too bad you’d be inhaling poisonous kerosene fumes while making that perfect amalgamation.

The final solution is sprayed on in a mist, preferably after the sun has gone down.

Without the kerosene/paraffin, this spray would be nontoxic to plants and soil, at least. With the kerosene, it’s not only poisonous, but stinky. We often romanticize former gardens, but it’s not all good stewardship and nontoxicity with these old-time pesticides. It wasn’t in the U.S., either.  I asked my father once about the treatment he and his father gave the apple orchard every year.  “Arsenate of lead,” was his reply.

Reference:

Sweet Peas, Horace J. Wright, J.C. and E.C. Jack,Present-Day Gardening Series, 1910

Here’s a story about a plant that’s conservative in the best sense of the word: it protected the life of a civilization, it grows in the desert, and it’s been able to hold on to its own life force for 2,000 years.

In the 1970s, archaeologists excavated Herod the Great’s palace on Masada, in Israel. One of the things they discovered was an ancient jar which proved to hold Judean date palm seeds, Phoenix dactylifera, still dry and well-preserved. When they were radiocarbon-tested, they were found to be about 2,000 years old. One theory is that they are the pits spit out by soldiers, caught in the compound during a Roman siege. Rather than surrender, they committed mass suicide. But they left their date pits behind.

Those soldiers are long gone, but the seeds are moving on to a new life. Thirty years after their discovery, on the Jewish new year of trees (Tu Bishvat), Dr. Elaine Solowey soaked three Judean date palm seeds in a solution of fertilizers and hormones. Then she planted  them at a desert kibbutz. Six weeks later, one had come up and started forming fronds; by June 2008, depending on whose report you read, it was four feet (1.4 meters) or five feet (1.5 meters) high, with nearly a dozen fronds.

“Methuselah” (the tree is named after the oldest person in the Bible) broke a previous record of old-seed-sprouting: a 1,300-year-old Chinese lotus seed. The Judean date palm may be younger than some ancient grain seeds that have been sprouted, though. Nobody knows yet whether Methuselah will bear fruit;  as with many ancient plants, date trees are dioecious, with male and female flowers on separate trees. You can see it pictured in its smaller stages here.

Judean date palms were an important part of ancient Judean culture – so important that they became a symbol of Judea itself. When the Romans invaded, they found forests of 80-foot date palms, part of a fruit-export business, and a source of shade and shelter as well as food for the residents.

Any sweet-fruit-bearing tree is important, not only for the candy rush but for the things you can make from fermenting and processing their sugars: vinegar (for disinfection and food preservation) and alcohol (no need to describe its uses, I think). The rest of the tree was used to make furniture, rope, fuel, and packing material.

Probably because of their generous gifts to the people who grew them, Judean date palms  are were a symbol of grace and elegance in ancient Jewish culture; the name “Tamar” is derived from the date palm’s ancient Hebrew name. Judean date palms were also used medicinally, for anything from a hot sex life to tumors, heart problems to constipation. But by about 70 CE, when the Romans invaded for the second time, the date palm was on the decline; the fruit-export business had stopped. By 500 CE, the Judean date palm had disappeared.

Until now. Genetic tests show that its DNA is most closely related to an old Egyptian variety, Hayany. It may contribute endurance and disease resistance if it’s crossbred with other dates. (It seems as if it would certainly contribute to longevity.) Modern Israeli date palms are a strain originally from Iraq, which arrived in Israel via California. As far as anyone knows, they don’t have the medicinal qualities of the ancient Judean date palm.

In ancient Egypt, date seeds were placed in pharoahs’ tombs, symbolizing immortal life. Whether this refers to date’s medicinal powers, or just the everyday miracle of a plant’s ability to renew its own life, that practice gives resonance to the Judean date palm’s botanical name, Phoenix dactylifera. The fabulous Phoenix was able to burn itself at the end of its life – and then fly up, resurrected.

 JUNE: A MONTH TO HONOR WATER

In a way, my whole blog is about low-water gardening; that’s the reason I got involved with tulips, and I already loved natives and Mediterranean herbs. During June, my posts will all be about conserving water in the garden. This gives me scope to cover everything from containers to cityscapes, soil to site to sprays, and of course portraits of more of those stellar plants that spread their glories with little or no watering. (Hint: the “Wild Plants” category will give you quite a few more; so will the “Bulbs” category.)

I don’t have a greenhouse, but Peter Henderson had several. So I’m going to him for information on how to save water in a greenhouse.

Those of you who look askance at this old information: think about how much energy modern greenhouse systems often take. Should we turn up our noses at simple solutions if they work, and cost us less in water, time, energy, and money?

Henderson, one of the up-and-coming plantsmen of the 19th century, had an avid interest in solutions that saved all of those things. Managing a thriving nursery business in New Jersey, he felt he was growing in a climate most garden books don’t address, one that was hot and arid. Really, he was comparing his climate to Britain, where English-language gardening books came from. In 1874, U.S.-oriented garden books were still a novelty, though they’d been around since the 1840s (Henderson himself was one of the first in the field). Britain was the standard of reference for the English-speaking gardener.

OK, so compared to Britain, New Jersey is certainly hot, but arid? Anyone who’s sweated softly through the hot steam that is summer air in New Jersey, and seen the basement dehumidier tank fill in half a day, will wonder at that idea. I think he meant that it rains less than it does in Britain. The state of New Jersey’s climate is useful information when considering Henderson’s greenhouse methods, because you know they work in very humid and hot environments.

“A point indispensable in our hot and arid climate is, that all plants in the green-house should stand on close benches, overlaid with sand or ashes, or some such material. This keeps plants moist and prevents the plants from suffering, if any omission occurs in watering. We know that the practice in many places is entirely different from this, the plants being stood on benches of open slat-work. No plant can be kept healthy in such a place, unless with at least double the labor of watering necessary with those standing on sand. This, like many other of our mistakes, is copied from a mode pursued in England, where a colder, moister, and less sunny climate may make it a necessary practice.”

Interestingly, most greenhouses still use the open slatwork benches, or something akin to them. Maybe the U.S. is still in allegiance to England, at least as far as gardening is concerned. Or maybe there are climates where Henderson’s method just doesn’t work. But it sure seems worth a try in places where greenhouse plants suffer from heat and dryness in summer.

For keeping the plants cool, Henderson recommended a then-new ventilation system which opened greenhouse sashes, a single crank-lever serving them all. I’m not sure if Henderson used this method, but old-time greenhouse keepers often painted whitewash on the windows in summer for shade. (Whitewash is a combination of powdered lime and water, and was used as a cheap-and-easy paint on farms for ages.) Whitewash is easily scraped off when cold weather comes again; it’s basically just sprayed-on lime powder, and whatever scrapings are left will actually be good for your plants.

What are your own low-tech greenhouse secrets? When I have a greenhouse, I don’t want it to be a water and energy hog. So I’m collecting information.