gardening with nature

This is the time of year when I start to spend more time in by the fire than out in the garden (although I still have more bulbs to plant…). One of my amusements is to look through the garden pictures, with an eye to what worked and what didn’t.

I want to make my grouping of plants under the big madrone into a more cohesive group, so one of the things I’ve been looking for is plants that have worked well in semishade for me. Northern Shade has opened my eyes to how much texture and color you can get with the right foliage, something I might have worked out by looking at the forest floor. But sometimes gardening is like a crossword puzzle: somebody fresh has to come along to fill in the blanks you can’t get.  I’ll need to do research on the plants Northern Shade recommends, though, since my climate is a lot hotter and dryer.

Before I was reminded of the possibilities of foliage, though, my original shade-plant-finding focus was a hunger for flowers; flowers for summer (after the bulbs) and for shade to semishade, which is mostly what I’ve got.

The digitalis in the photo at the head of this post obviously did very well under the madrone (the red-barked shiny-leaved tree you can see in the picture). And I have a past history of digitalis doing well in places like this, where they get some morning sun, and occasional dapples throughout the day. This foxglove (an unknown variety from the drugstore) kept on gradually increasing its spire as it flowered, until it had a whippy spine of seedheads several feet high, topped with a few flowers.

My ‘Royal Standard’ hosta is a common plant, but a new venture for me. It sulked in the full shade I gave it before, putting out a few leaves but never flowering. I had mixed feelings about hostas; they seemed kind of like, I don’t know, plants for gardeners who had completely matched wardrobes and sock drawers with no strays: not plants that would fit in my garden.  But in my continual research for shade plants that flower, I’d found that hostas fit the bill, and that some of them even had fragrant flowers. When I went to a local plant sale, it was pretty easy for me to get persuaded into a good deal on Royal Standard.

I found that this junior leaguer actually fit quite well into my garden, once I put it in a pot on the back porch where it got more shots of sun. It brought forth the beautiful rose-flushed buds that turned into a modest scape of (to my nose) mildly sweet-scented flowers. (For those of you who are wondering about the dead leaves in the background: those are buckeye leaves, which are the earliest to come out, and shrivel by late summer.)

My prejudices began to tumble. I started to see what people saw in the leaves: the innocence of the tiny leaves on the flowering stem,

the sensuous ribs of the broad leaves below–

which turned gold all at once in fall.

Next post: more flowering shade plants

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how exuberantly beautiful a vegetable can be. This fading but vital red chard arrested me as I was passing through a friend’s garden, just at the moment when the sun backlit it.

In the past twenty years or so, there’s been a movement to get vegetables back into the ornamental landscape (or maybe it’s the other way around). Pioneers such as Rosalind Creasy an Robert Kourik proved that edible plants can be ornamental, and that landscaping can provide food.

This seems like a new idea (it’s still controversial for some zoning boards and neighbors), but it’s actually a very old one. Food plants didn’t get split up from other plants until the age of European colonialism.

Colonialism opened up new vistas of plants, and for the first time, it wasn’t just curators of botanical gardens who were plant collectors. Wealthy people became aware that they could show off their status by using exotic plants in their gardens. Though slow transportation and primitive shipping methods meant many foreign plants arrived dead, avid collectors were willing to pay the price. Wanting to be the first on your block to have something is not a modern phenomenon.

Neither is showing off  to your neighbors.  Wealthy Western Europeans started to display their substance to the world by planting only ornamentals in the visible parts of their gardens and landscapes; the vegetables and fruits were relegated to areas visited only by the servants.  To show only ornamentals was to announce that you were too wealthy to farm; someone else could do that work for you.

This trend only applied to the wealthy, of course.  Workers and farmers kept on doing what gardeners have done for millenia: they grew what they needed as near to the door as they could get it. Plants that provided medicine or dye or food or were just the gardener’s beautiful pets or breeding project were all grown in one place: the original definition of a cottage garden. For many people, the idea of edibles as ornamentals has never passed away.

But as time went on, Western Europeans (including the ones who emigrated to the what became the U.S.) adopted the styles of those who were wealthier than they were. This trickle-down or social climbing in styles is a very pervasive feature of Western European cultures. The styles don’t necessarily have to make sense for us to adopt them. The reason why Spaniards lisp, for instance, is because one of the royals a few hundred years ago had a lisp. In order to save him embarrassment, the courtiers-the wealthiest class-followed suit. Since the courtiers were wealthy and prominent (the equivalent of movie or rock stars today), people copied what they did. The lisp spread until now standard Spanish Spanish means lisping,  and not only on the “s” sound.

Our culture is full of stories like these. Many of our fashions are not only the sign of deep changes; they are part of creating them. On a larger scale, the separation of food and ornamental plants-something you see in most of the gardens of the modern-day U.S.-reflects the economics of colonialism. A garden that shows that you don’t have to work the land yourself, that unseen others do the dirty work for you, is the basis of colonialism, where far-off workers make cheap goods for our sometimes uneasy consumption. It’s  a knotty issue we’re still struggling with. Maybe we can begin to unravel that knot by appreciating the beauty of red chard.

It’s the time of year when plants are dead, dormant, or dying: dropping leaves, shriveling up, slumping to the ground. At least they are if you’re north of the equator.

But all year, if you look for it, there are signs of death in life, as well as the other way around. I look for them, for I find a strange, guilty pleasure in the beauties of death and dying.

I take photos of what I see, and since I take hundreds of photos (oh, the greatness of digital cameras: I don’t have to feel guilty about wasting film, or the poison chemicals it will take to process it)—since I take hundreds of photos, some of them turn out almost like what I was looking at, or, if I’m really lucky, like what I was feeling as I looked. I keep them. (To be honest, I also keep a lot of others; it’s a great way to learn how not to make a picture.)

In this post, I’m showing a few of the photos I’ve made on the beauties of death. As the number after the title hints, this isn’t going to be the last of this.

I know I’m not the only one who values the beauty in death: besides the fact that I’m not megalomaniac enough to think I’m that unique, I’ve seen some incredible photos on the subject, on the web and off.  I’d be interested to hear of others’ transcendent moments with death, and maybe even do a guest post of photos, if there’s an interest. To me, the amazing thing is that, no matter how many people take (or paint) a picture of the same thing, any honest pictures will be fresh. No one sees things quite the same way.

Years ago, I read something in a Dave Wilson catalogue that changed my understanding forever: cold air is like water. It sinks.

Since heat rises, this makes sense. (Cold air molecules are more tightly packed than the molecules in warm air. This is what makes cold air heavier. ) These physical facts make a lot of difference to your plants.

If you live on a slope, like everybody in my area does, you can imagine the cold air running down it just as water does. If there are depressions in the ground–bowls or valleys–the cold air will pool there.  If there’s a steep downslope, the cold air will keep on flowing until it finds a place to rest.

When you understand how this air flow works, it’s easier to take advantage of it–or to mitigate it, if it’s a problem. Cold air can back up behind houses and fences, the way water gets backed up in a dam.  (Check the bottoms of fences, hedges, and walls for frost; if you find it, that’s a sign that this may be happening in your garden.)

All this can mean the difference between frost and no frost, which can mean the difference between a dead plant and a live one, or a bearing plant and a fruitless one.  In my area, almonds (and often peaches and plums) don’t bear, because their flowers are way too early for the climate. They bloom, frost hits, boom.

Some people recommend planting these marginal early-blooming trees on a north slope: that way their sap stays cold and sluggish for awhile longer, and they bloom later, maybe late enough not to get frostbit. We live in hope.

If you allow for ‘drainage’, you can warm up those areas: an opening along the barrier will act as a kind of sluice, letting the cold air drain down the slope, and keeping the planting area by the barrier marginally warmer.

Even people who live in flat areas generally have some contours in the ground; dips and streambeds surrounded by trees; a slight grade to the ground behind the house. This allows cold air to back up in the same way. (Since it’s been a long time since I’ve been in a flat place, maybe someone else can answer this question: does a flatter gradient mean fewer degrees of frost, or not?) Just look at your ground and imagine water flowing over it, or a big rainfall. Where would the puddles and pools be? These are your cold spots.

Besides “draining” your cold spots, you can also just avoid them when you plant something that thrives on heat, or really should be growing in a warmer climate. I’ll have to test this, but it seems possible to me that it also works the other way around: if you have a plant that really prefers a cooler climate than the one you’ve got, doesn’t it make sense to try putting it in the cool spots?

Anyway, back to mitigating cold–besides draining, you can do it in the time-honored way, by wrapping plants in burlap and bundling them up with leaves, pine needles, or straw. Or, you can do it the modern way-with a spray that protects leaves from sunburn, or with hot caps, water walls, frost blankets, and other coverings.

Another possiblity is using passive solar heat by putting up a west-facing stone or concrete wall. The wall will absorb the sun in the day, and release it gradually at night.  As long as the wall is “drained”, it will keep plants next to it just a little warmer . Warning: if you are in the shade (or in a cloudy climate) it doesn’t matter what direction the walls face; they will always be cold and clammy. There’s nothing quite as chilling as really chilled stone.

If you’ve played with this idea in your garden, I’d be interested to know how it worked for you. I don’t care if it was a success; I just want to know what you learned.

References:

ancient Dave Wilson catalogue, since buried in the archives (read: piles of printed matter)

and from my local nursery: Weiss Brothers Master Nursery newsletter, Nov/Dec 2008

It’s December, but some plants here think it’s spring. These violets are among them.

They’re either some passalong kind of Viola odora from my friend Dan’s garden, or they are ‘Queen Charlotte’, long ago purchased from some nursery I can’t remember. I do label my plants, but, as I keep whining, the labels keep getting buried and lost, complicated by the fact that I have moved those violets at least twice.

I have to bend low to get the wonderful whiff of violet, which is like nothing else on earth. That’s because my violets are limited to containers. I have a friend who has violets running through her orchard in profusion. In early spring, everyone asks her, “What’s that great smell?”

In the also-ran category is this moonvine (Calonyction alba, also sometimes filed under Ipomea, various species). As so often happens, none of my moonvines flowered this year–but this flower on my back porch did give it a good try. As the weather cooled (relatively speaking), it started to open–but it just didn’t quite make it.

Strictly speaking, this ‘Sharifa Asma’ rose isn’t blooming out of turn; it’s a David Austin rose, and they are technically reblooming.

My experience of Sharifa Asma, though, is that they give a big flush in the late-spring/early-summer rose season, then sporadically rebloom through the summer. I don’t recall them ever blooming this late, though I wasn’t surprised to see a small fall flowering from Pemberton rose ‘Penelope’ (now gone to the tissue-paper stage). Sharifa Asma is in a bit more sun this year, and it did get severely deer-pruned late in summer (I didn’t keep up with the deer-repellent spray as I should have), so maybe it’s making up for lost time.

It took about two weeks for this bloom to go from bud to flower, a slow-motion opening, and the bee-like insect pollinating it is definitely on extended season. The special transclucent quality of Sharifa Asma sends me. See what you think.