gardening with nature

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 don’t really like novelty-colored tulips. And my experience of green tulips in particular is, well, not so hot. (Sometimes green tulips are called viridiflora tulips; they’re the ones with the thick green stripe down the petals.)

Yet the moment I saw ‘Formosa’, backlit in the Scheepers catalogue, I was drawn in. Attraction can be like that. Through all the multiple crossings-out that take place between my first list (for, oh, say, several hundred dollars’ worth of bulbs) and my last (much more moderate, but still more than I should really sensibly spend), Formosa remained. I wanted this tulip in my life.

I actually got Formosa fall before last, but for some reason it, and other tulips I planted that year, didn’t emerge, except blind.  (“Blind” is a term for bulbs who put up leaves but don’t flower. You can see why you’d want a shorter term for that.)

 But this year, the spiky clawed buds came up and opened into flowers rather flatter than the usual tulip.

Formosa has been worth the wait. It’s not a big, showy flower, but it has a charm of its own, like many heirloom tulips. It’s officially a yellow tulip with green stripes, but the effect is a radiant chartreuse.

Formosa’s luminous green blends beautifully with all the spring greens surrounding it,  and it is beautiful with other tulips.

This unusual stripey combination may never happen again in my lifetime. I’d planted the early greigii tulip ‘Professor de Monsseri’ in with the late Formosa, figuring it would be good succession planting. But this year, our spring has been so cold and rainy that all the flowers have lasted and lasted, and they’re blooming together in stripey splendor.

In the garden, under the newly-leaved oaks, chartreuse Formosa sets off ember-colored ‘Annie Schilder’.

When the black tulips near Formosa start opening, the two will be a satisfying combination of deep and luminous, light-drawing and light-radiating. I know this because I already have a preview in the vase.

This bouquet combines ‘Dreaming Maid’ in its later, more purple stage, and ‘Paul Scherer’ along with Formosa, with a little white-flowered lunaria in for interest. I love the way ‘Paul Scherer’ is the exact same chocolate-black color as the anthers on Formosa.

I’m always torn about cutting tulips, because I enjoy them so much in the garden. But putting tulips in a vase is a way to get to know them up close and personal.  You get to watch them as they go through all their changes, and notice every little detail of their colors and shapes.  Putting a vase of flowers in a spot you often pass by or look toward will subtly, magically, lift your mood. It’s one of those little pleasures of life that make it really worth living.

Paul Scherer, with his black heart open to the sun

Queen of the Night, ditto

I got ‘Paul Scherer’ because I love the deep, the black, and the mysterious, and I want as much of it in my garden as possible. I was also curious to see how it compared with ‘Queen of the Night’. Pretty closely, as it turns out.

The white bloom on the buds and very new flowers of Queen of the Night

is pretty closely echoed by Paul Scherer in a similar stage.

At first, I thought Paul Scherer had a more mahogany-red tint than Queen of the Night’s plum overtones.  But look at them both here: can’t make much of a case for that:

Queen of the Night has a distinct mahogany tint in sun

as does Paul Scherer

Then I thought that Paul Scherer was maybe a little more matte than Queen of the Night, a touch less shine to the petals. Maybe. But as Paul Scherer aged, it became harder and harder to tell them apart. Same purple-black anthers (before pollination). Same shiny creamy-white stigma and style. Even the blue-black-hint-of-white markings at the base of the flower are similar.

Queen of the Night. The split stigma happens after pollination. Since the pollen is still dark, that means the deed has just been done.

Paul Scherer, in a slightly earlier stage.

Every time I shot a picture, I made sure to shoot the label of the plant first, so I could tell which was which when I went through the photos. (Shooting labels is my shorthand for having a photographer’s notebook. This could be a Handy Tip for you. I don’t use it very consistently, but for botanical gardens and indistinguishable sprouts,  or these two tulips, it’s ideal.)

I got Queen of the Night because - because it just always seems weird, the years I don’t order her, and I haven’t gotten enough of a return bloom from her to live on that alone. (Perennializing tulips is one of my not-always-successful hobbies.) I love her deepness, her blackness, her unadorned and unashamed drama.

The only difference was that Queen of the Night emerged a few days to a week later than Paul Scherer, at least this year. Which might mean that when Paul Scherer settles in, he will be fading as she comes out. Officially, they are both single late tulips, and unofficially, this is a very screwy year for order of bulb bloom, so it seems likely that they’ll bloom at the same time next year, if I get them to come back.

I did the Ultimate Observation test: I cut one of each tulip and put them in a vase I pass many times a day. If you want to see a flower develop up close, this is a good way to do it. But if you want the color to be the same as it would have been outdoors, you must wait until the tulip has been open a day or two.  Color develops last in the tulip bud, and the sun seems to have a role in developing or at least stabilizing it. If you cut them a day or two after they’ve opened,  you get less vase time, but more accurate viewing.

So that’s what I did, and you know what? Even up close and personal, the only way I could tell the difference was that I’d left a leaf on Paul Scherer, and cleaned off the stem of Queen of the Night. I was glad I’d done that, actually.

I’ve read rumors, supposedly kept darkly secret, that any tulip that is too popular for too long develops a virus. * Queen of the Night has been around since about 1940, and has been deservedly popular all that time. So the industry is worried that it will develop a virus which will inevitably rush through all the cloned crop, just the way potatoes wilted by the thousands in Ireland. All of them exactly the same stock of potato.

Maybe Paul Scherer has been developed to step in in just such an emergency, and that is why he is so nearly like Queen of the Night. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - and the best safeguard to a continuing buying audience. Movie moguls understand this, clearly.

If you’re not involved in the murky underworld of tulip marketing, it’s hard not to innocently enjoy more of what you love already. Tulips can’t have the creativity squeezed out of them the way movies can. We tend to think we’re very powerful, but we’re not strong enough to eradicate this flower’s personality, and its personality is just why we like it. As for these tulips, I like - no, I’m not ashamed to say it, I love -  both of them. I don’t know which personality is which, and I don’t care.

So I enjoyed my double harvest, my two black tulips, and I enjoyed them even more because some of the colored ones I’d planted to bloom with them never showed up, or didn’t set them off the way I’d hoped, so that I had  a sea of darkly luminous tulip heads under the Ponderosa pine. A srange sight to some, but wonderful to me.

Can you tell which is which here? I can’t

Besides enjoying Queen of the Night and Paul Scherer together, I found a third flower which is their perfect foil: pale pale blush tulip ‘Silverado’. I only found it out because I had a few of each left in the garden, so I put them in a vase together. It was too late in their lives to document the beautiful bonding, but there was something blue in each of the shades that set each other off perfectly. I’m going to let them spend more time together next year, and see what develops.

Silverado, Queen of the Night, and Paul Scherer.  I can only identify Silverado for sure.

*I think this may apply to humans, too.

 This post was inspired by Jan at Thanksfor2day: I encourage you to check out this link and read  other contributors to the Garden Bloggers Sustainable Living project for great ideas on living a greener life. Every day is an Earth Day, but the official celebration comes up on April 22nd. It’s a good time to get even more ideas about how we can be a part of planet’s health.

I celebrated my first Earth Day by planting a tree. They were planning to pave part of my high school grounds for a parking lot. Some of us protested. The tree was my idea.

This Earth Day (April 22), I’m going to celebrate by planting a seed.

It may seem like a small thing to do, given the magnitude of the situation. Other posters in this Earth Day series have written about compost, conservation, and organic everything. All very valuable ideas, each of which has a body of literature to itself - and deserves it.

But there’s something a lot of gardeners (and would-be gardeners) don’t think about: where do the seeds come from? And what impact does that have on our environment?

I’m not talking about where the seeds are grown, though that’s certainly a consideration; organic seeds are becoming more and more available, and I sometimes pay the extra price for them so I can support organic seed growers. We all know that inorganic farming washes away irreplaceable topsoil, right?

The thing I’m talking about is what’s hidden inside the seed.

Most of the seed gardeners choose from is in one of these categories: open-pollinated, , F1 hybrids, and genetically engineered seed.

Open-pollinated seed is the kind gardeners and farmers have been using for millenia. The kind you can save and plant again next year, getting plants that are pretty close to what you had before.

Open-pollinated seeds can’t be patented; no one owns them. Heirloom seeds,  like the ones from Baker’s Creek  and Renee’s Garden are open-pollinated. So are wild, medicinal, and traditional garden plants, such as the ones in the JL Hudson catalogue  (which also carries heirloom ornamentals and edibles). (By the way, I don’t have a financial deal with these companies; I just think they’re good companies.)

Open-pollinated seed doesn’t just carry on ancient traditions: it’s also what keeps diversity alive. It’s bees, moths, and birds (and the occasional rodent) who do the pollinating, and they don’t have any agendas about making money off the results; they just want immediate gratification. Which means that open-pollinated seeds may sprout in any of a number of combinations of DNA, giving rise to different colors, sizes,  bloom and harvest times, and other variations.

That means if conditions change, the seed has the potential to change with them. So if rainfall levels, climate, water availability or soil changes, open-pollinated seeds have more ability to adapt. And open-pollinated seeds which are saved for enough generations will develop characteristics that make them grow better in your particular plot of soil and climate.

So why would anyone want to plant anything else?

Well, people who want very predictable results when they plant their seeds. Which would be the farmers who raise our food. The big seed companies breed F1 hybrids, to produce the crop uniformity that makes machine-harvesting easier. If you re-use F1 hybrid seed you will get a strange, straggly assortment of plants which may or may not bear resemblance to the plant’s parents. F1 hybrids aren’t designed to reproduce themselves. They’re designed to get you to buy seed from the companies every year.

In the garden, F1 seed provides the same uniformity and vigor. Your petunias may flower more, and longer; your tomatoes will all come in at the same time, and have the same appearance.

I’m not a purist; I’ve bought F1 seed because I’m intrigued by a variety. But mostly, I stick to the old-fashioned kind of seed: open-pollinated.

One kind of seed I won’t knowingly buy, or eat, or use is genetically-engineered seed. Unlike F1 hybrids, genetically-engineered seeds are altered at the level of their DNA.  That means they can be crossed with plants which would never cross with them in nature, as well as with animal DNA and bacteria. Creating, for example, a potato that is properly classified as a pesticide. “The [New Leaf] potato was designated as a pesticide and so was regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), instead of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) which regulates food,” I read at Sustainable Table. Yes, truth really can be stranger than fiction.

Here’s something even stranger: if the GM companies have their way (and right now it looks as if they’re getting it), we may not be able to save our seed any longer.

One farmer who tried to save seed was famously sued for it. Percy Schmeiser,  in Saskatchewan. A seed breeder, he planted his fields with his specialized canola seed. But some genetically-engineered Roundup Ready Monsanto seed drifted in from other fields, contaminating his crop.

Not only did Monsanto not pay him for destroying forty years of breeding work - they sued him. Whether or not he had benefited from the Roundup Ready seed (he certainly hadn’t), Monsanto claimed he owed them money for having their patented crop in his field.

Schmeiser decided to fight back, a small but determined Canadian David against a large corporate Goliath. He toured the country, telling his story, and raising money for his defense.

The Canadian Supreme Court sided with Monsanto. When Schmeiser appealed, the court allowed as how he didn’t have to pay Monsanto - but the other aspects of his appeal were denied. That means that a precedent has been set: it’s OK for gigantic genetic-engineering companies to take over farmer’s fields without their consent. And it’s all right for genetically-engineered seed to wipe out seed that has been carefully bred for generations - seed that has the diversity to adapt to future conditions.

The reverberations may be world-wide: genetically-engineered seed is being forced on many countries in the form of foreign aid, as hybrid seed was before it. If farmers won’t plant this type of seed, they don’t get any of the other foreign-aid benefits: schools, wells, economic projects. But the seed they are given won’t grow without the water and equipment that US farmers use for their crops. And farmers in poor countries just don’t have those. They don’t even have the gasoline to run equipment if they are given it, not just because they don’t have the money, but because they have no transportation to a place where they could buy it. If I were a farmer in that position, I would learn to hate the country that put me into it.

Nobody knows what effects long-term consumption of GM seeds and foods will have. The EU has outlawed them for that reason. And no one knows what future conditions will call for the diversity only open pollination can provide. So when you choose your seed this spring, you’re not making a small decision.

Everything starts with a seed.

While reference books gave me a little sense of the role ‘Beersheeba’ played in daffodil history, I thought I’d like to branch out a little, to see if I could find more of Beersheba’s story.

The ‘snippet views’ at Google Books can be tantalizingly frustrating - they give you only a bit of a sentence around the word you are searching for. Still, even these tiny offerings can offer insight: I would love to know what the House of Commons debated on NARCISSUS ‘BEERSHEBA’ in 1971. But that knowledge is denied me.

Even the scantiest information makes it clear that ‘Beersheba’ was used extensively in breeding, and remained one of the most popular white daffodils for many years after its introduction to the world.  It won prize after prize, and not only in England. The  New Zealand Railways Magazine pictured Beersheba among six of “the best blooms shown at the National and Auckland Daffodil Shows, 1932.” The famous daffodil breeder Guy Wilson used Beersheeba in his breeding programs, ensuring that Beersheeba genes got into the many daffodils that have been bred off his own hybrids. Even a brief glance at breeding records from the UK and the US shows that Beersheba chlorophyll may be lurking in many of our modern white daffodils, so popular was it for breeding early in the century.

But Beersheba also shone on its own, not just as a parent. Its long popularity testifies to that. In 1939, the Herbertia, the American Plant Society’s publication, mentioned Beersheba as a “supreme variety, fully proven”.

In 1948, 25 years after ‘Beersheba’ first made its appearance, “Flowers in Colour” (obviously a pamphlet meant for general home-garden use, nothing esoteric) lists it as “a pure white, producing finely shaped large flowers suitable for second-early forcing or for garden decoration”. When they first open, the “pure white” - the trumpets, particularly - is more of a cream. And grown in shade, the trumpet of my Beersheeba stays creamy. With more sun, they go to that sparkling white these older records keep warbling about.

“In 1966, daffodil expert George S. Lee, Jr., lauded ‘Beersheba’ -then the most widely grown of all white trumpets-as a “flower of perfect form and purity of color that it still holds its own after 40 years, ” reports Scott Kunst, in a 1989 version of his Old-House Journal. Scott Kunst is the owner of Old House Gardens, where I got my Beersheba bulbs. Yes, the world of heirloom bulbs is a small one.

McClure and Zimmerman, which also carries Beersheeba, describes it as “a more delicate version of Mt. Hood” (another heirloom white, which I am very fond of). This description appears word-for-word as a Martha Steward article quote, so I assume it was cribbed from McClure and Zimmerman. While generally McClure and Zimmerman’s writeups strike me as amazingly good (they’re one of the remaining catalogues that relies on words and line drawings to entice), this one strikes me as an insult to both Mt. Hood and Beersheba. It’s like saying an ear of wheat is a more delicate version of corn on the cob. It is, but their uses and personality are so different that saying so doesn’t get us much further forward.

On the other hand, another tiny snippet gave me a lot of information, since I have the context to put it in: Elizabeth Lawrence liked Beersheeba. For some of us, that’s enough, as far as garden taste goes. It also means that this is a daffodil that will do well in warmer areas, up through about zone 8, or maybe higher in the west.

But clearly Beersheba is a wide-ranging daffodil. Dave’s Garden lists the plant as growing in Garberville, California (a northern California town with mild winters and burning summers) and Nantucket, Massachusetts (a lot colder). There are clues to this in some of the older snippets, as well as some of the more modern writeups on what has now become a hard-to-find antique: Beersheba is recognized as a reliable garden citizen, coming back and establishing itself comfortably.

Sometimes it’s good, though painful, to smash old worlds and go on to something new. But Beersheeba is such a beautiful survivor of another world: I’d like to see it come back. Partly because that would signify that at least sometimes, there is a place in the world for the refreshment of quiet beauty.