gardening with nature

  The point of putting evergreens around, this time of year, is to remind us of spring to come: that the snow and dark may put us into temporary dormancy, but life will renew itself. 

In more modern times, since we’ve had heated houses, greenhouses, and fast transportation, we’ve dreamed up more elaborate ways of showing ourselves that there is hope  of more expansive days to come: if we have enough money, we can pretty much have any flower we want, in any season. 

But hothouse flowers, while lush and beautiful, don’t give me the refreshment I get from those simple plants whose ancestors have been providing that little adrenaline rush to people for millenia. 

A lot of those flowers that last through snowy weather are bulbs, so of course I’m going to write about them. But the violets at the top of the page not only lasted through snow, but went on to bloom for weeks more (I’m pretty sure they’re a sport of an old variety I dug up at a friend’s house). And one of those durable bulbs I was so hopeful about, Fritillaria persica, looked as if it was doing well in the snow

but future events showed differently. I was so disappointed. I have never gotten Fritillaria persica to flower yet.

 On the other hand, some bulbs are designed for snow, as this daffodil (an anonymous daffodil from a big cheap bag at my hardward store, probably the ubiquitous ‘Dutch Master’).

 While this modern daffodil is bigger than its ancestors, they share the deep tube that keeps its sexual parts safe and sheltered – so, should a pollinator be abroad on a snowy day, it will find shelter. You can see that even though this daffodil is tattered by weather, once the pollination has been carried out, the seeds can still develop in their cozy (relatively) little incubator-trumpet. 

These small Tulipa turkestanica are another plant that was made to take the snow. They come from the high mountain passes of  the Turkestan mountains, in Central Asia. I suspect, as in my own mountains, they get sudden dumps of spring snow.

  One of the big problems with those spring frosts and snows is that they kill fruit tree flowers at a crucial time (fruit trees don’t have those nice protected pollinating spots that daffodils do; too bad). This flowering plum (which gives excellent, red, cherry-size plums in season) looks happy here. But we had snow after this picture was taken, and all our fruit was really expensive, because there wasn’t much of it.

 You can always count on crocus, though, which originated in the same high mountains as Tulipa turkestanica.

 Like the ‘Gypsy Girl’ crocus,  this iris x histrioides ‘Katherine Hodgkins’  might be unrecognizable to its ancestors, but it still keeps its resilience to snow. 

 I’d be curious to know of other people’s favorite plants that flower in snow. 

Surely Breck enjoyed the fan-play of hyacinth foliage…

They don’t write books like they used to.

  ”Let us learn another lesson from the lily of the field. How small a portion of its exquisite beauty is within the reach of our vision. Look with a true heart and a loving spirit, study its wondrous mechanism, its faultless form, seek for the secret of its ‘tender grace,’ and when you have read all that eye can see, and have felt all that heart can receive, remember that you know but in part, that you see the beauty of this flower only through a glass darkly. It has a wealth of beauty that to you is entirely imperceptible.” 

…and the first violets poking through snow and leaves 

 That’s from Breck’s New Book of Flowers, written in 1866, when Joseph Breck was 70.  Not only does he take some pages to discuss the spiritual value of flowers, he takes even more to describe how every child will benefit from growing flowers, and how, for a person in declining years, gardening is the perfect exercise.

He goes on to paint a portrait of his dead mother:  how she grew, gathered, and had flowers around the house. ”With tender emotions do I remember the old white rose-bush, trained up to the top of the house by the hand of a dear mother, the abundant and fragrant flowers of which gave delight to all the household as well as to the neighbors, who received them as expresions of neighborly friendship and good-will.” (If you’d like to read the full text, you can find it at google books.) 

As the founder of one of our most famous U.S. bulb catalogues, Breck must have enjoyed the unfurling of a tulip bud as much as I (although the bud, and the tulip, would have been smaller than this one)

While no one would write in such a florid style now, many gardening books and articles include childhood garden inspirations, and descriptions of the generous spirit plants often seem to nurture in gardeners. (I can’t help wondering what that fragrant white rose would have been, though. Perhaps a white damask of some type? Or maybe it was an alba, which would be appropriate.)

 What interests me is that, these days, the memoir and the paeon to the joys of plants would probably not be in a book of practical instruction. Or at least it wouldn’t take the first few chapters, and be interlarded with the practical instruction that followed. I’m not sure this means we’ve gone forward in the world of garden writing; I think it’s more a case of pressing forward in the world of book marketing.

The incredibly fragrant ‘Painted Lady’ sweet pea was known in England in the late 1700s, so Breck would have been familiar with it 

  And, speaking of marketing, by the time Breck was writing, he was living in the same breathless pace of plant fashion we know today. “Time makes great changes in all the pursuits of life, and in none more than it has in Floriculture in the last 15 years..” he says, giving the reason why he’s writing the new edition, and not even bothering to amend his old flower book. Which is to say a lot of new plants had come into style, and a lot of old ones had been relegated to the back of the catalogue, or been cut out of it entirely. 

“There is a fashion among amateurs of the floral kingdom…thus, when  new flower of fancied merit is introduced, it becomes all the rage, for the time being,” Breck writes knowingly. 

Species nicotiana were popular Victorian flowers. The species names were different, though. The Nicotiana longiflora in Breck’s book is probably N. sylvestris. The flower above is N. alata. 

Ignorance is another gardening trait which hasn’t changed over the years. In the section where he discusses seed vitality, Breck tells a story about a Maine farmer who sent him a potato which, he insisted, had grown on the roots of a Gilly-Flower (carnation, or pink; it’s a corruption of “July-flower”). Breck feels called upon to tell this story because, despite all Breck’s careful explanations, the farmer was firmly convinced that a potato could be bred with a Gilly-flower, and he wouldn’t budge from his story.  (Of course these days that farmer could breed a potato with a fish, if he were talented at genetics.)

  Are there still people out there who believe a potato could grow from carnation roots? Well, judging by the ads for Giant Tomato Trees and Giant Bluberries, which I’ve been seeing for the last 20 years, credulity still seems to be a part of horticultural life.

  And judging by location-establishing shots that have roses blooming all year round in Washington, D.C.  (a popular TV show which shall remain nameless), we are probably no better educated than Breck’s farmer audiences. Possibly less: most of us don’t have the daily experience of nature and its vagaries firshand. 

Honestly? I didn’t use to like orange. It was my least favorite of colors.

But I’ve reformed. And, like all converts, I’m anxious to spread the good word. If you’re still wondering which tulips to get,  allow me to offer a harvest time selection. Orange tulips can really grow on you, as you may be able to tell by my header photo (‘Apricot Beauty’ and ‘Annie Schilder’ are major players in that picture).

I was originally enticed into growing orange tulips because many of them have something extra: scent. And, gradually, I came to enjoy the orangeness for its own sake. I mean, how could you not like the full-moon tulip-bottom of Annie Schilder, above?  And how could you not like watching the daily movement of their earlier brick-orange turning into that luminescent glow?

It’s true that I started out with the soft stuff – pale peaches and apricots. ‘Apricot Beauty’ is so popular it would be a cliché – if it didn’t live up to its name so well. Like Annie Schilder, it starts out a deeper shade

and then its color lightens (I can’t say fades) to something so beautiful, so pale, so ethereal, that I used to think calling it orange was a crime.

The diminuitive ‘Apricot Jewel’, a batalinii tulip, was another of my first ventures in orange. I’ve written about these tulips elsewhere, mostly because they’re so beautiful I can’t shut up about them. I’d call them more of a peach than an apricot – they’re much yellower than Apricot Beauty – but I’d rather enjoy them than quibble over the color.

I ventured into the deeper colors of orange – and the deeper scents. To my nose, Apricot Beauty has a faint scent in its earlier stages (scent is a come-on for pollinators, so once the deed is done, it tends to fade). Apricot Jewel has none. I was greedy; I wanted huge shouting fragrance and tulips in once package. A little research showed me that the logical choice was Generaal de Wet.

Generaal de Wet did not disappoint; one day, I woke, and the first thing that impinged itself on my consciousness was not “I want a cup of coffee” but “where is that smell coming from?” It was a penetrating, musky smell that came right in the house and sat down for a visit, and it was coming from the group of Generaal de Wet I’d put right by my front door.

After that, I went on to Annie Schilder (which is more fragrant to my nose than Apricot Beauty; but  milder than Generaal de Wet), and I also tried ‘Prinses Irene’, another medium-fragrant tulip (I still haven’t grown any tulip that matches the strength of the Generaal).

 I wish I hadn’t grown Prinses Irene so early in my garden-photography career, because these photos give you only some idea of how the amazing colors develop. For a good picture of Prinses Irene, fully developed with its purple streaks, go here.

But these photos do give some idea of its Harlequin-like color development and blazing backlit orange.

Once I’d been bitten by the orange-tulip bug, I kept experimenting. There was T. whitallii, a species tulip only a few inches high.

 And ‘Daydream’, a tulip that starts out straw-yellow, gets a flush of orange,

and morphs into a wild pattern of almost-scarlet and yellow.

‘Orange Favorite’ is an heirloom parrot tulip whose complicated buds burst with variations of orange.

As they open, the purple and green and cream streaks start to show, and the flagrant fragrance (to my nose, the next runner-up to Generaal de Wet) unfolds, too.

Dark tulips are great complements for orange tulips, bringing out their colors beautifully in the vase and the garden. Van Engelen has a special combining Prinses Irene with ‘Purple Prince’, a combination I keep meaning to grow, but haven’t yet. (By the way, if you’re interested in knowing which are the best catalogues, in my opinion, you can take a look at the first of my five-part series on bulb catalogues. Oh yes, I take my bulb shopping very seriously indeed. And if you want the best in resplendent beauty, so should you.)

I tend to grow the black-purple tulips, ‘Queen of the Night’ and her look-alike consort, ‘Paul Scherer’. (For more on them, you can check ‘The Black Tulips”.)

But along with the deep richness of  dark tulips, I’ve also opened my heart to their brighter, glowing orange cousins.

 I had it all wrong about cottonwoods.

I love the sound of the wind in their leaves,  a sound that mimics flowing water in the way a rainstick echoes rain. I thought they made that sound because they had double-jointed leaves.

It’s one of those things that stuck in my head – wrong, as it turns out. So when I got next to a cottonwood, and started looking at where the petiole meets the branch, and I couldn’t figure out what makes it different. (The petiole is the part that connects the leaf to the stem. In some plants, like willows, it’s very short. In others, such as cottonwoods, it’s extended.) Since I couldn’t make head or tail out of what I was seeing, I went to my old reliable Sierra Nevada Natural History, and looked it up.

I found the clue under aspen (Populus tremuloides). From its species name, tremuloides, it’s easy to guess what trait is being described. From the genus name (Populus), it’s easy to guess that both aspens and cottonwoods are related to poplars, which have the same trembling leaves.  The reason for that, my Sierra Nevada Natural History told me, is that “the leaves, having vertically flat petioles, quiver in any breeze.”

“Vertically flat petioles, vertically flat petioles,” I muttered to myself, unable to configure vertically flat in my mind. So I went out to look.

 Vertically flat petioles look like this:

 And in action, they look like this:

The wide flat edge acts like a miniature sail, so that the least breeze causes leaves to move, and gives them that unique sound.It could be that this allows their seeds – little bits of white fluff that give cottonwood its name – to be scattered farther, increasing their tribe. In any case the sound of the poplar family is unlike any other, a restful sound, as if I were listening to a brook made of air.  Some cottonwoods grow straight up, like their poplar relatives, and others branch out into several trunks. Unlike poplars, however, their crowns are broad and flat.

The bark of the Fremont cottonwood that I was looking at (there are other kinds) is rough and fibrous, a clue to the kind of wood within. A source who knows his firewood told me that it’s next to useless for burning. Since cottonwoods grow only where there’s a high water table, every one of those fibers is filled with water.

So first you have to really dry them out. Then, when you get the into the stove, they burn quickly and dirtily, without much heat, and leave a lot of ash.  If you’re looking for firewood, best look elsewhere. But if you’re looking for a sign – and a sound – of water, cottonwoods will take you there. 

Leaf buds for next year 

 ”What’s a Wardian case?” my sister asked, when I told her in an email that I’d just acquired one.

As well she might. These days, most people call them terrariums, or mini-greenhouses, or cuter names which I’ll refrain from using.

But if you grow imported plants – and almost everyone does – Wardian cases are an invisible but important part of your garden. Back in the days before air freight, or even steam shipping and railroads, plant explorers were often frustrated by the amount of plants that arrived dead. Sailing ships might take many months to go from, say, South America or India or China to Europe. There was no temperature control, and fresh water was at a premium. I imagine sailors looking askance at the plant collector who wanted to use valuable drinking and cooking water for a bunch of dead-looking roots.

Plant collectors who shipped their acquisitions with other people had even more problems. Years ago, I wrote a book review on Anne Leighton’s history of U.S.  horticulture. (It’s really a history of white anglo upper-class U.S. horticulture, so it’s incomplete, but fascinating.) In one of her books, she quotes a rather crabby letter to a sea captain who was entrusted with bringing plants from a collector here to a plant enthusiast in England.

The sea captain, it appears, had not been too anxious to spend water or time on the plants, so they sat in unfortunate places on the journey, and more than half of them died. The other ones weren’t in great shape, either.

The English plant collector’s frustration was more than we might experience by ordering from a catalogue that ships us puny, half-dead plants. Plant importers of the time were rabid plant nuts, somewhat like old rose enthusiasts now: they looked for the unusual, the long-hidden, the thing that everybody else didn’t have. The plants they imported were expensive and unique. It might take years to replace them. Or they might never be available again.

Plant collectors were also commercial. In the 1700s, wealthy people began to show off their money and culture by growing imported plants on their estates. Imported plants were rare, pricey, and something your neighbor could envy. They were an ideal way to genteelly show your wealth.

The working class, meanwhile, was importing plants in the old-fashioned way: gardeners have been taking seeds and cuttings from wealthy employers for a long time. Once in the cottage gardens, the exotic plants spread from hand to hand.

By the mid-1800s, middle-class homeowners had adopted the exotic-plant craze, – on a smaller scale, of course. Imported plants had become big business, and smart horticultural entrepreneurs were springing up everywhere.

New technology made this possible. New technology in the form of a Wardian case.

In 1829, Dr. Nathaniel BagshawWard discovered that plants could survive for very long times under glass without care.  He was actually tying to create an entomology exhibit, a case holding a moth pupa in a “natural environment”.

 As time went by, he noticed that the ferns he’d put in as part of the environment were surviving well – better than the ones in his garden, in fact, which were overrun by smog (they called it “pea-soupers” back then, but it was still smog).

The tightly sealed environment allowed plants to survive where before they died miserably. The Hookers, a father and son plant exploring team, knew Ward, and they were quick to see its use. On their Antarctic expedition, they shipped back plants in Wardian cases. Successfully.

Ward became interested in the commercial uses of his case, and experimented by shipping English ferns and grasses to Sydney, Australia – then a six-month journey by sea. The plants arrived in perfect shape, and the native Australian plants he brought back to England on an 8-month trip (they hit a lot of storms) did well, too.

After that, they were quickly adopted, not only by plant hunters but by plant growers who enjoyed having their own little worlds to construct and put on a parlor table. Terrariums are the modern descendants of Wardian cases, and they are still pleasing for the same reasons.

Those of you who are interested only in the history of Wardian cases can stop reading now. Those of you who are toying with the notion of your own Wardian case, or just wonder what kinds of shapes and sizes they come in, can keep reading.  Because my own connection with Wardian cases is also something of a commercial venture.

Daffodil Planter, who edits and blogs at H. Potter, as well as her own blog  and the enticing morsels of Dirt du Jour, told me that, if I was one of the first 25 people to sign on as an H. Potter affiliate, I would get a Wardian case.

A Wardian case is a long-held garden fantasy of mine. Not one I tell to a lot of people, since I hate to be thought of as a “cute” gardener. But, well, there is an appeal in having a tiny world you can design to your taste. Much of the world is out of our control, so it’s nice to think that this shoebox-sized patch is  mine, all mine.

Since I know H. Potter containers are well-made, I feel fine about advertising them. And since I got my own Wardian case, I’ve been admiring it from different angles. At last I have a greenhouse. Even if it’s tiny.

I love the little cross-shaped openings that act as vents, just like a real greenhouse

And the completely unnecessary but very appealing spiral metal edging.

If you want to indulge your own fantasy and look at more Wardian cases, click that nice discreet terrarium ad on my right sidebar.

If you want ideas about how to plant a Wardian case, check out English Creek Gardens,  or read Tovah Martin’s post on terrariums for children at the H. Potter blog.  (Tovah Martin is a member of the family at Logee’s, a nursery that’s been growing greenhouse plants since Victorian days.)

If you’re an orchid grower, this post  by Susan Taylor can give you ideas for making a tiny greenhouse full of orchids. And if you want to get even more exotic, you can have a case full of carnivorous plants .

I’m not sure yet what I’ll plant in my Wardian case. I’m still dealing with fall planting, so I have all winter to fantasize. I could go for the original Wardian-type fern planting. But then again, a Wardian case allows me to grow tropical plants I couldn’t otherwise manage.

I’ll have a lot of fun deciding.