Daniel Mount Gardens

FROZEN FOODS

2012-01-25T07:15:00.000-08:00

Well, I got my wish. Snow, snow, snow and more snow with freezing rain and then some more snow. I know why people complain about snow. But being trapped in the house for a few days having to eat as much of the frozen food as possible because there is no power and everything is thawing faster and faster isn't so bad. ANd I think these cabbage will somehow survive.
I got the office cleaned and made a few hikes out into the glistening valley. Not so bad, now that it's over. Though I think the bamboo would have something else to say if it could talk.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

2012-01-15T12:10:00.000-08:00

When does the New Year end? and the regular year begin? In our rush to get back to work, on with our resolutions and to stash the Christmas decorations away most of us start the year on January 2nd. But when exactly does the baby become a child?
In the Shinto tradition the new year lasts until January 15th—now that’s a generous holiday. Of course in modern Japan like most modern countries people get started as soon as possible after the New Year’s Day. We are uncomfortable with fallowness. Even though I’m a gardener and supposedly more connected to the seasons than many other people, I have been very productive since January 2nd. Not gardening necessarily, though I have done a bit of clean up and pruning. I’ve been busy trying to get my unruly office in order, no success yet, and in getting my new website launched.
Each Year around New Year’s Day, Michael and I travel down Crooked Mile Road outside of Granite Falls to Tsubaki Grand Shrine. We go to wander the beautiful site of this Shinto shrine, to stand on the banks of the Pilchuck River which bends and eddies there with poetic vigor. We go there to receive the New Year blessing from the high priest, who sweeps a wand of crisp white paper over our heads, booms on a great deep voiced drum and jingles bells. Though it would be easy to dismiss this ritual as ancient mumbo jumbo, I can’t help but put some hope into it, as I do in touching the great stone frogs which are said to bring good fortune to those who return to the temple each year.
When we came home the mild weather had induced the tree frogs to start their spring songs. It fills the night air of the sleeping swamp that lies around our farm. They boomed and jingled like temple bells and drums. Though I know that spring is months away a great positivity rose up in me. After all the witch hazel’s already in bloom and I saw a flock of swans today decidedly flying north, though the ground was covered with snow.
And the baby has stood up and started to walk.

DIGGIN' IN

2012-01-01T09:54:00.000-08:00

I sit here to write, sluggish and bloated with holiday cheer, a laughing Buddha on the precipice of the New Year. The landscape I survey is hazy, what will I make of it and what will it take of me. I know it will be busy with travel , gardening and writing.
Thomas Jefferson said, “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more of it I have.” So it’s time to get down to the digging and uncover some of that luck. I hope to share it with you here as the year unfolds.
Best wishes for good health and good luck in 2012,
Daniel

THE COLOR OF CHRISTMAS

2011-12-24T09:31:00.001-08:00

Already 3 weeks ago, when I first heard Bing Crosby’s dreamy crooning, I too began to dream. And even wish out loud for snow. Not mountain-top, ski-slope snow, but snow right down here in the lowlands. I know my wish was childish, say around 10 years old with a new sled under the tree. I know my wish had traffic-snarling, jet-grounding impact, but all I cared about was my dream, and well, Bing’s too, and any other number of crooners who’ve tackled the song. Ask someone who grew up in Wisconsin, there is nothing like a white Christmas.
So weeks ago I began with the dreaming. In some sort of neo-shamanistic ritual I sprinkled popcorn along the rails of the deck outside the kitchen window. I told Michael it was to entice the birds closer to the house, but under my secret wishfully dreamy breath I was also trying to entice the weather gods to give us snow.
It’s not that I am ungrateful for the incredibly mild December we’ve been having. Nor do I mind the dense fog that the inversion layer kept pushed down around our ears for weeks now. I actually like the truncated visibility, turning the swamp surrounding our farm into a gothic masterpiece inhabited by spirits wearing moss pelts and opalescent pearls of dew. I love to walk through the valley this time of year when most others avoid it.
As I walked through this river of fog a few days ago and the season hung drab all around me and my dreaming about snow crescendo’d and collapsed, a strange sensitivity awoke in me, as if the low levels of light made my eyes more sensitive to subtle color variations. We grumpily refer to this weather, the fog, as the gray as if it were one thick coat of paint over everything. But it often reads blue especially early and late in the day. Sometimes even a vague sort of yellow when there is incandescent lights near by, haloed with eery greens.
And sometimes you enter pockets of the purest white. I had entered such a pocket on my walk that day when what to my wondering eyes did appear, actually it was my ears first that caught the magnificent trumpeting. A jubilation. Then just over my head out of the white sky a flock of 8 swans, a multitude of heavenly hosts, dropped from invisibility just yards over my head. They had not seen me either and a honk-honk-honk of warning echoed among them and they banked. The breath from their 16 wings brushed my upturned face. Then they vanished in the swaddling opaque fog. As this sublime monochrome moment opened and closed a shimmer like a shutter went through me. It was nothing that electricity could duplicate. Or, alas, words convey.
By solstice the weather had shifted a little. Shifted I say because there has been no wind to speak of, no great change, just a sleeper shifting under blankets of fog and clouds. The sun broke through. At first it merely laid on the fallen leaves, the walls, the blacktop, not penetrating, not heating. Even in the bluish shadows I could see it’s presence though, cool as electricity, skittering across the pebbled pavement, the rough trunks, and the smudged window of the Salvadoran restaurant where I ate pupusas.
Then through a slow persistence that seemed to bare no force heat came through. As I walked northward from the restaurant to my parked car I could feel this heat massage it’s way through 2 layers of wool and 2 layers of cotton and touch my fog-pallid skin. I forgot about summer and everything I did to keep the suns burning rays from damaging my oh-so-pale and cancerous skin. My skin called to the sun that day, nearly lifted off my shoulders as if desperate, as if starved for the closeness of those warming rays.
The sun left that day smearing the western horizon with an explosion of oranges, reds and yellows. I tipped my hat, so to speak, knowing it was now on it’s way back. And shivered under my for layers, a little wet with sweat, as I scurried through the crowds of shoppers back to my car.
Here its is Christmas Eve already. No sign of snow, not even in the mountains, much to the skiers’ chagrin and this snowshoer’s. It seems ironic the the classic Northwest Christmas song is written by Brenda White and extols the blessings of a “Christmas in the Northwest / a gift God wrapped in green.” Looks like the lyricist name is the closest we’ll get to a white Christmas this year. Why am I so obsessed with a Christmas that is a certain color?
About 20 years ago when I was working as ‘Mr. Christmas” for Molbak’s Seattle Garden Center in the Pike Place Market, there was a big push for a jewel tone Christmas by the people selling decorations. The traditional silver and gold, red and green were being replaced by multi-syllabic colors like turquoise, amethyst and aquamarine. Classy colors. I’m all for reinventing the wheel. But when it comes to Christmas I’m a traditionalist. I don’t want any Chippendale mermen on my tree, or chili pepper lights or jewel tones.
Give me silver and gold.
Give me the mono-syllabic red and green.
And, please, oh, please give me a white day after Christmas, if only in my dreams.

WHO NEEDS POINSETTIAS?

2011-12-23T11:07:00.000-08:00

Rhododendron 'Ostbo's Red Elizabeth' blooming again the day before Christmas. Eat your hear out all those of you who are blanketed in white.

FALL COLOR X

2011-12-16T09:52:00.000-08:00

I love prune brown, though I would never eat these old pear leaves, frozen, rained on, in decay. But the color to me is as rich as chocolate, savory as braised lamb, hefty as pumpernickel. Who needs pink this time of year? There’s a bucket of potatoes to be peeled for dinner.

FALL COLOR IX

2011-12-09T09:38:00.000-08:00

How precious the light. I don’t care how high the price of gold goes. This time of year when the clouds break, you have to stop and catch it. Not just with the camera, or the skin, but with the very fiber of being. That is all that will sustain us until the clouds break again. Decorations are distractions, but the way this fading Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘All Gold’) shines under the wash of sunbeams enlivens.

FALL COLOR VIII

2011-12-02T09:13:00.001-08:00

As I searched through my my fiery vocabulary for a metaphor to describe the generous beauty of this sourwood (Oxydendron arboreum), I ran up against trite words like “volcanic”, “molten”, unsatisfying phrases like “engulfed in flames”. Then I tried invoking the the gem-like quality of poisonous cinnabar, or the sugary cheeriness of cinnamon bears, to no avail. I exhausted quickly up against this beauty. And then I found these words of Rabindranath Tagore:
“As the season ends let everything go in an orgy of giving away.
Come, thieves of hidden honey; come now bees—
The year has chosen to marry death and wants to give all as she leaves.”

FALL COLOR VII

2011-11-22T19:48:00.000-08:00

As the cold melancholic rains strip the color from the trees, flinging the golden leaves of the cotton woods into the gutter, the flaming reds of maples across the lawn, I wonder how I will sustain this post series until December 21 when fall ends. I could go on about green for the next month. But I’ll save that for later. What I see now is white, ominous white. Will snow come, or nor? Snow berries ( Symphorocarpos albus) are certainly already here, ghostly, inedible and totally beautiful.

FALL COLOR VI

2011-11-16T07:45:00.000-08:00

If you’re prone to metallic hyperbole you’d probably call the color of these fallen cherry leaves bronze. If you’re like Crayola you’d probably call it burnt sienna. If Caran d’ache is more your style you’d most likely call it cinnamon. If masculine Sherman-Williams supplies your color vocabulary you might call it tobacco, But if you’re slike me you probably prefer brown. Not that I don’t see the complexity and richness of color here, not that I don’t appreciate a lovely associative word. But because I love the roundness of the word brown. Because to me the color brown is round, not just for the sake of rhyme. It is a color swollen with implications.

FALL COLOR V

2011-11-11T19:38:00.000-08:00

This lovely lavender dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis) has been blooming since April. In July as it began to lay down slowly on the surrounding perennials I thought I should cut it back, but then forgot. By August I was wondering, “How long will this damn dame keep blooming.” The flower spikes were stretching nearly 8 feet by then. We’ve finally had a killing frost, 22º. Much was blackened and flattened over night. All the leaves of the empress trees dropped green. There was ice in the watering can. But the little, well not so little , dame’s rocket just keeps on blooming

FALL COLOR IV

2011-11-06T19:36:00.000-08:00

A few night s ago I had dinner at a Japanese restaurant that I hadn’t dined at in years. It actually had changed hands and names several times since I was last there back in the early 90s. It’s in an odd little corner of Seattle and a basement at that. But when you enter this finely laid out and decorated subterranean restaurant, you feel like you’re in Japan. Well, I feel like I’m in Japan, though I’ve never been to Japan and don’t really know what being in Japan feels like. But the atmosphere of this restaurant, which has gone through some changes since I was there last, still has a quintessentially Japanese feel. At the end of the small front dining room, which used to be the bar twenty, thirty years ago, is the beautiful autumnal mural. Japanese maples in reds, oranges and yellows seem unusual, most Japanese restaurants focus on bamboo or spring and cherry blossoms for their decor. These maples frame a plunging narrow water fall now covered by Samsung large screen T.V. The waitress caught me taking this picture, looked puzzled and then apologized, “ It’s a shame we put a T.V. in the middle of that beautiful painting.” I just smiled.

FALL COLOR III

2011-11-02T19:33:00.000-07:00

This weekend we had a sunny day. Michael and I were rushing around the garden gathering the last of the gatherables before the next swath of rain passed through. A few pears, a few pumpkins. And even some beans. I bought the seed for this yellow romano bean in Lucca, Italy a few years ago. It’s called Meraviglia di Venezia, the Marvel of Venice, for a reason. The first year we grew it we was totally disappointed with it’s slow growth and reluctance to produce. But then late in the season, when the rest of the beans had given up it began to develop these beautiful and tender yellow pods. Again this year the late harvest was marvelously rewarding. Its a bean we will grow again and again.

FALL COLOR II

2011-10-27T19:32:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Michael and I drove to Boise, Idaho for his parents Golden Wedding Anniversary. It’s a beautiful drive, that we take frequently through the Cascades, the sage lands of the Yakima valley and the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon. This was the first autumn trip we made. I was surprised by the colors.The cotton woods in the river valleys were golden, with that yellow between egg yolk and lemon rind that we call golden. The slopes were reddened with sumac and service berry. Yet the dominant vegetal color beneath the clear blue October skies was beige. Almost a non-color in its ubiquity and neutrality. The grasses were beige and every form of herbaceous growth, the flower head of shrubs like the rabbit bush (Chrysothamnus naseosus) above and the stubbly fields of harvested wheat. It’s an affable if dead color, not cheery like spring time pinks, or bold like autumn gold, but valuable and calming. Or maybe it was just the long ride in this sublime beige landscape that calmed.

FALL COLOR

2011-10-20T06:12:00.001-07:00

Fall is creeping up on us slowly. Certainly the temperatures have changed, the clouds are back, the rains have begun on schedule. It’s the colors that are being shy. The grand autumnal colors, gold, orange, red, are just starting to peek out here and there. Sometimes it does that here. Sort of like spring is a prolonged parade from February to June. I have been taking pleasure in other colors as I wait for Fall’s triumph. Like anemones and aster. And the leaves of this purple brussels sprout lacquered with glare.

SITE UNSEEN

2011-10-04T20:12:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Michael and I headed to Mount Rainier for a 3 day weekend. We were celebrating Michael’s birthday and escaping a myriad of projects around the house. Though the weather forecast was mixed, as it has been a lot lately, what we got was foggy, cloudy, rainy, actually any meteorological phenomenon that reduces visibility and gets you wet. Still, we had a beautiful time. “Invisibility is its own natural wonder,” writes the novelist Joyce Kornblatt. Certainly over the weekend as foggy distances gently opened and shrunk like schools of jelly fish, played peek-a-boo like a 2 year old, or teased like Sally Rand with her fans, we were continually awed by the beauty. And there was a certain peacefulness, which we didn’t realize we were seeking, that came over us, and would have been impossible if the sun was shining and the views gargantuan and triumphant as a brass band at Christmas.

TULIPTIME?

2011-09-26T20:07:00.000-07:00

It seems an odd time of year to be selling tulips. There are sunflowers, asters and mums ripe for the picking. I wonder where these six-petalled beauties are coming from. Somewhere below the equator where it is spring? From some strange complex of coolers and hothouse nearby where spring could be electronically recreated? It makes you wonder how they can get them to us so cheaply.
David Perry and Debra Prinzing are writing a book about sustainable, local flower growing called A Fresh Bouquet. Their blog is full of beautiful photos and interesting interviews with growers around the country involved in local sustainable flower culture. I’d be visiting it know except my bulb orders just arrived and I have hundreds of tulip bulbs to unpack. Giant Darwin Hybrids, Greggii Hybrids and Fosteriana Hybrids for my clients. And a few species tulips for me.
Maybe September is tulip time after all.

HOMESICKNESS

2011-09-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

I’ve read that all gardening is a sickness, a homesickness. A deep seated longing for our mythical home in Eden. Or an echoing refrain of our evolutionary beginnings on the African savannas. I know many people who plant lilacs or peonies because their grandma did. I grow cucumbers and pickle them in memory of my mother’s sour briny summer kitchen. And I am researching arborvitae, a native of my home state Wisconsin, for an article. This research lead me to Oregon last weekend to tour conifer nurseries, take photographs and interview growers. I saw many new beautiful cultivars of Thuja occidentalis, as well as standards like the stalwart ‘Emerald Green’. But when I saw these ‘cactus’ I had to stop. I imagine the owner of this car wash was longing for his home in the Sonoran desert when he planted them. Even the 'Stella D'oro' daylilies seem like yuccas in this context.

SELF PORTRAIT

2011-09-06T20:21:00.000-07:00

THE LONG AND THE SHORT

2011-09-04T12:19:00.001-07:00

I have been accused, affectionately by friends, of being a long winded blogger. This criticism was relatively painless, yet baffling because I’m always thinking I’m not writing enough. So I looked around the garden-blog-o-sphere and realized most garden blogs are about pictures not words. But, boy-oh-boy, I love words. I realized most garden blogs are about gardens, primarily pink flowers, but I love to digress. And digress ad nauseum.
So let me be brief, for once.
Over the coming months I will be focussing my energies on finishing my new website. So I will be posting in snippets. I have given myself a limit of one photo and one paragraph a week. After my new website is up and running my blog will take on a new format. Longer, yes, longer, posts once a month. Hopefully this will liberate me to digress in depth. I will also be disabling the comment function, I’m trying to shed some spammers. If you have something you must say please e-mail me.
Here’s the first photo and paragraph.

Michael has been trying to grow a decent daikon for a few years now. This year he gave up. A few wild radishes always sprout up in our field, but when I saw what I thought was a daikon seedling among the peas I let it grow. And it grew. Good thing we only got one. I don’t know what we’re going to do with this one, let alone a dozen.

GRASSLANDS

2011-08-20T15:41:00.001-07:00

Last week I headed out on a scouting trip. Unlike the scouts of the great American expansion of the 1800s, I headed east, not west, towards the green, green grass of home, not away from it. To see family not to escape it. But I was also a scout for the Northwest Horticultural Society. We are planning a tour of gardens of Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin for the Fall of 2012. I was sent to make connections and find gardens.
A few savvy gardeners here in the Pacific Northwest questioned my sanity:
Isn’t it all lawns and foundation plantings?
Corn fields and pastures bucolicly furnished with Holsteins?
Maddening right-wingers and a disgruntled working class?
As a scout I wanted to prove them wrong:
Wisconsin, like the world, is not flat.
The natives aren’t hostile.
And all gardens are not made of junipers and lawn.
I saw the happiest and healthiest hostas I’ve ever seen. I experienced the hot humid weather that encourages exotic annuals to tropical proportions. I met fervent gardeners who would not let USDA zone 4 stand in the way of creating interesting gardens.
And I envied these gardeners’ panache with grasses.
Madison is situated in a very botanically complex part of the country. A area where the great hardwood forests of the Northeast peter out making way for oak savannas and prairies. This biome exalts in grasses. And so do the gardeners.
My first stop was at Olbrich Botanical Gardens, where I met with Director of Horticulture Jeff Epping. Olbrich is included in Horticulture Magazine’s top 10 inspirational Gardens in the U.S. for a reason. Under Epping’s guidance these gardens are a show case of what is possible in this nearly impossible climate. Grasses are one of the many things that make this garden so successful.

The enchanting softness, yet down right toughness, of prairie dropseed ( Sporobolus heterolepis), a Wisconsin native reaches it’s peak in this selection ‘Tara’ found not far from the garden by nurseryman Roy Diblik of Northwind Perennial Farm.

Though there are plenty of native grasses exotics like silver feather grass (Miscanthus sinensis) seem right at home. Here Epping uses the cultivar ‘Adagio’ in masses to great effect against the Prairie School arbor and large lawn at the center of the garden.

At home Epping has a little less ground to garden, yet he gardens it exquisitely and intensively, not even shying from including two lawns. In the back of the house a small square of traditional lawn is crossed by neatly set pavers that lead to a pocket park, where boys tackled and tossed footballs.

At the front of the house Epping challenges his neighbors with a fescue lawn which he mows only once a year. In the waning daylight of late summer it’s tousled, sexy bed-headed look made it seem gentle enough for cuddling. Or was it the red wine and fireflies?

Further afield at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum I met Ed Hasselkuss, curator (for 45 years!) of the internationally recognized Longenecker Gardens. I was impressed by Ed’s planning. Here he has planted trees in rows separated by lawns the width of a normal city street to demonstrate there use as street trees.

What the arboretum is probably most famous for is the Curtis Prairie, the oldest restored prairie in the world. Here one finds not only the beautiful little and big blue stem grasses (Schizachryum scoparium and Andropogon gerardii) but an absolutely complex yet unified matrix of forbs and grasses which make prairies so beautiful and important ecologically.

As my day wound down I headed to my friends’ house. Linda Brazill and Mark Golbach (Each Little World) have truly bucked the trends, following a very traditionalist lead from another country: Japan. Working within the limits of climate and site they have created an exquisite and strangely exotic garden in a rather ordinary neighborhood. Their attention to detail and commitment to traditional Japanese garden making is admirable.
Though they use grasses sparingly, and often accidentally, grasses can not be denied their place in this garden. Berms, mimicking mountains at the back of the garden, are allowed to grow a host of grasses and wildflowers, They read with a velvety softness from the distance and echo the great swaths of moss in the shadier parts of the garden.

Grasses become fragile in the shade, like whispers in wind, they bond in quiet communities with violets and mosses keeping my steps firmly on the granite pavers. I am reminded of the delicateness of existence here as much as I was reminded of it’s robustness in the Curtis Prairie, or it’s toughness played out on a park lawns.

When I returned home to the Evergreen State I was not surprised by the tawny lawns, at least not like I was 22 years ago when I moved here. With are predictable late summer drought and abundant rain the rest of the year many eco-concious gardens forego being green for the summer. Hardly a place for football or a picnic, or pasturing sheep for that matter, these burn out lawns have a certain amber-waves-of-grain beauty about them. And though they look like the penultimate in neglect, at least to someone, like my father who had the oscillating sprinkler out on our Wisconsin lawn weekly, they are a sign of the great care for the greater garden in this place that “always” rains.

Except in summer.

OUT RIDIN' FENCES

2011-08-14T18:17:00.000-07:00

While I'm traveling think about the Rentable Fences. As a band name.

Excuses

2011-08-07T12:23:00.000-07:00

One of my clients has a sign in the bathroom the gardeners gets to use which says: Live life by exclamations, not excuses. That said I am posting one picture, worth a thousand words they say, while I'm working on my next thousand word post.

Nothing exclaims like 'Jester' New Zealand Flax ( Phormium cv.) with the sparks of 'Boone' gladiolas (Gladiolus cv.) shooting from it's flame like leaves. Below the coals of this combination are purple wood spurge ( Euphorbia amygdaloides 'Purpurea') and ' 'Molten Lava' oxalis ( Oxalis vulcanicola).

FENCETIVITY

2011-07-16T13:48:00.000-07:00

On a cold and rainy Saturday last month, when I was trapped in the Plum Island beach house of my dear old friend, the songwriter Loey Nelson, I found I had not only taken a trip to the East Coast put the past. The historical past of New England and the personal past of rainy coloring book Saturdays. It wasn’t Loey I colored with but her 4 year old son Andreas. We shared a scrambled box of crayons and a coloring book, each taking a page. I riffled through the crayon box looking for the most natural colors, while Andreas grabbed red and hit the page ignoring the outlines set out by the coloring book designer, even sometimes ignoring the page his stokes on to the floor. He finished and was ready to turn the page long before I ever got one color laid down on the vest of a cartoon cowboy cat, yodeling with guitar in hand.
As we turned pages I knew we had to speed up, to cast out my ideas of coloring-in and just lay down color on the page as fast as possible before Andreas turned the next page. It was incredibly liberating, this boundless coloring, though the end result may have been not os aesthetically gratifying. It also made me aware how much my mind clings to all the outlines, boundaries, fences around things. How as a gardener I am ceaselessly maintaining them, the edge of the beds against the lawns, the property lines, the fences.
The ubiquitous and ever-commenting "they" say “Good fences make good neighbors.” Or, is it good neighbors that make good fences? Either way a boundary is constructed for many reasons. To keep the dog in, or the neighbors kids out. To state “this is mine” and “that is yours”.
My childhood garden was bounded by a white picket fence to the south, but our neighbors to the north had no fence. Can you guess which neighbor was more friendly? Who we shared more vegetables from our garden with? And who shared the apples from their giant tree, which we kids were allowed to climb?
I’ve taken a particular interest in fences lately. Not just as boundaries, but as objects, elements of design and use, as symbols, and as, well, fences. I’ve never built a fence. I’ve never owned anything to put a fence around, unless you consider the makeshift pen around the ducks a fencing of my property. I really did it to protect them from the coyotes. But you can see where this is leading. Fences are useful for many reasons and you can’t avoid them.
Each week as I drive around photographing fences discerning their uses and their beauty, I become more entranced, amused and puzzled by them. I plan on doing several posts over the next few weeks about what I’m seeing, why they entrance, amuse or puzzle me. Why sometimes these last few weeks I’ve been yodeling in the car, the old cowboy tune“ Don’t Fence Me In.”
I’ve been working on an article for The Washington Park Arboretum Bulletin about the Arboretum Nacional Juan Bautistas Salas Estrada in Managua, so I decided to start with photos of fences I’d seen in Nicaragua last winter. Many fences there, especially on Little Corn Island where we spent most of our time, are make shift which I find very charming and most are for keeping animals in or out. So function out weighs aesthetics, and from the looks of the materials, cost effectiveness plays a huge role.

Is a fence defined by materials or use? Is this stone balustrade a fence of sorts?

A fence or a wall? I think of fences as being permeable, letting air and light pass through.

The Catholic Church can afford some pretty fancy fences. Is this one around the cathedral in the center of Granada to keep satan and looters out, or to keep the faithful in the fold?

The seemingly purposeless fence tells people on the public beach where the private resort's property begins.

Once again, it acts like a fence, is permeable to light and air, one of my criteria for a fence, but it's made of concrete not a fencing material at all.

In the tropics many trees sprout from a limb chopped off and stuck in the ground, thus living fences, which actually shade cattle and act as wind breaks to crops as they mature. A very useful sort of fence in this photos made with jinocuabo (Bursera simaruba) commonly used through out Central America fro living fences.

A trick fence at a resort. There is actually chain link under those palm fronds.

FOR THE TREES

2011-06-18T15:47:00.001-07:00

Some people say, “ You can’t see the forest for the trees”. I think, “ you can’t see the trees for the grass.” Or at least that’s how I felt a week ago when I had toured the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. I guess I’ve been living a little myopically since I “discovered” the grasses a few weeks ago. I’ve had a hard time keeping focused on the bigger picture, which at the Arnold is some very impressive old specimen trees. As I scrolled through my photos when I returned, I’m working on an article for the Washington Park Arboretum Bulletin, I was surprised how many photos included grasses.
Now it would be hard to exclude grasses from almost any arboretum photos. Grasses make the perfect under story for trees, a soft hardscape for strolling among them. As I wandered the Arnold looking for specific trees I found I was often walking through grasses, wading at times, after a deluge of thunderstorms passed through the area saturating the park, as I went deep into the collection where there was little foot traffic. The park is crisscrossed by black top roads, and sidewalks, gravel paths, muddy paths and mown paths. There is a constant stream of dog walkers, stroller joggers, kids and work vehicles on the move there. There were even amblers, and a few questers like me looking for a specific trees, or the perfect shot for photographing.
I took each of these ways through the park at one point or another, but mostly I stuck to the grassiest ways, which conjured words I’ve only read and never written like sward, glade, turf, and green. Certainly it was green. The lawns stretched across the 265 acre park varied greatly from the finely manicured lawns near the Hunnewell building which housed the visitor center and offices of the arboretum, to glades beneath the stands of tall oaks, and meadows in open areas between collections.
I was surprised how much I was captivated by the grassy areas; I came for the trees. But if it weren’t for the grasses I would have only seen a forest and probably not the trees.
Walk with me and you might see what I mean.

Many choices. many directions to choose from.

Expansive well groom lawns read like architecture.

Kentucky coffee tree off the main drag.

Gravel leads deeper into the collections.

Grass captures shadows.

Deeper still on a path less travelled.

Shadows pool on the meadow on a hot afternoon.

The path becomes obscured as it penetrates the conifer collection...

until I'm knee deep in the sward.

AND AWAY WE GO

2011-06-10T20:54:00.000-07:00

"The urge to travel is self-perpetuating and can never be satisfied. It seems to have been handed down genetically, a residual trace perhaps of vast prehistoric migrations undertaken by our distant ancestors."

James Atlee Nocturne

GRASSES

2011-06-06T07:11:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I was out for a walk down the road. I was still tingling with the excitement of seeing all the desert wildflowers the day before. My mind was keen with finding more.
Well, there were buttercups, and clover, and herb robert. All the usual suspects of the weedy roadside buried in a matrix of grasses.
I had been looking right through the grasses for the pretty petalled forbs. Then I looked at the grasses. I began to pick a few grass inflorescences just to get closer. I was stunned at the diversity of grasses I found in the 10 foot swath along the road. I picked a whole handful of inflorescences as I went to examine when I got home.
I pulled the only book I have on wild grasses and began to read:
‘Few people — even those who are passionately interested in nature — take the trouble to learn the names of grasses,” wrote Lauren Brown in her book GRASSES: An Identification Guide, “Enthusiasts who will travel hundreds of miles to look at ‘wildflowers’ ignore the grasses in their own back yard (even though they are technically also wildflowers).”
That sure sounded like me. So I decided to bridge that gap in my botanical knowledge and start learning the grasses. So like a good poet cum botanist I begin looking. Just trying to see the grasses. And the more I see the more there are. The word ‘grasses’ begins to hiss through my teeth like all the blue racers I saw on my walk fleeing the warmth of the black top for green privacy. But it is like calling my friends “people” instead of using their names. I want to learn their names.
A few were familiar, even had familiar friendly names like timothy and brome, from the summers I spent in the hayfields of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Some like quack grass and crab grass, with their cranky little names are familiar from a life of weeding. But there were many lovely grasses I had never taken notice of before. And June, the grassiest month, when they all start extending their inflorescences and letting their wind born pollen fly, is the best time to be looking.
So I am asking you, too, dear readers, to look. Not at lawns necessarily, or the ornamental grasses in you garden, but at the grasses that are everywhere in vacant lots, cracks in pavements and along the side of the road, the green swath that we speed by each day. And if you can find a place to get out of your car and take a closer look please do.

I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

SPACED OUT

2011-05-29T08:07:00.001-07:00

Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you how claustrophobic I am. Though my therapist friend Judith insists, as she always does putting a positive spin on things, that I just need more space than most people. Still I had to be drugged to take an MRI, and I opt for staircases over elevators any day.
Michael calls me affectionately “squirrelly” . I’m not sure exactly what he means. Is he referring to my evasive nature? Or my nuttiness?
Here on the farm space is at a premium. Our house is tiny, with no room-of-one’s- own for either of us, which can make winter uncomfortably tight. With the lingering winter skies which can be so bitterly low compounding the fact. In spring and summer our lives expand on to our vast decks and expansive lawns spreading out through the orchard right up to the edge of the swamp. Life gets a little yin and yang around here as we expand and contract our realm with the seasons.
My working realm also expands greatly this time of year. I garden about 15 acres all together for my 4 clients and if you count the 7 acres at home, well, you get the picture. There is a lot of ground to cover in a week making more like a Serengeti ungulate than a squirrel. Some days I wish I could soar over it all like an observant raptor instead.
The term “ spaced out” is probably foreign to my parents generation. I’m sure it arose from the drug-induce mind-altering state know as the 70s. It is a floaty state hard to explain, between meditation and aggravation, activity and sloth. No place to anchor, nothing to understand. I felt it when I floated on my back in the briny Caribbean off the coast of Nicaragua in March. I feel it sometimes in the morning before my first cup of tea, when my mind lies numb in my cranium.
Now I don’t want to live my life in a spaced out state. I love the rush of activity, the sparkle of curiosity, the solid silence of meditation. But sometimes , just sometimes, I like to space out, to vanish.
And sometimes that involves getting away.
On Saturday I used the last of my energy from a very exhausting week to rocket myself out of the lowlands. With my caffeinated foot hard to the pedal I sped over the rain splattered, green saturated Cascades and down into the inland deserts of Washington. There wasn’t enough time to think, so I headed to a favorite spot: Umptanum Canyon.
The valley was filled with bird song and wildflowers, the skies blue. The treeless landscape let my busy mind wander, dissipate, finding the relaxing space it needed.
And then I could enjoy, plainly and simply enjoy, the beautiful flowers, so casually, so artfully strewn through the valley. Each time I go there the I see new flowers. The season has been cool and wet many early flowers still bloomed though the valley was filled with Memorial day hikers and campers.

Lithospermum ruderale

Prunus virginiana, the chokecherry native to vast expanses of North America.

Some grasses are already turning autumnal colors as the soils dry out on the slopes above the Umptanum Creek.

Nothing helps the the spacing out process better than lazily moving clods in a blue sky and a nap.

This remarkable little Mimulus gave this inch worm a place to nap out of the sun.

This garden worthy combination of Hackelia diffusa, spreading stickseed, and Lupinus sericeus, silky lupine, is prevalent throughout the canyon.

My favorite Northwest desert shrub Pushia tridentata, bitterbrush, a rose relative, has a beautiful fragrance taht is not at all rosy.

After leaving the canyon I drove around to Umptanum Ridge. Wind whipped and spartan offering vast open views even with the clouds moving in. It takes austerity to a new level. I hardly spaced out though, so attracted to all the wild flowers that defiantly break out of this hard volcanic soil and into the harsh winds.

Among the many species of lupin here, the stony-ground lupin, Lupinus saxosa sood out with it's dense flower heads.

There were still vernal pools pocking the dry ridge where common camas, Cammasia quamash, grow.

There were also several species of l phlox in bloom, this one is Phlox speciosa, showy phlox, which it certainly is.

Thompson's paintbrush, Castilleja thompsonii not yet in bloom but lovely none the less

I had to hold this large flowered brodiaea, Triteleia grandiflora var. grandiflora, against the raging winds.

.

Any of you who have been reading this blog for a while know I have a fondness fro clovers, Trifolium ssp. This is Trifolium macrocephalum the large heade clover, one of our natives, unfortunately not in bloom.

In some ways I’ve always lived on that wind swept ridge. I feels more like home than the lush Snoqualmie Valley. But when I returned home to our freshly tilled field and new greenhouse I knew I wouldn’t be able to space out any more. It’s time to plant the vegetables and flowers. But somewhere in side I have put the expansive Umptanum Ridge , the roar of it’s wind, the intimacy of the wildflowers and when I need a moment to space out, I’m going to close my eyes and go there.

JOY TO THE WORLD

2011-05-22T10:06:00.000-07:00

Time seems more and more slippery as I age. One year, one month, one moment more firmly braided into the other, emerging from the other like a new snake from an old skin. At no time is this more obvious than in spring. I have an itchy need myself to change. To strip free, unfold, awaken. To re-green.
A dear friend of mine who reads this blog regularly asked me why I changed the design of my blog so much. I guess because it’s easier than painting the house or the extra bedroom. Easier then finding someone to give me a desperately needed hair cut now that my Laotian hairdresser has disappeared with out a trace. I worry, I worry.
I worry, dear readers, that you will get bored with the same-old-page week after week like I do. Magazines change their faces regularly. The seasons change, and so do I. My blog seemed so wintery all black, dark and cramped. I wanted to set it free, let it express the lush new world I face each day.
When I talked to my mother on Mother’s Day, she was jubilant as a a spring song sparrow. “The grass is just jumping out of the ground,” she chirped. She had looked out over the still brown pastures in the morning, winter leaves late in the Upper Pennisula of Michigan, by afternoon all was vibrant green. I can remember the speed of the re-greening in the midwest, the fresh emergent green that delights and energizes. I began for us months ago and progressed langurously through one of the coldest springs on record. Now everything is so green you can’t even see green any more, or imagine the months when it vanishes. Here in the Evergreen State, where dark conifers dominate and green never totally retreats the re-greening of trees and fields is slower, easier to ignore. I was blind to green, my head buried in my work and worry.
Last week I was doing some transplanting for a client. I was thinking about my grandfather who was an estate gardener, too. I was feeling grumpy about being out in the chilly morning air digging, as I’m sure he often was. He was a grumpy old man who most of his grandchildren could not appreciate. To me he was magical with his stories of growing up in Brazil, his knowledge of nature, even his grumpiness seemed like a power and not a short coming. When I was doing my grumpy digging I dug up a piece of debris. The garden in which I was working is a new garden, I never find a chard of pottery or an aluminum pop-top, so to finally dig something up was quite exciting. I like finding bits of the past, pulling them out of the dirt and into the light. The something I found was on an old Pall Mall cigarette pack, my grandfather’s brand. It’s red and white printed paper was protected by the cellophane wrapper for years in the earth. It seemed spooky strange and yet comforting to find that Pall Mall package while thinking of my grandfather 30 years after his passing. As if from the underworld, the other side he was saying hello. It was also my brand for a while after he died, some strange reach for continuity, just like being a gardner is, and perhaps the grumpiness.

I don’t really like being grumpy in spring, while every blade of grass and flower is being so joyous. Each year I swear I will take spring slower the next year so I can enjoy it. And each year spring and the busy season comes and I’m a rushing grump again. I know there are remedies for this. Sometimes it’s a beer, other times a nap. But this week I found an even better solution: joy. It took a little work and a little caffeine to find it, but it’s there among the flowers. In particular the tulip ‘Happy Generation’.

I had stopped at Wells Medina Nursery, one of many nursery stops in my busy day. In their mixed borders they had planted a miscellany of tulips, that I actually took a moment to enjoy. And what a joy they brought. Especially ‘Happy Generation’. There is something about the combination of red and white. The fierceness of red balanced by the cool sophistication of white breeds pure cheerfulness. Why do you think circus tents are red and white?
I know there is a certain Christmassy sort of tackiness to this color combination, but it makes me squirm with childish delight. Candy canes and Santa come to mind, but also Valentiney wishes. “Be mine, be mine.” Who can decline these cupidinous wishes’ kisses? So I let these tulips kiss me all over. And I began to laugh. I suddenly remembered why I was gardening, and at such a fierce pace. I was not for money, or too keep busy, but for joy. Joy, that word I rarely use, too antiquated, too Christmasy for any other time of year, is what filled me.
One of my first memories is of sticking my face into a big red tulip, a gigantic tulip compared to my two year old face. A group of adults stood around smiling as I took a whiff. In my memory I have no thoughts, just the un”adult”erated feeling of joy.
I forget, I forget about this joy in getting caught up in my grumpy adult life. But it only took a tulip to remind me and then I saw red and white everywhere in the gardens I create.

Cytisus alba ‘Elegantissima’ froths over Rhododendron ‘Winsome’

Tulipa ‘Red Shine’ behind a variegated boxwood.

Once I was woken up by red and white I could see the green. The spring greens are already darkening into summer greens, which will become the golden greens of August before it all drops away again to the dark, dark greens of winter when I can legitimately sing “Joy to the World”.

And suck on a candy cane.

DUMB LUCK

2011-05-08T12:32:00.001-07:00

John Lennon said “Life is what happens when you’re making plans to do other things.” I’d like to alter that quote to say, “ Life is what happens when you're putting off things you should have done last year.” I’m banging myself over the head right now for not getting plants labeled in the garden. I always relied on my firecracker memory for plant names, both Latin and common, but when I walked around our muddy 6 acres yesterday I realized my cup runneth over and what is spilling out is all the names of plants I thought I would surely remember when I planted them only 3 years ago. Michael was proactive and got all his roses and hydrangeas labeled a month ago.I thought I could skiff along on his wake and get my labeling done, too. Too busy. It’s that time of year.
But here’s the problem, a little fancily marked 4-leafed clover that I bought a few days ago came home without a tag. It was the one plant I bought that day that I didn’t know the name of. Not that it’s all that important, it’s just a Trifolium repens cultivar that I want to watch grow, see if it hybridizes with others on the property, just fun. So why am I obsessing? Because there are a lot of plants around here, valuable, rare , unique, that I don’t remember the names of. So I decided in lieu of a lengthy, photograph-laden blog. I’d keep it simple so I can get my labeling done.

THE FUCHSIA IS NOW:REPRISE

2011-04-30T12:58:00.001-07:00

I know I swore I’d focus on the here and now when I was finished with all the Nicaragua blogs. But the here and now is about the future at this moment. And in mine and my clients’ futures are fuchsias.
We’ve been having an unbelievably cold spring. I’ve heard 15 degrees below normal. It’s great for the daffodils which are in a state of suspended animation. I wish I could say the same for myself, but the busy season has started. Those of you who think professional gardeners have a great life filled with stop-to-smell-the-roses moments haven’t known a gardner in spring. The pressure is on, the future whether it’s June garden tours or August parties is already being prepared for. This is when I love fuchsias the most. I can buy and bed them out early, I wouldn’t plant coleus, petunias or geraniums during these cold wet days, and they will perform until the first hard frost. I wrote several posts a few years ago about the glory of fuchsias. I’ve lost a few of the not-so-hardy ones since then but not my love of these excellent performers. The one pictured is ‘Cherry’ a reliable upright for bedding out.

I made be exaggerating a bit about the non-stop busy-ness. I actually made a stop at the Washington Park Arboretum the other day to catch the last of the late Japanese cherries in bloom. I love the flowering cherries more than any flowering tree.

Pink powder puffs are usually not my favorites, but I couldn't help but stop to marvel at this old unnamed cultivar in the Arboretum.

I prefer the white cherries or this green flowered form 'Ukon', some listings call it yellow, but to my my eye it is the shiest bit of elegant green I've ever seen in a flowering tree.

And as far as daffodils go....
Who needs ‘em when you have a lawn full of dandelions?

Of course I do. I love the snowy ‘Mount Hood’, and about 150 others, at least.

"PLANTS, PLANTS PLANTS!"

2011-04-25T06:33:00.001-07:00

Well, here they are. A handful of what I saw, just a taste of the amazing botanical diversity of Nicaragua.

Jicaro (Crescentia cujeta) has a strange flower pollenated by bats, it actually looks like a bat. It produces large hard round fruits that contain numerous protein rich seeds that are made into a drink. This one is growing in Arboretum Nacional Juan Bautista Salas Estrada in Managua.

The national arboretum a center for education in the capital grows many useful plants of Nicaragua. Common Bamboo (Bambus vulgaris), though not native is grown extensively for construction material. It ain't bad looking either.

We went to Chocoyero Canyon National Reserve outside of Managua mostly to see the flocks of green parakeets, toucans and yellow headed amazon parrots, but we had a lot of botanical surprises along the way. Like this Philodendron goeldii.

The very large buds on a vine I never found the name of.

Along with the creepy knowledge that vampire bats inhabit this canyon, luckily we visited after dawn, was this floral oddity, a Dutchman's pipe of some sort ( Aristolochia sp. ).

Our destination was Paradise and that was Little Corn Island on the Caribbean side of the country.This little island inhabited for a long time was forested with plants from around the world. Mostly fruit producing like bananas (Musa acuminata). The whole island felt more like a garden than a jungle, though jungley it was.

It rained daily while we were there. Plenty of mushrooms erupted from logs, piles of manure and the ground. We didn't eat any. But I had to get a picture of this odd fuzzy one. The photo is a little fuzzy, too.

Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) another tree brought to the island by man made up a large portion of the jungle canopy.

Hoja de estrella, or root beer plant, (Piper auritum) is native to the island though I only encountered it in gardens. The leaves smell like root beer and the locals make a tea from the leaves to aid digestion; they are also used to flavor meats and tamales, though modern research says it could lead to liver cancer.

Mangoes (Mangifera indica) were the dominant tree on the center of the island, coconut palms dominated the beaches. Both are from South East Asia, though they look right at home. While we were there the mangos put out their new spring growth, which was a beautiful bronzy plum pink.

Ah, my beloved pineapple (Ananas comosus). There is noting like this bromeliad. It is said to be native to Brazil, but to date there are no wild populations found. It has been cultivated so long and has settled in on Little corn Island so that it seemed quite natural to see them popping out of a clearing in the jungle in glorious technicolor.

Syngonium angustatum grew prolifically on the island, climbing palms, mangoes and anything else it could get a hold of. It grows throughout Central America. The red fruit are eye catching but inedible.

This sweet little fern covered the volcanic rock on the north side of the island. Wherever I travel ferns are the one thing that make me feel at home.

I wonder if these islanders realized that they painted their house the color of the Senna alata buds. Or did the color just seep subliminally into their design scheme?

Where the palms hadn't gotten a foothold, bay cedar (Suriana maritima) grew in thickets on the beach. For a tough little shrub that takes salt spray, harsh winds and high light it has a rather fine and delicate appearance.

Yuca (Manihot esculenta) is a starchy staple in the tropics. It only makes it to northern tables after being processed into tapioca. The beautiful growth habit and red petioles are not to be ignored either.

After leaving Little Corn Island we spent a few days in western Nicaragua in the city of Granada which gave us the opportunity to vist the the cloud forests of Volcan Mombacho. Begonias tumbled out of every rock, climbed every trunk and bloomed with abandon. Every year back home I kill a few. I still don't get begonias, though I love them.

The starry fruit of Clusea sp. in Michael's big hand.

It was unfortunately not orchid season. Still we did see a few. And a lot of Epidendrum radicans. It covered a large open meadow high up on the volcano. It was so windy that day I asked our guide Eddie to hold it still while I took the picture.

Though ferns usually make me feel at home the unearthly size of these young tree ferns lets me know I am far from home. Eddie and Michael look on.

The cloud forest if a matrix of varying textures. The large oak like leaves are tobaco de monte(Telanthophora grandiflora), not a tobacco relative at all but a miniature sunflower.

The leaves of Capriote (Miconia laevigata).

Back in Granada there was no lack of plants though most were sequestered in inner court yards. Here the shadow of a royal palm (Roystonea regia), a native of Cuba, commonly found ass street trees.

The inner court yards of the beautifulMi Museo, Granada's archelogical museum, were beautifully planted and a tranquil cool place to escape the city in the afternoon.

The inner court yard and open air restaurant of La Islita, where we stayed. How nice to here the screech of parrots and cacophony of grackles during breakfast.

Just behind our hotel the tourist zone ended. This over grown orchard, I'm not sure what kind of fruit trees these were though next door they grew cashews, was a great spot for bird watching in the early morning.

The symmetrical use of royal palms in the inner courtyard of Convento y Museo San Francisco amplified the contemplative beauty of the place and induced a sense of grandeur though the space was quite small. A tip to all gardeners:keep it simple.

And to all travelers: visit Nicaragua.

Apologies

2011-04-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

Years ago a chef friend of mine said you should never apologize for a meal your serving. “ It’s the worst seasoning,” she said. I’m sure I had just apologized for a meal I felt was over-salted, overcooked or just plain tasteless. My wise-chef-friend ate it anyway, relished it if I remember correctly; she had a great appetite. And the subject never came up again.
Until now. I wanted to start this post with an apology. My internal editor, consistently on, said “ wait a minute...” So I must pad my apologies with a few excuses for not having written more about Nicaragua. The country I was so fascinated by after visiting it in early March for the first time, that I ran to the library after returning, actually several libraries and the internet, to read all I could about the natural and human history of the country.
It’s flora and fauna is amazingly diverse. It’s history complicated by evil dictators, revolutions, counter-revolutions, earthquakes, embargoes and hurricanes. And hope. I found Nicaragua a happy place. Not just because I was happy to be in the sun and warmth in early March, when spirits in the Pacific Northwest were being doused with chilling rains. There was a simple everyday happiness there, maybe in comes from living where it’s sunny and warm all the time. Maybe it comes form having devastating earthquakes and evil dictators and revolutions behind . Suddenly ordinary everyday living is like a celebration. I’m not saying there weren’t complainers, we’re everywhere. We probably were kicked out of the garden of Eden for complaining about the taste of the forbidden fruit, not for picking it.
I had intended to write a series of posts on Nicaragua. And all I have are a bunch of excuses: there was a flood; there was a debilitating head cold; there were daffodils , making me forget about coconut palms, bananas and hibiscus. Shouldn’t I be writing about daffodils? You will be able to find plenty of blog posts on daffodils this time of year. It’s spring, they’re triumphant and nothing makes people crow louder than triumph.
Now that I am finally and firmly past the beginning of the post I can start apologizing. Firstly, I’d like to apologize to my readers who have been waiting since I promised “pretty pictures” of our trip way back on February 20th, nearly 2 months ago. I took over 1200 pictures on the trip. Mostly snap shots, though some could actually be called photographs. Thank God, for the digital camera; remember all those rolls of film?
As you know I love to take pictures of plants. “Plants, plants, plants!” my friends scream when I show then pictures from a trip. So I tried to be bold this time and include buildings. All the following pictures were taken on Little Corn Island. Though “in” Nicaragua, this tiny island is, geographically speaking, more part of the West Indies.

I am especially fond of these last 2 buildings. They look like something I could build. I also have a rustic hut fantasy. “ Ah, the simple life.” I must admit the barefoot inhabitants of these 2 building looked totally relaxed and happy. They were not rushing anywhere, or fussing. Maybe I misread them, but abject poverty looked very tempting when I thought of all my commitments and work back home.
It made me wonder what on earth our government was doing in the 80’s, and actually well before. Thwarting these peoples hopes of living in a more just society, in being able to own the land they worked, to have health care and education, doesn’t seem very democratic to me. It seemed like a huge cruelty and filled me with a million apologies every where I went. Luckily the Nicaraguans are governing themselves, not that I didn’t here complaining (what is democracy without complaining), but they're getting on. The many members of cooperatives that served us, from the cab drivers to the nature guides, to reforestation projects, all seemed very happy. And that made for a happy trip for us.
Oh. one last apology. I still haven’t posted any pictures of all the cool plants and gardens I saw. That will be coming next... And then on to daffodils.

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

2011-03-22T21:35:00.000-07:00

If you read my last blog you know how fond i've become of coconut palms, so when I saw this palm root wound up in a plastic bottled I had to laugh. But it was an ironic half sad laugh. There was plastic everywhere on the beaches of Little Corn Island. This island we ran off to to escape the world, had the world washing up on it's door step everyday.

I only then found out that Caribbean cruise lines can dump their garbage in the open ocean. And anything that floats is a gift to the beaches so popular with tourists, like us.

And that there is also a plastic island, by some estimates the size of the U.S., another amusingly sad irony, that floats in the Pacific Ocean.

I have a collagist eye for garbage. I used to collect it excessively when I had a studio. I see stories in lost things. Like this forlorn ball.

Little Corn Island is a poor island; they don't have recycle bins, or even garbage men or a dump. From the smell of it on somedays I imagine all they can do with non-organic garbage is burn it. And with the thousands of tourists generating garbage on the island over the years you can see the mounting problem. Where we stayed the water was fine to drink we never had to buy a plastic bottle of anything. Okay, we had a coke once. I was flummoxed as I searched for a recycle bin. It was another sad irony to a North Westerner who is so habituated to recycling everything that I couldn't even find a garbage can. Some one on the island who calls her business Little Corn Island Trashures has found one way to mine the beaches tide lines for profit but sorely it did little to slow the daily onslaught of plastic.

Some islanders are very concerned about the build up of garbage spoiling their home and livelihood. Some beaches especially in front of the busier encampments are cleaned of trash. Unfortunately that leaves the large wild beaches covered with plastic along with the more natural debris, which I guess is the nature of a beach anyway. I have been grateful since my return for the urban industrial complex that sucks up all the plastic I buy and reuses it. Still I'm really thinking about plastic since I came back. How much I buy and reuse and recycle, and throw away.

I hope you will, too.

COCONUTS

2011-03-19T10:44:00.001-07:00

As a writer I am always looking for something to write about. Something unique, extraordinary, important. I often overlook the obvious and ubiquitous.

When Michael and I arrived on Little Corn Island on the Caribbean side of Nicaragua, we were not the only travelers there. There were Canadians and Italians, one French woman and some permanent residents from Holland and Sweden. Oh, and coconuts. Though nearly every tropical beach worldwide seems to be graced with coconuts (Cocos nucifera), they are relative new comers to the shores of the New World. They were brought here by the Spanish and Portuguese from the South Pacific where they had been cultivated and spread for over 3000 years from their original, if only speculative, home of Malaysia.

Now I am not much of a beach bum. I burn too easily for one thing and I’m way to curious for another. So as soon as we settled into our little cabana at Farm Peace & Love I headed into the jungle clad interior of this tiny island to see what I could find. The canopy was primarily mango trees (Mangifera indica) native to India, breadfruit (Atrocarpus altilis) another South East Asian native and Indian almond (Terminalia catapa) I was beginning to wonder what might be native here. Even the under-story thick with bananas (Musa acuminata), cannas (Canna edulis) and pineapples (Ananas comosus) was manmade. This unruly jungle as it turned out was a great big garden. An Eden even.
When we disembarked I heard someone say, “ Welcome to paradise”. He most certainly was standing under a coconut palm. They were everywhere at the single dock that served as the port to the island. There were coconuts everywhere. Their propensity for sandy soils, their shallow roots like lots of air, has made them the iconic beach plant. Iconic to the point of being trite. No desert island cartoon is without it’s coconut palm. No sunset postcard from Hawaii with out a palm’s silhouette.
Since we were only 5 days into our two week stay on this very small island, only 1.1 square miles, and I was getting lazier by the hour, I cut my hikes into the jungle down. And began to stare at the palms. It was easier from my towel in the sand, or the hammock on the porch of our cabana. I realized how much I took then for granted, almost hated them for there idle presence. Though they rattled in the wind with gusto on some days, they had a benign sort of easiness to them that was what we came here for. A rest.

A few mornings later, I had to contemplate my intent in the spa like heat and humidity for a few days, I thought I’d give the coconut palms a closer look. I got out my point-and-shoot camera and avoiding the leaning palm tree icon for high light beach shots, fiddled with the manual settings and moved in on the palms. They were lichen splattered, twisted, decaying and emerging. What I saw first as a pole with a mop on top had an elegant architecture and a vitality. They can be crowned with over 30 leaves and in the process they drop one leave a month and create a new one, with leaves that can reach up to 6 meters this is no lazy plant.

Though my little camera helped me look closely at the mighty coconut palm, it became like taking a picture of my freckled sunburnt knee and saying it was a self portrait. So the next day I pulled out my sketch book and pencils. There is something about drawing from life that really gets you to see. I wanted to see the palms.
Getting a rough cartoon of a palm was trouble enough, my skills as a draftsman are sorely rusty. But my eye is still strong and I absorbed information like a sponge. It was hard to capture the disheveled architecture of the palms. The raggedy motility. The crisscrossed shagginess was exuberant, joyous as each palm lifted it’s giant pre-shred leaves as a sacrifice to the wind in order to capture the sun.
Now I know I should have been spacing out looking at the aqua waters, napping, lolling in the warm waves, but I couldn’t help but get more and more fascinated with the palms. To think I had over looked them as trite icons of the tropical vacation just a week earlier and now they were becoming dynamic living beings.
In many cultures they are called the tree of life. They have become integral to coastal tropical life. From thatching to glycerine for explosives they are in all ways useful. And delicious, we ate cocos bread every morning baked by our hosts and drank coconut water right from the shell, prying and nibbling the tender white flesh as we half-snoozed under the palms, the grit of sand between our toes, in our ears and in our mouths . I was getting to see why this tree was so icon of the pleasures of tropical life, tropical vacation. And beginning to enjoy it.

The name 'coco' comes from the Spanish meaning “goblin”. Certainly their little 3 eyed faces remind one of monkeys or even more mischievous beings. Michael always sited us just out of reach of the falling nuts; they can be lethal. One night when they fell during a storm it was like being bombed. The leaves crashed thunderously too. As a gardener I speculated on the size of rake one might need to clean up the mess, of the slow, even in the heat and humidity, decomposition of the leaves and husks. The downed leaves became barricades around homes. The nuts germinate everywhere. Coconuts are easy to grow from seed, thought they need a lot of room until they can be “limbed-up”. They also produce their first crop of nuts only 4 years after germination. Not at all an indication of laziness.

Now that I am home writing this at our kitchen table looking out at the cherry orchard with it’s buds just beginning to swell, the orchards of coconut palms seem like a dream. The heat, too, a dream. Had we actually gone? I turned one of my palm photos into a screen saver. It’s iconic of the well being I felt resting on a tropical beach. I’m setting a goal by looking at it every day and imagining returning to a coconut lined beach next year.

At least in my dreams.

SLOWNESS (an open letter to Patricia Hampl)

2011-02-20T16:06:00.000-08:00

“Maybe the world isn’t at it’s heart so modern as we tend to think. As we walked, it kept reverting to an ancient, abiding self.”

You wrote those words while walking the hills of Umbria, actually, I imagine, you wrote words very similar but not exactly those words. Those words as they stand, as I quote them, didn’t take form until you returned to St. Paul and began working on your book Virgin Time.
I read those words on the train to Portland on Friday. I was only half an hour into my trip, when they stopped my reading. Made me reread, made me write them down in my notebook. I thought of the slowness of walking even as I raced passed the ancient, abiding world. I longed for the slowness of walking. Since I have moved to the country I find myself more often behind the windshield than with the ancient and abiding wind in may face. Even that day, when I opted to take the train, to get out from behind the windshield, and because “You don’t really need a car in Portland”, I was still separated from the world by glass and high speeds.
I tried to set aside my longing and enjoy the rock of the train and the world it passed through of beginnings and ends. Refineries, graineries and warehouses full of goods form the east ready to enter the world of trade, and the refuse of the world of trade piling up in junk yards, being dumped like homeless sofas under bridges, acting as homes. I have always had a melancholic taste for the decay of industry. Trees sprouting out of abandoned factories are like flags of a passive victory to me. I cannot let go of my nostalgia for things as they were, romanticized as they are. Or stop wishing for a ripping away of the modern world to expose the ancient, abiding self everywhere.
And yet there I was speeding to a panel discussion on garden blogging. Now nothing, at least in my estimation, is farther apart than gardening and blogging. And yet I am a gardener and a blogger, a garden-blogger. Can’t I just say a garden writer? Does the format really matter? That is why I was rushing to Portland to the panel discussion by garden-bloggers. I was looking for meaning not advice. If your sweep through the numerous garden bogs out there you’ll see there are plenty. More than enough. Maybe too many. Is that what modernity is about? Is that why modern design focuses so heavily on simplicity? Here I could blabber on. Question, question, question. Question my motives as well as the motives of modernity. But the train pulled into the station, and I would soon be on foot.
We arrived about noon and I was certainly ready for lunch having risen at 5:30 and eaten a hasty piece of toast and cup of tea in the car on the way to the station. I made a deal with myself to stop at the first Asian restaurant that I passed. I soon found myself at a fretful urban pace trying to escape the rain and find food at the same time. The traffic was noisy kicking up showers off the wet pavement. A compressor was blowing off steam and everyone was dodging in and out in a chaotic lunchtime rush to food or back to the office. And this was only Portland. Sleepy, lovely Portland. I noticed I was glad people were working at the same time I noticed I was gravitating to Koji Osakaya, “my favorite” Japanese restaurant in Portland. Actually the only Japanese restaurant I ever eaten in in Portland. I stumbled in to it on a very similar rainy day years ago and the confident and homely food offered succor. On Friday I wanted succor more than adventure. “ I could have easily stayed home,” I told myself until the warm miso soup, the oily grilled mackeral, white rice and uneventful salad began to go down. I settled a little even at the uncomfortable heights of the stool at the bar. I let dystopic thoughts of a Bladerunner-esque future, a very near and very modern future, dribble through me.
Then I caught the wings of the tea and flew off to the Portland Art Museum. There are some Japanese textiles donated by the Seattle-based garden designer Terry Welch on display along with many painted scrolls he collected. The young woman at the ticket counter acted rather disinterested in this rain soaked disheveled man until I asked her about her tattoo. Right at the neckline like a piece of fine jewelry and deliberately exposed by her low cut blouse were the words: veri veniversum vivus vici. They were scrawled in an elegant gothic script and no one could miss them nor the importance she applied to these words. I silently tried to piece together a meaning from the botanical Latin I had learned years ago. Since the train ride I realized that this trip to Portland was becoming more about a search for meaning than advice. I’m sure many people stared silently at her exposed tattoo. And I’m sure she silently took pleasure in it. People had come to the museum to look, why should they wait until they’re in the galleries. I gave up and decided to ask her, “What does your tattoo say?”
“What do you think it says,” she flirtatiously asked back. She was a beautiful woman and I’m sure she was hit on numerous times. I wasn’t hitting on her; I was looking for meaning. I needed to ask.
“Something about coming to truth...” I trailed off all the words began to look the same.
“That’s the closest anyone has ever gotten,” she was proud of me, I passed, or a least didn’t fail, her test. “ It says, ‘By the power of truth, I while living have conquered the universe.’” I scanned the words again, the curvy blue ink across her white skin.”Really?” I thought.
“It’s from Faust.” she added glibly.
I wondered if she read Faust, or just looked up Latin quotes on line when looking for a slogan. I wondered if she knew what truth was. Or if she really wanted to conquer the universe. It was a beautiful tattoo on a beautiful throat and gave me something to chew on. But like gum I chewed and chewed until my jaw was numb and my search for truth empty. I relied on the beauty of the Japanese scrolls selected and collected by Terry Welch to buoy my spirits. You could see the power of his designer’s eye in his choices. And his love of gardens, the sweep of trees, the balance of asymmetry.
That’s when they entered, hundreds of 8th graders, their squeeky-sneaker-soles breaking the silence. I tried to escape them in more remote galleries, yet they were everywhere. They giggled in front of every nude sculpture and painting in the museum. That’s when I decided to leave for the Portland Japanese Garden. I knew on a day like that day, rain-sodden, cold, most people wouldn’t be thinking garden. My trip to Portland, which began as a search for advice, then a search for meaning, morphed as it riffed off a tattoo to a search for truth, suddenly craved silence.
I mass-transited as close as I could to Washington Park then walk the rest of the way through the pouring rain up the steep muddy lawns to the Japanese garden. I passed through the bald rose gardens. Last time I was there was in the summer with Michael, the roses in full bloom, wedding parties taking photos, hundreds of people and millions of flowers. Now every rose was pruned to stubs that seemed prisoners to the symmetry that in summer seemed graceful with logic.
I kept moving quickly. There was no need to stop here. The rain was getting harder and colder and I imagined a tea shop in the Japanese garden. A place to sit and warm up.
I was wrong.
Yet when I entered the gates to “the best Japanese garden outside of Japan” something relaxed and awaked in me at the same time. I didn’t need the vivifying effects of tea, I suddenly didn’t crave warmth either. The austerity of being chilled seemed totally appropriate here. I had stepped outside the modern world and into the ancient, abiding one. The garden is barely 50 years old but has the feeling of centuries. Suddenly all the splatter of urbanity on a rainy day was replaced by the crunch of gravel under my boots each step noted in some eternal notebook.
The moss swathed garden is contrived to say the least, over worked, and yet primeval. As I wandered I realized why Japanese poets wrote about the raindrops, They articulated everything from the branches of bare trees to pine needles and even the puddles of the gravel path. I swam in this quiet to extend the water metaphor and to help forget about my aching wet feet. When I arrived in karesansui niwa, the minimalist sand and stone garden, a woman there sneering at her husband said to me, “I wanted to walk across it, but the wouldn’t let me.”
I know she was looking for sympathy but I couldn’t help but support him, “I’m glad he didn’t”. As they wandered away, I wondered what “those sort of people” were doing here on a day like this, obviously reserved for me and the one photographer set up to catch raindrops falling from maple twigs. I finally succumbed to the wet and hunkered down into a machiai, a waiting station in the tea garden. I wasn’t feeling well, hadn’t been feeling well. “I could’ve just as easily stayed at home.” I only sat briefly before a father and son came up the path, the son stomping the puddles to see how big of a splash he could make, the father neither admonishing nor noticing. I envied his youthful vigor, which his father seemed plagued by, I needed it just then for the walk back to the city, . As he slipped under the bamboo shelter with me I said, “Beautiful day”, ironically.
“Yea,” he returned diffusing that irony. I was glad he didn’t want to talk. This was just a bus stop to him, a place out of the rain, that I gave up to him and his son when I realized the time and my need to be at the convention center.
“It was all too quick,” I didn’t want to blame it on myself, my need to fill the day with as many things as possible. It was life’s fault, modernity’s fault. Maybe I could blame it on the internet. Should I blog about that?
I tried to be less rash in my shap-shooting as I left. Stopped, composed, shot. Yet internally time ticked away.
I was back in the parking lot of the rose garden assessing as fast as I was walking, when a tall young man with big blue eyes who just got out of his car. Her greeted me in a lonely voice with an upbeat twist, “Hello.” He would have talked to anyone I supposed so I asked him directions.
“Do you know a short cut back to the city?”
“Are you walking?” he asked incredulously. Had he noticed my muddy shoes? My wet hair? He couldn’t feel my impermeable raincoat soaking through.
“I’m new here; I haven’t done much hiking around here.” I wasn’t looking far a hike just a short cut to the light rail line.
“I have a GPS,” he said with the friendly desperation of the lonely. We ducked under the protection of a nearby kiosk. I wondered why he was up in the rose garden by himself, if he was really so friendly. He slipped the GPS out of his pocket and held it up as proof of knowledge, his magic wand. Now I like magic, even this modern magic, so I stopped to watch him perform his trick. He maneuvered over the icons with his two opposable thumbs, as I wondered how on earth he planned to find a muddy short cut, a foot path out of the park on that thing. John Lennon piped up from my memory: “All the lonely people/where do they all come from?” I flirted with some hopefulness more for his sake than mine, as he fiddled thumb-wise for a minute or two before he said, “I guess I need an address.”
I was antsy to get back to the city, out of the rain and into some warm cafe with both my hands wrapped around a hot ceramic cup, or a paper one if need be. He lingered silently. Was he feeling the pain of defeat? He could have helped someone. That would have felt good. Something flashed through those blue eyes. A big “Not again.” He tried not to show it with a covering smile. He was still warm and dry from his car. I began to envy him his car, his dry jacket, his youth, his sad-sack youth, which once was embedded in me.
I looked out and surveyed the surrounding terrain for a way back down the hill. A way to warmth. The wind kicked the rain under the kiosk making it as useless as the GPS.
“Well, I think I’ll go this way,” I pointed in the direction of the only way I knew out of the park. Maybe it was the quickest way after all.
“I really need to do some more hiking around here,” he told himself out loud.
I didn’t know what to say anymore, “ You really picked a great place to live.” I paused to add both humor and weight, and then continued, “If you can stand the weather.”
“I love the weather,” he said. defiantly. He was already becoming a true North-westerner, knowing that to start complaining about the weather can very well be your undoing. He followed me along for a while like a puppy; I wanted to throw him a frisbee.
As I stepped off in my direction I said “ See you, “ meaning more “ I see you, lonely young man,” than I will see you some time in the future.
“Yea,” he said and our paths parted.
In my rush to the convention center, (I was sure I was late) I never stopped to wrap my hands around a hot cup. The Oregon Convention Center, like convention centers everywhere, offered little comfort, little intimacy, even less than airports. But I ran into people I knew which made it easy to drop the little bit of sad-sack-i-ness I picked up on my way down from the park. I was in, and out of the rain, and snacking on a free buffet provided by the sponsors of this GWA event. Here I was at what I came for, what I paid for and the trip seemed to end. Not in a dead end. But my search for meaning for truth was getting filled with information, with advice. Satisfying enough I let myself believe.
But I couldn’t wait to be back on the train to Seattle and slowly reading Virgin Time for three and a half uninterrupted hours, dear Patricia.
And back to my search for meaning.

P.S. Sorry for this extra long blog. I'm off to Nicaragua with Michael to slow down on an island without cars, computers or telephones, so I won't be posting for nearly a month.
I promise plenty of pretty pictures next time.

WHITE RABBIT

2011-02-10T08:16:00.000-08:00

Last Wednesday I stood in the middle of winter and took a deep sigh. We’ve made it half way. Ground Hog’s Day. He was kind to us this year promising a quick arrival of spring. By East Coast standards spring is already here. Daffodils and crocuses in bloom, flocks of robins on the lawn. I even heard frogs on that one really warm wet day last week.
When I was depositing my checks at the bank on Imbolc, the beautiful ancient holiday that marks the half way point between winter solstice and spring equinox, the teller asked. “ How are you doing today?”
I know she probably meant nothing by it, but in my heart I was celebrating Imbolc. It put a little bounce in my step that had been missing for weeks. A little spring.
“ I’m doing well, there is some sun in the sky today,” I said.
I guess she was expecting a simple flat “Fine.” Something she didn’t need to respond to. She craned her head to look out the window to see if the sun was really out. She was so deep in the recesses of the room she could only see a corner of the sky, a cloudy corner.
“ It seems cold though; is it going to snow?”
“ I don’t think it will snow.”
“ I like snow,” she confessed.
“I like snow, too.”
“ Where are you from?” She asked. It was strange for a teller to become so inquisitive. But I have to admit I was very inquisitive about where she was from, too. Her exotic unclassifiable beauty made me curious, as did her name, a strange hybrid of Hindu, Arabic and Russian with way too many letters so that it stretched the whole length of her name tag.
“ Wisconsin,” I said as if I had just stepped off the boat, I was feeling a need to appear a bit exotic myself.
“ Oh, that’s in the middle of the country,” she was drawing a comparison. “ I come from the middle of Asia. Kyrgyzstan.” Now that sounds much more exotic than the Midwest, but by her estimation it was the same. “It is very cold and snowy in the winter there,” she said with a nostalgia strange for someone I am guessing is only 20 years old. Then she added with languorous delight, “ And hot in the summer.”
I smiled at her delight in these extremes, “ That’s how it is where I come from, too.”
She felt finally she had an ally. “It is always spring here,” her voice slumped as if in defeat, as if trapped in Purgatory.
“It is always spring here,” I had to agree.
We finished our transaction and wished each other a good day and another snow storm, las if we were wishing each other good luck with a lotto ticket.
I doubt we’ll have more snow, though there is a possibility. Just as it is possible to have a sunny 60° week this time of year. We linger in possibilities forever it seems, yet slowly nudging forward. So I always celebrate Imbolc, or Candlemas or St. Brigid’s if you’re Catholic, because it’s a reminder of the gentle nudge forward toward real spring, flower-bloated, pollen-clogged real spring.
Actually I’m glad we still have half of winter to endure. There are some books I still want to read. Not to mention a green house, toppled like a house of cards by flood waters, that needs to be righted. There is still plenty of mulching and pruning to do. And seed orders to make. It’s going to take some time and ambition.
Luckily it is the Chinese Year of the Rabbit which promises ambition along with good taste and financial luck. But rabbits, it’s hard to feel lucky about rabbits. They are already chewing down the tops of all the tulips in one garden I maintain. Actually it doesn’t matter if it is a dragon year or a dog year, the rabbits, hungry for something new, start chewing the tops off the emerging tulips about now every year. What I wouldn’t do for a snow cover to keep them at bay a little longer. Of course that would only make them more voracious. The worst part is I never see them, they sneak in and out during the shadowy dawn. All the natural irritants I apply won’t keep them away. I encourage the neighbors cat to wander the garden, but he seems rather ineffectual.
One of my colleagues dismissed my complaints, “They’re part of the natural order.”
I was irritable that day so all I could respond was, “There is nothing natural about that garden.” In a way it’s true. Gardens are a contrivances. Tulips hail from far off places like Kyrgyzstan. As I walked away from him I wondered if he killed slugs. There is nothing smugger than a “Green” gardener.
Now I like rabbits, bunnies if you will. I was born on Easter, and was my mother’s “ Little Easter Bunny” for many years. I have an affinity for bunnies. I’m a Chinese dog, they’re my natural allies. But when they start messing with my garden...
Of course this is a lot of bravado. Last summer Michael found a nest of bunnies in our vegetable patch. Neither one of us had the heart to kill them to avoid the ensuing carnage, or is that green-age, when they left the nest and lived off our labors. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for us, they all died before ever leaving the nest. Had the mother been nabbed by coyotes or an owl? We actually contemplated saving the last one and nursing it on. I think Michael had braising in mind.
But I don’t think he could have done it. There was some magical adorability about them making it impossible. Rabbits figure in many cultures as magical beings, tricksters, Bugs Bunny is a very ancient archetype so it seems. They bring luck and fecundity. In the far east they are believed to live on the moon. As burrowers they are said to bring messages from the Underworld. As Thumper, Peter or Roger they are memorable characters of our culture.
But that doesn’t stop the damage they’re doing to my tulips. And reclassifying them so that they’re no longer rodents but lagomorphs, doesn’t make them any less a pest. I’m trying to be expansive. To share the garden with the rabbits. I plant more salvias and alliums as deterrents around things they love like asters and hebes. Who would think they’d eat hebes?
But still I can’t help but let a “damn rabbits” out of my mouth at least once a week. But I’m not alone.
“Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall.”

THE MOUNTAIN TOP

2011-01-30T18:38:00.000-08:00

In January, as all the hope and sparkle of Christmas is stripped away, when we are left finally with what we’ve been avoiding: Winter, is when they begin to appear. Tropical Beaches. They appear on billboards and in magazines, on the sides of buses. Palm trees, blue waters and sunshine, everything we feel we are lacking.
So when I arrived in Milwaukee at the beginning of the coldest month of the whole winter, my sister was laughing, “ Why did you come to Wisconsin in January?”
I fished through my thoughts: “Cheap airfares?”; “ Work was slow, it was a good time to get away?”.
Actually I wanted to visit my parents at a time of year when they rarely get visitors. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, or the U.P. as it is fondly known, isn’t much of a draw unless you like ice fishing or snowmobiling, neither of which were in my plans.
I love winter, real wintery winter, it must be encoded in my nordic genes. I had no problem whatsoever with the cold. It sure beat the soggy flooded cloudy valley back home. Breathing the dry cold air, like mountain top air, was so exhilarating, my post-flood blues fell off me in one big lump, like the ice that fell off the chassises of semis on the freeway as I drove further north and away from the tempering of Lake Michigan.
When I arrived at my parents farm outside Iron River the temperature was already 10 below zero. The snow was squeaky, dry and kick-able as sand. I ran from the car to the door, the house was, thankfully, as warm as an oven. A tropical island with bananas and oranges in a bowl.
By Saturday night the temperature had dropped to 28 below, that’s without a wind chill factor. I don’t even think it’s that cold on the top of Mount Rainier. I couldn’t resist going out before bed to see the stars. I slipped on some shoes and a jacket, I wanted to feel the cold. Become one with it.
It had been years since I had seen the stars glisten so. With no major cities near by and acres of national forest land surrounding my parents’ farm it is a very dark place at night. Stars are always particularly bright there. With the cold temperatures stripping every bit of moisture out of the air, icicles formed on my beard and mustache in the mere moments I was outside, the stars shined. Never have I felt so among them, felt the coldness of outer space so cuddlingly close. As the skin of my cheeks tightened and burned like some astringent spa treatment, I realized I would not survive long, even if I was filled with my mother rich stew and had a least three layers of underclothes between me and eternity. One needed a space suit for this kind of weather or a few shots of strong whiskey downed in foolishness. I could feel the cold air constricting in my throat as I breathed.Since the whisky was back in the house, I left the charms of the starry night sky behind for faux tropical comfort.

The next morning at breakfast we watched the clusters of chickadees, nuthatches (2 types), gold finches, actually drab finches in dull winter plumage, and red squirrels unfazed by the frigid temperatures, gorging on sunflower and millet seeds. My father in his new child-like wisdom wondered, “ Are those trees going to make it?” We looked out at their 100 year old apple orchard. I had to admit all the trees looked dead, not just sleeping. There is no “zonal denial” here. Zone 2 is zone 2. It took my mother years to find a forsythia cultivar that could survive the winter and there is only one rose in her garden, just a scraggly pink rugosa dwarfed by the climate. But my how here peonies and lupines thrive.
“ You’ll have to wait until May, “ I told my father, “ to see if they start to grow again.”

Later when it was sufficiently warmer, it was only 9 below, my mother and I went out for a snowshoeing around the 40. The biting cold was tempered by the lack of wind, yet we only lasted half an hour. And were back on the sofa reading and eating pretzels.
When I left a few days later the temperatures were decidedly over zero. The thermometer in my rental car read 13 degrees as I pulled out of their drive. I wondered how my parents had lived through over 30 winters there. Certainly they have a good furnace, and a knack for avoiding boredom I can’t fathom. Yet I envied them there life in such a pure and beautiful place, as if they lived on a mountain top like a Nepalese lamas. By the time I reached Milwaukee only 212 miles south and tempered by being on the shores of Lake Michigan it was in the 20’s. It felt balmy.

But it was still winter. Even that great hulking lake was icing up.

And even though I ran into the Milwaukee Art Museum to enjoy the colorful collection of folk art, I couldn’t stop my fixation with the white world of winter and sat on a bench in front of this sculpture ‘Edge of England’ by British artist Cornelia Parker made of chunks of the white cliffs of Dover suspended like a moment of memory. Snowy memory.
That’s all it is now, back in the snug green valley of the Pacific Northwest where the witch hazels and snow drops and the early daffodils bloom.
When I talked to my mother today she said contentedly, “ It warmed up; it got up to 15.”
I grumbled back about the gray and the damp.

HYDRAULIC JUMP

2011-01-18T21:26:00.000-08:00

A flock of trumpeter swans flew honkingly over the house as I took this picture of the swamp's slow encroachment.

Later that day the river broke it's banks. Flowing over fields and roads, it quickly filled the valley.

The next morning a flock of trumpeter swans flew over the house, afloat in a murky rushing lake.

WHITE WASHED

2011-01-09T11:14:00.001-08:00

We were back to those day that the weather man on KIXI ironically called “those lovely days when the high and the low are only one degree apart”. The temperance of the Pacific Northwest is what drew me and a million other gardeners here. Still every year my mother asks me as she sits in her living room looking out the window at feet of U.P. snow, “How can you keep busy this time of year?” She is a Midwesterner of German decent and keeping busy is of the utmost importance. I actually totally enjoyed the week between the holidays when just a dusting of snow validated my laziness. I actually lied on the sofa for days and read. And if that isn’t lazy enough for you, I took naps. Not one or two , but many naps. Long winter naps.
After a while the somnolent days wore thin. I wanted to get busy. There is nothing like the rush of productivity. I am a real American in those matters. Fortunately just as the the holidays ended our “ warm” winter weather returned and melted the white wash of snow. Most of the year snow is evasive here, at high elevations, or a brief traffic-fucking burst in the lowlands. I love the way it gently changes the world, washes it clean in a sense.
This past week as the snow vanished the flood debris, the rotting cabbage and the muddy paths returned to the farm. They were always there, just hidden. And now here it comes again as I write, snow. It’s starting to stick. And there is more on the way. I love the unified world covered in a blanket of white. I love even more all the garden projects around here put on hold, I know in a few months it will nearly be impossible to get me into the house until dark, so I’m savoring this mini-vacation. Skimming through my photo files for white flowers. But what I found a lot of was white variegation.
Being a “color-guy”, I thought I’d find more yellow variegated plants than white in my files. But it wasn’t the case. I use plenty of white variegation in the gardens I create. Especially as a foil for dark flowers. Here are a few of my favorites:

I love variegated hosta, this unidentified one in my friend Jon's garden isluminous in his dark front yard
.

Royal catchfly ( Silene regia) screams in front of variegated figwort ( Schrophularia aquatica 'Variegata')

Menzies' Burnet (Sanguisorba menziesii) a northwest native looks exotic in this border of variegated plants including variegated pamapas ( Cortaderia selloana 'Silver Comet'), Miscanthus 'Cosmopolitan' and variegated yellow twig dogwood (Cornus sericea 'Silver and Gold')

Variegated Money Plant ( Lunaria annua ' Variegata Alba') makes a dramatic statement in the spring garden, here paired with Marsh Marigol (Caltha palustris).

Lamium 'White Nancy' in a classy combination in Jon's garden.

Forsythia 'Kumson' has foliage like a tropical house plant.

Japanese knotweed is nothing I recommend planting, it covers acres herein the Snoqualmie Valley, Bu the variegated form (Fallopia japonica 'Variegata') is well behaved and beautiful in all stages of growth. Here it is still showing the pinkish caste of the young growth.

One of my favoite hostas 'Mount Tom'.

Variegated Pennywort (Hydrocotyle sibthorpioides 'Crystal Confetti') is a manageable thug that makes a bright ground cover under dark foliaged shrubs like Weigelia 'Dark Horse'.

WHITE CHRISTMAS

2011-01-02T11:22:00.000-08:00

Beyond it’s banner of complimentary red and green, behind the glitter of silver and gold, Christmas is the white holiday. Blame it on the snow or Irving Berlin but Christmas even trumps New Year’s Eve with Old Man Time, white-bearded and white robed, and the New Year Baby, freshly diapered. I was once very caught up in Christmas decorating, when I worked in retail and then for a florist. And I still hold an interest though I am less likely to expend yards of energy on decorating like in the past. But I do love to visit the city and see what all the retailers are doing.
It was a decidedly white Christmas in Seattle. No it didn’t snow. But every window in town seems to have been hit by a blizzard. Windows were frothy, frosty and spare. Even on the home front, my friend Jon, the consummate tree decorator, purchased his first flocked tree, and Michael’s mother abandoned all sentimentality and bought a new fake tree and covered it with doves, snowflakes and pearls.

I like a white Christmas of the snowy kind. And we did hit a patch in the Blue Mountains on our drive back from Boise, that threw us into the median barrier. And then a day later it hit us here in the valley. Not a blizzard, but not a dusting either. With the frigid temperatures that followed a furry pelt of hoarfrost crystallized over limb, blade and board.
Just the kind of holiday days for a fire in the stove and a book on the sofa.
I’m reading The Hare with the Amber Eyes by ceramist Edmund de Waal, who works in porcelain making rarified collections of white cylinders. And, being a white lover I assume, had to include the detail that his distant Uncle had 20 gardeners on his winter estate in southern France, and they all wore white. Maybe he was missing the winter snows of Vienna like I miss the winter snows of Wisconsin during our long green and gray winters here in the Northwest. Or maybe it was a way to keep an eye on them. I like to dress in grays and browns when I work. To hide in the garden, so that it seems like the garden is gardening itself.

Yet even now as I write looking out on the snowy white landscape, I am beginning to wish for a thaw.
The holidays are over and I have to get back to work.

WHITE SLAVERY

2010-12-24T19:44:00.000-08:00

Not so long ago, when I was beginning my career as an estate gardener here in the Northwest. I got a job working in a white garden. Every rose, phlox, dogwood, pieris, wisteria and daffodil was white. This was during a time when I hated white. Who knows why?
In retrospect I wish I had been more appreciative. The garden was designed by a locally prominent landscape architect, and was really quite lovely. But when you’re the guy whose pulling shot weed (Cardamine hirsuta)—a white flowered plant by the way—all day and beating back gooseneck loosestrife (Lysimachia clethroides) you start craving a little color in your day. I blamed the limited color palette, and the formalist design for my boredom. I was still a young anxious gardener and had not learned to calm my mind for 8 hours of weeding.
But the whole time I was learning something, subliminally.
Now landscape architects are not known for there smart use of plants. And the guy who design that garden was no different. This lovely formalist garden was carved into a bit of Northwest woods and the plants he chose were all wrong. In the shady enclosed garden rooms the phlox suffered terribly from powdery mildew, but instead of reveling in the whiteness of it, like a baker’s dusty apron, my client required me to pick each infected leaf of the plant. Some years there were only flowers left on 3 foot stalks. The ‘Iceberg’ roses, if they had any leaves left on them after plucking all the black spot off, eventually succumbed to the mildew, too. I tried to talk to my client about changing these plants out for something more appropriate, but she paid a lot of money for that garden and wanted it to be as planned. Now, I’ve been called stubborn more than once—luckily mostly by people who love me—but the rigidity of my client made this work feel like slavery. Of course it wasn’t. I was getting paid and for 3 years I religiously picked mildewed leaves, deadheaded browning flowers on the ‘Nuccio’s Gem’ camellias and beat back gooseneck loosestrife. But I also met some of my favorite plants for the first time: Narcissus ‘Thalia’, Cardamine trifolia—a close relative of shot weed— and Sarcococca hookeriana var. humilis.
Maybe it’s surrender, like the white flag. Maybe it’s maturity. Or a slowly acquired sophistication. Over the years since I worked in that all white garden I have added, one after another, white flowered plants to my palette. Some of them I absolutely love, can’t be without. Since it’s that time of year for singing, or writing, about favorite things, like “silver white winters that melt into spring”, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite white flowered plants.

Crocus ‘Jeanne d. Arc’

Lily of the Valley
(Convallaria majalis)

Regal Lily
(Lilium regale)

White Clary Sage
(Salvia sclarea var. turkestanica ‘Alba’)

Flowering Cherry
Prunus serrulata ‘Mt. Fuji’

English Daisy
(Bellis perennis)

Zinnia ‘Polar Bear’

Laceflower
(Ammi Majus)

Echinacea purpurea ‘White Swan’

WHITE WATER

2010-12-19T17:36:00.001-08:00

Last week it flooded in the valley.
A rather benign flood compared to the monster that hit us in January of 2009. This flood would have made most people nervous, but I was strangely comfortable with it. We were ready, everything was out of harm’s way. We blockaded the basement with boards, plastic and sandbags. With a naked Christmas tree in the house and plenty of food, we had dug the last of the potatoes, carrots and beets the week before, we were ready to be trapped for a day or two.
Knowing that everything was in order, it was easy to go into the deep sense of awe that a flood inspires, to be comfortable with 3 feet of water rushing across our property, to be thrown back in geologic time to when this valley was a Lake. And to be reminded how temporal everything is from the flood itself rushing by in a few days to the giant lake that took millennia to drain.
Michael and I had a chance to try out our new canoe. We paddled back to the unnamed lake hidden in the brushy marsh behind our house. It is nearly impossible to reach during the dry season, being so densely overgrown with salmon berry, willow and spiraea. With the high water we slid across the tops of it all, snagging only occasionally. The sun came out as it always does during a flood, after the horrific rains have passed. We skidded across big white clouds reflected in the murky water. We bushwhacked afloat down to the beaver pond and we flew out to the road, then paddled our way home and on to the half submerged drive. We agreed the canoe was a smart purchase, a good fit, right comfortable.
But one thing will never be comfortable: the quality of the water. The gray sludgy swill belches diesel fumes and septic farts as it passes. It is not pretty water. It is downright gruesome. If you fell in you’d be grateful for the hypothermia that took your life quickly. The infections one could get from this opaque soup! Horrifying!

I like water when it’s brisk and sassy. Jumping down a mountain, slapping rocks; spitting, shouting and singing like a bunch of reckless teenagers. It’s ebullience charms. It’s power crowned with snow white froth, like flocking happy gulls. I could go on metaphorically for pages. It’s so alive and enlivening.
They say water kicked up like this creates an abundance of positive ions in the surrounding atmosphere. When we inhale them they produce biochemical reactions that increase the level of the mood chemical serotonin, which helps alleviate depression, relieves stress and boosts day time energy. It is a tonic I take as often as possible, living on the western edge of the Cascade Mountain Range. It’s better than any supplement and just about as good as sunshine, which is scarce right now.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to the rhythmic spanking the Pacific gives the western edge of the continent. Nothing compares to the sea foam, salt spray, the briny fishy stink of the beach. And the seemingly limitless expanse of water before you.
This is where those damned flood waters head, out to sea.
Leaving us to slosh through the muck and mire here in the valley, not a positive ion in sight.

THE WHITE HOUSE

2010-12-05T11:43:00.000-08:00

I live in a white house. Well, actually I live in a piebald house. Michael and I want to change the color. The splotchy evidence covers the north side like a crazy quilt. Our inability to decide, or was it to agree, on a color lead right into the rainy season. Too late to paint now.
I grew up in a white house, that never changed color. That post-war Cape-Cod-esque house was sided with aluminum. “We never need to paint,” was my mother’s victory cry when she bought the house. Of course years later my step-father went after it with a hose and a brush. Not to change it but to keep it white.
White happens to be the most popular paint color in America, both for interiors and exteriors. Most paint companies have a wider range of whites than any other color. There are even paint companies that produce only white paints. So there are alot of white houses out there.White houses are by far not my favorite. I seems ironic, or at least odd, that I keep landing in white houses. Of course the odds are good.
Back when I was living in that white house on 65th Street in Milwaukee, I took a trip with a school group to our nation’s capital. Washington, D.C., as you know is the home of the most famous white house, the White House. It is also home to innumerable other white buildings. Mostly neoclassical behemoths paying tribute to the birth place of Democracy, Greece. As a 13 year old I had no ideas about politics, history or government. These bone white structures left me cold. I was more interested in the dinosaur bones in the Smithsonian.
Twenty years later I travelled to Greece. I was much more taken with the Byzantine churches and monasteries than the tumbled down Classical World. When I found out that the Acropolis was closed due to strikes, it didn’t mar my visit to Athens at all. I even went to the movies, an American movie, when I was there. Yet each day when I left my hotel I could see the Acropolis between some high rise apartments. Its looming appearance from all over town became enough. Enough all ready. Every where little replicas of the Parthenon for sale, metal, marble and resin replicas. Finally, on my last day in town, when I was in the Agora sampling yet another feta (a very white cheese, I might add) I heard some tourists talking. The acropolis was open. Only for 4 hours that afternoon. No explanation. I was spending way to long in Athens according to the guide books. I was trying not to be a tourist. Sitting in little neighborhood parks just day dreaming. But suddenly I wanted to get caught up in the fury. I ran to the bus, that took me to the base of the hill on which this Unesco World Heritage site stood. I had been being teased and acting disinterested ever since I arrived in Athens. Now that access was granted I was running.
It was late October, I don’t know if the benign weather, the late day sun or the lack of tourists were all that were at play, but the Acropolis was luminous.
I was floored.
It was not only monumental but sublime. All the architecture that had echoed off of it over the millennia seemed a sham. I imagined how celestial this place must have seemed with the wise and newly democratic Greeks wandering about in their seamless white draperies. But wait, that brilliant marble was painted. Garishly so. One scientist even speculates the Parthenon was painted red, white and blue. But at the time none of that knowledge marred the few hours I got to spend in total white rapture.
I was not so lucky when I travelled to India twenty years after that. The day I was going to catch the train to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, that other monument to white architecture, I came down with a severe case of amoebic dysentery. I barely left my room , let alone the compound of the dargah of Hazrat Inayat Khan.

The only white building I would see for that week was this small mosque outside my door. Not the most splendid mosque in the Nizamuddin ghetto of New Delhi it may seem strange the impact it had on me. But it became my clock and calendar, even a barometer, as it’s white dome changed color from sunrise to sunset, carried the shadows of clouds or was plunged into darkness when the electricity was shut off in the neighborhood each night. It became the moon in the night, full with whatever ambient light it could catch. Since I was sleepless I would sit on a little chair outside my door, and in a dehydrated revery watch it rise from the darkness.

White is a very common color for houses of worship as well as homes. Think of the white chapels cluttering the American countryside. In Playa del Carmen, Mexico the steeple of this church raised our eyes from the bubbling colorful commerce of that tourist town, and toward the blue sky. That’s why we came so far south in February after all. Not to shop.

The Shakers did not shrink from painting buildings red, especially workshops and barns. But their dormitories and meeting houses were always a puritanical white. This meeting hall in New Lebanon, New York has the same moon-ascending quality as the little mosque outside my room in Delhi.

I took this picture from the top of the leaning tower on a winter afternoon in Pisa, looking west over the Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta. This cathedral; along with the other buildings of the Campo dei Miracoli, can blush like a school girl at sunset, but was sullen and ashen as a corpse under the low gray skies of March.

Augustine Hope, the co-author of The Color Compendium writes about the last century, “ I don’t think another century has its own color, but this one does. And that is white. White before this century was a luxury.” When I think of all the refridgerators, not to mention the billion or so other appliances, I can agree, the 20th century is white.White is modern and no one knew that better than the Bauhaus Group. They ushered in a rage for all things white in the early 30s. Maybe a reaction to the gloomy Great Depression? In this apartment house in Berlin the flatness of the white facade and the serious symmetry breaks into joy with the brightly colored door and windows. Once again white responding to its surrounding.

The interior of the entrance hall of the new wing of the Milwaukee Art Museum, not far from that 65th Street house where I grew up. This was Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava’s first American project. Bauhaus member Johannes Itten said “form and color are one”, as far as the architecture of Calatrava is concerned I couldn’t agree more. His elegant air born buildings would look foolish in any thing but white.

The Marie-Elisabeth-Lueders-Haus, part of the modern government complex at the center of the reunified Berlin though modern in form has the beauty of ancient marble. The concrete surfaces were coated with a multifunctional scumble, a glaze for concrete and stone.

But all white buildings are not monuments, holy places or government building. More often they are homes. This small white house was built by my step-father and his father back in the 40s. I now belongs to my sister and I can’t imagine it being anything but white.

Even this humble little Mayan hut in Ekbalam, Mexico has a dignifying coat of white paint. Or maybe it’s just a practical heat deflecting coat of white paint.

Then there is home-sweet-home, white as sugar. Where I sleep and eat.
Where I write from.
Where the only monument, the only holy site, the only governance comes from a pale blue sky smeared with white clouds.

THE WHITE BLOG

2010-11-23T14:09:00.001-08:00

The first snow flakes of the season appeared last week. Graphic snowflakes on the little weather calendar in the newspaper foreshadowing a cold front, and yes, snow, on the way. Everyone was excited. If I, like mother says, had a nickel for every time I heard the word “snow’ I could have quit working by this week. Instead I’m laid-off by snow. Not the wordy, chattery snow that spews from everyone’s lips when the forecasters start mentioning snow, but actual rain-turned-into-ice-crystals snow.
Just days ago I made a little square of my left forefinger and thumb, and right forefinger and thumb. I looked through it like a photographer at a portion of the garden that could have been spring. I framed a sasanqua camellia, an apple tree still full of green leaves, fuchsias and one erratic rhododendron covered in pink flowers. There was not a hint of Fall’s changing leaves or decay. It was a scene as fresh as May. But it was November 17th.
Fall can be that way here. Langourous. Not in a hot tropical way, but in a confusing abundance of color from the changing leaves and the newly blooming flowers. From temperatures which don’t quite reach freezing and yet stay warm enough to keep dahlias in bloom. Not to mention fuchsias, camellias and rhododendrons. And provide cucumbers and zucchini into November. I find myself rather flummoxed during these months. Do I cut back the dahlias when they’re still half-heartedly blooming? Do I let all the nasturtium seedlings that are popping up in abundance and growing with Spring-like vigor go until they freeze? Or get the work over with now? Can I validate staying in and reading all day on a Saturday which is only cloudy and 55 degrees?
So last week when I was thinking it wouldn’t snow, “Just more meteorological exaggerating,” I couldn’t help but wish it would snow.
You see, I love snow. The more the merrier. I love a city muffled, tongue-tied. Traffic at a stand still. These snowy days are the real holidays, no Labor Day Blow-out Sales, no New Year’s Eve Galas, or Easter strolls through the Arboretum, en masse. I do feel sorry for the people who collide, spin-out and slide off icy roads. It’s no fun. But what does it hurt if everything shuts down once in a while?
But more than anything I love a world swathed in white.
A few years ago, as a Christmas present to myself, I went to see the Vedic Astrologer Dennis Flaherty. I am a sceptic. So I let astrologers go on without giving any cues. Let them damn or vindicate themselves. I was quite surprised how precisely accurate he was. By the end of my session Mr. Flaherty was vindicated. And I had a new color: white.
Now, I’ve never been a big fan of white. To me it’s not even a color. But the insightful astrologer insisted it was my color, when he saw a puzzled look creep on to my face. If he would have said red or yellow, I would have agreed whole-heartedly. If he had said green or blue I would have assented. But white? I had no feeling for white. It rouses neither anger nor happiness; neither comfort nor excitement in me. Maybe he wasn’t such a great astrologer after all.
But I kept what he said in a secret part of my heart.
White.
White?
Why not white?
I’m a gardener and, like Pig Pen, a perpetual cloud of needles, leaves, dirt and rocks- yes, once I took off my shoes at a friends house and a rock fell out- follow me everywhere I go. White surfaces, white clothes are my nemesis.
But that’s not why I don’t like white.
It’s been three years since Dennis Flaherty told me my color was white. I’ve been looking askance at white ever since. Asking white to prove itself.
I guess I’ve always been intimidated by the imperiousness of white. Wedding dresses. The white-glove-tests. Porcelain. Jock socks. Snow White ( the Disney Classic). Ambulances. Clapboard churches. Linens. The absolute perfection of a hen’s egg ( I usually buy brown ones).
The White Album.
The blank page.
So lately I’ve been trying to create a blank space for myself to re-address white.
Trying to look at the white that I like instead of white that scares me. It began with those first graphic snowflakes last week. They reminded me how much I love snow and, well, snow is white.
So I began a list:
Sugar cubes.
Madonna lillies.
Bone china.
Swans; mute, trumpeter and whistling swans.
Paper bark birches, especially Betula papyrifera and B. utilis jacquemontii.
Ghost brambles (Rubus lasiostylus hubeiensis)
And, snow, even when it covers the beautiful golden-orange decline of fall.

MY CUP

2010-11-15T08:48:00.000-08:00

The other day Nora Ephron was on NPR, touting her new book I Remember Nothing. The host asked her what her advice was for people who were aging, since her book was about the aging process.
She replied ( I am paraphrasing wildly here) that you should do what you want now. Don’t put things off, or keep overly busy with things you don’t really like to do. She used a friend dying of throat cancer as an example. This woman could not eat anymore and she regretted not eating enough hot dogs in her life.
Now I don’t want to eat more hot dogs and I don’t have terminal cancer and by all life expectancy charts I’ve got a ways to go. But there was some truly practical wisdom in what she has to say. I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about practical wisdom, way too late into life. So that I’m melting in that direction is certainly a sign of my aging. So I gave the flip-file of my mind a whirl and began looking for those things I’ve been putting off. What do I want of the rest of my life?
More travel?
More writing?
More work? More friends? More fun? More sex? More books? More plants?
More time;more sleep, more food; more...?
More. More. More. I was beginning to sound like Ronald Reagan.
Do I really want more out of my life? Do I really want to squeeze harder and see if I can get one more drop or two out of this stone?
Hardly.
I know Mies van der Rohe’s words “Less is more” have been quoted to death. Do I really want to do some conversion mathematics with my life and get more out of less? We’re back to that squeezing again. I’ll save that for yoga class and orange juice.
Since I was driving when Ms. Ephron prompted this rash of thought about the rest of my life--I never would have expected it of her-- I really didn’t stay very focused. There where intersections to maneuver, cops to slow down for and one wildly erratic dog bouncing in and out of traffic as if it were one of the pack.
Maybe I didn’t want to think about the rest of my life just then. Too loaded.
And then just as the flip-file fingering stopped I realized all I really wanted was to appreciate what I had. Really and truly. And then all the rest would fall into place, I am sure.
But that’s getting harder every day. With my cup running over things are getting awfully messy around here. It’s hard to know what to appreciate or how.
When I was a bartender in Cologne, Germany I had that over the top American sense of service that the Germans don’t know how to appreciate. Its just not in their make up. “Just give me the beer, and cut the friendly chatter.” Once I did that my job got a lot easier and, yes, my tips went up. What was harder to get was the filling of a glass. In Cologne the regional beer Koelsch is served in a thin cylindrical glass that is marked a few millimeters from the top with a small white line and the number 0,2 l. Like a test tube in a laboratory. Most Germans didn’t like when I broke this boundary, which I saw as being generous. “Its too full I’m going to spill it.” Besides the beer was suppose to end at that line and the foam begin. It was an exacting art which I eventually became very good at.
I sure don’t want to draw a line on my the glass of my life, or cup as the case may be. I’m not that exacting, and I actually like a half empty glass once in a while as much as I like the messy overwhelmed feeling of over flowing.
I like picking our last zucchini on November 14th. The garden just won’t quit, which is the kind of overflowing I like. But I also don’t know if I want to head to the other side with a suitcase so full its bursting at the seams. Or have to run out to the garbage can more than once a week, or have recycle bins full of junk mail, or try to remember what I have to do for the week. I’m a chronic list maker at this point. I know this all sounds like complaining but I think that is part of this sorting out process. If I’m complaining about something is it something I really want in my life? Is it something I want to put the effort into appreciating? Or just get rid of?
Well, I can’t, for example, stop taking out the garbage. That’s one of the things in life where you just don’t want any overflowing going on. So what do I do? Stop making garbage? That certainly is an option. And I try to re-duce, re-use , re-cycle as much as possible, but that takes time too. So now, this is still in the experimental phase, I try to make the trip to the garbage can an adventure, a little hike through a portion of this magnificent world. I listen for birds, smell the air, gaze off a the mountains. Yes, I am very fortunate to have mountain views on the way to the garbage can.
Then suddenly I am appreciating something that I don’t necessarily like to do.
Now if I can spread this appreciation over everything, like a great blanket of sparkling snow...
Its in the experimental phase, as I said.
But it seems to be working, because now I even appreciate Nora Ephron.
Thanks for the advice.

UNSTOPPABLE

2010-11-08T08:44:00.000-08:00

I keep getting letters from Garden Design warning me to renew. Each letter over the weeks escalates in urgency and makes grander and more generous offers. I think I’m up to 3 years for the price of one by now. No matter how they plead, whether with fear tactics, or enticements I can’t help but refuse.
Not that I don’t find Garden Design a beautiful magazine full of inspiration. I just have so many other things to read. “Read” is the operative word here. I don’t read Garden Design. I flip through. I pause here and there, even at ads. I read a caption, a head line...
Okay, I read Garden Design. I even read a whole article in the November/ December issue. “Your last issue.” Again!?
The article, “Jack Frost: Master Gardener”, was written by Valerie Easton a local garden columnist and author. I feel the same sort of triumph that Val feels when she wrote: “Only after a killing frost puts the garden decidedly to bed do I have guilt-free time to read a novel or go to the movies.”
Well, frost of any kind has been late in coming this year, unnervingly so. Usually out here in the valley we have a killing frost by mid-October long before Seattle and the rest of the Puget Sound Basin. I look forward to that frost exactly for the reason Ms. Easton states. I want to be able to turn my back on the garden guiltlessly.
I am always looking for reasons to snub the garden, or in more enlightened moments “let it go”, even in spring and summer. But it’s hard to let go when the weather isn’t cooperating. In August I gave up on ever seeing cucumbers, the summer was so cool they barely came into bloom. But last Friday firmly Fall and well into November I picked our last cucumber. we do not live in Mexico you understand, or even southern California. We’re only a little over 100 miles form the Canadian border.
Mid-week when the temperatures reached upward toward the mid-70s making bulb planting a delight I was feeling a bit anxious about where this was all going. The weekend before last the river, filling with heavy rain, was nudging toward flood stage. Luckily it never got there, though it did spill in places out onto the road. I had begun the settled-in season during those rains, opened a book and began to read without an end point in sight. It was a guilty pleasure. Though it was wet it was still warm enough to get some plants in the ground. That’s the problem with doing this for a living, there is an unstoppable stream of plants coming on to the property. But my clock was ticking already to a different drummer, sorry for that mixed metaphor, but you understand the ticking was drum-loud. I needed to crash, to go into reading, writing, baking, the general preoccupations that make ignoring the garden less guilt-ridden.
I was looking forward to a dismal weekend, where lethargy finally won and I could finish reading “Sukkwan Island” a startlingly excellent novella by David Vann. On page 103 when the two protagonists , a father and a son “... both looked into the sky, into the grayness that had no depth or end, and then they went inside” sounded like the perfect weekend to me. I’m sure those of you who were stuck in an office on Tuesday and Wednesday when summer made a guest appearance --I even tanned a bit-- would disagree with me.
Yet we both got what we needed.
Saturday offered all manner of glum weather, rain, wind, clouds. Hardly miserable, but “miserable” I said none-the-less, pulled the fleece blanket over my pajama’d body and went on reading. I finished “Sukkwan Island” and headed back into Roger Deakin’s Wildwood:A Journey Through Trees. I started it about a year and a half ago and have been savoring the series of essays on the cinematographer’s relationship to trees and wood, and the fascinating people and places this interest found for him. I’ve been reading Deakin’s rich humble prose in chunks between other books. And I know it will be one of those books I’ll return to over the years like Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being. I finished Deakin before bed time and began assembling a stack of back issues for my Sunday reading. I was getting into this lazy thing. And what could be more lazy than reading magazines all day? Well, I guess, napping. But I’m sure that would happen between Gardens Illustrated and Pacific Horticulture.
You see, there are getting to be way too many periodicals in out house between my horticultural subscriptions and Michael’s literary ones we probably get upward to 10 magazines a month. I usually try to read them all in January when the weather is really bad and it’s time to do a little new year purging. But I was looking forward to getting an early start and maybe using my January downtime for something productive.
Then the sun came out.
It was Sunday and it was sunny. It was what all you office workers were hoping for and it dashed my lazy hopes of wallowing in the glossy world of magazines.
Oh,well, I could have just lied there basking like the cat. But you don’t know me if you think I could do that. I would take a 101 degree day, or a 101 degree fever for me to just lie around on a sunny day.
So I went for a walk.
As I walked I called my dear friend Joseph who lives back in Philadelphia. I didn’t really want to walk alone and Michael was busy writing. Joseph and I always share weather reports for the first few minutes of our calls. Who’s warmer? Who’s wetter?A bit competatively, but all in fun. He almost always wins, living on the rambunctious East Coast. When I win it is when we are having a prolonged cloudy spell, weeks, months even, without sunshine.
It happens here.
But not this year. What we’re having this year is prolonged instability. The sunshine never stays long enough to build false hopes. The rain and gray just takes us to the edge of dismal and then retreats. So when a Sunday is sunny and your plans are for lying on the sofa with stacks of back issues, because after all it is November and it should be at least cloudy if not raining, you change your plans and go out for a walk.
It was good to do some foot work assessment of the valley and the progress of fall. So after I said good-bye to Joseph I kept walking to Tolt MacDonald Park.
The river was no longer frighteningly high. Yet the “pond” is back in our neighbors’ horse paddock. The drainage ditches along the road which cuts through the swamp are engorged. Frogs scuttled across their glassy black surfaces as if winter was an afterthought instead of a foreboding. The prognosticators, those generators of doom and gloom are predicting a walloping good winter this year. Wet, cold and snowy I keep hearing. Then why is November nearly as pleasant as July?
The calm before the storm?
At this time of year, the flood season, when the river becomes threatening, I wonder sometimes why I gravitated to this watery place. Even if it only closes the north end of the road and I have to take the long way out it feels like more than an inconvenience. But I have an affinity for watery places. When Michael and I were traveling through Rajistan a few years ago I was constantly on the look out for sources for water. How do all these people live with such little water, and such dirty water at that? I am increasingly uncomfortable when I visit my sister in Arizona. I have watched Phoenix mushroom out into the desert at an alarming rate and I can’t help but ask, “Where is the water?”
“ I wondered again,” writes Roger Deakin about his travels to the arid landscapes of Kyrgyzstan, “ how it is that trees are able to feel their way towards water, even when their roots have to travel some distance to reach it. By which process do they sense its nearness? Those little roots, which do all the work of absorbing water, may just be antennae of a kind.” Like roots the search for water is innately deep in me. I feel more comfortable knowing its near. Like a willow on a river bank dangling its toes.
It was like being home being able to just walk through my neighborhood.
And the walk was remarkably rejuvenating, probably much more so then a slumped afternoon on the couch with a stack of magazines. There were birds and birders on the road, bikers, roller-skiers and Sunday-drivers-- some of them were actually driving like it was Friday afternoon-- their were families in the park, dog-walkers and dogs, joggers and me stopped on a log to take notes:
“ When I woke before dawn I opened the door to let the black cat in. At first I sniffed the darkness. Then I drew it in deeply through both nostrils. There was a faint sweetness to the air that one might misread as the first frost. It was clear enough. But not cold enough. By mid-day I basked on a log in the woods, where sun rays piercing the canopy were warm, released some tensions still lingering from the week. I had wanted a gloomy Sunday, an excuse to retreat from the world, but I was totally glad it wasn’t delivered.
“You can’t always get what you want,
But if you try sometimes you just might find,
you get what you need.”"

" JAZZ!"

2010-11-01T09:11:00.000-07:00

Last week Michael and I went out to dinner on an inconsequential Wednesday. We went to Boxley’s Place, a rather excellent restaurant, in North Bend. Boxley’s offers live music, mostly Jazz, every night of the week.
While we were there a pianist, Tony Foster, got on stage. Was briefly and dramatically introduced, then began to play to the handful of diners. He began to play well, then perfectly. Michael and I stopped our inconsequential Wednesday conversation and turned toward the stage to listen.
There was a mike shoved in to the open lid of the grand piano, though the restaurant was small enough for un-aided music. His playing was amplified to drown out clanging cutlery, the birthday-toast glass-tinging, and the general level of the conversation which got louder when the music began.
I listened intently. But also wondered intently, about how such a talented musician ended up at Boxley’s on a Wednesday night in mid-October. An inconsequential Wednesday night at that. Did he have time to kill? Or are there just too many jazz pianists? Too few venues?
I was suddenly reminded of a guest in one of my gardens who, loaded with as much gin as I was, could not desist from questioning me. What sort of garden was this anyway? “I mean,” he begged, “what do you call this style of gardening?”
Gin-numbed I had no answer. I had never thought about a style of gardening really. My client had requested an English garden. I interpreted his wishes by creating lush and colorful mixed borders in the open woodland setting.
The guest still stared at me waiting for the answer.
“ English mixed borders?” I guessed, unconvincingly.
“No,” the garden guest continued, “ that’s too stuffy. This is not a stuffy garden at all.”
“ I don’t know,” I had continued to sip gin and a clear answer became harder and harder to find for this guest who wanted a definitive and exacting answer.
I began to swagger through my memory of the process of making this garden. What were my influences? I had never actually seen an English garden at that point. I had grabbed from every direction I could. The Italian countryside, the German naturalistic gardens I worked in, the lush annual plantings of the Missouri Botanical Garden, even the Sonoran desert. I was a collagist at heart, a surrealist. I had even been called an impressionist or an abstract expressionist, my gardens always being equated with art movements of the past.
Yet I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, put a name on my style.
But the guest only got more inflamed the vaguer I got. If I couldn’t supply an answer he would.
“ Jazz!”
Obviously he had a better handle on the gin than I did. He was suddenly clear and confident in his assessment.
“That’s it! It’s like jazz!”
Now jazz is not my favorite kind of music. It’s too complex, too sophisticated, too brainy for my tastes. But here he was someone I had met for the first time calling my style of gardening “Jazz!”.
And he was right.
All the other tags I applied to this garden, all my efforts to name what I was up to fell short.
Then flat when he repeated it, “Jazz!”
“Jazz!”
I felt he was becoming more interested in his assessment, his accurate assessment I must add, then in the garden, my style or even me.
As I looked around with the word “Jazz!” bumping against the gin in my head, I could see the complexity and the brainy sophistication in the borders. I could see his point.
I wondered if anyone else saw it that way. Or knew what they saw. Or cared. Most of the other guests in the garden that evening weren’t even looking at the garden; it was just background noise to their conversations.
On that inconsequential night at Boxley’s, I was drinking gin and watching Tony Foster play his heart out to no one but Michael and I. I saw my own dilemna of “playing to deaf ears”. But this pianist’s confidence, the very timbre of his being needed to play. He would have played, like falling in an earless forest, because he had to play.
Like I have to garden.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A few nights ago Michael put on some Thelonious Monk for dinner music.
Now I like dinner and I like music, but some forms of jazz at dinner jangle my digestion.
Maybe it is the demands of the music drawing me away from the pleasure of the meal. I have a hard time “drowning it out”. I decided at that moment, “I don’t like jazz.,” though I kept it to myself.
But I can’t help but agree with the garden guest from years ago, who insisted on calling the garden I created “Jazz!”. I love syncopation. I love setting up a rhythm and breaking it. I love to free associate, to improvise. It’s probably why I found so much pleasure in collage for years. I had made a god of collage and made my gardens in his image. But slowly I am beginning to see the musicality of gardens.
Already years ago I was flirting with this idea, when I was living in Germany and had way more time for thought. A man I was dating at the time was studying musicology at the University of Bonn. I couldn’t believe how angry he was with me for insisting that music and gardening were very closely linked art forms. As if I were trying to connect heaven with hell.
I wasn’t just talking about the rustling of leaves in the wind, or songbirds’ warblings. I insisted that both took place in time and worked intently with interpreting time. He would have none of it. I think that’s when he started considering me an idiot and our lovely little love affair ended shortly thereafter.
I still believe the ideation necessary to make a garden span time is the same sort of ideation needed to make music. I still believe in rhythm, “that fascinating rhythm”. In syncopation, in meter, in harmony and dissonance, and in cadence in the garden.
I still beleive in Ella Fitzgerald, Keith Jarret, Betty Carter, Duke Ellington, and even Thelonious Monk
And, yes, that’s Jazz.

PICTURE THIS

2010-10-26T16:12:00.000-07:00

Picture a blue dawn nibbling at the blackness as the thermometer continue to drop. The morning turns a rich Cornell blue, a distant blue I named after Joseph Cornell the collagist I imitated for years.
Picture the lapis fog hugging the vague and luminous morning, pulling it near.
Picture a fog so thick the wipers scrape it off the windshield like lightly falling snow.
Picture the illustrious blue fading as the day brightens, whitens.
Picture the bruised apple brown of the big leafed maples;
the speckled towers of Lombardy poplars;
the edible red of Virginia creeper spilling down the barrier walls on the freeway as I race by.
Picture the blues far behind me.

SPRING IS NEAR

2010-10-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

I know the orange assault of the sugar maple has only begun, but I can’t help but think of spring. I’m planting bulbs this weekend. And just the other day when I entered the greenhouses a Molbak’s Farm I was overwhelmed by the scent of violets, the sweet elusive fragrance vanished quickly. But not it’s impact. I was standing in a house full of warm sunshine and 1000s of winter pansies. It didn’t smell like fall at all. No crisp vinegar of rotting apples, no burnt sugar of katsura, or marigolds’ persistent pungency. It was the sweet scent of spring. Or the faux spring of my youth when I visited the temperate dome at the Mitchell Park Conservatory around Valentine’s Day. The streets outside would be crusted with months of old snow, but inside newly planted and replete with pansies and bulbs we got a glimpse of spring.
I grew up in a place where winter pansy was an oxymoron. So when I arrived in Seattle 22 years ago and saw pansies for sale at the grocery store in November I was shocked.
Shocked and delighted. I love pansies. My excitement about moving to the Northwest trebled as I put the little blue 4” pansy into my shopping cart. Yet I was both doubtful and hopeful.

Until a few months later when the north winds flew in with fists, like a master boxer, flattening my winter pansy. Down for the count, I had little hope and abundant doubts about winter pansies. Yet with the first warmish days of February it was up again. It was perched so carelessly on the window ledge, god knows I was doing nothing to help it along. I am a cruel lover.
Then a February snow floated in like a butterfly and stung like a bee, taking the wind out of my hopes completely. My little blue pansy, I had chosen “Crystal Bowl True Blue” for it’s stunningly icy purity, lied bruised and prostate over the edge of the pot.
Not all pansies are winter pansies. Maybe I had been duped?
Most pansies fitting into the inter specific hybrid Viola x wittrockiana, named after the Swedish botanist V.B. Wittrock who studied them extensively, are the progeny of three european species. V. tricolor, V. lutea and V. alaica. The enthusiastic hybridizing which began in England in the 1820s, made pansies one of the most popular annuals.
Though botanically speaking all pansies are Violas, not all violas are pansies. Some sources say the difference lies in fragrance, pansies have it and violas don’t , carrying more genetic information from the scentless V. tricolor. Another source says that pansies have a black velvety splotch in the middle where as violas don’t. I asked a friend at Wells Medina Nursery, who said, “We call the little ones violas and the big ones pansies.”
“ A rose by any other name...” I replied.

Nomenclature and botany aside, I love them all. And their persistent popularity, almost 2 centuries, is proof that I am not alone. With over 70 names in English they have endeared people as much as dogs or cats. Of these names “pansy” , from the French pensee meaning “thoughts”, seems to have stuck. Thought, one author speculates, because it is “ the noblest faculty with which mankind is gifted”. My Aunt Lottie had her own take on it, she found their pinched little faces charming aggravated with thought. “Heart’s-ease”, a name that appears as often in older literature speaks to the calming effects of the fragrance and it’s attribution to Saint Valentine. And I must admit they do do something to my heart that feels quite a bit like ease.
By April of my first year here, my seemingly limp-wristed pansy, like the effeminate boys it lends its name to, proved to be tough. Came out swinging. As winter was lead from the ring, my little winter pansy was crowned with a victor’s bouquet of blue. This same triumphant nature has inspired British artist Paul Harfleet to develop The Pansy Project, an ongoing installation to bring awareness to homophobic abuse.
And to spread the love of pansies. Sometimes as orange as maples

TAKE ME HIGHER

2010-10-10T12:40:00.001-07:00

Last Sunday we left our home at 65 feet above sea level to go hiking near Mount Rainier. It was Michael’s birthday, actually the day before, and he just wanted to “get away”.
We headed out of the fog belt early, or so we thought. By the time we had reached the gate of the park our hopes of seeing the mountain were pretty slim. Even the ranger who greeted us as we entered said, “You won’t see the mountain today.” We decided to drive up to the trailhead at Sunrise anyway. At times we were totally encased in clouds. Yet when we reached Sunrise and the lodge at 6385 feet, the day broke all its dreary promises and showed us blue skies and a magnificent view of the north side of Mount Rainier.

The clouds had not really broke, they lurched and eddied below us in the valley. We had risen above them. The lodge had already closed for the season and the normal crowds were absent from the parking lots and trails at Sunrise. We planned only a small hike, but it kept expanding as we enter this incredible landscape. Humbled hikers coming down, dumbfounded by the beauty said simple things like; “ Great view.”; “It’s worth the trip.”; or “It’s beautiful up there.”
We hiked through the alpine meadows and clusters of alpine firs(Abies lasciocarpa). Up on to the tundra covered lava flow of Burroughs Mountain.

Though I knew it was beautiful up there I also could not stop seeing the beauty all around. I would have been just as happy, or so I say now, if the mountain had not shown itself and our view had been limited to the statuesque heights of the white barked pines (Pinus albicaulis), to the flushes of huckleberries, blueberries and mountain ash turning fiery hues. I would have been happy with lichen speckled rocks, seed heads and chipmunks. Yet the shear mass of the volcano drew us on. I stopped as often as possible, though, to take snap shots along the way. The details were so engrossing. I love the details. “God’s in the details,” it's sais. But who said? Descartes? Henry Ford?

Michael was getting a bit perturbed with me stopping to snap at a wild flower, a picturesque view, or a portrait of him. “Why can’t a hike just be a hike?” he harumphed. I told him, “Don’t stop for me; I’ll catch up.” But he has some inbred politeness, akin to my inbred acquisitiveness, which makes him stop and wait. Which makes me hurry up, feeling like the “ol’ ball and chain” again. I understand that a goal is set, but I’m a dallier. I like to botanize, take a photo, watch a bird through the binoculars.
Why am I so unsatisfied with the 2 lenses God gave me? I have excellent eye site, at least at a distance, reading glasses are a necessity though. Why do I need to capture with the little lens of my camera, my little ineffectual camera in the face of such grandeur, any of this? Why must I zoom ahead of my steps with the binoculars? Go beyond where I am to over there, way over there, to catch some detail I could catch with the bare eye? When at my feet the detail is rich and rewarding?
I even questioned my eyes and their exquisite lenses, 52 year old lenses still penetrating the visual world with acuity and speed. Soaring miles across the landscape, or hunkering down into saxifrages clutching at rocks. Here I was in front of this sprawling view of the mountain and all I could do was see it. I wondered about an internal lens, a way of perception beyond seeing. Or a way of seeing beyond perception. I am only speculating here, but I imagine that lens is what some people call the soul. This huge polished convex existence I call me, facing the world, both absorbing and reflecting it.

Then a clutter of alpine birds skittered over the pumice strewn moonscape of Burroughs Mountain and I went for my binoculars as a hunter would a gun. The birds didn’t pause very long, the binoculars were useless. If I would have watched them with my eyes what sort of flighty dance would I have seen? What wealth of detail is required by the casual observer? If I had stopped opened some magical internal lens of my imaginings, what would I have seen? The swirl of the cosmos wrapped in gray feathers? Or just birds being birds?

Michael had already reached the summit, “ the very end of the world” as he called it. I had to catch up. My questions became as cumbersome as cameras and binoculars, and my ever acquisitive eyes.

At 7400 feet I joined him for an apple on a rock above a gaping white sea of clouds below and the incomprehensible mountain above. The mountain rumbled with avalanches. I was covered with awe like a blanket, like blindness though I could see.
I could see.

The winds shifted and the clouds began moving up the flanks of the mountain. As we hiked down the clouds swaddled the trail. Forced us back into the human scale world of conifers rocks, and alpine perennials. The flowering was over, yet the spectacle of regeneration plumed the alpine meadows with seeds. I stopped again and again as I tend to do. Maybe Michael was getting tired, he stopped more too. Maybe he was beginning to enjoy the little pauses these stops prompted. Maybe he was beginning to appreciate a chance to dally as much as I appreciate him driving us on.
And driving us home through some of the densest fogs I’ve seen.

EXHAUSTED

2010-10-02T11:59:00.000-07:00

I thought I had exhausted the nursery possibilities here in the Northwest. Maybe I was exhausted, gave up the hunt for something new. I stopped going to plant sales, started doing more mail order. Dragged seed back from Italy, Turkey and Wisconsin.
Yes, Wisconsin.
I’m getting older, becoming more motivated by nostalgia than innovation. Last month, I traveled with glee through my home state which I loathed with a premeditated boredom just years ago, over 25 now. Having firmly and irreversibly moved away, and as I said, having grown older and more nostalgic, I find Wisconsin a delightful place. Its rather lackadaisical - you must realize I live with a view to the rather dramatic tectonic uplift of the Cascades - landscape has a loveliness akin to Central Europe or England. As we drove through rolling farm land, the shear agronomic force of the state made us hungry. And Wisconsinites, my family among them, have a propensity toward eating. As we drove by wagon loads of melons, squash and sweet corn I begrudged our road trip which did not always involve a kitchen at the end of the day.Though we did mange a stop at a cheese factory for “squeeky” cheese.
But Michael and I were not on a culinary foray, but a horticultural one. When I lived in Wisconsin, it’s where I studied botany, I rarely found time for gardens. I was in the woods or in a bar, or the library. I had not quite seen my future as a gardener. Though there were gardeners all around me and I always managed to find the 3 square feet of bare dirt behind any apartment I lived in to fill with a tomato plant or sunflowers, I still did not consider myself a gardener. Even to this day I have a shrug-it-off reluctance to calling myself a gardener, though I garden continually. And when not gardening I am writing about gardening.
So Wisconsin had many surprises for us with it’s many interesting and regionally driven gardens. As we toured around I began to realize a whole host of my favorite plants either come form there or perform better there than in the timid climate of the Pacific Northwest. I am especially fond of prairie plants. Liatris, black eyed susans, tall blue-stem, golden rod. I have tried to use them in the gardens I create here, but eventually they succumb to the dry summers or a warm wet winter. These plants were made to thrive in a harsh climate. Only in rare pockets of the Northwest have I seen the prairie style of gardening succeed. Yet there even the weedy roadsides looked like grand mixed borders and European weeds like Queen Anne’s lace, day lilies and sow thistle wriggled into the mix as if guided by a designing hand.
One of the few prairie plants I have had success with in the Northwest is the black-eyed susan (Rudbeckia ssp.) Their outlandish color, though hard to mix, and stalwart nature has made them nearly ubiquitous at this point. Yet I never tire of this ubiquity especially at this time of year when doses of strong color assuage any melancholy brought on by the encroaching gray.

I was captivated by the height and pinwheel-like flowers of the sweet black-eyed susan named ‘Henry Eilers’ (Rudbeckia subtomentosa), when I saw it at Northwind Perennial Farm. With the impulse of a neophyte I bought one, along with compass flower (Silphium lanciniatum) and deer-tongued grass (Dicanthelium clandestinum).

In the display gardens at Northwind it was obviously late summer. The dramatic sweeps of grasses, both native and exotic with a mix of shrubs and flowering perennials were already crashing from excessive rains, drought and high winds. But his chaos was beautiful and strangely restful compared to the more dramatic annual plantings elsewhere.

Although I was glad we stopped at the Rotary Botanical Gardens in Janesville. The outrageously unexpected red and black borders surrounding the parking were stunning.

At the Olbrich Garden in Madison grasses were used through out, as architecturally as conifers or furniture.

The exotic Japanese fountain grass (Pennisetum alopecuroides) and Japanese silver grass ( Miscanthus cv.) frame a ‘Golden Globe’ arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis- a Wisconsin native).

The Monarchs were leaving in great feeding flocks, if that is what butterflies travel in. And we, too, had to travel.

I borrowed a suitcase from my sister to pack all the plants I was bringing back. Who did I think I was? Dan Hinkley? Was I trying to retrieve a past I never truly appreciated? Or experienced? I had dug 3 black spruce (Picea mariana) from my parents farm. Was I trying to transplant the great northern forests that cover Canada to the Snoqulamie Valley? Or was I truly just experimenting with a tree that I've grown calmly and slowly fond of? I dug a piece of my mother’s fern leaf peony (Paeonia tenuifolia ‘Rubra Flora Plena’??) which I knew I could getback in Seattle, but it wouldn’t be from my mother’s garden. But when I saw the ‘Henry Eilers’ rudbeckia at the Northwest Horticultural Society’s plant sale ,where I bought even more plants, I realized maybe my search of Northwest nurseries was not as exhaustive as I thought. Maybe I am just suffering from the exhaustion of acquisition. But I know when that rudbeckia blooms and reminds me of a September day in rural Wisconsin, I will have forgotten the $15 dollars i spent on that extra peice of luggage and remeber a Septenber day in rural Wisconsin.

WEATHER, OR NOT

2010-09-26T20:06:00.000-07:00

If clothes make the man, weather makes the garden. No matter how clever my plantings, how thorough my care a heavy rain, a cold spring, or a hot dry spell can alter a garden in ways never intended.

A few weeks ago when I visited the Chicago Botanical Garden with my sister Julie, the winds were high the sky smudgy with clouds, making photography rather difficult and the whole visit fraught with a low level irritation. Not at all my experience there on other occasions. I didn’t like the garden. But truly I didn’t like the weather. Even though the stiff Japanese garden didn’t budge in the winds there was no tranquility to it, only resistance. The only serenity to be found that day was in the banks of ornamental grasses plowed over by the forceful winds. They had no qualms as they became the winds, which we could not.

A few days later at Taliesen the winds were more rambunctious. As Michael and I roamed the hills of this fascinating estate, we were nearly blown away. Yet Frank Lloyd Wright who grew up in this rolling landscape along the Wisconsin River, knew these winds and designed bluffs and coves of ferny stillness which were refuges on our tour.

Just a few days ago it was a weather-less day. No shadow under the thin fog, no precipitation, no wind. The fog lent a whiteness to the morning that made everything gray. Yet you could hear the sun’s rays pinging off the upper surface of the fog bank as they slowly stripped it away with seductive slowness. First the shoulder of a hill, then the moony pale inner thigh of the lake. Eventually the sun broke through and a breeze trembled through the springy boughs.
Even this little shift from morning to afternoon was a reminder of the direction we were heading.
Yes, the winds will come.
The leaves will fly.
The rains fall, and the frosts kill.
That weather-less day was the last day of summer and, paraphrasing T.S. Eliot, it ended with a whimper, not a bang.

TRIP WITHIN A TRIP

2010-09-18T09:28:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I am so frustrated by blogging that I want to quit. No time has this been more true than this morning when I sat down to post about my recent trip to Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It seems all I can share is snippets and snap shots. I can not pour the familiar humid fragrance of late summer in Milwaukee through cyberspace. Nor can I capture the warblings of warblers in Estebrook Park, or the crack of wind in leaves. Nor the subtle changes of temperature through out the day. The blast of hail, the crack and blitz of lightening and thunder. Nor the bite and sugar of a vine ripe Big Boy tomato sliced thick and big enough to cover a whole slice of toast slathered with mayonaise.
I can not capture the miles traveled to family visits, gardens explored and natural wonders touched. But one trip with n the bigger trip I cannot avoid writing about.

Michael had never seen Lake Superior, so when we were visiting my parents on their farm in the Iron River we decided to take a day trip north.

Our first stop at Canyon Falls on the Sturgeon River was a revelation. What the guide book calls the “Grand Canyon of Michigan” is only 300 feet deep at it’s deepest farther north from where we stopped. Yet the twists and turns of the river through the forest as it headed into the canyon were lovely.
Our goal was Point Abbaye an un-populated cape just east of the town of L’Anse. The road in had my father perpetually asking “Where are we going?” Michael jokingly responded, “To the end of the world.” I was beginning to wonder myself if we were headed toward the end of the world as the gravel road narrowed, got muddier and offered only scant views of the the lake through the dense forest. We wondered if we had made the right choice, but there was no place to turn the car around, so on we went.

We were not disappointed when we finally reached our goal. The sand stone shelf flaked and eroded by wind and water at the tip of the cape was picturesque and offered great views of the Huron Islands and the Huron Mountains to the south.

Michael walked right out to the very end of the world.

While I got into the details of the place.

We only saw a snippet of the lake, a hint of it’s vastness. Lake Superior, the third largest body of fresh water in the world has the largest surface area of any, 31,820 square miles and contains over 2904 square miles of water. It’s a cold lake with and average summer temperature of 40 degrees and the deepest of the Great Lakes at 1332 feet, give or take and inch.

The wind swept point was densely forested nearly to the shore and with a surprising number of very large trees that I though should have succumbed to the horrific winter storms that cross the lake.

My parents posed for me in front of the largest red maple (Acer rubrum) I’ve ever seen. Even though I had visited many gardens, the Chicago Botanical Garden, Olbrich Garden in Madison, the wonderful Northwind Perennial Nursery and Taliesen, Frank Lloyd Wright's school and home in Spring Green, WI on this trip, nothing could match the beauty of this little forlorned cape jutting proudly, silently into the vastness of Lake Superior. And a brisk and summy day spent with my parents and Michael.

COLD COMFORT

2010-08-31T07:47:00.000-07:00

A rainy chilly morning once again dispelling any sense of summer. At least summer as I like to think of it, blistering hot, cucumber-laden, shade-seeking summer. At least the rain keeps the pools of fog out of the valley. I have a gothicky side that loves a blinding fog. But this time of year when the fogs start settling in it can mean death for our tomatoes. Already the chilly nights dipping into the 40’s--- for chrissake, it’s August!---has slowed the already sluggish ripening process.
I started to look for green tomato recipes, but the ever-optimistic Michael told me to “hold my horses”. His faith in a tomato-y future, a red ripe tomato-y future seems futile to me. But who am I to question faith? Or complain about a Northwest summer that is truly not that far from normal?
But you can’t eat 4-leafed clovers. Well, I guess you can. You might even be able to make some sort of pesto out of them. Hmmm.
Yet there is always one green thing that is ripe and ready. Cabbage. It’s no wonder they are a constant in Northern European cuisine. We had cabbage last year when summer was sweltering and we have cabbage this year when summer is faltering. Beyond my seasonal pinings for sauerkraut, I love the pallid sulfurous crunch cabbage lends to fish tacos, I even eat the slightly wilted and greasy bed of it that comes under the egg rolls in our favorite Vietnamese restaurant Tamarind Tree.
Cabbage is comfort food for me. Other people might like their loaf of bread, their potatoes, their 5 o’clock cocktail. For me it’s cabbage. Even before I was farming I always had a head of cabbage in the crisper. It’s exactly this storability which puts me at ease. We leave them in the field nearly until Christmas if we don’t get a frost. Or we hang them upside down roots and all in the basement, where they last until spring. Actually one started growing again to our amazement.
So when my flimsy faith in a red tomato-y future wanes I take precious comfort in our rows of cabbages, benign and beneficent. If there won’t be spaghetti sauce there will at least be potagers.
Yet, I can’t help but hopefully turn up the cucumber leaves in my search for supplies to fuel one of my greatest summer pleasures, pickling. This year I managed to squeeze out 4 quarts of pickles. Not a lot I know but come December, a guaranteed triumph over winter and grocery store prices.

I have been driving Michael crazy with my obsession with heirloom vegetables with Wisconsin place names. After the year we tried “Pride of Wisconsin’ cantaloupe and it barely made it to boasting, he’s been suspect. But his good nature and scientific inquisitiveness always lets me experiment.
So this year it was ‘Sheboygan’ paste tomatoes. Named after the foggy city on the shores of Lake Michigan I thought they might have a chance here. Actually they’ve proven to be the only tomatoes to ripen for us so far this year. Don’t forget we have a red tomato-y future ahead. They are a lovely pink and have a delightful sweet flesh. We will definitely grow this one again.

The cucumber ‘Wautoma’ named after the Central Wisconsin city famous for pickle production, Wisconsin ranks 4th in US pickle production, has not been extremely generous, how could it be with nights dipping in to the 40s. But the gherkins it did produce were, crispy and flavorful with a a dark green skin making a beautiful pickle.
Since I am off to Wisconsin tomorrow, I’m afraid I might miss that one red tomato which the future promises. Or the 3 cucumbers which are smaller than the slugs, granted we have very large slugs and a few too many this year, inching their way to completion. But I know I can take comfort in the fact that when we return in 2 weeks there will be cabbage. Not just one cabbage, but months worth of cabbage, ripe and green and ready for the picking.

PARKED IN A PARK

2010-08-23T19:50:00.000-07:00

Last Monday I parked my green truck under a big leafed maple beleaguered with moss. One would think in a summer behaving more like a prolonged spring or an extremely early fall I would have headed for the sunniest location I could find. A place to bask and relax, a beach maybe, or at least a tanning booth. But not me. I headed straight for the shadowy depths of the Olympic Peninsula. The Queets River valley to be exact.
The Queets valley was added to the Olympic National Park in 1953. It is a relatively narrow finger of the park that follows the river nearly to it’s mouth at the Pacific Ocean. Once in the valley’s lush green confines I scarcely remembered the acres of clear cut I had to drive through to get there. Because this valley is not famous like the Hoh Rainforest, or tourist friendly like Lake Quinault there were few other campers. This was the place Michael and I were trying to reach last December in search of a giant sitka spruce. One wrong turn and we never made it.
Well, I made it and set up camp just meters from the 400 year old giant Sitka spruce. My little human cocoon of manufactured goods seemed so out of place, yet I felt immediately at home there, even after night fell with a darkness so thick I could not see my hand six inches in front of my face. My flashlight did little to pierce the hallucinatory blackness, but my customary shot of scotch helped immensely. The river’s sputters and tuts were all I could hear, masking sounds I might not want to hear. So I slept soundly, cougars and bears far from my roving imagination.
The first morning I hiked up the valley after fording the chilly rapids where the Sams River enters the Queets. I passed through groves of old growth Sitka spruce, Douglas firs and western hemlocks. The trail was obviously rarely used so the sense of truly entering wilderness was elating. Yet European weeds abounded. Buttercup, dock and, yes, white clover were everywhere. No, I did not find any with four leaves, though I did find a four-leafed oxalis.

Native flowers, like this tooth-leafed monkey flower (Mimulus dentatus), though less frequent than the dandelions, were still blooming in abundance.
Therapeutic breezes sloughing off the glaciers of nearby Mount Olympus (not the one in Greece) made the hiking comfortable. There was very little climbing,too. The Queets river is rather unusual for a large river, flowing through a relatively low-gradient, heavily forested valley. So my morning hike turned into a 12 mile sojourn, as I was urged on not only by the ease of going but by the formidable giant trees, toads, fungus and the incredible and muffling moss.

I was rewarded with a sunny beach and a warm pool. I stripped and dove in. I lied in the black sand mounded behind a log jam and took a sunny little summer vacation after all.

It is hard to write about the grotesque beauty of the rain forest. It is at once spellbindingly horrific and at others as whimsical as a fairy tale. The moss distorts and animates everything it grows on. Whether you imagine bears or poodles is up to you. Me, I saw nothing but moss. I had my hand lens out and looked closer than I ever looked at moss. I was reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Gathering Moss and her vivid and passionate description of mosses and their ways had inspired me to take a closer look. I will never see moss the same way again.

The temperate rain forest of the Pacific Northwest is not all moss and giant conifers. It breaks into meadows, thickets of salmon berries, groves of maples and shade dappled "lawns". So parklike at points to pull the word "garden" to the tip of my pencil.

The next day I stayed closer to camp, though the visual cacophony of the forest was no lesser there. This was no garden. This cacophonous green life form seemed almost alien, yet never disquieting. Actually quite quieting. Partially because I could not control it. I didn’t need to. My eyes are always so busy in the garden's I make and tend, contriving interest, discerning, editing, enquiring. In the forest nothing was in question. Everything stood it’s ground ...

or toppled,

but never stopped. Every leaf, twig, trunk just fell back into the whole, became covered with moss the nursery of the future forest.

I followed elk trails and creek beds deeper in. The air remained still and humid while above the canopy creaked and popped with coastal winds. I felt safe here. Never alone, but part.

Never alone because there were always slugs. Or robins which seemed to follow me. Was I stirring up bugs? Elks coughed and whistled in the thickets. Only one showed a flank and an eye. A Douglas squirrel chattered and blamed me. Was he the same one who bombed my tent at 6 a.m. with green spruce cones?

I sought out meaning in the details not able to comprehend magnificent aliveness of the whole.

And when I tired of the green cacophony I would walk down to the river, where the water sculpted rock and gravel bars. I lied in the late August sun the aqua gurgling along the rocks a nap time lull-a-bye. I rested and swam as if I were on a real vacation.
Until I had to leave.
I was reluctant to drive out that afternoon. I was just settling into the beauty of the old growth.

But the world and it’s ways waited for me.

VACANCY

2010-08-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

A long overdue escape to the woods is underway. Please follow these links to my column The Story of Plants: Hellebores : and Sitka Spruce

LUCKY YOU

2010-08-04T19:04:00.001-07:00

I know I was bragging a bit about my ability to find 4-leafed clovers - I actually found a 5-leafed clover this week along with a few more 4-leafed ones - but would you believe there is a guy in Alaska who has collected over 111,060 4-leafed clovers since 1999. Now ther's some luck!
And in Japan some one found a clover with 18 leaflets. I don't know if the luck is multiplied by the number of leaflets, or the rarity of the find but Shigeo Obara ended up in the Guinness Book of World Records. Not bad luck, I'd venture.
I know most of you aren't that lucky. Or obsessive/compulsive enough to scan every clover patch you encounter.
So there is always Marsilea mutica, the water clover fern. Pictured above is this lovely floating fern from Australia. If your not lucky enough to find it at your local pond supply store you can always find this purple 4-leafed version of the very common white clover.
You won't have to look to hard or long to find a 4-leafed clover in your garden then.
And it really does make you feel lucky.

( Trifolium repens 'Purpurascens Quadrifolium')

A LUCKY WEEDER

2010-07-24T13:47:00.000-07:00

Last week when I was in the garden of my client who envies my weeding career, I held up a big handful of morning glory freshly yanked from a shrub. I held it high like a victor and cried out “ Morning glory; your favorite.”
She laughed and lamented, “I wish my favorites grew like that.”
I couldn’t help but venture, “Then we’d be pulling our favorites out like weeds,too.”
“I guess so,” she conceded and left me to the task at hand.
I guess I am lucky to include some weeds among my favorite plants. Actually I could say one of my favorite plants is a weed. No, not dandelions, though I do love dandelions. But clover.
Not just the gorgeous annual crimson clover (Trifolium incarnatum) [see May 11 post] which I planted as a cover crop last fall, but the ubiquitous white clover (T. repens). I even saw it at the base of the post holding the sign announcing I was entering the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, like us humans it knows no bounds. That’s not necessarily why I like it, but I don’t have a clear answer. Certainly nostalgia plays a role. Nostalgia for a time when I didn’t know a weed from a rose. Nostalgia for summer days lying on the lawn tying clover flowers into chains and wearing them as crowns. Or lying on the lawn snatching clover heads from honeybees and eating them imagining myself a goat, or in more exotic moods a gnu. Then my step-father moved in and banished the clover from the lawn with a few graceful sweeps of weed and feed. It seems my weedy youth and honeyed innocence vanished then too. Maybe it is this sense of innocence which clover revives in this old goat that makes it so dear. Certainly the moniker “weed” implies anything but innocence. And I try not to see them as weeds even though weeds they are and pull I must.
Though as I grow old, more philosophical and less religious I can’t help but note the some sort of magical religious quality to the three leaves ( tri-folium) of the little clover. Considered a plant of Venus in earlier times it was a token of hope, later the leaves were considered to represent the Holy Trinity. And the luck afforded to those, usually in the form of happiness, who found a 4-leafed clover is legendary. And to be “in the clover” a state of abundance. I’m sure to early people having a field of nutritious clover meant more milk and fatter calves and thus a sense of felicity.
I’m happy to be living in the country where clover grows unchecked and is the least of our weedy worries. On our little 7 acres we have 5 species of Trifolium, none of which are native. Arthur Lee Jacobsen, in his book Wild Plants of Greater Seattle rues the loss of native clovers. He estimates there were about 8 native species of Trifolium in the area before the introduction of European species, both deliberately and accidentally. Both red clover (T. pratense) and white clover ( T. repens) were most certainly introduced as fodder and honey crops and are still used to this day for that purpose. The tiny and noxious little hop-clover ( T. dubium) and large hop-clover ( T. campestre) and the pretty and less invasive rabbitfoot clover (T. arvense) were more than likely introduced in hay that was used as ballast in ships arriving from Europe. Like us they are here to stay.
Of the over 300 species of clover world wide, there are according to Hitchcock and Cronquist in their Flora of the Pacific Northwest around 40 species and varieties, both native and introduced here. When I talk about clover I am talking about the genus Trifolium, there are many other legumes loosely referred to as “clover”, which are not true clovers. A few of those have made it onto our property, too.
It is hard to find anyone recommending clovers for the garden though. Bob Lilly recommends 4 in Perennials: The Gardener’s Reference. Of these the only one I’ve seen readily available is the purple 4-leafed clover ( T. repens “Purpurascens Quadrifolium”).
I wonder how much luck can be plucked from a clover that has only 4-leaflets on every leaf? I have no doubt though that I have inherited the 4-leafed clover gene from my grandmother, who I can still see standing in a clover studded lawn casting her gaze like a rotary sprinkler then diving in to snatch a treasure. Her Bible was cluttered with the pressed leaves and she would often include them in cards especially Get Well cards. This year I have found about ten in our little 100 square feet of white clover. It must be the weeders eye that can scan all that green and select just one leaf, one exceptional and lucky leaf from the many. I guess all the weeding I do is paying off in 4-leafed happiness. I certainly know I’m lucky enough to have one of my favorite plants growing just about everywhere I go.
Here are a few from the valley:

Alsike clover (T. hybridum) once considered a hybrid of red and white clover.

Red clover (T. praetense) seems purple to me. It grows right along the black top of our road, never wilting, even on the hottest days.

Little-hop clover (T. dubium) is easy enough to over look in the vast matirx of weeds here.

White clover ( T. repens) often has leaves with “halos” which I find remarkably beautiful.

In “Green Ice”, a selection of white clover growing in my friend Jon’s garden, the halo extends to the edge of the leaves creating a silvery aura.

Hungarian clover ( T. pannonicum) is one of the few ornamental clovers I’ve bought. It’s large ivory flower heads and well behaved manner have charmed me for years.

White sweet-clover (Melilotus albus), not a true clover, seeded into out garden for the first time this year. If it wasn’t a weed I’d bet it would be in more gardens. Statuesque and long blooming, it is a real beauty.

Rabbitsfoot clover (T. arvense) forms smoky mounds along the side of the highways this time of year. Another one I dare not plant but can’t help but admire.

Need I say more? It’s beautiful.

"WEEDING"

2010-07-11T09:03:00.001-07:00

A few days ago an envying client said to me, “ How nice to weed all day and let your mind wander.”
I had just been weeding for hours, tiring of the tape-loop of worried and complaining thoughts circling in my head like a caged hamster on his wheel. I smiled though, not letting on. I’m sure if she had to do the rounds of her clients and then go home to weed she might have a different idea about this mindless task. I can agree with her that there is something delightfully mindless about weeding. But after an hour or two. A day or two. A week or two mindlessness becomes a mind-numbing bore.
When I start feeling this way, it invariably happens each July, I know it’s time to pack up and head to the mountains and my favorite garden Tucquala Meadows where I don’t need to weed. Unless you considered taking snapshots of wildflowers “weeding”.
There is something about the careful observation of a wildflower that is the antithesis of weeding. Here’s a sampler of what I saw:

Rosy twisted stalk ( Streptopus lanceolatus var curvipes )

Redwood violet ( Viola sempervirens )

Broadleafed mimner's lettuce ( Claytonia cordifolia )

Star Solomon's Seal ( Maianthemum stellatum )

Mountain strawberry ( Fragaria virginiana )

Western meadow rue ( Thalictrum occidentale )

Bunchberry ( Cornus unalaschkensis )

Tall bluebells ( Mertensia paniculata )

Mountain Heliotrope ( Valeriana sitchensis )

Checker lily ( Fritillaria affinis )

Western bistort ( Polygonum bistortoides )

Spreading phlox ( Phlox diffusa )

Western dog violet ( Viola adunca )

Bog candle ( Platanthera dilatata var. dilatata )

Coastal larkspur ( Delphinium menziesii )

GETTING THERE

2010-07-01T19:42:00.001-07:00

As I leave the rain washed valley, sliding in my sleepiness across the narrow black top road, realizing that “getting there” isn’t half as soulful as “being there”, I begin to wonder where the hell I’m getting to. It seems I’ve been in constant motion since March, some would say since I left the womb.

I’m always trying to get somewhere. To work. Back home. To the desert. To the forest. To a comfortable place in my work weary body. To a peaceful place in my mind. Today I leave the valley road and join the many on their way to work, as I follow the highway to a freeway, the freeway to a highway, joining the great swarm at ever higher speeds.
Where is the “there” we’re all getting to?

Is it the “happy place” that Ellen jokes about?

We are promised the pursuit of happiness in this country. Not happiness itself. Could you imagine the chaos on Capitol Hill if they were trying to make us happy? All they need to do is provide the means for the pursuit of happiness. Well, this morning, a rainy Thursday morning, I’m already going well over the speed limit. Other drivers whizz by me, in hot pursuit, like cops to the scene of the crime, burning up these means.

I’m on my way to work. I am happy to be a gardener, even on this cold and rainy first day of July. Since I’ve stopped asking the question: When will summer get here? It has freed up my mind to ask even bigger questions like “ Where the hell are we all getting to?” Or at least “Where the hell am I trying to get to?”

I’m on my way to a garden. I guess I took Joni Mitchell seriously when she sang, ‘We got get ourselves back to the garden.” But I might have missed the point. Maybe too these truck loads of logs will end up in a garden, as fences, decks and furniture.
These palettes of bagged potting soil and mulch are, after taking a ride to Home Depot, and then a car ride, on they’re way to a garden, too.

I don’t think that is what Ms Mitchell had in mind when she sang about the garden.

Each week when I drive by this little house with the big “PSYCHIC” sign, I want to stop and ask her “Where the hell am I getting to?” But there is no time to stop. I’m on my way to work. To a little bit of faux paradise at the and of another country road. I will spend my day compulsively trying to get to the perfect garden, but rarely enjoying it’s present perfection. I guess that’s my job finding the flaws and correcting them.
And then driving home.

In the dry and womb like warmth of my green truck riding down the split the black top makes through the green world I realize I better get while the getting is good.

BURNED OUT

2010-06-24T19:18:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago when I was all rapturous about red, when the crimson clover was flowing down the banks of our critter pad, we had are friend Theo Nestor and her boyfriend, Geof over for lunch. It was a predictably mis-predicted Sunday. The 70 degrees, the very sunshine they had promised did not appear. Actually it rained and it was cold-ish, but we ate outside anyway under an umbrella and toured our muddy 6 acres in boots. This was our spring. Always sunshine on the way, always another cloud in the way. I tried to regain my sense of wonder in these sodden days by focusing on red flowers.
But our friend Theo saw nothing but green when she was here.
As we walked her and Geof around the farm showing off our horticultural prowess Theo’s response was simply, “It’s so green!” I think she would approve an exclamation point in this case. The she repeated herself, “It’s so green!” with yet another exclamation point. And repeated it again, “It’s so green!” Stating and restating the obvious is not usually Theo’s manner. Her chant had even Michael and I seeing green for a change. We had become inured to green as it crept into our lives daily, seemingly in droplets. I took Theo’s emphatic “It’s so green!” for us to realized, yes, our world was “ So green!”
The red clover has burned out since then and the sun has returned though standing water here and there is evidence of the inordanently wet spring we’ve had.

But the green has stayed, we’re in the Evergreen State after all. So much green it is near impossible to appreciate. We needed a city person to show us how rich in green we are. The other day as the sun broke and I walked down the road I saw a rainbow and I saw it’s end. It landed in the middle of a green field. There was no pot of gold only rich lush loam with a thick pelt of green.
I have a friend who says he has golden handcuffs, a job he doesn’t love but that pays too well to quit. I can’t say I have golden handcuffs, but I certainly have green ones. I cannot stop planting. I am a slave to this compulsion I call a profession. No more so than this week in which I am feeling as burned out on gardening as the crimson clover is on red. And still there is, outside my normal 40 hour work week of gardening, hours of planting at the farm yet to do. We don’t even have the corn in yet. I know it’s late and west of the Cascades is hardly Iowa but each year I have to try. This year it is ‘Quickie’. Territorial Seed says it will have edible cobs 64 days after planting. I hope they’re better prognosticators than the meteorologists around here. I can already see the pot of water boiling on August 20th.
I don’t want to make too much of it, but why did someone have to show me green. I eat, breath and live green. I am so attached to green I can’t even see the umbilical cord. So I’m making an effort not to ignore green, no matter how many orange flowers our ‘Royal Sunset’ rose puts out this summer. No matter how many blueberries load down our bushes this year. No matter how often I look off to the mountain top to see if there is still a trace of snow. I will try my hardest not to miss all the green.

I wonder if you will too?

A SECRET

2010-06-13T08:50:00.000-07:00

It is no secret that Washington State, famous for rain and moss draped coniferous forests, is two-thirds desert. The Cascade Range keeps all that rain close to the coast, the inland part of the state remains incredibly dry and sunny most of the time. That’s why Michael and I went there last weekend to escape the the torrential rains at home, besides the fields are so mucky we couldn’t even plant if we wanted to.

This is what we saw:

SEEING RED

2010-05-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

The other day I was stopped at a red light, behind a red Cadillac plastered with angry bumper stickers. I seemed funny to me that the hot-headed driver would cover all that shiny candy apple enamel with what was on his mind. But people want to be heard.
Me, too.
So here I am plastering what’s on my mind on the shiny screen of your laptop.
The only thing on my mind these days is red. I love red. It’s my favorite color. Red. Since I can remember it’s been red. Certainly there’s been flirtations with yellow, then orange. I couldn’t stay far from red for long. So I’m back to red and I’m sticking to it.
Yes, I’m a hot-head, too.
And nothing gets my dander up more than the abuse of red. I mean the theft of red by the Right. It doesn’t seem that long ago that the color red represented the left, the far left. Our enemies, the commies. I had no problem with them using my favorite color for their flag because my leanings were decidedly left.
But I don’t understand when or why the Right absconded with red. I have a vague memory of Nancy Reagan appearing in red after the “Evil Empire” fell. I have a bigger and vaguer memory of it liberating red from the left and starting a fashion trend. Like the scalps of fallen settlers red became a sign of some sort of victory, the blood of our bloodless victory. I think that’s when I started wearing blue.
But I still love red. So I will try no to think about my favorite color being stolen, too much. After all, it’s a free country. And all evidence points to the fact that red belongs to no one.
Not even me, a red lover.
Not even the crimson clover (Trifolium incarnatum) which is possessed by red and raving swarms of bees, not hot-headed, but happy and busy.

I

TIME AND MATERIALS

2010-05-15T14:18:00.000-07:00

“ Time waits for no one,” it is said, or at least sung.
I like to imagine Time at the bus stop, lighting one more cigarette, impatiently looking up the street for the bus which is not necessarily late but which keeps Time waiting. I guess it’s a rather grim image of Time to hold, considering I am that beleaguered bus, stuck in traffic, loaded with passengers, just ever so slightly late on all accounts.
“ But late, goddamn it. Late.”
Maybe I should imagine Time as a bookish girl at the same bus stop,reading a very thick Russian novel, lost in her reading, totally forgetting about the bus or waiting. Maybe that’s what Mick Jagger meant.
Time doesn’t wait because it don’t need to; it’s time.
It’s only me turning time into a character waiting for a bus.
Turning it into a commodity to be spent, used. Doled out for this or that. As something to run out of, or want more of.
“I wish I had more time.”
But it’s May . And I have very little time it seems. Every moment seems so preciously usable. Time has boiled down to days, hours, minutes in which to get things done.Time has become as material as the flats of annuals to be planted, the bags of fertilizer to be spread and the packets of seeds to be sown. Time is the miles travelled, the hours slept, the days worked.
It seems a bit abusive to whittle grandiose time down to packets, bags and flats. To measure it, dole it out. To slice it and dice it until there isn’t a moment to spare. It’s not Time that’s in a rush. Time’s not impatient; I am. I am always trying to be 10 steps ahead of myself. I think I need to be this time of year. But do I?
That’s why I decided to sit in my parked truck and sing:
“ Ti-i-i-ime is on my side.
Yes, it is.”

ARIZONA:CODA

2010-04-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

Michael and I left our friends and our desert retreat behind and drove back to the hot valley of Phoenix from the northern reaches of the Sonoran desert last Monday. Some how we had a brief few hours before our take off in Phoenix. And Phoenix like London coincidentally has their botanical garden near the airport. It was hot with no cool pools to plunge into to. But we had plunged forward in time. The prickly pears that were only in green bud up north were in full bloom here and the early ephemerals were already fading under the heat of the blazing sun.

I, hopefully not erringly, have decided this must be Agave titanota, not a Sonoran native but prevalent in the Phoenix landscape. As you can see with Michael , my 6 foot 2 measuring rod that that is one impressive inflorescence.

On the Desert Wildflower Loop there was an endless number of things in bloom, as colorful as a summer garden here.

These impressively simple shade house were built for cactus. Yes, there are cactus that need shade.

Sorry I did catch the name on this cactus as beautiful in new thorn and bud as any blooming cactus.

This was the prickly pear (Opuntia phaeacantha var. discata) we only saw in bud farther north.

The hot red young thorns of an organ pipe cactus (Cereus thurberi).

The dramatically thorny diamond cholla (Opuntia ramosissima).

Few of my pictures turned out of the dramatically architectural new entry gardens at the Desert Botanical Garden, the only botanical garden in the world to be devoted solely to desert plants. Though this shot of Dale Chihuly’s glass agaves gives you an idea of what I am talking about. If you’re there don’t fail to visit this garden. It has gone through spectacular developments since I was there 15 years ago. I will not fail to visit it each time I go to Phoenix. Even if I only have a few rushed hours like we did this time.

SECRET WATERS

2010-04-24T12:18:00.000-07:00

We were led deeper into the desert canyon. Night had fallen halfway through our hike in, a newly crescent moon had little power to dispel the deep natural darkness, far from city glow. We had meandered back and forth across the wide canyon bottom, crisscrossing the river that meandered, too, among the boulders, sand flats and rock bars.
Luckily we were being led by friends, people we trusted, who knew the place. It was their secret place. Far from civilization, a jet crossing the sky with the falling stars was forsaken and miniscule. We set up our primitive camp in the dark. Lit a fire that became our catacomb of light, ate burritos, drank whisky and smoked cigarettes. Things that friends would do on a dark night in the desert, while trying to pull constellations from the awe inspiring endlessness.
We slept like angels, or “rocks “ as one of us said the next morning.
I was the first to wake, as I often am. The sun was not yet visible but it’s light erased the stars and their encompassing blackness, brushed our camp with visibility. The air was cool so I lied in my sleeping bag, though my eyes sprung great distances, finally able to fill the darkness with information.
We were in the Sonoran desert alright, in the golden haze of brittle bush (Encelia farinosa) covering the surrounding bluffs stood emblematic saguaros (Carnegiea gigantea). The air was sweet and resinous from creosote bush (Larrea tridentata). The old stone mountains, fallen mountains, falling mountains, enfolded the river. Granite laced with quartz and mica, bubbly scoria in red and black, and slick basalt trundled down in slabs, chunks and granules.

The river formed a pea green pool before our soft sandy camp. Willows, once again verdant, leaving a wet winter and voracious floods behind them, clung to the banks at crazy angles. Willows appearing so tender against the prickly backdrop of teddy bear cholla, prickly pear and ocotillo. Out of place willows, right at home on this river bank in the depths of the desert.
I was shocked by how stark the desert isn’t.
Of course the Sonoran desert is the wettest desert on earth. And during these few precious April days we spent lolling in the chilly current or napping naked on sun warmed rocks, it was obvious.

I scribbled notes about the water, the mystery of water. Water bubbling up from hidden springs, water draining from distant snowy mountains. Water always in movement, taking as well as giving as it worked its eroding way, constantly rubbing the canyon smoother and smoother. Desert water, oases, precious water, the same element I often begrudge at home, dread even during the flood season. I will not share these notes grasping at thoughts that tried to turn up a profundity; it would destroy a secret. Besides my wonder was sun-stroked and lazy, took more pleasure in the company of friends than any earnest thinking. Took pleasure in chilly dips, and hot rocks.
Took pleasure in wildflowers...
The desert was in bloom, generously, bee-buzzingly in bloom. This, more like our summer, was someone’s spring, a desert spring warm enough for swimming and sleeping under the stars with no fear of rain or damp morning fogs. Yet absolutely and floriferously spring. Tickling both the poet and the botanist in me. I become acquisitive, need to see every flower, learn it’s name. I was happy this trip to add many new plants to my list, new genera, new species, even a new family.

Prostrate Ratany (Krameria lanceolata), not only is this a new genus for me it is also a new family of plants, the small one genus family of Krameriaceae. This genus is semi-parasitic, drawing water from the roots of other plants, a rather sinister strategy for survival in this arid ecosystem where all adaptations are about getting and conserving water.

This rambling milkweed (Sarcostemma hirtellum)was a little more familiar, I had assumed it was an Asclepias, but it is a new genus for me in the milkweed family.

I am still learning the cacti, this barrel cactus ( Ferrocactus cylindraceus) is just a juvenile about the size of a soft ball. They can reach up to 11 feet.

This strange little flower which which lure flies with a foetid sent and captures and holds them for the night to make sure they cover with pollen is Watson’s dutchmann’s pipe (Aristolochia watsonii)

One of my favorite desert succulents dudleya (Dudleya saxosa) is a variable species. This is the first time I’d seen one with pale lemon flowers with white stripes.

Bladder sage (Salazaria mexicana) is a new genus for me. You can see how it gets its name from the ballooning seed pods.

Cactus have some of the most spectacular flowers in the desert. This is the small but glorious strawberry hedgehog cactus (Echinocereus engelmannii), named not for the strawberry pink flowers but for the strawberry like sweet fruits that follow.

Prickly pear (Opuntia sp.) still waiting to bloom. I could have stayed another week, or month if necessary.

Even if the sinuous algae was beginning to choke this puddle of a river being sopped up by willows and evaporated by an ever hotter sun, I could have stayed. We all could have stayed, sleeping under the stars, finding midday shade for naps, diving into the deep cool pools and climbing out onto the hot rocks until the waters had secreted themselves again into the arid appearance of the desert.

Snowbirds

2010-04-17T19:46:00.000-07:00

I’m off again.
To Arizona this time, with Michael.
They call us “snowbirds” there, even though we’ve seen no snow here this year.
I’m taking this opportunity to post one more photo from Elba, that reminds me a bit of snow,and of birds.

This beautiful flower is a roadside weed. I saw it on strada dei Mulini, a dirt road that leads down from Rio nell’Elba to Rio Marina. The water mills are ruins now which makes the walk rather romantic, even when alone. Of course in this altered state, first sunny day of spring, Italian ruins, I fell head over heels in love with this weed. I couldn’t even find it in any wildflower books of the island or the mediterranean. It wasn’t until I stumbled on it accidentally in an English gardening magazine touting weedy annuals for easy gardening that I found out this lacy beauty was Orlaya grandiflora, or white lace flower. With all my preoccupation with green and yellow. I was startled by the white.

I was as startled by this other weed on the mill road, Borage (Borago officinalis). I know no blue as celestial. No matter how many times I see these flowers I can’t help but stop, and I’m a hard one to stop.

LA PRIMAVERA:CODA

2010-04-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

I had a dreadfully long lay over in London. Or maybe I should say more cheerfully, “My trip had a coda.”
Coda is the italian word for tail. In musical terms, as the dictionary says, “It is a more or less independent passage, at the end of a composition, introduced to bring it to a satisfactory close.” It seemed my trip ended on that sunny Good Friday in the garden of the school of Philosophy at the University of Pisa.
Or did it?
There was that long lay over in London. Actually Richmond outside of London. Just enough time to catch a quick sleep in a cheap hotel and make a visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The clouds broke as if on command after days of rain, as I was told. So I rushed off to Kew as soon as I could. Spring was poised here between the first shy breaths it was taking in Berlin and the lushness that had already washed over Italy. Even in those rushed few hours I had at Kew spring seemed to advance and retreat, as it does, warming then chilling me. But mostly it was the big bold clouds of April threatening those proverbial showers, then releasing just enough sunlight to make it a perfect day, for a minute or two.
Kew is fantastic for someone like me who is part gardener and part botanist. It is a scientific collection in which organization takes precedence over aesthetics. But what beautiful organization. I could have spent days. I was nearly running and barely covered a third of the 300 acres and certainly only had a glimpse of the over 20,000 plants there.

I tried to squeeze as much out of my time as possible. Truly ran at times to get from one point of interest to another. I must have appeared a fool. An April fool trying to capture everything in mere hours, when probably what would have been best would have been to lie down in the damp grass and enjoy the glorious sprawl of daffodils. But I was still in hot pursuit of la primavera, the first green, that green tinged with yellow. Or is it truly yellow on it’s way to becoming green? I’ll never know at this rate.
I did slow at times, was even stopped.

And not always by yellow. But blue. This overwhelmingly blue lawn of Byzantine squill (Scilla amoena), shimmers like a lake before the temperate greenhouses .

And the Temperate House. There is something so palatial about Kew, it is the Royal Botanic Garden after all.

But Kew so firmly in the past also moves forward. Is modern as much as historical. The new Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art is as minimal as the Temperate House is excessive.

The space-age Davies Alpine House arches up out of the ground like a huge jelly fish, strangely displaced and strangely beautiful.

In this house absolutely flagrant with potted bulbs, I was also stopped by my favorite yellow. The faint butter yellow informed by green of this gorgeous cretian arum (Arum creticum).

By the time I was rushing toward the exit and my flight home, a shimmer of honest sun light fell over the garden. The luster of spring fell on me, too, as I smiled at total strangers who, though English, were not shy to smile back.
A happy ending; a wagging tail on a wonderful trip.

LA PRIMAVERA

2010-04-05T12:14:00.000-07:00

I had anticipated the first day of spring in Italy to be sunny. So I had planned a hike across the mountain tops of eastern Elba to take in the views and the lushness of spring after a wet winter.
But the sirocco, the strong winds rising in the Sahara and traveling northward across the mediterranean, obscured views and saturated everything. I began to wonder why I had come such a long way to seek out spring, la primavera, which I carelessly translate from the Italian as first green, when already at home in the Pacific Northwest spring was racing forward at an unusually fast tempo. Nearly as fast as the winds off the Mediterranean that nearly blew me from the peaks with gale force. I had imagined a light galavanting stride through flowers and bird song as I searched for this first green.
There was plenty of green. Elba is a lot like the Northwest, evergreen. The dull dark green of conifers here is the dull dark green of lentisco (Pistacia lentiscus), laurustinus (Viburnum tinus) and rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) there. What I was expecting were those acid greens that drove van Gogh wild, like the scirocco which eventually drove him mad. Maybe I had a bit of him in my blood that day, because despite it being Sunday, and me still fatigued from jet lag I insisted on making a long hike. A hike that was a constant fight against the wet winds. A vista-less hike, no grand and picturesque views to the Tyrrhenian sea or Corsica. The fog, so unlike the lackadaisical fog that slumps into the valley here at the farm, was driven by the winds, forced me to trust a trail that I could only read to about 20 feet in front of me. I did not look back as the same wind and fog erased where I had stood moments before isolating me in a soaking wet present. The birds I encountered screeched instead of sang as I frightened them from their hiding places in the macchia; they flew in short low bursts to escape me and the winds. Any flowers I saw were not in a state of triumph, but declined recognition by hiding their faces.

Star anemones (Anemone hortensis) cowered against the wet wind.

And the only bit of sunshine was the bright circular presence of lichens on the stones. But yet I remained happy. It was the first day of spring despite the weather. I know to expect nothing from spring even if I had wished otherwise. Spring is capricious, down right irresponsible. A tease. But I would not let this cold shoulder dampen my spirit in the quest for the first true green.
Yet that day there was no trace of first green, of that lovely green infused with yellow. After all that is what I am really waiting for, yellow. In Wisconsin, where I grew up, we were actually starving for green, any green, even the green of weeds, by the time March rolled around. But when one lives in an evergreen place, whether the Pacific Northwest or the Island of Elba, I think the hunger is truly for yellow. Whether it is the yellow which vivifies green, or the raw primal dandelion yellow so prevalent in spring is irrelevant. There is something defiant about yellow. Yellow won’t take “No” for an answer.

Even the cemetery cannot not sulk or haunt when yellow overtakes it. That’s why I think that yellow is the color of spring. I know, I know, there will be many colors that come and go as spring traces its yearly course through April, May and June. But at the end of March, even in Italy it is yellow that is the triumph over winter. It is the force that breaks spring through.

It appears in macerone, what we call alexanders,(Symrnium olusatrum),

and in the sunny yet invasive Bermuda sorrel (Oxalis pes-caprae)

or the lovely early spider orchid (Ophyrus sphegodes).

Even if it is only dandelions, or sow thistle (Sonchus oleraceus) I love yellow this time of year.
My time on Elba went so fast, as if the winds had blown me on and once again I found myself in Pisa for a few days. Someday I’ll need to write about Pisa, I have spent more time there than is necessary for most, those jumping off of trains and buses for a glimpse of her leaning tower. This has forced me below her surface, has helped me find her heart beat. I am a hybrid here, part tourist, part guest. A friend and a foreigner. Like a migratory bird.
And then I flew.

I flew to Florence, actually I took the train. My impatience got the best of me and I bagged the lines at the Uffizi once again. It was sunny, the touristic squalor of Florence was disheartening, so I went and stood on a bridge over the Arno. If I would once again miss Leonardo’s drawings I could at least watch the waters that he watched. Those gray green waters rushed with an urgency. Spring’s urgency. Then I snuck off to Giardino Bardini, hoping no tourists would follow. And they hadn’t. I had the place to myself. There were swallows, swallows swallows; sparrows, sparrows, sparrows. And one lonely dove, or at least she sang that way. I sat in the grass polka-dotted with dandelions and looked into the valley below. The valley filled with triumphant Palm Sunday church bells, then emptied again, taking my breath away.

I wandered on to Giardini Boboli. After too many visits in winter to this heavily clipped and statue laden garden, it was a revelation to visit in spring. I was taken by the nearly vertical bulb pocked meadows. When I finally met up with my friend and fellow gardener Alessandro Tombelli it was already late in the afternoon. We headed out for a walk in the hills around Florence and to visit Gallileo’s villa which was only open for the day. Once again a line of tourists beyond imagining. So we paused and in that pause, lighted on a wall. There I found the green I was looking for in the olive orchards surrounding the villa. So vivid it made the cypresses look black and the olives gray. So vivid as to electrify. I just wanted to stare, as I did, as if I were drinking. As if I had thirsted and could finally drink. It was a speechless satisfaction nothing could match. Green, new, completely new green. La Primavera!

Spring seemed suddenly in a rush. The sun roused birds, flowers and humans, which buzzed as plentifully as bees around the city. The next day I climbed the hill, actually the bus climbed I just sat, up to Villa Gamberaia. You think I would have been satisfied with having found that virtuous green the day before. But still the desire to know this first green informed my looking. My eyes scanned thirstily, now that I had drunk, my thirst was not slaked but strengthened, took on bestial breadth. I new at the end of the day I would be leaving the sunny south and flying north, not of my own accord but in a jet, to Berlin, where rumor had it winter was still lingering.

Luckily the tired old boxwoods were blushing like giggly school girls in the water parterre at Villa Gamberaia. Not blushing a fleshy rosy pink, but blushing a virtuous yellow green. All the immaculately carved shapes of the garden were blurred with the new growth. They went fuzzy like chicks, or me when my hair won’t lay right. What could have been austere became jolly under the influence of new growth.

I couldn’t help but smile the whole time I was in this perfectly proportioned garden. I even rested there in the warm shade near a damp grotto. For a few moments I forgot my travel plans, I forgot I had to return to the valley city below to catch a train in a few hours. Forgot about eating lunch, about writing or taking pictures. Surely this was created to be a pleasure garden, and what a pleasure it was to forget all the traveling I had ahead of me, and to just sit and inhale green.

But the alarm went off, the dream was broken. It was time to head back down the hill toward the train that would take me to Milan, and the jet to Berlin and possibly winter. Yet like the bad tourist I was becoming I could not leave Florence without cramming in one more thing. Il Orto Botanico del Universita degli Studi di Firenze. Florence’s little botanical garden founded in 1545, the third oldest in the world, after Pisa’s and Padua’s gardens, is a Renaissance jewel, besides being the only garden where I’ve seen poison ivy ( Toxicodendron radicans) deliberately cultivated. The great renaissance order of the garden lied under a patina of decline, yet trees planted centuries ago lent venerability. All in all my rushed visit was a delight. I found the botanical name for macerone in the well labeled collection of edible plants. This is why I love botanical gardens; collections and sign-age. They are really living books. Voluminous encyclopedias of living information. Shamefully I had just flipped through the pages of this one, then rushed off to catch the train to Milan.
And the flight to Berlin.
BERLIN.
I don’t know how to write about Berlin. It’s magnificence, it’s vivaciousness bounds ahead of my words. It’s so young for an old city. When I first visited in 1984 West Berlin was an island in communist territory. Now Berlin was set free. Black girls, together with Chinese girls and German girls break-danced on the steps of the Reichstag. Children ran through the powerful sobriety of the Jewish Holocaust Memorial with a glee that shocked me. Their laughter I hoped rose like prayers of forgiveness. Their laughter was yellow ringing in the the gray catacombs of shame and sorrow. The sound rang fresh as rivulets off the recently melted snow, feeding a swollen Spree, Berlin’s river. Despite the rumors I heard, spring was in the air and coming out of the ground. The miracle of air travel is not only that one transverses vast amounts of space quickly, but that one also travels through time. I had flown backward in time to early spring which was already gone from Italy, and even Seattle, which I had left weeks earlier.
I was starting all over. As was Berlin.

There is an incredible sense of hopefulness at the start. Otherwise why start. In Italy, especially Florence, though lovely beyond words or photos, things seemed to sag under the weight of historic importance and tourism. But in Berlin a renaissance has begun, a modern renaissance. But still I insisted on visiting the 100 year old botanical garden, the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden. Not old, I know, by Italian standards, but significant in its position as the largest botanical garden in Middle Europe and third largest in the world in collections.

You know even in the most unlikely of seasons, the snow had just fled, I needed to go out and see what’s growing. The first breaths of spring were being exhaled like a sigh of relief after a winter everyone was declaring “the worst” . I could see severe damage around the garden, but I wasn’t really looking for what winter had done, but for what spring was doing. I know spring only gets better as it turns into summer, yet I have a real love of spring’s beginning. And the defiant first flowers of spring. I couldn’t help but lay aside my yellow fetish when I came upon this crocus lawn. The squirrels had eaten all that I had planted at home, so I had missed crocus this year, until then.

As the clouds fickly stole and returned the sunshine and the warmth throughout the day it was hard not to want to cling to yellow. The stark leafless trees seemed hopelessly locked in their dormancy. Yet garish forsythias and primrose (Primula vulgaris subsp. vulgaris) refused to be daunted by the changeable weather.

As did the swamp lanterns (Lysichiton americanus), which stopped me in my tracks, the fast moving almost unstoppable tracks of a brief visitor. A migratory bird. Okay, a tourist. A tourist with so little time to enjoy it all. It was not only a dramatic joy they brought to this swampy corner of the garden, but to me a jaundiced homesickness, or was my liver tired from all the pork and alcohol I had consumed in the previous weeks? I wanted to stop each and every visitor who stopped to wonder at these exotic plants. I wanted to tell them “ This plant grows wild in my garden back home.” There I said it, home. I love to travel, but I also love to go home. The swamp lanterns would already be finished by the time I return, I knew. So I let the nostalgia flood me a little and then I rushed off to the moss collection. A botanical garden with a moss collection!

Here outside the botanical museum is the moss garden, you can step down into this basin and view the mosses at eye level. That some one thought to make these miraculous little plants so accessible for viewing I found brilliant. Yet I had to leave, there were so many other brilliant things to be seen in Berlin, like the Neues Museum, the New Museum, and I had so little time left.
I am not a travel agent and my return from Berlin to Milan than Pisa, where I would catch a jet to London and from there another to Seattle was wrought with bad timing, middle of the night layovers, and a long last day in Pisa, which I thought I had seen enough of.

But when I saw this graffiti on the wall outside the garden of the Biblioteca di Filosofia e Storia which read “Lift your eyes” I could not resist to wander into this garden I had never visited. It was Good Friday. A good friday, a warming sun shone and baked a bit of the German chill out of my bones. This garden had been renovated with a great deal of care and talent, yet was not maintained. I wondered how the landscape architect might feel. I wondered about my own anal insistence on weed free gardens as I watched the care free students move through this one, verdant with weeds. Maybe this weedy garden was the last vestige of wildness in a cityscape centuries in the making. I thought about what the graffitist said about looking up. I don’t think he meant for everyone passing by to look up into the blue skies. At least that’s not the way I see it, because when I look down and see the yellow flowers of spring, even the weed, I can’t help but quote the man whose death is celebrated on Good Friday:
“Look, all is new.”

JARDINIER SANS FRONTIERE

2010-03-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

I am too migratory to be a good gardener. Too mobile.
My friend Jon Dove, an eternal inspiration, knows how to stay put, focus his energies. He prefers to. Actually Jon has 3 gardens. His home garden which he has tended for over 24 years, his one client’s garden which he has tended 10 years and a new rental property which he has tended for about 4 years now. In the 24 years we’ve been friends I have had my hands in more gardens than I can count. I lack his stick-to-it-iveness.
I am much more nomadic. Truly of my grandfather’s genes, who was also a gardener. From his birth in Brazil he moved constantly. To Canada, to Paraguay, to the U.S. where he moved his young and growing family from Maryland to Minnesota to Texas to Wisconsin to Montana, back to Wisconsin, with side trips without family to Arizona and Washington. I’m sure I’ve missed some stops and have the order all mixed up, but you get my drift. He did slow down with age, spent his last years in Wisconsin in various trailers and trailer parks always on the verge of moving on, which he finally did. I’m sure he gave me my first understanding of impermanence.
In the garden yesterday, someone’s garden not my own, just a place I landed, I watched a flock of robins leave a dogwood in a whistling chatter, they flew over roof tops and property lines as if they didn’t exist. I flew myself with them, if only with my eyes, until they were out of sight. I realized how little these boundaried gardens appeal to me. They are merely stop overs on a flight. And if I can imagine my life ending I see it as a drop in mid-flight. Metaphorically of course, I don’t want to go down in a plane. Or die behind a mower like my friend Jon swears he will.
I am poised on a branch again. Ready to take flight. I’m heading back to Italy and il eremo di Santa Caterina. You can see in the bird’s-eye-view of the garden above the stone and chain-link boundaries there. Yet the garden is undeniably only part of a bigger picture including the mountain, the sea and the sky. This is always the gardener’s challenge to be inclusive. Most gardeners I know are actually rather reclusive, or at least enjoy a good amount of time alone, a property line marked by a fence, a hedge or a wall. It is these ideas of enclosure and inclusion I will be facing there. How to bring a broader community of gardeners, students and visitors to this place. How to represent the diverse flora of the Tuscan Archipelago in the limited space allowed. And to do it aesthetically.
I will meet with friends: artists, gardeners, botanists and even the founder, Hans Georg Berger during my travels which will bounce from Pisa to Elba to Florence and Berlin, before a short day in London on my flight home. But there is one particular friend I am looking forward to seeing again, pettirosso, a small bird the English call robin red breast, though it is more closely related to our bluebirds than our robin, which is akin to their blackbird. You know, “blackbird singing in the dead of night.”
Pettirosso doesn’t sing at night, but he gets up awfully early. The Italians call pettirosso, il amico del agricoltore, the farmer’s friend. Maybe because he wakes them. Maybe because he loves the worms and insects they turn up in their labors. When I made a longer stay at il eremo years ago. I relied on this little bird's friendship, as he followed me around the garden, searching the soil I disturbed for treats, he thanked me with the his illustrious song. Or so I imagined.
I imagine he will inspire me again to sing with every feather that allows me to take this flight. And sing joyfully.

cabbagecabbagecabage

2010-02-28T09:52:00.000-08:00

Last night, the last cabbage of the year bubbled down into a delicious curry.

It had started as a seed, as hard and round as a lead pellet, on the 7th of May last year. I started late, as did spring. The seedlings didn’t get into the ground until June 9th. A very late start for a rigorous plant that can take Spring’s changes with ease. A plant that actually benefits from the cool rain and bursts of warmth April and May offer. And sulks in the heat of July and August. Our farm is perfect for cole crops: broccoli, kale , kohlrabi, Napa, and cabbage all do very well in the deep moisture retentive soils of our late afternoon shaded field. Even in the hottest summer on record the cabbages thrived.
We must have had 120 or more heads from the small early ‘Gonzales’ to the mammoth savoy ‘Perfection Drumhead’ to the late winter lingering ‘January King’. When I was digging around in the ‘fridge for what to make for dinner, I found the last cabbage nestled into the vegetable bin among wilted green onions and some leathery lemons. I was inspired, as I often am by cabbage, to make one of my favorite dishes from Camellia Panjabi’s 50 Great Curries of India, the simple recipe which she simply calls: “cabbage with spices and tomatoes”.

My long love affair with cabbage probably started when I was an art student taking frequent train trips to Chicago from Milwaukee which passed through the kraut fields of Franksville, Wisconsin. The row after row of blue green orbs was as stunning as any Nam June Paik installation, or van Gogh painting Chicago had to offer. There was something about the way the rows peeled through my field of vision as the train sped by that was mesmerizing. But already then there was a deeper more penetrating memory an invisible memory, primal even, which had lodged cabbage so enigmatically in my mind. It is my mother’s creamed cabbage with caraway seed, a recipe that probably came from the Old Country with my grandmother. There is nothing like tender slow cooked cabbage whether it the creamy white and mellow like my mother’s, or fiery and lava red like Ms. Panjabi’s. There is also nothing like coleslaw, sauerkraut or a French potee.

But it is not out of hunger alone that I scour the cabbage section of every seed catalogue that enters the house for new cultivars or heirloom varieties. Cabbages are my roses. Their fetal roundness, they are where babies come from after all, just delight me like a ball does a dog or the full moon does a sufi.
When I woke at 4 a.m. this morning to let the black cat in, the full moon, veiled just by a hint of fog, a bone chilling , gothic fog, was already touching down on the tops of the trees lining the western bluff above the valley. It was a heavy pregnant moon. Full of expectation. A forceful moon splitting open the fist tight buds of the plums and cherries, like I split the last cabbage with the cleaver, before I shredded it and melted it by slow cooking into a delicious curry.

THE FROGS

2010-02-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

When I step out the front door it is hard to believe. February. Can this be February? A giant forsythia in full bloom. Birds singing nesting songs as if it were April. Bud scales peeling, falling; it should be snow. I am adamant in my disbelief. I insist there is something wrong.
But then I succumb, at night I succumb. To the frogs.
Their song is so loud it becomes silent. Or silencing like the huge velvet drapes in a theater absorbing the audiences’ expectant murmurs.
When you live in a swamp you feel like a member of the Addams Family. Frog song becomes seductively symphonic, as do coyote yips, or the basso profundo of the barred owls. The blinding darkness, on cloudy nights, makes your ears larger, makes your sinewy joins vibrate with song. I can not go to bed without standing in the absorbing whirr of Spring’s arrival. For a moment, or two I believe. It is too real to deny.
As I lie in bed, “Finally,” I say, still winter weary, and a bit cranky with an alder pollen headache. The invisible frogs ringing like bells, fleshy wide-eyed and leggy bells, invisible bells of the blackness. Their song dropping meticulously, their song, like a strong rain on the skylight, lulling me to sleep. Lulling me into belief.

LAZY

2010-02-16T07:09:00.000-08:00

I'm too busy to be lazy.
But that doesn't stop me form letting other people do my work.

My friend and writer Debra Prinzing and I went to my friend Jon's for tea the other weekend. Debra caught it beautifully in words and pictures. Visit her blog Shed Style to see.

SIBLING RIVALRY

2010-02-11T20:51:00.001-08:00

My brother Herby and I flew into Phoenix last Friday. He from Wisconsin, and I from Seattle. They call us “ Snowbirds” there not because of our pallid complexions but because we’re part of a huge flock of Northerners that come by the jet-loads to the Sonoran Desert each winter.
We were actually going to celebrate my sister Peggy’s birthday. Nothing auspicious, just her 61st . We missed her 60th. It’s hard to believe that she’s that old already, she’s so lively and happy and full of energy as always. And still somehow mysteriously blond, though I thought she had brown hair in her youth.
My brother and sister, although they are my siblings, are also my oldest friends. Our rivalous natures have calmed down over the years, and we focus less on what we disagree about and more on what we have in common. One of those things is a walk in the woods. So we took a walk last week in Spur Creek State Park on the edge of Tonto National Forest.
I’ve been coming to the Sonoran Desert regularly for almost 30 years now. As the planet’s wettest desert it receives 3-16 inches of rain a year, which supports nearly 2000 species plants and many animals. Still it is hard to image it as forest, though there are trees, like the yellow palo verde ( Parkinsonia microphylla) and honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa). This forest is really more famous for the emblematic saguaro cactus (Carnegeia gigantea) which towers above everything else. They lend a grandeur to the desert like conifers do to the Northwest forests.

For many years I imagined I’d become a desert denizen like my sister who fled Wisconsin as soon as she had a chance. Why I chose the absolute opposite, the rainy Pacific Northwest I begin to wonder more with age. How quickly all the little aches and pains vanished after a few days in the desert. But the sun does not always shine there either, one day during my visit the skies were absolutely leaden. It made all the plants shine. And a hard rain fell, sweetening the air, bringing flowers into bloom in mere hours. Over my 30 years of visiting the desert I have grown so familiar with this place it is like a home away from home, partly due to my sister’s generous hospitality. And partly due to my insistent curiosity they wants to get to know the desert. I take every chance I can to get out into the desert even if it is just to walk the dog through the washes dissecting the subdivision where my sister and her husband live. Pale faced and blond I feel strangely out of place there, as strange as the agaves and cactus and aloes cluttering our kitchen window sill in the grave cold north. There is a desert inside me like a little twin that never developed and when I go to the desert he lives, but briefly.
I often dream of gardening there, I can’t help but wander my sister’s subdivision re-imagining the gardens. What they can grow! I remember my first visit back in 1980, I was stunned by the palms and orange trees, and bougainvilleas. Now they all seem boring to me like rhododendrons do here. As I got deeper into the native flora I started to develop a love for jojoba (Simmondsia chinensis) and Ocotillo (Fouquieria splendens). A few years ago Michael and I visited after a very wet winter and were wowed by the desert ephemerals.

But after years of developing an amateur botanist’s appreciation of the intricate and amazing Sonoran flora, I still get floored by the exotics, especially the aloes. On the last day my sister, my brother and I went to the Phoenix Zoo. Zoos make me feel a bit queasy at times. My own claustrophobia gasping for breath at seeing animals in confinement. Certainly zoos are more sensitive than when I was a child and gorillas were behind glass in a tiled cubicle. But I noticed I began focusing on the wild birds that flew in and out of cages robbing the caged animals of their food. I also couldn’t help staring at the aloes, dramatically in bloom far from their African home. It seems less cruel to displace a plant than an animal. That’s what I like about gardening, plants are so willing to please. Though I doubt I’ll ever plant an aloe in my garden here.

With my brother now retired and my sister close to retirement, life seems as fleeting as this desert weekend. Some things like our sibling rivalries are easy to let fly in the winds of time, giving room for our love to grow. As we walked quietly, well not really, through the desert remembering our youth and teasing each other about getting old, my appreciation for our decades long relationship which endured cloudy days and sunny ones became stronger.
He said, "Even the desert will bloom."
I think he was speaking metaphorically, but I believe the desert blooms for those with their hearts open.
I'm working on it.
Happy Valentine's Day.