HOMESICKNESS

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

THE LONG AND THE SHORT

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

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

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

Excuses

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

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.