FALL COLOR II

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

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

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?

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

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.