How's your Latin?



My mother became a sort of hermit in her old age, rattling around all alone in her house in West Hartford.  When she broke her hip at age 92, however,  she reluctantly agreed to hire some help.  The agency sent an attractive young girl whose name was Virus. If germs didn't immediately come to mind, wouldn't that name be as pretty as Vera or Violet?

Isn’t Vermin as appealing as Vernon, unless of course you automatically conjure up visions of rats and cockroaches?  Words like syphilis or rebella could make pretty names if you didn’t have previous notions of their meanings.  Why isn’t rancid as nice a name as David?  Is Claudia any prettier than phobia? The names for plants can cause these same sorts of problems.  Take the name streptocarpus.  You might think that attractive houseplant could give you strep throat if you weren’t familiar with the pottted plant

above, whose common name is Cape primrose.

 . Isn’t the name Doll’s Eyes, a baneberry's seeds pictured below,  a more fun name than Actaea Alba? I rarely use Latin names for the plants I write about.  To me a name like Prunella  vulgaris doesn’t bring to mind the little purple flower we know as selfheal, It sounds like it might be the name of one of Hank’s old girlfriends.  Of course it helps if you know that the Latin word vulgaris means common in English

When translated, all those Latin names help to identify plants, but another even more important reason to know them is because they are universal, unlike the common names which vary from place to place. 
 

You may call the wildflower above with a little yellow bloom and spotted leaves a dogtooth violet.  Other folks call it the adder’s tongue.  I like to call it the trout lily because it is a lily, not a violet, and has those speckled leaves that look similar to a trout. We should all call it Erythronium americanum and there’d be no confusion at all.

What a mouthful! I much prefer the imaginative common names, but maybe I’d feel differently if I hadn’t had such a bad start with Latin. I spent my first two weeks at boarding school in the infirmary with bronchitis and when I finally got to my first Latin class I found I’d been placed in second year Latin my mistake. The teacher was convinced I was just panicked at missing the first weeks of class, and as a consequence I was four weeks behind when I got to the right class. By then I loathed Latin. 

The first botanical name I ever succeeded in remembering was Dentaria.  Its common name is toothwort and its white blooms resemble teeth.  There are two species of this wildflower, D. multifida  which translates as "many times parted," referring to the leaves,  and D. maxima which means "largest." It could really help to know Latin.

I've never managed to keep Chimaphila umbellata and Chimaphila maculata straight, two little evergreen wildflowers of the same genus. The common name for C. maculata is pipsissewa or spotted wintergreen, a summer blooming wildflower with a variegated leaf.  It turns out that maculata means spotted. C. umbellata has no white in its leaves.  It looks like a miniature pachysandra. Its flowers are umbels. I confess I had to look that word up – “a flat-topped flower cluster in which the individual flower stalks arise from aabout the same point.”  Chimaphila combines the Greek word cheima, meaning "winter," and the Latin word phila meaning “having a preference for growing.”

This column has suddenly turned into a lot of work.  I’m afraid I’m too old to start studying Latin. I’ll leave all those botanical names to the botanists, and spend my time enjoying the flowers, whatever their names.

More Difficult Rams

D

 

 

Today marks the beginning of my 31^st year of writing Weeds and Wisdom. I thought just offering you a picture of my wonderful new zebra to finish off 2012 would help me over my feeling of burn-out, but it wasn’t enough of a rest, Writing garden columns takes a bit of research, especially when the world is blanketed in snow,  so because animal tales are easy I’ve chosen to write a little more about the rams on Locust Hill which requires only a good memory.

 

Last June I told you a bit about Rammit, the first father of our flock, Beaver, our lethargic second ram, and Zinnia, a newborn male whose mother had died.  I never finished his crazy story, so here it is.

 

After Zinnia’s mother’s death we were down to just  three ewes, so instead of turning two of  his daughters into lamb chops, we let them join the flock.  Of course this meant that come fall, incest would run rampant, but we didn’t think that would be a problem.

 

Apparently Zinnia disapproved, however. He became very cranky, backing off  and lowering his head threateningly at anyone’s approach.  We learned to treat him carefully, but that winter we’d planned a family vacation. We hired a young neighbor, Tinker, to feed dogs, cats, sheep and chickens while we were gone, and also asked our good friend Henny if she’d water the houseplants and collect the eggs. 

Each morning Henny would stop on her way to work and search out the eggs laid by our roaming chickens. One day she spotted several eggs in the sheep manger, innocently opened the inner door and  collected them.

The next thing she knew she was laid out in the muck with a tongue-panting Zinnia leering down at her.  She escaped with no serious damage, unless you consider going on to the office with runs in your stockings, manure on your skirt and egg on your face damaging.

  Henny never thought to close the door as she fled so Zinnia, his appetite whetted by his first victim, waited outside for his second.  That afternoon Tinker raced into the yard on his motorcycle and suddenly was racing around on foot, chased by the snorting Zinnia.

Tinker’s reaction was not fright but fury!  As soon as he got over his surprise, he jumped back onto his  motorcycle and gunned it straight  at his opponent. The chase was reversed (as the muddy tire tracks in the lawn showed for weeks afterward), and Tinker pursued Zinnia until the ram was as harmless and worn out as an old wool sweater.

Since there are no photos of  that catastrophe, here’s  one of nice gentle sheep eating their dinner.

 

Once we’d learned about Zinnia’s behavior we  decided we should probably sell him, but before we found a buyer, he followed in his mother’s hoof prints.  We acquired more rams in future years, but I will save their stories for the next time I need a break from gardening columns

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR



                 I thought you'd get a laugh over this new

              addition to the  menagery of animals on Locust Hill

How's that for a great Christmas gift!

A Christmas Poem



 

 

 

                   

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

 

 I’m afraid my Christmas spirit has fizzled just like those blow-up Santas and snowmen people put in their front yards at this time of year that lie in airless puddles each morning.

 

Trying to come up with something to write about, I got some old photo albums that I hoped might inspire me.  Much to my surprise, one of them turned out  to be full of poems composed by my mother that I hadn’t read in years. 

 

Unlike the doggerel verse I write, my mother’s poetry was… what shall I say, serious?  Much of it she successfully published.  When I came upon a poem she’d written about Christmas,  I realized it expressed the same sort of feelings I’m having about this season, so… no column this week, but best wishes for a joyful Christmas.

 

       Christmas Thoughts

         By

          Alice Dickinson Robinson

 

Dear Lord, forgive the clutterings we strew

Across an hour that once was clean and bare;

The gilt and tinsel trappings hang anew

Upon a truth so humbly nurtured there;

Forgive the meaning lost, the word mislaid

In all the fevered rush of this bazaar

And quicken foolish children who have made,

With backs to heaven, a wistful paper star.

 

The Three are gone; so many men are wise;

Half-heartedly, confused by myriad ways

We face the East – The wonder-flooded skies

Are dark… we rest upon our shallow days.

Forgive that we are sheep who nibble sod

And not the Shepherd, searching out his God.

 

  

    

       WISHING YOU

   A JOYFUL CHRISTMAS 

 

                AND A PROSPEROUS 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All about Wild Vines



 

 

 

 

Wow, it's already December?  2012 has been a difficult year. and I'll be glad when it's over.  I shouldn't complain, especially when I think of the devastation caused by Sandy which missed my corner of Connecticut, but I am not feeling very Christmassy.  Since 1982 when I started  writing Weeds and Wisdom, I've probably  composed at least 30 Christmas columns -- , choosing the tree, trimming the tree, family traditions,  making wreathes, lights and decorations, gifts for gardeners -- so I’ve decided to ignore the coming holiday and write about vines today.

 The first vine, however, is one whose seed pods  can be used at Christmastime, the wild cucumber vine. When my kids were little we always went out and collected these unusual seed pods to hang on our tree, spray-painting them silver or gold.

I went out to find a few for this column, but I couldn’t scare up a single vine, so I went on the Internet to get a photo. At first I got nothing but pictures of big edible cucumbers, and when I finally found the one above it had obviously been taken too early in the year to look at all like the lovely lacey net that makes a good Christmas decoration., but none of those could be copied.

If you go on the Internet and google Echinocystis lobata, the wild cuke's Latin name, you'll see lots.   I'm no horticulturalist and rarely use Latin names for plants, but found this one amusing,  It translates into  the Greek words for  bladder and hedgehog. The vines grows fast and has dozens of white clusters of bloom all summer.  It makes a nice screen to shade a sunny porch or hide that ugly propane tank in the back yard and other unattractive objects. 

Few gardeners plant wild vines, preferring to buy cultivars such as  clematis, silver lace or trumpet vines, but for many years I made do with whatever grew wild on Locust Hill – woodbine, which turns a handsome red mingled with clusters of blue berries each fall,  wild honeysuckle that fills the air with perfume, or – DON’T’ EVER DO THIS  - the nightmare of bittersweet, a rampant uncontrollable vine that strangles anything it can climb. 

The one cultivated vine I grew back then was English ivy, but only because my grandmother had beautiful ivy beds and I could make root cuttings from her vines by just sitting them in a glass of water for a week or two.  Yes, ivy climbs, but it should only be allowed to do so on brick or stone buildings, so like my grandmother I planted mine as a border.

The leaves looked lush and green all summer, but because they faced south they are exposed to harsh sun and wind in the winter, so each spring I face dried up brown leaves until the shiny new ones appeared. If grown on the east, west or north side of a house ivy gets little sunburn, and if you’re willing to protect  ivy you’ve planted in a southern exposure with pine boughs or burlap each winter, this problem is eliminated. 

My grandmother’s ivy beds looked lovely each spring as her gardener performed the tedious task of covering them from winter burning. I suppose I could protect  mine each fall, but I think I’d rather put up with brown leaves than a mess of burlap right by the front door. 

The Baltic and the Bulgarian varieties of English ivy resist burning, but by far the best variety of all is one you may never have heard of, 238^th Street Ivy.  It was discovered on 238^th Street in Manhattan and was introduced by the New York Botanical Garden where it is grown in extensive beds.

One of my readers brought me two little containers of this fancy ivy after I’d written an ivy column and  complained about winter burning.  I planted them under the sugar maple in the front yard where they faced lots of harsh winter sunlight, and promptly forgot about them.

Two years later I suddenly noticed that two or three stems were busy climbing the maple’s trunk and had already reached higher than my head.  It had been a hard winter, but there wasn’t a single brown leaf on these vines. 

Sad to say, that beautiful maple tree started to die about six years ago.  The two different tree surgeons who inspected it could find no reason for its dying limbs and offered me no solution, but both assured me that the ivy was not the cause.  They each gave me an appallingly high estimate of what it would cost to cut down this very large tree.

 My solution is slow but cheap. I have a wonderful yard man, Steve, who comes for  an hour or so a week to do the "man chores", mow the steep banks around the pond, lifting rocks I can’t lift, fixing mechanical problems.   He handles a chain saw with great skill, so when there’s nothing more important to do, he cuts off a dead limb or two that I saw up for firewood.  As you can see above, the 238^th Street ivy loves this tree.  When Steve has cut off all the limbs, I'm hoping it will make a lovely covering for the trunk.

 

I think you must make a visit to the New York Botanical Garden if you’d like to buy 238^th Street ivy, but if you want a bed  of this handsome vine on the south side of your house, it would be worth the trip. Or better yet, put it on your Christmas wish list.

Teddy Bear Trees



Of all my favorite months, November is NOT one. It is such a funereal month, filled with farewells – goodbye to warm, sun-ripened tomatoes and fresh lettuce, colorful bouquets of asters and goldenrod, and New England’s  flaming autumn colors.

Our woodlands stand gray and black to face the coming winter. There’s one exception, however, a most unusual tree that is just now turning from green to a warm cinnamon brown.  It’s a tamarack, the only conifer that is deciduous, not evergreen.  You may know the tamarack as a larch, or even a hackamatack, but I never knew it by any name until the year daughter Bridget turned 16 and got her license.

That summer, driving on a back road in Falls Village, Bridget swerved to avoid a little bird, and then looked back (Not via the rear-view mirror) to see if she’d hurt it.  The car knocked down three guide posts, sheared 20 feet of dirt bank and landed in a tamarack tree.

Neither Bridget nor the bird was hurt and that was how I  learned what a tamarack tree looked like.  Such a unique conifer, the only needled tree native to North America that drops its foliage each fall.

Tamarack needles grow like small shaving brushes along the branches and are soft and delicate compared to those of spruce or fir. They may be hard to tell apart from their evergreen cousins in their summer greenery, but now when other deciduous trees have been stripped naked, their needles lose their chlorophyll and become as conspicuous as polo-coated preppies at a nudist colony.

These tufts of needles have turned a soft warm brown and have opened out so that each branch looks like a tiny modern hayrake, making the trees resemble furry teddy bears.  By December their needles have all dropped and the black skeletons left bare give the impression of having been charred by a fire, looking totally dead.

Although tamaracks are most commonly found in swampy areas, they can  live equally well on a dry hillside where they grow very fast, as much as three feet a year.  Along with sumacs and poverty birches, they are often the first trees to appear in open land and are called nurse trees, as they prepare the way for trees needing shade.

After the Mad River dry dam was built just west of Winsted, I watched the open meadow beside Route 44 fill in, first with sumacs and a few popples, then tamaracks.  Eventually white pines moved in, and at this time of year make a spectacular sight of rich green and cinnamon.

Searching for more facts on tamaracks to fill this column, I located an article in a 1926 Antiques Magazine written by Hank’s grandfather describing a variety of products made from tamarack.  The wood is apparently very hard and almost impervious to water, so it is used in ship building and dock pilings.

If you’ve never known about or noticed tamarack trees right now is a good time to spot them, especially on that hillside to the right as you head down into Winsted.  n

Canaan has hardly any tamaracks, but when I drove to Sharon the other day I saw one here and one there.  They've almost lost all their teddy bear look, so you may have to wait until next November to spot one.    Happy Thanksgiving.  

A Really Tasty Tomato?






It’s a rare occurrence when reading my daily copy of the Wall Street Journal that I find an article on gardening, but several weeks ago I was stunned to discover an entire 4-page section entitled “Innovations in Agriculture.” It contained eight articles, starting with one titled Vertical  Farming about growing crops in urban high-rises, and ending with one on robots harvesting fruits and vegetables.

I’d just consumed the last two delicious tomatoes from my garden and since I refuse to buy the tasteless offerings at the supermarket, I skipped straight to an article headed with an illustration of ripe red fruit, eager to read about producing a truly tasty tomato.

The first five paragraphs explained why store-bought toms are so bland and tasteless – farmers demanding plants with high yields, retailers wanting toms with good color and long-lasting shelf life, and of course the shippers need sturdy fruits that can withstand their  traumatic journeys crammed into crates.

All these excuses for ignoring taste are well known, but the last one was a surprise, the fact that back in 1940 a genetic mutation was developed that made tomatoes ripen uniformly, but was discovered only recently to seriously reduce their sugar content.

Fortunately this mutation is not incorporated in many of the seeds sold to home gardeners such as Big Boy and cherry tomatoes as well as the Heirloom varieties.  This is one  reason our home-grown tomatoes are tasty compared to store-bought offerings.  

 

Although scientists have been struggling to discover how to improve the tomato’s flavor, progress has been very slow because at least a dozen genes account for a truly mouth-watering tomato – its aroma, texture, sugars, acids. And field trials take years and often end in failure.

The article does end on a hopeful note.  This past May scientists decoded the tomato genome for the first time.  Plus something called “marker-assisted” breeding is now making the discovery process of genes much faster. In the meantime, growing a few tomato plants in your backyard each summer is definitely worth the effort.

I skimmed through the article on growing crops in urban high-rises. It may be of interest to city folk who have no access to local farm markets, and will be able to get produce close to home, but not to me.   The same can be said for the robots who harvest vegetables and fruit.

The other article that I found intriguing was one on the breeding efforts to improve our fruits and vegetables.  Monsanto has bred iceberg and romaine lettuce together to combine the sweet taste and crisp texture of iceberg and the higher levels of vitamin C and deeper green color of romaine.

Soon there will be seedless watermelons, broccoli with higher levels of antioxidant, its cancer-preventing properties.  Ah, a new variety of onion with less pungency, meaning no tears.  Grown for fall harvests, it will serve the winter market when the famous Vidalia onion is not available. 

Reading about all these agricultural pursuits in the WSJ was a real treat compared to plowing through all the stomach-grinding articles on politics.  I hope it inspires some of you to think seriously about having a vegetable garden next summer.