Seeing Red

The flag at the Blackberry River Inn 

It’s probably just because I’m getting to be too set in my ways, but I find it depressing how things have changed since I was a kid.  Because it’s about to be the 4^th of July, I’ve been thinking about the American flag.  I remember being taught that flying the flag wasn’t allowed in bad weather or after sunset.  When we were given the privilege of raising the flag at school we made sure it didn’t get dirty, wet or even touch the ground.

I guess once folks started burning the flag, all these ideas became obsolete, like ladies wearing hats in church or men dressing in a coat and tie at a cocktail party.  Nowadays I see the Stars and Stripes day and night, rain or shine.  I’m not being critical, just making a comment.  The only flag on Locust Hill is in the attic, has 38 stars and is probably full of moth holes.

I can remember when I was around eight or nine our class planted a flower bed that stunned us the following spring by bursting forth as the American flag – seven rows of red tulips interspersed with six rows of white ones and a blue square of I can’t remember what, probably scilla, with white stars.

I’m not so patriotic that I’d contemplate planting such a flower bed, any more than I’d overpay my taxes to help reduce the national debt.  Red, white and blue is a great color scheme for flags and 4^th of July parades, little girls’ dresses and little boys bedspreads.

Red, by itself, is a very strong color so an all-red garden is almost too overpowering to consider.  I’d better add, in my opinion, since beds of red cannas or salvias are very popular. I prefer to use this hue more sparingly.  A single splash of crimson in the garden will catch the eye the same way a pretty girl just home from the Caribbean will sparkle at a winter cocktail party in New England.  If all the guests sported that same gorgeous tan instead of looking white and pallid, she might not stand out.  Too much of anything ceases to be an eye-catcher.

Most annuals are available in red, but both seeds and seedlings are usually sold in mixed colors.  Perennials are easier to find labeled by color, and because they bloom for a limited time, they focus attention on different parts of the garden each month. 

I"m more fond of pinks and blues and have very little red in my garden, but one perennial I particularly like is the blood red Russell lupine. Even when the nurseries don’t label their lupines as to color, you can tell the red by its leaves, which are much darker than those of the pinks, blues and whites.  Unfortunately my red lupines are past their prime so I went over the the Freund's Nursery for a photo.  This is Celosia, also known by its more common name, cockscomb.  It comes in yellow as well as red, a tender annual and easy to grow from seed.

The campions (Lychnis) which bloom in July, are  a nicely contained perennial standing two to three feet high with attractive foliage and large, rounded clusters of fire-engine red flowers.  You may know them as soldiers on the green or scarlet lightning.

Another July bloomer is Monarda, more commonly called beebalm. Its shaggy Raggedy Ann flowers attract hummingbirds, who shimmer and hum over the bright red petals, slurping up the sweet nectar. That’s the best thing about red flowers. Hummingbirds are addicted to them.  These tiny birds are such a treat to watch that even if you're like me and aren't fond of red flowers, you should grow a few just for that reason. 

Have a happy 4^th of July, and be kind to your flag.

Who Loves Weeds??



Weeds make great compost

I’ve decided that reading the Wall Street Journal every day is emotionally exhausting. My feelings run the gamut from fury and frustration to despair and disgust. Rarely do I read anything that’s remotely cheerful, and it’s only once in a blue moon that I find an article related to my own subject, gardening.

For someone who has to dream up a new garden column every two weeks, that is a delight, so I was happy to find a two-page article last week entitled “Why We Must Learn to Love Weeds” by Richard Mabey, excerpts from his book “Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants.”

I enjoy weeding, but do I have to love the weeds? The first page and half of the second gave no reasons why we should love them.  Instead it gave the many reasons why we dislike them,  how they sabotage our plans and ruin our visions of garden designs.  It described many horrible weeds, from New England’s poison ivy to the South’s ravenous kudzu that’s even worse than our bindweed, pictured above. .  Both are obviously related to the Boston Strangler.

On top of that, was the discouraging news that it’s our fault that weeds thrive in the company of humans. We are their natural ecological partners, clearing the soil so that they are most often found where we’ve been weeding!  What an irony.

At last Mr. Mabey offered a few good things about weeds. “Weeds  green over the dereliction we have created. Their willingness to grow in the most hostile environments means that they insinuate the idea of wild nature into places otherwise quite shorn of it.”  He also mentioned that they gave us our first vegetables, our first medicines and our first dyes.  But then he went on to describe more dreadful weeds, one that I and many of my friends have fought to eliminate, horsetails,  and pointed out that their abrasive fronds were once used to polish pewter.    

Turning weeds into compost was one of the only useful things mentioned.   Yes, indeed.  What would we do with all those pulled weeds if we didn’t compost them.  And they do make great compost, full of nutrients. I’ve always felt that the process of composting is one of Mother Nature’s miracles, turning a pile of  greenery into something as tasty looking as chocolate cake.

Are you familiar with Japanese knotweed, Polygonum custpidatum?  My dead-end road is edged with this aggressive weed which can grow to six or seven feet in a summer.  Its blossoms are white drooping panicles, followed by brown berries.  I think everyone living on Locust Hill Road has tried to eliminate it from their property, but with no success.  It spreads by rhizomes and seeds.  Digging up the rhizomes just encourages the bits left behind to start a bigger, better colony of knotweeds.  Cutting the plants down, even 3 times a summer, does little good.  Spraying with poison can stop them temporarily, but they soon come back.  How could anyone love the noxious knotweed?

Some weeds are actually attractive and do well in difficult places.  I have a handsome patch of variegated goutweed just below my sugar maple.  This plant is definitely considered a weed.  It spreads like measles and once established is very difficult to get rid of.  Fortunately my patch is bordered by lawn and a flagstone terrace so it is unable to spread, provided I nip off all the blossoms it produces before they go to seed.  It thrives in deep shade among the roots of the maple tree where nothing else could survive.

My apologies.  I didn't mean to write such a critical column, but I think  the title of Mr. Mabey's article was rather deceiving and set me up to be disappointed.  I don't really hate weeds, but loving them is asking a bit much.

An Artist's Garden

                     

Have you ever bought one of those flower seed collections the catalogs all brag about?  The most popular ones produce a huge variety of wild flowers, but there are also many other types – cut flowers, shade lovers,  even one promising  continuous bloom of bulbs from spring until fall.

Most gardeners I know who’ve tried planting a collection have had little success, so I’d like to tell you about my experience planting “The Artist’s Garden,” a collection of 150 varieties of flowers that Claude  Monet had grown at Giverny, his famous garden outside Paris.

In 1987 when I discovered the freezer still contained six packages of vegetables I’d put up in 1984 I realized it was time to shrink the vegetable garden.  It was 50’ x 50’, filling the entire back yard and had fed our family of five for many years, but with all the children married, it obviously was way too big.

What better place to begin a flower garden than an area that had been tilled and manured, weeded and watered, was full of sunlight and nicely protected from  early frosts?   The Artist’s Garden packet, given to me for Christmas several years earlier, had been sitting in a drawer unopened, since I’d never figured out where to plant it.  Now I’d found the perfect place!  I'm sure choosing it was the reason my Monet garden became such a success.

That winter I opened the Artist’s Garden packet and began reading.  What a challenge! The list of flowers included in the collection was awesome.  Groups of either annuals or perennials were sorted by color and size – Annual/short/blue - Perennial/tall, yellow. _Annual/medium/red-pink. etc.  All the names were in Latin.  The design instructions were not exactly helpful. either.  “Do what you think will look good. There are no rules.”  Hmm. I’ve never been fond of rules, but in this case I could have used some.

Once it finally warmed up in late May, I raked and roughened up the soil, then broadcast each container of seeds over the area, scattering the tall varieties toward the garden’s edges, the short ones close to the paths, the in-betweeners in between.  Then I carefully sprinkled four or five buckets worth of compost over the seeds, raked again and was rewarded by Mother Nature who sent down a soft gentle rain.

As the dozens of unfamiliar seedlings began popping up that first summer, I spent hours trying to identify them.  Garden books are full of photos of beautiful blooms, but not a single one of a seedling.  I felt like Sherlock Holmes as I peered at these wispy little stalks of greenery with my magnifying glass and concluded that I should not pull up anything I couldn't recognise as a weed. 


Feverfew                                Campanula

As it turned out the most prominent flowers that summer were my own - feverfew and pink poppies - that always appeared whereever I sprinkled my compost.  They looked gorgeous, but they weren't Monet's, so I didn't bother taking a photo. The only Monet plants that showed up were the white and pink companulas.

But the following summer I began to see dozens of new flowers as the perennials matured and blossomed.  Solving the mysteries of those unknowns that had previously haunted me was a delight.  What fun to see the first delicate lavender blooms of Granny Bonnet columbine, so different from the yellow and red of the wild variety. What a relief to see that a clump of unknown seedlings had turned into handsome mallows.

There was one particular little vine  that I had resisted pulling up. It looked just like some useless weed, but at last I was rewarded  for my patience -- tiny pink blooms opened their eyes as they nestled in a bed of soft gray lamb’s ears. I'd saved a creeping baby’s breath, Gypsophilia repens-rosea..

I could write another whole  column on the Artist’s Garden, just describing the agonies and ecstasies I went through in the next five years.   My feelings ran the gamut from frantic frustration to ecstatic enthusiasm.  Excitement, exhaustion,  chagrin at my ignorance, every imaginable emotion except boredom. 

By the fourth year the rarest flowers had been pushed aside by more common species included in the collection - Queen Ann's lace, goldenrod and even morning glories, which strange other plants and deserve their other name, bindweed. 

I was also beginning to miss having a vegetable garden, so daughter Bridget and I dug up the plants from a corner of the garden and transported them across the meadow to her house.

I continued to enlarge my botanical knowledge finding new and different plants, but by the fifth year the endless maintenance seemed almost too much.  There is constant work required to maintain such a large crazy quilt of blooms looking well. Dead-heading the spent blossoms, keeping the weeds at bay, thinning the more invasive plants, staking the tall plants like delphiniums and foxgloves.  

By the fifth year  the Artist's Garden  had stopped being a labor of love and as fall neared I began calling my garden friends, inviting them to come and take home whatever plants they'd like.  Bridget and I cleaned up the leftovers and by October we had the first signs of the new lawn that would take over the area. The Artist's garden had been a marvelous introduction to new and different flowers, a never-ending supply of bouquets for the house and a fantastic learning experience. 

If you decide to try planting a seed collection, just remember that preparing the area is eccential and probably best done a year in advance.



The Gardener's Merry-Go-Round

Can you remember the excitement of a carnival’s Merry-go-round when you were a kid?  Racing to get on the big black horse, then deciding you like the white one better, then finally settling on the little gray pony so you’d be next to your buddy. The first warm days of spring are a gardener’s Merry-go-round  as we rush from one job to another. The excitement of seeing that your special rose bush has survived the awful winter, then noticing the delphiniums already need staking, heading back to the shed for stakes,  but unable to resist the sight of a scummy birdbath and getting a bucket instead and…

You get the picture.  Just a thousand different horses to choose from.  This year the first day my back was good enough to let me contemplate getting on my Merry-go-round, I thought I’d  start by checking out the Abitta garden.  To my amazement it was thick with Self-Heal, an interloper I’d never seen on Locust Hill before.  How or why it had managed to settle there, uninvited, was a puzzle.

Prunella vulgaris, the Latin name for self-heal, flips off my tongue with ease because in one of the early paragraphs in my Wildflower program I say “By the time I got married and moved to my husband’s home town, I’d long forgotten all those Latin names I learned in college Botany, and didn’t know whether Prunella vulgaris was a wildflower or possibly one of Hank’s old girlfriends.”

Fortunately good old Prunella has a small weak root and is easily pulled up, but once that job was done, my back needed a rest so I walked down the perennial border, just admiring the sight of the little green hands of lupine leaves, the dazzling clumps of forget-me-nots, unable to resist dead-heading finished daffodil blooms, finding a dozen peony shoots pushing up from under last year’s old leaves.

At the end of the border is a funny little building we call our Hottentot house.  Back in the early 70s we were inspired, having just enjoyed our first sauna  while visiting friends in Vermont,  to construct one of our own.  The Hottentot is a circular building made out of the tongue and groove boards from an old silo George Ford had just pulled down. We cut the boards into eight foot lengths, set them up against the circular foundation we’d poured, and tightened them together with wire, the same way you’d make a barrel, and  topped them with a plywood roof. Inside we constructed a platform which we filled with sling-backed chairs (so much more comfortable than benches,) put in an old kerosene stove  and  filled its top with a pile of nice round stones.  

We had a double reason to build the sauna.  Because our new pond leaked badly, it was only full and swimmable in the spring and fall, and resembled a mud puddle in the heat of summer.  The sauna allowed us to dive into the icy water in April and May and again in October and November.  A few years later we added industrial rubber to the roof so I could plant a variety of flowers on it. The roof's baking heat required  almost daily watering, more frequent than I could manage, so the only plants to survive were dandelions and weeds, but we continued to use the sauna frequently until the kids were married and were no longer living at home. From then on it was only used to store inner tubes, life preservers and other swimming paraphernalia.

What can happen to a neglected building over a period of twenty years can be shocking.  When I opened the door that day, I could hardly believe what I saw.  The weight on the roof combined with termites had collapsed the large roof beam. The silo boards had rotted in places, leaving large holes in the walls. Woodbine vines growing at the back of the building had snuck inside and wrapped themselves around the chairs whose cloth backs were tattered rags.   Decay had turned our Hottentot house into a catastrophe. 

I’m sure if Hank were here instead of in heaven, he’d have some wonderful idea of what to do, but I am a total blank. Is it worth repairing? If I tear it down, what do I do with the cement floor?  Should I buy a gazebo to take the Hottentot’s place?  I’ve been looking at dozens of gazebos on the Internet.  They're very expensive and they're just too cutsey.  I can't picture any of them on Locust Hill. And what would we use a gazebo for anyway?   It would be too open to hide the mess of swimming gear (with the leaks fixed, the pond is swimmable all summer long) or the tangle of weeds and woodbine sprawled behind it.  If any of you have a suggestion to solve this Hottentot problem, please send me an email.  In the meantime, I've shut the door.

Before the day was over both my back and I had cheered up and I continued on my Merry-go-round, transplanting a half-dozen clumps of forget-me-nots that had appeared in the vegetable garden to spots in the border, weeding around the blueberry bushes I bought last year and mulching them with fresh pine needles. They didn't look very happy, so the last thing I did was mix up some Spray ‘n Grow (a marvelous concoction that acts like a double dose of vitamins to plants) and gave the blueberries a bath and used the rest of the mix on the clematis vines, tree peonies and other perennials.

What a treat to finally spend a warm day in the garden.  I hope you're enjoying your days on the garden Merry-go-round.  We've certainly waited long enough for spring to arrive, haven't we?

Where are you putting that Vegetable Garden?

                    

Back in January I wrote a column on having a vegetable garden, hoping the idea of all those fresh vegetables would inspire my readers and help solve our  country’s obesity problems.  Now there’s another good reason to start raising vegetables – food inflation.  The price of fresh vegetables at the super market are getting as painful as the price of gas, so let’s look at the essential requirements needed for a successful vegetable garden.

Picking a good site is of course the first step, and sunlight is the most important aspect of the site to consider. That may seem obvious, but I've seen many a garden shaded by a barn or a big maple tree in the early morning or late afternoon. The more sunlight your garden gets, the better and faster just about any vegetable will grow.

When you think about where to put the garden, there are a few other things to think about besides sunlight.  Here in New England where late spring and early fall frosts are always threatening the plants that need a long growing season, picking a protected site for the garden can make a big difference.  Vegetables like melons, winter squash, and sweet potatoes may require as much as 90 days to ripen.  And of course tomatoes, which we all grow, not to save money but to get that real home-grown flavor, are the most susceptible to frost.

Our first garden on Locust Hill was up behind the barn, surrounded by open meadow.  It was so unprotected that we could easily get a killing frost in June and once had one in mid-August. We hardly ever got anything but green tomatoes.  It took us almost ten years to move that far away garden down to the back yard. By doing so, we gained almost a month to our growing season as it was beautifully protected from frost - the garden shed on its north side, a retaining wall to the west and the house (not so close as to block the sun) to the south. 

Obviously good soil is another important ingredient for a successful garden  and was actually the reason we put our first one where we did.  Our other choices had terrible soil - clay fit for a potter's wheel and rocks enough to build a stone wall.  But unlike limited sunlight, poor soil - too much clay, sand, rocks - can be turned into good soil.  Adding compost and manure will turn the worst soil into something vegetables  thrive in.  Planting Swiss chard in a different area each year can do wonders as its roots spread and dig down for five or six feet, aerating the soil.  Then they decay over the winter adding humus and nutrients.

Having the garden in the backyard had many other advantages.  The previous garden had been "out of sight" and also "out of mind." It was easy to neglect, easy to forget to weed or water or even harvest the beans. Having the dinner's vegetables ten steps from the kitchen was a boon when suddenly I needed a few chives for the salad or  a cucumber for a sandwich.

It also eliminated the problem of deer and woodchucks and other wild critters that had plagued the other garden, since our dogs bark their heads off whenever unwelcome wildlife is tempted to invade.  And that brings me to another important ingredient of a successful garden - a good fence. Possibly if you live in a suburban community, the wild critters that would plague my garden wouldn't bother yours, but I think even suburbia has rabbits, chipmunks and nowadays probably more deer than are found out in the country.

I have my fingers crossed that two columns on the delights of growing your own vegetables will inspire you, even if it's just to grow a few tomato plants in a big pot.

Spring Chores at 45 degrees??

I suspect all New England gardeners have been waiting more impatiently for warm weather than kids wait for Christmas.  After the monster winter we've suffered through, the hunger for spring has become more and more painful as the temperature refused to get beyond 50 degrees.

When the day finally arrived that I didn't have to put on a woolly hat and mittens, I went out to face the winter's destruction.  I knew exactly what my first job would be - picking up the bark and branches my dying sugar maple had been shedding all winter and the stubby broken limbs littering the lawn from the Carpathian walnut, riddled with holes made by the sapsuckers.

That debris will make good kindling next year for the wood stove, but picking it was a full morning's work and not what my bad back needed.  In fact the only other job I could tackle that day was one that didn't 

involve leaning over - cutting back the autumn clematis beside the front porch.  It always amazes me how fast  the new stems of that clematis will sprout and climb and even reach the porch roof by June. That is 

not true of my other clematis vines which I must cut back in a very limited way.                                      

Since my back is still in bad shape, I was relieved when that one warm day was followed by more cold  and rain, but how to finish the rest of this column presented a problem.  I decided to fill it by mentioning a few of the other jobs I will tackle when my back and the weather improve.  You probably won't learn much, but it   might make you thankful that your own garden chores aren't as major as the ones I'll face on Locust Hill.     

As you can see, I don't tidy up my 100-foot perennial border each fall.  The big reason I wait until spring is because the stalks of all the tall plants, phlox, asters, daisies, etc. if removed in late September or October must be individually clipped, while in April they can be broken off by hand, a dozen at a time.  Plus the fact that doing the job in April is much more fun - discovering the first green leaves of a lupine pushing up through the debris, uprooting a thistle with ease from the wet soil, or releasing a struggling daffodil of the old dead leaves strangling it.


There are scummy birdbaths to clean and all that tired ivy on the wall behind the birdbath that needs to be clipped - so much prettier when you can see the stone wall.  There are also many shrubs that need pruning and as you can see below, hunks of lawn uprooted by the town plow to replace.

                                                     

And lest I forget - there's the yearly chore of mending the sheep fences.  This is usually not a big job, but after the winter's heavy snows, our fences, as you can see, are showing their age.  Hopefully you will not have quite so many spring chores to tackle when warm weather gets here.  Surely we will wake up to      beautiful sunshine on Easter morning. 

                                 

Harbingers of Spring

I must have written half a dozen columns on the harbingers of Spring - the first flock of robins landing on the lawn in a whir of wings, the sudden appearance of bright red buds on the silver maple just beyond my bedroom window, the goldfinches shedding their drab winter gray to don sunny summer feathers, the happy sound of peepers singing in the swamp.  This year for the first time in almost twenty years one of my favorite forerunners of Spring is missing - Golda Meir.

You probably remember my beautiful goldfish who died last summer at the age of twenty-five. Every April she would rise from the muddy bottom of the pond and hover beneath the inlet where I could greet her.  When she died I asked my readers if any of them could offer me a good name for my next goldfish.  I'm ashamed to say that I didn't keep a record of the 10 or 12 names I was sent, exept for the one I liked the best, Ben Hur, sent to me from Beret Woodworth.

Several readers also wrote to tell me the best variety of fish I should buy next, fish that are able to survive being dumped into a totally new environment.  If you're one of those readers, please send your recommendations again as I didn't keep those emails either.  I'm afrad that once read, I delete all too many nice emails.

This year there seem to be very few harbingers of Spring to be seen yet.  A few snowdrops and crocuses are the only cheerful sights I spied when I went out looking yesterday.  Did you know that the ancestors of the crocus resided in the tropics and had no bulbs?  As they migrated north to colder climates they developed this method of storage in order to survive.  It took untold millions of years to perfect such a clever tecnique.

If you slice down the center of a bulb - a daffodil bulb is easier to try than a crocus - you can see the pre-formed leaves and flowers packed tightly inside, waiting for the warmth and water that will swell them to their full size.  What would we northern gardeners do if crocuses and daffodils and other such plants hadn't figured out how to store the following year's growth in this form?

When I eliminated my Monet garden many years ago, turning the area into a lawn, I decided to plant crocus bulbs  as well as grass seed, but there was a problem.  Once the flowers of the crocus have faded, the plants need a certain amount of time for the slender leaves to store enough food for the next year's blooms. No garden book that I could find would tell me just how long that amount of time needs to be.  So the following spring  after these little darlings bloomed, I marked the calendar and waited until Memorial Day to mow the lawn.  At that point the crocus leaves were turning brown and the lawn looked like a hay field.

The following year I had plenty of crocus blossoms, but Memorial Day is pretty late to start mowing the lawn.  To make a long story short, I cut the lawn a little earlier each spring until the year when only about 3 crocus appeared.  Lawns are not a very good place to plant crocuses.  Fortunately the ones I've planted in the cracks of the terrace flagstones or in the flower beds do just fine.

A flower that rises almost as early as the crocus is the coltsfoot, a sad little yellow bloom that is most often found in large clumps at road edges.  If you see it only from a car window, you might easily mistake it for the common dandelion.  Look carefully, however, and you'll discover that even though the golden shaggy head is similar,, it is unaccompanied by the usual jagged green leaves.  In fact it doesn't have any foliage at all.

What an odd name, coltsfoot.  Was it a cure for hoof and mouth disease back in the days of our ancestors?  Maybe it grows in horse paddocks? With no leaves and a scaly anemic stem that couldn't possibly produce enough chlorophyll to support the blossom, could it derive its food from horse droppings?

I might never have found the answer had we not asked the town for its road sweepings many years ago to fill in a washout on our road to the upper pasture.  Salty sand seems an inhospitable environment for anything except hermit crabs to grow in, but that summer I noticed that it was supporting a large cluster of unfamiliar leaves.  The following spring I found dozens of golden coltsfoot flowers bloom in that same spot.

Sure enough, when I looked up coltsfoot in the garden encyclopedia (strangrly enough it is rarely included in wildflower books,) there was not only a picture of the blossom, but another of the leaves.



          Coltsfoot in bloom                                      Leaves of the Coltsfoot



According to the Encyclopedia the name comes from the fact that the leaf resembles a colt's foot.  It does?  I've never studied the hoof of a cot, but I can't imagine it looks like those leaves.  Obviously I'm in the minority, however,  as other names for the plant include horse hoof, foal's wort and bull's foot.

Coltsfoot's botanical name is Tussilago fargara, from the Latin tussis, meaning cough. The plant was brought to America by early settlers to be used as a remedy for coughs and other respiratory ailments.  The leaves were collected in small bunches, dried and then added to a variety of tonics.  They were also smoked as tobacco by asthma sufferers.  Why someone already having difficulty breathing would want to smoke even an herbal cigarette is a mystery more puzzling than the name coltsfoot.

I don't think I'd consider this ordinary little plant the most exciting harbinger of spring, but I guess that after this past winter any of Mother Nature's signs that warm weather is arriving would be pretty thrilling.