Wooded Paths

Obama Against Poker

2011-04-17T12:14:00.004-04:00

If Obama can play poker with his Chicago cronies, how come the rest of us can't play it on line?

Click on the headline for a news link from Reason.com. (The story was covered more dispassionately by most major news sources.)

Fortunately, I only use play money online. So I haven't had any funds frozen by the Feds. But it pisses me off that I can't go to Poker Tilt any more. Its software and game options were far superior to games elsewhere. I also doubt that any of the real money players will be better off -- indeed, they are likely to be screwed -- because of this "fraud" investigation. Players were not defrauded, but their credit card charges said something other than "poker" because they wanted it that way, just as people using cards for sex or porn have more discreet charges shown; to my knowledge this is the only "fraud" in question.

*******Update 9/21/11******* Now the Feds are claiming that Full Tilt was a ponzi scheme -- that the owners took out a lot of money and didn't maintain the account balances necessary for the players to actually have the money shown in their balance statements. I don't know if this will be claimed for, or shown, for the other two major sites shut down by the Feds, but obviously this is not a frivolous charge. I have found a pretty good site for play money (PokerStars); they still have cash games, but not for "my area." (Presumably the U.S. I personally wouldn't play for real money on line anyway.)

If The Windmill-Powered Casino on Greylock Never Gets Built

2010-06-20T20:44:00.004-04:00

A band of solar cells all around the moon? Beaming energy in the form of microwaves at the earth? A Lunatic idea. And Murphy's law would seem to dictate that we'd want to design a system so that, even if the beam were deliberately pointed at Manhattan, no one would suffer much inconvenience or heating (let alone instant, smoking death).

But it's an idea that just might work, someday. At any rate, it's great that the modern world can fund and support NASA and academic (and even Japanese construction firm) scientists working on theoretically possible methods of achieving such a sustainable power source.

Why solar power in space and not on Earth?
Clouds.

Why the moon and not in closer, easier to get to, orbit?
1) Crowded space in the lowest orbits and in geosynchronous orbit.

2) Panels in space would considerably shade Earth (but that might be a good thing if global warming becomes a problem).

3) Cost. Cost. Cost.
Theoretically, at least, it could be cheaper to do it on the moon than closer to Earth.

That's because even low-earth orbit is very expensive to obtain (at least $2,000 per pound of payload to low orbit), and geosynchronous orbit costs about 5 times as much. And costs are not going to fall much until or unless we have a cabled space elevator (for geosynchronous).

It is, course, much more work to bring things and people to the moon. (We haven't done it recently, making cost estimates speculative.)

The moon is 250,000 miles away, versus ~200 miles for a rather low orbit and 22,000 miles for geosynchronous orbit; but bringing the material to the moon would not be proportionately more expensive, as we see with geosynchronous orbit being 100 times higher, but only 5 times more expensive, than low orbit. (That's because the cost of getting a mass to low orbit is more set by the need to obtain 18,000 MPH orbital velocity, than by the need to merely lift it 200 miles.)

More important, the Moon, unlike space, is filled with stuff. The trick is to design a system of mines and factories so that a modest amount of materials, robots and people sent to the moon can be be used to mine, smelt and manufacture that stuff into the materials needed to build a massive belt of solar cells all the way around the Moon's equator. (Half of the cells would be in the daylight at any given time; the power would be sent to the main Moon base, which position would always be facing the Earth.)

Consider one way to bootstrap materials: instead of shipping all the water that the base would need, ship hydrogen, which could be used to grab the oxygen from various moon rocks, producing water weighing 9 times as much as the brought hydrogen, and simultaneously producing metals and other elements (e.g., aluminum, titanium, silicon) of perhaps twice the weight of the hydrogen.

With silicon for solar cells, aluminum for electric transmission lines, and titanium for structural elements, you've got essentially everything you need to manufacture your enormous belt of solar cells.

Once the moon base was making more solar power than needed to maintain itself and keep its humans alive, this power could be used to separate minerals without much need for additional resources from Earth. Then a growing proportion of the growing power supply could be sent to Earth by some form of electromagnetic radiation, such as light (laser) or microwaves. Lasers sound rather dangerous to me, whereas there ought to be some radio or microwave frequency that could be picked up by giant antennas, but which would mostly bounce off the Earth if they missed the antenna.

While the Moon transmitter would need only one location (since the moon always keeps the same face to us), the Earth would have to have receivers in three locations, with each getting energy for about 1/3 of each 25-hour "day" when the moon was overhead. The energy received at each would in part be delivered as electricity for immediate use, and in part be stored, perhaps as synthesized fuels such as hydrogen or natural gas (used to generate electricity for the 2/3 of the time that no Moon energy would be arriving), or it could be delivered around the Earth by intercontinental electric transmission line.

So, there are a few problems yet to solve... But this concept is the first I've ever heard that justifies the manned space program as more than just bread and circuses, but without the bread.

The Circle Game

2010-06-11T19:42:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I'm amazed at what my children know, and sometimes I'm amazed at what they don't know.

I attended a middle-school graduation ceremony today. The younger students, including my 8-year-old daughter, made up a chorus. Their last song was, as the music teacher informed us, a real tear-jerker -- "The Circle Game" by Joni Mitchell, with the chorus:

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

Women were wiping their eyes, and I was probably close to sobbing as well. The kids performed quite nicely, but I sensed that they had little idea of what the song was about. I asked my daughter later, "why do you think the song was sad?" Her answer: "because a man is stuck on a carousel?"

NY Times Says Circulation Holding Up to WSJ Assault

2010-06-04T23:27:00.003-04:00

That's the headline in a Bloomberg story of June 4 based on an interview with New York Times CEO Janet Robinson.

"We are definitely not seeing any effect in regard to the circulation," Robinson is quoted. But if you read to paragraph 7 of the story, you learn that "The New York Times’s nationwide circulation fell 8.5% to 951,063 in the six months through March, while circulation at the Journal, which includes paying Internet readers, rose less than 1% to 2.09 million, data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations show."

How can such a juxtaposition earn the headline "NY Times Says Circulation Holding Up to WSJ Assault" instead of something like "NY Times Official Puts Desperate Spin on Plummeting Circulation Figures"? (Which would itself be a pretty soft way of calling her a liar.)

It's part of a pattern which could make left- and right-wing talking heads on Fox News look objective. Take a similar article from April 26, which includes this:

Diane McNulty, a Times spokeswoman, attributed the lost print readership to a focus on “quality circulation and high retention rates,” saying the newspaper has kept most readers who have subscribed for two years or more. In an e-mail to employees today, New York Times Co. Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson and Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said that “readers and advertisers are very loyal.”

The Journal “will soon discover the intensity of that dedication,” they wrote.

So they haven't this year lost more than 50% of "readers who have subscribed for two years or more"? Is there anyone who would guess that things could be worse than that?

The Times and sister-paper Boston Globe, like many other newspapers, are going down the tubes; demonstrating that they are run by fantasists certainly can't help matters, even if they have Bloomberg headline writers and the Obama Administration eager to bail them out.

16 Bean Soup

2010-03-28T19:55:00.009-04:00

I recently bought a bag of Goya’s “16 Bean Soup Mix.” It's basically a pound of mixed beans, with wonderful variation in size, color and texture. But when the soup was made as directed on the package, it was insipid. I fixed it by adding a chopped up onion, fried with spices. The soup was then delicious, but it called for some more vegetables, which I added the next time I made it.

This is now the best and most nutritious vegan soup I’ve ever had. (And for this carnivore, pretty damn good even compared to a meaty soup.)

Although I gave considerable thought to the pairing of flavors, I'd have to say that other than the beans, water and olive oil, you can probably get away with skipping any (or several) of the soup's ingredients. It is a bit labor intensive, but you also get a lot of soup, either for a big group meal, or for leftovers.

Ingredients:
1-lb. bag of 15- or 16-bean mix, e.g., Goya.

2 or 3 bay leaves
1 or 2 cans vegetable [or chicken] broth

1 large or 2 medium yellow onions, to be finely chopped
[optional serrano or other hot pepper, if you like your food spicy, to be finely chopped]
1/2 tsp ground pepper
1½ tsp cumin
1 tsp paprika
1½ tsp flour
2 Tbsp olive oil

3 stalks celery, to be bisected and chopped into 1/8-1/4 inch thick pieces
15 ounce can Petite Cut or diced tomatoes
1 tsp salt

3 carrots, to be chopped about 1/8-1/4 inch, and bisected if fat.
½ tsp curry
~1 Tbsp olive oil

½ pound butternut squash, to be diced
1 tsp cinnamon

1 bundle asparagus. Throw out base 40%. Chop the rest 1 cm long, except very tip, ~2 cm
1 cup cider

Preparation:
Soak beans that morning (if for dinner), or overnight (lunch).

About 2½ hours before serving: Drain the beans; put in a soup pot; add bay leaves, broth and water to bring liquid to 4 cups; bring to a boil and then simmer, covered. Throughout, stir occasionally, adding water if necessary.

Now you have a half hour or so to chop everything.

In a bowl, combine onion [and pepper] with spices. In a large frying pan on medium heat, add 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and when hot, the onion mixture. Mix/flip with a spatula as needed. After frying to some brownness, add onion mixture to soup pot, leaving behind what oil you can. Also add celery, salt, and tomato to pot. It is now perhaps 1½ hours before serving.

Now add olive oil to frying pan to bring it back to about 2 Tbsp. Brown the carrot/curry mixture, and then add to soup pot.

Again add olive oil to bring back to about 2 Tbsp. Brown the diced squash/cinnamon mixture, and then add to soup pot.

Continue to occasionally stir the simmering, covered pot.

About 20 minutes before serving, add cup of cider and asparagus directly to the soup (no frying). Taste a spoonful (no asparagus, of course) and ponder the salt level and flavor. Keep the soup covered unless you think it needs to boil down.

Most people will find the soup could use some more salt, so you can add some more if you know you don’t have anyone used to low-salt eating, or put a shaker on the table. If you like your food spicy you may also want to put a hot sauce or hot Indian cilantro chutney on the table, especially if you didn’t chop in hot pepper with the onions.

Moscow's Stray Dogs Evolving Greater Intelligence, Including a Mastery of the Subway

2010-01-26T20:39:00.003-05:00

This seems worrying:

Poyarkov has studied the dogs, which number about 35,000, for the last 30 years. Over that time, he observed the stray dog population lose the spotted coats, wagging tails, and friendliness that separate dogs from wolves, while at the same time evolving social structures and behaviors optimized to four ecological niches occupied by what Poyarkov calls guard dogs, scavengers, wild dogs, and beggars.

The guard dogs follow around, and receive food from, the security personnel at Moscow's many fenced in sites. They think the guards are their masters, and serve as semi-feral assistants. The scavengers roam the city eating garbage. The wild dogs are the most wolf-like, hunting mice, rats, and cats under the cover of night.

But beggar dogs have evolved the most specialized behavior. Relying on scraps of food from commuters, the beggar dogs can not only recognize which humans are most likely to give them something to eat, but have evolved to ride the subway. Using scents, and the ability to recognize the train conductor's names for different stops, they incorporate many stations into their territories.

Additionally, Poyarkov says the pack structure of the beggars reflects a reliance on brain over brawn for survival. In the beggar packs, the smartest dog, not the most physically dominant, occupies the alpha male position.

Those Russians. Haven't they seen Planet of the Apes? What's to keep us from Planet of the Dogs? How quickly can intelligence and brain structures evolve? Does the Precautionary Principle require that we kill them all, before they enslave or kill us?

Provincetown

2009-08-19T16:47:00.002-04:00

My wife and I just spent two days in Provincetown (Cape Cod MA). It's one place where the bed & breakfasts' guests aren't stuffy couples in their 60s. Most of them did seem to be married, from Massachusetts or California before Prop 8.

It's hot even on the Cape. I noticed most of the gays are wearing cargo shorts (with trimmer Madras shorts also fairly common) and sleeveless T-shirts, so I can continue to wear my fading collection without fear that I am hopelessly out of style.

Spinach and Egg Pie with Bacon

2008-12-15T19:19:00.004-05:00

My daughter ate a healthy meal tonight. Usually one has to point out that dessert is conditional on eating at least a serving of dinner, including vegetable, but tonight she ate so much dinner she had no room for pumpkin pie (a first in this house).

This Spinach and Egg Pie is basically a quiche, except it makes its own crust. I have been experimenting with variants on such egg pies; this is my most successful by far:

SPINACH and EGG PIE

INGREDIENTS
* 5 pieces bacon
* 1/2 yellow onion

* 8 large eggs
* 3 Tbsp flour
* 1 oz. parmesan, grated
* 1/2 cup milk
* 1/4 tsp salt
* 1/8 tsp nutmeg
* 2 grinds pepper

* Butter

* 2/3 bag of fresh baby spinach

* 2 oz. cheddar

DIRECTIONS

* Preheat oven to 375F. (Or 340F if you don’t have a microwave.)
* Put steamer on stove with water to boil.

* Put bacon in skillet at medium.
* Finely chop onion and fry with bacon

* Remove the onion bits when lightly browned, to cool.
* Chop the bacon when cooked.
* Meanwhile, combine egg group 7 ingredients in bowl.

* Add cooled onion to egg bowl.
* Puree with immersion blender, or whisk (if eaters don’t mind little pieces of onion).

* Butter 2 liter Pyrex pan (11” * 7”)

* Pour a thin layer of egg mixture into pan, put in oven until set.

* Meanwhile, steam the spinach until just limp.

* Add bacon on top of set egg layer
* Add spinach on top of bacon.
* Pour rest of egg mixture over spinach.
* Grate cheddar on top.

* Microwave for 2 minutes on high, turn and microwave a second 2 minutes.
* Bake for 15 minutes at 375 F, then check for doneness.
(If no microwave, instead cook at 340 F for 30 minutes).

Pink and Purple Season

2008-06-18T22:59:00.004-04:00

The early yellows (Narcissus) are gone, and now it's pink and purple (and mauve) season, at least in my garden, featuring Dianthus (pinks, lower left), Iris, Allium (chives), Lupinus, and Tradescantia (purple near the center, bright pink to extreme right). Not shown: Perovskia (Russian sage), Nepeta (catmint), Digitalis (foxglove). Photo taken June 12; today the clumps of low Sedum (in wall, lower right) showed visible yellow buds, and Alchemilla (ladies' mantle) was starting its chartreuse bloom. Warmer yellows, reds and oranges will become more common over the summer, with Hemerocallis (daylily) and various daisies taking the lead. This seems the most common color progression. Perhaps you have a different scheme?

Frost, Death and Growth

2008-05-05T21:38:00.003-04:00

Plant growth is most notable at this time of year, when above-ground growth is just taking off. It was clear in my garden, as from the weather report, that today was the first significant growing day in about a week. For most plants, growth follows temperature in an almost linear response, from zero growth at 40F to maximum growth at 80F (leveling off suddenly, with distress beginning at 86F.)

What had shut things down, of course, was that after weeks with much warmth and without frost, we got a 25F frost in Adams last week, followed by cold and clouds. The frost had been predicted at least 5 days ahead of time on weather.com, and so I was ready, and put inverted buckets over the two Weigela "bushes" (a few inches high) I made from cuttings last June. The plants had overwintered successfully, and are generally considered hardy to zone 4, but I wanted to be sure of their safety. Fresh spring growth is far more sensitive to frost than is a dormant plant (if that weren't true, the plants wouldn't bother going dormant now, would they?), and tiny cuttings are less likely to have reserves of energy and bud tissue if they lose their growing ones.

As it happens, none of my other bushes or perennials suffered any significant setback -- a trivial one is mentioned below -- so I probably hadn't needed to protect the Weigelas. (Not that there was a downside to doing so.)

But I had forgotten to protect the one plant obviously sensitive to cold - a just-planted blooming pot marigold (Calendula), which was entirely turned to mush. Not valuing annuals much, or at any rate, not being afraid of losing them, I did not give any thought to that plant even though it was the only thing I had really blooming except for some of my daffodils, and even though it's native to the Mediterranean and Middle East.

So what was damaged? The bleeding heart (Dicentra spectabilis), the one plant which was just starting to open its blooms (the earliest blooming perennial of significant size, to my knowledge, and a great plant in part for this timing), seemed to have had its flowers shriveled a bit even though the plant itself is hardy to zone 3. The flowers and top-growth are still a bit small and limp, but not dead.

Finally, most of the pink magnolia trees in the area saw their magnificent flowers turn to brown mush overnight. Perhaps they had another week in them. Magnolia x soulangeana is hardy to zone 5, but those ratings refer to the plant's reliably not dying, not to its never losing flower buds.

Speaking of hardiness, I once had a conversation with a local woman who told me that she had planted some Gladioli and then never lifted their bulbs, and yet they came back strong for a couple years, until a (probably colder) winter killed them off. I left some Glads in the ground last fall, since the late-planted ones would probably not have the energy to bloom again this year anyway, I felt like trying something else in their place, I am always looking to experiment, and I am lazy.

As it happens, those Gladioli in the normal ground position and in turf all died (nothing came up), while one I had planted in the best-drained position possible (in loose earth just inside the loose rock wall of a 2-foot-high raised bed) has come back this spring, although apparently having split into separate little bulbs (there are several growing points). This makes sense. I had read (e.g., by the late Christopher Lloyd, IMHO the greatest of garden writers) that for many such Mediterranean plants, hardiness is more a matter of drainage than of absolute temperatures. (This winter's snow cover may also have helped.)

Does anyone know of anything else damaged by last week's frost, or have a surprising tale of hardiness?

Forsythia Time, And the Garden is Needy

2008-04-23T20:21:00.002-04:00

Well, tree budding seems to be about two weeks earlier than average. More specifically: The Forsythia are blooming – and this is perhaps the most useful harbinger of spring, and of several spring chores.

When the Forsythia are blooming it is time to:

1) Spread pre-emergent herbicide on your lawn, if you do it at all.

2) Divide Hostas and most other perennials.

3) Fertilize your bushes, if you do it at all.

4) Prune your bushes, which you really ought to do if it has been more than a couple years.

1) Lawn Work
If, unlike me, you care about having a green, uniform grass lawn, you may choose to spread pre-emergent herbicide on your lawn. Such chemicals kill the sprouting seeds which annual weeds rely upon to regenerate, but do not kill lawn grass or other perennials. Still, they are potentially toxic chemicals. Except for corn gluten. Regular corn gluten is an effective pre-emergent herbicide, which also provides Nitrogen and Phosphorus (NPK of 9-1-0). It is sold in garden centers, but not, the last time I looked, in places like Home Depot. If you are to use corn gluten or any pre-emergent herbicide, you really should do it this weekend, before most of the weeds have sprouted.

2) Divide Hostas
Most Hostas are an inch or two tall as of today. It’s easy to see where they are, and even which ones are variegated, dark blue, etc. Now is the time to cut a chunk out of a Hosta, and plant it somewhere else, preferably with half-sun or less, in rich and humusy earth. (A week ago was fine too, but the job becomes much more destructive of the plants once they are all up and flopping about.) Fill the hole up with rich soil, or soil mixed with composted cow manure, water immediately, and water every couple days in dry weather (which we have been having).

Most other perennials can be similarly treated. There are perennials which don’t like to be disturbed, but all those which spread, and/or form “donut” shapes by expanding while their middle goes into decline, are suitable for propagation by shovel, and most even benefit from the shovel and subsequent soil enrichment. (Throw out the dead middle of any donut-shaped plant.)

3) Fertilize Bushes
This is most important with sheared plants such as hedges and most foundation plantings of yew, because shearing removes a lot of nutrients over time. But most shrubs in most locations would benefit from some fertilizer, be it a top-dressing of composted cow manure, some other rich compost, or a granular product (ideally, with at least some leaf compost or peat moss or a natural bark mulch which can break down and add organic material to the soil). If you have Rhododendrons (that includes azaleas), Pieris/andromeda, Kalmia/mountain laurel, Vaccinium (e.g., blueberry) and Erica & Calluna/heath & heather (apart from variegate Euonymous, most broad-leaved evergreens are in this family, the Ericaceae), then I recommend the Holly-Tone acidifying fertilizer, especially if you garden in a limestone area, such as most sites in the Northern Berkshires. Read the instructions. Don’t apply more than recommended. Instead, apply that amount, or half as much. You may repeat such treatment in early summer, but for most plants this second treatment should not be delayed past mid-July, lest you encourage lush growth which will fail to harden before an early frost. Note that many shrubs, notably Rhododendrons, have very shallow roots, so you should not try to dig fertilizers in.

4) Prune Bushes – Especially Hydrangeas
Pruning bushes is especially important for those with a tendency to build up congested and dead wood, such as most Hydrangeas. But almost any shrub needs pruning if it hasn’t gotten it in the last 2 or 3 years.

Pruning is needed for a number of overlapping reasons:
To remove dead, diseased or damaged wood
Remove rubbing or crossed branches
Open up the center to air and light
Make physical space for new buds to grow
Increase flowering or fruiting
Remove non-variegated reversions
Make the shrub more compact or a certain shape, to fit a spot or allow views out a window.
Make the shrub more compact, to look less scraggly
Deal with a fungal, bacterial or insect problem

Don’t Fear Radical Pruning
Even more so than with carpentry, there are several tools for removing wood, none for putting it back. But shrubs are far more forgiving than trees. You don’t have to worry about making multiple cuts so the branch won’t tear out of the trunk. You don’t have to worry about killing yourself. And you don’t have nearly as much reason to worry even about killing the plant. Shrubs aren’t just smaller than trees, they also tend to have multiple stems, and the ability to readily sprout new stems from the ground or close to the ground.

It is very hard to kill a shrub or permanently make one ugly due to pruning. Cutting a shrub all the way to the ground could kill it if hot dry weather ensues and you don’t water it daily, or if the shrub has no dormant buds near its base. But any shrub without such buds would be short-lived anyway, as it would not be able to replace old or damaged stems (e.g., lavender and some other woody herbs, and brooms, quick-growing plants most of which aren’t reliably hardy here anyway.)

There are a few rules to follow, but usually there’s no need to commit to a particular course of action when you start pruning. You first cut out the dead wood, clean out any refuse, and remove any intruders (weeds, seedlings, aggressive neighbors). With the lines of the shrub’s living wood revealed, you may now see that it’s a hideous misshapen mess. In that case, you may go straight to “radical pruning” – to cutting the plant to within an inch of the ground, or to a foot or so of trunk for those with a single trunk at their base (Rhodies, again). More likely, you’ll be merciful to the plant, because a hideous bunch of stems in April can still become a beautiful shrub once it’s leafed out and made new growth. But you will likely see that the remaining plant could still be reduced by a third (or perhaps even two-thirds). So you will remove some of the oldest stems (thicker, or with rougher bark), and you will remove stems with ugly scars or possible signs of disease or infestations.

If the plant is in leaf, and has leaves which are variegated or in colors other than green, you should remove any reversions to solid green. Most variegated cultivars will show such reversions over time. Even if you like the striking combination of areas of green contrasting with areas of a finer two-tone look, it is often best to remove the sold-green leaves since they will likely out-compete the rest of the plant.

For shrubs, like most Hydrangeas, with branches sprouting from the ground, almost all of your cuts will be to the ground. Easy, apart from the possible difficulty of reaching your clippers into the space. For other shrubs, with one or a few trunks which divide as they go up, you will be cutting higher up. Just remember not to cut a branch to some random point along its length, or to where you think that will make the shrub the right overall size. Instead, cut to where the branch sprouts from a larger branch, to just outside any branch collar (the swelling around the base of a branch).

Ode to My Laziness

2008-01-05T11:43:00.000-05:00

I'd like to say
that I've been busy.
Putting up Yule lights
and trimming trees.
But the house was dark,
we holidayed on the Cape,
My only active pursuit
cooking a few meals,
and donating old toys and clothes
in time for a 2007 tax deduction.
The firebush can wait.
My wife is a redhead,
but that's not what I meant and you have a dirty mind.
Perhaps 2008 will be different.

Who does this look like?

2007-11-19T21:48:00.001-05:00

What is up with the U.S. Mint? Is commemorating the infamous Ron Jeremy some sort of sick joke? Should the citizens of Massachusetts start dressing up like Native Americans and throwing these coins into the sea? I'm just asking...

Red Marks The Spot

2007-10-26T21:23:00.001-04:00

In the normal course of affairs, we can’t expect to see a lot of flower color in late October. This bold circle of red Salvia is the exception which proves the rule; I doubt it could look this good this late in the season (10/25/07, Adams) in one year out of ten.

A more typical level of October color would come from the berries on a female holly such as this one (Ilex, variety unknown, 10/26, North Adams), but this is an unusually pretty and heavily berried example, despite the lack of any obvious nearby male pollen partner.

Darwin
By design, fruit must follow flowers, so a plant is more likely to be fruiting than flowering in October. But fewer plants use flamboyant fruits for animal attraction than earlier used animals for pollination. This fruit strategy is common to shrubs and small trees, perhaps their greatest strength in the competition with forest trees and other woodland plants. Their berries are nutritious, at least for birds, and the plants use this fact to attract birds. The birds are often aided in their quest by the berries' bright color, frequently red. For the plants, birds' smaller digestive system and lack of molars mean the seeds will pass through the birds undigested. Bird mobility is of course also a positive. At the same time, many berried plants use strategies to keep from being eaten by larger land animals. Thorns are the best-known, but the toxin in poison ivy, whose seeds are meat for birds, and poison for mammals, is another such strategy. (Poison ivy's red leaves are a great attraction to birds, while its actual berries are off-white.)

Flamboyant Foliage
To get really large masses of bright color in October, we have to look to foliage, not flowers or berries, on plants which are themselves pretty massive. Of course, not all foliage is equal to the task. Evergreens generally have only subtle color changes, and with many deciduous plants even peak fall color is muddy or uninteresting. In other cases a shrub’s bright fall foliage is as ephemeral as are its spring flowers. (Even foliage is running perhaps two weeks later than average this year; but it certainly tends to run later than just about any reliable flowers, except for a few little bulbs such as Colchicums and fall crocuses.)

A number of vines have excellent reddish fall foliage. Poison ivy is perhaps the most beautiful. But leaving aside a few special needs, as in places where trespassers have driven one to misanthropy, there are more reasonable options such as the Boston ivy shown above (Parthenocissus tricuspidata, its specific name referring to its three-pointed leaves, 10/26, Williamstown), Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia, named for its groups of five leaflets), and grape plants (Vitis), which are in the same family as Parthenocissus (Vitaceae).

And of course, shrubs and trees which have red foliage all summer, such as this Japanese maple (Acer palmatum, looks like the ‘Bloodgood’ variety, 10/25, Adams) still have red foliage up until leaf fall – not as dramatic looking in fall when other plants are even brighter, but certainly providing a contrast to neighbors which might still be green, or turning yellow, orange or brown.

So, noting that vines are a niche item which needs the right backdrop and a support which is strong and undamaged by heavy shading, what is generally the best source of massive bright red fall color?

There are a number of shrubs which, like poison ivy, attract the eye with brilliant fall foliage. For example, for those of us with acid soil who are considering the blueberry (Vaccinium), fall foliage is just icing on the (edible) cake. But to me, the role of providing a large and dramatic colorful emphasis is best filled by the much-maligned, much-abused, and much-misused Burning Bush (Euonymus alatus, or Winged Euonymus or Winged Spindle). A common bush, found in parking lots, and sneered at by landscape architects who call it the “worst bush ever” you say? Indeed, all true. But it gets a bad rap, in my not-humble opinion. Where it is allowed to grow without heavy pruning or shearing it can be quite beautiful, wherever a spherical 10-foot bush can find at least partial sun, in all but the most extreme soil and water conditions.

Can't Believe It's October (8th)

2007-10-08T15:26:00.000-04:00

Having just missed a frost by a couple degrees, two (?) weeks ago now, it seems especially implausible that these unretouched photos were taken today. First, the Hardy Mum I put in the ground a year ago, whose bloom is just peaking, behind an established Sedum that looks like 'Autumn Joy,' whose color has faded from a fairly pure pink toward a more browned purple.

Second, a closeup with a yellow Trollius (globeflower), red Dahlia, and Ipomeia ('Heavenly Blue' morning glory, which has only been blooming for a couple weeks).

The Trollius, whose main bloom was in mid-July, has a new bloom now probably only because it is a first-year perennial. Like its cousin the Delphinium, and most members of the Ranunculus/buttercup family (Ranunculaceae), it likes more moisture than this raised bed would tend to have, but there in the front row by my driveway it's also easy to water.

This weather means any newly-planted shrubs and perennials should be getting well established, provided we have been watering them every couple days when it hasn't been raining. (Established plants generally shouldn't need watering more than once a week.)

Fall Isn't Only About Foliage

2007-09-26T18:02:00.001-04:00

As summer flowers fade, and October themes of harvest, fall and Halloween predominate, gardens are getting more subdued, and more orange. If your gardening energy isn’t flagging, you could fight this with a huge infusion of late annuals, and almost recreate the riot of color of early July. But for those of us who are over age 25 and eschew the use of stimulants more powerful than coffee, it may be more practical to accept the general trend of softer and browner tones, livening them up with perhaps a few points of late-blooming or long-lasting perennials or shrubs (especially roses, such as the ‘The Fairy’ I showed two posts ago).

Gladioli

Gladioli (the magenta spikes seen at left above) are not very long-flowering plants. Their flower spikes look good generally for just a week or so, which period can be stretched slightly if you deadhead the lower flowers (which bloom and fade first) while the topmost flowers are still opening. They are available in any color, but the yellow-to-red spectrum predominates.

Although they are individually short-flowered, you can plant them at any time from the start of May to the end of June or even into July, and they will then flower reliably, if not exactly predictably, about 2½ to 3 months later (by late July, or as late as right now). Their spiky foliage also looks pretty good and healthy for a long season.

My late-planted (6/29/07) Gladioli are almost peaking today. They did not appear affected by the near-freezing morning temperature we experienced the week before last. Late plantings are of course at some risk of freezing off before they get a chance to bloom. On the other hand, in the absence of hard frosts, cooler daytime weather and shortened days should extend any bloom period.

As seen here, I have a clump of Gladioli in my lawn. Gladioli do not mind the low-fertility conditions apt to be found in an unfertilized lawn. You do need a tough step-on bulb-planting tool to get this effect in turf. I think this feature will work better visually if I put a bigger clump next year. In the lawn they stand up vertically; it can be hard to get Gladioli planted in flower beds to do so. You can stake them, or use any awkwardness as an excuse for cut flowers on the table.

Gladiolus corms are not difficult to overwinter, their skin keeping them in good shape under a range of reasonable conditions (unlike Dahlias, whose tubers can shrivel and die if too dry, or get moldy and die if too moist – of course, Dahlias are larger plants, with a much longer bloom season). Late-planted corms are less likely to build up enough strength in their new corms before frosts shut the plants’ photosynthesis down, but like most bulbs Gladioli are fairly cheap as garden plants go.

After frosts have killed off the foliage (or indeed, right now, for earlier-planted ones which flowered more than 6 weeks ago), dig up the corms (or even pull them up slowly by the stem, if they’re in fluffy cultivated earth). To keep them through the winter you should rinse them off, dry them out for 2 weeks on a tray in your basement or garage, then tidy them up by cutting off straggly roots and pulling off last year’s corms. You can store the corms in a mesh bag or panty hose, hanging them up in a dark cool spot such as in your basement. Only the larger corms are likely to flower next year, but you can also save the numerous smaller corms, to plant out next year in some place like a vegetable bed, to bulk up for flowering the following year.

I’ve met a gardener in this area who regularly left her Gladioli to overwinter in the ground. They came back some years and not others, presumably depending on how hard and deep the ground froze in a given year. If you are going to take this gamble, I’d at least recommend putting about 4 inches of loose mulch over them to increase their chances. (We’re in zone 5b in most of the Northern Berkshires, while most Gladioli are reported reliably hardy to zone 8, with thick loose mulch and a position up against your house making them hardy to zone 6, according to my American Horticultural Society A-Z Encyclopedia.)

Hardy Mums

The most common – if not ubiquitous – flowers at this time of the year include the “Hardy Mums,” a form of Chrysanthemum. One can certainly overdo them, but they are healthy and reliable, and available in almost any color except for blue.

Why are Mums always left in pots? Mostly because they’re cheap enough to treat as annuals. Some are not in fact reliably winter hardy here, although they earn their name by holding up well to early frosts. I planted two in the ground a year ago, giving no special coddling or mulching. One survived into this year, and is just now starting to bloom again. I like its orangey contrast with pinky-mauve Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ as seen here.

Mums like ideal positions, namely full or mostly sun, and moist but well-drained soil. Whether you intend to overwinter them or not, Mums will do at least as well for now in the ground as in a pot, without the need for the regular watering or fertilizing of a pot plant. They are also more likely to survive the winter if they are planted now, rather than after another month in their pots. The only downside to putting them in the ground is if you would consider a death there a demoralizing failure. But if it’s a plant you would otherwise nonchalantly kill off by leaving in a pot outside, why hold on to such a cautious attitude?

Last Chance To Plant, Until...

2007-09-22T22:37:00.001-04:00

Southview asked me in the previous post:
"I bought a couple of lilac bushes (just stems with a couple of leaves) and they just arrived. Should I stick them in the ground now or pot them till spring then plant them?"

Here's my quick advice:

Stick the lilacs (or any plant you have) in the ground now. Preferably in a spot somewhat sheltered from the wind, but that isn't essential with most lilacs, as they are very hardy (mostly to zone 3 or zone 4; we are in zone 5; there are more tender lilac species, but I don't think anyone around here would be selling them).

The notion of a fall planting season isn't only a marketing gimmick, although in a colder climate like ours, the spring season is a slightly safer one for marginally hardy plants. The heat of summer does provide a real gap between these seasons, even in the Berkshires. But it's late enough in the year for this area that heat stress is no longer a factor.

Certainly by now we're in the fall season here (and the first official day of fall is September 23 this year), and the earlier in the fall you put your plants in, the better established they will be when the ground freezes hard (roots grow even after leaves fall, but not once the soil nears freezing).

Last year I don't believe the ground really froze until about January 10, so even November plantings of Zone 5 plants should have done fine, but you can't count on such a mild early winter. Basically, we have a couple more weeks of likely good planting season, although I might consider an October shrub purchase if the price is radically cheap (like 60% off a fair initial price).

Lilacs are not houseplants. Keeping them in the house in pots is actually more risky than planting them out, perhaps even if you have a cold greenhouse. And keeping plants in pots outside would be the one way cold could kill them. Effectively, being in pots tends to reduce hardiness by 2 zones. I believe that nurseries holding potted trees will bury even the hardiest of them in foot-deep piles of mulch.

I do recommend that, after some cold weather, when the top half-inch or so of ground is frozen, and rodents have found other places to spend the winter, you spread 2 inches of mulch around the new shrubs, keeping the mulch a couple inches from the trunk. The mulch layer is primarily meant to reduce sudden freeze-thaw cycles, but will also somewhat reduce the depth of hard freezing.

Most winter deaths for plants claimed to work in your zone, especially of new plantings, aren't due to absolute cold, but rather to dehydration, as frozen roots can't supply water to a dessicating plant. This is a bigger problem with evergreens, especially broad-leaved evergreens like Rhododendrons (I recommend Wilt Pruf or other antitranspirant spray for new plantings). You should note if there's a fall drought (which isn't as obvious as a summer drought) and if so keep the plants well-watered.

But ironically, good drainage actually helps prevent the frozen-dehydrated problem. Soggy ground freezes solid, while soil with proper drainage has air pores, freezes less deeply, and allows meltwater periodically to percolate in.

Naturally, I have not done extensive experimentation on all of this (i.e., with randomly selected plants and placebos), but am reporting the collected wisdom of botanists, arborists and other authors whose expertise I trust. I have seen Wilt Pruf-treated rhododendrons looking much happier than nontreated neighbor plants, and have noted the tendency of well-drained and amended beds to not freeze as hard as other spots.

[One last tip. Don't fertilize any plants other than annuals now, or after about mid-August for most zone 5 areas. Fertilizing will encourage soft new growth -- which will be killed off in cold weather -- and should be held off until next spring, generally when Forsythia blooms.]

Cuttings For My Garden

2007-09-16T21:14:00.001-04:00

Personally I find nothing more thrilling in gardening than the successful propagation of plants. While growing from seed is pretty good, especially for perennials, taking cuttings of plants is positively magical. It is, after all, cloning.

This year I have taken cuttings from two shrubs. The first is a friend’s red-flowering Weigela, which blooms at least twice each summer, fairly unusual in Weigelas. I don’t know if it’s a known or named cultivar, or a lucky find in a seed-raised plant. (Weigelas aren’t known for great foliage or branch or fruit interest when they’re not in flower, so rebloom is an important feature.) The cuttings were taken in late June. I cut off several branch tips, keeping them in a Ziploc bag with a damp paper towel for a few hours before getting to my garden.

Most of the Weigela cuttings had two leaf nodes. For each, I made a fresh cut just below the lower leaf node, removed the lower leaves, and trimmed back the upper node to two half leaflets (i.e., I cut each leaflet in half). I used a single-edge razor blade, but a knife will do if it is sharp.

I inserted the cuttings in some seed starter mix, in 3-inch Jiffy peat pots, and kept them damp and under a clear plastic cover, with perhaps an hour of morning sunlight each day. Basically a cutting is a race to grow roots before wilting or a fungus takes over, but you can’t try to rush the growth with heavy sun or fertilizer, or you will uniformly fail.

As soon as a cutting starts visibly growing, it is also growing roots, and it can be put where its humidity-sealing cover is removed gradually, perhaps an hour a day for a few days, until it is always uncovered. Once uncovered, you will have to water or mist it daily. And then you put it into successively sunnier locations until it is acclimated to where you want to plant it, and you’ll only have to water when the soil is dry.

As of now I have three strong Weigela plants, which have rooted and more than doubled in size, four more plants whose future is in question, as they haven’t grown and are looking rather tired, and about four which succumbed to rot. (You must throw out any rotting ones lest the fungus or whatnot spread to the others.)

The beauty of cuttings is that with access to a healthy bush it’s trivially easy and cheap to take a dozen of them. And with most plants, most of the time, and a modicum of care, that’s usually enough to guarantee a few successes. If you can get Rootone®, TakeRoot® or a similar hormonal rooting product, that often increases your success rate to a clear majority, but with some plants like willows (various Salix species) you can put a stick into the ground just about anywhere, even upside down, and be almost guaranteed of success. (They are harder to keep alive when rooted in a pot.)

Weigelas aren’t quite as vigorous as willow cuttings, but they are known to be easy, so I didn’t bother tracking down Rootone, which I was surprised to learn is not carried by all garden supply stores and nurseries. Of my three successes, I put two into my garden in late August. The third is in a fairly large (perhaps 5-gallon) plastic pot which I aim to bring inside for the winter and place in a window. Hopefully at least one plant will survive cold, snowfall, and/or neglect (the oversized pot will last longer between waterings), making it to spring, and clear sailing for a shrub.

This year I purchased the rose known as ‘The Fairy’ – a smallish but very healthy, adaptable and long-flowering rose with many small pink double flowers. It is known to root fairly easily, with spreading canes which often layer spontaneously where they touch the ground. The Fairy dates from 1932, and so is not under patent.

On the 13^th I decided to experiment with this plant, to see if I would have any success under, if not the worst of conditions, then certainly a half-assed attempt to maximize success -- late in the season, with no rooting powder, and using no cover, relying instead on shade, cooler weather, and the harder wood of later-season cuttings being more resistant to wilting.

I trimmed off a disproportionately long cane (partially seen in the top center of the first photo) and made about ten cuttings.

I had used a gloved finger to pop the thorns off to the side, making the material easier to handle, but while the Weigela had been softwood in late June, this roses’ hardwood cuttings were, indeed, quite hard to slice through with a razor blade. I was almost surprised I didn’t get myself sliced in the process. Note the sticky pad, which is a 3-inch square; a fully prepared cutting is to the left of the pad.

Most of the cuttings have three nodes; some have two. I removed the lower two nodes’ leaves, and half or more of the leaflets in the top node, and inserted most of the cuttings, untreated, into the ground. This was in a very well-drained area, a raised bed, which I had double-dug and amended with compost a month previous when I was planting a (rooted) Weigela. It is important that the cuttings area be such well-drained and yet moisture-retaining material, free of competing roots, loosened, but also firmed down. Ideally, experts such as Christopher Lloyd recommend a mix of 1 part loamy soil, 2 parts peat moss, and 3 parts coarse sand or grit (1/16 to 3/16 of an inch).

Four of the cuttings I inserted along the rim (shaded side) of the large pot with the rooted Weigela in the middle. This pot is still outside, getting morning sun on the Weigela, but it will go inside for the winter.

Certainly these late, unbabied rose cuttings are at greater risk than the already-rooted Weigelas. But even fully rooted cuttings are not as winter-hardy as larger, established plants. Altogether I will be happy if I get at least one Weigela and two roses to survive into next year’s growing season; after all, they cost me nothing (I did use about $6 worth of supplies I already had, as noted). I may put something cage-like on top of the outside plants so heavy snow won’t crush them.

How late in the season can you do all this? Softwood cuttings are best taken by early July, so as to be strongly rooted by end of season. Hardwood cuttings are supposed to be doable even into November. But in that case, you can’t expect any growth or rooting until spring. (The cuttings will probably survive, dormant, since having no leaves that late they won’t be losing much moisture.) The limiting factor then may be frozen ground. You could, if planning cuttings, prepare the ground ahead of time and keep it unfrozen with a thick layer of mulch.

Any questions?

July Goes Out Like a Lamb

2007-07-29T20:31:00.000-04:00

A rather interesting daylily (Hemerocallis) fronts some ladies' mantle (Alchemilla mollis) on my rocky slope.

Lupine fronts unfurling Rudbeckia 'Goldsturm.' This photo was taken today. It's not often a perennial Lupine reblooms (the first bloom peaked around 6/30/07). I did dead-head it quickly after its first flower spike was finished, but it's probably only because it's a young (first-year) plant that the rebloom occurred. (I got it at the North Adams Garden Club sale this spring.)

Best Chicken Ever Goes Down

2007-07-26T08:12:00.000-04:00

Sadly, I must report that yesterday as I was driving down Summer Street in Adams, I saw that the Jolly Butcher shop has signs in the window saying "We Are Now Permanently Closed." So another tasty establishment has gone down the tubes. Their pressure-fried chicken was beyond compare (OK, it was a bit like KFC, if KFC used better chicken and had consistent quality control). They also had good raw meat. (See "It’s all about the Ribeye.") Apparently, they just didn't have enough customers.

The problem with depressed retail in Adams and North Adams is of course a lot broader than one shop or even retail in general. And for Summer Street, the relative absence of through-traffic and of out-of-towners adds to the difficulties. Since our main street (actually named Park Street, aka route 8), while busier, also has empty store-fronts, I'd think the longer run solution for this town is for most of the Summer Street shops to move to Park. Of course, if I owned real estate on Summer Street I'd probably feel differently. Hopefully, the new Topia will entice some new customers and businesses to Park regardless.

I haven't had any connection to the retail business since I was in college. And I can't think of any retail concept crying out for a presence here. Except possibly for a bike shop with espresso and ice cream, since the Ashuwillticook ends right at the center of Adams. (However, there is a good bike/outdoors shop a couple miles away.)

Apart from a casino, does anyone have a retail wish, or an idea for something they think could do well in Adams or North Adams?

Rainy Day Project

2007-07-19T16:20:00.000-04:00

So as soon as I get a couple days off from all responsibilities (i.e., my children), it starts to rain. A lot of projects have been building up, because it’s been a pain in the butt to find most of my more esoteric tools and hardware parts. So after 12 months in my Adams House (oddly, that’s the name also of the dorm complex I lived in for 3 years, 20 years ago – must have been fate that sent me here), I finally got around to organizing my tools.

Naturally, this meant a peg board, as I had in my last (Natick) house. At Greenberg’s an 8’ x 11’ piece of 1/8^th inch peg board was $11. Add in about $12 for peg board hooks and such (most of which I already owned), some lumber (mostly scraps I had), and a half-dozen hours of labor, and here’s the result so far. (I took perhaps 90 minutes to cut and set up the board and lumber, the rest of the time to go through cardboard boxes, tubs and tool boxes, peg things to the board, shelve larger items, and perhaps most important, hook up some old yard-sale speakers to an equally ancient amp, so the iPod and CD Boombox can be properly cranked with Woodstock-era rock and roll music.)

Now I can instantly find my plumber’s snake (for the slow shower drain) and my small screwdrivers (to fix a lamp cord-switch), and all my other projects will go much more quickly. (Just 10 minutes for the shower drain which has been plaguing me and my understanding wife for months.)

Do any of you have any exciting rainy day projects, done or as yet undone, to share?

How’s Your Garden?

2007-07-06T16:29:00.001-04:00

At the Independence Day parade in Williamstown, I ran into a father of a girl who will be in my daughter’s kindergarten class. He noted that it’s been a great year for his garden. It hadn’t occurred to me until just then, in part because I’ve only had my garden here for 11 months, but yes, it has. Almost everything is growing strongly and flowering well. And apart from a little powdery mildew on some of my goldenrod, I have had no problem with fungal or other diseases. Of course, the weeds are also vigorous, there have been insects here and there eating things, and the rodents haven’t let up on their depredations. But you can’t have everything.

Naturally, if this phenomenon (i.e., a great year) is real, and not a figment of our imaginations, it must be due to some aspect of the weather. While we’ve felt a bit sticky from humidity, it seems to me that unlike last year, we haven’t had much very hot weather. (I understand that right around 86 degrees F is the point where most plants stop growing and start suffering.) We also have had plenty of rain, fairly regularly, but not so much overcast weather that things are suffering from a lack of sun.

Here’s a flower bed of mine a week ago (6/26/07). You may note Delphinium and Cosmos in bloom, and a few flowers left on Centranthus ruber ‘Coccineus’ and Lupinus (front center and back right). Not very floriferous, I’ll concede, but: It’s the first year for all of these perennials; the Potentilla fruticosa ‘Pink Beauty’ shrub (reddish twigs behind and to right of Cosmos) can’t be expected to be doing any more in its first season (it was supposed to be a “trade gallon” but arrived as a bare-root -- at least Wayside Gardens did give me a half-back credit when I complained); and the area has a bunch of plants scheduled to start blooming by August (four big Dahlia plants around the middle right, Chrysanthemums at left, Liatris spicata ‘Kobold’ just to left of Cosmos, Solidago / goldenrod and Hemerocallis / daylily at back).

Does anyone else in the area have any other theory about the conditions this year, or have anything to report on growth or health of their plants?

Best Man's Toast

2007-06-26T20:25:00.000-04:00

I was Best Man in a wedding this past weekend. The groom is a pretty easy-going guy, and he is an excellent friend of long standing, so the only hard part of that for me was the giving of the Best Man’s toast. I have innately at least the average level of fear of public speaking, and I haven’t spoken to a significant audience since I was 13 years old.* I wanted a proper speech, not just a one-sentence toast, although the groom graciously allowed that the latter would be fine if I didn’t think I was up to writing and giving something longer.

The Best Man’s speech is a tricky genre in which to write. It has to be in part a roast of the groom and perhaps the bride, the beauty of the ceremony and the bride must be noted, and it also must contain a certain amount of schmaltz. Positive things must be said about love and marriage, but not children or “family,” which might lead to nosy questions. Everything must be in balance lest someone be offended or shocked. “Is he saying the bride’s an alcoholic and the groom a poon-hound?” is something I’ve found myself asking on more than one such occasion.**

Anyway, I got a lot of praise afterwards. Of course I can’t be sure it was not the kind of praise you give the retarded girl for her indecent dancing with her grandfather. (No, this example does not concern a guest at this wedding.)

My one regret is that I didn’t play down or hide from the groom my performance anxiety. Giving the groom fewer, not more things to worry about, is ultimately the job description of the best man.

So here goes, as I had it printed out before me.

*******

Excuse me everyone, if I could have your attention for a moment, I’d like to say a few words.

I’m David Pittelli, and I have the honor of being Brad’s best man.

Looking around today at all these guests, I am thankful that the duties of best man no longer include fending off the bride’s relatives with swordplay.

Civilization has advanced from Anglo-Saxon times, and of course Kim would make a pretty formidable swordswoman herself if it came to that.

So now that I’ve delivered a groom and a ring to the ceremony, it is my final duty and honor to make a little speech suitable for mixed company.

First I would like to thank our hosts, Kim and her parents Ruth and Bill, and Brad and his parents Priscilla and C.C. What a lovely place they’ve chosen for a June wedding.

It's my job to compliment the beautiful bride and also to say something profound about Brad. The first part is easy. Kim, you look stunning, and Brad is a very lucky man.

Like most of us here I know one half of the wedding couple much more than the other.

In fact, I have known Brad for almost 30 years.

I’d like to help you all get to know Brad as I have.

But, on advice of council…

I’m going to have to invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment on all of that.

Brad is getting married late enough in life that, no doubt, many have seen him as a life-long bachelor...

Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Destiny is a fickle mistress, if I’m allowed to use that word tonight.

In Brad’s case, finding a bride was merely a matter of a company hiring both him and Miss Right… after he had driven a few biotech firms into the ground.

I have been married for a few years. And while getting married was the best thing I ever did, my wife and I do have our occasional disagreements.

To deal with them, Brad, sometimes you’ll need a firm hand.

And sometimes you’ll need a delicate touch.

While washing my wife’s delicates the other day, it occurred to me that Brad really is a very good friend. He helped me through many a romantic crisis in my single days. And if you’ve got a difficult construction project, Brad is always willing to lend a hand.

And he’s more fit than he looks.

Which is a good thing, because it’s murder getting an ambulance through Salem traffic.

I’d also like to say that Brad is the most level-headed man I know and, along with his generosity, another thing that stands out is his appreciation of quality. And today, Brad, you’ve found a lady of true quality in Kim. It’s been an honor and a privilege to be your best man today.

So finally, it is my considered pleasure to say let us drink to the everlasting love and happiness of Brad and Kim!

*******

* A debate before a prep school of 300. One reason I recently taught that class “Rejuvenating Your Shrubbery” was because I wanted to build up some practice speaking to a little group. Well, I got one student! My legions of fans let me down. It’s a good thing I’m not a cult leader, or you’d all be getting the Kool-Aid… Actually, the class size of one meant I could instead hold it in the student’s garden; and I think that worked out quite well for her and was good practice of another sort for me.

** It is fairly easy to write one-liners which might be funny if you heard them second-hand or in a movie featuring an awful toast, but which would really upset people in a real wedding. (e.g., “…No, we won’t be making midnight trips to Tijuana anymore, but John, one thing won’t change… you’ll still be paying for sex!”) It seems to me that the tension created in the audience, when they think you’ve just said, or are about to say, something wildly inappropriate, either explicitly or as double entendre, but then just barely don’t, is the basis for a lot of the humor in this genre. And of course, fitting the details of personality, family and history is a good idea, if for no other reason than so people don’t think you just lifted your material from the internet.

Here are two outtakes – jokes which didn’t quite work for me (the first perhaps too hard to follow aurally; the latter might have worked if I were gay):

I looked up the meaning of Brad’s name and discovered that Bradford is a place name meaning “broad ford” – as in a river crossing – and that Brad just means ‘broad.’ I looked up the meaning of Kimberly and found it means ‘ruler’ or ‘royal fortress.’ Go figure. “Broad” and “ruler.” Now what could that mean?

I know that whoever said that marriage and family can be work was not kidding. But to me, building a family is like planning and making a garden. The result and even the process are usually pleasant, even if you do get a little dirt under your fingernails. Now, ornamental gardening is my primary hobby. Perhaps to Brad marriage should be seen as an extended fishing trip. But then, ending up with a stinky fish would come to mind – so never mind all of that.

Plugs of Poop and Hosta

2007-06-10T09:23:00.001-04:00

I have a large row of well-established Hostas, and had known since moving here last year that I would be dividing many of them this May. Except for a few times when I wanted to totally remove a perennial from an unsuitable place, I don’t think I have ever divided one in the classic fashion, by lifting it out of the ground, cutting it up, and putting the pieces back in amended ground. Instead, I have used a smaller shovel to cut individual portions off from the established perennial, like cutting pieces off a pie. This method also allows me (pretty much requires me, actually) to move the center of the perennial a few inches in whichever direction is less crowded.

I am always up for labor-saving techniques and experimentation, and I have considered using a bulb planter to do this work. But I hadn’t gotten around to it, or perhaps dared to do it, until I saw a “reader tip” in Garden Gate Magazine this spring, which said the technique worked for Hosta, albeit with the claim that it was most suitable for fall, not for spring divisions. The primary advantage of this technique is that the cylinders of plant fit neatly into holes cut in the ground with the same tool, meaning less time getting pieces to fit, moving loose soil around, and cleaning up. (On the other had, if the plants’ destination is hard, root-filled ground, you should probably do some digging there anyway to prepare the bed before drilling your planting hole.)

For plants in softer ground, the hand-held type of bulb planter works well. But for some of the plants the earth or roots were too hard, and I used a heavier, sharper, foot-pushed bulb tool designed for use in turf.

This plug-planting was fairly easy to do in early May, when the Hostas were just coming up. You carefully orient two or three buds into the bulb planter, then push or twist down as far as you can, until you get through the crown and root layer, and lift up a plug of Hosta roots, soil and sprout.

I moved the Hostas on 5/6/07, and this photo of one was taken on 6/9/07:

Naturally, the Hosta isn’t huge, but it is healthily established, the moving process was easy, and its removal subtracted hardly a whit from the parent plant. (My hand-held planter is 2.5 inches in diameter at the bottom cutting edge, and the foot-pushed planter is 2.25 inches.)

A related idea came to me a couple days ago. I had bought some Delphinium and Lupinus at the North Adams Garden Club plant sale on May 19. Rushing to put them in to suitable-looking empty spots in my raised bed, I did not notice until later that in some of those locations, the sandy soil lacking in humus drained and dried out very quickly. I didn’t want to be wedded to daily watering, and I didn’t want to traumatize the plants – or overtax myself! – by lifting them and working extensively on their beds, but I wanted to do something more extensive than just a top-dressing or mulch. So last week I brought around a container of composted cow manure, and used my bulb tool to remove plugs of low-organic soil, and replace them with plugs of manure. Since the plants had been in the ground less than a month, I was pretty confident I could skirt their roots by keeping a half inch beyond their original pot diameter, and that a few removed roots wouldn’t matter much. I put 3 or 4 plugs of poop around each plant, then watered. Here is a photo of a Delphinium with two holes of bad soil removed, and one already filled with manure:

Naturally, some top-dressing and mulch would also be a good followup. I don’t think I have to fear burning or otherwise harming the plants if they come in contact with pure manure (it is composted, and claims just 0.5/0.5/0.5 NPK percentages). One concern is whether worms or water flow will sufficiently mix the manure or its soluble nutrients with the adjacent soil.

There’s another experiment I will try some day, when I get a proper subject: a somewhat exhausted “donut-shaped” perennial that I have no particular need to propagate, and which has sufficient elbow room all around. Instead of dividing, I will just drill out the middle hole of weak old plant with one or more stabs with a bulb planter, and then fill the hole with composted manure. Treating the plant thus in situ should be easy and without risk of shocking the plant.

Orange Mockery

2007-06-09T10:00:00.000-04:00

Having moved into a Victorian with some overgrown areas less than a year ago, I am still pleasantly surprised as formerly unknown or unnoticed plants have come into bloom. One side of my property is lined with a “hedge” – not a typical in-town sheared hedge of one or a few carefully chosen types of plant, but a hedge of the sort, composed of a mix of species, many of them sown by birds, that one would find along a small farm field. On Wednesday (6/6/07), fresh blooms led me to discover that much of this hedge consists of mock orange, or Philadelphus – overgrown, however, by more aggressive brambles and bush honeysuckle, and topped by dogwood trees (Cornus alternifolia).

Most Philadelphus grow up to about 10 feet tall and wide, but there are 4-foot cultivars. It does not generally get much respect for its appearance out of flower – it is rather like a smaller-caned lilac – and like the slightly earlier blooming lilac, its flowers are most prized for their scent. But I think they look pretty snappy. I wouldn’t have guessed that they are a good cut flower, but I had this spray in my house for two-and-a-half days before taking this photograph, and it has even opened additional buds since I picked it:

Philadelphus has a very pleasant scent, unfortunately not as strong with my bushes as with most of its many named cultivars. Naturally, a bigger vase with perhaps four such sprays would be more attractive and odiferous.

The fact that several of these bushes have survived and even flowered where they have is testimony to their adaptability and essential toughness. Mine did have black aphids on some young branch tips which were in more congested and shaded areas. Pruning out the affected tips and competing growth should open up the bush enough to reduce its suitability to the aphids.

Philadelphus are fairly vigorous cane-growers, reportedly easy to grow from cuttings throughout the summer. They can take hard pruning, and like Forsythia should have about a third of their older canes cut to the ground each year. This not having been done in over a decade, I have a lot of dead and/or crowded wood to remove, as you can see:

A Paean to Gold and Chartreuse

2007-05-25T22:21:00.000-04:00

Mid-spring is here, and we can now take for granted the ubiquity of green leaves. But it wasn’t that long ago that brown twigs dominated the landscape, and even the scraggliest of spruces was a welcome sight in the garden. Most evergreens are needle-leaved, which limits the textures available to us in the winter, but of course there are some tough broad-leaved evergreens.

In colder climates such as my own zone 5, the role of the broad-leaved evergreen is most commonly filled by members of the Ericaceae, the heather family. These include the Rhododendron/azalea, Pieris/andromeda, Kalmia/mountain laurel, and Erica & Calluna/heath & heather. All can be quite beautiful, in or out of flower. But almost all of them must have acid soil, while a few tagged as “lime-tolerant” can really just handle neutral (pH 7) soil, lest they suffer from mineral deficiency, discoloration, slow growth, sickness and even death.

Most of the northeast has acid soil, but as I noted in an earlier post (“Should You Buy Shrubs At The Supermarket?”), the particular mountain ridge I live on (in Adams, MA) is made primarily of limestone, such as is most visible at the Specialty Minerals site on route 8, where the base of Mount Greylock is ground into products such as Tums.

If your soil is really mixed up with limestone particles, you can’t as a practical matter acidify it except by putting in a lot of new soil in a raised bed. But if you already have a Rhododendron, it couldn’t hurt to add an acidifying fertilizer such as Holly-Tone, and perhaps some peat moss, to the surface, then cover with mulch. (Rhododendrons have very shallow roots, so you should not try to dig things in.)

With the Ericaceae impractical for many of us, the preeminent broad-leaved evergreen in this area is Euonymus fortunei, the wintercreeper, especially in a few variegated cultivars such as ‘Silver Queen’ and the similar ‘Emerald Gaiety’ – which have white leaf-edges; and also ‘Emerald ‘n Gold’ – which has golden leaf edges. Many people around here seem to have one of these variegated evergreens, especially the former white/silver types.

I am not generally a fan of variegated cultivars of garden plants, because most of them have reduced vigor, look sickly in the summer, and are very picky about getting enough sun (since they have reduced chlorophyll) but not too much sun (lest their pale portions burn). But these Euonymus fortunei cultivars usually look very healthy, and being evergreen bushes they don’t have to start from nothing each year, but can defend their territory quite well once they are established. The white/silver ones especially can look magnificent at all seasons, provided they are given room to spread naturally.

The variegation of ‘Emerald ‘n Gold’ is claimed to turn an attractive pinkish in the winter, but most I have been watching actually spent much of the late winter and early spring with a lot of their leaves looking like sickly pink-brown winter-kill. Right now, however, all signs of winter damage are gone, and the shrubs’ leaf edges are an especially bright chartreuse, as in this picture:

Unfortunately, I think that most of these bushes aren’t used to best effect. First, these rather slow-growing shrubs naturally have a beautiful form, with branches jutting out here and there in an informal, yet clearly noble, display. But most were placed where they cannot spread to their full size (perhaps 7 feet wide, but probably not for more than a decade after planting), and so eventually they are cut back to relatively smooth-surfaced globular shapes, often with hedging shears. Second, these bushes’ unusual color, especially in spring, calls out for some more dramatic contrast than green & gold versus just green or green & silver. How about some red, mauve or blue late tulips, early peonies, roses or Dianthus, as in the picture in this link from "Kachinagirl"? (I’m not allowed to actually show the photo here.)

http://davesgarden.com/pf/go/55631/index.html

By the way, I believe that the mystery shrub with no leaves in “What Would You Do With This Shrub” (April 18) is a Spiraea japonica or Spiraea x bumalda hybrid, such as the popular ‘Anthony Waterer’ cultivar, which will have flattened bunches of pink flowers in another month. Here it is in a photo taken a week ago:

It looks remarkably good for having been such a congested bunch of sticks a month earlier. Such a bush would be: if a Forsythia, or most other genuses, bare-legged; and if a Hydrangea, at least 50% dead wood.

Savoy Mountain State Forest Blues

2007-05-20T20:32:00.000-04:00

I did a day-trip to the Savoy Mountain State Forest today with my family. As a family outing it was less than a success, given bugs in our faces, a wet hiking trail, and a grumpy little girl. But they have a nice looking campground (tent sites with picnic tables and grills, some cabins, bath facilities) which was empty, and a couple of ponds (with perhaps 8 men fishing).

Also, I saw some interesting plants I've never really noticed in the wild before. First, a Trillium erectum (aka purple Trillium, or Stinking Benjamin, seen here with aforementioned little girl). It's a full foot and a half tall, hence its specific name. I only saw one cluster of two of these flowers.

Second, an Erythronium americanum (yellow trout lily) which is closely related to the pink-flowered E. dens-canis (dogtooth violet). These plants were all over, but only two or three were in the full flush of bloom, that I could see, with many holding on to maturing seeds, and many as yet unflowered. Like the Trillium, its flowers nod downward and aren't all that showy from above (but not hard to find due to their brighter color). I have a couple of the similar (yellow) Erythronium 'Pagoda' in my garden, but here's the Savoy wilding:

Finally, it's interesting to see how far the garden Viburnum has come from the wild type we see in our local woods, Viburnum dentatum [CORRECTION: I was in a rush to watch the Sopranos, and misidentified this shrub: it is almost certainly Viburnum lantanoides, the Hobble bush]. Part of the difference is genetic, of course, but part comes from the limited sun in the woods, even along a path. Most wild shrubs are understory plants which grow healthily in the shade. But most can also handle at least half sun, and can thereby gain a lot of extra energy for fuller growth and flowering.

Wake Up! There’s Been A Slaughter Here.

2007-05-10T22:24:00.001-04:00

While gardening, I tend to listen to my iPod. As in my car, most of the time I’m listening to the Grateful Dead. But when I’m slaughtering weeds, especially if with my weedwacker, I listen to The Doors. Today I wacked the Aegopodium, as seen in this photo. Of course, that and the earlier Roundup treatment won’t be sufficient to kill it. But it’s been weakened a bit until I cover it with newspapers and mulch, or a hideous blue tarp.

In other news of plant slaughter, last year I cut down two medium-sized trees in this garden. But I had a third tree, a fairly large Norway maple with about a 20” trunk diameter, which was crowding two other trees, and was awkwardly positioned on a steep slope looming over the street and some lilacs.

So yesterday I had some local arborists over. People I play cards with were agreed that I’d get the best price, at least among businesses with insurance and proper safety equipment, from these guys:

It was pretty impressive how quickly they could climb up, cut down and clean up a hardwood tree.

Of course, there are divots in the lawn where pieces of trunk were dropped from high above – that’s inevitable.

In a fairly normal snafu, the bulk of the tree got a bit out of control on the slope. It was stopped by a heavy rope (and 5 guys), but not until damaging a lilac by bending it to the ground. I lopped off the larger, split trunks of the lilac today, leaving several younger canes; this pruning might have been a good idea anyway.

Here you see the difference between one of their saws and my little (16”) McCulloch, which has almost exactly half the engine displacement.

I can’t imagine using such a large saw while up in a tree. Size apparently isn’t the only difference. As the climbing guy explained to me, professional and home-use saws differ subtly in the construction of their chains, such that an amateur who buys a professional saw is apt to have it bite and kick into them, sometimes with catastrophic injury. I could not fathom exactly what advantage this saw blade of death had for him.

Fritillaria Look Upon Menacing Neighbors

2007-05-08T22:27:00.000-04:00

My Fritillaria meleagris (snake's head fritillaries) are blooming. Here we see them facing the menace of aggressive neighbors -- not in the 100-year-old house at top, but rather the Lonicera stump behind them, sprouting freely now in its attempt to recreate itself as a 10' x 10' bush, and the Aegopodium podagraria groundcover which has spread around and well beyond them. Both invasives are covered in the previous post.

A Tale Of Two Invasives

2007-05-07T23:12:00.000-04:00

The Japanese, or so I have read, believe that you can make a fine garden out of a wild piece of land with nothing but a cutting tool, such as a pair of pruning shears. Naturally, you can use them to kill or control the existing plants, but cannot add any new plants.

By this method it takes a couple decades to achieve anything of true merit. At that point, you are going to have one of those minimalist gardens with a handful of species, including a lot of moss, some rock, and if you’re lucky perhaps one flowering plant providing a week or two of non-green color. These are serene places for tea ceremonies and meditation. But I don’t have that level of maturity or patience, nor do I expect it from my pre-school children. So I am not trying to emulate a “knife-only” garden.

But I am trying to discover what has been growing in my new (to me) garden, and what is coming back from root or seed now that I have removed two fairly large forest trees. And I do aim to give existing plants every chance to prove their merits, to use the knife judiciously.

As the Japanese well know, one of the best plants to keep in place as a groundcover in a shady setting is moss. I “mow” the weeds, or unwanted plants, off of it with a pair of scissors, to give the moss the upper hand. Pulling out the weeds would not work here, as the delicate moss would be ripped up with root-held chunks of soil. Of course, as with grass mowing, I will have to do this more than once, but unlike grass, moss mowing will be needed less frequently as competing plants are killed off with repeated cutting down to the dirt – if I do it frequently enough.

Here you can see the results of an almost-finished first-time cutting, with bare patches evident and some loose detritus remaining. While sitting on my butt doing this I get to pick and choose which of the other plants get to survive unscathed; I have left an unknown succulent (probably a Sedum) at the top of the photo, as well as the Eranthis (blogged on earlier when it was in flower) at right.

Naturally, in a wild place you’re going to see more brambles than Trilliums, and more wildings than choice cultivated plants. In this next photo, you can see two of the “worst” invasives.

The stump is the remains of a large bush I cut down last fall. It is probably a bush honeysuckle, one of several Lonicera species which is taking over our woods. It took a long time for me to tentatively identify these (I have several) because they are “old-fashioned” plants which were sold 100 years ago when my house was built, but are not widely available now. Indeed, it is not PC to plant such a bush, and environmentalists sometimes hold invasives cleanups, where they cut them down in the woods and paint their stumps with Roundup (imagine, environmentalists with Roundup!)

Like most bushes with red berries (e.g. Euonymus alatus, Berberis), Lonicera attracts birds, which eat the berries and then poop out fertile seeds all over the place. These shrubs have taken over many lightly wooded areas, shading out and outcompeting native flora.

Personally, I think a vigorous bush with nice-smelling (albeit not very showy) flowers, nectar for pollinators and berries for birds, has pulled its weight in the grand scheme of things. And so I am going to let some of my Lonicera live, at least for a while. Some I have pruned modestly. Some I have killed. Others, like this one which was pushing up against a handsome native dogwood (Cornus alternifolia), I cut to the ground last fall, expecting it to come back. Here we see that it is already re-sprouting strongly. I will probably use selective pruning each year to keep it within bounds.

Around the bush is a groundcover of the same color. This is the infamous Aegopodium podagraria. A lot of people have planted this in its variegated form, and lived to regret it. It spreads by rhizomes and seeds. This nonvariegated form is even more invasive. It will either be stopped forcibly, or it will take over every inch of garden earth.

It is a lot more work to clear out a small, herbaceous plant like this than a woody plant like a shrub, which grows relatively slowly and can’t propagate until it is of quite a noticeable size. I have been pulling up the Aegopodium, but it breaks off at the surface, leaving a thick nodule right below the soil surface. So the scissors are just as effective. I have also been painting its leaves with Roundup, to modest effect after a week, and may use a tarp or newspapers and mulch on larger areas (it fills a circle about 20 feet across, not counting a vanguard which has crossed a path to infest a patch of daylily).

Getting it all will likely take two growing seasons, even if I remain super-diligent.

But for this year at least, I have made my peace with the Lonicera. I am open to the suggestion that it is wrong for me to allow a red-berried foreign invasive such as bush honeysuckle to remain in my garden. But if we are obligated to remove plants for this reason, I don’t see how I can destroy the Lonicera without also taking action against the giant Norway Maple which shades almost my entire house, but which has left perhaps 10,000 seedlings in my yard this year.

Should You Buy Shrubs At The Supermarket?

2007-05-04T00:41:00.000-04:00

The local supermarket in Adams (Big Y) has put out a display of shrubs for sale. The specimens look healthy, and prices are right, at $13 for a 2-gallon pot. However, I expect that most of these plants will not meet their buyers’ expectations. Why is that?

First, most of the plants are in the Ericaceae, the heather family, and will only be healthy in acid soil. These include several Rhododendrons and azaleas, and a couple cultivars of Pieris (as seen in this picture), also known as Andromeda. However, most everyone’s soil around here rests on limestone bedrock, and is mixed with limestone pebbles. As such, it is almost certain to be alkaline, not acid, except in raised beds built up with peat moss, in places with deep humus-rich forest soil, or where people have used acidifying chemicals, such as sulfur or Holly-tone fertilizer.

This is not a mere hypothetical problem. Compared to those in the suburbs of Boston, Rhododendrons and their acid-loving cousins almost always look sickly in this region, and even some that are apparently healthy often have the subtle distress signs of chlorosis, such as leaves yellowing, with green veins (second picture, taken in North Adams).

Another plant with a large display at the Big Y (Hydrangea ‘Endless Summer’) is shown on its label with bright blue flowers, but it will probably be pink (and perhaps chlorotic) in most people’s gardens, again because the soil is not acid. The fine print on the Hydrangea label does state this color effect, but for the rest of the acid-loving plants, only some of the labels inform us that the plant needs acid soil, and some don’t.

Besides, the Big Y is not a specialty plant nursery. It is an impulse purchase point for people who are generally not very garden-knowledgeable. It is not reasonable to expect this broader public to know whether their soil has a high (alkaline) pH. Even if everyone did know this, it still makes no sense to offer a limited display of plants, the majority of which are unsuitable for the local conditions.

The other big problem is some of the plants are of questionable hardiness for our Zone 5 climate. To go back to ‘Endless Summer’ – this is a Hydrangea macrophylla cultivar. Most H. macrophyllas are rated hardy only to Zone 6. While there is some controversy on the matter, this cultivar is probably bud hardy in protected (nonwindy) areas in warmer parts of zone 5. But there aren’t a lot of places around here which don’t get much wind. (The cold wind is the other reason Rhododendron and Pieris often suffer hereabouts.)

The plant will survive our winters, but it will likely have significant die-back – including most of its overwintering flower buds – in many if not most winters. Yet this shrub’s label simply says that it’s hardy in Zone 4. It also claims that the plant will bloom throughout the summer, first on its old wood (i.e., on overwintered flower buds), and then on new wood. This reblooming feature means it should in fact bloom here in late summer on its new wood, but again, the earlier blooming on old wood is highly questionable in a zone 5 garden. (Because of dieback, it also probably won’t attain its expected size of 4 to 6 feet.)

Finally, one of the plants was a cute “Alberta Spruce.” Generally this variety of the white spruce species (Picea glauca var. albertiana) is sold in its ‘dwarf’ form. People are often surprised that these dwarves eventually grow to 15 feet tall. But in this case, the plant isn’t a dwarf at all. It is expected to grow up to 60 feet tall and 20 feet wide. Fortunately, this fact is on the plant’s label, but I question whether it makes sense to include such a tree, because most people are not out making impulse purchases of 60-foot forest trees, and at least some people who buy this plant probably aren’t going to notice that that’s what they’ve got, especially given its name and similar appearance to the popular dwarf spruces. Of course, it is a lot quicker and cheaper to grow a non-dwarf spruce to the 2-gallon size than it would be to use a real dwarf cultivar.

I don’t expect the Big Y to have dedicated shrub buyers, but you’d think they could find somebody in the headquarters who has done some gardening and has given some thought to what grows in the area. It’s not like they’re down in Bentonville, Arkansas or something.

Cornus mas (Cornelian Cherry)

2007-04-25T22:06:00.000-04:00

I had never noticed a specimen of Cornus mas, the Cornelian cherry, until this year. (Photo 4/24/07, taken in front of the Williamstown Library.) While it is a dogwood, it bears some resemblance to the much more popular Forsythia x intermedia (large bush, yellow flowers, early spring), but it has several differences, some at least to the advantage of the Cornus:

1) Cornus is usually at least a couple weeks earlier to bloom, when the landscape is still in winter bleakness. This year, however, our one-week transition from snow on the ground to 85 degree sun meant Cornus mas was only a few days earlier than Forsythia, which is just starting to bloom in significant measure as of today (4/25/07, likely peaking within the week).

2) It has a mounding or tree-like form, whereas the Forsythia grows with numerous separate canes. While aesthetic opinions of form will vary, I find the more tree-like form more noble in appearance, and its form is part of the reason that the Cornus needs much less pruning than the Forsythia. Forsythias can be “gracefully arching,” but are large and can also get rather sloppy, tempting owners to top or shear them. (Better for the Forsythia’s health and floriferousness to cut out older canes to the ground each spring.) Cornus mas is a bit bigger than Forsythia, at the largest attaining about 20’x15’, while Forsythias attain about 10’x10’.

3) It is as least as hardy as the Forsythias, many cultivars of which, while being “hardy” in zone 5, will lose flower buds unless they were covered with snow during the winter’s coldest snaps.

4) Cornus mas has “cherry” fruits (½”-long plum-shaped, red). These are not showy as they are hidden among midsummer foliage, but are reportedly very tasty for jelly, or they can be left to feed the birds.

5) Both plants are very flexible as to soil type, and grow well in full sun or light shade. But either will have fewer flowers in shade. (Note that there is another Cornus mas across the street from the library, in a shaded area in the rotary oval, which has about half as many flowers.)

6) Both plants bloom before any significant leaf production. But the Cornus has an airier, more see-through appearance, and would benefit more from a dark background, such as a forest or evergreens, perhaps most ideally a yew hedge. Forsythias also so benefit, but with their generally bolder colors and denser canes, probably need it less.

I have both Cornus mas and Forsythia (cultivar undecided) on my list of plants to obtain for my slowly growing shrubbery. Can anyone in the Berkshires, or in the broader inland Northeast, report on successes or failures, or notable specimens of Cornus mas?

Eranthis hyemalis (Winter Aconite)

2007-04-23T20:41:00.000-04:00

The winter aconite (Eranthis hyemalis) is a minor bulb, to be sure. It fills the same role as the similar-sized Crocus, or the snowdrop, the value of the little flower being largely due to its very early season, when almost nothing else is noticeably active. Eranthis is generally expected to bloom even earlier than most Crocuses, at the same time as the snowdrops (Galanthus, photos in earlier posts). But this year, in this location, the Eranthis bloomed at the same time as my Crocuses (4/21/07), a good 18 days later than the snowdrops (granted, the Eranthis may have just had more weather sense). These 3 blooms are the result of 5 bulbs I planted early last fall (9/24/06).

So why plant Eranthis instead of a yellow Crocus? Primarily because it is ideal for shadier (deciduous shade), more woodsy locations, with humusy soil that is moist in winter and early spring; while Crocus prefer sunnier, better-drained positions, such as in my sun-baked front lawn slope.

Of course, either bulb will tend to make a minor impact, unless it is present by the hundred. Eranthis, like some but not all Crocus varieties, is known for multiplying if it likes its location. My small planting is an experiment to discover if it likes mine. I may add to it this fall, but I am always prepared to wait for results that may be obtained cheaply (5 bulbs for $2).

I bought the bulbs at Ward’s Nursery down in Great Barrington, which is pretty far away, but had a far better selection of bulbs than any other place I visited last fall. (As far as I know, you can’t find Eranthis in the Northern Berkshires.) If you have a lightly wooded area, or a shrubbery, I recommend you give them a try. (They won’t do well under evergreens.) While Eranthis’ greenery disappears by midsummer, when shade and dryness makes their position inhospitable to most plants lower than their overtopping shrubs or trees, their presence in the spring is reputed to stifle most weeds.

I have never noticed these bulbs other than in a botanical or open-to-the-public garden. I suspect there is a “chicken and egg” problem here, given that they've never heard of them even in most places selling bulbs. Do you have experience with them, or questions?

What Would You Do With This Shrub?

2007-04-18T21:09:00.000-04:00

Here is a shrub, photo taken today (4/18/07), on a quiet residential street in the northern Berkshires. Can you identify its species? I can’t. However, I can tell a few things about what has been done to it culturally, and what I would do to it now if I owned it.

Shrub treatment, like most of horticulture, is an evolving science, an art, or even a matter of some controversy, rather than a science of certainties. What do you think? How has the shrub’s owner treated its soil, its woody structure? Which treatment appears to be better than average, which appears to be a mistake, and what changes would you recommend?

On Wednesday June 6, I will be teaching a two-hour course (6:30-8:30 pm) in MCLA’s Continuing Education program: “Garden Design: Making the Most of Your Shrubs.” The class aims first to help homeowners make the most of their landscape’s existing shrubs, on the grounds that, compared to ripping things out and starting over, rejuvenating what you’ve got is free or cheap, more environmentally sound, and quicker than growing or buying new plants. We will look especially at analyzing some locally common shrubs for problems and potential, and the purposes and methods of pruning, especially of woody plants which have never seen the knife. We will also consider choosing shrubs for a given site, or finding the best site for a given shrub that’s not so happy where it is.

Take Two

2007-04-10T11:16:00.000-04:00

Now three, actually.

Garden Event Tuesday

2007-04-06T20:49:00.000-04:00

I see that the North Adams Public Library is hosting a free talk with garden editor and author Elizabeth Stell, on Tuesday evening (April 10, at 6:30).

The lecture is titled “Gardening Made Easy(ier)” – which as described sounds like it’s intended for garden burnouts (“Has your love of gardening fizzled out? Do you put off weeding because there’s just too much? … Come learn some garden tricks and time-savers. Liz Stell will help you create a strategy for how to get more fun and more flowers out of your yards and gardens.”) But we can all use easier ways to achieve our gardening goals, and such a topic can be used to cover just about anything in the garden. I’m always interested in books written with the input of local gardeners, and I think I’ll attend.

Ms. Stell is the author of Secrets to Great Soil (with our local Storey Publishing, 1998) and coauthor of Landscaping with Perennials (from the famously organic Rodale Press, 1995). She’s an organic gardener of food and flowers at her home in Lanesborough, has taught at Berkshire Botanical Garden, and managed the herb gardens at Hancock Shaker Village.

While doing the Amazon “Search Inside” on Secrets to Great Soil I found a neat experiment, which I think I can properly summarize as a fair use: Take a tablespoon of thoroughly dried soil. Add several drops of vinegar. If the soil fizzes, then pH is above 7.5 (alkaline). Take another tablespoon of dried soil and add water until it’s very moist. Add a pinch of baking soda. If the soil fizzes, then pH is below 5 (acid). (She does point out that you should get a more thorough test before working on your soil’s chemistry.)

Spring Comes and Goes

2007-04-04T19:41:00.000-04:00

With today's hail, sleet and slush I am reminded of Henry Mitchell's "On the Defiance of Gardeners." It is, of course, absurd to complain of ice storms in early April, in Massachusetts, unless it is actually a complaint about the decision to live here. And I like living here. Anyway, I don't feel particularly defiant, because I've got it easy. But these guys, these guys are defiant today, looking just as in this photo (from yesterday, 4/3/2007) except for the inch of frozen slush at their feet.

Fatherless Dropouts – How Big a Problem?

2007-03-28T14:00:00.000-04:00

I first noticed this issue while looking at the “Walk In Brain” blog (linked at right). Blogger Wes attacked a letter writer (Pittsfield attorney Rinaldo Del Gallo, III) in the Berkshire Eagle (March 24, 2007), paraphrasing Del Gallo as thinking “Watch as I downplay race and class in service to my own narrow agenda of not having to pay child support!” I didn’t think it was fair, or persuasive, to attack Del Gallo’s motivations like that, but I did believe that Del Gallo’s statistics were fishy.

Del Gallo claimed “As dramatic as these [race- and class-based] numbers may be, they pale by orders of multiples compared to the graduation rates of children from households with and without fathers. While whites are 1.76 times as likely to graduate than Hispanics from Pittsfield's schools, according to numbers from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Educational Statistics, children from homes with fathers are nine times more likely to graduate.”

After spending hours hunting down these and similar statistics, I concluded that while the stat was created using such official data, the math underlying it was also based on some false assumptions. Unfortunately I didn’t think a full disproof would fit the Eagle’s size limitations or their audience. But I did write a short rebuttal letter to the Eagle, which they also published (always a thrill!):

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

Wednesday, March 28

To the Editor of THE EAGLE:

I do not want to belittle the difficulties faced by fatherless children, but I am writing to correct a statistic which grossly overstates the problem.

Fathers' rights attorney Rinaldo Del Gallo, III, in his letter of March 24, claimed that "children from homes with fathers are nine times more likely to graduate" from high school. This statistic is extremely implausible on its face, since the claim could only be accurate if children in homes without fathers have an 11 percent or lower graduation rate (i.e., only as high as 11 percent if children with fathers have a 100 percent graduation rate, and commensurately lower if they do not).

Del Gallo's Web site claims the statistic is from the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics, NCES 98-117 (June 1998). This document contains nothing resembling such a claim, but rather finds that some negative outcomes (not dropouts) are up to twice as common where a nonresident father has no involvement with a student's schooling.

I should also note that this claimed statistic is far more commonly seen as "children from homes without fathers are nine times more likely to drop out of high school," which is equally implausible for the same basic mathematical reason.

The claimed statistic has been sourced to a wide variety of more or less definitive-sounding sources, including the Census Bureau, Centers for Disease Control, Department of Justice, the National Principals Association, and some PTA groups. However, all of those claimed sources are either dead ends, or are themselves secondary sources.

The actual sources for the "nine times" statistic are all associated with "Fathers' Rights" groups, not with government statisticians or academics in pertinent fields.

DAVID PITTELLI

Adams, March 26, 2007

UPDATE

The next day Del Gallo climbed down a bit. After making some new calculations he now believes that children in homes without fathers are about seven times more likely to drop out from high school than are those living with their fathers.

However, while he begins from reasonably-sourced data, he makes some logical errors with it, his most significant being the assumption that if 26% of children age 0-17 are in fatherless homes, then we would, in the absence of an effect, expect 26% of dropouts to be in fatherless homes. This assumption is unwarranted because fatherless rates start at a low level for infants and go up as a child ages, as divorces occur throughout the course of a marriage, and fatherlessness is closer to 50% as children approach the more likely dropout ages of 16-17. (According to divorcemag.com, the percentage of marriages reaching their 5th, 10th, and 15th anniversaries is 82%, 65%, and 52% respectively.) That and sociocultural effects will explain most, and perhaps all, of the effect of fatherlessness on dropout rates.

Pregnant? Scared? Welcome to North Adams!

2007-03-23T07:41:00.000-04:00

Have you noticed, when you drive into North Adams, that almost all of the billboards are Ad Council offerings? Coming in on Route 2 from Boston, we have long been welcomed by this billboard. Of course, it’s a good thing that pregnant single women have places to get counseling (although as I understand it, most such counseling places have one agenda or the other with respect to abortion), but is it good for North Adams that this is the first big sign one sees upon entering the city?

As it happens, that particular billboard has now been replaced by the “asthmatic fish,” which while useless at telling us anything we didn’t know about asthma, at least doesn’t make us look like victims of dysfunction in need of counseling. On that score, other recent billboards have urged us to personally not engage in gun violence (“when you do a gun crime, your whole family serves time with you” or some such), to talk with our 8-year-old (or thereabouts) child about drinking alcohol, not to scream at or beat our spouse in the presence of our pre-school daughter, and to contact Joe Kennedy 4 cheap Oil (not sure if this last one is a freebie).

As I understand it, advertisers give space (or TV time) to the Ad Council when they couldn’t otherwise sell the space to a paying client. So, as would probably be apparent to many people, an Ad Council ad is always evidence of a moribund commercial market. Making the ads so pathos-invoking is just icing on the cake, so that everyone who is moving to (or opening a business in) the area, will feel like slitting his wrists.

The few commercial billboard ads don’t do too much to counter this notion. Apart from area banks and a couple restaurants, we see mostly ads for liquor (what the hell does “New Green in the Hizzy” mean in conjunction with Teapartay, anyway?), and in the summer for cultural festivals as far afield as Manchester, Vermont, but rarely for those in our own area.

Obviously the owners of the billboards are getting little or no rent from them, but they at least are expressing some hope for the future, in that they are paying to keep them up at a loss, rather than tearing them down or seeking to donate them. Still, the billboards can’t be worth much to them. Perhaps some of the people spending money and time designing ways of improving the local image can buy up the billboards, to use or even tear down, or at least rent them to advertise local events, such as art exhibits at MOCA and the Clark (they did a few last summer), or to promote MCLA or such events as the Adams Fair.

I can’t complain that such moneys aren’t being spent, since I’m not exactly ready to step up to the plate, but in the absence of such sums, couldn’t the owners of the billboards at least donate their space to local events and nonprofits, rather than making them icons of desperation?

A Complaint on the Declining Status of Marriage

2007-03-10T10:39:00.000-05:00

No, I’m not talking about gay marriage, which I will probably vote for someday, if it comes to a state referendum. And I’m not talking about widespread divorce, either, although that is certainly a problem, and is perhaps related to my beef.

My complaint is that businesses no longer take marriage seriously. Yesterday, I noticed that my life insurance information was still being forwarded from my old address. I called the firm up, to change my address. No problem. How about changing my wife’s address? “You can’t do that, only your wife can change her address.”

A couple days earlier, I had trouble logging on to my bank account. I needed to reset the password. I called the bank, which informed me that they could set up a new online identity accessing the same account – which would have none of the information on the bills I pay regularly – or I could have my wife call them up to reset the password on the existing online identity. You see, the online identity was linked to my wife, not me (even though it includes my name!).

In each case, the firm has instituted a security measure which may seem to occasionally make sense given the sleazy behavior of some divorcing couples. But treating your married clients like they’re all in the throes of an ugly divorce is both inconvenient and disrespectful.

And it doesn’t actually do anything to improve security. As I explained to the bank, my wife and I have a joint checking account, and I could, if I so wished, write a check to drain every penny from the account, and my wife would have no recourse. Further, I have legitimate access by various means to all of the past transactions in the account. Since a checking account’s value is limited to the money in it, and perhaps also to the information incorporated in its history, there was no logical reason to keep me from using the online banking system (even apart from the fact that I had in fact been using for over a year). Q.E.D. – but not to the bank.

Further, as with the insurance address change, if I were acting improperly, I could have done my evil deed with the aid of any woman – say, one of the many mistresses I’d be leaving my wife for. Just as I could have been any male voice claiming to be me, as long as I had certain account information in front of me, if I had had any adult female in the room, I could have put her on, to claim to be my wife, and no one would have been any wiser. For that matter, I could have done this even if my wife kept a separate account, provided I found one of her statements, something a departing husband would likely have had access to. (And as far as our life insurance is concerned – it’s a cheap term policy with no cash value whatsoever.)

As I explained to the bank’s customer service people, one of the economic advantages of being married has long been that you could combine various properties and accounts and B.S. errands, so that one member could take care of the business of both, saving time and consolidating resources. This is increasingly not the case. I don’t like it, I don’t think it’s helpful to any civic purpose, and it’s not a good way to treat your customers.

Used Bookstores - The Opiate of the Bourgeois Masses

2007-02-21T21:26:00.000-05:00

Since I just moved to the Berkshires last summer, I’m still figuring out where all my haunts will be. I’m pretty up on playgrounds and museums and such for preschool children – my most frequent need given my “job” – but I haven’t been entirely satisfied with the used-bookstore situation.* I am addicted to nonfiction books, in the past mainly theology and fishing, but for the last 5 years mostly books on ornamental horticulture.

I find the used bookstores to be more exciting because I never know what I’m going to find, and because I’m cheap. (Garden books are pricey. Say I see the latest by Tracy Disabato-Aust; I’m just not going to feel good about myself in the morning if I have to lay out $40 to get her.) Of course, most used book stores are pretty useless for my purposes. Half the stores must be excluded because they have almost nothing but trashy novels, or their stock looks like it’s been stored in a damp basement for 10 years. Maybe 20% or 30% have enough gardening books to allow a 30-minute browse.

So anyway, I think I have just found the best used bookstore in the area. It’s The Book Barn, at 200 Troy Schenectady Road (Rte 2), in Latham NY. From the center of North Adams, take Route 2 West, set your trip odometer as you crest the upramp out of town (just before the first cemetery) and when it hits 40 miles, you’ll see the store, which takes up the bulk of a small strip mall, on your left.

It’s a bit far to go just for books, I suppose, but surely one can find an excuse to visit Albany. (I was on the way back from Jeepers in Albany, which is sort of like Chuck E. Cheese, but for some reason this “Seed of Chucky” doesn’t fill me with the same dread as the original.)

Why do I like The Book Barn?

The store has 100,000 books.
Neatly arranged by topic. Naturally, it has a lot of books in a lot of topics (“124 categories,” according to their business card).
More gardening books than any used store I’ve been in except for the largest few in Boston and NYC.
The owners skillfully buy their stock and can quickly find things.
No crap. No old, festering useless tomes, no glut of ancient houseplant How-Tos or general books with titles like “Gardening” or “Gardening for Special People.” The hokiest stuff there was the old Time-Life Encyclopedia Of Gardening series, but those are actually fairly well done (albeit dated) books, and these copies were unusually complete and pristine.
The strip-mall may be an architectural wasteland, but my books don’t smell like mildew, as they often do when bought out of marginally heated, sprawling farmhouses.
Low prices. Most brick & mortar stores are still stuck on selling for half the cover price. That’s acceptable for a new remainder, and of course an antique can be worth a lot more than Gertrude Jekyll was selling it for, but in the days of Amazon I don’t know how they can expect to get that for the typical used book. At any rate, I bought five beautiful and interesting books, with $17 to $50 list prices, for $5.50 to $6.95. (One had a gift inscription, often the case with gardening books, but which doesn’t bother me or even register as a demerit from otherwise very good condition.)

For what it’s worth (OK, to the sane and skeptical reader presumably more than is my opinion) the store has won awards from Albany media sources in categories like “best used book store” and “best used bookstore (selection and price).” It’s open M-F 10-8, Sat 10-6, and Sun 11-5.

Does anyone have any other bookstore tips?

* There are indeed some pretty good bookstores around in Shelburne Falls and along the Connecticut River / Route 91 towns. They generally charge half-list, or about as much, as does the smallish but very interesting place on the ground floor of the Eclipse Mill (I drop in after art openings in the Mill’s gallery; I always find one thing I can’t resist, which is good because I’d find it very awkward leaving a one-man store, in a guy’s house yet, without buying something).

It’s all about the Ribeye

2007-02-02T17:12:00.000-05:00

I live in Adams Mass., near the “Big Y” Supermarket. It’s a small chain, with 27 stores in Mass. and Connecticut (launched in 1936 in Chicopee, MA at a “Y” intersection, as I learned at bigy.com). It’s convenient for me, and I buy close to half my groceries there, but sometimes it feels like I’m going to a casino, not knowing if I’m going to get a good price, or pay perhaps 50% more than a good price. Further, in order to get the good price you may have to bring not only the members’ card on your keychain, but also their big, plastic, color-coded discount coins.

So when I have the time and I’m driving by, I go to the big Stop & Shop on the North Adams / Williamstown border, or the Wild Oats, for baked goods and produce; and I also feel like I should stop by Wal-Mart every couple of weeks, getting everything I need which they have there, cheaper. So my convenient supermarket, isn’t.

On a related note, I try to buy things in small, local shops in Adams and North Adams when practical. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still largely about the Benjamins. I won’t eschew the leviathan from Arkansas just because it’s the leviathan from Arkansas (or because “it’s like Hitler,” as my mother helpfully pointed out), but at the same time I’m willing to give a little place some business if the service justifies the price. It often does: Service is great around here, precisely – I suppose – because the business climate is so difficult; and often the prices are great too.

One such place I’m happy to shop in several times a month is The Jolly Butcher Shoppe in Adams. I haven’t tried the deli items, but the raw meat is great. It’s open Wed-Sat 10:00-6:00 at 90 Summer Street, an area that’s neck-and-neck with Eagle Street in North Adams for the prize of Most Struggling Retail District in the Berkshires. (I also get haircuts and furniture on Summer Street.)

So how does it stack up? I’ve taken Jolly Butcher’s printed price list to the Big Y a couple of times. (I was surprised at how paranoid I felt with my “Jolly Butcher” price-list, as if a couple goons wearing bloody “Y” aprons were gonna throw me out of the joint.) And Jolly’s meat prices were almost always better than Big Y’s. I’m not going to get into specifics, because prices fluctuate, but I entered prices into a spreadsheet,* and Jolly averaged about 24% lower than Big Y’s regular prices. When items had a “Sale” promotion at Big Y, Jolly Butcher was still 8% less expensive. It was only the “Buy 1, Get 1 Free” deals at Big Y which were cheaper than Jolly’s prices. They’re great if you happen to luck into something you want, and you want 2 of them, but they’re not reliable sources of savings unless you’re completely flexible about what’s for dinner, and yet can pack away a lot of the same cut of meat before age or freezing enter into the picture.

My favorite piece of meat is probably the Ribeye steak. Jolly always seems to have it, cutting up a big boneless one every week. (I wouldn’t mind the bone, too, if the price were cut slightly to reflect that.) Usually I fry it in an almost dry, very hot pan for 2 minutes on a side, remove the steaks and turn the heat down to medium, then put in a couple tablespoons each of butter, chopped fresh ginger or garlic, and soy sauce, and return the steaks until medium-rare. The ultimate in meaty goodness!

The Jolly Butcher has also recently added cooked chicken on the bone [pressure-fried] sold a la carte. When the owner told me he was going to be spending $13,000 to install a cooker and vent for chicken and fish, I resisted the temptation to shout, “Good God man, haven’t you noticed this is a depressed mill town?” Well, it’s fortunate he ignored the advice I did not presume to proffer, because it’s better than any other fried or roasted chicken I’ve ever had.

* (prices for Hamburger 90% lean, Hamburger 80%, Filet Mignon, London Broil, Boneless Ribeye, Chuck Roast, Boneless Breast and Pork Tenderloin)

Gideon’s, RIP?

2007-01-23T20:36:00.000-05:00

I just learned today that Gideon’s is in dire straights. According to its phone message, the restaurant was closed last weekend, but hopes to reopen on Wednesday January 24^th. Apparently EGL (formerly Gideon’s Nightery), which was being spun off from Gideon’s and lately under the management of Vaal London-Kane, is in similar straights.

Well, this is horrible news. The first dinner my wife and I had in North Adams, when she was interviewing for her job as Web Communications Director, was at Gideon’s. The fact that we could get a meal as good as at any foodie restaurant in Boston was a significant factor (OK, a not insignificant factor, at any rate) in making us comfortable about moving out here; the relative ease of getting a reservation, and prices about 30% lower than in the city, was icing on the cake. And apart from our own comfort, the prosperous-seeming restaurant crowd also made us a little more comfortable about North Adams’ economic trend being up now, rather than down as in previous decades. The fact that Bill Gideon’s resume (among others) showed that he could make it anywhere, but he chose to come here, was also a good sign.

Gideon’s was always busy when I was there, but perhaps that was only on Saturday nights. Busy Saturdays are necessary, but not sufficient, for success in the business, so I guess I was “part of the problem” despite eating there every month or two. EGL has been less crowded; it was a great bargain for lunch or a light dinner; my wife gave them a fair amount of lunch business and raved about the food; its chef, Joe Mezza (spelling?) had been sous-chef at Mistral in Boston, a widely acclaimed French restaurant which we had never gotten to, mostly as they were on the high end of our price range.

There is still, of course, Gramercy Bistro, which is close to and similar to Gideon’s. And I understand that Milan at 55 Main is quite good; I have not eaten there. (Although my Italian grandmother has now been dead for several years, I still feel a bit guilty about getting Italian food anywhere else.) But between Jae’s closing up its restaurant in North Adams, and now this, I am not happy about recent trends. (I did finally get to Coyote Flaco on the far side of Williamstown last weekend; it’s unusually good Mexican for New England, and very reasonably priced, but not so convenient from Adams.)

So what to do? I will try to follow the situation with Gideon’s and EGL, and eat there on a weeknight if I get another chance.

Does anyone have any details about what happened? At one level, I’m sure it’s a problem of not making enough money, but how did the problem go down, and what does that mean for the prospects of reopening?

UPDATE: Having heard from a couple of reasonably well-connected (but not directly involved) sources, I believe that Gideon's had plenty of business but was mismanaged to the point its bank felt the need to shut it down. EGL, while apparently less of a going concern, may be slightly more likely to make a comeback. I never did "Drinking Liberally" which has been hosted there, mostly because I'm not a liberal (except in the classical sense), but I see such events as important to the success (cultural and otherwise) of North Adams' continued revival. An arts community needs reasonably priced places for refreshments and entertainment that can attract pinkos, artists, students, dilettantes and groupies, and gays and lesbians, and North Adams doesn't have a surfeit of them.

UPDATE 2: Gideon's phone message no longer says they're hoping to reopen tonight (Wednesday). Also, EGL does not look likely to reopen as such, at least any time soon, although Vaal, its manager, would appear (unlike Gideon, can't say more) to remain viable in the local business community. She just took over the now-shuttered restaurant a couple months ago. EGL was to now, I believe still "owned" by Bill Gideon, not Vaal (that is, to the extent it was not owned by the bank which lent Gideon considerable sums).

Cooking Inspiration

2007-01-05T10:19:00.000-05:00

A disturbing number of spring buds and bulbs are sprouting in this very mild winter – disturbing because we must fear that a colder February could kill off most of next spring’s flowers. Nevertheless, there’s not a lot of gardening going on in Zone 5, so for now I will change the topic to cooking.

As a stay-at-home dad with a working wife, I tend to do most of the cooking. With pre-school children demanding their bland favorites, while my wife and I want more flavorful foods, it’s hard to please everyone, and easy to get into a cooking funk. (It doesn’t help that I like rich meaty dishes and only like a few vegetables, while my wife wants low-fat vegetable options, and hates ham and mushrooms.) I think a dinner has to include a meat/protein, a starch, and a vegetable, so I usually have to have more than three dishes to cover everyone’s needs. So it helps if the recipes require a limited preparation time, include more than one of the three food groups, or are palatable to all of the family.

Since my wife and kids got me another old cookbook for Christmas, I have been inspired to find/alter and create several entrees. The inspiration came from the Time-Life Foods of the World series 1971 book American Cooking: The Melting Pot. (Like the rest of the series, it’s a collection of travelogue vignettes, with goofy photos of very square pre-1970s characters breaking bread together.)

For the first recipe, Chicken Paprikash, I had to go online to find various versions since the book only alluded to the dish. From previous experience, I’ve found that mixing a chopped onion with flour and spices, and then frying it, is a lot quicker than making a separate roux, and makes for a thickened and flavorful sauce or stew. So I incorporated this method into the core of the various recipes I found. The next day, I realized that if you eliminated the paprika, replaced the chicken with beef, cooked the meat for longer, and added a couple of sliced vegetables, you would have a very successful Beef Sofrito. Either dish can work for the kids if I go light on the hot pepper; they can eat the meat and sauce with ziti or penne pasta. Here goes [optional ingredients are bracketed]:

Chicken Paprikash

2007-01-05T10:17:00.000-05:00

1 lb. boneless chicken breast, sliced thin

2 Tbsp butter or olive oil

1 medium onion, chopped

[garlic, chopped]

[dry or fresh hot pepper]

1 Tbsp flour

1/4 tsp black pepper

1/2 tsp dried thyme leaves

2 Tbsp paprika

8oz. can tomato sauce

1 cup (8oz.) chicken broth

1/4 cup sour cream or ½ & ½

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

Toss onion in bowl with flour & spices. Open cans and ready tomato, broth & cream.

[Shake chicken with extra paprika and pepper. Salt only if broth is low-salt.]

Melt 1 Tbsp butter over medium-high heat. Fry chicken until just browned.

Transfer chicken to plate.

Add remaining 1 Tbsp butter to skillet.

Add onion and sauté until beginning to soften, about 3 minutes.

Add tomato, broth, cream mixture. Stir. Boil until sauce thickens enough to coat spoon thinly, about 5 minutes.

Mix in chicken and any collected juices.

Reduce heat to low. Cover with top or colander depending on need to reduce.

Cook until chicken is just done.

Beef Sofrito

2007-01-05T10:14:00.000-05:00

1 lb. stew beef cubes

2 Tbsp butter [or olive oil]

1 medium onion, chopped

1 clove garlic, chopped

[dry or fresh hot pepper]

1 Tbsp flour

1/4 tsp black pepper

1/2 tsp dried thyme

1 tsp dried parsley

1 carrot, sliced “paper” thin

1 celery stalk, sliced “paper” thin

8oz. can tomato sauce

1 cup (8oz.) chicken broth

1/4 cup sour cream or ½ & ½

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

Toss onion in bowl with flour & spices. Open cans and ready tomato, broth & cream.

Melt 1 Tbsp butter over medium-high heat. Fry beef cubes until just browned.

Transfer beef to plate. (You may choose to slice up beef in spare time during next steps.)

Add remaining 1 Tbsp butter to skillet.

Add onion and sauté until beginning to soften, or brown, about 3-10 minutes.

Transfer onion back to bowl.

Add carrot & celery (or bell pepper) and sauté until soft or browning.

Add tomato, broth, cream mixture. Stir.

Return beef (and juices) to skillet.

Boil at medium heat until sauce thickens to liking. Reduce heat to low. Cover until beef is thoroughly stewed.

Who's Wearing The Pants Now?

2006-11-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

With the gardening season effectively over for the next 5 months in Zone 5 – barring an early spring for such bulbs as Galanthus (snowdrop), Eranthis (winter aconite), and Crocus – I’m going to talk about something almost completely different: Pants and where to get them.

I’ve been looking for flannel-lined khakis or blue jeans, because I don’t find separate long underwear very comfortable (it always seems a bit stuffy in the manhood department). We haven’t used our furnace yet, just a gas fireplace to warm the living-room some mornings (this economizing due to the prospect of paying heating bills on a 3,000 square foot Victorian with 10-foot ceilings). And somehow 60 F, if it's indoors, feels F'ing cold!

I went to the new Peebles in North Adams on opening day, and I suppose they do a pretty good job trying to provide every kind of garment, from men’s suits to little girls’ pajamas, in a modest space, but it’s just not possible. They have a Carhartt section for work clothes, but no lined pants; thankfully a salesperson did tell me that Tractor Supply Company, in Bennington VT or Pittsfield MA, would have a wider selection.

A subsequent visit to the mall in Lanesboro proved fruitless, so I went to Bennington yesterday, where TSC had all kinds of utility and casual clothes at great prices (like 100% flannel shirts for $12), including lined blue jeans for $45 (Carhartt) or $30 (TSC’s own C. E. Schmidt line, which I found especially comfortable and well-fitting), both of which appear to be pre-washed and very well made.

They’re not the very heaviest of pants, but they’re a lot warmer than unlined jeans or khakis. They have a checkered blue lining, which seems a lot more sensible to me than my old L.L Bean khakis with a checkered red lining, which I’m never sure whether to wash with the reds or with the neutral colors.

While there I noticed a couple of the women’s garments, which seemed a particularly outré example of Western kitsch, perhaps suitable for Halloween, but I wasn’t really paying attention to whether any of the women’s stuff would appeal to ex-yuppie women for their casual clothing (sorry wife, but I did have two pre-schoolers antsy to get to the Bennington McDonalds with the indoor playground).

In short, for any man looking for clothes for gardening or weekend wear, or for a casual work environment, I heartily recommend a trip to Tractor Supply Company (or www.mytscstore.com).

Note that I have no financial connection whatsoever to TSC or its agents, but if they wish to pay a bribe for my bringing my legions of fans to their doors... let's just say that "prices are low." I do not currently own their stock (Nasdaq symbol TSCO), but I may look into it one of these days as they seem to be a well-managed firm with more potential for growth (and reportedly better employee relations) than, say, Wal-Mart.

My New House

2006-10-02T21:36:00.000-04:00

As my legions of fans are no doubt dying to learn, I have completed my move(s) and real estate transactions. I now live in the Berkshires (Adams, MA) about 10 miles each from the Vermont and New York lines, in a pink Victorian with a sloped half-acre lot. The Victorian is about one-and-a-half times as large as my Natick house, yet cost less than half as much as we got for Natick (even though its buyers struck an astute bargain). I can walk to a supermarket, restaurants and shops in the town center. Given that my new lot is basically in town, and is all in close visual proximity to an ornate Victorian, the style of gardening will be somewhat more formal (i.e., symmetrical) as well as more baroque and neat (rather than casual and woodsy).

I moved a dozen perennial divisions from Natick, and engaged in some “radical pruning” (including cutting down a magnificent 40-foot spruce which was crowding and shading what used to be a mostly sunny raised northwest-sloping bed). More recently I have accepted plants from family, moved some free “shrubs” (more like whips, of Euonymus alatus, and shovels-full of Vinca minor from my neighbor), and planted 100 bulbs. (My wife planted 100 more.) Here’s a photo of my family at our new house on May 21 (the first time we toured it). I think the pink rhododendrons are rather wasted in front of the pink house. The back slope (where I’ve done almost all of my work) is hidden behind the house. Many of the spring bulbs are naturalized in the grassy slope to the right of this image.

Settled and unpacked in a permanent (as much as anything can be predicted to be) place, I expect I will be back on the blogging more regularly (not that that is setting the hurdle high).

Your New House

2006-05-02T23:43:00.000-04:00

First of all, this is a shameless plug for my house, which sits on one end of an aqueduct trail in Natick, Massachusetts, 1.3 miles from the Natick Community Organic Farm and the local elementary school. It just went on the market for $589,000, and there should be an Open House on Sunday May 7th.

The house’s details and photos can be found on newenglandmoves.com or Realtor.com by town and price, or by MLS number 70376174

http://www.newenglandmoves.com/Listings/SingleFamily_NewEnglandMoves.htm?id=1010628056

The house, at 160 Cottage Street, Natick, has 4 bedrooms and 1.5 baths, 1900 square feet and 1.37 acres. Part of the land is the aqueduct path itself. In advance of putting my house on the market we sold the town a hiking easement to ensure that the trail’s current but unofficial use will be able to continue (i.e., hiking, skiing and biking are good, but no horses due to erosion issues, and no motor vehicles except for aqueduct maintenance).

Anyone wanting to use the trail in either direction is welcome, despite the legal fiction No Trespassing sign still on my property (put up by the MWRA, not me, presumably to reduce their liability if someone gets injured on this very flat and easy trail).

It’s been great living here, in large part because of this trail, which gives my wife in particular the opportunity to bike the children down to the school playground and organic farm (basically a free zoo), and to meet the many neighbors who walk their dogs and bike and cross country ski here. The wild turkeys crossing the back yard are pretty cool too.

The Jewel Box Garden

2006-01-14T20:52:00.000-05:00

A Book For Avant-gardist Gardening Snobs

Author Thomas Hobbs is, at least in the persona he presents in this 2004 book, an avant-gardist gardening snob. He sees gardening as a fashion-driven art, where trendy plants are to be discarded as soon as they become too popular with the petit bourgeoisie, for whom his contempt is made clear on almost every page of text. Some of this stuff can't be spoofed, because it's impossible to be more catty than Hobbs here. (The following quotes will work better if you imagine them spoken by David Sidaris or a lisping Harvey Korman.)

Some gardeners will never learn the art of plant assemblage... As I drive by their predictable efforts, I often wonder, "Is Life Easier?"

Being a left-handed, Gemini breach-birth allows me to love tetraploid daylilies. It is who I am botanically.

Bowling balls are appropriate in Marcia Donahue's garden/gallery in Berkeley, California, because she did it first.

Hobbs is obsessed with rejection of the common and the clichéd, but most of his featured gardens also look alike, in part because they're almost all small shaded urban gardens in the coastal Northwest, but more notably because they eschew flowers in favor of foliage plants - mostly bright or spiky - with color from kitschy cast-offs and outré sculpture, including flesh-colored ceramic penises.

In my (hardly original) opinion, a big problem with most people's enjoyment of the arts today is that the field has already done what is pretty or handsome, and since its current practitioners are jaded by their predecessors' work and aspire to being original, they must often produce what most nonspecialists consider ugly. This is notably a problem with architecture and oil painting (and classical music) by about World War I, and haute couture since the Kennedy Administration. So far horticulture has largely escaped the curse of avant-gardist ugliness, but not in this book.

I wondered whether it was fair to Hobbs to say he has passed a step beyond "Shocking Beauty" (the title of his 1999 book) to where much of this book is ugly, but then I came to his penultimate page of prose:

I have noticed a switch in gardening, from "pretty" to what I call "the New Ugly." I find this fascinating and very, very attractive. In gardening, ugly has been redefined by brilliant plantsmen and -women who get absolutely no thrill from trying to make a pretty picture. By increasing the dosage of all that is weird and unexpected, these thrillseekers are creating powerful, unforgettable experiences.

Umh, no it hasn't! If we wanted "powerful, unforgettable experiences" of ugliness, we would just move into a junkyard next to an oil refinery! That said, if the book's title or dust-jacket reflected this decadent philosophy, I could rate it 4 stars and say that it was suitable for people who agree with Hobbs' pro-ugly position.

Perhaps oddly, Hobbs' Vancouver garden is larger, far more colorful and floriferous, and far more beautiful, than the preceding gardens. Hobbs doesn't fail to add a campy dramatic element, however, to his discovery of the Vancouver house:

I will never forget ringing the doorbell, expecting "Max," [from Sunset Boulevard] or at least Harvey Korman dressed as "Max," to open the door. Instead, a very short Alfred Hitchcock type greeted us, with a badly-wigged woman peering over his shoulder.

As you might have guessed, the text of this book is more about Hobbs' persona than about gardening. But it isn't until the very last page of prose that we learn exactly how, for Hobbs, the garden is therapy - about talking to plants, which most people can't do ("and it shows"!) - and about remembering gardeners who gave him plants and then died of AIDS. Life is a veil of tears, so maybe we should cut him some slack, even if we are not in love with ugliness.

(FYI, I have nothing against snobbery in gardening, and hope to increase my own. But a snobbery based on beauty (or erudition or even class) is one thing; a snobbery based on scarcity and ugliness, quite another).

The Unapproachable Christopher Lloyd

2005-11-27T14:50:00.000-05:00

I love checking out my library’s new book section. Last week I discovered Succession Planting for Year-round Pleasure, a fantastic book by Christopher Lloyd. The photos are among the most beautiful I have ever seen, and I give this book my highest honors. But perhaps it deserves some demerit on the grounds of impracticality or even depressing unattainability.

For one thing, Lloyd’s long border at his estate at Great Dixter is 200 feet by 15 feet, so many of the effects which he finds practical are not possible in any garden likely to be owned by the bourgeoisie. Further, he gardens in England in perhaps the equivalent to Zone 8. Despite this, he is always looking to push the limits of hardiness with exotic plants. And outside of Britain and coastal Oregon and Washington, there is virtually nowhere in the English-speaking world where the winters are so mild, and yet the summers are not too hot for many of his plants.

So taken altogether, in any combination of 3 plants you might consider, it’s a safe bet that 1 of them either can’t be grown in your location, or will require extraordinary levels of coddling to get through the winter. At some level there’s nothing wrong with that; who hasn’t at least considered growing Dahlias or Gladioli, which must be dug up, but can then be stored in most basements? However, his planting schemes are more labor intensive than this. The semi-hardy and tropical plants he loves must be dug up, or have cuttings taken, and many are wintered under glass; to do this for all of his many varied plants, he apparently has at least 3 different temperatures in his greenhouses or cold frames.

Normal (i.e., not superhuman) gardeners use biennials and short-lived perennials (the ones which seed themselves to death) such as Lupines, many Dianthus, Digitalis (foxglove) and Lychnis coronaria, as relatively easy self-sowers, performing enough dead-heading to keep seedlings to a modest level, and hopefully to keep the mother plant alive as well. For Lloyd and his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, the chosen method for all of these but the Lychnis (rose campion) is generally to sow seeds in summer, pot them up and put in a cold frame in October, bed out the next April or May, then rip out the plants as soon as their blooms have faded. Naturally his Lupines make mine look diseased. Damn him to hell and all that. For fuzzy-leaved Verbascums, which he winters in their final positions, he actually suspends a plate of glass over their crowns to keep them dry so they don’t rot!

All that said, his plant combinations are exquisite, and many of them are obtainable by most gardeners in temperate climates. More important, the principles he espouses, the color combinations, and the methods of succession among broad types of plants, are all transferable to less intensive methods, or to other plants which are more practical for your situation. Further, I defy anyone to read this book without discovering several new plants he will plan to try out. I am made newly aware especially of several with true- and deep-blue flowers. Buy or borrow this book, but also consider his older books, The Adventurous Gardener and The Well-Tempered Garden. They have essentially no illustrations, but a wealth of cultural information and design ideas and critiques of many plants and cultivars.

The Adventurous Gardener

The Adventurous Gardener, which I obtained for $4.98 in the bargain book section at New England Mobile Bookstore, has long graced my shelves. It provides a brilliant gardener's take on any number of practical, as well as aesthetic, judgments. The first 11 chapters concern maintenance and propagation, such as "Unusual Ways with Rose Cuttings," “Maintaining Mature Hedging,” and "Some Reactions to Cutting Back" (which covers the results of radical pruning on scores of genuses of shrubs and trees).

The next 8 chapters cover trees and shrubs, Lloyd’s experience and opinions of hundreds of species and cultivars, and the best ways, culturally and aesthetically, to use them in the garden. The rest of the book covers a variety of herbaceous plants, design concepts, the theories of Gertrude Jekyll, “Planning a Border,” you name it. Of course, the book, at 250 pages, is not comprehensive. For that matter, Lloyd’s The Well-Tempered Garden is in a sense basically the same book, except that there is very little overlap. Each is a series of essays which stands on its own. (Similarly, the estate of the late Henry Mitchell has 3 such books out, made up of his newspaper gardening columns; but Mitchell’s columns are shorter and more about literary style than detail, and his 3 books overlap each other considerably.)

This book’s greatest weakness: it only has 18 low-resolution black & white photos. These are in the book's center, and do little to illustrate the text. So in order to follow many of the chapters, which concern specific varieties of, say, crabapple trees, or concern combinations of plants, you will have to have the A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants or a similar reference at hand. That said, this keeps the book small and dirt cheap (as little as a dollar used via Amazon). I suppose I could, for lack of hundreds of glossy color photos, rate the book less than the perfect 5 stars, but I can’t see criticizing a book for not being what it is not, especially when it is so good at being what it is.

2005-10-07T22:48:00.000-04:00

Not bad for October. (No frost yet!)

A Longer Lasting Rudbeckia?

2005-10-07T22:35:00.000-04:00

The above photo shows part of my double border (photo taken 10/7/05). Obviously, the plants are past their peak. But note that Rudbeckia 'Irish Eyes' (near left) is still looking relatively fresh, while Rudbeckia 'Goldsturm' (just to the right of 'Irish Eyes') is now basically just brown "cones" with all petals fallen or drooping straight downward. Now, 'Goldsturm' is a great plant, and I like its slightly golden tone (and brown centers) slightly more than the purer yellow petals and greenish centers of 'Irish Eyes,' but the 'Irish Eyes' habit of blooming at least three weeks later into the fall is worth something.

Also, since everyone has 'Goldsturm,' I wouldn't want to overuse that variety. Fortunately the two plants go together well, so I'll keep 'em both. Another good thing about 'Irish Eyes' (and Rudbeckia and composites in general) is that it can flower well even in its first year from seed, which is unusual at least for noncomposite perennials. I started them indoors on 2/27/05 and planted out on 4/26/05, with no coddling.

2005-09-17T12:20:00.000-04:00

My trellis, with Ipomeia 'Scarlet O'Hara.'

Head in the Sun, Roots in the Shade

2005-09-13T22:07:00.000-04:00

It’s not often that gardening makes me feel stupid.

Killing plants doesn’t. Plants die. And generally when I’ve killed them I had recognized that I was taking a risk, such as putting a silver-leaved plant in moisture-retentive soil in part shade, because I liked the way it looked there more than any other available spot. (On that score, Lychnis coronaria is far more tolerant of shade and moisture than is Lavandula angustifolia ‘Munstead.’)

But last week, I found myself wondering how I could possibly have failed to understand the needs of vines. It’s often said of Clematis, among many vines, that they like their “head in the sun and roots in the shade.” This would seem to fit their natural orientation climbing over shrubs or trees. But isn’t the same true of the shrubs or trees, and even herbaceous border plants, as well?

These plants also generally have their heads in the sun, and their roots are also shaded, by themselves and, in a closely planted bed, their neighbors, yet something different must be happening with vines to lead to the “head in the sun and roots in the shade” prescription – assuming it isn’t a bunch of bovine feces.

Although I’m not arrogant enough to think that such a common prescription could be entirely wrong, the bovine feces hypothesis is always worth consideration. For one thing, roots clearly don’t sense the sunlight itself. They sense temperature and moisture levels. Naturally, a good layer of mulch can, as much as shade from above-ground growth, keep the sun’s rays from raising soil temperatures and evaporating near-surface moisture. Dry soil will be hotter than moist soil. And the application of (cold) water from ground sources and deep reservoirs (i.e., most any private or municipal water supply) will directly and rapidly cool an overly warm bed of soil.

Of course, the questions remain whether one can add sufficient water to cool the soil, without damaging a plant not adapted to bogs, or whether soil in New England will ever be both quite wet and too hot for a “normal” plant – or just about any plant, given that the silver-toned Mediterranean plants which like dry conditions are also resistant to any heat that New England can dish out.

Getting back to my “D’oh!” moment of last week. The morning glory (Ipomeia ‘Scarlet O’Hara’) vines have run well over the top of my trellis (previous post). Whenever I’ve watered, I’ve see that they’re dry (by poking a finger through the mulch) and added as much water to them as I do to just about any of my herbaceous plants (10 seconds from a handheld shower head nozzle at a non-blasting but considerable flow). This seems like a lot of water, given that the 10 plants are a foot apart and seem to share each others’ water, are well mulched with cedar chips, are clear overhead to rain water, and are really only getting half sun. But while the plants have grown tall, and flowered reasonably well, they’ve still always seemed a bit peaked. So this last time, I checked the soil again a few minutes after I watered. Bone dry! I repeated this process 6 times (pausing for soak-in) before achieving, I think, the average moisture level my other plants would get from one pass.

*And then I realized... like I was shot with a diamond bullet right through my forehead, that this scarcely more than 10 square feet of planted bed was supporting close to 100 square feet of foliage – 100 square feet of plant matter which was transpiring, in the face of the sun, perhaps 10 times more water than if the bed were planted with modest-height border perennials.

Many vines like sun. And unlike most sun-loving plants, perhaps all of them will benefit from shading of the soil around their roots. But the crystalline, pure truth of the vine’s essence and needs is that it sucks up a lot of water because it is so tall and skinny and covered with foliage along its height. In contrast, trees and tall self-standing perennials keep most of their foliage on the top and side edges of the volume they “fill.” (Interior foliage, if it is not sloughed off, is largely shaded.) As such, their water needs do not go up linearly (or much at all) with their height.

On the whole, the printed sources I’ve checked speak of a need for average soil moisture for morning glories, or say “keep well watered until established.” I can’t disagree, but I am pretty sure that maintaining an average level of soil moisture will always require an above-average level of watering, for morning glories and probably for virtually any vine.

*Kurtz, 1979

2005-06-20T00:21:00.000-04:00

My newly completed trellis (details below).

Trellis, Anyone?

2005-06-20T00:15:00.000-04:00

I’ve been largely out of commission in the garden for the past two weeks, due to jury duty and personal matters. But on Saturday (June 18) I built this 7 foot tall by 9 foot wide rustic cedar trellis. It took all day, the process including cutting with a gasoline chainsaw and electric circular saw, digging, elevating and securing all pieces with stainless steel #10 2½” screws. (Tree felling and design had been done earlier.)

The upright posts are Juniperus virginiana (Eastern red cedar), with horizontal and diagonal stiffening pieces of the same wood or of hardwoods, as I didn’t have a lot of long, straight, smaller diameter cedar. The rear posts are set 12” in the ground, on top of 4” of rocks and sand, the remaining 12” hole then filled with 8” of sand and 4” of soil. I suspect the posts will last for 8 to 10 years, while some of the hardwood cross-pieces may have to be replaced in as little as 2 years due to rot. It’s not much work to replace cross-pieces one at a time; the difficult task is setting up posts and holding them upright while securing them.

I have yet to run vertical strings for the morning glories (Ipomeia ‘Scarlet O’Hara,’ visible in the center of the soil bed, and now just 1 foot tall) to climb, and I will also be adding some smaller pieces of wood, or horizontal wires, for various plants to climb, the exact use of which depends on what other plants I end up adding.

Given the yellow and white house, the existing morning glories, and my desire for roses, I think I’ll have to stick with red to orange or red to pink flowers.

I want to have at least one rose, given the site probably a climber like the red 7-petaled Altissimo, or the nonremontant red very double ‘Chevy Chase’, both of which Peter Schneider on Roses says are good choices for half shade. (This is an excellent book, probably the best of the “Burpee Expert Gardener” series; it consists of Schneider’s favorite 400 or so rose cultivars among the 1,400 he boasts of having grown, with many photographs and some broader cultural tips and information on classes of rose.)

For the other plants I am undecided. A clematis would be nice, especially a later bloomer that can be pruned in the spring with the rose.

Ideally, at least one of the plants will grow long and full enough to cover the top of the trellis and shade the chairs below from the mid-day sun behind them. And some broad-leaf evergreen foliage would be nice in the winter, although I think that would mean including a plant without blooms as flamboyant as rose or clematis, so I wouldn’t want to overdo the evergreens, or have to keep fighting to keep an invasive ivy off of my flowering plants.

2005-06-16T23:08:00.000-04:00

Blooming rugosa Moje Hammarberg, among other plants in my long bed (see text below).

Moje Hammarberg and his neighbors

2005-06-06T19:48:00.000-04:00

Here’s a section of the middle of my long bed, which is finally showing some promise for the season.

Near the right we see ‘Moje Hammarberg,’ whose first bloom opened 6/6/05. Its loosely double, bright saturated purplish-pink flowers are sweetly scented, and come early and throughout the season. (This year everything is running relatively late; I haven’t seen other cultivated roses blooming to date.) This rose grows 3 or 4 feet tall and at least as wide. Like most rugosas, its wrinkly leaves are extremely healthy, its stems are extremely prickly, it will have large hips, and it’s hardy down to Zone 3 or 4 (it was introduced in Sweden in 1931). Last year I wasn’t blown away by the number of its blooms, but that was its first season, and I purchased and planted it rather late (6/20/05, consequently it was just $10 outside the Building 19 on routes 27 and 9 – their non-rugosas were looking pretty sick by that time). The only care I gave it: planted in a well-dug bed, watered when droughty, and knocked off Japanese beetles (tools: a plastic spatula and a soapy pail of water). While powdery mildew was pervasive among nearby roses and brambles, this plant never showed a sign of it, or of any stress. I heartily recommend it, especially to gardeners who think roses are too difficult.

Next from the right: Narcissus leaves (dead-headed).

Middle: Lillium ‘America’ is putting up quite a few big, healthy looking stalks. In my previous post I covered its scarlet lily beetle infestation. As it happens, since my one spraying of Pyrethrin, I have only seen 1 or 2 beetles per day, so I’m hoping my daily inspection and squashing regime will keep the plants healthy without resort to more radical measures.

To the left, behind a tuft of daylily foliage and the Lillium, Centranthus rubra (Jupiter’s Beard, aka Red Valerian, among other names). You can see the first small blooms just starting on top of the Centranthus. This plant handles extremes of temperature, soil and moisture – despite its Mediterranean origins and reputed preference for dry, alkaline conditions, it proved healthy and vigorous for me last year (while my Verbascum was putrefying), with a long season of bloom. Individually, its clusters of small flowers don’t compare to, say, roses, but the plant will soon be much more flamboyant than pictured here. I don’t know why it’s not more popular, unless it’s because it’s too easy to grow for bragging rights, and gets large and flops a bit on its neighbors – that doesn’t bother me if a plant is easy to shear back (no picky pruning regimen, prickly thorns or overly invasive roots). Centranthus is also available in lighter pinks and white. It is featured in the book Antique Flowers, by Katherine Whiteside (1988), a great source for discovering old-fashioned and relatively neglected species.

And to the left of the daylily foliage, a pale pink Oenothera (evening primrose). Or actually, a number of seedlings from the Oenothera, as there did not appear to be a returning (perennial) stalk. These beautiful pinkish mauve flowers appear to glow brighter-than-white in low light conditions, and despite the species' common name, appear throughout the day.And behind Oenothera: Alchemilla mollis (Lady's Mantle), and pink-flowering Allium (chive). All three of these plants are easy and healthy, although often reported to be somewhat invasive I have only found the Oenothera to be so, and its seedlings are pretty easy to identify and pull up if necessary (unlike some invasive plants which spread by runners). The chive is of course tasty with scrambled eggs.

Back Row near right: Lupines and Lychnis coronaria (rose campion, not yet flowering).

Killing the Red Lily Beetle

2005-05-23T22:48:00.000-04:00

I have the dreaded red lily beetle (aka scarlet lily beetle). Yesterday I saw several adult beetles living on the Fritillaria imperialis in my bulb bed, as well as on the Lillium ‘America’ in my long bed, but not (yet) on the shorter Lillium ‘Stargazer’ in the same bed about 15 feet away.

So I sprayed Lillium ‘America’ with Schultz House & Garden Insect Spray (0.02% Pyrethrin) yesterday. The product claims to work on beetles, and today I saw no beetles there, although they were still on the unsprayed F. imperalis. But I have seen reports of very limited effect from this organic pesticide, and it’s close to impossible to spray-cover all parts of this Lily plant, whose leaves are still quite curled up, especially if you want to avoid overspray.

I do not want to use far more toxic pesticides such as imidacloprid. Instead, I have a more radical plan, or experiment, in mind. That is to use fumigation (i.e., gas, within an enclosure). In general, fumigants are considered too dangerous for amateur use. But I would use either cigarette smoke or carbon dioxide to kill the beetles, and I can’t see fearing either gas (well, smoke is more like an aerosol), especially when used outside, and within an enclosure.

Basically, I could upend a container like a trash can – preferably clear – on the plants. This container would have two holes in it, one connected to a hose, the other with a flap or other one-way valve on it. Since smoke (and carbon dioxide) is heavier than air, I will pump smoke into the lower hose, with air to vent out the top until the container is full of smoke. The cigarette will be held within a pipe-like mechanism, surrounded by a glass cylinder, so I can watch the cigarette burn down as I pump air into the mechanism, through the hot cigarette, and into a narrower tube placed on the filter. (I may remove the filter; why reduce the toxins?)

Of course, I do not know if this will work – ideally, kill adults, eggs and larvae. I have read of a high-school science experiment / propaganda, where tobacco smoke is shown to kill flies, which are unharmed by a similar amount of paper smoke. Also, nicotine has long been used as an insecticidal powder, and is in the tobacco plant precisely as a systemic pesticide, as are most plant toxins. It’s just a question of dose and duration, relative to the particular susceptibility of the Lily Beetle.

Provided the beetle infestation survives the pyrethrin – which seems likely – I think I will have to head out to a hardware store, or maybe a head shop, if they still have those, soon.

Whether tobacco works or not, I may also try carbon dioxide. It’s easy to get 10 to 20 oz. tanks of pressurized liquid CO2 for use in “constant air” paint ball guns (they’re rather smaller than the standard propane tank used by plumbers).

I have not been able to find anything concerning horticultural use of tobacco smoke as an insecticidal fumigant. Does anyone have any experience with such methods, or know of any source concerning the same?

2005-05-17T22:48:00.000-04:00

Three primula bought at Home Depot for a total of $4.00. See story below.

Home Depot: Godsend or Evil?

2005-05-17T22:38:00.000-04:00

In my opinion, Home Depot offers us a dilemma of cheap products sold with a caveat emptor attitude. Here’s some of the Good, the Bad and the Nonexistent:

The Good

I started buying primroses at Home Depot in February, keeping about 3 pots at a time in my dining room window for as long as they bloomed. At $1.49 each for 4” pots, and sometimes $0.99 for slightly older stock, I figured that at worst I was still getting flowers cheaper than the doomed ones from florists. Most of the plants had no label, but the odd pot would have a plastic marker saying “Primula acaulis Danova Mix.” Probably most or all were of this type, although that’s hard to prove with a variable seed-sown strain, and a few were more of the ‘candlestick’ type in shape. As each plant’s blooms got ratty I moved it to my cellar under lights. I put 8 plants out on April 22, most in a wooded strip above the aqueduct path that will be mostly shaded once leaf-out is largely complete at the end of May. Seven of the plants still have fairly healthy looking foliage, and 2 are still blooming, which is pretty impressive considering the plants were forced into growth and bloom well before their natural period in this climate.

The Bad

The glossy boxes of Peonies and Phlox, on sale this March, showed a color photo of what to expect, but provided essentially no information about the plants, except for estimated heights, the fact that the peonies were double and might need staking, and that the peonies and phlox were each in assorted colors (i.e., nothing on cultivar or even species). A Google search also yielded nothing on these “Growing Colors” products. But at 4 peonies for $9.96, or 8 phlox for the same price, I figured if even one of each survived and proved worth keeping, I was at least breaking even compared to buying potted growing plants. I know that peonies are best planted in fall, but some sources I checked said that planting was also acceptable in the spring as soon as the soil could be worked – rather vague, I know. (The box said to plant the peonies after the ground warms to 50 degrees F.) I planted all of both species on April 22, about an inch deep, watering them in well, and conditions have been mild and moist since then. The peony buds had elongated to 3” spears, so I left 2” above ground, so the crown and base of the buds was an inch or two deep. Perhaps it’s too early to tell, but 25 days later I haven’t seen any growth from any of the phlox or peonies. Other people I know report losing bare-root plants as often as not, but 0 for 12 is ridiculous. Also, it wouldn’t cost them anything to have some more information on varieties or ancestries on the glossy box and whether to bury all of the elongated growing points, and it wouldn’t cost them much to have something on the web from the mysterious “Glowing Colors” firm which the package lists only as a P.O. Box in Lakewood, New Jersey.

The Nonexistent

While Home Depot has a large selection of deadly pesticides and herbicides, they have not offered any of the organic pre-emergent herbicides made from corn gluten. The Home Depot employee I asked had heard about such products, and had no answer for why they didn’t carry them. So I got it at my local garden center, Windy-Lo Nursery (Natick, MA). The product seemed to work. At any rate, the lawn improved a lot where I spread it (a sunny area where annual grasses had dominated in the lawn’s newly seeded first year), although I can’t prove it wouldn’t have otherwise. Tests I’ve seen on the web indicate an 80% to 90% reduction in lawn weeds, a 10% Nitrogen component, and as one would expect for corn gluten, complete safety even for food plants. I’m no purist about being organic, but why spread deadly chemicals all over a lawn if you don’t have to? (Maybe it’s because I just don’t care all that much about lawn perfection, because I will spray poisons to get rid of poison ivy, or pests in my perennials, but I think the difference to me is that the lawn is large and exactly where my kids are playing.)

Conclusion

I’ll continue to shop at Home Depot for hardware, and I can’t resist checking out their plants whenever I go, but I’ll do far more of my horticultural shopping at:

Windy-Lo Nursery (the closest to me, and a lot larger than it looks from the street)

The Saturday farmers’ market on the Natick Common (fresh, often field-grown plants)

One-time events at nonprofits like schools or the Mass. Horticultural Society in Wellesley (I find that plants in a well-managed one-time sale are timed right, not underdeveloped and not pot-bound)

Russell’s Garden Center (more comprehensive selection)

In the parking lot of the Building 19 on routes 9 and 27. (I never would have expected lumpen-retailer Building 19 to have decent plants, but then one of my clients told me that it was a family business not really part of Building 19, and I checked it out regularly last year. Their product is great, at least when it first comes in, and none of the bargains have been disappointments.)

2005-05-13T23:50:00.000-04:00

Here is the right side of my long perennial border just after dusk tonight (5/13/05), shot (zoomed in) from the window next to my PC as parental duties ruled out leaving the house.

Dusk from my window

2005-05-13T23:49:00.000-04:00

At right we see Dicentra eximia and the taller and more flamboyant D. spectabilis in their new bloom, taking over from Narcissus bulbs (back left) which are past their perfection, but still beautiful and scene-stealing in the otherwise relatively monochromatic bed. D. eximia is longer-blooming, but I prefer the purer red-pink of D. spectabilis, and its more “heart” shaped flowers – and in this position, shaded from about 11AM to 3PM each day, even D. spectabilis bloomed for about 6 weeks last year. I am glad to have these plants, whose size and timing is crucial in this bed – although their niche could also be filled by early Rhododendron, which would also have winter and more early spring interest.

At left front note a green-over-brown Lillium spear, 4 Fritillaria meleagris in front of last year’s dead cropped Pennisetum grass, and the new spiderwort (Tradescantia) foliage, still streaked with red-brown. The Fritillarias are rather lost here, in part due to my reddish (not the garish dyed red! red) mulch. I have several spaces here to fill (last year’s Pennisetum, Lavandula and Verbena, I’m afraid), which means I can buy more plants without doing more double-digging. I won’t again attempt a Mediterranean plant like Lavandula on this side of the bed.

The back row has, between and to the right of the clumps of blooming Narcissi, healthy returning perennials – Lupinus, and Alcea (hollyhock), respectively. These were grown from seed sown in situ last summer, and so if all goes well this will be their first season blooming for me. (Last year I placed purchased Lupines in the front of my house, where the afternoon sun killed them.)

Gardening Books

2005-05-10T23:21:00.000-04:00

There isn’t much happening in my garden, with things slowed down by excess cloudiness. (OK, the daffodils are still looking good despite last weekend’s howling winds, the bleeding hearts are beginning to bloom, the Lavender, Verbena and Pennisetum I’ve mentioned earlier are probably dead, but all the Lillium are spearing up.) So I’ve decided to write about my favorite garden books.

I just counted my gardening books. I have 98, unless I missed a few, and I’m damn proud of it, thank you very much. (If I had to report an even 100, you’d assume I was estimating or even exaggerating the count.) Most of these I bought cheap at yard sales, library sales, used book stores, or discount sections. This would of course count as a huge waste of time, if I didn’t enjoy the pursuit. Although library sales and book stores almost always have a separate section for gardening, I count myself lucky to find one useful or interesting book in a rack. It seems inevitable that more than half will be on house plants or will have titles like “Gardening,” with no focus whatsoever. (For me, the latter category can occasionally be worth purchasing if it’s big, old, well-illustrated, or written by one of the greats, who mostly seem to be British).

I won’t tell you which used book stores have had the most interesting selection, because I am selfish, but I will tell you to check out the New England Mobile Bookstore (so-called, it’s actually a masonry building) in Newton, MA. I used to take my lunch break there twice a month just to see what was new in their unusually large section of discounted books.

One of course has to have reference books showing specific plant species and types, ideally some that are broad but shallow, and others that give a whole page or more per species, with cultural information and photos of various cultivars. If you’re reading an essentially photo-less book like The Damp Garden, by Beth Chatto, the presence on the same table of a well-illustrated reference tome makes all the difference between completely useless incomprehension and full knowledge of what she’s talking about.

So, apart from reference books which one generally doesn’t “read” as such, here are the 4 books to which I return again and again:

The perennial garden: Color harmonies through the seasons, by Jeff and Marilyn Cox (1985).

This book has a lot of useful things to say about color and garden design. Some of the color theories presented are flaky and esoteric (such as detailed color-emotion link tables, and matching hues to musical notes and making a literal “color harmony”), but the reader is free to learn and choose from many color and design theories. Since garden design is a subjective art, I can reject the need to use, say, the “golden section” in a given design, yet believe that it’s a good idea to consciously consider it. (I may blog later on different cultures’ contributions to ideas about symmetry, at least 3 of which I am open to.) The book also has about 150 pages of information on specific perennials, by genus, and chapters on matters such as building up soil, and building paths – wasted pages if you already have a good basic library. For me, the book’s best feature is its 80 well-annotated color plates, arranged by season, showing either a medium close-up of 2 or 3 plants or a broader landscape view. It always inspires and humbles me. I got the book at a yard sale for a buck; it’s almost as cheap used via Amazon. (Jeff Cox’s Perennial All-Stars: The 150 Best Perennials for Great-Looking, Trouble-Free Gardens, 2002, is also a very useful possession, but not as fun or inspiring to read.)

Crockett's Flower Garden, by James Underwood Crockett (1981)

Despite its age, if you live in Zone 6 or 7 in the Northeast, this may still be the most useful “what to do when” book you can find. The book is arranged by month, with what should be done to various plant species arranged alphabetically (by common name), along with a few broader pointers, also by month. It can be a bit frustrating to have to look in 2 or 3 places to read all that is written about, say, Phlox, but since now is in fact May, it is most useful to be able to scan one short chapter to see what can be done now, and what you might have overlooked. Has color photos of given plants on almost every page, but not much on putting together plant combinations, or on good garden design. Dirt cheap used on Amazon. (Jim Crockett was the first host of the PBS show “Crockett's Victory Garden” – this, his last book, was finished by Marjorie Waters and John Pelrine, who received credit only inside the book.)

Penelope Hobhouse’s Natural Planting (1997)

This book covers the use of native and other well-suited plant choices to match your local conditions and create beautiful, generally lower-maintenance, informal gardens. Beautiful photographs, tips for various cultural types (e.g., meadow gardens, shrub borders, woodland edges) and design theory, with a moderate emphasis on the temperate conditions one might find in England or New England. New England Mobile Bookstore has long had a stack of this book selling new for $9.98 (paperback edition). This book has no section arranged by species, but that’s no loss for most garden readers, and Hobhouse shows a detailed knowledge of plants and gives plenty of tips on their specific use within the culturally arranged sections. (Hobhouse has a large number of books in print and out; all that I have read have been worth purchasing.)

The Green Tapestry, by Beth Chatto (1989)

This book has a similar philosophy and arrangement by cultural conditions as Hobhouse’s. While Hobhouse’s looks to gardens around the (temperate, Western) world, this book is all based on Beth Chatto’s garden. But that’s enough, as these are the large and varied display gardens at her retail and commercial nursery. The gardens are set in Essex, an area of England with harsher conditions (drier year-round, with a cold winter) than most of the country, and thus more like that of much of North America. While the book doesn’t have a big alphabetical plant reference in the back, Chatto does have a few pages on each of many of her favorite genera. Amazon shows used Simon & Schuster copies available from $4.50 (Another edition, presumably the one printed in Britain, starts at $124.31!) Chatto has other books worth purchasing if they match your local conditions: The Damp Garden (1996), The Dry Garden (1996), Beth Chatto's Gravel Garden: Drought-resistant Planting Through the Year (2002), Beth Chatto's Woodland Garden: Shade-Loving Plants for Year-Round Interest (2002), and no doubt the revised Beth Chatto's Damp Garden: Moisture-Loving Plants for Year-Round Interest (May 2005).

2005-05-03T00:11:00.000-04:00

Front row: Nicotiana, Potentilla, Veronica, [invisible Alcea], Lavandula
Second row: Asclepias (yellow), Rudbeckia, Lillium, Pennisetum
Details Below. (August 1, 2004)

Long Bed – Reds and Yellows

2005-05-03T00:05:00.000-04:00

Let’s return to my long flower bed, whose theme is primarily one of ‘hot’ colors such as yellow, orange and red, but with some cooler tones, primarily on the shadier right end (covered in an April 29 post). I do want my young children to be pleased as they walk through the U-shaped path, with flowers on either side, so I have made it a little on the flamboyant side for a perennial bed. So far I’ve succeeded with my “best” critic, as my 19-month-old son runs down the grass path yelling “flowers!” upon seeing a patch of daffodils, or “poppies!” when glimpsing anything red, even the picture on a plant label.

With writing, as with a garden, one has to consider one’s audience. I assume that people searching the internet for gardening blogs are already capable of looking up plants and varieties, and so I intend to focus on my experience with plants and groups of plants – what’s worked and hasn’t worked for me, culturally and visually – rather than broader information that may be of use for people in other climates, but would just reflect my regurgitating other stuff I’ve read, or the sort of information you’d likely find on a plant’s label.

The photo above focuses on the front bed, near the right-hand side, just next to the Tradescantia and Verbena I mentioned on April 29.

What’s in it?

At front left in this view, Nicotiana ‘Nicki’ is a popular annual. It performed fabulously, its red and pink flowers blooming through the summer as one expects from most annuals (I did deadhead it almost daily with my fingers). But unlike most annuals, which turned to mush in our October 6 frost, the Nicotiana remained healthy, like most of the perennials – and even flowered into early November, as I recall the only thing to do so except for my miniature rose ‘Starina.’ I expect I will soon get the same plant for this spot.

Next to it is Potentilla ‘Gibson’s Scarlet’ – its flower stalks sprawled a bit more later in the summer, but the flowers also became more abundant. The small, dark red blooms are not as outré as some of their neighbors, but they do show up better in person (under daylight conditions) than in this photo. It also has pretty foliage. The plant is today (May 2, 2005) a beautiful mound of foliage already about 2/3 as wide and half as high as in this photo.

Veronica spicata ‘Royal Candles’ (speedwell) didn’t flower or grow much in 2004, but hey, it was a first year perennial. It’s already as big today as in this photo, and I expect to see its blue-purple spikes this year, especially as it’s described as “deer resistant.” I’m hoping that the slightly bluish pink of the lily behind it will allow it to gracefully fit into this composition.

What appears to be a blank space to the Veronica’s right held a tiny seedling of hollyhock (Alcea) from the Fordhook Giants Mix. The plant grew larger last year and is already an attractive clump of about 10 leaves as of today; it may bloom pale yellow, pink or dark red, judging from the seed packet photo. (I have a dozen of the same strain in the back row, behind the grass path and all of the plants discussed here.)

At front right, Lavandula angustifolia ‘Munstead’ is smaller than the more popular ‘Hidcote’ and probably more bluish in hue (both types of English lavender are often sold by name despite being raised from seed, and are reported to vary in color and form). I should probably move this plant to the sunnier side of the bed and raise it up a couple inches with some added grit; it was sluggish and floppy last year, and seemed to have some powdery mildew. But perhaps with the infected multiflora roses and brambles removed from the nearby slope, and some chemical steps taken (such as baking soda in water, as I want to minimize the use of more toxic chemicals), it can flourish here in just over half sun, especially if we have a drier summer.

In general I have not been especially careful to segregate plants by water needs, figuring that in a dry year some plants will do well, while in a wet year others will; and under typical conditions, I can water, say, my Siberian Iris, while the daylily beside it will do alright with its seepage. So far, I think my only total failure was Verbascum pulverulatum (elsewhere in the back row of this bed), which flowered weakly and died before even setting seed. If I have the time to start some new raised beds in the sun, I will try Verbascum again, and move or divide other lovers of dry soil into this bed, which I will amend with grit or gravel and sand.

Second Row

At left, Asclepias currasavica ‘Silky Gold’ (a butterfly weed or milkweed, which Monarchs are attracted to). Since nothing has come up from its rather woody stump this spring, I googled this plant today and learned it’s only hardy to Zone 8b, but is often consciously grown as an annual – well worth it, in my opinion, for its large size, clean foliage and long-flowering habit. (Its milkweed pods filled with parachute seeds were also interesting, but I deadheaded most to limit self-seeding and, I thought, keep the plant strong.) So I have another place for a plant, and an improvement. Perhaps I will plant another butterfly weed, this one or the more common Asclepias tuberosa (hardy to Zone 4), and in either case will likely choose one of the more golden-orange flowered types over this yellow-gold cultivar. The yellow plant was, on its own merits, quite perfect last year, but for the fact that it was right next to Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm,’ which had, to my eye, exactly the same shade of yellow.

Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm.’ It seems that everyone who has any perennials has ‘Goldsturm’ – which is the only drawback of this excellent, long-flowering, deeply colored, vigorous and healthy cultivar (and a common problem with many cultivars which are head and shoulders ahead of their siblings, such as ‘Happy Returns’ daylily, Coreopsis ‘Moonbeam,’ and whatever that pale purple rhododendron is that’s first to bloom each spring – like right now). Once you’ve seen a few of one of these ‘All Stars’ you can drive down a country road at 40 MPH and identify the plants from peripheral vision alone. It’s enough to keep me from putting a half-dozen ‘Goldsturm’ next to the street, but it won’t keep the plant entirely out of my beds. It has returned this spring, looking healthy, but is still quite small compared to the mounds of Potentilla and Veronica in front of it.

Lillium ‘Stargazer.’ True lilies may be the most important genus of hardy flowering plants that many experienced gardeners in my area have given up on. Their mortality problem is due primarily to the lily beetle. So I am not going to go hog-wild for lilies, thinking that the more I have the sooner they will find my garden. (Unfortunately, they also eat Fritillaries.) I saw no sign of damage last year.

Pennisetum setaceum 'Rubrum' (Fountain Grass). I don’t want to have a lot of ornamental grass, but I think this was one of the finer touches in this bed, keeping its deep red color until frost. This plant is only hardy to Zone 9a, so I dug it up in November and put it in a pot in the stairway down to my basement, not knowing if this would be warm enough. So far no sign of life this year.

As you may have noticed, the bed looks a bit sparse in this photo, with considerable “bare” soil covered in mulch. Viewed more horizontally, as most people do, the multiple rows of plants filled the apparent space fairly well, but I’ll concede they’re far from filling the bed to the sort of lushness most of us hope to achieve.

I do expect that many will be ready for division this fall or next spring. They have already multiplied considerably in their one season of growth. Indeed, many were bought in quart or 4” containers, and most of the plants in this section were put in the ground in late June or July, and were thus in the ground only about a month when this photo was taken. I credit double-digging and a pickup truck load of 2-year-old cow manure.

2005-04-30T16:20:00.000-04:00

Here is my foundation planting of bulbs in its first spring. (May 1, 2004)

Bulbs, With Mixed Success

2005-04-30T16:14:00.000-04:00

Moving to the front of my house, I have a bulbous foundation planting, about the only thing I planted in 2003 apart from a nursery bed. The bed gets sun from about 1:00 PM on (that’s high noon given Daylight Savings Time).

In this photo, (from May 1, 2004) the Crocus blooms have passed (you can see the grassy foliage of those in front) and the Alliums have yet to bloom. The former were of course welcome harbingers of spring, as well as being beautiful of bloom and foliage in their own right, although we would hardly notice them if they bloomed in June unless they carpeted a large section.

I was especially happy with the three orange Crown Imperials (Fritillaria imperialis) near the back. They are well worth the $6 a bulb, as much for their tall (40”) stately foliage and funky smell (some don’t like it) as for their flowers, which are rather short-lived like most early bulbs’ (perhaps a week at peak beauty). I can always justify such a purchase when I compare it to cut florist flowers.

What’s not working here? The back row, of azaleas and the Narcissus (daffodils) which are just inside them, which was here when I bought the house in 2003. While the Narcissus added a certain something when the house was white, they are barely noticeable against the now-yellow house. And the azaleas are quite hideous before they flower (pale purple) and get their leaves in mid-May; they manage to hang on to just enough withered brown leaves through the winter as to look more ugly and bleak than even bare sticks. They are slightly more compact this year after moderate pruning last June.

Finally, the predictable flaw in my all-bulb design is its lack of bloom or even foliage after late May. The nasty dying-down bulb foliage isn’t hidden at all and can’t be removed until June lest the bulbs weaken and die out over the next season or two – the few, later-blooming Alliums can’t hold their own under these conditions.

How did the plants hold up in this, the bed’s second year? Most of the bulbs have returned, to my semi-surprise given that through last summer I found dozens of holes dug in this bed by chipmunks, until I did away with them with a rather sinister trap. The rodents seem to have gone primarily for the Crocus, as there are about a third as many of these this year. The grape hyacinths and tulips seem exactly like last year, as do the Alliums, although it’s too early to tell about the Alliums’ blooms.

The most noticeable decline is in the Fritillaria imperialis. One didn’t come up at all. A second came up, but with two stalks for a while, and it does not now have a flower. I understand that bulb-splitting and non-flowering is common with these plants in the garden. (Obviously someone has figured out how to grow perfect flowering bulbs for sale, no doubt in a field with more sun, perfect drainage and high fertility.) The third Fritillaria is blooming now, but it and its nonflowering sibling are only about two-thirds of the height they reached last year. Yet the two tallish plants are still a positive, bringing vertical elements, foliage color, and one rather impressive cluster of orange blooms to an otherwise blankish wall flanked by the “undead.”

I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from growing Fritillaria imperialis based on my example. Again, they’re only getting half sun, and my soil here is only about 8 inches deep, over foundation-related gravel, meaning the fist-sized bulbs were at the bottom of the soil layer. Further, the top 3 or 4 inches of dirt seemed to be almost entirely cedar mulch of varying levels of decomposition. The breakdown of wood removes Nitrogen from the soil, but I applied a bare minimum of Hollytone 4-6-4 to the bed last summer, probably later than would do much good for the bulbs. I’m not a strictly organic gardener, but I do generally minimize my use of chemicals; for some reason it would bother me much more to kill things from a chemical excess than from neglect.

Planting Out Seedlings – Too Early?

2005-04-29T23:17:00.000-04:00

I finished planting out the last of my seedlings today, apart from the Scarlet O’Hara morning glory I started a week ago. (I started most of them under fluorescents in my basement at the end of February). It’s a bit early by the calendar, but the 10-day forecast shows no frosts. The forecast also shows a lot of cloudiness and rain (as we have been getting for the past week and a half), and so conditions are quite favorable for transplants to recover without a lot of coddling -- to be honest, without any hardening off process.

Fingers were crossed, for I would have preferred to make the move later and more gradually but for an infestation of tiny flies in my basement. This infestation seemed hardly dented by my spraying pyrethrin, something I felt less than comfortable doing given the product’s warning that it might damage young seedlings. (Are those spots on the Papaver due to insects, insufficient light or fertilizer, or the pyrethrin? Now I have made the point moot.)

It’s been a strange spring, although I know, as the immortal Henry Mitchell has reminded us, that the perfectly average spring would be the truly strange one. In April we went from snow-covered, frozen, saturated earth to too-dry-to-allow-burning conditions in just 10 to 14 days of unusually dry, sunny and warm weather.

These conditions compressed bloom times on our early bulbs. In fact, my Crocus and Chionodoxa started bloomed before my snowdrops (Galanthus). And while snowdrops have a delicate beauty to them once you get down on your knees, no one bothers to do so when there are relatively large, colorful flowers in the same view.

After the area’s out-of-control brush fires peaked on Boston Marathon / Patriot’s Day (April 18^th this year, for those of you not blessed with this Massachusetts holiday, which often grants us a 1-day reprieve on our federal taxes), Nature followed with 10 days alternating between, on the one hand, overcast days, and on the other hand, overcast rainy days. So I was able to have my 4 brush fires, the product of my messy, overgrown wooded strip, and I have been able to plant my 3 to 4 inch seedlings with some prospect of success.

What did I plant?

Rudbeckia ‘Irish Eyes’ (although I’ve had second thoughts on these “green-eyed susans”)

Rudbeckia Morveno (an orangish, generally annual form)

‘Lavender Lady’

Celosia ‘Red Velvet’ (annual)

Yarrow (Achillea) ‘Summer Pastels’

Poppy (red and white annuals)

Most went into the 42’ bed I’ve shown below, or into the slope behind this bed. This slope still has many living stumps of brambles and poison ivy, so I will now have to use a surgeon’s delicacy in killing them with loppers and chemicals, while coddling my transplants from any turn to sunny weather.

2005-04-29T22:04:00.000-04:00

Perennial Bed, from North, with aqueduct behind, September 6, 2004.

My Long Perennial Bed

2005-04-29T22:03:00.000-04:00

All in all, my perennial bed worked out quite well in 2004, its first season, helped by more annuals than it will have in 2005 or future years. A grass path divides it into a rear inverted-U bed of 3’ width, and a straight front bed of 4½’ width. The U bed is 42’ wide. It also has a mown grass path behind it, below which is the slope down to the aqueduct.

It was of course quite a lot of work, de-sodding and double-digging the whole bed, then amending the soil with peat moss, leaf mold and composted cow manure, ratios varying depending on soil conditions, material availability and whim as I went along, with a dose of Hollytone 4-6-4 added where cow manure was not.

The bed runs East-West, sitting atop a slope several feet down to the similarly situated aqueduct. Much of it gets close to full sun from April through August, but a row of very tall white pines to the South, on the far side of the aqueduct, shade it in other seasons when the sun is lower. This may be a good thing, in that it prevents premature spring thawing and frost heaves.

2005-04-29T22:02:00.000-04:00

Right hand of bed, September 6, 2004.

Right Hand of Bed

2005-04-29T21:58:00.000-04:00

As we move to the right, the bed is increasingly shaded by a high deciduous tree (visible next to hideous white pipe) from early May on. This provides afternoon (and even mid-day) shade, with shading beginning earlier in the day the farther one moves to the right, providing a good bed for bleeding heart (Dicentra spectabilis), the longer-blooming fringed bleeding heart (D. eximia), Astilbe, and, since the photo was taken, a variegated Hosta last fall and a Primula just a week ago (a Home Depot $0.99 special). The bleeding hearts were freebies from my neighbor, and remained healthy despite moving with limited root structures and despite my delay in getting some of them in the ground.

I credit the soil.

This far right-hand section of the bed was actually the worst I have dug, with compacted clay and rocks making up the bulk of the “soil.” After using the mattock and shoveling out clay and rocks, I amended it most heavily, adding leaf mold, wetted peat moss and local soil in mid-May, just a day before planting. “Aging” the bed was not necessary due to my avoiding incompletely composted materials. Despite some fear of a bathtub effect, I’ve seen no signs of sluggish drainage; the site’s raised location apparently makes up for its being surrounded by packed clay.

The afternoon shade allowed my spiderwort (Tradescantia) to keep its delicate blue-purple flowers open all day (they more typically close up at noon), yet the full morning sun is enough to keep pink Cleome and red Cosmos happily flowering behind it, if a bit leggy. The red grass at left (a non-hardy Pennisetum, I believe) also grew tremendously, but the lavender in the left foreground wants more grit and sun, and the barely noticeable Verbena to the immediate right of the Tradescantia suffered from powdery mildew. This mildew was endemic to the brambles (Rosa multiflora, blackberry, and something else with 5-leaf clusters and thorns) which dominated the aqueduct slope behind until I ripped and cut them all out last fall (some visible to left of Cleome in this photo), leaving behind established clumps of goldenrod (Solidago).

First Things

2005-04-27T20:05:00.000-04:00

This blog will primarily cover gardening, particularly the gardening I’m doing on my 1.3 acre partially wooded property in Natick, Massachusetts (zone 6A). The property’s most unusual feature: it includes a below-ground aqueduct which used to feed water to Boston. While the aqueduct, which dates to the 1870s, has been superseded by more than one larger replacement, the MWRA (Massachusetts Water Resources Authority) maintains the pipe and keeps the path clear. Basically, it’s a wide, almost perfectly flat trail through the woods. As ground levels vary, it is bordered by upward or downward slopes, looking much like an abandoned railroad easement.

While I own a stretch of the aqueduct, I have to allow the MWRA access, and I don’t object to others’ access (despite the big “No Trespassing” sign posted by the MWRA along the street). I can’t plant on the flat part of the path, or put trees or shrubs along the slopes. The MWRA mows the flat part each year in late summer or autumn, and uses slope mowers often enough to prevent trees from sinking roots into the below-ground masonry work.

Because there is a daily stream of joggers, cross-country skiers, dog-walkers and romancers passing along the aqueduct path, I consider it, more than the street, to mark the “front” of my property, and atop the slope edging down to the aqueduct is where I have put my largest and most labor-intensive planting, a double-dug 42’ by 8’ bed of perennials (with lesser numbers of annuals, bulbs and roses). This was just planted in the spring and summer of 2004 (a year after we bought the property), but I think it worked out pretty well for a first-year performance (photo from upstairs in my house).

Above the aqueduct I have a second path, basically an allée through the trees. So far most of my work on this area has been destructive (thinning trees and brush, pulling poison ivy, brambles and strangling vines).

Of course I also have lawns in front and back of my house, although the front lawn is in significant part a leaching field, meaning I can only plant the shallowest-rooted plants upon it and should minimize walking on and watering of the area. It’s now a grass lawn, and I have yet to do something about screening the prominent white vent-pipe.

I may also cover politics, particularly local politics as it relates to my property, adjacent properties and the aqueduct easement.