My Mother In My Garden

I spent a good chunk of time in the garden on Sunday. I had flowers to pot up for the front steps, and plants gotten at the garden club sale to put in the ground. There was a bleeding heart that was eating a corner of the perennial bed, a bleeding heart so big it had collapsed of its own sheer exuberance (abetted by a heavy rain). Even though it was still kind of in full bloom, I heartlessly dug it up and divided it in half. Here's hoping it survives. I impaled myself trying to prune the flowering quince, getting intractable thorns stuck in both hands. By the time I was done, I was filthy and sore, and oh so very pleased with myself.

It's impossible for me to work in the garden without thinking of my mother. Hers was her joy. A chore, to be sure, but a joy. She was ever shuffling hosta; I do the same. Her plants are scattered through my yard - hosta, astilbe, sedum - and solomon's seal running up along the front steps.



The sign was hers, bought in France, brought home and mounted on a bit of plywood. It faded terribly, its white letters all chalked off a few years after she got it. But she loved it so, and so painstakingly repainted all the little letters. You can't tell from a distance, but up close? It bears her brushmarks. And I think that's a bit of her standard issue hosta in the lower right hand corner.



It amuses me no end to have her sign living in my own garden. Little children are particularly perplexed, because (as yet) none of them speak French. If you come visit, you're not allowed pick the mushrooms (we've only toadstools), but I might send you home with a piece of hosta.

Shrubbery

I have a thing for shrubbery.

It may have something to do with Monty Python:

ARTHUR: Well, what is it you want?
HEAD KNIGHT: We want... a shrubbery!
[dramatic chord]
ARTHUR: A what?
HEAD KNIGHT: Nee! Nee!
ARTHUR and PARTY: Oh, ow!
ARTHUR: Please, please! No more! We shall find a shrubbery.
HEAD KNIGHT: You must return here with a shrubbery or else you will never pass through this wood alive!
ARTHUR: O Knights of Nee, you are just and fair, and we will return
with a shrubbery.
HEAD KNIGHT: One that looks nice.
ARTHUR: Of course.
HEAD KNIGHT: And not too expensive.
ARTHUR: Yes.
HEAD KNIGHTS: Now... go!

Then again, it could be my mother. She once went to her favorite garden supply place, and encountered a woman wandering around the azalea department shrieking "where are your bushes?" - presumably not recognizing azaleas as bushes. Or shrubbery. "Where are your bushes?" is one of those lines now in the family lexicon.

Or perhaps it's an Edward Gorey thing.

On the shore a bat, or possibly an umbrella,
disengaged itself from the shrubbery,
causing those nearby to recollect the miseries of childhood.

In any case, I found myself highlighting a sentence in the Wilkie Collins book* I'm reading.

He drifted away aimlessly in the direction of the shrubbery.

And when you highlight things on the Kindle, other people can see it via "popular highlights". So will the next person to read said Wilkie Collins encounter my shrubbery highlight? I do hope so.

Incidentally, shrubbery is a collective, a plurality of shrubs, but A shrubbery is a place, a garden border thickly shrub-planted.

Bring me a shrubbery!

---

*It's called No Name, and I got it as a free Kindle download. Free! I do love it when things go out of copyright. And I'm enjoying it, and I can't remember why I looked for it in the first place. Did you tell me to read it?

The Mania

Hard on the heels of that garden talk I went to the other night, I ordered a whole mess of plants by mail:

• Amelanchier stolonifera
• Amsonia elliptica
• Hylomecon japonicum
• Ilex verticillata (two kinds, male & female)
• Malus "Ralph Shay"

And bought others at a "native" plant sale:

• Mertensia virginica
• Phlox divaricata "Blue Elf"
• Asarum canadense
• Tiarella "Oak Leaf"
• Dryopteris marginalis

And bookmarked a few others for purchase in the fall.

Clearly I've gone off the deep end, especially because the shipping on the Ralph Shay was more than the plant! Margaret Roach has a lot to answer for.

Learning to Look

My day yesterday was bookended by gardens.

In the morning, I had a meeting right near one of the entrances to the High Line. I got there with a few minutes to kill, and instead of heading inside to eat soggy pastries with strangers, I climbed the stairs and reveled alone in the curious and beautiful meadow. Gazing downtown, taking in the whole of the vista, the plantings merge into a swath of green cutting through the industrial grit.

A closer look, though, reveals a multiplicity of color, texture, leaves, flowers. Blooming now, April, there were grape hyacinths and daffodils and salvia and little red species tulips. A fat bee was working the salvia, and but for him, I was alone in the glorious sunshine in my city of eight million people.



In the evening, I played suburban dowager (not really - 95% of the people in the room were older than I am) and went to a talk at my public library - a talk with slide show by Margaret Roach, gardener and blogger. It was packed, and she was excellent. Funny and self-deprecating, she tripped over the latin names of some of her plants and claimed to have buried old boyfriends in her compost heap. I'm ready to plant Ralph Shay and Molly The Witch, respectively, a crab apple and a species peony - but lord knows where I'll find either one. Esoteric garden material can be awfully hard to dig up (ha ha, I said dig up). The "title" of her talk was Nonstop Plants: A Garden for 365 Days - and it was really about looking at the little things, and at the big picture. Plant things that look good in the snow, plant things you can see from your bathroom. Plant tulips under the rhubarb so they peep through the big leaves.

Somehow, I think I'm going to be getting dirty this weekend.

Dinner For One, for Two People

Cast of Characters
1 child who wants plain buttered pasta
1 husband who had a late lunch and doesn’t want any dinner at all
1 self who is craving vegetables

Ingredients
1 bunch of almost over the hill Asian braising greens from the CSA
1 bunch of similarly almost over the hill turnip tops from the CSA
3 garlic scapes from the backyard garden
2 springs of flat leaf parsley from the CSA
2 potatoes, because they’re there
Butter
Olive Oil
Salt & Pepper
Balsamic vinegar (the dregs of a fancy bottle rinsed out with the cheap stuff)

1. Pour glass of wine.
2. Put pot of water on to boil the child’s pasta.
3. Wash and chop the greens, tossing out all the really over the hill bits.
4. Decide that sautéed greens isn’t really enough dinner, and boil another pot of water for some potatoes.
5. Peel and dice the potatoes, and toss ‘em in the pot for 10 minutes.
6. Heat up a little olive oil in a skillet with a lid, and toss in the chopped garlic scapes.
7. Remember that you forgot to salt the now boiling potatoes and the pasta water.
8. Cook the child’s pasta.
9. Rescue the garlic scapes before they start to brown, and toss in the still wet chopped greens. Slap a lid on the pot.
10. Mince the parsley and put it someplace where you won’t forget to add it later.
11. Drain the potatoes and mash ‘em with a pat of butter.
12. Drain the child’s pasta and toss with a pat of butter. Serve.
13. Scoop the greens onto the mashed potatoes and mix it all up, gently, with another pat of butter.
14. Serve up the demented colcannon in a bowl, sprinkled with a little rubbed kosher salt, freshly ground pepper, the minced parsley and a few drops of balsamic vinegar.
15. Eat. With more wine, as necessary.
16. Don’t share when husband says “I didn’t know you were making that. It looks good.” Because it’s just enough for one.

Heirlooms

I suppose that if I were a real gardener, I'd grow my tomatoes from seed. But I'm not, and we get lots of great tomatoes from our CSA, and can get lots more tomatoes at farmstands and the like.

But I do like to put in a couple of plants, just because. And if you only want two plants, it doesn't make any sense at all to buy a package of seed, most of which will go to waste. Furthermore, most of what we'll get from the CSA will be plain red tomatoes - great, but not unusual. So, I want to grow something different, off the beaten track.

I picked up my two tomato plants the other day, from Silver Heights Farm, a vendor at the Union Square Greenmarket who sells nothing but seedlings, almost all of which are heirloom varieties of herbs and flowers and vegetables that you've never heard of.

• Black Krim, 75 days, I. This heirloom has become quite popular in the farmers’ marketplace, but is a bit tricky to harvest. Pick before it appears to have developed full color and ripeness, when the fruit is still somewhat firm. 10-12 oz., dark brown-red is darker in hot weather. Interior is a deep reddish green. A hint of saltiness, unusually juicy, with plenty of meaty texture. This heavy producer is prone to cracking and catfacing. From Krymsk on the Black Sea of Russia.
  
  
• Dagma’s Perfection, 73 days, I. This elegant fruit is bi-colored, pale yellow with delicate, light red striping. Slightly flattened, 12 ounces, with 3” diameter. Flesh is firm and juicy with hints of tropical fruit and lime. 
  

I can't wait to slice one of each, and lay them on a plate, and drizzle them with olive oil, and sprinkle them with kosher salt, and bedeck them with chopped basil.  Two and a half months to heaven.

Wordless Wednesday: Lilac

[This isn't the standard garden lilac - it's got much smaller leaves and a more open flower structure, and while it smells wonderful, it doesn't smell quite the same. But it's lovely, none-the-less. I think it's Syringa microphylla, the littleleaf lilac. But it came with the house, and I don't know for sure.]

Annals of Gardening: Garden Club Sales

The next best thing to digging up plants at my mother's house are the annual garden club sales. Oh sure, they sell some commercial stuff like six-packs of impatiens and hanging pots of petunias, but the good stuff, the stuff I want, is the stuff people pot up out of their own backyards.

By some grace of scheduling, I got to hit two sales this morning, one starting at 8 in the next town over, and my town's at 9. I did buy some basil and a six-pack of lobelia, but mostly I scored a mess of perennials, eleven pots in all. It's like the plant material equivalent of locavore eating - it all came from with a few miles of my house.

I got huge pots of phlox and nepeta, and little ones of heuchera and pulmonaria. There's physostegia and penstemon and wood geranium and corydalis. But my favorite two were a pot marked yellow iris that also contained thalictrum, and a pot marked brunnera that included a piece of variegated hosta. Clearly the iris likes the thalictrum and the brunnera complements the hosta, or their former owners liked the combinations. In any case, I transplanted them as I got 'em.

Here's hoping my local plants like their new locale.

Graces #8 to 12 - Spring

#8
The smell of the flowers on the pachysandra - before yesterday, I never knew that pachysandra in bloom had such a lovely, sweet fragrance.

#9
Free compost from the town dump - I love the dump, I love that they take leaves and other garden waste, and turn it into rich, beautiful compost for the taking. We made three trips, and top-dressed all of the perennial beds.

#10
The joy of the child as she ran through the sprinkler, dug in the dirt, mixed up mud, "saved" worms, and helped me to plant seeds.

#11
How nicely my rhubarb is thriving - my neighbor gave me a piece in full leaf at the end of last summer, while they were packing up to move, and I was worried that it wouldn't take.

#12
The gorgeous salmon pink of the flowering quince in full bloom - I don't care that Dirr finds it "over-rated", in its moment of glory it is a beautiful thing (and the deer and the bunnies don't eat it).

The New Hyde Park Lily

My paternal grandfather is probably the only person I will have ever known who was born and died in the same house. In the house. He was born in 1900, at home, as happened in those days. He died there too, after having moved into a hospital bed in the living room. And except for time away from home for college and law school, and a few years living in a nearby house when he was newly married, he lived out his whole life in the same house.

It was a farm house, built in the late 1800s, added onto once or twice. It had a front porch and a sun-room, one indoor bathroom and one unheated powder room accessible only from the back porch. It had a bit of land around it, with a sour cherry tree, a huge copper beech, and a grape arbor. There was a garage (once a stable), with an attic loft and a root cellar. Grandpa would buy a bushel of oysters every winter and keep them in the root cellar 'til they were gone.

After he died in 1988, my grandmother continued to live there, though in a much diminished state - it was as though she had just checked out. And when she died, the house was sold.

There was a moment when one of my cousins was going to buy the house, but she was unable to pull it off. Over the course of about nine months, the children and the grandchildren gradually cleaned out the house. We found homemade liquor put away during prohibition, and baby clothes from the turn of the century. There were quilts and lace curtains, huck towels and glassware. The cellar was full of books and jars and tools, and a stunning glass vase, five feet high. There were metal film canisters with home movies from the 40s and 50s. My grandfather's pipes were awaiting another smoker. His handmade ankle boots were snapped up by a cousin with the same sized feet.

One day, I was poking around and found a lily coming up in the rose garden. I dug it up and stuck it in a hideous turquoise plastic wastebasket, and planted it at my mother's house. It turned out to be a dark orange-red, which clashed with everything in her garden, but she tolerated it. When we moved into our house four years ago, she said "you're going to take that lily, right?" And so I did.

The first couple of years, it sent up a flower stalk, but the buds were summarily eaten by some nefarious creature. This year, it bloomed.


I can't imagine how old it is. I dug it up in 1992, and there hadn't been any gardening going on there for some time. But it seems happy, it's got babies coming up around it, and this year, it thwarted the wildlife.

My grandfather's house is still standing, but three tiny crappy houses now surround it - two to one side, and one to the other. The house is in terrible condition, an antique falling into desuetude. We drive by once in a while, but it's increasingly sad to see what's happening. But that little piece of it lives on - the lily in my backyard.

Plant Rustling

Further evidence that I have lost my mind:


It's not enough that I can't visit my mother without nabbing some of her plants. On Sunday, I was on my way up the street from her house to get a piece of a peony in a friend's yard - a wonderful peony that looks like fried eggs, with single white petals surrounding a yellow center - when I spotted an iris blooming across the street in the house sold out from under the elderly neighbor last fall. The house has been vacant since the tag sale, and there's been no sign of any activity save the clear-cutting of every tree on the property. Every single tree. They left one shrub down near the sidewalk.

The iris was blooming in the back of the house, but off to the side so it was visible from out front. I grabbed the garden cart, along with some plastic pots and newspapers and a shovel, and I hightailed it over to rescue that poor iris. And, because I couldn't help myself, I dug up a clump of hosta, a bunch of lily of the valley, a whole mess of stachys (lamb's ears), and one allium that had escaped from civilization into what little remained of a lawn. It turned out that there were a lot of irises - two different varieties, mostly purple, neither beautiful - they both came home with me.

I could have spent all afternoon there.

Part of me wants to write a letter to the minister's wife and tell her that I've rescued some of her plants, along with two charming terra cotta pots. But part of me thinks that it'll break her heart.

Beautiful Rocky Hills

Last weekend, on a beautiful sunny day, we went to visit a nearby private garden that was open as part of the Garden Conservancy's Open Days program. It was glorious. There were lilacs just beginning to bloom and hellebores still hanging on. There were ponds connected by a little stream. There were paths through the shrubbery, and wooden benches deployed in apposite locations. And there were forget-me-nots everywhere, blindingly blue.

Yesterday, I was on the train home when I spotted a woman sitting a few rows away, facing me. I thought she looked familiar, but it wasn't until we both stood up to get off at the same stop that I was sure. It was the nonagenarian owner of the property that we'd visited, and she was wearing the same huge and distinctive earrings that she'd worn on Sunday. I asked "Are you Mrs. S___?" and when she said she was, I introduced myself and told her that I'd seen her wonderful garden earlier in the week. We chatted, and as we were crossing the overpass, I asked if she had a ride home. As it turned out, she didn't and I offered her a ride back to her house. I sort of don't know what came over me - usually I don't talk to strangers - but somehow it just seemed like the right thing to do.

The thing is, she's made plans so that her garden will become a public garden, owned by the county, with a conservation easement so that it can't be developed. And that's a selfless act, giving that beautiful garden to the public. I figured the least I could do was drive her home.

Playing Round the Garden Trees

My mother has lived in her house since 1972. I remember when we moved in: I had just finished sixth grade, the grass hadn’t been cut in years and there was a row of hemlocks along the sidewalk that completely blocked the house from the street. But there was architecture to the yard - low walls of river stone bounding untended flower beds, lovely pink dogwoods that bowed down to the ground, a cement fountain near a decrepit fish pond.

Over the years, my mother has tended every square inch of the property. There are curving pathways edged with hosta, flowering shrubs, perennials galore. A grape arbor abuts the garage, a row of raspberries borders the vegetable garden, there are blueberry and currant bushes. She’s composted forever: kitchen scraps go to one pile, and fallen leaves to the “rhino pit”. The hemlocks are long gone and the street side of the house is visible, but from the side porch, you can see no other houses.

When W. and I bought our house three and a half years ago, we started to address our own garden. We took out a wild rose that had smothered two big azaleas. We moved shrubs that were too close together, and others that were just in the wrong places. I’ve ripped out countless wild daylilies while reclaiming a hillside flower bed. And nearly every time I’ve gone to visit my mother in the spring or summer or early fall, I’ve returned home with a plant or two, or a carload.

This past weekend, I spent some time at her house. Much of the time I was tending to her, and monitoring my daughter, but for an hour on Friday, while the hospice aide was watching my sleeping mother, I puttered around out in her yard. I dug up a bit of this, a little of that, and took it all home to plant on Sunday.

I have a tiny piece of a fancy blue hosta, a couple of volunteer boxwoods, and some sweet woodruff. There are coral bells and creeping sedum and candytuft and bleeding hearts that originated at my grandmother’s house. I found a little doublefile viburnum, maybe three feet tall, under my mother’s huge one. A divine and feisty woman from across the street had once passed on some of her peonies and irises; I took a little of each. I dug up a mess of variegated solomon’s seal – a plant that someone else had given her. Along her front walk, out of place and threatening a yew, was a volunteer evergreen that I can’t identify – but I potted it up anyway.

It so pleases me that I have these pass-along plants. It connects me and my land back to my mother and hers, and to my grandparents too. It connects me to my mother’s friends and neighbors, and to all the other people to whom she’s given bits of plants. And when I walk around my house and through my yard at the end of the day, it feels like home.

Garden Mystery Solved

We moved into our house on August 1 a few years ago. Every day, every week I wandered around to see what we had in the garden, what had come with the house. I freed two big azaleas that had been overrun with a wild rose. I cut down vines that were choking the trees. The next spring brought daffodils, peonies, flowering quince, crocuses. Bit by bit, I'm working at making it mine. I ripped out a pachysandra bed where I wanted a kitchen garden. We’ve moved shrubs here and there. I love working with the existing "furniture" but moving it to better please me. I can't imagine having ripped out the mature rhodys, the huge and shapely burning bush, the whimsical persian lilac standard.

The house is on a hill, and the bed below the house and above the flagstone patio had been completely overrun with wild tawny daylilies, a nice small leafed hosta, and the insufferable bishop's week. Last year, I ripped out about 25% along the bottom - discarding the weeds, and repurposing the hosta (everywhere) and the daylilies (across the street on town property in my personal neighborhood beautification project). This year, I've tackled the next 25% - I'm working my way up the hill. And it's finally starting to look like something!

The pictures are of those new perennial beds on the hill. The first shows the alliums I planted last fall - and didn't even remember that I'd done so until they were up sort of enough to identify them. The second is a fancy peach colored iris that my brother-in-law gave me last spring. It's surrounded by a crane's bill geranium, some alchemilla, and some nepeta that isn't blooming yet.

Bit by bit, we push back at the entropy.

Word of the Day: Stoloniferous

Nice word, huh? Very…mellifluous.

Yesterday, Miss M. and I were poking around in the garden. W. had recently patched some bare spots in the so-called lawn with grass seed, and I showed her how the new grass was coming up. She asked “how do we make grass?” It’s a common type of question of hers, and is always phrased that way:

• “How do we make cows?”
• “How do we make Jeeps?”
• “How do we make eggs?”
• “How do we make airplanes?”
• “How do we make ants?”
• “How do we make frogs?”

I like that she thinks all of those things are made by us humans. Anyway, in the strange way my mind works, I got from grass and grass seed to stoloniferous grasses and stoloniferous weeds. I have an evil weed in the garden, a stoloniferous evil weed called goutweed or bishop's weed. I get down on my hands and knees and start pulling it out, carefully so as not to break it off and leave the roots in the ground, following the root along to get as much as possible, muttering to myself “stoloniferous weeds, stoloniferous weeds…” It is the kind of weeding that is like eating peanuts; once you start, you can't stop.

Garden Mysteries

Alice had a post the other day, of all the things in her garden that she couldn't identify. But she just moved in! And she didn't plant any of those bushes! What's my problem, that I have things in my garden that I know I planted, and I still can't identify them? [That's why I bought 100 plant markers.]











I think the first is some kind of daffodil, but tiny and fancy and fragrant.

And I think the second is an allium.

I wish I still had the packing slip from the big mess of bulbs I bought last fall.

Art Installation

Recently I bought a whole mess of plant labels from the wonderfully named Paw Paw Everlast Label Company. We spent the weekend puttering in the garden, cleaning, planting, moving, mowing. Miss M. spent a good part of the morning arranging my "signs". The photo is lousy, but the forest of plant markers was a thing of great beauty.
Incidentally, the plant markers are great. The price was great, and they arrived amazingly fast.

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and...

Basil!

Mysteriously, the sage died over the winter...I didn't think you could kill sage, so I had to get a new one. I thought the parsley would be okay too; it's a biennial, and it had been in year 1 last year, but, no - this was a harsh winter. Rosemary and basil always have to be replaced.

And I need thyme, but they were out of anything but lemon thyme at the Greenmarket yesterday, so thyme will have to wait.

Spring! (Cheating)

Okay, it is spring finally, and some of the daffodils are blooming and so are the crocuses, and we spent all day today and yesterday raking and pruning and rearranging the plants.

But this here fritillaria? It was forced. Yes, it's now planted in my garden, and with luck it'll bloom again next year, but it didn't bloom here in situ.

The other day as I was walking through the greenmarket on the way to work, I spotted some forced fritillaria in full bloom. I idly thought about buying one, mostly because I've never seen them forced before. But I didn't. Sometime later, someone scurried past my desk with one yellow fritillaria muttering "I've got to get rid of this, it smells like marijuana." I scurried after her, and told her I'd take it home. I schlepped it home, on the subway, on the train. It does smell funky, but now it's outside, where it belongs!

Dirt, or, when will it ever be spring?

As Margaret Atwood once said, “In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” I am waiting for that day. Instead, we are watching it rain and rain and rain.