Bobbie

Introducing the Wild Things

Posted on January 2, 2021January 2, 2021 by Bobbie

Green Prints

In the shade of mingling Paulownias, eight children sprawled like a litter of puppies atop the blue tarp, fair heads and dark dappled by sunlight. Seasoned veterans of the library’s summer “reading program,” they radiated skepticism. Under their scrutiny, all my hours of planning – upwards of twenty – and gathering – five, two of them after twilight the night before, three before dawn this morning – for a one-hour program, including craft, juice and cookies, seemed paltry. Not up to the task of engaging such a jaded lot of post millennial first to third graders.

On the table before them, my overnight harvest jostled across its top like so many drunken sailors; spilling over onto the poplar logs I’d stood upright as three-foot mobile labs. Excreting from the trees’ exfoliating bark, an arboreal feast of Polypore and parchment mushrooms and gelatinous oozes of Crustose and Foliose lichens posed, waiting to entertain the budding naturalists, or so hoped my cynical heart. Decorating every available surface, vignettes of discarded turtle shells, abandoned bird-nests, butterfly carapaces parodied Wonderland, “Touch Me.” And in specially prepared, purpose built, living museums – a flat of old potting soil and a quart jar with a perforated lid – dwelled several earthworms and two teenage tadpoles, all four legs exposed. In addition, plants of various olfactory and tactile properties flaunted their earthy attributes.

Not really a sea of faces, more a puddle, looked up at me, expectant. My charges, then, for one fleeting hour, this small congregation of fledgling souls, held within fragile vessels of flesh and bone – together a sampling of our homogenous world, individually as unique as snowflakes. So I began, “I am a very, very lucky person. Every morning I get to go outside and play. If I really listen, I’ll hear the very first bird of the morning say “hello.” If I close my eyes and breathe I can smell the licorice of the fennel and the sugar from my sweet peas and tea from my rose garden. I can hug a hickory tree and taste raindrops. Every day I get to watch the frogs leap into the pond and feel the water splash on my face.”

My squirming octet stills. “Now let me show you what I found right outside my door.”

I plucked a nest from its log pedestal and held it in the palm of my hand. Upturned faces, expressions rapt, made me feel like Merlin, or Gandalf, or Dumbledore.

“Where’s the eggs? Let’s see the eggs?” Chin jutted, jaw set, one six-year old demanded an answer.

I tell them I never collect a nest until the birds move out, finished for the season. “Even this one”, and I lift my husband’s straw hat off the table. Tucked inside, a nest woven of grasses and fluff and hair from one Great Pyrenees lay emptied of its small family of Wrens.

I pointed to the logs, pregnant with fleshy protrusions, and invited them up to touch the swelling amorphous masses.

“Ewww!” One little boy shuddered. “No way!”

Shoved aside by a dark-eyed pixie, crimson ribbons in her springy curls, he watched with admiration as she squeezed and patted a lump. “Feels nice.” She said.

Now, they’re all on their feet reaching for a nest, stroking a potted lavender plant, digging into damp soil rooting out an earthworm.

One puzzled second-grader contemplated the shell of a box turtle, and I told them that one time I watched just such a turtle dig a hole with her fat, clawed feet, lay her eggs and then cover them up. “And it took longer than a Spongebob Squarepants show.

“This kind of turtle can live to be a hundred years old,” I said. “That’s even older than me.” They looked from me to the shell, suitably impressed.

For long minutes we immersed ourselves in bits and pieces of the natural world, awash in the mystery of it all. Imagine, right outside our own backyards. Astounded at the sights seen through the magic of magnifying glasses – eighty-nine cents courtesy of the dollar store – the children studied an earthworm’s belly corsets, the hieroglyphics of a swallowtail’s wing and stroked the nesting material contributed by a woman’s best friend. One little girl held a lens to the sky and trained it on a fork in the tree where swallows had made a home. “Where is it? Where is it?”

Good citizenship in action, they shared the four spyglasses amongst themselves, with minimal prompting.

As the hour wound down, I presented the piece-de-resistance – the living, breathing tadpole twins, out adventuring in their retrofitted RV, straight from their home shores and shortly to return.

We were almost there, the end in sight. Only one remaining spectacle to behold, only one more song to be sing. In the long, long time ago, a band of intrepid Girl Scouts roasted marshmallows over an open fire and beneath a silvery moon serenaded a sparkle of fireflies. My voice rusty and of insignificant timber, I sang “There’s a hole, there’s a hole, there’s a hole in the bottom of the sea,” and I go on to populate the hole with a log, then a knot on the log, next, a FROG! on the knot, followed by a wart on the frog, and a hair on the wart, and so on down the line of memories. The crowd cheered, a mother applauded, a cohort said “bravo!”

It was over. My hope rekindled. It could have been my daughter there on the big blue tarp, and her mates from a too distant childhood. Same curiosity, same excitement, same wondrous awe. And I thought, let them be children. In time they will take on the mantle of caring for the earth. But first they must be allowed outside to play upon it, only then will they love it, only then will they care.

First Published in “Green Prints Digest”

Journeys in The Garden

Posted on November 20, 2020November 21, 2020 by Bobbie

It’s moving time here in the garden. With every walk down the pathways, every pass beneath the trees, the list of travelers grows. Placed at the top of the list is our Acer japonica aconitifolia, the peacock maple. For the fourth consecutive year, it leafed out only to offer its tender green leaves as virginal sacrifices to a late spring frost. Then as usual, it spent the summer looking unkempt, kind of pinched and needy. Instead of dazzling with its promised “amazing fall colors”, it fizzles in shades of toast and drab. Out into the early morning this summer before the heat suffocated both body and soul, I roamed the garden on the lookout for the Peacock’s new resting place. There’s no room in Kim’s garden, and it’s still too exposed across the creek next to the purple bench. Its spreading branches too beautiful to be hidden, it deserves to be, at least, a minor focal point.

Years ago on a muggy mountain morning in late July, I looked down on a fully mature, newly transplanted peony plopped down in its hole by my chain-smoking buddy and neighbor. Lipping a cigarette, fist propped on one skinny hip, she said, “Oh, I just move stuff all the time, anytime. Just have my hole dug and ready.”

Fortunately for my pride, I kept my book-educated opinion to myself. When we had to leave our Blue Ridge valley, the peony was still thriving, along with the Hydrangeas, the junipers, the Viburnums she’d moved when they got in the way of her next big project.

And a peony, barely discernible among the weeds and sycamores, was the first plant I moved in this garden. Far distant from our old farmhouse, she crouched on a precipice overlooking a monster-sized culvert, put in by the previous owner to ford a three-foot wide creek. A legacy from the first gardener here, she graced the dooryard of a cabin now long gone. I lugged the peony, rootball dangling, across the creek and into the sunshine on a lovely morning in May. Possibly the old double pink ‘Eudilis Superba’, she’s still doing well more than a decade later.

The exodus that almost broke our backs, along with our spirits, was the hoisting of a six-foot tall, five-foot wide dogwood that was definitely not ‘Lustgarten’s Weeping.”

After that we perfected our method – first, dig the receiving hole, then go back and double its width. Water the transient tree or shrub deeply. Employ a tractor and a long rope and a driver who knows the meaning of the words “gently, slowly and stop!” Wrap the tree, tie the rope and holler “Yo”, then throw yourself between moving object and destination, maneuvering around all other botanical obstacles. Lift with tractor bucket and carry the pampered plant to its new abode. Keep roots and leaves hydrated.

That’s how we relocated a six-foot tall, ten-feet wide weeping Prunus ‘Shidare Yoshino’ – size not properly researched on my part, or not properly labeled on someone else’s – that had grown far too intimate with the tin-topped, stucco “Ruin” we use to shelter garden tools.

This year the list for migration grows ever longer. Seventeen years in one garden makes a mockery of the ten-year rule beloved of plant labels. The ‘Yadkin Creeper’ Chinese Fringe Tree I planted in a beautiful cobalt fluted pot a few years back has, as they say here in our neck of the woods, been a real show-out. It now blocks the view outside the library window as I write these words. And as lovely as it is, it needs its space, and I need the perspective beyond. Tilted and cut out of its home, using my gardener’s machete, it will be relocated a few yards away sunk into the earth steps away from the greenhouse.

Same for an Acer ‘Radiant’ residing now in a large cast stone urn. Its branches scrape the antique French windows in the kitchen every time a storm blows out of the west. I’m still walking around, gazing into the distance, waiting for inspiration as to where its next home might be. In the afternoon shade of one of the groves of bald cypress, perhaps, but the trouble is the cypress trees keep getting bigger and bigger, expanding to cover a lot more territory than I anticipated. But oh, they are beautiful and elegant, like the Coco Chanel’s of the woodland kingdom. So how far away do I plant ‘Radiant’? Too far and she’ll wash out from too much sun. Too close and it’s just a matter of time before she’ll have to up roots again.

And then there’s Cercis canadensis ‘White Water’. For the third summer running, her milk-splashed, pale green leaves are full of shot holes. Located in more open ground bathed in morning light with the purple bench and a Camellia sasanqua – variety unknown – for company, maybe she’ll feel safer, more appreciated.

Thinking I’d finished with the listing of all my unhappy, wrongly placed tree and shrub community, I headed to the greenhouse this morning, side-stepping around a Lespedeza ‘Gibraltar’ with aspirations of being the only prima Dona on the path and caught sight of the ever faithful, never complaining, neglected step-sister, Punica granatum ‘California Sunset’ standing in the shadow of ‘Gibraltar’s’ increasing girth. I’ll return her to a place in the sun where she might once again bloom.

But before all that, before Acers cross the creek seeking home and Pomegranates travel to sunnier climes, I’ll move a Hellebore swamped Pulmonaria, a sulky Acanthus, a stunted Fatsia japonica ‘Spider Web’, a handful of Hostas, a half dozen oak leaf Hydrangeas, growing in the cracks between the brick border of Kim’s Garden, and as always as many Hellebore seedlings as I have time for. Lastly, I’ll uproot the six boxwoods grown to maturity, hampered and shaped by neighbors too near for comfort. I’ve set five gallon buckets to mark their final destination. As I look at the stand-ins, they seem to shadow the sometimes halting, often stumbling footsteps along the path of my life. Talk about symbolism. They progress westward toward the setting sun, and eternity, and to me represent all the questions of these last long years, still unanswered.

SAM_2604 — Japanese Maple in all its Glory

A Mystery of Moonflowers

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Bobbie

Standing at the open door, listening to the Cardinals bedding down for the night, I inhaled the fragrances of day surrendering to those of the night – Abelia and old rose yielding to Nicotiana and moonflower. But blanketing, smothering all these sweet, green scents of the garden, was the pervading odor of dust.

For more than a month we’ve had no rain, except for a spit from a passing cloud that seemed to begrudge every drop. In times like these, when the heat and the dry seem not only unnatural, but numinous, I catch myself looking backward to the old talismans, old beliefs, as if I need to find a sacrifice to appease an angry god, say a diseased political system or two. I feel the despair hovering for all the things I can do nothing about and grope for a practical thought or a treasured memory with which to fill my head instead, shoring up my vulnerable spirit. I shrug and turn and see the mystery of the moonflowers weaving their way down the path to the garden gate.

I planted the moonflower (Ipomoea alba) seeds late this year because of all the rain. Rich with years of composting, the soil along the iron fence now sucked at my boots, and I worried that the seeds might rot in the pudding like earth. A few days later, I set out the seedlings of Cobaea scandens, the cup-and-saucer vine, hoping they would enjoy each other’s company. The moonflowers sprouted, then sulked like recalcitrant toddlers. At last as if having made their point, they decided to grow by twining leaps and climbing bounds all throughout a soggy June and July. And then came the second week in August, and the rains ceased and the temperatures rose. It seemed hell had come to roost in the Appalachians of the South.

As if in defiance, the moonflowers began to bloom – nodding from the finials, drooping from the branches of a Magnolia, swooning across the pathway. In the mornings before the sun gathered its strength, gnats gathered inside the flowers, looking like pepper garnish on salad plates of the finest porcelain. In the evenings as the air cooled and the blooms began to glow in the coming darkness, moths sought out their nectar, and I sought out their fragrance.

They should have never continued to bloom so beautifully, or look so lush, mornings and evenings. The only moisture they received in this time of drought was a quick spray from the water hose on my way to all the newly planted trees and shrubs. A coward, I averted my eyes from the annuals and the faithful, traitorously choosing who might receive that

Cobaea scandens, the cup-and-saucer vine

thirst quenching drop. And still the moonflowers bloomed. As did the Cobaea with their royal purple cups and mellow lime saucers, happy neighbors invading the Ipomoea’s territory.

Barely two feet away, the spade chipped through the soil to a Saharan depth of ten inches. A few feet beyond that a Vitex thrust out its second flush of blooms. In Kim’s Garden the Camellia sasanquas blossomed, the C. japonicas budded. The flowers of Anemone ‘Queen Charlotte’ curtseyed like courtesans in the hot breezes. Some of the Magnolias suffered early leaf fall; others retained their green leaves now turning gold. All the trees and shrubs and perennials, having made this their home throughout the years, look as if they’re baring up, their roots pushing hard, traveling deep, searching for moisture. After two years of record rains, how could it be too far away? But how to explain the moonflower, the cup-and-saucer, both natives of the tropical Americas, both with their limited life spans in our temperate though chaotic climate? When the first frost – if it comes – shatters their glory, I’ll perform an autopsy, see how far their roots dug, check their vascular systems.

I seem to be always experimenting on the deceased and many times the living. I’ve just finished hauling all the potted Colocasias and Agapanthus, the tender trees and seedlings up a flight of stone steps to the greenhouse. I notice I’ve missed one container – Colocasia ‘Illustris’. With its offspring now safe under glass, it becomes another experiment. I shove it into a sheltered corner next to the furnace. If the promised rains come and “normal” returns for a nostalgic visit, we should get our first frost and cold temperatures tomorrow.

Postscript:

The rains fell, first as a whisper in the early hours before dawn, then increasing to a steady rhythm. Later out in the sunshine, I scattered poppy seeds. The seed pods along the moonflower vine look swollen and fat and shiny and beautiful.

Seed pod of the Moonflower Vine — Seed pod of Ipomoea alba, the Moonflower Vine

Seeding the Sense of Wonder

Posted on December 12, 2018April 19, 2019 by Bobbie

Digitalis ferruginea gigantea in the Garden

Downstairs in the kitchen before any other human is afoot is my time for reading and coffee – lots of both. I’ll sift through my library of garden and nature books, gathering strategies and jotting down ideas. I’ve gotten to page 124 of A Gardener’s Life by The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, when I run across another remedy for bulb scavenging squirrels and mice. As a deterrent the Dowager says, mix cayenne pepper with water to a slurry consistency, dip the bulbs and plant.

This beautiful book, by a woman who writes as well about gardens as she designs them, includes such places as The Museum of Garden History in London, Hatfield House in Hertfordshire and Chateau de St Clou in Provence. I’ve often wondered what it might be like to garden within a thousand-year old stone wall – no need, then, to treat my Camellias with an anti-desiccant as I did yesterday. The warmth off the wall would be a worthy opponent for the winds and plunging temperatures of the recent chaotic winters. And, oh, to have the funds and labor to plant an allee of sixty-year old olive trees. But then I’d miss the satisfaction of completing a three-foot section of my own dry-stacked wall. It’s been a bit like building a cathedral. You know you have a life’s work ahead of you, never seeing the end, knowing the purpose is in the journey. And I have my own grove – one potted olive, one Meyer lemon and an eight-foot bay laurel, each moved inside the hoop house at the onset of winter.

I head outside into the wind and chill to take a walk through the garden and woods, reconnoiter, stop to scoop another bucket of leaves from the ponds now overflowing with autumn’s leafy tapestry. Late in coloring this fall, the possumhaws, Viburnum nudum, hold fast to their leaves, only now beginning their transformation through the kaleidoscope of marmalade, mango, peach and Merlot.Against the kitchen wall, a foxglove – Digitalis purpurea – sends up a late bloom spike. A single bud revealing a dollop of strawberry cream in spite of the recent eighteen-degree dawn, an incongruous reminder that I want to order more seed. This year, I’ll add D. parviflora, called the “chocolate soldier”, and D. ciliata, the hairy foxglove with bell- shaped creamy blooms, and perhaps D. ‘Anne Redetzky’, the creamy petals cut and fluted. Stiff competition for them, though, in the D. ferruginea gigantea I started from seed two years ago.

Foxgloves start easily from seed. I scatter them across a flat filled with potting soil topped with a thin layer of vermiculite. Depending upon the species, I leave them exposed to the sun or cover very lightly with another sprinkling of vermiculite. Once watered, the vermiculite conserves the moisture necessary for sprouting while its structure promotes adequate drainage – that mythical grail of all gardeners. In all my years in the nursery business it’s the propagation method I found most reliable. In my present small greenhouse, the flats are kept on a bed of sand heated with coils and lit by plain old fluorescent bulbs, hooked up to household timers. One day I’ll break down and buy the more efficient LED lights. For seeds needing winter cold to germinate, I leave the trays on racks without heat.

Another seed I’ll be planting come spring is the fragrant sweet pea, Lathyrus odoratus ‘April in Paris’. This past April, I planted a packet next to the walls of our ‘Ruin’, sheltered from the prevailing winds. I didn’t hold out much hope. Not only had the horrendous winter stymied my earlier planting, but my success with sweet peas in the past has been pitiful at best.

Intense and intoxicating, the fragrance greeted me one morning as I stepped out the door. Mesmerized, I stood for a moment my nose in the air. Then I remembered the sweet peas. Walking down the path to the Ruin, I encountered their creamy pastel blossoms nodding over the wall, practically gleeful at my amazement. Even into July’s muggy early days, they continued to offer a blossom or two, making me smile.

As soon as it became available this fall, I ordered more seed from Renee’s Garden Seeds, www.reneesgarden.com. Four packets. One, I’ve already sown, covering the seedbed with six inches of mulch – a trial for our Zone 7A. Starting in late February, I’ll sow another pack, then another in March and again in April. See if I can have a succession of ‘April in Paris’.

My morning rambles takes me around the spiral pathway through Kim’s Garden and past the “October Magic” Camellias, bred by Bobby Green of Mobile, Alabama. Their magic is palpable, resonating this year from C. sasanqua ‘Orchid’, rich in blooms. Six feet away, ‘Bride’, looking beautiful in her greenery, hides one lone bud on her backside. Behind the first ‘Orchid’ at a remove of possibly ten feet, another stands budless. A little further around the path, ‘Inspiration’ looks virginal without bud or flower. The only other Camellia in the entire garden that bloomed this year, and she rioted flowers, was the C. sasanqua ‘Setsugekka’. They all endured the same cruel weather from last winter.

The same compost and pine bark amendments. As in all shade gardens, the light varies somewhat, but surely not that much in such short distances. The flowering beauty is a year older than a couple of the other Camellias, but others are the same age. Perhaps the ‘Orchid’ is planted a little higher on its mound. Would that make the difference? But the ‘Setsugekka’ is not, but it is planted in the protection afforded by the back porch. Ah, the vagaries of the natural world are endlessly fascinating, launching a lifetime of discovery and revelation.

Back inside, I turn on the radio. Some host is recommending the best Notepad, I-Pad, Amazon Fire type device for a four-year-old this Christmas. Say, something under a hundred dollars or so.

With a pack of seeds, a little water and a few moments in time, that father could give his child a world of exploration and adventure, and that ever more elusive, so easily lost, sense of wonder – all for a pittance.

Become Lost in Wonder,

Bobbie

Grounded and Blessed

Posted on November 2, 2018November 20, 2020 by Bobbie

The beauty of Acer palmatum var. unknown against an emerald boxwood green

I was out this morning under an umbrella of roiling clouds, scooping leaves from our two small ponds. With each gust, leaves shook from the trees in dervishes, raining yet more of autumn to float upon the water. But that’s okay. It’s a contemplative exercise, soothing to the spirit, and it’s just so beautiful.

American Bullfrog contemplating Autumn — A Zen moment in the life of an American Bullfrog

At the back pond, on the margin between cultivated gardens and woods, I share the view with questing frogs and tree limbs studded with opportunistic squirrels. On the hill behind the barn, the beech trees rustle with roosting turkeys. I accept the invitation and go for a walk.

Passing by an old boxelder maple in decline, its trunk decorated with leathery Polypores, possibly Phellinus gilvus, though cupped. Further along, other Polypores, this time tiny Trametes versicolor spangle the sides of an old post. I step lightly. If I stay low as I approach the rise to the old TVA pond, I might get lucky, privy to a raft of migrating waterfowl. Instead, I surprise another squirrel and flush out our resident Blue Heron. And right there, a hundred paces up the hill, a half-dozen wild turkeys scratch amongst the beech mast. I climb to the top of the dam, stepping around the crushed and flattened leaves where a deer lay last night. From the tiny hoof prints sprinkling the mud, it looks like Mama’s idea of a good hiding place.

As I stand atop the weir, enjoying the fiery colors of sourwoods, maples, dogwoods, I know how blessed we are to live here surrounded by nature, that recently recognized – again – prescription for the ills of humanity. Some might disagree. Only along the ridgeline towering now above my head can we get cell phone reception on our flip phone. Internet is available only through satellite with its molasses paced speed; and as a consequence and by choice, neither of us has ever considered a Facebook page – unless you count the one my nieces set up for me as a joke fifteen or so years ago. They used an old second grade picture of me, chubby-cheeked and snaggle-toothed. For all I know, it might still be out there somewhere in the ether.

But John and I ground ourselves every day working in the gardens and striving to preserve what’s left of the history of this farm and these woods. This land was farmed with care and diligent husbandry for close to a hundred and fifty years, before it fell to a shiftless lot in the 1950’s. While digging another hole for a volunteer Magnolia macrophylla or transplanting another wood fern from up the cove, I still, on occasion, run my spade into a thudding mass of folded plastic, discarded and buried under fifty years of autumns and falling leaves.

It takes caring and mindfulness and plain hard labor to reverse the sacrilege of neglect imposed on a piece of earth. But we are thankful for the work, and blessed to realize we are but small particles in the divinity of nature. And that we must “first do no harm”, and then must never take more than our share.

Time to walk back to the house. I cut through the barn and look up at the rafters. No bats, the dusty quality of the guano on the ground below evidence that they’ve moved to winter quarters.

Past the tractor shed, I pause at the new garden pond, again, to dredge out a few more leaves. Looking about me, I see the squirrels are taking advantage of the stone wall, performing their own adaptation of the Nutcracker. Yep, Grounded and Blessed. That’s me.

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New Secret Recipe for Gardenia Success

Posted on September 25, 2018 by Bobbie

Coquettes all, Gardenias tease with their shiny green foliage and promise of forever; they seduce with their fragrance like silky nights on Delta shores. Only such sirens could make me bend my rule – “three times die and you’re no more”. But after trying every acid, sandy, loamy, free-draining, full sun, shady afternoon, planted high recipe I could find, I called it quits at five deaths. Not another penny did I spend on a soul-stirring Gardenia. But I failed to reckon with the two freebies on offer from a generous plant breeder.

Sinking them in a free-draining, slightly acidic, moist soil, next to our dovecote “ruin”, I recited a little Voodoo and, thinking positive thoughts, crept away lest I disturb the little beauties. They lasted through the summer, began to turn pallid come autumn, downright necrotic during winter, pushed out two new leaves this past spring, and then dropping all their leaves, died.

Skeptic or dreamer that I am, I waited until the end of April – more out of a need to scold myself with the pitiful sight of gnarly roots and branches than to encourage anything like hope – before digging up the Gardenias and starting across the creek to the compost heap. Too tired and discouraged to carry on up the cove, I stopped off at the new garden and dropped them out of sight between a red maple and a box elder stump. Maybe they’d find salvation in death, adding a little humus to the churned up splinters and mud left behind by the deconstruction of the old log barn.

A few weeks ago, I stepped outside into an August morning awash in what already felt like the sweet wine of October. In my arms I carried a tray of Carex ‘Everillo’ mixed with a half-dozen hellebore seedlings. Time to move a few more orphans from the greenhouse into the Spartan landscape I alternately called “Kim’s Annex” and the “Barnless Garden.” The axed box elder made an adequate plant table for the sedges and Lenten roses while I ruminated on where to plant them. Would the hellebores ground the spindly-legged Camellias or perhaps, better yet, skirt the raw rock wall? If wall it could be called with its lofty one stone height.

: The Barnless Garden – New Home of Gardenia jasminoides planted with the “secret recipe for success.”

Moving the hellebores from the wall over to the Camellias and then to the Lilliputian forest of Digitalis ‘Silver Fox’, I scooted the ‘Everillos’ over on their stump and joined them to meditate upon the scene. I almost stepped on it – shiny green-leafed twin to the one at its side, both throbbing with rude health and vitality. They – still holding the shape of their late black plastic pots – sat poised atop the ground, side roots exposed, just as I’d dropped them months before. Except for all that burgeoning life.

I’ll keep my expectations low. See how it goes. I doubt I’ll ever see a bloom, but I’ll settle for life. Maybe, after all, I stumbled on a new recipe for cultivating Gardenia jasminoides. If, I can stop myself from throwing a little soil over those roots. If, I can restrain my urge to treat them to just a little water. If, I can keep my interfering, gardening hands to myself. And if, pigs can fly.

The image above – The Ruin Garden where the Gardenias, sad and forlorn, wasted away to nothing.

Creating a Water Garden for Lilies, Lotus and Frogs

Posted on June 30, 2018June 30, 2018 by Bobbie

I’ve spent most of my life and career surrounded by plants, the terrestrial kind. But gardeners, we’re always on the lookout for a new challenge and the steeper the learning curve the better. That’s why early spring two years ago found my husband and me digging a hole two feet deep and six feet in diameter in the center of the ammonite-spiral path through Kim’s Garden. Into that hole we sunk a similar sized galvanized livestock tank and filled it with water. Three days later the brown truck backed down the driveway and “Mary” alighted carrying a box the size of a four-slice toaster. Inside, our entire water garden – two hardy (zone 5) water lilies, ‘Perry’s Baby Red’ and ‘Walter Pagel’, a bundle of purple leaf cabomba for shading, red-stemmed parrot’s feather for oxygenating and a batch of frogbit – lay in a nest of biodegradable peanuts.

And then began the time of miracles as both ‘Perry’ and ‘Walter’ rose from the depths to bloom their first spring, and a small khaki-colored frog, dubbed Henry, took up residence.

Every day throughout the spring and summer, we found reasons to detour around our little pond, admiring the reflection of clouds mirrored in the water, contemplating the ripples from a sudden breeze, clearing the fallen debris from surrounding trees. We’d often come upon Henry having his Zen moment among Medusa’s cast stone strands, placed there for his meditative pleasure and his safe escape from the pool. By the end of summer, he was hosting gatherings of his bullfrog buddies and paramours.

But the chill meeting me as I stepped out the back door put an end to my complacency. Time to ready the pond for winter, and we didn’t have a clue how to go about it.

We consulted the experts – a lot of them, in books and on the Internet – many with conflicting advice. To us, at least, it seemed the companies selling pond plants and equipment supplied the most complete information. We compared, sifted, gleaned, and with winter drawing close decided to pick the instructions that made the most sense and to trust our instincts. And in the end, as often happens, it proved quite simple.

In our Zone 7a, water is not supposed to freeze deeper than a few inches, if that; so after the first hard frost, I pruned the leaves on our hardy water lilies back to pot level. To keep the pond clear of rotting vegetation, we removed the frogbit and composted it, dislodging any of the potato-looking buds we found and dropping them to the bottom of the pool (normally a natural occurrence) to see if they’d sprout the next spring. We left the parrot’s feather and the cabomba submerged.

But what to do about our community of American Bullfrogs in the cold dark days ahead? The answer? Leave them to it. They’d pass the winter hibernating, settling among the pots and vegetation at the bottom of the pond or moving to the nearby creek and sinking to its muddy floor, breathing through their skin. Their own type of anti-freeze – high concentrations of glucose in their vital organs – would help in combating the cold.

We spent the next weeks scooping leaves from the pond and enjoying its wildlife. When the bone deep cold began to creep into our valley, John and I did our own hibernating – inside the house with cups of coffee, a warm fire and a stack of books.

The following spring a longed for lotus joined Henry in the pond; then I decided he needed two – Nelumbo ‘Chawan Basu’ and ‘Gregg Gibson’. I never imagined leaves so iridescent, a bloom so beguiling, so full of mystery. I, also, never imagined they’d grow so big, extend so many leaves. I wondered how Henry and his gang managed to find their way out from under all that luscious foliage. Later, I found evidence the gang had been getting up to a little procreation under the lotus and lily leaves. Our family was growing.

Last fall, we, again, prepared the pond for winter. Or so we thought. Weeks of single digit temperatures, over night and late into the morning, froze the pond to a depth of twelve inches, encasing the largest lotus pot in solid ice. Looking into its depths, I thought of Narnia.

This spring, ‘Chawan Basu’ moved to a new home in a deep pot outside the kitchen door. Leaves emerged. In Henry’s pool, the lily pads rose to settle and float upon the barley-cleared water. Looking down upon ‘Gregg Gibson’, I saw no sign of life. Instead, tadpoles, like so many half-licked Tootsie Roll Pops, bobbed among his decimated stems. Taking a back seat to the Oscars, this show kept us mesmerized for weeks, until first one lily pad after another starred its own froglet. And there between cloven lily pad and streaming frogbit, another kind of leaf – rounder, fluted, bluer – floated. ‘Greg Gibson’, tendril crawling over or under its pot had rooted deep in the sediment at the bottom of our small pond, a survivor after all.

Lost Gardens, Lost Plants

Posted on June 5, 2018January 26, 2019 by Bobbie

Out in the garden this morning, I’m administering last rites to first one winter weary tree, then another.

Rain and snow and sub-freezing temperatures assaulted us here in the southern Appalachian foothills for the entire month of January. February brought record rainfalls. Bad enough the days and days of unrelenting cold and rain, but then the roller coaster ride began. And for three months the garden couldn’t tell from one day to the next if it was July or January.

Out the kitchen door, I follow the gravel path to the old iron gate and step through. Up on the back porch our dogs, Dinah and Charlie, critique my progress. The katsura tree looks heavy with dew. Like an aspergillum a branch dips, sprinkling droplets, baptizing Dinah’s head. Planted fifteen years ago as a four-foot sapling, we now look up at it from our second story, this Cercidiphylum japonicum – the epitome of grace in ascending layers. Witness to our first katsura, maturing in the Gardens of Reynolda in Wake Forest, North Carolina, we bought one on our way home. In the years since, it has become a familiar and beloved part of this place. Only a little frazzled from the last late frost, it looks good.

Beyond the katsura’s reach the sun shines on this back garden for five hours of each day, in spots maybe six. I stop, surprised by an unlikely casualty, deserving of a moment’s silence. Bought as a pair three years ago in a “Fall Bloomers Crepe Myrtle” sale, the gallon-sized Lagerstroemia x ‘Natchez’ twins looked like the before in the old Charles Atlas ad from the 1950’s – pale and spindly and afraid of a fight. Planted three boot strides apart to frame a bird table, the two ‘Natchez’ settled into their new home of loamy clay, made more porous with streaks of leveling sand left over from a septic tank excavation years before our time here. I don’t recall much about the day I planted them, other than it was early fall still miserable with summer weather – bone dry but muggy with gnats. The crepes received the initial standard soaking followed by weekly ministrations until winter arrived to take over. I left them to it.

At the onset of this last winter, they stood over six feet tall – more than double their original size – but still too young, yet, for their trunks to turn sinewy with the glossy burgundy coloration of their Lagerstroemia fauriei parent.

Anyone familiar with crepe myrtles knows it’s a struggle to kill one save with an ax. But on my reconnaissance, I find one of the pair still bare, its limbs dull, the life force surrendered.

I move on.

Two springs back in the buying frenzy of the Arboretum plant sales, I lost control, yet again. Numbered among my acquisitions were a Magnolia virginiana var australis ‘Mardi Gras’, the lustrous green leaves rimed a chartreuse gold; a Cestrum parqui to perfume the hours before dawn; and a Magnolia figo, the banana shrub, zone 7’s all. In the border skimming the creek, only the figo shows signs of recovery, pushing out three lovely, trembling leaves. A blessing in the winter with their “ever greenness”, these magnolias suffer in its icy winds, losing precious moisture through those evergreen leaves. I thought I’d done well siting them all, studying our sloping, undulating terrain, gauging the fall of sunlight, the protection from late frosts. Looks like I got it wrong.

Looking out to Kim’s Garden beyond the blue bench, I see the camellias – so often prima donnas in this garden – have survived and are putting on new licorice-red growth.

I save until last my two, long-coveted, botanical gems. ‘Perfume Princess’ droops, forlorn, denuded but not yet withered. On trial in the garden, the Daphne odora, a new from Tesselaar Plants, was bred by New Zealand’s renowned plant breeder, Mark Jury. It has already survived two winters with little damage, blooming sporadically throughout, exhaling its magical fragrance. But none of us were prepared for the chaotic extremes of this last wintry season. I reach for a stem to check for flexibility, but stay my hand. I don’t want to know – not yet.

And now I approach my Melianthus major ‘Artonow’s Blue.’ Bought just last year, it spent the summer enchanting us all. Each morning, I’d walk out the back door and see the dew pooling in its magical, crenelated leaves – the dew being the extent of the moisture for much of last summer. I think it was the third late-winter temperature soar and plummet when it gave up, dropped all its leaves, the stone wall at its back failing in its promised protection. No longer able to face the skeletal remains of the honey bush, I cut it down. Now I’ll wait. See if it will sprout from the roots.

I stand and look toward the cypress grove. Clematis ‘Polish Spirit’, performing somersaults, sprints to the top of the arbor. I walk through and glance down to the stump belonging to Ficus palmata ‘Icebox’. ‘Artonow’s Blue’ all over again.

But for every tree or shrub or perennial lost – Clematis ‘Pilau’, Dierama ‘Blackbird’, Rosa ‘Desdemona’ – I see a dozen survivors.

The contorted hazel, whose buds looked like tiny fists refusing to open after their first aborted attempt two months ago, now stands half-dressed in glossy green leaves. And the Magnolia sieboldii ‘Michiko Renge’ – the Japanese Empress, the lotus flower – greets me fully leafed, its fourth resurrection proving successful. Michiko’s one remaining flower bud hangs mummified.

Most of those lost had been in the ground less than three years, proving the vulnerability of youth, the resilience of maturity. Having the experience of my own maturity, I’ll wait before I bury my dead, give them the summer, maybe longer. And if those left standing can’t quite muster another revival, I’ll resurrect them with a coat of purple paint – colorful sculpture for winter.

In the meantime, I’ll go inside and order another Melianthus, another ‘Arnow’s Blue’ as it is purported to be a little hardier than the straight species. Then I’ll come back outside on the hunt for the “perfect” location to plant it. I read that it needs to be planted three to four inches below the soil line. Before it arrives I’ll study on it, do a little research.

Sources:

Melianthus – Digging Dog Nursery http://www.diggingdog.com

Cercidiphylum japonicum – Mr. Maple http://www.mrmaple.com

The Language of Flowers

Posted on April 15, 2018August 11, 2020 by Bobbie

In the Language of Flowers my grandmother would have been a cactus. If dour sprung from a turnip, or burdock represented intractable, then her nosegay would have been composed of a prickly pear, a purple top and dock. Or, this is what I thought for a time, for a season, or two.

The rain tracked westward dragging in its wake a breeze spiced with resin. Sitting in lawn chairs rendered shabby chic by hot sun and one too many tropical storms, my mother and I swatted at yellow flies. Slash pines sketched the ground in Whoville shadows, bruising our faces in their retreat from the silvered hide of my Grandmother’s Airstream trailer at our backs.

Clamoring for our attention, orange and yellow marigolds screamed at each other across a stage of root-muscled earth. Pink and purple Petunias pranced like kindergarten ballerinas against a curtain of saucy Caladiums while fiery Zinnias, red-hot pokers and bloody cockscombs cackled their bawdy jokes from the wings. A lone pink waved from a crack in the cement slab beneath our feet.

Two dogs, out for a day of socializing, trotted toward a triple row of black-eyed Susans hedging the show. As if finding the dare , they checked at the corner, looked toward the trailer and launching themselves over the Rudbeckia set off at a dead run; just beyond good rock-chucking distance. Sailing across to the other side, they skidded to a stop, glanced back, moved on, another afternoon meander.

It was a Sunday. Prayers were winding down for my grandmother at the church across the field.

I inhaled the soft southern air and, tilting my head toward a bucket of morning glories sprawling at my feet, asked, “Mom, where in the world did all this spring from?”

Beneath her dun-colored bonnets my grandmother looked out upon a world sorely in need of a good shaking. In her presence I slunk; we all did, hunkering down out of her sight line. Granny loomed to Biblical proportions in a body barely five feet tall.

In her yard pine needles fell with an apology. If she’d felled everything within her domain and dared it to re-sprout, no one would have been surprised. And, yet, here we were ankle-deep in flowers.

“Did Granny have a garden? When you were a little girl?”

My mother looked over at me. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Squinted. Sought an answer in the tall pines. Dropping her eyes to her hands, she began to worry at a honeysuckle stem.

“You know, it was on the tip of my tongue to say all my Mama ever gardened was cotton, peanuts and Dominecker hens. But…” She hesitated, sifting through memories. A car door slammed over at the church across the field.

“I remember the house yard. Had a wire fence around it. Mama used to sweep it with a gallberry broom, punishing it down to bare clay. By the time she passed the broom on to me, the ground next to the fence rose up a good 18 inches higher than the middle; kind of like a dirt farmer’s version of a HaHa.” My mother dropped the stem and popped off a bloom, held it to her nose.

Memory picking, my Mother sorted, discarded. She looked at me. Slowly, light like an Easter sunrise flushed her face, and she began. “But out back, between the smokehouse and the clothesline, there was an old syrup kettle she used to boil our clothes in on wash day. I remember sitting on the edge of it with Jessie picking a bouquet from the flowers planted inside. Four O’Clocks?” She shook her head as if to rattle free their identity.

“Anyway, around the outside of the kettle was a circle of more flowers. Reds and purples, pinks. And then around that Mama’d laid out these bricks.

“And there was a fig tree. We’d play like the leaves were our dinner plates. And Jessie, just a little bitty girl, would scramble up to the top to pick the biggest, prettiest ones. Sometimes we’d lie under it with a leaf laying over our faces, our arms folded over our chests.” I watched a dove shuffle among the pine needles, heard another car door slam over at the church.

“There was a rose, too, climbing over the smokehouse, so burdened down it looked like it might buckle at the knees. The flowers were yellow, like sunshine. Mama called it her ‘Lady’. And another rose looked like a ball gown. Blooms always reminded me of that verse. You know. ‘Of cabbages and kings’”. My mother’s voice was a whisper now.

“There was a bush at one end of the clothesline. She kept it pruned so it looked like a giant toadstool. The line pole shot straight up out of the middle. Mama said it was a tea shrub. The clothesline seemed always full of dungarees, socks, dresses and the like, but the sheets she spread over her tea shrub.” My mother, she’s eight years old, again, lying beneath a fig tree. Her mother sails a sheet into the wind, flicks, holds tight, wins the tug-of-war. It settles to dry atop a mound of green.

“We saw it bloom once, me and Jessie. One flower. Blood red. We didn’t say a word, not even to each other; afraid Mama’d be out there with the cutters. But, come wash day she just tucked the sheets up around that flower, like a blanket around a baby.”

A hawk’s cry jarred the silence. Mom tracked its flight across the sky, her gaze tangling high in the pines. From the church I could hear the sound of a car crunching across gravel, voices.

“On the day Jessie fell I couldn’t find Mama at first. Finally come across her kneeling next to the clothesline. I’d run all the way from school and I couldn’t catch my breath to tell her. Joe come up behind me said ‘Jessie’s hurt.’ One minute Mama was there, the next I was standing all alone staring at a bucket full of wood’s dirt. A coffee can lay next to it with this little bitty vine spilling out, roots all naked and the sun baking down. I set it back in the can, pushed some dirt around it. I still remember the smell, earth and roses and smoky ham.

“Jessie died on a Sunday.”

Memories ended as the ring of bells and the heat from the sun cut through the pines. Noon. We both looked over at the church. I saw my grandmother, a metaphor for the live oak that humanizes so much of our deep south – limbs gnarled, stooped toward the ground by a lifetime of troubles; the Spanish moss swinging from its branches a color match for her thinning hair. She started across the field stepping high, and I thought of the resurrection fern that inhabits the nooks and crannies of the live oak. As she plowed through the fennel weed, lingering rain darkened the hem of her Sunday best.

The following January, weary from her ninety-eight years and another winter, my grandmother left her garden for an eternal spring.

My sister parked out front under a Chinaberry tree. The two of us climbed out of the car, followed by my daughter, Kim. We waited. My mother needed a little time. The house where she grew up, where her little sister died, where a little garden grew out back between a clothesline and a smokehouse, still stood on the land my uncle bought with the ashes of his conscience. But the house had become a kudzu-shrouded shell, rusting tin curling gap-toothed to the sky.

Listening for squeaks of surrender, we picked our way across the front porch boards. Inside, a well of gloom haunted us across the floor. Bricks had tumbled from the fireplace, scattering the smell of soot and sorrow. Cobwebs swung from the rafters.

Accompanied by muffled scurrying, we shuffled across shifting beams and stepped off the back porch to a flurry of crows. Thirty feet to the south lay a jumble of old poplar boards rendered in hickory smoke and brine. Across an echo of purples and pinks, bouquets and laughter, a wizened crone of a fig tree threw up lichened branches to grip a post, axed by rot. From the half-dozen leaves still clinging to a stem, I recognized Granny’s tea tree – a Camellia sasanqua, variety known only to the past.

Thirty years since my grandmother left us, and I wonder in this fickle spring if in an Alabama field a Camellia still lives in a fig tree’s embrace.

There are gardens open to us of such a strong sense of place, they connect us, not only to our pasts, but to who we are now:

Gibbs Gardens – Ball Ground, Georgia http://www.gibbsgardens.com

Chanticleer Garden – Wayne, Pennsylvania http://www.chanticleergarden.org

Cheekwood Estate and Gardens – Nashville, Tennessee http://www.cheekwood.org

Winterthur – Winterthur, Delaware http://www.winterthur.org

And books that tell us of the elements in the making of such a garden:

The Gardens of Arne Maynard and Gardens with Atmosphere by Arne Maynard

Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City by Dan Pearson

The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift

A White Oak, a Cypress Grove and a Flawed Miracle

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Bobbie

Startled from winter’s dark torpor by a thump worthy of a Hagrid, we looked at each other and rose to face what waited outside in the night. The beam of our flashlights swept the path leading from the kitchen to the back garden and caught an opossum poised for escape. Fat though he was on grubs and bird seed, he was too pint-sized for a sound the magnitude we’d heard. Slipping to the kitchen’s side doors, John flipped on the light and aimed his torch down the walk, through the pergola to a scene straight out of our own personal Dark Forest. A cataclysmic force of nature as told by the Brothers Grimm, carrying with it a miracle, flawed but full of magic and grace. Slain by merciless rain and implacable gravity, a massive white oak tree slumped dying across a hundred feet of garden, its massive roots pawing at the wind on the other side of the creek. Its branches, broken and twisted, now lay at our feet, inches from the arbor clothed in ‘Polish Spirit’ longing for spring.

With only a whimper of light to mark our way, we passed down the length of our fallen oak. Out there in the dark, in the path of the great tree, lay the fate of others, wonders all, that I’d planted one by one over these last years. I swung the torch westward and illuminated the Magnolia ‘The Woodsman‘ its fattening buds trembling but intact. Feeling my way, I encountered the slender branches of the young Magnolia pyramidata, all there and accounted for. John swept his flashlight right, then left. The grove of cypress appear unscathed. At last I turned east and looked for the winter bones of my Hovenia dulcis, my Japanese Raisin tree, bought in part for the poetry of its name, and found it still whole and beautiful in this its seventh year. I exhaled. On the way back, I almost stumbled over a small Cryptomeria japonica ‘Black Dragon’, wounded, mutilated – this miracle’s dusky side.

Before surrendering to the torrential storms of this past chaotic winter, the oak had clung to the lowest slope of a wooded hillside that climbed at a roller coaster pitch, teaching a lesson in the tenacity of trees. With the onset of the colder months, the sun sinking ever lower in the sky skirted the ridge line, flashing through the forest of beech, oak, poplar and redbud in a teasing memory of summer and a promise of spring. Along with me the trees dwell in a season of gloom. I wonder if they dread it as I do.

This land has been farmed for close to two-hundred years, tilled first by a moldboard plow behind a team of mules. In the first half of the previous century, mechanization arrived in the hills of Tennessee and a Ford 8N began the circuit of this particular three-acre parcel – year after year – forming a berm like a cresting wave along the creek bank. Thirty feet to the north, the land begins a gentle slope skyward, turning a worn out tobacco field into a swamp.

Our first year we cut drainage ditches that silted full by autumn. We dug again year two. Year three found me standing in water lapping over the toes of my Wellies, contemplating removing the “lip” from three-hundred feet of creek bank bordering the worst of the flooded area. There, fueled by aggravation, bloomed an epiphany. I’d plant Taxodium distichum, a reminder of a childhood spent playing in the cypress bogs of my deeper south.

We planted eight – bareroot, four feet tall. Topping eight feet by their fourth year in the ground, they were already making a difference, their roots soaking up excess water. After a rain days of standing water turned into a few hours. We planted another eight two years ago.

Now on either side of the downed oak, our grove of beautiful cypress trees stood firm – trunks spreading like buttresses, “knees” popping up around them.

Making hay while the sun shone, John revved up the chain saw and cut the oak trunk and larger branches into eight foot sections, stacking the kindling-sized debris in temporary piles for the wrens, chickadees and finches to enjoy. From the confusion of branches, I eyeballed a selection, four to five-inches in diameter, and rolled them into the edging divots I’d made along the garden where I’d extended the beds – yet again. Contributing even in death, the oak would last until I could come up with a more permanent solution, leaving behind its spirit as compost for the soil.

Connecting the ancient roadbed across the creek to the cypress grove on this side, the last of the great tree rests. Almost three feet in diameter, it will remain. A bridge to the other side.

Sources:

Taxodium distichum – http://www.coldstreamfarm.net

Hovenia dulcis – http://www.forestfarm.com