Garden Rant

Why all the attacks on the White House Garden?

If you missed the big gardening news this week, here's the summary version:

After the not-surprising attacks on the organic nature of the garden from the lobby group for Big Chem, this latest attack came curiously from the left.  It started with a story in Mother Jones claiming that the garden, with its 93 parts per million of lead, is "contaminated", supposedly due to the composted sewage applied to the land during the Clinton years.   

Then a Huffington Post writer took that ball and ran with it: The Obama Organic Family Garden: Swimming in Sludge? Here's a quote [bold added]: "Recently the National Park Service discovered that the White House lawn, where the garden was planted, contains highly elevated levels of lead -- 93 parts per million. It's enough lead for anyone planning to have children pick vegetables in that garden or eat produce from it to reconsider their plans: lead is highly toxic to children's developing organs and brain functions -- however, it's below the 400 ppm the EPA suggests is a threat to human health."

First, the 93 ppm finding was known by the Park Service months ago and made public back in March when the garden was announced.  And who says 93 ppm is enough to stop people with children from growing food in it?

But to the rescue of good science and journalism is my favorite DC food blogger, Eddie Gehman Kohan, author of Obama Foodoramama.  She got the old-fashioned notion of contacting soil scientists - 3 of them - and their responses are detailed in her post:  The Only Thing Toxic about the White House Kitchen Garden is the Rumors: Scientists Correct the Record on Contamination".  There she calls the attack "the latest from the pooposphere of poor fact checking on Huffington Post".  And she finds it interesting that "some of the people who are most likely to take media stabs at the White House Kitchen Garden are those who profess themselves to be champions of environmental stewardship and of a food system that's local, sustainable, and organic," citing the author of the MoJo story in particular.

And she goes on to indict lots of bloggers:  "Many other food and gardening blogs posted about the Mother Jones sludge/lead contamination, too, without fact checking. Even very reputable ones."  Okay, who was it?

Then Eddie responded on HuffPost itself with this takedown.

And here's a point that bears repeating:

The other bizarre element to the whole bashing thing is that anyone who thinks the White House left a single stone unturned in planning the garden is...what's the most delicate, diplomatic, term? Oh yeah, silly. The White House was well aware that the first food garden planted on the campus since WWII was going to be big news. Of course all details were accounted for. Of course appropriate testing was conducted. The White House has the finest minds in America, experts in every field, available for consultation. It's beyond silly to imagine that the garden wasn't thoroughly "vetted."

That's exactly my impression of the garden gang at the White House (see earlier post about how smart the whole project is).

Oh, and here's the link to the Mother Jones story.  When I tried it, an error message came up saying due to a fire, the server was down, but check back for news of Sarah Palin and "MoJo's scoop that the White House garden has been poisoned by sewage sludge".  Still, after all the debunking!

SHOUT-OUT TO A SUPERBLOGGER
This is yet another example of bloggers getting it right after mainstream or print media get it wrong.  In this case, Eddie's a career food policy writer and consultant, so it's no wonder she knows a thing or two.  [Photo of Eddie on the "Today Show".]  And get this - she got herself invited to the White House Easter Egg Roll - by continuously bugging the Press Office - AND the White House Correspondent's Dinner. I'm so jealous.

MORE ATTACKS
In a close reading of "ObFo", I see that Politico and the Drudge Report have also "bashed" the "WHKG".  It's just more proof that gardening's (finally) a hot topic, so let's enjoy it! 

Not Much Lead in White House Garden

But still somehow newsworthy. Little bit of lead never hurt anybody, right?  Whatever's in the soil, that garden is looking pretty durn good.

Speaking of Lists

I just found out about WeFollow, a service that lets you find other Twitter users who share your interests.  Here's their list of gardening Twitter users; anyone can add themselves to the list. I don't know any of these top gardening Twitterers--I'm off to check it out.

The Indie Gardening & Nature Bestsellers

I missed this list when it came out, but a copy arrived from my publisher the other day.  Of course, I've got a vested interest in the contents of such a list right now, but it's also interesting in a broader sense.  So what does the Indie Gardening list say about gardeners who shop at independent bookstores?

• Narrative.  We've got your Kingsolver, your Pollan, your Wild Trees by Richard Preston (about redwood trees and the people who study them), a cool new book of botanical history called The Brother Gardeners by Andrea Wulf, and Our Life in Gardens by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd.
• Local.  It's all local, isn't it?  Here's the Sunset Western Garden Book, Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, and Audubon's guide to eastern trees, all of which have to be doing well in their own regions to make a national list.
• Veggies.  Almost half of the books on the list concern themselves with growing food.

I went through the list and realized that I own or have read 17 books on the list.  Has anyone got me beat?

A Tale of Missoula Chickens

Before and After in the Garden of Shirley Bovshow

Sure, I was in Los Angeles last weekend for a family wedding but - Hallelujah! - there was time for some garden-touring.  One whole day of it Included Huntington Garden (report coming soon) and the awesome personal garden of garden designer and TV host Shirley Bovshow.  EdenMakers is her business name and it turns out it's oh-so true, way too close to Eden for this jealous Zone 7 gardener.  (I'm sick with envy but I'll get over it, I think.)

You'll see the source of that envy in my photos of the garden. Then for dramatic impact there's nothing like these before and after photos that Shirley sent me.  She couldn't have started with a blanker, flatter site.

 

 

 

But there's more.  Here's Shirley's photo page about her garden.  And here on YouTube is my video tour, along with my request for video-making suggestions (camera, software, taping techniques). 

What the photos don't show are the dozens of *edibles growing in this small space - all incorporated into the mostly ornamental plantings. 

THE TAKE-HOME from Shirley's garden, for me, is the value of hiring a good designer.  The two times I've worked with professionals have cost me little, but taken my garden - and my passion for gardening - to new heights.

*Edibles listed below the jump.

The Seattle Garden Show Has a Buyer

This just in. Thanks to Timber Press for tweeting the tip.

Variation Is The Spice Of Life

An unusual foxglove in Mary Barnes' garden.  Digitalis lanata?

Mary Barnes of Slate Hill Farm Daylilies is my kind of gardener: a mad scientist.  I love her for allowing my kids to be mad scientists, too.  She lets them hybridize daylilies and then gives us the seedlings to grow out, so they can see the fruits of their fun.

When we arrived there last Saturday, she had a milk crate full of seedlings for us, all labeled with a number indicating the cross and the name of the kid who decided that a plant called something like 'Screaming Meemie' desperately needed to exchange genes with another plant called something like 'Pants On Fire.'  Subtle their crosses are not.  They usually result in flowers so big the plant can hardly hold up its head and colors from a Velvet Elvis painting.  I'm going to give these monster hemerocallis their own bed in the country.

Mary's own experimentation takes not just the form of professional daylily breeding, but also non-professional fooling around with seeds of all kinds.  She saves her vegetable seed.  She's growing quinoa and flax seed for her cereal.  She's able to plant really unusual flowers, including a very tall and thin white and brown foxglove, because she raises them from seed.

On Saturday, she showed me precisely the thing that makes seed saving so fun.

Behold a poppy produced by saved seed:

Here is the poppy's much better-looking brother:

 

And here are lettuces from seed she saved:

The ones on the right are all from the same variety of lettuce. They all have the same trout-patterned leaves. But some of them are red-spotted chartreuse.  And some of them are an even mix of red and green.

I love the idea of selecting my own flowers and vegetables, too, and breeding the better-looking lettuce.  I've got an enormous parsnip sending out flowers while we speak in my vegetable garden, just because I want to observe the natural behavior of this biennial.  But I frequently intend to save seed and then never get around to collecting it. 

Too busy raising the results of previous experiments involving my husband, I suppose.

Experts Are Sometimes Excellent

We've been talking a lot about color clashes at Garden Rant.  The worst in my garden this year centered around the pale, pale pinks of two classic plants: 'Sarah Bernhardt' peony and 'New Dawn' rose.
'Sarah Bernhardt' is one of the tallest of peonies, with fluffy flowers of silvery pink.  She is a real supermodel, stunning on her own, a problem in combination with any other flower in my yard because she makes them all look muddy and unappetizing.

My 'New Dawn,' too, is so healthy and beautiful that three of my neighbors have been inspired to seek out their own 'New Dawns.'  However, her flesh-toned pink color seems not to complement any other color, but instead, to compete with them and make them look bad because she is so delicate and pure.  We've all met this kind of girl and found her intensely annoying.

I thought she needed some gothing up.  So I bought a maroon clematis for 'New Dawn.'  Nope.  That is not the solution.  In fact, trial and error and fits of crazy shovel-work moving stuff doing perfectly well here over to there--which is what I use instead of color theory--left me empty-handed.

But on a visit to the amazing Slate Hill Farm Daylilies this weekend, I posed the question to owner Craig Barnes, who not only grows and breeds fields of gorgeous daylilies, but is also a painter.

"Lavender," he said instantly.  "Slatey blue.  A blue with a lot of white in it, like the rose."

I went delphinium shopping.  Whereas my instinct would always be to pick out the darkest or most intense and dramatic ones, I instead went for the lighter, grayer ones.  I also bought a pale blue baptisia and the palest lavender veronicastrum.   'New Dawn' looks very pretty indeed, surrounded by these acolytes.

This is why painters' houses are always nicer than mine, too.

Some not-so-humble hostas

The first flush of roses is fading here in WNY. I am now welcoming martagon lilies (with many more lilium species and cultivars to come) and other midsummer plants like rudbeckias, phlox, and hemerocallis. They’ll come in and out of bloom, get mildewy, and fade away, according to their various wonts.

But faithfully in full leaf since May and continuing through September are the sometimes-maligned hostas. What would the dry shade gardener do without these plants? I would have practically nothing in certain sections of my front garden, I know that much.

Above and at top you see some rather prepossessing varieties one of my neighbors has going in her front easeway. We are all hosta-lovers here in the land of the Norway maple. (I include a human for scale.) These aren't the newer, fancy ones you see in catalogs: just some tried-and-true varieties—Sieboldiana 'Elegans' and Sum & Substance, I'm thinking.

Can the urban farmer and the Solon be friends?

 

Today I am attending a chicken hearing at Buffalo City Hall. This is not the first time I’ve attended a legislative hearing of our Common Council, but it’s the first time I’ve gone to advocate for chickens. Usually I am there to stop demolitions of historic properties or—a couple times—to speak about quality of life issues such as bar patios open too late and so on.

I have high hopes for this. It should provide some entertainment and the word is—as I’ve reported before—that an ordinance allowing chickens is likely to pass here. But on the other hand, it is a bit frustrating that this issue, like so many that affect urban gardeners and farmers, has to be such a heavy lift for local politicians. If I were to ask any of these legislators what LEED standards were, I’m pretty sure they’d be able to say Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (this phrase bothers me, by the way—“energy design?” Huh?). They get buildings and clean energy. But they don’t get sustainability when it comes to uses that don’t have to do with bricks, mortar, and generating power.

And it goes well beyond Buffalo. Here is a woman in Springfield, MA who is trying to sell her vegetables and is running into trouble (though she is prevailing), while fierce battles between developers and urban farms occur in cities throughout the U.S. regularly, including a famous example in Los Angeles that is the subject of the film The Garden (reviewed by Susan).

Urban gardeners are running up against laws and governments nearly daily, and while some of it is easy to understand—you need regulations and order in any community—a lot of the trouble comes from city planning mindsets that seem wedded to the disastrous urban renewal paradigms of decades ago. The plan for success still seems to be: lure a big company, build lots of apartment buildings and parking ramps and make sure there’s a convention center and a stadium nearby. I exaggerate but not by much. For too many politicians and planners, cities still mean concrete and construction cranes, not healthy neighborhoods where people try to live sustainable lives. The path to economic survival in cities has changed and it's got more to do with livability than skyscrapers.

Wallabies - yet another way to give up the Toro

First goats, now wallabies.  

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The "garden" at the American Indian Museum

It's nobody's notion of a garden; it's a re-creation of the natural environment here in the Chesapeake Bay watershed as the original inhabitants knew it.  It surrounds the awesome building and together the exterior - building and landscaping - is actually more popular than the displays indoors. 

I was given a tour of the landscape recently by Marsha Lea, the designer, along with two of her colleagues with EDAW - Jeanette Ankoma-Sey and Roger Courtenay (Roger designed the new National Garden at the U.S. Botanic Garden).

It's hard to imagine from these photos how downtown this site is, what with all the wildlife it's attracted.  Like birds galore, mallards, night herons, a family of 11 ducklings.  The plants were grown locally for the project, some by our buddy Barry Glick.  And the plants are all strictly species, no cultivars allowed.

From the museum's website we learn that:  "Four hundred years ago, the Chesapeake Bay region abounded in forests, wetlands, meadows, and Algonquian peoples’ croplands.  The [museum] restores these environments and is home to more than 27,000 trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants representing 145 species."

But keep reading to learn about the various habitats replicated here - hardwood forest, wetland, meadow, traditional cropland and Grandfather Rocks.  It was all carefully researched and executed, and is a great addition to our National Mall.

Here's News Nobody Wants

Craig D. Cramer has just directed us to his Cornell Horticulture blog post about Late Blight disease observed in tomatoes and potatoes in the Northeast.

This is the same disease that caused the Irish potato famine, and it is apparently extremely contagious in wet weather like this super-rainy spring.

It arrived in Ireland in 1845 on ships from North America, and in the Northeast in 2009, possibly in containers of seedlings grown in the South.

I hate starting seedlings and every year, I swear I will never do it again.  This year, after babysitting carefully chosen varieties of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants (including a Turkish orange variety) for two months under fluorescent lights and waiting, like a mature person, until May 31st to plant them--they were all wiped out in one night by a June frost.  GRRRRR!

But maybe start-your-own is really the way to go.  Because a summer without homegrown tomatoes is not a tragedy on the level of no potatoes for a population eating nothing but--but it is quite sad nonetheless.

What were they thinking?

Barbara Feldt sent us this photo with the caption:  Viagra Headquarters?

How one law can reforest a nation AND lower its divorce rate

On the Indonesian island of Java, which has experienced massive deforestation, a new law requires all newlyweds to plant 10 trees.  But get this: if they later divorce, they have to plant 50 more.   Brilliant!  Here's the story.

To Label or Not to Label?

I've been on the road talking about wicked plants for a month, and what a long, strange trip it's been.  People gave me necklaces of poisonous seeds after learning at my talk that their jewelry was deadly and deciding they didn't want them around anymore. People shared their plant poisoning horror stories. And lots of people asked me this question:  Why don't garden centers identify poisonous plants?

It's a perfectly reasonable question.  If you're a dog owner and you come home (as one woman who just e-mailed me described) and find that your dog has nibbled the fronds of your lovely new houseplant, and then you find out that the lovely new houseplant is a sago palm, which is highly toxic to dogs, and then you rush your dog to the vet where he spends three days in intensive care and just barely survives--well, if that happened to you, you might just wish there had been a warning label at the garden center.

But look at it from the perspective of the garden center owner.  Most of the plants you sell are not edible.  With the exception of the veggie starts and the herbs and fruit trees, almost everything you sell is not food.  Don't eat any of it, you might tell your customers.  Don't eat the shrubs or the trees or the shovels or the rakes or the fertilizer or the bug spray.  This is not food.

From that perspective, a garden center is not too different from, say, an office supply store or a drugstore.  Does a shopkeeper really have to go around and put poison labels on the batteries, the bandages, the dish soap, the pens, and the printer cartridges?  None of those things are food, and it's assumed that you won't eat them.

And here's the real question.  Where does it end?  Maybe our well-meaning garden center owner puts a warning label on the sago palm (poisonous to dogs), the lilies (toxic to cats) and the most deadly human poisons, like castor bean, monkshood, daphne, lantana, etc.  But does that mean that any plant without a poison label is guaranteed to be safe?  Would the garden center owner have to worry about getting sued for failing to properly label a plant? 

And what if a new plant comes into the garden center and there's simply not any reliable information yet on its toxicity?

Would it be enough to post a broad disclaimer explaining that just because a plant is not labeled, don't assume you can eat it?

Would it be enough to offer a shelf of reference books and brochures that list poisonous plants so people can look them up?

And--would garden centers (or the growers who supply the plants, with labels, to garden centers) be more likely to try some common-sense labeling if there was one agreed-upon industry-wide list of plants that should come with a label?  That way each individual store isn't having to figure it out for themselves, and maybe they'd be less likely to be the target of blame as long as they adhered to the list.

I include some links to poisonous plant references on my website, but as you can imagine, it's hard to come up with one list that works all over the country and contains enough information for people to make informed choices.  For instance, this list contains hydrangea and foxglove along with deadly nightshade, castor bean, water hemlock, and poison ivy.  But it doesn't tell you exactly how poisonous each plant is, and of course something like poison ivy isn't going to be sold at a garden center anyway.

The California poison control center sells a poisonous plant poster and the Texas poison control network lists some common Texas plants that could be toxic.

But are these lists good enough for a garden center owner? 

Or should it just be" gardener beware"?

Below:  a photo of my poison garden, and a couple of the rest of the garden.  As you can see, it's been at its crazy, overgrown peak all month while I've been on the road. 

These kids today

This speaks for itself, I think. Billy Goodnick, Owen Dell and friends present "Taking Out the Grass is a Gas"

Garden Walk!

As complaints about the summer heat reach critical mass in the blogosphere, I am reminded that the weekend for Garden Walk Buffalo approaches. Not many are complaining in Buffalo, believe me, as now is finally the time—leaving the brief moment of spring bulbs and early perennials aside—when our gardens snap into action. And color.

 This year, GWB is July 25 & 26; you can find out anything else you’d need to know about it at the link, including all the national press we’ve received and advice for those who are traveling from other parts of the country (or world; we’ve been getting some European visitors). For those of you new to this event, GWB is likely the largest garden tour of any kind in the U.S., other than Open Days (which is geographically spread out over a whole season).

A lot of my friends are on the walk and every year we worry that things won't be in bloom in time, that they'll be early or late, or that some catastrophe will happen. (Don't even say the R word.) But every year it's the same. In spite of how tall my lilies were in May, it looks as though they will bloom at exactly the same time they always do—during the Walk.

I think this year’s poster (the printers talked us into foil—that's the shiny part) is a good indication of the types of high-impact mid-summer gardens visitors will see, though there are plenty of subtler examples among the 300+ that will participate this year. It’s free, and if you’d like more info email ealicata(at)yahoo.com.

Nothing to see here, folks

 

Clashes, they say? I don’t think so. Nonetheless, thanks to all the good sports who actually linked to images or posts where (so they thought) they had inadvertently placed plants/flowers that failed to play nicely with their neighbors. Quite honestly, I failed to find much fault with any of the images that were submitted, but I could see what people were talking about. I’m so glad to see plants thrive where I assume failure that I am easily blinded to unfortunate combos. In fact, as I was sitting on the patio today, I was delighted to see the heliopsis blooming (more to follow) along with the clematis and roses I mentioned as clashing before. So now we have a yellow along with the two mismatched reds. Image above. Glorious!

 

And so to the winners. I have three books from Timber Press to give away, and three different winners. First, I suppose some might object to the combination of scaevola and stachys that Cindy/From My Corner of Katy offers (above). I happen to like it, but nonetheless, she gets the Book of Blue Flowers.

 

And I guess that Denise’s salvia, calendrina, and crocosmia (cropped out) might not please an overly picky eye. She gets Plant-Driven Design.

 

Even my tolerant eye is ever so slightly taken aback by the combo Dee/Red Dirt Ramblings displays. There are daylilies and glads of all different shades here, as well as other plants I can’t quite identify. Quite a gorgeous miscellany. Green Flowers goes to Dee.

The problem is that we garden bloggers don’t like to show jarring or supposedly unflattering images of our gardens. But I think as long as there are lots of healthy, appropriately-selected and well-tended plants, it’s all good. Not everyone would agree, sure.

 

There were other submissions that I just didn’t think showed much if any clash, like Barbara/Mr. McGregor’s Daughter's image (above) and Amy/Garden By Chance's (below). I think Amy is concerned about the red roses that have followed these lovely spring flowers and I am not sure what clash Barbara sees.

 

Thanks, too, to Todd and Carol/May Dreams Gardens for submitting. Todd’s clash was most benign and Carol’s had to be imagined. I’ll close with this fabulous image from Craig/Ellis Hollow. It’s not his garden, but part of a color demo he put together at Cornell. Love it!

It's Good To Be Rich

photo by Jeff Goodell

The view from a porch at Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, NY.