Garden Rant

This Just In.

Dear Gardener’s Supply Co. affiliate:

Due to business reasons connected with the new online tax law in California, we have chosen to remove all California affiliates, effective July 1^st, 2010.  We regret having to do this and hope that the law may be struck down in the future so that we may be able to resume the productive business relationships we have enjoyed with you.

We appreciate your understanding in this matter and look forward to working with you again.

Regards,

Caitlin Callaghan

The Gardener’s Supply Co. Affiliate Team

 

 

Dear Caitlin,

 I'm happy to see my home state working to collect much-needed sales tax revenue from all retailers.  I think it's wonderful news and I hope that the new law will not be struck down.  I would like to see online retailers embrace the idea of fairness among all retailers and work to advocate changes to the law that allow for an equitable, nationwide system for collecting sales tax from all customers.   This will allow all businesses to be treated the same, whether they are a brick-and-mortar business or an online or catalog business.

Here are some useful facts about sales tax collection.

All best,

Amy

UPDATE:  Thanks to the person who just sent me this, from the NYT:  "

Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, said, "We collect and provide to each of the states the correct sales tax. There are vendors that specialize in this (we use Vertex). It’s not very hard."

Any number of online businesses already collect sales tax nationwide, from B&N.com, to Walmart, to Best Buy, to Target, whose online sales are handled by Amazon, suggesting that Amazon is more than capable of collecting sales tax and paying it to the states. Presumably Gardener's Supply Company is as well.

Wicked Plants in the Conservatory with RadioGarden

Andrew Keys invited the staff at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers to create a RadioGarden podcast about the making of the Wicked Plants exhibit.  He assured us that any ordinary audio recorder would work; in fact, he's done interviews on his iPhone.  So, equipped with exactly that sort of technology, curator Lau Hodges and I settled in to do our interview the afternoon before the opening night gala.

Except.  Andrew Roth, the extraordinarily creative sound engineer who designed the sound effects for the exhibit, was sitting quietly in the corner, fine-tuning his audio creation. When he saw me pull out my cheap Radio Shack digital recorder, he could remain silent no longer.

"Uh--would you like me to record this interview for you?" he asked.

We both looked over at him in amazement. 

"I am the sound guy, after all," he said.

Oh, yeah!  So after a little scrambling around, Andrew got us wired up and we sat down behind this gate and started recording with his much nicer equipment:

AND--after Lau and I were done, Andrew sat down and talked about how he created the sound effects.  And that is my FAVORITE part of the interview.  Everyone on staff learned something--none of us had any idea what went into creating sounds that go along with a garden of poisonous plants. (his part starts around minute 16)

How does a plant sound?   How does fear sound? Tune in and find out.

Chicken Books!

This ran last week on Kirkus Review's garden blog--do go check that out.  And today on Kirkus Reviews see Michele's article about The Aphorists.

I am one of those crazy chicken owners who owns more books about chickens than actual chickens.  In fact, the ratio right now is three to one in favor of the books.  Chicken-raising is one of the more entertaining enterprises you might ever undertake, but it has its harrowing moments:  fragile, day-old baby chicks and their weirdly specific temperature requirements (95 degrees, no more, no less or you risk freezing them or roasting them); young layers and the strange eggs they sometimes lay (double yolks, no shell, enormous eggs one day and tiny eggs the next); and, of course predators.  Everyone has a horror story.  A chicken is everyone’s lunch.  Dogs, hawks, bears, raccoons, skunks, possums—they all go after chickens.

So I think it’s reasonable to read up.  And I’ve yet to find the one book that covers every possible chicken contingency, from hatching to old age.  But here are two that I love.  They’ll get you through coop construction and past that freaky, vulnerable hatching stage.  After that, chicken-keeping becomes a much simpler matter, anyway.

Chicken Coops by Judy Pangman is the best guide to building a coop that I’ve seen.  Even if you already have a shed, an outbuilding, or a dog run that you plan to convert to chicken housing, give this book a read.  It will not only help you figure out the space requirements, ventilation, and other issues that go along with housing chickens, it will let you evaluate your proposed coop against other, perhaps better-considered, plans. 

I’m particularly fond of the toolshed henhouse, which stands at eight feet in height, giving the chickens room to flap around and making it easy for you to get in and out.  One vital piece of advice that might not be immediately obvious when you’re flipping through this book:  You, as the chicken-keeper, need to have access to all parts of the coop.  If there’s a fenced-in run that you can’t get into, build a door for yourself.  You don’t want an injured bird or a nasty mess to be just out of your reach in the coop. Also, your flock will sort out its pecking order much more easily if the less dominant hens have room to fly up into roosts to get away from the boss.  So give them height, and give them more space than you think they’ll need, especially if they won’t be free-ranging much.

And once the coop-building is out of the way, it’s time for the fun part: the chicks!  Chick Days by Jenna Woginrich is the most charming and most beautifully photographed book on chicken-raising I’ve ever seen.  It’s a sort of What to Expect When You’re Expecting for chickens that takes you week-by-week and month-by-month through the process.  Unlike other chicken books that round up generic photos of hens to illustrate each chapter, Jenna’s photographer Mars Vilaubi photographed his own chicks as they matured.  And as it turns out, watching real chicks grow up in a real backyard is infinitely more useful than a more general, abstract discussion of chick-raising.

In addition to the usual advice on food, shelter, temperature, and so on, you’ll get suggestions on how to introduce the chicks to children and pets, how to make sure they’re tame enough that you can pick them up (important if you have to tend to an injury or just quickly get them out of harm’s way), and—my favorite—how to teach them tricks.  This is not a book on chicken farming scaled down to a backyard.  It’s a book that acknowledges that your chickens are pets, not livestock, and that makes all the difference. 

The Grafted Tomato Challenge

Okay, Log House Plants, I'm in.  This Oregon nursery has developed a line of grafted tomato plants that they have branded "Mighty 'Mato."   As I understand it, these tomatoes are available online this year and are starting to be distributed at independent garden centers.

The idea is this:  Commercial tomato farmers already graft their tomatoes onto modern, disease-resistant rootstock that is intended to not only help fight disease but also increase yield and survive temperature swings and other such abuses. Just as roses and fruit trees are grafted onto modern rootstock, so, apparently, can tomatoes, eggplant, pepper, melon, cucumber, squash, and (I hear, but have not yet seen) basil. 

Alice Doyle, the owner of Log House Plants, has talked to me about these grafted vegetables a few times and she knows well the challenges I face:  living eight blocks from the giant air conditioner known as the Pacific Ocean means that temps never, ever exceed 80 degrees in my backyard, and tend to hover around 70 all summer long.  It's not prime tomato-growing weather. Add to that the soil-borne diseases that turn healthy green tomatoes into black monstrosities overnight late in the season, and--well, let's just say I support my local farmers who have the sense to live inland, where proper summer weather can be found.  I have more or less given up on growing tomatoes.

So.  I (along with a lot of other garden bloggers, I suspect) have been sent two tomatoes to test:  A grafted 'Big Beef' and an ungrafted 'Big Beef'.  I've planted them side-by-side in identical containers, where they can get the best sun and heat my sad little fog-bound garden can offer. The grafted version is on the right, and the ungrafted version is in the middle.  (On the left is a Sweet 100 cherry tomato I bought at my local garden center on impulse.)

Normally I would never attempt to grow a tomato with a name like 'Big Beef.'  I'd try a cherry tomato or a small cool-weather variety like San Francisco Fog.  I mentioned that to Alice and she promptly popped a few more varieties in the mail.  More on those next week.

Meanwhile, here's the test setup.  I'll report back throughout the summer.

For the complete list of grafted tomato varieties, go here and look at page 3.  Although the cost is higher, I'd happily pay a little extra for a tomato that actually produced food I can eat. The 2-in-1 (two tomato varieties on one rootstock) are a great idea, especially for containers and hanging baskets.  And I am wildly excited about the basil, which is the other plant I desperately need but simply can't grow in the chilly weather.

If anyone else is trying out these grafted vegetables, please do let us know where your reports on the experiment can be found.

 

At the Franciscan Monastery, formality works, until it doesn't

Another D.C. garden that few tourists ever see surrounds the curiously named Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America, where glorious architecture meets formal rose gardens to great effect.  That link tells us a lot about the buildings - in the monastic style of the late Romanesque period - but nothing about the gardens except for blooming times, the highlights of which are the tulips and then the roses.

To see more of the gardens and outdoor sculpture, click here and then on the numbers 7-12 and 15-20. 

Entrance to the Grotto of Gethsemane

To my eyes, formality works fine in this setting, through the rose gardens and the newer perennial gardens - all good!  But these soldierly rows of bedding annuals are jarring and downright ugly.  I find myself cursing them.

There goes my serenity!

Are YOU still seeing formally arranged bedding annuals in your town?  Anywhere besides gas stations?

Looking aruncular

My friend Sally calls aruncus (goatsbeard) "poor woman's shrub" and you can see why here--in a lovely garden behind the Lake Placid public library.

Gardening apps—I'm over them. Really.

Don't laugh. You're looking at the future of garden design.

Remember when we first got our iPhones?  It was all about the apps. Mine is still loaded up with six screens worth, only 4-5 of which I use on a regular basis—a weather app, whatever will find restaurants and stores, Hootsuite, Facebook, and the Public Radio station finder/player. (I’m not counting email, pictures, music, GPS, and other basic iPhone functions.)

Back in those days, we blithely demanded more gardening iphone apps, specifically searchable perennial databases, weed finders, a Farmer’s Almanac, and some that now exist, like Dirr’s Tree and Shrub Finder.  There are now plenty of plant-list-type apps on iTunes now. I would download them, except I suspect they would sit untapped with all the rest while I use google.

The Audubon guides are great—although these would not work in the wild if you need to be connected—and if I’m home I’d as soon grab a book. There are also ID type apps like Leafsnap. Unfortunately, with Leafsnap, you have to place the leaf against a white piece of paper. Well, if you’re home doing that, you could also use a book—any good tree book will have leaf close-ups. Another fun nature app is Chirp, which helps you ID birds by their calls. (Actually I like to just play the bird sounds; it makes my garden sound way more diverse than it really is.)

Here’s what I don’t need or want, even to sit ignored on a screen along with RouteShout, PocketFlicks, and GroceryZen—any of the “design your garden” apps out there. These are silly by definition, because nobody would ever put together a garden using  templates (like the one above) and plant lists. That’s not how a gardener does it, anyway. 

There are many of these, each as ridiculous—and usually strangely awkward to navigate—as the next. We get emails about them regularly, and I usually ignore them, but I will single one out from Holland Bulb Farms called iMyGarden. This is actually supposed to get you to order bulbs through the app; the design part is—charitably put—incidental.  It gives you 3 templates—a mailbox, a tree well, and a front yard, and then a list of plants you can fill them up with. And—guess what!—all these plants are bulbs that can be ordered from Holland Bulb Farms! In fact, you can do it right then and there, through the app.

I love my iPhone, but if this is the future of gardening apps, like I said—I’m over it. 

Michele swoons over Capitol Columns at the National Arboretum

Pictures must be taken!  Even without a single bloom in the shot.  (Here's one with cherry blossoms.)  You can just barely tell from here, but the acreage around the columns is meadow, not mowed.

Next, the columns up close.

These columns from the U.S. Capitol were deemed not substantial enough for the larger-than-expected Capitol Dome - it was a big honking design error! The solution was to remove them, which was done in 1954, and they were located here in 1984. 

  This link tells more about them.

Learning to Love the Bureaucracy

If you'd ask me, I'd tell you that I like gardens that are individualistic, quirky, surprising.  But I've spent the last few days on business in a setting that is the very opposite of that--at the William F. Bolger Center for Leadership Development, which is owned by the United States Post Office--and found it weirdly peaceful and pleasing.

Set in the woody Maryland suburbs, it really seems like a Soviet-era retreat for high-up apparatchiks.  Indeed, the main building above, built in 1959, was named The Generalate in fine Communist style, even though it was commissioned by the Sisters of Mercy, an order of Catholic nuns.  The Sisters sold the joint to the Postal Service in 1980, who bought it as a training facility, which they now rent out to other organizations.

What's really nice about this place is the incredible aesthetic consistency, though you could reasonably argue that it's consistent in considering aesthetics irrelevant. 

Only the most common plants are used here, and they are used in such a way as to prevent any dangerous mixing of ideas!

Petunias--these are employed in industrial quantities--are grouped with petunias.  Roses with roses.  Liatris with liatris.  Colors in each block are NOT to harmonize with other colors in other blocks!

There is careful attention to labelling here, and it would be impolite to question whether such labelling is really necessary when the planting is so devoted to only the most common subjects.

Of course, the labelling is often wrong.  That's liriope below, but it isn't variegated.  However, if the Party says it's variegated, it might be wiser not to suggest otherwise.

Still, I find myself in the peculiar position of having completely enjoyed moving through a landscape of grand old trees and meticulously maintained petunia and begonia and marigold beds.

Real taste is dangerous, subversive, anti-collective, too much about individual expression to be trusted.  What's happening here is something else, but there is no question that the people who maintain this place really care about it.  It's colorful where it should be.  It's immaculate.  It's restful.  Every single person I've interacted with here, from the woman who runs the coffee stand outside the dining hall to the clerk at the desk has been unbelievably lovely.

After two nights at the Bolger Center, I'm ready to hang up my spurs and join the Party.

Even More Bad News For Tick-Infested Gardens

Haven't ticks, which my vet says were never seen in Washington County, NY until the last decade, caused enough misery?

Apparently not.  The New York Times reported this week that another tick-borne disease called babesiosis is spreading rapidly.  And babesiosis, unlike Lyme, is sometimes fatal.

Getting weird and funky with Chanticleer, a Pleasure Garden

Here's my most recent review for Kirkus, and today they've posted Amy's review of chicken books.

“Neither a museum nor a great plodding institution, Chanticleer is a gardener’s garden,” says Adrian Higgins about what he and garden photographer Rob Cardillo and this blogger and horticulturists all over the world call their favorite garden. And surely gardeners will be inspired by Higgins’s new guidebook, Chanticleer, a Pleasure Garden, to make their gardens better in at least some small way.

Now don’t let “guidebook” scare you off. Higgins is no hack—he’s the garden editor of the Washington Post, and he knows how to tell a story not just list plants. Sharing his own reasons for loving this garden, he notes that it’s not designed by committee but by a group of “very gifted” gardeners, each one allowed to take chances and get as weird and innovative as they want. No wonder those seven jobs are so coveted.

Higgins also appreciates that unlike so many public gardens, Chanticleer has no agenda to teach or preach to visitors about climate change or sustainable agriculture or any other important issue; its only mission is to induce pleasure, to satisfy all our senses. Thus, horticulture rises to the level of art form, but in a personal way that doesn’t take itself too seriously, thanks to touches of wit and whimsy.

And not guidebook-like at all are the 80 fabulous photographs by world-class garden shooter Cardillo, who has the good fortune to live just 20 minutes from Chanticleer. He’s been able to visit countless times over the years, whenever he damn well pleases, and the result is a visual feast.

Chanticleer Garden, on 40 acres along Philadelphia’s Main Line, was the vision of Adolf Rosengarten Jr., heir to the Merck chemical fortune, who created the huge endowment that’s enabled creativity here with no financial restrictions. No ripping things out because the garden can’t afford to maintain them. No having to use plants that are cheap. Lord no, none of that.    

The garden’s been open about 18 years and is finally ready for its close-up—this book. But it won’t stand still in time because again, there’s no committee fighting change. On the contrary, the gardeners are instructed to “be brilliant, be inventive, and do something fresh next year.”

Like the piece of land art they call the “Serpentine,” seen in this photo of ripe sorghum in late summer. It’s the work of one gardener who’s also a farmer and craftsman, and he plants a different agricultural commodity each year. (If you’re thinking “land art?” it just goes to show that it’s something we don’t see enough of in the United States.)  

Or like the funky furniture, bridges and sculptural pieces the gardeners create during the winter when the garden is closed. Other winter pursuits by the staff include study and travel to gardens around the world. Nice life!

Read the book before you visit, after you visit, or, sadly for you, instead of visiting. It’ll still inspire you to take some chances in your garden. Which seems easy to say, but I’ve been there three times and did it change my garden? Not nearly enough. But like Chanticleer, my garden’s not finished and it never will be. Now I’m off to find some funky furniture and a few weird plants to try.

Click here and here to see my photos of Chanticleer in May.

Bossy Boots is coming to my Garden~!

In five years, no Ranter has ever seen my garden, but that's about to change.  Michele is working in the D.C. area as I type and will be visiting me on Friday.  Says she's dying to see my garden. 

Which looks like crap. Like most gardens in late June.  Sigh.

"Bossy Boots" is a name recently bestowed on Michele, as you may recall.  I believe the word "cantankerous" was also used.

Now Here's a Smart Way to Handle Street Trees

Spotted at the Missouri Botanical Garden. I saw this kind of paving around every big shade tree in the parking lot.  Sure, it's a little bumpy, but that only made the cars slow down, which is a good thing in a parking lot.  You know this is what that tree needs to be happy.  I hate seeing trees isolated in the middle of a sea of pavement -- that can't be good for the roots, can it? 

Renegade Gardener Parts Company with GardenRant

 

We've long been admirers of Don Engebretson, the Renegade Gardener.  We love his funny and spot-on yearly awards so much, we recommend them again and again and again.  He's given this blog and especially the Manifesto a shout-out or two and we've become a mutual admiration society among ranters.  But now he's having second thoughts.

The fine and feisty women over at GardenRant.com have a manifesto on their home page that includes the statements, “In love with real, rambling, chaotic, dirty, bug-ridden gardens,” and another, “Bored with perfect magazine gardens.” When I first started visiting the site and read the manifesto I thought yeah, right on—rambling, dirty gardens are what most turn out to be, chaos is the norm, perfect magazine gardens are unachievable. I’m easy...

I now find it paradoxical that the first statement in the GardenRant manifesto is, “We are convinced that gardening matters.” You’re damn right it does. And if gardening matters, what matters most, is gardening well.

Accompanying this declaration is the photo above with the caption: "One of mine, I’m proud of it, and I can do better."

Now might be a good time to confess - I don't exactly live by that part of the Manifesto, either.  I DO love gardens that are real, dirty (what else?), and bug-ridden (especially pollinator-ridden).  And rambling is fine in a large space.  But chaos?  That's what gardeners work their butts off to fight off, right?  We bring order to what would otherwise be a big unruly mess.

 

Here's what I mean.  I may have gotten rid of all my turfgrass but I didn't exactly replace it with a tall-grass meadow.  Lord no.  This 3" tall mosaic of groundcovers criss-crossed with brick pavers is about as much chaos as I ever want to see in my little patch of heaven.  And even as I post this photo my eye goes right to the messy edge around what's supposed to be a perfect oval shape, and I want to fix it.

And am I really bored with perfect magazine gardens?  Actually, I'm more bored by the how-to articles than by the gardens.  Great, imaginative gardens - well photographed - I could look at all day, especially in winter.

So where do YOU stand on "real, rambling, chaotic, dirty, bug-ridden" versus "perfect magazine" gardens?

Reefer madness at Scotts Miracle-Gro

You'd think that our friends at S M-G were doing pretty well with their $2.9 billion of sales, but according to stories posted last week at a number of news sites, including here, it's not enough. They're coming for the stoners. Here's Chief Executive Jim Hagedorn: “I want to target the pot market,” Hagedorn said in an interview. “There's no good reason we haven't.”

Read the Wall Street Journal article here, which gives some of the strategic reasons for this move. As I was discussing earlier today, big box revenues aren't what they used to be, so it's time for some diversification.

As summer begins, 5 randoms:

1. Clouds of mosquitoes rise across the Northeast and all the other regions that got soaked this spring. Time to pull out all my organic, all-natural repellants—sent by various companies last summer—and see if they work.

2. Luxuriant green growth is one of the benefits of all this rain, but I am concerned that it may be accompanied by moisture-related problems. Will my husband’s tomatoes survive and thrive? Stay tuned.

3. A National Gardening Association spokesperson calls upon the Lord in this statement from a recent AP article: "A lot of folks, I think they kind of look at the evening news or read the paper or read something online, saying 'Jesus, this world is out of control and I can't have any influence on what happens out there but, by God, I can control what happens in my backyard.'"

I am not totally sure that the recession has provided that great a benefit for local gardening centers. Fewer people building or buying houses must mean fewer starting gardens.

4. On the bright side:  judging by the roses of June (other than these, most of my blooming action happens mid-summer), it will be a colorful summer. All of the martagons are about to pop and it looks like a big crop of later-season lilies will follow. Lily beetle, stay away!

5. After a tentative start last summer, Buffalo is instituting what must be one of the few traditional UK-style Open Garden programs, complete this year with a guidebook. Unlike the Garden Conservatory’s Open Days program, there is no charge and the gardens are open every Thursday or Friday (at stated times) for 5 weeks.

There are 66 gardens open, and people are traveling here to see them—I got an enquiry from a couple who is staying a week just for the Open Gardens (not for Garden Walk) the other day. It will be interesting. Again, stay tuned.

Looking Even More Like A Garden

Not bad for three days' work over Memorial Day Weekend.

Are The Cut Worms Italian?

A new wrinkle in my new vegetable garden: cut worms.  The hardest thing to keep alive to maturity by far so far: basil. 

I don't bother starting basil from seed until shortly before the last frost, when I'll throw a handful of seeds onto a pot of soil and stick it onto a windowsill.  My basement fluorescent light set-up is completely given over to tomatoes, tomatillos, eggplants, and peppers.

Next year, I may have to rethink, so I can set sturdy nibble-proof basil plants into the garden.  Because, like the cut worms, I consider basil one of the basic food groups.

Celebrating an unapologetic ornamentalist

Here's my Kirkus column from last week. Check here for Susan's post on Chanticleer.

For the past couple years, I’ve been fighting a feeling that I’m being left behind by the gardening world as part of a forgotten minority. The hottest trends have passed me by. I don’t grow food, I don’t raise chickens, I hide my compost bin, and I’ve never had a rain barrel.  Don’t think there’s a powerful movement afoot? Here’s the opening line of Dominique Browning’s review of gardening books in the Sunday New York Times: “The garden book jury has returned a verdict. You are either growing vegetables or you have become one.”

I wonder what the late Christopher Lloyd would have thought of it all. It was his books and those of British garden writers like him that seduced me into gardening. Even though England’s gentle maritime climate ensures results I can never dream of in Western New York state, I still pore over favorites like The Well-Tempered Garden, and Christopher Lloyd’s Garden Flowers. In many ways, Lloyd’s standards are completely unattainable—it would probably be much easier to become an urban farmer superhero than to achieve what Lloyd did on five acres in East Sussex. A chicken coop would be a snap to throw together compared to a yew topiary, a carefully maintained meadow, or even the exotic mix of hot colored flowers and extravagant foliage that used to be Lloyd’s rose garden. (I do have something like that—it’s known as the rose garden that I turned into a big hot mess.)

And yet. These are the aspirational books that I’d take over any prosaic how-to—regardless of actual results. I will always love and reread them because nobody writes about flowers or gardening like Lloyd. Here’s a taste:

On gardening’s disappointments:
“When a plant dies in your garden, how do you react? Do you reenact one of the historic tragic roles: Medea, Phaedra, Werther, Macbeth? Do you lash out? Or do you, with a glazed, all-passion-spent-expression, merely comment that plants invariably die on you, and that you only have to look at one for it to wilt forthwith?”
(The Well-Tempered Garden)

On plants he doesn’t like:
“‘A grape hyacinth is a grape hyacinth is a grape hyacinth,’ as Gertrude Stein might have said. … It flowers in April—they all do.”
(Christopher Lloyd’s Garden Flowers)

On plants he does like:
"The rest of one’s life is a love affair with lilies, but, as is the way with such affairs, constantly fraught with frustration and disappointment. It has been said, with a wry element of truth, that the bond between turkeys and lilies is that their sole ambition in life is to die."
(Christopher Lloyd’s Garden Flowers)

On the necessity of changing it up:
"Never let your gardening become stereotyped and never take a plant or group of plants in your garden for granted. Even shrubs should be put through the hoop at regular intervals, and with annuals it a crime to grow the same kinds in the same place year after year … "
(The Well-Tempered Garden)

Lloyd grew vegetables too, of course. And there are many more books, including two that came out after his death in 2006. I keep them handy at all times, to bring out whenever I need a reminder of why I started gardening in the first place.

Blooming in Maryland

In celebration of June's Garden Blogger Bloom Day I'm showing off my favorite new thing - vegetables festooned with petunias and other blooming-like-crazy annuals.  These petunias are called Panache 'Tickled Pink' and Hort Couture sent them to me to try, along with the sweet potato vine 'Blackie' you see there and lots more. 

Click here to see the rest of my Bloom Day offering.