Garden Rant

Support our Gardening Troops in Iraq

by Susan 
I'm not kidding.  A Logistics Specialist over there recently left this comment on an old article about HGTV's Paul James:

I am presently stationed in the Kuwait/Iraq region and miss watching "Gardening by the Yard". I was told of a tree called a Bulb Willow. I seen pictures of the tree but I have never heard of that type of Willow. Can you help?
Also, are there DVDs of "Gardening by the Yard"?
Thanks from the sandbox!!

My gawd!  Can you imagine what being in that world would do to YOUR gardener's soul?  Of course I shudder at the whole thing but I'd sure like to help this gardener from St. Louis see his damn gardening shows.  What with him serving in such a hell-hole and all. 

So I checked with HGTV and there are a few Paul James videos on their site. (Just put his name in the search on this page.) And YouTube has exactly one of Paul - plugging nurseries.   

So come on, Gardenrant readers, is there some way we can help out Norman Bullerdick, a passionate gardener who's needs a gardening fix bad? Can anyone make DVDs from their TV?  Or maybe he can use old-fashioned videotapes?

If you're thinking of Netflix, here's their offering of gardening DVDs.  Here and here are raves about our favorite garden-related movies, and here's Google results for "gardening DVDs".

And what the heck is a bulb willow?  I Googled it and got bupkis!

THE PAUL JAMES REPORT
Now if I did the sensible thing and took my  now-inactive old blog offline I'd save 90 bucks a year but you know, I'd miss hearing from Paul's fans, like the 81 other commenters there with Norman.  Maybe they'd just find this other post about Paul here on GardenRant and join the 66 other fans who've left comments on it - in the vain hope of actually reaching him or his bosses at HGTV - but I'd hate to miss any of their passionate messages.

So Paul, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'll always be here for you.  I'll take your messages and cheer on your fans as best I can, because I'm as ridiculous about your show as they are.  Norman speaks for us all. 

Photo credit - the U.S. Department of Defense.

UPDATE:  Gloria at Pollinators Welcome sent me this link to a photo of a bird - in a bulb willow tree.  We're closing in!

The "Mouse and Trowels", and the Power of Awards

by Susan

Remember last year when Colleen first announced the Mouse and Trowel Awards to honor online gardening and we all knew instantly it was a great idea?  Then almost 500 of us voted and the happy winners got to put little badges on their sites and blogs and call their endeavors "award-winning".  And the whole enterprise brought attention to our community.  In a fit of pompous proclamation worthy of cable TV, I called Colleen "blogosphere-changing," something I just assumed must be true and see no evidence to the contrary so that settles it.  Anyway, online gardeners are indebted to her for going to a LOT of trouble not in hopes of winning awards herself but just to promote good garden writing on the Web.

2008
Well, it's that season again.  Bloggers are asking their readers to nominate them, because who doesn't want to be nominated?  Lord knows WE do, so we humbly suggest you give us a nod.  And don't forget our individual blogs if they've amused or enlightened you over the past year.   Here's the link to the nomination form.

BLOG CATEGORIES
There are lots of cool blog categories to choose from again this year and even 2 new ones:

• Best New Blog, a category many of us lobbied for and I can't wait to see the nominees.
• Blog Post of the Year, which is a bit more challenging but the results will surely be worth it.  I'm more of a skimmer than a reader elsewhere on the Web but here on the Rant I read every word so I'll be nominating: Michele's "The Commencement Speech No One's Invited Me to Deliver",  Amy's "Confessions of a Fake Memorist," and Elizabeth's "Welcome to my Nightmare".

WEBSITE CATEGORIES
Beyond the blogosphere, the categories are pretty discouraging.  There's no Best New Website category, and these three categories from last year have been discontinued: Best Informational Gardening Site, Best Plant/Seed Source, and Best Gardening Magazine Site. Seems that there was low participation by us voters, and there's a perception that they don't fit in with the other awards.  So gardening websites are down to Best Forum and Website of the Year.

Bummer! See, I get excited about promoting good gardening information websites, making it easier for the public to FIND them.  Instead of the crawlers that steal from us all.  Instead of the income-dominated sites that have more ads than content.  Instead of the corporate sites that are filled with products we're supposed to buy.  And instead of sites that require payment in order to read them.  A few of us webmaster types interested in offering high-quality alternatives to all the crap online have banded together to help Googlers find the content-oriented sites, but we're few and far between.  Whole regions of online gardening information are still missing.

So readers, how about voting for that little band of webmasters as a way to encourage others to start content-oriented sites, too?  By nominating Regional Garden Gurus you nominate all of us and more to come, plus all the other good sites we link to.  (Of course you're invited to peruse our individual sites for possible nominations, too.) "Website of the Year" sounds awfully grand and we thought we had a better shot at "Best New Website" - but enough whining from me.  Start nominating right here.

GARDEN WRITERS ASSOCIATION AWARDS
Of course we're HOPING that the blogging community rallies this year and goes nuts nominating sites for the two remaining website categories so that the website Mousies make a comeback next year but just in case, I did a little lobbying of the GWA Awards Committee on behalf of the electronic world.  You may remember they have zillions of categories for writing, editing and photography in PRINT, and scant mention of "electronic" efforts, a category that includes everything on the Web, plus DVDs, podcasts and television.  Well, I recently ran into the Washington Post's Scott Aker - he's the guy responsible for these awards - and asked if new categories would be created, at least one for each unique medium that falls into that supercategory, and his response was superdiscouraging.  Oh well.  Their entrance fees would inhibit participation by most of us anyway.  (GWA awards are a fundraiser for the association.)  Here are their 2007 winners.

So bloggers, until something else comes along, it's up to us to encourage and reward websites in our chosen niche, so let's go for it.

Beneath the term locavore lies...confusion

by Susan
Did anyone catch "Big Foot," the recent New Yorker article by Michael Specter about carbon footprints?  It's long (of course), so here are my favorite bits.

It seems that England's grocery chain Tesco has declared its intention to drastically reduce the number of products they sell that are shipped by air - to 1 percent - and the lonely 1 percent will be labeled as such.  Trouble is, they've since discovered that "green" isn't exactly synonymous with "local", or even "air-travel-free."

The Latest in Sustainable Gardening News

The February issue is out, and here are  some items that are new to GardentRant.

ON THE BLOGS

• Jane Berger's review of Native Ferns, Moss and Grasses by William Cullina makes me lust for both the book and the plants. Included are some frightening projections of changing cold-hardiness zones.
• Kathy Purdy reviews a great-looking book called Fallscaping by Nan Ondra and Stephanie Cohen.
• Pat, the Commonweeder, reviews Weeds of the Northeast.
• Our Commonweeder friend also reports having great success with the unintimidating rosa Rugosa.
• Pam Penick shows us what a green roof looks like in Texas.
• Here's my rant against Arbor Day and Earth Day being in the spring.  People, fall is for planting.
• My "Standard Disclaimer about Lawn Removal" defends the honor of turfgrass - when it's grown organically.

IN THE NEWS

• This weekend - Feb 15-18 - is the Great Backyard Bird Count, brought to us by the   National Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.            
• These 10 Rules of Eco-Gardening are great, including the very English "Thou shalt leave a messy bit."  Both the language AND the content are distinctly different from similar advice in the U.S.
• Pesticides are STILL on our apples, according to this in the Seattle PI.
• There's a report on California's Sustainable Agriculture Conferfence on Grist. From the same source, check out "Buzz Kill," a beekeeper's take on Colony Collapse Disorder.
• Leafblowers - not a climate problem? is certainly a provocative question, also on Grist.            
• The European Union may ban all outdoor patio heaters,  because of complaints about their inefficiency.  And remember open fires are big polluters, so IS there a good alternative?

Here's the whole newsletter.  As always, the sidebar is blatantly off-topic.

Gardenblog Round-Up

The folks at Elements in Time have issued a Growing Challenge to encourage people to grow food and help them do it. Hey, I'm there.  Click on this cool graphic for all the dope.

Kathy Jentz's Third Annual Seed Exchange [pdf] was a big success, with only one tiny complaint from one attendee (but it still bugs her.) 

And thanks to Kathy for sending me this intriguing rant about environmentalists.  It asks:  "If it's so easy to see that Greens are often right, why are they so damned annoying? The answer is that they hate people" and goes on to compare and contrast "Dark Greens" and "Bright Greens."  Anybody see that breakdown in the eco-gardening community?   

Our friend Ed Bruske is getting to be a regular in Martha Stewart Living Mag - this time on the subject of rhubarb.  And here's his post about urban chickens.  He wants 'em bad!

I got some great ideas from Shirley Bovshow's post about creating garden maintenance manuals for her clients.

Carol at May Dreams Gardens has chosen Michael Pollan's classic Second Nature as the Garden Blogger's Book Club selection for February-March.  I hope to have time to do a little rereading and participate because it's chockful of challenges to conventional wisdom and a meaty discussion will surely follow.

And here's a cool new gardenblogger thing to do: The Garden Bloggers Geography Project! Fellow map nerds, this is for us.  Jodi at bloomingwriter asks readers to write posts about where they live, then send her the link for her very cool collection.  Great idea.

Later today - even more links to recent gardenblog posts, so check back!

The English are paving over their front yards?

My, this IS depressing - the news that Londoners are paving over their gardens for parking spaces. And if the ENGLISH don't give a fig for growing plants, who does?  Simon Burch reports in the Financial Times a 30 percent loss of green space in London as a result.

Pave-overs have been in the news in my part of the world, too.  A town in Northern Virginia passed a law prohibiting them, in response to the trend among immigrants living as large families with lots of cars.  So of course it's politically charged, but there's no disagreement that paver-overs result in increased run-off and the likelihood of flooding. 

But back to Simon Burch's article.  He goes to tell us the history of the front yard and make it quite interesting. 

Then my favorite part is when he says that my town offers "daring inspiration" and "ostentatious challenges to the normally sedate British front. "  Hey, that sounds like fun.  Brings back nice memories of tooling around Richmond, Virginia in full hippie regalia in the late '6o.

Okay, here's the article.

Garden blogs by region, too

Boy, we are really going regional here today.  Marie's request that the Friends of Rant be listed by region prompted me to finish the reorganizing of my own Blogroll by Region (already in progress!) and get it up here today. 

Who's on it?  Everyone who was on the Friends of Rant list last summer when I started the blogroll, plus everyone who's asked to be included since.  It's open to all and I'll be adding it to our Regional Guru site, so y'all send me your links! The Friends of Rant list is open to all readers, too.

And guess what.  Grouped by region, the list is suddenly interesting to me.  I get to be impressed by the irrepressible blogging spirit of Midwestern gardeners.  And is anybody doing it in Arizona and New Mexico?  And if not, why not?

Hint.  Garden in two different regions - or better yet, different countries, like Graham Rice - and you get listed twice. 

Beavers in the Burbs

by Susan
In Martin Luther King Park, just minutes outside DC's beltway, beavers are hanging out in this cozy lodge, waiting for darkness to come again so they can get back to work.

Wikipedia tells us: "There are typically two dens within the lodge, one for drying off after exiting the water, and another, drier one where the family actually lives. Their houses are formed of the same materials as the dams, with little order or regularity of structure, and seldom contain more than four old, and six or eight young beavers. Sometimes some of the larger houses have one or more partitions."

Now look at the other result of their industriousness - felled trees all around the pond, with Wiki telling us one beaver can bring down a sizable tree in one night.  Did the one who hacked away at the tree in the photo above just get bored and not bother to finish the job?  Isn't the purpose of all this cutting to get the tree on the ground where they can eat the bark?  Or not?  (Wiki can't tell us everything.)

So yeah, it looks bad for this little bit of heaven but maybe not: "The actions of beavers for hundreds of thousands of years in the Northern Hemisphere have kept these watery systems healthy and in good repair, although a human  observing all the downed trees might think that the beavers were doing just the opposite." (Also from Wiki.)

One tree whose days were numbered is, according to this plaque, a seedling from the famous, dearly departed Wye Oak I mentioned recently.  But beavers can't read and white oaks make good chewing, so to hell with claims of famous parentage (presuming to speak for them).

Luckily, this famous seedling has a protector.  My friend Pam lives across the street from the park and walks it almost daily. (Retirement IS bliss, she reports.) Her solution - wrapping it in wire - seemed to work and was soon copied by the park maintenance crew, who've since encircled all the still-standing trees with wire. 

What I found most interesting is that contrary to our automatic suspicions about humans always behaving badly in nature, the park authority is doing nothing else to protect trees from damage by beavers.  Despite MAJOR tree loss, the beavers remain safe in their lodge, still eager.

Beaver photo credit.

Jerry Baker's Revenge - Spam!

by Susan
Several times a week, every week, I get an email telling me that either Hillary, Britney, Helga, Sveta or Bush has left a comment on my old Jerry Baker post.  There's no need to open the messages anymore because they're always spam.  You know the kind - "I really like your site" followed by a link to some outfit selling Viagra or its competitors, a link now deposited on our unsuspecting blog.  Makes me wonder:

• Why do they ALWAYS target posts about Jerry Baker, not just on the Rant but back home where I first ranted about him?
• Why do they use just those names over and over?  Although I admit that just today there was a little relief from the monotony of Britneys and Hillarys.  This time it was "Musclemen xxx" leaving a comment about Jerry Baker and he deposited a link I thought I'd have to be in the mood to actually click on. I'm no prude but no porn before noon, please.
• And don't they know that comment spam doesn't work anymore?  At least that's what one IT person told me - that Google no longer recognizes the links deposited on our blogs that way. 

So please, Britney, Hillary and most especially Bush and Musclemen XXX, find something better to do with your time.  How about assembling a nice rain barrel kit for your home?

For the record, I'm not the only one ranting here about good ole Jerry Baker, just the only one putting his name in the title. 

Garden Coach Leaves Client in Tears

by Susan
While reports of great publicity about garden coaches keep coming in, there's this other story - a funny/sad one in the SF Chronicle about a coach who needs some coaching herself - from Miss Manners.  Writer Leah Garchik was the high bidder for an hour of garden consulting at a charity fund-raiser and the experience was so bad, she wrote this article advising readers to hire consultants only if they really have to. 

But there's lots more than one rude consultant in this fascinating story - it's also about our relationships with our gardens and how to use the services of any consultant, for better or worse.  Let's dissect:

• The consultant asked Garchik to gather some photos of gardens she liked before their appointment.  That's a great idea because most people have NO IDEA what they actually want, so how can a consultant help them get it?  But notice that magazine photos didn't actually help.  Too perfect, too expensive.  Instead, I ask people to find a garden in their neighborhood they like, if possible, and show me THAT, or at least a photo of something reasonably REAL.
• Was it too-too judgmental to describe the consultant as "carefully made up" and "newly coiffed"?  It FELT like that, and maybe because this hit a little too close to home and now I'm worried that make-up and blond highlights leave me vulnerable to the same reaction.  (Though in my case there's nothing careful about any of it.)  But a consultant's appearance does say something about their style and if it's perfect and tightly controlled, maybe that's a legitimate red flag.
• Suggesting a bunch of plants that Garchik didn't know from petunias is useless, and that's why I started creating plant profiles.  Now I just send links to each plant page.  And if they live nearby I invite them to stop by and see most of the plants I'm recommending right in my garden (or we sneak next door to see even more).
• And what the heck is that invasive plant that's destroying Garchik's garden from below?  In my area bamboo certainly does that but what could it be in the SF area?

Now let's look at what Garchik could have done to benefit more from the consult:

• Raked.  I've been called to look at gardens that I also COULD NOT SEE, either because they were covered with leaves or, even worse, a jumble of invasive vines mounding to 5 feet high over a sea of mystery plants.
• And Chron reader comments are SPOT ON about people not understanding the commitment it takes to have a nice garden, either of their own time or the money to pay someone else to do it.  People want no-maintenance plants, or plants that do really well in the absolute worst places, and are unbelieving when told that no such plant exists.

"I'D NEVER WORK WITH YOU PEOPLE"
That's what a friend of Gorchik's was once told by another consultant, supposedly because the friend and her husband were "bickering".  Well, considering that designers of all types encounter marital bickering ROUTINELY, it must have been really bad.

Me, I've had only two clients that I wouldn't work with again for all the money in the world.  One was a husband-wife team who'd imported me to resolve conflicts over their yard, and the bullying husband who assumed I'd agree with him was none too happy with me.  What a relief it was to just hop in my car knowing I'd never see HIM again.  Then there was the woman who started attacking me as soon as I arrived, kind of a preemptive move before I could attack her, it seemed.  "I suppose you won't approve of THAT."  And "I know THAT's not your style but..."  And so on.  And everything single suggestion I made elicited an angry response.  After all that she demanded that I draw a sketch for her property and when I said I don't do that she almost lost it.  I won't even mention the extremely weird and disturbing way she kept displaying her private parts to me.  Get me outta here!

So readers, can you relate to any of this - as either the customer or the person being hired?   

Thanks to Chuck B at Back40Feet for posting about the story.