Snow Upon Snow

Belinda’s Dream

Make a Joyful Noise!

Helen has a sunny nature, and was one of the bright spots in my difficult year of teaching sixth grade. Her very smart, imaginative and creative daughter Jenny was in my class, and the link that brought us together. From there Helen introduced us to the fledging Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA) – this was in 1974 – and a whole community of wonderful folks who went at their farming and gardening with great zest and good humor, and a willingness to share their ideas and expertise.

In addition to being a fabulous gardener, Helen is also an environmentally sensitive artist. She was explaining to me her interest in computer art. “I am not wasting materials, it is relaxing when I am tired, and my trials don’t fill up the wastebasket. Nor do I fill up storage space in my studio with drawings.”

We are fortunate to have some of her silkscreens, and a beautiful baby quilt, embroidered and appliqued with all the denizens and implements of a farm, rabbits, carrots, ducks, chickens and gourds. The quilt has been well used, but remains bright and warm, a testament to her talents and her affection for which we are grateful every day.

Merry Christmas

Peace on earth to all of good will!

More on Rain Barrels

There was so much response to the posting about rain barrels in Garden Rant that I want to pass on a link to Rebecca Chesin at her website with lots of information about making a rain barrel, and information from various dependable sources about the safety of water that has washed off the roof. I never thought that asphalt shingles or that the chemicals used in wooden shingles to make them rot-proof or moss resistent might make the water unsafe for use in the vegetable garden. The moral of this lesson is Know Your Roofing Material.

Capturing the Rain

Peter’s Travels

When Peter travels he needs to fill his eye with ART. And do he went looking for works by Louise Nevelson – and others. His journey continues.

If a flâneur were to select the ideal urban spots for his dawdling, no doubt two of three places selected would be a park and a museum. Fortune smiled when our San Francisco trip’s plans included a visit to the de Young Museum, located in Golden Gate Park. The museum is newly rebuilt after a recent earthquake caused structural damages beyond repair. The new structure, a wonderfully organized assemblage of gallery and administrative spaces organized about gentle and spacious circulation and clad in a gargantuan-scaled mesh of steel armature and perforated copper panels, designed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Basel, Switzerland.

We entered the museum from the parking garage (new, clean, spacious) and thus missed the more august arrival sequence into the museum, but quickly took to the spirit of the place. We headed first to a vast, temporary exhibition of the sculptor Louise Nevelson, whose work I’ve been attracted to since I was an architecture student. Afterward we found ourselves in a vast collection (and seemingly infinite, by virtue of mirrors) of commissioned teapots. One would not have thought there were so many ceramicists, so much creativity, or so many willing to tackle such an iconic and quotidian object. For readers of Common Weeder, it would have been much like entering an especially flamboyant Royal Horticultural Society’s London Flower Show, accompanied by throngs of matrons in garden party or Ascot-appropriate hats. Oh, that I might have taken surreptitious cuttings!

But enough about Art.

We took a sleek elevator up the administrative tower to a top floor space offering a panoramic view of Golden Gate Park and the northern half of the city. From that vantage point it is readily apparent that the city enjoys a wealth of outdoor spaces. And it also affords a view of one of the lessons the de Young Museum teaches to willing eyes: that exterior texture can mimic the effects of the garden and the landscape. The roof of the de Young is furrowed like a field, the copper veil is perforated by a computer-generated pattern that shifts and plays with light, and even the transition from walkway paving to simply planted outdoor space is a contrast of textures.

What lessons for gardeners and others? I could be flippant and suggest more gardeners could have museum stores, but the de Young makes a far more serious case for the highly effective incorporation of strong texture in the garden, both with plant materials and with manmade surfaces. I have no doubt that gardeners are well-aware of this, but it is heartening to know that the possibilities are endless for invention, and that invention continues and certainly continues to give pleasure to the eye.

A final note: the museum’s café offers organic foods to be eaten in its dining room or on its broad terrace overlooking a sculpture garden. We chose the terrace for our lunch and at some point noted that the clear hard plastic cases in which our sandwiches were packed bore stickers reading “I Can Be Composted”! We did not see packaging at the Louvre’s café reading “Je peux être fait du compost.” San Francisco. What can I say?

Heifer and Me

My Friend Peter, Traveler

My friend Peter is not a devoted gardener, but he is discerning and witty with a strong visual sense and a lot to say about the world around him. The following is his dispatch from San Francisco.

Being an architect can be difficult if one lives in a rural and relatively remote part of the country. Architecture is largely an urban exercise. For an architect the city is his garden. Sometimes it can be highly instructive or illuminating to shed the biases and perspectives of architecture and instead try to look at things from the point of, say, a gardener. At least this was the pretext adopted when I asked the author of The Common Weeder if I might report on my mid-December visit to San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Things need time to grow and things need time to digest. My sense of what I saw on this trip remains still inchoate but some notions are emerging. One of the things that struck me, clobbered me really, was that one aspect of what makes a landscape work (urban or rural) beyond the plant material itself, is the perception or appreciation of fundamental visual qualities such as silhouette, texture and light. To tell the truth I’m not certain if I was more attuned to these qualities because of the different coast I was on or because they were more abundant in San Francisco. My guess would be that I had simply made an effort to look – and that in looking, I was seeing.

Because we had arrived rather late at night one of the first things noticed after checking into our hotel was garden lighting. Okay, I still smoke cigarettes. And I have to go outside to do this. Walking around the hotel’s grounds I noticed that every tree was illuminated from below. To some extent this was useful – I quickly realized that much of the ground cover was in bloom and actually recognized a plant: agapanthus! I had been given agapanthus (three enormous pots of them) several years ago and with them came the most elaborate set of instructions for their care throughout the year. I seem to recall that the point of these fastidious (tedious really) instructions was to get the plants to bloom. After all these years ours have yet to bloom, and we have comforted ourselves with the response that we really do not like the pompom-like blossoms anyway, and much prefer the foliage. So there I was in the not-so-dark, thinking about agapanthus and jet lag. And I though if these agapanthus can survive hotel neglect (and they were) and the cold (it was nearly freezing) then perhaps I can forego some of the rules and simply bring in my agapanthus before the first frost each year, water them as I feel they need it, and forget all the other ICU standards previously followed with diligence. This was a burden lifted, tantamount to checking off an onerous chore from one’s to-do list.

Adopting more casual agapanthus-rearing techniques would make life simpler. And in that hotel garden that night I noticed another opportunity to eliminate both work and expense. As I said, the trees and shrubs (you gardeners do use that term-of-art, right?) were illuminated from below. Since it was mid-December some more formal plantings were also festooned with Christmas lighting – the elaborate, labor-intensive tiny lights that follow ever branch and twig. But it was the year round lighting that bothered me. There was already enough ambient light (this was downtown Paolo Alto) and the way-finding path lighting was more than sufficient. Lighting plants from below seemed as unnecessary as planting trees upside down – Mass MoCA has just such an installation.

I don’t think the garden need be a 24/7 operation. Everything doesn’t have to be seen all the time. And the lighting from the sun, from the side at sunrise and sunset, and from above at noon, seems to be more than adequate. Unlike electric illumination, the sun and the atmosphere provide constantly changing color and shadow that electrical lighting cannot duplicate. And when, as had been done in this particular garden, some of the up-lights had colored filters, the tinting of the foliage was ghastly.

Later on the trip I had my notion reinforced when I saw the sunrise illuminate the cypress in the manner nature intended. After all, we all photograph best in Natural light. Not only could I forego offering my agapanthus manicures and pedicures, I could dispense with the expense and labor of outdoor lighting. What progress! I extinguished my cigarette and hoped my nocturnal plant photography had not alarmed fellow guests.

The calla lilies are in bloom . . . After the thrill of actually recognizing a plant, “That’s an agapanthus!” I could not believe my luck when, the next morning, I spied a calla lily in bloom. As I walked around I discovered more. I knew and recognized two plants. Fortunately I do not and don’t plan to grow calla lilies. But it was pleasant to see them; heretofore I had only seen them in florists’ arrangements or in the arms of Katherine Hepburn. Who knew they actually grew in the ground?

I also enjoyed the December thrill, for a New Englander, of seeing a palm tree. I’m not even going to think about whether or not these palms actually belong in San Francisco. All I knew was that they were there, they were doing well, and that they represented just how far I’d traveled from the snow and ice. Whether on the Sunday before Easter or during a visit to balmier climates the frond of a palm tree is an exotic and thrilling icon. And if one happens to be driving down a boulevard lined with palm trees the feeling is positively triumphant. I had to drive through the Stanford University campus to retrieve someone from the Alumni Center. The drive required cruising down Palm Avenue for nearly a mile – it was so glamorous it could have been Hollywood. Had the rental car been of a 1950s vintage I assure you, I would have been ready for my close-up Mr. DeMille.

I will never be able to have palm trees lining my drive in Hawley, Massachusetts and I do not want to even imagine global warming accelerating to the point where that might not be so absurd. I will travel for my palms or I shall wait until the Sunday before Easter.

You can follow Peter’s country doings in his new blog, www.flaneurdupays.blogspot.com

Jenny’s Garden

Jenny Ruhl bought a house in Gill four years ago and started a new garden. She also started a new website describing all the limitations of her landscape – rocks, thin soil, lots of shade – and then documented the 2007 garden year with wonderful photographs and brief text. Jenny’s Garden can be seen at www.phlaunt.com/jennysgarden.

This is the time of year when we can all review the garden year and think about 2008. This is what Jenny had to say “As far as my plans for the garden go next year, I’m going to be putting in some perennials in the shady area towards the bottom where I have been putting the nonstop begonias, as that area is looked pretty sparse this past year. The Begonias didn’t like the drought and I lost quite a few of those I’d been saving every year I’m also going to have to think of something else colorful to put in where the zinnias have been for the last couple years because they were all so virus infected this year. I’ve been told they need to be rotated. I’m giving up on the dahlias, too. They were beautiful my first two years, but the last two years the Japanese beetles ate almost all the blossoms. Each year the beetles get worse so I want to plant things they don’t like. I accidentally yanked one of the lupines doing my fall clean up, too. So there is a lot of room for new plants next year. “

I have found there is always room for more plants. One way or another. I’d love to hear about more gardens and hope more people will share.