My Friend Elsa
Though I haven’t read Dear Friend and Gardener I have my own great garden friend. When I moved to my Massachusetts hilltop, I found that one of our area’s most famous perennial gardeners, Elsa Bakalar, lived on a neighboring hilltop. She was a generation older, British, much more knowledgeable about flower gardens, and way more opinionated than I was about anything but happy to befriend a novice.
She is a born teacher, and even now living in a nursing home, she is always imagining classes and lectures she is ready to present.
I knew nothing about perennials and never imagined growing any flower more exotic than a marigold, but she taught me and I encouraged her to write, to put all those good lessons down on paper where they could be shared. We started writing together. It was my byline that appeared under The Flower Garden According to Elsa in the January 1987 issue of Horticulture Magazine with fabulous photographs by Gary Mottau, but the very definite and charming opinions were all Elsa’s.
Elsa not only has skill in the garden, as well as a strong aesthetic sense, she has a sharp wit. It is her sense of humor that helped make her a sought after lecturer at garden clubs, flower shows and botanical gardens all across the country. The tales she brought back from Williamsburg, Virginia, and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art entertained all of us in Heath.
The speaking engagements finally inspired her to put down her thoughts about gardening. Though she held strong opinions, she believed that gardeners should please themselves. Bring on the gnomes and flamingos if that’s what the gardener loved. Her book is aptly titled A Garden of One’s Own: Making and Keeping Your Flower Garden. Elsa was insistent about using those brisk Anglo-Saxon words – make and keep. Forget designing and creating she said. The book came out in time to mark her 75th birthday in 1994.
After we met she watched me put in a 90 foot perennial border and knew how foolish that was at that stage of my life and responsibilities. She just shrugged when it disappeared. She grew a single Queen Elizabeth rose, but appreciated my collection of hardy roses as it grew. Imitation was not considered a compliment in her book. For Elsa the garden is all about pleasure. That was the only thing she demanded a gardener find there. It is what I find with Elsa.
At this time of the year when the ground is covered with white snow, and yet the sun is brilliant and almost warm, the desire for something green growing in the earth is great. Even the sight of a weed would be cheering.
Of course, it is the weeds that may be the first things that I notice when things start up in the spring. At least that is the way it usually is here at the End of the Road Farm. Over the years that we have been gardening here I have learned a lot about weeds, the hated couchgrass/quackgrass, the hawkweeds, Virgin’s Bower which sounds lovely and which I actually planted on purpose, and that most common of weeds which was my inspiration when I named my website and blog, the shaggy dandelion.
As much as I thought I knew about weeds, this book, Weeds of the Northeast, has proven a treasure trove of interesting and useful information about all the weeds in my garden and the fields around. Each two page spread gives information on one side about the names of the plant, a general description, how it is propagated, a description of the flowers and fruit, it habitat and distribution. Since words are often not enough, the facing page gives clear photos of the plant in its various stages from seedling, to flower to seedcase and seed.
The book is also a veritable botany handbook with a glossary of botanical terms, and drawings of leaf shapes and arrangements. If the ability to name something gives us power over it, this book makes me powerful indeed.
The Wolf Moon, the January full moon, shone over our house this week. According to country wisdom you should still have half your firewood left when the Wolf Moon is full. We do! The wood pile is ornamented with snow and ice, but there is plenty to get us through the winter, and those cool, damp spring evenings.
The freezer also contains a good ration of our blueberries and strawberries, as well as the chickens that we raise for meat every year. There is great pleasure in feeling the security we built for ourselves in the easy days of summer.
After putting up the photos of two of my rugosas, ‘Apart’ and ‘Mrs. Doreen Pike’, and after turning away from the white landscape outside my window where temperatures have been in the single digits, I found solace in Roses: A Celebration. This book. a collection of 33 eminent gardeners talking about their favorite roses, is edited by Wayne Winterrowd. Not only are the rose fanciers like Peter Beales, Jamaica Kincaid, Michael Polan, Ken Druse, Julie Moir Messervy and Pamela Stagg eloquent, Pamela Stagg has added her delicate and accurate paintings to the work.
Each of these essays has its own charm, and it is interesting to see how – and why – different gardeners respond to different roses. I can identify with Julie Moir Messervy who ‘never really liked roses very much.” And then tells the story of her coming to appreciate roses that are easier to manage than they were in her mother’s day.
Michael Pollan loves two of my favorite roses, ‘Mme Hardy’ and ‘Cuisse de Nymph’. First he describes “‘Mme Hardy’ an aristocrat, incomparably more subtle and, in form , so much more poised, than, say, ‘Dolly Parton,’ with her huge blossoms.” And like me he is fascinated that Cuisse de Nymph comes with so many other and antithetical names: ‘La Virginale’ and ‘La Seduisante’. I call mine ‘Passionate Nymph’s Thigh’ and it was the first rose I bought. The vitality of that Passionat Nymph is evident because she continues to thrive and bloom even though in my thoughtless siting, I planted her right under the roof drip line where ice falls on her all winter. And yet she blooms and scents the air.
A happy discovery is that a nursery that Lloyd Brace mentions,
Hortico in Canada, not only sells his favorite ‘Astrid Lindgren’, but some of the rugosas I have found difficult to locate like ‘Apart’.
Susan Harris of
Garden Rant talked about trends for the year, including a link to Slate about roses. The thrust of the article was that it doesn’t necessarily take a lot to get roses to thrive. I can speak to the hardiness of old shrub roses, albas and gallicas, and rugosa roses including the newer hybrids. The trick to growing roses, as it is for any plant, is the right rose in the right place and some care with the initial planting.
I live on a hill in western Massachusetts where temperatures go to 20 below 0F and the winds across our fields are terrific. Those are the challenges my roses face.
The benefits they have are full sun, and good soil that drains pretty well, a careful planting and annual feedings of rotted manure and compost. When the spring is dry I give them a good soaking at least every week as they come into bloom. Not every rose I have planted I have survived, but for people who need really tough roses, I cannot speak highly enough of the rugosa.
The rose pictured above is R. rugosa ‘Apart’, which has big wonderful blossoms, and is immensely fragrant. Similar in shape and appeal is R. rugosa ‘Mount Blanc’ which is white. For the most part they only bloom for about three or four weeks, from mid June into July.
There are other rugosas like Mrs. Doreen Pike (shown) which grows low with bright green foliage, and small ruffly flowers that continue for most of the summer. Linda Campbell is also low, but in a vivid red. I have been very happy that there seem to be more rugosas available since I started 20 years ago.
Although I have bought many roses locally and from a variety of mail order nurseries, I got my first roses, and many more since then from
Roses of Yesterday and Today in California. They have a huge selection in their on-line catalog
I have two strong associations with the name Viola. First it was my mother’s name. Growing up I never met anyone else named Viola and wondered whatever had possessed my grandmother to choose such an unfashionable name.
When I got to high school I was amazed to find one of Shakespeare’s brave and passionate heroines named Viola. During a shipwreck she is separated from her twin Sebastian, and unbeknownst to both they wash up on the shores of Illyria. And what could a maiden do when alone in a strange country? She must disguise herself as a boy for her own safety.
Then follows the comedy of errors. Eventually the wins and their lovers sort themselves out for a happy ending and Viola is once again her delightful self. So it was that I gained a different appreciation for the name, but I still did not know about the existence of a flower named viola.
I was familiar with Johnny jump ups of course, which I always thought of as a kind of wild pansy. Like a pansy it loves cool weather and has a similar arrangement of petals. However, it was not until I learned that Johnny jump ups and pansies are both violas, members of the same genus, that I could picture a mother holding her baby girl, and looking into that tiny face with its blue eyes. Then I could imagine my grandmother finding Viola a suitable name for a beautiful baby, her first daughter, whose future she hoped would be as blessed as any flower garden.
Violas for the garden are always being improved and I was happy to get this photo and information about Skippy KL Plum Gold, an All America Selection winner for 2008. It’s a bit more delicate than the johnny jump ups that seed themselves all over my garden, but I cannot imagine that it is any less hardy.
You can find out all about all the AAS winners at their website.
This is my first Bloom Day! I couldn’t help getting a little headstart on Sunday with my previous post about my abutilon. See my previous post – and the blooms in back of the Christmas cactus.
I don’t have much in the way of houseplants. There is so little room in our house which is fairly cool in the winter. However, I cannot give up my Thanksgiving and Christmas cactus. This is the larger of my two Christmas cactus, and the most in bloom at this point. The other is budded but taking its own sweet time about actually blooming. I think I kept them both out in our coldest room too long.
Being in that room is a testament to their hardiness, but it meant there were no flowers at Christmas.
My parlor maple (abutilon or flowering maple) is a delight all year long. There is rarely a time when it is not in bloom. Another of its gifts is that it is happy in a cool house. Abutilons are happy with temperatures down to 40F and some even a bit cooler, down to 35F.
And for all its floriferous abandon it does not need much care. It needs full sun. Mine sits in front of an east window, but with a south window just a few feet away. The room is very bright and sunny even thugh it is cool, probably below 50F at night because it is next to our bedroom and I require a cold room for sleeping.
According to the rules it should be fertilized weekly, but I rarely remember to do this. On the other hand I have to admit that its lower stems are bare, which is a sign of insufficient feeding. I’d better make a new resolution.
This plant was given to me last year by a friend who started it from a cutting, so I don’t know its name. When we went on vacation it did not get wataered for nearly 2 weeks and was dry and sad when we returned. However, I cut off the dead parts, resumed watering and gentle fertilizing and it totally recovered. This indicates that it does indeed respond well to hard pruning.
I have never had a problem with whitefly, which can be a problem treated with a cotton swab dipped in alcohol and then rinsing the plant.
Abutilons come in a variety of colors, and some like Bartley Schwartz with cascading yellow orange flowers is perfect for a hanging basket. If you don’t have a friend with abutilon babies
Logee’s Nursery has a good collection, and I have had excellent luck with all the plants I have gotten there.
Drew is my 9 year old grandson who now lives in Texas, near Houston, with his older brother Anthony, his mother (daughter Kate) and father, Greg. This week he had to write a story at school. A story that every grandmother hopes to hear.
Granny’s House by Drew Lawn
I love my Granny’s house! Of course it has Granny and Major. She has three very nice cats and one is shy and very hard to spy. The cats are hard to find.
I love my Granny’s garden. We call it the ‘sunken garden’. It used to be a shed and it caught on fire and they made it into a garden and it is the same as any garden, except on a lower level, which is why we call it the ‘sunken garden.’
Her chickens are really neat. They run around and I open the door from where they lay their eggs to where we feed them. We feed them corn and greens. We throw it over the fence and some fly over the fence.
It snows where they live on the very big hill. I love to make snow angels! Their pond freezes and I love to go ice skating.
I love to pick blueberries because they are fun to pick. I love Granny’s homemade pancakes. My dad likes them so much he ate inside the house and he’s allergic to cats! I will never forget her house. THE END
The family snapshots don’t exactly match the story, but I hope they capture the mood. I don’t have a photo of the boys feeding the chickens, but I did have the camera out when they were cutting down old pea vines for the chickens. They were much appreciated.
Over the years we have become more conscious of the waste in our American life, and have gradually made changes in the way we run our household. In the past year we replaced at least half the light bulbs in our house with CFL (compact fluorescent lights) which use a fraction of the electricity as incandescent bulbs, we used LED lights on our Christmas tree, and put our computer and TV on a power strip so that they could both be turned totally off when not in use. Our idea was to reduce our energy use, and save money. According to our electric bill our energy use is substantially reduced, but alas, we haven’t saved any money. Tell me how that works!
We garden organically and do not use any chemical pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. I want the grandchildren to be able to eat an unwashed tomato, snap pea or green bean safely. I don’t want chemicals seeping into our well water.
Our lawn which is more accurately a ‘flowery mead’, full of dandelions, clover, hawkweed, and ground ivy, flourishes with only the addition of occasional liming and grass clippings. My Extension Service says that is all it needs.
We recycle paper, glass and cans. But I know we can still form better habits. So, inspired by the Just Change One Thing movement, we have resolved to cut down, if not eliminate, the number of plastic shopping bags we get at the supermarket. I have the canvas totes, and store them near the door after I am done unloading them. This is the hardest part for me, forming the habit to always have canvas bags with me in the car. I am working on it.
Garden Bloggers Book Club | Pat January 31, 2008 | 
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