Saturday I went into Greenfield to buy plants at the Greenfield Garden Club Plant sale, but also stopped at the Greenfield Farmers Market to buy beautiful lettuce from The Kitchen Garden for Gourmet Club, and I bought a pot of beautiful double white petunias from LaSalles.
Shoestring Farm Booth
The Farmers Market was full of vegetable starts, flats of annual seedlings, as well as the first greens of the season and huge bouquets of peonies from Hadley where spring has sprung to a greater degree than in Heath. Strolling among the Farmers Market booths my head is filled with fantasy visions of my own garden, equally productive and beautiful.
Shed Bed
When I got home I had to face the reality that I am still weeding and planting madly – and it is not a pretty sight. Some creature is daintily nibbling at the lettuce in the new Front Garden. That will require further investigation and thought. Somehow the Shed Bed of Roses, next to the henhouse, is incredibly full of weeds and grass this spring. I hadn’t made even one pass through when daughter Diane arrived on Sunday afternoon for a short visit. I immediately showed her the Shed Bed and we set to. She is such a cooperative and energetic daughter. I got to use my fabulous West Country Rose Gloves to prune and hold roses out of the way while Diane dug out grass and weeds. We noticed that the rose Mrs. Doreen Pike, a low rugosa with bright green foliage and pretty very double little blossoms, who had sent runners toward the back of the bed, had totally disappeared to the back of the bed leaving a big empty spot in the front. What to do? And how to handle that empty spot considering the location of the bed next to the henhouse?
Chickens! There is a fenced chicken yard, but a few adventurous birds routinely fly the coop for a day eating grass and bugs and taking ‘dust’ baths in the cultivated soil of the Shed Bed. Since I fear the dread ‘rose disease’ that spells certain doom for any rose planted where a rose lived before (at least for a couple of years) one solution to that empty space is a patch of annuals. Not good design, but functional. The problem is those chickens and their dust baths. I’m wondering if I can make a kind of cage out of chicken wire to put over the annual seedlings. The chickens won’t be able to dig them up and the annuals (maybe cosmos?) will grow up through the cage and pretty much hide it. It’s my only idea so far. What do you think?
When I went to Greenfield yesterday to help set up the Greenfield Garden Club Annual Plant Sale and Extravaganza, I got to see some of the damage wrought by the terrible storm the other night. So many trees were taken down that clean up is not yet completed. Branches and whole trees are stacked by the roadsides waiting for removal. I was stunned to see this tree on Wildwood still leaning against the house.
In spite of damage at their own houses and lack of power, Greenfield Garden Club members found their way around closed streets to set up an varied array of plants that will be on sale tomorrow from 8 am til 1 pm at Trap Plain on the corner of Silver and Federal Streets. This is an opportunity for new gardeners to get some good plants and for experienced gardeners to get some excellent plants at extremely good prices. There was a beautiful array of hostas as well as shrubs and named and described daylilies. There will also be a tag sale of garden related items. Happy Shopping!
Last year this nameless tree peony did not bloom at all, but this year there will be three blooms. My dark pink tree peony only had one blossom, but paler pink Guan Yin Mian had 15 blossoms! Not all at once – which is a good thing.
Rugosa alba
This is the common white beach rose. I have several bushes in a kind of hedge. It has taken quite a beating over the past couple of years, but I think it is really indestructible.
Mrs. Herzig rose
Mrs. Herzig of Colrain gave me this tiny pink rose. It jumped from the original spot where I planted it into a wild hedge of forsythia and spirea. I don’t know what type of rose it is, but it is so pretty and so sturdy.
Queen Elizabeth
I can’t really take credit for this bloom. I bought Queen Elizabeth in honor of my dear British friend Elsa Bakalar who passed away this winter. She didn’t grow many roses but she always had a Queen Elizabeth in her garden.
cheddar pinks
dianthus
I love pink. Pink roses and pinks like these dianthus that are also called pinks.
I love the spicy fragrance of pinks.
Cotoneaster
Last year this cotoneaster began blooming. I was shocked. The blooms resemble quince blossoms and they last for quite a long time. It took me a long time to learn how to pronounce this plant. I kept mis-cuing and thinking of it as a cotton eater. It is co-toe-knee-aster.
My Chinese wisteria
And this year I have to celebrate my wisteria that is now at its peak. I hope it hasn’t used up all its strength. I am looking foward to a repeat next year.
In the cool of the early morning I wandered down The Rose Walk and found that Dart’s Dash has put out its first blossom. Rugosas are the first roses to bloom in my garden, but this is especially early. I’ve been watering which the roses love and temperatures in the 80s and today in the 90s have persuaded the roses that summer might almost be here. Dart’s Dash is a low growing rugosa, but has the rugosa’s vigor and tendency to spread. It is at the end of The Rose Walk and marks the entry to the Potager. Wonderful fragrance.
The bumbleebees are buzzin’ in the wisteria blossoms, and all kinds of bugs are biting me around my eyes, behind my ears and in the middle of my back where I can swat or scratch. It got so bad that in the heat of the day yesterday, I retired to the house for iced tea and a dip into Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles (Knopf $29.95).
I was entranced the first time I picked up this book and began at A for Air. In 1926 a little monoplane took off from Tallulah, Louisiana to collect insects from the high altitudes. That was the first attempt to use an airplane, but not the last. While statistics tend to put me to sleep this chapter counts the amazing numbers of insects, some as common as ladybugs, at 6000 feet. Some are wingless, but carried by air currents. At 15,ooo feet a ballooning spider was found. ”Think of 26 million little animals flying unseen above one square mile of countryside. . . . a vault of insect laden air.”
But that is just an introduction to the insect world, which for Raffles in an introduction to many other facinating topics and a spur to his own thoughts and point of view as an anthropologist. He is interested in how humans interact with all manner of animals, including insects.
The twenty-six chapters or essays range between 2 to 44 pages, and cover insects from a variety of perspectives. In Chernobyl he writes about Cornelia Hesse-Honeggers painting of mutations in insects caused by radiation; in Fever/Dream he writes about malaria and his own attack; and in The Sound of Global Warming he writes about pinon engraver beetles. Chapter headings like The Ineffable, Temptation and Zen and the Art of ZZZ’s take us to unexpected and fascinating places. When the grandsons visit this summer I’ll be full of weird and wonderful facts. They love weird and wonderful things.
Raffles has said that writing this book as an ‘encyclopedia’ is bit of a joke, making fun of the idea that you can gather all the information about anything and put it in one place. But he is an anthropologist, not an entomologist, so he comes at insects in myriad ways, with references to artists, philosophers, novelists and the ways they approach the world, not only insects. The book (well footnoted if you are interested) ends with this: “Learn to live with imperfection. We’re all in this together. The miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.
I am still going to put on insect repellent when I go out in the garden today.
And buy! Gardeners are allowed to browse the hundreds of perennials laid out at the Bridge of Flowers Plant Sale – but no touching! Not until the starting bell rings out. This year the young woman in charge of the Annuals from LaSalle’s in Whately said for the first time she had two women poised over a single flat of gorgeous rich purple geraniums. They did not come to blows; they shared, half and half.
Bridge of Flowers Plant Sale
The sale runs til noon and committee members were on duty along with Carol Delorenzo, our Head Gardener, to answer questions about the suitability of a plant for a particular site, and share tips on plant care.
Bridge of Flowers Entry - Shelburne Side
I stopped at the Bridge on my way to the Sale for inspiration – which begins right at the entry. I knew I would need to get home right after the sale to begin planting, which still continues. I cleared out a spirea shrub that was not doing well and now I have a big new space that I am filling with blue and white flowers, Connecticut Yankee delphiniums, Blue Paradise phlox, White Seashell cosmos, annual light blue lobelia, Snow in summer and a white filipendula. For a little accent I planted two beautiful golden Troillus globe flowers and a yellow yarrow. Other perennials have been planted in other beds. Most of the annuals will go in containers. Stay tuned.
Wisteria 5-19
One of the pleasures of the week has been watching the wisteria begin to bloom.
Wisteria 5-23
As the sun was setting last night the air was filled with the sweet perfume of the wisteria. What a way to end the week.
Spring madness was in the air when I trekked to the New York Botanical Garden for the special exhibit Emily Dickinson’s Garden: Poetry in Flowers. Two rooms of the stunning Enid E. Haupt Conservatory were given over to interpretations of the gardens and Dickinson’s home, The Homestead, in Amherst.
While many of us have a vision of a slight, white clad woman quietly writing odd verses in her bedroom, seeing no one, Emily Dickinson’s early years were quite ordinary. She did not become reclusive until she was in her thirties. Her father was a prominent citizen of the town who served as treasurer of Amherst College for decades, as well as a state legislator and as a member of the U.S. Congress. The household was busy and engaged in the social life of the town.
Born in 1830 Emily, and her sister Lavinia, attended school at the Amherst Academy, and later attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Throughout her girlhood she suffered from health problems, and it was poor health that ended her attendance at Mount Holyoke after only a year.
In spite of her poor health, the family deaths that occurred while she was young, and the view of the Amherst cemetery from the Homestead’s windows, her life was not drenched in sorrow. Emily grew up in a busy family, in a handsome pale yellow house, amid flower and vegetable gardens and once declared, “I was reared in a garden, you know.”
In fact she studied botany, and when she was only 11 she began putting together an herbarium that ultimately included 400 plants, each labeled and identified with its proper Latin name. A beautiful facsimile of this herbarium was created and published by Belknap Press of Harvard University; the original resides in Harvard’s Houghton Library.
Dickinson gardened all her life, caring for roses, lilacs, tulips, zinnias, foxgloves, sweet Williams and poppies as well as all the bulbs that bloom in the spring. When the family was prosperous enough a small conservatory (now gone) was added to the house. Plantings there included a fig tree and other tender and exotic plants.
All these and more are included in the lush plantings in the Conservatory. I was particularly taken with the recreation of the well traveled path between The Homestead and The Evergreens, the house her brother Austin built for his family next door. Of course the Conservatory staff has the skill to bring flowers from a whole season into bloom at the same time, peonies with roses, delphiniums with foxgloves, columbine with morning glories.
Set among the plantings are little placards with appropriate poems including all the creatures that visit the garden including birds, and bees. Only 18 of Dickinson’s poems were published during her lifetime. It is only after her death that her sister found the little booklets in a drawer – the more than 1700 poems her sister had written and organized.
One of the poems set among the flowers shows a more positive feeling about fame than I ever imagined she possessed.
“Fame is a bee.
It has a song –
It has a sting –
Ah, too, it has a wing.
That poem strikes me as wistful, a peek at Dickinson imagining a different world for herself if she had found fame. Yet another poem with its black cawing crow presents a very different picture of fame and its consequences.
“Fame is a fickle food
Upon a a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set
Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the
Farmer’s corn
Men eat of it and die.”
Fame did come to Emily Dickinson, but not until many years after her death in 1886. She is now considered a major American poet. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. By R.W. Franklin have been published by the Belknap Press of Harvard. The exhibit in the Conservatory gives an idea of the joys and inspiration Dickinson found in the garden.
Nearby the Conservatory is a Poetry Walk with 30 Poetry Boards featuring some of Dickinson’s poems about flowers and the garden.
Dickinson's garden included vegetables
A further exhibit is on display in the NYBG’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library Gallery will showcase items reveal the context of her life. It should be noted that Jane Wald, Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum is a key member of the Curatorial Team that put this exhibit together.
The exhibit will continue at the NYBG until June 13. On Saturday, June 12 from 10am to 6 pm visitors are invited to read their own favorite Dickinson poems aloud, and on Sunday, Judith Farr, author of The Gardens of Emily Dickinson will give a talk about Dickinson’s Eden” at 4 pm.
Even if you can’t nip down to the exhibit, we have the Emily Dickinson Museum in our own backyard, and there is a whole raft of beautiful and fascinating books about Emily, her garden, and an imagined life in the novel I Never Came to You in White, also by Judith Farr.
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One place to spruce up our own individual Edens, is the Bridge of Flowers Plant Sale next Saturday, May 22, from 9 am to noon at the Green at the corner of Main and Water Streets. In addition to a wonderful selection of perennials, and annuals, the following vendors will be on hand: Nancy Dole Books; OESCO, Michael Naldrett’s photo notecards; Steve Earp’s pottery; and John Sendelbach’s garden art.
The harvest has begun, but with the help of Mother Nature. Last night we had our first garden fresh salad, mostly with these self-seeded lettuces in the vegetable garden.
Spinach
The spinach in the Herb Bed needs thinning (and weeding) and I added the thinnings to the salad.
Red Sails lettuce
The Red Sails lettuce directly seeded in the new Front Garden is also ready to be thinned. All of a sudden it is really taking off. I love being able to pick my salad right before dinner!
This is the day I wait for every year – the first tree peony blossoms. I bought this one because of the name which translates as Guan Yin’s face. Guan Yin is the goddess of compassion and I am sure her face is as beautiful as this blossom. Tree peony flowers look fragile, but the plants are extremely hardy.
I vaguely remember buying a bag of pink tulip bulbs last fall, and then sticking them in any old where – and promptly forgot about them. They were a wonderful surprise when they came up this spring. Maybe if I look through my Journal I’ll be able to find their name. All the plants loved the inch of rain we had all day yesterday.
Beauty of Moscow lilac
The fat pink buds of Beauty of Moscow have very slowly been opening because the weather has been so cool, but I think today’s promised heat will bring an explosion of bloom.
Annuals, Chickens, Farms, Monday Record, My Family, Vegetable garden, Vegetables | Pat May 31, 2010 | 
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