Muse Day September 2010

“Few things are more annoying than dogmatism; and dogmatism is nowhere more misplaced than in horticulture. The wise gardener is he whom years of experience have succeeded in teaching that plants, no less than people have perverse individualities of their own, and that, though general rules may be laid down, yet it is impossible ever to predict with any certainty that any given treatment is  bound to secure success or failure.” Reginald Farrer in My Rock Garden.

No season was ever greater proof of this quote from Reginald Farrer (1880-1920) than this spring and summer.  We couldn’t complain about early or late blooming, because all bloom was operating on some mysterious energy. Some plants bloomed late, and some early.  People who planned wedding dates with available garden flowers in mind found themselves in difficult straits.

Last week I opened A Century of Gardeners by Betty Massingham that I bought at the Friends of the Heath Library Book Sale at the Heath Fair. The brief biography was so tantalizing I ran to my bookshelf and there was A Rage for Rock Gardening: The story of Reginal Farrer, gardener, writer and plant collector by Nicola Shulman.  I’m afraid the term rock gardening put me off to such an extent that I hardly opened the book when it was given to me as a gift years ago.  That was a mistake because if Massingham’s book tantalized, Shulman’s book delighted in the ways I assume Farrer was able to do.

Born in 1880 his youth was difficult because he was born with a cleft palate which affected his speech.  The corrective  surgeries that were available at the time sound barbaric, dealing with “hot tongs, sulfuric acid and metal bridles.”  Because of this he was schooled at home and learned to deal with physical hardships, a different type of which he met up with on his plant hunting travels..

He was self taught in botany and at the age of 14 he rebuilt his parents rock garden. Unlike my vision of a few rocks on a slope with bits of basket of gold alyssum stuck in beetween which is what my  first and only rock garden looked like, Farrer’s rock gardens were designed to coddle alpine plants. His book was written when he was 22 and it was well received. However, fame as a novelist is what he longed for. The five novels he wrote did not give him fame or even critical applause.  His relationship with his father, never close or easy, deteriorated to such a degree that he was finally forced to earn money on his own.

Needing money he took to writing garden books  -  books about his plant hunting and planting aesthetic.  Along with William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll he is responsible for changing the whole approach to gardening. The Victorian way was bedding out, turning flower beds into complex and brilliantly colored carpets. The way we garden now, more naturally, with the gardener working with the plant instead of working to subdue the plant, is thanks to Farrer as well as his more famous colleagues.

His other books include In a Yorkshire Garden, Alpines and Bog Plants,  On the Eaves of the World and The Rainbow Bridge. His writing about plants was as new and unique as his garden style. For him plants had personalities. They sulked or were capricious.I will have to search them out as well as Farrer’s Last Journey by E.H.M. Cox about his expedition to upper Burma.  The novel failed him, but his literary talents bloomed when he wrote about plants.

I want to thank Carolyngail at Sweet Home and Garden Chicago for hosting Muse Day which I always look forward to. I keep my eyes open for something to share – and love seeing what muses are inspiring other gardeners.

Buzzin’ of the Bees

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.

Gardening There – and Here

Betsy and me in The Secret Garden

If there is anything more enjoyable than an afternoon working in one’s own garden, it is spending an afternoon working with a daughter in her garden.  Yesterday we visited Betsy for a garden consultation, nursery shopping and planting day. Betsy has done some landscaping around her house which is built on sand that hides many many stones. In fact the house is directly across the road from a granite quarry whose boulders form a major element of the landscaping. However,  she has not really been a gardener. That is changing. We went to Mahoney’s huge nursery, which is overwhelming, but between us we picked out an array of plants that she likes – and that are suitable for different areas of the property.

Betsy - finished with planting

This little sunny garden is not visible from the house and Betsy calls it her Secret Garden. It is filled with spring bloomers, Siberian and bearded iris, creeping phlox and ajuga. Quoting The Nonstop Garden: A Step-by-step Guide to Smart Plant Choices and Four Season Designs by Stephanie Cohen and Jennifer Benner, I helped Betsy choose plants that would extend her bloom season. I was so happy when I saw her light up at the sight of a pot of daisies. “I love daisies!” she said.  We bought daisies and pink echinacea, and a bargain pot of coreopsis, and a red bee balm I brought from my own garden.

Roadside garden

One of the appeals and challenges of Betsy’s property is the little woodland. It provides privacy for the house – and is home to a number of pink lady slippers!  Betsy is planting the western edge of the woods with shade lovers, like hostas and now a new bleeding heart with golden foliage, but the area between the woods and the busy road has been a bit of a desert wasteland. The soil is sand and stone in equal measure. The area gets shade from the quarry on the other side of the road and the woods. It only gets sun until about 1 in the afternoon at this time of the year.  With Henry hard at work digging $50 holes, we planted a pink mountain laurel, a big pink astilbe and Walker’s Low nepeta. The lesson for Betsy was stressing the importance of $50 holes for planting, loosening the tight roots of the potted plants, and  using a mixture of  two parts composted cow manure, 1 part peat moss and 1 part of the removed sandy soil around the plants. Unfortunately, Betsy couldn’t find any commercial compost makers in her area and has to make do with bags of composted cow manure – and we used a lot!  The final part of the lesson was deep watering and an admonition to keep watering these plants while they settle in and get established. This is especially important considering her sandy soil.

Rory, waterer and mouse hunter

Our grandson Rory, 13, was the major waterer. He doesn’t like spiders, but he was fascinated by the mouse that he found living in the hose reel. He also helped moving loads with the lawn tractor. There was work for us all.

We left Betsy to plant her new herbs. She was delighted and amazed to learn that some herbs are perennials. She bought peppermint, sage, marjoram and thyme. And a pot of Italian parsley. I left her with two big clumps of forget me nots from my garden. It was a memorable day.

Naturally I could not go to Mahoney’s without buying something for myself. Today I plant a healthy looking Pinky Winky hydrangea from Proven Winners. This will finish my hydrangea hedge. It will take a while to fill out, of course, but the oakleaf hydrangea, Limelight and Pinky Winky will make a 25 foot long hedge, underplanted with barren strawberry and daffodils. The daffodils are already there and the barren strawberry is slowly moving across the area.

So it’s been a busy week with the purchase of astrantia, echinacea, heucharella, baptisia and astilbe for my own garden as well as the gift of Pocahontas, Excel and Maiden’s Blush lilacs from my friend Jerry. I am planting and weeding and fertilizing. It’s spring!  More plant shopping at the Bridge of Flowers Plant Sale on Saturday, May 22 in Shelburne Falls!  And more shopping at the Greenfield Garden Club Extravaganza on May 29.  There is always room for more plants.

The Uninvited and Everpresent

For years I complained about witch grass – until I bought Weeds of the Northeast by Richard Uva, Joseph Neal and Joseph DiTomaso – and found out I should have been complaining about quackgrass. Witch grass (Panicum capillare L.) is a summer annual that reproduces by seed that germinates in late spring and midsummer. It is found everywhere, in gardens, farm fields, in poor dry soil and wet fertile soil.

Quackgrass (Elytrigia repens) also known as couch grass, is a rhizomatous perennial. It spreads by seed as well as by those awful fleshy white rhizomes. If I leave even the tiniest bit of rhizome in the soil when I am weeding, it will continue to grow and send up new shoots. It grows throughout the northern U.S. and Canada and as far west to southern Arizona. I love to find an isolated bit of quackgrass with stems coming up in a straight line from each underground node because I feel I have a better chance than usual of getting up the whole rhizome.

Unfortunately this is not the only weed grass that comes up in my vegetable and flower beds. I can safely say I also have wirestem muhly (Muhlenbergia fondosa), also known as knot root grass, another rhizomatous perennial that also reproduces by seed as well as by the distinctive knotty roots and rhizome.

I am pretty sure I have barnyard grass (Echinochloa crus-galli) a clump forming summer annual; orchard grass (Dactylis glomerata) a clump forming perennial; downy brome (Bromus tectorum L.) a summer or winter annual; wild oats (Avena fatua L.) an annual grass; and yellow foxtail (Setaria glauca) a clump forming summer annual that produces the familiar fox tail or bottle brush seed head. Downy brome, wild oats and yellow foxtail have very pretty seedheads in the summer, just the kind of thing you would want for a dried arrangement, but they will each spread hundred of seeds to come up next year.

Broadleaf dock (Rumex obtusifolias L.) is perennial and a bane of my existence. It grows thickly and fleshily with a deep taproot that is hard to cut out and almost impossible to dig out. It also produces seed that will germinate from spring through early fall.  The ripe reddish brown flowering shoot might also add interest to a fall dried arrangement – but is never interesting in the garden.

One of my favorite weeds is bedstraw (Galium), a summer or winter annual. There are two galiums, and I am not absolutely sure if I have G. aparine or G. mollugo; I will have to look more closely at the stems. This is a weed with fine whorled foliage and tiny white flowers. They are fairly easy to pull, but they are so pretty that I often leave them alone – depending on where they are. I don’t mind too much when they grow up through the middle of a rose bush because it is almost like having a rose and baby’s breath bouquet.

I think I have the annual carpetweed (Mollugo verticillata L.) too, which is very similar to Galium but it is prostrate, creeping across the ground, thus the name carpetweed. Carpetweed is very similar to the perennial common chickweed, and mouseear chickweed (Cerasteum). I know I have this weed because it forms dense mats; the stems root at each node. It produces tiny white flowers from spring into October.

Galium or Bedstraw

Weeds of the Northeast gives very specific ways of discriminating one plant from another when they are similar by describing the shape of the stem, round or square, the arrangement of leaves, color and hairiness. On many plants you have to look closely, but you will see that some have little hairs on the stems or foliage.

I find sorrel (Rumex acetosella L.) throughout the gardens. I used to think it was culinary sorrel, and while it does have a sour flavor and is edible there are other sorrel varieties that are more often used in cooking. If I want French sorrel soup I will have to look for R. scutatus.

Sour Grass or Red Sorrel

I’m happy to name one weed, hairy galinsoga (Galinsoga ciliata) because people often ask about it and I like saying the word ‘galinsoga.’ Sometimes this 8 to 20 inch plant is called shaggy soldier, I guess because it is kind of floppy. It has tiny white flowers around a yellow center. It is an annual and easy to pull out, but because the seeds have no dormancy they can germinate soon after being shed which means there will be several generations in one season. The leaves are egg-shaped and toothed. Both leaves and stems are hairy. My book says it is difficult to control and is usually found on fertile soil. Nice to know I have fertile soil.

I call my lawn a flowery mead because it is full of wildflowers, what some would call weeds. First and most noticeably there are dandelions, the common weed for which I named my blog. In the spring there are also field pansies that look like tiny Johnny jump ups, and blue violets. I cannot get too upset about these weeds.

Later in the summer the hawkweeds (Hieracium) bloom. These are perennials and reproduce by seed, rhizome and stolons. I have H. pratense that has yellow flowers and H. aurntiacum which has red-orange flowers. I call them devil’s paintbrush, some use the term Indian paintbrush.

I haven’t given a full catalog of all my weeds, but now you know why one visitor whispered to her friend, “She doesn’t weed!”  I do weed, but not well enough.

Between the Rows  April 10, 2010

The Meditative Gardener

The Meditative Gardener by Cheryl Wilfong

I met Cheryl Wilfong at a recent Garden Writers (GWA) meeting in Boston. The meeting was excellent with good advice about blogging and writing  given by Richard Banfield of freshtilledsoil.com.  The speaker gave me more than I ever expected, but one of the reasons I attended was to meet other writers, some of whom I already knew through their blogs.

Cheryl brought her book, which I bought, and information about her website, meditativegardener.com.  In spite of a weekend Vipassna session years ago, I do not claim to be a meditator, but I don’t think you need to claim this title to recognize many of the feelings, thoughts and reactions that Cheryl describes.  The book describes many Buddhist and meditative practices which appeal to me, in and out of the garden. Not to mention the gorgeous photographs.

I was particularly taken with the Flower in Your Heart Meditation.  I grow flowers, and yet rarely bring them into the house because the cats always knock the vases over, and I even more rarely give bouquets away, for no reason except affection.  I will be more mindful of this opportunity.

Every day our gardens teach us, about the ways of nature, about the ways to be  generous, and about the ways of the spirit.  So does this book.

The Green in Vogue

Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier

In preparing for a Fashion in the Garden posting I have been reading the spring issue of Vogue magazine. Strictly business you understand. Besides, Tina Fey was on the cover.

Although I wasn’t looking for it, there was a little feature on page 370, The Green List, with John Patrick’s (whoever he may be) five latest (fashion everywhere) faves.  There is seedlibrary.org for heirloom seeds; Emiliano Godoy, an industrial designer who focuses on sustainability; Magnus Larsson, a Swedish architect working to stop the spread of the Sahara!; Ecocradle for shipping materials made of mycelium, —  remember you heard it here first; and Edible Forest Gardens by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier.  Well, Dave Jacke is headquartered  right in our own green county. I hope to catch up with him this spring.  I met Eric Toensmeier when he spoke at the local Master Gardener’s Spring Symposium a couple of years ago and bought his book.  I am going to plant perennial Good King Henry (Chenopodium bonus- henricus) in my Henry garden.

Who knows who I’ll meet at this year’s Spring Symposium. Check out the full schedule and info.

Kids in the Garden

I didn’t need all the talk about ‘nature deficit’ to think that children can be entertained, educated and nurtured by spending time in the garden, with and without adults. As a child I spent a fair amount of time watching the bugs on my aunt’s black seeded simpson lettuce, while I daydreamed in the sun.  I don’t know how that affected my personality development, but I am sure it was in many good ways.

Black Dog Publishing also believes children will find good things in the garden  and have just published Kids in the Garden by Elizabeth McCorquodale. They are giving my readers a discounted offer that will bring you this $17.95 book for less than you can get it on Amazon.

To order your copy email Jessica (jess@blackdogonline.com) with commonweeder in the subject line. You will get a 40% discount, which makes the cost $10.77 plus shipping.  Jessica will tell you about shipping once she has your address.  I do not make any money on this transaction, I just like to encourage getting children in the garden.

Kids in the Garden is an easy and fun guide for children to use on their own or with adults, and encourages children to learn about gardening, healthy eating and caring for the environment. With easy to follow step-by-step instructions, with bright photography and fun illustrations. The book is aimed at children aged five upwards with adult supervision, then for older children up to 11 to complete on their own.

The book features more than 50 projects, with full instructions on the materials needed, companion plants, saving resources, harvesting seasons, seeds, the water cycle and indoor gardens. There is also a section on wildlife, showing how to encourage animals into your garden, as well as how to make a mini pond, birdhouses, pest patrol, building a wormery, rescuing bees and ladybirds, and much more. The plants and vegetables featured include potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, peppers, herbs, strawberries, blueberries, sunflowers and many more. The recipes included are simple to make with the fresh produce and include; one pot jam, minty fizz and easy pizza sauce.

Reading and Planning

I am still in the middle of reading and planning season. Two very different books have sent my imagination into high gear.

Toad Cottages & Shooting Stars: Grandma’s Bag of Tricks by Sharon Lovejoy  ($14.95 Workman Publishing) is ostensibly for grandmas, but among the 130 activities described and illustrated with engaging photos and charming drawings, many will engage mommies and daddies as well.

The opening chapter, Preparing Camp Granny, gives advice about welcoming a visiting grandchild so that even the first night without parents can be comfortable and cozy. Like Lovejoy we have a well stocked dress-up box, but I am going to have to think of a place to have a tokonoma, to place a simple flower arrangement as they do in Japan. You don’t even need a grandchild to make and enjoy the pleasure of a fresh daily plant arrangement reflecting the season.

The other chapters, Neighborhood Naturalist, Kids in the Kitchen, Kitchen Garbage Garden, Kids in the Garden and Rainy Day Activities, also have many ideas that are as appropriate for moms and dads as for grannies. Many, but not all the activities involve the natural world; I was happy to see that Reading Aloud plays a part in Grandma’s bag of tricks.

Lovejoy explains how to attract butterflies to the garden. In addition to including plants that support butterfly life cycles, she says something as simple as a shallow bowl filled with wet soil and sand, complete with a rock island, will help attract butterflies who need a place to drink. She mentions that butterflies and moths also like to dine on rotting fruit, and gives a recipe for Moth Broth of mashed up banana, plum or peach that rots quickly in the summer sun. Moth Broth can be painted on trees and prepares the way for a magical show of moths eating it up in the dark of a summer night.

Water, food and shelter are all a granny needs to entice all manner of wildlife into even a suburban yard that can be rich in wonder for a young child. One of the things that made a particular impression on me at UMass when I was in the education program there was the Square Foot Field Trip project. Everyone was sent out to the grounds around the building to choose a single square foot of ground and examine and catalog it carefully, noting all the different life forms, to see and think about what was going on, and what relationships might be.  What worked for would-be teachers also works for grannies and parents. We all have to learn to keep our eyes open and pay attention.

There are any number of projects that I can’t wait to try out when my grandsons visit this summer, making a pizza box solar oven (I’m a big fan of solar power) that will make grilled cheese sandwiches, mini pizzas and half baked apples; sprouting seeds including peanuts; planting a garden in a straw bale or two; and making leaf and flower collages.

Lovejoy is also the author of Sunflower Houses: Inspiration from the Garden, Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots, and Trowel and Error.  She advises about children’s gardens to the American Horticultural Society and has a charming website and blog for adults, www.sharonlovejoy.com .

Children love color but Tom Fischer’s new book, The Gardener’s Color Palette with photographs by Clive Nichols (Timber Press $12.95) is a delightful  book that will appeal to the sophisticated gardener. Fischer presents ten flowers in each of ten color families to entice the gardener into colorful new directions.

I confess that that I don’t take a very organized or artistic approach to the garden. Partly because I don’t have a very strong visual sense, and partly because I am so easily seduced by a flower in the nursery or catalog and buy it without thinking about where or how it will fit into the rest of the garden. I comfort myself with Elsa Bakalar’s dictum that all natural colors  go together and one shouldn’t agonize too much.

Still, I love books like The Gardener’s Color Palette because it opens my eyes to colors I hadn’t even thought of using. Some colors like red, yellow and blue are very familiar to us in all their shades. Others are less so.

Fischer looks at ranges of color like orange to peach with the strong hues of Orange Beauty cannas to the Dordogne single tulip which is a blend of amber, coral and gold. Fischer is also generous with suggestion for plant pairings. He says Dordogne would be pretty with the clear yellow Mrs. John T. Scheepers tulip, but a more dramatic companion would be the dark purple Greuze tulip..

One unusual color family is Brown, Bronze and Copper from the familiar chocolate cosmos with its dramatic dark flowers that has such a long season of summer bloom, to the copper flame on the ruddy brown Abu Hassan triumph tulip. Fischer suggests that a planting of Abu Hassan with other tulips in orange, deep ruby or darkest purple will be a striking sight.

This book is not all about dreaming and planning. Fischer gives an ample measure of information about the cultural needs of each plant.

Somehow with its gorgeous photographs of one hundred flowers The Gardener’s Color Palette is spurring a thousand ideas for this summer’s garden.

Between the Rows   February 20, 2010

My Friend Elsa

Elsa Bakalar was my friend. This morning I got the call that I had been dreading. Elsa passed away peacefully on January 29.

We moved to Heath in December of 1979, but I did not meet Elsa, who also lived in Heath until I began writing a weekly garden column, Between the Rows, for The Recorder. I had heard about Elsa and her garden and finally got up my courage to ask her for an interview. It must be admitted that I was not an expert gardener, but got the job because I wrote a compelling letter saying I would interview all the expert gardeners in our region.

I  had seen Elsa’s initialed articles in Mike’s West County News launched not too long before we moved to Heath and I imagined a young couple sharing a romantic journalistic enterprise. When we met I was somewhat shocked to find that it was more in the nature of a romantic post retirement project. They taught me that it is never too late for new beginnings.

Elsa not only gave me an interview, about starting flower seeds in the dead of winter, she began my education. I had been concentrating on vegetables and had hardly planted a marigold. She also hired me to work alongside her at Greenfield Community College where she was the Director of Community Service.

All too soon I was trying to tend a 90 foot long perennial border, filled with divisions from Elsa’s garden. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is not what Elsa expected from her students. Although she had very definite opinions of her own, she always insisted that gardeners please themselves, and plant what they liked, in the way they liked.

Elsa became known for her garden designs, how she combined color and form, but in the end she said, all the colors of nature go together, and there was no point worrying excessively. .

I was fortunate enough to participate in one of the Study and Travel courses Elsa taught at GCC. After familiarizing ourselves with England and its gardens in class for a few weeks, 35 or so of us set off to tour the great and intimate gardens of England with Elsa, entertained by her wit and knowledge. It was  well known that where Elsa was, there was a party.

Right up to the end when she was frail Elsa made a party happen. My husband and I visited her for the last time in mid-January. As it happened, two other friends arrived as well. There was chocolate cake and candies. Laughter and talk. Another of Elsa’s parties.

If there is any word that defines Elsa it is teacher. She had taught elementary children in a village school in England, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in NYC,  and more locally, the Academy at Charlemont. She taught garden workshops in her own garden, and she went on the road lecturing, teaching, amusing, and delighting audiences all across the country. Sometimes she lectured to local garden clubs, and sometimes she gave workshops or lectures for august organizations like Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, the New York Botanical Garden, and even the Whitney Museum of Art.

Together we wrote an article for Horticulture Magazine. I loved interviewing Elsa for that piece about Color in the Garden because we talked about so much more than the task at hand. I learned about her job teaching in the Penshurst Village school in England during WWII where her young students brought her jam jars filled with flowers. She lived in a cottage where she gave the goats free range, and entertained a number of servicemen who seemed to find their way to her door.

She told me about her days working for British Information Services in Rockefeller Center in NYC, and meeting Mike. When we heard that Benny Goodman had died she reminisced about the apartment she and Mike shared on West 13^th Street, and how they wore out three Benny Goodman records – and the linoleum dancing in the kitchen.

Elsa edited and revised the article with me numerous times, and then the editor at Horticulture had a few things to suggest. It finally appeared in January 1987 with gorgeous photographs by Garry Mottau. Elsa, Gary and I all met in Elsa’s July garden at dawn to get the best light. I ran around holding a shiny sheet of thermax insulation to help gently direct sun onto Elsa’s face or particular flower. It was an amazing photography lesson for me, and lots of fun.

When she retired from GCC, she wrote a book, A Garden of One’s Own: Making and Keeping Your Flower Garden that was published in 1994. Mottau again did the photos. I remember the discussions about a title.  She would have no designing or creating. “Make and keep were good anglo-saxon words,” she said. That is what she chose.

Elsa was just a little older than my mother, but I never thought of her in those terms. Still I loved hearing about the girls, students from Fieldston where she taught, who spent summers with her in Heath for several years. Elsa once told me that they had all gone on an outing to Tanglewood and some music lover looked at this bevy of girls and asked what camp they belonged to. One girl drew herself up, . “We are not a camp. We are Mrs. Bakalar’s girls,” she said with great dignity.

I like to think maybe I became one of Mrs. Bakalar’s girls, too. ###

BETWEEN THE ROWS  February 6, 2010

The Gardener’s Color Palette

Tom Fischer, Editor in Chief of Timber Press, has created a small, inexpensive book with more than 100 gorgeous photographs by Clive Nichols of 100 plants in the ranges of 10 colors – scarlet, orange, lime, blue, mahogany, and more!

My garden, full of roses as it is, is heavy on pink, but when I look through this book I can’t help imagining a color themed garden.  Lots of people have blue and white gardens, which are easy because there are so many blue and white flowers, but when I look at the photographs of scarlet crocosmias, Gardenview Scarlet bee balm, Rubinzwerg sneezeweed and red canyon sage, I am tempted to put together a Red Garden. It probably won’t look like the long red border I saw on a garden trip to England, but a book like this makes one dream.

What color would you choose for a color theme border?  Mauve with alliums, bellflowers and clematis?  Yellow and white would  be very pretty too.