Movie Gardens

Photo credit: Melinda Sue Gordon - Universal Studios

Amy Stewart over at Garden Rant posted about the reality of Meryl’s Streep’s garden in the new movie, It’s Complicated. As the LA Times article said, this garden was not planted or tended in situ. It is a movie set. The plants for this ‘potager’ were grown in a greenhouse and laid out when it was time for the scene to be shot. Tomatoes were wired to the plants.

Some people have complained that this fantasy of a garden is laid out to seduce would be gardeners, and even experienced gardeners to such a degree that they will be disappointed and discouraged at not being able to create such a thing themselves. For myself, I cannot believe there are too many people who look at any house or garden in a movie who do not understand this is fantasy. It is a set created to establish character, and to entertain.

However, for those who are inspired by sets Amy passed along Remodelista’s posting on stealing the look with similar items that are available to us all. For a price.

Even before this movie came out, with its seductive garden, I’ve been thinking about making up a list of movies with beautiful or interesting gardens. I’ve come up with the recent documentary The Garden about a community garden in LA which is moving and frustrating and wonderful; The Secret Garden which heals; The Garden of the Finzi-Continis which I barely remember; Enchanted April with its glorious landscapes;  and Under the Tuscan Sun that has a fantasy house and garden. Surely there are other movies with notable, unique gardens or landscapes. What would you add?

A Retiring Garden?

Bruce and Anne Aune

“The garden just grew,” Bruce Aune said with a slight shrug as we sat in his living room and looked out across a still green lawn to a neat curving border. All the perennials had been cut back, but shrubs, evergreen and deciduous, and small trees remained, providing the bones and structure of this garden.

While it is true that the garden had changed over time as Bruce and his wife Anne moved into retirement, it had not changed in ways I expected a retirement garden would evolve. The Aunes admitted that beds were still being added to the garden, but were quick to say that those beds were filled with small trees and shrubs, and hostas, which meant less work during the main part of the growing season. “We are not buying and planting, as we did,” Anne said. “We do prune, and deadhead. And we replace things that die.”

A tour of this Montague garden begins on one side of the house and ends on the other, but requires some doubling back along enticing secondary paths to see the whole. The lawn, is sunny, but beyond the deep shrub beds woodland trees throw some shade. A huge 30 year old holly, azaleas and rhododendrons remain points of interest in this season. Bruce said they have chosen a number of PJM rhododendron varieties even though the color is not their favorite, “but we love the foliage,” which turns a deep, almost bronze shade in fall.

Winterberry

A colorful exclamation point in the border was the winterberry trees, two females in full brilliant red berry, and one leafless and berryless male.

Early on the Aunes worked with landscape designer Gordon Fletcher-Howell of Amherst who assured them that there were no shortcuts to a beautiful garden. A mantra they have come to repeat many times. Repairing the lawn was one of their first improvements to the house that was built in 1990. Two hundred and forty yards of loam were brought in to provide a level lawn surface, a proper base for seeding the lawn, and enrichment for the new beds as they were laid out. Currently there are about 400 running feet of deep beds.

Bruce and Anne are both Master Gardeners and work together in the garden, but they each have their own special interests. Bruce loves hostas. His collection includes over 100 varieties of every size, color and pattern. His biggest problem is the voles who love the roots which provide just the taste and nutrition that voles need. “I’ve touched a wilting hosta and knocked it right over. The roots were totally gone,” he said.

Hosta cage

To foil the voles Bruce now plants each hosta inside a hardware cloth cage, actually a cylinder he builds to the appropriate diameter. The cylinder is buried 7 – 8 inches deep with 2 or 3 inches remaining above the ground. The protruding section of hardware cloth is painted with black car primer to be inconspicuous. Voles will only burrow about 6 inches below ground “and their delicate little feet can’t go over the wire cage,” Anne said. Thus are the hostas preserved for another season.

Rock Garden

Anne has a love of conifers and alpine plants. One of the newer sections of the garden is the rock garden with its striking stone bench. Bruce brought mossy and lichen covered stones from the woods to the gentle slope where Anne planted a variety of conifers including a dwarf Mugo pine, Japanese white pine, a bird’s nest spruce, and chamaecyprus as well as heathers and succulents. This area with its differing needle forms and textures remains interesting even in winter.

Although, true to their name, evergreens do remain green throughout the year, Anne pointed out that they do not necessarily remain the same shade of green. Some are a brilliant yellow green in the spring and early summer, but shade to a dark bronze in the fall.

Bruce retired as a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts and Anne from teaching French at Amherst High School; both continue to learn by becoming members of the New England Hosta Society and the North American Rock Garden Society. These active societies put out newsletters, have plant sales, organize meetings, letures and tours. They have also been a way to meet those with similar interests and passions.

On tours they have seen different ways that gardeners handle their extensive collection. Bruce remembered one garden with over 2000 hostas, each labeled with full information about the plant including the date planted. He recalled another garden where each hosta was isolated as a specimen and he felt it was more like looking at an insect collection.

The Aunes have chosen instead to integrate their special plants into a graceful whole. Visitors may not be aware of the rarity or unusual nature of some of the hostas and conifers, but all recognize their beauty and feel welcomed into this landscape.

The pleasure and information the Aunes have gotten from their society memberships remind me that during gift giving seasons memberships in a specialty society make an excellent present. The cost is modest, but the return is great. Most horticultural and plant societies now have websites and joining is very easy. For more information about the New England Hosta Society (www.nehosta.org) or the North American Rock Garden Society (www.nargs.org) logon to their respective websites. There are societies for many other plants, easily found on the Internet.

Between the Rows  December 5, 2009

The Brother Gardeners

The Brother Gardeners

Much has been written about the “Columbian Exchange,” which refers to the plants and animals (and diseases) that were exchanged between the Old World and the New once Columbus started ships regularly traveling across the Atlantic. The Old World owes a lot to the New, especially in an agricultural sense. Potatoes, corn, tomatoes, cocoa, pineapples and pumpkins and a dozen other crops traveled from the New World to the Old so successfully that everyone’s diet changed radically.

However, in addition to the food crops that traveled across the ocean, countless ornamental plants were also shipped from the colonies, as we were then, to London for dispersal to various beautiful estates. The men responsible for beginning this exchange were John Bartram, a Quaker farmer, amateur botanist and friend of Benjamin Franklin, in Pennsylvania and Peter Collinson, a successful Quaker businessman and a passionate gardener living in London, who was also an agent for Benjamin Franklin’s new subscription library.

The first book Collinson sent Franklin was about horticulture, because he hoped this hint would bring him some exotic Pennsylvania plants in exchange as a thank you. That didn’t happen and he finally had to ask for plants. Franklin was no plant hunter, but he eventually sent him the name of John Bartram. In 1734 Collinson collected the first two seed boxes that Bartram sent across the Atlantic; all the seeds were in good shape. Thus a four decade friendship began, resulting in a business for Bartram, and the planting of beautiful American forests and shrubberies on British estates.

The story of this friendship is told in The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obessession by Andrea Wulf (Knopf $35).

It is easy to understand how difficult it must have been to ship seeds and plants from Pennsylvania to London when the trip was so long and perilous. Finding a way to pack the seeds and cuttings so they would arrive in good shape and ready to be planted after a long sea journey was just one problem. Over the years, as war between France and England was declared in 1756, ships carrying Bartram’s boxes were lost to battles as well as to storms that might sink a ship.

Trees like the balsam fir and sugar maple had already made their way to Britain, but they remained very rare. Trees, shrubs and flowers that Bartram introduced to England included the river birch, Franklin tree (Franklinia alatamaha), witch hazel, sourwood tree, white pine, fringe tree, Hydrangea arborescens, mountain laurel, great laurel, sassafras, scarlet oak, goldenrod, Eastern hemlock, Phlox divaricata, as well as seeds and cuttings of plants that were already known in England, but not easily propagated.

Through Collinson and his contacts, Bartram and his boxes became well known in England. In 1765 King George III named him the King’s Botanist for North America and paid him a stipend until Bartram died in 1777. At the same time Bartram’s own garden continued to grow and became the first Botanic Garden in this country.

Wulf also describes the scientific and horticultural world of the time. One controversy of the day was plant taxonomy and nomenclature. There was little agreement about how to name plants, although botantists had tried to replace names like “welcome home husband though never so drunk” with Latin names. One of the horticultural experts, Philip Miller, preferred to call Magnolia grandiflora Magnolia foliis lanceolatis persistentibus, caule erecto arboreo, trying to include a description of every aspect of the tree.

The ultimate winner of this debate, although not without considerable reluctance on the part of many, was Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) of Sweden. He did not like long plant names because it became so difficult to communicate with other botanists, especially as so many new plants were being discovered. He wanted a single system and came up with a two word name for every plant. First would be the genus, like Magnolia, and a second word like grandiflora would denote the individual species. This binomial system was controversial because Linnaeus paid so much attention to the sexual parts of each plant, and discussing sex in this way offended many scientists.

The history of plant hunting, and plant politics, can be told through the naming of certain plants. Linnaeus named the Rudbekia for his teacher Olof Rudbeck, and the Kalmia or laurel for Pehr Kalm, who made an important plant hunting trip to North America. The Magnolia is named for Pierre Magnol “who invented the concept of plant families’ and Gardenia for the Scottish botanist, Alexander Garden.

Enmities played out in names as well. Linnaeus named a stinky weed Siegesbeckia for Johann Siegesbeck who criticized Linnaeus’ sexual classification system for many years. Since there was more than one such case, Linnaeus often found himself beleaguered with requests to have plants names changed.

Linnaeus himself chose a small pink woodland flower to bear his name, Linnaea, not because he was modest, but because he felt “forgotten and ignored.”

John Bartram did not achieve the fame of Johnny Appleseed, but his plant hunting and propagating changed the domestic landscape for gardeners here in what was soon to be the United States, and in the great botanic gardens and estates of England.

As Thanksgiving arrives I am remembering John Bartram and Peter Collinson and giving thanks for all the friendships that have grown in the garden throughout the years, and for the beautiful changes that have been wrought in our gardens because of those friendships.

Between the Rows  November 21, 2009

DON’T FORGET THE GIVEAWAY !  Leave a comment about a book you found especially useful and engaging, or your own seed starting tip and on December 6th I’ll choose one commenter at random to win Nan Ondra’s new book, The Perennial Care Manual and 2 boxes of CowPots.

Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden

Peggy Rockefeller hybrid tea rose

All those who think roses are finicky plants that require fussing and lots of chemical sprays for disease and bugs will be surprised when they visit the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) in the Bronx with its more than 3000 healthy roses.

Curator Peter Kukielski

            I visited the garden last week and spent an afternoon with the Curator, Peter Kukielski, the man who has supervised the renovation of the garden over the past three years, more than doubling the number of roses in the garden and choosing hardy, disease resistant roses making this is one of the most environmentally friendly rose gardens in the world.

            The rose garden, designed by Beatrix Farrand in 1916, but not completed until 1988 after decades of varying interest, is laid out in a sunny hollow. It is now enclosed by new metal trellising with three entries, intersecting paths and a graceful gazebo in the center. There were still large beds of turf so my first question was to ask Kukielski  how he fit so many more roses into the defined space.

            “I just made better use of the space, starting with planting the roses more closely together,” he said matter of factly. He also explained that he used the full depth of the beds which had not been done before. Even though a bed might be 14 feet deep, the roses were planted in a single row. Now the depth of the bed is filled with climbers along the trellis, generous shrubs in the middle of the bed and low growers in front along the path.

            We walked through the main entry where David Austin roses still bloomed on either side of us. “I wanted people to feel embraced by the roses and the garden when they entered,” Kukielski said smiling, and watching me to see if I felt the effect he had worked to create.

            “When I came, there were heritage roses growing by this entry, but they only bloom once a year. The rest of the time it was only green. Now the deep beds on either side of the main entrance are filled with David Austin hybrids which give a long season of bloom,” he said happily as he saw my own pleasure at the loveliness of the roses, even in early November.

            As we made our way to the North Entrance we came to a planting that included EarthKind roses. I have seen this label in nurseries, but had little idea of what it meant, thinking it was some marketing ploy. Kukielski explained that researchers at the Texas A&M University wanted to identify already existing roses with good flowers that were hardy and disease resistant, suitable for planting in sustainably managed gardens. “They chose roses they thought might have strong genes, planted them and watered them for one year. After that they gave them no care for nine years. In the tenth year they chose the first roses to get an EarthKind designation. More have been added since then,: Kukielski said.

            I was familiar with some of the EarthKind roses including KnockOut, The Fairy, New Dawn and Carefree Beauty which grow in my garden. Now I am thinking about which other EarthKind roses I can add.  The directions for EarthKind roses call only for compost and mulching.

            Kukielski said he was particularly interested in the EarthKind roses as well as the relatively new varieties introduced by the German hybridizer Kordes. This old company has been hybridizing for a century, but the newest generation to take over realized that sustainability was going to be important for success in the future. Their hybridizing efforts were to concentrate on disease resistant roses. One of the results is the Fairy Tale series including Kosmos, Cinderella and Brothers Grimm.

            Because New York state has new rules that make many of the chemicals previously used in growing roses illegal Kukuielski has a need, as well as a desire, to grow these new hybrids.

            No matter what variety he plants he said “we take careful strides now to be pro-active with our soils. . . .We do have a fertilization program that is tweaked again and again each and every year.  Primarily we use ‘Rose Tone’ 3 times a year.  I like this product because it is all organic and supplies all 16 essential nutrients.  We also supplement this with some foliar feeding using seaweed extracts, fish emulsions, Monty’s Joy Juice, and/or potassium silicate.  Next year we will be adding a product called Uncle Tom’s Rose Tonic from England.”

            Kukielski explained that the NYBG does have a compost pile and he uses “compost, manure, chopped leaves, and a product called ‘roots’” whenever a new plant is put in.  He also mulches with chopped leaves twice a year.

            Evaluation of each rose bush goes on all year. During my tour we met one of the many volunteers who help keep the garden in good condition. This volunteer was clutching a handful of evaluation forms and he was giving all aspects of the rose careful consideration. Was the foliage healthy? Was there leaf drop or insect damage? What was the condition of the flowers? Was there fragrance?

            I asked if he would give this small white rose a B- or B+ and he said he wished it were that easy.   After some discussion, and with a look at Kukielski, we agreed that a ‘high 7’ was a good mark. The rose will stay in the garden.

            That rose only got a 7, but my day with Peter Kukielski definitely rated a 10!

Between the Rows    November 14, 2009

Country Gardens

The  city is left behind. I’m home and the first trip out to visit friends we see a porcupine in front of the house eating an apple falled from our old apple tree.

Bok choi

We had a delicious lunch of homemade tomato juice (with a few additions) carrot and parsnip soup, little chicken salad sandwiches and tiny fruit tarts. One of the best things about having a wonderful lunch at this house is having a tour of the vegetable garden before we leave. I took away a bag of bok choi, and 

Tuscan kale and wild kale.

I admired the last of the artichoke foliage. Can you believe there is a gardener skilled enough to grow artichokes on a high Massachusetts hill?  A bag was filled with leeks too. This will be Heavenly Soup and Bread Week at our house. Thank you Mary Kay and Earl.

Then it was back home. The porcupine was back too, but I don’t think he found the weeds and roses as tasty as the apples.

City Flowers – November

Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, NYC

My friend Peter and I drove into Manhattan for a day of wandering and listening to the symphony of the city, so it was appropriate and easy to park under Lincoln Center. I got to see all the changes and new construction. Then we were off to the subway and downtown.  We saw lots of flowers . . .

flowers on clothes,

flowers on silk brocades (lots of flowers at Pearl River),

flowers on pillows,

and flowers on china. As the commonweeder I really liked this plate but I didn’t buy it.

We saw flowers outside the windows,

we saw sparkly mosaic flowers inside the windows.

If there are mosaic flowers, there are bound to be mosaic butterflies, even in the concrete canyons of SoHo.

We saw armloads of flowers in street corner shops,

and pots full of flowers at fancy florist shops. When it was time to start finding our way home we found the scene had changed at Lincoln Center.

A farmer’s market had been set up right in front of Barnes and Noble and across the street from Lincoln Center. Fruits  . . . .

and vegetables, too. Cauli – flowers!

Of course we saw roses. On the street corners, in the fancy shops and even in the fancy food shops like Dean and Deluca.  What a day!

Heath School Garden

Carin Burnes and Virginia Gary

             ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

             How does your garden grow?

            With silver bells and cockleshells,

            And pretty maids all in a row.’

            Illustrations of this familiar nursery rhyme tend to show proper young ladies in beribboned batiste holding colorful watering cans with clean hands, but while the students at the Heath Elementary School do all they can to make their garden grow, there is no sign of batiste.

            Real modern children favor denim and t-shirts and hands dirty with planting, weeding and harvesting.

            Five years ago Carin and Chris Burnes, who with their children are avid organic gardeners, started a Garden Club at the school. This was essentially an extra-curricular activity, but two years ago, Virginia Gary, a teacher, saw how gardening could be integrated into the curriculum. Many parents feared their children would not be interested, but since there is as much fun as learning in the garden those fears were unfounded.

            Gary explained the ways the garden fits into the standard curriculum. The theme for all the kindergarten children is Explore; there is everything to explore in the garden.

            Gary teaches one of the Primary classes this year (Heath School combines ages in some classes) and the science curriculum focuses on Life Cycles. She said last spring students planted pole beans with beans they had saved from the previous year’s crop. That was a concrete example of complete life cycle.

            Third and fourth graders study plants. Where better than in a garden?

            It is a challenge to find a garden hook in the fifth and sixth grade curriculum, but this year they will be doing soil testing and studying the implications, as well as helping spread wood chip mulch around the perimeter of the garden in every gardener’s never ending battle against weeds.

            Each classroom accepts responsibility for a section of the garden. The kindergarteners got the biggest plants – Hubbard squash!

 Jorie McCloud’s class grew the native American Three Sisters, corn, squash and beans, but with a twist. Instead of sweet corn McCloud grew broom corn. These older children combine their garden work with what they learned at Old Sturbridge Village about brooms. They will make their own broom and research the capabilities of the brooms they find in their own homes.

When it was all planted the garden included all the usual veggies.

            It took some community help to start the garden in the spring. Mike Smead rototilled and Dominic Musacchio, Shelburne Farm and Garden, and Avery’s General Store donated seeds and plants. David Gott of the Benson Place blueberry farm worked with the older students on pruning the school’s fruit trees.

            All the students spend some time in the garden every week.  Working with the cold frames provide extra excitement because the glass sections are not hinged and need to be lifted and laid on the grass. And what enjoys that warm space under the glass after it has been in the sun for a while? Snakes!

            “Yes,” Gary sighed, “everyone loves snakes. And catching crickets. And watching caterpillars. I am hoping we can plant a butterfly and hummingbird garden so we can attract even more birds and butterflies.

            “Thinning the carrots is not so much fun. Still, one child got so carried away with thinning, we had to replant that section. It’s all learning,” Gary said.

            The garden was tended during the summer by families who took responsibility for a week or two.  Some families spent a lot of time in the garden together. Families were also welcome to harvest the produce as it came in.

            Now that school is in session produce has turned up in cafeteria lunches. The children loved digging up the potatoes and washing them. And eating them, However, the big stuffed baked potatoes were not from the garden. Even though the youngest students had dug and washed their own small potatoes, they had trouble grasping the concept that the big potatoes did not come from their own garden.

            Teachers and students continue to learn, as I have, that work in the garden leads down many paths, history, math, writing, art and music.  They measure and map the garden, keep journals of the garden’s progress, study how plants like potatoes originated in the New World, are transplanted to Europe, become diseased and send thousands of Irish immigrants to the United States to escape the great Potato Famine. This is a whole different aspect of the ‘Columbian Exchange’, the movement of plants both east and west across the Atlantic.

            They look at the mysterious zucchini-pumpkin cross and talk about pollinators, pollination, and hybridization.

            “We want to feed the school,” Gary said. “That is one of our goals.”  To that end they are planning ways to improve the garden. “We need a shed. Right now it takes nearly half a period just to bring the wheelbarrow and tools to the garden. We want to make raised beds which would make it easier for the students, and keep the soil from compacting.”  Grants are being written. All donations are welcome.

            “Inch by inch, row by row,” this garden is growing, as are the gardeners. They grow in their understanding of the soil, in their appreciation of the bounty they can help produce, in the discovery of where they fit, and how they affect the natural systems of our planet. That is a full curriculum.  ###

In early June I visited the Heath School for Garden Day. The kindergarteners were going to plant sunflowers around their sand pile. They dug a trench but needed bags of top soil. Heavy bags. The girls were just as strong and devoted to duty as the boys.

The sunflowers grew all summer, as best they could this cold wet summer. Another lesson in the garden, but the kindergarteners were perfectly happy.          

      Between the Rows   October 10, 2009 

A Mysterious Lady

When I visited Marie Stella at her house, Beaver Lodge, she took me out onto the deck overlooking the woods and beaver pond. She said The Birch Woman was a sculpture done by Sally Fine. I looked, but did not see.

Birch Woman

Although the birches were beginning to lose their leaves, my eyes had to adjust to the shifting light and shadows as the leaves danced in the autumn breeze, until suddenly the Birch Woman materialized.

Birch Woman by Sally Fine

The Birch Woman had come to The Beaver Lodge after being exhibited at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA.  The DeCordova Museum Sculpture Park is comprised of 35 acres where modern outdoor sculptures are on display, some from the Museum’s own permanent collection, some are on loan from private collectors, dealers and artists, and a few have been created by artists for a particular site in the Park. “Many of these installations are environmentally based, in terms of both materials and content.”

Marie plans to exhibit the work of  other environmental artists in the future.

Gardens of Possibility

Marie Stella

            “We live where there is so much possibility in the landscape,” Marie Stella said to me as we stood on the deck of Beaver Lodge, her house in Ashfield, looking through the woods down to the beaver pond.  Stella has entered into most of those possibilities, using native plants, planting vegetables and fruits where a lawn might be expected, harvesting rainwater, using stone from the house site to form walls of the retention pond, and turning the oaks that had to be cut into flooring.

            All of her projects are in aid of creating a sustainable home and landscape that would use little power and other resources while protecting the environment.

            Both the house and the gardens are still works in progress because although Stella has given up her garden design studio in New York City which she has moved into her house, continuing that business, also continuing to lecture, leading garden tours and teaching.

            Her teaching has many facets from working with graduate students from the Landscape Institute at Boston Architectural College, and more informally to opening her LEED Platinum house (the only residence with that high environmental certification in western Massachusetts) to the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) tour of Green Buildings today, October 3^rd from 10am to 4 pm. Logon to NESEA.org for full directions to Stella’s house and many other green buildings in our area. There is no registration or fee. Just show up at the houses you are interested in.

            Through her own Beaver Lodge Environmental Center she is also offering a five weekend workshop on Permaculture Design with Eric Toensmeier, author of Perennial Vegetables: From Artichoke to Zuiko Taro, that will focus on the principles of permaculture, building healthy soils, edible landscaping, water management and much more. Weekends are spaced throughout the year; participants can join during any month.

            I expressed my own wonder at the scope of the domestic projects while maintaining a full professional work schedule, but Stella said, “I love to wake up to this challenge every day. I find it so exciting, but at the same time feel incredible tranquility in this beautiful place.”

Soil Building

            Stella walked me through the raised bed gardens on the south side of the house. She explained that these beds are filled with handmade soil. During the year that the house was being built she took the discarded sheet rock which is mostly gypsum, and laid it where she planned garden beds. She covered this with leaves and weeds, any greenery that needed to be cut, and rotted hay. After that first year she used rot resistant catalpa beams to form the raised beds, and continued filling those beds. It was a form of sheet composting.

            She added some finished compost from her old house, worm castings from her worm bin and planted winter rye as a cover crop last year.

Winter rye cover crop

This spring she turned the winter rye over with a garden fork and planted a full range of vegetables from peas to peppers without doing much cultivating. Everything did well, but the new soil layer is still quite thin so the soil building goes on. Where she has finished the harvest she has planted winter rye as she did last fall. It may look like grass now, but in the spring she will turn it over again. The green shoots and the roots decompose adding organic matter and nutrients to the soil.

Cover crops not only improve and enrich the soil they help keep down the weed population.

The wide paths between the raised beds, and indeed the whole area around the house, have been covered with wood chips.  There is no unsustainable lawn.

This sunny vegetable garden, with perennial crops like raspberries, red and black, blueberries, rhubarb, cardoons and purple asparagus off to one side, is a constant invitation to come out and be in the garden.

Vegetable gardens need sun, but they also need a steady supply of water. Our springs and summers do not often give us that steady supply. This year’s July was the rainiest July on record, and September was the driest September in many years. Stella’s answer to this challenge is a rainwater collection system.  She calculates that rain gutters on the roof will deliver 30,000 gallons of water over the course of the year to a 550 gallon cistern and to a water retention pond.

The cistern water will be gravity fed to the garden, and a solar pump will bring water from the pond to where it is needed in the garden.

There are more plans. She has the supports ready for a grape arbor. A playhouse, built in the same green manner as the house, will soon be ready for visiting youngsters. She’ll need a garage and thinks it could have a sod and wildflower roof.  Maybe a strawbale shed.

“I like there never being an end to the possibilities,” Stella said.  She knows that not all these ideas will appeal to everyone, but she is pleased that her house and landscape contain dozens of lessons for her students, as well as for those friends and visitors who come by.  “People will see what is possible and make their own choices about what they can, and want to do.”

For information about the Permaculture Design course email Marie Stella at kirinfarminc@aol.com.  If you want to visit the house today, Oct. 3, logon to www.NESEA.org website for full directions to the Beaver Lodge. 

 Between the Rows    October 3, 2009

Apples Apples Apples

Ginger Gold and Paula Red

My father never felt dinner was over until he had eaten his apple. The apple was a ritual. He loved cutting an apple in half around the equator to show us, or any available children, the star hidden in the center of the apple. And he proved the adage that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. He rarely needed the services of a doctor until his short final illness.

            With news coverage of the H1N1 flu, we are all looking for ways to stay healthy.  I haven’t heard that the beneficial properties of apples will help in this instance; frequent thorough handwashing is the main prophylactic, but keeping all systems strong and healthy is never a bad idea.

            Apples have all sorts of nutritional benefits providing antioxidants, Vitamins A and C, fiber, and boron which helps strengthen bones.  All this and only 81 calories for a medium sized apple.  It is important to remember that the apple skin is a vital part of these benefits.

            Perhaps the ancients knew of these benefits because apples have been cultivated for thousands of years.  Apples are thought to have originated in Kazakstan. Their culture spread throughout the Fertile Crescent and by 6500 B.C. archeological finds show they were grown in the Jordan Valley.

            The Greek Homer wrote of the pleasure of apples; the Romans Cicero and Pliny the Elder encouraged the growing of apples.  Right here in the United States we have our own historic apple planter, Johnny Appleseed.

            Johnny Appleseed was born as John Chapman in Leominster on September 26, 1774 which seems an appropriate month for the birth of a man who gave his life to planting apples.

            He was only 18 when he set out from Massachusetts and spent the rest of his life wandering in the Midwest, mainly Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, planting apples wherever he went.

            As Michael Pollan pointed out in his book, Botany of Desire, settlers of that day were not as interested in eating an apple a day as they were in drinking apples.  Cider, hard cider, was a way of preserving apples for use all year long.

            Cider is still an important product for apple orchardists, and for their customers. This year Cider Days are scheduled for November 7 and 8, with tours of local orchards throughout the county, and tastings of local cider and apples.  Ben Clark of Clarkdale Fruit Farm said they press cider about once a week. For Cider Days they will have a special Vintage Blend cider, made solely from Northern Spy and Baldwin apples, as well as a Russet Blend made from Roxbury Russet and Golden Russet apples.

            Johnny Appleseed might very well recognize some of the heritage apple varieties that still go into good cider, and are becoming more popular for eating out of hand. Of the 50 or so varieties grown at Clarkdale, about 15 are heritage apples like Cox’s Orange Pippin and Spitzenberg. In fact Spitzenberg is thought to be Thomas Jefferson’s favorite apple.

            Tim Smith at Apex Orchard also grows several heritage varieties including Spitzenberg, Ashmead Kernel, Milton and Baldwin.  Instead of cider, Apex Orchard makes vinegar. Smith says that since the different varieties ripen for harvest over the fall season they use the sweetest varieties available at any given time to make their vinegar. 

            As a baker I was interested in recommendations for pie baking.  Tastes in pies differ as I found.  Clark prefers Gravenstein and Northern Spy, while Smith says his family uses Macintosh and Cortland. He added that when he bakes the pie he always adds a Mutsu.  They both agree that a combination of apples makes the best pie. That is the way I bake my apple pies as well.

            Both Clarkdale and Apex also grow the very popular Honey Crisp apple, a relatively new variety. Smith said that Honey Crisp ripens over a month starting now. One of its benefits is that it keeps so well in the orchard’s storage room where the temperature is kept at 32 or even 30 degrees.  Smith explained that the sugar in the apples keeps them from freezing.

            I asked if I could store apples in my 50 degree dirt floored basement. Smith said yes, depending.  He explained that for every degree above 32 degrees, two weeks of storage time is lost.  I guess I’ll just keep using my refrigerator crisper and restock it frequently.

            We all have our favorite apples. When I was a child I thought Red Delicious apples were a real treat. Nowadays I like Spencer apples for eating.

            Apples are available all year long in the supermarket, but I prefer to eat them during the very long local season. Apples take me through the fall and winter, right into spring when local strawberries come in. 

Davenport Apple Collection at Tower Hill

            Tower Hill Botanic Garden celebrates the fall with their Shades of Autumn: A Family Celebration of the Fall Harvest Season on Columbus Day weekend, October 10, 11 and 12.  A star of the event is the Davenport Collection of Heirloom Apples comprised of 238 trees and 119 pre-20^th century apple varieties.  Each afternoon at 2 pm they will hold an apple tasting, giving visitors a chance to taste some of their old apples, many of which have been very uncommon at the market.

 For full information about Shades of Autumn entertainments including entry fees logon to the Calendar section of their website, www.towerhillbg.org. 

Between the Rows  September 12, 2009