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.

Smith College Bulb Show

A Turkish Delight

Robert Nicholson, Manager of the Lyman Conservatory at Smith College complained about the challenges of all the cloudy weather we have been having, but, once again, he and the crew more than met the challenge of forcing 5000 bulbs to bloom all at the same time. The Conservatory is a Turkish Delight of flower and fragrance, with all the usual bulbs, but also many freesias and delicate species tulips from Turkey.

Opening Night

On Friday evening I attended the lecture by Smith alum, Lynden B. Miller. She described the public gardens she has designed over a long career, and what she has learned about plants that work in public gardens. Fortunately, if you missed the talk you can get all that information in her beautifully  illustrated new book Parks, Plants and People.

Lynden B. Miller and her book

After her talk in the new Campus Center, attendees were invited to a preview of the Bulb Show which will run for two weeks until March 21. The Conservatory is open every day from 10 am to 4 pm. A $2 donation is requested.

Botanical Radiography

In addition to the Bulb Show, there is a beautiful and fascinating display of radiography, The Hidden Beauty of Plants, in the Church Gallery of the Conservatory. These exhibit is a collaboration between the Smith Botanic Garden, Dr. Merrill Raikes, retired radiologist and Robert B. Hallock of the UMass physics department. This exhibit will continue until September 30.

Gardens appeal to every sense. This year there is an audio installation in the Palm House, What Every Gardener Knows. This piece by Susan Hillier (Smith ‘61) is presented in collaboration with the Smith College Museum of Art. It will continue only until March 31.

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.

Lynden B. Miller

The annual Smith College Bulb Show at the Lyman Conservatory will begin with a free lecture by Lynden B. Miller (Smith ‘60) in the Carroll Room at the Campus Center at 7:30 pm on Friday, March 5.  Miller is a noted public garden designer and will be talking about her new book Parks, Plants and People: Beautifying the Urban Landscape.  She feels that “beautiful parks and gardens are essential urban oases with economic benefits and the power to transform the way people behave and feel about their cities.” After the lecture attendees can tour the Bulb Show.

Miller is currently director of the Conservatory Garden in Central Park which she rescued and restored, but “her work includes gardens for The Central Park Zoo, Bryant Park, The New York Botanical Garden, Madison Square Park and Wagner Park in Battery Park City as well as many smaller projects in all five boroughs and beyond.”  It is heartening to know that as we talk about ‘nature deficit’ in children, we are also coming to acknowledge that people of every age benefit from the beauty and calm of a garden, of natural green space.

In her book, and her work Miller shows us the importance of public gardens, and with luck, will give us new eyes to look at the public spaces in our own communities.

The Smith College Bulb Show runs from March 6 through Sunday, March 21 from 10 am to 4 pm every day. A $2 donation is suggested. In addition to the spectacular bloom there will be an exhibition, The Inner Beauty of Flowers, radiograph and Xray photographs of flowers, and an audio installation of music composed by Susan Hiller (‘61) titled What Every Gardener Knows playing in the Lyman Conservatory Palm House.

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 Flowery Mead

My Flowery Mead

Now you know why I chose the name commonweeder. I love common weeds. Otherwise known as wild flowers. In some circles.  I call this wildflower garden my flowery mead. Others may call it my lawn.

Lawns have become controversial because they can take a toll on the environment.  Herbicides and pesticides can runoff into streams and other waterways causing pollution and killing wildlife. Many people water their lawns when the weather is hot and dry, using that precious resource, water.  Many people (like me, or more specifically my husband) use power mowers that use gas and pollute the air.

There are various ways to cut down on this environmental toll. We never use chemical fertilizer. My husband thinks the grass grows quite fast enough, thank you very much.  I do lime the lawn periodically. That make nutrients available to all the plants in the lawn. I want to encourage the microbial and animal life in my lawn, not kill it.

We never water the lawn. Should it go dormant and brown, it will green up again when the rains come.

We mow as infrequently as possible. My husband and I do have different opinions about that.

We are trying to eliminate lawn. Some lawn has been turned into The Lawn Beds. The Daylily Bank, The Rose Bank and The Early Garden are in process. I’m also removing the grass from a wide strip next to the road and planting hydrangeas and barren strawberry ground cover.

This is planning season. There are many ways to create a sustainable lawn and many resources to help you do this. Paul Tukey has written The Organic Lawn Care Manual, available and bookstores and libraries. You can also log in to is SafeLawns website.

The Lawn Reform website also has advice and resources. You’ll see some of the best and most influential gardeners have joined this movement. Your lawn can be beautiful – and healthy for you and the environment.

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.

More Reading

This morning I was so excited while sending in my online rose order that I gave a shipping date of a month earlier than was wise. Now I have to call them and explain that my desire to get these new roses in the ground overwhelmed me, but I finally realized I have to bow to the realities of our Heath climate.

Having put off planting dates, I satisfied myself by settling back to finish two excellent but very different books that I have been reading.

The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds, and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot Bloomsbury $25) is by Chip Brantley, a local author who has written extensively about food and flavor.

I confess that when I first saw pluots being sold at the supermarket, I thought it was some kind of marketing ploy, and that fruit farmers were simply operating under the theory that consumers would buy more of anything new. I did not think that farmers were actually looking for fruit with wonderful flavor and sweetness. Brantley has disabused me of that un-generous thought.

Brantley also explains why I, and many other shoppers, have hesitated in front of the plum bins at the market. There are dozens of plum varieties that ripen over a long season. The simply labeled black or red plums that you buy on July 1 are not going to be the same black or red plums you buy on July 15 or August 1. You’ll be getting a different plum as the different varieties ripen. This explains why I have hurried back to a store to see if I could get the plums from that particular shipment because they were so good. It never occurred to me they were good, or only OK, because I was getting a different variety each time.

Some fruit breeders in California like Floyd Zaiger who have been growing and hybridizing fruit for more than a half century, wanted to make the plum more flavorful and crossed plums with other fruits, resulting in pluots, plumcots, and apriums, all plum-apricot hybrids. Brantley learned that one of the measures of a good hybrid was its Brix measure. The Brix scale measures sugar content.. A Brix of 12 is poor, 21 is really good but 26 is outstanding.

Brantley reminds us that Luther Burbank, one of the great hybridizers, was a Massachusetts native, growing up in Lancaster, and moving to California in 1875 where he started improving all manner of plants including the plum. He was the first to use the term plumcots and in 1907 introduced his Santa Rosa plum, which was the most widely sold plum in the U.S. for over 50 years.

We also get to meet Rod Milton, whose family had been farming for over 100 hundred years, Mike Jackson who decided to ‘chase flavor’, as we learn all about Dapple Dandies, Flavorella and Dinosaur Eggs in the most entertaining way.

In Lives of the Trees: An Uncommon History (Algonquin $19.95) Diana Wells takes us through centuries of myth and history to give us weird, wonderful and poetic facts about 100 familiar and not so familiar trees. For example, how many of you have been stumped when a child asked you what is frankincense? Or even worse, what would the Baby Jesus need with frankincense?

According to Wells Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt sent to the Land of Punt (now Somaliland) for 32 frankincense trees to plant near an Egyptian temple in 1482 BCE. As you might imagine from its name, the small frankincense tree produces a resin that is used as a high quality incense. It was extremely valuable.  As for the Baby Jesus, I always imagined that the three gifts brought by the Wise Men financed the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, and kept them afloat until it was safe for them to return to Nazareth.

The maple which is native to many parts of the world, gets a substantial entry ranging from our native red maple to the varied and delicate maples of Japan and the Norway maple which has become a dangerous invasive in our country.

I have long wondered about the Monkey-puzzle tree which shows up in so many English mysteries and novels. This tree, Araucaria, is originally from Chile; seeds were was brought to England in 1795. It is so ancient that it was growing in the days of the dinosaurs. It has been thought that those strong prickles protected the tree from browsing dinos.

Monkey-puzzle trees were very popular in England, especially during the Victorian age as a weird and exotic specimen tree. I saw a couple in California, and did not see the appeal, but it is a different time.

Many of the trees Wells describes are ancient varieties, or ancient in their current self. There is a bristlecone pine in California that is called the Methusela tree because it has been calculated to be 4700 years old.

Olive trees send up shoots after the main trunk is cut down, regenerating itself  for centuries. Some olive trees are thought to be 1000 years old.

For a time coffee was one of the most dangerous trees. It was banned by both Muslims and Christians at different time. Coffee drinkers could even be put in sacks and drowned in Constantinople for a time.

So many trees.  So many stories. More than enough to while away the hours before rose planting season. ###

Hope to see some of you at the Greenfield Winterfare on Saturday, February 6 from 10 – 2 pm at Greenfield High School. Fresh produce, barter fare, workshops and Soup for Lunch.

Between the Rows  January 23, 2010