Human Flower Project
Gardening & Landscape
New Haven, Connecticut USA
Philadelphia, PA USA
Kodiak Island, Alaska, USA
Saturday, March 10, 2012
This Blessed Plot
What happened to the front garden? The original home theater and neighborhood forum, a gift that’s been retracted. (Thank you, John.)
Essay and photos by John Levett
There’s a saying: ‘Don’t change yer clout ‘til may is out.’ Discussion used to always arise about whether changing clout (clothing) should take place after the may (hawthorn) came out or May came in. Whatever. The may is out and in these parts it feels as if the season is on the turn. The weather has been kind this year. It’s just turned March and I’m in credit with the energy company. We had a cold spell at the opening of February but you get the feeling that that’s that.
March is busy: finish pruning anything left before nesting time, clear the space of rubbish, repair paths, wash out the shed & re-prime, buy in the mulch, first feed, tie in stray shoots, secure ramblers—get to the point where you feel you can start sitting in the garden. It’s a long month to come before I’m in that state but it’s started.
It’s a time when the planning trope creeps back in. What’s the new grand design? What’s not there that should be? What have I always planned to raise? Everything’s possible at this time. Nothing that’s not worth a shot. Gardening in heroic mode. (Note to self: “Yes it’s failure, but how good a failure?” - Cornell West.)
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Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Pittosporum Vindicated
After a bloomless 2011, five pittosporums more than make up for it in Austin, Texas.
A honeybee at work on the flowers of Pittosporum tobira
March 7, 2012
Photo: Human Flower Project
A rock-headed landscape specialist advised us ten years ago to chop down an old pittosporum tree. But we don’t think he’d suggest such a thing today. The huge sprawling plant —five of them actually, growing under and through a mott of live oaks in the side yard – is in full bloom. Opening the front door to get the newspaper is an ethereal act. The bees are intent but everyone else in the vicinity is spellbound— even if they don’t know why.
In last year’s drought there were no blossoms at all, a sad spring. But this year’s flowering has more than made up for it. In twelve Marches, we can’t remember a more exuberant show.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Keeping Up with Snails
An old garden pest puts a dent in what has been predicted to be a banner year for wildflowers.
A brown garden snail and milk snail try to escape
after one of many hunts, Austin, Texas, 2/28/12
Photo: Human Flower Project
The glory days of March in Texas are nigh. After an unrelenting drought, good rains late last year and intermittent downpours over the past two months have the wildflower swamis grinning in expectation.
So were we until about a week ago, when we saw that a once-lush patch of bluebonnet plants along the front slope was taking a beating. The leaves were mangled and bitten off. Trampled by pigmy goats?
No. Along the central stalk of two big Agave americanas and deep into a razor sharp sotol, we spotted snails, scores of them, tucked away for the afternoon.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Weaving among Hardiness Zones
Kentuckian Allen Bush pushes the limit with new plants from Florida, seduced by the USDA’s new maps.
Edgeworth chrysantha: an early bloomer, “insanely intoxicating”
Photo: W.J. Hayden
By Allen Bush
The long awaited interactive garden tool was released a few weeks before our Florida vacation. I didn’t study the new map, though I could see Louisville, Kentucky, was colored some shade of green. There were adjacent greens but I’m red-green colorblind. It was all a muddle.
On our vacation to Sanibel Island, a few weeks later, Mary Vaananen, my Jelitto colleague, emailed and announced that Louisville had been upgraded from 6b (-5 F to 0 F/-20.6 C to -17.8 C) to 7a (0 F to 5 F/-17.8C to -15 C). I started shopping for native Florida plants the next day. Florida and Kentucky have a lot in common. Florida once sat at the bottom of an ocean floor; so did Kentucky. In 1824, botanist Constantine Rafinesque wrote in Annals of Kentucky: “The briny oceans cover the whole land of Kentucky.” Kentucky was only 10 degrees north of the equator, when we were sitting under a shallow ocean in the Devonian Period 380 million years ago.