Human Flower Project

Gardening & Landscape

Friday, March 12, 2010

There’s More to Life than Squirrels

Crocus and sweet box are blooming in Louisville. Allen Bush isn’t declaring victory but he’s out-of-doors, working with winter on its concession speech.

Sasa veitchii, in the author’s alley garden, March 2010
Photo: Allen Bush

By Allen Bush

Cold and gray is the lonesome price of a Kentucky winter.  I pay little mind to the garden for three long months except to tap the kitchen window to shoo the squirrels away from the bird feeder.  A sweet-scented, yellow-flowering Witch Hazel, Hamamelis mollis ‘Wisley Supreme’ ignores the winter forecast and blooms triumphantly for weeks in February and early March.  I can also see bits of green that freckle the brown hued landscape of Hydrangeas seed heads and Panicum leaves. 

My wife Rose contends I have it in for evergreens, but I don’t completely disown them. I can point to two pencil-thin boxwoods, Buxus ‘Graham Blandy,’ standing at attention in the back garden, and a young Yucca rostrata nearby, with leaves—like rigid-swords—that form a lovely hemisphere.  Sasa veitchii, a medium-sized bamboo down by the back alley, has 10” lance-shaped leaves whose edges turn the palest brown after a hard autumn freeze. But none of these are the green, sculpted conifers that Rose wants so badly. The Taxus topiary hedge-in-progress, pruned to look like a big sofa, at the end of the scree garden, is my concession to green blobs.

Allen Bush revels in a warm(er) March day, kicking back by the Taxus sofa.
Photo (detail): Rose Cooper

Carex plantaginea, fine sedge and a good emerald-green colored groundcover, looks as good as it did in September.  We should have more of them, I argue. And more Rhodeas, Arums, Cyclamen hederifolium, or some patches of Carex morrowi ‘Silk Tassel‘ —something subtle and herbaceous. 

I’m happy with my winter break and pity the poor souls who have to weed all year long. I realize someplace warm and sunny might be a good tonic for early February (I’d volunteer to weed!), but I’d prefer the usual Kentucky winter, just shortened by a few weeks. Sometime later on in February, with winter not quite vanished, I’ll be startled by a day with clear skies, and I suddenly realize there’s more to think about than squirrels. A few catalog plants, coveted all winter, will be ordered and my scuffle hoe sharpened.

Crocus chysanthus ‘Blue Bird’: an early bird, too
Photo: Allen Bush

The foliage on one of my favorite Coral Bells, the one with a doozy of a name, Heuchera villosa var. macrorrhizza, stays fresh-looking in spite of snow and cold. Its first new leaves are chartreuse and brighten-up shady spots. A nursery person years ago, recognizing the obvious merits of a plant saddled with a botanical variety name long on Rs and Zs, cleverly anointed a new name: ‘Autumn Bride’  - - with “gorgeous white blossoms in September.”  The northern Alabama endemic was henceforth stripped of its Latin birthright and became popular overnight.  (The cultivar name ‘Autumn Bride’ has no botanic legitimacy, but those of us in the horticultural pro ranks turn an occasional blind eye for commercial opportunity. There’s precious time for lessons in binomial nomenclature when garden centers find themselves at the mercy of a few sunny spring weekends to try and turn an annual profit.)

The Christmas Rose (Helleborus niger)
Photo: Allen Bush

The usual suspects were blooming as the snow melted. Snowdrops couldn’t wait any longer. And the long delayed pure white flowers of Christmas Rose Helleborus niger, huffing and puffing for weeks, looking for a short string of warm days, coincided, at the beginning of the Lenten season on February 21st, with the first hint of bloom on multi-colored selections among Lenten Rose Helleborus x hybridus. The Lenten Rose, misleadingly touted for its evergreen foliage, looks pretty beat-up and the old leaves need to be cut-back to let the fat February flower buds have a chance. What surprised me most, this year, was seeing hundreds of little Lenten Rose germinating seedlings coming-up under the snow. Though the temperature was still cold, the days must be lengthening just enough, and adequate light filtering through the snow, to trigger germination. Daughter Molly asked where she could get some Hellebores locally. I said, “Look no further. Take all the seedlings you want.”

Less showy, more fragrant—Sweet box
Photo: Allen Bush

The Sweet Box, Sarcococca hookeriana var. humilis, a name that sounds like a deadly staph infection - is March’s best kept secret. I love its low-growing, stoloniferous, short (12”) groundcovering habit, and have it planted in one-half dozen partially shady spots. Weeds find it impenetrable. Try to find the blooms?  You might not notice them.  They’re barely visible - not as obvious as the species crocus that are drawing the attention of honey bees - but you can’t miss the sweet fragrance.

Clumps of Phlox ‘Minnie Pearl’, scattered around the sunny borders, adjacent to the oval pond, come to life when I least expect them - and really need them.  I love the fresh, slender lime green leaves that rumble out of the cold February ground—no taller, now in early March, than a short buzz-cut. The pure white blooms on elongated, mature 18” stems are the main feature, sometimes lost in the May shuffle. Minnie Pearl, the real McCoy, and star of the Grand Ol’ Opry, used to bellow: “How-w-w-DEE-E-E-E! I’m jes’ so proud to be here!”

Yes, indeed. A great big Howdy to spring!

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

It Looks Ready

How firmly to cut back the roses? How lackadaisical to be this spring in the garden, or how obsessive? John Levett is back at it.

“After a brief interlude of faith-loss”—it’s time.
The gardener begins again
Photo: John Levett

By John Levett

When I was young I liked going to chapel. I didn’t turn up at one on a whim; my mum sent me to Sunday School. I think she was a believer of the Pragmatist School—if there’s something in it you’ll be getting in on the ground floor of salvation; if there isn’t you’ll have a nice few afternoons listening to stories & bashing out some songs.

Not for me. I took to it wholeheartedly. I took to the chapel, the prayer meetings, the Bible study classes, the youth club, the three-times-on-a-Sunday services, the witnessing on the streets & the knocking on doors. It was all the community that I’d never had & I was accepted in totality for what I was. It became my life. Until it wasn’t any more. After a brief interlude of faith-loss I joined the Young Communist League. Different book; same routine.

Just before last Christmas I was watching David Harvey’s online lecture course on Marx’s Capital. After the last session I recalled a similar exercise in interpretation when I was a chapel goer. I’d bought a three-volume study course called ‘Search the Scriptures’ which was designed to take one through the Bible in three years. I must have started the course four or five times; never starting from where I’d left off, always starting from Lesson 1. It was a great lesson that Lesson 1; at a push I could probably recall its substance but never made it to the last volume.

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Sunday, March 07, 2010

Botanical Gardens, It’s Time to Make Our Case for Plant Research

James Wandersee and Renee Clary see the economics of botanical science changing. For plant research programs to survive within botanical gardens, they may need to show profits and/or make the benefits of their discoveries better known.

A Louisiana first-grader studying leaf structure
Photo: Vermilion Parish Schools

By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group

A recent Human Flower Project article entitled “Mr. Bromeliad Heads for Singapore,” presented the story of a famous Florida botanical garden that is losing some of its acclaimed research scientists, as that institution trims its budget and juggles multiple priorities. Recently, two of the garden’s orchid experts were dismissed, and now “Mr. Bromeliad,” Harry Luther, has left for a new job in Singapore.

The back-story source hyperlinked in the essay suggests that the garden’s current board is not principally interested in botany and considers plant science research to be tangential to its newly emphasized garden focus of engaging the public with plants—in aesthetic and utilitarian ways. 

From a different perspective, one of the fired scientists put it this way: “Science, I think, intimidates the board. They don’t understand it; they don’t like it; they have no interest in it.” Another said, “I don’t think they see any value in the [botanical] research.” (quoted in Levey-Baker, 2010). As a result, the garden may have lost its hard-won, international scientific reputation as an orchid and bromeliad research center.

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Saturday, February 27, 2010

Down on the Digital-Dirt Divide

For plantsman Allen Bush, it all began by getting shooed out of the house. After digging holes to an imaginary China, he’s actually gone there, collecting rare species and befriending rarer horticulturalists from across the world.

A youth spent in the woods leads to self-esteem, and in some cases, to a career and schanpps, also
Photo: Jonathan Prescott

By Allen Bush

I wish children could experience the same simple pleasures I enjoyed over fifty years ago. They should try to dig a hole to China.  My big adventure was slowed by summer heat and hard clay, but I finally busted through, on a plant hunting trip in 2001. Memories of abandoned, shallow craters from childhood expeditions in Louisville are nearly as good as Sichuan itself turned out to be.

Back in those early years, I imagined I could poke through by noon and be home by dark. But the only way kids are going to dig to China now is if they hack into Chinese cyberspace. American youngsters can’t be bothered with a spade. And they’re certainly not spending much time outside, unless you count a precious few minutes misspent with older brothers and sisters who stand shivering at the back door catching a smoke.
 
The digital-dirt divide worries me. Edward O. Wilson understands outdoor lessons: “The Secret Places of childhood, whether a product of instinct or not, at the very least predispose us to acquire certain preferences and undertake practices of later value in survival. The hideaways bond us with place and they nourish our individuality and self-esteem,” Wilson writes in The Future of Life. ”If played out in the natural environment, they also bring us close to the earth and nature in ways than can engender a lifelong love of both.”
 
Generation Z may learn again how to dirty their mitts and swing on a wild grape vine across a skinny creek, but it doesn’t look promising.

Among American children, ages eight to eighteen, more than seven and half hours are spent each day wired to smartphones, music/video devices, computers and televisions – sometimes multitasking several digital gizmos at once—according to a study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And there’s no “Thank God It’s Friday” for this demographic. Bleary eyes are focused 24/7 all week long—which amounts to a whopping fifty-three hours —barely seeing the light of day. Stop and smell the roses? Doubtful.
 

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