Human Flower Project

Travel

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Cycling to Ashwell, Two Gardens

John Levett rides south of Cambridge to see what generations of nickings, seed droppings, and skill have made: the expected and the surprising.

Spring at Docwra’s Manor House, Shepreth, England
Photo: John Levett

By John Levett

I cycle a lot. It’s what I used to do as a kid. Stopped. Then started again forty years later. When I was growing up in South London in the 50s I used to walk over to Lewisham some Saturday mornings, up Loampit Hill then down Tanners Hill into Deptford. Just before hitting Deptford Broadway there’s a small turning and there used to be Witcomb’s cycle shop. I went there to watch the frame builders. They had four or five in those days plus a racing team. Most famously, Stan Britten rode a Witcomb in the 1958 Tour de France. He finished in 69th spot but a Brit taking part in those days was a moment of wonder. I’d get a Witcomb when I went out to work (it said on my list of what to do with money when I got some).

Fast forward forty years to 2001. I decided I wanted a road bike to add to my workhorse that got me places but not fast (nor stylishly) enough and it was then that Witcomb came back into mind. Did they still make bikes? Did they still exist? Never mind looking it up; I hadn’t been down to Deptford for decades. I travelled down from Cambridge at Easter that year, tube to New Cross Gate and down New Cross Road. Still there and as small and grubby as ever it was and Dad Witcomb still behind the counter.

The Witcomb, parked in the garden at Level Crossing, May 2008
Photo: John Levett

To cut to the end I got the bike I wanted as a kid. Made to measure, full road spec, Witcomb lilac and black head tube just like Stan’s. Part of my history. It took until October for Barrie Witcomb (my age, ex-racer, sole frame builder) to complete the bike but I took possession a few days before I had to undergo radiography treatment at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Each afternoon, after treatment, I took Witcomb out into the Fens and rode through a perfect Autumn.

I love the Fens in any season and they’re not as featureless as pictured; the surprise of villages, the washes, remnants of farmsteads, the island settlements, the Ely towers, trails where there’s nothing and nobody—rare in this part of the kingdom. But no hills.

I often ride over into Essex for variety around Thaxted, Dunmow and the North Weald but my favourite detour is up to the Cambridgeshire hills overlooking Duxford and then over the Hertfordshire border to Reed; Therfield (one of the beacon hills of 1588 announcing the sighting of the Spanish Armada); Kelshall at the eastern end of the Chilterns near Royston; then dipping down into Ashwell whose spring sources the Cam. The church is fine, has a mason’s scratching of the original St. Paul’s cathedral before the Great Fire and graffiti recording the Black Death of 1349. My route from Ashwell back to Cambridge passes through Shepreth (‘the brook in which sheep are dipped’). It’s got two gardens worth a stop; for different reasons.

Hemerocallis Fulva points the way to the Manor House, Docwra
Photo: John Levett

Docwra’s Manor House is 17th. century. Its garden’s got a formal informality. Let me explain. When I was learning history one of my teachers was WG Hoskins whose most widely read publication was The Making of the English Landscape; a fine television series came out of it too. He took us out into the Leicestershire countryside and demonstrated how everything that looks natural was in fact built, contrived, purposely located and served a variety of economic, political and social interests. I get that feeling about Docwra’s. It feels too much like how a manor house garden should look; even down to the seat, the sharpening stone, the water butt. On a blisteringly hot day you could think yourself into The Go-Between.

This might seem to be knocking the gardening skills that have gone into its creation. My problem (if problem it is) has always been that, whichever season I’ve been there, I’ve found whatever I’ve expected to find. For me, surprises have been few. Nonetheless, I love going there. Sometimes I like comfortable recognition. I love the mix, the heights, the turns, the contrived skill of the planting.

Docwra’s gardens: successful “experiments”
Photo: John Levett

Docwra’s represents what many gardeners (especially in England) aspire to: a garden that reflects the gardener’s ease and casual facility; an almost-inconsequential dropping of a seed here a cutting there; an accepting awareness that one experiment will succeed, another fail and in the scheme of things all moments pass. Gardening by walking about. Plantings merge. Seed drops. Confusion’s eased into what fits. Sorted.

I contrast it to Beth Chatto’s garden (or gardens) at Elmstead Market in Essex. My Uncle Syd used to live in Brightlingsea nearby and when I visited we often wound up there. (Syd left England in the 1930s for the States, going from one depression to another, looking for work and started off as a seller of Mazawattee tea. He finished up as butler to the Bloomingdales and often featured as a model in adverts in the photogravures of the ‘50s advertising pool-side drinks or crisp, white shirts. He bore a passing resemblance to Alfred, butler to Adam West’s Batman.) Anyway...I first went to Beth Chatto’s in the early ‘80s and got thrilled, bought more than I could afford and wanted back to spend more. It was some years later but by then the commercial side seemed to be doing the driving and a supporting contrivance dominating. I know all gardens are contrivances but this seemed to be up front and centre.

Level Crossing, where the rail line crosses Ashwell Road
Photo: John Levett

Docwra’s has the advantage of being just a garden; no ‘Buy one get one free’ of anything. It has confusion too; it’s part of its artifice. A near neighbour has it as well.

The Level Crossing garden is a couple of hundred yards down the road from Docwra’s; at the apex of a triangle formed by Ashwell road and the main line Great Northern railway. These crossings used to be hand operated; gardening was no doubt a way of passing time between trains. I’ve often passed it on a ride but only rarely stopped.

There’s a recognizable trend in urban gardens these days not just for off-the-shelf-as-seen-on-TV gardens but for if-it’s-too-small-pave-it-or-chip-it-over approaches. Thankfully there are still many who see small as challenging—what works, what might work, what’s worth a try, that’s-too-big-but-I-love-it, that’s-too-small-but-it’ll-give-a-season. Cookery.

Level Crossing garden, nothing wasted
Photo: John Levett

Once, there used to be a generation of gardeners who thrived on nicking cuttings (pinchings more likely) from roadsides, other people’s front gardens, stately homes, next door neighbours. It made sense. There might have been a local nursery but unlikely, probably a greengrocer who doubled up on seed packets, possibly a corn chandler who’d do seed potatoes and onion sets in season but many gardeners just picked up plants on the fly or exchanged on the allotment. It was part of communality; but communality needs time to give and stay awhile with neighbours. That’s becoming scarce.

Level Crossing always strikes me as a throw-back to such a time. Nothing wasted, its meanderings Looking-Glass like, its confusions essential. It’s the sort of garden you’d walk daily and recognise something planted seasons ago and forgotten, smile and congratulate yourself on your prime competence.

A lesson in planning
Level Crossing
Photo: John Levett

There is also a confident plan to the garden. I could be wrong but it’s not as casual as it looks. It’s a small plot but the paths that almost turn back on themselves, the siting of bowers & the space beyond that they suggest, the just-slightly enclosed seating, the taller plantings that ‘hedge’ a small bed , the pottings that fill any spare space — create an available space seemingly greater than its extent. That’s always a lesson in Garden Planning 101 but so difficult to achieve in common practice.

I also get the feeling there’s an element of ‘Thrive or Die’ about some of the plantings. We’ve all done it: the must-have that universal experience says is a plant-death waiting to happen but we plant it anyway. I’m reminded of H. persica which is a native of Iran and Afghanistan and was mightily difficult to keep alive in Europe. (John Lindley 1829 “Drought does not suit it, it does not thrive in wet; heat has no beneficial effect, cold no prejudicial influence; care does not improve it, neglect does not injure it.”) Jack Harkness brought it to Hitchin in Hertfordshire the early’ 60s from seed given by Alex Cocker in Aberdeen—it thrived; crossing with such as ‘Canary Bird,’ ‘Cornelia,’ ‘Margo Koster,’ ‘Roseraie de l’Haÿ.’ (I think ‘Euphrates’ was Harkness’s first commercial child in 1986). One feels anything from central Asia would have the same success in Shepreth.

The comfort of a welcome, Level Crossing
Photo: John Levett

There’s another historical comfort to Level Crossing—its openness. Until recently (and in neighbourly streets you still can) you stuck your head into someone else’s garden, walked around, stopped awhile, moaned about the weather and the price of stuff, remembered before the war, swapped plants, gave out left-overs. There’s less of that now; we’re too busy on these islands. Level Crossing’s one of those spots you can stick your nose into; there’s no feeling of taking up someone else’s time. In the housing block where I live, three of us are gardeners and one tries (I take an Aristotelian view of that—to try is to succeed). We won’t win prizes but none are bothered; it’s all in the doing and the sharing; the giving and the trading; the stopping and the nattering. When I walked around Level Crossing it felt like next-door’s garden. But for the train.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Altitude Fear & Latitude Envy

The saturated colors of mountain flowers are legendary, but are they worth an anxiety attack? We search for a flatter alternative.

Ryuzu falls and mountain flowers, 1997
Nikko National Park, Japan
Photo: Kohei Tanaka

We are alpi-phobic…Something about having grown up on the banks of a huge, sluggish river, maybe, or hearing one too many Appalachian folk songs where a woman’s dragged into the hills and smashed in the head with a rock. For us, just the idea of driving “into the mountains” tightens the throat.

After reading about flower color today, though, we have reason to overcome this neurosis.  EarthScholars Jim Wandersee and Renee Clary wrote in their essay on the floral spectrum several months back: “More vivid colors are seen in cooler stands of flowers growing in places like Alaska. The intensely bright fuchsia of fireweed flowers makes driving Alaskan highways ‘a journey into the Land of Oz.’”

Gentians at 12,000 feet
on Cheli La Pass, Bhutan
Photo: Nancy Holyoke

Nancy Holyoke sent us a photo of gentians she spotted in Bhutan, a blue the likes of which we’ve never seen on even the most psychedelic morning glory. Wouldn’t this be worth suffering through the claustrophobic shudder that steep slopes bring on?

Like a lot of folks, in and out of lederhosen, we’d assumed that tropical flowers (like the hibiscus blooms you see on Hawaiian shirts) were the brightest of all, but that’s not so. “Twelve years of observation among the vegetation of the eastern and western tropics,” wrote A.R. Wallace, “has convinced me that this notion (of more colorful tropicals) is entirely erroneous.”

“The beauty of alpine flowers,” Wallace noted, “is almost proverbial. It consists either in the increased size of the individual flowers, as compared with the whole plant, in the increased intensity of color, or in the massing of small flowers into dense cushions of bright color. It is only on the higher alps above the limits of frosts, and upward towards the perpetual snow line that these colors are fully exhibited.” We have a sick headache.

Another 19th century botanist, “M. Flahault in going north from France noticed in Zeeland that many flowers had already brighter colors. In Norway the colors of nearly all flowers were brighter, and he gives a list of 16 native and 12 cultivated plants in which this difference was especially marked. He also caused seeds of 14 species to be sown the same season in Paris and at Upsal in Sweden, with the result in each case but one of brighter colors in the northern locality.”

-- from Arthur Alger Crozier’s opus: “The Modification of Plants by Climate (1885)

We’d brave quite a lot to see intensely beautiful flowers, but before we invest in hiking boots, there may be another way.

An inkling came in a note this morning from our cousin, painter Melinda Waring. “All you artists out there,” she wrote, “will understand, when I say an overcast day has more light than a sunny day.” And then we retrieved this long treasured post card of Van Gogh’s bulb field

Flower Beds in Holland
by Vincent van Gogh (1883)
Image: National Gallery of Art

The sapphire blues, golds, whites (and one patch of lavender) are brighter for the two brown barns anchoring each side of the painting, a fringe of dark hills in the distance, and the very cloudy skies.

For a more contemporary view of the same phenomenon, here’s a photo from the Dutch government.

A tulip field, with lilies and narcissus in Northern Holland
Photo: Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs

This region of Northern Holland is of course one of the most popular floral tourist attractions all year, anywhere in the world. Even though Holland’s tulip bulb industry is dwindling (gradually migrating from the Netherlands to Poland and facing competition from China), The Keukenhof, in Lisse, still draws 700, 000 visitors each year. The tulip season there is just winding down.

Could it be that the qualities Wallace attributed to alpine height were really the effects of distance from the equator, of northerliness – of perception? Certainly the EarthScholars’ example of color intensity, Alaskan fireweed, could help make that case. As could M. Flahaut’s investigations, Paris to “Upsal.”

As a flower lover, we will trek for color. But as a flatlander, we’d like to begin our quest for intensity via latitude (and cloud cover) rather than by taking on altitude. Let’s keep in mind the Dutch, including Vincent.  Instead of boots, we’ll buy a locket and fold in it this heartening observation from the mighty Felder Rushing, a fellow Southerner, likewise in search of more vivid flowers:

Holland is “farther north than Nova Scotia…. The angle of the sun is so low way up there, colors get ‘punched up’ and seem more vivid than they do in our muggy heat, which washes out a lot of the blue and green. Same thing in England, New England and British Columbia. Because of the climate, many plants grow better. And because of the angle of the sun, they simply look better.”

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Proto-Peony Pilgrim, at Ashland

Too early for the flower show, but just in time for a zillion blinking buds.

Cyndy Clark overlooks the heavily budded peony bed
at Ashland, the Henry Clay home, Lexington, KY
Photo: Human Flower Project

Religious pilgrims go in certainty; they know the saint’s fingerbone, kept in a golden box since the second century, will be there at the cathedral, whenever they arrive. It’s floral pilgrims who need faith or, short of that, an open-mind. The forsythia’s over, and so are the weeping cherries, but you had forgotten about lilacs. The peonies aren’t in their glory, but the buds are.

With friend and gardener Cyndy Clark, we made our pilgrimage to the big peony garden at Ashland, a historic home in Lexington, Kentucky, one week ago. Only five or six beautiful clumps were flowering; most of the garden was leafy and covered with huge plump buds.

Bud with juice, and bloom, Ashland, Lexington, KY
Photo: Human Flower Project

The Garden Club of Lexington installed the bricklined peony beds in 1986. “Dozens of Saunders hybrid peonies were donated by Bobbi Van Meter in honor of her mother, Alice McIlvain Prewitt, owner of Walmac Farm.” Mrs. Prewitt had been a longtime member of the club, which maintains the walled garden at Ashland, too.

A.P. Sauders was an early peony hybridizer from Canada.  We wish we could tell you names of these particular cultivars, in bud and in bloom, but we found no tags anywhere (it really wouldn’t be in keeping with Lexington style, you know).

Now about those buds…Some, tight and green, looked like brussell sprouts – has anyone ever eaten one and can account for how they taste? Others buds were blinking, “tears” at the edge of chartreuse, pink, and wine-purple eyes. A few more had cracked like eggs, with pink, cupped feathers lifting open.

True peony lovers know that different varieties open at different times through the season (generally early May through early July). For the peony gluttons out there (count us in!) here’s a website that purports to offer a seven week cycle of flowers, with varieties grouped by their bloom dates. Florists are intensely interested in the habits of peony buds, too, as these prized cut-flowers ship at bud stage.

The most curious feature of the Ashland peony garden is what’s NOT there – ants – even though many hundreds of buds were secreting shiny syrup.

Our mother’s peonies in Louisville have always had ants circumnavigating the buds. We’d thought that ants were somehow good for these flowers. (Peony buds attract wasps, too.)

Ants aplenty on Anne Ardery’s peonies, in Louisville, Kentucky
Photo: Human Flower Project

“The garden myth is that peonies need ants on them in order for the buds to open properly,” wrote Hanna at This Garden is Illegal, in May 2006. “This is not true. A peony bud will open just as well with or without the ants.” She goes on to write that the ants do prey on other insects that can be harmful to peonies. So perhaps it’s “mythological” in the best sense: true, but not widely understood.

One of the early Saunders peonies at Ashland, April 27, 2008
Photo: Human Flower Project

Today we imagine that Ashland’s garden is in full blowsy flower, swarming with people. Henry Clay, the Kentucky politician who once lived here, is famous for telling his fellow U.S. Senators: “I had rather be right than president.”

REALLY, Henry? Well, you got at least half your wish. Loving the garden in bud, we can’t go so far as preference. We had rather found the peonies in bloom.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Geobotany: Rocking the Garden World

Nature first put flowers on stone pedestals, but gardeners of the Picturesque school followed, with painterly landscapes of their own. Well done, say the EarthScholars: But, please, give rocks equal time!

Trees, Fort Greene Park, 2004
by Kerry O’Neill

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

Unwittingly, people view landscapes through the lenses of their prior knowledge and experiences. They compare the new landscapes they visit with ones they already know.  Given that more than half of the world’s inhabitants now live in big cities, more and more people lack an extensive personal knowledge of nature. Nor have most people, urban or otherwise, traveled to explore a variety of conserved natural ecosystems —experiences they could use in making comparisons and aesthetic decisions about the new landscapes they encounter.

There are many theories about how humans perceive landscapes. The Australian environmental scholar Andrew Lothian poses the question: Is landscape quality inherent in the landscape or in the eye of the beholder? He opts to defend the latter.

R.P. Taylor, writing in the journal Leonardo, recalls that, “In art school I was told that Monet’s water lilies calm the observer, while van Gogh’s sunflowers electrify. To what extent, however, do paintings [of landscapes] really affect the observer’s physical condition? The foundations of this question date back to 1890, when the connection between psychological states and physiological states was first considered.”

A famous African Savannah,
the Maasai Mara
Photo: Masai Mara

Judith Heerwagen, in her article on the Psychosocial Value of Space, notes: “Drawing on habitat selection theory, ecologist Gordon Orians argues that humans are psychologically adapted to and prefer landscape features that characterized the African savannah, the presumed site of human evolution….If the ‘savannah hypothesis’ is true, we would expect to find that humans intrinsically like and find pleasurable environments that contain key features of the savannah that were most likely to have aided our ancestors’ survival and well-being.”

Features of the savannah landscape include a fairly unobstructed “big sky” view, a high diversity of flowering plants, scattered clusters of trees with high canopies, swaths of open grassland, occasional rocky outcrops, multiple visual corridors, and topographic changes to enhance predator surveillance and long-distance escape movements.

Do humans really prefer these, or other, particular landscapes? History shows us that colonialists and emigrants sometimes attempted to transform their new landscapes of residence into replicas of those they had known. Presuming the superiority of “The Old Country,” they tried to mimic what they considered “civilized spaces”—importing plants, seeds, and even rocks from their landscapes of origin.

Just as people’s first maps showed their tribes or cities at the center of the world, it is common for us all to judge new landscapes by the rather xenophobic criteria of familiarity and congruence with our original cultural values and preferences.

In 18th century England, complex debates developed about the essence of beauty in the landscape--with followers of the ‘Sublime’ school inspired by wild, natural landscapes (simultaneously fascinating and startling), while those of the ‘Picturesque’ school wanted ‘painterly’ landscape views (human-designed to be blurred, disjointed, and soft composites of color and contour).

Followers of the latter were willing to have flowering plants moved from their traditional positions in borders or against walls, provided they were regrouped to form non-linear, painterly compositions (“painting with plants”). The eye of the landscape artist (painter), with its aesthetic understanding of nature and training in the principles of composition, was thought to be the best guide to good planting design.

Plant Hunter Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Rhododendrons of the Sikkim-Himalaya (1849-51)
Image: Garden Visit

The Picturesque school had a pronounced effect on landscape design. It both justified using foreign plants in British gardens and provided a system of compositional principles to harmonize the intermingling of exotic and native plants and natural objects. Instead of the plantings being natural of themselves, landscape designers were to use art to imitate rugged natural scenes in aesthetic ways.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the Picturesque Style was used, for example, in the making of woodland gardens. Landowners on the western shores of the British Isles installed rhododendron woods, arranged in “painterly compositions.” As can be seen from Hooker’s print (above), the art that inspired Paxton’s landscape (below), making effective use of jagged irregular lines of plant and rocks, represents the furthest possible conceptual distance from an artificial geometrical regularity. In contrast, fractal geometric patterns predominate—for both plants and rocks.

Landscape at England’s Birkenhead Park, Designed by Joseph Paxton
Photo: Garden Visit

Like Charles Darwin, Joseph Dalton Hooker saw the need to integrate botany and geology to understand nature. When he was only 5 years old, Joseph regularly attended his father’s botanical lectures at the University of Glasgow, and displayed a genuine interest in the subject. Because his parents thought Glasgow High School’s curriculum was too limited, he and his brother were withdrawn from formal schooling to be home-schooled. In those days, botany was still regarded as merely a branch of medicine, so like every other young Glaswegian botanist in his day, Hooker studied for his medical degree at the University of Glasgow. This education later proved to be quite expedient because, in 1839, Sir James Clark Ross, famous discoverer of the magnetic north pole as well as his father’s good friend, offered young Joseph the position of Assistant Surgeon on Clark’s expedition to the Antarctic, aboard the discovery ships Erebus and Terror.

This four-and-half-year voyage allowed Hooker to botanize in many lands and also to notice the natural relationships between botany and geology. At the Kerguelen Islands, where Captain Cook had managed to collect just 20 new species of plants, Joseph identified and collected over 150 different species, including flowering plants, 3 ferns, 35 mosses, and the rest lichens and seaweeds. This was no easy task, as the cold, harsh weather and rough terrain made collecting very challenging. Hooker wrote: “Many of my best little lichens were gathered by hammering out the tufts, or sitting on them till they thawed.” Joseph later became assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, near London.

One result of the English affinity for Picturesque landscape design was an enthusiasm for rock gardens. A European rock garden, also known as an alpine garden, features extensive use of rocks or stones, along with plants native to rocky alpine or tundra environments. 

Alpine flowers on tundra along Trail Ridge road
Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
Photo: Q.T. Luong

In 1803, Europe’s first alpine garden was constructed at Belvedere Castle in Vienna. The best rock gardens were designed and built to look like natural outcrops of bedrock (e.g., limestone, sandstone). Stones were aligned to suggest a bedding plane and plants were often used to conceal the joints between the stones. This type of garden was especially popular in Victorian England as well.

The first rock garden of appreciable size to be constructed at an American botanic garden opened at Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 1917. Today, some of the best alpine rock gardens may be viewed at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, Scotland; Le Jardin Botanique Alpin du Lautaret, Grenoble, France; Cambridge University Botanic Garden, Cambridge, England; Royal Horticultural Society Garden, Wisley, England; New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY; Devonian Botanic Garden, Devon, Alberta, Canada; Göteborg Botanical Garden, Gothenburg, Sweden; Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, Vail, Colorado; Jardin Botanique de Montrèal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; and the Tromso Arctic-Alpine Botanic Garden, Tromso, Norway.

A Picturesque rock garden at Chatsworth Manor, England
Photo: Michelle Anstett

Although the use of rocks as decorative and symbolic elements in gardens can be traced back to very early Chinese and Japanese gardens, rock gardens dedicated to growing alpine plants have a shorter history. During the age of the great plant explorers (basically, the 1800s) there was great interest in the exotic discoveries being brought back to England, and people wanted to grow these amazing new treasures successfully. Although others had previously written about growing alpine plants, it was actually Reginald Farrer who, with the 1919 publication of his two-volume book The English Rock Garden, rocked the gardening world for the first time. There was great interest in Farrer’s method and approach to creating large-scale, naturalistic settings for growing alpine plants.

(For more about the man credited with starting the rock gardening craze, read Nicola Shulman’s biography of Farrer).

Alpine Crevice Garden
Alpine Garden Society Center
Pershore, Worcestershire, England
Photo: Stone Garden

Because our own research group focuses on the integration of botanical and geological knowledge, we strongly recommend that public rock gardens interpret both the plants and the rocks that are present. The public trails we have designed always include geobotanical interpretation. As visitors tread the rock garden’s paths examining the alpine plants, we think it is helpful for the visitors to understand the geologic history of any garden site, to know what kind of rocks they are seeing and their influences on plant growth.

We appreciate, for example, University of Florence’s Botanical Garden exhibit that interprets the geobotany of the alpine plants of Italy’s Dolomite region via a simulated outcrop of limestone derived from the Dolomite Mountains themselves. Similarly, we think the rock garden at the Botanic Garden of Montreal is exemplary from a geobotanical perspective. It’s not only a rock garden, but also a mineralogical garden, with rocks and minerals drawn from all over Canada.

Finally, if you live in the US, be sure to experience the Denver Botanic Garden’s remote 1.5-mile Walter Pesman Trail through the alpine tundra on Mount Goliath, a mountain peak section of the Mount Evans area within the Arapaho National Forest (17 miles from Idaho Springs). Volunteer guides will interpret not only the plants but also the rocks that you see in this “nature-made” alpine rock garden, but only during the summertime days when the alpine flowers are in bloom, June 26th to August 7th. (Reservations are required: phone 720-865-3539). The Denver Botanic Garden within the city also has a fine rock garden, with thousands of different rockery plants collected by Panayoti Kelaidis--the godfather of American rock gardening.

We conclude with a passage from author Donna E. Schaper: “Building a quiet [sanctuary] of stones and plants, slowly and meditatively over time, is [a rock garden’s] true meaning. Process over product, journey over destination, forever a work in progress—rock is the best metaphor we have of everlastingness.”

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Carmen: Red Hot, Yellow Acacias

The original bad girl, Bizet’s gypsy heroine, casts a floral spell, but why do opera productions always get her bewitching blossom wrong?

Francesca Zambello as Carmen, Royal Opera House, 2008
Photo: Telegraph

Seeing the opera Carmen for the first time this past Friday, we met Amy Winehouse’s great-great grandmother.  The lady with churning hips and long black hair, on the loose while her boyfriend keeps winding up in jail, first came along 150 years ago. Georges Bizet was inspired to compose his opera after reading of this femme fatale in Prosper Merimee’s novella published in 1845. Look out!

‘’She was wearing a very short red skirt which revealed white silk stockings with more than one hole in them, and dainty red morocco leather shoes tied with flame-colored ribbons. She wore her mantilla lowered in order to show off her shoulders and a big bouquet of acacia at the opening of her blouse. She also had an acacia flower in the corner of her mouth, and she walked swaying her hips like a filly on a Cordova stud farm.”
—from Prosper Merimee’s Carmen

That flower, as opera buffs know, has its own role in the drama.

Franco Corelli as Don Jose, in jail,
in love with the wrong woman
(and holding the wrong flower)
Photo: Sandy’s Opera Gallery

A squadron of French soldiers, stationed in Sevilla, Spain, is killing time outside a cigarette factory. The working girls come out for a smoke break, and all the guys go apoplectic for the brash and gorgeous Carmen. She winks and sings, sidling up to a few of them. After teasing the whole regiment, she at last tosses her “acacia” flower to a standoffish sergeant, Don Jose, who tucks the blossom inside his uniform.

He’s a goner, of course. Carmen soon gets into a nasty girlfight (marvelously staged by Austin Lyric Opera, with many fistsful of convincing hair-pulling). The smitten Don Jose helps her escape arrest, and for his trouble gets thrown in prison.

In Act II, our hero is released and finds Carmen dancing on tabletops and flirting with a bullfighter in a bar on the edge of town. He prepares to tell her off – or worse—but reaching inside his coat, pulls the blossom out. (In last Friday performance, it was a pink fragile thing that shattered right on cue.) And so begins his aria.

La fleur que tu m’avais jetée,
Dans ma prison m’était restée.
Flétrie et séche, cette fleur
Gardait toujours sa douce odeur…

The flower that you tossed to me
Stayed with me in my prison.
This flower, withered and dry,
Never lost its sweet perfume.

As Don Jose clutches his flower and pledges his love, Carmen gazes off. For the first and only time in the drama, she seems concerned, maybe confused is more like it, confused by tenderness.

Acacia retinoides:
relative of Don Jose’s floral love charm
Photo: Floracyberia

Meanwhile, we ask, what is a red flower doing on stage? Acacia blooms are bright yellow!

From looking around, it seems a very common mistake by the props managers for this opera. Carmen’s temper and the Andalusian setting make red roses or carnations the obvious choice, that is to say, cliché.

But acacia, often called “mimosa” in southern France, has a lot more to offer here than mere faithfulness to Merimee’s story.

In the 19th Century, when both the fictional and operatic “Carmens” were born, several species of acacia were imported from Australia to Southern France and became hugely popular both as landscape plants and cut flowers. Hundreds were planted as ornamentals around the homes of wealthy English and Parisian vacationers, who escaped to the Cote d’Azur in winter. Happily the mimosas bloomed as early as December, a relief from all that gray.

A wreath of acacia in Provence, along the Mimosa Trail

Today’s travelers in Provence take the Mimosa Trail in February through Rayol Canadel, Ste. Maxime, and Tanneron (a major acacia growing center) to Cannes Mandelieu (Merimee’s old stomping grounds), and finally the perfume industry capitol of Grasse.

As well as scenting Don Jose’s uniform, acacia farnesiana is the major ingredient in many perfumes, among them Mimosa pour Moi, and L’Eau d’Azur. “Fragrances in which mimosa plays a vital part, but is not the main theme of the fragrance, include Farnesiana by Caron, Chanel Nº 5, Moment Suprême by Jean Patou, ... Paris by Yves St Laurent, Byzance by Rochas, Amarige by Givenchy as well as Summer by Kenzo.” One source describes the acacia scent as “sweet, heady, almondy.”

Placido Domingo sings Don Jose’s aria in Carmen, with faux acacia blooms, in a 1978 production by the Vienna State Opera, filmed by Franco Zefferelli

If you’d like to hear what melted Carmen’s heart (temporarily), here are a few fine tenors singing “La Fleur que Tu M’Avais Jetee” (The Flower Song). Jussi Bjorling clutches a rose bud. Franco Tenelli fumbles something red. But, here is Placido Domingo in 1978, performing with the Vienna State Opera AND some round yellow flowers, acacia at last. Leave it to the Austrians to get the flowers right! Bravo.

Friday, April 18, 2008

In Iris Society, ‘It’s What You Like’

Dishwater blondes, clowns and upturned beards, the American Iris Society has seen it all.

Members of the American Iris Society, in Austin, Texas
for their annual meeting, toured the mammoth iris bed
at the Natural Gardener on April 17, 2008
Photo: Human Flower Project

Peachy, icy, frilly – and then there’s the one that looks like a grimy t-shirt.

Iris fanciers must be the most broadminded of all floral enthusiasts, because there’s a greater range among the flowers they breed, grow and travel cross country to see than any flower–type we know.

You orchid people may take issue. But who has seen a two-tone brown orchid? Who’s bred one the color of rag and named it “Ugly Duckling”? We saw Ugly Duckling and many fairer species with our own eyes yesterday, tagging along with the experts as the American Iris Society descended on Austin for its annual weeklong convention.

Miracles of azure, crystal puffs and mongrels in several shades of tinkle-yellow…what a range of color! Shapes too. We saw iris blooms delicate as meringues and others like smashed pinwheels, enough to make a small child cry. Much to their credit, the iris people seem to enjoy them all. Here was one the color of a puddle. “You either like it or you don’t,” Jim Morris of St. Louis told me. “I like it.”

Jim Morris of St. Louis, an iris grower since childhood and veteran of many meetings—thus the badges—took notes on the flowers Thursday; the year’s winning iris will be announced Sunday, April 20
Photo: Human Flower Project

There have been lectures, judges training sessions, and classes for the 430 participants, but the highlight, as at every iris convention, has been the garden visits, seven in all. Thursday, April 17, the group bussed west of the city to the Natural Gardener, one of Austin’s premier nurseries, to check out the 800-plus varieties that have been grown in the big full-sun bed made just for them.

Convention locales are decided at least two years in advance. That way, breeders can send their rhizomes ahead to be planted and get established so that by meeting time, if all goes well, they’ll be in full, healthy flower.

Some of the irises had “bloomed out” before the AIS members arrived. Other plants were still a just few green blades, but scores more were performing well. Jim Morris, who’s raised irises since childhood, was taking careful notes, as were many others. On Sunday evening, all the convention-goers will cast ballots for the best flowers they’ve seen this week.

Augustine, a bearded iris (non-space age) bred by O. Schick, 2005
Photo: Human Flower Project

Barbara Sautner, president of the Iris Society of Minnesota, explained that judges look for “branching, bud count, and growth.” (To our surprise and chagrin, fragrance doesn’t matter.) Sautner, and many others, too, lingered by an unnamed seedling, AM0010550-3, bred by Anton Mego of Slovakia. These are new varieties that have yet to be introduced to the market. “They want to see if we like it,” said Patricia Wurtele, of Ramona, California. From all the eye-bugging and finger-pointing, Mego’s tall purple, yellow and red iris is a winner, and for a $15 registration fee, will get a name. Since this lilting three-tone iris had thrived here in Texas, how about “Jimmie Dale Gilmore”?

A successful seedling, as yet unnamed, from Slovakian hybridizer Anton Mego
Photo: Human Flower Project

Sautner said that several of the nation’s biggest iris companies are located near Portland; Schreiner is in Oregon today, though it began in the 1920s in Minnesota. “They started bringing in iris from France and the Mediterranean that couldn’t survive our winters,” she explained. So the big hybridizers eventually moved west.

We’d never thought of Central Texas as iris land (not like back in Kentucky). Skimpy white “flags” are among the earliest flowers here in Austin, often blooming in mid-February and spent a week later. We have some pretty, but also frail, passalong purples that flower in March. And our neighbors David and Wendy Todd have many tall Louisiana iris, bright yellow, now blooming around their pond.

But the huge bearded hybrids these iris experts most admire are Bouvier des Flandres compared with our local fidos. There are double scoops of sorbet – like the aptly named Trinotostare. And the iris socialites appear to be especially taken with “space age” varieties. These irises, Richard Wurtele told us, were introduced over the past ten years and bred with weird beards. Rather than hanging down, a little bristle down the center of the iris “fall,” these beards are flexed into “horns, spoons and flounces.”

Hybridizer Jack Worel talks to Jean Morris and Barbara Sautner about
his Silver Creek iris, which has taken to Central Texas beautifully
Photo: Human Flower Project

Jack Worel, from Osseo, Minnesota, said that hybridizing iris is fairly easy (Note: Jack may be at a genetic advantage—his great aunt Elsie Peterson was one of the first iris judges in the U.S.). On Thursday his Silver Creek, a white iris with a deep orange beard, drew a crowd. “Wow, what a clump!” exclaimed Jean Morris of Baldwin, Missouri, as she scribbled in a notebook. Jack said that Silver Creek is the offspring of Michelle Taylor, another white iris, and Shirley M, pink with a blue beard. Loaded with cigar like buds and rippling blooms, it seems to like it here in Austin.

A “space age” iris with upturned beard and plicata (speckles)
Photo: Human Flower Project

After encountering Worel’s beautiful white iris, as well as Hurry Up Sun, Augustine, and Full Figured, we will have to give bearded iris a try. Patricia Wurtele says these spectacular hybrids aren’t hard to grow, so long as they’re shallowly planted and receive a half day of sun. They do like water (a problem here) and good drainage. “And they’re hungry flowers,” she says, recommending alfalfa pellets to enrich the soil.

But just because a hybridizer can concoct an iris with a red, spoon-shaped beard that sticks two inches in the air, does anyone want one? Apparently so. “It’s what you like,“ Jim Morris says serenely. We like Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Twickenham, or London ‘Recovered’

Unfolding a map of London, John Levett sets out for an old bastion of privilege; crossing a bridge, here are magnolias, a common, a view. Thank you, John.

Mogg’s postal district and cabfare map of London
Image: Emonson Family History

By

I was almost born in London but not quite. My mother’s labour came too early for that so I was diverted elsewhere but we arrived there some six years later. I grew up in the fiercely middle class suburb of Bromley. My mother ran a small grocer’s shop and was visited at yearly intervals by the freeholder to see what needed doing to the property then did nothing. For the post-war British middle class, time was going to have to stand still at some point and it was in the early 1950s that time came to an end for those of a certain age in Bromley for whom the Coronation year of 1953 was possibly ‘the last best time.’

I came to this thought from having discovered a cousin. I write ‘discovered’ but should, maybe, describe her as ‘recovered.’ I lost contact with what remained of my extended family in the mid-’90s for reasons it would take a book to explain and another to describe what led me to seek them out; my cousin and her husband were the only ones I once knew who were still living. They were of a generation born at the start of the ‘Long Weekend’ of the 1930s who came to maturity in the early 50s and would now be enjoying the fruits, benefits and cookies of non-compulsory activity — life with the kids, safaris (didn’t those go out with Grace Kelly, Clark Gable and Mogambo?), walks across Indian beaches, watching the sun go down on Ayers Rock. They won’t be doing any of that; my cousin has a degenerative neurological condition and the only treatment is to make the decline easier than it might otherwise be. But describing her as ‘recovered’ is still appropriate.

I’m not getting here into a palaver about the resilience of the human spirit or the beauty of the inner self; knowing you’re degenerating and losing contact with all the facility you once had isn’t uplifting—not for you nor anyone around you. This was the time you looked forward to; promises you made to yourself and each other; something deserving after the toil and toeing the line. Not to be. I started visiting my cousin regularly, catching up on both our lives and the trip-ups in both. Our pasts are always there but this past also had something concrete.

Fenced tree, Ham
Photo: John Levett

As a result of the various deaths in the family my cousin had become the ‘keeper of the family archive’—the snaps of a century. There’s too much to tell here so I’ll cut to the chase. The family had become Londoners in the second half of the nineteenth century, coming down the fifty or so miles from Suffolk and setting up their stall in south London near Greenwich before spreading throughout Kent. Looking through the family albums and reflecting on the scattering of the seeding family a quaint thought came to me—how little of London I’d known outside its south-east boundary and its arterial roads into its centre. I noticed how I’d always travelled into London by the same routes and out the other side by a similarly familiar trail. Throughout my growing-up years I’d clung to the safe—same buses, same trains; same clubs, same pubs; same bookshops, same record stores—never touching another point on the London boundary.

Last Thursday I took out a map of London and found out where I’d never been. There was a lot of it. I looked west along the course of the Thames—Barnes and Chiswick; Richmond and Twickenham; Brentford and Hounslow; then north through Harrow, Ruislip, Northwood; south even to Wimbledon and Kingston. I’d never had any cause it seems. I could attach associations—Battle of Britain fighter squadrons, sport, horses, births and deaths —but no compulsive need to trip off there. So I chose. Twickenham would do.

Dutch House, Twinckenham
Photo: John Levett

The moment I chose I knew why I’d never been there. Twickenham is home to the English Rugby Union and throughout my growing years rugby was associated with the class enemy, chinless wonders, hooray harrys, unearned privilege, family advantage and not the sport of the sons and daughters of toil and soil. It’s changed; they’re now as unremittingly bourgeois as the rest of western Europe. I trooped down from Cambridge and caught the 11.50 out of Waterloo. Another first; I’d never taken a mainline train from there before. (Footnote: John Schlesinger made a film of Waterloo station early in his career, Terminus 1960.) I passed through Clapham Junction and made a note that I’d never been there either. Thence to the suburbs.

St. Alban’s Church, Twickenham
Photo: John Levett

Twickenham promised nothing. Like every suburb, town, city in this increasingly dis-United Kingdom it’s got the full complement of corporations in the High street (with the singular exception, as far as I could see, of Woolworth. Whatever happened to them? I used to spend an afternoon in Woolworth as a kid just looking at stuff). I took off for the nearest available Thames bridge some two miles away.

As I walked I began to warm to the place. Much of the housing development was post 1880s and was in great debt to the early patriarchs of Modernism—Voysey, Webb, Townsend. It tails off into early 1900s pattern-book eclecticism but there are enough features on enough houses to stop for. As I closed on Teddington lock I stopped at St. Alban’s church. It was begun during the high point of mid-Victorian self-confidence and opened to the prayerful in 1899, curtailed its activity when the subscriptions dropped off and fell into disrepair. Like many similar parish enterprises it now serves as an arts centre. I crossed the Thames into Ham.

Ham Common
Photo: John Levett

Now I knew that ‘Ham’ had something to do with a bend in the river and that didn’t take much working out but beside that I knew nothing. So I asked. Ham is on the southern boundary of Richmond Park which is deemed to be a Royal park which means that some Royal stole the land from the peasantry who held it in common. That Royal was Charles I who clearly paid heavily for the theft. Needless to say the payment didn’t involve handing back the land. Some common land was left; cunningly named Ham Common and a fine spot it is. Having walked around the backside of Ham and getting the impression it was all 1920s social housing with the inevitable mock Tudor affairs, Ham Common was a joy. I sat down and got all this info chatting with Alfred who had come here after demob from the last war. (No doubt there will shortly be a generation, if it hasn’t already arrived, for whom the term ‘the last war’ will mean no more than ‘the last war before the present one’ and each indistinguishable from any other.)

Alfred married Bettie and moved into Bettie’s family home because it was just off the Common and Bettie wasn’t moving because they’d never get anything as lovely. Bettie’s parents died within the decade and they had the place to themselves and their own family. Bettie knew a thing or two.

From Alfred I got the history—the Common, Richmond Park, Ham House, the ferry across the Thames, his family, other families, that house over there, the murder there, the plane crash. It was the warmest day of the year so far so sitting around was fine.

Magnolia, blooming in Ham
Photo: John Levett

When Alf took off so did I. Walking the back streets. You could make a forest from the number of magnolias in bloom. I often think that should I have space one day for one plant only then the magnolia it should be. I’ve never cared about the flowering season of anything I’ve ever planted (my rose garden has largely been and gone by high summer) and the lift to the spirit that magnolias bring is special.

I walked past Ham House towards the Thames and chose to walk the bank to Richmond. Not that there was much choice. My London means a bridge available whenever needed; not a walk of a mile or paying the ferryman.

One feature of the London A-Z is that it has no contours so I was surprised by Richmond Hill rising some couple of hundred metres from the Thames and a view straight through to the southern Weald. It’s not Table Mountain nor the view from Machu Picchu but I’d never seen it before; never seen this view of the Thames other than the one passing Charing Cross; never knew London was this tall; never felt the surprise of a city new to me. I may seem small beer but I thought once I knew it all. Then a few more pennies dropped. The habits of my early years I’d taken with me through decades. Always took the same route to school; always got off at the same bus stop, never one stage before or one after; strolled from this place to that, looked in the same store windows; it seemed to me that I still do. I realized it was the same with my cycle rides; anti-clockwise out of Cambridge whichever point of the compass I was aiming for hence I always get the same scenery at right and left.

View of the Thames from Richmond Hill
Photo: John Levett

It may seem strange that something that is someone else’s daily grind gives a heart a leap. But then it should; there should be wonder in small things; there should be daily discovery; there should be looking up; there should be a daily new horizon. Sitting on the top of Richmond Hill I hoped that the Richmondians took joy too as I do walking along the Backs. It’s often forgotten that people pay good money to visit what we see as our own back garden. Two days ago I found a small booklet on Cambridge architecture contemporary in 1960 on a market stall. I was struck by how much I’d never noticed; bold-for-its-moment design, bold-for-any-age innovation that had now been blended by its generic successors. Yesterday I started a walk wide-eyed and camera-laden looking for this stuff. The stuff I was looking for is not King’s College Chapel nor Wren’s Trinity Library which means it’s no doubt continually under threat; 1960s concrete is not beloved, hospital architecture disappears with changing demands, pupils outgrow schools, shopping arcades fall with the styles they sell. But there is a remarkable volume of seen-as-disposable building that I’d never noticed, never seen as more than purely functional (which maybe accounts for its success and continuation). It seems that in twenty-first century fashion I’d easily cast off easily-acquired, soon-too-familiar views. I’ve begun to rethink, review two favourite cities. Fun for all the family.

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Garden Bloggers Cross-Pollinate

A weekend in Austin, Texas, pitches three dozen garden writers together: let the hybridizing begin!

Writers ooh, ahh, click over the ‘Embroidery Garden’
at James David and Gary Peese’s home in Austin
Photo: Human Flower Project

Writing is solitary, whether it goes on in an ivory tower or a partitionless newsroom with a hundred jangling phones. So the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling that took place in Austin over the weekend felt strange and delightful – like an orgy.

There were 38 of us, thereabouts, gathered in the sunshine without so much as a paragraph to stretch over our private identities. Bloggers from Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Idaho, New York, Indiana, Oklahoma, Georgia, and all over Texas (yes, even North AND South Austin) spent a humming two days together. We visited a public garden for $8, and several private ones for free. We hung out at a local nursery, listened to an inspiring talk over fajita lunch, let our hair down at organizer Pam Penick’s house and garden, and gorged on a family-style barbecue dinner.

Carol of May Dreams Garden discusses garden blogging at Pam Penick’s house during the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling, April 5, 2008
Photo: Human Flower Project

After all that we’re not exactly “family,” but we surely cross-pollinated in ways that only our subsequent writing, thinking and photography will bear out.

There are already loads of interesting accounts of the event on the web, with a compilation to come on Pam’s site, Digging. Here’s some pollen we picked up, from bloggers and others throughout the weekend, delivered orgy-style:

There is such a thing as too-good drainage: Frances, who gardens on a slope in East Tennessee, swears that’s so.

People aren’t making money off their gardening weblogs – or if they are, they were mighty quiet about it.

The term “live oak” is fiercely contested; we witnessed a spirited discussion between a transplanted Texan and a transplanted Georgian, both natives of England and so, by birthright, experts in such matters.

Wordpress seems the blogging software of choice, though there were lots of grumblings about it. Kathy Purdy, who has her own blogging advice site, gave a tutorial on Pam’s porch and brought along the telltale Wordpress for Dummies.

Snow Melt, iris hybridized by M. Sutton at the Natural Gardener
Photo: Human Flower Project

Bearded iris really can grow in Austin. Really. We met a volunteer from the local iris society who was weeding a bed of 800+ varieties at the Natural Gardener. And the American Iris Society will actually hold its national meeting here in a week.

Several of the most enchanting garden writers we met are also historians, deep in to genealogy and regional research. We especially hope that Mary Ann Newcomer follows through on her study of Polly Bemis, a Chinese-American pioneer whose Idaho garden grows on.

From poolside, gardens of James David and Gary Peese in West Austin
Photo: Human Flower Project

REVOLUTIONARY PARADIGM SHIFT: Better listeners told us that James David and Gary Peese, whose imperial gardens we visited Saturday afternoon, are not so sweet on spring. Their favorite season is late summer/early fall. Let’s say that again, another way: Their gardening year revolves around the Texas summer because it’s the one reliable season here. As in, 112 degrees. As in, hasn’t rained for four months. This is samurai gardening!! Rather than dreading, moaning, and if possible running like hell from the facts of August, they face up, figure out, and work to make that time splendid. Honestly, just the idea sounds impossible—even nauseating—to us, but the thought has been planted. And our “endure” or “cut and run” approach hasn’t even been character building.

The way to pronounce “clematis” is klem-e-tis. One of the aforementioned English experts confirmed this—as gratifying an episode as we could imagine (since that’s how we’ve always said it).

Lucinda Hutson’s purple house and wonder garden, Austin
Photo: Human Flower Project

The Virgin of Guadalupe smiles on gardens, as proven by Lucinda Hutson. Her serendipitous invitation was the icing on the orgy Sunday morning. About a dozen of us wandered around waist high snapdragons, chard and poppies, sniffing leaves from her allspice tree as images of Our Lady—in stone, paint, tile, wood and beadwork—blessed our every step.

That plant we have tried unsuccessfully to kill for nine years is actually a treasured “native” – Twisted leaf yucca (Yucca rupicola) – on display at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. Terrific – antipathy has turned to pride, and there’s one less thing on our garden hit list.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

The famous last line of Mary Oliver’s poem now has a context, thanks to Tom Spencer.

Fearless leader and ace-pollinator, Pam Penick
Photo: Human Flower Project

And despite the bluster, everything is NOT bigger in Texas. One out-of-stater looking over a patch of bluebonnets Saturday morning quietly confessed: “I thought they would be much taller.”

To Pam Penick, the prime pollinator of this whole event, thank you. We’re also grateful to organizers MSS (Zanthan Gardens), Diana (Sharing Nature’s Garden) and Bonnie (Kiss of Sun) for all the behind the scenes work. You all make orgy-hosting tasteful and heavy lifting look easy. 

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Falklands Flowers at 52° Latitude S.

Even on windy islands of peat in the far Southern Hemisphere, if there are Anglos, there will be gardens, too.

The garden at the Government House in Stanley
Falkland Islands, Februrary 2008
Photo: Sharen Branscome

A territory hospitable to penguins doesn’t put most people in a gardening mood. But most people are not English people, and they’re the ones who, mainly, settled the Falkland Islands. Shallow soil be damned. What’s a little Antarctic wind? There WILL be gardens.

Friends Jim and Sharen were recently in Stanley—at least Sharen was, while Jim played shuffleboard on the ship and sent out email: “The wind was still blowing at 41 mph this morning when we arrived....” That’s tough on plants. But Sharen found some fascinating gardens around town. The best known, likely the grandest, is outside the Government House, built in 1845 to be home for the presiding Englishman here. As Jim and Sharen discovered in southern Chile, lupines are the showboat garden flowers of the far southern hemisphere. Some grow tall as hollyhocks. The flower stalks bristle with color all the way up—you’ve got a tiger by the tail!

There’s also a big greenhouse and nursery on the grounds for growing the governor’s vegetables. It’s a long choppy ride to the supermarket in Chile (since the war with Argentina in 1982, Falkland Islanders tend to go the extra mile).

Though the islands are way far south, at 52 degrees latitude, the climate here is generally called “temperate.” For example, it’s a very reasonable 61 degrees at Mount Pleasant Airport today. Still, growing things is tough because the islands’ soil consists of ”shallow peat over clay” and the winds blow steady and harsh. “Once you get outside the landscaped yards in town, there is nary a tree or bush to be found. Anywhere. None. There is one trial nursery for trees, but no natural greenery reaching above about 12” above ground.”

Felton’s Flower (Calandrinia feltonii)
rescued from extinction by gardeners
Image: Falklands Conservation

All this makes islanders exceptionally proud of the native wildflowers—the species that can make it. Herds of sheep about did in Felton’s Flower (Calandrinia feltonii), an endemic plant that would be extinct today, had it not been for the acquisitive efforts of Falklander gardeners.  Pale Maiden (Olysnium filifolium) is the Falklands’ national flower. Botanist J. D. Hooker described “grass plains...almost whitened by the profusion of its pendulous, snowy bells” in “the spring month of November.” That was a hundred years ago.  We understand Pale Maiden isn’t so plentiful now.

Gnome Garden in Stanley, Falkland Islands
Photo: Brian Lockett

Resignation to “dwarf” plant varieties and delight in the islands’ abundant bird life may have inspired this garden in Stanley. Photographer Brian Lockett provides this description. “The yard was tiered. The lowest tier of the garden was occupied by dozens of garden gnomes. There was a ceramic Mexican burro and a pair of plastic, pink flamingoes behind them. Farther up, there were a couple of species of ceramic geese. A large shrub in the highest tier was surrounded by a collection of ceramic Gentoo Penguins and topped by a ceramic hawk.” You will also want to experiment with Brian’s alternative view of this yard: ”Cross your eyes” he suggests, “to see the gnome garden in 3-D.”

Jim, have you tried that? You don’t even have to leave the ship!

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Today’s Hawaiian Lei (Kiss Not Included)

Competition from Asian growers and airport security are stifling Hawaii’s famed floral greeting.

Mr. and Mrs. Mainland Get a Blast of Aloha
Image: art.com

In the late 1800s, visiting Hawaii meant sloshing over hundreds of ocean miles: The Boat Days, they call it in the islands. To be greeted with a lei after braving the seas (or before, if one were headed back to the mainland) seems to have caught on quickly, an indelible tourist experience that swiftly became part of travelers’ expectations and tour guides’ provisions. Lore grew around the lei custom, too:

“It was said if a departing visitor tossed their lei into the ocean and it floated back to the beach, it meant that the person would someday return to the islands. Hundreds of leis could be seen floating in the crystal waters off of Diamond Head as a ship steamed away.” (Anyone who finds this too sentimental, please break a brick with your head!)

Lei Vendors in Honolulu
Photo: via art.com

The University of Hawaii has posted a brief history of the lei tradition based around interviews with Honolulu lei vendors. It notes, “By the turn of the (20th) century, the lei industry was well established in Honolulu. Hawaiian lei sellers — generally women — were visible on the sidewalks of downtown Honolulu in the area of Hotel, Maunakea, and Kekaulike streets.” Travel to the islands swelled in the late 1920s, as Matson Navigation Company began luxury liner service between California and Honolulu.  The lei sellers, picking flowers from their own yards and local farms, strung garlands and brought them to the waterfront on steamer days (usually twice monthly). With the beginnings of air travel in the 1940s, some moved to the airport, selling their flowers from the backs of trucks.

“(We) had all these jalopies. We just build a stand on. No more electricity over there. Just a dark road and don’t even have street lights. What we have is gas lanterns. We hang it onto the stand. This is how it started,” said seller Harriet Kauwe.

And today? Hawaiian tourists have come to expect the lei greeting. And it’s still provided though the circumstances, the vendors and the flowers themselves are changing fast. Most of the lei sellers on Maunakea Street today are Filipino women, not Hawaiians. Nearly all lei greetings take place not at the shining waterfront or even the airport gate. Instead, airport regulations require “greeting companies” to station representatives in the baggage area holding out signs with passengers’ names (limousine-service style). One company explains: “After deplaning, clients should recognize their name sign. In the traditional way of saying Aloha, a lei, specially selected from one of our four service categories, will then be presented” (we’re not sure if a kiss comes with that).

Shirley Magaoay, a lei vendor born in the Philippines
at her shop on Maunakea St., Honolulu
Photo: Olivier Koning

Also, it’s likely that the flowers looped around your neck will not be Hawaiian. The state’s annual summary of the flower and nursery business found that Hawaii-grown lei flowers had been steeply declining for several years. Production of plumeria, creamy yellow and highly favored for leis, was down by half from 2002. Cultivation of pikake (Jasminum sambac), a pearly and more traditional lei flower in the islands, was down even more. “In 2002, nine growers sold 81,000 (pikake) blossoms valued at $242,000. In 2006, five growers sold 23,000 flowers worth $60,000.” Carnation and tuberose production in Hawaii has sunk also.

What’s happened? As on the mainland, U.S. flower farmers can’t beat the cheap labor costs in Latin America. And Hawaiian growers find themselves in added competition with farms in Japan and Thailand. Not only were total blooms and revenues down between 2002 and 2006, so was the acreage dedicated to lei flower production. (You can find the whole report here.) We’d suppose that as in much of the rest of the U.S., flower growing simply doesn’t look like the most lucrative use of land, especially so in Hawaii where there’s not much of it and demand for a piece of paradise is high.

The one exception in this decline of locally grown lei flowers seems to be the orchid Miss Joaquim Vanda, a splashy purple and white blossom hugely popular in the 1930s that’s making a comeback. This flower doesn’t travel well, so Hawaiian blooms can still dominate the market.  “To make a vanda lei requires somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 flowers,” said Richard Criley, horticulturist at University of Hawaii. “Of course, the old-style lei, the flat one, which uses only the principal lip petals, requires many, many more flowers. That would account for the increase right there.”

But Criley also believes that lei sales generally have fallen off. Perhaps Hawaii, more accessible now than ever, is also less exotic, and a fresh garland has a whiff of absurdity. All the new rules at U.S. airports have made greetings clumsy, too. “There used to be a whole slew of people waiting by the gates with lei in hand. Now, you have to wait at the baggage area, which isn’t as easy,” he says. No matter how much slack guitar music they pipe in, blinking alarms, Hertz and drug hounds, moving walkways and conveyor belts are mighty low in Aloha.