Defiance and information

Before I go off to do some actual gardening, here's today's little bit of philosophy.

I had another one of those conversations the other day, the one in which it comes up that I'm a gardener, and the other person says, "That takes special skill. I can't grow anything; I kill every plant I touch. I don't have a green thumb."

Which of course first off makes me think of this bit from my favorite Henry Mitchell essay:

There are no green thumbs or black thumbs. There are only gardeners and non-gardeners. Gardeners are the ones who ruin after ruin get on with the high defiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of her chaos and tornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises.

Defiance is what makes gardeners, he says, and to a large extent, and especially on a large scale, I think that's true. But the other thing that makes gardeners is information. Of course you kill plants if you have no idea what their needs are, where to put them, how to take care of them. No one would, for example, adopt a dog without finding out how much it needs to be fed each day, that access to water is required, that it needs to be taken out to poop. (Or if they would, I don't want to know them.) This isn't even getting into issues of training or veterinary care, or geeky stuff like clipping poodles or teaching frisbee catching.

You don't get cited for cruelty if you mistreat plants, and their deaths are usually less painful than those of pets, but the need for information is just as critical, and people don't realize that. Nor do most retail outlets emphasize it, though good garden centers have staff members who can answer questions - if customers know to ask them, which they often don't. Just... take a plant home and stick it in the ground, right? Or, sometimes, try to grow it in the same tiny pot you bought it in.

I like to think I've saved quite a few lives in my time as a Master Gardener. (Lives of plants only, I assume.) But anyone who bothers to learn something about gardening can pass on what they've learned, and often it's the really basic stuff that people need to hear. "You need to water this," is likely number one. ("You need to water this less" is certainly in the top ten, too.)

Also: "It's okay to make mistakes." And with that, I'm going to go off and make a few. :)

The cycle, not the instant

Crap, I missed posting yesterday. The day got away from me, what can I say: but I'm sure there was something I could have noted.

What I've got for today is another Henry Mitchell quote, which I think illustrates my failure to find an appropriate subject quite nicely. There is always something in Henry Mitchell that fits. He's like Shakespeare, with complaints about too many marigolds.

Anyway.

It is the spectrum, not the color, that makes color worth having, and it is the cycle, not the instant, that makes the day worth living. Sometimes the big thing in the gardener's day is irises and roses and peonies all together in a gorgeousness suitable for keeling over at. Other days it is a squirrel loading a dry oak leaf in his mouth--God only knows why he picks one and not another, but he shops around--and you would think from his nervousness with the leaf that he was carrying a bushel of lightbulbs across the Beltway.

There will be a post tomorrow. About something.

Unnecessary things

So today, true to form, what you get is a Henry Mitchell quote:

In brief, I am no stranger to the anxieties or disappointments of a garden. A fine gardener once said his garden had a certain origin: "This garden is the result of doing unnecessary things which we could not afford at the wrong time of the year," he used to say, and the garden was quite beautiful. Of my own garden I might add, in addition to all that, "and furthermore nothing is doing all that well and it looks utterly hopeless."

He does give the essay an optimistic turn after that, and so do I hope to, with regard mostly to the dreadful jungle mentioned here yesterday. But I do have a lovely and growing pile of weeds of which something may be made: compost, I hope.

More tomorrow, probably about the demo garden, or possibly leek spoonbread.

Mertensia: notes on confusion in nomenclature

For someone who really loves Virginia bluebells, I have very few of them.  But I'm dividing and acquiring as I can, and someday I will have lots.  They're blooming now, and looking splendid in part-shady spots with the bleeding hearts (which will eventually swallow them, so I'll probably have to move the bluebells.  They are unassuming little dears, that take over by slow colonization rather than by getting enormous and overwhelming).

But this post isn't about the plant, really; it's about the genus name.  There are a bunch of Mertensias, though virginica is the only one I know well.  I've been taken with the name since I first learned it, and (this is the way of writers) decided that it would make a great girl's name, not for any real-life girls but for a fictional character, possibly the daughter of a botanist.  I had a couple of vague potential characters in hypothetical novels whom the name might suit, both born in about the 1750s.  So I looked it up to see if a botanist of the time would have known the name, and immediately plunged into confusion.

Just about any source you'll read (including Wikipedia) says this about Virginia bluebells:  "The Latin name Mertensia was given to this plant by Carolus Linnaeus in honor of the German botanist Franz Mertens."  Sounds good, right?  Except that Linnaeus died in January 1778, and Mertens was born in April 1764.  If I'm doing the math right, that means Mertens was 13 when Linnaeus died.  He might have been a precocious botanical genius, perhaps... but on investigation it turns out that he studied theology at university, and only pursued botany in his spare time, though he did have some substantial achievements in the field.  And no, his father was not a botanist.

I had to poke around a good deal more, into the International Plant Names Index and a scholarly article, to figure out that Linnaeus did indeed first (scientifically) name the Virginia bluebell, but he called it Pulmonaria virginica. It was later segregated from that genus and given the name Mertensia pulmonarioides by A.W. Roth in 1797, and the name was later stabilized as Mertensia virginica by J.H.F. Link in 1829 (with help from Persoon).  Presumably Roth and Link were honoring Mertens, who was by then old enough to have achieved something in botany deserving the honor.  Linnaeus probably never even heard of him.

So this is a lesson to you: a) do not read too much into those (L.) nomenclature notes without investigating (it says "Pers. ex. Link" too for a reason); and b) don't copy your information off Wikipedia.  Really though, I probably would have accepted the "Linnaeus honors Mertens" thing if I hadn't been trying to figure out the date the bloody thing was named, so I could tell whether giving a character who was in her 20s in the 1770s the name of the genus was possible.  Alas, it is not; I will have to reserve the name for someone in that Victorian novel I will never write.  I did name the laptop on which I am typing this Mertensia.  (All our computers have names, though this is the first one called after a plant.)

Subculture

Me saving mouse melon seed

Time flies... two weeks ago now, I went to the Washington Gardener Seed Exchange, and Our Fearless Leader Jon Traunfeld was there to speak (and get some seeds).  Jon said he'd told his 17-year-old son about the event, that there would be 60 or so people trading seeds, and got the reply, "Wow, is it a subculture?"

And... well, yeah, it is.  I sometimes feel that I'm surrounded by Seed People all the time, but actually we are quite a tiny sprig in the broader landscape, those of us who save and trade seeds, and the larger group who plant and appreciate them (which is still not all gardeners; plenty of people deal only in plants).  And we don't all do it for the same reason.  Heck, each of us doesn't do it for a single reason; often it varies per plant (or day, or whimsical fleeting thought).

I wrote a review over on Grow It Eat It recently about a book called The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans, which I really liked and highly recommend.  I do admit to being a little twitchy about the title -- no, not the "sustainability" part, though having this comic appear while I was reading it made me laugh.  It's that I always read "Ethnic Americans" as "Ethnic-Americans" and, you know, I am a Non-Ethnic-American, being English-Scottish-Welsh-Irish-Dutch-German-Swedish-American with no immigrants later than the early 20th century and no significant cultural ties other than reading lots of British mysteries and watching Doctor Who.  (Doctor Who is not "ethnic."  Though it does constitute a subculture.)  I know what Klindienst meant (assuming the title is hers and not the publisher's); it's the "sharing a common and distinctive culture" definition - the Non-Culturally-Amnesiac-Americans.  I have a sufficiently privileged and confusing background to not have to worry about being defined by my culture, if anyone can figure out what it is besides Twitchy-Snarky-American, but there's also a thread of unreasonable jealousy in there toward people who actually do have a defined heritage that, for one thing, gives them stuff to plant and cook that they know their ancestors planted and cooked and that are more distinctive than, say, beets.  Not that I don't love beets.

Where was I?  Oh yes.  One of the gardeners Klindienst interviewed, an Italian-American woman named Maska (because everyone in her family has Russian names), was showing all the great plants she had in her garden, and Klindienst asked her if she had any heirloom tomatoes, and then immediately knew it was a stupid question:  yes, of course she did, but she didn't think of them that way.  They were tomatoes grown from seeds that she'd saved and replanted, that had history clinging to them along with the mucky stuff you have to ferment off before drying, but they were named after the people who'd given them to her or by their culinary characteristics, to accommodate no one but herself.  In other words, without the intermediary of the Seed Savers Exchange catalog or the formally-arranged trading events or the tomato tasting festival with little cups of forty supposedly different varieties.  She saved seeds because that's what you DO, although saving money and preserving culture were part of the equation as well (though the latter is probably expressed better as "these are good tomatoes and I want to keep eating them").

So, these are the Seed People, a subculture with room for those who don't know they're part of it, along with those who are kind of hyper-aware and more-heirloomy-than-thou (yeah, I've done it too, though I'd get thrown out of a lot of groups for planting hybrids).  A Big High Tunnel (tents would block too much light).  I have to say I save seeds (and I'm just getting started at it, really) mostly because it's fun, it keeps my seed budget slightly lower, and it allows me to be pushy about mouse melons.  (You really ought to grow them, you know.)  I have written before about being far too distractible to be good at preservation; I always want something new (or old-new), not the same thing year after year, but that doesn't mean I couldn't save the seed and pass it on to someone else.  The other side of being the Purple-Carrot-Chaser is that I'm willing to try anything (see this post on growing "exotics" - which is a much more twitch-inducing word than "ethnic").  And I guess not having a distinctive cultural heritage means I'm not tied to growing anything in particular (not that anyone should be); the world is my oyster plant.  (Though I have tried salsify and am not sure it's worth it.)

And oh, crap, I have a bunch of seeds to start today, and a map to draw, and a class to plan.  Get moving.

Cute Caucasian Child Syndrome and Other Instances of Racial Skewing in Gardening Catalogs

... a highly unscientific survey, I assure you, but based on years of observation.  I've written about this phenomenon before, but probably three people read it then, so it seemed time to restate.  This may not be a post so much for African-American Heritage Month (if you want that, go see what Michael's up to) as it is for Month You Start Actually Looking At The Catalogs Instead Of Madly Preparing Your Order, but let it be my white girl's gesture toward equality.

So, not every company makes it as obvious as Baker Creek (the Gettles have a very cute daughter who is clearly tops in the Adorably Posing With Enormous Vegetables field), but you may or may not have noticed that along with the Cute Caucasian Children in the seed catalogs, there are a lot of other white people and not so many people of any other race.  Well, let me rephrase:  there are not a lot of people in the catalogs, not when compared to the number of vegetables and flowers.  Some catalogs avoid humanity altogether, and in some the human presence is subtle.  But when it's there, it's white.

To choose one example, not entirely at random but based on the relative prominence of human skin therein, the 2012 Territorial Seed Company catalog has, by my count, 55 photos that include people or parts of people (hands, for the most part; don't be imagining anything else, now) in which skin color is reasonably visible, and I interpret 100% of these as representing Caucasian heritage.  (Two of the same Cute Caucasian Child included, appropriately enough showing off the Cute Stuff Pepper.)  Misinterpretations based on degree of tan may exist, but mostly they look pretty pale.  I'm not picking on Territorial; this is a near-universal phenomenon.

Now, I can see where it comes from.  Seed companies and garden supply outlets do not have enormous budgets.  They're not hiring models; they're using their staff to pose with tillers and hold up bean pods.  And most of these companies are based in pretty white areas of the U.S., so most if not all of the staff is white.  (Territorial has a photo of the staff, with TINY faces so I can't tell for sure, but yeah, pretty much pale.  Based in Oregon.  Maine is another big seed company center.  Wisconsin, Missouri, the rural regions thereof, you can see the trend.)  I'm not saying that white people who love plants and have a secret longing to become hand models shouldn't go to work at these places.  I'd love to work at one of them.  Nor do I know anyone non-white who's decided to boycott seed companies based on who's demoing the hats and gloves and handfuls of red wiggler worms.  It's possibly not that big a deal.  On the other hand, how hard would it be to pull in a friend of color when it's time to take the photos?  No one needs to know you paid them in free seeds and a meal of heirloom veggies, because that just might possibly be interpreted less than positively, but as long as everyone agrees, fine.

A couple of minor exceptions:  Landreth does use this lovely historic illustration to advertise the African-American Heritage Collection, and since they have no modern photos at all except of plants, it's about as good as you're going to get.  And Seeds of Change usually has a few non-white faces in the catalog, though usually in the context of We Do Inner City Projects Yay Us, or occasionally because non-white farmers grow seed for them.  The hand models are mostly white.

I'd love to see Southern Exposure buck the trend; right now they don't even have hands in their photos, so no chance.  Nice veggies, though.

A singular concern

Oh dear, rather a long time since I posted.  It's been a migraine/insomnia/backache sort of week, with lots of work stuffed in between the inoperable periods, so that may explain the gap.

I have plenty to post about, mostly about seeds and seed catalogs (went to a fun seed exchange yesterday, got to meet Ira Wallace and hear her speak, got all my seed orders in after collecting the freebies of which there were plenty) but today, while putting together the data that will hopefully allow me to create a coherent map for the demo garden (mapping my own garden is a luxury I will not have time for, I suspect), a linguistic puzzle occurred to me, trivial to be sure, but I'll share it anyway.

So, when we're making lists of vegetables (and other plants too, I think, but I'll stick with veggies for now), whether in a catalog or for planning purposes or whatever, why do we state some of them as singular and some as plural?

I give you some gratuitous (and singular) Swiss chard, and carry on, citing from the Southern Exposure catalog in Ira's honor, as I think their usage is completely typical.

Singular vegetables:
Cabbage
Cauliflower
Celery
Chard
Corn
Eggplant
Garlic
Kale
Kohlrabi
Lettuce
Mustard
Okra
Rhubarb
Squash
Watermelon

Gratuitous plural tomatoes

Plural vegetables:
Artichokes
Beans
Beets
Carrots
Cucumbers
Leeks
Onions
Parsnips
Peas
Peppers
Radishes
Tomatoes
Turnips

Some oddities: broccoli is an Italian plural that's treated as both singular and plural in English; collards doesn't really have a singular; Southern Exposure makes the choice to list "Muskmelon" in the singular, but I usually see "Melons" (and often "Watermelons" too).

So why these default choices?  I considered the idea that plural vegetables are those that bear multiple product on one plant, so you can't really have just one (although I have had tomato plants like that), but then one hopes to get more than one okra per plant and squash are notorious for overproducing.  You can have just one plant of cabbage or chard, but one corn plant is not good strategy.  Radishes produce one root per plant, as do all the other root vegetables in the plural list, and artichokes, if you can get them to bear at all in this climate, usually have one flower bud, but are always plural in catalogs.

Most but not all of the cabbage family plants end up on the singular list, including all the leafy ones (if you discount collards as above).  In fact leafy things are generally singular, unless you call them "greens."  Leeks and onions are always plural, but you never hear "garlics."  Eggplant, the fruiting nightshade family plant, is routinely singular (even if you call it aubergine), whereas peppers and tomatoes are always plural.

So I really have no answer other than "tradition" though I expect it could be investigated.  I can tell you that an excerpt from "Landreth's Companion for the Garden and Farm" of 1884 (conveniently provided in the fancy new catalog) gives us much the same usage except that carrot, leek, onion, pepper and tomato are singular.  I'd have to burrow around a bit to find older sources than that.

Probably I should be concerning myself with more important matters (like making the damn map) but distraction gives life savor.  Along with vegetables.  (Please ignore implied lack of verb-subject agreement.  Vegetables are usually plural, and somehow not so appealing when not.)

Three things

1) Article today in the WPost about the new loosening of Latinate standards in the botanical world (plant names will still be Latin (or as much as they ever have been) but officially published descriptions may now be in English.  Did you even know they were still in Latin?  I didn't).  It's interesting and a slightly more complicated issue than one would think, but what really struck me was this sentence:

"The same [using Latin names] goes for the pretentious gardener who, trug in one hand, pruners in the other, can wax on about the Syringa (lilac), Salix (willow) or Solidago (goldenrod), et cetera."

Yes, well, I talk with my hands half the time, so I'd have to put something down first.  Ha.  And then I looked at the byline and it's Adrian Higgins writing that.  Adrian, how could you?  It's like a librarian describing hair buns and glasses on a chain and vicious sshhing.  I actually don't use Latin names most of the time in the gardening context, but sometimes it's just good sense, if the common names are common to more than one species and you really want to be, hm where does this word come from, specific.  And it's a good memory exercise.  When I reach the point of forgetting the common name but having the Latin come to mind immediately without hiding behind another name beginning with the same letter, then I will be worried.  Rosmarinus officinalis, that's for remembrance.

2) We're doing a seed catalog review series over on Grow It Eat It.  The link will show what we've got so far; there will be more.  And I did call Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds "food gardening porn" over there, too, so never say I'm not brave.

Speaking of (1) above, I have a sneaking preference for seed catalogs that give you the Latin even for vegetables - and I don't know why I should say "even for," as though pretentious Latin-naming was the exclusive property of ornamental gardeners.  I know we don't generally talk about chopping up some cabbage to make Brassica oleracea var. capitata slaw, but it is interesting to know that the "cole" we do use is from the Old English (and Latin and Greek) for the brassicas then extant, such as kale and rape, and it's actually quite important to know what others plants fall under Brassica oleracea, such as broccoli, cauliflower, collards, kohlrabi (there's that cole again), and Brussels sprouts.  They are all the same plant, variations bred out of an original wild species.  Similarly, chard and beets are both Beta vulgaris (this usually surprises people immensely when I tell them, even assuming they've heard of both vegetables).  Anyway, I could go on about it for days, but check those seed descriptions for bits of Latin.

3) My son's high school is doing the musical of The Secret Garden this spring.  Am itching with anticipation to see what kind of set they'll come up with for the exterior scenes (and should I volunteer to help?).  I dreamed I went to Misselthwaite again...

The aesthetic seduction of seeds

Well, my posts might get a leetle less frequent at this time of year (also, ridiculous weekend followed by brain-numbing cold; you're lucky you get me at all).

I did want to mention that among the slow avalanche of seed catalogs arriving at my house, I received yesterday the one I actually bothered to pay for, from the D. Landreth Seed Company.  They are in serious financial straits, and I encourage you again to jump in and order something from them, either a $5 catalog or a holiday gift or actual seeds.  The catalog is a marvel.  My one complaint is that the print describing the seeds is a bit small (aging eyes), but it's readable online where I'd be ordering anyway.  The rest of it is just great fun, with full-color reproductions of old catalog covers (from the 1800s to early 20th century mostly; the company has been around since 1784 but the catalog not that long) and engravings, plus pearls of wisdom, research stats, complaints about their competitors, etc. from the same period.  If you like history, and that moment when you read historical sources and realize how much and how little has changed, you'll enjoy it.

They have a really quite decent selection of seeds, including some collections (the African-American Heritage one is a collaboration with Michael Twitty and really interesting) and it's definitely one of those catalogs where you page through saying "ooh, I'm going to get that... and that..."  We'll see how my orders actually come out, but I'll get some stuff from them to be sure (prices are good, too).

Landreth is also the kind of company where, when you order a bunch of old seed packets (for purposes of... framing for decoration, I guess; I just thought they were cool) that they sell on the website, you get a call from not just customer service but the company president, to be sure you know the packets don't contain seeds.  Apparently some people thought they did; hope they didn't think they could plant them as a time-travel device.  (Though it is a fascinating idea.)

The packets evoke the days before what you got to illustrate your purchase was most often a photo of the flower or fruit or whatever end result is desired, impossibly perfect and yet, because it is a photo, daring you to challenge the perfection as unrealistic.  Drawings of unrealistic produce let you in on the joke more, I think, though possibly the gullible were once just as susceptible to them.  Not that I haven't had perfect produce out of my garden on occasion, and it's the privilege of the market to sell based on the product that tops the curve.

Seed catalogs (and with them, though not always matching one-on-one, seed packets) seem to fall under the general headings of "trying for pretty, with varying success depending on financial resources" and "trying for utilitarian, with varying success depending on how much we also want to include pretty photos."  Landreth (like Shumway's, but more successfully) goes for historical aura, but also shoves photos of most of their offerings into the center.  Their modern seed packets have modestly-representative photos on them, like most of the packets you buy in hardware stores; it's not art, but it tells you what you're supposed to be getting.  I for one like to see photos or good drawings, even if I don't believe them; it's habit and human failing, as if the lack of a picture somewhere means that the plant won't do its thing.  Some companies - Seeds of Change is one - edge over into really good photography, both in the catalog and on the packets; Seed Savers Exchange does this too, and their catalog is a pleasure to look at.  Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds goes almost too far in this regard; it's hard to tell in my photo, but their seed packets are downright seductive, and the catalog (huge and glossy) is basically food-gardening porn, which I find amusing considering their squeaky-clean home-schooled-Christian image.  The other end of the scale are companies like Johnny's and Pinetree, which have no pictures and little information on their packets, and catalogs that don't get fancy even if they are (in Pinetree's case - and Fedco, too, come to think of it - must be a Maine thing) occasionally quirky.  Johnny's has more money and can afford glossy photos, but their pride is in giving you tons of information and a wide selection, not in making you pant with longing.

And then there's the pretty-drawings crowd, which in the group above includes Renee's, Territorial (photos in the catalog), and Southern Exposure, but there are others.  Artsy, sometimes folksy; seducing with design and words rather than with enormous shiny watermelons.  I buy from them all in turn, depending on my mood and my needs, and I'm not denying the effect of presentation in my choice.  Go ahead, seed companies: cater to my desires; make me want you.  (Just please no more cute Caucasian toddlers holding jumbo produce, or I will throw up.)

GBBD tomorrow - I have blooms, and not just on seed packets, either!

You say you want a revolution

Sea kale at Monticello.  Still jealous of how good it looks.

(I was going to go with "Words, words, words" to continue the Shakespeare streak, but sometimes you just need the Beatles instead.)

Not completely accidentally, I recently read, back to back, a pair of related books only one of which is garden-themed.  The first was Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History, a historian's examination of how the Tea Party uses the events of the American Revolution to present itself and its goals.  I did not read this for what is probably the usual reason, i.e. to gather ammunition for an assault on the Tea Party itself (though, nothing wrong with having some cobblestones in reserve to toss), but because I'd found myself in the odd position of having written a novel that begins with a visit to the Boston Tea Party (yes, it's about time travelers; they work for a Washington-area contractor in 2173; please send agents/editors my way) and includes a reactionary organization that idealizes the past, and having in fact written it (not, alas, by using a time travel device) several years before people started stapling tea bags to their hats (which... don't get me started, okay?) and waving signs about how none of us should pay taxes since the ancestors of some of us didn't like the dumping on our markets of shiploads of stale tea that despite having unfair duties slapped on it still undercut the smugglers' prices.  (Like most historical happenings, it was both very simple and very complicated.)  I'm still not quite sure how directly I need to reference in my characters' conversations what I hope would be a long-forgotten political group, but since I am revising the thing now and trying to get it published hopefully in this decade, it's not an aspect I can ignore.  Anyway, it's an interesting book (Lepore's, I mean, though I hope mine is too along with its three sequels), and though I clearly share her biases I think she presents her information pretty well.  And I do not like anachronism and presentism and the exploitation of selected snippets of what men who would have laughed to hear themselves called Founding Fathers said and wrote, so while I did wince once or twice at not-useful condescension, I did enjoy reading about it all, and I think it's a good lesson for all of us no matter what our political views: if you're going to use history as a tool, for God's sakes get it right or at least do some bloody research.

The potential for exploitation of Revolutionary heroes worried me a little, approaching Andrea Wulf's The Founding Gardeners, a sequel of sorts to her The Brother Gardeners (which explored 18th-century British-American sharing of botanical material and culture).  The newer book deals with the influence of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison (along with Franklin and others) on American attitudes toward nature and horticulture in the context of a new nation and its political structures.  While it is, I'm cynically sure, an attempt to sell books in an atmosphere of New Revolutionary Awareness, it works as a solid piece of nonfiction (and, see above, I use the word advisedly) and it's very good at expressing the yearning each of those early presidents felt for getting the hell out of the White House (or its earlier equivalents) and back to farming and obsessive landscaping.  Washington might as well have said, "I need to spend more time with my shrubberies."  And while it's a somewhat one-sided approach to early American history, regarding for example the founding of our political party system from the point of view of attitudes toward agriculture, it neither ignores other aspects of the problem nor sugarcoats (with either imported cane or homegrown maple) the animosity expressed, particularly between former friends Jefferson and Adams (they made it up later, largely in farm-related correspondence.  IMO this works better than golf).

Vigna caracalla (I think now reassigned as Phaseolus) at Monticello

.

 

The multi-person biographical approach, in fact, helps achieve balance between the personages (almost like crop rotation) and emphasizes both differences and similarities, along with how interesting these guys really were.  Jefferson will always be my favorite, flawed, contradictory and compulsive as he was, and I am getting to know Monticello fairly well now after several visits, but I need to see Mount Vernon again (it is the closest to me, after all) and I've never been to Montpelier (shame) or Adams's Peacefield.  I knew little about Madison as environmentalist (to use a presentist term for his advocacy on behalf of the natural world) and I think the frontier aspects of horticulture in this period are bountifully significant and, though I've already read William Bartram and Meriwether Lewis, worth more exploration (pun intended).  And I have a novel brewing in the back of my head about all of that, too...

One thing I really like about Wulf's work is how she brings out the importance of gardening in larger national and international contexts; people tend to lose that, or dismiss it.  Not just agriculture, which often gets ignored too (the implications of tea only being commercially grown in China in that period should be understood by anyone who talks about tariffs), but plain old gardening for pleasure and sustenance.  I recently reviewed a book (for Washington Gardener magazine; should be out in the winter issue) called Futurescapes, by Tim Richardson, about new trends in landscape design (a stretch for me; I usually grab the veggie gardening books), and really appreciated Richardson noting in one of his essays that "the dreaded G-word" has been regularly dismissed by landscape architects, who regard gardening as "bourgeois," "embarrassing," "uncool," and the province of right-wingers, old people, or social climbers.  But in the new professional zeitgeist, he says, urban landscape planners are beginning to think of themselves as "gardeners of cities," with emphasis on (gasp!) actual plants and how people relate to them.  It's not conformist or capitulating or backward-thinking, or for that matter purely trendy; it's a recognition that what we grow fundamentally affects our essential humanity and connects us to one another, and to the past and the future both.  And this was no less true in the eighteenth century than it is today -- differently true because it was a different time -- but equally important and, may I say, revolutionary.  Revolutions are not only fought with guns, or with hatchets to break up and destroy an addiction to the products of exploitation; they can be fought with seeds and roots and vegetables and the desire to go out into the wilderness (or the back yard) seeking knowledge, or to return to one's own farm in preference to the endless noise of political disputes.  Which last does not equal quiet retirement; just read Jefferson on the number of test crops "killed by bug" or otherwise lost in the battleground of the garden (and he was not just playing around but trying to help his seedling country become self-sufficient, a goal we still haven't realized, though for his own table the failed crops were replaced by produce bought from his slaves, who I'm sure tended to go for reliability over wild experiment).  It can be brutal out there, and ever-changing and challenging; I submit, however, that it seems to be easier to learn from one's mistakes in a garden than in the politico-historical arena.  (Also, you can often eat your mistakes, and they seldom taste like crow.)

Words, words, words.  More visits to historic gardens called for, for sure, and also I need to grow one symbolic tea plant.  Merrifield Garden Center has them; I nearly bought one this fall but it started to rain and I went inside and bought a lime tree instead.  Did not really have a place for Camellia sinensis, anyway (except for where I already put the other camellia), but one will be found.

And yet more planted!

First, the dawn redwood has its fall color (needles to the left) and I think when the ginkgo is larger it will be a very lovely combination.  Not that it's not now, just kind of unbalanced.

Now that the back slope is semi-planted, and the new evergreens are in, I can turn my attention, such as it is, to the rough patch that lies more or less on the property line between us and the next-door neighbors.  (More or less is all we can say; these are old houses and the deeds tell us to measure from stones that aren't there any more or from the railroad tracks which are twenty feet wide.  The two families get along very well, which is a good thing.)  We've traditionally used this area, which is under a line of maple and black walnut trees, for piling brush and logs that never became firewood (neighbors used to have this awesome Guy Fawkes Day party), and then last winter when we had trees taken down, a lot of it went into a chipper and became the mulch that I was slithering in on the back slope a few posts back.  There are still rotting logs and lots of vines and roots and weeds, but the soil is lovely.

I have always meant to plant some native shrubs along there, and did in fact put in a Carolina allspice years ago, which has had to fight its way along between strangling vines and dumped Christmas trees, but is still alive.  Now I hope to get somewhere with this project.  I grabbed three winterberry hollies at American Plant's 40% off sale, and have now cleared enough space and got them planted.  They are Southern Gentleman and his two Winter Red consorts; the females are the ones with berries and need a male pollinator.

(If this sort of thing makes you snigger, and who isn't occasionally prone to that, you might amuse yourself (if you can tolerate 18th-century poetry) by reading The Loves of the Plants by Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), which is based on Linnaeus's system of taxonomy as derived from plants' sexual parts, and goes along like this:

With charms despotic fair CHONDRILLA reigns
 O'er the soft hearts of five fraternal swains;
 If sighs the changeful nymph, alike they mourn;
And, if she smiles, with rival raptures burn.
So, tun'd in unison, Eolian Lyre!
Sounds in sweet symphony thy kindred wire;
Now, gently swept by Zephyr's vernal wings,
Sink in soft cadences the love-sick strings;
And now with mingling chords, and voices higher,
Peal the full anthems of the aerial choir.

Which apparently is by way of saying that in flowers of the genus Chondrilla there is one female unit (pistil) to five male units (stamens), that the male parts are confederate, or linked at the top, and that everyone has a good time together.  Both Linnaeus and Darwin were considered quite racy.)

Where was I?  Oh, yes, winterberries.  So they are planted; here's one in a bad photograph:

They get 6-8 feet in every dimension and are deciduous with persistent berries.  The birds eat the berries, but leave enough for winter display.

Winterberries at the MoCo MG's demo garden a couple of winters ago -->

A real wow factor, bird food, and native, plus the benefit of chuckling about plant sex!  What could be better?

I'll put the viburnums back there as well, next spring when things are cleaned up a bit more, and we'll see what else I can come up with.

First 2012 seed catalog!

Before Halloween, yet: now, that's scary.

Thompson & Morgan just has to get in there first.  As far as I'm concerned, it gives me ample time to forget about them before I really get down to seed-buying decisions in January, though they will probably send me another catalog by then.  I did look through it, of course, and if I decide I have room this year to grow perennials from seed (I miss doing that, but the demo garden has kind of stolen away that seed-starting space, and I'll have less room than I did last year due to bathroom renovations), I might be tempted by the mixed heucheras.

image from T&M website

I've grown heucheras (coral bells) from seed before, but that was just old reliable Palace Purple; they've been self-seeding happily and I have quite a few of them now.  These would be something different (without having to actually buy plants; being able to say each plant cost me well under a dollar is part of the attraction).  I'd have to plant them somewhere where the groundhogs don't browse, as they seem to adore the leaves.  Well, something to consider (and I'll want to see what Park's has to offer too).