Het tulpenboek

No, I am not Judith Leyster all of a sudden, but I thought Dutch was the appropriate language for the announcement: my second book is out! You can read all about Time and Fevers on my website.

Here is the cover:

The image is an anonymous (similar to Leyster's, but not credited to her) watercolor of the ultra-valuable "broken" (i.e., infected with a virus) tulip Semper Augustus, which is the MacGuffin of my tale, the object that my pair of time travelers is after, at great cost to their already shaky personal equilibrium.

I feel more on-topic discussing this one on the gardening blog, because tulips and gardens figure in it in an important way. (The first book in the series centered around tea, but the smuggling and drinking of it more than the growing.) I had a great time exploring 17th-century Amsterdam and environs in my head and on the page, along with burbling about the philosophical aspects of walled gardens and Arcadia and Paradise, and the craziness of market forces; I hope the result is as enjoyable to readers.

I went out a bit earlier to photograph flowers and such (another post coming later, sort of the ides of GBBD) and did manage to capture a few tulips, but wow, I used to have a lot more of them. I've kind of given up, because of deer-munching, but I suspect there are a few places I could still slip some in (inside the garden fence, if nowhere else). The above one is a lone Orange Emperor being all dramatic in the shade under the dogwood and next to the cherry laurel. And have some cute little clusianas while we're at it:

I was going to take a photo of the glaringly orange 'Surprise!' tulips, a couple of which still managed to flower this year (well over a decade after planting, in eight inches of clay by the mailbox) as part of their usual catfight with the (now fading) purple-pink magnolia, but though they were there yesterday, they were gone today, and the way the stem was snapped off implied that deer rather than passing pedestrians had found them irresistible. Oh well, I hate them anyway.

A lot of people around here just shrug and say "Tulips are annuals" but I have found some to be reliably perennial (and, all joking aside, not just because they are planted where they will clash violently with other flowers). The Triumph line is pretty long-lived, and most of the little species tulips last for years. Where they don't get eaten.

If I try tulips again, I will probably go with cheaper ones I can afford to lose to ruminants, rather than the beautifully tempting offerings of Old House Gardens. But they are so beautiful and historic - and they have true broken tulips. (The 'Rembrandt' mixtures found in more common garden catalogs are not virus-infected, just stripy. But they're pretty and I have planted them before.) I'm sure they wouldn't mind if I steer you their way with a lovely image borrowed from their online catalog:

Silver Standard, c. 1760

That one costs $17.50 each, but if you're into rarities, this is the place to go.

I wrote a book!

Announcing (for the few people who read me here and not other places) my novel!

This is the first book in a series of time travel adventure novels that I've been writing since 2002, finally available - in ebook form only for now, though in print in a few weeks, I hope.

You can find sample chapters and purchasing information at my website. It's chock-full of smuggling and literary quotations and romance and sailing ships and fistfights and the past and the future, and I hope you will check it out to see if it's… your cup of tea. Ha.

And no, this has nothing to do with gardening, aside from Camellia sinensis being a plant (which I tried to grow, once. Dismal failure). But it has everything to do with me, so.

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.)

Other stuff I write

Until I get down to serious seed-shopping and starting, my winter posts might be a bit sporadic here, so in the chance you're dying to read more of my writing, here's where it's at.

I've been writing book reviews for Washington Gardener Magazine for over a year now - and if you live in the DC area and like gardening, please do subscribe!  I write for and administer the Grow It Eat It blog (link in sidebar).  At some point I plan to pull together some articles to submit to various gardening magazines; this blog helps me try out ideas.  But nothing in that line yet; I'll be sure to let you know.

I have an account at Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction site run by the Organization for Transformative Works, and yes, that is a real thing, and yes, I do write fanfic, when the occasion occasionally presents.  It is possible that some of my readers here will enjoy my piece "In Defense of Food," which is a loving parody of Michael Pollan and the local/heirloom food movement wrapped in the delicious trappings of C.S. Lewis's "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" (the appendix to The Screwtape Letters).  If the idea of devils chewing on locally-produced, compost-nurtured souls calls to you, you are probably as odd as I am, but at least you can indulge your craving.

Most of my fanfic is written in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga universe, so if I've surprised any Bujold fans here, jump in.  It's not all about gardening, of course, but I put together an essay that's turned out to be pretty popular (linked in a festschrift and an academic paper as well as read a fair amount), titled "Runaway Roses and Defiant Skellytums: Thoughts on plants, gardens, horticulture and botany in the Vorkosigan novels of Lois McMaster Bujold" which can be found here, and just recently wrote what manages to be a story about garden design that appeals to a science fiction-reading audience, "The Emperor's Garden."  I note that both of these contain spoilers for major plot points, so if you have started the series but not finished it, or think you'd like to read it someday unspoiled, take heed.  If you haven't read the books but think you can cope with confusion and destruction of innocence just to enjoy my prose, be my guest, and I'm honored.


There.  That was a little different than the usual garden blog fare.  Welcome to the blending of my universes.  *takes big panicked gulp before pressing "post"*

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

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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.