in the garden
In the Spring Garden, Some Joys Just Won’t Wait
Take time out from garden chores to savor moments of beauty like a visit from bluebirds.
MY friend Rock and I have different attitudes about the garden.
Or enjoy the purple blooms of a lilac.
Planting zinnias like Apricot Blush, from Renee’s Garden, is a low-effort and high-reward enterprise; they grow quickly from seed.
He sets out on a Saturday morning with a list of chores — mow the paths to the stream; fix the broken locust gate; dig compost into last year’s squash patch — and proceeds to work madly until they are all done.
I have a similarly impossible list — plant the seeds of sunflowers, zinnias, bishop’s lace, nasturtiums and cosmos, now that all danger of frost is past; figure out what went wrong with those African lilies I just moved outside; plant the climbing rose my friend Steve made from a cutting, which I have allowed to languish in a pot for two years — but I don’t really care how much I get done.
For me, the point of gardening is being in the garden. Or outdoors, I should say, because I’ve tucked so many plants all over this old farm in Maryland — from a growing collection of mints, separated as a way of inhibiting cross-pollination, to the watercress taking hold in the stream.
The birds, of course, are always grabbing my attention. Last week, as I headed outside with a coffee cup and a bundle of flower seeds, a baby bluebird landed unsteadily on the railing of the deck outside the kitchen screen door.
I didn’t want to scare this fuzzy fledgling. So I set down my coffee cup and the seeds with the stealth of a burglar and reached for my binoculars. With the glasses, I could see the white speckles on his feathers, his luminous dark eye, cocked innocently toward the window — Oops. With a flutter of wings, he was gone.
Bluebird worship is more important to me than any plant screaming for help. Let the weeds grow, I say, when there are other joys that will not wait, like burying my face in the deep purple blooms of the old French lilac that my friend Henry brought me years ago as a mere sprout, or in the fragrant double-white lilacs that my grandmother planted here as a young bride a century ago.
They had almost finished blooming, so I grabbed my secateurs, filled a pail with warm water, and went out to cut some flowers for the house. This is a ritual I enjoyed as a little girl with my father, who showed me how to make a slanted cut right above the node on a woody stem, then plunge it into warm water. After cutting, we would go into the kitchen, where he would bang each stem with a hammer to break open the tissues.
“They’ll draw up the water and last longer this way,” he told me. Research has shown that this damages plant cells, which is too bad, because it was fun; now I just put the stems in the bucket.
Always cut flowers in the morning, when they are turgid, or full of water, Dad told me, and that advice still stands. The hotter the sun, the more water they lose throughout the day.
It was Mother who put an aspirin in the water before arranging a bouquet in the vase to keep it looking fresh (though researchers say that doesn’t help; rather, you should use a floral preservative, which contains sucrose and an acidifier, which inhibits microorganisms).
I cut the last of the late tulips, thinking of her.
My favorite tulips this year are viridifloras, tall, late varieties flamed with green: Spring Green is snow white with green flames and a touch of yellow; Flaming Spring Green is green and white, fired with red; Viri-lemon is primrose yellow and apple green.
As I arranged the lilacs in an earthy Guy Wolff pot and the tulips in a hand-blown vase, I took a moment to inhale the heady fragrance that filled our house. The lilacs’ voluptuous flower heads won’t last more than a few days. Tulips, on the other hand, always look a bit shocked at first and hang their heads over, as if about to die. Within a few hours, though, they acclimate themselves, one curving to the left, another to the right, one up, one down, in their own serendipitous sculpture.
While I stood there admiring their satiny petals, I remembered the seeds I had left lying in the sun somewhere (a no-no). I ran out to find the packets lying in the shade of Henry’s lilac, and then proceeded to the kitchen garden, determined to plant them in beds, covered lightly with compost.
There, by my cold frame — which is now full of succulent greens, because I planted the seeds back in March — I started pulling out lamb’s quarters, a weed that tastes remarkably like spinach, from between its cousins, Melody and Bloomsdale.
“You can stir-fry those, you know,” a nature-loving friend keeps telling me. “Dandelion greens, too.” They’re full of vitamins and antioxidants, she tells me.
Maybe so, but they don’t melt in your mouth like the tamed varieties, I thought, chewing on a tender Melody leaf. I pictured a big salad for lunch, then wondered whether it was better to plant more seeds to keep the greens coming, or if it was the flowers that couldn’t wait.
I noticed some rhubarb I had given up for dead poking up through the weeds. And the sugar snaps and snow peas needed watering so they can scramble up the fence.
And so it went one May morning in the garden. If I had planted all those flower seeds before noon, I would have missed the lilacs and the tulips.
As I carried some fresh greens into the house for lunch, I stopped dead in my tracks: my tree peony was loaded with semidouble pink flowers as big as lunch plates — Gathering of Rosy Clouds, a name inspired by its changeable pinks and the dark red flares in its throat. I’d seen one like it years ago at the Cricket Hill Garden, in Thomaston, Conn., and ordered one for planting in late August.
Some winters, the deer eat its succulent buds, but last year it went unnoticed. So I went into the house, looking for a bowl in which to float one exquisite flower.
For the Lazy Gardener: Plant, Then Stand Back
IT’S fun to plant annual flowers from seed in a pot or in the garden. Just keep the soil damp, so germinating seeds and seedlings don’t dry out. A few of my favorites, listed below, take 60 to 90 days to flower.
Unusual zinnias can be purchased from Renee’s Garden (888-880-7228; www.reneesgarden.com) in Felton, Calif.: Cool Crayon Colors (lavender, rose, pink and white) and Hot Crayon Colors (scarlet, yellow and orange) were prolific bloomers in my garden last year; Green Envy, a chartreuse semidouble that doesn’t bear that well, is a knockout in a vase, so plant plenty; and Apricot Blush is just plain irresistible.
Placed in an earthen crock, the happy, eerily sentient faces of sunflowers are like company in a room. I order from the Seed Savers Exchange (563-382-5990 or www.seedsavers.org), in Decorah, Iowa: Autumn Beauty, which grows to 5 to 8 feet with yellow, gold, dark burgundy or bi-color flowers; Irish Eyes, which is 24 to 30 inches with a green center and gold petals; and Giant Primrose, an 8- to 12-foot plant with a creamy pale yellow flower with a dark brown center.
Check Out My Other Blogs (click on blog name to go there) = / 1.3rd Eye Blog / 2. Favorites Blog/ 3. Vita Excolatur (Living Well ...) Blog/ 4. Humor Me Blog/ 5. News and Current Events Blog/ 6. Consider This ... Blog/ 7. Consumer Warnings Blog/ 8. New Orleans Pentimento Blog/ 9. We Constant Gardeners Blog/ 10. Chaillot Family Blog/
posted by Joe Paris @ Thursday, May 22, 2008
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