Planters
Punchlines
Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield
March 2016
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
" Easy Care Roses for the Home
Garden "
@ Men’s Garden Club of Wethersfield March
Meeting
Monday March 28 @ 7:00 pm in the Pitkin
Community Center
Marci Martin, Master Rosarian and President of the CT
Rose Society, will be presenting on “Easy Care Roses for the Home Garden”.
This is our major fundraiser. Club members are asked to contribute "home grown" perennials to the sale.
Annual Plant Sale is May 7
What will you donate?
How can you help?
Compostable Matter
By Jim Meehan
It would
happen every March on one of those weekends that start off cool – then become
warm enough to make a gardener believe in the imminent probability of
spring. A day to go outside in a
short-sleeve tee, a flannel shirt, and a down vest – and strip down to just the
innermost layer as the work grew more strenuous and the sunlight became more
intense.
The task at
hand was the turning of the soil in Mars and my vegetable garden. That piece of land is now devoted to (mostly
unknown) perennials rescued from destruction in the town’s now-defunct
“Heritage Garden” at the Town Hall, and gifts from friends who were not quite
sure what they were giving us – but were
certain that we would like it. Back in
those days however it was the home to several varieties of easily identifiable
and annually planted edibles. And the
yearly turning of the soil in that bed was my ritual equivalent of throwing out the first ball of the gardening
season.
And Nicole
Marie – our fifty-five pound, black Labrador Retriever / Irish Setter
cross was always there to help.
My weapons
of choice were a garden fork (aka spading fork, digging fork or graip) for loosening,
lifting and turning over the soil; a bow rake to break up dirt clods and smooth
out the area; and, to finish up, a Garden Claw to cultivate, loosen, and
aerate, but mostly because it is such a cool, fun tool to use. (It is an upright, three-foot tall, T-shaped,
blue device with top handle which you twist back-and forth to manipulate the
four-talon claw at the bottom. The
shoulder twisting was a good workout for my delts, and the turning motion
actually seemed to loosen the muscles of my lower back, which by then were
pretty sore and tight.)
Nicole’s
implements were her snout and front, web-footed paws.
The garden
was divided into three plots. And I
turned-over and raked each section three times.
I began my work on the west-most one with the graip while Nicole
patrolled the grounds, nose down, inhaling the incipient aromas of the upcoming
season. Then she would lie down on the
grass to watch me work. Being a dog she
of course did this with her eyes closed.
When my
first pass was completed Nicole would rouse herself up and walk into the plot
to burrow into the freshly turned earth with her dark, black snout – and
sneeze. Often she would dig a small depression with her paws in order further
investigate the ground’s contents. Then she would give me her signal for me to
continue work by sauntering over and nestling her dirt-covered nose in my
sweaty hand. She usually repeated this
ritual a couple more times before we were finished.
After the
second or third iteration – about the time that my flannel shirt had just
come off and the surface level of dirt had morphed from underground cold to sun
enhanced tepid – Nicole would return to the garden, stake out a spot, and roll languorously
in the lukewarm loam. Then she returned
to aroma patrol, and the important job of watching me with her eyes
closed. Sometimes when I would stop
briefly to wipe my forehead or clean the perspiration from my glasses she would
walk over and stand next to me. After
getting a quick pat on the head she returned to her post.
And when I
was finished, and my tools were all put away, Nicole and I headed into the
house for a well-earned cold gulp of water and a snack.
Today, over
a quarter of a century later, this is what I remember at this time of the
year.
Plans for the New Year
BY Henry Homeyer – the gardening guy
I wonder
why it is that so many of us make resolutions at this time of year: lose
weight, keep a clean desk, be nicer to people working for political candidates
that call us during dinner time … and so on. As a gardener, I don’t tend to
think so much about resolutions, but more about what I hope to do in my
gardens, come spring. What plants shall I try? What new gardens might I
develop?
I recently
got a catalog from a whole- sale plant nursery, Van Berkum’s of Deerfield, NH,
and spent an evening drooling over their catalog and thinking about all the
plants I wanted. I made three kinds of notations: a star for everything I
simply must have, a check for everything I’d like to have, and a dot for
everything that sounds interesting. Needless to say, there were way too many
marks to buy them all – I just don’t have room. Here are some of the starred
plants.
Meehan’s
Mint (Meehania cordata). I’ve never seen this, so I’m intrigued. It is for
shade or part shade, likes moist soil, and spreads slowly by stolons (roots).
It has showy lavender-blue flowers in May-June, and is a native wildflower that
comes originally from Appalachia. I know where to plant this: under some old
apple trees where my primroses bloom in pinks, whites and magenta. The foliage
is just a couple of inches tall, and the blossoms stand 3 to 4 inches above it.
Dulea
Purpurea Missouri Botanical Dulea Purpurea Missouri Botanical Purple Prairie
Clover (Dalea purpurea). Browsing the on-line photos that are not included in
Van Berkum’s printed catalog, the photo caught my eye. Nothing like the clovers
I know, it stands 24 to 30 inches tall, and has showy cylindrical cones covered
with tiny magenta flowers. The blossoms remind me of teasel flowers in that
only part of the cone is blooming at any given time. Native to Missouri, it is
hardy to Zone 3 (minus 30 degrees) and needs full sun.
Geum Rivale
Flames of Passion Geum Rivale Flames of Passion White Cloud Calamint
(Calamintha nepeta). I’ve seen this and even planted it for one of my gardening
clients. I love it, and although it is listed as a Zone 5 plant, the one I
planted wintered over last year, even with a cold winter. It forms a
globeshaped plant loaded with tiny white flowers, reminiscent of baby’s breath.
I need one (or more)! Full sun, it tolerates dry soil.
‘Miss
Manners’ Obedient Plant (Physostegia virginiana). I love obedient plant, but it
is not obedient at all. It’s a thug! Tall, with wonderful pink flowers, it is
great in a vase. But my goodness, getting it out of my garden was a struggle.
But I miss it, and am tempted by this plant which is, allegedly, “not
invasive”. Only 18 to 24 inches tall, it has white flowers and loves moist
soil, and I have plenty of that. I’ll keep a sharp on it, and it if takes off,
yank it!
Geum rivale
‘Flames of Passion’. This is a small perennial that does best in part shade and
takes drought. I want it, largely, because it was introduced by one of my
garden heroes, Piet Oudolf. One winter when I was passing though Holland I
visited him at his home in the countryside; I loved the fact that he had
commissioned someone to carve life-size stone sheep and had them “grazing”
around his property.
Piet Oudolf
is a garden designer extraordinaire; among his projects is the High Line, a
garden a mile and a half long built on an abandoned elevated railway line in
New York. I plan to go there this year on my 70th birthday, April 23. Let me
know if you want to join me for a garden walk there. It would be great fun to
walk it with interested gardening friends – new or old.
Feather
Reed Grass, ‘Karl Foerster’. I’ve got to try this tall grass, having heard it
lauded by gardening great Bill Noble when I interviewed him recently. It’s his
favorite plant. It grows 36 to 60 inches tall in a big clump, and is lovely
from early in the season till late. Full sun.
I love
delphiniums, but hate staking them up. There is a new group of them, the New
Millennium Hybrids, that “shouldn’t need staking” if planted in full sun. I’ll
give one or two a try, and see how they do.
Lastly, I
absolutely must get an Itoh peony. This is a cross between a tree peony and an
herbaceous peony, and at maturity can produce up to 50 blossoms over the course
of a month. Expensive, but I’ve decided it‘s worth it. They come in a variety
of colors, and I will buy mine when in bloom, so I will know exactly what I’m
getting. I just need to figure out where to plant it. But, hey! I’ve got all
winter to do that.
So make
your gardening resolutions, or create a wish list for what you hope to plant.
You can see photos of the flowers I mention on line at
www.vanberkumnursery.com. They are strictly wholesale, but their website has a
list of retailers that carry their plants.
Henry
Homeyer can be reached at PO Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746 or by e-mail at henry.homeyer@comcast.net.
Frost Against the Panes
From The Garden Lover – Liberty Hyde Bailey, 1928
It is in
the dead of winter that the greenhouse is at its best, for then is the contrast
of life and death the greatest. Just beyond the living tender leaf — separated
only by the slender film of the pane — is the whiteness and silence of
midwinter. You stand under the arching roof and look away into the bare depths
where only the stars hang their cold faint lights. The bald outlines of an
overhanging tree are projected against the sky with the sharpness of the figures
of cut glass. Branches creak and snap as they move stiffly in the wind. White
snow drifts show against the panes. Icicles glisten from the gutters. Bits of
ice are hurled from trees and cornice, and they crinkle and tinkle over the
frozen snow. In the short sharp days the fences protrude from a waste of drift
and riffle, and the dead fretwork of weed-stems suggests a long-lost summer.
There, a finger’s breadth away, the temperature is far below zero; here, is the
warmth and snugness of a nook in tropic summer.
This is the
transcendent merit of the greenhouse — the sense of mastery over forces of
nature. It is an oasis in one’s life as well as in the winter. One has
dominion.
But this
dominion does not stop with the mere satisfaction of a consciousness of power.
These tender things, with all their living processes in root and stem and leaf,
are dependent wholly on you for their very existence. One minute of
carelessness or neglect and all their loveliness collapses in the blackness of
death. How often have we seen the farmer pay a visit to the stable at bedtime
to see that the animals are snug and warm for the night, stroking each
confiding face as it rises at his approach! And how often have we seen the same
affectionate care of the gardener who stroked his plants and tenderly turned
and shifted the pots, when the night wind hurled the frost against the panes!
It is worth the while to have a place for the affection of things that are not
human.
Horti-Culture Corner
A Boy Saw a Little Rose Standing
By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Urchin blurts: “I’ll
pick you, though,
Rosebud in the
heather!”
Rosebud: “Then I’ll
stick you so
That there’s no
forgetting, no!
I’ll not stand it,
ever!”
Shut Up and Dig
Learning To Say Goodbye—With Pleasure
Posted by Elizabeth Licata on gardenrant.com
I’ve never
felt this way—in fact, I probably go too far in the other direction. I embrace
failure because it gives me a chance to try something else. For our front
garden shrubs, I immediately got rid of the old yews that were there when we
moved in. They say to wait a year on newly acquired gardens, but I doubt the
yews would have improved in that time. (Of course, the idea of not waiting
becomes more attractive when the snow melts and you discover you’ve inherited 4
beds of pachysandra.) The yews were replaced with some late-blooming
rhododrendron and now I’m trying leucothoe. The rest of the garden has changed
completely many times. A perennial bed became a pond; a rose garden a perennial
bed, and various shade perennials and come and gone in my difficult front
space. I’m still killing at least 2 a year.
As for
bulbs. The hundred or so that are currently being forced indoors (many just
coming into bloom) will eventually find their way into the compost bucket, as
will the ones in large containers that I bring out in April. These are all
hyacinths and hybrid tulips. The tulips rarely come back and I’ve nowhere to
put the hyacinths. Anyway, I’m always happy to start over with new bulbs in the
fall. Even the species tulips in the ground aren’t completely reliable—I have
to add more each year.
Houseplants
are where people really lose it. Houseplant owners need to face the fact that
the American home is generally inhospitable to plant life. You must choose
carefully and accept failure. The easiest houseplants are also the ones that
clean the air most effectively, so don’t scorn sansevaria, pothos, dracaena,
philodendron, spider plant, and the others most commonly found in offices.
There’s a reason you see them there—even the lack of natural light and harsh
dry atmosphere of the average office will not kill these. Chances are you won’t
either. You might also get rid of formaldehyde, benzene, and trichloroethylene
in your domestic atmosphere—brought in from carpets, cleaning products, scented
candles, and so on. (Google this and you will find dozens of studies.) In the
realm of houseplants, accepting death and soldiering on is actually a health
issue.
It’s not
that I don’t treasure my most venerable plants—a climbing rose that’s been here
at least three decades, a very old sugar maple, the unknown hostas that have
been raising their tall deep purple flowers since before we moved in, my
thirty-year-old schlumbergera, and many more. But I wouldn’t love them as much
if I couldn’t change and refresh so much else.
Home & Garden | Garden Q&A
Alternatives to the Usual
Stephen Orr in NYTimes.com
Q. I want
to plant a small flowering tree in a sunny spot in my garden this spring. There
are already dogwoods, cherries, plums and redbuds in my neighborhood. Can you
suggest a few spring-blooming alternatives?
A. Even if
you are in the mood for something unusual, you don’t have to resort to the
exotic. There are several underused American natives that fit your request.
They may not match the vividness of familiar Asian species in full bloom, like
the frilly double-flowered Kanzan cherry, but their quiet beauty will draw many
admirers. And most will grow no more than 30 feet high, the textbook definition
of a small garden tree.
One of the
most graceful, Carolina silverbell (Halesia tetraptera), has dangling hoop
skirts of pure white flowers followed by lobed fruit. In “Dirr’s Hardy Trees
and Shrubs: An Illustrated Encyclopedia,” Michael Dirr, a woody-plant expert,
praises its merits: “The flowers, in a subtle, not boisterous way, are among
the most beautiful of all flowering trees.”
Other
Halesia varieties that may do the trick include Rosea, a pink form, and
Variegata, which sports white flowers and variegated leaves. A shorter variety,
Wedding Bells (above), has large white flowers and reaches 20 feet.
Another
good candidate is the serviceberry (Amelanchier), a white-flowered shrublike
tree with several useful varieties. They include the elegant Allegheny
serviceberry, which blossoms into a cloud of white and looks at home in either
a woodland or a small garden. According to folklore, the serviceberry got its
name from 19th-century settlers heading West who knew that when the tree was in
bloom, the ground had thawed, so it was time to dig graves and bury those who
had died during the winter.
For a
dramatic statement in the garden, the fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus) is
sculptural even when not in bloom, thanks to its graceful, often-multiple
trunks. In the later part of the season, in May and June, it produces a
spectacle, covering its twisting branches with a fragrant threadlike bunting of
delicate white flowers.
The Eastern
redbud (Cercis canadensis) may not interest you because of its ubiquity, but
consider its white variety, Alba, or Forest Pansy, a darling of plant
aficionados several years ago, which has pink blossoms and dark purple leaves.
A new, harder-to-find variety, Hearts of Gold, has vivid yellow foliage that
leafs out after the decline of its hot pink flowers.
If you must
have something exotic, though, consider two non-native trees: the Japanese
snowbell and the yellowhorn from China. The snowbell (Styrax japonicus)
resembles a Halesia and, like other light-colored flowering plants, looks best
against a backdrop like a solid wall or a dark hedge. The yellowhorn
(Xanthoceras sorbifolium) has shiny dissected leaves and scented white
crepelike flowers with yellow and red centers. It is relatively rare but worth
the trouble to find.
Why the Tomato Was Feared in Europe
for More Than 200 Years
How the Fruit Got a Bad Rap from the Beginning
By K. Annabelle Smith on smithsonian.com
A nickname
for the fruit was the “poison apple” because it was thought that aristocrats
got sick and died after eating them, but the truth of the matter was that
wealthy Europeans used pewter plates, which were high in lead content. Because
tomatoes are so high in acidity, when placed on this particular tableware, the
fruit would leach lead from the plate, resulting in many deaths from lead
poisoning. No one made this connection between plate and poison at the time;
the tomato was picked as the culprit.
Around
1880, with the invention of the pizza in Naples, the tomato grew widespread in
popularity in Europe. But there’s a little more to the story behind the
misunderstood fruit’s stint of unpopularity in England and America, as Andrew
F. Smith details in his The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and
Cookery. The tomato didn’t get blamed just for what was really lead poisoning.
Before the fruit made its way to the table in North America, it was classified
as a deadly nightshade, a poisonous family of Solanaceae plants that contain
toxins called tropane alkaloids.
One of the
earliest-known European references to the food was made by the Italian
herbalist, Pietro Andrae Matthioli, who first classified the “golden apple” as
a nightshade and a mandrake—a category of food known as an aphrodisiac. The
mandrake has a history that dates back to the Old Testament; it is referenced
twice as the Hebrew word dudaim, which roughly translates to “love apple.” (In
Genesis, the mandrake is used as a love potion). Matthioli’s classification of
the tomato as a mandrake had later ramifications. Like similar fruits and
vegetables in the solanaceae family—the eggplant for example, the tomato
garnered a shady reputation for being both poisonous and a source of
temptation. (Editor’s note: This sentence has been edited to clarify that it
was the mandrake, not the tomato, that is believed to have been referenced in
the Old Testament)
But what
really did the tomato in, according to Smith’s research, was John Gerard’s
publication of Herball in 1597 which drew heavily from the agricultural works
of Dodoens and l’Ecluse (1553). According to Smith, most of the information
(which was inaccurate to begin with) was plagiarized by Gerard, a
barber-surgeon who misspelled words like Lycoperticum in the collection’s
rushed final product. Smith quotes Gerard:
Gerard
considered ‘the whole plant’ to be ‘of ranke and stinking savour.’… The fruit
was corrupt which he left to every man’s censure. While the leaves and stalk of
the tomato plant are toxic, the fruit is not.
Gerard’s
opinion of the tomato, though based on a fallacy, prevailed in Britain and in
the British North American colonies for over 200 years.
Around this
time it was also believed that tomatoes were best eaten in hotter countries,
like the fruit’s place of origin in Mesoamerica. The tomato was eaten by the
Aztecs as early as 700 AD and called the “tomatl,” (its name in Nahuatl), and
wasn’t grown in Britain until the 1590s. In the early 16th century, Spanish
conquistadors returning from expeditions in Mexico and other parts of
Mesoamerica were thought to have first introduced the seeds to southern Europe.
Some researchers credit Cortez with bringing the seeds to Europe in 1519 for
ornamental purposes. Up until the late 1800s in cooler climates, tomatoes were
solely grown for ornamental purposes in gardens rather than for eating. Smith
continues:
John
Parkinson the apothecary to King James I and botanist for King Charles I,
procalimed that while love apples were eaten by the people in the hot countries
to ‘coole and quench the heate and thirst of the hot stomaches,” British
gardeners grew them only for curiousity and fo the beauty of the fruit.
The first
known reference to tomato in the British North American Colonies was published
in herbalist William Salmon’s Botanologia printed in 1710 which places the
tomato in the Carolinas. The tomato became an acceptable edible fruit in many
regions, but the United States of America weren’t as united in the 18th and
early 19th century. Word of the tomato spread slowly along with plenty of myths
and questions from farmers. Many knew how to grow them, but not how to cook the
food.
By 1822,
hundreds of tomato recipes appeared in local periodicals and newspapers, but
fears and rumors of the plant’s potential poison lingered. By the 1830s when
the love apple was cultivated in New York, a new concern emerged. The Green
Tomato Worm, measuring three to four inches in length with a horn sticking out
of its back, began taking over tomato patches across the state. According to The Illustrated Annual Register
of Rural Affairs and Cultivator Almanac (1867) edited by J.J. Thomas, it was
believed that a mere brush with such a worm could result in death. The description is chilling:
The tomato
in all of our gardens is infested with a very large thick-bodied green worm,
with oblique white sterols along its sides, and a curved thorn-like horn at the
end of its back.
According
to Smith’s research, even Ralph Waldo Emerson feared the presence of the
tomato-loving worms: They were “an object of much terror, it being currently
regarded as poisonous and imparting a poisonous quality to the fruit if it
should chance to crawl upon it.”
Around the
same time period, a man by the name of Dr. Fuller in New York was quoted in The
Syracuse Standard, saying he had found a five-inch tomato worm in his garden.
He captured the worm in a bottle and said it was “poisonous as a rattlesnake”
when it would throw spittle at its prey. According to Fuller’s account, once
the skin came into contact with the spittle, it swelled immediately. A few
hours later, the victim would seize up and die. It was a “new enemy to human
existence,” he said. Luckily, an entomologist by the name of Benjamin Walsh
argued that the dreaded tomato worm wouldn’t hurt a flea. Thomas continues:
Now that we
have become familiarized with it these fears have all vanished, and we have
become quite indifferent towards this creature, knowing it to be merely an
ugly-looking worm which eats some of the leaves of the tomato…
The fear,
it seems, had subsided. With the rise of agricultural societies, farmers began
investigating the tomato’s use and experimented with different varieties.
According to Smith, back in the 1850s the name tomato was so highly regarded
that it was used to sell other plants at market. By 1897, innovator Joseph
Campbell figured out that tomatoes keep well when canned and popularized
condensed tomato soup.
Today,
tomatoes are consumed around the world in countless varieties: heirlooms,
romas, cherry tomatoes—to name a few. More than one and a half billion tons of
tomatoes are produced commercially every year. In 2009, the United States alone
produced 3.32 billion pounds of fresh-market tomatoes. But some of the plant’s
night-shady past seems to have followed the tomato in pop culture. In the 1978
musical drama/ comedy “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” giant red blobs of the
fruit terrorize the country. “The nation is in chaos. Can nothing stop this
tomato onslaught?”
Gourdzilla!! Growing Champion Pumpkins
Growing titanic orbs or gourds is a competitive cut throat
sport. As recently as 16 years ago, the heaviest (official) pumpkin weighed a
mere 403 pounds. Now in 2015 the one ton mark has been surpassed. That is a lot
of pumpkin, not to mention how do you move one that size?? With a fork lift and
pickup truck at the very least, so this is not something that any home grower
can do. Champion pumpkin growers have their own methods and secrets that they
guard closely in hopes of breaking the record books one more time.
