Garden Rant

What Native-Plant Gardens Need

by Guest Ranter David Schmetterling of Montana Wildlife Gardener

It is wonderful that native plants and landscapes featuring native plants are gaining popularity.  This departure from conventional landscape design and plant selection has been in part spurred by the economic downturn and our nation’s increasing awareness of the effect of our lifestyle on our environment.  Indeed, the economy has inspired many to reevaluate their lifestyles and expenses, especially for ornamental gardens.  Converting lawn to native plant garden beds or to a vegetable garden is wonderful and will ultimately pay huge dividends to homeowners, their families and to the environment.  Although it is fantastic and encouraging to see native plants getting some attention and respect, unfortunately many are choosing native plants primarily because of the reputation that they do not require care or maintenance.

Too often I see native plants advertised as "low-" or "no-maintenance". When teaching workshops I hear people saying they want to plant natives because they heard they do not have to care for them or they can just plant them and ignore them.  Unfortunately, through neglect, plants die, weeds take their place and people are disillusioned by the promise of native plants and think that native plants are overrated or not as durable as exotic cultivars. 

You need to care for native plants, especially while they get established.  Inherently, periodic care, cultivation or just maintenance define a "garden" and distinguish it from a natural area. Perhaps instead of "maintenance-free", native plant gardens should be thought of and referred to, as "less resource-intensive". This is probably a more accurate and appropriate descriptor, since, in their native environment, native plants do not need soil amendments, fertilizers, pesticides, protection from hot summers or cold winters, and additional water (once established), but they do require care.

Unfortunately, failures in one's yard can have cascading trophic-level effects (I love the opportunity to use that phrase).  That is, the effects of poorly maintained and planned native-plant gardens can have consequences outside the owner’s garden- it gives native plants a bad name.  To paraphrase an expression, “hate the planter, not the plants”.   The lack of attention people pay to native-plant gardens does a disservice to promoting native plants as landscape alternatives, especially when the aesthetic of a native-plant landscape is a departure from the accepted norm (the norm being the French or English garden of a manicured lawn, and a few specimen trees).  In the dry intermountain West, one of the challenges is to get people to look beyond the conventional, unsustainable landscape norms, and embrace xeri-scape aesthetics, and the aesthetic of the natural plant communities of the region (short grass prairies, in particular). 

In my area, “Trout-Friendly Lawn” signs (don’t get me started on this, inherently a “lawn” in Montana is not trout friendly, and not just because trout don’t use lawns), and “Pesticide Free” signs abound, and have become a sort of status symbol (almost as common as a catchy, eco-something bumper sticker on a Subaru Outback).  When I see one of these lawn signs on lawn-alternative landscapes it practically signals “that is my excuse for bad garden design and laziness”.  I am reminded of the phrase, “good intentions are not good enough”.

As I have mentioned (read: ranted) in past posts on my blog, native-plant gardeners need to be thoughtful and consider the same design elements as for any landscape. Having a native-plant garden is not an excuse to have an unkempt garden.  Maintenance for a native-plant garden may be for a variety of reasons including: aesthetics, "tidiness", to promote undergrowth, to deadhead and prolong the bloom (though this is not very effective in our climate since we do not water), to maintain diversity of plant species and structure, or so some flowers don't set seed.  As I often remind people, it is "xeri-scape" not "zero-scape".

David Schmetterling is a wildlife biologist and avid native-plant and wildlife gardener.  David's blog Montana Wildlife Gardener chronicles his home garden on a small city lot in the middle of Missoula, Montana.

Where the $@*% is the Army of Gardeners? Get Off Your Duffs and Make A Difference!

Guest Rant by Shawna Coronado

You know what ticks me off royally?

Churches, synagogues, temples, and businesses of every sort! Shocking, isn’t it? And let’s make this clear they tick me off because in every community across the United States you can find these organizations AND MORE displaying acre after acre after expansive acre of grass with no real gardeners doing a thing about it. Where’s an Army of Gardeners when we need one?

Lousy, useless, non-sustainable grass is pretty much good for nothing. Grass is the enemy. Face it: grass sucks! No literally, grass sucks a tremendous amount of chemicals which are bad for our water aquifers and sucks good old-fashioned water which is good for… well… staying alive.

I mean, c’mon people use your common sense. Let me spell it out. With the nation's population projected to increase to 392 million by 2050 combined with a down global economy where many cities across the United States alone are seeing over 11% unemployment rates – we are in trouble.

It is not the responsibility of the government to solve every problem we have. Get off your duffs and build your community. No one else is going to do it for you. Here’s how you get started – first, get rid of all that useless grass that’s sucking our most precious resource. Encourage your businesses, churches, neighborhoods, non-profits – and most importantly – your family to start planting vegetables like they are going out of style.

Here’s a real shocker – vegetables are going out of style. Food around the world is being rationed. With the Global Warming Crisis causing weather changes and crops to fail around the world, this is no longer something we should be ignoring.

It’s difficult to conquer all the grass in the world. However, I have chosen to set the example for my Army comrades. Without a regret, I have ripped out my front lawn and planted the damndest little veggie garden you have ever seen (in part-shade no less). Guess what? It’s growing just fine and so far I have donated over a hundred pounds of veggies to the local food pantry.

If you cannot plant vegetables, plant a Therapeutic Garden. Cancer, diabetes, and heart-disease rates are skyrocketing. Why not plant a useful garden which might encourage your community to be healthier? By planting more gardens you are also preventing crime in your neighborhoods. Let’s see… hmmm… what are the benefits? Stronger mental and physical health, reduced crime, and fresh organic veggies for your neighborhood. Seems like a win-win to me.

Never has the world needed an army of gardeners like it does now. Come to attention! Build a neighborhood garden, grow extra veggies to share, help your community now because without your help some of your neighbors might not be able to weather these difficult economic times.

Grab your pitchforks, hoes, and rotted manure! It is time we made a difference!

Shawna Lee Coronado is an author, locally syndicated newspaper columnist, blogger and greening expert focused on teaching and living a green lifestyle. Visit Shawna's prime website for more information on her book and other media - The Casual Gardener.com.  Also visit Shawna’s gardening blog, The Casual Gardener and her greening blog, Gardening Nude. Photo by Shawna of her front-yard veg garden.

Why Aren't Americans Screaming "Bloody Murder" about Non-Labeled GM Food?

Guest Rant by Grace Sylke of AquaponicsUSA 

On May 19th this year, 2009, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine announced their position regarding GM Food; and it wasn’t pretty. They said in their position paper, which you can access here. 

"There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects.” This paper goes on to explain that based on multiple animal studies, “GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health and are without benefit, . . .”

This isn’t the first study to report these kinds of findings. Way back in 1995, a respected Scientist named Arpad Pusztai of Scotland’s Rowett Institute was awarded a large grant to create a model for testing genetically modified foods. Mr. Pusztai was eager to do this research and deeply believed his model would show genetically modified foods were as their creators, the Monsanto Corporation claimed, perfectly safe for human consumption. But to his dismay, that is not what he found. After creating a rigorously thorough testing model using potatoes and adolescent rats as his subjects, Mr. Pusztai saw that the rats who ate the genetically modified potatoes had immune system dysfunctions and damaged vital organs. When asked in an interview if he would eat GM foods himself, he replied: “If I had the choice, I would certainly not eat it until I see at least comparable experimental evidence which we are producing for our genetically modified potatoes.”  He went on to say, “I find that it is very, very unfair to use our fellow citizens as guinea pigs.”

Soon after making this statement, Mr. Pusztai was fired from Rowett, forbidden to discuss his research with the threat of a law suit by Monsanto and subjected to a massive smear campaign on his reputation. By this time, he was also privy to the fact that GM foods had been secretly approved in both the UK and the US prior to his becoming involved; and the people had unknowingly been eating it for over two years. This story was front page news all over Europe, which explains why there were large demonstrations against GM food there while we didn’t make a peep in the US. Our access to the information inundating Europe was suppressed.

Sadly, this spring’s scathing report by the American Academy of Environmental Medicine about the dangers of GM food has also been successfully smothered. It certainly was not on front-page news or any of the TV news stations.

So we continue to dine on these Frankenstein concoctions with no way to know which of our foods are harboring this deadly genetically engineered brew. It is my belief that the fields of GM crops that are taking over our nation and the world while contaminating traditionally farmed crops would be much reduced if the people were simply given a choice to eat GM foods or not. Isn’t it time we demand our right to choose? So let’s start screaming, “Bloody Murder!”

Sources: “Seeds of Deception” by Jeffrey M Smith; “ The World According To Monsanto,” a 10-Part You Tube Documentary; “Position Paper On GM Food” by the American Academy of Environmental Medicine.

Marigolds!

To illustrate the fun discussion of marigolds going on over Hanna's Slut Plants post below, I went looking for them on Flickr.  Turns out they're pretty photogenic.  But guess what!  This photo of not just the flower but the whole plant and lots of them - the kind of photo we're always asking catalogs to please show us - is by The County Clerk a/k/a Hank Heatly of Lake County, who was once a frequent commenter here (and he's missed). 

Slut Plants

by Hanna, the Not-So-Angry-Redhead

The ignominy that plagues commercial properties, particularly apartment complexes, and the McMansions are marigolds, dusty miller, pansies, and vinca: the slut plants.  These tarts flash their goods at cheap prices in public places.  You can hardly throw a sock full of quarters without clocking one of these vestibules of cheap overcompensation before your weapon hits its intended target, a 30-something year old man with 8 kids driving around in a Miata.  These nutrient- and water-guzzling Hummers of the botanical world are tacky and rarely given the chance to grow into full specimens before being ripped out of the ground for the next batch to take its place.

You can mark your seasonal calendars by the annual bed changes in front of large apartment complexes from pansies and dusty miller to marigolds and vinca.  If you see the ground finally getting covered, you know autumn is coming, which will spur a hurried rush to, “Quick, grab your shovels!  These sluts are coming out of adolescence!”  You begin to wonder if a pedophilic high-flying banker is put in charge of these landscaping decisions – always wanting the soft, fleshy colors and growth but as soon as the ground isn’t bare, it’s out of the bed and into the compost.

Some annual enthusiasts blame the slightly horrific selection of annuals on the Dutch, due to large numbers of annuals being shipped overseas for propagation.  This in turn leads to annuals returning to the US that have produced well in the Netherlands in a prodigious enough quantity to be shipped out to all the large nurseries in the nation, regardless of local climate at the point of sale.  With enough water and chemical fertilizer, the plants will grow, albeit with a chemical dependency.  Then whatever chemicals aren’t absorbed by the plants get leeched into the water supply and surrounding soils to make addicts out of local plants and ecosystems.  It is for certain that these growers turn plants into pushers.

Annuals are not terrible creatures, but they are a product of their environment.  Therefore, everyone should do his/her part to encourage nurseries, landscapers, and owners to search out new and exciting plants.  Even if they aren’t necessarily new and exciting, they just shouldn’t be the same old slut plants.  For example, there are some amazing varieties of Clitoria with a smooth scoop and a beautiful button of petals.  Alternatively, annual beds could be changed to perennial beds with a variety of Mammillaria cacti or maybe a particularly handsome specimen of Echinopsis bridgesii forma mostruosa inermis.  They might get boring after a while, and you might think about moving on to greener pastures.  However, a perennial is forever.

About the author: Coming out of my rebellious teenage years roughly one decade late, I'm a struggling ecofeminist trying to discover some tolerable compromise between comfort and conscience in Austin, TX.  As a beginner/amateur gardener, I currently have as much passion and zeal as any recent cultish convert, and I would like to blame the following individuals: my mother and her frazzled casserole dish of a garden; my sister and her overly-Southern-Homes garden; Rock City in Chattanooga, TN; Paul James and his plumeria. 

Author Disclaimer:  I use "slut" purposefully as a word that I detest for planting practices that I loathe.  Most references in this article are tongue-in-cheek.

Plant Thieves - the Dirty Underbelly of Gardening

Guest Post by Marie Viljoen of 66 Square Feet

When I was a little girl, I picked a branch of pink lilac hanging over a neighbour's fence, in Bloemfontein, South Africa. I carried it home to my mother. The elderly gardener whose lilac it was pursued me to our front door. My mother was preternaturally calm about it all, and refused to punish me. Perhaps because I had picked the beautiful flower for her. I might be bent, but I was pure.

Soon after, when I picked all the pink sprays of blossom I could reach from the tall old lilac shrub at the same front door, my mother was less sanguine:  What have you done? she cried, tears starting in her blue eyes.

Mutely, I held up my offering.

Thirty years later, I'm standing at our studio window on the Lower East Side, New York, where our garden design business is based. I see someone across the street, in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, standing in the flower bed, between two low fences, calmly snapping off waist-high Formosa lily blooms. I planted those lilies three years ago, from 100 bulbs we purchased for the park, in slow transition from drug strip to inner city oasis. I rush across the road, forgetting traffic, with camera in hand. Snap-snap-snap, I take pictures in my rage. She does not even look up. She stuffs her haul, upside-down, flower heads first, into a shopping cart on the other side of the fence.

From my mouth my mother's cry, down the years

What have you done????

You are a thief! I gasp. The charge is basic. Eloquence flees. The root of the matter. The flowers do not belong to her. Nor do they belong to me. They belong to the air beneath the plane trees and the traffic whizzing past on East Houston and the basket ball dudes on the courts and the old Chinese ladies doing Tai Chi at 7am and the bums at the tables with their brown bags and the hipsters eating lunch on the steps from Wholefoods recyclable cardboard and the ambulance drivers who always let their engine idle while they rest in the cool air conditioning inside and the apartment dwellers flanking the park and us across the street, designing gardens for rich rooftops and nostalgic for scented blooms in the middle of the biggest city in the United States.

Cut off at the knees.

Not that it was unprecedented or unexpected. Last spring our pots in front of the office were trashed. We replanted. A favourite flowering quince was broken into. Then the boxwoods of summer disappeared. We planted more. The median we had planted for the city suddenly lost about 90% of the agastache we had purchased and planted in May: systematically snapped off. We kept on watering. It resprouted.

And that is the only lesson I can draw. Don’t give up. Keep on truckin’. Whether people are aware of it or not, flowers and plants make us better people.

At least most of us.

Marie designs gardens in New York City and tends her own little terrace in Brooklyn.

Photos:  Top, thief making her getaway.  MIddle: the trashed pots in front of Marie's office.  Bottom: remains of agastaches.

Stop the Photoshopping

by Guest Ranter Joseph Tychonievich of Green Sparrow Gardens

I'm sick of photoshopped pictures of plants in catalogs.

I never really thought about the pictures in the catalogs I drool over every year until I was at an academic conference in The Netherlands a couple years ago and visited a company (which will remain nameless) that produces marketing images for Dutch flower bulb companies.

I think the image above says it all: How do they get the lovely image of a clump of daffodils growing in a perfect garden you see in the catalog? A single flower in front of a green screen. I watched and listened in amazement as they explained how they can take pictures of the same flower from different angles then copy and paste them in front of a perfect garden background picture. But I wasn't really horrified until they cheerfully demonstrated how they also tweak the color of the flower to “make sure the image has the true color of the real flower.” Right. I'm sure they are only “fixing” colors which didn't photograph very well. They never adjust and augment to make a flower brighter and richer colored than the real thing.

Are you kidding me?

Now when I get a catalog I scrutinize the images. Funny how sometimes the flowers in the background are in just as crisp focus as the ones on the front, funny how sometimes the flowers don't seem to cast shadows on each other.

But even more strange is how often flower colors are not quite what I would expect. Have you ever seen the tulip 'Blue Parrot'? It is purple. There are no blue tulips, tulips don't have blue pigment, end of story. But flip through some catalogs, or do a google image search, and you'll see pictures of 'Blue Parrot' every color from the authentic purple to a breathtaking true blue that rivals delphiniums and hydrangea.

Ordering plants sight unseen from a catalog is always an act of faith, and it doesn't help to undermine it with blatantly artificial images. I love mail order plants, I love curling up with a wonderful, beautifully photographed catalog on a winter evening and dreaming of the garden to come next year. I don't want to have to put the catalog down and pull up google to try and find out if the color in the picture has anything to do with the actual color of the plant. If I seen an astonishing plant that looks too good to be true, I want to be excited about growing it, not rolling my eyes at the fakery.

So, if any of you catalog people are reading this, just STOP! I don't want to have to stop ordering from you because I can't trust you. Maybe you can fool me once with a meconopsis-blue tulip, but when they come up purple, guess who I'll never be ordering from again. How about some wonderful, lovely, drool-inducing, REAL pictures in your catalog this year?

Joseph lives in Lansing, Michigan, where he's a grad student in horticulture.

Where is the Julia Child of Gardening?

by Guest Ranter Steph Britz of Swamp Gardener

I just went to see Julie & Julia with my mom and sisters.  Not only am I obsessed with gardening, I also love food, cooking it, eating it, and talking about it.  As we were walking out the door, a thought occurred to me and I posed it to my Mom, also an avid gardener, "Where's the Julia Child for the gardening world?"  You see, Julia Child basically created the Food Network, Martha Stewart, and the Kitchen Stadium.  She made cooking a spectator sport, a national pastime (though not something we actually do, according to Michael Pollan).

My thoughtful mom pointed out, "Gardening takes too long - months for things to happen."  "Years," I piped in.  We walked our separate ways that afternoon, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with the answer.  You could film during peak season,  you could travel. There were ways around it, but then I realized I missed her point.  I think what she meant was people want instant gratification, the feeling they could head into the kitchen and whip up that weekend what they had just seen demonstrated.  This is not exactly possible when you garden. 

But I'm not giving up on my search for the transformative gardening guru, because as any gardener will tell you, it's the best thing ever!  Julia Child faced a similar problem; people thought cooking was drudgery, hard work, but she connected to her audience and got people to appreciate the process, launching a thousand cooking shows and an entire TV network.  So I've decided we need to find someone who can reach people and share that special feeling that happens when you tend a garden.  Any nominations?

Plant Less

by Guest Ranter Thomas Mickey

I see many people planting a garden, working a landscape, or putting in a lawn. But that is only the beginning. It is the upkeep and maintenance that form the essence  of gardening. And from what I see that is not happening. People are too busy to take care of what they have in the garden. The solution: plant less so you can take care of it, or plant what needs a minimum of care.  The headache of garden maintenance can find relief!

Thomas Mickey gardens in Rye, New Hampshire

Sucker!

Guest Post by Veratrine of Dark of Night 

Strictly for suckers?

Thanks to the internet, I’m that annoying patient who comes into the doctor’s office, primed to the gills with "informed questions". And, similarly, the people at my local nurseries probably cringe when I show up, printouts, catalog, or book in hand, looking for a particular plant or product. Case in point: roses.

About three years ago, having cut down the existing, sickly, spindly roses behind our 1920s bungalow,  I decided to replace them with roses I remember from growing up in a Victorian on California’s central coast. These were tea roses, both pink; they flourished with little water, without a sign of disease or pests, year after year. “That,” I said to myself, “is what a rose should be.” 

These were clearly not the roses I was likely to find at Home Depot, however, so I went hunting for them online, and in the process I acquired that proverbial small but dangerous amount of knowledge. One thing I learned was that “suckers” are bad. Very, very bad. To avoid this lurking danger, I would have to buy own root roses. I also learned that I should dig a big hole when planting my roses. So it was that in January, armed with shovel and pick axe, my husband and I were excavating three enormous craters for the three wee little rose plants I had bought online--two Cornelias and a Cecile Brunner.

The descriptions of the Cornelias on the websites I surfed reminded me of the huge five-foot-by-five-foot shrub that engulfed part of the white picket fence around our Victorian, while the Cecile Brunner reminded me of the better-behaved tea rose that lived on the other side of the house, near the plum tree. I got lucky, here. The Cecile Brunner, which is a shrub variety rather than a climbing variety, is pretty much exactly what I remembered and wanted. The Cornelias, however, were another story. 

The Cornelia roses were said to tolerate a little shade, so I planted them near the edge of the shade of the ficus tree that looms over the back yard. Neither of them apparently liked this choice, despite the giant pits my husband and I had dug for them so that their roots would have room to expand. One grew a little and put out a few anemic blossoms. The other sulked, remaining exactly as it was for over a year. Then I moved it to a new, sunnier location, where it began to make many long, sprawling canes, but without a sign of flowers. Eventually, both Cornelias met the fate of the original roses that came with the house.

However, I was undiscouraged. Having built an arbor during Christmas break, I decided I wanted a climbing rose and, again, I was determined to buy own root to avoid the horror of....suckers! But I didn’t want to pay shipping and in the interim I had found a local nursery with a huge selection of roses. So, another grey January morning found me poking around among uninspiring thorny stumps, thumbing through the well-worn rose catalog that had been living beside my bed.

The nursery guy who came to my aid had the kind of grime embedded in his hands that comes only from a lifetime of gardening, but despite this evidence of experience, it seems he either didn’t see my catalog or he kindly decided to overlook it. No, he said, they didn’t have the rose variety I wanted, but he could suggest an alternative: Sally Holmes.

“Is it own root?” I asked, very concerned, but also a bit smug in showing off my knowledge. Here, I knew he would say to himself, is a true rosarian.

“Nope. None of these are own root. They’re all grafted.” 

“But what about suckers?” I inquired in horror, surveying at the hundreds of plants in neat rows stretching out around us, clearly lying in wait to sprout something from beneath the bud union as soon as the unwary buyer wasn’t looking.

“We never have a problem with them,” he said. 

“Never?”

“Maybe one in all the time I’ve worked here.”

Very skeptically, I bought the roses, and, perhaps because I had already erred against the wisdom of the internet, stuck them in holes just big enough to spread out the roots. And...you know what? There’s a reason why the expert is an expert and you, despite the reams of information printed off the internet are not. The Sally Holmes roses have flourished, with nary a sucker. They do have a problem with powdery mildew, but so do a lot of things in my yard, and I find that spraying them with a solution of water, horticultural oil, and baking soda (1 T each per half gallon of water) every couple of weeks keeps the mildew in check. 

So, are ‘suckers’ a bogey man to scare people into sending away for tiny pricey own root roses? I don’t know, but I do know that they don’t frighten me any more. Perhaps even more importantly, I’ve learned that the root stock roses are grafted onto can give a rose the energy to produce great results in a short time. And, I’ve learned to implictly trust experts in the field of their expertise. (Just kidding. You’ll still recognize me by my smug look of expertise and my handfuls of dogeared printouts and catalogs.)

Photos by Veratrine:  top, 'Sally Holmes' in her 'goth garden' (bat house, skeleton flamingoes, artemisium absinthium-- the usual).  Bottom, Cecile Brunner.

Let the Guest-Ranting Begin!

We asked:  Got something to rant about?" and the answer was "Hell yes!" for about 20 of you.  So our modest notion about a Guest Rant Week has turned into Guest Rant Fortnight and will run through Labor Day.

So while the ladies of GardenRant relax on the beach work on stuff that pays the mortgage, enjoy!  And a great big THANK YOU to our guests for stepping up in droves with such terrific posts.

I'll Have a Weed Killer on the Rocks, please

You know those herbicides that were supposed to maybe probably be really pretty darn safe and not at all likely to end up in our nation's drinking supply at alarmingly high levels that might cause birth defects and other frightful health problems?

Well...uh...yeah.  About that...

"An investigation by The New York Times has found that in some towns, atrazine concentrations in drinking water have spiked, sometimes for longer than a month. But the reports produced by local water systems for residents often fail to reflect those higher concentrations."

Hmmph.

The Gardens of the White House Gardeners

You've seen them on their trips to the White House - to the garden and even the kitchen - the lucky 5th graders at Bancroft Elementary School in D.C.  The First Lady's also dropped by the school to catch up with her favorite gardeners, and plant some cucumbers in their raised beds (photo right).  Among their many souvenirs of their gardening fame are special T-shirts and lots of press clippings from all over the world, but they'll soon be off to middle school and and there's mystery in the air - will the next 5th grade take their place, or will another school be chosen?

IT TAKES SOMETHING LIKE A VILLAGE
That's my segue to the question of how these kids were chosen in the first place.  And to find out the answer I recently visited with Bancroft's long-time volunteer garden coordinator, my old Hort-Club friend Iris Rothman, and she thinks Bancroft was chosen because of the "huge community involvement in the gardens."  And I saw plenty of evidence of that even on an August morning - the PTA prez was there doing some harvesting with his son (and letting me know Sam Kass is a "great guy!")  And everywhere there were signs of help from the U.S. Botanic Garden, the city's Dept. of Environment, neighbors, college volunteers, the staff of Illinois's Senator Durbin, the generosity of the Japanese Embassy (Iris has no idea why), and more.  It's also true that 40 different countries are represented in the student body of 450, almost 80 percent of whom are from low-income families, and that the school's bilingual.

THE SITE
Honestly, Bancroft needed help - big-time.  The building looks like a prison and its "landscape" includes chain-link fencing and acres of asphalt, the cause of horrendous erosion down the hill into Rock Creek.   

THE GARDENS
They include a large rain garden, raised vegetable beds, a Three Sisters garden, community garden with 12 plots, an alphabet garden for the youngest students, and this nice pavilion with path and seating, but here's a complete description of the Bancroft Gardens.

ALSO ACCOMPLISHED

• Removal of some of the overwhelming expanse of asphalt
• More stormwater management improvements
• Planting of 20 new large trees (thanks to Casey Trees)
• Sending several teachers to Chicago to study at the Botanic Garden's renowned schools program

GARDEN INSTIGATORS
You know how there's sometimes just one or two people who seem to make everything happen?  In this case lots of credit has to go to Iris herself for raising so much money for the gardens and corralling so many volunteers to help ("Anyone can help in the garden.")  Her first project like this had been making a children's playhouse happen in Mississippi, where she and her husband spent seven years back in the civil rights era - Iris as a Head Start worker. 

Since 2001, Iris has adopted Bancroft School as her prime project and its gardens as her own to improve - she lives a few blocks away. 

But just in case I might be crediting her in this article, Iris made me promise to give "huge praise" to Nancy Huvendick at the 21st Century School Fund!  So kudos to you, too, Nancy!

Addendum: Iris also urged me to add that her latest project is working with Lola Bloom of Cityblossoms to put together a book of Lola's vegetable recipes for kids.  Lola used the recipes in a series of workshops for Bancroft second-graders this summer, and the book will include kids' drawings and photos of them enthusiastically eating vegetables grown at Bancroft from White House-supplied starts.  (I've mentioned Lola here before - the gardening world in D.C. is a small one.)

At the County Fair

Good times!

Hard Truths of Gardening from Sunset

We all know that great gardening information is regional, except when it's not.  For example, one of my favorite blogs is Sunset Magazine's Fresh Dirt, and I totally GET its Hard Truths of Gardening, despite living nowhere near the climate they write about.

First, Sharon Cohoon's list of Hard Truths includes a point about plants that are landscape staples and it doesn't matter a whit that here in Maryland our tried and true plants are different ones.  And to her Truth about buying plants for their flowers being as stupid as like choosing a wife for her bonnet I say absolutely!  and Thank you~!

Now notice Sharon's eighth Truth - about paving stones with groundcovers between them:  "Spending hours weeding where you walk is dumb."  Hmm, I've always wondered about that, what with all the suggestions that replacing lawn with pavers and groundcovers is so low-maintenance.  (The notion that lawn substitutes are lower-maintenance is a prime candidate for myth-busting, imho.)

And of course the Truth that hand-modeling is incompatible with gardening?  This proud owner of dirty fingernails agrees.

Next, on co-blogger Jim's McCausland's list, my faves are the last two:

• Tree topping is usually evil, always expensive, rarely effective, and dependably ugly.

• Sometimes unlimited money just allows tasteless gardeners to fully express themselves.

Great lists, Jim and Sharon.  Great blog, too, even for an ignorant Easterner.

Artists’ gardens

In today’s New York Times. Check it out. I think I like the Sonnier property the best, judging by the limited slide show.  Though the Blell garden is magnificent in a way, I can’t imagine trying to relax around all that severely clipped shrubbery. The grass and pavement checkerboard concept I've seen before (in a magazine, maybe)  and admired it, but again. Too much control—for me. 

At $100 a pop (excluding airfare and hotel) you can see these for yourselves! $500 if you want cocktails.

In CA it’s always about the water

California is surely not the only part of the U.S. where water shortages are an issue, but the distribution of water there is historically controversial with a lengthy and diverse oeuvre of films, photography, and literature to accompany it. (Chinatown is one of my favorites.)

 So it’s no surprise that water legislation is once again in the news there. Part of the controversy now concerns so-called “water buffaloes” calling for water development by any means necessary, while conservationists try to protect fish such as delta salmon and smelt, who are threatened by dams and pumps.

It's a gigantic, complex issue. We have two comments about this under the Ballard party garden post: "Ann” mentions possible subsidies for the Carlsbad flower growers, while “Liisa”  says (among other observations), “Many of the largest food suppliers not only get their water either free or at a ridiculously low cost, they are able to sell it back to the state. For a state that seems to be suffering from drought every year, this appears to be folly.” 

I thought I'd give the water issue its own post; Gordon's cantina didn't seem quite the right forum. Water is not the popular beverage there.

And the party garden wins

 

Snaps to my good friend Gordon Ballard (who does not blog but should); photos of the transition of his entertainment area from a winter disaster to an awesome gathering space won the July Fine Gardening photo contest (on their website). 

Above is one of  my favorite images of Gordon's garden, though I've certainly logged plenty of hours at the cantina. (I guess this is kind of a TGIF post.)

"A Vermont Couple's Remarkable Garden"

I LOVE that we're finally seeing headlines like this one about couples with names like Joe and Wayne.  They've been together 40 years and finally are able to get married September 1, when Vermont's new marriage equality law takes effect.  Both are garden designers and writers and their 23-acre garden has been a 32-year labor of love in every way.  In all that time it's caused only two disagreements, one of which involved planting a tree on a slant.  "It takes a lot of courage to plant a tree crooked," says Wayne.  You bet.

Adrian Higgins' story covers their garden in glorious detail and is illustrated with huge, fabulous photos.  But it also covers the people, and here's two of my favorite bits:

• About their having focused on the "manic development of their own paradise" (in Higgins' words), Joe says "I think gay people have always fashioned private worlds because the public world was so unwelcoming." They've been a couple since the late '60s, after all - not a welcoming world back then.
• The three books they've written together are "deeply autobiographical books of our relationship, and gardening is the lens through which we see the account of that relationship".

And here's a transcript of their online discussion of a few hours ago.

"Grass Nazi" on Penn & Teller Tonight

Anybody got "Showtime"?  Then tune in at 10:30 tonight for the Penn & Teller show, featuring one of our favorite topics - homeowner rules requiring perfect lawns - and tell us all about it.  I just hope the opening line in this trailer "Today lawns are more popular than ever" is wrong-wrong-wrong.