Garden Rant

Rant on the Road: SoCal and Austin!

Hey y'all--

I'm doing a very cool event in southern California with Nan Sterman, Debra Lee Baldwin, and many other groovy people.  Stop by and check us out.

And then--Austin!  At last!  What could be better than a weekend back in my old hometown?  Hope to see you there.

Saturday, October 17
Master Gardeners of Orange County Annual Gardening Seminar
Los Angeles, CA

Saturday, October 24 11 a.m.
Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center
Austin, TX

Sunday, October 25 1 pm
Pots & Plants Garden Center
Austin, TX

Creepy Botanical Reads for Halloween

I picked up each of these books without realizing they had some devious connection to the botanical world.  Imagine my delight when I discovered:

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood.  I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance.  I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.  I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise.  I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagent, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom.  Everyone else in my family is dead."

Yes!  Don't you all go rushing to the bookstore at once.  There's more:

"Constance can put her hand upon a bewildering array of deadly substances without ever leaving home; she could feed you a sauce of poison hemlock, a member of the parsley family which produces immediate paralysis and death when eaten.  She might have made a marmalade of the lovely thornapple or baneberry, she might have tossed the salad with Holcus lanatus, called velvet grass, and rich in hydrocyanic acid."

It's Shirley Jackson's classic We Have Always Lived in the Castle, with a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem. De-lish.

And then!  Alan Bradley's wonderful The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, also about a young girl with a taste for murder.  Eleven year-old Flavia de Luce has a chemistry set and a working knowledge of poisonous plants. By the time we get to page 12 she's distilling the urushiol from poison ivy and adding it to her sister's lipstick.

And as she's trying to figure out what poison a murderer might have used, she says to herself:

"Then there was curare.  It, too, had an almost instant effect and again, the victim died within minutes by asphyxiation. But curare could not kill by ingestion; to be fatal, it had to be injected.  Besides that, who in the English countryside--besides me, of course--would be likely to carry curare in his kit?"

Good stuff.  Go check it out.

He's STILL Planting Bulbs?

Check out yesterday's Doonesbury strip, and today's as well (by hitting Next), if you haven't already.

Doonesbury in the Garden.

Make Compost, Not Garbage

Guest Rant by Roy Mastromauro

You don't compost?

Why is that? Icky?

I'll tell you icky, broham. How's about a banana peel 10 years old, looking like it did before you put it in the garbage?

Yea, that's icky. Because it's in a state of suspended animation, surrounded by all those styrofoam peanuts, q-tips, and coffee grounds you and everyone else is putting in the garbage. Encased in a lovely shroud of plastic.

Think your garbage smells? Why are you combining it with everyone else's? Let someone else deal with it, you say.

And they will. It's not an easy business, and hardly efficient; all those big trucks running daily routes to pick stuff up that you just know you could compost.

But, it's icky. You get some flies in the house, some flies on the pile, and to hell with it.

Come to think of it, the landfill is sorta like hell, isn't it? Where everything goes that everyone wants to forget about. And each in it's own little cell, way down deep.

Know what's icky? That a "green" landfill might actually promote itself as environmentally friendly by taking your crap and harvesting the methane off of it. It'll be a shining star in the community, because it uses your crap to build a mountain and make methane.

And someday sell it back to you? Now that's icky.

If you're not composting, and doing it fiercely, you're making folks laugh at those that do. "Ah, those crazy kooks out there in San Fran, what'll they come up with next? Whatta they gonna do next? Eat raw fish?" Every time you toss a banana peel, you sushi roll goes bad.

You like dirt, you keep your eyes out for sales on soil amendments. Once in a while, you might buy a bag of it. Meanwhile, you're trying to figure out the best way to deal with your leaves this fall, all those weeds you pulled. "They've got seed heads," you say. If your damned garden was so precious, you wouldn't have let the thing go to seed in the first place, would you? Compost the stuff, give your plants the nutrients, and let them crowd out the weeds.

I won't even get into the "right" way to compost. There just isn't. I'm pretty sure, though, that there are better ways to do it. However you do it, it's bound to be better than letting the landfill do it, though.

All that old-school stuff about what and what not to put in the compost heap has got to end. Nothing magic happens at the dump that doesn't happen in your back yard. It's just going to take a whole lot longer out there, and it's going to be mixed in with everyone else's crap. There's a way to compost it. You are not the first one who had a stinky compost pile, and you won't be the last. Everything composts somewhere. You might as well get the good stuff from it.

Roy Mastromauro is a Cincinnati native, husband and father of two boys. His composting efforts started the day after he bought his first home, and now involve finding ways to get his hands on other people's compost stuff. He is actively involved in learning, teaching and writing about compost methods, gardening, and securing a sustainable future for his family and community.

Photo credit: D'Arcy Norman.

Victory Garden Historian: "There's a gardening revolution going on right now!"

If Rose Hayden-Smith sees a big enough surge in gardening to call it a revolution, I'm going with it.  She's a historian specializing in food policy and the U.S. "homefront" era and I had the pleasure of hearing her talk about victory garden history at the U.S. Botanic Garden.  She and the other Food and Society Fellows were in DC for a food policy conference, and counted visiting Michelle Obama's kitchen garden as a highlight (sadly, no photos allowed!)  Here's her report ("It's all a blur!")

Turns out we don't know much about the history of Victory Gardens, usually confusing World Wars I and II (I know, ancient history).  Tidbits I love:  President Wilson declared: "Food will win the war."  Herbert Hoover, as President Wilson's "food administrator", encouraged local food production and consumption to reduce food miles (that being a much-used term even back then).   Victory Garden posters used slogans like "Uncle Sam says Garden," "School Garden Army," "A Garden for Every Child" and "Exempt No Land". 

But my take-away was the breadth and depth of government action promoting the home growing of food, which resulted in 40% percent of American production being homegrown.  Every community had a "foodshed coordinator" who worked to make sure the right types of food were planted, all coordinated in a big-picture way.  By 1943 there was a national program for school, home, workplace AND community gardens, and three-fifths of all Americans grew edibles. Wow.

So why did Americans stop growing food, Rose?  The highway system, technological improvements, advertising, and the federal lunch program.  Gardening came to be perceived as a "hick thing to do."  We bought into the culture of lawn-and-ornamentals.  (Rose said it's great to see "lawns becoming out" - we hear ya.)

So what's the evidence of this "gardening revolution" Rose declared? Encouraging survey results, of course, plus the impact of our First Lady and her team.  But Rose also met with folks at the USDA while she was in town and left convinced that next year the feds will implement a "national gardening initiative", something she's campaigning for.  And just last week the USDA launched their "Know your farmer, know your food" campaign.  (Awesome government website!)

Here's a great article by Rose about food policy that was recommended to readers by no less than Mark Bittman. 

Victory Garden poster care of the Library of Congress.

Garden Prof wins Top Garden-Writing Prize

Great news for Garden Professor Linda Chalker-Scott, and gardeners everywhere.  Her myth-busting book The Informed Gardener took the big prize at tonight's GWA awards ceremony - for best book-writing!  More good news - her Part II is coming soon.  Nice show of support for good writing AND good science.

The Bad Boys of Southern Gardening

That's Felder Rushing pointing to the cartoon version of himself on Tony Avent's T-shirt.  You know you've made it when you're depicted on one of the outrageous Plants Delights catalog covers.

They're just two of the countless garden celebs palling around with us regulars in Raleigh.  Also?  Erica Glasener!  As pretty as ever and friendly, too.

Gotta run to meet Linda Chalker-Scott for breakfast.  I'll be putting a bug in her ear about some horticultural myths I'd love to see her debunk.

Crushing Beauty

Sweet autumn clematis in my garden, one of my favorite of all plants. Exuberant at a time of year when I am mourning the end of the basil and need exuberance.

Though I cut both plants off knee-high this spring, they are nonetheless taking down my nice Smith & Hawken iron arch.

I'm not sure what's next. Cementing the arch into the ground? Replacing it with something even sturdier?

How Writers Grow

We love University of Minnesota horticulturalist Jeff Gillman here at the Rant because he brings news from the world of science to this blog, because he contributes a scientific skepticism to gardening in general, and because he is one of the few scientists who actually bothers to talk to gardeners. 

But we never thought we'd love him because he's a poet.  We were wrong.  Give him a subject worthy of poetry, and he rises to the occasion.  His new book How Trees Die: The Past, Present, and Future of Our Forests is at once delightfully informative and disturbing and profound. 

Jeff Gillman being Jeff Gillman, How Trees Die offers all kinds of knowledge that will have you wondering where you've been all these years.  Here are a few bits from a chapter called "Apples and Age" that deals with the peculiar fact that vegetatively propagated plants can be old and young at the same time.

• "Though a plant grown from a cutting may seem young, the meristem of this little bit of plant may actually have been around for a long time.  In fact, this little piece of plant material may easily be forty or fifty years old, though the plant in your garden has existed only for a year or two.  Over time that little piece of plant will accumulate mutations, or problems with its DNA, which may or may not affect how the plant grows."
• "There is, in strawberries, a disease affecting some varieties and not others called June yellows.... It seems to be a genetic disease triggered by age.  Every plant of a variety which has June yellows is a time bomb.  And since every plant is propagated asexually, and are almost exactly the same age, all of the bombs are set to go off at once.... Wham! There goes that variety of strawberries."
• "As the tree grows up, it matures.  The growth that has already been deposited, the part of the tree trunk near the earth, will stay relatively young while the growth near the top, though it may be newer chronologically, will be physiologically older because the tree is programmed to mature as if it grows, and the only way for this to happen is for the new growth (chronologically) to be more mature than older growth....Cuttings taken from locations closer to the top of the tree will produce trees that are physiologically older, while cutting taken from closer to the base of the plant will produce trees that are physiologically younger."

I learned many other weird and shocking things from How Trees Die, including the mind-blowing fact that there were no earthworms in the Northeastern United States until they arrived in the ballast of European ships.

But I also found myself musing about mortality and the blundering stupidity with which we humans move through nature and the fact that we know so little about the trees to which we instinctively compare ourselves in their quiet dominance of the landscape.  And maybe, by extension, we know relatively little about ourselves, too. 

This is not where I usually end up after reading a gardening book, but How Trees Die is no ordinary gardening book.  It is an entirely amazing piece of writing.  Don't miss it.

Easy to understand this name

Callicarpa (American Beautyberry) at the Duke Gardens, in the Blomquist native plant garden. And you can use your cell to get a detailed narrative.

Deer repellant that's good enough to eat

From G.W.A

Beware the Evil Hornworm!

Guest Post by Jean Greenfield at My Recession Kitchen

Seriously, was Mother Nature having a bad day when she invented the hornworm?  I’m at a loss, what was she thinking?  What’s the purpose of such an ugly, destructive creature?  No one seems to know. 

Sure, wasps like to lay their eggs on the backs of hornworms, to use them as a host.  I could do without  wasps as well.  

This is a picture of Manduca Sexta, the evil hornworm.  This is a tobacco hornworm to be exact.  I’ve always called them tomato hornworms, but I’ve come to find out there are actually two varieties. This one has seven diagonal stripes and a red horn, so it’s a tobacco hornworm.  Tomato hornworms have eight v-shaped markings and a black horn.  They’re cousins.

While I found this unpleasant creature on my heirloom tomato plant (I’m really not growing tobacco, I promise) it turns out that the tobacco hornworm likes tomatoes as much as his cousin.  They can do a lot of damage, very quickly.  Like this...

That tomato was just starting to turn red, my first ripe tomato....it’s life cut short. And then there was this.....

Hornworms will, occasionally, attack eggplants, peppers, and potatoes as well.  You can discouraged them by planting marigold flowers around your garden, but the best thing to do is to regularly check your plants.  The hornworms are hard to find because they blend so well with the greenery, but you’ll know they’re there by the missing leaves and half eaten tomatoes.  Pick them off of your plants and dispose of them or feed them to chickens...chickens think they’re candy. If you have a blacklight, you can find them at night since they glow under the ultraviolet light.  Evil that glows in the dark!

Eventually, if they live long enough, the hornworm will go into your soil and come out looking like this....Mothra.  I don’t want Mothra in my yard either, so I check my tomato plants regularly.

Seriously, what was she thinking??

Jean lives and gardens in San Anselmo, California.

At the GWA Tweet-Up

Wish you were here.

Reporting in from GWA

I'll do my best to post some photos and witty remarks from the Garden Writers Association conference in Raleigh, where I'm hanging out with Susan, Elizabeth, and many Friends of Rant.  You can also follow along on Twitter with the #gwa hashtag if you're so inclined.

One thing I intend to do this year is to spread the word about the Garden Writers Discussion Board, which we started last year right after the conference.  You can read all about it here and find out how to join. We've got 244 members, but the board has been kind of quiet lately.  Remember that you can set it up to e-mail you when new topics are posted, and you can subscribe to it as an RSS feed.  It's a free board, although making donations will keep advertising off your screen.

I set it up in response to the many groans from GWA members when we found out that the organization's new website wouldn't have a discussion board because it "wasn't in the budget." Well, it doesn't take a budget, just a little bit of time.  There are almost too many ways to keep in touch these days--listserv, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, etc--but I understand why people said they wanted a discussion board.  You can start a topic on a subject like, say, how much to charge to speak to a garden club, and even if nobody has anything to say on that topic for a few months, it's easy to go back, read what everyone did have to say at the time, and revive the discussion if you'd like to.

So if it's useful to you, get in there and check it out--and perhaps we'll see a bunch of new members after GWA.

That Was DeadheadERS, Not---Oh, Never Mind.

From the "Only in California" department comes this gem of a story in the San Francisco Chronicle.  Gardeners at the Morcom Rose Garden in Oakland put out the word that they could use some volunteer help to deadhead the garden's 5000 roses.  But when you say "Deadheaders Wanted" in the Bay Area, in the middle of a drowsy, fragrant, late summer weekend, what do you get?

Deadheads.  Lots of them. In their tie-dyed shirts, Felcos in hand. 

"There was a bit of confusion, but it turned out great," said city of Oakland gardener Tora Rocha, who oversees the city-owned 8-acre park off Grand Avenue. "We ended up getting tons of volunteers."

Far out.  Now the Deadheads show up and prune and listen to some tunes and it's all very beautiful in a horticultural Summer of Love way. As one Deadhead said, "If you can get all these hippies to take care of your garden, everyone wins."

Hard truths about perennials for landscaping (Ofa Conference, continued)

According to Ofa Conference presenter Cathy Tenaglia of the Brickman Group, the good news is that corporations, institutions, and governments are willing to use perennials for public landscaping. Tenaglia started out by saying that early in her gardening career, she vowed to replace all the creeping junipers she saw on traffic islands.

And to some degree, Tenaglia and others have been successful; we’re much more likely to see perennials in public spaces  than ever before. That those perennials tend to be the same ones over and over again is something Tenaglia ruefully admitted and explained during her presentation. The talk reminded me of sessions I attend about the most popular city/regional magazine covers: they always say the same thing (sexy women, top docs, and food), but we still all attend and listen breathlessly, I guess hoping that it’s become a good idea to feature contemporary art or landscape architecture. It never happens.

 No surprises here, either. You will continue to see Stella d’Oro daylilies, hostas, rudbeckia Goldstrum, coreopsis Moonbeam, sedum Autumn Joy, calamagrostis Karl Foerster, and other usual suspects in public/corporate landscaping situations, at least in the Mid-Atlantic and parts of the Northeast and South. Which is fine, because—except for the loathsome Stella, apparently the darling of all Tenaglia’s landscaping clients—these are all great plants, much better than evergreens and grass, I think. There were other, more surprising choices too, like ceratostigma plumbaginoides, a wonderful plant I purchased recently (shown above), and some others one doesn’t think of as landscaping plants, like astilbe, tiarella, and geranium Rozanne.

Tenaglia gave a great talk, explaining how she uses astilbes with different bloom times to lengthen their show, how she’s had to train workers not to be afraid to whack perennials back mid-season, and how she relates what she does in the public arena with her own gardening and what she learned from her mother. I am sure many of you will agree with her assessment about showy hybrids that don’t stand the test of time, like the red and orange echinaceas (she sticks with Magnus and White Swan) and the pink and red reblooming daylilies (sadly). She touched a chord with me when she spoke of her love for hostas, because, as a dry shade gardener, I need to love them.

She also gave a long, tough list of conditions landscaping perennials need to withstand: salt, deer, drought, and bad maintenance. They must also be cheap, long-blooming, never need staking, and preferably offer some multi-season interest. Given all that, her list of 20 became even more attractive. Except for Stella. 

On to the next conference! The next time you’ll hear from me, Susan, and Amy, we’ll be dishing the GWA, and reporting on the beauties of Raleigh’s gardens.  

A spy among the plant geeks

As promised, I was able to stop by part of the Ofa Perennial Plant Conference, a get-together for plant growers and retailers, held here in Buffalo Sunday through today.

 For some reason, I find myself intensely curious about what plant growers and sellers talk about when they get together at events like this. My first question: why Buffalo? According to conference staffer Brian McLaughlin, they originally wanted Connecticut, but Buffalo was also central for a large number of companies that produce perennials—for example, the Sunday tours included visits to Dickman Farms, who produce for Ball, the herbaceous test plots at Cornell, and Baker’s acres, who grow 1000 varieties of perennials and 125 herbs.

 During the Unplugged freeform discussion, I found myself deciphering phrases such as “TC plants have no juvenility,” and “vernalization requires soil temperatures of 42-45°.” One thing I got out of it is that tissue culture causes issues for growers that does not happen with traditional propagated plants. Much of the discussion centered on how continuous light cycles help plants bulk up. It was significant that the plants used as examples were echinaceas; one imagines that growers are jumping through all these hoops to make sure we get those fluffy pink and bright orange and yellow varieties that are wowing everybody at nurseries these days.

A discussion of green roofs was both exciting and frightening; one of the leaders was Kees Govers of LiveRoof Ontario. (They donated some of the small panels we used for a Show House project here in Buffalo.) As you may know, any construction in Toronto over 20k square feet requires some green roofing. But despite the huge potential of this technology, it pretty much takes a village to make a green roof successful. If any link in the chain—architect, contractors, plant providers, installers—is weak and if maintenance isn’t planned for, green roofs fail (usually, with litigation). On the other hand, if Walmart is considering green roofs, there’s every chance that the 182,400 acres of potential green roofs in North America could become reality.

Next post: perennials for landscaping (some surprising, most not).

Weigh in on draft of "Lawn Care We Like"

Update: Since our launch a week ago, the Lawn Reform conspirators have been encouraged by the flood of support, complete with suggested links to more good resources for our website.  But as if to highlight the need for what we're creating, we've also seen a bunch of out-dated articles recommending resource-intensive practices.  Like?

Keep your lawn well-fed and well-watered - you know, an inch a week of water per week even during the summer.  Feed your lawn with bags of fertilizer product (no mention of the nonbagged alternatives).  Kill those dandelions and all that clover.  Just trade your old synthetic products for the new organic ones and you're an organic gardener.  And so forth.So to help homeowners in their lawn management and to be up-front about the kind of lawn care advice we'd like to see everywhere (and the only kind we'll put on our website), we've compiled some quickie bullet points for the busy reader.  We'd love your feedback - over here on my blog.Photo by Billy Goodnick.

New Hort Research that Gardeners Can Use, September '09 Edition

By Jeff Gillman, associate professor of horticulture at the University of Minnesota.  Jeff's earlier quarterly updates are archived here. 

First, a Worry
I worry about transgenic plants. To be a little more specific, I’m not one of those people who believe that no genetically modified plant should ever see the light of day, but I do worry that some of the things which we’re releasing into our environment could harm us, or the species around us, if we’re not really, really careful.

One of the transgenic crops with the most potential to cause problems, at least in my mind, is transgenic turfgrass which has been modified to resist herbicide.  I worry because I see the potential for grasses such as this to invade the ground where we grow our crops and become superweeds. 

Recently I noticed an article by a group of researchers who made tall fescue resistant to a particular group of herbicides.  Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think that this is the end of the world or anything, but I hope that these researchers know what they’re doing and that if this crop is ever released (and it might not be – many studies are done just to prove that they can be done), plenty of care is taken to make sure we’re not putting ourselves into a bad position if it escapes cultivation.

That said, on to more important (at least in the short term) things - a few of the great articles published over the last few months.

Houseplants that Clean Air
So, you know those crazy air cleaners that you can buy at Hammacher Schlemmer?  Well, it turns out that your house plants can clean the air, as well.  Twenty-eight house plants were tested for their ability to remove five organic air pollutants, including such things as toluene and terpene.  Of the plants tested, the best were English ivy, red flame ivy, wandering Jew, Sprenger's asparagus fern and wax-plant, but the authors were careful to point out that different plants are better at removing different things, so it’s best to have a variety of houseplants living on your tables and windows.¹

Getting Orchids to Bloom
Having trouble getting your Phalaenopsis or Doritaenopsis orchids to bloom?  The problem may be that you’re keeping them too warm.  For both of these orchids it’s best to keep temperatures below 79 degrees F. during the day to promote blooming.  If temperatures do climb over 79 degrees and stay there for more than 8 hours it could prevent your orchid from flowering, at least until temperatures drop again.²

Wilt-Free Geraniums
Researchers in Florida took a look at 61 different geraniums to find out which were most resistant to bacterial wilt.  In general, they found that zonal and ivy geraniums don’t have much resistance. Regal geraniums don’t have much resistance either, though the cultivar ‘Elegance Camelot’ shows some promise.  But there are a few scented geraniums with resistance, including ‘Snowflake’, ‘Old Fashioned Rose’, ‘Apricot’, ‘Peppermint rose,’ and others.  Even though these geraniums may have resistance, if there is a cut on the plant, the disease may be able to overcome the resistance.³

Mulch Options
Thinking of planting a tree in an urban lot and using mulch to protect it?  Be careful what you use.  When redbuds and baldcypress were grown in Texas there were distinct advantages to using organic mulches such as pine-bark mulch.  However, crushed bricks used as mulch seemed to have a negative effect on the trees.  Surprisingly, the researchers found that performing better than either bare soil or bricks as mulch are certain plants - like St. Augustinegrass - grown around trees.⁴

Breaking - Trees Need Water!
And our “Who woulda thought?” award this quarter goes to a study which shows that not watering trees when they’re first planted isn’t good for them.  Of course there is more to the study than that.  The authors also determined that, of the lindens, little leaf linden and silver linden were most resistant to drought and that, of the Norway maple cultivars tested, ‘Emerald Queen’ and ‘Deborah’ were the most resistant.⁵

Wandering Jew photo by Crows to Burnaby. Study details below the jump.

Raleigh, NC, where the sunflowers are energy, here we come!

Most of GardenRant will be in Raleigh this week for the GWA annual shindig, with Amy, Elizabeth and Susan all making the trip (and really bummed about Michele not being able to join us).

So while our sights are set on the Raleigh scene, here's an intriguing story about their utility department growing 50 gorgeous acres of sunflowers for biofuel. Cool - is that on our tour?

Photo by Brian Hathcock.