Garden Rant

Urban Farm Magazine is Awesome

The people at Urban Farm magazine sent me a stack of recent issues to check out, much to my delight.  I've always loved Hobby Farms, the magazine that is sort of the parent of Urban Farm, and of course I adore their Chickens magazine.  A whole magazine about chickens?  Hell, yes!

What's so great about these magazines is that they do not assume that you are a trembling, fearful beginner who needs to be talked down to and reassured and lulled into a stupor with pretty pictures and useless little lists and sidebars.  No, they assume that you intend to roll up your sleeves and actually go outside and build a chicken coop or birth a calf or put up enough turnips to see you through the winter. They assume, in other words, that you are a competent adults, engaged in the business of amateur farming, and that you're well past the stage of wanting to lounge about reading a teaser or an overview that won't let you do anything but dream about maybe someday getting a flock of turkeys or planting an apple orchard, if only someone would actually tell you how.

No.  Hobby Farms, and Urban Farm, and Chicken magazine, will actually tell you how. You will find brilliantly specific articles on, say, moulting.  That's right, moulting.  It's not a bullet point in a sidebar, but the subject of an entire article in the Sept/Oct issue of Urban Farm. In that same issue, you're also going to read about goat bedding.  Not about goats in general and how cute they are and how maybe you might get some someday.  No, this is an entire article on the subject of bedding.

And so on.  How to graft an apple tree, how to stock a root cellar, how to tap a maple tree, how to make kaffir cheese, how to make a table out of an old door.  Sure, there are profiles of community gardens, product reviews, interviews with the rock stars of the urban farming world, and other such bits and pieces. But mostly, every magazine these people put out is devoted to hardcore, nuts-and-bolts, meat-and-potatoes GETTING STUFF DONE.

And they're nicely photographed and well-written and all that. And subscriptions are something like $15, which is less than the price of a pizza. And I promise that you'll get more pleasure--and more good food--out of this subscription than you would from the pizza.  So do get over there and check them out.  They're awesome.

A few final words on Weeds

Since it is the most interesting book I’ve read on renegade plants—OK, it’s right up there with the most interesting books I’ve read on any kind of plants—I thought it would be good to wind up our coverage of Weeds with a Richard Mabey interview. I sent Mabey a few questions, and he responded (if not quite at the length I could have wished). But he also said he was eager to get going with his next book.  Sounds good to me.

My questions in italics.

My take on your book is that it is far more an appreciation than a defense of weeds. I think you convey a great sense of the discovery and fascination with which we encounter these plants, but I do not think you’re trying to make a serious case that we should nurture them (or at least stop fighting them). Thoughts?

This is so—in  the main. I was boxed into a corner by ECCO's [Harper Collins imprint] subtitle—that combative "In Defense Of...".  The original UK subtitle (mine) is less polemical: How vagabond plants gatecrashed civilisation and changed the way we think about nature, which I think better expresses the fact that the book is  "a cultural history" (the UK publisher's original, if deadly) dull subtitle.

Having said that, I think there are large numbers of situations where we should, if not literally nurture, at least positively encourage weeds for their ecologically healing behaviour: eg, as hosts for pollinating insects round crop fields, on riverbanks which are eroding because of lack of vegetation, on any sites of dereliction, where weeds hide scars, create new soil, act as pioneers for more sedate vegetation...etc.

I imagine if you were writing your book as an American, there would be much more time spent on lawn obsession. Could you speculate further on why this is so prevalent in the U.S.?

That would be impertinent of me as a limey! I think what I say in the book pretty much exhausts my view-from-a-distance.  

And following up on that, we’ve (Garden Rant) also interviewed entomologist Doug Tallamy, who maintains in his book Bringing Nature Home that the suburban monoculture of turfgrass and alien foundation plants is a major obstacle to any hope of regaining biodiversity. He stresses planting native trees and shrubs (mainly) as a way to support diverse forms of wildlife. Are you familiar with his work, and, if so, your opinion of it?

No, not familiar with him, but with the argument. Certainly native plants are better for native animals, but I'm surprised to hear an entomologist come out in favour of trees: bug-people in Europe spend all their energies fighting for open habitats - grasslands, heath, light scrub, bare soil—all (in Europe at least) proven more [conducive to] biodiversity than temperate tree-land. 

There has been somewhat of a backlash against the native plants movement lately. Your thoughts?

Really? Can't imagine what the reasons for that are. It is exactly the opposite here, with native plants now regarded as an essential (almost obligatory) part of any ethical garden plan. Again, I must add qualifications. In urban areas there is a much more tolerant attitude (which I support myself) towards even invasive aliens, which are seen as the proper ("natural" even) flora of a cosmopolitan environment where the native vegetation has been disestablished for centuries.

I have to return to the qualified awe and informed appreciation with which you approach weeds. For me, it is the best thing about the book.  Are there any cultivated garden plants that come close to inspiring those feelings?

Thank you for that. All plants inspire me with their intelligence and inventiveness and beauty. But cultivated plants are, by definition, beholden to us. They're pets. Weeds (by definition also) defy our attempts  to order nature.

What I love them for is their resilience and obstinacy and regenerative power—and the blissful paradox (the weed world is full of paradox) that despite the fact they need us to exist, both physically and philosophically, they will not play by our rules. 

Mabey photo by Elizabeth Orcutt.

Aziz Ansari's Nomenclature

Thanks to Andrew Pulte for sharing this.  Happy Wednesday, y'all.

The garden of Linda Chalker-Scott

I've long been a fan of Hort and Extension Professor Linda Chalker-Scott, whose jobs it is to teach horticulture to regular gardeners - a job she accomplishes by writing award-winning books and on her  Garden Professors blog, in addition to her usual duties. But my fandom reached new heights last week after seeing her gorgeous and totally lawnless garden in Seattle, and picking her brain over dinner at Seattle's best vegetarian restaurant.

Now about Linda's garden.  This is the front yard, y'all!  Notice how the fence (the handiwork of Linda's husband Jim, shown above) provides privacy from the street and even screens the cars in the driveway. Theirs is a strange lot with almost no back yard, so it would be a waste to devote the front to the usual lawn-and-nothing-but.

Now for the plants.  The blooming groundcover is Blue Star Creeper, which grows to just 1" and is hardy to Zone 5 but (sadly for me) only evergreen in Zone 8 or warmer.  The other dominant plants here are a Weeping Larch shown above to the left of the Japanese maple, and in the foreground above, an Arctic Willow (Salix arctica), which is prostrate and surprisingly large.  It does drop its leaves but Linda says its form is so interesting, you want to see it without leaves sometimes.

In this shot of the front of Linda's house, notice all the wood chips. They prove that she walks the talk of debunking the notion that wood chips shouldn't be used as mulch because they leach Nitrogen from the soil. She assures us that except for very shallow-rooted plants - annuals and some vegetables - they do no such thing.  What's more, for many of us (and for her) they're free.  Pile it on thick enough and voila - no weeds. 

Finally, what the heck. Here's my photo of the inside of Cafe Flora, which is lovely and has enough plants inside to merit being shown on a garden blog.  We sat on the right, to be close to the fountain.

The Garden Bloggers Gather. And Blather.

A whole bunch of rambuncious garden bloggers (64, if I'm counting the blogroll right)  are convering on Seattle for the--what, third? fourth? fifth? annual gathering of garden bloggers?  Let's see, we had Austin, Chicago, Buffalo...I guess this is #4.

And I have yet to make it to one, but I love following along on Twitter.  It's #seattlefling - so check that out if you want to get some vicarious thrills.

It's a big job for a group of volunteers to put this thing together, and it's no small feat for the bloggers themselves to get on a plane and get out there.  I love the way this thing has come together in such a--shall I say--organic fashion over the last few years.

And there's a long list of sponsors who have chipped in to make it all possible, so do give them your thanks if you have the opportunity. You can find all of their links on the Fling website.

Wicked Plants in the Conservatory with RadioGarden

Andrew Keys invited the staff at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers to create a RadioGarden podcast about the making of the Wicked Plants exhibit.  He assured us that any ordinary audio recorder would work; in fact, he's done interviews on his iPhone.  So, equipped with exactly that sort of technology, curator Lau Hodges and I settled in to do our interview the afternoon before the opening night gala.

Except.  Andrew Roth, the extraordinarily creative sound engineer who designed the sound effects for the exhibit, was sitting quietly in the corner, fine-tuning his audio creation. When he saw me pull out my cheap Radio Shack digital recorder, he could remain silent no longer.

"Uh--would you like me to record this interview for you?" he asked.

We both looked over at him in amazement. 

"I am the sound guy, after all," he said.

Oh, yeah!  So after a little scrambling around, Andrew got us wired up and we sat down behind this gate and started recording with his much nicer equipment:

AND--after Lau and I were done, Andrew sat down and talked about how he created the sound effects.  And that is my FAVORITE part of the interview.  Everyone on staff learned something--none of us had any idea what went into creating sounds that go along with a garden of poisonous plants. (his part starts around minute 16)

How does a plant sound?   How does fear sound? Tune in and find out.

Creepy or cool? You be the judge!

Actually I would rather have this than a star named after me. Bios Urn.

We Heart RadioGarden, and You Should, Too

We've sung the praises of Andrew Keys' RadioGarden podcast before, but it's time to do it again.  Really, it's the coolest thing out there, and we should be shouting from the rooftops every time a new episode goes live, but somehow they slip past us.

So.  Right now.  Go here to check out the podcast and to subscribe through iTunes.  My favorite recent episode is an interview with the botanical artists who illustrate the Botanical Interests seed packets.  I mean, where else are you going to get something like that?  It's smart, thoughtful, lively, and wonderful. Although I try to avoid these kind of facile comparisons, it really is This American Life for plants.

Get over there and give Andrew a little love.  Really, he's amazing.

Q&A With the Gardening Deejay

Last week, I had the great fun of interviewing Graham Rice for Kirkus Reviews' new book blogger network. Please say hello to Graham, author of more than 20 gardening books, including the American Horticultural Society’s  Encyclopedia of Perennials, one of the most frequented books in my gardening library.  The encyclopedia is comprehensive, informative, and lavishly illustrated, as you’d expect…but it’s also delightfully opinionated and fun, as you wouldn’t.

The surprising amount of personality operating here is really no surprise, given that Graham, a transplanted Brit, also moonlights as a DJ for Radio Catskill.  He describes his BritMix show as an eclectic blend of “the weird and the wonderful, the sparky and the strange…the majestic, the quirky; the catchy and, occasionally, the almost incomprehensible.” Sounds VERY MUCH like my garden.

Q: When you graduated from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, did you expect to make your living as a gardener... or as a writer?  How did the writing happen?

A: When I was 12,  I wanted to be sports writer, but as I got interested in plants, both the sports and the writing all went dormant. When I left Kew, I planned to study plant taxonomy.  But that misfired, so I started to write a few pieces, and it went from there.

Q:  How did you become the “Transatlantic Gardener," which is the name of your blog, gardening in two places?

A: I married an American. In 1997, garden writer and photographer judywhite, who was managing editor of Time Warner’s Virtual Garden website, hired me to be part of the first-ever online coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show. When we met at the show, my life changed, and we now spend most of our time in northeast Pennsylvania, with a cottage in Northamptonshire in England.  I don’t garden much in England.  We’re not there enough, so a friend who runs a floristry business uses the garden to grow cut flowers.

Q:  When I was a beginning gardener, I was very inspired by photos of British gardens.  But the truth is we don't have the same idyllic conditions for perennials here in the US, with the possible exception of the Pacific Northwest.  Do you write differently for American audiences?  Do you garden differently in the US?

A: The climate is so different in the US from the UK, I had to learn how to garden here in Pennsylvania--and also to realize that knowing how to garden here didn’t mean I knew how to garden anywhere else in the country.

 I came back from England recently, where the daffodils were in full bloom and the snowdrops finished. Here, the daffs are just peeping through the snowy soil and the snowdrops just opening. Then there are all the oddities of vocabulary and phraseology to deal with, and Britain only uses metric measurements.

But today’s economics of book publishing determine that most garden books are published in just one edition that has to try to suit everyone, including gardeners in Australia and South Africa. So I’m very pleased that my Encyclopedia of Perennials is published in both an American edition and a separate British edition.

Q: What are the differences between the US and British editions of the Encyclopedia of Perennials? 

 A: While many of the 6,800 plants included are the same, of course, some are different. The choice of daylilies, for example, is very different in the two editions: Daylilies are far less popular in Britain, and older, taller and smaller-flowered varieties are far more widely grown than they are in North America.

The cultural advice is also appropriate to each edition.  Being a transatlantic gardener was a great help in refining the choices for the two editions. 

Q:  What are you working on now?

A: I’m just working on the proofs for my next book, Planting the Dry Shade Garden, which gives advice on how to make the toughest spot in the garden more hospitable to plants and also recommends a wide range of plants that will thrive in those difficult conditions. That will be out in August from Timber Press.

Q: How does The BritMix fit into all of this?

A: I need to do something completely different from gardening. So I have a weekly public radio show on WJFF, which serves the Catskills and northeast Pennsylvania. I play British music from the 1960s up to the latest releases, including artists who are relatively unfamiliar to American audiences. I have fairly eclectic tastes, so the show covers rock, punk, traditional folk, British blues, singer-songwriters, reggae even a little jazz and contemporary styles like folktronica and dubstep.  But it’s all British.

There are so many British acts that ought to be better known over here, so it works very well. But music by people whose prime aim is to become pop stars is usually disqualified from inclusion!

Q:  Name your favorite unsung bands that we might catch on BritMix.

A: The Unthanks and Imagined Village are taking traditional folk music in completely new directions. No one here seems to know the punk poet/singer from the 1970s Patrik Fitzgerald. Cherry Ghost combine energy, style, intensity and great lyrics, and for intense energy, the Fratellis and The Wombats are really exciting.

Q:  You've written more than 20 books.  How do you keep it fresh?

A: When I was on the staff of a gardening magazine years ago, we had a famous British garden writer working for us, and every month she would call up and ask for ideas for her column. To me, that was a sure sign she should have been doing something else.

There’s never a shortage of things to write about. Going back and forth across the Atlantic certainly helps.  Just looking down from the plane as I approach the airport sparks fresh thinking about the natural world. With new plants, the unexpected ways in which plants behave, new ideas on using plants--plus important issues like planting natives and dealing with invasives--I always have ideas.

In fact, having ideas is the easy part.  It’s more difficult to pick the best ideas to run with.

Wicked Plants Swag--Oh, and the Exhibit, Too.

I spent last week in San Francisco at the opening of the Wicked Plants exhibit at the Conservatory of Flowers. They've been working on this thing for over a year, and although I was very eager to help make it happen, in the end my role was pretty minimal:  I supplied some text from the book for signs, gave them a species list and some suggests on how to find some of the more obscure plants, helped get contracts signed, and generally stood by, waiting to see what they'd come up with.

Last week was the big reveal. The day before the show opened, we had TV cameras in throughout the day to get some footage, and then there was a preview night reception for members.

Here's a news segment on the show:

 

And here are a few photos from opening day:

But the most exciting thing for me was, of course, the gift shop.  Wicked Plants temporary tattoos!  Beer glasses!  T-shirts!  Shot glasses!  Seeds! 

And yes, they're selling this stuff online as well.  Shop online here, and go here to check out the details on the exhibit, which runs through October.

(Oh, and warning:  The T-shirts run small.  Go up a size.)

The Founding Gardeners: An Interview with Andrea Wulf

 

This is the latest in our series of bookish posts for Kirkus Book Reviews.   And yes, we have a copy to give away!  Comment to win--all comments considered, we'll choose at random.

Andrea Wulf is following up The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire, and the Birth of an Obsession with a new book about America’s founding fathers.   Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation, is out this week from Knopf.  Wulf has an absolutely insane tour schedule  here in the United States, starting April 5 and continuing through June 9 with stops all across the country—then she’ll be back in September for a few more dates. Do go see her if you have a chance.

I met Andrea at Petersham Nurseries in Surrey last fall. It’s an extraordinarily elegant garden center that seems like it’s been there for three hundred years—exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find in the English countryside.  You can even have your afternoon tea there. It occurred to me, as Andrea and I were talking that day, that it must be interesting for someone who lives in such a garden-obsessed country to write about the history of American gardening.  Here’s what she had to say:


AMY:  I'm sure you're going to get this question a lot on your book tour:  Since you are not American, what attracted you to the American founding fathers for this book?

ANDREA:  I was born in India, brought up in Germany and lived for the past fifteen years in Britain.  my last book, The Brother Gardeners, was about the British obsession with gardens. When I researched it, I not only discovered how important America had been in the creation of the English garden but also that plants, gardens and nature played an important role in the shaping of the American nation.

I would have never thought that this would lead me to write a book about the American founding fathers and gardens. I had never thought of America in terms of gardening -- in particular compared to Britain, where I have lived for the past 15 years and where everybody seems crazy about their flowerbeds.

AMY:  Had you spent much time here in the States before you came over to research and write the book?

ANDREA: My first impressions of America were shaped when I went in 1987 on a seven-week road trip across the States. It confirmed every cliché: gigantic shopping malls, colossal billboards, endless drive-thrus, bulky fridges and huge cars. I thought of America as an industrial, larger-than-life country. I certainly never thought of it in terms of gardening  -- in America, I believed, I was more likely to see someone driving a riding-mower than pruning roses. 

But how wrong I was!   At its roots America is a gardening nation  -- just a bit different to the British.

AMY:  I'm willing to bet that many Americans don't know about our early gardening history. So who are the Founding Gardeners?

ANDREA:  One of the protagonists in  The Brother Gardeners  is John Bartram, an American farmer and plant collector who lived outside Philadelphia.   For four decades, from the 1730s, Bartram sent so many seed boxes of American trees and shrubs to Britain that he completely transformed the English garden.

It was in Bartram's letters that I first realized a remarkable connection to the founding fathers, for he was a good friend of Benjamin Franklin. As I read on through letters, diaries and other manuscripts, I came across a visit of the delegates of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to Bartram's garden and an invoice to George Washington, who had ordered hundreds of trees and shrubs for his garden at Mount Vernon, as well as accounts that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had visited. As I read on, I realized that America s first four presidents - Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison -  had used nature, though in different ways, in their fight for America.

AMY:  It's amazing to think that they had time for gardening or even farming.  I mean, there was a revolution going on!

ANDREA:   They not only created the United States in a political sense, they also understood the importance of nature for their country. Golden cornfields and endless rows of cotton plants became symbols for America's economic independence from Britain; towering trees became a reflection of a strong and vigorous nation; native species were imbued with patriotism and proudly planted in gardens, while metaphors drawn from the natural world brought plants and gardening into politics.

In fact, I believe it's impossible to understand the making of America without looking at the founding fathers as farmers and gardeners. But the greatest surprise for me was that James Madison is the forgotten father of American environmentalism. He regarded nature as fragile ecological system that could easily collapse. Man, he believed, had to find a place within the  balance of nature  without destroying it --  words that remain as important today as they did when he spoke them.

Growing a Greener World: Season One Wraps

 

26 episodes.  8 months. 18 states.  36 cities. 254 stations. 4,058 tweets. Joe Lamp'l's PBS show Growing a Greener World has wrapped up its first season, and they've got a cool summary reel that looks back over their first year on the air. (It'll be worth watching through to the end just to see Joe roll around in shit.  Or is that compost?  Whatever--we love to watch Joe get dirty.)

 

 

It's a massive undertaking, of course, to get Joe, the host, along with co-host Patti Moreno and Chef Nathan Lyon and the crew to a bajillion locations across the country to cover all things horticulture--and of course, a lot of it has to happen in season, which explains the 8-month sprint. I've been following associate producer and canning guru Theresa Loe's Facebook updates, and I get exhausted just reading them.

Speaking of Facebook, it's not enough to have a TV show anymore, is it?  There's also a blog that chronicles the show (with posts like "We're sleeping WHERE?!?").  And a podcast, in which Joe interviews such Friends of Rant as Paul Tukey and Jeff Lowenfels.  And a Twitter feed.  And a Facebook page.  All of which is up to date.  And relevant.  And interesting.  And written by real people, not a PR firm.

Anyway, kudos to the whole gang for pulling it off.  Are you watching the show on your local PBS station?  (Go here to find out if it airs near you.) The show has already been picked up by an astonishing 254 stations, representing national coverage of about 70 percent. If it's not showing in your area, I'm sure that a nice note to the station, with a donation enclosed, will work wonders--and will probably get you a lovely tote bag, too.

Or are you watching it online?  Full episodes are posted here after the show airs. (The Annie's Annuals episode is totally charming.)

Well done, people.  And, because TV shows don't happen for free, a hat-tip to Fiskars and Burpee and Liquid Fence and Subaru for stepping up and backing their efforts. I'm told that Season Two is well underway, with six episodes in the can and more to come.

Michelle Obama, Garden Writer

Before Michelle Obama was a garden writer, she was First Lady of the United States.

Look out for a garden book from Obama next spring.  It will "explore the much-covered patch on the White House grounds where the First Lady has focused on bringing the public a broader message about the importance of access to locally grown food," according to the Publishers Weekly report. It'll come out in a four-color hardcover and in an enhanced ebook format from Crown. Proceeds go to charity.

What do you think?  Will she come on GardenRant and do a guest post and book giveway?

Consider it an open invitation, Ms. Obama....

Robert Frost, Poultryman

Before Robert Frost became Robert Frost, he was a chicken farmer. In 1899, at the age of twenty-five, he rented half a farmhouse for himself, his wife, his first two children, and several dozen Wyandottes. He soon ran out of room and moved to a larger farm in New Hampshire, where the local newspaper reported that "R. Frost has moved upon the Magoon place which he recently bought. He has a flock of nearly 300 Wyandotte fowls."

During the day Frost did what all chicken farmers do:  he repaired coops, built fences, scattered grain, gathered eggs, and sold live birds to butchers for meat. He read poultry magazines, consulted with breeders, followed the market prices in the newspaper, and attended poultry shows.  And at night, he wrote poetry.

The poetry wasn't exactly a hot seller:  he'd sold one poem a few years earlier and, emboldened by his success, proposed to his future wife.  She turned him down the first time, perhaps feeling that he ought to find a more stable occupation (like chicken farming) before she accepted.

Frost sent his late-night poems off to magazine editors, who mostly rejected them. That's when he got the idea to write fiction and sketches for the poultry magazines he subscribed to.  He sent off a query letter to Farm-Poultry in Boston, offering an article "a little outside the usual line, but with instructive ideas." The editor agreed to take a look, and Frost wrote something up and submitted it. But it, too, was rejected.

Fortunately, a rival publication, The Eastern Poultryman, liked his style and started running his pieces. That got Farm-Poultry's attention, and soon he was writing for both magazines, always under the initials R.L.F. He wrote eleven pieces in all, earning about ten dollars each time.

By 1906, when he was in his early thirties, Frost was getting out of the chicken business and into the writing and teaching business, and from there--well.  From there he became Robert Frost.

Fortunately for us, Frost's early writings on chickens were collected into a lovely little book called Robert Frost: Farm-Poultryman, edited by Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson, and published in a beautiful (and still very affordable) edition by the Stinehour Press in 1963. (The pieces can also, apparently, be found in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, but I'm not sure if you get the nice essay from the editors, which is where I learned most of what I've said here about his early days as a henman.)

His are charming stories about the lives of poultry fair judges, young ambitious chicken farmers, and editors of poultry magazines. The story about the editor begins like this:

"The editor sat at his desk. He had been writing about hens all day, and he hadn't heard a hen since he left home in the suburbs in the morning, and he was tired of it." It goes on to tell the story of an editor who is alarmed to learn that readers have actually been following the advice in his magazine Hendom to the letter, so he decides to go have a look at one such reader's chicken operation. Chaos ensures.

One problem with the chicken-writing: Frost was frustrated by the facts. One piece made a passing reference to a farmer whose geese roost in trees; it generated a sarcastic letter to the editor that began, "Will you kindly inform me through your next issue what kind of geese Mr.Hall has...Now I am 45 years old and have been among geese all my life, and I can never remember seeing a goose in a tree.  I thought if I could get a breed of that kind I could dispense with coops." It's probably just as well that he went on to poetry, which surely gave him more freedom.

If this has you desperate to read a little Robert Frost, let me send you over to his 1914 poem "After Apple Picking." It's not about chickens, but it's about farming, and I guarantee it will make you want to throw your computer out the window and go tend to something outside for the rest of the day, or perhaps the rest of your life.  I hope that a few of you do.

Jeff Gillman on Invasives

I am so excited about Jeff Gillman and Eric Heberlig's smart and insightful analysis of the many scientific and political debates that rage in our own backyards. The great thing about this book is that you don't have to agree or disagree with anything they say.  They're just laying out the arguments, sorting fact from fiction, and letting you decide.

The two wrote a series of blog posts for Powell's about some of the major hot-button issues in the book--but the chapter that most interested me was the one on invasives.  So I asked Jeff to answer a few questions about some of the more thought-provoking statements in the book.  Here goes:

AMY:  There was this line that almost made me drop the book. You quoted someone as saying that no plant species in the United States has ever been driven to extinction by an invasive plant. And I had never thought of it that way.

JEFF:  In the continental United States, that's true. I was quoting Mark Davis out of Macalester College, a small college located right here in Minnesota. I've heard him speak and read his book Invasion Biology, and that's just a fact.

On an island, when you have an invasive species, you can drive a plant right to the edge and then off that edge.  But the continental United States is pretty big, with a whole bunch of different ecosystems – in other words, places for plants being infringed upon to escape to.  Now, Dr Davis did not say, and nobody believes, that invasives can't infringe on a native plant's growing range so that where it once covered 100 acres, for example, it now covers one.  But in terms of making a plant go extinct?  It hasn't happened.

AMY:  So here's my question. Where is the line between a plant that is really invasive in the sense that it bullies other plants and pushes them around and steals their food and actually wipes them out, as opposed to a plant that is simply more vigorous but didn't necessarily stomp out something else in order to make its place in the world? For instance, a plant that just happens to do better in an ecosystem after that ecosystem has been disrupted in some way?

JEFF:  Well, if a plant is doing well in a location then the perception is that it is pushing other plants out.  If we see what appears to be a monoculture of what we know to be an alien plant then we tend to just assume that plant is displacing natives – often without much data. 

Much of the United States is a disrupted ecosystem – that’s what people do when they inhabit a place – we disrupt things.  It just so happens that many foreign plants do well in disrupted ecosystems – it’s interesting how we hate them so much just for doing what they do best.  It’s also interesting that we don’t call foreign crops, like wheat, invasive. Wheat, corn, and soy, all foreign plants, cover millions of acres, at the expense of native plants, ecosystems, and animals – they do much more than plants we usually think of when we consider invasives, but no one thinks of them as invasive.  Now I’m not suggesting that we should get rid of these crops, but it’s a good mental exercise to think of things in different ways.

AMY:  So wait--it sounds like whether the ecosytem is a forest or wetland that we've messed up, or a field that we've planted with a crop we like, the outcome is the same.  We create an opportunity for something else to grow there. So are there good scientific definitions of what an invasive plant is?

Acres of annuals—now? In Buffalo?

Last night, I taught a blogging workshop to an adult horticultural class, which was a fun and enlightening experience for a few reasons, but one of the most rewarding parts of it was the setting. It was held at McKinley High School in Buffalo, a public school where there is a 4-year horticultural training program.  It is only one of 2 such programs in New York State. (I wonder how many other there are in the country.)

There are several greenhouses and workshop rooms where students learn to grow, pot, propagate, design, and so on. There are 2 ponds and several areas where tropical and other plants are kept, and most surprising of all, two greenhouses were filled with tables of annuals: lobelia, pansies, petunias (including old-fashioned fragrant varieties), impatiens, and so on. Not such an interesting sight at any other time of year but on February 28, a most welcome phenomenon. It’s months before these would be seen anyplace else in my part of the world. These will be used to cheer up the annual garden show, Plantasia, which usually relies on forced bulbs, early-flowering shrubs, and evergreens for its plants. All grown by the students (under instructor Dan Robillard) and it looked like they did an fine job.

I had been invited by another horticulture teacher (now a professor at a nearby college), Tom Mitchell. He thought of me after seeing a post where I remarked on a proposed NYState playground pesticide ban, claiming that our local nursery association was against the ban. Mitchell concedes that many members might have been against it, but that the association as a group would never take such a position. I believe him, so I must have been mistaken.

Mitchell wanted the students to be exposed to a blog like Garden Rant where these issues are discussed, and I was happy to take them on a tour of our most controversial posts. He is also threatening to start a blog of his own; that will be very welcome—too few of our local horticultural insiders are involved in the online gardening discussion.

I wanted to take a table of these flowers home.

Mark Ruffalo - Gardener and Activist for Clean Water

 
Somewhere in Upstate New York (Sullivan County in the Catskill Mountains), an impossibly cute, Oscar-nominated actor gardens with his family.  In a recent story he said, "I know all my neighbors. It's beautiful and healthy, and in the winter there are blankets of snow covering the rolling hills.  But I'm raising three kids up there, primarily because it's supposed to be so clean, and all of a sudden I'm in the middle of a public health fight."

The public fight he's in the middle of is against fracking, the "controversial and potentially polluting natural gas extraction process by which tons of water are infused with chemicals."  Ruffalo says, "They blast the mixture underground at such high levels that it fractures the bedrock, which allows the natural gas to escape." 

He first learned about the fracking debate at his local farmers market, where he goes to buy the things that he and his wife, Sunrise Coigney, don't grow in their own garden. (But they grow almost everything. They are those people. Asked to identify anything in his salad he could have harvested himself, he lists everything but the cheese.)

In Men's Health we learn that the Ruffalos live in a 150-year-old post-and-beam barn on their 50 acres of secluded farmland. They spend a couple of months in that "healing place" every summer, and the Men's Health reporter found him there "playing with the kids, Dad-erranding to town for supplies, and moving some rock and grading the entrances to the barn."

So, it turns out the character Ruffalo played in "The Kids are All Right" - the laid-back grower of organic foods - was no stretch. 

And now that we know that he's a gardener/farmer in Update New York, where there just happens to be a GardenRanter nearby, a site visit and gardener interview are definitely in order.  Michele, you have your assignment and this quote by Ruffalo offers a clue to approaching him: "You know, the people around here just work too damn hard to go to movies, which means that the guys at the local Agway are just as insulting to me now as they always have been. And I like that."  So just insult him like the local farmers do and you're in!  We want photos, too.

But back to fracking, it's just one of many water issues he hopes to see people coalesce around. "Our idea is to go from city to city [and unite] whatever water groups are fighting mountaintop removal, or water scarcity, or gas drilling - anywhere that water is under attack, we host a concert there."  And here he is on "Need to Know" making his case.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

To learn more about fracking, I'm putting the anti-fracking documentary Gasland in my Netflix queue.  It's also Oscar-nominated.

We have 2 winners for our most popular book giveaway ever!

Lynn Rosenberg and Dave Glasebrook will receive copies of Michele Owens' Growing the Good Life. The rest of you (all 102 of you), please—buy your own copies, preferably at your local independent bookstore or online here. Or at a chain bookstore that is not yet bankrupt.

Five cool things about Michele Owens' new book

1. It’s called Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise (Rodale). Note the statement—GROW the good life. Not “Here’s how to grow the good life.” As Michele says in the first chapter, “The problem is that many how-tos refuse to admit the contingency of their own advice. Many of them spend so much time trying to cover every eventuality and anticipating every possible problem that a beginner might reasonably conclude that growing food is nothing but a series of problems.”

2. Like Michele, the book is forthright and opinionated. And funny. I couldn’t agree more when she says, “Seed starting is babysitting, babysitting somebody else’s peevish and ungrateful children. I hate it.” (But, of course, she does it, when there’s no other way to get the varieties she wants.)

3. It talks about the concept of beauty in the garden. It’s strange, but too few gardening books do, and hardly any vegetable gardening books. Books talk about good design and color combinations but they don’t often get into all the strange and wonderful places where beauty can be found—whether in the glossy black of an eggplant or in a misty view of empty plantings beds against an old barn.

4. Grow the Good Life does what no other gardening book has ever done—it makes me hungry. There aren’t recipes, exactly, but in a chapter called Flavor, Michele talks about the difference in flavor between just-picked and just-purchased vegetables, as well as the possibility of some things improving over time—like parsnips: “Finger-sized slices of parsnip roasted in olive oil and salt, with the sugars caramelizing on the outside, is one of the finest dishes known to man. And parsnips … are even sweeter when they’ve sat on my cellar stairs a few months.”

5. I’m giving it away. Please respond in comments and I will choose a winner (randomly) by 2 p.m. EST tomorrow.

I love this book. It's intelligent, passionate, self-assured, and—most of all—beautifully written. Congratulations, Michele!

Landscape architects I've known and been intimidated by

For a plain-old home gardener and gardenblogger, I've gotten to meet an amazing assortment of landscape architects with marquee names in their profession.  Like Laurie Olin, who redesigned the grounds of Washington Montument, and the late Lawrence Halprin, whose Roosevelt Memorial (photo right) is a local favorite.

And Jim van Sweden, whose D.C.-based firm pioneered the New American Garden style and is now working on the Martin Luther King Memorial.

Another locally based bigshot is the gentlemanly Roger Courtenay, who designed the garden around the American Indian Museum and is now working on the Eisenhower Memorial (more on that later - the architect is Frank Gehry and it's going to blow some minds.)

Michael Van Valkenburgh was in town a lot redesigning Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House.

And Katherine Gustafson, well known for the Lurie Garden in Chicago, is winning her share of D.C. projects - the courtyard at the American Portrait Gallery, and still in planning, the African-American Museum. 

So now I'll tell you how I've come to "know" (okay, most of them don't even know my name) these stars of landscape architecture.  They've all appeared repeatedly before two review boards I worked for in my previous career, when I provided transcripts of their meetings.  These public events involve designers of all types presenting and defending their projects here in Washington - the big, important ones.  And my front-row seat for this show taught me just a bit about design but made big impressions on me - like how little I actually know as a home gardener, and how awed I am by their profession.  (And not just by these famous ones.)

But finally I come to another big name in landscape architecture - that of Diana Balmori, who sits on one of those boards as a presidential appointee.   At the time of her appointment I already knew of her because she co-authored  Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony back in '93 and even coined the term "Freedom Lawn".  A pioneer of the Lawn Reform movement!

So when I heard the title of Diana's latest book - a Landscape Manifesto - I knew I had to get my hands on it and review it right here.  You know, the place with the Manifesto.  

So, presenting myself as the co-author of a popular gardening blog (!) I asked Yale Press for a copy, got one immediately, and dug right in - tackling the section on lawn first, of course.  She calls the American lawn a "dramatically impoverished ecology"and goes on to assert that "Your back yard is...your private property and nobody else's business" - love it!  (She has lots to say about the history of the lawn, and I'll be covering that on the Lawn Reform blog.)

Then I got into the meat of the book, the manifesto part, filled with other-worldly visuals and scholarly discourse, and I came to a realization:  This isn't gardening, or garden writing.  This belongs in the more rarefied world of planners, those artistic, brainy people who get published by Yale, work all over the world and get paid very well.  Like I'm assuming Diana was for her design shown here that surrounds and improves on Gehry's most famous project - in Bilbao, Spain.

What was I thinking?  It's time for me to return the book, or maybe pass it along to a local blogger who's an actual landscape architect for him to review. 

Roosevelt Memorial photo credit.