Some Gardening Humour...

 

stolen from Jacob Kane Kanduch on Facebook.

Portland's Famous Roses are out with a Gusto!

    For generations, Portland, Oregon,'s famed roses have inspired dwellers of the more frigid prairies with hopes for spring.

    Growing up on the farm, roses were an annual crop not expected to make it through the winter.  The exceptions were the wild roses, the rugosas, the Persian Yellows, and the Copper Pennies.  Roses the likes of Jackson & Perkins could only be enjoyed in catalogs or while enviously visiting cousins and friends in Portland, Vancouver, or Seattle. 

    This Facebook post from a high school classmate brought back the joy of Portland's Rose Season and heavily spiced whiffs of rosey nostalgia.

    Thanks for the pics, artist Jacob Kane Kanduch!

What's up with the Rhubarb?

  I have been happily cultivating a new patch of Victoria Rhubarb awaiting the second-year harvest, a long anticipated reward for a year of just leaving the new plants alone.  This is recommended to give the yearlings a chance to establish themselves while drawing energy and food supplies from all the leaves the youngsters can manage.  Traditionally, the second year is the first year of harvest.

  The rhubarb started off with a promising gusto -- sturdy, green and assertive amongst the mulch covering under which it overwintered.  By all rights, I should be spending this week celebrating the first cutting, but alas, the plants are healthy but not overly productive.  I will probably choose to merely thin the stalks and patiently wait another year.

The best of my Victoria blossomed about 1 1/2 weeks ago.

  But a more puzzling problem has presented itself.

  Out on the farm, one easily gets about two cuttings of 1 cup to 1 1/2 cups per plant before the bloom hits.  The bloom is a naturally occurring flower stalk that is normally removed to prevent the plant from going to seed, to prolong the cutting season, and to maintain a strong and vibrant root system.

  The bloom usually occurs sometime in June and after the leaves have matured.  My leaves were not yet even a single foot tall.

  I grew up with non-descript plants that may or may not trace their history back to the Mennonite Kolonies of Molotshna and Gnadenfelde in Ukraine.  Perhaps Victoria has an earlier bloomtime than those non-descript heritage mongrols?

 

  A quick call to my Scandinavian-Jewish friend in St Paul, Minnesota, revealed further puzzlement.  Her rhubarb was also blooming long before the first cutting, and about a month earlier than she is used to.  She also purchased new plants for her new home, now ruing the loss of her nameless childhood cultivars.  A neighbor on my street, designated a "master gardener" in Indiana, has reported similar puzzlement over her plants.

  Our finding is that despite all the hype and claims to "heritage seed status", store-bought Victoria plants just don't have the vigor, the taste or the "delayed?" bloomtimes (which translates into production vigor) of our nameless Scandinavian and Russian heritage plants.

  I happy to have had the opportunity to purchase a plant not in over-all demand as a consumer item, but the promise of Victoria Rhubarb has fallen short -- being more bloom than vigor.

  Of course, we will update our perspectives next year.  Stay tuned!

The Fairy Gardener: Of Fish, and Graves, and Waxy Bells...

by Jim Edminster, Chicago, IL

Let's start this glorious May Day with a seemingly gloomy item from the NY Times:  A woman, Katrina Spade, is trying to start a composting business.  For human bodies.  She has titled her enterprise the Urban Death Project & estimates the whole process would cost about $2500, much less than any burial.  Think about this a bit - I've kidded for years that I wanted to die on the dance floor & be put in my compost heap.  Cemeteries are overcrowded and even crematoria chapels (with niches for ashes in urns) are becoming too full.  Ms Spade will return about 3 cubic feet of perfectly good dirt to the bereaved for the garden or forest or park.  Dust to dust you all.

A couple more sad stories:  Horticulture magazine reports some (unlabeled) flats of flowers have been sprayed with pesticides that attract & poison bees.  Don't plant Callery (aka Bradford) pears anymore:  they have weak crotches which break easily & worse - when blooming they smell like something nasty your dog has rolled in.  (These are ornamental non-bearing plants.)

I hereby establish the "Ivy League Sub-section of the Guerilla Gardening Society."  Lately people have been putting up large windowless, unornamented red brick buildings in the hood.  These buildings need something.  Ivy comes to mind.  My house has ivy & it has ivy berries.  These berries seem to be flying to the bases of these buildings.  Imagine!

Garden notes off the top of my head - I've been planting some spring bulbs & plants.  My yard is fairly dense so I've marked their burial (this is a theme in this essay) spots with bright bendable plastic drinking straws.  The yard looks like it's full of little periscopes.  I've planted 3 packages of borage which is a foot tall herb with fuzzy jade green leaves & bright blue flowers loved by bees ( & it's not poisonous!)  I moved a trial geranium in & out of the house 3 times before it stayed warm enough for it outside.  My wonderful tenant, Brit, (helped by her white husky, Nova) helped me haul my water lilies, cannas, dahlias & amaryllis out of the basement onto the patio.  I will have to pull MANY yellow jewelweed babies out (because their parents loved the yard & multiplied!)  I've never planted a red tulip in my life but a third of my yard's tulips are red.  All my fish are having a good time in the pond.  I have an actual bed frame in the yard (for a flower bed, of course) & I found 2 old cracked but handsome chairs for plant stands.  This garden is going to be a real garden room.  Just took my sasquatch out to put on the garden path - he's my green apeman I found a couple of years ago.  Found some hardy primroses to plant along my garden path . .I have a 3 foot wide, 40 feet long stretch of dirt between my sidewalk and my neighbor's house - it has many blank spots in it.  I'm going hogwild and planting every color of heuchera (coral bells) that I can find in those spots.  I need more shooting stars along the path and where a small oak-leaved hydrangea passed away (we return to the theme) I'm going to put a yellow wax bells (Kirengoshima) as soon as I can find.  

Announcement

    At T4781, we'd just like to let you know that Will and Kelsey need to take some time off for a bit.  Summer is an incredibly busy time at the Farmers Market and it is the season for architects. 

    While they are on sabbatical, we will be narrowing the focus of T4781 a bit to help manage the intellectual work load for the rest of us.  Officially, we will be directing a public dialogue on horticulture, gardens, and personal food production, while working behind the scenes to promote greater and more open dialogue encouraging economic and cultural diversity within our historic urban built environments.

    Forward into Summer! 

Ai Wei Wei: Using the New to re-claim the Old

    T4781 contributor, Jim Edminster, recently attended the Ai Wei Wei Circle of Animals exhibit in front of Chicago's Adler Planetarium.

    Wei Wei, a Chinese dissident artist, has stepped back into themes of controversy in the arts, this time addressing the complicated issue of the looting of cultural treasures by imperial powers or occupying armies.

    In 1860, British and French troops looted the Imperial Chinese Summer Palace during the Second Opium War, removing the heads of the Chinese zodiac clock-fountain from the palace grounds.

    As seen in the illustration, the twelve figures, designed by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Castiglione for the Qianlong Emporer, were grouped around a fountain in the garden and are thought to have spit out water as a sort of fountain clock.

    Now we hit upon the controversy:  the Summer Gardens and statues once defined a semi-public space celebrating aspects of local culture through the arts.  These figures were undeniably vandalized and looted by invading armies and arguably, aught to be returned to China.

Summer Palace Plan ca 1888, courtesy WikiImages.

    On the other hand, the remaining original heads probably owe their 20th Century survival to have been looted and removed to Europe where they were somewhat ironically safe from the horrors of Asia in World War 2, from the ravages and destruction of China's Communist Revolution, from the evacuation of China's armies from the mainland to Taiwan, and furthermore, from the intentional destruction of much of China's intact Imperial heritage during the Cultural Revolution.

    Now a stabilized economic world power, China is anxious to rebuild its past and to reclaim a heritage it once wantonly destroyed, as a symbol of its cultural prestige and contemporary ambitions.

Monkey, original

Bull or Ox, original

    Wei Wei wades into this debate with secure footing, having reproduced a set of disembodied Chinese Zodiac figure-"heads," which despite the heated political and cultural debate surrounding them, yet retain a power to define space and elevate one to contemplate time and destiny. 

    Perhaps the original Garden of Clear Ripples could be restored, finally providing a secure and culturally-intact sense of space and cultural connectivity to the people of Beijing.  Perhaps also, Wei Wei's Circle of Animals could help inspire the former occupying powers to create their own images and recreate similar spaces within their own parks, for their own people.  The British, French, and Americans are hardly bereft of their own artistic resources, and perhaps Wei Wei might be willing to continue to lend out his works as inspiration and models, a sort of diplomatic transitional shift allowing the originals to retire back to their homeland while passing the torch to a new generation of sturdy, much less controversial, traveling heads.

images courtesy of Jim Edminster
editing courtesy Agassiz Media & Consulting 

   
   

A short break...

Notes from Steve...

    Spring has hit hard with a long list of tasks, chores, jobs, and obligations, making it difficult to maintain blog postings. 

    A minor update -- the rose trellises proved to be an ambivalent success regarding their ability to withstand the wind -- such ability seems somewhat dependent on their being anchored to the plants that they are in turn supporting -- a true symbiotic relationship.

    Jim Edminister was correct, the tulips proved to be too much of a temptation for passers-by.  I had to clip the remaining blossoms in order to prevent the bulbs from being pulled up.  The show has been magnificent though -- the classic tulips are almost done, the Rembrandts are just manifesting their full glory, and the species tulips are just about to blossom, probably next Tuesday or so.