Advent and the Calla Lily's Call

Post 17

Bare Tree, Bright Tree

Hello and welcome to Advent, the last part of the darkening year, the first part of the yet-to-be-born year.  Traditionally it's a time for quiet and meditation --after the garden's bounty, after the harvest and feast, before the light.

"God beyond answers
Lord beyond words
Spirit beyond imagining
Move us today. Amen"

This prayer, from the Church of Scotland's website, greatly moved me when I read it.  Unbidden, there arose in my mind's eye a globe, alight and vibrant with uncountable,  invisible connections.  And accompanying it, a bit like an inaudible trumpet's call, was the urge to write this...

"What if you could thank everyone who has ever prayed for you or blessed you or wished you well?

Who would you meet?

The stranger who once saw your stricken face through a car window?


The cashier you were impatient with?


The patron you were able to cheer?

Your spouse, in mid-argument? Your spouse, in mid-pleasure?

A teacher you can hardly remember?

Someone who read something you wrote, or heard secondhand something you said?
 

The atheist who wished you well?

The person whose dog played with your dog in the dog park?

The child or sibling or relative who never understood you, or whom you never understood? The child or sibling or relative you think doesn’t understand, but understands you too well?

The friend who sympathizes?  The friend who has outgrown you?  The friend you have outgrown?

The enemy who wishes you were not so easy to despise?  The enemy who wishes you were not so hard to despise?  The enemy who is no enemy at all?

The parent who wishes life could teach you more gently?  The parent who wishes life could teach you at all? The parent who wishes love had more power in this world? The child who wishes they could save their parents?

What if everyone you had prayed for, or blessed, or wished well, could thank you?

What if we found out we had all prayed for each other or wished each other well? Wished each other better?

What if we all forgave each other?

What if we were all grateful?

Would, even could I?  Would, even could you, any of us?

Or is that what something like heaven is for? I do not know, but I wonder."

If you think it's a bit treacly, well yeah, it might be. But why are we so overly afraid of treacly in our culture?  Cool is like a gangster boss inside our souls demanding cash for not much of value.  I chose not to give in to that.  So while I'm not much for mortifying my flesh; I am for mortifying my cool.


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How-to Calla:  The white and maroon trumpeting flowers you see above are scientifically no longer either Calla or Lily, but thankfully, such a melodious name for such a fetching plant remains. Their flowers remind me of the elongated instruments played by etoilated angels that brighten Medieval manuscripts.


Zantedeschia aethiopica, originates, as you can guess, in Africa. As such, our climate is a bit too cold and wet for them to overwinter. You can dig out their rhizones in the fall and overwinter them as you would a Dahlia. This means dig up the gnarly rootstock after cold has damaged the leaves, dry the rootstock out, then pack up in moistened perlite. In spring plant back up with plenty of water. Callas like some shade and water, while good drainage and rich soil is a plus. But all, in all, they are easy. 


They can be expensive though, which is why I only grew them one year.  (Should have overwintered them.  Should have overwintered them.)  I found the two varieties pictured above at Produce Junction, for a price too low to resist. (Produce Junction is a thrifty grab-bag of whatever they can pick up, fruits, veggies, plants, garden supplies--you never know week to week.) There is something fun about not knowing what pleasantly surprising plant you might find. And these Callas took my breath away.
 

 

Thanksgiving

Post 16

Deerfield Village, MA

Now is the time for giving thanks. We are problem-solving, stimuli-hungry animals who lose track of the common and uncommon graces of our lives.

Somehow, for me, gardening slows down time. For after an hour or so of digging, smelling, placing, moving, something in me stills. Only then do I truly begin to feel, really feel, the sun massaging my shoulders or the fine texture of  grit on my fingers

It's easy to be so busy thinking/planning/solving that living, feeling unwanted, gets out of the way.

The word gratitude, comes from the Latin gratitudo and gratus. Which means thankful. It also means pleasing, as in pleasure...

Pleasure gets no respect. We suspect it because it can lead us astray. But it can also lead us right.

Part of adolescence is learning to extract pleasure from things we originally find repugnant. From booze to tobacco to movies without happy endings, we learn to overcome instinctive pleasure. How else can we be cool and grown-up? We learn to tolerate, even be proud of,  the deadening side effects of overiding our nature, and then wonder, years later, what's gone wrong.

Maturity, among so many other things, may be about shedding such roughshodding over pleasure.

Pleasure is easy.  It is everywhere. And much of it is innocent. It does not hurt you or anyone else. That is the pleasure to go for, to be grateful for.

According to the OED, the second meaning of gratitude is grace. Like the the grace of innocent pleasure, there for us when we want it.

So is the act of feeling pleasure, in an of itself, a type of gratitude? The answer seems both obvious and paradoxical.

The reason I've made a garden is because it gives me pleasure, a pleasure I learned about by experiencing other peoples' garden. I hope my garden passes on that pleasure. I hope this blog with its pictures does too. It is a way of saying thanks.

Wissahickon Style I, or the Humility of Corydalis lutea, the plant money can't buy

Post 15

Every place has its own feel. And the factors that go into this feel are too complex for rational analysis. No instrument can measure it; only human intuition is complex enough to process it

It's what the ancients called the Genius Loci, the intelligence of the place. If you garden in harmony with it, it will do the really hard work for you.

In Chestnut Hill/Mt. Airy/Germantown, with our Arts & Crafts Wissahickon Schist houses; acid, clayey soil; tall trees and the remnants of slate roofs and sidewalk, a distinctive style has spread without any trendy style guru laying down dictates, although a generous founding family has and does exert a benign influence.

Overall  it is a style that has evolved with the community through time. I love that, I love it and I love that folk-styles, of all sorts, can still exist in this product-driven ( fallen?) world.

Once this area was grand, where Philly's richest, (and those who strove to be its richest,) built. It was a shiny modern thing--a railroad suburb. Time has worn down the shine. Now it is home base for a combo of comfortable professionals, bohos, civil servants, middle and working class and the remains of a true American gentry, whose trust funds may not be what they once were,-- but whose taste is.

So often things are just a tad shabby. Items in the garden may look inherited, whether or not they are.You can always refer to wear as patina.

The Arts &  Crafts  influence (many of the houses were built 1880-1930,) comes in various substyles: Norman, Cotswold, Colonial, Queen Anne, William and Mary, Dutch, Carpenter Gothic and Italianate. Add to this some earlier houses, some Frank Loyd Wright-like numbers nestled into hillocks and brick rowhouse construction from Victorian times till post-WWII. None of these styles are pretentious. Some, if kept up gleamingly, may whisper wealth; none shout. One of the common factors to Wissahickon style is its mix of beauty with a comfortable lack of pretension.

"Homes built in the Wissahickon style of architecture are inspired by the vernacular architecture of France, England, and Colonial America ... They use native materials, such as Wissahickon schist, in their construction and native plants in their gardens...It’s very attractive, but it also makes sense ecologically,”  

Remark by historian David Contosta, from story in the Springfield Sun, Mar 24, 2011

When the houses have grown into the land, or the land has grown up around them,--and especially when its hard to tell which -- you've hit Wissahickon style paydirt. And in some corner or niche, you are likely to see a  humble, local weed/ flower. People who evaluate things by cost call it a weed, I call it an overlooked, undervalued treasure. Since it dislikes being potted up it usually spreads by seed, not sale. If you do not have any of this gem, yellow corydalis, just ask around. Chances are it modestly grows somewhere near you, peeking out of a crevice in a wall or from the underside of a step.

Its bluish, ferny, feathery foliage comes up early and leaves late. It blooms for months  in the spring and months in the fall; mid-summer it sulks and wishes it were north in a mountain glade. Each plant is short lived, but since it replaces itself so readily you are unlikely to notice this.  It is as good as a catmint or hardy geranium for underplanting larger, showier plants.

The nursery business has developed a slew of blue- and purple-flowered versions that are almost too lovely for words.  The bad news is that they are pretty finicky in our clay soil and high summer humidity. They are also expensive. I got a purple one, Blackberry Wine, to last for 3 years, but it never reseeded, which just did not seem right for a corydalis. There is a lovely, wispy biennial native form, Corydalis sempervirens, which has a pink and yellow flower and pines for mountain glades. There are also a host of yellow or white corydalis that the Brits grow as garden plants and which show up on sale from time to time. They are usually worth buying.
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How to Corydalis.  Yellow corydalis or Corydalis lutea, likes semi-shade best. It will take full sun in spring as long as some foliage emerges above to provide relief during the hottest months. It can take full shade but does not like being directly under a tree or within the dripline of a house since it needs some moisture. It has an affinity for stone, liking soil a bit more alkaline than ours usually is. So if you have a wall, path, stairway, court, alley, well or edging in schist or slate, that is a great spot for it. The roots or corms (its rootstock looks like geraniums',) often break off, so transplanting is best done with tiny seedlings, not mature plants. And those tiny seedlings, once they come up in spring, will be large and billowing by fall. In fact, one is still blooming in a wind sheltered part of my garden.

Bringing in the Pots

"Bringing in the pots, bringing in the pots, we will go rejoicing bring in the pots."

Post 14 (was 13)

Some say our average first frost date is Oct. 15th.  'Hah!' to that. It is more like Nov. 1st or  after. (I mentioned in an earlier post about how gardening instills humility--well so does writing about it. You see your mistaken assumptions flat in front of you.)

This means, that if you have potted-up tropicals out in the garden, it is time to begin bringing them in. And if you do not have potted-up tropicals, it is time to start thinking about getting some.

They are useful, good-looking heck on cherubic wheels. They are useful outside, filling in visual holes in the garden as plants shift in and out of bloom. Put on a stand or trash-picked wire chair, and they add height. Lay low and they're groundcover.

They are also useful inside, cleaning the air while adding interest and life to a room. Plus overwintering them means you need not buy more next summer. Many people can not be bothered. In fact, if you keep your eyes open on trash days, you may find some people are dumping healthy plants merely because they do not want to care for them over the winter.

Please pardon the lack of home design flair in the at-home  photos. I do not do much to set up shots. What we have is what you see. No rearranging furniture, no primping, not even a proper once over with the dust mop first. And since this blog is for people who want a beautiful garden without too much work, expense or pretentiousness, my hope is that the hand-me-down furniture and menage-a-thrift store blue and white is acceptable.

 There are all sorts of useful, work-intensive things you should, could, really do not have to do when you bring in your pots. It is a good thing to spray them for insects. But I never have, and have not had any bad results. So, after spraying them with pesticide, you are supposed to wash them, repot them, freshen up the soil and take off sun damaged leaves, etc. Again, I don't do this. About the most strenuous thing I do is water them.  In return they class up the joint and increase the oxygen level.

Recognize the plant above on the left?  It is the broad-leaf baby that shelters the outside angel in summer. In winter it does duty in the dining room. At some point I will take off the dead leaves, but probably not till we have people over for dinner. The two plants pictured like shade, which they get from the low light here, a window facing onto an alley. Besides water, the only other thing you really need to get right is light levels. Respect the plant's needs and all will usually come out right.  Since most of the plants I bring in like sun, it is lucky we have a glassed-in sunporch...

...which is also my husband's mancave. And he likes plants. The wall against the house is Wissahickon Schist, which, obviously, goes well with greenery. Also with the print of him fly fishing, which was done by a neighbor of ours.


The other three walls are glass, with window seats of schist and cement onto which I can put the plants. There are few things as peaceful as laying out on the sofa, surrounded by greenery, while watching a snowstorm outside. The muted light, hushed streets and juxtaposition of snow and leaf, cold and warm, windy and still, can make winter, for those long, seemingly timeless moments, pure gift.

See how nasty it is out. Think how warm and cozy you are in. Good time to snuggle up and dream.

Now those perfidious English, they write books about how you can have fresh flowers all year round.  But those blighters are in zone 8, that's northern Florida in American terms, so there will be a period from before Christmas till February when you will be consigned to indoor gardening, and the old blooms of the previous summer.


Which aren't bad looking, cost nothing and are whole world better than artificial ones.

So next time you think of decorating indoors, think of what the garden has to offer. It can make winter healthier, heartier and homier.