Plant Talk

Paris Perfections

I can't get Parisian gardens out of my mind. As highly designed and vast as they are, the public gardens of Paris are full of quiet and not-so-quiet surprises. How can gardens based on geometric shapes and planted in rigid allees of trees be so satisfying? I think it's both the age of the gardens, and the human factor - these old gardens have mellowed with time, acquired a patina over the years. They're softened and given human scale by all the tourists and locals that populate them, for the parks are filled with people sitting around enjoying the weather, the plants, the passing parade of people...

I've written a longer column about Parisian gardens for Pacific Northwest magazine in the Seattle Times which will run in a few weeks...in the meantime, here are a few perfect late September moments in Paris:

This expressionistic vegetable garden, complete with pumpkins and colorful fencing, was unexpected in the mostly formal gardens at the Tuileries in the heart of Paris: (All photos taken by me with my iPhone)

We came across this shady grotto in a corner of the Luxembourg Gardens - which to my eye was much more impressive than any of the more elaborate ornamentation and statuary at Versailles.

Ivy draped like garlands is reflected in the still waters of the rectangular pond.

The flower borders are both loose and formal, like these two in the Tuleries. The top photo shows pale blue little phlox grown to standards, interspersed with fragrant nicotiana and trimmed with marigolds and pennisetum (who would have thought that combo would look so good? Is it because it's repeated for such a long stretch, and set off by the simplicity of green hedging and lawns?)

I especially loved the watermelon-colored'Alma Potschke' asters (bottom photo) that I grow in my garden on Whidbey, shown here  with Verbena bonariensis and the Louvre in the background.

 

 

 

 

Artichoke Past its Prime

By the third week of October, most anything left standing in the garden is fair game for bouquets. I scavenged just before the rain set in, fighting my way past the spider webs to harvest these final flowers: hydrangea, Northern sea oats grass (Chasmanthium latifolium) with its flat, reptilian-like blooms, a re-bloom of grape colored penstemon, sneezeweed, and an artichoke so past its prime that it was topped with a fringe of purple-buzz cut.…..I’ve mostlly been away from the garden for weeks, traveling and then busy in the city. In my absence, the spiders took over, wrapping shrubs and perennials in their sticky, dew-drenched masterpieces.

Are spiders the sign of a healthy garden? If so, mine is doing great….the dahlias had a boost from a few days of warm weather, as did the sneezeweed….love the hot orange of 'Fortnett’s Furnace' dahlia, with yellow centers that inspired the choice of vase…The green tomatoes tell the story of a chilly summer or perhaps fall arriving a couple of weeks too soon (doesn’t it always?) and the purple grape leaves turned burning red play off the intense color of the dahlias….

 

Gardening from the Source

Scratch any passionate gardener, and you usually find, just under the surface, the memories of a parent or grandparent who gardened. Those old influences run deep.Gardening was my Mom's greatest pleasure, and I absorbed that from her even though I wasn't the least interested in specific plants or caring for them when I was a kid. Yesterday would have been her 90th birthday (she died a few days after she turned 65, which sounds younger and younger to me all the time). I often think of all I learned from her about gardens. Not that I ever helped or listened to a thing she said, but the inspired and wild garden she made was the delight of my childhood.

All us kids spent every moment we could outdoors, never coming in until we were called over and over, often long after dark. A creek ran through our garden filled with crawdads, water skippers and fat, spawning salmon. We had deep woods, a raspberry patch, sword ferns to pull for fights, a grassy hill to roll down, tree swings, and lots of places to hide. I still dream of that garden, its unkempt spots and its scary woods, the rose garden, the hugest hydrangeas I've ever seen, fertilized with well-composted manure from my Dad's racing pigeons.

When I was in high school, my parents moved from that big old house and wild garden. I never forgave them, but as I grow older I understand. My mother wanted a chance to make a new garden, and I recently realized how modern that new garden was, with mostly drought tolerant groundcovers, small shrubs, native plants, pathways, terrraces, and a few beautiful trees. She still grew her favorite hydrangeas and fragrant Exbury azaleas, a border of Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) which she loved to pick...

How could such minimalism and control ever compete with the wildness and disorder of that garden we grew up in? When I visited the Chase Garden near Orting I recognized the swathes of groundcover as similar to the new garden my Mom made in the years before she died...I just wish she'd lived out another 20 years of gardening life, long enough for her to see her new garden mature...and for us to garden together....

Photo courtesy of the Chase Garden

Pumpkins Galore

I love to grow unusual pumpkins and squashes - but this year you can find such an assortment of fabulous ones in shops and stores I'm thinking I won't give up garden room to the colonizing vines anymore....Even Trader Joe's has fat French Cinderella heirloom pumpkins for $4.99!

For a fine assortment of heirloom squashes and pumpkins in glorious shades from mint green to deepest burnt orange, stop in to Marigold and Mint in the Melrose Market on Capitol Hill.  These fruits from Gordon Skagit Farms are so varied and beautiful it'd be a shame to carve them.  For your Halloween pleasure:

Taken to Task

There's an art to taking someone to task and reader Anita Legsdin has it mastered. Her email was as delightful as it was educative....who would have known sugar combined with mountain ash berries and shaken regularly would result in a liqueur you'd want to drink? 

Anita wrote in response to a Q&A in the Seattle Times from autumn 2006 (no statute of limitations on ANYTHING now that everything appears online as well as in print) in which she thought I was far too dismissive about the taste of mountain ash berries. Here's her email:

"I am of Latvian ancestry, and Latvians do all kinds of things with mountain ash berries. In Latvia, they wait until after the first frost to pick them, then they make jams and jellies out of them. My mother used to layer berries and sugar in a jar, then pour vodka over them, shake the jar once a day. After a few months, you have quite a pleasant-tasting liqueur. The older women liked to tell stories of birds that ate too many berries that had fermented, then crashed into windows.
 
Because of my experience with these berries, I take violent exception to your comment that they taste bland. They do not taste bland at all, rather, they are quite tart, with a very strong, unique taste. I have always thought they would make a fine addition to some kind of chutney, but I have yet to find a recipe that includes them. I am still looking."
Anita Legsdin

Anyone have a recipe for chutney made with mountain ash berries? If so, please send it my way so I can pass it on to Anita....

What's Up With Nasturtiums?

Nasturtiums may be common and old-fashioned, but don't their cheerful,height-of-summer flowers do your heart good? I I adore how easily and quickly they grow seed, how they bloom for months, and their peppery smell that signals summer as surely as lily perfume. Both leaves and blossoms liven up the taste of a salad or sandwich. And I'm grateful my nasturtiums don't seem to notice it's mid-October and are still going strong.

Yet this summer these dependable favorites have driven me crazy! The leaves have grown huge and ungainly, hiding the flowers. They survived a July bout of aphids (dispatched with strong blasts of water from the hose) only to sprawl and trail all over the garden in an ungainly, leafy mess.

So now I'm on a quest to figure out which kinds of nasturtiums stay compact and produce more flowers than leaves. There must be some that hold their blooms high above the foliage...aren't there?  I turned to Renee Shepherd of Renee's Garden Seeds for the answer to which nasturtiums I should grow next year...

"The weather has a lot to do with blooms on nasturtiums -- a chilly, dank summer will be a factor in producing more leaves and flowers. It's also absolutely true that over fertilized or over rich soil will tend to produce more leaves and flowers," writes Renee (Guilty as charged, I do grow nasturtiums in the same soil I grow strawberries! And chilly and dank certainly describes summer 2010). But there's good news...

"The seed producer is what makes the difference," she continues. "We get the same nasturtium variety from different seed producers to grow out and look for this trait (flowers held above the foliage), selecting the most floriferous to offer for Renee's Garden packets. So this is a case of you get what you pay for and it's important choose your seed packet provider carefully. That said, I think Whirlybird is a good one to grow along with most of the trailing ones and our Alaska , Cherry Rose and Buttercream.."

Okay, put my order in...for a warmer summer, as well as Alaska Mix, with its lovely warm colors and variegated leaves. Also Buttercream, new for 2011, and Whirlybird, with its lively mix of shades from palest yellow to hot pink and red....

 

 

 

Everyday Bouquets - Almost Over

Picking the last really big, fill-your-arms bouquet in autumn is a bittersweet pleasure. Still, it should probably be acknowledged as a seasonal marker, if not celebrated as joyously as the first big bouquet in spring. Although I still have sweet little raspberries, increasingly skimpy dahlias, heliotrope, a few last 'Westerland' roses, and nasturtiums that are actling like it's mid-summer, the garden is mostly winding down. 

I felt like I was stripping it clean as I gathered the last of the sunflowers, red and black hypericum berries (leaves stripped off so they’re spikes to stick in last among the flowers already in the vase), dahlias, sneezeweed, crocosmia. The big autumn flowers, like sunflowers with their heavy stems, need a heavy, wide bottomed vase like this two-toned pitcher.

The glossy hypericum berries in red and black spark the autumnal yellows, rusts and gold, but a few sprays of purple and watermelon-colored asters would be the perfect color contrast. As I put this bouquet together I resolved to somehow shoehorn in at least one hot pink 'Alma Poetschke' aster, and a plant or two of the long blooming, purple-blue Aster x frikartii 'Monch' to add to next year's final, bounteous bouquet.

 

 

Come Celebrate Miller Library's 25th B'Day

We are SO fortunate to have a library here in Seattle devoted to the literature of gardening - free and open to the public. It was Betty Miller's vision, and the generosity of the gardening community, that created this unique resource....and now the Miller Library is celebrating its 25th anniversary and you're all invited to come help celebrate. 

This is a little bittersweet for me, in part because it makes me feel like a dinosaur to be reminded that I started work at the Center for Urban Horticulture in June 1985! Due to so much help, especially from the Northwest Horticultural Society and the Miller Charitable Foundation, as well as the the faculty, students, and professional horticulturists, the library grew and thrived and I still can't believe it's been that long!!

The library staff invites everyone to stop in on Saturday Nov. 6th, anytime between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., for a piece of celebratory cake and glass of punch. Join in a free, hourly raffle for choice plants, watch a slide show of library history, sign up to borrow books, view beautiful botanical illustrations by Linda Ann Vorobik and bring the kids (age 2-8) for a children's story time at 10:30. If you haven't seen the re-designed, rebuilt (since the eco-terrorist fire bombing in 2001) Merrill Hall, here's your chance....please come join the celebration of our horticultural library treasure....here are a few photos as added enticement....(3501 N.E. 41st Street, near Laurelhurt and University Village; http://depts.washington.edu/hortlib/)

Parisian Flower Shops

Nearly every block in Paris has its own little flower shop. Buckets of flowers, pots of plants and racks of sophisticated, silky little bouquets spill out onto the sidewalks. Flower shops are nearly as plentiful as boulangeries in the City of Light, their offerings as eagerly sought and appreciated as croissants and pain au chocolats. The flowers are as fresh as the pastries and nearly as fragrant, yet each shop is quite different from the one on the next block.

Some are flower markets, offering buckets of cut roses, hydrangeas, and lilies, as well as berried branches, sunflowers and pots of herbs for customers to pick and choose from. Others offer nosegays in bright colors, or small, elegant bouquets; all the arrangements are sized for apartments and affordable. I especially liked the simple, modern flowershops with tins displaying bouquets tied with ribbons; some shops were more elaborate and elegant. It's said that Paris is a city of neighborhoods, which for the flower lover could be defined by the number, quality and character of the flower shops - here are a few from Le Marais to Rue Cler.....don't you wish we had more little flower shops spilling out onto Seattle sidewalks??

The flower market on Île de la Cité, an island in the middle of the Seine River.

 

French Gardens

Due to the magic of technology, previously written posts have been showing up here on the blog while I've been traveling around France photographing plants and gardens for the last couple of weeks. My husband and I finally took our 30th anniversary trip (after being married 37 years...took us awhile to pull it together) to Paris and the south of France.

Who would have known that France is a gardener's paradise? I was spellbound with everything from the formal gardens at the Tuleries to the agaves sprouting from the rocky cliffs above the Mediterranean Sea. You can't believe the beauty and lushness of the Mediterrean coast, with lemons, hibiscus and oleander everywhere, and the hugest magnolia trees I've ever seen. Public gardens, like this one at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, a villa high above the sea in Cap Ferrat, are filled with exotic succulents.

And in Paris, crape myrtles (Lagerstroemia) were in full bloom at the base of the Eiffel Tower the last week in September. 

I was surprised at the complexity and variety of the bedding in all the parks, narrow strips of plantings outlining public squares, paved or grassy. At Versailles, the color scheme was silvery pale, almost ghostly; at the Luxembourg Gardens on the Left Bank, the bedding was more colorful, with Melianthus major, fountain grass, and hot pink and purple dalias.

Stay tuned for a look at Paris's fabulous trees, enchanting flower shops, and the exotic plants along the Mediterranean Sea...