The Special Quality of Vines

I have had occasion to speak and write about the book A Pattern Language recently and I am reminded about the transformative quality vines can have when well placed such as on the tool shed of this Chicago area garden.

A Great Shade Garden Plant

It is a bit slow growing but in a few years golden-seal will make a sumptuous clump of deep green leaves even in deep shade. These red fruit are a bonus. I wonder if they are edible; they look tasty, but I am afraid to try.

A Missed Opportunity

 

I am giving a talk to a local Lion's Club in a few days on the history of Kingwood Center. I had a great time scanning old black and white prints of Kingwood in the days when it was Mr. King's home and when it was a new public garden in the 1950's. It reminded me again how interesting Mr. King's featured garden was in his time, when it still reflected the original 1926 design details of the landscape architecture firm Pitkin and Mott. It has been a source of persistent frustration that I have been unable to find the funds to restore that garden. Currently the garden is showing its eighty-plus years. That's not to say our current treatment of the garden isn't attractive, but the infrastructure is crumbling and we are missing a great opportunity to really distinguish this space from the rest of our contemporay gardening efforts.

 

While on a North American Rock Garden Society meeting in the summer of 2007 I had the chance to see Deschampsia flexuosa (Wavy Hair Grass) in its native habitat as pictured above. I am always fascinated by the frequent contasts in appearance and behavior of plants in the garden (see below) and in the wild (see above).

 

Deschampsia flexuosa (Wavy Hair Grass) is a fairly obscure native grass that I have enjoyed growing in my garden. It was slow to take, but as can be seen in the picture above it has begun to fill in nicely. It is notable in part because it is shade tolerant unlike most other grasses, and it forms short dense mats with pleasantly soft flower and seed heads. I saw a line drawing in William Robinson's The Wild Garden of peonies growing in a swath of grass. Maybe this Deschampsia can be that swath of grass for my peonies growing on the edge of the canopy of a silver maple.

Asparagus is to my left and raspberries are toward the camera

Fitting Homegrown Food into a Gardening Lifestyle

One aspect of synchronizing my garden with my day to day life that has proven to be a challenge for me is homegrown food utilization. I have never been much of a vegetable gardener, although I love to grow perennial foodstuffs like asparagus, apples, raspberries, and so forth. I am also rarely without tomatoes, but my challenge has always been in organizing my meals around food available in the garden. I will often forget that asparagus needs to be cut; I won't feel like eating what's ripe; or I will be in a hurry and not want to take the time to pick and/or process what's out there. The most memorable frustration along these lines was when my then spouse insisted on buying lettuce at the grocery store rather than walk forty feet to three rows of different lettuces she helped select.

Some successes have included raspberries and blueberries which are like picking candy to me, making fruit "leather" from apple sauce(my kids love it), growing potatoes and garlic which can be harvested all at once and stored, and drying cherry tomatoes to make so called sun dried tomatoes. (I use a dehydrator, not the sun alas.)

I am alert to new way of getting better satisfaction from the large surplus of food I grow. For example, this year I am keen on trying fingerling potatoes which may offer a bigger reward than the varieties of potatoes that are so amazingly inexpensive at the grocery store, but I am looking for more and better ideas.

“Luck is the Residue of Design”

Sometimes success in gardening results from luck, but gardeners can improve their luck through their gardening practices. For example, I tried a couple of different cultivars of the hybrid saxifrage often called mossy saxifrage or Saxifraga x arendsii but usually just called Saxifraga followed by one of a huge number of cultivar names such as, in my case, Purple Robe and Floral Carpet. I have noticed and read that they are subject to rot in anything but a very light soil. I hoped a crevice in a rock wall would give them proper drainage. They grew well the first growing season and the second, but alas it looked like I lost them over the second winter. But wait, as the third summer wore on I noticed that in the little moss covered clumps of soil that accumulated on top of the projecting rocks the little saxifrage leaves were emerging. So maybe the crevice didn't work out for them, but I did provide the general environment suitable for the plants and luckily some seeds found the right spot nearby.