Lavender & Larkspur

There are certain plants that hold a glamorous mystique for me, usually because I’ve read about them in plant books and seen their pictures in plant catalogs but have never actually viewed them live and up close. The Himalayan blue poppy was one of these plants for me for many years–that glorious poppy shape! That vibrant azure hue! And while I’ve still never seen it with my own eyes, a woman I used to work with snapped a photo of it while she was visiting the Pacific Northwest years ago, and gave me the photo. I still have it on the bulletin board atop my desk, and it still makes me smile whenever I see it, both for her kindness and for the sheer beauty of the blossoms.

I’d never seen sweet peas for many years, either, but reading about them in an English seed catalog I used to get, and seeing all the different colors and reading about the fragrances made me long for them in the worst way, Anglophile that I am. Ten years or so ago, I finally got up the nerve to order some seeds. Turns out that for me, at least, they grow beautifully. Now my garden is never without them, and all through the summer there’s a tiny vase of them on my kitchen table.

Trollius is another plant of mystery and romance for me. I’ve seen them described as giant buttercups, which is plenty intriguing if, like me and my sisters, you used to play the buttercup game in summer by holding buttercups under one another’s chins, to see if our skin turned yellow, thus proving that we liked butter. (Mine ALWAYS did!) I like the name, because it reminds me of the troll dolls those same sisters and I played with for hours and hours on end, and also because it reminds me of Shakespeare’s play Troillus and Cressida. Trollius come in shades of yellow and orange and cream and are recommended for moist but sunny spots. I have a nice little patch of land out by the garage that could be so described. So–what’s stopping me? Well, they cost so darned much. White Flower Farm has a beautiful variety, ‘Cheddar,’ that’s a lovely pale ivory, but it’s $12.95 per plant. That’s so much money for something I’ve never seen and can’t be sure will grow! It’s not like blowing $2.95 on a packet of sweet pea seeds.

Then again, the White Flower catalog, which is always mighty flowery itself, says trollius fill “a real need for color in the garden between the last daffodils and the full onslaught of peonies, poppies and iris in June.” Well, $12.95 isn’t too much to fill “a real need,” now is it? Maybe this will be the year I’ll take the trollius plunge at last. At least White Flower is assiduous about replacing plants that fail.

Photo by Salvor Gissurardottir.

If you think about it, “Christmas cactus” is sort of like saying “Easter enema” or “Thanksgiving thyroid condition.” Cactuses are not generally considered to be festive, although I do love that new commercial that shows Shaquille O’Neal and the “Shaqtus,” even though I can never remember what the commercial’s for. But I get tempted every winter by the pretty little Christmas cactuses for sale in the grocery store, decked out in ribbons and festooned with silky, orchid-esque flowers in pretty shades of pink and cream.

I don’t ever buy them because I already own two Christmas cactuses. I’ve had them since time immemorial—one of them grew from a cutting from a plant owned by my husband’s grandmother. Compared to the dainty cactuses for sale at the supermarket, my Christmas cactuses are like Jabba the Hutt. They’re big, ugly, sprawling stegasauruses, the horny-skinned rhinoceri of the floral world. One of them flat-out never blooms. The other adorns itself with a sprinkling of flowers halfway through December every year. I go on jags when I’ll try treating my Christmas cactuses better, pampering them with feedings and the like. Nothing seems to make much difference. Every year they get bigger and bigger, but they hardly ever bloom. And it’s not like a non-blooming Christmas cactus is a thing of beauty. The descriptive term “monstrous” actually comes to mind.

Ah, well. I haven’t got the guts to ditch either of my Christmas buddies. I’ve tried on occasion to convince myself that the one that does actually bloom is the one that grew from the cutting from Doug’s grandma. If I could do that, I wouldn’t have any sentimental attachment to the other and could dump it in the trash where it belongs. But the sad truth is, in my heart I know my non-bloomer is the one from Grandma. So I hold onto it, and to the other, and thus valuable window real-estate is wasted on these non-producers. But if we can’t be sentimental at Christmas, when can we be?

Photo by André Karwath licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License.

I saw a snippet of an article in this week’s Time magazine about the power of names. According to the piece, people with unpopular names are more likely to become criminals than those whose parents slap them with Jacob, Emma, Hannah and Michael. The article questioned the role of cause and effect in the results, but concluded that there’s no denying that a name we’ve heard before leads to “greater social acceptance.” And this made me think of flowers.

Historically speaking, the names given to plants have tended to be utilitarian—sneezeweed, soapwort, fleabane, pondweed, toadflax. This system worked well for thousands of years, right up until the advent of seed catalogs. No gardener in her right mind is going to place an order for “stinging nettle” or “skunk cabbage” or “squalid senecio” (a.k.a. “Oxford ragwort”). Ah, but christen fleabane the far more mellifluous “erigeron,” or list soapwort in your catalog as  “Bouncing Bet” or “hedge pink,” and the orders roll in. Granted, I did once buy seeds of “inula helenium” (pictured above) that I might not have shelled out for if I’d known the common name of “sneezeweed.” But there’s a down-to-earth (of course!) charm in those older titles, with their reminders that once upon a time, when one had a headache, one utilized what was growing outside one’s door and not what one plucked from a shelf at CVS. And the funny thing is, so many of the remedies we still use derive from flowers we still grow: digitalis from foxglove, aspirin from willow bark, atropine from deadly nightshade, opiates from poppies. True, the chemicals are created in a petri dish today, rather than grown and distilled. But the essence remains the same. Nowadays, we look at gardens and admire their beauty, rather than their powers. We’re a little leery, I think, of herbalists and the voodoo of old garden lore. But for thousands of years, those plants were all we had to treat our ailments. How remarkable that nature provided the drugs we needed—and how enterprisingly human that we managed to track them down, name them, and utilize them!

Photo by Jean Tosti licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0

More seed catalog perusal: Today I noticed a listing for “Pepperbox Breadseed Poppies,” a variety of poppy one can grow specifically for poppy seeds. I love poppy seeds. In fact, I love to eat seeds of all sorts—flax seeds, poppy seeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds. There’s something so viscerally satisfying about biting into a tiny seed, about one’s teeth cracking the firm hull and then sinking into the rich, dense interior. I know that poppy seeds come from poppy plants, and flax seeds from linum, or flax plants. But where, I suddenly wondered, do my favorite seeds of all, sesame seeds, come from? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a seed catalog that offered sesame seeds, much less the plants.

So I did a little poking around into the subject of sesame seeds (which make the best sort of bagel topping, by the way, not to mention tahini—yum!—and halvah—yum yum!!). They do indeed come from the sesame plant, and while it seems to favor warmer climes than my Zone 7—it has wild relations in India and Africa, and in the U.S., most of the crop is grown in Texas—it’s an annual, and so theoretically could be grown here. (The African name for sesame is “benne,” which is used a lot in the U.S. South.) The plants look rather pretty in the photos I found, with their petite ivory-colored blossoms, although the delicacy in the photo above may be deceptive, since the plants grow up to six feet tall. The seeds are full of minerals, including iron, manganese, copper, magnesium and calcium, and are very good for you. The problem is finding seeds that will grow. You apparently can’t just sprout the ones you have in the jar in the pantry. Nor can you shake your bagel over the garden bed. My best efforts have turned up only one source of the seed, and that’s a source aimed at mass growers. (Speaking of which, I turned up this interesting statistic: A third of all the sesame seeds the U.S. imports from Mexico are used in the sesame seed buns that sandwich two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese … you know the McDonald’s mantra.)

You’d think a plant that’s so widely grown and used, and has such a rich history, both culinary and in terms of literature and mythology—Assyrians believed that after the gods created the Earth, they toasted with sesame wine, and modern-day Wiccans believe the seeds aid in conception—would be easier to locate. If anyone out there knows where to find sesame seeds that will grow, please, share the wealth! Oh, and in case you were wondering about the famous Arabian Nights command in the post title, it sounds to me like the sort of magic a bogus swami would cook up. It seems sesame seed pods, like those of balsam impatiens, burst open when they’re ripe–so nature itself obeys an order to “Open sesame!”

Photo by Frank Xaver licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

I was meandering through one of my favorite seed catalogs (yes, it’s THAT time of year already)–John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds, which always has lots of neat heirloom seeds, a great variety of vegetable seeds, and wonderful “kitchen garden” flowers like calendula and nasturtiums—when I came across a listing for “Hopi Red Dye Amaranth.”  I know amaranth from the old-fashioned garden staple known as “love-lies-bleeding,” with its long, pendant fronds of blossoms, and also from a gimmicky variety known as Joseph’s Coat that has multi-colored fronds of red, orange and yellow on a single plant. I was also vaguely aware that there’s a Native American food grain called amaranth that, like its cohort quinoa, is fashionable in earthy restaurants nowadays. But I’d never heard of Hopi Red. It sounds like the ultimate all-purpose plant. You can use the red leaves in salads at the baby stage, or cook them when they’re more mature, the way you would spinach. The feathery red bracts are handsome in the garden. The stems are red, too, and the plant grows up to six feet tall. Scheepers says you can crush the red seeds into cornbread to turn it red, which sounds very festive, especially for Phillies fans during the post-season. And the Hopi Indians, it turns out, ground the seeds to produce a red dye for basket-weaving and fabric-dying. That’s a lot of bang from one $3.25 packet of seeds.

Oh, wait, I almost forgot–you can also make gluten-free flour out of the seeds. And there’s actually a color in the dye industry known as “amaranth,” though it’s usually produced chemically these days. In fact, the color “amaranth” is what infamous Red Dye No. 2 was concocted to emulate!

Did I leave anything out? The name comes from the Greek for “one that does not wither,” because the flowers (okay, okay, the bracts) are so long-lasting. “Amaranth” is an old-fashioned name for girls. Amaranth grain contains especially complete protein for a plant source, and while Native Americans used the plants medicinally in a number of ways, it’s been found useful in preventing premature graying of hair! Talk about a wonder plant!

Photo by Kurt Stueber licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

I was in my car the other day, listening on NPR to a show about different food traditions at Thanksgiving, and as happens fairly often, my husband was listening to it, too, in his car at the same time. When we met up again in person and discovered we’d both heard the same show, he mentioned the Southern tradition of having macaroni and cheese for Thanksgiving and suggested that we ought to adopt it. Both my kids and my husband definitely have pasta as their default starch of choice. My own default is bread; I’d much rather eat bread than pasta or rice or potatoes. And I like Thanksgiving because you get bread twice, in the form of both stuffing and crescent dinner rolls, at my house. If one substituted mac-and-cheese, I pointed out to Doug, what would one do with the gravy?

But the show mentioned another Southern tradition, which is collard greens for Thanksgiving. I love, love, love me some collard greens. I’ve never even tried to cook them. I went to college in North Carolina, and the cooks in our cafeteria there made the smoothest, silkiest, saltiest tart-sharp collard greens, and they were available at every single dinner. They were a staple, like the grits at breakfast, which I never cared for.

I don’t know why I don’t try to cook collard greens. Lord knows they’re cheap enough to buy at the store. They’re good for you, too, as long as  you back off on the fatback—full of Vitamin A and antioxidants too. I’m thinking you could probably cook ornamental cabbage, which is actually a form of kale, which is a cousin to collards, the same ways. (Everybody is related somehow down South.) I found a couple of super-simple-seeming recipes for ornamental kale. In one, you simply sauté the greens for 25 minutes in olive oil, then add some chopped onion and garlic and sauté for five minutes more. This isn’t anything like the long, slow cooking that collard greens get in North Carolina, but I think it’s worth trying. The other suggestion I found is to lay the leaves in a roasting pan, cover them with olive oil, salt and chopped garlic, and roast them in at 400 degree oven for half an hour. This sounds SO GOOD, doesn’t it? So now that it’s time to put up the Christmas decorations, let’s all roast our ornamental kale!

Photo by Terren licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

In searching for photos of red azaleas yesterday, I came across the photo above of banks of rhododendrons growing in Washington State, and was abruptly overtaken by a memory. Twenty years ago, just before I got pregnant with our first kid, my husband and I took a trip to the United Kingdom. We landed in England, visited a friend in London, rented bikes, took them to Scotland, and proceeded to bicycle across Scotland. Granted, it was the most narrow part of Scotland, but still, we did bike all the way across. Up in the Highlands, I noticed banks of thick foliage on either side of the road that went on for miles and miles. Our visit was in April, so not every bush was blooming, but gradually it dawned on me that these miles and miles of bushes were rhododendrons. They were growing wild, mostly in shades of white and light pink, and really, they were breathtaking. Not until years later did I learn that the U.K. has a serious problem with rhododendron infestation. Apparently the plants, believed to have been imported from Spain and Portugal during the 18th century, when estate gardening was so widespread, just love the British climate and have no natural enemies. They grew and spread and overtook vast expanses of land, choking out native plants, destroying the habitats of native critters, and disturbing the equilibrium of waterways.

Years later, we took the kids to vacation for a number of years in the wilds of West Virginia, and on our hikes and forays found the same vast spreads of rhododendrons growing wild there. It was so strange to find a plant I’d always considered difficult and finicky–the one that grew beside the front door at my parents’ home, where I grew up, hardly ever bloomed, and certainly never needed pruning—thriving and becoming invasive. I’m sorry for the destruction they cause. But there is something breathtaking about being surrounded by rhododendrons for as far as you can see.

Photo by Triviaking licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

I spent this afternoon going through all the old photographs in the house, looking for suitable pics for my son’s high-school yearbook ad–something cute, not too embarrassing, evocative of good times. We used to take A LOT of photos of the kids, and I’ve never been the photo-organizing type (though I do admire those who neatly label and file their photos, whether in albums or boxes). I just have piles and piles of yellow Kodak photo envelopes stacked up in a cabinet. My daughter helped me look, for a while, until she got bored. She never gets tired looking at old photos of herself; just those of her brother.

It’s funny to see how everything in the photos changes and grows–the kids, the dog, the garden. I came upon some photos of Homer when he was just eight weeks old, before he turned into a 120-pound monster mutt. He was adorable–for about three weeks after we got him. Then he became dignified. The kids’ growth runs in spurts; they’ll look pretty much the same for about a year, then change radically. I found myself oohing and aahing over cute outfits and haircuts I remembered, and laughing at the poses they’d strike. Sometimes they look invincible in those old photos; other times, they look so painfully adolescent and lost and confused. Then there are the surly years–from about 12 to 14–when you can’t pay them to smile.

As for the garden, the growth is more subtle, since I’m always pruning back the roses and shrubs, and we don’t have any trees. I did find some glorious shots of the front bed, the one where I had my husband yank out the giant rogue cedar tree that had shot up there, so hopefully with the new bulbs I planted and that cedar gone, this spring it will look just as glorious. And you can see change in the roses, though it’s less obvious. When I first put them in, the branches grew straight and supple. Now, after so many years of pruning, the lower extremities are gnarled and twisted and thick and misshapen—sort of like me! And the azalea, which was venerable when we moved in, is downright ancient. It doesn’t bloom as much as it used to, but it still manages to put on a show every spring. Nothing fancy–it’s that good old-fashioned azalea rosy-pink color, which I happen to like more than the newer, paler shades. In China, the azalea is the “thinking of home bush,” so maybe that’s why I was thinking of it while looking at old photos over the holiday.

I’ve grown, too–around the waistline, but also in other ways. When I look at all those years of gardening trial and error, it makes me think that raising kids is pretty much just as hit-or-miss. You know what the books and the experts say, but you never can be sure what’s going to happen once you plant them. Maybe you could if you raised them in a greenhouse, but then they’d never be able to survive in the outside world. All you can do is care for them as best you can, then wait and see what happens. It was wonderful having both kids home for Thanksgiving. Here’s hoping we’ll all be together again next year.

Photo by Thegreenj licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Okay, happy Thanksgiving and all. Now we’ve got that over with, what’s the common thread here?

1. My in-laws took us out to breakfast today and there were azalea flowers on a bush in the parking lot.

2. I have a rose blooming in my side yard.

3. There was frost on the grass in the backyard this morning.

4. The wind blew over all the chairs on the patio this afternoon.

5. It was sunny and hot just before the sun went down.

6. It’s colder than Kansas right now and I just asked my husband to bring the big hibiscus plant in. That’s right; tonight I’m throwing in the towel at last.

Gardening is going to get more and more challenging if this overall weather weirdness continues. Oh, and speaking of weirdness: Last night I was casting about desperately for something on TV to hold the attention of my in-laws, me, my husband, and the two kids. The only thing we could all agree on (well, except for daughter Marcy, but even she found it entertaining) was something called Punkin Chunkin’ on the Science Channel, about weirdos who build giant catapults and trebuchets with which to hurl small pumpkins for distance in competitions in front of huge drunken crowds dressed in autumn-themed apparel. Best line: A dad, when asked about his grown-ass son’s hobby of making gigantic pumpkin-chunkin’ contraptions, said, “The boy’s an idiot.” It brought down the house. Highly recommended!

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All the Thanksgiving baking I’m doing—especially since I somehow became responsible for making treats for the referees at my son’s football games (remember the volunteer’s credo: Never do once something you’re not willing to go on doing indefinitely)—plus writing about orchids yesterday reminded me that I ought to celebrate my fave flav, good old vanilla. Some women love chocolate. I love vanilla. Always have, always will. It’s just icing on the cake that vanilla comes from an orchid, in particular the one pictured above, Vanilla planifolia. In honor of vanilla, here are some vanilla facts:

Like chocolate, vanilla is a New World product, introduced to Spain by Cortes in the early 1500s. But the plants proved impossible to propagate in Europe, because they were only pollinated by a particular type of New World bee—giving Mexico a 300-year monopoly. Not until 1837 did a European botanist figure out how to artificially propagate the vines. His method wasn’t commercially viable, but four years later, a 12-year-old slave on the Ile Bourbon found a method of hand-pollinating the plant.

Vanilla is the world’s second most expensive spice, after saffron.

Vanilla seeds won’t germinate without the presence of a particular fungus, so commercial growers propagate by cuttings.

Vanilla flowers only stay open one day, so hand-pollinators have to constantly patrol fields.

The commercial value of vanilla beans is based on the length of the pods; the longer, the higher the price they’ll bring.

Vanilla was once considered an aphrodisiac (but then again, what wasn’t? .

Vanilla is widely used in the perfume industry.

And, finally: the name “vanilla” comes from the Latin “vagina,” meaning “sheath.” Hah! And they say women love chocolate.