SPRING, THE EPHEMERAL SEASON

An old pink dogwood (Cornus florida) blooms on Hemlock* Street in Traveler's Joy*

“I shall remember this spring day on my deathbed, if I remember anything at all -- a day shaped like a shining cup, brimful of birdsong and green blades.  The dogwoods have exploded into blossom overnight, and the air vibrates with the music of the honeybees.  In the afternoon, my husband and I take our coffee in the shade and simultaneously point to an iridescent phantom flashing among the wild columbines, sipping nectar from the bells.  It is the first hummingbird of the year.” 

I wrote that on April 9^th, at the beginning of the week-long spring break, when I was finally free to enjoy a few days welcoming spring and reviving my spirit.  Sitting in the garden for those halcyon moments made me mindful of Baudelaire’s advice to “extract the eternal from the ephemeral.”  Don't we spend our whole lives attempting that?

Young hosta

One of the singular joys of this season is witnessing the resurrection of plant life, of seeing the spears of hostas and the long red fingers of peonies emerge from seemingly barren soil, and of watching shadows return to the garden, the light changing and taking on pastel hues beneath canopies of leaf and blossom.  For me, the most anticipated of these emergences is the gallery of ephemerals, those spring perennials and wildflowers that grace us briefly with their presences before retreating into dormancy come summer. 

Visiting these natives in their natural state is the optimal way to appreciate them, and I have done that in years past.  I have especially fond recollections of a day-trip to the Smoky Mountains taken in April about a decade ago.  We hiked up the Deep Creek trail, a few miles outside Bryson City, North Carolina, me toting my old Nikon and trying to keep it dry under my raincoat.  (My husband, serving as my photographer’s assistant, received no such special treatment, I’m sorry to say, and remembers the trip much less enthusiastically.)  Growing on the steep creekbanks and in the shallow rills carved beside the trail were crested dwarf iris (Iris cristata), showy orchis (Galearis spectabilis), white and pink trillium (Trillium grandiflorum), jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum), foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia) and carpets of delicate mountain violets and unfurling fiddleheads.  It’s well known that the southern Appalachian mountains harbor a greater diversity of plant species than almost any other region in North America, and if you’re lucky enough to live within a few hours’ drive of these spectacular forests and waterfalls, as I do, you owe it to yourself to go see what all the fuss is about.
 

Autumn fern unfurls

The college’s academic calendar has made spring visits to the mountains much harder to pull off, however, and most Aprils I must content myself with greeting ephemerals that bloom in my own backyard.  Luckily, there are plenty that thrive in our climate and conditions.

One of the most reliable of these is the mayapple, or mandrake (Podophyllum peltatum).  My patch has gradually increased over the last five years, originating with a plant dug up in advance of construction on a neighborhood lot long ago and carried with me to each new garden like the horticultural equivalent of sourdough starter.  There are Chinese cultivars on the market now, but I prefer the less showy leaves and pristine white flowers of the American native.

Mayapple grows in moist Piedmont woodlands

 The plant emerges as blunt shoots just as the weather warms in March, with the blossom (one to a plant) coming later.  The flower hides demurely beneath the leaves on the foot-high stalk, and as May approaches, produces a small green fruit, or ‘apple,’ which is poisonous until ripe, when it can apparently be made into jelly.  (You’d need to stumble on a very large patch in the wild to have enough fruit for that.) 

Fruit of the mayapple

Because the mayapple’s native habitat is the moist woodlands of the Piedmont – it grew beside a shady creek in the site where I salvaged it ahead of the bulldozers– I grow it in my small woodland garden along with hearts-a-bustin’ (Euonymus americana), Iris cristata ‘Vein Mountain,’ a powder blue variation on the wild species, Solomon’s seal (a white-edged selection called Polygonatum odoratum variegatum), and a patch of remarkably hardy red trillium (Trillium cuneatum) given to me by a friend.

  

Trillium cuneatum

I like the trillium’s common name, Wake Robin, because the plants’ emergence early in the season does coincide with the arrival of the robins. I have seen the same species, sporting maroon flowers and toad-spotted leaves, growing in large colonies at Pearson’s Falls, the idyllic trail and waterfall near Saluda, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  It surprises me that my trillium has accommodated so well to life in the lowlands, but then, we’ve had extremely cold winters the past two years.  I mark their position with a large peony stand every year because the plants melt away in June, and as a forgetful gardener, I’ve come close to digging up their roots in autumn when trying to plant some new shrub. 

Solomon's seal appreciates a cool, shady corner

In another part of the garden, in the bright shade cast by the giant pecan, I’ve planted several native coralbells, or Heuchera Americana.  Their tall flower stalks are architecturally striking in the shadows, and I like the leafy petticoats of their foliage paired with ferns and azaleas.  These perennial workhorses increase quickly, and in the three years since planting the first one I’ve moved offsets all over the garden.  Early last spring I was surprised to discover small, finely bladed leaves emerging in the soil around the winter-tattered foliage of the first heuchera I had planted.  In April I was elated by the appearance of tiny yellow bells at the ends of these stalks, identifying the plants as a species of mountain bellwort which I believe to be Uvularia puberula.  Some seeds must have hitched a ride in the original pot and have settled in beautifully in the rich, light soil around the Japanese maples. If I had ordered the rhizomes of this southeastern ephemeral from a specialty nursery and had planted them in a carefully amended site with perfect conditions I suspect they would not have fared half so well.

Mountain bellwort, Uvularia puberula

 With the temperature spiking this week and the showy headliners in the garden – the roses, irises and lilies –grabbing the spotlight, my ephemerals have begun their exit from the stage.  I may prolong the season with a trip to the beautiful Blue Ridge, walking the trails where the trillium rules.  Join me.

ROOMS TO LET; Eastern Bluebirds Wanted

The male Eastern bluebird scouts a suitable starter home

My tenants have returned to Traveler’s Joy.  They’re highly transient, this lot, and while it may be true that beggars can’t be choosers, some of these beggars seem very picky about what’s available. 

On a relatively mild day back in January I climbed on a ladder to pull out the straw and feathers left behind in the boxes from last season, and scrubbed the stained interiors with a solution of diluted bleach to insure that no parasites or diseases carry over.  

In the new year, remove last season's nests and scrub the boxes with a solution of water & bleach, 9 to 1.

The house sparrows that have fledged so many generations from the small box beneath the eaves of the front porch moved back in almost immediately.  They have also been hanging around the free-standing birdhouse in the garden, the one that housed a prolific pair of Eastern bluebirds when I first erected it five springs ago.  I would give anything to be able to evict the sparrows permanently and lure the bluebirds back, since the bluebirds are endangered natives and the house sparrows are most decidedly not.  Besides that, there is no sight on earth bound to quicken a winter-weary heart more thrillingly than the first flash of blue wings in a bare tree.  

That’s why I was delighted when I spotted a male bluebird perched on the ledge of the birdhouse two days ago.  When he showed up this morning with his less-glamorous mate in tow, standing guard on the finial while she sized up the digs, I allowed myself to be wildly hopeful.  However, I know the odds are against them.  The bluebirds are much more selective about where they nest, and despite the fact that the free-standing box (built to Audubon Society specifications, with a 1 ½" hole to deter larger birds) is ideally situated a few steps away from my organic vegetable garden, which in spring and summer abounds with berries, muscadine grapes, tomatoes, sweet peppers and earthworms, they are deterred by the proximity of myself, my husband and our rowdy dog Alice going to and from the front garden to the back. 

House sparrows favor the box on the porch.

The sparrows have no such sensitivity.  They are a species introduced from Europe to New York in the mid-nineteenth century, intended to control insects that preyed on local crops.  Like all brilliant ideas that involve messing with a finely tuned ecosystem, this one backfired badly.  The birds reproduced so rapidly in North America that they began to crowd out native species. 

A house sparrow gets a head-start on nesting, in a February snowstorm

Their mating season begins much earlier than most migrating natives, a fact I can attest to.  I have observed pairs take up residence in my nesting boxes as early as late January, when snow is still swirling through town, and have watched in amazement as they proceeded to crank out one squatty little brood of birds after another, faster than you can say Passer domesticus.  Another characteristic in their favor is that they aren’t as picky about where they live, preferring the comforting din of nearby humans.  Living so close to people, they are less at risk of predators, unless a housecat is quick enough to catch them.  (My cat sits on the porch salivating as the birds flit back and forth to the box and perch on the porch swing, but with one eye she rarely manages to snag her quarry).

For all these reasons, the house sparrows, with their ‘You snooze, you lose’ attitude, have the Darwinian edge over the more desirable bluebirds.  It’s likely that the sparrows will sneak back into the box when the bluebirds’ backs are turned, as they have done before, and will kick out my elegant blue tenants. 

Tough little interlopers

Native songbird advocates advise getting tough by removing the nests of invasive interlopers like the house sparrows and finches, but I know I haven’t got the stomach for ornithological eugenics (not this season, at least), so I’ll continue rooting for the bluebirds and keeping their environment as peaceful as I can with high hopes they settle in.

Meanwhile, I’ve hung the beautiful orchard mason bee-house my husband bought me in Old Salem, facing east for the benefit of the sun's warming effect on hatching bees, as instructed.  (Refer to my May 9, 2013, blog post, “Bee Aware,” for more about this non-colonizing species of pollinators, also known as blue orchard bees.)  On that side of the garden shed the rainwater has always drained slowly, so much so during this soggy winter just past that I pulled out what I had growing there and replaced it with a large division of Iris virginica, the native blue-flag that grows happily in standing water and very heavy clay.  The iris has settled in wonderfully, flaunting its purple-based foliage that is the hallmark of spring growth for iris descended from riverbank natives.

Nesting box for orchard mason bees

I’m hoping that the mud and shallow water forming the iris’ habitat will help to attract the female mason bees, who collect mud and bring it back to hollow reeds, woodpecker holes in trees, or sections of bundled bamboo stalks, which is what my house is made of. Here they lay their young atop provisions of nectar and pollen before sealing the eggs off in mud-walled compartments.  (This is where they get their common name as ‘masons.’)

The new generation of mason bees starts hatching and emerging from the reeds around the time the redbud blooms in the Carolinas, which is happening right now in glorious profusion.  If I’m successful at attracting any mason bees this season, the latest generation of pollinators should start the process of mating, laying and sealing up their young within the next couple of weeks.  I plan to keep out the welcome mat, or in their case, the mud puddle.

The life-cycle of the mason bee is synchronized with the redbud

I spied a brown thrasher kicking up the duff around my raspberry canes this morning, and the red-capped woodpeckers have been scurrying up and down the big maples in the front yard since early February.  I haven’t heard a catbird cry yet, but it’s early still for these secretive gray migrants.  They prefer the dense woods and blackberry thickets at the edge of the meadow that borders our garden, which is also where we watch for the young rabbits to emerge at dusk, bounding in pairs across the uncut grass and nibbling the wild onions.

Male robins have set up camp in the big trees on our southern boundary and are driving my husband berserk by perching on the side mirrors of our cars and charging the rivals they see reflected in the mirrors.  This form of mortal combat involves the ejection of great quantities of liquid waste, with the ardent birds covering our car doors in streaks of hardened ka-ka studded with feathers that has to be cleaned off every morning before we can drive to work. I know Shakespeare wrote that “Men are April when they woo…” but in the case of these puffed-up suitors our paint jobs would appreciate a little less wooing and a lot more wisdom.  I suppose that will come soon enough.  Spring, and romance, are seasons sometimes made sweeter for being short-lived.

Mr. and Mrs.

If you live in the Carolinas and are interested in learning more about attracting mason bees to your garden, download the North Carolina State University Cooperative Extension fact sheet: “How to Raise and Manage Orchard Mason Bees for the Home Garden,” by Stephen Bambara, Extension Entomologist.

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/ent/notes/Other/note109/note109.html

VALENTINE

My mother died on Valentine’s Day, riding out of this world on the tail of an historic storm that dropped almost a foot of snow on parts of the Carolinas.  The timing seemed significant for a woman whose earliest memory was of her father lifting her from her crib while her wet diapers steamed in the frigid air of a Wisconsin morning.

MJ and her father

The hospice worker was trapped in her townhome by an unplowed driveway, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to navigate the route to Charlotte from South Carolina, even with 4-wheel drive, before my mother passed away.  Fortunately, my husband and I arrived at her bedside on Friday noon as the sun was starting to melt the drifts heaped into the middle of Park Road and to steal across her windowsill.  An instinct for tenacity must have kept her going through those snowed-in days when I was kept away, for she had stopped eating days earlier and hadn’t left her bed.  It had been many months since Mary Jane spoke two words together, over a year since she’d recognized me, and much longer than that since she’d led a life she could honestly call ‘her own.’  And yet the resiliency of her tiny frame moved me in ways I still don’t fully understand. 

            In the last scene of the last act of her life I was motivated to explain her to someone – some individual who didn’t have a complicated history with her, as everyone in our family does – someone who might find her narrative compelling for its face value, without being burdened by the formidable load of baggage that attends it.

            That person materialized as if by decree (or psychic summons) in the person of David B.*, a social worker from Minnesota, of all places, who was making his rounds for hospice that afternoon in Charlotte and who wasn’t deterred by icy streets.  David sat with me and MJ as the shadows lengthened and asked me to tell him about the two framed photos I’d placed on her dresser. 

MJ and her mother, about 1918

             The studio portrait must have been taken just prior to the start of the Great Depression and the closing of my grandfather’s pharmacy, because Mary Jane looks to be nine or ten as she poses in a sailor-suit beside her lovely mother, both of them exuding the kind of shy confidence and health that prosperity provides.  In the other photo, dressed in an evening gown, Mary Jane lounges on a couch with a cigarette dangling theatrically from her right hand.  It was taken at the Top of the Mark, the nightclub atop the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco, and it was New Year’s Eve shortly after the war.  I have no memory of my mother ever smoking but she told us she tried it as a young woman making her way in the advertising business because she mistakenly believed that it made her look sophisticated.  I have never known any woman less concerned with what people think about her than my mother, but in that photograph her features are softened by innocence as if by a layer of baby fat; the resolute adult is still years in the making.

 As I rattled through some of my mother’s best stories with David, surprised to find myself laughing along with him at the funny parts I’d forgotten about, I squeezed her hand and listened to her breathe.  I was struck by a startling idea: that having lived for the better part of a century, she is one of the last members of a generation that was truly able to keep their private lives ‘private,’ in the sense that they lived, loved, suffered and exulted in the days before flip-cams and Facebook made so much of life explicit.  (I should note one exception here: my paternal grandfather, a filmmaker in the days that pre-dated ‘media,’ took some rare footage in his Santa Cruz garden of Mary Jane playing with her first baby, my eldest sister.  The sound of my mother’s impossibly youthful voice exhorting Elizabeth* to do somersaults haunts me for being as familiar as it is strange).   Going to the grave with your mysteries intact will be nearly impossible for people recently born in the first world, now that we are tracked, tweeted, recorded and instagrammed (or blogged within an inch of our own lives!...) as we push the borders of banality with self-exposure. 

            I can’t imagine what she would have made of the Information Age.  My mother was a solipsism, a law unto herself, like Joan of Arc or Antigone or Greta Garbo, if Garbo had laughed.  Her self-reliance was her undoing in one way, because it was so effective at masking problems as she grew older.  She was a complex synthesis of open-hearted gregariousness and fiercely guarded privacy, deflecting questions about her past, her ‘feelings,’ her marriage and her finances as deftly as she dodged good intentions: with humor, but also with persistence.  I used to wish I could knock a chink in that Midwestern steeliness, but having your parent come apart on you can be a mixed blessing, as I discovered during the years I was her caregiver.

Panning for gold in the Sierra Nevadas, late 1950s.  SR on Mary's left, with older sister DJ in hat.

  

            By the time Mary came to live with me, my husband, and our daughter over a decade ago, dementia had eroded her defenses, exposing long-protected compartments of the heart.  The story she’d always told us was that she left Milwaukee because she couldn’t abide winter, but I began to think she may have had other reasons for boarding that west-bound train in Chicago all those years ago.  Not long after she was moved out of her house by Protective Services and relocated to our home across the country in North Carolina, she began receiving letters, and then phone calls, from a gentleman I had always known as a family friend.  Bill Wilson’s* wife was still alive, I gathered, but he was apparently living with one of his daughters and seemed to be suffering a milder version of Mother’s illness.  I only know this because by this time M.J.’s eyesight was poor and her attention strayed when she tried deciphering the printed word; it was necessary for me to read her mail aloud to her.  Increasingly, I found myself having to censor Bill’s blushingly romantic (and specific) mash notes to my eighty-five year-old mother, and in her responses to what I did read – a gallic shrug or an amused tsk-tsk – she caught me off guard with her display of sangfroid. 

            Bill and his wife had several children close in ages to my sisters and me.  When we were little, our parents occasionally took us in the station wagon on the long trek over the mountains, testing the limits of the Ford’s brakes and engine on the Carson Pass, to visit the Wilsons in their rambling Victorian home in Nevada.  Even as a child, I sensed a complex connection between my mother and this confident, garrulous military man, so different from my father.  When I was grown, I saw a photograph of Mary Jane and Bill Wilson* taken decades earlier, during the war, when he must have been home on leave in Milwaukee.  He wore his Navy pilot’s uniform and my mother looked like a cover-girl in a pair of peep-toe Cuban heels and a new spring coat.  To borrow a phrase I’ve heard used in Traveler’s Joy: she was as pretty as a speckled hound in a Tennessee field.  Bill had his arms around her and had pulled her into a snowbank where they were laughing when the photographer captured the moment.

            At some point after that photograph was taken, Bill met Allison,* who was serving in the WAVES.  Not long after that he must have informed my mother that he and Allison were married.

            Mommy would never confirm that there had been a true romance between herself and Bill, or anyone from her hometown, for that matter.  Without waiting for the war to end, she boarded the train for Berkeley and claimed that she never looked back.  Once she met my father they married quickly and she began to have babies at a fast clip. It only occurred to me as an adult that she may have been in a hurry because of her age; thirty-one was considered old for a bride in that era, and she may have felt pressure to build her family more quickly than someone married at twenty-one who had time to spare.  In any case, she loved children and it’s likely she would have had more of us if my father had been a reliable provider.  However, he was not and she did not, and considering how fractured our family became over time, it probably worked out for the best.

####

            Near the end, her skin grows translucent.  It is like watching a flame burn lower and lower in a candle, until it no longer becomes a question of how much light is cast but of how long the wick can sustain itself.

###

            When she first came to live with us, we bought Mommy a typewriter and my daughter set to work helping her write a memoir.  We realized quickly that she was not able to type; however, she was happy to dictate to her granddaughter disjointed and sometimes hilarious recollections of her life.  The dictation continued for three chapters before her diminishing strength put an end to the project.  Even before Mommy passed away but after she lost her ability to communicate, I found myself pulling out the blue notebook that holds these pages and dipping into their contents randomly, just to hear her voice speaking through the words, and to know her again.  “I was a good kid,” she wrote in Chapter Two, “And I was the only kid in the family.” (Her brother R.S. wasn't born until Mother was nearly fourteen.) “I had a lot of good friends but I was lonesome in the house.  You may not believe this, but when I went to bed at night, I’d tell myself a story.  There was nobody else to tell me one.  It was a warm cozy bed, and sometimes it was snowing outside.”

            I can’t bear to think of her being lonely in death, so I tell myself she’s been reunited with her family, her lifelong friends, and her legion of feral cats in some distant realm where the beds are warm and soft.  I wish I could go back in time to that silent house where the snow is falling, to read her all the stories she wants. 

            She is the story now.  God bless, Mary Jane.

Little Mary. Madison, Wisconsin.  Winter.

SUMMER-BLOOMING BULBS FOR SOUTHERN GARDENS

In late summer, crinums and dahlias bloom in my Traveler's Joy garden

It’s hard to think about summer when you’re wearing socks to bed and are forced to don a parka to retrieve mail off the porch.  The night the mercury dropped to 9 degrees one of our new pipes actually froze – not burst, thank goodness, but the water froze solid and I had to wait for the sun to hit the side of the house before I could make coffee.

Gardeners dwell in more than one dimension of time, however, always living off the promise, not the present; we are always looking ahead to the next season (or year, or lifetime…) when we will plant/ditch/drain/prune/fertilize/sow/reap exult in something that strikes everyone else as highly irrelevant just at the moment.  That’s certainly how it is with bulbs, which must be planted months ahead of their flowering dates.  Spring bulbs?  By now they are yesterday’s news.  The daffodils are already pushing up their blunt noses in my garden, and the earliest ones, like Narcissus ‘February Gold,’ started blooming a month ago, although the Polar Vortex hammered them.  Lacking time last fall to plant, I will spend another spring wishing I’d ordered a few crocus in a spare moment, or a couple of hybrid muscari to make up for the scented blue and yellow M. ‘Golden Fragrance’ that didn’t survive the transition from my previous garden.

I consoled myself this week with a very modest order from Brent and Becky Heaths’ catalog of summer-blooming bulbs: a few dahlias and some Asiatic lilies.  Accepted wisdom says that lilies get a better start when planted in the fall, but that season slipped past me.  The bulbs are going to have to adjust, as I always seem to be doing.

LILIES OF THE FIELD

Yellow passalong lilies in early June

True lilies, of the genus Lillium, have been in cultivation longer than almost any other garden plant, which may be why a summer garden without them strikes me as incomplete.  In rebuilding my collection here in Traveler’s Joy, I’ve been the lucky recipient of some remarkable ‘passalong’ lilies, including the sack-full bequeathed to me two years ago by my neighbor Steve, who had been helping his daughter G. renovate her garden.  I have been grateful for their gift ever since the lilies bloomed that first June in a blaze of clear yellow, lighting up the bright shade beneath the pecan like a candelabra from Paradise. 

On the other side of the path, in full sun, a remarkably vigorous hybrid lily has settled in comfortably, throwing up five-foot tall stalks in late spring and producing creamy, sunburst-type flowers with cinnamon sprinkled in their throats.  I have passed along many divisions of this hardy lily since stumbling on it years ago, and left a large stand of it in my last garden, where I hope it blooms still.  I bought it at the long-gone McIlwhaine nursery in Huntersville, North Carolina.
 

McIlwhaine's Mystery Lily

 At that time, Huntersville was still sleepy and woodsy, with traffic on the back-roads often slowed by farm tractors.  It was transitioning, like all of North Carolina, but had not yet devolved into the gridlocked exurban community of transplants from Buffalo and Long Island that it is today.  Mr. McIlwhaine, a notoriously reluctant businessman, was a casualty of that transition.  At his jungle-like plot off Gilead Road he held irregular hours and eschewed staff or signage of any kind, especially anything so mundane as a price tag.  Those of us intrigued by the wealth of plant matter scattered around his acre braved the place hoping his wife would be on-site when we got there.  She wasn’t as much of a misanthrope as her husband, and could sometimes be persuaded to sell a plant!  It was there that I found a healthy-looking lily stalk sticking out of a small pot, no name provided and no clue to the color, and paid $6 for it, which I would have considered overpriced at a regular nursery.  I planted it and it performed like magic.  The bulbs increased quickly, and every June for fifteen years the ivory blooms have opened in slightly scented clouds of glory.  I’ve tried to identify it, but there are so many lily hybrids on the market and so many variations on a theme of ivory flowers with brown speckles that I decided to call it ‘McIlwhaine’s Mystery Lily’ in honor of its source.

Lilies are occasionally troubled by diseases and pests, but you can improve your bulbs’ odds by siting them correctly from the start.  When I first got interested in lilies I sent for a booklet from the North American Lily Society called Let’s Grow Lilies; an Illustrated Handbook of Lily Culture.  It was first published in 1964; thirty years later when I got my hands on it the booklet's charmingly retro illustrations were still intact (what woman wears Capri pants and earrings when she’s on all fours in the dirt?...).  The basic rules of lily cultivation outlined in Let's Grow have served me well.  First rule: lilies must have excellent drainage.  This isn’t always easy to achieve in our heavy clay soil, even if you plant in a raised bed, so I try to follow the auxiliary rule to that first one whenever I can, which is to plant the bulbs on a slight slope. This way they won’t be standing in water, no matter how much rain falls.

In late May a pink hybrid lily blooms with Rosa 'Veilchenblau' in the background

Secondly, the soil must be fairly rich but light and friable.  This is best achieved by mixing plenty of humus into the site before you plant and also when you backfill.  Replenish the organic matter regularly by adding leafmold  or compost, but hold off on pine bark mulch or too many oak leaves, as that adds to your soil’s acidity and lilies do better with a neutral pH, between 6 and 7.

With McIlwhaine’s Mystery Lily, the yellow passalongs, and a nameless pink hybrid lily from a local garden center performing well in the upper garden’s beds, I’m taking a chance this summer on Lillium ‘Forever Susan,’ (couldn’t pass up the name, clearly), despite the fact that Asiatics are generally short-lived in Southern gardens.  I am occasionally tempted to overlook their flash-in-the-pan constitutions for the sake of color and eye-popping pattern.  The one I ordered promises maroon lilies with orange bands (and no – I’m not a Virginia Tech grad), which I’m imagining in combination with marigolds and the double-flowered species ditch lily, Hemerocallis kwanso. At bloom time I will probably wonder what I was thinking when I behold the garish effect, and will find it hard to remember, in May and June, how desperate I was for hot colors in February.

DAHLIA DAYS

Dahlias also satisfy cravings for color. I confess to being a former snob where dahlias are concerned, having seen too many videos of British estate gardens with portions of the vast parks cordoned off to contain “day-lee-awz” as the plummy-voiced BBC announcers call them.  Who can appreciate a garden consisting of plants segregated by their genus and each strapped rigidly to a stake, putting one in mind of heretics prepared for immolation rather than flora cultivated for pleasure?  Despite my disinclination, however, there was that longing for color, so I tried (and failed) to grow several of the discount store varieties one digs out of bins, the tubers dried-out and puny.  My experience seemed to confirm what certain Southern gardening experts tell us, that we should resist our longing for dahlias when in Dixie.  It’s either too hot or too cold in our Carolina climate, I’ve been told, and these natives of Central America must have sharp drainage or none at all.  In addition, wherever temperatures dip below 20 degrees, dahlia tubers supposedly must be dug up at the end of the season, stored in wood shavings in a cool, dark, well-ventilated place, and re-planted in the spring after danger of frost has passed.  I’m convinced that this practice was handed down from a duchess with a gardening staff bigger than my town’s population.
 

Dahlia with Black-Eyed Susan vine

 Whatever the current horticultural opinion on dahlias may be, it’s interesting to note that they were grown in Southern gardens historically, and with great success.  In a collection of papers compiled from an annual conference held in North Carolina on restoring southern gardens and landscapes, I found an intriguing piece written by garden historian and researcher Davyd Foard Hood.  His paper examines evidence found in letters, journals and travel accounts of the plants people grew here in centuries past.  One of those people is Catherine Ann Devereux Edmonston, who brought to her marriage a dowry of two plantations, and who gardened at those farms in Halifax County, Looking Glass and Conneconara, as well as a third home called Hascosea.  Until the Civil War intruded on the Edmonstons’ lives and Miss Catherine was finally forced to close her diary of daily life in April 1865, she kept an enthusiastic log of her activities in those gardens. Hood notes that “the dahlia held pride of place in her garden” (17).  Writing in July, 1860, she exults: “My dahlias are magnificent! … Glory is gorgeous indeed; and Cheltenham Queen is indeed a Queen for delicacy and purity!” (17).  From her meticulous accounts, one learns that Edmonston oversaw the disinterring of her beloved dahlias’ roots “after frost but before freezing,” storing them in late autumn until they could be safely set out again in spring (17). Since Halifax, NC, is about three hundred miles north of Traveler’s Joy, and tends to be a good deal colder in the winter, I can see how this may have been prudent practice.  In any case, labor-intensive horticulture wouldn’t have posed any more problem for Miss Catherine than a duchess with an army of gardeners, considering that the Edmonstons owned over eighty slaves who worked their gardens and tended their crops.  That ended in 1865, and so, we presume, did the dahlias.  Drat that Abraham Lincoln!
 

I’m not sure what prompted me to give dahlias one more try, but I’m glad that in a rash moment three winters ago I sent for half a dozen Dahlias ‘Classic Elise,’ a single form with dark stems.  The tubers arrived from the Heaths at the recommended planting time for my zone; I was surprised by their size (looking much like small sweet potatoes) and their density.  No dried out roots, these. They grew and blossomed well in the first summer, becoming a showstopper by the second.  The color of the flowers changes with the sun: glowing peach by morning light, turning to bright pumpkin under the noonday sun, and heating up to copper in the slanting light of September afternoons.
 

CRINUM MORE, MY DARLING

‘Elise’ dazzles in combination with the neon-pink crinum hybrid, C. ‘Ellen Bosanquet,’ a clump I have divided and moved several times since purchasing one leek-sized bulb at Plant Delights Nursery in Sanford over a decade ago.  (As usual, I have no hand in planning the most pleasing combinations of blossoms in my garden.  The crinum-dahlia pairing is another one of what I call my “brilliant accidents.’)   While these two plants have different water needs (more on that later), planting them together makes sense from the standpoint of winter mulching.  While Zone 8 gardeners may not need to dig them up and replant them every winter, crinums and dahlias do need protection from severe cold.  With the duvet-sized pile of leaves and fir branches I packed over their crowns I’m hopeful that I prevented severe damage or death on our recent single-digit nights.

 

I’ve been consulting my copy of Elizabeth Lawrence’s definitive tome on Carolina gardening, A Southern Garden, first published in 1942, in which she writes that of the seventeen crinums she had grown in the open, “ten had proved hardy” (114).  Lawrence gardened in Raleigh before moving to Charlotte and starting over in the fifties.  Winters in Wake County, like Halifax County, tend to be a good deal colder than in my current garden.  I speak from experience, having weathered the snow of ’96 in the little town of Wake Forest when my daughter’s elementary school was closed for a week and when, desperate to save our sanities, I tethered the family dog to the sled and allowed Wally to drag her all over the snowy neighborhood.  I’m hoping that in Traveler’s Joy my tender bulbs have a slightly better chance than Lawrence’s did.  In any case, I’d like to find a hardy white crinum to add to my collection, like the Crinum moorei var. Schmidtii Lawrence grew in her Charlotte garden.  She describes this crinum as having bloomed normally after an especially cruel winter that partially killed or inhibited blooms on all the other crinums in her Myers Park plot.

Crinum 'Ellen Bosanquet,' with bud stalk on left

 

During the growing season, crinums are thirsty plants as well as very heavy feeders.  I planted ‘Ellen Bosanquet’ at the bottom of a sloping bed where the soil gets quite boggy during heavy rains, and where organic matter washed down the slope tends to pile up.  If I expect to see plenty of richly-colored buds forming on stalks in mid-summer, however, I must also douse the plant regularly with diluted fish emulsion.

 

This regimen is not advised for dahlias, which do need plenty of water but can’t abide standing in it.  I thought I’d planned for this differential by planting ‘Classic Elise’ on the incline above the crinum, where water doesn’t collect under normal conditions.  Last summer was so rainy, however, that the lawn in the upper garden was a lagoon much of the time, and ‘Classic Elise’ contracted a bad case of wilt.  I struggled with it all summer, cutting back the withered foliage and blackened stems, eventually digging up and disposing of several infected tubers.  I won’t know for several months if the patient survived the surgery; Dahlia ‘Purple Puff,’ when it arrives in April, is headed for a drier and higher spot beside the shrub roses.

GLAD TO KNOW YOU

Glads catch the morning rays

Arguably, the easiest summer-blooming bulb to grow in my southern garden is the gladiolus.  Glads (which actually grow from corms, not bulbs) are enjoying a revival of sorts, after being out of fashion in the flower world for a long time.  Like virtually all the gangly boys of summer, these spiky plants must be staked, and reproduce so rapidly in genial conditions that they require a bit of maintenance in the form of digging up and dividing.  But they are the most excellent cut flowers my garden produces, and once cut, the flowers last indoors for long periods.  For my daughter’s bridal shower, held at the house in late June last year, the most magnificent decorations at the party were the jewel-toned bouquets of freshly-cut glads.  Blooming in abundance were the purple-flowered 'Violetta,' pink and white 'All My Love,' 'Green Star,' and an extraordinary peach-colored glad with a lavender throat that was passed along to me from a gardening buddy in North Carolina.  More than one person asked, "are those real?" and trust me, they were.

 

Cut glads decorating a June bridal shower

 As with dahlias, gardeners in the middle south are advised to dig up the glad corms at the end of the season and store them away from killing cold.  However, since glads multiply as fast as rabbits in a sack, I consider it highly unlikely that an entire family of corms could be killed by anything, including Arctic cold.  If I’ve got time to spend on cultivation and care I’d rather use it to dig up the glads in early spring and separate the fresh new corms from the previous year’s exhausted ones.  The old corms cling to the basal plates of new ones like flattened inner tubes; with one twist of the wrist they can be snapped off and discarded on the compost pile.  Don’t destroy the baby corms, or cormels, that cling to the new corm, however.


Gladiolus 'Wiig's Sensation'

Set out the ones that are about the size of a penny, re-planting them along with the rest of the gang.  In a couple of years they’ll be ready to send up stalks and will flower. 

Last year's shriveled gladiolus corm (bottom) is ready to be twisted off

Meterologists are forecasting another 'wintry mix' headed for us next week, which squares with what the groundhogs all predicted.  As far as I can see, however, the only thing predictable about this time of year is that gardeners like me will be looking beyond the bare trees, frozen birdbaths and sleepy groundhogs.  We'll be dreaming of our summer gardens, knowing that when the flowers are in their glory, there's no place on earth we'd rather be.

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LINKS:

www.brentandbeckysbulbs.com (The Heaths' website offers information, catalogs, and takes orders)

www.lilies.org  (This is the official website of the North American Lily Society)

www.plantdelights.com  (Plant Delights does an extensive mail order business, but it's a treat to visit the nursery during their bi-annual Open House days.  Check the website for dates.

https://www.gardenconservancy.org/garden-preservation/gardenpreservationservices/preservation-projects/elizabeth-lawrence-garden?title=2  Elizabeth Lawrence's garden in Charlotte has been restored through the joint efforts of the Garden Conservancy and the neighboring Wing Haven Garden and Bird Sanctuary.  It is open to visitors.

WORKS CITED:

Hood, David Foard. "Their garden was of moderate size, well laid off..." Historic Southern Gardens in Letters, Journals and Travel Accounts." Cultivating History; Exploring Horticultural Practices of the Southern Gardener. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference on Restoring Southern Gardens and Landscapes. September 27-29, 2001, Old Salem Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 2003. 1-26.  Print.

Lawrence, Elizabeth.  A Southern Garden. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1942, 1967, 1984, 1991. Print.

        

WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, THERE'S A FIRE-TRUCK

            A rumor making the rounds in Traveler’s Joy* is discouraging, if true.  I’ve been told that the town’s government was bilked out of $25,000, maybe more, when the money was paid to a contractor to start building a fire-truck museum for the town.  This dream of a museum is held by the mayor, mostly, and is reportedly not shared by a majority of the town’s residents (especially considering that Traveler’s Joy only possesses one fire-truck at this time).  Even before the money was rumored to have vanished, people questioned why those funds weren’t being spent on code enforcement, or trash collection, or infrastructure repair, or a scholarship fund at the high school, or the subsidizing of dog and cat spay/neutering clinics in town to cut down on the staggering number of unwanted pets that roam our streets. (I’ll admit it – that last one is my idea). 

Traveler's Joy suffers from lack of code & ordinance enforcement

            Now that the contractor has disappeared with the cash and is not responding to phone calls or letters, and now that the Town Council has been informed that no functioning business exists at the address he provided, the funds probably won’t even be spent on the antique fire-truck.

            This contractor apparently earned the admiration of Traveler’s Joy administrators for the flipping jobs he performed on two old homes on Granite Street*. The first was generally known as Dr.Tarleton’s* house, after the family practitioner who lived there years ago and tended to patients in his clinic on the first floor.  After he passed away it changed hands a few times, ending up as a tenant house (sharing the fate of so many houses left to absentee heirs after the original owners die – see my earlier posting, “The Tenant House”).  Residents who were in the house in its heyday describe it as an elegantly proportioned Southern bungalow in a modified Low Country style.  A decorative railing graced the porch, with more wrought iron wrapping around the second floor balcony.  Even with the ravages imposed by the shifting tribe of people who inhabited the house in recent years, one couldn’t help but admire the remnants of the doctor’s garden out front, where a very old Japanese maple graced the path to the front door, and where mature gardenias, philadelphus, camellias and peonies brightened the shade under the massive willow oaks.
The last members of the tribe moved out during the recession’s peak, leaving their trash spilling into Granite Street and one bewildered, pregnant cat crouched on the porch.  The bank notice tacked to the front door announced that the mortgage was in default and declared the home property of ABC Savings & Loan, etc.  It did not address ownership of the cat.  On my walks down the street I tried to approach her, but she was too skittish for company. 

            Months later, a convention of panel trucks on the lawn signaled that the bank had found a buyer.  Whoever this person was, he was clearly not a horticulturist.  That’s because the enormous Acer palmatum, an arboretum-quality specimen the likes of which landscapers typically pay two to three thousand dollars for the privilege of salvaging intact, was chopped down to allow access by construction vehicles.  A front-loader made quick work of the gardenias and the peonies.

Granite Street

             Then, just as suddenly as it began, the remodeling halted.  I assume that the house changed hands yet again, because a new set of trucks appeared one day and a new boss-man seemed to be in charge, someone who drove a flashy Town Car with custom rims.  This gentleman set his crews to work in earnest, and a ‘For Sale’ sign appeared in the spongy spot where the Japanese maple had once stood.

            I wasn’t in town the day the Open House was held, but several people told me about the transformation of the interior.  The contractor hadn’t aimed to remodel the house in keeping with its architectural style or period.  Instead, he had made the house merely inhabitable, installing drywall, new flooring, and working appliances.  This bare-bones level of improvement must have appealed, because in due time the house sold. 

            I only discovered that fact because one cool spring day I parked beside the abandoned house next door, a hideous pile of cinderblock painted the yellow-brown hue of infant poop, to leave dry kibble for the two kittens born to the abandoned cat from Dr.Tarleton’s house.  These timorous felines – one solid black and the other a zany, patchwork-patterned calico -- had taken shelter under the Poop House but were clearly starving to death now that their mother had moved on.  By this time I had burned up the telephone lines trying to find a state or county resource that would help me trap, neuter, and adopt out the feral kittens.  If such organizations had ever existed in South Carolina, they had lost their funding with the double hits of the recession and Gov. Haley’s ruthless hatchet-chops to state funding for social services and animal welfare, so when I got an answer, it was always ‘no.’  I also knew from experience that I couldn’t effectively trap the cats and bring them to my house with any hope of keeping them there.  Feral cats, once moved, light out for home, and with ‘home’ only four blocks down the road from me, distance would be no deterrent to them.  My only recourse was to call back to the Tomahawk County animal shelter and get a trap delivered.  Once I trapped the cats, I would have to summon the dog-catcher to pick them up one-by-one and take them to the shelter, where their odds of being adopted were so negligible as to approach impossibility.  So I postponed the inevitable, giving them a minimal amount of food and watching for signs of pregnancy in either cat.  Eventually, the littermates were joined by a scarred, pinkish tomcat who seemed grateful for the company.  I called this cat ‘Gramps’ -- his swollen glands and testicles suggested he had already used up eight lives on his journeys, and was eking out his ninth life as long as he could.

            On this particular spring day, I only got one foot out of the car before a stranger was yelling in my face.  This young man had been tipped off by a neighbor that I was feeding the cats and had been waiting to confront me; he warned me to get off his street and not come back.  He turned out to be the new owner of Dr. Tarleton’s house.  He was not interested in the plight of homeless animals, not even if the two young ones were the legacy of his home’s previous owners, and he was clearly so territorial after just a couple days of ownership that he saw no distinction between my feeding the cats out of sight on the lot next door or on his own front doormat.  He promised to solve the problem by killing them, if I couldn’t come up with a better solution.

###

            I set about obtaining a trap from Animal Control and placed it under the big cedar in the Poop House’s yard.  The next morning on my way to work I stopped on Granite Street and found Sissy, the calico, bleating inside the trap.  Gramps was nestled beside her protectively.  (Ever pragmatic, he might also have been waiting hopefully for his own chance at the shreds of tuna fish still clinging to the bait can.)  I called the shelter for pick-up.  However, when I drove past the house again at the end of the day, no one had retrieved the cat.  It was a very hot day, with Sissy clearly stressed from fear and dehydration.  The homeowner’s threats were ringing in my ears, but her suffering affected me more.  Knowing it was probably a pointless exercise, I lifted the howling, trapped calico into the back of my SUV and raced home with her.  When I opened the wire cage in the shade of my backyard, she exploded out of it like she’d been shot from a cannon, tearing for the shelter of my neighbor’s shrubbery on the other side of Kent Street.  I estimated that it would take her two days to find her way back to the Poop House, but considering how stressed she was (and Sissy was not the brightest one in that bunch, which is precisely why she was so easily trapped), it was three days before she joined Blackie and Gramps in the long grass beside the empty house.  I was happy to see her alive, but I despaired for all three of them. 

            That pessimism deepened when I stumbled on a Tomahawk County real estate website a few days later.  I was looking up the details of another property in Traveler’s Joy when I clicked on the listing for the Poop House, which had been for sale for years.  Judging from the quality of the photo, the local agent must have been in a prodigious hurry the day he snapped it, as if he were shooting with one hand while steering past at thirty miles an hour with the other.  The snapshot depicted the mustard-colored façade of the house with the dark spire of the cedar slicing vertically across it. In the foreground, the blurred images of two small cats had been captured in the act of rushing reflexively towards the sound of a slowing car.  The agent had signaled dinner.

            Not long after that, trucks were parked in front of the Poop House, as was the Town Car with flashy rims.  It looked like the Tarleton house contractor had settled on his next quick-profit project in Traveler’s Joy. 

            Sissy disappeared first, followed by Blackie two days later.  I had a chance to say good-bye to Gramps the following afternoon.  He was sitting in a pool of sunlight on the last day I fed him, as contented as a king.  The next day, no cats came out to eat.  It was the same the next day.  I searched all over the yard, and even up to the brush pile in the back, but I never found their bodies.

###

Tree down

            Before starting work inside the house, the contractor toppled the giant cedar.  Once felled, it covered half the front lawn and jutted into the street.  Apparently, most of the people who buy property in Traveler’s Joy want to start with a clean slate, no baggage.  Take the trees, please.  Take the nineteenth century craftsmanship.  And by all means, get rid of the homeless cats.   If we want any of those, we’ll make our own.

###

            I’m sorry about the town’s financial loss, if the story of the contractor is true.  (That’s a portion of our 2012 taxes down the toilet, after all.)  But such a mishap makes me hopeful in another way.  Maybe when people in Traveler's Joy think on the Folly of the Fire-truck, they'll consider more critically what the pressing needs are in this town, and what kind of effort ought to be directed at those needs.  Maybe, in future, they’ll give some thought to what has value.