Gunnera

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A friend recently posted a picture on Facebook of her Washington-state yard. Like most Washington-state yards at this time of year, it was mostly under two inches of water. Off to one side, however, was the most spectacularly huge-leaved plant:

I mistook it for a Philodendron selloum, which was unlikely, even in warm wet Washington, but my friend quickly corrected me. It is, in fact, a Gunnera manicata.

 

  

Gunnera's glory is its foliage. The leaves, as you can see, are comically gigantic. It's sometimes called "wild rhubarb," as the leaves very much resemble those of rhubarb, and some gardeners call it "dinosaur plant," for obvious reasons. Can't you just picture a brontosaurus peacefully chomping on it?

The more I studied the picture, the more I knew I'd seen it before. I went through some old photos and found it in Adare, a picturesque Irish village Partner and I visited in 2007; it was growing at the boggy end of a public park, and its leaves were so spectacular that I had to take a picture of it. I discovered online that it's a moderately common garden plant in Ireland; locals sometimes pick the leaves and use them as umbrellas.

 
Gardens should always be a mix of old and new, common and unexpected, big and small. We love to see a hundred daffodils in bloom, but we need the darkness of tall ominous pine trees behind them to make them shine. We cherish our one-blossom-at-a-time borders, but we need something big and splashy to give them drama.

Gunnera, with its rich green tablecloth-sized leaves, will give your garden all the drama it needs.

 

Just don't blame me if you start attracting dinosaurs.

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Stinkhorns

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Now and then, growing out of the mulch in front of my office building, there’s an outcropping of the most amazing mushrooms:

“What in the hell are they?” Apollonia squealed when I pointed the latest batch, which (as you can see) are especially evil and healthy-looking. “They smell rotten. Can’t you smell them?”

“Not a thing,” I said. (To be fair, I have a terrible sense of smell.) “And they’re beautiful. What colors!”

I looked them up later. They are stinkhorns. (I always thought “stinkhorn” was Apollonia’s maiden name.) They stake out lawns and driveways, and keep coming back forever once they’ve established themselves. They are Phallaceae, and if you look at the above picture, the name will probably make sense to you. There are many horrifying variants, but ours are Mutinus caninus, the “dog stinkhorn,” and maybe the “dog” part will make sense to you too if you look at the picture again. Stinkhorns are gooey and disgusting on purpose. They attract bugs with their smell and nasty texture, and the flies and ants carry the spores around. They start as an egglike growth like a puffball, and then – in just a few hours – they manifest their adult form. Here’s a time-lapse film of twenty hours in the life of a dog stinkhorn:

Nature is trying to send us a message through organisms like these.

But what’s the message, do you suppose?

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Cannas

I wrote recently about hostas, those garden-foliage favorites with dull purple flowers, and how dull they are.

Cannas are the opposite of hostas. They are the opposite of dull and ordinary. They are exciting and unusual.

I first saw them growing alongside my grandmother’s house in Selleck, Washington, back in the 1960s. I found them unbelievable: five-foot stalks with blazing crimson flowers, and gorgeous dark-green foliage.

They are huge and dramatic, and what’s the matter with a little drama in the summertime? They also seem to grow easily; I see them in sidewalk pots all over the city of Providence.

They always make me smile when I see them. Here, in Providence’s Wayland Square, merchants put them in pots, and they thrive.

They are the torches of summertime.

Rejoice in them.

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Botanizing

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In Tove Jansson’s Moomin books (which you should read, if you haven’t), there’s a character – a Hemulen, if that means anything to you – who collects stamps. He finally collects all of the stamps in the entire world. He despairs, because now his life has no purpose anymore. But then he realizes: he can start collecting plants instead! His life has meaning again!

I love plants. I don’t have a garden, which means I subsist on a few houseplants and a few office-grown things (which I’m very proud of, as they’ve grown extraordinarily). So, when I walk back and forth to work, I examine the gardens and yards and fields I pass by, and I identify the plants I know, and I puzzle over the ones I don’t know.

The one above, for example. What is it? Yellow vetch? Alfalfa?

Nope. I finally identified it. It’s Lotus corniculatus: bird’s-foot trefoil.

I walk by a field full of it every morning on my way to work. First I noticed them out of the corner of my eye, thinking I knew what they were. Then I took a closer look, and realized I wasn’t so sure.

I checked the leaves the other day, and now I’m sure. It’s L. corniculatus, all right.

Any day upon which I identify a strange plant is a good day. It gives my life a tiny bit of added meaning.

I think I must be a Hemulen.

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The wildflowers of downtown Providence, Rhode Island

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A local photographer has taken some lovely photos of plants and flowers that occupy the property formerly occupied by I-195 in Providence (which, for the past two years or so, has been a vast green space in the very middle of the city).

I walk through that green space every day. I rejoice in it. I love my friend Oma’s comment recently: “Here in England it's not so important to drive as over there [in the USA]. In your neighbourhood it looks similar. As long as you can get to the shops, you can walk along the sidewalks and look at the flowers or the weeds.”

Notice what she said: “the flowers or the weeds.”

She and I feel the same way: weeds are lovely too. She sent me a lovely book about weeds a while back, and it was after my own heart.

Here are some of my own photos of weeds / wildflowers in the neighborhood. They’re not as good as they might be, but oh well, I’m a terrible photographer, who cares?:

CHICORY (Cichorium intybus). Beautiful blue/purple flowers. This is a picture of a lovely stand of them very near the Point Street Bridge. The roots are roasted and ground and mixed with coffee; I’ve had coffee with chicory, and it’s delicious.

BUTTER AND EGGS (Linaria vulgaris). A beautiful roadside wildflower. Not useful for anything that I know of. Also called “toadflax.” I like the name “butter and eggs” better

MILKWEED (Asclepias sp.). I mistakenly told a coworker recently that this was “Joe Pye Weed,” which is horribly wrong. The flowers are very fragrant, and the plants are attractive, and the seeds are big cloudy masses of fluff.

RABBIT’S FOOT CLOVER (Trifolium arvense). I only identified this one a few weeks ago. It’s obviously a clover, but fuzzier, and very cute. This one was huge until it was cut down by the city, but it began to come back within days. You can’t kill clover.

BIRDSFOOT TREFOIL (Lotus corniculatus). Obviously a legume, with beautiful yellow pea-like blossoms. The whole field was golden with these, until they were cut down. They too came back within days.

JAPANESE KNOTWEED (Fallopia japonica). A terrible invasive species from Asia. But it has lovely foliage and nice flowers.

DEADLY NIGHTSHADE (Atropa belladonna). A relative of the tomato. Look at this pretty little lady, with pretty purple blossoms! But she’s terribly poisonous. Notice the cute little green mini-tomato berries; they’ll be a delicious-looking red later in the season. Just don’t eat them, okay?

QUEEN ANNE’S LACE (Daucus carota). The wild carrot. This is a sweet little flower that also grew very healthily where I was born, back in southwest Washington. This is a very small specimen, but nice; I’m always glad to see it.

These are all just as beautiful as any garden flowers. More so, really, because they don’t rely on gardeners to take care of them.

They take care of themselves.

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Bees, and why you need to care about them

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I have been hearing about colony collapse disorder since the mid-1980s, when I lived in Tunisia and actually knew some beekeepers. Their hives were dying, and they had no idea why it was happening.

It’s now a worldwide problem. The European Union is voting on the subject soon, and I hope they vote sensibly.

Do you realize that our crops – our food sources – almost entirely depend on bees? Bees are the key to pollination. We farm bees just as we farm crops like corn and beans, but the bees are not so reliable anymore, because of this damned colony collapse disorder.

It may be a fungus. It may be the overuse of certain insecticides. It may be some mysterious illness. It may be Gaia’s revenge on mankind.

At any rate, the European Union is taking steps by banning certain pesticides which seem to be implicated in the colony collapses. An English friend of mine, Oma, recently posted a blog about the movement to ban these pesticides.

I know what you’re thinking: Who cares about bees?

Answer: if you don’t care about bees, you’d better change your mind, and fast.

You can follow this link to sign an American petition to ban certain chemicals connected to colony collapse disorder.

Please sign.

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Hen-and-chicks

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I’ve been fascinated with cacti and succulents since I was a kid. They’re always odd-looking, and sometimes they reward you with beautiful flowers.

One of the easiest to grow is Sempervivum tectorum. My mother called it “hen-and-chicks.” This refers (I assume) to the plant’s growing habit: there’s generally a fat rosette in the middle of a planting, surrounded by its children, which peek out like happy faces. Sometimes the “hen” puts out a long chicken-neck blooming stalk in midsummer. The plant can deal with dry climates and wet climates; as with many succulents, if the weather goes the wrong way, the plant simply quiets down for a while and stops growing. As soon as conditions improve, however, it bounces back.

The ancients believed it protected a house from lightning and sorcery, and even planted it on their (thatched / peat) roofs. (“Tectorum,” its species name, means “of the roof.” Charlemagne recommended that his subjects plant it on their roofs, to protect themselves from various evils.) In England and Wales the plant is called “houseleek,” literally “the house plant.” Old botanicals and herbals say that its juice can be used to alleviate or cure a long list of ailments: fever, erysipelas (does anyone get erysipelas these days?), dysentery, thrush, burns, scrofulous ulcerations, corns, warts, neuralgia, migraines, shingles, and insomnia.

In brief: it’s a sweet benevolent plant that likes to live where people live, and seems to get along with people very well.

And it has more common names than any plant I’ve heard of: Thor’s beard, devil’s beard, sengreen, thunderplant, St. Patrick’s Cabbage, and a dozen more.

The best of these, and the longest (for the knowledge of which I thank Richard Mabey) is “Welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk.”

Now where do you suppose that name came from?

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Hosta

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This time of year, Partner and I walk to and from work more often. Our neighborhood is full of pretty houses and nice gardens, and it’s always entertaining to see what people are doing in their yards. The other evening, for example, I was scampering home by myself, and squealing like a pixie over each and every late spring / early summer plant and blossom: creeping phlox, flowering quince, bamboo, copper beech, wood hyacinth, honey locust, vinca –

Oh.

And hosta.

Hosta is a border plant often found in Eastern gardens. It puts out its greenery in April and May, and later – June/July – it puts out dull light-purple blossoms.

I find it terribly dull. It fills in the gaps in the hedge, but so would Romaine lettuce. The flowers and leaves are dusty-looking, and the foliage (in summer) is undramatic and uninteresting.

Partner tells me that, in his childhood, he and his friends used to pop the flower-buds before they bloomed, just for the hell of it.

I understand the temptation. 

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Carpet bugle

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Here in New England, spring comes in with a roar. Everything seems to bloom at once, in the space of a week or two: the daffodils, the tulips, the forsythia, the cherry trees, the magnolias.

Then there are the quieter flowers, buried in the grass. Crocus are done by now, of course. Dandelions are back, blooming as brightly as they do in July. I saw my first violet about two weeks ago. Catmint is blooming from cracks in the sidewalk only a few blocks away.

And just yesterday evening, I spotted one of my favorites: the carpet bugle.

Don’t you just love that name?

Carpet bugle is a half-weed half-garden plant. It’s springy and green, and bounces when you tread on it like – well, like a thick carpet. It raises little green flowering heads, studded with little purple flowers. It spreads like mad and creates its own landscaping, and its combination of dull green and soft purple is very nice.

Its Latin name, Ajuga, is uninformative, but its English name is perfect. It spreads like a carpet, and the flowers are little violet bugles.

It requires no care: it simply grows. Our courtyard is full of it, and violets.

And now we’re ready for summer.

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Tulipa tarda

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All of the early bulbs are blooming at once this year: squill, and snowdrops, and hyacinths, and daffodils, and crocus. The tulips are holding off, as always.

 

 

Except Tulipa tarda.

 

 

Funny: the name, Tulipa tarda, means “late tulip.” But hereabouts, it blooms before all of the other tulips. It’s a botanical tulip, which means that it was never hybridized; it still grows wild on the plateaus of central Asia.

 

 

It is a small tulip, with bright yellow-and-white starlike flowers on short stems. Most hybridized tulips bloom for a year or two and then die away; Tulipa tarda goes on and on for years and years.

 

 

I love hybridized tulips, don’t get me wrong. They can be extraordinary: the parrots, and the lilies, and the Rembrandts. The colors and shapes are beautiful.

 

 

But one of the charms of spring bulbs is their simplicity. We don’t look for lots of variation in our crocus, or our squill, or our snowdrops: we just love looking out the window and seeing hundreds of them thronging the garden.

 

 

That’s what I love about Tulipa tarda. They are simple and unextraordinary and still very beautiful. They pop up from the grass and shine up at you like little stars.

 

 

If you want something different and easy and charming in your garden in early spring, go buy a few T. tarda bulbs.

 

 

You won’t regret it.

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From paradise to parking lot

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You know I have a great affection for weeds. I grew up on the edge of a National Forest, and we had more land than we could use (my parents started with twenty acres of woods and pasture, sold half, and still couldn’t figure out what to do with the remaining ten acres). There was one small patch of weeds, probably twenty feet square, just off to one side of our house, on a little hill. My mother insisted that it be mowed from time to time, but I resisted. I rejoiced in it. It had everything: dandelion, chess, quack, vetch, three kinds of clover, plaintain. I literally used to roll in that weed patch on sunny days. It was a miniature jungle, just right for a little boy.

 

 

I visit my old home on Google Earth from time to time. The house is still there (though greatly changed). But I see that my old patch of weeds is all plowed up now, made into useful ground.

 

 

What a pity.

 

 

Even here in Providence, where people have been building and ripping up and building again for over three hundred years, there are still little patches of chaos. One of my favorites was on Angell Street, a few blocks from where I’m writing this. In summer it was practically tropical; it featured a couple of gigantic trees-of-Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), that fabulous fast-growing weed tree, bigger than any I’d ever seen in southern New England, and at least two dozen smaller species.

 

 

Then, about ten years ago, the bulldozers moved in, and they plowed it under, and they built a Starbucks.

 

 

Another piece of paradise gone.

 

 

There’s another little patch close to our apartment, a hill with trees and flowers. Huge mullein thrive there, and weedy maples, and Queen Anne’s lace in summertime.

 

 

The backhoe was there this morning, ripping it all up.

 

 

Sing it, Joni Mitchell!

 

 

 

 

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The tree of heaven

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I have written enough about carnivorous plants and poisonous plants. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.

 

 

I see the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) every summer day in the streets and alleys of Providence. It’s everywhere in the eastern United States, and thrives in cities. It is a weed, believe it or not; it grows wherever it can – up through cracks in the pavement, if that’s all it can find. It can grow six feet a year. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the old book/movie “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” but the title tree is A. altissima; it keeps bursting through the street, and no one can stop it.

 

 

I’ve never noticed (maybe I haven’t gotten close enough), but apparently it smells bad. T. S. Eliot, in the “Four Quartets,” refers to “the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard.” The Chinese word for the tree, chouchun, means literally “stink tree.”

 

 

Ah well, we can’t all smell like lilac or lavender, can we?

 

 

Ailanthus can reach tremendous heights, or it can be a shrub. It loves sunlight, but can tolerate shade when it has to. It likes rich soil best, but tolerates nasty environments too, and can grow in soil with the acidity of tomato juice. (Such a lot of things I learn from Wikipedia!)

 

 

The Chinese use it medicinally, to treat mental illness; the shaved root is mixed with boys’ urine and fermented soybeans, allowed to sit for a while, then strained. The bark contains an acknowledged antimalarial substance.

 

 

Most importantly of all: I like the tree of heaven. A few blocks from here, there used to be a vacant lot full of ailanthus, at least twenty feet high, in full sunlight. I loved them, though I knew they were squatters and that their time was probably short. Sure enough, they were cut down to make way for a Starbucks.

 

 

Starbucks coffee cannot be used to combat malaria, or mental illness, not even if you mix it with boys’ urine and fermented soybeans.

 

 

I would like my grove of ailanthus back.

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Deadly nightshade

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I realized recently that I’ve written about a lot of nefarious plants: Darlingtonia (AKA the cobra lily) and pokeweed.


I guess I sort of love the deadly plants. There are the poisonous ones, like poke, and the meat-eating ones, like Darlingtonia. They don’t pull any punches. They don’t like us members of the animal kingdom – or, rather, they like us fine, so long as we’re for breakfast.


A few years ago, before the I-195 bridge through Providence was uprooted, there were some beautiful Datura plants under the overpass. Datura (also called Jimson weed) is reputedly hallucinogenic, and even deadly. (In the Delibes opera “Lakme,” the title character commits suicide by drinking nectar from a Datura flower.)


Then there’s deadly nightshade.


We are having a lovely crop of it around town this year. See the above photo? That’s in a parking lot about two blocks from my office. Nightshade (AKA Atropa belladonna) is completely deadly; the families of the early Roman emperors were decimated by people (like Livia, the wife of Augustus) who knew how to use  Atropa correctly.


It’s a lovely plant, as you can see above, and looks completely harmless. It’s a member of the same family as the tomato, and (as you might imagine) it took a while for the tomato to become accepted in Europe and America, because in those days, everyone knew what happened when you ate those little appetizing-looking red fruits.


Also, it has its everyday uses. If you use the extract (called “atropine”) as eyedrops, it gives you lovely big dark pupils. This accounts for its other name: belladonna, “beautiful woman.”


Also, atropine reduces your vulnerability to radiation. If you know a nuclear strike is impending, take a big dose of atropine and get in a bathtub full of water; you’ll greatly reduce your danger of radiation poisoning.


Unless, of course, the nuclear strike doesn’t happen. In which case you will die of atropine poisoning.


But life isn’t perfect, is it?

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A bumper crop of weeds

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Such a crop of weeds we’ve had this year!

 

 

There’s a yard down on Cooke Street, a few blocks from our house, with weeds like nothing I’ve ever seen. Some of them are eight feet tall. There’s dwarf dandelion (it seems silly to call it “dwarf” when it’s that tall, although “dwarf” refers to the flowers, not the plant), and some pokeweed, and other things I don’t know the names of. I actually own a copy of the “Golden Guide to Weeds,” and I still cannot figure out what some of them are. They are like props in a horror movie, or background scenery in an episode of “Lost in Space.” They tower over me. (Fine. They’ll be dead in a few months, and I’ll (probably) still be here. So let them tower.)

 

 

I love weeds. I love the way they sprawl and occupy the space they’re given. I know they can be parasites, but they’re often lovely. (My father, a farmer at heart, hated weeds, and hated it when he saw me playing with things like quackgrass and cheat. I had no idea that I was doing anything wrong.) I love the resilience of weeds, and their vigor. Many of them are annuals: they grow from seed in a single season, and die. Imagine that! All that growth in a single year!

 

 

And they are common, and friendly, and green. They mean no harm. (Most of them, anyway.)

 

 

And why do you suppose we’re getting such a nice crop of them this year?

 

 

We’re getting warmer hereabouts; we’re getting a climate that’s more like the mid-Atlantic states. Climate change, you know. And the landscape, and the greenery, are responding with gladness

 

 

Lovely weather, if you’re a weed.

 

 

(Not sure if it’s so good for us people, though.)

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The Darlingtonia preserve

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In 2005, on one of our trips to the Pacific Northwest, Partner and I were running up and down the Oregon coast: Lincoln City, Yachats, Florence. 

 

 

On our way to Florence I noticed an odd sign pointing to a DARLINGTONIA PRESERVE.  The name rang a very faint bell, but I couldn’t quite place it, and I suggested that we stop.

 

 

I am so glad we did.

 

 

It is a small park which serves as a natural preserve for a rare local plant, the Darlingtonia californica, aka the cobra lily.

 

 

Darlingtonia is a carnivorous plant resembling the pitcher plant.  Its body is a cup of water, topped by a cobra-like hood.  Insects blunder inside and fall into the water to drown; the hood helps keeps them inside if they try to escape.

 

 

Once they’re dead, Darlingtonia californica eats them up, slowly, by dissolving them and absorbing their delicious little bodies.

 

 

Bloodthirsty, I know. But the plants were gorgeous, and you have never seen so many together in one place in your life.  They were shining bright green in the fitful Oregon summer sunlight, hundreds of them in their damp little peat bog, humming to themselves, waiting for the little buggies to arrive for lunch.

 

 

Plants are remarkable.  We animals have always had an advantage over plants, seemingly; we move faster, anyway. But plants are sneaky and malevolent. Some are poisonous, like nightshade and datura and pokeweed. Some sting and burn, like nettles and poison ivy. Some are beautiful and dangerous, like the foxglove. Some can gash the hell out of you, like the cholla cactus. Some of them can poison the ground beneath themselves, so that nothing else can grow (many conifers do this).

 

 

But all of them, just like Darlingtonia californica, are beautiful in the sunshine.

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Cabbage butterflies

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I like butterflies, especially the big 747 models with snazzy colors, like the monarchs and the swallowtails. But I also have a nice feeling about the simple dull colorless ones; they give a pleasant fluttery feeling to the day when you see them, and they seem pretty harmless. (As Bart Simpson once said: “No one ever suspects the butterfly.”)

 

 

For example: now and then I see cabbage butterflies, AKA cabbage moths, AKA Pieris rapae. You know them: the white ones that swirl and dart through the garden like animated dinner napkins.

 

 

My parents used to grow basketball-sized cabbages, and the cabbage butterflies loved them. They don’t eat them, you see; they lay their eggs in them. Then their children (green oozy-looking caterpillars) eat the cabbage.

 

 

My mother hated those caterpillars. She had a giant salt-shaker of some infernal pesticide, which she used on the cabbages the way you’d sprinkle Parmesan on your spaghetti. It certainly didn’t kill all the caterpillars, and I marvel that it didn’t kill all of us. (One of our neighbors saw her strewing poison on her cabbages once, and wrote a letter to the local paper about “my neighbor lady who sprinkles poison on her vegetables.” He also said something like “I’d rather eat a bug once in a while than poison my own food.”)

 

 

(We thought he was crazy. Forty-five years later, I see that he was ahead of his time.)

 

 

Mom’s poison didn’t seem to reduce the population of cabbage butterflies, as I recall. And what’s a summer day, after all, without a few cabbage butterflies wheeling and pirouetting in the sunlight? 

 

 

I suspect that, if I’d been born a butterfly, I’d have been a cabbage butterfly: not extraordinarily beautiful, but with my own quiet charm.

 

 

And I do like cabbage once in a while.

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Poke

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Poke is a weed that grows all over the Eastern and Southern United States. I see it everywhere in Providence; it is very beautiful, and very toxic. It has deep green leaves and white flowers and juicy-looking purple berries, all of which are very poisonous if you eat them unawares. (The berries can be used to make ink; the Founding Fathers used pokeberry ink to write the Constitution.)

 

 

The leaves are (just barely) edible, if you cook and rinse them a couple of times. Some say rinse them twice; some say three times. You used to be able to buy the leaves canned, but not so much anymore.

 

 

There’s a song, by Tony Joe White, in 1968, that tells the whole story:

 

 

 

 

I don’t want any poke salad. Then again: maybe I want to know what it tastes like. Even if it’s poisonous.

 

 

I am just perverse that way.

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My coffee plantation

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Gardening runs in my family.  My father grew industrial-sized corn and cabbages the size of world globes in our backyard.  My mother’s dahlias were enormous.  Both my sisters had incredibly lush gardens, and both had the knack of snipping off a tiny bit of a plant from anywhere – a doctor’s waiting-room, a restaurant, a neighbor’s (private) garden – and taking it home and sticking it in the ground and making it grow.

 

 

I do not generally share the family gift.  I love plants and flowers, but they do not grow gladly for me.  Either they grow rank and wild like disobedient children, or they don’t grow at all.  Partner and I had a plot in the local community garden for a few years, and everyone else’s garden looked like a Brazilian rain forest, and ours looked like a moonscape.  We harvested precious little: a few flowers, some tomatoes, a couple of peppers.  I gave it up after a few years.

 

 

My garden is now a small table next to a south-facing window.  I have some cacti, purchased from Ikea four years ago in a three-pack.  They were little peanutty things when I first brought them home, so I put all three together in a mini-topiary arrangement and told them good luck.  They thrive.  All three have quadrupled in size; they are so healthy, in fact, that I’m afraid they may be mainlining steroids, or Vigoro, or something.  One of them is putting out leaflike projections at the moment; they’re getting bigger and weirder by the day, and I can only hope this is not some peculiar “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” situation.  (I also bought a companion cactus a few months ago in Big Lots; it was cheap and peculiar-looking, lumpy and spiny and shaped like an alien fortress, and it looked as it might fit in with the first three.)

 

 

There is also a Pereskia aculeata, aka “Barbados gooseberry.”  I have written about it before.  It is one of the rank/wild/disobedient plants. It’s pretty much a weed in the Caribbean.  It climbs all over everything, and it has wicked spines (it looks like a regular creeping vine with big shiny green leaves, but it’s a cactus too, believe it or not).  I’ve had it for twenty years; it has changed residences with me twice, and it has grown monstrously and died back, and it is still with me.  I am sure it will outlive me.

 

 

Also, my pet, my prize: a coffee tree, which I bought about ten years ago.  It was just a baby then; it’s almost three feet tall now.  It is a lovely shrub, with nice shiny leaves.  Several years ago it surprised me by blooming (my plants never bloom), with small jasmine-like flowers scattered all over its branches. 

 

 

Then, somehow, it pollinated itself, and I had a crop of coffee berries.

 

 

The berries are lovely too: small, bright red like cherries, and slow to mature.  The tree has repeated its fruit-bearing phase twice, and I just picked a ripe berry tonight.  I tried looking up the method for making actual drinkable coffee out of the berries, but it’s a long process, with fermentation and drying, and I don’t think I’d get much coffee out of the small handful of beans my little tree has produced.

 

 

But I am impressed that it has shown the effort to bear fruit.  Of all the plants I’ve ever owned, it’s the only one that has actually behaved nicely and done what it was supposed to do.

 

 

Does anyone want six or seven coffee beans?

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Skunk cabbage

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I wrote a blog not long ago about how warm the winter and early spring have been here in southern New England, and how all the plants are confused and blooming out of season. 

 

 

It was an apocalyptic screed, and I wanted to write something more mellow to counter it.

 

 

Early flowers are not entirely a bad thing.  They are lovely. Right now, in early spring, the magnolias are blooming on the Brown campus.  The azaleas are blooming near my office building!  I’ve seen dandelions in bloom!  And there’s something in the grass outside our apartment that looks almost like carpet bugle, with tiny purple blossoms, but much smaller.

 

 

All this in early spring.

 

 

(Ahem.  Global warming / climate change / apocalypse. Ahem.)

 

 

The other day we were driving through rural Connecticut (to go to Foxwoods – why else would we be driving through rural Connecticut?), and I was watching the drab early-spring scenery rush by.  And I saw, in a low unruly-looking place among trees, skunk cabbage coming up!

 

 

It took me back.  I don’t know if East Coast skunk cabbage is the same as the West Coast variety I used to see in Washington state, but it looks exactly the same.  Those big shiny green leaves!  Those big juicy yellow flowers that smell like rotting meat!

 

 

That, my friends, is the nasty sulfurous aroma of rebirth.

 

 

Welcome, Connecticut skunk cabbage.  We’re very glad to see you. 

 

 

You're the real herald of spring.

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Selaginella kraussiana

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I was charging around Eastside Marketplace recently, buying chips and sardines and onions and other necessary things, when I made a detour through the garden section.

 

 

And I found the most adorable little display of potted plants.

 

 

They were frothy little yellow-green fellows, with fern-like fronds, tipped with silver.  They were labeled “FROSTY FERN.”

 

 

But I recognized them right away.   They were Selaginella (sp. kraussiana).  

 

 

I purchased one immediately.

 

 

Maybe you’ve seen them.  They are cousins of the “resurrection plant” found in souvenir shops and joke-shops: those dried brown masses that you immerse in water until they unfold into (unattractive) masses of living foliage. 

 

 

Selaginella are club-mosses, actually, although they’re part of a group called the “fern allies,” because they resemble ferns.  I used to find their relatives when I was a kid, up in the Cascades, kicking around when my family was picking huckleberries; they’re stiff, low-growing, intricate little plants. 

 

 

I find, when I look them up online, that Selaginella is an invasive species in New Zealand, a pest, a nuisance.  I don’t think they’ve reached the nuisance level here in the USA: I don’t think the climate allows them to grow so freely.

 

 

I brought my little Selaginella home, and repotted it right away.  It is bright and charming.  My south-facing window might be a little bright for it (club mosses prefer dim light), but we’ll see.

 

 

I looked online to find out how to care for my new Selaginella, and kept finding comments like this: “I am very taken by these small plants.  I am charmed by them.  I don’t know why.”

 

 

I think I know why. They are modest and attractive, compact and neat.They brrr nicely against your hand when you touch them (unlike my cacti, which snag my clothes and wound me constantly).  They are green and fresh. 

 

 

And they need constant care: they need moisture and shade. 

 

 

I just don’t hope I don’t kill it.

 

 

Pray for it, kids.

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