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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Green thumb

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All kinds of weird talents run in my family. My aunt Louise channels entities who tell her about life on other planets and who have shown her the history of Atlantis. Mom could tell when I was sick, without even seeing me: I’d come home from school feeling ill, and she’d already have the bed turned down for me.

But I never had the green thumb.

Mom and my sister Darlene had the green thumb. They could take a leaf – one leaf! – from a plant (usually stolen, from a doctor’s office or a restaurant) – and put it in a pot of unpromising soil, and it would grow. And in no time they’d have a whole garden full of – whatever.

I had the black thumb – the opposite of the green thumb – for many years. I’d buy a potted plant, and it would keel over within days. I’d plant seeds, and nothing would happen. If I repotted something, it died within weeks.

Except that, over the past few years, something has happened. Evidently the stars have realigned. Now I can make things grow!

Example: I put a potted Pereskia aculeata (“Barbados gooseberry”) in my office window a few years ago. Within months it was climbing up the Venetian blinds. It has now made its way all the way to the ceiling (well over ten feet), and is thriving. Regardez:

Example: I took a few Sansevieria leaves out of the garbage-can at work, and a few stems of Epiphyllium that someone threw away, and potted them. The Sansevieria grew at approximately sixty m.p.h., and is huge now. The Epiphyllium is thriving, and I even gave some to Partner’s sister. This is the Sansevieria:

Final example: a departing staff member gave me his dying Dracaena. It looked moribund when I took it in. I repotted it, and gave it some nourishing plant-food and a little water. It returned from the dead within days. It’s thriving now.

Finally: I’m making amends for all of the plants I’ve killed over the years.

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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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Pirate gardens

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There used to be a big nonsensical loop of interstate highway through the middle of downtown Providence. Some years ago, they rerouted the highway more sensibly, and tore down the old highway (which ran through some really prime downtown real estate). It’s mostly just green now: grass, and weeds, and wildflowers, and now and then (especially after a good heavy rain) huge angry geese.

When Boston redeveloped after the Big Dig, they left a nice strip of green through the heart of the city, and it’s a beautiful long narrow park snaking through the downtown area.

Providence won’t be that smart, I fear. I’m sure developers are already sparring for the land. But, for now, it’s mostly open space.

As I walk down Wickenden Street toward the Point Street Bridge, I cross a corner of this open space. And this is what I encountered about a month ago:

Some local person – “Pip” – had claimed a few square feet of it, to grow sunflowers and cosmos and various other charming odds and ends.

Within a week or so, some other people had joined Pip and made their own tiny garden beside his own.

I wanted to see this pirate enterprise prosper. I wanted to see ten or twenty more little pirate gardens spring up by Pip’s garden.

But gardening is hard. Weeds and wildflowers can grow all by themselves without care; garden flowers need water and cultivation. Back about a week or so ago, things were getting pretty dry down there, and Pip’s garden was suffering

No one ever said that piracy was an easy life.

But Pip learned his lesson. It’s been a pretty hot summer, and Pip has been keeping everything watered nicely since then. The sunflower especially is very cute (as you can see).

I’d like to see more of this. I’d like to see more people reclaiming unused land, in vacant lots and by the roadsides, for flowers and whatever they wish. I’ve tried scattering seeds and planting things in odd places myself, but nothing ever seems to come of my attempts. (I should stick to wildflowers, I suppose.)

Pip’s kind of piracy is the kind of piracy I can really support.

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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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Gardening blogs

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Oma, one of my favorite Wordpress bloggers, recently presented me with the “Beautiful Blogger Award.” It’s one of those blog-specific awards that encourages you to pass the award along to blogs you read and admire, so that your own readers can read them and try them out.

 

 

Today I’d like to give you three blogs, all of which are favorites of mine, and all of which are about gardening, one way or another.

 

 

(Why gardening? Because I love it, and I have nowhere to garden. I had a little plot in the local community garden for a couple of years, but the snobbery became so intense that I had to drop it. Now I live vicariously through other people’s gardens. Like these.)

 

 

First of all: Oma’s own blog, “Cottage Life in England.” Oma lives in a completely enchanting cottage in Luton, and takes wonderful photos of everything – her garden, her house, food, her grandson – and is very good at documenting everything. She and I write about some of the same things: getting older, food, plants – and write little notes back and forth sometimes. (We’re kindred souls, in that both of us generally know the scientific names of the plants we’re discussing.) She also writes very well. I recommend her highly.

 

 

Second: “The Soulsby Farm.” This is a couple in Ohio who run a real honest-to-God farm, and take photos, and document their experiences. They’re a lot of fun, and very down-to-earth. They write about things that are of interest to all gardeners: insect control, weed control, fertilizer. They recently ran an Ugly Tomato contest. I like them; I always get a smile out of their posts, and sometimes I actually learn something. Again: high recommendation.

 

 

Third: “Tangly Cottage Journal.” These are professional gardeners blogging from the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state, where my parents used to take us for summer vacations. I love the area – it’s wild and very beautiful. This blog will give you a very precise image of the area, and the vegetation (which is all over the map – it rains constantly, and is very warm), and the challenges of creating a garden in a place where Nature wants to do everything at once. These are professional gardeners, so they hold everyone and everything to high standards. I love them, and I love their posts, and their photos.

 

 

If you love flowers and gardens and good writing, follow all three of these, please.

 

 

If you don’t: what’s wrong with you?

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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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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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Fancy names for pretty flowers

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I used to work with someone named Tom. Tom was one of those people who was always rolling his eyes at something; he couldn't ask you to pass the salt without sounding terminally weary and disgusted with everything. And, to top it off, he was a gardening snob. I was looking at a bouquet in the lobby once and wondered aloud what one of the flowers was. He looked at it critically. “Well,” he said in his whiny Paul Lynde voice, “it's obviously a Cornus of some kind.”

 

 

I could have slapped his silly face off.

 

 

The thing is, I do exactly the same thing.

 

 

I love scientific names, especially for plants. A flower can have a dozen different names in English, and a dozen more in every European language, but it will only ever have one scientific name. This is, by common agreement, the flower’s true name.

 

 

And (as we all learned at Hogwarts), if you know the true name of a thing, you can conjure with it.

 

 

Some names are obvious. Tulips are Tulipa, roses are Rosa, violets are Viola. Some plants have only their scientific names: Poinsettia, Fuchsia, Rhododendron, Azalea, Camellia.

 

 

Now we get to the snarky part.

 

 

Are those sweet-Williams, or are they pinks? Or even gillyflowers? No, sugar. Those are Dianthus.

 

 

A friend asked me about “those yellow flowers in front of the supermarket.” I thought for a moment and then brighened. “You mean the Hemerocallis?” I said cheerily. She looked at me with a veiled expression, which I believe meant she wanted to slap my silly face off.

 

 

Partner pointed at some California poppies, and I shook my head. “They're not even Papaver,” I said. “They're Escholtzia.”

 

 

It really is maddening, isn't it?

 

 

But sometimes it’s worthwhile.

 

 

When the witch-hazel blooms with its eerie yellow-red spidery flowers in the January and February snow, I look at it and whisper: “Hamamelis virginiana.”

 

 

A name to conjure with, on a cold winter day.

 

 

And best of all: there is a lovely tree hereabouts, that grows to enormous heights, and in summer bears extraordinary yellow-green cuplike flowers in its upper branches. It looks supernatural.

 

 

It is, of course, the tulip poplar.

 

 

Oh, no, it's not.

 

 

It is the Liriodendron tulipifera.

 

 

Now that’s a name.

 

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Seed-catalog nirvana

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It is the worst bit of winter now here in New England. January and February are not bright cheerful months hereabouts; they are a long slow death-slog through snow and cold and ice and mush.  Wednesday's mini-blizzard dumped about fifteen inches of snow on us. Partner and I both had the day off – the university (wisely) closed preemptively the day before – so we stayed in the house, reading and napping and watching TV and baking. We ducked out for a while in the afternoon to shovel out the car, which took about ten minutes (thank god the building has a guy with a snowblower handy), but that was about it. Oh, and also, I took out the garbage, opened the dumpster, saw something big and furry scooting around, assumed it was a rat, shrieked, threw my garbage at it, realized (too late) that it was just Partner's favorite neighborhood squirrel, and let the dumpster lid slam down right on the poor little nutmonkey's kidney. He leapt straight up, landed on the Sno-Cat that was parked next to the dumpster, and disappeared.

 

 

I bet he really hates me now.

 

 

So it's time for seed catalogs. I dug out the Gurney's catalog yesterday evening and spent some time perusing the various fruits and vegetables and flowering plants. I love that they send these things for free. Man, you can just eat those colors! When you read these things, you always end up with huge visions of summertime – squash as big as a human head, ears of corn like torpedoes, tomatoes like volleyballs, a flower garden that looks like Middle-Earth on crack.

 

 

Unfortunately, all I have to work with is a concrete parking-lot and a very narrow windowsill.

 

 

Partner and I tilled a small plot in the local community garden for a few years. It was fun, but not very productive; everyone there was very competitive. One guy had gigantic steroid-enhanced tomato plants that looked like oak trees; that was the year of the Great Tomato Blight, though, so all the little yellow tomato blossoms dropped off before they set any fruit.

 

 

Tee hee.

 

 

You see? It turned me into a horrible person. Finally I quit doing it.

 

 

I mean, it's silly to read a seed catalog if you don't have a garden. It's like reading a cookbook if you don't have any food in the house. You're just going to make yourself hungrier.

 

 

But it doesn't seem to work that way. It's more like buying a lottery ticket. Yeah, maybe you waste a buck, or a few minutes of your time, but you come away with a beautiful dream, and a smile on your face.

 

 

And now, in the dark days of January, with a predatory squirrel on the loose who thirsts for my blood, I can use all the beautiful dreams I can get.

 

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