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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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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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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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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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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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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Lilacs

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I was walking the other day at lunchtime when one of my co-workers called over to me: “The lilacs are blooming over there.”

 

 

She gestured over at the animal-rescue place across the street, which has a flowery hedge. And their lilacs were in full bloom.

 

 

Lilacs (well, Syringa if you're a snob) send me into reverie every spring.  The house I lived in when I was very small had a lilac hedge; they were all purple except one, which was creamy heavenly white. The scent was heavenly also. It’s heavy and can be oppressive (I wore lilac scent for a while some years ago, and was probably the bane of the office), but – in small doses, and when you smell it on the breeze on an April day – it’s wonderful.

 

 

They remind me of Walt Whitman, and the death of Abraham Lincoln, by way of “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d.”

 

 

They remind me of Milton Berle, who camped it up on the old “Batman” TV series as the dandy gangster Louie the Lilac.

 

 

They remind me of New Hampshire, which uses the lilac as its floral symbol, and good for them.

 

 

I think they were probably one of the first flowers I ever examined closely. I remember wondering at those huge clusters of much smaller flowers, and having a dim intuition that it was very smart of the lilac bush to make big floral explosions out of hundreds of smaller blossoms.

 

 

They are lovely.

 

 

Admire them while they last.

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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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Cherry blossoms in September

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It’s happening again this year.

 

 

Walking to work yesterday morning, I could see a filmy white cloud around some of the trees on the far side of the Providence River, as if they were in bloom.

 

 

In late September!

 

 

Ridiculous, right?

 

 

I saw them close up later yesterday morning.  Yup.  In bloom, and lovely as an April day.

 

 

In late September!

 

 

Waiting for the shuttle yesterday evening, I was examining the shrubbery nearby: some low-growing azalea-like thing.  And oh my dears it was plumb full of flower buds.

 

 

I know I wrote about this last November.  And I am a broken record on this subject anyway.

 

 

But the bloody climate is changing.  Isn’t it obvious? The plants are confused. They’re blooming at inappropriate times.

 

 

Back in the Northwest where I grew up, flowers bloomed deep into November and December; it was a gentler climate.  Those of you who are familiar with New England know that, while September and October can be (and usually are) glorious, they also (usually) grow gradually colder day by day.  I even remember seeing snow on the grass in October once or twice.

 

 

But that was quite a while back.

 

 

What can we do about this? Nothing, probably.  This is one of my “hopeless glance into a dark unfriendly future” blogs, in case you can’t tell.

 

 

The change will continue.  Maybe in a hundred years the Yukon and Nunavut will be garden spots.  (And maybe Copenhagen and New Orleans and poor low-lying Providence will be under water.)  Maybe Canada and Siberia will become the breadbaskets of the world.  (And maybe Cape Cod and the Elizabeth Islands will be washed away.)

 

 

Not to mention that I don’t do so well in warm weather.

 

 

Probably it’s a good thing that I won’t be around for much longer.  I’d be complaining incessantly.

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Black bananas

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“Lisa!” Marge says in an old episode of “The Simpsons.” “We have black bananas. And you know what that means.”

 

 

“Banana bread!” Lisa shouts with glee.

 

 

My work nemesis Apollonia is (as you surely know by now) severely unbalanced. Among her other quirks, she cannot abide bananas with black spots. “They're sugar spots,” I said. “They don't mean anything except that the banana is ripening.”

 

 

“They're hideous,” she shrilled. “I can't stand them.”

 

 

Mental illness is a terrible thing. But sometimes you don't know how deeply it goes.

 

 

I saw her the other day, and she looked like she'd been through an atomic explosion. “I just got off the shuttle,” she said. “As soon as I got on, I saw that the driver had a black banana. Oh, man. And then he stopped, and I knew he had to kill some time, and he peeled it, and he actually ate it. Oh, my god. I could smell that banana.”

 

 

“You have a very serious condition,” I told her. “Get help immediately.”

 

 

By now, everyone in the tri-state area knows about Apollonia's preferences. Partner and I were in the grocery store the other day, and he bought some really perfect bananas, but one had a tiny black spot. “Apollonia wouldn't like that,” he observed.

 

 

See?

 

 

(Do you know, this is the second blog I've written about bananas? There must be something profound about them.)

 

(And, by the way, I bake a killer banana bread.  And black bananas are always the best in it.)

 

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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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