Fake Blogs in Winter

There is, in my mind, no sustaining solace in the drab brown of a Flint Hills' winter.  Oh, I could ramble about for a few paragraphs extolling the virtues of the subtle hues of amber and gold and taupe in my winter landscape, but then that would be "Fake Blogging."  Just as "Fake News" has joined the lexicon of our political debates, "Fake Blogs" should be called for what they are; ill-conceived attempts to paint pictures that don't really exist.  Fake blogs wax eloquent the delicate beauties of bark when there are no flowers or foliage to distinguish one ice-laden tree from another.  Fake blogs discuss the delicate dancing of grasses as a blizzard bears down and smothers the garden.  Fake blogs pretend that browsing glossy garden catalogs is a suitable substitute for the feel of warm earth in your hands. 

I wait in January, interminably it seems, for the smallest, briefest indication that Spring is coming.  A flash of blue from a bluebird, a hint of green in the rushes, and my heart beats faster and my spirits lift.  Difficult to find, those moments, as Yoda would say.  When the snow melts, there is a brief period on the prairie when the grasses have enough remaining moisture to display their mahogany and umber undertones.  Then dry in a twinkling, the rolling hills of brown stretch to the horizon, dead grasses blending individual hues to a bland carpet of boring.  Life is color, death is drab.

Last week, when the weather teased me with warm sunshine and clear air, I strolled during lunch to the K-State Gardens, seeking signs of Spring.  I wanted only a brief glimpse of a timid peony breaking through the ground, or the slightest sight of  a subterranean squill squeezing through the frozen crust.  My desires, like a foundering ship against the shore, dashed by the dry remnants of dead perennials, the only bright spot, Bittersweet, both in name and in spirit, as pictured above.  Russet sumac berries failed to break the brown monotony and puce coralberries merely blended into the bleakness.  I left, back to work in walled confines, to wait further, sullen and sad.

Thank God, in such moments, for Bittersweet and Fake Blogs. 

Either Fruit or Die, Please?

This weekend I was starting to read Peter Schneider's excellent 2009 book, Right Rose, Right Place, when a great line jumped right out of the text and tweaked my nose. 

Peter had been introducing the main themes of the book (the gist of which is that all roses are not created equally and that we should spend time choosing the roses that will thrive best wherever we want to grow them), when he wrote the striking sentence: "There are two kinds of rose failures; plants that die and plants that won't."  Now, Peter was writing primarily about roses, but for sheer calling a spade "a spade", the concept he expressed can't be beat.

I've got a number of plants that I wish would die, and my usual modus operandi in such cases is to neglect the plant until it succumbs to disease and pestilence.  Sometimes, though, I've chosen the plant so well for Kansas that I simply can't neglect it enough to kill it, no matter how dry the summer or cold the winter.

The particular plant on my mind this morning is my ugly and hopeless bittersweet plant, pictured from this morning at the upper right and to the left.  This is one of those dual sex plantings (bittersweet is a diecious plant) that I purchased with both a male (Celastrus scandens 'Hercules') and female (Celastrus scandens 'Diana') vine potted together by the nursery.  I planted them next to each other on a large wire cylinder so they could climb high and provide me with the females beautiful orange and red fruits as Fall came.

But this pair has been nothing but trouble since it was planted seven years past.  They are healthy to a fault, and they survive sub-zero winters, triple-digit summers, flood and drought with impunity.  They quickly overwhelmed the trellis, which I've had to strengthen twice previously as it was bent down by strong winds. Again, now, it is bowed to the East at about the 5 foot level from a storm that occurred in August.  Even worse, even though both vines have survived and had a typical flowering period each of the past five Springs, the plants have never set fruit.  Not a single orange kernel.  Perhaps they don't like each other and have chosen to be celibate, or perhaps the nursery sold me two male plants instead of a mixed-sex pair.  I'm discounting the possibility that they could both be female plants because wild bittersweet occurs in the woods nearby and even if these are refined and gracious cultivars, they surely would be desperate enough by now to dally with the local peasants.  In any circumstance, there's no debauchery happening in my garden and I'm tired of it.  In my view, a garden should be all about sex and procreation and 'Hercules' and 'Diana' aren't contributing to the party.

I'm done waiting on them. Since they won't either fruit or die, I'm spade-pruning them.  Well, in truth, I think I'll move them down onto the barbed wire fence in the pasture, where they can challenge the prairie for dominance or let the grasses beat them.  Maybe a little adversity will scare them into trying to reproduce themselves in a Darwinian last-ditch effort.  I don't care.  I guess you could say that I'm bitter about the failure, but anticipating the sweetness that a nice Clematis will add to that site.