Burbank's White Blackberry

I've been caught up recently reading a wonderful biography of Luther Burbank titled The Garden of Invention, a 2009 publication authored by Jane S. Smith.  For a biography of a non-exciting and non-current public figure, this is a surprisingly easy read that introduced me to a whole aspect of gardening history of which I had little prior information.

Luther seems to have been an odd duck, born as a New Englander, but transplanted to California on a post-Civil-War whim to make money.  His methods, coming on the heels of the dissemination of Darwin and Mendel's discoveries, seem to have been as much mystical as science, based more on the writings of Emerson and Thoreau than the new science of hereditary.  Descriptions of his poor note-taking and nebulous written records of crosses only contribute to his eccentric persona.  I didn't know he was awarded an early Carnegie grant, but it doesn't sound like the Carnegie Foundation put up with him long. 

In a table that appears before the table of contents in the book, Ms. Smith lists Luther Burbank's most famous introductions.  I was both shocked and disappointed that, although I consider myself a pretty knowledgeable amateur gardener, I could only recognise a few from a list of about 40 plants.  I recognized the Burbank potato (1873), Shasta daisy (1901), and elephant garlic (1919), which most other gardeners would know as well, but I wasn't even aware that the latter was a Burbank introduction. I always knew that the Shasta daisy, which I hold in high regard, was a Burbank creation, but I, an avid rosarian, had never heard of the 'Burbank Rose' and I still don't know what his 'Surprise Daylily' looks like.  Neither it nor Luther Burbank are mentioned in Sydney Eddison's A Passion for Daylilies or any other daylily encyclopedia I can find.  I have had some previous experience with Burbank's Sunberry, mentioned in the book although it didn't make the top 40 list, which I had purchased a few years ago from Seed Saver's Exchange and which I found to be extremely disappointing in taste quality and a bit of a nuisance in terms of reseeding itself. 

I am currently captivated though, by the thought of the white blackberry (named 'Iceberg'), that Burbank had introduced in 1894 after crossing the wild New Jersey blackberry marketed at the time as 'Crystal White' with the well-regarded 'Lawton' blackberry.  A pretty good description of the development of 'Iceberg' can be read on the web at the bulbnrose.org website.  The white blackberry leapt from the pages of the Smith book into my compulsive mindset and I HAD TO HAD IT. Even if it was disappointing in taste, I reasoned it would be worth growing as an heirloom conversation piece.

Alas, after three frustrating hours trying to find a current source to procure the white blackberry, I struck out.  It isn't offered for sale at any commercial nursery that I can find and my only remaining hope is an email I sent to another blogger who posted last June that he is growing it in California.  Of course, I could have missed finding a nursery offering on a Google search, given the difficulty of this particular search.  Just try searching for "white blackberry" on the Internet.  Today, all you get is 100,000 sites about some crappy second-rate phone called a "Blackberry."  Who the heck would name a phone after a fruit? And I'm going to write a letter to the Gold Ridge Experimental Farm.  That's the former experimental farm of Burbank's, now made into a tourist attraction.  The gift shop to the farm sells only typical tourist shirts, notecards and other crap.  No plants.  I don't know who runs the gift shop but it ought to have dawned on the curators that most of the visitors may have some gardening interest and might be interested to buy some of Burbank's famous plants.

Like a white blackberry for instance.

Mums The Word

My muse for today's blog is a coworker and friend who has become a new homeowner. She's faced with the dilemma of all non-gardeners that suddenly find themselves with a town lot whose previous owner seemed to have neither the talent nor the interest for gardening. A forsythia seems to be the only salvageable landscape-worthy plant in her yard at present. Thus, she has been slyly and periodically pestering me with questions about plants and landscaping, seeking out knowledge from her captive manic Extension Master Gardener, and probably secretly hoping that I'll show up with a bulldozer and a truckload of plants and a sixteen color, meticulously thought out plan for the landscape.  Alas for her, like most poorly-trained men of my generation, I'm oblivious to feminine hints.

Her latest gardening question though, struck a nerve, as did her suggestion later that I should write about it and call it "Mums The Word" (she loves really bad puns).  She had just asked via email if I thought that "mums" would do well under a large shade tree that borders her property.  I calmly replied that mums wouldn't do well in the constant dry shade that I knew her spot had, and that she needed to plant them where they'd get six hours of sun or more.

That's not what I wanted to say, though.  She doesn't know that I hate mums, or more properly Chrysanthemum sp. with a passion second only to my distaste for spireas.  Spireas are a special case with me as readers of Garden Musings (the book) know, but mums are about as worthless in the garden in my estimation. Yes, they provide us some nice fall color, if you just want flowers, but they provide nothing interesting in the way of decent foliage contrast or shape variation for Fall, and the rest of the year they're either just a slowly-growing blob that sits there like a green turd in your landscape or else they are just dead stems that break with the first snowfall.  To add insult to injury, although mums are a perennial elsewhere, they're really an annual in Kansas, weakening in at most a year or two likely because of the dry hot Kansas summers and drier cold Flint Hills winters.  I'd really sooner have my friend plant ragweed in her yard than a border of mums.

Look, for instance, at the picture above of the current landscaping (taken this morning) around some KSU apartments that stand opposite the exit I use every night from work.  Let me repeat that;  I'm forced to look at this landscaping debacle every night.  What insanity overtook the K-State groundsmen that they thought these alternating yellow and orange mums would make a wise display?  K-State colors, guys and gals, are purple and white. Now it's true that the most common colors of mums put up for sale seem to be yellows and oranges and russets, probably because the fall colors sell best in what people think of as fall flowers, but mums do actually exist in purple and white.  I've seen them.  If we must have round balls of color alternating in our college landscape, perhaps purple and white might have been a better choice, here at a stone's throw from the KSU football stadium.  Luckily these were just planted this year; I'm betting they don't survive till next year and thus we'll have a chance to get something better.

I have no chrysanthemums at all in my garden, just as I have no spireas.  The closest thing I'll allow is the wonderful Shasta Daisy, which blooms during the height of summer and used to be classified as a chrysanthemum, but today has been wisely moved to the Leucanthemum x superbum taxonomic group.  Please, everyone, let's not whisper the word "mum" around me again; it plays havoc with my blood pressure, as you can now attest to.

Books and Blogs

Those who have been following this blog in its short life since late July have been seeing its evolution and my slow learning process here, so I thought I'd take a single blog to address the whole "why do you (I) blog and write?" and "where is this thing going?" series of questions.

Here is the key;  I've always been a bibliophile and I've always said that someday I would write a book about something.  I started writing the book Garden Musings (pictured and linked on this blog) a few years back solely as a release for me.  I simply enjoy the writing process and years ago I was conditioned by a great set of high school English teachers to be able to sit down and vomit my thoughts in a relatively coherent fashion onto paper.  But, after a couple of decades where my writing was confined to dry scientific papers in my chosen profession of veterinary orthopedic surgery, I simply missed the more creative outlet of writing for the fun of it.  And I know I'm not even close to being a horticultural expert (I should barely claim amateur status based on the survival rate of flora that I place into the ground), but I didn't want to write about veterinary patients after treating them all day, so the next best choice was a book of gardening experiences. So I started slowly writing Garden Musings and finally, during the cold winter of 2008-09, I made a push to put enough essays together to make a decent-sized book, went to an independent publisher (iUniverse), and got it out. What a learning experience publication was! 

Now, notice that I said I started writing Garden Musings solely for me.  Because I, like many others, stated loudly and clearly at the beginning that I was NOT writing because of ego.  Well, the second key here is this:  I don't care who you are, writing may be for the writer, but publishing is ALL about ego.  You may think you start writing for yourself, but once your baby is out there in the world, you suddenly CARE that others read it and you suddenly want to know what they thought of it.  There's even a whole new addictive syndrome, "Amazon-Rank Fixation," where the gardener begins checking the ranking of his book on Amazon at hourly intervals and comparing the rank to books by other well-known garden writers.  Not that that ever happened to me. 

I've had good feedback on Garden Musings the book. Much of the feedback was surprising, though.  I didn't write it to be a comedic work but I was told by some readers that it was side-splitting funny in places.  Some did think it was informative, those few poor souls who didn't realize that I kill more plants than I grow.  I was told by one reader that it's the perfect book for reading on the toilet;  each essay is three-four pages long on average...just long enough.  My mother said "I suppose it's a good read if you like gardening" (she doesn't) and my father suddenly realized, as he told my sister, "that I was a deep thinker."   

Regarding Garden Musings the blog though, there is, if you haven't run across it yet, at least one book out there specifically about writing on gardens, Cultivating Words by Paula Panich, and of course I came across it after I already published my book.  Cultivating Words covers the whole gamut of garden writing, from weekly newspaper columns to monthly magazines to books, and it's a very informative work. Using ideas from Panich's book and elsewhere, I even put together a pretty good presentation for gardening groups on the process of garden writing (lecturing is, of course, yet another form of ego-stroking as any other professor will tell you).  Ms. Panich cautions "book writers" not to become "blog writers" because blogging funnels the creative instincts away from finishing books.  And I heeded her advice for awhile, but at heart, I tend to be a little resistant to authority. A friend suggested starting the blog and that sounded like a new and fun experience, and the software seemed to be easy enough to figure out, and off I went. 

Blogging, though, is also still all about the writer's ego and it is even easier to measure the ego boost by counting numbers of comments and page hits and ranking sites and all that. These days it is all about the voice provided to me by the audience. I write for you. If you have followed me long, you may have guessed that I'm trying to settle down into a pattern: a random thought that has been occupying me on Mondays, something I'm reading or reviewing on Wednesdays, a rose feature on Fridays, a gardening technique on Saturdays and a little garden philosophy on Sundays. Of course, my obsessive-compulsive disorder occasionally rears its head and I blow that schema, but I'm trying.

I'd love to have feedback whenever my readers get time. What articles did you like?  Which were thought-provoking?  Which will keep you coming back?  God knows, except for the poor curious souls who click on the advertising and provided the $2.26 I've earned so far, I'm not in this for the money, I'm in it for the camaraderie of gardeners.  And, to be honest, the occasional ego boost of having someone else listen.

Kon-Tiki Seasons

When I considered the suggestion by horticulturist Kelly D. Norris to take pictures repeatedly of the same view in the garden (see my blog titled "Sometimes a Diversion"), I realized that I had presciently taken that advice, but only in regards to one or two specific places in my garden.  And "The Head" was one of those places that I haven't yet written about.

The Head, an Easter-Island-type statue I obtained from a local garden store, has been in my garden since the beginning.  It was the first statue of any size that I placed in the garden.  I keep the somber Head on a pedestal in the middle of two yellow 'Rugelda' rugosa hybrid roses, backed up by the white 'Marie Bugnet', and facing, of course, due east on the compass.   There it waits daily for the sunrise and stands watch for me to spread the alarm in case of the return of the Gods.

I'd always thought The Head provided a handsome conversation piece, flanked by the glory of the 'Rugelda' roses, but since I purchased it, it was always a point of ridicule for me from my loving wife, who despises it.  The last laugh was mine, though since the identical piece of concrete appears frequently on HGTV in the garden of Paul James, the Gardener Guy, forever muting my better half's questioning of my gardening tastes.  Anyway, when the 'Rugelda' fades, pink 'La Reine Victoria'  and blush white 'Comte de Chambord' are there to pick up the slack.

The Head is a good soldier, standing firm in the face of thunderstorms, prairie fires, and the ever-present Kansas wind (at least after I finally created a stable concrete foundation for it to keep it from slowly listing and falling off the pedastel).  It takes the harsh eastern sunrise on its face and the full burning Flint Hills non sun on its hatless skull without complaint.  And even when the ice comes down and glazes its features, it stands silent, immune to the world.

 

But I have seen The Head, in the depths of winter, weeping with me at the cold damage to the naked rose canes surrounding it and its poor perennial friends shivering in the show. The Head is always a good garden companion for the plants and for me alike. It doesn't talk to me though, really it doesn't.  At least not that I'm telling.  And I'll let you know if it informs me that the Gods have returned from space.