Blog Action Day 2010

Yes, Gardener/Reader, I know that it's a Friday and I know that I just posted recently that I try to write something about roses on Friday.  But I was tipped off to a rather special event held today and decided to postpone the rose blog until tomorrow. You'll have to bear with me because Friday, October 15th is Blog Action Day 2010, and this year, October 15th is all about water.  Safe water, clean water, plentiful water for all.

Regular readers of this blog probably don't take me as a crusader for anything except the art and practice of gardening, but stay around a minute while I mentally don my nonexistent (in reality) Birkenstocks and tie-dyed shirt (also doesn't really exist) and join the U. N. and bloggers worldwide in an effort to raise awareness of the condition of our global fresh water supplies.

Fresh, unpolluted water is an important consideration to inhabitants of the tall grass prairie ecosystem here in the Flint Hills because we simply don't have enough of it even here, in the midst of the North American bounty. Once you get to wandering around the Flint Hills, you'll find the remains of many old, very small, limestone houses, usually near the shallow muddy streams at the bottoms of the hills.  Frankly, I look at those houses and the terrain and wonder how anyone survived here before modern plumbing and septic systems.  I, at least, hope the cows were pastured downstream from the homes.  The biggest issue with potable water for the pioneers here was that clean water is deep.  In fact, one of the most advertised tourist spots on any Kansas guide is the "world's deepest hand-dug well" at 109 feet deep and 32 feet wide in Greensburg, Kansas (What can I say?  Aside from the world's largest prairie dog and the world's largest ball of twine, we suffer for tourist attractions around here).  Contrast that with my native soils of southern Indiana where the picture at the right is of a pump andwell in my father's vegetable garden, hand-driven by my father when in his late 60's.  Heck, in our bottom ground there, I used to dig fence post holes and hit water.  Here in the Flint Hills, I could probably dig past the center of the Earth without moistening my shovel.

Average annual precipitation in the Flint Hills is around 34 inches, not bad compared to the majority of North America, but the wind and summer heat dry it off fast.  Besides, as I've said before, we get about 25 inches of that rain in April, May, and June as torrential rains with dark storm clouds.  The rest of it is spread over the rest of the year, with very little normally in the hot months of July and August.  My point is that generally, this is an arid land, with native yucca's and cacti starting to make their appearance in untilled areas only an hour west of me.

I try to do my part to conserve water here, as every good gardener should.  I'm a deep mulch fanatic, and I try very hard to select plants that will do well both in the cold wet clay of spring and the hot brick-hard clay of summer.  It certainly limits my plant selection, but as a general rule I water plants and trees only the first full year that they're in the ground.  Beyond that, it takes a pretty bad summer to get me to provide water.  This year, in the midst of a 6 week drought with 100 degree temperatures, I watered the garden beds exactly once, in late August when established shrubs shriveled to brown.  I have no permanent irrigation at all and my immediate lawn is buffalograss.  I am considering adding some drip irrigation on my strawberries and blackberries to supplement their growth and my harvest, but the rest of the vegetable garden and orchard is on its own as well.  I use artificial fertilizers as little as possible and used no insecticides this year save some Sevin on the squash.  Somewhere down the hillside from the house and garden is a pond muddied by cows, but with a thriving amphibian population, which I take as a good sign for the impact of my runoff.  

Anyway, all of this to say that I believe that gardeners can and should do what we can to minimize our impact on our local environment.  We may fight tooth and nail to hold back the ferocity of nature, but we CAN keep our gardens without resort to chemical sterilization and nuclear holocaust.  For further viewpoints, you can read all about the global effort to improve water supplies at the Blog Action Day site and visit over 4000 blogs about all aspects of the effort.  And I promise, the roses will be back tomorrow.

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.