Bliss in a Garden

My primary reading material this week (now that I've gotten past the latest Tom Clancy and Stephen Hunter novels) is The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner.   Subtitled "One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World", the book is exactly that; a tour of places in the world where people seem to have high levels of happiness, from Bhutan to Switzerland, to Asheville.  This was a bargain-bin hardback I picked up last week for $2.98 and it is, as bargain books often are, slightly outside of my normal reading genre, but I've found it both entertaining and thought-provoking.

So how, you might ask, is this book related to gardening?  And my answer is that it isn't, but there are many lessons inside it to apply to our gardens.  As you read, you internalize some of Mr. Weiner's thoughts on the nature of happiness and realize that Eric is on a quest of places with high average happiness.  And that leads you to thinking that you don't care about Bhutan's penis-adorned fertility shrines, or the legal pot and prostitution party that constitutes The Netherlands, or the regimented clockwork society of the Swiss.  What you care about as you keep reading is thinking about what would make/does make YOU happy, or your immediate family happy, right there in your own little world.

So, my fellow gardening friend, what makes you happy?  And how much of your happiness is tied to your garden?  These are the deep questions of our gardening souls and each strikes at the reasons we bother to garden at all.

ProfessorRoush, unlike the grumpy Eric Weiner, is generally a happy guy.  I have my manic times, but those are not balanced much by black periods; in other words, I have lots of "ups", but very few "downs", generally making myself a cheery nuisance in the lives of those nearby me who prefer instead to go through life in a sour mood.  And part of my happiness does indeed come from my relationship with my garden, but, as I think about it, not in the way you might expect.  I don't gain a lot of joy from walking around patting myself on the back for the beauty or design of my garden (it commonly lacks both).  I actually grumble a lot about my frequent poor vegetable production or strawberry production from my garden.  My frequent readers can probably easily recall a number of blogs complaining about the drought or Kansas soils or freezing rains, or the wind.  You'all know that most of those complaints are tongue-in-cheek, right?  Or at least good-natured grumbling?

No, it is the PROCESS of gardening that strokes my happy note.  The simple daily activities of planting and pruning and digging and caring.  The blooming of a baby rose, a daylily not yet seen, or just the tall and rapid stretch to the sky of an ornamental grass. The sweetness of a blackberry warmed by summer sunshine, or the sound of rain quenching the thirst of the earth.  The intense concentration and smile on Mrs. ProfessorRoush's face as she inhales the perfume from yet another new rose.  I go through my garden work in a Zen-like trance probably closer to Bhutan's Buddhist lamas than I would have admitted.  Those are the good days, the days of not thinking, but just being, in my garden. Outside the garden, my happiness is in life, in total, lived once and lived well.  If only I could stay on that path every moment, there would be no regrets at the close of daylight.

So what, my friends, makes you happy about your gardening?  For some of you, we've spent enough time corresponding that I could almost guess; for others, I have yet to learn your dreams.   But we would all benefit from taking time, in this winter of our leisure, to think about happiness, in our gardening and in our lives.

Perfect the Dawn

Last fall I finally broke down and planted a classic rose on a new pergola leading from my garden down to the cow pond; a 'New Dawn' climber that I hope will grow next year to grace the south side of the pergola and cover the 8 foot span.

'New Dawn', KSU Rose Garden, 2010

 I don't know exactly what took so long for me to finally add 'New Dawn' to my garden.  Perhaps the poor quality of the plants I'd seen, limited availability, or always having a different or better choice to make when sending in a mail order let me keep putting it aside.  But a local nursery had them on hand, and potted, late  last season I was filling a new spot.  Of course, I don't have a picture of the rose in bloom yet in my garden, but the picture at the left of the 'New Dawn' in the KSU Gardens should suffice so that all can appreciate the spectacular display of this beauty.  At least I already know the rose is a survivor in my climate because I've watched the KSU rose through ten seasons now, trellised against the north wall of the old dairy barn where it gets little sun.  It has been an incredibly healthy rose at the KSU rose garden, and never has blackspot despite its site in long shade.  Here in Kansas, the moderately full blooms occur in small clusters at a frequency of 3 flushes over the summer.  The rose has a  moderate sweet fragrance, but the beauty is in the blush pink coloration of the blooms, as pictured at the right, below.  The canes grow about ten feet long and 'New Dawn' puts up many strong canes every year. 

'New Dawn'

There are probably very few gardeners who aren't familiar with this rose, but, if you have missed out, this beautiful light pink Large-Flowered climber has a bit of a mystery of a history.  It is believed to be a sport of the single-blooming Dr. W. Van Fleet (hybrid Wichuraiana), and was, according to most sources, "discovered" by the Somerset Rose Nursery and introduced into the US by Henry Dreer in 1930.  I was fascinated to find out that The Plant Patent Act was signed into law in 1930 by Herbert Hoover and 'New Dawn' has the distinction of being the first patented plant in the United States; PP1.  'New Dawn' was also named one of the first of Texas A&M's Earth-Kind Roses, adding still more evidence for its vigor and health in the Great Plains climate.

Unknown white climber, single blooming

I do have an unknown identity short white-flowered climber, a rose I obtained from rustling a cutting near an elementary school in town, that I initally thought was 'White Dawn', but due to its lack of repeat bloom and decreased number of petals, I now think this one is an entirely different animal. I don't, however, now have any clue as to what it might be.  Pictured as a young rose in my garden at left, it seems to be healthy and grows canes about eight feet long.  It blooms every year in a nice display over several weeks, but then its done, finished, for the year. It's beautiful, but it'll likely remain a mystery as long as it grows in my garden.

Construction Sunday

Since the unseasonably warm temperatures are holding, I spent my Sunday out on the concrete garage pad making a few more of my own North American Bluebird Society-approved bluebird boxes.  Five boxes took me 3 hours, including the time it took to haul all the saws and drills out of the basement and into the sun.  I did the work outside so I could gain the advantage of the sunlight on my retinas to also ward off any seasonal affective disorder, which I'm not really prone to, but everybody can use some extra Vitamin D in the winter.  You might say I was both holding back the blues and preparing for the blue (-birds) at the same time.

Yes, I know that the entry holes on a few of them are a little askew and there may be a crack or two in the fitting of the sides, but hey, I never claimed to be a carpenter.  Anything over changing the oil in the lawnmower or reprogramming the garage door opener tests ProfessorRoush's competencies.  And I'm paying the price today for my three hours of labor performed standing, sitting, or kneeling on concrete and waving a heavy battery-powered drill around.  When I put bone plates on dogs, I rarely need more than 10 screws.  Every birdbox here is 17 screws, predrilled and then placed.  But, whining aside, they are done and I needed them to replace a few of my older style boxes.  And soon, because them Eastern Bluebirds will begin nesting here in a few weeks.   

Turd Trees

Quick!  Can everybody identify these seemingly big brownish-green turd-looking things laying among the brown-er prairie grass of my pasture?  I'll give a hint to the non-MidWesterners...they're a fruit.

But not a fruit that anyone really wants to eat, since it is mildly poisonous and may cause vomiting.  Probably to no one's surprise, this is the Winter appearance of the ubiquitous Hedge Apple, Maclura pomifera, also known as the Osage-orange tree.  Second in number only to the invasive Red Cedar (Juniperus virginiana) in Kansas, they are a very, very common weedy tree here, originally native to the Oklahoma-Texas region.  We can probably blame FDR for the invasion of these trees; the WPA's Great Plains Shelterbelt" project planted hundreds of millions of Osage-orange trees on the Great Plains between 1934 and 1942.

Personally, I tend to hate Hedge Apples; thorny, multi-trunked, small trees that are impossibly hard to chop down and nearly impossible to kill since they sprout back every time from the stumps (unless you resort to herbicides).  In fact, another reason they're believed to be common in the Flint Hills are because they are often used as fence posts and if you plant a bright orange-yellow fresh post, with a little bit of bark still on it, you'll often have a living tree soon afterwards.  The species tree is pretty lousy as a gardening specimen, but it was useful to the Native Americans, who made bows of the strong, springy wood, and to the prairie settlers as fence posts, resistant to rot and very strong, in fact so strong that it is difficult to pound a fencing nail into a seasoned post.  Usually I get a couple of good whacks at it and then the nail goes winging off into another dimension or bends in half before it is buried enough to hold up the wire. 

All that aside, the large, heavy, fruit fascinates me.  There is a large Osage-orange tree near my fence line that I've left alone primarily out of lazy aversion to dulling a chain saw or two on the trunk.  Last year, I noticed that the tree had no fruit at all and I speculated about the effects of the late Fall drought in 2010, but this year, in a full low-rain and very hot summer, the tree produced more fruit than ever and the ground is covered with these hard lumps oozing sticky white latex.  It makes mowing a jarring, messy experience, at the very least.  Now, I'm wondering if the tree wasn't so much stressed last year as just demonstrating its diecious nature.  Is it possible to be a male tree one year and a female tree the next?  And if so, would these trees be allowed at all in the yards of Religious Right Republicans or banished from the kingdom?

Osage-orange trees also bring out the dinosaur-fascinated child in me.  Most fruits, you'll remember, have evolved to be attractive to one or more species that were likely to harvest the fruit and aid in distribution of the seeds (often after passing through a digestive tract). But if we look around the prairie today, no animal is a distribution host consuming the Osage-oranges.  They lay there all Winter and finally rot after multiple freeze thaw cycles, never moving far from where they fell.  Neither cows, nor horses, nor even mice seem to care for them.  Current theories for the "dispersal-host" of Osage-orange ranges from extinct giant ground sloths to other extinct Pleistocene megafauna such as the mammoth, mastodon or gomphothere.  Now isn't that a neat idea?  Just picture a giant sloth picking one of these off a solitary tree on the prairie, or a mastodon picking up one with its trunk and dropping it down the gullet. 

A few thousand years back, that was the prairie, an endless savanna of big animals.  Another ecosystem lost in time, represented today only by the grasses and the Osage-orange trees.  And by me, wondering what used to be around to eat and digest these big rubbery balls.