Heart's Safe

First October, red and gold,  
Spread through forest, cross the fields,
The Garden long past summer's heat.
Squash rich and heavy, corn hangs low,
The frost moves in and seedlings shiver,
The Gardener sounds a swift retreat.

November leads to bitter cold,
Barren soil and harvest done,
The Garden runs to fortress strong.
Hiding from approach of Winter,
The sunlight dim and hours waning,
The Gardener mourns as days grow long.

Then December's shortest days,
Night grows long and silence deep,
The Garden bides its time secure.
Tall grasses dance in frigid wind,
The Solstice comes and starts the siege,
The Gardener braces to endure.



Blizzards howl and Janus reigns,
His icy hands a death force hard,
The Garden lingers brown and dormant.
Dead some would say, its bones exposed,
The green of life stripped from the bare stems,
The Gardener wails of sunless torment.

Yet deep within the seedman's chest,
Secluded well from Hornung's lash.,
The Garden lives and safely grows.
On through Winter, on to Spring,
The beds are turned, the planting planned,
The Gardener stirs and finally knows.

That March will come again in glory,
Blooms will burst with April's rain.
The Garden lives inside, apart,
From Winter's cold and stony grasp,
Within a fortress warm and verdant,
The Gardener safes it in his heart.
The Gardener holds it in his heart.

 

Thank you, Milady

Sorry everyone, I've been in a bit of a posting funk this past week, probably as a result of the lack of green vistas or other garden stimulation to get me moving.
 

'Milady Greensleeves'

Thankfully, I was momentarily rescued last evening by an email from a daylily hybridizer/AHS volunter asking to use my 'Final Touch' daylily picture to serve as the picture of that particular cultivar for the online AHS database.  I got a little excited about the thought that, however anonymous and unanticipated, I am able to make a contribution to the database.  That got me to looking at my other daylily pictures from last season, which led further to this post.

A standout daylily picture that caught my eye this morning was that of 'Milady Greensleeves'.  I captured 'Milady' on the 3rd of July, just at the beginning of our summer heat wave.  She is a delicate but large blossom, 7 inches in diameter, and fragrant as a rose.  I love the gradation of the green throat morphing into yellow and leading to the pastel lavender petals, marred in this picture only by the orange pollen staining the top petal. 'Milady' is a dormant midseason daylily, and despite her size is supposed to be only a diploid.  Hybridized by Lambert in 1978, I think she displays her color better on cloudy days here in the Flint Hills, where a harsh mid-day sun will bleach her out in minutes.

It interests me that I have used a number of pictures of daylilies from this 2011 group, but that until now this picture had escaped my notice.  Am I so hungry for color and the start of the new garden season that I've widened my criteria of beauty?  Or did I just get overwhelmed last year in the midst of all the blooms and photos and miss this delicate prize?

Unknown Yellow Daylily

Regardless, if there was ever a perfect yellow daylily, it is pictured at the left, another forgotten photo that I ran across.  This one is an unknown for me, but the soft yellow hue and perfect form has no peer in my garden.  Those frilly petals and ribbed sepals rival the finest ladies lingerie, I think.

 Gracious, what am I thinking about?  I most definitely must need some warm weather, sunshine, and flowers to work off my pent-up winter energy.  For now, still in the grip of January, a cold shower and dreams of daylilies will just have to do.

Burn, You Must

Somewhere in the midst of Winter, I've begun to think of Spring, and thoughts of Spring here on the prairie lead to plans for burning of the prairie, if not annually, at least on a periodic basis.  Around this same time, in preparation for the clouds of eastward-blown smoke, regional newspapers begin to spew forth various editorials for and against the prairie burning, with "pro" articles highlighting the benefits to the local environment (i.e. the immediate prairie) and "con" editorials bemoaning the detrimental effects for air quality in the eastern cities.  Take note here that both arguments are based on ecologically-principled arguments.  Particularly, in the last few years the EPA has begun to regulate the prairie burning with the excuse that it raises the ozone levels in Kansas City (already high from their human infestations) to unacceptable levels.

But, echoing Yoda, if prairie is to exist, burn you must.

So, ProfessorRoush, surely you exaggerate?  No, I'm afraid I don't.  While driving down the road this weekend, I took just a few pictures to illustrate the point.  In anticipation of the gnashing of teeth and wails about air quality loss, I'd like to make sure all my readers understand what will result from a complete ban on burning of the prairies.   If you don't burn the prairie, after three years or so, you get a view that looks like this:

 I've referred before to the colonization of the unburned prairie by Red Cedar (Juniperus virginiana).  Red Cedars are dense, slow-growing evergreens that are native to the MidWest and they are quite simply fatal for the prairie grasses and forbs who cannot exist at their dry, sunless feet.  Underneath a stand of cedar trees in the Flint Hills is a barren ecosystem; bare, arid dirt without the slightest hint of herbaceous plant or moss.  Perhaps there will be a scattering of needles, which themselves raise the pH of the soil, making it more alkaline and the nutrients less available for plants.  The Red Cedar has been found to reduce the nitrogen available in prairie soils and, more importantly for those who hope to store excess CO2 from industrialization as soil-bound carbon, have also been found to reduce the carbon content of the soil, in contrast to the deep-rooted grasses that they outcompete.

In ten years without burning, it looks like this, an impenetrable thicket of stiff, worthless weed trees.

 

If these were California Redwoods, beautiful and pristine, or some useful tree species to man or animals, I might feel differently.  But even when they're allowed to grow with plenty of space around them, Red Cedars often aren't very pretty or useful.  The lower branches get singed by burns or die off one by one, and sometimes you're just left with a naked trunk and branches, bleached white by the sun, which stand alone for decades before the rot-resistant wood succumbs to wind or weather.  And then it lies on the ground for another decade unless removed by man.   

So please remember, when you're complaining that the air is a little hazy or smells a little burnt this April, there really is no alternative to burning if we want to keep a prairie.

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.