New Leaf, Writer

I am "draft post" crazy right now, stacking up a number of post ideas after the drought of the last two winter months.  Pictures of the early garden blooms are running my SDcard over and demanding that I honor them with a blog.  But at the same time, I'd be negligent to my purpose of celebrating garden writers if I didn't blog on my latest read, A New Leaf, by Merilyn Simonds.

I'll state it flat out;  this is the most delightful garden read I've had all year, maybe the best for several years.  Ms. Simonds is, by reputation, an established fiction writer, new to the genre of garden writing, but her previous experience shines throughout this book of garden-focused essays.  I marveled over and over, and was humbled to my core, by the wonderful use of language, the phrasing, and the vivid descriptions, heedless of whether her subject was daffodils, hollyhocks, or fungus.  Lord, how I wish I could write at her level.

Some examples:

All my gardening life, I have wanted to grow in swaths...But I have not always had the luxury of landscape.

The beds that seem so sedate in April, and maybe even May, spiral out of control in June.  The self-seeders are getting it on like teenagers home alone.

I have always thought of peas as too much work: all that popping and thumbing of pods and for what?

People come to the garden....at the same time they come to the psychotherapist's chair:  when they reach the halfway point, when the number of years that stretch ahead are no more than what's behind.  The summer solstice of a life.

Daffodils are, to my mind, the very best of Spring bulbs.  They don't ask for much more than a bit of April sun and rain to rise golden into the air.

See the point that I was feebly trying to convey?  Despite  a self-described reputation as a voracious reader, I am rarely tempted to repeatedly slow down and enjoy the feel and flow of the language.  Ms. Simonds, in A New Leaf, took me beyond the garden into a fresh garden of words and pages.  A garden that blooms in phrases and imagery every bit as well as the physical garden it describes.

I wait now, Winter biding time for Spring,  hoping that there is another set of garden essays coming from Ms. Simonds in the near future.  And I'm challenged by her example to write better; to set garden images in words instead of digital pictures; to churn the soil in words as effortlessly as with a spade.

The Last Daffodil

Here it is, the last new daffodil to open in my yard this Year of Our Lord, 2012.  All the others, the Trumpets, the Large-Cupped, the Small-Cupped, the Jonquils and the Species, have given me the gift of their bloom and moved on, leaving behind only their grasslike foliage to wither, die and litter my garden beds at leisure.

I find myself a trifle melancholic at the thought of these cheery faces withdrawing to their soil homes for summer recuperation.  I don't begrudge them the rest they are so well and truly due, but I do regret that my time with them is so short, my admiration of their perkiness so fleeting.  I treasure daffodils above the other bulbs here in the Flint Hills, for only they are strong enough to survive the prairie unassisted.  Tulips live short lives and constantly need replenishment.  Crocus peek above the brown buffalo grasses but are instantly whipped to shreds by the winds.  Scilla provide me with calm induced by their sky-blue presence, but they lie too low to the ground to impress visitors, and they require the extra moisture of a mulched garden bed to flourish.  The daffodils alone endure.

Daffodils harken me to Spring with their jovial yellows and oranges and creams, impervious to late freezes and unappetizing to deer.  They laugh at the winds of Spring, keeping perfect form and color through rain and storm.  They carry the hope of the prairie gardeners, giving form to our long Winter expectations and filling the promises of our optimism.

As they leave us, plunging head-long into hibernation away from the harsh rays of Summer, the memory of their friendship stays behind in the gardener's heart, a kernel of Spring locked away to tide us through the next winter.  The daffodils are gone, but they've promised to return with the next warming soil.  And we garden on madly alone, through irises and roses and daylilys, mums and grasses and asters. Waiting all the while for the next perfect daffodil to fill the promise of the resurrection of Spring.

Roses? April Fools, Not!

'Harison's Yellow'

Whatever this crapola is, global warming or normal climate variation or coincidental heat spell, it has to stop and it has to stop NOW!  I was outside this morning doing routine garden chores for this time of year and I suddenly noticed this:

'Marie Bugnet'

And this:

'Robusta'

And this:












Three different roses blooming on April 1st?  I understand that two of them have Rugosa blood and the third is normally an early rose;  but April 1st?   'Marie Bugnet' is normally the first rose to bloom for me, starting, on average in the 1st week of May.  The earliest bloom I ever saw on that bush was April 21st, in 2009.  The next earliest was April 23rd, in 2005.   April 1st?: preposterous!  'Harison's Yellow' has only bloomed once in April in 10 years; on April 30th, 2005.  This cosmic scheduling is ridiculous.  The lilacs are in peak bloom here.  My earliest peony (Paeonia tenuifolia) and my earliest iris ('First Edition') have just started blooming.  Tulips are starting to open. Clematis montana has just started to bloom.  Daffodils have just slacked off.  And my roses are blooming?  A closer look reveals that rosebuds are developing on most all of my rosebushes, but perhaps in less than normal number.  I'm all for being able to enjoy the scent of roses early for the season, but at this rate, we'll be done with roses blooming by May and their normal abundance may be lessened.

Looking at the odd bloom sequence, I believe what it tells me is that the bulbs and other flowers dependent on ground temperature for growth initiation are blooming closer to their "normal" time, while the plants dependent on air temperature to develop buds are being pushed by the (today) 90F degree temperatures.  That's my theory anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

I know it's April 1st, folks, but this is no April Fool's.  I took these pictures today, April 1, 2012.  God Save the Planet.

Magnificent Magnolias

Magnolia 'Jane'

I still linger in wonder, sometimes, that I have not only one but three magnolias growing in my Kansas garden.  I associate magnolias so strongly with the true Southern United States, that I simply have trouble accepting these large leathery petals will survive on the Kansas prairie.  If the cold doesn't kill them in the long run, surely the dryness and wind will.  I wasn't much of a gardener at the time, but I don't recall them growing in the zone 5B area of my Indiana childhood, so I never expected them here.  I was only experimenting when I first attempted Magnolia stellata 'Royal Star' here, pessimistically expecting only a wasted effort, but it is difficult to argue with success.

'Jane', on the prairie

They're all blooming now, all three of my magnolias, causing me to daydream of dinosaurs and foot-wide dragonflys, coal swamps and pterodactyls.  Something about those large leathery tepals and the deep musky scent evokes a memory from deep in my brainstem, instincts and dreams from times past.  This is one of the early flowers, the Dawn Flowers, as Earth's flora leaped into the sexual reproduction revolution and left the cycads and conifers behind.  Magnolias, evolving before the appearance of bees, were forced to toughen up their carpels into these rigid toothy mounds so the heavy, ungraceful beetles of the time could facilitate pollen transfer.  The glorious center organ of my young 'Jane', pictured above right and as a whole bush to the left, just seems to scream of warmth and dampness and sex, does it not?

Magnolia 'Yellow Bird'

Every year, I hold my breath until my Magnolias bloom, particularly until my baby 'Yellow Bird' (Magnolia acuminata 'Yellow Bird') shows signs of life, always hoping against hope that this year will not be the one I'm taught a painful lesson about the dangers of zonal denial.  Magnolias always burst into bloom naked, with no warning by accompanying leaves that life has begun again.  This year again, 'Yellow Bird' became, for a short time, the focus of my garden, tiny though it is, even prompting Mrs. ProfessorRoush to ask me what the beautiful yellow shrub was in the back garden.  I always know I've got a hit on my hands when it registers on the consciousness of my horticulturally unaware spouse.  I personally thought the yellow hue was a little less bright this year than last, perhaps "washed out" by the extremely wet weather a few days before these buds opened, or perhaps less developed when the rapid onset of heat pushed these flowers into an early Spring.  I was shocked to reread last year's post on the first bloom of 'Yellow Bird', dated April 18th, 2011, knowing all the while the tree has almost finished blooming this year at this end of March.   Again, evidence of an extremely early Spring.

'Yellow Bird' at 2 years

Magnolia stellata 'Royal Star'

And, as always, Magnolia stellata 'Royal Star' was the anchor of the Spring season, opening a couple of weeks back with the first scented bloom of Spring.  It always preempts the stage before the Witch Hazel here, before the tulips, almost before the daffodils.  This year it bloomed only briefly but gloriously, showing the ground with fresh clean white tepals during the strong winds and rains a week past.  Right now, unusually, some tardy buds are blooming again, making sure that this shrub makes its statement in my garden for another year.  A last brief shout before the rapidly developing summer heat makes this Magnolia dream again of dinosaurs past.