Frosty Morning

We had the first nights of freeze several weeks ago here in the Flint Hills, but the actual frosts have been few and far between.  It takes humidity in the air to condense as a frost and the average humidity hasn't allowed it save for a few delicate mornings.  But now, as the nights grow longer and my hibernation begins, I bless the mornings when the quiet reigns and the sun still promises a warm day at the end of the afternoon.

This picture, taken at dawn a few days ago with my  iphone, is probably not striking enough to attract any real attention by others, but for me, it hints of many marvelous possibilities. The first thing I notice is that, in its original form, the pixels are just coarse enough that if you blow it up, all the garden grasses appear a little blurred as if from in impressionist painting, showing me by example that I need to modify some photographs of my garden creatively this winter and expand my vision.  Gardens designed by Gertrude Jekyll are supposed to have been influenced by her poor eyesight. Perhaps blurring the camera can help me with mine.

The moisture of the frost brings out the winter colors of the drying foliage, showing me a little more color in this early morning picture than I had anticipated in my dreary winter landscape.  I need to spend some time thinking about this view.  Since it corresponds to four months of looking out my bedroom window, improving and expanding the interest and structure of the garden could brighten my winter. 

The mowed paths through the drought-shortened unmown prairie now look too rigid, too straight, and too formal to lead me down to my haphazard garden.  Next year I'll mow them with a little less stiffness and with a little more weave.  And I think the trees need to hurry up and grow, as I need height to separate this garden from the prairie around it. 

And last, the picture tells me how late in the seasonal path we are.  That point of sunrise is closer and closer to Winter Solstice, and far south of where the Summer sun rose at dawn.  It will be interesting to see where the Solstice sun rises in relationship to my new neighbors house on the ridgeline opposite.  It's just possible that while their encroachment messed up my horizon, they've created a Stonehenge for me to measure the passing of years.

Winter Garden Reading II

The second "relaxed" winter garden reading series that I would introduce to readers is Ann Ripley's excellent mystery series that features another heroine of the gardening world, Louise Eldridge, this time a housewife who actually works a real garden while she snoops around.  The series begins with a book titled simply Mulch, where she is drawn into a murder investigation when body parts turn up in the leaves and clippings she purloined from neighborhood streets on trash day (come on, you do it too!).  The series currently runs to six or seven different murder mysteries, all well-written and interesting. 

I must confess that I liked this series a little better than the Flower Shop Mysteries, even though it seems not to be as popular and you'll probably have to go to Amazon to find it.  And I've read them all.  Louise Eldridge is a grounded woman with a mild-mannered husband, Bill (who just happens to work for a secret agency of he government), and a pair of daughters that grow up through her books.  Louise works out of the home as the host of a television garden show, so her character grows and well throughout the mysteries.  The series starts near Washington DC and then Ms. Eldridge moves to the front range of Colorado, where I believe the author now lives as well.  The sweaty hunks are missing (for the most part) from these novels, and the villains are harder to identify, so this series keeps you reading.  Pick one up, on Amazon, or otherwise wherever you can find it.  I have a copy of one of the books that I purchased at The Strand in New York City.  Where better to find a garden author?



Winter Gardening Reading

In Winter, my reading about gardening takes the place of my gardening, so I'm already in that phase where I'm accumulating things to read for the winter.  There are times I like serious gardening texts and times that I'd rather vegetate in what is the garden equivalent of a summer read.  You know what I'm talking about; those mostly mindless novels that have a little gardening, a little mystery, and a lot of relaxation.

Along that line, I know of two authors with a plant-focused novel series that other readers might enjoy.   Just last week, I learned of a series of around eight or ten mysteries written by author Kate Collins.  Of course, I just had to find one immediately to see if I liked it and was able to purchase the first book of the series at a local bookstore.  The series is called The Flower Shop Mysteries, so named because the main character, Abby Knight, is the busybody owner of a flower shop, "Bloomers", and is a former flunked-out law student.  Abby is constantly involved in some kind of trouble, and the series seems to be popular since it makes it onto local bookshelves. The first book of the series is titled Mums The Word, and it's a fairly decent tale of a local murder and Ms. Knight's investigation of it.  The other books in the series follow on the first, and all have clever titles like Slay It With Flowers, and Dearly Depotted.  I so love a good pun.

To be frank, I think Mums The Word was an engaging read, but I don't know how many of the rest of the series I'll be reading.   Don't get me wrong, they are good, but they are definitely written for a female market, and (as a middle-aged, hopelessly archaic, male) I'm just not the prime demographic.  In Mums The Word, the villains are easily recognizable, the women are often victims of bad dates and bad men, and there is a gratuitous hunk named Marco who makes several appearances as Abby's rescuer and heartthrob.  Being male, and hoping for a twist in the plot, I kept expecting Marco to turn out to be one of the bad guys, but, no, he just stayed a sweaty, bodice-ripping savior.  Really didn't do much for me since I never could understand the pirate-lusty maiden genera.  Carrying the book around bothered me a little as well, because, as you can see above, the cover is designed a little frilly and pastel-colored for my tastes.  Maybe I can put a plain book cover over the next one?

I thought I had already blogged about the other author, Ann Ripley, whose series I finished long ago, but it turns out that I haven't. I guess I'll make this week a "two-fer" on that front so stay tuned in a couple of days for that review.  And in the dead of winter, when you're staring out the window at a snow-covered landscape, Mums The Word could be just your ticket.  If you are a middle-aged or older female who likes pirate novels.  Hey, come to think of it, Mrs. ProfessorRoush might like this one.

Either Fruit or Die, Please?

This weekend I was starting to read Peter Schneider's excellent 2009 book, Right Rose, Right Place, when a great line jumped right out of the text and tweaked my nose. 

Peter had been introducing the main themes of the book (the gist of which is that all roses are not created equally and that we should spend time choosing the roses that will thrive best wherever we want to grow them), when he wrote the striking sentence: "There are two kinds of rose failures; plants that die and plants that won't."  Now, Peter was writing primarily about roses, but for sheer calling a spade "a spade", the concept he expressed can't be beat.

I've got a number of plants that I wish would die, and my usual modus operandi in such cases is to neglect the plant until it succumbs to disease and pestilence.  Sometimes, though, I've chosen the plant so well for Kansas that I simply can't neglect it enough to kill it, no matter how dry the summer or cold the winter.

The particular plant on my mind this morning is my ugly and hopeless bittersweet plant, pictured from this morning at the upper right and to the left.  This is one of those dual sex plantings (bittersweet is a diecious plant) that I purchased with both a male (Celastrus scandens 'Hercules') and female (Celastrus scandens 'Diana') vine potted together by the nursery.  I planted them next to each other on a large wire cylinder so they could climb high and provide me with the females beautiful orange and red fruits as Fall came.

But this pair has been nothing but trouble since it was planted seven years past.  They are healthy to a fault, and they survive sub-zero winters, triple-digit summers, flood and drought with impunity.  They quickly overwhelmed the trellis, which I've had to strengthen twice previously as it was bent down by strong winds. Again, now, it is bowed to the East at about the 5 foot level from a storm that occurred in August.  Even worse, even though both vines have survived and had a typical flowering period each of the past five Springs, the plants have never set fruit.  Not a single orange kernel.  Perhaps they don't like each other and have chosen to be celibate, or perhaps the nursery sold me two male plants instead of a mixed-sex pair.  I'm discounting the possibility that they could both be female plants because wild bittersweet occurs in the woods nearby and even if these are refined and gracious cultivars, they surely would be desperate enough by now to dally with the local peasants.  In any circumstance, there's no debauchery happening in my garden and I'm tired of it.  In my view, a garden should be all about sex and procreation and 'Hercules' and 'Diana' aren't contributing to the party.

I'm done waiting on them. Since they won't either fruit or die, I'm spade-pruning them.  Well, in truth, I think I'll move them down onto the barbed wire fence in the pasture, where they can challenge the prairie for dominance or let the grasses beat them.  Maybe a little adversity will scare them into trying to reproduce themselves in a Darwinian last-ditch effort.  I don't care.  I guess you could say that I'm bitter about the failure, but anticipating the sweetness that a nice Clematis will add to that site.