Chickweeds

What I did on my summer vacation

2009-09-11T07:04:00.000-07:00

The history of Willowwood Arboretum in Chester, New Jersey occupied much of my time. This meant more time in libraries and archives than outside in its intimate gardens and wide meadows.

Wednesday mornings found me volunteering at the Cross Estate Gardens in Bernardsville:

We traveled to New England for a talk for Historic New England. Staying with friends in Southport, one morning Cathy took me to the Coastal Maine Botanic Garden. They make wonderful use of stone. Here is Cathy sitting in the meditation garden.

Kirke and I especially enjoyed a trip to Celia Thaxter's garden on Appledore Island, one of the Isles of Shoals off of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Celia Thaxter is famous for An Island Garden, published in 1894 with illustrations by Childe Hassam.

In town, I sold tomato plants to benefit the Farmers' Market and answered questions with fellow master gardeners. I am working with the Environmental Commission trying to get a community garden started. That has been an education!

And at 29 Pine, there be tigers...

Dump Run

2009-07-01T05:11:00.000-07:00

Chatham Township has a dump. It's mainly a recycling center, but there is also a big compost area for grass clippings, leaves and branches. As I'm getting my garden ready for a visit from the Morris County Master Gardeners next week, I have been doing the pruning jobs that should have been done in spring.

All this was an excuse to ask my friend Sarah if she'd come over with her truck to take me and a load of branches to the dump. Sarah has a truck. Not just any truck. A 1931 Model A Ford pickup.

As loaded up the back, I whined, "Do you want to wrap them in a tarp? Won't we scratch it?" Sarah laughed. "Oh, no, she's a working truck."

We hopped in and started her up. The controls are wild. Clutches and chokes with a beautiful sleek design. Henry Ford was a minimalist.

So off we went. You get wonderful reactions in an antique truck: drivers wave, walkers smile, mothers point you out their children.

The dump. It is along the power lines with an inviting dirt road leading into it. There are great piles of organic matter and a savory smell of rotting vegetation, if you like that sort of thing as I do.

Here are Sarah and her truck.

The truck's name is Emma.

Oh what fun it was to ride in a 1931 Model A Ford, on a sunny summer morning. Dashing to the dump.

Rain!

2009-06-28T06:11:00.000-07:00

Many gardeners have been bemoaned New Jersey's record precipitation this month. But shame on them, those dogs in the manger.

It is true that the roses need frequent deadheading, but their lax ways add to their charm.

Burgundy foliage and flowers shimmer on the smokebush (Cotinus coggyria 'Purple Smoke'). Though perhaps we should rename it "fogbush" or "drizzlebush."

A frilly opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) nods her head.

Miniature Hosta 'Pandora's Box' is happy as a clam, in spite of being halved for the Cross Estate plant sale. Rocks do look splendid when they are wet.

Is this fern weather? Totally.

Happiness is a big rainfall. Picture Burt Lancaster in the 1957 film The Rainmaker, finally breaking the drought. Lancaster plays Starbuck, a sort of meteorological Music Man. The movie's climax has him out in the long-awaited downpour. (You can see the love scene with co-star Katharine Hepburn at http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?cid=208673

but do try to see the whole film one of these days.

So just call me the princess of precipitation. And now the sun is shining. Ho hum.

The Garden Changes Her June Tune

2009-06-15T15:37:00.000-07:00

She plays a trio for the Viola tricolor.

She rings the foxglove chimes.

She whistles in yellow.

Third Floor Walk Up, Rent Free

2009-06-14T16:12:00.000-07:00

Welcome to New York City's newest park, the High Line.

Running from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street, an old elevated railway is converted into a contemporary aerial park.

The views of the city are bird's eye, if a low-flying bird.

Built for industrial freight in the 1930s, it is fitting that the new High Line has splendid views of transportation. Roadways...

And waterways.

It still has some grittiness.

Hold on to your hats urban archaeology fans, the developers are coming!

The original High Line was an infrastructure project from the First Great Depression. So it is, perhaps, appropriate that its new life ushers in faster change for the Meat Packing District.

A clever sign, if slightly contradictory, says, "Keep it Wild. Stay on the Paths."

The plantings evoke a wild landscape, weeds growing out of the rails, with grasses, forbs and native plants. Bloom and texture among the salvaged tracks with a gravel topdressing.

The benches play off the shape and color of the tracks.

Come up for a stroll. Soon.

Other People's Gardens

2009-06-10T03:05:00.000-07:00

It is garden tour season, and this year I've indulged in several. Opening a garden to scads of visitors is a terrifying experience, but visiting is a sweet pleasure. Someone else has done the weeding, planted the containers, deadheaded the roses. It is vaguely decadent, balanced on the tightrope between inquisitive and nosy.

Come, let's peek...

A formal garden with lettuce used as an edging plant. The edible landscape goes high end.

An undulating line for a flagstone walk and boxwood hedge. Simple but so effective.

A massing of boxwood and alchemilla makes a statement for a formal entrance.

Where do they put the banana trees in the winter?

A stunning long view.

Punctuated by a perfect pot of sempervivum (hens and chicks).

My favorite herb garden, on a sunny front stoop.

But it's hard to beat a mature stand of specimen trees. If you look closely, you can see the Dove Tree (Davidia involucrata) in bloom.

Time for tea.

Real Gardeners of New Jersey

2009-05-13T03:48:00.000-07:00

Last night Bravo premiered Real Housewives of New Jersey, a reality TV series featuring big hair, bigger boobs and biggest houses. Shall we subtitle it, "Channelling Carmella Soprano"? As an alternate take on the Garden State, allow me to offer some real gardeners:

Cheryl weeding at the Cross Estate Garden.

Mary and Frank helping at the Watnong Plant Sale.

Kay visiting Leonard J. Buck Garden.

Jonne promoting "Trash into Treasures" at Van Vleck House & Gardens' Springfest.

The Garden Club of Morristown in front of the restoration of Miss Caroline Foster's Cottage Garden at Fosterfields Living Historical Farm, which they helped to fund (and I designed and, with lots of assistance, planted.)

And yours truly, in Yolanda's photo of the plant sale which she titled, "Old McDowell Had a Farm." Dad McDowell would have said "Grinnin' like a mule eatin' briars."

And what have Jersey gardeners been doing this season? This one has been teaching, doing designs for clients, madly working on various projects, and, as Mom McDowell would have said, "Burning the candle at both ends." Lucky the days are getting longer! In my own garden I have been growing on heirloom tomato seedlings. (They've now graduated to gallon pots on the patio.) Surely you've heard of Jersey tomatoes...

Capturing a few early bulbs for the kitchen table.

Inhaling the scent of Narcissus 'Geranium.'

Enjoying the bubbling over of Spring, including the first bloom of Epimedium x warleyense 'Orange Queen' tucked next to a piece of Jersey's own red sandstone.

And already thinking about the daffodils to order for the fall, a hazard of volunteering at the Regional Daffodil Show at Frelinghuysen Arboretum.

Real gardeners of New Jersey may have too many plants, but they never have enough.

Mom Wasn't a Gardener

2009-04-03T05:39:00.000-07:00

Fifty years ago I was confident of my uniqueness. I had a successful career, a recently acquired graduate degree and a new and exciting man in my life. This morning in the Shop Rite parking lot as I bent over to pick up a penny, I thought, “There I go again. Just like Mom.”

As my 50^th birthday stretches behind me like a late afternoon shadow, I am somewhat reluctantly acknowledging that the person I see in the mirror is turning into my distaff parent.

My mother, Mary Catherine Ryan McDowell, was from central Illinois, “downstate” if you are a Chicagoan. Lincoln was her home, a rural county seat with a central square and domed courthouse whose namesake visited repeatedly as a circuit-riding attorney. Her Irish father delivered laundry and later drove the milk truck for his brother-in-laws’ dairy. Her German mother baked the best cakes in town, and sometimes sold her angel food cakes to help satisfy some of the extra wants of her son and four daughters. My mother was the firstborn. And while I was the youngest in my family, raised in Northern New Jersey rather than the Land O’ Lincoln, it is my mother into whom I am morphing.

When she was a girl, Mom had three wishes: to become a teacher, to travel, and to own a fur coat. While she taught children in a one-room schoolhouse; I have always taught adults, but we were both teachers. She and my father met in San Francisco, and they always loved to go places; I readily yield to wanderlust. And while her coat was mink-dyed muskrat and mine is thrift-store mink, I do have something furry hanging in my closet.

My love of thrift shops is genetic, though I think that my mother’s ultimate thriftiness must have skipped a generation or at least skipped me. She may have invented the “Reduce-Recycle-Reuse” mantra, or if not, she was an expert practitioner. My friends still don’t believe that every year we carefully plucked the strands of tinsel off the Christmas tree and laid them flat in magazines to be reused the next December. And yet when I find myself fishing out my teabag so that can I steep two cups out of one, it does make me wonder. Just as well, in these economic times, that I remember those lessons.

Having grown up during the first Great Depression, Mom’s fiscal nature was hardly surprising. Nor was her small, well-used collection of Depression glass: assorted plates and dessert dishes in patterns like “Blue Bubble.” She acquired them, she told us, at the movie theater, emphasizing that in Lincoln it was called the “the-A-ter.” At a nickel a shot, it was a bargain that enhanced the daily shows. I loved eating out of these fairy tale dishes, and when I was old enough to go antiquing I started buying look-a-likes for my own kitchen. I added her pieces to mine after we lost her to ovarian cancer. Too soon, too soon.

When my sisters and I were clearing out the family home, one of the tasks was recycling her vast array of jars. A good jar had potential. It could store so many things, from buttons to leftovers. It could mix flour and water for gravy or dressing for salad. Jar labels were soaked off. Bristling clean, they were arranged by size in the cabinet under the sink. These days, in spite of a healthy supply of plastic containers, it is still hard for me to pass up a good jar. Standing at the sink, scraping away at some label, I wonder, “Why do manufacturers have to use such strong glue?”

Inheritance is Crazy Glue. Let’s face it. You might have Dr. Pretty abbreviate your nose or bolster your breasts. You might get pierced, painted or permed. It just doesn’t matter. My husband likes to say that fifty percent of the things you do, you do to spite your parents, fifty percent you do to please them, and the rest is your own free will. Even post-therapy, post-meditation, post-medication, a girl’s still going to turn into her mother.

Being able to differentiate among various maternal qualities is key. I can choose not to be a back seat driver if I really concentrate. Some days I can avoid being critical. But I can also remember that it is better to finish a book than the housework. That an outing to the grocery store can be an event. That your favorite clothes are also your most comfortable. That while aging is inevitable, whitening hair and softly lined skin, can be beautiful. That I might as well concentrate on staying active rather than the fact that the veins on my legs are starting to look like a Blue Highways road map.

I think that my mother left me a road map. While Paul Simon thought up fifty ways to leave your lover, I don’t think that you really can leave the ways you are like your mother. You just need to figure out your own routes and detours and destinations.

The Bad Mother

2009-04-02T17:31:00.001-07:00

Here at 29 Pine, everything is popping in the perennial border. Yes they are precious; yes, I could wax poetic, but some days I want to say, "Who are all of you, anyway?"

So let's raise our glasses to Dorothy Parker who penned those immortal words, "Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants."

Sap Rises

2009-03-30T12:09:00.000-07:00

Bacchus gets a bad rap. The god of fermentation inspired so much frenzy that the word "bacchanal" is now a direct substitute for "drunken frenzy." Being more-or-less a teetotaler, I object. Bacchus, a.k.a Dionysus, was also the god of growth, of life force rising up through plants. This time of year, sap rises by a miracle of reverse osmosis, a gravity-defying feat performed, in the case of deciduous woody plants, without leaves.

Herbaceous perennials are breaking dormancy.

The early flowering trees are breaking bud.

The earliest flowers are breaking into a landscape of brown, like these little reticulated iris called "Harmony."

And ideas are breaking into my mind for new work, new words and new gardening projects.

Emily Dickinson must have felt it too. In April, 1862 she sent a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, with enclosing four unsolicited poems as a sample of her work. It was a cold call, the hardest way to have your work evaluated. I wish I could capture Higginson's thoughts as he read the opening of her letter. "Mr Higginson, Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?"

Here is one of the poems she included:

I'll tell you how the Sun rose -

A Ribbon at a time -

The Steeples swam in Amethyst -

The news like squirrels ran -

The hills untied their Bonnets -

The Bobolinks - begun -

Then I said softly to myself -

"That must have been the Sun."!

But how he set - I know not -

There seemed a purple stile

Which little Yellow boys and girls

Were climbing all the while -

Till when they reached the other side -

A Dominie in Gray -

Put gently up the evening Bars -

And led the flock away -

Thanks to Vicki Lane, Emily Dickinson and Bacchus for inspiring this post.

Digging is Underrated

2009-03-29T15:41:00.000-07:00

Do you ever feel like you do all of your gardening at the keyboard? It's that stretch from Christmas to St. Patrick's Day that seems endless. Now that the ground has finally thawed out enough to submerge the tines of the spading fork, we can all go back to the best physical and mental therapy. There is a substantial reason why calm folks are called "grounded."

My favorite gardening e-newsletter, the Old Bulbs Gazette arrived earlier this month. Scott Kunst, gardener and writer, always comes up with some new goodies. This time he introduced a new singer-songwriter, Karen Savoca, and her song, "In the Dirt." The lyrics are so good, I copy them here in their entirely. It has a melody to match. You can buy it on iTunes for just $.99. For the real dirt, see www.karensavoca.com

Dig on!

gonna dig down in the dirt
get it all over my skin
sleep real well and up with the birds
do it all over again
        dig down dig down
        way way down in the ground

gonna dig down in the dirt
feel it between my toes
gonna find out what every farmer knows
there down in the dirt
        dig down dig down
        way way down in the ground

gonna dig down in the dirt
plant good things to eat
gonna heel it in with my own two feet
way down in the dirt
        dig down dig down
        way way down in the ground

gonna dig down in the dirt
where all the good things grow
gonna have a long talk with mother earth
she knows how to soothe my soul
        dig down dig down
        way way down in the ground

whatcha gonna do when you've had enough
        when the bills pile up
        when the water's too deep
        when the hill's too steep
                dig down dig down

whatcha gonna do with a head full of bees
        when you're tired of sayin' please
        when the motor won't run
        when you're feelin' done
                dig down dig down

whatcha gonna do when the baby can't sleep
        when you're too tired to weep
        in a world full of schemes
        to remember your dreams
                dig down dig down

New Season, New Name

2009-03-22T07:38:00.000-07:00

Ah Spring, and the sap rises. With it, new growth and thus a change in blog title. Something a bit edgier? With a bit more personality peeking through.

Chickweeds germinated as a blog title, fertilized by several sources. When I left my corporate job at Prudential (almost 10 years ago!) planning a switch to horticulture, a friend sent out invitations to a farewell party labeled "From Leading to Weeding." I love to weed. Well, I should say, I love to weed in Spring. It gets you up close to your soil, to emerging perennials and annuals.

I found other affinities with Chickweeds, beyond the pun factor. Stellaria media, is a European import, as are my people. It is a cool weather annual, putting on most of its growth in spring and dying out in the dog days of summer, about when my enthusiasm for weeding flags. Chickweed is edible; so add it to salads though it may not be to everyone's taste. Stellaria is from the Latin for 'star.' Based on its white flowers it is a small star indeed.

So welcome to Chickweeds and Happy Spring. I've imported the blog archive, but look for new posts here!

Vernally yours,

Marta McDowell

a.k.a. Chickweeds

(Photo by Curtis Clark, source: wikicommons)