GreenPrints 100

WINTER 2O15

No. 1OO $6.OO

GREEN R PRINTS “THE WEEDER’S DIGEST”

G

REEN

P

RINTS

2

#1OO

W

INTER

3

2O15

G

REEN

P

RINTS

4

#1OO

W

INTER

5

2O15

G

REEN

P

RINTS

6

#1OO

00th the 1

At The Gate!

GP#1 COVER ART BY JAY KELLY

I tell you, I could just cry. Honestly, I am stunned. The idea of publishing 100 issues—of creating this little “Weeder’s Digest” for 25 years—never once crossed my mind in 1989. I’d lost my job at a “real” magazine and didn’t want to move my family or myself, so I decided to start a magazine that would focus on the human side of gardening. (There was no way I could compete with all the how-to garden mags out there.) It was an idea, but scarcely a plan.

And 25 years later, I’m still doing it?!

I am incredibly blessed. And grateful. Grateful to Susan and Franklin Sides, without whose labors Year One would have been Year Done. To the writers who’ve shared their wisdom, heart, and wit—especially long-time Contributing Editors Diana Wells, Mike McGrath, and Becky Rupp. To the artists, whose glorious, creative illustrations bring our stories to life. To our advertisers.

(Please, please support our advertisers—they are great folks with wonderful wares—and tell them GP sent you!)

Mostly, of course, I am grateful to you, the readers. Without your love for gardening, this little quarterly would not exist. We need and appreciate you, every one. (And, yes, we need more of you: Give holiday subscriptions. They start with this special issue!)

I have worked very hard on GP#100. It includes pieces (like the Mark Twain) I have been saving for years. It has extra pages, with so many special stories I can’t begin to describe them all. And it has a theme, one appropriate for the occasion and for all gardening: time.

Thank you. Bless you. Enjoy. And let’s all keep on growing, Pat Stone, Editor 7

G

REEN

P

RINTS

8

#1OO

W

INTER

2O15

Summer, 2014: The entire Stone clan reunites at Isle of Palms, SC. REENPRINTS, “The Weeder’s Digest,”™ is brought to you by Pat (Editor, pat@greenprints.com) and Becky (Circulation, becky@greenprints.com) Stone and Circulation Assistant Julie Wander, with loving encouragement from Nate, Jesse, Sammy, and Tucker Stone (828/628-5452; www.greenprints.com). Contributing Editors: Mike McGrath, Diana Wells, and Becky Rupp. Contents © 2014 by GREENPRINTS®. Allow four to six weeks for subscription fulfillment. Please notify us when you change your address! Writer’s Guidelines (also Artist’s) available at website or by mail (send Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope). Submissions are read in Nov., Feb., May, and Aug. (send SASE).

GREENPRINTS® (ISSN 1064-0118) is published quarterly by GreenPrints Enterprises, 23 Butterrow Cove, Fairview, NC 28730.

Subscriptions are $22.97 for four issues ($26 to Canada and Mexico. $32 to England. U.S. Funds only) from GREENPRINTS, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730. Periodicals postage paid at Fairview, NC, and at additional mailing offices.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to GREENPRINTS, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730.

Cover No. 100 by Christina Hess 9

Julie

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Susan Portman: “I am a middleaged, married, liberal, reformedattorney gardener. My garden is certified both as a Texas SmartScape Laurel Radomski: WI’s Laurel hates and a wildlife habitat.” Susan has Jack pines and admits that she’s a been in GP# 88, 89, 91, 94, and 95! bit of a rabid gardener. Need proof?

Read her hilarious “Gardenitis” in Donna Gardner: From Baldwin GP#95!

City, KS: “I am a professional horticulturalist who has managed a Garth Nix: Garth is a prominent greenhouse and been a TV and radio Australian writer who specialises in gardening host. But this is my first children’s and young adult fantasy freelance submission.” novels, notably the Old Kingdom, Seventh Tower, and Keys to the King- LaVerne Otis: Bellflower, CA’s Ladom series. verne has had stories in GP# 81, 85, 90, 93, and 99. The one in #90 told of Marianne Willburn: Freelance gar- the time she was stuck in her garden den columnist (smalltowngardener. smalltowngardener for hours—on her stomach! smalltowngardener. com) Marianne lives in Lovettsville, VA, where she tends a garden, Mary Whitsell: Wh “I am an American chickens, bees, and children. expatriate living in Scotland. Until I started gardening a few years ago, Hermine Robinson: “I live in West- I always imagined I’d be a natural ern Canada, where winters are long. at it. I have learned otherwise.”

From spring to fall, I work as a gar- Mary’s wit has appeared in GP#91, dener for a landscaping company. 93, 95, and 97.

The rest of the time, I write.”

Rachel Lancashire: From EnnisChristine Webb: Kalamazoo, MI’s more, Ontario: “I am a fish and Christine teaches middle-school wildlife technologist, and would English and environmental science. rather be outside surrounded by She did not inherit her grandmoth- green than anywhere else. I have er’s green thumb, but did raise two gardened since I was old enough cacti once in Nevada! to hold a shovel.”

B U D S

C R E D I T S

“Kind Deeds” (p. 19) sent in by Diane H. Toomoth of Neosho, MO. “Small Planet” (p. 71) sent in by Pierrette ierrette L. W Wing of Spokane, WA. “Doing Better” (p. 95) sent in by Diane Kunde of Belleville, WA. Contribute your favorite garden quote to“Buds.” If we use it, we’ll give you a year’s subscription.

10

HEATHER GRAHAM

Contributors

W

INTER

2O15

GreenPrints

Winter, 2O15 #1OO

Encora Imparo .............................................................................................................. 16

By Laurel Radomski Three Roses ................................................................................................................... 20

By Garth Nix Full Circle ...................................................................................................................... 28

By Marianne Willburn Recollections ................................................................................................................. 34

By Diana Wells Four Covers! .................................................................................................................. 38

By Pat Stone The Future of Gardening ........................................................................................... 44

By Anthony Tesselaar How I Edited an Agricultural Paper ........................................................................ 46

By Mark Twain Peace Lily ....................................................................................................................... 56

By Hermine Robinson Better and Better........................................................................................................... 58

By Becky Rupp Flower Fairies ............................................................................................................... 62

By Christine Webb In Time ........................................................................................................................... 64

By Susan Portman The Fish Bowl ............................................................................................................... 68

By Donna Gardner The Ten-Day T Tree ......................................................................................................... 72

By Mike McGrath My Hummingbird Helper ......................................................................................... 80

By LaVerne Otis Hard on the Ego ............................................................................................................ 82

By Mary Whitsell Growing Up with GreenPrints, Part I ..................................................................... 86

By Nate Stone Ducks in My Gard Garden................................................................................................... 92

By Rachel Lancashire Breaking Ground ......................................................................................................... 96

By Pat Stone

11

MAKE IT A GREENPRINTS XMA MAS S! God’s Word for Gordener’s Bible

A complete, lovely, truly informative, beautifully written, and deeply reverent devotional Bible—for gardeners! Hardback.

Item #A039 $34.99

GREENPRINTS Notecards!

w!

Ne

The Gardener’s Year

n k i !!! c Ba rint P

The Signature of All Things

This little-known gem is my absolute all-time favorite garden read.

Karel Capek’s joyous, lyrical, 1929 classic is a true hyacinth for the soul. Paperback.

Item #A001 $14.95

An exquisitely written, very moving—and very surprising!—novel about an American woman moss botanist in the 1880s. Hardback.

Item #A037 $28.95

Down the Garden Path

in ck t! a B Prin in ck t! a B Prin

The first of Beverley Nichols’s hysterical, passionate, unique, and justly famous gardening books. A classic from 1932. Hardback.

Item #A025 $24.95

How Carrots Won The Trojan War

arding! w A inn W

My Garden Doctor

n k i t! c BaPrin

Elizabeth & Her German Garden

Much-loved, but long out of print, this 1898 classic tells of a female aristocrat trapped by life but freed by her garden.

Enrapturing. Paperback.

Item #A004 $15.95

A fascinating collection of odd but true facts & stories about common vegetables. By GP Contributing Editor Becky Rupp. Paperback.

Item #A034 $14.95

Eight Beautiful Full-Color Notecards (with env.), two each of four great past covers, covering all four seasons. $15.95 Item #A040

Francis Duncan’s longforgotten 1913 classic about an ailing New England woman healed by gardening is finally back in print!!

A great gift! Paperback.

Item #A031 $14.95

The Essential Earthman

n k i t! c BaPrin

BACK AT LAST! The famous first collection (1981) of Henry Mitchell’s biting, witty, and wise Washington Post garden columns! A true classic! Paperback.

Item #A015 $20.00

One Man’s Garden The second collection of the irrepressible—and irresistible—Mitchell’s work. Belongs in every literate gardener’s library! 91 essays.

Paperback.

Item #A016 $17.95

MC/V/D Phone Orders: 1-800-569-0602 Internet Orders: www.greenprints.com

Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul

d!

e ign

S

IT’S HERE! 101 of the most moving, funny, and inspirational gardening stories ever collected.

Coedited by Pat Stone.

Paperback.

Item #A020 $12.95 Audiobook #A021 $9.95

Weeder’s Digest

!

ed

n Sig

Plant Whatever Brings You Joy

Merry Hall Beverly Nichols, the funniest British garden writer of his generation, is back in print! His passionate gardenmaking makes delightful reading! Hardback.

Item #A013 $24.95

Going to Seed

52 wonderful & winsome prose poems about gardening. Exquisite snapshots of garden experience.

A great gift!

Item #A030 $14.95

This remarkable anthology contains the 40 absolute best pieces from the first 5 years of GREENPRINTS magazine —with over 60 illustrations! Paperback.

Item #A002 $15.95

A lifetime’s worth of heartwarming and poignant stories that share “Blessed Wisdom from the Garden.”

Paperback.

Item #A038 $19.95

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

A remarkable chronicle of a bedridden woman’s life with a wild snail as her companion.

Hardback.

Item #A032 $18.95

The Roots of My Obsession

30 Great Gardeners tell the stories of why they garden. Fascinating. Paperback.

Item #A035 $14.95

Mail orders to: GreenPrints, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730 Quan. Item # Title

Payment: Check Enclosed MC/Visa/Dis

Unit Price Amount

SubTotal 7% Sales Tax (NC residents only) S&H ($3.00 for one item; $5.00 for two or more) GRAND TOTAL

_______________________________ number

_______ exp. date

____________________ daytime phone #

MC/V/D Phone Orders: 1-800-569-0602 Internet Orders: www.greenprints.com

G

REEN

P

RINTS

14

#1OO

W

INTER

15

2O15

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Encora Imparo Words to live—and garden—by.

By Laurel Radomski Me: “Honey, can you cut down that ugly pine tree in the back yard, please?”

He: “Sure, no problem.”

Me: “Honey, please cut down the ugly tree.”

He: “Yeah. It’s on my list.”

Me: “When are you going to cut that tree down?”

He: “I’m getting to it.” his conversation took place over a period of several weeks.

Eventually, I realized I would have to take matters into my own hands. So one day when Ed was at work, I went looking for a weapon. I saw the old chainsaw Ed’s father had given him. Now I’m not real smart, but I’m not real stupid, either. I knew that if I attempted to use that heavy, temperamental chainsaw, I was more likely to cut off a body part than a tree limb. So I went with the next biggest saw I could find in the garage—a keyhole saw. That tree was coming down even if I had to cut it one twig at a time.

By the time Ed came home from work, I had trimmed off all the branches I could reach. The tree was still standing, but at least it was a lot slimmer! Ed took one look at me, went to the garage, and revved up the chainsaw. One swipe—and the pine was down.

“Why didn’t you tell me you wanted that tree cut down?”

He said. hus began my foray into gardening.

I knew when we moved into the house that I wanted to 16

W

INTER

2O15

be able to look out any window and see all manner of flowers and foliage. Considering that we had bought a house on a barren lot (if you don’t count the Jack pine trees), my dream appeared to be just that: a dream. However, after that first tree came down, I got to work. All I needed to do was scrape the sod off of the area where I wanted a garden and plant, right? Never mind that we had sand for soil, that I had never read a gardening magazine or book, and that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I was pretty sure it couldn’t be that difficult.

I chose a spot, removed the sod, and transplanted some ditch lilies—which, of course, grew quite well, because ditch lilies grow anywhere. I felt victorious!

I started ordering from every garden catalog I got, taking little note of zones or water needs or growing conditions. Every new 17

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

and wonderful plant I read about, I had to have.

I’m not going to mention how much money I lost to my dream.

And that’s just the plants! Every spin-ny, flower-y, bug-gy, sil-ly garden ornament the stores sold showed up in my gardens.

It looked like a dollar store had thrown up in my yard.

But I persisted. I started reading gardening magazines and books. I learned about amending the soil, compost, zones, and growing needs—all the important things a successful gardener needs to know. As the garden grows, so does the gardener, they say. I’m here to say the reverse is equally true.

Twelve years later, the cheap tacky stuff is all gone, and I am slowly finding my voice in the gardens that surround my house.

Each year, I get rid of more grass and replace it with more color.

I subscribe to the wabi-sabi Japanese theory that there is beauty in imperfection. I like rustic, handmade, repurposed garden art.

If something breaks or rots, that’s fine. Nothing lasts forever, nor is it meant to. My gardens are not perfect by any means. Perfect is perfectly boring.

I work in a factory. Everything there feels gray. When I drive onto my street at the end of the day, I see perfectly clipped lawns, all the same, monotonous green. I can see my own oasis half a block away—because it has a veritable riot of color. Armillaries stand tall, with clematis, American bittersweet, roses, and wisteria twining up, around, and through them. Miscanthus with their lovely seed heads wave in the breeze, much like my gray hair waves at me in the mirror each morning. Popcorn and gourds mingle with cosmos, lilies, sea holly, and blanket flowers. Even in winter, my garden catches the eye. Cardinals, blue jays, finches, woodpeckers, and other birds feast on the beautiful rose hips and the orange and red bittersweet seeds. The snow rests on the armillaries and frosts the dark brown twigs of the Diablo Ninebarks.

These are words said by Michelangelo in his 87th year. Words painted on a chair in my garden.

Words I live by. ❖ 18

BUDS

HEATHER GRAHAM

Kind hearts are the gardens, Kind thoughts are the roots, Kind words are the blossoms, Kind deeds are the fruits. 窶認rom From a 19th centur century primary schoolbook 19

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Three Roses his is the story of a gardener who grew the most beautiful single rose the world had ever seen. It was a black rose, which was unlikely, and it grew the whole year round, which was impossible.

Hearing of this rose, the King decided to see it for himself. With his entourage, he rode for seven days to the gardener’s simple cottage. On the morning of the seventh day, he arrived and saw the rose. It was even more beautiful than the King had imagined, and he wanted it.

“How did you come to grow such a beautiful rose?” the King 20

ILLUSTRATIONS BY P. SAVAGE

A tale of love. By Garth Nix

W

INTER

2O15

asked the gardener, who was standing silently by.

“I planted that rose on the day my wife died,” replied the gardener, looking only at the flower. “It is a true, deep black, the very color of her hair. The rose grew from my love of her.”

The King turned to his servants and said, “Uproot this rosebush and take it to the pal“Uproot this ace. It is too beautiful for anyone but me.”

But when the rosebush was transplanted rosebush and to the palace, it lasted only a year before it take it to the withered and died. The King, who had gazed palace. It is too upon it every day, angrily decided that it was the gardener’s fault, and he set out at once beautiful for to punish him. anyone but me.”

But when he arrived at the gardener’s cottage, he was amazed to see a new rosebush growing there, with a single rose. But this rose was green, and even more beautiful 21

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

than the Black rose.

The King once again asked the gardener how he came to grow such a beautiful rose.

“I planted this rose on the anniversary of my wife’s death,” said the gardener, his eyes only on the rose. “It is the color of her eyes, which I looked into every morning. The rose grew from my love of her.”

“Take it!” commanded the King, and he turned away to ride the seven days back to his palace. Such a beautiful flower was not fit for a common man.

The green rose bloomed for two years, and the King looked upon it every day, for it brought him great contentment. Then, one morning, it was dead, the bush withered, the petals fallen to the ground. The King picked up the petals and spoke to no one for two days. Then he said, as if to convince himself, “The gardener

From the Author I wrote this story the day before I needed to read something at an event in Melbourne in late 1997. The occasion was the annual celebration organized by Australian children’s literature champion Agnes Nieuwenhuizen for librarians, teachers, and book aficionados, and this one was entitled “An Enchanted Evening.” Half a dozen authors were to speak, each reading or telling a story about love or in some way related to love.

I don’t know why I wrote a story about a dead wife, since at that time I was single, I had never been married, nor have I ever had a significant partner die. I also don’t know why it came out as a fable or fairy tale. Part of it was written on a plane, and part in a hotel room. It wasn’t even typed when I read it for the first time at “An Enchanted Evening.”

But it surely was a tale of love, and the evening was indeed enchanted, as I met my future wife, Anna, there. So perhaps it is the most important story I have ever written, for the greatest reward.

22

W

INTER

2O15

will have another rose.”

So once again he rode off with his entourage. This time, they took a spade and the palace jardinier.

Such was the King’s impatience that they rode for half the nights as well as days, but there were wrong turns and flooded bridges, and it still took seven days before he once again rode up to the gardener’s cottage. And there was a new rosebush, with a single rose. A red rose, so beautiful that the King’s men were struck silent and the King himself could only stare and gesture to the palace jardinier to take it away.

Even though the King didn’t ask, the gardener spoke before the spade broke the earth around the bush.

“I planted this rose three years after the death of my wife,” he said. “It is the color of her lips, which I first kissed under a Harvest Moon on the hottest of summer nights. This rose grew from my love of her.”

The King seemed not to hear but kept staring at the rose. Finally, he tore his gaze away and turned his horse for home.

The jardinier watched him go and stopped digging for a moment.

“Your roses are the most beautiful I have ever seen,” he said.

“They could only grow from a great love. But why grow them only to have these memories taken from you?”

The gardener smiled and said, “I need nothing to remind me of my wife. When I walk alone under the night sky, I see the blackness of her hair. When the light catches the green glass of a bottle, I see her eyes. When the sun is setting all red against the hills and the wind touches my cheek, I feel her kiss.

“I grew the first rose because I was afraid I might forget. When it was gone, I knew that I had lost nothing. No one can take the memory of my love.”

The jardinier frowned, and he began to cut again with his spade.

Then he asked, “But why do you keep growing the roses?”

“I grow them for the King,” said the gardener. “He has no memories of his own, no love. And after all, they are only flowers.” ❖ Copyright ©2000 by Garth Nix. First published in “Eidolon” Issue #29/30. Reprinted by permission of Jill Grinberg Literary Agency, LLC on behalf of the Proprietor.

23

G

REEN

P

RINTS

24

#1OO

W

INTER

2O15

LETTERS TO GREENPRINTS

I’m always grateful to hear from readers. Write me at GREENPRINTS, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730 or email pat@greenprints.com.

the magazine’s readers. We in gardening-related businesses are among the luckiest people in the world: We are privileged to offer people so much pleasure and satisfaction.

—Renee Shepherd Renee’s Garden

This issue marks the first one in our 25th Anniversary Year. If you have something to say about GREENPRINTS on this occasion, please send it in. I’d love to share it in a Letters page this year.—Pat Dear Pat and the whole GREENPRINTS family, My heartiest congratulations on this special anniversary!

I’ve looked forward to every issue since the beginning and always recommend G REENPRINTS to gardeners at every level!

I really like holding the journal in my hands—it is obviously so carefully and lovingly produced. While I enjoy all the stories, among my favorites are the latest report on the GREENP RINTS family’s adventures.

And I especially look for the funny pieces—particularly the regular column where people share their mistakes. I can always relate to them!

It does my heart good to see how much gardening means to

Renee is the owner and creator of Renee’s Garden and, as far as I’ll always be concerned, the official patron saint of GREENPRINTS. Early on, she offered to let me insert a flyer in 80,000 of her seed company’s orders—for free! It singlehandedly got this mag off the ground.

A quarter of a century ago, I was stuck at home with three young children in the tiny town of Enumclaw, WA, near the Cascade mountains. Your first edition of GREENPRINTS was a breath of fresh air in my rural mailbox. Somebody understood there was a lot more to gardening than the end product! I was thrilled to recommend this new style of magazine to the readers 25

G

REEN

P

RINTS

of my weekly garden column.

I will never forget getting to meet and watch you perform with your wife Becky at a convention years later. I knew then the not-so secret of your success—GREENPRINTS is authentic, genuine, and from the heart.

The more we all are bombarded with internet PR, advancing technology, and photo-shopped images, the more we all appreciate the articles, art, and heart in GREENPRINTS. I still get “thank you’s” from readers for suggesting a GREENPRINTS subscription at Christmas. Congratulations on your 25th anniversary—and Keep Growing!

—Marianne Binetti Enumclaw, WA

#1OO

and laughter . . . with a little music on the side!

With great admiration, —Becky and Brent Heath Brent and Becky’s Bulbs Brent and Becky are wonderfully kind and gracious people who have a beautiful bulb business. Brent breeds and lectures. Becky runs the show (and sings like a dove!).

Dear Pat and all the wonderful people at GREENPRINTS, Happy 25th! I just read over the letter I wrote for GP#1, 25 years ago. At the time, I said I hoped you’d become a literary legend. I think I called it, guys! You’ve done just what you started out to do and then some. It’s a joy and a privilege to write for you.

Now go crack out the champagne!

Many congratulations, Becky Rupp —Swanton, VT

Marianne is a dear—and a nationally known newspaper columnist, author of nine gardening books, and radio and TV personality.

Congratulations to Pat Stone and the family of GREENPRINTS on your 25th anniversary! You have helped to teach about God’s beautiful world, its plants, and how to make them happy—in a fun and humorous way. We look forward to another 25 years of knowledge through great stories, smiles,

Contributing Editor Becky is the insightful and wonderfully witty author of more than a dozen books for children and adults, including Weather!, How Carrots Won the Trojan War, and (my favorite) Red Oaks & Black Birches: The Science and Lore of Trees.

26

W

INTER

27

2O15

G

REEN

P

RINTS

28

#1OO

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Full Circle I was eighteen. How could I have guessed?

By Marianne Willburn ❖

❖

❖

ILLUSTRATIONS BY NICOLE TAMARIN

million years ago, when I didn’t know what the words “Olay Regenerist”* meant, I graduated from high school, hugged my parents tightly, and found myself sitting in San Francisco’s International Airport, waiting for a PanAm 747 to take me across the Atlantic to England, the country of my father’s youth. I had big plans to find a job, see the planet, and dangerously expand my horizons. First stop: London.

Sitting next to me at the busy gate was an old woman. ‘Old’ is a relative term when one is eighteen. She could have been forty . . . or seventy for that matter—I was far too young to make that determination. She asked me what my plans would be when I arrived, listened intently to my campaign strategies for world domination, and then With a gentle quietly told me the purpose of her trip.

Along with a group of gardening enthusmile, she said, siasts, she was going to tour gardens she had ”Someday it read about all her life—Sissinghurst, Hidcote, will be you Tintinhull, and many more whose names meant nothing to me. Private tours and besitting here, hind-the-scenes glimpses were promised, and you know.” her small group would even be given lunch by the (apparently) renowned Christopher Lloyd at his legendary garden of Great Dixter.

She was so excited, in an understated, middle-aged sort of way, that just talking about it started her flipping through the large picture book on her lap, holding up the odd photograph * It’s a best-selling, anti-aging moisturizer—your didn’t-know Editor.

29

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

and rummaging around for a notated map.

I was eighteen. At that time, and with a little coaching, I could just about tell the difference between a chrysanthemum and a rosebud—but that’s not to say I particularly wanted to. As long as I could remember, I’d watched my parents loiter amongst the lettuces—enough to know that what I was about to do was ‘exciting,’ and what she was about to do was anything but.

However, I had been raised with an English sense of propriety, and thus knew to listen intently, nod when she glanced at me, and behave with that sickly youthful indulgence I now recognize when teenage hipsters at the mall give me directions to JC Penney’s.

After chatting away for some time, I suppose she noticed that my very young eyes were beginning to glaze over, for she stopped, closed her book with a gentle smile, and said, “Someday it will be you sitting here, you know. If you have an interest in England, someday you will have an interest in her gardens.”

I was quiet, thoughtfully pondering her words while I flipped through the empty pages of my new passport. I could not quarrel that gardens weren’t lovely, but to spend precious money on a trip devoted to them? My secret love was Shakespeare, and the only ‘garden tour’ that I was interested in taking was exploring Stratford-upon-Avon with a sprig of rosemary tucked in my pocket.

But she was kind, and could see that for all my bravado, I was a little nervous of the task I had set myself. So she sat near me on the plane and we parted ways only when the wheels touched down on the black tarmac of Heathrow airport—she to start her pilgrimage, and I to start the adventure of a new life. wonder what she would have thought to have seen me 25 years later, waiting in a lay-over airport somewhere in the middle of Canada surrounded by tired children, McDonald’s wrappers, and carry-on luggage far too big to fit under my seat?

What would she think if she asked me where I was going, and I answered, never missing a beat, “To tour the great gardens of England”?

Would she ask me what I had done with the last twenty-five 30

W

INTER

2O15

years? If that adventure had panned out after all? If I’d seen the Mona Lisa and crossed the Mediterranean to caravan through the Western Desert? Or would she simply nod her head, look at the state of my nails and the soil-embedded hands, and quietly say . . . “I told you so.”

For in the end, she was right. A few years of temperate English summers, glorious hanging baskets, and weekends at National Trust gardens in an effort to flee the fabulously exhausting London metropolis, and I was My garden hooked on the crazy idea of growing things.

My urban windowboxes soon became patio has provided gardens; and with a move back to America, excitement in morphed into reclaimed suburban hell-strips ways I never and classic cottage potagers.

In time we moved to a country garden in could have Virginia, where English colonists once cleared dreamed. endless woods and sowed plants like linaria and verbascum—plants that still colonize my little lane and make me smile with their yellow cheerfulness during the dog days of summer.

And, sweetly contrary to the ‘life plan’ mused over in that airport so many years ago, in time that naïve eighteen-year-old not only became a gardener, she became a garden columnist. A person who joyfully does her best every week to communicate the deep pleasure that comes from pursuing a physical connection to the earth.

I did not give up the backpack without a struggle; but the observations made as a young woman of a nation devoted to this rewarding pastime certainly made me into the gardener I am now—a gardener with a passion for fifteen-foot deep borders and low-ice gin and tonics; and one who periodically finds herself in an international airport mapping out the best way to hit four gardens a day without provoking her family to mutinous acts. For those of you who are convinced that we travel a circular road in this life, I am here to tell you that I have personally come full circle.

Fortunately, the girl who was convinced she’d be eighteen and adventurous for the rest of her life picked the right profes31

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

sion. My garden has no idea whether I am eighteen or forty-three, and has quietly instilled in me a sense of contentment and a deep sense of place—providing excitement in ways I never could have dreamed.

How else can one describe the heart-skip that comes when a beloved zone-pushing gordonia throws out a sprig of new growth after a brutal winter? Or the thrill experienced upon finding an urbiniana dogwood in the markdown corner of a small Southern farmer’s market? Legs that once ran to catch a midnight ferry from Brindisi to Patras now run faster at the sight of overfilled clearance carts at my favorite nursery; and arms that hoisted my young body onto the back of double-decker buses and Eastern-bloc trolleys now dig holes for all the treasures found upon those racks.

What a shame it would be if life did not grant us this seasonal contrast—just as the garden does—offering us the “glad and sorry seasons” of Shakespeare as it flies. anAm ceased to exist twenty-three years ago. The trans-Atlantic jets have become 787s, and a lunch with Christopher Lloyd in his little kitchen at Great Dixter is merely a memory for those fortunate enough to have lived that bit of gardening history. To my great surprise, I find that my passport has been renewed three times since the afternoon I sat listening to a woman describe gardens with a sparkle in her gentle, middle-aged eyes.

Yet the gardens that inspired an ‘old’ woman to save her pennies and board a bus tour twenty-five years ago continue to inspire another generation of gardeners . . . and no doubt bore the life out of another generation-someday-to-be. With a little encouragement, however, there is every reason to believe that these young people might also find themselves bemusedly looking back upon 25, 50, or 75 years of getting their hands in the dirt—quietly joining those lucky men and women whose continuous relationship with the garden allows them to embrace each season of their lives.

There we are young. There we are old. There “we in it shall be remember’d.”

We few, we happy few, we band of . . . gardeners. ❖ 32

W

INTER

33

2O15

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Recollections GREENPRINTS and I have grown together for 24 years. By Diana Wells ❖

❖

When I was a child in England, we used to spend our vacations in a small village on the coast of the Isle of Wight. I loved wandering around the village looking at the different gardens. Many of the residents were retirees who gave their little red-brick houses names such as Dunworkin, Last Port, Erzanmine, and the like. Looking at the gardens, you could Elisabeth Woodburn, tell a lot about their owners. There was one GP#5 with a miniature railway line (a retired engineer?). Others had meticulous graveled walkways and spare flowers in neat rows. A few had fairies and gnomes, tiny waterfalls and plaster toadstools—reflecting perhaps dreams of magic lands unknown. Some were bare with nothing more than a dog kennel and a few balls.

A garden tells so much about the gardener—and I am no exception. But, of course, When I first over the years, my garden has changed as much as myself and my life. For the past 24 wrote for Pat, years, I’ve shared many of these changes we both had with you, GREENPRINTS readers. small children.

I started writing for GREENPRINTS by accident. It was when my much-loved menNow we’re both tor, owner of Elisabeth Woodburn books, grandparents. suddenly died in November, 1990. She had always been good to me. When I tentatively showed her my manuscript, Making an English Garden in Pennsylvania, she had done her best to help me publish it. Those were the days of Alan Lacey, 34

BARBARA NUSSDORFER-EBLEN, JEAN JENKINS, PETER LOEWER, ANDREW SUDKAMP, KATHERINE SHIMADA, P. SAVAGE & BLANCHE DERBY

❖

W

INTER

2O15

Eleanor Perenyi, and Henry Mitchell, all known to Elisabeth—but in spite of her belief in me, publishers weren’t about to take on an unknown Englishwoman trying (unsuccessfully) to emulate the lush gardens of her youth. The book was never published.

Elisabeth was, however, with me after all.

When she died, I wrote a tribute to her and, raw writer that I was, I sent copies to four gardening magazines simultaneously. Three of them accepted it! Your Editor was the first, sending by return mail an acceptance accompanied by a huge (to my novice eyes) check for $50! When the acceptance from a prestigious international Plants Behind English garden magazine Glass, GP#12 arrived by the next mail (with a proposed fee many times that of dear Pat’s), it was too late. They regretfully could not accept an article already taken—albeit by a very new little magazine in North Carolina!

Well, Elisabeth must really have been watching over me. The British publication has long been out of business and GREENPRINTS, Pat, and I have marched onwards hand in hand—for 24 years! From Rare Courage, a GREENPRINTS piece (“Rare GP#16 Courage” in GP#16) came, in 1993, a book contract [Diana’s best-selling 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names] that led to another and two more after that.

When I first wrote for Pat, we both had small children. Now we’re both grandparents—a few times over. Those early garden stories often inAre Gardeners cluded my children: my little boy’s lemon tree Good?, GP#21 grown from a pip and left for me to look after.

Or the Mother’s Day plant, seemingly nourished only by the letters “I Love You, Mom” on the too-small plastic pot, where it 35

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

miraculously survived for longer than seemed possible. That article included a letter from me to Pat: “I trimmed this piece three times, as well as pruning all my shrubbery this week. My desk is littered with dying bits of story that were branching out of flowering delicious little secrets there’s no space for.”

It’s been a long time since I could prune shrubbery for a week—if at all. Those early stories were about A Prayer of Harvest having too many T Thanks, GP#27 tomatoes or zucchini, about replanting and expanding flowerbeds, about experimenting with rare plants and making a white garden, and about growing organic vegetables refused by my sharp-eyed children when (inevitably) they found the odd caterpillar on their plates. I have only two tomato In T The Pink, plants these days, GP#34 for there are only two of us left at home (well, three, counting the dog), when once I used to cook supper for six every night of my life.

So the years have gone by. There have been death and Parsley and birth in my life and Caterpillars, GP#65 in the garden, too.

There have been worries—war in the world and in the garden, too. There have been passions, from plastic flamingos (temporary) to beautiful trees (now far taller than I). Both I and my garden have aged: It’s easy to see just by looking at either of us. Yes the trees are taller, but Sitting in The so also are the weeds.

Garden, GP#77 Sure, my garden isn’t neat, but I do 36

W

INTER

2O15

have many, many self-seeded beauties that wouldn’t have had a chance if I weeded properly. Foxgloves pop up everywhere. Monarda and cardinal flower have taken over whole areas. There are less desirable self-seeders there, too. I’m still learning from my garden: Tolerance self-sows and flowers into beauty, in life and in the garden. And after all, I’m not perfect, either. I, too, could do with a bit of pruning and weeding . . .

Pat, stalwart friend, only refused one article ever (and I put it into a book later!), but, of course, we didn’t always agree.

Repetitions, He sometimes took liberties—yes, he did!

GP#83 Sometimes I left the piece a little too long so he could “enjoy” cutting it. If he changed things too much, I objected. We argued. We worked it out. We remained friends.

We have only met twice, many years ago, and no doubt we’ve both changed since then. He’s never seen my garden, and probably won’t. I know that, one way or another, GREENPRINTS and I, my garden and I, will have to part, as indeed, sooner or later, we all have to leave what we love. But Houseplants, enough of that!

GP#84 We’ve made it for over 20 years, GREENPRINTS, my garden, Pat, and I. Let’s hope we can all go on a while longer. Whatever is to happen, though, a wonderful 24 years have passed—and those can’t be taken from us. Happy Anniversary, GREENPRINTS! Happy Anniversary, Pat, My Gardening Mother, and to all your wonderful family—in GP#94 print and out! ❖ 37

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Four Covers!

Just for you.

100 issues. 100 covers (84 of them in color). All special. All unique.

A farmer plowing on a Manhattan rooftop. The view out a winter window. A woman made out of vegetables. A gardener starting seeds under a growlight. Bulbs under snow. A county fair where the contestants look like their entries. A robin with a worm watching a man till the garden it came from. A falling leaf. Dandelions sprouting through asparagus. The happy terrier that just dug up the daffodils. A bumblebee sleeping in cosmos. Planting bulbs with Grandpa. A young girl eating corn right in the corn patch.

A tomato wearing glasses. A woman turning steaming compost.

Filling out the seed order . . . checking the cold frame . . . .

100 issues. 100 covers. 100 wonderful covers, over 25 years.

Just this once, I’d like to share four of them in full color, one for each season. Readers, enjoy. ❖

And Now—Notecards!

Becky and I have talked for years about how wonderful it would be if we could offer subscribers notecards of some of our favorite GreenPrints covers. Well, we finally ((finally!) put on our “Git ’Er Done” caps and did it. You can order a set of eight gorgeous, full-color GREENPRINTS notecards, two each of the four covers on the next four pages, for $15.95 plus $3.00 s&h from GREENPRINTS, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730 (or call 800-569-0602 or go at our website, greenprints.com).

38

W

INTER

2O15

Spring 2012 GreenPrints #89 Artist P. Savage 39

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Summer 2014 GreenPrints #98 Artist Christina Hess 40

W

INTER

2O15

Autumn 2008 GreenPrints #75 Artist Christina Hess 41

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Winter 2001-02 GreenPrints #48 Artist Heather Graham 42

W

INTER

2O15

New England Seasons

By Ruth Heuberger

inter freezes Springtime eases Summer glows Autumn blows Summer races Autumn braces Winter dozes Springtime poses

LINDA COOK DEVONA

Autumn litters Springtime skitters Winter sleeps Summer leaps Springtime knows Winter’s rose Summer’s hot Winter's not

43

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

The Future of Gardening Is wonderful—just smaller and smarter.

By Anthony Tesselaar ❖

❖

❖

1. Garden Spaces Are Morphing. There’s abundant evidence that personal garden spaces are shrinking. Look at new real estate offerings if you crave physical proof. Or read urban development reports, which document the move to greater density. Happily, as our personal outdoor spaces grow smaller, another green space is emerging—the shared community green space now often included in developments. These private parks filled with lawns, trees, mass plantings, water, sculpture, playgrounds, and even food gardens are for residents to spill out into and enjoy the living space, the seasonal changes, the color of flowers, and the company of others. In many cities, a retrofit approach is emerging—New York’s High Line is a great example of infrastructure turned green and shared. This trend is a brilliant way to encourage the health and well-being aspects of being outdoors surrounded by plants.

44

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TESSELAAR PLANTS

Twenty years ago, I stood in front of a group of people [the Mail Order Gardening Association] whose passion was gardening.

I’d been asked to describe to them what I thought the future would be for gardeners and for the industry that supports them. With some smugness, I have to admit my predictions then turned out close to the mark. Perhaps that’s why, years later your Editor has asked me to share my thoughts about the next twenty years! So . . .

W

INTER

2O15

2. Great Plants Grow Well. We are fortunate that there is such a breadth of choice today when it comes to plants. To walk into any nursery, garden center, or box store is to be overwhelmed by texture, color, scent, and choice. The point is that people will become more discerning in the future. With garden sizes shrinking, the space available for planting will put pressure on people to choose carefully. Everything they grow is suddenly more visible, making successes a joy and failures a sore-point. So whether they learn by trial and error or by seeking feedback from other gardeners (ah, the ease of going online), people won’t waste time with any plant that does not perform. And by perform I mean grow well and grow easily. Two plants may look as lovely as each other, but it will be the proven performer that will be taken home to the garden.

3. We Celebrate What Is Different. One thing that will never change is the power of Gardening in difference. Surely gardeners have always been fascinated by anything that is different—it’s containers will certainly been the case for me personally. continue to be Tell me about a lovely red rose with a gorpopular—for geous scent and I’m listening: Tell me about four reasons. a blue-black rose with purple hips and I’ve already booked my flight to go and take a look. I think most gardeners are the same. If they wander into their local nursery on a mission to find a tall, slim tree to screen the neighbor’s basket-ball hoop, a rose to mass plant beneath the front window, or some flowering annuals to pop into a pot on the back deck, you can be sure their ears will prick at the sound of the words, “We have something a bit different over here . . . ” 4. Potted Gardens Will Become Even More Popular. Gardening in containers is already a growing trend, and I think it will continue to be so for four completely sensible reasons: space, time, food, and drought. As space becomes reduced, the obvious response is to pack your gardening punches into tidy packages—and what could be better than a series of largish containers (or clusters of grouped pots) on the balcony, deck, or courtyard? Next is time: People who 45

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

love to garden don’t always have much free time. Growing things in pots helps to make the most of the time that is available. More and more people are learning how satisfying it is to grow food in containers: It’s an achievement and a wonderful way to connect with the living world. Plus, the food is fresh—and you know what you’re eating! Finally, where water’s a limited resource, planting into pots is a great way to make the most of it.

5. Growing Plants Continues To Be Seductive. If you want to see if the primal urge to garden is alive in newer generations, go online. Here you will find a fresh, youthful community of gardeners—people who will be middle-aged when I next put a forecast together. They are busily trading advice gleaned from older and more experienced members of the gardening community. Equally, they are flipping traditional gardening ideas on their heads—mounting staghorn ferns onto the tiled wall of their showers, growing salad makings in pots hung upside down in a kitchen window, or planting out their desk drawers at work.

These new gardeners are taking community food gardens and giving them an über chic take in cities around the world. Here hip gardeners gather with others who like to be outdoors connecting with Nature, which makes me realize that every era adds a little more luster to the humble pleasure of gardening. It’s hard to improve on something so wonderful to begin with. But these new gardeners will. They’ve already started!

And just in case anyone’s interested . . . this is what I looked like 20 years ago, and this is the now me.

Anthony Tesselaar heads an international project management company (www.tesselaar.com) dealing in plants, especially horticultural research & development. His Flower Carpet roses (inside front cover) are celebrating their 20th anniversary.

46

W

INTER

47

2O15

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

CU T T I N G S

Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well, Under the snow and ice, under the darkness, in every square or cubic inch, Germinal, exquisite, in delicate lace, microscopic, unborn, Like babes in wombs, latent, folded, compact, sleeping; Billions of billions, and trillions of trillions of them waiting, (On earth and in the sea—the universe—the stars there in the heavens,) Urging slowly, surely forward, forming endless, And waiting ever more, forever more behind.

—From FFrom “Leaves of Grass” bbyy W Walt alt Whitman. Contributed by Matthew Hoffman of the Living Seed Company.

48

CATHERINE STRAUS

Unseen Buds

W

INTER

2O15

Short selections—both old and new— sent in by our readers.

Gardening in the Rain

DENA SEIFERLING

This is my first real garden and definitely not my last. I try to listen and learn every trick I can, especially old-timers’ advice, old wives’ tales, and ancient family secrets. I have a very scary scarecrow, a grid system, plants on mounds, and plants in rows. The latest tip I heard was that wet newspapers laid around the plants will keep weeds down—and are imperative for tomato plants. I am especially worried about my two tomato plants. I feel they are a staple in any garden, as in, “If you don’t grow tomatoes, you’re no gardener no matter what else you grow.” I really, really want to be a gardener, so I baby them. Wet newspapers, it is!

I got my stack of newspapers yesterday with plans to get them in the garden today. I woke up to the nicest, softest rain. As I lay listening to the unexpected morning showers, it dawned on me to get those papers out right then and there. After all, other tidbits I’d picked up are that natural rain is better than hose water and that this morning was under the June solstice honey moon.

I had to get out there that minute for the honey moon rain to wet down my garden’s newspapers!

Admittedly, puttering in the garden in the early morning rain made me feel more like a kooky, old, superstitious lady than an expert gardener, but so what if it doesn’t end up working? So what if I get wet, or, worse yet, a cold—I’ve got old timers’ advice for that, too!

—By Jenean Roth of Portland, NY. 49

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

How I Edited An Agricultural Paper

I did not take temporary editorship of an agricultural paper without misgivings. Neither would a landsman take command of a ship without misgivings. But I was in circumstances that made the salary an object. The regular editor of the paper was going off for a holiday, and I accepted the terms he offered, and took his place.

The sensation of being at work again was luxurious, and I wrought all the week with unflagging pleasure. We went to press, and I waited a day with some solicitude to see whether my effort was going to attract any notice. As I left the office, toward sundown, a group of men and boys at the foot of the stairs dispersed with one impulse, and gave me passageway, and I heard one or two of them say: “That’s him!” I was naturally pleased by this incident. The next morning I “Turnips should found a similar group at the foot of the stairs, never be pulled. and scattering couples and individuals standing here and there in the street and over the It’s much better way, watching me with interest. The group to send a boy up separated and fell back as I approached, and I heard a man say, “Look at his eye!” and have him I pretended not to observe the notice I was shake the tree.” attracting, but secretly I was pleased with it, and was purposing to write an account of it to my aunt. I went up the short flight of stairs, and heard cheery voices and a ringing laugh as I drew near the door, which I opened, and caught a glimpse of two young rural-looking men, whose faces blanched and lengthened when they saw me, and then they both plunged through the window with a great crash. I was surprised.

In about half an hour an old gentleman, with a flow50

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HANNAH ENGLAND

By Mark Twain (Yes, that Mark Twain!)

W

INTER

2O15

ing beard and a fine but rather austere face, entered, and sat down at my invitation. He seemed to have something on his mind. He took off his hat and set it on the floor, and got out of it a red silk handkerchief and a copy of our paper.

He put the paper on his lap, and while he polished his spectacles with his handkerchief he said, “Are you the new editor?”

I said I was.

“Have you ever edited an agricultural paper before?”

“No,” I said; “this is my first attempt.”

“Very likely. Have you had any experience in agriculture practically?”

“No; I believe I have not.”

“Some instinct told me so,” said the old gentleman, putting on his spectacles, and looking over them at me with asperity, while he folded his paper into a convenient shape. “I wish to read you what must have made me have that instinct. It was this editorial.

Listen, and see if it was you that wrote it: “‘Turnips should never be pulled, it injures them. It is much better to send a boy up and let him shake the tree.’

“Now, what do you think of that? for I really suppose you wrote it?”

“Think of it? Why, I think it is good. I think it is sense. I have no doubt that every year millions and millions of bushels of turnips are spoiled in this township alone by being pulled in a half-ripe condition, when, if they had sent a boy up to shake the tree—” “Shake your grandmother! Turnips don’t grow on trees!”

“Oh, they don’t, don’t they? Well, who said they did? The language was intended to be figurative, wholly figurative. Anybody that knows anything will know that I meant that the boy should shake the vine.”

51

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Then this old person got up and tore his paper all into small shreds, and stamped on them, and broke several things with his cane, and said I did not know as much as a cow; and then went out and banged the door after him, and, in short, acted in such a way that I fancied he was displeased about something. But not knowing what the trouble was, I could not be any help to him.

Pretty soon after this a long, cadaverous creature, with lanky locks hanging down to his shoulders, and a week’s stubble bristling from the hills and valleys of his face, darted within the door, and halted, motionless, with finger on lip, and head and body bent in listening attitude. No sound was heard.

Still he listened. No sound. Then he turned the key in the door, and came elaborately tiptoeing toward me till he was within long reaching distance of me, when he stopped and, after scanning my face with intense interest for a while, drew a folded copy of our paper from his bosom, and said: “There, you wrote that. Read it to me—quick! Relieve me. I suffer.”

I read as follows; and as the sentences fell from my lips I could see the relief come, I could see the drawn muscles relax, and the anxiety go out of the face, and rest and peace steal over the features like the merciful moonlight over a desolate landscape: The guano is a fine bird, but great care is necessary in rearing it.

It should not be imported earlier than June or later than September. In the winter it should be kept in a warm place, where it can hatch out its young.

It is evident that we are to have a backward season for grain. Therefore it will be well for the farmer to begin setting out his corn-stalks and planting his buckwheat cakes in July instead of August.

52

W

INTER

2O15

Concerning the pumpkin. This berry is a favorite with the natives of the interior of New England, who prefer it to the gooseberry for the making of fruit-cake, and who likewise give it the preference over the raspberry for feeding cows, as being more filling and fully as satisfying.

The pumpkin is the only esculent of the orange family that will thrive in the North, except the gourd and one or two varieties of the squash.

But the custom of planting it in the front yard with the shrubbery is fast going out of vogue, for it is now generally conceded that, the pumpkin as a shade tree is a failure.

Now, as the warm weather approaches, and the ganders begin to spawn— The excited listener sprang toward me to shake hands, and said: “There, there—that will do. I know I am all right now, because you have read it just as I did, word, for word. But, stranger, when I first read it this morning, I said to myself, I never, never believed it before, notwithstanding my friends kept me under watch so strict, but now I believe I am crazy; and with that I fetched a howl that you might have heard two miles, and started out to kill somebody—because, you know, I knew it would come to that sooner or later, and so I might as well begin. I read one of them paragraphs over again, so as to be certain, and then I burned my house down and started. I have crippled several people, and have got one fellow up a tree, where I can get him if I want him. But I thought I would call in here as I passed along and make the thing perfectly certain; and now it is certain, and I tell you it is lucky for the chap that is in the tree. I should have killed him sure, as I went back.

Good-by, sir, good-by; you have taken a great load off my mind.

My reason has stood the strain of one of your agricultural articles, and I know that nothing can ever unseat it now. Good-by, sir.”

I felt a little uncomfortable about the cripplings and arsons this person had been entertaining himself with, for I could not help feeling remotely accessory to them. But these thoughts were quickly banished, for the regular editor walked in! [I thought to myself, Now if you had gone to Egypt as I recommended you to, I might have had a chance to get my hand in; but you wouldn’t 53

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

do it, and here you are. I sort of expected you.]

The editor was looking sad and perplexed and dejected.

He surveyed the wreck which that old rioter and those two young farmers had made, and then said “This is a sad business—a very sad business. There is the mucilage-bottle broken, and six panes of glass, and a spittoon, and two candlesticks. But that is not the worst. The reputation of the paper is injured—and permanently, I fear. True, there never was such a call for the paper before, and it never sold such a large edition or soared to such celebrity; but does one want to be famous for lunacy, and prosper upon the infirmities of his mind? My friend, as I am an honest man, the street out here is full of people, and others are roosting on the fences, waiting to get a glimpse of you, because they think you are crazy. And well they might after reading your editorials.

They are a disgrace to journalism. Why, what put it into your head that you could edit a paper of this nature? You do not seem to know the first rudiments of agriculture. You speak of a furrow and a harrow as being the same thing; you talk of the moulting season for cows; and you recommend the domestication of the pole-cat on account of its playfulness and its excellence as a ratter!

Your remark that clams will lie quiet if music be played to them was superfluous—entirely superfluous. Nothing disturbs clams.

Clams always lie quiet. Clams care nothing whatever about music.

Ah, heavens and earth, friend! If you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day. I never saw anything like it. Your observation that the horse-chestnut as an article of commerce is steadily gaining in favor is simply calculated to destroy this journal. I want you to throw up your situation and go. I want no more holiday—I could not enjoy it if I had it. Certainly not with you in my chair. I would always stand in dread of what you might be going to recommend next. It makes me lose all patience every time I think of your discussing oyster-beds under the head of ‘Landscape Gardening.’ I want you to go. Nothing on earth could persuade me to take another holiday. Oh! Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t know anything about agriculture?”

“Tell you, you corn-stalk, you cabbage, you son of a cauli54

W

INTER

2O15

flower? It’s the first time I ever heard such an unfeeling remark.

I tell you I have been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever heard of a man’s having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper. You turnip! Who write the dramatic critiques for the second-rate papers? Why, a parcel of promoted shoemakers and apprentice apothecaries, who know just as much about good acting as I do about good farming and no more. Who review the books? People who never wrote one. Who do up the heavy leaders on finance? Parties who have had the largest opportunities for knowing nothing about it. Who criticize the Indian campaigns? Gentlemen who do not know a war-whoop from a wigwam, and who never have had to run a foot-race with a tomahawk, or pluck arrows out of the several members of their families to build the evening camp-fire with. Who write the temperance appeals, and clamor about the flowing bowl?

Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave. Who edit the agricultural papers, you—yam? Men, as a general thing, who fail in the poetry line, yellow-colored novel line, sensation, drama line, city-editor line, and finally fall back on agriculture as a temporary reprieve from the poorhouse. You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands. Heaven knows if I had but been ignorant instead of cultivated, and impudent instead of diffident, I could have made a name for myself in this cold, selfish world. I take my leave, sir. Since I have been treated as you have treated me, I am perfectly willing to go. But I have done my duty. I have fulfilled my contract as far as I was permitted to do it. I said I could make your paper of interest to all classes—and I have. I said I could run your circulation up to twenty thousand copies, and if I had had two more weeks I’d have done it. And I’d have given you the best class of readers that ever an agricultural paper had—not a farmer in it, nor a solitary individual who could tell a watermelon-tree from a peach-vine to save his life. You are the loser by this rupture, not me, Pie-plant. Adios.”

I then left. ❖ 55

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Peace Lily

put my Peace Lily out every spring after the threat of frost here in Calgary, Alberta has passed. It is a forgiving soul, but come summer, my plants left indoors are neglected. Outside, tucked between terra-cotta planters full of annuals, the Peace Lily has a fighting chance. It is content with the excess water that spills into its ceramic pot and prefers the dappled light that filters down through the flowers and foliage of its greedy brethren above.

Those petunias and lobelias soak up the full sun, bursting forth with frantic colors and heady scents until autumn cuts short their quest for meaning.

I bring the Peace Lily inside again before first frost hails the end of summer. Revived by fresh air and rain, it will survive another season of pale winter light in my living room. I pinch back the curled yellow leaves around the perimeter to make room for the creamy white and green spears shooting up from the base—new leaves, but no flower stalks. This variegated Spathiphyllum has not bloomed since I got it five years ago. t will just get thrown out if no one takes it,” said the funeral director as he handed it to me. All the colorful bouquets—wonderful expressions of our love, prominently displayed at the front of the chapel beside my father-in-law’s coffin—were long gone.

The Peace Lily stood alone, a plain and ordinary houseplant with its single white flower. I checked for a card, but found only the grower’s care tag: Peace Lily: Traditional, easy care, resilient, and forgiving.

I thought of my father-in-law and smiled. ❖ 56

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CATHERINE STRAUS

Traditional, easy care, resilient, forgiving. By Hermine Robinson

W

INTER

57

2O15

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Better and Better Think positive—and roll up your shirtsleeves.

By Becky Rupp ❖

❖

riting is a lot like gardening.

Or, at least, writing is sort of like gardening. Not, of course, in a physical sense: from a physicist’s point of view, the two professions, workwise, don’t begin to compare. Work, to a physicist, equals force x distance. That is, W = Fd. By this nit-picky mathematical definition, moving the couch is work; trundling a wheelbarrow full of potatoes from the garden to the porch is work; picking pumpkins is work; and digging a hole is work.

Reading, however, is not work, even if you’re slogging through heavy-duty stuff like the history of binomial nomenclature or the politics of the Panama Canal. Writing isn’t work either, unless you count the tiny little force required to compress the average computer key a fraction of an inch. I got a lot of grief about this when my The Little Blue middle son took physics. It is not always fun Engine didn’t to have a physicist in the house. just sit on Get beyond physics, and writing and gardening begin to coincide. In the ordinary the track, sense, there’s an element of helpful practice to wishing. It both: That is, the longer you write or garden, got out and the better you get at writing and gardenpulled the train. ing. Writers, for example—often by painful trial and error—learn to avoid silly uses of apostrophes and the awful consequences of dangling participles; while gardeners—ditto—discover how many hills of zucchini are way too many and learn that no mulch on the planet is a match for dandelions.

58

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BLANCHE DERBY

❖

W

INTER

2O15

There’s more to it than that, though. The thing about writing and gardening is that, in both cases, no matter how long you’ve been at them, you always believe that your next try will be better. The next book will be To The Lighthouse, To Kill a Mockingbird, Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone. The next essay with be E.B. White and Samuel Johnson, rolled into one. The next garden will be picture perfect, free of Japanese beetles and all that twiny stuff that periodically tries to strangle the tomatoes. It will have straight cucumbers and no rabbits. Next year’s eggplants, unlike this year’s pathetic performers, will produce eggplants; and the feckless person who didn’t buy enough beet seeds this year, next year will buy more of them.

At the heart of writing and gardening, in other words, is 59

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

forward thinking. Writers and gardeners know what it means to bury the disasters of the past—sometimes stomping on them—and look to the future.

This sort of hopeful determination is exemplified by the classic children’s book The Little Engine That Could. The Little Engine, first published in 1930, is the story of a cheerful train filled with all kinds of goodies for kids: toys, candy, creamy milk, and—this is a moral tale—fresh spinach for their dinners. Unfortunately, the train can’t get over the mountain to reach the children without the help of an engine. The toys beg for help from every locomotive in sight, all of which snootily turn them down—until at last a modest Little Blue Engine agrees to give it a try. Chanting a mantra of “I think I can – I think I can,” the Little Blue Engine successfully makes it over the mountain. The lesson is that hard work, effort, and positive thinking will ultimately triumph—which, when you think about it, must have been a tough message to sell in 1930, the first year of the Great Depression.

The positive thinking movement—called “New Thought”— first showed up in the late19th century, most effectively popularized by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science. The idea was that the right, bright, I-think-I-can attitude could solve any number of personal problems. The philosophy was expanded by French psychologist Émile Coué, who pitched self-improvement via auto-suggestion to his clients: Would-be positive thinkers were told, just before bedtime, to repeat twenty times the phrase, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”

Coué’s touted method didn’t last much past the 1930s—perhaps because it was obvious, what with the soup lines and massive unemployment, that nothing was getting better at all—but the idea was picked up again in 1956, when Norman Vincent Peale published his immensely popular The Power of Positive Thinking.

“Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” wrote Peal. “Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade.” Millions, eager for success, did their best.

The cult of positive thinking, writes Barbara Ehrenreich in Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has 60

W

INTER

2O15

Undermined America (2009), has been with us ever since, perhaps reaching its nadir with Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (2006), a self-help guide to health, wealth, and achievement by dint of promoting positive, and eradicating negative, thoughts. Byrne suggests that followers tack up pictures of things that they want (houses, cars, trips to Paris) on a “vision board,” decorated with glitter, ribbons, and the cut-off corners of dollar bills. At least once a day, she directs, hold the board to your heart and recite the chant, “All good things come to me.” Then, she adds, “Let the magic begin.”

Well, I can tell you right now that that approach isn’t going to get me any more eggplants. The Little Blue Engine didn’t just sit on the track, wishing. It got out there and pulled that train.

I don’t have anything against positive thinking per se. An upbeat attitude can certainly alleviate stress and make life sunnier for those around you. Eeyore, the mopey donkey of Winnie-the-Pooh, must have been an awful downer for his pals. But, at best, a positive attitude is the tip of the iceberg. The secret to writing—and gardening—lies in trying again and again and again.

This time of year in Vermont, with the garden plowed under for the winter and the leaves starting to fall, I find myself already looking ahead to next spring’s beginning. This year’s garden is over. This year’s book is written. But I’m not quitting yet.

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language,” writes T.S. Eliot. “And next year’s words await another voice/And to make an end is to make a beginning.”

But perhaps my favorite is still from Philip Larkin’s poem “The Trees.”

Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say.

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

P.S. I’m honored to be part of the 100th issue of GREENPRINTS, whose exploration of the soul of gardening has grown better and better with each passing year. And I look forward to being part of the magazine as we—both—continue to try again. ❖ 61

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Flower Fairies Every good garden needs them.

By Christine Webb ❖

❖

If you picture the Queen of England living in metro Detroit, you would have an accurate picture of my Nana. She is quite elegant and proper, and she always makes time for a cup of tea. She did, indeed, finally move back to her home country of England, but for my entire childhood I got to visit her one week each summer at her condo in Detroit. I looked forward to that week the entire year. I loved to visit her and play in her balcony garden. Nana was an avid gardener, and she spent hours and hours in the garden on her expansive balcony. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. People all over town knew where I was staying when I said, “That condo with the beautiful garden.”

I always thought her garden was pretty, but gardening didn’t really appeal to me when My brilliant idea I was young. While Nana would work in her garden, I would read her books or look at hit me when the artifacts she had brought back from her I was looking world travels. One day when I was about at the picture seven years old, I came across a book called The Complete Book of Flower Fairies. I adored of the Morning its pictures of little fairies dancing through Glory Fairy. gardens—the Purple Lilac Fairy, the Pink Rose Fairy, etc. I started to dream of what the world would be like if fairies really did dance through gardens.

My brilliant idea hit me when I was looking at the picture of the Morning Glory Fairy. Morning glories were my Nana’s favorite flowers, so obviously they were mine, too. As I stared at the picture of the Morning Glory Fairy, I thought, “My Nana 62

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HANNAH ENGLAND

❖

W

INTER

2O15

has those flowers. I wish I could give her a fairy to put in them.”

Suddenly, I figured out a way to do it. I waited until Nana came inside to make lunch, then I put my plan into action.

About a half an hour later, Nana came out to her garden to see what I was up to.

“Christine, darling, what are you doing?” she asked in her silky British accent.

“Look, Nana, I made your garden better!” I cried. She looked around nervously, wondering what I may have done to her garden.

Then she noticed the fairy on the birdbath—and started laughing.

“I put my Barbies out here to be your flower fairies!” I exclaimed. “Every good garden needs flower fairies, and your garden is the best!” I had put every Barbie in my toy bag out in her garden. There was one swimming in the bird bath, one on the railing tanning herself, and various Barbies peeking out or waving from behind various plants (because flower fairies are very shy—it said so in the book). I tried my best to match the outfits to the colors of the flowers, just like the book did. I was quite proud of myself.

To this day, I have never seen my Nana laugh so hard. She walked around her garden rolling with laughter. Just as she would start to calm down, she’d discover a new Barbie and start laughing all over again. Tears were streaming down her face by the time that she turned back to me and told me what a clever girl I was.

And me? I glowed with pride for making my wonderful Nana so happy. ❖ 63

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

I seem to sometimes move forward, sometimes back. By Susan Portman ❖

❖

❖

wenty five years ago, I knew everything—love, loss, fat, friendship, clothes, cooking, logarithms, law, other alliterative duos. That stage of life is not just limited to teenagers, it can be achieved in adulthood, as well. I had moved to an in-house position with a Fortune 200 Company and was feeling . . . let’s say “confident.” I would do “Sweating 64

ILLUSTRATIONS BY LINDA COOK DEVONA

In Time

W

INTER

2O15

to the Oldies” with Richard Simmons for about 30 minutes when the spirit moved me and had a cholesterol level so low some questioned if I was really alive. Certainly there were things that had nothing whatsoever to do with my life, like plants, so I knew nothing about them. Even the confident admit that. One thing bothered me. I was reading a series of books set in New Orleans and the author had the habit of referring to plants by name with no description, for example, “bougainvillea.” Wasn’t that like saying “house” and nothing more? I considered it the mark of a lazy author, someone not doing her job. After all, as mentioned, I knew everything (including, obviously, what other people should do to help me know everything). ifteen years ago, I knew everything—well, everything I needed to know. I had learned the common names of annual plants, sun and shade, for winter and summer—enough to fill my beds with color. I had limited planting space, and it had Twenty-five served my purposes to shop at my neighbor’s years ago, garden center down the street. Suzanne knew exactly what to show me when I said I wanted I knew “tortellini.” So: torenia, begonia, impatiens, everything. periwinkle, pansy. Gardening Done. I was doing step aerobics then, most days, for the better part of an hour.

True, I still had no idea what bougainvillea looked like. (Yes, Anne Rice, I am talking to you.) hirteen years ago, things changed: I had a lot to learn. I did a stint at Suzanne’s garden center during their busy time because she didn’t want to hire someone part-time for only four months but could not handle the intensified, pre-Texas-summer-blast-furnace, plant-buying traffic by herself.

Customers did not know the names of what they wanted. Not only that, but they wanted advice. From the people who worked at the garden center (Suzanne and, now, me). Even though I had filled my bricked backyard with over a hundred containers of cheerful flowers, my plant knowledge, particularly with respect to trees 65

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

and shrubs, remained slim. After the first two hours, Suzanne was not quite so amused by my sending customers to her and saying she was the brains and I was the brawn. She handed me a plant list, a plant encyclopedia, a wax pencil, and sign material. My assignment: Give every type of plant a sign with its name and a description of its characteristics. So I learned. With a high school reunion coming up, I added 30 minutes of dancing to my step aerobics routine. I looked good. There were no bougainvilleas at the garden center, so I continued my love/hate relationship with The Vampire Chronicles. ight years ago, I knew everything (this is called a “relapse,” in medical terms). I was going to attend Master Gardener school only to validate myself to a highly skeptical husband before spending $10 zillion (his estimate) on the garden I wanted to build at the new house. On the first day, we had a semester’s worth of college botany taught by a Texas A&M PhD. I thought my head would explode. Every class was pretty much the same—humbling. After each session, I thought: Finally! I know everything I need to know. With the beginning of the next class, I discovered I had a lot, lot more to learn.

So it turned out that Master Gardener school was the cure for my relapse. After the classes ended, I became a real gardener, planting three thousand plants in three years.

There was no formal workout then because I had not one drop of energy left. Also, menopause had launched an attack on my body and, while I valiantly fought the good fight, it won. I did, by golly, finally know a bougainvillea when I saw one, however. Too bad I had long since finished reading those vampire books. hree years ago, I actually bought a bougainvillea and gave it a home in a very large pot, which “we” (which, this time, really is “we”) dolly into the house each winter. It is a majestic, gigantic and sprawling, low-slung, shrub-like plant, interlacing its long branches through the wroughtiron rails of our upper-story deck while spilling over the top, its vivid, papery, orange triangular bounty of “flowers,” hundreds 66

W

INTER

2O15

at a time, creating its own festival, while wearing thorns to make the meanest rose look tame, just to ensure no one takes its wild, tropical beauty for granted. There, Anne, was that so hard? ow I do yoga for an hour and a quarter and I am dancing once again, because I am happiest when I don’t feel like a beached whale. Being fit also makes gardening much easier, although I still occasionally resort to taking two aspirin before I even step outside for a morning dedicated to getting blissfully dirty. I fondly, but only vaguely, remember the days when I could control my weight with exercise and still eat pretty much all the reasonably healthy food I wanted. Looking on the bright side (which is not my way), “portion control” allows me more time to . . . honestly?—think about what I am not eating (which is precisely why I don’t bother with “bright side” scenarios). I hear Anne Rice is once again taking up her storyline on New Orleans vampires. I’ve got that covered, at least.

The state of my knowledge, 25 years later? Well, the perennial bird of paradise (Caesalpinia) [yup, Latin now] I grew from a seed is over 15 feet tall, much bigger than it ever should have been. The Chinese pistache continues to grow up, with no signs of spreading its limbs to be the shade tree I intended. The special, Texas-tested, disease-resistant Earth-Kind roses are the ones getting rose rosette disease, and the recommended-for-Texas, Indian-named crepe myrtles are the ones most affected by the new scale. The two tree-form althaeas with no protection did fine after a scary-harsh winter, while the two on the south side of the house, the ones with toasty brick at their backs, perished.

So. While I know, or thought I knew, what should have happened in each one of those situations, “shoulda” bears no resemblance to reality. This growing season alone has taken me through all the various stages of confidence and dropped me off at the lower end of the scale once again. Nothing teaches me that I don’t know but a thing or two like time, time and a whole bunch of experience.

Twenty five years of gardening later, that may be the only thing I am now truly confident I know. ❖ 67

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

The Fish Bowl Which is more fragile—a bowl or our feelings?

By Donna Gardner

I

manage a Mom and Pop, 38,000-square-foot retail greenhouse in East Central Kansas. We plant up a lot of custom containers for our clients. The customers usually pick out the flowers they want, and we put them in the pot of their choice. We have potted up wire chickens, boots, snare drums, lanterns, birdcages, and iron kettles. About anything that holds soil, we’ve put a plant in it.

One day a woman named Jolene brought in a fish bowl. It was a common goldfish bowl; anyone could’ve bought one like it at the Five and Dime. She wanted an asparagus fern potted in it.

68

W

INTER

2O15

ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHRISTINA HESS

Jolene was excited about this because her son, Tony, was about to go off to college. This was the same fish bowl that she had sent with him on his first day of kindergarten. She had sent it so he wouldn’t be lonely—to keep Tony from crying because he missed his mommy. And this was the same fish bowl that her own mother had given her, many years ago, for the exact same reason. They had kept it on his nightstand for the last 13 years, replacing the asparagus fern every year (how those ferns lived in there with no drainage is a mystery to me).

I understood how much this fish bowl meant to her, so I decided to personally take care of the planting. Jolene carefully picked out the perfect asparagus fern and said she would return the next day to pick up her arrangement. I took it directly to the potting bench and personally planted the asparagus fern in the fish bowl. The fern poked out the top and looked great. I put it up on a high shelf for safekeeping. It was springtime, and the greenhouse was busting It had slipped at the seams with customers. I had to make through my sure no harm would come to this keepsake. hands before The next day when Jolene arrived, I went to retrieve the fish bowl. I got it down off the I could shelf and held it with both hands. It is exactly even react.

200 feet from the shelf to the front counter.

I had walked it a thousand times. I had a grip on that fish bowl like a boa constrictor on a rat. I started up the middle aisle to the counter, walking very cautiously, making sure not to bump into anyone.

The next thing I knew that fish bowl was falling to the gravel floor. It had slipped through my hands before I could even react.

It shattered to pieces. The plant and glass lay there in a tangled heap. To this day I don’t know how I dropped it. I have run that incident over and over in my mind. I must have gotten distracted and lost focus. I don’t know.

I did know, however, what I had to do next. I made my way through the sea of customers, went behind the counter, and faced Jolene. I told her what had happened. She was extremely upset.

Indeed, she became hysterical. She started yelling, calling me 69

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

names I didn’t even know existed. The sea of people stopped in their tracks—all eyes fixed on Jolene and her ravings. She used every curse word in existence.

I waited for her to get it all out of her system, but she didn’t stop. I tried to apologize profusely, but my apologies seemed to fuel her fire. I began to cry out loud and asked her to please stop.

She just kept screaming at me. After about five more minutes, a woman said to Jolene, “For the love of God, just go buy another one. Leave her alone. She didn’t drop it on purpose.”

Suddenly Jolene realized that 30 people were staring at her.

She turned around, faced the crowd—and told them they could all go to hell! Then she stomped out the door, slamming it so hard that merchandise fell off the wall. Every last person began to clap when she exited. A few were crying, some were laughing, but all were sympathetic. I came out from behind the counter, and the woman that had stopped Jolene’s ranting gave me a big hug. I hugged her back, tears streaming down my face, and earnestly thanked her.

The next day, I was called to the front counter over the twoway radio. There, in the sea of people, stood Jolene. She was holding a brand-new fish bowl. She gave me a very sincere apology.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—this woman who was so fiercely displeased the day before was now making amends!

I was elated to hear her apology; the incident had weighed very heavily on my mind. I took a fish bowl, put an asparagus fern in it, brought it back to Jolene, and handed it to her with a smile.

I told her there would be no charge. I wished her well and told her to come back anytime. She smiled and told me she would not shop for plants anywhere else. Then out the door she went.

I never saw her again.

T

hat was 17 years ago. What did it all mean? For her, well, I can’t say. For myself, I’ve never forgotten the incident, even though it happened nearly two decades ago. As you can tell by the fact that I wrote this piece, I still dwell on it.

Be mindful of your actions and reactions. They can affect people for a long time. ❖ 70

BUDS

CATHERINE STRAUS

For, in the final analysis, our most common link is that we all inhabit this small planet.

We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

—John F. Kennedy — 71

G

u th Yo et a r ® r B u n! cG Yo de M r e a G ik M By

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

The Ten-Day Tree And the 60-Cycle Hum. ❖

❖

❖

First: Congratulations to Pat and his clan for reaching the 100 Issue mark! (I’ve been here getting my kicks for 2/3 of the ride, as this cool column is my 66th.)

Now, when Batman’s comic reached the magic Century number in 1956, we were treated to a cover that commemorated The Dark Knight’s origin, showed him playing chess with The Joker, celebrated the creation of the Batmobile and Batplane, and promised to reveal “The 1,000 Secrets of the Batcave!” I want to achieve the same level of excitement!

However, my secret origin involves a pretty girl at a party who wanted somebody to grow raspberries for her (which I would argue is much better than a bat flying in the window); I drive a Prius (which is NOT the Batmobile—but I get better mileage!); and I fly coach (but at least I don’t have an annoying little kid in green pixie boots sitting next to me yelling “Holy Cloud Bank!”

Let’s get this the entire trip). But my basement contains party started— at least 1,000 secrets [which I hope remain by trash that way] and I hear people say “The Joker” all the time! talking a tree.

So Happy 100; Now let’s get this party started—by trash talking a tree.

Actually, the Talk of Trash came not from my lips, but from those of noted organic fruit enthusiast Lee Reich, who began the conversation by agreeing with me that peach trees, despite their faults (which are Legion—and not the Legion of Super-Heroes, but the Legion of Oriental Fruit Moths and Brown Rot, which lack the former’s colorful costumes, flight rings, and cool 25th-century clubhouse shaped like a jukebox), are four-season beautiful. “Un72

W

INTER

2O15

like apple trees,” stressed Lee, adding that although he enjoys the fruit, the plants themselves start the season looking pretty hideous and by June have progressed to just plain ugly.

“Yes,” I kind of vaguely agreed, looking out at my own particularly nasty work of a crabapple in late July, the ground around its gnarly branches littered with Japanese beetle-savaged, diseaseridden yellow leaves, “but for a month in the Springtime, it’s a thing of beauty!”

“You mean the three days it’s in flower before it starts dropping its diseased leaves?”

“Three days?! My good man,” I responded with all the insincerity I could muster around that phrase, “the blooms last for weeks! First appear the beautiful little bright red buds that remain tightly closed, followed by the slow procession of their opening, as red becomes pink and finally a bridal white, eventually carpeting the area underneath them and the nearby street, stretching almost as far as the eye can see!”

“Either you live on a really tiny street or need to get your cataracts sand-blasted. Three days. That’s it. Three days of nonugliness followed by a summer of hideous. And that’s only if it doesn’t rain on Day Two.” “Well, harrumph to you, too!” (Lee’s been in a bad mood ever since that house from Kansas fell on his sister.) Then I went outside to tell The Old Girl how well I had defended her honor. But it WAS July, the magnificent carpet of delicate apple blossoms had long since been replaced by a layer of yellow leaves that reminded me of an actual carpet I once had in college (to quote a girl named Louise, circa 1971: “Eeeeuuh! Get that thing out of here!”—and I’m pretty sure she meant the rug) and, instead of infesting the branches, the moths of tent caterpillars and webworms were flying past quickly with their mothy little noses stuck up in the air.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Get back here! You’re supposed to be attracted 73

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

to stressed plants! Look at these twisted branches, yellow leaves, and rotten little fruits! Come back here and build your nasty nests in this obviously ill crabapple!”

And then I realized two things. One, I had been reduced to standing in my driveway, begging a pest to come infest one of my plants to prove that it was just unwell and not ugly. And two, the lousy tree was probably healthier than me (at least mentally).

Just as I said (okay—‘yelled’) that thought, one of the moths turned and made a beeline (actually, I guess it would be a mothline) towards me, and I ran into the house screaming, “Is there a webworm nest in my hair?!”

My wife just gave me The Look, and I could SEE the thought balloon over her head that said, “It’s a good thing you really were able to grow raspberries.”

Then, as previously reported in these pulse-pounding pages [Just last issue—Stickler For Accuracy Stone], I learned the difference between a partial tear of the rotator cuff (“Oh dear, that hurts . . . ”) and a complete tear (“Oh {bad word}; oh {bad word, active tense} {very bad word} {bad word}”) that November.

Which is how I got my helper, Matt. My surgery was scheduled for May, which got winter out of the way (darn good thing, too, as winter tried to get US out of the way several times last season), but precluded my caring for—among other things—my wife’s peaches, and . . .

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘OTHER THINGS’?! What’s more important than my peaches?!”

“Only you personally, dear; only you.”

(Hey—even really thick men learn something after 30 years . . . although I was thinking about also mentioning the constant threat of Flying Monkeys if I did not behave.)

So I thought that Matt should see the garden—AND ESPE74

W

INTER

2O15

CIALLY THE PEACH TREES—before my surgery, because I was honestly worried about my ability to do anything but drool during the month afterwards. (Turned out I was right—and I’m a world class drooler!)

So this earnest (and tall! Good! I am so tired of reaching up high, even without an injury. “Matt—get this! Yo, Matt—snag that!”) [A girl could get used to having (tall) help around] young man shows up for his initial visit, and we discuss horticultural philosophy, hoppy beers, the art of pruning, the agony of fruit thinning, and finally he looks up and goes, “So—what’s with the dead tree growing into the power lines in the middle of your driveway?”

Sigh. Art is so poorly understood in America.

So I explain how, yes, this tree might not be dancing on “America’s Prettiest Plants” right NOW, but just you wait, BoyO! Just you wait until it’s apple blossom time again.

Then this wretched old specimen might show you a thing or three!

I wait until I see the taillights of his car disappear around the bend, turn to the tree, and go, “You better not be [bad word] dead; I’m telling you now!”

(Right—because if it WAS dead, I’d make it worse? Oy!) The snow finally stops. Surgery comes and the drooling begins.

Then, after about two weeks, my patience and the peach trees’ wear thin and they burst into spectacular bloom. I call Matt and he comes out and prunes, and we fill a dozen homes with flowering branches. The next day I call him back and say, “I thought you pruned yesterday,” and he comes back in a huff (actually an old Saturn), ready to yell or quit and instead looks up and says, “Where did all these new branches come from?!”

75

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Peach Trees, Stretch.

A couple of prunings later and the peaches are finally open enough to toss a cat through the branches (see last ish for details—You Know Who). So we (which means “Matt;” man, I’m loving this worker bee thing!) get done pruning and then we (as in “Matt”) proceed to fruit thinning—and the apple tree is just sitting there.

“Not dead, huh?”

“No! It’s not dead! It’s . . . it’s . . . resting!” I’m tempted to add ‘It’s pining for the fiords,’ but instead criticize his fruit thinning.

Two weeks later, red spots appear, and then within a week, there is a riot of red in the entire tree (Finally!). And then the weather stays cool and the red persists for a week before the flowers open up to a beautiful pink. “Well, you were right,” says Matt, “it looks great. But what are we going to do about that hum?”

He’s right. There is a loud electrical “60 cycle” hum coming from the tree, which is growing JUST into the wires along the road.

That’s not good. “Well, we can’t do anything about it; I’ll have to call the power company—they’ve wanted to take the whole thing down for a long time, anyway.”

I can hear Lee Reich chortling in his hidden lair, but then there’s

A Thank-You Note to Mike

You may have noticed that Mike McGrath frequently makes comic-book references in his stories. He’s always been a comic buff; indeed, he once worked for Marvel Comics.

And Mr. Mike once used his Cosmic Comic Connections Power to do me a big favor.

Three years ago, I was yearning for the newest whitewater canoe, the Canadian-made L’edge. Canoes had recently undergone a true design revolution: The new ones were more stable, maneuverable, drier, and sturdier, all attributes which would greatly help an aging paddler such as myself both enjoy the sport more and be safer doing it.

76

W

INTER

2O15

a sudden change of wind and the hum moves sharply stage left.

We look up into the canopy more carefully and see that the hum is not from wires but from an insanely large swarm of beautiful bumblebees digging greedily into the flowers. “There must be thousands of them,” I blurt out.

“Maybe tens of thousands,” suggests Matt (and he’s a college man so he Must Be Right). “And your friend may be right about the blooms, but these bees are going to be around a lot longer than ten days.”

And so the flowers turn to pure white, carpet the road, and are gone. All summer long, the tree descends further into apple-ness, but the gardens are lousy with bees of all shapes and sizes, pollinating from plant to plant and falling asleep inside of flowers.

The phone rings. Lee wants to know how my peaches are doing in this cool, wet year. And: “Oh, by the way, how’s your three-day tree?”

“The blooms lasted ten full days,” I was happy to report.

“And NOW . . . ?” he chortled.

“It’s humming along nicely, thank you.”

(Just like this small magazine.) ❖ There was one hitch, though: The new, high-tech models were expensive: $2,000 expensive! I don’t really have that kind of coin lying around to spend on leisure pursuits. But I did still have the very first Spiderman comic book ever published, which I’d purchased way back when I was in 8th grade. But how does one get the best price for an antique comic book?

I asked Mike for advice, and he took complete charge, setting me up with a professional comic dealer, who got ol’ Amazing Fantasy #15 auctioned off—for considerably more than my coveted canoe!

I named the boat, which I’ve now paddled a good 200 times, Gorgeous Gwedolyn, after Spiderman’s first girlfriend—but I dedicated it to Mike McGrath. THANKS, Mr. McG! 77

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

40 Cent Seed Packet

If you wish to start a garden or experiment with seeds without spending a fortune, choose from over 200 varieties of herb, vegetable & ower seeds at 40 cents a packet. Plenty of seeds in each packet for a small garden or indoor/patio garden. For a trial oer send $1.00 for a catalog and 4 sample packets of herb seeds.

We also carry Live Herb & Perennial Plants.

Le Jardin du Gourmet P.O. Box 75 GP St. Johnsbury Ctr., Vt 05863 See our web page at www.artisticgardens.com

78

W

INTER

2O15

Emptying the Tr T ash in Vietnam

By Nancy Schwartz

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARILYNNE ROACH

Years ago, o, before ever everyone— even the big Box Stores—began selling bamboo, I learned that the gentleman who had planted the Bamboo Garden at our botanical center was getting out of the business and selling all his bamboo. Bamboo! I rushed to place my order.

That March, eight clumps of what looked like mud with a few spikes in it came in the mail.

I planted four near our front fence line and the other four next to our goat barn. I couldn’t wait to see a dense stand where the wind would rustle and birds would roost. By May, each clump boasted only four or five canes, and not very big canes at that. I let them be and forgot about them.

Six years passed. My children grew. One day I noticed bamboo shoots in my lawn—definitely not bamboo territory. The lawnmower made short work of that. Not so with our fenced-in garbage can corral next to the goat barn. My teenaged son, Rob, had the job of emptying the garbage. He came into the house exasperated and said, “You know, Mom, that’s like emptying the trash in Vietnam. It is a jungle out there!” Bamboo canes—fat, deep-green, 15-feet-tall bamboo canes—had grown all through the garbage can corral! Rob had to use loppers to clear his way to the trash cans. Then the gas man said he couldn’t get to our propane tank without a machete!

Soon af after, we sold that house and moved. I recently drove by the old home. The four plants we set out front now cover close to an acre! It really is a jungle.

I didn’t go around back to look at the goat barn.

What’s your worst gardening mistake? Send it to GREENPRINTS, Broken Trowel Award, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730. If we print it, you’ll get a free one-year subscription and our GREENPRINTS Companion CD! 79

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

My Hummingbird Helper I tended the tiny bird. Then he tended me.

By LaVerne Otis ❖

❖

t

❖

was a gray day—at least it looked gray to me. Fog gripped me as I knelt in my garden, weeding around my hummingbird plants. My Tangerine Beauty crossvine, morning glory, and scarlet honeysuckle plants seemed devoid of color.

Yes, it was that glorious season, late spring. The sky was sapphire blue, with marshmallow clouds dotting it like whitecaps on the sea. Birds sang as they scuttled around scratching for worms and making nests. But I didn’t see or hear any of it.

It had been almost seven years since my second episode of colon cancer. I’d always heard that a person was pretty much cured if they made it five years without a recurrence or metastasis, so I had been feeling very hopeful.

But the next shoe had fallen—and all I could see was black.

Three months before, a routine CT scan Then, much to my surprise, the had shown that I had something in the right lower lobe of my lung which had not hummingbird been there before. I had to wait three more let me pick months and repeat the CT scan to see if the nodule had changed or grown. Now I had him up! just had my second scan and was waiting for the results. Even though my oncologist told me he thought the nodule was from an infection, I was terrified. I didn’t want to die. I am sure there are birds and plants in heaven, but I like the ones I have here!

It isn’t fair, I was moaning to myself—when suddenly a male Allen’s hummingbird flew in and around my head. He then 80

W

INTER

2O15

ILLUSTRATIONS BY P. SAVAGE

landed just two feet from where I was kneeling! My hummingbirds routinely buzz around me or hover in front of me to see what I am doing—you know how nosy they are—but I had never had one land right next to me before!

I looked closer at him and saw he had a big knob at the end of his beak. I knew that wasn’t normal, so I began the baby talk I always use with my birds, trying to calm him.

The Allen’s just sat there, breathing a little heavily and moving his head back and forth.

Gently scooting over, I slowly reached out for the hummingbird. I got a closeup view of how perfectly beautiful this gift from God is. He was in full breeding plumage, and his rufous coloring was stunning. His orange-red gorget feathers flashed at me—the first color I had seen in days.

Then, much to my surprise, the hummingbird let me pick him up! I quickly saw that the nub stuck to his bill was a dead ant.

Holding the Allen’s in one hand, I carefully removed the ant from his bill. The tiny bird then looked at me and began to wiggle so I slowly opened my hand. He flew up to a vine on my honeysuckle and began chattering at me.

I was in awe and felt an energy I had not felt in weeks. The male Allen’s darted over to one of my hummingbird feeders and hovered there a long while, sipping nectar. My eyes were opened—and I noticed all the beauty I had worked so hard to create in my garden, as if I were seeing it for the first time. I felt peace. I felt a connection to this bird that made me embarrassed at the self-pity I had indulged in. And I knew, I just knew, that everything would be okay.

It was. ❖ 81

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Hard on the Ego

ome years ago, I was showing my friend Samuel around my garden. Samuel is a master gardener and I defer to him on almost everything, but I had him on peonies. He stopped short near my bed of unambitious snapdragons and pot marigolds and pointed to my peonies behind them.

“Hey, are those peonies?” he asked, his eyes wide.

“Yes,” I said.

“Peonies!” he said, shaking his head. “How did you manage to get peonies to grow?”

“I just planted them,” I said. “I stuck the bulbs in and they came up.”

“Well the ones I planted didn’t,” he said, frowning. “And I’ve tried three times.“ “Maybe your soil is different.”

Samuel gave me a short lecture about lime-loving plants and acid-loving plants and the type of soil they preferred. He explained that he and I both had the acid-loving type because we both had azaleas in our gardens. “I really don’t think it’s the soil,” he concluded.

“Maybe you should have put some sand in when you planted them. Did you try that?”

He gave me an affronted look. “Of course I did.”

“And you dug the hole a lot deeper than—” He stopped me with a look.“I use chicken manure for fertilizer,” I told him. “And I give them a little bone meal, too. Maybe that would help your peonies along.”

His eyes glazed over a little. “Chicken manure and bone meal— that’s pretty much what I used, too.” I put on a sympathetic face, 82

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MATT COLLINS

Sometimes gardening truly is.

By Mary Whitsell

W

INTER

2O15

but it was hard not to swell with pride. Samuel has been gardening for years and his garden is much nicer than mine, but I’d managed to get peonies to grow and he hadn’t! Maybe I was developing a green thumb at long last. And it was about time. I’d planted so many things that had wilted and died despite tender loving care. Even plants that other gardeners have sworn are completely idiot-proof.

Like periwinkles, for instance.Not long after Samuel’s visit, I 83

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

went to visit my friend Dina, who is a fabulous gardener. She has a bed filled with periwinkles. They are all studded with bright, perky flowers of many dazzling shades of blue, purple, and violet. They make me sick with envy. I can’t grow periwinkles, and I desperately want to. I have all sorts of bare shady areas in my garden that periwinkles are supposed to be perfect for.

“How do you get such great periwinkles?” I asked Dina, trying to keep the envy out of my voice.

Dina laughed, as though I’d said something funny. “Periwinkles? It’s not hard to grow periwinkles!”

I know this must be true because everybody tells me it is.

Not being able to grow periwinkles is like not being able to grow dandelions. “Well, they haven’t worked for me,” I mumbled.

“Did you break up the soil before you planted them?”

“Of course,” I said, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. I didn’t just break up the soil before I planted the last lot; I was out there with a shovel and a fork for hours, pulling up old tree roots, digging up fist-sized stones, and fluffing up what was left. You bet I broke up the soil.

“And you planted them in a place where they get at least some rain?”

“Duh.” This is Scotland, after all. Finding a place where you don’t get rain would be a trick here.

“And not in full sunlight, right?”

I gave her another duh look.

“Then your problem shouldn’t be getting them to grow,” Dina assured me. “It should be getting them to stop growing.”

Dina and I went out into her garden and selected some cuttings from various kinds of periwinkles. She made sure to get me some good, healthy specimens with roots. We put them in little plastic bags filled with water.

84

W

INTER

2O15

When I got home, I planted the periwinkles immediately and watered them in. Instead of putting them near the weed-riddled patch I hoped to cover, I decided to spoil them first by starting them off in a relatively weed-free area a few feet away. A few days later I went outside to see how they were doing. They looked wilted and sullen, like teenagers asked to do an unpleasant chore. I checked them over for slugs or other pests—there weren’t any that I could spot— and watered them lightly anyway. Several days later, I went to check on them again, and they looked even more pathetic. It was obvious they weren’t going anywhere but the compost heap.

“They didn’t take,” I told Dina the next time I saw her.

“Take some more cuttings home with you,” she advised. o I did. We put them into plastic bags filled with water, and I repeated the whole tiresome process all over again, scattering some organic slug-killer about just in case.

Once again, those periwinkle cuttings died, but the lesser celandine, shepherd’s purse, and dandelions appreciated the nicely dug-up soil no end.

“Try it again,” Dina said when I told her. “Third time lucky.

Believe me, any fool can grow periwinkles.”

I let her give me another bag of cuttings, but I did not have the courage to tell her that it was not my third try, it was actually my sixth.

The cuttings were dead as doornails within a week. Which shows that I am not just any fool, I am a very special one.

“How are those periwinkles doing?” Dina asked the next time I visited.

“They didn’t take,” I said. “I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.”

Dina gave me a look that hurt my gardening pride.

“I’ve got some great peonies, though,” I bragged, stuffing my next lot of doomed periwinkles cuttings into a plastic bag. “My peonies look great this year.”

“Yes,” Dina said. “This must be a good year for them. Mine are doing really well, too.”

I’m planning to invite Samuel over again. Soon. ❖ 85

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Growing Up with GREENPRINTS, Part I The children of Your Editor report on life with a magazine in the house. By Nate Stone ❖

❖

❖

Editor’s Note: Normally, when GREENPRINTS has an Anniversary Issue, I step out from behind the publisher’s curtain and write a piece about the person—me—who puts this magazine together. This time, though, I thought I’d ask our four children if they’d like to share their versions of living with a small home-publishing business. To my surprise, they all jumped on the offer!

So as part of our special 25th anniversary year, each issue in 2015 will contain a piece by one of our (now grown) offspring about “Growing Up with GreenPrints,” starting off with these words from our oldest, 35-year-old Nate.

86

W

G

INTER

REENPRINTS

2O15

came into my life when I was 14. As the oldest child in my family, I had already watched as my share of my parents’ time was reduced at regular intervals: first when Jesse was born when I was 3, then by Sam when I was 6, and finally by Tucker when I was 10. (My parents tell me that I yelled, “What were you thinking?!” when they told me I was going to have a baby brother.)

GREENPRINTS was introduced to me right on schedule. Approximately three years after Initially, I hated Tucker had been born, my parents sat us all it. The entire down at the table on our porch and my father family might be asked us if we wanted him to take an offer gathered round to edit a prestigious magazine up north or did we want to stay in North Carolina and the table for pitch in to help him start a small gardening weeks at a time. magazine here. All I heard was move far away or stay in North Carolina with my friends Jamie, Doug, Phelps, and Lizzie. I did not ask or care about what starting a magazine meant—I wanted to stay put.

At the time, I was convinced that my opinion was one of the key components in our family’s decision to stay in Fairview.

When I asked my father about this fifteen years later, I found out my voice may have been a little less important than I imagined.

However, it was—and is—a charade I appreciated. In any case, GREENPRINTS quickly became large in my life.

I don’t think I actually read the magazine until after I graduated college. While I was in high school, I limited my interactions with Nate Then the rag to the functional and necessary (sort of like I did with my two youngest siblings). The only time I became involved in the literary aspect of the magazine was the time my father asked me to draw an illustration for a story [“A Garden Is To Grow, GP No. 3]. When I realized I could make a few dollars and have a published drawing, I jumped on the opportunity. But 87

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

after GREENPRINTS’S and my brief fling at artistic involvement, our relationship quickly devolved back to its original status (just like a typical high-school romance).

And what was my status? Laborer. Just like I had to babysit my siblings on occasion, I (and the rest of my family) frequently got roped into a working relationship with the magazine. Hours and hours were spent around the dining-room table putting together mailings of renewal notices, gift orders, subscriptions, flyers, and other assorted pieces of paper. I couldn’t tell you what they were, I simply folded and stuffed as I was asked. (OK, that’s a little idealized: After protesting and exhausting all the excuses I could possibly come up with, I went to work.) Initially, I hated it. The entire family might be gathered round the table for weeks at a time. I would Nate Today: Teaching in the yearn to come up with a soccer practice or homework or some other obligation Atlanta City Schools . . . that could get me away.

Interestingly enough, though, I eventually began to like it. I never wanted to do the work, but the hours gathered together as a family became bearable. My youngest brother wasn’t much fun to be around at that point, but the sessions at the table gave the rest of us a lot of quality time together. I found out my sisters Jesse and Sammy, were pretty entertaining and intelligent people.

My father would “regale” us with stories from his youth (true, the hundredth retelling may have lacked some of the original spice, but when you’re stuck around a table doing mindless work, you take what you get). My mother was the loving, laughing anchor that kept things moving, and we would frequently have someone read a book out loud while we worked. I remember hearing in high school how cigar rollers in Cuba would have someone read to them while they worked, and I completely understood how it could make the hours go by. Although I won’t say that I looked forward to those hours, I do think that GREENPRINTS helped solidify our family. Especially for the kids, it gave us a common enemy, 88

W

INTER

2O15

and nothing brings people together like a shared opponent. If you can make it out of that much time together and not hate each other, then you have a good thing going.

By the time I graduated from high school and left home, work with GREENPRINTS had started to slow down for the kids, precisely because the magazine was doing better. Dad could now afford to hire people to do some of the work, so the long hours around the dining-room table had been reduced. For a long time I envied my little brother, Tucker, because he missed out on the biggest years of GREENPRINTS labor. But those times became my basis for a relationship with the magazine and an understanding of my Dad’s work.

Eventually it made me realize that I needed to read it. For the last seven or eight years, I have been a regular consumer of the magazine. I no longer have a working relationship with the periodical, instead I get to open and enjoy it. . . . and Proud Father (of Otis) I now take pleasure in it the way and Husband (of Atteeyah). you enjoy watching a sibling or a family member that is all grown up do its thing: with love—and with pride that I played some small role in its development.

In many ways the GREENPRINTS life is a polar opposite to the work I do and the life I lead now. I teach middle-school math in the city of Atlanta’s Public School system—a long way from peaceful moments of reflection amongst the dahlias and roses in a quiet family garden. In other ways, GREENPRINTS celebrates the same values I hold dear: compassion, love, and work. We just manifest it differently. The magazine’s subtitle used to be “Chasing the Heart and Soul of Gardening.” In each of my family members’ lives (and I will assume in each of yours), you simply have to change the last word of the phrase. It is a wonderful thing how the most mundane tasks (and mailings certainly epitomize mundane) can become an expression and a pathway to understanding love. ❖ 89

G

REEN

P

RINTS

s ove l g Fox ake ts!

M Gif eat Gr

90

#1OO

W

INTER

91

2O15

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Ducks in My Garden

Are they hassle-free? No. Do I love them? Yes.

By Rachel Lancashire ❖

❖ 92

❖

W

INTER

T

2O15

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TIM FOLEY

hey were dark times then. Dark, dark times in the garden.

The pond lily leaves lay in tatters across the water, every trace of their former splendor gone. The frogs faced brutal extirpation, the few survivors fleeing their impending doom. The hostas were shredded and flattened. The borage was decimated. The sorrel couldn’t be saved.

And all this destruction from four little beings that only a few months earlier had come home cuddled in one corner of a shoebox. They appeared to be ducks, Indian Runner ducks. They look adorable, and they had charming names: Flower, Frog, Duck, and Scuba. But they acted like the spawn of Godzilla. Their feet were so small, but so massive, too: huge, flat, webbed triangles They appeared to that trampled tender sprouts and fell over be ducks, stems. They seemed too awkward, too unbut they acted gainly, too adorable to be monsters—but like the spawn look what they did to the greens. Let them out of sight for a second, look away for an of Godzilla. instant, and—blink—they blink—they raced towards the blink vegetable garden and devoured the chard, spinach, and lettuce with the swiftness of a shop vacuum.

A small spot of mud in the garden? They rooted gleefully in it, smacked their bills in the wetness, dug frantically, and left behind an enormous, deep, lifeless hole. Those seedlings that just got watered? Gone, all gone. We shooed, we herded, we chased, we tried to save the frogs. All in vain.

Those were dark days, indeed, and the ducks ran rampant, havoc trailing in their wake. What had we done?

The garden had to be saved. We prepared our defenses—using low-fencing as our protective weapon. We enfenced the pond, the greens, and the seedlings. We learned to water when the feathered fiends were locked away for the night. Suddenly the future brightened. The ducks grew and inexplicably lost their taste for hosta. The frogs returned, safe in their fenced sanctuary.

No longer terrors, our ducks became benevolent, enthusiastic garden explorers. To them, our yard holds an endless array of wonderful and mysterious marvels. They race through the vegetable 93

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

garden, only their heads visible above the raised beds, turnng as they corner sharply left, right, left without slowing. They climb the steep compost pile, rooting in the straw with contented nasal quacks. We lose them, then they tumble from the asparagus or trip over the sweet peas, falling and stumbling and shaking themselves loose and running because there is so much more garden to explore. They disappear again, this time in the far corner, lost beneath the hostas.

And while they still pine for the pond, circling the fence and chattering amongst themselves, Flower, Frog, Duck, and Scuba love their garden world almost as much as I do. From across the yard they see me with the shovel and make a beeline for me, their awkward feet a blur as they barrel madly. They swarm me, and there are hiccupy, peeping chirps of utter happiness as they clamber over my feet and investigate a pile of weeds. Flower lunges at my arm, quivering with excitement. Shy Frog’s timidity falls away in anticipation of worms. She stands on my feet, squeezes under my arm, brushes against my hands, her feathers soft and smooth like silk. Their joy is catching, my smile impossible to suppress. Weeding was never so delightful. This is gardening from a fairytale.

The yard’s slug population has plummeted. And the day that Flower sprinted from the garden with a fat tomato worm, a giant one of the sort that no one wants to touch and makes you afraid to reach into the tomatoes, I realized that our ducks, once garden terrors, had become little garden heroes. Oh, there is the odd broken geranium, and a flattened hosta where they like to stand and quack at a tree stump, but no garden is perfect. Careful timing when watering does wonders, but I am not going to lie—there is still some frustrated chasing. I do love being in the garden with them, though, and I am hard-pressed to find a slug in the yard.

They are pets, and we love them. So we make it work. ❖ 94

BUDS

DANA MARTIN

The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisďŹ ed. They always look forward to doing better than they have ever done before. —Vita Sackville-West 95

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Breaking Ground Getting better at getting along. By Pat Stone

W

arm day. Dry soil. Early spring. Groundbreaking day in the garden.

I go out to negotiate with ol’ Dobbin, my middle-aged rototiller. She’s getting a bit stiff in the joints and cranky at times, but if you talk gently to her and coax her choke just right, she’ll start up eventually and put in a few hours of work.

Good work, too. Like a weaver at the loom, I work my way across and back over my plot, watching prepared earth emerge line by line. As my body starts to sweat, my soul begins to swell with the thick smell of turned soil. With the tussle of cool air against warm sun. With the hope of new life in the ground.

My tranquil excitement is broken by only one thing: noise.

There is nothing exalting about rototiller roar in your ears. That never-ending wave of sound makes me envy the gardeners who quietly spade their soil. Or the few farmers left who pop open their sod with the slicing “schiss” of a horse-pulled plow. True, though, not enough envy to make me actually work up my whole garden by hand.

The noise reminds me that—let’s be honest—I am chainsawing the soil. Running a two-wheeled Cuisinart through sleeping, brown earth. But, I quickly reason, all gardeners assault the soil.

The hand-tool digger whacks big clods into little ones. The horse plow throws huge rolls of earth turtlelike onto their backs.

I wrestle the tiller through a tight 180-degree turn, flinging myself around in a half-circle, and start down the next row. My thoughts take a new turn, too. Gardening is not a natural activity.

Gather wild nuts and berries, forage feral fruits of the earth, if you want to be Joe (or Jo) Back-to-Nature. But don’t tell me that Osterising the earth into brown marbles, yanking out every plant The first story in the first issue of GREENPRINTS is the last one in this.

96

W

INTER

2O15

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOSEF CAPEK FROM THE GARDENER’S YEAR, MY ALL-TDIME FAVOIRTE GARDENING BOOK (P.12)

that wants to sprout in the soil, and then inserting the foliage you choose where you choose is a natural activity.

The machine and I sputter to a halt. I gaze over the plot, envisioning its future, and my spring-inebriated self cries, “It is, too, a natural activity.” Soon these chocolate rows of earth will nurture the births of peas and flowers, little seedlings that, like tiny-fingered infants, tug chords of protectiveness from my heart. Soon transplants spoiled by the soft light of their indoor maternity ward will look to this plot I’ve prepared for succor, for home. Soon the sodden brown soil will turn green with life, a green flecked with yellow, blue, red, orange, pink, white. Bees, toads, and butterflies will join the increasing revel in its bounds.

I kneel down and palm some of the prepared earth. It’s dark, rich, loose. Five years Gardening is ago, when I started this garden, it was pale, a continuinglean, slick. Cover crops and compost, fertilizer and time have turned this clay into loam. I, education course human, have intervened, but my efforts have in finding a way steered this garden’s life, made it better.

Earth in hand, mind on soil, the relation- to fit on a planet ship becomes clear. Gardening is an interface, where people a connecting portal. I tell the life I sow what and flowers I want it to do. It replies by what it does and both belong. doesn’t. I listen to those answers, devise a response, and try again. With this dialogue, I delve into the language of another phylum, trying to serve it better so it can better serve me.

The broader lessons of gardening aren’t the same as those learned from wilderness: maxims about the need for untrampled nature. They are teachings in communication, interdependence, and relationship, human with earth. They are a continuing-education course in getting better at getting along, finding a way to fit on a planet where people and flowers both belong.

I set down my handful of soil, recrank the engine, and once again head the tines down a row. Grateful for my garden. For my tiller. For this exhilarating day.

And, noise and all, for another chance to break spring ground. ❖ 97

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

The best gardening record keeper ever!

Scull Studios Engagement Calendars, since 1935, with special paper you can write on in pen or pencil with ease.

10%

discount for “GreenPrints� people.

See scullstudios. com for prices & more.

98

W

INTER

99

2O15

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

Mission Statement: CSPMA is an association of peat moss producers and related enterprises devoted to promoting the sustainable management of Canadian peatlands and the industry. We provide support and advocacy for our members and leadership in environmental and social stewardship and economic well-being related to the use of Canadian peatland resources.

Paul Short, President Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association 2208, 13 Mission Avenue, St. Albert, AB T8N 1H6, Canada Ph: 780-460-8280 www.peatmoss.com paul.short@peatmoss.com STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION (required by 39 USC 3685) for Winter 2014 for GREENPRINTS, published quarterly at 23 Butterrow Cove, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730-9568. having headquarters or general business ofďŹ ces at 23 Butterrow Cove, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730-9568. The names and addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor are: Pat Stone, GREENPRINTS, 23 Butterrow Cove, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730-9568. GREENPRINTS is published by Robert K. and Rebecca N. Stone, 23 Butterrow Cove, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730-9568.

The known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1% or more of the total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: none. The Average number of copies each issue during the preceding twelve months are: (a) Total number of copies printed (net press run), 12,430. (b) Paid Circulation: 1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions 11,687. 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions 57. 3. Paid distribution outside the mail 0. 4. Paid distribution by other classes of mail 0. (c) Total Paid Circulation, 11,744. (d) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution 1. Outside-county copies on PS Form 3541 119. 2.

In-county copies on PS Form 3541 0. 3. Mailed at other classes 107. 4. Outside the mail 106. (e) Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution 332. (f) Total Distribution 12,076. (g) Copies Not Distributed 354. (h) Total 12,430. Percent Paid 97.25%. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to ďŹ ling date are: (a) Total number of copies printed (net press run), 12,000. (b) Paid Circulation: 1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions 11,464. 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions 52. 3. Paid distribution outside the mail 0. 4 Paid distribution by other classes of mail 0. (c) Total Paid Circulation, 11,516. (d) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution 1. Outside-county copies on PS Form 3541 114. 2. In-county copies on PS Form 3541 0. 3. Mailed at other classes 113. 4. Outside the mail 69. (e) Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution 296. (f) Total Distribution 11,812. (g) Copies Not Distributed 188. (h) Total 12,000.

Percent Paid 97.49%. I certify that the statements made by me are correct and complete. Pat Stone, Publisher/Co-Owner

100

W

INTER

101

2O15

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

If unusual plants are your passion, there is QUACKIN’ GRASS NURSERY. Come and be enchanted.

Visit our online only catalog at www.QuackinGrassNursery.com.

102

W

INTER

2O15

www.miniforest.com Dwarf and Miniature Plants for Fairy Gardens, Bonsai and more. $5 catalog

MINIFOREST BY SKY P.O. Box 1156-GP, Mulino, OR 97042

103

G

REEN

P

RINTS

#1OO

FUNNIER-THAN-AVERAGE jokes on garden signs. Originals designed and created at my kitchen table here in Tennessee. Completely homemade, and beautifully handlettered on gray background weatherproof molded plastic tile in black 1/2�-high letters, very legible. Will last for years.

For free list of quotes and S.A.S.E. write to Signs of Growth, 7169 Andrews Rd., Bartlett, TN 38135.

Please allow up to 4 wks for your hand-painted signs.

104

W

INTER

105

2O15

GREENPRINTS it!

a W ’t

Back Issues are magic, unique, —and running out!

n DoNos. 1, 5, 7, 8, 17, 35, 59, 68, & 76 are gone for good!

Special Holiday Offers: Complete Set of all

90 available back issues.

1,000+ stories! only $199.00!

Bargain 10 - Pack

Order any ten issues of your choice. only $35.00!

Last Year

The 4 just-past back issues all at once! only $20.00!

Circle the ones you want.

Quan. Issue 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Unit Price Amount $4.00

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

$4.50

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

$6.00

Full Set of All 90 Back Issues Left

$199.00

Any 10 Issues (circle your choices above)

$35.00 $

Last Year: The 4 most-recent back issues in one package

$20.00

SubTotal Payment: Check Enclosed Mastercard/Visa

7% Sales Tax (NC residents only) S&H: $3.00 for 1 item; $5.00 for 2 or more

___________________________________ _______ number exp. date __________________ (daytime phone no.)

GRAND TOTAL MC/V/D phone orders: 1-800-569-0602 www.greenprints.com

Mail orders to: GreenPrints, P.O. Box 1355, Fairview, NC 28730.

W

INTER

107

2O15

GREENPRINTS P. O. Box 1355 Fairview, NC 28730

108