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GREEN R PRINTS “THE WEEDER’S DIGEST”

2IVE5RSARY TH

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P.12 CHICKENS & TOMATOES? NO! P.16 TENDING BEAUTY P.34 PEANUTS FROM CAMEROON

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At The Gate How do I create an issue?

Let me count the stories.

First, I sat down in May and read all 118 manuscripts that had come in by mail and email in the last three months. I accepted 13. Reading, deciding, responding, and buying took a week. A hard week.

I filed them all away under SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER, and ANYTIME. Then I reopened the file drawer, pulled out the FALL and ANYTIME stories, and started reading again. Two days later, I had chosen 66—that’s right, 66—stories that would fit fine and dandy in this issue. (I made a list of them all: See indecipherable scrawl above.) A few were obvious choices for the issue—especially if they’re seasonally appropriate—but after that the Dance of Decision begins. I know I want a balance of humor, tenderness, and insight. I know I don’t want too many stories on any one topic (pets, pests, grandparents, etc.). But lots of pieces fill those bills. Which ones (beside the three from my wonderful Contributing Editors) should I run?

I wish I could logically explain it. All I can say is each story in this issue called out, “Me! This time, Me!” At some level, I don’t choose them; they choose themselves. How else to explain it?

Only three of the 13 stories I just bought are in this issue. Another I bought this past February. One I bought in 2014, two in 2013. But I bought the others in 2008 . . . 2006 . . . 2004 . . . and 1997. (1997? That’s 18 years ago!)

Really, in the end, I’m not sure just how the various stories in this—or any—issue got in.

But I’m very, very grateful they did.

Pat Stone, Editor 3

BEA EAU EA AUTY T FRO R M BULBS RO Aft Af fter a long, cold winter, r there is nothing better fo r, f r onee’s spirits than the hopefu f l emergence of early crocus fu and galanthus fo f llowe w d by swe we w eping drift we f s of narcissi ft and vibrant swaths of colorfu f l tulips we fu w lcoming us back to our gardens. It is hard to imagine a spring without the beauty t of bulbs gracing our fa ty f mily’s lives.

If yo y u would like to bring the special a beauty al t of ty f owe fl w r bulbs to yo we y ur fa f mily’s garden, please contact our fa f mily’s companies fo f r a copy of Va V n Engelen’s 52-page wh w olesal a e price list or John Scheepers’ al 88-page color catalog. We W off ffe ff fer over 800 varieties of the best fl f owe w r bulbs fr we f om the annual Dutch harvest at the very best prices.

Narcissi • Tu T lips • Scilla • Hyacinth • Anemones Leucojum • Camassia • Al A lium • Lilies • Muscari Amaryl y lis • Galanthus • Fritillaria • Crocus yl Chionodoxa • Iris • Paperwh w ites • Eremurus wh 23 Tulip Drive PO Box 638 Bantam m, CT 06750 Phone:: (860) 567-87344 Fax: (860) 567-53233 www ww ww.vvanengelen.com ST83

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See r v i ng S n g America’s ffi nest gga rd rde d e ns ffo r over 100 yyears r! rs

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FEA EAS EA ASTS T FRO R M SEE RO E DS EE A we As w nestle into our homes aft f er hav ft a ing av put our gardens to bed fo f r the winter, r we r, w can relax a a bit and enj ax n oy the fr nj f uits of our labor~sav a ory dinners bursting with the essenceav off summer taste fr ff om our own gardens. Homemade soups, roasted vegetables, pasta sauces, herbed breads, chutneys y , jams, ys and special vinegars and oils spiced with sprigs of fr f esh herbs.

Our new e Ki ew K tc tch chen Ga G rd rde den Se See eed eds ds catal a og wi al w ll be av ava vailable in early January wi w th a distinctive v line of gourmet ve ve v getable, herb and fl f ow owe wer seeds . . . and the promise of delectable summer fe f asts. Please contact us fo f r our 52-page catalog complete with tantalizing recipes fr f om renown U.S. chefs f , practical gardening fs tips fr f om Barbara Damrosch and precious illustrations by Bobbi Angell.

Parsnips • Salvia • Artichokes • Shallots • Broccoli • Melons • Beans • Corn • Leeks Straw a berries • Herbs • Squash • Cosmos • Eggplant • Peas • To aw T matoes • Endive Lav a atera • Onions • Peppers • Potatoes • Salad Greens • Dianthus • Edible Flowers av Sweet Peas • Asparagus • Garlic • Cabbage • Spinach • Nasturtiums • Sunfl f owers fl ST83

S rving Se n America’s fi ng f nest ga g rd rde dens fo f r over 100 years r! rs

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Pat, Otis, Nate, Atteeyah, Denise (Atteeyah’s mother), and Becky with . . .

Clive Tupelo Stone! (You can barely see him here: more on p.76!)

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 © 2015 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, “Getting Ready,” by Kate O’Hara 5

Julie

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Contributors

B RC U DE D TI SS

“The Wonder” (p. 41) sent in by Linda R. Bell of Knoxvile, TN. “The Mountain and I” (p. 67) sent in by Carol Lillevang of Vallejo, CA. “He Who Sows Courtesy” (p. 81) sent in by Diana H. Toomoth of Neosho, MO. Contribute your favorite garden quote to“Buds.” If we use it, we’ll give you a year’s subscription.

6

KEERY CESEN

MARILYNNE ROACH

Ann Pedtke: Ann is an education consultant for nonprofits in New York City City. Ann also had poems Amber Kanuckel: From Walhond- published in GP’s No. 62 & 72 when ing, OH: “I am an accomplished she was a teenager! ghostwriter (over 1,000 blog posts) and avid gardener (whose green Rita Traut Kabeto: From Portland, thumb is often all too brown).”

OR: “I grew up in Germany in the 1950s. I took my first composition Linda Clearwater: Lewes, DE’s class in college (when I was 35!) and Linda has been in the creation busi- have been writing ever since.” ness for over thirty years—designing, illustrating, writing, Johan Dahlberg: Dahlberg “I am an and gardening.

18-year-old Swedish male who is living in Finland. I Robert Wolfe: Benfield, love to write. I also enjoy TX’s Robert has gardened reading, sports, friends, since he was a kid (“We and more.” had an enormous garden then“). His daughter PauRhonda Fleming Hayes: Hayes la is now an interior designer with From Wayzata, MN: “I’ve never two sons and two grandchildren. lived this far north. So far all I am growing is snow. I’ll adjust. I Sue Marra Byham: Westtown, PA’s always do.”

Sue had “The Perfect Hammock” run in GP No. 97, “My Fairy Gar- Janny J. Johnson: Johnson Nowadays this Paden” in No. 65, and a song—“The 12 cific Northwest writer is the mother Days of Gardening”—in No. 64! of four and grandmother of three.

She’s still weeding dandelions.

Dee Ann Grecu: From Noblesville, IN: “I was born with my hands Thomas Sullivan: Seattle’s Thomas in the dirt. Working the soil is in (thomassullivanhumor.com) is the my DNA. It and writing are great author of the essay collection So pleasures for me.”

Much Time, So Little Change.

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GreenPrints

Autumn, 2O15 #103

Chicken Tomatoes ......................................................................................... 12

By Amber Kanuckel Tending Beauty .............................................................................................. 16

By Linda Clearwater Show-and-Tell Potatoes ................................................................................ 20

By Robert Wolfe Bluebirds in the Pokeweed .......................................................................... 24

By Sue Marra Byham Molehill Mountain ........................................................................................ 28

By Dee Ann Grecu Peanuts from Cameroon ............................................................................... 34

By Ann Pedtke Never ................................................................................................................ 38

By Rita Traut Kabeto Not Bad Apples .............................................................................................. 42

By Becky Rupp My Grandmother’s Ring Ring .............................................................................. 46

By Johan Dahlberg Exploding Forsythia! ..................................................................................... 49

By Mike McGrath Rhonda’s Garden ........................................................................................... 54

By Rhonda Fleming Hayes Dandelion Wishes ......................................................................................... 58

By Janny J. Johnson A Rose Is a Rose Is . . . Grace Darling? ...................................................... 64

By Diana Wells “Heed!” ............................................................................................................ 68

By Thor Hanson Growing Up with GREENPRINTS, Part IV .................................................... 74

By T Tucker Stone Growing rowing Closer Together ............................................................................. 78

By Thomas homas Sullivan 7

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Chicken Tomatoes

love to grow tomatoes. There’s nothing like homecanned sauce, so each year I grow at least 30 tomato plants. For a number of years, I also raised chickens so that I could stock the fridge—and the neighbors’ fridges—with fresh eggs.

For a few summers, the chickens and tomatoes got along just fine (i.e., their paths never crossed). But one summer I decided to treat the chickens. On this particular day, the tomato harvest wasn’t going so well. Between the slugs and the unusually wet weather, I had enough defective ones to fill a small bucket.

As I carried that bucket of bad tomatoes to the compost pile, I wondered if the chickens might like to eat some. When I passed the chicken yard, I tossed a few over the fence, just to see what happened. Some of the hens came over to investigate, and a couple There wasn’t a single tomato of them pecked at the tomatoes in a desultory fashion. I shrugged and turned towards the left—not even compost pile. a green one.

I hadn’t gone but a few steps when I heard the most terrible racket. I turned and was greeted by the sight of a flock of hens that had gone completely mad.

It turns out that chickens do like tomatoes—and I mean they really like them. As I watched, one hen grabbed a tomato scrap and ran across the yard, neck and wings outstretched. Three more hens pursued her with evil in their eyes. Two hens crouched in a corner over a fallen tomato, raising their hackle feathers at each other. Other hens cackled triumphantly over their tomatoes, and 14

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DENA SEIFERLING

Two things you don’t want to put together.

By Amber Kanuckel

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the poor rooster stood in the middle of the yard, scratching the ground furiously while crowing as loud as he could.

Amused, I threw a few more tomatoes over the fence and watched as the chickens scrambled and gobbled. Before too long, my bucket of bad tomatoes was empty and the hens were settling down around the yard, tired and satisfied.

Those tomatoes made the chickens so happy that I made sure to feed them at least a few tomatoes each day, even if I only had green ones. Each batch of tomatoes caused just as much mayhem as the last. I’d lean on the fence and chuckle at the hens’ antics, sometimes calling my husband over to watch.

He was less amused. In his opinion, I was enabling a tomato addiction, and he said, repeatedly, that sooner or later I was going 15

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to regret it. I brushed off his concerns. Chickens, while adorable and often amusing, are not noted for their intelligence. I refused to believe that feeding them a few tomatoes each day would lead to the ruin of my tomato bed.

But that is exactly what happened. One fine morning I was walking through my gardens, sipping coffee, when I came upon a scene of unimaginable destruction. As I later found, something had torn a hole in the fence around the chicken yard—a raccoon, most likely—and the chickens had gotten out.

Those chickens had ignored every part of the vegetable garden but the tomatoes—and the tomatoes were a sad sight. Vines trailed where they had been torn down from their cages, and a few of the cages lay on their sides on the ground. The wooden stakes I’d used to support the back line of tomatoes now leaned at crazy angles, reminding me of the headstones in some forgotten cemetery.

There wasn’t a single tomato left—not even a green one.

Back at the chicken yard, a dozen of the happiest, fattest chickens you’ve ever seen were lying around in the grass. Some had one leg kicked out so that they leaned lazily to one side. Others lay with their wings loosely hanging by their sides, beaks resting against the ground. Only the rooster cocked an eye as I approached, and when he saw it was only me, he ruffled his feathers and went back to sleep.

Cursing my foul—OK, fowl—fate, I silently fixed the hole in the chicken fence. I devoted the rest of the day to salvaging the tomato bed: clearing away fallen branches, pruning broken stems, righting stakes and cages, and tying up the plants so they once again stood upright.

The chickens were forced to quit their tomato habit cold turkey. I assumed that after a week or two, they would forget about tomatoes entirely. or the second time that summer, I was wrong.

One day, about two weeks after the Great Tomato Massacre, as my husband had taken to calling it, I went out to the chicken yard to feed and gather eggs. When I arrived, I found a tree limb lying on the fence. There wasn’t a 16

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single chicken in sight. I rushed to the tomato bed, but the chickens weren’t there, either. Apparently, they had flown the coop in search of something better than the few tiny green tomatoes that had grown back in my garden.

I went back to the chicken yard, cleared away the tree limb, and repaired the fence. Then I gathered eggs and put down feed.

Over the years I’ve learned there is nothing so pointless as chasing chickens, so on my way out of the yard, I left the gate open. I knew that toward evening, no matter where they’d gone, they’d come home to roost, and I could just close the gate behind them.

Sure enough, they did, and I did. s the days went by, I didn’t think much about where the chickens had gone or what they had done. The important thing was that they had all come home safely, and they had done it without finishing off my poor tomato plants.

Then, on a hot late-summer afternoon, I was out on the property line, inspecting the fence and clearing brush. My neighbor, Eugene, spotted me and came over to chat. We talked about weather and neighborhood happenings, but the subject—as it invariably does among country gardeners—eventually turned to tomatoes.

“A couple of weeks ago,” Eugene said, “the strangest thing happened to my tomato plants. They were all just torn to bits.

There wasn’t a tomato left any place.”

Oh no, I thought. I did my best to look concerned as Eugene recounted the horrors inflicted upon his tomatoes.

“I dunno what coulda done it,” he added. “Don’t have a clue, really. But I thought you should know so you can keep an eye out.”

“I’ll do that,” I replied with a weak smile. We talked a while longer, but my heart was no longer in the conversation. I made a polite exit, picked up my tools, and headed home. I was halfway there when I heard the chickens cackling loudly. I couldn’t help but think they were doing it on purpose, just for me.

Am I ever going to let a chicken get near a tomato again?

Only if they’re both in a casserole. ❖ 17

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Tending Beauty Learning to enjoy my garden—and my girls.

By Linda Clearwater ❖

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY NICOLE TAMARIN

Working in my garden is a lot like raising my girls. I often think about what I should do to make both it and them beautiful and healthy and strong. And although I weed and discipline, sometimes it feels as though I’m not really making a difference. There always seems to be one more problem to sort out. The lawn needs mowing. Hair needs untangling. Weeds take over a flowerbed.

Laundry piles up until my two daughters and I are sorting through it to find the least Maybe if dirty thing to wear.

Right now, as I stare out my bedroom I wasn’t so window, I see a poison ivy vine climbing up hard on myself, the dogwood tree. I am fiercely allergic. ConI wouldn’t tact with this plant always leaves me looking like a burn victim. I have often lain awake at be so hard night, regretting that I didn’t protect myself on them. with long sleeves and gloves.

I’ve also lain awake at night regretting things I said to my children.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said to Genna once when she locked her keys in the car while the engine was still running. I know there’s nothing wrong with her. She just made a mistake.

Then she locked the keys in the car a second time.

“Again? What’s wrong with you?”

Dani, my younger daughter, carried scissors to the living room with the blades facing her chest. “Don’t be stupid,” I said.

“Hold those things the right way.”

Late at night, when the girls are sleeping and I am alone having a cup of tea, I often relive the events of the day. The other 19

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day I cut a clump of weeds with my scissors because I was too tired to pull them out properly. In the process I also cut off a long stem of bleeding hearts. Then I remembered the cutting remarks I’d made to my daughters and realized they may do more harm than scissors.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said aloud—to myself!

That’s when I realized that maybe somebody besides my daughters needs more gentleness and tolerance. Maybe if I wasn’t so hard on myself, I wouldn’t be so hard on them.

How to do that?

I’ve taken up squinting.

Yes, a little selective blindness goes a long way in helping me enjoy the world around me. After all, if I don’t see a problem, I won’t be bothered by it, right? So the ryegrass is invading the hardy blue ageratum. If I squint, it blends right in. So Dani has a pair of shoes lying under the coffee table, another pair adorning the front entry, and two more in the dining room. I’m still squinting here!

Sometimes I have to squeeze my eyes down to tiny slits.

When Genna returned from college this summer, I came home from a hard day at work to find two extra bureaus in my dining room and a television parked upside-down on the couch. I had to almost shut my eyes that time.

Outside, the blackberry bushes on the north side of the house grew right through the hostas and the caryopteris. My, My I say squinting, what lovely white flowers they had in the spring! In July and August, my daughters and I were treated to raspberries just outside of our back door every morning with breakfast—we just had to move the patio table a little further every day. And now, in October, the Concord grape vines have reached out to the nearby Dragon Lady holly tree. If I squint, it all resembles a mother hugging her child.

Genna is 21 now and away at college most of the year. She gets A’s, holds a part-time job, and pays her own rent. I don’t even have to squint to realize that she is doing well.

I look at my younger daughter, Dani. She’s 11. Her hair is uncombed and wild with curls. Her clothes are, well, imagina20

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tively mismatched. She has been following me around the house all morning, chattering away while I’ve been doing chores. And now she is standing very quietly by the window in her sister’s bedroom, which I have slowly been turning into an office now that Genna is away.

“Genna has the best view,” she says. This will always be considered her big sister’s room.

I walk across the room, stand at the window with her, and look down into the garden. It’s autumn. Many of the perennials are past their prime or overgrown or getting ready to sleep for the winter. There are apples rotting on the trees. The fruit vines are leggy. The walking trail has bits of grass growing up between the soiled chicken hay I used to line the path.

“This really is the best view,” she says. She leans close to the screen.

Dani doesn’t see the lackluster leaves, the thorny twigs. She doesn’t realize that the perennials are depressed and the path is full of chicken manure. The paths look like gold to her. She is remembering the raspberries of summer. She sees and smells the grapes on the vine. To her, the ten-foot Joe Pye weed makes a monumental statement. The fallen Silver Queen artemisia plants make a regal carpet in the flowerbed. The few remaining flowers of the obedient plants dance like fairies on their tendril stems. She looks at the bench under the grape arbor and sees the picture I took of her and her big sister there that now sits in a gilded frame on the living room piano.

“I think it’s beautiful,” she says, staring down.

I realize that she doesn’t see the things that are wrong with the garden.

She sees colors and shapes and textures.

She sees the life. She is seeing what I saw when I first imagined the garden, years ago.

I give her a small hug and squint down into the garden.

“I think so, too,” I whisper.

I think so, too. ❖ 21

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Show-and-Tell Potatoes Where were the potatoes?

By Robert Wolfe A couple of years ago, we moved to a place with a large lot. I borrowed my dad’s rototiller, broke up a large area, and planted rows of vegetables.

Our son Paul, eight, and daughter Paula, five, helped us plant the seeds. Then we covered them and watered the garden.

Paul enjoyed gardening—but Paula became fascinated with it. One day she came into the house, her hands full of little beans.

“Look!” she said in her shrill little voice, “I picked the beans!”

When we explained that the beans needed to get bigger, she began to cry. She thought she had ruined the garden. We told her the plants would make more beans. She thought that was magic.

Every day Paula After that, Paula checked the garden every day. When plants matured, she was would come and elated. She would come running into the tell me that house, calling, “The beans are big,” or “The there weren’t squash is ready,” or “The tomatoes are red. any potatoes.

Now!” We would have to go out—right away—and harvest.

Every day.

Then one day as I pulled into the driveway, Paula met me with a confused look on her face.

“Daddy,” she said, “the potaters did not make.”

“Really?” I said.

“Look.” She led me to the potato patch and pulled back the leaves. “They got blooms, but there’s not any potaters.”

I rubbed my chin. “We’ll have to keep an eye on them,” I said.

After that, every day she would come and tell me that there weren’t any potatoes. Every day. The plants bloomed. The plants 22

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY HANNAH ENGLAND

dropped their flowers. Still no potatoes.

One Saturday morning at the end of August, my wife looked at me earnestly. “Paula is out there again looking for potatoes,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s time to show her where they are?”

As I was drinking my coffee, Paula came in, a sad look on her face. Before she could speak, I said, “I guess if those potatoes are not going to make, we need to just dig them up.”

My wife looked at me and—trying to keep a straight face— said, “That sounds like a good idea.”

Paula ran out the door, shouting, “I’ll get the shobel!”

By the time I got outside, she was dragging the shovel across the yard. “Here, let me have that,” I said.

I carried it out to the garden, dug deep under a plant, and turned it over. Big, beautiful potatoes rolled all over the ground. Paula stood transfixed, her eyes as big as saucers.

My wife walked up with a paper sack. Paula screamed, “Mommy! Potaters! Under the ground! LOOK!” “Here, baby,” my wife said. “Put them in the sack.”

Paula dropped to her knees and grabbed potatoes as fast as she could.

“Dig another one, daddy! HURRY!” she shrieked.

We dug up two more plants and left the rest for later. Paula talked about nothing else all day. She showed Paul. She told the neighbors. She even called Mamaw and Papaw on the phone.

That Monday she took a sack of potatoes to her kindergarten class for Show-And-Tell. ❖ 23

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Celery Pride

By Sandra Kocher ❖

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LINDA COOK DEVONA

lancing down at bright green stalks of celery on my plate crisp to the bite stuffed now with cream cheese I have to remind myself that this celery grew in my garden not in supermarket packets celery that grew like miniature trees lined up in two short rows I talked to it, fed it, gave it plenty of water tried not to play favorites It actually grew in rocky New England soil far from California crunch, crunch, the celery disappears

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Bluebirds in the Pokeweed

ere’s a scenario that used to snap my pitchfork: I’m working in the yard. The guy next door goes for a walk with his son, and passes my way. I chat with the man a bit, long enough to confirm that we still have nothing more in common than our geographical proximity. Then just as the boy is beginning to take an intelligent interest in my activity, his father takes him by the shoulder, says, “Let’s let our neighbor get on with [dramatic pause] whatever it is she’s doing,” and steers him away.

This, of course, leaves me wondering why it isn’t perfectly obvious what I’m doing. Or “What are you if it is obvious, but he can’t imagine why I’m doing it. Does he mean to imply some subtle doing?“ he criticism? Is he actually expressing disapwhispers, thus proval of my gardening strategies? proving that his My mental channel, until moments ago tuned to crickets, now flips to a witty internal father’s worries monologue: Our house is nestled in fascinatare justified. ing greenery that’s chock full of wildlife.

What have they got over there? A nasty shaved lawn that makes the house look like a toy sitting on a pool table. A few precisely shaped shrubs, tortured into spheres, and one straight line of plastic-looking flowers.

If I sound paranoid, blame the fact that many of the plants I love best are often called “weeds.” Even the sweetest gardeners slaughter them by the millions, so that I despair of them surviving another century.

Stewing in my suppressed wrath, I reach into the trash bag 26

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That crazy eco-nut (me) and her neighbors.

By Sue Marra Byham

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of pokeweed I had gathered from a nearby construction site and go on laying the berry-filled stalks near the roses in front of my house. The boy is shooting a basketball his father handed him before going back indoors. He dutifully makes a few baskets, then he dribbles to the end of his driveway and, with a wary look toward home, kicks the ball to where I stand. Sidling up to me

casually, he whispers, “What are you doing?” He thus proves that his father’s worries are justified. Left unsupervised, he will sop up my lectures like a sponge, and some fine day when he becomes a man, stab his father to the quick by acting on them. May I live to see the day! Not from any sense of injury, of course. Purely for the good of the planet.

“This,” I whisper, one spy confiding in another, “is called pokeweed. It was highly prized by our ancestors for many reasons.” I know better than to mention poke salad until he is 18. Then I will 27

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no longer be answerable to his parents if he prefers eating weeds to eating out of a box.

I smear a pokeberry into a tissue. “See what a bright magenta it is? If you get it on your clothes, it won’t come out. That’s why pokeberries have been used in dyes and inks for centuries.”

“I bet you have all the recipes, too,” he says in a neutral tone.

He hasn’t yet decided if I am a nut or not. But I am interesting for being unlike his parents.

“I have a few recipes,” I say. “But I’m not planting pokeweed to make ink.” e gets called into dinner, and our conversation ends.

Fall turns to winter and winter to spring before we get another chance to talk. During those months I get only glimpses of him being hurried from climate-controlled house to climate-controlled car and back again. (His family must wonder what I could possibly be doing outdoors in the cold.)

Then one morning, while I am thinning the young seedlings, he comes over to me. “It came up!” he shouts. Then, as if remembering something he was told, he adds, “You won’t be able to get rid of it now.”

“I don’t want to get rid of it,” I say. “But I could. See how easily you can pull the young shoots from the ground?” I pull one up.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m encouraging them to grow into a hedge.”

His next question is cut short when his mother drives up and opens the door so he can scoot into the car. ur

ur next pokeweed encounter is in the summer. “Dad doesn’t like that stuff,” he says in greeting. We both stop a moment to watch butterflies fluttering ecstatically through the abundant pokeweed blooms.

I already know that his dad doesn’t like them. I had some growing near the property line behind our houses, and he invariably crossed the line to hack at them with his string trimmer—despite the fact that they were well pruned and well on our side. This was partly why I had planted the new patch out front.

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“Why doesn’t your dad like it?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Why do you like it?”

“One of the biggest reasons,” I said, “is that pokeweed is a favorite food of the Eastern bluebird. The bluebird has been having a hard time around here. These berries will help the bird survive in the winter. And I’ll be able to watch them from the window.”

At least that’s what I’m hoping, I don’t add out loud. he boy and I meet again that fall—as I am hauling a bucket of black walnuts to the porch so that my husband and I can see who comes to snack on them.

“Is there anything you don’t feed?” he asks. There is scorn in his voice. Oh, dear. Next he’ll be rolling his eyes and asking why don’t we watch TV instead of the window.

“My dad says there aren’t any bluebirds around here anymore.

He says nobody has seen one for years.”

“Bluebirds don’t go where there’s no food or water for them,” I reply, a little too harshly.

At that moment, I hear quick footsteps coming up the drive.

It’s the boy’s father. He looks excited about something. He points, jabbing his finger in the air, and we look.

There are bluebirds flying toward the pokeweed—at least three dozen bluebirds! They settle into it, play a game of musical perches, and begin stuffing themselves silly. My neighbors are beside themselves. They’ve never seen such a thing before.

The sun is bright, so the bluebirds are a startling blue, and their melodic cries and murmuring, their rustling and their wings flapping, are suddenly the only sounds in the world. The earth seems to pitch beneath my feet.

Jaws drop on either side of me. I planted pokeberries. I said the bluebirds would come. They did. Logically then, though I am still one of those eco-nuts, I am no longer a crank.

In the months to come, our conversations may be brief and far between, but now they are cordial. There is peace between our houses. Pokeweed prospers on our border. And what’s more, a state of the art, copper-trimmed bluebird house now flashes its welcome in the sun behind my neighbor’s house. ❖ 29

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Molehill Mountain

hine. Whine whine whine.

The puppies were whimpering downstairs. I squinted at the clock: 6:02 A.M. Ugh, I mused. Maybe they will go back to sleep.

I closed my eyes. The whimpering continued. Wendy and Gretel were nearly housebroken. Ignoring their whining could cause a setback. And Joe, my husband, was away on business.

I swung my legs over the mattress, reached for my robe, and glanced out the window. Snow had fallen, the first of the season.

It looked rather pretty. Scanning the frosty overlay, I saw no indication of overnight mole activity. Good, I thought.

Our property on Bull Mountain offered a distant view of Mt. Hood. Bull Mountain, though, was not my idea of a mountain.

It was more like an oversized hill—an oversized mole hill.

The pups increased their pleas. My nightLeaves and gown fluttered as I quietly descended the muck covered steps. Maybe the children won’t wake up and I my nightwear, can sneak back to bed for a few more minutes. my hair, and We had moved to Oregon right at the beginning of the school year. It had been my body. tough on our kids. We bought the puppies to try to divert their attention from their old friends. I had left my friends behind, too. My own diversion therapy was working on establishing the landscape.

Our new lot featured a double-decker backyard. The flat upper lawn led to a steep slope, which bottomed out to create the lower lawn. We hired a contractor to lay sod on the two lawns.

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How I became Mrs. Bigfoot.

By Dee Ann Grecu

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Installing groundcover plants on the slope was my project. Digging, planting, and mulching the slope required a true balancing act, but working the soil comes naturally for me, so my part went fairly smoothly. Soon after the sod was down, though, molehills began to appear. For some reason, the lush instant grass was irresistible to the Bull Mountain mole population.

We tried home remedies and commercial mole repellents.

Neighbors recommended everything from fruit-flavored chewing gum to a shotgun. Nothing worked. New molehills cropped up daily. Exasperated, we searched online and discovered the website of someone called The Mole Man. We called him immediately.

A few days later, a ramshackle van emblazoned with the words “Mole Control My Goal” showed up in our drive—and out stepped The Mole Man. He looked like a trapper from the pages of American history. Burly and slightly hunchbacked. Leathery face and jagged brown teeth. Long scraggly hair and beard. He even wore a coat made from some type of fur. (Mole?)

The thought popped into my head that he resembled Bigfoot, 31

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the elusive legend of the Northwest. When I told Joe, we tried to suppress our laughter. A decades-old mystery had been solved!

The Mole Man ignored our amusement—he was used to it.

Customers quickly learned to not mind his looks: Mole eradication was his passion and he had a reputation for success.

The Mole Man walked around the yard, exploring the hills and tunnels established by the burrowing varmints. At various spots, he stooped down, muttered the words, “Confounded moles!,” and inserted bullet-shaped capsules into the ground. When the job was complete, Joe and I followed him to his van.

“You might find a body or two before long,” he said, deriving obvious pleasure at the prospect. Spittle bubbled as he spoke.

“Them that survives usually runs off to bother somebody else. I don’t expect I’ll hear from you again.” Joe handed him a check, then he climbed into his mole-mobile and drove away.

We looked at each other, both said, “Confounded moles!” and exploded into laughter. But the real joke was on the moles. Ten days later, new molehills had all but disappeared. nside their pen, Wendy and Gretel wiggled with excitement. I slipped on my moccasins, scooped up the pups, and carried them out through the garage.

Then I stood in the doorway watching them scamper and squat. Cold air infiltrated my bathrobe.

Suddenly something caught my eye. Lying in the grass by the deck was—what?

I retrieved the pups, placed them in the garage, and cautiously stepped over to investigate. It’s a beaver, I thought. No, it wouldn’t be a beaver, not up here. I leaned forward for a closer look.

Good grief! It’s an enormous mole. Do they really grow that big in Oregon? No wonder they live underground. They’re dreadfully ugly!

Then I remembered The Mole Man’s warning: “You might find a body or two.”

Or two? I thought. I think one is more than enough.

Why was Joe always out of town when things like this happened? I grabbed a trash bag and shovel from the house and returned to the scene. I prodded the body with the shovel. No 32

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response. It’s dead, all right.

Stretching my arms and holding my breath, I lifted the carcass with the shovel and flipped it into the garbage bag. As I closed the bag, I noticed tracks in the snow.

More Moles? I grabbed the bag in one hand, picked up the shovel, and followed the tracks. They led to the slope. I stopped and leaned over to examine the lower lawn.

Warning To All: Moccasins don’t grip damp ground.

In an instant, I was skidding down the incline on my rear. I rolled onto my front to try to brake myself, but that only smeared my front side as well as my back. At the bottom of the hill, I stopped—spread-eagled, with my robe and gown scrunched around my waist. I lay there, covered in a slimy mix of snow, mud, mulch, and uprooted plants.

My mind raced. Oh, dear Lord, am I dead? No, I think I am alive, but is my back broken? I don’t think I can move. I’m stuck, lying halfnaked on this blasted hill, holding a shovel and a large dead mole in a plastic bag. The kids will never think to look for me out here. If I can’t move, I will freeze to death, and this is the way the neighbors will find me. I’ll die of embarrassment!

I couldn’t stand for that. So, groaning, I struggled to my feet.

Using the shovel as a cane, I inched my way up the slippery hill, moccasins squishing in the gooey mud. Leaves and muck covered my nightwear, my hair, and my body.

I staggered onto our deck, stopping outside the family room window. The children were seated on the floor, bowls of cereal in their laps, eyes fixed on the television.

I tapped on the glass. The children turned their heads—and shrieked! I pulled the mole out of the trash bag to show them.

They dropped their cereal bowls and ran from the room!

I caught sight of myself in the window glass. I’m the one who could be mistaken for Bigfoot, I realized.

I trudged out to the yard, dug a hole with a shovel, and buried the varmint that had caused all this. Then I went back to the house, turned on the hose, and began washing myself off, clothes and all, with the spray of—very cold—water.

“Confounded moles!” I muttered. ❖ 33

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C U T T I N G S Messenger for the Bees

Where would our gardens be without bees?

Bees are messengers of love. They flutter around, getting drunk on nectar. They carry sex on their furry bodies while spreading pollen from one flower to the next. They even do little dances to invite their hive mates to join the party. Without their playful exchanges, our world would be a much less colorful place.

Trust me. I know.

In the summer of 2010, two of my beehives at Hayes Valley Farm, a 2.2 acre urban farm in the center of San Francisco, were found sprayed with insect killer. More than 100,000 bees died. Someone had trespassed onto the farm in the night to kill them.

My initial reaction was fierce anger. I suspected a neighbor and felt an overwhelming sense of distrust. I mourned for the bees.

Many people fear bees. Most don’t know that honeybees don’t sting unless provoked, and that bees are responsible for pollinating 85% of our plants and one in every three bites of food we take.

I recently launched Project Grow the Rainbow. With the help of people all across the country, we’re growing one million flowers for the declining bee population. I realized that education is needed and solutions can be simple. The Grow the Rainbow Project is my offering to the bees and to my six-month-old son.

Especially after that violence, I choose to believe that a more beautiful world is possible. I choose to be a solution. I have to be, for my son. I want him and everyone else to know that with each frustration, each bit of stress, and each annoyance, comes an opportunity to “bee” the change we wish to see in the world.

May we all become messengers of love for the bees.

—By Chris Burley of Daly ly City, CA. 34

BLANCHE DERBY

“Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.”

—Bill Mollison

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

Birds and Boysenberries

LINDA COOK DEVONA

The garden of my childhood was a wonderful place. The caretaker of this magical playground was my father. He spent hours tending the flowers, vegetables, and fruit trees.

One of Dad’s prized crops was his boysenberry vines— carefully tended, pruned, and trained onto homemade fences.

(The jams Mother made from them was one of our family’s unique Christmas presents.)

His boysenberry nemesis was birds—mostly jays and mockingbirds who agreed that these were very good berries, indeed. I remember the frustration in Dad’s voice when he yelled at them. He even shot over their heads with a rifle to scare them away. (This was the 1950s. You probably couldn’t do that today.)

Many years passed. Dad began getting weaker. He still spent a great deal of time in his garden, but more and more, he just sat in the sun and enjoyed the place he had created.

One morning when I was home from college, doing my laundry, I saw Dad through a window sitting in his garden. I was sad to see him so frail, but what brought a smile to my face and forever etched the moment in my memory was what he was doing.

Dad was putting peanuts close by so the birds would come up to get them.

—By Marvella Peterman of Pacific Grove, CA. 35

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Peanuts from Cameroon Putting down roots—in America.

By Ann Pedtke ❖

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ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINA HESS

t my community garden in the Bronx, we grew many things.

Sunflowers bobbed at the fence line, overlooking the cracked sidewalk and the rundown bus stop. Spindly peach trees offered up small, fuzzy fruits, many of which were stolen before they were ripe. Eggplant and tomatoes bravely forced their way through the crumbling soil.

This small urban plot, squeezed in between the highway and the Bronx River, was not the type of garden I was used to. So I didn’t realize how deep roots could go here—not until we grew peanuts from Cameroon.

The peanuts came with the refugees. One early spring day they arrived, a dozen uncertain faces: some old, some young, some in between. Many of them had fled political turmoil in West Africa or Southeast Asia, “My sister has and had lived in the United States only a few weeks. Their guide from the international ressent these, from cue organization led them in, speaking in brief our country, syllables as she gestured to a daffodil and a and I want pair of ducks on the river. The refugees seemed to share them even more uncomfortable in an urban setting than I was. They didn’t know English, and with you.” they didn’t know the city, but when I opened the garden shed and began to take out our garden tools—hoes, spades, wheelbarrows—they smiled. This they knew.

Every week the refugees returned, eager for the familiar scent of soil, this reminder of their old lives on the land. An old man from Tibet calmly watered the beds, waving the hose slowly back and forth while nodding and smiling to himself. One of the rescue workers told us he had been a professor in his home country and was the author of several books. Two long-legged teenagers from Sierra Leone raced their wheelbarrows of mulch down the garden path. They were in school now but had been placed with much younger students in order to catch up on the language. A mother and daughter from Myanmar knelt side by side pulling weeds, speaking softly in Burmese. Their husbands had not yet been permitted to leave the country.

One woman, Angel, spoke better English than the rest. She 37

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wore flowing yellow blouses, hoop earrings, and a headwrap bright with floral designs. “In my country,” she told us, “in Cameroon, we grew corn, cassava, peanuts. We grew tous les choses.

There was no one, personne, who did not farm.”

One day, Angel arrived at the garden with a small bundle clutched to her chest. “Come,” she said. When all of us had gathered round, Angel carefully opened a paper bag, crumpled and soft around the edges. It contained a few handfuls of tiny peanuts.

“My sister has sent these, from our country,” Angel told us, “and I want to share them with you. We will plant them here.”

As we knelt together around a raised bed, recently cleared up of bindweed, no one thought to question whether peanuts could grow in the Bronx. No one remembered that it was almost summer, late for planting. No one worried whether the soil could offer all the nutrients peanuts need. We all stood in Angel’s spell, watching carefully as she showed us how to plant the peanuts a hand’s width apart, placing three or four seeds together in each small mound. Each of us planted a peanut in the ground—those of us who had planted peanuts many times before and those of us who had not imagined that we ever would. Then we waited.

After that, each week when the refugees arrived, they gathered at the peanut bed. The boys ran ahead to get there first. The older members of the group followed behind, craning their necks for a glimpse. On days when the group didn’t visit, I snuck over to check on the peanuts myself. Would rats or squirrels dig them up? Would the packed soil prove too hard for them to grow? Would summer rains wash them into the Bronx River?

But the peanuts grew, and so did our group. The refugees began to come twice a week, then three times. Some of them brought new friends along. The peanut plants grew runners. They flowered. They put out more runners. They spread.

Other community gardeners visited the bed to examine this curious crop. The peanuts looked healthy, but what was happening beneath the ground?

Autumn came. Pieces of litter blew against the garden fence.

Pumpkins and zucchini ripened. Yellow gingko leaves, twirling down from the street trees, came to rest in our vegetable beds.

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At last it was time to harvest. We planned a celebration in the garden: Each family brought a dish from their own country, and we strung up ribbons and balloons. The children played tag around the little peach trees, while the grown-ups laughed and spoke to one another in many languages. New visitors stepped tentatively into the garden, lured away from the bus stop by the sound of music and voices. We picked—squash, kale, cauliflower, the last of the tomatoes—and divided the bounty among all the guests.

Then all of us, 40 or 50 people, gathered at the peanut bed.

As we watched, Angel bent down, her enormous hoop earrings swinging in her ears. She gave the first plant a solid tug, bringing it up all at once in a bundle of leaves and runners and roots and soil. She shook it to clear off the soil clumps, and we all leaned closer. There they were: tiny pale peanuts clinging to the end of each runner.

The guide from the rescue group plucked a tiny peanut and put it tentatively in her mouth. Suddenly her face curdled, and she spit the nut back out. No one spoke. I stared at the plant in dismay. Had the peanuts rotted in the rains? Had mold set in?

Angel laughed, a deep hearty laugh low in her throat. “We have to dry them first,” she said, her voice flowing richly over the group. “After two, three weeks, then—then comes the eating!”

We all surged forward then, grinning foolishly, to pull up our own plants and get a look at the peanuts. I rolled one between my fingertips. They were soft, with hardly any definition between the nuts and the surrounding shell. They would not be like peanuts from the grocery store, even when they were dried. Not like what I was used to. But I didn’t mind.

We carried the peanut plants in a parade through the garden. A plant would be carried back to each household, where it would be hung to dry before the peanuts were roasted and salted for eating. The garden would close for the winter and lie dormant in the cold and ice. But in the spring we would all be back. We all knew the truth now: Roots could be put down, even in hardpacked city soil. If peanuts brought all the way across the sea from Cameroon could grow in the Bronx, then anything—and any of us—could grow here, too. ❖ 39

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Never

I promised myself when I was young.

By Rita Traut Kabeto ❖

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hen I was young, in post-war Germany back in the 1950s, I promised myself that I would never have a garden. Mother was to blame. She had a huge garden. Since she also worked in the family store, she eagerly drafted as many of us seven girls as she could for garden duty.

Our garden was the first one in a huge community garden.

A concrete path led down the middle. To the left and the right of it stood apples, plums, pears, and sour cherry trees, along with countless currant and gooseberry bushes. Vegetable beds, raspberries, rhubarb, and a few flowers filled in the gaps.

And that was before our garden neighbor died, which made his garden available for a new owner. Mother didn’t waste anytime getting it!

On the right, a short path led to the garden Every German house (my father had it built by a couple of employees who were trained carpenters). knows the story The little attic above its two rooms housed about the poet the tools. I remember a time when we had who got an no garden house, only a large box on stilts to hold our tools. When it rained then, Mother earwig in his ear. got wet.

I was young.

The garden house was a nice gift to I believed it!

Mother, but a source of resentment for us girls. Since it rains a lot in the region I came from, the ground was always wet and muddy. We had to wear gardening shoes, loose-fitting, decrepit things with dried mud crumbs inside that could never be completely removed. Their worn heels made walking difficult, so we could never run and play.

There wasn’t much room to play, anyway: Trees with branches full of bugs (it seemed to us) were everywhere.

The garden shoes dragged mud into the garden house, so every weekend one of us four oldest girls had to wash the floor.

We used a rag that we hung on the plum tree to dry. When we took it down a week later, earwigs fell out of it. Earwigs also fell out every time we opened the shutters on the garden house’s back window. Every German knows the story Balduin Baehlamm

by Wilhelm Busch, about a young poet who was lying in the grass 41

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to think—and an earwig made its way into his ear. I was young!

I believed it.

Spiders built webs in the window corners of the rooms, webs that filled up with dead bugs. When ripe fruit fell and turned to mush, bees and wasps feasted on them—so we didn’t dare walk barefoot.

Raspberries often had little tiny worms in them, so you had to check before you popped one into your mouth. Speaking of raspberries, our garden plot had no toilet, so when the urge hit, you had to dig holes among the raspberries and hope that no one was looking.

When all those fruits and vegetables ripened, we had to pick them, all of them, every last little current berry that we had left because it was so small. Buckets upon buckets of gooseberries, cherries, raspberries, plums, green beans, carrots, and more—all of it made its way into our kitchen, where we had to wash it, pit it, peel it, slice it, and can it.

The work made my fingers black and dirty-looking, especially around the fingernails. And that on a Saturday, when a girl wants to primp in preparation for Sunday!

Mother did not allow us to have boyfriends. Of course I had one anyway, a secret one. But every summer Saturday afternoon, Mother would make some of us go out with her to the garden.

Not everyone had a telephone in those days. If I made a date and Mother suddenly drafted me for garden duty, it was real agony for me. I worried that my friend might interpret my no-show as a break-up.

We couldn’t even escape Mother’s gardening at home: She kept plants on every window sill. If I dared to throw away a sickly plant, she promptly pulled it out of the trash, put it back on the sill—and gave me a lecture!

No, I was never going to have a garden when I grew up.

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hen I came to the United States and got married. It didn’t take me long to get tired of tasteless, store-bought tomatoes. So I went out and bought some plants.

I have been gardening ever since. ❖ 42

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KERRY CESEN

The wonder is that we can see the trees and not wonder more. —Ralph Waldo Emerson 43

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Not Bad Apples A fruit with a reputation. By Becky Rupp pples have a bad reputation dating back to the Book of Genesis. And we’re never going to let them forget about it, either, since we’ve immortalized their part in the Garden-of-Eden fiasco in scientific Latin. The generic name of the apple is Malus, from the Latin for bad, as in malicious, malevolent, and that creepy fairy Malificent.

I like apples and I don’t think they deserve their bad press.

It seems particularly unfair, since these days botanists and biblical scholars agree that the fruit that Adam and Eve so disobediently ate probably wasn’t an apple at all. That said, they don’t agree on what the mysterious fruit actually was. Various guesses include the fig, the date, the apricot, the grape, the citron, the carob, and the olive—which last, at least, seems unlikely. In the fresh-off-the-tree untreated state, olives taste awful; the First Couple would immediately have spat them out and saved themselves a lot of trouble.

Carrie Nation Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, argues that the had a hatchet forbidden fruit was a banana, an opinion because she was that was shared by no less than Carolus Linafter the ruinous naeus; and there’s a hefty contingent of fruit cider-producing fans that opts for the pomegranate.

Much of this fruit guessing depends on apple trees. where the guesser thinks the putative Garden of Eden was located. Traditionally, Eden has been imagined as flourishing somewhere in the Middle East—which puts apples neatly out of the picture, since apples originated in Kazakhstan in Central Asia. (Alternative proposed locations for Eden include such locales as Mongolia, Ohio, and the Bermuda Triangle.)

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY BLANCE DERBY

times, where—according to Greek mythology—they caused Hercules a lot of trouble (to get at them, he had to bash a dragon with a club), lost Atalanta a crucial race, and started the Trojan War. By the fourth century BCE, according to the playwright Aristophanes, apples were common enough to be tossed to favored clients by dancing girls in brothels. “Tossing apples,” in ancient Greek, thus soon became a catchy euphemism for sexual intercourse—remember this the next time you’re in an apple orchard—and it may be Greek slang that led to a lingering European superstition that eating apples could make one pregnant.

Medieval Christians—who teetered among figs, grapes, and apples in early representations of forbidden fruit—finally settled on the apple, which has since served as the symbol of original sin.

By the time John Milton wrote Paradise Lost in the 1660s, the apple 45

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was firmly established as a bad guy—and as such, it’s worked its way into our folklore. When the wicked Queen did her best to kill Snow White, you notice that she didn’t poison a pear, a peach, a plum, or a quince. She poisoned an apple.

Given the apple’s immoral aura, it may not be surprising that Episcopalians—not the straight-laced Puritans—first brought apples to North America. By most accounts, the first apples in the colonies were planted on Boston’s Beacon Hill by an Anglican minister named William Blaxton (or Blackstone), who arrived in Boston Harbor in 1623, along with several boxes of books and a bag of apple seeds. His congregation gave up within the year and ran for home, but Blaxton stayed behind, comfortably settled in his cabin, surrounded by books and an orchard of infant apple trees. He remained there, solitary, for seven years, reading and developing the New World’s first named apple variety, Blaxton’s Yellow Sweeting.

This horticultural idyll ended abruptly in 1630 when 17 boatloads of Puritans arrived, under the leadership of John Winthrop—and none of them wanted anything to do with a presumably less-than-saintly Episcopalian. Blaxton was summarily banished to Rhode Island. The Puritans took over Beacon Hill and the orchard, and notably improved Blaxton’s crop by importing pollinators in the form of English honeybees. Eventually Winthrop, hopefully ashamed of himself, forwarded some bees to Blaxton in Providence, and also sent along his books.

By the 18th century, most American farms boasted apple trees. The first recipe for the all-American apple pie appeared in American Cookery, the first American cookbook, published by Miss Amelia Simmons (credited on the cover as “An American Orphan”) in 1796: It called for stewed apples flavored with grated lemon peel, cinnamon, mace, rosewater, and sugar, baked in a “paste.”

New Haven tradition holds that Yale students were served apple pie for supper every night for an unbroken 100 years—and a lot of New Englanders (including my granddad) routinely ate apple pie for breakfast, with cheese.

Dried-apple pie, the crust rolled out on the wagon seat, was a staple of the wagon trains. This didn’t suit everybody; one un46

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happy eater left behind the condemnatory verse: “I loathe, abhor, detest, despise/Abominate dried-apple pies.”

The vast majority of early American apples, however, went into hard cider. The usual farmhouse cider barrel held fermented cider, a brew that contained about 8% alcohol, which doubtless explains its traditional use as a cure for “melancholy.” For those who wanted even more bang for their buck, a beverage called applejack could be made from hard cider by a rough-and-ready process of fractional crystallization: freezing. As more and more water, in the form of ice, was removed, hard cider was converted to an even more alcoholic drink, said (by some) to taste just like Madeira wine. Really frigid winters could produce a truly phenomenal applejack, with an alcohol content of up to 30%.

The temperance movement, which began in America in the 1820s, promptly zeroed in on the apple. The only decent course for Prohibition orchard owners, according to “What Shall I Do With My Apples?,” an inflammatory temperance tract of 1827, was to burn their trees down. Every barrel of cider, the author thundered, is “enough to ruin a soul, if not destroy a life.” Cider, in fact, was even worse than rum. Rum, the tract continued, quoting the nameless wife of a cider-drinker, “laid him prostrate and helpless on the floor,” while cider “gave him the rage and strength of a maniac.” Carrie Nation had a hatchet because she was after the ruinous cider-producing apple trees.

Luckily, commonsense prevailed and (most of) America’s apple trees survived.

Fall, of course, is the season for apples. October is National Apple Month—established in 1904 to “enhance consumer awareness and usage of apples”—though you pretty much can’t help being aware this time of year if you’re anywhere near an apple tree. The apples are cold and crisp and delicious; and the smell of them is the smell of autumn, the essence of those bright blue days before winter shuts us down. “You are new like nothing/and no one,/always/freshly fallen/from Paradise,” writes poet Pablo Neruda in his “Ode to Apples.”

Apples—well, yes, they are tempting.

But—believe me—they’ve never been bad. ❖ 47

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My Grandmother’s Ring How I lost it—and found it.

By Johan Dahlberg y grandmother used to love gardening. She lived alone in a rather small house here in Jorvas, Finland (“the cottage,” we used to call it), but had a fairly large garden which she nurtured almost like a much-loved child.

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She spent hours caring for it every day.

I used to visit her once a month to help out. As she grew older, she had trouble looking after the garden as well as she wanted to. She often told me how much she appreciated my help, even though I was only around ten at the time.

One day, before I returned home from one of my visits, my grandmother gave me an old gold ring. Apparently it had belonged to her mother, and she wanted to pass it on to me, her only grandchild, as a way of saying thank you for my help in the garden.

That was the last time I saw her.

That very same Two days later, we received a phone call day, I realized from Bill, a friendly old man who lived next door to my grandmother. He used to check I had misplaced on her a couple of times a week. He’d found the ring her in bed, thinking she was asleep. It soon she gave me. became evident to him that she wasn’t going to wake up. She had passed away.

That very same day, I realized that I had misplaced the ring she gave me. I wasn’t even sure if I had brought it home with me from the cottage. I searched both her house and ours, but I was never able to find it.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY SELENA WONG

t’s been eight years since my grandmother’s death. My family inherited the little house with the garden, and we’ve used it as a summer cottage ever since. During these eight years, I’ve kept my grandmother’s garden intact. I knew how much she cared for it, and I wanted to keep a piece of her alive.

A few months ago, I was planting a new apple tree in mygrandmother’s garden. I discovered something shiny while I was digging in the dirt: a tiny, rusted little metal box. I forced it open.

Inside, I found what I had been missing all those years: the ring she’d given me. Along with the ring, there was a note: “You forgot this, dear. I’ll leave it here where I know you’ll find it.”

That was the best day of my life! ❖ 49

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Exploding Forsythia!

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Many things are my fault. The forsythia is/are not one of them.

They were here when we moved in. Actually there were more forsythia(s) then in the front of the house but we wanted to see the front of the house so I ‘dug one up.’ Broke two shovels and with sweat not only pouring down my face but into all those other places, looked at the still-mint-condition hulk of a plant and said, “What we have here is a failure to communicate” and went for the chain saw.

I used it to carve a trench, which was a use of Many things the tool that most would are my fault. call “off-label.” (The little pictures on the label This is not kind of maybe implied that, but next to the little drawing of me using it to dig a trench one of them. with a line through it was a drawing of a can of beer with a line through it, which I took to mean I should knock one back before proceeding any further.)

I’m not sure if it was the sparks, the noises that accompanied the sparks, or the small (OK; smallish; what are you—a cop?) projectiles being hurled into the roadway that caught my neighbor’s attention, but there he appeared.

“Can I give you a hand there, Mike?”

I replied, “No;” which he, being a fellow male, understood to mean, “Yes, please help me before I qualify to cash in on a twodollar-a-year grade-school insurance policy.” (“One new eye, arm, and leg = $750.”) So we both dug new shovels (his) into the trench 51

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and under the plant, another neighbor came by and the three of us were finally able to pull the root mass out of the ground. It looked like one of those science-fiction scenes where a city rises up into the air. Not sure why a forsythia needed wiring and sewer pipes coming out of its rear end, but there they were.

We dragged it into the woods where it lives to this very day, blooming for spite every spring. It took a yard of soil to fill the lousy hole. We planted a tree there. It died.

Then there were two others, which I kind of then knew better than to try and kill (I think I have to find their pictures up in the attic first) and so I prune the living heck out of them after they finish blooming every spring.

Seeing what (I was going to say “I prune the bejesus out the local crazy of them,” but that made me think, “Does that mean there’s an A-Jesus? Why wouldn’t I use man is doing Him first?”) Lately this pruning has become is one reason more—shall we say, enthusiastic (because I neighborhood probably can’t get away with any of the real dogs get walked words)—because two of our peach trees are eight times a day. between them and the house and they have enough trouble without the Herculoids cutting off ALL of their air and sunlight.

And so I hack away, hack away, almost all. Then the next week I go back and cut down everything that has since grown over ten feet higher, which is all of it. The one closest to my office door tends to take the hint and finally accepts the shape of a fat little boy. The one by our front door must be overtop of an old privy because it keeps growing into late January.

And this year, the birds have been yelling at me. Okay—I mean yelling at me more than usual, which is a lot. In early spring, chickadees fly up in my face demanding to know why I’m not filling the suet feeders any more. “So that you losers now have to start eating the peach trees’ pests!”

Yes, I yell back at the birds. Seeing what the local crazy man is doing is one reason my neighbors are generally right there to help when I have finally clubbed a giant plant unconscious and need help dragging it into the woods. Some of the dogs in our 52

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neighborhood get walked eight times a day.

“Daddy, Mr. Mike is in his front yard yelling at his plants.”

“Well, aren’t you supposed to talk to your plants?”

“What does #@$%^!! mean?”

Hummingbirds show up in the summer and get in my face because there are no ‘hummingbird flowers’ for them. “Do I look like your mother? Plant them yourself!”

And the wrens yell at me because they are certain that they actually live here and my wife and I are the ones not paying rent. They nest everywhere. Somebody gave me an ‘ornamental’ birdhouse; an ‘object d’art’ that was intended only to capture the ‘spirit’ of a birdhouse. Well, these ‘spirits’ leave a heck of a mess on the floor.

So when I’m out hacking away at Mr. Big Hair on an especially muggy day and a bird gets in my face and quickly darts away, I figure it’s a wren complaining there’s no hot water in the birdhouse. I go inside for some ice cubes, come back out, get hit by a blast of humidity generally reserved for St. Louis in mid-August, and go back inside to get more ice cubes.

Finally we run out of ice cubes, and I have to go back to work.

The forsythia has grown three feet while I was trying to see how much of my head would fit into the freezer (“Now he’s cursing and 53

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there’s icicles on his beard!”). I see that one side is really blocking the air, so I reach in to get one of them big feeder branches . . . . . . and the shrub explodes in my face, knocking me back into the really-now-inconveniently-positioned climbing rose that replaced the dead tree that replaced the Forsythia In The Woods. I scream out, “More ice cubes!” (it’s all I could think of), my wife comes out to say that thanks to me there are no more ice cubes, and finds me sprawled on top of what is now a prostrate rose bush.

“And what do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m taking a break. This is more comfortable than it looks.”

She helps me up and I try to explain that our forsythia exploded. “That one over there,” I point. “The mean one!”

She goes back inside mumbling, “The neighbors are right about you,” and I take great satisfaction in the hope that she will try and make herself a glass of iced tea. “Good luck with that,” I yell to the closed door, and a bird in a nearby tree dive bombs me and flies into the woods. Hmm; it’s too big for a wren. And kind of reddish. Oh no! Just what I need—one of those crazy male cardinals staking out territory. I yell, “Your wife is really plain-looking,” hear a dog walker pass by, and wonder what that conversation is going to sound like.

I go inside and yell at the freezer to work faster, go back out, pick up the pruners, and the forsythia explodes in my face. I say hello to the rose bush again, deeply regret wearing shorts, and wonder what I’ve done to deserve this.

OK—besides that.

And that.

And that was NOT me. Or if it was, I had taken an Ambien.

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know you could buy an exploding forsythia with your whoopee cushions and black-eye telescopes from the Johnson-Smith catalog (or I would have bought one long ago).

Now there’s a robin yelling at me from a nearby tree, and as I pull myself up, he starts yelling harder. Then I turn my head and see the nest in the middle of the forsythia. “Why didn’t you just say so, you Drama Queen?!”

Cue the dog walker. Houses never stay up for sale long on our block.

The next day, I of course have forgotten the whole thing, go out to thin some baby peaches, and the forsythia explodes. But I do NOT go into the rose bush! (I’m on the other side, so I instead take out a hanging basket that crashes against the door of my wife’s car. “That’s why I park on the far side,” I yell at the house.)

The day after that, I’m working on the other side of the yard, completely forget, wander over, and get exploded on again. (Bed of pansies; RIP). I turn to the Angry Bird (hey—that’d be a good name for a video game! Nah . . . ), tell it that I’m going to see what all the fuss is about, and look into the nest.

The words ‘robin’s egg blue’ don’t do justice to the reality. It’s the color of the prettiest ocean water you’ve ever seen. I turn to the bird and say, “They’re beautiful,” and step away slowly. Détente.

That forsythia can go without a haircut the rest of the summer.

But I still have to work out there, and every time I go near it, the forsythia explodes and I am once again surprised. I am a cheap date.

Then one day a couple walks up to me while I’m working outside, explains that they are new to the neighborhood, have heard about me, and ask if I can give them a little tour of my garden.

A friend once gave me one of those cute little hanging signs that says: “Garden Tours Five Cents.” I used it for firewood. It wasn’t even a cold day.

This I do not want. This garden is my private shame. Then I have a thought.

“Why sure; you’ll note that this seemingly ordinary forsythia has a very striking feature if you’ll look right in here . . . ” It was a short tour. I’m liking these birds more every day! ❖ 55

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The year I didn’t have a garden—but did.

By Rhonda Fleming Hayes he tenth November in my kitchen garden found me cleaning it up just like I had the nine before. Saving the few green tomatoes that still hung from the now-blighted vines. Picking the last chilies that dangled like colored lanterns among the debris. Raking up the coin-shaped leaves of the neighboring pear tree.

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Rhonda’s Garden

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Once again, I had that satisfying sense of rightness that comes when the beds are nothing but blank brown plots inside a picket fence. I knew that picket fence well. It was built as a frame to contain my gardening ambitions. As the wife of a corporate nomad, a kitchen garden was all I dared risk. Repeated moves had made me shy of planting bulbs I would never see bloom or trees that would fruit for strangers. Growing a few vegetables, some herbs, and cut flowers inside a fence was safe.

Usually.

Yet as we stayed in this community year And that’s when after year, I was eventually lulled and jumped it happened. my boundaries like a rampant rhizome. I put in English roses, and followed that with Across the table, foxgloves. Before I realized it, I was collaboI saw the rating with a young landscaper to reclaim look on my the front yard. Then I started planting for husband’s face. wildlife value and four-season interest. Koi pond? Why not?

I could blame it on my Master Gardener program. My gardening calendar now went all year: fall classes, winter planning, spring events, and summer hotline duty. In the program, I had found my tribe—200 like-minded friends who liked to play in the dirt.

As my knowledge grew, so did my garden. So that November, I mailordered an entire lot of pastel lisianthus and petite dahlias for my cut-flower bed without the slightest twinge of guilt. Heck, I might as well throw in some of that Blue Wonder scaveola for the rock garden while I was at it! y husband works long hours and travels as well. But we have always found time for breakfast out on weekends.

And that’s when it happened. Across the table, I saw the look on my husband’s face. It had been ten years since the last time he had broached this topic, during another breakfast outing. I knew that look.

A new job. Another move.

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lenge, a change. It was just heartbreaking.

I spent those late winter weeks preparing the house for the market—repairs and cleaning, painting and primping. I staged the house, but I couldn’t fake a garden. I couldn’t even pull weeds without crying.

And then, as if to rub salt in my wounds, boxes marked “Live Plants” started to arrive on the doorstep. I had completely forgotten my mailorder shopping spree. Rather then plant them for an unknown buyer, I took them to the extension office for the Master Gardeners’ demo garden. At least that way they would go to a good home.

In spring, I said goodbye to my friends and to my garden.

I took in the unforgettable fragrance of my Zepherine Drouhin climbing rose one last time, and we drove away.

Suddenly we got a phone call: A sewer pipe had broken in our new home. We would have to remodel—immediately. There would be no gardening that summer. Instead I spent it cajoling carpenters and soothing tearful teenagers who missed their friends.

Sometime in late summer, I received an email from the Master Gardener group back home, telling me how great my garden was growing. What garden? What were they talking about? I was too busy dealing with drywall installers to ponder the question.

Then I got another email from the horticulture agent, telling me that my flowers were performing better than the ones in the trial garden. I was confused. I hadn’t touched a trowel for many months. My fingernails were—uncharacteristically—very clean.

The email had an attachment. I opened it and up popped a photo from the demo garden: a flowerbed with a profusion of pink, blue, and yellow blossoms. There was a sign in front of the flowerbed. It read, “Rhonda’s Garden.”

I had had a garden after all. ❖ 58

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The Tree

By Laurel Radomski R

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARILYNNE ROACH

When I first bought my house in 1991, there was a cute little evergreen in the front yard that the previous owner had planted.

Of course, over the course of 23 years, it hadn’t stayed little and cute. It’d become big. And obtrusive.

About nine years ago, I brought home a puppy, Roscoe, and a year later, Bodie, his brother. The “boys” liked to run under the pine tree and not come out. I got tired of fighting limbs, sap, and pine cones going after them, so I pruned some of the lower limbs. Of course, I had to cut more limbs, here then there, to make it all even—and eventually ended up with a Wisconsin palm tree!

In a panic, I planted ditch lilies around the tree to mask the bare trunk. But ditch lilies only look good the 20 minutes they’re in bloom. Worse, in winter my husband used the snow blower to make a ring around the tree—a “pee path” so the little Shi Tzu mixes wouldn’t frostbite their lower parts. After nine years of this, I had a brown dead ring around a palm pine tree, with drooping ditch lilies, to boot. And this vignette of horror was right outside my front door!

I tried using motivational speaking (some call it “nagging”) to encourage my husband to cut the tree down. No luck.

Finally, this year Good Fortune smiled upon me. The tree developed some sort of blight and became so scraggly my husband finally relented and cut it down.

What did it in? Mother Nature? Nine years of dog pee? My years of withering looks? I like to think it was the last cause: me.

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! 59

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Dandelion Wishes Trying to weed my worries away.

By Janny J. Johnson ❖

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ILLUSTRATION BY HEATHER GRAHAM

he alarm went off, woke me up—and I realized that my hand wasn’t on my baby’s chest! Then I saw that the bassinet was gone. That meant that my husband, Paul, had taken the baby to give me a break. Relief washed through me. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. It didn’t work. I couldn’t.

Our newborn, Matthew, had begun having seizures a month before. One minute he would be fine, and the next he’d stiffen, his back would arch, and his eyes would roll up in his head. Then he’d begin making guttural, moaning sounds. Once a seizure was over, Matthew wouldn’t make eye contact for the next couple of hours. He’d just lay limply in my arms.

The first time he had a seizure, we rushed him to the hospital. By the time we got there, But over the the episode was over. The only thing the docnext couple tor saw was a tired baby. The doctor assured me the seizure hadn’t hurt, but how did he of weeks, know? He hadn’t seen Matthew during it. He Matthew had sent us home, saying that it would probably another seizure, be a one-time occurrence.

But over the next couple of weeks, Mat- and then another. thew had another seizure, and then another.

I watched for episodes constantly, barely sleeping at night. I kept one hand inside his bassinet when I dozed. And I kept asking myself why this would happen to such a perfect little person—and when would the next one hit?

So far I’d been strong. I rarely cried. Instead I read everything I could find about seizures—what caused them and what to do about them.

But there were no answers. I didn’t know what to do. And, as the mother of a newborn and a five-year-old daughter, I was tired.

That afternoon I was sitting in the family room next to Matthew. He was sleeping peacefully in his bassinet. I looked out the window and saw dandelion seeds fluttering on the breeze. Our yard was already full of those yellow-headed weeds!

I carefully plucked up Matthew and, calling to my daughter, Katie, headed outside. I grabbed my well-used leather gardening 61

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gloves and a dandelion fork from the garage and lay Matthew on a blanket in the yard. Dropping to my knees beside him, I began the attack. I plunged the fork into the yard over and over, yanking the weeds out of the ground. Katie started to complain that she would have no more pretty yellow flowers to pick. I flung out my arm and pointed to the hundreds of flowers here and in the neighbor’s yard next door.

I was determined to at least get the dandelions out of my yard. While Matthew slept and Katie gathered yellow bouquets, I tackled the prickly I looked out leaved monsters. When Matthew needed to nurse, I held him with one arm and tried the window. to weed with the other. Katie played and Katie was danced, happy to be outside. deliberately After a couple of hours, Paul arrived blowing the seeds home from work. When he walked into the backyard, he must’ve seen the steely look off dandelions! in my eyes. He took Katie and went to pick up some fast food for dinner. When they returned, he offered me a hamburger. I refused. How could I eat when I had a sick baby—and weeds besides? Katie and Paul chatted and laughed as they sat in chairs on our tiny patio.

When the sky began to dim, Paul gathered Matthew in his arms and sent Katie to me for a goodnight kiss. As she hopped toward me across the lawn, she stopped, plucked a delicate whiteheaded dandelion, and blew.

“Katie! No!” I cried. “The little seeds you’re blowing make weeds!”

“Okay, Mama,” she said. “Night-night.” Her little arms hugged me and she gave me a kiss.

“Good night, Katie,” I said to her. “I love you.”

Katie ran back to Paul and hopped at his side as they went in for her bedtime story. Paul paused at the corner of the house and called softly, “Come in soon.”

I nodded my head. The nod meant that I had heard, not that I was about to stop. I wasn’t. I was going to get rid of every dandelion, leaving only soft grass for my little ones. Next year, when 62

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Matthew learned to walk, he would love the feel of grass on his bare feet. My yard was going to be weed-free.

Perfecting my jab and twist, I removed one dandelion after another. When I finished one section, I’d shift my position and start on another.

I saw the light from Katie’s bedroom and knew that Paul was snuggling in bed with her. The baby would be propped between them as Paul read from Katie’s favorite book, the one about fairies. It was tempting to go in right then, but I wasn’t ready. There were still more weeds.

Finally the sky grew so dark that I could hardly see. I got up, turned on the garage light, and skewered some more.

A shadow crossed my path. Without looking up, I said, “Paul, get out of my way. I can’t see.”

“You don’t want to be out here weeding this late,” he said.

“Yes, I do.”

Paul stepped closer and knelt beside me. Matthew was on his shoulder. My sweet husband tried to give me a hug, but I pushed him away. “Stop it, Paul. I want to finish this.”

“Janny, you can’t finish it tonight. Look,” he said, pointing.

“There are too many left.”

I jabbed at a closed dandelion, but missed. My eyes blurred.

I jabbed—and missed—again.

I dropped the dandelion fork, turned, buried my face in Paul’s chest and began to sob. He held me close and ran his fingers through my hair.

“Why, Paul?” I sobbed. “Why don’t they know what’s wrong?

Everywhere I read about medical miracles. Where’s Matthew’s miracle?” As my tears continued, I said, “I just want him to be OK. And I wish . . . I wish I didn’t have to worry about it all the time.”

I hiccupped, reached over, and caressed Matthew’s cheek. “I can’t explain it, but right now I want a lawn without weeds.”

Paul whispered, “You’ll never get them all, honey.”

“I know, but—” “There will always be more,” he interrupted. “If you manage to get all the weeds, there will be bits of moss, or the lawn will need to be mowed just one more time.” Paul caressed my shoul63

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der. “That’s just the way lawns are.” He smiled. “For that matter, that’s the way lives are, too.”

I rubbed my forehead—and surrendered. “You’re right.” I handed him my weeding tool, and he helped me up.

The next morning, my muscles ached when I got out of bed. I slipped into the kitchen to find Paul. Matthew was sound asleep in his bassinet in the family room. Paul gave me a quick kiss and left for work. Katie followed him out the door and ran into the backyard.

I sat on the couch and gazed out the window. Masses of white dandelion seeds wafted across my vision. I looked out the window. Katie was deliberately blowing the seeds off dandelions!

Dashing to the back door, I yanked it open. “Katie! What are you doing? I told you, they make more weeds!”

She spun on her feet and blew one more great breath, releasing more dandelion seeds. “They don’t make weeds, Mama, they make wishes. Papa read it to me in the fairy book.” She ran to my side. “I am making wishes so Matthew will be better and you will be happy.”

I hugged Katie close and caressed her head. “Thank you, honey. I think it’s wonderful that you’re making wishes for Matthew.” Inside, I thought, maybe it’s time to take away her book of fairy tales. It’s teaching Katie to believe in the unbelievable.

Or was it? Maybe she had learned that even when things seem impossible, there’s always hope. Looking at Katie’s eyes, I saw that they were full of sparkle and awe. She believed. I realized it was time for me to begin to believe in something beyond myself, just as I had as a child.

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lthough I didn’t know it then, my son would overcome his seizures. He would grow up and one day become the father of his own healthy baby boy. I don’t know if his sister’s dandelion wishes played a part in that.

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A Rose Is a Rose Is . . .

Grace Darling?

How plants get human names.

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loved my mother, but I couldn’t grant her wish. She longed, she often said, to have a flower named after her.

Flowers and plants named after people are, as we know, numerous. As I wander around my autumn garden putting it to bed, I see many shrubs that soon will be bare brown lumps, less distinguishable than the botanists that bear their names: Clark Abel, William Forsyth, Johan Van der Deutz, and Charles von Weigel are all remembered here, but their namesakes will be more or less anonymous for the next few months. At least the Kalmia (mountain laurel) will stay green. It commemorates the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm, who accompanied Linnaeus to Russia and was loved by him “as was his own child.”

Many who knew Linnaeus didn’t always respect those to whom he gave plant names. He named Grolittle or nothing novia for the ambitious botanist Gronovius, of horticulture “being a climbing plant which grasps all other remain forever plants.” And he named the day flower Commelina because it has three petals, two large in the names and one small, and there were three Commelin of plants. brothers—two prominent botanists and one who died “before achieving anything in Botany”!

Although some names remind us of distinguished persons, others refer to those who would probably otherwise be forgotten. At this time of year, one of the loveliest sights in my autumn garden is the Parrotia persica, a hazel-like tree now covered with brightly hued leaves. No, it’s not named for the brilliantly feath66

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY LINDA COOK DEVONA

ered bird—but for an obscure German botanist, seemingly best remembered for climbing Mount Ararat in 1834!

In spite of her love of gardening, my mother never knew a botanist to give her name to a flower—though many who knew little or nothing of horticulture remain forever in the names of plants.

Roses, particularly, were named for wives, mistresses, film stars, and heroes in all walks of life. One example was Grace Darling, who lived with her father in a bleak lighthouse. In 1838 she courageously rowed through huge stormy seas to help rescue shipwrecked sailors. She died young, but left a creamy pink rose named for herself. She herself, as far as I know, had no roses or even a garden of her own.

My mother never gave her name to a flower—nor did she name either of her daughters for one! Naming girls for flowers goes back a long way. Indeed, in Greek mythology, gods and wayward nymphs quite often turned into flowers—Daphne is a common girl’s name still. Other girls were called after well-known flowers, especially those associated with innocence. In the 19th century, particularly popular were names like Daisy, Violet, Lily, and Rose, seeming to Victorian mamas emblems of purity and loveliness.

One hopes the young ladies grew up as expected. Other names, used still today, are more sprightly—Poppy, Heather, Holly, and Cherry being just a few.

One name not often found was of the “bumboat” woman in Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. This lady, always portrayed as large and buxom, was called “Dear Little Buttercup,” 67

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although, as she sings, “I could never tell why.” Her abundant curves (and a certain amount of intrigue) eventually win her the captain of the ship!

Yes, flowery names can definitely give the wrong impression.

Indeed, I know two odiferous dogs called Lily and Rosie. I know a canine Holly and a canine Poppy. There are pooches called Jasmine, Daisy, Dalia, and Iris among the flower names—though, in truth, I can never tell why!

Not all young girls, either, had a history as fair as their namesakes. In the Middle East, Tamar is a popular name for girls. It comes from tamr, the Arabic for “date.” The date in that culture was not only essential to life, providing food and shelter, but revered for its graceful palms. It was often a suitable name for a lovely young girl. Not all their lives reflected it. Tamar, Absalom’s “fair sister,” was helplessly embroiled in a story worthy of the most sordid news we read today, including incest, rape, and murder. (The curious can read all about it in II Samuel 13.) Poor little Gelsomina (Jasmine) in La Strada had a sad story, too. And Rosamund (for Rosamundi, or “Rose of the World”) was, the legend tells us, hunted down by Eleanor, the jealous wife of Henry II, and murdered. Legend or not, we know she died young and her tomb bore the epitaph that she did not now smell like a rose (non redolet sed olet). The rose called for her is, however, pink and white and deliciously fragrant.

In the autumn, we often think of those who are no longer with us. It’s that time of year. Life will continue, but much is dying away. It’s time to let the garden die, too—or at least go to sleep until next spring. We gardeners are lucky because, having learned this year what not to do, we’ll have another chance to change things. Sadly, we can’t always do that with our own lives—and we sometimes wish we could go back and give more to those we loved. At least I could have been more sympathetic when my mother wished to be remembered in a flower. I just didn’t see why she would have wanted that! And I cannot give her the wish unless I breed a new flower (that’s unlikely). I can do no more than remember the flowers she grew so lovingly. Perhaps that might be enough for most gardeners in the end. ❖ 68

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We sit together, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains. —Li Po 69

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“Heed!”

The fascinating—and vital—world of seeds.

By Thor Hanson ❖

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Long-time readers of GREENPRINTS know that I am constantly looking for good garden books. I love to share excerpts from them to give you appetizing tastes of what’s new.

Well, I recently discovered Thor Hanson’s admirable The Triumph 70

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of Seeds (subtitled How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History).

Hanson’s writing is lucid, both personal and scientific, and a true pleasure to read. In researching this book, he visited rain forests, grain elevators, and seed vaults. He launched seeds from ladders, explored coffee made from defecated beans, and tried to unravel cotton. (He didn’t have much luck: A single cotton boll can contain over 20 miles of fibers!)

The result is an extremely informative and entertaining book about the part of plants that humanity most depends on. To give you a feel for the range of Seeds, I’ve picked two short passages from its beginning, one personal and the other scientific. Enjoy!

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn!

You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into a giant oak!

Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.

—George Bernard Shaw, The Vegetarian Diet According to Shaw (1918)

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harles Darwin traveled with the HMS Beagle for five years, devoted eight years to the anatomy of barnacles, and spent most of his adult life ruminating on the implications of natural selection. The famed naturalist-monk Gregor Mendel hand-pollinated 10,000 pea plants over the course of eight Moravian spring- Every time Noah disassembled times, before finally writing up his thoughts on inheritance. At Olduvai Gorge, two gena piece of fruit, erations of the Leaky family sifted through he would raise sand and rock for decades to piece together a the seeds in handful of critical fossils. Unraveling evolutionary mysteries is generally hard work, the my direction stuff of long careers spent in careful thought and shout, and observation. But some stories are obvious, "HEED!” crystal clear from the very beginning. Anyone familiar with children, for example, understands the origin of punctuation. It started with the exclamation point.

Nothing comes more naturally to a toddler than emphatic, imperative verbs. In fact, any word can be transformed into a 71

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command with the right inflection—a gleeful, insistent shout accented from a seemingly bottomless quiver of exclamation points.

Whatever nuances of speech and prose might be gained by the use of comma, period, or semicolon clearly developed later. The exclamation point is innate.

Our son, Noah, is a good example. He began his verbal career with many of the expected phrases, from “Move!” and “More!” to the always-popular “No!” But his early vocabulary also reflected a more unusual interest: Noah was obsessed with seeds. Neither Eliza nor I can Seeds are quite remember exactly when this passion began; literally the it just seemed that he had always loved them.

Whether speckling the skin of a strawberry, staff of life, the scooped from inside a squash, or chewed basis of diets, up in the rosehips he plucked from roadside economies, and shrubs, any seed that Noah encountered was lifestyles around worthy of attention and comment. In fact, determining which things had seeds, and the globe. which didn’t, became one of the first ways he learned to order his world. Pinecone? Seeds. Tomato? Seeds. Apple, avocado, sesame bagel? All with seeds. Raccoon? No seeds.

With such conversations a regular occurrence in our household, it’s no wonder that seeds were on my shortlist when it was time to settle on a new book idea. What might have tipped the balance was Noah’s pronunciation, which added a certain imperative to his botanical observations. Sibilance did not come easily to his young tongue, but instead of lisping he chose to replace ‘s’ sounds with a hard ‘h.’ The result was a barrage of double commands—every time he disassembled some unsuspecting piece of fruit he would raise the seeds in my direction and shout, “HEED!” Day after day, this scene repeated itself until I eventually got the message: I heeded the seeds. After all, little Noah had already pretty much taken over the rest of our lives. Why not put him in charge of career decisions, too?

I

n business, people mark the ultimate success of a product by its brand recognition and universal availability. When I lived in a 72

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mud-walled hut in Uganda, four hours from a paved road, on the edge of a jungle called the Impenetrable Forest, I could still buy a bottle of Coca-Cola within a five-minute walk from my front door.

Marketing executives fantasize about that kind of ubiquity, and in the natural world, seeds have it. From tropical rain forest to alpine meadows and arctic tundra, seed plants dominate landscapes and define entire ecosystems. A forest, after all, is named for its trees and not for the monkeys or birds that leap and flutter within it.

And everyone knows to call the famed Serengeti a grassland—not a zebra-land with grass. When we pause to examine the underpinnings of natural systems, time and again we find seeds, and the plants that bear them, playing the most vital roles.

While an ice-cold soda tastes pretty good on a tropical afternoon, the Coca-cola analogy only goes so far in explaining the evolution of seeds. But it is true in one more respect: Natural selection, like commerce, rewards a good product. The best adaptations spread through time and space, in turn spurring further innovation in a process Richard Dawkins aptly called “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Some traits become so widespread they seem axiomatic.

Animal heads, for example, have two eyes, two ears, some kind of nose, and a mouth. Fish gills extract dissolved oxygen from water. Bacteria reproduce by splitting, and the wings of insects come in pairs. Even for biologists, it’s easy to forget that these fundamentals were once brand new, clever novelties spun from the sheer persistence of evolution’s trial and error. In the plant world, the idea of seeds ranks right alongside photosynthesis as one of our chief assumptions. Even children’s literature takes the notion for granted. In Ruth Krauss’s classic book The Carrot Seed, a silent little boy disregards all naysayers, patiently watering and weeding around his planting until at last a great carrot sprouts up, “just as the little boy had known it would.”

Though famous for how its simple drawings transformed the genre of picture books, Krauss’s story also tells us something profound about our relationship with nature. Even children know that the tiniest pip contains what George Bernard Shaw called “fierce energy”—the spark and all the instructions needed to build a carrot, an oak tree, wheat, mustard, sequoias, or any of the esti73

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mated 352,000 other kinds of plants that use seeds to reproduce.

The faith we place in that ability gives seeds a unique position in the history of the human endeavor. Without the act and anticipation of planting and harvest, there would be no agriculture as we know it, and our species would still be wandering in small bands of hunters, gatherers, and herdsmen. Indeed, some experts believe that Homo sapiens might never have evolved at all in a world that lacked seeds. More than perhaps any other natural object, the small botanical marvels paved the way for modern civilization, their fascinating evolution and natural history shaping and reshaping our own.

We live in a world of seeds. From our morning coffee and bagel to the cotton in our clothes and the cup of cocoa we drink before bed, seeds surround us all day long. They give us food and fuels, intoxicants and poisons, oils, dyes, fibers, and spices.

Without seeds there would be no bread, no rice, no beans, corn, or nuts. They are quite literally the staff of life, the basis of diets, economies, and lifestyles around the globe. They anchor life in the wild, too: Seed plants now make up more than 90 percent of our flora. They are so commonplace it’s hard to imagine that for over 100 million years other types of plant life dominated the earth.

Roll back the clock and we find seeds evolving as trivial players in a flora ruled by spores, where tree-like club mosses, horsetails, and ferns formed vast forests that remain with us in the form of coal. From this humble beginning, the seed plants steadily gained advantage—first with conifers, cycads, and ginkgos, and then in a great diversification of flowering species—until now it is the spore bearers and algae that watch from the sidelines. This dramatic triumph of seeds poses an obvious question: Why are they so successful? What traits and habits have allowed seeds, and the plants that bear them, to so thoroughly transform our planet? The answers frame the narrative of this book and reveal not only why seeds thrive in nature, but why they are so vital to people. ❖ Excerpted with permission from The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History History,

by Thor Hanson. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2015. To order, see p. 6.

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

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As part of our special 25th anniversary year, each issue in 2015 will contain a piece by one of our four offspring about “Growing Up with GreenPrints.” So far, we’ve heard from the three oldest, Nate, Jesse, and Sammy. T This go-round, it’s 26-year-old Tucker’s turn!

I am the only Stone child who can truly say that I’ve known GREENPRINTS all my life. (The youngest of us four, I was born six months before the first issue came out.) But to say I really know GREENPRINTS isn’t entirely accurate. I mean, I know how to label an issue, I know how to stuff a renewal envelope, and I know 76

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how to stamp and send that letter—I could do all that with my eyes closed. But I never knew what went into the magazine. Oh, I read the occasional story, if Pops was trying to figure out which stories to buy or run and wanted to hear my opinion. Sure, I would look at the beautiful artwork, read the “Buds” quotes (They were GREENPRINTS short!), and check out the family pictures Dad gave me a used and what he said about us. But that was dad who was about it. I never even read an issue from blessedly cover to cover until I was in university.

So just what did I know about GREENaround.

PRINTS? As a child I was acutely aware of how close we were to deadline (all you had to do was watch—and listen to—Dad!). I knew when Dad was reading through submissions trying to figure out which ones to buy, and I knew when he was rereading those bought submissions trying to figure out which ones to run. I knew this because he’d either tell me to quiet down, or he’d just go hide someplace where my noise wouldn’t find him. (“Say, where’s Dad?”) I knew that when our house phone gave a double ring, I shouldn’t pick it up and say, “Wassup.” That double ring meant it was a GREENPRINTS phone-order call (and yes, Tucker Then I have picked up the double ring with a “Wassup? I mean, GREENPRINTS, this is Tucker Stone. How can I help you?”).

And I definitely knew how heavy those boxes of issues were when we got them in from the printer. I knew because I got lots of “character-building experience” unloading them!

However, I also know that GREENPRINTS has put food in my belly every day. I know that GREENPRINTS helped put me out on the soccer pitch, which Tucker (and Dad) Now 77

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in turn led me all across the country. I know GREENPRINTS brought me back for Christmas the year I was living in South America— and the list goes on. But most important, GREENPRINTS gave me a dad who was blessedly around, a dad doing the things he loves.

There’re times when I think, “Man, Pops coulda been rich if he’d followed that big magazine that offered him a job up north.” But then I reach the same conclusion I’ve heard him reach every time Autumn, 2O15

No. 51

THE GREENPRINTS LETTER Behind the Scenes of Your “Weeder’s Digest” Magazine

Clive T Tupelo upelo Stone!

On June 18 our oldest son, Nate, and Atteeyah, his wife, brought our fourth grandchild into this world!

All went smoothly with both mother and child—and you can bet Becky and I hightailed it to Atlanta as fast as we could. Like his older brother, Otis, Clive Tupelo Stone (at press time his parents weren’t completely certain whether to call him Clive or Tupelo) was born in the same hospital in which my own father worked.

We are all so grateful to have Clive (Tupelo?) among us and for his wonderful, caring parents. And let me tell you, he’s adorable. See for yourself!

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he talks about the decision to move or stay 25 years ago.

I’m glad he chose GREENPRINTS. I’m glad he chose GREENPRINTS because with GREENPRINTS came Dad at my chorus concerts, Dad leading camping trips and canoeing trips, and Dad home mornings through evenings. And that’s a gift from GREENPRINTS and you, the readers, that I’ll forever cherish.

Thank you, GREENPRINTS. ❖

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Growing Closer Together

y father was a hobby grower. At least he wanted to be a hobby grower. One year he decided to make wine from the grapes he’d grown on a trestle in the backyard.

The resulting creation was a bitter, pulpy drink that he named Chateau du Puck, in honor of my involvement in little league hockey. He served the wine at Christmas dinner, where my Mom and one other adult choked down a glass of the stuff, grimacing like they were swallowing purple turpentine.

The following year the grapes didn’t return, as if in protest.

Another year Dad decided to grow tomatoes. Every time he’d come in from inspecting the garden, he’d comment that the plants seemed to be taking too long to bear fruit.

Soon after that, I stumbled across a red plastic ball in the basement, and an My mom and idea popped into my head. The next day I punched a hole in the ball and scrounged up I were living a twist tie from the kitchen drawer. I strolled in two separate out to the garden and attached the ball to one worlds, with of Dad’s bare tomato plants, carefully hiding the tie behind a leaf. When Dad got home an little overlap hour later, I joined him on his stroll. When and even less we approached the tomato plants, he got to agree on. excited and scurried into the stalks to check out his first tomato. He touched it gently, looked up in confusion, and then glanced back at me. One look at the grin on my face and he knew where that tomato had come from!

When I was growing up, Mom did very little gardening. But after Dad died and we kids were gone, she took to it with gusto.

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How gardening connected my mother and me.

By Thomas Sullivan

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Where Dad’s efforts hadn’t been much to talk about (except humorously), Mom gradually transformed our yard into a lush landscape of ferns, wildflowers, azaleas, and perennials. The air became filled with the gentle buzzing of pollinating bees. A pair of rabbits made their home under the powder-blue rhododendron.

The backyard now resembled a country estate. It was lovely.

But along with providing beauty, the garden also provided a larger function, at least for me. In her later years, Mom had gone from being a middle-of-the-road moderate to a far-right conservative. No one in our family saw that shift coming. Since I myself am somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders, the range of topics that we could discuss suddenly shrank precipitously. I found my Mom and I to be living in two completely separate worlds, with little overlap and even less to agree upon. Our contact lessened over time and, in a sense, we started becoming strangers.

But we could still garden, which we always did when I visited during the summer months. We’d kneel in the dirt, silently pulling weeds or deadheading some blooms.

Most of my trips home involved such light gardening. But the summer before Mom passed away, I took on a Herculean task— 81

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trimming back the many trees and bushes in the yard. I knew from childhood that Mom was a ferocious pruner. She wanted her shrubs to look like they’d gotten military buzz-cuts. So one day I slashed my way, plant by plant, through her yard. By the time I finished the last item, a dying apple tree, I was exhausted and covered in dirt and pine needles.

I had set the pruning saw down and was looking proudly at the expertly trimmed tree—when I heard a voice.

“Oh, you can take way more off.”

I turned to see Mom a few feet behind me, wearing the jeans shirt and the Gilligan-style cap she’d had forever.

I laughed and said, “Oh, so we’re trying to kill it, are we?”

Mom chuckled and I said, “Remember when Dad tried trimming that oak near the house? Dad would cut for a while. Then you’d call for more. He’d cut again, and you’d call for more. He thought you wanted to prune that oak back to an acorn!”

Mom gazed off a moment. Then she grinned and said, “Yup, he could be stubborn. But he was a good man, like you.”

It was a touching thing to hear from someone who was so guarded with her affections.

An hour later—after I’d repruning that apple tree—we were sitting on the back porch drinking iced tea. I looked over at Mom with a serious expression and said, “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Mom replied.

“That loud thump. I think the apple tree just died.”

Mom furrowed her brow a moment. Then she smiled—just a bit—and said, “No it didn’t.”

She would never have let on, but I knew she enjoyed these little foolish moments.

Yes, for me, my mother’s garden became a way to connect when most other avenues had shut down. I became much closer to Mom in her final years, and her garden played a big part in that renewal.

So this year, in honor of Mom, I started my own garden. Unfortunately, I may have inherited more than my sense of humor from my dad. I planted tomatoes a few months ago.

I’m still waiting for one to show up. ❖ 82

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LINDA COOK DEVONA

He who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love. —St. Basil the Great 83

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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 & flower seeds at 40 cents a packet. Plenty of seeds in each packet for a small garden or indoor/patio garden. For a trial offer send $1.00 for a catalog and 4 sample packets of herb seeds.

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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.

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Our TREES FOR BEES help honeybees and beautify your landscape. Our 28 different high-quality honeybee trees are shipped in 1- and 2-gallon containers (not bareroot).

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

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GREENPRINTS P. O. Box 1355 Fairview, NC 28730