D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
March
2009
From Page to Planting
Read now, plant later — garden reading to get you through to "no chance of frost" time.
"The best recommendation I can give to those who have taken up the delightful, absorbing, intensely gratifying, maddening and exhausting activity of gardening is to dig, plant, weed, work, and... read, read, read."
— Elisabeth Sheldon, Time and the Gardener: Writings on a Lifelong Passion (Beacon 2003)
What a perfect time of year to heed Mrs. Sheldon's advice and get thee to a library, especially since you have already ordered seed packets and purchased the fruit tree that rooted in your subconscious all winter.
Of course, most gardeners possess beloved tomes that are pulled from the bookshelf again and again to reread favorite passages, finding those starred markings of profound advice and scrawled lists of plants you once coveted.
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Showing off gardening books at the
Silver City Public Library are Dorothy Eagan (left), circulation supervisor;
Eileen Sullivan (center), reference librarian; and Gina Heiden, a library
volunteer and vice president of the Evergreen Garden Club. (Photo by Lisa D. Fryxell) |
I know this. I too am guilty of defacing my gardening books when Post-it Notes have mysteriously vacated the desk. But nothing fosters new insights and creativity like a great gardening book.
In anticipation of the fever that grips plant people in March, the staff of the Silver City Public Library have culled the stacks and selected some special reads. All are on display to help us bide time and remain rational until the "no chance of frost" banner unfurls o'er the land.
My recommendations on some newer titles are mentioned below. Visit the library and check them out!
During my winter hiatus from writing this column, I not only read several recently published books on garden design, but also added two Philadelphia public gardens to my "Life List."
Bartram's Garden, the country's oldest, is famed for plant species discovered by botanist-explorer John Bartram in the 1700s. Its colonial layout and stone buildings echo times past.
The centuries-newer — trendy and widely photographed — Chanticleer garden serves as a site lesson on how to combine new, nontraditional plant varieties. Plus lots of art dots the 30-acre grounds, including the exuberant and iconoclastic work of Berkeley artist/sculptor/gardener Marcia Donahue, stone garden furniture, innovative planters and unusual bridges and railings.
Photographs of Chanticleer appear often in Plant-Driven Design — Creating Gardens That Honor Plants, Place and Spirit (Timber Press, $34.95) by Lauren Springer Ogden and her husband, Scott, who garden on spreads in both Austin, Texas, and Fort Collins, Colo. The book emphasizes how plant and site are inextricable; the Ogdens' landscapes, captured in her photography, are designed for "punishing climates," where plants with interesting foliage and texture take precedence over flowering choices.
State the authors: "We see flowers as much-anticipated and expected desserts — but not the main course."
The astute yet witty prose of Lauren Springer Ogden's 1994 The Undaunted Garden (Fulcrum, $34.95), subtitled "Planting for Weather-Resilient Beauty," is equally evident in Plant-Driven Design. Springer's many local fans, including potter and gardener extraordinaire Phoebe Lawrence, may once again enjoy "Springerisms" like, "Plants that die well deserve high praise."
A book with an ethos similar to the Ogdens', but using plants less familiar to southwesterners, is Designing With Plants (Timber Press, $19.95) written by Piet Oudolf with Noel Kingsbury. Here the influential, naturalistic landscapes of Dutchman Oudolf are explained in thoughtful text supported by glorious photography.
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Featured among 100
plants in Tropicalismo!, the Mexican Bush Sage provides area gardeners
with a wallop of cha-cha-cha. Like other salvias, its survival is enhanced
by not being cut back in winter. From Tropicalismo!.
Photo by Pam Baggett, 2009. Provided courtesy
of Timber Press, Inc. |
Oudolf's work venerates the life cycles of perennial plants and demonstrates the beauty of seasonal changes in their color, texture and shape. Visuals communicate how the dried wintry forms of seed heads can create emotional and evocative landscapes. One senses why the kinetic movement of ornamental grasses evokes mood.
Two sections in the volume, titled "The Sublime" and "The Mysterious," are standouts that alone are worth the read.
Perhaps Noel Kingsbury describes the book best as "a reevaluation of what we consider beautiful in the garden." The reevaluation encompasses "nature's lovely untidiness."
Also available at the library is Thomas Hobbs' The Jewel Box Garden (Timber Press, $24.95). Although the title is saccharine, the content is not. Hobbs is acerbic and judgmental, but also zany and brilliant. His jewel box is "a garden full of beautiful plant treasures."
Disdainful of mass-marketed garden items like my white polyurethane patio chairs, Hobbs exhibits the "aesthetic dividends" of Italian terra cotta pots and creative garden art.
An admitted arbiter of good taste, Hobbs enthralls us with his skill in turning a container of succulents into an arrangement as breathtaking as a Rembrandt still-life. Instead of the Dutch master, however, we gasp at David McDonald's luscious photography on every page.
And here are two examples of the Hobbsian mindset:
"In a mixed planting, never put the tallest plant in the center of the pot. Doing that immediately gives one away as artless. If a pot is to be seen from all sides, plant three tall things in the middle instead of one. . . . This is much more visually interesting than a green dracaena 'spike,' the last refuge of the truly desperate."
and
"As you spend more time gardening, you develop a need for higher highs, a botanical fix that never satisfies. Walking around a nursery becomes more of a mission than an excursion. Avid gardeners become plant sharks. . . ."
Identify?
I thank Kate Schilling, Silver City's renaissance plantswoman, for placing The Jewel Box Garden in my hands two years ago. Salut!
Debra Lee Baldwin's Designing With Succulents (Timber Press, $29.95) covers agaves to aloes and way beyond. There is sufficient text on succulent culture to allow the reader to make regionally appropriate plant choices.
Finally, if you've wondered how tropical plants might fare in our sterling town, Tropicalismo!, subtitled "Spice Up Your Garden with Cannas, Bananas, and 93 Other Eye-Catching Tropical Plants," by Pam Baggett (Timber Press, $14.95) is a quick read offering 100 prospects with growing-zone requirements.
Granted, the splashy photos can easily entice you to abandon zonal sensibility and purchase a specimen that could ultimately become either an indoors winter resident or a transient in a friend's greenhouse. So be careful. Moving a 10-foot-tall potted Musa basjoo (hardy banana tree) inside may well expand the housing crisis.
Also remember that a "tropicalismo" left in the garden when the mercury drops will therein be rendered a "tropical deceasemo."
Author Pam Baggett's entries include several zone-seven canna lily species. I grow some successfully at Ditch Cottage that appear each summer in a thirstier and more pampered bed surrounding a pot pond. If the canna's foliage starts to look like a tsunami blew through — I heap compost on the soil.
Baggett rates a Phormium tenax atropurpureum (New Zealand Flax) as an overwintering plant in zone 7B. Well, que sera sera.
One of her picks is Salvia leucantha (Mexican sage bush), a drought-hardy plant that grew without a hitch in my zone 8 garden in Austin, Texas. However, there is a primo, properly sited specimen that blooms in summer in The Hub's courtyard (Bullard at 6th St.) in Silver City. Everyone should attempt to grow s. leucantha — it's gorgeous!
Since utilizing library resources will help save you money, feel free to stimulate the nursery economy by buying lots of new plants. But before you do that, support the library by becoming a Friend.
Southwest Gardener columnist Vivian Savitt gardens at Ditch Cottage in Silver City.