Habenaria radiata 2009

Little Habenaria radiata surprised me this year. In the past the plants I've seen and grown have had only one or two flowers, at most three, per stem. One of the plants here this year produced a stem with six flowers; another produced a stem with four. And they seem to be setting seed this year.

What should we be calling this plant? It's been placed in the genera Habenaria, Platanthera and Pecteilis. Each of those names still seems to be in use for other orchids, and that suggests that there is someone out there who considers them to be good genera.

One of my email correspondents says he has hybridized Habenaria radiata and Platanthera blephariglottis. I hope some idiot does not announce this as a "bi-generic hybrid" instead of doing the more reasonable thing - acknowledging that two plants which hybridize to produce viable offspring do not belong in different genera. In fact, some might say that in spite of whatever morphological differences exist between them, the ability to "hybridize" and produce viable offspring is a good sign that they are in fact the same species.

The daffodil season begins

I'll bet that most of you wouldn't know what the plant shown above is without my telling you. And then when I told you, you might think I'm a bit off and refuse to believe me. But it is a daffodil, at least in the current, usual arrangement of things. It's Narcissus serotinus, a plant which has been known to European plant enthusiasts since at least the end of the sixteenth century. It's in the old herbals, but few transalpine gardeners back in those days had probably seen it as a living plant. And there is a hint in those herbals which lends credence to that point of view. The illustration used in the old herbals was drawn from a dried plant. How do we know? First of all, notice that I wrote "illustration" rather than "illustrations". The illustration prepared by the Antwerp publisher Plantin for the works of Clusius shows an error, and that error (in the form of copies of this illustration in various degrees of fidelity to the original) was perpetuated for well into the eighteenth century. The error is this: if you look at that illustration, it seems as if the stem of the flower is jointed, somewhat like a bamboo stem. No daffodil has such a jointed scape. But it's now known that if the fresh, blooming scape is dried, it sometimes does develop wrinkles which in an illustration do look like joints. But so few people had actually seen the plant back in those days that the error persisted for centuries. See the account in Bowles' A Handbook of Narcissus (from which I've taken most of the information in this paragraph) for more details.

And why had so few people seen it? At first glance, it does seem strange: this species has an extremely wide range, from Portugal to Israel on both sides of the Mediterranean and on many Mediterranean islands. But it's a tiny plant; as daffodils go, it's hardly a prepossessing one. For another thing, it blooms in the autumn. But the third reason is the clincher: it does not grow as a garden plant in northern Europe. It requires very careful protection to be grown at all in cold, dull climates.

The first image above shows the blossom; the image below it shows the illustration used in the Historia of Clusius (the 1604 edition). According to Bowles, Clusius had first used this same illustration in 1576.

Jim to the rescue...

While out in the back garden today I looked down and saw something neat: a huge black rat snake, Elaphe obsoleta (aka Pantherophis obsoletus) . It surprised me by not making any attempt to get away (they often do that - as snakes go, they have a very laid-back disposition). Then I saw why: it had crawled into some of that bird netting I use to protect plants from deer and was trapped in it.

I carefully lifted the snake and netting from the ground; then I could see that it was really seriously entangled. The netting had cut into its skin in several places.

I put it down and went into the house to get some scissors. Then I very carefully began to cut the snake out of the netting. About eight inches of the front end of the snake (the business end!) were free, and although it maintained a striking pose through most of the ordeal as I cut, it never bit me. There were times when I felt as if I were doing surgery.

When I finally got the snake free, I took it in to show Mema. Then I got her to take my picture with the snake. Unfortunately she had trouble pointing the camera (at one point she was pointing it at a tree and kept saying "I can't see you"). The picture with me isn't great because it does not show the length of the snake - easily five feet. And it was a fat heavy one.

Black rat snake, Pantherophis obsoletus (Elaphe obsoleta)

After all of this I returned the snake to the back garden. I put it on a vine, and it made a nice pose. I ran back in to get my camera, but in the meantime the snake had disappeared.

Mystic dahlias

I'm not really into dahlias. I admire the flowers, but I seem to get indifferent results in growing them. I've learned that there is nothing to be gained in our climate by planting them early: they make great growth initially, but when the summer weather arrives they go into a slump. They can be revived by cutting them back severely (at the height of summer, not exactly when one wants to do that sort of thing), watering them generously and feeding them. With luck, they bounce back for an encore during the autumn.

A simpler approach is to wait until early summer to plant them. This year I waited until the last week of June to plant my dahlias, and the result has been steady growth which is now blooming freely.

The dahlias you see above are representatives of a new group raised in New Zealand by Dr. Keith Hammett and called the Mystic series. I bought my plants last year and grew them that first year in pots. This year they are in the ground and are better for it. These Mystic dahlias are characterized by finely divided very dark foliage. This dark foliage makes a nice contrast to the vivid flowers. They look a lot like some of the Mexican wild dahlias.

The one shown above is 'Mystic Desire'.

More food for a hungry man

I prepare all of my own meals when I'm at home. I almost never eat out. I enjoy cooking, too, but sometimes it presents a dilemma: cooking takes time, and sometimes it's time better spent doing something else. And so the question often arises: what can I fix for dinner which is tasty but which won't keep me in the kitchen for hours?

You see one answer to that question above: popovers. It takes about ten minutes to whip up a batch of popover batter. One then simply pours it into the pans, puts it in the oven, and then comes back about an hour later to enjoy the result.

Popovers are one of those foods which can with equal success be treated as a savory or a sweet food. The batch above was made with a bit of blue cheese, an addition which nicely spiked the flavor profile. Mom and I ate the first ones slathered with butter; the remainder were eaten with orange marmalade.

×Amarcrinum

The plant shown in the image above is one of the hybrids known as ×Amarcrinum. The little times sign indicates that it is of hybrid origin; the name itself is derived from the names of the its parents, Amaryllis belladonna and Crinum moorei. This hybrid has been produced at least twice, and it is sometimes called ×Crinodonna.

Amaryllis belladonna itself does not seem to settle down in our gardens to become a good garden plant. Numerous Crinum grow well here, but their foliage is hugely out of proportion to their flowers - and none of the Crinum I've grown as garden plants could be called free blooming.

×Amarcrinum combines the fragrance, late season and manageable size of the Amaryllis belladonna parent with the ease of culture of the Crinum parent. For small local gardens it's a better choice than either parent. The foliage goes down during the winter and the plants make strong growth during our summers.

For more views of these plants, which I photographed today in a local garden, see here:

http://jimmckenney.com/x_amarcrinum_in_a_local_garden.htm

Two more glads

As more of the new glads come into bloom, I'm reminded of what I've been missing during the years I have ignored these plants. Two blooming this week show really startling color combinations. Above you see 'Flevo Kosmic' and below that is 'Velvet Eyes'. Of the two, 'Flevo Kosmic' is definitely a keeper.

I'm not so sure about 'Velvet Eyes': it's an interesting color but the color pattern on this one reminds me of that of a virus infected tulip. This cultivar is a reminder that glads provide a source of really good purples during the summer; that color combined with their tall stature and elegant bearing makes them tempting candidates for livening up late summer borders.

Impressive as these glads are, I still have my doubts about their role in our gardens. In our climate, the flowers don't last long - when it's really hot they seem to come and go within a day or two. It has long been known that as cut flowers they have the advantage of opening to the last flower in the spike; maybe the best place for them is in a vase.

Food for a hungry man

Last week I had been traveling back and forth between home and western Virginia; my hours were irregular and my eating was even less so. I fell prey to fast food repeatedly. When I got home for good, I wanted a meal high in bulk and fiber and low on fat - something interesting, flavorful and satisfying. Something as simple as a baked potato fills the bill, but it also means an hour wait for it to bake. Yet potato satisfies as few other foods do, so it had to be potato in some form.

The other day I was browsing a WWII era cookbook and came on a recipe which combined mashed potatoes and peanut butter. I was having trouble getting that taste combination in my head, so as soon as I had the chance I tried it. The potatoes were cubed and boiled in chicken stock. When the potatoes were getting soft, they and the stock were put into the food processor. About two tablespoons of peanut butter were added and the mixture was processed enough to make a thin puree. It was too thin, so I added some chunks of stale baguette to thicken it a bit. This basic peanut butter mashed potato combination is good in a bland sort of way. But I wanted something with a bit more presence on the palate. I began to make additions…

Talk about fusion food. Earlier that same day I had been reading a Greek cookbook (think skordalia and taramosalata), and unconsciously those preparations must have guided my next additions. The first additions were a bit of olive oil and some chopped garlic. The result? Good, but I knew it could be better. Then I added some chopped cilantro and the juice of a lime. Now I was getting somewhere.

But it still needed something, and that something was serendipitously on hand: kippers, smoked kippers if that’s not redundant. I say serendipitously because I’m probably the only person in our family who even knows what a kipper is. I broke the kipper up into small pieces and ran the food processor enough to incorporate it thoroughly into the potato mixture.

The final result was comfort food of the best sort – a nice combination of the familiar flavors of the potato, peanut butter and garlic combined with the intriguing, sprightly flavors of the cilantro and lime and the smoky quality imparted by the kippers.

What we didn’t eat right away appeared at lunch the next day, this time as little balls rolled in flour and fried until crisp in olive oil. These were delicious spread on celery.

Glamini glads

This year I’m trialing various garden glads. This week a form new to me has started to bloom. These are sold under the name Glamini Glads.

Experienced gardeners generally have plenty of stories to tell about the absurdities of the mass-distribution catalogs: the hyperbole, the misidentifications, the outrageous colors (blue tulips, roses and dahlias, anyone?) and the dubious hardiness claims. Why this happens is beyond me because, in most cases, the plants themselves deserve better than this shabby treatment.

The catalog entry for these Glamini glads provides a good example. It shows what seem to be typical garden glads cut down and stuffed into a container; such foliage as can be seen is suspiciously short, and the stumpy, graceless inflorescences squirm artlessly upwards as if to distance themselves from the deception taking place below them.

Forget all of that. In the garden these Glamini glads are really graceful and beautiful. They measure over 30” high with three inch flowers. The flower colors are appealing: they remind me of sherbet colors.

Count these as a good addition to our garden flora (at least until the thrips find them).

I purchased these as a mix and then went back to the catalog to identify them as they bloomed. So take the cultivar names given here with a grain of salt. If I've got them right, the one above is 'Emily' and the one below is 'Zoe'.

I wonder where I got it...

Late this afternoon I wandered into the kitchen to look for something. There on the kitchen table was the paper napkin and rows of leaves you see above. Mom had been out in the garden and picked up some crepe myrtle leaves which were showing early color. She has an eye for leaves showing unusual color patterns or particularly vivid color. In a few weeks she'll be bringing in leaves of the Franklin tree (glorious, waxy scarlet) and any others which catch her eye.

I have memories from early childhood of short neighborhood trips mom, my sister and I took to collect leaves, acorns, grasses, feathers - whatever chance and the season offered. My sister would have been in the Taylor Tot at that age, I would have been four or five.

Mom got us pointed in the right direction at an early age.

Hibiscus syriacus 'Blue Satin'

A plant of Hibiscus syriacus ‘Blue Satin’ was obtained earlier this year. I’ve had my eye on this cultivar for several years, and I’ve always hesitated. Why have I hesitated? Because Hibiscus syriacus cultivars, with the exception of some notable cultivars to be mentioned later, have the potential to infest your garden with hundreds of unwanted seedlings. This small shrub is one of the ultimate pass-along plants: so much so that there is inescapably something trashy and weedy about it. It’s often seen flourishing on abandoned inner-city lots and other waste places. It’s widely known as Rose of Sharon or called Althaea, a name sometimes used as the generic name of hollyhocks. They are both members of the mallow (hibiscus) family, Malvaceae.

These blue-flowered cultivars of Hibiscus syriacus (there is also ‘Blue Bird’) become a nuisance once they begin to bloom freely. One must either pick off the spent blooms frequently or be prepared to pull seedlings for years. But are there any other large-flowered, blue-flowered hardy shrubs for their season? I can’t think of any with large flowers. There are the various Buddleja, Vitex and Caryopteris, but all of those depend on flower clusters for effect: the individual flowers are tiny.

Individual blooms of ‘Blue Satin’ are about 3 or 4 inches in diameter. The color is hard to describe. Early in the morning, out of direct sun light, they seem blue, the sort of blue seen in some hardy Geranium. By noon, in bright sunlight the magenta tones are strengthened, and the color, to my eyes at least, is much less attractive. The same thing happens with the blue-flowered garden geraniums I know. Of the images shown above, the upper one was made before the sun struck the bloom, the lower one was made in full sunlight.

Something really exciting happened in the Rose-of-Sharon world in 1970: the United States National Arboretum named and introduced the beautiful triploid cultivar ‘Diana’. Not only was it beautiful, it rarely produces seed. No trash plant this, it’s a beautiful addition to our summer garden flora. The tantalizing excitement continued in 1980 when the Arboretum introduced three more of these triploid cultivars, ‘Aphrodite’, ‘Helene’ and ‘Minerva’.

Exciting as these cultivrs are, they are not the plant for which some of us were patiently waiting. The untimely death of Donald R. Egolf, who had guided the development of these cultivars, evidently brought an end to this line of breeding. What we are still waiting for, of course, is a triploid, seed-free, blue-flowered Hibiscus syriacus.

Until that happens, if you want a blue-flowered Rose of Sharon be prepared to spend a lot of time cleaning up after its prodigious seedling production.

For more information about the US National Arboretum introductions, check out these links:

http://www.usna.usda.gov/Newintro/diana.html

http://www.usna.usda.gov/Newintro/hibiscus.pdf

Lycoris squamigera is a tough one!

When I left the garden shown in the Lycoris squamigera in a country garden series, I was carrying a bag of Lycoris squamigera bulbs. My hostess offered them to me with the comment that they had been dug earlier in the spring. As she returned from the house with the bulbs, my expectations rose because she had a plastic grocery bag with what seemed to be a muskmelon-sized lump. As soon as she handed the bag to me, my hopes were dashed: the bag weighed about as much as a peanut and, as a discrete squeeze revealed, seemed to contain only chaff.
When I got to the car, I took a closer look. Yes, the bulbs were extremely desiccated; but they seemed to have a solid core. Maybe a bit of life lurked in some of them.
I soaked them at the first chance, and something amazing happened. Within a few hours those bulbs went from featherweight ghosts to heavy, plump, seemingly normal bulbs. I was amazed, although I should not have been. I’ve known Nerine to do the same thing: shrink down from a two inch diameter bulb to a pencil-thin core during the dry season and then miraculously plump up with the first good soaking.
Those Lycoris squamigera bulbs are not wasting any time: they are already sprouting new roots!

Lycoris squamigera in a country garden

At about this time last year I stumbled upon a small country garden full of Lycoris squamigera. A knock on the door of the house did not bring an answer, and I was reluctant to enter the garden without permission. It was very tempting, especially since the garden was unfenced and very welcoming.

I was in the same area this weekend and took a detour from my planned route to see if I could find this same garden this year. Not only did I find it; this time the mistress of the garden was on hand to invite me in and tell me a bit about the history of the garden and its plants. I was probably there for about two hours: an hour and forty-five minutes chatting and fifteen minutes photographing plants.

I would not be surprised to hear that others have seen similar gardens in the small towns nestled in farming country across the land. The garden I visited Friday was bright with phlox, August lilies, physostegia, perennial herbaceous hibiscus and balloon flower. But the real show came from the hundreds of Lycoris squamigera.

I hope everyone enjoys these pictures. They are a glimpse of a form of gardening which is probably slowly disappearing. And only someone with very deep pockets indeed would be able to plant Lycoris squamigera in this quantity now.

For more images, take a look here:

http://jimmckenney.com/Lycoris%20squamigera%20iacg.htm

Be sure to click on the images to see the enlarged version.

Lycoris longituba

The genus Lycoris has had an interesting history in our gardens. Some, such as Lycoris squamigera and L. sanguinea, were well known in New England gardens a century ago. Others, such as L. radiata, became naturalized in the Gulf states. L. squamigera became the common Lycoris of the North and L. radiata became the common species in the South. Other species were imported occasionally, but the stocks were typically mixed, there were the usual problems with accurate nomenclature, and commercial nurserymen here in the US did not take them up enthusiastically. Nor, it seems, did the gardening public. Was there ever a "Lycoris Society" ? I don't think so. One Sam Caldwell made a stir about forty years ago by showing a nice range of hybrids. Few people back then had ever seen a Lycoris seed, much less a home grown hybrid. Nothing permanent seems to have come from Caldwell's work.

Now there are probably more varied Lycoris available than at any time in the past. Hardy yellow-flowered Lycoris, long a holy grail of Lycoris enthusiasts, are now readily available. More to the point, there are now several Lycoris forms readily available which set viable seed: these promise an even brighter future for these plants in our gardens.

The plant shown here, Lycoris longituba, is a relatively new arrival in my garden. These were obtained in 2007 and are blooming here for the first time this year. This Lycoris longituba is said to be a good species, good in the sense that it sets viable seed which, if grown on, produce more Lycoris longituba. But from what I've read, the cultivated stocks seem to be variable.

The catalog description led me to expect white-flowered plants. Indeed, from a distance they do look white. But close up it becomes apparent that the color is more complex: the white is suffused with orange and yellow, giving an orange-juice-in-milk effect. It's very beautiful.

The fragrance of this one is pleasant, a quality it does not share with all of its relatives. The plant we call Lycoris squamigera, for instance, has a scent which to me is the scent of vinyl.

For the future: there are at least two different (purportedly) yellow-flowered species growing here: I'll show those when and if they bloom.

What triggers bloom in Lycoris? So far, it seems to be an unsolved mystery.

Fuchsia 'Gartenmeister Bonstedt'

The hummingbirds and I both like this plant a lot.

As a group, fuchsias are little grown in our local gardens. One sees them in numbers around Mother’s Day: the local nurseries sell loads of them. About a month and a half later one sees those same plants dangling from some porch rafter in a hanging basket, hanging on not only to the rafter but to dear life, mostly defoliated, partially dried up, a pathetic sight ready for the trash bin. Evidently there are cultivars which can be successfully grown here, but they don’t seem to be catching on with local gardeners.

One which does very well here is shown above. This is 'Gartenmeister Bonstedt', an old hybrid of Fuchsia triphylla. It has the potential to bloom year round: the plant in the image above has done just that. The blooming period typically begins here sometime in June as the newest growth begins to produce flower buds. Bloom continues steadily right into the new year (it comes inside sometime in November; indoor life slows it down but the blooms keep coming). In most years it will take a break from February to May or so, but last year it bloomed throughout the winter and early spring, too.

The genus Fuchsia is named for Leonhard Fuchs, a sixteenth century German botanist. The plant was not known to Fuchs; it was discovered about a century and a half after his death. The typical American pronunciation is FEW-sha; Herr Fuchs would be better remembered if we were to pronounce it FOOKS-e-a. If you know how to do the glottal ch, so much the better.

Lilium 'Black Beauty', Salvia guaranitica

If I’m ever asked to recommend a lily for a public planting, or if a gardener new to lilies asks me to recommend a good starter lily, I won’t hesitate in picking one: it’s got to be ‘Black Beauty’. To my eyes it’s much more attractive than the hybrids derived from it. It retains from its wild parents poise which is lacking in its descendants. It’s fragrant, but not overweeningly so. It’s as reliable and vigorous as any lily known to horticulture. It’s big enough to make a show in the garden, yet its innate grace saves it from being a lout.

It’s also just about the last reliable lily to bloom each year in the garden. This year it’s making a particularly good show with some nearby Salvia guaranitica. The color of this salvia does not carry, but up close it’s the sort of color on which the eye can feast. The salvia and the lily are about the same height, with the sparse inflorescence of the salvia at about the same height as the lily flowers. This is a combination I’ve grown to like very much.

Eustoma grandiflorum

Forty years ago I was in the Army stationed in central Texas. I was there for a full year, and thus had the chance to see the local flora (and some of the fauna, too) through an entire yearly cycle. For someone who grew up east of the Mississippi, this first glimpse of life west of the river was a real eye-opener. I spent every spare minute out in the field collecting and soaking it all in.
One day in the barracks I noticed that I was not the only one who collected the local vegetation. There was briefly a Japanese man in our unit, and one day I noticed that he was carefully pasting a sample of the local vegetation into what appeared to be a letter. I mistakenly jumped to the conclusion that his interests were botanical; as it turned out, he was finishing up a letter to someone back home (he was very reticent about it all) and all I could gather was that the blade of grass and blossom I noticed had a purely sentimental or poetic significance for him.
Those months in Texas certainly made a good impression on me. There were so many exciting discoveries: my life back then reminds me of a certain risible boy’s book published in the early twentieth century, a book where on every page a rattlesnake, tarantula or Gila monster wanders into the story to liven things up. In the book it was ridiculous, but in real life it was just that, real. Gila monsters don’t live in Texas, and I never saw a wild rattlesnake, but there were the occasional Texas copperheads (very beautiful, much more so than the local Maryland ones), plenty of tarantulas if you knew where to look (I quickly figured that out), and scorpions.
The flora was mostly new to me. I’ll never forget the thrill of seeing Eustoma grandiflorum in full bloom in a dry summer field. The plants were about three feet high and full of dark purple bloom. I didn’t know what it was when I first found it, but it didn’t take long to find out.
Eustoma is nothing new in cultivation – seed lists from the early part of the twentieth century sometimes list them. But the modern cultivated strains are the result of more modern effort to commercialize this plant. I have no idea why they are marketed under the old name Lisianthus. And, I believe, these modern strains were first developed in Japan.
And that makes me wonder if that Japanese man I saw putting local flora into his letters had anything to do with it: wouldn’t it be an amazing coincidence if he did!

The plants you see in the image above were a Mothers' Day gift from my sister and brother in law to Mom.

If you are new to botanical nomenclature but trying to learn, you are perhaps puzzled why the genus name ends in the letter a (suggesting that it is feminine) yet the species name ends in -um suggesting it is neuter. The Greek word stoma (which usually means mouth) is neuter, so the adjective modifying it must be neuter also. If a botanical family should ever be established based on this name, it would be spelled Eustomataceae, not Eustomaceae because the oblique stem of stoma is stomat-.

When the author of a botanical name does not explicitly state the meaning of the name, there can be no certainty about what it means. Various publications have given "meanings" for the word Eustoma, most of them focusing on the usual meaning of the Greek word stoma (mouth). These meanings tend to be infelicitous (I'm reminded of the German Maultasch) . But stoma can also mean the entire face, and with that in mind I prefer to think that Eustoma means "pretty face".

Calla lilies

Although I’ve grown these South African plants all of my gardening life, I have never felt comfortable about them as garden plants. Long ago I realized that one of them, Zantedeschia albomaculata, was hardy in our gardens. And that realization prompted me to try a few others. But as a group, calla lilies have yet to achieve a permanent place in my garden.
It’s time to change that. Evidently they are a lot more reliable as garden plants than my limited experience has suggested. A few years ago Wayne and I saw huge, floriferous clumps in a western Virginia garden. These plants topped out at three and four feet high and had formed thick clumps. The discussions on the Internet forums suggest that they are surviving winters well north of me. Get busy, Jim…
Zantedeschia are aroids, jack-in-the-pulpit relatives. What we call the flower is in fact a colorful modified leaf, technically a spathe, which surround the real flowers. The real flowers are inconspicuous little things hidden inside that spathe. The spathe lasts in good condition much longer than any true flower: little wonder that these are popular florist flowers.
I’m now growing eight different cultivars – that’s a fraction of what’s currently available. The one in the image above is ‘Sunshine’. It was planted in late June and is in bloom already.

Tuberous begonias

Although in a recent blog I said that the tuberous begonias do not thrive in our area, in doing so I was mostly repeating uninformed gossip. The prevailing attitude is that they do not do well here. But even in the older literature from eastern North America, there were those who stood up and said that although there are problems, these plants are well worth growing,
Over fifty years ago, in the Silver Spring neighborhood where I grew up, one of my neighbors grew tuberous begonias in a big way. He ordered the bulbs from California and planted them in a long (maybe 30’) bed at the back of his garden. I sometimes saw him in the woods gathering top soil for his begonia bed. As a youngster I took these begonias for granted: I had no idea that what he was doing successfully was the exception rather than the rule.
My own first trials with tuberous begonias came long after those times. For me, they were not good garden plants, and I soon lost interest in them. But occasionally I would see photographs (especially in older books) of tuberous begonias growing luxuriously in favored climates, and this would bring on another wave of temptation.
It happened again this year: I saw picotee flowered tuberous begonias illustrated in one of the catalogs. Actually, I had been noticing them for several years. And by then I had also dreamed up some schemes which might make their successful cultivation possible here. So I ordered a half dozen earlier this year, and the first of them have been blooming for weeks.
So far they look great. And they are beginning to bloom freely.
Am I counting my chickens before they hatch? Is there some serious tuberous begonia problem in my future? We’ll see: but for now, enjoy the image above. With luck, there will be many more in the weeks ahead.

The ageing gardener

I’m at the age where it’s probably appropriate to start to think about the disposition of my goods so-to-speak. And while I don’t expect a precipitating event to occur any time soon, my sense of what old age really means has changed a lot in recent years. By “really means” what I mean is the distinction between being alive on the one hand and on the other hand being a full participant in life. Although from a perspective which takes into account only health issues, there is every reason to believe that I’ll live a lot longer, I now realize that simply being alive does not count for all that much. I’m paying a lot more attention to the lives lived by otherwise healthy older people lately, and the one thing I notice is that we experience a huge drop off in physical activity as we age.

Should I live a long time longer, and should my mind still function reasonably well, I probably won’t be doing much but sitting and reminiscing. Evidently, even for those lucky enough to retain their memory, the process of recollection even slows down. I remember hearing someone on the radio describing the adaptations needed to deal with an elderly parent: the one which fascinated me the most had to do with recall. The speaker told the story of visiting her elderly father and, at one point in the conversation, asking him a question. He did not answer. But the next day, when she was visiting him again and having another conversation, he unexpectedly and spontaneously blurted out the answer to her question of the day before.

This elderly person gave on the first day the impression that he had lost his memory. But it was not his memory which was faulty, it was the recall process. And it was not really faulty, it had just slowed down. The data were still on the disk, but there was so much else on the disk that it took longer to evoke it.

So what does this have to do with gardening? Well, for one thing, I’ve collected a lot of plants and a lot of books over the years. If I wait too long to disperse these, it will never happen with my participation. So it has occurred to me that the time to do this is before I lose both the energy to do it and the wit to do it gracefully.

That’s in another forty years, right?