Surprise Encounter: When my kids were very young, longtime horticulture friend Bob Brzuszek took us out into a Mississippi bog to show us wild pitcher plants (Sarracenia), carnivorous plants which get their nutrients from dissolved insect prey trapped in tall, hollow, water-filled leaves.
Semi-digested contents
In a shocking real-life case of deus ex machina, as Bob sliced open one of the colorful funnels to reveal the partly-digested insects inside, a recently-ensnared honeybee flew out, released from the grisly death trap.
That came rushing back to me the other day when my sweetheart and her sister and I, looking for a rare colony of naturalized pitcher plants, were out “bog yomping” which is what locals around my summer home in northern England call hopping from tufts of grass to keep from getting muddy while traversing the remote moors.
Fens and Bog People
The misty moors of Lancashire are steep and windswept, nearly treeless except in the deep waterfall-fed ravines; the hillsides are covered with grasses and sedges, and rife with shallow pools gouged out by ancient glaciers, now matted with deep blankets of sphagnum moss, wildflowers, pink-and-purple heathers and thickets of sweet blue wimberries, tart blackberries, and succulent raspberries.
This is my fourth Floriade experience, attending the world’s largest horticultural exhibition, hosted in The Netherlands just once every ten years. This year’s show, as in the others in 2002 and 2012, featured stunning garden designs from dozens of countries around the world, exciting plants, unique accessories, garden art and other “hard” features, and the latest/futuristic horticultural innovations. With universal themes of sustainability and connections to nature, I took notes on dozens of ideas I can use in my own little cottage-style garden.
An exercise in Occam’s Razor (the K.I.S.S. approach)
Bottle trees, beyond their being folksy “make-do” garden ornaments, are a proud form of recycling. I’ve met hundreds of folks who openly confess they are “saving bottles” for a notional future state of nirvana they hope to reach when they’ll feel daring enough to actually put a bottle tree in their garden. Where used bottles belong.
Bottles yearning for the garden
In these weird times, bottle trees strike a chord for being a simple, refreshing, liberating aspect of life where there are no rules at all about getting it right or wrong. Unlike same old, same old pink flamingoes, no two bottle trees look exactly alike, not even those made of standard welded frames bedecked with your personal choice and placement of bottles. So, without a standard to go by, you actually can’t mess up.
Glass “bottle trees” have been around for centuries, first as icons of superstitious beliefs based on a three-thousand year old Arabian folk tale, and now increasingly as eccentric but popular home-made glass garden ornaments. I know these folksy sculptures aren’t every one’s cup of tea, but there are thousands of them scattered across gardens of a surprising assortment of people; I’ve photographed them in modest home gardens to upscale botanical gardens and art museums, rarely with any two being exactly alike – the only things the widely diverse gardeners who create or display them have in common are glass bottles held up where the sunshine can radiate through them.
Some wet blankets sniff that these folksy paeans to stained glass are forgettable sights, which to me means they just don’t get it, and that’s okay – I mean, not everyone hangs glittery stuff from holes in their ears, either, right?
Though Eudora Welty photographed a bottle tree in the 1930s, the first authentic glass bottle tree I can recall was beside a tenant shack on a dusty road dead center in the Mississippi Delta. I was maybe fifteen, yet to this day the inexplicable spectacle haunts my sense of the absurd.
Can’t get away from Mississippi ditchbank weeds – even in England (where they seem to be better appreciated)!
All Mississippi natives in English garden – plus a rustic fence to make it work!
But truth is, just as we yearn for stuff from afar, Southeastern U.S. native flowers are wildly popular in most upscale English gardens – used “as if they are normal plants” – with the best being those accessorized with natural or rustic elements.
As a “person of curiosity,” I’m easily thrown off course when little garden events prompt questions.
On summer evenings in my youth, I was sometimes encouraged to sit on the porch with grownups, to be mesmerized on rare occasions as my great-grandmother’s treasured heirloom “night blooming Cereus” unfurled its large, exotic, fragrant evening flowers. Now that’s a way to hook kids on the mysteries of the garden! And I was also shown some of the creatures that billowed or crept out of the shrubs at night to pollinate those flowers, or to hunt the pollinators.
Night blooming cereus – a tropical tree dwelling Epiphyllum
Anyway, one recent sultry summer evening, watching evening primrose flowers open at dusk and basking in the heady bouquet of four o’clocks in the still night air should have been soothing to my creative right brain. Instead, the interwoven dance of flowers, fragrance, and large, hovering sphinx moths flitting around between newly-opened flowers and avoiding voracious night-feeding geckos, kicked my analytical left brain into overdrive.
Evening Primrose opens only at night
Clear-wing “hummingbird moth” pollinates both day and night
Sphinx moths are too fast for my cameral to capture
One of my so-far unanswered question is, what makes some plants flower at night? In addition to the primrose and four o’clocks, other of my garden’s evening flowers are moonflower vine, angel trumpets (both Datura and Brugmansia) and a scraggly night-blooming cereus (Epiphyllum) grown from a cutting from my great-grandmother; there are more, of course, in gardens of others, plus many daytime flowers that remain open all night (Cleome comes to mind).
On moonflower (photo by James Taylor)
At rest (photo by Bridget Regan)
At rest (Photo by Angels Lewis)
Truth is, we still don’t know why they open at night. Best theories are that over thousands of years some plants have adapted techniques for avoiding moisture loss in hot, dry climates; and that some evolved light-colored, fragrant blossoms which open late to attract shy pollinators that venture out at night to avoid predators that are less aggressive in the darkness. Except for those insatiable, lightening-fast geckos, of course, which by the way have gotten rid of ALL the roaches that used to frequent my back garden.
Camouflaged night-feeding gecko
Anyway, while jonesing for explanations to these minor mysteries, I pored over my faded plant physiology class notes, trying to rewrap my old head around long-forgotten technical concepts.
Mysteries of Life
(cover from The Moody Blues album Every Good Boy Deserves Favour)
Not to get too technical here, but plants have light sensors, called phytochromes – biological switches that turn night/day responses on and off. Full sun exposes phytochromes to lots of visible red light, which energizes plants into active growth mode; shaded or late afternoon sun has more far-red wavelengths, which tell plants it’s time to transition into night mode.
Here’s how plants tell time: Certain compounds produced during daylight hours break down slowly overnight, enabling plants to chemically “know” how many hours they spend in darkness; yeah, plants tell time by hours of darkness, not hours of daylight. Plus, as nights get successively shorter or longer, plants keep track of this stored information to gradually prepare for changes needed in approaching seasons. Horticulturists take advantage of this by using extra lighting or shading to trick poinsettias, Easter lilies, chrysanthemums, and other holiday flowers to bloom out of season.
The physics are interesting as well: Different stimuli, including temperature and humidity, trigger plants into pressurizing fluids that move into or out of “hinge cells” at the base of leaves and flowers, causing them to get bigger or smaller, longer or shorter. This is what crank flowers to open and close, leaves of some plants to fold and unfold, and stems to bend towards light.
Ah, I can go on and on until our ears start to bleed. I just think that science is so grand! Helps me sort out what’s happening, if not why. But I’ve got to relax now, try to get back to just soaking in the evening garden’s natural sensory allures.
(Sitting on the porch swing, I hear someone murmur “Don’t those four o’clocks smell nice?”)
Turns out, it’s a literal thing that “You can take the man out of the garden, but you can’t take the garden out of the man.”
My spot-on sweetheart has commented many times about how this “mucky pup” of hers loves little more than just digging in the dirt. Not necessarily planting anything, just… digging. Truth is, I have a nearly atavistic urge to turn soil over and over, beyond the expected satisfactions: it’s part of me, from how through decades of gardening I’ve slurped tons of unwashed berries, forgetfully chewed garden grime-crusted fingernails, and inhaled enough dust to start a raised bed.
Good enough to eat?
In W H Auden’s In Praise of Limestone, the poet suggests that the physical characteristics of a place shape the essence of people who live there, often without their noticing the subtle sways. Having grown up during the innovative 1960s musical melting pot of Blues, Country, Rock & Roll and military bands, I have to tip my hat to Auden’s description of music as an encompassing influence which “can be made anywhere, is invisible, and does not smell.”
But unlike my beloved Mississippi Delta’s signature Blues music, the alluvial soil of my region, kicked up by ag machinery and blown by dust storms, can be sensed physically. It clogs our fingernails, stains our britches knees, billows and swirls up to create amazing sunsets and moonrises. And, right before approaching thunderstorms, we can easily smell its peculiar pong – that fresh rain’s coming fragrance.
One of the common smells produced ahead of thunderstorms is from ozone being released by lightening and other molecular schisms, which really is a thing. But ozone has a sharp smell, almost like chlorine, or an electrical fire, not the damp, earthy smell I’m thinking about.
The faintly sweet, earthy smell is caused by bacteria and fungi that create an oily substance called geosmin, which has a distinct musty odor most people can easily smell at low concentrations. It’s what gives plowed fields, compost, mushrooms, catfish, and warm lake water their faint earthy scents. And when big raindrops hit exposed dirt, or a low-pressure front ahead of a summer storm “degasses” the soil and pulls geosmin into the air, we inhale a compound of it called petrichor.
So, I’m thinking, if George Harrison’s (from Savoy Truffle) phrase “of what we eat, we are” can also apply to what we smell, then, yeah – in a way, my garden is not only in my heart and mind, but also coursing through my veins.
Gotta go. Dirt is in my hungry blood, and it’s calling me back to the garden.
I’m sharing this book review by Jessica Russell – thanks for your kind words, Jessica! Hope to see some of you at the Eudora Welty House and Garden, from 1-3pm today.
A review of Maverick Gardeners: Dr. Dirt and Other Determined Independent Gardeners by Felder Rushing University Press of Mississippi Paperback
Maverick Gardenerscelebrates gardening offbeat, on purpose
By Jessica Russell Special to the Mississippi Clarion Ledger USA TODAY NETWORK
At last, Mississippi’s favorite offbeat horticulturist takes us behind the vine-wrapped gates of some of the funkiest private gardens in the South. Suffice it to say, this is not your mama’s garden guide.
With a profusion of interesting and unexpected themes planted densely together, it reads rather like a cottage garden grows: A memoir here, a tribute there. Some history. Some recipes. And plenty of good laughs in between—thanks to Rushing’s signature narrative style.
Nestled among eye-popping photographs of unconventionally beautiful gardens are personal stories of the maverick gardeners who tend them. Between these fanciful encounters, like a well-placed garden bench, the author provides space to pause and reflect. To think…
Maverick Gardeners is my way of celebrating the weird, wild and wonderful things that we gardeners often do. In every corner of the world, in every village and neighborhood, across all cultures and social differences, maverick gardeners exemplify a spirit that, more or less, runs through us all. I call them DIGrs (Determined Independent Gardeners).
These nonconformist souls see no sense in trying to fit in and follow the footpaths of others, yet are well worth getting to know. Some are celebrated like the late, great Dr. Dirt whose passion for his flamboyant garden and sharing with others are at the heart of the book. During the ten years of our rollicking cross-cultural collaboration of swapping plants and rubbing shoulders with fellow DIGrs we unraveled a shared humanity, and spread the word through co-hosting a weekly live National Public Radio broadcast and lecturing across the country.
Dirt in his garden
There are also in-depth interviews with a guerilla gardener who shares food he grows on a vacant parking lot, a woman whose “grief garden” for a lost son is accessorized with countless birdhouses, a neighbor who works at a garden center to feed her plant passion and then uses her miniature horse to weed out those that are not worth growing, and a Jamaican immigrant whose jungle garden is her home-away-from-home.
You probably have a DIGr in your neighborhood as well. A few hints might be their smorgasbord of “passalong” plants – including many in assorted (often recycled) containers, and a packed row of plants languishing in hope for a garden spot to open up soon. And quirky home-made garden art. And a hose that is never rolled up. And a somewhat humble, somewhat defiant attitude.
How neighbors see DIGrs
While each may garden alone, these seeming outliers are a loosely-affiliated tribe bound by plants and attitude, and a love of sharing with others. They’re what I call modern-day “keepers of the flame.”
In the course of writing Maverick Gardeners I discovered for myself some keys to enjoying the journey and its side trips as much or more than the destination. There have been some weird moments, including clashes of umbrage between Master Gardeners and “dirt” gardeners, miscommunications that hurt feelings, waves of astonishment over amazingly simple discoveries, and laughter. Lots of laughter.
My hope in writing the book, then, is to share my take on the experiences, challenges, joys, and frustrations of these exuberant gardeners who joyfully color outside the lines, and to interpret them for those who “don’t get it” but are willing to learn.
And yeah, we ALL have a bit of Maverick in us – so you will most certainly find something in this unique book that will be helpful for your own gardening muse!
SPECIAL NOTE: To celebrate my new book, Maverick Gardeners, my NPR Gestalt Gardener producer Java Chapman and I are taking our weekly garden party on the road, and everyone’s invited. At several of the venues we’ll be broadcasting the Gestalt Gardener radio show from my antique green pickup truck and its overstuffed garden (transmission permitting).
A full list of dates, times, and places – all free, and socially distanced, of course – is available on the MPB website. Click on the Felder caricature for more details of our community road show.
…but, in a “stuck here in the middle with you” scenario, halfway between our Northern friends’ undulating mounds of snow, and the non-stop tropical flowers of SoCal and Florida, we have stuff to keep our pineal glands puffed up, staving off Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Front Garden in Snow
This week it dropped from the low 70s to 9, which kicked hard on plants that which are normally hardy but had lost their cold conditioning.
Camellia shrubs can take cold that the flowers may not
So the day the sleet and snow started falling I went around my garden and neighborhood and collected a few flowers that flower naturally in January and February, capturing them in the still-life of a vase.
Felder Rushing's Blog 