This was the third morning of a five-day trip to celebrate Christmas in DC with our son and his wife. When I’m traveling, my hours of sleep typically increase–as do my most vivid dreams. Perhaps the brain enjoys being free of the many routine daily tasks that consume my life back home. Our days in Washington were certainly filled with inspiring visits to the city’s art galleries and museums: a beautifully designed exhibition focusing on Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party at the Phillips, an incredible examination of Vermeer and his Dutch compatriots at the National Art Gallery, Ai Weiwei's monumental “Trace” installation at the Hirshhorn, a retrospective celebration of Michael Nichols’ photographs of wildlife at the National Geographic Museum, and on Christmas day several hours at the US Botanic Garden.
Stimulated by these daytime trips and nighttime visions, further enriched by many hours for reading, I kept with me a small, pocket journal where I jotted down notes on stuff I was thinking–or dreaming–about. Here are a few of those notes, amplified during some post-trip moments of tranquility.
• While sitting in the Cedar Rapids airport, waiting for our flight to Chicago, I began reading A New Garden Ethic by Benjamin Vogt. This proved to be a thought-provoking experience. Owner of a garden design business in Nebraska, Vogt is a passionate advocate for gardens that exclusively rely on native plants. He believes our primary commitment must be to healthy ecological relationships. We must do everything possible to enhance the health of the soil and the lives of the millions of life forms dependent on that soil. We should not be introducing plants to Midwest landscapes simply because they are pretty. Although I was often frustrated with how he developed and presented his argument (absence of citations for his sources, absence of any reference to vegetable gardens), Vogt raises crucial issues about the purpose of an ornamental flower garden and whether it is possible to create an ecologically sensitive garden that effectively blends native forbs and grasses with non-native ornamentals.
• One of my Christmas morning gifts was a copy of Ali Smith’s Autumn (a Man Booker Prize finalist). The novel is not on gardens, but it can be difficult for a gardener to read a novel without hearing garden echoes. Here’s an excerpt from a pun-rich conversation between an elderly Daniel and a younger Elisabeth as they reflect on the word “gymkhana”:
The word gymkhana, Daniel said, is a wonderful word, a word grown from several languages.
Words don’t get grown, Elisabeth said.
They do, Daniel said.
Words aren’t plants, Elisabeth said.
Words are themselves organisms, Daniel said.
Oregano-isms, Elisabeth said.
Herbal and verbal, Daniel said. Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. Then the seedheads rattle, the seeds fall out. Then there’s even more language waiting to come up.
• Despite Vogt’s advocacy for native plants, it’s hard to imagine the Alumni House garden without ‘Bishop Llandaff’ dahlias. These classic dahlias from the 1920s have a rich burgundy foliage that provides a dramatic contrast with their red flowers. I have also discovered they are a favorite summer nectar source for our Monarch population. A fall issue of Horticulture magazine that accompanied me on the DC trip includes a recommendation for “Twyning’s After Eight,’ a dark foliage dahlia with white flowers supposedly superior to a Bishop. Having located a mail order source in California, I suspect in 2018 we’ll give this new cultivar a trial run in Iowa.
• While in DC, I came across the suggestion of using old wine corks as mulch for potted plants. Sufficient motivation to increase our annual consumption of wine?
• In the National Gallery book store, I discovered two books that really caught my eye: An Oak Spring Pomona and An Oak Spring Flora, both published by Yale University Press. These volumes provide illustrations (with detailed bibliographical information) from rare books, manuscripts, and works of art in the Library at Oak Spring, Rachel Lambert Mellon’s family estate in Virginia. While I was tempted to add several pounds to my backpack, these hefty books are also quite expensive. Lacking Mellon’s near infinite resources, I need to keep my garden book selections focused on more practical purchases.
• What is the difference between a patio and a terrace? I’ve always referred to the area attached to the east side of the Alumni House as the patio, but as I was looking through a book on European gardens, I realized the authors were referring to similar architectural structures as terraces. Based on a few minutes of Google sleuthing, it appears the two terms are often interchangeable. One source defined a patio as “attached or detached, hard-paved, on the ground and of the earth” and a terrace as “attached or detached, hard-paved, most importantly . . . raised from the earth around it, but not yet a deck.” Since the Alum Garden patio/terrace is raised above the earth around it, calling it a “terrace” seems applicable. But several sources also note that patios are typically used as outdoor dining areas, which applies to the Alum Garden space. I also tend to think of terraces in a garden as coming in a series (as I envisioned in my DC dream), but that’s not the case with Coe’s garden. At the moment I’m inclined to think the word “patio” emphasizes that the structure is attached to the Alumni House and the word “terrace” implies the area is part of the garden.
• My light reading on this trip was Carol J. Michel’s Potted and Pruned, a collection of revised (i.e., “potted and pruned”) blog and newspaper articles on gardening. These are casual, breezy, often self-deprecatory and amusing reflections on various aspects of a gardener’s life. Michel writes about frass (insect poop), the undependability of motivation, the erosion of her favorite gardening t-shirt, the bad manners of inviting an oak tree to grow in your garden (comparable to “inviting a dinner guest who drops their food one piece at a time throughout the entire dinner, and then gets up after dinner and leaves a trail of food crumbs all the way out of the house”). My favorite passage came in a paragraph portraying the gardener as a hero: “the disciplinarian, pulling plants apart, cutting off their seed heads, and otherwise using a variety of pruners and occasionally even saws to bring order out of the chaos created by my misbehaving plants.” Under the Alumni House garden shed’s east window is a large poster of Terrell Jacobs, an Indiana boy who became a lion trainer for the Barnum & Bailey Circus. The poster's placement is intended to symbolize an intrepid gardener’s daily efforts to control the wild flora and fauna determined to run rampant within the walls of the Alumni House Garden.
• Some Alumni House Garden plants I don’t mind whipping into shape. I enjoy engaging with the garden’s yews, attempting to accentuate their structural presence as a backdrop for the plants cavorting in front of them. It is, however, much harder for me to prune the cavorters. On my final day in DC, I started reading Paige Dickey’s Embroidered Ground, a series of essays reflecting on the 30-year evolution of her Duck Hill garden in upstate New York. Without hesitation, Dickey advocates the importance of a “hard” April pruning of all woody herbs: lavender, thyme, rue, sage (all stalwarts in our herb, rock, and crevice gardens). Inspired by my circus poster, I trust I will find the courage this spring to follow Dickey’s advice.
• While DC’s museums and art galleries were all closed on Christmas Day, the United States Botanic Garden, just a few steps from the Capitol, was open. Most of my attention during our visit was focused on locating plants we grow (or could grow) in Iowa, though the tropical orchids were too captivating to ignore (as evident by how they dominate the slide show accompanying this Garden Shed piece). The high point of the trip, however, came as we were leaving the outdoor exhibit and discovered a beautifully shaped rainbow pillar serviceberry, Amelanchier canadensis ‘Glenform.’ Despite having neither leaves nor berries, it immediately struck me that this might be a Midwest native ideally suited for a garden area we had cleared of vegetation earlier this fall. I had been planning to use a Japanese maple in the spot, but perhaps we should be taking Vogt’s proposed garden ethic more seriously, making a stronger commitment to native flowers and shrubs, even in a garden initially conceived as an “English” garden. This year I’ve begun to think of Coe’s garden as expressing an “Anglo-American” ideal. That will mean entering a series of renegotiations as we attempt to work out the balance between the “Anglo” and the “American.” In my DC dream, I felt so confident advocating terraces for someone’s hillside, but in the daylight hours, any self-confidence in my inclinations is harder to find.
I'll conclude this December posting with a slideshow of a few photos from the DC trip.