Whenever I go looking at garden furniture I’m struck by a) how expensive much of it is, and b) how inexcrably uncomfortable most of it is. As far as b), while I know Americans tend to be a little more zaftig than the rest of the world, I hadn’t realized that their anatomical parts devoted to sitting were shaped something like large, unyielding cardboard boxes. Or at least that’s the impression I get when I test-sit garden chairs. And the higher the price tag, the less comfortable the seats seem to be.
Shopping for anything in my household is made exponentially more difficult by the fact that I’m an average 5′ 10″ and 160 pounds while John is 6′ 9″ and somewhat heavier. What fits me well feels puny to him, and anything that he likes makes me feel like Edith Ann in her high chair.
Luxurious plastic
Consequentially most of our outdoor chairs and tables have been home-store treasures made out of a luxurious material unknown to the ancient Greeks and Phoenicians: plastic. These ten to twenty dollar seats sit as well or better than those ten to fifty times their price tag, a comfort that is compounded by the fact that you haven’t spent ten to fifty times more for something that inflicts instant pain.
The other night we had dinner with one of our friends who happens to design cars for a major car company. I asked him about car seats, particularly whether they up-sized seating for the American market. The answer was basically that, no, they design only for a “standard American,” and that with India and China being such large market targets, making things too large would be detrimental.
After dinner, we drove home in his SUV. John had several inches over his head in the front passenger seat, and my seat in the back was far better than tolerable. So…if they can design cars to fit a variety of people, why can’t they do the same for outdoor seating?
Scooter, my cat, is microchipped should she ever get separated from home. But implanting microchips into plants? It’s not like they wander away on their own.
The practice seems to be catching on. In response to thefts of valuable golden barrel cactuses from median strips and other city plantings, the city of Palm Desert has begun to implant the little devices in some of their costly specimens. And other cities are getting into the act.
Garden pots and planters can be made out of almost anything that can stand up to sun and moisture. Clay, both glazed and unglazed, has been the main material of choice for natural materials, and it can assume all kinds of shapes, sizes and colors. Plastic wins out in the area of man-made materials, combining lighter weight, extremely mold-ability and options for all sorts of colors, usually combined with lower cost.
The three big pots I picked for the new plants on the roof deck are made out of a less unusual material: terrazzo, a concrete that’s been ground down so that you can see the polished aggregate mixed in with the cement matrix. Being made from concrete, they’re heavy–more so than low-glazed ceramic. But I really like their surfaces and the modern profiles of this line from Vietnam. Here’s a closeup of their surface, contrasted here against the leaves of Euphorbia cotinifolia:
Terrazzo planter detail
Concrete planters are used commonly in commercial situations because of their extreme sturdiness, but this terrazzo finishing technique looks to be fairly uncommon. (A web search found lots of outlets in Australia, but not the U.S.) But fortunately they’re available here in San Diego at Walter Anderson Nursery. They’re not super-cheap–maybe double the cost of similarly-size ceramic pots at home stores, but they’re not ridiculous, either.
Yesterday’s BBC News had a commentary by Peter Baker taking an economist’s view of food production. It sounds like an excellent argument for growing your own food. Here’s an interesting excerpt:
The orderliness required to plant, grow, harvest, process, pack, store, monitor, administer, transport, display and sell the produce in a supermarket is simply staggering, and the expended energy intense.
As an example, tomato production in the US consumes four times as many calories as the calorific value of the tomatoes created…
Even before its sea voyage, the calorific value of US wheat is only twice the amount of calories expended to produce it. Compare this with cassava production in Tanzania where 23 times the calorific value is gained for each calorie of human energy input.
Of course, you can’t derive nutritional benefit from drinking diesel fuel or some of the other power inputs necessary to produce food in the industrial American agricultural system. But that would be fuel that could be devoted to something more important–or kept out of the atmosphere entirely.
(The statistic on farmed tomatoes has shades of the title of William Alexander’s book, The $64 Tomato, a book I haven’t read yet. It’s on my list…)
The roof garden now has three plants I’ve never grown before. I tried to pick plants that were tough sun-lovers that required almost no attention and not much water. While I don’t like to write about plants I don’t have any experience with, I thought this might be an opportunity to take you along for the ride as I try these out.
Lomandra longifolia ‘Breeze’
The first new plant is Lomandra longifolia ‘Breeze,’ a dwarf mat rush. I’ve always liked spiky grass– or flax-like plants, and this stopped me with its dramatic long, narrow leaves. It’s listed as maturing to about 30 inches high and wide, though will likely be a tad smaller in a container. The plant is being marketed as a good plant for traffic medians. I’m hoping that will mean that it will require little care–though that may just be a marketing ploy to sell more plants. Another part of the sales pitch is that it should be extremely drought-tolerant once established. Looking around the web I found a listing for it that went on to say that potted versions of the plant will require regular water. Well, it ain’t gonna get lots of water up there on the roof, so we’ll see how well it’ll do. At least its new container is four times the size of the nursery pot and should dry out a lot slower.
Kalanchoe prolifera
New plant number two is Kalanchoe prolifera, a succulent from Madagascar. It’s definitely an architectural plant that to me it looks a little like an overscaled, cartoon version of a bamboo, with its thick trunks and chunky leaves. The picture here shows the light green freckles on the trunk of the plant, making it a good plant to enjoy up close after you’ve oohed and ahed over its silhouette. Size could be a problem, with some listings saying that it can get to ten feet when it flowers in the winter. But then it dies back and starts all over again. Another experiment for sure.
I picked the final plant, Euphorbia cotinifolia, partly because I wanted something with interesting red foliage. Then when I saw the genus name I was thinking “slam dunk.” Great leafy foliage and extreme drought tolerance because euphorbias as among the camels of the plant world, right? Well, not so fast, because it turns out this is one of the euphorbias that actually likes fairly regularly water. Groan. It was a big plant and I wasn’t looking forward to taking it back to the nursery, let alone having to spend another half day trying to find something I liked only half as much.
Euphorbia cotinifolia closeup
Then, researching it some more, I read that it’s actually extremely drought tolerant after all, but that it will drop its leaves in response to drought. Okay, it’s worth a try, I thought. Experiment number three. Placed in the largest of the large containers it’d stand a chance of staying watered enough to hold on to its leaves during the warm part of the year. (It’s naturally deciduous during cold weather.)
So I’ve ended up with three very different looking plants. The lomandra should stay green and grassy year-round. The kalanchoe will shoot up to some impressive height, flower during the winter, and then die back to start all over. And the euphorbia should be a warm, reddish-purple presence much of the year, only to shed its leaves when the kalanchoe is getting ready to show off. It should make for an interesting, ever-changing show.
Our roof deck has felt like a barren wasteland ever since it was built. There’s a set of plastic garden furniture up there, but we’ve stared at the space and wondered why it continues to feel so inhospitable.
For the last two years, being a gardener, planting something up there in pots has been my first thought towards a solution. The space gets full sun all day, however, and even though we’d thought ahead to install a hose bib up there, the last thing we want to do is to lock ourselves into a responsibility of trying to remember to trudge up there X times a week to keep things watered.
There are automatic watering systems out there that might have helped with the problem. Orbit, for instance, makes a line of inexpensive battery-powered devices that hook up to a hose or bib. Our experience in the past with one of these units soured us on that thought, though. We found that the thing required a lot of attention to get flow and timings just right, and it resulted in an octopus’s worth of little hoses going everywhere.
Also, I’ve decided that there are two kinds of people out in the world. The gadget people are the ones who have to have the latest cool gizmo or supposed labor-saving device. They’re the first to have an iPhone and the last to pull a weed with their bare hands when there might a special device in the garage.
The simplifiers–and I usually count myself in their numbers–have little use for gadets, which we typically refer to as “toys.” We can sometimes seem obstructionist to the march of progress, and we often have to have the worth of something proved to us before we adopt it. At that point we’ll call a gadget a “necessary tool.” (A Luddite would be a highly developed subspecies of simplifier.)
So, last weekend, this simplifier decided to finally take on the roof deck. To make long-term life easier for me, the roof solution had to include the following practical considerations:
Tough, sun-loving, drought-tolerant plants
Large pots (to hold moisture longer)
Mulch (to reduce evaporation of moisture)
A grouping of pots so that the plants could shade each other
To that list, I needed to add that the chosen plants would have to be able to visually hold their own in a large space. And of course, the end result had to be fabulous, at least to my eyes. So shopping I went.
After spending so much time outdoors, visiting every nursery and home store in a ten mile radius, I came home with the worst sunburn so far this year. I also had three pots, three plants, and several bags of potting soil. Getting the largest pot–which must have weighed a hundred pounds–up the spiral staircase was quite a feat, but here’s the result.
Roof plantings
In the next couple of posts I’ll talk about the plants–which are all new to my garden–and then the pots, which I thought were cool finds.
I was writing recently about how my new raised bed was a yellow exclusion zone except once a year when the kahili ginger (Hedychium gardnerianum) came into bloom. That time is now. The plant began Thursday, and should keep going, on and off, for just a few weeks.
Kahili ginger
In my early teen years I was involved in the dark underground world of competitive rose and flower shows, a subculture fraught with as much danger and intrigue as the illicit drug network or the world of showing dogs. My only best-of-show attempt came with a tall spike of this ginger, the best example of it that I’d ever grown. The stem was in peak bloom the morning of the judging, and the entire auditorium glowed with the flowers’ amazing fragrance.
The plant that I have now is a piece of that first plant, which itself was an offset that had been pimped me by one of my mother’s friends. Here in San Diego kahili ginger just chugs along minding its own business, asking only for occasional water. It’s hard to imagine that this plant is considered a nasty invasive species in some tropical regions. In fact, one site in Hawai’i recommends: “Because this is an extremely invasive plant, it should be destroyed when found.” Reading that was like finding out a loved member of the family is wanted in three European countries for crimes against humanity. Not my precious ginger!
The key difference between here and there is one of water. In warm, frost-free areas with abundant water it can easily become an unwelcome pest. But it stops where the supplemental water stops, and the local ten inches or less a year of natural rain can’t sustain it outside of watered garden spaces.
If I were ever to retire to Hawai’i it’d be a tough choice. Could I leave this plant behind?
Although this is not a political blog, it’s a space that acknowledges that you can’t escape the world, even nested within the walled confines of your privategarden spaces. An event that crept into my mental garden is the 20th anniversary of the 8.8.88 popular uprising in Burma (a country whose military rulers have decided should be called Myanmar). I thought I’d mark the occasion with pictures from a trip I took there with my father in 1998, shortly after the tenth anniversary of the attempted revolution.
But first, a quick recap in case you’re not familiar with the events: On August 8, 1988 student protesters led a popular uprising against the ruling military junta, leading in the course of several weeks to the downfall of General Ne Win. For the first time since 1962, when the general seized power, the country sensed that democracy might be possible once again. But the military panicked and installed martial law, leading to a crackdown that very likely resulted in far more casualties than China’s notorious and better known Tiananmen Square incident which would take place less than a year later.
The incident in China was immortalized in that famous photograph of the lone protester facing off with a tank. Fragile flesh meets hardened steel; youthful idealism confronts bureaucratic power. How can anyone forget that picture?
But with a government more secretive and repressive than even China’s, there were no similarly indelible images to make it out of the Burma, and the events of 8.8.88 live primarily through stories handed down from those who were there. In retelling the story I hope to keep its memory alive. [Read more on Burmese democracy efforts.]
Fast-forward ten years to October 1998, the end of the monsoon season, and two months after a small band of students had staged a protest in front of Sule Pagoda in downtown Rangoon. The students were no match and the government won this time.
Things were “stable” when we arrived, though an Orwellian smog hung in the air everywhere we went. Soldiers with rifles guarded key locations in Rangoon. Checkpoints with armed guards slowed down travel outside of the capital. (The US State Department still had a travel advisory in place.)
Orwellian sign
Above: One of the many mind-control signs you see around the country. (The Tatmadaw is the ruling junta.) This one is on the grounds of the historic palace in Mandalay–prime tourist habitat. Imagine a sign like this at the entrance to Disneyland…
Our plan was to touch base with family in the Rangoon area for a week, travel for two weeks around what parts of the country the military allowed anyone to visit, and then return for a final week to Rangoon. That last week was time I’d set aside to “do photography” beyond my tourist snapshots. The malaria I contracted in up-state Burma gave me a week of fevered delirium to end my trip instead, so all these photos were snapped during the first part of the trip. Out of a few hundred slides, I’ve scanned a few of botanical interest, a few of my father’s home village, some zoo pictures, plus a few that show some of the textures of how people live under one the most repressive regimes in the world.
The flat tire
To get to my father’s village we drove to the city where the good dirt road ended and the bad dirt road began. There we rented a Jeep to take us as far we could get on road surfaces that were still part-liquid, part-goo from the monsoons that were just concluding. In Burma’s poor economy, even the relatively prosperous who could afford a vehicle couldn’t necessarily afford tires or the bribes necessary to get you in the good graces of the officials who would have access to foreign-made tires in the first place. After we couldn’t go any farther in the Jeep, we hired a bullock cart to take us the last couple of miles to the village.
Village catch basin
One of my father’s friends who also emigrated to the United States from this village sent money back to his relatives. Some of the funds helped the family get by. Some went to build a small pagoda outside the village. And some went to building this catch basin that helps provide the villagers with water through the eight months of the year that see almost no rainfall. This is generally how projects get financed. The government does virtually nothing unless the rulers can derive some kind of benefit from the transaction.
Blooming cotton
A flowering cotton plant in the village. Although I wear a lot of cotton, I’d never thought much about where it came from until I saw this plant. Looking at the flowers you can tell right away that it’s a mallow, first cousin to hollyhocks, okra and hibiscus.
Lily/Weed
Farmers in the village cotton fields, like farmers and gardeners everywhere else, have problems with weeds. Here’s one of their undesirables, an Asiatic lily. (If all my weeds could be so attractive I wouldn’t have any need for “good” plants!)
Bicycle mechanic’s shop
The village bicycle mechanic’s “garage.” The mechanic, like many adults that you encountered, automatically went into this stiff, at-attention pose whenever you’d point a camera at him, maybe something to do with cameras loaded with slow film… My father has the same posing issues, even with a camcorder. (You can imagine how compelling videos of him just standing there are.)
A village party
The last night we were in the village we hired a band and threw a party. Most of the village showed up. Two of the musicians are shown with split-bamboo percussion clappers called wallecotes (however you spell it…).
Village school
Above: After we left the village we passed through another, more prosperous settlement. Here’s a class at their school.
Agitated elephant, Rangoon Zoo
An agitated elephant at the Rangoon zoo. I am not a fan of zoos, and a visit to an old-school zoo like this one shows some of the reasons. The legs of the elephants stay chained to the posts all day long. Even at the thoroughly modern San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park, the elephants were kept chained to their stalls at night until the practice was discontinued in the 1990s in response to a well-publicized and particularly egregious case of neglect.
Caged Rangoon Zoo monkey
Caged monkey at the Rangoon zoo.
Caged leopard, Rangoon Zoo
This leopard and a neighboring lion got to spend their days pacing twelve-foot-square cages of steel and concrete.
Roadside staghorn and orchid
A couple of roadside epiphytic plants: a staghorn fern on the left and on the right an orchid in the vanda/phalaensopsis (Sarcanthinae) subtribe. Between cities, you can park your car and often see exotic plantlife like this.
Here are a couple good sites if you’d like to do a little more reading on the country. The second in particular has some actions that you can do to help bring democracy back to Burma, everything from switching off the Olympics to donating your many billions.
Many years back I planted a rose geranium plant (Pelargonium graveolens) and was close to pulling it out. The leaves had that interesting rosy, grassy rose-geranium scent, true enough, but the plant was sprawling, leggy, and in its underwatered spot looked nice only a couple months a year.
What gave it a reprieve was the recipe in the Chez Panisse Desserts cookbook for rose geranium pound cake, a delicate, subtle cloud of a dessert where even a tiny slice kept you captivated with its hard-to-guess source of flavor. And the little ruffled leaves that you baked into the top of the cake were an awesome decoration.
The kitchen remodel a couple years ago involved a bulldozer in the garden–usually not good news for the plants under its treads. The original rose geranium got squashed and dug up, and its original home is now a slab of concrete in the dining area. (Check out the funny description at Las Pilitas nursery for Penstemon Margarita B.O.P., a really cool plant that suffered a similar fate, though fortunately not until after it had been propagated. I never knew what the “B.O.P.” stood for until I read the note.)
Last weekend I finally bought a replacement. The small plant looked identical to what I’d grown before, but this one had a different species name on the label, G. capitatum ‘Attar of Roses.’ The Dave’s Garden writeup shows bigger, almost ivy-geranium-sized flowers on the plant, and the description puts it at half the size of what I had before. And the scented geranium list at Herbalpedia says there are at least 50 geraniums that have a rose scent.
Based on what I’ve seen from the plant, however, I’m skeptical that my plant is much different from the previous one. I’m not taking chances. It went into the ground where it’ll be screened by a few other herbs.
Here’s the recipe in case you get motivated. Also check out the Herbalpedia list above where you’ll find sixteen other recipes, plus lots more ideas of what to do with scented geraniums.
15–18 small rose geranium leaves
1 1/4 cups unsalted butter, softened
1 1/3 cups sugar
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 teaspoon rose water
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon Cognac
6 eggs
1/8 teaspoon mace
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 2/3 cups unsifted cake flour
Butter and flour a 9-inch springform pan or a 10-inch bundt or tube pan. Rinse and dry the rose geranium leaves and arrange a dozen of the in a ring around the bottom fo the pan, undersides up. Arrange the rest in the center.
Cream the butter until very light and fluffy. Beat in the sugar and continue beating until the mixture is fluffy again. Beat in the vanilla, rose water, and Cognac. Add the eggs one by one, beating to incorporate each one thoroughly before adding the next one. Beat until the mixture is smooth. Mix the mace, salt and cream of tartar into the flour and sift the flour over the butter mixture in four portions, beating just until each one is mixed in. Carefully spoon some of the batter into the pan to anchor the leaves in place. Pour the rest of the batter into the pan and smooth it. Tap the pan on the counter to force out any air bubbles.
Bake in the center of a preheated 325 degree oven for about an hour and a quarter, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool. Turn out of the pan and optionally dust lightly with powdered sugar that’s been stored with a vanilla bean. (I like it just fine without this step.)
