Not long ago one of John’s friends, a florist, stopped by the house for a visit. She brought with her a single long-stemmed red rose in a tall vase. When I came home there was the flower, huge, red, perfect and scentless, sitting on the counter.
As you might guess from my title, there’s a good chance I might have an uncomfortable relationship with flowers from a florist. If you go to someone’s house and want to give them something special, do you stop by the grocery and pick up a pound of tomatoes as a host or hostess gift? Of course not. You’d pick some from your garden and share something special, something seasonal, something that gives of yourself and your garden. For me a store tomato has always shared something with a florist’s rose. What you hold in your hands might be cosmetically stunning, but it leaves me with a question…what is this thing, anyway? Is it botanical? Or maybe some industrial product?
It just so happened that a couple nights before I’d finished reading Amy Stewart’s 2007 book, Flower Confidential. If you don’t know her as an author of books, you might know her as the woman behind the blog, Dirt. And if you don’t know the book, it’s basically a look inside the cut-flower industry and reveals it to be just that: an industry. The three big sections of the book, “Breeding,” “Growing” and “Selling” may well explode any warm and fuzzies you might have about the florist trade, and show it to be possibly worse for the environment, workers and public health than the part of big agribusiness dedicated to food crops.
Here are just a few snippets:
[U]nlike imported fruits and vegetables, flowers are not tested for illegal pesticide residue. After all, they’re not going to be eaten. That creates a situation in which growers have an incentive to use the maximum amount of pesticides to eliminate the possibility of a single gnat turning up in a box.
The complaints about labor and environmental problems have been part of the flower industry’s legacy for as long as it has been in Latin America. Although the situation has been thoroughly reported by investigative journalists, it doesn’t appear to have changed American’s buying habits. Every year, a greater share of flowers sold in the United States come from Latin America. Over the last decade, sales of domestically grown roses have dropped from almost 500 million to just under 100 million. Meanwhile, imports of cut roses have increased to over 1.3 billion stems a year.
At the grocery store, I can buy organic wine, fair-trade chocolate, and hormone-free milk from a local creamery. But the flowers in buckets by the cash register are unlabeled, unmarked, entirely undifferentiated. There’s no basis on which to compare and choose, except for price… The anonymity of cut flowers has made it impossible for customers to demand anything different.
There’s a lot more to the book than rants against the trade, and it’s a worthwhile read if you’d like to know more about what you find at the store.
Several days after the perfect florist’s rose finally passed on to the next plane in the way that florist’s roses do—without opening up, without showing the stamens and pistils that are a flower’s very reason for existing—Linda showed up at the house with a bouquet of roses from her garden. Even before I saw them I knew there were roses in her hands. There was a breeze coming in the front door, and there was scent of roses coloring the air.
Over the next days the roses proceeded to do what roses do. They opened. They continued to release their scents. And in a couple more days they’ll start to drop their petals and fade. They participate in a natural process in a way that their more primped runner-up in a beauty pageant relative does not, and I appreciate them for that.
June 30 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: books • cut flowers | 4 Comments »
Olivier and Clara Filippi have been gardening in the south of France for well over a quarter century. Theirs is a mediterranean climate, and their nursery, Pépinière Filippi, located near Montpellier, specializes in plants adapted to the dry-summer/wet-winter cycles that you find in only five large regions on earth: the Mediterranean zone, proper; South Africa; the southwest corner of Australia; Chile; and much of California.
When I picked up Olivier Filippi’s recent The Dry Gardening Handbook: Plants and Practices for a Changing Climate, I was expecting it to be a different sort of book than it is, maybe something about general drought-tolerant plants, or a volume dedicated to helping your garden adapt to using less water. What this is, however, is a straight book on mediterranean gardening and plants suited to mediterranean climates—something that probably shouldn’t come as a surprise since that’s the focus of the author’s nursery.
There’s a brief introduction to what constitutes a mediterranean climate, followed by notes on the strategies plants use to survive and thrive in it. Good advice on planning, planting, establishing and watering a new mediterranean garden comes next. Then Filippi gives us the heart of the book, a listing of over 400 mediterranean-adapted species, containing common and scientific names, approximate mature plant sizes, and notes on cultivation and propagation. (If you can begin to read French, you can check out the online catalog at the author’s nursery, which closely mirrors the list of plants recommended in the book. There you’ll also find some of the advice that’s offered in the book, although without the nice photos in the book.)
Olivier Filippi gardens in France, and the plant list definitely Eurocentric: lots of different lavenders, cistus, phlomis, for example, with relatively few plants from other the other great mediterranean regions. In fact, many of the non-Mediterranean mediterranean-friendly plants listed are drought tolerant selections from several non-mediterranean climates. For gardeners in dry climates that don’t undergo mediterranean cycles, these suggestions might be some of the best options to try. But those plants might not the be greatest of discoveries: Photinia, heavenly bamboo (Nandina domestica), red-hot poker (Kniphofia sarmentosa) and American gaura (Gaura lindheimeri), for instance, are probably already common offerings in many American nurseries.
One of the book’s most outstanding features is the use of a “drought resistance code” that assigns a number from one to six to each of the species in its plant list. Based on work by plant geographer Henri Gaussen, the number quantifies the number of months of the year a plant can be expected to survive under drought stress. The book also contains instructions on how to calculate the climatic profile of where you live. (I figured out that my coastal San Diego location exerts a 3.5 to 4 drought stress factor. (Edit May 20: I oopsed on my figuring for coastal San Diego. My revised number is a much dryer drought stress factor of 6.)) All that’s a really useful way to understand drought.
When you see plants sold in nurseries and catalogs as drought-tolerant, the description can be meaningless. A variety that would go fine for two weeks without water could turn into seasoned kindling if subjected to six or seven months of continued drying. Realizing that a “drought-tolerant” chamomile plant has a drought resistance code of 2 would begin to tell you that it wouldn’t thrive in the same conditions that would suit California’s more “drought-proof” Romneya coulteri, which has a drought resistance code of 6. Having that information could help you plan companion plantings, as well as help you avoid plants altogether that would only lead to expensive mistakes.
Coming at plantings from a mediterranean focus leads the author to say some choice things about lawns:
You don’t have to be a visionary to see that the traditional lawn is an absurdity in mediterranean climates. If you nurture a deeply rooted feeling that you can’t be happy without a vast, lush lawn, then perhaps you ought to consider going to live in Cornwall… People often imagine that they need a huge expanse of lawn, but all too often the only person who walks over a traditional lawn in its entirety is the unfortunate individual who has to mow it every Sunday.
The author’s solution? Landscaping that pays attention to where you live. For those of you in mediterranean climates, this book can help you develop a deeper understanding of what’s unique about your environment. It can help you come up with good plant choices compatible with what your location offers. Along the way, it could help you save water, reduce pesticide use and maybe even free up some of those Sundays you spend mowing the lawn.
May 16 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: books • drought-tolerant landscaping • Mediterranean climate • Olivier Filippi | 7 Comments »
Here are a few more selections that you might find interesting from American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land, by Peter Coates, published in 2006.
Before Columbus brought seeds and cuttings along on his second voyage to the West Indies, North America was home to less than 1 percent of the world’s total complement of cereals, starches, fruits, and vegetables.
Today, the only crops of significant commercial value native to the territory that became the United States are cranberry, blueberry, pecan nut, sugar maple, sunflower, and tobacco—a fact that offers eloquent testimony to the great service that has been duly rendered by a sting of public-spirited Americans…
No American public servant since [Thomas] Jefferson deserves more credit for transforming the foreign into the common than David G. Fairchild. In his capacity as agricultural explorer in charge at the Section for Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction from 1898 until 1928, Fairchild brought the navel orange to Florida and California from Brazil and oversaw the introduction of Italy’s seedless grape and China’s dry land pistachio. His most notable contributions, however, were in the introduction of the Chinese soybean and…the tree that became an essential prop of Washington, D.C.’s monumental landscape, adorning the Tidal Basin: the Japanese flowering cherry tree.
Fairchild’s encounters with the infamous vine that “ate the South”…left him somewhat chastened. He first came across kudzu about 1900 while touring Japan, where this wild, semiwoody perennial was fed to livestock. In his autobiography he recalled a visit to a “kudzu enthusiast” in Chipley, Florida, who was renowned for singing its praises as a forage crop in the early 1900s, despite his neighbors’ distrust. “Whenever I think of that night’s talk with the kudzu pioneer,” recalled Fairchild, “I have a special feeling of pride in what might be called our American willingness to try something new, whether it be a new forage crop, a new food, or any one of a thousand new, machine-made gadgets.” Fairchild, who confessed that “perhaps I have an undue passion for the new,” retained his faith in kudzu for quite some time, despite its proclivity to spread at will. By the late 1930s, however he was expressing his growing reservations in print. The seeds he brought back from Japan and planted on his property in Florida “‘took’ with a vengeance, smothering everything they got onto, and pretty soon we became alarmed. Feeling that the kudzu was too much for us, we began to cut it out.”
Fairchild finally returned home, so to speak, in 1946, when invited to make his selection for the “My Favorite Tree” guest column in the journal of the American Forestry Association (the nation’s oldest conservation organization, founded in 1875). After mentioning a string of exotic also-rans, but discarding them as unsatisfactory, he recalled that he had seen his first grove of California coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) fairly late in life, at a time when he was still besotted with exotic Asiatic promise: “A feeling of utter paralysis overtook me and the passion for planting trees, my puny little trees, anywhere, became distasteful.”
The stories in the book are great, and the social commentary is compelling. Unfortunately, every now and then a botanical clinker drops into the book’s pages, such as the one that follows the quote on redwoods immediately above, where the author waxes, “Though the redwood is only really found in California (there is a tiny patch in the most southwesterly corner of Oregon), it is arguably more American than any other tree in the United States insofar as it has no relatives, near or distant, in any other country.” Like, um, what about the Chinese dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides)?
Okay, this isn’t a book you read for the botany, but it’s a worthy and thoughtful work on plants and the human condition, perfect for late winter reading as you contemplate the impending blooming of your cherry trees.
Although it’s primarily about biological immigrants to North America, Peter Coates points occasionally out that the immigrant-carrying boats sailed both directions:
The native oaks of Britain and the United States were greatly admired by J.C. Loudon, a leading British horticulturist of the mid-nineteenth century. He pronounced them “the most beautiful of trees.” Yet exotic trees had already become a mandatory ingredient of the “polite” British landscape enclosed within private estates. Loudon himself was one of the trendsetters who insisted that, notwithstanding the oak’s charms, “no residence in the modern style can have a claim to be considered as laid out in good taste, in which all the trees and shrubs employed are not either foreign ones, or improved varieties of indigenous ones.
The most sought-after of these arboreal exotics were hardy North Americans. Britons were ruthlessly condescending toward American artistic achievements at this time. “In the four quarters of the globe,” Sydney Smith famously inquired [in 1820], “who reads an American book?” or goes to an American play” or looks at an American picture or statue?” Yet no one asked “who plants an American tree?”
February 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • quotes | Tags: Add new tag • agriculture • books • David G. Fairchild • exotics • invasive plants • kudzu • native plants • Peter Coates • trees | 3 Comments »
Linda brought by my desk the 2009 Spring catalog of the Princeton Architectural Press. She really like the photo on the cover, a planting by Andrea Cochran, a San Francisco-based landscape architect and the subject of a new book, Andrea Chochran: Landscapes, which is just about to be published. (The project shown is the Ivy Street Roof Terrace Hayes Valley Roof Garden in San Francisco.)
You may recall that Linda is a quilter, and the cover design really looks quilt-like in the way it’s put together: blocks of different plantings (not just blocks of single kinds of plants), all assembled together so that one grouping of plants contrasts dramatically against another, like one patterned fabric in a quilt that’s been set against another. In fact the author of of the book describes Cochan’s work as “studies in repetition and order, orchestrations of movement in the landscape, and elements placed in geometric conversation”—which almost sounds like the principles operating behind many quilts.
Check out Andrea Cochran’s website for other examples of her strong, linear landscape designs.
Thumbing through the catalog I ran across another title that made me stop for a closer look, Bamboo Fences, by Isao Yoshikawa and Osamu Suzuki. The catalog says that the book “provides a detailed look at the complex art of bamboo fence design in Japan, presenting these unique structures in over 250 photographs and line drawings. From the widely used ‘four-eyed fence’ (yotsume-gaki) and the fine ‘raincoat fence’ (mino-gaki) to the expensive ‘spicebush fence’ (kuromoji-gaki), these exquisite designs impress with their simple beauty, providing plenty of inspiration for your own bamboo fence.
“Author Isao Yoshikawa gives a brief overview of the history of bamboo fence building in Japan and classifies the different designs by type. A glossary provides explanation of Japanese fence names and structural terms.”
Of course, fences like this probably wouldn’t work so well if your house is in the Tudor or Spanish taste. Unless of course you want your home to develop a “home store Gothic” look that one writer called the look that suburban houses accrue over time as their owners buy whatever strikes their fancy at the local Home Depot, historical accuracy and style be damned.
But imagine these around a clean-lined modern house. In fact, Richard Neutra was known to like his glass-walled homes to look out on a Japanese-styled landscape. And some of the more geometric versions might even look amazing behind a landscape designed the the subject of the first book….
Above: Images from the book, photographed by Osamu Suzuki.
January 28 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: Andrea Cochran • bamboo • books • fences • hardscape • Princeton Architectural Press | 5 Comments »
Okay, Santa, in case you’re reading this: You know that I love books. And with the publishing industry being so battered by new media like, gulp, blogging (mea culpa), what better way to support the art form of cool, interesting books?
Garden picture books are always appreciated, as are books that are a little more thoughtful about gardening and nature and culture. New books from the local bookstore are great, but used ones from a local bookstore or a site like abebooks.com work just as well. In fact, that’s where you can find some great out of print books you’ll never encounter anywhere else. And what better way to participate in recycling?
Here are some titles that would make me extra-happy, and I’d guess that many like-minded gardeners out there would find them interesting as well. Some are from the past year, some from further back.
- Niwaki: Pruning, Training and Shaping Japanese Garden Trees by Jake Hobson
Books with functional instructions for how to prune are useful, but this book gives you ideas on how to move from the functional to the sensitive, graceful and artistic. This is pruning with nature instead of against it. I don’t have a Japanese garden, but I can always learn lessons from its traditions.
Although I love the works of the Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, one of the gods of the “new perennials” gardening movement, I realized that I didn’t have any of his books. The titles that look the most interesting:
And some selections that are more from the art side of things:
- Los Angeles Trees : Paintings, Drawings, Filmstills by Lucas Reiner
I haven’t had a chance to flip through this book, but the recent LA Times writeup looked enticing. “The trees exude patience and humor, casting sneaky, leafy shadows across the graffiti and cacophonous signage of L.A… [Reiner] began to draw and paint individual trees, most of them not California natives. He saw their strange shapes as ‘the result of their interaction with the needs of civilization.’”
If price is no object, there’s always the classic (and now ridiculously pricey):
- A Few Palm Trees by Ed Ruscha
The title pretty much says it. Ruscha’s book has black and white photos of various palm trees in the Hollywood area, along with the street addresses where he found them. The photos aren’t particularly “good” in any traditional artistic sense. It’s just a stupid little artist’s book with pictures of a few palm trees—pretty much the antithesis of the preceding effort, just a cool little slacker of a book. It’s weirdly compelling.
And keeping with the one-plant theme:
- Saguaros photographs by Mark Klett, text by Gregory McNamee
Mark Klett is one of my favorite photographers working today. Few people capture the edges of civilization and nature better than he. In this book Klett collects together images of saguaros he’s take over the years. No two plants of any species are exactly the same, and with saguaros it’s even more true. These are plants with character, photographed with soul.
And then I might add some general items, not strictly book- or gardening-related, but products that are made of things from the earth:
- Artisanal cheeses, anything from stinky to refined!
- Craft beers, ales especially, the hoppier the better
And you thought I was hard to shop for!
December 09 2008 | Categories: art • gardening • photography | Tags: books • presents | 1 Comment »
