I'm not a gardener, though I wouldn't be ashamed of it if I was. My interest in gardening comes from my desire to reproduce the romantic Black Forest that you see in classic kids book illustrations: the mysterious and menacing home of witches, raptors and things that dwell in the shadows. I like flowers but only as a counterpoint to set off the forest. They shouldn't look too civilized or fussed over. But I'm an appreciator of this sort of thing, not a participant. I'm always looking for the quick fix that'll provide the most stimulation for the least amount of work. Certainly an aromatic garden fits that description. Some of the most fragrant plants are little more than weeds, and require almost no care once they get started. Lots of people have small herb gardens outside the kitchen door. They're easy to grow, smell great, and taste great...what's not to like?
Here's a book I just got from the library: "Crockett's Victory Garden," one of the bibles of backyard gardening. I don't see much about herbs in there, but the book has an interesting structure. It's all about what you should do every month of the year to grow your own vegetable and flower garden. Crockett's not really interested in flowers but he figures that if you're going to go to all that trouble to grow vegetables, then you might as well throw in some flowers too.
According to Crockett it's already too late to get a lot of flowers and vegetables started. You start summer gardens in the late winter and early spring. Maybe you could start strawberries this late, but you'd better do it right away. According to Crockett you might get some fruit buds in just over a month, say in June, but you should resist the temptation to let them grow. Keep cutting off the buds until August and that'll force the plant to slow down and send out tendrils to make new plants. If you do this you should have batch of big, pluckable strawberries by the fall.
May is also a good time to plant pole beans. You should grow these even if you don't like beans because the tendrils are beautiful. Books about weird geometric shapes in nature always include bean plants. I had some pole beans growing under my bedroom window and it was a treat to see the constantly-changing shapes they would take as they snaked up the screen.
I wish more people would plant shrub bushes (above) and ivy around their houses. They grow easily from cuttings, and require no effort to raise. You just have to cut them.
May is a good time to buy or plant geraniums. these are truly the lazy man's flower. They look great and only require light watering every other day in the summer. They bloom most of the year in warm climates like LA but the stems look gnarly after the first year. That's OK, just plant new ones from cuttings. Just put the cutting in a jar of water and it'll sprout roots.
Here's (above) a small Japanese garden that I found when looking for the other pictures. *Sigh*
BTW, the two paintings of plants in the middle of the post are by Christiana Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick's wife. I particularly like the one with tiny little bean and cucumber sprouts. Sprouts are a sheer joy to watch. You see the miracle of new life unfolding in front of your eyes. You find yourself asking, "Are these delicate, fuzzy little things really alive? How can that be? They're so different than I am." This time of year everybody should have sprouts growing out of old orange juice cans on their windowsills. That way you can witness the miraculous and profound while you scrub pots.
Here's a book I just got from the library: "Crockett's Victory Garden," one of the bibles of backyard gardening. I don't see much about herbs in there, but the book has an interesting structure. It's all about what you should do every month of the year to grow your own vegetable and flower garden. Crockett's not really interested in flowers but he figures that if you're going to go to all that trouble to grow vegetables, then you might as well throw in some flowers too.
According to Crockett it's already too late to get a lot of flowers and vegetables started. You start summer gardens in the late winter and early spring. Maybe you could start strawberries this late, but you'd better do it right away. According to Crockett you might get some fruit buds in just over a month, say in June, but you should resist the temptation to let them grow. Keep cutting off the buds until August and that'll force the plant to slow down and send out tendrils to make new plants. If you do this you should have batch of big, pluckable strawberries by the fall.
May is also a good time to plant pole beans. You should grow these even if you don't like beans because the tendrils are beautiful. Books about weird geometric shapes in nature always include bean plants. I had some pole beans growing under my bedroom window and it was a treat to see the constantly-changing shapes they would take as they snaked up the screen.
I wish more people would plant shrub bushes (above) and ivy around their houses. They grow easily from cuttings, and require no effort to raise. You just have to cut them.
May is a good time to buy or plant geraniums. these are truly the lazy man's flower. They look great and only require light watering every other day in the summer. They bloom most of the year in warm climates like LA but the stems look gnarly after the first year. That's OK, just plant new ones from cuttings. Just put the cutting in a jar of water and it'll sprout roots.
Here's (above) a small Japanese garden that I found when looking for the other pictures. *Sigh*BTW, the two paintings of plants in the middle of the post are by Christiana Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick's wife. I particularly like the one with tiny little bean and cucumber sprouts. Sprouts are a sheer joy to watch. You see the miracle of new life unfolding in front of your eyes. You find yourself asking, "Are these delicate, fuzzy little things really alive? How can that be? They're so different than I am." This time of year everybody should have sprouts growing out of old orange juice cans on their windowsills. That way you can witness the miraculous and profound while you scrub pots.
20 comments:
I should have posted on MySpace page some shots of my garden/yard that had been taken over by all the vegetation before I started hacking away at it. The parsley, oregano and thyme has made the backyard very fragrant - never try growing arugula - the damn thing literally tries to take over the neighborhood, and I can't abide the overpowering stench it makes - the strawberries are growing wild all over, not terribly big, but will eventually ripen all sweet and tangy. There's these sweet yellow bite-size "bulb"-shaped tomatoes that grow until December here in Dallas, and our watermelons pop up unannounced three years running, from late August thru early November, very sweet but must be rotated constantly or will go bad from the side that is laying on the ground.
I love how whenever John K makes disparaging comments about Anime, Comic books, etc. a bunch of idiot fanboys crawl out of the woodwork to try to "debate" him, blah blah blah but with all disrespect if you were to look at mr. blahs work you would realize that this medium is capable of blah blah blah
re:anonymous, I like it, theres nothing funnier than "nerd outrage"
I hate my generation for the most part, all they care about is retro nostalgia for crappy 80's sitcoms and animated series and nintendo games.
Enough with the whole snarky meta pomo irony thing already,
This excerpt from David Foster Wallace sums it up better than I ever could
So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites.
( . . .)
And make not mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I'm saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.
( . . . )
The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, ananchronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal." To risk accusation of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law."
Anon: Wow! Well said! What are you quoting from? Some of those remarks about irony are close to my own thinking on the subject.
I can't stand irony. Irony is like cool...both are great when somebody with a talent for them does it, but it doesn't suit the average person. For most people simple sincerity is the way to go.
Last: Boy, I want a fragrant garden. I think I'll try planting some spices.
Its from a David Foster Wallace essay, I actually found it by typing "irony sucks" into google, Im not too familiar with his work though
I love gardening, although I'm not very good at it. I wouldn't guess in a million years that you'd care about it as a concrete activity. Huh!
I too used to love watching the old Crockett's Victory Garden show-I knew zip about gardening(back then (what teenager cares about that? Especially one living on NYC or Philly?) but the show was still so wonderfuly comforting and relaxing to have on-and it made me interested in gardens and plants. I remember one year they had a months-long contest where they visited a dozen different backyard home gardens all over the US for the viewers to vote on which was the best. Paradise for a nosy character like myself--so many wonderful, imaginative gardens.
Nowadays I love to putter when I get the time-and I love fragrant plants more than anything else. There's a really good source for cheap mail order fragrant plants online, Logees. They have not one or two but dozens of varieties of jasmines, for example-what youi buy are mostly tiny cuttings.
Everything you write about geraniums is true(was that all gleaned from Crockett?). And there are a whole slew of geraniums available that have been bred to have truly fantastic scents: mint, chocolate(really!), curry,lemon, rose(this one smells really great)...and lots of others. Those are hard to find unless you do get the mail order baby plants but it's worth it.
For your and everyone's delictation, here are some of my favorite scented plants: Madagascar jasmine(a vine-it needs to be trained with stakes or a trellis), plumeria(one of the most populat lei flowers, a tropical, mostly indoor plant), 'mock orange'--a shrub that can also be a tree, and in spring when it first turns warm right through summer has the most incredible scent imaginable from clusters of while flowers, and of course the humble alyssum, the little carpeted cover that smells like honey. Not forgetting the other foolproof plants. lavender and rosemary.
Jenny: Thanks a million for the recommendations! I wrote all the names down!
You're right about fragrant gardens and fragrant plants are often easy to take care of. I don't see why more people don't plant them. For a little effort there's such a big reward.
Anon: I wasn't familiar with D. F. Wallace till you mentioned him. I watched a Charlie Rose interview with him and it was interesting, but I still couldn't get a sense of whether he could write or not. I'll check him out at Borders.
Dear Sir,
I hate to be late to the party, but I just remembered a wonderful song composed, arraigned, and orchestrated by Morricone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKSuG1LOaYI
Mr. Morricone certainly had a long and interesting carrier.
I wonder what Porter Wagoner's work would've been like had he taken to using irony? It just might have changed the world.
I want to thank you for the tip on the strawberries. I'm going to do just that, pick the blossoms to the plant will get stronger. Right now, the plants are giving strawberries, but few and far between.
I've also heard that you can organically kill your slugs and snails by putting down a dish of beer! The snails love it, get drunk, and then die. I wonder if I should use imported or domestic beer?
Domestic. Don't waste the good stuff on the snails.
- trevor.
"it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage."
Man, that's poetry.
The irony of ironies would be seeing that on a T-shirt.
- trevor.
Boo: Haw! Did you get it wrong!
I'm not a gardener, though I wouldn't be ashamed of it if I was. My interest isn't in flowers but rather in art directed black forest scenarios. I like the romantic forest which is full of witches and raptors and menacing shadows.
I can't think of a more rewarding hobby than gardening in Socal. There's always something in bloom.
One other fragrant vine that thrives on neglect is stephanotis. I have one that has climbed 20 feet up a wall out of a 3-gallon pot. They bloom in clusters of waxy, white trumpets that smell like orange blossoms.
****
Irony needs to be insightful, passionately perverse or at least funny.
Your typical knee-jerk ironist strikes a pose of knowingness, but it's not "hip" in the "knowing" sense. It's only 'tude.
I blame TV. First, they made earnestness repellent, then a new, cool generation of execs took over & covered the same vacuous drivel with a brittle patina of cool. One reason literary folks like Wallace hate it is that irony is a lot easier to do on TV than in text. Ever notice that, in the blogosphere, no one can hear you being sarcastic?
Pappy d--stephanotis *is* madagascar jasmine(not officially speaking a 'true' jasmine, but oh well)! So there's two votes, Eddie!
David Lee Roth = irony
Sammy Hagar = sincerity
I wonder what Porter Wagoner's work would've been like had he taken to using irony? It just might have changed the world.
Maybe he was being ironic and nobody knew it. ;)
Thanks, Jenny.
I love Logee's too. They have the weirdest stuff.
I agree with you that Crockett's Victory Garden is a nice book - the month by month coverage of garden activities is what I particularly enjoyed about it. You noted the rare coverage - in this volume - of flower topics. For that, you should look for "Crockett's Flower Garden" and "Crockett's Indoor Garden". There is also more coverage of herbs in the Time/Life book which James Underwood Crockett was the writer of.
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