Herb of Grace

Last month I read Henry Beston's small book on Herbs and the Earth. It was charming, old fashioned, and he wrote about nature and the garden in beautiful, poetic images.

We got discussing it at my garden group and when I mentioned that one of the herbs he rhapsodizes about, Common Rue, is a plant I'd never even seen, the whole group was amazed. Every one of them told me it's a plant I should have in my garden.

It's ancient; the Romans knew it and grew it. Medieval herbalists did too, and sprigs were sprinkled on people in Catholic masses, giving Rue the beautiful name "herb of grace".  In Shakespearean plays characters plant banks of Rue for weeping queens. Modern gardeners love it for its curious blue foliage and low bushy habit.

So . . .  definitely.

I trust the gardeners in my group, all of them far more experienced than I am, and all of them in love with this plant. I immediately went home and looked online for sources where I could buy Ruta graveolens to plant in my garden next spring.

Yikes. Really?

The foliage is interesting, ferny and dissected. Okay. The flowers are small and yellow. Right. The habit in most images I found made it look a little weedy. Um, fine.

I really value the opinions of the gardeners in my group, and the writings of a famous naturalist like Henry Beston as well, not to mention Shakespeare and the ancients who adored this herb. I must be missing something.

So I researched Common Rue some more.

Eek.

Everyone in the group mentioned that handling the foliage gives some (but not all) people a skin rash, and the online sources all warned "wear gloves". The rash, if you are one of the unfortunates who gets it, is awful and lasts a long time. Sunlight triggers it after touching the leaves.

Rue is also toxic if ingested. Although Mediterranean cultures have used small quantities of the leaves in cooking for centuries, it is actually highly toxic if you ingest more than a little. Another set of warnings from my research: do not eat or taste the leaves.

But I really want to have this beloved herb despite it being weedy looking, rash-causing, and poisonous. I really think I do.

So I did more research and found it is advised to plant Rue where you have problems with animals in the garden because it stinks. The smell of the plant is described as unpleasant to humans, and repellant to cats.

It may be repellant to bugs too. Rue is often planted in front of roses to keep insect pests away.

Now I am giving up.

Common Rue stinks, causes horrible rashes, is toxic, and I can't find a picture that even comes close to Henry Beston's description of a plant "like nothing else in the garden, for it is a dark and somber tone of blue green lightened with a silvering of gray. Mysterious in color and strange of leaf, potent, ancient, and dark, Rue is the herb of magic, the symbol of the earthly unknown . . . " (he goes on).

But it is the recommendations of my garden friends that I struggle with most. All six of them said this is a stunning, fascinating, easy plant for the front of a sunny border or along a walk and it is absolutely something I would love.

And because I so treasure this group and their botanical experience and their consistently good advice, I am going to buy Ruta graveolens, maybe one plant of it, and try it to see what is so beloved about this herb.

If I get a rash though, or get sick to my stomach, or find the thing is too smelly or too weedy . . . . herb of grace or no, friends or not, there will be unholy retribution.

Big Plastic Bag

I get annoyed when trash and papers get snagged in the woods behind our house. A busy road runs behind us at the top of a short hill, and I am forever cleaning up stuff that gets caught in the branches of the roadside trees.

That white plastic bag stuck in the trees in the center of this photo was particularly irksome. It was caught midway up, very noticeable in the barren winter scene, and it was a cold day to go out there and detangle it.

When the bag fluttered in the chilly breeze, it looked odd. Then I realized it was not trash at all, but a big red tailed hawk checking out the back yard.

My photo is terrible. How I wish I had a camera and the quick moves to capture this scene without scaring the hunter off. This hawk was huge, which means it was probably a female. The female Buteo jamaicensis is a third larger than the male, which is typical for hawks in general.

Here's a better, professional photo of a red tailed hawk, found on the internet via Jerry Liguori:

I couldn't get over how big the hawk looked out in our back yard. I think she had fluffed out her feathers in the deep cold, making her look even bigger.

Red tailed hawks are common here and are the best defense against vole populations. The hunting is excellent in our yard. We see more red tailed hawks in winter when northern birds join the resident birds here. In summer we hear the high wild screech of red tails overhead often. It's the sound movies use for raptor calls -- when you hear an eagle on TV, it's usually a red tailed hawk you're hearing.

These hawks normally hunt by soaring overhead in wide circles, and then attacking in a controlled dive with legs outstretched. I didn't expect this hawk to make any catches from her perch in the tree, and when she flew away her wide wing span and sheer size in the air was quite a sight.

That was no roadside plastic bag out there.

I Was Afraid of This

I was sitting at the table having lunch the day after a sleety storm. Boom. Thud. Shudder.

It was the sound of a dull explosion a few blocks away. Again. Another deep boom. It happened several more times and I looked outside, a little alarmed, to see if tanks or military vehicles were passing by lobbing explosives.

This is what I saw.

Chunks of ice had slid off the roof and littered the front walk. I was afraid this would happen.

Our solar panels are on the front of the house, directly over the front door. A thin coating of ice and sleet barely covers the lawn, but adheres in a solid coating to the panels. When it warms just enough, the coating slips off.

The reason the panels are on the front of the house is that the house has a full southern exposure, and gets unobstructed sunshine full on. But it's oddly just angled away a fraction, and the slope is just shallow enough that ice and snow stay up there and don't melt, even when all over town similar solar installations are clear the day after a snowstorm.

After this minimal bit of ice from a minor storm, everyone's panels were clear but ours. The incredible deep booming sound came from ice slipping off those six lowest panels. If the rest loosen there will be more thudding booms. It's hard to believe what a thunderous sound the falling ice makes.

The worst of it is that the icy debris lands on the front walk and needs to be cleared. Ugh. A shovel won't do, it has to be scraped up.

And the very worst of it is that my benighted weeping Japanese maple is right under the front eaves. It got clobbered. At least the dense Alberta spruce in the corner is tucked away out of the path of destruction. Icy landslides would certainly maim that stiff little tree.

Twigs of the Japanese maple, with lacy leaves still attached, were simply sheared off and littered the ground.

It will be interesting to see how the tree looks next spring after this kind of pruning approach. I can live with twigs being shorn -- it's an overly twiggy, branchy tree anyway. But I don't want icefalls to break the trunk in half or lop off whole branches, and it's in serious danger of that happening.

I was afraid of this from the beginning. I knew putting solar panels smack over the front door was not ideal. But it never happened all last winter. We had so much snow last year, but never had ice chunks fall off.

This year we're getting ice slides, at least on this one occasion. The shuddering booms are startling. The debris is troublesome to clean up and tree damage is worrisome. Not to mention the possibility of injuring the UPS guy when he comes up the walk.

And, most annoying of all, I knew this could happen.

An Outdoor Sink

The weird warm weather is gone and today it is very cold and sleeting. Less pleasant but more seasonal. Everything is coated in a thin layer of white finally.

I am indoors, thinking about things I need outdoors. This is what I need:

Found on Root Simple

The potting bench I have is sturdy and big, and I have a hose hanging next to it, but without a place for the water to drain, potting activities are limited. Small pots can be put up, but anything involving washing off the rootball or cleaning out used containers or rinsing tools has to be done out in the garden, usually on my hands and knees.

My bench on the patio -- there's a hose for watering but nowhere for washwater to drain.

My big potting bench could be so much more useful if I could find a sink like this, assemble it in the bench top and put a big bucket below.

Found on Hometalk

Even this simple set up would work -- either on the patio with a 5 gallon bucket under it, or out in the garden itself, freely draining into the dirt.

Found on Earthfinds

These set ups require salvaging an old sink. The stories accompanying the pictures talk about using one found in the house they were renovating, or scoring one of these old enamel farm sinks discarded by the side of the road, just waiting to be hauled home. Right.

Found on faded charm cottage

A couple years ago I did see an old farm sink at an antique store in Vermont and knew it would fit my plans exactly. Perfect! The price was over $1,200 dollars, though, so that didn't happen.

Where do you find old sinks by the side of the road?

An Uncommon Christmas

Christmas day was unusual here. Too warm.

It was record setting, in the 60s, and warmer than in L.A. where we had just spent the prior weekend having an early Christmas with Tom and Greg and Zaneta.

I gardened on Christmas day. In shirtsleeves, without a jacket.

Well, I mostly just puttered, putting away new garden tools and gloves that Santa brought, and potting up a little holly plant.

Christmas day was also disrupted here.

We were supposed to have dinner at my sister's but she decided at the last minute to spend the holiday in the hospital, giving all of us a terrible scare and a lot of worry.

She is okay, but while our dinner was disrupted, her holiday was a disaster. Thank god for the nurses and doctors and everyone else who works Christmas shifts to help others.

Today we'll go to Massachusetts to celebrate with Hope and Steve and it is another unusually warm winter day. What is going on? All over the east coast the temperatures are bizarrely spring-like.

It's been way too warm for many days, and the winter weeds (popweed, creeping charlie, etc.) are greening up and spreading. The early irises and the daffodils and alliums are all peeking up out of the soil. The snowdrops went by and have wilted.

'Dawn' viburnum, which has never flowered much in past springs, has pink buds opening all over it and is threatening to burst into full bloom before New Year's Eve.

The lawns are all green, the Christmas wreaths are brown, and the whole season is out of kilter. I've never seen the holiday greenery go by so fast. The wreaths are dried out and have to come down already.

Under the windows on the front of the house, below the desiccated wreaths, the pink blooming heath is in full flower.

The holiday has been uncommonly strange this year. But despite the odd weather, brown wreaths, untimely health problems and missed dinners, there was one event that put Christmas day into perfect balance: I am going to have a new daughter in law. An engagement ring under the tree, a happy phone call, and excitement all around!

December Music

Here is some music for today:  Thinking Out Loud

There is more music here:  More. . . .

I wish peace on earth, music, and m&ms to all!

The Dim Corners

It's the darkest time of the year and I crave light. Indoors, where I spend the short days now.

It used to be so easy (so much was, sigh). You bought 40, 60, 75 or 100 watt incandescent bulbs. 90% of what they produced was heat, and 10% gave off light. When they blew, and they blew often, you put another one in.

The wattage was printed right on the top of the bulb. Easy, although 3-ways only worked in certain lamps, and exceeding the wattage for the lamp you had was hard to determine. But still, who even thought about lightbulbs?

Now it's a science project.

Here's what I mean:

When we had solar panels installed the state required an energy audit before they would let us take the hefty state rebate for solar installation. The audit involved two men roaming our house for two hours, looking for insulation air leaks and power inefficiencies. The really cool thing was that these two guys replaced every single one of the light bulbs in 29 lamps and fixtures throughout the house.

They did the tiresome work of unscrewing and replacing every light bulb, put in CFL bulbs, and even left us about 20 extras. All for free -- and those bulbs are not cheap!

So we are upgraded and lit. But now, the desk lamp broke and I need a new one, and as I move furniture around and am trying to light spaces in my house that weren't well lit before, I am at a loss on lightbulbs.

It's not easy to figure out what wattage is currently in the lamps I have, or what wattage I need for the new lighting I want. Some of the new CFL bulbs have a watts number printed on the base in tiny print, but it's hard to find and many do not even have that.

New lightbulbs are not sold by watts. Watts measure power. New lightbulbs measure light output, or lumens, not power, since the whole idea is that they drastically reduce the power needed. You rarely have to worry about exceeding the wattage rating for the old lamp you've had since college -- it doesn't matter any more with CFLs or LEDs.

Some new bulbs do give an equivalent (such as: 13 watt CFL = 60 watt incandescent) but that's way off, I learned.  It's not really equivalent, it's more like a range, or maybe like a suggestion. CFL bulbs are variable in the power they use compared to the power (watts) the old bulbs used. The pertinent info is lumens.

Okay. Here's some homework. Study, discuss, and get back to me.

I had to learn these conversions, and I did. Even so, when you go to buy new lightbulbs, these equivalencies are all over the map between different manufacturers.

This chart doesn't even show all the 23 and 32 watt CFL bulbs I have and what they convert to. The 40 watt CFL I bought because it was supposedly equivalent to an old 150 watt incandescent is so glaringly bright I had to remove it before the airport started landing planes in my foyer.

I also had to learn that "soft white" means 2,700 kelvins which is a yellow glow, and the cool bright white of daytime and operating rooms means 5,000 kelvins and boy, does the color of the light make a difference with CFL or LED bulbs.

So, this is the basic stuff you need to know about lightbulbs now:

1. lumens for brightness (800 for desk work, 1600 or more to light an area) 
2. kelvins for color (2,700 = yellow and warmer, 5,000 = brighter and cooler)  
3. and wattage doesn't matter since new bulbs use 1/4 the wattage my lamps are even rated for, and they only covert to the old wattage in a wide and confusing range of equivalency. 

Got it.

Now, the other problem.

The dining room chandelier is a builder grade light fixture that came with hard plastic sleeves to cover the wires in the "candle" stems. When I put black chandelier shades over the incandescent candle lights, the original white plastic sleeves charred and turned ugly brown after a few years. Replacement sleeves looked good in these photos, but literally melted into plastic puddles inside each brass cup after one use, leaving the wires exposed. Ack.

I can get LED candle lights that burn much cooler under the shades, but they are not dimmable with my current dimmer switch. And the cooling effect comes from a "heat sink" (the solid wrapping at the base of LED bulbs) that looks dumb and directs light upwards into the shade and not down to the table.

It took two days of intensive research and going down electrical chat room rabbit holes before I learned that dimming + LEDs + bulb temperatures + strobe effect problems + light direction all have to be coordinated in confusing combinations when buying LED bulbs.

LED bulbs have an alternating current / direct current conversion technology inside that solid base that would leave Edison and Tesla muttering. Me too.

So, cooler bulbs that won't melt the fixture under black shades are Not An Option. Bare bulbs might not melt the sleeves, but are also Not An Option -- without any shades the 5 bulb fixture is small and skimpy in our large open dining room. And without shades, you can see the replacement sleeves don't quite cover the black wire housings which show at the top. It looks cheap.

We need a new dining room chandelier and I am making a project out of finding the right one. With the right lightbulbs. And the right shades.

And we need a new desk lamp to replace the broken one. With adequate lumens. And kelvins! And efficient wattage.

All this attention to lighting has now made me realize how shabby my lamps are. With the exception of the new floor lamp I just bought with the butterfly shade next to the bookcase, many of my lamps are ancient -- either from college or from my first house in the 1970s.

They wobble, are the wrong size for what I'm trying to light, are missing hardware, and the old faded shades look cheap. Or they are builder fixtures that were also kind of cheap when they were installed 11 years ago. I never realized how dim corners of my open floorpan house are. It's dark in here at night.

But who knew upgrading and fixing the lighting in my house would require an electrical engineering degree?

Breakfast Book Nook

We've been living with the new furniture arrangement for a while now. Patterns have developed. I use the desk in the breakfast area constantly and Jim uses the kitchen table in the reading area for his paperwork and computer surfing. We eat breakfast and lunch here.

We got a rug. It's jute, very neutral and probably too small (6 foot round).

But a larger size would have made this look more like a dining area, emphasizing the table. We already have a large dining room. As my friend Peggy suggested, this area works better in the open room as a book nook, emphasizing the bookcases and going for a study carrel vibe rather than a cafe feeling in the living room.

So no pendant light, no large rug under the table, and the fact that Jim leaves his stuff all over the table makes it look library-esque (humor me here).

Lighting is still an issue, but I got a taller, sturdier floor lamp and put in a brighter CFL bulb and it's a little removed from in front of the thermostat. It does light things up better. I moved a small glass-shaded bankers lamp I had to the bookcase instead of that too-large table lamp you see in the picture, and it's bright enough.

There's just no direct light over the table, so at night card playing or sitting around going over maps of Paris or decorating Christmas sugar cookies is not easily done at the table.

With little direct light it really doesn't function as a library study spot. But it does look and feel like a cozy book nook and we do eat our breakfasts here and I'm happy with the arrangement.

The cardinal at the top of the Christmas tree agrees, and we all know how judgmental cardinals can be.

What to Cut Down

It has warmed up in these shortest days of December and we've had temperatures near 60. Unreal.

I got the big asters and the nepeta cut back last week. I leave a lot of things standing in winter, but those get smushed when snow comes so they need to be cleaned up.

I'll leave the 'Karl Foerster' grass standing. It's at the edge of the meadow behind the berm, and when snow comes it will just lie down with the other tall things out there.

Meanwhile, I can't even think of taking it down. Early morning light illuminates it so dramatically.

I liked the look of this feather reed grass edging the line between meadow and lawn so much that I planted a couple other clumps along the boundary of the lawn, and those light up later in the day, just as beautifully. I'll leave those standing too.

We did get the miscanthus grass by the garage door cut down. It too is beautiful right now, but snow and ice will destroy it and cause it to flop in front of the garage door, so it has to go.

It's a job, but Jim dispatched it pretty easily this year with the hedge trimmer. I used scissors to cut the Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa) along the walkway, and pruners to get at the amsonias.

The trio of 'Northwind' panicums remains standing. They also suffer from winter smushing, but they are at the back of the garden, in front of the meadow and I think I'll leave them up.

I have regretted that in past years when they looked so bad in heavy snow, so I'm not sure why I think this time will be better. Maybe because right now there is something vaguely biblical about these three standing vigil out there just before Christmastime.

I cut the 'Henryi' clematis at the front walk all the way back. But should I take down the viticella clematis 'Alba Luxurians' on the tower beside the patio wall? It's still green in December, and it makes a nice pairing with the bronze sweetfern (Comptonia peregrina).

I cut this clematis back in midsummer and it regrew vigorously all the way to the top of the pyramid by fall. But unlike other years when I chopped it down in midsummer after flowering had gone by, it didn't rebloom very much.

All the pots are removed from the patio now, some in the garage, others on the unheated porch, where it's above 60 degrees due to this warm spell.

What else needs cutting down?

Beads of Frost, Rays of Sun

Right now I am loving the patches of epimediums that grow under two trees in my garden. In early December this sturdy groundcover just shines. Frost decorates the foliage in the mornings, and in the afternoons the low sunlight makes the papery translucent leaves sparkle.

Epimedium perralchicum 'Frohnleiten'

Under the flowering dogwood tree at the front walk 'Frohnleiten' has turned bronze and copper and olive green. It's a beautiful, complex mix of autumn colors still going strong into winter.

A second patch grows under the maple tree in the back garden. This is 'Rubrum' and it has a more uniform coppery fall color with an occasional red leaf peeking out.

Epimedium alpinum 'Rubrum'

The leaves are curled and shaggy looking now, but the warm color is nice with a clump of still green 'Ice Dance' carex next to it. These are two tough plants that laugh at winter.

Epimediums are great plants to cover a spot of dry earth under the shade of trees, but they spread very slowly. It takes four years to get a patch going, and they don't grow incrementally each year -- they simply do nothing for three years, not bulking up even one bit to your impatient dismay, and then in year four they move out and cover quite a bit of ground quite expansively.

They have cute nodding flowers on tiny stems in spring that look like little hats, and one common name is bishop's hat for that reason, or sometimes fairy wings, which describes their airiness. But epimediums are most commonly called barrenwort, (old English "wort" meaning medicinal plant) because the plant contains the compound in sildenafil, so it was used  to ward off infertility from erectile dysfunction. If you watch TV and suffer through Viagra ads, you know what sildenafil is.

The sweet flowers and aphrodisiac uses are benefits of these plants, but it's their foliage and ability to cover ground that I love. They have interesting leaves in summer, and those leaves make a lush carpet under trees where little will grow. They do well in tough conditions because they have tenacious roots (I've tried to divide some and it's a job), wiry stems, and stiff leaves that don't tear or wilt.

And look at how they behave in winter, turning bronzy and curling, but still carpeting the ground thickly as they catch beads of frost and rays of sunlight in the cold winter air.