Nine Hundred Miles

How to pack for two different climates in one trip?

We're gone for a while, visiting the southwest in winter. We're combining two destinations -- a visit to the chilly elevations of northern New Mexico (snow, cold air, mountain scenery), followed by a visit to the Texas gulf coast (warm, balmy breezes, beaches, sun and sand.)

I overpack on every trip I take, so planning for two completely separate wardrobes -- one for cold weather and one for beachwear -- means I am completely at a loss.

It seemed to make sense when we booked this vacation. New Mexico and Texas are adjoining states, right next to each other, so why not spend a week in northern New Mexico, then hop over to Texas for a a few more days to visit friends at their condo on the gulf. It's all the southwest, after all. We're from a tiny state in New England, what do we know. . .

. . . . these two locations are more than 900 miles apart. Over nine hundred miles. That's like combining a trip to Connecticut with a stop in Chicago.

Nine Hundred Miles.

This country is so damn big. It boggles.

Daylilies in Summer

Want to see beautiful summer garden shots on this winter day? I have some for you.

Ommmm. Summer.

This is the garden of a friend in town, who is an active member and leader of the Connecticut Daylily Society. She was featured recently on the Hemerocallis Society's blog.

           Click to see the Garden of the Week

I have visited her garden often, so it's fun to see some of it featured in photographs. The shots are lovely, focused on her extensive daylily plantings, but they don't begin to capture the charm of her old farmstead or the scope of the gardens, terraces, outbuildings, and lawn sweeping down to the pond below. Or the coolness of a ramble on a hot day through the tall shade plantings at the side of the house.

The photos on the site do show the wisteria vine at her front door -- what a sight that is in bloom. Even in winter it's a major feature as you walk under the immense woody structure to enter the house.

Wisteria at the front door

So go ahead and click on the link to take a tour of Cheryl's garden and read the story of how it all came to be. You'll be impressed with her daylilies, and her whole garden. And you'll be treated to some high summer in the middle of winter.

Dead Wood

I've been learning recently that when pests infest a tree, the damage they cause inside the trunk can create an interesting look in the wood, which is valued by woodworkers.

Trees die in the woods all the time, but the logs are no good for lumber. It's too hard to reach commercially, dead trees start to rot quickly, and even if they can be reclaimed, modern milling techniques can't deal with the areas of board that are too damaged. Lumber harvesters want healthy, whole, solid trees.

Dead forest in Colorado killed by Mountain Pine Beetle.
Needles turn red, then the dead trees remain standing for two years.
They then fall and rot or are consumed in ever bigger wildfires.

Doesn't it seem that already dead trees would be an excellent source for wood products? Especially when you consider the huge tracts of dead conifers in the west, killed in the millions and millions by pine beetles.

The western pines that are under attack from beetles get a fungus that stains the wood blue gray. The disease colors the milled planks in beautiful striations.

Beetle Kill Blue Pine salvaged lumber has interesting
 streaked wood for furniture, flooring and crafts.
From Core 77 article

Apparently there are niche lumber operators who can harvest some of the dead trees and make beautiful use of the colorful boards. But it's never going to be a large scale operation and so it is limited to crafts people and specialty designers.

When sanded and clear stained the colors pop, making beautiful furniture slabs.

My son has discovered a specialty wood source in Denver and he has taken up woodworking. He recently built an industrial chic shelf out of spalted maple and gas pipes. Like blue stained pines, spalted wood is the result of a fungus in the dead tree.

"Spalted" describes any wood that has black streaks from a fungus.
The maple he used shows the interesting black streaky pattern.

Spalted wood happens when a tree falls to the ground and moisture starts to creep in and fungus invades the wet wood. If the log can be harvested quickly enough, the damage leaves interesting black streaks. But after only a few months the wood will rot and become unusable. So the time to harvest is very short, and salvaging spalted lumber commercially isn't feasible.

The key is to select a board that shows streakiness at its edge as well as the top.

From my son's new interest in crafty woodworking, I am learning much more about trees -- dead and diseased ones to be sure, not the live ones I nurture and grow.

What fascinates me is the fine balance between health and disease, growth and rot, that creates beauty.

It reminds me of the tulip craze in Holland in the 1600s when unusual striped tulip bulbs, called "broken" tulips, were selling for fortunes and were prized for their rare beauty.

Only in the twentieth century was it discovered that the stripes were the result of a virus that damaged the bulb, and not careful or lucky breeding. How those diseased tulips were admired, though. And still are.

I try to keep bad bugs and plant viruses and fungal infections out of my garden in order to keep my living plants beautiful.

But I am learning that even when the bad actors and the fungus among us takes over, a dead tree or diseased flower is capable of producing something really beautiful.


Here's what the woodworker built.  Check it out.

A Disguise

The Colorado blue spruces that were planted on a raised berm at the back edge of our property have been in decline recently.

They were little green pyramid blobs when first installed in 2006. It was hard to picture them forming a line that would ever screen anything.

But they did. By the winter of 2012 they had grown majestically and were quite a sight -- five in a row, staggered a bit for visual interest, and screening the back of our house nicely.

I never thought they would turn the interesting blue that I had expected. They were green for the first years, but then began to develop the blue cast that Colorado blue spruces are known for. In fact, they became a real steely gray color.

But as soon as they had become stately, blue, dense and tall, they went into decline. Of the original five, two are gone now. We had to take two out in 2014 because of extensive branch dieback. They were looking very sparse and half dead.

Three remain, but the one on the end is looking bad now too. The lower branches are dying out from the inside. There are healthy blue needles only on the very tips of the branches. The inner part of each branch has died back.

It gives the tree an open, droopy, empty look at the bottom and it will get worse, probably until we have to take the whole thing out.

Spruces do not regenerate growth. The dead parts of the branches will not regrow. But Mike from Bartlett suggested helping the tree disguise its empty parts by stimulating more healthy growth at the tips. More needles at the growing ends of each branch will make it all look fuller.

How to do that? He suggested a root collar excavation. All of the spruces on the berm were planted too deep originally. It's a common condition when landscapers install trees, they simply put them in too deep. Additionally, the soft, newly dumped dirt of the berm settled over the years, and the trees kind of sank with the settling. Dirt piled up even more over the root flare, constricting nutrient flow and limiting growth over time.

That's not the main reason my Colorado spruces are in decline, though. They are a poor choice for our climate -- they want open, sunny, dry, cold places, like the Rocky Mountains they come from. Humid, warm, crowded conditions in my garden are not ideal, not even acceptable, as the declining blue spruces let me know.

But we'll do the root collar excavation in spring. Bartlett will use air spades to blast away the dirt compacted around the trunk without cutting any of the root mass away. They have done root collar excavations on a number of large trees on my property and the resulting growth stimulation is always impressive. It works.

So that will help my sad, sparse, blue spruce. New growth at the tips will be a clever disguise, at least for a few more years.

Bail Pulls and Boring Holes

Back in 1971 we inherited some old furniture from the estate of a relative I never knew on my husband's side -- I actually can't remember who it was. This chest of drawers was one of the items we got, along with end tables (one of which I still use in the living room) and a few other miscellaneous wood pieces.

I've used it all these years. It's been in my bedroom in every house I've lived in. It's roomy, the drawers slide beautifully and it's a solid, handsome piece of furniture.

For over 45 years, all the time I've owned it and certainly before we even got it, the lower left drawer pull has been missing.

It doesn't affect anything -- the drawer opens easily using only the one pull on the right. It's always been this way. Forever.

But over the decades I did want to fix it, especially when we moved to this house 12 years ago and things here were "nicer" and newer. But I could not find an exact replacement anywhere. I did look for a long time online, but finally gave up.

Now, suddenly, I really want it restored. This time, instead of looking for a single replacement that matches, I ordered 10 new handles and will replace all of them. They're called bail pulls apparently, and you measure the boring holes to get the right size.

Ten forged brass bail pulls are expensive, even the low-end ones I got. The cost seems ridiculous given that I have had this chest with a missing pull for more than 45 years.

My. Entire. Adult. Life.

But I'm on a kick to get all the little things that have not been right in my house up to par. There is no gardening in winter and I get antsy to do projects at this time of year, and my focus has inexplicably, after all these years, fallen upon this chest.

So I'm getting a whole new set of handles to completely dress up and restore an antique chest of drawers.

I hope the ground thaws in Spring before I start replacing all the doorknobs in the house.

Garden Impressions

My husband has always been fascinated by the Impressionist painters, and a highlight of last year's trip to France was our day at Monet's garden in Giverny. I got to wander the gardens looking at gorgeous plants, and he got to immerse himself in the painter's world. It was magical for both of us.

Several years ago he took a stab at painting. He produced quite a few small canvases, but the one that rivals any work by any French Impressionist is this one -- it is called "Laurrie in the Garden".

That's me working the earth, and a deer eating everything I have planted next to me. He tells me there are symbolic touches, like a dead vole he put in there, but I'm not sure I see that. I do see the four hearts in the sky.

Monet painted and painted and repainted his garden over and over multiple times, trying to get the light, the look, and the essence of what he had created. He had dozens and dozens of canvases of the same view.

I can understand that as I try all the time to document my garden in photos. I have thousands of pictures, many posted on this blog, and each one is an attempt to show not only the beauty of the place I've made, but the essence of it.

But Jim's painting captures it like no photograph could.

December 31
Happy Birthday to the
Impressionist painter in my life!

Warm Wishes

(Source: snowbellschristmas, via blulilly)

Breathing

I am re-posting something I wrote at Christmas five years ago, because it still takes my breath away. Here it is, from December 2011:

It is Christmas. You are expecting a red and green theme, some holly and berries, evergreen trees and bright red ornaments, right?  And you know it is the season of miracles.  So here is my red and green post, and it tells of a miracle, one that happens all around us.

As a young student, Donald Culross Peattie was amazed to discover that plants breathe light: 

"Using spectrum analysis, Peattie learned that the constituents of a chlorophyll molecule were eerily familiar. 'To me, a botanist's apprentice, a future naturalist,' he writes, 'there was just one fact to quicken the pulse. That fact is the close similarity between chlorophyll and hemoglobin, the essence of our blood.'  

This is no fanciful comparison, but a literal, scientific analogy: 'The one significant difference in the two structural formulas is this: that the hub of every hemoglobin molecule is one atom of iron, while in chlorophyll it is one atom of magnesium.'  

Just as chlorophyll is green because magnesium absorbs all but the green light spectrum, blood is red because iron absorbs all but the red. 

Chlorophyll is green blood. It is designed to capture light; blood is designed to capture oxygen".  *

Merry Christmas to all the creatures breathing oxygen and all the creatures breathing light in our world.

* Quoted from Tree, A Life Story by David Suzuki and Wayne Grady (it follows the 500 year life of one douglas fir).  Also, read Donald Culross Peattie's book: Flowering Earth. 

This is the chemical diagram, if it helps. 

Groundnuts

One of the things that has defined me my entire life is that I have had, since birth, a severe and life threatening allergy to peanuts. I had two frightening episodes in childhood, and one in adulthood when accidentally ingesting peanuts. Epinephrine and quick medical care were, literally, lifesavers.

But mostly my life has been defined by constant vigilance about menus, obsessive reading of labels, cautious experimenting, and being annoying to many hostesses with my fussy habits.

Family and friends have been absolutely wonderful, always making special nut free versions of treats just for me. I am impressed and grateful when they go out of their way for my unique needs.

Jim has not had a jar of peanut butter in the house all the years we have been married, and PB & J was a favorite of his.

Now, with all the controversial super-attention to peanut allergies in recent years, my life has gotten easier. It was more of a challenge growing up 50 years ago when peanut allergies were apparently rare, and when German grandmothers, to my mother's horror, simply declared "och, a few won't hurt her, she's too picky."

And now, instead of trying to monitor and modify the environment by keeping peanuts away, there is a research effort to modify the peanut itself. This article in the New York Times describes how the allergen-producing proteins can be isolated and plants can be bred (or the nuts treated) to eliminate those proteins. Fascinating stuff, at least to someone like me.

Peanuts are sometimes called groundnuts for obvious reasons. They are Arachis hypogaea. But other plants that have edible parts that grow underground are also called groundnuts, and one that I have wanted to grow is a native vine, Apios americana.

Apios has beautiful flowers and protein rich tubers that sustained native Americans. The Lenape word for it is hopniss.

Hopniss vines grow wild in our New England woods, and are prolific around areas where native tribes once camped. But groundnut tubers are not nuts, they are fleshy roots most resembling potatoes.

I was intrigued by this article that describes growing and eating groundnuts -- it's a good read about foraging for wild foods. One thing caught my attention in the article, and I have read about it elsewhere: about 5% of people get severely sick after eating groundnuts.

Peanuts and groundnuts are in the same legume family. It's unclear whether they have the same proteins that produce the reactions -- both are very high sources of protein.

Somehow the concept of an allergy-producing food growing underground, called a groundnut in both instances, was enough to put me off this wildflower. It's not like I was going to grow it for a food crop, I just thought it was garden worthy and pretty.

But I couldn't.

Even though everything about the Apios plant appealed to me -- it is lovely and native and easy to grow and I like the mauve colored pea like flowers -- everything about the name and the underground parts and the possibility it has the poisonous proteins of the peanut gave me virtual heart palpitations.

I couldn't. It's a groundnut.

Who's the Father?

Something I don't know about is going on in my garden. Because the proof is right here:

Those are holly berries on my Ilex opaca. Very festive at this time of year.

As I have written about before, and as many know, holly plants are dioecious, meaning plants are either male or female and you need one of each to fertilize the flowers and produce fruit.

Obviously my American holly tree is a female. What I don't know is where the male holly is -- he has to be nearby somewhere, right? But it's not like American holly trees are scattered about in the woods, and no one I know in the area is growing an American holly, much less a male one.

It doesn't have to be an Ilex opaca for fertilization to happen. Many homes have ornamental holly shrubs around and I grow Ilex verticillata, winterberry holly, so any of those other varieties could be providing the pollen that the bees bring to this tree.

They have to all bloom together, though, so the flowering timing has to be just right. I wonder what variety is pollinating this tree.

I did plant a male Ilex opaca in the meadow a few years ago just for the purpose. It was tiny, about six inches high, and it died. I planted another and it too is a twig, barely leafing out at all. I never saw flowers, it doesn't seem to be thriving and it can't possibly be the male contributor to the berries on this holly.

So some other holly is the father. I did read that like varieties will produce a much more prolific display of berries. If a male Ilex opaca was nearby and big enough to produce a lot of flowers, it could be that my female tree would be absolutely covered in red jewels at Christmas.

Instead, it has a fair amount of red berries, but you have to look to see them. Sparkly white snow would help highlight them, just as it does for the winterberry hollies.

The tree itself is just a few years old and needs to fill out, but I'm pleased with how it is growing. It's doing well, gaining size and getting a little bit of shape.

It's a long way from the specimen I saw years ago at Conn College in summer, though. That one was a beautiful dense shape, sitting in a pool of light in an opening in a forest. I came on it unexpectedly as I walked through the woods. It was a magical sight.

Mine will never be branched to the ground like that. But as it fills out I am hoping it starts to look as dense as the mature specimen. It's certainly as green and shiny.

But wouldn't my holly be great covered all over in red berries -- many, many more than what it has now from an unknown source of questionable parentage?

Who exactly is the father, anyway?