Rosemary for Remembrance

 Any time I put on gardening gloves -- other than for rose pruning -- I discover after a few minutes that I have discarded them.  I need to feel the soil -- how wet it is, how it responds to pressure, whether a plant is securely seated.

This means that any time I'm working in the garden, my nails become lined with dirt.  Sinking my nails into a bar of Ivory before gardening helps a lot, but only if I remember to do it.  (I never remember to do it.)  I'm trying to clean my nails with an orange stick before going to an Apple Genius Bar appointment, but the results are patchy at best.   Ah, well.  If I have to choose between having my hands in the soil and having dainty ladylike hands, I pick gardening every time.

 My old gardener was extremely simpático but his workers did a terrible job (heading trees, killing flowers, and so on.)  I let him go this winter.  At the end of rainy season, I started looking to hire a new gardener, together with everybody else in Northern California.

In the last two weeks I had three gardeners ghost on me.  Came, surveyed the garden, promised to give me a quote, then were never heard from again.  I also interviewed three arborists.  One of them, a fruit-tree specialist, did the fruit trees.  The other two, thank Heavens, did show up and give binding estimates.   I'm planning on going with the second one, after double-checking scope with husband.  I may leave one inconvenient leaning oak tree until fall.  

I now have a gardener who's going to do the wildly overdue cleanup as well as monthly maintenance.  If he's a plant-killer too, I'll start all over on the monthly maintenance.

Still to do: find somebody to inspect and fix the sprinkler system.   However, today is a day of rest, dammit.   

My old gardener did all the above: spring cleanup, hedge trimming, tree pruning, and sprinkler maintenance.  I have to keep reminding myself that I wasn't happy with the way he did most of these, and that having to have multiple specialists may be more expensive, but gets the job done.  Sigh.

(posted for future reference)

I was reading the New York Times account of "the" Mrs. Astor's daughter's wedding in 1884*. The wedding description included descriptions of all the flowers**. The front parlor held "two bunches of choice pink roses set off with the costly Farleyeuse [sic] fern." I was curious about that costly fern, so I decided to track it down . It took some doing because of the misspelling. Somewhere in the transcription and transmission process a "u" turned into an "n".

Farleyense is now known to be a cultivar rather than a species; it was discovered in Barbados in 1865. I found pictures in the Online Plant Guide. It's an exquisite thing, densely packed with leaves and with each leaf subtly shaded from green to pink tips. You can see that it would be very pretty with pink roses.

The American Journal of Horticulture and Florist's Companion v. 6 (no date) comments that it "must for many years continue to be valuable; for it can only be increased by division, and the few who have plants rather prefer to keep them intact as specimens than to tear them up for multiplication." This, together with the slow growth habit mentioned in the Online Plant Guide, would explain its rarity. I assume that the ferns mentioned in the wedding notice must have been in pots surrounding the cut roses.

* "The" Mrs. Aster was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, who came from an old Dutch family, then the highest society in New York, and married into the then-upstart new-money Astors. She was the lady whose associate, Ward McAllister, coined the idea of the 400, the most elite people in New York. 400, not so coincidentally, was the number of people her ballroom accommodated.

** The reporter lays emphasis on the expensiveness of the flowers: "Palms and ferns and creeping plants, roses and orchids, lilies and violets, carnations and marguerites, filled every part of the house..." The wedding was in mid-November, so the garden plants listed would have been out of season. Carnations used to be one of the most expensive of flowers rather than, as now, one of the cheapest. I wonder what changed in cultivation.

Someday I am going to track down the person or persons who recommended pink knotweed as a ground cover and there will be no survivors.

 Many of the plants I grew up loving in Indiana and, later, New England don't thrive in Northern California.  They need hours of winter chill, and we don't get enough.   I had assumed peonies were one of those; certainly the garden catalogs said so.  Then I discovered the site of Charmarron Peony Gardens, in the hills above San Jose.   I found the site in midwinter, so I made a mental note to visit when the nursery reopened in spring.  

Yesterday was a glorious day, sun shining, cirrus clouds, birds singing, but not too hot.   We made the drive to Charmarron, which is in a part of the Bay Area I'd never visited -- south of the Bay, in the rolling foothills.  It's beautiful.   Because of the California climate, the hills are mostly bare with the occasional shrub or tree, so you can see the curved body of the landscape underneath.   We wound in and out around the hills and up to the nursery, gasping at delight at the vistas along the way.  We're in the tiny window between winter rains and summer heat, so the hills were green not only with live oaks but with grass.

Charmarron assumes you know what you want in a peony.  There are lines on lines of peonies in the display garden, but they're all just marked by name; no indication of when they bloom, what color they are, what height they are.   It's a display garden, and if you're there when a particular plant is in bloom you can find out for yourself.   Otherwise, there's the woman who owns the nursery, who will answer questions if you can hunt her down and wait for her to stop answering other people's questions.   In general, her answers will be "It depends".  "Does this have a scent?"  "Well, everybody's nose is different."  "What height does this grow to?"  "I've only had that one five years."  Questions about bloom seasons -- even questions specified with "guesstimate" are answered with "It all depends on the weather."  Which is true, obviously.   However, if you ask her a question she doesn't think is dumb, she is a fountain of information and advice.  I said "I'm Sunset zone 16" and she said "Oh, [town name]?  I used to live there."   I asked about chill, and she said no, chill was not the issue, full sun was the issue.  Full sun I have.

In short, the nursery is for people who are serious.  It was tree peony bloom season; the owner imports almost all her varieties from China and Japan.  The Chinese varieties are marked both in characters and in transliteration.  The names not further explained.  I was particularly taken by Shima-nishiki, which comes out in random blossoms of white or red or both.  ("Don't get this if you won't be happy with an all-red plant.  You never know.")   As it happened, everybody else in the garden that day had at least one Asian-descended family member who could presumably interpret some of the names; we just bumbled around and said "Ooh!  That's pretty!"   

I eventually chose "High Noon"; when I asked her to get a pot, she said "Oh!  Haven't I told you about Bartzella?"  It turns out that there are now hybrids between tree and herbaceous peonies.  Bartzella is freer-flowering, lower to the ground, and has a prettier shape.   I came home with a Bartzella for the back garden.  Then we made the long beautiful trip out of the hills toward home.

 In three weeks -- "but I can't be sure" -- I'll be back to look at the herbaceous peonies.  The hills will probably be brown by then.   I need a "Festiva Maxima" to remind me of my youth, and probably one or two more will hop into the back of the car.

My bulb order from Old House Gardens just arrived -- they ship to warmer zones last. That means that some of the bulbs need to go in the ground RIGHT NOW. Unfortunately, I'm a post-migraine wreck. My daughter valiantly took me out into the front gardens and we planted the "grape hyacinths". I put it in quotation marks because Muscari botyroides, the grape hyacinths that Northern Americans grew up with, are now extinct in cultivation, meaning that no nurseries are raising bulbs. I'm planting Muscari neglectum.

I noticed with some irritation that the large, healthy shoot from Mme. Isaac Pereire is blooming and is, of course, Dr. Huey. I try to buy own-root roses whenever I can, but apparently Mme. Isaac was grafted. Time to go out into the garden with the rose gloves and a lopper and Take Steps... tomorrow.

The next urgent planting is six lilies; after that it's just daffodils and heirloom hyacinths, which will probably go in the window-box on the deck so we can admire them.

This is a thoroughly shoddy and snobbish book. These quotations from the introduction will give you a sense of it:

• Garden history has been abducted by the art historians. This book is an attempt to get it back for the social historian. Too much garden history has been concerned with when gardens were made, what they looked like, who made them and how they changed. More interesting by far is what the makers expected from the gardens, and how they and their successors evaluated their investment in gardening and the return it brought them.
• There is more to social history than drawing attention to the great gulf which divides the rich from the poor and then whingeing about it. This book is concerned with the middle and upper classes ... They are more interesting because others aspire to be like them.
• Why do hundreds of middle-class Englishwomen have a white garden and a potager and a collection of old-fashioned roses? Because these features are smart -- or may have been smart about ten years ago -- not because their owners think they are beautiful or useful, but because they make them feel good -- better than the neighbours. Gardens are symbols of social and economic status.
• The arbiters of garden taste and the innovators of garden fashion are the well-to-do and the creative craftsmen, nurserymen and designers who supply them. The poor are often portrayed as conservative because they have tastes and values which were more fashionable a generation or so earlier.
• It has been claimed that an interest in gardening cuts across all classes and creates points of contact between people with social differences. [long quotation from Alfred Austin] In practice, one finds that such people have rather different tastes from one's own; it is fashion which binds people together and divides them from others. [it. mine]

I think "snobbish" has adequately been demonstrated. But what about the book? It's not social history at all. It's a series of anecdotes about the wealthy owners of estates, and their professional gardeners. The citations are almost entirely to other people's books, most of them biographies; the few journal citations are to Horticulture, the Journal of Garden History, and the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society. There are no citations to other social historians that I could spot. There are 9 pages of index for a 258-page text, the majority to person's names.

The problem with snobbishness is that, although it makes a history of gardening easier to write, it doesn't acknowledge the osmosis that goes on between social classes. Throughout history, the upper classes often ape lower-class fashions, suitably embellished and refined.  When the upper-classes go self-consciously rustic, they respond not only to the idea of the lower-class garden but to the gardens themselves.   See, for instance, last decade's fad for the "cottage garden", and for the plants that were favored in those gardens in an imagined pre-industrial age.

When gardening, the middle and lower classes work on a different scale; they aren't imitating grand estates because they haven't got the space. As a result, the choices, both in plants and in planting, made by small-scale gardeners are very different from the choices made on the grand scale, and respond to different constraints. A small-scale gardener can lovingly tend a single plant, and focus on it, in a way that only the very wealthiest can afford to pay gardeners to do.    There's a long history of home gardeners carrying forward and improving individual varieties of plants -- for instance, this book entirely ignores the Lancashire mill-hands' preeminence in auriculas and the Paisley weavers' laced pinks.*      During the periodic upper-class crazes for "old-fashioned plants", the plants become available because they have been preserved and cherished in the gardens (and cemeteries!) of the poor and middle classes.  

If you see this book second-hand, it may be worth buying (at a sufficiently low price) for the excellent color plates. Otherwise, you can do better.

* The first citation I found for this was from The Bedside Book of the Garden by D.G. Hessayon , which looks like a much more interesting book.