Kiss the Earth

I went to Chanticleer yesterday, claimed my rooster cookie (yum) and had a wonderful time despite the cold. About 100 people showed up on opening day (Saturday) and about 20 had visited by mid-morning yesterday when I arrived.

There was no sun, but in the chill gray light, whatever was blooming looked especially bright: hillsides of daffodils and scilla, coy hellebores, tiny seedlings in the vegetable garden and everywhere, things just about to burst. I peeked into the cold frames and saw all manner of interesting greenery ... snowflake pea pods, French baby leeks, troutback lettuce. How delicious do they sound?

About halfway through my visit, I stopped taking notes. My fingers were freezing, true, but the point of this garden, after all, is to experience and enjoy, letting your mind (and feet) wander. I walked up the grassy hill, through the ruin garden, which was amazing, around the Asian Woods, through the dry garden. I sat on some of the many fanciful chairs and benches and felt the only peace and quiet of my entire weekend! And was it nice to sit down.

Much of the rest of my weekend was spent in the garden at home. It's looking much better (still nothing like Chanticleer), after two days of raking and mulching and getting the raised vegetable bed in shape. It was very nice to escape to Chanticleer, and, as promised, I checked out the flower arrangements in the ladies rooms.

One gent, emerging from the men's room in the Asian Woods, remarked, "This is nicer than the bathrooms in five-star hotels!"

It doesn't feel quite like the beginning of the gardening season yet. But with last night's rain, and this week's warmth, we're on our way.

Reader Meredith McGlinchey shares her photographic impressions of Chanticleer in warmer weather ... Meredith, who lives in South Philly, is a teacher at Freire Charter School in Philadelphia. She describes herself as "a garden appreciator" who enjoys taking pictures, giving credit to her mother for being "the one with all the plant knowledge and true flora passion."

The pair visited Chanticleer last year. Meredith shot these on 100 speed slide film that was cross-processed, which is what gives them the red tones and high contrast. We're merely "photo appreciators," meaning we have no idea what cross-processing means, but we certainly appreciate you sharing these beautiful images with us:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dizzymcg/sets/831945/

Wasn't it wonderful to see the sun this morning? I looked out my kitchen window and marveled at the blueness of the sky, the clearness of the day and especially, the sunshine. My pink magnolia survived the cold night and is in full bloom. Soon the velvety petals will cascade down by the dozens, all over the patio, the yard and the sidewalk below. You know the drill ... they turn brown and slippery, nothing like their delicate pale pink selves. So it goes. I sure wish these first bursts of spring - the magnolias, the cherries, the redbuds - would last longer!

This morning comes word from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society of workshops and trips and all sorts of terrific gardening activities coming up in the next few weeks. I can personally attest to the value of these things, having attended many over the years. The folks who run them are as nutty for gardening as the rest of us.I sometimes think they bound out of bed in the morning full of ideas and thoughts about flowers and plants. I know I do! Well, most mornings ...

Here are some of the workshops coming up in PHS' city gardening series: The Fragrant Garden (this Saturday - hurry!); Environmentally Friendly Gardens; Designing the Garden with Native Plants; Rose Care; Low Maintenance Gardening; All About Annuals; Growing Vegetables and Fruits in Containers. And so much more.

Most of the workshops are FREE, held in libraries and other spots around the city. No better bargain. For information or to register, call Marilyn Reynolds at PHS at 215-988-8872 or go to www.pennsylvaniahorticulturalsociety.org

These events are casual, fun and not only do you get good, practical information, you get to meet and exchange ideas with other gardeners. In this crowd, nobody's eyes glaze over. Nobody says, "I don't have a green thumb." It's pure pleasure.

I figured FREE STUFF would get your attention. In this case, it's really cool free stuff - a heavy-duty plastic compost bin. Compost is one of those un-sexy topics, but some people - like me - are really into it. It's gotten to the point now where just about everything we use in the kitchen, except those darned nonrecyclable plastic containers, gets recycled in one form or another.

Composting is so easy, so basic. Green and brown, grass clippings and leaves, most kitchen scraps - they all get tossed in the composter. I hear some people say it's so much trouble, they can't be bothered. But it's second nature in my household and takes no more energy than throwing something in the trash can and later bagging it up to take to the curb. And think of the good you're doing.

Back to the FREE STUFF. Penn State cooperative extension in Philadelphia is about to start its composting workshops again, and the first 100 people to sign up get a free compost bin. My husband and I have been to two of these workshops, separated by a couple of years, and each time we learned more and different things.

This means we have two bins in our garden, in addition to a small one by the kitchen door that we fill and then dump in the bigger ones. The workshop bins look like something from a Jules Verne movie, like an underwater capsule, or like the space vehicle John Glenn orbited in. You dump your leaves or grapefruit rinds in the top, make sure you have a nice balance of greens and browns and heat and water. Occasionally you need to stir things up in there, and before you know it, nice, rich crumbly compost to put on your garden.

For information on the free compost workshops, call the Penn State extension at 215-471-2200.

Anytime home gardeners get together this time of year, the talk usually revolves around a few familiar topics. Weather. What's coming up in our gardens. What we didn't do last fall that we now have to do. New plants and designs we'd like to try.

And then somebody mentions onion grass and everyone groans.

It's quite charming to hear old timers who grew up around cows reminisce about how the fresh milk and homemade ice cream had an onion-y taste every spring 'cause that's what the cows were eating.

But no such romantic notions persist these days. Onion grass is a royal pain. I've been lazy about digging up the little bulbs and recently, thinking I was being so very clever, I covered a bunch of it in my sideyard with mulch. But the onion grass just poked through a few days later, making my nice neat mulch job look a mess. Very frustrating.

So I consulted with Bill Bamka, agricultural agent with the Rutgers cooperative extension in Burlington County. He laughed when I told him why I was calling.

It won't do to try and pull it out with your bare hands because it'll just break off, he says. Unless you're willing to "take no prisoners" with an herbicide like Roundup (which we're not), the only solution - and not a very good one, at that - is "to get in there with a shovel or fork and dig out the bulbs."

Or, he suggests, you could "pay your kids a penny apiece" for dug-up bulbs. On second thought, Bill says, "even my own children wouldn't do that."

He says onion grass is actually called a winter annual. (I call it lots of other things.) That means once the weather warms up a little, this pesky stuff will go away.

But there is no rest for the weed-weary. Once the onion grass dies back, something else pops up to take its place: Star-of-Bethlehem. This cute little nasty was introduced as an ornamental years ago and at some point took a leap over the fence. Now it's in everyone's garden, including one I saw last summer on a Main Line garden tour.

There it was, poking its miscreant self up here and there among the most gorgeous irises I've ever seen - Caesar's Brother. Deep, velvety purple, there were hundreds of them, in a very traditional - and otherwise pristine - garden. The army of gardeners tending that iris bed must've thought these "stars" belonged in the spotlight. Little did they know.

Definitely, little.

I probably wasn't the only gardener who went to bed last night thinking positive thoughts about the heavy rain and our spring flowers. And I probably wasn't alone in my reaction this morning, upon looking out the window at lawns and trees covered with slushy snow. But I don't believe there's any reason to panic if you take the long view, that this sort of topsy-turvy springtime hijinks has been going on forever. We'll probably be OK, given that the temperature is already headed up.

That said, I hope none of you had barrelled ahead and planted anything that needs steady warm weather. There's a reason we're advised to wait till after Mother's Day to put most stuff in the ground. That's a pretty tried and true dividing line between frost-possible and frost-free. We cross our fingers.

Before putting on our boots, of course.

For all the talk about Mother Nature walloping us but good here on the East Coast with a nor'easter, I thought I'd share a story about her gentler side, which I enjoyed during a visit to Rhode Island this weekend.

We were gathered for a funeral, relatives from far and wide, and when the service was over, a few of us decided to clear our heads and head for the beach to gather seaweed for our gardens. This is an old practice in many quarters, and the Rhode Island cousins who live along beautiful Narragansett Bay swear by it. Seaweed is loaded with nutrients and there's plenty of it along the shore, just sitting there at low tide. Why not?

We had a drive back to Philadelphia to consider, and listened politely to all the caveats and jokes about how stinky the seaweed can be sitting in the trunk of the car or spread over the garden back home. But we'd also heard cousins earlier in the day explain how they dry the seaweed, then crumble it and toss it in the composter for later use or hose it off (to get rid of the salt), cut it up and put it right in the beds. Everyone seemed to have a favorite method of recycling it, but they all agreed it was dynamite on flowers and vegetables.

So four of us - my husband and I and two of our favorite cousins, Susan and John from Camden, Maine - trooped off to the public beach in Narrangansett. I fished an old trash bag and some Shop Rite bags out of the trunk - I knew they'd come in handy some day! - and we made our way to the water. It was low tide. The wind was whipping us, our hair was standing on end and the temperature had dropped. But the shore was loaded with goodies ... seaweed, clam shells and carcasses of horseshoe and spider crabs. Perfect.

There seemed to be as many dogs as people walking along, and we stopped to pet every Lab we encountered, which was just about every single dog there. It was a wonderful antidote to the funeral, my second in a week.

We filled the bags, took a lot of silly pictures, caught up with family news and ended up walking several miles along the shoreline, getting our shoes and jeans wet and sandy. It was comforting being with old friends and being there, at the beach. Funerals have a way of shutting you down and our seaweed excursion helped us all rebound.

So now I've got a bunch of Rhode Island seaweed in my garage, just waiting for the weather to warm up. It didn't smell on the ride home and it's OK in the garage. I kind of like the idea of having such a tangible reminder of all the fun we've had with the cousins in Rhode Island. And I love the idea of the friendships and histories we share with them being present here in Philadelphia, in our garden, through something as simple as seaweed tossed upon the shore on a chilly, gray afternoon in April.

If you're going to use seaweed in the garden, Joe Alvarez advises that you toss it in the compost pile first and let it break down. But if you don't care to wait and want to spread it directly on the flower and vegetable beds, that's OK, too.

Just don't pile it on, he says. Sprinkle it into the soil, not on the plants themselves. Joe is an agricultural program assistant in the Rutgers University cooperative extension in Cape May County, and he knows a little about using the bounty of the sea to grow things on land.

"People around here use crab shells, fish heads, fish tails, clam shells for calcium carbonate," he says. All good organic stuff delivered to your door - your feet - at low tide.

Alvarez, like all good extension agents, recommends you get your soil tested before adding any of these things to it. If you've been conscientiously taking care of your soil, adding compost and mulch, and your plants look healthy and happy, chances are you have pretty good soil already and can pass on the soil test. But "if you're a first time starter and you're going to go out and get all the seaweed you can becuase you read it in the paper, it's probably a good idea to get your soil tested first," he says. Otherwise the seaweed may not "take" and it's all for naught.

(You can buy the kits through the extension service and some plant nurseries.)

Joe says seaweed is packed with terrific micronutrients for your plants - nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous, the big three, with traces of boron, copper, manganese and zinc, which "help the plants grow bigger and better."

After this conversation with Joe, I wondered whether it's legal to just wander down to the beach in South Jersey and start collecting seaweed. So I called Bill Hollingsworth, whose official title is "clean communities coordinator" in Ocean City. That sounded good to me.

Bill advises that lots of folks collect seaweed from beaches at the Shore, usually for clambakes or cooking seafood some other way. Seaweed adds moisture and sea water and makes everything it envelops taste moist and magnificent. (I could go for some moist and magnificent seafood right now!)

He's heard of gardeners using it, also fishermen, who like fish heads and other parts left over after they've filleted the day's catch. Clam shells, too, are ground up and used sometimes in commercial driveways and home gardens. They let moisture through for good drainage, which helps prevent flooding, and look nice besides.

"It's Nature's way of recycling," Bill says.

And it's OK, meaning legal, to collect this stuff from the beach. If it's washed up, it's fair game. Ocean City public works employees are out there every day, too - cleaning the beach, picking up shells (which would be hazardous to your feet), and collecting seaweed. They grade the seaweed back into the sand dunes to help build them up.

It's a nice, neat recycling system, the kind Mother Nature is famous for.

Last night I stopped in at a garden center, just to see what's up and to make myself feel better. Spring is here, I keep telling myself. It just doesn't feel like it yet.

The place was pretty empty. (If only we could peruse the aisles like this in the height of the season!) One person at the check-out, one helper to answer questions, one other customer and row upon row of pansies. It was very pleasant to examine them closely, without being jostled or rushed. They're not the first flower to come to mind when you think color, texture and shape, but they're actually quite beautiful. Take a look some time.

I've always loved pansies. They're such a cheery sight, especially when the spring skies are dark and it's chilly and you're thinking sun and warmth will never get here. I especially like the single-color ones in shades of purple and yellow, purple so dark it seems brown or black and yellow as golden as corn. Careful if you touch the petals. They're soft as a ripe peach.

The name derives from pensee, the French word for thought (it should have an accent on the second e but I can't figure out how to do that), because the flower's heart shape looks so human. And don't you love the fact that another name for pansy is "love-in-idleness"? In Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the juice of pansy blossoms becomes a love potion:

"Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness."

Unfussy, delicate but sturdy, smile-inducing, sweet, pansies are the perfect harbinger of spring. We wouldn't mind a little love-in-idleness either.

A reader who obviously kisses the earth at every opportunity wonders if onion grass is edible. At first, I thought, heck no, unless you're a cow. A while later I was on the phone with Jim May, a master gardener in South Jersey who knows lots about plants, and I asked him. He said that onion grass is about as close as we're going to get to domestically grown chives and in his opinion, yes, it's an edible grass.

"If you want to dig it out of the ground and eat it - this is my opinion here - you can. I don't think it's poisonous," he says.

You can use the grassy part as you would the herb chives and you could try cooking with the bulbs. Up to you.

Jim calls onion grass "the first green fuzzy entry into your backyard every spring," along with crocuses and tulips. It sounds so cute. But even Jim has his limits.

Every year he goes ballistic over one weed in his yard, he says. Guess which one he's going after this year ...

Over the weekend, I was reading "Digging In: Tending to Life in Your Own Back Yard," a gentle gardening memoir by Robert Benson (WaterBrook Press, 2007) and he had a thought that I've been considering ever since: that gardening is a lot about waiting. We may think it's about vibrant colors and dramatic design but really, Benson's right. It's more about waiting.

We wait for spring, we wait for rain, we wait for the temperatures to rise so we can wait for stuff to come up. We wait for the trees to leaf out. We wait for the hostas to poke up. We wait for buds to turn to blooms and blooms to turn to seed heads. So much waiting.

I guess gardening isn't for the impatient, but even patient types get antsy this time of year. Visiting a Home Depot over the weekend I noticed lines in the garden center stretching all the way to the back of the building. Yes, it's warm out there, but it's still a little early to be planting in earnest.

You'd never know it from the length of that line. I went looking for a certain kind of rose the other night at a specialty garden center and there wasn't one to be had. "It's a little early," I was told. But lots of folks at Home Depot had roses in their carts.

"You cannot hurry it along," Benson writes of the season we're in right now. "Spring comes when it comes; roses bloom when they will; the garden grows at its own sweet pace. What it teaches you is to wait, to be patient, and to pay attention."

Paying attention we do in spades. I'm out there every morning and evening checking progress in millimeters. I'm waiting, all right. And struggling to be patient.

Shows you how long I've been hanging around the garden ... it was 17 years ago, almost to the day, that I wrote a story about the restoration of Fairmount Park's Azalea Garden, 4.4 acres nestled behind the art museum, off Kelly Drive. In that story, the restoration project's manager remarked that before the project began, the garden was "a big bang of color in May," and that was it.

"Now it's a symphony for all seasons," she said.

I was remembering that story, and the old azalea beds, when I passed by this morning on the way to work. The garden is looking beautiful, right on the verge of, as Ginger Nicholson enthusiastically put it, "exploding."

Ginger, an artist, printmaker and photographer, is also a longtime volunteer with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. She walks in the Azalea Garden every day and does voluntary cleanup with PHS once a month. She helps pick up debris and trash, deadhead and prune, depending on what the season is.

In 1988, when the garden renovation first got going, the place was a mess. Weeds like mugwort and knotweed had smothered some of the azaleas, several of the elms were diseased and the soil was as hard as concrete. Thousands of dollars, bulbs, perennials, annuals, shrubs and trees later ... "It's an amazing space," says Ginger, who lives a block away and considers the Azalea Garden her personal back yard.

Wedding parties sometimes vie for photo position and the place is so well used, volunteers often have a lot of cleanup to do. Kind of awful to think that some folks are tossing trash literally in the middle of one of the prettiest public green spaces around. Ginger was noticing the trash accumulating last week, "then Earth Day came and thank heavens, people came and cleaned it all up," she says.

Every year, new things get planted to replace dead or damaged plants. This year, PHS is planting new hostas, begonias, coral bells and dogwoods. They provide the soft context for the azaleas, which is what people mainly come to see.

There's something for everyone, whatever size and color you like ... about a dozen colors in all, ranging from pure white to flame orange and shades of pink and purple. And in another couple of weeks, bingo! The symphony will reach crescendo - for this season, at least.

I plan on stopping by to listen.

Yesterday I wrote about the Azalea Garden. Today I stopped by. It was one of those rare occasions when nobody was there. I walked around, happy to be the sole recipient of all that this beautiful place has to offer but it was a bit lonely, too.

Public gardens are truly designed for the public, I guess, and when they aren't there, it feels empty. But was it clean! Spotless.

And it was nice to be reminded that while the Azalea Garden may showcase azaleas, there's a lot more to see, including a host of hostas that look so fresh and spring-like, you can practically smell the blossoms they'll produce this summer.

The cloudy day gave this well-travelled garden a rest, quite a contrast to the activity on the art museum hill. I wouldn't want to be sitting in that bulldozer.

Much better to have a seat in the Azalea Garden, even if I'm all by my lonesome.

I was delighted to see the story in yesterday's New York Times about Prince Charles. (www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/dining)

Long maligned by the British press for "talking to plants," Charles, it turns out - and we gardeners have known this forever - is a great friend to anyone who gardens organically. No less a luminary in the culinary world than Alice Waters said of the prince: "He is, in private, really one of the most forward-thinking, radical humanitarians I have ever talked to."

He's all for "responsible stewardship of the land, preservation of rural life and the need for good food grown without chemicals or worker exploitation." There's plenty in there that relates to gardening, even if you don't grow veggies.

All I can say is, it's about time - for organics and for Charles. You just can't believe everything you - used to - read about this guy.

Last summer, while reporting on a story about the intern-inspired "stumpery" at Morris Arboretum, I learned that Charles was so enamored of these peculiar Victorian garden features, he had one built at Highgrove, his organic farm. At the arboretum, by the way, the stumpery's turned out to be a favorite spot for photo ops.

And then yesterday, I read that he uses seaweed for fertilizer. (See earlier posting)
Way to go, Charlie!

Say what you will, I like people who talk to plants. I think Charles is a pretty smart dude.

Looking out my kitchen window this morning, I saw nothing but rain and darkness. Gloomy Friday. Then, over in the corner of the garden, I noticed a dogwood tree in full bloom. Wow! The flowers almost look unreal, like something painted on rice paper.

They're about two inches across, an unusual coral color, and in the morning darkness, they lit up the yard. I grabbed my pruners and went out there in the rain and cut a few airy stems. They fill a foyer window just so. Imagine how they'll look when the sun shines again.

There are many kinds of dogwood, but the American eastern dogwood (Cornus florida), which is native to this area, is the state flower or tree in three states - Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia. (In case you're wondering, in Pennsylvania, the state tree is the eastern hemlock, the flower mountain laurel, and in New Jersey, the tree is Northern red oak and the flower is violet.)

There's a lot of folklore surrounding the dogwood, and who knows what's true. Diana Wells, in her interesting book 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1997), explains that a dogwood with exceptionally hard wood was used by the Greeks to make javelins and spearheads. In fact, she writes, the wood was as hard as an animal's horn. Cornus is Latin for horn ...

So where'd the dog part come from? That, Diana says, comes from the idea that the berries were considered unfit for human consumption and so, were fed to dogs. Or the idea that the leaves were used to bathe dogs. Or whatever. Take your pick.

She also suggests that the twigs, if chewed first, can be squished into a kind of primitive toothbrush. I was a hyperactive Girl Scout who made the most of everything in the woods and garden, but ouch!

Today I'll - happily - settle for blooms in the gloom.