Deer and Man, a Reflection

The Goddess Diana.

     Deer have long been a symbol of nature's brighter side: peaceful, idyllic, prosperous and mystical. The ancient Greeks and Romans worshipped their virginal goddess Artemis/Diana, who chit-chatted with wild animals and especially enjoyed the company of deer. The Medieval Roman Catholics had St. Giles, a monk who lived alone in the woods with a red deer as his sole companion, perhaps surviving off her milk. During the horrors of the Black Death, plague victims prayed to St. Giles for relief. 

St. Giles and the Hind c. 1500

     Deer were also a recurring motif in the decorative arts of Old World European royalty. Majestic, masculine and swift, the stag is an ideal symbol for the king's public image, assuring his subjects that when the kingdom was not at war (during which the ruler posed as the lion), he was attending to his subject's prosperity--the land on which he allowed them to live and work.

King John hunting in Sherwood Forest.

   While the seeds of democracy were being sown during the Age of Enlightenment (18th Century), man's view of nature veered in a new direction. The wild became less a place of monarchical/religious symbolism and more a place to be observed and pondered with a rational, scientific mind.  In the image below, the landowner seen in the left of the canvas seems insignificant, and in fact it is the male deer on the right that watches down on him, not the other way around.

Joseph Constantine Stadler (German, fl.1780 - 1822), after William Hodges,
A View of Windsor and Eton from St. Leonards,
with deer in the foreground and Windsor Castle beyond

   In the 20th Century, sharp-witted painter Frieda Kahlo further redefined deer symbolism for a clever self-portrait: her body is riddled with arrows, and the surrounding forest is filled with leafless, rotting trunks. Beneath her hooves is a single, broken bough. She stares at the viewer calmly and defiantly as if to say, "I may be frail and disfigured (Ms. Kahlo in real life suffered greatly from a violent accident that ruined her spine), but I will not be your martyr." The image is shocking because we are accustomed to images of slain deer lying gracefully at the feet of their Noble hunters, not wounded ones that pierce our voyeuristic stare. By turning her (wounded) self into a deer she confronts our infantile belief that nature should please and serve us but never interfere with our selfish goals.

The Little Deer by Frieda Kahlo 1946

     Today, it seems the deer is simply vilified. A modern retelling of Little Red Riding Hood would have virtuous Red devoured by the Big Bad Deer. The predator-wolf still terrifies but deer are now at least equally loathed for their affront to suburban idealism. Yet, try as we may to eradicate deer because they no longer please us, animism cannot simply be waved away--deer are firmly embedded in our imagination. We proudly build our miniature castles on lush landscapes and along comes the ravaging deer to ridicule our fantasies, reducing us to our naked, mortal selves: creatures who are too impotent to stop the wild from being wild, or at least from being uninvited. 

Bleeding Deer, Original Art by L-Dopa

     This new conflict between deer and humans is one caused mainly by economy and politics. Democratically speaking, anyone can purchase his own (infinitely smaller) Windsor Castle, but deer are no longer a symbol of the landowner's potency. Landscapes are costly to install and demand fiscal input: mowing, weeding, fertilizing and pruning all take from our pocketbooks and our free time, which we earn from our jobs. Vegetable beds and fruit trees honestly don't save anyone much money--we do it for pleasure and romance--and the stakes are high. Deer, although only one of many assaults every garden will endure, can be an especially grave insult to the gardener. The anger is real but misplaced. Citizens cry foul, demanding government intervention, and somewhere above the shouts for vengeance is the sound of Diana's mellifluous voice, begging to be heard: she would only like a moment of our time to remind us that sadly, we have forgotten, she has never cared one wit for politics.  

Shane VanOosterhout is The Passionate Gardener.  

For more garden inspiration, you can follow him on Facebook. 

Bright Lights Big Basil

     "Grow your own wonderful fresh cooking and other herbs indoors all year long, and stop paying grocery store prices! Get started with your own indoor herb garden in minutes and have fresh herbs 

within weeks!"

All Photos by Shane VanOosterhout

    

     I lifted the above quote from wheatgrasskits.com, one of the many websites selling indoor herb kits. For their low price of $29.95 you receive 12 different herb seed packets and a growing kit that includes a plastic tray with a lid: "the perfect climate for fast herb growth." 

     The perfect climate...where? Hawaii?  Spain?  The South of France?  Last time I miniaturized myself and crawled under a moisturized plastic dome I thought of Minneapolis on July 20, 2011 when the heat index hit 119 degrees and the dew point spiked 82%.

Full-spectrum light from T5 florescent bulbs.

     Yes, heat and humidity are necessary for seed germination, but so is light--a lot of it, and forget about a bright windowsill because winter's sun in the northern hemisphere is far too feeble. The only way to achieve an adequate growing climate for herbs indoors is to provide an artificial light source.  So, let's talk a little about foot candles, or how the strength of light is measured when it strikes a surface.

     Today, January 28, more than a month past our winter Solstice, at 1:30 in the afternoon, my light meter reads about 1800 foot candles when I touch it directly on the window glass. At six inches away from the glass, the foot candles drop to 1500. 

     Herbs need, at the very minimum, 2,000 foot candles of light, which is still on the far end of wimpy when you consider that the bright summer sun delivers 10,000 foot candles, the same time of year when seasonal herbs are at their peak.

     When I place a light meter on my growing table it reads about 4,400 foot candles, as you can see in the photo below.

    

My dad's old light meter from the 1950's.  Vintage.

     During the first week of January I sowed a handful of herb seeds in four-inch pots. By the way, I've been using the same Basil packet since 2009 and the seeds are still viable. Truth is most garden seeds have a long shelf life if they are kept perfectly dry at room temperature. 

Renee's Seeds are excellent, and the packets are very well-designed.

Baby Basil's first set of true leaves rising above its cotyledon.

  

       Indoor seeds should be started in a soil-less mix (literally contains no soil particles), not potting soil. Potting soil holds too much moisture for tender baby plants with tiny root structures. The (non) soil temperature must be warm--70 degrees, and consistently moist (but not wet) or the seeds will not germinate.  As for those plastic domed mini greenhouses?  Watch out, they quickly become tropical mini rain forests--great for terrariums, terrible for herb seedlings, which are vulnerable to rot. 

Second set of true leaves.

     Once the new plants have their second set of true leaves, transplant them into a high quality potting mix--light, fluffy, with added perlite, and allow the soil to dry between watering. Notice in the photo above that the stems are thick and strong, not spindly or bending over.  Also notice that the distance between the two sets of leaves is compact, not leggy, and the foliage is a lovely, rich green color.  

     In a few weeks from now I'll be making pesto!  

Larger pots can accommodate up to four Basil plants.

Parsley seedlings.

I love Rosemary!

This fine lady is more than a decade old. Her tiny flowers are pure white.

Severe pruning stimulates tender shoots on old wood. 

Shane VanOosterhout is The Passionate Gardener.  

For more garden inspiration, you can follow him on Facebook. 

Gardeners, Travelers, Friends

       "Gardening is a long road, with many detours and way stations, and here we all are at one point or another. It's not a question of superior or inferior taste, merely a question of which detour we are on at the moment. Getting there (as they say) is not important -- the wandering about in the wilderness or in the olive groves or in the bayous is the whole point."  Henry Mitchell
 

     Five years ago I met a tiny woman with bobbed, ivory hair named Alice Wilkes.  She struck me as once-famous 1920's flapper girl who had traded table top dancing for gardening because at the age of eighty-three it made good sense to keep nearer to the ground. 

      Alice showed up at my workplace brimming with questions. Apparently her raspberries had gone bad over the years as raspberries always do and she was looking for a better variety.  I recommended some reliable mail order companies that sell virus-free bramble stock.

     Alice and I hit it off quite well. The ladies at my office remarked that I had made a new friend and sure enough, she called me two weeks later. "I do wish you'd come for a visit and see my garden," she said.  

     When I arrived Alice seemed reluctant to invite me in through the front door, ordering me to meet her outside at the rear of the house.  On the way I passed a detached old garage filled with everything but an automobile -- shovels, trowels, hoes, rakes, forks, towers of clay pots, bags of manure and fertilizer.  It was so crammed with garden apparel that there was scarcely enough room to stand, but looking at Alice's diminutive body I believed she could crawl unscathed through loops of barbed wire to find a good spade if she needed one.

     Her garden wandered along a narrow strip of side-yard, each off-kilter bed growing into the next as if the plants had burst through uneven walls and she had set forth, ant-like, to contain the green spill within a new border of smooth beach stones.  

     "It's really just a lot of plants I like."  Alice said it so plainly that any scoundrel would take her at face value, but I knew better.  She was a true connoisseur.

     She pointed out her recent acquisitions and we both agreed that creeping miniature sedum 'Angelina' was a stand-out, although she remorsefully added that hers was subject to a bit too much afternoon shade and was therefore spindly.  

     The real jewel, however, was soon revealed:  a common Mediterranean fig (Ficus carica) that had wondrously survived three consecutive Michigan winters.

     "Any fruit?"  I asked, greatly impressed.

     Alice shook her head.  "The dog-gone things never get big enough to ripen before the snow hits.  Maybe this year I'll hit the jackpot."

     For a while we simply sat on the cool earth, noting our shared affection for rampant clover in turfgrass, praising the weather and hinting at politics (we agreed).  I learned that her husband had recently died and that her son had been killed in the Vietnam war but she said it all with a slight shrug, not indifferently but without complaint.

      Before we parted, Alice shared some of her Cranesbill and loaned me her paperback edition of Henry Mitchell's book One Man's Garden.  "He's marvelous," she promised, adding, "If you don't care for him I just might not be able to be your friend."

     Oh, Alice, I thought, I love it when you talk like that.

     The next time we met, just before August's conclusion, I gave her a dense clump of Helianthus maximiliani, which I instantly regretted. Where on earth would she put this rocketing prairie giant in her small suburban garden?  I warned her that if she showed it too much affection she might be sorry.

     I spent the cold months reading One Man's Garden, relieved that Alice and I would remain friends after all.  That was five years ago, a blink of an eye.  We visited only once this summer, regretfully too near the end of things, but her late-season raspberries were refusing to quit and we stood on the driveway, happily eating them together.

     Alice said nothing that humid afternoon of the plastic tube tucked beneath her nose, nor did I ask. I gave her a new copy of Doug Tallamy's revelatory book Bringing Nature Home, promising her she'd adore it as much as I do.  We observed the gently swaying curly locks of her Corkscrew Willow and then she said it was time for her to go to dinner with her daughter -- they were having burritos.  Glancing at her, tinier than ever, I wondered where all those beans could possibly fit.

     Alice phoned my office the next week but missed me.  She had a question about figs -- would they ripen indoors if they were still green?  I returned the call but received her answering machine.  "I'll be here on Wednesday," I said, "I look forward to talking with you then."

     I did not hear from Alice again.  A co-worker broke the news as she handed me Alice's obituary.  I placed it on my desk next to the yellow notepad where I had written a reminder.  My handwriting seemed urgent.  "Call Alice," it said.  

     When I thought of Alice's garden without Alice there to tend it, it was too awful to consider.  The best I could do to ease my sadness was to revisit the words of Henry Mitchell, a man who wisely understood that in our deepest hearts, gardeners become the luckiest of traveling companions when we cherish our journey together, even if we only cross paths every once in a while.

   

Introducing Country Living and Ty Pennington Themed Christmas Decor     

Heckled

   













     I was recently heckled at a ladies' gardening club. 
   "What about the weeds?" An old woman narrowed her eyes in contempt, as if I had spoken unholy words.
    "I'm sorry?" I asked.
     "What about the weeds I said!"
     "What would you like to know about them?"
     "You used the word "natural."  A natural garden will just fill up with weeds."
     I rewound my thoughts.  "Yes, good point, a weed management program is necessary to maintain any sort of garden.  I am speaking today on garden design that is not formal.  "Natural" does not mean you allow the weeds to take over."
     She said no more but her expression did not convey satisfaction.  Perhaps she was just displeased with the lunch options.
     I concluded my lecture without further complaints, although another woman left early (not before noisily bundling some brownish cookies into a paper napkin) and there was a couple in the back row who chatted furiously throughout, their heads bobbing like a pair of tweedling sparrows.
     Public speaking is not without entanglements.  Many people I know are terrified of facing a group and opening their mouth at the same time, insisting that they'd rather take a sharp stick in the eye, but giving a horticulture presentation is one of my favorite things to do.  The process combines some of my best creative skills:  writing, photography, verbalizing ideas, and sarcasm.  
     Crafting an engaging garden lecture is no different from telling a good story, as long as the story is told by someone who is recommending horse shit, not selling it.  
     Over time, gardeners naturally become good skeptics.  They've heard a zillion claims and tried as many gimmicks.  Say "Meadow in a Can" to a room full of knowing gardeners and you are guaranteed to get a laugh. 
     I once attended a garden convention where a man was marketing a "microbial caffeinated soil enhancer." 
     "Why caffeine?" I asked.
     "Because it wakes up the beneficial bacteria and gets them off to a fast start."
     There was some horseshit I wasn't buying.




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The Lessons of Raspberries, Japanese Beetles & Winston Churchill.

Early this spring I tore out all of the raspberry canes at the roots and promptly burned them, following the recommended guidelines for old brambles (seven years). It was not too painful a chore. Raspberry plants are not at their best in clay soil, and despite my best efforts - proper pruning and fertilization - they have been only a moderate success in my garden.

What my raspberry plants did provide me with more reliably than fruit were Japanese beetles, the miniature WMDs of the insect world, gifted to us from Japan in 1916 via a shipment of iris bulbs received by way of port in Riverton, New Jersey.

Until I planted those blasted raspberries I could readily boast of having Japanese beetle-free gardens. Perhaps it was only a coincidence, but either way, two years after the raspberries were planted, the Japanese beetles located me by way of their internal GPS. At first the ravenous barbarians seemed to prefer the raspberries to anything else in the garden. Fine! I convinced myself they could have the damn things. "Devour them all!" I cried.

But this was only an early stage of denial: bargaining with the insect gods to sacrifice my middling raspberries for the sake of everything else they love to eat. Then, as they swarmed and mated and buzzed and oozed their slatternly perfume to the wind like degenerate gluttons at Caligula's penultimate orgy, hatred seeped into my arteries.

I was cornered, indentured to confession: I have Japanese beetles. Oh, how these four words chilled my marrow. I vowed to fight, to be brave, to not let them beat me at my game. Every evening after work I stalked the little demons with reprisal, plunging hundreds of wriggling beetles into a bucket of soapy water where, like hoards of flying Rasputins, they clung to life with shocking tenacity. To witness this phenomenon, I immediately discovered, is as equally horrific as it is beautiful.

The war declared, I began to doubt my natural approach to I.P.M. Each time I entered a hardware store I found myself drifting, trance-like, toward the shelves of brightly colored pesticide containers, every label a declaration of annihilation of loathsome garden pests.

Then one day I purchased a bottle of Sevin (carbaryl).

I applied the Sevin to my raspberries. The Japanese beetles seemed mildly irritated but only a handful died. Some flew away before I sprayed them. Many departed unscathed even after I sprayed them.

The day following the first application, the beetles returned to dine, yesterday now forgotten.


As I approached the raspberry patch I stopped to listen to the hum of pollinators collecting nectar up and down the flowering canes. My eyes followed a spider as it danced across a billowing web like an eight-legged ballerina, her private stage hidden within a jungle of glowing green leaves and flickering shadows. Brown ants, fearless, busily streamed atop the shaded leaf litter as they carried the food that would sustain their colony.

When I thought of the lethal rain of insecticide falling down upon all this life, all this important activity, silencing it for the sake of a few raspberries, I reminded myself why I garden in the first place: to woo nature closer and learn from what I see.

In battle a man is tested.

Winston Churchill once said, "Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesmen who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforseeable and uncontrollable events."

I did not ever again apply Sevin to my raspberries but instead returned to hand murdering each Japanese beetle, hurling them into a sudsy bucket. The rows neatly gleaned, I dug a hole and buried the dead.

Shane VanOosterhout is The Passionate Gardener.  

For more garden inspiration, you can follow him on Facebook. 

Good Yews

By Shane VanOosterhout

The mighty yew (Family: Taxacaea; Genus Taxus) is a woody plant I used to disdain. How ridiculous of me. What I understand now is that I was judging the yew not on its own merits but instead because it is often used poorly in the home landscape.

I should clarify. The yew is used extensively in the home landscape because it possesses remarkable characteristics, mainly that it is nearly indestructible (tolerates abusive pruning) and is evergreen even in part sun to part shade.

Professional nursery growers love the yew because it propagates easily from cuttings. Landscapers love the yew because it is a budget-friendly shrub and provides instant green on the new, barren home site. In effect, it is probably the utilitarian nature of the yew that has contributed to unintended ugliness in our country.


Yews can grow 30-60 feet and spread 15-25 feet. There is a famous 300-year-old hedge on Bathurst Estate in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, England that is 40 feet tall that requires the aid of cherry pickers and two days' work to keep its shapely figure.

As an ornamental the yew has quite literally defined the gardens of the upper classes for centuries. Descriptions of lovelorn women scampering breathlessly through tall shrubbery is a veritable staple of British Empire narrative.

In the United Kingdom the yew is highly romanticized, its history full of lore, long-associated with mysticism, Druid culture and fertility rituals. The heartwood was used for crafting the longbow, a formidably powerful weapon used for defense and hunting.


In most American landscapes yews are planted on small lots where homeowners eventually begin to fear them or hate them as is evidently plain in their need to attack them with saws or throw bicycles at them.

Pruned or not, the yew is at its most stately and beguiling when allowed to develop some stature. Larger yews have elegance; they are regal and bespeak their ancient story. The needles are superior in the garden, their glossy foliage dark and powerful, providing essential texture, form and color.

The best looking yews I spot in neighborhoods are those that were planted with the intent of "disguising" the air condition units or the electric box. They are generally ignored which means they are given permission to grow. After 10-15 years these yews become handsome specimens even if they do tend to look a bit goofy stuck out on the corner of the lot with no companions to keep them company.


Nervous types get antsy when it comes to the toxicity of the yew, *banning them from playgrounds or anywhere children might play. Sources are known to erroneously report that the fruit (aril) is poisonous. The author(s) of an article on Botanical.com state of the yew: "Poisonous Parts---Leaves, seed and fruit" but in fact the poison taxane resides in the seed not the flesh of the fruit. (A reminder to carefully check your sources when researching online).

As a maturing gardener I've come to love the yew in a way I never thought I would. Plants have little say in where they end up in the landscape and I suppose it is not always fair to blame them for looking ruinous. I've always said that if plants could talk we would not have to dig them up and relocate them 20-30 times before finding them a proper home.

If you have a spot in your landscape to plant just one single yew where it can gain some real size I highly recommend doing so. Resist shaping it. Let it be. In time you will discover why our cousins across the pond hold the beautiful, practical yew in such high esteem.



*41 percent of all poisonings reported occur in the home kitchen, 21 percent in the bathroom and 12 percent in the bedroom, leaving 26 percent for other places, according to Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Statistically. the garden is not such a dangerous place for children.

What is your time worth?

"What is your time worth? Though it is often asked, I do not think this question answerable. It is the same as asking what your life is worth. And I can give it only the same nonanswer: it is worth whatever it means. the ideas that you cannot afford to raise a garden is based on the assumption that it means money, that if you are not receiving the top dollar for every minute of your life, you are suffering a "loss" - a doctrine that would not only put an end to gardens, but soon drive us all to theft or suicide."

Wendell Berry, from his essays The Gift of Good Land.

Green Thumbs Don't Grow on Trees

People often tell me they aren't good gardeners, as if possessing a green thumb is a genetic trait, bestowed only to a lucky few. To this I reply, "If any of us were born with green thumbs we'd no doubt be spending a fortune on trying to correct the problem."

The metaphor of the green thumb is best suited to describe a hard-earned honor, a skill gained from routine practice, from many years of experience.

If there is a "secret" to becoming a good gardener, to turning one's thumb green as it were, it is not an inborn trait; it is passion, and everyone has passion.

The surprising thing about becoming a gardener is discovering your passion; rousing ancient senses within your mind and body that will lead you on a lifelong journey. Little did you know that new seedlings just up from the warm soil have their own unique odor, just as the sweet smell of babies can only be found on babies.

When hands touch a leaf or stem or petal one's nerves tingle. The brain, I am convinced, was long-ago wired to communicate intuitively with the botanical. This is not a magical phenomenon, it is evolutionary, for without a trait for the desire to care for plants the human race would undoubtedly perish; our earliest ancestors secured a place for homo sapien through the very act of gardening, through forming emotional connections with plants.