From Heather Gladney
Chlorophyll
You might think writing has little or nothing to do with gardening. This is just like people who think writing has nothing to do with cooking. Silly people! If you've ever read a Penzey's Spice catalog, or a Cook's Magazine, you have been subjected to a rarified and very exacting form of writing, one that I think is even more technically demanding than writing romance novels. Some call it food porn.
There is also garden catalog porn. Let us pass over the poor mass mailing offers printed on flimsy paper. Let us regard, instead, the great traditions of rose and orchid catalogs past—one classic old rose catalog I used to get from a nursery in Watsonville could make your mouth water and your nose twitch over black and white print, no pictures at all, except on the cover. This writing was so good that it materialized little bare-root plants right into your hands without you noticing that it ever hit your wallet. It described one rose bloom as “the exact color of raspberry puree swirled into heavy whipped cream, and with a smell to match.” Other descriptions invoked ivory evening gown satin, or gray silk, or the scent of violets, or it stated this crisp white bloom was the perfect size to put in your buttonhole for a gentleman's boutanniere. It conjured up the world of Fred Astaire's movies, or thirties mysteries, such as Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie, or Josephine Tey's mysteries, with a side-glance toward Nero Wolfe's orchids. They were doing it in perhaps three paragraphs per variety, maximum. I'm not a huge fan of Thirties style glamor, actually. But I do like the economy of writing in those mysteries and in the catalog writing that invokes it. I've learned to pay attention when I come across writing like this, because I would love to become so effectively concise. Such writers wallow in the details. They are paying so much attention that they will tell you what the difference in the color of the *leaves* in different rose varieties.
Gardening will teach you to look at things at a scale that many people never even examine. Distinguishing what you're looking at well enough to do a decent job of weeding and pruning will teach you to see different shades of green and slightly different forms among very similar plants. Once your educated eye can see that, you can see it elsewhere.
I actually started off as a gardener because I was a bored teenager with a stack of old Sunset books at home and I'd run out of fiction. These were the original paperbacks put out back in the sixties and seventies. The Sunset books made basic planting and harvesting sound perfectly easy at the time, and that's a slippery slope indeed. That was what got me started on trying out things in dirt. They are still pretty darned effective garden catalog porn. The pictures are important in all of those types of books, whether from Ortho or HP or any of the other publishers. I'm still a sucker for that perfectly composed bloom shot. I blame it on being a visual person, myself. Now I love odd colors in flowers and variegated leaves, and of course I think red Japanese maples against yellow-green ground covers are fabulous. Show me a truly brown rose bloom—it can have purplish streaks in it--and I'm nuts for it. There are, of course, some difficulties with this. I've killed a lot of innocent plants in my time, and I will admit it is true of any experienced gardener.
I still perpetrate green stuff. Also, I admit it, I am something of a reformed collector. I used to do African violets under lights, for instance. Now I do orchids inside, as they're much easier for people who are short on time. Soak 'em once a week in active growth, leave water in the humidity tray, call it good. Their flowers these days are enormous, too, and last for ages.
Some people would say that I'm wasting my time when I am not writing, when I waft away to the lovely green expanses I keep round the house, where I sniff the flowers and clip an errant twig or two-- why yes, I do write fantasy, why do you ask??
Sigh.
Truth be told, my garden thinks that I need to get out and wrassle things that are a lot bigger than I am. Apparently it also thinks that I ought to make the occasional blood offering to the gods, too. It's quite happy to oblige. When I need some ungentle exercise (and sometimes when I'm really not in the mood anyway) I go outside to battle it out with dallis grass and rampant wisteria and blackberry vines and tangle with wisteria—oh, and I almost forgot the Virginia creeper that came in from goodness only knows where, probably from berries, with the help of local birds. Not to mention the volunteer plums and Persian walnut and Japanese privet trees, some of which are well past the stage of nice pencil-size graftable whips, and well up on their way to shading out the competition in the rose beds. Yeah, well, winter pruning hasn't been high on the list of to-dos the last couple of years, I'm afraid. That said, the roses are holding out awfully well, considering the kind of thugs they're up against.
The roses are what people notice first. These are not your neighbor's prissy battered little fusspots butchered down to a pathetic set of stubs that barely get to knee-high. These bushes are, shall we say, substantial. If they were tabby cats, they'd be Norwegian Forest tabby cats, or mackerel tabby Maine Coons, or possibly bobcats.
A lot of the traditional perennials, and roses, are a good choice for the kind of soil I have. If I can get something started growing in this heavy clay soil, and it can survive being completely waterlogged for 2-3 months in the winter, it can make use of all that clay to get very happy. Very happy. Very...large. This is not helped by my tendency to properly winter prune things in rotations maybe every 3-4 years, and not fussing with it much the rest of the time.
I can give you some examples, too.
White butterfly bush, catalog says it gets 2-4 feet tall. Mine? Cut it out of the powerlines, please, it's making the lights flicker whenever the wind blows. Part of it broke out in a storm about five years ago. The broken trunks were about four inches thick.
Dwarf spirea, catalog says 2 feet tall. Well, gee, it's only about three feet tall for me. Ah hah! while it may not get tall, it goes wide. Recent division (I split the original trunk with a pruning saw) planted about four years ago, is now about five feet wide, near the mailbox. And the front entry. And the back patio. And the...
This is the problem with vigorous plants that give you plenty of divisions, of course. I could make it worse. I'm warning you now. I could give this thing away to other people.
Mr. Lincoln is a dark red hybrid tea rose. The catalog says that, well-grown, it should be about 4-5 feet tall, and as wide. It is to laugh, I tell you. This thing becomes what anybody else would call a climber. (Wait till you see my climbers.) But he's not alone in his sprawl, oh no—those canes are indistinguishable from the morass of equally tall other varieties all flopping about on the fence top and waving about far above it. (Fence is eight feet tall.) Not tall enough for you? Over there is Taboo, another dark red older variety, which reportedly tends to the taller end for a hybrid tea. Uh huh... Let's try about thirteen feet on that one, although I'm not entirely sure. I really did prune that one, just last winter! Really, I did! You couldn't tell it now, of course.
Rosarians would look at this mess in horror and shout at me that it's more like a berry bramble than a series of properly trained rose bushes. Well, maybe not shout. Many of them would say it firmly, in that very polite manner which reminds me of British drawing room mysteries, and which is much worse than shouting. They'd be right, too.
The heaps of wisteria tangles are the worst. It can shade out Bermuda grass, which is amazing. Honestly, I don't understand why a nice purple flower and and a threatening tendril of 'wisteria rampant' isn't one of the common images used in heraldry designs, because it's capable of strangling any unicorns or lions that plow into it. Goodness knows it's got nefarious designs on my house--last year it tried to rip the gutters off, and was going for the neighbor's puny tinwork as well.
There really is a limit to how long the desirable (i.e., non-aggressive plants) can hold out against the bullies, and my garden has been coming up on those limits for some years now. One weekend I began an effort to get started clearing things away in a serious manner. The manner where you hire folks who are stronger than you are, and ask them to come in to yank and haul and whack, and you don't worry too much when they step on things or break things. You just worry about them falling into things, screaming, and never being found again.
So, we have started on it. The white tea rose climber 'Sombreuil' is going to be vastly happier with the heaps of stray grape vine and wisteria cleared away. I hope I can get a trellis capable of holding it up before it tries to eat the pathway again. I'm thinking it needs something welded in iron, maybe like a bent or tri-fold screen. It really is a climber by nature. Around here, it was shooting canes twelve and fifteen feet long without effort, before it got overwhelmed by the real bullies. It gives you some idea of the dangers of wisteria when I tell you that this rose was really struggling under the burden.
The other sad bit of neglect is that, after marathon improvement work to begin with, when I dug up the original planting beds, I have only gone through occasional bursts of weeding and adding horse stable bedding and grass clippings since. The last two years, things have been neglected except for mild doses of fertilizer every few weeks in the summer.
Well, okay, okay, maybe the fertilizer does have something to do with it. When I get bags of the makings, I mix it up in five gallon cat litter buckets and toss it around the place as if I'm sowing grass seed, and water it in. That's about every three weeks or so. (That's an easy, low-guilt job that does not involve wrassling.)
It's based on the advice of local rosarians to fit our local soils. It's usually three parts general 16-16-16 garden fertilizer, two parts alfalfa pellets such as rabbit feed, one to two parts Citrus, acid, or azalea food, one part Ironite, and one half part Epsom salts. The alfalfa has extra growth promoters which really help roses develop new basal canes, the acid foods and Ironite help supply iron chelates as iron is unavailable in this alkaline soil, and the Epsom supplies magnesium that we lack, even though it's so alkaline. Obviously your mileage may vary. If I was in a high-rainfall, acidic soil area, I'd be throwing about the dolomite (lime) powder instead.
In addition, I siphon water from my fishtank (which has its own nutrients added, see the Wetlab page) and I add soluble orchid fertilizers to it when I soak my orchids, and then I dilute that solution with more tank water. I carry that outside to potted plants outside with this micronutrient-heavy brew. There's usually only enough to do containers, mainly because I get tired carrying out that many five gallon buckets of water.
Any gardener will tell you there's never enough soil amendments, and never enough mulch afterward. I haven't kept up on it either. This means that the little micro-organisms go on breaking down all that organic stuff that I added, and after fifteen years here, we're right back to original heavy clay soil. Any vegetable gardener can tell you this will never do! You have to keep adding things and improving the soil—yes, even if you just dump it on the surface, and call it a fancy word like mulch, so you can pretend that it wasn't involved with lawn mowers or chicken pens or horse stalls or whatever.
A few months ago, I got a largish compost bin that has been eager to get shredded cardboard and paper along with the extra vegetable trash from our CSA farm box. Fortuitously, we also got a stronger shredder which likes cardboard because it cleans out the grinder teeth nicely. So I've been busily hauling out bags of paper shred and compost. I do hope it will stop looking like shredded paper one of these days. I'm concerned it will end up looking like wisteria, instead.
About the Author will take you to further discussion on how I ended up writing.
Bibliography will take you to the listing of works completed so far.
About the Series will take you to more details on the Teot's War series of sf & f books.
Short Stuff will take you to a goody page of links. There's pdf scans of short stories, research and maps related to the Teot series.
Wetlab will take you to another messy non-work preoccupation.
Site Archives take you to old blog-type comments carried over from the ghosts of ancient websites past, if you were interested in seeing how things develop, and just how far back all this goes.
Rather than maintaining an entire page of links that always need updating, I've posted lots of bizarre and useful links, with tags, here: http://del.icio.us/hgladney