GroHappy

Celebrating the sun

To say that it has been unusual winter in the Northeast is an understatement and the first day of Spring was no different with temperatures in the mid 70s in Fairfield County and every chlorophyll-filled entity thinking it was May. In celebration of the season, we went for a nature walk at Ann’s Place and built sundials from trees and branches that were downed last year during our hurricane and Snotober.

The grounds were accommodating in beginning to show off their potential. A few of the 4,000 daffodils planted in the back started to unveil themselves though most were just awakening. The muscari was emerging along the path, its bunches of tiny grape-like purple blooms poking their spears though the soil appearing among the greening fescue grass.

As we walked the grounds everyone was amazed by how all the buds were swollen and ready to burst. “Here are a couple of things you want to avoid,” I pointed out. I then cut a sprout of Japanese barberry from a plant that had lodged itself in the rocks showing the class the tail tell orange innards as well as the spiky stems. “If you have this in your yard, you want to get rid of it. It may be pretty but it will take over,” I said and then pointed to the wetland area beyond the fence. It was filled with barberry, which was letting little else survive. Some skunk cabbages were making an attempt to show and flower, but they were hard to see under the blanket of greening barberry.

“Here is something else you want to avoid,” as I pointed to an attractive green floret. I attempted to pull it off but snapped off the stem. “This is not what you want to do when you try to get rid of garlic mustard. Pretty soon we will have to start weeding in earnest.”

As we walked around the garden, the sun started poking through the clouds. It was a good time to bring the group back to the front where I had set up an example of what we would be building that afternoon: a sundial.

“This is what all of you will be making today, a sundial. My wife, who is vastly more talented than me, made this one and it is accurate to our longitude and latitude.”

As some of my clients looked at me strangely (a familiar look) I explained. “It is guaranteed that nearly any sundial you purchase will be wrong as it need to be timed, so to speak, to the latitude and longitude where the sundial will reside. For people in the New York City area . . .” I then went on to describe the mathematics of sundials and how they work.  While the class was interested and attentive in how sundials worked it was clear they wanted to start building their own sundials.

Unlike other exercises we have had, building a sundial is much less free form as there are two important things you must consider. The first is transferring hour lines to the correct position on the dial face. The other is to position the gnomon, which casts the shadow on the dial, in the center of the dial so it lays directly above the line for high noon.

In keeping with the horticultural therapy theme, I cut the dials from a locust and black birch trees that fell on my property during the year. The gnomons were cut from Japanese red maple, sugar maple, black birch, and oak. I cut the disks as uniform as I could and then used my table saw to cut each gnomon so that it would lay on the dial at an angle of 41 degrees, which is the latitude of the NYC area. Given these materials, a series of instructions and templates, the group set off to work.

The usual casual chatter was deferred for quiet determination as each client focused on drawing their lines on the slab of their choice accurately. “Remember nothing is wrong until you commit a permanent marker to the wood and even then we can probably sand most anything off.”

Unlike other sessions, this one was filled with purpose and concentration. One of the clients became frustrated early as she was having a hard time working through the transfers of the sundial hour lines to her dial. “Nothing is wrong with what you are doing,” I assured her. “Just determine which direction you want your sundial to point toward and put down the template like this.” I demonstrated how to transfer the information and she became much calmer. A slight smile emerged.

“The fun part of this is how you personalize the sundial and what type of designs you want to consider. Those should be done free hand without transfer paper.”

As the session went on, everyone became more at ease with the task at hand and started to create different and unique designs (which I could not record as the battery on my camera died.) The chatter started slowly and then people were talking and sharing ideas as has been typical. When they were finished, each had a sundial that would tell time in their back yard. All were very happy with their accomplishment.

“I never would have thought about doing something like this,” said one. “But it turned out better than I ever could have imagined.”

When the clients finished their pieces, I sprayed them a few times with a quick drying lacquer to hold up against the elements. “You should consider putting a coat or two of spar varnish on these if you want them to last outside,” I suggested.

I then told them how to set their sundials at night, gave them a instruction sheet to help them remember and then sent them on their way. As I was cleaning up I noticed that the sun was still visible in the sky and my wife’s sundial had been left out still telling time.

Vacation from gardening, sort of

When it is February in Connecticut, there are few gardening tasks at hand as the soil is cold and the only thing that warms the soul is the prospect of new growth pushing through the ground in the next month or so. In the next week I will be starting flats of early greens and other vegetables. Flowers and warm-weather vegetables a few weeks later. As my horticultural activities are in stasis, I thought it was a good time to head down south where I can get a jump on a farmer’s tan and enjoy the already green landscape.

If we were having a spring-like winter up north, the south was experiencing a summer-like winter with temperatures in the mid-80s. The grass was a lush green, trees in full bloom and sun lovers in all manners of undress. The wind off the ocean felt warm with the slightest smell of seaweed.

So like a long dormant perennial I soaked up the sun. I was a plant, not a gardener. This would not last as eventually the siren song of working in a garden would prove to be too enticing.

One morning at my friend Brian’s house in the Florida Key’s, he mentioned that he needed some help cleaning out and cutting down vegetation around his fish pond, which had been depleted of fish by a resident frog and crab.  This sounded like a nice way to spend the morning so naturally I volunteered. At first I thought just a few small trees and bushes would need to be removed. When my friend got out the chain saw I realized that the job would become much larger.

When you live in the north you don’t realize that potentially invasive nature of a Southern garden. Like the ruins of Tikal or Chichén-Itzá if you stop cutting down foliage, it will quickly overrun your space. That is kind of what happened in my friend’s fish pond. He planted a couple of papyrus plants in his pond and within a few years, it had spread and taken over. An agave plant that was taken from a tiny houseplant was now the size of a small elephant with porcupine sharp spikes. Trees that started as sticks a few years back, shot up 10 feet high with tuffs of leaves on their tops shading everything below. And finally a neighbor's tree with spiked bark hung over the fence completing the darkening of this area.

It started simply enough with a few small trees being removed with little problem. It didn’t appear to be too hot and the prospect to work outside was appealing to me with my exposed snow-colored legs reflecting the sun like the White Sands in New Mexico. Soon I was up on a ladder cutting down limbs with a chain saw with sawdust falling in my eyes and beginning to coat my increasingly sweaty shirt. Within an hour my skin was covered with creamy, yellow dust that I hoped that I was not allergic to as it became pasty on my epidermis. You never know in the topics.

With each toppled branch came the opportunity to cut another. And another, And another. Little thorns were sticking in my arm like severed stingers from a swarm of angry bumblebees. Razor-like leaves etched fine lines in my legs and arms: the work of Nature’s tattooist.   I was a stinky, sweaty, bloody mess. It was great! Soon we had cleared out enough brush to fill half of Brian’s back patio area and opened the pond to sun it hadn’t seen in years. Brian was happy with the results and said that he could easily muck out the pond, evicting it of its unwelcome tenants.

Fine by me. I was happy to finish a morning’s gardening. Time for a shower and beer.

Starting from scratch

There was nothing but barberry as far as the eye could see. Dead trees, thick vines, large boulders were scattered around an inhospitable landscape. This is what I have to work with to create a therapeutic space.

It should be fun.

(I have to admit I’m a bit behind on my writing. Unlike the photo below, the ground is now covered with a over a foot of snow with the promise of another foot on its way.)

In a prior life I often looked at such circumstances as problems to be dealt with; now I see them as opportunities to exploit.

 

 

With the start of a new year comes a great opportunity to practice horticultural therapy with a new group of clients at Ann’s Place, a cancer support group in Danbury, CT, that will be opening its permanent headquarters sometime in the Spring. I have been talking with Wilda Hayes, the executive director, on and off for the past year but it wasn’t until this past summer where we got started in earnest. Wilda is a kindred spirit who understands the healing powers that working with plants can afford. One of the challenges, however, was finding an exterior space to work with clients. She didn’t see much hope.

“What about the property in the back?” I asked.

Wilda somewhat dismissed it while adding that there wasn’t much we could do as the landscaping/mitigation plan had already been approved by the town. Being naive about such things I asked her if we could arrange a visit with Dan Baroody, the official who dealt with mitigation issues for Danbury. I would propose to him a vastly different and expanded mitigation plan. And it worked. He liked the idea. Now I just had to design it.

The prior mitigation plan removed around 1,500 square feet of barberry and had 60 plants (five different cultivars) tightly planted. My revised plan removed over 7,500 square feet of barberry and has nearly 140 plants (26 different cultivars) planted in both tight and spaced out configurations. In removing all the barberry, we discovered abandoned stone walls, one of which I rebuilt, and very interesting spaces that we could use for therapy. 

We spent much of October and November removing all of the invasive species as well as dead trees. After a rough grading and the construction of nearly 300 feet of nature trails, we started to plant.

I was torn between all the different trees and shrubs to consider. On the one hand I wanted to have a wide array of native species. On the other I didn’t want to serve up too much deer salad. So I stayed (mostly) with cultivars and species that are theoretically distasteful to deer. They include black chokeberry, red osier dogwood, winterberry, spiraea and American cranberry. I broke this rule in selecting some mountain laurel as well as low- and high-bush blueberries though I am hoping that their position will minimize predation. After two days of digging and planting we were mostly done.

In the Spring, we will seed the area directly in front of Ann’s Place with a no-mow native fescue grass seed and the remaining areas adjacent to the wetlands with a New England conservation/wildlife seed mix that contains many native grasses and flowers that used to be all too common in this area.

Another area was planted with daffodil bulbs: about 3500. Because the ground was so full of ledge rock, I roughed up the soil a bit, put the bulb down on its stem and then put 6 inches of topsoil over them all. If the bulbs hit any rocks with their roots, they will just push themselves up a bit through the loosened top soil over time. At least that’s the theory. This will become the basis of a memorial garden that we are building.

We have lots of plans for other spaces, but we ran out of time in early December when an early hard frost made the ground like concrete stopping any further work. We will continue in the spring.

The idea of virgin territory is just that, an idea. So much of the Northeast has been altered and invaded since settled over 300 years ago that whenever a new space is examined it must be done through the lens of transformation and mitigation. I’m hoping that the spaces the we are creating at Ann’s Place not only restore native plants to an old home but also happiness for a troubled client base.

I’ll keep you posted.

Freezing a feeding possum

One of the battles that gardeners have with wildlife is over compost. We see our piles as a way to transform plant waste into nutritious compost that will help the next generation of plants grow and be healthy. Wildlife often sees compost piles as a 24/7 diner where they can sample the latest seasonal fare.

I used to be very laissez-faire about the construction of my pile. Some pieces of old fence, some 2-by-2 posts hammered into the soil surrounded by some extra chicken wire, old shipping pallets, etc. have all been used. The trouble with these constructions, however, is that during certain times of the year, my pile would not grow regardless of how much stuff I put in. In the summer I would see corn cobs that had been placed inside the pile the night before, emerge scattered around the back yard the morning after. In the fall, the remains of a pumpkin has its seeds scattered around the outside of the pile. And in the winter, little footprints and pieces of an apple core make a trail into the woods.  The panoply of creatures dining in my yard fill a big list: Crows, wild turkeys, groundhogs, squirrels, raccoons, possums, deer, chipmunks, etc., etc., etc.

So a few years ago I bit the bullet and purchased a proper wire compost bin from Gardner’s Supply, which also included a top to keep the creatures out. And after I figured out an easy way to keep the top shut (and most creatures out), I was in compost city. My production of compost tripled in the last year and my plants this past summer responded to the extra nutrients with fantastic growth and harvests.

I did miss seeing the occasional wild turkey and its babies come round the pile looking for food, but I told myself that it was worth it. Until today.

As it has been a cold fall, we have been burning wood at a rapid pace and if the weather continues as is, we will be out of wood within a month. So I thought today was a good day to get out and make my back and shoulders sore by splitting logs to replenish the pile. As I was walking out the back gate, the compost heap was to my right as was a possum. Upside down. Very frozen. Very dead.

Poking it a few times to see if I was mistaken, it was motionless as its tail was wedged in a corner of the compost bin while its little paws were gripping the mesh and its mouth clamped on a wire. It must have been looking for food last night and upon climbing down from the top got its tail caught and was unable to move. It froze to death.

My daughter Sarah came out and took a few pictures of it before I went to split wood. As I was swinging my maul, I kept thinking about the possum, its search for food and bad luck last night.

Fabulous foliage and fungi

We have had the most spectacular autumn in memory. Even to a color-blind boy such as myself the shades of the season have been alarming in their density and variety. Perhaps one of the best things about moving to Connecticut from Long Island is the superior colors of autumn. Long Island has great farms, beaches and harvests but not the color of New England. Too many oaks that hang on to their dying brown and gray leaves too long are not a sight to behold. My mother’s street is full of these types of trees with their dead and lifeless pompoms swaying in the breeze.

So to take in the last of the season, my wife, our dog and I took a walk and picnic lunch up to a local park in New York with a view of the rolling hills that define our area. But while I was looking up and out at the trees, my wife was looking down and around for mushrooms.

“I can’t believe all the mushrooms here,” said my wife as we started out on our walk. She had just taken a course in drawing mushrooms at the New York Botanical Gardens and had been conditioned for the last month as a budding mycologist seeking to identify and understand every mushroom she came across. She had me snapping pictures all over the park at ankle level as that is where we found most of the mushrooms, though there were more than a few taking residence up on trees.

Our observations were not alone as newspapers all over the country have been writing about the excess of mushrooms, especially the giant puffball (which we did not find.) We found lots of others, however, and my wife is looking forward to drawing them.

Unlike the other three seasons, autumn is the most fleeting as its bounty goes as quickly as it abruptly arrives. A clean log is populated with a mass of mushrooms a few days later. It is impossible to predict when and where they will show up. Many of these mushrooms look tasty and we fantasized about stir frying some with our dinner. But as neither of us have been trained to identify mushrooms, we decided to take a miss as while these fungi are beautiful they could also be very deadly. Better to just take a picture.

The existential pleasures of watering

It has been a toasty and dry summer on the East Coast, with nary a drop of rain from the sky to my yard in weeks. Thunderstorms roll through on a regular basis but it seems as if an invisible umbrella extends over my property as they hint of but never deliver water.  Unlike last year when the slugs were as thick as garden hoses and my watering can sat lonely and unused, the slugs are hard to even find and my hose is a constant companion.  But because we have a well that is only 70 feet deep I need to be judicious in how often, how widely and how deeply I water all my plants. Rather than turn on a sprinkler I water the garden by hand.

This is not a chore but a pleasure as I stand over different parts of my garden thinking and carefully looking at each specimen I water. The rose leaves are chewed up but not badly; no need to spray. A small grape vine has taken hold near the asparagus; it must be pulled. Another hornworm is spotted on top of a tomato plant; remove it.

Most the time, however, I just stand and marvel at how wonderful the garden smells and looks. I think about things that I have not had the opportunity to fully contemplate during the day yet am aware of and seeking surprises in the garden. The gentle swish of the water from the hose is a fine white noise that is a constant companion yet not so loud that I can’t appreciate the coo of a dove or the screech of a hawk. I stand moving the hose back and forth across a collection of plants or hold it stationary so the roots of a thirsty butterfly bush can suck in the needed moisture. A toad jumps, disturbed by the cool sprinkle of water.

Though the ground is dusty, the most plants are holding their own as I try to keep their immediate surroundings moist. I have not cut my lawn in over 6 weeks. It is thick, unruly, lush and green. Without any rain in the forecast I am loathe to cut it, which would stimulate its growth and need for water. My lawn is one of the few things I don’t water. It has to get by on what nature provides it and the errant spray of my daily wonderings. My herbaceous boarders of hostas, astilbes and ferns are in the same boat. They are too many and too thick to water and I must leave them to their fate. Some of the ferns have started to burn up but I have to turn a blind eye as I know they will come back next year.

All the gardening books tell you not to water toward the evening as it can promote fungal growth, but it has always been my quiet time. When I used to work a high-pressure job it was the holding of a watering rather than a beer can that calmed me down and removed a nasty edge from my demeanor.

With the dry weather, there is an urgency to water (especially with the container plants) that can mute some of its pleasure. If you don’t want that lovely fuchsia that sits in the back attracting hummingbirds to wilt and drop its flowers, you need to water it at least every other day; every day when it is hot. But there is only so much time and water so you have to play gardening god and make a choice: What gets water and what stays thirsty? How much time should I spend verses can I spend with the hose? Did I remember to water the Echinacea that we planted in late June?

Such urgencies can turn watering into a job rather than a pleasure and I try to mute these concerns through attentiveness and consistency. If watering is one of my daily pleasures then it is not a chore and these pressures fall to the ground like water from the hose.

My mother’s greening thumb

  As I mentioned in a prior post, my mother has started to become more active in her garden. About a week ago we chatted and I asked her if there were any signs of the lipstick tulips that we had planted last fall.

“Why yes, Erik. They are flowering and look wonderful.”

As our tulips were just beginning to poke their way out of the soil, I should have not been surprised as the gardens in Long Island are always a month or so ahead of those at our home in Ridgefield, CT. So it was obvious that I needed to come down to help my mother get the garden going. When I suggested it, she was pleased and looked forward to my visit.

A few days later we went to a local nursery for annuals but only pansies and early-season vegetables were available. It was too early for begonias and impatiens, which we had planted last year and had done wonderfully well. My mother loves pansies, but because of her medical conditions can’t bend down enough to deadhead the plants after they flower. So between the lack of sun (as they were on the north side of the house) and the lack of maintenance, her pansies did poorly last year. We decided to pass on the annuals for at least the time being and just purchased some pine chips and dehydrated manure to dress up her garden as well as some grass seed to patch some bare spots on the lawn.

When we got home, we took a walk around the garden to look at her tulips. She became upset as around a third of the tulips were spent. “What happened? They were fine a few days ago,” she said.

“I’m not sure Mom, but it seems you have visitors,” I replied pointing at a topped off tulip stem that was likely removed by a rabbit. She looked a little disgusted but resigned to the fate of the flowers.

Getting my mother out in the garden has been great therapy for her as she now has an activity that takes her outside and gets her to walk and extend her limbs. After we looked at the tulips I told her that some needed deadheading so that they would have a more robust bloom next year. I gave her a set of pruners and got her to clip off the developing seed heads. It was a bit difficult for her, but provided a good stretch for her arms and back.

We then went to the front yard and saw all the different plants emerging that we had planted last year: astilbes, hosta, muscari, lilies, ferns, bleeding hearts and coral bells. She could not believe that anything was coming back as in prior years her spaces would always be barren come spring. Because we amended the soil last year, the recently dormant plants were doing well. I applied a good helping of manure and compost around the plants and then covered the spaces between the plants with fresh wood chips. When we were at the nursery my mother thought I was buying too many bags of wood chips for the beds. As it turned out, I was one short. My mother watched attentively waving her cane at spaces that didn’t get covered properly or at ones that she felt I had covered with too much material. It was comforting to see her at my side.

With the garden now dressed out, we needed to seed the lawn’s bare spots. My mother has arthritis and has a difficult time holding items. To help her, I put the grass seed in an unused cookie tin so she could grab small handfuls easily. I then demonstrated to her how to broadcast it. We would work together as a team: I would rake the bare spots to disturb the soil and she would throw down the seed.

We made our way around the yard looking for spots devoid of grass. She would walk over to one place and then backtrack to another. The day became warm and sunny making it a nice way to spend time with her outside.

1. After we had finished with the seed we took a final walk around the house. The rose bush I had discovered last year in the back of the house was robustly sending up new shoots around the trellis I put up and the Japanese maple planted near the house had survived the winter and was growing well. I will need to transplant that in the next few years.

My mother noticed the old garden bed next to the house where my father used to plant tomatoes. It was weedy with dandelions, crabgrass and a dead weeping willow that my wife and I had given them many years ago.

“That really looks horrible,” said my mother. “We should do something.”

“Well Mom, we can just pull everything out and leave it for the grass to take over or we could start another flower garden.”

“Let me think about it,” she replied as she started her way back into the house but not before noticing a random group of daffodils that recently emerged near the back corner of the garage.

Whittling trust

Though the snow is not even close to melting and the wood stove has been blasting continuously, we have started seeding at the Children’s Garden. Which is a good activity for the greenhouse given the fact that outdoors the temperature has not gone north of 20 F for over a week. In this type of weather, it is best to hunker down in the confines of a greenhouse that is uncomfortably toasty when the sun is out.

So my job for the day with my charges was to plant at least two trays of coleus, pansies, dusty miller and geraniums. The start was easy as Mike (not his real name) mixed the appropriate soil and put it into the seeding trays.  I didn’t think the task would be too challenging until I opened the first packet of coleus and suddenly remembered how tiny the seeds were.  I tried to pick one up but it was impossible for me with my stubby fingers. Even Mike, who has the long delicate fingers of a piano player, could not be successful.

I should have thought about this before we started and retrieved the hand seeder to help us with this tedious chore. But I didn’t so I had to come up with an alternative as Mike was becoming increasingly frustrated. I then remembered my Swiss Army knife and took it out. I have found that rarely a day goes by without me needing this essential tool. I never know for what but I only notice how much I need it when I forget to place it in my pants pocket each morning.

The main blade on the knife is very thin (and sharp). Each blade has a small groove where you place your fingernail to pull it out. This groove, in fact, is the perfect size to hold a tiny seed.

“OK Mike this is what we are going to do. Use this popsicle stick to move a seed over to the blade and place it in the groove. Then move the knife slowly over to the tray and place the seed into the soil.”

Mike was initially indifferent to the planting of seeds but when he saw that he would be able to wield my knife, he became very attentive. For the next 45 minutes we worked together in planting coleus seeds. He wanted to use the knife all the time but sometimes he let me use the popsicle stick to push a seed onto the blade of the knife. We were not very productive but we worked well together. Mike is typically a patient child but giving him a knife permitted him to focus on this task much longer than he would have otherwise.

My next student Tony (not his real name) was a different matter. Tony has a very hard time controlling himself and sitting still. As I picked him up from class he was his typical jittery self. I wasn’t sure if I could let him use a knife. I had finished planting the coleus seeds with Mike and now we needed to plant geraniums. These seeds were a little larger than those of the coleus; Tony had small enough fingers to pick up them up. So I told him to pick up the seeds and plant them carefully while I use my knife to plant seeds. That way we could work together.

As Tony spied my knife he asked, “Do you know how to whittle?”

“Sure I do. I learned how to do it when I was around your age.” Tony looked at me sheepishly and said that he did not know how to whittle. “Would you teach me?”

I was a bit worried about this as Tony’s personality personifies Freud’s concept of id and the idea of giving him a knife gave me pause. So I constructed a test.

“Tony if you can seed these three rows carefully, I’ll show you how to whittle.”  I thought if he could control his motions well enough to accomplish this task, he could safely whittle. Tony agreed.

He then displayed a behavior I had never seen from him: he quickly albeit carefully seeded three rows of geraniums. Without the reward of a knife, it would have taken him the entire session to do this task; with the reward of whittling lessons, it took but a few minutes.

I got a popsicle stick and illustrated to him how to whittle wood and the importance of the angle between the wood and the blade of the knife. “The key to whittling Tony is to control the angle of the blade, which effects how deeply it cuts into the wood. But you also need to be careful with the blade and always keep your fingers away from the blade. You are always pushing the blade away.”

Tony nodded and made a few simple strokes with the knife. In the beginning he held the knife awkwardly. I cradled his hands within mine so together we could shave off a few slivers of wood. Tony’s eyes opened at what he was able to do. We practiced a few more times together and then I let Tony go on his own. Like all beginners, he had a hard time regulating the depth of the cut. He soon made slivers of the stick.

“Can we make something?” Tony asked. I nodded yes and drew the outline of a canoe on another popsicle stick. All that would be required would be for him to carve out the center. He liked the idea of a boat and started to work.

Initially he let his hands slip uncomfortably close toward the blade, which caused me to push them back frequently. “Tony you need to keep your hands behind the blade. If you don’t I’m going to take the knife away.” Tony agreed and continued carving.

Ultimately his boat looked more like a speedboat than a canoe, but it didn’t matter as he was pleased with his initial foray into whittling.

After he finished we spent the rest of our time together seeding rows of geraniums. He finished the entire tray quickly and without incident. He was smiling as I took him off to lunch and was looking forward to showing off his speedboat to his classmates and teacher.

Christmas greens (not to eat)

This is the longest stretch I have not been blogging since I started this endeavor almost six months ago. It has not been for lack of topics but rather lack of time as the Christmas season can easily consume any spare moments. Making preparations for Santa more than makes up for the time I get back from a dormant garden. Christmas is a pretty big event for our family so between the cards (we are still sending snail mail), the gifts, the wrapping, etc. it is a frenetic season. And when it comes to plants, there is much that needs to be done.

Planning for Christmas begins back in August when we remove the amaryllises from their perch in the back of the garden and place them in the basement to go dormant. Regardless of my methods, I never seem to be able to get them to bloom around Christmas. This year I potted them up in early to mid-November with half of them still appearing dormant and the other half just beginning to leaf out. So there will be no amaryllis this Christmas but with any luck they will bloom in the next month or so.

Christmas cacti is a misnomer as ours bloom during Easter, Halloween and Thanksgiving. Every holiday but Christmas. While the professionals are much better than I in timing the flowers, there is only so much work I am willing to put forth with house plants. For us their blooms will be a surprise.

After Thanksgiving we start decorating in earnest, with this year compressed due to its late date. The big outside job is to put lights on a recently transplanted fir that we bought over a decade ago in memory of my mother-in-law, Stella. Every year the task has become more difficult as the tree has increased in size; this may be our last year of it having lights unless I want to break out my 30-foot house ladder. Or hire a cherry picker.

Even though it was difficult to hook up the lights this year it was a lot of fun with my daughter, Kathryn, and nieces , Helen and Lucy, as we tromped through the pachysandra tossing strings of lights around the different branches. It does look spectacular this year though because of all the snow we have had. I am not sure I’ll be able (or wanting) to take the lights down until the spring.

The next part of our Christmas greenery was to cut down a tree. We are fortunate to live in an area where there are lots of Christmas tree farms within an hour’s drive of our home. We don’t have any favorite farm but rather drive to a different place every year to be surprised. This year’s trip was a real Courier & Ives experience as we drove through the hills of western Connecticut surrounded by a landscape covered with freshly fallen snow. Trooping through snow while throwing snowballs at each other just added to the special time we had in selecting our tree this year. And while we cut down the tree over three weeks ago my wife Juana just put the finishing touches on her nativity under the tree this afternoon. It takes a lot of time to build a village.

I then planted up a couple of pots of paperwhites for a Christmas display. Like the amaryllis, I was late in potting them up and will not get flowers for at least another week, though their fresh growth is wonderful to look at. We wait anxiously for their sweet overpowering smell.

Wreaths were next on my list and I bought quite a few from the country store at Green Chimneys, where I volunteer. One of the employees makes wreaths daily so the shop emits the sweet smell of conifer sap. The fir wreaths had bits of white pine throughout giving them a more fluffy and festive look than the typical ones brought down from Canada. I also purchased a few holly wreaths and combined them on our front door and gate for a wonderful effect. Pinecone wreaths that I made years ago were also brought out for display as well as dried mistletoe.

Then there are the little touches. Thick mosses growing on rocks outside brought in for my wife’s nativity. A rope of princess pine, which is neither a true vascular plant nor true fern, used for accents. Pine cones placed around the mantle. Small holly shrubs and a miniature spruce replace long since spent summer annuals in window boxes. Sprigs of winterberry and viburnum are place to accent other plants with their delicate dried berries.

With the hope of not having to leave my yard for a Christmas tree, I planted a quartet of blue spruce seedlings. Three years ago we harvested a fir that had self-seeded in the yard. So now every year we plant a couple of seedlings with the hope of a Christmas tree selection in five years or so.

And what of poinsettias? My wife and I went on a small field trip to a local wholesale greenhouse and were mesmerized by a sea of this time-dependent plant (for a poinsettia to bloom it needs to be in total darkness for 15 hours for 45 to 60 days). Reds, pinks, whites, variegated combinations lined up ready for market. It gave my wife ideas of what she really wanted this year from this Mexican plant.

Tomorrow I need to run off and buy the last of our Christmas food. The plants are done for now. Except, like Thanksgiving, their ingredients will make up the vast majority of our winter feast. And with any luck I may be able to pull greens from the garden to eat (rather than display). That would be a real treat. I’ll put it on my Christmas list.

A golf course is not a garden

I took Wednesday off to play golf with my son-in-law Alan. He also had the day off and the weather was turning to the better from being forecast as the worst so we figured it would be a good way to hang out together and have some fun. While I used to be an avid golfer in my youth, familial responsibilities as well as a new found love for gardening transferred my spare time over the years from putting on the greens to growing the greens.

Though November in New England can be raw, it was a splendid day with temperatures in the mid 50s, little wind and partly sunny skies. There were few people on the course so we could take our time without the pressure of others. And given my "military-like" golf game of left-right-left-right across the fairways, around the woods, in the sand, etc., I got to see much of the course. And what I saw was disquieting.

My recollections of golfing were of outings that provided a good amount of exercise while surrounded by nature. The exercise part was still the case (perhaps even more so) as I huffed and puffed my way up and down hills, bag on shoulder. The nature part was different as my memories of golf courses were of landscapes of green and full of life. And while that recollection is true, its context is vastly different to me today.

Instead of a beautiful varied environment, I saw a dull monoculture. The woods from which the course is carved out has many different trees, but they provide a simple and boring backdrop to a consistent green carpet.  In the spring there would be few flowers to view as the dominant trees (oaks, maples, ashes, hickory, tulip and black birch) give wonderful displays of color in the fall but little the rest of the year. And now there is little undergrowth as fall dormancy combined with an active deer population keep the forest floor bare.

So as I looked for my balls in the woods and nearly every place on the course except the fairway, I also searched for interesting signs of life: I didn't find much. On one hole there was a small clump of white birch, which stood out from everything else. On another there was a wild cherry that I spotted that I'm sure is spectacular in the spring. And perhaps there will be skunk cabbage, arrowroot, and lilies in the swamps and ponds that dot the course.

Strangely there were few creatures around. In years past I recall ducks, swans and geese that would populate the area but on Wednesday it was strangely silent. The deer were no doubt dining at nearby houses, which have better pickings than where I was. The frogs, I hope, were dormant sleeping in the mud.

The grass is lush but artificial considering the time of year. The horticultural steroid of nitrogen keeps the ground green and alive, but at a price.  I think of my own little lawn that is just coming into its own without the benefit of fertilizer or excessive care and consider the difference. It already has the opportunistic weeds of clover and crabgrass making a home, which as far as I am concerned is great. Some patches are struggling to get 1 inch of grass while others are already thick and 4 inches high. The golf lawn, on the other hand, has no room or time for such diversity as its purpose is to provide a consistent and flawless platform from which to swing a golf club. My lawn's purpose is to stop erosion and provide a home for all the little creatures that want to live near my house.

As I walked the course with Alan and chatting I couldn’t help but think about how to change the course. The easiest thing would be to replace or supplement the trees on the fairway with more visually interesting plants: white and paper birches, variegated and American holly, crabapple, viburnum, American hornbeam, persimmon, dogwoods, willow, poplar, butterfly bush, and sweet gum. The tee areas could be planted with herbs and bulbs and low bushes that have a good three-season display. And all of these things could be deer proof or at least resistant, which means no rhododendrons or azaleas. The possibilities are endless.

Regardless, Alan and I had a great time and he won our household version of the Ryder Cup for England, which meant beers were on me. As we sipped a pint looking out at the fairway late in the day I couldn’t help but feel a bit melancholy for my former impression of golf courses and my youth when my drives were straight and my garden knowledge incomplete.