GroHappy

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.

Raking memories and leaves

I hadn’t raked leaves at my mother’s house for nearly 35 years. The yard service had done a final cut a few weeks back but since then it seemed as if all the neighboring trees had decided to give their leaves up to my mother’s lawn as a going away gift. Her trees—all oaks—have been stubbornly been hanging onto their charges not wanting to give up this year’s production. It was as if they decided that this was the season to wear a raccoon coat of foliage and no rain or wind would remove the slightest bit.

So as I looked upward at the future blanket for the lawn, I needed to deal with the neighbors’ leaves. There was an old rake missing a few teeth in the garage that my father used years ago before he turned over that duty to others and a pile of old plastic bags. I asked my mother to join me outside. To my surprise she did.

The straw-like zoysia grass was holding onto its blanket with more vigor than does my fescue at home. Perhaps it realizes that the trees above will not give them cover quickly leaving them to deal with the cold autumn winds for longer than they would like. Regardless, I pulled the leaves into large dumpling-shaped piles in the middle of the lawn. Now it was time to bag.

My mother walked out to take a look and I joked to her if she would like to jump into a pile. She laughed and said that was my pleasure of years ago. I thought back about that and remembered that the piles seemed so much larger then. My father and I would rake leaves into a heap that was as tall as me and then I would burrow inside as would a creature readying to hibernate for the season. It was warm and there was an unmistakably sour-sweet smell of decay.

But the piles have gotten smaller as I now towered over them not wanting to jump in but bag them so the town could haul them away to compost. At my home, I just rake the leaves into the woods. Job done. But in my mother’s manicured neighborhood, there is no such space and everything must be removed.

So I opened a bag, shook it out and placed it on the ground anchoring it with my feet and holding an edge while my other arm started to pull swaths of leaves into the bag. Like a piston, my arm mechanically swept the area until I needed to stop and rebuild the pile. Pulling the bag off the ground I shook it and then punched the leaves down, compacting them into a tight mass before repeating the exercise. My father taught this to me.

My mother was supervising the operation from the front step, sitting down carefully after she placed her cane next to her and a piece of cardboard under her as a cushion. I went over during a break and we reminisced about how my father used to feed the squirrels with walnuts from his hand. He would squat down in an seemingly impossible configuration with his knees high and his bottom low rhythmically bouncing while he would smack the walnuts (or filberts) together announcing his arrival.

Initially cautious, the squirrels took to my father (and his nuts) quickly. But they soon came to expect his attentions on a more frequent basis. If they perceived he was late they would come to the house and congregate on the stoop chastising my father that he wanting. And in a Pavlovian manner he would respond.

My mother and laughed. I handed her an acorn and went back to work.

Autumnal plums

This season is bittersweet as the harvest and display of flowers is great while their remaining time with us is short. Tomato plants full of reddening fruit are but a few weeks from being pulled. The sunflowers brightening my driveway are having their last smiles. A few rose bushes have started their second flowering and the buds on my Montauk daises have started to bloom.

When I visit my mother on Long Island at this time of year, I often take her to the  beach as the weather is in the Goldilocks zone (not too cold, not too hot, just right.) Sitting with her on a bench talking and staring out at Long Island Sound reminds me of the trips we would take many decades ago with my brothers and sisters when we walked the beach looking for horseshoe crab molts and shells.

After a lifetime of collecting such detritus, I have moved on to scavenge other things. And at this time of year it is beach plums. In mid to late September beach-plum season is in full swing on Long Island so I try to time my visits to my mother to take full advantage of the bounty. Last year the harvest was poor, no doubt due to the cool rainy weather. I was afraid that this year’s heat and lack of rain would serve up more of the same but I was pleasantly surprised that there was a good amount of fruit on the bushes. When I viewed them in mid August, bundles of tiny fruit hung from the branches promising a future sweet harvest.

When I visited the beach last week with my mother the bushes were distressed as it had rained less than an inch since I last saw them. Many bushes were sporting raisin-like bunches of plums on branches devoid of leaves. Mostly pit, these little blue orbs acted as sad decorations portending the beginning of fall and perhaps the death of the plant.

I was, however, able to find a few bushes that for some reason were flush with green leaves and fat blue plums. I greedily harvested a bowl of them for my wife and I to consume over the next week.

Beach plums are a bit of an acquired taste as they are the size of a gooseberry, taste like a plum mixed with a blueberry and have a large pit very similar to that of a cherry. One year we made beach plum jam, which was delicious but time consuming because of the pitting process. So this year they have become our fruit when we feel like a light snack. As you expel pit after pit from your mouth, you often wonder if it is worth the effort as the pit sometimes appears bigger than the fruit you are able to suck off. The berries have a short life as they ripen quickly once picked. Some fruits are still a bit too sour as my color blindness doesn’t let me discern a ripe from an unripe plum. Others are past their prime as a bite into them will give you a squirt of sour or in some cases fermented juice. The fermented ones are the most interesting as you get little jolts of alcohol that reminded me of some home-made wine my father used to get from a friend.

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.

Horticultural therapy in the news

Here is a piece that gives a nice overview of the history, benefits and aspects of horticultural therapy. There is nothing new here but it provides a good background and summary of the topic. This article examines the link between gardening and spirituality.

This news article discusses how master gardeners are working with clients at St. Luke’s Rehabilitation Institute  in its horticultural therapy program.

A community garden for seniors has been created in Andover, MA, that will offer horticultural therapy as part of its services.

The New York Times recently published a long review of a two-acre organic farm in Garrison, N.Y., that brings recovering drug addicts and alcoholics from New York City together with nature in an attempt to heal them. The Renewal Farm is run by a N.Y. not-for-profit agency and the men who toil the soil live locally at St. Christopher’s Inn. The group believes that its approach of using farm work and vocational training to overcome addiction has been more successful than other approaches; under 5 percent of all inhabitants have tested positive or alcohol or drugs during their stay.

Horticultural therapy in the news

This story reviews how hospice clients and families use the Heritage Gardens for  horticultural therapy. The garden is located on the campus of Lower Cape Fear Hospice & Life Care Center  in Wilmington, DE. The center has a number of gardens all with different characteristics and stimuli to interest the wide variety of people who come to the center.

This piece in the Staten Island Advance recounts the experiences of Eileen Torricelli, who is Garden Therapy Chairman for First District Federated Garden Clubs of New York State. It reviews the programs at the Community Resources main campus, group homes and pre-school in Richmond, Staten Island. The nice aspect about the piece and the center is the wide range of therapies used as well as populations served.

The integration of physical, occupational and horticultural therapy is the focus of this story about how gardening is being used at the Cookeville Regional Medical Center in Tennessee. The brainchild of a farmer who had a stroke and two physical therapists, a small courtyard was turned into a therapeutic gardening center. It has been so well received that the site is being expanded next year and a larger garden built.

Herb Haven is a vocational and gardening program targeted toward women and children striving to become independent. Its recent profile illustrates how horticultural therapy can be used not only to mentally heal people but also provide vocational training.

No longer pining for a pino

Every tree displays its beauty differently. The American Chestnut’s magnificent canopy. The Sugar Maple’s autumn color. The stark bark of a Quaking Aspen or Himalayan white birch.  One of my wife’s favorites is the white pine. It is a lovely tree that grows straight and fast with fragrant, long cones and soft fluffy needles. When my father-in-law was alive he would take my daughters and look for “pinitos” or “little pines” If they found a self-seeded little tree, they would either transplant it into a pot or just wait for it to get taller.

One of the things my wife and children loved about the house we live in now was that when we bought it had three full and fluffy pines: one red and two white. (And there were lots of “pinitos” in residence for the children.) When we moved in, each tree was about 25 feet high and shielded the house from the nearby street as well as the northern winds. As we found out, however, pines are not the best trees to be near a house. They grow very quickly and soon our 25-feet trees were pushing 40 feet.

Pines are also very dirty.  When the weather warms from winter to summer, the trees start dripping large quantities of hard-to-remove sap. Needles fly off in large quantities filling up gutters, window boxes, windshields, etc. And the needles don’t really compost nicely but rather become a gooey mat of impenetrable gunk daring anything to grow through or around it.

But if you don’t mind the pine detritus or the fast-growing limbs, then how a pine deals with snow or ice storms may change your mind. When pines are tiny, their limbs hang decoratively with either snow or ice bending obediently with the weight and then once their blanket is removed, spring back to their old selves. But like people, as they become older they become more brittle and hard to change in their ways: they would rather break than move. And that is what they do during winter storms.

Our first experience with this came after we were in our house for a decade and on Christmas Eve we had a large storm of heavy wet snow. The beauty of the heavy snow against the outdoor lights was counterbalanced by cracks and crashes we heard all night as the limbs of different pine trees snapped under the weight of Christmas droppings. In the morning, the arboreal destruction was vast. One of the white pines had lost at least 60 percent of its limbs. I spent Christmas morning climbing up the tree with a hand saw, taking off cracked branches all around the tree. By the time I was finished, it had a horrific hair cut and needed to be taken down.

The red pine near our driveway fared better but years later after my wife and I tired of removing pine sap daily from our cars (and delivery trucks kept knocking off lower limbs,) that one had to go too leaving us with one white pine in front of the house. But time combined with snow and ice storms formed a tree that was missing over half of its limbs and over 75 feet high; it was only 10 feet from our house. So with many reservations we recently had it taken down: first most of the limbs via a cherry picker and then the rest topped off and then dropped on a gravel parking space. Counting the rings, it was only 36 years old.

We will miss the tree as it housed many birds who flocked to our feeders, but it will be replaced by a fir that we planted a decade ago in memory of my mother-in-law. Besides, one of the pinitos is growing at the edge of my property. It’s only 10 feet tall.

Smelling the roses, remembering mother

My mother’s garden continues to please her and amaze her friends. As I wrote before, my mother has become much more comfortable in her garden and is looking after it with the attention and pride of a mother who just gave birth to a cute child. The last time I checked in on my mother, her sister (my aunt) was visiting from Florida and it was time to trim the roses. A few months ago my mother didn’t even know she had a rose bush, but it was there, hidden in the back yard.

After we had rehabilitated the two front beds in the house mid-spring, we went to the back and saw an out-of-control bittersweet. As I started to pull it out I realized that there was a rose bush as well as a Japanese maple covered by the choking leafs.

“Mom, did you know you have a rose bush in the back?” 

“What rose bush?”

After I pointed it out, she had no idea how the rose got there. But I had an idea.

When we were young, my father installed a split-rail fence around the property and planted a rose bush between each set of posts. In the early years, they bloomed expansively covering the top rails. They were planted in colored sequence—yellow, red, white, pink—up the side street and around the front. My mother used to go out to smell the roses and look with wistful pleasure at her flowering property line. But years of children trampling over and lawn mowers not respecting them led to their slow and steady demise so that decades later there would be but a few survivors. (These survivors were a blessing for me as I used to clip their flowers and bring a bouquet to my future mother-in-law while I was courting my wife.)

My father eventually took down the fence and I believe he took the single remaining rose and planted it in the back yard without telling anyone. Over a decade later, my mother and I found it and a self-seeded Japanese maple.

I first cut down the bittersweet as best I could and then dug out the maple. My mother decided to plant it near the corner of the house. We then dug in lots of manure and compost.

That was a few months ago and since then the roses have been plentiful and the bush has tripled in size. My mother and her sister loved going out and looking at the new gardens. But it was time to dead head the rose bush.

I gave my mother my pruners and even in her weak, arthritic hands they worked well. For me this was pretty amazing as a few years ago, my mother would not take care of a plastic plant and now she was enthusiastically and carefully trimming off dead branches and buds of a rose bush that was first planted on our property over 40 years ago. She started on one side and then moved over to another. We talked about the house’s old rose bushes and those at her mother’s house. She used her cane to gather the cuttings in one pile so it would be easy for me to rake everything up and cart it away. As there we a few spent buds she couldn’t reach I took the trimmers from her. She directed me on what to cut and where. “You missed that one in the back. . .Not so much from the front. . .Don’t forget that one.”

After we were finished we all sat down and I asked her and my aunt about their mother and if she was a big gardener. “Oh yes,” said my aunt. “Mother had a wonderful garden.”

“We used to make dolls out of hollyhocks,” added my mother.

With that stimulus, my mother and aunt started to talk about their mother’s garden. There was a line of lilies along the side of their house along with white, purple, yellow and pale violet irises. My aunt’s favorite flower was the peony and she loved the scents in the garden.

In the back of the house there was a rock garden with big Japanese poppies where she and my mother spent lots of time as children playing dress up with their mother’s old clothing. They argued over who was the princess most of the time and the different colors and types of flowers that were around the rock garden and how they would roll down the hill at their Uncle Bill’s house. They started to laugh and exchange silly stories about when they were both girls. I just sat back and watched how having just a little garden has changed my mother. She now likes to go outside to water and deadhead her flowers. It makes her feel good, especially when the neighbors notice and complement her on how nice everything looks. And for me it’s the best as I can sit back and listen to stories about her youth and my grandmother than I would never have gotten to hear otherwise.

My Tom Sawyer moment

When it comes to gardening I prefer low tech. What this translates to is that I have no electrical or gas-driven tools to help me manage the jungle. An old pair of hedge trimmers quietly snip, snip away at the forsythia. My felcos dead head tulips, day lilies and the odd hosta spike. My scythe cuts down the long grass that the mower doesn’t get. And my mower? It is one of those old push mowers. A real reel push mower where the only power is me (or my son-in-law.)

The standard push mower with an engine has a 21 inch cut whereas my Scott has a 20 inch one. I’m willing to give up that inch for a very different mowing experience. A manual mower doesn’t spout fumes but emits a quiet whirl of the blades touching the cutting bar as it severs the grass. It is so quiet that I can mow my lawn in the early morning without disturbing anyone in the neighborhood.

As I mow the lawn, I can see little frogs, toads and other creatures that hop out of the way and have enough control over my machine that I don’t frappe them. I can also hear what is happening around me as I make the circular hike about my yard.

I suspect that many of my neighbors find this tool and my behavior somewhat strange. Not only do I cut and trim my own lawn (an anomaly to begin with in my neighborhood) but I use tools that have neither a motor nor engine to accomplish this task.

One day my next door neighbor who is retired came out of his home to get the mail. He saw me mowing the yard and asked how difficult it was to push the mower. “I haven’t seen a mower like that in decades,” he said. I told him it was nothing at all and if he would like he could take a push or two on it.

He accepted my offer and pushed the mower up the hill taking inches off my lawn. He thanked me for the demonstration and then went to get his mail.

A little later a teenage boy came walking down the street. He stopped and looked at me in a quizzical manner.

“I bet you have never seen one of these before,” I said to him. He nodded his head in agreement. “How would you like to take her for a spin? You don’t need a license.”

He quickly agreed and did a pass up the street and then back with my mower.

“That was cool.”

“Well don’t stop!,” I implored. “Do a few more passes or if you want you could even finish the front part of the lawn here.” He thought about it for a second but ultimately declined. Another neighbor was jogging up the street as this potential seduction was unfolding. As she passed me she said laughingly, “Too bad you don’t have a fence that needs whitewashing.”

I agreed with a chuckle and thought to myself perhaps she would also like to take a push. I didn’t have the nerve to ask.

Horticultural therapy in the news

A couple of interesting stories making the rounds. Here is a profile with lots of  pictures of a wonderful horticultural therapy program in Atlantic City, N.J. that was facilitated by a $10,000 grant from Toyota. Beyond providing many of the calming and soothing  benefits of horticultural therapy, the program is also providing vocational skills to some students.

Another focuses on the healing powers of the garden in this story on Debra Radvany, who was diagnosed with cancer over 20 years ago. The experience of living with and beating cancer is very inspirational, with Debra’s time in the garden key to her healing and positive outlook on life.

And this article reviews a horticultural therapy program in Cleveland, Ohio, that helps homeless men  at Joseph’s Home. The newly planted therapy garden is just part of a comprehensive program that the facility runs to help men recover from a variety of health ailments.

What all these stories share is the empowering effect of gardens on people’s psyches and spirits. The effect of smelling a rose or sitting quietly on a bench listening to leaves rustle in the wind should not be under emphasized.