Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photos will debut online at Library of Congress site

Published on April 13, 2012 in Gardening and General Ag News and Notes.

In a picture taken in her Washington studio, photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston looks the part she set out to play: an artist ready to take on the world.

But if the 1896 pose with flashing petticoat, wispy cigarette and beer stein was meant to make a shocking declaration of bohemian genius, the world of fine art photography was not impressed.

Joseph Keiley, a disciple of Alfred Stieglitz, deemed Johnston’s art compromised by her work as a commercial photographer — “retarded by . . . an onerous professional life.”

The rest of us can reassess that view on Friday when the Library of Congress puts online its digitized collection of Johnston’s beguiling images of gardens, more than 1,130 glass-lantern slides, two-thirds of them hand-colored and created between 1895 and 1935. Continue reading ‘Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photos will debut online at Library of Congress site’

Allotment thieves caught after vegetable identity parade

Published on February 4, 2012 in Gardening, General Ag News and Notes and Vegtables.

Police caught a gang of allotment thieves after holding a bizarre identity parade – of stolen VEGETABLES.

Lawrence Miller, 44, and Steven Randall, 46, were caught carrying a bag of stolen fruit and veg at allotments in Brampton, Cambs.

To get evidence against the duo police lined up the food on the roadside and asked allotment holders to identify their stolen vegetables.

They instantly spotted their crops, including a marrow with a distinctive stripe, rhubarb, leeks and cabbages.

The two offenders were left looking red-faced as beetroot when they were ordered to pay £20 of compensation and £85 costs at Huntingdon Magistrates’ Court.

Miller and Randall, who were both on benefits, were said to be living “in extreme poverty” and stole the vegetables to feed their families.

Both men were granted a conditional discharge.

Prosecutor Penny Cannon said police spotted them run across the road into the allotment and when they stopped and searched them found stolen produce.

She said: “Police carried out a unique investigation by photographing the fruit and vegetables and then putting them on the verge, asking people if they could recognise or identify the vegetables.”

One of the plots had also been damaged on the same night, the court heard, Continue reading ‘Allotment thieves caught after vegetable identity parade’

Heady, heavenly garden scents

Published on January 29, 2012 in Gardening and General Ag News and Notes.

BURYING your nose in a bunch of lavender or running your hands along a hedge in full flower is one of life’s pleasures. Whether it’s an old-fashioned rose, a small bunch of freshly picked violets or a pungent herb, the heady smell is a reminder of the joy that nature – and gardening – bring to our lives.

Lilac trees hold a special place in my heart. My mother grew them in Nottingham and she picked the flowers in spring to bring inside so we could enjoy the delicate blooms and revel in their beautiful perfume. Likewise with sweet peas, which she grew in abundance every year.

An Australian friend got quite teary in the 1960s when he came across some gum trees while in the Canary Islands, which shows how evocative a fragrance can be.

No garden is complete without something exuding an aroma, be it a tree, vine, shrub, ground cover or herb – unless, of course, you’re highly allergic. So let’s start from the ground up.

Obvious flowers that have a delicate smell are violets, but they can be a curse when they multiply, unless you go for native violets (Viola hederacea), which aren’t quite so prolific. Dianthus or pinks (smaller relatives of carnations) have a very sweet smell. Lily of the valley has a lovely perfume and flowers on Caulfield Cup Day, but I find them tricky to grow. Then there are the many heavily scented spring-flowering bulbs such as freesias and jonquils. Continue reading ‘Heady, heavenly garden scents’

All about Palms with William Merwin and Leland Miyano

Published on January 15, 2012 in endangered species, Flowers & Nursery, Gardening, General Ag News and Notes and Native Hawaiian Plants.

MALP Educational Meeting—Free to the public

Date: Tuesday January 24, 2012
Place: Maui Community Service Bldg next to CTHAR Extension Services (Map) on the UH Maui campus.
Time: Pupus will be served at 6:30 pm and the talk will begin at 7:00.

On January 24th MALP is proud to host guest speakers: William Merwin and Leland Miyano as they share with us their vast combined knowledge about palms. Their talk will include information on Hawaii’s palms, palm growth habits and conservation efforts.

William Merwin, who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and is the recent US Poet Laureate, has lived and gardened on Maui for over 30 years. Most of his focus has been on cultivating palms from around the world. He has gathered approximately 800 different species of palms, creating a truly unique palm jungle within the rainforest of Maui’s north shore. His enduring gardening passion along with his legacy of being a successful poet will be preserved with the recently created “The Merwin Conservancy“.

Leland Miyano, a good friend of Merwin, is an artist, landscape designer and author from Oahu. Leland has years of experience working with native palms throughout Hawaii and has worked extensively with many highly respected people in the field of horticulture and design. Leland’s numerous books include: Hawaii’s Beautiful Tree’s and Hawaii, A Floral Paradise. Leland’s own 1-acre garden in Kahalu’u is renown for its design and features numerous palms.

CLICK HERE for full information on this truly notable event.

Celery root may be daunting, but it can rewarding to have in your garden

Published on July 14, 2011 in Gardening, General Ag News and Notes and Vegtables.

Discover celery root in a produce bin and it will not be love at first sight. What, you ponder, would anyone do with these bumpy beige orbs, from which someone has removed the nice green tops?

Pull one out of the ground and you’ll be even more daunted, faced with a tangle of gnarly roots. But persevere. Chop off those tentacles with a large knife or cleaver, and then keep chopping until all the bumps and soil-choked crevices are gone. By now the thing might be half its original weight and size. Scrub it some more, then chop it up, boil it and puree it with a little cream. Then you will see why my friend C.R. Lawn of Fedco Seeds calls it “the frog prince of vegetables.” Imagine a pile of very smooth mashed potatoes with the flavors of celery and parsley and a bit of sweetness — so rich and elegant it doesn’t need butter.

Celery root is a celery plant that’s been bred not for succulent, crunchy stalks, but for its root or, more accurately, a tuberlike enlarged stem base. (Its top growth can be used to season a soup but is not tender enough for nibbling.) Other names for it include celeriac, turnip-rooted celery and knob celery. In Europe, where it is more popular and better known than stem celery, it’s often grated or julienned and used raw in a salad, absorbing the dressing like a sponge. Continue reading ‘Celery root may be daunting, but it can rewarding to have in your garden’

Waterlilies, hardy or tropical, can lend a touch of magic to ponds

Published on July 3, 2011 in Aquaculture, Gardening and General Ag News and Notes.

If I bought a house that happened to have a swimming pool — not my favorite landscape element — I would hope that the feature would be geometric, at least. If it instead were kidney-shaped, I would fill it in with loads of sand and peat moss and turn it into a garden of the prettiest swamp flora, full of pitcher plants and Japanese and Louisiana irises.

If the pool were a much preferred circle, square or rectangle, I would make it uniformly 22 inches deep, grow lots of aquatic plants in containers, throw in a few small koi and spend the years watching them grow.

I have no intention of doing this, by the way, because I already have a pond. My garden would seem lifeless without it, however, I would offer this general advice about decorative ponds, besides the shape. Make them bigger than you think you need. Small ponds are harder to keep clean and algae-free, and the water temperature fluctuates too much for the good of flora, fauna and owner. Another hard-earned lesson: Set it up so that the pump and the filtration box sit out of the water. This will reduce maintenance further and keep you out of the pond.

No ornamental pond is complete without waterliles. Part of the magic of a waterlily is that its flower inhabits two realms. It is born in the submerged crown and journeys upward to the dry world, where it opens to the delight of the aerial circus of pollinators and to the thrill of the gardener looking for beauty in the heat of summer. Continue reading ‘Waterlilies, hardy or tropical, can lend a touch of magic to ponds’

Eat, grow, heal – Hawaii Features – Staradvertiser.com

Published on June 27, 2011 in Gardening, General Ag News and Notes and Ginger Root.

For botanist Laura Shiels, herbs in the garden are not only a source of spice and flavor, but of healing.

Lemongrass adds zest to a soup but also helps relieve insomnia, while ginger is good for nausea. Chili peppers add spice but also stimulate circulation.

Basil can help relieve indigestion or nerves. Rosemary is said to enhance memory.

Shiels, a doctoral student in ethnobotany and former lecturer at the University of Hawaii, has been teaching workshops on how to grow and cultivate herbs for several years, with a focus on healing.

“Let food be your medicine,” says Shiels, who cultivates gardens everywhere she goes.

Many culinary herbs make aromatic compounds to protect themselves from being attacked by viruses and fungi, as well as to attract pollinators, she said. Those same compounds have antioxidant or antimicrobial properties.

So you can add flavor and health at the same time, she said, and address specific ailments with herbs.

Basil, for instance, popular in salads and the main ingredient for pesto, alleviates gas. Its leaves can be used for many dishes, while the flowers can be brewed into a tea, good for treating coughs.

Garlic is good for lowering blood pressure and relieving colds and flu. Continue reading ‘Eat, grow, heal – Hawaii Features – Staradvertiser.com’

Gardening as you age: How to go low maintenance without losing beauty

Published on June 16, 2011 in Gardening and General Ag News and Notes.

After three or four hours digging and weeding, a hot bath, a soft chair and a couple of aspirin have their appeal, but I like to think I’ve got a fair few years of full-bore gardening in front of me. And yet I do wonder what happens when you reach that point in life when the limbs are too feeble or arthritic for the work.

For many folks, not much will change. They will continue to view the space around the house as a necessary evil and get the mow-and-blow brigade to cut the grass, mulch the beds and shape the bushes. (Favorite cringe scene of the past year: mow-and-blower sculpting a gumdrop azalea with gas-powered hedge clippers.) But for active gardeners, who love to nurture plants and work the soil, the decision to scale back gardening also means scaling back the garden. This can be hard, to let go of beds that are full of memories as well as flowers.

Page Dickey, a garden designer and writer in North Salem, N.Y., has consciously dismantled some of the beloved elements of her 30-year-old, three-acre garden at her property, Duck Hill, now that she and her husband, Bosco Schell, are in their 70s. Continue reading ‘Gardening as you age: How to go low maintenance without losing beauty’

Taming the unruly tomato vine

Published on June 1, 2011 in Gardening, General Ag News and Notes and Vegtables.

By Barbara Damrosch,
We’re all rooting for the tomatoes right now, hoping for fast growth, strong stems and branches laden with fruit. How easily we can forget what happens when tomatoes run amok.

It’s probably too late to warn you not to grow too many of them and not to plant them too closely. But without dampening your enthusiasm, let’s talk about support. How much you invest in that is up to you. The easiest thing is to do nothing and let the plants flop on the ground. This works with the determinate types, which stop growing after a few feet and set all their fruits at once. But the indeterminate vining ones must be trained upward before their heavy fruit brings them to their knees in a tangled, impenetrable mess.

Tomato cages, if they’re strong, work fine. I make mine out of concrete-reinforcing wire, which I buy in five-foot-wide sheets from a building supply store. This sturdy mesh has six-inch-square openings through which I can easily reach the tomatoes for picking.

I form it into cylinders 16 inches in diameter and set them over the young plants to guide their ascent, pinching out the suckers at the bottom. (A sucker is a little shoot that emerges in the angle made by the leaf branch and the main stem.) The lowest suckers emerge just above the first pair of leaves, the smooth-edged seed leaves. Left to grow, they would branch out rather than up and just get in the way. After that, there’s little to do except remove wayward branches and a few more suckers if growth is rampant. Continue reading ‘Taming the unruly tomato vine’

Flower bandit filches Cleveland Park blooms

Published on May 29, 2011 in Gardening and General Ag News and Notes.

They’ve waged war against deer and battled hungry possums that snatch tomatoes just when they are at the peak of their flavor. But there’s one pest the Newark Street gardeners have been unable to thwart: a certain two-legged rat with a penchant for peonies.

For 10 years, gardeners in this Northwest Washington neighborhood believe the same man has been stealing spring blooms from their plots in the Newark Street Community Garden. Not just a few stems, mind you, but bunches — as many as 30 to 50 at a time.

“He does this every year, starting with the peonies,” said Marcia Stein, one of the flower thief’s victims, who lost a bunch of blooms this month. “Last year, he stole all of my peonies.”

Gardeners say the suspect has expensive taste. He ignores lesser flowers in favor of pricier blooms. (At Johnson’s Florist and Garden Center in Cleveland Park, peonies sell for $8.99 a stem.)

And when he steals them, he’s not gentle: He rips the blooms right out of the ground.

For years, the gardeners kept quiet, fearful that publicity would encourage more thefts. Continue reading ‘Flower bandit filches Cleveland Park blooms’

The Chelsea Flower Show: New plants and the not-so-new

Published on May 26, 2011 in Gardening and General Ag News and Notes.

The Chelsea Flower Show is perhaps the world’s brightest stage on which to launch new plants. It’s great opportunity to tell gardeners about new plants, and blogs, websites, newspapers and magazines are full of the news. The Chelsea Plant of The Year award, launched last year, has ratcheted up the interest.

But some nurseries announce plants as new when they’ve been around for years. Others fail to mention really good new plants that they’re exhibiting and have to have the information coaxed out of them. And can a plant first publicised last summer really be “launched” at the show?

Hillier Nurseries have a very attractive new ruby-red leaved maple, Acer palmatum ‘Shaina’ (pictured above), a lovely plant, which they say is “Available exclusively through Hillier Garden Centres and online at www.hillier.co.uk in 2011″. But in fact it’s been available since the 1990s, the RHS themselves say it’s listed by 24 other nurseries and garden centres all over the country have it. Despite three or four attempts I have been unable to get hold of Hillier to ask why they’re promoting the plant in this way.
Clematis ‘Celebration’ Clematis ‘Celebration’. Photograph: Fred Godfrey/Sussex Plants

Clematis ‘Celebration’ is certainly a breakthrough clematis – the first ever large-flowered type with yellow foliage – and Thorncroft Clematis are lucky to have it. Continue reading ‘The Chelsea Flower Show: New plants and the not-so-new’

Chelsea Flower Show a target from touts after record sales

Published on May 21, 2011 in Gardening and General Ag News and Notes.

The public isn’t even let in until Tuesday but the “sold out” signs are up already. If your heart cries out for streams of individually hand-washed pebbles, orange trees with each fruit in its own little shower cap to be whipped off just before the judges arrive, or a silky lawn weeded with eyebrow tweezers, and you haven’t already got your ticket for the Chelsea flower show, then bad luck. Your only hope is to lurk around the railings until a sinister figure in print dress, straw hat and pearl earrings shuffles up to offer you black market tickets – about 10 times the £47 face value might be a good starting point.

All 157,000 tickets sold out months ago, in 16 days, a record. The Royal Horticultural Society is warning the public to beware of touts and of forged tickets.

The RHS also notes that visitor records are being broken at all its gardens, and 19,000 people have joined the society in the past three months. “I believe this increased interest can largely be attributed to a desire to get back to the simpler pleasures in life and also to benefit from the huge trend to grow your own food,” Sue Bigg, director general of the RHS, said.

On Monday the judges and the royals arrive: the Queen is definitely coming, and the romantics among the show staff hope William and Kate will too, to inspect the new rose named in their honour. Continue reading ‘Chelsea Flower Show a target from touts after record sales’