Summer Fling

A little over two years ago, local artist Sheri Wood launched a public garden from the roof of an empty two story-building in downtown Durham. Her seed-filled “Pinata Anchor of Hope” broke open in a vacant lot near a pad of prepared soil. Children and volunteers pressed the carefully blended mix of summer annuals and drought-hardy perennials in place. Several weeks later I noticed the piñata’s insides had morphed into a rowdy collection of green stalks with a few spare cosmos flowers. Other seedlings would identify themselves later.

Working downtown at the time, I loved seeing the Anchor of Hope growing in a mostly empty and central location. It was a temporary exhibition, but supposedly so was the state of downtown- a lot of street construction and few pedestrians. Unlike the streetscape improvements, the Anchor of Hope project looked better as the summer wore on. I coveted the carefree blooms for my home garden and tried to identify the jumble of plants in the circular plot. I made a list on the back of an envelope with plans to recreate a version myself one day.

Sometime in September, Sherri and a helper put the flowers to bed. The conglomerate was still flowering, but the summer was over. As I stopped to chat, she gave me a few packs of seeds from the original Anchor of Hope mix as well as a division of aster. The aster had almost a dozen powder-purple daisies clinging to the sticky bundle of stems. I took these back to my windowless office on the first floor of City Hall and thus began to day-dream about a humble start for my own yard. That weekend, I put the aster in the ground and saved the seeds for the next spring. I was giddy. My list was now inside of an envelope.

For the past two springs and summers, my family and many a bumblebee have enjoyed a decent growth of upright or “purple top” verbena courtesy of the Anchor of Hope. Their ability to reseed keeps them around. The gift of aster has given birth to its own clumps that have been moved around a couple of times already. They should start their display again in few days or weeks.

I am glad I got to witness the Anchor of Hope’s growing season. It lives on in my yard and probably several other lots in town whose owners were lucky enough to pass near the intersection of Main and Corcoran streets on the day it had to go away. The streets and sidewalks in downtown are much improved. New restaurants have come and more are due. Today, a promised revitalization for Durham’s core is easier to imagine. This vision includes a planned office tower for the site where the Anchor of Hope once held a small place. Perhaps a landscape architect can make room for some xeriscaping or low-maintenance plantings when those plans are fine-tuned. I’ve got some stuff that would look great there.

I wish I could have gotten a hold of Sherri before writing this post. I wanted to ask her some more questions and see if she would be offended by my attention on this blog. I hope she is not, and am glad that she was so generous with her project.

from today's N&O

In line with my last two posts, "Heirloom Needs," an article from today's N&O Life section caught my eye:

http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/708713.html

Heirloom Needs- continued

This is a continuation of my post from last Thursday.

My great-grandparents would be wowed by the immense and diverse market that supports our modern landscaping, nursery and turf industries. In some ways, smaller yards and less choices could be a good thing. Compared to yester-year, we have countless options for flowers, trees, shrubs and annuals at the big-box garden center. Unfortunately this also means we have a great chance of putting a blooming thing in the ground in April or May that will be dead by August.

In a recent conversation with Jim Ward, Interim Assistant Director of Horticulture at the North Carolina Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill, I was reminded that we are more likely nowadays to “garden for pleasure” than for food and therefore more likely to put things on life-support (artificial irrigation), put exotics where they were never meant to grow, and sacrifice the time and the money to create lush lawns and flower borders that can be felled by drought.

Losing the hibiscus beside your mailbox to a dry year is one thing. Losing a quarter acre of sod, four Japanese Maples, and twenty azaleas is quite another.

Pass-along plants are a great way to keep your yard local and thriving. Market bulletins and catalogs aside, dependable self-sowing annuals, tough perennials that need dividing, and cuttings from your relatives or neighbors would have been the source for a good bit of ornamental plant material 80-100 years ago. If you saw clematis or a red-hot-poker growing just fine next door or down the road, chances are it would probably do well in your yard. Of course, many gardeners are still reaping the rewards of pass-alongs, especially if they have something to swap and an ear for the story of where their new addition came from and what conditions it likes. You cannot get that same experience at the super-center.

An improvement, in my opinion, on domestic landscape practices from my great-grandparents’ era, is our increased acceptance of native plants. For folks who haven’t discovered how wonderful roadside “weeds” can be, they are missing out. Joe-Pye weed, golden-rod, and asters are commonly recommended by garden writers today for late summer and low maintenance bloom. This is a positive trend that has been gaining momentum in recent decades. Mixing perennials and shrubs from your region often gives you a water-wise, chemical free haven for butterflies and birds. Viburnum, milkweed, and switch-grass are doing just fine in my yard right now. The Durham County Cooperative Extension and the North Carolina Botanical Garden are excellent places to scribble down ideas and procure plant lists. They will also gladly give you the locations of local nurseries and garden supply shops specializing in native and drought resistant plants.

While I may grimace at the brown stalks of a few choice perennials in my side yard and the dying dogwood along the edge of a natural area, I am fortunate that I am not staring at a half acre of suffering vegetables or many acres of ruined livestock silage. To put this drought in perspective, I have to remember that a dependence on Mother Nature for your daily bread is not a historical footnote; it is an everyday trial for a lot of families in North Carolina. This year may cause many folks to give up their way of life as they are finally persuaded to sell the farm to a developer of a subdivision. Folks are moving into the countryside (or at least a marketable version of it), but unfortunately they aren’t taking back the wisdom of a country gardener. Instead they are too often striving for a large, expensive, and environmentally unsustainable lawn.

For my great -grandparents and their contemporaries, there was always next year in the garden. I share that sentiment with them but am also blessed that my dry sky is only affecting a hobby and not my family’s welfare. I can always go to the grocery store or a Farmers’ Market to buy my vegetables. I bet my grandmother’s mother would recommend the Farmers’ Market.

Heirloom Needs

It is hard to look outside and think about landscapes without focusing on the drought North Carolina is in. It has made me wonder how folks may have tended to their gardens and farms a couple of generations ago when the clouds failed to burst for weeks on end. If my great-grandparents were living today, what would they think of the choices I have made for my garden and what advice could they share for coping with tough growing conditions?

First, before sharing anything, they would be shocked at the lack of a premium I put on freshly grown produce from my own yard. The great-grandparents on either side of my family were not occupants of large farmsteads in central or eastern North Carolina, but they certainly grew beans, okra, greens, and tomatoes for their table and from their topsoil every summer. Fig and Pecan trees were not necessarily started because they would be handsome landscape elements some day.

For my parents’ parents, supplementing or supplying your dinners with a garden was mandatory. My father inherited the duties of tending a family vegetable patch in the summers immediately before and during World War II. I would have looked at his “patch” and called it a field. He weeded the plot in the mid-afternoon sun before his parents came home from their mill-work in Thomasville. Dad does not remember too many hours spent hand watering or lots of rows lost to drought. Even though it was a successful source of food, this garden was a still a step down from what his grandfather grew only a couple of decades before when the family lived further out in the countryside.

I have almost bottomed out this downsizing family trend. This summer, on my urban southwest Durham property, I planted two tomato plants, one eggplant, and one pepper plant each in a large pot. Granted, these were the deepest containers I could find, but the watering was still too much for me last month. The sun dried out these vegetables which got no relief from the late afternoon sun. I have sparingly hand watered, but instead of trying to save anything for my plate, I have tried to keep a half dozen other moisture loving plants alive. My ancestors would take one look at my mixed shrub and perennial border and wonder how I hadn’t starved. After an awkward tour, they would undoubtedly take me aside and point out the merits of getting some fall collards started.

This heat may have zapped even my grandparent’s ambitious plot of edibles. The fact that they used composted manure for the soil, mulched generously, watered deeply and infrequently to stimulate root growth, and made good use of the sun and shade, meant their seed starts and transplants stood a fighting chance. They also prayed more.