food and fellowship in the St.Phillip's community garden

This community garden sits beside the parking lot of Durham's St.Phillip's Episcopal Church at the corner of East Main and North Dillard Streets. The gates are always open. One of the goals of this well designed garden was to invite nearby residents to come in, ask questions, pick vegetables, and enjoy the pleasant green space. With that measure, the experiment was a success. The garden is beautiful even on a cloudy and foggy morning. Look for a short piece about this garden in next month's Skywriter.

in the middle

When I lived in Baton Rouge, live oak trees were like crape myrtles in North Carolina-- they were planted everywhere. But in south Louisiana, live oaks were more than a "street tree." They turned into large and low-slung behemoths. From a distance they looked like thunderheads of evergreen and gray. The coastal and deep South is where Quercus virginiana gets real big and sometimes gets real Spanish moss on its limbs.

But live oaks can survive into Durham (zone 7a/b) and other parts of the middle South. There are online garden forum discussions of specimens even making it in Kentucky and Tennessee. Some of those threads get crazy when folks start debating the trending of real temps, global warming, native trees, etc. Even weather is controversial when you get passionate folks together who have the Internet and an opinion to share.

Pictured above is my favorite local live oak. It was probably planted thirty-plus years ago when Duke's mid-campus apartments were newly built/landscaped. The sheltered and sunny site in between two buildings makes a good spot for this marginally hardy tree.

an unexpected garden tour

On Tuesday, I took my lunch in the car. I do not usually do this, but I was on a mission to find a gardener. Not just any gardener. I was looking for someone with a big loud crazy bunch of flowers, succulents, topiary, or statues in the yard. I was looking for an interview subject for an article I am writing about pass-along plants. I slowed down past several houses in Old West Durham and Trinity Park but it didn’t look like anyone was in their yards or on their front porches. With my lunch break winding down, I drove through the Burch Avenue neighborhood and made notes about houses and gardens I would like to visit sometime. I saw bold sunflowers beside the sidewalk, long mantles of clematis vines, plenty of canna lilies, and heaps of the not-so-precise cottage garden style that I love to rave about. But no one was toiling in the noon-time sun. So I made up my mind to hit Arnette Avenue where I had been planning to drive by a corner property for some time.

As I pulled up to the incredible yard and garden in Durham’s Morehead Hill neighborhood, I realized I was in luck. The resident gardener was in. His name is Angel Redoble, owner of a landscape design business named Angelscapes. Immediately he took me into the complex and serene world of his garden as if he had been expecting me.

It was wonderful. Angel’s lot has a koi pond that he hand-dug after hurricane Fran took down a large oak tree in 1996. He finished it in four days as a birthday present for his wife. He has named each of the big fish. This water feature is covered with netting to keep two things at bay-falling leaves and a blue heron, both of which should return to his urban property in the next month or two.

We talked about plants and the business of landscape design. I asked him some questions about favorite flowers, but I became distracted by all the sights in his garden- a statue made from a tree trunk; a row of purple crape-myrtles; the three and a half foot tall spikes of something I’ve heard called jiso, akajiso, Chinese basil, and wild basil. Angel calls it red basil. It self-sows, tastes good in salads, and looks like a bushy coleus. Coincidentlly, the day before, a co-worker had "passed along" this plant (perilla frutescens) for planting in my garden.

I had to leave too soon. But I left with Angel’s card and gave him mine. I also gave him a promise to return. His place is glorious in the springtime. I know because he showed me pictures and because I’ve driven by before, wondering who lived in that old house with the traffic-stopping yard. Now I know and now I have at least one more person to swap plants and stories with.

campus trees

Above are common Eastern red cedars. A lot of folks would not confuse these with the same scraggly things that we see crowding fence rows and interstate medians all over the South. But out in the open and limbed up, their trunks are beautiful. Birds appreciate the winter cover and berries.

These photographs were taken last September, just west of Duke Chapel.

what's in bloom in my yard this week?

....mostly stuff that needs little attention: obedient plant, lantana (miss huff), green headed coneflower, and cypress vine. I am glad since I have very little attention to give.

The tale of the Oxford Orphanage flower

The Human Flower Project might be one of the most interesting websites I have come across in a long time. On Monday, I was alerted to a recent post. The author, horticulturalist Allen Bush, had written about a particular flower given to him by Elizabeth Lawrence after a visit to her Charlotte garden in 1982. It was something called the Oxford Orphanage flower.

Lawrence is considered one of the best American garden writers of the 20th century. She was the first female graduate of North Carolina State's landscape architecture program in 1932 and her book A Southern Garden, published in 1942, is considered a masterpiece. Saying that Elizabeth Lawrence was a well regarded garden designer/writer is like saying Bruce Springsteen is a a well regarded singer/song writer- it's not quite enough. And a visit to her garden was a big deal for anyone- especially a plantsman like Allen Bush whose trip occurred only a few years before she passed away.

Read his remembrance here: http://www.humanflowerproject.com/index.php/weblog/elizabeth_lawrence_past_passalong_future/