"..like roses, only easy to care for, don’t have thorns and aren’t ugly when they aren’t blooming"

That is probably one of the five best quotes I have ever read in a garden article.

In case you missed Thursday's Home and Garden section from the NY Times, check out this wonderful story about rare camellias in southern Louisiana. 

a week of real winter

Since last Friday we have seen the first night below 20 degrees, a first snowfall, and the first seed catalog in the mail...It feels like January already.  Last Saturday's inch-plus of wet fluff broke a limb on one of my adolescent wax myrtles.  A chunk of ice shattered my rain gauge.  My roses are probably done and my spring bulbs are finally planted. So now I am taking notes on what to do next year.

Speaking of next year, I got the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds Catalog in the mail on Tuesday and it is filled with lusciousness.....pulling names at random from its glossy pages, you could find things like the Knife River Squash, originally cultivated by Native American tribes from present day North Dakota;  a watermelon developed by Mississippi State University in 1965; and the "Spanish Mammoth" sweet pepper which was (according to the authors) shipped to Paris markets in the 1880s from Algeria and Valencia.  Oh, and if that is too Western Civ. for you, then you could cash out for Christmas on dozens of Pan-Asian antiques. I have my eye on a Japanese pumpkin developed in the Edo period (1804-1818).  I don't know where the hell I could plant 1/100th of all the good stuff but I am excited to read and dream. 

If you are interested in the heirloom, the unique, the rare, and the organic seeds that you can't find in local stores, then other catalogs I would recommend are:
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, High Mowing Organic Seeds, and Seed Savers Exchange.

eye candy from the 2010 Baker's Creek catalog

pearson's falls- polk county, north carolina

Well over a hundred years ago, an employee of the Southern Railway was scouting land in southwest North Carolina.  He would remember one particular place of beauty and was able to purchase it for his family homestead. Now known as Pearson's Falls, this property's mountain glen has been open to the public ever since the Tryon Garden Club acquired the 268 acres in 1931 in order to preserve this scenic attraction and its  native woodland flora.

An admission fee is charged by a resident caretaker. The site, open year-round, lies just off what used to be the major road (Hwy 176) between Henderson and Polk Counties. This two laner has plenty of narrow curves and kudzu covered embankments. Tourist cabins used to dot this stretch of Pacolet River valley before I-26 made the route obsolete. Visiting Pearson Falls is well worth the back road route and the $5 adult ticket.

On the hike up to see Pearson's Falls I was intrigued by the large number of wild native hydrangea canes that seemed to crowd the trail- Hydrangea aborescens is also called smooth hydrangea.  Dried brown clusters of the summer flowers still hung on, helping me make the positive identification. Come March I would wager there is  a good show of early spring ephemerals between the massive mountain laurel shrubs that seem to clamber everywhere.  I'd pay to see that.

other people's wwws: Garden History Girl

historic preservation and gardening... if you are looking for an intersection, here's one. Check out the links too.

other people's wwws: Monticello

Over the past week I noticed several garden related stories about Monticello. First, was the NY Times' piece on  the work being done to interpret the landscape there.....the always excellent Anne Raver explains that there's more to these gardens than a postcard picture. 

On Sunday I came across another reference to Monticello, this time from Pepperdine professor Wade Graham in a McClatchy op-ed piece. It made me think about those palladian windows that are so common in McMansions nowadays....

And lastly,  I just opened my mid-summer email from the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. They are helping out with an heirloom tomato tasting at Monticello later on this summer. It sounds like a good enough reason to go....if I could just find a weekend to get away from my own garden. Of course with this heat and lack of rain, I may need to seek out someone else's tomatoes.  

other people's wwws: UNC's North Carolina Collection- flower postcards

Here's an interesting  link.  The picture above is of the W.A. Hanchey & Son Canna Farm (ca. 1940-60). Enjoy browsing the subject index too...

other people's wwws: Carl Sandburg Home and Connemara Farms

Last summer my family made a pilgrimage to the Carl Sandburg Home, a National Historic Site in Flat Rock, NC. We spent the whole time outside enjoying the trails, gardens, and farm buildings, but if we had had the whole day, we would have gone inside a wonderful house museum to learn more about Carl Sanburg (1878-1967).

At the Carl Sandburg Home, you can  learn a lot about his work as a  Lincoln biographer, poet, folklorist, journalist, songwriter, labor organizer, ...( *maybe one reason a lot of folks don't appreciate the Sandburg legacy as much today, is because it is hard to describe exactly "what he did."). 

Visitors can learn about  his wife Paula, and her acclaimed goat herd. The  descendents of these animals are still kept on the farm. Her dairy operation was nationally famous; the picture to the right is from the National Park Service's online exhibit about the Carl Sanburg Home, which has tons more images and information about the site in case you cannot make the drive in person.

abandoned cemetery jonquils

I had noticed these jonquils for a year or two before I saw the headstones set in the underbrush off Chapel Hill Road last month. Based on what little research I've done since, it belongs to the city of Durham;  like many other abandoned burial grounds there are no families or funding sources to keep it maintained. There are dozens if not hundreds of other parcels like this all over the city and county. Another unclaimed cemetery sits less than a mile away at the intersection of Prince Street and Chapel Hill Road. I have not been over there to poke around the brush yet.

The North Carolina Cemetery census lists an Anderson-Grouduph family cemetery at a location very close to this one. When I have time and a GPS handheld, I'd love to double check the coordinates. Last  Friday, I was mesmerized by the stone carved dates (some from the eighteenth century) that silently mark a plot within sight of a city bus-stop. I could see less than half a dozen markers in the woods but I  am sure there a more under the ivy. At least one grave was marked by just a rock. For all I know, each of these could have been a humble memorial to those who lived a life enslaved.

These jonquils are similar to the kinds of everblooming clumps you might find all over the South if you know where to look: abandoned dooryards, family graveyards, ancient fields, and historic homes.  Even though a lot of folks use the terms jonquil and daffodil interchangeably, they are not the same bulb. But they are both members of the narcissus family. If you go to Lowe's and Home Depot to buy spring blooming bulbs next September, you will not find the old fashioned narcissus bulbs that your great grandparents handed around. You are better off shopping these wesites: Southern Bulb Company, Old House Gardens, and Brent and Becky's Bulbs. Unlike the burial grounds where they were often planted,  N. jonqullla can still thrive in neglect.

super sunday hike at stagville

I attended the Trading Path Association's "Super First Sunday Hike" yesterday. A couple dozen of us parked our cars outside the state-owned Stagville historic site and immediately started trouncing briars and rotten pine logs in the hopes of finding an old packhorse trail or wagon road bed. TPA founder and CEO Tom Magnuson has been leading hikes around this former plantation site for years. We had originally planned to check out one of the old fords across the nearby Flat River, but the ground was too wet (and in some places-too frozen).

For me, the highlight of the trip was coming upon the Bennehan family cemetery. I had a vague notion of where this burial ground was, but since it is not a part of the normal public tour, I had never visited. I wasn't expecting to see beautiful low walls of red sandstone. This was obviously not the rubble foundation of a service building. You could tell right away that it was the work of a skilled mason or team of masons.


Inside the cemetery were three raised tombs. This was where Richard Bennehan, his wife Mary, and son Thomas, were laid to rest over a span of thirty-five years. Mary A. Bennehan, in 1812, was the first to be buried here. It seemed like a big empty space for only three grave sites. In Piedmont Plantation, Jean B. Anderson's history of the Bennehan-Cameron family, she notes that the large size probably reflected Richard Bennehan's hope that his daughter Rebecca would be buried there along with members of her brood. She married into the elite Cameron family. Her body lies elsewhere. I'm not an expert on this family history but the docents at Stagville are......the site is open for free guided tours Tuesday-Saturday from 10-4pm. The last tour starts at 3pm. Again, I should note that this cemetery is not on the tour and visitors are not allowed to wander into the forestland surrounding the visitor's center, parking lot, or main house. If you want the behind-the-scenes treatment, then get involved with the Trading Path Association because this hike is one of their favorites.

I would love to learn more about the work that was done to build this cemetery's walls. Tom Magnuson mentioned that it is one of the finest examples of a dry-stacked stone wall that he has seen in North Carolina. And even though dry-stacked stone masonry has a long western European tradition, that does not mean it wasn't often carried out by folks only a few generations removed from west Africa. Like almost everything else on a Southern plantation, it was likely built by the enslaved.

a dirty slate

As a gardener and preservationist, I respect many of the planting choices other green thumbs have made on and near my almost quarter acre of property in central southwest Durham. Others I am lukewarm about, but fifty plus years of landscape history have given me quite a few things to learn from and be grateful for. This is just one benefit of living in an older (some may argue historic) neighborhood.

My house was built in the mid 1950s. It was around this same time that the Rockwood Park neighborhood was annexed into the city. A quarter century or so before that, our residential subdivision was most likely carved from the eighty-plus acre Mangum family farm that also gave rise to a core-portion of the Tuscaloosa-Lakewood neighborhood. These are part of Durham’s early family of automobile suburbs.

A large willow oak sits on the west side of my street. It was likely planted in the late 1920s, the same time that a handful of the earliest Rockwood Park houses were built. From my front room window, a view of this impressive tree shows me what hundreds of other street-planted oaks in Durham were imagined to be, before above-ground power easements chopped them into monstrosities. Trees like this cannot be replaced overnight and barely in one lifetime.

Over the past two years, I have spent a lot of time adding things to a large planting bed in my side yard. It is now a garden with a picket fenced border and several nearby shrubs. Before, this had been part of an uninterrupted lawn dominated by Bermuda wire grass, clover, and some fescue. Now I have less to mow and a lot more to look at. However with all the attention I have given to this area: raising butterfly weed from seed, remembering to prune back my buddleias, stressing out about whether or not my buckeye gets enough shade, or if my red-twig dogwood will be too thirsty, I have neglected to appreciate some other parts of my yard that do not need “new” landscaping. These old choices are very vital to my home landscape. I like to think of them as the horticultural equivalent to the forty-five year old basement fridge that was conveyed when we bought the house and is still keeping our leftovers and homebrews cold.

First, I have to applaud the Oregon Grape Holly (Mahonia aquifolium). Once you recognize the 4-6 foot tall shrub, you will begin to see it everywhere: beside shady old patios, skirted with monkey and mondo grass on the north side of municipal buildings, and peeking out from behind garages and outbuildings. It is easy to grow and does not mind drought. It likes shade and provides berries, clustered spikes of highlighter-yellow flowers, and attractive leathery green leaves. These leaves can prick but mine have not caused any major cuts (unlike the wintergreen barberry that I wish had not been planted so close to my carport). My healthy mahonias would cost a lot to replicate and I cannot think of anything else I would rather have in their place. Thanks is owed to Mrs. T., who probably picked out and planted all four at least twenty years before I was born.

Secondly, we have been blessed with camellias. I cannot claim to know much about them beyond their color (red, white, pink, red-and-white) or bloom time (early winter, mid-winter, and early spring). Mine are established enough that I have not had to care too much for them, but a western exposure (or lack of appropriate fertilizer) on one or two has contributed to some yellowing leaves. As a group, these half-a-dozen camellias serve a great purpose in the ivy covered no-man’s land behind my house by enhancing the evergreen cast of the backyard, helping things look lush even in winter. I am also able to use them for flowers on Valentine’s Day.

My yard has also offered surprises. I have dug up over a dozen heavy pieces of flagstone slate from beside my driveway. They are discarded remnants from when the original sun-porch floor was set and are useful stepping stones for a garden path. Daffodils that should be divided, multiplying spiderwort, and an ephemeral grape hyacinth or two show themselves in the spring. I need to rescue cuttings from a vanishing bank of azaleas that are choked in underbrush after I transplant some roadside golden-rod to a sunnier and roomier location. My spicebush viburnum, that I finally identified this year as NOT a crabapple, needs two large dead branches pruned. Come August, I will need to lift and move clumps of dormant bearded irises which have never bloomed under my care.

These are chores that I am glad for. Starting over on a scraped clay cul-de-sac with no landscaping or shade, it would be tempting to pay for a carpet of sod and rows of whatever was on sale or blooming at Home Depot. I am tempted by the home and garden stores, but lucky I do not have to depend on them for making a yard or garden from scratch. I owe a lot to the folks who came before me and planned out my property and surrounding neighborhood when it was a newer subdivision on the edge of town. I am doing my best to honor their past weekend projects and make a mark with my own.

March daylilies

There are good reasons to look forward to March in Durham. We can now taste spring in small but regular doses thanks to more daylight, pink cherry trees, daffodils, and white spiraea bushes. Other things are blooming too but I am excited about my daylilies which, like most everyone else's, will not release flowers until early summer. But this first week of March is when their flat green swords gain a few inches of clearance above last fall's mulch and this season's lawn weeds. Another first week of March, three years ago, is when I inherited my first crop of plain tawny-orange daylilies. They were part of a severance package that I picked out after I left a job managing a house museum near downtown Raleigh.

For eight months, beginning in the summer of 2004, I was charged with running Mordecai Historic Park. The main attraction was an antebellum plantation house. Furnishings (especially portraits) drew a large share of questions and content for the docent-led tour. Busloads of school kids made frequent class trips to participate in crafty programs and wonder about chamber pots, kitchen fires, slavery, and the Civil War. Master gardeners and their friends had created an old fashioned kitchen garden based on recollections from a long time ago. My workplace was a good spot to take a walk, help stage a wedding reception, or ponder several complex themes of Southern history and culture. As an employee, sometimes I got to do all of these things in one day.

On my first day at work in early June, the modern air-conditioning system broke inside the big house. A condensation line routed in the attic had become clogged on an extremely muggy day and water had shorted out a smoke alarm. The air handling unit outside was terribly silent as the heat index screamed 97 degrees at 5pm. Even though I was far from comfortable, I fondly remember the stopped fan and its metal housing sitting in a sea of glorious and peak-blooming daylilies. It was the perfect low-maintenance perennial for disguising this utilitarian piece of the property. A repairman fixed the AC and the outside fan stirred the flowering scapes crowding closest to it. Looking from a window, that was our visible sign that things were working again and part of only one pleasant memory from my introductory shift.

I got used to an enjoyable job. As I memorized the house tour, read about the history of the ancestral family, and thought about future exhibits, I became drawn less to the architecture on site and more to the landscape. An overgrown thicket hid an old spring near the visitor’s parking lot. It was to this water source that generations of enslaved residents must have walked millions of steps, down a hill and back again. Old shrubs and trees dotted the small park that was once a part of a huge holding. One tree, an Osage Orange, won an award for being one of Raleigh's most notable historic specimens. Reprints of an old hand drawn map showed me and the staff that it was probably one of many that formed a hedgerow when it was small enough to be used as a livestock barrier. Another tree, a Cedar of Lebanon, stands large in front of the house today. It is visible from a 19th century sketch as a much smaller planting.

As my stint at the historic park carried from summer into winter, I began to plan a future landscape tour of the property. I had also begun planning a future garden in my own Durham yard. An interest in horticulture was growing as my future at the house museum was dimming. My non-profit employer was resigning from the larger role of managing the place for the city of Raleigh. I did not wish to fill out a job application for a post I already held, so I put in my notice and left on good terms.

My last day was in early March. A week earlier, a past garden volunteer was wandering around the grounds talking to a friend about the old kitchen garden. I stayed a few steps behind, hoping to pick up on some inside advice and looking for an excuse to show them I knew a thing or two about plants. We stood near the east porch of the main house, beside a low fence which screened the air-conditioning unit. Thick masses of daylily bulbs grew in tight mats on both sides of the fence. To these green thumbs, the sight may have held the same promise as an NCDOT highway median. To me however, this was a reminder of my tenure's beginning when I was enamored by the plantings, their perfect location, and the incredible number of reddish-orange flowers. I offered the professional opinion that, “these could stand some dividing.” It probably sounded about as expert as having shared the knowledge that, "some trees lose their leaves in the winter, but not all."

Before leaving my job in Raleigh, I got permission to take some of these overgrowing daylilies with me. I put my clumps in two large plastic trays and the next weekend, my dad and I planted them at the top of a ditch bank near my driveway. An adjacent oak, leafless in late winter and early spring, allows for their new growth to soak up enough sun so that the old tree’s June shade does not steal the power of our daylily border. Thirty plants have given birth to many more. Next spring, some of them could stand to be dug up and moved elsewhere.

Rural Reminders

Here is a link to one of Jim Wise's columns from Saturday's Durham News. It looks at the clean-up of a family burial ground near the Bennett Place State Historic Site, and some questions about its future maintenance.

Today's post from Endangered Durham features the impending redevelopment of an old farmstead near 15-501 between Durham and Chapel Hill. Unfortunately, the farmhouse and its outbuildings are not part of the plan.

Trinity Park trees: a news link

Below is a link to a recent article in the Herald-Sun. It looks at a specific threat to endangered old trees in Durham's Trinity Park neighborhood.
http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-886532.cfm

Power line pruning, compacted soil, increased automobile traffic, and road/sidewalk repairs have been taking a toll on many 75-80 year old street tree plantings in several historic neighborhoods around Durham. How to best preserve these trees and plan for their ultimate demise presents a difficult problem that won't be going away any time soon. Look for more related articles in the future