Garden Djinn

March Book Review

The Garden Blogger's Book Club

The Gardener's Year, by Karel Capek

A balm and a tonic is this book. 

Capek takes the toils and the joys of the garden and holds them up woven in a fabric that reflects all life.  His love of words and language are revealed even in translation; the rhythm of the sentences and the flow of the year wind in this book like a mobius strip - spring on the underside, always emerging. 

Because of his sensuous prose and lifting optimism, I will forgive him his architype of the gardener as male. 

Highly recommended to all who read, gardeners or no.

Book Review: February

The Garden Blogger's Book Club

Two Gardeners: A friendship in Letters: Katharine S. White & Elizabeth Lawrence
Edited by Emily Herring Wilson

A glimpse into another time, not so removed from ours, and yet such a strange landscape.  A world where Lawrence keeps files upon files of clippings from papers and magazines she collected from correspondents all over to further her plant knowledge.  A world where DDT is sprayed regularly, all around the streets, with no notice to the residents.  A world where Rachel Carson is just publishing Silent Spring, as a serial, in the New Yorker.  The worlds of White and Lawrence, and the era in which they lived, are an interesting backdrop to their correspondence. 

And the plants they write about?  I wish that I could dedicate large chunks of time to tracking down such beauties as Peony Sylvia Saunders.  Obtained by White in in fall of 1960, this plant was given a Memorial Award from the American Peony Society in 1974.  When I look for it today, I find it mentioned at  La Pivoinerie D'Aoust, a specialty nursery in Canada, but not available in their catalog.  So once again, if you fancy a plant out of trade propagation, you will need to find someone who will send you a division.  The more things change...

Paeony Sylvia Saunders

Today, we can use the internet to find all sorts of plants, some are plants that we are seeking and some are plants that we just find.   We can protest the use of chemicals in our immediate environment, but not so much in our food production.   We aren't watching our men and boys go off to Vietnam, but instead the go off to Iraq, to Somalia, to who knows where next...

But we bide by our gardens, tending our earth, and sending out our correspondences via computer.  It's a much bigger world out there today, and so much smaller.

Book Review: January

The Garden Blogger's Book Club

I was unable to get my hands on a library copy of Teaming With Microbes, so that goes on the 'future reading' list.  What I did do was rummage through my library and find a pair of books that I thought would be of a similar message and tone. 

Start With the Soil, by Grace Gershuny

A very good basic primer on the ins and outs of soil.  Published by Rodale Press, the emphasis of this book is organic methods.  Gershuny discusses the basics of soil, devotes a chapter to the microbial community that makes a soil fertile, and offers ways of building humus content to your garden's soil. 

There are some very handy charts of information leavened throughout the volume - one lists where weeds thrive, so that by identifying your weeds, you can have some idea of what your soil is like. 

She covers composting, vermicomposting and green manure crops (that are turned under before planting - usually in vegetable gardens, but also useful in preparing beds for perennials.)  She gives some information on root development and nutrient uptake, explaining why some nutrients may be present in the soil, but not available for the plants, and gives some tips on how to 'nudge' those elements back into usefulness.

There is a chapter devoted to the soil needs of differing plantings: vegetables, flowers, trees and shrubs, and potted plants.

Overall, this is an easily accessible book for the gardener who wants to know what to do, and why.

From the introduction:

...your handbook to creating and caring for healthy, productive soil.  It contains both the science you need to understand the complex cycle of life and fertility, and the practical tips on how to put your knowledge to use in the garden.

This book is a basic in my library.

Step By Step Organic Vegetable Gardening, by Shepherd Ogden. 

Looking at this book today, I am surprised to see it is published by Harper Collins.  I thought it was another in the organic Rodale library.

Yes, it's a vegetable book, but the lessons on soil are much the same.  This is another primer, and covers the very start of a garden - siting for optimal sun and rain, what tools to use, where to put the compost pile. 

Odgen provides a good background on the chemical school of fertilizing, a bit of history, a bit of chemistry. Ever wonder why potassium is indicated with a 'K'?  The Latin name is Kalium.  I didn't know that. 

An excerpt: 

What is most wasteful about manufactured fertilizers, though, is that 30 to 50 percent of the nitrogen and 20 percent of the potassium and phosphorus in them is washed away into our streams, ponds, and groundwater aquifiers before plants can use it.
...
Compost, on the other hand, with its low apparent "analysis" -- that is the official N-P-K listing with indicates the immediately available nutrients -- is a stable, slow-release fertilizer whose nutrients will not easily wash out. 

This book, too, has helpful charts, geared more to the vegetable gardener.  The one I will get the most use of shows what plants are in the same families, and therefore should not be planted in the same spot every year, but instead rotated from one area to another.

Crop rotation serves two purposes - one - it prevents the soil from harboring insect pests that target that plant group, and - two - it allows the gardener to put the crops in the best soil for that plant.  Some plants need rich soil.  Some prefer a leaner diet.  This book will set that straight, and set you up for sucess.

This is another book that has been in my library for some years, and comes out when I have a question. I'm still in the process of (re)reading it; I've progressed to the chapter on seed starts.  C'mon March.  I'm ready to start seeding!

Post Script:  One of these books had a great test for fertilizer*.  Put some of the fertilizer on one side of a plate.  Add a few worms to the other side.  If they try to flee off the plate, you might not want to use that fertilizer.  If they move toward the fertilizer, you have a winner that won't burn your beneficial organisms (large and small) out of the soil. 

*{Which of course I can't find, now that I am looking for it}

Good gardening!

Book Review: December

My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love, by Jamaica Kincaid. 

Well.  And well.  This is an interesting assortment of pieces.  Interesting. 

I find I have to talk about the book itself, as Tracy  has done, only in a different perspective.  This book has texture.  The essays, poems and writings are smooth, and rough, and light, and dark.  Some are high and some are low.  I have to believe that this was the intention of Kincaid, else I can't fit one piece into this book. 

I have to come around from the back of the book, traveling back through my thoughts through the pages, to make the one jarring entry fit.  I'm not even sure it does then.  It's only eight pages.  Eight slim pages that seem entirely out of place. 

The flower in the title is not loved.  The plant that is the (literal) touchstone of the protagonist is a fungus.  The story is difficult to read.  It is low and dark. 

I was further dismayed to note that the piece appears to be a fiction work.  Something autobiographical might better sit with me, presented in this context. 

It is unfortunate that the tone and content of this one story should so affect my enjoyment of the book overall, but that is what has happened.  This may just be a personal failing.  Or it may not. 

Otherwise, this was a thoroughly enjoyable book to read.  The poems 'Bearded Iris' and 'Purple Anenomes' revealed themselves charmingly.  I've not read D. H. Lawrence, and was surprised by his sly humor and astute observations. 

I find myself wanting to seek out the clove carnations praised by Graham Stuart Thomas; and Ken Druse only maddens my desire for Arisaema.  Thomas C. Cooper wryly notes that Pelargorium are not Geranium.   Nancy Goodwin lists cyclamen for me to try.  I, like Thomas Fischer, crave the blue of the delphinium.

But finally, my favorite piece in the book is the dry text of Geoffrey B. Charlesworth, on the tiny but mighty Physoplexis comosa.  Sometimes you have to get right down to the level of the dirt to truly appreciate a small beauty.

But watch you don't pick up ringworm...