Musings of a Woman with Filthy Hands

Compost March 5
...1. trash doesn't decompose as fast as you want, (cigarette butts never do) and 2. large sticks are ugly as mulch. They take a detour to the
dump or woodpile before their last step of either ashes to ashes or dust to dust.
I get a little tense when I read in gardening publications that one mustn't put "weeds" on the compost pile, else one will be pulling those
weed seedlings from the garden. I am certain that gardening wouldn't be much fun if there were no weeds to pull/leave/move/admire/curse
at. It's all part of it! Every year a healthy stand of snap weed grows behind one of my beds. You know this one-- it's sometimes called jewel
weed (impatiens capensis) and it is the MOST fun to pull. It's tall, so you don't have to bend. It comes out like, well, just pretend
you had to pull a hot knife out of butter. It makes a good toy when you make the seed pods explode. And after I fill my
wheelbarrow with its tender, already decomposing stalks, I am not about to put that bounty anywhere except my compost pile.
Putting everything in the compost pile means you get all these free plants from seed! Tomatoes, cilantro, feverfew, digitalis,
cleome, hollyhocks and alchemilla mollis are my most prolific. Love 'em all, and if I don't love where they sprouted, I pull.
This is not punishment. This is fun.

Kitchen garbage goes into a plastic tumbler given me by a tennis/gardening pal. I let it take a turn in there for a few weeks before it
graduates to the big pile. This measure enables me to avoid stepping on rotten tomatoes and brown lettuce when I climb on the pile. Much
more pleasant to step on gook that was, until recently, rotten tomatoes and brown lettuce.
Another day I will write about how the big pile works.

Spring appears and disappears, cont'd March 24
....Still visible and quite obvious on the “dead stick bush” were the skeletons of last year’s blooms, and I asked
Chatty Gardener if they would just come off on their own. They will, apparently, but I find that in my garden I
cannot wait for that, at least with those hydrangeas in plain and frequent sight. My “Annabelle” in particular
looked like hell until I had at them in early March. Last year’s blooms on hydrangeas make for decent winter
interest, but at this time of year I am ready to clear the decks for all the good stuff to come.
Two publications made available to us on this trip have been “Virginia Living M agazine " (April 2008 issue),
which features an article on The Garden Club of Virginia, and the pamphlet Chatty Gardener fetched for us
about the Pavilion Gardens at the U of my home commonwealth. The two have lots in common.
I had always known that Mr. Jefferson, who loved gardening as well or better than the 147 other hobbies he
had, had designed the ten buildings of his “academical village” (I have a Duke buddy who always rolls her eyes at that creative adjective,
and I see my computer’s spell check is rolling its eyes too) so that the professors who lived in them would have gardens too, and that space
could be used for everyone in the community. Each professor was charged to care for the space (probably somewhat less than ¼ acre each,
by my reckoning) as he saw fit. Many never saw fit at all, it turns out, and for many years (the University was founded in 1819) the 10 spaces
had varying levels of care and maintenance. But bring on a bunch of productive ladies in the form of The Garden Club of Virginia, and
everything changed in the 1950’s.
Christine Ennulat’s article in “Virginia Living” is aptly entitled “Ladies Who Launch”, and it paints a genuine picture of what a very capable
and persuasive garden club can do. Financially powered by their signature 75-year-old tradition Historic Garden Week, the Garden Club of
Virginia has been able to restore and preserve sites all over the commonwealth and even over in Europe. Ennulat’s accompanying article in
this “Virginia Living” issue zeros in on the Pavilion Gardens, one assumes because of all the myriad projects it has adopted, the University’s
gardens are the biggest project ever taken on by the GCV.
Many of us have toured these gardens tucked behind their serpentine brick walls; I used to sit in them for hours, imagining I was studying.
They are so fittingly compatible with the set of 10 similar yet distinct houses that they attend-- we might assume Jefferson designed them too.
But the disparate levels of care and attention they received for well over 100 years got the attention of the ladies of the GCV, who in turn
hired Alden Hopkins, the landscape architect who just happened to have help throw together a little spot called Colonial Williamsburg, and so
by the 1950’s anyone on the Grounds could use these 10 now compatible yet distinct sanctuaries for repose, solace, receptions, and in my
case, sunbathing (I was subtle! not too much skin.).
During the 60 hours we were in Charlottesville, Spring visibly progressed. I can only hope it makes its way up to southern New England
before too long.

More Musings of a Woman with Filthy Nails
These pages have nothing to do with Green Fingers Garden Club, except that I am a proud, somewhat atypical member. You have
stumbled upon a bit of a diary-- a "blog", I suppose, of someone who likes to dig and write. If you liked what you saw one page
back, scroll down until you find it. If you want to get back to the Green Fingers web site, I don't blame you one bit.
Click here to hurry back to the Hort page.


	Books Can Teach... March 8 ...one of the reasons is that it turns out to be a very easy plant to maintain, but there are other reasons, which I studied and executed, and as a result of this new (to me) intelligence, I hope to see those impressive golden thingies emerge more often! My mother-in-law has always loved clivia and when I was a young bride she thought it proper that I should too. For the first six years the clivia she gave me existed, but only because this particular plant is a challenge to kill. Once, I think, it bloomed, and I had one of the first experiences of a feeling I have had countless times since in gardening: awe mixed with total personal detachment. I didn't know why it happened, and it most certainly didn't have anything to do with me, but I thought it was cool. This year, however, I will honor myself a modicum of credit. Not only did the original plant put out 8 stalks, but three of the other 4 progenies put out at least one also. And I am smugly aware of why. It turns out that besides being partial to being ignored, a fact I realized early on, as other plants on that same health plan expired one by one, clivia wanna be cold at night. That I can do--got got a enclosed porch with a separate thermostat zone, and that sucker never goes above 50 degrees. If you are like me, though, you get all into one of these great books, you leave it out and flip through it it and really and learn from it for 5-7 days (I even got out a stack of stickies and started cross-referencing stuff in this one, good lord) and then something husband quaintly calls a "cleaning frenzy" occurs. It's sort of like a weather event. One can usually predict it (company coming) and it can be mild or severe. Other families members generally take refuge. The result can be a perfectly good source of information, like "The House Plant Expert" disappearing into the book shelf, only to be forgotten about for weeks or months or forever. Please tell me that I am not the only one ever to buy a book, get it home, look it over, and then find a spot for it on the shelf, right next to the same book. I do that with clothes too. Ahem, ANYWHO, the moral of this story is that books teach, and a mildly surprising sub-plot is that I can be taught.