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Saturday Snippet: The Scent of Extinct Flowers

Botanical print of extinct flower Leucadendron grandiflorum

Well, this is just fascinating: Guerilla Artist Daisy Ginsberg Recreates Scent of Extinct Flowers.

Where others might seek to reconstruct a woolly mammoth from centuries-old sequences, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is part of an interdisciplinary project to recreate the scents of plant species lost to human colonial destruction of their habitat.

But wait, it gets better! Dr. Ginsberg is also working on a plant-based art installation at The Eden Project:

I am creating an artwork not for humans, but for pollinators, whose numbers are in global jeopardy. In September 2021, we are planting a 52-meter-long garden at the Eden Project in Cornwall [UK], designed by an algorithm to optimize ‘empathy’ for other species. I’ve defined that as planting to support the maximum diversity of pollinators, using carefully developed regional planting lists that the algo selects and optimizes from. Hopefully, this garden will look strange to human tastes—with every color and size and shape of flower included, plus patterning to support different foraging strategies. It is an unnatural garden designed for nature. I want to challenge what we think of as a garden and who it’s planted for. The algorithm will be online so anyone can create their own artwork for pollinators which we invite them to plant.

You can learn more about the installation, and even use the same algorithm to create your own planting scheme (it’s designed for UK plants, pollinators, and climates), here: The Pollinator Commission.

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Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin

I haven’t posted here in too long — I spent the month of May posting daily on my other blog, “Serenity Now”, in a “Roses de Mai Marathon” of rose-centered fragrances. It was great fun, and it took my mind off the ongoing pandemic, social isolation, etc. I am privileged to be able to work from home, so my employment has not been interrupted; and my family are all safe and well, which is such a blessing.

The events of the last ten days here in America have been astounding, and it is taking me a while to process them. Meanwhile, we have had a beautiful spring; my own roses have been spectacular (and are now starting a second flush of bloom), and I’ve planted what I call my “virus victory vegetable garden”, which is flourishing. We’ve already harvested our first purple cauliflower, which got much bigger than the photo below, and it was delicious!

The peace and beauty of my city garden, and the weather, contrast so much with the conflict just outside my neighborhood. It is quite jarring, and my husband and I comment on that dissonance often on our regular walks. I’ve been thinking a lot about Voltaire’s famous ending phrase from his novel Candide, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” What does it mean?

Literally, in English, it means “We must cultivate our garden.” Sometimes that is taken to mean that it is useless to try to understand or counter the wider world’s troubles, and that all one can do is retreat to one’s own garden.

Tempting as that is, for an introverted gardener like myself, I don’t think that’s it. Or maybe, I prefer to think that’s not it. Adam Gopnik wrote in “The New Yorker” magazine, some years ago, in response to a translator who translated it as “We need to work our fields” (which implies something very different):

By “garden” Voltaire meant a garden, not a field—not the land and task to which we are chained by nature but the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, “We must cultivate our garden,” is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action.

Whether or not that is what Voltaire intended over 250 years ago, that resonates with me. So I will cultivate both roses and vegetables in my actual garden, and I will do my best to fulfill my immediate and local responsibilities to advance justice and peace, and build a better place by love. Right here, right now, where I live. After all, bees love flowers, but they are also symbols of peaceful, industrious activity, and community.

If you’ve read this far, I hope you and your family, and your garden, are staying safe and well.

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Happy Birthday, Old Herbaceous!

WordPress reminded me yesterday that I had started blogging four years ago that day. It doesn’t seem possible that it has been that long, but it has — I started this blog the summer that I came home from a trip to London with a broken shoulder, was confined to home for several weeks, and couldn’t leave the house, let alone do any gardening. So I read gardening books instead, and shared snippets of them here. And so a blog was born.

Thank you, to those who occasionally follow my meanderings! The best part of blogging is sharing a little piece of thought and sending it out into the world, knowing that it will connect with someone who reads it. Happy summer, and happy gardening! Do you have any garden projects underway?

Featured image from http://www.annegeddes.com

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Saturday Snippet: Le Petit Prince

Illustration and quotation from Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This is a tardy Saturday Snippet, posted on a Sunday because I spent most of yesterday actually planting things in my garden! But I have the perfect reason to post this weekend, complete with literary tie-in: my new rosebush, Le Petit Prince.

Also known as La Rose du Petit Prince, this beautiful rose is named for the classic novella Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, which features a Rose who is the Little Prince’s responsibility and love, in spite of her flaws.

Illustration from Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

But here’s some additional, wonderful information about the actual rose, from the blog www.thelittleprince.com:

“For over 50 years the Pépinières et Roseraies Georges Delbard nursery gardeners have been creating exceptional roses. Very possibly you have a Claude Monet or Comtesse de Ségur rose bush growing in your garden … It was back in 2008 that they first thought of creating the Little Prince rose in partnership with the Petits Princes Association! It was altogether fitting that the celebrated little fair-haired Prince who was so attached to his flower should have a rose named after him. With its beautiful mauve petals with hints of violet, the Little Prince Rose reminds us of both the sweetness and the power of children’s dreams. This admirable partnership hoped by means of this initiative to send a message of hope to all sick children. For each rose bush sold, 2 euros are paid to the association, in order to perpetuate their action.

This very beautiful rose has also won several awards in the context of the Grand Prix de la Rose. This year it won the 1st prize, thanks above all to its original scent!”

When I saw this rose at the local garden center, with flowers that read more of a pale pink to my eyes than mauve, then read its name, and smelled its heavenly, lemony-rose fragrance, I knew this little prince had to come home with me.

Pépinières et Roseraies Georges Delbard's rose hybrid Le Petit Prince, or La Rose du Petit Prince
Rose Le Petit Prince; or La Rose du Petit Prince.

One of the most famous passages in Le Petit Prince describes the little prince’s leave-taking from the fox he has tamed, at the fox’s own request:

“Go and look again at the roses. You will understand now that yours is unique in all the world. Then come back to say goodbye to me, and I will make you a present of a secret.”

The little prince went away, to look again at the roses.

“You are not at all like my rose,” he said. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”

And the roses were very much embarassed.

“You are beautiful, but you are empty,” he went on. “One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you–the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.

And he went back to meet the fox.

“Goodbye,” he said.

“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

“What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

“It is the time I have wasted for my rose–” said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

“Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose . . .”

“I am responsible for my rose,” the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

Welcome to my garden, Little Prince!

Featured illustrations: from Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery; in public domain in the U.S., still copyrighted in France.

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Saturday Snippet: “Transplanting”

Assortment of dry flower bulbs.

I don’t post nearly as many Saturday Snippets as I used to; that was something I started when I was housebound, healing from a broken shoulder and unable to garden. But I have just discovered a poem, “Transplanting”, by Lee Ann Roripaugh, and it took my breath away, especially the fourth section:

4. Dalmatian
There is an art to this. To shish
kebab the varnished pit of avocado
on three toothpicks above a pickle jar
of cool water, tease down the pale
thirsty hairs of root until one sinewy
arm punches up and unclenches its green
fisted hand, palm open, to the sun.
To discern the oniony star-struck
subterfuge of bulbs, their perverse
desires, death-like sleeps, and conspire
behind the scenes to embroider
the Elizabethan ruffles and festoons
of their flamboyant resurrections.
To trick the tomatoes into letting down
their swelling, tumescent orbs
in the cottony baked heat of the attic
until their sunburnt faces glow
like round orange lanterns under
the crepuscular twilight of the eaves.
Unwrapping the cuttings of succulents
from their moist, paper-towel bandages,
and snugging them down into firm
dimples of dirt and peat, coaxing up
the apple-green serpentine coils of sweet
pea with a snake charmer’s song to wind
around the trellis and flicker their quick
pink-petaled tongues. The tender slips
of mint, sueded upturned bells of petunia,
and slim fingers of pine that pluck
the metal window screen like a tin harp
by the breakfast nook where my father
stirs his morning coffee and waits
for the neighbors’ Dalmatian to hurl
itself over the back fence and hang,
limply twisting and gasping on the end
of its chain and collar like a polka-dotted
petticoat, until my father goes outside
and takes its baleful kicking weight
in his arms and gently tosses it back
over the fence into the neighbors’ yard.
Year after year, the dandelions
and clover are weeded out, summers
come and go, and roots stubbornly inch
down around the foundation of the house—
labyrinthine, powerful and deep.
Wow. If I could write one line like this:

“To discern the oniony star-struck
subterfuge of bulbs, their perverse
desires, death-like sleeps, and conspire
behind the scenes to embroider
the Elizabethan ruffles and festoons
of their flamboyant resurrections,”
I would consider retiring my pen, content that I had done my best.

Assortment of different Dutch flower bulbs
Dutch flower bulbs

Featured image from http://www.dutchgrown.com.
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Saturday Snippet: Scented Moss

Orbella’s new Fragrant Moss is bioengineered to smell like patchouli (earthy and spicy), linalool (floral and fresh) or geraniol (rose-like and bug repelling). “Orbella Fragrant Moss is a line of home fragrances cultivated in a glass terrarium. Using nature’s simplest ingredients — sunlight, CO2, and water — Orbella delivers a safer, cleaner, greener alternative to…

via The daily lemming — Now Smell This

I haven’t posted a Saturday Snippet in a long time, but this popped up on one of the fragrance blogs I follow and I couldn’t resist sharing! Talk about combining my interests: fragrance AND plants. And I do love moss. If it were a bit cooler in my part of the world, I would have a moss garden. Haven’t quite figured out how to make that work in Zone 7 with high humidity and summer temperatures …

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Saturday Snippet: Introducing…Capability — David Austin Wedding Roses

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | Contact: Eleanor Clevenger David Austin Roses Introduces An Exceptional New Variety — CAPABILITY (Ausapply) Luxury cut-garden rose is perfect choice for weddings, events and home decor. ALBRIGHTON, UK — Oct. 12, 2016 — David Austin Roses is pleased to announce the addition of a new cut rose variety: CAPABILITY (Ausapply),…

via Introducing…Capability — David Austin Wedding Roses

Isn’t this new rose just beautiful??

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Saturday Snippet: Period Gardens

Photo of child's hand in garden dirt, learning how to garden, from the Eartheasy blog

I have a odd but pleasing book called “Recreating the Period Garden”. It was published by the National Trust and edited by one of my favorite garden writers, the great gardener Graham Stuart Thomas, with contributions by six other distinguished English garden writers. This week’s Snippet is from the Foreword by Graham Stuart Thomas:

Many of us start gardening in a small area of ground in our parents’ garden. After this early start, apart from a certain amount of grass-cutting, hedge-clipping and the like, the pursuit of gardening remains in abeyance until we own a house with the surrounding plot of land. Then gardening starts in earnest if we are that way inclined.

The foreword goes on to muse on how many of us then progress to visiting famous gardens from which we draw a pastiche of ideas from different periods. But what I like about it is this evocation of how many of use became gardeners. I got my start in gardening helping my parents: my father with his large vegetable garden (which I hated, as most of my chores there involved weeding in the hot sun), and my mother with her planters on the deck behind our modern house. That was much more fun, as it also gave me the opportunity of having some of her time and attention, which, as a quiet middle child of three, I often craved. I always loved flowers, though, and often had pots of my own plants, indoors and out. I did enjoy the many pots of forced bulbs my father planted every fall and brought out one at a time starting in late winter and early spring.

Where or how did you being gardening?

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Saturday Snippet: The Plant Hunters

Flowers of the regal lily, or lilium regale.

Having enjoyed several visits in recent years to Kew, I recently bought a book called “The Plant Hunters”, by Musgrave, Gardner and Musgrave. (There are several books with that title). It is the story of several of the most legendary botanical explorers, who brought back exotic plants previously unknown in Europe and England, including many that I saw this summer in The Lost Gardens of Heligan. Fascinating!

Hundreds of thousands of us enjoy gardening and visiting famous parks and gardens. Yet few of us, as we admire the beautiful and diverse range of plants around us, stop to wonder where they come from, and fewer still think about how these plants came to be here in the first place.

How many of us, for example, know that the explorer who found over 300 rhododendron species was one of two survivors of a party attacked in a rebellious uprising and had an escape worthy of a member of the Special Forces; that the man responsible for establishing the tea industry in India single-handedly fought a gun battle with pirates while running a high fever; that the plant hunter who introduced many conifers to our landscape was gored to death by a bull; or that the discovery of the Himalayan rhododendrons resulted in a kingdom being annexed into the British Empire?

Book cover of The Plant Hunters: Two Hundred Years of Adventure and Discovery, by Toby Musgrave, Chris Gardner and Will Musgrave
The Plant Hunters: Two Hundred Years of Adventure and Discovery.