Suddenly, Cerulean

I'll admit it: Cornflower was my least favorite color in the 64 Crayola box. Bluebirds, sky blue, the Virgin's traditional celestial mantle. I always gazed on them, each, with the smallest amount of skepticism. I was drawn to the earth tones: moss on oak bark, sandstone flecked with iron, the hull of a buckeye.

In a Maine salvage shop, the Virgin's celestial robe. In the "Art of Painting," Francisco Pacheco decreed, no other hue would do.

Something about that particular hue of blue was too unsubstantial, wafty, perhaps even, insipid.

But no more. Lately, I am startled, I am stunned, when I encounter, suddenly, cerulean.

Emerging from the dank cell of a Philadelphia trolley tunnel, I look up. Philadelphia's great Victorian pile of a City Hall, against a suddenly cerulean sky. The sky blue city flag, so hued by old Swede settlers, flaps briskly in a stiff breeze. When I boarded that trolley above ground in West Philadelphia, that same sky was dark and foreboding.

That's the thing about cerulean. It can come right at you, seemingly from no where. Especially, in the garden, where the greens and reds and golds fight it out for supremacy.

On a soupy July afternoon in the sunny perennial border, regal spires of blue Delphinium startle with a hue unlike any other in the garden that day.

At the estate, an ancient clematis decorates, reliably, an equally aged gate post every summer, its hue perfect against peeling white painted stone and silvery Stachys byzantina.

Nigella damescena, or Love-in-A-Mist, is the rare flower whose botanical and common names are equally lovely. A packet of seeds for this cottage annual, from the corner hardware store, tossed casually in unforgiving soil, will reward in perpetuity with lacy foliage and ethereal blue flowers that volunteer year after year. In my vegetable garden it startles always with the unlikely crevices and perfectly placed cracks in brick pathways in which it finds to seed itself.

At the estate garden in fall, it is the blaze of scarlet and crimson that steals the show. But in a sunny patch of the woodland garden, tall rangy spires of Aster tataricus, Tatarian aster, are just the right subtle counterpoint of steely blue.

In all seasons, even in winter, hues of blue have their place. A calm resting place for a busy eye, florist's blue hydrangea is a startling, welcome relief in the Longwood Gardens hothouse, a break from halls decked with red and green and gold.

So, there is something about cerulean. This past year, whether jogging along the river trail at Philadelphia's cliffside Water Works Garden, after the sky suddenly shifts, or for the brief periods most of these rare blue flowers alight the garden, I have a new appreciation for this celestial hue.

After a long, cold, gray winter, hiking the craggy sandstone cliffs of my native Cuyahoga Vally, I ascend the canyon walls. And, there, suddenly, a blue sky over trunks of silvery beech and still naked oak, clinging to their rugged sandstone foundation. The sun's rays warm the soil on the magic days before leaves unfurl, ephemerals will soon grace these craggy canyon walls.

In planning my gardens, I try always to remember the magic of sudden cerulean. But there is only so much one can plan, the best cerulean moments are serendipitous. At the estate, the owners surprised me with a polished silvery chair from Akron artist Don Drumm. We placed it in a neglected part of the garden, in front of a less than ideal chain link fence on a recently reseeded lawn. It brightens this dismal corner quite well.

And then, suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, through the salt hay of a newly planted lawn, Scilla siberica, Siberian squill, emerges faithfully, as it does every year. Against the artist's silvery chair and under a dismal March sky, it was just the right thing. Unexpected, brief, startling. The magic of sudden cerulean.

Hot Cross Buns

Every time I do this work, I marvel at how lucky I am. We were meant to tend this earth. Every time I do it, it feels right. Let me get on a soapbox for just a moment: if we all engaged in labor, joyfully, every day, instead of avoiding it, we might all be more happy. (Stepping off soapbox now.)

Every day it is a new plant that captivates me. Today, our humble native redbud has me swooning.

I have lived on this earth for 40 years. I have seen and felt the seasons change, but not until recently did I appreciate what that means. Each night I bike home, I am overcome by the moon. Or, how the leaves unfurl. Or, the fragrance of the snowball viburnum. These things have been with me all my life, but not until recently did I appreciate them.

These cerulean days: magnolias in full glory, a silvery beech about to burst leaf.

One thing about skilled physical labor: it engages your body, and your mind. And, if you are lucky enought to work in the elements, you see the seasons change.

These magic sun dappled days: soon, my woodland paths will be shaded.

I am blessed, or cursed, with a metabolism that requires constant attention. I love to eat, but also require a lot of food, every few hours, to keep me going.

Normally on estate days, I pack sandwiches. Six or eight of them.

Today, I was running late. So, that required a trip to Narberth,

Feels, immediately, like a place you have been before.

Narberth is a little stop on the Mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad. For years it was an enclave, filled with Irish Philly cops, derided as a backwater, a working class place "betwixt and between" the mainline proper and the city itself.

A genuine, fully stocked five and dime.

But, my first time setting foot in this place, it felt immediately "home:" a two square block downtown, with extant deli, hardware store, five and dime, grocery store, movie theatre, pizza shop, laundromat. Everything you need, within a few blocks.

Not that I ever lived in such a place. I think I was remembering my Fischer Price "Little Village." The downtown where I grew up has been gasping for breathe most of my life, but I do recall angle parking in front of the shoe store, pharmacy, hardware store, before the whole thing was bricked off and made a "mall."

Next door to the first rate hardware store, every year they set up a temporary shelter to sell pansies and Better Boys.

So, today, I go to the old A&P, to get a sandwich. Though the whole place is but 4 aisles wide, all is contained here, that you need. I approach the deli counter, and order a Narberth Special Hoagie. Which, of course, I painfully pronounce NAR BERTH. The octogenarian deli man, taken aback, clarifies. "Oh, you would like a Narbit?"

Those little red plastic fringes separating the sections of the meat cooler brought back immediate, visceral memories of A&P's and Krogers I have known.

Waiting for my sandwich to be handcrafted, I roam those four aisles. In front of the tiny circular conveyor belt check out lanes, exactly like they used to have at the Sparkle Market or the little Acme in Cuyahoga Falls, is a tin foil pan of hot cross buns.  

I pick up the pan of buns, euphemistically thinking, perhaps I will save them for breakfast.

I go back to the deli man, he assumes I am from this place and asks why he has not seen me lately. I play along to the extent that I can, feigning familiarity with this place and an imagined connection to this place that feels immediately familiar yet completely foreign. It is the primal hometown.

A bank of grape hyacinth in front of a gambrel roof house.

I pay for my purchases and bike my way back to the estate.

One after another, I eat the hot cross buns, under a magnolia in full glorious bloom.
I marvel at the season changing before my very eyes, rejoice that I have a job that lets me immerse myself, viscerally, in each unfolding day, and realize, if I had not forgotten to pack my lunch, most likely, I would have made it through Easter without the pleasure of a hot cross bun. And that, would be a shame.

This magic day, buds unfurl to leaflets before your very eyes.

These magnolia days: ancient trees tower over already substantial stone homes, glinting with Wissahickon shist.

Found Objects

Yesterday I biked home in a gentle April shower. I was startled, suddenly, to see chartreuse: in the hours I was inside at work, ginkgo and honey locust unfurled eager leaflets from swollen buds. Magnolia and cherry petals carpet the road west, as if heralding Spring's triumphant arrival.

Red maple buds relish warm rays in front of a suddenly cerulean sky. Any day now, they will unfurl.

These magic days: before the leaves unfurl, I find myself paying attention to the structure and the objects in my gardens, before they are robed in springtime splendor.

Again and again I find, the things I love in the garden are things that look like they were always there. More often than not, theese are the found objects.

It all started in my West Philadelphia community garden, where detritus was a fact of life. The site of a former carriage factory, it was nothing but rubble: crumbling brick walls, chunks of concrete, shards of glass, bricks, stones, iron. We piled all the rubble in a heap, and eventually we made a pond atop it. In this corner we collect the bricks and stones and timbers from which we will make raised beds and paths.

Steve found an antique bench in someone's trash: he fabricated a new leg, sanded and painted it. It is now a favorite respite atop the Pond Hill. One day it will be shaded by a Paw Paw tree Ginny brought from her family homeplace, now just a seedling planted with love, on unforgiving terrain. Cast off grasses from the Estate provide a perch for birds after they shake their wings in our cooling waters.

My first year I had to prove myself to the other gardeners. They granted me a 4' X 4' foot "trial" plot. My own little urban Eden. I built raised beds of brick and rubble, and each subsequent season, was fortunate to have my acreage increase. I loved the way the sun shone off the many shades of found bricks, how I always found just enough old curbstones to complete a new bed, how early spring peas clamored over old rusty iron fence.

In a city where sometimes in especially soggy Junes, old abandoned houses will simply tumble down on themselves, there is never a shortage of raw material to scavenge. Old scrolled porch posts from a tumbledown ruin provide lascivious clematis a more than ample trellis over which to scamper.

A potager is an ornamental raised cottage vegetable garden, and my little patch of lettuce, in a raised bed of old bricks, rivals any flower garden for its ornamental appeal. A vintage rose, Fourth of July, leans on an old piece of iron gate that I carried from Kinnessing.

In front of a raised wall garden terraced by broken up old sidewalk pieces, an old teak bench,  destined for the garbage at an estate, in a shady corner of our garden, under a mulberry tree, is upholstered exquisitely in moss.

Cast off wheel barrows have earned their keep. Once their axles no longer can be repaired, I have designs on re-purposing them as planters.

Pond walls made up of old concrete chunks, will eventually be obscured by perimeter plantings. When I rebuilt the pond walls, I started with natural stone, but ran out. In this context, old concrete looks just about right. This garden is of the city, and from its old infrastructure, it takes its form.

At the Estate, the owners found this statue at a rummage sale. Most months it is a hidden treasure, a blue slate path wends through the woodland garden to it. The path's old slate pieces we squirreled away under an ancient yew, awaiting a purpose. Once this bluish gray statue arrived, they had found it. Only during azalea season does this statue's presence announce itself. Otherwise it is a secret shrine.

During these magic days, awaiting the canopy to unfurl, I take pleasure in the objects I encounter in the garden, remembering where they came from, and marveling how the right object, serendipitously found, looks like it has always been there.

These humble gleanings, moreso than expensive objects d'art, give the garden good bones. I am so glad for those few pleasant days in February or March, when the sun warms the soil, that I have the time to work some of these cast off treasures into structure that summer's bounty will eventually clothe.

Plants I Love

Don't ask me to choose a favorite, I love them all in their own way. But here are some plants that I keep coming back to, again and again.

An unforgiving foundation area under a truculent old holly. We brighten the shade with white leaved perennials: Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost,' Lamium maculatum 'White Nancy,' Japanese Ghost Ferm, and variegated Solomon's Seal.

When Nigella's blooms are done, the show does not stop: otherworldy, alien-looking seed pods emerge to prolong the display. Let them keep seeding, and eventually they will revert to mauves and pinks and purples, in addition to the blues selected so long ago by Miss Jekyll.

At the end of the season, chartreuse leaved salvia. Spires of fire engine red plumes, well nigh six feet tall, fire away in front of an ancient maple grove.

Simple, peaceful, restful: golden Japanese forest grass, thick shiny leaves of European ginger, Ghost Fern.

Memories of gaudy giant purple alliums in the back of bulb catalogs, with a freckle faced little urchin posed next to them to illustrate height, always scared me away from alliums. But, the white variety, with their perfect snowy orbs, lend grace and height to a burgeoning June garden.

An unforgiving southern exposure on a busy downtown street: you need plants that are tough as nails. Paging Knockout roses and lemony yellow tree hibiscus!

Opunta, a perennial cactus native to rocky mountain faces in the ridge and valley section of Pennsylvania, surprise everyone each season with their sunny yellow blooms. Here, they grow through brick and rubble.

As a horticulturist, I know I am supposed to use Latin botanical names. So here is some Kniphofia uvaria. But I am also a folklorist, and you can never beat the traditional common names. So here is some Red Hot Poker. Or Torch Lily. Perfect name, easy plant.

This ancient Clematis 'Nelly Moser' has been climbing up through the canes of an old rambling rose, for more decades than I have been alive, without an ounce of effort or help from me. Nelly shows up every summer and struts her stuff.

Yellow flag iris naturalize in our community garden pond, behind a clump of Baptisia australis, or False Blue Indigo.

I am honored to tend this ancient grove of Japanese maple. Of course they woo you with their spectacular leaf color and graceful form. But as the years go on, I admire their smooth, sinewy trunks all the more.

You will never get more bang for your buck than a $.99 pack of Nigella seeds, or Love in a Mist, as the old ladies called it, from the corner hardware store. It volunteers itself year after year, flowers of blue and of white float above ferny fennel-like foliage.

Why I Do It

Double parked in front of a Rittenhouse townhouse, unloading trees and shrubs and bags of soil, on the lookout for Parking Authority agents and rogue cabbies intent to run me over, I thought: this is it. No more Center City landscaping jobs.

Rittenhouse Square worksite.

And yet, as I worked, on a busy social strip of Spruce Street, I was heartened as passerby after passerby stopped, smiled, chatted. A yellow tree hibiscus is just a middlin shrub on a suburban patio, but in the bustle of Center City, it evokes comments, smiles, questions.

Newly planted window box, awaiting summer growth.

When I work at the mainline estate, it is peaceful isolation. Just me, and my thoughts, and the hundreds of perennials and shrubs and trees that I have nurtured into maturation in 5 years plus of gardening there. It is satisfying to look at the landscape I have created. But I do wonder: all this for just a few to see?

Perennial border at Malwyd estate.

But in the city it is different. Hundreds of people walk past the window boxes I plant there. Sure, some throw their beer bottles, syringes, or worse in the shrubbery. But people inevitably pause and smile as they walk past. A few are curmudgeons, "Why do those crazy people plant flowers that will just be stolen?" "That's never gonna survive here."

But planting anything anywhere is always an act of hope and devotion.

And I realize to make it worth my while, I need to triple my rates for these challenging Center City sites. And yet, I think I would almost do this job for free.

Every time I work in Center City, I field dozens of inquiries: Do you plant street trees? Does your company do patios? How can I get my fig tree to fruit?

My "company," I explain, is just me. And I'm fully booked. But thanks for your interest! My standard response...

When I was doing this full time, one day of planting window boxes on a busy city sidewalk was enough to line up clients to keep me busy for the full season.

Sure, some of these people are cranks, or crazies, or impossible to please.

But generally, folks willing to invest a little care and money into creating something that will please not just them but the larger city are good folks to know.

After a summer of luxuriant growth.

After I finished planting the Spruce Street job today, I got my tools and equipment put away, myself cleaned up, and the sidewalk swept. I was walking west toward home, several blocks from where I'd been working all day. A woman called out to me from across the street. She waved me down frantically.

I paused. She froggered her way across Walnut Street.

"You're the Plant Guy!" she said.

I was about to give her my "booked for the season" speech.

But she beamed and continued, "Just wanted to let you know, I have been looking forward all winter to what you would be planting this spring on Spruce Street. What you do gives us all such pleasure and a little bit of joy everyday."

She reached out, clasped both of her small soft manicured hands around one of my grubby calloused veiny hands, squeezed gently, smiled, and went on her way.

Maybe I will keep on doing a few Center City landscape jobs. Or, at the very least, this one.

The sun sets on a day of satisfying urban horticulture.

Snow Changes Things

It's not an April Fool's Day joke, it's the real deal. Snowing on the first of April. Snow happens.

Here in Pennsylvania, the old timers call it Onion Snow. The dark crunchy green of wild onions, at the pasture's edge, blanketed in winter's last mantle. Or, as the old wives tell it, it always snows at least once on the daffodils.

The winter of my birth, 1971, was a snowy one in Cuyahoga Falls, according to the photo album of my first year. The little house Jim and Marge bought, just for my arrival, so raw it does not yet have foundation shrubs, momentarily blends into the landscape onto which it was plunked, thanks to winter's forgiving blanket. My brother, bundled in pre-microfiber 1970s winter wear, lists back helplessly on a Radio Flyer in the front yard, as immobile as Ralphie, a turtle on its back.

Snow changes things. A formative memory:

The smell of candles, a warm handshake from Dr. Drake. Mr. Chamberlain's Bach postlude wafts out wooden Methodist church doors over just-fallen snow. Under a giant hackberry tree, a lamb, someone's tiny pony, hay bales, Mother and child. Across the street, Charlie Boyd's tinsel and lights, so garish by day, look just about perfect shrouded in snow. All of this happened in the one hour we were inside, as if on cue.

Snow on the Memorial Strip, in Cuyahoga Falls

When it is unexpected, snow can startle with its sudden silent blanket. Once in downtown Akron, I stepped out from a smoky club for fresh air, unaware that snow and then sleet had been falling. Everything was cast in an eerie, even light, so bright, I could see as if it were day. I walked for blocks, crunching through virgin snow, over a canal long buried under streets and stores.

In 12 years as a horticulturist in Philadelphia, snowy winters, until recently, were quite rare. Winters were a soggy, gray, barren affair.

But not the last few seasons. For one born into a snowy winter, I have relished these last few niveous years. Our usual urban routine disrupted: cross country skiers glide unimpeded down our busiest avenues.

Our fair city, it turns out, is fairly ravishing under snowfall. The newly restored cliffside gardens at the Art Museum and Water Works, courtesy of those very busy horticulturists at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, resemble nothing so much as a Swiss Alpine village.

In my own West Philadelphia urban village, those wily Victorians had to have abundant snowfall in mind when they built all these turrets and gables. Many a morn I awoke, thinking I was inhabiting someone's under-the-tree Victorian Christmas Village. Although, this stuff was not cotton batting.

In my own horticultural work, I can't say that I specifically plan for how things will look under a cover of snow. But it must always be somewhere in the back of my mind.

I know the townhouse I landscape in Rittenhouse Square gets tremendous foot traffic all year. Although everyone appreciates the lemony yellow tree hibiscus in summer, I think they especially need a little plucking up in winter.

This past winter, I think I just about got it right: Black Dragon Japanese Cedar, yellow twig curly dogwood, aurora sedge, golden juniper, African knobs, white doll's eye berries, and just a few magnolia branches.

Similarly, at sidewalk level, out in West Philadelphia, a spire of cryptomeria, goldenthread false cypress, and Harry Lauder's Walking Stick just about did the trick.

Winter in the city: a time to  slow down, hold tight, pull close. Snow changes everything. Even when it falls on the  onions.