Swooning

or The Graceful Art

Pretending to be a ribbon isn't all that easy.  I found that out when I was seven or eight and have never tried it again.

Crocus ancyrensis 'Golden Bunch'

I'd been reading a book, of course.  It may have been Caddie Woodlawn, or something like that—a tale of pioneer communities in the 19th century and the odd smatterings of Civilized Behavior that followed them from non-pioneering places.  One "civilized" thing the girls did was to practice fainting gracefully.*  They were supposed to pretend to be ribbons falling, and then in theory a graceful swoon was theirs for the asking.  I wasn't all that interested in swooning, but what with my parents refusing to buy me a horse or let me start a fire in the schoolhouse (only so I could help put it out, of course!), it was one of the more manageable feats in the book to try for myself.  Pretending to be a ribbon, though—I don't know.  Even on the shag carpeting that graced our home at the time, I mostly ended up feeling bruised and kind of stupid.  I guess you're either a swooner or you're not, and 20th-century girls are just mostly not.

Crocuses are like that, too.

Some of them are as sturdy as all get-out.  The 'Cream Beauty' Crocus chrysanthus that started blooming the first of February have just now faded away completely, a month later.  They withstood snow and wind and the neighbors' cats and looked beautiful for weeks without making a grand fuss about it.

The 'Golden Bunch' Crocus ancyrensis, on the other hand, for all their bold, vivacious coloring, are a lot more delicate.  They balked at blooming through a colder than average February; when they did bloom, they only opened their petals part way.  Dropping a camera on them (ahem) absolutely cr-r-r-rushed their spirits.  Their wounded looks chided me clear across the garden.  Compared to the other crocuses, the 'Golden Bunch' are less likely to come back from one year to the next, quicker to fade away once they bloom, and a lot more likely to

swoon. 

But don't they do it gracefully?

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* Because that's a useful skill for farm women carving out homesteads on the open prairie.

I was doing a search on "how to swoon gracefully," as one does, and came across an actual set of swooning lessons.  As always, be sure to consult with your doctor before starting this or any new exercise program.

A Little Knowledge

or Dangerous Things

Every time I start to write about wine cups, black widows get in the way. 

Callirhoe involucrata

Sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively.  From wine cups to black widows it's a short step, you know, to idle musing about injustice, fear and ignorance, but somehow then a long step back to wine cups.  It's just that black widows get such a bad rap.  Yes, they're venomous, if not to a lethal degree then certainly to a painful one.  But just because they can hurt you doesn't mean they want to.  They're so far from being aggressive, they're downright chicken-hearted.  They are shrinking violets.  Jumping spiders will return stare for stare as you observe them; orb weavers will ignore you magnificently until you finally get bored and leave.  To daddy-long-legs, you're just so much geography to be traversed.  But let a black widow—that dangerous, venomous, bulbous, patent-leather spider with the hot red markings—catch sight of you, and she will go running for shelter.  She may even abandon her web altogether and find a safer place to start again.  (The males aren't web-builders; nor are they as poisonous.)  She won't bite unless she runs out of options.

A black widow huddled up as small as small can be (which isn't
very small in her case) to avoid me.  The white sphere is her egg sac.

Once you know how terrified black widows really are of you, and how harmless they would very much prefer to be, and how good their thick, messy webs are at trapping the biggest pests, wholesale destruction starts to seem a little unfair.  I tear down the webs now and then with a (long) stick to discourage them, and do destroy any egg sacs I find, but as long as the spiders stay off the Adirondack chair, I don't go out of my way to kill them.  I wear jeans, shoes with toes, and gloves (among other things) to garden in, and the black widows (in theory) run away at the sight of me.  Still, you never know when an unintentional act will leave a black widow feeling like she's run out of options.  A little knowledge has me living dangerously.  It's fair, though:  we're not at peace, exactly, but we're all very non-aggressive.

Just like wine cups.  Callirhoe involucrata occasionally gets a bad rap, too, but mostly from people who've never grown it, who judge its appearance but don't know what it's really like.  I have come across people who take one look at its luxuriant growth and far-reaching stems and mark it down as a thug:  bishop's weed with blooms, bindweed with bling.

The leaves fill a geranium-shaped spot in my heart.

A little knowledge, a little experience shows you just how little danger wine cups pose.  The three-foot stems don't creep and twine and root themselves in inconvenient places; they just grow horizontally rather than vertically, no more a threat to your garden than a salvia or a daisy stem.  They may thread their way up through taller supports, but they're not kudzu or ivy, overwhelming their hosts.  They just...appreciate the support.  They lean.  They relax.  They take it easy, in someone else's arms.  Finding your rosemary and gaura sporting bright magenta blooms is really quite charming.

Among the gaura.  The flowers open during the day and close at night.

Not only are wine cups not aggressive, but they die back to the crown in winter and (at least in my garden) the worst of summer heat.  Leaves re-emerge when conditions improve, but they do leave blank spots where lush greenery used to reside.  I find that growing them among the autumn sage  (Salvia greggii) works well—the wine cups fill the space while the salvia grows back from its winter pruning, and then the salvia takes over as the wine cups fade.  If wine cups were like bindweed, we wouldn't have to make these little plans.

C. involucrata in strong, mid-day sun near a west-facing wall.  The new growth
is monsoonal; the brown is left over from the last heat wave.  The wine cups
grown in more shade still have all their leaves and are blooming well.

My limited experience is that wine cups are borderline plants here in Albuquerque.  They're native primarily to the Great Plains and, while their good, thick taproot makes them drought tolerant, drought and desert are different things; in my garden they look best with a little more moisture and a little less sun.  They also prefer cooler temperatures and don't bloom for as long here as they do elsewhere, but six weeks in flower is still nothing to sneeze at.  Otherwise, give them good drainage, and watch them go—in a vigorous but non-aggressive sort of way.

A little knowledge, a little experience:  doors open, possibilities beckon...  What a dangerous thing.

In the interests of full disclosure, though, wine cups do have one bad habit.  While they don't self-seed with abandon or require dead-heading, they do shed dry blossoms wherever they feel like it.  They're a little messy.  You wouldn't think that reaching in to tidy them up would be a problem, and it wouldn't be.

Messy.

If the black widows weren't in the way.

Odd One Out

or Harmless Eccentrics

Mormon tea (Ephedra viridis)  has only the tiniest of leaves, useless little scales that you'd hardly recognize as leaves at all.  It keeps its chlorophyll in its stems instead, which is unusual behavior in a shrub but an ingenious response to the desert, as Ephedra has no broad surfaces to be robbed of moisture by the wind and sun.  Even in its first year after planting, it doesn't want much watering, and after that it's quite content with rainfall.  It seems to be a unique cross—or a link—between conifers and flowering plants and is a little odd-looking.  But then, the climate it's adapted to is an odd one, too.  In the hottest corner of the garden between the south and west-facing walls, I don't know what would do better.

Ephedra viridis

Years ago I was visiting with a friend at his house back in rural New York state.  He was a grad student in Renaissance literature, and we got ourselves lost in a discussion of Shakespeare.  We had come to a knotty point about Henry V when a squirrel in the garden made its way over the baffle that should have stopped it but mostly didn't, and scampered on up the bird feeder.  My friend excused himself mid-sentence, opened the living room window, picked up a BB gun lying on the sill, fired a few shots at the roof of the feeder, frightened off the squirrel, put down the gun, closed the window, and resumed discussing Henry as if nothing had happened.  "This," I thought, "is how eccentrics are born."*

For many people, I do think eccentricity proceeds that way:  You're off on your own somewhere, in circumstances that call for an intense kind of focus, and don't stop to wonder whether your actions are quirky or strange.  You just do what needs done with the resources you have, without looking up and around at the wider world, and the next thing you know, that focus, that set of responses, has turned into habit.  Shakespeare and BB guns have merged into one harmonious world in your head.  You've shed your leaves, the chlorophyll has moved into your stems, and the neighbors have started to look at you funny.  You may have adapted well to the circumstances, but that doesn't mean you're not a little...odd. 

The micro-garden, showing two colors of orach, along with pepper cress and garlic.

One of my current neighbors and I take turns peeking over our shared garden wall to see what the other is growing.  We have completely different approaches and interests, which is half the fun, of course.  He's particularly fascinated by the micro-garden, the divided, 2' x 4' raised bed where I grow vegetables.  "What's that on the end?" he'll ask, and we'll start working our way around the bed.  Orach, amaranth, arugula, sweet potato vine, pepper cress.  "Don't you ever just grow, you know, lettuce?"

I don't—it doesn't thrive, as my non-vegetable growing neighbor hasn't had to discover.  I find myself going farther afield from lettuce and spinach every year, not in the quest for something new and different, just for something that will get past its first set of true leaves before bolting.  The hunt for leafy vegetables that will do well in strong southern sun a mile above sea level, with single-digit relative humidity, 25-30°F differences between day and night-time temperatures, strong winds, and plagues of leafhoppers, is unending it seems.  The time between last frost and scorching heat, on the other hand, is short.  Lettuce is not adapted.  Anyone wanting greens would be smarter just to break off a twig of Mormon tea and start gnawing.

Failing that, however, I'm growing orach (Atriplex hortensis), as it bolts without turning bitter.  Orach wouldn't be an unusual garden plant if we were in France, say, and it's not an odd plant in itself at all—it's perfectly lovely, in fact, in entirely normal ways.  It keeps its chlorophyll in its leaves and everything.  Its only oddity lies in being rare in a world of grocery stores, where salad means lettuce.  I say all this to my neighbor.

He gives me the humoring look reserved for harmless eccentrics.

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* Squirrels have a lot to answer for.