gardenerd

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(JSTOR) Scientific Theory in Erasmus Darwin's "The Botanic Garden" (1789-91)
Clark Emery
Isis, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Sep., 1941), pp. 315-325
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society

gardenerd 

Frosty Day

Robert Frost ~ A Girl's Garden
A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.
One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, "Why not?"
In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, "Just it."
And he said, "That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm."
It was not enough of a garden,
Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don't mind now.
She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load.
And hid from anyone passing.
And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
Of all things but weed.
A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
And even fruit trees
And yes, she has long mistrusted
That a cider apple tree
In bearing there to-day is hers,
Or at least may be.
Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.
Now when she sees in the village
How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
She says, "I know!
It's as when I was a farmer--"
Oh, never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
To the same person twice.


ROBERT FROST

"I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."
- Tennyson

Aching for my garden lately,
I miss this space. sigh

The picture is deceiving, there are actually two chairs, comfortably snug in a lush nook of balloon flowers, pumpkin plants, bergenia, those pretty peach day lilies, phlox, and herbs. Tucked behind the apple tree, it was my secluded room with a view. Aaah, and where little green bottles grew!

I have to be grateful for this journal; what an asset it is for planning the move.

PLANTS BEING MOVED:
roses
John Davis
Morden Fireglow
Morden Blush
Winnipeg Parks
Morden Sunrise
J.P. Connell
George Vancouver
shrubs
blue spruce (Picea pungens 'Globosa') x 2
Weigela 'Red Prince'
Hydrangea 'Annabelle'
Elder Sambucus racemosa 'Sutherland Gold'
day lilies
Double River Wye
Raspberry Parfait
little peach one in front
Fairytale
Strawberry Swirl
other little peach one
random perennials
spiderwort Tradescantia 'Caerulea Plena'
Thymus praecox 'Nutmeg Thyme'
Viola labradorica 'Purple Labrador Violet'
Phlox subulata 'creeping phlox' (Emerald Blue)
lungwort x 3
goat's beard
adjuga
bergenia pig squeak
Stachys byzantina 'Lamb's Ears'
Heuchera micrantha (Coral Bells) 'Purple Palace'
Echinacea ' Big Sky Sunrise'
Hosta 'Tokudama Flavocircinalis'
Hosta 'Paradigm'
hostas x 3 more unidentified
fern
astilbe x 2
irises
chives
sedum(s)
lavender
that pink peony by the shed
sunflower
thank goodness I didn't plant much last year

Incidently, as I write this I'm listening to In the Key of Charles on CBC Radio 2. His theme this morning is ANGELS. All angelic playlist: good angels, dark angels, evil angels, and more good angels. Fantastic!

I will need at least twelve very large pots, sixteen to twenty 24-26" pots and another dozen or more 16-20"ers. I'm doubting very much that I would be able to transplant directly on May1st, so I think it'll be less worrisome to plan for the pots; keeping in mind that the plants may spend a considerable period of time in their pots. If I'm lucky enough to be able to transplant a few things directly, it would be a relief at the time - but it's just not something I can realistically count on.
I'm sure I can borrow some temporary pots from the greenhouse while I collect great pots like these pictured, work for dirt *er* soil, and I'm starting to dream up ways of training John Davis in a pot with a trellis - which I think will be beautiful. :)

• 
  The sixth day of February is the feast of St. Dorothy of Italy, who survived being thrown into boiling animal fat, but who was beheaded in ca. 313 CE. She returned to earth as an angel child, bringing three apples and three roses from the garden of paradise to the lawyer and cynic Theophilus, who had mocked her on her way to death. He was astonished at the sight and was instantly converted by the miracle. Theophilus was himself later beheaded, cut up into little pieces, and fed to the birds. Saint Dorothy is depicted with apples, either in her hand or in a basket, and with roses.
  

Ward, Bobby J.. "A Contemplation Upon Flowers: Garden Plants in Myth and Literature." Saints of the Spade. Timber Press, Oregon. 1999.

Birches - Robert Frost

WHEN I see birches bend to left and right
Across the line of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches;
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

The Sun Parrots are Late This Year

For Chico Mendez, murdered Brazilian environmentalist

The great forests of the world are burning down,
Far away in Amazon they burn,
Far beyond our eyes the trees are cut
And cleared and heaped and fired:
Ashes fill the rivers for miles and miles,
The rivers are stained with the blood of mighty trees.
Great rivers are brothers of great forests
And immense clouds shadowing the rose-lit waters
Are cousins of this tribe of the earth-gods
Under the ancient watch of the stars:
All should be secure and beautiful forever,
Dwarfing man generation after generation after generation,
Inspiring man, feeding him with dreams and strength.
But over there it is not so; man is giant
And the forest dwindles, it will soon be nothing,
Shrubs sprouting untidily in scorched black earth.
The sun will burn the earth, before now shadowed
For a hundred thousand years, dark and dripping,
Hiding jewelled insects and thick-veined plants,
Blue-black orchids with white hearts, red macaws,
The green lace of ferns, gold butterflies, opal snakes.
Everything shrivels and dust begins to blow:
It is as if acid was poured on the silken land.

It is far from here now, but it is coming nearer,
Those who love forests are also cut down.
This month, this year, we may not suffer:
The brutal way things are, it will come.
Already the cloud patterns are different each year,
The wind blows from new directions,
The rain comes earlier, beats down harder,
Or it is dry when the pastures thirst.
In this dark, over-arching Essequibo forest
I walk near the shining river in the green paths
Cool and green as melons laid in the running streams.
I cannot imagine all the forests going down,
The great black hogs not snouting for the pulp of fruit,
All this beauty and power and shining life gone.
But in far, once emerald Amazon the forest dies
By fire, fiercer than bright axes.
The roar of the wind in the trees is sweet,
Reassuring, the heavens stretch far and bright
Above the loneliness of mist-shrouded forest trails,
And there is such a feeling of softness in the air.
Can it be that all of this will go, leaving the clean-boned land?
I wonder if my children's children, come this way,
Will see the great forest spread green and tall and far
As it spreads now far and green for me.
Is it my imagination that the days are furnace-hot,
The sun-parrots late or not come at all this year?

Ian McDonald (1933 - 2003)

McWatt, Mark and Stewart Brown, ed. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. New York: Oxford, 2005.