Exactly 10 years ago today, I had one of my best spring garden visits anywhere. Except it just happened to be right here in Toronto at one of our biggest ‘tourist attractions’, Casa Loma. But back on May 12, 2011, I didn’t bother staying inside the castle (which I had toured many times) and instead went right out to the garden. I passed by the Asian-themed garden with its pretty azaleas…..
….. and walked down the slope past the bright-magenta Rhododendron dauricum. For geology fans, this hillside is actually the ancient shoreline of Lake Ontario’s Ice Age predecessor, Lake Iroquois.
I slowed down completely as I came to the staircase near the bottom, where native Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) were at their very peak.
Virginia bluebells might be one of the northeast’s most splendid springtime sights! Like many of our native spring wildflowers, they’re ‘ephemeral’, meaning after they flower and set seed, they just die back completely… until next spring.
I had a destination in mind, and it was the Woodland Garden with its beautiful paper birches and a spectacular underplanting of some of the best spring natives, as well as a few delicate Asian groundcovers that added their own charms. Here we have Virginia bluebells with lots of lovely ostrich ferns (Matteucia struthiopteris).
An ascending path made from grit and flagstone slabs takes you back up the Iroquois shoreline so you can enjoy all the shade-lovers. Here we have the three principal actors: Virginia bluebell (M. virginica), yellow wood poppy (Stylophorum diphyllum) and ostrich ferns. (Note how much bigger the wood poppy’s flowers are than that confusing, weedy, invasive doppelgänger with the small yellow flowers, greater celandine, Chelidonium majus.)
I love yellow-with-blue in the garden, and this is one of the finest duos!
Ontario’s provincial floral emblem, shimmering-white, showy trilliums (T. grandiflorum) add to the display.
Virginia bluebells are also lovely with yellow merrybells (Uvularia grandiflora).
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I’ve never identified the buckeye seedlings that were popping up in this planting, but given it’s mostly native, perhaps Ohio buckeye (Aesculus glabra)?
There were also epimediums in this garden, like the red-flowered E. x rubrum you can see at the bottom left, below,
… and here, with Virginia bluebells.
Yellow-flowered Epimedium x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’ was featured in the woodland as well……
…. and orange-flowered Epimedium x warleyense ‘Orange Queen’.
Finally, a pure-white trillium with E. x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’.
Whoever said it was terrible to garden in shade?
*****
If you want to read more about spring designs for shade, have a look at my blog on the Montreal Botanical Garden’s fabulous Jardin d’Ombre, A Shade Garden Master Class.
Winter. It’s never really over until the fat robin sings… at least 50 times.
We’re always reminded of that in April when mother nature says, “Here, have another helping!”
We had snow last night in Toronto, quite a lot for mid-April. I went out with my camera as I often do early in the morning after an ice storm or dusting of snow leaves the spring flowers shocked but photogenic. My Tulipa fosteriana ‘Orange Emperor’ bowed down – humiliating for an emperor.
Tulipa praestans ‘Shogun’ seemed less martial arts this morning, more ‘shivering’.
Sweet little Iris aucheri ‘Ocean Magic’ looked like Arctic Ocean magic….
…. and Muscari latifolium wore a tiny white toque.
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Hyacinthus ‘Gipsy Queen’ looked like she wanted to move her caravan somewhere warmer.
Snakeshead fritillaries (Fritillaria meleagris) seemed less than impressed.
Miss ‘Beth Evans’ (Corydalis solida) swooned. I’m not sure why, her kin come from northern Europe – she should be used to this spring trickery!
In the back garden, the resident cardinals were quiet – why sing when you can stay warm in the cedar hedge?
But out on the street, the sparrows kept up their spirits, and reminded me to keep mine up, too. After all, April snow showers bring (back) spring flowers, right?
The end of the gardening season, the beginning of the festive season: this was always the time of year for the WWWG to get together for dinner. WWWG – the “Wonderful Women Who Garden”. We addressed our emails that way, with great affection and without a trace of irony, honouring how we four had become friends through gardening. My earliest photo of us is from late August 2003, seven years after we collaborated on the series of garden books that had brought us together. We’re at my cottage on Lake Muskoka for a ‘slumber party’, the four musketeers: from left Liz Primeau, the founding editor of CanadianGardening magazine; Wanda Nowakowska, then Associate Editorial Director at Toronto’s Madison Press; Penny Arthurs, garden designer and writer; and me. It was a rainy, stormy weekend but it didn’t matter at all; we cooked together, we drank wine, we sang songs from the 60s, we swam (well, Penny did) and we talked and talked and talked.
Penny was a woman of many talents. She designed gardens – classically beautiful, often formal gardens with the kind of lasting structure she believed every landscape needed. A 2012 article surveying top local designers in the Toronto Botanical Garden’s Trellis newsletter noted: “Many of her colleagues echoed the statement of Penny Arthurs (The Chelsea Gardener & Associates) that ‘good bones – quality paving, walls, fences, underpin plantings and endure through one’s worst gardening disasters’.” Her friends knew her client list spanned the wealthy and politically powerful, but Penny never named names. She only wanted to give them beautiful gardens. Speaking of “good bones” and the Trellis, the first time I saw Penny’s name in print was the 1992 cover, below, advertising her lecture on “The Garden in Winter”.
She wrote regular design features for both of Canada’s main gardening magazines back then, including this Spring 1996 article in Gardening Life ….
…. and Canadian Gardening, where the article below appeared. Liz Primeau has two memories of their relationship at the magazine when she was editor. “She’d used the phrase ‘have your cake and eat it, too’ in one of the design columns she wrote and I had changed it to ‘eat your cake and have it too,’ which seems far more logical and the right way to use the phrase. Penny phoned to ask why. A lively discussion ensued (Google it – we didn’t have that luxury then), and she let me have it my way. She won the other skirmish. She’d used ‘a myriad of…’ to describe something gardeny, and I edited it to’myriad’, having been corrected in my youth that the correct use of the word was as an adjective, not a noun. We consulted various dictionaries and a thesaurus and I had to concede the word could be used either way.”
Penny and I saw each other periodically in the 1990s at the Toronto Botanical Garden (then called The Civic Garden Centre), particularly at the weekend-long Great Gardening Conferences held biennially between 1985 and 1997. In fact, we were both on the planning committee for the seventh and last one titled ‘Connectedness from the GroundUp’ at which she was also Master of Ceremony. I photographed her own garden that autumn, a lovely, leafy sanctuary, below, that expressed many of the design principles she had honed in a career that took root in The English Gardening School at London’s Chelsea Physic Garden (thus her company name), was polished at the School of Landscape Architecture at Ryerson University, and practised over the decades in her design studio at home.
But it was with the Canadian Gardening book series published that same year that our friendship and that of Wanda Nowakowska and Liz Primeau, blossomed. My title was Water in the Garden; Penny’s was Small Space Gardens, below, and it was filled with her design wisdom.
Penny floated effortlessly between the rarified world of landscape design and the quaint world of garden writing. In 2009, she beamed at a party with (from left), former Globe & Mail gardening columnist Marjorie Harris, garden writer Stephen Westcott-Gratton, former Toronto Star gardening columnist Sonia Day, Penny, landscape architect Martin Wade and me. Behind, left to right, were garden writer Lorraine Hunter, designer Sara Katz and horticulturist Paul Zammit.
In 2011, I hosted some of my garden-writing cohorts for a June weekend at the cottage. Though I made Penny pose for a portrait, as I did with all my friends …..
….. she was much happier at my barbecue, below. And what a great cook she was! Liz Primeau recalls Penny’s offering that day: “How I remember her barbecued beef filet rolled in coriander seeds and served with roasted beets and homemade horseradish crème fraiche.”
Aldona Satterthwaite, former editor of Canadian Gardening magazine and former Executive Director of the Toronto Botanical Garden, was there that Muskoka weekend, too. She and Penny, below, had known each other for more than two decades. As she recalls: “She was one of the rare people in my life with whom I felt an immediate connection, as though I’d known her forever. In the 1980s, we both studied landscape architecture at Ryerson—she was a class or two ahead of me and wildly talented (I realized early on that as a landscape designer, I was a decent writer). We both attended a multi-day workshop given by John Brookes at the TBG. And yet, I believe I knew her professional work as the Chelsea Gardener— elegant, well proportioned, unfussy—before I really got to know her. Over time, as our paths continued to cross, we discovered that we had a great deal in common–including living in swinging London in the 1960s and being born in the same month of the same year–and became good friends. Penny was witty, warm-hearted, irreverent, pragmatic, smart as hell, fiercely stylish, and great fun.”
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Marjorie Harris, below, was there that June weekend on Lake Muskoka. She remembers Penny as “a wonderful garden designer who was inspiring to me when I was first starting out as a garden writer in the 1980s. We used to go together to every garden tour we could find in the city and analyze them to a fare-thee-well. She showed me that you can love garden design deeply and still be critical of it. She had a sharp tongue and a wit to go with it. I have missed her rare and fascinating temperament in recent years and probably always will. She was unique.”
Besides her close family and her garden friends, Penny was part of many social circles (dance, theatre and her husband Harry Arthurs’ career in academe, especially his tenure in the 80s and 90s as president of York University), but she always made us feel that she was our close ‘girlfriend’. When the WWWG got together for our annual dinner, we shared the latest about our own families; our children and their doings; later on, their partners and spouses; and finally, grandchildren, of whom Penny was always so proud, digging out her cell phone to show us the latest pictures. This was us, below, in 2015 at the bistro at the Art Gallery of Ontario then called FRANK, after the architect Frank Gehry who designed the AGO’s extension. Wanda had spent eight years at the AGO, six of them editing the magazine Art Matters, and the bistro staff knew her well. It became our regular place to meet. If conversation lapsed, which it rarely did, I’d ask Penny to share again the story of how she was set up with the bachelor Canadian law professor Harry Arthurs all those years ago in England. “Oh Gawd!” she’d answer in her wonderful dulcet tones, rolling her eyes. Then she’d proceed to captivate us all once again with that romantic tale.
In September 2018, the WWWG convened to celebrate the opening of my autumn-themed photography show on Harbord Street.
As the years went on, we decided we needed to meet more than once a year, so we set up a spring lunch too. On June 6, 2019, it was Liz’s turn and we arrived in her beautiful garden to find bees buzzing on the alliums and cornflowers.
Nourished by a delicious lunch and conversation about spring plants and gardens, we posed for a happy group selfie, below. It was another visit long before that Liz recalled recently: “We were strolling through my intensely planted but rather muddled back garden and Penny gestured toward a sprawling bed of pink and purple bee balm, coneflower and blazing star left over from my try at a prairie garden. ‘That bed is working nicely, isn’t it?’ said Penny, and I glowed inside. Penny wasn’t one to lavish praise, and a word of it was precious.”
One of the advantages of archiving emails for two decades (okay, not throwing out emails) is that I can track our back-and-forth through decades of restaurant get-togethers, theatre plays and garden events. But it was Penny’s email of August 21, 2019 that shook our little group to the core, the one with the subject line “Penny’s Not So Great News”. In it she shared that she had been diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour, relating the strange way it had been discovered, which seemed almost as noteworthy to her as the grim diagnosis. We were devastated. Over the next five months as she underwent chemo and radiation, we showered poor Harry with emails, sending our wishes to Penny and asking to see her. He was gracious in his responses; along with Aldona, we were christened Penny’s ‘Sisters of the Soil’.
Fortune smiled on us one last time on February 5th, when we toasted our dear Penny with glasses of prosecco in our favourite bistro. She was sanguine about the cards that fate had cruelly dealt. “I’ve had a good life. I have no regrets.” In retrospect, we felt so lucky to have had this last evening with our dear friend, given the way the entire world changed just weeks later. And we mused that perhaps that sense of feeling ourselves so much a part of nature’s cycles – as gardeners, as true sisters of the soil – gave us a more balanced view of our own place on the planet.
Liz Primeau summed up Penny and their 30-year relationship perfectly. “Penny was a class act: fair, level-headed and down-to-earth; she was stylish, too. Her clothes and the way she put them together were unique. I never saw her in anything but sensible shoes, but she made them look like they belonged on a runway in Paris. Her house might have been featured in a Homes magazine. Penny, for (a) myriad (of) reasons we shall never forget you.”
Wanda Nowakowska said: “I’ve walked the streets and parks and ravines of the city for many years now, always with a quiet nod of thanks to Penny for teaching me to notice the “architecture” of nature — the shape of trees, even in winter; the play of light, shadow and colour in plantings; the texture of stone in walls and fountains. She’ll be with me, in spirit and in gratitude, for many walks to come.”
As for me, I think of one line in Penny’s beautiful obituary, following her death on August 28th. “Born in Sheffield, and herself an only child without so much as a single cousin, Penny built her own family in Canada.” I like to think we were her family, too…. her Wonderful Women Who Garden, her Sisters of the Soil. We will miss you so, dear Penny.
******
If you would like to leave your own memory of Penny Arthurs, please feel free to do so in the comments section.
After five long months of wintry weather in Toronto, there is nothing more uplifting than the first flowers of the small spring bulbs. Over many years, small bulbs and corms in my front garden have multiplied, their clumps becoming gradually bigger, or seeds have scattered about until there are pools of colour. My camera finger is always itchy after being out of service since the last of the fall colour dies down, so I head outdoors as often as I can. In this spring of self-isolation, that might be several times a day and I’m often greeted by neighbours stopping to see what’s in bloom. The cold March and April temperatures have made the flowering parade move as slowly as sap up a maple trunk, but every year starts the same – with the snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis). Because they can easily be moved in flower, I have been dividing this old snowdrop clump and digging sections into my front garden.
I’ve also made a habit through the years of cutting these tiny flowers and giving them the high-fashion studio treatment, like the snowdrops below in an antique shot glass.
Next to emerge is usually a tie between species crocuses and little Iris ‘Katharine Hodgkin’. I adore her. She was bred in 1955 in England by E. Bertram Anderson Her mother is pale yellow Iris winogradowii hailing from the Caucasus mountains. That gives her extreme cold hardiness and her tendency to shrug off snow.
Her father is pale purplish blue I. histrioides from Turkey, lending her the pretty pale blue hue. Her existence is the result of only 2 seeds produced in open pollination breeding work by Anderson, a founding member of the RHS Joint Rock Garden Plant Committee and president of the Alpine Garden Society from 1948-53. She flowered in 1960 and was named for the wife of Anderson’s friend Eliot Hodgkin
This year, my crocuses were wonderful, both the species “tommies” (Crocus tommasinanus) and the bigger, slightly later-flowering Dutch hybrids.
On the one warm day we experienced so far this April, I found honey bees foraging for pollen on the crocuses. I’ve always wondered who in my neighbourhood has beehives, since the property size requirements for beekeeping are fairly stringent in Toronto. Having done a little research, I think they likely originated in the hives on the roof of Sporting Life department store about a half-mile from my garden.
I often combine these early bloomers in a tiny bouquet. Even though they last only a few days, the joy they bring is in inverse proportion to their size.
Crocuses, of course, have their own chalice-like charm – even if they decline to stay open long once removed from sunshine.
My front garden in early spring is anything but neat, given that I mulch it with leaves in autumn and leave many cut perennial stems to biodegrade where they fall. I do lighten the leaf mulch in late winter a little, raking some off so the small bulbs don’t get lost in the duff. This is a side-by-side view of my front garden this spring on March 23rd and April 13th. Once the crocuses fade, the Siberian squill (Scilla siberica) starts to turn my entire garden azure-blue. Most springs, the native cellophane bee and bumble bees make great use of the scilla carpet, but this year’s temperatures have kept most bees in their nests.
My garden’s “blue period” also includes the amazing, rich-pink Corydalis solida ‘George Baker’.
I always love the combination below, ‘George Baker’ with glory-of-the-snow (Scilla forbesii, formerly Chionodoxa). A few weeks ago, I divided some of my corydalis clumps while in flower and spotted them throughout the garden. That deep cherry-pink is too good not to spread around!
And, of course, I’ve given George his own studio cameos in the past as well……
The glory-of-the-snow has been ready for its closeup….
…. as has the cultivar ‘Violet Beauty’.
Striped squill (Puschkinia scilloides) are ultra-hardy little bulbs featuring pale-blue flowers with a darker blue stripe.
Here’s a closer look of that sweet striped face.
Between the Siberian squill, the glory-of-the-snow and the striped squill, the colour theme of these chilly weeks of early spring is most definitely blue. And with most everyone in Toronto now into their second month of self-isolation, the neighbours have been telling me how much they’re enjoying watching my front garden change every week.
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White Siberian squill (Scilla siberica ‘Alba’) come out a little later than the blue ones.
Photographing them in a tiny bouquet lets me appreciate details of their flowers that often go unnoticed when they flower en masse.
Among my favourite of the small spring flowers are Greek windflowers or wood anemones (Anemone blanda). These are tubers, rather than bulbs, and they need to be soaked for 24 hours prior to being planted in autumn. Their daisy-like flowers always cheer me up – though they only open wide when the sun is shining. This cultivar is ‘Blue Shades’.
Putting just one windflower in the tiniest vase reveals the beautiful contrast of the bright yellow stamens with the silky petals and fern-like leaves.
‘Pink Charmer’ is lovely, but tends to be mauve….
….. and finally there’s ‘White Splendor’.
My broad-leaved grape hyacinths (Muscari latifolium) have just emerged and are still tight. The light flowers at the top are sterile, while the deep-purple ones at the base are fertile.
Here they are, below, in a little salt shaker vase. Common grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum) emerge just a little bit later.
Along my sideyard path under a big black walnut tree is a colony of Corydalis solida that comes into bloom a little later than the pink ‘George Baker’ in my front garden. This species is very vigorous and will make its way around the garden and even pop up in the lawn. In fact some gardeners consider it a weed – but I adore it. And after it finishes flowering, its leaves turn yellow quickly in the thicket of Solomon’s seal just emerging, then it disappears until next year. You might also see it hybridizing with some of the colourful cultivars, if you can find them to order.
Like all these little spring treasures, it is such fun to snip a handful to bring indoors so they can be appreciated for their beauty up close.
Soon the forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica) will be in flower. I have loads of these biennials throughout the garden and their season is very long. By the time my crabapple tree is in bloom along with later tulips and daffodils, they will be pale blue clouds underneath.
But for now, I enjoy adding the very first forget-me-not blossoms to the little bulb bouquets that now include common grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum)……
….. and the native Confederate violets (Viola sororia var. priceana).
All this early beauty of the little bulbs, this re-affirmation that spring brings colourful renewal – especially this year, when we need it so desperately – is one of the most beloved aspects of my own garden. I simply would not be without my snowdrops, crocuses, corydalis, puschkinia, scilla or grape hyacinths. And then, as if by magic, all these wondrous little chorines of the first act will quietly wither and disappear under the later weeks of tulips, daffodils, camassias and the emerging foliage of summer perennials, lying dormant below the soil surface so they can perform the same miracle early next spring. Needless to say, the foliage of all spring bulbs must be allowed to turn yellow and ripen in order for continued photosynthesis to nurture the bulbs as long as possible.
Meanwhile, my garden moves on through myriad subsequent scenes, not in the least hindered by all these tiny bulbs that helped me bid farewell to winter. Here is my front garden over the space of twelve months. This year I’m filled with anticipation – and nothing but time to enjoy it.
**************
I buy almost all of my spring bulbs from my friend Caroline deVries’ online retail store flowerbulbsrus. They are available at reduced prices until August 31st and are excellent quality. A good selection of the small bulbs is also available at www.botanus.com in British Columbia; they ship throughout Canada. (I purchased my own cultivars of Corydalis solida in Canada from gardenimport, which sadly is no longer in business). In the U.S., small spring bulbs can be purchased from my friends Brent and Becky Heath at https://www.brentandbeckysbulbs.com/. They have discounts for ordering before July 1st.
I have a particular fondness for the award-winning book Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney (Viking, 1982). First, it celebrates grandparents. Second, it’s a story about enchanting lupines. Third, it honours the essential gardening impulse to “make the world more beautiful”. If you’d like a little 4-minute bedtime story, have a listen to me reading it to my granddaughter Emma.
Who doesn’t love lupines? Or lupins, if you like. I’ve always added the “e” to mine, given that’s how the North American clan are usually spelled. The British tend to refer to them as lupins. In fact, most of the colourful garden lupines are the offspring of those developed from 1911-1942 by the British horticulturist George Russell (1857-1951). . He planted many lupine species together in his two allotments, including the blue-purple North American species Lupinus polyphyllus – which had been brought back to Britain from the Pacific Northwest by explorer David Douglas in the 1820s – along with yellow bush lupine (L. arboreus), sulphur lupine (L. sulphureus) and others. As for the crosses, he always claimed he let the bees do the breeding work for him, but he selected the best colour combinations, gave them names and saved the seed to sell. There’s a good story on George Russell and his lupine breeding here. In Toronto, I get my June fix of multi-colored Russell Hybrids at the spectacular four-square potager garden behind the Spadina House Museum where they grow with lots of old-fashioned flowers.
In June in Toronto, Spadina’s garden is my favourite place to photograph.
The gardeners there keep the lupines coming back every year, with colours ranging from the deepest purple…..
….. to bubblegum-pink, with many bicolors that feature white, yellow and crimson markings.
They’re arrayed around Spadina’s gardens and bloom near the grape vines with sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis)….
…. and the beautiful bearded irises….
…. and blowsy peonies…..
…. and old-fashioned ragged robin (Lychnis flos-cuculi)…..
…. and yellow loosestrife (Lysimachia punctata).
As the lupine season is winding down, the catmints (Nepeta sp.) make pretty partners.
Bumble bees have the long, strong proboscises necessary to probe through the lower keel to get at the pollen. I’ve done a lot of my bumble bee photography at Spadina House.
The Russell Hybrids have given rise to many of the modern lupines, like the Gallery Series in red….
….. and white.
I’ve been photographing lupines for a long time. The photo workshop I took with Freeman Patterson at his New Brunswick Nature Conservancy property Shamper’s Bluff back in the 90s featured….
At Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden, native bigleaf lupine (Lupinus polyphyllus subsp. polyphyllus) is planted under silk tassel bush (Garrya elliptica ‘James Roof’).
Lupinus polyphyllus subsp. polyphyllus is the locally indigenous sub-species of bigleaf lupine.
When I was travelling in Sisimiut, Greenland, I came upon this lovely stand of Nootka lupine, Lupinus nootkatensis.
One floriferous California spring (2004), I found this stunning hillside of dwarf lupine (Lupinus nanus) in the Los Padres National Forest.
Ten years later, I photographed arroyo lupine (Lupinus succulentus) in a magnificent meadow at the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, along with yellow tidytips (Layia platyglossa) and goldfields (Lasthenia californica).
I came across an amazing meadow containing lupines and hawkweed in Vermont one June, and used it as the dreamy background to some abstract images…..
….. featuring close-ups of lupines. They hang in my kitchen at home.
But back to my own little patch of ground: my meadow at Lake Muskoka. I have to say it wasn’t easy to establish lupines, but after figuring out what they needed to germinate, and where they wanted to grow their first set of leaves, and how to care for them that first season, I enjoyed their beautiful spires each June.
They loved my acidic soil – they do much better in a low pH soil, despite what some cultivation guides say – and…….
…… the overwintering bumble bee queens always found the pollen to furnish their nests.
They emerged with an early cast of characters including blue false indigo (Baptisia australis) and ubiquitous oxeye daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare), below.
You can see some of wild lupine’s meadow companions in this bouquet I made featuring oxeye daisy, blue false indigo, large-flowered penstemon (P. grandiflorus), blue flag iris (Iris versicolor) and buttercups.
Many years, my lupines sported impressive coats of aphids. If I had the energy I’d try to spray the stems with soapy water, but there were lots of stems…..
And in time, I had my own supply of lupine seeds. But the white and red pines I planted in the meadows have now grown so tall that they shade out the wildflowers and grasses. That was the general idea: to have “in-between meadows” as our hillside healed itself after our construction there. I do miss them in their abundance, but enjoy the few that flower still.
There’s another reason I love Miss Rumphius. It was the subject of the very last weekly gardening column I wrote in 2006 for a certain national newspaper before they cancelled my column “to focus more on real estate”. In truth, they were bleeding money and I was just one more freelance budget item to cut. (At least I hope that was the case!)
Miss Rumphius (Viking, 1982) – written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney.
In any event, the column I wrote detailed how I managed to germinate and grow seed of Lupinus perennis at my cottage, seen in the photos above, and I offer it here in case you want to make the world more beautiful.
ADVENTURES OF A LUPINE LADY (May 2006)
There’s a much-loved children’s book called Miss Rumphius (Puffin,1985). Written and illustrated by the late Barbara Cooney and first published by Viking in 1982, it won the American Book Award for its renowned Maine author.
Miss Rumphius tells the story of a little girl named Alice who sits on her grandfather’s knee and tells him she wants to be just like him: to travel to far-away places and live in a house by the sea. Her grandfather says that isn’t enough: “You must do something to make the world more beautiful”.
Alice grows up to become Miss Rumphius, the librarian. She travels far and wide, climbs mountains, rides camels and buys a little house by the sea. But she’s worried because she hasn’t yet made the world a more beautiful place. Then one spring she spots “a large patch of blue and purple and rose-colored lupines” in flower on a hillside near her home where they’ve spread from plants in her own garden. Miss Rumphius becomes the Lupine Lady, spreading lupine seeds wherever she goes and, yes, making the world more beautiful.
Like Miss Rumphius, I adore lupines with their bewitching blue and purple flower spires in late spring. At my cottage, I’m working on creating my own wild lupine meadow too. But at the rate my plants are growing, I’ll be an old woman with a cane by the time I’m ready to beautify the rest of the world. For lupines have very particular needs, both in their germination and ongoing growth.
Growing Wild Lupines
Perennial wild lupine (Lupinus perennis) or sundial lupine is native to eastern Canada and the eastern U.S. where large lupine meadows are a familiar sight in late spring-early summer in the Maritimes and New England. One of more than 300 lupine species worldwide, it’s the only known host food plant for the endangered Karner Blue butterfly. Preferring full sun and well-drained, sandy soil with a low pH (acidic), wild lupine grows naturally in sand prairies, open oak woodlands and grassy areas with granite-based soils. It will not tolerate clay soil, making it a challenge to grow in most gardens.
Nursery-grown lupines often fail because their long tap roots make potted plants notoriously difficult to transplant, so it’s preferable to grow your plants from seed. If I do the math on my own seed-to-plant success, I estimate it’s about a 10:1 ratio, so a large supply of seeds is needed . Note: L. perennis is a widespread species and available from a large number of seed companies, including Wildflower Farm and Prairie Moon Nursery. (Postscript: But do make sure it’s the right species – my seed turned out to be the west coast species L. polyphyllus or a hybrid of L. perennis and L. polyphyllus. Lovely but not the same thing.)
This spring, I sowed a handful of lupine seeds at my lakeside cottage, observing a ritual I’ve perfected over the past five years. First, I soak the large seeds overnight in water to soften them. Then I get down on my hands and knees and carefully press each seed just under the soil surface in what I call my “lupine mud”. It’s actually a patch of rich, damp, sandy soil behind the house that never dries out because it’s in part shade at the bottom of a hill, thus retaining the moisture that wild lupine seeds need to germinate. I’ve tried at various times of the year to germinate lupine seeds in situ, but their critical need for moisture immediately after germination has led me to separate my seed bed from the actual growing locations.
A month or so later, when the little plants have several leaves and a small root system, I’ll carefully scoop them up with a large spoon and transplant them into my dry, sunny hillside meadows where I water them regularly the first summer as they put down their tap roots. Those that survive the first winter seem indestructible and completely drought-tolerant thereafter. They may not bloom for two, three or four years, but they’re on their way, ever so slowly, to becoming a meadow.
We can’t all be like Miss Rumphius, travelling to far-off places and living in a house by the sea. But we can, in our own small way, make the world a more beautiful place.
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It’s impossible to find a song about lupines, and not easy to find a song about gardens and children either, I discovered, but I did remember this one written by Dave Mallett in 1975. Personally, I would not use the word “prayer” and instead substitute the word “compost” – but I suppose a lot of people would not object to being prayerful about their garden. So here it is with John Denver and some singing flowers from Sesame Street.
THE GARDEN SONG (Dave Mallett composer, 1975)
Inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
And inch by inch, row by row
Someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below
Till the rain comes tumbling down
Pulling weeds and picking stones
Man is made of dreams and bones
Feel the need to grow my own
Cause the time is close at hand
Grain for grain, sun and rain
Find my way in nature’s chain
And tune my body and my brain
To the music from the land
And inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
And inch by inch, row by row
Someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below
Till the rain comes tumbling down
And plant your rows straight and long
Temper them with prayer and song
Mother Earth will make you strong
If you give her love and care
Old crow watching hungrily
From his perch in yonder tree
In my garden I’m as free
As that feathered thief up there
And inch by inch, row by row
Gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
And inch by inch, row by row
Someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below
Till the rain comes tumbling down
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This is the eleventh blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others:
