Amaryllis bulb

I have been pulling some of my Amaryllis bulbs out of the basement and get them potted to re-grow, bloom, and brighten my mother’s kitchen. These are amazing plants: start as a baseball-sized bulb; stick it in a 6 inch pot with a little soil; a shoot grows 10- 16 inches, topped with red, white, or pink blooms; plant it in the garden to recover all summer; cut off the leaves and stick it in the basement for the winter to “nap;” and start all over the next spring.

This amazing plant reminds me of my favorite artist-scientist, George Washington Carver. His painting by Betsy Graves Reyneau in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, depicts him as an older man working at one of his favorite hobbies, breeding Amaryllis. At the risk of sounding over dramatic, the arc of Carver’s career was like the Amaryllis – a humble looking origin, opening to a spectacular blossom.

(via National Portrait Gallery)

Because there are many excellent books and articles about Carver, as well as two National Park Service sites in Missouri and Alabama memorializing his life and work, I am going to give only a brief sketch – one that may be at odds with the usual hagiographies.

Carver was born a slave in Missouri between 1860 and 1864. After emancipation, the orphan child continued to live in the household of his former owner. From Mrs. Susana Carver he learned cooking, laundry, hand weaving, crochet, and knitting. This was still a time when utilitarian yet beautiful items were made at home from materials at hand – straw, vines, bark, pine needles – as well as thread and yarn. As a small boy, while on an errand to deliver bread to a neighboring household, he saw painted portraits for the first time. Perhaps the story is apocryphal, but later he recalled a sense of awe, “A man made those pictures. He made them with his hands. I want to do that.” A world opened to him of the possibility of representing the beauty of life through art. Using scrap wood, tin, and glass in place of canvas, making simple pigments from bark, roots, and berries, he began painting.

(via Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site, National Park Service, NPS)

The rural landscape of Missouri was beautiful to Carver, in spite of being a motherless child. “Day after day I spent in the woods alone in order to collect my floral beauties and put them in my little garden.” Even then neighbors recognized he had unusual skill with plants. Art and botany would remained linked for his entire life.

By the time he entered Simpson College in 1890, he had enough self-taught ability in voice, piano and painting that the art instructor, Etta Budd, over ruled the college registrar who had said, “Enroll in the art class?! No colored person should thus waste his time.” Though living in an unused shed, taking in laundry for a living, Carver prospered as a student developing fine skills in painting. He produced a series of botanic still life and landscapes, three of which were selected for exhibition at the 1893 Colombian World Exposition in Chicago.

(via George Washinton Carver National Monument, NPS)

In 1891 he transferred to Iowa State where Etta Budd’s father was a professor of horticulture. It is not clear why. Some suggest that he was persuaded that an African American could not hope to earn a living as a fine artist. Or, as Carver recounted years later, the Iowa State dean of agriculture asked, “Why not devote a portion of your time to painting?” He replied, “Because with a knowledge of agriculture I can be of greater service to my race.”

As a boy, he gathered flowers from the fields for fun. At Iowa State he started collecting and identifying specimens for the school’s herbarium. Over 300 of his specimens are still in the collection ranging from marsh marigolds to prairie violet, lady slipper orchid to native campanula, poison ivy to nannyberry viburnum, red cedar to American elm. During his years as a graduate student he was appointed to the college faculty. Among his responsibilities was collecting and identifying pathogenic and non-pathogenic fungi. These are now housed in the mycology collection at New York Botanic Garden.

Herbarium Specimen

In 1896 he became head of the agriculture department at Tuskegee University Even as he began his tenure at the scientific institution so closely associated with his name, the arts still called to him when he told the school’s finance committee, “I do not to expect to teach for many years, but will quit as soon as I can trust my agricultural work to others and engage [once more] in my brush work, which will be of great honor to our people showing to what we may attain.”

His years at Tuskegee focused on encouraging small farmers to diversify their crop selections, use more sustainable practices, and use on-farm resources to make their own paint, for example. Carver did not invent peanut butter. He was not the first agronomist to recommend peanuts as a crop for the South.

Of all important public figures of the 20th Century, few had their life and memory (mis-?) appropriated as widely as Carver. Whether it was the U.S. Peanut Council, Christian evangelists, or advocates of “separate but equal” second class institutions for African Americans, Carver’s success, humility, and seeming disinterest in political action led white establishment to wrongly point to Carver as an example of a harmless stereotype. George Washington Carver’s commitment to education for African Americans at the university as well as on the farm, and his personal history of unswerving determination to seek education where he wanted, contradicts this image.

(via Iowa St University Library)

(via George Washinton Carver National Monument, NPS)

Carver continued his teaching, research, painting, and fiber art until his death in 1943. Sadly, he kept little in the way of laboratory notebooks on his research, and most of his paintings were destroyed in a fire at Tuskegee in the late 1940s.

(Images via George Washinton Carver National Monument, NPS)

Suggested reading:

Kremer, Gary R. (editor). 1987. George Washington Carver in His Own Words. Columbia, Missouri.: University of Missouri Press

Barry Mackintosh, “George Washington Carver and the Peanut: New Light on a Much-loved Myth,” American Heritage 28(5): 66–73, 1977 (http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1977/5/1977_5_66.shtml )

Linda O. Hines, “White mythology and black duality: George W. Carver’s response to racism and the radical Left,” Journal of Negro History 62(2): 134-146, April 1977

Dennis Keeney, “G. W. Carver rooted in sustainable agriculture,” Science with Stewardship Fall 1998 (Aldo Leopold Center, Iowa State University)

(via IMA Flickr 2004)

Bambi is a browser. This does not mean that deer tend to thumb through magazines at the newsstand instead of making a purchase. No, they browse in the sense of “chew off the buds and tender twigs of trees and shrubs.” Sure, deer eat grass and hostas and other herbaceous plants, but they have a fondness for woody plants enjoying the young stems and sweet buds of fruit trees and shrubs – I need those buds for next spring’s blossoms. And they like to take naps in the flower beds. So, if you see Odocoileus virginianus out in the gardens, please suggest they trot back over to 100 Acres or Crown Hill.

2009 was a great year to be gardening, because there was plenty of rain and it was not too hot. That also made for a great year for plant pathogenic fungi, which spread more readily during damp weather. In particular downy and powdery mildew defoliated my squash. Unless the plant is a cultivar with disease resistance, it is necessary to spray fungicide once or twice per week. That is NOT something I will be doing, so I may opt for newer varieties if I cannot find resistant heirlooms.

Us plant wonks got a little excited when a seldom seen parasitic plant showed up this past year. Dodder (one of several species in the genus Cuscuta ) probably arrived as a contaminant in some clover seed. Dodder is not a fungus, but a true flowering plant whose seed germinates in the soil, but it promptly attaches itself to another plant, in this case clover. The dodder then loses its roots in soil, and lacking chlorophyll of its own, sucks nutrients out of its host. The stem of the plant is thinner than a paperclip, with flowers about the size of this letter “o”.

Due to a lapse on my part, cabbage loopers (the larvae of a moth) wrecked havoc on my Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and kale. Not much thicker that a pencil lead, they can quickly defoliate cole crops. Fortunately, there is a highly effective organic control, a naturally occurring bacteria called Bascillus thuringiensis (often sold under the brand name Dipel or BT) which only attacks larvae of moths and butterflies (collectively referred to as the order Lepidoptera). Unfortunately, Bt does not work if it is sitting in the bottle on the shelf.

The most diligent pest was the bushy-tailed marauder the fox squirrel (Sciurus niger).

"Dug the Dog"

The cute critters started the season by eating the few apples that “set” on the newly planted trees in the Tanner Orchard. Then they moved on to strawberries. And finished the season munching on sunflowers. Hrrr-rumph.

Sharing sometimes seems over-rated!

As Irvin so beautifully illustrated last week, winter has arrived. I have had to break out my heavy coat and glove liners for working in the gardens.  At home, I’ve had to light the furnace and there have been “three-cat-nights.”  But if I see one more Snuggie or Dreamie commercial , I’ll scream.

Dreamie (via buydreamie.com)

Particularly as I am a traditionalist when it comes to warmth, sticking with moth-eaten wool blankets, like the all purpose flannel of one of my childhood heroes, Linus van Pelt.

Linus, by Charles M. Schulz (via fanpop)

"It just needs a little love!" (via JKönig)

He is of course correct, our gardens just want to be shown a little loving care.

There are several versions of horticultural “blankets” in the vegetable garden of the Tanner Orchard this winter.  The one I am most pleased with is our “cover crop” or “green manure.”  In mid September, after all the squash, carrots, beets, and onions were harvested, I spaded over those areas to more deeply incorporate the horse manure and compost applied in autumn 2008.  Then spread and lightly tilled a thin layer of new compost and did a dense broadcast seeding a mix of Austrian field peas and barley (Pisum sativum and Hordeum vulgare).  The pea will add nitrogen to the soil, and both help smother fall and spring sprouting weeds. Neither plant is hardy below 20F and will die down and be easy to till under  in spring, adding organic matter.

Green manure cover crop

The strawberries get about two inches of straw as a blanket against damage to buds and crowns by drying winds and temps below 20F.  The straw will be raked off in March, when nighttime temps are consistently out of the mid-20s.

To help the asparagus and rhubarb beds get pumped up during 2010, so that they will be ready for cuttings to eat – finally – in 2011, I’m following a recommendation form the ag extension office at Texas A&M University and applying 2 inches of rotted horse manure.  Rain and snowmelt will carry nutrients into the soil, and act as an insulating mulch protecting the shallow crowns of the rhubarb.

Rotted horse manure on asparagus and rhubarb

Finally, the remainder of the beds have been deeply spaded, to bury crop and weed debris.  Then 3 to 4 inches of leaf compost are being added, too be incorporated in the spring of 2010.

aaaaaaah! mmmm! all snug and comfy.

For more on green manure, check out Johnny’s Selected Seeds. No endorsement by the IMA Environmental and Historic Preservation Dept is implied.

Sadly, the garden’s ornamental pond no longer has working plumbing for pump and filter to help keep the water free of algae.  Dis-satisfied with the use of chlorine and water colorants, I’ve tried a variety of plantings meant to shade the water and absorb some of the nitrogen and phosphorus in the water that feed the algae.  These, plus hand skimming and bi-monthly pumping and mucking-out have mostly worked.

This is all by way of introduction to the surprise benefit of a little anti-mosquito ecosystem.  Not only do large animals like birds (Coopers hawk for example) and squirrels come to drink, in the water there is a community of thumbnail size critters.  The pool is too shallow and hot for fish, but as hitchhikers either on a duck’s feet or on purchased water plants, several species of insects have arrived.  Arriving on their own are dragon and damselfly larvae.  The top predators, lurking in the bottom of the pond, are the 1 to 1.75 inch immatures of species like the Blue Dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis)  or  Green Darner (Anax junius) eat whoever they can catch – from mosquito larvae to their siblings.

Just as hungry are the critters you are likely to notice skittering on or near the surface: Water Striders (Neogerris hessione) and Backswimmers (Notonecta undulate aka Coraxia sp ).  They will grab adult mosquitos trying to lay eggs, or gobble-up larvae that manage to hatch.  One finds very very few mosquito “wrigglers” in this still pool.

Blue Dasher

As Leeuwenhoek wrote in 1676 of his early microscopy observations “… This was to me, among all  the marvels that I have discovered in Nature,  the most marvelous of all; and I must say for  my part, that no greater pleasure has yet come  to my eye than these spectacles of so many  thousands of living creatures in a small drop of  water….” But these marvels here can be viewed with your unaided eye if you simply stop to look.

Coopers Hawk

Photographing this miniature menagerie was beyond my skill.  I turned to some super fun websites from Iowa State University, the Univ of Michigan – Dearborn campus (where I spent many enjoyable afternoons), and the Roger Tory Peterson Institue in New York (Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History ).    Let us all thank these patient naturalists!

In the great green garden-room
There was an elephant ear alocasia
And some blue and white balloon flowers ….”

Brilliant red of the native sourwood tree with the clear yellow of Photinia in the background. IMA/Oldfields border garden near orchard.

Arisaema and sourwood leaves

It has been a long gentle slide through a beautiful autumn here in the gardens.  Cool sunny days and no heavy rain storms meant outstanding leaf color on trees and shrubs around the campus.  But the bright yellow has now fallen from the sugar maple outside the Deer-Zink Pavilion, the needles of the great pyramidal dawnredwoods around the Sutphin Fountain are going to russet orange, and the red maples on the mall above the parking garage are just past peak color.

Yesterday morning folks in my neighborhood were needing to really scrape frost from the car windows.  The last of the summer’s annual plantings are being pulled out.  Hostas are cut down, and autumn windflowers are spent.  Only some purple monkshood and blue tartarian asters have blossoms among the perennials.  And I have not been able to make myself dig this year’s surprise performer Canna ‘Ermine’ still pushing white bloom spikes 6 feet above the perennial border in the Tanner Orchard.

Canna Ermine

But it is, “Goodnight garden, and off to bed.”  The elephant ears from the Garden for Everyone are cut back and ready for their long winter nap in the hort office basement with their banana buddies.  I’m sure they are dreaming of the sunny tropics – or at least humid Hoosier July.

Bananas in the basement

A few more leaves to rake and compost, then a long winter trying to convince my colleagues to allow a few native black cherry seedlings to grow up in the gardens, “… but you heard Dr. Tallamy say black cherry supports vastly more Lepidoptera than redbud….”

Leaf pile

Post script for true plant nerds:
If Susan Sarandon can do the original version of Goodnight Moon on YouTube, is a horticultural version by Tracy DiSabato-Aust far behind for the next Perennial Plant Association conference?

Ooooo, the blog is getting a little too deep and self-consciously artsy.

Who said something about art being either plagiarism or genius?  In the horticulture trade, one of the first things a gardener learns is to borrow and adapt what others do. A good gardener  gives proper credit when told, “That is a nice plant combination.”  So, John Teramoto, Marty Krause, Annette Schlagenhauff (am I forgetting anyone?) – thank you for the exhibit Lay of the Land.

The exhibit combining Asian and Western art prints and poetry, set me to thinking about how often images in the galleries, or music and poetry cause me to recall some beautiful place I’ve experienced.  Nice memories and feelings …. trying to capture the bliss of the moment.

So as Autumn brings another season to a close, I offer some images and poems, with apologies to the artists,  that reminded this gardener of the promise and beauty of Spring as compensation for labors…

Work
The corn is baking in blue smoke,
Pickled tomato is piled ready on my plate,
And the chrysocolla of a young cedar branch is close.
Yet the breakfast that should be calm and enjoyable
makes me uneasy.
I’m worried about the manure I threw yesterday
From the horsecart and left on the slope.
Kenji Miyazawa 1896-1933

Manure and compost on vegetable garden at Oldfields

“Peasants Going to Work, by Jean F. Millet (IMA 40.65)”

============================================

Ah. It is spring,
Great spring it is now.
Great, great spring.
Ah, great –
Matsuo Basho 1644-1694

Apple blossom in April 2009, Gene and Rosemary Tanner Orchard, Oldfields at the IMA. Photograph by Sue Arnold

Check out the IMA’s searchable database of the art collection any time.

Check out the flowers, and maybe some leftover
manure,  dawn to dusk on our 152 acres, or right where you live.

Before I arrived at the IMA, I worked in the for-profit, residential landscaping trade.   During the period of  January through mid March when work would pause due to ice and cold, I sometimes worked as a substitute teacher.  I enjoyed the time in classrooms at Pike High School except for one problem:  more than half the classrooms had no windows.  I would arrive in the dark morning and leave in dusky afternoon.  I felt like a plant unable to photosynthesize.  Worse, I had no connection to the world, no sense of wind, rain, heat or cold, nor natural sound.  I felt like I had been numbed and wrapped in cotton balls.

Those sun-shiny memories are meant as preface, sympathizing with cubicle dwellers, retail and restaurant staff, and factory workers.  Rise up comrades!  And step outside.  Even in a place with as much asphalt and concrete as the IMA parking areas, you can meet natural wonders. Just slow down and look.

There is an asphalt roadway three lanes wide, in and out of the IMA’s underground parking garage.  The low shrubs on either side, caught between the curb and concrete retaining walls are fragrant sumac.  Being careful about traffic, reach down and rub a twig and leaves gently between your hands.  Now smell.  Spicy, refreshing?

If you do this in April or May, you could encounter a female mallard duck, sitting on a clutch of eggs.  Just there, 5 feet off the curb and the cars whizzing by.  Her dark, speckled color blends into the dappled shade.   I’ve found nests in the salvia, just inside the Michigan Road gate, and the 2 foot wide liriope bed along the patio at Garden Terrace.  She’ll sit for four weeks, then she and the ducklings will make the quarter mile plus hike to the canal.

Behind the Garden Terrace building there is a dumpster.  One day I was picking weeds and trash when on the stem of a coral bell flower, almost in the shad of the dumpster, I met a stealthy herbivore in the midst of enlarging its body.  A “walking stick,” once considered a relative of praying mantis, was just finishing molting.  Walking sticks (in the order Phasmatodea, this one probably a species of Diapheromera) look like, well, a twig.  They wait, very still, moving with a rocking motion that mimics that of a branch in a light breeze.  This insect, 3 to 5 inches long, sheds its hard outer shell when it grows to large, as a  snake sheds its skin.  It then inflates its body to a larger size before the new exoskeleton dries.  So delicate, so amazing such a small creature contains organs and structures to respire, move blood, eat and digest, move and sense its surroundings.

There are moths as big as sparrows and wrens, even in a temperate climate like Indiana.  Many moths hide during the day and are more active at night.  One afternoon a colleague walking past the vegetable garden, called out to me.  Hanging from under a squash leaf was a huge brown moth. I did not immediately recognize it, so I searched several image collections on the web.   The color patterns on the underside of the moth are very different than the patterns on the top which we use for identification.  Not wanting to disturb the creature, I could only get photos of the underside, though if I craned my neck I could see the top.  With a wingspread almost as long as my palm and extended fingers, was a one of the largest lepidoptera of the Midwest, an Imperial moth (Eacles imperiales), a member of the broader north American silk moth group.

So sneak out, and take a look.