Paula Panich

An Essay: Robert Irwin / Getty Garden

The Central Garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles is not just a collection of plants but a complex sculpture by contemporary artist Robert Irwin. Set like a jewel within the Getty Center’s imposing promontory overlooking Los Angeles, Irwin’s work is a critical element in Getty’s collection of contemporary art.

This year is the Center’s – and the garden’s – tenth anniversary year. It should be high on any art-and-garden lover’s list of places to visit in 2007. This garden sculpture may well prove to be the signature piece of American landscape art of the 21st-century in the manner that Fletcher Steele’s ‘Blue Steps’ at Naumkeag marked the 20th, and Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park delineated the 19th.

Most everything about this piece of art will subvert expectations. Let’s start with the artist himself. Irwin is not: a landscape architect, a garden designer, or even a gardener. I’ve learned over the last year and a half (I have visited this garden perhaps 50 times) that many (not all, of course) gardeners can be, well, a bit reactionary. Even professional garden writers, horticulturists, and garden historians (all of whom should know better) will dismiss this work of art (after a 15-minute flying visit) on the grounds that “it isn’t really a garden in my definition,” or “for heaven’s sake, all those azaleas baking in the sun.”

Irwin is, or has been, on the other hand: an early abstract expressionist; a minimalist; a painter, a sculptor; an installation artist; and an artist of what is called by some “the articulation of space and light.” His life as a working artist – some fifty-plus years, as he is in his eighties now – has been one of constant personal and aesthetic reinvention. What he came to is this: Art is pure perception. We, the experiencing viewers, are therefore implicated, and included – if we abandon prejudice to clear the doors of our own perceptions. Irwin may work at the Getty with Cor-Ten steel, and boulders, rocks, stone and pebbles, brass and teak and water and plants, but it is up to us to shred our preconceptions to enter into what is really not a place, or a garden, in a conventional sense, but an ever-changing experience.

The Central Garden of the Getty Center is set among the white, unified village of imposing, linear buildings designed by the internationally celebrated architect Richard Meier. His geometry marks the definition of the Getty Center. The high white travertine-clad village, a stunning addition to the architectural treasure-trove of contemporary Los Angeles, can be seen for miles – well, on a clear day.

The Central Garden is the counterpoint to the straight lines and rational approach of Meier’s cubes. The garden, in contrast, zigs and zags and curves and circles, and even shocks with layered color and texture and form.

A walk through the garden is a kinesthetic and sensual experience. The “sculpture” is essentially in three parts: the first is called the stream garden, where a visitor begins walking down a slope to what looks like the terminus of the garden and a sweeping vista of Los Angeles. The stream garden is essentially a canyon of tumbling green chert boulders sliced by running water, and punctuated with – now remember this is Los Angeles, USDA Zone 10 – large deciduous London plane trees (Platanus x acerifolia ‘Yarwood’), employed as almost abstract elements. (It’s not that Irwin just “liked” these plane trees. He studied how they looked lit in front and back; he considered their effect on color in the garden, in leaf and bark – and also their density, and form.) Visitors walk in a zigzag pattern down the canyon, on a stone path laid in herringbone design. When the stream is crossed, teak planks repeat the herringbone of the stone. This is not even to mention the plants, or the sound of water, the smell of flower and leaf, or the boulders giving way to smaller rocks and then to an elegant pattern of stone in the waterway.

The stream garden spills out to a second overlook, a transition space, or plaza, marked by seating areas with umbrellas of bougainvillea and metal fifteen feet overhead, the bougainvillea tumbling out of bouquets of the unexpected – industrial rebar.

It’s now that you see what you couldn’t see before. Follow the sound of water and peek over a carnelian granite wall to see the stream plunging 20 feet into a pool of water surrounded by what is called the bowl garden. The oft-discussed and controversial azalea maze is set into this pool (they do seem to bake in summer, but never mind).

Mountain Stories: A Gardener in the Wild

The San Jacinto Mountains, above Palm Springs, California, shoot up 10,804 feet from the desert without, as one writer has it, the geologic fanfare of foothills. I’d come in January to one of its mountain towns, Idyllwild, to try to recover some shred of a self fractured from a September move. I left a beloved New England landscape, town, house, and garden for a particularly congested section of Los Angeles, called Miracle Mile. The miracle, as far as I can tell, has to do with cramming 5,280 linear feet with a million people, an equal number of cars, and billions of dollars.

Every day in L.A. was raw, and seemed dangerous. Drivers were poised to kill. I saw a homeless man brush his teeth over a trash bin. On a clear night in October we heard long minutes of gunfire. I couldn’t sleep. A California native, Salvia leucophylla, bloomed blue-lavender in the neighborhood, but my heart was closed. One afternoon I hit a car in a parking lot. In early January I had two bouts of traffic-induced panic.

All this was confusing and upsetting. When I did sleep, I often woke up crying. I wanted to steady myself, thinking of the far greater displacement and losses suffered by survivors of Katrina, and tried to buck up. But all life is individual life.

The first week or so in mile-high Idyllwild I ran at urban speed. Cell phone work? Wi-fi card installed? Bills paid? On a six-hour hike on the familiar South Ridge Trail, I scrambled off-trail up a ledge, and then couldn’t remember the way I had come. Body not attached to head.

On the coastal side of the mountain, eleven overlapping life zones seem to call in the plant diaspora of California. It’s a dizzying and unpredictable botanical stew, where Chaparral-zone shrubs chat up lodge pole pines. Particularly striking are the twisting architectural shrubby trees, manzanita (Arctostaphylos spp.). The mahogany-cinnamon color of its smooth and slick-looking bark enlivens the forest and rocks and boulders and honeycombed canyons of greens and greys and coffees. Even the silvery skeletons shine.

One warm mid-January morning something happened between me and a manzanita that brought me back to ground and to my senses. I was walking along the Ernie Maxwell Trail. I had strolled by thousands of these shrubs and small trees already when, for some reason I spied, I suppose in some Buddhist sense, one. It was holding onto a small slope just up from the trail, trapped by debris from a fallen tree. I jumped into the manzanita. I grabbed dead branches from its crown. I pulled out pieces of wood from its branches. I threw it all into a pile across the trail. I cracked, shoved, dragged, kicked. It was as if I had run out after a storm to find the venerable mountain laurel in my Massachusetts garden similarly stricken. I worked so fast and hard my arms scraped and bled, but not so mindlessly that I lost balance or footing.

I finally stopped. The tree was permanently pinned and torn in three places by the splintered giant. Short of a chainsaw, I could work no further. I grieved for this little tree.

Then, I took a broader view. The mountain was witness to thousands of crushed manzanita, most still living. I’ve since returned to Idyllwild (it’s the anti-L.A.) to see new growth on the tips of “my” manzanita, in spite of its wounds. A couple of times though, preoccupied on the trail, I’ve whizzed by it. So much for oneness.

Yet I carry a few of the manzanita’s small leathery leaves in a pocket, and hide three or four in my pillowcase. I can’t explain why.

Two days after my adventure on the trail, a generous Czech woman in Idyllwild leant me a book about “plant spirit” medicine. She did not know about the manzanita. Eliot Cowan writes in this book: “[T]he magic is not in the matter. It’s in the spirit.” So I don’t worry about losing the leaves. I don’t know what to make of it all, really. Sometimes I think it was just the natural behavior of a gardener in the wild.

Paula Panich is author of Cultivating Words: The Guide to Writing about the Plants and Gardens You Love (Tryphon Press, 2005), and gardens (in containers) in Zone 9.

The Long Goodbye, by Paula Panich

Edith Wharton moved into The Mount, her house in Lenox, Mass., in 1902; she put the now-famous house and garden up for sale only nine years later. Yet she wrote in 1934, just three years before her death: “The Mount was my first real home . . . and its blessed influence still lives in me.”

Leaving a beloved home and garden is saying good-bye, and never saying good-bye. It’s like taking the beloved child to college 3,000 miles away. Nothing will be the same but the steady unshakable heart.

This year I finally sold our house and garden in Northampton, Mass. We moved to Los Angeles in 2005, but we held onto our beloved homestead until August. We too had a nine-year custodianship of this home of my heart.

To leave a garden one has built oneself is to leave a husk of that self — gardens are, after all, defined by death and resurrection, chemistry and alchemy, physical and intellectual labor. All that fussing and thinking and crawling about on hands and knees. To leave a garden is to have a heart aflame.

The buyers of our house asked for a list of garden plants. But that’s just the crust of a garden. How to explain that my whole life is in it? I’d have to have the language of a geologist, paleontologist, archeologist, even a paleo-geologist, if there is such a thing, not to mention a good shrink, to talk about my garden.

A lifetime of training the eye; that’s in there too. Studying art, making art, looking at gardens, looking at texture, color, form. And reading. And trial-and-error. And place – oh yes, the foundation of experiencing place in the deepest sense.

Place is everything to me: New Mexico, England, France, Spain, Japan, Mexico, Iceland; Los Angeles, San Francisco, the Owens River Valley; the Connecticut River Valley; the Berkshires. All of these places are in my garden. A few things were directly translated — the front walkway, for example, an interpretation of a pathway at the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto.

Friends brought their own trained eyes to my garden — Carol Pope, garden designer; arborist John Berryhill; stonemason Kim Harwood; Master Gardener Marsha Humphrey. The years I spent walking through the gardens and landscapes of Smith College, kayaking on the Connecticut River (looking at loosestrife loosed on the landscape) hiking up Mt. Tom, seeing the last blooms of the year in November on a bewitching witch-hazel — I planted my own Hamamelis, a peachy-spring-blooming one, in tribute — all of it is right there, in the rich and giving ground.

The Berkshire Botanical Garden: I think of walking through it in early winter. I had to be taught to see winter beauty; my teacher was painter and gardener (now Berkshire resident) Nava Grunfeld, who showed me form and color when the world seemed frozen stiff. How could there be a greater gift?

Naumkeag: I walked through it at least twice a year. Nothing in Western Massachusetts has influenced or amazed me more than Fletcher Steele’s work in Stockbridge. He is the Gershwin of American landscape architecture, and the Blue Steps at Naumkeag — famous throughout the world — are his rhapsody. Steele’s combination of Salvia nemerosa and Nepeta remain in my (alas, former) garden.

During the cool summer of 2009, I edited the garden for the last time. By then I had studied Southern California gardens — I was a changed gardener. The Northampton garden, especially that front garden, planted in 2002 and thought about almost every day of those years, was what I wanted it to be. The small Japanese maples bore grace and exquisite color; the river birch, shaped by arborist Jeremiah Woolley, shook its beautiful tresses in a downpour. A village of friends and fellow gardeners — how can gardens be anything else but living tapestries of relationships among plants, people, landscape, climate, and culture?

We held on for five mostly-absent years with this three-thousand-mile garden. When it became clear we would not be able to return, well, it was time to leave. Leave that beautiful house, garden, street, town, people, a community we all love.

Will the new owners rip out the garden? Change it beyond recognition? Probably. That it will never be the same is a given. (Gardens are, after all, as Fletcher Steele once wrote, “the most ephemeral of the American arts.”)

I think of Wharton leaving The Mount behind as she struck out for a new life (and new gardens) in France. And that mad gardener Chekhov too – who, health failing, left his beloved small estate in Melikhovo, outside Moscow, after only a few years. There really was a cherry orchard, by the way, and he had to leave it behind. I think of their brave good-byes and on a good day, it helps.

Good-bye for now to the whole sweep and beauty of the Connecticut River Valley and that great American river, cradle for the imagination. (Don’t even get me started about the concrete-lined Los Angeles River.)

As I write this essay from our tiny Los Angeles house in an urban village, I am looking at a destroyed back-yard landscape about the size of a handkerchief — concrete blasted away, shrubs removed, grass killed, everything ready for next, and very different garden A new garden may help. I’m trying to count on it. I can have a smoke tree here. Imagine! I was never without one in Massachusetts. But so far there is nothing to take the place of seeing the 90-year-old mountain laurel in the Massachusetts garden burst into tea-pink in spring, or the blizzard of white in early autumn next door — a hydrangea-tree forest, lovingly and hopefully planted in the 1930s.

Northampton, Massachusetts

The late afternoon of August 19, 2010, was hot, and the air heavy. Even my bare feet echoed as I walked out of the living room for the last time, and into the dining room, light slanting through those beautiful windows, the cherry floors warm, shining, and soft. How could this be so final? I burst into tears. I hugged the walls. I asked our beloved house for forgiveness. I sailed through the kitchen looking neither right nor left, and closed the door, the feel of that doorknob still in my hand today. And the Japanese maples — I couldn’t. I couldn’t look at them. No gardener is that tough. In the driveway, still crying, I hugged my neighbor. I stepped into the car, pressed my foot to the clutch, and turned the key. I drove away, looking straight ahead.

Paula Panich writes, teaches, gardens, makes art, and speaks to groups about great gardeners who were also great writers, in Los Angeles She blogs at www.theliterarygardener.com and www.atplayinla.blogspot.com.

Paula Panich is author of Cultivating Words: The Guide to Writing about the Plants and Gardens You Love (Tryphon Press, 2005), and gardens (in containers) in Zone 9

The Traveling Gardener in Winter

Arizona

If winter in the Northeast is, horticulturally speaking, the time of Persephone, we were thinking about where to go for a respite from the cold and a chance to learn more about plants. Botanic gardens and museums near and far are a good start.
Now that Southwest Airlines is flying to the Southwest from Providence, Rhode Island, Manchester, New Hampshire, and — beginning on October 31 — from Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Connecticut, Arizona seems almost as easy and cost-effective to get to as Florida. Well, not quite, perhaps, but the Sonoran Desert is a very good place to visit in winter.

Sunrise on the Sonoran Desert (Photo by Terrence Moore)

Phoenix, in the Salt River Valley, is in USDA Zone 9 — but it is a rather odd Zone 9. Extreme summer heat and an appalling lack of water for cultivation finally drove away the Hohokam people around the year 1400, after they had been there for 1,600 years. Their descendants, the Tohono O’odham and Pima peoples, emerged around the year 1700 and lived peaceful, agricultural lives, although on a smaller scale. It wasn’t until Anglo-Americans came looking to make their fortune in the late 1860s that this part of the Sonoran Desert began to sustain another growing population. The problem of water had to be solved anew. In 1867 the first irrigation ditch since the time of the Hohokam snaked its way through the valley.
This ditch spawned an agricultural revolution as well as other irrigation ditches, and by the end of the century, thousands of acres of alfalfa, wheat, barley, and corn were under cultivation. Impressed by this agricultural miracle, pioneers built houses and landscaped them with thirsty non-indigenous trees and lawns.
An extreme drought a century ago sent many farmers and homesteaders fleeing. But the federal Reclamation Act in 1902 brought hope to the Salt River Valley and the rest of the Arizona Territory (statehood wouldn’t come until 1912). Water reservoirs were built, and the U.S. government bought the valley’s private canals and organized them into one system.
With the completion in 1911 of the Roosevelt Dam 80 miles east of Phoenix, the greening of the desert speeded up. Citrus, date, and olive groves were added to other crops, and Phoenix was planted with fig, ash, pecan, maple, eucalyptus, and other trees never intended for the desert. The central core of Phoenix was no longer a desert at all.
The greatest boom in the two major cities of Arizona, Phoenix and Tucson, came after World War II, with the advent of air-conditioning. But the populations grew and grew — and soon Tucson, with its 12-inch annual rainfall, with a million people, was the largest city in the country at the mercy of pumped groundwater for its survival. Phoenix gets 7.8 inches of rain a year, and depends on 1,265 miles of canals and a complex of four dams on the Salt River and two on the Verde River to supply 75 percent of its water. The rest comes from the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a giant canal that brings water to Maricopa County (the huge county where Phoenix is located) and to Tucson, which cost somewhere close to $4 billion.
A decade or so ago, when Arizona’s beloved statesman Morris Udall was alive, he said: “If I could turn the clock back fifty years and do it all over again, instead of spending $3 billion for a water plan that would let Tucson grow and turn Phoenix into another Los Angeles, I would have suggested we take land by the Colorado River, where we have the water, and build ten cities the size of Yuma [population 60,000].”
For the visitor, there’s a lot to forgive in Phoenix. The traffic is dreadful, downtown is mostly sharp-edged, and airport car-rental agencies gouging. Yet the winter weather is perfect, pools are an ideal temperature, restaurants are wonderful, and if you’re inclined to golf, you can play until you drop. The arts flourish here, and a generation of landscape architects and designers have, for the past two decades, been composing with native plants to great effect. Native plants can be lush, too, with a little more water than the scant rainfall provides. Not only are native plants cost-effective and water-saving, but they also attract pollinators and predators and tap into the food chain, bringing even more life into the landscape. This may seem obvious to people who live with much annual rainfall and a high water table, but the people who settled these desert towns were people from New England and the Middle West, and what they wanted in their gardens was much what most everyone else wants — things that remind them of home.

Heard Museum, Phoenix

The first essential stop for the Phoenix visitor is the Heard Museum in downtown Phoenix, probably the premier private ethnographic museum in the country. Built in 1929 to house the Heard family’s collection of Native American artifacts, the Heard has grown over the years to be a major museum, most recently completing a two-year expansion in early 1999.
The Heard Museum had its back, so to speak, to the city for 70 years with a curving wall along Central Avenue. When the museum was built, its small-scale entrance along Monte Vista Road was more than sufficient, and the building was in tune with the residential nature of the neighborhood in scale and style. It was the time of the Spanish Colonial Revival, and the red-tile roof and graceful arches of the museum became a Phoenix landmark. But seven decades, a million and a half people, and a rapacious real estate market later, the character of the city has changed dramatically.
“The historic entrance to the museum on Monte Vista is really a period piece,” said architect and landscape architect John Douglas recently, sitting in the shade of the new courtyard at the museum, sipping an iced tea.

What Douglas, the chief designer of the recent expansion, meant was that the well-established plantings around the Monte Vista neighborhood are lush and non-indigenous, requiring much water and maintenance. Around the corner on Central Avenue, the main thoroughfare downtown, the city adapted a 4.5-mile native-plant streetscape plan.
John Douglas’s landscape plan for the Heard Museum has allowed this beloved institution to give a gift to the city — a lovely large open space and a subtle amphitheater in a mostly native-plant xeriscape that will nonetheless mature into a lush space.
That a serene environment can exist once more in this hard-edged and mirrored urban core is astonishing. The museum itself is set back 400 feet from Central Avenue; palo brea trees, planted up and down Central Avenue as part of the city’s plan, are here too. The low-grade, elegant spiraling amphitheater (a separate design project of Design Workshop of Tempe) fills most of the space in between. Desert mesquites are planted along the perimeter of the space — fast-growing trees that will reach 24 to 30 feet in three to four years. Perforated screen walls front the new section of the building, and at night they are lit from within like a lantern — another gift to the city.
“This is a new experience for the giant city that’s here now,” said Douglas, as we now stood near the edge of Central Avenue with its whizzing cars, admiring the human-scaled miracle of urban open space.
The Heard Museum houses a stunning collection of more than 32,000 works of art and ethnographic objects including works of contemporary Native American fine arts. Its collection of Hopi Katsina dolls is unparalleled, much of it donated to the museum by Barry Goldwater. This is the place to begin to understand the shaping of culture in the Southwest. Coming up at the Heard Museum: “Powerful Images: Portrayals of Native America” (11/13/99-3/19/00), an exhibit portraying the intersection of pop culture and Native American art. On March 4 and 5, 2000, the 42nd Annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market will be held, which is not to be missed. You can see Native American dancers in that lovely new amphitheater.
The Heard Museum is open from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily except for major holidays. For recorded information, call 602.252.8848. Visit John Douglas at www.douglasarchitects.com and the Heard Museum at www.heard.org.

Barrel Cactus (Photo by John Nemerovski)

The Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix

To put this revered institution in perspective, it is helpful to consider that, like the Heard family’s desire to preserve some of a vanishing Native American way of life, the fledgling Arizona Cactus and Flora Society was likewise pulling against the tide. With 700 plants collected by a single individual, the group broke ground for a “clubhouse” in 1939.
With wartime gasoline rationing, only a few volunteers were able to travel to the garden to water, and much of the garden didn’t survive the war years. But in 1947, thanks to a willed trust, the garden began to grow anew.
The Desert Botanical Garden conserves the desert plants of the world (with a special emphasis on the succulent plants of the Southwest) and displays approximately 20,000 plants representing 4,000 taxa in a 145-acre garden on the border of Scottsdale and Phoenix. The Desert Botanical Garden has the world’s two best-documented succulent collections, and one of the world’s most extensive seed banks.
A special conservation collection preserves 250 rare, threatened, or endangered species from the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.
The Luminaria Walk, December 2, 3, and 4, 1999, is the Desert Botanical Garden’s annual winter event, when the paths and walkways of the garden are lit with candles, and visitors are, without fail, intoxicated with the beauty of a desert night in winter.
The Desert Botanical Garden is open daily except for Christmas Day. Winter hours are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. For information: 480.941.1225 or 480.941.1217. Visit its site at www.dbg.org.

Winter Horticulture Closer to Home:

Jardin Botanique de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec

Montréal’s Botanic Garden, exceeded in size only by Kew in London, offers The Wonders of Wintertime from December 21 to March 20. Its extensive greenhouses are open all winter; in the Chinese Gardens (from January 29 to February 21) will be the Harbin Ice and Lights Festival, where glistening translucent ice sculptures will be lit up at night, and mazes and slides sculpted for children. I love the following description of the “Butterflies Go Free” show in the Tropical Plants Greenhouse: “Take a trip to the tropics and admire graceful butterflies as they flit about in the midst of a Quebec winter. It’s the perfect way to beat the winter blues.” The show begins on February 26 and ends March 21, 2000.
Jardin Botanique de Montréal, 514.872.1400.

Tower Hill Botanic Garden, Boylston, Massachusetts

The Orangerie at the Tower Hill Botanic Garden, an 18th-century-style greenhouse, opened in February 1999. It looks like a fine place to spend a winter’s day, in 4,000 square feet of thriving plants. There is a canopy of four palms; citrus trees like Meyer’s lemon, Dancy tangerines, and Persian limes; and an understory of shrubs, perennials, annuals, and bulbs. See the Calendar page for classes and special events at Tower Hill.
Tower Hill Botanic Garden, 508.869.6111; www.towerhill.org.

— Paula Panich

Tiger Leaping Man

Dan Hinkley in China (and Massachusetts)

In photographs, Dan Hinkley, co-owner of Heronswood Nursery on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington Sate, looks a bit the mountain man. It might be the angle, but he seems the renowned plant explorer in suspenders one might conjure up, readily leaping over tigers to grab that rarest of epimediums. So I was unprepared on a snowy Sunday in February for the gentle-looking man in the corduroy jacket patched (deliberately) at the elbows to lecture in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to an enraptured audience of 500 gardeners, all longing for spring.

He is slighter than in the imagination, with a closely cropped beard and a calm demeanor. I was able to snag a half hour with him before his slide lecture began. His face reveals delightful laugh lines, and he doesn’t collect plants after all – he just borrows a little seed.

Hinkley was on tour around New England promoting his newest book, The Explorer’s Garden: Rare and Unusual Perennials (Timber Press, 1999). The book is delightfully written, beautifully illustrated with photographs by Hinkley and an associate, Lynne Harrison, and teases with chapter headings such as: “The Ubiquitous Umbellifers” and Berberidaceous Botony.” Hinkley is a passionate man, and his passions are these plants he has propagated from his forays into wild terrain where the cottage gardener would fear to tread.

Later, during his talk, at each click of the slide projector, the audience would quietly gasp at the stunningly beautiful plants on the screen.

I asked him about his collecting trips to China – he’s explored there twice, in 1996 and 1998 – and especially about Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan Province. Hinkley has stayed in the nearby village and collected seed around the chasm itself. A trip is planned to explore the gorge, the world’s deepest canyon, set at an altitude of 1,550 miles (its southern wall rises another 3 kilometers) above the rapids of the Yangtze River.

Tiger Leaping Gorge is between Dali, in northwestern Yunnan Province, and Zhongdian, in Tibet, still a geologically active region of “thin pasture, alpine lakes and chattered peaks painted crisply in blue, white and gray,” according to The Rough Guide to China. Dali, says Hinkley, has become the Katmandu of China, attracting young Westerners by the hordes.

But the little village outside Tiger Leaping Gorge – it got its name because it is so narrow in places that legend has it that a tiger once leaped over it – is where Hinkley and his entourage dug in and called home. Their hotel – “a negative two star accommodation,” he teases – was called Stay Put Up. The sanitary facilities were outdoors and emptied into pig troughs. “Unfortunately, we often saw the piles of rice that would become our meal outside, between the loo and the kitchen,” Hinkley says, almost relishing the memory. “But believe it or not, we ate sensational fresh food in China, there were the oddball dishes, like queen wasp larvae, a seasonal specialty. We had them stir-fried. I ate them in Vietnam, too.”

A day collecting seed would begin early. There were eight others in his party, including the writer Jamaica Kincaid. They would be on the road by 7:30, arrive at a collecting site at 9 or 10, and then “scatter like ladybugs escaping from a jar.” they worked until late afternoon. Hinkley prefers to collect by himself. “I’m totally focused on the plants, ” he says. “But it is nice to come back at the end of the day and share experiences.”

I asked him about Salvia yunnanensis, which is described in the Heronswood Nursery Ltd. catalogue for this year as “second-generation seedlings from my original collections above Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan Province with erect stems to 2 ft. carrying pretty medium purple, tubular flowers…”

Hinkley doesn’t collect plants after all –
he just borrows a little seed.

“There are a tremendous number of salvias,” Hinkley says, “and many of them are species. There is so much to learn about Chinese salvias. The taxonomy is very confusing.”

But then it was time for the lecture to begin. The lovers of rare and unusual perennials were hungry for color, and for tales of Arisaema candidissimum, with its enormous trifoliate leaves. Hinkley writes: “The very distinctive inflorescence possesses a spathe of precious light pink and white striping…” Read about them in The Explorer’s Garden, Chapter 24, “Enchanting Jacks: Arisaema and Pinellia.” Who cares if they hardy only to Zone 7?

– Paula Panich

Red-Hot Mother

Chilies Tohono Chul is a 48-acre botanical garden in northwest Tucson, Arizona. The name, in the language of the Tohono O’dham tribe of southern Arizona, means “desert corner.” The Santa Catalina mountains loom in the near distance; the garden is an oasis in a busy, growing city.
In a corner of this corner of the Sonoran Desert is a small ethnobotanical garden, and it is here that a sharp-eyed visitor might see the delicate low-desert bush called the chiltepín. In the early part of the year, the plant is festooned with tiny red berries perhaps a quarter of the size of cranberries.

Yet before you imagine these berries tarted up with sugar and lemon peel, hold on. The innocuous-looking chiltepín is, in the words of naturalist Gary Nabhan, the “red-hot mother of chiles.”
The chiltepíns at Tohono Chul were started from seed from plants in Tumacacori in southern Arizona, near where wild chiltepíns mark the northern edge of the world’s wild chile populations.
Capsicum annuum var. aviculare: Look at it as the little bush that shook the planet. Once 15th-century Europeans tasted of this exotic culinary fire, all hell broke loose. It is tempting to hold the chiltepín and its cousins on the subcontinent and in Southeast Asia responsible for the development of sophisticated navigation, the flowering of the Renaissance, and the swashbuckling of Elizabeth’s sea dogs.
If that seems too far-fetched, perhaps the chile is responsible for the well-being and friendliness of the people of the Southwest — it’s not just those mild winters. Those hot chiles in your green corn tamale aid in the release of the body’s own opiates, the endorphins, in response to fire on the tongue and in the gut.
The wild little chiltepín and its relatives conquered and colonized the world, for the chile in its myriad forms is eaten in larger quantities and by more people than any other condiment. The chile is the real connective tissue of humanity.
Capsicum annuum is the best-known domesticated chile species in the world, most likely because it was the first pepper found by Columbus and other New World adventurers. The “warm-weather exotics,” in the words of food writer Raymond Sokolov, were spirited onto ships and transported “to the land-locked icebox” of Europe, where they quickly became the hot ticket on Portuguese and Spanish trade routes. Sokolov opines that fires were lit under Indian and Sichuan cuisines because the Portuguese brought capsicums to their colonial possessions Goa and Macao.
One of the mysteries of my childhood was the hot pepper-eating, followed by the momentary misery, of my paternal grandfather, born in the Voyvodina region of Yugoslavia near the Hungarian border, more than a century ago. So how did hot peppers reach southern Europe? Sokolov offers a compelling theory. Capsicums were brought to their far-flung empire by the Ottoman Turks, who had felt this burn on the tongue when they conquered the Portuguese colony at Hormuz on the Persian Gulf. My grandfather hated the Turks but loved the peppers.

Botanist W.H. Eshbaugh suggests that C. annuum var. aviculare, the chiltepín or wild bird pepper (so called because it is propagated by wild birds), is genetically the most related taxon to the domesticated C. annuum, the origin of which is to be found in southern Mexico.
The chiltepín has been used by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and the southwestern United States for centuries, and most of it, surprisingly enough, is still taken from the wild. For Native Americans, chiles, like corn, were gifts from the gods. The Papago Indians, according to Gary Nabhan, refer to it by a name suggesting that the chile has claim to have been present at the beginning of creation.
Hot chiles, according to a psychologist cited by food and science writer Harold McGee, may be the food of choice of risk takers. Eating chiles is a “contained risk.” The body’s responses to the capsaicin (the alkaloid concentrated mostly in the chile’s seed-bearing white placental tissue) — the vertigo, the shock, the burning tongue — can be enjoyed for their own sake, without any real risk, and then there’s that cooling endorphin afterglow.
The chiltepín has four times the capsaicin “per unit weight than do larger, domesticated chile varieties,” writes Nabhan. The chiltepín is hotter than the Japanese santaka, he says, and “39,000 times more powerful than what it needs to be for your taste buds to tell you that you are eating a chile!”
Yet people can’t have enough chiltepín. Forbidden by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to enter this country, chiltepíns make hot trade for smugglers. People still eat them pulverized and sprinkled on food in the manner of their ancestors 500 years ago. Although the chiltepín is found in southern Arizona, its consumption remains mostly local.
Fears remain regarding the chiltepín in the wild. Demand is high; often plants are damaged in the process of hasty hand- harvesting. Since the 1980s, some farmers in the state of Sonora, in Mexico, have been planting chiltepíns in fields, often starting plants from cuttings of wildings. It is hoped that these efforts will bear fruit of more than one kind. Perhaps domestic cultivation will take the heat off the wild populations of this red-hot mama.

— Paula Panich

Nourse Farms: Local Strawberry Makes Good

strawberry The mists of early morning over the meadows of Whately dissipate under a surprisingly warm spring sun. In the patchwork landscape, the chartreuse of late-April willows is punctuated by the occasional pink-and-white “cup and saucer” magnolia, three-quarters of its way into full bloom. Although it is just before eight o’clock, there’s a strong impression that the farming business of Whately has already been hours in the doing. Edging the fields closest to the road at Nourse Farms, dark, glossy rhubarb thrives in the still-cool air. A buzzing tractor heads for the horizon.
The farming business of the Connecticut River Valley has in fact been flourishing since the middle of the 17th century – but Tim Nourse, an energetic and engaging man who began farming in Whately in 1969 with his wife, Mary, has a relationship to those early farmers as parallel as that of the alphabet to the personal computer.

Whately may still look a bit like the 19th century, but the facts belie its bucolic appearance. Tim Nourse presides over an international fruit business – and the size of the fruit is the only thing that’s small about it. In fact, at any chic restaurant in California’s Sonoma Valley or in the Los Angeles basin, the strawberries in your strawberries Romanoff could be an issue from a plant cell grown in the lab at Nourse Farms in Whately, Massachusetts.
In 1999, Nourse Farms will ship 15 million strawberry plants to growers and gardeners around the world. That’s not to mention raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, currants, and gooseberries, as well as asparagus, rhubarb, and horseradish, which will also be sent to fields and gardens as far as Sweden.
As Nourse sits in his cramped office at Nourse Farms, every surface covered with publications, papers, and notes, it is clear – although he is a gracious host – that the boxed boundary of this office is not his natural habitat. Above his desk is a late-19th-century photograph, quite romantic, of a farmer walking home from the field. We’re looking at the subject’s back, his sharp hoe swung across his shoulder, and a century later the satisfaction in his body still speaks: The day in the field has ended as a job well done.
Nourse grew up in Westborough, in eastern Massachusetts, on a farm that has belonged to his family since 1722. Today the Nourses’ son is the 10th generation to farm there.
Thirty years ago, when Tim and Mary Nourse bought 70 acres in Whately – acreage that would grow to 400, cutting across the boundaries of three towns – “we didn’t have lofty goals,” he says. One of three Nourse Farms board members had built a small fruit business in eastern Massachusetts; the group saw “an opportunity to try to farm something that wasn’t a commodity,” Nourse recalls. Although today raspberries make up a large percentage of the business, its basis has always been the strawberry.
The core of strawberry production is, of course, plant stock. “Until the 1970s,” Nourse says, “the United States Department of Agriculture would supply all the so-called nuclear stock to growers. But with budget and program cuts, each nursery must produce its own.”

single strawberry Because commercial growers make up 70 percent of Nourse Farms’ customer base, a propagation method was needed to secure a large volume of quality stock. In 1980, a tissue-culture lab was instituted at Nourse Farms, which today employs about 10 people and is under the direction of plant pathologist Susan Sheplick, who is also the director of greenhouse operations. The lab has a contract with Cornell University – USDA Beltsville for virus indexing (testing for plant viruses) and plant propagation. “It’s very unusual that a lay lab [that is, a lab outside a university or other institution engaged in scientific enquiry] is involved with this level of disease testing,” Nourse says.
For example, strawberry plants are indexed by grafting a leaf from a test plant onto an indicator plant; viruses make themselves known by visual symptoms. The ELISA test is another indexing method, in which an enzymatic color reaction indicates the presence of a virus in a test plant.

The heart of the lab operation, though, is plant propagation through tissue culture, which supports the nursery operation of Nourse Farms.
Tissue culture is a means of producing whole plants from pieces of plant tissue. In Stage I of the tissue culture process, tiny sections are cut from the meristem, an area of actively growing cells near the tip of a stem, of an indexed, virus-free stock plant. The sections are placed on a white growth medium (his visitor notices that it looks a bit like marshmallow-in-a-jar) in a test tube under sterile conditions. In 10 to 12 weeks, each meristem develops into a plantlet.
The growing medium is changed, thereby forcing a Stage I plantlet to develop side shoots, which in turn multiply into a small clump of plantlets. In Stage II of the process, the clumps are separated into single plantlets and transferred onto fresh growing medium. Hundreds of bits of meristem produce thousands of plants.
Tim Nourse takes his visitor through the labs, where people are busily engaged with giant tweezers in a sterile environment under laminar flow hoods at four workstations. We also see the growth room, where thousands of glass jars bask in 16 hours of light per day and in a constant 72°F temperature – a good place to spend the winter, in the visitor’s opinion.
From the lab, the plants are taken to one of the seven Nourse Farms greenhouses for Stage IV development. Stage III, rooting cultures in the lab, is skipped over in this lab, as plants are rooted in the greenhouse in a soil-free medium in a highly humid environment. In 8 to 12 weeks plants develop a strong root system that will enable them to survive and grow in the field.
The tissue culture plants are sold as green, growing plants or as dormant plugs from cold storage at 28°F. Some are planted at Nourse Farms as foundation stock.
Because strawberry plants are shipped throughout the United States and to Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, they are bred for regional conditions, including the number of hours the plant will be exposed to sunlight. California varieties are “short-day” plants; those for the East and Midwest are “long-day plants.” Some are “day-neutral” and will fruit regardless of the number of hours of sun exposure. A grower in San Diego, for example, will order short-day plants, as the strawberry growing season in this temperate climate extends from January through February, when days are short.
As we walk through the Nourse Farms greenhouses, we’re greeted by enthusiastic choruses of “Hi, Tim” and “Hello, Tim.” It is clear that Tim Nourse is a well-liked and appreciated boss.
Nourse inspects a vast tray of tiny 6-week-old strawberry plants and pulls one out of its plastic incubator. “Feel these roots,” he says. “Aren’t they healthy and firm?”
Indeed. I recall a fairly recent trip to Tuscany, and the strawberries I hauled back from open-air markets. Might the fattest and the reddest among them have had a humble cellular beginning in a Whately, Massachusetts, greenhouse?
For specific instructions on planting, irrigation, mulching, and renovation of strawberry plants, consult Nourse Farms’ well-organized and comprehensive Web site: www.noursefarms.com.

Maple Ridge Peony Farm

peonies Bare branches, silvered by snow, then honeyed by warm afternoon light — the Williamsburg-South Ashfield Road in western Massachusetts, with its gabled farmhouses and snow-drifted fields, looked for all the world, on this late January day, like New England’s dream of itself.
I was on my way to Maple Ridge Peony Farm, in Conway, and wondering how the exotic “garden” peony — the herbaceous sort that will die down in winter — came to be part of almost every American farm gardener’s dreams.

From May until July, the peonies require full-time attention from the Viglianis. For the vigor of the root and for perfect, single flowers on individual stems, the family chooses to “disbud” each plant: They remove the side buds from the 4,000 that are in production. This job will take three people three to four days to accomplish. “We do this together,” says Alice, “and talk and visit as we have our hands on every stem. It’s a good check-in. We are basically examining each plant, on the lookout for the fungus botrytis, our enemy.”
The first line of defense against botrytis is planting with air circulation in mind; the second is to keep clean beds — no weeds to hold in moisture, no fallen leaves or stems to rot on the ground.
Another potential troublesome element in the peony garden is a certain species of the “plant” bug, Hemiptera miridae, which appears on the buds in May. The Viglianis pick them off by hand to prevent them from sweeping the fields. Plant bugs look somewhat like fireflies. “We could spray,” says Paul, “but we prefer to pick the bugs off. It’s another chance to check each plant.”
The growers follow a “biodynamic” approach to their peony and other flower beds. Their interpretation of this cultivation method is to develop biologically rich soils, with active and appropriate microorganisms, which in turn contribute to disease-free plants. “We make our own compost and add biodynamic preparations to it — that is, extracts from certain native plants and other organic materials; then we work the aged compost into our production beds and fields, to maintain active microflora in the soil. Then we spray additional biodynamic preparations on the growing plants. Our peonies therefore receive the combined benefit of maximum soil and plant tissue vigor.”
A sustainable system of agriculture, “biodynamic” growing is based on principles set forth by the Austrian social philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s. “We’re not experts or fanatics about this philosophy,” says Alice. “We just apply some of its practical suggestions, and our plants are phenomenally healthy and vigorous.”

Maple Ridge peonies, as cut flowers, have, in the last few years, made their way to the Boston Flower Exchange and to other wholesale markets in Hadley, Springfield, and Framingham, Massachusetts. In the last two or three years, the couple note, the balance of the wholesale trade has been swinging from the standard pink and white doubles traditionally desired by florists to greater interest in singles and Japanese peonies.
Among the growers’ favorite cut flowers are ‘Port Royale’ (a deep maroon Japanese); ‘Gay Paree’ (a delicate two-toned white/pink Japanese introduced in 1938); ‘James Pillow’ (a huge, tall, deep, full pink double introduced in 1936); and ‘Top Brass’ (an unusual tufted and fragrant off-white Japanese).
“I feel so excited when I see the peony plants coming up in the spring,” says Alice. “It’s like anticipating a visit with a good friend.” Her husband adds: “They’re a presence. I like them before they flower. You can see the vitality and energy in them.”

— Paula Panich

To get on the mailing list of Maple Ridge Peony Farm in Conway, Massachusetts, send your name and address to Alice and Paul Vigliani, 1784 Main Poland Road, Conway, MA 01341.

The text of The Book of the Peony was reprinted in 1993 by The Timber Press (800.327.5680 or www.timberpress.com ), with an introduction by the well-known commercial peony grower Roy Klehm.

Mrs. Edward Harding — Alice, whose legacy includes an eponymous tree-peony hybrid — sets us straight in The Book of the Peony (Lippincott, 1917): “The fact that the peony does not appear in horticultural literature in this country before 1800 may be accounted for more by the absence of the literature than the absence of the peony. Not till the beginning of the Nineteenth Century did horticulture as distinct from agriculture attain some individuality. The literature arose with the art.”
When Mrs. Harding refers to “this country” she means, of course, New England, and no wonder. The herbaceous peony had a recorded place in English gardens in the 12th century and most likely was present long before; and as Alice Harding describes the “splendour and majesty of presence” of the peony, along with its “grace and comeliness,” she assures her readers that “all, however, have an air of sturdy character and self-reliance.”

At Maple Ridge, a 15-acre farm on a hill just on the Williamsburg-Conway line, another Alice, Alice Vigliani, along with her husband, Paul, presides over 3 acres of herbaceous peonies planted in raised beds and rows — about 5,000 plants representing 35 varieties.
Alice and Paul moved to this pretty acreage (I saw it first during bloom time last June) in 1984, when Alice accepted a job in Conway. They had been vegetable and flower gardeners in rural Wisconsin, but had never grown a peony.
A chance remark by a friend soon after they built their two-story farmhouse — “I know someone in New York who bought an old peony farm” — set their minds toward peonies as a potential economic venture on their land.

The Viglianis had bought a long-abandoned, burned-out dairy farm. They found the remains of a barn and bits of a foundation, but otherwise, 40 years of trees, shrubs, and weeds choked the land that had once been home to pastures, house, and barn. They cleared the land, leaving the forested section intact, and tried to reclaim a neglected apple orchard. Deer and porcupine were more than grateful for the couple’s efforts.
The intrepid growers started with perhaps 25 peony plants in 1988. “The old barnyard soil is quite rich,” says Alice, “and deer won’t eat peonies. In fact, they don’t even damage the plants when they step among them.” The “Queen of Flowers,” as Mrs. Harding refers to peonies, doesn’t seem to be on the porcupine’s menu either.
The Viglianis knew their peony-growing experiment would be a long-term investment. How would the plants behave in the microclimate on their hill? They decided to concentrate on cut-flower varieties. “It took years for things to get going,” says Paul. “But we could tell after two or three years which plants would behave well.”
Their peony-growing ridge is cooler and windier than many home gardens in western Massachusetts, so the peonies bloom a bit later. The raised beds receive full sun all day. “Peonies don’t like to be sitting in wet soil,” Paul says. “And the air currents are good for them. There’s a general operating theory with peonies that air circulation helps prevent fungus problems. We plant the peonies very close together, 18 inches to 2 feet, depending on the variety, for production efficiency, so the moving air is important.”
Maple Ridge Peony Farm sells cut flowers to wholesale flower markets around New England and the New York City suburbs. The Viglianis prefer Japanese varieties and “singles” (although they do grow other forms) — that is, peonies with one row of petals instead of a whole head. A Japanese peony is typically defined as a flower with five or more outer petals and a center of staminodes (stamens without pollen). A “single” peony has one or more rows of outer petals with a center of pollen-bearing stamens. “We like the looks of Japanese and ‘single’ peonies,” says Alice, “and we chose the cut-flower varieties that have performed well here. Many floral designers prefer these flowers too.”
To pass the cut-flower test, the variety or hybrid must have sturdy, tall stems and a long vase life (that means they will hold petals for at least six days). Most of the flowers grown at Maple Ridge will hold on for 10 to 12 days. “A garden variety can easily drop its petals two days after it is picked,” says Paul.