Village Books in Bellingham, Washington, hosted our first bookstore appearance of the Great ‘Here Come the Plant Docs’ Book Tour of 2010. There is something very comforting about beginning such a venture talking about a book surrounded by good books, in the company of bibliophiles and phytophiles.

On this, my first trip to Bellingham, I discovered what a delightful town it is. Kathy, at the Village Inn, greeted us with an enthusiastic, “Oh, I should have recognized you. I have your book.”  Making us feel a little like the Olympic athletes who were also staying there (overflow from the games in Vancouver, just across the border). Naturally this welcome warmed my heart immediately and made me very predisposed to love Bellingham.

Robert, our host at Village Books, was equally kind and welcoming at this great bookstore filled not only with great books, but intelligent readers. I overheard some fascinating discussions about books as I wandered the store. As wanton book-o-holics David and I had to be very careful not to fill our van with books.  This may have been a dangerous place to begin the tour. But we survived. And we only bought four books. Whew.

 We had a good turnout for the talk and even sold and signed some books We got some great questions, such as: “What is the white stuff covering the soil in our houseplant pots?” Naturally we asked some questions and found that these folks were new to growing plants. We asked about their water and fertilizer practices, because we thought perhaps that the white substance was salt build-up in the potting media. But no. So we asked if tiny black bugs flew up into their faces when they moved the plants? Yes. Okay, those are fungus gnats. And is the white stuff soft and fluffy? Yes. Okay, that is a fungus that grows on the potting media. Use a mulch such as decorative stones or sand on top and that will cut down on the fungus problem and help to control the fungus gnats. We signed their new book and they went away happy.

We ate breakfast the next morning with a flowering plum. The early spring exuberance encourages and energizes us for the road ahead.

Today we are in Philadelphia, about to venture into the huge Flower Show at the convention center next door to our hotel. We traveled all day yesterday to get here. Got a great night’s sleep and are ready to roll. We look forward to giving a lecture tomorrow (March 3, 2010) here at the Flower Show.

We invite you to share your stories of the greenworld, and welcome you to join us at one of our stops on the road. See our events page for all the details (www.ddandkw.com/events)

A February Friday, unusually warm and sunny. Spring is here. Friends already lay out their soaker hoses, sow seeds indoors, and move seedlings out into their cold-frames. We’re going to miss all that this year, as we travel to talk about our book, and other topics from the greenworld. We won’t bemoan the loss too much. Surely an exciting journey lies ahead. David and I love a road trip.

The second event on our book tour is behind us. David and I gave a talk at the Port Townsend, WA public library last week. This low-key chat with our “homies” in the town where we live was a perfect send-off for the tour. Next week we’ll be in Bellingham.

At the library we talked about how we developed the book – our book – from inchoate thoughts about the questions we must ask when someone else asks us, “What’s Wrong With My Plant?” A very common question, btw.

Looking at the notes, it seems unlikely that we could corral the wayward notions and make a logical flow of questions, answers, and diagnoses, doesn’t it?  We started by recognizing that other references about plant problems require that you know the name of your plant. Lots of us don’t know this. Of course, David does, because he is a botanist whose PhD is in plant systematics – the very people who make up these names. But he doesn’t count.

What we see on our plants are symptoms, not Latin names. Symptoms – like spots, or holes, or distortions, which we see on plant parts – like the leaves, the stems, or the fruit. So, we sorted through the symptoms, the plant parts on which symptoms occur, and found tell-tale characteristics that illustrate a certain disorder, disease, or pest.

It took time, some nutrients, some nurturing, but we made it. It turned out alright.

As we prepare to travel, we’re going through a similar process. Sorting through belongings. What to take? What to put in storage? What to get rid of as a bad idea. (Whose idea was it to buy that hideous plaid jacket anyway?)

We identify the tell-tale characteristics of intrinsic value or usefulness. We store possessions that are truly useful or have sentimental value. We take those that will help us succeed on the road. We also take those that will bring joy to the journey, such as the new little teapot and cups. It’s kind of fun figuring out what we really care about, and lightening our load of extraneous possessions.  

In other words: Spring Cleaning

We invite you to share your stories of the greenworld, and welcome you to join us at one of our stops on the road. See our events page for all the details (www.ddandkw.com/events)

Well, we did it! Last week we held the first event of our book tour with a talk at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show. There may be no better place to get inspired for the road ahead.

Display gardens at big shows always have an idea or two that can be incorporated into small gardens and home landscaping. Vendors always have enough stuff to sink several container ships, yet they also make attractive displays, offering useful tools, lovely plants, and often, solid information. We visited with the folks at Seattle Tilth and the Northwest Horticultural Society. We admired some of the new, more ergonomic pruning and digging tools.

We particularly appreciated the well-executed designs of two displays: “A Family’s Little Farm in the City,” designed by Jessica and Noah Bloom. NW Bloom( www.nwbloom.com) and Seattle Tilth (www.seattletilth.org) collaborated on the installation; and “Crops for Clunkers,” designed by Colin McCrate, Brad Halm, and Noel Stout of the Seattle Urban Farm Company (www.seattleurbanfarmco.com)

Jessica Bloom’s design provided detailed views of the many creative ways for any home gardener to grow their own food in a small urban or suburban setting. Using recycled materials, one can create a raised bed out of almost anything.

Crops for Clunkers, from the Seattle Urban Farm Company displayed the most creative use of recycled material. The installation also demonstrated extremely useful techniques for any small space garden. We saw a very clear example that you can use almost virtually anything as a container. Techniques such as the vertical planting bed along the side of the truck illustrate what you can do on the side of a building, on the balcony of an apartment, or in containers indoors (if you choose the right plant material, of course).

Gardens also provide refuge, and we often venture into the greenworld to seek serenity.

Wherever we have lived – the Desert Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, and Hawaii – David and I have always grown our own food. We also experience our garden as the gateway to the natural world. We combine food, medicinal herbs, and flowers for ourselves and beneficial insect partners. We grow polycultures for both sustenance and beauty.

We invite you to share your stories of the greenworld, and welcome you to join us at one of our stops on the road. See our events page for all the details (www.ddandkw.com/events)

David and I are wandering the Northwest Flower and Garden Show this week, and giving a talk on Sunday (February 7, 2010). The display gardens are beautiful, as always. Some are even spectacular.  But only two garden installations serve to truly inspire an urban gardener in these times. Since David and I are particularly interested in sustainable, organic food production for urban dwellers we found that these two gardens had the most to offer: “A Family’s Little Farm in the City” and “The Truck Farm.” (More on that in my next blog). “A Family’s Little Farm in the City” certainly lives up to its promise: to “demonstrate how a family can live sustainably in the city.” A small dwelling – actually a barn, but it could be modified – with solar panels, a quiet patio serving as a front porch, vegetable beds, an edible forest, compost bins, rain barrels, and bee hives. All thrive on this tiny plot of land.

I love this chicken tractor. The hen industriously scratches and pecks, tilling the soil for you. She can retire to her little shed to lay her eggs. Talk about a valuable partner!!  This is probably my favorite item in the display.

We’ve built cold frames from discarded windows for thirty years, but it is really treat to see one so well-built and attractive.

Rain barrels make sense no matter where you live. There are so many places in the world where water is a problem. Anywhere along the west coast of North America, the summers are dry. In the Southwest U.S. it’s dry all the time. Even the east coast of the U.S. experiences prolonged periods of drought. Catch water off any roof and storing it for later use is a great idea.

And what garden would be complete without some domestic animal companions and helpers?

I am immersed these days in the language of botany. It is just as though I have signed up for one of those immersion programs used to learn a foreign language. Which I guess is what I am really doing, after all. I had Latin in high-school, but can’t remember much of that.  But David knows the language well.  And in the classes we teach on Plant Identification, we talk about the features of plant flowers that tell us its name.

Botanical Illustrations show the technical features botanists use to identify plants. Here are some for you to enjoy:

Our fingers are stiff with cold. It is winter here in the Northwest. David picks up his end of the measuring tape, and a hundred feet away, I pick up mine. We walk ten feet downslope and lay the tape on the ground again. Steamy clouds of our breath hang in the air. Dry leaves and twigs crunch underfoot. David turns on his recorder and walks across the slope toward me. He records the name and size of every plant the tape touches.

“How’s it look?” the landowner asks. She stands beside me and is concerned. A year ago, the bluff on which her home sits started sliding toward the beach. Saturated by heavy winter rains the glacial till became unstable and slumped. Afraid her house might fall into Hood Canal she called on us to help her manage runoff, re-establish appropriate native vegetation and stabilize the slope. Today, we conduct line-intercept transects along permanent monitoring points to see if any movement has occurred in the last year. If the land is moving, then the plants will have shifted position.

“So far, so good,” David responds. “Nothing has moved.”

The woman smiles in relief.

David slowly rewinds the meter tape onto the yellow spool. “The beach strawberry is doing a great job of stabilizing the slope. The mix of other perennials and shrubs we selected are providing good cover.” He bends over to examine the small plants at his feet. “And I see a dozen new starts of your alumroot. Looks like volunteer seedlings.”

A colony of our native small-flowered alumroot, Heuchera micrantha, occupied the slope prior to its collapse. Now the new seedlings’ bright green leaves spread across the brown leaf litter on the ground.

“Great. I love them.” The woman stamps her feet and flaps her arms to get her blood moving. But she grins with pleasure and relief at David’s news and at the appearance of a favorite plant.

The tail end of the tape-measure slips home. “All done. I still have to transcribe the data but it’s clear that this slope is no longer moving. Your new French drains collect and redistribute the up-slope runoff. And the new plants control the erosion.”

We walk back to her house through the garden. As part of her effort to control the erosion that threatened her home, she has removed the lawn, put in berms, and planted low maintenance perennials and shrubs that she doesn’t have to water. Closer to the house, she has placed plants that need slightly more water. She stops and points to her Heuchera hybrids. “Look at them. Mid-winter and colorful as ever.”

“Isn’t this one ‘Amber Waves’?” David touches the golden leaves of one variety. “Did you know that one of its parents is the native species growing on your bluff?” He points to another with nearly black foliage and another with brilliant chartreuse leaves. “This must be ‘Obsidian’, and this one, ‘Key Lime Pie.”

She nods, delighted to talk plant with another aficionado. “I love all the color you get from these, all year long, and they’re totally trouble free.”

Many Heuchera hybrids have achieved celebrity status in recent years and have become glamorous stars of the perennial garden. Like Academy Award winning actors, these new hybrids appear on television, in magazines, and win “Oscars” in perennial trials across the country.

Our native Heuchera micrantha is a humble denizen of the floor of the emerald forest on the Olympic peninsula. Like any parent of a child star, our native alumroot stays in the background, allowing her celebrity children to take the spotlight.

The common name, alumroot, suggests medical uses, and Native Americans pounded the dried roots to make a poultice to stop bleeding and promote healing of cuts and sores. This medicinal usage followed the plants from America to Europe where Linnaeus gave the name Heuchera to the genus in order to honor Johann Heinrich von Heucher, Professor of Medicine at Wittenberg (1677-1747).  Modern pharmacopeias included Heuchera in their texts well into the twentieth century.

The second part of the name (the specific epithet), micrantha, means small-flowered, and gives rise to her common name, the small-flowered alumroot. While individual flowers are small, white, and not very showy, they are borne in great numbers on long, one-and-a-half-foot tall many flowered stalks.

David Douglas (1798 – 1834) named Heuchera micrantha based on his collection of the plants from the Columbia gorge in 1823. Haenke, the botanist on the Malaspina expedition from Spain collected specimens of this species on Vancouver Island in 1791. However, Douglas published first, so the plant gets Douglas’s scientific name, despite the fact that Haenke was the first European botanist to collect it.

All fifty-five species of alumroots are members of the Saxifrage family and all are native to North America. H. americana, whose native range is from New England to the Midwest states, traveled first to Europe and is another important parent of modern hybrids. A third  parent, H. villosa, comes from Virginia, Georgia and Tennessee. All three of these species, H. micrantha, H. americana, and H. villosa, figure prominently in the genetic background of all the modern Heuchera hybrids.

The bright red flowers of another species, H. sanguinea, attract both hummingbirds and humans. Coral Bells, as it is commonly known, comes from New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico. It contributes genes for larger, brightly colored coral-red flowers to numerous hybrids in the genus.

We gratefully enter the warmth of the home-owner’s country kitchen. Sipping chai spice tea beside the fire, David relishes more conversation about plants. Whenever genuine garden devotees gather they seem to spout lists of names. Scientific names, cultivar names, obscure botanists from the past. Their pleasure brings me a smile as I leaf through plant catalogues, winter inspiration to the avid gardener.

Beyond the window snow flurries swirl. My companions are lost in their discourse. Outside, a cobalt blue pot, stuffed with the many-colored Heuchera, sits on the patio. The glowing leaves, ignoring the cold, provide all the colorful inspiration we need.

Today is Christmas day and I thought I’d share with you a few photos of some of my favorite native plants of the Northwest. All of the plants featured here are evergreen shrubs or trees. All of them produce berries that attract birds to your garden. All the fruits are edible by us humans too and are quite tasty.

David and I went out for a walk on Christmas eve and took these photos to share with you. We walked along the shores of Hood Canal on the Kitsap Peninsula up in Washington State. Winters are mild here and there is no snow on the ground. Plants that keep their leaves all winter are especially valued in the landscape in the Northwest.

White puffs of breath hang in the cold air. Snow dusts our heads and shoulders as we brush back the limbs of conifers that crowd the trail. David and I hike the Larch Mountain Trail near the Columbia River, east of Portland. We’re not going far on this wintry day, hoping only to catch a glimpse of noble fir, Abies procera, in its native habitat.

As we near the holiday season, we’re seeking a “wild Christmas tree.” David decided we should look for the “perfect” wild Christmas tree, the noble fir. “The most elegant of Christmas trees,” he says. “It holds its branches symmetrically, the boughs sturdy and level.” He extends his arms straight out, away from his body.

“It twists its needles upward, exposing the lower surface of the stem. A perfect place to hang ornaments. The needles have a bluish cast and the tree does not shed them as they dry. Yep, just about perfect.” He continues with long strides up the path.

Larch Mountain, where noble fir is abundant, is the best location for our wild tree safari. We might even find a 200 foot specimen of this peerless winter holiday tree. Despite the mountain’s misleading name, it harbors no larch. Both mountain and trail get their names from timber men who harvested and sold the noble fir as larch. No one would buy fir in those days.

David leads the way to the right micro-climate: mid-elevation, a moist habitat, and rich deep soil.
“Here’s one,” I cry out in order to get his attention.

He stops and shakes snow from the bough. “Almost,” he says. “This is a Douglas fir, not a true fir.” He turns a branchlet over to expose the growth habit of the needles on the underside. “In noble fir, the needles look like little hockey sticks. See, these needles grow straight out from the stem all the way around, like a bottle-brush. But, on noble fir, the needles bend, right at the base.”

“Why?” I find these details endlessly fascinating.

“An adaptation to garner more light. So, it makes more food, can out-compete its neighbors,” David says. “Also, look at the bud at the tip of the branch. It’s pointed. On true firs the bud is round.”

“Well, this tree is pretty too.” I head up the trail.
“Sure it is. And, at least, you recognized the differences among firs, pines and spruce.” David catches up, then retakes the lead.
Earlier he explained distinctions in the world of conifers. Pine needles occur in bundles of two, three, or five. Fir needles are solitary and spruce needles bite. In other words, they’re sharp and, well . . . needle-like. But that tidbit of information is irrelevant; there is no spruce up here.

“Whose idea was this?” I grumble, rubbing my hands together. I’m not used to this weather despite living in the Pacific Northwest for some years.

David laughs. “C’mon, where’s your Christmas spirit?”

I laugh along with him. But I am thinking about the idea of bringing trees into the house in mid-winter. I mean, whose idea was this? I know the Egyptians were the first. They brought date palm fronds inside during winter solstice celebrations. But does that count?

All the mid-winter festivals celebrate the shortest day of the year in some way. It marks the return of the light. The point when the sun begins to climb back up, higher in the sky, bringing longer days. That’s the moment when you know that the long dark months are over. It’s the return of hope.

Still, who started the tradition of bringing an evergreen tree into the house? I know the earliest written record comes from Alsace. A forest ordinance of 1561 reads, ‘No burgher shall have for Christmas more than one bush of no more than eight shoe lengths’. That sounds like the first environmental regulation to me.

A Hessian mercenary soldier fighting with the British probably put up the first Christmas tree in North America in 1777. Yet the tradition of having a decorated tree inside most certainly came to this country with German immigrants. Matthew Zahn of Lancaster, Pennsylvania wrote about his family’s excursion to cut a Christmas tree on December 20, 1821. The tree was decorated with nuts, dried fruits, and seeds.

The English colonists actually outlawed Christmas trees. The idea really wasn’t acceptable until Queen Victoria and Prince Albert popularized it in the 1840s. In fact, Massachusetts banned their use until 1857.

In my musing I have lost sight of David, but soon hear his whistle and I hurry to catch up. Two more bends in the trail and I find him examining the silvery-blue foliage of a young noble fir.

“See the hockey sticks?” David holds a bough in a gloved hand. He hands it to me. “Feel the weight of it. Smell it.”

“It’s heavy.” I hold it to my nose and take a long, deep breath. “It smells like the deep forest.”

“And like Christmas,” David adds.

When I was a kid my mother grew an enormous poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima) in a dormer window in my bedroom. She had received it one Christmas as a small potted plant to decorate the dinner table. We always gathered as a very large extended “family” that included close friends of my parents and their children. My siblings and I are still friends with the children of these families and consider them hanai brothers and sisters. Hanai is a Hawaiian word that loosely equates to “adopted”. Holiday gatherings of our hanai family brought many celebratory traditions together: Jewish, Egyptian, German, and Celtic. I’m not sure who brought the little poinsettia as a gift, because all those cultures embrace the practice of bringing greenery and plants into our homes in winter, especially during the winter feasts.
Most of the time, the plant lived in a giant yellow pot in the bay window of my bedroom. There, it soaked up plenty of sunlight, just enough water, and not too many nutrients. To tell the truth, I never really paid attention to how my mother cared for it. But she must have babied that plant, because by the time I was a teenager, the poinsettia was lush, robust, and six feet tall.
Every autumn my mother came to my bedroom each evening and dragged that heavy pot and plant into my closet. Shoving the shrub among my clothes, she’d pull on the sting to turn out the light, shut the closet door, and forbid me to open it until morning. And by Christmas every year bright red “flowers” festooned the branches. I didn’t know then what I know now – that these are not really flowers, but modified leaves that change colors through the lengthening dark nights of early winter. Before the solstice and the return of the light.

The English common name comes from Joel Roberts Poinsett, who introduced the plant to the U.S. in 1825, when he served as the first U.S. Minister to Mexico. Poinsettias are large shrubs or small trees and are native to dry topical forests in Mexico, but now grow wild nearly everywhere in the tropics. Indigenous peoples have used their bracts to make red dye and their milky sap for medicine to reduce fevers.
I vividly recall the day I first saw a poinsettia in the wild. I was nineteen and had traveled to Belize and Guatemala with two college chums. We hitch-hiked from Belize City to Tikal and Guatemala City; we cadged a ride on a sail boat to the barrier islands off the coast; and we traipsed through the forest in search of adventure.
One night we camped in a clearing at the foot of one of the excavated pyramids at Tikal. In utter darkness, surrounded by the shuffling, calling, scurrying sounds of nocturnal animals, we threw our sleeping bags on the ground and slept the sleep of complete ignorance. The kind of ignorance that brings forth the guardian angels. Next morning we rose early and encouraged each other to climb to the top of the tallest pyramid. The real reason we were up at dawn is because the ants had emerged from their burrows and swarmed over us. They had a wicked bite.
We headed down the jungle trail, quickly leaving the clearing behind. In just a few feet we crossed paths with a long line of harvester ants – ones that cut leaves into little pieces and transport them over well-worn trails to feed their cultivated mushrooms. None of us knew much ecology then, so after watching them for a bit,  we dubbed them umbrella ants, and set off on our way again.
A troop of howler monkeys soon spotted us, and remaining at a safe distance, paralleled our track. Hooting and howling, they taunted us with their calls. One, who seemed to be an adolescent like us, swung aggressively close overhead, and tried to nail us with a torrent of his urine. That will teach us to trespass in his territory. Luckily he missed.

Just as we reached the base of the towering monument, I spotted a vaguely familiar shrub – leggy, and scraggly, yet similar to my old room-mate. A few reddish-pink bracts adorned its branches. I was completely taken aback. It was like running into an old acquaintance from elementary school – you know you know them, but haven’t been in touch for a long time. Suddenly I saw, really saw the plants of the jungle around me. Wasn’t that vine climbing up the trunk of that big tree just like the plant in my mother’s sun room? And what about the tree itself – wasn’t it a huge specimen of the small potted “fig” tree my mom had?
This was my first conscious encounter with a wild houseplant. Oh, to be nineteen again. To discover the world as if you are the first person to ever see such sights.

Orchid Obsession

David has turned his attention to the tropical plants that live in our houses, in particular one of his true loves – orchids.
My first day in Hawaii, many years ago, was filled with orchids. I had stopped to visit David on my way from Australia where I had been leading an eco-tour of the Great Barrier Reef. He lived in a tiny cabin deep in the jungle of the west Maui Mountains, where he headed up a research project in biomass production from tropical trees. A shimmering green light bathed the interior of his dilapidated shack. One of the three or four intact buildings of an abandoned poi factory complex. Of course, I loved it on sight. Surrounded by huge trees — mango, grapefruit, avocado, and monkey-pod — each with its own community of epiphytic orchids and ferns clinging to each massive limb. While I knew none of these plants were native, I was still enchanted.

We dropped off my luggage and rushed straight back to town to buy me an appropriate dress for the annual banquet of the Lahaina Orchid Society. In his spare time, David had become an orchid judge and breeder. Hundreds of guests mingled and merged, ebbing and flowing around me. Long tables filled the ballroom, each table festooned with orchid plants – all in magnificent bloom. The heady scent of orchid blossoms filled the air. I listened to bizarre conversations around me.
“Did you see that Ports of Paradise ‘Glenyries Green Giant’?’
“Oh yes, he da kine li’ dat.”
“I no know. What about that Ida Fukumura?”
“Yeah, she really da kine.”
Later I would learn that the first is an intergeneric cattleya hybrid and the second a phalaenopsis, but that night I sat stupefied as the mix of pidgin and orchid-speak assailed my ears. It was like listening to aliens from another planet trying to include me in the conversation. I smiled a lot.

Many remarkable events took place over the next few weeks of my visit. David took me to orchid shows and orchid ranges (what the rest of us might call nurseries). We visited other judges and experts, all of whom were smitten with orchids, afflicted with orchid obsession.

I gradually learned to distinguish between a cattleya and a phalaenopsis. Slowly I could recognize a dendrobium, a vanda, and a paphiopedilum. The orchid maniacs I met were mostly big men with arms covered in tattoos. Men who could easily be mistaken for the goons that gangsters send to break kneecaps. They showed me how to gently remove pollen from the “father” (pollen parent) and place it on the stigma of the “mother” flower (pod parent). With a toothpick!

David showed me his research – volumes of notebooks with orchid genealogies going back centuries in some cases. Research designed to support the breeding program he intended to start. We began touring orchid ranges in earnest with the goal of purchasing “stud” plants – those perfect plants, with the perfect genetic composition for David to use to create award-winning plants. Yes, David had it bad – a serious case of orchid fever. Yet, it never seemed extraordinary to me. It seemed perfectly normal, in fact.

We grew orchids in pots, on benches or on the ground beneath the towering trees surrounding the cabin. We borrowed a friend’s laboratory to sow orchid seeds in a sterile environment in specially prepared media inside glass flasks and baby-food jars. I read every orchid book, magazine and research paper David handed me. And the few weeks visit turned into months.
Without quite realizing it, the orchid obsession took over. We moved to the Big Island of Hawaii. We started our own orchid range. Built our own laboratory. Amassed a stunning collection of “stud” plants. We filled every inch of our lives with the incredible beauty of these exotic, luscious plants. Oh, and while we were at it, we got married.
Even though we no longer grow orchids, our love for these plants remains. I do not know why some people succumb – as we did – to orchid fever, but I highly recommend it. I guess for me orchids embody an incredible, wild, effortless ride into joy.