Portraits: Shrimps and Pansies

Surely there was never a plant so aptly named. I have waited two years for Justicia brandegeana to flower and for some reason only during the last month has it finally got up a head of steam. So assuming that the freeze will kill it off, I spent the last warm afternoon attempting to paint this complicated bloom. This particular variety even has whiskers like a shrimp.


I have several terracotta wall pots from my mother's garden that get filled with seasonal color. When I'm at my kitchen sink I see these pansies and think of her. She loved pansies and named one of her cats after this flower. I love these purple faces with their yellow dot.

Merry Christmas Thoughts

“It is only to the gardener that time is a friend, giving each year more than he steals.”
Beverley Nichols, Merry Hall

Just finished this famed garden memoir by Beverley Nichols, which falls on many people’s lists of favorite garden books of all time. This Zelig-like writer flitted in and out of politics, celebrity, and journalism during pre/postwar Great Britain, and somehow found time and money to garden like a crazed Johnny Appleseed in series of homes in the English countryside. Merry Hall is an account of the years he lived in a run-down Georgian manse surrounded by five acres where he torched unwanted shrubs, felled mature trees he deemed ugly—and then replanted forests of trees, lilies, roses, and more trees. He apparently did no work himself, preferring to direct gangs of workers and his fulltime gardener, a man of almost mythical horticultural skills named Oldfield. To read the book is to take an amiable meander through the garden with this interesting man, stopping for a moment in the greenhouse, witnessing hilarious drop-ins by eccentric neighbors and the antics of his two cats, and listening to Nichols natter on about his love for lilies. There’s a terrible poignancy about the whole book as well, embodying as it does a world now vanished, where infallible gardeners, faithful valets, and unimaginable real estate economies existed.

Do NOT turn your back on that weeping willow!

Fascinating story by the always-readable NYT science writer Natalie Angier on the consciousness of plants yesterday. As an unrecalcitrant meat-eater who can't understand this reductio ad absurdism of what to eat and not eat (how about air? can we eat air?), it just confirms my own suspicions that plants can and do scream when under attack by Woman-With-Shears or the hungry caterpillar. Some of the aggressive actions taken by plants as reported in this story are downright spooky. If the ficus I'm currently training as a topiary ever gets it phototropic/cellular shit together, I may be in for trouble.

So I'm not the only deranged espalier artiste on the planet.

(Photograph by Francois Halard)

Past madness here.

A Sod Site for Sore Eyes

The before and after pictures of the great lawn in Zilker Park after this weekend’s ACL Festival here. The folks at Bermuda Tifway 419, the grass that was relentlessly flogged in on-air mentions leading up to and during the ACL Festival probably won’t be including this in their follow-up PR. Let’s hope the turf’s advertised “quick recovery from injury” is true.

The Top Ten Reasons I Garden in Austin

10. It gives me carte blanche to use lower back pain as an excuse not to go on the charity Fun Run that ties up traffic in the center of town for hours and that people invite me to every weekend.

9. I can construct to-scale dragons, unicorns, and gryphons out of the thousands of little plastic I.D. sticks that come in bedding plants and sell them for huge profits at the Dungeons and Dragons Swapper’s Saturday at my local comic book shop.

8. A good poison ivy rash obscures the aging-dowager liver spots on my hands.

7. It makes pretty clear to my neighbor that I do not share his reverence for late-90s gangsta rap and there will be no need for that mix CD he’s always talking about leaving on my doorstep.

6. I heard a rumor from an old North Austin hippie that repeated exposure to massive doses of fire ant toxin bestows immunity to H1N1, AIDS, Alzheimers, annoying acid reflux, and being abducted by aliens.

5. Dirt never has anything but a kind word to say about everything and everyone.

4. An anagram for Austin Gardener is A Grandeur Set In.

3. Double digging in 105 degree heat quickly rids you of that pesky 10 lbs. of unwanted water weight and/or last night’s alcoholic bloat.

2. I love seeing the miraculous circle of life, from seed to tiny sapling to dried up, shriveled, and dead in the 105 degree sun.

And the Number One reason I garden in Austin is:







Fall

I could do this. All I need is a white stucco wall and a euphorbia.

Richard Felber