Quote of the day

*

Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

- Henry James -

...and now, off to Scandinavia. We'll be spending four lazy weeks with the families, sitting in the shade and inhaling the ripening green scents of high summer, occasionally plunging into the brackish water of the Baltic sea... I'll be back late August.

... and slender, native Columbia lilies

A fully open Columbia lily, with golden, gracefully curved petals spotted with dark mahogany freckles.

*
Lilies are out not only in the gardens of Pacific Northwest, but they are also blooming wild on the mountainous, rocky slopes of the area. Tired from the 4th of July celebrations, we took our girls for an easy hike to the top of the Little Si just outside the Seattle metropolitan area. On the way up, we ate our lunch surrounded by peckish squirrels making eager calling noises for others to join the expected feast.

Mount Si hiding in the fleecy coulds, as seen from the top of Little Si.

Between the cliffs, the slopes were filled with slender lilies bearing their golden flowers with curved petals like glowing little lanterns. They were small, barely two feet high (0.5m), and most of them had only managed to produce one or two flowers at the top of their meager stems on the stony soil. Delicate and elegant, they looked almost out of place on the barren hillsides, like young ladies dressed to kill but nowhere to go...

*A newly opened bud; the tips of the petals are starting to curve upwards.

*

Back home, I identified the flowers as Columbia lilies, Lilium columbianum, that grow on elevated hills from northern California to British Columbia. Their flowers resemble in appearance the "Turk's cap lilies" like Lilium martagon, L. henryi and L. tenuifolium, and they even share the typical whorl of leaves that grows circularly from the nodes of the stem.

*

Despite all the other, lush vegetation we saw during the hike - ferns, salmonberries, giant redwoods - it was these glowing, fragile lilies that made the deepest impression on me. Maybe it was the crawl through the thicket to catch the photos, but afterwards I felt like a modern day plant explorer hunting for new treasures, despite actually having been only a couple of steps from a popular hiking track...

*

Giant Himalayan lilies

The Giant Himalayan lily, Cardiocrinum giganteum, in full bloom beside a velvety Hydrangea aspera at the Bloedel Reserve gardens. I'm sorry for the poor photo quality; it was difficult to catch the lily in the bright sunlight...

**

A real photographer never takes pictures in full sun, I read somewhere; he or she only works on over-cast days, during the tentative light of the early morning, or in the warm, soft glow of the evening. But I rather accept the less than ideal conditions than leave things undocumented... Like on last Saturday, when my dear, non-gardening friend Tina was on a brief visit from Berkeley. I just had to show her the Bloedel Reserve, one of the greatest gardens in North America, and despite the relentless high noon sun, I tried to catch a picture of the Giant Himalayan lily, Cardiocrinum giganteum, that was in full bloom, towering almost 10 feet above the soft, humus-scented ground of the gardens.

*

I first met these huge, regal lilies in Marian's garden last year, and have been fascinated by them ever since. Originating from the lush and fertile mountains of the Yunnan province in China, they were discovered (to the eyes of the Western gardeners...) by Scottish plant explorer Robert Fortune in mid-19th century. Giant Himalayan lilies can be cultivated at least in Danish gardens, but I had never seen as far up as in Stockholm; I would be very interested to know if anyone there has grown them. They are quite expensive to buy as bulbs, but as they do not like transplanting, they are safer to grow from seed. Their journey from seed to a flowering plant takes five to seven years, so they are definitely not something for gardeners expecting instant effects; therefore, they remained a collector's plant even in climates well-suited for cultivating them.

*

A tuft of leathery, glossy leaves of young Himalayan lilies, not yet ready to flower.

*

During the first five to seven years, the lilies only make large tufts of glossy, leathery leaves. Then, when the bulb is mature, a tall shoot emerges from the centre carrying narrow, jade-green flower buds. In the middle of summer, the buds start to open one after another, from the bottom of the raceme and upwards, revealing the large, white bell-shaped flowers with a touch of burgundy in the throat. The flowers emit a heady fragrance during the night-time; only one lily plant is enough to scent a whole garden. After two weeks the Giant Himalayan lilies finish their flowering and if left in place, the dry, soaring stems will fill the air with sparkling, translucent seed. Exhausted by their magnificent performance, the mother bulbs die after flowering, leaving their offspring in the soil, ready to start the long cycle of life again.

*

Browsing through some gardening literature, I found some quite eccentric advice on how to plant Giant Himalayan lilies. Miss Gertrud Jekyll, for instance, advised on digging a hole of one cubic yard, filling it with compost and manure, and tossing in a rabbit before planting the bulbs. Major George Sheriff, a Scottish plant hunter and botanist who visited the Himalayas, went further and recommended digging a far larger hole, as according to him only a dead yak will do being a native to the same area as the Cardiocrinums.

*

I guess the rabbit would be the most realistic option for a home gardener like me, and even then I would be quite concerned about the local dogs getting wild about my gardening methods... But given how long time it takes for the lilies to flower, I won't be growing them any time soon as I don't know how long I will be tending my present garden; it would be too sad to leave them before they flowered. So I guess I just have to be content with admiring them at a distance.

Happy 2nd anniversary...

The golden, silky petals of a double Icelandic poppy, Papaver nudicaule, almost ready to be carried away by the wind.

*

After a couple of hectic weeks of driving my girls to their summer camps and then having our house full of friends, I almost missed the second anniversary of my blog. I was trying to remember the reason for starting it, but could not come up with nothing more exotic than a pinch of loneliness caused by moving into a new country, and maybe a dash of curiosity about getting something out there... It felt a bit like I was sending my own tiny messenger satellite out to the boundless space of connected gardeners and other like-minded souls and waiting if there would be any signals back.

**

The name of my blog, The Intercontinental Gardener, was something of a joke from the beginning, referring to the relatively nomadic gardening life I've led so far (both Nomad and Nomadic Gardener were in use those days, even if they both now have disappeared from the blogging universe). At times, I've felt tempted to change it to something more relaxed... I mean, some days I've definitely felt more like "Garden Punk" or "Heavy Petal" than the proper "Intercontinental Gardener". But somehow the name stuck, and now it would feel strange to see anything else on the top of the page.

*

Looks like this guy is sticking its tongue out...
*

During these two years, I've connected with many talented, writing garden people. Karen (Greenwalks) was one of my earliest commenting visitors. Being a natural connector, she organized Seattle area bloggers to meet at irregular intervals, which is how I came to know Daniel (Daniel Mount Gardens), Jean (Jean Bradbury) and many others here. In the early days, Tina (the Garden Design Chronicle) from New Zealand was living in Melbourne, and her beautiful blog felt like a wonderful greeting from the town where I had spent four wonderful years. Nilla (then the Reluctant Gardener, now Utanpunkt), won my heart with her insightful writing and exquisite photos, and not surprisingly, she is now working on a collection of novels. I can't wait to get to read them in print. Alice Joyce's amazingly energetic travel blog Bay Area Tendrils gave ideas for gardens to be visited on my trips to California. Ruben (Rubens Rabatter) always manages to make me glad with his sympathetic posts, and James Golden's (View from Federal Twist) quite philosophic posts about his wonderfully sensitive, naturalistic garden are a constant inspiration, that I will keep in mind when I start working with my own garden in Sweden again.

*A dark maroon, speckled and nameless lily from Marian's garden.

*

Of many visitors I will never know more than the country and city address they leave on the tracker of my blog. Many of them land on my blog by searching for "Fergus Garret", "Villa Mairea" or "Daniel Hinkley, Windcliff" (all three top key words for finding this blog - amazingly, the word "stumpery" also get many hits...). Some come from faraway, exotic places that I sometimes search myself to see where they are. Some come from places that I have a personal connection to. For example, I would love to know who visited from Iittala, a small town in Finland where both my mother and the famous Savoy vase by Alvar Aalto come from. Or, who visited from the tiny, dusty village of Birregurra in the rainless countryside of Victoria. It felt like a distant, eucalyptus-scented greeting from an unknown friend. While living in Australia, we often stopped at this sleepy village on our way from Melbourne to Apollo Bay, bought a cup of coffee from the old ladies at the local coffee shop and let the girls have romp at the playground before entering the last, winding miles that lead to the beaches of the Great Ocean Road. The improbable name of Birregurra brought vivid memories back, and I would dearly have wanted to ask how things were back there, and if the drought had loosened its grip.

*

So what now, after two years and 126 posts? I'm not sure. I sometimes ask myself if I should be blogging at all, as it can be extremely time consuming. But at the same time, it feels like keeping a living log about my thoughts of all things related to gardens and gardening. I love the spontaneity and directness of posting my little writings; it is so completely different from the long and laborious process of getting something out in print. So I guess I will just keep writing, one post at a time, and see where this blogging life is going to take me.

Delicious thugs

*

As a sad outcome of the recent housing bubble, there are a couple of empty, unfinished houses in my neighborhood, waiting for the good times (and builders) to return in some distant future. I find it fascinating to see how fast the lush, abundant nature of the Pacific Northwest has claimed the land back, and filled it with such a rampant tangle of blackberries that they make the roses covering Sleeping Beauty's castle seem lethargic.

*

*

In my innocence, I thought that these vigorous plants were native - they surely look like they are having a ball here - until I found them on the list of noxious weeds in this state. Only the tiny, trailing dewberry, Rubus ursinus, is native to the Pacific Northwest. The thugs in my pictures are Himalayan blackberries, one of the two non-native species of blackberries that were introduced here by two unsuspecting Europeans, eager to find new berry varieties to grow in the fertile soil of the Northwest.

*

Dr. Laurea was the first to try his luck with blackberries, and imported the evergreen blackberry, R. laciniatus, from Hawaii some time in the 1850s. Some thirty years later, horticulturalist Luther Burbank acquired a package of seeds of the Himalayan blackberry, R. procerus, from an seed exchange in India. The seeds proved to be more than the success Burbank had hoped on. Proud of his novelty, Burbank wrote in his catalogue that "the Himalayas would produce buckets of berries on wines that could grow 100-200 feet in only one season." Obviously, he didn't think this would be any kind of a risk, and definitely did not foresee having just introduced one of the area's most notorious weeds ever, capable of covering countless acres of land with impenetrable, thorny thickets.

*

*

I guess that in the horticultural hall of fame, these guys score only a bit above the Englishman who imported rabbits to Australia, even if it has said in their defence that those days nobody quite knew about the huge risks of importing new species to new continents. And at least they were trying to grow something edible, instead of just wanting to introduce the ancient sport of fox hunting to their newly established society...

*

*

Anyway, being an eager scavenger of all things edible, I'm already looking forward to the blackberry season ahead. It seems to become a good one: the wines are full of flowers and tiny, green berry babies. Almost no-one bothers to pick them in my neighborhood, which means that all the more are left to me and a couple of old ladies of Asian heritage, all of us probably the only ones eccentric (or greedy?) enough to do this. In two months time, we'll all be standing amongst the thorny wines again, picking the sweet, juicy berries with our sticky fingertips stained dark purple.
*

Gossip in the garden

Ohhh... do you really mean...? Are you quite sure?

Only a moment ago, I stole a picture of these bursting little ladies,

eagerly sharing the latest tattle of the rain-drenched garden.

I think I heard something about Mrs. Papaver's dress looking already quite ragged, but I might just as well be wrong.

Quietly, I left the scene, careful not to disturb their discussion.

*

I don't think they noticed me.

*

Listening to a greenfinch

Hilding Linnqvist: Song of the heart, 1920. Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
*

As I was younger, I loved studying the sumptuous flower still-lives painted by the Dutch artists of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Their lavish and colorful bouquets, containing flowers from all four seasons in one single picture and complemented by carefully selected memento mori, could hold my attention for a long time. I loved to trace the delicate, skillful brushstrokes that formed the silky petals and see-through drops of water that still, after centuries, carried a message of our earthly mortality and a promise of an eternal life in paradise.

*

Gradually, my fascination with those magnificent paintings cooled down, and even if I continue to love gardens and flowers, only a few artists who depict them seem to be able to capture my interest. One of them is Hilding Linnqvist, whose naivist painting 'Song of the heart' has been one of my favorites for years. It is tiny, only 37x24 cm (or 16x9 inches), and in it, a little green bird seems to be singing its heart out on the top of a bunch of French marigolds. A dove sits besides the glossy iron urn, gazing aimlessly at something outside the frame.

*

The whole painting is a lyrical poem of symbolic meanings. The dove represents love and peace (or the holy spirit), and lemons stand for fidelity in love. Peaches are the fruit of salvation and cherries the fruit of paradise. The blue color of the background can depict sadness, or remind of Virgin Mary, whose mantel is most often painted in rich, deep blue tones. The forget-me-not stands for remembrance and the tiny white aster is sometimes told to stand for after-thought.

*

What has always intrigued me though is the French marigold, Tagetes patula, that shares the main stage with the little greenfinch. I've often wondered why Linnqvist put such an ordinary kitchen garden plant in the center of his painting; Tagetes might be great for fighting nematodes in the soil, but with its plain little flowers and unpleasant smell, poetic it is not (even if here it visually forms a great contrast to the blue background of the painting - this is probably the most beautiful portrait of a Tagetes ever...).

*

Tagetes as a symbol leaves many openings for an interpretation. In English speaking countries, it has been said to symbolize Virgin Mary, coming from the common name marigold - Mary's gold. Sometimes I've read that marigolds symbolize grief, but it is difficult to know if Tagetes or Calendula is meant in the texts, as both have been called marigolds in the English language. Marigolds were a sacred flower for the Aztecs in Mexico, and they've been held as a symbol for the Spanish conquest, with the red and and yellow colors standing for the Aztec blood spilled by the Spanish conquistadors over the gold of the Aztecs. Marigolds have also been called flor del muerto, and they are often used when celebrating the Day of the death in beginning of November in Mexico and other countries. Linnqvist was well-traveled and -educated, so he most probably knew a lot about the symbolism of flowers. But did he refer to Virgin Mary, to grief or the flower of the death?

*

And the little greenfich then? Or is it even a greenfich, with its little head touched with red and black feathered wings with their distinct white spots? What does it want to say? I don't know. The painting leaves so many open questions. But after so many years of looking, the dainty little bird still touches my heart, and I keep listening to its passionate song.

The remains of an old nursery

The mossy, old boiler house, slowly sinking into the water-logged ground...

*

This morning, an article about the historic Winters House in Bellevue being on the way for light rail construction caught my eyes in The Seattle Times. I drive regularly past the building, but being a rather ugly, Spanish Mission style house from the 1920s, it has never really roused my interest. Behind the house, the Winters had a nursery that grew and sold azaleas, daffodils and irises from the 1920s to the 1940s. After that, a rhododendron nursery operated for years in the same location. A brief note that the remains of a sinking old boiler house still stand behind the house woke immediately up the "ruin romantic" in me and I just had to brave the miserable weather and venture out to take a look.

**

The mouth of the rusty old boiler stands gaping above a mirror of water. Heat from it was led through pipelines to seven hothouses where azaleas were propagated.

*

The mossy remains of a hothouse are barely visible under the rhododendrons gone wild.

* *

With water dripping down my neck and my camera carefully bundled under my raincoat, I trailed along the boardwalk built on the boggy terrain, admiring one of the most impressing, accidental rhododendron parks I've seen. The moss-covered, gnarled trunks stood up from the water-logged soil, mingling together with ferns and great horsetail plants and sending up desperately beautiful trusses of bright flowers in all shades of whites, pinks and maroons. Beneath the glossy leaves, remains of the seven hothouses could still be seen, their broken roof lines slowly rotting away and sinking into the soaked ground. In one corner, between tangled rhododendron trunks, giant leaves and slender white flowers of the umbrella tree, Magnolia tripetala, tried to make their way towards the light.

*

A boardwalk leads through the area, as the soil is covered with water most of the year. Hundreds of old rhododendrons fill the ground, fighting for place amongst the ever increasing native vegetation.

Pink and red rhododendrons growing through a carpet of horsetail.

As the Seattle Times reported, the Winters House is now under threat of ending under the new light-rail to be built through the area, and of course, the construction would alter the parkland behind it too. Somehow, despite this closer inspection, I couldn't quite warm to the house itself, but I loved the overgrown, forsaken old rhododendrons patiently growing through the watery marshlands, like giant old ladies who still were putting up the show even if all the money was gone a long time ago. Completely realistic about the barren economic climate of today, I understand it would require a miracle to raise the funds and build a tunnel just to save an abandoned, old nursery, but it still would be lovely if someone would come with a miracle wand and make it happen...

*

The Seattle Times: National register house in Bellevue lies within path of light rail.

More information and old pictures of the place is found on: History of the Winters House.

*

Varied about variegated leaves

Helleborus argutifolius 'Pacific Frost'

*

It is a pity I didn't take photos of this variegated Corsican Helleborus, Helleborus argutifolius 'Pacific Frost' a bit earlier in the season, when its ghostly pale shoots emerged from the soil. After a while, the leaves turned into a spotted jumble of lime and cream, and the flowers opened equally spotted, only a couple of shades lighter in color. Now, the strong, glossy leaves form an excellent contrast to the softer spring time perennials around it, and their waxy tone picks up the whites of the flowering Corydalis and Omphaloides effectively.
*
Russell Page discusses plant combinations with variegated leaves in his book The Education of a Gardener (this book from 1962 is my perennial favorite, one of the most wonderful books about garden making ever published...). In a garden he planted for the Duke of Windsor, he used the variegated Acer negundo and underplanted it with Eleagnus pungens aureo-variegata, Elymus arenarius, Eulalia zebrina (now Miscanthus), variegated hostas and the variegated form of Iris pallida dalmatica; all plants with spotty and stripy, variegated leaves.
*
He writes that the planting made him think "even in grey weather that a patch of sunshine had been caught and held in that shadowy corner", which is a wonderful description, even if the combination sounds a bit too visually restless to me. I prefer using variegated plants against a backdrop of plain, preferably dark green or even purple leaves; for example, the pale, spotted 'Pacific Frost' Helleborus above would probably look wonderful against a bed of black mondo grass, too.

Until quite lately, I've had a bit ambivalent relationship with variegated plants. I've always liked the stripy ones, like Miscanthus sinensis 'Morning Light' and many hostas. They always look elegant, like they would have been touched by a thin brush adding strokes of light on their leaves. But variegated leaves that are spotted have always made me look a second time to check if they really are meant to be like that, or just affected by some kind of a nasty bug or a virus. Coming from the harsh, Nordic climate, I naturally prefer strong, healthy plants; variegated plants, having less chlorophyll producing tissue, tend always to be weaker than their plain green relatives. But I guess I now have an excellent opportunity to rethink my likes and dislikes: while living in the temperate, horticultural Eden of the Pacific Northwest, I can for the first time fully revel in the possibilities of using variegated plants without any concerns about their hardiness.

A portal of monkey puzzles

*
Walking past the stately, century-old houses that fill the residential area of Capitol Hill in Seattle, these magnificent two monkey puzzle trees, Araucaria araucana, caught my eyes and I had to add this snapshot of them to my photo collection of period gardens in Seattle. Probably planted as small saplings soon after the large Arts & Crafts style house was built in 1909, their umbellate canopies now join gracefully together, forming a decorative even if quite prickly portal in front of the main entrance.
*
Monkey puzzles were one of the it-trees of the Victorian era, after they first had been discovered in Chile in the end of the 18th century. First in 1844 enough of viable seeds were obtained by plant collector William Lobb, who had been to South America to collect plants for the firm of Veitch.

*

Monkey puzzles are very hardy and long-lived; some specimens in the Chilean forests are well over thousand years old. They are also one of the oldest living species of plants, dating back to the days of the dinosaurs; their scaly, prickly needles seem to me very well suited to that era, and I think they always look a bit alien in residential gardens.

* A Tudor Revival style house in Seattle, with a young monkey puzzle tree on the front lawn. Period photo by Seattle photographer Asahel Curtis, early 20th century.

* *
During the second half of the 19th century, monkey puzzles became very trendy and many were planted on the grounds of Britain's great estates. As so many other garden trends from Europe, this one also followed the newcomers to the Seattle area. Planting monkey puzzles, Chilean conifers popular in English gardens, must have given their owners more status than using any of the handsome native conifers readily available in the area (which in turn were very much sought after in Europe - I guess the grass is always greener...).

*

Many photos of residential houses in Seattle taken in the late 19th and early 20th century show monkey puzzles proudly planted as solitaire specimens to adorn the front lawns of the houses. Some of them have survived and thrived in the temperate climate of Seattle, and are now, a century later, huge trees that have since long outgrown their allocated spaces.
*
Having two of them, like these magnificent ones flanking the main entrance of the house above, must still be extremely unusual, and I was thrilled to find such fine, living examples of garden history. Admittedly, they are now far too large and dwarf the house with their huge trunks, and they probably cast a deep shade and drop their extremely prickly needles everywhere. But I still hope that all inconveniences can be overlooked, and that the present and coming owners of this house see the historical value and charm of their huge monkey puzzles. Given that they often live for over thousand years, they can still delight several generations to come...
*
PS - the history of the name "monkey puzzle tree" is just as silly as the name itself: in the mid-1850s, some Englishmen who saw the tree for the first time, commented that climbing the tree would puzzle a monkey. Amazingly, the stupid name stuck, even if there are no monkeys neither in England nor in Chile where the tree comes from...