Make love, not war

Two amorous bees at work in a heliotropium...

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I've been spending time at the Elisabeth Miller Library, our wonderful botanical and horticultural library in Seattle, wading through old magazines for an article series I'm trying to put together. Amongst the fragile, yellowed pages of "Little Gardener", a publication by Lake Washington Garden Club's ladies division, I found following advertisement from 1933:
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War! War! War!

We don't believe in disarmament!

We do believe in preparedness!

We are not pacifists!

We are for war!

Gardening is a perpetual warfare against
weeds, slugs and insects!

I can easily see those little ladies in aprons, all well prepared with gleaming cans of DDT, chasing up poor little slugs and bugs in their gardens... and I hope I'm not too optimistic when I think that we gardeners have evolved into something better now that organic gardening has become mainstream in most developed countries.

Have a love-filled gardening weekend.

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The rose of the Sweetbriar Bride

Louisa's rose was filled with lacquer red hips when I visited...

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Gardens often give us a sense of belonging. When we are uprooted and thrown - voluntarily or not - into new places and surroundings, the plants we grow can link us to people we have lost and long for, and offer a living connection to places that used to be called home.

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Louisa Boren Denny, the "Sweetbriar Bride" and one of the founding mothers of Seattle, was a wonderful example of this. In 1853, she was the first white woman to get married in what then was only a tiny new settlement of maybe 140 people. Louisa earned her nick-name from fellow settlers by planting the fragrant but hardy Sweetbriar roses, Rosa eglanteria, in front of the windowless, cramped cabin she and her husband David had built for themselves. In 1851, before starting from her long journey to west by wagon from Illinois, Louisa had gathered Sweetbriar seeds in the garden of her dearest childhood friend. Throughout her long life, she kept planting her rose in front of every house she moved into, like a sign of enduring loyalty to her friend whom she never got to see again.

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A typically thorny cane of the Sweetbriar rose.*
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I've often wondered how it would have been to leave, and not to be able to go back like Louisa and countless other settlers and immigrants have been forced to do throughout the history. I am so lucky to have the choice to revisit places and friends I miss. Even if my story is not nearly as romantic as the Sweetbriar Bride's, I still grow plants plainly out of nostalgic reasons, and as long as I live in places with a suitable cool or temperate climate, there will be snowdrops and wood anemones in my gardens...

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The pictures above are of a Sweetbriar that is said to come from a cutting of Louisa's rose. It grows in the Woodland Park Rose Gardens in north Seattle. It is unmarked in the maps and not entirely easy to locate, but with some tracking, it can be found on the left side of the decorative white retaining wall at the north side of the park. Last week, when I visited, it was too late for any flowers, but bright hips filled some of the typically thorny canes of the Sweetbriar.

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No peonies before breakfast

I shall try to fix firmly in the mind of the peony lover

the proper time to begin planting:

it is September 15th at 9 A.M.

(I do not believe in hurrying through breakfast).

- Alice Harding, The Book of the Peony, 1917 -

Alice Harding, also known as Mrs. Edward Harding, was an American horticulturalist and peony expert. Her two books, The Book of the Peony (1917) and Peonies for the Little Garden (1923), were much appreciated and popular works when they were published, and still remain the standard account of propagating and growing peonies. Her work was widely acknowledged by horticultural societies both in the United States and in Europe, and several peonies and other garden plants were named after her.

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While writing this, it is already one hour past the "proper time" so I'd better get going...

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A roof garden by the sea...

The elaborate roof garden of the club house...

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Just have to share this... we spent the weekend with friends, camping by the beautiful, rugged coast of northern Washington. Our kids were happily engaged in building huts out of the plentiful, silvery drift wood that fills the shoreline. When we parents almost started to feel completely neglegted, a proud delegation arrived and invited us to inspect their new club house, complete with a roof garden and a watering system made out of water-filled kelp bladders, as shown in the picture below. I guess there's no need to worry about the creativity of this "nintendo-generation"...

The watering system made out of water-filled kelp bladders; long stems of kelp drift up from the deep, cold waters of the northern Pacific ocean.

Two portraits of a Bishop

A baby Bishop, with an exquisite combination of lime and plum on the top of the glossy bud.

I'm baffled over that I'd forgotten about getting a couple of Dahlia 'Bishop of Llandaff' tubers from Marian last November. I can't understand how this could happen; I was so excited when she gave them to me, and then wandered around for a long time in my garden trying to find the best place for them with rain dripping along my neck.

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In one of the beds, I found a suitable corner between a hazy burgundy smoke tree (Cotinus coggyria 'Royal Purple'), some deep purple Spanish Lavender stoechas, and a crimson Berberis (B. thunbergii 'Atropurpurea nana' - not my favorite, but it fits into the color scheme...). I wasn't sure if the wonderful, dark foliage of the Bishop would be a good complement to the combination, or if it would disappear completely against the others. But luckily, my Bishop seems to enjoy its new diocese, and appears to be getting along very well with its earlier inhabitants.

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A Bishop in full regalia... I love the way the grey tones of its dark leaves both pick up and contrast with the greys in the Lavender, and how its bright scarlet flowers pop against the hazy purples and greys of the smoke tree behind. (The flowers are not this bright in reality, somehow photos of them get this neon-like quality in whatever weather I try to catch them...)

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An odd crop: Camellia fruit

A swelling, walnut sized fruit in my Camellia japonica.

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This autumn, the branches of my double pink Camellia japonica are filled with swelling fruit, up to the size of a large walnut. The youngest ones are glossy green-pink, but as they mature, the shells of the fruit get a matte brown coating that makes them look like doll-sized quinces.

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I can't remember that I've ever seen a Camellia fruit before. I don't know if I've only been negligent or if producing fruit, especially in prolific amounts, is a rare occurrence in the life of Camellias. In that case, maybe a bountiful crop of Camellia fruit has a special meaning in its countries of origin, the way plentiful rowan berries are said to predict harsh winters in Scandinavia... I would love to know.

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A dashing bunch of tubers

Dahlia 'Brookside Cheri'

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I have to admit that I've never been really keen on Dahlias, even if I sometimes admire them in other people's gardens. I've thought that their stems and leaves resemble too much potatoes and other nightshades, and that their often giant flowers, too heavy to carry their own weight, are a bit too over-bred and elaborate to be truly beautiful...

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Dahlia 'Fire Magic' and 'Mingus Toni'.

Maybe as a person, I've just never been flamboyant enough to grow the large ones with their cactus-like blooms, nor sufficiently preppy for the small pompon-flowering ones. But it is difficult to ignore a flower that the late Christopher Lloyd, legendary plantsman and gardener, once mentioned as one of the eight (!) plants he would not want to live without on a desert island (in case you are curious, the other seven plants are Verbena bonariensis, Canna 'Wyoming', Hydrangea aspera Villosa group, Melianthus major, Aucuba crotonifolia, Anemone 'Honorine Jobert' and Crocus speciosus, of which I would probably choose at least the Melianthus, Hydrangea and Anemone...).

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Dahlia 'Odyssey"

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So I've been approaching them tentatively, observing them from all angles, occasionally stepping back a little, and then looking again. And I have a feeling that if I give them a bit more time, I just might have to try a couple of them, in case I manage to decide which ones to choose from the hundreds of different cultivars...

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My oldest daughter, Astrid, didn't have any difficulties in choosing her favorites amongst the hundreds of cultivars blooming in the Volunteer Park Dahlia garden in Seattle two days ago, where I took all photos above.
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Tinker, tailor... and a sailor

Lush tobacco plants by the old Rettig tobacco factory at Luostarinmäki (which translates to 'Cloister Hill") museum in Turku, an old Finnish-Swedish university town where I spent my school years.

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As much as I love visiting castles and manor houses and their gardens, I find the history of ordinary, common people often more touching. Luostarinmäki in Turku (or Åbo in Swedish), offers a most fascinating glimpse to the homes and lives of the craftsmen and other professionals that lived in what was the capital of Finland in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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These 18 blocks of houses, streets and courtyards are the only wooden buildings that were saved in the Great Fire of Turku in 1827. They were a living neighborhood until 1940 (I never miss to point out to my girls the house where my friend's grandfather was born and raised), when some far-sighted townspeople understood to preserve them to the future generations as an open air museum.

* The orange daylily, Hemerocallis fulva, is a hardy perennial often found in old gardens. I think its slender stems and long strappy leaves are more striking than many of the new cultivars...
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The people who lived at Luostarinmäki were proud craftsmen and professional townspeople with their own homes and workshops: tinkers, tailors..., and while there were no soldiers, there was a sailor, whose touching little house was filled with blow-fish and seashells that he had brought from the seven seas.

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Observing the meagerness of life here is always gripping, especially when thinking that the inhabitants were not by any means the poorest of the society. The houses are small, the rooms tiny and the amenities few, but there is a silent, dignified beauty in everything. Tools and things are well-worn and carry marks of a hard life, but they were made to last in the hands of their users, and to be mended, not to be thrown out.

*One of the narrow, quiet streets at Luostarinmäki, earlier full of life and sounds from humans and animals alike... Picture from Wikipedia Commons.

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From a gardener's point of view there is not much to be seen, as most of the plants there were grown for their economical value like the lush tobacco plants above. An occasional bower of lilacs, a long-lived cluster of orange daylilies or other seemingly self-sown old-time perennials are some of the few ornamentals that bring colour into the tiny courtyards. Many roofs are covered with birch-bark and grassy, flowering turf, which shows that vegetative roofs aren't something invented by our generation.

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In a way, it would be lovely to see more old-time plants and perennials at Luostarinmäki, but then, the museum would loose some of its authenticity, as ornamental gardening was clearly out of reach for the people who lived there. Instead, strolling through the narrow, grassy streets and small courtyards was a sobering lesson in times when "less is more" was not a choice, but a reality of life.

For the benefit of body and soul: Sagalund in Kimito

Small wooden carts in the gardens of Sagalund.
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While in Turku, or Åbo in Swedish, in the southwestern coast of Finland, my parents took us to the charming outdoor museum of Sagalund in Kimito, founded in 1900 by teacher Nils Oskar Jansson. Jansson was a devoted admirer of the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné, and believed strongly that gardening had an inspirational, uplifting effect on the young souls he was entrusted with.

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First of May gardening tool inspection at Vreta Folkskola, Sagalund, in 1906.

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Every spring, his students were instructed to bring tools from home to the school: a wooden trowel, a small rake, a basket and a little cart for transporting soil, mulch and manure, and for hauling away waste to the compost. Each year on the first day of May, all students stood in row while the tools they had brought were inspected. The students were also encouraged to take home bulbs, seedlings and plants in their small carts.

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Nils Oskar Jansson wrote to his students in the early 1910s:

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"The purpose of gardening is to benefit both the body and the soul. (...) The needs of the soul should be nourished by making the nearest grounds of the home as flourishing, blooming and attractive as possible. This is achieved by growing all kinds of fruit trees, shelter belts of green trees and well-tended hedges, and by saving and pruning what nature itself has planted in the place."

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I especially liked his thoughts about the connection between gardening and the characteristics of a soul:

"What is planted and grown bears witness to the home owners disposition; idleness and negligence do not thrive in gardens, and coarseness and wickedness do not like flowers."

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Next week, the school year starts again here in Seattle. I wonder if we are doing as good job as Nils Oskar in nourishing the young bodies and souls of our children...

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A cuppa in the garden: Cafe Koloni at Olle Nyman's atelier

Sitting in the shade of the old linden trees by Olle Nyman's atelier at Cafe Koloni in Saltsjö-Duvnäs.

I've always been a cafe person. I love sipping from a cup of steaming tea or coffee and observing passers-by, alternatively resting my eyes on something soothing and beautiful, like a stunning view or a flower-filled garden. Not many places can combine both, but Cafe Koloni is one of them, and that's why I keep going back there when in Stockholm.

*A gathering of houses; above, the cafe at the left and the house where Olle Nyman lived on the right. Below, the studio to the left, and Olle's atelier to the right.

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Situated in Saltsjö-Duvnäs some 8 kilometers from the city, Cafe Koloni is tucked away in a white-washed wing in a gathering of houses, an atelier and a studio that used to belong to the Swedish artist Olle Nyman. You can choose to sit either inside the building or in the adjoining herb garden, or further away in the old fruit orchard. If you choose your seat carefully, you can watch sailing boats glide by on the adjoining inlet of Duvnäsviken.

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Entrance to the veranda at Olle's house.

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Despite it has lost some of its initial "hidden gem" atmosphere, Koloni still is one of those rare places where you can sit surrounded by the graceful patina of the 18th and 19th century buildings, listening to the whisper of the old lindens. After your coffee, you can check out the annual exhibition in the studio; it always has a connection to either Olle Nyman or Saltsjö-Duvnäs, and even the name Koloni refers to Olle Nyman's time when he together with his artist friends filled the place with a buzz of creative activity. A place well worth a little day trip, especially for those with artistic ambitions... whether they are gardeners or not.

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On the balcony, an undated painting by Olle Nyman. It shows a couple on one of the buildings at the Koloni towards the inlet of Duvnäsviken; one of my favorite paintings of his in all its simplicity...