Yards Park - KEEP OUT

Lounging on the lounges

Last Sunday, I ran away from home. This came shortly after My Prince, with a smile, announced that it was mid-August. Summer, he said most peppily, is almost over.

A tidal wave of images ensued. Hanging at the pool, literally. Elbows propped on the coping, nose in book, legs wriggling in the cool.  Beach trips, bags packed with Pringles (the only chip to stay crunchy and sand free, as long as you remember to put the lid on). Hours of alternately staring at a book and the waves. Moving the chair down to the water's edge to stare at more pages and waves. Sunburn. Gin and tonics on the porch.

Absolutely none of which happened this year. There was this that and the other tedious thing occupying our weekends, which meant no pool no beach oh BAH.

Since Baby married the lovely Pete there is no longer the goof-off imperative of having to entertain The Child, even unto the furthest reaches of childhood, which matched what I consider middle age in length. 

Riverwalk to Navy Yard

On this day he agreed, with martyred eyes, to go to the pool. I said thanks but no, sniff, do as you wish and I'll do...

So I packed my trusty pocket Sony and the new House Beautiful (with its unappetizing shades of orange Fall cover, just to rub in the misery) and marched a mile in the 95 degree heat to Yards Park which, several years in, and despite a raft of awards, remains one of Washington's least discovered pleasures.

At the west end there's the baseball stadium, which alternates concertos by the world's Taylor Swifts and the thwack of Nat's games, punctuated by fireworks. To the east is the walled fortress of the Washington Navy Yard, for which the park was named, which bustles industriously on weekdays but is nearly abandoned on weekends.

Bridging the two is the Park. There are marvelously cool gardens and fountains, a futuristic soaring bridge, restaurants and sidewalk cafes, a lawn for picnics, and a quiet glen with banks of built-in lounges to doze or read or sketch out some fantasy of turning the attic into a master bath, reached by a ladder up the wall -- I mean, how else are we going to get another bath in this house?

There appears to be an unspoken code of silence under the trees. The quiet people are here, doing quiet things.

The wallowing pool and, at left, the waterfall

An enormous shallow pool for wallowing has concrete pads for I don't know, posing like Greek statues maybe. The Kardashians would find a use. There's a waterfall at one end to jump through (in the tropics that would be the swim up bar, but you can't have everything. I suppose).

Notice how empty the pool is? This is early afternoon on an August Sunday. No whistle blowing lifeguards, no admission gates or fees, no eyesore sign of regulations.  Just a bunch of contented adults cooling their heels and kids splashing mindlessly about as they do. Probably peeing in there as well, which is why no adult is sitting down.
 
The park is fronted by a segment of the Riverwalk, which is actually twenty miles of walking, biking, and running trail on either side the of the Anacostia -- a beautiful river that leads into the more famous Potomac. (Unfortunately it's somewhat tainted by its association with a shall we say difficult (though topographically magnificent) part of town and various bouts with foul floating whatnots over the years).

Behind the park, office buildings and apartments with terraces and rooftop pools are sprouting. New townhouses mingle with old on side streets. A few nice hotels have gone up. There's a fancy gym for the aspirationally svelte and a trapeze school offering curbside entertainment, or classes if you've got the guts.

Despite its brand newness, this area is the oldest in the Federal City (which did not include Georgetown), dating to the 1790's and the construction of the Capitol and the Navy Yard.

Under the waterfall, coolest place in town

The wading pool reflects the series of inlets carved like gapped teeth into the river bank, which once led to wharves where marble and sandstone arrived from far-flung places for the building of the Capitol. This was then horse-hauled up 8th Street, now known as Barracks Row, then west on Pennsylvania Avenue to the construction site. Food stuffs arrived for the original Eastern Market which was erected in 1805.

Trapeze School New York

The area continued to bustle until after WWII, and then fell into disrepair. Public housing mingled with a handful of derelict row houses. A few corner stores and bars were interspersed with a random assortment of buildings containing  mysterious (because who then was interested?) public works.

Then, about 20 years ago, a series of extremely tedious meetings were held that eventually spat out a half-assed Plan to put up a monolithic corridor of office buildings with no space for shops or restaurants.  Workers, it was eventually agreed, could take a shuttle bus to Barracks Row for lunch.


That's enough of that story.

I don't recall mention of the park or the Riverwalk in the several boring years I spent at these interminable meetings, at which the high point was donuts.

Thankfully, like the mysterious fire that gutted the second Eastern Market -- erected in 1873, in the adjacent residential neighborhood of Capitol Hill -- and ended decades of angsty meetings about what to do, a cool new neighborhood emerged and somehow, someone, got this park done.

Now it just needs a few visitors. Or does it? Maybe not. Forget I said anything.

The NY Times is High on Pots - What are they Smoking?

Stone Urn on a Concrete Pillar

Sometimes, and by this I mean daily,  the design pages of the New York Times provoke me to scream, ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MINDS?

And I say this fondly, being an ex-New Yorker, born and raised and schooled and once able to tell at a glance a real Gucci bit on a shoe from a knock-off -- and consider this essential information.


I'm looking here at a wood frame plant stand. It's essentially an open-sided packing crate made of ash, with a built-in saucer. Pop in your pot  and it's off the floor -- Thank God the parquet is safe!

The collection, by "designer" Trey Jones, begins at $550.  I think, I'm in fact sure, there's something like this lurking in the garage, or possibly the basement. Maybe the attic.

How do they write this stuff without snickering?

Now, no one loves pots and planters more than I do -- see various posts on the subject --  but the most I've ever paid for one, and technically it's not a planter but an umbrella stand cunningly redeployed, was a hundred bucks. I considered this a charitable contribution to the legal costs of a couple of guys who got caught selling a miniscule amount of weed, which is neither here nor there.

Cast Iron Pot on Stone Stand

Otherly, every otherly, the plants  that  stud our porches and gardens (that sounds a lot grander than it is) were found -- discarded on the sidewalks, sticking out of a dumpster, or gifts of a sort, as in: Please take this or I'm throwing it out.

An Early Find in Georgetown

Generally, all one needs to do to land free stuff is have knowledge of the trash truck timetable for various neighborhoods; of course the finer the neighborhood the finer the trash.

Where once Capitol Hill  was considered more shabby than chic, and one needed to forage in Georgetown or Cleveland Park, our streets are now littered with Bugaboo strollers pushed along by au pairs and nannies endlessly chattering on their cell phones in French, and Spanish, and Chinese, and the restaurant line for Roses stretches hours down the sidewalk.



Add to that being a rather transient place, what with upheavals of political fame and fortune, and the pickings are rarefied.

Chinese Pot on a Bunch of Put Together Junk

I've found pots and pedestal bases made of stone and concrete and porcelain. A cast iron pot with curly handles, weighing easily 100 pounds and valued at around $350 (triple that in New York) was a moving giveaway. I was very moved, as was my back. It holds a sago palm and summers on the front porch atop another find, this one picked up at curbside, a wonderful stone stand with protruding lion heads that winters in the living room and makes a fine extra seat when magazines aren't piled on it.

I don't know where I found the Chinese pot on the back porch and am, in fact, amazed that it is not broken. This one comes upstairs to my little greenhouse come November.

Furzed Terracotta

Nestling near the pond,  in a collection of ferns, is a gorgeous terracotta number the Prince brought home from who knows where last year --  it's now growing a fine furz of moss, which is a lovely touch.

Furz, I've just discovered, means flatulent in German. It sounds like it should mean a fine spread of soft fuzz. Doesn't it?


Last Sunday morning I toted home three fine pots glazed green. They'll be good on the porch steps, planted with the pink hibiscus and a jasmine that are currently being smothered by elephant ears.

Concrete Pot in Front Garden

I MEAN!? WHO throws this stuff out? But they do.

We have also acquired a pair of these rough concrete pots (at right), both are tucked in the front yard ivy and usually sport something seasonal - pansies or mums, maybe tulips. At the moment they're doing this crumbly thing that I quite admire, and anyway they flank a pot I'm saving for another post that's stuffed with geraniums and lavender and something else that I can't remember.  

The swirly half moon of wrought iron behind it was another trash fine,
I believe it was a headboard. This arrangement of stuffs totally thwarts the tromp of the postal persons, a 30-year goal finally realized.

Happy trashing!

Can You Hear Me Now? Elephants have Big Ears

In my garden of few successes, the elephant ears are an unqualified delight. Much like the wandering jew that meanders here and there, easily filling bald patches at the poke of a chopstick, the colocasia (just looked that up so's I'd look knowledgeable about something) devour space with glee, and need no care whatsoever -- with the exception of setting the bulb with the bit that's supposed to bud at the top (and I'm not even sure about that).  

Water, don't water, fertilize, don't fertilize, sun no sun, up they come, sooner or later -- pretty much depending on how deep I've planted them. Too deep is a perennial mistake. I buy a bag of ten or so each spring at Costco and stick them behind pots, in front of the garage window, beside the pond, behind the cherry tree, hiding the straggly base of the honeysuckle, and higgledy-piggledy every elsewhere.

The ones that come up fastest are crowded in a clay pot, covered with a couple of inches of dirt (topped with some poked in wandering jew so I remember not to toss it), and set on the back porch steps. Give them a couple of weeks, and they'll be leafed out and ready to be strewn here and there in wherever is still unoccupied. This is something, by the way, that year after year I fail to recall.

I mistakenly plant them like tulips, with 6 inches or so above their heads, and then sit here until -- um, last week in one case -- for the plants to show. And, since the wait is lengthy, and I have a hinky memory (as I believe I've mentioned), the spots must be marked (with another chopstick -- the prince bought me a pack of 100 a couple of years ago) so I won't go planting something else on top or step on an emerging sprout.
 
Technically, I suppose, they're much too large for this little space, but then I don't do much of anything in a small way (see various rants on the irritation of twee and, for that matter, my pruning issues, and let us not forget my vines) and their mammoth leaves add even more shade to the shade so I'm constantly moving this and that to chase the spotty sun -- the hibiscus and African gardenia are not at all happy, though they'll recover nicely in the greenhouse this winter. 

In the meantime, what giddy joy bring these giant leaves!! 

Grown Any Good Books Lately?

Cymrot's Box

On Capitol Hill they're pushing up like weeds, the free book boxes. Some are organized under the umbrella of littlefreelibrary.org, a group I'd never heard of until yesterday but is apparently an international org with on-line maps showing people desperate for something to read where to find boxes in places like Turin and Detroit. They also sell labels and placards and brochures and suggest building plans and materials.

Other boxes are renegades, sprung up delightfully unregulated.

Self Explanatory

All have but one rule in common. Take a book, and leave one, hopefully in the same box. I'm not too good at this - at least the part about leaving books in the same box I took from -- I tend to wander with something half read, that I'm not about to dump (unless it's dreadful) for something new. But I know I'll require something else in an hour or a day and so rummage in the boxes and grab a book for the thirsty time to come.

The first book box I saw was a few years ago, in front of the junior Cymrots jack-o-lantern colored home on A Street, SE -- sitting there like a Lilliputian renegade branch of Riverby Books on East Capitol Street, which was founded by the senior Cymrots (One is reluctant to categorize Riverby as a used bookstore, since it is so tidily kept and carefully edited, and includes rarities).

Capitol Hill Books Window

Riverby is nothing like Capitol Hill Books, near Eastern Market, a 3-story warren of rooms and books stacked dustily in windows or heaving the shelves. The owner (miraculously) knows where what is but for the browser it's a challenge.

This is the granddaddy of the neighborhood's book free-for-all (if I'm wrong, do tell). 

The one around the Corner from Safeway

Outside Capitol Hill Books is a folding table that is frequently heaped with books, sometimes they're the store owner's rejects, a remaindered book's last chapter as it were. Other times, people dump books when they're moving or are simply done reading and don't like the clutter, bless them. The owner, if he's swift, creams the lot, but often they're wonderful finds (if you haven't discovered the mysteries of Francis Fyfield -- bet you can't read just one).

Those were three paragraphs of beside the point. The point being the book boxes,which can now be found scattered about the neighborhood.

Some are sadly utilitarian, like the one around the corner from Safeway. It's quite large, with a  hinged lid, and often filled with the good and the curious and only a rare bodice ripper.

Mid-Century Modern

It's in front of a (I think) commercial building that always looks to be becoming something -- it has looked that way for thirty some years. Except for the book box, it is the kind of shady place one would suspect is a front for some nefarious dealings. This is my favorite box for rummaging, even though one has to prop the hinged lid on ones head when poking about. But then, a bookie constructed it, I suppose. So what do you expect.

More satisfying for the "shopper" is a book box with a normal door that swings open and stays that way as you make your selection. While I'm not fond of the design of the mid-century modern ranch house number above right (it looks like it belongs to a house with an Edsel in the drive), it does it's job well.

More charming in this neighborhood of late 19th and early 20th century row houses are the boxes that play with their host's design, like this simple one on Lincoln Park, with a grey and white color scheme borrowed from the home:

On Lincoln Park

Right around the corner on Kentucky Avenue is this charmer, with leaded glass panes and a tin roof:

 And then there's this wonderful, multi-story construction on 13th Street, nestled in day lilies and zinnias and considerably grander than the home it belongs to -- no offense homeowner:

I should like one colored like our house: celadon, eggplant, and rose. I've long overflowed the living room bookcases, the hall bookcases, my office bookcases, the upstairs hall bookcases, and books are forever piled unsteadily on the floor and shoved under the bed and tossed around the bathroom floor. Occasionally in a fit of neatness, I pick a sunny day and pile a few armloads out by the curb, where the neighboring book vultures pick through them fast -- but I'd like to be able to leave them out in a downpour, instead of scurrying to bring them in or stashing them in the trunk of the car. 

Maybe for my birthday. Right. The only way that will happen is if My Prince sees that project as a fresh excuse for not cleaning out the garage. Please! Let's not get started again on the garage.






 

Oh Willow Weep for Me! A Gardening Trail of Tears.

A Stand of Lilies

This is what you call a stand of lilies. Oh, I suppose if you had acres to occupy you might do a lusher job, but here we're talking about a bitty border on a city street - so it's quite a sight. And there's no support or ties or whatnots. The stalks are proudly upright and massed with yellow trumpets.

Then there's THIS:

A Droop of Lily

THIS sorry display was in my back garden yesterday. This morning it is sadder still, as Someone managed to knock its support and step on the single flower -- which I've spent the last month waiting for. May I say, this lily whatever it's called has been taking up precious space for several years, growing taller and leggier every season -- but has never been more floriferous.

Massing of Mallow

Continuing on our early morning walk to and from the market to resupply my Prince with his bananas and juice we come across another curbside display, this a massing of mallow -- dinner plate sized relatives of the tropical hibiscus -- this example, growing in part shade, smothered in buds.

Pathetic

And to think of all the self-congratulatory yelping that went on as I left the house with a fond gaze into the trough of ivy, basking in its patch of part sun, and the f-ing spindle of fertilized and coddled mallow that has managed to poke its way up and put forth three buds (one a year I think that is). This will probably bloom while we're on vacation, as these things do.

Angel's Trumpet

Ah yes, there's more. Here we have something that really makes me puke, a largely untended curbside clump of angel's trumpet. Look, LOOK at the buds on this sucker!

Uh

And here we have -- why is the bare and anorexic stalk of my angel trumpet reaching for the heavens? And I was enjoying (another) self-congratulatory moment with it just before my hike -- thinking about the duPont Garden in Wilmington where angel's trumpet are trained in pots as standard trees and fantasizing that this is where this sorry (and entirely flowerless) specimen that I've been nursing for three summers is headed. Even my cunning under planting of moon flowers and pink morning glories is struggling. The god's laugh.

Pink Trumpet Vine

Yes, it looks like a bunch of dead sticks (though the cilantro seed I tossed in to remind me not to discard the pot IS flourishing. Ole', guacamole).  However! No one else in the neighborhood has one, so what you have here is area's premier example of a pink trumpet vine.  Exquisite, isn't it.

On Faking It ... Again

Margot Before

Observe my forlorn hydrangea Margot. She's eight or ten or who knows how old now with one lousy blossom.

This is all the flowering I can expect this summer as the hydrangea sets bud for the following season on the current season's woody stalks, which they more or less reliably do -- unless some Prince wanders by with loppers and in a fit of neatness (would that such a fit take hold in the garage) lops off the buds in September. 

Which is precisely what happened last fall.

I was unaware of this tragic happenstance until a sorry dawn in March when I took a somnambulistic perambulation (that was SUCH FUN to write) through my garden patch, sleepily observing the this and the that, and noticed the plant's sharply nipped tips.

Bracing myself, I approached the only possible source of this mishap, and asked if perhaps he'd exceeded the boundaries I'd imposed on his pruning - which was supposed to be confined to the (for me) unreachable. Well.  His Irish cheeks reddened and his bald patch began to mist and he insisted ... that it was the damn squirrels.

Squirrels, said I, do not have teeth like pruning shears, the branches would be nibbled not whacked. And he scurried away muttering something...

And so this year we have ONE flower, which is particularly tragic since we moved Margot last summer - or he did, while I supervised -- a terrifying feat in Washington's paralyzing heat. She'd grown so enormous that she could nearly shake hands with Phyllis across a path that one might (if one was of a mind to) call the ceremonial approach to the to the aforesaid garage. She'd spent last summer regaining her verve, and was fine and bushy until.... 

Margot After

Yesterday, in what will be will be fashion, we off and went to Michael's, purveyors of largely hideous fake flowers among other craft items, where I scored a coup of sorts: three reasonably realistic green hydrangea branches at a buck a piece that, when poked among the bush's branches, appear to have blossomed there.

Irresistible Invasives

Drinking my tenth cup of coffee at 7 am, perched on the back porch steps, I'm anticipating another season of thwacking at the vines that have been strangling my garden for 30-odd, emphasis on the odd. I wrote the following several years ago and haven't had a better thought on the subject since:

Apart from the pathetic wisteria that gallops across the roof of the garage, the trumpet vine was the dumbest idea for my bathtub sized garden.

I first saw it many years ago, in Rehoboth Beach, announcing a restaurant entrance.

What an exotic transition I thought it announced from the hurly burly scene on the street where the halter-topped and coconut scented beach-goers wandered, dripping pizza and ice cream. Being as this was so early on in my gardening, um, career, I had no idea what it was except that it looked fabulously tropical and was heavy with flowers and my id cried out I WANT ONE. 

Amazingly, it took years to find in a garden center. I don't know if this was because the trumpet vine was once uncommon or if it had been in garden centers all along but I hadn't noticed -- or if the wise purveyors of plants knew that this was a rascal, a mad weed capable of smothering everything in its path -- dueling only with the mighty wisteria for dominance; King Kong vs. Godzilla vs. the tulip.

It is clearly called invasive in every article I've read after I bought and planted it.

Window Box Doldrums

 

Why do I feel like a wastrel when lying abed on a sunny Sunday afternoon, nose to book, and somehow industrious when doing the same while basted and splayed out at the beach?  

This has nothing to do with the subject at hand, yet again renovating the window boxes, but it's a stuck thought that needed to shake lose.

Note the pink geraniums in the lead photo. These are fake.Geraniums, as you may or may not know, do not do well in 90 degree weather. They stay green, even flourish in their greenness, but are hard pressed to put out more than a measly flower or two between June and September -- at least in the tropical heat that smothers Washington, DC each summer. 

And so, we make do. The Prince and I took a highly organized trip to the Maryland suburbs yesterday, first to the fantasia that is Homestead Gardens to look for pond plants, then to Michael's for fake flowers, then to Pet Whatsis for a dozen feeder fish* for the pond.

We're late with the fish business since our little garden again became an aviary this spring with successive bird births and if the pond is not covered during this period, well, tragedy inevitably ensues. 

Of course, tragedy also occurs with fish, when one allows one's prince to tend to one's pond--though I am never one to assess blame.

So here we are in July and the five frontal boxes look good, if a little dull, with small leafed ivy dripping over the sides and green potato vine beginning to cascade down the front, but there's little of natural color -- just pops of purple wandering jew, some no-account coleus, and several experiments that are a complete waste of water. My red fauxberries are doing fine, as one would expect of fakes.

Here:

Fine, but a little dull

 Michael's supplied the following -- a couple of bunches of pink geraniums, and some little purple stuffs and these pink nubbins. All at 70% off -- so for like 6 bucks, replenishment. Dirt cheap is FINE for this sort of job, just look for reasonably natural colors  -- and don't fret the leaves, rip them off if they're too tacky. These blooms are about to borrow from reality.

The trick to effective fakery is to break the bunches apart so individual florets can be cleverly dropped into appropriate locations -- like next to the actual doing nothing geraniums, thusly:

Not Enough

  

Now one steps back and says -- NOT ENOUGH -- and sticks a few more stems in. And voila!

Repeat process with howevermany boxes you have and done. If one were really anal, one would move the flowers about each week as if they're actually blooming. One is not. 
  
*Feeder fish are what I suppose pet shops consider junk. Variously colored and frequently quite pretty, they are served to snakes and whatnots; lagniappes before the rodent course. They happen to be cheap. I bought a dozen for $3. And if the Prince doesn't do these in, they'll grow to impressive size, live for years, and be just as uninterested in me as those fancy koi the racoons got.

Larcenous Thoughts on an Urn

Despite frequently mentioning thievery as the cheapest, most efficient method of obtaining plants and ornaments for the small urban garden, I am not the sort to wander the neighborhood by night uprooting and scavenging peoples possessions. Really I'm not.

Oh, I might snip a bit of a plant here and there, nothing that anyone would notice, just enough to stick in some water or dip in rooting powder. Or I might pick up a twig at a garden center, something they'd otherwise discard, and do the same. But actually pillage?

Bad karma.

HOWEVER. If I was Going to Steal, this urn would be at the top of the list. With a witty interplay of color and texture it has the look of MacKenzie Childs, though I don't think it is. (And if it was, I couldn't afford it. Just look at the photos -- and prices!)

Nor can I think of a way to fake/make it, although I have most of the parts -- a reasonably similar urn, a base that would work, a husband that could be beaten into assembling the thing. My painting talents, however, are decidedly minimal. 

But this urn has taken this porch from charming to I-almost-clipped-someone's-new-Mercedes trying to get a look at it. 

So I shall put it out there into the universe, which is something I keep hearing one needs to do if one whole-heartedly wants something.

 Universe! I'm telling you I really really want this pot!

Peanuts are Plants Too

I know what Baby will say about this: Ma! If you want to write about food start a food blog.

But a peanut is a plant, oui? And I don't grow everything I write about. I also buy both plants and peanuts in the supermarket. It's all interrelated. And I like these peanut cookies, even if I nearly choked to death on a bit of one last night as The Prince instructed: Arms over head! Arms over head!

He always says that when I choke to death and it never works. Get me some damn water.

But that is neither here nor there.  And I have nothing else to write about today so peanut cookies it is.

Wikipedia says (you needn't bother to read this, I didn't):  "The peanut, or groundnut (Arachis hypogaea), is a species in the legume or "bean" family (Fabaceae). The peanut was probably first domesticated and cultivated in the valleys of Paraguay.^[1] It is an annual herbaceous plant growing 30 to 50 cm (1.0 to 1.6 ft) tall. The leaves are opposite, pinnate with four leaflets (two opposite pairs; no terminal leaflet), each leaflet is 1 to 7 cm (⅜ to 2¾ in) long and 1 to 3 cm (⅜ to 1 inch) broad."

Resume reading. 

I like these cookies because they take about ten minutes to whip together and another ten in the oven and they're done. You might have noticed that most cookies require some hours rest in the fridge.

Hours of rest? Really? When I want a cookie I want a cookie, now.

For these you just mix the batter and toss spoonfuls (spoonsful?) on a baking sheet. It happens to be a very tasty batter too, which is why I usually get involved in baking -- that sudden and insistent hunger for batter, preferably scraped out of a bowl with my finger while leaning over the sink (which means it has no calories). 

I can also make half a batch, roll the other half into a lumpy log, wrap it, and freeze it.

There are various reasons for freezing half, actually two: If I don't, the two of us will probably finish all of the cookies at a sitting; and I can whip out the second half, slice it into rounds and bake them in the unlikely event that someone pops by for tea.  

I think the tea thought because of my Aunt Ann who used to do just that, and it was like an amazing parlor trick. Growing up in New York, surrounded by shops tendering sublime pastries and breads, I didn't think baking was something one could actually do at home. I also didn't know that a veal was not an animal until I was 25, but that is neither here nor there.

PEANUT COOKIES*

1 stick softened butter**
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 egg
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 cup salted peanuts (like Planter's)

Preheat oven to 350

Cream the butter and sugars, add the vanilla and egg, beat well. Add the flour and baking powder and then the peanuts. Blend well.

Drop by the tablespoon on a baking sheet, 2 inches apart. Bake 10 minutes. 

**If your butter isn't softened, like mine never is -- see batter craving -- cut it into pats, it'll soften up quickly enough in the mixer.


*Next time, Jill's walnut and mushroom pate, a ringer for chopped liver! Walnuts and mushrooms are plant material, right? While chicken livers? That's too much of a stretch, even for me.

The Winter Window Box Again - A Stroke of Luck

While the backyard is full of them, I didn't buy pansies for the window boxes this fall.

I have a Springtime habit of  overstuffing the five boxes that suspend from the front windows. Installing pansies would have required prematurely uprooting or discarding basics like the massive drips of potato vines that had reached Rapunzel lengths,  the hot pink geraniums that revived with the first cool blasts of fall, and frills like the bits of wandering jew that had grown from  exclamation points poked into the boxes in April to substantial flourishes.

Besides, I needed to find room for the tiny cabbages (!) I picked up at the Raleigh Farmer's Market when I visited Baby in North Carolina this past November.

Garden snobs sniff on, but cabbages delight me, the colors, the textures, the feel of a birthday card when you're five years old and the bunnies hop hop down the yellow path with blue birds and butterflies winging overhead and daisies and zinnias dotting the psycadelically green grass...all cabbages need is a little glitter. (mmmmmmmmm thinking glitter. That's an aside.)


I feel I must here reinforce my curmudgeonly creds: I don't like photos of cats, bunnies, or babies. In fact I don't particularly like kids (other than MY Baby)-- unless they're strange, or have froggy voices, or are at least a little weird looking. That's enough for today.  

One last thought about the cabbages, since I think this post is about petunias, finding them small -- in six packs, no less -- for ONE DOLLAR EACH -- was a halleluja event. Full size cabbages are not only ridiculously expensive, they bolt too quickly in this warmish climate, shooting up leggy bits that disorder the pretty clump. They are also difficult to plant in window boxes because of their large root balls (which don't take kindly to trimming, by the way). Plant full sized cabbages and you can have little else, which  doesn't at all suit me.

After two months they are now the perfect size, by four they'll start to become unlovely, but it will be Spring and time for a cycle of something else.

So now that the cold has dropped over us like an icy shroud, and I contemplate the immediate loss of whatever in the boxes has so far survived and find myself hungry for the color and cheer of pansies.

As luck would have it, Maggie and Gary are leaving today for half a world cruise, a month on a ship that will leave from New York and eventually pitch up in Australia where they'll spend another month exploring.

What I get out of this -- in one of those mom and dad went to Hawaii and all I got is this stupid t-shirt events -- is four 4-packs of pansies from her terrace that she never got around to planting. Oh, and two avocado plants rooting in a glass jar, but that's neither here nor there.

I toted them home last night and sat a pack in each corner of the two lower boxes and find I am delighted with the way they look -- hoisting up the rear of the display in a way they ordinarily would not.  In past years I've tucked them on either side of whatever I've got going on as a centerpiece, which means they're usually obscured by adjacent foliage.

While I don't know about maintaining them in the shallow soil of the plastic containers,  I'm delighted with the composition (although I expect those last waggling leaves of a purple wandering jew to be a black sog by tomorrow -- finally, a frost!). 

I need to containerize them in such a way that they retain the lift, but don't require near daily fussing followed by near certain death.

Small pots would do I think and might be unearthed from my charming potting area under the back porch, feel free to fantasize while I move a spare tire and the rusted saw blades. Among other things.

But how much more interesting would it be to employ a little creative reuse of stuff more immediately to hand -- a line of thinking that reminds me of gardens and window boxes at a recent Philadelphia Flower Show, where various non sequiturs became part of the displays.

I have plenty of oddments lying about, and if I was feeling a little more energetic I'd photograph them nicely against a black backdrop so they sparkle. But I'm not, so I'll just say that on a quick inventory of household objets that I just did between the keyboard and the kitchen there is the concrete thingamabob doing nothing on the fireplace hearth that sits next to a copper urn that is likewise under-employed, and the three glass lamp shades that are for some reason sitting on the kitchen counter (which probably have to do with a Princely project - but I could just look blank and say "I dunno" when he asks where they went), and the trio of long-stemmed, pink and green Mexican wine glasses that are never in use, and a few silvery bowls with sufficient depth ....

Off to play.

News Brief from the Tiny Conservatory

The Clamondin

 Introducing the newest addition to my wee greenhouse, the Clamondin, which bills itself as "the other lime," though it smells like an orange, specifically the insanely sweet scent of the orange blossom perfume that Kristen brought back for me from a trip to Cocoa Beach maybe ten years ago. Pure 1950s Florida in a bottle. 

I keep it on my desk and sniff it in times of (generalized) panic, like tropical smelling salts, which is why it appears full. This is not the sort of scent One, meaning me, wears in public. 

The Clamondin was a gift from The Prince for our 30th anniversary, knowing I (fortuitously for him) prefer exotic plants to jewelry.  It joins the key lime and the Meyer lemon, and the various jasmine, hibiscus, amaryllis, and bromeliads that winter in the tiny solarium off my second floor home office.

While Clamondin's were introduced to Florida in 1899 (according to Purdue University's horticultural site), I had never heard of them. These prolific fruiters are said to be juicy and sweet, the plants grow in anything from clay to sand, and are reasonably cold tolerant.

Plus! Duke reports the fruit can be used as a shampoo, a hair growth stimulant, and a laxative. It's also said to ease the itch of insect bites, bleaches freckles,  soothes coughs, "expels phlegm," and the leaves can be brewed to create a "carminative"* more powerful than peppermint at relieving flatulence.


It's also "a prime host of the Mediterranean and Caribbean fruit flies," however these are not known plant threats in Washington, DC.

All in all a perfect plant, eh?


Getting back to the smell of the thing. I would not have known that the Clamondin (notice the artful blackdrop in the photo? It's just a cape on a chair but it looks so professional for once. I'm very pleased with myself) had such a delightful scent except that it needed repotting and instead of doing this on the solarium floor, where it was certain that I'd spill dirt and then stand up and grind it into the carpet and then have to haul the shop vac upstairs again, I wisely carried it downstairs and outside to the area under the porch that I'd like to think you think is my spacious and charming  potting room.

It was as I was walking down the stairs that I caught a euphoric whiff of the plant's blossoms, of which there are many.

One, meaning you, might wonder why I hadn't noticed this incredible -- really quite extraordinarily powerful -- scent before the traipse.  I mean, the entire staircase vibrated orange.

Blue

May I now introduce you to Yolko Ohno and The Bluebird of Happiness, also known as Yolko and Blue.

Yolko

Several months ago they joined my boy birds Shakira and Boychic who I thought required girlfriends. (Although Blue's femininity is now questionable. But that's another story).

Sadly, I am an extremely slow learner who is easily swayed by blasts of romantic inspiration. I should know by now that there is little charm to the actuality of free-flying feral birds in the house, only to the notion.


To be blunt. The upshot or downshot or whatnot of this family addition is that  four birds create far more than twice the seedy, feathered mess and STENCH as two.

I do not know why this is, but it has led to a great deal of unnatural activitiy. To whit: I mop, I vacuum, I wash the (mainly decorative) cages and sniff and sniff and still there's this foul, ammonia stench.

This I am combating with various odour eliminators,** which I might add Do Help, but while they soften the bird reek to near subliminal levels they unfortunately eliminate the transporting scents of the tropical plants that are half the purpose of this room, replacing them with an  offensive whiff of cheap perfume.

I am not supposed to be reduced to furtively sniffing orange blossom perfume from a bottle. I am supposed to be sitting in the wicker chair in the greenhouse inhaling and exhaling ecstatically. 

And so it goes.

* Carminative. What a dainty term that I'd never heard of!

The butler arrives, crystal glass on silver salver: "Your carminative, madam."

"Thank you Reginald, please crack the window before you retire."

 ** Nature's Air sponge is one. Activated charcoal stomped under the rug is another. A sprinkling of Arm & Hammer's Pet Fresh carpet cleaner is the third. Only the charcoal is odorless.