Horticultourism--Tyler, TX

Lovely glass fountain at Blue Moon Gardens with complementary gazing balls

I've been meaning to visit Tyler's very large municipal rose garden for some time now.  We are rose enthusiasts, after all.  So we woke up early, stopped off at the little red taco wagon for our customary Saturday chicken fajita breakfast tacos, and hit the road.

The gardens were looking well--plenty of blooms, well maintained--but the truth is that it's not really our cup of tea (excuse the pun)--and not just because of its focus on moderns.

Here's the thing: making an entire garden out of nothing but modern roses is like trying to write a sentence using nothing but exclamation marks.  All these vibrant reds, oranges, and yellows are screaming at you from all over the place, trying to grab your attention.  But there are so many of them, and they are all in uniform, boxy parterres, so nothing really draws you eye any more than any other thing.  It's overstimulating and unsatisfying simultaneously.

Using parterres seems like a clever way to impose form on plants that are often so formless and scraggly, but it represses the distinctive personality of each cultivar.  It de-emphasizes the rosiness of roses.  Or so it seems to me.

The admittedly impressive rows upon rows of roses.  Note that the garden is at least this big again to the right.

There are some nice architectural elements in the park. I think it would have been better to select some roses for specimen plantings and some for massing, and then use the architectural elements to support the specimen plants--corners and archways and urns and central medallions in walkways that direct your attention and make the best use of different cultivars' strengths.  And then use evergreens in the background to ground the whole thing and to give some relief from the riot of color.  Think of a classic perennial border in England--a veritable Mardi Gras of colors and forms, set off by an impossibly smooth grass walk and the neutral background of a weathered brick wall--uniform, serene contrasts to the busyness of the flower beds. (See also the Bagatelle rose gardens in France)

As it is, this was our favorite part of the whole experience--a three-level koi pond tucked in a shady spot away from the roses.  Why not put a few roses around the pond's sunnier bank?  Some lovely cascadey thing, like swamp rose or 'Climbing Pinkie' or a very mature unpruned Tea rose.

And then my other favorite thing was this cultivar--you should click on it to fully grasp how heavily covered it is with hips, and what a bright gold those hips are.  I've never seen anything like it. Unfortunately, it was unlabeled--maybe 'Dainty Bess'?  If anyone recognizes it, please let me know.

I feel like I've been a little unfairly harsh--it's pretty nifty that a smallish town--or any town at all, really--has taken on the expense and trouble of maintaining a collection of this size.  I mean, look at the pic above--so clean and orderly!  Can you imagine how much mulch this requires annually?  And there are some very pretty spots--the koi ponds, the camellia walk, and the idea garden full of blooming perennials, for example.  It was just that it helped clarify for us some of our own ideas about how we think roses are best used in the landscape, which would be less rigidly formal, more individualized, and mixed with other species.

After that, we went to Chamblee's Roses, which I had always thought of as the Antique Rose Emporium's main competitor.  I think their main focus is wholesale and mail order, though.  Their excellent facility was scrupulously clean, tidy, and weedless, but it isn't a showplace the way that A.R.E. is. It is definitely worth the visit--we bought 8 roses and a book between the two of us--but it's a straightforward production unit for a terrific boatload of roses rather than a magical garden experience.

It was thanks to Chamblee that we finally got Buck roses.  "Moderns," we had hitherto sniffed dismissively.  But when saw them in person and full of blooms, they pretty much had us at hello.  We bought 'Dawn Star' and coveted 'Quietness' and 'American Legacy.'  They seem to combine old rose flower shapes with high fragrance on what are reputed to be very hardy plants.  We'll see what kind of shrubs they make. (Footnote: all 3, coincidentally, are posthumous releases of seedlings Dr. Buck gave to family and friends, according to this thread on Gardenweb.)

And I finally got some David Austins: 'Abraham Darby' and the 'Ambridge Rose' and 'Sharifa Asma'.

We also picked up a 'Mrs Dudley Cross' and peppery little 'Spice,' to replace the one from my undergrad days that died of Horrid Fungus our first summer in Elgin.

Then, back in Tyler, I saw the official lettering of the trip--how adorable is that New York Store?

 Delectable vintage lettering in Tyler's brick-paved downtown square

Next, on the spur of the moment, we googled "best nursery in Tyler," and got a recommendation for Blue Moon nursery, which turned out to be that unexpected something extra that makes a trip.  It was a small place with a lot of very nice plants in excellent shape set in creative, lovingly tended--and immaculate--display gardens.  We picked up a bog sage, a tiny yellow daisy whose name eludes me, some purple-flowering Thai basil, a hummingbird feeder, and two Dwarf Hamlins (that Pennisetum alopecuroides cultivar I was seeing all over the place at TNLA).

On the grounds they have this awesome patio/performance area--a fireplace, a niche for an urn, a mantel, a window, and--is that a pizza oven?  Whatever it is, it's delightful and convivial filled me with envy.

 Fireplace and patio at Blue Moon Gardens

At Blue Moon, they recommended we eat at either Edom or Ben Wheeler--apparently, these two rather remote hamlets are bursting with culinary goodness.  We chose The Shed in Edom where we had very satisfactory old-school chicken fried chicken and country fried steak; but interestingly, it was the fried cabbage (pretty much everything on their menu is fried--be prepared) that was the revelation--caramelized, sweet, but not soggy. Delectable. They must fry it very fast, in what tastes like bacon grease.  So it's going to be a salady week making up for that one, but, lordy! that cabbage was good.

I like this conjunction of signs.

So, all in all, a good trip. Long, but good.  We learned some useful things, bought some nice plants, saw some gardens, and had some yummy food.  That's about all you need.

In Which We See Dead People

Awesome polychrome Jesus, Dugas Cemetery, Montegut, LA

Matt & I took a trip to south Louisiana a couple of weeks ago to visit some of the little towns that come up over and over in my family tree, and to scan in old family photos. I adore old black-and-white family photos.

My grandmother's family is from the pink area, while my grandfather's is from the blue. We visited Breaux Bridge, St Martinville, Lafayette, Thibodaux, Houma, and tiny Montegut.

We also saw a bunch of cemeteries, hoping to find ancestors. It was a sort of treasure hunt, where the treasure is an ancient, crumbly tomb whose residents have long since turned to dust, or possibly something wetter and stickier than dust, this being south Louisiana. We found a few, plus many unrelated tombs that were interesting in their own right.

Since this is usually a garden-centric blog, I'll start with items of horticultural interest.

Ferns
This neat little fern was growing in all the crevices and cracks it could find in tombs from Breaux Bridge to Houma. This specimen placed itself particularly artfully.

A permanent green bouquet. Not bad for a dude who's been dead since 1882.

Drought
Louisiana, like much of the south, is in a nasty drought. Not as bad as ours here in Texas, but pretty bad. The funny thing is, a terrible drought by Louisiana standards looks like an unbelievably lush summer by Austin standards. It even rained while we were there. Yeah, that's right--they still make rain in Louisiana. Jammy bastards.

Small cemetery by the border of Vermillion Parish. I wish our drought looked like this.

Of course, a drought isn't about how much water you get in absolute terms; it's about how much water you get relative to what you usually get and what you need to be productive. From that perspective, all this gorgeous green is deceptive. Still, I'd rather suffer in a pool of emerald than on a barren brown rock.

Acquisitions
Matt was unbelievably sweet about this whole trip--patient and interested and accommodating about everything, even though ancestors are mostly only interesting to the folks who owe them their genetic material. He even memorized the relationships between all the principle ancestors, by both real name and family nickname (no easy task!), and kept a little chart in his pocket notebook. By way of reward, we stopped at a nursery that had caught his eye. Of course we bought stuff. I got a small silver-blue saw palmetto (Serenoa repens) for the shade garden, and a Formosa lily (Lilium formosum) for... someplace. Matt got a new cuphea (he loves cupheas), an orange-flowered Crossandra, and an unknown variegated foliage plant. Plus Granny Babe gave us some of her yellow-flowered Louisiana irises.

Neat Cemeteries
One of our best finds in terms of ancestral mausolea was for awesomely named Alidor Stoufflet (b1848) and his equally awesome wife Melicie Walker (b1844) in Houma. They were my g-g-g grandparents, and they died in 1930 and 1924, respectively, but they were almost the oldest ancestors we found. Their tomb is only 80 years old, but it already looks like it's about to fall apart. All flesh is grass, folks. Unless you build a Taj Mahal or a pyramid, don't expect to stick around too terribly long after you shuffle off the mortal coil. (This trip may have accelerated the mid-life crisis I'm due for in a few years.)


The very oldest was this guy--not an ancestor, but more like a third cousin, 8 times removed. Or something. His tomb in Montegut, Louisiana is about as creepy as you can desire--the very picture of decay. Deliciously, the inscription's in French; it says, "Here rests Honore Robichaux, died 7 Oct 1907, age 88 years." He was the grandson of my g-g-g-g-g grandfather, Jean Baptiste Robichaux of Halifax. I guess that actually makes him my second cousin, 6 times removed?

I'd have love to have found tombs of older ancestors, but I guess that will have to wait for a future trip. (To be taken at a much cooler time of year. Good lord, it was hot! I think I may have broken Louisiana's drought just by sweating all over the state.)

Thibodaux had the most intrinsically fantastic cemetery (which is good thing, since it's ginormous and took hours to cover, but didn't actually furnish up any family members). First, you see this unbelievably genteel boulevard of irreproachably white and identical mausolea. So uniform! So tidy! But this is the new part.

Respectability Row

When you turn the corner, you start seeing a lot more variety--new tombs, old tombs, rich tombs, poor tombs, big ones, small ones... This is where it starts to get fun.

Old Town

Then, if you're Matt, you go poking around behind the tombs and discover this hidden alleyway. There's no real path to it; you just have to pick your way between the tombs. There's no grass--though there are weeds. It's the weirdest thing. It's like burying someone behind your garage or something--a neglected, hidden area that stretches on most of the length of the (very large) cemetery. Could it be an island of unconsecrated ground? Is this where they stick the Protestants? Or is it just where they stash the poor? Did they dig these folks up and move them to make way for Respectability Row? Answer comes there none.

Storyville?

Meanwhile, Matt, in his role as intrepid investigative reporter, stuck his camera in a tomb whose front door was partially missing. This is what the inside looks like. All those roots dangling from the ceiling kind of creep me out. Stop trying to eat people, you sinister plants!

In an "oven"

According to the internet, a niche like this within a tomb is popularly known as an "oven," partly because these tombs heat up in the sun and turn their occupants into humus in a year or two. Then if space is at a premium, the remaining bones are dumped out of the coffin and swept into a communal ossuary within the same mausoleum, and the oven is ready for its next occupant. Sort of like slow-motion cremation. Pragmatic and efficient, though I find the idea of my bones commingling promiscuously with those of my family members to be off-puttingly incestuous.

Here's a commingling that I love, though: old tomb, new occupant; old vase, new flowers.

Grey tomb, yellow flowers

Family Photos
My grandmother and her cousin, Shirley, were incredibly generous with their time and knowledge, and I was able to scan hundreds of wonderful old photos and gather stories about them. Here are a handful. Shirley has an awesome old carte-de-visite style album given to my great-great grandmother by a hitherto unknown (male!) friend with the implausible name of Webb Zenor. Check out the inscription: his handwriting's as fantastical as his name. See the little curlicues inside of the word "Compliments"?

To Miss Rosa Muller / Compliments of / Webb Zenor / 1879

This is the oldest family photo that I know of. Below it is the inscription "Mrs. (Felicie) Nicholas Muller." Now Felicie Hebert was born in 1833, according to my records, which makes this one old photograph (maybe 1836?). I don't think England's royal family started having their pictures taken till the 1840s. Victoria's coronation in 1837, for example, wasn't photographed. So I'm suspicious--either the attribution or Felicie's birthdate is likely in error. Still, for the moment we'll call it our oldest photo.

Felicie? Maybe? If so, her parents--who lived in New Iberia--were crazy early adopters of photography. They'd have been all over the iPad like white on rice.

Here's her son, Anthony Muller, dressed as a Mardi Gras king.

Anthony Muller, g-g-g uncle

And here's where family history meets the larger tide of history. Several decades later, it's a Mardi Gras parade in Morgan City. The king and page are white. The guys pulling the float and carrying the torches are all very reluctant looking black guys. Very, very Jim Crow. Eerie.

Morgan City's first(?) Mardi Gras parade

On a happier note, here's Tante Rose (g-g aunt) with two unknown pals. She's dressed as a man and smoking a cigar. Granny says Tante Rose was "a character"--not, I think, in a good way. She liked her own way, I gather, and maybe she was a bit selfish and hard on others. But here she looks like a barrel of fun--like the family cutup.

Tante Rose on left, with cigar

And lastly, the Venus of the Bayou. This might be Maggie Elbina Stoufflet (Mommom--pronounced "muh-MOM," not "mom-mom"), but then again it might not. I love her come-hitherish pose.

Acadian Odalisque

Sparkly San Antonio

I've been AWOL since early December--busy month. So here's the first installment in the backlog: our annual trip to San Antonio to see the Christmas lights on the riverwalk.

We spent the night at the St. Anthony Wyndham, which is a few blocks from the river (and therefore a little cheaper than the places that are directly on the water). It was built around the turn of the last century, and as you can see from the lobby, it's très chi-chi.


The bit we liked best, though, was the doorbell.

Each room room has a brass plate with a button on the outside; push the button, and a clapper chimes on a couple of pieces of metal inside. We know this because we were fascinated by it and pushed the button over... and over... and over... Our poor neighbors.


I would pay good money to buy such a device and install it on our front door--so cool, so analog, so fin-de-siècle.

This is mostly what we came to see: the lovely lights blinking in the trees and reflecting in swirls on the water. We never found a camera setting that could really capture all the color, but this trippy picture was oddly the best. Drink enough overpriced margaritas, and this is roughly what the riverwalk looks like.


The next day, we visited the San Antonio Botanical Garden.

It was in the throes of a lovely explosion of fall color. I think--but wouldn't swear to it--that these are chalk maples--Acer leucoderm.


The baldcypresses were also changing, which looks especially nice against clumps of palmettos.


I always like visiting the fachwerk house they have on the grounds. They had to replace or resurface the plaster and replace the roof, but the beams are original. I'm not sure what kind of wood they are, but these gnarled old beams are neat.


Although it was quite crisp out, a number of plants were in flower, like this Turk's cap (Malvaviscus arboreus).*


*Actually, technically, a giant Turk's cap, Malvaviscus arboreus var. drummondii--good catch, Bob!

San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum

San Francisco Trip, Part 2

Eucalyptus bark. I couldn't believe how huge these things get in CA. And they're everywhere.

Our other big hort excursion in SF was the San Francisco Botanical Garden at Golden Gate Park. Wow, was that humbling. In general, I'm glad that I majored in horticulture rather than botany, but on trips like this, I remember the drawbacks to a horticentric education: my plant knowledge is so location specific. If I had spent more time studying plant taxonomy & morphology, I wouldn't be so utterly bewildered when dropped in an alien ecosystem.

Fortunately, the signage at the SFBG was really pretty good, and we were able to identify most of the plants were interested in. And these were many. Most would probably fry in our heat, but I'd like to try at least a few.

We started out in the prehistoric plants section, where, interestingly, the plants are said to be microchipped.

Presumably, some are so valuable that people steal them. Perhaps this nifty sago--I know big cycads can be worth a lot of money, and this one has an especially ferny quality to it.

Cycas pectinata. Tight like Fort Knox?

Or this neat tree fern--someone would pay a lot for that black quill-like bark, right?

Dicksonia squarrosa

There was also a dwarf equisetum in this area. It's native to only the very top of the US, and it's listed as endangered in a few states. This blows my mind. It's possible to endanger an equisetum? How? With plutonium?

Equisetum scirpoides: adorable, grass-like, and ancient

Elsewhere in the garden, we found this Cuphea nudicostata, which Matt would like to grow. It has the nicest deep cherry red flowers. Green is my favorite color, but I never do get tired of deep cherry red.

Cuphea nudicostata - unusually large flowers for a cuphea

In a similar vein, I was delighted by the big fuzzy spikes of the red velvet sage, Salvia confertiflora.

Salvia confertiflora. That has to grow here, right? All salvias grow in Texas.

Then there's this elegant Kashmir cypress, Cupressus torulosa var. cashmeriana.

Cupressus torulosa var. cashmeriana

Dave's Garden only has two members growing this one, but one is in Houston. So there's hope! It's got the most artistic-looking flat zig-zaggy leaves, and I love its graceful droopiness.

Kashmir cypress leaves

Then there are the plants I'm not even going to try. This beautiful dome-shaped tree, Maytenus boaria. It's from the cloud forests of Chile. It looks like it doesn't know the meaning of the word "August."

The delicately ferny foliage of the Maytenus boaria

This exuberantly flowered little tree with the absurd moniker of Fremontodendron. It goes from sulphur yellow (in the background) to that awesome peachy-orange in the foreground. Despite the leathery leaves, it just doesn't feel to me like it could live here.

Fremontodendron 'California Glory'

And finally, awesome though it is, I have no hope at all for this beautiful and unexpected orange passionflower, Passiflora parritae. Apparently, it drops its flowers once the temperature reaches 90 degrees F. Beautiful, but wimpy.

The beautiful but finicky Passiflora parritae

Falling Piers, Muir Woods, & the Taxodiaceae

San Francisco Vacation, Part 1



We just got back from our vacation to San Francisco--phew! There was a lot to see in a small space of time. I wore holes in my feet and caught a cold, but we saw a lot of lovely things, at some scrumptious food, and enjoyed just being in a place that was so very different from our everyday lives.

Being plant dorks with a limited time, we managed to miss Alcatrez and Chinatown, but we did see Muir Woods and the botanical garden at Golden Gate Park.

I think this was Matt's Favorite Thing from the whole trip:


It's a sign that warns you not to walk on the rickety old part of the pier because it could fall down under your weight... and then pieces of it might hit a passing swimmer. Please: Think of the swimmers.

And I made an exciting culinary discovery within the first couple of hours of being in the city: Vietnamese pancakes, or banh xeo.


I've never noticed them on the menus of local Vietnamese places, but they're scrumptious crispy crepey confections, just slightly sweet, with a stir-fried savory filling. Yummy.

Butmy favorite part was probably Muir Woods. We took this pretty road to get there.


Muir Woods is populated by coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens), which are the tallest trees in the world. They are not, however, the most massive trees in the world: those are their cousins, giant redwoods (Sequoiadendron giganteum). Giant redwoods are the ones you can drive cars through. While coast redwoods are no slouches in the diameter department, the tree below may be the widest we saw in the park.


I was interested to see that the National Park Service still describes redwoods as members of the Taxodiaceae. That family was named for one of my favorite tree species, Taxodium distichum or baldcypress. Sadly for the honor of my favorite tree and my home state (it's the state tree of Louisiana), recent genetic research caused that family to be dissolved into the larger cypress family, the Cupressaceae (for the curious, here's a phylogenetic tree of the Cupressaceae, showing the genera it currently contains).

But baldcypresses and redwoods share a certain something or other that sets them apart from their cypressy cousins, like junipers, Italian cypresses, and arborvitae. Even baldcypresses have an august, primordial quality, and that same narrow, linear form. Below you can see an impressive example of the deeply furrowed bark that is characteristic of the former family.


And this tree--in addition to being covered in interesting aqua-colored lichen--exhibits the same graceful flare at its base as baldcypresses do.




Nevertheless, folks who know a great deal more than I do about botany, plant physiology, and genetics seem persuaded that the new classification is the most accurate. And it does now put the tallest tree, the most massive tree, and the longest lived tree (Fitzroya cupressoides) in the same family, which is kind of neat.

We took the main trail, which is paved and very congested, and took the first turnoff (Ocean View? Something like that). That trail goes up the mountain by way of a bunch of steps and is WAY quieter than the main trail. It's less lush, but there are no joggers up there (there were joggers on the main trail! Galumphing along, getting underfoot, and generally harshing the redwood mellow). The Ocean View runs into the Lost Trail, which takes you to the Fern Creek trail, which, by innumerable knee-jarring stairs, takes you back down to the main trail. The beauty of this route is that you get lots of quality alone time with the trees, and at the end of your exertions, you're rewarded with the best of the trees--the ones in the part of the trail that runs along Fern Creek at the base of the mountain. These are the biggest, most lush, and most mossy and lichenous of the lot. And the creek's beautiful too.


Many of the trees in the park are hollow, which doesn't seem to bother them one bit.


And, of course, there are fallen trees, which form an important part of the forest ecosystem. They also look really neat.


There were other interesting plants in the park. These dessicated ferns glowed in the dim forest light.


And there was moss everywhere, making everything look soft and green and fertile.



...More to follow...


ADDENDUM:
Bob asked if we saw any Pacific black-tailed deer while in Muir Woods. In fact, we did (or at least we saw a deer with a black tail--presume it's the PBTD), and we even snapped a picture:

Click picture for larger version

It looked at us inquisitively, determined we did not have any food, and slouched off in a huff. Or something like that, anyway.