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I have Ruby-throated Hummingbirds in my garden. They fly across the Gulf of Mexico, 500 miles, non-stop each year and spend March to October with me. I think their baby birds learned to fly last week and have joined their mother at the feeder. My sister asked if I had seen their nest; sadly I have never seen a hummingbird nest. This isn’t a big surprise since the nests are only the size of a half dollar. They are built with spider silk and hidden with lichen and moss. The u-tube video below shows a nest, not only found, but photographed day by day so that the progress of the little birds is revealed.

Unlike the troubled Monarch butterfly I wrote about last week; hummingbirds are able to rub along well with humans. They like the colors we like: red, yellow, orange, pink and purple. They love the flowers we love: bee balms, columbines, daylilies, impatiens, and petunias- to name only a few. It is also extremely fortunate that hummingbirds are too teeny to eat; and happily, it is now illegal to kill hummingbirds and use their feathers for hats and clothing. link

Hummingbirds have thrived on Earth for a long time; originating in South America 22 million years ago. But in the Miocene, 13 million years ago, the Andes rose up and the little birds scattered across the world. link

And channeling the great mountain range, this little creature can rise into the air–straight up–its iridescent green wings shining and its scarlet throat aglow. There is only one word for Hummingbirds:  divine.

What if you were asked to create a magical being with amazing powers; one that would be truly unbelievable. You might imagine a creature that was almost weightless, say less than a gram. To breed, this being would fly 2000 miles each fall from the cold north to warmth in the south. Then in the spring this being would fly back north, another 2000 miles, where it would lay its eggs. Who among us would think to make every part of the creature poisonous? And it would eat, oh, one plant; of course a poisonous one. You would also be tasked to make the thing beautiful and full of grace. The human mind is a wonderful thing, but dreaming up a monarch butterfly might be beyond us all.

And the Monarchs are in deep trouble right now.

As of 2018, the monarch population has declined by more than 80 percent in two decades. link Once numbering 10 million strong, the number of western monarchs that fly south to our California coast are down to 300,000 and the extinction of this branch of the family is predicted. link Fortunately, about 99 percent of North American monarchs head to 12 mountaintops in central Mexico each winter. In the mid-90’s there were a billion monarchs there; now a new report shows the monarch population down to approximately 93 million butterflies. A crash is expected in about 20 years at the current rate of decline.

The destruction of this marvelous creature is, well, unbelievable. The Mexican government and many private organizations are working to preserve the mountaintops. The loggers oppose them. A few dedicated advocates worry that monarch adults and their baby caterpillars are dying throughout the U.S. The producers of herbicides and pesticides do not care. Milkweed, the only plant the monarch caterpillar eats, is being wiped out by herbicide spraying–mostly to achieve the mass production of corn and soybeans. The death of the caterpillars is the result of the killing of the milkweed by herbicides and also because of the heavy use of insecticides, toxic to them and to the adult butterflies. Wouldn’t it be great if it were a status symbol to have milkweed all over your lawn? Lawn owners don’t think so.

Worse, if anything could make this worse, is the steady increase in fall temperatures. Last year was the warmest fall in 123 years. In the warm autumn weather, the butterflies delay their trip south and wind up trapped by the cold in New Jersey or Kentucky. They can’t make it home to their mountaintops. They die. link

There is no push to care for the natural world. There is no voice for conservation. We drench our farmland with poison; then we throw away 40% of what we put on the table. link You can’t make this stuff up.

“Well loved he garleek, oynons, and eek lekes.”

Geoffrey Chaucer – Canterbury Tales

Before agriculture, before writing, humans loved Alliums. Onions, leeks, shallots and garlic were humanity’s companions that grew readily almost everywhere on the planet; any old soil suits them. They thrive in almost any climate. They are easily dried to store away for hard times. They have been packed into “go-bags” for thousands of years. link

Onions

I plant mine on or near George Washington’s birthday. I use the sets available in nurseries and grocery stores. However, they grow easily from seed: in fact, if you want green onions in the garden, you have to plant from seed since the sets are only ‘big’ onions as far as I know. Green onions are the favorite onion in China, where onions have been enthusiastically written about for over 5000 years.

Writing emerged in most early civilizations 5000 years ago and all of them wrote about onions. An old Sumerian text complains that the governor’s onion patch was plowed up.  The oldest Vedic writings from India mention onions and by 700 BC the curative powers of the onion appear in the great medical book, Charaka – Sanhita. The Egyptians believed the onion to symbolize eternity with its circles within circles and buried it with the dead. Greeks ate many pounds of onions and rubbed onions all over their bodies before athletic competitions, including the early Olympics. link Of course Europeans loved onions; the first settlers brought them on the Mayflower. They  found Native Americans entirely familiar with onions, the wild onions that grew all over the North American continent. I don’t mean to belabor all this history, but any advice about cooking with onions or growing them is a waste of space. In the garden, they need some water but no pest control since bugs don’t bother them. Cooking? There must be a million recipes. And cooking without onions? We couldn’t do it.

Leeks

Onions recommended for hot climates do not store as well as onions that grow up North. But leeks can take over in the kitchen when the onions are gone. I was happy to find a bundle of leek sets at the farm supply store this year and put them in. I have grown leeks from seed in past years. They come up in the potting soil like little green hair. In the garden, even when very small, they survive well since pests like bugs and rabbits do not eat them. Leek gardeners advise putting the leeks in a trench and gradually filling it as the leeks grow to produce the long white root. I am too lazy for all that and just plant them. They are lovely in the kitchen, Julia Child is a master of their use, for example her Leek and Potato Soup.

Shallots 

The history of shallots is comparable to that of onions and garlic. Shallots have been beloved by those with fine pallets for centuries. Crusaders are said to have brought the shallot to France where the French turned the cooking of shallots into an art. The Gray Shallot is considered the most flavorful by gastronomes but I have not had it produce well in my garden. It is important to order shallots for planting from a nursery that names the zone where your shallot will be planted. I imagine Gray Shallots do not like my hot weather. Shallots in general like cool soil. They are best planted in the fall after the first frost since exposure to freezing weather improves their flavor and size. If the thermometer drops below 25 degrees a hay or straw mulch will save your plants. Shallots can be round or oblong; they come in many colors as you can see on the right: red, yellow, gray, black and white. They make one think of the French royalty at Versailles.

Garlic

The history of garlic in incomparable. Neolithic humans are said to have cultivated garlic 10,000 or more years ago. In the Stone Age. Later, garlic was used by the Egyptians and the Greeks as a medicine and a body strengthener. The Assyrians used it as an antibiotic. Roman physicians used garlic to clean the blood and thin mucus. The Chinese preserved food with it and also used it to treat depression and plague. In India garlic was use as an aphrodisiac and to heal wounds, worms and heart disease.

It is easy to grow. It is expensive to order from a quality nursery, but then year after year, you can replant from successful bulbs. I have broken up a head of organic garlic from the grocery store and planted the little bulblets. Gardeners complain that it is in the ground for a long time; all winter and much of the spring, but it is so reliable that I do not mind it using up my garden space. A farmer friend told me he plants garlic in the spring and gets little ‘green garlic’ plants to use in the kitchen. And it is in the kitchen where we embrace this plant as a friend, a long-time companion–one truly loved.

I enjoyed a happy childhood; my mother was considered a good cook and family meals were a pleasure most of the time–although not without drama on occasion. Herbs were entirely unknown to us. We always had a salad or a vegetable–home grown at times, but we did not eat herbs. No one I knew ate herbs.

It’s not as though humans had not run across herbs yet. In Genesis, we read that every “herb bearing seed” was gifted to humankind. Pliny the Elder praises mint for its marvelous smell and taste. He wrote about the herb 2000 years ago. Hamlet  speaks of fennel and rue and violets. We drank gallons of iced tea without fresh mint to flavor it. Why we didn’t include fennel and violets in our salads I’ll never know.

My favorite garden plants may be my herbs. I decided I had to grow them when I began reading about English cottage gardens, one of which is pictured above. Herbs and flowers and vegetables were just tucked in here and there without a grand plan. Many cottage garden plants self seed and skill is required to let the plants have their way when they pick some corner of the garden.

I am pretty sure basil did not grace my garden last summer because I was too enthusiastic with the hoe. It had popped up all over the garden for years, a tropical plant that loves hot summer days and hates the cold. It is native to Africa and Southeast Asia but is grown and used by cooks all over the world. Of course such a well-traveled plant has many names, basil being derived from Latin meaning kingly plant. It is like a king in the kitchen with it strong taste and scent; my son makes pesto each year, I love it raw or cooked, in salads, on bruschetta, any way at all. And there are dozens of kinds of basil: sweet basil, cinnamon basil, purple basil, anise or Persian basil, all worth growing.

An herb that does not mind the cold is parsley. It is a biennial and flowers every other year, then the seeds scatter across the garden and come up where they please. I had a large plant in the middle of the path last year. This year it is thriving at the feet of a grapevine. When temperatures dropped to 13 degrees in the winter I put a bucket over the plant and it was unharmed. Its leaves are very welcome in the kitchen during the cold weather. Parsley doesn’t mind hot summer weather either. I have found it to be delicious in salsa. The combination of tomatoes, onion, peppers and cilantro is grand; but cilantro likes it cool and is often gone by the time the tomatoes and peppers are ripe.

Cilantro also wanders all over the garden. It was by the holly last year. Cilantro is the Spanish name for the plant, coriander another name, although coriander is normally used for the seeds that form as soon as the weather heats up. The plant is native to Iran, but, like all beloved cooking herbs, it has been spread all over the world. Seed pods of the herb, called mericarps, were found in a Neolithic cave in Israel and over two cups were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.

I will have to say that I love my thyme since it stays put. It forms a sort of homely little bush; it loves heat and doesn’t mind the cold. Mine has reliably come back year after year. A friend whose thyme had spread too much brought me a beautiful clump several weeks ago and it is doing well. I would like this plant to cover as much of the garden as it likes, to go out of control. This herb also has a venerable past: it was used for embalming by the Egyptians, as incense by the the Greeks, used to flavor cheese by the Romans and used to cover bad smells by medieval Europeans. It’s loaded with health benefits. Bees love its flowers. Fungus doesn’t like it; bugs don’t bother it. Did I say I love this plant?

A distant relative of thyme and a member of the mint family, oregano, is also a perennial. It grows into a large clump and its flowers are beautiful. High-end chefs use the flowers in their expensive dishes. It is reportedly hard to get an oregano plant that has ‘real’ oregano flavor. I may order Greek oregano and Syrian oregano this year from a reliable herb nursery. I understand that really strong oregano can numb the tongue. And the herb is the only one I know of that is reportedly better when dried. I will hang on to my trusty old oregano that has thrived in my hot, alkaline soil for years, it is beautiful in and out of bloom. I have been too lazy to dry it, but a big handful picked fresh is always welcome in my kitchen.

Mint is often the subject of complaints since it is very enthusiastic. it will cover ground fast and its tight roots will compete successfully with any other plant in its path. But the weedeater keeps mine in bounds and I would never want to face a hot summer without it for my iced tea, lemonade and mint juleps. Or face winter without mint jelly. It is also famous for its health benefits, helping with good digestion, weight loss, relief from nausea, depression, fatigue, headaches, asthma, memory loss, and skin care.

Rosemary has just as impressive a list of health claims; it is said to be good for us: boosting memory, improving our moods, reducing inflammation, relieving pain, protecting our immune systems, preventing premature aging. I grow it because it tastes good, looks good and smells divine. The Egyptians, Romans and Greeks considered the herb to be sacred. And the name? The Virgin Mary is said to have spread her blue cloak over a rosemary bush with white flowers and rested there. The flowers turned the familiar beautiful blue and the herb became known as “Rose of Mary.”

Living without herbs? Unpossible.

Plants have been used for thousands of years to heal. I grew about a dozen little Chamomile plants from seed and tucked them into my garden last weekend. I got better germination than I expected and, if I am lucky, I should have Chamomile to share with friends. Like little Peter Rabbit, any of us can have a bad day and Chamomile has long been embraced as a cure for anxiety and insomnia.

Most proponents of plant cures are too human-centered for my taste. They make breathless, often commercialized, claims about plants as though the plants are mindless, passive beneficials here for the purpose of healing humans.

Plants are great chemists and have been working out one chemical compound after another to protect themselves for 700 million years. The defense mechanisms of plants are a kind of warfare, dangerous and powerful. That the chemistry used by plants is not very well understood by humans is not a surprise; we only rolled in 200,000 years ago. For example, Chamomile is said to be able to fight allergies, cancer and inflammation, but it also can cause excessive bleeding if used long term in combination with other drugs and it can cause allergic reactions. Excess and ignorance are everywhere.

I love the idea of using plants for good health. I have plants in my garden that feed bees and plants that attract butterflies. I have plants that are simply beautiful. But I have also planted many of the healers of the plant world. I have two Elderberry trees, now in full bloom. Their white flowers and dark berries can be made into wine and tonics that boost the immune system and help fight flu, make skin beautiful and maybe prevent cancer. But the stems, unripe fruit, roots and leaves of the plant are all poisonous. It is an exercise in patience to separate the teensy flowers and ripe fruit from the poisonous stems. I did it only once.

I also love my Vitex tree. I have never tried to crack the toolbox of this tree for its health benefits. It is famous for boosting fertility and for its ability to cure many women’s complaints. I like to have it in my yard just in case.

The venerable St. John’s Wort is a native plant in my area, and has been used for centuries to reduce scarring and to help with inflammation. Its most famous use is as an antidepressant. Recent studies show it can induce mania just like most conventional antidepressants so it must be used thoughtfully and with care.

There are hundreds of plants and trees that can help us live healthier lives: lavender, valerian, cinnamon, sage, peppermint, tumeric. I have a dozen books on medicinal plants but find the subject so very detailed, so very mysterious. It’s fun to try and draft off what the plant world has created to help me live better.

The Ginkgo tree helps us keep in mind that plant remedies belong to the plant world. While extracts made from this tree can help us with memory loss, fatigue and mood disorders, the Ginkgo dates back 270 million years. The illustration below shows a dinosaur standing under the tree. We can only imagine the chemical genius that has allowed this tree to succeed year after year after year. To heal itself year after year.

Failures mean little to dedicated gardeners. I have planted jasmine a half dozen times in the last half dozen years. Star Jasmine. Carolina Jasmine. And any other jasmine I came across. All dead now except a Carolina Jasmine lighting up my fence right now for the first time as pictured above. It’s like a Las Vegas slot machine with room for only two pictures, the one in my head and the ‘reality’. If I just keep pulling the handle, I can get the two pictures to match. Sometimes.

Another vine that lives in my imagination but not in my garden is the native, Passion Vine. Its flowers are drop dead beautiful and appear to have come from 1970’s movie about an alien invasion. I ordered the vine from an acclaimed nursery that specializes in native plants, I purchased another from a highly rated local nursery and I have planted it from seed. All  dead–even though native plants are supposed to grow well here. I put in my fourth try yesterday; from the Home Depot. What the heck.

Planting natives is a good idea, but even better is to avoid plants that are not hardy in one’s growing zone. I just cut down a Meyer Lemon tree. It was just too cold for it, but I thought I had a perfect sheltered spot on a brick wall facing south where it would be warmed by the winter sun. Exceptionalism. Not good. English garden writers are very enthusiastic about cheating the winter weather with warm southern walls. But the Arctic winds drop down south, through the plains, and hit my garden hard. Every year, without fail, I have several days of temperatures in the teens. I have protected the lemon tree from the bitter weather with old-fashioned hot Christmas lights, Planketts, plastic piping with a heavy plastic overlay, the same piping with plastic and a Plankett. Even with the protection, it was just so ugly after its winter trials; although, to its credit, it would put on six feet of beautiful citrus leaves each summer. But it was right outside my kitchen window so the three months of ratty, cold-damaged branches was just not worth the two lemons I got each year.

I also tried Olive trees. There are several large commercial Olive gardens near me. One owner said that every few years a ‘blue norther’ comes down and he loses a third of his trees. He considers that a cost of doing business. The costs to my garden are three out of four trees dead. One very large one died of root fungus, cold killed two others. The one Olive I have left is of French, not Italian origin and better suited to my climate. It is supposed to grow to about 20 feet, but it never gets bigger than its three feet. The weather dropped to 13 degrees two months ago and the little tree did not seem to mind the cold. It’s tough and really charming. It reminds me of the dwarf in Game of Thrones.

Failures aside, I am just not happy with the fashionable idea that I should plant only natives; I am a little skeptical about the labeling. Who decides? When I lived in the North daylilies, originally from Asia, were much loved. They are dependable and beautiful; bullet-proof. I thought they would love my southern garden. Shortly after I moved, I ordered three pricey premium plants from a southern nursery that specializes in daylilies. My chickens ate them; the buds, the leaves, the tubers and the roots on the tubers.

Nevertheless, when a neighbor offered a clump of daylilies after her spring cleanup, I drove right over to get them. I pulled the big clump apart and wound up with twenty or so starts of the Daylily, Stella D’Oro. I have put my new daylilies in the vegetable garden where the chickens are not permitted to go; I am hoping the plants will thrive and that my intelligent and resourceful birds will not find another feast. Hope.

Near the daylilies is a very special rose, Pioneer Spirit, purchased at least seven years ago from the ‘Antique Rose Emporium’, a nursery only a 100 miles or so from my house.

I am a great fan of Vita Sackville West, an English grande dame, whose garden writing has inspired my friends and I for decades. She grew rose bushes 10 feet tall and her favorites were the cabbage roses with their hundreds of petals. Bred at Texas A&M in the 1990’s, my Pioneer Spirit is supposed to be 10 feet tall and its flowers are said by the rose purveyor to mimic famous luxurious roses of the past. The rose is a modern version of the grand traditions of the great gardens of England. While I have lots of good clay soil, this poor rose wound up near an underground vein of caliche and began suffering from Chlorosis shortly after I planted it. Chlorosis is an iron deficiency caused by alkaline soil that locks up nutrients including iron. I have tried fix after fix and last fall I told the homely three -foot tall rose with its yellow and brown leaves that I would dig it up in the Spring.

In preparation for my new and trouble-free imaginary plant, I piled hay and manure from my new bull in a ring about 18 inches high around the rose, expecting lovely compost after a winter of freezing and thawing. Last week I ran across a new expensive soil drench that promised a cure for Chlorosis. I thought I’d give the rose one more year and walked out with my bucket of ‘cure’ to find the plant with lots of healthy new green leaves and only a few yellow ones. Wow. I applied the drench but now will never know whether the manure/hay mixture might have cured the plant without help.

Gardeners. Even when we succeed we drive ourselves crazy.

When we decide to make gardens, sometimes a kind of madness creeps in, a single-mindedness that results in, for example, the beautiful Hanging Gardens of Babylon built in Iraq by Nebuchadnezzar II in 600 BCE to please his homesick wife. Historians tell us that evidence of pleasure gardens in Mesopotamia dates back 6000 years or so; but I am skeptical that humans have not always had the desire to shape the beauty of nature for their enjoyment and consolation.

Gardens are temporal and even a garden considered to the one of the Seven Wonders of the World can be left unrecorded and only available to us through the imaginations of artists. The illustration above is my favorite depiction of the Hanging Garden; it looks like a happy place, just the thing to make a woman longing for home make peace with a new world.

Gardening in relatively nearby Turkey was also an ancient practice. Enjoying the then-rich soil and availability of water, market gardens flourished for 1500 years. Large parts of Istanbul were planted with fruits and vegetables for the urban populace. These gardens, called bostan, were vast and faded away in the middle of the 20th century as demands of population growth squeezed out the famous strawberries, lettuce and figs to make way for human habitation.

Ancient gardening in India still amazes the world. The famous Mondore Gardens of Rajasthan were created by the flower-loving migrants from Central Asia who settled in Northern India after they fell in love with the Palash trees, covered with red flowers, and other exotics. They became devoted to the brightly colored lotuses that grew wild because of the abundant water that flowed from the Himalayas. Southern India?  A dozen famous names occur throughout our literature; for example, Shalimar, a household word–stunning with trees and water features. The grand garden alley here makes it clear that the  single-mindedness, the madness to create perfection apparently extended through many generations in India.

The gardens of Japan are so different from ours in their construction, yet my garden contains a surprising number of Japanese cultivars. The Japanese gardeners practiced botany at its highest level. Ancient Japanese gardens were first described in 720 AD in the Nihon Shoki, the first book of Japanese history. In the spring of 74 AD, that book tells the story of the Emperor putting carp into a pond and rejoicing; the animation of fish are now always a part of a Japanese garden. Not long after, another Emperor expanded the idea to a lake where he could take his favorite concubine to feast and bask in the beauty of the combination of water and plants. I have never toured a Japanese garden that did not contain a water feature.

As esoteric and, perhaps out of reach, Japanese gardens are, ancient Roman gardens are easy and friendly. The typical middle class Roman home included a garden and one we Americans can relate to. They did not use lawns, a very recent form of gardening madness. Their gardens were located in a courtyard in the middle of the house, very green and fragrant with herbs the Romans used for cooking. Bringing nature in–using it. It’s in our DNA; it’s part of being human.

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” -Cicero