Dandelion clock
I’m in the midst of a very busy week. While I often complain (politely of course) of spending too much time cooped up inside behind the keyboard of my laptop, the alternative – having several appointments, meetings and commitments everyday for a week – rather throws me for a loop as well.
The week dawned gloriously with sunshine and warm weather. Monday I spoke to a local garden club, shared a lovely lunch and reveled in the beautiful spring weather. My topic was a reading/slide show of Hortus Miscellaneous, my first book. You’d think in the time I spent writing the book – let alone the 2 years since its publication – that I would have learned how to describe this unique little tome about gardening’s most arcane and esoteric tidbits.
For a while I settled on “the horticultural love-child of the Old Farmer’s Almanac and Ripley’s Believe It or Not.“ Either people didn’t get my reference…or maybe they just didn’t think it was as funny as I did!
Too often I find myself almost apologizing for Hortus; describing it as “silly” or “geeky.” Admittedly, it’s no horticultural manifesto out to change the world with brilliant insight, taxonomic revolution, or poetic prose. However, I think it does accomplish what I intended, which was to touch on the universality and broad impact that gardening has on life; not just gardener’s lives but the entire human experience. Nothing SILLY about that!
a pretty girl prerusing Hortus in Paris
These days I’ve almost made a game out of leafing through the pages of HM to discover a tidbit, tip or tale that relates to today’s life; sort of a horticultural Oujia Board or the Magic Eight Ball of gardening. It’s fun, it’s enlightening, and – as any gardener will attest – weeds are anything but silly to an overbooked gardener with too little time.
Poetically described as a plant whose features are not yet recognized or any plant in the wrong place, in fact weeds are a group of plants that have developed amazing reproductive capabilities and tough constitutions that allow them to survive where other more “civilized” plants cannot. in this way weeds play a valuable environmental role in covering bare ground and preventing devastating soil erosion.
Keeping the ground covered, whether with mulch, groundcovers, or spreading plants, is the best defense against weeds gaining a foothold int he garden. If they do – and they will, being weeds and gardeners being mere mortals – take care to remove any seed heads as they form before they have the opportunity to spread their prolific progeny to any other available scrap of bare earth.
Make Weeds Work for You!
The following weeds are not recommended for planting in the garden. These are merely suggestions for making good use of that which we cannot get rid of. A knowledgeable gardener might put these weeds’ unique properties to good use in the garden.
Mustard: This family (alyssum, phlox, kale, etc.) will clean up salty soils and can be planted where they will improve roadside beds following winter de-icing, and they will perform well in areas where soils are high in naturally occurring salts.
Geranium: Many types of this large family of plants have proved fatal or at least toxic to Japanese beetles, a pernicious pest found east of the Rocky Mountains that can wreak havoc with garden ornamentals.
Horsetail: An especially persistent weed in wet soils, horsetail is an effective anti-fungal agent when brewed into a strong tea, cooled, and sprayed on plants subject to mildews and fungus.
Stinging Nettles: High in potassium and calcium and extremely nutritious for both garden and gardeners alike. Apply to soils as a tea or add to the compost pile. To protect oneself from the nasty sting of fresh nettles caused by the fine hairs along their stem and leaves, wear protective clothing when harvesting.
Comfrey: Also high in potassium and a valuable addition to the compost. Treat a bruise with a comfrey poultice
from Hortus Miscellaneous, Sasquatch Books, 2007, pg 34-36
