Historical Ways of Herb Gardening: Another European Perspective

While South Carolina's cottage gardens are more in the English tradition (like very much of South Carolina; the Charles Pinckney Historic Site's information pegs the English heritage of the Carolinas at the time of the Declaration of Independence at something like 86%), this very lovely post discusses another old-world herb-gardening tradition with sensitivity, historical context, and beautiful pictures: Creating your own jardin de cure.

There's an herb list, a discussion of the cohabitation of herbs and vegetables, and some talk about the role that knowledge of simple remedies plays in traditional education.  There's also a bit of discussion of the difficulty of preserving a garden as a historic landscape.  Most interesting reading!

I will later edit this post with a photo of Magnolia Plantation Gardens' Scriptural planting, so stay tuned.

A Perspective on Multi-Use Landscape Management

"I sometimes think it's not enough to be concerned with just the restoration of a building.  I also try to think about what needs it will serve.  So I become an advocate for these existing buildings, and instead of just restoring them, I create a program for them that makes them more valuable than they've ever been to their community."

-- Theaster Gates, Jr., who has turned abandoned homes in his downtrodden Chicago neighborhood, Greater Grand Crossing, into an art library, a set of historical music listening rooms, and an African-American cinema museum ... and plans more such re-purposings.

Source: Walser, L. (2012, Spring).  Theaster Gates, Jr. is restoring his community, one house at a time. Preservation, p. 8.

Advance in endangered orchid cultivation shows the fungal benefits of native soils in undisturbed forests

"The team ... planted and tracked three U.S. orchid species -- all present in the East and endangered somewhere in the country -- in six study sites: three in younger forests, which were 50 to 70 years old,  and three in older forests, which were 120 to 150 years old .... Older forests, McCormick and her colleages found, had about five to 12 times more orchid-friendly fungi than younger forests, and the fungi in older forests were more diverse."

-- Carrie Madren for Scientific American on Melissa McCormick's Smithsonian Environmental Research Center team, whose work has helped to demonstrate that, even on a microscopic level, old-growth forests are a superior habitat for preserving native endangered species. 

Learn more about the experiment here.

Source: Madren, C. (2012, April).  Picky eaters club: Fungi that orchids need to grow are just as finicky as the exotic flowers themselves.  Scientific American, 306, p. 16.

Series Teaser: Woodland Edge Plantings in the South

This blog will probably always be updated more in the spring and the fall, since those are the Southern garden's pretty-and-interesting seasons.  However, all the seeds are finally, finally in the ground (with luck, they'll come in next year even if this year was way too late ... heck, who knows, in a normal year this might have been good timing ... and we still have a fall planting of milkweed and Sweet Joe Pye weed to do in probably early October).

There's a gardening report to come once I finish learning my part as Floride (it's pronounced fleur-REED) Calhoun for our Meet the Pendletonians event (it's $3 a carload tomorrow at Ashtabula! Join us!), and an upcoming series that I think will be of interest to everyone who loves history or works in landscape management.  Here's a teaser.

This is what the woodland edge, where the plantation grounds suddenly stop and yield to a tangle of dappled-shade growth, looks like in late spring in the Upstate:

This, on the other hand, is how a plantation's woodland edge grows in the Low Country, near Charleston:

 

Note the actual presence of palmettos and the rich, goopy, gorgeous, organically-rich black soil.  Does anyone else kinda want to roll around in it, or is that just me?

Rainy Days and Five-Point Stars

I've been desperately wanting to get into the garden and put the rest of the seeds in the ground -- yes, this is belated, but I'm hoping it'll still be okay, since in normal years plants do things like go dormant and die of frost in the beginning of April, not go limp from heat.  We've had a bizarre year where few things ever bothered to go dormant and the spring ephemerals all bloomed around Christmastime, so I'm telling myself the weirdness isn't my fault.  The seeds will come out of stratification and go in the ground when we get back from Charleston next week.

Anyway.  I've been wanting to garden, but yesterday there was a wedding and today it's raining in a steady drumming fall, so it's not happening.  Instead, I designed a new little graphic for the sidebar, which you can see over on the left.

I've never done design for an entire website and I wouldn't dare try (this blog has a free Blogger layout with some tweaking).  If I ever start an independent domain I'll hire a real designer; it makes a massive difference.  However, it's not actually hard to design your own small graphics for a blog or for a frame website like Etsy or Ebay, provided you have some free time, an eye for color, and a free program like GIMP. So I made the graphic with two hours of fiddling around in GIMP from a very nice photograph of an Anemone virginiana bloom with a bee on top, which I found on Wikimedia Commons.

This Anemone species -- tall thimbleweed -- is sort of Woodburn's herb garden mascot, so to speak.  Here's why:

1. It's an upstate native that thrives even in conditions of neglect -- just like the house itself.
2. It attracts native pollinators -- which is an important purpose of the garden.
3. It offers medicinal benefits that were historically important -- while many anemones are poisonous, this one is used in wound poultices and to treat that most Victorian of diseases, tuberculosis (consumption).

There's also a more personal or symbolic reason.  I wanted to include a plant in the landscape that had a clear five-petaled shape.  Five-pointed stars are important in Woodburn's architectural iconography (read more about this here).  The original moldings around the interior doors and windows feature an inverted Federal star at the corners, as you can see in this photo from the drawing room:

 Five-pointed stars or pentacles with the point downward (though they've been adopted as a symbol by Satanists today) are a semi-common good-luck symbol found in the architecture of Charleston-style plantation houses.  They're usually tipped downward, much as lucky horseshoes are placed with the curve down in order to "catch" good fortune.

However, Woodburn also sits at the center of a natural pentacle.  Its original documents describe it as being placed at the apex of five ridges, which are roughly shown in this pretty diagram I just made in MS Paint:

While the eastern ridge has been lost to industrial grading, I suspect the remaining ones may be even more obvious from the air now than they would have been in the 1830s, because untended woodland now fills the gaps between them pretty thoroughly.  I've walked three of the remaining four -- our compost pile is actually about where the "a" in "along" is, there at the top of the diagram -- and this feature of the landscape remains intact.

Superstitious, maybe, but I have a feeling that Woodburn, as a house conscious of its years of neglect, might be rather happy to have someone add this symbol back into its surroundings.  Who knows; maybe the stars will catch some luck for our garden project and the seeds will flourish despite being planted so late.

Stuff in the Garden: Pink Wood Sorrel

A note which has absolutely nothing to do with anything: As I write this post, I'm sitting in my friend Cindi's backyard next to the maple tree, periodically tossing toys for her terriers, wearing a long skirt and a broad-brimmed hat, working on my laptop while sipping from a plastic tumbler of iced tea mixed with a generous dollop of fuzzy navel.  Am I a real Southerner yet?

Anyway, back to a much colder day in February.

"What's the clovery thing?" Megan asked me as we poked gingerly through the fluffy fennel.

I confessed I didn't know, but pointed out, "there's more there ... and there ... oh, God, if this is really a hardy clover, we'll never kill it."

We had to wait for flowers at the end of March in order to positively identify it, during which time we went on calling it "clovery thing" -- but it's not clover, and we'll still probably never kill it.  But at least that's something we're happy about now.  In fact, it's a welcome addition to this old Southern garden's herb list.

The clover-like perennial mounder with tender, three-lobed green leaves turned out to be a wood sorrel -- either pink wood sorrel, Oxalis articulata, or violet wood sorrel, Oxalis violaceae.  Obviously we'd prefer the latter, as that garden-friendly shamrock relative is a native forb beloved of bees and other pollinators, but we should be so lucky.  However, judging by the stubby petals and darker centers of the flowers, it's not Florida's plaguing invasive creeping northward, so we're letting it be either way.

 Pink wood sorrel at Woodburn, late April.

At Woodburn, the Pinckney, Adger, and Smythe families might have used their wood sorrel in teas to soothe a mild fever.  Slaves and tenant farmers might have plucked a few stems when going to work in the hot sun -- the lemon-bitters flavor of the crunchy edible herb quenches thirst, so it would have tided them over between drinks of water.


Click below for more about the cultivation and cultural uses of wood sorrel, as well as links to wood sorrel recipes both modern and Victorian, plus an embarrassing picture of the blogger!

Herb Gardens for Wildlife

I've found a couple of reassuring (and purpose-affirming!) projects lately, and thought the links might be useful to other organic gardeners with similar numbers of landscape uses to balance.

First of all, the UK's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) offers this article about the wildlife value that can be included in planned herb gardens with floral borders -- which is exactly what we want to cultivate at Woodburn.

Also, I was skimming through May's issue of Southern Living (since Megan and I are currently dog-sitting for one of our coworkers and she left us her garden magazines) when I was suddenly arrested by a gorgeous spread showing a formal garden yielding to a wild wetland yielding to an agricultural field.

The article was about Virginia's Kendale Farm, an 1830s-1880s farm house on the Rappahannock which boasts a splendid formal garden with a curving walkway based on Monticello's, and persists as a working farm growing three major crops, and is a National Wildlife Federation certified wildlife habitat (there was even a sidebar in the magazine about the four requirements of food, water, shelter, and places to raise young), and presents educational opportunities (the owners have an arrangement with local schools to allow student wetland exploration).

It's incredibly heartening to see a landscape that successfully incorporates a historical home, functional agriculture, pesticide-free gardening for wildlife, edible landscaping, formal gardening in the English Enlightenment mode, native grasses, a cut-flower garden, and educational space -- in such a heartstoppingly gorgeous and seamless way.

Pick up May's issue of Southern Living if you can, or I've found a few pictures you can browse online.  Here is a writeup in the county's historical home listing with a gorgeous sketch of the home; here is a post on the landscape designer's company blog; here is a photo album on the landscape designer's Facebook page.

And as for me, I'm going to keep those links in my Firefox toolbar to remind myself that what we're attempting on such a small scale at Woodburn is not only possible, but incredibly beautiful when done right.

Woodburn: Herptile Haven?

It looks as though our friend, the five-lined skink, has a girlfriend!

The female is a little larger and less dramatically lined, but as I was lying on the stone bench a week ago, hoping my back would stop providing such exciting shivery sensations after I used a shovel instead of a pitchfork to spread leaf mulch, a pair of skinks rippled down the carriage house wall, paused briefly to stare at this largeish mammal hulking in their environment, and then crossed to the dripstone beside the cabin for a drink.  I don't know what skink mating rituals look like, but to my eyes they definitely seemed to be hangin' out.

She was kind enough to let me stalk her for pictures, but since I left the camera on the ottoman, I'm stuck with grainy cell phone shots instead of Megan's clear, precisely framed photographs, which are what usually appear here.

Even pixellated, she's a pretty creature.

A similarly bold vertebrate startled me early in the mulching process by rustling rapidly past my hand.  I withdrew quickly, thinking it might be a rat destined to be afternoon tea for a Herbert (I like rats in theory, but know better than to get close to wild ones in practice), and examined the ground -- to find this fellow!

 

Based primarily on location and lack of distinct cranial ridges (source), I'm going to tentatively identify him as a Fowler's toad, Bufo fowleri.

He seems to live under one of the rocks of the retaining wall behind Quadrant II (where the tomatoes and marigolds will hopefully be giving way to black cohosh and milkweed next year), so I hope he likes leaf mulch.

Come to think of it, one of the Herberts will still probably eat him if he goes too close to the cabin, but here's hoping he'll thrive.

A Short History of the Garden Hoe

Hoeing the garden is both wonderful and awful for me.  On the one hand, it clears a lot of space in a short time without compacting the soil too much.  On the other hand, it makes me feel like a pathetic weakling: I have short arms, so it's difficult for me to position myself to use it without quickly becoming exhausted.  This is ridiculous, because hoeing is apparently one of the things that Jane Edna Hunter was doing for thirty cents a day on this very property in the 1890s, when she was in her early teens.

Nonetheless, the hoe is awesome.

 Sorry, plow, but at this scale, you just don't compare.

The invention of the hoe, a simple but highly efficient tool, is said to have taken place in the fifth century BC, but the kings of the Chinese Zhou dynasty were issuing coins in the shape of miniature bronze hoes (since bronze tools were a common medium of exchange) a century earlier (source).  They're also mentioned in the Book of Isaiah in about 8000 BCE, but this may be an artifact of translation.  The oldest one I can find photographs of is a Roman sarculum from 2000 BCE (see photos in the collection of Smith College here).

If you don't have a hoe, you have to do it like this.  And yes, that's me (Chelsea).

The simple hoe, with a flat edge and a wide blade, is called a Dego hoe, but no one seems to know why (if you do, please leave me a comment to let me know!).  The long handle of the typical hoe is a necessity; in fact, a 1975 decision by the California Supreme Court banned short-handled hoes from use in agriculture because of the crippling back injuries they can cause laborers (source).  Those involved in that decision saw short hoes as a way to keep Mexican field workers living humble, stooped-over lives.  I have the urge to sort through our collection of period photos of Woodburn to see what length of hoe the sharecroppers there were using, but I don't think we have any agricultural photos.  I'll check.

The hoe is also responsible for one of those quintessential colonial American dishes: the hoecake.  Hoecakes are made from cornmeal and were a staple food of early American colonizers "from Newfoundland to Jamaica" (Wikipedia).  Supposedly they're called johnny cakes if you go a bit further Yankee-ward, but I'm not sure I believe this, since the term "johnny cake" was recorded in 1739 as the name that South Carolinian African-Americans used to refer to a Native American baked cornmeal cake -- and the Haw Branch Plantation cookbook records it as being called a hoe cake in Virginia.  These were probably eaten by the tenant farmers at Woodburn; you can achieve the same effect with this recipe from Hillbilly Housewife.

Happy hoeing!

Wildlife at Woodburn: Snakes, Swallowtails, and Skinks

One of our secondary goals of the herb garden at Woodburn is to make it relatively wildlife-friendly, so we were delighted at the end of April to see quite a few little friends in the garden area!

First off was this handsome fellow, who is working on a nice cocoon on the side of our wren house:

 

A bit of Googling (this is a useful site, but not complete; we found it here) reveals the little dude to be a black swallowtail, Papilio polyxenes.  We're well within the Eastern black swallowtail's large native range.  He was probably attracted by our pesticide-free and insanely fluffy fennel; they're also called parsley worms, since they feed on plants in the carrot family (including parsley, fennel, and dill).  While we'd like some wrens to live in the wren house one day, we're only too happy for him to camp out here while it's going spare, so we'll leave him be and see if he continues to spin.

More after the jump, but warning for those squeamish about reptiles:

Gardening Report: Hoeing, Oh God So Many Gladiolus, and ... Tomatoes?

I must regretfully report that the race against time has been lost to gladiolus.

Note: Since this is my first Gardening Report post, I was seriously contemplating backdating posts to fill in since last February ... but then I realized that they would all read, "We pulled weeds, fought mightily against the oregano, and moved gladiolus.  The end," and it just wouldn't be interesting.  So we'll start last Thursday, a stormy Thursday toward the end of April, and work our way up from here.

 A pretty moment around 3:00, sandwiched between thunderstorms.  Ah, the early Southern summer.

Also, as of a couple of weeks ago, I am fully prepared to declare the hoe to be the most important invention of mankind short of the laptop computer.  But more on this later.  Back to gladiolus.

Woodburn's garden is absolutely filled with heirloom gladiolus (gladioli? ... glads).  At some point, someone seems to have planted them along the southern border of the garden, and they have now mounted a hostile takeover.  In my experience, gladiolus don't flower unless they're extremely happy with their location, but when they are ... ohhh brother.

On the upside, gladiolus are an absolutely stunning tall element in a summer garden.  

On the downside, they don't belong in this one.

The time to transplant gladiolus is after they've flowered.  However, if we'd waited that long, we wouldn't have been able to see the garden for the gladiolus, so we've been digging them and moving them to the edges.  Since these flowers get insanely tall (though heirloom glads are shorter than hybrids, some of ours are looking me in the eye already), we'd like them to serve as a border to stop people treading on the plants.  Transplanting the gladiolus is a tedious process, because it involves disentangling the corms (roots) from one another and from the roots of the crabgrass that has also moved in.  It also means that they probably won't grow again until next year, since gladiolus don't like to be disturbed after they've put up leaves.

If they've put up not just leaves but flowers, however, moving the glads can kill them.  It takes a lot of energy for bulbs (and corms) to flower, and they need the photosynthesis time afterward to build up energy for next year's flowers.

Sometime in the first half of April when M and I were horribly ill, they've flowered.  We have lost this battle for time.  But we will win the war ... when they're done flowering.

Scores for 4/27/12

Heirloom Tomatoes Planted: 3
Other Plants Planted: 5
Types of Seeds Planted: 4
Wheelbarrows Added to Compost: 1
Wheelbarrows of Soil Returned to Garden: 1
Horribly Painful Thorny Weeds Grasped: 3
Tree Saplings Removed: 4

Things on the To-Do List Now:

- plant the seeds currently cold-stratifying in the refrigerator
- plant the foxglove, thimbleweed, chamomile, and catnip seeds
- prune the fennel again
- continue policing for oak saplings
- moisten the compost heap
- plant marigolds near the tomatoes
- build tomato cages out of sticks

Things to Be Done at Some Point which Is Not Now:

- move the rest of the glads
- dig the pond
- do something about the brick path sliding down the hill

More photos and tales of seeding, including the question of why on earth we're planting tomatoes, after the jump!

How it All Began

"Who's in charge of the herb garden?" I idly asked our volunteer director, E.  It was a ridiculously cold day in February, and my partner and I were shivering under fleece hats and winter coats behind the gift shop table.  A few yards down Woodburn's long, sloping lawn, a reenactor was telling Gullah folk tales; to her right, an enthusiastic quilter chatted with customers about her techniques.  Another reenactor's voice boomed inside the historic cabin.  It was the Pendleton Historic Foundation's annual African-American Heritage Day at Woodburn Plantation (which isn't actually a plantation), and it was early enough in the year that I could still look at a 15-by-15 patch of scrub and think there might actually be someone in charge of it.

 But hey, daffodils, you guys!

E explained to me that every couple of years, some master gardener comes to her offering to take it over, at which point she gives them $40 and never sees them again.

Restoring a historical herb garden at a nineteenth-century home was just entirely too much temptation for a girl whose garden consists of a strange collection of South Carolina native plants growing on a second-floor deck with northern exposure.

I went away deep in thought, conferred briefly with my partner, and came back to E:  "I'm not a master gardener, just an enthusiastic amateur, but I work Monday afternoons right across the street, and I drive in with Megan, so I have nothing to do Monday mornings.  Want me to clean that up?"

She showed me which key opened the garden shed.