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.