The Fifth Season

September 26, 2014 by Frederick in Gardening

The gardens in which I have spent time have distinct peaks. In maritime climates it is surely mid summer—the warmest months during which the days are long but not terribly hot and everything gently blooms. Winter in the tropics has the consistent charm of fooling the senses, although I find palms melancholic on those days when a cold front nudges perilously near. It is the continental climate, however, which has the most dramatic time of year. There are five or six weeks shared between September and October when summer barrels into autumn and neither gives an inch of ground. And while this fifth season might make dressing difficult, it does produce some of the better moments in the garden.

This is the best time for produce. Tomatoes are associated with high summer, but the best I’ve had hung heavily on the vine through September. Tender zucchinis and cucumbers give way to hardier winter squashes, although both seem to fight for room in the farmer’s bins at market. Robust greens begin appearing, many as tender, immature versions ideal for raw salads. My herb garden goes wild; tarragon becomes leggy, thyme ranges about desultorily, rosemary, after politely occupying a modest corner of the planter, doubles itself in a macho display of preparedness for the cold. Basil is the best though. It has flowered and grown woody, a wild and weed-like shadow of its lush, midsummer self. Many people pull their basil out after it bolts; I still eat it though, its sweet, herbaceous profile having turned metallic and almost curry-like.

The official flower of the fifth season is the hardy mum, a cold-resistant and late-blooming cultivar of the Chrysanthemum. These fly from the shelves of garden centers like pumpkin-spice lattes the weekend following the first cool-snap. I adore mums, but I am an inveterate cynic—the sort who grumbles beneath his breath at the sight of apple orchards that sell pre-picked bags of apples alongside carnival rides and artificially-flavored apple donuts. Autumn can’t be commodified! It would be sad to cheapen the mum into little more than a brief, autumnally colored caprice. I prefer to plant mums early in spring in a sunny but protected spot with good drainage. They will remain green and uninteresting until fall, when the shorter days and longer nights lights some deeply encoded chemical fuse that explodes in burgundy and amber come October. To maximize the effect, new growth should be regularly pruned through spring and summer, encouraging a denser plant with more buds.

Speaking of pruning, the fifth season is ideal for lazily wandering between plants snipping here, trimming there. I’m not suggesting serious work though; real pruning is best done to shrubs in the spring so as to encourage compact and even growth. Actually pruning isn’t even the right word. Most of what gets removed is already dead, like fully spent blooms, wind-snapped stalks or annuals that have punched themselves out. I don’t work up a sweat, and if I feel one coming on I go back to the house for a refill. But it isn’t all pastoral bliss; sometimes a tough decision needs to be made. Annuals that straggle despite facing certain death deserve a quick and dignified end. A sharp spade to the root ball should do it.

The exclamation point at the end of all this sputtering life and solemn decay is the bonfire. I collect a season’s worth of trimmings and scraps, and despite late-summer’s frequent squalls, the mound is brittle tinder come the end of the fifth season. A good bonfire will burn evenly and predictably if care is taken in its construction. The foundation must be the lightest and driest material, followed by increasingly substantial layers of sticks, branches, scrap wood and logs, all steepled and interlocked so air may pass through and feed the boiling center. But the vital ingredient is patience; igniting the pyre on an evening when summer still hovers on the air has the syrupy effect of Auld Lang Syne a month too early. Resist the first few cool evenings until certain autumn has firmly taken root; the reward is the fifth season’s last and most magnificent bloom.

License to Grow

June 26, 2014 by Frederick in Food, Gardening

A planter of herbs is a virtually skill-free endeavor.

Growing herbs has always seemed to me one of those activities best practiced by the newly enthusiastic—the college student who has made the leap from dorm to apartment, or the young couple who finally gives in to suburbia. Is there a better symbol for starting fresh than a window planter that quickly becomes abundant with edible verdancy? Though real cooking happens everyday in our house, I’ve always just bought whatever fresh herbs I have needed along with the other ingredients. I think this had more to do with convenience than cynicism.

Two years ago I was given a pot of English thyme. I was going to clip the whole bunch of tender shoots and use them that night on a roast chicken, but for one reason or another it was forgotten. A few days later, out of pity or curiosity, I planted it alongside some Coleus and Celosia. I was amazed to find it had almost doubled in size by the end of the week, and by the end of the following I was clipping strands to thin the growth and using the fragrant leaves wherever I could. The realization for me wasn’t that herbs are good—I have been adamant about including fresh ones in most of what I cook for years. The abundance was the revelation.

The following year, alongside thyme, I planted basil, rosemary, tarragon and parsley. They flourished like weeds. Which taught me my first lesson about herbs: they do not require any skill to cultivate. They want to spread and thicken, especially basil and parsley, which very quickly dominate a planter, sometimes to the detriment of less vigorous herbs. If you have ground, put those there, saving planter space for thyme, tarragon and rosemary where they will receive unobstructed air and light.

The only maintenance needed (other than water) is thinning—a regular harvesting which is the sole reason for planting herbs anyway. Woody herbs, like thyme and rosemary, will need a pair of snips; basil, parsley and tarragon are tender enough to pluck with fingertips—just be sure not to disturb the root structure. I like to take a combination of new growth, which is usually found at the top, and inner, older growth from the center or the interior. This practice is not just for the health of the plant; the combination of tender, new herbs and more mature ones provides the full range of flavor in a dish.

All this abundance requires recipes that star herbs rather than calling for them as a mere seasoning. A salad of herbs and something more neutral, like butter lettuce, can be a very refreshing start to a meal. Tarragon and parsley are the main ingredients in Green Goddess Dressing—that 1920’s classic. And packing herbs onto a piece of meat before roasting is rarely a miss. But if the herbiest punch is desired, little approaches pesto. To make a good one, strike the gloppy, buffet horrors and mix-and-match noodle/sauce restaurants from your memory, focusing instead on the name itself. Pesto is derived from the italian verb to pound or crush, inspired by the original mortar and pestle method. From Provence to Genoa preparations call for various herbs, nuts, cheeses and oils—not out of wild experimentation, but based upon availability, that most crucial of ingredients.

Basil Pesto

Wash a few handfuls of freshly plucked basil. Dry. Toast a small handful of pine nuts or walnuts in a dry pan. Let cool. With a vegetable peeler, fill a small ramekin with strips of a hard cheese, like Pecorino or Grana Padana. Place nuts and basil in mortar and grind in circular motion until a fairly uniform paste is achieved. Grate in a pinch of fresh garlic. Slowly incorporate extra virgin olive oil, about half a cup total, mixing continuously with pestle. Grind in cheese.

The Shrewdest Shrub

May 25, 2014 by Frederick in Gardening, Home

I wonder if the display of boxwood is some sort of code for quality within. When in an unfamiliar place, one can bet the lunch money that the cafe with the boxwood planters will do the best oeuf poché, and would a lousy hotel really maintain a healthy boxwood border in its courtyard? Of course lesser establishments have caught on to this unspoken signal, and the display of convincing faux shrubberies has confused the matter somewhat. I’m surely not the only one to have pinched a suspect leaf on occasion to determine the true character of a proprietor.

If thickly matted ivy connotes permanence, boxwood, lush and neatly kept, signifies order, elegance and propriety. We plant ivy when we wish to relinquish control; the cultivation of boxwood is a statement of intent—living evidence to our audience that we wish to carve some rich order into our immediate environment. Not that boxwood is particularly expensive or high maintenance. One could just as well plant a few and permit them to grow leggy and wild. But this seems unlikely--boxwood almost wills its owner into action.

Happily, pruning is a deeply rewarding activity. And the tools are exciting. A proper boxwood border is going to need real hand shears with 18 inch blades, preferably serrated, and sturdy, offset handles. It takes a certain fearlessness to lay into a handsome row of boxwood, but as long as the cuts are kept to the exterior foliage, and not the interior stem structure, that gusto will be rewarded with the emergence of a rough form. While intricate spirals and severe geometrics seem appealing, enthusiasm for their upkeep will wane, and what could be sadder than a novelty shrubbery grown shaggy with neglect? I recommend the soft rectangle; it has the linear character for which boxwoods are famous with a roundness that forgives those Saturdays when pruning falls several rungs below shining shoes or ironing shirts.

Once a rough form is established, fine-tuning is best accomplished with a pair of topiary snips. These should be spring-activated and sharp for cutting through wayward and woody offshoots, and operable with one hand as you'll need the other to brush the snipped pieces to the ground. Mine look as if they were willed to me by some green-thumbed great grand-father; I’m not ashamed to admit that’s why I bought them from a fancy design store. I have both small snips and curved hand-shears—both make fast work of refining the boxwood’s rough shape, and with fewer snips than one might expect a polished line will appear.

Pruning is a strange cycle though. Removing foliage encourages new growth, and those fresh shoots might not mature enough before the first frost. So I prune in Spring, soon after the first new buds develop. This, I must admit, requires a strong constitution; lopping off this innocent and tender growth seems criminal. Persevere though: the only way to encourage density and uniformity is to prune. Of course over-pruning can be problematic too, creating too dense a shell while starving the interior of air and light.

Fearlessness, form, patience, perseverance, harmony—boxwood disperses some aerated cocktail of these qualities in its immediate environment. While handy in determining the better place for brunch, those who cultivate it at home soon learn boxwood’s real value: encouraging these same qualities in its owner.

Ivy the Terrible

March 04, 2014 by Frederick in Home, Gardening

This innocent tendril will one day strangle my neighbor's ficus.

I’m really more of a boxwood person, but I must admit a certain nostalgic delight when I see old-growth ivy. And by ivy I am speaking of English Ivy, of the Hedera family. This is important; most of what we see in this country, though commonly referred to as Boston Ivy, is in reality closely related to the grape vine—a different type of creeper altogether. In fact, and I’m sure to put some backs up when I say this, Wrigley Field’s luxuriously green outfield wall isn’t, if we want to be precise, “ivy-covered.” It’s covered in a pleasant mixture of Boston and Japanese Bittersweet. And I can’t speak for each institution comprising the Ivy League, but I imagine much of the building foliage is of the Boston rather than the English variety. One might just assume the “creeping-grape-vine league” didn’t quite have the same cache.

Nostalgia aside, Boston Ivy (of University and outfield fame) is the far handsomer species, with its broad, waxy leaves that ripen to majestic hues as the season turns. Boston Ivy uses gentle suckers to quickly establish itself, and can be trained and cut back with ease. It is decorative and almost geometric when allowed to flourish, and can be a pleasure to propagate.

Evergreen: Hedera can weather even harsh winters.

By contrast, the English stuff (Hedera) is far woodier, with smaller, tougher leaves, usually outlined in cream, and punctuated by the occasional cluster of mildly toxic berries. It chooses to climb in the cruelest way a creeper can; Hedera forces its tendrils into the crevices of structures, or trees, or fences, or whatever meekly shares its space, swelling each to gain its purchase. Once established, it coils itself tightly with little regard for its host. Mighty, 200-year old oaks succumb to Hedera by way of a five-year strangulation. Given time, Hedera will peel the roof from a house. It is the ivy that will cover the planet after we are gone.

Hedera is also the ivy of my childhood, when I spent summers tramping through Wepre Wood, in Flintshire, Wales. This is a medieval wood, with cold, running brooks, and deep, unfound creases. There is a 13th century castle, and a modest waterfall said to be haunted by a murdered nun. And everywhere ivy: roots with the girth of tree trunks, impenetrable thickets obscuring the geography, and groping new growth, blindly searching every rock face. In one favorite spot the ivy ran in a tangled mass up a sheer dirt bank, enticing my cousins and me to use its sinuous offshoots to pull ourselves to the top. There it would thin out, desultory, blanketing a clearing, and for a moment, appear harmless. But I knew better; it was both lord and tenant of those old woods, and had been for a thousand years. When those summers would end, and it would suddenly be time to return to the States, I would desperately consider hiding a cutting in my backpack. I imagined it would sprout, and soon spread, lending its wildness to the tame and immature woods behind our house.

And this is the point really about English ivy. It possesses an implied longevity that we all recognize, and some of us admire. The oldest, gnarliest specimens suggest time has passed not in years, but over generations. When it has overrun a structure, thickly matting the architecture, it can be thoroughly transformative. No longer do we see a building that has been erected and then covered. Instead we encounter something that has risen from the earth, pulling the ground cover with it, and through unknown mantle forces, has established itself in a field.

Growing it though is another matter entirely. If it takes hold it will most certainly kill something, and if denied that pleasure, it will find a fence to dismember or a perfectly good shed to warp. Of course, if these things don’t bother you, then there is really no substitute for suggesting permanence. I bought a few pots of it several summers back with just this idea in mind—an ugly, barren wall needed cover. It died within nine months. And with that passing I had learned two more lessons of this ancient species. One, hedera needs something to crush or strangle. Give it a trellis at the very least. Secondly, do not buy hedera. Instead, find the oldest hedera-covered building in your area, and when no one is looking, relieve it of a cutting. Hedera is an unruly thing, and somehow it seems to appreciate when its benefactor is also willing to run a little wild.