the miserable gardener

Thus Mark Twain, in a letter, describing the “sage-brush”, Artemisia tridentata. I respond to this effrontery, quite belatedly, by including a picture of same, which I took without bothering to focus. Point-and-shoot, indeed.

Of course our beloved author was merely posturing as an Eastern snob who was conditioned to think that if plants are not green, they are worthless. Never having lived in a place with regular summer rainfall, I feel just the opposite.

Technically, of course, the sagebrush is green, though the green is concealed by silvery hairs which reflect sunlight and possibly reduce evapotranspiration. Sagebrush is strongly mycorrhizal, meaning, to gardeners anyway, that soil amendments, fertilizers, etc., work against the plant. It wants to be grown in dirt.

There are several varieties, and also smaller species with the same look to them: Artemisia arbuscula and A. nova are two examples that are sometimes available in nurseries.

There is an excellent discussion of the plant in Hugh Mozingo’s Shrubs of the Great Basin: A Natural History, whence I lifted the Mark Twain quote. And this website with a bunch of sagebrush information.

The plant has a characteristic smell that Twain described as “not quite magnolia, and not quite polecat”. It is one of the most evocative smells I know, though it only reminds me of sagebrush.

Most gardeners living in rain-drenched parts of the world would give their eye teeth to have silver such as this in their garden, but here, in a climate perfectly in accord with its own, the plant is despised. There is a moral to this.

Raced to the plant sale at Denver Botanic Gardens, where it turns out I’m not working until tomorrow (those instructions again…..), but of course I had to go today because all the cool stuff had to be mine, and now it is.

When I got home, it started to rain, so I planted like a crazy person. Well, no, I planted like a gardener trying to get as many plants in the ground as possible before the rain really got serious, and that’s hardly a thing to call crazy. Gardeners are mostly the sanest of people.

The rain stopped, so I took some pictures.

Here is Paracaryum racemosum, a borage from Turkey. It’s new at the zoo. In fact, pretty much new to rock gardening.

And another member of the borage family, Echium amoenum. It has the very attractive habit of seeding all over the rock gardens.

And an iris. I believe this is Iris pallida U58B, or something equally romantically named. I know, it sounds like a German submarine. In 27 years of marriage, my wife and I only had two fights. One was over bearded iris. I know a lot of gardeners, and even more non-gardeners, who find the modern iris, with falls sticking straight out, and ruffles and horns and dimples and stuff, to be attractive, if not gorgeous, but I’m not one of those people. There were too many such things in the garden and I dug them all up and gave them away. I. pallida got to stay because it looks (and smells) like a real iris, and the foliage looks good all summer.

(The other fight we had was when she insisted you could smoke a salmon and a turkey in the same smoker at the same time. You can, but only the salmon is edible afterwards.)

Finally, Erysimum capitatum. I think this comes in other colors besides orange, but this one is orange. I’m not sure what I was focusing on when I took the picture, but it was something.