trollope caves

In trollope galop, I wrote that Anthony Trollope's autobiography was "stashed on my Kindle,"* and not long afterward I started dipping into it. I'll admit that there are some long tedious sections, but along the way I have been moved to read two more of Trollope's novels: Orley Farm and The Way We Live Now. I just started on The Vicar of Bullhampton and am relishing the pace.

Trollope's definition of the novel is something like: "development of character over time."** Though he claims not to plan his plots, each character's story emerges and will be told as long as the author maintains his self-imposed writing schedule.

Much of Trollope's autobiography is taken up with detailing his literary standards and commenting on his contemporaries (he loves Thackeray, hates Disraeli, respects George Eliot, etc.). So far (and I think I am about two-thirds of the way through), one anecdote of Trollope's life has made me laugh out loud, and I must retell it.

After taking an early retirement from the Post Office Department in 1864, Trollope increased the rate of his literary output. Whenever he was in London for more than a day, he would write at his club, The Athenaeum. One afternoon when he was working on The Last Chronicles of Barset, two clergymen came into the room, sat down by the fire, and proceeded to discuss Trollope's novels. The author, of course, perked up his ears and listened very carefully while the two reverend gentlemen complained that he re-used the same old characters too often. In particular, they found Mrs. Proudie (the Bishop's wife introduced in Barsetshire Towers) to be most objectionable. Trollope was incensed. He stood up, introduced himself, and said something like: "Very well. If you don't like Mrs. Proudie I shall kill her off within the week!"

Accordingly, Mrs. Proudie's death scene is horrific. After orchestrating her sudden massive heart attack, and allowing several other characters to feel relieved by her passing, Trollope felt quite guilty, and was haunted regularly by Mrs. Proudie's restless ghost.

Personally, I love the way characters and places recur in Trollope's novels. I am happy to learn that Bullhampton is near the Chiltern estate, which I recognize from the six-volume Pallisers series. I could have handled more of Mrs. Proudie, and in fact was disappointed when Obadiah Slope, her evil minion, left Barsetshire.

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* Now all of Trollope's 47 novels are stashed on my Kindle in a single volume.

** Not a verbatim quote, but this is not a term paper and I'm not going to look these things up.

bulbine by any other name

At least fifteen years ago, I rehearsed for a play reading at the hillside home of one of the other characters. I think his name might have been David, and will call him so for purposes of telling this story.

David had a large and diverse garden including many succulents. I was drawn to one I'd never seen before, a grassy-looking plant with round leaves about ten inches high, and sprays of tiny yellow or orange-and-yellow blossoms borne on slender stalks rising up to twenty inches above the tops of the leaves. The stalks were so slender, in fact, that the flowers seemed to float above the plants, giving the illusion that they were hovering butterflies or tiny birds.

I asked the name of this fascinating plant, and David said, "I don't know. We always call them the little orange and yellow things." He gave me a generous handful of cuttings, and said, "Don't tell Marsha! She wants some of these, but I've refused to give them to her." Marsha, a mutual friend, was also involved in the play reading but wasn't with us on that day.

The little orange and yellow things did beautifully in my garden, and after having been tried in various places they've pretty well filled up the narrow strip between our driveway and our neighbor's driveway, interspersed with dogbane, various aloes, jade plants, and lion's tail, which supports the orange part of the color scheme. From time to time, I would continue to search for the name -- on line, in books, and at nurseries -- but the little orange and yellow things just had to do.

And then late last fall I finally joined the local garden club and took my mystery plant for identification. "It's bulbine!" said our knowledgeable president, and sure enough -- Wikipedia's illustration was a perfect match for the yellow ones (with some of its 160 species native to South Africa and some native to Australia), while the bi-colored ones turned out to be the rarer Hallmark variety.

I can't say I like the name bulbine very much, and so I'm going to call mine asphodel after their more poetic relatives.

BTW, I recently offered little orange and yellow things to Marsha, but she wasn't interested. Maybe she'd like some asphodel.

invaders appeased

Last Saturday's garden tour, held on the day before Earth Day, was appropriately advertised as a 'green' garden tour. This epithet referred not so much to color as to sustainability. Indeed, plants with grey, blue, dark purple, or cream colored leaves were standouts among the water-wise cacti and succulents.

Politically and environmentally correct practices abounded: rain barrels, drip irrigation, hydroponics, permaculture, cob building techniques, etc. Birds, bees, and butterflies were attracted, invasive species repelled. Literature was distributed, but not lavishly, as attendees had been enjoined to follow interactive on-line maps to the garden sites. It was a day for feeling responsible and resolving to continue along one's righteous pathway, paved with permeable materials so as not to overburden the storm drains and pollute the ocean.

I picked up a few brochures and cards, including one on invasive plant species, a favorite topic on this blog during my recent wars on Sprenger asparagus fern and Confederate jasmine plus pre-blog struggles with Algerian ivy, plumbago, Cape honeysuckle, and Banks rose. But wait! This 'Weed Watch' campaign -- sponsored by the worthy California Invasive Plants Council, Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council, and SMSLRWMA -- includes nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus) among the species NOT to plant if we are to "Stop the Invasion" of plants that "fuel wildfires, degrade grazing land, contribute to soil erosion, clog streams and rivers, and increase the risk of flooding."

Having posted nasturtiums rampant just over a year ago, and being delighted with this year's stand of the cheery yellow and orange blossomers,* I took umbrage.

One of the things I love best about nasturtiums is that they are so easy to get rid of after they have run their course, or at any time they become tiresome (yes, it occasionally happens!) . Nasturtium roots are so inconsequential as to bring Marvell's On a Drop of Dew to mind: "How loose and easy hence to go, / How girt and ready to ascend."

I do not plant nasturtiums, but I welcome their annual invasion, in my garden and along the highways and byways. Sometimes appeasement seems appropriate.
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* My spell checker disapproves this word, but Yeats used it in the majestic Among School Children ("O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, / Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?") I can't resist a parody: "Nasturtium, small-rooted blossomer / your leaves and flowers feed my soul!"

paltry in pink

A little over a year ago, I complained about the limited range of color in my 2011 sweet pea crop, which had actually started blooming at the end of November 2010 with a dark purple volunteer and eventually produced a few pink flowers. The pink ones may have been volunteers, or may have come from the saved seed I'd planted. One thing is certain, however: there were absolutely NO Blue Celeste sweet peas to be seen. Alas! Blue Celeste was the one variety I'd planted out of a commercial seed packet.

After mulching the front garden lavishly with spent sweet pea vines, I thought I'd get a good showing of volunteers. Sure enough, as soon as the first rains came along in October, I saw sweet peas coming up among the naturalized freesias and calla lilies. Only two came up along the chain link fence where I'd planted sweet peas in the past, but, having read somewhere that it's okay to let sweet peas sprawl about on the ground, I decided to leave things as they were and not plant any sweet pea seeds for the fring-winter-spring season on 2011-12.

Now that April is more than half over, the volunteer sweet peas along the fence have barely started to bloom. They're pale pink, with short stems, and the vines are less than two feet tall. Nary a one of the sprawling sweet peas in the front garden has managed to bloom, but some are reaching over a foot long, so I haven't exactly given up hope. If they do bloom, they should deflect attention from the drying freesia leaves, and if they don't bloom, they'll continue to 'fix' nitrogen in their magically fabaceous way. This is a sort of "win-win" situation, but the score is not high.

Years ago (like in the late 70s when magazines came in the mail), Sunset Magazine informed me in a somewhat authoritarian tone that if I wanted sweet peas for Thanksgiving I should be ready to plant them in September. "Who wants spring flowers for a fall festival?" I asked myself. But after we put in our chain link fence, I was hooked on vines.

Though preoccupied with perennial sweet peas and the quasi-perennial hyacinth bean for the last couple of years, I must admit that I miss the conventional sweet pea's fragrant frilliness. In early October, I'll be out there with my saved seed and will even give Blue Celeste another chance

slimy surprise

Earlier this week I just about finished deadheading all the freesias and hyacinths in our front garden. It's a complex process and has required several sessions of work. We're talking about hundreds of snips here, with faded blossoms joining the perma-mulch and leaves left to dry in place while nourishing the bulbs and corms beneath.

After our recent rains, the floppy freesias tend to form an ugly sodden mass, and so I have developed a technique of lifting their leaves, trimming off the faded blossoms, giving the leaves a shake or two, and letting them fall. This exposes weeds -- petty spurge, oxalis, tufts of grass, and even the occasional Star of Bethlehem -- while fluffing up the dying freesias and making them look a little better during the wait for convolvulus mauritanicus and Mexican evening primrose to fill in.

Hyacinths' blossom stalks stand taller than those of freesias, and their glossy leaves stay dark green after the flowers fade, so deadheading them is easier. Nevertheless I started poking around in their foliage to look for weeds and -- voila!  -- found snails clinging to the undersides of hyacinth leaves. Since discovering Sluggo Plus two years ago, we have not had a problem with snails and slugs, but by the time I'd finished deadheading the hyacinths I'd found eight mature snails and trampled them gleefully in the gutter.

And now my morning ritual must include hyacinth leaf surveillance and land mollusk sacrifice, until the snails find safer places to wait out our summer dry spell. Three succumbed this morning.

noiseless, patient

I enjoy watching spiders, indoors and outdoors, at home and at cultural venues such as zoos and natural history museums. I try to set a good example for arachnophobic friends by transporting spiders gently outdoors instead of smashing them or sluicing them down the drain. I do try to stay away from the black widows and brown recluses, but tarantulas fascinate me.

The phrase "a noiseless patient spider" often comes to mind when I am watching spiders, and recently I felt an urge to know more about its origin and context. I turned first to the works of Emily Dickinson. Since she had written "a fly buzzed when I died" and "how public, like a frog." I assumed she must be my spider poet.

So wrong!

Walt Whitman wrote A Noiseless Patient Spider. This knowledge was strangely satisfying to me, because I've always liked Whitman's poetry much better than I've liked Dickinson's. Reading the whole poem, I was entranced by its tight structure and the parallelism of its two five-line stanzas: the first describing the spider in its "vacant vast surrounding" and the second making an analogy to the poet's soul, "Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them ...Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere."

Ah, the old microcosm / macrocosm theme! Of course I was reminded of Andrew Marvell's On a Drop of Dew, which for me is the quintessential 'metaphysical' poem. "Seeking the spheres to connect them," I moved on to William Blake's Auguries of Innocence, which starts: "To see a world in a grain of sand ... And eternity in an hour" but turns into a series of rants against cruelty at all levels, including "The wanton boy that kills the fly / Shall feel the spider's enmity."

And so I am brought back to spiders, and to my surprise that Walt Whitman had written A Noiseless Patient Spider. I think of Whitman as the poet of noise and impatience -- known for the "barbaric yawp," and "happiness, knowledge, not in another place, but this place—not for another hour, but this hour" Carol of Occupations, line 157).

I prize silence and spiders, but might never have thought of them together if I hadn't been stuck in this web of poetry.

tree revision

In Cyathea mater epiphiticorum, I wrote about tying a variety of epiphytic plants to the trunk of a dead tree fern that has stood in our front garden for years. I had started this experiment late last fall with two cuttings of basket plant (Callisia fragrans).

With almost daily misting from a spray bottle, the basket plant regularly produced new green leaves at its tips, while its older leaves turned a purplish red and then brown. The redness was caused by exposure to sun, while the crispy brown leaves were simply dead. As new growth slightly outpaced losses, I not only rejoiced in having remade a tree, but also added epiphyllums and epidendrums to the mix and  gave my creation its outrageous Latin name..

A couple of weeks ago, while cutting off dead leaves,  I noticed something sticking out of one of the basket plant stems. Curving to a sharp point, it looked like a parrot's beak, but in fact it was a whole new shoot of tightly furled leaves. Looking more closely, I saw that it was growing on a short piece of stem that had no other leaves. Evidently this stem had broken off one of the two original cuttings.

Delighted with the new growth, I looked critically at the tree as a whole and decided that the clumpy epiphyllums had to go. They had made absolutely no progress, and even if they had, they didn't seem compatible with the feathery basket plant. And so I untied several strips of the raggedy brown towel I'd used to tie the epiphytes to the tree fern trunk, removed and discarded the epiphyllums, and moved a sad epidendrum to a less obvious position.

Two delicate tillandsias of different sizes took the place of the rejected epiphyllums. Finally I added some strands of Spanish moss (actually a type of tillandsia) at the top of the trunk and the bottom of the basket plant stems.

Potentially, my recycled tree fern could bear five different colors of blossoms. I have never seen a basket plant in bloom, and would bet on the common epidendrum to be the first if not the only flower. But it's time for me to step back and let nature surprise me with whatever new growth my efforts may have fostered. Meanwhile, nasturtiums are creeping toward the base of the tree and will create their dependable bright orange accents.

Balanced between control and chance in this fascinating project, I feel uniquely ready for the equinox.