The 3,000 Mile Garden by Roger Phillips & Phillips Roger

Author:Roger Phillips & Phillips, Roger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Reference, Nature, Leslie Land, Roger Phillips, The 3, 000 Mile Garden: An Exchange of Letters Between Two Eccentric Gourmet Gardeners, Penguin (Non-Classics), 0140254471, Gardening, Gardening/Plants, Gardening / General, Literary Collections / Essays, General
Publisher: Roger Phillips
Published: 2010-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

Do you remember the toronjil, the Mexican marvel that grows right next to the Joe Pye weed, the thing that looks like mimosa but isn’t? It closes at night but doesn’t close at the touch. Tiny bluish leaves with a beautiful delicate red edge, and good sized, eventually gets to about four feet though this year I don’t think it will on account of the drought. I got it to flower last year for the first time because I potted one and put it in the greenhouse. it made extremely petite flowers which I remember, probably inaccurately, as a kind of purply-pink but it did not make seeds. I’m sorry I forgot to put it in anything I cooked while you were here. It has a unique, delicious, lemon/pepper/camphor scent, but only when very Fresh. The perfume dissipates within hours and the dried herb is dust. Perhaps that’s why it isn’t better known. Seed, purportedly collected by Zapotecs in southern Oaxaca, Mexico, is from J. L. Hudson, P.O. Box 1058, Redwood City, Cal. 94604.

The Gaura (Gaura lindheimeri) is just beginning, barely, to bloom and its—honesty compels me to say rather weedy-looking arching arms are reaching out. They do go well with all of those low matte things, though, because they put in a little bit of height. All of the white bee balm (Monarda didyma “Snow Maiden”) is blooming. The white is not strong, it’s not like the white of the lavatera next to it (Lavatera “Mont Blanc”), which is a very pure, intense, laundry-line white sheet white that just shines from the bushes. The monarda continues to be dark green on the old growth and chartreuse on the new growth and brown and silver where the painted lady butterflies are all over it. They really are having a good time whereas the bees appear uninterested.

The datura which was so paltry a month ago is now beginning to bloom. It’s the nameless one from my neighbor. Very low and bushy, not one of those big majestic items and I’m sorry to say it’s not particularly fragrant so I guess it isn’t metaloides, though the leaves are very blue. Enormous great white trumpety flowers, though, big even for datura, that are perhaps most striking before they open. You get a long calyx, maybe four or five inches, out of which the flower rises and the flower is very long too, a cream color before it opens to white. It’s a perfect closed whirl with five sharp points and then very very slowly they unfold and unwind themselves.

The Nicotiana sylvestris is also starting; at this point what I mostly have is fragrance and suggestion but the big flat leaves promise monstrous plants; as far as I can tell it will probably be just at its apotheosis when I leave for New York. The poison I knuckled under and put some on the roses seems effective. They’re covered with buds but i don’t yet know if the thrips have e been conquered.

In the

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