"Not With a Bang, but a Whimper"

A few years back, at the Catholic hospital I worked at, the Money Men (those CEO gunslingers who had replaced the Sisters as administrators) decided to do some staff pruning. One of the people they decided to cut was a venerable Nursing Supervisor in her sixties who had worked there over forty years. This woman still dressed in white uniforms and wore a white nursing cap. She was mother and grandmother to many, a true daughter of her church. And loyal to the hospital.

There was once a photo of her on the front page of the Tennessean newspaper. A photographer caught her as she talked to a member of the SWAT team on a night when a drunk showed up in the ER with a gun and shot up a couch in the waiting room.

She was not let go. The doctors stopped the hospital from deleting her. As a pulmonologist there told me"If this is the kind of thing we have to do to keep this hospital open, this hospital may not be worth keeping open".

A friend emailed me last night that this same hospital has once more brought out the shears. And these cuts will bleed.

The chaplains who worked the evening and night shifts are gone. The people who came to sit with dying patients, who came to calm distraught daughters, who came to listen to nurses conflicted about when to stop life support and when to go on-

Gone.

Meanwhile up in the Executive Suite it is all fresh flowers, clean carpets, pipe dreams about "market share".

If this is the kind of thing they have to do to keep the hospital open, maybe the hospital is not worth keeping open.

A Timely Bit of Doggerel

Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, had an idea for a prison where guards from one vantage point could see all their prisoners all the time.

He called it a "Pantopticon".

I dedicate this little piece of doggerel to the tireless folk at our beloved N.S.A, who are on a mission to turn our country into Bentham's prison, all the better to know which senators, Supreme Court Justices, and TV talking heads they can blackmail.

Here is to you N.S.A.! And a merry Fourth of July to you! May the Farce be with you-


Pantopticon- A Bit of Doggerel by ME.


To those who live in foggy fear

Of the Ever Eye, and the Government Ear

Consider this about the powers that be

The more they have to watch

the less they will see.

Collectors

People collect all sorts of things. One need only go to an estate sale or to our mother in laws' house to prove it. There are the Hummel figurines, the McCoy Pottery bowls, the old state license plates, a locked cabinet of bass plugs and fishing lures.

Till recently I worked with a woman who collected dolls.

Dolls of every size and vintage. Hundreds of dolls. She showed me the pictures.

There they were-in chairs, on the window seats, on a bed. Everywhere.

But not in her house. They were in their own little house, built by the woman's husband. Large enough for full grown people to walk around in, but private enough for the secret life of dolls. Who knows what they were up to when she was not looking-

A few weeks ago I went through an old trunk where I kept watercolor paints, pastels, old short stories never seen by anyone other than myself, and I found an old monograph on the David Austin roses that I had written twenty years ago for the Cheekwood Botanical Gardens here in Nashville.

I did not remember writing it, and did not realize I had saved it, but the first line I wrote took me back to my own collecting days.

"In my Bellevue garden", I wrote"I grow over two hundred fifty varieties of roses".

And I did. Until the trees I planted shaded the beds out. Until I began to be unfaithful with other plants.

Many gardeners have been afflicted with this mono-cultural monomania for roses ever since the first roses came out of Persia and China. It is a passion even the layman, the non-gardener can understand.

But other gardeners develop a taste for other plants not so admired by ordinary people.

The Plant Delights Nursery in North Carolina sells twenty plus varieties of Arisaema , otherwise known as Jack-in-the Pulpit. These are woodland plants, and if I had a shaded garden and room for them I might have a cluster of three or four of the common variety found in the eastern woods. This would be enough for me.

But to a collector, enough is not enough. He, or she is infected with a horticultural Pleonexia.

If a plant explorer finds a 1/2 inch tall Arisaema growing in moss on the north side of a Nepalese rock, the collector must have it.

Back many years ago,when I was out and about in horticultural world more than I am now, I visited several collectors' gardens.
No Jack in the Pulpits there. These were gardens for day lilies and for rare species tulips and daffodils.

The latter garden belonged to a sweet elderly Yankee lady who belonged to the Daffodil Society and the Herb Society. (The Herb Society being a social signifier, since membership was by invitation only to the right sort of people, a group to which I have never belonged).

This lady, for she truly was one, had tiny, rare species of spring blooming bulbs that came from the dry regions of the world. From Turkey, from Iran, and the Caucasus. Since winters in those places are dry, and Nashville winters are soggy, these bulbs would not survive here without special measures.

The day I visited her duplex in a cul de sac , I saw those special measures. There were two of them. Two six foot conical mounds of dirt and grit on either side of the front entrance walk. What the neighborhood association thought of this I do not know, but I expect they were not happy to see dirt piles that looked as though some race of giant fire ants had moved in to start their assault on the city.

For the purpose of these strange cones was to keep the little tulip bulbs dry with sharp drainage.

Perhaps it was the lady's graciousness that kept her neighbors mum. Perhaps it was the blue gingham shirt waist dresses she always wore, remnants from a more genteel time.

I saw this garden in summer, sans tulips. The owner had planted some creeping verbena on the mounds, but it was insufficient camouflage.

Barbarian that I am, I remember commenting to the Lady that her garden mounds must be beautiful in spring. I was gently rebuked by another Garden Lady, one of the owner's friends, who reminded me that this garden was beautiful now.




The daylily garden was on a side street off Woodmon Boulevard. And it was not in the lawn or in beds around the house.

It was the lawn. Every inch of it.

Daylilies are a common plant. Most everyone knows what daylilies look like, and if they do not, they need only to drive Highway 70 into my suburb of Bellevue to see feral orange daylilies blooming in the waste areas along the road.

Orange was too narrow a color range for hybridizers. Tasteful gardeners wanted pale yellow,pale pink, apricot, butter yellow.

Add bronze,rust,red, and brown to these tints, and make the plants miniscule or altissima.

They were all in this garden. Hundreds of them, and carefully labeled. I do not even remember if this house had foundation shrubs. All I remember was daylily after daylily, different colors, but all alike.

I did not comment on this garden to any of the other visitors. Words seemed superfluous. But even now I can remember the last daylily I looked at before I fled to my car. It was small and brown and ugly, hybridized by someone with a sense of humor. It had a label, and a name.

It was called "Little Wart".

Hiatus Cancelled. Back, but Temporarily Without Photos

I fear that gardening and culinary posts will be difficult without pictures, but there are free photos on Wikipedia Commons that I might use. Little essays and opinion pieces do not need visual aids, as Kay G. pointed out to me.

So- Blog resumes Monday.

And I do still have photos I have never used in my picture gallery on line!

Blog on Hiatus

I regret that this blog must be suspended for an unknown duration of time. My Sony camera, an antique, has died. I do not know when I will be able to afford another-

Tales of a Nashville Gardener- Crinums in Nashville Gardens

The crinum in these photos is an old "Milk and Wine Lily" from the garden I once had here in Bellevue. When I lost my house, a friend went with a shovel and rescued all my crinums and took them to her garden in Green Hills. These bulbs came from the old Mary Walker Bulb Farm in Georgia. I bought them in the late 1980s, and they have been living outdoors in Nashville dirt since then, which should settle any questions about hardiness.

Crinums are a form of hardy Amaryllis. Like so many of our fine garden bulbs they came from South Africa, and when they arrived in America they became a plant of permanence in old gardens across the South. In the gardens of New Orleans. In the gardens of grandmothers from South Georgia to the coast of Texas. They were a "pass along plant", given to daughters and handed over the fence to neighbors.

Their flowers do not last long, but established clumps do send up new scapes. A week before I took the photo of the Milk and Wine, it had had already bloomed once. This plant is in average soil in a garden that lives on only rainfall. It is not irrigated.

I have never seen crinums offered by any garden center I have visited, and I have been to many. One must seek them out from specialty growers. Several mail order nurseries offer many varieties.

In their his "Heirloom Gardening in the South", William Welch wonders why crinums are not grown as much as they should be.

I think this is because any plant not lined up at the garden centers is a plant invisible. Ordinary or new gardeners have not heard of it,or would not order it by mail even if they had. And crinum bulbs sell for $22.00 and up. One bulb might take a year to bloom and years to form a colony. One must have patience, especially in a garden, where plants grow by their own calendar and not by ours. Some things are worth waiting for, which we forget in our "I want it now" world.

Excellent books that have information about crinums are the aforementioned "Heirloom Gardening in the South" by William C. Welch and Greg Grant and "Garden Bulbs for the South" by Scott Ogden. Ogden's chapter on Crinums is exhaustive with dozens of pictures. Of crinums he writes:

"Their continued presence in gardens is a living testament to the movement of people through the warm climates of the world. Several old crosses are so robust and vigorous that they have outlived their creators and, like Methuselah, seem destined to outlive us all".


Here are some nurseries that sell crinums on line.

Jenksfarmer.com

Old house Gardens.com

Plant Delights.com


I have bought a number of plants from Plant Delights, and have always had good luck. The other nurseries I have yet to buy from.

*The Milk and Wine Lily gets its name from having pink stripes on its white bloom.

An Ugly Incident

Last night two of my neighbors-an attractive couple in their mid-twenties, drove away from these apartments , having spent the last two days loading up a U-Haul.

Good riddance to them I say.

For what were they doing just before they drove off?

Throwing twigs and little pieces of gravel at the barn swallow nest and nestlings just under the eaves of the parking shed.

They stopped when I went put onto the porch and yelled "Hey" at them. They stared at me ,and I stood out there staring them down until they left.

What kind of people are these? Did their parents teach them nothing? What good is it to be handsome and young if you are devoid of values and of any inner life that might make you decent?

I recall the scene in C.S Lewis's "Perelandra", where a new Satan on a new planet walks along tearing apart any small animals he finds just because that is who he is.

Evil does not have to be large. It can be small and banal. It is always with us.

What a stain on the Universe.