Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Wreaths Go Full Circle
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Urban gardeners grow year round.
Never sell yourself short.
Never sell yourself short. Urban gardeners are intrepid souls. We live in today confident our safely stored, dry, cool, seeds will prevail. New generations are ahead. Urban circumstances inspire creative approaches to garden. Bulbs, corms, tubers, lay under soils full of random urban detritus. Leaves, hay, seaweed, manure, and the versatile large brown paper bags stuffed like sausages along sidewalks are all useful in the garden. Worms, our humble allies, are active beneath mulch blankets. Their endeavors transform organic materials into ever more useful forms, releasing the miracles of photosynthesis into the perpetual cycle of growth and reproduction. Our community gardens, plots, pots, compost heaps, are microscopic sinks for carbon dioxide rich atmosphere. The best place of excess CO2 is in soil.
We are guides.
We are guides. Our companions are the many plants we’ve enrolled into the human experience. Food plants are but a fraction of botanical species people need for full lives. Herbs provide medicines, concentrations of vitamins and minerals in unique association. Medicine is derived from our long study of plants. Nor are we confined to the domesticated. Surrounding our pavements, buildings, industries, are hardy plants. Each is an inspiration, a reminder of life’s tenacious hold brave in the face of adversity. Nameless to most, cleome, verbena, evening primrose, morning glories, and the essential milkweed, persist between sidewalk cracks, broken bricks, abandoned industrial sites. Golden leafed ginkgo trees transform pavements. Steeped in hot water, ginkgo leaves improve the memory. Brought as a botanical curiosity by Victorian plant explorers in China, the ginkgo is easy to identify and lingers, a genetic testament from a planet once dominated by dinosaurs. With the past in mind, around us, improving us, let’s think of the future.
Sunshine Affect Disorder, “SAD”
Sunshine affect disorder, “SAD”, afflicts many of us. Shorter days, longer nights, disorient the senses. Our mood is hit hard. Morose negativity enrolls us into tiresome futile illogical thoughts. There is a cure, a solution, and it’s within the reach of all of us. Let’s look over the shoulder towards our urban gardens for the remedy.
Hard indeed is the heart
Hard indeed is the heart that dismisses the symbolic. Rather, like gardeners everywhere, we enter the garden not to find statistical beneficial sales, aptly named Black Fridays, for their shadowy tin tin tin. No, the big discount is not in the garden. Urban gardens offer dividends on scales usually enjoyed by the plutocrat. Gardens are net positive; they are beacons during the nadir.
Coniferous plants have long enjoyed
Do not strip our rural or suburban regions
Do not strip our rural or suburban regions of Prince’s Pine, Creeping Jenny, Mountain Laurel, or native hollies. Life is difficult. Tolerate the native species, we are their trustees. As if rapid climate changes, violent storm systems, howling snow storms or massive rainfall weren’t enough; our native plants have many challenges. Our gardens provide hope’s green colored testimony. Like all urban gardeners, scratch us and find the qualities of do it yourself. Let’s start with Ilex, or the Holly, sacred to many traditions.
Hollies are always attractive
Hollies are always attractive. Their constant beauty is reliable in a world full of flux. Sometimes variegated and hybridized into every shade of green, we have native species and introductions from temperate Europe and Asia. Hollies are an understory small tree or shrub that thrives in moist conditions under or near taller trees such as maples, witch hazels, and shadbush, all species that prefer their feet on the damp side. They do not require much care as long as gardeners respect their first preferences. Hollies have long lives, do not like to be moved, are happy in the acid soils common to the eastern USA, and will tolerate considerable pruning. They survive browsing pests such as the now common white tailed deer.
Hollies are gender specific
Hollies are gender specific, plant a male holly with many more female hollies within a 100 foot orbit. Each female holly will delight those afflicted with S.A.D. A bright red berry is the beginning, happily like dowagers of old; hollies are often bright with red berries. A sprig with a leaf or two of holly berries was once required by every Druid to formulate the spells for eternal life. Somehow, we’ve never forgotten this. Find room in your spaces for the holly. Leave it alone for a year or two, let it put down roots, do not cultivate within the “drip zone” or anywhere beneath the furthest tips of overhead branches. Clip branches full of wholesome green. They remain bright and healthy in water, it’s always good practice to change the water each day and drop in a child’s strength aspirin.
Never plant for one season
Never plant for one season, one person, one purpose. Plant instead, for the long term, eyes on the beyond, our vision unfocused upon scripted details more appropriate for spreadsheets. You will never regret your share of legacy. Hollies are affordable, best planted small when transplanting is less trying for them and so popular they’re ubiquitous in every nursery.
Grapevines are good alternatives
Grapevines are good alternatives for wreath making. Rampant grape vines offer best yields when pruned back. They are pliable and fun to weave into any size wreath. Actually, grapevines lend themselves to huge wreaths that weather into ever more beautiful shades of textured brown stem and bark. Start your wreath with an overhand hitch, just like tying your shoeless just before the two bows, and wrap continuously. Weave, tuck, rotate. As I form grapevine wreaths from the grape arbor I fall under their spell. Enchanted, gardeners everywhere do not regard this rite a labor. We are part of the endless cycle of life, the wheel of existence.
Life is difficult. Do not despair
Life is difficult. Do not despair, give up or surrender to sadness. Urban gardeners know from fingertip to toenail there are remedies. Stroll into neglected grape arbors and cull out last season’s overgrowth. Use sharp garden shears to clip, prune, and groom holly bushes. Look for those common “foundation” plantings required for VA mortgages. Harvest fragrant arbor vitae, the tree of life, select holly sprigs, employ imagination, right or wrong are not values here. Sense the elegant reduction of beginning and ending that exists at every point on a circle. By every measurement, pi is the infinitesimal fraction of spirit within each circular wreath and also, within every urban gardener. Embrace life’s beauty, weave a wreath, hang it. Life just got better. It can for you, within sight, everyone.
Related Articles
- The Urban Gardener: Strawberries and Chives for All
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Harvesting Green Beans + Sunflowers
- The Urban Gardener: Rise and Shine
- The Urban Gardener: Cheerful Daffodils
- The Urban Gardener: Growing Herbs For The Kitchen + Heart
- The Urban Gardener: Time To Harvest, Time To Plan
- The Urban Gardener: Some Like it Hot, Harvest Time
- Leonard Moorehead,The Urban Gardener: Minor Bulbs Rule
- Leonard Moorehead, The Urban Gardener: Fall Gardens Flush and Full
- The Urban Gardener: Cold Frames Endure
- The Urban Gardener: Leaves, the Gardener’s Friend
- The Urban Gardener: Harvest Moonshine
- The Urban Gardener: Hunker Down, Look Ahead
Follow us on Pinterest Google + Facebook Twitter See It Read It