I have gone over the river and through the woods vis-Ã -vis garden tackiness. My longtime "Exceptional Good Taste" card ought to be confiscatedhelping a friend move I found by his new back gate some discards of a neighbor's, a toddler's bed. Ivory-colored, vaguely baroque. I swooped up the head and base boards, brought them home, and painted them a dusty rose. They are going to be (oh, lord, I can hardly write this) a ... flower bed. They will frame a mass of blue hydrangeas fronted by a line of big blue-green hostas which in turn will be fronted by gold hakone shade grass. I can hear the white-coated attendants coming up the garden path singing, "We're coming to take him away, tra-la."
Someone, for heaven's sakes, is trying to make a better supermarket tomato. About time. Harry J. Klee has discovered three tomato genes that control flavor. Tomatoes also contain 400 mysterious volatileschemical aromas that include some that make the fruit sweeter without additional sugar. Another thing Klee has to work with is the gene that makes tomatoes lusher and redder but which also makes it blander. Klee is doing this without genetically engineering the plant; Europe and parts of Asia wouldn't buy it then because of political concerns re Frankenfoods. Instead, Klee is breeding tomatoes the old-fashioned way. They're soon to be in your grocery store.
Here's this month's recipe, adapted from an old Kansas dish of my mother's: Sweet hot baked beans.
Ingredients: Three large cans pork and beans, two large onions, whole cloves, cup brown sugar, 10 strips bacon, can (whatever size you like) of crushed pineapple, cup (hot or mild) giardiniera, cup catsup, one half cup yellow mustard.
Instructions: Pour pork and beans in large greased baking dish. Fish out pork chunks and cut into smaller pieces and put back in beans. Peel and coarsely chop one onion; peel the other. Mix the pineapple, brown sugar, giardiniera, catsup, mustard and chopped onion into the beans. Stud other onion with lots of cloves and set in center of dish. You can either fry up the bacon and crumble into beans, or lay the strips raw in an arrangement around the central onion. Bake for an hour or so at 375 degrees.
Late into this summer I have been glancing through a number of gardening books: Horace Walpole's little work, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, is considered the first modern Western books of gardening. Written between 1750-1760 and fewer than a hundred pages, his 18th-century snarkiness shines through and also his snobbishnesshe basically dismisses all ancient classical gardening and oriental (Persian, Chinese, Japanese) as worthless and tasteless because they weren't ... British.
Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd's book, Our Life in Gardens, is a lot more sympathetic. The two men were partners who gardened together in Vermont for more than 30 years. (Winterrowd passed away in 2010.) The book is written as though one man is telling the storythey mention they can't even tell who said what first. The book is packed with practical tips for gardeners here in Chicago. I can't resist telling one of their anecdotes: They started gardening by raising chickens (??!) in a Boston apartment. Once while having the chairman of the Tufts University English department to high tea their broody little cochin hen, Emma, hopped out of her nest box in the kitchen and led her entire adopted bevy of 12 chickies (all of whom she hatched) into the living room to inspect the guest. After circling him and unimpressed, she led all the peepers back to the kitchen. The well-mannered gentleman said absolutely nothing. I must also quote from E & W to show how much their point of view coincides with mine: "No real garden should ever show bare earth, much less a sea of bark mulch, which always represents both an opportunity lost and a failure of horticultural seriousness."
I am also reading Gordon Campbell's The Hermit in the Garden, which is a history of garden gnomes. (They used to be real people, if you can imagine that.) A slightly heavier book on deep ecology (yes, it's an extension of gardening) is Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution by Caroline Fraser. This book traces the new emphasis on "cores, corridors and carnivores"or establishing enormous connected green belts all over the world to save both plant and animal species. Scientists (NOT sci-fi writers) have even proposed a "Pleistocene rewilding" as a part of North America, reintroducing animals similar to those driven extinct 12,000 years ago, including camels, elephants, lions and cheetahs. (Extinct members of the elephant family, such as mammoths and mastodons, kept the forest brush eaten down, thereby controlling the spread of fires in what is now the western United States.)
I must tell you that if you want a spectacular potted plant for your patio next year, get a golden shrimp plant. I was given one, and two months later it still gloriously bloomingI can also recommend Pamela Crawford's Easy Container Gardens, Vol. 2, in which shrimp plants figure prominently.
R.I.P., the giant old catalpa tree that decorated the parkway of my friend Edwin in Old Irving Park. He came home after a windstorm the other day to find the tree atop his house resting on its peak and front porch. The house was sturdy enough to bear most of the burden and Edwin (and cat, Sha-Nay-Nay) are upset mostly for the house but partly for the tree. The city may put back a tree there but not a catalpathey are now officially "messy" trees. Some folks don't like their long bean-like seed pods (which is why little kids used to call them "cigar" trees) and they do leak sticky sap when they are attacked by aphids. But in the spring, when they are covered with their orchid-like blossoms (against their large deep green leaves), they are magnificent.