Primula Odyssey

When I moved to Michigan on a day much like today (snow in March), I had left behind a California garden full of succulents and tropical plants like fuchsia and hibiscus.  Now it was time to regroup.  I studied the English cottage garden (always an ideal) and prepared to grow herbaceous borders.

Browsing through the seed packets at the garden store, I found Primula veris.  I had read about primroses in English gardens so decided to try it, though it looked difficult.  Two years later, I was enchanted.  The plants grew vigorously, self-seeded, and helped to make spring cheerful and light.  That was the beginning of an odyssey into understanding and growing this genus.

A classic polyanthus. I call this one "Old Yellow".

The most familiar Primula are the polyanthus "primroses".  These are hybrids and many selected varieties exist.  The flowers are held on a stalk, usually above the leaves.  Actually, these are not true primroses.  Botanically minded gardeners sometime refer to them as Primula X polyanthus to indicate that they are hybrids.

Primula vulgaris "True Blue"

The true primroses are Primula vulgaris, a European species that is well known as an English wildflower (but apparently much less common in the wild now).  The flowers are not mounted on a stalk, but arise singly from the crown of the plant, thus are sometimes referred to as "acaulis",  "caul" referring to a stem.  The classic P. vulgaris is a lovely creamy yellow (the color sometimes called "primrose").  But there are many color variants that have either occurred naturally or through hybridizing with garden plants.

But the genus Primula is not limited to our familiar garden plants.  Primulas exist in the wild all over the world, though the single species in South America is likely a modern introduction.  I can make this statement because I possess the most authoritative book on Primula in existence and it describes the range and distribution of the genus. The book is Primula, by John Richards (Timber Press).  Anyone who has become as obsessive as I have about primulas should have the book, which describes the history, distribution, and biology of the genus, as well as its taxonomy.  There are also a selection of color plates.  But for a really wide selection of pictures of primulas, see Pam Eveleigh's gallery of Primula species  (she uses Richards' taxonomic scheme).  As Richards makes clear, the overwhelming majority of primulas are from Asia, or as he puts it, "the eastern Sinohimalaya".

Candelabra primulas

Fortunately, the English, being great plant explorers, brought many Asiatic species home and they are available to gardeners.  The candelabra primroses are descended from those early collections.  They have been hybridized and released as special varieties, which are usually grown in sweeps together. But the species are still grown. The plant blooming to the left is Primula burmanica. Primula helodoxa is just visible to the right.  The hosta behind them is full-size; P. helodoxa is very tall.  The Asiatic primulas appear to require continual seed-harvesting and replanting.  For that reason, there are not many left in my garden.

Primula auricula

Another species that has been widely adapted to gardens is Primula auricula.  There are some varieties that are spectacularly colored, so that they almost appear to be from outer space.  They are usually grown in greenhouses and brought out only for flower shows.  But there are garden auriculas too. Note that the foliage is quite different from the other primulas shown.

Primula juliae

Primula juliae is not only a long-lasting and enjoyable garden subject, but was also the source of some of the colors now available in polyanthus.  It has a different growth habit, creeping to form a little colony over time.

Having grown, loved and lost a number of primulas, I've come down finally to concentrating on those I know will have some staying power in my garden.  They include my faithful Primula veris, the acaulis P. vulgaris types,  P. juliae, and the endless varieties of polyanthus. But probably I'll always be tempted by another challenge to engage more primulas.

This polyanthus is of the true "primrose" color.

Note: this article follows another one on primulas, Primula Fever, which describes more primulas and their hybrids and has more pictures.

The Transplant Conundrum

The gardener's holy grail, right up against yield and taste or quality, is getting the maximum out of the growing season. Season extenders like row covers, plastic mini-greenhouses, and even hoophouses have become popular. So it seems natural to get a jump on the season by starting plants indoors and transplanting seedlings once the weather is more favorable. Another garden blogger in my area reported planting her kohlrabi by direct seeding and I proposed a race. We planted at about the same time - my germination log says I planted Kolibri (Johnny's Select Seeds) on March 20 and her blog report is dated March 22.


The seedlings (now about 3 weeks old) were pricked out some time ago and yesterday I put them into the cold frame for hardening up. They mostly have two true leaves by now. I'll probably plant them into the row in about another two weeks, depending on how the weather goes. My cold frame has an automatic opener so that when the internal temperature gets too warm, it opens to vent. Meanwhile the seedlings are being treated to fluctuations in temperature (but not below freezing) and real sunshine. I know from past experience that they will really take off once into the row.

But as simple and elegant as this process (which I use for all my brassicas, or cole crops) is, I was startled to find that it is controversial.

Recently I purchased a book, "Gardening When It Counts", subtitled "Growing Food in Hard Times". Its stated purpose is to explain subsistence gardening, that is, growing vegetables out of necessity rather than fashion. The main point - and a valuable one - is to use plant spacing rather than intensive gardening, to reduce necessary inputs of fertilizer and water. Unfortunately the book also contains a number of diatribes. One of them is against the use of transplants. The author, Steve Solomon (who founded Territorial Seed Company and now lives in Tasmania, apparently for the fine gardening to be done there), has nothing good to say about use of transplants for any but the most frost-sensitive plants (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants). I was particularly dismayed to see his criticism of growing brassicas from transplants. He claims that the harvest is not much advanced and complains that everything becomes mature at once. He hit home with his mention of cabbages splitting, since I've had that problem. But his advice to plant just a few seeds every week for a while sounds burdensome.

I first saw the practice of growing cabbage from transplants in visiting fields in Wisconsin where cabbage was grown for commercial kraut production. They planted transplants as early as possible, using a mechanical planter. I've always done it and been happy with the result. So I'll probably continue, but I'm going to be more observant. In particular, I'll be interested to know how my gardening acquaintance's kohlrabi advances. I'm guessing that right now her kohlrabi looks a lot like the lettuce I planted on March 18 and grew under row cover. The little seedlings are just now beginning to put out a true leaf.

Pollan's Progress

Michael Pollan is the prophet for the local food/real food movement, to the extent that there was a serious effort to have him named as Secretary of Agriculture in the Obama administration. He is probably the person most single-handedly responsible for shifting the perspective of a significant proportion of our nation regarding food and how it should be produced. If he did not coin it, he has clarified and explained the concept of "industrial agriculture". Reading his book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (2006), has been what many have described as the signal moment when they realized that they had to redefine their relationship to food, and how it is produced. He has certainly had a profound influence on my thinking.

I've become more and more interested with his progression to where he has arrived. I was intrigued by his statement on a recent TV interview that he had reached this place because of his experience as a gardener. If I recall correctly, he said that gardening had made him think about food and how it was produced. I've been reviewing his books and his personal evolution, as reflected through them. The books are remarkable in that they are both intimate and lofty. While he poses big, universal questions, he then muses aloud, relating his own personal experience (with sometimes embarrassingly self-revelatory snips, like reading The Selfish Gene while stoned on pot), and yet manages to place the subject within an extensively researched and broad historical context (most of his books have a comprehensive bibliography) .

Pollan is a journalist who wrote extensively for the New York Times Magazine before beginning with books. But he bought a piece of an old farm in Connecticut in 1983, began to garden, and then to write about it. This eventually led to his first book, "Second Nature", first published in 1992. The book made quite an impression on me when I read it shortly after its publication. It is a personal exploration of his own evolution as a gardener, with chapters on miscellaneous subjects like choosing a tree to plant (alas, it was a Norway maple), the politics of garden catalogs, his grandfather's garden and what he learned from it, lawns, weeds, and rose gardens. There are some amusing stories, some that are touching. But Pollan gives away his real identity as a seriously serious writer in the Introduction: "...I soon came to the realization that I would not learn to garden very well before I'd also learned about a few other things: about my proper place in nature...about the somewhat peculiar attitudes toward the land that an American is born with...about the troubled borders between nature and culture; and about the experience of place, (and) the moral implications of landscape design..." He then somewhat bashfully admits, "It may be my nature to complicate matters...to search for large meanings in small things...". Yup.

Probably the most significant chapter in the book is "The Idea of a Garden", in which he explores most of those questions from the Introduction. He tells a sad story of old-growth trees in a Nature Conservancy tract that were felled by a tornado. What to do? Remove the trees, which would make the forest pretty again, and less likely to be a fire hazard? Or let "nature" take its course by leaving them in place? The final decision in such cases is destined to meet some human desire (whether for a pretty scene or a sense of untouched wilderness). This leads to a musing on what the real "nature" of such a place really is, and what is the meaning of wilderness in the presence of humans. The overall conclusion is that we treat all of nature as a garden, even when we are trying to "preserve" or to "restore" it.

His next book (if we skip over a book about building a house) was The Botany of Desire (2002). Here again is the theme of the interaction of humans and nature. But a new insight is expressed here - that we are interacting with plants, influencing their evolution while they influence us. Pollan chooses just four plants to discuss, the tulip (a discussion of tulipomania and our fascination with flowers), the apple (Johnny Appleseed, wild and heritage apples), marijuana (humanity's need for intoxication), and the potato.

Particularly in this last chapter, we see the present Pollan emerging. He discusses the spread of the potato across Europe and the effects of the late blight epiphytotic in Ireland in the 1840s, while also traveling to Monsanto in St. Louis to learn about genetic engineering. Talk about going into the belly of the beast - just as he would later buy a steer and follow it all the way to the slaughterhouse, he obtains potatoes that contain the gene for Bt resistance and plants them in his own garden (he would later discard them rather than serve them to the unsuspecting). He later visits a potato farmer in Idaho, where he sees the many baths of pesticides that potatoes grown conventionally must be treated to. (A moment of hilarity ensues when he is served a potato salad made of freshly dug potatoes that include the genetically engineered variety as well as some presumably pesticide-treated ones.) Afterwards, he visits an organic potato farmer, whose complex adaptive strategies are described at length. And then for the first time, he uses the phrase "industrial agriculture", as he discusses the efficiencies of monoculture and the problems it creates. (Of which the Irish potato famine is again presented as a prime example.) After musing on our collective responsibility for demanding perfect McDonalds' french fries and thus perfectly industrially produced potatoes ("the problem of monoculture may be as much a problem of culture as it is of agriculture"), he goes home to harvest his own (untreated) Kennebecs.

So - the perfect circle, from the gardener to the front lines of the food system, and back to the garden again, where it all begins.

This Garden Earth

Thomas Princen's book, The Logic of Sufficiency, is not an easy read but contains plenty of food for thought about the socioeconomic principles by which we live and their effect on our planet and ourselves. (Yes, I'll get back to the garden at the end.) He points to the ascendance through the last century of the concept of "efficiency", which is used here as a catchall phrase for many terms and practices that characterize the "market" approach (my summary, not his).

He contrasts this with what he calls "sufficiency"; "the sense that, as one does more and more of an activity, there can be enough and there can be too much." I love the illustration on the cover - the glass not half full or half empty, but full. And yet it is not running over.

The point is that "efficiency" is aimed at increasing yield or wealth for individuals or groups, which leads to more and more exploitation of resources, whether they are soil, water, trees, human effort, or the ability of the planet to absorb insults like pollution and global warming. But our planet is near its "biophysical" limits (see also "Spaceship Earth") and we need to adopt approaches that are sustainable on a system-wide level.

This is beginning to sound like an environmental text, but it is not, though he does refer to environmental concerns and endorses "ecological rationality". It is really more of an essay on economics and how assumptions and beliefs about economic mechanics have brought us to where we are, at the brink of a catastrophic tumble (again, my words, not his). One of the frustrating things about reading the book is that he teaches by long example, such as the story of Pacific Lumber (long-term management of old-growth redwoods) and a lobster fishery (deliberate restraints on fishing to maintain stocks). There is no list of bullet points for a quick take-home message; it requires really studying all the examples and what they mean about behavior that incorporates frugality, moderation, a sense of limits, and allowing respite (his term) for people, animals, and natural systems. (Note that "resources" is actually an efficiency-type term.) A great windup is where he shows that "efficiency" is to blame for mad-cow disease. He also mentions (in a book published in 2005) that we have been turned into "consumers" and driven into debt in order to support a society built on efficiency.

Since Princen doesn't supply sound-bites for his thesis, I won't try to either. It does have strong echoes of Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons. I heard Hardin speak in the 1970s and his favorite story was about the common pasture where 10 cattle could graze without harming the capacity of the pasture to renew itself. If 10 farmers graze 10 cattle, all goes well. But one of them decides that he wants more, so puts an additional animal onto the commons. It suffers just a little but then the others see that someone is getting more than they are, so they put additional cattle on too. Soon the pasture system collapses and can't maintain any cattle at all. That is where the market ideology (aka efficiency) has nearly brought us today.

Yes, I'm postulating that our entire planet is like that pasture - or like a garden. If we can learn to take only from it what is sufficient, while we continually build up the soil and understand the complexity of the plants, animals, and physical environment that make it up, our garden can support us for a long time. We should cultivate it wisely.

Contrariwise

Since I've been predicting disaster for years, I particularly enjoyed an article in the January 26, 2009 New Yorker discussing "The Dystopians". It describes the people who have made it their career or at least their avocation to tell the rest of us about how bad things are going to get. An outstanding example is the author James Howard Kunstler, who has written such books as The Long Emergency. I only discovered him with this article. Another author mentioned is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan. That one I read last winter, before our economic system collapsed enough that everyone noticed. As the author of the article (Ben McGrath) notes, these days are great for celebration of "triumphant pessimism".

Now Taleb is getting a major following from newly converted financial professionals. His writing is very hard to follow; he alludes to chaos theory and various statistical models without really explaining any of them. The basic idea is that we fall in love with the current trend and situation and expect that things will go on forever as they are, only maybe getting better and better. His clearest exposition of this is with the story of the turkey who enjoys day after day of plentiful food, water, and sunshine. The turkey confidently predicts that this will go on forever, and his predictions are good - until Thanksgiving Day. This was exactly like our county's budget director who every year presented a budget with ever-increasing totals and the comment, "The best prediction of the future is the past." Now the county has a $10 million deficit and is closing entire departments. Unfortunately, my protests at the time had little effect, and someone once informed me that I was a "contrarian". "I told you so" after the fact is pointless and unsatisfying.

McGrath reveals a taxonomy of sorts of pessimists - "peak oilers", "back-to-the-land types", and generalized Cassandras, "doomers". My husband has been a "peak oiler" for decades and the Hubbert Peak was one of the themes of our household discussions. More recently we've both read lots of Jared Diamond. His book, "Collapse" gives a detailed backward look at how many societies have failed, and there are many uncomfortable parallels to be found with our own. There seems to be a fatal human tendency to ignore the long-term consequences of our actions. Since I see the universe in terms of thermodynamics, I have always had trouble with people who persist in believing in the free lunch.

My particular place in the taxonomy of "doomers" is the back-to-the-land type. I've been looking with horror for some years at our drawn-out food chain - how can we possibly be expecting a stable food supply from a distance of thousands of miles? Just as Voltaire cultivated his garden during the dying decades of the French monarchy, I am seeking to find a self-sustaining life to the extent possible. Thus the support for local enterprise, local farming, and thus I grow and preserve as much of our own food as I can. Food security is the most basic human need and it is not a given. We should be worried. I am. More on that later.

Part of being self-sustaining is learning a new way of eating and cooking. I've been learning new ways to use my bountiful sauerkraut production. Here is a new recipe I just discovered. It is modified from one I found among my mother's files.

Winter Slaw with Apples and Sauerkraut

1 quart sauerkraut, preferably raw (drain, place on a board, and cut up into smaller pieces)
1 apple, peeled and chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
1 small or 1/2 large sweet onion (Walla Walla type), chopped
1/2 sweet red pepper, chopped (I used frozen, roasted and peeled red pepper)
1 T seasoned Japanese rice vinegar (contains sugar and salt)
1 t sugar

Marinate the onion briefly in the vinegar, then add the other chopped ingredients, then the sauerkraut. Mix and chill for a little while before serving.

Note: no salt needed - the kraut is slightly salty, as is the vinegar.
Adjust sugar and vinegar to taste.

This has a nice fresh flavor and is a very light dish.