It is the 28th of July and the 31st consecutive day of 90+⸰ F temperatures. The heat index, taking humidity and general oppressiveness into account, reckons most of those days equivalent to 100+⸰ F. At this moment it is said to be 98 and to feel like 110. Several other heat indexes (hottest July days ever, hottest number of days in a row, single hottest day, the most heat records broken in one month, etc.) have been recorded in tones of awe on local TV, but it is not as if that matters to plants. Plants, individually and as a kingdom, have no concept of television. Some may call that a bold claim. I’m positive plants do think. I’m not at all sure how. But the thin wash of radiation that comes off TV screens would satisfy only the most modest of plants, such as cave algae.
Piedmont Virginia, like the rest of the Piedmont south, bakes in the summer under long dry spells, suffocates in humidity, and hosts violent storms coming off the Gulf, the Atlantic, and the Monongahela. It’s a brutal, fertile, heartbreaking climate where trouble can blow in from any direction, though insects and things that eat insects seem to love it. The ancestors had to battle the July sun. They did not get to sit in a shady arbor with a bit of breeze and something chilled and bubbly. If they had thrown in the sponge on summer, none of us would be here and the Raccoon would be the dominant species on earth.
These are days of danger for the gardener. Heat stroke is not a conspiracy theory, and even incipient heat stroke can ruin your week. We pop out in the early morning and do what we can before the sun takes over. Younger gardeners can do more. Older gardeners are obliged to do less. Something I’d consider a warm-up task in October or May—some little job to finish before putting in a full day—turns into all I can do for the day, in July. The air seems hot and sticky, even syrupy. You are bitten, scratched, crawled on. There are poisons concealed in the most innocent places. Brushing against a tiny Saddleback caterpillar on the underside of a leaf (the likeliest place to find one is the out-of-view underside) is about equivalent to a hornet sting or, if you’re lucky, a really full-on sting from a red wasp. The Spiny Oak Slug is a good deal worse. The Buck Moth caterpillar, also an oak caterpillar, is just about common here and a run-in with one will put an end to the day. Sometimes in July, all that really makes sense for a gardener to do is to go inside and let the neurotoxins burn themselves out while the swelling goes down. C’est la guerre.
Piedmont Virginia, like the rest of the Piedmont south, bakes in the summer under long dry spells, suffocates in humidity, and hosts violent storms coming off the Gulf, the Atlantic, and the Monongahela. It’s a brutal, fertile, heartbreaking climate where trouble can blow in from any direction, though insects and things that eat insects seem to love it. The ancestors had to battle the July sun. They did not get to sit in a shady arbor with a bit of breeze and something chilled and bubbly. If they had thrown in the sponge on summer, none of us would be here and the Raccoon would be the dominant species on earth.
These are days of danger for the gardener. Heat stroke is not a conspiracy theory, and even incipient heat stroke can ruin your week. We pop out in the early morning and do what we can before the sun takes over. Younger gardeners can do more. Older gardeners are obliged to do less. Something I’d consider a warm-up task in October or May—some little job to finish before putting in a full day—turns into all I can do for the day, in July. The air seems hot and sticky, even syrupy. You are bitten, scratched, crawled on. There are poisons concealed in the most innocent places. Brushing against a tiny Saddleback caterpillar on the underside of a leaf (the likeliest place to find one is the out-of-view underside) is about equivalent to a hornet sting or, if you’re lucky, a really full-on sting from a red wasp. The Spiny Oak Slug is a good deal worse. The Buck Moth caterpillar, also an oak caterpillar, is just about common here and a run-in with one will put an end to the day. Sometimes in July, all that really makes sense for a gardener to do is to go inside and let the neurotoxins burn themselves out while the swelling goes down. C’est la guerre.
Saddleback Caterpillar (Wikimedia Commons). An ordinary garden inhabitant around here.
The ornamental parts of our garden are laid out with summer in mind. I hope my summer flower beds are arranged loosely enough to give the summer plants a chance of living almost as if they were wild. Some (not all) have to have an annual feeding, especially the big lilies. Feeding is done in the spring or fall. The minimum ornamental garden hand work is three main weedings a year, in the spring and fall and at the end of June, to prevent nature from reclaiming the whole thing. If the local cloudbursts, cold fronts and hurricane remnants are inadequate for water, I usually try to preserve annuals like zinnias, or dahlias, by watering. With luck a few senescent hurricanes will drift through and things will be wonderful. But if you get very much water, the weeds will erupt—something to keep in mind when playing with the water hose. Generally I regard artificial watering as a last resort. In July the last resort can arrive in about 12 hours. To sum up, the ornamental garden requires a lot of preparation to still be an ornament in July, because July is harsh.
Oriental lilies, doing well in partial shade.
A gang of Orienpets—Oriental/Trumpet crosses--doing well in full sun.
“Anaconda”, a trumpet lily, in full shade.
Hemerocallis: a double orange sport.
The daylily or Hemerocallis is not a lily, but like the lily it is a monocot, a very ancient branch of the plant kingdom. The daylily can thrive even in baked red clay soil and is fully naturalized for easy high summer bloom in Virginia. Deer love both daylilies and real lilies, and will eat them to the ground if given a chance—the post-scientific or ‘disappointing’ phase of the plant’s existence.
Both the ornamental and the vegetable garden have been showier and more productive in 2020 than ever before. This is largely because the pandemic is keeping us home. Karen now has time to go through the individual vegetable plants nearly every day, picking eggs, larvae and destructive pests off by hand. The hand-picking technique is a bit prehistoric but we can see that it works fairly well, time and energy allowing.
Both the ornamental and the vegetable garden have been showier and more productive in 2020 than ever before. This is largely because the pandemic is keeping us home. Karen now has time to go through the individual vegetable plants nearly every day, picking eggs, larvae and destructive pests off by hand. The hand-picking technique is a bit prehistoric but we can see that it works fairly well, time and energy allowing.
Karen, concerned and thoughtful, giving the local praying mantises a hand.
Extreme heat causes extreme thunderheads.
The vegetable garden has to be weeded as much as possible, of course. Even in July. If water is deficient it must be provided. And the ladybug and the mantis really are our friends, as are the wasps and every other pollinator.
Our new 2020 garden annex in early June.
Same site in the early A.M. at the end of July. The work of insects: pollination.
Tetsukabuto winter squash.
I re-read Rappaccini’s Daughter this spring, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off ever since. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 garden romance, Giacomo Rappaccini’s walled garden in Padua, secret to all but a few, is poisonous—as is his delicate and lovely daughter, envenomed by a life spent among the rarest and most toxic horticultural peculiarities. The story has legendary and mythological sources, though it’s hard to be sure Hawthorne knew all the potential sources. Back in my student days, when Hawthorne was just barely dead yet and his remains had only recently been put on display in the Old Customs House at Salem, Mass., the battle for this story was fought out mainly between stodgy old Freudian interpretations and exciting new Jungian interpretations, and there was plenty of ammunition for both sides.
Doctors and druggists ordinarily compounded with acutely poisonous medicinal plant materials in Hawthorne’s time. Herbalists’ gardens and medical gardens of biologically active plants would not have seemed entirely strange in 1844 and a secret poisonous garden is not an enormously exaggerated possibility. There would have been herbalists with plant collections in the Boston area. There were important medical gardens in Padua, whose university has been at the forefront of Western science since 1222. By romanticizing an equally poisonous secret girl, Rappaccini’s Daughter joined the tradition of desperately doomed Italian love affairs, a tradition including Shakespeare and Boccaccio and probably the Etruscans.
Doctors and druggists ordinarily compounded with acutely poisonous medicinal plant materials in Hawthorne’s time. Herbalists’ gardens and medical gardens of biologically active plants would not have seemed entirely strange in 1844 and a secret poisonous garden is not an enormously exaggerated possibility. There would have been herbalists with plant collections in the Boston area. There were important medical gardens in Padua, whose university has been at the forefront of Western science since 1222. By romanticizing an equally poisonous secret girl, Rappaccini’s Daughter joined the tradition of desperately doomed Italian love affairs, a tradition including Shakespeare and Boccaccio and probably the Etruscans.
Padua’s Botanical Gardens in the mid-16th century (Wikimedia Commons).
Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe were both redefining the brief prose romance genre in the 1840s, and Poe was already publishing about the structural details, for instance in “The Philosophy of Composition” in Graham’s Magazine in 1846. Hawthorne’s main vision in Rappaccini’s Daughter could well have been setting a fatal Italian romance in a particularly original type of garden. When Poe says one of the best emotional prose effects is to kill a beautiful woman, we can be sure he knows what he’s talking about. It’s all very well to believe in genius, but genius without method wouldn’t be anything.
Poe’s original Gold Bug? A Dynastes rhinoceros beetle carapace found on the roof of a garden shed.
The notion that gardens can be sinister seems contrary to the main garden tropes of paradise and beauty, going back to Virgil’s Bucolics, not to mention Genesis. However, Virgil’s shepherds complain, and the Biblical Eden, with its spring-loaded snake trap and permanent punishments, is sinister to a degree. But real garden stories are more humble. They are the fleeing stories of trespassing baby rabbits who encounter Mr. Man. The best are stories like “The Little Red Hen.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5dowCyaP7I
The prize: Some of today's heirlooms.
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