Infinite Tulips

Or infinite flying cows!

Adriaen Pauw's garden in Amsterdam (or near Amsterdam) had an mirror illusion trick to multiply the number of tulips in the garden. A looking-glass cabinet stood in the bed of tulips and made the bed look as though it had infinite tulips. Naturally I want an infinity cabinet as well, for my small garden. However, this was in the 1600's and perhaps the book that has a description of such a cabinet is not scanned yet.  Or it was never described. Here's what I found along the way.

Goat Crooks and Rockrose Ticklers

The crook,
the "flail", and the
ladanum-impregnated goat's beard

I love the smell of rockrose. I used to run past some hedges of pink rockrose and always stopped to sniff it. Was it Cistus creticus?

I just learned that the crook and and flail possibly represented the tools of a goatherd in Egypt: the "crook" for managing goats and the "flail" for gathering the resins from rockrose.  The resins were used to make labdanum.

Given the choice I would rather spend eternity with something nice smelling (to show how RICH I was) than spend eternity showing what a disciplinarian I was. 

Give me a fabulous smelling resin-soaked goatbeard, my crook to manage my goats, and a tool to gather more resins and I'd be happy. But that's me.

Old Roses

Already dog-eared...

Just returned from the National Heirloom Expo 2015. Heirloom plants and heritage breed animals. Piles of squash and rows of tomatoes. Very cute big and little piggies, bronze age goats. Lots of interesting thought-provoking speakers (and some really out-there speakers). Good food and good music.

Talked to the Heritage Rose Group people who had some booklets and some old roses for sale.

There are many people who call themselves "Rose Rustlers" who (very politely) find and propagate old roses found in cemeteries, homesteads, and old houses.

Initially, I was drawn to their booth because I'm looking for the Niles Cochet rose that was introduced by the California Nursery Company in 1906. However, I'm also interested in old roses because many are very drought tolerant and some might provide edible petals and rose hips.

How did fountains work before electricity?

Fountain of Alcázar
N.A. Wells

I just read about the fountains in the gardens of Alcázar in Seville where some of the fountains have extra jets - burladores (or "jokers") that wet unwary visitors.

First thought was -- I want one.

Second thought was -- How did they do that before electrity?

Third thought was -- can this technology be adapted today?

So I went looking for the burladores.

California Nursery Company, 1888

Pacific Rural Press, April 14, 1888

The Nursery Business.

The business of tree propagation, as might be inferred from the fact that orchards and vineyards are multiplying with such rapidity, is one of the most important lines of our horticultural industry. It has had its ups and downs, as have most productive efforts in this State, and, in fact, anywhere. The oscillations are, however, more sudden and marked in California than elsewhere, because horticultural fevers and fashions here surge higher and fall lower than in older countries. When the tree-plant-ing fever runs high, nurserymen multiply; you can hardly fire off a gun anywhere without hitting one. When the fruit prices have been low for a time you might hunt all day for one— unless you should hunt in the advertising columns of the Rural Press, and there you will always find the most enterprising of them. Growing nursery stock is very much like growing hops, except that surplus fruit trees are of no earthly account—you can't even make homemade beer out of them. As with nursery stock, however, as with hops, those who operate the business intelligently and enterprisingly and stay with it through thick and thin become well-to-do and are generally well esteemed in the community— except now and then when an order for winter apple trees is filled with cherry plums. Such incidents sometimes lead orchard-planters to think nurserymen are not honest.

Hortulus, Walafridi Strabi

Something lots of gardeners wonder about their cuke tendrils:
why are there two coils,
one going one way and the other,
the other way?

Walafred Strabo (wikipedia) was a monk (808-849 A.D) who wrote about his garden. Here he writes about gourds:

"Gourds also grow up high from modest seeds. Their leaves look like shields and cast huge shadows, and they send out their tendrils from several different branches.

You know how ivy encircles tall elms, how it wraps its arms around the tree trunk on the ground and then hides the rough bark all the way to the top in a covering mantel of green leaves.

And you know how the grapevines growing in an orchard will climb up a tree and hang grapes on the top branches, pulling themselves upwards by their own strength-- how reddish grapes hand from alien branches, and Bacchus sags down through a carpet of green, while vines poiferate and penetrate the canpoy of foliage.
The gourd plant rises up from weak seedlings and, in a similar fashion, clambers up a supporting trellis, and grasps the alder branches with its coiling shoots.
So that no raging storm can tear it loose, it sends out just as many shoots as there are knots which need to be tied, and since each tendril then bifurcates, each joint on the trellis is doubly tied left and right.

Did Walafred Strabo notice the coils? He continues.

The Wild Garden, William Robinson

The Wild Garden was published originally in 1870. In 1903, it was republished (with many changes?) with illustrations by Alfred Parsons with this note:

"The wild rose has given her petals to the winds for over twenty summers since this book with its solitary wood cut first saw the light, and if these many years give me any right to judge my own book, I may say that much experience since tells me that the 'Wild Garden' deserved to live, and that such ideas carried out with some regard to the soil and other things affecting plants in each place, may be fertile in making our open air gardens more artistic and delightful."

Read the illustrated 1903 version of The Wild Garden in Google books.