16 October: reading weather, Windcliff book, and a gritty digression

Friday. 16 October 2020

At last, I had a day of rainy reading weather.

South window view into south Catio

I should mention that I recently read Rebecca Solnit’s excellent new memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, loved it, but it brought up so many thoughts that, at this busy time of year, I can’t get up the steam to write about. I read it in chapters at bedtime. Today, I was delighted to be able to read the entirety of Dan Hinkley’s new book while sitting with kittens. They are not restful lap companions but eventually settled on the bed next to me. It’s called Windcliff, not While Sitting with Kittens, and is about the creation of his personal, post-Heronswood garden.

I was envious at Dan’s ability to write about his neighbors. I’d be afraid of making people mad (the ones I don’t know who aren’t very friendly).  In a glorious chapter about planting for privacy, he starts with, “Call me a misanthrope, but I do not like to garden under the curious gaze of the folks next door.  …..The need to interact with the outside world takes a nosedive for many people I know when ensconced in their own home and garden.” I immediately felt the warm glow of like-mindedness. 

When he described one young neighbor as “making pathetic sounds on her coronet” from a house that was right on the property line, and described the horrors of another house being built that overlooked over the Windcliff property on the other side, and then described in detail what he planted to get his privacy back, I was thrilled. The second large house and garage eventually became occupied by good gardening neighbors. I confirmed this by looking at Google earth, which showed a pleasant looking garden there.

So even though, other than some mention of security lights, I don’t say much about the neighbors I don’t know, I will share that one of them had a wireless network called “Be a good neighbor and stay over there.”  Not a difficult request to fulfill since, unless I garden for a neighbor, I’m pretty darned standoffish myself these days and will duck behind a large shrub (planted for that purpose and to block lights) to avoid having my gardening interrupted by random passersby. If you are reading this, you are not a random passerby and I don’t mean you. 

I was also startled by Dan’s frankness about going on garden tours in connection with his speaking engagements: “….the most exhausting part of the process is the much-invisaged tour of any region’s horticultural high spots before or after the lecture…” and he goes on to describe one such garden in an honest but eventually sympathetic way; a moment of realization that many gardeners love their humble gardens as much as the most renowned garden designer. (Not being a famous and brilliant plantsperson, I just damn with faint praise if I visit a garden I don’t like and, being a completist, blog about it along with gardens I love on a garden tour weekend. I try to find something to like and only occasionally fail, usually if the garden is installed by someone other than the gardener.)

Dan Hinkley’s words to live by while garden touring:

Windcliff is a great book and gave me a wonderful day. I have my own copy. If you are a local and you promise  to be very careful and read it and return it within a week, I will lend it to you. I now feel that I need more space for more plants and should expand beyond the south gate (even though at other times I feel that I should leave that area wild).

Not only did I get some help in how to plant for privacy and light-blocking in the two areas that have been challenging for me, but of course I ended up with a list of plants that I must have (some of which will be impossible to find without making a trip to the Windcliff non-mail-order nursery), as follows:

Kniphofia drepanophylla (blooms in nov) 

Grevillea Canterbury Gold

Escallonia illinita or viscosa (smells like curry)

Olearia x oleifolia ‘Waikariensis’ (smells like coconut) 

Indigofera pendula (small multistemmed tree)

Agapanthus ‘Graskop’ and ‘Quink Drops’

(Deciduous ones are hardier)

Maybe at the Port! 

Panicum ‘Dallas Blues’

Rhodocoma (restios)

Cannomois virgata. (Dry and close to house …rare …Dan writes, “I have it and you probably never will.”

Elegia capensis 

Grevillea ‘Canberra Gem’ (blooms eight months)

Veratrum Californicum  (Saw this afternoon a garden tour, liked it…poisonous per google)

Thus my list of plants of desire, most of which I can’t find anywhere around here, grows even longer.

A few more delightful saves from the book…

I am comforted that even such a plantsman as Dan struggled with crocosmia.

I feel better now about my battles with Lucifer in Long Beach.

On hearing a lecture by British garden designer Dan Pearson (whose book Home Ground: Sanctuary in the City I love): “His garden and the plants he employs were described in a humble, quiet poetry I will never forget.” I wish I had been there. Perhaps I can find a lecture by Pearson online.

A warning: The sharp awns of Stipa tennuissima got stuck in the throats of Dan Hinkley’s dogs, resulting in vet visits. I’m glad I just dug a bunch of it out of the J Crew garden.

I think I have finally identified from a photo in the book (without having to search my blog post for the day I bought it) the plant that I bought from Dan’s booth at a Hardy Plant Study Weekend: Fascicularia pitcairnifolia. Pretty sure!

Finally, I again am flummoxed by garden grit. Monty Don and Carol Klein on Gardeners’ World are always going on about using grit while potting up or even planting in the ground, and now Dan also writes about having “honed the drainage further by adding pea gravel and grit…” and “a five inch stratum of amber-colored quartz…” What is this grit and where does one purchase it? I thought maybe pea gravel would do, but now I read it is definitely another thing. And then “top dress planters with fine grit.” The only thing I can find locally is turkey grit, a fine stone material that is white, and not all that attractive. Then he writes about mixing “#6 sandblasting grit” with potting soil. Google did not help me. All I could find available at online hardware sites was some kind of metal grit. Even though English garden writer Marion Cran went on about “basic slag”, which turned out to be a metal byproduct, that can’t be right for grit, can it? And then, pages later, “the best general sowing media, high in fine grit.” I remain frustrated and flummoxed. If I lived in a gardening Mecca like Seattle or Kingston, I would no longer by mystified, I suppose. Or if I lived in my true spirit home, the UK, where finding grit to buy is easy.

Perhaps washed quarter minus gravel would be proper grit. Even though it is a dull grey rather than the attractive amber grit I’ve seen Monty use. But I can’t buy washed gravel from any local source. Perhaps I have a fine enough screen to wash my own damn gravel. If that is even the right thing.

I found this in another online search.

And found a Swedish gardener equally flummoxed in this Gardeners’ World forum. As for the Reddit advice, I have it on good authority that play sand is the wrong thing to use.

Now, just as on my reading day, I have digressed from the delights of the book. Do get it. Meanwhile, this says it all about my annual plant sale, in its third year next spring, if I’m lucky, and on which I’m already spending a ridiculous amount of time: