The Urban Gardener

When we moved into our new house, I found a garden already in place, though not the garden I would have created for myself. In my ideal garden, I would have tons of wildflowers and native plants. It would be full of bees and butterflies. And I would feed myself for much of the summer from its produce. What we have here instead is a garden that’s shaded most of the day, precluding the riotous flowerbed and vegetable garden I would normally plant.

But the previous owners created something equally amazing in its own way–a Japanese-style garden, full of stones and sculptural rocks and an astonishing sense of tranquility for a garden in the midst of a bustling city. There is a small pond and waterfall in the back, which has a remarkable effect on visitors sitting out back. “It’s better than a spa break,” as one friend put it. The previous owners left these notes so that we could understand what we’ve been lucky enough to inherit.

Excerpted from A Japanese Garden Journey: Through Ancient Stones and Dragon Bones by Judith D. Klingsick

“A Japanese garden is often called a ‘garden of the mind’… Whatever its style, every Japanese garden serves as a mirror of nature. Perhaps the most vivid reflection you will see in that mirror is a ‘tension of opposites:’ delicate versus dramatic, changeless versus changing, wild versus controlled. Like the cosmic forces of In and Yo (Yin and Yang in Chinese philosophy), the opposites are never in conflict. Rather they complement each other in order to bring about balance and harmony in life as well as in the garden.”

~ Zigzag pathways: “Japanese legends say that evil spirits can travel only in a straight line. Therefore, bridges and pathways often use zigzags in their designs. While you can easily shift directions, the evil spirits that may be following you can’t twist or turn. They either fall off the water or veer off the path, no longer able to bother you.”

~ Rocks: “Ancient legends suggest that huge rocks heaving out of the ground are dragon bones. In fact, rocks throughout the history of Japan have been called ‘the bones of the earth.’ They are the framework or skeleton that holds the world together. Whether they are pebbles for a river bed or boulders for a mountain-scape, rocks are the most important element of a Japanese garden. Garden designers… determine the rock’s best ‘face’ by looking at its veins, colors and fissures. They plant rocks into the ground, making it seem as if a rock has been living in that place forever. The more moss and lichen growing on a rock, the better, because they add age and permanence to its character.”

~ Small rock gardens: Ours were influenced by Zen gardens “named after a branch of Buddhism which emphasizes meditation and simple living in harmony with nature as ways to find inner peace.”

~ Bamboo fence & bamboo plants: In Japan, this member of the grass family is a sacred barrier against evil; in China, a symbol of longevity.

~ The “moon gate” on our back fence is a variation on this theme:

From Lewis Ginter’s Botanical Garden: “A moon gate is an intriguing entryway that dates back to ancient China and Japan. Its defining element is a partial-circle opening that acts as the pedestrian’s passageway into the garden…. Asian noblemen incorporated moon gates in their landscapes for spiritual enrichment. The opening transported the visitor from the human world to the natural world—from busyness to relaxation and reflection … Then and now, a moon gate symbolizes the transition to a special place of beauty and respite … the circle universally represents perfection, eternity and wholeness. The moon gate takes you from one place of beauty to another, and in its pure form reminds us how we all are connected through space, time and spirit.”

For the last four years, I have written about the challenges of urban gardening—that is, gardening without any actual yard or lawn, only concrete strip next to the sidewalk and the tiny patch of dirt around the tree in the sidewalk. Over the years, I have been flabbergasted at neighbors who have picked my flowers, dug up the marigolds around the tree, walked off with entire potted plants, and plucked and eaten my tomatoes right in front of me. I have adopted several methods of deterrence to stop the pilfering. For example, to prevent pranksters from walking off with plants hanging on the railing around the house, I planted morning glories this year to replace the hanging plants. Just let them untangle those unruly vines!

But now that I am moving to a new house with an actual garden behind it—a garden that won’t be on the street and therefore will be protected from human predation—I find myself already missing the myriad exchanges I have with neighbors on a regular basis, while watering or otherwise tending the garden. Hardly a day goes by when someone doesn’t stop and say, “Beautiful garden.” “This must be the botanical gardens of Hoboken.” “It reminds me of my grandmother’s garden in the old country.” “I’m teaching my child vegetables from your garden.” “I’m teaching my little girls colors from looking at your flowers.” And best, “This place used to be so dead. You’ve brought it to life.”

Here’s what it looks like today–compared to what it looked like before I started my garden. It’s brought me far more joy than I ever could have anticipated. For all its challenges and limitations, I will miss it.

Every year, it seems, I try a new herb in the garden that surprises me with the intriguing dimensions of flavor it adds to my cooking. Last year it was oregano, which pepped up our salads in unexpected ways. This year, it’s tarragon, which I never really thought of before as anything other than a slender stalk in vinegar bottles.

How wrong I was. The French, it seems, were onto tarragon long before I was, designating it one of four essential herbs in their fines herbes and using it as an essential ingredient in Béarnaise sauce. The first time I snipped some into a salad this summer, the burst of flavor was unlike anything I’d ever tasted—with a kapow, zip, and zing that made me sit up a little straighter in my chair. My husband and I have since added it to scrambled eggs and even an herb sauce for fish. (There’s no special recipe for that. My husband just takes handfuls of all the garden herbs—mint, thyme, tarragon, rosemary, oregano, basil—and tosses it all into the blender.)

I immediately went in search of tarragon recipes and found a zinger of a salad dressing with tarragon, finely grated ginger, garlic, and chopped scallions (photo, above). But my new aspiration is to make this amazing-looking recipe–Tarragon Olive Oil Ice Cream from The Bojon Gourmet. I rarely post photos that aren’t my own, but this one from Bojon’s site just looked too delicious to pass up!

Call me crazy, but I’m always shocked when people take things from my garden—like half a dozen roses, or entire potted plants, or my garden hose. Lately, of course, it’s the tomatoes. Both the Cherokee Purple heirlooms and the Sun Sugar cherry tomatoes are apparently ripe for pilfering, as I routinely discover when I go out to pick these vine-ripened beauties for the night’s salad or ratatouille. Even the police are not above suspicion. “Nice tomato garden,” said a beat cop to me the other evening. “Thanks, but people are stealing them, “ I replied. To my amazement, the cop said he’d thought about it himself.

“But you’re a cop,” I protested.

“Hey, this is New Jersey,” he said. “We grow great tomatoes.”

But almost every day, something really nice happens, too. While I’m out watering my garden, a puppy will wriggle through the fence to sniff the tomatoes, or I’ll spy a butterfly flitting among the butterfly bushes, or someone will stop to compliment the flowers, or give their children a lesson in herbs and vegetables, or tell me about the glorious gardens their parents used to have in the old country, wherever that might be. “My mother always said she felt closer to God in the garden,” said one stranger who recently. Well said.

But something really extraordinary happened in late May. A woman I’d never seen before came by while I was watering. “I see you like plants,” she said. “Can I give you mine? I’m moving.” Could she! Would I ever say no to plants? Her friend came by the next day and left a small collection on my stoop, with a little note thanking me for taking them (photo, right). They were mainly struggling houseplants that would need to be nursed back to health. But there was one that I was thrilled to have—chocolate mint.

Chocolate mint has been aptly described as tasting like the mint in Girl Scout cookies. It’s got a strong menthol flavor and releases a mouthwatering aroma when you brush past it. It’s supposed to taste particularly delicious in anything made with chocolate. But it also tastes good in anything you’d use spearmint or peppermint in. I use mine in mint tea, vanilla yogurt, salads, even herb sauces for fish.

I immediately went out and bought a new chocolate mint plant that was younger and healthier and has since then sprawled enthusiastically along my stoop. I’m obliged to pick mint regularly to keep it under control—a pleasure, if ever there was one, for chocolate mint has become, well, my newly minted favorite.

It’s been a great season for strawberries, as you can see from these organic beauties. But what’s with the one in the middle?

Strawberry blossoms

I cannot help but recall the words of the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas:
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
-from the poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”

A cold snap once killed the buds on a japonica bush. This was not just any japonica bush, but one at the hermitage where the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh lives. As he writes in his book No Death, No Fear, he initially mourned their loss, yet weeks later, new buds had appeared. “Are you the same as the flowers that died in the frost or are you different flowers?” he asked them. And, as perhaps only a Buddhist monk can claim without seeming crazy, the flowers responded, “We are not the same and we are not different. When conditions are sufficient we manifest, and when conditions are not sufficient we go into hiding.”

I thought of that passage many times this winter, as I wondered whether spring would bring “sufficient conditions” for my two lovely butterfly bushes—or whether the winter’s polar vortex and the accompanying deep freeze would do them in.

In fact, the winter’s unrelenting cold squeezed the life out of the corner one (photo on the left, from last year). Last weekend I dug it up. The roots—so tenacious in a vigorous plant—yielded without a murmur. Truly, life had passed.

But what about the other one (photo on the right, from last year)? A month ago, it looked just as lifeless as the first, until I cut off the end of one branch and found a little bit of green inside—a sign of life. I tried another, twig and then another, with no further signs of encouragement. But then, a few weeks ago, scattered clusters of leaves began appearing on several of the brittle, woody branches. “Get rid of it,” said my husband. “Don’t mess around with it. It may grow, but it will be stunted.” But what about that green inside? What about the tiny leaflets?

In 2005, comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to describe an argument that has emotional appeal and the ring of truth to it—even if the facts contradict. As I looked at my struggling butterfly bush, I decided that it contained a quality I dubbed “plantiness”—containing the essential ingredients of plant life, no matter how tentative.

I did buy a new butterfly bush–two new ones, in fact, to provide food for any bees and butterflies that may be looking for early-season sustenance. But instead of throwing out my old friend, I pruned it and gave it a dousing of fertilizer. And now I will wait for it to make its comeback—when the conditions are sufficient.

Wasn’t it just days ago that I finally declared it was spring? So what’s with the snow? Seriously, this was just two days after 70-degree weather.

“I planted pansies, so it’s spring now!” declared my sister-in-law on her Facebook page. That was on March 9, during one of the brief lulls between this winter’s brutal cold snaps. The polar vortex was gone, but unfortunately, winter was not. “Make sure you cover them Thursday when it snows,” a friend shot back.

I can’t blame my sister-in-law for trying to will spring into existence. In my lifetime, I can’t recall a year when I was happier to greet the spring—that is, spring that actually feels like spring, not the snowy calendar date that meteorologists told us marked the change of seasons this year.

But now that warm weather is finally coaxing me outdoors, the budding of tulip trees, forsythia, and daffodils fills me with hope. My seeds are planted; new bareroots roses are on the way; tomato cages stand at the ready.

Over the weekend, I made my first trip to the garden store, which felt like a joyful reunion of old friends. My husband and I came home with an armload of hyacinths, narcissus, and pansies—in purple, green, and gold, the colors of Mardi Gras. And a celebration it is, indeed. “Can you just leave the hyacinths in the car?” my husband asked, intoxicated by their heady scent. We are so ready for this day. Welcome, Spring!

Gardening introduces you to some curious facts. For example, who knew that chrysanthemums entered the United States through my hometown of Hoboken, NJ? Hoboken is known for many things, including being the birthplace of Frank Sinatra and baseball as played by modern rules. It claims to have had the first brewery in America and still has a frightening ratio of bars to inhabitants. It’s the town where the movie On the Waterfront was filmed with Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint, with all the extras being town residents. My husband and I quickly learned these bits of random information when we moved here. And yet, it’s somehow taken me years to discover the chrysanthemum connection.

In 1798, it seems, a variety of chrysanthemum called “Dark Purple” was imported by Col. John Stevens, a character in his own right. Col. Stevens served in George Washington’s army during the American Revolution, and he purchased the tract of land that later became Hoboken after it was confiscated from a Tory family in punishment for their misaligned loyalties. As the story goes, Col. Stevens thought the mums would make an interesting “attraction” for a park at the north end of the fledgling town. Who would have imagined that two centuries later, every supermarket in Hoboken would sell truckloads of mums each fall for $5.99 a pot? The small, tight flowers are so dense and so uniform that they lack all sense of delicacy or style. It’s hard to imagine them as an attraction of any kind.

For that, you have to go someplace special, like the chrysanthemum exhibition that took place in October at the New York Botanical Garden (right). Called “Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Garden,” it was a true attraction, showcasing flowers worthy of royalty. Literally. The Japanese have elevated cultivation of mums to an art and even dubbed the emperor’s throne (and by extension, the monarchy itself) the Chrysanthemum Throne.

As the show demonstrated, not only can these flowers be beautiful and varied, with forms ranging from spiky spider mums (left) to pillowy “incurve” chrysanthemums (below left), with their mounds of large petals curving gracefully toward a center. They can also be coaxed into growing in truly astonishing ways. To create the ozukuri, or “thousand blooms” design, the gardener takes a single cutting from a mature mum and patiently pinches back the tips of branches, so that a profusion of new branches develops. When the plant reaches a certain size, it is then trained to grow over a giant metal form, the gardener tying down the desired shoots to the frame until the branches form a cascade of flowers or even a bridge (below). The resulting creation boasts hundreds, sometimes thousands, of blooms–all from a single plant.

Granted, this is not something I’m ever going to try at home. The New York Botanical Garden cultivated these plants for a full year to achieve this effect. And to coax the flowers into blooming all at once on cue for the show’s opening, they covered them with giant plastic sheeting for all but roughly six hours of daylight.

In the Japanese garden, other mums are cultivated for a single precious bloom and lined up in perfect diagonal rows, alternating pink, yellow, and white, like the bridle of the emperor’s horse. The design is known as tazuna-ue, or horse bridle.

I will, of course, never attempt such ambitious designs in my humble container garden. But I do treasure the “football chrysanthemum” on my own stoop earlier this fall (top left). It displays grace and elegance, like something you would see depicted on a Chinese silk jacket or a Japanese screen. It’s my own, very small, Hoboken attraction.

What do you do with self-watering containers when winter arrives? You pull up the vegetables, empty out the soil, and pour out the water in the reservoir underneath to prevent the water from freezing, expanding, and damaging the containers. So with temperatures plunging, I finally pulled up my tomatoes, uprooted the basil, dug out the eggplant and made a shocking discovery.

My husband had observed over the summer that some of the tomatoes, which were cracking along the sides, seemed to be getting too much water. I didn’t see how that was possible and routinely pooh-poohed the suggestion. But as I shoveled the last soil out of the largest of my self-watering containers and burrowed down to the plastic cover that sits atop the water tank below, I started noticing that the plants had sent root tips right through the slits in the plastic and into the reservoir below. When I pried the cover loose, I was astonished to see not just wispy little root tips, but a massive mat of tangled roots in the water. My plants, the sneaky little creatures, weren’t just supping. They were mainlining water—overdosing on it, in the case of the tomatoes.

Next I turned my attention to uprooting the sweet potato vines, basil, mint, marigolds, and sorrel in my other self-watering containers. They, too, had sent their roots down deep into the reservoir, making these plants a whole lot more challenging to pull up than plants in regular containers. No wonder they seemed so happy.

But the biggest chuckle of the day came when I found the actual sweet potatoes among the roots of my decorative vines. Large and ruby red, they looked like lips ready to give a Valentine’s Day kiss. Pucker up!

“I’m a city girl from Paris,” declares artist Francine Demeulenaere. “But I woke up one day two years ago with a dream in my head. It was so clear in my mind, this sentence: If each person in the world could plant four fruit trees, in five years there would be 28 billion fruit trees on the planet.” That’s billion with a “b.”

It was an idea she couldn’t shake, so she decided to start planting her own four. But where? She was living in a small apartment in New York City and renting an art studio in Hoboken, NJ, across the river. Neither one included land. Her studio did, however, have a wall of west-facing windows that let in plenty of light. Demeulenaere decided to turn her studio into a place for both painting and planting.

To say that she has full-fledged trees now would be an exaggeration. “It takes five years on average to grow a fruit tree and I only started two years ago,” she says. But she has two enormous tables, groaning under dozens of heavy pots full of shoots, saplings, and cuttings from exotic plants—lemon trees, orange trees, passionfruit, peach trees, even pineapple—not to mention a grapevine, lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, peppers, lavender, rosemary, thyme, mint, Thai basil, marjoram, and a “rescue plant” she can’t identify. All together, it creates the impression of a small jungle. “Here I have two seasons,” she jokes. “Summer and when the heating comes on.”

For Demeulenaere, almost any fruit or vegetable on her dinner plate becomes a source of potential seeds. Even her sprawling pineapple plant was a do-it-yourself job. (Want to try it? Cut off the leafy crown of a fresh pineapple, strip the bottom leaves to reveal the stem, then stick the whole thing stem-down in water for a couple weeks until it forms roots a couple inches long. Then plant in sandy, well-drained soil.)

Before long, Demeulanaere’s plants came an artistic inspiration, as she started to notice that certain patterns in nature repeated. The cosmos in all its grandeur, she found, formed a mirror image of the tiniest details of her plants. For example, the closer she zoomed in on the center of a daisy, the less it looked like a colored pad anchoring petals and the more it resembled like the Milky Way. She began taking photos of her plants—so close up you would be hard pressed to identify any individual parts—then superimposing a piece of glass onto which she paints dots, creating a three-dimensional image that does indeed look cosmic.

The 18th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, she says, noted the similarities of the microscopic and infinite and has become her inspiration with quotes like this: “By space the universe encompasses me and swallows me up like an atom.” And this: “Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”

As she says, “It makes me think that nature has an intelligence and is telling us something that we are not seeing because we are so disconnected from the natural world. But what if everybody could grow something in their homes? Then maybe we could reconnect with nature and able to live in harmony with nature instead of against it.”

Her studio is on the artists’ studio tour this Saturday and Sunday in Hoboken.

I knew that airport security would pull me over, and they did. I was flying home from the Garden Bloggers Conference in Atlanta with an azalea in my suitcase—yes, an actual shrub—and the round pot, filled with damp soil, must have looked like a bomb to the pair of agents screening the carry-on luggage. “Is this your bag?” the TSA officer said to the gentleman behind me, as soon as my suitcase had gone through the scanner. “No, it’s mine,” I volunteered. “It’s a plant.”

A look of relief crossed the agent’s face—then a smile, as I opened my suitcase, revealing the deep green foliage and soft, pink blossoms. She still had to wipe down my luggage, looking for explosives, but this was clearly the highlight of her workday. Her whole demeanor softened. “Have a good flight,” she said, waving me cheerfully on.

I’ve never tried flying with flowers before, and I don’t recommend it. But when you’re at a garden conference, and every attendee is given an azalea, what are you going to do? To my amazement, it’s not actually that hard to pack a plant–at least, not a sturdy one like an azalea. I simply bundled it into my suitcase, wrapping a plastic laundry bag from the hotel around the pot, so that dirt wouldn’t spill out onto my clothes. Then I stuffed my clothes around it, trying to cushion the shrub from the inevitable bumps.

Eight hours, two cab rides, and one airplane flight later, the azalea emerged from my suitcase—a little worse for the stifling and parched trip, but still alive. Now, three weeks later, you’d never guess how many petals were crushed en route. My azalea, as you can see, is thriving.