Tag Archives: gardens

The Baboon Congress

Group Discount

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Today’s guest post comes from Renee in North Dakota

It is only to be hoped that the recent Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage will have a salutary effect on the price of admission to the McCrory Gardens in Brookings, SD, the largest public garden in the region outside of Omaha and the Twin Cities.

Admission used to be free, according to my son and daughter-in-law, but was increased to $6.00 and the 25 acre Formal Garden site fenced in and closed each day after 8:00pm due to public safety concerns and vandalism in the wee hours of the morning. Locals were quite unhappy with the decision to put up a fence and limit access. The 45 acre arboretum remains unfenced and open 24 hours a day.

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We traipsed around these most beautiful gardens during a recent visit to Brookings. This August marks the 50th anniversary of the gardens, named after a former Horticulture professor at South Dakota State University. The site is on the campus and is affiliated with the Plant Science department. 40,000 annuals and perennials are planted each year, and I imagine there are scads of Horticulture students and budding landscape architects who have worked like navvies to maintain and improve the gardens.

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There is a children’s hedge maze, a cottage garden, AAS field plots, a rock garden, and wonderfully designed garden plots dotting the landscape at every turn, loaded with annuals and perennials and shrubs and vines. The cottage by the cottage garden is a former gas station. I found it quite charming and I included a photo of it. The site also boasts of the largest selection of maple trees in South Dakota. The leaves in my other photo are from a Harlequin maple tree.

The linden trees were in bloom, scenting the air with an elusive, sweet perfume that took us quite a while to identify. Staff were setting up for a garden wedding, and we could see the bridal party having photos taken. I wonder when the first gay wedding will take place there? Perhaps the increase in weddings will help lower or even abolish the entrance fee. One can only hope. Gardens are always changing and shifting with the seasons, and so does the social fabric, even in the Dakotas.

You have 70 acres, a large budget, and an army of eager and willing horticulturists. What kind of garden would you have?

 

The Baboon Congress

Southern Discomfort

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Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

Twice in one day I received eye pings, that is discordant visual images it took my brain several seconds to recognize and decode.

The first happened while driving in Mankato; the vanity license plate in front of me read “M MORT.” What? Then I realized it was on a hearse, a Mankato Mortuary hearse no doubt. But isn’t “M MORT” just sort of a small “ewee”? Do they have another one called “M MINKY”?

The second happened about an hour later in Barnes & Noble. I was staring off into empty space; not into space actually but into the magazine rack a few feet away, which is by-and-large the mental equivalent of empty space. I read as the title of a magazine Garden & Gun.

What? Was this real? Had I misread? Nope. I looked closer and saw a subtitle “Soul of the South.” Hmm. The entire complicated cultures of the ten or so states of The South find their soul in gardens and guns? I do not like sweeping generalizations about nations, cultures, peoples, regions, but gardens and guns are a big miss for my experience of The South. But see it’s for real.

Then I looked lower on the cover and it read “The Hollywood Issue.” Now that’s more than a bit discordant. Has Hollywood ever represented The South as anything but tired old cliches? Or The Midwest, or New England? To Hollywood has The South ever been much beyond hillbillies, plantations, bigotry, and threatening ignorance?

What was on the cover? But of course, a woman showing cleavage.

Cover Garden & Gun

Anna Camp, whoever she is. Another actress of whom I have never heard, but I am ignorant in this regard. In a wedding dress–is that what that is–and cowboy boots. How did cowboy boots become Southern, anyway?

I scanned through the magazine. It is actually very slick, high-concept, visually very well done. It had few pictures of either guns or gardens. It did, however, have an extensive article with high-quality photos on how to make moonshine.

It was all too big a brain cramp for me. I went and scanned through Mad Magazine–much more in my frame of reference.

What would be your “_____________ & ____________” title of a magazine on The Midwest?

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Deep In The Weeds

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Speaking of working steadily at a task that feels endless (as we were yesterday), I have been slowly making my way around the yard hand-weeding some planting beds that have been allowed to go to seed.

The original plan was to keep these areas heavily mulched and carefully tended to provide some space where flowers, ornamental grasses, trees and bushes could thrive. And at first, that’s how it worked. But over time the mulch dissolved (as expected) and while I was looking the other way, the beds have filled in with misshapen, spiky intruders from Mars.

I could go after the invaders with a noxious chemical cocktail, but that’s a solution for cowards. I need to confront the weeds personally, face to frond. Besides, there is always a risk that any foliage killer I spray on unwanted greenery will drift off and murder the more upstanding flora I’m trying to protect. I suppose it’s like keeping a loaded gun in the house. With very little effort you can do more damage than the threat you armed yourself against at the beginning.

These photos show you the scope of the task.

Backyard Vengeance Tour – the results

My approach is simple and brutal. I drop to my knees and claw at the Earth with a three pronged hook held in my right hand. As the soil is loosened I grab the weed with my left hand and toss it into a bucket. Then repeat, repeat, repeat. If it sounds “old school”, you’re right. This is basically the technique our prehistoric ancestors used to spiff things up around the entrances to their caves. I flung myself at the problem for several hours straight on Saturday, all the while wondering what possible good could come of it.

In the sandy areas, scurrying ants reproached me for destroying their cities. I tried to explain that I was down here with them because I was withholding my support from Monsanto, but the ants were too busy running in panic to pay me much mind.

I continued to dig. After an hour, I found it very difficult to stand up straight. After two hours, I had a sense that if I suddenly keeled over, the weeds could reclaim everything before I was cold.
Weeding must be the opposite of teaching. You can see immediate results, but you can be pretty certain your work will have absolutely no effect at all on the future.

To which pointless chore have you given too much of your time?