Post Earl Beauty: All is well

As Saturday afternoon gave way to evening, I paraphrased an old expression from the 1970s "What if they gave a hurricane and nobody came?" Earl was pretty much a non-event for us; some wind, some rain, happily no damage to crops or properties around here. A few trees uprooted or broken in other areas, some power outages, but really, it could have been much worse. Thank you all for your good wishes and caring; I hope everyone got off as unscathed as we did.

Ironically, we had more wind on Sunday and Monday, of a more damaging kind because it came out of the west southwest, than during Earl's visit. I was pretty cranky when I walked around the garden on Monday and saw some of the perennials had been beaten around by the wind, by banging into other plants, but I soon got over it when I noticed some of the marvels that were happening.


Starting with the blooming of 'Sungold' buddleia, one of the most beautiful of flowering shrubs. Here in Nova Scotia, buddleias are not only NOT invasive, they are often marginally hardy. They will die down to the ground and come back fresh for some, but I tend to treat them as annuals, buying small plants each spring and tucking them into spots where they will hopefully be happy. Obviously, this one has been happy.

While I don't have drifts and drifts of Verbena bonariensis, I have half a dozen good plants from transplants this year, and I'm optimistic that we might get seedlings. If not, I'm sure a visit to my friend Terri next spring will yield some new seedlings. This is such a great plant, beloved of butterflies and other pollinators as well as by the gardener.

'Lemon Princess' spirea has decided to throw up a number of new blossoms along with some freshly gold foliage. I normally don't even pay much attention to the flowers on most of my spireas, as I chose them for their foliage colours rather than their blooms.

After years of battling with Russian sage, I decided to simply treat it as an annual, and buy it every year. I've placed it in the best-drained garden, where the echinaceas live, and if it survives the winter and comes back next year, great. If not, I still like it and will plant it again next season.

One of my favourite roses is the rugosa hybrid 'Polareis', which I bought at Cornhill Nursery about seven years ago and which is a spectacularly floriferous and well behaved shrub. It does get some aphids on its buds, but I just spray a blast of water from the hose on them or let their predators feast on them.

This is the season when perennial grasses are really coming into their own. Some of them have finished flowering, but others, such as the miscanthuses, panicums, molinias and schizachyriums are just coming on.


I have half a dozen or more miscanthus varieties around the property, not all of them clearly identified. Since this one came from Baldwin's Nurseries and is the earliest to flower, I'm fairly sure that it's 'Malepartus'. It was unperturbed by the wind, whoever it is.

While I am kicking and screaming about going into rapidly shorter days, I do like the light of September, especially when it plays on foliage such as in this garden. This is a garden in Wolfville that I discovered today; along with numerous low growing shrubs such as barberries, there are Japanese blood grasses (Imperata) and fountain grasses (Pennisetum) catching the light.

Although some of the echinaceas were battered and petal-bruised by the weekend weather, 'Secret Passion' decided to comfort me by producing several new blooms. It's not quite as awesome as 'Hot Papaya', but it's pretty close.

To go along with my lovely yellow buddleia, here's another late-blooming shrub: Caryopteris, or blue mist shrub, sometimes also called blue spirea. This is a small plant, bought this summer from a nursery that had brought it in thinking it was somehow a perennial (I think the nursery they ordered from screwed up their order). I love caryopteris, though it can be really slow to bloom here; its cooling blue flowers work beautifully among the hotter colours of many of September's blooms.

Skywatch Friday: The calm before Earl...

Thursday morning I went outside just after sunrise, when the sky was simply heat-haze coloured as opposed to blue, to take a walk around the gardens and record what they look like while we wait to see if Hurricane Earl comes a-calling. It seemed like a good idea to have a look at the mass of bloom still happening in my garden, when things are relatively tidy and floriferous and there wasn't a breath of wind to disturb the scene. So although it's not really sky-oriented, this is my offering for this week's Skywatch Friday.

A variety of hydrangeas provide a backdrop for this wash of perennials, evergreen and deciduous shrubs. I refer to this as my mini-prairie-in-progress, with panic grass, rudbeckias, and other coneflowers consorting with bee-enticing plants such as agastaches and eryngiums. The bees were extremely busy this morning, loving the heat, and perhaps knowing that there is inclement weather coming. They bustle around the garden, diving into flowers and essentially ignoring me. I listen to them and smile a lot.

My coneflowers are still going very strong in their bed. I mentioned on Facebook that Longsuffering Spouse kindly edged around this bed on the weekend, cutting out a good foot of sod and then adding well-composted manure to the bare ground. In a few weeks time, it'll be perfectly suited for tucking in some springflowering bulbs, and next spring I'll spread the perennials out, moving some of the coneflowers forward and letting the taller ones work as a backdrop.

The outburst of gold in the centre foreground is Solidago 'Little Lemon', a cultivated goldenrod sent to me last year by Dugald Cameron of GardenImport. It's thriving beautifully, and is becoming one of my favourite later-season flowers. I plan to divide the plant and move it to another bed where it can spread out and consort with eupatorium and other later-season stars.

Signs of the closing down of summer: some of the miscanthus are beginning to put up their tall, wispily elegant flower heads over their fountaining foliage, while Actaea 'Pink Spike' is in full bloom. Tanacetum 'Isla Gold' is blooming enthusiastically, although I plant it more for its gold foliage, which is starting to fade to a bright lime green now, and Monarda 'Raspberry Wine' is still providing lots of food for the lingering hummingbirds. It'll be interesting to see if they stay beyond tomorrow or if they take off on their migration before the arrival of Earl.

We're not terribly concerned about Earl, whether he arrives as a hurricane or a tropical storm. Living in a rural community on the shores of the Bay of Fundy means that we expect bombastic weather from time to time, and we are generally prepared for it. Those of you who are regular readers know that we get truly rude winter storms, and usually at least one tropical storm or diminishing hurricane as summer winds down. So things may be messy on Saturday, and there may be some flattened flowers and defoliated shrubs come Sunday, but I'd sooner that we took the brunt of it than the apple and pear producers down in the Valley below us. It could be a difficult weekend for them.

Virtual Book Tour: Hothouse Flower & the Nine Plants of Desire

A few weeks back, I was contacted by a publicist who wondered if I was interested in participating in what is called a Virtual Book Tour, in which a number of us would read and review a particular novel. Based on the blurb about the novel, I agreed to do so, and read Margot Berwin's Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire.

In my real life as a freelance journalist, I write for a variety of publications and clients, and about a number of different subjects. Despite the fact that it’s time-consuming and doesn’t pay well, I regularly review books for the provincial newspaper, occasionally for other publications, and occasionally put up a review here on bloomingwriter. Normally, I review books of nonfiction in my areas of interest: gardening, nature, science/environment, occasionally history; occasionally I review a work of fiction. I have interviewed numerous authors, including Canadian icons Margaret Atwood and David Adams Richards, (two of my favourite authors) and have long taken my philosophy of book reviewing from something Ms. Atwood wrote some years ago.

“I still won’t review a book I don’t like, although to do so would doubtless be amusing for the Ms. Hyde side of me and entertaining for the more malicious class of reader,” Ms. Atwood wrote in the introduction to her essay collection, Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004. She goes on to say that if a book is really bad, it ought not be reviewed at all, or if it’s good but not to her taste, someone else should review it.

This isn’t a bad book, but it’s not a particularly good one. I will stress that it’s mostly not to my taste, which runs the gamut from science fiction to thrillers to hardcore literature, so maybe I'm just being a grump. However though not entranced by it, I see some flashes of delightful ability in the author, enough that I will be quite willing to read a future work by Berwin even though I won’t re-read this particular one.

If you’ve been following the virtual book tour set up for Hothouse Flower, you may have already read the book, or at least know its premise: Lila, the narrator/lead character is newly divorced, lives in New York City, works a sort of dull job in an ad agency, has a bright but dull apartment. She has no commitments—no relationship, no pets, no plants, no real life outside of her McJob—until she buys a tropical plant from a smooth-talking street vendor. She then meets an odd but somewhat intriguing man who has a Laundromat filled with exotic and wonderful plants, and through her own errors in judgment, she causes this man to lose his plants. Her ensuing quest to replace his plant collection leads her to the rainforests of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.

The premise is intriguing, and the book blurb sounded promising. And while Berwin writes quite well at times and has a quirkily fun sense of humour, her characters simply don’t work for me. My amusement at some of the dialogue, events and descriptions in the book was completely overshadowed by the characters, none of whom make me care about them even a little bit, and several of whom are reprehensible for no apparent reason related to the storyline. When the little bits profiling each of the plants at the beginning of chapters are the most entertaining parts of the novel, there’s a problem with the work.

At times, there’s a bit of a magic realism feel to events in Hothouse Flower. But unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez with his One Hundred Years of Solitude or Jack Hodgins’ brilliant romp The Invention of the World, there’s not enough mystery between the covers of Berwin’s novel to make me really wonder about the odd things that do take place here and there. Rather than be fetchingly mysterious and ineffable, they come across as jarringly annoying and contrived, as if the author was trying overly hard to be clever.

Normally, when reviewing a book I avoid any reviews done by others, lest my opinion be in some way coloured by the comments of more learned heads than mine. Because I was completely unfamiliar with Berwin prior to reading Hothouse Flower, I did seek out more information about her. She has said that while this is her first published novel, it’s her third work, and does draw on some aspects of her own experience. Although it spans mere months as opposed to years, Hothouse Flower could be considered a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age novel of self-development, by an author still fledging her wings. With this in mind, I do genuinely look forward to reading future work by Berwin when she has had a few more years of honing her skills.