ON PETALS AND PAGES

My trade is Ornamental Horticulture, which means that with the help of many others, I grow attractive plants to sell to homeowners and garden installers.
It is expected that I can advise on the choice of plants from a menu of many thousands of trees, shrubs, vines, groundcovers, waterplants, annuals, perennials and herbs; in addition to tree fruit, berries and vegetables.
 Not only must I know the plant material by both their scientific and common names but be able to speak to their future care and maintenance including the proper response to insect problems and plant diseases. If this was not enough,
 I venture into botany: to understand the magic of photosynthesis and enquire into their floral sex life. My idea of pornography is the close inspection of pollen on the virile anthers and the many varied forms of the receptive stigma.
It is all totally fascinating and I stand in astonished wonder at it.
 Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, fellow gardeners; I am ensorcelled by plants. I am smitten.

 Given the claims that I make in this preamble you will appreciate that I do not like to have plants libelled or slandered or the profession of horticulturist undervalued. In my  years of working in horticulture it was my privilage to meet many like-minded people, both as co-workers and as clients, some of whom were kind enough to suggest that I should write a book. I would thank them for their courtesy and smile, thinking of the many fine books that have been published in the last thirty years and doubted that I had anything original to say. In the 1980's I was trying to learn the herbaceous perennials and found Canadian Garden Perennials by A.R. Buckley published by Agriculture Canada in 1977 ; and nothing else until All About Perennials in the excellent series of gardening books from Ortho-Chevron in 1981. Since that time, as keen gardeners will know, there has been a deluge of helpful texts on all aspects of the subject. Canadians have been particularly well served by our native writers with knowledge of local conditions. 

THE CHINAMAN'S HORSE

Are Hydrangeas poisonous? Well, there is the story about the chinaman's horse. This was a cart horse owned by a Chinese man who was described as a peddler. A veterinarian was called to treat the horse that showed the distressful symptoms of gastroenteritis. Its abdominal muscles were tense and it kept its tail tucked under except to raise it and expel eruptions of liquid and bloody faeces. The animal was fed its usual food and water at noon.
 Apparently it had felt a little peckish an hour earlier and had consumed the flowers and leaves of a potted hydrangea which was later identified as Hydrangea hortensia var. otaska. We would know it today as Hydrangea macrophylla. The vet dosed the horse with turpentine and raw linseed oil flavoured with ginger and capsicum. By late evening the pains had lessened and the horse seemed to be more comfortable. The following morning saw the cart horse completely recovered from its dietary mishap. This incident of floral 'poisoning' took place in Vancouver B.C. in 1919 and described in the Journal of Veterinary Medicine in 1920.

Are Hydrangeas poisonous? Well there is the story of the tossed salad.
   In 1957 there was a report of a family in Florida who experienced gastroenteritis and nausea (A sore tummy and not feeling well.) after consuming hydrangea flower buds that the children had creatively added to the salad of greens. They all felt fine the next day.

Conclusion: Hydrangeas are NOT A FOOD ITEM.

ICONOCLAST DEFINED

 Iconoclast : A person who attacks a cherished belief or institution.

     It was Marjorie Harris, Canada's most knowledgeable and best garden writer who first characterized me as an iconoclast.
 As a reluctant convert to the use of a personal computor and the wonders of the Internet, I did not google the meaning of the word but consulted the Oxford English Dictionary and had to agree with her assessment.
Being a Scot probably helps. Canadians are so notoriously polite; whereas I am all too outspoken at the sight of a grievous error.
 Blunders abound and mistakes, misunderstandings and myths are endlessly repeated.
 It will be my self-appointed task to correct the most egregious.

( I always wanted to use the word, egregious, I will try not to do it again.)

THERE IS GRANDEUR IN THIS VIEW OF LIFE

CHARLES DARWIN
The man who found the cure for religion.







The homeowner who posted his property with a sign that warned us about hydrangeas was indulging his sense of humour and in some sly psychology. Goodness, that was seventy years ago and the image is still clear in my mind.
 I am telling you stories like this so that you might begin to know me as I make the claim to be very naturally a plant person. A talent, if I can call it that, that came with my genes. If I had wanted to be a linguist, a musician or a mathematician I should have chosen different parents.
 In the Nature/Nurture debate I come out strongly in the belief that Nature wins every time. This is a comfortable stance since it absolves me from my errors.
                 "Fallor ergo sum."    Aquinas.
 My bookshelves should be revealing, very little fiction, mostly popular science with an emphasis on plant life. My great hero is Charles Darwin, the cleverest man that has ever lived. The man who found the cure for religion.
 There are almost no people in my albums of photographs nor in my 35mm slides; and no dogs. My interests are the natural world, the world that surrounds me; particularly the plant world on whom all other life depends.

Some might argue, but I don't consider myself a misanthrope (although we are a frightenly dangerous animal). Call me a biophile.
 To capsulate my view of life in a phrase that I adopt as my credo, a quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; "Zum erstaunen bin ich da." which can be translated perhaps as, "I am here in astonished wonder."


We have to have water and we must eat. If you don't eat you die. Only when you are well fed and confidently expect to always have your daily bread, can you write a symphony or just listen to one. But the need for food is constant and never goes away.
 It is fit and proper to always be looking for something to eat.but don't have a proper fit when you find something that does not want to be eaten.

 If you do things my way we will get along fine. So please stop calling things poisonous. In my vocabulary a poison does not discriminate and a small amount would be fatal to any one of us. Not something that takes excessive amounts, not a rare susceptibility nor an allergic reaction.

Now that we are doing things my way, I will make my first pronouncement :  from now on Poison Ivy will be known as Skin-Rash Ivy.




  

Dire Warnings

It is a surprise to find many decades on that I am still being given the same advice: to “Beware of the Hydrangeas.” not jocularly but apparently in all seriousness; not only hydrangeas but chrysanthemums, periwinkle and peonies.   This is a list of about seventy plants that are described as being ‘poisonous to humans’. These dire warnings are contained in a pamphlet called Plant Safety - Information for Families, an advisory that is co-published by the world famous Toronto Hospital for Sick Children and Ontario Regional Poison Information Center.

 Parents could not ask for two authors with better credentials. Why then am I so unimpressed and find fault with it in almost every detail?

Whoever compiled this list of hazardous plants (someone from the typing pool would be my guess) demonstrates that they are not familiar with plants and apparently quite oblivious to the need for scientific names. We name things so that we can talk about them and read and write about them. Using scientific names is meant to insure that we are all on the same page and are all talking about the same thing. As a horticulturist I am familiar with plants and in most cases I have a good idea of the reason that they might be thought to be injurious although in my years of experience I have never before heard of peonies being regarded as hazardous.

We are talking about peoples’ health and well-being, possibly of life or death. It is then too bad that parents are left to simply guess which plants are being referred to.  If parents are expected to heed this advice: what do they do now? Bar the children from the garden until the peonies are got rid of?  Call in a HazMat team to get them off the property. You surely cannot add them to the compost or put them on the curb for collection. They are poisonous you know.

BEWARE OF THE HYDRANGEAS

The sign on the garden gate read BEWARE OF THE HYDRANGEAS. My gang of street urchins could all read even if it was only the comics such as the Dandy or Beano.

 We were all about seven or eight and would have known signs like Beware of the Dog but neither I nor any of my ruffian buddies had the least idea what Hydrangeas were. They certainly sounded dangerous. It was many years before I re-encountered Hydrangeas and discovered that they were garden shrubs with very large round flower clusters in pink or blue, and that they were not hydra-headed monsters or dragons conjured up by my juvenile imagination.

It is true that private gardens had become more vulnerable to trespass since they had lost their wrought-iron gates and metal railings. These had been sacrificed to the all- out war effort. Burly men with acetylene torches had swept through the residential areas and without as much as a by-your-leave had stripped homes of everything iron that presumably were turned into artillery shells and bomb casings.

 I well remember in vivid colour the scarlet of Oriental Poppies in my grandmothers’ herbaceous border, despite them being smothered by an emergency stockpile of fireplace coal. I wish that I knew the name of the rose variety that she grew that in June was covered with fully double pure white highly fragrant blooms. Many lawns that I remember were thick with small white daisies that were low enough to escape the blade of the mower. I recall, when not much more than a toddler, sowing Candytuft, (Iberis) and Sweet Alyssum, (Lobularia) seeds between the stones of our ‘rockery’. Not that that I knew those names at that age and would have had no idea how important plant names would become to me some day. We had a vegetable garden to assist our domestic economy and to augment our severely restricted food rations. We grew corn one year although we called it maize. Americans apparently thought highly of ‘corn on the cob’ but I must say that we were not impressed. In summer we used our food coupons for sugar and made our own jam from the ‘brambles’ that grew wild in the countryside. Such foraging trips were high adventure in austere times.