The Unexpected Houseplant by Tovah Martin: A review

(Cross-posted from The Nature of Things.)

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I remembered Tovah Martin from some of the gardening shows I used to watch on TV, back when there were actual gardening shows on TV, so I was interested to read her book on houseplants. She is also the author of a number of other gardening books, none of which, I admit, I had ever read.

The uninitiated tend to equate indoor plants with that dusty, forgotten philodendron standing in some dark corner of the house, but according to Martin, the choices for indoor plants are much more extensive than philodendrons, African violets, and orchids. She is an evangelist for adding plants of many different varieties to the indoor garden.

She writes of using spring bulbs, lush perennials, succulents, even flowering vines and trees indoors. The key to the survival of these plants is, of course, light, water, feeding, grooming, and pruning, especially light and water, and Martin gives practical advice on how to provide what these indoor plants need. She gives tips on troubleshooting your plants, season by season, in order to keep them healthy.

Martin is a convincing proselytizer for the benefits of having an indoor garden. It's not just a matter of adding design flair to a home. Houseplants help to clean indoor air, which can be much more polluted than the outdoor air, and thus make the house healthier for its human occupants.

Martin's enthusiasm for her subject is obvious and she writes in a very knowledgeable and accessible manner which should be easily understandable by beginners as well as experienced indoor gardeners and decorators. Moreover, her text is illustrated by some beautiful photography by Kindra Clineff.

All in all, this is a comprehensive and useful guide for anyone who wants to add some beauty and warmth to their home with the use of houseplants. And it might even help you to keep those plants alive well into the new year!

(Helpful tip: Just don't overwater. That's always the cardinal sin that I and many other indoor gardeners seem to commit.)

Note: A copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher for the purposes of this review. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.


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The frost is on the pumpkin!

We've had light frost for the past two nights as temperatures dipped into the lower 30s. I thought at first that the frost really had not done much damage but as I walked through the garden this afternoon, it was clear that all the tenderest of the plants are gone. Banana tree - gone. Cannas - gone. Porterweed - gone. Tithonia - gone. Several other plants, such as Hamelia patens, got nipped but still have some green leaves.

This was the first warning to plants to get ready for colder weather and many of them that had not already started the process will be shutting down now. By this time next month, the garden will be a very different place.

I welcome the change. Winter is coming and it will be a needed respite for both garden and gardener, a time to gather our energies for the busy seasons to come.  A time when the major activity in the garden will switch from actual gardening to watching the birds and making sure their feeders are kept full. There's always something to do in the garden - even if it isn't strictly speaking gardening.

Autumn reflections

Autumn is a time for reflections - on life as well as on the garden. It's the time of year and the time of life when we are most able to look back over the year in the garden or over our lives and see what has worked out well, or where we have made mistakes and what we can do to correct those mistakes or at least to keep from making them over and over again.

As the leaves fall faster and faster around us, we are forced to think about the passage of time and how gardening is a bit like life itself. As gardeners, we experience life in its full circle every year, from planting and reproduction in spring right up through death in winter, and yet, as gardeners, we know very well that nothing - nothing - ever really disappears from the earth. The tree that disappears from the forest or from our landscape may no longer be recognizable as "tree", but it is still there. Its atoms and molecules may be changed, but Earth and its natural processes will not suffer it to be lost.

Our planet is a closed system and everything that was ever here is still here. The dinosaurs may no longer walk the earth (although some of us believe their descendants fly around it every day) but they are still here. Their molecules have been changed and have migrated into some other form, but nothing is lost. Nothing is ever wasted.

As gardeners, we amend the soil and plant. We water and fertilize and prune - yes, and water again. We are witnesses to the constant changes throughout the gardening year, and, if we take the time to think about it, we can see those changes reflected in our own lives as well. For there, too, we amend the soil and plant and water and fertilize and prune. We strive to learn and grow as human beings, to prune away bad habits and bad thoughts and to fertilize and encourage good ones. We are always seeking to make our lives blossom and to achieve that perfect form which only we can see.

One learns to garden by gardening, but, in a very real sense, one can learn to live by gardening as well. The lessons of the one translate well in facing the problems and vicissitudes of the other. Gardening as a metaphor for life seems very plausible to me on this perfect autumn afternoon of reflections.

A day in the life of a gardener

With one interruption after another, I haven't been able to spend as much time as I would have liked this week in the garden, even though the weather has been cooperative. But, finally, today I was able to put in several hours getting some much needed chores completed.

The day started propitiously with blueberry muffins, one of our favorite breakfasts. The blueberries were not from our own yard - we'll have to wait a few more weeks for that - but the ones from the grocery store were perfectly acceptable and I made the muffins from my favorite recipe. I've shared it with you before, but just in case you missed it, here it is again:


BLUEBERRY YOGURT MUFFINS

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□ 2 c. all purpose flour
□ 1/3 c. sugar
□ 1 tsp. baking powder
□ 1 tsp. baking soda
□ 1/4 tsp. salt
□ 1/4 c. unsweetened orange juice
□ 2 tbsp. vegetable oil
□ 1 tsp. vanilla extract
□ 1 (8 oz.) carton vanilla low fat yogurt
□ 1 egg
□ 1 c. fresh or frozen blueberries
□ Vegetable cooking spray
□ 1 tbsp. sugar
Combine first 5 ingredients in a large bowl; make a well in center of mixture. Combine orange juice and next 4 ingredients. Add to dry ingredients, stirring just until moistened. Gently fold in blueberries.
Coat muffin pan with cooking spray and divide batter among 12 muffin cups. Sprinkle with sugar.

Bake at 400 degrees for 18 minutes or until golden brown.

Thus fortified with delicious muffins and coffee, I headed outside to get my garden under control.

As I walked into the backyard, the trees were full of goldfinches and they were all pointing out to me that the birdfeeders were empty! I knew I couldn't get anything done with all those hungry birds hanging over my shoulder and screeching at me, so I headed to the big metal trash can that keeps our supply of birdseeds safe from the raccoons. I took some of the fruit and nut mix, as well as the thistle seeds and the black oil sunflower seeds and went to replenish the feeders. I filled the backyard feeders and then moved to the front yard to fill that feeder. By the time I returned to the backyard, the feeders there and the ground underneath the feeders were covered by hungry goldfinches.

Time for my first break. I sat and watched the birds for a while and thought about what I needed to do today.

Yesterday, I had made a run to The Arbor Gate and purchased a few new plants for the yard. I got some viburnums, columbines, African daisies, and a couple of 'Blue Elf' aloes. I wanted to get those plants into the ground as well as getting a few more shrubs and perennials moved.

My first project was to plant the aloes in the xeric bed around the bottle tree, but as I walked through the sitting area under the sycamore tree, I noticed that several of my potted plants looked a bit droopy. I checked their soil and found they were pretty dry. I always forget just how fast pots can dry out, so I got my trusty watering can and gave them all a drink.

On to the bottle tree bed with my new aloes. The plants in this bed have come through winter in pretty good shape, although the cenizo is looking a bit sad just now. It has lost a lot of leaves, but I'm hoping it will rebound. The Mexican feather grass, the agaves, and the sedum all seem to be thriving. I dug my planting holes and added the aloes, and felt pleased with the result.

Time for another break and more bird watching. I hadn't seen the bluebirds around for several days so I was very happy to note that they were back visiting the bluebird box today. Even better, the male bluebird perched in several prominent locations around the yard and sang his spring song to let all the other male bluebirds know that this is his patch. Perhaps we will have baby bluebirds in my yard this year after all.

After this entertaining interlude, I moved to the front yard with my Hinckley's columbines. These I planted in the bed under the red oak tree. I hope they will be happy there.

While I was in this area of the yard, there were a couple of plants that I needed to "tweak" just a bit. A mahonia and my anonymous camellia both needed to be moved to another part of the bed for better placement, so I did that and watered them in well.

After another break, (Yes, I do take lots of breaks. My back demands them.) I planted my "Proven Winner" Osteospermum 'Sunny Henry' plants in the bed with my 'Radazz' Knockout roses. I think they'll look good together.

There was an autumn sage plant that I wanted to move to a new location, so I did that next. Then I dug up the pink coral vine roots. They appeared to be alive, so I plunked them into a new bed next to the wooden fence, firmed and watered them in and wished them well.

By this time, it was late afternoon and we hadn't stopped for lunch. All the time that I was busy moving plants around and watching birds, Hubby had been working on laying rocks on a bed of sand under the red oak tree. When he's finished, this favorite sitting area of mine is going to be a lot more attractive.

But now it was time to feed the hungry man, as well as my hungry self. I cut a head of cabbage from the veggie garden, opened a couple of cans of vegetables to go with it, made some cornbread and we had our vegetarian lunch.

By that time, it was a bit late to work on planting my Viburnum tinus 'Spring Bouquet' plants and my dwarf Walter's viburnum. I would need to move a couple of plants in order to put them where I wanted them and that would take some time.

Anyway, I'll need something to entertain me tomorrow. A bored gardener is a scary and dangerous animal!

If you can't be a marigold, be a daisy. Or, whatever...

(Originally posted here on February 19, 2009.)

"It is not a bad thing for plants to express individualism. Not everyone can be a marigold." - Our Life in Gardens by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd

My husband, the non-gardener, gave me this really thoughtful gift. It is a book called Our Life in Gardens by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd.

I'm in the midst of reading another book at the moment, and since I'm a one-book-at-a-time kind of reader, I haven't actually started my official reading of this book yet, but it looked so interesting, I couldn't keep from dipping into it. Once I started dipping, it was hard to put it down.

It seems to be the love story of the authors and of the gardens they have created and loved together. Their joint history starts in the 70s in Boston where they created a garden in their apartment. They even had chickens!

Later they moved out into the countryside where they could spread their roots as gardeners, and, a couple of years after that, they found some property in Vermont which they bought. They built their house and started their garden, and they live and garden there still.

Their garden is called North Hill and it is on some lists as one of the best gardens in North America. This book seems to be mostly about what that garden has taught them - about gardening and about life.

After a brief introductory chapter, the remaining chapters of the book are arranged alphabetically from agapanthus to Xanthorrhoea quadrangulata, a rare and endangered plant from Australia that the pair had luckily acquired before it was designated "rare and endangered." It seems an imminently sensible way to arrange a book about gardening or a book about life. It imposes order on what is essentially a disorderly process.

So what could a garden located in the Vermont of long and brutal winters have to teach me, a gardener in subtropical Southeast Texas? The plants are different, the climate is different, and the lives of the gardeners are very different from my own. And yet from my brief introduction to their book so far, I feel a real kinship.

Maybe gardeners really are the same all over the world, no matter what their different circumstances. We all worry about too much rain or too little rain, too much cold or too much heat, insect pests, and, of course, weeds.

In the end, we are all attempting to create something of beauty in our gardens and in our lives. I think that's the central lesson that Our Life in Gardens has to teach. Just like the flowers at North Hill, we can't "all be marigolds." But we can be ourselves and that's even better.