Poison Answer!

Do you know which one is poisonous? Which one is the carrot?

Carrot.......................Poison Hemlock........Queen Anne’s Lace

For detailed information on the whole Umbel Family of plants check out Barbara Lawton’s book “Parsleys, Fennels, and Queen Anne’s Lace” on Amazon.

My Library

Growing up, my grandmother was the county librarian. I love to read. I love old books and have several of my great-grandmother’s collection. I also collect old religious books including Bibles…I buy them at garage/estate sales. It would be better if people used the Bibles as reading material, but in my case they are usually a topic of conversation when people visit our home. As kids we used to have a saying… “Do you swear on a stack of Bibles?” I try not to swear at all except when I garden. It reminds me of my former neighbor Lucy. Because we were raising children we took out our frustrations by digging in the dirt. We shared a garden between our houses where we laughed hard, cried softly, and used swear words loudly. It still makes me laugh. We once had a visitor who commented how ‘whimsical’ our garden was…and I’m sure it was!

Master Gardeners are to educate others based on research. We all tend to have pretty extensive libraries of our own and can use the Kemper Center resources at the Missouri Botanical Garden when needed. We also use each other. For the past few years I’ve been serving on the board of the Museum of Transportation. Recently, Doug Wolters, St Louis County Parks Dept., and I have put together an interesting adult speaker series on gardening. Check it out on the website.
http://www.transportmuseumassociation.org/

Doug and I have also been working on a native landscape grant with good friends and fellow master gardeners Betty Struckhoff and Carol Wellman.

Back to books

One of my favorite garden writers, Barbara Perry Lawton, also happens to be a master gardener. I feel privileged to have been in the same garden club and she was one of my favorite guests on the radio show. If you like herbs and/or history you will enjoy her book “Parsleys, Fennels, and Queen Anne’s Lace” published by Timber Press.

According to Barbara's book (which you can find HERE), Socrates (470-399 BCE) was poisoned by a member of the parsley family, poison hemlock. In a radio interview she told me she had seen a rather large patch of poison hemlock along the railroad tracks Valley Park. With the going green efforts and more areas converting to native plants, maybe a little more education is needed. You need to know what it looks like so your children and grandchildren don’t play in it. I never stop learning new things from other gardeners. Barbara Lawton has won national awards for her writing and you can find her books on Amazon.com and at local bookstores including the gift shop at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Do you know which one is poisonous? Which one is the carrot? Leave a comment to me know your guess and then check back tomorrow for the answer!

In the picture above is also a book on Heucheras or common name coral bells by Dan Heims. I heard him at the Horticulture Coop Symposium at Meramec Community College in spring of 2007. He is president of Terra Nova Nurseries which is a wholesale nursery specializing in perennials. As a lover of ‘chocolate’ plants I have several heucheras in our garden.

Heuchera ‘Carmel’ ...............Heuchera ‘Brownie’....Heuchera ‘Chocolate Ruffles”

More on Chocolate plants will follow along with my favorite websites and nurseries.

If you cannot be outside digging in the dirt, you can be inside reading about digging in the dirt.

Welcome to A Gardener’s Home

CAN’T WAIT FOR SPRING

It is never too late to be what you might have been. George Eliot

That is the way I feel when I look at gardens and houses (although Mr. Eliot probably meant the above statement to be about people).

My husband, our 7-year-old Australian Shepard and I currently live in a 1937 Storybook Cottage* with visits from our son who is away at college. We live at the top of a hill and at the bottom runs a natural creek complete with small waterfall. After living here about 18 months, we are just beginning to make house and garden “what it might have been”.

These are hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis - Common, Dutch or Garden Hyacinth) coming up from bulbs planted by Richard Spencer who lived and gardened here before us. His widow Maggie says he planted them by the door so everyone who came and went could enjoy their scent. We loved them last spring and when I saw them last week it made the 17-degree weather seem more tolerable. Richard was a mason by trade and you will see his work throughout the yard and house.

Our front yard is pretty plain at the moment. It is way too cold to work much in the garden. If you live in St Louis you know we have had 70-degree weather and the next day 20-degrees. We use cypress mulch and a triple-ground darker mulch to not only help stabilize the ground temperature but also add accents in the winter. Underneath all this mulch are about 650 bulbs. As a garden writer I often receive trial bulbs (about 150 this past fall) and I’ll be writing about as they come up. Richard had a lot of bulbs already planted and we added about 400 bulbs I had ordered and let sit in our unheated garage most of the winter. We planted them in late January, early February, so I’m also considering them as trial bulbs. Check back for more on bulbs and I’ll show you my secret for planting large amounts…hint: power tools.

Thanks to friend David Homeier we also added a bed of pachysandra (Pachysandra procumbens) under the maple tree. It was one of those sunny fall days and David brought over cuttings from his beds and helped me plant them. It was also the day we had to put our 15-year-old Aussie to sleep. Gardening always helps me deal with life’s ups and downs. The vet made a paw print in plaster for us to keep. I had to laugh as the print was muddy and it reminded me of all the times she dug in the yard trying to get a mole, not to mention all the muddy prints she made thru the house. Still miss that dog.

*For more about these cottage homes check out this informative book “Storybook Style America’s Whimsical Homes of the Twenties” by Arrol Gellner and Douglas Keister. Amazon books has it listed starting at $17.