Colleen James, perhaps rationalizing her inclusion in the upcoming Farm Tour by wearing a stylish Italian zucchini.

We’re at harvest-time, and the To-Do List is growing as fast as an August zucchini. Summer’s cresting over the start of autumn, multiplying and overlapping tasks.

It’s a great time to divide and transplant perennials and small shrubs, and it’s time to get fall bulbs ordered at least, if not dug in. But meanwhile, the food garden is ripening fast and furiously. There’s more food than any family can eat, which means that somebody’s got to tackle freezing, canning, and drying, and right NOW, while the fruit and veg are at their ripest best. 

So a few odds and ends first:

• This Saturday, the Farmers’ market will host its Jams, Jellies, and Salsa Competition. Come taste and compare. I’ll be helping with the judging between 11am-12:45pm.

• Organic roma tomatoes at $1/lb at Thriftway—a screaming deal. If your garden (like mine) hasn’t quite ripened enough plum tomatoes to “put up,” you might consider supplementing your batch with these robust romas.

• Birder Alan Huggins and Vashon Audubon will offer a five-program series on Vashon birds. The first is Wednesday September 28th. All classes 7-9pm at the Land Trust building. Questions, contact Alan at alanhugs@comcast.net or 567-5166. You can probably find a flyer at the Land Trust building or the library.

• On Sunday, September 25 from 10am-4pm, Vashon hosts one of King County’s three “Fall Harvest Farm Tours.” (Look for a pretty large booklet/brochure put out by King County and WSU Extension on these tours.) Vashon Winery, Greeman Farm, and Island Meadow, Plum Forest, and Sun Island farms will participate. So will Colleen James, perennial plantswoman of Burton Loop. Suggested donation is $5 at the first farm you visit (beyond anything you buy, that is.) Leave dogs at home.

Dividing and Transplanting

With the heat simmered down and a protective cloud cover back over us, this is an excellent opportunity to divide and transplant perennials and small shrubs. The warm soil means severed roots will quickly regrow. But you’ll have to keep disturbed plants well-watered until fall rains kick in and take over that chore for you.

Colleen James propagates perennials at her home garden on the Burton Peninsula, so I consider her an expert on perennial upkeep. I asked her what plants are good to divide right now. She said to look for plants that aren’t blooming as much as in former years: it’s a sure sign they want dividing. Lift the whole plant and, if it’s gone hollow in the center, chunk off a couple daughter divisions with a shovel, sharp knife, or by teasing it apart between your hands. Big, tough perennials like daylilies may take two big garden forks, back to back, to pry the plant apart.

Replant the “mother” back in place, refreshing the soil with some compost and watering in. Then move the new “daughters” to new sites, also tucking them in with compost and lots of water. Don’t use fertilizer: you want the plant to recover, not have to put out new growth that will just be killed off by a frost in a couple months.

Here’s her list of perennials to divide now: Yarrow (Achillea); Lily of the Nile (Agapanthus); Tickseed (Coreopsis); Prairie Coneflower (Echinacea); Cranesbill (Hardy Geranium); Daylily (Hemerocallis); Bee Balm (Monarda); Phlox; Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia); Lamb’s Ear (Stachys).

You can add to that list, the following: Lady’s Mantle, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Boltonia, Brunnera, Bleeding Heart, Epimedium, Irises, Peonies (3-5 eyes per division); Poppies, Penstemons, Solomon’s Seal, and Soapwort.

Some of these plants (particularly in Colleen’s list) will still be blooming. So cut all blooming stems back to the crown, fill your flower vase, then cut off any other dead foliage and stems and divide. By late October, new leaves may have filled in “mother’s” gap teeth, giving your garden a more filled-out appearance going into spartan winter.

It hasn’t been a long summer, but my potted plantings are looking beat from the heat. Stretched, dried out, flowers faded from sun, foliage a little chewed from deer and multiple dead-headings. 

Time to go get a new Fall wardrobe for those pots.

Both Kathy’s Corner and DIG are throwing late summer specials right now. DIG is moving many plants out for a “Driveway Sale: 75% off”. Kathy Wheaton has carts of plants at half off, with many more plants at 25% through next week. 

Think “Thriller-Spiller-Filler” for Pots

I went first to the Labor Day Sale at Kathy’s Corner, picking up pansies and geraniums for some quick color “fillers.” Kathy had some good ideas to carry pots into the cooler months. She suggests using small evergreen shrubs as center “thrillers”. Choose those that offer color or texture contrast, such as red twig dogwood, carex, sedums, boxwoods, hebes, or barberries. She also suggested redbor kale or rainbow chard as colorful, practical plantings: her nursery will be getting new starts of those by mid-month. 

For flowers, she particularly likes Veronica ‘georgia Blue. “It has medium-blue flowers that last into winter. The green foliage goes to bronze later in fall, and it’s frost-hardy.”

As for spillers, I found purple potato vines screaming “BUY ME!” at $3.00 a 4″ pot. Frost will kill it, but that’s two months away, and meanwhile that deep maroon will set off pansies beautifully.

Kathy’s got the “fillers” and “spillers”, but DIG has more small shrubs that make good backbone “thrillers.” Ilex mariesii ‘Golden Tips” is a small, barbless holly, each tiny leaf tipped in gold. Berberis thunbergii ‘Helmond Pillar’ will eventually be 4′ tall and 12″ wide, but for a couple years will rise from the center of a pot in a vertical column of deep maroon. 

If you’ve ever visited the California Sequoia forests and remember that citrus/cinnamon smell of the myrtle leaves lying all over the ground, a 16″ Umbellularia california will (with some protection, say close to your house) provide your cooking with that scent and your pots with spiky, mid-green evergreen leaves. If you prefer an evergreen grass with some light in it, seek out that Libertia ‘Gold Finger’ with its yellow strip running the length of each olive-green blade; it thrives in dry soil, in light shade or sun, and has tri-petaled white flowers in late spring. (I saw one note that insinuated Libertia is poisonous—but then, you’re not eating this stuff.)

Since you’d probably want to build a pot based on the central “thriller,” I’d suggest starting at DIG, then find your flowery “Fillers” and drooping “spillers” among the many annuals still blooming their heads off at Kathy’s Corner.

A couple of years in pots and these small shrubs will have sized up enough to move into the garden proper, without fear of being swamped by the more mature plants. In the meantime, they’ll provide a backbone upon which to build a colorful, refreshed fall dressing to carry your pots into winter.

Here’s a close-up of one pot with winter pansies, zonal geranium, and purple potato vine.

Dark red and ripe: Island Loganberries

Loganberries, raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, and the promiscuous clan of blackberries: chesters, marions, boysens, olympics. These are the berries that once put cash in Vashon pockets, from the kid picker to the grower to the cannery.

“Hey, they’re paying 4¢/lb at the Vashon Island Fruit Company!” (that’s back in 1915). It’s not much higher by the 1960s when Kathy Wheaton of Kathy’s Corner was picking for 25¢ per flat (6 containers holding a pint each). By 1979 toward the end of picking here, Tokio Otsuka, who everybody knew as  ”Tok,” was paying $1.30/flat to as many pickers as he could find. He told a Seattle P-I reporter in 1979, “ ”Berry growing on the island was a tradition, but there are only 3 or 4 of us left now. People don’t want to work on the farm anymore. The kids all want city-type jobs, they rather be a box boy at Thriftway.” 

So the fields, without enough workers to pick them, went from commercial crop to u-pickings to finally hay and gentlemen homesteads. But that doesn’t mean all the berries vanished…

Here and there, old berry bushes carry on, though sometimes with help. Craig Harmeling, former fire chief native to the Island, told me he rescued some loganberries from the field once farmed by Fred Eernissee, before Island Lumber came in with bulldozers to rip it all up for their big-box store and parking lot. His great-grandfather, Stephen Jay Harmeling, ran a nursery from the 1910s-40s on Bank Road that sold many Island farmers their berry and fruit tree starts (that property houses the old brown bungalow opposite the Sunflower housing campus; Stephen Jay built its now-defunct greenhouses.)

Hal Green found a source of “Vashon heritage berries” when he decided to replant his father’s berry patch at Triplebrook farm, installing marionberries, loganberries, and a thornless “Chester” berry. I saw them during my tour of Triplebrook for my VAA garden previews. From Hal, I learned about Helen Brocard of Dockton, his source for those island-grown loganberries.

Island Heritage Loganberries—still growing in Dockton

I went to meet Helen at the very end of the loganberry season. On the phone, she told me she might be able to find “just enough to make a pie,” and yes, I could come help her pick them.

If you visit the VIGA Farmer’s Market, you might have already met Helen. A short, lean, straight-backed gal somewhere above 70, she shared a table selling berries and local fruit with Dr. Bob Norton of the fruit club. They’d alternate as each one’s fruit came into season: first Bob with his strawberries, then Helen with currants and loganberries. She also sold her fruit through Bernie at the main corner, and she’s spoken at the fruit club.

“Oh, she’s probably our Island expert on those berries,” Bernie had told me. So I was expecting a planting a little larger than the two 20-foot rows just west of her house. “It’s a personal planting, really,” she explained when I got there. “I don’t want to become a nursery.”

Loganberries grow as canes that need trellising on wires. Her first-year “primocanes” were growing on the ground while the second year “floricanes” had been brought up during the last dormant season to the double row of wires and wrapped around them; the berries grew off their short secondary branches.

The ripe berries were a dark purple-red, “but you can also eat the bright red ones: they’re good enough for pie,” she advised. “Do you use flour in the filling? I don’t: I use a tablespoon of cornstarch mixed into the sugar because it makes a beautiful transparent filling that shows off the color of the berries. Flour just mucks them up.”

And then she told me the story of how she got her berries.

A Story of Hardship and Survival

This was her parents’ farm: back in the 40s, they grew gooseberries, loganberries, and ‘Red Lake’ currants commercially. Her father, Ivan Kranjcevich, came from Croatia in the 1930s and jobbed across the country. Once he met and married Eva, they bought seven acres to farm on Maury Island.

Sunny Jim Fruit Processors in Tacoma used to send a man out to inspect and offer a price to farmers for their crops. Then they’d send a truck out to pick up flats from not only Ivan’s place, but his brother’s farm and their neighbors. “This was all berry- and fruit-farming, back then,” Helen told me. 

But berry farming couldn’t pay all the bills, so Ivan, like many farmers, hired out elsewhere. Ivan took a job cooking on the Dockton fishing boat Umatilla, captained by Lucas Plancich. Up near Cape Flattery, in the middle of a clear, moonlit night, the boat was rammed by the U.S.S. battleship Arizona, cutting the boat in two, killing two crewman, and spilling 7 men into the water, where they were fished out by their companion boat, the Emblem. The captain of the Arizona kept right on going until the Navy forced him back, tried and demoted him. 

Ivan had severe internal injuries and eventually a stroke from the accident. But he could still cook for the family, so he took over the kitchen while they carried on berry-farming; he died in 1945. Faced with a choice between going on welfare and keeping the farm, Eva chose the farm. They kept going until, with her kids grown, Eva remarried in 1960 and moved to Tacoma—taking some berry plants with her.

In Tacoma, Eva dug up her yard, installed her berries and other productive plants and flowers, and started selling produce and flowers to local restaurants and neighbors. Helen, who eventually married and settled in Bellevue, started her own restaurant, “Pogachas” (which means “flatbread” in Croatian) that served California-style cuisine; it’s still going strong today. And from her mother’s garden she took cuttings of currants and loganberries and “stuck them into pots, lost 2 out of twelve” and nursed them on for several years.

When Eva died, Helen and her brother inherited those original seven acres. After selling Pogachas, and after volunteering for four years at the Bellevue Botanical Garden, Helen moved back to the Dockton homeplace. She took the berries with her.

She carried them forward: those 1940s loganberries and currants are back where they started. Still ripening, still filling pies, still tasting wonderful. Maybe if you join the fruit club and ask her nicely next year, she’ll dig up some rooted starts of those Vashon heritage loganberries for your own garden.

THIS is the Olympic Berry.

If you are old enough to have visited the Tea Room of Frederick & Nelson, Seattle flagship department store through much of the 20th century, then you may recall ordering, for a whopping 40¢, a slice of their exclusive “Olympic Berry Pie.” Exclusive, because the store bought out the entire crop.

That Frederick & Nelson Exclusive was a product of Vashon Island.

Back in 1909, Mr. Peter Erickson of Vashon Island took himself to the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, held on the grounds of what would become the University of Washington campus. There he met the famous plant breeder Luther Burbank, up from California to extol the virtues of his ‘Phenomenal’ berry, his cross between a loganberry and a wild blackberry.

Mr. Erickson thought he “could do better.” It is not known whether Erickson made this boast to Burbank’s face, but Burbank did eventually send Mr. Erickson a plant of ‘Phenomenal’ to use in developing his own berry. Erickson, with the help of his son-in-law Halleck F. Greider, crossed ‘Phenomenal’ with a wild black raspberry of Minnesota called ‘Plum Farmer’ and came up with this new berry.

The berry was large, sweet, hardy to -18°, and productive over a long season (July-October). And, because it wasn’t prone to breaking and thus bleeding its juice all over everything, it was probably easier than most berries to harvest and handle. The men named the berry ‘Olympic’—perhaps in honor of the wonderful view from his fields of that mountain range—and in 1937 they took out a patent on the plant in Halleck Greider’s name.

I can still enjoy a glimpse of the Olympics not far from where I picked my handful of berries. 

By 1948, both Erickson and Greider had died, leaving the widow Pauline to struggle on. By the 1950s, the 25,000-ton crop had dwindled to six tons. In the 1990s, grandson Hal sold the property to the Green family for their alpaca farm. Here, I share a garden plot with Bill—our “GreenDale Farm”—and that’s how I came to be holding a handful of these succulent, Vashon heritage berries.

There aren’t many plants left, Bill told me when we went scouting for them. The one surviving row he found upon moving here was drowned by standing water a couple of winter storms ago. His son Nathan keeps the few surviving plants encased within concrete rubble to make sure delivery trucks don’t run over them.

But they ARE survivors. And the flavor is complex, full, very sweet. If only there was a pie’s worth to spare…

“A thin layer of silt, clay, sand, and gravels ground underneath the glacier,” is how Vashon Till is usually described. Well, “thin” is relative when you are talking about something made by a mile-high sheet of ice.

I’d asked Ann Spiers, co-author of the new edition of Trails, Walks, and Parks of Vashon Island, where I should go to see the best effects of the Vashon Glacier that formed Vashon-Maury Island about 13,500 years ago. She sent me and my four companions to KVI Beach to investigate the bluffs along its northern shore.

The first thing we saw, Linda & Peter Milosoroff, June Niece, Bob Dale, and I, was the sheer face of a massif about 50 feet high. Pale gray, polka-dotted with pebbles from top to bottom, with a thin scalp of grass and side-winding roots on top and a few tapered veins of larger cobbles poking through to break up its massive uniformity. Linda grasped a half-bedded cobble and tried to pry it loose. Not a chance: it might as well been bedded in concrete.

That’s Vashon Till.

Also called hardpan,” Vashon Till mantles the upland of Vashon Island, as it does most of the Puget Sound landscape. Anywhere from 5′ to 125′ thick, it’s covered by topsoil and, in some less-eroded places, by a layer of loose sand, gravel, pebbles, and boulders that the glacier left behind as it melted, called “recessional outwash.” In some places, that cover is several feet deep, but in other places, like around the homes that top this bluff, the till rises nearly to the surface. 

Kevin Freeman, who taught a geology section for Vashon 101 a few years ago, lives on this bluff. “When I’m gardening, I have to deal with compressed, rocky soil because the Till is right at the surface,” he told me recently. “We’re all into raised gardens; we import a bunch of stuff that nature didn’t give us. It’s Geology that’s driving you to Kathy’s Corner and Island Lumber to get stuff for raised beds.”

I asked June, who used to design septic fields for Islanders, about her encounters with Vashon Till. “When we were searching a property for a drain-field, we did not want to find this stuff,” she said. “No bulldozer can get its teeth into it, and nobody has enough money to dig through it.”

That makes till a good base for a house foundation, but a lousy place for a septic field. Water perks through till extremely slowly—about 1-1.5″ inches per month—in a day, the thickness of a playing card. A few days of rain can dump far more than that, so water spends some time sitting on top of the hardpan, backfilling the topsoil and (if it’s present) the recessional fill and making your garden too wet to dig in. Eventually, what water isn’t sucked up and out by plants will drain through the soil into low points like ponds, wetlands, springs, and streams (scrape through the muck of any upland Vashon pond, and you’ll probably find it bottoms out on Vashon Till), will ”perch” in depressions in the till layer itself, or will find cracks in the till and drain into the ground below.

And there, the water collects. It’s sandwiched between the lid of till and the clay bottom of the old glacial lake in a layer of compressed sand and gravel that geologists call “advance outwash.” Using the force of its own meltwaters, the glacier purged sands and gravels from itself and dumped them out front of its advancing toe. Those same glacial streams washed most of the silts and clays out of this loose material before the glacier overran the whole mess, so those sands and gravels are pretty clean. And while compressed by the weight of the glacier, they aren’t cemented together, but actually have quite a bit of space around the bits of rock and cobble—space where water collects. This clean, abundant source of water is our Island’s aquifer, tapped into by Island wells and Island water systems. And it’s kept pure and clean thanks, in part, to the lid of Vashon Till lying on top.

“As you walk north on that beach, you’re actually walking back in time,” Ann’s husband David, who is a geologist, told me later. “The land uplifted after the glacier’s weight was gone, and at that point the till layer is above you. Nearing Klahanie, you get the ‘advance outwash’.” [It's harder to see because trees have gotten their roots into it.] “If you find a clay layer down at beach level, that’s the Lawton clay, made of whatever sank to the bottom of the lake in front of the advancing glacier. And in the beach itself, did you see a layer of what we geologists call ‘woody peat?’ It’s made of twigs and old trees from the inter-glacial period. That stuff’s REALLY old.”

Husband Bob is a slow walker, but he’s leap-frogging past us rubber-neckers, as we point and poke and puzzle our way along the cliff face. We start to find the cliff’s made of looser sand, with small strips of “rust oxide mottling,” says June, that show where water has leached from the bluff. Is this some “advance outwash”—that sand & gravel layer that stores our island’s water supply? The surface’s loose enough for somebody to scrape “Geri” into its sandy face, for me to squeeze some scrapings into a ball. We debate: is it silt? clay? Esperance Sand? or just erosion? 

We can’t walk any farther back in time: June’s got an appointment, and backs are starting to ache. So we turn back, filling our pockets with leavings-behind: chunks of Canadian granite transported here by the glacier, bits of red brick from the old brickworks, shells that came in with the tide. It’s marvelous to look underneath the skin of the earth. Quite a puzzle for a layperson, trying to assign geology labels to the chaos that Earth actually shows. And humbling: it’s all been here long before we were, will be long after we’re gone. 

Still, how many places can you take in 13,500 years in an hour?

Caught in a sun-spot: Julia's daylilies

I’m excited to get hiking this week. I finally snagged the new edition of the park district’s trail book, plus found a place to print out a huge geologic map of most of Vashon and Maury islands.

This handbook for explorers, Walks, Trails and Parks on Vashon Island, was first published by John Gerstle and Susan Sullivan in 2003, with net proceeds given to the Vashon Park District. This fourth time around (the book keeps selling out), they recruited naturalist writer Ann Spiers, who often publishes articles in the Beachcomber, to add her perspective. (Doubtless they got her husband David, a geologist, to lend his expertise as they tromped around the Island taking notes.)

So not only is this a book to walks on the Island, it’s packed full of information on our flora and fauna, geology, Island history—even the original S’Homamish tribe’s place-names. To give you a sense of how MUCH this book offers, here’s an excerpt about KVI Beach:

“KVI Beach is a sand spit bordering a tidal salt marsh, a very rare wetland in King County. Salicornia grows here, a low springy vegetation foraged by many waterfowl, such as ducks and gulls. In spring an fall, sandpipers and plovers migrate past here. In July, there are purple martins, and by August, swallows and martins appear in large flocks… The Native American name for the area is Tuqo’olil, or “hidden spring,” after a secret spring where a young girl was hidden to keep her from an unwanted marriage. 

On this short hike, you walk the shore of Tramp Harbor. In the 1880s, Chautauqua, now Ellisport, was the site of a 1,200-seat pavilion and campground, the gathering spot for participants in the Chautauqua movement. An East Coast phenomenon, Chautauquas were events dedicated to adult education and recreation.

Tramp Harbor is a migrating bird stop with an overwintering flock of American Wigeons. The first set of pilings you pass was once a dock for the Mosquito Fleet. Later, perched above the tide zone, pioneer Hiram Fuller built a store and a 14-room hotel. The first stream, Ellisport Creek, empties through twin culverts from under Chautauqua Beach Rd. SW onto the beach. The extensive wetland across Chautauqua Rd. served as a mill pond with an adjacent lumber mill…”

All that, within a single page. 96 pages worth for $12 bucks, including a fold-out map of Vashon Island tucked in the back (they didn’t manage to fit Maury Island on the fold-out, however). Even if you are just an armchair hiker, you will find out TONS about the Island you never knew (such as why those reflector tapes are on the telephone wires strung across Portage). Theoretically, the book’s available at bookstores and the big retail stores, but in truth they’re sold out everywhere but at the Park District. 

The Big BIG Map

After reading the book, I called Ann Spiers to tell her how much I enjoyed the new naturalist/geologist component of the Trails book. I asked her where the best geologic exposures were found, and she suggested I explore the cliffs around the corner from KVI Beach. “And do you have the Derek/Troost GeoMap?” she said.

I knew just what she meant. And If you’re at all interested in the Island’s geology, if you want to know what all those layers of cobbles and clay mean as you walk along the shoreline, let me suggest the “Vashon Quadrangle” map created by UW geologists Derek Booth and Kathy Troost. 

You may know that Vashon-Maury Islands were formed by the movement of a large ice-sheet that covered Puget Sound about 15,000 years ago. During this last ice-age, the glacier that once covered Puget Sound a mile high left behind debris piles layered in silts and clays, cobbles and sand, that today ARE our Islands and the Puget Lowland land-mass.

This particular map, one of many, of The Pacific Northwest Center for Geologic Mapping Studies (GeoMapNW) is (quoting from their website) “a collaborative effort to develop new data and greater understanding of the geology of the central Puget Lowland.” On top of a detailed topographic relief map, it plots where the various types of glacial layers are exposed on Vashon Island. Viewers can plainly see the regions of Vashon Till—our notorious hardpan—the areas of loose recessional advance that the glacier left behind, and the advance outwash layers underneath the till that hold, within their compressed mass of cobbles, sands, and gravels, our precious single-source aquifer of drinking water.

You can view the map online at http://geomapnw.ess.washington.edu/services/publications/map/data/Vashon_11-10-06.pdf. South Vashon/Maury Island, and west Vashon, are shown on other Quadrangle maps: to find them, go to http://geomapnw.ess.washington.edu/

As a 36″ x 48″ map with legend and essay, it’s a large map and a little awkward to view online. However, Island Lumber has a large-scale color printer  that can print out an emailed pdf attachment. Call Karen Abott at the Contractor Sales desk and ask how you can email her the pdf of the map: I got mine the day after I sent it. 

It’ll be awkward unfolding it at KVI Beach (I hope for a NON-windy day), but it’ll be a treat to trace out, on the map and the lines of the KVI cliff-face before me, the tracks of a 15,000-years-past glacier. Plan A is to go at 1pm Saturday: Contact me if you’re interested in joining me.

One of the charms of summer is harvesting with your friends. Climb into the trees, forage through the berry vines, stoop to pluck and cut, your voices floating over the crop rows. 

At GreenDale Farm, our rows are finally fulsome, really yielding good stuff. The carrots are surprising sweet, the one cauliflower (so far) grew big enough for us to split, and we ate the first tomato, a ripe ‘Stupice’ covered with leaves of basil, right in the field.  We have way more than we need, but the point of this garden (besides gaining me some sunny growing space) was to grow an excess and give it to the food bank (like this harvest in the back of my Subaru that Bill’s showing off). Bill estimated last week that we’re giving about 85% of our mutual patch to the Food Bank. And it’s appreciated: even with the additional yield coming from the food bank’s garden and half-acre farm, staffers at the food bank tell me the produce shelves are stripped bare by the end of Wednesday distribution. So bring on the vegies, folks: the food bank clientele will eat it up! (By Tuesday noon or Wednesday 9:30am, please.)

I spent a couple hours at the food bank farm with Jenn, Kyle, and Becca last Tuesday pulling up the last of the ‘Sugar Ann’ pea vines. These peas had been picked through twice before, but on their last legs, mildewed and yellow, they still yielded a couple bin’s worth of incredibly sweet snap peas (mental note: plant THIS variety for myself next year…)  Becca and Kyle sat with me, plucking peas from vines out the back of the collection cart, and I listened to them compare notes about what it was like to grow up on “the Rock.” College aged, freshly seasoned with off-island experiences, they both confessed a strong pull BACK “because no where’s quite like this is.”

Ann's vegie and berry patch

A yoga friend has long invited me to come see her garden, and finally the offer to come “pick my Royal Ann cherries” was too much to resist. Her ten acres are on the very top of the Judd Creek Watershed, and driving up, I could see hers was our “hole in the forest” type of garden.

Thirty years ago, she and husband Dexter came looking for a well-timbered acreage, intent on his dream of building a log cabin in the woods. They harvested their own trees, peeled and graded them, then spent the next two years building their home.

It’s actually two buildings—an A-frame and a rectangle—connected by a covered foyer. Here’s the A-frame with its deep eaves, framed between a lovely Japanese maple and a plume poppy on the right. Like anybody’s dream of a log cabin, this has upper lofts, a wood stove, wooden floors, and plenty of recycled windows and skylights that Dexter salvaged from here and there. “We built the walls to fit the windows,” Ann told me. “The light is so wonderful here: in autumn there’s all this color from outside bouncing in, and winter has this silvery light.” 

The kitchen is a bump-out created after the main structures were up (interesting omission…). The building method is not notched logs, but logs that float on rebar “pins” so there’s little wood-to-wood contact, with insulation and chinking packing the interstices between logs. “This building is very green: it breathes, and sometimes it leaks. But I don’t mind that.”

Here’s Ann reaching into her cherry tree. And here’s her raspberries, shining like ruby jewels in the afternoon sunlight. Thanks, friend, for the chat and the cherries, the berries with yogurt and your special ice tea, and the eye-popping inspiration of your house. Down with drywall!  Hurray for homegrown timber! and berries! and cherries! and all the good stuff we can grow on “The Rock!” 

I was in Portland last week visiting family & friends, and if it hadn’t rained so torrentially, I would be torturing you with yet more photos of roses, this time from the Portland Rose Test Garden. Despite protests that one of my best life moments was touring the rose garden “IN THE RAIN!” at the Parc de Bagatelle in Paris,  no amount of umbrella-brandishing would persuade my sister chauffeur to drive me there. “Don’t be stupid,” she said, and that was that.

So I returned after five days to a lonesome hubbie and a rain-fattened garden. It’s the only downer about coming home from vacation this time of year: you go down the garden path, and the new growth throws itself upon long-lost you: wet fondling ferns, block-your-way nettles, brambles tugging at sleeves, dandelion stalks beating their tiny wrists on your ankles. Time for a serious beat-back session out there.

Even the good stuff, such as sweet woodruff and foxglove, is charging toward weediness.

Case in point: in the photo above, the sweet woodruff is a thick blanket under the taller japanese anemone. When I planted the rose garden many years ago, I stuck in some woodruff side by side with primroses, purple heuchera, bergenia, crocuses, epimedium, rhubarb. A nice mix of ground-covers to hide the gawky legs of the rose bushes.

Sweet woodruff leafs out in early spring; in May, it blooms a lace of tiny, pure-white flowers. When it gets tatty, you can mow it—and, as the medieval floor-strewing herb it once was, it will smell good. I once passed a Seattle side-yard smothered in woodruff; in this small, sun-soaked space was captured a heady, sweet-grass perfume. Who wouldn’t enjoy that smell around the house? And, it follows, who wouldn’t like lots of woodruff in their garden?

Yes, but… Today, only the ping-pong paddle leaves of the bergenia rise from the run-wild carpet of woodruff. Hurky rhubarb is struggling, heuchera engulfed long ago. And she’s moving on, sweet woodruff, cascading down two—no, look, it’s three—terraces of my southeastern slope. She’s in the woodland. She’s in the ravine. She’s mixing it up with Creeping Charlie in this photo, another plant I thought was handsome until it tied my lawn in knots.
 

Down in Portland, I went to church with Mom, where I listened to the pastor take his sermon from the parable of the Good Seeds and the Bad. In this story, the farmer plants good seeds in his field, but during the night some joker also sows weed seeds down the same rows. Among the good grain the weeds hide, growing larger, inter-twining their roots and stems so the good stuff can’t be separated from the bad. “What’s gone weedy in your life?” said the pastor to his flock. “What grew to be unmanageable and out of balance? Will you recognize it and pull it before it takes over?”

Back in my rose garden, recently back from viewing that Island secret rose garden, I had decided two weeks ago that it was time to prune away the winter’s dead wood. My favorite rose, a pale pink blooming floribundantly, had a left trunk that showed no sign of life. I took my loppers and snaked its head through the thicket of sweet woodruff, found the base of the dead trunk, squeezed the loppers—and down fell the living rose bush in a flutter of pink petals, me screaming “NOOOOO!” as it timbered down. I’d been blinded by too much woodruff.

Today, there’s no more woodruff in that garden bed, just clean dirt—plus a stub of a rose bush I’m watering in hopes of a resurrection. I hope I’ve learned my lesson: to keep my too-enthusiastic growers in check so that they don’t become smothering weeds. Bindweed, nettles, blackberries, dandelions—they’re easy to spot and pull. When you’ve got WAY too much of a good thing, that’s hard to recognize, even harder to pull or prune. Just do it carefully so you don’t lose the Good Stuff.

Postscript, September 27, 2011:  I’m happy to report that, with plenty of watering and a shot of fertilizer in August, the timbered rose turned into a Resurrection Rose. Three new cane-breaks burst up from the graft and, by mid-September, this rose was topped with those familiar pale-pink, baby-powder-scented flowers. The rose has returned—Hallelujah!

Finally the sun is here, shining down on a Vashon rose garden.

It’s been a long winter, with lots of winter damage. She had to prune many of her bushes nearly down to the graft, then water them well, feed them, watch over them. But, by and large, they’ve come back, her 350± rose bushes. 

This is the private sanctuary of a private person—I’ll call her “Mrs. Rose” here—and I felt privileged to gain entrance. It’s not many rose gardens that grow not only hybrid teas, but old roses, too. Walking along the rows is an education, as you can see the incredible variations of expressions that breeders have coaxed from the rose’s basic, five-petal form. 

Species Roses—a simple, carefree look

Just to show you how far rose-breeding has pushed the flower’s form, let’s look for a moment at two species roses. Below left is our native Nootka rose, which can be found deep in the woods; though the plant may reach 6′ tall, the flower is coin-sized and the leaves aren’t much larger than a pinkie-nail. On the right is a Rosa Rugosa, which flowers in colors from white to pink to nearly red. Its pleated leaves are so resistant to damage from sea air that it’s been called the “Salt Spray Rose”; it’s much planted along shorelines (and to the entrance to the Vashon Athletic Club.) Both plants have that basic rosea flower form shared by relatives the apple, cherry, strawberry, even blackberry: a cupped flower of 5-16 petals with a central boss of yellow stamens. 

These plants are carefree, disease-free plants; you can grow them on their own roots and won’t have to spray them for insects or common rose diseases. But they will bloom once, in early summer, their flowers transforming into bright orange or red hips in autumn. 

Old Garden Roses—cupped, many petalled complexity

Their descendents, the Old Garden Roses such as the gallica, moss, damask, Portland, bourbon, and hybrid perpetual, and rugosa hybrids, are, according to Mrs. Rose, also carefree, disease-free plants. They need feeding before bloom, then after bloom. The form tends to be cupped with many petals—’Konigin von Danemark’ has up to 200 petals—often grouped into “quarters.” These plants provide many more flowers than the Hybrid Teas—but they aren’t the big blooms on the long stems of the Hybrid Tea Rose either. “Here in our climate, a flower with more than 30 petals tends to just ball up and not bloom,” Mrs. Rose warns.

I was thrilled to view the old garden roses Madame Hardy, La Reine Victoria, Mutabilis, Rosa Mundi, Marbree. As David Austin wrote in his introduction to Old Roses and English Roses, “The Old Roses began to lose their popularity in the latter part of the 19th century, and by the early part of the 20th century had almost disappeared… in the face of competition from the al-conquering Hybrid Teas.”

The Modern Rose: the Hybrid Tea, Floribunda, and Grandiflora

“Hybrid teas are the Prima Donnas of the rose world, but they are a superior rose,” said Mrs. Rose. “When I’m picking a bouquet, I pick Hybrid Teas.” She has 124 hybrid tea bushes, nearly all in a triple row with other Modern roses along the wide eastern border of her lawn.

The form of the hybrid tea is the opposite of the Old Garden Rose: it peaks in the middle, with the outer petals often flaring outward instead of cupping. The plants throw long stems, and with judicious de-budding of extra buds on that stem, you can produce a very large flower for exhibition: a very Vase-Worthy display. She said, “The old advice to ‘deadhead back to a stem with five leaves’ is to encourage a single big flower on one stem, exhibition-style. If you want more flowers on a stem, prune back only to the 3-leafed stem.”

From the Rosa Mundi onward, I quickly saw that Mrs. Rose was a big fan of the variegated rose. “But they don’t look good with other colors in a bouquet,” she lamented. Not even with pink roses?

The hybrid tea was bred in part for cutting, and one of its beauties is that the flower is beautiful all the way through its passage from bud to full flower, as here shown with the floribunda ‘Lady of Guadalupe.’

And of course there are so many enjoyments with the rose: the way the light and shadow play within the petals, the way the colors fade, deepen, or change as the flower ages, the way the petals unfurl so hypnotically. 

Breeders have pushed colors in so many forms: streaks, bi-coloration, reverses where the outside of the petal is a different color than the inside. 

Eventually, a nostalgia for the Old Garden Rose—its cupped form and particularly its fragrance—led the English breeder David Austin to cross a  floribunda rose with old garden roses to create his “English Roses.” He tends to name them after characters in literature or history, and here’s an example: ‘Sweet Juliet.’

My visit was on a hot afternoon, and though I snifted each and every one of those blooms, the scent tended to be soft. I asked her when fragrance was at its strongest, and she said, “in the early morning or the evening after the sun goes down.”

Care of Modern Roses

In the summer, Mrs. Rose gives each of her plants an inch of water a week. She has drip-lines to each plant, and she also waters herself, by hand, at least once a week “to keep an eye on the roses and know what’s happening to them.”

Though her plants are bursting with health, the occasional bit of black spot or rust gets through. “A leaf with black spot will fall off within 2 weeks, and black spot can kill a bush if it has a serious infestation.  Black spot defoliates a bush, causing it to drop its infected leaves.  It then makes new growth, which is higher (further from the soil), but that new growth can also become infected.  All this creates stress for the bush, which will weaken it.  This is why it is so important to know what is going on in the garden, so you can take corrective action if needed.”

“You can try to prevent these problems, but don’t treat until you see a problem. Disease comes out of the soil, so keep a clean ground, give your plants good air circulation, don’t let your weeds or cuttings sit on the ground, and use mulch.” She uses a shredded bark mixture she buys locally. And yes, she sprays, fully covered in a moon-suit, using either Safer organic products or non-organic products from Bayer or Ortho.

She is a Master Rosarian now. But how did this obsession with roses begin, 20 years ago? “With this birdbath—I just wanted something nice around the bird-bath.”

Thank you, Mrs. Rose, for showing us that beautiful roses of every kind can be grown on Vashon Island.

Greg of Island Meadow Farm suspected as much a couple weeks ago, and today’s confirmed it: they will be harvesting BASIL tomorrow. “Basil before peas this year,” he mentioned two weeks ago. “Weird year…” He credits early sowing and planting into a low hoophouse for the early basil harvest.

Plum Forest also reports that they’re including the first of their basil, as well as anise-flavored chervil, in their Gourmet Salad Greens Mix. They do have peas, and they’re also harvesting kale, swiss chard, red romaine, small turnips, pickled jalapenos from last summer, and broccoli and a broccoli-raab cross called ‘Piracicaba.’ Joanne quotes from the Washington Post as saying—

“(Piracicaba broccoli is)…so good you could eat it raw.  All the parts I sampled raw were sweet, mild and tender. I took a bowlful back to the house and steamed it for lunch. Equally delicious! It needed just a few minutes of cooking, and since so much of it was leaf, bud and narrow stem, there was less risk of overcooking the tips before the stalks softened. And the buds didn’t disintegrate in the pan.”

Here in my somewhat-shaded kitchen garden, the spinach is done and pulled, replaced by bell pepper plants in a low hoophouse. I’m taking a tip from Island Meadow: if it’s good enough for basil, it’s good enough for peppers.

At GreenDale farm, the ‘Stupice’ tomato has its first, dime-sized fruit (whoopee!). The transplants  of lettuce ‘Australian Heirloom Yellow’ and ‘Four Seasons’ are big and luscious, thanks to good soil and a good headstart from Langley Fine Gardens.

The moral of this spring? Starting seeds in a protected space gives you insurance that yes, you WILL have a spring garden, no matter WHAT the weather does. Thanks to using transplants, I’m betting we’ll have TOMATOES before peas at GreenDale Farm. What a year…

Next week (or soon anyway): start of a series on roses.