Emailed December 07, 2011. To subscribe, click here.
To reprint any of this material, simply credit www.oldhousegardens.com. © 2011
Friends of Old Bulbs Gazette
Old House Gardens, 536 Third St., Ann Arbor, MI 48103, (734) 995-1486
"From December to March, there are for many of us three gardens -- the garden outdoors, the garden of pots and bowls in the house, and the garden of the mind's eye." -- Katharine S. White, 1892-1977, from Onward and Upward in the Garden Happy Holidays! From all of us here at Old House Gardens, thanks for another wonderful year of friendship, support, and our shared enthusiasm for flowers too good to lose. May your holidays and the new year be full of everything you love! Santa Says: It's Easy to Give a Winter Filled with Dreams of Spring! Warm someone you love all winter long with our unique, dream-inspiring gifts: Save 50% on Our Red or Green Tote-Bag When You Spend $50 in December Our cool OHG tote-bags are regularly $10, but if you place (or have placed) an order for $50 or more this month, you can have one for just $5! We're down to our last 20 or so, though, so don't delay. When they're gone, they're gone! For Delivery This Year, Order by 3:00 EST, Tuesday, Dec. 20 Our two-week holiday break is coming up, so if you need a gift certificate or anything else delivered this year, please make sure your order reaches us by Tuesday, Dec. 20, at 3:00 in the afternoon Eastern time. After that, we'll be closed until Jan. 4 to give our staff a well-earned rest. Book of the Month: Founding Gardeners Our first four presidents weren't just fiery revolutionaries, authors of the Constitution, and saviors of the new nation, they were also avid gardeners. In Founding Gardeners, British author Andrea Wulf explores the intertwining political and agricultural/horticultural lives of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison. All four were farmers who believed that citizens who worked their own land were the foundation of democracy. All four had a deep love of the American wilderness, and they found comfort and inspiration in cultivating their own home grounds. Save the Peonies! Rescuing the Treasures of a Century-Old Nursery When I first started collecting heirloom plants in the 1970s, I was elated to discover a small, family-owned nursery in Iowa with an enormous list of peonies. Founded in 1887, Sherman Nursery was especially rich in peonies from the nineteenth century, many of which were no longer available anywhere else. Unfortunately they were wholesale-only and wouldn't sell to me then, but soon after mailing my first catalog in 1993 I started thinking about someday offering their rare heirlooms. Two Great Heirloom Flower Calendars Give yourself or someone you love a lush bouquet of heirloom flowers every day of the year with Suzanne Lewis's 2012 Bouquets calendar. An award-winning photographer and long-time customer of ours, Suzanne features many of our flowers in her calendar's stunning images. In the February bouquet, for example, 'Rubrum' lilies mix with old roses, in March there's an amazing all-blue, all-heirloom bouquet of hyacinths, and in October elegant 'Jersey's Beauty' dahlia glows among burgundy mums and autumn leaves. Looking Ahead: What's Your New Year's Resolution for the Garden? In winter, every gardener seems to be making plans for how they're going to make their garden even better in the year ahead. So we ask: do you have a New Year's resolution for your garden? If so, we'd love to hear it at charlie@oldhousegardens.com. Heck, we might even share it in an upcoming newsletter. To prime the pump, here are a few of ours: Please Help Us Reach Our Goal of 1000 Facebook Friends by Jan. 1 We dream big here, so when we launched our Facebook page in July, we set a goal of having 2000 friends by the end of the year. As of this morning, our friends totaled 947 (which is awesome!) so our new, improved goal is now to have 1000 friends by midnight, Dec. 31. With your help, we can do it! Our Facebook friends share tips and raves with other fans, enjoy weekly photos of what's blooming here, get occasional insider alerts and special offers, and help spread the word about our amazing heirlooms. If that sounds good to you, please "like" us now! Winter Tips from the OHG Archives If you're storing tender bulbs this winter, put a sticky note on your calendar reminding you to check on them every month or so. If you find moisture condensing on the inside of the plastic bags or boxes your dahlias are stored in, open them slightly to allow the excess moisture to evaporate or you may lose them to rot. Conversely, if your dahlias are shriveling, sprinkle a little water on them and move them to a bag or box that's more moisture-retentive. Did You Miss Our Last Newsletter? Read It Online! November's articles included One Writer's Garden, a comic ode to bulb-eating rodents, fall tips for thwarting iris borers, Charlie's first-hand advice on feline diabetes, and more. You can read all of our back-issues, by date or by topic, at oldhousegardens.com/NewsletterArchives.asp . Share Our Gazette with a Friend! Please help "Save the Bulbs!" by forwarding our newsletter to a kindred spirit, garden, museum, or group. Or if a friend sent you this issue, click here to SUBSCRIBE! Remember: We will NEVER share your email address with anyone! To Guarantee That You Get Your Next Newsletter . . . Please add newsletter@oldhousegardens.com to your email address book or safe/approved list today. To Unsubscribe We hope you find our Gazette helpful and fun, but if not simply email us at newsletter@oldhousegardens.com with Unsubscribe as the subject and we'll drop you from our list immediately.
Gorgeous Gift Certificates: We'll hand-write your personal gift message in our beautiful, bulb-flowered card and include our fabulous, full-color catalog.
Bulbs and Samplers for Spring Planting: Hardy iris, graceful daylilies, dahlias for bouquets, fragrant tuberoses, tiny glads, and more. Order now and we'll deliver the bulbs to the lucky recipient's door at planting time in April. For the holidays, simply give our catalog with the bulbs you've chosen circled in it (ask and we'll send you a copy for free), or print out descriptions and photos of them from our website. (For larger photos, click on the small ones.) A picture is worth a thousand words, and anticipation is one of gardening's greatest pleasures!
Even readers who are familiar with the garden-lives of Jefferson and Washington will find a lot of new information in Wulf's book. When the Constitutional Convention was on the verge of breaking down, for example, James Madison and several other delegates took a break to visit Bartram's Garden, the nursery of the famous colonial botanists. There they saw native plants from all of the colonies growing happily together, with trees from big Southern states like Virginia sheltering woodland shrubs from small Northern states like Connecticut. Returning to the Convention with a fresh perspective and renewed commitment, they brokered a compromise that established the Senate and House as we know them today, with representation that protects both large states and small.
Although Founding Gardeners disappointed me in some ways -- the narrative bogs down at times in too much political detail, Wulf makes several misstatements about plants (tuberoses are from Mexico, not Europe), and almost 40% the book's 350 pages are end-notes -- I finished it with a better understanding of a fascinating era in American history and of four great men who, like me (and you?) loved to putter around in their yards.
It took a while, but in 2008 we added peonies to our catalog, and since then all but two of the 18 we've offered have come from the Sherman collection. (See them all here and here.) Unfortunately, like many nurseries Sherman's was hard hit by the economic downturn, and in 2009 it was sold to a much larger Midwestern grower. When I heard the news I was worried about their peonies, because wholesalers typically make their money by selling large volumes of relatively few varieties, but I was busy and . . . before I knew it, instead of the 111 peonies that Sherman's was growing in 2001, only 56 were still available -- and last month we learned that 17 more will be dropped next year.
Although there's no way Old House Gardens can save all of those peonies, we're doing what we can. We alerted our friends at the University of Michigan's historic Peony Garden and they spread the word to some of the country's leading peony specialists. We also joined forces with the Iowa farmer we get 'Festiva Maxima' from, buying the last available roots of several rare peonies from the Sherman ark and turning them over to him to preserve and multiply for us. If all goes well, we'll see the first fruits of this partnership as early as next year when we hope to offer the fragrant Midwestern classic, 'Frances Willard'. With your support, there will be more good news. Stay tuned.
If you're a fan of the antique images we use for our catalog covers, check out the Smithsonian Institution's 2012 Seed Catalogues calendar. Our friend Brienne discovered it while shopping at Whole Foods and texted us in excitement. Each month features a different image from the Smithsonian's huge collection of American seed and nursery catalogs. Our favorite is December's 1896 lithograph of dahlias -- which graced the back of our own catalog a couple of years ago.
Mike (IT Assistant): To force hyacinths indoors (since last year my beagle dug up all the ones I had in pots outdoors).
Kelly (Shipping Manager): To plant my lawn-extension with daylilies.
Rita (VP for Customers): To fertilize!
Vanessa (Bulbs Manager): To make sure there's color in my garden for all four seasons.
Derick (Order-Entry Expert): To learn from everyone else here how to keep my first bulbs coming back and blooming bigger and better.
Rick (IT Manager): To start the year weed-free. I plan to take extra precautions to control weeds as early as possible. This includes teaching my children!
Here are some other handy winter tips from our Newsletter Archives:
"Tips for Storing Tender Bulbs (But Only If You Want To!)"
"Storing Glads in Egg Cartons"
"How Are Your Forced Bulbs Coming Along?"
"Extra-Easy Refrigerator Forcing"
"Bone Shavings & Hartshorn: Victorian Tips on Forcing"
"Don't Pack Up Those Xmas Lights: Extreme Gardening in Minnesota."