Rocktober Festival of Decorative Gourds and Exuberant Flowers.

Whuh.. wha… huh?  What just happened?  It’s not 128 degrees anymore?  I remember sometime back in May thinking ‘hmm, is this going to be one of those terrible summers?’  And then it was like Manny Pacquiao tapped me on the shoulder and when I turned around- ka-POW! 

So now, when I step outside in the morning and it’s nice out, or even blessedly cool, I feel a bit like I’ve just left a full-on metal concert and got in a car with my friends to go home, and for the next twenty minutes we’re all yelling at full volume and don’t even realize it.  Only in this case instead of yelling we’re trying to make sure we park in the shade and/or put the sunscreen up, slathering on the SPF 380, and trying to avoid exposure in the middle of the afternoon altogether. 

Okay, all right, calm down, it’s over. 

There, feel better?  Starting to relax?  Well, don’t get too comfy, ‘cause it’s ROCKtober, Baby!  And it’s just as intense as the summer ever thought about being.  I was talking to my brother in Rosenberg the other day about when we could get together with our buddies to hang out and catch up.  We started tallying up holidays, weekends at the in-laws’, various fall festivals, and other obligations, and it looks like we’ll get around to it sometime in late February.  And the whole season kicks off with fat sausages, dark beers, pecans on the ground, deer running across the road early in the morning with a panicked look in their eye, and pink hogs on everything (you know what I mean, Elginites).  BUT, I’m a plant nerd.  So the icons of fall for me are Fall Asters in bloom…

Fall Asters going crazy

Fall Mums…

'Clara Curtis' garden mum

… and the sight and smell of Copper Canyon Daisies.

Pumpkins are pretty cool.  Sometimes the faces people give them can get pretty imaginative.  The kind of gourds I like, though, are those warty little orange and yellow ones that pop up in grocery stores this time of the year.  This year, for the first time in several years, I grew birdhouse-type gourds in my backyard on a twenty-foot arbor I built back in the late spring. 

After being shy throughout the summer, now the gourds are popping out all over the place.  Every day I walk through the arbor and count how many new little baby gourds there are. 

What am I going to do with all these gourds?  Well, it’s one of those journey-rather-than-the-destination kinds of things.  I guess there will be plenty of housing for the local birds.

October also means rose-cuttings.

Around mid-October is the best time to take cuttings of any roses you’d like to propagate.  I have several roses around the house I propagated myself that are still smallish, but it won’t take long before they’re established, full-size rose bushes.  One of my favorites, and a very easy one to propagate, is the Green Rose.  And strangely appropriate for October, I think.


Yep, that's a rose.  Sort of.



Take a cutting of a rose that’s about the thickness of a pencil, and about 2-3 inches long.  Cut it so that there is a node (where a leaf comes out) at the bottom, exposed to the soil.  Use a nice, loose soil, and maybe even some rooting hormone, like Rootone.  Make a hole in the soil with your finger or else the same pencil you used to measure the cutting.  Dip the cutting end into water, and then into the Rootone.  Carefully place the end into the hole, being careful not to knock off the Rootone as you do.  And then cover up the bottom with soil, and keep the cutting warm and moist for the next eight weeks or so.  Some folks will make a little tent with a plastic bag or an empty two-liter plastic bottle.  The bottle method is nice because you can cut off the bottom and put it down over the cutting, and unscrew the top whenever you need to vent it.  Until you vent it, it’s an enclosed system, so it won’t really need much water.  Just keep an eye on it and make sure there’s some condensation on the inside.  My wife used this method to propagate a Cramoisi Superieur rose, which was the first thing we planted in front of our first house. 

So we humans, mostly, love cooler weather.  But the plants are digging it, too.  Aside from the Autumn-specific bloomers like the Fall Aster and Copper Canyon Daisy (and Mexican Mint Marigold, which has the same flowers but with foliage that smells like licorice), a lot of the plants are breathing a sigh of relief that’s nearly audible, and absolutely visual. 

Make time for Octoberfest in Fredericksburg, the Fall Festival of Roses at the Antique Rose Emporium in Independence, maybe a trip to Plantersville in your coolest chain-mail, squeeze in a drive through the country to see what’s going on out there, and go buy enough candy to make sure the little tricksters-or-treaters are zipping around like hummingbirds on coca-nectar when they get home.  And rock out!  ‘Cause it’s Rocktober!  Which is like October, just more. 

Dreams of Ice

Long, long ago in a land that for all practical purposes might as well be far, far away, it was not brutally hot.  No, really.  Think back… it was a time known as “February”.  It was a time when British towns were not being looted and Standard and Poor’s wasn’t quite so dismal.  Not only was it not so hot, it was cold.  It was really cold.  There were no leaves on the trees, but it wasn’t because of drought.  The landscape was bare and stark and the ground was rock-solid.  And then, one morning, we came to work here at the nursery to find fantastic scenes of alien worlds, fairy castles, and extravagant island resorts built by Middle-eastern sheiks.  There was ice, and not just a little.  Remember that?  Maybe you do.  Maybe you have a vague memory that you’ve started to assume was a really crazy, really vivid dream.  But it was real.  We know because we saw it, too, and we took pictures. 

This sprinkler stand was a column of ice all night, but as the sun struck it in the morning, I was able to catch that little drop of water coming off of the stalactite on the right in mid-drop.

 There’s this really cool succulent plant called Lithops, which kind of look like little round rocks that have been split in half.  These looked to me like Ice-Lithops.

Non-ice-Lithops

One of the best things about the ice was all the different and weird patterns it made. 

Grass in stasis

The frozen grass made a very satisfying crunch when stepped on, which presented us with a dilemma: stomp around in it and listen to the crunch, or leave it as pristine as possible as long as possible?

An ice-beard hanging off of one of the pots

Ice-roots

Ever read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”?

 The ice has decided to colonize the pot, and is trying to put down a root to anchor itself there. 

It’s like these trunks started out as pure ice, but were slowly becoming real trees as they grew.  That ice is tricky stuff.

 Ice-falls.  If you were about two inches tall, this would be so awesome!

Poor frozen extremities of the Dwarf Yaupon Holly

 This is like a scene from a horror movie for plants.  This is the part where it’s nearly completely engulfed by the Ice-blob, and finally manages to stretch one small branch up and out of its icy clutches.  But the the Ice-blob bloorps up a little bit of itself to smother the Yaupon’s last hope for freedom.  This is the scene that makes little Yaupons want to sleep with the lights on, and make the Mommy Yaupon look under the bed and make sure there are no Ice-blobs hiding there. 

 

So how did we get all of that ice all over our plants?  With an ice-hose, of course.

A leaf's-eye view

Trapped behind a wall of ice.  Poor little plants.

This is a new variety of Texas Mountain Laurel we’re working on.  Gives you big clusters of ice-flowers all summer.  They smell like orange blossoms and taste like a frozen margarita.  You can either enjoy the flowers on the tree, or use them in your drink.  We expect this to be one of our best sellers

Is it live or is it Memorex?  Or is it just really blasted cold?

It was so cold the camera shutter stuck about halfway open.  But it did make kind of a cool effect. 

Is that a penny trapped under the ice?

 These little frozen blobs didn’t crunch like the frozen grass, but we couldn’t slide across them either.  We just sort of hobbled across while trying not to fall down.  Which was fun in its own way.

Jared's World

Christina's World

A frozen grass-blade's-eye view

Ice-a-saurus sculpture

Apparently wire fences stop ice formations.  This is useful information.

Ice-Nessie

Here are either reminders of the awful winter we all survived six months ago, or they’re images of relief while we all survive this awful summer.  In which case, you’re welcome. 

The Dead Cajun Tour

My wife’s mom’s family is from Louisiana, and that means absolutely everything you would think it would mean.  It means her Granny always has some gumbo or etouffee going in the kitchen.  It means that while the family sits around the table eating the gumbo or the etouffee, the conversation runs from the cousin who’s at LSU to the upcoming birthday of the priest of the local church to “Big Mike, you remember Big Mike?  Oh yeah, cher, you know, his brother used to live next door to the woman who used to sew the covers for the pews of the church.  She was the one that had the son who went into the army and married that real pretty Vietnamese woman, and they live over to Lafourche Parish now.  She runs a pet grooming business now and Lord but she talks so fas’ I can’t unnerstand a ting she say.”  It’s that kind of Cajun family (or Acadien family; there was some disagreement as to which is the more accurate term).  Several years ago, someone in the family gave my wife copies of old pictures of family members.  These are black and white, stiff cardboard pictures of Cajuns with straw boaters and parasols, having a picnic in a swamp somewhere, the Spanish moss cascading from the huge oak trees in the background.  We don’t actually know who these people are, just that they’re family, and that they were picnicking well before Henry Ford delivered his vision to the country. 

Lately, my wife has become interested in researching her family’s history, and finding more old pictures of Cajuns.  So we arranged to go visit her Granny in Louisiana, scan a bunch of old family photos, get the stories behind the pictures, and go find where a bunch of her distant relatives are buried.  Of course, it’s Louisiana, so any of those relatives that weren’t washed away in some flood or other were not so much buried as entombed.  Apparently caskets that are buried in Louisiana have a bad habit of floating down the street during a flood, so people there put their loved ones instead in an above-ground burial vault.  So over the Fourth of July weekend, instead of grilling hamburgers and drinking cold lemonade, we were prowling through old cemeteries in southern Louisiana and drinking lukewarm Gatorade.  But the names, oh man the names…

We had a list of names we were looking for, names of people we knew were in her family and that we were pretty sure were in the cemeteries we visited.  Some of the ones we searched for and found were Pierre-Jean Bourg, Jean Baptiste Charpentier, Michel Morvent, Eugene Robicheaux and Francois Sevin.  And that’s not seven, as in one more than six.  That’s say-vaugh as in “I’m so French I can completely ignore the last letter of my name.”  And then there were the names we saw and weren’t looking for, but were just too great to ignore.  Being a compulsive list-maker, I now have this awesome list of Cajun-French names.

My niece, Delilah, just turned one a few days ago.  Before she made the scene, my brother and his wife were searching for a name for her and decided they wanted an old-fashioned, more traditional, perhaps even retro name for her.  They went with Delilah- a fine and lovely name- even though I suggested Lula or Pearl.  Well, if little Delilah ever gets a littler brother or sister, I have a list of names for him or her that are real doozies. 

My folks named me Matt after a character on ‘Gunsmoke’.  Okay, that’s fine, but do you have any idea how many Matts were born in the early 70’s?  Lots and lots and lots.  But how many times are you in a public place and you hear “hey Ulinor” or “well if it isn’t Junius, you old sonofagun”?  Or say there’s a woman who, well- she has a great personality.  But her name is Etienne or Justillia or Clothile.  Or Eufrozine.  I mean c’mon, she’d have to have an eye in the wrong place or have too many ears not to be cool with a name like Eufrozine.  That’s just instant cool points. 

So we huffed and sweated our way through cemeteries that featured brilliant, freshly painted tombs and headstones at the front, and older, more ornate, crumbling tombs toward the back of the cemetery.  The new, clean white tombs were in perfectly straight rows, like a warehouse for, you know, dead Cajuns. 

Searching those tombs for names from the list of family names we had became some sort of an incredibly hot, tortuous march: step, step, look to the right, sweat, step, step, look to the left, sweat.  Between and behind the clean white tombs were the older graves and tombs that stood at odd angles, where weeds were allowed to grow around the grave markers…

…or even on them.

 These are the really interesting parts of the cemetery.  These older tombs and headstones (and here’s your plant tie-in) had a mosaic of moss and lichen growing on them. 

Spanish Moss dripped off of every tree surrounding the cemetery, and ferns grew out of cracks and in corners. 

Some of the really cool plants I saw growing were a Dwarf Palmetto and a white Verbena that had escaped whatever borders it once grew in. 

In Thibodaux, there was this gorgeous, very dark blue Agapanthus… maybe it’s ‘Elaine’?

Pretty much anything you put in a cemetery will eventually be covered in lichen and mold.

Of course, you know the most popular kind of flower in a cemetery?  Plastic.

Hey, you know why they have to put fences around cemeteries? 

‘Cause people are dying to get in.