Digging the Corpseflower

The pear and the Russian prune hedge are just coming out; the forsythia's in full swing. Let's pray it doesn't freeze them all to black like last year. I don't trust God's rainbow promise. Spring in Ohio is usually brutal.

This is the time of year when the whitefly and aphids get so bad in the Garden Pod that trying to spray for them is like cleaning the house while the kids are around; like shoveling the driveway while it's still snowing. So I took advantage of a couple of warm thundery days last week to give everyone a two-day bath, washing the sticky aphid pee off the leaves, bumming out the whitefly colonies. I repotted plants that couldn't live another minute in their small pots, trimmed things back, groomed off the dead blossoms and leaves. And had to load everything back in when it dropped to the 40's Friday night. Sure enough, we had a mild freeze Monday night, which meant that I had to empty my linen closet to drape my 16' tall heirloom lilac with sheets. The whole garden looked like a yard sale, with sheets and pillowcases on everything. I'll stand out there with a space heater if it means I can save the blossoms this year. They all froze off last April 13. That is not going to happen this year if I have anything to say about it, because last spring nearly killed me.There is a terrible lot of biomass in that greenhouse by mid-April. Terrible. You can't even move in there without a clippers in your hand. But I've got to deal with it until at least May first.The bougainvilleas have done terrifically well this winter. I love these prickly old things, whether they're blooming or not. Good thing, because as soon as I set the pots outside, that's the last I'll see of flowers until next January. Go figure.

Sauromatum venosum, or corpseflower, is a truly icky plant. That's why I love it. A member of the Araceae, or jack-in-the-pulpit family, it has a long blackish-red spathe and a greenish spadix that it sends up in early summer from a bulb that can attain truly titanic proportions. The flower smells like something died. See my post, "Look, Darling, The Corpseflower is in Bloom!" from March 2006, when nobody but Mr. Gold Wow Powerleveling Runescape had much to say to me. The miracle of it all is that it's hardy over our Ohio winters. I plant it right near the front door so I won't miss it when it blooms, because that dark blackish-red color kind of fades into the background. This is the flower of a 1" bulb. You can imagine what a 6" bulb puts forth...Peeeee---yewwwww. But don't worry. The flower only lasts a couple of days. Then it sends up a single fantastic 2-3' wide pinnate leaf on a long stem that's speckled like a gecko. Sauromatum, with flowers that smell like rotting flesh, isn't for everybody, but the bulbs multiply and I've sent them to two similarly twisted friends already since I got my first, tiny bulbs from my friend Dave about three years ago. By the way, the rot smell is to attract fly and beetle pollinators. It works. I found the blossom among the hostas last year by following the smell and the sound of buzzing flies, expecting to find oh, maybe a dead raccoon. Mini-Baker fix, just so you know he's still alive and kicking. Sorry for the dearth of doggeh posts. I've been traveling and gardening (working like a mule). Bacon is still up to his old tricks.

I wanted to send a bulb to a special friend in New Jersey before they started growing for the spring, so I gingerly forked around where they were lying, dormant, under the soil. I was a bit concerned that all the tubers I dug up had soft gooshy spots, but I scraped out the rotten pulp until I got to firm living bulbflesh, washed the bulbs, and replanted them. I don't think there's much that's going to stop these things.
You can see where I scooped out the flank of the huge bulb. I still think it's going to grow fine; in fact it's already working on its flower. Weird enough for you, Chet Baker?
Mether. These are yucky. I am not a squeamish dog, but I have to wonder about a person who would plant something like this by her front door. There are other people in this house, you know. Namely me, Chet Baker. This bulb is bigger than my head. Do you remember last year, when I found the flower? Well, I thought it was something lovely to roll in, but it was only a plant.

Here's an excerpt from Scott D. Appell's wonderful writeup on the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's web site:

This tuberous aroid, hailing from the Himalaya, is considered to be subtropical (tolerating a minimum temperature of 41°F) and technically has no place here, but I am including it because I cultivated a four-foot-wide colony of it in Columbus, Ohio (Zone 6), through decades of freezing hibernal Midwest temperatures. It could prove hardy for you too! Considered a horticultural novelty, the voodoo lily tuber will produce its purple-mottled shiny green spathe and purple-brown spadix on a windowsill even without soil or water. The early-spring inflorescence grows up to 15 feet tall and emits a profoundly strong smell of carrion. (When I grew the plant, it attracted every fly in the neighborhood. "Did one of your cats die?" a neighbor inquired.) After its inflorescence fades, each tuber produces a single dark green, two-foot-tall leaf divided into numerous lance-shaped segments. The leaves have puce leopard spots on their petioles, and in large clumps they make an impressive tropical foliar display. By midsummer, the foliage shrivels away, but in fall, clusters of attractive red berries appear. The tubers multiply rapidly, making propagation from offsets easy. Plant the tubers six inches deep in fertile, well-drained soil and partial shade. With adequate protection in the colder areas, the voodoo lily can be hardy from Zones 6 to 9.

He grew 15' tall voodoo lilies in his Columbus garden?? Sounds like a soulmate. Stand by. Pictures of flowers in May or June. I just hope I'm here for the blooming, because it comes and goes in a couple of days.

Did You See the Sky Last Night?

The storm front that brought such destruction to the states just south of us brought us terrible winds in the wee hours of February 6, winds that it seemed would tear the roof off the house. I spoke with a friend from down the road, whose house also tops a hill, and she said she lay awake all night, unable to get this image out of her head: That the wind would take the roof off her house and suck her two youngest daughters out of their cribs. I lay awake with similar thoughts, constructing disaster scenarios. Finally I got up and paced from window to window, my limbic system having taken over completely. I muttered like a mother lion, thinking about how and when I should take the kids to the basement, knowing that I'd never see a twister coming in the inky darkness. We all ended up in bed together, Baker too, listening. He is stunningly unfazed by lightning or thunder, high winds or rain. But he comforts where he can.

All the storm brought us was rain, some creek and river flooding, and a sunset of unbelievable beauty and majesty. It was like an apology for the terror of the night before. It all started yesterday evening with a sudden downpour, a burst of late sun, and a big fat rainbow, plunging down behind our pear tree.

Ranks of puffy thunderheads marched away off to the southwest, over our meadow. Creamy clouds are ever my favorites.
I shot a lot of creamy cloud photos, and realized we had better get our hineys up in the tower to get the best views, because this was going to be one humdinger of a sunset. There, we discovered a lavender and pink wonderland unseen from the ground, off to the north. I wish I could tell you how those distant ridges looked, lit with peach and apricot. This picture only hints at it all. It's not often you see steely clouds march across a flamingo-pink backdrop.
One little red cloud rose up in the southwest sky, seemingly still inflamed from the previous night's battle.
I whipped back around to the north to see more alpenglow and pink fantasy. I felt I was missing something no matter which way I faced.
Now it was getting serious off to the west. The kids and I were freezing in the rapidly dropping temperature; the wind was still whipping. I stripped off my coat to wrap Liam up and kept shooting.
A closeup of that coral tornado:Here's the wispy underlit backdrop to the pink tornado. At this point we were howling in appreciation.
I think the name I put on this jpeg is sunsetjustridiculous20608:
Finally, everything went kind of steely with just licks of crimson and rose, and suddenly the show was over. We were all breathless with cold and catharsis. These clouds looked to us like dragon heads, coming to eat the sun. Or, as Liam said, "A Triceratops, biting off a piece of plant."
It's hard to know what to do with sunset photos. I take a lot of them, but rarely find a way to say much of worth about them. Sunsets just are. Their beauty is so intense, yet fleeting, that I feel I have to make some homage to it. I have to do something about it. And so I run out and take photo after photo, and then I run up to the top of our tower and take more. It's cool to be able to capture just a little bit of it and share it here, but putting a winter sunset in a rectangle never does it justice. It's like looking at a still from a movie, minus the action and music. It's being bathed in that glow, feeling part of some unique and irreplaceable natural happening in 360-degree panorama that makes my heart race. I spent today in the company of two of my best girlfriends, and both of them led off our separate conversations with, "Did you see the sky last night?? I wanted to call you!"