Bahçe Hastası - Garden Freak in Istanbul

Another Winter Surprise - Bir Kış Sürprizi Daha

2012-01-23T21:39:00.000+02:00

In late 1982, my mother moved from Iowa, where she had lived since 1960, to the small community of Fairfield Bay in northern Arkansas. She'd always loved gardens and plants but until moving to Arkansas, had had only a passing interest in wild flowers. But there, living in the middle of oak-hickory forest that extended as far as the eye could see in every direction, she started paying attention to what was growing around her. I was taking a plant taxonomy class at the time and had learned to recognize basic plant families, and she got interested too. So I gave a copy of my class syllabus, and it wasn't long before she not only left me trailing in the dust, but became a local expert that botany professors from nearby universities contact when they're looking for a population of such-and-such. She also fought tooth-and-nail to have a local glade full of rare species protected from development and dumping.

So what does this have to do with the subject of this post? Not much really, but who can pass up a chance to brag about their mother? But it does have to do with her curiosity!

Mom's an early riser, which does have to do with the subject. On a winter morning several years ago (she can tell me exactly how many in the comments) she looked out back window onto the natural landscape interrupted only by some branches, strategically placed in order to keep visitors from trampling choice plants. The back yard was covered with white blobs. Figuring an animal had gotten into a garbage can and allowed chunks of styrofoam to blow through the woods, she headed out to clean up the mess. But when she reached down to pick up the first piece, she came up with a handful of ice. Looking around, she realized that all these chunks of styrofoam were made of ice, and had formed on the bases of the dead stems of certain plants.

Some research revealed that they're known as frost flowers, and in her area, they form mainly on the stems of two local plants: Verbesina virginica (white crownbeard or frostweed) and Cunila origanoides, aka dittany. There are other plants also known to produce ice ribbons like this, including Helianthemum canadense and Pluchea odorata. Mom has also seen them growing on Vernonia, aka ironweed. For that matter, they don't only form on plants; under the right conditions they can form on wood or even pieces of metal where there's some water inside. Different plants and materials produce different forms; the dittany makes curly whorls with sometimes amazingly intricate shapes, while the frostweed tends to form ridges, wider at the bottom of the stem and tapering higher up. When they form wood as is more common in Europe, it's sometimes known as hair ice (or in Dutch, haareis).

So mom being mom, she doesn't do anything halfway! So she started documenting them, going out every morning the temperature dipped before zero to photograph the new crop of frost flowers. Now she has one of the largest collections of frost flower photos that I'm aware of. She also pampers these plants in her yard so that they'll grow and multiply.

If you want to see frost flowers, there are a few requirements. 1) You need to live in an area where the temperature dips below freezing at night but above during the day, so the water can seep into the stems of plants. 2) You need to have some of the right plants, and 3) You need to get up early! As soon as the sun starts hitting these very temporary creations, they crumble and melt back into the soil. Ever since I decided to write this post, I've been waiting for a good frost to take a walk around the garden and through the open areas on the hills above my house. The cold weather finally came, but with an inch or two of snow, so if any frost flowers did form, I'll never know about it! I'll be watching the weather reports though. If any readers outside the US (or within for that matter) have seen frost flowers, I'm sure my mom would love to hear about it, and see photographic evidence!

A few links on frost flowers / Kirağı çiçekleriyle ilgili birkaç link:
My mom's photos, including lots of other subjects as well. You might end up becoming a fan of wild turkeys!
(Başka konular da dahil olarak annemin fotoğrafları. Yaban hindileri hayranı olmanız da mümkün!)

Another site that includes some of my mother's best photos
(Annemin en güzel fotoğraflarından birkaç tanesini içeren bir site)

A site that includes photos of ice forming in a similar way on metal railing

(Buzun benzer bir şekilde metal bir korkuluğa oluşmasını da gösteren bir site)

(Ice formations on wood)
(Tahtada oluşan kırağı oluşumları)

(A great time-lapse film of frost flower forming.)
(Bir kırağı çiçeğinin oluşmasını gösteren harika bir hızlandırılmış çekim)

1982 yılında annem, 1960 yılından beri yaşadığı Iowa eyletinden ayrılıp, Arkansas eyaletinin Ozark dağlarında bir küçük kasabaya taşındı. Iowa'da güzel bir bahçesi vardı fakat yeni evinde toprak çok ince ve sertti, ayrıca önlemler alınmayınca ne ekersen ek, %95i yaban geyiklerine yem olur. O yüzden dikkatini daha çok bölgenin zengin bitki örtüsüne çevirdi. Yerel bitki ailelerini tanımayı öğrendi, ve birkaç yıl içinde kendini aşıp, bölgedeki üniversite profesörlerin, belli bir bitki türü bulmak istediği zaman başvurdukları bir uzman haline gelmişti. İşte annem hiç birşeyi yarım yamalak birşeyi yapmaz!

Bunun konuya ne alakası var? Hemen hemen hiçbiri ama annem için biraz böbürlemek için fırsatı kaçırmak istemedim. Yine de annemin merakıyla ilgisi kesinlikle var.

Annem her sabah çok erken kalkıyor. Yani 4.50 civarında. Sabahlardan biri, arka penceresinden, ziyaretçilerin özel yaban çiçeklerine basmalarını engellenmesi için yerleştirilen birkaç ağaç dalı hariç doğal halini hemen hemen tamamen kornunmuş olan arka bahçesine bakarken, her tarafta beyaz topaklar görmüş. "Her halde bir hayvan tekrar bir çöp tenekesini devredip her yere strafor dağıtmış" diye, ceketini giyip temilemeye çıkmış. Fakat ilk parçayı toplamaya eğilince elinde bir avuç buz bulmuş. Meğer bütün bu strafor parçaları, buzdanmış, hem de sadece belli bitkilerin kurumuş gövdelerinde oluşuyorlarmış.

Fenomeni biraz araştırdıktan sonra, bunlara "frost flowers," yani "kırağı çiçekleri" denildiğini öğrendi. Onun bölgesinde özellikle "kırağı otu" adıyla da geçen Verbseina virginica ve kokusu kekiğe benzeyen Cunila origanoides olmak üzere iki bitki türünde oluşuyor, fakat değişik bölgelerde kırağı çiçekleri oluşturan başka türler de var. Hatta sadece bitkilerde değil, bazen içinde su biriktiği metal korkmalıklar ve odun parçalarında bile oluşabilir. Batı Avrupa'da oduna oluşan buza "saç buzu" derler, veya Hollandacada haareis.

Annem annem olduğu için, dediğim gibi hiçbirşeyi yarım yamalak bir şekilde yapmaz, dolayısıyla her sabah çıkıp fotoğraflamaya başladı. Kaç yıl önce başladığını tam hatırlamıyorum (her halde yorumlarda bize söylecektir!) fakat şimdi bildiğim kadarıyla dünyanın en büyük buz çiçeği fotoğraf arşivine sahip. İsteyenler, fotoğraflarını yukarıdaki linklere tıklayarak görebilir. Bir de, çok büyümeleri için bahçesindeki bu bitkileri çok şımartıyor!

Kırağı çiçeklerini görebilmeniz için yerine getirilmesi gereken üç şart var. 1) Sıcaklık geceleyin 0 altına düşüp fakat suyun bitki gövdelerine akabilmesi için gündüz sıfırı aşması da gerekiyor. 2) Yapısının kırağı çiçeklerinin olşmasına uygun olduğu bitkiler mevcut olması lazım. 3) Erken kalmanız lazım! Çünkü güneşin ışıltıları bu çok geçici "çiçeklerin" dokunur dokunmaz, hemen eriyip toprağa dönüyorlar.

Acaba Türkiye'de de oluyor mu? Bilmiyorum. Bu yazıyı birkaç hafta önce yazmaya karar verdiğimden beri her gece hava durumuna ayaz için bakıyorum. Olmadı....olmadı....sonra geldi fakat beraberinde birkaç cm kar da geldiği için, kırağı çiçekleri oluştuysa ondan habersiz kalmaya mahkumum işte. Ve beklemeye devam! Bahçede veya evimin yakınındaki kırlarda görürsem fotoğrafını çekip paylaşırım. Siz de paylaşın!

Winter Lights - Kış Işıkları

2012-01-09T18:44:00.000+02:00

I'll be the first to admit that I don't spend lots of time out in the garden this time of year. We have some pleasant days but overall January in Istanbul is not much different from January in Seattle. If you like blowing cold rain, this is the place for you!

But of course there are still things going on in the garden. We think of winter as an inactive time, and spring as the season of reawakening, but here in our hard-to-pin-down, almost-but-not-quite-Mediterranean climate, things are a little different. Fall does bring the baring of the trees, but also the first real rains, which wake up most of the herbaceous plants. By January, the hills are green; as I walk up the long back road to the Kavacık market I see growing Geranium robertianum, grasses, sweet violets, sicleweed, wild Erodium and Lathyrus species and much more. Chickweed makes a deep fresh carpet over exposed areas, along with one of my most-despised weeds, pellitory, aka asthma weed (Parietaria judaica). If you live in the US you might not be familiar with it; if you're in Australia, you almost certainly are. It's a spreading weed with brittle red stems and tenacious roots that produces no end of small burr-like seeds. But it has its place as part of the spring carpet.

In the garden, there are still some autumn stragglers. The most conspicuous is the pineapple sage (Salvia elegans). In Seattle I grew this plant for its wonderful fragrant leaves but rarely got much floral mileage out of it because the first frosts would usually put an end to the show almost as it began. Here, it gets nearly five feet tall and it's just now starting to look a little tired. It also set seed for the first time since I've grown it; several small plants have come up around the garden.

Of course the winter preparation for the spring burst is also underway in the garden. There are now great rosettes of white comfrey and borage, waiting for the warming of spring to send up their white and blue flower clusters. Evening primrose rosettes lay dark and flat, taking advantage of the occasional warm day to score a little growth. Hellebores are also taking advantage of the abundant water to grow this year's collection of thick leaves before hardening them off for the hot days ahead. Some of the narcissus, most notably the paper whites, are already almost full size, and it won't be long before they add their fragrance to winter days. A single sweet violet has already bloomed. The Amaryllis belladonna is growing great guns, storing its energy for the show. It takes a slightly different tack, dying down in late spring and waiting till most of the competition has passed before re-announcing its presence in late summer with a sudden fanfare of hot pink trumpets.

Sometimes what we think of winter flowers are just late fall stragglers, or especially precocious spring bloomers. In Iowa crocus and grape hyacinths were early but that meant April; here the crocus are already well on their way by late February. Still, they are "spring flowers" to me. Others though are real winter troopers, going through the worst that (our) winter has to offer. Winter Honeysuckle is one of them; I've already seen its sweet-scented flowers appearing on bushes around the city, mostly unnoticed by passersby. Chimonanthus praecox (wintersweet) is not all that common here, but it should be starting any day now with its yellowish bells and bittersweet fragrance, like perfumed wine.

The other day I was out checking the state of things when I noticed a flash of purple out of the corner of my eye. It was an iris, but not a confused German iris like last year. This was Iris unguicularis, or Cretan iris, also known as Algerian iris. I'd gotten the plant 3 years ago from a friend in Seattle along with several Pacific Coast hybrids and they'd gotten mixed up. Since they look rather similar out of bloom, I wasn't even sure what the plant was till I saw it in bloom for the first time.

This is one very tough plant, and ideal for xeriscapes. It's a carefree plant that will practically thank you for summer neglect, rewarding you in the darkest days of winter with a long succession of beautiful flowers ranging from pale lavender to rich purple blue. The flowers are not held high; they can be somewhat obscured among the leaves but why look a gift horse in the mouth? It may also take a little patience, but about the only thing you will have to be vigilant about is slugs and snails; for a snail, an emerging Cretan iris flower is something like a dark chocolate pecan caramel in the middle of a box of fruit creams...they'll pass up everything else to get it. So a sprinkling of snail bait is not a bad idea!

I. unguicularis is not the easiest plant to find in nurseries but it's available online with several named varieties, including some pure white varieties. One English company that offers it is Avon Bulbs.

Kışın bahçeme çok çıkmadığımı açıkça kabulleniyorum. Buranın Ocak havası, Seattle'ınkine fazlasıyla benziyor zaten, sümüklü böcekler veya soğuk rüzgarlar ve yağmur seven mazoşistler için ideal!

Genelde kış hareketsiz bir zaman olarak düşünülüyor fakat aslında çok hareket var. Bizim "hemen-hemen-Akdeniz-fakat-tam-olmayan" ikliminde kış, bir "uyku" zamanından çok, bir "hazırlanma" zamanı olarak nitelendirilebilir. Sonbahar çıplaklaşan ağaçler getirse de, aynı zamanda yamaçları yeşile büründürüen ilk yağmurlar da getiriyor beraberinde. Belli olmazsa bile, soğanlar ve diğer bitkiler büyümek ve yazda azalan sudan iyi faydalanabilmek için köklerini derinlere uzattırıyor. Hodanlar şimdiden kocaman olmuş, yanındaki bitkilerinin ilbaharda altlarında kaybolmasını engellemek için şimdiden iyice elemem gerekecek. Onları elerken, aynı zamanda her tarafta büyüyen, en çok nefret ettiğim ot olan Parietaria judaica'yı yoluyorum. Türkçe adını hiç bilmiyorum, bilen varsa söyler misiniz? İngilizcede "astım otu" diyoruz. Ben de onu "İstanbul'un resmi otu" olarak düşünüyorum, bulunmadığı yer yok çünkü! Toprak biraz sertleştikten sonra çok daha zor olacak, çünkü gövdeleri kırılgan fakat kökleri sapasağlam. Şimdi kolayca çekilebilir.

Çiçeklerini sonbaharda açan bazı bitkiler, kışa devam ediyor. Bunlardan kendini çok belli eden bir tane, Salvia elegans, nam-ı diğer "Ananas kokulu adaçayı." Seattle'da bu bitkiyi daha çok mis kokulu yaprakları için yetiştiriyordum, ayazlar daha erken geldiği için çiçekleme faslı başlar balamaz sona eriyordu. Fakat İstanbul'daki bahçemde bu dayanıklı bitki yaklaşık 1.80 cm'a ulaşmış, çiçeklerini açmaya da devam ediyor. Geçen yıl ilk defa tohum da yaptı, birçok küçüğü bahçenin değişik yerlerinde çıktı.

Başka bitkileri "erken açan ilkbahar çiçekleri" olarak değerlendiriyorum. Mesela çiğdemler çok erken açsa da, gerçek kış çiçeği sayılmaz.

Fakat bazı bitkiler gerçekten kış kahramanları oluyor. Mesela İstanbul'un çok parkında bulunan fakat pek farkına varılmayan Kış Hanımelisi (Lonicera fragrantissima) var. Şimdiden bile güzel kokulu çiçeklerini açmmaya başlamış. Şimdiden ana gövdesinden 20 cm'lik bir ucunu kırıp toprağa dikerseniz, ilkbahara kadar kök salar. Her bahçenin bir köşesinde olmalı bence! (Öyleyse neden benimkinde yok?) Bir başka parlayan kış yıldızı, Chimonanthus praecox'tır. Bu İran menşeli bitki İstanbul'da çok yaygın olmamasına rağmen yok da değil. Levent'te bir evin önünde kocaman bir çalısı gördüm. Memleketinde "gol-e yakh" (buz çiçeği) olarak bilinen bu bitkiyi belki ilk başta gözleriniz değil burnunuzla bulursunuz, sarımsı çan şeklindeki çiçekleri parfümlü şarap gibi bir yoğun koku saçıyor. Sabriniz varsa tohumdan da yetiştirabilirsiniz, kışta dallarında devam eden tohumları şimdiden ekebilirsiniz. Fakat çiçek açana kadar en az 4 yıl süreceği için biraz para harcayıp fidanlıktan almakta da yarar var.

Birkaç gün önce güzel havadan faydalanıp bahçemin durumuna bakmak için çıktığımda, gözümün bir ucunda mor bir parıltı gördüm. Bir iris (süsen)miş! Fakat geçen yılki gibi şaşırmış bir "mezarlık zambağı" değil, bu kez gerçek anlamıyla bir kış irisiydi - Girit irisi veya Cezayir irisi olarak da bilinen Iris unguicularis. Birkaç yıl önce Seattle'da yaşayan bir arkadaştan aldığım bu bitkiyi, çiçek açmadığı dönemde çok benzediği Pacific İrislerle karıştırıp, acaba niye çiçek açmıyor diye merak da etmiştim...

Daha yaygın olan mezarlık süsenleri kadar gösterişli bir bitki değil bu, çiçekleri genelde yaprakların arasında açılıyor. Fakat kışın bu denli güzel bir çiçek açtığına göre, "bedava bir atın dişlerine bakılmaz" bence. Son derece dayanıklı bu iris, ihmalınız için size karakışın ortasında bol çiçekle teşekkür edecek, yeter ki biraz sabrınız olsun. Ayrıca salyangozlar her halde bunun tomurcuklarını, bayat sossuz salatanın ortasında bir parça baklava gibi gördükleri için biraz salyangoz ilacı da kötü bir fikir değil.

Cezayir irisi burada kolay bulunmaz fakat internette satış yapan yurtdışı fidanlıklardan elde edilebilir. Avon Bulbs mesela beyazdan zengin mora kadar uzanan birkaç cinsi sunuyor.

Hurma tohumlarını isteyenlere bir not: Sizi unutmadım! Birkaç istek geldiği için hepsini aynı günde göndereceğim.

Arkansas: Wild Persimmons / Yaban Hurması

2011-12-05T16:24:00.000+02:00

The American South has lots of beautiful places and interesting plant life as well. Northern Arkansas might be on the edge of what's normally considered "The South" but there are plenty of things that place it firmly there. A conversation with an Ozark local will leave no doubt as to where you are culturally, and besides that, there are wild persimmons there.

Amerika'nın güney bölgesi, hem çok sayıda güzel yere, hem de ilginç bitki örtüsüne sahip. Kuzey Arkansas belki normalde "Güney" sayılan coğrafyasının kuzey ucunda bulunsa da, yerel biriyle biraz konuşursanız hem şivesi hem de kültürü, hangi bölgede bulunduğunuza dair herhangi bir şüphe kalmayacaktır. Ayrıca yaban

hurması var!

Actually, we have wild persimmons in Turkey as well; our local species is Diospyros lotus, which naturally occurs in the Black Sea region and is known locally as the "Trabzon persimmon." The fruits are about the size of a very small grape. The flavor is similar to that of the large Japanese persimmon (D. kaki), but they are generally a little more watery, with lots of seeds, and seem to hold onto their astringency until the very last possible minute. I can'τ count the times I've had my mouth puckered even by fruits I was sure were ripe enough.

Aslinda yaban hurması Türkiye'de de var, fakat ayrı bir tür. Yerel türümüz, halk dilinde "Trabzon hurması" olarak bilinen Diospyros lotus'tur. Meyveleri küçük bir üzüm büyüklüğünde, tadı bildiğimiz büyük hurmannın (Japon hurması, D. kaki) tadına benziyor fakat daha sulu ve bol çekirdekli. Hem de mayhoşluğunu son ana kadar koruyormuş gibime geliyor...ne kadar beklersem bekleyim yine de ağzımı bürüştürüyor!

The American persimmon (D. virginiana) is somewhere in the middle with fruits about the size of a plum. That's variable though, as are their shape, texture and astringency. The fruits above are flat, and ripened to a rather grainy consistency, before which they were inedible. A small stand I found nearer my mother's home had much larger, rounder fruits that were fine as soon as they softened (L).

Amerika hurması (D. virginiana) erik büyüklüğündeki meyveleriyle ikisinin ortasında kalıyor. Büyüklüğü değişken aslında, hatta şekli, kıvamı ve kekremsiliği de öyle. Mesela yukarıdaki fotoğraftaki meyveler hafif basık şeklinde, yenebilmesi için hemen hemen şekerlenmiş bir kıvama gelmesi gerekiyordu. Annemin evinin daha yakınında bulduğum bir grup ağaçlar ise, yuumuşur yumuşamaz çok lezzetli olan, daha büyük, yuvarlak meyveler veriyordu (Solda).İkisinden de bol tohum topladım, denemek isteyen varsa paylaşırım!

But for me what sets the Amerıcan persimmon apart is its flavor. There is a fragrance and depth of flavor that I haven't found in any other species. Actually, the genus Diospyros is quite large but most of them live in the tropics. Some resemble the American persimmon, while others are more exotıc, like the famous black sapote (D. digyna) has smooth black pulp that is said to taste like chocolate pudding.

Fakat benim için Amerika hurmasını farklı kılan, tadıdır. Başka türlerde bulamadığım bir koku ve derinlik var. Diospyros cinsi aslında oldukça büyük bir cins olmasına rağmen mensuplarının çoğuna sadece tropikal bölgerde rastlanır. Bazılarının tatı bildiğimiz hurmalara yakınken, diğerleri daha egzotik sayılabilir. Mesela ünlü siyah sapote'nin (D. digyna) meyvelerinin içi simsiyah, tadı ise çikolatalı pudinge benziyormuş.

Arkansas

2011-12-05T14:45:00.000+02:00

If you've followed this blog, you know Arkansas comes up from time to time. My mother moved there back in the late 1980s and has become a local wild plant expert. She also has become fascinated with frost flowers, about which I'll do a post soon.

Blogumu izliyorsanız zaman zaman Arkansas eylatinin gündeme geldiğini biliyorsunuz. Annem 1980'li yıllarda oraya taşındığından beri bir yerel yaban bitkileri uzmanı olmuş. Aynı zamanda daha sonra yazacağım buz çiçeklerine de ilgi sardı.

Mostly we think of chrysanthemums and turning leaves in the autumn, and there were plenty of those. It was a bit early for peak color, but the winged sumac was putting on a spectacular show this year.

Sonbahar denince en çok kasımpatı ve rengi dönen yapraklar aklımıza geliyor, onlardan bol vardı tabii. Sonbahar renklerinin doruk noktasına daha birkaç hafta vardı fakat yerli bir tür olan "kanatlı sumak" güzel bir gösteri yapıyordu.

Still there were some fall blossoms to be found as well, especially goldenrod,
Yine de birkaç sonbahar çiçekleri vardı, özellikle Amerika'daki alerji hastaların haksız olarak kahrettiği Solidago türleri,

and several species of asters.
hem de birçok Aster türü.

I especially love these pale purple ones, which I remember from my childhood.
Çocukluğundan hatırladığım bu hafif mor olanları çok seviyorum.

There were less showy ones as well, but that didn't deter a hungry wasp!
Daha az gösterişli olanlar da vardı fakat aç bir eşekarısı caydırılmadı!

Bahçehastası Gets a Macro! Bahçehastası, Macro Lensi Aldı!

2011-12-05T13:46:00.001+02:00

I was back in the US for most of November, and because I don't do well with jet lag, I like to break it up. This means 5 days or so in New York (-7 hours from Istanbul), a visit to my mother in Arkansas (-1 hour) an then the final stint in Seattle (-2 more hours). Actually coming east is harder, so I should probably go to Seattle first, but for some reason the ticket comes out half again as expensive. It's all a racket...

I mentioned before that I'd finally gotten myself an SLR, and one thing I'd really wanted to do was macro photography. This requires the right lens, and a decent macro lens doesn't come cheap. So having a few days in New York, I hightailed it down to B&H Cameras' second-hand department, and lo and behold, a 100mm Canon macro had just come in that day at a good 30% off. Of course if you've ever been to B&H, you can probably guess that I spent almost as much on necessary accoutrements as I saved on the lens...

So of course the first thing I had to do was take it out for a spin. Now one might not think of New York streets as a paradise of botanic photography, but there were plenty of small gardens in Jackson Heights. I also didn't have a tripod with me, but luckily it was a bright morning and the air was very still. There was a log of white Ageratum around and I did shoot some photos of it, but none of them really did anything for me. However as I was focusing on plants, I noticed this cranefly on a leaf. It seems a lot of this sort of photography involves choosing what part of the subject will be in focus and what you're willing to compromise on for the best effect, because actual depth of field is quite narrow.

I also found that closer-up is not always better! This Penstemon was beautiful, and close-up it's fascinating, but somehow it reminds me a little too much of this.

Kasım ayının çoğunu ABD'de geçirdim. Beni genelde fazlasıyla etkileyen jetlag'ı kademe kademe aşmak için ilk önce New York'a, sonra Arkansas'ya ve en son Seattle'a gittim. Dönüşü? Sormayın.

Tabi ki New York'tayken fogoğrafçıların cenneti (veya cehennemi) olan B&Η Camera'ya uğramadan edemedim. Birkaç ay önce ilk SLR'imi almıştım, fakat yapmak istediğim macrophotografçılık için macro lensi lazım, hem de ucuz değil. Çok şükür iyi durumda olan bir ikinci el 100mm Canon lensi bulabildim, o gün gelmişti. B&Η'te sağladığım herhangi bir tasarrufu diğer "gerekliler" alarak iptal ettim tabii. Türkiye'de çok daha pahalı diye avutuyorum kendimi.

Neyse ertesi sabah çıkıp denemek lazımdı. Tripod yoktu fakat güneşli ve rüzgarsız bir sabah olduğu için il denemelerim tamamen başarısız olmadı. Botanik fotoğrafçılığı denince akla gelen ilk yer New York olmayabilir de, aslında mahallelerin sokaklarında çok sayıda küçük bahçe var, kısaca bol madde vardı. Hatta böcekler de boy gösterdi...

A Moving Post - Hareketli bir Giriş

2011-08-06T13:16:00.000+03:00

I do love the new instant YouTube link capability in Blogger!

A couple years ago I did a post (Lost and Found II) about a plant that was a favorite in our family garden for years. But since half the fun is the flower's time-lapse-like speed in opening, I decided that I'd try to film it. Now I just need to find a way to transmit the smell!

May - Mayıs

2011-08-04T22:24:00.001+03:00

Really expert gardeners, the ones who write books instead of blogs (though some of them write blogs too), stress the importance of a careful choice of plants to provide interest and harmony in the garden throughout the summer. Their gardens are always lush, with expertly-designed contrasts of color, structure, and texture. They practice certain strategies like grouping plants for more punch, thinking carefully about what plant will provide a good foliar backup for whatever will be in bloom at any particular period; and they keep diaries, making notes to move plants to a better location next year for a more effective show.

There is, however, another kind of gardener: The plant freak. These gardeners pick something up from the garden center because it was wonderful, and wander through the garden, searching for some place that doesn't either have something occupying the space, or (if they can remember), have some dormant precious bulb just under the surface waiting the hard edge of the spade. I'm mostly this kind of gardener, though I think I've gotten marginally better. I actually did plant a group of three Monardas last year. Only one of them really took off, completely subsuming the other two, but next year, they'll be fantastic. Really. Or not.

In any case, the plants that really attract me tend too often to be those that bloom in spring and early summer. Or have great leaves during those months. It's okay, I tend to be kind of bad about watering in the summer and so there is a de facto xeriscaping happening out there. If you survive, you're in for next season! Of course really special or rare things might get a little more attention...

There was one highlight this May - I bought my first SLR, something I'd been shying away from for a long time because of a bit of technophobia. And of course after just a couple days, with lots to learn still, I don't know how I ever did without. So this will be another mainly photographic post with a few explanations.

Epimedium leaves

The Judas tree, a local species of redbud, which is practically the symbol of Istanbul.

Iris xyphium, a bulbous iris.

Geranium macrorrhizum, a very hardy and drought-tolerant hardy geranium, known for its medicinal qualities.

A Pacific Coast Iris in its second year. It only send up one bloom spike this year but has spread now, so better luck next spring. I'm happy to have any PCIs surviving here!

Another PCI, "Pacific Warrior," probably an I. douglasii hybrid. It grows in an area that's perfectly swampy through the winter and spring, and then gets quite dry in high summer. It's grown like a house afire!

Iris graminea, a plum-scented iris with flowers that open well below the tops of the leaves. This got seriously snail-chewed this year and probably needs to be moved. I'll probably move it...

Cappadocia / Kapadokya

2011-08-03T14:05:00.025+03:00

After Antakya, my plan was to return to Istanbul making several stops in different areas along the way, and photograph the spring flora. But the night my friends and I arrived in Ürgüp, the main town of Cappadocia, I started feeling a suspicious tickle in the back of my throat...and by the next day I had the worst cold I'd had in years. I did manage to get out that day, but the next day was so miserable that I didn't even leave the hotel. Which was, by the way, a really wonderful place.

Cappadocia is truly amazing, and no picture can quite capture it. The towers of soft volcanic tuff rise up everywhere, and anywhere there is tuff, there are ancient dwellings. The rock is constantly eroding, so some former homes are now fully open; in some cases only a depression in the stone remains; the back wall of what was once an entire living space.

The soil around the "fairy chimneys" is very light and fast-draining, so the plants that grow in it are well-adapted to drought, either through succulent tissues as in some of the thick-stemmed Euphorbias, or as ephemerals, which grow in the rains of fall, establish themselves further through the winter, then rush to grow, flower and set seed in the spring before they're dessicated by the parching summer heat.


A sample fairy-chimney landscape.

Some random flora among the chimneys

Graveyard and orchards where fields meet tufa

An anemone in a fallow field. In Turkey, many plant families are represented by red flowers with black centers.

More fields and orchards. What a place to live!

An unexpected green spot among ancient rock dwellings in the Göreme open-air museum.

Alkanna sp. (orientalis?)

Can't have a wildflower post without at least one Verbascum!

An Anchusa species very common in much of Turkey, which can range from blue through purple shades. I adore it.

The remains of a once enclosed home.

Ranunculus (buttercups) growing above a valley near Göreme.


A peaceful valley near Göreme that we accidentally drove into while looking for another site.

A short video shot in that same valley

More Anchusa, showing the range of color.

What looks to be a truly lovely clover species

More spring ephemerals. In another month, they'll all be dry straw.

A non-botanical shot which I couldn't help but add. I saw two stern parents disowning their pregnant and unmarried daughter...

Anchusa and an aromatic mint family-member in the spring grass

Anchusa in the field. The white mound of gravel behind is all that remains of what was once a fairy-chimney that has eroded away.

Some chamomile growing among old building stone

Another truly lovely Euphorbia. It was almost entirely made up of flowers!

Antakya in April. Nisan'da Antakya

2011-08-03T13:35:00.000+03:00

Yes I'm aware that it's not April, but I can explain, really!

Once again you're probably given up on me. It's been a full summer; not so much an extremely busy one, but there have been lots of things vying for priority. But that doesn't mean that the garden hasn't been growing, it just means that I've neglected it here and there. Most notably during the winter, when I'd normally have a big patch of fava beans, garlic, peas and other winter vegetables coming on. I was growing frustrated with the incredible growth of bindweed in that patch, so I've decided to cover it with black plastic for a season. They don't call it "devil's guts" for nothing.

The garden was growing, but I took a nice trip out of town (the first in way too long) to visit friends from the town of Antakya (aka Antioch) in Turkey's easternmost Mediterranean province, Hatay. It was cold and miserable in Istanbul, but Hatay was at the height of spring, which meant that I got two springs this year. So without running on too much, here are some of the botanical highlights of the trip. I'd love to be able to say I tromped around the mountains and explored habitats, but my friends are not such botanical types, so these were all taken within the immediate surroundings of the city.

Campanula sp.

Phlomis sp.

A DYC and Verbascum. I do love me a Verbascum!


Another Verbascum!

The ubiquitous P. rhoeas

A truly beautiful Euphorbia

A typically spiny garrigue/maquis shrub

Looks like a Linum (flax) species. The blue-topped plant (which was actually a bit more purple than my camera could render) is a salvia; the actual flowers are small and white, with the bracts doing all the advertising work.

Naturally-tasteful planting of Linum and Salvia

Not a wild iris; this was planted en mass outside a city building. But seeing any bearded iris other than the dark purple I. germanica is always a treat. They smelled delicious.

A bit more Verbascum. This species grew almost exclusively on near-vertical rock faces.

The colorful Euphorbia on another outing, the hills rising immediately behind the city.

A lovely little ground-hugging clover.

No idea what this is, but it is almost certainly in the Borage family. I searched and searched but could find only this single specimen on the entire hill, and it was growing on an outrcop right at the summit. How did it get there?!

A great little spreading clover with curious balloon-like sepals. I kept thinking of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

A general view of the area. The rocks, slopes and flatlands below all had very different mixes of plants.

Cycling Liminalities - Eşiktelik Döngüsü

2011-03-15T23:28:00.002+02:00

liminal adj.

Of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition. In-between, transitional.

Nothing like an extended absence to let you know people are reading! Thanks to everyone who wrote and asked. Actually I've been wanting to write for almost two weeks, but the powers that be (actually, one power in this particular instance) made a quick decision that resulted in Blogger being blocked until yesterday.

To be honest, I've hardly touched my garden, pulled a weed, potted up a cutting or done much of anything horticultural for several months. When things are in a state of change (it could be anything really; relationships, life goals, priorities), sometimes you need to turn inward rather than broadcasting to the world. In my case, some of the above apply, and in addition to that, the landlord popped by in November and had evidently decided that he wasn't getting enough money out of this apartment. So he wanted to raise our rent by 50%. Undoable as that is way beyond our budget, and also illegal, as rent increases may be made according to the annual inflation rate, which was 10% last year. As soon as we said we couldn't pay it, he immediately resorted to threats of calling the police, declaring an illegal occupation, changing locks, etc. He accused me of getting rid of his shed without his permission (absurd), called my garden a garbage dump, bla bla bla. He can't actually do anything for a variety of reasons, but it was so uncomfortable that I was seriously considering moving elsewhere, It was hard to stay focused on a garden I might very well be moving (again!).

But now things seemed to have calmed down (including myself), and it looks like I'll at least be here for this summer, so I may as well enjoy it. And the fact that I neglected things doesn't mean that nothing was actually happening in the garden!

This has been a very strange winter. We didn't get a single hard freeze this year; the coldest day we've had so far was 4 days ago, where it hovered just around freezing for a couple days; yesterday and today were in the 60s. My Brugmansias have survived, and barring any more surprises, I should have double-high Brugs this year!

For that matter, winter didn't even truly arrive until well into January. We had October and early November days so warm that it gave a whole new meaning to "Indian summer." A day or two after Christmas, missing the 75-degree days in Bahrain where I'd just been for ten days, I walked out to get some wood for the stove and noticed a flash of purple to my left. The earlier variety of I. germanica had been fooled and was in full bloom! I snapped this photo a few days late after it had been buffeted a little but it was still hanging in there. An odd sensation to smell iris in December...sort of like eating those Chilean grapes that hit the shelves in mid-winter. Right smell, but the context is all wrong.

Now the weather is warming, the garden is calling, and the weeds are snickering. Were snickering; last time I was back in the US, I splurged and got myself a nice Hori Hori. If you've never used this wonderful Japanese garden tool, you should definitely try it. Sturdy as all get-out, pointy enough to get between stones, and narrow to allow you to dig in deeply and selectively. I won't say it makes weeding fun, but it does make it satisfying!

Have a happy spring!

Blogculara bir tavsiye: Halkın blogunuzu takip edip etmediğini tespit etmek isterseniz, birkaç hafta eksik olun! Tüm yazıp soranlar sağolsun. Aslında yaklaşık iki hafta önce yazmak istiyordum fakat bilindiği gibi Blogger engellenmişti, eninde sonunda daha mantıklı zihinler hakim olmuş çok şükür. Neden yoktun diye sorasanız, bu kış (yaşadığımız mevsime gerçekten kış diyebilirsek eğer) kararsızlık/"eşiktelik" içinde geçti. Değişen ilişkiler, öncelikler, v.s...öyle zamanlarda en iyi şey biraz içe dönmektir. Bunlar yetmezse, aynı zamanda ev sahibimiz, daireden yeterli para almadığını algılayıp, %50lik bir zam yapmaya kalkmaz mı? Öyle birşey söz konusu değil tabii fakat öyle bir miktar veremediğimizi söyler söylemez adam hemen çıkarma, izinsiz işgal ihbarı, polis, kilitler değiştirme gibi tehditler etmeye başladı. Bahçeme de "çöplük" dedi... Bilinen sebeplerden kanunen birşey yapamıyor fakat sonuçta yaşadığım yerde kendimi rahat hissedebilmeye çok önem veriyorum, ev sahibiyle dostluk olmasa da hiç olmasa karşılıklı bir saygı istemek çok mu mantıksız? (Gerçi ben yokken ev arkadaşıma "o Amerikalı daha çok para versin" diyen birinden ne beklenebilir ki...) Ve başka bir yere taşınmayı ciddi bir şekilde düşünüyordum. Şimdi sanki fırtına geçmiş, zamanın neler getireceğine bakarız ama...

Tabi ki ben bahçemi ne kadar ihmal etsem de, yine hareket var. Aralık ayında Bahreyn'e gittim, dönünce hava hala çok soğumamıştı. Hatta Noel'den birkaç gün sonra odun almaya gelirken mor birşey gözüme çarptı...baktım ki irislerin (mezarlık zambaklar) erken açan cinsi uzun süren pastırma yazından kandırılıp çiçek açmıştı! O mis kokuyu kışın ortasında hissetmek çok tuhaf birşey gerçekten, Şubat'ta tropikal bölgelerden getirilen üzüm yemek gibi. Koku var fakat bağlam yok.

Şimdi hava ısınmaya başlamış, bahçe çağırıyor, otlar da kıkırdıyor. Kıkırdıyorlardı daha doğrusu, çünkü memlekete son gittiğimde biraz hovardalık yapıp, kendime güzel bir Hori Hori aldım. Bu harika Japon bahçe malzemesini hiç kullanmadıysanız, denemenizi mutlaka tavsiye ediyorum! Çok dayanıklı Hori Hori'nin sivri ucu, taşların arasına kolay girmesini, dar boyutları ise çok seçici olup derin köklü otları kolaylıkla çıkarabilmenizi sağlıyor. Ot yolmayı eğlenceli kıldığını demeyeceğim fakat en azından tatmin edici oluyor!

Herkese mutlu baharlar dilerim!

Account Hacked!

2010-11-16T01:57:00.000+02:00

I'm really sorry to have to make a post like this one here, but my Google account was hacked, and everyone on it got a message supposedly from me, stranded in Cardiff, Wales, and asking for 2,800 Euros, or 3000 dollars. I finally got my Gmail account back and it looked like some people had actually answered but hopefully nobody actually sent money. I think the language of the letters would have probably tipped them off that something was amiss.

Unfortunately they also deleted my entire contact list and all of my emails since June; some of the contacts I was able to recover from the bcc in the sent letters box but only from the letter K on; they'd deleted the earlier sent mails as well.

So if any of you were the recipient of the letter, please accept my apologies for any worry it might have caused, and drop me a line so that I can get your contact back!

The Beginning of Autumn / Sonbahar Geliyor

2010-10-04T13:26:00.001+03:00

When I took off down the coast to Kuşadası and from there to Samos six days ago, it was definitely summer here, even if it was an Indian Summer. 80 degrees plus, humid, and everyone was asking when this damn heat would let up. When I got back yesterday morning at 6:30 a.m., it was below 60, and it had rained. In some parts of the world it's turning leaves that are the symbol of autumn, but here, like in Seattle, it's rain. In Seattle, where you'd sometimes not see the sun for a month and a half at a time and it was hard to tell sometimes if summer had come (or even would come), rain was something I appreciated in a resigned sort of way. But in Istanbul, after a hot summer like this one, the cool was like a mother's caress.

They tend to wilt a bit by day...

Some early mushrooms up in Belgrade Forest evidently felt it coming, as did my large pink Brugmansia. It was planted directly into the ground last year, and I thought I'd lost it in the snowstorm, but it came back fro the roots improved and this year, after flagging a bit in the heat of the summer, is giving me a great show. The fragrance in the evening comes all the way into the house.

Altı gün önce Kuşadası'na ve oradan Sisam Adası'na hareket ettiğimde yaz (pastırma yazı olsa da) kesinlikle hala hakim oluyordu. Sıcaklık ve nemde herkes "ya yeter ya bu sıcaklık ne zaman biter ya" diye şikayet edip duruyordu. Dün sabah saat 6.30ta döndüğümde sıcaklık 15 civarındaydı, yeni yağmur yağmıştı. Iowa'da sonbaharın simgesi rengi dönen yapraklar oluyordu fakat İsanbul'da, benim için, "sonbahar geldi" diye anons eden şey, yağmurdur kesin. Yazın bazı tam olarak gelmediği, güneşi bazen bir buçuk ay boyunca görmediğimiz Seattle'da yağmura katlanıyordum, alışmıştım, fakat böyle bir sıcak ve nemli yazın sonunda bu hava, bir annenin okşaması gibi geliyor. Belgrad Ormanı'nda bazı mantarlar değişimi sezip uyanmaya başlaıyor, ve yazı biraz rahatsız geçen Brugmansialar yeniden çiçek açmaya başladı. Geçen yıl direkt toprağa ektiğim bu Brugmansiayı, kar fırtınasında kaybettiğimi zanneetmeme rağmen ilbaharda köklerinden daha da güçlü olarak çıkınca bu yıl muhteşem bir şov yapıyor. Geceleri kokusu öyle yoğun ki evin içine bile ulaşıyor.

This one won't be going in any curries...

Of course fall is harvest time, and there was a garden full of winter squash out there. The best policy is often to leave the squash on the vine as long as possible and harvest when the vines shrivel. For most of them that's definitely true but I decided to go just a bit early for two reasons. 1) I lost two very ripe Bungkans to rot, and 2) the snails are out in force, and love to eat at the base of squash stems. Triamble stems seem especially attractive to them. And most of the vines, if not actively dying, are yellowing off anyway. So I decided to go for it.

Tabi ki kabaklarla dolu bir bahçe de var. Normalde bitkilerin tamamen sarardığına kadar bırakıyorum fakat bu yıl birazcık erken toplamaya karar verdim. Sebleri ikidir: 1) Çok olgunlaşan iki Bunkan kabağı çürüdü, ve 2) yağmurlarda bir ordu gibi çıkan salyangozlar, kabakların koçanlarını yemeyi seviyor. Özellikle Triamble'inki cezbediyor. Zaten kurumamış olan bitkilerin bile çoğu iyice sararmaya başlamış.

Here's the first batch. The orange ribbed futsus actually ripened quite a while ago, so I just put one in for variety. The slightly greenish-yellow, teardrop shaped Seminole was the first to be harvested, its vine is still looking good and they're up out of snails' reach so I'm going to let them ripen to the end.

İlk partisi bu işte - turuncu boğumlu futsular aslında çok önce olmuştu, biraz çeşit adına dahil ettim. Sol tarafındaki "damla" şekli olan Seminole ise, bitkilerinde hala kalan 14 tanesinden bir tanesidir. Ağaca tırmandıkları için salyangozlar erişemiyor, o yüzden ya en azından ayın sonuna kadar, ya bitkileri tamamen kuruduğuna kadar bırakacağım.

The first batch.


Yesterday's harvest. The straight-necked Penn. Dutch was growing off the ground. The large gray one is a Turkish squash planted by...who knows?

Strangely enough, the most tropical of the group - the moschatas - are still in the best shape. Pennsylvania Dutch crookneck is still setting new fruits, and Bungkan has at least 7 more out there ripening, three of which are hanging up in a plum tree! Some will make it, some may not.

İşin acayıp tarafı, üç türün en tropikalı olan C. moschata cinsleri, hala en sağlam durumda. Pennsylvania Dutch Crookneck hala yeni meyveler oluşturuyor, ve olgunlaşan en azından yedi tane Bunkan var. Bazıları olacak, bazıları da olmayabilir. Hatta üç tanesi, Ağustos ayında tırmanmaya başladığı erik ağacının tepesinde!

Bungkan, the "Duracell" of squash...they just keep going, and going, and going, and going...

Summer Flowers and Mold / Yaz Çiçekleri ve Küf

2010-08-25T18:26:00.015+03:00

The main reason I haven't written much about flowers lately, besides my being a squash-obsessed lunatic, is because with all the rain, followed by the sudden heat and humidity, lots of things just didn't do very well. We went through a wave of heat and humidity here that nobody can remember the likes of. Clothes mildewing in closets, carpets molding on the floors, cocoa molding inside its packet. It's been unreal!

İstanbul'lulara, bu yaz yaşadığımız sıcaklık ve nemi anlatmaya hiç gerek yok. Dolaplarında küflenen elbiseler, yerlerde küflenen kilimler... Hepimize geçmiş olsun! Bahçeyi de etkiledi, bu kadar sıcaklığa dayanamayan bitkiler yok oldu. Fakat en endişelendiğim Pacifik Hibrid İrisleri turp gibi!

I lost two of my Geraniums in the upper garden, which are usually tough as nails and which I've been growing for years. Who knows, maybe they'll come back in the spring.

And it's still too early for chrysanthemums, but I have several new ones from seed that should bloom this year. Patience.

Ironically, the plants I was most concerned about - the Pacific Hybrid Iris - have done famously; they've grown and spread beautifully!

One other plant that did do well in the heat was the Rudbeckia (Black-Eyed Susan) above, that I'd completely forgotten about! I'd planted the seeds last year, they came up, grew a bit, and I never got around to planting them. This spring there was one left, and for some reason I'd gotten it into my head that it was a Gaillardia. It was stunted from its stint in the skimpy amount of poor soil left in the pot, but it rallied! I suppose it's a "common-as-dirt" sort of plant but if you grow up in the Midwestern US, these are such a major part of late summer that you almost can't not have them.

Çok başarılı bir bitki, tamamen unuttuğum bir Rudbeckia oldu. Bunlar büyüdüğim ABD "Orta Batı" bölgesinde yazın sonunda açan vazgeçilmez bir çiçek. Yerel adı, "Karagözlü Suzan"dır.

In keeping with the color scheme, the Coreopsis tinctoria is doing a good job of seeding itself around the garden. I love plants like this; they just find themselves a comfortable niche. Still, I grab the seeds and scatter them in other places to see if they'll like it there as well. The original seeds were a gift from my friend Rabia in New Mexico, and they're everywhere now!

New Mexico eyaletinde arkadaşım Rabia'nın verdiği Corepsis da sıcak, nemli havada çok mutlu. Bu tek yıllık bitki en rahat olduğu yerleri bulup kendiliğinde çıkıyor artık, yine de tohumlarını yeni yerlere de serpiyorum.

In other non-squash areas, the old pomegranate at the end of the upper garden has set fruit for the first time since I arrived here two and a half years ago. I hear tell that its fruits are not all that good, but it's still nice to see them.

Şimdiye kadar meyvesini hiç gördüğüm nar ağacı bu yıl ilk defa meyve veriyor. Duyduğum kadarıyla çok lezzetli bir nar olmamasına rağmen varoluşuna sevindim.

Of course there have been squash happenings as well. The Seminoles started setting fruit late, but there are now at least 13 on the vines, which have nearly reached the upper street level; enough to attract the curiosity of passersby. Some of whom have come down and asked about them, and assume they're just some sort of ornamental gourd. But I've promised seed to a couple of people, so Turkey's cucurbit repertoire may soon be expanding. Here's a rather bad picture of Seminoles climbing the dead apricot tree. The fogginess isn't just because of the backlighting; it was because of the humidity; the temperature differential was enough to cause my lens to fog up in the wet-blanket humidity.

Kabaklar gelişmeye devam ediyor tabii. Seminole kabakları, meyveleri nispetten geç oluşturmaya başladı fakat şimdi en azından 13 tane oldu. Bitkiler hemen hemen sokak seviyesine ulaşıp, geçenlerin dikkatine çekmeye başladı. Birkaç kişi, hiç görmediği bir süs kabağı sanarak inip sordular. Şimdiye kadar en az iki kişiye tohum vermeye söz verdim. Türkiye'nin kabak repertuvarı genişleyecek demek ki!

The acorn squash have already started to mature; I so identify them with autumn that it feels a bit strange to be eating them in the heat of August! The heat wave has passed and though we've had no rain, the water that I give them does stay around longer. Now the acorns have begun to set fruit again, so I suppose we will have some for fall/winter as well! One of them has also thrown a very strange looking cristate stem, which opens an entire bouquet of flowers every morning. So far they all seem to be male. I decided to take the picture in the evening so the flowers wouldn't obscure the flattened stem.

Palamut kabakları şimdiden olmaya başladı. Bu kabağın tadını öylesine sonbahar ve kış aylarıyla özdeşleşmişim ki, Ağustos'un sıcaklarında onları yemek biraz tuhaf geldi. Sıcaklık geçmişken, yine meyve oluşturmaya başladılar. Bitkilerden bir tanesi botanikte "ibikli" olarak tanımlanan bir gövde yaptı, her sabah bir demet açıyor, ne yazık ki hepsi erkek. Gövdenin tuhaf şekli görünsün diye akşamda çektim fotoğrafı.

Aw, who am I kidding? I'm just too lazy to get myself down to the garden early enough in the morning. Besides, despite my earlier concerns over male flowers with skimpy pollen, the bees do seem to be doing the job, as witnessed by the trio of acorns here.

Akşamda çekmemin aslıl sebebi, sabah saatlerinde kalkıp inmek için fazla tembel olduğumdur. Ayrıca az polenli erkek çiçekleri kaygılarım bir yana, her halde bu mevsimde çok çiçek bulamayan arılar çok iyi yapıyorlar işini!

But aside from the Seminoles (which I haven't actually tried yet), the star of the show this year has been the Bungkan squash. Not only is it prolific - setting more fruit again - but it's beautiful, like a gray raku flying saucer with a stem nearly ten inches long, and so far is one of the most delicious squash I've had. The fruits weigh about four or five pounds each; the flesh is firm, deep yellow and rich in flavor. I've sauteed it with onion, sage leaves and olive oil, and used thin slices of it in a Thai red curry. I also want to try it in the yogurt soup called borani in the Hatay area as soon as I can get the recipe from my Hatay friend who left us to get married in Denmark!

Daha tatma fırsatım olmadığı Seminole'ler bir yana, bu yılın yıldızı, Bungkan kabağıdır. Sadece verimli değil (o da yine meyve oluşturmaya başladı), meyveleri çok da güzeldir, raku adlı Japon seramiğinden yapılan uzay gemilerine benzetiyorum. Koçanı da upuzun, yaklaşık 25 cm, her kabak aşağı yukarı iki - iki buçuk kilo oluyor. Hem de yediğim en lezzetli kabaklardan. Eti sert, koyu sarı renkli, yoğun lezzetli. Soğan, adaçayı yaparağı ile zeytinyağıyla kızarttım, hem de bir Tayland körisine ince dilimlerini attım. Hatay'da yapılan bir tuzlu yoğurt çorbası olan boranide de denemek istiyorum. Danımarkalıyla evlenip kaçan Hataylı arkadaşımla konuşur konuşmaz tarifini alırım!

This Year's Squash - Bu Yılın Kabakları

2010-08-04T14:27:00.011+03:00

This will be mostly a photo entry to show what my squash are up to so far.

Bu kayıt, bu yıl ektiğim değişik balkabağı cinslerinin ilerlemesini göstermek için çoğunlukla fotoğraftan ibaret olacak...

The most unusual of the squashes this year is Triamble, an Australian C. maxima variety. Appropriately, I only have three fruit set but one is quite large. This is the medium-sized one.

Bu yılki kabakların en olağanüstüsü, Triamble adlı, Avustralya menşeli "üçgen" bir C. maxima cinsidir. Sadece üç tane oluşuyor fakat bir tanesi bayağı büyük.

Acorn squash are an old favorite of mine, my mom would always half them and bake them with butter and some orange juice. I've heard "Table Queen" is much better than the supermarket types, so I'm trying it.

Amerika'da eski bir favori olan Acorn (Palamut) kabaklarını ben de çok seviyorum. Annem yarıya kesip içlerine tereyağ ve biraz porakal suyu doldurup, fırında pişiriyordu. Birçok alt cinsi var, çok sebze gibi "Table Queen" ise süpermarketlerde bulunan cinsten kat kat daha iyiymiş, o yüzden onu ektim.

It's still setting new fruits despite the heat and the fact that many of the male flowers emerging now seem to have very little pollen. You can see this autumn's crop of borage seedlings already coming along around it...hard to believe they'll turn into meter-high hulks if I let them!

Sıcklak ve şimdi çıkan erkek çiçeklerin çok az polen üretmesine karşın hâlâ yeni meyveler oluşturuyor. Etrafindaki küçük yeşil yapraklar, bırakırsam ilkbahara kadar bir metreye ulaşacağını zor inandığım hodan bitkilerine ait...

It's also set several double fruits, which developed from two flowers emerging from a common ovary.

Hem de, tek bir tohumluktan çıkan iki çiçekten oluşan birçok çift meyve de oluşuyor. Bunları süpermarkette bulmayız!

Pennsylvania Dutch Crookneck, a Butternut ancestor, is quite productive. Some of them seem to have an overly large seed cavity and thin neck, which makes me wonder about the purity of the seed. Time will tell. When taking the photos, I found one that had somehow become separated from the vine. It's still quite soft but I think it will be edible as a summer squash.

Migros gibi süpermarketlerde zaman zaman bulundurulan Butternut kabaklarının bir atası olan Pennsylavania Dutch Crookneck, çok üretken. Fakat bazılarının tohum kısmının çok büyük, "boyun"larının da nispetten küçük olması, aldığım tohumun saflığını düşündürüyor. Zaman gösterecek işte.

Fotoğrafları çekerken koçanından kopmuş bir tane buldum. Hâlâ olmamış tabii, belki yeşil kabak olarak kullanabileceğim.

The Futtsus don't seem to be overly productive this year, probably because they aren't getting as much sun as they should. They stand out from the rest with their gray dusty appearance.

Futtsu'lar bu yıl çok üretmiyor, büyük ihtimalle nispetten az güneş gördükleri için. Yine de birkaç tane oluşuyor. Gri tozlu görünüşüyle diğerlerden hemen ayırt ediliyor.

The Thai Bungkan squash is also a first this year. It's set lots of fruit but now that the weather has really warmed up (this is not news to the good people of Istanbul....), it's not setting any more.

Tayland'dan gelen Bungkan cinsini ilk kez deniyorum. Şimdiye kadar çok meyve tutmuş, hava artık iyice ısınmışken (İstanbullulara haber değil...). tutmuyor.

The semi-wild Seminole was late in setting fruit, but it finally started! Since it originates in Florida, it seems to like the heat. This one is hanging about 4 meters high; the plant has climbed up into a dead apricot tree and through the ivy covering a tall retaining wall.

Florida'dan kaynaklandığı ve dolayısıyla sıcaklıkta son derece mutlu olan yarı-yabani Seminoli kabağı, meyvelerini geç oluşturmaya başladı fakat başlamış işte. Tırmanıyor bunlar! Bu meyve, bitkinin içine girdiği sarmaşıkta 4 metre yükseklikte süs gibi asılıyor.

There were also two plants that I did not plant! I'm not sure where they came from, but they're almost certainly a maxima, and growing a large round ribbed fruits that look suspiciously like the local Adapazarı type, but the leaves aren't nearly so large. It could be Uşak; we did have seed around but it came up in a place where I wouldn't have considered planting squash! We have a squash fairy it seems!

Hem de hiç ekmediğim iki tane var! Nereden geldiğinden emin değilim fakat bir maxima cinsi hemen hemen kesin. Büyük tırtıllı meyveleri, yerel Adapazarı kabaklarına çok benziyor fakat yaprakları çok büyük değil. Uşak kabağı mı acaba? Onun tohumu vardı fakat kabak ekmeyi aklımdan bile geçirmeyeceğim bir yerde çıktılar! Bahçemizde bir kabak perisi mi var?

California Dreamin' I: Passionate about Passifloras

2010-07-14T07:38:00.020+03:00

One of the reasons for my lack of posts recently was that I was in California for a couple of weeks. Every time I go to the San Francisco Bay area I fall in love with it again. Well, at least with the gardens; I'm not sure I could deal with actually living where summer temperatures average around 65! But the mild, cool climate means an incredible plant palette on hand. Of course just as people in Seattle tend to overplant Rhododendrons and Hypericums, there are certain plants in the Bay Area that everyone and his brother plants. Some - like Arabian jasmine and Brugmansias, don't bother me; I'm always happy to see and smell them. Others, like Bird-of-Paradise and Agapanthus (aka "Gas-station lilies") do get old, though some of the deep purple Agapanthus are quite nice. As for the white iris-like Neomarica (?) that is everywhere, the jury's out. It's nice but there are so many others available as well!

This time I was particularly captivated by the passion flowers (Passiflora). In Seattle we could grow P. caerulea and P. incarnata (if you dare plant them), and perhaps in a mild year you might bet Passiflora x "Incense" to overwinter. In Berkeley...wow. On every errand I would make sure to take a different street in order to see as many yards as possible, and every outing seemed to turn up a new Passiflora.

The first one I ran across was "Blue Boquet" (above) on a fence by the sidewalk. The woman who grew it was rather at her wits' end with various problems in the area and was ripping everything up (almost in spite it seemed) and moving out of town. I begged some cuttings and she was more than happy to oblige. When I went back a couple days later, it had been hacked back to a stump. Which - like in the case of Clematis "Betty Corning" and so many other things in live, just goes to show, if you want it, don't dawdle!

Right around the corner (I was tipped off by the same lady), was an enormous, robust P. ligularis, also known in Hawaii as "lilikoi," or "banana passion fruit." It's one of many introduced plants that has become a serious invasive in that state, but in California it seems to be better behaved; the "bad boy" status being reserved for the rampant P. caerulea. I took several cuttings from this one as well, and noticed that it was setting abundant fruit. This is especially good news as many Passifloras need another clone to fruit, but this one is evidently self-fertile. I wish I had a reason to be in Berkeley again a couple months hence!

There was one large pink vine right down the street from my friend's house that I believe is a selection of P. manicata called "Coral Sea." It's quite common in the area. One thing I like about many of the tubular-flowerd Passifloras is that although they are robust (to put it mildly), they don't seem to throw up suckers everywhere like some of the others.

One day while heading over to a friends house down a street I'd walked several times, I saw a large fence covered with two different Passifloras that I'd missed before. Evidently the day I'd passed by it had unexpectedly gotten warm and all the flowers had closed and I hadn't noticed them from across the street. They were also quite beautiful. The brilliant red Passifloras are rather a mystery to me but I think it *might* be "Cordilia," a P. vitifolia cross. Elsewhere I took starts from another variety (but had no camera then) with less reflexed petals

On the same fence was this other very nice deep coral pink variety as well. Another P. manicata hybrid perhaps?

Normally I like to ask before taking a start of any plant but when th vine covers 10 square meters of fence space, I figure only a truly greedy or completely anal retentive person would object! And anything that crawls out onto the sidewalk is fair game as far as I'm concerned. If anyone knows for sure what these varieties are, do let me know.

As for propagation, Passifloras are generally pretty trouble-free. I've rooted them in a glass of water, but perlite or a mixture of perlite and sand is generally better. My way is to cut the stems between every other node, resulting in two-node lengths. They don't root at the nodes so it's not important that a node be in the rooting medium, but it is important that you have at least one node to sprout, two seems a safer bet. As Passifloras keep growing throughout the season, take a long cutting, which will give you a variety of ages. The general rule applies, try and get growth which is hardening off but not completely woody, and also avoid too-new growth which crushes easily between your fingers. Cut off any flower buds. I generally cut off all the leaves as well, as they only cause water loss if you have to hold them in a vase for a time before sticking the cuttings; and especially any damaged leaves (as when you've packed them in a bag and left them in a suitcase for 36 hours) will likely rot in the rooting chamber anyway. I generally get roots with no rooting hormone but a mild one won't hurt. For an easy homemade setup, I take a large commercial water bottle and cut it almost all around. I then ut about 4 inches of perlite in the bottom and wet it, but there should not be water pooled in the bottom. I close the top after sticking my cuttings, but leave the cap off the top so there is some air circulation (the cut edge also offers some ventilation) and then put it in a bright area but out of direct sunlight; even with the top open it could get dangerously hot if it got direct sun. The cuttings can take from 1 to several weeks to root, so be patient. You'll know when they have taken as you'll see vigorous new growth; but they may grow even before rooting as Passifloras seem have boundless energy.

If you live in an area where your plants can grow outdoors year-round, you can plant them directly into the soil, but keep in mind that they can be rampant, and if there is any P. caerulea or incarnata in the mix, they'll likely sucker as well. They're not as bad as kudzu, but a happy passiflora will gleefully cover whatever support it finds, and when that is full, it will find a new one. But they're forgiving and you can generally prune them back pretty severely without serious consequence.

Next - the other plants besides Passifloras!

Pumpkin or Squash? (Or Marrow? Or Courgette? or Zucchini?) Cucurbitacious Linguistics!

2010-07-12T09:32:00.006+03:00

In web sites and other writing I constantly come across questions about whether something is a "squash or a pumpkin," or references to "true pumpkins" but with little useful information to back up the lingo. So I thought I'd take a moment to clear up some of the confusion about the many different words we use to refer to all these plants.

So what's the difference between a squash and a pumpkin? Botanically, absolutely none. Huh?

There are four species of the genus Cucurbita that we commonly refer to as pumpkins and squash (Brits, we'll get to you in a moment): C. pepo, C. maxima, C. moschata and C. argyrosperma. The first two are incredibly diverse in shape, color and texture while the third tends to have bottle-shaped fruits, usually striped, with a slightly bulbous top and swollen lower portion. Think of a grossly overweight bowling pin.

The confusion comes from the fact that all these plants come from the New World, and so English originally had no word for them. The American Indians on the other hand were very familiar with them and had as many words for them as they did languages. The first Native Americans that the early English settlers came into contact with were Algonquins, who called them askutasquash. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, means "green things that may be eaten raw." The last part, =asquash, is the "edibles" part of the word, and the English shortened it to "squash." Which I suppose to an Algonquian speaker would sound like"dibles."

To the likely dismay of the Algonquins, the English stayed in the New World, and the Algonquian word fragment stuck, so Americans use the word "squash." However, the squash did not stay in the New World; it traveled back to the Old World, and to England among other places. And not having many Algonquins around to help them out, the inhabitants of Merrie Olde England had to find another word. So they likened the strange new food to something they did know, the "pumpion," which was an old word for a melon that they got from the French, who called them pompon. It eventually morphed (probably with or influenced by the diminutive/endearing ending -kin) into "pumpkin." And as more English came to America, now familiar with at least one variety of squash, they added their own new word to the mix. Most likely they had a round, orange variety, because in the US, the only thing that distinguishes what is called a pumpkin is a basically round shape, usually with vertical grooves, and an orange color. Never mind that there are white and green ones around too. These orange round(ish) pumpkins can be either C. pepo (mostly) or C. maxima (especially the giant pumpkins). For the rest of them, which were probably still less familiar to the newly arriving English, the term "squash" remained in use. This is not the case in England today, where "pumpkin" refers to a much broader range.

So what about "winter squash" and "summer squash?" Surely there must be some botanical distinction there?

Only sort of. C. pepo is a remarkably diverse species. Pretty much everything we call "summer squash," the generic term for squash that are picked while immature and includes what we call zucchini (Do we want to go there? We will.), yellow crookneck, etc., are varieties of C. pepo. But so are the orange pumpkins. And so are the vast majority of the decorative gourds, which are nothing more than pretty - but tasteless or bitter - varieties C. pepo. (The bottle/dipper gourds are of another genus altogether, Lageneria, and are old-world plants. Some of their fruits are also eaten immature; when mature they are incredibly bitter.)

Basically, the plants we call "winter squash" are the ones, regardless of species, which we allow to ripen and harden off, and which are more or less storable. Though out of the three species, C. pepo is the least storable, which is why you have to eat acorns and delicatas early, while you can keep a butternut or a hubbard around for months or even a year or more. The "summer squash" then, are simply varieties that we eat during the summer, while they're still immature. Some squash varieties can be eaten both ways, by the way.

When the members of the genus Cucurbita traveled to Europe, they didn't all go the same way. Some came directly to England, while others went through France. The French used the word courge for squash, and the immature ones were referred to as courgettes, which is what the English call them today. Only they also call them - or at least the variety C. pepo fastigata - "vegetable marrows." Which is just silly, but there is probably a perfectly logical explanation for it. Does anybody know?

Meanwhile, a similar variety that was now being grown (or had developed) in Italy returned to America with Italian immigrants. They called the squashes zucca (except for some which they called cucuzzi but just never mind) and their word for the immature ones was zucchini. These are the courgettes of England. The marrows are not as well known in the US, but they should be - though the English tend to grow them larger, they are at their best when about 8 inches long and light green, and are more flavorful than zucchini.

So in the end, the only clear distinction between all these varieties is their actual species. So now that I've confused you completely, here's a selection of some of the better known varieties of squash/courgette/pumpkin/marrow/zucchini according to species:

C. pepo
Most of these tend to have some fiber when mature, so more are eaten immature.

Most jack-o-lantern pumpkins
Acorn squash
Delicata squash
Most ornamental gourds
Zucchini
Pattypan
Spaghetti squash

C. maxima
Some of the best winter squash, many with smooth, dry flesh and little or no fiber. They tend to make better pumpkin pie than most of the ones we call "pumpkins;" commercial pumpkin pie filling is actually made from Gray Hubbard.

Hubbard squash
Giant pumpkins
Buttercup squash
Pink banana squash
Gray banana squash
Jarrahdale squash
Kabocha squash
Winter keeper squash
Cinderella

C. moschata
This includes some eminently edible squashes as well as several watery, stringy varieties.

Butternut squash
Futtsu squash
Long Island Cheese pumpkin
Winter crookneck, Pennsylvania Dutch crookneck
Seminole pumpkin

C. argyrosperma
These are not very popular in the US due to their stringy texture but some are not so bad if you run the cooked flesh through a food mill.

Cushaws

Bakarsan Bağ Olur, Bakmazsan....

2010-07-12T07:21:00.011+03:00

...Dağ Olur! So goes the Turkish saying about gardens: "If you look after it, it becomes a garden, if you don't look after it, it becomes a 'mountain.'"

I tested the theory to its (almost) fullest this June, when I went to the US for almost four weeks. During my time away, it rained almost constantly in Istanbul, and I returned to find my garden spectacularly overgrown. Here's the sight that greeted me in the morning:

Fortunately it was not overgrown to the point where the things I wanted to grow were overwhelmed, with the possible exception of several daylily seedlings. This was bad, because in three-plus weeks, just about every grass seed that had ever been deposited in my garden took advantage of the cozy conditions and grew up to two feet tall. Still I managed to locate some of them, and i'm hoping that the ones that got ripped in the ensuing mercy-weeding only lost some leaves and will send up more.

Of course there were good things as well. The squash vines are obviously doing quite nicely, and happier now that I've pulled out the wild amaranth that they had scrambled over rather than rooting into the ground. The amaranth is one of my favorite wild greens anyway, so there will be plenty of "vlitopita" (amaranth börek) over the next couple weeks. The green one in the front is our local wild variety (there are actually two or three species); the tall red one farther back is "Hopi Red Dye," which seeds itself happily every year. A little too happily to be honest, but it's easy to pull out and provides a beautiful red accent in the flower garden.

The Lobelia cardinalis I put into the wet swampy zone in early spring is coming into beautiful bloom, and will probably continue to as long as I keep the mint at bay. Notice the healthy growth of grass, nightshade, amaranth and pigweed. I guess that will come out today...

And speaking of things red, the Korean runner beans sent to me by my gardening friend Jim Wright near Seattle, WA are growing spectacularly! They have extremely large beans, and it turns out that the "gigantes" (giant beans) popular in Greece and known as "Bombay fasulyesi" in Turkey are a white variety of the same species. I planted mine on a "teepee" a foot or two taller than myself, and I see now that it could have been much taller.

In the upper garden, the only thing worth mentioning (well...besides the 13-foot pokeweed) is the Seminole squash experiment. "Seminole" is reportedly a semi-wild variety of C. moschata which has a penchant for climbing; but accounts differ as to its actual willingness to climb. I instructed my housemate to guide it up the ropes I'd tied into the dead apricot tree, and so far it seems perfectly willing to grow skyward as long as it finds something to hold onto. The vines haven't been tied; I just provided the lines to offer them an anchor so that they can reach the branches above. If they decide to drape downward when they reach the ends of the branches, that will be fun too. Like annual English ivy on steroids.

To me, the C. moschata squashes with their enormous white-streaked leaves are beautiful plants as well, and if you have the room they offer a tropical air, especially in a smaller garden. There are already flowers on the way, which will be all the more beautiful. And not that I'd ever count chickens before they're hatched or anything (really now, can one be a gardener without a bit of pre-hatch counting?), but I can't wait to see the large-softball-sized fruits hanging down from among the branches.

***
Blogumun Türkçesini ihmal ettiğim için özür dilerim! Gerçekten son aylarda öyle yoğundum ki Türkçe tarafını bırakın, İngilizcesini bile ihmal ediyordum. Ve sabriniz için teşekkür ediyorum.

Üç küsur hafta Amerika'da geçirdikten sonra yağmurlu havalarda resmen fışkırmış olan bahçeme döndüm. Ve gerçekten dağ olmuş...sanki son asır boyunca topraklarında bekleyen her çim tohumu, hem yağmurlu hava hem de benim yokluğumdan faydalanıp, yarım metreye kadar büyümüş. Diğer bitkiler de büyüdüğü için büyük sorun değldi, kolay yolunur zaten, fakat yeni ektiğim ve herşeyden çok çime benzeyen minik zambak (Hemerocallis) bitkileri kesinlikle mağdur kalmışlar. Yine de birçoğunu bulabildim. Bu bahçede "en uygun olanın yaşaması" kanunu geçer zaten!

Kabak bitkileri de çok güzel büyümüştü, hele hele üstüne tırmandıkları ve dolayısıyla toprağa köklerini salmalarını engellemiş olan sirkemotlarını söktükten sonra daha da mutlu görünüyorlar. Sirkemotunu çok seviyorum, gelecek günlerde her halde bol bol gözleme ve börek yiyeceğiz!

Yabani sirkemotu ön tarafta; arkadaki kırmızı bitkiler ise Hopi Kızılderililerin törensel yemeklerini kırmızıya boyalamak için kullandıkları "Hopi Red Dye" (Kırmızı Boya) cinsi. Her tarafta (hatta fazlasıyla bile) kendiliğinden çıkıyor. Fakat çok kolay yolunur, ve koyu kırmızı yapraklar ve çiçekleriyle, çiçek bahçesine çok güzel renk veriyor.

Amerika'nın güney eyaletlerinin sulak yerlerinde yaygın olan ve ilbaharda ektiğim Lobelia cardinalis güzel açmaya başlamış. Bahçenin sulak bölgesindeki tek varlık olmaya yüz tutan naneyi biraz uzaklaştırabildikçe öyle devam eder her halde. Amerika'da böyle kırmızı renkli ama çoğu zaman kokusuz çiçekleri genelde arıkuşları tozlaştırıyor. Avrupa ve Asya'da bu kuşlar yok, arılar başarıyabilecek mi acaba?

Seattle kentinin yakınında yaşayan arkadaşım Jim Wright'in gönderdiği dev Kore ateş fasulyeleri de güzel fışkırmış. Jim beyin Kore kökenli eşi ilk tohumlarını Koreli bir çiftçiden almış, yıllardır bahçelerinde yetiştiriyorlar. Aslında bildiğimiz Bombay fasulyesinin aynı türünün bir beyaz cinsidır. Kore'de çerez olarak tüketiliyormuş. Bunları iki metrelik bir "çadır iskeleti"nin etrafına ektim; aslında üç metrelik bir tane fazla olmayacakmış!

Üst bahçeden bahsetmeye değer birşey adeta yok, Seminole kabağı deneyinden hariç. Florida eyaletinde yaşayan bir Kızılderili kabilesinin adını taşıyan Seminole balkabağı, yarı yabani bir cinstir. Bu kabak birkaç ilginç özlliğe sahiptir: 1) Meyveler, i taş gibi sert olup, sadece balta ile açılabiliyormuş, 2) tropikal bölgelerde yıllarca yaşıyormuş; bir bitki bir dönümlük toprak kaplayabiliyor, ve 3) seve seve tırmanıyormuş! Hatta günümüzde Florida denen bölgesine giren ilk Avrupalı gezginler, Seminole'lerin bu kabak cinsini, kabuğunu sıyırarak kuruttukları ağaçların etrafına ekerek yetiştirdiklerini, meyvelerin ise ağaçlardan süs gibi nehirlerin üzerinde astıklarını yazmışlar. Cinsi yetiştiren kişilerin anlattıkları değişiyor; bazılarına göre tırmanıyormuş, diğerler ise biraz tırmandığı fakat ilk fırsatta yine yere indiğini diyorlar. Belki cinsine göre değişebilir, şimdiye kadar benimkiler, filizleri tutunacak bir destek bulabilince seve seve tırmanıyormuş.

Dereye gelmeden paçaları sıvama derler de, bahçe ile uraşmak bizi biraz öyle yapmaya zorluyor bence. Dolayısıyla (nazar değmesin) gülleye benzeyen meyvelerini kurumuş kayısı ağacımızdan asılmalarını göremeyi dört gözle bekliyorum! Eğer dalların sonuna kadar uzanıp aşağıya asılmaya başlarsa yine razı olacağım. Devasa beyaz çizgili yapraklarıyla C. moschata cinsleri zaten son derece güzel bitkiler oluyor, özellikle öyle küçük bir bahçeye tam tropikal bir hava katıyorlar. Tam tropikal bir bitkidir zaten. Yetiştirdiğimiz üç kabak türünden en büyük çiçekleri bu tür açıyor ayrıca.

The June Peak!

2010-06-01T12:50:00.010+03:00

Unless you really have money to burn, a new garden takes time to reach any kind of maturity. Even if you do have money to buy large-size pots of perennials, or have moved them from somewhere else, they need their time to grow into each other, fill in the gaps and make an expanse of soil with plants in it look like an expanse of plants! Until they do, fast growing annuals can provide an effective if temporary foil. One of my favorites is Nigella damascaena, or "Love in a Mist." It's a close relative of the nigella that provides the pungent seed that's so common on buns and breads here that one friend said "It's really the national aroma of Turkey." N. damascaena seeds are also fragrant, but in a very different way - to me they smell just like Juicy-Fruit gum.

Of course one of the hallmarks of a truly "mature" (not to mention "well planned") garden is that it is satisfying year-round, or at least throughout the season you want to be in it. Still, after the spring flush, things gradually rev up for the next big show, which I call the "June Peak;" a time when well over half the things in the garden are in full bloom. One of the things I am trying to get better at is providing for the time following that peak bloom.

In that sense, I couldn't say my garden is "mature" by any means, but in this, it's third spring, it does seem to be reaching a sort of adolescence. Ground covers have covered, perennials have gained height and bulk, as well as roots deep enough to ensure that I don't have to brood over them with a garden hose. So let's recap shall we?

Here's what I started out with in March 2008. An expanse of borage, lamium and sparse weedy grass, as well as a shed that put Jed Clampett's place in Bugtussle to shame. Oh - and enless whips of wisteria covering everything.

And then the day after moving day, my entire old garden removed from the plastic garbage bags and quickly planted into the nominally-prepared soil.

For the same period in 2008 I don't have much to show. Some things were starting to fill in, but well, there's a good reason most of my pictures from that year are closeups! The garden view in this picture is obviously incidental. That year did see the removal of the grotesque rotting shack.

And here it is, June 1, 2010, it's really starting to feel like a garden. Not only have perennials filled out, but annuals have seeded themselves enough to make nice patches of temporary color and greenery that will die down as the perennials fill out. Of course it means I'll have to let fewer of them mature next year, but it's always a matter of maintaining a balance. Since I now have a sitting area at the end of the garden and the ancient apricot tree finally completed its death throes, I decided to use the big chunks of marble (actually the remains of the house's old-style Turkish toilet) to make a large raised planter, where I've planted Seminole squash that I hope I can persuade to climb up into the limbs of the tree. The red poppies in the foreground, by the way, are P. rhoeas but they're the form from the Aegean region, collected by a friend from Manisa. Whereas the northern form of P. rhoeas is scarlet-to-almost-orange, these are truly blood-red.

I also had some first time blooms this spring. Back in 2006 a friend of mine brought me five tall bearded iris rhizomes from Seattle. It was way past the optimum time (it was spring and they were nearly dessicated), so the first year was a matter of trying to revive them. The next year animals - probably martens - decided that digging up iris rhizomes was the thing to do. In 2008 they were getting better established, and then I had to move. In the spring. Since then they've been putting on some size, and this year one of them finally bloomed spectacularly, with enormous blooms (well, enormous if all you have around you is the old I. germanica!) and a fragrance that hit me 6 feet away.

Another plant that really doesn't like root disturbance is oriental poppies. This one came from seed I scattered in my old garden; it was putting on size nicely and then I dug it up and broght it here. At first I thought it was a goner but it pulled through. Last year it started producing a bud but then changed its mind and aborted it. This year, it sent up one husky flower, and then went on to produce six more! By the way, for those of you who haven't noticed, Papaver orientale smells like pumpkin!

Speaking of poppies, this is the first year California poppies have really performed well for me. The soil in the last garden supported nice growth through the spring but was so sandy that once the weather warmed, even they couldn't hold up. Here they're putting on a nice show in an area with slightly poorer soil. This is actually good for some things; if the soil is too rich they grow so exuberantly that they all end up just falling over. So this section of the garden is overwhelmingly Mediterranean in character.

A plant I'm growing for the first time this year is Lobelia laxiflora, a gift from an old gardening friend in Seattle when I visited in October/November of last year. It was the perfect time to transplant. L. laxiflora is not what we typically think of as Lobelia-like, though neither is the gynormous L. tupa which I want to try next. But then lots of common plants in the nursery trade have really unusual and less commonly grown cousins.

Lots of them also have really ugly and not-worth-growing cousins but if you're really passionate about, say, Oenothera, it's fun to know that there's a species two inches high that bears a few pale yellow flowers less than a centimeter across! Still I won't be ripping out everything for the sake of growing them...

A Beautiful Verbascum

2010-04-21T23:21:00.005+03:00

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have sort of a "thing" about Verbascums, more commonly known as mulleins. Verbascum thapsus, introduced from Europe and now common throughout the United States, fascinated me as a kid with its densely furry rosettes. I didn't really care much about the flowers; the single yellow spike seemed almost a disappointment after the exotic prelude. It felt like it should do so much more!

Turkey is the center of distribution of the genus Verbascum, with some 75 or more species. Most, but not all, are furry, some densely so. Many do leave V. thapsus trailing in the dust when it comes to flowers, with as many as 100 spikes in dense candelabras. Their leaves are also extremely varied, with an indumentum ranging from thin and brown to dense, deep and white, some dull, some shimmering. Some have neat rosetts, others have contorted leaves that form an almost ball-like plant. The leaf margins of some are smooth, others are deeply convoluted, and others, like the one above, are delicately and exquisitely fluted. And it seems that wherever I travel in Turkey, I come upon a new one that I've never seen before. What I didn't expect was to find a new and beautiful one right in my own back yard! Well, at least in Istanbul's back yard; more specifically, on Kınalıada, the first of the Prince's islands off Istanbul's Asian coast.

I went with two friends the day before Easter, and took a hike around the back side of the island, taking pictures of wild flowers coming into bloom and collecting wild greens. And there, down near the sea, was a small patch of one of the most beautiful mulleins I think I've ever seen. Of course it's the one at the top of the article.

One extremely frustrating thing is finding a beautiful plant in some out of the way place that you'll probably never get back to and realizing that there won't be any seeds available until several months hence. But a very nice feature of mulleins is that their seed stalks tend to persist from the previous year, and very often there is still some seed to be found. I was lucky this time as well. There wasn't a lot of seed, but really, how many of a plant like this do you need?

If anyone knows the species of this particular plant, I'd love to know!

My Iris Fantasy

2010-04-21T23:02:00.005+03:00

To me, iris are such beautiful plants that you hardly have to write anything about them. They speak for themselves. They also hold a special place in my heart because my mother had a long row of them in her garden back in Iowa where I grew up. Each spring as they bloomed, I would go down the row smelling each one, and marveling at the wonderful scents. At their best, the fragrances are truly delicious, almost hinting at edibility. Not so much at the bronze and yellow ones, which often smell more like something that came out of a male cat, but even those are interesting.

Iris aren't very popular in Istanbul, because they're associated mostly with graveyards, which explode with iris every spring. So the only tall bearded you see here is generally the very early purple I. germanica. Luckily for me, the fact that purple iris grow in graveyards doesn't count against iris, it just makes the graveyards that much more beautiful! This is one of the blooms on a plant that pops a good week and half before any of the rest. Other than that, it's almost identical with them.

In my mother's garden, there was a particular sky-blue one that sticks in my mind. I have no idea what the name of the variety was. But the blue was so pure and clear that sometimes I wonder if the reason I've been unable to find anything like it, is that I've idealized it in my mind and nothing will ever measure up. And I had a fantasy when it came to that iris. I had it with most of them, but it was especially the clear blue one that brought it up. It was not enough to look at the iris, or smell it; I wanted to be inside the iris. Maybe it was the fact that the upright, incurving standards of bearded iris suggest a room by their very shape. I wonder if I'm the only one who thought of it. But who wouldn't want to walk inside a cave of their favorite color, backlit by the sun, and surrounded by the intoxicating scent of iris?

I used to think that at least the bees could enjoy it. Later I learned that the inside of the "room" formed by iris petals are of absolutely no interest to a bee at all; they enter the little "ramp" over the yellow beard, three on each flower. So I needn't envy them, my fantasy remains mine.

Iris Catchup!

2010-04-21T22:35:00.007+03:00

No, this post will not contain any suggestions for making a condiment out of spent iris flowers. This has been a pretty busy time for me, so although I've been out snapping pictures of the spring rush, getting them posted has been another thing altogether. So now it's catch-up time! There's a lot going on out there now, but I'll start with the iris.

In cas you were wondering what the nondescript white bud from the "Messin with my Mind" post turned into, I think you'll agree it was well worth the wait! A beautiful unidentified (by me) very substantial white Pacific Coast Iris.

Here's a top view.

It's already opened its last bloom for this year.

While we're on the subject of Pacific Coast Iris, here's the third one that bloomed for me this year. It's another I. douglasiana, a nice rich purple. I had to play with the colors a bit on photoshop because many digital cameras turn deep purples into blues. This is the closest I could get to the original hue.

In addition to the PCIs, I also had my first bloom of Iris graminea, a truly unusual and beautiful small clumping iris with blossoms that smell somewhat like plums. The only negative point is that the blooms tend to open down in among the leaves, but it's such an interesting shape and lovely collection of shades that I'm perfectly happy to overlook its little flaw.

There's more to come, some of my tall bearded iris look ready to bloom for the first time this year. Other plants will come in "Catchup II," to be posted when I can get round to it!

Spring Makeover!

2010-04-21T21:50:00.005+03:00

I'm a plant freak, so my attention (and money) tends to go toward plants and whatever I need to keep them thriving. But the hardscape of a garden is important too, especially what's underfoot. Back in Iowa, m moms gardens were mostly borders along the house and the corner of the yard, so there were no paths per se. When I started making my own gardens, they were not part of the yard, they werethe yard, and so the problem of how to get through them emerged.

I do love brick paving. In Seattle I was lucky to find a huge pile of bricks from a torn down wall, and had enough to pave the path down to a nice grassy circle below. In my last garden, in Kocamustafapaşa, the soil was full of bricks as well, so I got at least enough to pave a circle. But there were no free bricks to be had in my present garden. I got the paths laid out, but they were paved with dirt. And of course, dirt is...dirty! And it grows weeds rather quickly. At the left, you can see the layout early on, dirt paths and all.

So pretty early on, I opted for my second favorite option: gravel paths. Only I couldn't find the gravel I wanted. I like a light gray almost white gravel; I think it shows off the plants the best. Unfortunately it just isn't to be had here. I found some light reddish-brown gravel that might have harmonized with the walls, but it just didn't feel right. What bothered me about it was the color - a somewhat odd bluish-gray. Dark. Believe me, I went all over looking for alternatives, but everywhere, it was the same.

Then I found a pile that looked a little better; and it turned out it was the same stuff, but it was dry and had sat out in the weather for a while. So finally, I just bit the bullet and had it brought in. Because my uppermost garden is down three flights of steps, I couldn't have it dumped; it had to be bagged. I started with thirty, but the bags werent' overly full, so I ended up getting another ten. And here is the result!

To be honest, I still would have liked to find something just a bit lighter; hopefully it will lighten up a little. But the garden really does feel like a completely different place now! You can see the rather striking difference in color between the moist gravel and the pieces that have dried in the foreground.

Over most of the path, I used the plastic mesh bags the gravel came in underneath the gravel in order to make it a bit harder for weed roots to get into the soil. Overall, "weed barriers" are hooey, especially over actual planted area. And they don't really keep weeds from growing. But in my last garden I did notice the same bags under the patio did give me a bit of a margin, and they were easier to pull.

I've also left one section unlined. Why? Gravel is actually provides an excellent environment for starting some seeds, because it holds in some moisture. I remember back in Iowa, our best evenin primroses grew out of the layer of rocks on our patio, and the Verbascum olympicum I saw on Uludağ was also often growing in gravelly areas. So it will be a bit of an experiment. I don't think I'll regret it!

Messin' With my Mind

2010-04-05T12:35:00.021+03:00

I can get very nostalgic about plants. A particular plant or flower can have the same effect on me as a smell does, whisking me back to a distant (or not so distant) place or time. When I was about 35 years old, I went to eastern Washington, and noticed that there was sagebrush growing there. I got out of the car, plucked off a sprig, and as soon as the smell hit my brain I was transported to the age of 9, on a dusty roadside in a somewhat bleak landscape in Montana.

In Greece and Turkey, blood red poppies are everywhere in the spring. And years after I'd returned from Greece and the first Greek poppy bloomed in my Seattle garden, it was almost as if the garden disappeared and I was alone on the flank of Mt. Lycabettus in Athens, marvelling that a plant could poduce something so purely red.

Some plants can really mess with your mind though.

On my trip back to the US last Oceober, I brought several Pacific Coast Iris varieties. It's an amazing group that doesn't thrive (or even survive) everywhere. But since Istanbul winters are almost indistinguishable from those of coastal N. California or Oregon, and the season was right, I thought I'd give it a go. Bare-rooting plants is always stressful, but if you're going to do it to a Pacific Coast Iris you better do it at theright time of the year.

So they seemed to settle in quite well, and several weeks ago were obviously sending up flower buds. Last week the first bud started to open, showing a tantalizing line of purple. ("But that's not purple on that bud in the photo, and it's not a line!" you must be thinking. True, on both counts. Don't be so literal-minded!)

Anyway, when you see that on a tall bearded iris, you know you'll have a flower very soon. It's as if the ecological knowledge born of their evolution in lands filled with hungry slugs and snails is telling them, "better get on with it!"

Now the Pacific Northwest is famous for slugs too, giant ones, and to read some garden writers from there you'd think that Seattle and its surroundings would be little more than a barren field of slimy green stubs. But our natives are actually pretty harmless. It's the imported varieties that cause all the damage. Emmet Watson would agree if he were among us today.

So every morning I would grab my camera and head down into the garden, brimming with the expectation of finding either the first bloom of a PCI in Istanbul, or a snail-eaten stub. And every day, I found neither: just a slight bit more purple edge had shown itself. It was only by the day before yesterday that the entire bud had emerged, ready to burst into bloom.

Yesterday morning, once again, I stumbled out of bed and down to the garden, camera in hand. And there it stood, tall, proud, stately... and still defiantly closed. And it sat that way all day. If it weren't for slug bait*, it would have suffered the same fate as the Siberian squills (or green and blue stumps thereof) that surrounded it. It was something like holding a lollipop in front of a sugar-starved 4-year-old and asking him to please not lick it. Who could blame a snail?

It's taxing on the psyche. I'm confident that if I were a Hosta grower here, by now I'd be full-on, certifiably, bat-shit crazy.

Well, this morning it finally did pop. And predictably, since I haven't had a Pacific Coast iris blooming in my garden for ten years now, it was one of those time-tunnel experiences. Against the very real sound of the chickadees and the familiar cool breeze on my face offset by warmth of the sun on my back, I could almost feel the gentle green embrace of my old garden, and the sweet resinous aroma of budding poplars that fills Seattle every spring.

Of course summer will be the real test of these beauties; Istanbul gets hot. I'm hoping the cooling effect of the nearby Bosphorus will help them pull through; back in Kocamustafapaşa with its more Mediterranean microclimate, they would almost surely be toast by July. Maybe mine will be. That's okay, I have other nostalgia plants on the way...Geranium x magnificum, night-scented stocks, Korean chysanthemums...

So I suppose I've almost come full circle. Iowa to Illinois, where I grew my mom's evening primroses as my tie to home, Illinois to Greece where I grew...well, almost nothing...Greece to Seattle and Greek poppies tied me back to the fleeting green of a Greek hillside; and now Seattle to Istanbul, with Pacific iris. Though with all due respect to the folks in Helena, I'm kind of hoping the next step will not be me, trying to garden on a dusty hot roadside in Montana!

_________________________________________

* "Oh dear, slug bait?!" I can hear the more ecologically minded of my readers clucking. Tsk tsk! But I challenge any of you to resist after you've picked and smashed hundreds upon hundreds and still come out to find your newly-emerged beans and peas, your clematis, all your bulbs, your iris, your...just about everything, mowed to the ground. In fact I challeng you to try and raise anything here without it! I would smash them in the hundreds and more just materialize. We've got an acre or two here after all. "Get a goose!" they say. I can hear the neighbors now as the goose begins honking. And I can see me as it goes through the garden, eating a beakful of rarities for every snail it downs! "Get rid of their hiding places!" If that means pulling up all the wild flowers, all the borage, white comfrey, arum, smyrnium et al. that grow here, and tearing down all our rock walls, I suppose that would be an option.

Honestly I'd rather not use it. We don't have the harmless-to-wildlife brand here. Fortunately there is a tiny granular one of a bizarre color and not much smell; I've never seen any bird or animal (outside snails) show the least interest in it. But snails - five or six species, all of them voracious - are simply part of the landscape here. Between slug bait and a couple of gypsies from Adapazarı, they are kept moderately in check.

New This Year from Show-Me Nurseries!

2010-03-28T17:41:00.019+03:00

Note: I know I've already done a piece on garden catalogs but there is one very special catalog that always shows up around this time each year, and I couldn't resist including some of the highlights here. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

For a gardener, one of the most exciting times of the year is when the first garden catalogues start showing up in the mail. Everybody has their old favorites, standbys they order every year without fail; it might be a special tomato your mother grew or a poppy that is now inextricably associated with a place or a time dear to your heart.

But the we plant freaks also look forward to the new and unusual, and when it comes to the unusual, no mail-order catalog tops Show-Me Nurseries. Aptly named for the skeptical nature of native Missourans, you'll have to see their collection to believe it!

New this spring from
SHOW-ME NURSERIES
P.O. Box 12345
Homily, MO 01011

HARDY MANGO - "Nanook"
This unexpected genetic break from the common mango strains produced a tree that can be grown as far north as zone 4 with no visible damage. Evergreen, this tree stays lush and beautiful to 5F, showing slight cold damage at -10 and below. Fruit ripens in February, and is comparable to the best tropical cultivars, though tends to be tough at temperatures below 20 degrees.

"Brrrrrrr!"

MANGO "Nanook" - 2' trees, $30.00

BLUE RASPBERRY (Rubus dubia)
Ever long to grow the same blue raspberry that supplies the flavor for cotton candy, popsicles, and blue Jell-o? This was a gardener's impossible dream until recently, as this plant grew only in the volcanic soils in wind-swept Tierra del Fuego, and was gathered from the mat-forming plants by the local Indians. Now an upright less finicky form is available, though it will not flourish in areas with hot summers.

Ooooo! It's Bluuue!

BLUE RASPBERRY (Rubus dubia) - 5 canes for $40.00. Supply limited.

*Show-Me Exclusive* POPCORN ON THE COB!
We have long wanted to offer this unusual variety of popcorn but could not obtain stock until this year. "Early Wonder" popcorn is the only variety of popcorn known that actually pops on the plant. This corn grows normally until the ears mature, and then, when the weather gets hot, *watch out!!* The first day over 90 degrees will cause the kernels to pop right in the husk. You have to add
the salt and butter though. Great conversation piece.

Hey! Is that popcorn I smell?

Popcorn "EARLY WONDER" - $5.00 per packet. Shipped in cold storage.

"HOLY TLAQUEPAQUE" Hot Pepper (Capsicum horridulum)
This is positively the hottest pepper we have ever seen or heard of. Thin green peppers cause severe blistering with mere skin contact, and eating just one can render the most seasoned pepper-eaters unable to speak or even swallow for several days, let alone pronounce their name to emergency room physicians. This is not an ornamental pepper - growth tends to be rangy and tall, with sparse pale leaves. To tell the truth, we couldn't say what you would do with this pepper. But they sure are hot.

Yeeeee-HAAA!

PEPPER "HOLY TLAQUEPAQUE" - .50 per packet.

ANT TREE - Myrmecodia
An unusual plant with a swollen, stubby trunk from which the flowers and fruit grow directly. Your friends will want to bend down and take a closer look, but imagine their surprise when they find themselves covered with vicious stinging ants! Great conversation starter. The tree is not difficult to grow or propragate, but we must ask a higher price because the queen ants are so difficult to smuggle past the agricultural agents at the border.

Come closerrr!

ANT TREE - $70.00 EA. (Ant cultures shipped separately)

PERUVIAN WONDER BEAN
Another scientific breakthrough, this bean is a laboratory cross between a fava bean and a garbanzo. Both delicious and heavy bearing, this amazing bean has another hidden quality – hidden that is, until you eat them: They produce enough gas to cook the next pot of beans. It requires a bit of timing to get it just right, and you won’t want to eat these if you’ve got a date that night, but they might just be a partial solution to the energy crisis. Have dinner, then hook up the special collection tank when you go to bed (please send personal measurements for the proper fit) and at the very least you’ll be able to make your breakfast with no extra tax on the environment.

Not for the faint hearted.

PERUVIAN WONDER BEAN – 1 packet (30 seeds) - $12.00

New Plant Collection Offers:

Barrier Garden

This is a collection of all the most beautiful and unusual plants with stinging or irritating hairs, some possibly fatal. Includes 5 varieties of nettle, including the famous "creeping nettle" of Venezuela, which spreads quickly by underground runners, Devil's Club from the Pacific Northwest, a beautiful shrub-small tree covered with irritating spines, several species of Loasa, and of course, the famous Australian Stinging Tree, a brush of which can make a grown man writhe in pain for several months. Plant this collection instead of an electric fence to keep plant thieves away from your prized items. Victims are a good source of extra nitrogen too!

I'm fertilizing my garden!

BARRIER GARDEN - $30.00

New Roses collection:

The biggest and gaudiest of the new hybrid tea roses, many with no irritating fragrance to mask your own perfume, natural scent, or barbecue smoke. Some of these varieties combine up to five colors in one bloom. A few examples:

"LIBERACE" - This old rather forgotten variety throws up candelabra-like spikes of large shining blooms of green, red, and hot pink, with crystalline sparkling spots.

"ROSEANNE" - A white and red striped *big* fully double rose which does have a slight scent of old beer.

"SCREAMING QUEEN" - Lavender and magenta of course, with red flecks and lots of other colors too. Developed from a seedling of "Liberace," this rose has an interesting scent, somewhere between "Obsession" and "Aramis."

“JANET JACKSON” – Selected from a large lot of seedlings that showed promise but began to exhibit breaks as they matured, this trouble-free double rose that maintained its original color will just keep on performing in your garden!

"MADONNA" - Tall thin plants with black shiny leather-like blooms. Oddly pointed pistils protrude far beyond the rest of the floral parts. Will hybridize with anything.

“SARAH PALIN” – It’s been years since we’ve offered anything new so we decided to go ahead and introduce this one, even though it’s not quite stabilized. Pretty if in an unimaginative sort of way; it will go well with your plaster moose and other garden ornaments. Blooms tend to shatter when the weather gets hot.

For the Perennial Border:

Arabian Night Flower – Euphorbia flor-achrista
A rarity from the desert near Jeddah, this plant’s bloom is the stuff of legends. Don’t be mislead by the name – it doesn’t bloom every night, just one the 1001st night. The flower emerges on a slender delicate stem, and when its filmy green half-inch petals open the garden is flooded with the heady scent of camel breath. Gazing upon this flower in bloom is said to ensure a sensible arranged marriage to a heterosexual husband.
ARABIAN NIGHT FLOWER - $50.00

Bishkek Cheeseberry – Ahmedovskia pordoides
You have visual beauty and scent in your garden; now you can also add sound with this attractive groundcover from the mountain meadows of Kyrgyzstan, the “whoopee cushion of the plant world.” Technically not a berry but rather an inflated silique, the seedpods that follow the attractive clusters of pink flowers are full of (unfortunately scentless) gas that bursts forth with exuberant “raspberries” when ripe, propelling the seeds to a distance of up to three meters. The plant is also receiving much attention from the medical community due to a compound found in its leaves which show a very promising ability to change the color of dandruff.
BISHKEK CHEESEBERRY - $15.00

Mousetrap Orchid – Mysodolos cyanarchidia Another oddity from Central Asia, this high-country orchid has a strategy similar to the famous bee orchids of the Mediterranean. Opening at the peak of Tadjikistani field mouse mating season, the flowers have a shape and scent that cause the hormone-addled male mice to mistake them for a female Tadjikistani field mouse. The little fellow mounts the flower but his genitalia trigger an amazingly adapted clamp at the end of the column to close tightly around his scrotum. The hapless mouse hangs there until the female flowers open in the morning, at which point the clamp releases its grip but not without attaching a pair of pollen sacks to his foreskin. Now desperate for release, the mouse immediately forgets the pain of the night before and, full of hope, has frantic, passionate sex with the female flower, which dumps him as soon as he has performed his function. When your friends see this plant, bedecked at dusk with ten or more writhing male mice, your garden will be the talk of the neighborhood!
MOUSETRAP ORCHID - $30.00

To Order

We have no formal order form. Write your order on the back of a cereal boxtop (any brand will do), and send it to us by car, courier, or carrier pigeon. All orders must be received by April 1, 2010. Send no payment until order is shipped. Show-Me Nurseries does not accept credit cards, traveller's checks or money orders. Don't send cash through the mail! It's dangerous and we don't accept it anyway. And stop whining.

Waiting for April 1 is so last year!
Thanks to my house mate Yasin for being a good sport, and to my friend Shakir for his PhotoShop wizardry!

This Year's Seeds - Bu Yılın Tohumları

2010-03-04T16:39:00.002+02:00

(İngilizceyi bilmeyen okurların anlayışına sığınarak Türkçe çevirinin eksikliği için özür dilerim! Son haftalarda öyle yoğunum ki İngilizce tarafını ihmal etmemek için çabalıyorum...yine de ihmal ettim...biraz zamanım olunca en azından özetleyeceğim!)

My profligacy in the seed department is coming home to roost. I always go overboard, but gardening here is still pretty experimental, and besides the tried-and-true, there are things I'm not at all sure will survive or not. Then there's always a bit of overkill on flower seeds - you buy a pack of 100 seeds and maybe really only want three or four of what you're planting...

Vegetables:

Winter squash "Triamble" (C. maxima, a gray three-lobed one that keeps forever), "Seminole" (C. moschata, vining with rock-hard fruits that are reportedly delicious), "Table Queen" (C. pepo, the best acorn variety out there), "Pennsylvania Dutch" (C. moschata, an ancestor to the modern butternut, but strongly recurved) and "Bungkang" (C. moschata, with deeply furrowed dark green skin, from SE Asia). How on earth did I end up with 5 winter squash varieties? God help me. I might have to farm one out to a friend with several acres...I kind of wanted to grow "Futtsu" again this year too...

Korean Radish "Tae Baek"

Thai Basil "Thai Magic"
Tah Tsoi (Trying this for the first time at the suggestion of a friend who loves it.)

Rainbow Chard (A long-time favorite vegetable)

Cardoon (Also qualifies as an ornamental in my book)

Amaranth "Oscar Blanco" (a very tall one, up to 12 feet, pink, that is both ornamental and edible)

Sugar Snap Peas (Mine almost never make it to the kitchen...I end up snacking on them in the garden.)

Red Orach (Also ornamental but it tastes great)

Flatleaf Parsley (In Turkey parsley is a vegetable, not just a garnish!)
Coriander (Cilantro - almost completely unknown here.)

Oxheart tomatoes (Ordered them for friends last year and they loved them.)

"Pink Ponderosa" Tomato (free gift from Baker Creek)

Molokheiya (A leafy vegetable popular in Egypt and Cyprus)

Flowers/Ornamentals:

Tall Snapdragons

"Balcony Mix" Petunias (old-time fragrant lavender variety)

"Aztec Sweet" Nicotiana

Nicotiana glutinosa (Pink bell-shaped one, sounded intriguing!)

Tithonia "Mexican Torch"

Sweet Four O'Clock (Mirabilis longiflora - long white flowers with red centers and very fragrant)

Asclepias tuberosa "Gay Butterflies"

Matthiola bicornis ("Evening Scented Stock) - everyone should grow this!

Salvia patens (Wonderful low-spreading salvia with huge clear blue flowers)

Nepeta nervosa (we'll see if it survives the neighborhood cats...)

Nectaroscordum siculum (Great onion relative with downward-hanging red and white flowers; the leaves smell absolutely foul when crushed)

Feverfew

Melittis melissophyllum (Bastard balm)

Impatiens balfourii

Hesperis matronalis (I've tried twice already to get this going here and it hasn't come up, but I'm trying again. It was one of my favorite plants in my Seattle garden; there's nothing quite like the smell of it at night!)

Decaisnea fargesii (A bizarre plant with steely blue pods full of snotty pulp that is marginally edible. I'm hoping my neighbor will think it's as wonderful as or better the Ailanthus tree she allows to grow...)

Canna speciosa (A hardy one from the Himalayas with blue-purple flowers. Cannas are remarkably easy from seed, as long as you nick the seedcoat and soak them overnight first. If they swell, you nicked it far enough, otherwise try again. Then they come up like zinnias!)

Oh - and then there are the sweet peas and Korean runner beans sent to me by a seed-trading friend in Washington, an odd little Mexican cucurbit that's good for stuffing and keeps down cholesterol sent by a new friend in Iowa, and Solanum quitoense and Bitter melon, as well as a start of another cholesterol-reducing plant, Moluccan Spinach (Gynura divaricata) sent by a correspondent from North Carolina. It's growing great in a pot now. I'm looking forward to seeing what it does in the long run, it's in the same genus as "Purple Passion Plant," the fuzzy purple houseplant with the foul-smelling orange flowers. This one isn't fuzzy (it probably wouldn't be too palatable if it were) but it's definitely purple! And a jar of assorted morning glories from my friend Rabia in New Mexico, I can't wait! Thanks to everyone for sharing!

My seed sources this year were Chiltern Seeds, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and Evergreen Seeds. I've always had great luck with the first two; it's my first time ordering from Evergreen.

AND - to help me deal with all this, this year I happened to find something I'd been looking for unsuccessfully in garden centers here for years: Seed flats! I found them in Eminönü, but not in the gardening area (that would be too logical). Directly across the parking lot from the cheese and meat shops along the side of the Spice Market, about half way between Kahve Dünyası and the road, is a shop that sells all sorts of plastic items - little ziplock bags, garbage bags, you name it. And 3 different sizes of seed flats. They also sell what we called "jiffy bags" back home - the black cheap bags that nurseries use to raise plants in. Good to know!

Is it here? - Geldi Mi?

2010-02-24T19:41:00.017+02:00

Is what here? Spring of course, what else could a gardener be waiting for, the return of the snails? (As if they ever went anywhere...)

Of course I'm quite aware that many who might be reading this live in places like Minnesota, so for them, even the question is absurd. I did my time too; I grew up in Iowa and remember the agony on my North Carolina-born mother's face when my grandmother in Charlotte would call around this time, and with mock surprise in her voice, say (Imagine a thick old-style southern accent here) "Oh, there's still snow on the ground there? Here the jonquils are in bloom, and the camellia's almost through, and the tulips are comin' up..." Later it would be the ripening figs (what my mom would do for a ripe fig in Iowa!).

But it's payback time (karma is so fickle, isn't it?) because I live in a mild zone now, so y'all can go eat your hearts out. My tulips are up, and yours aren't!

Well...actually they are up but they won't bloom this year because they've divided.

But my first snowdrops did bloom this year. The funny thing is, I have no idea where they came from. There are lots of wild ones around, including one that's endemic to the Istanbul area. I suspect mine may have come in with some primroses I brought from Belgrade forest last year. Wherever they came from, they're doing well and I hope they'll multiply.

The first calendula is also in bloom; there will be many more of those. An odd and somewhat useless fact: Here, they call calendulas "nergis," which means "narcissus." I don't know why; perhaps it's because they're both yellow (usually) and both come up in early spring, and someone got confused, and it stuck...? Some garden snobs might think of it as "pedestrian," but I love it for its timing if nothing else. I'm also going to try and get the local wild one going in the wilder areas of the garden.

Another old standby, and a plant that I've grown infinitely more appreciative of since coming here is Geranium macrorrhizum.

The Bulgarians know it as "zdravets," and use it in a variety of ways that are supposed to be very, very good for you. One website provides this bit of herbal knowledge:

Zdravets essential oil has antiseptic, antispasmodic, anti-allergic, astringent and capillary strengthening qualities. It lowers the blood pressure in hypertension sufferers, due to its flavonoid content. It can also lower the level of blood sugar in diabetics. In addition, zdravets oil can relieve menopause symptoms, stimulate the blood vessels and relieve insomnia and fatigue. Used on the skin, zdravets oil is helpful against itching, skin lesions, furuncles and hemorrhoids.

I'll remember that if I ever find myself with a furuncle. I probably wouldn't joke about it if I knew what a furuncle was; I certainly know better than to joke about hemerrhoids. Personally I find the smell a bit off-putting, not as bad as "Stinking Robert" (G. robertianum) but close. My newfound appreciation of it has nothing to do with its health-giving properties, but with its sheer hardiness. The plant that spawned the one in the picture is growing in an incredibly crowded pot, where it's undoubtedly thrived for years and years. Each year it produces a profusion of bloom, and though I doubt there's much of anything resembling soil left in that pot, it hardly flags even in the hottest of weather. To list it as one of the first flowers of spring is almost misleading, because the truth is that it never quite stopped! It does produce a full flush of bloom when the weather warms a bit, but from fall until the weather really gets hot, it always throws out a few flowers here and there. I really should get myself some of the other varieties of it.

Besides finding out what did or did not survive the winter, spring is also when you get an idea of how far your invasive species have progressed! Here we have white yarrow (Achillea millefolium) happily sending up new sprouts a couple of feet from where it was originally planted. Honestly I don't know why I chose the white one, but I did and it's here to stay. Unless, of course, it is outcompeted by Verbena bonariensis, a plant of which is coming up at the right. V. bonariensis is a funny thing, it can be rampant but never has been for me; in my Seattle garden I never even managed to get it to grow even though some friends were tearing it, and their hair, out in handfuls trying to contain it. Here I get four or five seedlings a year; I can deal with that.

I also got some surprises this year. Right at the entrance of the upper garden is a clump of Iris foetidissima, a plant I've always loved for its brilliant red seeds in the fall. In Seattle it used to always seed around, but though the plant here was an old one, i never found a seedling. I suspect that's because the area around it was never cleared; this spring a poke around the base revealed lots of seedlings coming up. My friend Ayfer gets first dibs, the rest are up for grabs!

Another pleasant surprise was that the "Matucana" sweet peas I grew last year managed to ripen and scatter some seed before I was able to collect it, and they came up in the fall. I was a bit worried that they might get zapped in the cold snap, but they've obviously come through it just fine. This prompted me to go ahead and sow some more out there in the same area. If you want a really, REALLY fragrant sweet pea, this one to grow; it's purportedly the closest to the wild species which grows in Sicily. I grew it together with "Cupani," a lighter bicolor pink, which was also incredibly fragrant, a few of these brought in the house produced enough scent to be noticeable all the way across the living room. This year I'm trying several more; sweet peas are another plant that I never had much luck with in Seattle but grow well here.

The final "eat your heart out" picture is this - the first flowering stalk of the freesias that came two years ago from the garden of my friend Peggy in Berkely, CA. They were a perfect "gardenwarming" present. In California (and I suspect, here as well) they can get to be a bit weedy, but there could be worse weeds. Especially if you're one of those poor souls who live in Minnesota. (On the other hand, you get to grow brilliant rhubarb, and great peonies.) Now in Turkey they believe in the nazar, or evil eye, which means that coveting something is believed to be injurious to the object of the covetousness. I used to think it was silly. Then I watched a beautiful stand of Kalanchoe growing in a shop, which I'd stand and admire every time I'd go by it, become decimated by fungus. Obviously it was all my fault. ;) So by encouraging all this eating out of hearts, I might easily provoke a case of nazar, and come out one morning to find all of my freesias cut down by snails, or my snowdrops dug up by cats and replaced by...well, you know what cats leave you when they get to digging! It will be y'all's fault as well if I do!

I Am the Groundhog

2010-02-24T17:53:00.010+02:00

I finally got a good day of gardening in today! Since my last post, I've been leading a groundhog-like existence, vegetating in the house, trying to get back in shape musically and making (and eating) lots of kimchi. Which is better than sitting around eating cheesecake in the long run, but still the steadily greening view below kept reminding me that there was a lot to do before I could start planting!

And we still have March to get through... March is fickle; in Turkish there's a saying about March:

Kapıdan baktıran, kazma kürek yaktıran ay

The month that has you looking out the door, and burning your picks and shovels.

...the jist being that the warm weather encourages you to go out, but it could just as easily be wintery cold that has you burning whatever is left because your winter fuel has run out! And since you never know what's coming, it's best not to look out on the weed-filled expanse and say "I'll do it tomorrow..."

The snow was not the last of the things keeping me out of the garden. It was followed by several weeks of non-freezing but consistently wet weather -- I think three days was the most we had without rain at any given point. I did take advantage of that three-day spell to get the worst of the weeds out of the vegetable garden, and as the soil was marginally workable, I managed to get half of my cover crop of fava beans planted. I'd wanted to do that as soon as I got back from Seattle in November but well, it was late November, and winter had kicked in. Now I have a dense growth of favas an inch high covering half the garden. I'll leave a couple rows to fruit as I love fresh fava beans, but the rest will get dug into the soil that will support this year's expanse of squash, tatsoi, garlic chives, rainbow chard, amaranth and sunflowers. Oh, and big Korean radishes!

Today was devoted to other pursuits - I weeded my neighbors' garden. Now before you think "what a good neighbor, I wish he lived next to my garden," I should note that I weeded only very selectively, and with a clear ulterior motive.

I mentioned in a very old post that the yard had a plethora of borage in it. There's so much that it forms carpets in some areas, as in the photo above. And my neighbors are very much fair-weather gardeners; they won't be out tilling the soil till the warmth of April, which gives lots of weeds a glorious opportunity to reseed themselves abundantly, and grow big before they're hacked out.

They also tend to overfertilize. While this makes for astounding growth of their tomato plants, it also means that the weeds turn into a veritable forest. They can keep the mallow, the Arum (the arrowhead leaved clumps in the front), the dock, the poison hemlock, the mystery weed that smells so bad that even goats won't eat it, the chickweed and veronica, but the borage is mine! There was enough borage growing there, multi-branched with stems over an inch wide, to make several piles three feet high. And since the rain and mud had foiled my cover cropping plans, what better way to have a nice layer of green manure than to import it from 30 feet away?

Of course, growing a cover crop serves a dual purpose - not only does it provide organic matter and friability when dug into the soil, it also shades out weeds and makes it more difficult for them to grow. Since I missed the boat on that, I decided not to dig the borage in right away, but to spread it all over the non-planted side of the garden and let it break down, all the while covering the weeds. I'd already gone through and dug out all the buttercups and arum I could. I also pulled lamium (dead nettle) I could before it has a chance to set seed. It's all over the lower garden but there's relatively little of it in the middle section, and I'd like to keep it that way. It produces millions of seeds that lay dormant in the soil for years, just waiting for their chance in the sun. And when they get their chance, they come up in a dense green carpet that you can turn under repeatedly, only to watch it renew itself as ever more seeds are exposed to the sun. It's an effective evolutionary strategy used by plants that can't normally compete well with neighboring plants. When they are suddenly exposed to the sun it normally means disturbed soil and therefore the elimination of their immediate competition. This is the reason that plowed fields in Europe throw up a dense carpet of brilliant red poppies in the spring.

I'm not sure if borage concentrates potassium in its roots like its relative comfrey, but it certianly provides the bulk if its happy. Another plus is that it's an annual, where with comfrey you have to be careful or you'll turn your garden into a comfrey plantation...as long as you yank the borage (and even large plants are very easy to yank) before it sets seed you won't have an invasion the coming year.

But fortunately borage is also a beautiful plant, so I let it grow to its heart's content in the non-cultivated/cultivable parts of the garden, where it delights with its sky-blue flowers each spring. I also left several developing plants in the neighbors' garden so that I can raid it again next year....

And...the Aftermath!

2010-01-28T20:48:00.005+02:00

Our cold snap is now over! Up until this point the weather had been so mild that I actually harbored hopes that we would get through this winter without a really hard freeze. It's happened before, and I'm not far from the water.

But no such luck this year! After the first major snow the temperature fell and hovered around 28F (-2C) for a day or two. Not a deep freeze by most cold region standards and most of the garden is unscathed. I decided to do an experiment in Arctic training for an Aloe arborea (I have another one that I brought in). It does not look happy though it seems that the parts of the plants that were buried in snow are still firm. The outer ends of the leaves are complete jelly though. San Francisco received a freeze like this back in the early 90s, there was a lot of damage but lots of things did come back from their roots.

I had two large Brugmansias in pots, one Charles Grimaldi with pale orange flowers, and one unidentified pink one. In past years the pink one has seemed to be hardier than Charles, but this year it's suffered more from very light freezes we've gotten this year. i planted one pink one out into the soil last year and grew like a house on fire, but unless the roots survived (there is a fairly good chance they did actually), it's toast. Time will tell. I'll have to wait for the snow to finish melting before I can tell what happened to the sweet peas that had volunteered and grown nearly 5 inches...

And here, just for touristic value, is what the Bosphorus looked like today from the hill up above Anadoluhisarı. Tomorrow the temps are supposed to get to 10C, so there will be no more of the white stuff by this time tomorrow evening! But we still have February and March to get through...

Winter Finally Arrived!

2010-01-24T01:19:00.003+02:00

Well, I knew the mild weather we've had so far was too good to last. Until today, we hadn't even had a hard freeze. Now we have!

Here's the lower garden...

...and the upper garden.

And for a couple of touristic pictures, the Bosphorus, with the Bosphorus Bridge,

and the Ortaköy Mosque.

This is Turkey! / Burası Türkiye!

2010-01-22T16:22:00.006+02:00

Once you live in Turkey a while and create your little bubble of order in the relative chaos of Istanbul (relative, because when I go back to the US I frequently find myself exasperated at things that I never thought twice about when I lived there), it's easy to forget that you live in what some might consider a Second-world country (I don't think it's been "Third-world" for quite a while). And then you come across something that reminds you. Turks tend to explain such things with the catch phrase, "Burası Türkiye!" (This is Turkey) as if no further explanation were needed.

I had a minor little burası Türkiye moment yesterday when I was trading some squash seeds with friends and decided to give in to my inner Pandora and peek into the commercial packet of winter squash seeds I got last fall. The seed packet should have been a hint - packaged in 2004, with a badly focused and printed picture of some sort of pumpkin, and no particular variety indicated. But when I opened it, I got more of a surprise than i expected! Here is part of the contents:

There are no less than two different Cucurbita maxima varieties, as well as some other seeds that look like C. pepo or maybe C. moschata. And a bean.

If I had a huge amount of extra room, I would plant a selection just to see what would come out; some might be good. But I'm not going to do the grunt work of opening up 200 more square feet for unknowns when there is so much dependable seed of such amazing varieties available. If I planted them I'd likely get something like the mix in this picture a friend took in Antalya. There is definitely a C. maxima or two, and several moschatas in various shapes and sizes. The maximas might actually be good; they look like some sort of banana squash. I've had some of the dubious moschatas before in Greece; they tend to be fibrous and watery, but with this much variety who knows? I'll probably chuck them, unless there is someone out there who would like to grow a few mystery squashes.

I'm totally planting the bean though.

Flowers on the Water / Suda Çiçekler

2010-01-20T21:53:00.016+02:00

When I was a kid, I remember looking with fascination at the marbled outer surface of the pages of the huge unabridged dictionary in our elementary school library. Though it made me think of water, I had no idea how it was actually done, or that it even had a name. In Turkey, this art form has been taken to an extreme and is known as ebru. It's commonly translated as "paper marbling," and as in the west, it is sometimes used as decoration for page edges or frontspieces of books, but in Turkey it is an art in its own right, and often used to create beautiful floral motifs.

I've watched ebru being done many times; almost any traditional arts exhibition here will feature an ebru artist at work. The paints are dropped or spattered with special brushes and a stylus onto the surface of water which is thickened with a plant extract called tragacanth. The paints are mixed with varying amounts of gall, which controls how much they spread over the surface. It's all a complex balance of chemistry and technique; even the humidity and temperature can affect the outcome.

I'd always wanted to try it, but for whatever reason, never had. Today I was walking through the Taksim metro station and noticed an exhibition of ebru there, by artists Fatih Yeşil and Hüseyin Gülbaran. Strangely the place was almost deserted so I could look at the prints at my leisure.

Mr. Yeşil was there, and had a pan set up for people to try it themselves. I watched him talk a woman through a basic tulip, and decided to try it myself. We'll come to that in a bit!

As a gardener and plant lover, ebru is more than a decorative art, it's a documentation of the way people see and interpret the flowers that grow in Turkey. This is not a static thing; in addition to the stylized much-repeated traditional motifs, new motifs are appearing as well, and each artist brings his or her own perceptions into their work. Some of the pieces at the exhibition today could be called more or less botanically accurate, immediately recognizable. For example, the poppy here shows a typical color pattern for P. rhoeas, the field poppy found throughout most of Turkey. The same is true for this Bellflower (Campanula). Though perhaps not any particular species, it would be instantly recognizable by anyone familiar with the family.

One flower that features prominently in ebru is the tulip. There are probably several reasons for this: Turkey is the homeland of many wild tulip species, the tulip mania that eventually spread to Holland began in Turkey, and the shape of tulip petals seems to cry out to be depicted in ebru.

Today I was struck by something I had never noticed before: how the change in varieties of tulips on the market has been reflected in ebru. Though there are many tulip species in Anatolia with a variety of shapes, the most prized in Ottoman times were those with long, thin petals, like the golden tulip in this painting. There were many named varieties, nearly all of which have been lost to cultivation today. There is now an effort underway to recreate some of these varieties, and I even was able to buy one last spring at a nursery down the street from me.

The tulips depicted in most of the older and/or more traditional examples of ebru, as well as many other turkish art forms such as tilework, depict these graceful long-petaled tulips, like those in the example here. However, during recent decades the Dutch have become the undisputed kings of tulip production and breeding, and have focused more on flowers which can be appreciated from a distance and especially when planted en masse. This means large, robust flowers on tall stems. This type of tulip has also become more common in ebru, as it's almost the only type of tulips that are commercially available any more. Still, ebru is a stylized art, and it seems that in the language of ebru, pointed petals are an essential factor in tulip-ness.

Dutch-type tulips are not the only new flowers to show up in ebru: Ottoman art lovers would almost certainly have scratched their heads if they'd seen an ebru Bird of Paradise!

Mr. Yeşil, who is also a teacher of Ebru, has his own page devoted to the art of ebru, provided below, and courses are available.

So what of my own first attempt? I wanted to try the more abstract "battal" type. At first glance, it would seem to be easier, right? But it's not! Think of it this way - is it easier to paint a picture directly or try to do it by throwing the paint at the canvas? You tap the brush a little too hard on your finger and you get too much paint. Tap it too lightly and you get none. Hold your finger too stiff and the paint shoots beyond the place you're trying to apply it. Here is mine still in the tray:

The final step is to carefully lay the paper over the surface and draw it off - why drawing it over the edge of the pan doesn't mar the paint I don't know... And I present to you, in living color, my ebru representation of... corn smut! It's a beginning...

Please visit Mr. Yeşil's page at http://www.dokusu.com and be sure to watch the videos of ebru in the process of creation! There is also an ebru gallery where you can see many fascinating examples of this unique Ottoman art form.

Türklere ebrunun ne olduğunu nasıl yapıldığını anlatmak biraz gereksiz olduğunu zannediyorum, benden çok daha iyi anlatan yerler var zaten! Bugün Taksim metrosundayken bir ebru sergisine rastgeldim ve ebru satıldığı çok yer gibi ziyaretçilere ebru yapmayı deneme imkanı da sunuluyordu. Ebru, uzun zamandır denemek istediğim birşey olduğu için sansı değerlendirdim, sonra biraz botanik bir açıdan ebru hakkında yazmaya esinlendim.

Batıda "paper marbling" olarak bilinen ebru, orada daha çok diğer objeleri süslemek kullanınan bir sanattır. Küçük çocuk olarak ilkokulumuzun kütüphanesinde dev bir sözlük vardı, kapalıyken sayfa uclarındaki desenlere hayran kalmıştım. Nasıl yapıldığını hiç düşünemiyordum, suyun yüzeyinde olacağını nereden tahmin edeyim ki?

Botanik açısından ebruyu sadece bir süs sanati değil, Türk insanının doğal dünyayı nasıl algılayıp betimlediğini bir belgeleme olarak görüyorum. Botanik olarak ele alınan çiçekleri birebir yansıtmamasına rağmen (ki bu ya imkansız olurdu ya ebrunun imkanlarını ciddi bir şekilde sınırlandırırdı), çiçeklerin özünü ortaya çıkardığı kesindir. Ebruda görünen gelincik, lale veya çan çiçeği, doğaya herhangi bir botanik türüne tam benzemiyor fakat hemen hangi çiçek olduğunu anlıyoruz.

Çiçekleri birebir betimleyemediği halde, yine de bitki dünyasında belli gerçekleri de yansıtıyor ebru. Mesela ebruda sık sık ele alınan bir çiçek, laledir. Anadolu'da birçok yaban lale türleri olması yanısıra, özellikle Hollanda'da olmak üzere batılıların bir lale soğanı için aklı şaşırtacak para harcamaya teşvik eden "lale çılgınlığı"nın başlangıcı, Türkiye'nin Lale Devri'nde idi. Osmanlıda en gözde laleler ise, günümüzde artık çoktan kaybolmuş, yaprakları uzun ve sivri olan cinslerdi. Daha eski ve/veya geneleksel Osmanlı sanati örneklerinde betimlenen lalelerin büyük çoğunluğu, bu uzun ince yapraklı cinslerden esinlenmiş olduğu görülür.

Çok şükür, bu eski türleri yeniden hayata geçirilmeye çalışılıyor artık fakat şimdilik lale üretimi ve geliştirmesinin merkezi kuşkusuz Hollanda'dır. Her ilkbahar İstanbul'un caddelerine binbir renklerini katan lalelerin hemen hemen hepsi, Hollanda'da, uzaktan göreni etkileyip gözü kamaştırmak için geliştiren, uzun boylu geniş yapraklı cinslerdir. Bu da ebruda görülebilir artık. Hatta Fatih Yeşil ile Hüseyin Gülbaran'ın eserleri yer aldığı sergide "cennet kuşu" gibi Türkiye'ye ancak bu yüzyılda gelen, Osmanlıların hiç tanımadığı çiçekler bile gördüm. Ve gelecekte başka neler ebruya girecek diye sabırsızlıkla merak ediyorum! Ebru ustası Fatih Bey ayrıca dersler veriyor; hem dersler hem de ebru için daha ayrıntılı bilgi için http://www.dokusu.com web sitesine başvurabilirsiniz.

Benim ilk girişime gelince...çok sevdiğim, daha soyut olan "battal" ebru tarzının, çiçeklerden daha kolay olacağını sanmıştım. Meğer öyle değil! Neden mi? Normal resim düşünün, hangisi daha güzel bir sonuç verecek, bir fırça ile direkt boya uygulamak mı yoksa uzaktan fırlatmak mı? Ustanın elinde son derece kolay görünüyor tabii, fırçayı sol elin parmağına hafif vurarak suyun yüzeyine boya damlacıklarını dağıtıyor. Fakat! Az fazla hafif vurursanız hiç boya çıkmaz, biraz fazla sert ise çok fazla çıkar, sol elin parmağını fazla kasarsanız da boya istediğin yeri aşar. Benim ilk ebru örneğine gelince... çiçekten çok, mısırda çıkan bir mantar hastalığına benzedi! Bir başlangıç işte...

A New Endeavor: The New Daylilies!

2010-01-04T17:40:00.017+02:00

Well, this title isn’t entirely accurate; it’s hard to find a gardener (at least in the U.S.) who hasn’t grown daylilies, if only the common orange ones (Hemerocallis fulva), and I've grown them too. They can often be found growing in huge stands across the American countryside; and since they are a sterile hybrid that produces no seed whatsoever, they did not seed in, but were planted in deliberately at some time or other. Where you see a lone stand with no surrounding buildings, chances are that there was once a home there. It’s such a vigorous and durable plant that it’s easy to see why it was popular among pioneer gardeners – and why it remains long after every last trace of the home has disappeared.

My mother grew other daylilies in her Iowa City garden – there were some of a deep orange-almost-red shade, and a stand of tall clear yellow ones that, as I remember, had a very sweet pistil that I liked to pluck out and eat. In my Seattle garden I found one dwarf daylily languishing between the walk and the foundation and brought back to life, wondering what it would do. It turned out to be Hemericallis lilioasphodelus, commonly called “Lemon lily,” and with its small but substantial clear yellow blooms and delicious fragrance, it was one of my favorite plants.

Overall however, even though I’d seen some different daylilies in garden catalogs – whites, spiders, even pinks, they always seemed…“common,” for the lack of a better word, or maybe “unconvincing.” The reds seemed muddy, so were the much-hailed pinks…as if, despite their outward difference, they were really just aching to be dusty orange.

On my last trip to Seattle in November though, my old neighbor and fellow garden freak Skot (I'm not a sycophant but I really should be embarrassed to even compare myself to him!) showed me the daylily plants he had been bidding on. “Bidding on?” Yes– it turns out there is a truly devoted group of people who are crazy about daylilies and who are producing new hybrids that are so spectacular they’ll give tall bearded iris a run for their money. He was doing this bidding through the Daylily Exchange. http://www.daylily.com/ Just the image on their homepage is a hint at what’s to be found within. If you aren’t convinced, check out Bill’s Hemerocallis Page http://www.ofts.com/bill/daylily.html., and particularly the gallery at http://www.ofts.com/photo/gallery.html. (Thanks to Bill for generously allowing the use of his images!)

This for example, is no run-of-the-mill daylily!

To be honest, just like the new iris hybrids, the price of many of the newly-released daylily hybrids places them well beyond the reach of the average gardener, but in a year they become last year’s hybrids, and so on, and there are lots of wonderful things to be had for reasonable prices.

There is also the option of growing them from seed. Growing regular lilies (Lilium) from seed is a rather involved process often involving a double stratification, but daylilies are almost as easy as zinnias. People have several different approaches to sowing them but Skot takes his seed and puts it in the freezer for a couple weeks, after which it’s ready to sow whenever he wants. Sowing seed in the fall and growing through the winter under lights can often produce a bloom the first year, though the true character of the bloom will become clearer after the plant is better established. I have several of his seedlings growing in my garden now and have gotten blooms on two - one is a large clear yellow spider and the other is...well, orange, but a much richer and substantial orange than any old fulva and I'll let it keep growing.

An entire jargon has grown up around daylily breeding – UFOs, spiders, watermarks, shark’s teeth… And just as with bearded iris, there are now lots of reblooming daylily hybrids. But here the daylilies have a fascinating twist: the second flush of bloom often exhibits a color shift so striking that it’s hardly recognizable as the same variety. Another surprise in some of the new hybrids is the size; some of the spiders in particular have blooms of up to 15 or more inches across! Many of them are semi-evergreen as well, meaning they continue to provide substance when they are not in bloom in the form of their arching, strap-like leaves.

So if the thought of daylilies still conjures up images of invasive orange things, why not reconsider and try something really new this year? I'm already looking forward to the first blooms on the rest of the plants I planted last year, and knowing I have seed of some very high-falutin' plants here gives me even more to look forward to!

Winter Blahs: The Antidote / Kış Sıkıntısının Panzehri

2010-01-02T21:21:00.011+02:00

I should start right out by saying that when I compare my location with those of many who are reading this blog, I realize I have absolutely no right to talk about winter blahs when it comes to gardening. I have Brugmansias that are still struggling to pop out an occasional flower, a huge bush of Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) in bloom, my Geranium macrorrhizum is just starting to open its deep pink flowers, and the pot of fragrant cyclamens is completely covered in white upturned petals. As if that weren't enough, a Paphiopedilum orchid is throwing up an off-season flower that should open any day now.

And yet it happens...long gray (if not necessarily frigid) days, and frequent rains that keep the soil too wet to really do anything with can add up to a bit of indifference to the garden. And it's just at this point that capitalism steps in to save the day with the perfect antidote to the winter blahs with the arrival of the first seed catalog!

In Seattle, I would regularly receive fifteen or more catalogs - Thompson and Morgan, Park Seed, Wayside Gardens, as well as several specialty catalogs. And of course there was always (sniff...) the Heronswood Catalog to look forward to. Living in Turkey, I don't get nearly as many, and to be honest I do a lot more of my seed shopping over the internet. But that made it even a nicer surprise to come out of the rain into the front porch and see a long, thin catalog with flowers on it. Chiltern Seeds' catalog is so distinctively shaped that I didn't even have to read it to know what it was. Of course like the rest of the bunch, you can shop from Chiltern's online too, but it's such fun to pick up the catalog, flip to a random page, and come across an entry like this:

953M £1.94 Papaver, unknown species, 'Via Rotorua'

This plant and its name need some explanation! Rotorua, as we all know, is in new Zealand, which is we all also perhaps know, is not the home of anything in the Poppy family. Resumé-style the story goes: folk emigrate to N.Z., take beloved Poppy seed, nurture strain, years pass, send seed to UK, writer’s wife happens to spot flowers growing in the UK, loves them, can she have some seed. Result a rather lovely, easily raised Poppy with single blooms, three inches or so across, with silky, mauvy-lilac petals with a black blob at their base. 1-2 ft.

Not only does it sound like something I'll have to order, but I learn something new in every catalog, and I always come across things I've never even heard of before, like:

899Q £1.98 Nicotiana glutinosa

Not often offered is this showy species from Peru with grey-green foliage and open bell-shaped, glossy rose-pink flowers. Easy to grow and your bees and butterflies will love it too. 2-2½ ft.

Guess I'll be ordering that one this year too!

Of course, all this thinking about plants gets me thinking about the weed-choked expanse that doubles as a garden on good days...and spurs me to get my butt out there and pull out all the mallow and borage that would like to be the only things out there. I will, and it will be replaced by Lamium and bindweed, but that's another problem for another time.

Happy 2010!

Hemen belirteyim ki bu blogu takip edenlerin bazılarının yaşadığı yerlere kıyaslarken, bahçeyle ilgili olarak “kış sıkıntısı” denilen şey için şikayet etmeye hiç ama hiç hakkım yok. Hâlâ arada bir çiçek açmaya çalışan Brugmansialarım var, Geranium macrorrhizum’um koyu pembe çiçeklerini yeni açmaya başladı, ve geçen yıl bulduğum kokulu siklamen saksısını kıvrık bembeyaz yapraklarıyla doldurmuş halde. Ayrıca evin içinde bir pabuç orkidesi mevsimdışı bir çiçek açmak üzere.

Yine de başıma geliyor…uzun, çok soğuk olmasa da gri günler ve toprağı sürekli kazılmaz halde tutan sürekli yağmurlu hava, bir ilgisizliğe yol açabilir. Ve tam bu esnada, kapitalizm gelip, ilk tohum katalogunun varışıyla günü kurtarıyor!

Seattle’dayken her yıl - Thompson and Morgan, Park Seed, Wayside Gardens ve birçok özel fidanlıktan gönderilen onbeş küsür katalog geliyordu. İstanbul’da o kadar almıyorum, ve gerçeğini söylemem gerekirse bahçe alışverişimin büyük çoğunluğunu artık internet üzerinde yapıyorum zaten. Fakat belki de ondandır ki, yağmurlu bir günde eve dönüp kapının yanında çiçeklerler süslü uzun ince bir katalogu bulmak beni daha da mutlu etti. Son derece orijinal şekliyle İngiltere’deki Chiltern Seeds katalogunu hiç bakmadan bile tanıyorum. Siz de Chiltern Online’den alışverişinizi yapabilirsiniz. Fakat internet ne kadar kolaylık sunarsa sunsun, yağmurlu bir günde rahat bir köşeye sığınıp gelişigüzel katalogu açıp, böyle bir açıklamaya rastgelmek, son derece eğlenceli:

953M £1.94 Papaver, bilinmeyen tür, 'Via Rotorua'
Bu bitki ile adı biraz açıklama gerektirir! Hepimiz bildiğimiz gibi Rotorua, Yeni Zelanda’da ve yine de belki hepimiz bildiğimiz gibi, söz konusu ülkede, Gelincik ailesine ait olan herhangi bir bitki bulunmamaktadır. Hikaye tam bir özgeçmiş gibi: İnsanlar Yeni Zelanda’ya göç ediyor, sevdikleri gelincik tohumunu da götürüyor, cinsini koruyup yetiştiriyorlar, yıllar geçiyor, tohumu İngiltere’ye gönderiyorlar, yazarın eşi İngiltere’de bitkileri yetişirken görüyor, biraz tohum istiyor. Sonuç: dibinde siyah bir beneği olan, ipekimsi mor/lila yapraklı 7 cmlık tek çiçekli, hoş bir gelincik.

Bunun gibi kesinlikle sipariş etmem gerekecek tohumlar içermesi yanı sıra, her katalogda yeni bir şey öğreniyorum, hatta hiç duymadığım yeni türler sunuyor, mesela:

899Q £1.98 Nicotiana glutinosa
Peru’dan gelen gri-yeşil yapraklı, çan şeklinde açık parlak gül pembe çiçekli bu gösterişli tütün türü sık sık sunulmamaktadır. Yetiştirilmesi kolay, arılar ve kelebekleriniz de ona bayılacak.

Her halde bu yıl onu da sipariş edeceğim!

Tabi ki hep bu bitki muhabbeti, beni iyi günlerde bahçe olarak geçen araziyi düşündürerek, kıçımdan kalkıp her yere saran, bahçenin tek varlığı olmaya yüz tutan ebegümeci ile hodanı yolmaya teşvik ediyor. Yolacağım, ve hemen ardından yerine ballıbaba ile beyaz sarmaşık gelecek, fakat onlar, başka bir zaman için başka bir sorundur…

Herkese mutlu yıllar dilerim!

The Last Squash Report! Son Kabak Raporu!

2009-09-27T12:10:00.011+03:00

I promise, from now until planting season I will write nothing more about winte squash! Well, maybe not.

Here are some of the squash from the garden. The Rouge Vif d'Etampes produced nicely but with the exception of one, they didn't display the flat shape that is supposedly characteristic for the variety. They also were not nearly as tasteless as I've read, and one made a pretty decent soup.

Yemin ediyorum, ekin zamanı gelinceye kadar balkabaklar hakkında bir daha yazmayacağım! Belkı... Buyrun bu yılın balkabaklarından birkaç tanesi. Rouge Vif d'Etampes, çok güzel üretti fakat bir tanesi hariç o cinse özgü basık yayvan özelliğini göstermedi. Okuduğum kadar tatsız da çıkmadı, bir tanesinden çok lezzetli bir çorba yaptım.

The Futsus impressed me; despite the fact that I got them into the ground way too late they produced a lot of squash. I've already eaten several, but I decided to wait for a while before eating any more to see if they sweeten up. I cooked them stuffed with apples, with a little nutmeg, cinnamon, brown sugar, butter and a little orange juice. They do have a slightly different flavor but I would have never thought "hazelnut."

Küçük gri Futsu'lar beni çok sevindirdi, çok fazla geç ekmeme rağmen yine çok ürettiler. Bir kaç tanesi yedim de zamanla tatlanacak mı diye bekleyeceğim. Fırında elma, biraz tarçın, muscat cevizi, tereyağla doldurup, biraz da portakal suyu ekleyrek pişirdim. Harika! Biraz farklı bir tadı var fakat her yerde okuduğum "fındık" tadını ben duyamadım. Reklam abartısı her halde.

The biggest disappointment was the Marina di Chioggia - I only got two! The reason is no mystery - a pack of dogs that came into the garden and decided to dig right where they were growing, snapping off two of the best runners. The quality is really nice though and I'll plant it again next year.

En büyük hayal kırıklığını, Marina di Chioggia ile yaşadım - sadece iki tane verdi! Sebebi ise mechul değil, bir köpek sürüsü bahçeme girip tam yetiştiği yerde kazarak en büyük iki sürgününü koparttı. Kaletesi son derece güzel ama, gelecek yıl da kesinlikle ekeceğim.

My housemate was down in his home town of Aydın, and brought a pack of seed that is supposedlyl of the preferred variety there. Turns out the company is in Istanbul but generally the squash sold here come from Adapazarı, and are dark gray, resembling the Australian Jarrahdale pumpkin but less glossy and more irregular in shape. It makes a great pie. But there are other varieties as well grown in the south, especially a large, smooth pale gray-green one with very shallow grooves and pale orange blotches; I'd love to score some seed of that one.

Aydın'lı ev arkadaşım da bir paket balkabağı tohumu getirdi. Satanlara göre o yörede en çok yetiştirilen cinsmiş. Tohum şirketi İstanbul'da ama... İstanbul'da benzer birşey gördüm de, burada en çok satılan cins "Adapazarı" veya "Kestane" denilen, büyük derin boğumlu gri cinstir. Aydın'da yetişen başka bir cins de var, büyük, oval şekli sığ çizgili, uçuk turuncu benekli açık yeşilimsi gri renkli bir tane. Ondan birkaç tohum elde etmek isterdim!

And the last pumpkin-related bit: I was in Greece for several weeks and when I came back through Komotini in northestern Greece, I found some very attractive winter squash in the markets that looked like a more bottle-shaped butternut. (CD added for scale.) I was too curious about the variety so I bought one and it looked pretty nice when I opened it, but I was underwhelmed; it cooked up very fibrous and pulpy, with not much flavor. I won't be growing it next year!

Veeee kabaklarla ilgili son paragraf olarak... Yunanistan'da birkaç hafta geçirdim, dönüşte Batı Trakya, Gümülcine kentinde görünüşü çok güzel olan bir balkabağı buldum. Bizim çok popüler olan "butternut" cinsinin daha kabarığı, şişe şeklinde birşey. (CD, boyunu göstermek için eklendi.) Cinsi çok merak ettiğim için bir tanesini aladım, açtığımda güzel göründü fakat tadı beni hiç etkilemedi; eti tatsız, lifli ve çok sulu çıktı. Gelecek yıl yetiştireceğim bir cins değil!

Squash Update / Kabak Güncellemesi

2009-08-07T12:32:00.011+03:00

Yeah, I know what you're thinking...This guy is really obsessing on the winter squash!

Yep, I am! There aren't many other vegetables in the garden (okay, it's technically a fruit) where you plant a seed, watch it sprout and get established, then get to watch it bloom and begin growing with amazing speed, but have to watch through the entire summer to bring those fruits to maturity. Maybe corn would compare but it's still much more gradual and subtle. Tomatoes, okra, even melons, are harvested as they become ripe, with more constantly on the way; but with winter squash, your fruits set, and it's those same fruits you nurture over the months until it's finally time to harvest them. (Potatoes are another matter - you plant them, know they're growing down there, but you really don't know how many you'll get or how well they did until the moment of truth arrives. My potato harvest? Um...let's talk about squash!)

Above is a large and still-developing Rouge Vif D'Etampes fruit; it probably weighs about twelve pounds now and it hasn't even started to flatten out or turn color. Rouge Vif D'Etampes is interesting that way; whereas some squash make their eventual shape obvious even before the blooms are fertilized, this one starts out as a little yellow golf ball that doesn't show its eventual flat shape until fairly late in the game. Below is another one that is coloring up nicely. It is a bit smaller since it started forming earlier but I let several fruits form on its vine. I gave seeds to friends in Iznik as well, and there seems to be quite a bit of variation in shape; some of the fruits are deeply ribbed while others are smoother. This one is on the same plant as the one above; it grew round until just a few weeks ago when it began to flatten noticeably.

Below is another one on a different plant; all of this plant's squashes have a distinct green mottling that may fade as they mature.

Here's the same one just a couple weeks earlier. Though it had not begun to color up at all yet, it already had the green mottling.

The only "bad news" about Rouge Vif d'Etampes is the flavor reviews I've seen. The description was "delicious sweet flesh, perfect for pies and custards." Others, notably Amy Goldman, author of "The Compleat Squash," (more about her later) beg to differ. In her own words:

"This one coasts by on looks alone, being insipid and watery. It's enchanting, but I wouldn't cook with it."

Well, dang. We'll see. It was quite good when it was still yellow.

So what about Marina di Chioggia? Goldman gives it rave reviews, and even if its flavor were mediocre, I'd still be glad I planted it because it's an amazing looking thing. Unfortunately because of its situation, and the fact that a pack of dogs came into the garden are badly damaged the vines, I'll only get two of these for all my efforts. The larger of the two is just starting to develop the characteristic warts:

As a diversion from the squash, here's a picture of that nice Amaranth, "Hopi Red Dye," coming up among the leaves. There is a Rouge Vif d'Etampes lurking under the leaves though!

And then there's Futsu. I had something unusual happen with this one. Usually winter squash start blooming male, and after a succession of male flowers it finally opens the female flowers. My Futsus did exactlyl the opposite. As the fines took off, lots of male flowers developed at the nodes but they progressed very, very slowly. Meanwhile there were female flowers coming on quickly. I got two female flowers before I had any males. Since Futsu is a C. moschata, it technically can't cross with C. maxima (though it has been done artificially). But I thought "what the heck" and tried it anyway. The seeds may come out sterile but the fruits did set! Here's one of them - the picture's a little old and they're now much larger and a very dark green.

The Futsu plant is probably one of the most ornamental squash plant I've ever grown. I find the leaves beautiful with their generous white marbling, and the flowers are enormous! The mid-90s weather we have been having has seemed to put a bit of a damper on their fruit set but it's cooled a little now and some more females have started to grow instead of yellow and drop.

I've also finally found the place where gourds like to grow. Before I arrived my housemate had grown gourds in the upper garden but I've tried for 2 years in a row and despite manure and generous watering, I just can't get them to take off. I made a small arbor in the lower garden and planted a tiny ornamental bottle gourd with fruits only about 6" long at maturity. They really took off and are well on their way to to the top of the large plum tree next to them. They should be fun to decorate as Christmas or other ornaments. There are at least 14 out there and many more on the way.

If you are even remotely interested in squash, I can't say enough good things about the book "The Compleat Squash: A Passionate Grower's Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes and Gourds," by Amy Goldman. I knew there were lots of different kinds of squash but the illustrations in this book will have you drooling. She goes through the three major squash species and gives descriptions of both common and rare varieties' uses, table quality and origins. It's interesting how many heirloom varieties are stringy and unappetising; perhaps they grew them because they didn't have another variety available and were used to them. Other types, especially some of the large pumpkins, were grown as cattle feed. I'm already planning which new (to me) varieties I'll grow next year, and I'll definitely have to clear at least another 50 square yards of planting area!

And since you made it this far (well, I'm assuming), here is a compleat-ly squash-unlrelated picture: A bloom on my neighbor's giant white Datura just on the point of popping open. This is a plant with a strategy! The scent starts emerging from the flower long before they unfurl even to this point, and like hungry campers in the food line, they swarm around the flowers trying to find the entrance. Then the flower suddenly pops open, and it's dinner time!

A Botanic Garden in Istanbul! İstanbul'da bir Botanik Bahçesi!

2009-08-03T20:57:00.014+03:00

I remember once when I was about 5, looking everywhere for my superball. It was my favorite toy. I'd just seen it a little earlier, and I was looking everywhere...under the couch, behind all the chairs, in my room, in the hall. I asked my mom if she'd seen it. "Yes, I did see it!" she said. "Where?" "Oh, I think you'll find it soon enough," she said. A couple of minutes later, I started pestering her again to tell me where it was. "It's very close to you!" she said. When I couldn't stand it any longer and was about to get whiny, she said "take a look in your hand."

It was there. And no, I was not a head-start drug user!

Beş yaşı civarındayken en sevdiğim oyuncağım olan "super top"umu arıyordum. Koltukların arakasında, yatak odamda, koridorda, her yerde arıyordum ama nafile... Anneme gördün mü diye sorduğumda, gülümseyerek "evet, senin de çok yakında bulacağını zannediyorum" dedi. Aramaya devam ettim, yine bulamayınca anneme mızmız etmeye başlayınca sırıtarak "eline baksana" dedi. Oradaymış. Ve o küçük yaşta narkotik kullanmaya başladığımı zannetmeyin...! Sonuçta bazen çok aradığımız şeyler burnumuzun altındayken nedense farkına varmıyoruz. Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanik Bahçesi ise tam öyle bir vaka...İstanbul'da yaşadığım dokuz yıl boyunca otobüste bilmem kaç kez oradan geçmişim, ama varlığının bile farkına varmadım! Onların ayrıntılı web sitesinde burada yazdığım bütün bilgileri bulabildiğinize göre (hem de tembel olduğum için) bütün yazımı Türkçeye çevirmeyeceğim. Fakat hiç gitmediyseniz, hiç zaman kaybetmeden bu bahçeyi ziyaret etmenizi kesinlikle tavsiye ediyorum!

The point is, sometimes something you wish you had can be right under your nose and for some reason you just find out very late. Such was the case when, almost two months ago now, I learned that Istanbul had a botanic garden! I did know about one at Istanbul University but it is famously unkept and neglected; this one is a real jewel in a very unexpected place. As a matter of fact, I've gone right by it on the bus to Kozyatağı, and never even noticed it! And since it took me so long to find out about it, I think it's only appropriate that my post about it is late as well.

I actually was not out looking for botanic gardens; a gardening friend of mine invited me to a lunch by a group called İmece Evi. İmece is Turkish for a traditional village work party. In the old days, and sometimes still today, certain jobs like boiling, drying and pounding bulgur, making dry lavash for winter, food for weddings, etc. are easier to do as a group effort and all the women or men of the village will pitch in. The İmece Evi group has a communal village in the Kazdağı area, where they grow organic produce, learn to live naturally and sell the products of their (joint) labor. They are also planning to begin restoring and farming in an old abandoned village in the mountains near Izmir. The lunch was at the Nezahat Gökyiğit Botanic Garden in the unlikely area of Ataşehir, Istanbul. I say "unlikely" because...well, look at this! If anyone doubts the resourcefulness of the Turks, this should be enough to set them straight:

The garden is literally surrounded and bi-/tri-/quadrisected by freeway. And I have to admit that when I first heard there was a botanic garden there, I was not expecting anything very impressive; the entrance to the garden off the freeway did little to make me any more optimistic.

Sometimes it's really nice to be wrong though. In Istanbul, where there seem to be about 20 plants available in most nurseries, there were truly interesting things growing along the path up into the garden, Verbascums, rare Centaureas, Salvias and more. With over 75 species, Turkey is the center of distribution of the genus Verbascum, or mulleins. But even though there are some dandies here, they are ubiquitously seen as weeds, and even among those interested in flower gardening, it would be a rare gardener who would actually plant one! So I was thrilled to see this specimen, a Vebascum I saw in the wild near Selçuk, site of the ancient city of Ephesus. It's a truly beautiful thing with its white fur and half-appressed leaves up the flowering stem.

But the really amazing thing to me was that even though the garden was in some of the bleakest concrete high-rise sprawl of Istanbul, they had done a beautiful job of hiding it. The garden is divided by the highways into five "islands." From the main garden there is an overpass into a large picnic area which is also nicely planted. Another beautifully planned section is accessed via a drainage tunnel that runs underneath the highway. They have camouflaged this so well (see the first picture above) that you really have no idea the highway is there, and the walls of the tunnel on either side are outfitted with lighted panels explaining different aspects of plant evolution, adaptation and survival strategies.

In addition to the purely ornamental plantings, there are plantings representing a variety of habitats throughout Turkey, where local plants with specialized soil needs thrive. To the left is a beautiful scarlet Glaucium that was growing in a bed devoted to the salt plains near the Salt Lake (Tuz Gölü) in Central Anatolia.

The garden was first planted by Mr. Nihat Gökyiğit, not as a botanic garden at all, but rather with a double purpose: as a memororial to his wife Nezahat as well as an attempt to repair the land that had been degraded as a result of freeway construction. Over time it grew, and was declared a botanic garden in April 2003. It is now a member of the International Association of Botanic Gardens, and operates its own foundation.

Below is a spectacular Delphinium species native to the volcanic steppe soils of Anatolia.

Though many who visit it undoubtedly see it as simply another place to have a picnic (and in Turkey, a picnic means a grill, a gas canister to make tea and lots of meat smoke!), and a picnic area has been opened, accessed by an overpass, the hope is that people who come for the green space will also explore the rest of the garden and become more aware of Turkey's incredible plant diversity and the need for protecting it. To the right is a poster about an endangered species of Centaurea which grows in the area of Konya. And of course the plant is being grown in the garden; below are some of its unopened flower buds.

The garden has a herbarium, propagation areas and classrooms with courses and workshops on urban gardening, composting and botanical illustration. It also has an ever growing botanical library, and puts out a quarterly gardening magazine, the only one I'm aware of in Turkey which is really devoted to plants instead of "expensive crap you can buy to stick in your garden!"

In addition to the two planted islands and the picnic area, there are two more islands which are not open to the public. The reason is that although they belong to the garden, the only access to them is by dashing across the busy freeway! One of them has been allowed to develop completely naturally, as a living museum of plant life in the Istanbul area.

You can find further photographs of the garden on its home page under the "Album" header in the English section, as well as on this site.

Lost and Found II / Kayıp Eşya Bölümü II

2009-07-14T21:33:00.000+03:00

Sometimes a plant becomes loaded with so many memories that it's hard to imagine not growing it, and there is one such plant in our family.

Years ago, when I was maybe 8 years old, my grandmother gave my mother what looked like nothing more than a pot of dirt and said, "grow this." My mother asked what it was, and all she would say was "something beautiful!" Mom never did know just what it was supposed to be, but what did come up was a seedling of an evening primrose with larger and more fragrant flowers than any I have ever seen. I sent seeds to somone for identification and he told me it was Oenothera biennis. I'm not convinced though, because I've never seen an O. biennis with 1) such large flowers, 2) such fragrant flowers, and 3) such a frequently branching habit. It does sometimes get a bit tall and gangly but when it's growing well, it also branches frequently.

The plant seeded itself in the rocks on our back patio, and each evening new flowers would open like time-lapse photography, releasing a heavy scent of jasmine tea into the humid Iowa summer air. When we had summer parties, there was always a crowd of people gathered around the stand of evening primrose (which we just called "night flowers"), watching in anticipation as the buds swelled slowly, then suddenly opened completely over the course of about 20 seconds, the sticky pollen stringing between the anthers in wait of the hawk moths who would be visiting, almost immediately. It turned out their larvae also liked to eat it as much as they did tomatoes.

When I moved to Seattle, I made sure I got seed of this plant that was such a part of my childhood, and grew it in the front garden of the first house I live in. It did beautifully there, and even produced one almost-white flowering plant which unfortunately did not recur. I moved to a second house and the night flowers followed me there too. Finally I moved to the last house I'd live in Seattle, where I gardened for nine years. I planted some older seed I'd saved, but it didn't come up - evidently I hadn't kept it dry enough. I went back to my old place to find a seed pod, and the entire garden had been dug up and replaced with a vegetable garden (oh, the horror!). My mother had since moved to Arkansas and though the plant will grow there, it seems to be a favorite of the deer, and she's given up. (The local O. biennis survives though, which also makes me suspect it's something else.)

So I got desperate and searched through the lawn near where my flower garden had been, and found three tiny seedlings. They became the parents of a new overgrowth of evening primrose. This time I was sure to share seed with friends as well!

When I came to Istanbul, I had no garden, but after a year or so I was living in a place with a balcony and tried growing seed I got from a friend back in Seattle in pots. It didn't like the pots, or more likely the insubstantial fluff that is sold as "potting soil" here. I saved the rest of the seed, and when I found a place with a garden a few years later, one of the first things I did was to plant "our" night flowers! And once again, the seed was no longer viable. This time, finding seed was a bigger adventure. On my next trip to Seattle, I called all my friends, and one person did have one plant growing in the garden. About to leave town, he told me he'd leave a stem of it on the chair on the front porch. A day later I went by...there was nothing there. He later said he'd put it there but evidently a housemate had been cleaning... I couldn't find anyone who had any, so in a last-ditch attempt, I went to my old house. And there, right on the edge of a sidewalk, in among the weeds, was a stem with about 8 seedpods in it. I nearly threw my back out, I leaned over to grab it so fast!

So now I've learned that it has a name here too - "Ezan Çiçeği" - the ezan is the call to prayer, which no doubt refers to the fact that it starts opening about the time of the evening ezan. I've seen seed of it offered, but it's not quite the same as mine, so I don't grow any other varieties. It's now seeding happily around my garden, so it appears that this plant will be with me for a while to come.

Squash Flowers - Stuffed / Kabak Çiçeği Dolması

2009-07-14T01:48:00.000+03:00

Better late than never! They ended up being with meat. I suppose I could have appended this to the previous post but that would have meant 10 minutes spent removing tags....

My filling is with chopped meat, rice, parsley, grated tomato, tomato paste, pepper paste, cumin, salt, pepper, and lemon juice. As my mom would say, it's "almost good enough to eat!"

Edible Weeds - Amaranth / Yenilebilir Otlar - Sirkem-Horozibiği

2009-07-11T23:21:00.000+03:00

In the States, Amaranth is best known as the holy grain crop of the Andes, where it was the staple grain of the Incas. It was also an important ritual food; cakes of it were made with the blood of sacrifices and this led to it being forbidden by the colonial priests. It's an incredibly productive plant, the large grain varieties can produce over a pound of seed per head.

There are also several ornamental amaranths; "Love lies bleeding" is one of the best known. I'm growing one grain Amaranth - Orange Giant (which I planted way too late so it's not "giant" at all...maybe next year...), and a beautiful deep red one called "Hopi Red Dye," that has seeded itself prolifically each year since I first planted it in my last garden several years ago. It was used as a source of red dye for ceremonial foods. My apologies for the really bad quality of the picture here. The plants are quite puny as well since it's being grown in the dry flower bed, but it goes to show just what a tough plant it is!

But there are local, native Amaranths in Turkey too, and they are just as tough. None of them are showy, they are green plants with green flowers, some with red stems. They are mostly considered weeds here, and will come up in waves wherever the soil is watered regularly and lots of places where it is not.

I would probably be trying to eradicate it entirely if it weren't for the fact that it's one of my all-time-favorite summer greens. Istanbul is not such a center of wild green lore as other parts of Turkey, and many local people just pull it out without ever thinking of eating it, but in the Aegean region, "Sirkemotu" is a very well-known and popular wild green. It, along with purslane, are two of the very few wild greens that are edible throughout the summer. You can pull off the tender last few inches of stem along with whatever leaves are there, and it will immediately branch and come back improved. If it's happy, it can get up to a meter and a half tall though usually it's shorter. Mine would get that high but I tend to keep it in check, otherwise I'd have nothing else growing in the garden. It produces a lot of seed. So much that I will not consider requests for seeds of these plants...I don't want to inflict it on the southern U.S.! Don't worry, plain old Love Lies Bleeding is every bit as good to eat, and actually preferred in many Greek gardens, where it serves as both an edible and as an ornamental. In Greece, it is known as "Vlita." Vlito is also a slang term for someon who is not too bright, due to the fact that if you eat a really large amount of it, it is said to make you a bit foggy-headed. I wouldn't know, pretty much any good meal does that to me anyway and I don't consider "food coma" to be an entirely bad thing!

You can use Amaranth in almost any way you'd use spinach - raw in salads, as a filling for pita (a friend in Naxos made a really nice "vlitopita") or boiled/steamed as a potherb and drizzled with olive oil and lemon. A little crushed garlic mixed in is not bad at all. Just be sure not to overboil it; just like spinach it will become mushy if overcooked but I think overcooked Amaranth is even less appetizing.

Today I made a very Turkish dish out of it - gözleme. It's a bit of work but not all that hard. I started with a plain dough of flour and water with a little oil mixed in and a bit of salt. It should be about the same consistency as bread dough or, as they say here, "like an earlobe." Knead it for around ten minutes, then cover it and let it rest. After 15 minutes or so, divide the dough into pieces about the size of a large egg and let rest again. (You might want larger or smaller, depending on the size of your frying pan.)

By the way, if you don't feel like dealing with dough, you could also take two flour tortillas and do this as a quesadilla. But it won't be nearly as good!

Meanwhile make your filling. Chop the amaranth leaves fairly finely. Chop an onion finely and sautee it, then add it to the Amaranth (the amaranth will cook later). The rest is up to you; I mixed in a handful of crumbled beyaz peynir, Turkey's take on feta cheese, some red flake pepper and some paprika, some salt and black pepper and that's pretty much it. You could also add kashar cheese, or boiled and semi-mashed potato.

Heat a heavy frying pan. In Turkey they use a "sac" (pronounced "saj"), like a shallow convex wok placed over hot coals. But a cast iron frying pan or griddle will do just fine.

Take a piece of dough, generously flour your counter and roll it out into a long oval about 1 mm thick. Here they use a thin dowel-like rolling pin called an oklava to do this, but you can do it with a regular rolling pin as well. You'll have to be a bit more patient though. Once it's open, take a generous spoon of the filling and spread it over half of the oval of dough, then fold the uncovered side over the filling. Press the edges to seal. Add a bit of oil to your pan, and put the gözleme in, and brush some more oil over the top. Once the bottom is browned, flip it over and cook the other side. Repeat with the rest of the dough. Gözleme filled with various fillings is a common wedding dish in E. Turkey, and I saw gözleme filled with Amaranth in the weekly market in Söke near Kuşadası. By the way, Kuşadası is pronounced "KOOSH a-da-suh," not "koosaDAWsee!"

Another great way to eat Amaranth is with eggs. Fry some onion in a generous amount of olive oil, add chopped Amaranth along with pepper if you like and saute till the amaranth is soft. Add salt to taste, then pour beaten eggs over the Amaranth, cover and let cook till the eggs are cooked through. Afiyet olsun!

Kabak Çiçeği Gibi... Squash Flowers

2009-07-04T20:16:00.001+03:00

I'm not much of an early morning person... Actually I love early morning but early morning doesn't like me. But today I did decide to rise with the chickens (well, somwehere) and get out into the garden to photograph - and then collect - one of the treats of summer: squash blossoms. I set the clock for 8:30 but for some godly unknown reason woke up at 7, and coffee in hand, stumbled out into the garden. There was no sound except birds, a dog barking somewhere and the rumble of distant thunder. As soon as I finished shooting, the first drops began to fall.

Ben hiç bir anlamla erkenci değilim. Aslında erken sabah vaktini çok seviyorum fakat o beni sevmiyor galiba... Yine de bugün yazın sunduğu güzelliklerinden bir tanesini fotoğraflayıp toplamık için tavuklarla (nerede olursa olsunlar) kalkıp bahçeye çıkmaya karar verdim. Çalar saatimi 8.30'a ayarladım fakat nedense 7'de uyandım; kahve elimde bahçeye tökezledim. Kuşlar, bir yerden havlayan bir köpek ile uzakten gelen gök uğultu sesinden başka bir ses yoktu. Bitirir bitirmez yağmurun ilk damlaları etrafıma düşmeye başladı.

I love to grow winter squash. Summer squash is nice and I'll eat it gladly; it's arguably a more useful thing to grow in terms of the sheer amount it produces. Everyone remembers their neighborhood's dreaded "zucchini lady" who was always coming around with armloads of zeppelin-size zucchini to palm off on the neighbors. That would be my mom. ;) But the fun in growing winter squash is the incredible variety of different shapes, colors and flavors. I've resolved to try at least one new one each year.

Balkabakları yetiştirmeyi çok seviyorum. Yeşil kabak da güzel, seve seve yerim, hem de ürettiği miktara göre belki biraz daha verimli bir kabak olabilir. Amerika'da her mahallenin korkulan, toplamayı unuttuğu kocaman kabakları komşulara yüklendirmeye çalışan bir "kabakçı kadını" oluyordu... yani annem... :) Fakat balkabağı yetiştirmenin zevki daha çok sonsuz şekil, renk ve tat yelpazesinden geliyor. Her yıl en azından bir yeni cins denemeye karar verdim.

The flowers are also a draw; winter or summer, there's not much else in the vegetable department that produces anything quite as voluptuous as a squash flower. In Turkey when a formerly well-behaved boy starts sowing his wild oats and going a little wild, they say "He opened like a squash flower." It's an apt description because they are there to do one thing and one thing only - sex! Not only are the flowers beautiful, but they have a delicious fragrance that reminds me of tall bearded iris. They're edible to boot, but more about that later.

Bir de çiçekleri var, ister yeşil olsun ister bal kabağı olsun, bu kadar albenisi olan bir çiçek yoktur sebze bahçesinde. Zaten "kabak çiçeği gibi açıldı" deyimi hiç tesadüf değil! Gerçekten çok iyi bir benzetmedir çünkü bunların bir fonksiyonu var - bitki seksi işte! Hem güzeldir hem de süsen aromalı çiçekleri mis gibi kokuyor. Yenir de, o konuya daha sonra değinelim.

In my old garden I grew the local one, known as Adapazarı, for the town east of here where they are grown extensively. It's a BIG squash, with deeply-ribbed gray "pumpkin" type fruits weighing up to 20 kilos. The trouble with growing such a large squash is that although they keep well, once you've cut into it it's like slaughtering a sheep. If you don't have a spacious freezer you have to make a lot of pumpkin pie fast! So now I'm preferring slightly smaller squash.

Eski bahçemde pazarlarda yaygın olan Adapazarı cinsini yetiştiriyordum. Çok lezzetli bir bal kabağıdır ancak öyle kocaman bal kabaklarının desavantajı, çok iyi saklanabilmesine rağmen bir kestin mi kurban kesmek gibi olması! Ya büyük bir derin dondurucunuz olacak ya da bütün mahalleye dağıtacaksınız. Yine de kendinizi komşularınıza beğendirmeya amaçlıyorsanız bal kabağı dağıtmak hiç kötü bir fikir değil! Fakat şimdi biraz daha küçük cinsler tercih edip, Adapazarı kabaklarını pazarcılara bırakıyorum.

This year I'm growing three - a Japanese one called Black Futsu, a old French variety called "Rouge Vif d'Etampes" and an Italian heirloom type called "Marina di Chioggia." The Kabocha went in a little late but it's catching up fast. It produces small squash with a (supposedly) chestnut-like flavor. I'll be looking forward to that! Vif D'Etampes looks to be a beautiful thing, with broad, flattened brilliant red-orange fruits. Marina di Chioggia is definitely the "oddball" of the bunch, with dark gray, warty fruits. Both have started to set fruit now.

Bu yıl ise Siyah Futsu adlı bir Japon cinsi, Fransa'nın eski ve meşhur bir cinsi olan Rouge Vif d'Etampes ile İtalya'nın bir sahil kentinden gelen Marina di Chioggia olmak üzere üç tane yetiştiriyorum. Kabocha'yı biraz geç ektim fakat yetişiyor. Ürettiği küçük boylu kabaklarının tadı kestaneye benziyormuş, onu dört gözle bekliyorum! Çarpıcı turuncu-kırmızı yayvan meyveleri ile Rouge Vif d'Etampes çok güzel bir şeye benziyor. Koyu gri "siğilli" kabakları ile Marina di Chioggia ise kuşkusuz grubun garibidir, okuduklarıma göre en lezzetlisi de.

As long as you provide a few basics, winter squash aren't too difficult to grow. They want sun, decent soil with plenty of organic matter, and a good supply of water. You'll do yourself a favor if you dig in a healthy amount of manure in the fall, supplemented by compost. This year I added "green manure" in the form of fava bean stalks; I just chopped them up into the soil below where the vines were to be planted.

Birkaç temel ihtiyacı yerine getirirseniz bal kabakları yetiştirmesi pek zor değil. Güneş, bol organik madde içeren iyi bir toprak ve bol su istiyorlar. Sonbaharda toprağa bol gübre artı compost (çürümüş yaprak, çim, mutfaktan kabuklar v.s.) katarsanız çok iyi olur. Bu yıl ise "yeşil gübre" de kattım: sonbaharda yoğun olarak ektiğim bakla gövdelerini kürkle ufalayıp kabakları ektiğim toprağın içine karıştırdım.

The common knowledge is to grow them in "hills," but I'm not really sure why. One thing squash really resent is dry soil, and hilling IMHO makes it more likely for the soil to dry out, especially when the plants are young. I just dig the soil deeply and plant at the normal level. The American Indians of the Southwest actually planted them in deeper depressions so that they would have a better water supply. If the soil is moist, the vines will root readily at the nodes, and you can help this along by mounding the soil up every 8th node or so. The large leaves of squash plants transpire quickly and this way there are more roots to help quench their thirst. In the picture at left an emerging root is visible.

Türkiye'yi bilmiyorum, Amerika'da hep "tepelere" ekilmesi öneriliyor. Nedenini pek anlamıyorum açıkçası, balkabağı kuru topraktan nefret ettiğine göre tepelere ekmek, kuruma olasılığını daha da artıyor. Ben toprağı derine kazıp, toprak seviyesinde ekiyorum. Hatta Amerika'nın güney batı bölgesindeki Kızılderililer, suları eksilmesin diye küçük çukurlara ekiyorlar. Toprak nemliyse gövdelerden de kök salar, bunu teşvik için 5-8 boğumda birini toprakla hafifçe gömebilirsiniz. Geniş yaprakları, sıcak havada bol su kaybettiği için ne kadar kökü varsa susamışlığını o kadar iyi giderebilirler. Soldaki resimde bir kök görülür.

Once the vines get to the necessary size, they'll begin to produce flowers, and lots of them. Squash have separate male and female flowers, and the male flowers are produced first. This ensures that when the female flowers come along, there will be plenty of male flowers to ensure that they get pollinated. If the flowers don't get pollinated, you get no fruit. We have a beehive in the garden so the deed was done long before I ever got out there, but if you have a dearth of bees in your area, you can help them along by pollinating them yourself. You'll have to get up early in the morning though; as soon as the heat sets in the flowers shrivel and close.

Bitkiler yeterli büyüyünce çiçekler de açmaya başlar, hem de çok. Kabakların erkek ve dişi çiçekleri ayrıdır, ilk çıkanların hepsi erkek oluyor. Bu durum, dişi çiçekler gelince tozlaşmayı yerine getirebilecek kadar erkek çiçekleri olmasını sağlıyor. Çiçekler tozlaşılmazsa kabak da olmaz. Bizim bahçemizde bir arı kovanı olduğu için ben çıkmadan çok önce iş işten geçiyor fakat büyük şehirlerde arı eksikliği ciddi bir problem olabiliyor. Durum öyleyse tozlaşmayı siz de yapabilirsiniz. Yetişmek için erkenci olmanız gerekecek ama; sıcaklık basar basmaz çiçekler solup kapanıyor.

How to sex a squash flower?

Kabak çiçeğinin cinsiyeti nasıl tespit edilir?

The male flowers, which you'll see first, are fairly simple affairs and borne on tall thin stems. The flower in the photo to the right is male. Notice how it's held high up (though they aren't always above the leaves), and the base of the flower is fairly simple.

İlk önce göreceğiniz erkek çiçekler oldukça sade olup, yüksek gövdelerde yer alıyor. Sağdaki çiçek erkektir. Çiçeğin dibi sade, her zaman öyle olmasa da gövdesi onu yaprakların üstüne yükseltmiş.

Inside is a single anther (actually a group of them but they appear as a single unit). The produce a lot of pollen, enough to generously cover the bees that are irresistably drawn to them.

Çiçeğin içinde tek bir ercik başı var. Aslında 5 tane var fakat birleşmiş haliyle tek gibi görünyor. Cazibesine karşı koyamayan arıları tatmin etmek için çok polen üretiyorlar!

The female flowers, which start to appear a bit later, are always in the minority. They are borne close to the stem, and are atop a round swelling - the ovary - which will grow into a squash if the flower is pollinated. Below are newly developing female flowers of Marina di Chioggia and Rouge Vif d'Etampes side by side for comparison.

Biraz daha sonra çıkmaya başlayan dişi çiçekleri ise her zaman daha az oluyor. Ana gövdenin çok yakınında açıp, tozlaşma gerçekleşirse kabak olacak yuvarlak bir tohumluğun üstünde yer alıyor. Aşağıdaki fotoğrafta kıyaslayabilmeniz için Marina di Chioggia ile Rouge Vif d'Etampes'ın yeni gelişen dişi çiçekleri görünüyor.

They grow fast, and a few days later they're open and ready for business! Just hush up about those weeds...

Çiçekler hızlı büyüyor, birkaç gün sonra ise açık ile işe hazır olacaklar! Otlara gelince...yorumlar istemiyorum!

Their insides are also different. On the left is a male flower - notice the shower of pollen on the bee inside. On the right is a female flower; to get to the nectar produced in the base, she has to squeeze in between the three-lobed pistil and the walls of the flower, ensuring that the load of pollen on her back will be rubbed off.

İçleri de farklı tabii. Sol taraftaki erkek çiçeğidir, içindeki arıyı kaplayan poleni farkedin. Sağdaki ise dişidir; tam dibinde üretilen nektara ulaşmak için çiçeğin duvarları ile 3 kısımlı dişilik organının arasında sıkışarak sırtına yapışmış olan polen yükünün dişilik organına yapışmasını sağlanır.

Success!

Başarı!

If pollination is successful you'll know it within a couple days, because the stem whill thicken and the ovary will begin to grow at an astonishing rate. Here are flowers just two days after pollination; Rouge Vif d'Etampes is almost golf ball size already.

Tozlaşma başarılı olarak gerçekleştirilirse bir iki gün içinde gövdenin kalınlaşması, tohumluğun şaşırtıcı bir hızla büyümesinden belli olur. Yukarıdaki fotoğraf, çiçeklerin tozlaşmadan sadece iki gün sonraki durumunu gösteriyor; Rouge Vif d'Etampes'ınki bir golf topunun boyuna büyümüş bile.

Aborted Flowers

Düşen Çiçekler

Often in my experience the first one or two female flowers abort without opening. I'm not sure why, but if they continue to abort it may be that the weather has gotten too hot, or your plants aren't getting enough water. I have fairly well-drained soil, and give them a good soaking each morning. If your female flowers make it to blooming size and then abort a day or two later, they were most likely not pollinated, or under-pollinated and the plant "decided" that it was not worth it to expend the energy to produce a big honking squash for the sake of a few seeds.

Genelde bende ilk çıkan dişi çiçekler nedense açılmadan kuruyup düşüyorlar. Fakat sürekli düşüyorlarsa sebep, havanın fazla sıcak olduğu veya susuzluk olabilir. Benim toprağım fazla yağlı değil, her sabah iyice suluyorum. (Burada akşam suluyorlar genelde fakat gecede yapraklarda kalan su damlaları, mantar sorunlarına yol açabilir.) Eğer dişi çiçekler açılıp sonra dökülüyorsa, büyük ihtimalle ya hiç tozlaşılmamış ya yetersizce tozlaşılmış. Bu takdirde bitki, bir avuç tohum için kocaman bir kabak üretmenin faydasız olduğunu "karar" veriyor.

Hand Pollination to Maintain a Variety

Bir Cinsi Korumak İçin Elle Tozlaşmak

If you want to collect seed from an heirloom variety for next year and are growing more than one variety of squash, you'll want to hand pollinate. Start by selecting a female flower and bagging it with some cheesecloth or gauze to keep the bees out, or you may get a cross with the others you are growing. When the female flower opens, take a male flower (preferably from a different plant of the same variety), peel off the petals leaving only the stamen in the center, rub the stamen all over the pistil of the female flower, and replace the cheesecloth. You can do the same thing with a small paintbrush. Once you're sure that you've gotten pollination and the flower fades, you can remove the cheesecloth. Be sure and mark your fruit to remind you which one it is.

Eğer birden fazla cins yetiştirirken tohumlarını gelecek yıl için saklamak istediğiniz beğendiğiniz bir cins varsa, melezlememelerinden emin olmak için elle tozlaşmanız gerekecek. İlk önce gelişen bir dişi çiçek seçip, arıların girişini engellemek için bir parça tülbentle hafifçe sarayın. Çiçek açılınca aynı cinsten fakat tercihen başka bir bitkiden bir erkek çiçeği koparıp, sarı yapraklarını tamamen sökün. Geri kalan ercik başını dişi çiçeğin dişilik organına sürünüz. Sonra tülbendi bir daha yerine bağlayıp bekleyin. Tozlaşma işini küçük bir fırça ile yapabilirsniz. Tozlaşmanın gerçekleştiği, çiçein solduğundan sonra tülbendi alabilirsiniz. Hangi kabak asıl tohumunu içerdiğini hatırlamak için mutlaka etiketleyin!

Eating Them

In villages on the island of Mytilene in Greece, kids coming from the garden with big boquets of squash flowers was a common sight. Their mothers would stuff them in exactly the same way as peppers or grape leaves; you can use your favorite mixture but I think if you do it without meat the flavor of the squash flowers will come through better.

You can also fry them, either dipping them in batter or dredging them in egg then flour before they hit the oil.

Another way I found, from a YouTube comment no less, is to make a quesadilla out of them. Put a tortilla in a hot pan, sprinkle on grated cheese, a bit of hot sauce if you like, arrange the squash flowers over the cheese, then cover with a second tortilla, and cook, turning occasionally, until the inside is cooked and the tortillas are lightly toasted. I was going to take a picture but Blogspot adds endless "div" tags every time a photo is added, and I worked so long to get the spaces right!

Nasil Yenir?

Yunanistan'daki Midilli Adasının köylerinde bahçelerde gelen, ellerinde kabak çiçeği demetleri tutan çocuklara sık sık rastgeliyordum. Anneleri tıpkı yaprak sarması veya biber dolması gibi yapıyordu. Zaten Türkiye'de de yapılır, özellikle Ege bölgesinde. Bence çiçeğin tadını daha güzel ortaya çıkardığı için zeytinyağlısı daha lezzetli.

Ayrıca güzel bir meze için ya hamura, ya da ilk önce yumurtaya sonra una batırıp kızartılır.

YouTube'da bırakılan bir yorumdan öğrendiğim bir yöntem daha, "quesadilla"sını yapmaktır. Artık her yerde satılan tortilla ekmeğinden bir tanesini hiç yağ katmadan kızgın bir tavaya yerleştirin, sonra üzerine rende peyir ve isteğe göre acı sos serpin. Sonra peynirin üzerine kabak çiçeklerini dizip, ikinci tortilla ile kapatın. Tavada birkaç kez çevirerek, içi pişmiş, dışı biraz çıtır hale gelinceye kadar pişirin. Herhalde gözlemesi de çok güzel olurdu.

Catching Up!

2009-06-27T22:42:00.000+03:00

I've been lazy just lately, not only because I've been distracted by politics and duties, but also just because it's been damn hot, and I've felt more like sitting around drinking cold things than doing garden stuff!

In Seattle, June and early July were the real peak times in my garden. Here it's earlier, and now that things are getting good and hot; the ephemerals are done, and I'm mostly keeping busy just trying to keep up with watering.

In the flower garden, the Lavatera I call "ex-Barnsley" is going great guns, and is considerably taller than I am. I say "ex" Barnsley because I bought Lavatera "Barnsley" years ago in my Seattle garden and for two or three years it produced the pale pink, dark-centered flowers. But sometimes this variety reverts back to it's original form, a much more uniform pink. I got my start early in the spring and didn't know it had reverted until later, but no matter, I still like it even if I probably would never have actually bought it. The pink flowers keep coming for a weeks and weeks, standing out against the small dark green leaves. It's quite drought-tolerant to boot.

The sweet peas are on their last legs now. This is the first year I've ever been really successful with them and it was worth the extra effort. I grew two old varieties: Cupani, a bicolor pink that was among the first to be grown in Europe, and Matucana, reputed to be the closest to the original species. Both are known for their exceptional fragrance. They certainly lived up to the hype; I brought a few flowers of "Matucana" (L), and they soon overwhelmed me on the table where I was working, so they went across the room! Now there is one forlorn pink flower left, and lots of seed pods. The stink bug can't be getting much of a meal from the almost-dry pods, so he must just be here for the exposure.

The big old magnolia tree is in full bloom, and though it's a bit scruffy and the old yellowing blooms still hang on, but a newly-opened magnolia is a beautiful thing to behold.

Down below, an enormous old canna is in full bloom. I used to hate cannas. With their banana-like foliage, they just seemed not to fit anywhere in Iowa where I grew up. The real problem was what they were planted with, or not planted with. Ours is a variety of the "indian shot" canna, named for its rock-hard seeds. It's not as flamboyantly showy as some of the hybrids are, I like it. They are incredibly easy to propagate from seed, you need to scarify them (I use a steak knife to get past the hard black seed coat) and soak them in water overnight. Once they sprout they develop very quickly. I started a few this spring, and out of eight, one came up with red leaves so it was a keeper.

The other thing in full bloom is the sunflowers. They have an interesting personality, there's somethign old-fashioned about them, and they always make me think of a bunch of old pioneer women standing around gossiping. I don't remember what the variety was, but it's a mixture of various colors with branching stems. There were supposed to be pinks and whites in there but mine all range through yellows to reddish browns. The other thing they don't do is face the sun; they look any way they feel like. I didn't plant a single one on purpose; they are all volunteers from the ones I grew last year.

Just like last year, I had a crowd of five-foot ones, and a single very tall one (as in about 8 feet) with a very dark center and smaller petals in relation to its large center. It has a slightly different habit than the others as well; while the shorter ones tend to set new buds close together, this one makes more of a "boquet" of flowers each on its individual long stem.

It's really a little late for Nigella but for some reason mine got off to a late start. So they are blooming all over the place and I'm humoring them with water, but the tallest one is a foot or so tall. Next year they'll volunteer on their own time.

The Daturas are some of my favorite night-bloomers. Not sure which one this is, either metel or wrightii. The plant is perennial here, coming back from the roots each spring. The enormous white flowers open just before dusk, and when several open at once, the fragrance fills the entire garden.

Last on today's list is Amaranth "Hopi Red Dye," which I've been growing for several years now. I abuse it, otherwise it would a lot larger. When it's happy, it can get up to five feet tall, but when they grow in the flower garden with mostly drought-tolerant plants, they rarely get over two feet tall, and grow in nice mid-sized clumps. Like most amaranths the leaves are edible, though I prefer the local wild green one for eating, and will talk about them in the next post.

On a Non-Gardening Subject

2009-06-24T23:07:00.000+03:00

It's been a while since I've added anything to my blog; the reason is that though my garden has not gone anywhere, my thoughts have been elsewhere, namely in our neighbor to the east, Iran. I've had good friends from and in Iran ever since the 70s, witnessed how they have been affected by an oppressive government, a revolution, a war, more oppression, renewed hope and bitter disappointment. It has been with a mixture of fascination, horror and hope that I've followed recent events there. In this spirit I share this open letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, and hope you will consider signing it as well.

To: To the people of the world!

Open letter to Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations

And

To the leaders of the Free World

Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, Noble Ladies and Gentlemen; heads of the democratically elected governments of the world,

Over the past few days, following the fraudulent Iranian presidential “elections”, the entire world has been witnessing the uprising of the freedom loving people of Iran against deception, injustice and tyranny of the rulers of the Islamic Republic.

The Iranian people have been demonstrating their outrage against their repressive rulers by the millions and in epic levels throughout Iran. After 30 years of oppressive and despotic rule by the clerics, the great and heroic people of Iran are now determined not to allow their intelligence to be insulted any longer and have decided that ENOUGH IS ENOUGH and are unequivocally calling for an end to the tyrant rule of the clerics in Iran. The Islamic rulers and the clergy not only have no respect for the will of the Iranian people, but have demonstrated their truly fascist essence by resorting to the most barbaric and inhumane crack downs on people’s peaceful demonstrations.

In their quest for achieving their goal, which is for a free, democratic and secular Iran, the Iranian people are being confronted by the most brutal and barbaric attacks by the state police, security forces and armed thugs organised by Ahmadinejad’s government. Thousands of protestors have been brutally assaulted and beaten up and many have been killed in the most vulgar manners during the peaceful rallies in Tehran and other major cities.

There are hundreds of pictorial evidences recorded on still and movie cameras showing the barbaric behaviours of the Islamic Republic’s security forces, which in time shall be presented to the International Courts of Law as hard evidence in order to bring the perpetrators of these crimes to justice. The ultimate responsibility of these crimes will be put upon the rulers of the regime, in particular, Mr. Khamenei himself; the so called “Supreme Leader”!

We, the undersigned, draw your immediate attention to the following:

• Any State with such measures of brutality and savagery against its own people can not possibly be tolerated and hence be worthy of recognition by the world community.

• At these critical moments, the Iranian people need the support of the world community who have been watching the ongoing events in Iran with dismay.

• The free and democratic nations can not possibly tolerate such barbaric behaviours of a repressive state against the will its own people.

• The Islamic Republic of Iran has been and continues to be in gross and intolerable violation of all international conventions to which they are party to and have been signatory to adhere to.

• After the recent events in Iran, and the barbaric response of the Islamic government to the protestors in the aftermath of the rigged “elections”, the world community can not possibly consider the Islamic Republic’s government as the true and legitimate representative of the great Iranian nation.

• We demand the United Nations to expel the Islamic Republic of Iran from the United Nations and void its membership in protest for its blatant violation of human rights in Iran. There are hundreds of undeniable pictures and video clips to substantiate this fact.

• Equally well, we ask all the Free States and governments of the world to expel the Islamic Republic’s so called “Diplomats” from their countries and to close down its embassies in their respective countries to show their denunciation of Islamic Republic’s inhumane behaviour against its people and to support the legitimate demands of the freedom seeking people of Iran.

We expect the free world community to stand beside the Iranian people during these critical times and to show their support for their freedom seeking struggle during these decisive moments.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

To sign the petition, click here.

Lost and Found! / Kayıp Eşya Bölümü

2009-06-04T02:28:00.000+03:00

Finally, a post on something that smells good!

Fragrance is one of the most important elements to me in the garden. I grow plants based on lots of merits - color, form (I don't much like double flowers), leaf form and habit, but I'm always a sucker for something that smells good!

In my Seattle garden, one of my favorite plants for fragrance was Night-Scented Stocks (Matthiola bicornis). I'd read of this plant several times and thought "that sounds interesting, I ought to try it some time," but for years never did. When I finally got around to it and the first few flowers opened and filled the garden with a sweet-coconutty fragrance, I decided I'd never be without it again. The only downside is that while the plant is not outright ugly, it's insubstantial and straggly, and the flowers droop during the day. But I really should get some more seed of it nontheless.

Several years ago I was visiting my friend Souzana on the island of Naxos in Greece, and we took a trip up to the northern coast. On a bank by the sea there was a huge stand of a Matthiola with substantial light purple flowers atop robust plants with heavily wavy gray leaves. There was not even a trace of scent, but I suspected they might be night fragrant, and asked a local girl who was collecting them if they smelled at night. "Nope" she said. I didn't believe her, so I collected as many of the matured seed pods as I could find, and we also got a boquet of the flowers for good measure.

As soon as it got dark, they poured out a sweet, candy-like fragrance that literally filled the room. I got to work splitting the long seed pods and scraping the seed out onto a sheet of paper, collecting the seeds in a shot glass. It was slow work and I was the last to bed.

In the morning I got up and went into the kitchen. The shot glass was gone. Souzana had been tidying up and unaware of the treasure the glass held, she had dumped the seeds out. Aaaaaaaarrgh! There was no chance of going up and collecting more; we didn't have a car and there was no public transport.

However there was some good news - Souzana had not dumped the seeds into the garbage, but into the container where she put all the peels, cores and old leaves destined for her compost pile.

The next spring, the seeds came up all over her vegetable garden, and she recognized them and let several plants grow, then sent me seed from those. I suspect that they may have hybridized a bit with other stocks there, but they have the same night-only fragrance and grow beautifully in Istanbul. Though they don't fill the air quite like the homely little night stocks did, the remain an important component in the general fragrance of my evening garden.

Pheeew! / Öğğğğğk!

2009-05-28T14:51:00.000+03:00

Well, yesterday it finally did its thing. I took lots of photographs, and the smell was strong enough that I ended up with a headache. I read once of someone living in a very cold climate and was growing it as a houseplant (haha) had one pop off inside the house. I can't even imagine it.

Dün olacak nihayet oldu. Çok sayıda fotoğraf çektim, kokusundan başım ağrımaya başladı. Birkaç yıl önce, çok soğuk bir iklimde yaşadığı için salon bitkisi olarak yetiştiren birinin hikaysini okudum...çiçek evin içinde açmış. Düşünemiyorum bile, bu göz yaşartıcı bir kokudur gerçekten.

It's been fully open for two days now; yesterday was bad but it seems it was just revving up, because today it's completely disgusting and the pollen hasn't even dropped yet. The flies are having a party. Here's a short film of the activity.

İki gündür apaçık, dün kötü kokuyordu fakat sanki sadece prova yapıyormuş gibime geliyor çünkü bugün kendini aştı. Umarım komşular şikayet etmez. Sinekler şölen yapıyor resmen. Buyrun bir kısa film:

Today there was a new twist: When I went out, it was making a sound, almost as if something was boiling. I looked in and it was "boiling" - with little carrion beetles. They probably came at night, and have become trapped in the flower; the sound comes when they scrabble up the slippery sides of the inflorescence, then fall back down into the cup. In the picture below you can see them, along with the many stigmas of the individual female flowers. This is the only day that the flower can be pollinated; the pollen would have come on the beetles or flies from another flower in its male stage. Tomorrow, the pistils will no longer be receptive, but the anthers (which appear in the film as a white band) will open and shower the beetles with pollen. Then the walls will cease to be slippery and they will be able to emerge, to pollinate another flower. But of course there won't be one.

Bugün yeni bir gelişme de vardı: Bugün dışarıya çıktığımda hemen hemen birşey kaynıyormuşcaçına bir ses çıkıyordu çiçekten. İçeriye baktım ki sahiden kaynıyordu - küçük leş böcekleriyle. Her halde gece gelmişler. Şimdi çiçeğin içinde yakalanmış, ses ise, kaygan yanlarını tırmanlamaya çalışıp bazına tekrar düştüklerinde geliyor. Aşağıdaki resimde sayısız dişi çiçeklerinin tek pistilleri görülebilir. Sadece bugün tozlaşılabilirdi; pollen, başka bir çiçekten çıkan böcek veya sineklerde gelecekti. Yarın pistiller artık pollen kabul edemeyecek, üst fotoğrafta beyaz bir şerit olarak görünün erkek çiçekler ise polenlerini böceklerin üstüne bırakacak. Ondan sonra çiçeğin duvarları kayganlığını kaybedecek, böcekler çıkıp başka bir çiçeğe gidip tozlaşabilecek. Nafile tabi, bu tür Asya'da yetişiyor!

At last! Nihayet!

2009-05-26T18:31:00.000+03:00

So, you all know now to say "at last" in Turkish now. :) The spathe is now starting to flare nicely, and there is a new fly visiting every few minutes, confused. It must be like walking in to an empty room filled with a wonderful bakery smell.

Botanik yanısıra "nihayet" sözcüğünün İngilizcesini de öğrenmiş oldunuz işte. :) Güzel açılmaya başladı artık, birkaç dakikada bir yeni bir sinek gelip, şaşırıyor. Onlar için, güzel bir fırın kokusuyla dolu fakat boş bir odaya girmek gibiymiş her halde.

There are other things happening in the garden as well; some of them even small good but this one doesn't: A nice orange-red honeysuckle is in bloom, only a few this year as it was only planted this spring, but it's a nice hint of things to come. The red/orange honesuckles are all American natives as far as I know, and all are scentless. The reason is that they are not pollinated by bees, which are attracted by scents, but by hummingbirds. Wherever you find naturally-occurring red honeyuckles, you will find hummingbirds as well.

Sonuçta bahçede başka gelişmeler de var, hatta bazıları hoş kokulu bile. Fakat bu değil. Turuncu/kırmızı renkli bir hanımeli de açmış, bu ilkbaharda ekildiği için az açtı fakat gelecek yılların bir önizlemesi hiç olmasa. Bildiğim kadarıyla bütün kırmızı hanımelleri Amerika'dan geliyor ve hepsi kokusuz. Neden mi? Bu çiçekler, kokulardan çekilen arılardan değil, sadece Kuzey ve Güney Amerika'da bulunan arıkuşlarından tozlaşılıyor. Yani bu hanımellerinin doğal olarak yetiştiği bölgelerde mutlaka arıkuşları da bulunur.

Another favorite of mine just opened spectacularly today - the thuggish but beautiful Passiflora caerulea or blue passionflower. The scent of the flowers on their first day is intoxicating and it always leaves me thinking, "there must be a way to get this scent into a drink." I even tried steeping some once but it didn't work... The second day they are scentless. If you want to cut one to float in a bowl, look at the pistils first. If they are pointing down as in these flowers, you will enjoy it for 2 days. The second day, as the anthers open, the pistils fold up to avoid self-pollination. If you cut t at this stage, it will be closed by afternoon.

Çok sevdiğim bir başka çiçek de bugün gösterişli bir açılış yaptı - arsız fakat güzel Passiflora caerulea, yani Çarkıfelek. İlk açtığı günde çiçeklerin kokusu büyüleyici olup, hep "keşke bu kokuyu bir içeceğe aktarmak için bir yöntem olsa" diye düşündürüyor beni... Hatta demlemeyi denedim fakat nafile. İkinci günde kokusu yok. Evde bir tasta yüzdirmek için kesmeyi düşünüyorsanız, birinci günde kesin. Kokusu yanı sıra, üç pistilleri (dişilik organları) fotoğraftaki gibi aşağıya doğru yönelmişse yeni açmış demektir. İkinci günde ise ercik başları polenlerini bırakırken pistiller, aynı çiçekten polen almamak için yukarıya katlanıyorlar. Bu halde keserseniz, akşama kadar bile açık kalmaz.

12:00 May 26 Mayıs - 108 cm!

2009-05-26T12:16:00.000+03:00

It is still taking its sweet time, a bit more redolent but still not really active yet. I do get whiffs of it on the air though. The scent, combined with that of the honeysuckle that grows all over the railings, is...interesting. Sort of like waltzing with the grande dame at a living dead ball.

Hala hiç acele etmiyor, biraz daha kokulu fakat gerçek anlamla aktif hale daha gelmemiş. Havada kokusunu arada bir alıyorum ama. Korkuluklara sarılmış hanımelinin kokusuyla karışımın...ilginç olduğunu diyebilirim. Bir zombiler balosunda bol parfüm sıkmış bir hatunla vals oynamak gibi...

Well...maybe not just yet! Henüz olmadı...

2009-05-25T17:10:00.000+03:00

I thought for sure it would open this morning; the occasional fly was showing interest, but it's just growing - 106 cm at 5:00 this evening. The spathe has begun to flare more now.

Bugün açılacağından emindim de...arada bir tek tük sinek biraz ilgi gösteriyor fakat hala yükseliyor - saat 17:00'den itibaren 106 cm. Fakat etrafini saran yaprağın ucu, artık daha çok genişlemeye başlamış.

Tomorrow Morning! Yarın Sabah!

2009-05-24T17:33:00.000+03:00

This is the plant as of Sunday, May 24. It is already starting to smell slightly, so tomorrow morning things will be pretty stinky around here....

Pazar 24 Mayıs'taki hali. Şimdiden bile biraz kokmaya başladı, demek ki yarın sabah buralar biraz çekilmez olacak...!

Won't be long now (again!) - (Tekrar) az kaldı)

2009-05-22T11:43:00.000+03:00

I originally thought I'd take a photo every day as this bud rose and developed but it seemed like a bit of overkill. So here is it's progress as of this morning. I fıgure tomorrow or the next day...

Önce bu tomurcuk yükselip gelişirken her gün bir fotoğraf çekmeyi düşünüyordum fakat sonra aşırıya kaçmayayım dedim. Buyrun bu sabahki hali! Yarın veya öbür gün galiba...

For those wondering what the plant itself looks like, here is how it looked last October. Botanically this is a single leaf; it emerges all at once, folded up, then spreads out like an umbrella. I should have taken a picture then actually, it's amazing to watch. The stem is firm but is not woody at all; the mottling on the stem seem to make it appear woody and less appetizing to whatever animals could eat it. Not a mammal though; it is in the Arum family and has calcium oxylate crystals that would cause serious irritation.

Bitkisinin nasıl birşey olduğunu merak edenler için, geçen Ekim ayından iki resim ekliyorum. Botanik açısından bu tek bir yaprak sayılır, katlanmış bir halde bir bütün olarak çıkıp, şemsiye gibi açılıyor. Keşke o zamanda bir fotoğraf çekseydim aslında, o süreç çok ilginç. Sapı sert olsa da hiç odunsu değil; pürüzler ve şekilleriyle onu yiyebilen hayvanlara pek iştah açıcı gibi gelmiyor her halde. Memeli hayvanlar zaten yiyemez, Araceae (Yılanyastığıgiller) ailesinin bütün mensupları gibi dokularında mevcut olan Kalsiyum oksilat kristalleri, ciddi bir tahrişe yol açardı.

2009-05-19T22:04:00.000+03:00

Getting behind on a garden blog is really not a good thing to do, especiall this time of year when everything is taking off. Normally it would be better to take one subject and treat it well. But instead, I dumped a bunch of photos onto the page and I'm going to address them in the order that they appear. That way I don't have to deal with all the "div" tags that pop up!

So the flower that is drawing people into the garden right now is one of those "Plants That Are Not Grown In Turkey," for whatever strange reason - Nicotiana alata or Jasmine tobacco. The garden centers in the US usually sell lots of small Nicotianas as bedding plants in various colors, but if you want fragrance, forget those and grow this one. Thought the seed is tiny, it develops amazingly quickly and is very easy to raise. It's usually offered as an annual, but if you are lucky enough live in a mild climate it will survive the winter and truly outdo itself the next year. Two years ago I watched one slowly rise from its already large rosette to around four feet, and branch out like a Christmas tree. During the height of its bloom, it produced a good 200 flowers at a time and the entire garden was redolent. I'm particularly fortunate in my present digs because the garden faces south and is backed with a high wall. This means that the south evening breeze carries the fragrance straight into the garden where it builds up and wafts up to the street; I smell the Nicotianas as I come in the gate. They aren't much to look at during the daytime I'm afraid, the flowers droop a little but by early evening they are opening up, and even before it gets dark, they begin pumping out the fragrance. It's a plant I'll never be without again if I can help it. It's especially impressive at late dusk, when the flowers seem to jump out at you.

Another Nicotiana I love is N. mutabilis. It's not fragrant but the medium-sized, black-ringed flowers have an amazing characteristic - they open white, fade to pink the second day, and dark pink on the third day before dropping. It's also a plant I'm sort of "proud" of because as far as I know, I was the one who got it into the horticultural trade. I saw it growing in pots in the University of Washington greenhouse, where it was being used in Nicotiana genetics experiments. I begged a little seed, grew it in my garden - where it proved to be an incredible hulk of a plant - and gave seed to my friend the late Stephen Antonow. He sent it to a nursery in England, and now you can find it by Googling it. All I really was, was a "vector," a plant I have more of a right to be proud of is the cross I made between it and N. alata above. It's always a bit of chance with crosses. What I wanted was a little better-behaved (read: less overbearing and floppy) plant with the same color-changing characteristics and fragrance as well. I got very lucky - the plant was well-behaved, the flowers showed hybrid vigor, color change and fragrance to boot, though not quite as powerful as N. alata. It is hardier than N. mutabilis as well; my old neighbor is still growing it 10 years later. And I'm not...but I did get some N. mutabilis seed and will make the cross again this summer if my seedlings make it!

Speaking of fragrance...if you are going to grow a plant to draw people into the garden, shouldn't you grow one to get rid of them as well? One of my favorite plants in the world is about to bloom, and I'm not looking forward to the neighbors' reactions when it does (well actually, I am, just a bit): Amorphophallus rivieri. A member of the Arum family which includes calla lilies and philodendrons, A. rivieri is a hulk of a plant that sends up what is technically a single leaf but looks like a small palm tree with a beautifully mottled trunk. But the real fun begins when it blooms - it is fly pollinated, and we all know what flies like. So does Amorphophallus, and the various species in the genus have flowers to suit the tastes of just about every dung/carrion/rotten fish loving insect. The flower bud rises slowly from the giant corm, then as it prepares to bloom, the growth rate increases dramatically; mine is growing over an inch a day now. It finally bursts open like an enormous calla lily gone horribly wrong, and emits an odor that will make your neighbors think you collect roadkill for a hobby. Mine is just a small one - the corm is probably about a foot in diameter now - so the flower won't be more than about a meter or so high, but larger plants can send up an inflorescence 8 or more feet tall, and the corm can weigh 30 pounds or more. A close relative of A. rivieri, also known as A. konjac, is Amorphophallus titanum, famous as the largest inflorescence in the world. A. rivieri can reach 8 feet but it's largely stem; A. titanum's enormous inflorescence is born on a stem only a foot or so in length; the rest is composed of its spathe and towering spadix which is the source of all the fun: it smells like rotten fish/urine, which is just what small carrion beetles love. A. titanum is not a plant that the average person can grow as a houseplant; the leaf alone grows up to 15 feet or so, is enormous, and it is not at all cold hardy. A blooming-size corm is also enormous. A. rivieri on the other hand is fairly easy as long as you can provide the heat it needs to prosper. In cool-summer areas it may survive the winter but emerging late, it won't have the time to put on size before frost, and will decline over time. Still I've seen it grow on for years as a foliage plant.

The mere mention of "comfrey" is enough to make many gardeners nervous, and having watched a friend's garden turn into a sea of comfrey, I can't blame them. Common comfrey (Symphytum officinalis) is not a plant to grow if you are going to be lazy - you have to make sure and cut off the flowers before they set seed, otherwise you will have it everywhere. We have Symphytum orientale here in Istanbul (pictures a couple of posts back); and it's not overly invasive, and pleasant enough with its snow-white flowers on multi-branched stems. But for me the real star of the genus is Symphytum caucasicum, or Georgian blue comfrey. It has more or less the same habit as white comfrey, but its flowers are a beautiful sky blue. Here you can see them opening, with the typical backward spiral inflorescence that is the dead giveaway for members of the borage family. I've never had it set seed; evidently it needs cross pollination to do so. It is so similar in shape to white comfrey that I wonder if they will cross-pollinate, but perhaps it's bets to leave well enough alone and enjoy my well-behaved plant the way it is.

Another favorite of mine that's blooming now is Lychnis coronaria, sometimes known in the US as Mullein Pink because of its hairy leaves. It's also seeminly unknown here, but people rightfully go nuts over it. You could hardly ask for a more undemanding plant; it is drought tolerant, doesn't require overly rich soil, and self seeds without being weedy. Though the plants set a lot of seed, I generally get only a few plants around each mother plant. The blooms are such an intense magenta that it's almost difficult to focus on them. What's fascinating to me is that the camera seems to be "overloaded" by its intensity as well; this picture is in focus but the flowers are blurry, like they've been colored by a kid who doesn't stay within the lines. Here you see it against a backdrop of Stachys byzantina (lamb's ears), the color of the leaves are so similar that it almost looks like the lamb's ears are producing those blooms. The flowers of the latter are not nearly so showy and usually end up falling over, and I cut them off as soon as they do, but let them grow up to that point because I like their form. There is a white version but I sort of wonder "why bother?" There are other species of Lychnis as well and some of them are quite beautiful. One of my favorites is another variety of this one, Lychnis coronaria occulata; it's similar but with bicolor flowers.

I'll finish up with an iris - an old hybrid called "Salonique." It's a bit ironic that this one is blooming now. Two years ago I had several rhizomes of tall bearded iris brought by a friend; the soil in my last garden was miserable and they were uprooted several times by martens, who love to dig where I have dug. They are growing beautifully now but have yet to bloom; next year for sure. Salonique on the other hand I bought early this spring; it was a forlorn rhizome, dried out in a plastic bag in the bulb section of Bauhaus. But it had two growing points and was fat, and it prooved to be a trooper. The stalk is a little puny and it will do a much better job next year, but it encourages me in my "mission" to promote tall bearded iris here. Why? Because several people have seen it in bloom now, and not a single one has recognized it as being a brother to the purple "graveyard lilies" that fill Istanbul's cemeteries (see previous post). One even asked me if it was some sort of a tulip. There is hope.

Bir bahçe blogunda geri kalmak hiç iyi bir fikir değil hele hele her şey çok hızlı gelişmekte olan Mayıs’ta! Normalde bir konu ele alıp iyi irdelemeyi yeğlerdim (kimi kandırıyorum ya) fakat bu kez tam tersine bir sürü fotoğrafı sayfaya döküp önüme çıktığı sırayla ele alacağım.

Peki bu aralarda insanları bahçeme çeken çiçek, nedense “Türkiye’de Yetiştirilmeyen” sıfatıyla tanımladığım bitkilerdendir: “Yasemin tütünü” olarak da bilinen Nicotiana alata. Amerika’daki bahçe merkezleri çok sayıda küçük ve rengarenk küçük cinslerinden satıyorlar fakat istediğiniz, koku ise, onları unut ve bunu yetiştirin. Tohumları çok kolay sipariş edilir (ben de sevinerek paylaşırım), tohumları çok minik olmasına rağmen son derece kolay yetiştirilir ve inanılmaz bir hızla gelişiyor. Genelde tek yıllık bitki olarak satışa sunulsa da mülayim iklimlerde çok yıllık oluyor. İkinci yılı inanılmaz bir performans yapıyor, birkaç yıl önce bir bitkisi ilkbahar yaklaşırken yavaş yavaş bir buçuk metrelik bir Noel ağacı gibi yükselip, açınca bütün bahçeyi kokusuyla doldurdu. Gündüz çiçekleri pek gösterişli değil fakat akşamüstünde açılıp mis kokusunu havaya dökmeye başlıyor.

Çok sevdiğim başka bir Nicotiana türü, N. mutabilis’tir. Kokulu değil fakat orta boylu siyah halkalı çiçeklerinin şaşırtıcı bir özelliği var: beyaz açılıp ikinci günde uçuk pembe rengine soluyor, üçüncü günde koyu pembe döndükten sonra düşüyorlar. Sürekli yeni çiçekler açtığı için üç aşaması her zaman mevcut. Bu arada bu bitkiyi ticarete dolaylı bir şekilde tanıştıran benim; yıllarca önce bir üst lisans botanik öğrencesinin Nicotiana cinsinin genetik araştırmasını yapmakta olup yetiştirdiği Washington Üniversitesinde gördüm. Biraz tohum için yalvardım, yetiştirdim. Bitki çok gür bir şey çıktı, sonra tohumundan rahmetli arkadaşım Stephen Antonow’ya verdim. O da İngiltere’de bir fidanlıkla paylaştı…ve şimdi bir Google arayışı çok sayıda fotoğraf ortaya çıkar. Fakat saha gurur hissettiğim bir bitki var – N. mutabilis ile N. alata melezi. Hybrid yapmak bir şans eseri oluyor, tam ne çıkacağını bilmek imkansız. Amacım, biraz daha uslu, N. mutabilis’in renk değişme özelliğini koruyup fakat kokulu olan bir çiçek oluşturmaktı. Tamamen şanslı oldum, ortaya çıkan bitki hem usluydu, çiçekleri üç renkli ve kokulu olması bir yana, çiçekleri ise N. alata’nınkinden de büyük çıktı. Hem de N. mutabilis’ten daha dayanıklı, Seattle’da bir eski komşum o orijinal bitkiden on yıl önce verdiğim bir parçasını halen yetiştiriyor! Fakat ben yetiştirmiyorum…bu yıl N. mutabilis tohumunu sipariş ettim ve eğer inşallah iyi yetişirse, aynı melezi yapıp ekerim. (Fakat kim bilir, belki bu kez kokusuz küçük beyaz çiçekli olarak çıkar!)

Kokudan söz etmişken…insanları bahçenize çekecek bir çiçek yetiştirecekseniz, insanları bahçeden kovmak için bir şeyi de yetiştirmemeli mi? Dünyada en sevdiğim bitkilerden bir tanesi açmak üzere ve açılınca komşularımın tepkilerini görmek için fazla sabırsızlanmıyorum (e, belki biraz da…!): Amorphophallus rivieri. Çok bilinen bitkileri içeren Yılanyastığıgillere ait olan bu bitkinin çiçekleri, sineklerden tozlaşılır. Ve sineklerin nelerden hoşlandığını hepimiz biliyoruz zaten. Amorphophallus da biliyor ve bu cinsin değişik türleri, düşünülebilen her türlü bok/leş/çürük balık v.s. kokulu çiçekler açıyor. Bir türü de hoş kokulu, ailenin yüz karası her halde… Çiçek, kocaman bir yumruktan yavaş yavaş yükselir, açmak üzereyken büyümesi bir hayli artıyor. Benimki son üç gün boyunca her gün 5 civarında santim büyüyor. Ve bir gün yoldan korkunç bir şekilde çıkan bir dev zambak gibi açılıp, öyle bir koku saçıyor ki bütün komşularınız hobi olarak ölü hayvanlar koleksiyonu yaptığınızı zannedecekler. Koku sadece bir buçuk gün sürürken çiçeği yaklaşık bir hafta duruyor. Sonra botanik olarak tek yaprak sayılan fakat rengarenk gövdeli bir palmiyeye benzeyen yaprağı çıkıp yaz boyunca duruyor. Fotoğraflardaki örnek hala küçük ve çiçeği büyük ihtimalle bir metre aşmaz – yumruğu en fazla 40 cm genişliğinde - fakat daha büyük bitkiler 3 metreye yükselebilir. Yakın bir akrabası, dünyada en büyük çiçek durumu olan Amorphophallus titanum da 3 metreye ulaşıyor fakat A. rivieri’nin çiçek durumu çoğunlukla saptan oluşurken A. titanum’un sapı sadece 30 cm civarında, gerisi dev spadix’ten oluşuyor. (Spadix, çiçeğinin ortasından çıkın kısmın adıdır.) A. titanumu ev bitkisi olarak yetiştirmek, hemen hemen imkansız çünkü yaprağı 5 metreden fazla yükseliyor ve çiçek açabilecek kadar büyük bir yumruk, 60 kilodan fazla oluyor! Ancak A. rivieri çok kolay, yazları sıcak olması kaydıyla çok güzel gelişir. Çiçek açmasa bile yaprağı çok güzeldir.

Eşekkulağının Avrupa’da en çok bilinen türü (Symphytum officinalis), o kadar arzız bir bitkidir ki çok bahçıvan, bahçelerine asla sokmaz. Hak da veriyorum çünkü Seattle'da ona dikkat emeyen bir arkadaşımın bahçesini bir eşekkulağı denizine döndürdüğüne şahit oldum! Türkiye’deki beyaz çiçekli türü (Symphytum orientale), hodan gibi tohumlarını bahçeye serper fakat aşırı “istilacı” bir bitki değil. Fakat cinsin en uslu ve bence en güzel temsilcisi, Gürcistan’dan gelen mavi eşekkulağıdır (Syphytum caucasicum). Hodangiller’e ait olduğunu ele veren ters sarmallı çiçek durumu, bu fotoğrafta son derece belirgin. Hiçbir zaman tohum üretmedi, üretebilmesi için belki başka bir bitki gerekebilir. Kökünden sap sayısı her yıl artsa da hiç yayılmaz. Form açısından beyaz eşekkulağına çok benzediğine göre acaba melezi olur mu diye düşünüyorum fakat belki doğayla karışmayıp, güzel ve uslu bitkimin tadına çıkarmak daha iyi olur!

Şu anda çiçek açmaya başlayan başka bir gözde, Lychnis coronaria’dur. Amerika’da tüylü yapraklarından dolayı “Mullein Pink” (sığırkuyruğu karanfili) olarak bilinen Lychnis, Türkiye’de adeta bilinmiyor fakat gören arkadaşlarım haklı olarak ona bayılıyor. Daha kolay bir bitki de bulunamaz, sıcaklığa dayanıklı, çok iyi toprağa ihtiyacı yok, ve kendiliğinden tohumdan çıksa da hiç arsız değil, bol tohum üretse de, ana bitkinin etrafında her yıl sadece birkaç küçük bitki buluyorum. Çiçekleri öyle yoğun bir “Çingene pembesi” ki, göz onlara zar zor odaklanır. Fotoğraf makinesinin de aynı zorluk çektiğini, çok ilginç buldum – bu fotoğraftaki diğer nesneler son derece netken, Lychnis’in çiçekleri flu çıktı. Burada İngilizcede “Kuzu Kulağı” dediğimiz Stachys byzantina’nın yapraklarının önünde çok güzel belirliyor. Beyaz çiçekli bir cinsi var da, çok ilgimi çekmiyor. Fakat Lychnis coronaria occulata’nın çift renkli çiçekler hakikaten güzeldir.

Bir susenle bitireyim. Fotoğraftaki, “Salonique” (Selânik) adlı eski bir cinstir. Aslında bunun bu yıl çiçek açmış olması biraz alaycıdır çünkü iki yıl önce, ABD’den altı değişik cins getirttim fakat eski bahçemin toprağı berbat olması yanı sıra sansarlar ektiğim bıkıncaya kadar ektiğim her şeyi iki üç kez kazıyorlardı. Bu yıl çok güzel gelişiyor fakat çiçek yok, gelecek yıl her halde. Ama Salonique’i, bu yıl Bauhaus’ta zavallı, kurumuş bir kök olarak aldım, ve aynı yıl çiçek açmaz mı?! Gerçi biraz ciliz açtı, gelecek yıl bunun iki katına yükselir. Yine de “gizli misyonum” açısından cesaret vericidir! Neden mi? Bahçeme gelip bu çiçeği gören arkadaşlarımdan hiç biri, İstanbul’un kabristanlarını dolduran “mezarlık zambağının” bir kardeşi olduğunu tahmin etmedi. hatta birisi, “bu bir lale cinsi mi” diye sordu. Yani uzun susenlerin Türkiye’de popüler olması için umut var demektir!