What on earth...

I spotted a few interesting things when I dropped by Navy Pier early this week to see the building of the Chicago Flower & Garden Show, which opens tomorrow. Wonder what's going on here? Go to the flower show and make a treasure hunt of it.








Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Speaking dates coming up; flower show about to bloom

I have a busy couple of weeks coming up with speaking dates.

Tomorrow, March 5, I'll be speaking on small-space vegetable gardening at the Fernwood Botanical Garden & Nature Preserve in Niles, Michigan. They are holding their first garden symposium and I'm on the bill with Mike Nowak, Roy Diblik and Chris Woods, the designer of Chanticleer Garden near Philadelphia.

That will keep me away from the opening day of the Chicago Flower & Garden Show at Navy Pier. I'll be sorry to miss a meeting of the Garden Writers Association that day.

But on Tuesday, March 8, I'll be giving an evening talk at the show called
"Start Here: Basic steps for the New Gardener." And by steps, I mean steps. No sitting. The idea is to walk through the show and point out in the display gardens features that illustrate the basic steps in starting a garden for the first time. I did this last year with vegetable gardening and it was fun. of course I'm counting on the garden builders to include all the things I need to point to -- and when I dropped by Tuesday, the building of exhibits had just begun and it wasn't at all clear what the gardens would be like. But that just adds to the suspense.

On Saturday, March 12, at 12:15 p.m., I'll be back at the flower show to give a slide talk called "Taming the Wild Ones" on how to use native plants in the garden.

There's a great schedule of how-to seminars any day you go to the show, though, and they are all free with your admission.

I'll also be hanging around a couple of the vendor booths at the flower show at certain times if you'd like to drop by. On March 8 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and on March 12 from 6 to 8 p.m. I'll be at the booth of Chicagoland Gardening magazine, where I'm a senior editor.

On March 8 and March 12 from 2:30 to 5:15 p.m. I'll be at the booth of Openlands, since I'm an Openlands Treekeepers volunteer. Be sure to check out the Openlands display garden, which looked to me like it is shaping up very interestingly.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

A poignant vignette from @mayoremanuel

There's been a big hoo-ha the last few days over the revelation that the writer of the hilarious @mayoremanuel Twitter saga, which followed the adventures of an imagined Rahm Emanuel during the recently concluded campaign, was a Columbia College professor named Dan Sinker, and that the real mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel actually thought it was funny. The Atlantic broke the story on Feb. 28 and on March 2 Sinker and Emanuel met on the radio.

The Twitter saga had begun as a spoof of the candidate's alleged hot temper and potty mouth. But Emanuel declined, as he has since deciding to run for Chicago in September, to lose his cool or burst into profanity.

I enjoyed following @mayoremanuel as much as anybody--about 40,000 people, apparently, four times as many as followed the real mayoral candidate at @RahmEmanuel. (It's worth noting, though, that although this all was great fun for political junkies nationwide, there is no indication that it had any effect whatsoever on the actual Chicago election, which the real Emanuel won handily despite all parody and opposition.)

I can easily concede that @mayoremanuel was, as many have said, the best fake Twitter account ever. (Or the best #@$*&%!! fake Twitter account ever, if you like.)

But like many others, I didn't enjoy it just as parody. I enjoyed it for its gradual deepening into real feeling. And for me, the most poignant moment in the saga was an imaginary image that Alexis Madrigal, author of the Atlantic article, extracted from tweet form (in the first-person voice of Sinker's imaginary Emanuel) and presented as prose:

And Daley's gesturing for me to follow him, and suddenly we're out a window and heading up a motherfucking fire escape. We're on the roof of City Hall. The wind is fucking strong and the snow stings when it hits my face. Daley heads into a glass dome. It's so warm and beautiful in the dome--green everywhere--and the air is pungent with the smell of... is that fucking celery? Daley fucking plucks a stalk. "Care for these. Let flowers bloom. Dry them. Harvest the seeds. Grind them. Mix with salt." He hands me a small pinch of powder and the sharp taste of celery salt crosses my lips. "Our legacy," he says, and points to the stalks.

For so many people Richard M. Daley's City Hall roof garden is a joke. His love of trees that expanded into a broad environmental consciousness is a joke. His green initiatives are a joke. And his "green legacy" is a joke.

But I don't think so, and that's what gives this little snippet from @mayoremanuel (hot dog references aside) its sad power for me. I think that as we lose Daley we are losing something real and important. There's a big pothole appearing in the city where environmental leadership used to be.

Emanuel is certainly more knowledgeable about most environmental issues than most of his challengers were, but there's no indication he considers them important.

Of course we expect him to deal first with the crushing deficit, the brutal cuts that are no doubt necessary, the leaderless and ineffective schools, the police department whose most arrogant and intransigent members are now preening themselves for having driven out Jody Weis. But Emanuel gives no sign that he plans to give any consideration at all to the lake, the parks, the trees, to the role of landscaping in the city's vital fabric, to water issues, conservation issues, energy issues, food issues -- or green roof issues.

Mayor Daley's push for a green Chicago has been an enormous source of focus and energy and growth in the city over the last 20 years. If that green roof dries up and blows away, a lot more than celery seed will blow away with it.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Pruning time dwindles as bud burst approaches

A few days ago, since I had many more important things to do, I went out in the yard and finished up my dormant pruning. It was about 25 degrees and snowing lightly on my head, with the remains of frozen snow crunching underfoot. Perfect yard work weather for me.

I was delighted to discover that nearly all the $10 end-of-season shrubs I planted late last fall have made it through the winter with minimal dieback. So have all the other shrubs.

Here's how to tell: Dieback shows up on evergreens as individual twigs or branches with brown, dried-out needles. I'll go ahead and cut those out in winter on a yew because I can bet it will quickly grow back. But on pines or arborvitaes I'll give it a couple of months and see if new needles grow. If it doesn't look better by May or so I'll prune the whole dead part out.

On a deciduous shrub, dead wood is dry and brown. I'll take an experimental snip with my pruners toward the end of a branch; if I can feel the blades crunch through the wood and the cross-section is entirely brown or tan, it's dead wood. Then I'll move a couple inches down the branch and make another cut at a node where there is a bud. If it's live wood I'll feel my pruners slice through the wood rather than crunch, and when I examine the cross-section of the branch, I'll see a thin layer of green just under the outer bark. That's the cambium, where the growth goes on, and if it's green the branch is alive.

I didn't actually have much dead wood to prune, so I just tidied up here and there and did some shaping and size control. I'm pruning back some overgrown yews pretty brutally to try and reduce their size by pushing them to sprout from adventitious buds down close to the base. After the big flush of spring growth I'll know if it worked.

But mainly I was out there to notice. I noticed that many of the new shrubs, including the chokeberry, have already set plenty of buds that are getting close to bursting. There were lots of adventitious buds sprouting on the yews. The high survival rate of cheap shrubs led me to realize that this winter, as miserable as it has sometimes been for people, seems to have been good for my plants.

There's been snow cover -- often deep snow cover -- for most of the winter. That has provided insulation and steady soil temperature as well as moisture as it melts. (Regrettably, it has been as protective of the creeping Charlie in my lawn as of the hellebores.)

The only downside was visible in one of my bargain shrubs, a dwarf fothergilla: The bark had been heavily chewed up to a foot or so high. Voles and other small creatures had been able to tunnel through the 20-inch-deep snow that lay for weeks and feast on my fothergilla bark. That'll happen.
Even though it didn't appear to be entirely girdled, the fothergilla may not make it. But for $10 I can afford to be philosophical.

I'm done pruning, which is a good thing, because the woody plants are going to be coming out of dormancy soon. I should get all the dead perennials cut down soon, because new growth is not far off. There is still crunchy frozen snow in my yard, but there are rumors of days in the 40s and even 50s in the next week, and we are officially in something called "meteorological spring." That doesn't mean we can't still have more snow and bone-chilling cold. But it's time to look for snowdrop shoots.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.