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Gardening Glimpses
Christmas treasures frequently arrive under
the tree in recognizable shape and heft
ALL MY LIFE Christmas has meant
new books. For the last half of that lifetime,
the favorites have been the newest
(or rarest, or oldest, or hardest to find) gardening
books, about plants and by and
about the people who love them and grow
them well, who share their interesting horticultural
adventures and what they have
learned.
I’ve good reason to be confident about
some packages of recognizable shape and
heft already under the tree. But meanwhile,
I’ve been enjoying a brand new gardening
book for two months now - Ray Rogers’
“The Encyclopedia of Container Plants.”
It’s good to sit down regularly for coffee
with a good friend, but usually hard to
manage from New Jersey to Mississippi.
But thanks to the still-potent magic of the
printed page, it can be managed. Most
mornings since the first of October, I’ve
enhanced my first and second cups of coffee
with a dip into this book.
By its nature, any encyclopedic book is
best enjoyed and absorbed in small snatches,
as well as staying handy for answers to
odd or even very basic questions about
plants. I’ve been needing a reliable basic
reference for container plants for many
years, and had never found a satisfactory
one - until now. (I wish I’d had this book,
a few years ago, when my great pleasure
in Allen Lacy’s and Nancy Goodwin’s “A
Year in Our Gardens,” needed only some
knowledge of the new plants they were
sharing to make it perfect.)
FIVE HUNDRED PLANTS, gorgeous
pictures on nearly all of the 340-plus
pages, and in-depth information about all
of the entries. And since to Ray, every
plant on the planet is potentially a container
plant, worlds of useful gardening information
about plants we also grow outdoors
in our climate.
This book is a highly successful team
effort between the author and the photographer,
Rob Cardillo. I asked Ray, “Do you
write the book and then ask Rob to go take
the accompanying pictures, or do you
browse through what he already has in his
vast store of garden pictures and make
choices?”
“Both,” he replied. “Rob is very cooperative
about looking for something, for anything
that I need, or think I need. But he
has a keen eye for the great plant combinations,
the containers placed in just the right
spot.” This isn’t a yearbook collection of
head-on plant portraits, one after another
into the sunset. These are pictures of
plants, in lovely traditional or offbeat containers,
as you could use them.
Cardillo, in the front of the book,
expresses his appreciation to the garden of
Chanticleer in Wayne, Pa., “where poems
are written with plants.” This tribute merely
reinforces the status of Chanticleer as
number one on my list of gardens to visit
which I’ve not yet seen.”
Ray is an excellent writer (you don’t get
published by Timber Press if you are not)
but a thoroughly educated horticulturist,
with not just the requisite school background
but also the assimilated learning
from a lifetime of continuing education
working with plants. He expresses his
appreciation to Ken Selody II, the owner
of Atlock Farm in Somerset, N.J., a unique
specialty nursery, where he lets Ray work
his imaginative magic on the container
plants, and, I suspect, much of the landscaping
in season.
FOR MOST OF US, Christmas or our
birthday is the highlight of the year. For
Ray, it is the week each spring of the venerable
and spectacular Philadelphia Flower
Show. So he knows each year, probably
every month, what’s new and desirable in
the plant world. But he has a good memory,
too, of his own experiences with the
“Grandmother’s garden” plants that many
of us cherish and depend on.
He feels obligated to use the latest
approved garden plant terminology and
botanical classification. Here I mostly
ignore him, and freely tell him so. It took
me 30 years to accept “pothos” as the
Page 15B
By Mrs. Herman McKenzie
proper name for my beloved houseplants
which I’d grown up calling “philodendron.”
I simply refuse to shift over to
“epipremnum.” (Have you noticed that
every time the botanical scholars reclassify
plants, it is always into a category even
harder to spell?)
One thing this book is definitely not -
bedtime reading. It’s much too heavy, but
also it is likely to inspire you to get up and
make lists, or stay awake planning your
own new plant combinations. (I wish Ray
would someday write his own paperback,
non-illustrated book about the gardens and
gardeners he has known in a plant-dedicated
lifetime, one with decades left of active
gardening.)
But if you have a smidgen of the gardening
gene, you will enjoy having this book:
“The Encyclopedia of Container Plants.” It
serves admirably much of the time as the
requisite hefty and lavishly illustrated coffee-table
book we often need to display.
But it’s always handy for you to enjoy and
absorb bits of gardening ideas, especially
valuable in this gloomy, dreary season of
the year.