While gardeners are gaga for plants, we do realize that gardening is actually a bit more than green things that grow from the ground. A proper garden would not be a garden without the supporting cast commonly referred to as animals and insects. A butterfly brightens as well as a dahlia. Without the earthworms, we would be working on concrete rather than soil. And while some critters are not so welcome, the fact is that plants and animals go had in hand like peanut butter and jelly (though I tend to think of deer like chunky peanut butter. I have never been a fan of the chunky kind).

Which is why it is so cool that the Cleveland Botanical Gardens has incorporated the animal aspect into the glasshouse. Outside, animals are a breeze to attract. Let’s face it, it’s where all the rich deer in Cleveland plan to have their wedding receptions. But inside, keeping animals happy and healthy is not so easy. Which is where Matt Edwards comes in.

Matt is the animal caretaker for the CBG. It is his job to make sure the animals are happy, healthy and content. Matt has worked at the CBG for about 3 ½ years now. In a blatant rip off of ReadyMade magazine, we are going to have a quick round of HYGTFAJ.

So, how does one land a job wandering through lush gardens caring for animals and getting paid for it? Well, a biology degree, a lizards and amphibian hobby along with a healthy dose of sheer luck and damn good timing. The cool thing about Matt is he is also a die-hard gardener. How do I know this? Because when a Clevelander waxes lyrical about their brugmansias, gardening is not just a hobby, it is an obsession. Matt and I traded thoughts on brugs, orchids and all the rest.

Matt’s charges were as fascinating as the plants were.

There was, of course, the obligatory butterflies. Lovely to behold, delightful to see and slightly embarrassing as they mated on the walkway (just one couple, I guess they were exhibitionists), they are the basic part of any garden display. We got a close up look at the chrysalises before we got to see the mature adults and it was funny the range of cocoons. The Cream Spotted Tiger Wing’s looked as though they has just come straight from a Star Wars set, while the Owl butterfly’s cocoon looks like a dead leaf.

Many of Matt’s critters are of the scaly type. A gecko, an oustalet’s chameleon and a pair of freaky eyed panther chameleons were hanging out in the back awaiting their debut in the gardens.

My favorite had to be the red eyed tree frog. An amphibian that is a big winner in our house due to the fact we love Wartz from It’s a Big, Big World. Seeing one in real life is like seeing Technicolor for the first time. That picture does not do that animal’s color justice.

Butterflies are not the only exoskeleton critter at the CBG. They have ants. Not just ants, but leaf cutter ants, which was like the coolest nature program subject to watch when I was a kid.

See those mandibles on the solider ant? You don’t screw with these ants.

The best part about the CBGs greenhouse is the birds. The bird song is constant and the thing that just streaked by you was a bird. They have no fear of humans and I will guarantee that you will get within 2 feet of one while you are there.

The images in this post are set up to enlarge, so click on them to get a closer look at any of these fun animals. Of coourse, seeing the real thing is always better.

There is nothing like a good flower show to make the winter months a bit more bearable and the Cleveland Botanical Gardens has put on a good show to chase away the winter blacks, blues and blechs.  Orchid Mania was wonderful.

As mentioned, orchids are not a complicated plant to care for, if you are not interested in getting them to rebloom. They are, however, a complicated plant to look at. I once had an art teacher who said that a piece of art should not be merely looked at as you stroll through the museum, but rather, you would most appreciate it if you sat and studied it. So it is with orchids.

Not happy with merely blooming, orchids must do so in complicated and fascinating manners. Take, the Angraecum Sesquipedale (first one on the second row), the little tentacle thing hanging off the left side… A moth has to stick its whole tongue down that thing in order to pollinate it. I can honestly say that all sorts of impolite things pop into my head on that subject, but let’s just stick with what we can talk about in polite society… That orchid is a high maintenance bitch of a plant and it is a wonder it survived as a species. But not all orchids are that complicated to pollinate, but enough that I do wonder how there got to be 30,000 kind of orchids.

One thing I did learn at this show is the amazing scents that orchids can have. They are so lovely to look at that it had not occurred to me before that they might be nice to smell as well. With scents that ranged from chocolate to hyacinth to lilies to melon, the orchid took on a whole new sensory aspect for me after going to the show.

Before are some of the pics I took at the show. While the pics are nice, just like with art, seeing the real thing is always more satisfying.  Orchid Mania is running through March 9th and I would recommend it as a nice hiatus from the snow and cold.  I also have it on good authority that if you attend the last day or so, you can bring home your very own orchid at a great price.  The blooms should be able to hold you over till spring, or at least when the Lenten Roses start to bloom here.

Click on the images to view a larger version:

Over the past few years, I have begun to think that Hollywood has run out of original ideas. Original ideas have not been overly abundant. Actually, judging by Hollywood’s revisiting, I would say that good, original ideas ended shortly after I turned 18. Every show I watched and loved as a kid has been redone… polished to a CGI gleam that blinds and baffles all at the same time. Honestly, I am beginning to think that Hollywood is out to prove how Gen X wasn’t nearly as cool as we thought we were (but we had a good imaginations).

On the other hand, seeing Optimus Prime real as life or TMNT as something more than lame rubber suits or X-men who can really change the (imagined) world does have a certain appeal. The modern world brings them to the glory that we always knew they deserved.

I thought this phenomenon was restricted to cartoon and comic book characters, but apparently the city of New York has decided to move the game into the botanical world. Specifically, trees. NYC has decided to clone 25 historical trees from thoughout the city, a few from each of the boroughs.

It is part of the Million Trees effort. If all goes well, these 25 trees will be cloned into 250 genetic copies that will be replanted in various spots around the city.

And I don’t know how I feel about that.

It implies that the genes had some bearing on the events that happened around these trees. Really, when it comes to historical trees, it was luck of the draw that George Washington walked by and an over-interested act of fate that prevented a New York minute from happening to it during the last century or two. Does a tree deserve to be replicated based on dumb luck? In that case, I know a few lucky morons who need to be turned over to science for the good of everyone (and I hope that the human cloning technique is still a few centuries off).

What ever happened to making new legends? Allowing for Nature to create the next generation of stories that we can awe over? Must we always attempt to recreate the past going forward into our future? Can I state for the record, that I don’t like watching the same movie twice so I don’t think that I would enjoy walking under the technologically created same tree 10 times.

Yes, on some level it is a marvel to witness our childhood and historical legends return to the world, young and remade, but in the end shouldn’t we be focusing on something new, something for the next generation to marvel and crow over?

Sometimes when you pull a can of soup out of the pantry or squirt ketchup on your hamburger (or mac and cheese, like my cousins do *blech*) it can be a little difficult to remember that the ingredients had to be grown somewhere in the first place. We don’t live in a world of Soylent Green yet. What is even harder to remember is that the companies that make our food products don’t just grow a little or even an acre of just any old thing. They have to grow acres and acres of the same thing.

A major food company has to expect that every fruit or vegetable they put in their product tastes pretty close to the fruit or vegetable they put in their product 6 months… 2 year… 10 years ago. As any home gardener can tell you (probably with a few swear words), getting even the same variety of tomato or pepper to taste and produce the same year after year is no small task. Just imagine having to do it in fields that are easily larger than some European countries.

Because of this need for consistancy, many food companies have actually developed their own strains of fruits and vegetables or have kept alive some very old heirloom varieties in order to keep the quality of their products consistent.

The Tabasco chili pepper is probably the best know variety like this. Tabasco has been using the same variety of hot peppers for over 130 years. The original seed is of unknown decent and was given to the founder of Tabasco. The ancestors of that original handful of seeds still make the hot sauce you buy today. When the crop is harvested, the seeds from the best plants are carefully stored at several corporate locations and in a bank vault as well to ensure that no matter what disaster might befall the company, the Tabasco pepper will continue to be grown. The home gardener can an also buy Tabasco pepper seeds so that they can grow this variety in their own garden.

Campbell’s Soup is another company that has developed their own lines of tomatoes and peppers for use in their products. In 1948, they set out to create consistent lines of tomatoes and peppers for use in their food products. So far, 24 varieties of tomatoes and 10 varieties of peppers have been produced from their research end development center. While their seeds are not as readily available as the Tabasco brand peppers, if you know the names, you can still find them available in seed catalogs.

Heinz is another company that has invested time and money in creating new varieties of tomato seeds to keep their products consistent no matter where the tomatoes are grown. Heinz tests each new variety in 10 different countries. Most of Heinz’s varieties are used commercially and are difficult to find for the home grower, but they can be found if you know what to look for.

While you might think that corporate veggies might be less tasty than the laymen kind, you might be surprised. Remember, corporate branded produce does not have to travel as far as, say, the cardboard grocery tomato, so they are bred more for taste and production than for transportability. Certainly, if you grow them in your garden, you might be able to trick the kids into eating the Heinz tomato rather than the Heinz ketchup.

And the frenzy of the season can commence! Black Friday, smack Friday… who needs holiday shopping when the 2008 last frost date is only 159 days away! The seed catalogs have begun to arrive and I can plan in earnest how I am going to blow a couple of hundred dollars on seeds that I will not do a damn thing with. I still have 3 years worth of unwise impulse buys that I had neither the space nor money to spend on them. But, god it is so fun.

A while back, I wrote about how to tell the quality of a seed catalog based on paper weight. On a related subject, this barrage of seed catalogs in December is probably not intended to produce sales in December, other than the odd gift from or to a loved one. To tell the truth, at least 50% of what you see in the catalog is not even in stock yet, especially anything that says “New for 2008”.

Mostly, these catalogs are a way to ramp up the later spending of dependable buyers. Yep, I am willing to bet any of you out there who are getting catalogs right now bought from a catalog or from an online site that has a catalog.  And you are salivating over a catalog now.

Seed companies know a little something about people who buy seeds from catalogs; like that these are the hard core gardeners. These are the ones who pine longingly over seed catalogs and use them as a surrogate garden while they wait for cruel white snows to recede. The longer you have a catalog handy, the longer your list of seeds will get.

Round about mid to late January, you will get another seed catalog from these companies. And maybe another in mid to late February, if they know that you buy ALOT of seeds.  These are for all you disgustingly organized gardeners and those suffering from serious seasonal affective disorder. But, while profiable, these mailings are not the biggies. Round about early March, you will probably get another one. Also, you will get seed catalogs that you never bought from. Your mailman will start to glare at you a little. Those catalogs are heavy, you know.

That March catalog is the money maker catalogs. Seed buying gardeners are whipped into a frenzy at this point in time. There have been a few moderately warm days that hint at Spring. The possibilities… The hope… The excitement! Suddenly that very long wish list you have compiled over the winter, when all those catalogs were your only solace, seems very possible. This will be the year!

The credit card gets whipped out. The order is placed and you now have something to look forward to other than the first robin.

It is only about May that the truth sets in.

1. You will not be able to grow all these seeds this year
2. Half of them are not suited to your climate anyway

You promise yourself that next year you won’t buy any seeds. You have enough to last you through next year. But that next catalog will be arriving sometime around the beginning of December…

For all of you English language die hards who refused to use the word “hardscape” due to the fact that it wasn’t a real word, you can now relax your panties and use the word with abandon. The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary has officially added the word to its pages.

No more do gardening show hosts and prolific garden writers need to be sneered at by the literary elite. Landscape architects and designers may utter this word without fear that clients may think less of them for using lowly gardening slang.

Among the other words added by Merriam-Webster, you will also find the garden related terms “mircogreen” and “viewshed“.

Speak them freely as they have graduated from being merely commonly used slang to full blown word. You go, word!

I don’t suppose tomato blossoms really have a smell. If they do, it is overwhelmed by smell of tomato foliage, which is still a pleasing scent.

Poor little tomato blossoms. Gardeners watch for them. We laud their appearance and lament their falls. We count the days from blossom to fruit. They are essential to the process of bringing forth tomato fruit into the world and yet, do we ever stop to look at them?

Several years ago, around the time I first started to explore the world of heirloom tomatoes, I was alarmed to find that the blossoms on one of my tomato plants didn’t look quite right. They were too full, too frilly. I fretted a bit, but eventually let it go and hoped for the best. I got perfectly normal tomatoes from the plant so I supposed nothing was wrong. But I did watch my tomato blossoms a little more closely after that. It wasn’t long until I discovered that tomato blossoms can vary as much as their fruit does.

If you have never noticed this about tomato blossoms, I would not be surprised. Besides the whole craving for fresh tomatoes that blinds even the most observant of people, tomato blossoms, for the most part, are shy. While squash and cucumber blossoms flaunt themselves around the garden like a cheerleader in the back of the quarterback’s car, tomato blossoms keep their yellow skirts demurely pointed towards the ground. You have to make an effort to peek under those petals.

I have found that tomato blossoms can be double or single. Have 5 petals or 10 or more. They can have thin frilly petals or just a few broad ones. So far, I have not noticed a pattern to the size and shape of the blossom to the color and taste of the fruit, but to be honest, I have not given the topic too much thought.

Tomatoes are one of the garden’s finest products, and its flowers will never be a startling centerpiece. But sometimes it is nice to take note of the prelude to the culinary symphony.

I suppose that when I say this is my favorite garden decoration, what I actually mean is that it is my favorite non-organic decoration, as my flowers are my favorite organic decoration.

This is the base to an old seventies lamp. Originally, this was part of a pair that I found in the trash. They were painted ebony and gold and were probably some suburban housewives idea of groovy interior decorating. I am guessing that their children who were moving them into a nursing home felt different (rightfully so) and the pair ended up at the curb.

That’s where I came in, tooling around the ‘hood with my little convertible, looking for interesting junk to put into my garden. Even my mother cringed when she saw these two, but I assured her that they would look great. I took a hacksaw to the lamp top and then split the pair and gave one to my neighbor. Mine got painted white, hers got painted in faux verdigris. Over the years, the paint, both the original and the added, peeled off and, year by year, the “statue” has been slowly disintegrating.

I think it adds an air of history, as if my garden that has seen grander days and we are only looking on the tail end of its grandeur (it’s a convenient fantasy for the mess I call a garden).

What is really odd is that this is not the only lamp base I have in my garden. There are actually two or three gems like this hidden around. Whether it be the decaying statue or a metal pedestal or a gaudy green glass bauble, I find that old lamp bases make for amazing garden decor.

The next time you are out on trash day or when you are making the yard sale rounds, take a close look at the junked lamps. Yeah, they suck for interior decorating purposes, but how would they look surrounded by petunias?

What a happy day this is! The State government, despite having such pressing tasks such as saving strippers from their mean ol’ customers and completely ignoring the school funding crisis here in Ohio, has seen fit to vote (once again) on the fitness of the lowly Lycopersicon esculentus in representing the State of Ohio in the official capacity of State Fruit.

This grand title was snatched from the paws of the paw paw plant just a few years ago. Apparently, while the bill was introduced, it never made it to the floor to be voted on.

The office of State Fruit has stood empty for far too long and it is a brilliant move on the part of our politicians to name a fruit that is commonly regarded as a vegetable to fill the position. I am fairly certain that this move will have far reaching effects on the fruit mistaken as vegetable populations.

I ask you… no… plead with you to write your Ohio state representative (Or if you don’t live in Ohio, feel free to write mine) and ask them to get this uber important bill to the floor. Urge your representative to vote yes on this issue. The tomato minority is counting on you!

I Love eBay.

• My matching set of titanium and gold wedding rings… Bought on eBay
• My ‘05 PT Cruiser Convertible… Bought on eBay
• My Doc Martin Boots… Bought on eBay
• My computer I am typing on right now (and the other three in my house)… Bought on eBay

So this morning, when I reviewed the ailing plants that were transplanted from the bad soil and decided that there was no hope in this green earth that they would ever make a recovery, I knew where I needed to go. I had to go to eBay.

Now, just about everybody knows that everything under the sun is sold on eBay. You can buy human souls, Mary bearing toast and giant Cheetoes. I mean what else is eBay for but to buy things you have absolutely no use for.

But when I mention to people that you can buy live plants, 9 out of 10 times I get a quizzical look. “Plants… on eBay… you can do that?” Yeah, they are right there next to the human souls section.

If they don’t react with surprise, they normally have some apprehension on whether or not eBay plants are quality plants.

I personally have never had a problem with my eBay plant purchases. I am careful to check the feedback score and the feedback comments and as long as I find that they are both positive, I find that I get great plants.

The really awesome thing about eBay is that many plant sellers are just small hobbyists selling their extras. Some very unusual and hard to find varieties are very reasonably priced when sold by these people.

With my half of my tomatoes dead in the water (or soil as it may be), I decided to buy a lot of heirloom tomatoes from TomatoGirl. She has an excellent, high feedback score and a to die for selection of heirloom tomatoes. Not to mention that the cost is only about $2.50 per plant and that is even after shipping. I couldn’t buy even the most common heirloom tomato plant for that price at my local nursery.

I ordered a lot of 10 and they should be here by the end of next week. Thank goodness for people who can grow seeds a hell of a lot better than I can and for eBay who makes it easy for me to buy from them.