Reflections on 2012

Another year of gardening comes to an end. Truthfully, I spent more time learning about gardens, than actually gardening! Between my two classes at Merritt College—Tree ID and Plant Diseases; traveling and writing; and the demands of work and life, there was barely time to plant a seed or tend my garden.

In 2012, Eden By The Bay continued to explore gardening in the Bay Area, especially trees! One of the highlights included observing popular street trees through the seasons. It was surprising to see so much seasonal change despite our subtle Bay Area seasons. We explored nature and gardens in multiple climates, including the deserts of Southern California and Spokane, Washington; the coast and tundra of Southcentral Alaska; and the dry and riparian zones in Southern Utah. We visited public and private gardens, including Filoli Gardens, Nishinomiya Japanese Garden at Manito Park, and Overfelt Gardens.

Trees - through the seasons. Labels: nature, seasons, trees	 Nature - let nature inspire garden design. Labels: garden design, nature
   Gardens - visit gardens for ideas. Labels: Filoli, garden design, gardens	 History  - study the gardens of the world. Labels: garden history

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We studied ancient, Japanese, Chinese, and Persian garden history, all of which influence our garden designs today. We continued some of our themes from last year – trellises and green roofs; winter and summer movies that star the plant world; spices that flavor our holiday cooking; and great reference books. We mourned the passing of my mother-in-law—my husband’s mom—as we visited her garden in Spokane; and we celebrated our son’s art show at the Crush Bistro in Anchorage and met his lovely girl friend. It was a full year of friends, family, and gardens!

 

Presidio for a New Perspective

The fun and flurry of Christmas is over. The rains continue to pelt the Bay Area, with brief interludes of clear skies. The winter solstice recently marked the shortest day of the year, with many more short days to come before spring. It will be awhile before we can get back into the garden - what to do?

This is a great time to take the family or friends out and enjoy the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bay Area abounds with cultural, historical, and natural destinations that appeal to many ages and interests. After 15 years here in the Bay Area, we are still discovering new and interesting events to attend and places to visit. A recent find was the Presidio of San Francisco, including Fort Point and the Fort Scott parade grounds.

Fort Scott parade grounds - now with other uses, like the Disney Museum
 

Presidio arches - the old and the new

The Presidio is a decommissioned military base that sits on the southern face of the Golden Gate. Fort Point was built in 1793-94 to defend the entrance to the San Francisco Bay. Its 7 feet-thick walls and San Martin canyon, cast in Peru in 1684, sit beneath the giant support structure for a portion of the Golden Gate Bridge. This location provides a perfect spot to view San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Marin Headlands from a whole different perspective. Sometimes a new perspective is just what we need, to move in a new direction.

Golden Gate Bridge and Marin Headlands - viewed from Fort Point

 

O Tannenbaum

After studying trees all year—especially the street trees in Dublin, California where I work and walk—I thought it would be fitting to look into the Christmas carol O Tannenbaum (Oh Fir Tree in German, and Oh Christmas Tree in English). It is not a religious song, but the carol is frequently included in any good line up of Christmas carols. It seems perfectly fitting to sing “Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree, how lovely are your branches”, while sitting at the base of a beautiful tree, decorated with lights and ornaments.

Turns out, the carol was not originally associated with Christmas, but based on a German folk song from the 1550s extolling the evergreen fir tree branches as symbols of steadfastness. Many versions of the lyrics exist (including many parodies). Modern lyrics for several verses are attributed to Ernst Anschütz, an organist, teacher, and composer from Leipzig, in Saxony, Germany in 1824. Think of the carol next time you see a fir tree – green whether in summer or winter. Enjoy the carol in German: http://youtu.be/Oq_sD3hMBhc 

 

Merry Christmas to all!
 

Holiday Cooking – Allspice

This month I have explored several favorite spices that flavor my holiday baking, using J.O. Swahn’s The Lore of Spices for information. Today I’m learning about allspice, which I use in several cookie recipes. The spice is also used in many commercial products, such as condiments, pickles, sausage, and spice mixtures (including Jamaican jerk spice).

Pimenta dioica (formerly P. officinalis) is in the Myrtaceae (or myrtle) family and native to tropical West Indies and Central America. Today it is cultivated in Jamaica, Cuba, Trinidad, Mexico, and Honduras. According to Swahn, allspice was largely ignored by early European explorers in the New World. In the 1570s the scholar Francisco Hernandez observed that a spice about the size of peppercorns was an ingredient in the spiced chocolate drink made by the Aztecs. In 1600 the spice was exported to Europe and became quite popular. In the late 1600s the English naturalist John Ray called the spice “sweet-scented Jamaica pepper” or “allspice” in his Historia Plantarum.



Botanical illustration of Pimenta dioica from Koehler's Medicinal Plants.
(Published before 1923 and public domain in the United States)

Allspice is a tree that grows to 40 feet. Leaves are oblong-lanceolate, to 6 inches long, with prominent veins. Flowers are white, ¼ inch across, with four-lobed calyx. Fruit is round, ¼ inch across, and dark brown, containing two seeds. Both leaves and fruit contain the aromatic oil – eugenol, also found in cloves. The fruit is harvested before it is ripe, typically in July or August while still green, and then dried in ovens. The dried berries are used whole or ground.

Finished Plant Diseases!

Last week my Plant Diseases course at Merritt College in Oakland, California came to an end. Our professor, Dr. Ann Northrup, did a fantastic job teaching the course. We learned about plant pathogens from five kingdoms or phylum – plant, animal, fungus, bacteria, and protists (as well as viruses). We focused on fungi and bacteria, since they are the most prevalent. We learned about the pathogens we experience in the San Francisco Bay Area (water molds are big). I was fascinated to learn about:

• Viruses (bits of genetic code encased in protein), which, when inserted into a plant cell, change its DNA to create a habitat for a vector (such as the oak apple gall that provides housing and food for the Oak Apple Gall Wasp).

Oak apple galls near Clear Lake, California.
Genetic engineering by the Oak Apple Gall Wasp

• The relationships between plants and pathogens (narrow and wide host ranges).
• The native plant-pathogen arms race where each tries for supremacy and adapts in response.
• The dangers of exotic pathogens that can wreak havoc on native plants that have not been in that arms race.
• The built-in mechanisms that plants use to fend off or work with its pathogens. Hint: caffeine and nicotine are poisons that coffee and tobacco plants use as defences against pathogens.
• The merits (and fears) of genetic engineering for ensuring food production as the world’s population soars.
• How well fungi and bacteria will thrive as the planet warms, and the threat to the food supply that will result.

I am sorry to see the class come to an end, but look forward to visiting the Sick Plant Clinic at U.C. Berkeley and continuing to learn more about Bay Area plant diseases and how to manage (or live with) them. With this class, I’ll have met the requirements for the basic Landscape Horticulture certificate at Merritt College. From my point of view though, I’ve just scratched the surface of all there is to learn!

Holiday Cooking – Cloves

This month I’m back to learning more about the plants that flavor my holiday baking. Today it is cloves, which I use to flavor pumpkin and vegetable breads, pumpkin pie, and cookies. I also use whole cloves, along with cinnamon sticks, to flavor hot apple cider. For years my maternal grandmother, Grandma Char, hung a string of cloved oranges over the sink in her kitchen. Whole cloves were pushed into a fresh orange like little tacks, and seemed to preserve the orange as it dried and hardened. The aromatic mixture of clove and orange oil was released into her tiny kitchen as it heated up from the hot stove or steaming kettle.

Syzygium aromaticum is in the Myrtaceae (or Myrtle) family, and originated in the Molucca Islands (or Spice Islands) in the Indonesian archipelago north of Australia. Cloves have been used to sweeten breath in China; increase male potency, warm cold feet, and cure gout in Europe; keep evil spirits out of body openings through nose and lip clove piercings in the East Indies; used as a local anesthetic for dentistry in Germany; and flavored food, cigarettes, and perfume worldwide.

Cloves have also caused bloodshed as the Portuguese, Dutch, and English sought to control production and distribution in turn. Clove production in the Molucca Islands was tightly controlled from the 1500s through 1700s to the point that wild or privately grown clove trees were destroyed, smuggling cloves was punishable by death, and an estimated 60,000 islanders were massacred. In 1753, a Frenchman named Pierre Poivre (or Peter Piper, of “picked a peck of pickled peppers” fame), smuggled clove plants out of the Molucca Islands and grew them successfully on the Isle de France for presentation to King Louis XVI. Today cloves are grown in the warm climates of Malaysia; Tanzania; the islands of Zanzibar, Pemba and Madagascar; and the West Indies, as well as the Moluccas.

Botanical illustration of Syzygium aromaticum from Koehler's Medicinal Plants.
Published before 1923 and public domain in the United States.

Cloves are the flower buds of an evergreen tree that grows to 30 feet high. Leaves are elliptic, dotted with glands, and fragrant when crushed. Flowers are yellow to white as buds, to ¼ inch across in terminal, sparsely flowered panicles. The buds are harvested by hand before the flowers open. Flowers grow at different rates, so a single tree can have multiple harvests in a season. The buds are sun dried, and sold whole, crushed into powder, or extracted as oil.

Gingerbread Houses

All this talk about ginger and spices and Christmas baking brings up wonderful memories of making gingerbread houses with our son. Initially we made basic gingerbread houses – typically cabins in the woods with four walls and a pitched roof. They were encrusted with frosting and gumdrops and peppermint and all types of candies. The neighborhood kids could not wait to destroy the gingerbread houses and then eat the (very stale and hard) building materials.

We used the gingerbread recipe from the Betty Crocker Cookie Book (a gift from the family for which I babysat as a teenager). The recipe was selected due to its excellent flavor and building properties. It calls for four favorite holiday spices – cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and allspice.

Little gingerbread house in the woods, complete with lolipop windows.

As our son got older, he and I pushed the design and architecture limits for gingerbread. We experimented with many shapes and structures. One year we made a cutaway gingerbread house (Santa’s workshop)—almost like a dollhouse—with scenes inside and out. That year we battled with a sagging second story floor. The year we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, we created a two-dimensional reproduction of several key buildings and landmarks. Our challenge was to keep the large cookies upright.

 

San Franciso Bay Area in gingerbread - Painted Ladies, Coit Tower,
Transamerica building, and the Bay Bridges.

Another year we created a structure from one of our son’s favorite manga stories – a tubular building with a mushroom dome. Our attempts to bake a tube-shaped cookie did not work, but we came up with a workable solution by gluing flat cookies to a round oatmeal cookie box with frosting.

 

Merry manga Christmas in gingerbread. 

At some point we stopped making gingerbread houses (other priorities moved in), but we have some great memories of working together to create our gingerbread masterpieces. Now, we use the same recipe to bake delicious batches of gingerbread men and women every Christmas season!

Holiday Cooking – Ginger

Hard to believe that it is the Christmas holiday season again! A year ago I reported on the plants that season some of my favorite Christmas recipes. This year my holiday baking is slightly delayed while I finish my Plant Diseases class. Until then, I can learn more about the spices I love, using J.O. Swahn’s The Lore of Spices.

First up is ginger – a key ingredient in many of my cookie recipes, as well as the Asian dishes I enjoy preparing. The exact origin of Zingiber officinale is unknown, but it is thought to have been native to Southern or Southeast Asia tropical rain forests, or the islands to the east. It is no longer found in the wild, but is cultivated around the world in China, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Jamaica, and other West Indies islands. According to Swahn, ginger was the first spice plant to travel from the Old World to New for cultivation. Ginger produces a light yellow essential oil that is used in the food industry to flavor ginger ale, ginger beer, and preserves such as Gherkin pickles. It is dried and ground to powder to flavor curry sauces and baked goods, and can be used raw. Historically, ginger had a reputation for being an aphrodisiac – something to consider when planning a romantic dinner menu.

Botanical illustration of Zingiber officinale from Koehler's Medicinal Plants.
Published before 1923 and public domain in the United States.

Ginger is a perennial tropical plant with a dense stem to 20 inches tall, composed of overlapping leaves. Flowers are yellow-green, with a purple lip with cream blotches and base, surround by green bracts with translucent margins. Leaves are up to 7 inches long and ¾ inches wide, with parallel veins (monocot). Ginger is obtained from the tuberous, aromatic rhizome, which is an underground stem (not a root). Ginger plants are cultivated for more than a year before the rhizomes are harvested. They are dug up, cleaned, and sun dried in preparation for sale.

Persian Gardens – The Alhambra

Heading west from Iran, the Alhambra is an example of a Persian garden style adapted by the Moors in Spain (the Arabs occupied Spain from 710 – 1492). Alhambra (“the red one”) was constructed as a palace and fortress complex built on top of the hill of the Assabica near the city of Granada. Construction started in the mid-tenth century, and continued in multiple construction phases over the next several hundred years. Water was brought in to the complex via a carved stone aqueduct system. Alhambra is another UNESCO World Heritage site.

Look for glimpses of Persian garden elements (click X to view the advertising later):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v-niFdko1w&feature=youtu.be

According to Christopher Thacker, author of Thacker’s The History of Gardens, The Alhambra retains most Moorish characteristics, but has been overlaid with later European features. The charbagh  (or garden) is retained with a fountain in the center, four channels of water, and four rectangular quadrants. The four planting areas were originally two feet lower than they are today. The effect would have been that the flower tops would have been at the same level of the path – similar to a floral boarder on a beautiful Persian carpet.

Sometimes when visiting the Spanish missions in California, I am struck with how much the central fountain and courtyard, the intricate tile work, and the gardens remind me of these Persian garden elements. It is interesting to think of the history that brought the Persian garden style to the missions of California.