first published January 25th, 2007

The other day, I was in the greenhouse feeling a little surprised by how quickly our Easter lily bulbs were sending vibrant-green shoots up through the soil. There was something magical about the speed of their emergence and it got me thinking, strangely enough, about a particular Loony Tunes episode and how cartoons may have shaped my generation’s view of plant science. For lack of a better term, I call it Bugs Bunny science.

Bugs Bunny was, and still is, my favourite cartoon character. He, and his fellow cast, not only provided me with hours of entertainment, but they also put their own spin on how the natural world worked. Watching the lilies poking out of the soil reminded me of the botanically rich episode called “Beanstalk Bunny,” which was the cartoon version of Jack and the Beanstalk.

For those of you who have never seen “Beanstalk Bunny,” it begins (if my memory serves me correctly) with a somniferous Bugs Bunny who is unaware that Jack (alias, Daffy Duck) has thrown some magic beans down his rabbit hole. The magic beans, not surprisingly, become gigantic, and the branches engulf a still sleeping Bugs and carry him into the stratosphere. When he awakens, he discovers he’s arrived in the Giant’s (Elmer Fudd’s) garden patch, which is chock full of gargantuan vegetables that include—of course—enormous carrots.

Beanstalk Bunny science sounds like an oxymoron and, of course, it is, but I think that although many of us would deny it, we have incorporated some of the ’science’ we learned as kids from watching Bugs Bunny into our ideas of how, among other things, plants grow.

As far fetched as the concept of beans shooting out the ground like rockets out of an underground silo is, suspension of disbelief requires at least one grain of truth, so I went looking for it and put my Bugs Bunny-science hypothesis to the test.

What’s Up?
The unscientific test involved an impromptu quiz with some people at work. The only quiz question was as follows: if you nail a wire fence securely to a rapidly growing tree (and please don’t try this; it’s never a good idea to pound anything into a tree), will the fence be pulled out of the ground and dangle from the trunk, or will the fence stay put? There were a lot of snickers and a few eye rolls but, without exception, everyone took some time to ponder the question before answering; and many people answered that, yes, the fence would end up hanging in the branches. The truth of the matter is that trees don’t grow like magic beans, and gardeners won’t ever have to worry about aerial fences crashing into their gardens.

Everyone knows that buildings aren’t pushed up and out of the ground; well, neither are trees nor Easter lilies. Plant growth is similar in principle to building construction. Actively growing plants get taller from cells continually dividing and stacking up at the branch tips—just like buildings get taller as construction materials get added.

There is some practical application to understanding that plants grow taller not from the base of their stems or trunks but rather from their tips or growing points. When you prune a tomato plant, for example, you would never lop the top off and expect the plant to shoot up from the ground like a magic bean. Lopping is a death sentence for a tomato because there are no growing points from which the plant can resume growth. On a similar note, the point where your tree branches fork won’t gradually move upward and rip out your eaves trough, but the branches will continue to stack new growth on the tips and they will gain in girth, which may be a threat to your troughs.

That’s All, Folks
So maybe I have gone off on a tangent and taken a little too much liberty blaming “Beanstalk Bunny” for tainting our plant science knowledge. After all, childhood is all about indulging in fantasy, so there really isn’t anything wrong with thinking that “Beanstalk Bunny” was a documentary.

Jim’s Notebook

Hits & Misses: New Guinea cuttings & order forms
Timelines: Time the crop and grocery shop
Question of the Week: Why isn’t my plant growing?
Business: Not easy finding green
Science and Technology: Stomping out stumps

I came across a brilliant term the other day in the trade magazine Green Profit. One of the articles referred to large tropicals as “living furniture.” It really struck a chord with me because we tend to forget that plants aren’t destined only to sit on top of furniture—they can also replace certain pieces, standing in for screens or other vertical design elements. Unfortunately, many people are willing to pay $500 for a screen or a tall decorative stand but not for a plant. Yet if you equate houseplants with furniture, it’s not hard to start thinking of truly beautiful ones as works of art. Then $500 may not seem quite as expensive as it once did. And, hey!—if you spill something on your houseplant, it won’t even leave a stain.

Hits & Misses
Hits: The Virtues Of Impatiens
Not all cuttings are easy to root. In fact, some are a downright pain. In a perfect world—or at least in a perfect greenhouse—all cuttings would take after New Guinea impatiens. They really are remarkably hassle-free: we root our New Guineas now, and provided we keep them warm and hydrated with a bit of mist now and again, they invariably produce an abundance of vigorous roots. Now if only I could get some of the more unruly cuttings to learn from the New Guineas, I’d be thrilled!

Misses: Not Loving The Letter
“Not available,” “Crop failure,” “Short crop,” “Seed didn’t perform,” “Back ordered”—these are all phrases we hate seeing on our order forms. Long story short, they all mean the same thing: we haven’t got a hope (in you know where) of getting certain varieties of seeds, cuttings or plant plugs. Now, I don’t blame the suppliers—they can’t control the weather or the myriad of other things that can affect supply—but it’s always disappointing to tell customers that one of the gorgeous plant they fell in love with in our Spring Gardening magazine won’t be available this year. But that’s just the reality of the business: some plants simply don’t abide by our wishes.

Timelines
Time The Crop And The Grocery Shop
If you’re involved with a business for a long time, it’s fair to say that you’ll occasionally get caught with your head down. For us, crop timing is one of those critical things we can’t stumble over. Obviously, Easter lilies that won’t bloom until a week after Easter Sunday just aren’t going to sell. Clearly, timing is everything, but what exactly is the right timing?—should lilies bloom a few days before Easter? A week? Two weeks? When I asked one of our staff members, she said matter-of-factly that lily timing goes hand in hand with grocery buying! When I didn’t connect the dots, she explained that the Easter groceries are usually purchased about two weeks prior to Easter Sunday so, naturally, that is also when one would purchase Easter lilies. Perhaps the fact that I found that concept revolutionary says a lot about the number of Easter meals I’ve prepared.

Question of the Week
No matter what I do to my houseplants, they just refuse to grow. What am I doing wrong?
This is a common wintertime question and one that can only be solved by adding one key ingredient: light. Light levels in our homes during the depths of winter are often just enough to keep plants idling but not enough to cause new growth. Unfortunately, there’s no true substitute for the sun’s energy. The good news is we are (slowly but surely) gaining light energy as the day length and sun intensity increase.

Business
Not Easy Finding Green
The University of Alberta is undergoing a building boom. Its skyline is dotted with construction cranes busily erecting some truly outstanding buildings that will leave a tremendous legacy in this province. But being a member of the U of A Alumni Council and Senate, I often hear concerns about preserving the ‘green space’ on campus. Fortunately, an open-spaces plan was created to preserve the natural environment that weaves its way throughout the campus. After all, a lot of intellectual achievements may have been born in the university’s lecture halls, but I’m willing to bet that a few brilliant ideas were also born under the shade of one of the Linden trees.

Science & Technology
Stomping Out Stumps
The Pest Management Regulatory Agency in Canada is exploring the possibility of registering a bio herbicide that the forestry industry could use to kill stumps. A bio herbicide is a living organism (in this case, a naturally occurring fungi called Chondrostereum purpureum) that offers non-chemical vegetation control. C. purpureum has proven effective at controlling shoot regrowth from the cut stumps of several deciduous tree species, and it doesn’t attack healthy trees. But don’t expect to see C. purpureum in garden centres anytime soon. Even if the product is approved for use in the forestry industry, it doesn’t guarantee that anyone will seek registration for its use in home gardens. As interesting as it is to see good organisms used to fight bad ones, I find it intriguing that C. purpureum is also known as silverleaf, a fungal disease that attacks many of our prized ornamental shrubs. Fortunately, this particular strain of silverleaf doesn’t attack healthy plants.

Winter brings its own special challenges even to indoor plants. Jim gives a few quick tips on ensuring your houseplants thrive through the winter.
Quicktime
WMV

First published January 18th, 2007

Most gardeners are comfortable with the term perennial plant but I would venture a guess that few have even heard the term monocarpic perennial. I like to think of monocarpic perennials as the stereotypical tragic heroes in action movies—the ones who, regardless of how the movie unfolds, are destined to have a spectacular but ultimately disastrous ending.

Monocarpic means to flower once and then to die shortly thereafter, and although there aren’t a huge number of perennials that are monocarpic, there are some truly fascinating species that have a penchant for the dramatic.

The most famous and stunning of the monocarpic plants has to be the century plant. It’s a species of agave (Agave americana) indigenous to the desert regions of North and South America. It requires anywhere from 30 to 60 years before it is capable of blooming, but when it finally gets the impetus, the results are nothing short of spectacular. A flower spike bursts out of the central rosette of the foliage (a low-growing circle of basal leaves) and shoots 7.5 metres into the sky, terminating in a panicle of flowers! The development of the spike is always bittersweet because the emergence of the flower foreshadows the imminent death of the agave plant.

If you want to see an example of a huge monocarp, the Muttart Conservatory in Edmonton has a relative of the century plant called a false agave (Furcraea selloa) that is in the final stages of flowering and its 6-metre tall flower spike is stunning.

Many of the monocarpic perennials that put on the greatest shows seem to be somewhat inconspicuous during their juvenile growth phase but, obviously, more than make up for it during flowering. Once the flowers have matured, the plant takes a poison pill, so to speak, and dies. It sounds like a bit of a suicide mission, but if everything has gone according to nature’s plan, the flowers are successfully pollinated and viable seeds fall to the ground to start the life cycle once again.

The Tell-Tale Perennial
Although spectacular monocarpic perennials, like yuccas, aren’t hardy here, there are a few lesser-known monocarps that grow exceptionally well in our gardens. Take the false houseleek (Orostachys spinosa) for example. False houseleek is a small plant that is excellent for rock gardens due to its adaptability to dry, poor soils and hot sun. It has an intriguing whorl of spiny leaves surrounded by large fleshy leaves and is only about 10 cm wide at maturity.

Orostachys spinosa

When it’s time for it to bloom, a flower will suddenly shoot up from the centre and tower above the small rosette of leaves. In our show garden, one false houseleek produced a ‘flower’ that looked like it belonged in an Edgar Allan Poe story. When it emerged from the rosette, it looked like a hand reaching up from a grave, as if to grab the leg of unsuspecting passersby. Of course, being that the false houseleek is a monocarpic perennial, ‘the hand’ lasted only a couple of months before it
dyed—along with the rest of the plant.

In full flower, this Orostachys spinosa was the centre of interest in our show garden.

The question that many gardeners may be asking themselves is why plant a perennial that is programmed to die? Well, I think that the most compelling reason is that they are intriguing and attractive plants throughout their entire lifecycles. For those who require another reason, there is also something admirable about a plant that goes out in a blaze of glory—too many plants lead lives of quite desperation.

But if you really don’t like the blaze of glory scenario as much as I do, you could try cutting off the flower before it matures, the theory being that removal of the emerging flowers will prevent the death signal from being sent to the plant.

Finally if none of these scenarios appeal to you, you might be won over by this last fact: when a monocarpic plant flowers and dies, it’s one of the few times a gardener can shrug and say, “Well, it’s not my fault.”

Sounds perfect to me.

Hits & Misses: Tropical plants and repotting services; and were our Christmas cacti too small?
Question of the Week: How do I stop my ornamental flowering crabapples from producing fruit?
The Business: Dihydrogen oxide—a versatile ‘chemical’
Science & Technology: ‘We like to blame disease because it exonerates us.’–A.R. Chase

January is not only the coldest month of the year—at least in my part of the country—it is also the month when the seed products start arriving at our garden centre. Marlene Willis is our seed guru who searches far and wide for reliable and interesting seed products and spends months pouring over catalogues long before they reach the home gardener’s mailbox. There has been an industry-wide decline in seed sales over the years and that’s a pity. Perhaps it’s because people are too busy and can’t be bothered with growing their own plants from seed, but I for one wouldn’t give up my home-grown vegetables for anything. And many of us here get a real kick out of growing some of Marlene’s oddball selections (sometimes you end up being the first person on the block to try something brand new). Take my advice; pick up a pack of seeds, even if it’s only an exotic lettuce you haven’t tried before. It’s a great way to Enjoy Gardening.

Hits & Misses:
Hits: A Little Something Extra
It is not always easy to entice people to leave the warm confines of their houses when there is a blizzard raging outside. But a greenhouse chock full of lush tropical plants can be just the ticket to beat the post-blizzard blues. Each January, we custom order truckloads of beautiful indoor plants and gorgeous pots in the hope of bringing people who are feeling a little house bound out to the greenhouse. We also find that it’s those little extras that make the real difference to our customers. For example, we offer a free repotting service to customers who purchase a pot with a plant. Repotting is a messy undertaking at home. Regardless of how careful you are, the potting soil ends up everywhere and the time spent cleaning up seems to take twice as long as the repotting itself. It is no mystery why the repotting service is so popular.

Misses: To Small To Be Appreciated?
The Christmas cacti didn’t sell as well this year as they have in the past. I think part of the explanation for their poor sales has to do with their size. Although our Christmas cacti were healthy and in full bloom, I don’t think they were big enough to capture our customers attention. There seems to be an increasing demand for bigger and bolder Christmas cacti, so next year we will test market some of the jumbo-sized varieties to see if our theory is correct.

Question of the Week
How Do I Stop My Ornamental flowering Crabapples From Producing Fruit?
We are in the middle of preparing a new landscape book for publishing later this month, and its author, Maggie Clayton—an architectural landscape designer who works part time in our Nursery—tells us that her landscaping clients often ask her how to stop the fruit from forming on ornamental flowering crabapples. It seems that while people love the spring blossoms, they’re less enamored with the fruit. Unfortunately, the answer to preventing fruit formation is to remove the blossoms, which kind of defeats the whole point of growing ornamental crabs. The best solution to the fruit drop problem is to grow crabapples that are fruitless or that yield tiny fruit. One crabapple variety that fits the bill is ‘Spring Snow.’ It doesn’t produce fruit, yet has beautiful bright-white blooms in spring. Maggie also says that if you grow a really columnar form, such as ‘Rosthern’ columnar crabapple, you’ll end up with fruit in a very small area beneath the tree—easy to clean up, and you don’t have to sacrifice any flowers!

The Business
A Versatile ‘Chemical’
Sanitation is a critical part of the disease control equation in our greenhouses. You can’t grow disease-free plants in a facility that isn’t clean; end of story. We’ve found that over the years, one chemical has proven to be an indispensable part of our sanitation program. Its called dihydrogen oxide, and we use plenty of it to keep the walls, floors and tables clean. The beauty of dihydrogen oxide is that it is safe to use and highly effective, although it does require a fair bit of work to apply it properly. So where can you find this wonderful product? Just turn on your faucet. Dihydrogen oxide’s common name is water, and nothing beats a bucket of warm, soapy water as the important first step in the sanitation process.

Science & Technology
‘We like to blame disease because it exonerates us.’–A.R. Chase
I’ve listened to plant pathologist, Dr. Anne Chase, speak at many greenhouse conferences over the years, and I always find her sessions highly informative. One statement that she made at a recent conference that has stuck with me is, (I hope she will forgive me for paraphrasing!), “We like to blame diseases for plant problems because it exonerates us.” How true that statement is. I would say that 90% of the indoor plant problems I see are not attributable to diseases. Incorrect lighting, poor soil, too little or too much water and/or fertilizer and improper temperatures are responsible for the vast majority of plant problems, but to ascribe a disease to an ailing plant has a way of availing us of any wrong doing. Not that there is anything wrong with that strategy—if it is used sparingly!

First published January 11th, 2007

Over the years, I’ve found that the best way to make people feel just a little bit happier about paying their natural gas bills is to tell them that I’m in the greenhouse business. It just has a way of making even the most cantankerous person feel a tad sorry for you.

The general perception about greenhouses is that they require a fair bit of natural gas to grow plants in colder climates, and that perception is accurate. As wonderful as greenhouses are for bathing plants in sunlight, they aren’t so great at keeping in the heat. That, however, may be about to change.

I attended a lecture this past year at a greenhouse conference in Ohio where I listened to Andre de Raadt, a greenhouse environmental-control systems specialist from Holland, present his research on “zero-energy greenhouses.” Being the unabashed skeptic that I am and considering the size of the bills we pay in the industry, I found the premise of a “free lunch,” in terms of greenhouse energy, a little hard to swallow. But as I quickly found out, the science behind zero-energy greenhouses seems quite solid, and a few experimental greenhouses in Holland are not only paying next to nothing for heating but are also exploring options that may allow them to export excess greenhouse energy to a few surrounding homes.

Waste Not, Want Not
Even in northern latitudes like ours, the incoming solar energy is more than adequate to heat our greenhouses year round. On a 30˚C or hotter day during the summer, shutting the doors and switching off fans to our greenhouses—for just an hour or two—causes the inside temperature to rise above 50˚C. Even on a moderately cool but sunny day, with all of our exhaust fans running, an incredible 1.5 million cubic metres of warm air is drawn out of the greenhouses each hour—enough to fill up the world’s largest cruise ship five times! The problem is that this excess heat can’t be stored and used when we need it most, during the coldest months of the year.

Heat has a sort of Jekyll and Hyde personality in that it is designated as waste through much of the summer and as a resource during much of the winter. The principle behind zero-energy greenhouses is to challenge the idea that heat is a waste at any time of the year. The method is simple. Instead of dumping heat out of a hot greenhouse and letting it dissipate outside, the greenhouse is sealed tightly, and the excess heat is extracted with heat exchangers and stored in an aquifer 20 to 100 metres beneath the ground, depending on the composition of the soil. During the winter, the stored heat from the summer is piped back into the greenhouse. In the experimental greenhouse in Holland, cool, 6˚C water was pulled up from the cold-water aquifer and used to ‘air condition’ the greenhouses in summer, and the hot water was stored underground for winter use.

But while the concept is simple, the cost to install such a system is immense and requires some pretty sophisticated engineering. The geology of the area also has to be suitable for heat storage. It is an exciting concept, though, and with the great leaps being made in alternative-energy technology, coupled with rising heating costs, I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more about zero-energy greenhouses.

Being that I’m in the ‘green’ business, I always find it refreshing to hear that the energy prospects aren’t all doom and gloom. All it takes is a few

Let’s keep the ‘happy’ in ‘Happy New Year’ this upcoming gardening season by ensuring that gardening is first and foremost about enjoyment. In our hectic lives, we turn to gardening as a way to seek refuge from the stresses of life, not to increase it. I think that, by and large, most gardeners have an implicit understanding of the ‘Zen’ side of gardening, but I also think that many newcomers to gardening see it as a ‘have to’ task as in ‘I have to do it to keep the yard looking somewhat respectable,’ rather than a ‘want to’ as in ‘I want to spend time enjoying the plants for their intrinsic value’. So 2007 will be the breakout year for the ‘have to’ gardeners out there. At Hole’s we are looking at some innovative ways to really ‘Enjoy Gardening’ by reducing some of the labor intensive tasks in our yards such as watering for instance—keep an eye out for some remarkable xeriscape patio planters we will be creating this spring.

Hits & Misses
Hits: Singularly Striking Cineraria
We recently planted up a crop of potted cineraria. If you are not familiar with cineraria, it is a compact plant with heart-shaped foliage and it produces single, daisy-like blooms in many colours, some with eye-catching white centres. It’s also a very popular flowering plant. Cineraria like cool conditions, and I have to say that this particular crop of cineraria is one of the best I have seen. Part of the reason for their outstanding quality is the fact that we fortified the potting soil with some extra iron, which ensures a wonderful deep-green hue to the foliage. The iron adds an extra expense to the cost of growing the plants but the results are wonderful.

Cineraria benefit from a little extra iron in their potting medium.

Misses: Doing The Greenhouse Shuffle
If you think it’s difficult to find just the right location for a plant in the garden, you should try finding the perfect spot in a commercial greenhouse! Case in point: our tropical banana plants. Last week some of these plants developed some strange black spots on their newest leaves. The speculation running wild among the growers was that perhaps someone had overdosed the bananas with fertilizer, but the answer was a lot more chilling, literally. Bananas are one plant that have a very low tolerance for cold temperatures and, unfortunately, they were placed in a cooler section of the greenhouse where a couple of days of outdoor temperatures in the negative teens was enough to cool their spot, resulting in foliage damage. The bananas have since been move to a cozier environment and will recover quite nicely. The greenhouse shuffle never ends!

People
Marvin Joslin, Lily Breeder Extraordinaire
The gardening world lost a wonderful person recently. Marvin Joslin, who died on December 31st 2006, lived on an acreage just south of Spruce Grove where he pursued his love of gardening. He was a very avid collector and breeder of lilies and honoured my mother by naming one of his prized lilies after her. Today we have the ‘Lois Hole’ lily growing in our garden and are forever grateful for that kind gesture and for his enrichment of the gardening world in general. He will be deeply missed by all of us.

Question of the Week
There is a weird brown lump growing on my weeping fig tree. What is it?
It certainly sounds as if you are describing trunk gall. Gall looks something like a brown knot and is usually found growing on the tree’s crown or trunk. Most galls won’t kill a tree, but they will disfigure it. What causes it? Gall is caused by the soil-borne bacteria Agrobacterium tumafaciens, which enters the tree through wounds in the crown or stem.

In most cases, gall is not lethal. If the gall cannot be cut out without extensively damaging the tree, I suggest leaving it alone. The best way to prevent gall is to use a high-quality, pasteurized soil-less mixes and to take care not to nick or wound the crown or trunk of trees.

Greenhouse Pests
Pheasant Under Plastic
Now that we’re deep into the heart of winter, I can’t help but reminisce about an unusual ‘pest’ that paid a visit to our greenhouses one snowy winter. The story begins with our greenhouse roofs. Each roof is composed of two layers of plastic that are separated by a ten-centimetre layer of air and are kept inflated by a small inflation fan. One winter, after a particularly heavy snowstorm, a rather large pheasant decided to bury herself deeply into what she thought was a regular, run-of-the-mill snowdrift. But this particular snowdrift was on top of our greenhouses, and the bird not only tunneled through the snow but also managed to cut through the first layer of the plastic. She somehow worked her way into the film and wedged herself deep between the two plastic layers. The next morning, we noticed the poor pheasant splayed out four metres above our heads looking like a drastically undercooked chicken in a ziplock bag. The confused bird was unable to move a muscle. We managed to climb up and on to the roof and free the pheasant from its transparent prison and she flew off none the worse for wear.

Timelines
T’is the Season…For Flowering Plants
We are just in the process of planting up bougainvillea, hydrangeas, azaleas and fuchsias. There is quite a bit of soil management that occurs to ensure that each plant gets the best soil mix for its particular needs. For example, if we want some of our hydrangea crop to produce pink flowers, we need a soil with a higher pH—a soil with lower pH will cause the flowers to turn blue. A pH that is somewhere in between results in ‘blurple’ flowers which, I suppose, are fine for those of us who are a bit indecisive. At any rate, our soil mixers are busy keeping up with the demands.

first published January 4th, 2006

I can’t say that I’ve ever set a New Year’s resolution. Oh, I’ve entertained the thought more than once, but my enthusiasm always succumbs to the reality that I won’t keep it. But this year is different.

I’ve decided that the trick to keeping a resolution is reasonability, so I’m going to eliminate completely unrealistic resolutions, like never swearing when I’m cut off in traffic, and instead focus on setting the resolution bar several notches lower. Being that I am in the plant business and that this is a gardening column, I’ve decided that a horticultural resolution might be a good starting point.

So here goes. Be it resolved that, in 2007, I won’t get mad at any plants.

Y Not?
I’m not kidding. I blame my occasional angry outburst at plants on my genes—specifically the Y chromosome I inherited from my dad. There’s one memory in particular that always comes to mind when I think about Dad and plants. Way back when we built our new greenhouses, Dad was carrying four trays of tiny but expensive seedlings down one of the aisles and inadvertently slipped on a wet metal gutter cover. Three of the flats tumbled out of his arms and scattered across the concrete floor as he tried in vain to regain his foothold. Dad did manage to save one of the flats by balancing it in his arms, but instead of seeing his glass as quarter full, I noticed his right eyebrow droop—just a tad—as it always did when he was about to get angry. Then, after he entertained a very brief moment of reflection, I watched as he drop kicked the remaining good flat of seedlings 10 yards down the greenhouse. Mom, my brother Bill and my sister-in-law Valerie were aghast at seeing the only good flat take off on a wobbly trajectory toward the pile where the other three flats lay scattered, but I couldn’t help but empathize with Dad. Sometimes logic just doesn’t cut it.

Although I’ve never punted an entire flat of pricey seedlings, I confess to giving the odd planter a “gentle” kick, particularly after I’ve tripped over one that surreptitiously moved into the aisle where I was walking. I will even admit to dropping the odd hammer, wrench, flashlight or ladder on a fair share of plants, but most of those instances had more to do with carelessness than malice.

Jim, Bill, Lois and Ted in front of the old red barn in St Albert.

Baby Steps
I think the best way to succeed with my resolution on horticultural anger management is to come to grips with the fact that there really are no malicious plants out there—just misunderstood ones. Had I ensured that each and every plant was a safe distance away from where I was working, and had I taken the time to learn more about the nuances of each variety that hadn’t performed to my expectations, I think I could easily have quelled the rising tide of anger that pulsed through my veins on those occasions.

Really, there’s no benefit to getting mad at a basket of petunias that looks pale when I know full well that I was the one who failed to give them enough iron and nitrogen. It’s not their fault. Plants are passive organisms responding as best they can to the environment we provide.

I guess I’ll see how my resolution goes. If it doesn’t work out, next year, I can resolve not to break resolutions. It makes me think of what Einstein said about insanity. His definition of it was that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. My take on these sagacious words of wisdom is that the only way to purge my periodic outbursts of anger is to drop the idea that some plants, at some times, are out to get me. I really do know that in the back of my mind, but when I think back, Dad sure did put a damn nice spiral on that flat of seedlings.

first published December 28, 2006

We give cloves little thought until we inadvertently chomp into one of them. Then a flood of questions start to run through the mind: Should I spit it out? Chew it? Will it burn my mouth? So just what are those little brown nails anyway?

I suppose that because moms and grandmothers have traditionally been fond of sticking and studding cloves into our food, we have always assumed that they were somewhat edible—or at the very least, safe to eat. But while the ‘Mom knows best’ attitude is comforting and fine for most people, I think it’s a good time of the year to take a closer look at this mysterious thing we call the clove.

Name Game
Clove is the common name for a species of tree called Sysygium aromaticum. These trees are indigenous to Indonesia and grow about 8–30 m tall. The name clove was derived from the Latin word clavus, which, not surprisingly, means nail. What is surprising is that these hard ‘nails’ are really flowers. More specifically, they are the tree’s dried, unopened flowers. It takes about 10 years for the trees to begin flowering, and on average, one clove tree will produce about 4 kg of dried cloves.

Cloves gain their distinctive flavour and aroma from essential oils, which are at their highest concentration in the flower buds. Essential oils are complex mixtures of plant chemicals, but the word essential is a bit misleading. In this case, essential refers to essence, as in perfume—not essence, as in essential to the plant’s survival. The main component of the oil is a chemical called eugenol, which was likely synthesized by the clove tree to fight off plant diseases, marauding insects and grazing animals. Strangely enough, although eugenol is used in cooking, it has also been used to alleviate tooth aches, to attract and trap fruit-damaging flies in orchards and to anesthetize fish.

It’s interesting that the eugenol found in cloves is virtually identical, chemically speaking, to the chemical isoeugenol, which is found in nutmeg. In fact, if you made tabletop-sized models of each molecule and put them side by side, you would need to do a double take to see that they weren’t identical. It would be like building two complex Tinkertoy replications of each chemical and then sticking an extra stick onto one of them. Even the chemical in ginger called zingerone is only a few of sticks and wheel different than eugenol. Although the three chemicals look nearly identical, it’s the way those structures fit into our taste buds that allows us to distinguish them from each other.

Addictive pleasures
When I think about what triggers some of my most powerful memories of Christmas, I usually think of how our house smelled when a holiday meal was being prepared. Today, whenever I detect even the slightest fragrance of cloves, I’m immediately transported back to the family dinner table and clove-studded ham. But while cloves evoke vivid memories of warm fireplaces and food in the minds of Canadians, they likely evoke drastically different memories in the minds of Indonesians. Although people in Indonesia use cloves for culinary purposes, apparently, they also have a penchant for blending them with tobacco and transforming that blend into cigarettes called Kreteks. Hopefully, that product will never find its way here. Besides wanting my memories of cloves to remain linked exclusively to family Christmas dinners, the last thing we need is smokers walking around with two patches on their arms: one for nicotine and the other for eugenol.