Hanging in there on Capitol Hill, LittleBird Stephanie’s Meyer lemon. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh. On the front / iStock photo.

THE CHRISTMAS CACTUS bloomed the other day. I found it on the floor of my little greenhouse, probably tipped over by my adorable visiting granddog, Tallula. Its droopy, sickly-sweet pink flowers lay splayed against the black and white floor. Like a ballerina in her death throws.

So I retrieved it and stuck it in the urn that’s temporarily sitting atop a pedestal in a corner—I have yet to repot a palm that’s supposed to be therein ensconced (that’s probably some kind of grammatical misconstruction and if it is not it is certainly pretentious and . . . eh. Sometimes the way things dribble forth is the way they dribble forth).

The urn needed something, having lost its centerpiece twice this past summer, because I was too lazy to get off the porch in the blast-furnace heat and inspect the garden for drought-related disasters. So now a collection of various trailing greens and sprays of purple wandering jew embrace an insipidly hued focal point that has all the charm of a wet pink tissue. Better than nothing, I suppose.

Christmas cacti, botanically known as Schlumbergera or Zygocactus (should you wish to look like you know what you’re talking about), are not my cuppa. This was a gift plant from I forget who, as opposed to the apology plants that always come from My Prince after he’s irritated me in some fashion.

A little splint is holding these guys onto their branch. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

My mother used to have a windowsill lined with a collection of vaguely unpleasant-looking specimens. They’d sit looking droopy and a bit evil, with their needle-tipped, fleshy green leaves quivering at you most of the year, and then bloom, though never at Christmas, which is when they’re supposed to flower, and which is why they’re so named, for heaven’s sake. Some time after the holiday they’d deign to bud and by Easter they’d be covered with pendulous, less-than-impressive flowers. This would follow the considerably more impressive Valentine’s Day reflowering of the poinsettias that she also insisted on holding over. The same sort of poinsettias that right-minded people dumped in the trash after the previous holiday season, she’d nurse along—and they required considerable tsking and coaxing—until they once again set buds. Pretty much as she raised me, come to think of it.

I used to look forward to the Blooming of the Paperwhite narcissus (narcissi?).  As usual I started a dozen bulbs in early December, popping them in bare patches of soil surrounding other plants. (you don’t have to use pebbles, you know—they actually do like dirt).  Anyway, they have peaked, thankfully, and only their faintly scented dry heads remain, which is quite enough, thank you. I no longer love their smell; the honeyed perfume is overwhelming, nauseating even. One’s nose changes over time they say, correctly.

In more positive news.

Happy I am with six new additions. My baby sister, in a burst of inspired inspiration, ordered orange Bird of Paradise from a grower she found on Amazon.com. I’d tell you who, but all I can come up with on my mess of a desk are the instructions for the Roku and a business card from Mildred Baldwin, who crafts the most gorgeous leather bags and sells them at Eastern Market on weekends, which is clearly neither here nor there, but she’s worth searching out.

I’m glad of the bird bounty since, according to Wikipedia, they are pollinated by sunbirds, of which I think we have none, and therefore I’ll have no more. They arrived in beautiful condition, and will grow to either 2 ½ feet or 10 feet tall, depending on the species, and as I’ve lost the paperwork the end result will come as a surprise. In any event, they will be shorter than the white beauty I bought in a burst of insanity this past fall, which threatens to eventually dwarf the house.

Most blessedly, the Meyer lemon has given birth to two. Which is better than last year’s one.  As usual, one of the two is on a branch that broke two years ago (so many ones and twos! Do I get to use the word binary? And how should I use it?) and is/was plastered together with packing tape and some green plastic-wrapped wire that I managed to unearth in the garage. If I had pruned the damn branch I would have cut my fruit production this year by 50 percent.

It’s amazing, or dismaying, that doing nothing frequently triumphs over doing something.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie etc.

iStock photo.

AMONG THE MANY things my mother taught me was how to grow grass.

I speak not of Kentucky Blue or Fescue or Bermuda, but the grass one smokes, or bakes into brownies, the sort that leaves one happily mellow, able to dust the gargoyles and whatnots in a happy blur (or so I’ve heard).

She was about the age I am now when she took up the hobby. At the time this seemed laughable, in an “isn’t she cute, the old bat” way that youths have of looking at people of maturity and prosperous bellies, amazed that they are still moderately functional.

In retrospect, of course, it seems a normal sort of thing to take up, should one get hold of some tasty seeds.

My dad had died a few years before and mom had moved from our large corner  apartment on the 18th floor of a building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to a delightful one-bedroom that fortuitously came available next door. There were two terraces, one off her bedroom, the other off the living room. Both had views due south, which plays a key part in the story.

Michael and Astrid moved into our old place. She worked for designer Norma Kamali and was as exotic as you’d expect. He, at 35, was a semi-retired stockbroker, now only doing a deal at home from time to time. They raised little sand crabs in a tank in their bedroom, which moved creepily from pretty shell to pretty shell, which is neither here nor there.

They broke up, and Astrid took up with Bud, moving around the corner to an apartment without a terrace on 79th Street. Mom remained friends with both, riding to the theater on the back of Michael’s motor scooter, taking him soup when he had sniffles and hanging out with Astrid and Bud. She was beginning to feel her oats, as they say.

I was living in DC but had lucked into a job that frequently landed me in New York, and I’d stay with Mom, who would take the opportunity to teach me stuff that she’d neglected to teach me earlier. Important things like how to fry chicken. We once spent a week frying chicken every night until I got it right.

I never knew she was capable of preparing a meal without two vegetables.

The author’s late mother, Lynn Siegel. / Photo by her late father, Jerry Siegel.

Anyway, there was once a gap of a month or so between my visits and I arrived one evening to find her puttering about the kitchen in a florid housecoat making brisket and potato kugel (I’m sure there was a green veg but I’ve forgotten what it was).

“Astrid and Bud are coming over for dinner,” she said, stirring the gravy.

“Good,” I said. I enjoyed them too.

We’d finished eating and were having coffee when Bud looked at Mom and said, “Lynn,  do you think the stuff is ready?”

“I don’t know,” she said, hopping up and going over to the armoire near the window. She opened a door and took out a rumpled sheet of paper towel topped with a heap of brittle greenish branches that looked like, as they rightly say, oregano.

Bud took it from her and crumbled the leaves into a fine rubble, nodding and smiling, and pulling out rolling paper as I looked on in disbelief.

Joint lit, Bud politely passed it to Mom, respect I suppose for her age, her position as grower and hostess. She inhaled, eyelids fluttering, holding in the smoke quite expertly.

“Well?” he said.

“It’s good,” she said on an exhale, “but not as good as the Colombian we had last week.”

I was smoking a Marlboro, in those days still considered marginally medicinal, and managed to choke out, “MA! WHAT IS GOING ON?”

“Well, Bud and Astrid’s place is so dark,” she said, passing the joint to Astrid.  “And I have a southern exposure.”

She pointed out some well-grown specimens on the terrace (in full view of the police helicopters, should they be searching for dotty old ladies growing grass on their terraces) and explained about the seeds and soil and such. It was all highly edifying.

How she came to partake of the weed was Michael’s story. I knew he’d been pressing her to try it because she’d asked me about the effects, the dangers and such. I said, Go ahead, the worst that could happen is you’ll fall asleep.

Running into him in the hallway the morning after the dope-growing revelation, I said, “So?”

“She brought me some soup one afternoon, while I was sitting around smoking,” he told me. “I offered her the joint and she said no, as usual.  And I said come on, Lynn, try it, and finally she did. Then the phone rang and I got tied up and the next thing I saw was her sitting on the floor in front of the fridge eating Cool Whip with her fingers, and the next thing I knew she was passed out on the sofa.”

And I laughed at the adorable old bat, I now recall with a cringe. Old bat indeed.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie assumes the statute of limitation is up for this decades-old venture into agricultural science, now legal in DC and many places. To read her earlier columns, type Green Acre into the search box at the top right of the page.

Light, light, as befits the Festival of Lights. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh. / On the front: iStock photo.

BESIDES THROWING OFF gloriously ruffled vines that grow to fabulous lengths in one’s window boxes, potatoes are also useful for potato pancakes, or latkes, the essence of the Jewish holiday of Chanukah, or Hanukah, or to get technical, חֲנֻכָּה.

In a time before food processors, Mama would grate the potatoes by hand, which always involved adding a bit of skinned knuckle and a drop or two of blood. She would also hand-grate onion into the mash so there would also be tears. This all feels very symbolic, but isn’t. It was just painful and a little gory.

A cast-iron pan is best for frying latkes that won’t stick to anything but your ribs. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

The pancakes were, and are, fried in oil until golden, a cast-iron pan giving the best color. Mama would stand in the kitchen over the hot oil frying and serving batch after batch, which guests would eat before she got to the table, since she didn’t want them getting cold and latkes grow unpleasantly heavy and flaccid if left to warm in the oven.

My older sister who, distrusting the newfangled, still grates by hand, gets around this by having people stand next to her in the kitchen, eating them the instant they’re done—and then sitting down to dinner.

The master recipe, as laid down by my mother, makes enough for two or three little piggies (or the kosher equivalent, which is what?).

Potato Pancakes

4 servings (you don’t want to know the calorie count)

2 large russet or Idaho potatoes, peeled

1 small onion, peeled

1 egg

Scant teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground pepper

½ cup matzoh meal* (or flour)

Peanut or corn oil

Cut the potatoes and onion into large chunks** and place in the food-processor bowl fitted with the steel blade. Chop—do not grate!—until the potatoes are about the texture of oatmeal (about 10 to 15 seconds, depending on the size of your chunks). Dump in a large bowl. Add egg, salt and pepper, and matzoh meal and combine well. Do not squeeze out or drain the moisture the potatoes release (I don’t care what you’ve read).

The mixture should just hold together when stirred. If it is runny, add more matzoh meal.

Heat enough oil in a frying pan for the potatoes to float. When sizzling (but not smoking) drop serving spoonfuls of batter into the oil, flattening slightly with the back of the spoon (don’t mash them down or they’ll stick to the pan), and fry until golden brown on one side, flipping and frying the other side, about 10 minutes total.  You should get eight in a 12-inch frying pan.

Remove and drain on paper towel or brown paper.

While it’s reasonable to prepare such a small batch while you’re putting dinner together, making latkes for many may  mean you’ll never leave the kitchen.

My mother’s recipe is straightforwardly doubled or tripled or more, the only possible adjustment being to add a little matzoh meal or flour if the batter is too runny.

Pause for extremely brief history lesson: Chanukah is considered a miraculous holiday, the Festival of Lights. The Jews, who had just beaten back the Greeks, needed oil for the temple lights but had only enough to last a single day. Yet the oil lasted for eight, time enough to keep the candelabrum called the menorah ablaze until a new supply could be prepared.

And so oil becomes a holiday theme, herein represented by latkes. Interesting side note: Jewish holidays, with few exceptions, involve eating extraordinary quantities of  particularly cholesterol-rich food, and yet we are often long-lived. Another side note is that Aunt Ruthie always had to lie down somewhere midway through holiday meals. She was also afraid of my pet mouse, Willie. But that is really neither here not there.

The miracle of cooking a party quantity of latkes is to pre-fry them.

Yum. But why not single-fry to get the latkes going, then fry again when it’s time to serve. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I usually make them around noon and consider a few testers to be my lunch. Fry them until cooked through, about 8 minutes total, and light brown, drain on a wire rack, which saves paper towels and therefore trees. Do NOT refrigerate, which lends an offish taste.*** There’s nothing that will spoil during a few hours’ rest.

It’s essentially like the double-fry method you use for making French fries. Reheat your oil (or use fresh if it’s a mess) until burbling and, when you’re just about ready to serve dinner, drop in the precooked latkes and fry 15 to 20 seconds on one side and flip for another 15 or so (experiment!). They quickly crisp up and heat through and taste as good as fresh.

I’ve been known to fry 100 for my occasional annual Chanukah party and have them on the table within 10 minutes.

With numerous decades of latke experimentation under my increasingly large belt, and a recipe that has brought grown men to tears, I do not know why so many people doubt that this method works. While I might embellish and exaggerate from time to time (alas, a family shortcoming), I do not lie, if I can help it.

And so I will here repeat: The large-batch process uses the same double-fry technique that’s used for French fries. The end result should be pancakes that are brown and deliciously crisp on the outside, warm and almost creamy within—and done in time for you to sit down with your guests and eat them.

Additional notes:

*Matzoh meal makes for a lighter latke

**Cut your potatoes into chunks just small enough to fit in the bowl without jamming the blades—quarters or sixths. Do not try to chop more than two potatoes at a time; they quickly go from oatmeal-coarse to liquefied.

***If you do have leftovers, they can be frozen or refrigerated and are not terrible reheated, as long as you bring them to room temperature before briefly refrying, not baking them. No matter how hot your oven, an oven-heated latke will never taste as fresh or crisp as on that’s been refried.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is writing about potato pancakes in her gardening column because potatoes are a plant, not that she grows them, but what the hey.

For this traditional mantel look, ivy is tucked into floral wire. Gilded pinecones and a handful of odds and ends add interest. Note the gilded pears atop the picture frame. / On the front: A grapevine wreath is prettier and easier to work with than a wire form. Add bow and fairy lights, and done. / Photos by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THERE IS LITTLE one can’t accomplish in the way of holiday decorating given a spool of floral wire and a batch of scavenged greens, and I say this as one who is exceptionally craft-challenged.

To quote myself from last week’s column, if you’re feeling really impoverished, or creative (you’re allowed to be both), you can build a free tree from the scraps of fir and spruce and pine at Christmas tree lots. There’s almost always a mountain of clippings somewhere, heaped in a corner and destined for the dump. Bat your eyelashes and ask nicely and you can probably haul away as much as you’ll need for window and flower boxes, railings, the mantel and whatever else needs greening.

Fancy this up with some lengths of ivy. I always have an abundance of ivy about—it long ago took over the front yard and grows up the garden walls. Branches of anything evergreen will do, actually: magnolia leaves (should you be so lucky),

sprigs of holly, twigs of pyracantha (another shrub with multitudes of red berries, also known as firethorn). Should your garden not be so blessed, I would personally case the neighborhood for possibilities and head out with clippers in the predawn light and snip-snip—subtly, from the underside please.

You might also walk the dog in a park with pine trees. Pine cones are always a nice, slightly rustic touch.

So far we’ve spent approximately $4.98 plus tax, the cost of 150 yards of floral wire, which should pretty much last the rest of your life.

Add a few bucks and you can pick up gold or silver spray paint for the pine cones, some glitter spray paint—or glitter hairspray, should you have some left over from Halloween—a smattering of small ornaments and a bunch or two of baby’s breath, which is great for snowy explosions most anywhere. A whole tree can be decorated with billows of white flowers;  just add lights.

While listing 10 tips for everything from a better sex life to cleaning the bathtub seems to have become de rigueur, I break with the pack and offer five dreckorating ideas, since I can’t think of any more.

1. Stair banisters. Twine floral wire up the staircase rail and tuck in branches from bottom to top. You might also wire the stems together to make garlands and tie them to the railings. Add lots of bows and bells and bits of glitz—I clip on a collection of feathered and glittered birds. Nice big bows are a welcome touch. But if you, like me, lack both patience and dexterity, wire-edged and metallic-mesh ribbons are wonderful add-ons: They twist and drape and make beautiful bows, and can be reused pretty much forever. Note! If your hip is killing you, as mine is at the moment, and you find you actually need to hold on to the rail or risk death, or worse, leave some gaps for handholds.

Along the banister, tree branch clippings are tied up with metallic mesh ribbon and dotted with glittery birds. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

2. The mantel. Hammer a little nail at either end of the mantel and string floral wire tightly between them. Shove branches here and there, using the wire to hold the branches firmly in place. Add bits of baby’s breath or berried branches and a few gilded pinecones. Done.

3. Make a tree. Scavenged branches are easily arranged in a vase. Add water, stand the branches upright and string them with beads, small balls, fairy lights and what-have-you. Or just mound them in a vase and call it a day. This makes a jolly accent for a guest room, foyer or wherever, and is so much more attractive than those pathetically spindly Charlie Brown trees Safeway is peddling for $29.95.

4. Ceiling fixtures. Wire a few branches from the chain or post of a ceiling fixture, inside or on the porch, and tie it at the top with a big bow.

5. Pseudo-wreath. Particularly handy if you have thieves in the neighborhood: They seem to prefer traditional round wreaths with big red bows to sweetly gift to, presumably, their mothers. Gather a bunch of branches and tie with a ribbon at the top, leaving the ends long and curling. String this from a nail or hook at the top of the door.  Or, a tip from Baby: Pick up a grapevine wreath for a few bucks at Trader Joe’s, add tree clippings and “whatever borderline-tacky glitter-

A bucket of raw materials, fresh from the tree lot. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

drenched dreck you have lying around . . . and fairy lights!” She does take after me, sigh.

None of this needs watering, by the way. Your arrangements should stay reasonably fresh-looking from now until after New Year’s Day. However, if you’re using a vase you might as well fill it.

Tip! When in doubt, always overdo. Generally, I find excess hides many flaws, which are plentiful since I’m more inclined to hot-glue my fingers together than to execute an artful assemblage. And so, if whatever it is you’ve created looks awkward, keep piling on the glitz until every eye is thoroughly distracted.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

*Dreckorate. ˈdrek-ko-rāte: Nonexistent though essential verb. To excessively adorn, ornament or embellish with a magpie sensibility.

Next week LittleBird Stephanie gives equal time to Hanukah with her recipe for latkes, since potatoes are plants, not that she grows them. 

Um, did she mention glitz? / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

MY PRINCE bought home a few flats of pansies for the window boxes last month. The squirrels have eaten all but one plant. This is typical, despite my going to lethal lengths to discourage them: inserting fondue forks prongs-up (when was  the last time I made a fondue anyway?), a wall of chopsticks, rock embankments. Squirrels are not always cute.   

Meanwhile, the recent cold snap decimated the massive drips of purple potato vine, the centerpiece of each of our five boxes, that had reached Rapunzel lengths, though frills like the bits of wandering jew tucked in last April, linger on, grown from exclamation points to now-substantial flourishes. Sadly, this weekend promises a frost, so they’ll be done in as well.

The ornamental cabbages, however, will flourish. As always, mine are shaded purple to fuchsia, to go with the house trim.  Oh, how they delight me. The intense color, the fabulously ruffled edges, like a birthday card when you’re 5 years old and the bunnies hop, hop down the yellow path with blue birds and butterflies winging overhead and daisies and zinnias dotting the psychedelically green grass . . . all cabbages need is a little glitter. (Mmmmmmmm, thinking glitter. That’s an aside, though I am toying with the notion of edible glitter, turns out there IS such a thing!)

Cabbages and Christmas, they just go together. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Back to cabbages: Do try to find small ones if you intend them for boxes. Full-size cabbages, the ones the size of a basketball, are not only expensive, they bolt too quickly in this warmish climate, shooting up leggy bits that disorder the pretty clump, and then die. They are also difficult to plant in most boxes because of their large root balls (which don’t take kindly to trimming, by the way). Plant full-size cabbages and you can have little else, which doesn’t at all suit me, particularly for the holidays when only a full Martha Stewart will do.

Last Sunday, my goy toy hauled my cartons of odds and ends down from the attic. If I were more organized, I would take before and after photos . . . showing you in shot after constructive shot how these largely dirt-filled window boxes, with just a spill of ivy off the sides, are magically transformed with the help of a pile of fake or once-alive crap combined with a bit of glitz and white lights.

You will note the jolly (fake) boxwood ball. It’s stuck on a sturdy stick to get it above the rest of the shrubbish and promises to do exactly what I want it to do (stay green and look alive).

Dangling in front are fir branches, from discarded trimmings at Eastern Market on Capitol Hill.* The red berries that resemble red berries but are some kind of Chinese substance were stuck in last Christmas and never removed. They were too jolly to pull, somehow looking right even in midsummer nestled among the sometimes-real pink geraniums.

In a stroke of luck, my friend Maggie is leaving in the morning to spend the hols in her native Yorkshire. What I get out of that—in one of those “my pal went to Hawaii and all I got was this stupid T-shirt” events—are several miniature fir trees, all decked in bitty balls and bows and such, which would otherwise be doomed if left on her windowsill. These fit in quite nicely, giving the boxes just a little extra oomph. Also present: gilded pine cones, shiny ornaments, fantastical glittered stems, Mardis Gras necklaces (because, why not?) and big purple bows with wired edges that twist this way and that. The bows more or less match the color of the boxes, which are painted the same purple as the front door.

Of course there are white lights twisted throughout. Quite the sight at night.

*If you’re feeling impoverished, or creative (you’re allowed to be both), you can build a free tree from the scraps at Christmas-tree lots. There’s almost always a mountain of clippings somewhere, heaped in a corner and destined for some dump. Bat your eyelashes and ask nicely and you can probably haul away as much stuff as you’ll need for boxes, railings, mantel and whatever else needs greening.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is writing a book on city gardening. Next week, she’ll deal with some of the other spots around your property that need a bit of holiday glitz.

Dead plants: a good target for the pup or the result of earlier attentions? / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THERE ARE places to pee and places not to pee, and on top of flowers is most definitely not the place to loose your dog.

I say that as the grandmother of the magnificent Lula the Murderess, a Plott Hound-Lab mix who is conducting a brief stay, and of whom I am fond enough to sleep even though she stinks at the moment, never mind what she did to my sweet parakeet Vinnie, which I cannot bear to discuss.

In addition to parks and other clearly public areas, Washington, DC, homeowners do not own the strip of grass that divides sidewalk from street. In fact, many of us do not own our front yards—we won’t get into the reason—even though we might plant them and tend them and water them at considerable expense.

Should we then be surprised that so many dog owners consider it within their rights to coo tenderly as Fido squats on the liriope? It is THEIR space too, is it not? And should you scream STOP, as some of us are prone to do, these owners draw themselves up in haughtiest hauteur and umbrage away, “THIS is PUBLIC space.”

My Prince tends a garden, of sorts, in the sidewalk patch in front of our house. Over the years he has planted it with a rather odd but endearing assortment of plants that include native grasses, a rose of sharon, a mock orange, the aforementioned liriope and many, many packets of seed. Of the probably 30 bucks he invested in seed this year, ONE cosmos plant emerged. And, unfortunately, it was yellow, a color neither of us much cares for . . . except in daffodils.

Lula, the Plott Hound – Lab mix. Don’t ask her about Vinnie the parakeet. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh. 

And why does this happen?

Tromp tromp tromp go the dogs, an endless stream (that’s a pun) morning and night—sometimes a clutch of them doing their noonsies on the arm of one of our many professional walkers (amazing how this became a profession). Cute little signs featuring squatting pups that say NO! don’t help, and whether I ask nicely or bellow at them, the doggers spit right back:

IT’S PUBLIC SPACE.

Yes, you turkey (to put it mildly, and ‘tis the season), it IS public space—your space and mine, and some of us appreciate it when these patches of earth are kept nice and not used as a stinking toilet for your forking pet. PEE KILLS PLANTS.

If you live on Capitol Hill, as I do, and are looking for some fine spots to guide your dog, I can direct your attention to an assortment of Very Ugly Gardens. All of them could use a dose of fertilizer.

And when you pick up that fertilizer, do your neighbors the favor of not just tossing the stinky little bag into someone’s trash can: Either  take it home with you or put it inside a trash bag that’s already inside the can. You know why you sometimes see a little shitty baggy lying on the sidewalk? It’s because it fell out of the trash as it was being collected and the keepers of the trash will not pick it up. I don’t blame them.

Speaking of signs . . .

My friend Maggie and I were walking along Pennsylvania Avenue on a mild and lovely afternoon, the Capitol dome

Here’s a “planting” ripe for pee. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

shining behind us, when a young woman guided her dog OVER the low railing that surrounded a freshly planted tree box and watched adoringly as her pet lifted his leg on the pansies.

Maggie said—and she’s got this wonderfully intimidating English accent so if we’re together I generally let her say things when things need to be said—YOUNG LADY, Why are you letting your dog RUIN that planter?

And the young lady looked up and said, and I kid you not, “There was no sign.”

There was no sign. This is the plant equivalent of McDonald’s marking coffee containers as HOT.

Imbecile.

Is it worse when the miscreants say nothing?

I give as an example: Coming home from Eastern Market last Sunday, I was approaching a most jauntily dressed young woman, beret tilted just so on her shiny black hair, red coat nipped at the waist, black boots—very Kate Middleton, as I’m thinking British—walking her fuzzy white yappy thing, and she directed it into someone’s carefully tended curbside garden and then watched lovingly as the pooch took a splendid dump directly on top of a patch of pansies.

This was so stunning I stopped dead on the pavement and bellowed: WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

Did she cringe? Did she even acknowledge me, towering over her in my stomping-around-Paris boots with the platform soles that give me a couple of extra inches with which to tower?

Not only did she not, she continued on her way, in the same direction I was taking, when anyone with any sense of shame would have had the decency to slink around the corner and at least pretend she was not going my way. After several blocks she skipped up the path to, presumably, her own house.

I know where you live, honey, and I’ve got a bigger dog than yours and she’s JUST BEEN FED.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie promises to be less cranky next week. You can read her earlier columns by looking for Green Acre in the Search box , top right.

Add a third stalk and this philodendron could take over Manhattan. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THERE ARE TWO THINGS I inherited from my Uncle Jimmy: his bunion and a love of the sound of baseball—not watching, just listening. The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the Vin Scully at the mic. Sounds that were a background to summer Sundays when he’d visit.

For most of my early years we lived on Long Island, in Sands Point, famously known as Gatsby’s East Egg. It was, my parents thought, a better environment for children than the city.

Jimmy, my father’s much elder brother would arrive each weekend, bringing still warm pretzels from Grand Central Terminal, dapperly dressed in suit and vest, and hobbling along with his right boot side-slit to accommodate the aforesaid bunion, and a cane for support.

He’d then ensconce himself in front of the TV, watching baseball all afternoon, interrupting himself only to be fed. Sometime after dinner, and a few too many rounds of Dewar’s, he and my father would have a fight, usually about politics (my uncle was an unrepentant Republican). Jimmy would then be returned to the train station. “And don’t come back,” my father would say.

The next Sunday he’d be back.

Fortunately, just as I entered my teens, and thoroughly strangled by suburbia, we moved back to Manhattan and a pretty fabulous apartment with a wraparound terrace and a clear view of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, a gob-smacking panorama that buffaloed me into agreeing to share a bedroom with my highly irritating little sister.

We get along fine now.

Uncle Jimmy continued to occupy space on Sundays, taking a cab up from his apartment in The Brevoort on lower Fifth Avenue and, ignoring the view, sitting in the dining room, eyes glued to the Dodgers, which were then properly placed in Brooklyn.

As a grand thank-you for putting up with him, I suppose, Jimmy one day sent a monstrous philodendron that he decided would be a fine addition to the dining room. It rose over five feet from its pot, stems twined around a log post, leggy arms reaching for the window.

Did I mention it was rubber?

My father, a furniture designer who resembled Bill Blass, with a bespoke wardrobe down to his hand-rolled, monogrammed handkerchiefs (among my mother’s many under-appreciated jobs was his maintenance), was appalled. The object was removed to his showroom, where it could gather dust in a vignette.

Replacing it in the dining room was a real philodendron, wrapped around a similar log. Not that it was to anyone’s taste, but it wasn’t worth war with Uncle Jimmy. Besides, there was the amusement of his sitting beside it each Sunday, rubbing the glossy leaves between his fingers and congratulating himself: “Amazingly realistic, isn’t it?”

At last we come to the point of this story.

Like hydrangeas, which I once viewed as an old lady sneeze, I’ve grown to love philodendrons. They don’t flower, but their foliage, ranging in color from bright shamrock to deep, velvety, jungle green, is stunningly ornamental.

They are also among the easiest, least cantankerous, of house plants. Why anyone would bother making them out of rubber is beyond me. Unless you leave them outside in sub-freezing temperatures (they are tropical and so not hardy), they’ll survive most any maltreatment.

There are two main types. Vining philodendrons, like Uncle Jimmy’s gift, like to climb something, preferably something appealing, like a fence or a wall.

Those that don’t climb require a great deal of space, like the Monstera Deliciosa (doesn’t the very name make you want one?), which grows as wide as it is tall, with split leaves the size of elephant ears. These take happily to cutting and sticking in a vase where they’ll remain ornamental for a month or more. Just two or three leaves create a Statement and are particularly handy in a dreary corner.

That they don’t care for direct sunlight I consider a plus. They also tolerate haphazard watering and careless pruning, and will survive my usual energetic if careless method of propagation: yanking them up and ripping apart the roots, which one periodically needs to do since they can rapidly grow to mammoth proportions.

Unless, of course, you enjoy living in a residential version of the Little Shop of Horrors.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is writing a book about city gardening. We’re laying odds as to whether she mentions philodendrons again. To see earlier columns, put Green Acre in the Search box at top right.

A rain-slicked residential sidewalk. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THIS MORNING IS rainy and mild, red and orange and golden leaves soggy the sidewalks while those remaining on the trees imitate sunlight against the dreary sky. Delightfully melancholy.

Tomorrow promises to be cool and crisp, foretelling a bubble-bath evening. I love these autumn hours, when Indian summer (can we still call it that?) appears to be past; when neighbors entirely abandon their stabs at kempt and let what’s left of the vines creep out of bounds, and the flowers frolic and tangle among them as the first mild flickers of winter encroach.

Some very tender plants have already succumbed to an early chill, going a bit limp and stringy, just hanging on, leaves tethered to branches by glutinous threads. Beside them, pink and red roses are still blooming, and the geraniums are

The happy hibiscus, now indoors. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

wondrously perky, both foolishly believing that warmth will go on forever.

The Prince and I hurriedly uprooted the garden last weekend, repotting and hauling summer to the little conservatory he created from the porch outside my office. This required much cursing, since the older we get, the heavier grow the pots. Sorry observation that, yes?

But the white bird of paradise looks grand out there, unfurled in the corner, and the hibiscus sports a brilliant pink blossom and plenty more buds. Worth a little back strain, I made sure to murmur to the schlepper-in-chief sympathetically.

Now the tulips must be planted, followed by Epsom salts and a heating pad.

Soon, frost will dust the morning plants, and the temperature won’t climb much above freezing. Soon I’ll be tugging on my boots and gloves and crunching a path to Eastern Market for chicken and cheese, iced leaves lining my way.

Finding beauty in the transience of life. The Japanese call it wabi-sabi.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is working on a book about city gardening. We hope she won’t finish any time soon so that we can continue to read her missives from Capitol Hill. To read earlier Green Acre columns, type Green Acre into the Search box at the top right of the page.

Capitol Hill neighbors planted Heavenly Blue morning glories, which soon enveloped an ugly new No Parking Here to There sign. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

SOMETIMES AN INVASIVE vine of the most voracious variety is just what one needs.

For instance. In the part of Capitol Hill where I live, parking is rarely much of an issue. Maybe after a late night out we might have to wriggle into a space around the corner; hardly a hardship as we’re still spry enough to hobble 50 feet or so.

It’s a pretty street, lined with some of the oldest, largest elms in Washington, with neighbors well trained by frequent tickets to park far enough away from various intersections to avoid another nasty pink slip, knowing how close they can go to the tenth of an inch.

Not so those in charge of parking enforcement.

So often were tickets issued and then dismissed that two years ago our fair city was apparently compelled to create another whimsical make-work program for our overstaffed Department of Public Works; they stabbed in plug-ugly No Parking Here to There signs at each street corner and alley entry. As it seems the parking persons can’t be trained, we were visited with . . . ugliness.

For some neighbor—at any rate, me—blighting a perfectly lovely porch view of the elm canopy. Damn sign doesn’t even stand up straight. Bah.

And so I was sent into a near swoon when I noticed that someone on a nearby block, in a brilliantly passive-aggressive, make-lemonade move, had planted a twining totem of morning glories to smother the sign in front of their bandbox Edwardian under an explosion of vinery, asphyxiating it with clouds of Heavenly Blue morning glories (which is what they’re called as well as what they are), and a beautiful sight it was.

Not resting on their laurels (or morning glories) the neighbors then planted a fast-growing trumpet vine, the second-most-invasive vine around. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Inspired by the neighbor and, of course, wanting to gild that lily, I mixed Heavenly Blue morning glories with moonflowers, for a little evening enchantment . . . and I soaked them, perhaps a bit too long, and planted them curbside and watched and watched and watched and, nothing at all emerged. Sigh. Sometimes I just despair of myself. Really.

Early this spring I passed by the morning-glory house and noticed something new sprouting. It was leafy and viney and I hadn’t a clue what it was . . . and then one day I passed and KAPOW! A trumpet vine had clutched the signpost and unfurled into a fabulously massive umbrella of orange pendules, a living exclamation point on the sidewalk outside this most charming home.

How brilliant, I thought, planting this second-most-invasive of vines—the harder the city tries to kill it the stronger and more murderously it will grow. (I know because I made the stupid mistake of starting one in my minuscule backyard to give balance to the wisteria—the first-most-invasive of plants—that I stupidly planted beside the garage, then “trained” it along the opposite wall).

This is where rash behavior gets you: “Oh! I love it! I’ll plant it!”

And, “I hope it will grow fast!”

Oh, fool.

Again I stared at my cockeyed sign, but in a rare instance of restraint, opted to muddle along in the sadly neglected front

All that’s left of the sign beautification project: a hacked vine. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

garden, figuring to distract attention with a cacophonous sea of floriferous stuffs, at least for this year.

Just as well. Last week I pattered by morning glory/trumpet vine house and this is what greeted me.

I weep.

Thankfully, there’s just no killing this sucker: It will rise again, bigger and more brazen come spring.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is working on a book on city gardening. You can read earlier Green Acre columns by using the Search box in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

Dumbarton Oaks, lovely. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

EARLY THIS SUMMER, Carol—The Prince’s ex-girlfriend thrice removed, a subject I’ll return to shortly—arrived for a long weekend. As our city garden was particularly fine, I was particularly pleased. I lowered my lashes as she enviously sniffed the jasmine and admired the trailing stephanotis.

I’m never more attractive than when I’m looking modest, though I had less than usual to do with the brilliant performance of my plants, having spent the spring being benignly neglectful, also known as sublimely lazy.

One trek we took that weekend was to the 27-acre garden of Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown, which was created in the early 1930s surrounding the home of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss.

Now public, the estate has pools and fountains and lawns and arbors and trails that wind, and benches on which to sit and contemplate or read or snooze amid gardens dedicated to roses and herbs and flowering trees and vines.

Pure bliss.

Having drowned in the scent of the Orangerie, and burned our feet on the paths, we took gasping refuge from the appalling heat in the Arbor Terrace. It’s a cool stony spot where a mythological god-head carved into a wall spits into a pool and the white hot sun is diffused by the mass of wisteria that clambers over the barrel roof.

Dumbarton Oaks, again lovely. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I would like something like this under the back porch, I babbled, flailing my arms about hither and thither in inspired consideration.

Maybe we can’t have vine-covered barrel arches overhead (and God forbid more wisteria), I said, but the under-porch beams have a rustic charm, the walls are brick, and there’s a similar greenish glow from the garden that’s reflected in the French doors that lead to the home’s grotto level (as I like to think of it, though others might call it the basement, or worse).

There could be a fountain mounted on the far wall that would spout into a somewhat smaller pool, and maybe we could fit a little bistro table and chairs?

Wine, cheese, some grapes maybe . . . mi amor?

Carol laughed as My Prince skittered away.

I do look forward to Carol’s visits—The Prince has such fine taste in women. I’ve met several of his exes, and they’re all quick and smart and funny. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that their visits are reminder trips, like those people take when they’re not quite sure they’re ready for kids and visit couples with multiple toddlers, at nap time.

The girlfriends come, look at his half-finished projects and the extraordinary mess that is his garage—it’s tempting to nominate him for that hoarding show—and leave with a sigh of relief at my truly boundless luck.

Oh, he was so easy to fall for; not only was he eye candy, he could actually do guy things.

Now my Pre-Prince, a lawyer, was the least-handy breed of person imaginable. That he knew which end of the hammer you banged with was the sum total of his expertise. He once went to a woodworking class figuring he’d make a coffee table, drawing up all sorts of plans in advance. I waved a lace-edged hankie as he drove off.

Under LittleBird Stephanie’s porch, not so lovely. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

An hour later he came home, poured a glass of wine, and announced, “Jews don’t make coffee tables, they hire people to

make them.”

Similarly handicapped I, of course, needed to get me one of those (people, not coffee tables); in this case a 6’ 2” blue-eyed goy-toy born with a hammer and a level in hand, who finds endless employ as a restoration carpenter.

That was at a time when I thought you needed nothing but willpower to keep the chins up. Had I been wiser, I’d have gone with a plastic surgeon—or stuck with a lawyer who could afford to pay for one, since I have demonstrated no personal skill at making money. This should probably alarm me, but it’s too late now to bother.

So commenced 33 years spent fantasizing projects like grottoes and powder rooms, verandas and, oh, a swimming pool with a drawbridge so one could cross to the garage, which would make such a sweet studio . . . None of these concepts has  materialized, though that never stops me.

That was a long, but I think interesting aside, at least to me.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie occasionally takes breaks from actual gardening to fantasize about how she should be gardening. You can find all of her gardening columns by typing Green Acre in the Search box at the top right of the page.

IF YOU SQUINT you may be able to see the date on the cover of this issue of Southern Accents magazine: July-August 1997. You’ll also notice (if you squint even harder) the thumb-tack holes and blackening in the margins where it has been alternately pinned and taped to walls and cork boards for almost 19 years.

This is Example “A” of something I want in my life but will never have, though I attempt to come close, in my higgledy-piggledy way.

Throughout the day, the sight of it in the corner of my eye energizes my fantasies. I crawl in and wonder: What’s beyond the arches, where the sunlight is so brilliant? It’s a garden, I think, deeply green, with a circular pool and a fountain. I can hear the gentle splashing from where I’m flopped on the settee, feet up on the flowered hassock with its deep turquoise fringe, my eyelids drooping over a book, probably something involving serial killers or clowns in sewers.

We don’t want to get too sappy now, do we? Like a sweetly decayed whiff of jasmine, a splash of sour is essential—like a touch of anchovy in the mozzarella in carozza (too often missing from restaurant offerings, I note in an aside).

Those “off” flavors are always what move a space from lovely to divine, be it garden or house. Or dinner plate, come to think of it.

Elder artists recognized that sour spice, reminders that death is always around the corner, a blink away. Like “the Vanitas theme in still life,” says my friend Sarah, a pre-Raphaelite beauty with tangles of red hair who always seems to rattle some deeper message in what I often consider my blather. “This always fascinated me in Art History—the inclusion of decaying fruit, or skulls or bugs in gorgeous, lush paintings of flowers.”

The jarring notes in this magazine picture are almost hidden: the raw, unfinished look of the doors to (presumably) the house; the dagger-sharp points on the chandelier, a guillotine above the rosebush. In the foreground, lashing out from the left corner, the needle-whiskered tongues of a cactus twisting toward the fatly innocent elbow of whoever is hefting a martini in that flowerfully cushioned wicker chair.

Those little threats are what make this room so tasty, that make me curl my toes. Observe how they contradict the almost overwhelming sweetness of the candy colorations, of the floral fabrics that cover the furniture, toss pillows and silken shawl. How they offset the ticklish fringes and tassels and the heady scent of full-blown roses in pink and vermilion.

Notice how they quietly call attention to textures that sit on a wobbly edge of discomfort: the brittle smoothness of the wicker, the slightly scratchy coarseness of the needlepoint pillows, the pebble finish of the strawberry-sherbet stucco walls, the ceiling that vaults and then melts into the columns’ massive Corinthian capitals, which in turn flow into curvaceous fluted shafts twisting to the floor like fat Edenic snakes.

NOTE  TO MY PRINCE (AND POSSIBLY YOURS): The juxtaposition of beauty and beast must be deliberate to properly charm. Not that I assess any blame but the mess of rusty tools and cracked pots under the back porch does not qualify, nor the broken tile in the bathroom, or the various fixtures without lights, or the cockeyed iron thing that theoretically hides the kitchen fan duct, or, oh lord, the garage. . . .

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is at work on a book about city gardening. You can read her previous columns by typing Green Acre in the Search box at the top right of the page.

An actual bud from a year when the pittosporum actually bloomed. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

WARNING: This story contains violent imagery.

I am mourning the loss of the pittosporum, even though this shrub has been a hit or miss affair since we trotted it back from a springtime trip to Savannah, Georgia, some five, six, seven, or maybe eight years ago. Could have been 10.

This was the last weekend of the summer garden, time to catalogue the tragic and the triumphant before everything is yanked and the tropicals move inside for the winter. The tulips are sitting in their bags ready to be buried deeply enough to avoid the squirrels, which make a game of their discovery.

To the pittosporum  I say a semi-fond adieu.

Given its tropical nature, there was no reason to expect it to last as long as it did.

It’s a nice-looking border shrub, but when in bloom its little white flowers have a scent that smashes you over the head so mightily that even My Prince, who is odor blind, notices it. Like orange syrup with a hint of vanilla. Like a Disney fantasy of Florida (albeit one tragically without absurdist Carl Hiaasen). Like heat and sun and endless summer. Wherever you stroll in Savannah, the springtime scent of pittosporum curls its scented fingers and lures your nose to hover. MMMMMMMMMMPF, you inhale. FFFFFFFFFFFT, you exhale. MMMMMMMMMMPF . . .  and so on, into delirium. And then you grow numb with it all and have to lie down for a good bit. Or at least I do.

Of course we had to have one.

The pittosporum doing nothing but taking up space, its usual mode. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

We traipsed about with a flower I’d furtively pinched, assaulting people on the street and popping in and out of  hotels and restaurants, yanking at the sleeves of those we thought should know: “What is this,” we’d say and say.

And invariably the reaction was an audible shrug. Seems this stuff is common as dirt in Savannah. So common no one needs to bother to know what it’s even called.

It was a doorman, I think, who told us the name, which we wrote down, and who directed us up a road that led to a garden center. A very long, hot road, where suddenly the jungle lush of Savannah disappeared and cars kicked up plumes of dust and my flip-flops began slurping against the asphalt.

But onward we trudged, for I don’t know how far, but at last a rather seedy-looking plant center materialized and we approached the genial-looking man who ran it and waved our slip of paper and now rather sadly wilted stem, and he drawled, “Aha. Over hee-ahh . . . ”

And yes, there they were. He said it’s only the tall-growing variety that will flower—that’s what he called it: Tall Growing Pittosporum.

Then he warned us that they would not grow up north. Frost, ya know. But we don’t listen to warnings, do we? And sometimes that works out fine and sometimes it doesn’t and this time it turned into a very little bit of this and a little bit more of that.

For a few years we babied the plant, keeping it in the dining room through the winter where it sat and did nothing but grow paler and more sickly-looking, limping through the cold months. Come spring, we’d move it out into the garden, where it would grow flower-free but immensely perky.

Immense being the operative word.

After a few rounds it grew too big to move and I left it in the garden with a intense sigh of probable farewell . . . but it made it through, thanks to a reasonably mild winter, I assumed. And, lo! It even flowered.

Unfortunately, there was a rather noisy conflict of scents between it, the honeysuckle and the mock orange all blooming simultaneously and quite vociferously. It was a bit overwhelming.

The next year we had no flowers. Oh, it looked like it was covered with buds, but it fooled me. Each branch bunched up at the end, swelling into a cluster of greenish bubbles and then with a gigantic SPRAHHHH bolted out a spray of . . . new leaves.

Feh.

Happened again the next year too, and then several more. But at least it was alive . . . though what good that was doing me was a wonder. Just growing bushier each year, it was taking up otherwise useful flowering space with a swath of glossy greenness.

I began to hope for its death. We don’t have room for nonperformance.

In desperation I called the Savannah Flower Something-or-Other and the nice lady, after telling me that the pittosporum should be dead (given that I’m attempting to grow a southern plant in what southerners consider the north), suggested a dose of Holly-tone plant food in early spring and again in the fall. Said it works for her.

So that fall and spring I fed it the Holly-tone and waited and the bunching began and my heart when ta-thud ta-thud but instead of leaves we had, miraculously, flowers!

And then this year it went belly-up for no particular reason that I could see, and My Prince unceremoniously yanked it up by its mighty roots and hauled the remains to the dump. One would think, as a lapsed Catholic, he’d have some appreciation for mourning and pageantry and decorum and so forth (he’d look quite handsome in one of those little white collars, whatever their called).  The plant’s disposal [Warning! You may wish to avert your eyes here] reminded me of the time a favorite and particularly fat and friendly goldfish died and My Prince dropped it in the trash masher.

The sound of the grinding of its golden body still gives me chills.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is working on a book about urban gardening. To read her earlier columns, go to the Search field at the top right of the page and search for Green Acre.

A lush Georgetown display that inspired LittleBird Stephanie’s Capitol Hill window boxes . . . for a while. Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THE FIVE WINDOW boxes that ornament our front windows are among a handful of home improvements that happened the moment I uttered the words “I want.”  This is not a happenstance to be sneezed at, as various other wishes of mine are now celebrating 30 years of partial completion.

This time my inspiration happened to conveniently collide with that of My Prince, who was as taken as I was with the window boxes that bedeck the ledges and rooflines of London. We noticed these on a visit some 20 years ago and we were both struck not only by the fabulous displays but their fantastic scale. While we installed boxes our very first summer on Capitol Hill, the charming terracotta numbers that we selected needed watering morning and night or whatever was in them frizzled. To get Britishy about it, the planters were too bloody small. Perhaps one or the other of us should have noticed this early on, but some of our flaws are unfortunately similar, such as looking things up before beginning a project and reading instructions and then not following them.

Immediately on our return, the Prince cobbled together lovely large boxes that filled the window ledges. Painted deep purple to match the front door and anchored securely to the sills (do I need to repeat that for you?), they were then filled with approximately 10 tons of potting soil.

Since we (meaning I, but I’m feeling kindly and inclusive this morning) wanted an even bigger bang from the boxes than mere size could provide, the ends were filled with small-leafed ivy to cascade down the sides, and pale green sweet-potato vine was installed front and center; it has such a lovely ruffly drape—like a Galliano gown. From summer to summer the background was filled in with a mix of not terribly imaginative but colorful stuffs, some more successful than others. Alyssum, so white and frothy and sweet-smelling, seemed a lovely idea but never did well, I can’t say why. Impatiens, begonias, petunias and coleus (after seeing a wow of a box in Georgetown; see picture at top) all had an unexciting turn. There was a dalliance with cherry tomatoes, another with iris.

Eventually I settled on pink geraniums, which seemed perky, easy to care for, colorful and an audience favorite—the  stroller bunch strolling by gave them the nod, the way one does with people who paint five shades of gray on the house walls and strangers feel called upon to vote—the one on the left, or the right or the middle or whatnot.

The remaining issue was, and continues to be, the centerpiece. First there were real boxwood, London-inspired and clipped into perky balls. These looked particularly wonderful at Christmas, covered in tiny white lights. But they died.

I tried again the next year and worse happened: Two of them dropped dead in late October, too late to be replaced and making a mess of the holiday display, though it did inspire an interesting and since oft-repeated use of stray branches of this and that.

Then there was the year of the dwarf azalea, which seemed like a brilliant concept but wasn’t, which was followed by several years that featured spikes, which they say should weather our weather but don’t.

The annual disasters were expensive and thoroughly irritating, though often my fault. I’m good with watering and feeding for the first few months and then get lazy, particularly with the upstairs boxes that are sheltered from rain and therefore dry out and, well, die.

So I went online and hunted up fake boxwood, ordering five faux balls from a wedding-supply vendor. (Who uses fake flowers in wedding displays, I ask you? And then I answer, That would be me bedecking the gazebo at the Raleigh North Carolina Arboretum with fake dogwood and hydrangea for Baby’s wedding—but that’s another story).

Back to this story. The boxwood balls were large enough, but a little squat for the hovering above the frontal shrubbish impact that I was going for, so I wired them onto chopsticks, which helped. I kept them for a season or two: Plastic plants do quite well in this climate, you can quote me on that.

But then I grew frustrated with the geraniums, which flourished most pinkly in spring and fall but had a season of boredom in between when they did nothing but sit there looking smugly green. So last year I yanked them and planted fakes, not silk but some Chinese replication from the too frequently mentioned (by me) Michaels. This meant, of course, that the fake boxwood had to go.

I have various personal rules about how much fakery is tolerable in my various planted situations.

An Old Town Alexandria impostor: fake peonies in a silvery serving dome. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Firstly, they should not dominate the box, occupying no more than one quarter of the available space. I present to you here  (see photo) a skin-crawler I had the misfortune of coming across in Old Town, Alexandria. Stuffed with an extravagant display of peonies, and perched at eye level, it demanded a sniff. Alas, going nose to blossom exposed their counterfeit souls, which was plain depressing. If, however, a blossom or two were mixed in with real greenery I would have enjoyed the tromp l’oeil joke.

Secondly, they should look as realistic as possible—or be completely, ridiculously, over-the-top unnatural. Anything glitter-dusted will do.

Anyway, this winter I’m attempting a rosemary centerpiece, having bought five nice tall ones from a tomato and mushroom vendor at Eastern Market. Rosemary appears to be hardy around here, but if it dies at least I can use it in a stew.

By the way, there were totally inadvertent additional benefits to fake geraniums. There are fewer actual roots jostling about for food and drink, which also mean less watering. I also don’t have the heartbreaking autumnal task of yanking the real ones which, with the advent of cooler weather, will have suddenly burst into robust and rather passive-aggressive bloom. These have to go at their peak, like around now, to make way for the pansies that need to be well established so they will carry us through spring. I can even stick the fake geraniums back in the boxes with the pansies and leave them be until their presence becomes entirely unnatural and then toss them under the back porch to loiter until warm weather returns.

If you’re looking for window box inspiration, the most luscious guide I’ve found is Window Boxes, by Tovah Martin.  Though apparently out of print, used copies can be had for cheap via Amazon and it’s guaranteed to give you palpitations.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is working on a book about city gardening. Until she gets it out of her system she will continue to write the Green Acre column.

That wild white autumn clematis. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I WOULD RATHER be writing about the garden on some tropical beach—there has not been
nearly enough blue water and white sand this year.

But then I’d be missing this view, the juxtaposition of fences and railings
and frothy white flower vine, also known as autumn clematis. Were I still
floating face down in limpid tropical water going ooooh, yellow fishie! ooooh,
blue fishie! and so forth, it would all be over. The peak of bloom scarcely
lasts two weeks into September.

Some years the foamy flowering begins in the far right corner of the yard
where the vine has climbed the wisteria to flounce along the top of the
garage in one direction and along the fence to the house in the other.
There it normally climbs the drainpipe and intertwirls the coils of the
white iron railing of the little greenhouse off my second-floor office in an
explosion of white.

There is always a frisson of tension that this display will be abruptly
curtailed by The Prince during one of his wild flails with the clippers. We
are opposites when it comes to rampant, untamed growth. I can’t wait to see
where it will lead . . . he  wants to whack it into submission.

Sadly, after just such a stealth pruning, this year the clematis merely dances along
the alley wall. Still wonderful, but not romping with its usual abandon.

This vine is a volunteer, unlike the one I actually bought some years ago, a
purple Nelly Moser clematis that went belly-up in some fit of pique, or
maybe went down screaming at a secret click of the secateurs.

Volunteer plants arrive here like fairy dust, floating in one day from who
knows where and taking delighted root. I say “delighted” because, unlike the
things I buy and then watch die, the volunteers arrive and tend to flourish.

This summer, Queen Anne’s Lace provided just such a fairy dusting, shooting
up out of nowhere in the front garden. At first I suspected it was a weed

The vine rampant, up to LittleBird Stephanie’s second-floor greenhouse. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

(which it actually is) but decided on watchful waiting and lo! The lovely,
lacy, saucer-sized flowers eventually unfurled. It does look a tad ratty
when the flowers die, like a carrot when its foliage is left too long in the
fridge, an apt comparison since the plants are related. But it’s so splendid
when in flower—possibly because it’s another of those plants they tell you
Not To Plant, NO, not under any circumstances. Beware! Invasive!

Of course I’ve always craved them, digging up roadside patches and
attempting transplants year after year and failing miserably, or so I
thought. I suppose a seed or two sat and considered before adopting my
front patch as home.

As did the wash of purple flowers called lunaria that suddenly went mad in
the curbside garden this spring. Commonly known as money plant, or silver
dollar, the mass of purple blossoms gives way to disks covered in a stiff
brownish casing, the color of three-day-old scabs. Peel off the scab and
paper-thin, silvery seed pods are exposed. My mother used to fit these into
arrangements, maybe yours did too. Now I do.

They blew in from Joe’s yard. The “mayor” of our block spends a great deal
of time rocking on his heels on the sidewalk and chatting to whoever wanders
by. Recently retired, he’s cultivating his dotage, though he’s technically
still too young.

There are quite a number of neighbors who’ve lived here 30 or so years,
buying in when Capitol Hill was still relatively cheap, energetically fixing
old houses, raising their kids, and now saying codgery things to a new
wash of children when they’re not taking their exorbitant profits and moving
to South Beach or Austin to recapture wild youth.

Anyway. The lunaria appeared in Joe’s front yard some time ago and then this
spring in our sidewalk patch, which is, curiously, a considerable distance
from his. The seedlings had to fly across four yards and a sidewalk to land
where they are.

Less happily, a Rose of Sharon in a depressing shade of lilac poked forth
several years ago and is now a 10-foot tree. No doubt it’s an unfortunate
offshoot of the immense red and white Rose of Sharon that billows in a
corner next to the back porch, like an awning in the South of France, its
only good feature. It was another of those apology plants from my beloved
who did something, I forget what.

I don’t much like either, as they remind me of The Prince once removed, but
as they’re among the few plants that bloom from July until frost, I leave
them be.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is working on a book about urban gardening. To see earlier columns, type Green Acre into the Search box at the top right of the page.

A crystal orb hanging from a string hanging from a broken lamp atop Gardener Cavanaugh’s desk. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

AMONG THE MANY questions I have never been asked is why there is a small crystal ball suspended from a rather grimy pink string hanging from the broken lamp that occupies a sizable section of my desk.

It is possibly the most useless piece of gardening equipage in my arsenal of gardening implements.

Equipage, by the way, and since I just double-checked with Encarta, means:  “The equipment and supplies needed for an undertaking, especially a military expedition.”

Which about sums up gardening tools, yes?

The crystal is supposed to sense the plant’s desires, the which way it wants to nestle into the pot or the earth. The “do I need water or not.”  The hunger for an 8-0-24 or 10-10-10 fertilizer.

All you need to do is hold the string (allowing enough string for it to dangle freely) with a weight suspended (I use a crystal since I happen to have such things handy, but anything with just enough heft to keep the string taut will do) between thumb and forefinger above whichever plant is troubling you.

Amazon offers a rather pretty amethyst number that is “12 Facet Reiki Charged,” which could mean it’s a good deal, for $5.20, chain and shipping included. 547 customers gave it 4.5 stars. 15 questions are answered.  https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Amethyst-Crystal-Pendulum-Charged/dp/B002Y2NJWS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474425311&sr=8-1&keywords=healing+crystal+pendulum

Now hold it steady and ask, for instance, “Is this planted in the right direction?”

Wait a bit and slooowly the weight will begin to rotate, circling to the right if the direction is correct, to the left if it is not. (Left, is always incorrect, unless we’re discussing politics, when it’s frequently right. And who’s on first, I might add).

Given time, the pendulum will begin to swing round and round, sometimes hesitantly, as if the petunia or mum is uncertain of its desires, and other times it swoops about with wild abandon, as if to say, “Now you’re talking!”

In either event, if it circles left, turn the plant in some direction or other and ask again. Continue until you get it spinning right.

If the health of a plant is suspicious—maybe it is looking forlorn, or even drooping dramatically—do not ask, “Are you dead?”  If the answer is yes, it is clearly lying.  (But why would it, you’re probably wondering. I don’t think you want to know the answer; lying plants are just unfathomable.)

Instead ask, “Would you care for a drink?” or, perhaps, “More sun?”  If there is no response, you can then assume it dead and dispose of it.

Such divining, as it’s technically called, can also be done over vegetables and fruits in the supermarket and is particularly helpful with those that are challenging and expensive, the ones that are particularly frustrating when you get them home and find them . . . inadequate. Take, for instance, honeydew melon, a constant cause of irritation, as its ripeness is particularly difficult to gauge. Just dangle your weight above one and ask, “Are you ripe?” Now stand there quietly, with your string and your weight (as people stare at you like you’re completely insane) and wait for the response.

You can also try this with daily life issues as well, like: Should I get a divorce? Eat a bacon sandwich? Take a nap?

This technique was learned as part of a session of past life therapy that I tried some (many) years ago, as a completely rational alternative to traditional therapy and the expenditure of countless dollars. During the session various things appeared, including a horse, apples, a lake, a cave, some great black clothing and really terrific hair.

I also learned the divining trick, which is, if nothing else, diverting.

Would that it worked when dangled over My Prince.

Namaste.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

LittleBird Stephanie is working on a book about urban gardening. To see earlier columns, type Green Acre into the Search box at the top right of the page.

Coconut palms on the grounds of the Old One’s condo complex in Juno Beach, Florida. / Photo by Monica Cavanaugh.

THE PEANUT ISLAND FERRY takes you to what minimal snorkeling is to be had around Palm Beach. A multipurpose conveyance, the ferry (and the captain) can also take your ashes out and distribute them, holding a two-hour ceremony, should you choose. The fee for this service is not listed on the website.

Peanut Island is where we’ll float, alive and nose to fish, I hope, for a few hours this afternoon. (If it weren’t for Zika we’d head for the Keys). The Prince, Baby and I are here for hurricane season, the annual birthday celebration for the sister we call the Old One, who is technically old enough to be my mother, but that’s another story.

These visits frequently involve monsoon rains and the occasional evacuation. Not this year, however. While the rest of the East Coast sat in the hot sand, glaring at the verboten chop of water, we’ve frolicked in an ocean as placid and warm as a bath, all crystal shades of blue and green. I am burnt.

The Old One has a condo on Juno Beach, the last relatively unspoiled strip of sand in South Florida. I am looking out the window at 9am and see one lone soul walking the water’s edge.

The condo sits in grand gardens. I can identify nothing. Plants here grow with prehistoric speed and gallivanting lushness; stick a stick of something in the soil, give it a week and it’s in need of pruning.

As is his habit, The Prince identified A Project that required abandoning the beach for a stroll through Home Depot. A momentary spell of wet descended yesterday afternoon, so off we went, he to rummage amongst the screws and bolts, Lil Sis (who also lives around here), Baby and I to investigate the retailer’s garden center.

This does not resemble any big-box garden center I’m familiar with. The orange, lemon  and Key lime trees already tower. There are vast beds of fabulous flowers of fantastic scale—I’m getting to the point here, shortly.

We marvel through the aisles. A woman trundles past with a shopping cart stuffed with an enormous hanging basket, a huge green thing covered with shockingly no-account yellow flowers. It is so no-account I can’t even figure how she found it, or why she wants it. She should be barred from buying plants.

Baby halts and gently yells, “Ma!” I join her and together we stand, admiring a baby coconut palm, slender fronds reaching up six feet. This will not fit under my airline seat but, of course, I want one.

More coconut palms, different time of day in Juno Beach, Florida. / Photo here and on the front by Monica Cavanaugh.

Did you know that trees grow from seeds? Those orange seeds one so blithely spits out would eventually spout forth creamy white, divinely scented flowers from which tiny fruits would emerge. This is something that has only recently occurred to me. It was like my discovery that there is really nothing sinister about vegetable soup. There’s nothing more frightening lurking in that murk than celery and maybe a pea.

Similarly, did you know coconut palms grow from coconuts?  A brief Googling explains that you take a coconut, with its husk still on, jiggle it for juice (demonstrating its freshness) stick it in potting soil and in some amount of time a tree will grow.

I saw just such a coconut on the beach the other day; perhaps it’s still there. Coconuts are both easy and difficult to find around here as the grounds crew evicts them as soon as they appear on the trees to avoid them dropping on some octogenarian’s head.

The Prince has a coconut-size corner of a suitcase available. If not, we can just leave some of his stuff here for next year.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

When she’s not exploring other climates,  Gardener Cavanaugh is working on a book on urban gardening in D.C. To read her  earlier columns, type Green Acre into the Search box at top right.

The mandevilla plant in question. So full of promise, so full of disappointment. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

WILL THE MANDEVILLA give me one lousy flower this year?

I have been observing the bud for the past week, creeping past last night’s dirty dishes (not my job) each morning and tiptoeing down the steps into the garden, wincing over the pebble path in my socks, hoping that this single bud has finally opened into a flower.

At 7am it was looking a little shriveled, although it appears better in the photo than it has any reason to. An over-caffeinated hand was at hand, giving it a facelift. Like a Vaselined lens focused on a wrinkled face.

This was an apology plant, purchased in early July at our local garden emporium, a small place, just past D.C.’s Southwest Freeway overpass, that’s exceedingly expensive but particularly lush and tempting. The Prince had done Something Bad, I forget what now.  And we were out for a bumpy walk that ended up here, with the purchase of this cheery specimen, all red and white stripes, as the photo showed. At $30, it was far more than I would usually spend, particularly for a plant that has repeatedly failed me (though it grows like a weed in every third garden in our Capitol Hill neighborhood).

But I let him buy it for me. Perhaps with a hint of malice, knowing that it would fail. And I’ve watched it grow bushy and green with not one hint of a flower, never mind a bud. Until now, at the season’s tail end, when I’m mentally preparing to up-pot my tropicals and tote them to the second-floor greenhouse—or figure out a way to guilt someone else into the toting—and considering the annual burying of the tulips.

Sadly, mandevillas do no better in the greenhouse than they do in the garden.

Why?

If you think that because I write about gardening that I know what I’m doing, you’re wrong. This month I am celebrating 33 years of generally unsuccessful toiling over the same garden. Pretty much nothing has gone according to plan.

My best work, in fact, has been cultivating friends who know less than I do and so are buffaloed into thinking  some strategy was involved in the garden’s evolution from dirt and a clothesline to a jungle.

I mean, I usually start out by reading and studying and developing . . . thoughts. I shall plant this and that and move this here and there . . . and maybe some lighting?

And then I get distracted by a mandevilla, knowing It Will Not Work under the dense canopy of shrubbish I have stuffed into this tiny plot and never get around to pruning. So many flowers are too captivating to ignore. Shiny things, you know. Do you?

Like lilies. For years I attempted them, I had some limited success early on, each year they came up, blossomed and then stood there looking all grim and spindly from late June through September. They did bring about one of my earliest and most successful eurekas of fakery, however. I wired some rather nice silkesque ones to the stems and honestly fooled myself into thinking them real. But even the stems fail on me now, just as well,  really—the scent of lilies reminds me of funerals. There was just one bloom on sorry display this year; that was sadder still as Someone managed to knock its support and step on that single flower. May I say, this lily whatever-it’s-called (I always think I’ll remember but don’t)  has been taking up precious space for several years, growing taller and leggier every season—but has never been more floriferous, which isn’t saying anything at all.

Then there’s the mallow, the giant-leafed relative of the tropical hibiscus with flowers the size of platters. You see them everywhere, in pocket parks, along highways, untended, growing like weeds. Except around here, where I thought they’d make a splendid display in the big planter near the curb. They didn’t even bother to come up this year, and so we tried . . . angel’s trumpet! Yet another flower of industrious production, poisonous to dogs, but hell—anything for flowers. And just this morning I was enjoying (another) self-congratulatory moment with it before my hike—thinking about the Du Pont garden in Wilmington where angel’s trumpet are trained in pots as standard trees and fantasizing that this is where this sorry (and entirely flowerless) specimen  that I’ve been nursing  for three summers is headed. Even my cunning underplanting of moonflowers and pink morning glories is struggling. The gods laugh

On the upside, there’s the pink trumpet vine, bought for $30 plus shipping from Plant Delights, an online nursery in North Carolina famous for its terrifically witty catalogue and for employing one of David Sedaris’s sisters for several youthful summers. The catalogue said, “Crinum ‘Pink Trumpet’ is . . . topped with 4′ tall flower spikes from July through September. Each spike terminates in a cluster of 8-10 dark rosy pink, very fragrant, trumpet-shaped flowers.” This I imagined splayed across the front yard, mingling with the ivy, a cheery scented sea of pink flowers.

This is the dead-stick pink trumpet vine. Don’t be fooled: The pink flowers in the picture are in the flower box in the rear window. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Yes, it looks like a bunch of dead sticks (though the cilantro seed I tossed in to remind me not to discard the pot is flourishing. Olé, guacamole). However! No one else in the neighborhood has one, so what you have here is the area’s premier example of a pink trumpet vine. Exquisite, isn’t it?

I think it may be dead.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Gardener Cavanaugh is working on a book about city gardening (and anything else she can think of). To read her earlier D.C. Green Acre columns, type Green Acre into the Search box at the top right of the page. We numbered them so you can follow the gardener’s “progress.”