Thanks to the wonders of Photoshop, a banana plant outside the Surroundings nursery on Capitol Hill masquerades as a Bird of Paradise. / Photo, here and on the front, by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

MY BABY, a fine piece of work, and her Personal Prince Pete share a newly built and bought home in Raleigh, North Carolina, with Tallula, a large brown dog, part Lab and part Plott Hound, who’s an excellent mouser and does several tricks, if bribed.

They landed here because Pete, a man of liberal leanings who resembles a younger Brad Pitt, joined the National Guard to fly Apache helicopters, as one does, and Raleigh is one of a handful of bases in this country that raises or musters or whatever one does with them, and it seemed the best option. This is so nuts I can’t tell you, but that is neither here nor there, because thankfully he’s now done. Exhale.

This more or less accidental and initially temporary location appears to have become rather suddenly and dramatically permanent as they, with the abetment of the lovely mother-in-law, managed to snag in a single week investment properties consisting of two vacant lots and a shack of a house, notable for its decrepitude and location across from a cemetery—a location even the real estate agent said had its downside. On the upside, all are in walking distance of downtown. On the other downside, there’s not a great deal to be said yet for Raleigh’s downtown, though it’s on the verge of becoming the next Austin, they say.

While there’s a budding foodie and craft beer scene, the general area is primarily a hotbed of fried foods. The 1853 Grille at the Raleigh Flea Market, which sadly just closed, served fried Twinkies, fried HoHos, bloom ‘n fried onions, funnel cakes, fried candy bars and (as opposed to simply fried) DEEP-fried pecan pie. Breakfast at a downtown café was, on one recent visit, fried chicken topped with fried eggs with fried churros on the side. I know just what you’re thinking: It is indeed amazing that there are some very old people here.

Anyway. Baby and her Prince are now budding land barons, up to their eyeballs in real estate, among their various other doings.

This is all beside the point, which is the introduction to my most spectacularly wrong-headed garden addition yet. My newest example No. 1 of why you should always read something about the plants you covet before you collide with the possibility of a spontaneous purchase.

It all began idyllically. The Prince and I visited Raleigh last weekend and took Baby on our usual side excursion to the State Farmers Market, half of which is devoted to tomatoes, okra and edibles of that ilk, and half to some of the most enticing tropical plants I have ever seen grouped in one location, and it’s generally inexpensive bordering on cheap, at least to our city eyes. There are lemons and limes, gardenias and jasmine, hibiscus and camellias. Some are the size of trees, some budlings; the scent is so heady you could expire with ecstasy; the colors are glorious, hypnotic in their strangeness. Did you ever see the film Mothra? Probably not, since it was the second half of a double feature in 1961, I think. But believe me, it’s just like that psychedelic paradise garden, where a giant moth is coaxed forth to protect these miniature singing island people… Come to think of it, a tropical horror story is what I’m about to tell, momentarily.

A Siam tulip in the corner of Gardener Cavanaugh’s Capitol Hill garden. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Among our finds, a huge orange canna that will vibrate splendidly against their house, which is painted a shade called Carolina Blue, a shade god probably had in mind when he named the color. There was also a purple Siam tulip, which is not a tulip though the flower somewhat resembles one but a variety of ginger that is native to Siam, tall-growing, probably delicate, and possibly impossible for either of us to deal with. This, however, was not the mistake I am referring to; this was par for the course.

Now.

Of all the exotic plants I’ve coveted, the Bird of Paradise has proved most elusive. Growing like a weed in hot places where I don’t happen to live, and aptly named, its flower is like the head of an exotic bird. Most commonly that flower is green-beaked, orange-plumed, with a fripple* of purple sticking up for emphasis, and grows out of a three- to five-foot stand of split-leaf foliage. But what I found was even more exotic, a WHITE Bird of Paradise, or mostly, so as the flower is shot with the faintest tinge of purple at its base, or so I see from the tag, since it is not in bloom at the moment.

I never thought I wanted a white one; indeed I didn’t know they existed. But having read the tag, I felt palpitations; my chest still heaves at the thought.

We trotted everything back to the house, Baby doing a brilliant job of dividing the canna, getting five plants from one, and splitting the Siam tulip in two, so I would stop whining that I want one and should have bought one and so forth. Thanks to me, she’s way ahead of where I was at her age, plant-wise. I was 32 before I had more than a fire escape for a garden; she grew up with one.

The cannas were planted behind the blue and greenish white hydrangeas in front of their house, while the Bird sat in temporary splendor, lording it over an entire corner of the border for a few days before we loaded it into our truck (such a sexy trip vehicle, but you just never know, do you?) for transport home to Capitol Hill.

How splendid I thought, settling in to Google the growth habits and needs of the Strelitzia Nicolai, which sounds to me like a lethal Russian virus, and to Baby a Russian ballerina, succinctly capturing a key difference between our outlooks.

It seems your options for obtaining a specimen this far north are fairly limited. Other than schlepping one home from Florida or California, one can order on Amazon where a six-inch pot goes for $7.99 + $5.49 shipping (not eligible for Prime), though they’re all out of stock, grabbing this five-foot-tall plant was indeed a coup. I was delirious. And it was just $18. But if you’re thinking about running right off and ordering, figuring you’ll just wait patiently for delivery, heh heh, STOP.

Quoting from the South Florida Plant Guide follows, please provide your own horror music as you read—start it softly so it can build. The text begins benignly, indeed joyously to my ear, or eye I suppose you might say since I’m reading: “The unique white bird grows in a clumping form and needs a large area in which to spread out and unfurl its big leaves.”

Oooh . . . ahh! JUST what I’m looking for, now tell me about the flowers….

“The plant blossoms on and off during warm weather, with flowers that bear an astonishing resemblance to a bird’s head.” Yes, go on! “The blooms, however, are less important to your landscape than the ultra-tropical look created by the beautiful foliage. The leaves look like an elite version of a banana plant. A white Bird of Paradise can be a real showpiece in a landscape . . . “

A showpiece! I need a showpiece! I love showpieces! And an “elite version of the banana plant”? Consider the snob appeal of this! Everyone and their brother is growing banana plants; why, one is now struggling through its third summer in the front garden. The neighbors are going to plotz with envy.

That it’s tropical is not an issue, as I’m lucky enough to have a little greenhouse. I’ll stick it in a pot and this showpiece will be the crowning glory of my winter garden . . . but then they continue: “The mistake most people make with a white Bird—and many other South Florida landscape plants—is not planning ahead for growth.”

You might increase the volume of ominous music here.

“This is a big plant.”

Oh? A lot of envy?

“When mature, it’s going to be over twenty feet tall by at least six feet or more wide, and it can tower over a small one-story house.”

Go ahead and read that again, let it swill around in your brain for a moment.

Twenty feet tall, six feet wide, or more?

That statement is accompanied by a photo of a giant white Bird of Paradise waving cheerily above the peak of a two-story house and crowding the front door.

And I thought my minute garden was in for a smidge of trouble, shoehorning what I assumed was a four-foot plant into to my collection of invasive vines, and other things that climb and bush, never mind the kwanzan cherry tree, all screaming at one another in a space where one of anything would be plenty, particularly if you mix in a table and chairs. Oh, and a pond.

Of course, you ask, where was My Prince (Baby’s was at work) while all of this buying was going on? Lifting our various finds onto the truck, even paying for a thing or three. You know he’s an enabler, classic behavior this.  An enabler, says Merriam-Webster is: “…one who enables another to persist in self-destructive behavior (as substance abuse) by providing excuses or by helping that individual avoid the consequences of such behavior.”

See? His fault, as always. Sigh.

Meanwhile, my little greenhouse, just 100 square feet and nine feet high, is totally inadequate. He can either build a bird house or drill a hole in our living-room ceiling so it can grow up and flower in a corner of our bedroom. I add these last thoughts only because Baby, who read this piece in advance, said, “Why are you always ending so abruptly. It’s as if you run out of things to say, and just stop.”

Yes.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

* I am appalled to find that the Urban Dictionary defines fripple as a frozen nipple. “When you get wet or cold and your nipple goes hard.” I prefer to think it is what it sounds like; a fillip of color or texture that contrasts with and enhances whatever it’s attached to. I made this up myself.  

Gardener Cavanaugh is working on a book about urban gardening. Her own city plot is on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. You can read all of her Green Acre columns by typing Green Acre in the search box at the top right of this page.

A DC garden with the happy addition of Christmas balls to supplant fading flowers. / Photo here and on the front by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

IT IS ONCE AGAIN the time of year when one must consider the Demise of the D.C. Garden: the molding of the zinnias, the wincing of the cherry tree leaves, the withering of the potato vine. That sort of thing.

It’s too soon for the pansies and mums (which live for about 30 seconds around here anyway) and those frilly ornamental cabbages that will carry us through winter.

Are we then forced to wait for some measure of garden jollity? Nyet, I say, exercising the extent of my Russian.

It is time to purpose and repurpose items that can cheer the border between now and then.

Consider now, that whatever it was you bought and planted, that thing that was certain to bloom but instead fizzled in the heat while you were off sailing with Cucumber and Desmond and you can’t plant a damn thing because of the heat wave (never mind that there’s scarcely anything left at the garden center). That’s when you crawl up into the attic and dig around for the box helpfully marked Christmas Balls and locate the glitteriest specimens and cart them off to fill that bare patch.

Do not dwell on this concept; I know it’s a little off-putting, so just glance over it. Imagine wandering down a little side street and coming upon this pocket garden glittering its fool head off in the sunshine, thanks to strewn glass balls in what-have-you colors that might have dropped from the sky in a recent rain, all higgledy-piggledy-plop.

It’s just happy. And, we might add a favorite word, cheap. Happy, cheap, done, drink time!

Now consider the urn, the one with the plant in the center, the one that is supposed to stand upright and bushy (I have one; it’s supposed to be covered with pretty little orange flowers but, eh, can’t have everything).

So—alert!—actual successful gardening tip coming.

But first I will point out that this was supposed to be cleaning day. Yesterday while floating around my pool draped over a hot pink noodle (Note: This is only my pool in the sense that I paid a couple of hundred bucks for The Prince and me to belong for the summer), I was getting all energized about Waxing the Floors and Washing the Kitchen Wallpaper. Perversely, as these things happen, this morning arrives and I have zero desire to clean anything. I am, in fact, in full step over the crap on the floor mode, and I catch sight of this leggy thing that just . . . drips. If it gets hit with rain it goes entirely splat and tangles with the ground cover. This is not the effect I was going for.

I really want to tell you about curly willow branches, which I buy each January and allow to leaf out in joyous celebration of the coming of spring. As always, this year I intended to plant them in a pot once they’d rooted in water and I was going to have this gorgeous display just like the one I saw outside a florist’s in Old Town last summer. This did not work, possibly because I am not a gay male, which sometimes you absolutely have to be for things to be . . . just so.

So. The branches did root, but then upped and died, and I was left with a bunch of curly-looking sticks. I liked them for their curliness and tossed them on the growing heap of stuff I can’t throw away that thrives under the back porch.

And then in one of these frissons that occasionally strike, I found myself holding a curly willow branch while eyeing the urn with the delinquent plant and, putting two and two together, I stuck the branch into the pot and coiled the limp and leggy stems around it.

And everything looks all jolly and perky, except for the missing orange flowers—and come to think of it, the greenish whitish plant that underlies it is supposed to have purple flowers . . . oh well.

You too could do this! You don’t need a curly branch, just something tall and interesting in shape. Jam it into the ground and twist the recalcitrant whatnot around the limbs. If you want to get fancy, as I semi-successfully did one year, spray-paint the branch a shiny Chinese red first.

Speaking of China, or Japan, maybe Thailand, plug the words “Asian umbrella” into Google and the colors will leave you heaving with passion. Hang one or several from a tree, or stick it in the garden. If you have deep pockets, get one that’s table-size. If I had deep pockets like you, I certainly would.

Add color! Paint a door turquoise, or plant a pair of shocking-pink chairs against the foliage—a brilliantly colored tablecloth works as well. Hang a bird cage from a tree and stick a fake parrot on a branch; I’ve seen it done and you don’t notice much else. Consult Thomas Hobbes or Tony Duquette if your senses need a thorough jolt; they give me palpitations. Amazon has their books.

You might also make a statement with statuary.

On a recent stroll around Capitol Hill I spied a six-foot-tall metal rooster, all red and white and green, that vibrates against a yellow house. Don’t tell the owner, who probably paid a fortune for it, but I recently saw a similar piece in the, um, statuary section of Slindy’s of Culpeper, my favorite junque shoppe, for 15 bucks. (Years of junking and no Renoir. Where’s the fairness in this, I ask you.)

Of course it’s nice if you happen to have evergreens to back-up your statuary and what-nots. (It’s also nice if you happen to have statuary), but a bed of mulch will do. In my wander I came across three amusingly primitive giant stone heads lined up in a nearby garden. I would have taken a photo but it was trash day and well . . . the big blue cans. Feh. Multiples of most things are good. Except trash cans.

A lovely gloom on Capitol Hill. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I love the gloom of the statue of Olive Risley Seward, commanding a private yard near Eastern Market. It’s depressing even in mid-summer, but now it has all the cheer of a tomb. You could change the offerings in the casket at her feet, winging along with the seasons. Petunias for now, skulls for Halloween, fir branches for the holidays, maybe some bulbs under-planted with crocus and tulips and such for a spring show.

Nearby, a four-foot statue of Bacchus usually sports shiny strings of Mardis Gras beads in addition to what looks like a bird cage on top of his head. Beads are always appropriate. Flamingos are too, as long as they’re not (shudder) plastic—this is never amusing. A neighboring house has a pair cleverly composed of conjoined bits of hardware and bicycle seats; they’re painted ballet-slipper pink and stationed beside a garden pond.

And you didn’t think Capitol Hill was witty.

Asian accents on Capitol Hill. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

In a more stately vein, a handsome Buddha mingles with ivy and grasses on North Carolina Avenue. There’s a large square Asian thing—I have No Idea what it is—behind him. The Buddha and the . . . thing . . . and a tree are angled just so, creating a clean and quite dramatic division between two otherwise joined townhouses.

A bold arrangement between homes, I have found, is a particularly fruitful idea for a D.C. garden when you have disgusting neighbors and don’t want to look at them. This is, theatrically speaking, called “pulling focus.”

—Stephanie Cavanaugh
Gardener Cavanaugh is writing a book on urban gardening. To read all her earlier Green Acre columns, type “Green Acre” in the Search box at the top right of the page.

The plants surrounding the twin pools at the U.S. Botanic Garden are not very colorful this year, left; last year, right, they were lush and vibrant–the way I like them. On the front, and below: a potted plant display at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. / Photos by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

THE MAIN HALL at the U.S. Botanic Garden at the foot of the Capitol does not thrill me this summer. There’s entirely too much restraint on display.

An ex-friend and I once had a dispute, well, we had more than one, which is why she’s now an ex-friend.

While I have no issue with disagreement in genera—a little disagreement can aid in the creation of thought balloons that contain symbols such as ? and ! and ?! As well as the strings of letters and symbols that we substitute for expletives.  I do however mind when said disagreement is entirely disagreeable, which is what  the final disagreement was, which I will not get into.

The following was minor as such things go:

We were not arguing over flowers, but over excesses. She preferred House Beautiful magazine, which was in those days a paean to the myriad things you can do with sheets, and what she called “practical furnishings.” I preferred dreaming big, drowning myself in  (the late lamented) House and Garden, with its photos and descriptions of things I will not have in this lifetime but can perhaps figure out a way to fake.

(Not that she wasn’t extravagant and acquisitive; she was terribly so, and snobbish about it. Thirty-some years ago, at a time before Rose’s Luxury, she came to see our brand-new old house, pinched her nose across the fence to our neighbor’s yard, strung with nylon line and dripping with wet underwear, then sniffed and cooed, “Darling, how quaint.”

Also note that House Beautiful has greatly improved since the time of the sheets. Worth subscribing to, particularly if you like odd color combinations, as I do.)

Where was I? Oh yes. The Botanic Garden.

Some years, like this one, it is pretty dull. Even the flowers of color are pale and constricted and constipatedly tasteful. Very Wasp (no offense to wasps). Very Washington.

In other years, the twin pools that flank the center court have been lush and fanciful and you want to take off all of your clothes and lie there in the turquoise water with the fountains splishing about while you breathe in and out many times while filling your eyeballs with purple and lush and overgrown. And there’s no worry of snakes nibbling your toes or bulbous hairy spiders flinging themselves out of the branches overhead.
My ex-friend would have it pruned.

I should mention, to get to the actual point of this story, most of the Botanic Garden’s  seasonal displays are in pots. The entry hall has pots of ferns and flowers grouped about the floor. More pots sit atop columns. These are filled with many things that grow up and down.

You will note how cleverly I am refraining from naming many (if any) plants. This is either because I do not wish to intimidate you with my knowledge of flora or because I have no idea what they are.

In any event, I  have found that displaying a knowledge of plant names can be highly irritating, particularly so when someone tosses about the Latin. And It’s a fairly useless use of brain space. If you need to have a certain plant, steal a sprig or bud or whatnot and wave it around at the garden center until someone identifies it.

The beauty of pots is that when plants die or fade or grow ratty, as they too frequently do, you can move and remove them so easily, just as you might do with certain friends.  Considering this, there is no excuse for the pallor of the current display. Surely there is something under the hothouse roof that is outrageously, sense-ticklingly florid that can be dropped in to perk things up. It’s quite simple.

For example:

On this morning’s tour of the back forty, I noticed that the six-foot-tall banana tree was crowded behind the hydrangea, so I put down my coffee on the pebbled path, shifted the jasmine a few inches to the left, picked up the banana and dropped it in the space. Then  I sat on the back porch, finished that cup of coffee and considered  the new arrangement. I think I like it, but if it disagrees with me later, I’ll just move the tree again. It took only, more or less, 47 seconds, including travel time.

My garden, or much of it, shifts around this way because it’s in a collection of pots and urns and assorted odd containers. The container collection has evolved over the years, from mainly plastic, to more exotic designs and materials. Among the more basic pots is an old plaster birdbath (which really needs work, I suddenly notice), and the Victorian umbrella stand that I mentioned last week, and the terracotta cat that The Prince and I toted back from Mexico City several decades ago that is stuffed with a few purple sprigs of wandering jew and perched in an old wire bird cage. Oh yes, and the bird cage.

Growing stuff in pots is helpful when you have an ill-considered if beautiful (for a spring week, maybe two if you’re lucky) cherry tree that’s swiftly taking over the air rights to your garden, as I do. And particularly when you persist in buying plants that thrive on sun and all you can provide, to put it generously, is dappled shade. That would be me as well.

And  when you spend a small fortune (me! me! me!) on plants that want to spit at you and thwack you with flailing limbs and lethal thorns for the lousy environment you’ve provided—the least you can do is attempt to make them happy. And if one of them is disagreeable enough to drop dead on you mid-summer? A little shift here and there and you soon forget to feel guilty.

Even if you’re blessed with sunshine, when August rolls around various clumps of wishful thinking will have gone belly up, leaving brownish clots amid the greenery. While you can plant something in the blistering heat (should you be lucky enough to find something to plant that isn’t already half dead), you’ll need to spend the rest of the summer hovering with a watering can. So much easier on the manicure to just move a this or that to there.

Speaking of there. There was a time, not long ago, when most of the garden was actually in the ground. But then The Prince, in a self-serving mood, built a greenhouse off my second-floor office so I would get the goddamn plants off the goddamn kitchen counter . . . where they upset him. And WHY, I ask you, since he hasn’t cooked since the artichoke debacle of 1994,  and considering the condition of his garage. . . .

Most likely he needed space for the often indecipherable notes and various lists and instructions that he leaves on the counter for me each morning. Today’s collection included the following proclamations: “I’m thinking of leaving you for the Duchess of Alba,” “Your damn pet mice will be killed this weekend” and, “I ate all the sticky buns, tough.”

One of my all-time favorites, and soon to be the title of my book, was a cautionary notice to my daughter Baby and me, set amid the merest sprinkling, just a dappling, of breadcrumbs, that began:  “Ladies! Ant season is upon us!”

Ant season. Pffft. The man is so put-upon. You’d think I didn’t keep him in Rice Krispies.

Anyway, he built the greenhouse, and this enabled me to winter-over the never-blooming lime and other leafy tropicals, marching them upstairs in their pots in October. Some of them die anyway, because I’m lazy and easily distractible, but most perform enthusiastically, and the scents of orange and jasmine and paperwhites and such are quite fabulous, drifting through the house in midwinter.

In April the plants march down again to take their summer positions in the garden.

The banana tree that I hoisted about this morning is fake, by the way. But that’s another story.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Gardener Cavanaugh is writing a book on urban gardening. You can read all her earlier Green Acre columns by typing “Green Acre” in the Search box at the top right of the page.

Yes, elephant ears! Ears of African elephants, mind you, not Indian ones. / Photo above and on front by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

IN MY GARDEN of many experiments and few successes, the elephant ears are always an unqualified delight. Much like the wandering jew that meanders here and there, easily filling bald patches at the poke of a chopstick, the colocasia (just looked that up so’s I’d look knowledgeable) devour space with glee, and need no care whatsoever—with the exception of setting the bulb with the bit that’s supposed to bud at the top (and I’m not even sure about that, or sometimes which is the top).

I buy a bag of a dozen for 10 bucks or so each spring at Costco or Home Depot and stick them behind pots, in front of the garage window, beside the pond, behind the cherry tree, hiding the straggly base of the honeysuckle, and higgledy-piggledy every elsewhere.
Water, don’t water, fertilize, don’t fertilize, sun no sun, up they come, sooner or later—the timing pretty much depending on how deep I’ve planted them. Though tropical, and technically not likely to survive our winters, there’s always an outlier or two that manages to weather the frost. Several poked up and said a surprise hello this summer.

Planting too deep is a common mistake. I’m forever treating them like tulips, with six inches or so above their heads, and then they sit there until—um, last week in one case—the plants emerge. And, since the wait is lengthy, and I have a hinky memory (as I believe I mentioned as an after-effect in my near-death sonata. If I neglected to, a hinky memory is an after-effect), the spots must be marked. Chopsticks are also excellent for this: The Prince bought me a pack of 100 a couple of years ago so I wouldn’t go planting something else on top of the bulbs or step on an emerging sprout.

And I watch and wait as weeks go by and sometime in early July, when maybe only four have unfurled their leaves, I heave a great despairing sigh and end up buying a few well-sprouted specimens—often for more than 10 bucks each—at some garden center or other. Of course, the following week the bulbs I’d already planted start poking up and sneering at me. Patience is not my middle name.

Happily, you can still find some around this late in the season; I saw several just yesterday on sale at Frager’s garden shop on Capitol Hill.

The ones that come up fastest are crowded in clay pots, covered with just a couple of inches of dirt (topped with some poked-in wandering jew so I remember I’ve planted them), and set on the back porch steps. Far faster than those in the garden, they’ll be leafed out and ready to be replanted in the yard where some disaster needs covering. The fact that shallow planting in a pot brings swifter growth is something that year after year I fail to recall. You can just leave them in their pots once they’ve sprouted, but for the leaves to reach a truly voluptuous scale they do best moved directly to the garden soil.

Technically, I suppose, elephant ears are much too large for this little space; their mammoth leaves add even more shade to the shade, so I’m constantly moving this and that to chase the spotty sun. But then, I don’t do much of anything in a small way, happily following the counterintuitive dictum that large-scale anything makes a small space feel bigger—and the hibiscus and African gardenia, which are currently not at all happy, will  recover nicely in the greenhouse this winter.

In the meantime, what giddy joy these jungle leaves bring to August, when little is in bloom and much of what’s left is bedraggled. Blast the Bob Marley and bring on me rum.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Gardener Cavanaugh is working on a book about urban gardening. To read her earlier columns, type “Green Acre” in the Search box at the top of the screen.

A few yellow leaves on the Cavanaugh gardenia, but it’s okay–they’re in the center. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh. Photo on front from iStock.

MY GARDENIA has suddenly sprung a few yellowed leaves and since it is a nice big bushy specimen with several promising buds, I decided to care and Google the issue.

Digression. Isn’t it wonderful that you can now ask a question of Google in any peculiarly phrased way you wish,  misspellings included, and come up with a few thousand . . . theories, if not correct answers? I’m sometimes curious about the people who torture the phrasing of their questions in the same way that I do. I’m sometimes curious about the people who even ask the same questions that I do, frequently with the same misspellings. What (frequently) demented path led them to wonder what they’re wondering and was it similar to mine?

Upon investigation, it turns out there’s probably nothing wrong with the gardenia (which, if you recall, is how we started out). Yellow leaves on the outside of the plant are disastrous for some reason that I don’t care about at the moment because mine are in the middle, where they’re yellowing because, as I discover, they’re just old. Like teeth. And they’ll die and fall off and be replaced by nice, new green ones. Unlike teeth. End of subject.

But in the course of this research I tripped across three suggestions for plant improvement that cost virtually nothing and don’t require getting in the car and driving to God knows where in Virginia. This is always a pleasant surprise: In fact these items are always in the house.

Epsom salts, also used for soaking The Prince’s old bones, is good for roses; and coffee grounds, also used for waking me up, apparently does the same for hibiscus; and rotten egg juice is said to be miraculous for just about everything.

A lovely trumpet vine; unfortunately it doesn’t belong to Gardener Cavanaugh, whose specimen might improve with the application of rotten egg juice. Ewwww. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Epsom salts, I’m reading, either diluted with water and poured about the rose or worked into the soil at the base of the rose, is said to promote branching, leafing and blooming. What more could you want! It has something to do with the chemistry and soil and stuff that makes me nod off like the dormouse while reading so here it is, from the Rose Magazine website (although we have politely fixed some of their spelling, grammar, etc.):

“Epsom salts are used to provide magnesium to the soil. Roses seem to be heavy feeders of this element. A soil test would be the only way to really know if your soil was lacking in magnesium, but most rose growers just apply a small amount per bush. You can sprinkle a couple of tablespoons around the rose, or dissolve it in a watering can first and water in. If you are using a balanced rose fertilizer that contains magnesium, it’s probably not necessary to add more. We tend to over-feed our roses at times. If your soil is light and sandy, feed more; if it’s rich or clay like, feed less.”

Public Service Announcement: I grow neither peppers nor tomatoes, but it is said that Epsom salts have a similar effect on both. Look it up yourself.

Now. Almost giving me the vapors is the notion that scratching coffee grounds into the soil around my hibiscus will promote flowers. First, because this house generates a steady stream of coffee grounds that otherwise land in the trash; and second, my hope for actual hibiscus flowers is suddenly revived.

My lack of success with the dozen or so hibiscus I’ve attempted to grow over the years probably has to do with the meager sunlight in the garden, a lack I attribute to My Prince encouraging my sudden and completely ill-considered notion to plant a kwanzan cherry tree in a yard more suited to a tall celery (does celery grow up or down? How does celery grow? This is interesting and will someday be investigated in a Google search).  Why he goes along with my fancies I do not know, but he is frequently wrong to do so.

But a judicious sprinkling of coffee grounds around the base of the plants is said to provoke fabulous flowering. It is also said to inspire jasmine to bloom, and it might just be doing so—several what I suspect are jasmines, I really don’t know since they haven’t flowered in years, have set buds.

And then there is rotten egg juice, a fairly disgusting liquid that is made by tossing your breakfast egg shells into a canister, covering them with water, and then covering the canister tightly, for what will become an obvious reason. Let this brew steep for a week or so and the stench when the lid is popped is breathtaking.

I’ve heard it is effective for all manner of flowering plants, but I’m specifically using it to coax my recalcitrant angel trumpet—special-ordered for what are supposed to be its divine pale pink with green throated flowers, I think I recall—into bloom. In its third summer it stands pathetic in a gigantic planter at curbside, its skinny stalks dangling droopy foliage. The most it has done this year is drop a shriveled leaf or two. This is not at all the effect I was going for.

I suspect it just doesn’t like me, but we’ll know soon enough.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Gardener Cavanaugh is working on a book about urban gardening. To read her earlier columns, type “Green Acre” in the Search box at the top of the screen.

Photos here and on the cover by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

SOMETIMES, AND BY THIS I mean almost daily,  the design pages of the New York Times provoke me to scream, Are you out of your minds!?

And I say this fondly, being an ex-New Yorker, born and raised and schooled and—to demonstrate my street cred—once able to tell at a glance a real Gucci bit on a shoe from a knock-off, and consider this essential information.

I am looking at a planter by designer Huy Bui, who wears what might impolitely be called a shit-eating grin in the photo that accompanies the interview, as well he should. It’s really a terrarium and it’s constructed of oak strips that you mount yourself, “like Lego blocks,” he says, on a charred wood base, whatever that is. Part of his “Homemade Collection,” it can sit on your tabletop for $850.

I think, I’m in fact sure, the parts for something like this are lurking in our garage, or possibly the basement. Maybe the attic.

For your outdoor space, Mr. Bui suggests various planters, including one with “deep asymmetrical ripples,” called the Babylon. Designed by Harry and Camila for Dedon, “it comes in four sizes, the largest more than three feet tall—ideal for a tree.” It costs $1,385 and is made of polyethylene.

Nestling near our pond,  in a collection of ferns, is a gorgeous terracotta number with deep asymmetrical ripples. It’s more than three feet tall, ideal for a tree. The Prince brought it home from who knows what sidewalk last year—it’s now growing a fine furze of moss, which is a lovely touch, and also very en trende, according to Bui.

(Furze, I am informed by the editor is a kind of gorse, a rather thorny plant, and not a  spread of soft fuzz, which is what it sounds like. Doesn’t it? Well, that is what editors are for.)

Furz, upon further investigation, also means fart in German—ein furz. And did you know that trump is British slang for fart? That is neither here nor there, but wonderful, I think.

The Prince, “shopping” for treasure in New Orleans. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Now, no one loves pots and planters more than I do—see various posts on the subject—but the most I’ve ever paid for one, and technically it’s not a planter but an Art Deco umbrella stand cunningly redeployed as a fern holder, was a hundred bucks. I considered this a charitable contribution, though alas not a tax write-off, to the legal costs of a couple of guys who got caught selling a minuscule amount of weed, which is also neither here nor there.

Otherly, the plants  that  ornament our porches and gardens (my, that sounds a lot grander than it is) were found discarded on the sidewalks, or sticking out of dumpsters, or they were gifts of a sort, as in: Please take this or I’m throwing it out.

Generally, all one needs to do to land free stuff is have knowledge of the trash truck timetable for various neighborhoods; of course, the finer the neighborhood the finer the trash.

Where once Capitol Hill was considered more shabby than chic, and one needed to rummage in Georgetown or Cleveland Park—and we’ve many fine finds from foraging out west—my neighborhood streets are now littered with Bugaboo strollers pushed along by au pairs and nannies endlessly chattering on their cell phones in French, and Spanish, and Chinese, and the restaurant line for Rose’s Luxury stretches hours down the sidewalk.

Add to that being a rather transient place, what with upheavals of political fame and fortune, and the Hill’s pickings are excellent—you can furnish a house, rather nicely, from the sidewalks.

I’ve found pots and urns and pedestal bases made of stone and concrete, porcelain and ceramic. The cast-iron pot I discussed several columns ago was a moving giveaway. Weighing easily 100 pounds and valued at around $350 (triple that, probably, in New York) I was very moved, as was my back. It holds a sago palm and summers on the front porch atop another find, this one picked up at curbside, a wonderful stone stand with protruding lion heads that winters in the living room and makes a fine extra seat when magazines aren’t piled on it. I don’t recall which yard sale or alleyway disgorged the Chinese pot on the back porch, with its green leaves dancing with brightly painted butterflies. I am, in fact, amazed that it is not broken.

Who throws this stuff out? But they do.

While New York is in a class of its own for foolish pricing of fantastic junk, Washington also has its moments.

On a recent meander through the chichi antiques shops of upper Georgetown I encountered a broken plaster pedestal bearing a fancy parchment tag with $350 handwritten in a scrolling script the color of faded blood.

As it happens, we have a similar broken pedestal, two in fact. Purchased at my favorite Virginia junk shop, Slindy’s of Culpeper (I added that “of Culpeper” to give the place some class),  it was not broken when I discovered it, shoved into a dusty shop corner. And it was shoved into that corner because it is not the sort of thing that attracts the typical Slindy’s client, who leans toward Russian military memorabilia and clown paintings on black velvet.

Therefore, I snapped it up for 10 bucks, figuring it would be a fine perch for my jasmine come winter in my tiny solarium. As such things happen, I carried it out to The Prince’s pick-up truck, which is always handy for such expeditions, and set it down gently on the pavement where it instantly and tragically cracked in half.

After eying the two segments for some time, I had a eureka moment: shove a plastic water bottle with the top cut off into the pedestal’s neck and make a vase. This is a clever trick, I might add.

Being a good and generous mother, I gave the other half of this pedestal (valued at $350) to Baby, who has stuffed it with curly willow branches and set it in a corner of her living room in Raleigh, home of fried Twinkies.

Speaking of brilliant tricks (there will eventually be mention of a garden): That same day in that same shop in Georgetown, I saw a table set with lovely faded purple damask napkins. Eight for $100.

While I find damask a little fusty in its white form, this color version was delicious. As it happened, I have a drawer full of white damask napkins that I couldn’t bring myself to toss out as they were inherited from my mother.

So I bought a large bottle of purple Rit dye and for a grand total of $4.98 and I now have eight beautiful napkins—that grow prettier as they fade in the wash.

Napkin trick: I grew up with and have always used cloth napkins. In cotton or linen they’re so much more pleasant than paper, and not in the least difficult to care for if you handle them the way my mother did: Toss them in the washing machine, fold them in half and pull and pat them flat, then hang them over a rail or a chair back to dry.

If you do this right, they’ll have just enough rumple that you look, not a slob, but a casually elegant housekeeper. Like someone with a garden in Provence, without the garden.  Brilliant, no?

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Gardener Cavanaugh  is writing a book on city gardening. You can read all installments of her MyLittleBird column by typing “Green Acre” in the Search box at the top right of the screen. 

The Cavanaugh attempt at a letter-carrier deterrent. / Photo here and on the cover by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

CAN YOU MAKE OUT this abomination from the photo above? I upped the contrast as best I could, but if I find it hard to see, I imagine you’ll find it nearly impossible, which on the one hand is too bad because it is really ugly, and on the other just as well, because it is really ugly.

The ugly this I am referring to is a blockade My Prince erected to thwart the postal persons who have worn a path across the ivy-covered front yard so he or she doesn’t have to walk down the front walk, down the sidewalk and up the neighbor’s front walk to deliver what’s left of the daily mail—usually a real estate postcard and a WETA fundraising letter.

We began with polite requests to cease the trampling. When they were ignored, in went a spike-topped section of wrought iron fence where said trampling usually began, more a symbolic barrier, a gentle suggestion that this was not a path but a garden. Sadly, the hint was disregarded, so a length of chicken wire was stuck to the left of the bit of fence, striking a slightly more ominous note.

One day, to test its efficacy, I kept an ear out for the mail truck, then lurked downstairs until our little offerings were slipped through the door slot. Then I skittered to the curtain and caught the postwoman, ear glued to her cell phone,  skirting the construct. Throwing open the door I flew out to the porch. “WHY? Why are you crossing the yard?!” I yelled. “Don’t you see that fence?”

“Nope,” she said with a shrug and turned her back to continue both her conversation and the swift completion of her appointed rounds, which may or may not mean delivering the mail to the appropriate slot.

“Flowers!” I cried as she waltzed off. “Flowers are coming up—little buds you can scarcely see—and you’re walking all over them.”  You would think this would touch her, but it didn’t. I mean: girls, flowers, that sort of thing. It’s interesting that I usually have more luck using this line with men who have the grace to look dismayed at hurting the bitty flowers with their big dumb feet.

With this latest affront, a length of rusty chicken wire was laid to the right of the bit of fence.

And yet, despite these ploys, the booted crunch of our mistresses of the post—the women are the worst, the most vengeful—continued skirting the newly enhanced barrier.

One might think we’d have long ago given up and laid a neat line of stepping stones across the yard. One might say this pile of junk that greeted visitors was worse than the sin of tromping on the ivy. One might. But there is a principle involved.

So we went in another direction. While the back garden has evolved from your basic dirt to a jungle of irresistible invasives and tropical plants that occupy most of our garden busywork, the front yard, we planted once and were done. In went a pair of forsythias to soften the porch rail, a pink dogwood positioned to set our house apart from our neighbor’s and a groundcover of ivy, sprinkled with spring bulbs.

If the original idea was lack of fuss, the new concept would be a screaming mass of flowers and foliage that would be guaranteed to smack even the most dimwitted across the nose.  The dogwood, a dismal failure, was replaced with a charmingly frilly red-leaf maple, pots and pots of this and that were scattered, and annuals sprinkled between them. In a triumph of “Where did you come from?” several clumps of Queen Anne’s lace have taken root, a six-foot volunteer barricade of flamboyant doily flowers. There’s even a length of fence (actually a whimsically curlicued iron headboard). One would, in short, have to battle through this with such determination…

And yet . . . just yesterday . . . she found a bloody gap.

I am now thinking of laying a wire grid, something completely undetectable and irritatingly trippable across the ivy. Ha-ha. And if that doesn’t work, land mines.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Gardener Cavanaugh is writing a book on urban gardening, of which dealing with urban pests, including postal workers, is an integral part. To read earlier stories, type Green Acre in the Search box at the top of the screen.

Tradescantia pallid. / Above and cover photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I JUST FLIPPED through 42 Googlets on the care, feeding and propagation of spiderwort—or, as my Jewish grandmother called it, wandering jew. This is the plant least likely to require any instructions whatsoever.

I have been growing tradescantia pallida (as it’s more haughtily called) since 1972, or thereabouts, when Stan and Betty Gottlieb gave me a sprig snipped on a trip to Jamaica or Trinidad or Aruba. I stuck it in one of the many potted avocado plants that lined the windowsill of the New York apartment I shared with my husband once removed (the Pre-Prince), and it grew.

Avocado plants raised from pits (stick a couple of toothpicks into the sides and balance on a glass of water until roots emerge) do not usually fruit, at least in northern climes. They are useful as screens, however, in this case softening an unglamorous view of Columbus Avenue (except when Robert Redford, in all his Butch Cassidy glory, was playing tennis across the street). They are also fine starter plants for budding gardeners since the process is so stupidly simple.

Similarly, you really have to work hard to come up with instructions for cultivating spiderwort—which is why it’s amazing that so many people have done so (me included, now it seems).

Pinch a bit off and stick it in soil.

They grow in the sun, they grow in the shade, they grow in crappy soil, they can survive an illegal trip home from the Dominican Republic wrapped in a wet bathing suit (got me a variegated variety that way). But they don’t care if it’s dry either.

Being tropical, they do not survive frost, but a couple of sprigs wintered over in the kitchen window—a glass of water will do, though they won’t protest a little dirt—will grow long and leggy and can be snipped and snipped again and plopped in pots and borders and baskets in spring.

And sometime around now, when bare spots inevitably appear in the garden or window boxes, you’ll have such an abundance of these leggy sprigs that gaps can be filled instantly and thus: Break off a piece, stick forefinger in soil, insert snipping, tamp soil down. If you feel like watering, do so. If not, it’ll rain soon enough, probably.

The avocados and the spiderwort, along with my myriad and ultimately ghastly collection of spider (aka chlorophytum) plants, were of a propagation technique called Entirely Accidental, with a result so stunning to the perpetrator (me) that it was, to get Olympian about it, like sticking a Yurchenko vault with 2½ twists (yes, I looked up “most difficult gymnastics vault”).

Purely as an aside here, the Washington Post says macramé plant hangers, the blight of the 1960s  Bohemian look, are back in style. Time to start cultivating the spider plants again, I suppose. Sigh.

Returning to the subject, it has taken years, nay decades, for me to realize that one can purposely and quite easily propagate other plants, a whole host of them! (I rarely deploy exclamation points, but this one is so deserved.)

I assumed, when I gave it any thought at all, that anything beyond putting a plant on a windowsill or in a yard and then praying that it would at least live was best left to the experts, someone schooled in the alchemy of grafting and light and fertilization…  A British accent helps, or a name like Agatha or Clive. But it was none of the business of mortals.

Occasionally Agatha or Clive issue mumbled convoluted and entirely inconvenient, messy and possibly dangerous instructions (involving knives) for doing this or that, while no doubt snickering behind a hand.

For instance, one or the other of them wrote that you can just yank geraniums out before frost and hang them by their roots in the basement or garage (or a closet if you’ve neither) to winter over. So for some years I did that, suspending their withering foliage and dirty feet from wire hangers hung on a basement beam. Many survived but when repotted looked hellish, bent and scrawny and slow to flower, and I’d trudge off to buy new ones.

And then—how did this happen? I realized that all one has to do is snip a twig of a branch, dip the cut end in some rooting substance (just ask for rooting substance at the garden center) and—as with those wandering jews—stick your finger in a pot, pop in the stem end, water and “Done.” I haven’t bought a geranium in years. If they get leggy-looking, break off a leg and stick it somewhere. Set the pot in a little patch of sun and they will grow. Easy enough?

However, it took me until now to discover there are all manner of plants this can be done with! (I have to exclaim again here.) And, you don’t necessarily need any special equipment or fancy potting medium—except maybe a pencil or a chopstick if you don’t want to dirty your finger.

The geraniums and wandering jew have a fat juicy stem in common. If you come across something of similar stem, do the dip and poke and see what happens. This can be done at any time of the year.

Plants with woody stems take marginally more effort—and apparently, this is the ideal time to do so. Don’t fall asleep here.

Late spring or early summer—now—is a ripe time for propagation. I found this out after looking for a website on cuttings and coming across this Aussie, who (by the way) called clippers secateurs, which is how I happened to mention them myself last week.

And I came across the Aussie because I was wandering the street with a stolen stem of I-don’t-know-what but it was pretty, and was halted in my tracks by an actual employed gardener who said, “Where did you get that? Throw it away, it’s poisonous, and don’t touch any orifice”—yes, he said that, and all sorts of visions ensued—”until you’ve thoroughly washed your hands.”

So as soon as I got home I immediately stuck it in a corner of a window box to see what it will do, and went off to wash. I am fine.

As I was chatting with the employed gardener, who kept imploring me to ditch my stem and Stop wiping the perspiration off my cheeks with my fingers (it was hot out), I asked about propagating and he said, grumpily, “Google ‘cuttings cutting cuttings.’ ” He said that three times, so that’s just what I did.

And the Aussie, who was the cutest of the lot that popped up, and of course had that accent that proclaimed authority, explained that you want the growth to be new, but firm; not sweet and fragile little buddlings that waver limply, but not so hard that you can’t cut them with the kitchen scissors when you’re not using them to snip chives or cut packing tape or some such. After that, it’s just dip and poke again.

I brought the question to my favorite Facebook group, Container Gardening Gone to Pot, which I joined many months ago because I was enchanted by the name. Sometimes the postings are less than useful, a photo of someone holding a rose asking, What is this flower? And all the photos of “fairy gardens,” a concept I detest.

But lurking are fine resources. In this case, after asking the group for suggestions, one reader directed me to Plant Propagation by Alan Toogood ($25.36), published by the American Horticultural Society. Toogood is, among other things, Horticulture Correspondent for the London Times (wouldn’t you just know).

Alliums, elsewhere on the Cavanaugh plantation. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

What a delightful encyclopedia of propagation it is; 318 helpfully illustrated pages covering everything from garden trees to roses, fuchsias to bougainvillea, some of it, like grafting, too exhausting to contemplate, but so much of it entirely accessible and as easy as dip and poke.

A complete primer on what to snip from a friend’s—or employ my favorite garden-center trick, the oops-this-bit-fell-off—and equally valuable, understanding when not to bother. Camellias, for instance, root easily from cuttings but can take three to four years to flower.

Right. Have I told you about the Raleigh Farmer’s Market? If you have about four hours and a car, you can get a beautifully budded camellia, cheap, and fried Twinkies too.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Gardener Cavanaugh is working on a book about city gardening and will join us again next week for her latest legal and extra-legal tips.

Stephanie Cavanaugh’s window box before the Michael’s treatment. COVER PHOTO: Window box after. Photos by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

PITY MY FORLORN hydrangea, Margot, named for the friend who gifted her to us. She’s eight or 10 or who knows how old now, with one lousy blossom.

This is all the flowering I can expect this summer as the hydrangea sets bud for the following year on the current season’s woody stalks, which they more or less reliably do—unless one’s Prince wanders by with clippers and in a fit of neatness (would that such a fit would take hold in the garage) lops off the buds in September.

Which is precisely what happened last fall.

I was unaware of this tragic happenstance until a sorry dawn in March when I took a somnambulistic perambulation (that was such fun to write) through my garden patch, sleepily observing the this and the that, and noticed the plant’s sharply nipped tips.

Bracing myself for the expected outraged denial, I approached the only possible source of this mishap, and asked if perhaps he’d exceeded the boundaries I’d imposed on his pruning—which was supposed to be confined to the (for me) unreachable. Well. His Irish cheeks reddened and his bald patch began to mist and he insisted  . . .  that it was the damn squirrels.

Squirrels, said I, do not have teeth like secateurs,* the branches would be nibbled not whacked. And he scurried away muttering something . . .

Sad Margot, the hydrangea, after an untimely pruning. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

And so this year we have one flower, which is particularly tragic since we moved Margot last summer—or he did, while I supervised. It was a terrifying feat in Washington’s paralyzing heat. She’d grown so enormous that she could nearly shake hands with Phyllis, another gift, across the path that one might (if one were of a mind to) call the ceremonial approach to the garage.

Margot spent last summer regaining her verve, and was fine and bushy until she was so thoughtlessly violated.

Happy albeit faux Margot, after her Michael’s treatment. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Sighing deeply, in my usual cheery what-will-be-will-be fashion, I off and went to Michael’s, purveyors of largely hideous fake flowers among other craft items. Here was scored a coup of sorts: three reasonably realistic green hydrangea branches at a buck apiece that, when poked among the bush’s branches, appear to have blossomed there.

This is hardly a new trick for me. I’ve been faking things since we moved into the house, beginning (I think) with spray-painting a patch of backyard where Someone sprayed weed killer a few hours before a dinner party, not realizing that there was no grass—just weeds.

I’ve even gone so far as to fake the flowers in the white garden of the Raleigh Arboretum where Baby and her Personal Prince Pete were wed last spring, draping the gazebo and surrounding bushes with branches of Michael’s finest white polyester dogwood and hydrangea blossoms. (Not only did she pick a weekend when there was absolutely nothing in bloom, but it poured on our exquisitely, expensively coifed heads, but that’s another story).

For the past few years I’ve planted fake geraniums in my window boxes.

As you may or may not know, geraniums do not do well in 90-degree weather. They stay green, even flourish in their greenness, but are hard pressed to put out more than a measly flower or two between June and September—at least in the tropical heat that smothers Washington, D.C., each summer.

And so, we make do.

Here we are last July. The five frontal boxes look good, if a little dull, with small-leafed ivy dripping over the sides and green potato vine beginning to cascade down the front, but there’s little of natural color—just pops of purple wandering jew, some no-account coleus  and several experiments that are a complete waste of water. My red fauxberries are doing fine, as one would expect of fakes.

Michael’s supplied the following additions: a couple of bunches of pink geraniums, some little purple stuffs, and these pink nubbins. All at 70% off—so for like six bucks, replenishment. Dirt cheap is fine for this sort of job, just look for reasonably natural colors.
The trick to effective fakery is to break the bunches apart so individual florets can be cleverly dropped into appropriate locations—like next to the actual doing-nothing geraniums. Don’t fret the leaves: Rip them off if they’re too tacky, they borrow nicely from whatever’s actually living beside them.

Now step back and ponder the effect. Wine helps to lubricate this process. If you’re like me, you’ll say not enough! and stick in a few more stems. Repeat this process with howevermany boxes you have. Et voilà!

If one were really anal, one would move the flowers about each week as if they’re actually blooming. One, however, is not.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Gardener Cavanaugh is working on a book about urban gardening. She’ll be back in this spot next Thursday, writing about . . . something (we just never know!).

*Secateur: A very fine synonym for pruning shears that I just learned that makes me appear extremely knowledgeable.

THERE ARE EXACTLY three things I remember from the last time I almost died.

I’ll let you know when to start counting; this first part is just setting the scene.

It was a gorgeous day in December, just over a year ago, and a week before Christmas. I’d been trotting around all day, the absolute picture of health, taking photos of an apartment on Capitol Hill for a client who needed a brochure with lots of pretty pictures of the place and the street, which still seemed vividly fall.

I settled at my desk with a little glass of wine and downloaded the lot, turned up the Edith Piaf to get in a Photoshop state of mind, and my head fell off.

Not literally, just creepily, like a giant fist grabbed the back of my neck and pushed it forward with about a thousand pounds of pressure.

What the fuck, I said. I do recall.

Being alone in the house—who knows where The Prince was—I lurched out of the chair and fumbled downstairs and out the front door and hung onto the porch rail for a few minutes. Air, you know. As all appeared to be attached, I turned to go back inside, and said again, What the fuck, as my swollen head bobbled.

It seemed so dumb calling 911. I explained to the operator that I wasn’t sure there was anything wrong with me at all, and I don’t want to waste anyone’s time with what has to be nothing—after all, splendid day, yes? Peak of health!

She said something like, Sit tight.

So I did, and shortly my little living room seemed completely filled with very large male bodies all gathered around me as they hadn’t been in probably 30 years, and was I ever charming and witty and eye-batty and they said, Sit still.

Bombé chest with “arrangement.” / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh. COVER IMAGE: iStock.

So I did, fuzzily contemplating the wilting flower arrangement on top of the bombé chest in the foyer which, it occurred to me, needed attention.

Lights, ambulance outside, where was The Prince when I needed him? He’s always there when I don’t. I scribbled a pissy note: Have gone to a hospital, I don’t know which one.

That is true. Every hospital emergency room in the city was full and the EMTs didn’t know what to do with me.

Somehow he found me, though. And somehow he had me transported from the worst hell hole in D.C. to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. I slept through it all, or thought I did. He claims that I yattered and ordered people around from the ambulance bed.

What I recall is that 24 hours later (which I thought was maybe an hour or two), a nurse gently shook me, and whispered: Your daughter’s here.

“Baby,” I said, cracking my eyes open, expecting to see her gorgeous face. Instead there was her soon-to-be mother-in-law, a lovely woman who just happens to be six months younger than I am.

This was not good. Actually, it was more distressing than finding myself in intensive care for a week. The Prince reminds me that I did not look well. I guess not.

Three things, I think I passed them . . . oh well, start counting now then:

Turns out a blood vessel popped in my head and spewed fluid around my brain. Nothing to do but lie there and take lovely pain stuff and not eat for the first time I can recall, ever. I could be running 105 fever and having convulsions and still crave fried chicken. So it was stunning to find myself forcing down an apple so I wouldn’t expire (fat chance anyway).

The other things I recall from what turned out to be a week’s stay, were that the nurses admired my mud-brown nail polish and several remarked—repeatedly and with a tinge of amazement—that I looked totally different when I sit up. I had no clue what they meant. It occurred to me to ask Baby, who did show up, as she does for my emergencies, and she said: “You look so sweet and innocent when you’re lying down.”

She didn’t complete the second part of that statement.

I’m now on a five-year plan with life-threatening events, none—the doctors assure me—that have anything to do with my drinking, smoking, lack of exercise, fried eating or genes. These events are inconveniently timed to coincide with major birthdays and holidays—though I’ve always sworn that people who up and die or almost die at such times are just being passive-aggressive, which I have never been accused of.

The previous trauma happened just before one of those rather major birthdays.

I thought I had indigestion and heartburn for a couple of months, plus a nagging cough. The doc said it was bronchitis. And then one day, after a night of pacing about rubbing my chest and moaning, I lucked into another doctor who slapped his iced stethoscope against my chest, listened and listened some more, and said: “Something’s hmpf” and scurried from the room.

It was another sit-down-and-shut-up moment. He phoned his buddy the ace cardiologist and, as this was late Friday afternoon, made an appointment for me first thing Monday morning. He also said not to move around much, or at all, until I got there.

What shall I wear, I recall remembering as I skipped home to tell The Prince, who was suitably alarmed, and almost immediately disappeared to grab the doctor before he’d quit for the weekend . . . and was instructed to keep me quiet and as motionless as possible, a state with tremendous appeal. I lay about limply and suitably pale (but with plenty of mascara) propped up on pillows with chocolates and books.

So Monday comes and we take Metro downtown, then run to the office, as we were a little late. And the cardio guy looks me over and doesn’t see anything in particular but on a whim orders up an ultrasound, which turns up a hole in the back of my heart “the size of a milk jug.” An ambulance was summoned.

This was alarming and very dramatic, as I like things, though it was a disappointment that there was no siren. The kindly technician who was monitoring my more-or-less-alive self said they do that when they’re racing to get someone, but not on the way to the hospital. I do not understand this.

And I was thinking, It’s a damn good thing I didn’t go to England with Maggie, to tour the bookstores of Yorkshire with her epic tome, “The Mish-Mash Dictionary of Marmite: An Anecdotal A-Z of ‘Tar-in-a-Jar’ ” (available on Amazon for $15 in paperback, though it’s out of stock but they promise to deliver it when it’s available).

Also. The timing sucked, being 10 days from a rather major birthday, and I do like my birthdays.

Anyway. Baby was called for, flown in from Austin where she was living for no particular reason, although the margaritas and queso are to die for, you should pardon the expression.

“This could be the last time you’ll ever see your mother,” The Prince told her.

Numerous hours later and thanks to the heroics of a rightfully self-congratulatory surgeon I was stitched back together with no pig parts and a sensational scar. There followed a week of drug-induced hallucinations, including hearing Marlene Dietrich repeatedly singing “See what the boys in the back room will have,” which, with its funereal, albeit jolly, refrain, seemed an odd song choice for a critical care unit.  Baby said this wasn’t happening.

At last we get to the tulips. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Meanwhile, I had about 500 tulips that needed to be planted in the backyard, which I find very boring to do though I admire the results. As I wasn’t allowed to bend over or lift anything heavier than five pounds for a couple of months, it was the perfect opportunity to order people around.

And Baby pulled together a fabulous resurrection party to celebrate my birthday, with queso and margaritas, and I marveled at still being alive.

I tell you this story because future stories will often hinge upon it, and I can stick an asterisk at the end so you can understand why.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

I AM IN the Era of the Urn and, as with most of my eras, this came about by accident.

Ta-dah! The elegant urn and its elegant sago palm, though we know it’s not really a palm (so don’t write to tell us that). / Photos, here and on the cover, by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

First there were huge and ornately embellished terracotta pots, serendipitous rejects from a Georgetown curbside, that suited the schefflera. Then came a gilded and sculpted fiberglass number that looks quite grand on the front porch. Metal urns turned up here and there. There are several in the garden, lightweight and cheaply made, but lively with ferns and sprigs of geranium and ivy and such.  In the winter they’ll come indoors to perch on the various columns I’ve similarly rescued and arranged around my tiny greenhouse.

My latest acquisition has nothing in common with the above, it is grand and weighty and more suited to my imaginary country manor than the concrete slab of my actual front porch. It appeared when I was in the scoping-it-out phase of staging a home that will shortly be sold—staging, if you’ve somehow escaped the term, is the process of rinsing a home of any notion of personality so it resembles as closely as possible an exceedingly bland yet marginally trendy place you’d see on HGTV.

The introduction of such cleansing usually requires heroics of patience and charm, which we leave to the real estate agents. I wander in when the dust settles to massage the bits that are left and take pretty pictures for the agents’ brochures and photo tours.

But in this case, the home was empty, the owner deceased and blessedly unable to weep and flail about the piles of pictures and dusty antimatussiemussies* being consigned to a thrift shop.  The executor was showing us through.

As it happened, a neatly planted pair of cast iron urns flanked the front doorway and 10 more marched emptily along the garden path in the rear of the house. I stared in wonderment; they were beautifully modeled, clearly antique, worth a small fortune. Each.

One of my minds turned instantly larcenous, licking its chops—I would shortly have the keys and who would notice? But my better half, that priss, barged in, “Will you be having a yard sale? I’d like to buy one of these…” I simpered, attempting a sweet and adorable countenance, which is not easy, being me.

“Please! Take one,” she said, so I did, and quickly, before she could change her mind. Staggering under the weight, I tottered with buckling knees up the back steps, through the house, down the front steps and to the car where I managed with a final insane heave to land it on the car’s back seat, drive it home and wrestle it onto the front walk, leaving further hefting for The Prince.

Happily, I happened to have a sago palm for a fine centerpiece. The sago is not technically a palm, though why it’s not I don’t know since it certainly resembles one. It has lethally barbed leaves that look like they’re growing out of a pineapple.

I bought it for $10 at the Raleigh Farmers Market, which is entirely worth a visit to North Carolina even if you don’t have a daughter living there. It is also a town that deep-fries everything, including Twinkies, and yet there are elderly people doddering about. A conundrum. This is neither here nor there but will be addressed further at some point or other.

Returning to the subject at hand. Since one thing is never enough, I tucked in a bit of an unnamed vine in a shocking shade of pink, that I actually bought (the vendor was so nice and really, $2? I hadn’t the heart to pinch and pinch, as I would ordinarily do).

This was added to purple and variegated sprigs of wandering jew that I snipped from the window boxes, and some flowering stuffs that recently arrived as part of a gift basket that have arranged themselves to drip rather nobly over the rim.

The whole is mounted upon another trash find—I can never believe what people discard around here—an iron base that The Prince insists is plaster and will be ruined sitting out in the weather. He is wrong, as usual. I pinged it.

So. It’s all very grand.

$12. How brilliant am I? Honestly. I can’t get over myself some days….

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Gardener Cavanaugh is working on a book about urban gardening. She’ll be back in this spot next Thursday, writing about . . . something (we just never know!)

*Antimatussiemussie is not a word, so don’t bother looking it up. It is a portmanteau nonsense word, combining antimacassar and tussie mussie that I think is an excellent description of the contents of most homes that have been occupied for any extreme length of time.

Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Allium is a genus of monocotyledonous flowering plants that includes the cultivated onion, garlic, scallion, shallot and leek as well as chives and hundreds of other wild species.

—Wikipedia

MAGGIE AND I were strolling along the other day chatting about this and that and nothing when she abruptly threw out an arm to stop me and pointed down at this sputnik growth alongside a garden path—”I will plant allium next year,” she announced.  Because she’s British, her announcements always carry particular gravitas.

At first I didn’t recognize it, it was kind of like running into a high-school mate 40 years later—there’s something about you but . . .

And then I did.

I grew a herd of allium sometime early in my gardening career (can you call something you do so haphazardly a career?) and recalled being enchanted by the fuzzy purple popsicle heads that sproinged about the garden but was put off in subsequent years by the price of the bulbs. Like 10 bucks each? I mean, these are spring thingies, they do nothing all summer, right? They come up and, bam, they’re over. If they bother to come up at all.

Stephanie’s allium, past tense. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

The purple fluff falls off and what’s left are these gnarly witchy fingers. I didn’t much care for the skeletal back then, the way the remains of something have a curious beauty.

The Japanese call this gradually increasing decrepitude wabi-sabi, finding enchantment in impermanence and gradual deterioration; a fine thing to cultivate when, to put it gently, you and everything around you are beginning to rot.

This is not the Iris Apfel school of age-defiance, the rambunctious posturing and costuming of bangles and baubles and giant red eyeglasses that bellow I’m Still Here (much as I cheer her on, and will, no doubt, be just as gaudy one day). It’s more the gentle acceptance and appreciation of age; of rose petals falling and mop-headed hydrangeas turning translucent in their parched fragility. Like the No. 7 Lift & Luminate facial serum commercial, featuring luminous 52-year-old ballerina Alessandra Ferri dancing with a hologram of her sprightly 19-year-old self. Watching her contains such a pleasurable sadness.

I did have an early introduction to an appreciation for decay, even if it took several decades to take root.

Maybe 30 years ago I picked up “Drawing on the Right Side of Your Brain,” and spent a week’s vacation sketching. A fascinating book for those whose representational skills stalled out at age 8 or so, which is (for some reason) most of us, says the author. Turns out it’s all about not really seeing what’s in front of your face. You’re looking right at a chair or a chin and not able to get your pen around the contours.

And then you pick up the book and do a couple of exercises and . . . so maybe you’re not Picasso but you’ve actually produced something recognizable, something with depth, proportion, something that comes perilously close to—art. Whoa.

I was lying in a bubble bath drawing my foot on the faucet, sitting in the front-porch rocker sketching our big elm tree, hovering over my toddler daughter, sketching her sleeping, thumb-sucking baby face.

But the more I drew the more interested I became in exploring out-of-kilter shapes and, most particularly, odd-looking people; Metro was a particularly good resource. My eye flitted right past the pretty to itch at the thought of getting a bulbous nose on paper, corrugated foreheads, wattled chins, jutting bones and opposing hollows . . . the old were particularly enchanting, with all their parts coming unmoored in such interesting ways.

This went on for some weeks.

Now, every once in a while I pick up one of the sketches and am briefly impressed with myself—and then I recall that I put the book aside and returned to drawing very much as I did in Mrs. Turtletaub’s third-grade art class. It’s so much easier. I am such a disappointment to me sometimes (I am shaking my head).

So the allium has reminded me of all this, and seeing the spiky remains beside that garden path made me determined to damn the expense and plant them again next year. There’s enchantment to be found in their demise.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Next week Gardener Cavanaugh dives back into her garden. Stephanie is currently working on a book about urban gardening.

The Cavanaugh garden on Capitol Hill. COVER PHOTO: The Cavanaugh grand-dog Lula, in the conservatory. / Photos by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

INTRODUCING THE PRINCE: Never marry a man whose job it is to fix things. You’ll always be last on the list and even then uncertain that the work will ever be completed. Thank God, My Prince, love of my life for 33 years, is not a plastic surgeon. He’d yank up one of my jowls and wander off, announcing he’s busy and telling me to just turn the other damn cheek.

We generally maintain more or less traditional roles in this house, me doing the cooking and cleaning and him doing the hammering and cursing. This is because I’m a writer and he’s a contractor—not the type that swoops over in the Jag and gestures eloquently at the pitiful condition of your home and then leaves you to the guys he picks up in the Home Depot parking lot. He is the sort that forever sports a bloody bald spot, sweats through his cell phone and cleans the daily grit from under his nails with my tweezers.

I cannot blame him for not wanting to work on the house when he’s been demolishing and rebuilding things all day, but dammit! As soon as I have the house marginally tidied he finds something in urgent need of fixing.  And instead of finishing a project—reinstalling the kitchen ceiling molding that I have been whining about for a year and a half, for instance—he starts another.

Last year I was fluffing the window boxes, which inspired him to paint the outside of the front door, a project that actually deteriorated as the days passed. For some reason the normally welcoming lantern was now hanging mournfully from its wires, drooping over the rather handsome pot of camellias.

Figuring he was safely occupied with that project, and anticipating weekend guests, I tackled the front hallway—polishing the bookcase and dusting the pictures, bathing the gargoyle, then Swiffering, then vacuuming, and finally scrubbing the floors on my hands and knees. How clean it all was!

Then I set about rearranging the hall table, a bombé chest of some age topped by an even older mahogany mirror. I set a fine spray of mock orange branches amid greens stolen from the neighbor’s yard in a Chinese pot of various bold colors and stuffed the unopened junk mail that accumulates, as these things do, into the top drawer.

Then I decked myself out and went off to a cocktail party, to which only I was invited, and left a note about being home for dinner and the oven is set to go on automatically so Do Not Panic if you hear the whoosh of it starting and yank the plug from the wall as you are prone to doing since you do not know how to turn it off.

And I got home, as promised at 7:30 or near enough, and not at all ploughed since the hosts were abstemious with the tequila in the margaritas, and there my boy was, on a ladder, framed in the glass door panel, making Do Not Open the Door signals, and my mind plummeted.

With good reason.

“Wow,” he said as he let me in, indicating the door frame, which was no longer trimmed out. “You could stick your fingers right through the wall!” This said as if the hole had not been there for probably the hundred years since the house was built.

He was waving about a can of this foam that billows like an episode of I Love Lucy to insulate your crevasses with vile yellow humps. Theoretically, once pumped into your holes and gaps, it is to be covered (or recovered) with molding. Sadly—remember that kitchen molding?—in this house it tends to sit for years wherever it is pumped, flibbering at one (me) like an egregious attack of hemorrhoids.

I had handled this situation wrongly, which I should have anticipated—adding the hole to my list of things to do,  because if you (meaning me) say you want something done around here it will never happen. Or worse, it will take place in parts—with the next part dangled in space like teasing a horse with a carrot, always an inch too far away to chomp.

Ideas must be inserted very casually, as if you really do not want whatever it is at all, and then pay no attention to him, because if you watch it will never take place.

Or one suggests a plan so offensive to his sensibilities, and just possible for one (again meaning me) to do (badly), that he is frightened into action.

My conservatory, a triumph of subtle misdirection, happened in this fashion. One fall day a few years back I off-handedly said, “Hmmm . . . maybe we could put up some plastic around the porch for my tropical plants?” And then pretended to forget about it. Next thing I knew, I had a little greenhouse off my office, a second-floor porch the size of a walk-in closet that was suddenly and wonderfully glassed in, becoming a tropical garden from November through March.

Alternatively, to keep things as they are you must always say, “I want that changed.” And the more insistent you are, the more assured you’ll be that he’ll leave it alone.

Take the near catastrophe involving the screen door that separates my office from the greenhouse. A beautiful Victorian piece with  scallops and circles and cut-outs that resemble dunce caps or ice cream cones laid sideways, it was something The Prince found and fitted to the doorway when the porch was still open—but with it enclosed, is now purely decorative.

But I love to see the plants through it. Particularly in the morning, when I walk into the office with my coffee and there’s this perfect green world floating there, sunny like no other place in the house, flower-filled and sweetly scented with jasmine and Meyer lemons.

Mine! Mine! Mine! I think. And I open the door and go out to sniff this and that and pinch off a yellowed leaf and note that the gerbera is returning from a near-death experience and has three fat buds coiled near its base and ready to burst. And I sit in a white wicker chair and drink my coffee . . .

The richness of this experience, of course, depends on the door. Like opening one of those gold Godiva boxes, what do they call them . . . ah yes, a ballotin.

And yet, last fall this delight of my days was nearly destroyed. How? I turned my back for a minute (one must never do this around him) and the door was gone.

“Why the hell do you need a screen door inside the house,” he said.

Clearly, I should have beaten him to it, told him to take it down when the porch was first enclosed, I hate that fool door, it has to go. Why the hell would we hang a screen door inside the house?

But I didn’t, and so he took it down. And now we had to have an argument about putting it back up, which . . . oh crap, I don’t feel like relating it.

I’ll just tell you this story instead:

It was a miserable, cold, wet September afternoon and I’d just had a really hot bath for the first time in a week. My bones were warm and I wouldn’t need a second pair of socks until the steam died off my feet.

The bath was hot because I had finally braved the basement, which is another story, and turned the water heater up from where it was set, at medium. Again.

This is a perpetual battle when the air turns cool. I turn the water heater up, My Prince turns it down.

“Why does it have to be so high?” He says.

“Because I want a hot bath.”

“But I get a hot bath without turning up the heat. It’s a waste of money.”

“But, my sweet” (I don’t actually say that, but you need to think I’m nicer than I am), “I don’t displace water the way you do. You fill the tub halfway, get in, and the water goes up to your chin. If I do the same, all sorts of parts that need to be submerged are floating like icebergs on the surface.”

This is an argument he distrusts.

We have similar arguments that go around and around to nowhere. Like this recent one, in the garden.

I’m contemplating the sickly red caladium, which is right next to a healthy, bushy greenish-white caladium with red splotches, when Prince Mishkin wanders past on his way to the garage.

“What’s that thing?” He says.

“It’s a caladium.”

He scratches his bald spot and says, “So what’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know. It’s just . . . not doing well.”

“What’s that nice thing next to it?”

“It’s a caladium.”

“One’s green and one’s red?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So why is this one dying when it’s right next to the other?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did it get too much water?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you overfeed it?”

Shrug.

“Well, what’s wrong with it?”

“I DON’T KNOW.”

He wanders over to the pond.

“There’s a dead fish. ”

“Oh. ”

“Why did it die?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there has to be a reason. Was it old? Did it get sick?”

Shrug.

“The others are fine.”

“Uh-huh. ”

“So why did it die?”

“OY! GO AWAY AND REPAIR SOMETHING. ”

But first make sure you check my list of things I absolutely do not want fixed.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Next week Gardener Cavanaugh describes the Subtle Beauty of the Dying Allium. Stephanie is currently working on a book about urban gardening.

The leafy Cavanaugh glen. Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh. COVER PHOTO: by Christopher Badzioch, iStock.

A MR. MOSQUITO RID sign has appeared in my neighbor’s property. “I’ve reclaimed my garden!” she said one gorgeous afternoon last week as we sat over coffee in her cigarette-musty living room. She’s rarely out there in the garden, though she hires a guy to come by and mow the lawn, and occasionally a team of inepts materializes to thwack back the wisteria.

Last week I caught a glimpse of Mr. Mosquito (not his real name, we don’t need to be sued), in full hazmat suit, eyes obscured behind the tiny window in his hood, sweeping his toxic wand over the azaleas and honeysuckle.

Not at all, by the way, as he is caricatured on his sign; like Fabio of the Flies, all flashing teeth and brawny forearms, manfully ridding the garden of blood-sucking pests.

The neighbor pays $400 or so for the season, and we appear to be receiving a residual benefit; our back porch, a good hundred yards from her garden, has been curiously mosquito-free since the spraying started. Let’s see what else drops dead.

I’m wondering if the spraying has anything to do with the departure of the birds that began to build their usual nest in the chandelier on the porch. They apparently have slightly tacky taste, as do I.

Not your garden-variety outdoor chandelier, the one in Gardener Cavanaugh’s backyard usually hosts birds and their nest. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

Each year they arrive, swooping in with their twigs and cellophane wrappers and shreds of paper and build as I sit on the sofa beneath them with my newspaper. In short order there are eggs, and mama and papa bird appear to take turns sitting, unless they’re lesbian birds. I know nothing about the distribution of labor among male and female birds. Nor do I know what kind of birds they are. I suspect, doves?

This goes on for weeks, with whichever bird is tending the nest getting more ruffled at my presence as the day of hatching approaches, scrawing when I appear. And I twit back, If you don’t care for company, why the hell do you build here?

It is queer, isn’t it?

When the birds hatch, watching them grow is a lovely activity. Last year there were two, one feisty and brave, the other a little chicken shit. The brave one flew first, perching on the edge of the nest and giving his wings a few pumps up and down before gliding four or so feet to a ceiling-fan blade (no, it was not on), cawing at his sibling to join him, which wasn’t happening. He sat for a bit, then with more confidence flapped back to the nest.

The next morning he coaxed his timid brother (or sister, or maybe he was the sister, who knows) to join him on the fan blade and his poor sibling remained there, seemingly traumatized by the effort, for most of the day.

And then they were gone, and I was pulling out the nest and washing bird dreck off the chandelier’s crystals and beads.

This year a nest was begun, then abandoned. Coincidence, Mr. Mosquito Rid? I think not.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Next week Gardener Cavanaugh  turns to her indoor environment. And we meet The Prince a/k/a her husband. Stephanie is currently working on a book about urban gardening.

iStock

Grab the Dark Glasses, It’s Paparazzi Time

‘Tis the season!

Not that season, the other one. When graduations strike and weddings blossom and you once again wince at the approach of the photographer.

Just hit The Pose. You’ve seen it a million times, on every red carpet, in every society page photo of Washington’s doyennes. It’s how they look fabulous shot after shot. “The sorority pose,” that’s what portrait photographer Elizabeth Dranitzke calls it, breaking it down this way:

Put one foot in front of the other with your weight on the back leg and the front leg slightly bent with your hand lightly and gracefully touching your thigh, twist your torso so it’s angled toward the camera, now arch your back and push your booty out, just this side of pain. Now tuck in your chin a little, suck in your gut, smile, and relax!

Got it? Good.  Even the size zero sylphs do it.

Get Ready for Your Close Up

Dranitzke has enormous eyes behind slightly larger glasses and laser focus, which can leave the photophobic a little unsettled, but any trauma is quickly offset by her deep and ready laugh. The owner of Capitol Hill-based Photopia, she shoots families, babies and events but takes particular pleasure in creating “elegant portraits (see example below) of women over 40.”

“Some people think they have a better side, and often they’re right,” she says. More often though, a successful photo depends on the lighting.

When you’re being shot by a professional you can usually depend on them to put you in the best light. But say someone’s coming at you with their camera… .

“Tell them not to use a crappy cell phone camera,” she laughs, knowing they will. “People need to learn to use their phones right: set it to high definition (consult instructions on your phone) and move people to the light. Many low-quality images occur when it’s too dark.”

By the way, Apple stores offer free training in composing and editing shots for those that wield an iPhone.

Bright, direct sun is equally bad. You’ll squint. “Open shade is best. In the shadow of a building or under a tree. Not dappled light, unless you’re getting artsy. You want reflected light, not direct harsh light. Or put your back to the sun.”

And tell the photographer to raise the camera a little, “it’s much more flattering to be looking up,” she says. Look at a few Kardashian selfies, if you can stomach it. See a double chin?

Still see it? You need to get that neck out and stretched like a turtle. Try this: Put your left hand on your collarbone and push your chin out and up, feel how taut your jaw is? Now hold it, smile and don’t forget to relax.

A posing don’t. The subject is looking directly into the sun and squinting. / Photo by James Kelly.

If you haven’t entirely mastered the sorority pose, simply “turn a little to the side, it’s much more flattering,” Dranitzke says. “And drop your shoulder bag and your coat. That can immediately improve your posture and the shot. Clutter drives me crazy.”

If you’re seated with your legs in view, scoot to the edge of your chair, shoulders back and down, it’s far more flattering than sitting back, “spreading in the seat,” she says. “That’s a particularly bad look in a short skirt.” Knees together, girls.

Then there are the dreaded dinner events. So often people are caught in a litter of dirty plates and napkins, with food dribbling out of their mouths as the photographer is coming by.

“Put your martini on the table, lean forward, with your chin out and down, and act natural,” she says.  Assuming you got your nails done, you can put your hand to your chin or your cheek, whatever you want to point up (or cover) but don’t press. Lightly touch with “ballerina hands,” she says. Remember those?

“Or engage in conversation, and laugh, even if your partner is boring,” she says. “There’ll be a happy picture of the event.”

Sit-Ups Not Required

The former photography teacher,  Dranitzke, who has an MFA from the California College of the Arts, also works with small groups and individuals, offering “The Ultimate Girls’ Day,” which includes professional makeup design, hair touchup, wardrobe consultation and a photo shoot. The $545 spring package is available only through June.  At Georgetown’s trendy boutique, Lili the First,  she recently taught posing for photos as brilliant shop owner Ifat Pridan gave pointers on style.

The trick, Dranitzke says, is to “pick something you feel good in. If you wear what’s you, you’ll relax and feel fabulous. We all know the difference, when you put something on, look in the mirror and say, ‘Yes! Good to go. Hot.'”

But keep in mind that not everything you love makes a great picture. Pay attention to fit. Baggy clothes don’t fool anyone, but a beautiful scarf or jacket can cover many sins.

Show off your favorite body parts with clothing that features layers and textures to create visual interest. But unless you’re the bride, “don’t wear white if you’re very fair. You want contrast with your skin tone,”  she says.  And skip sleeveless tops “unless you have Michelle Obama arms.”

Think about how you’ll wear your hair and when it looks best. Don’t think you have to go to the salon before a big event if your hair usually looks better on the second day. Maybe you’ll just need a little day-of styling. And if your hands will show, and you know they will, make sure your nails are ready for a close-up.

“Jewelry and earrings, even studs, make you look more put together,” she says. Not to mention providing distraction from that which you want to distract and calling attention to that which you wish to highlight.

A little make-up doesn’t hurt either. At the least, some lip color and a swish of mascara. “I believe more and more in working with a great make-up artist,” she says.  “In fifteen minutes they can enhance you, show you how one color can make you pop and another wash you out. It’s worth it if you’re investing in photography.” Short of that, there’s always the department store make-up counter for a quick lesson.

Photo Finish 

Just remember, no matter how awful the photo looks today, give it a decade or two and you’ll be wondering what you ever complained about.

Contact Elizabeth Dranitzke at 202-550-2520 or by e-mail. Dranitzke’s favorite make-up artists are Rhonda Stone, the Mid-Atlantic rep for Nars, who can be reached at ronni.stone@gmail.com, and Suzanne Eden at The Makeup Chic.

— Stephanie Cavanaugh
Stephanie Cavanaugh writes the Green Acre gardening column for MyLittleBird. 

This unfortunately is not Gardener Cavanaugh’s wisteria. The gardener herself recently took this picture, and the one on the opening page, at Longwood Gardens, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, so she could remind herself how wisteria vines are supposed to bloom and, in general, cooperate with the gardener’s plans. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

APART FROM THE pathetic wisteria that gallops across the roof of the garage (which we will get to momentarily), the trumpet vine was the dumbest idea for my bathtub-size garden.

I first saw it many years ago, in Rehoboth Beach, framing a restaurant entrance.

What an exotic transition I thought it announced from the hurly-burly scene on the street where the halter-topped and coconut-scented beach-goers wandered, dripping pizza and ice cream. Being as this was so early on in my gardening, um, career, I had no idea what it was except that it looked fabulously tropical and was heavy with flowers and my little id cried out I WANT ONE.

Amazingly, it took years to find in a garden center. I don’t know if this was because the trumpet vine was once uncommon or if it had been in garden centers all along but I hadn’t noticed—or if the wise purveyors of plants knew that this was a mad weed capable of smothering everything in its path, dueling only with the mighty wisteria for dominance; King Kong vs. Godzilla vs. the tulip.

It is clearly called invasive in every article I’ve read after I bought and planted it.

What is it about the word invasive that I consistently choose to ignore? Ha, I say to myself, invasive for someone else perhaps. Not me. Like, everyone else will eventually romp in Elysian Fields except for…hey, I’ll miss (some) of you! That was an aside.

My four-year-old trumpet vine is just now coming into bloom, which might be nice if one could see it. The “thought” was that it would grow on the wall behind the cherry tree—oh wait, that was another wrong move—and climb up the wonderfully curlicued wrought-iron arch that I would show you except that it’s smothered in vines and might as well be a couple of sticks and some wire, and the cherry is so enormous that the only way I can take a photo is by precariously leaning over the back porch rail and sticking the camera through the branches of the rose of Sharon.

I imagine the vine is very pretty on the other side of the wall, where our neighbors can enjoy it.

On the other hand, there was no difficulty finding a wisteria, which we planted our first summer in the house. Our neighbor Pat had one over her garage, fabulously full, dripping purple frills, and so softly and delightfully scented that it never provoked nausea.

Cannily siting ours in a location identical to hers, we have waited 33 years for it to do more than snicker and spit forth a couple of blooms a season.

We’ve tried Epsom salts and hacking off roots and pruning and not pruning and, nada.  What we do see are wisteria shoots every-damn-where. They tangle with the honeysuckle and the white flower vine and the ivy, shoot up to choke the roses, and slither along underground to pop up and throttle the jasmine.

The one positive is the galloping-over-the-garage-roof habit it has, sending foamy waves of green skyward from early spring until late fall and so obscuring the ladders and columns and chimney caps and other whatnots that have taken, it appears, root.

Which leads me indirectly to a recent brunch and a patch of wisteria wisdom.

Tom and Steve take care of a handful of gardens in Georgetown. Seven or eight, I think they said as I had my nose in a bloody mary at the time.

Enough clients, at any rate, to afford them a two-month holiday post-Christmas tinsel-hanging and poinsettia-ing in the grand homes of their employers. Clearly they choose their clients very well.

One happens to be the wife of a near-president.

This leads me to a thought. There are three types of self-employed: the Tom and Steves; the folks in the parking lot at Home Depot  looking for work; and people like me, who just hope to have enough for dentures should they live so long.

This is not to take away from Tom and Steve, who are tremendously talented—they just know how to play the game—and recognize that frequently the more money a client has the more they want to pay. Tom and Steve are happy to oblige.

I’ve got a talent or two as well—some of which, I modestly say, might equal theirs—but charge for it? Aiiee! Even the word makes me cringe. If something comes easily, what’s it worth? Oh, more the fool me. Maybe one day I’ll learn, and have enough for implants when the time comes.

The near-president’s wife, to return to the point of this story, has a fabulous white wisteria in her Georgetown garden and another at her place in Boston. Both are tended by her Boston gardener, a man with a particular knack, who is therefore flown to Washington several times a year so he can tend the other. Tom and Steve have been observing his ministrations for some time.

This seemed a fine opportunity to pluck the brains of some high-priced talent who have plucked the brains of some high-priced talent.

I told them that at first I tried watchful waiting, like men do with prostate cancer, since I read early on that it can take seven years for a new plant to bloom.

When spring of the eighth year dawned, I stood under the now-mighty vine, which sprawled across the garage roof, flinging tendrils upwards to embrace the telephone wires (a design triumph I call this; lunacy, said The Prince, after we called the telephone company, again).

I stood there, eye-caressing each shoot for a hint of what might be a bud and clearly recall my excitement at all of the little green nubbins, anticipating an explosion of intoxicatingly scented purple flowers dripping into the pale pink Queen Elizabeth climbing rose that artfully occupied the opposite corner and was intended as cover for a trellis over a dining patio (until it up and died).

And nothing happened. This state of nothing happening continued for several years, I told them. The wisteria just grew bigger and more unruly. I tried things: fertilizing, not fertilizing; Epsom salts; cutting back in winter, spring, summer, fall; root pruning.

Tom and Steve were excited at that last.

Root pruning! said Steve, scooting to the edge of his rocker.

But it didn’t work, I moaned. I counted three flowers this spring and they were entirely hidden by leaves.

Do you have a Chinese or Japanese wisteria? asked Tom.

?

Stupidly, I don’t know this. When we bought the house and I began concocting the grand scheme to replace the clothesline and plum tomato that the previous owner had planted, I thought a wisteria was a wisteria. Who knew?

I always intend to keep tags and then I don’t know where they go; this is of interest because we still have baby’s busted Game Boy, ca. 1990, and a great deal of other useless and broken dreck . . . but nothing to identify the plants. Of course, I assumed that I’d remember. Just like The Prince, who tossed the dishwasher manual, assumed that he’d remember where the damn filter or whatnot is, so it could be cleaned and the glasses wouldn’t come out looking like they were dipped in chalk and have to be hand washed . . .

In any event, I thought I’d done due diligence by planting it in exactly the same position as Pat—who does nothing in the garden but sneeze and go back inside.

Tom (though it could have been Steve) said that the Chinese variety flowers and leafs out simultaneously. The Japanese blooms and then leafs out.

Since I have to peer through a jungle of leaves to find the damn flowers, such few that I get, I suspect it’s Chinese. Which will never give me the effect I’m after, though they assure me that it’s very beautiful.

When it blooms.

That would be nice, I mutter.

Actual Flower Tip Follows!

To produce a fabulous wisteria, I’m told, the Boston Brahmin practices a little S&M on the plant, strangling the branches mid-summer, wrapping each one about four feet up with one of those plastic garbage bag ties, the ones with the jaggedy edges at one end that you pull through a hole in the other. Pull not so tightly that you cut the plant, but just enough that there are no gaps. I am assured that it will orgasm next spring in divine floriferous profusion. Or words to that effect.

This sounds interesting. However they haven’t seen our wisteria, which is more ridiculous than ever this year. The Prince has been far too busy, he’s said, to spend a Saturday morning on the garage roof as I stand in the garden and direct: that one, no that one, no— yes, no, that. And so forth until we have a giant argument and much stomping and carrying on.

We have to do this in the morning so that we can recover and go out to dinner and have a civil evening. Saturday night is date night.

I think I’ll lay in a supply of garbage bag ties and invite the boys for cocktails. Shortly.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Next week in Green Acre, Gardener Cavanaugh will consider “stealing” her neighbor’s anti-mosquito program so she doesn’t have to bother. Stephanie is currently at work on a book about life in a small city garden.

This is NOT Stephanie Cavanaugh’s wisteria. This one has for decades graced the garden wall of the Georgetown home of the late Senator Claiborne Pell. / MyLittleBird photo.

IT’S MID-MORNING AND I’m reading the review of last night’s “Dancing With the Stars” on the Entertainment Weekly website, which doesn’t mean I have nothing to do, it means I have nothing I care to do. I’m bored out of my skull.

And then the reviewer, who is engaging enough to keep me reading despite my near zero
interest in a show that I don’t even watch, says: We all have different voices in our heads.

Which led me directly back inside my skull because this is just what I was thinking yesterday when I returned from the market, having forgotten once again to buy ham for a sandwich.

Instead, I was standing at the counter slapping cream cheese on Triscuits and this voice pops up, Why don’t you make some? And some other irrational part of my being slapped me upside the head and replied, Great idea! Make ham!

Because that’s what I do. Make things. Or always assume I can, which prevents me from buying things, which I suppose is good.

Why don’t you make some? Ham. Uh-huh. And this would begin with growing a pig?

That’s a long way to go for a ham sandwich.

But that’s the kind of thing these odd parts of my brain say, even as the more rational part (there’s only one of these) purses its lips and lectures: Speaking of gardens, isn’t it time you did something out there?

So I’ll now mention that I intend to borrow Paige’s hedge clipper in the very near future and fully intend to hand it to The Prince and charge him with shearing back the honeysuckle, white flower vine and the blasted wisteria which—after 33 years—yields maybe 10 flowers each spring and then flings itself about the garden, throwing up tangled dreadlocks every which-where and threatening to strangle the climbing roses.

I will hand him the hedge clipper and announce that I am doing so because I have developed a crippling strain in a muscle in my left shoulder and mustn’t aggravate it. And then I will excuse myself to lie down for a bit. I will do all of this because I require someone to blame when things go wrong, as most assuredly they will, and he’s always willing and handy. Bless him.

This is Plan B.

Plan A was devised several weeks ago, when I was sitting on the back porch smoking and drinking coffee in a black T-shirt with bleach splotches down the front, and noticing that the wisteria had crept 30 feet from the garage roof along the fence and had unfurled many skinny arms that were groping their way across the alley, threatening the neighbors. One of my voices remarked, in a very cheery, chatty fashion, as if we were dressed in pretty cotton dresses and having tea together, along with little watercress sandwiches with the crusts cut off,  that it might be nice to convince the neighbors that a wisteria arch across the alley would be a lovely thing to have.

And the not-so-pretty me replied: A by-product of this would be, of course, that I could engage various other bodies in the tangling and disentangling of the stuff, and have a whole new stable of people to blame for what goes wrong in my garden.

And the me’s giggled and toasted ourselves and then my Prince went forth with the big clipper and slashed it all down and took it to the dump.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Next week in Green Acre, Gardener Cavanaugh has so much more to say about wisteria. Stephanie is currently at work on a book about life in a small city garden.

Pond snow: A backyard water feature a/k/a a pond is shrouded in cherry blossoms. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

I HAVE NOT EATEN an apricot in more than 30 years. The very thought of those sickly-sweet little fruits, the mushy texture of the ripe pulp, raises bile in my throat, a gag that begins just below the sag of me jowls.

Though the apricot tree died years ago,  the painful memories remain keen.

See, a stick that was off-centered in the garden of our brand new (to us) house and was said to be an apricot tree eventually became one. Lo it developed a habit of prettily flowering and then, after several years of pleasurable scent and blossom, began spurting forth fruit, bushels of fruit, which you might think was very exciting and pleasant and tasty but was instead utterly disgusting and grew increasingly vile with each passing year.

But in the beginning, how we thrilled that the skinny little sapling would eventually yield our very own apricot crop.

As it happened, just the summer before we bought the house we’d been visiting friends in California and spent afternoons sitting stoned (or at least one of us was) on a deck plucking peaches from the branches of a tree that hovered deliciously overhead, sweet juices dribbling down our chins.

We had a vision going here—and didn’t that apricot waltz right into the picture (funny what makes you buy a house, isn’t it? It’s all in the romance).

So we bought the house and watched the tree grow, fertilizing and fretting year after year
when no fruit appeared. It never would, the tree experts informed us, because there was no other apricot in the vicinity and cross-pollination (or was it fertilization?) would never occur.

Well, clearly someone must have planted one because there came a year when the tree-top had lofted itself above reach and it was in that year that the fruiting began. The tree’s height is essential information because fruit ripens (logically enough) from the top down.

I am no end of information.

The squirrels loved it. We attracted dozens of new furry friends who’d scurry up the branches and snatch the fruits, chittering and gnawing and then tossing the pits—at me, I swear—during the few fine days before the rot when I could sprawl with a book on the  flowered cushions of the wicker sofa. Plink on my head and plink again followed by a chorus of squirrelish laughter.

But they could gobble only so much, and since no human could reach the top branches—among other things we don’t have a deck—the fruit would ripen and putrefy and fall to the ground and would squish underfoot and stink and be crawling with flies and maggoty things. Year after year, every May morning began with me donning galoshes, grabbing a large black plastic trash bag and gagging as I shoveled the slops.

By the time it dropped dead of some blessed infection, the tree was well over 30 feet tall. Imagine the crap that falls from a tree of that size. Also imagine The Prince, teetering on top of the fence wielding a chainsaw,  taking it down. You’ll need to imagine it because I wasn’t watching. Among other things, I figured if he fell I wanted to give him time to be really dead, not just critically injured and hospitalized and in permanent traction with me as nurse for the rest of my life because he’s sure to outlive me out of spite.

A certain death and I’m out of here with the life insurance, on a tropical beach, with a fresh facelift and a gauzy caftan.

That was an aside. While I cowered in the kitchen, he took the tree down and chopped the branches into firewood.

The only good thing about the apricot was that it grew tall but spread little. Just enough to screen our yard from the blight of new townhouses that went up behind our place and obstructed a clear view of the sky.

That strong vertical aspect was something we should have kept in mind, but didn’t.  A rather large mistake ensued.

Oh, the Kwanzan cherry tree that replaced it is, in fact, a sight so splendid when in bloom that it’s difficult to heave my brain around the idea that it is mine. There’s always a frightening beginning, when I swear this year it must be sick . . . that limpish first fringe of buds, rather pale in color, looking pretty insipid. And then, like Miss Marmelstein removing her glasses, it bursts forth in such a splendor of blossoms that one is absolutely agog.

And then commences, depending on the heat and the wind and the rain, a couple of days or (with great luck) weeks of floral ecstasy.

The Cavanaugh garden today. / Photo by Stephanie Cavanaugh.

But once the bloom is over, there are another 50 or so weeks to contend with. And over these weeks the cherry feeds and grows at an alarming pace—a pace that was fine for the first year or so as I watched in self-congratulation as it blotted out the unpleasant view of the townhouses. It is now, 10 years later, beginning to eclipse the garden itself.

About this I was warned, I tell myself. And how many times in this lifetime am I not going to listen but run pig-headedly into trouble that I could have avoided if, if . . .

On the other hand, it just as frequently turns out that I shouldn’t have listened and should have pig-headedly gone about doing what I was doing.

Oh mercy, what a muddle life is.

One might ask, where was my Prince in this decision? Right by my side, sucking a cork and deferring to me and my carryings-on about gardening and trees, which are highly imaginative and only occasionally approach realism. It wouldn’t have mattered had he argued, because I would have managed to buffalo him into this, hopping up and down in my rightness. Poor boy.

The guy at the plant center was absolutely right when he told us this tree would eventually be rawther large in our small garden.

That there was a vibrant hint of future disaster just a few blocks away, was ignored. There a cherry is full blown and growing half outside the yard (one twice the size of ours) shading the sidewalk and reaching into the street, about to sweep cars up into its branches, belch and grow forth . . .

What I/we chose to hear was that the cherry blooms beautifully, grows quickly, bears no fruit—and was safe to transplant even though it was already quite tall (when it is usually recommended to start trees off small, it’s healthier and blah di blah).  But I/we couldn’t wait (didn’t want to wait) the additional season or so it would take to get the tree up to a view-obscuring height.

Which it rapidly did. Oh, what an insanely happy tree it is, stealing the dribble of light that leaves the once glorious lilies limp and allows the roses to bloom a little before succumbing to black spot.

The ferns are splendid, though.

—Stephanie Cavanaugh

Next week in Green Acre, Gardener Cavanaugh tackles the irresistibly invasive wisteria. Stephanie is currently at work on a book about life in a small city garden.