Walking through an exhibit made to look like an old house filled with the characters and stories and artifacts from a book I wrote...that is a weird experience.

And I realize that it sounds like shameless self-promotion to talk about it, but--it must be talked about.

It's happening at the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville, NC, and from there it will travel around the country.  I'm not sure where it's going next, but there are several museums looking at dates now.

Here's an interesting thing about this exhibit:  it's built in such a way that it basically packs itself.  No shipping cartons are necessary:  the walls, the furniture, the props--all of it fits precisely into a truck, with one room basically serving as a crate for all of the smaller bits, all of which only need to be wrapped in furniture blankets the way you'd move your own stuff.  Much of it is super-lightweight, too, which makes it less expensive and fuel-intensive to move.  This is the sort of thing that you'd never know about the exhibit walking through it--but it is very cleverly put together.

The walls are hung with portraits of the weird dead ancestors. The unfortunate victims of wicked plants, most of them.  Although some were practioners of the dark art of poison.

There are specially-made books sitting around the house--all of them made by a local book bindery.  In fact, almost 200 local artists and craftspeople and tradespersons were hired to help build the exhibit--it was its own little economic stimulus program.

There are dead bodies slumped over tables.  Imagine my excitement.

and, in the dining room, a liquor cabinet with bottles of mysterious wicked potions.  Each label is a fascinating little read all by itself.   

Even the bathroom is creepy and weird.

It's the kind of exhibit that requires you to figure stuff out on your own--you actually walk around opening drawers, taking things off shelves, examining the evidence.

I've been working with the Arboretum for the last couple of years on this exhibit, but honestly, I had no idea what to expect when I went to see it last month.  So I get no credit for this--this is really all their doing.  Amazing.

It'll be in Asheville through early September, then it starts to tour--to find out more about all of that, go here.  And if you're in the area, or if you have friends in North Carolina, I hope you'll encourage them to go check it out in person and let me know what you think.

Recently I've noticed a bumper crop of talks promoting something I'd never heard of before - forest gardening and the "food forests" or "edible forest gardens" that result from it.  Turns out my initial assumption - that a forest garden is a shady woodland garden of ornamental plants - is totally wrong; this is all about producing food.

And this is big-picture stuff.  Edible Forest Gardens tells us:

We can consciously apply the principles of ecology to the design of home scale gardens that mimic forest ecosystem structure and function, but grow food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizer, "farmaceuticals," and fun.

And they explain that this isn't about gardening IN forests at all:

Edible forest gardening is not necessarily gardening in the forest, it is gardening like the forest.

Anyone with a patch of land can grow a forest garden. They've been created in small urban yards and large parks, on suburban lots, and in small plots of rural farms.

I attended a talk by Lincoln Smith, a teacher of forest gardening, (photo above) and learned a bit more - that unlike most edible plants, the ones in forest gardens last at least two seasons and usually many more.  Plants are in layers – at varying heights, like fruit trees underplanted with herbs.  But importantly, the plant mix is diverse, nothing like the monocultures of conventional agriculture.  And if you mix the plants correctly, as a group they feed themselves and share space efficiently – both underground and aboveground.  That’s a lot to ask but it’s how it happens in nature, so it can be done.

Plants that need lots of nitrogen, like apples, can get what they need from “Nitrogen-fixing” plants growing near them.  Prime Nitrogen-fixers (plants that turn nitrogen in the air into nitrogen in the soil that plants can use) are clover, sweet fern, groundnut, false indigo, New Jersey tea, American wisteria, and vetch…. Larger plants that produce their own Nitrogen include black locust, alder and bayberry.

Lincoln showed data from a California researcher showing that as much flour can be made from acorns as from the same space devoted to wheat.  Here’s the link (it’s a Word document) or you can Google: “Bainbridge Use of Acorns for Food in California.”  Wow.  Makes you totally rethink our assumptions about food production and understand a bit how people sustained themselves centuries ago in forested regions like ours.  Sure enough, check out this website about cooking with acorns,  and this nursery in Michigan is growing oaks for food production.

But Here's my Question:  Really?

I don't know why, but this all brings out the doubter in me.  I've asked around and found other doubters among experienced gardeners, which makes me feel a bit better.  Maybe I just need to see some results.

So readers, what's YOUR reaction to this radical notion?  Has anyone tried this?  Please help!  I want to support forest gardening but like the permaculture movement that spawned it, my honest reaction to it is:  Huh?

This might be at the other end of the spectrum from funky bottle trees and found object enclosures. Acres and acres of lawn. Although Asheville’s Biltmore estate is set inside a magnificent wooded landscape, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the formal gardens surrounding the house (also by FLO) have retained less of their appeal. Appeal for me, that is. I’ve toured lots of estate gardens, mainly in England, and—although with these large properties there was also plenty of lawn (you can’t do without it)—the borders, water features, touches of whimsy, topiary and other, more intimate elements rose to a level I didn’t see at Biltmore. The Biltmore gardens are magnificent in some ways, but disappointingly lacking in personality in many others.

This article talks about the lawn care and other horticultural requirements. It takes a lot of horsepower to manage 8,000 acres!

I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. The drive to the estate was a wonder to behold, with its luminous plantings of bamboo and, of course, rhododendrons. The views from the terrace are breathtaking and I am always a sucker for a nice statue or three, especially when they are lightly clothed in moss. But the formal gardens overall? Too broad stroke.

If you'd like to see more, here is my facebook album from 3+ days of Asheville gardens.

This just in from Jay and Ken at Atlock Farm, a most intriguing place in Somerset, NJ:

After some 20 years, perched high above the succulents,in a green houses at Atlock Farm, (in Somerset, New Jersey), much beloved Aunt Tilly, cut loose and unceremoniously plopped to the ground.

Owner Ken Selody felt it only fitting to give the girl a chair and a cheer, by having her join us for cocktails. She had a Cosmo. A double.

This report was followed quickly by the following:

Okay...Ken said I must be honest here... Tillandsia had suicidal tendencies, and unbeknownst to me, she'd tried this before. We'll never know for sure, but she might well have purposely thrown herself from the top of the greenhouse....plunging to... her, well.... nearest cocktail? She liked to drink...albiet sparingly, considering her genus.

That is all.

I can't help but steal my post title from Billy Goodnick - the term is just too apt, in the case of these two juicy examples of bad pruning.  

On the left, the power company seems like the obvious culprit but once homeowners plant trees too close to the power lines, what's a company to do?  I shot this from my car last winter but I bet it looks just as ridiculous now, with leaves on that poor tree.

And on the right is the foundation planting in front of a gorgeous Capitol HIll townhouse, where two Euonymuses (Euonymi?) aren't just horribly shaped, but pruned to completely block the windows.  This is the garden of a new client of mine, who impressively hired me to give her landscape suggestions even before she and her fiance had moved in!  I happily reinforced their intention to get rid of these hideous blobs, as soon as possible.  It's a south exposure, so the choice of better alternatives is huge.