Check it out . . . Our good garden friend, Allen Bush, was featured in yesterdays NY Times! Congratulation Allen. Much deserved! HOME & GARDEN Plants With Roots Attached JULY 9, 2014 Times Topic: In the Garden LOUISVILLE, Ky. — It is through Allen Bush, the seedsman and raconteur, that I lay claim to the 400-year-old legacy of the Dutch engraver and floriculturist Emanuel Sweert. On a cloudless Saturday morning not long ago, Mr. Bush rummaged in his backyard and cut me a clump of a purplish iris. It was an ordinary looking plant, not yet in bloom — hardly noticeable in his oversize city lot. “It’s very small compared to the German bearded irises,” said Mr. Bush, 63. “You’ll look at it and say, really? But it’s got a charm because it’s so old. And because of Ellen.” That would be Ellen Hornig, the proprietor of Seneca Hill Perennials, in Oswego, N.Y. The nursery is gone now: she closed it to care for her ailing husband. But 20 years ago, Mr. Bush ordered the cultivar called Iris Swertii from Ms. Hornig. “She had a story about where she got all this stuff,” Mr. Bush said. This description was high praise. Though Mr. Bush is a gardener of unusual knowledge and influence, he is, first, a cultivator of stories and relationships. Over his long career in horticulture, he has gone herb shopping in the Smoky Mountains with the legendary British gardener and writer Christopher Lloyd. He has been received at the Bavarian garden of Countess Helen von Stein-Zeppelin. (“Her uncle was the Zeppelin of dirigible fame,” Mr. Bush said.) And Mr. Bush has wandered 10 countries and three continents on collecting trips with the grass king Kurt Bluemel. Never heard of Kurt Bluemel, who died last month at 81? Here’s a yarn: Mr. Bluemel sourced four million savanna plants for the safari ride at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida. As Mr. Bush tells it, the ride designers failed to anticipate that wildebeest would graze. You could see Mr. Bluemel’s little bluestem mix on a two-acre hillside at Mr. Bush’s country house near Salvisa, Ky., an hour east of Louisville. “He sent us a box of at least 100 pounds, which we scattered — kind of the meadow-in-a-can approach,” Mr. Bush said. It seems that Mr. Bush knows everyone in the garden world, and everyone knows him. As the former director of North American operations for Jelitto, a giant in the perennial seed market, Mr. Bush spent a dozen years calling on nurseries and garden centers. “Sometimes I felt like Willy Loman,” he said. “I’d do that nice-to-see-you kind of thing.” Mr. Bush estimates that he has visited more than 400 public and private gardens and another 400 nurseries and greenhouses. And while he insists that number is nothing extraordinary, he is hard pressed to name anyone who has seen more. But back, for a moment, to Iris Swertii. Mr. Bush not only shared the rhizome with me, but he dug up an old email address for Ellen Hornig. She replied to my inquiry immediately. Ms. Hornig had no information on the flower. But she recalled that Iris Swertii had come to her from Superstition Iris Gardens, in the California foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Richard Tasco, the longtime owner of Superstition, was equally gracious, though less forthcoming. He wouldn’t reveal where he had first acquired the cultivar decades ago. Historic irises are a “niche business,” he said, and easily misidentified. He had dropped this particular variety in 2011. Continue reading the main story Was Mr. Tasco’s flower the “Sweert’s Iris” that appeared in the 1823 catalog of the Linnaean Botanic Garden, in Flushing, N.Y.? (Here, at last, was a garden Mr. Bush had not seen.) If you followed the name still further back in time, you’d land on a floral print published by Emanuel Sweert. A dealer in botanical wonders, Sweert had included a handful of irises in his catalog, commissioned by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Looking at Mr. Bush’s iris, it was possible to imagine that a medieval relic had passed through gardens great and small. And now he had wrapped it up in a plastic grocery bag for me to take home. You can tell someone is a serious plant collector when the FedEx guy already knows what’s in the box. “I’ve got some more plants for you, buddy,” the deliveryman said. Within a minute or two, Mr. Bush had sliced open the package, from Plant Delights. (Tony Avent, the company’s owner, has been a friend “for a long, long time.”) He declared himself pleased with the condition of the baptisia, and even more impressed with the thoroughness of the packing job. For some 15 years, Mr. Bush operated his own quirky perennial nursery and catalog, called Holbrook Farm, near Asheville, N.C. The very idea of retailing perennials was quirky back in 1980, when Mr. Bush first developed the business plan. “Perennial plants are outdoor plants which may die back at the end of the growing season and then reappear the following year,” he wrote in his prospectus. He listed his (rather thin) qualifications as a plantsman: a year of intensive study at Kew Gardens, in London. Of his potential customers, Mr. Bush wrote, “my market will be drawn from magazine advertising in the horticultural magazines.” Mr. Bush keeps the original proposal in a scrapbook, and looking at it today seems to fill him with amusement. “This business plan looks bulletproof,” he said. “How could it go wrong?” You could start with the readers of horticulture magazines. “They were serious gardeners,” Mr. Bush said. “There just weren’t that many of them.” He was right about perennials, though. Panayoti Kelaidis, 64, senior curator at the Denver Botanic Gardens, recalled a time when perennials were “pass-along plants,” almost absent from the trade. Perplexingly, American natives were often available only in the Old World. Mr. Bush’s nursery, he said: “was the first one. With his experience in Europe, he brought the very best of the European cultivars. As well as, he had the native sensibility from gardening in the Appalachian region.” Mr. Bush pitched these unsung plants with wry and entertaining catalog copy. Of a shrubby herbaceous plant, Mr. Bush might write: “The truth is, for all its beauty, Caryopteris nepalensis contributes its own, shall we say, ‘distinctive,’ odor when handled. The names of major urban areas — Miami, Cleveland, Pittsburgh — have been mentioned in reference to this smell (folks have never mentioned their own towns).” Continue reading the main story Yet the catalog was no substitute for visiting the nursery in person, recalled Heather Spencer, 63, a regular customer who became a friend. To start, there was Mr. Bush: charming, literate, congenitally self-deprecating. “I’m sure many women went and bought plants,” said Dr. Spencer, a retired emergency room physician. Holbrook Farm ultimately taught Mr. Bush the difference between having a life in horticulture and making a living. In 1995, he liquidated the nursery and moved back home to Louisville. Soon after, he bought a house with his soon-to-be second wife, Rose Cooper. “When we go to conventions, my wife is happy to introduce herself as Rose Bush,” Mr. Bush said — one of those gifts that help a marriage endure. Ms. Cooper, a 60-year-old retired public defender, gardens in the front of their 1936 Federal-style brick house. After his years at the nursery, gardening in public, Mr. Bush now favors the solitude of the backyard. He has a tradesman’s knowledge of the right way to cultivate plants. And that’s mostly what he does not do in his home garden. The propagation greenhouse is the junked-up garage. The irrigation system is a hose and a Haws watering can. One of the few things Mr. Bush salvaged from the old operation is the sign for Holbrook Farm: a groovy blue hand holding a leaf. It now hangs in a place of honor, at the gate of the compost heap. The terraced garden at the Louisville house is totally Simple. The design itself is rather complicated: it resembles a ziggurat, with grass in the center and scree planting beds on the sides. The site includes a dry gulch for storm-water management, and a pond and fountain surrounded by a stone patio. Simple, to be clear, is an outsider artist and a longtime friend. “His name is ‘Simple,’ ” Mr. Bush said. “Not Bill or Bob.” Mr. Bush had imagined a naturalistic plan, inspired by the Potsdam-Bornim garden of the plantsman Karl Foerster. But you don’t hire Simple to do what you want to do; you hire Simple to do what he wants to do. This explains how Mr. Bush ended up with a colorful pergola that looks as if it escaped from a wine bar in Key West. (“He prevailed,” Mr. Bush said. “And I was glad he did.”) Along the stone stairs lie a couple of small concrete planters. Mr. Bush stopped here to point at a daisylike flower, Erigeron compositus. “This little thing is a fleabane,” he said. “I got this from Harlan Hamernik, a legendary nurseryman in Nebraska. His motto was, ‘If they’ll grow in Nebraska, they’ll grow anywhere.’ ” Mr. Bush continued: “He died two years ago, lighting his furnace, and the house blew up. It was really sad.” And yet the fleabane remains behind. “Now I pass by and see it,” Mr. Bush said, “and I think of Harlan.” Mr. Bush does not have a naturally morbid disposition. Yet a gregarious plant collector who stays at it long enough ends up accumulating a kind of memorial garden. The potted hollies came from Josh Brands, a Trappist monk in the Abbey of Gethsemani, once home to the author Thomas Merton. “It was always said, if you’re going out to visit Merton, bring a case of beer and a bottle of whiskey,” Mr. Bush said. The same rule applied to Brother Josh, who “had the reputation as the party monk.” Continue reading the main story Mr. Bush recounts the story at Garden Rant, the popular group blog, where he writes every month. He had helped Brother Josh install a garden at his private hermitage. The weather was bleak, and before long, Brother Josh suggested a detour to a Mexican restaurant: “Let’s go to town on the abbey’s credit card!” Mr. Bush’s friend died last year, having left his vocation. He was survived by the hollies (Ilex colchica and Ilex ciliospinosa), which Mr. Bush was attempting to propagate by cutting and seed. “He was a good monk,” Mr. Bush said. Mr. Bush’s own legacy is Molly Bush. This is a heuchera that he selected for its reddish bronze coloring. In the final Holbrook Farm catalog, in 1995, he explained that the cultivar had hit the market almost by accident. “The choice for a name wasn’t hard,” he wrote. “I named it after my daughter, Molly Bush. At 13, she’s unaffected by this distinction and remains less interested in plants than in horseback riding and her electric guitar.” Today, Molly Bush is 32, and she recently returned to Louisville with a 7-year-old daughter of her own. But the plant seemed to have departed for good. One summer it disappeared in the perennial jungle, and it didn’t re-emerge in the spring. Then, at a trade show, Mr. Bush met Susan Cohan, a New Jersey landscape designer. She had ordered the variety decades ago from Mr. Bush’s nursery and it had proved to be a good grower. “It’s always nice to hear how my baby is doing,” he said. Ms. Cohan kindly took a cutting of the original, and now Molly Bush was back home. A few years ago, an ice storm arrested Louisville. “We had no power for days,” Mr. Bush said. The house turned into a meat locker. “I was going to stay here in the ice cave to protect the fort. And Rose said, ‘I’m leaving.’ ” When they returned, the house appeared the same. And yet something had happened. “It was like I had no attachment to the place,” Mr. Bush said. In a similar fashion, he could feel himself disconnecting from the Louisville garden. Reflecting on the experience in a blog post last fall, he cited the philosopher Walter Benjamin from an essay called “Unpacking My Library”: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.” By comparison, the country house, on the Salt River, stands unencumbered by history. This seems unusual, because the original part of the structure likely dates to the mid-19th century. “This house was old,” Mr. Bush said. Ms. Cooper said, “This place was falling down.” With a farmstead so superannuated, you’re forced — and free — to create something new. They converted the barn into an office and table tennis arena, adding a glass garage door for light. When you sit on the rough furniture inside, the outside glows like a Kodak Colorama from the old Grand Central Terminal. Mr. Bluemel’s meadow grass is out there. So are 1,500 daffodils, which Mr. Bush has been installing in 500-bulb binges. Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story Ms. Cooper said: “I think it’s ironic as people in our 60s, we end up buying 50 acres out in the country. That’s not what most people do to downsize.” Mr. Bush said, “This is my garden for my dotage.” Ms. Cooper said, “We’re already in our dotage.” You could surmise that the new property is, in fact, an excuse to amass more plants. That’s what I originally thought when Mr. Bush asked me to mail him a couple of the sunflower seeds I had gathered in a jar last fall. I’d been gassing on about how the flowers were the size of basketball hoops, and how the stalks had eclipsed the garage. But this heirloom variety, Mammoth Grey Stripe, was actually quite common. You could order a packet for $1.30 from Fedco Seeds. Only when I dropped the gray-and-white seeds in an envelope did it occur to me that Mr. Bush was offering me a seat in his grand fellowship of gardeners. The sunflower seed was a token. What he wanted from me was a story. A version of this article appears in print on July 10, 2014, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Plants With Roots Attached. Order Reprints|Todays Paper|Subscribe NEXT IN HOME & GARDEN Putting the ‘Oh!’ in Patio
Posted on: Fri, 11 Jul 2014 11:17:48 +0000