Lyme Disease

If you are reading this and you are not aware that I recently contacted Lyme Disease, then you are truly a minority in this new Age of Information. In the past three weeks I have received calls from friends, friends of friends, and President Obama all inquiring about my health.

Before going further, let me say two things about Lyme Disease: first, contracting it is likely an inevitable part of being a gardener. The deer ticks that carry it are the size of poppy seeds and, at least in southern New England, they are endemic. (The photos at left show the relative size of an adult deer tick and the deer tick nymph that latches onto humans and spreads Lyme Disease. In comparison, the common dog tick is the size of Jupiter.) Second, there is nothing humorous about undetected Lyme Disease. It can be debilitating and cause long-term health issues.

Fortunately, my own prognosis and treatment came swiftly. Three weeks ago today, I saw a bulls-eye rash on my skin in the morning. Instead of pretending it was something else that would go away on its own, I called my doctor. My doctor saw me at 4 p.m., took one look at it and said it was Lyme Disease. “I’ve seen more cases in the past six weeks than I’ve seen over the past six years,” he said. “We’ll do the blood work, but I’m starting you on antibiotics.” A vial of blood was drawn. By the time I got to my local pharmacy, two prescriptions were waiting for me. I took my first pill with dinner the same evening I first saw the rash. (Attention Congress: this is how health care is supposed to work.)

Lyme Disease is a bacterial infection. A deer tick nymph attaches itself to you and settles in to draw blood. In the process, an infected tick releases borrelia bacteria. If you remove the tick within 36 hours, the chance of further infection is virtually nil. If you don’t, you may see symptoms (the rash) within days. The good news is that if you treat the infection promptly, the ‘cure’ rate approaches 100%. I’m pleased to report that I’m free of any other symptoms.

But the news of my infection has spread within the gardening world like a Japanese beetle infestation. The reason is that my wife considers my condition, well, fascinating. Not to get too personal about this but, after each gardening session, we perform a tick check on one another. The fact that this tick escaped our scrutiny is cause for comment. The unnerving part is that Betty’s description generally includes the tracing (on her own body) of the location and progress of the rash. As a result, I get stares at a part of my anatomy that, well, I consider unsettling.

The downside to taking the antibiotics is that you are warned not to go out into the direct sun. This leads to weeding the vegetable garden at 7:30 a.m., all the time keeping an eye on the sun as it inexorably rises behind the trees. Of course, on a muggy July morning, any reason to get in and out of the garden early is welcome, but I consider it my responsibility to do my fair share of garden work.

This will pass. The treatment includes one set of pills for ten days and another for three weeks. I take my last pill this evening. On Monday, I’ll see my doctor again and, with luck, he’ll pronounce me one of the fortunate ones who didn’t procrastinate and so who were cured with a few dollars worth of pills. Then, I’ll be back to pulling my full weight as we hit the peak of the summer season.

A word to the wise: If you see that rash, don’t hesitate. Don’t pretend that it will go away on its own (it will but, when it does, your problems are just beginning). Get a diagnosis and get treated.

A Double-Header in the Bronx

New York City is 210 miles from my home and, on a Saturday morning, it’s a leisurely three-hour-and-change drive. This past Saturday, my wife and I spent a beautiful day visiting two old friends – Wave Hill and the New York Botanical Garden. Both are in the Bronx, which causes people’s eyes to bulge (you went where?!). These two gardens are must-sees for anyone who is serious about horticulture.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Wave Hill is that it is there. You walk from a modest parking area around a bend in a hedge and there, before you, is a vista that ought not to exist. A vast lawn stretching hundreds of feet sprinkled with specimen trees, a magnificent pergola studded with plants, and a vista across the Hudson River to the 500-foot-high Palisades that is unchanged from two centuries ago.

But then Wave Hill has an extraordinary history and enjoys unusual support. Located in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, it began, in 1843, as the ‘country estate’ of a grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Theodore Roosevelt lived there for two summers as a boy and Samuel Clemens was a resident for two years while the property was owned by a wealthy publisher. In 1903, a financier purchased Wave Hill and began acquiring adjacent properties, ultimately assembling 28 riverfront acres. The property passed to the City of New York in 1960 and is run today as a city-owned ‘cultural institution’. But it is hardly an impoverished institution: as of their last annual report, Wave Hill held cash and marketable securities valued at $21 million.

The Great Lawn, with its flights of eminently movable, tall-backed wooden chairs, is the dominant feature when you first see Wave Hill. This is Riverdale’s ‘front porch’, so to speak. Dozens of people read books and newspapers or chat with friends, oblivious to the stunning backdrop. If there were no gardens, Wave Hill would be worth the visit, just for that glorious view of the river and the high-rise-free cliffs beyond.

But there are gardens. Imaginative ones large and small. The pergola is a study in the use of containers. It is a riot of colors and textures and much of it is provided by dozens of containers holding everything from full-grown fruit trees to cascading, flowering vines. In another part of the park is a monocot garden – one comprised entirely of plants such as grasses, grains, banana plants and taro that produce a single leaf from each seed instead of the more prevalent two – which in turn surrounds an aquatic garden. It is intelligent in its design and intriguing in its execution. There is a flower garden – tiny for so large a park but packed with hundreds of annals and perennials. The layout is a formal grid but plants spill over into walkways producing a glorious jumble. There is an herb garden and an elliptical garden, each a fascinating space. Perhaps best of all, there is a container garden filled with Alpine plants. The containers – concrete cubes mostly – would be plug-ugly except for the riot of tiny plants they hold and the imaginative arrangement of those cubes. They stack upon one another and spread out line an Alpine meadow. It is a wonderful space.

I have been to Wave Hill perhaps half a dozen times and each visit brings something new to explore. On this visit, for the first time, I explored a woodland trail that tacks down the hillside toward the Hudson. It brought me by an unmarked, half-acre-sized swatch of land that appears to have been given over to seed-eating birds. It is a mass of Rudbeckia, Vernonia noveboracensis (New York State ironweed), Solidago, and Echinacea. Every garden should offer something new with each visit. Wave Hill never disappoints.

The New York Botanical Garden may be the most exquisite public garden in the U.S. It is lavishly endowed and continually being renewed. Its horticultural staff has the funds to Do Things Right and its marketers continually dream up events to pull in the crowds. Every public garden that has ever bemoaned poor attendance needs to send someone to the Bronx to see how it’s done.

Seeing NYBG properly takes days. We had a limited itinerary: to see the Rockefeller Rose Garden in its summer glory and take a walk through the Rock Garden looking for ideas of how to improve our own.

During the interminable rains of June, multiple rose specimens were hit by fungal disease and the NYBG staff belongs to the when-in-doubt-rip-it-out school of floriculture. Seeing several linear feet of mulched, empty beds is startling in such a garden but a wise move on the part of those who tend the garden. The signs promise a return of new specimens. But the color of everything else made those empty beds almost unnoticeable. If there is a scheme to the arrangement of rose varieties in the garden it escapes me. It’s just a wonderful, formal space that no home gardener could or should ever try to replicate. It’s the reason why there are public gardens. It’s the reason why you have to see the New York Botanical Garden.

Altogether for the McLaughlin Garden: A Trip to South Paris

I will leave it to the social scientists to decide whether it is a sign of maturity or senility, but it has been quite a long time since I wondered what the people around me looked like naked. But I could be forgiven a lapse yesterday if I kept seeing them that way: on tractors, behind wheelbarrows, and weeding flower beds. Oh, they were artfully camouflaged with leaves or shovels in just the right places, but they were nude all the same.

I guess an explanation is in order. The McLaughlin Garden in South Paris, Maine, has a storied history. It was the 60-year-long project of Bernard McLaughlin, who died at 98 in 1995. Upon his death the two-acre property, consisting of a farmhouse, barn and the garden, went up for sale. Because of its location on a main road in a growing town, McLaughlin’s garden seemed destined to become a supermarket parking lot. Fortunately, a group of area residents acquired the property with the expectation that the garden would remain open to the public without charge, just as it had been in McLaughlin’s lifetime. Unfortunately, the group had few assets apart from the property which they mortgaged. Seven years after it was acquired, the garden seemed without a future. The McLaughlin Foundation had solicited funds in the conventional way but with little success.

Then, the foundation’s trustees hit on an idea. It wasn’t entirely original: the Rylstone and District Women’s Institute in the Yorkshire Dales had done it in 1999. They had published a calendar and it had done very well, raising over a million dollars for leukemia research. The McLaughlin Foundation had a no less noble cause: to save the garden. And so they stripped. ‘Altogether for the Garden’ raised enough to pay off the $450,000 mortgage and acquire an adjoining acre parcel.

On a glorious Saturday in July, I tagged along as the Massachusetts Master Gardeners toured the garden (http://www.mclaughlingarden.org/Tour-garden.html), led by Kristin Perry, Director of Horticulture. It was a three-hour drive each way to get there, but it was, as they say in the Michelin Guides about three-star enterprises, ‘worth a journey’.

Interior Maine has a short, spectacular gardening season. The earth is frozen solid into April but, when it thaws, plants jump out of the ground seemingly overnight. The bloom season is compressed from mid-May into late August because Labor Day frosts are not uncommon. McLaughlin was an avid plant collector and trader and the garden is a mix of Maine natives – especially wildflowers and ferns – and exotics, notably Japanese cultivars. He had a passion for lilacs (there are more than 200 of them in the garden) and irises, and those plants are found in virtually every corner of the property.

The garden plan is a combination of broad grassy strips delineating deep planting beds and narrow, hard-packed pathways among those same beds. It is astonishing to think that McLaughlin started with a treeless farm because much of the garden is in shade, some of it in deep shade from coniferous and deciduous trees that are now some seven decades old. A cow path from the barn to distant pastures became a delightful walk through a woodland garden filled with ferns and May apples. The literature describes the garden as ‘formal’ but the description is accurate only in the technical sense. Looking across the beds you see a tangle of plants, but there’s an intelligence behind it.

Kristin Perry’s job for the past seven years has been to maintain the integrity of the garden while also making sense of it. On the tour she pointed out where new trees and shrubs have been brought in as old ones died or did not over-winter. There are beds that are overrun with garden ‘thugs’ that need to be scoured of species that have outgrown their welcome. There is considerable deliberation taken before making changes: was this plant in the original garden? If so, the replacement should reflect McLaughlin’s vision. In the case of a particularly obnoxious Petasites overrunning a hosta bed, it was recently found to be an interloper. It is on its way out.

But it is a very good garden and the fact that it was the singular vision of a man with no formal horticultural training makes it all the more inspiring. McLaughlin’s house is given over to a café and a gift shop, the barn houses exhibits. McLaughlin would approve of the local Maine cuisine served there and of the friendly staff that goes out of its way to dispel the reputation of Downeasters as being aloof. The garden looks much as it did in his lifetime; a credit to Ms. Perry and a cadre of volunteers. I suspect is it very much as Bernard McLaughlin would have liked, even if it did take a bit of artful disrobing to make it all possible.

The Gardens of Litchfield County

So, here we were, at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning, driving leisurely through the foothills of the Berkshires in northwestern Connecticut’s Litchfield County. A copy of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Directory was on my wife’s lap, together with a fine-scaled map of the state folded to find minor state highways that seeming appeared and disappeared with abandon.

Open Days are wondrous things. People with tour-worthy gardens allow in anyone with five dollars in their pocket. Sometimes the gardens are spectacular; sometimes they’re ‘personal’ (a polite word for disappointing). Proceeds from these Open Days go to preserve noteworthy gardens that would otherwise disappear due to neglect or development.

In Litchfield County, even the ‘personal’ gardens are usually worth seeing and we had circled three as sounding especially intriguing. Owners write their own descriptions for the directory and, while some are grandiose, others are masterpieces of understatement. For example: “This Old World-style garden is intimate, with cobbled paths, terraced gardens, raised perennial beds, and reflecting pools. Overlooking the Housatonic River, the property has a distinct French/Italian flavor.” Twenty-eight words. And, as it turned out, I could have shortened it to just eight words: “You have to see it to believe it.”

To get to the garden, you go to West Cornwall. To get to West Cornwall, you go through a genuine, working, one-lane covered bridge across the Housatonic River. Just past the bridge you make a left hand turn on, naturally, River Street. You park and find… a shop: Michael Trapp Antiques. The front of the Greek Revival property gives nothing away. You enter around the side and the garden reveals itself. It is a masterpiece of both whimsy and design, studded with what Trapp calls ‘architectural fragments’. Stone and greenery blend seamlessly. Steps lead to a lower garden – actually, gardens – that border a fast-moving brook that feeds into the Housatonic. A long room, opened to the elements and stuffed with artifacts and objects of natural beauty, merges into the hillside. It is a garden of the imagination that demands exploration of every nook.

Trapp’s garden has been nearly twenty years in the making. The antique shop once also served as his home, but the garden’s (and store’s) growing fame became a problem. To quote a 2007 New York Times article, “People he had never met would arrive at all hours. They didn’t seem to care that the store was open only on Saturdays and Sundays or by appointment, and that the garden could only be visited through the Open Days program. ‘They walked in and out of my house all day long, thinking I wouldn’t mind so long as they were nice,’ Mr. Trapp said.”

From West Cornwall, we traveled overland to Falls Village. I confess that before I visited the Michael Trapp garden, the name meant nothing to me. But ‘the Garden of Bunny Williams’ is etched into the mind of anyone who has ever opened a gardening or décor magazine. This is her ‘weekend retreat’ – fifteen intensively planted acres – from her New York City interior decorating business.

Ms. Williams was in her garden, greeting a horde of visitors. She had out tea, lemonade, cookies and bottled water. It was a welcome gesture because truly exploring all of her gardens would be a day-long (or more) proposition. Visitors are first directed to a ‘rustic Greek Revival-style pool house folly’ (her precisely accurate description), which is a jumping-off point to a series of woodland trails. These eventually lead down to the main house. Or, or be more accurate, main houses (one is a converted barn). Around them are her set pieces: sunken gardens, perennial borders around a fish pond, flower- and herb-filled vegetable gardens, conservatories and greenhouses. They are a photo shoot awaiting only the arrival of the delegation from the high-end lifestyle magazine. Every detail is perfect. Everything is balanced, there is meticulous planning behind every plant in the garden.

There is also a gardener. We met him and chatted briefly. He was able to precisely name a woodland peony that had caught Betty’s eye and he even provided a source for it.

On a different day and in a different place, I might have objected to all this perfection. But this was a house and garden as objects to be admired. And, Ms. Williams actually lives there. She has created a space that few could ever afford to mimic, but darn it if she didn’t open up her private retreat for us to wander at will – and all for a worthy cause.

We also visited a third garden in the area. It was a lavish property and no expense was spared by the owner to have a designer create the perfect series of gardens. Everyone received a map of the premises printed on vellum-type paper. The garden was, ummm, very personal.

Blame Walt Disney

What’s the most environmentally catastrophic film of all time? Some sci-fi thriller? Not a chance. The hands-down winner is ‘Bambi’. Four generations of children have now been indoctrinated with the notion that deer are wonderful little creature with big eyes and cute lashes, and that they eat nothing but tufts of spring grass. Your garden may say something different.

The impact of ‘Bambi’ can be seen in the numbers. The whitetail deer population of North America before the advent of European settlers is generally pegged at around 20 million. Hunting by Native Americans and the realities of harsh winters kept the number of deer stable. European settlers brought farms, urbanization, and a rising demand for venison and hides. The number of deer declined through the 18th and 19th centuries, reaching a trough of under a million whitetails by 1930 because of over-hunting and habitat destruction.

Then, along came ‘Bambi’. Every child in America recoiled in horror as Bambi’s mother was killed by hunters. Hunters were portrayed as evil people, creating forest fires and killing with abandon. Not content with bringing child audiences to tears in 1942, Disney re-released the film in 1947, 1957, 1966, 1975, 1982, and 1988 (and thereafter on home video so it could be watched in an endless loop).

Today, the whitetail deer population of the United States is estimated at 30 million – fifty percent above the pre-Columbian figure. Deer have learned to adapt – indeed, to thrive – in suburbia. There are fewer hunters (Bambicide!), no wolves, no predators of any kind.
Keeping out deer has created an arms race worthy of the Cold War. We have friends who have encircled their entire property with a ten-foot fence – and worry every time the driveway gate is left open for guests. Other friends believe in hanging scented soap from the branches of bushes. The deer eat the shrubbery and leave the soap alone.

Which brings me to our garden. We back up to a pond and border several square miles of town watershed. I estimate the local whitetail deer population at around half a million. I see them strolling the neighborhood, tasting the new, the flowering, and the beloved plants (the Latin name for ‘tulip’ translates as ‘deer candy’), leaving a fresh crop of deer ticks in their wake.
My wife and I keep deer at bay through a number of techniques. In the winter we fence the most delectable plants. Every month we apply a solution that, when sprayed on plants, smells as though the entire sixth-grade class of our local elementary school came down with stomach flu in our yard. It works. The smell (the base ingredient is putrefied eggs) fades to the human nose after a few hours but the scent lingers (to deer, anyway) for several weeks.

My wife plants native trees and shrubs that have developed their own deer defenses over the millennia. Our property abounds in blueberry, Clethra, Fothergilla, Itea, Leucothoe, Rhododendron and a host of other trees and shrubs that look glorious to humans but that the deer find unappetizing.

When we note the presence of deer in our yard, usually in the early morning, we run out screaming in robes and slippers, waving our arms. The deer retreat into the woods a few feet and watch us. We chase them and throw rocks at them (yes, I throw rocks at Bambi; so sue me). By continuing to chase them deep into the woods, we have caused an entire generation of deer (and neighbors) to believe that there are crazy people living on the street that are best avoided.

There is no present solution for the glut of deer. Declaring open season for hunters in densely populated suburbs isn’t going to happen for very good reasons. ‘Relocation’ has proven an abysmal failure. Birth control (via contraceptive darts) appears to work only in areas with a static population such as islands. Friends of Animals estimates that half a million deer are killed each year in collisions with automobiles. Sadly, disease and starvation due to a lack of food – both products of overpopulation – are what currently thin herds. It is indeed time for fresh thinking on the subject.

In the end, it’s a problem of our own making – our own changing sensibilities along with the creation of suburban gardens that act as feeding station… aided and abetted by Walt Disney.

Stewards of the Land

The town of Medfield had several incarnations before it was a suburb of Boston. It was, however briefly, the straw hat capital of the world. It was an artists’ colony. It played a small but pivotal role in the King Philip War. Mostly, though, it was a farming community. The land upon which our home was built 14 years ago previously grazed sheep and was a working farm.

Around 1880, Boston’s growing affluence coupled with an excellent rail network created a new market opportunity for Medfield: ice. Farmers diverted streams to flood fields to a depth of six feet or less, then harvested ice in the winter, storing the ice in sawdust for use throughout the year. It was a good, niche business until the advent of year-round ice-making equipment in the second decade of the new century.

Danielson Pond, behind our home, began its existence as an ice pond. Sometime after 1880, a colony of snapping turtles (Cheldyra serpentina) made it their home. For a hundred years, the snappers lived in the pond, doing what turtles do. Each spring – in the last week of May – the pregnant females lumbered up the slope to high ground, climbed the farmers’ rock walls, and found a suitable place to lay a clutch of eggs. A few hours or a few days later, the turtles returned to their pond.

The building of our home and the creation of the gardens around it has been a transient event in the lives of these turtles – some of which are many decades old and have shells approaching two feet wide. Just as they learned to breach the farmers’ walls, so they have accommodated themselves to our home and garden.
Saturday morning, a turtle made her appearance on our front lawn. She was mid-sized – her shell was perhaps a foot wide indicating she was 15-20 years old – so she had made this trip many times before. She was investigating the perennial border along the sidewalk when we first encountered her. Directly in front of her was a mound of common Lady’s Mantle (Alchemilla mollis). To its right, an infestation of Japanese anemone we have been attempting, with limited success, to dislodge for years. To the turtle’s left, a carefully nurtured clump of Eupatorium chocolate that will be in its glory in late September.

We made the decision when we first encountered these snappers that we would do nothing to interfere with their egg-laying ritual. They will lay their eggs where nature dictates and, if it’s in the middle of the Eupatorium, so be it. There may two to three dozen one-inch-diameter eggs in a clutch laid in a shallow hole. Most will be immediately dug up by foxes or other foragers. Those which are not eaten will hatch in eighty days and must make a perilous trek past waiting predators which consider soft-shelled newborn turtles a delicacy. The literature suggests perhaps one turtle egg in a hundred makes it to become an adult.

Snappers may dig three or four holes before finding a satisfactory depository. The ‘dry holes’ remain excavated but uncovered, the final nest will be filled. We’ve identified as many as five nests on our property each year. It is our practice to mark the sites so as not to accidentally walk on or dig in the area. This year, we’re also top-dressing the nests with Milorganite – a fertilizer made from sewage that animals reportedly find repugnant. If we can improve the hatching percentage by a few points, so much the better.

We are stewards of our little chunk of land. While the pond may be the work of man, the turtles pre-date our occupancy by more than a century and it is our responsibility to accommodate ourselves to their nesting habits, not the other way around. One of our first acts as homeowners was to build a series of stone ‘ramps’ over the old farmers’ walls, the better to facilitate their migration. If our stewardship entails rehabilitating a few perennials or rock garden plants along the way, that’s a small price to pay.

The Slug and I

Last Tuesday morning, the Boston Globe reported something I already suspected: that eastern Massachusetts was on track to have its ‘dimmest’ June since record keeping began in 1885. According to the article, Boston and vicinity had, through June 22, received just 32% of the ‘available’ sunshine. In an average June, the region gets 55% of the possible sunshine between dawn and dusk. In June 1971, a record of 77% was set. (Also in that month, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers. Coincidence?) Until now, only 1903 was dimmer and, with a week of gloomy weather in the forecast, the record seemed certain to fall.

I do not know if we eclipsed the title, but I can state with some certainty that at least one record was set: I have never seen more slugs on my plants than I did in June. The slug population was off the charts.

I have learned that the common garden slug (Arion distinctus) is constantly with us, but usually as eggs. Charmingly, garden slugs are hermaphrodites, so any two slugs can get together, make whoopee, and play rock-scissors-paper for the right to lay a clutch of 15-30 eggs which lay dormant in the soil until it rains.

If you live in New England, you may remember that it rained in June. I can, personally, count on the fingers of one hand the number of hours in June when it did not rain. And, so, with cool temperatures and lots of moisture, the slugs hatched and came out to play. And to eat every plant in sight. By mid-June the slugs were fat, roly-poly things having feasted on the trays of annuals that were purchased in May with the expectation of planting beautiful, colorful containers.

My wife and I began looking for solutions. Being environmentally responsible sorts, we bypassed the Armageddon solutions at out local garden center. These pellets promised to Kill Slugs Fast, but cautioned in the fine print that they would also take with them to animal kingdom heaven ladybugs, earthworms, cats and dogs.

The Internet, that vast repository of wisdom, offered multiple ‘organic’ solutions to our slug problem. The first suggestion was to create a barrier of lava rock around the plants we wanted to protect. This probably works extremely well in Hawaii. It is of minimal utility in Massachusetts. There was also a tip that we could use lint from our clothes dryer as a deterrent. However, to be effective, we would need to add four ounces of vinegar to the final rinse water (I promise I am not making this up). Something called Quack Grass is reported to damage the nerves that slugs use for feeding. There was even a recipe for ‘Quack Grass Cake’ (corn bran, powdered milk, cornstarch, the aforementioned Quack Grass and 16 ounces of beer, beaten to a paste and run through a meat grinder). This seemed a somewhat promising lead until I Googled Quack Grass and got 134,000 hits, almost all of them in Q&A forums on gardening web sites asking, ‘Help! How do I get rid of the stuff?’

I decided that what we needed was not a deterrent, but a method of eliminating our garden pests, responsibly. One web site offered a list of predators. Rhode Island Red hens, the site said, are great slug hunters that eat every specimen of Arion distinctus they can get their beaks on. A nice idea, but our neighbors might object. Blackbirds, crows, ducks, jays, owls, robins, seagulls, starlings and thrushes are also known slug eaters. We have successfully encouraged all of the preceding (except seagulls) to visit our yard. But they do not appear to have developed a taste for our slugs. Perhaps they did not read that particular web site and get their dietary marching orders.

A further search yielded the tantalizing fact that there is a predatory nematode that has been demonstrated effective against slugs. Phasmarhabditas hermaphridita (hermaphrodite vs. hermaphrodite!) are being “mass reared” in England but are not yet sufficient in production to be used widely. Like some D-Day armada, they await the time when their numbers swell sufficiently, when they will likely be launched against the garden slugs of Normandy.

We decided it was time to stop reading Internet articles and start practicing Better Living Through Chemistry. Out came the trusty handbooks. Isopropyl alcohol works. Wonderful. It will also kill many of the plants to which it is applied. Next. Wormwood tea works. Great, but we don’t have any wormwood. Next. Ammonia works. It also burns tender leaves. Next. Quassia works. Wonderful. The nearest quassia trees are in Ecuador. Also available from your neighborhood herbalist at prices so staggering you can afford to replant your property when it stops raining. Next.

Iron phosphate. It kills on contact. It’s poisonous to slugs. It won’t harm plants if you use it sparingly. We looked for the downside. There wasn’t one. The slugs ingest the iron phosphate and lose the will to live. Where had this advice been hiding?

It must be that iron phosphate just isn’t glamorous enough. Wormwood tea, lava rock and Rhode Island Reds all have a certain folksy quality that sound authentic. Iron phosphate sounds… industrial. We found some. We applied it. A week later we had far fewer slugs.

We’ve dealt with the stragglers the old-fashioned way: we’ve removed them by hand, then applied shoe leather to slug.

There are Gardeners, and there are helpers

There are a handful of paintings that bring an instant smile to my face when I see them. They’re the kinds of painting where the artist has recognized some deeper truth about the objects before him (or her) and managed to convey that ‘something’ onto the canvas. One such painting is John Singer Sargent’s “Mrs. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes”, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Edith Minturn and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes were married in 1895, and one of the couple’s weddings gifts was of a portrait to be painted by Sargent. Sargent's first intention was to paint a single portrait of Edith during the summer of 1897 in Venice. After numerous posing and preparatory sessions, the artist decided to paint her as if she were just returning from a brisk walk outdoors, with a greyhound at her side. After Edith’s part of the portrait was finished, however, the greyhound was no longer available and I. N. Phelps Stokes suggested that he take its place. Sargent agreed, and the single portrait became a double portrait.

But, if it is a double portrait, it is one of the most lopsided ever done. Edith is radiant and forthright. It would not be an overstatement to say that she glows. Her husband, by contrast, is consigned to the shadows. Yes, he’s there, but he’s a stand-in for the greyhound. In another fifty years, I have no doubt that he will fade and the pentimento of a dog will take his place.

But the painting, in turn, captures the reality of the two. Both were from wealthy ‘reformist’ families. Edith threw herself into women’s suffrage and housing reform, among other noble causes. I.N. (he hated ‘Isaac Newton’) turned his attention to writing the definitive history of the City of New York – six volumes and over 7,000 pages. She was the sparkplug in the family, his role was to be supportive and to write large checks. Sargent saw it and captured it on canvas.

I was reminded of that portrait Sunday afternoon and evening as I attended a Master Gardener Open Garden. There are several hundred people in the Boston area who have gone through the Master Gardener program at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Several times each summer, a Master Gardener will open his or her garden to other Master Gardeners. These tend to be spectacular gardens, all them designed and tended by the homeowner rather than by some ‘name’ landscape designer.

Most Master Gardeners are women. Until this year, the courses were given all day, one day a week, which makes it difficult for anyone who worked full time to gain the accreditation. People who go through the same class tend to become friends.

There were probably thirty people at the garden in Quincy on Sunday afternoon and evening. Many Master Gardeners brought spouses. And, throughout that afternoon and evening, I could not help but be reminded of the Sargent portrait. The women – the Master Gardeners – were in charge. They talked of gardens and of plants. They dissected plant diseases and growing problems and evaluated landscaping choices. Their talks were animated and full of energy. They spoke for hours about their own plans for new beds and rare and unusual cultivars. Master Gardeners also get a heavy dose of environmental awareness as part of their studies and these women discussed organic and pesticide-free laws care and composting as though it were second nature.

The men… drank beer and ate guacamole. They were appendages in the spirit of Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes. They acknowledged readily that their responsibility is to dig holes and move plants when requested, and to be supportive, including the occasional writing of a large check.

The garden is stunning. It’s a quarter-acre lot with a 1930s-era house in the middle, but packed into that lot is enough landscaping for an estate. The lot slopes steeply making it possible to build multiple garden ‘rooms’ that are functionally invisible from one another. The owner - one of the rare male Master Gardeners - is a pharmacist by training who managed to become a Master Gardener in the same class as Betty by working extra shifts. Paul is also married and, in the true spirit of I. N. Phelps Stokes, his partner, John, says his contribution to the garden is to ‘suggest accessories’.

I never thought of myself as an I.N. Phelps Stokes but, being around those Master Gardeners and listening to them talk about plants and ecosystems as fervently as Edith Phelps Stokes surely talked about housing and universal suffrage, I knew how he felt. The best thing you can do is be supportive. Who knows, I may even write the next definitive history of something.