Posted onJanuary 19, 2023|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Panoptikon at Sons of Hermann Hall
Most of the time, attempting to show plants at a late-night event doesn’t work out well, It’s dark and often smoky (these days more due to fog than cigarettes), and the people most interested in carnivorous plants early on don’t want to break free to take their plants home and those interested later tend to get distracted. However, when the venue is the famed Panoptikon, newly revived at the equally famed Sons of Hermann Hall in Dallas’s Deep Ellum district, “most of the time” goes right out the window.
First things first, as fun as its original location was, the new Panoptikon locale is even easier to reach, from a vendor point of view. A few bugs need to be worked out with subsequent shows (namely, additional spot lighting), but it generally was a relaxing and friendly trip among both old friends and a lot of new attendees. The future of the Triffid Ranch is in doubt, but between here and the new locale for The Church, It Dallas’s goth community is in safe hands.
As to when the Triffid Ranch returns, that’s something that’s currently under consideration. Even after the gallery shuts down, the outdoor courtyard at Sons of Hermann Hall would be a great place to show off outdoor plants when the weather gets warmer, and the Panoptikon crew is always, ALWAYS, a joy to work with. Keep an eye open, because it could happen sooner than you think.
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Posted onFebruary 28, 2022|Comments Off on Gothic Gardening: “The Bugs You Don’t Expect”
(Background: this essay was one of several columns commissioned for the magazine Gothic Beauty between 2009 and 2011. Since the magazine hasn’t published a new issue in years, it’s time to drag up a few of these old columns so they can find a new readership.)
Dedicated to Steve Bissette, who helped me get on this odd path in the first place
Most typical garden books and sites include at least a thumbnail guide to beneficial and destructive animals that may visit, inhabit, or infest a garden area. After describing and illustrating the usual pests (whitefly, stink bugs, grubs) and the usual overly cutesy garden helpers (honeybees, earthworms), the typical garden writer is at a bit of a loss. This is a shame, because some of the ignored critters are the most interesting.
Let’s take a look at my new garden area, and note the animals that don’t make the usual “friends of the gardener” lists. I have lots of visiting birds, including both red-tailed hawks and Harris’s hawks that pick off overly unobservant mourning doves and bluejays. (I’d also like to mention that while years of Disneyfication of garden critters make hummingbirds out as “cute”, this comes from people who’ve never dealt with them. Hummingbirds have no fear of man, beast, or god, and there’s a very good reason why the Aztecs considered them avatars of their war and sun god Huitzilopochtli. I’ve seen hummingbirds challenge crows and hawks and win, and they’ll gleefully take on humans that get too close to their nests.) Besides praying mantises, there’s also the wheel bug (Arilus cristatus), a determined predator so named because it appears to have a watch gear jammed into its back. I have anoles (Anolis carolinensis) during the day that camp out on the trees in the back yard and flash their dewlaps at each other, and introduced Mediterranean geckos (Hemidactylus turcicus) that sing to each other all night. I have spiders and beetles and glowworms, grass and garter snakes, and any variety of natural decomposers such as worms and sowbugs. I’m not even going to start with the great horned, barn, and screech owls that buzz the house at night, or the plethora of Mexican free-tailed bats, or the great blue herons that fly over the neighborhood at dusk like misplaced pterosaurs.
The one set of regular travelers that are always welcome in my garden, though, are the ones that most gardeners try to drive off. Even the biggest advocates of organic gardening grab a swatter or a spray can when they see one of these, and they go berserk with rolled-up papers and brooms in pointless attempts to drive them away. Even mosquitoes only warrant repellent when their presence becomes too extreme, but any grocery store or garden shop has can after can of spray intended for my visitors, all promising to kill them dead from as much as 30 feet away. Not only is this an irrational response to one of the best beneficial organisms you can get in your garden, but it’s almost completely without merit. I’m talking about wasps.
Wasps are members of the insect order Hymenoptera, an order they share with their cousins (and possible descendants) the bees and ants. Wasps range in size from microscopic to the size of sparrows. Many species are social, such as hornets and yellowjackets, where they live in colonies of dozens or even hundreds of related individuals. Others are completely solitary. Both males and females subsist on nectar and other sugary liquids (the reason why wasps always show up around spilled fruit juice and soda), but only the female has a modified ovipositor that it can use as a sting for defense. Best of all, as far as the garden is concerned, most species are considered “parasitoid”, where they spend the first part of their life cycle feeding off a host. Each species of wasp has one particular host arthropod it uses as a host, and that list includes bees, flies, cicadas, spiders, tarantulas, and even praying mantises.
Social wasps, such as hornets and various species generally lumped together as “paper wasps”, capture small prey such as caterpillars, masticate them with strong mandibles, and then feed the mush to their young. As such, they’re very valuable predators. Others go through a much more fascinating and disturbing process. Many species fly to a host, lay eggs on or in the host, and then let the hatchlings feed upon the host’s body from within, ultimately killing it. Still others capture their prey, paralyze it with carefully measured stings, and return it to a bolthole or gallery. There, the mother lovingly places an egg in a particular location on or near the victim, seals up the space, and lets the youngster go through a complete metamorphosis from larva to pupa to adult.
Anyone studying wasps tends to use analogies from the Alien films to describe their reproductive behaviors: the larvae do feed on living hosts, and they emerge to metamorphose into beautiful and terrifying adults that capture new victims to continue the life cycle. It’s just that the fictional analogy is lacking compared to reality. For instance, picture a remake of Alien with Kane having three or four chestbursters ripping free, only to spend the next few weeks frantically guarding them as they pupated. The wasp genus Glyptapanteles does something much like this, where as many as eighty larvae emerge from one caterpillar and spin cocoons: the caterpillar remains by the cocoons and violently repels anything attempting to disturb them. Likewise, Aliens might have been even more horrifying if Apone and Dietrich had been stung in the head and then led willingly into the alien hive. The emerald cockroach wasp Ampulex compressa does just that to captured roaches. You have wasps that infest aphids, ones that capture big insects like cicadas and bury them in carefully dug galleries, and even make containers of mud and pack them full of paralyzed spiders. (For the record, the common mud dauber wasp Sceliphron caementarium is the main predator of black widow spiders.) The tarantula hawks, genus Pepsis and Hemipepsis, paralyze and take off with big ground spiders, hence the name, and one group even uses adult praying mantises as hosts. (In his book The Hunting Wasp, John Crompton compared this behavior to a mother deciding that the only food in the world good enough for her children was grizzly bear. Many times, the wasp loses the battle.)
The horror doesn’t stop there. Many other wasps parasitize the eggs of other arthropods, such as the nearly microscopic wasps that carefully drill into mantis egg cases and lay their own eggs therein. Other wasps modify the DNA of host organisms: the huge variety of plant galls are caused by wasp eggs that actually modify the surrounding tissue to form protective cases. Every time you eat a fig, you’re eating the end result of a very complex and disturbing life cycle involving the fig flower and one particular wasp, and if the wasp becomes extinct, so will the fig. Some wasps, such as the wingless ones known as velvet ants, live as cuckoos for other wasp species, laying their eggs on hunting wasp hosts and letting their young eat the hunting wasp eggs before they hatch.
Even without this, wasps are fascinating and underappreciated creatures. Fear of wasps is learned, usually due to parents who themselves were taught to fear wasps, usually way out of proportion to the actual pain of a sting. (I’m severely sensitive to bee stings, to the point of nearly needing hospitalization after one good bout as a beekeeper, and I’m amazed at how little a typical paper wasp sting actually hurts. For fun, look up the Justin O. Schmidt Pain Index for a useful and irreverent guide to the actual pain caused by many species.) While most wasps can be very territorial around nest sites, the allegedly aggressive flight patterns of many big wasps is actually caused by simple curiosity, and I’ve surprised friends and family by holding still, letting a wasp big enough to fly off with small birds make two or three passes around me, and then watching it buzz off once it’s satisfied that I wasn’t a threat. More often than not, individuals are stung in attempts to kill wasps, so the lesson is simple: DON’T TRY TO KILL THEM.
Like Gila monsters, Australian brown snakes, and snapping turtles, wasps have an insanely overwrought reputation for mayhem and menace. Stop for a second, put down the can of Raid, and watch wasps for a little while. I did the same a decade ago, and now anyone dumb enough to spray them in my yard is going to get more than angry wasps on their asses.
Reference
Shamefully, the literature on hunting wasps is very thin outside of scientific journals (even Carl Zimmer’s fascinating book Parasite Rex only contains a tiny bit on wasp parasitoid habits), and the two best available popular books are well over forty years old. That said, both are still fascinating reading.
The Hunting Wasps by Jean-Henri Fabre. 1919, Dodd, Mead, 432 pp. Although sadly neglected today, the French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre was an inspiration to entomologists throughout the early Twentieth Century for his careful observations of insect life. The Hunting Wasps goes into detail on Fabre’s firsthand excavations and experiments with both the wasps and their hosts. (If you read French, go for the original: the English translation is exceptional, but I understand it’s still missing much of Fabre’s passion and humor.)
The Hunting Wasp by John Crompton. Lyons Press, 255 pp., ISBN 978-0941130493 At times both irascible and awed, John Crompton’s 1955 book is still without peer on the subject of hunting wasps. Very much written as a popular account, it may be outdated purely due to scientific advances, but it still rates as one of the best books on wasps ever written.
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Posted onMay 7, 2020|Comments Off on Gothic Gardening: Getting the Lay of the Land
(Background: this essay was one of several columns commissioned for the magazine Gothic Beauty between 2009 and 2011. Since the magazine hasn’t published a new issue in years, it’s time to drag up a few of these old columns so they can find a new readership.)
Previously published in Gothic Beauty #28
Just for a second, think about the two words “gothic gardening.” Just for a second. Did you get images of an overgrown cemetery or abandoned park, festooned with creepers and dead branches? Do you have images of an herb garden where everything therein is medicinal or poisonous? How about antique Wardian cases full of ferns, club mosses, and other antediluvian remnants of past life? A pond overrun with water lilies amidst a half-sunken fountain? Statuary and gravestones? Topiaries? A greenhouse full of orchids and Borneo pitcher plants? Roses? Lilies? Angel trumpets and moonflowers? Nightshade and privet, or Venus flytraps and butterworts? Stark white marble ground cover to reflect the full moon, or narrow pathways between pumpkin patches and rosemary bushes?
Yes, you can see the problem. No matter how inclusive one wants to get, any definition of what constitutes gothic gardening depends upon individual tastes, attitudes, climate and soil restrictions, and available free time. Someone with independent wealth and time could reconstruct a scale Neolithic monolith site and festoon the area with raspberry bushes, but it’s no more or no less valid than the apartment dweller with a Vanda orchid that encircles a compact fluorescent fixture. Just as how gothic fashion has plenty of room for variation and experimentation, gothic gardening offers plenty of opportunities to explore the darker side of horticulture.
Since we could argue all day about the particulars of gothic gardening, let’s start with a basic assumptive definition. For our purposes, gothic gardening is any gardening style that emphasizes entropy, or at least more chaos than what’s normally found in a controlled garden area. Japanese gardens tend to emphasize the natural while subtly emphasizing the harmony of the scene: gothic gardening should emphasize the slightly unnatural, distorted, or disturbing. Good gothic gardens are beautiful, yes, but they should also be subtly uncomfortable.
One of the great ironies of gothic gardening is that it requires the heliophobic to acknowledge the sun. Without access to lanterns, there will be times where peeking out at the yellow hurty thing in the sky is unavoidable. Speaking as someone who does a very good impersonation of Bill Paxton from the film Near Dark when exposed to direct sunlight, I suggest three options for the seriously sun-sensitive: raise shade-loving plants underneath mature trees or along high walls, plant to do all of your work at dusk and dawn, or work indoors. Greenhouses are perfect for this, as both glass and most plastic greenhouse glazings absorb ultraviolet light, thereby protecting the contents of the greenhouse from the worst of the sun’s wrath. Likewise, many fascinating plants can be raised in sunny windowsills and removed at night in order to appreciate them, and many orchid and fern enthusiasts bring plants out for display in common areas well away from windows, returning them to the window before they wilt or fade and replacing them with fresh plants. If worse comes to worst, while the term “terrarium” invokes cheesy grade-school accumulations of plants in old mayonaisse jars, the art is staging a comeback thanks to improvements in enclosures, lighting, and varieties of plant available.
The first question that should always be asked when embarking on any gardening project, even more than “Do I have the time to do this right?”, is “What do I want to accomplish?” That may be a stumper for a while, but take your time. Think about it for a while. Look at your available area, and feel free to abandon the usual Better Homes & Gardens gibberish. Some of the best gardens I’ve ever seen used back spaces behind former industrial sites to produce an impressive combination of post-apocalyptic and lost civilization motifs. Don’t worry about having to spend a lot to get your dream garden, either: some of those after-The-Bomb gardens cost less than $50 to pull off.
When considering what you want to accomplish, let’s start with a few possibilities:
Utility: Is this a garden purely for your pleasure, or is it going to have to earn its living? Are you wanting a cooking and medicinal herb garden? How about garden for producing floral extracts, such as roses or lavender? Do you live in a locale where you can grow exotic fruits and vegetables outdoors, or will these need to stay indoors for most of the year? Do you want plants that provide habitat and feeding areas for your favorite animals (owls, lizards, opossums), or do you want vines and spines to keep everybody out?
Variety: Do particular plants draw you more than others? Are antique and graveyard roses a particular passion, or are orchids more your speed? Do you want a bog garden full of carnivorous plants and bog orchids, or do you want a craggy rock garden? Which works better for you: bamboo, cactus, or moss?
Features: Does your area have a particular aspect, such as a pond or a perpetually shady space, that automatically draws the eye? A fence that needs covering, or a window that needs enhancement? Is the area so overgrown and rugged that it may require everything to be razed and replanted, or is it so bare that anything would be an improvement? Do you already have stone, statuary, or water features that only need accents, or will you have to bring them in from elsewhere? Do you really want a Japanese garden, or do you only want to steal some of the techniques and take them somewhere new?
Seasonality: Let’s face it. What looks spectacular in the middle of summer is going to look threadbare or neglected in winter, and vice versa. Do you want a garden that only reaches its peak for two or three months, or one that continues to show new aspects of its personality all year round?
Time: Most gardening guides presume that we gardeners have nothing but free time to keep working on improving our sites. Realistically, though, most of us have real jobs (and those who don’t can stop flaunting it, thank you very much), so the only time available for improvements are weekends and the occasional holiday off from work. Do you want flora that look impressive but require a lot of babying, especially if it’s not quite appropriate for the area? Or do you want nearly indestructible plants that only need to be planted and established and they do the rest of the work for themselves?
Think about these for a little while, and consider the below references for guidelines. The important thing to remember is that gardening is supposed to be enjoyable: if you aren’t getting pleasure from the experience, you probably need to go in a new direction.
Plantwatching: How Plants Live Feel and Work by Malcolm Wilkins (McMillan, 1988, ISBN 0-333-44503-1). More of a general guide to the plant kingdom than anything else, Plantwatching goes into the details of plant physiology and what distinguishes different orders of plant from each other. It’s much more readable than a standard botany textbook, and it goes into quite a bit of detail on oddball varieties neglected in a world of carnations and hostas.
You Grow Girl by Gayla Trail (Fireside, 2005, ISBN 0-7432-7014-2). An extension of the famed www.yougrowgirl.com site, this is pretty much THE guide for urban gardening of all sorts, and it gives tips on everything from tips on propagating seed to making your own garden gear. The highest compliment I can pay to this book is that I snag every copy I can find from used bookstores and give them to friends for birthday gifts. Anyone at a loss with what to do with their back yard or apartment balcony needs a copy on the bookshelf.
Gardens of Obsession: Eccentric and Extravagant Visions by Gordon Taylor and Guy Cooper (Seven Dials, Cassell & Co., 2000, ISBN 1841880930). Making basic decisions about what to do with your garden depend sometimes on seeing what others have done with theirs, and Gardens of Obsession catalogues particularly bizarre or fascinating gardens around the world. Any book that catalogues Portmeirion in Wales (the shooting location for the Sixties-era television series The Prisoner) and notes its horticultural wealth is particularly deserving of attention.
Gardens of New Orleans: Exquisite Excess by Lake Douglas and Jeannette Hardy (Chronicle Books, 2001, ISBN 0-8118-2421-7). Sometimes it’s easy to become overwhelmed with all of the garden accoutrements and styles, and a new perspective is needed. This book is heartbreaking when you realize that almost all of the gardens described therein were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, but it’s also affirming in that most of these were done with little or no money in the first place, and that the people of New Orleans are building new gardens to replace what had been lost in the hurricane. The next time you tell yourself “I can’t afford to do this,” tale a look at the gardens of the Ninth Ward and understand that it’s the drive, not the money, that makes a memorable garden.
“Sidenote: The Starter”
It’s the universal question faced by anyone wanting to start gardening. “But what should I get that I won’t kill?” That’s one of the best questions you can ask, and it’s one of the hardest to answer.
One of the reasons why it’s so hard to answer is that short of sending someone to your house or garden and evaluating soil conditions, light, temperature, and the likelihood that you’ll have the time to keep up with your new charges, there’s no telling for sure. Those with more knowledge may give recommendations based on their own experiences, but advice on plants that do their best in Miami is almost worthless to Seattle gardeners.
This gets particularly touchy when it comes to intrusive species, which are plants and animals that grow out of control when introduced to new areas where they face no competition. The more famous intrusive include the mongoose and coqui frog in Hawaii and the cane toad in Queensland, but plant intrusive can be even more damaging or dangerous. For instance, Bermudagrass is one of the only varieties of lawn grass that can survive a typical Dallas summer, but it’s such a tenacious intrusive that deliberately bringing it elsewhere outside of its range is justification for fines, imprisonment, and the occasional savage beating by Customs and agriculture officials. Before bringing in something new, check with your local agricultural division or ministry and ask if the plant you just fell in love with is the local Public Enemy Number One. They’ll thank you later.
That said, picking a good starter plant for someone unsure about gardening ability spreads throughout the plant kingdom, and discussing the perfect starter plant among serious horticulture enthusiasts is a great way to turn a party into a recreation of the end of an Akira Kurosawa and/or George Romero film. However, I can make one really good suggestion as a place to start, because it’s where I started.
The genus Kalanchoe is a member of the crassula family, which includes the suitably alien jade plant Crassula ovata, and includes about 125 species in various stages of cultivation. The kalanchoes have the advantage of being very tough: besides being succulents, they thrive in poor soils and with lots of benign neglect, and they’re extremely easy to propagate. I currently have a community grown from a single broken leaf I scavenged from an old office, and K. daigremoniana is known as “Mother of Thousands” and “Pregnant Plant” because it grows new shoots from serrations in its leaves. Most only need watering once per month and low levels of fertilizer, thrive under standard morning or evening sun, grow in standard pots without issue, and produce spectacular blooms. They also grow in any number of disturbing forms, and many can be shaped, very gently, into bonsai, Under the right conditions, the question won’t be “Can I keep my plant alive?”, but instead “Do I have any friends who want to take my surplus?”
WARNING: many kalanchoes are toxic in leaves or stems, although some varieties are used in their native habitats to treat medical maladies. For this reason, research your species or variety for possible poisoning issues with pets and children.
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