Gifts for Gardeners 2009: A glove to love

The Ethel Traditional 'Signature' glove

The English language is about to change. No more “iron hand in the velvet glove”; from now on it’s “the iron hand in the Ethel glove”.

The new Ethel garden gloves for women are a sleek and comfy combination of Spandex fabric with synthetic suede palms, fingers and fingertips. Designed for a narrow hand, they fit me snugly. When in doubt, size up.

Ethel gloves come in more than nine patterns. My Ethel Traditional gloves with a two-inch cuff are ‘Signature’: dark brown with orange accents that look oh-so-Hermès and make me feel like a Parisian gardener swanning down the Rue du Faubourg Sainte-Honoré. They don’t show the red Nevada County dirt either.

How do these compare to Atlas gloves? The stretchy nylon part of Ethel is a bit softer inside than Atlas, and the synthetic suede fingers of Ethel have a much more appealing feel and a tighter fit.

For a regular garden day like today (raking, picking volunteer mushrooms before the dog gets them, scooping up gooky persimmons that fell during the storm) I choose Ethel. A muddy job--I’d go with Atlas.

The Ethel Rose glove

There’s another model in the Ethel line, the ultra-long-cuff Rose gloves. I’m sad to say they don’t work well in a rose bush. They’re fine on the way into the bush, but on the way out the thorns catch the gauntlet cuff. I hope these will be redesigned with the cuff made in synthetic suede. The current version works well with plants that have sharp edges but no thorns, like pampas grass. And my, they’re pretty.

Ethel gloves feel good, allow great dexterity and are fun to wear. I know they’ll give me that extra boost to get out in the garden on those mornings when I’m wavering. They machine wash and drip dry with no trouble at all.

Ethel Traditional gloves come in so many fabric patterns and it’s hard to pick just one. At least I know what to ask for as presents. Hustle on down to your garden center and buy some for the gardener on your shopping list or visit the fun Ethel website.

I received two complimentary pairs of gloves from Ethel Gloves, for trial and review. Actually they look nice together, so they are complementary as well.

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Gifts for Gardeners 2009: All wrapped up

Dianne Benson's Garden Gift Bag

Uh oh. It's the third night of Hanukkah and only 11 more shopping days until Christmas. Time to get cracking.

Luckily for you I have culled through the new garden merchandise and books for 2009 and have a list of five sure-fire gift ideas, one coming each day this week.

Was your favorite gardener extra good this year?

The luxe gift is this wears-like-iron Yard Bag, chock full of items to make a gardener gasp with joy:

*Japanese clippers

*English twine

*Fabled plant markers and magic pencil

*And what she calls the ultimate trowel--all chosen and packed up for you by Dianne Benson, one of the most famous gardeners in America.

A holiday discount takes the price down to $95. That includes gift wrap and a hand-written card.

For more on Dianne Benson check out the intro to her online gardening store and her suggestions on the best dramatic plants for Sacramento and Sierra Nevada foothills gardeners.

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The dangers of garden literature

1911 edition, illustrated by Troy Howell

Frances Hodgson Burnett has a lot to answer for.

Her children's book, The Secret Garden, may be the best gardening story since Genesis, and it hypnotized me into a lifelong penchant for climbing ivy and a general yen for the overgrown look. Little did I know the price I would have to pay....

We have a tall, wooden gate in a little-visited corner of our garden. We built it ourselves 12 years ago, and you can imagine how my heart rejoiced when I saw ivy from the next-door neighbors staking a claim to our disconcertingly bare gate.

The years passed, and the ivy did what ivy does, and soon the gate was a solid mass of green leaves. It really did present the most charming appearance, provoking our plumber, on a recent circumnavigation of the house, to exclaim as he wrenched the gate open, "It's just like The Secret Garden!" Music to the ears of this Burnett-obsessed gardener.

Yesterday, though, verdant impressions notwithstanding, a visiting contractor pointed out the shakiness of the gate posts and offered to repair them.

The ivy had both hidden and exacerbated the weakness of the gate and the adjacent fence.

Bitterness coursed through me as I wrested the tangled mat of ivy from the gate and fence.

What a fool I was, I thought, as my Felco pruners flashed through the vines, to be taken in by such a book. It's one thing to fall for that stuff when you live in a land of 19th-century, brick-walled gardens, and quite another when you live in California. Look where my repeated readings of Burnett have got me. Now I'll have to pay good, garden-writing-earned money to repair the damage wrought by English ivy.

Ironic? Certainly. But do I really have to abandon the gardening tastes of a lifetime, go all Modernist and start planting phormiums?

It remains to be seen. In the meantime, there is one vow I can make.

I renounce Frances Hodgson Burnett and all her works.

For at least a month.

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Mower

A guest post from award-winning poet, essayist, and radio presenter, Molly Fisk. Molly gardens in Nevada City, California. Her beguiling radio essays are broadcast on KVMR-FM and collected on two CDs, Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace and Blow-Drying a Chicken.

I once took an essay-writing workshop from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Adair Lara. She said that if your readers don't like you, you're sunk, and therefore some subjects just don't work, like being a size 6, or having an entourage.

Well, God knows I'm not a size 6, and my entourage is feline, which doesn't count, but I did win a prize the other day. Before you write me off, though, let me add that it was a poetry prize, and therefore marginal - along the lines of winning a spelling bee in Latvian or a recipe contest using only plums and Velveeta. Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled. But it's not something to dislike me for.

Adair also said that the fastest way into readers' hearts is to admit something embarrassing about yourself. Which brings me to the subject of riding lawn mowers.

Last summer, trying to cope with almost an acre of long grass, I bought a ride mower. I wanted to call it a tractor, which has a charming, Wendell Berry-like, rural cachet, but it was just a totally suburban ride mower. For an amazingly long time I was able to Tom-Sawyer other people into riding this thing. But yesterday the grass was knee-high and no gullible friends were around to save me.

      

Since the operating instructions were printed on the fender, I was able to turn the darn thing on and drive it around in circles quite successfully. I even figured out how to engage the blade so actual mowing took place. I tootled along, cutting a wide swath, as they say, until most of the grass was cut. There was just this one little inconvenient hill I had been avoiding, where I had to disobey the instructions and mow from side to side instead of uphill and down, due to three maple trees and the septic tank.

The first two passes across this hill were terrifying but accomplished without incident. Travelling at about the speed of grass growing, my non-size-6 person listing perilously to starboard, I made the final approach.

You think I fell off, don't you? Well, I didn't. I would never fall off a ride mower. Instead, there was a small cracking sound and the steering wheel came off in my hands. Unphased by this development, the mower kept going, heading straight for the largest maple.

That was when, with the speed and agility of a bareback stunt rider, I swung one leg over the saddle and slid gracefully to the ground (still gripping the wheel). No, I didn't break anything, and the mower cleverly stopped all by itself. With regal dignity, I jammed the steering wheel back on its column and walked up to the house.

 The mower is still out on the lawn. It looks kind of sweet there, red body, black tires, against the green of the grass. Since I'm never going to touch it again, I'm thinking of planting some petunias around the base and calling it yard art.

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Watering

At the Fountain, c. 1890, Theodore Robinson* (1852-1896)

Watering is not my favorite garden job.

I can never make it through unscathed. A simple procedure, such as moving the oscillating sprinkler into the center of the blue perennial border, will seem to be going well--when suddenly the hose arcs and strikes my shins, leaving a swath of mud on my pants just above the tops of my rubber boots.

I'm not as dumb as I look, and I finally realized there wasn't any point in doing "just a little bit" of morning watering in clothes I planned to wear into the world. It's one thing to visit Prospectors Nursery bedecked in mud, but agrarian-chic hasn't caught on in other venues.

Nevada County dirt is red and indelible. I'm an excellent laundress, but am defeated by local mud stains, so a new streak of mud is a sadly permanent addition to my wardrobe.

Pass me my watering can instead of a hose, though, and I'm as happy as a child with a favorite toy. I have an old-fashioned Haws galvanized-steel watering can, and using it makes me feel like the girl in the painting.

Time out from the 21st century. Time out from worrying about droughts or global warming. I'm focusing on the fine waterfall from the rose at the tip of the spout, concentrating on the balance of the can in my hand, admiring the plant I'm watering, and remembering why I chose it. Often a butterfly wafts past. The can is wet and I get a swipe of red mud on my pants. That's fine. Nothing can break my mood.

Watering is my favorite garden job--when I have a metal can in my hand.

*Theodore Robinson, an American Impressionist, lived next door to his friend Claude Monet in Giverny, France. This painting is in the collection of The Arkell Museum, Canajoharie, New York.

© Daffodil Planter 2009. All rights reserved.

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Feelin' Fine With Felco?

Are Felco pruners really the Ferrari for the fortunate few? 

I followed the writings of the Felco fans and became firmly convinced that my garden would fail without the fantastic Felco bypass action. Febrile fantasies formed in my mind, and fomented a fixation on fire engine red shears--the Felco Number 6 model (for a fine-boned hand) was my final pick.

What's your opinion on Felco? Do you have fulsome praise for fundamentally sound secateurs? Or do you think the hype is a lot of fancy phrases for foolish flower gardeners?

The Felco forum will run here for a few days; your factual and philosophical feedback is fervently desired!