“It’s a beautiful morning, ah
I think I’ll go outside for a while
And just smile.”—Felix Cavaliere/ Edward Brigati
In the early morning I leave the house through the door on the east side where big old oak trees line the road. Later in the season they will drop hard acorns, but now, in full summer, they are shedding seemingly weightless small globes, the husks of the oak gall wasp, beautiful spheres, smaller than a ping pong ball, with an important connection to humans. In 23 A.D. Pliny the Elder wrote a recipe for making ink from oak galls involving iron sulfate, gum Arabic, and the soaked galls. Through the centuries oak gall ink was the main source of writing fluid in the Western world. The Magna Carta, Beowulf, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights were written with ink made from these little spheres of a wasp.
As I continue to my garden, sometimes stepping on and popping a gall, I pass a big, bold plant by the house. A dense shrub-like mass of foliage is topped by a froth of creamy white flowers on Persicaria polymorpha, the white fleece flower. Piet Oudolf deemed it “staggeringly beautiful.” It is a terrific anchor for the back of a border or a stand out by itself.
I head down a well worn path to my lower gardens. First I come to my abandoned beds that I first planted 48 years ago. Clumps of Persicaria amplexicaulis, mountain fleece, a native of the Himalayas, peek through the fence. Spikes of rosy pink flowers bloom from July until the frost stops them. Again Piet Oudolf sings the praises of a member of this knotweed family, claiming “this ranks among the very best garden plants…strong as an ox, it will grow almost anywhere.”
A nightmarish cousin of the Persicarias, maybe stronger than an ox, has shown up on the nearby hillside a couple times. Polyonum cuspidatum aka Fallopia japonica aka Reynoutria japonica is the dreaded Japanese knotweed and must have blown in on the wind or been deposited in bird droppings. I think that I have eradicated it but time will tell.
Philip Franz Von Siebold worked for the Dutch East India company, stationed near Nagasaki, Japan. He collected a specimen of this knotweed on the side of a Japanese volcano and brought it back to Europe. In 1850 he donated a plant to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in London. The handsome plant became a popular garden perennial. Now it is the most invasive plant on earth. It is spreading in all but eight U.S. states, all but two Canadian provinces, and throughout Europe. In England some banks refuse to lend money for property infested with this plant. It’s roots reach ten feet deep and a fragment of root from mown plants reroots easily. Looked at objectively it is a handsome plant but seeing it overpowering roadsides makes me cringe.
Into my main garden where I grow another Persicaria, the well-behaved P.orientale. Thomas Jefferson grew this annual at Monticello and called it prince’s feather. Others gave it the sexier name of kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate. Growing to over six feet tall, on a slender stalk, with pendulous clusters of pink flowers, this is stunning grown with other tall bloomers such as cleome or Verbena bonariensis. Plant it once and you will have seedlings every spring. Wayne Winterrowd stated that they should be grown “for their height, endearingly awkward grace, and vivid flowers.” One drawback for this beauty is that Japanese beetles love it, but it can be used as a magnet to collect them.
I often return back to the house by a different route, up steep stone steps, bordered by some cultivated plants and a lot of wildings. Milkweed, feverfew, goldenrod grow amidst campanulas, verbascum, and another Persicaria amplexicaulis, this one with white flowers. And I return to the oak galls and gather a few to admire their beauty and history and think that so much writing has been made possible by a wasp and an oak tree!
“It’s a beautiful morning”
August 2022