NASTURTIUMS

“Tis said, in summer’s evening hour

Flashes the golden-colour’d flower. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In 1762 Elizabeth, the nineteen year old daughter of Carl Linnaeus, noticed that as the evening light faded the orange and yellow nasturtium flowers flashed and sparked. She was so impressed that she wrote and published an article, “On the Twinkling of Indian Cress” and the “Elizabeth Linnaeus Phenomenon “ was born. Darwin and Emerson were inspired by her insights, while Coleridge incorporated the above lines in a poem for his future wife.

Indian cress or monk’s cress, as well as nasturtium, are common names for Tropaeolum minus, which have a mounded form, and T.majus, which are trailing. Nasturtiums are indigenous to the mountains of Peru where the Incas used them for food and medicine. In the sixteenth century seeds were brought back to Spain by the conquistadors and the plants quickly became popular in Europe as a food and an ornamental. They were grown in the royal gardens of Versailles, and by peasant who ate the leaves. In the United States they were grown at George Washington’s Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, where he listed them as a fruit and pickled the seeds. Emily Dickinson grew masses of nasturtiums. And it seems Winnie-the-Pooh did as well, although he thought otherwise. “‘Christopher Robin gave me a mastershalum seed, and I planted it and I’m going to have mastershalums all over the front door!’ ‘I thought they were called nasturtium,’ said Piglet timidly, as he went on jumping. ‘No’, said Pooh, ‘Not these. These are called mastershalums.’

There are two spectacular gardens where trailing nasturtiums play starring roles: Claude Monet’s in Giverny, France, and, closer to home, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s in Boston.

In 1883 Claude Monet, the impressionist painter, was looking for a new home, spotted the village of Giverny from a train, got off, and found a home where he spent half his life and created a garden that inspired many masterpieces. From the green door of the pink house is a wide pathway spanned by arched rose trellises and flower borders. By summertime trailing nasturtiums spill out of the borders to meet in the middle of the path. It is a completely impractical and a completely inspired and stunning use of nasturtiums, creating waves of foliage capped with colorful blooms.

In 1904, in Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner inaugurated a tradition to celebrate spring, Easter, and her April birthday. In the courtyard of her mansion, from the third floor balconies, orange flowered nasturtiums were planted in pots and placed to dangle over the edge. Today the annual celebration continues. Seeds planted in June are grown and trained and coddled until the following April when twenty foot long vines are carefully borne by twenty gardeners and draped from the balconies. It is another fantastic use of nasturtiums. The show lasts for three weeks.

Back in France, my mother-in-law has a small, charming backyard garden where she always grows nasturtiums, or les capucines, as the French call them, a name referring to the hooded flowers similar to those of Capuchin monks. (Those monks also gave their name to the capuchin monkey; my favorite coffee, the cappuccino; and Capucine, a French actress in the Pink Panther movies). There is also a children’s song, “Dansons La Capucine”, whose lyrics lament the lack of bread and wine in the house while the neighbors had plenty but ends by saying we have happiness in our house and the neighbors are crying. Hmm.

I plant a lot of nasturtiums in my garden. By mid-summer I have the beautiful Monet dilemma; the trailers block the paths. Trailing nasturtium varieties include ‘Empress of India’ with dark blue green foliage and scarlet blooms, ‘Moonlight’ with creamy yellow flowers, and ‘Milkmaid’ with white ones. ‘Alaska Mix’ produces a mounded plant with leaves of green and white, like a tie-dyed lily pad. The flowers of ‘Phoenix’ have looser, split petals in fiery colors, like the mythological bird arising from the ashes. All parts of these beauties are edible and this year I resolve to pickle some seeds, like Thomas Jefferson, to make what are called ‘the poor man’s capers’.

Tropaeolum peregrinum, or the canary flower vine, is another species that I have grown. This is a vine to grow on a climbing structure. It has lobed foliage with bright yellow blooms resembling little birds. Another vine, T.tuberosum, is grown as a food crop in the Andes Mountains, producing potato-like tubers called mashua. It also has striking orange and yellow blooms, a bit smaller and denser than our garden nasturtium. Christopher Lloyd claimed, “There’s no more rewarding nasturtium than this.” Another new plant to try this coming year.

I write these words on the shortest day of the year. In the darkness and cold of winter; in this dark and uneasy world, remembering the jewels of nasturtiums is a comfort and the thought of planting again is even better. Isabella Stewart Gardner was a fellow lover of nasturtiums. In a letter to her friend Bernard Berenson she wrote words that inspire me to dream of a new gardening year. “My garden is riotous, unholy, deliriously glorious! I wish you were here.”

Soon.

January 2022