A Potpourri of Miscellany

I know my title is redundant. Potpourri and miscellany both mean a collection of various, usually incongruous things. But that’s what this Journal will be – a hodgepodge, salmagundi, jumble of the things I thought, wished, and did during the week. Those are all great words. I like how they sound when I say them – potpourri, hodgepodge, salmagundi, jumble, miscellany. They each can mean the same sort of thing, but some of them also mean something different. A potpourri can also be a mixture of fragrant dried flowers. A salmagundi can be a salad of mixed ingredients. A hodgepodge and a jumble can be any mixture of dissimilar things. In other words, this journal will be a mess.

It isn’t officially spring yet, but so far March has behaved as if it is. All week the temperatures were mild and springlike. We had rain, but no snow, cold nights, but just one morning frost on Friday. And with all of that, nature responded quickly with new life rising from the earth. The snowdrops reached their peak. The yellow crocuses began to bloom and the other colors are not far behind them. The first of the delicate iris reticulata opened. The buds on the trees are swelling. The rhubarb is pushing up its knobby red leaf buds. On Monday the first robins and bluebirds arrived in our yard. The red-winged blackbirds are in full voice in the mornings. In our little lily pond, the big bullfrog tadpoles have emerged from their sleep in the mud. We’re waiting to hear the first peepers. It will happen soon.

Some of my yellow crocuses.

The first of the purple crocuses.

The first of the iris reticulata.

Snowdrops in the woodland garden.

Rhubarb rising.

On Monday and Tuesday as soon as I got home from school, I went straight to work in the garden – and I worked in shirt sleeves for the first time this year. It felt so good. Wednesday it rained all day and on Thursday the weather cleared, but it was too soggy to do anything. I didn’t mind that. It gave my winter weakened muscles a few days to recover after two days of unaccustomed exertion. Friday after school I puttered around in the garden a bit. Then the rain returned on Saturday. We’ve come to the season of mud.

Now, as the gardening season gets underway, when I’m plotting out what to plant where in my flowerbeds, I find myself pondering on my Fantasy Fragrance Garden. Football fans have their Fantasy Football Teams. I have my Fantasy Fragrance Garden. I love flowers. I love all sorts of them – the simple, the complex, the subtly colored ones, the flamboyantly colored ones. But most of all, I love fragrant flowers.

Over the years in my encounters with gardens around the world and through my own gardening experiences, I have created a list of plants – flowers, shrubs, and trees, that I would, in a perfect world, put together in a perfect fragrance garden. The list began long ago with plants I discovered in the very first gardens I grew, things like roses, sweet peas, four o’clocks, violets, and jonquils. Over the years I added more and more flowers – lilacs, mock orange, pinks, stocks, petunias, snapdragons. Some flowers I discovered by reading descriptions in catalogs or by encountering them in other peoples’ gardens. Their scents attracted me and I grew them, if I could, and added them to my list.

Some of the more exotic plants on my list I added while I was in Japan. That is where I first encountered Gardenias (Gardenia jasminoides), Sweet Olive (Osmanthus fragrans), Wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox), and Japanese Apricot (Prunus mume). The gardenias I discovered growing against a low stone wall outside a pretty garden on a hill high above Osaka. Like many of the plants on my list, I smelled them before I saw them. It was a warm summer evening and we were riding our bikes on our way to meet with a family. The scent made me stop. My companion didn’t know what I was doing, suddenly stopping and looking around like I’d lost something, maybe my mind. I followed the fragrance across the road to the wall where they were blooming, small dark green leafed bushes full of single white flowers and that rich sweet perfume filling the air. There was an old man sitting in the garden on the other side of the wall and I asked him what they were. He told me they were called kuchinashi. I looked the word up in my trusty dictionary and became acquainted with gardenias.

Kuchinashi, gardenia.

On another day in the fall, while riding my bike through a very pretty neighborhood in Kawanishi, I again smelled something wonderful and, following my nose, came to a hedge filled with tiny orange flowers. The fragrance was soft and fruity and intense. I picked a sprig of it and carried it to the old lady who ran our train station at Uguisunomori Eki. (She doted on us missionaries. We called her the eki obaachan, the station grandma. She always had Japanese treats for us.) She told me it was called kinmokusei and that they used it to perfume tea. That was when I fell in love with Sweet Olive, osmanthus.

Kinmokusei, osmanthus.

Wintersweet and Japanese apricot both bloom at the end of winter and during the very first days of spring when nothing else is in flower. The first wintersweet I found was in February growing along the road by the side of a river, not in anyone’s garden. The waxy yellow flowers blooming on the bare branches of a scraggily bush were not much to look at, but the fragrance almost made me swoon. I picked some and took them to church with me where I was told they are called rōbai.

Rōbai, wintersweet.

And the Japanese apricot I discovered one morning when a sweet aroma filled the apartment where I was living. Upon investigating, I found that the little bonsai plant on the bookshelf at the back of the room, left there by a missionary who had transferred out and didn’t want to take it with him, was covered in pale pink flowers that smelled like heaven. I thought the plant was dead and hadn’t paid any attention to it until then. It was lovely. I wished I could have taken it with me and brought it home to the states, but that wasn’t possible. Instead, I added mume to my list.

Mume.

I’ve tried to grow some of those plants that I fell in love with in Japan. I have a potted osmanthus bush that I’ve been babying for years, waiting for it bloom. I set it out during the summer and bring it in during the winter. It hasn’t bloomed yet, but I hope it will delight us one of these years. I tried to grow a mume bonsai. It grew well for a year, bloomed once, and then died. I’ve grown gardenias in pots, but never had one survive for long. Wintersweet is too big to grow in pots and too tender to grow outdoors here.

Some of the plants on my list I discovered while I lived in California. I don’t remember when I first encountered daphne (Daphne odora). It was probably in one of the gardens I liked to visit there, maybe Descanso Gardens or the Huntington Library. It is one of the floral fragrances I love the most. Shortly after we moved here, I planted one. Some varieties are hardy to zone 5, which the USDA says we are here, but really we live in a microclimate that is more like zone 4. I decided to risk it. I planted it in the long border by the path where it would be accessible. Daphnes are notoriously fussy. I knew that and I fussed over it. In the fall I wrapped it in burlap and covered it with a glass box, its own mini greenhouse, to shelter it during the winter. It grew for five years and bloomed in the early spring and it was wonderful. Then it grew too large to fit in the glass box and I trimmed it to try and make it fit. It seemed okay, but the next spring, it was dead. I was so sad. I haven’t tried to grow another one. Maybe next year I’ll try again.

Daphne.

I do remember my first encounter with Night-blooming Jasmine (Cestrum nocturnum). I bought one at a local nursery and planted it in my parents’ garden in Sylmar, California. It didn’t look like much when I planted it, just green leaves, nothing exceptional, and I forgot about it. Then one evening, while working in the garden there, I smelled a wonderful fragrance. I investigated and there it was, covered in little nondescript yellowish flowers that smelled intoxicating. Several years ago, while visiting Sarah and Tosh in Toledo, we went to the fantastic nursery they have there and they had little potted night-blooming jasmine plants. I bought one and brought it home. I’ve had it for three years now. It grows in a large pot. I put it out in the summer and bring it indoors during the winter and several times during the summer it blooms and fills the air with its perfume.

Sitting here and writing about these flowers, I can conjure their fragrances in my mind and each brings back a memory. The sense of smell is strongly linked to memory and emotion. I checked some sites online to try and understand why this is so and found a good explanation at BrainFacts.org:

“Smell begins at the back of the nose, where millions of sensory neurons lie in a strip of tissue called the olfactory epithelium. The tips of these cells contain proteins called receptors that bind odor molecules. The receptors are like locks and the keys to open these locks are the odor molecules that float past . . . People have about 450 different types of olfactory receptors. (For comparison, dogs have about two times as many.) Each receptor can be activated by many different odor molecules, and each odor molecule can activate several different types of receptors. The complexity of receptors and their interactions with odor molecules are what allow us to detect a wide variety of smells. And what we think of as a single smell is actually a combination of many odor molecules acting on a variety of receptors, creating an intricate neural code that we can identify as the scent of a rose or freshly-cut grass. Once an odor molecule binds to a receptor, it initiates an electrical signal that travels from the sensory neurons to the olfactory bulb, a structure at the base of the forebrain that relays the signal to other brain areas for additional processing. One of these areas is the piriform cortex, a collection of neurons located just behind the olfactory bulb that works to identify the smell. Smell information also goes to the thalamus, a structure that serves as a relay station for all of the sensory information coming into the brain. You’ve probably experienced that a scent can also conjure up emotions and even specific memories, like when a whiff of cologne at a department store reminds you of your favorite uncle who wears the same scent. This happens because the thalamus sends smell information to the hippocampus and amygdala, key brain regions involved in learning and memory.”

That explanation is a bit long and complicated, but fascinating. It explains why I can remember my flower encounters so vividly. So once again I will grow what I can now from my Fantasy Fragrance Garden list. But I will have to wait to grow some of the others. Perhaps I never will be able to bring them all together in one garden and they will remain a fantasy forever. But I have hope. The first of my seed orders arrived in the mail on Thursday – sweet peas, two varieties, both of them fragrant, of course.

Frosty morning.

Thursday evening I drove out to Bingham Center and picked up our Amish friend Ervin Gingrich. He does all of our construction work for us. He rebuilt the barn when it collapsed. He built our new front porch. And last fall he put on our new roof. Thursday he fixed the problem I created with our stove pipe. If you recall, I asked the roofers to put a screen inside the top of the chimney to keep starlings from coming down it into the house. They did that, but the screen mesh was too tight and over the winter, soot built up on it and blocked the chimney. We haven’t been able to use our wood stove for several months because of it. On Thursday, Ervin climbed up on the roof and unblocked the chimney and wrapped the outside of it with wire. Now it will keep the starlings out and also let the smoke out too.

Ervin on the roof, Stacey and two of Ervin's children watch.

Yesterday, Saturday, Stacey and Miriam went with our friend Tom Kear to Cortland and Ithaca, New York, to do some family history research. They visited several historical societies. Tom is related to us distantly on our Carpenter line. The Carpenters and several of our other lines all go back, for a time, to those counties. They took a picnic lunch with them and left at 8:00 that morning. They got home around 6:00 and reported they had a good time, but found no new information. Family history research can be like that.

Miriam and Tom doing research.

Stacey and Miriam.

The Cortland Historical Society.

So Hannah and I were the only ones home all day. It was a cold, rainy day and I couldn’t do anything outdoors, so we decided to go to the movies. We drove up to Olean and saw Dune: Part Two. Frank Herbert’s Dune books and I go way back. I first read Dune when I was in high school. I consider it and its five sequels, the greatest science fiction novels I’ve ever read. Over the years, I have collected the books in various editions. Back in 1984, when the first Dune movie came out, I went to see it hoping it would be as great as the book. But of course, it fell short of my expectations. It was okay, but it was too abbreviated and a bit campy, especially the soundtrack by Toto. When Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One came out in 2021, I was impressed by how much better it was. It was, in fact, pretty amazing. Dune: Part Two did not disappoint. Being such an admirer of the books, there are always some things I find fault with in the movies, especially in the choice of actors who look nothing like the image I have in my mind of characters in the books. And they took considerable liberties with the story as told in the book, but it was so well done, I forgave them. Visually, both movies are stunning and worthy of the books in so many ways. I know that not everyone enjoys science fiction like I do, but I recommend these impressive movies.

At the movies with Hannah.

My Dune books.

And speaking of books, I ran out of library books last week and needed something to read. I scanned my shelves and selected at random a book I’d bought at a used book sale years ago. This book, Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton, turned out to be an amazing choice. Published in 1948 and set in South Africa in the 1940's, it is a deeply moving story. I have long had an interest in south Africa ever since I read The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books by Alexander McCall Smith, which are set in Botswana. (I was actually hoping one of my sons would be called to serve a mission there so we could go and pick him up when he was done, but that didn’t happen. They all served in the USA – Kentucky, Texas, and California.) Cry, the Beloved Country is a more serious story of families struggling through the period in South Africa’s history when society was in flux. The old tribal systems had been shattered by European colonization and new policies were being established to try and control things. I am surprised at how much the book affected me. I was silently reading it in school on Friday and reached a point in the story that moved me to tears and I had to turn and face the wall to cry a moment away from immature and prying eyes. I love books that have the power to move me. I haven’t finished it yet, but I recommend it.

We woke up to snow this morning. It was just a thin crust, but they say more is on the way later today. You can read that last part with a sad sigh in your voice. The snow won’t last long. The rest of the week will be in the 50's and 60's. I will begin some major yard work this week. The gardening season is soon to begin.

This morning.

So there you have it, my mishmash week of spring and flowers, Dune and South Africa, books and movies and rain and snow. Good Sabbath!