Shall this winter never end? I have it on good authority that it shall.
Last month, I attended the Summit County Master Gardener Saturday Gardening Series in Green, and it was indeed a “green” experience. Each table had a centerpiece of garden fence within which were cold-tolerant pansies, tiny onion seedlings and swiss chard.
One of the images I used at the program was of a picture of croci blooming in my yard, taken on Feb. 26, 2012, certainly much earlier than this year, but the crocus shall come. And spring! Let us listen.
From A.A. Milne: She turned to the sunlight/And shook her yellow head,/And whispered to her neighbor/Winter is dead. From Rainer Marie Rilke: It is spring again./The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart. From William Shakespeare: April hath put a spirit of youth in everything. And finally, from Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre: The Spring drew on … and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.
I feel warmer already. Thinking of spring alone can help.
Saturday’s talk of herbs helped, as did those of vegetable gardening, and conifers, and our state native fruit tree — pawpaw, and before all that, maple syruping to come in the next few weeks, and after all that, a trip of Summit County residents to the wonderful High Line park in lower Manhattan come September, led by Ohio State University Extension, Summit County educator Danae Wolfe.
Oh, what a wondrous world in which we live.
Name that plant
The winner of the last contest was Shane Lowrey, who will receive a copy of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. He correctly identified the last mystery plant in the rose family as medlar (Mespilus).
Medlar is a shrub to small tree that is undergoing something of a renaissance among edible landscape gardeners, returning to popularity a plant that was much-used during the Roman Empire and much-cited in literature during the Shakespearean age.
Its reputation was a bit sullied due to the nature of its fruits; they are harvested only after they brown and rot on the tree following cold weather, a process known as “bletting.” This tendency of rotting before ripening was much bawdified by Shakespeare and others, and of course is not as convenient for impatient and warm-day gardeners of subsequent centuries. Yet it arises anew.
There is a species native to the Middle East and one native to North America and it is truly rather interesting, which is easy for me to say, as I munch some toast smeared with Lois Rose’s medlar jam the morning I write this. It’s like a plum jam.
As noted in the clues last time and reinforced by the picture then, the spiny leaf-like sepals surround a central pit of the fruit that develops following pollination, fertilization, and the ovary of the flower ripening around the fertilized eggs and becoming the fruit. This characteristic hollow appearance of the mature fruit led Shakespeare to term medlars “open arses.” Ahem.
After bletting frosts, medlars wrinkle, soften, brown, with the interior becoming the texture of something like apple sauce, and are then eaten raw, served as medlar cheese which is like lemon curd, only earthier, or turned into jams and such. Again, quite tasty.
Medlar (the genus Mespilus) scions are often grafted to their rose family cousins, such as pear (Pyrus), hawthorn (Crataegus), and quince (Cydonia), once again proving the wisdom of botanists and their classification of families, which are groups of related genera. In fact, several readers guessed quince as the mystery plant. Close.
The inimitable Cuyahoga Master Gardener Lois Rose pronounced this past year as her best ever year for medlar harvests in her garden of endless edible and ornamental delights and as noted in the earlier column this crop yielded enough bletted fruit to provide ample samples of medlar jam to accompany the College of Wooster’s Arbor Day celebration the last week of April, when they plant … a medlar tree.
New contest
This time for our mystery plant, let us pick a most beautiful deciduous conifer that grows well here in Ohio, especially in wet sites.
Glorious light green foliage freshening up the spring, summers of a darker green, autumns of spun-gold fall foliage color, and graceful branch and twig structure in the winter.
If you identify this plant, Monty Python will be proud. If not, does it make you want to go home?
The first to e-mail or text me with the correct answer will get a copy of Aldo Leopold’s conservationist classic, A Sand County Almanac. Send email to chatfield.1@osu.edu or text to 330-466-0270.
Jim Chatfield is a horticultural educator with Ohio State University Extension. If you have questions about caring for your garden, write: Jim Chatfield, Plant Lovers’ Almanac, Ohio State University Extension, 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster, OH 44691. Send email to chatfield.1@cfaes.osu.edu or call 330-466-0270. Please include your phone number if you write.