A brilliant use of gnomes was devised by the Orange Alternative, an anti-government movement in Poland in the 1980’s. Armed with spray paint, the group peacefully protested the government’s censorship of free speech and public gatherings during the period of martial law by defacing communist propaganda with paintings of mischievous little gnomes. “It was a terrible, dangerous time. You couldn’t go out on the streets at night and there were tanks and soldiers in the main square,” reported a Polish journalist. “The dwarfs gave us something to laugh at, and that was the whole idea: to show how absurd the situation was and encourage people not to be afraid.”   The Orange Alternative organized a gathering in 1988, also known as the Revolution of Dwarfs which attracted more than 10,000 people who marched through the city center in Wrocław wearing orange dwarf hats.  A number of marchers were arrested and the press had a field day capitalizing on the humor of policemen arresting dwarfs which brought national attention to their cause.  Who’s to say if these gnomes had anything to do with the final demise of the communist government but it sounds to me as if they certainly had a hand in it, albeit a little one.
Fast forward to the new millennia.  The city of Wroclaw had a gnome statue erected to honor the legacy of the Orange Alternative.  The statue proved so popular that in 2005 the city commissioned a local artist to create more gnomes.  Enterprising local businesses quickly got in on it and contracted other artists to produce even more.  Very quickly gnome statues proliferated around the city and now number more than 400.  They have proven to be quite a tourist draw which has boosted the town’s economy.
My final tale about these creatures concerns the quaint fad of taking gnome statues on trips and posing them in front of iconic scenes like the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal. The concept of the traveling gnome started fifty years ago when an Australian photographed his own garden gnomes, Harry and Charlie, while he was traveling around Antarctica.  It reminds me of the Flat Stanley I took with me on vacation for my great-nephew.  Ideas often spark other ideas. The vacation gnome devolved into the not so quaint practice of swiping a gnome statue, taking it on a trip, and returning it with a photo album of his vacation. The earliest prank involving a traveling gnome also comes from the Australia.  The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 1986 that a suburban gnome-owner was distressed when she discovered her gnome had been stolen.  A note was found in its place: 'Dear Mum, couldn't stand the solitude any longer. Gone off to see the world. Don't be worried, I'll be back soon. Love Bilbo xxx.”

A special thanks to gnome-owners Janie Clark and Linda Douville :-)

This blog is a little unusual so let me tell you of its evolution.  While waiting for 'Meet the Member' stories from the GGC crowd, I went through my garden photos looking for inspiration and was thrilled with where it led me.   I had taken lot of pictures of whimsical garden statues including this jolly guy who guards Janie Clark's garden 24/7.  I started to do a little research about garden gnomes and dwarfs which resulted in so much strange and interesting information that I have written my first two-part blog. 
The allure of having quiet helpers in the garden dates back to the second century AD when the Roman emperor Hadrian had hermits living throughout his villa’s garden. This idea caught on again in 18th-century England when wealthy landowners would hire a person to be an “ornamental hermit” in their garden.  They were required to live in rustic outbuildings (or hermitages), wear disheveled clothes and grow beards. Having a hermit living in your garden became fashionable in Georgian England. Some historians believe that this garden hermit fad paved the road for garden gnome popularity in Britain.
Once the hermitages and their hermits fell out of favor, ceramic garden gnomes were offered as a less expensive and more humane garden décor.  As early as the 1600s, garden statuary in Europe had evolved to include a key figure known as gobbi which isItalian for “dwarf.” In 19th-century Germany, these diminutive men with pointed hats, round bellies, and white beards became known as Gartenzwerge (garden gnomes).
In 1847 English baronet Sir Charles Edmund Isham bought twenty-one terra cotta garden gnomes from a German manufacturer to decorate his rockery.  After Sir Charles passed away, his ungrateful daughters had all of them removed.  One gnome was in a secluded spot and managed to elude his captors. He wasn’t found until 1940 when he became famous as the oldest garden gnome in the world.  He was nicknamed Lampy after the luxurious Lamport Hall where he now lives indoors given his age and value.  He is insured for £1 million.
Next Friday's blog also includes a story about living dwarfs--stay tuned....

In October I wrote about the most well-known pollinator—the honey bee--with the intention of writing about some of the other pollinators before the year was over.  So here goes:
Honey bees are credited with 39% of pollinations with bumble bees, butterflies, wasps, flies, hummingbirds, and bats, accounting for most of the rest of the job. I photographed some of these other pollinators and am going to get into the weeds about the whole pollination process.  (Warning—Parental discretion advised) 
Most plants need to be cross-pollinated. The pollen from one flower’s stamen (the male part) ends up on the stigma (the female part) of another but same type of flower. The stigma sits at the very center of the flower at the end of a tube which runs down into the ovule. The ovule contains the eggs that will grow into seeds.  A pollinator is attracted by smell or color that promises them a sweet treat.  Pollen is the (usually yellow) powdery substance that contains protein, along with fat and other nutrients pollinators need while nectar contains sugars, vitamins, salts, oils, and additional nutrients that together offer a high energy food source.  Nectar is produced in plant glands called nectarines located inside the flower at the bottom. 
Pollinators have evolved over the years along with the plants they favor and are mutually beneficial to one another.  I was amazed at length of the proboscis on some of the butterflies, moths, and skippers I saw.   Here’s a cool story.  In 1863 Charles Darwin examined an orchid that grew in Madagascar. Since the nectar spur was longer than any known Madagascan insect’s proboscis, clever Mr. Darwin predicted that there must be a theretofore undiscovered pollinator with an 11-inch-long proboscis.  Forty years later in 1903, the Xanthopan morgannii moth was found with a proboscis three times its bottle length. 
Pollination is crucial to the reproduction of flowers but also necessary for the reproduction of countless fruit and vegetable crops including blueberries, pumpkin, apples, tomatoes, and chocolate.  If you like chocolate as much as I do, you might be interested to learn that midge flies (Forcipomyia) are the sole pollinators of the cocoa tree.  No midges—no chocolate (gasp).  The males do most of the pollinating while the female are off biting people and animals because, like their relative the mosquito, the mothers need blood in order to lay eggs.  Those nasty girls are notorious for ruining many a summer day especially the infamous Highland midge swarms in Scotland. According to her diary, Queen Victoria was half-devoured by these little ladies whilst at a picnic in Sutherland woodland in 1872.  I googled up midge swarms in Scotland and found a ton of sites giving information on how to have a midge-free vacation in Scotland.  I read that midges are one of the reasons for the relatively low population of the Scottish Highlands, and help keep the wildernesses wild.  That’s impressive power for such tiny critters. 
But back to the nice pollinators. Imagine zillions of these critters dedicating most of their lives to collecting nectar and pollen in minute amounts each time they visit a flower.  As a byproduct of their industry, we get to enjoy beautiful flowers and life sustaining food.  We truly live in an amazing world.  

Wishing you all a happy, healthy 2021  

​When I moved to Grantham full-time in the summer of 2011, we started going to the neighborhood social events. There we met Peggy and Rolf Hammer, who recommended two immediate activities to join - the water aerobics group and the Grantham Garden Club. Several of the swimmers were dedicated Garden Club members, and they assured me it was the way to meet people in Grantham. So that was how I joined a garden club, something I had never imagined doing!
I am the fourth of five children, with two brothers and two sisters, and I grew up in Easton, PA, and Upper Saddle River, NJ. Instead of attending senior year in high school, I went on a year exchange to live with a family in Germany on the AFS program. When I returned, I went to Smith College because my brother was at Dartmouth. (Trivia: I never actually graduated from high school.) There I met my future husband, Jim, a friend of my brother's. I went back to Germany for my junior year, then got married six days after graduation.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life, but I knew I never wanted to be a mother or a teacher! I ended up doing both, having three children and teaching foreign students how to speak English (ESL).
I grew up with casual gardening experience and continued that way in later life. I’m really more interested in trees and wildflowers than showy blooms. Also, we’ve always lived in the shade, which makes gardening more challenging. I love to mix in a few annuals with native perennials, and I plant small beds of annuals here and there around the edges of my yard, so I have color to see out every window all summer long.

Reflecting on how I became interested in gardening (flower gardening), I am reminded of my maternal grandmother and her gardens.  My mother, raised during the depression, was one of 12 children in a farm family in rural Michigan.  Home for me, was a suburb of Detroit, but as a young child I spent a great deal of time on the farm and even lived with my grandparents for periods of time.  As a kindergartner, I attended the one room country school with two of my youngest uncles.  My life there was right out of Little House on the Prairie.  My grandmother who churned her own butter, cooked on and baked bread daily in a wood stove oven, and had specific days for household chores like laundry using a hand ringer washer.  I even rode on a horse to school during the winter.  I loved it there and the life I experienced.
My grandparents grew almost everything they consumed, vegetables in the garden, wheat ground for flour, raised chickens both for eggs, and the meat, as well as pigs and a dairy herd which provided milk and beef at slaughter time.  I recall sides of beef and pork hanging in an unheated room in the house.  I remember when they first got indoor plumbing and could dispose of the use of chamber pots and the outhouse!
In addition to all this, my grandmother had an extensive flower garden that she tended, and there were always fresh flowers on the table in the summer.  I especially loved her gladiolas, canna lilies and zinnias.
I spent most of my adult life on Long Island where I raised my four children, but for some reason it never really felt like home.  I started creating flower beds at my house and later when I moved to a condo. 
Once I retired and moved to New Hampshire, I felt like I had come home.  The house I bought had few flower beds, but lots of large pine trees that were causing a variety of problems.  After securing permission to have many of them removed, I got to work.
The back “yard” rose in elevation and was a carpet of creeping juniper, which I hated.  I tried many ways to remove it unsuccessfully, and finally had to have it excavated and rolled up like carpeting, which was then dumped in my woods to decompose.  Tristin Gilson was fantastic in helping decide how to transform the area.  He terraced it, creating stone wall dividers, and steps going to the top, all using rocks that he would unearth on the property.  Then he brought in topsoil and I started planting.  I favor perennials and friends donated a lot of them to get me going, but the first few years needed a lot of annuals to fill in.
I have added what I refer to as my garden “junk”, an antique hand water pump, an old bicycle, antique watering cans and shutters.  My latest addition is an antique iron baby crib.  I have to resist overdoing it though.  Today, the perennials keep multiplying so I share with my two daughters as well as many friends.  The garden keeps evolving as it matures, and each season is a new wonder.

We made a vow, my older sister Madie and I when we were 10 & 14, that we would never ever ever EVER have a garden.  Why, you ask?  We lived on a 156-acre orchard in the Hudson Valley and we had 15 gardens!  My mother and dad were both gifted orchardists/gardeners, but both worked full time so Madie and I were left with the maintenance of the gardens.  They went from easy care shrubs at the bottom of the 100’ brick walk (that had to be weeded) to the dreaded perennial bed that was largely clay.  The garden on the top of the stone wall held chrysanthemums, while the one at its base held a mixture of annuals.  But the best garden was the rose garden with its magnificent soil and unique weeds.  There were 150 rose plants that lived in luxury.  Their bed had been dug with a back-hoe and created with large boulders at the base, smaller ones above, some gravel and then, finally, rich topsoil.  We drew straws sometimes to see who would work on which garden and the winner always got the rose garden because it was so easy to weed.  On Thanksgiving afternoon each year, the entire family, and any guests who were staying at the farm with us, put the rose garden to bed.  Each bush was cut back, covered with peatmoss with leaves on the top – bales of peatmoss that would, of course, be worked into the soil in the spring.  It was an EVENT.
Next to the rose garden was a huge bell on a 12-foot pole.  It was to be used to bring my dad in from the orchard in an emergency since this was well before any other sort of communication was possible.  Happily, it never was used for that purpose but was rung for celebrations!  That bell, on a much shorter pole, now sits in the middle of the “Circle Garden” to the south of our house in Eastman and has stepping-stones so that our granddaughter Maeve can ring it.
Needless to say, vows or not, my sister and I are both obsessive gardeners.  She has created gardens in Tucson, Syracuse, the Thousand Islands and Sarasota.  I started my first garden in front of our student apartment at Sachem Village when I was teaching in White River Junction and Russ was a graduate student at Dartmouth.  Spring bulbs and chrysanthemums were the mainstay and I was discouraged, when we returned 36 years later, to find that chrysanthemums are only annuals in zone 4.  I left behind a garden in Lancaster, PA, and more extensive ones in Albion, MI.  Taking an idea from Inverewe Gardens on the west coast of Scotland, we put in 8-foot posts with thick ropes draped between them in one garden.  Contrasting clematis and climbing roses wound up the poles and extended across the ropes.  They were gorgeous. 
Between us, Madie and I have produced another generation of gardeners.  Both of our daughters love to garden and have extensive gardens of their own – in NH and MI.

The Leadership team for the club has been working very hard to help keep some sense of normalcy during these isolating times with cards, recipes, ZOOM programs, plant/bulb sales and sharing pictures of gardens. Since we cannot meet and chat together at our monthly gatherings, we came up with the idea of starting a Meet the Member portion to the blog.  Everyone has stories and maybe by telling them, we can find shared interests and histories and maybe it will help keep us closer.  If you'd like to include your story, please send an email to president@granthamgardenclub.org with your phone number, and I'll be thrilled to contact you.  To kick it off the Meet the Member blog, I'll start with mine

​My introduction to the garden club happened three years ago when I moved to Grantham and wanted to meet people.  My husband Bob and I went on a trip to the gorgeous Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens with members of the GGC.  It never would have entered my head to join a garden club since I wasn’t a gardener.  They invited me so I thought I’d give it a try.  Because I took the chance, I am pleased to be a very active in the club as photographer, blogger, bulb planter, flower deliverer, plant sale worker, and board member. The best part has been getting  to know an amazing group of people.
Gardeners often tell me that their mothers were their role models for gardening.  The same is true for me.  My city born and bred mother never gardened and, sadly, neither did I.  Since joining the club, I have planted some bulbs in the Fall and was surprised at how excited I was when the flowers popped up in the Spring.  No wonder gardening is so popular.  
I did spend my childhood on land that had recently been a farm in Stoneham, Massachusetts.  The farmer sold his property to a developer who razed the land and erected cookie cutter ranch houses.  When I moved in at age five, there wasn’t a blade of grass to be seen.  The flat yards were covered with rich, dark dirt and each one sported a forlorn crabapple sapling held up by a stick.  On this land that once produced corn, hay, and tomatoes, a new crop grew—a crop of babies.  There were nine children in my family and all the other families had a huge brood of children too.  Mom called it “The Fertile Valley.”  We were free range kids who spent every minute we could out of doors with never an adult in sight.  The older children were often tasked to mind their younger siblings so our pack was made up of lots of ages and hierarchies.  The big kids were always the bosses. We combed the woods in search of adventure. I am ashamed to say that we stole cherry tomatoes from strangers’ gardens and swiped chunks of ice from the back of the milk man's truck. Our crabapple fights were of epic.  Ah, the good ole days.
Besides my darling husband, three kids and four grandkids, I am most proud of my ten years working with the Stand & Deliver Academic Mentoring Program.  I started the Corporate Campus piece of the program wherein the students were bussed to my company, which not only got them out of their poor community for a while, but showed them a whole new world with exciting possibilities. The program grew from a pilot program of fourteen students and fourteen mentors to over one hundred each every year.  The volunteers and the students are among the best people I have ever met. I see a parallel with gardening and mentoring and with flowers and mentees.  The gardeners and the mentors put their time, effort, and expertise into helping plants and young people grow.  The gardeners and the mentors derive pleasure and satisfaction from the experience.  In the case of the flowers and the young mentees, it is they who deserve most of the credit.  It is through their effort and gumption that they blossom. 

The wildflower plants are tucked away until Spring but it’s always nice to remember they will be back again.  We don’t plant them, weed them, deadhead them, or water them.  They do all the work themselves and we merely enjoy them.  That is if we remember to pay attention.  As I have done for many years, many of us are so busy with our lives that we don’t notice them on the side of the road or purposefully go on walks to fields, meadows and marshes to find these free spirts  Seeing them up close to me is the goal.  Sue Coakley, Nancy Crocker, Sharon Parker, Anne Langsdorf and Amelia Lantz alerted me when particular wildflowers were in bloom—the Wildflower Posse. 
One of my favorites was the ragged robin.  To me they look like mini fireworks, albeit all pink. Its name is associated with Robin Goodfellow (or Puck), a fairy trickster who is charming, sly, amoral, and rather dangerous to encounter.  Some cultures discourage picking the pink bobbing flowers lest you invite unwanted attention from the fairies.  Others say they’re lucky to pick.  I like the idea of taking away their image on my camera but leaving them where they decided to grow.
Here are some more musings to go with the pictures: 
Lady’s Tresses are actually wild orchids.  They’re difficult to spot, but when you do, you’ll see a flock of them.  They are delicate and sweet. 
The Rosa Palustris, or more prosaically named Swamp Rose, grows near brooks in Grantham.  They reward us with their color and their lovely fragrance.
Trefoil is a shortbread Girl Scout cookie shaped like their emblem.  Here’s a little-known fact:  Trefoils, Thin Mints and Do-Si-Dos are the only types of cookies required by the organization each year.  This year I learned that the Trefoil is also a gorgeous yellow wildflower. 
The asters are everywhere in Autumn—zillions of them. I even came across a calico aster which doesn’t resemble its cousin very much though both are beautiful. 
Blue-eyed grass is neither very blue nor a type of grass.  These shy flowers are very difficult to spot which makes finding one that much sweeter.  Here’s an interesting observation--the flowers bud from the side of the stem rather than the top. 
I’ll end with Crown Vetch because it the a perfect example of a wildflower that grows so widely and is so often overlooked but, on close inspection, is actually quite gorgeous.  

​While traipsing around Muster Field Farm in nearby Sutton, I came upon a new-to-me flower.  It was tall and looked like a kind of grass with lots of tiny red flowers budding on the top.  Imagine my delight when I learned that this bouncing little flower is called Kiss Me Over The Garden Gate.  I could easily imagine a tall country lad leaning over to steal a sweet kiss from the blushing farmer’s daughter.  I picture it as a Norman Rockwell painting.  And here are some more interesting flower nicknames that I was lucky enough to photograph this past growing season...

​We all have heard off forget-me-nots, but what about touch-me-nots? The touch-me-not is a small, bright orange wildflower that got its name from their seed pods that explode when you touch them.  So the name is actually a fair warning instead of a romantic notion  

​I read that the ugly named lungwort got its name because it looks like a lung (really?) In the Middle Ages, it was believed that God created it to look that way to guide people to use it to make medicine to help with chest ailments and coughs.  

This odd looking pink flower is Old Maid's Bonnet which must have received its nickname years ago before central heating; a time when old and young maids wore bonnets to bed and the men wore nightcaps.   

Where on earth did foxglove get its name with nothing foxy about it.  In Welsh this flower is called by the beautiful name of maneg ellyllon, or the fairies’ glove. In England these little elves were called ‘the good folks.’ No doubt, then, these flowers were called ‘the good folks’ gloves’, a name since shortened into foxgloves. 

Despite it sad name of Bleeding Heart, these flowers always delights when blooming in the garden.  A silly name for it is Lady in the Bathtub because someone thought that's what it looks like when viewed upside down.  Personally they always remind me of our beloved Peppermint Patty's who has been doling out ice cream to folks at Eastman Lake for decades.  
So that's the end of my odd named flower blog.  I'm running out of ideas in the non-growing season but have a few more up my sleeve.  

Flowers from the Shakespeare Garden, Muster Field, and the gardens of Anne Langsdorf, Elise Kendall, Janie Clark, Jane Verdrager, and Sharon Parker.