Finding warmth in seed catalogs
By BILL DUNCAN
As I write this column, snow is piling up outside my window, so the subject matter might seem a bit strange. I am projecting months ahead to the time I can turn the soil and start the miracle of the seed. Like Katherine White who wrote in her book, "Onward and Upward in the Garden," that "as I write, snow is falling outside my Maine window, and indoors all around me half a hundred garden catalogs are in bloom."
Since I live in the banana belt of Oregon, not in Maine, and certainly I am not surrounded by 500 garden catalogs, I can still dream of a time when the ground is warm enough to germinate seed in this black mud acreage I own in Roseburg, Oregon. I do agree with Katherine that I am addicted to reading seed catalogs, particularly in the dead of winter. It is, as she says, "unlike any other reading experience.” And I agree with what she says is the purpose of that reading “to find driblets of knowledge, for aesthetic pleasure and at the same time … planning for the future, so I read and dream."
The dream of all people of the soil is to see the miracle of a tiny seed germinating in warm soil to produce the beauty of a flower or the nutritious goodness of a vine ripened tomato. I discovered that miracle as a small boy planting my first seed in the sandy soil of the Florida Panhandle and watching it spring to life.
I was much like garden writer Linda M. Frank who said that her older brother placed a dried seedpod "in the palm of my small hand one day. I was five years old and already accustomed to this typical 12-year-old boy teasing his little sister." It was not a bug as she suspected, but seed from a morning glory plant. He showed her how to plant the seed and how to watch it become a beautiful blue morning glory and hooked her for life on gardening.
Rose Marie Nichols McGee, president of Nichols Garden Nursery, a seed company specializing in herbs in Albany, Oregon says, "gardening can sink its root deep in a family," explaining how her family continues the gardening traditions of her grandparents. My dad always had a garden, so that may account for my own gene.
I can remember each year ordering the Nichols Garden Nursery catalog while I lived in Southern California and envisioning a vast herb farm somewhere in Oregon as I thumbed through the catalog and ordered seeds. When I moved to Oregon in the 1970s, I made a pilgrimage to Nichols Garden Nursery in Albany expecting to see an expansive herb farm. It was not at all what I envisioned, but a house that sat on some acreage right in the middle of an industrial area.
The gardens out back of the house looked a lot like my own gardens. The house was a maze of rooms each filled with the aroma of herbs. In one room, the herbs were hanging from the ceiling to dry and workers were busy packaging the dried herbs to be shipped all over the world, including, no doubt, to my counterpart living in Southern California and dreaming of a large herb farm somewhere in Oregon.
Was I disappointed? Certainly not. I went home with dozens of seed packets and dreams of my own herb farm. I do grow my own herbs, but not commercially. I dry them and put them in fancy jars, or package them in bags to send out as Seasoned Greetings to friends and family.
It is still snowing outside, but inside, an old gardener who is not ready to throw in the trowel, is already cultivating basil, oregano, thyme, rosemary, fennel and coriander, not to mention sage.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470. Do so and I will send you some Seasoned Greetings.)